Just another middle class wanker

Insults

2010-10-17T21:51:00.002+01:00

Last week, Andrew Marr went on a rant at bloggers. He described us as "very angry""socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting"

Now I don't live in my mother's basement - I live in my cousin's bedroom, which might be worse - but I don't think he's entirely wrong. Some of the most vicious, stupid and badly spelt thoughts ever expressed are left on blogs. So too, however, are some of the funniest and most welcome observations.

As evidence of both types - though thankfully more the latter - I am pleased to present an edited selection of the best comments left on my Telegraph blog. I will update this post as I write more and as new and better examples are left. In the mean time, enjoy!

On tuition fees:-

"What a t*****!"

"Are you sure you didn't get a degree in Smugness?"

"His comments are obvious proof on the fact that educational standards have been dumbed down. And how the hell did he get into Oxford (or should it be Oxford Poly)"

On Chilean miners:-

"Vomit inducing opportunism in linking a truly heartwarming story to some cretinous human interest observation."

On Arnold Schwarzenegger's visit to Downing Street:-

"Doesn't know jack shit"

On the 'Fairness premium':-

"Another toryboy brat who can't see past the walls erected for him"

And perhaps most surprising of all, on middle-class outrage:-

"Hello Daniel. How refreshing to have someone young, thoughtful and intelligent contributing to The Telegraph Blogs"

The really crazy prize, however, goes to one commenter calling himself 'disgruntled', who has left several slightly incoherent comments questioning my very existence, and especially my right to write for the Telegraph. Of all the commenters so far, 'disgruntled' is the only one I see fitting Andrew Marr's stereotype. I won't copy the comments here, but if you want to be puzzled and slightly amused, I urge you to glance over them.

As for me, I'm going to carry on writing, because I'm damned well enjoying it. Please keep reading!

Huzzah!

2010-10-13T20:32:00.004+01:00

Amazingly, I seem to amassed one or two regular readers. To both of you, I would just like to apologize for my recent lack of posts. I'm afraid I have decamped to the Telegraph's blog pages. You can find my latest posts here. I think they are of suitably middle-class-wanker material, but I'll try to keep this site updated as best I can too.

Thank you for reading!

A vested interest

2010-10-06T03:05:00.014+01:00

Maybe not all of you will be aware of this, but I have been a staunch advocate of the legalisation of drugs for a while now. It's something I'm quite passionate about. One of the most successful student articles I ever wrote - for The Alligator at the time of David Nutt's sacking - was on the subject. It has proven so popular that the editors have republished it twice.

More recently, I actually raised the issue with a prominent libertarian Tory MP - Douglas Carswell - in front of a gaggle of other politicians, journalists, lobbyists and so on. He kept going on about the importance of freer financial markets, whilst occasionally dismissing drugs legalisation types as crazies - presumably just for effect. Lots of people had questions about financial markets, but I had a different one - I wanted to know about the drugs.

The response I got was surprising. First I was dismissed - the drugs question was apparently a very 'undergraduate' question to ask. Then I was told that it wasn't important. Douglas Carswell, understandably I suppose, quite frankly admitted that he wasn't going to risk his career trying to legalise drugs. He'd much rather tinker around with the regulation of banks. Essentially his point was this; 'serious' people aren't interested in the drugs debate. Serious people like the niggardly details of finance. Drug users like drugs.

It's a common attitude, and one that I find quite perverse. I have never understood why it should matter if you only want to legalise drugs to make it easier for you to take them. That you have a vested interest might motivate you to be dishonest in your advocacy, but it doesn't automatically make you wrong. To put it in terms a Tory would understand - most of the people who want to repeal the fox hunting ban quite want to kill foxes. That doesn't make them wrong. Equally, if Winston Churchill had owned a rather lucrative Polish sausage factory, would that have compromised his pro-war stance against Hitler? Almost any policy will benefit some special interest group or other; some policies are still right.

Most people recognise that, but apparently not in the case of drugs. Time and time again when I bring this up, I quickly find myself distracted from actually debating the issue. I'm not allowed to talk about Columbia, Mexico, Afghanistan, Burma or any of the other places destroyed by the drugs war. I'm not allowed to talk about the costs of the market being unregulated, of the cost of drugs being cut with rat poison, ground up glass and probably even oregano. I can't talk about the astonishing rates of imprisonment that prohibition necessitates. Instead of all that, I have to talk about the slight predilection I had for cannabis whilst in Canada four years ago.

Yet the fact that I might want to take drugs has never been the driving force behind my desire to legalise them. Somehow I doubt it is for James Delingpole or for The Economist either (nice though it is to imagine their office operating in a funk of green smoke). More and more reasonable people are standing up against prohibition. Douglas Carswell might not be keen, but this country is desperately crying out for a politician to stand up with us. Legalising drugs isn't a policy that will only benefit a few hippies; it is very much a policy for serious people.

And as if just to prove that, in addition to all the evidence about crime, public health, tax revenues and so on, the International Herald Tribune adds this; legalizing drugs creates jobs. Not just any jobs, but journalism jobs. Astonishingly, advertising for medical marijuana firms is driving a boom in local newspapers in Colorado, allowing them to recruit for the first time in years.

If that doesn't give me a vested interest in the matter, I don't know what does.

Following the yellow brick road...

2010-10-01T12:50:00.012+01:00

Uses for gold?

Imagine if you will some sort of inanimate, useless natural substance - perhaps a particularly brittle and ugly form of rock. Imagine that there isn’t very much of it and that getting to it is exceptionally difficult, requiring you to hollow out mountains or dredge through the sea just to get at a few grains.

You wouldn’t bother would you? And you would probably be surprised if anyone else did. But that is exactly what gold is, and crazily people do hollow out mountains for it. Demand is so high that people are now apparently willing to pay $1315 for an ounce of it.

Why? Certainly gold has some genuine uses - it doesn’t corrode and it is quite pretty. For fashioning high-fidelity cables or jewellery, it’s not bad. But the main reason why most people would buy gold has little to do with cables or jewellery. The only reason why most people are willing to pay such crazy prices for gold is because there isn’t very much of it, and because they think that a lot of other people want it.

Essentially, lots of investors are piling into gold because they are worried about inflation. The idea is that “gold keeps its value”, whilst “fiat currencies” – what the rest of us just call “money” – don’t. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been working at a libertarian think tank, but this sort of thinking seems particularly common at the moment.

The argument goes much like this; the government can, theoretically, create unlimited money, so there is no reason to trust in its long term value. There isn’t very much gold out there though, so it has to stay valuable. Conclusion; ditch money, buy gold.

Some people out there aren’t just saying that for individuals. They reckon that governments generally should ditch money and switch to gold. Every pound in your bank account, or in your wallet, should be matched by a defined amount of gold in a vault somewhere and not necessarily in a central bank. More simply, money should be privatized and governments should only use gold.

It all sounds quite nice, but actually money already is privatized. With the internet, you can bank in pretty much anything you like, including gold – it’s just that most people choose not to. Sure we should probably make it easier to bank in the currency of your choice, but even if we did, the fact is that most of us rather like our fiat currencies. And when you look at the history of gold, it’s easy to see why.

Because whilst you would probably be better off holding a gold bar now than a bundle of 10^th century Chinese “jiaozi”, who honestly has a 1000 year investment plan? Gold is only a solid bet over a lifespan. Over a decade or so, it is as unreliable as any currency. As a case in point, you would have done better burying a lot of dollars under a tree than buying gold in 1980, the last time investors got this absurd yellow fever.

But perhaps the stupidest thing from the point of view of those investors is that an awful lot of the world’s gold is actually owned by governments. Sure they can debase currencies by printing lots of money, but they could also sell their gold. As with anything, if you suddenly expand the supply then the price will tumble. Probably like a drunk pushed down a mountain. So much for gold being an escape from government…

If governments had any sense (or in the case of ours, any gold left to sell) they would start selling now. Sensible people already are – witness the proliferation of “Cash for Gold” shops and postal services. Really the only good reason to hold gold is if you think the global revolution is around the corner. And honestly, if you think that, instead of surrounding yourself with ingots, probably go for a fallout bunker and a lot of tinned food. Starving people don’t need bling.

On being a middle class wanker and finding somewhere to live

2010-09-22T11:35:00.001+01:00

Withnail and I - Middle Class Wankers in North London

From a financial perspective, one of the best things about being a Middle Class Wanker is that squalor is a 'Good Thing'. As I find myself looking at flats in 1960s council estates in Tower Hamlets, I can at least be grateful that living in such a place wouldn't be a departure from class - it would be an affirmation. Living in the midst of poverty has been a middle class right of passage since as long as there has been a middle class and I should be glad, grateful even, of the opportunity to live somewhere where I am quite likely to be stabbed by people more 'authentic' than I am.

The earliest example of this phenomenon that I can think of is that 5th century BC Indian prince - Guatama Buddha. As the age of 29 - rather late for a young middle class wanker I would say, but pioneers deserve some leeway I suppose - Buddha decided he had had enough of living in his father's palace and would go out and live with the people, in poverty, begging for alms and learning great things from wise teachers, in the hope of one day changing the world. Guatama Buddha, founder of the fourth largest religion in the world, was essentially just the 5th century BC equivalent of a postgraduate student moving from comfortable suburbia to somewhere ugly in the inner city in the hope of one day being important.

A slightly more relevant case is the University Settlement movement that began in about 1880 and carried on until the late 1920s. These young men, freshly graduated from Oxford and Cambridge, went and moved into fortified houses in the poorer areas of London where they sought to share culture and education with the impoverished inhabitants. The movement spread across Britain and the United States and did great things for thousands of Middle Class Wankers, who later could live with the healthy glow that comes from having brought enlightenment to the depths of misery. The modern equivalent is quite obviously Teach First - a charity which helicopter drops (not literally - cool though that would be) high flying graduates with no teaching experience into poor, inner city areas, where they try to do pretty much the same thing that the University Settlers did a hundred years earlier.

For me though, the most interesting specimen is surely George Orwell. George Orwell was perhaps the definitive Middle Class Wanker and an inspiration to thousands since. After leaving Eton, he went and worked in Burma for a year, where he detested the other Englishmen for their affectations and their petty snobbery, but also for not being captivated by the experience of being surrounded by poor, brown, foreigners. After contracting Dengue fever in 1927, he returned to England and spent the next few years living in poverty in London and Paris, only occasionally returning to bathe and eat at his parents house in Southwold. Later he not only went to fight poverty with words in Wigan - he went to fight fascists with guns in Spain. Eventually he emerged, as I'm sure you are all aware, as one of the best novelists of the 20th century. His life was a paradigm of what being a middle class wanker is all about.

I can't say I quite have the integrity of Orwell. Sadly, the police force in Burma doesn't recruit effete young Englishmen any more, nor are there very many good wars going on that I could join. I can however follow his path and live in admirable, middle class squalor somewhere in London. I have not yet sold my soul, but I have just about managed to lease it. The income should at least pay the rent on somewhere suitably horrible within cycling distance of the City. I am going to be a trainee financial journalist, at a publication I don't imagine any of you have heard of. I'm looking forward to it. Before I start though, I need to find somewhere to live, so if you would like to share destitution with me, or you know anyone else who would, let me know! And don't worry - I don't actually plan to live in Tower Hamlets.

Disappointment

2010-09-18T13:54:00.000+01:00

A week ago last friday, I was sending out a lot of books to various journalists, book editors, academics and so on. Stuffing two hundred copies of 'Does Britain need a financial regulator?' into envelopes has not exactly been the best bit of my internship so far. So I pulled a stunt. I discovered that among the addressees were three or four journalists from The Economist, including the editor and the deputy editor. So to their copies of this enlightening book, I added copies of my CV, a covering letter full of attempts to be funny and a short article. Crazier things have gotten people jobs.

Anyway, on Wednesday night I got home and logged onto my computer to find an email from my mother. Someone from The Economist had called. She wasn't sure who, only that he had called at around five and asked for me and she had given him my mobile number. He would probably call back, or so she thought.

The entire next morning I was anxious and slightly disbelieving. Stunts like this don't actually work do they? At about half eleven my phone rang and I rushed across the office to get to it. I answered, breathless in anticipation.

'Hello. I'm calling from The Economist'

'Yes?'

'Am I speaking to Daniel Knowles?'

'Speaking.'

'Would you like to take part in a trial subscription and receive 12 issues for £12?'

It was about as crushing as a fully grown African elephant weighed down with sandbags and then pushed out of an aeroplane at 30,000 ft. Hardly surprising though. There are no shortcuts into this industry it seems.

That said, for anyone wanting to subscribe to The Economist, £1 an issue is really worth it. If enough of you subscribe, maybe they'll decide they should employ me after all.

More on Liberalism and the Tea Party

2010-09-11T13:09:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine recently brought to my attention a quote from Hemingway that would have fitted my last post rather well. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, his Spanish Civil War masterpiece, the hero Robert Jordan, an American volunteer for the republicans, answers to this;

'But are there not many Fascists in your country?

'There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes'.

Today there are still not many fascists in the United States. Despite all the rhetoric of the anti-American left, the great western republic is a liberal democracy and looks likely to remain one. That said though, there are an awful lot of people who do not know that they are fascists but go around saying things that suggest that they aren’t that far off the mark.

For example. I’ve just started an internship at the Institute of Economic Affairs - a free market, libertarian think tank in London. The IEA itself is not an unreasonable body. Whilst they would certainly be considered right wing by many, I would say that they are more consistently liberal. They support slashing the size of the state, but they also support legalizing drugs. The director, Mark Littlewood, was previously director of communications for the Lib-Dems - hardly a far right organization.

On Thursday night however they hosted a party that was broadly attended by people who would never be considered even remotely left wing, mostly from various think tanks from the US and Europe. The event was a follow up drinks to this conference; an attempt to try to learn from 'Tea Party' tactics in the UK. Over flowing champagne - one of the few perks of working for free - I spoke to a woman who I thought embodied what is wrong with the free market right.

For some reason we were talking about gun control, and this woman was adamant that what we need in this country is more guns. At first I thought she was being facetious but it turned out that she was deadly serious. Apparently, the free market solution to gun crime is for everyone to carry a concealed weapon. That, she contended, would give criminals second thoughts about whether to try an armed robbery.

That is a stupid view to have, but it is not necessarily a completely indefensible one. High levels of gun ownership in places like Switzerland don't always coincide with American levels of crime. There are a few ways in which guns can be used responsibly - firing bullets at targets is harmless and can be incredibly satisfying. Although it is hard to see how practically it could work, ideally we should defend the rights of people to own guns whilst opposing those who choose to use them for crime. It is absurd for example that our 2012 Olympic pistol team are having to do their training abroad.

This woman didn’t make any of those arguments however - all she could muster was the point that ‘the criminals just get guns anyway’, so everybody should have them, to defend themselves presumably. That is quite clearly ridiculous - the vast majority of gun crime in this country is perpetrated by home made or converted handguns. Unlike drugs, it turns out you actually can restrict the smuggling of weaponry relatively well.

The drugs point was the revealing one though. I suggested that with more liberal drugs laws, perhaps we could reduce the number of criminals wanting guns anyway. This woman’s actual response was that ‘drugs are harmful’. Cannabis causes schizophrenia apparently. I had to stop myself from responding with ‘Well guns cause fatal gunshot wounds but you don't seem to mind those’.

Free market liberals in the UK often look to the US for answers, but co-opting the Tea Party as allies would be a tragic mistake to make. What passes for ‘libertarianism’ in the USA is half hearted and hypocritical. It is a movement that wants lower taxes for the rich but has no plans to lower government spending. They want the right to carry around guns, but not the right to smoke a spliff or to have an abortion. They demand civil rights, but not for suspected terrorists and illegal immigrants. They are not fascists, but were it to come to fascism, I suspect they would be much more likely to join in than to actually defend the freedom they love to talk about.

The Tea Party

2010-09-04T16:10:00.000+01:00

A lot has been written recently about the Tea Party and I certainly wouldn’t claim any expertise on the issue – my friend Ed for one knows a lot more and I would recommend you read his excellent recent piece here – but one thing that these bleating imbeciles keep reminding of is this, from Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier

“And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time--the office-workers and black-coated employees of all kinds--whose traditions are less definitely middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realize it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party. “

The tea partiers seem to be exactly these sorts of people – they are people who thought they were middle class. They grew up in the Mad Men-esque suburban idyll of the 1950s and 1960s, when salaries as a proportion of GDP were at their height and when executives earned tens of times as much as their immediate inferiors, rather than hundreds of times as much. They learned to expect comfort and continual progress. Instead, forty years of growth and innovation have left them almost exactly where they were before. Better healthcare has meant higher insurance premiums, eating into stagnant salaries. Unprecedented increases in the cost of a university education mean that even getting one of those salaries means accumulating a hell of a lot of debt. And worst of all, the thing that fuelled two decades of expanding consumption turned out to be a giant government engineered bubble – that’s the property boom no-one thought would ever end.

I’m not saying that the Tea Party is fascist. However awful Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are, I don't think that they are quite ready to send illegal immigrants to the gas chambers or to invade Canada just yet. What I am saying though is that the sort of middle class resentment that drives the Tea Party now also drove the Nazi party in the 1920s and early 1930s. In post-war Germany, the hyperinflation of 1923 wiped out the wealth and incomes of much of the German middle class. Afterwards, all they saw around them was immorality and the destruction of old values. They saw swinging Berlin and Marlin Dietrich and artists and musicians getting along whilst they lived in poverty. The country they thought they had built was gone. Was it any surprise that they bought so readily into the romantic myth of Nazism – to the idea of a ‘real Germany’ to which Jews, financiers, artists and so on didn’t belong? The Nazi Party didn't just offer prejudice. It offered a return to an idealized country of farmers and small businessmen and buxom blonde housewives. Now doesn't that sound familiar?

As I say, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are far from being Nazis. The myth they are selling though is still a very dangerous one. To counter them, people on the left need to stop just shouting ‘racist’ – they need to reach out to these people and actually offer an alternative version of America.

In support of a citizens income

2010-08-29T12:07:00.000+01:00

Today, on my way home from yet another interview in London, I popped into a newsagent in central Birmingham and I had to wait to buy my chocolate milk because some woman was buying a pack of cigarettes. Fine, I normally have nothing against smokers – I hate the way they are demonized by health conscious puritans – except that not only did this woman have a child, sat screaming outside in a pushchair, she was also heavily pregnant. Not the slightly pregnant level where you might not give up your seat on a bus in case she’s just fat. Not even just kind of pregnant. This woman was so pregnant that the shopkeeper was probably eying up the mop in case her waters broke. And she was smoking!

I was, of course, outraged, as all middle class people are when confronted with working class people being grossly irresponsible. It’s what the Daily Mail thrives on. But then I thought about it, and I couldn’t actually work out why I had any right to be outraged. It wasn’t my kid she was carrying around in her nicotine stained womb. It was hers. And whilst it seems a little harsh for children to be disadvantaged like that before they’re even born, we let middle class parents put their children through all sorts of terribly risky experiences, like learning to ski or to ride horses. Though we may live in a child obsessed age, where the Prime Minister invites parents to denounce companies that ‘sexualize’ children, and where an unfortunately ‘Lolita’ branded bed can become a national outrage, most people would probably still accept that parents have the right, within reason, to endanger the lives of their children. It shouldn’t matter whether they do it on a mountain top or by smoking a cigarette or two during pregnancy.

But of course it does. It matters because we (the liberal minded middle class) have allowed ourselves to be seduced by this radical leftist idea that somehow only middle class people need to be responsible, and not only are we responsible for ourselves, we are for everyone else too, and especially the poor. As a result, we have constructed a welfare system that is intensely hypocritical, because it treats the people who depend on it like children, shutting them into poverty traps, whilst depriving them of any real opportunity for advancement. The British welfare state was meant to be liberating. It began as an attempt to provide the poorest with opportunity, and to alleviate them from the savagery of a world they couldn’t control. Under New Labour, it has been transformed into a prison, one in which the inmates are watched and kept in line by a perpetual, snooping nanny state. Living on benefits has become the equivalent to going into the workhouse – recipients hand over their liberty and take their bread in return.

The young mother I saw buying cigarettes is a case in point. I initially felt justified in judging her because I come from the taxpaying class, and the taxes that my parents and friends pay, and that I (hopefully) will be paying soon most likely keep that woman in cigarettes. They also probably pay for a roof, for baby food, for a TV and so on. Her job is quite literally to raise children – that is what the state is paying her for - and so superficially it is outrageous if she is doing it badly. But what is really outrageous is that that is all she can realistically aspire to. If she wanted to get a job, for every pound she earned, she would effectively be taxed something like 90p through the loss of benefits. Moreover, she would need to pay for transport, childcare and so on. Faced with such rates of taxation, would anyone work? Probably not. The benefit system creates a situation where people are forced to become ‘scroungers’, and because they are scroungers, they apparently surrender their rights to choose how to live their lives. The right is allowed to hate them for abusing the ‘taxpayer’, but of late the left has been joining in, because with their fecklessness and stupidity, they undermine the project of building a utopia, where everyone is middle class and responsible, despite the obvious fact that middle class people can be quite irresponsible in their own ways.

As I see it, the best solution is to make benefits universal. Pay out enough to live on to every single citizen, regardless of whether they are in work, or have children, or not. Fund it by increasing income tax and by scrapping the entire patchwork of housing benefit, tax credits, income support and so on. What anyone does after that is their own affair. If they choose to spend it on tobacco or booze or gambling, it is none of anyone else's business. If, as a result, they end up being unable to pay their rent, then they suffer the consequences, instead of the state picking up the tab. In an instant, it would restore personal responsibility to the welfare system. It would make it genuinely liberating, quite literally providing a bank balance below which no-one can fall, whilst allowing anyone to rise above it. The concept is called the ‘Citizen’s Income’, and it is enormously popular amongst certain academics, economists, Think Tanks and so on.

It will of course never happen. The right would hate how progressive it would be. More importantly however, the left would hate it too; because it would be genuine liberalism, and letting working class people do what they want has never been the concern of the puritans who claim to represent them. If they did, when young mothers went out and spent it all on tobacco, they would have no right to care, and what is middle class socialism if not ‘improving’ the proletariat whilst hating everything they do?

The Police State

2010-08-05T03:44:00.000+01:00

Today I went to a ‘consultation’ meeting in Bordesley Green in Birmingham that was supposed to address some of the reasons why the ‘trust and confidence of the community’* has been eroded and what the West Midlands Police Authority might do to recover it. Except of course it didn’t, because the reason why the trust and confidence of people has been eroded is because the Police Authority rubber stamped the construction of some 290 ANPR and CCTV cameras funded by a counter terrorism budget that ring the Muslim districts of South Birmingham, because the Police continue to refuse to remove those cameras, because in their choice of chair for the 'independent' review into whether or not the cameras should stay up or not, they have chosen a woman who is in fact on the Police board which funded them in the first place, and because the chair of the meeting refused to concede any of those points.

Having apparently 'apologized' at the last public meeting, a much bigger event, with Shami Chakrabarti among several other high profile speakers, senior Police officers seem to have decided that they can whitewash their way through this, and then when the Guardian and Liberty turn their attention elsewhere, quietly take off the bags and start filming us all again. The fact that one of these monstrous cameras is sat outside my bedroom window feels reason enough to be outraged by this, but more important than that, this is evidence of the apparent complete disregard for civil liberties that has characterized politics in this country for the last decade at least.

Firstly, there are control orders, which allow the Home Secretary to place any person effectively under perpetual house arrest simply for being suspected of terrorism, without the need for a trial at any point. That we have apparently completely disregarded habeas corpus for the sake of fighting terrorism should be astonishing enough on its own; this is legislation more fitting in a state like Burma than in a major European democracy.

Secondly is secret evidence, whereby people are convicted (or control orders granted) on the basis of evidence which the defence is not even allowed to see, yet alone to dispute! This is often dressed up to mean the identities of secret agents or information that is of paramount importance to national security, but actually, it is often used to get ASBOs or other controls through the testimony of anonymous witnesses. The idea that people can be convicted on testimony of shadowy people who cannot be held responsible for what they say is completely illiberal.

These are but two of the worst of a litany of measures that have since September 2001 eroded and limited our civil liberties. Others might include the expansion of the right to stop and search, another by product of terrorism law, or the apparent collusion of MI5 agents in the torture of British citizens, among other people, in extraordinary rendition - torture, for those few not now aware. The main issue however is not any individual measure but the culture of control and surveillance that holds sway over those responsible for our security. The continued delusion of the West Midlands police is but one example of this. Every level of protest has been met by a sort of surprised indifference, like an alcoholic meeting a hiccup. The upper ranks of the Police desperately want these cameras and they are not going to let a simple matter of public opinion stop them. The Chief Constable seems simply to refuse to realize that until these cameras are taken down, people will continue to fight them.

Or will they? Salma Yaqoob, a charismatic and increasingly reasonable councillor from the Respect Party today led a chant of 'No More Cameras' that resounded around the old hall of the Bordesley Centre - once King Edward VI Camp Hill School. It was impossible not to notice however that the room was a lot less full than at the last meeting. Unfortunately, the main reason why our civil liberties have eroded is because we have let them. Police officers and politicians may often appear malicious, but they are usually just men and women trying to do their jobs - the problem is the powers that we give them are too broad. Old cliches like 'The Greater Good' and 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' still represent the views of the fearful majority. These cameras in Birmingham have become controversial because have been so explicitly built in a way that encircles and stigmatizes the more Muslim sections of the city, but they were first questioned not by the bearded young men of Sparkhill but by the Guardian reading semi-detached people of Moseley, where I live.

The Coalition government has been a glimpse of sunlight for liberals. Reducing the intrusiveness of the state is something that both David Cameron and Nick Clegg seem fundamentally agreed on, even if much of it will happen as sideshow to savage budget cuts. This newly ascendent liberalism is a lucky byproduct however of the inability of either the paternalist, authoritarian wing of the Tory party or the paternalist, authoritarian whole of the Labour party to win a majority of support. It is not, in short, representative. I have always said though that liberty is more important than democracy, and so I hope the Government seizes the opportunity to do some good whilst it lasts.

* I might say something soon about the disingenuousness of Government language - not to mention its sheer aesthetic awfulness. But it will probably be a ripoff of something Orwell wrote 70 odd years ago.

Also, if you've made it this far, thanks! This is obviously a lot more dry than the last thing I wrote, and mostly reflects some thoughts I've been building up for a while. If you've made it this far and you're bored and you hate me, sorry!

Can't say I'm not trying...

2010-07-27T17:28:00.000+01:00

Yes, I am on the dole. I'm going to try not whine about it - I'm living a fairly decadent live on my (yet to be paid) benefits - but one of the downsides is occasionally having to look at this site, the government job search site. As this screenshot shows, it doesn't work quite as I'd like it too...

Rejections...

2010-07-10T12:28:00.000+01:00

Perhaps it was just unfortunate timing. What with all these delightful Russian spies being exchanged, Third Man style, in Vienna, the appeal of espionage is probably particularly high at the moment - so perhaps the competition was stiff. Whatever the reason though, I just got rejected by MI5. It probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. I already failed to get into MI6 about nine months ago, so the fact that their slightly less interesting sister organization doesn't want me either isn't exactly remarkable. Particularly galling about this latest rejection though is that this time I failed even to make it beyond the initial stages of typing stuff into little boxes, or more importantly, the personality test. Admittedly, the evidence would seem to be that I don't have the right sort of personality for espionage - if I did, I'd probably have the discretion not to immediately start writing a blog about it - but a test asking me to rank my creativity and so on in tick boxes shouldn't be able to tell that. I at least want someone to interview me before they decide I'm an unreliable, pathetic egotist. I'm a complex, individual human being - it shouldn't be possible to work that out in half an hour of automatic questions.

Or should it? I'm increasingly of the opinion that far from being the extraordinarily interesting, exciting, intelligent and different person that I've long imagined myself to be (you know the type - deep emotional problems, repressed creativity, particularly good taste in novels) I'm actually just another Middle Class Wanker, a term I have decided to apply to a common sociological phenomenon, probably best summed up in the blog StuffWhitePeopleLike.com. It's kind of distressing, although obviously, the kind of distress that would probably feature in that blog. Existential angst is definitely a middle class preoccupation - as is writing about it in moleskin diaries. Or for that matter on blogs. This is unlikely to ever be read by more than around five or six disinterested friends who will later mock me about it (to all of you, I'll be prepared, so you'd better be witty at least) but I'm writing it anyway. Why? Because like most MCWs (I think we deserve an acronym, and it’s better than the terribly American ‘white people’) I'm spectacularly predictable. A couple of years back I saw a friend of mine wearing a t-shirt that read 'Lazy Middle Class Wanker'. I think perhaps there should be some sort of test for us, on completion of which we'd all be given that t-shirt and made to wear it just enough to remind us of our own uniformity - our membership of this predictable, unfortunate club. Then maybe we'd get less depressed about taking our prestigious degrees and getting high paying jobs in the city - it's not selling out if we realize we had nothing to sell.

That's probably the future for me anyway. I have an interview next week to work in financial PR. It's the sort of job that's well paid, prestigious, has good prospects - the sort of job that most ordinary, non MCW graduates would probably be delighted to have a shot at. If I actually get it, and take it, I'll probably even quite enjoy it. The problem I have is that being a MCW, I will never be entirely satisfied because I won't be able to stop myself thinking about the books that I could be writing, or the unnecessarily dangerous and uncomfortable countries I could be struggling to travel around, or the other pretentious, self-important authors, journalists and so on that I could be sipping champagne with at book launches and so on, instead of the stockbrokers and directors I will be sipping champagne with, at company launches and so on.

Which obviously is what this blog is going to be about. It's a sap to my predictable, unfulfilled ambitions, attached to vague and unsubstantiated daydreams about book deals and journalism jobs. I hope you enjoy it.

(For anyone interested in trying for MI5, the deadline is July 12th and the website is https://www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/careers.aspx. I've no issues encouraging anyone else to apply, since with this job, unlike a lot of the others I've been rejected for this year, at least I won't find out if any of my friends get it).

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