Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesIn memoriam: Ronald Searle
Posted on January 04, 2012Ronald Searle, the cartoonist who has died aged 91, may be most famous for his creation of St Trinian’s, but I will always remember him for his creation of Nigel Molesworth, the constantly mis-spelling, ungrammatical 1950s schoolboy and self-proclaimed “goriller of 3B”.
If you have never read a Molesworth book I can’t recommend them enough – and you can get a taster from the online version of the books here.
In memory of Ronald Searle, and in celebration of how his art is truly timeless, here is a Molesworth cartoon which applies as much to today’s Euro crisis as it did to Nigel Molesworth’s frustrations with his visiting French exchange student, Armand.
The caption, in the original (mis-)spelling: “It seem that Fr. and Eng. are divided by more than the Chanel”
Singh doesn’t mean “lion” for nothing
Posted on August 10, 2011For 312 years, Singh has been the surname almost universally adopted by baptised male Sikhs. It means “lion” and judging by last night’s events it’s no exaggeration.
Like many others following the riots last night I discovered Sangat TV, a Birmingham-based, rather obscure Sky channel which apparently normally broadcasts recitals of religious texts. When rioting began in Birmingham, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton, though, they changed their content.
A presenter and several of his friends and colleagues piled into a car with a microphone and a camera to travel around the West Midlands reporting on the riots and the actions of many Sikh communities to defend temples, shops and houses from the rampaging thugs.
If it sounds a bit haphazard, it was – jumpy footage, live interviews out of the car window and the driver intermittently wandering across the shot during set-piece broadcasts – but it was quite remarkable for two reasons.
First, that it is now technologically and financially feasible for a couple of guys with a car and a camera to become frontline TV reporters apparently funded by advertising from a sofa shop and a ghee (butter) company. Thanks to the low costs of entry into the media market and the viral nature of Twitter, the channel, its presenter and his message were soon becoming famous in a way that would previously have become impossible.
Secondly it was remarkable for the scenes and messages Sangat TV was broadcasting. Time and again the car would pull up to hear from Sikhs who had left the safety of their homes to protect the religious sites, property and homes whole community, regardless of religion. These were people who felt a strong and deep responsibility to the communities they live in and a strong revulsion for crime, looting and carnage and were willing to risk their own safety to put those principles into action. They weren’t vigilantes – they message was overwhelmingly that their religion forbids striking the first blow, and the channel repeatedly broadcast safety messages and warnings not to carry weapons or provoke trouble. They were just brave, decent people.
Of course sadly we’ve seen the deaths of three men reportedly killed while trying to protect a mosque last night.The full facts will come out in due time but before anyone rushes to condemn them putting themselves in harm’s way, consider whether you would prefer people stood aside and did nothing to stop attacks on their community.
Where the police weren’t able to step in, I for one am glad and proud that others were willing to do so. The alternative of shrugging and doing nothing to help is the philosophy of the rioters, not the British public who are under attack.
In between these interview stops the presenter’s commentary was utterly opinionated and utterly inspiring, the highlight of the night for me being:
Whether you support Arsenal, Man United, Chelsea, there is only one team to support-the Three Lions, Great Britain.
He also made the point that this crisis is the latest in a series of occasions when Sikhs have shown their self-sacrificing nature for the national good – not least during their long and loyal service in our Armed Forces.
Having set out to commentate on the night’s events, the Sangat team even put their money where their mouth was, helping police officers catch up with and arrest some looters:
You couldn’t imagine a better way to refute the racist bile that’s been flowing from Nick Griffin and chums over the last few days. It’s inspiring to see true British heroes do the right thing in a just cause for their country. Lions indeed.
BBC gives phone hacking 7 times more exposure than the Euro crisis
Posted on July 20, 2011The BBC are obviously smarting from the growing number of allegations that they have covered the phone hacking scandal so much that crucial issues like the increasingly likely collapse of the Euro have been neglected.
Of course many of those allegations are made by people who are themselves uncomfortable politically with the embarrassment being caused by the hacking issue, and of course the phone hacking scandal is absolutely rightly big news. However, if the Euro was to fall over next week with catastrophic economic consequences I suspect much of the public would be wondering how it all happened so suddenly, when in reality this crisis has been brewing for months and years.
The BBC’s Foreign Editor Jon Williams (who is, by the way, well worth following if you’re on Twitter) just said:
Surprised at claim #BBC covered #hacking to exclusion of other stories. Arab Spring, Italian Euro crisis & #eastafrica drought all prominent
It may be an exaggeration to say that other stories have been excluded entirely, but if you look at the evidence it’s pretty clear they’ve been eclipsed by the hacking coverage. Here are the results of searching the BBC News site for references to “hacking”, “euro” and “libya” over the last week:
Libya: 23 mentions
Euro: 32 mentions
Hacking: 246 mentions
As I say, hacking is a huge story and it does deserve large amounts of attention – but it’s hard to claim the BBC hasn’t taken its eye off other major issues while it’s been going on.
Unlike others I don’t necessarily think that’s solely because the BBC is threatened by Murdoch; it’s also because hacking is a media-village story taking place within the world most journalists inhabit. However the BBC in particular has a Charter responsibility to consider the public interest. That isn’t served by neglecting to cover the Euro crisis properly.
Malcolm Tucker really is out there
Posted on March 07, 2011As well as proving extremely popular with the public at large, the Thick of It was a smash hit in Westminster because of its worryingly accurate portrayal of the hurly burly and barely-managed chaos of British politics.
Today there is further proof from the Daily Mail of how deeply entrenched the series has become in Westminster culture:
With Britain’s Libyan policy descending into what one source called an ‘omnishambles’, David Cameron was kept informed as the Government’s Cobra crisis committee met through yesterday.
“Omnishambles” was of course coined as a term by Malcolm Tucker. Has he just outed himself as the Mail’s unnamed source?
Libertarians and the Apocalypse
Posted on January 10, 2011I’ve always loved apocalypse fiction, ever since I was a kid. Nuclear war, plague, natural disaster, zombies, the medium doesn’t matter – Day of the Triffids, I Am Legend, Alas Babylon!, A Canticle for Leibowitz, 28 Days Later, The Road, Survivors, The Death of Grass, The Walking Dead, I’ve enjoyed them all. (Before anyone gets scared, I should probably add that I do read and watch other things as well…)
I’ve come across plenty of other fans of end-of-the-world fiction over the years, from all walks of life and points of view (Tom Harris MP, for example). However, a pattern has definitely established itself bit by bit - libertarians are more likely to enjoy apocalypse fiction than any other political group I’ve come across.
Why should this be the case?
There’s a lazy answer, which we should deal with straight away. The usual political smear-merchants would trot out that it’s because libertarians hate human beings and wish secretly that everyone was dead. Obviously this is nonsense – for a philosophy founded on admiring people enough to trust them to live their own lives, it would be absurd to want everyone killed.
In fact, far from being a macabre interest in the apocalypse - stories about everyone dying – I think this is actually an interest in post-apocalypse fiction – stories about how people survive without the State.
There’s obviously the basic appeal of a world where there’s no-one bossing you around, telling you off for smoking or drinking or trying to gather your personal data. That’s something any libertarian merrily daydreams about. But most intriguing and fascinating of all is speculating about human innovation and interaction without an overriding authority either doing it all for you or forcing you to do as it wishes.
In our world as it is today, there are myriad restraints on living by a libertarian code. Indeed, most activity by libertarian campaigners is taken up opposing proposals that would further impinge on our individual freedom, so it seems that the general shift is even further away from our ideal position.
We are so far from a libertarian world that the best way to explore how our ideas might work in practice is through what scientists and philosophers would call a thought-experiment – testing out political ideas in a theoretical, simplified world.
For example, a physicist wanting to test a theory of how radiation operates under particular circumstances might well imagine a thought-experiment world where there was no background radiation, no sun and no stars to interfere. Similarly, someone wanting to explore how people might live in a libertarian way inevitably finds it interesting to imagine life in a world without authority, state, nosey neighbours or hectoring puritans – a thought-experiment provided most commonly in the world of apocalypse fiction.
Posh loner who liked poetry but not sport “obviously did it”, say media
Posted on December 31, 2010Chris Jefferies may have committed the murder of Joanna Yeates – but as one of the fundamental principles of our legal system reminds us, he is innocent until proven guilty. It’s become a tradition in these cases for the media to indulge in heavy handed, nudge-nudge wink-wink implication when reporting the arrest of someone even before any charges have been brought.
Recall the case of the Ipswich Ripper, who murdered five women in 2006. The case is still notorious, but most of us have forgotten about Tom Stephens, the innocent but extremely odd man arrested wrongly for the crime spree. As soon as his name was revealed, numerous outlets started heaping increasingly peculiar implications on him – normally using anonymous comments from neighbours an acquaintances.
The most bizarre of these, which I remember made me laugh out loud at the time, was that he had been “digging in his garden with a small trowel“.
The smear was that if he was digging, he must have been burying something (or someone). In reality, of course, if digging ones garden with a small trowel was a crime then millions would be detained every Sunday afternoon and the panellists of Gardeners’ Question Time are veritable Moriartys.
The same is happening to Chris Jefferies. I am not attempting to go on some crusade to clear his name – for all I know, he may well be guilty. The police may know more that persuades them of this. What is certain is that the media do not, but are engaging in trial-by-tittle-tattle all the same.
Here are a choice selection of some of the reports about Jefferies so far, including some recognisable classics of the genre and some really weird ones:
“Oddball” – Almost all newspapers
“He showed no interest in cars or sport” – The Mirror
“The way he pronounced words and said his sentences was also weird”…”The things he taught us were really odd, he loved old English poetry.” – Small World News Service [NB it's not that odd to like old poetry...when you're an English teacher]
“Campaigned for gun range and prayer books” – Daily Mail
“A loner” – Almost all newspapers
“very posh, a solitary figure and very cultured” – The Sun
“An only child who has never married” – Daily Mail
“an active member of the local Liberal Democrats and knew the leader of Bristol city council, Barbara Janke” – The Guardian
“his students remembered him for his love of the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti and idiosyncratic pronunciation of place names” – The Independent
If you spot any other corkers, put them in the comments and we can build up a full innuendo collection.
How did John Humphrys get a free ad in The Archers?
Posted on December 28, 2010Ok, I’m coming out – I’m a fan of The Archers. Yes, the hurly burly of local scandal in rural Borsetshire conunes my Sunday mornings on a regular basis. To be honest, getting that off my chest makes me feel a while lot better.
One of the reasons I like it is that it’s a corner of the BBC which never makes me angry – unlike, say, Question Time which I’ve had to stop watching for the safety of my television screen.
But now it seems even The Archers is not a neutral zone. Last night’s episode had the characters discussing a local society dinner – which was a cue for a massive plug for John Humphrys’ lucrative after-dinner speaking service.
“Ooh, he’ll have a lot of interesting things to say,” one of them even waxed.
Isn’t against the BBC rules to advertise products or services? Or does that not count when giving a free editorial plug to one of their own staff?
Three questions for the future of the blogosphere
Posted on December 20, 2010It’s a measure of Iain Dale’s huge success as a blogger that his departure from the blogosphere has led people to question the very future of political blogging itself.
A blog is dead, but blogging will live on – there is no reason inherent to blogging why the medium itself should die out, unless Government sets out to destroy it. Twitter is a complementary not competing medium, offering an outlet for snap reaction, jokes and debate but not providing space for longer analysis.
The real questions over the future of blogging are about its form and freedom. To my mind there are three essential issues about what may lie ahead.
Who will blog? With the departure of Iain, Tom Harris and Will Straw it’s clear that some of the first wave of big bloggers are moving on.
There is a natural churn in any industry or hobby – but to have churn, new must come in as old departs. This blog is still a relatively new arrival on the scene, but I confess I can only think of a couple of other new political bloggers. Of course that may be because i haven’t found them yet, not because they don’t exist. Which brings us on to the second question:
How will the blogosphere function? The right wing blogosphere has developed – utterly organically – an infrastructure. Three main hubs (Iain Dale, ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes) pull together the blogging that’s out there and transmit traffic to blogs further down the food chain.
One of those hubs has been removed, though I know Iain has expressed an interest in keeping the Daley Dozen feature going.
It’s not particularly healthy for any sector to be so reliant on so few hubs. The Big Three didn’t set out to build a monopoly – nor could they if they wished, given the way the Internet works. All three have in fact gone out of their way to provide a ladder for smaller blogs to garner extra readership through regular linking.
Really it’s down to the rest of us to work harder to build a new infrastructure in Iain’s place – either through a scrap that results in the emergence of another big beast or, more likely, through greater cooperation and linking between a number of medium-sized beasts.
The third and final question is the long-term and ultimately fundamental one. Who will control the blogs?
Iain’s departure is at least in part because his blogging has generated other work, such as his LBC show, which has ended up taking over his time. The ConHome team have long been able to work as essentially full time bloggers, while Guido seems to be taking the middle road of overseeing the blog while Harry Cole becomes News Editor. In the States, the professionalisation of blogging is best seen in the growth of the Gawker Media network.
This an understandable shift. Iain felt he had the choice between blogging and making a living in his dream job. Guido has strengthened his position enough to be able to afford to employ Harry but as a result has a business that consumes much of his time.
My concern is what this means for smaller blogs. On the plus side it means there is hope that at least some people can make a living from blogging.
On the down side, I fear this professionalisation may have unintended and perhaps inevitable consequences.
Look at the history of newspapers. When printing first became relatively cheap and widely feasible, in the 17th Century, it was an anarchic, free speaking and hugely popular industry that leant itself naturally to scepticism of power and authority.
The pamphlets produced were of varying accuracy and quality, but the public were free to decide what they liked. Ultimately, the pamphleteers’ radicalism was one of the driving factors in the English Civil War and the birth of the libertarian movement in England. The parallels with the recent history of blogging are obvious.
But the pamphlets eventually changed. Essentially, they became modern newspapers. Writers were able to become professionals, and quality improved – but regulation tightened its grip, and eventually a turgid morbidity set in. 300 years on, those weaknesses led blogs to become appealing, necessary and successful.
So maybe we’re seeing a similar shift taking place online (only faster, given the speed of modern technology). Professionalisation of the blogosphere is market-driven, so there’s little we can do about that. What we can and must do to escape the eventual fate of the pamphleteers is resist regulation. Hazel Blears has already led calls for the regulation of blogs, and I’m sure more such voices will follow – keen to stamp out a source of uncomfortable criticism and scrutiny.
There is a danger that as leading bloggers become professionals, Government will use the shift as an excuse to regulate what they can portray as an industry. Only by nipping that in the bud will hobbyists, spare-time bloggers and potential stars of the future be able to keep going. As with any market, to ensure competition and innovation the barriers to entry must be kept low.
If some bloggers are able to become professionals, then good luck to them – but to keep the medium relevant and therefore alive it must remain open, cheap to do and above all free to speak as it wishes.