Pep rally?

One of my colleagues has just called in. He's been at a meeting which provided a packed lunch.  I don't know what meetings he gets invited to, but at mine there are coin slots on the windows, let alone free water. Apparently convinced that the rest of us are starving to death over our computers, he has presented me with a spare packed lunch.

In the bag is a cheese sandwich, a cake and a bottle of Pepsi.

So what?

Well, I've never tasted Pepsi. I'm no Coke devotee either: I think the last time I tried one was when I was eight. It was vile and I've never had any desire to go back. So basically the only fizzy drink I've consumed since 1983 has been champagne. And now alcohol's banned on campus, I can no longer swig that during lectures. My family, on the other hand, swigged fizzy brown stuff at ever opportunity, except for my mum. Despite both parents being doctors, I don't recall any caution about the stuff. I didn't reject it for health reasons: I just found the overwhelming sweetness completely disgusting.

So in the spirit of Martha Payne and her wonderful blog Never Seconds, and a little bit by I've Never Seen Star Wars (I've seen twenty minutes here and there of the original trilogy, and was forced to see The Phantom Menace by friends, which convinced me that George Lucas despises you all), I'm going to try this brown carbonated water and review it for you.

So. First impression. Bottle: extruded plastic. No aesthetic qualities, and destined to poison the environment for some time to come. After it rattles around in my office for a couple of years. Colour scheme: red white and blue roundel is clearly meant to inspire subliminal American patriotism and – accidentally – perhaps British patriotism too. As I have an Irish passport, I'm pretty resistant. Oh, and because I'm not a capitalist and don't believe that consuming Pepsi (or Coke) is living the American dream. The lower-case typeface is airy, rounded and clearly influenced by urls and Apple. Personally, I think it's cowardice: like The Guardian becoming theguardian and therefore announcing to the world that it's a secondary product. But I digress. Basically: I feel patronised. I know Pepsi isn't cool and friendly. It's a corporate monster which makes money by persuading people to get fat and sick on its products.

Talking of which: the ingredients. In order of content: Carbonated Water; Sugar; Colour (Caramel E150d); Phosphoric Acid, Flavourings (including Caffeine). The links are to analyses of what these things are, and how much there is in the drink. The good news is that the Carbonated Water is pretty harmless, though quite ridiculous. Next: the sugar. Well, it seems that there are 13 teaspoons of this stuff in the bottle. Rather naughtily, the information on the bottle gives the amounts per 100ml and per 250ml. In very small print. Odd choices of quantity, given that the bottle itself is 500ml. Almost as though they hope anyone bothered to check the amounts won't notice the sleight of hand. The chart on the front lists the most important quantities per '250ml serving': though I'd guarantee that very few people indeed drink just half the bottle of fizzy stuff. OOH! No fat, Saturates (er, fat) or Salt! It must be healthy. Except for the 53 grams of sugar and the 10% of daily recommended calories.

The caramel seems to be harmless enough: carcinogenic in very large quantities but relatively piffling here. The Phosphoric Acid is what gives the drink its tang. But it's so bitter that it apparently needs the 13 teaspoons of sugar (sorry, but that number is obscene. I don't put sugar on anything and only have it in the house for guests who like a teaspoon of it in coffee) just to make it palatable. And then there's the caffeine, which although it's listed as a flavouring, is actually undetectable in scientific taste tests. It is, in fact, there as a mildly addictive stimulant to make you want more. The utter scum.

I've actually given up caffeine. I used to drink coffee in enormous amounts. A full stove-top espresso machine for breakfast, several trips to the CorpoCup bar at work, shaking, tired and weird by lunchtime. So this is going to reawaken a lot of bad memories.

Right. Enough displacement activity. Time to try the damned stuff. Good job I've been for a swim today. I'll open the cap. Helpful arrows to show which way it turns, which seems particularly moronic. It will only turn one way.

Pleasing sound of carbon dioxide escaping into the atmosphere. That'll show those polar bears who's boss.

Bouquet? Sugary with an undertone of acid. The Phosphoric Acid, that'll be. The stuff also used to remove rust and which reduces bone density. A hint of lambs gambolling across meadows. I'm getting hot-air balloons and starfish. Chignons and cherished books.

Not really. It just smells of sugar and acid.

And finally: emptying this stuff into my innocent, unsullied mouth.

Instant fizz on the tongue, teeth and upper palate. A huge rush of sweetness with the dense acid undertow. There is no 'body', as the wine-tasters say. After a microsecond, only the sweetness and the fizzing sensation are left. The 'finish' is revolting. Really, really unpleasant. The best I can say is that it's over quickly. Except that it isn't, of course: as the foul pollutant courses through my intestines, it induces a bout of belching of a most ill-mannered sort. My teeth, too, feel like they've been given a faux-fur coating.

What do people see in this stuff? Are you all just hooked on the caffeine? Or is it the marketing? I just don't get it at all. Beer, that I get. But brown sugary water with an addictive substance mixed in? No.

Will I be repeating this foray into Convenient Carbonated Sodas? Ask me again in another 30 years. Perhaps the memory will have faded. Actually, I'll be 68 then, so all my memories will have faded.

Back to the Futura

Yesterday, I went down to an old-fashioned physical book shop to buy the latest and last Iain Banks novel, The Quarry. Banks himself died last week from cancer, at 59: a massive loss to contemporary fiction. Ironically, he'd almost finished The Quarry before getting the diagnosis – ironically because one of the central protagonists is dying of cancer, and takes the opportunity to deliver some ripely expressive diatribes on the subject of those he's leaving behind.

When I took the book to the counter, the assistant remarked on the oddness of the cover:

Which was interesting because the day before, at the Futura Science Fiction convention (attended so poorly that a standard-issue police box would have suited us fine, never mind a TARDIS), one of the panels mentioned a book shop which deliberately obscured all its stock's covers with a paper bag on which a summary was hand-written. The thinking behind it is that cover design is a marketing tool which encourages ever-tighter genre descriptors and alienates potential readers. I'm in total agreement: much cover art is derivative and/or terrible, and it is alienating. There's a lot to be said for the old uniform Penguins.

Sometimes there are interesting experiments: I collect Jane Austen editions, and use them in my teaching about 'popular' and 'high' art. I show the students these copies and some other Austen editions, from too far away to read the names and titles, and invite them to guess what kind of novel is inside.

Then we talk about genre, marketing and how our reading are shaped by these kinds of expectations: the 'adult' cover art for children's novels also get an airing. It's a fun class and one which gets students talking about reading as a social and economic activity, as cultural capital and social positioning. At Saturday's convention, we were given several free books which looked like typical SF novels. One of them was described on the back as 'military SF': a sub-genre of which I've heard but never wanted to read. To me, military SF evokes Heinlein's neo-fascism and the kinds of terrible 'find planet-meet aliens-kill them all' stuff beloved of America's most imperialist phase, rather than Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. So you see, genre and cover art can repel as much as it can attract. 

But back to Banks. The quick chat with the bookshop assistant formed a kind of sad little coda (for me: she didn't appear to know who he was and I didn't want to break the bad news) for the weekend. The Futura event (I couldn't resist an SF conference named after a typeface) was overshadowed by Iain's death - for me as a reader but more painfully for the writers gathered. They'd lost their brightest star, and in the case of Ken MacLeod, a very close and longstanding friend. I didn't want to dig around in his grief during the kaffeeklatsch session (buying a convention ticket does include access to a man's grief), but he spoke very movingly and amusingly about their long association during his reading and presentation. Banks reciprocated: he makes a point of praising MacLeod's unpublished poetry in his last interview. We got the sense that the late 1970s was great for them: before Scotland's industrial destruction at the hands of Thatcher, Banks and MacLeod were bright, educated, hip young literary gunslingers. Active on the hard left, fond of a drink, full of the Scottish virtues of socialism (MacLeod described their politics as 'Socialism within, Anarchy without', which seems pretty seductive to me), contempt for the cosmopolitan and determined to put all this into their work, they seemed to have had a ball. Banks had three SF novels rejected before deciding to write a 'mimsy mainstream Hampstead novel' as MacLeod put it, and he worried that it was a betrayal of all he stood for. No need to worry: The Wasp Factory was hailed and condemned in equal measure as a nasty piece of outsider tyro viciousness. 

The convention itself was enjoyable, though it did feel a little like the last months of the airborne party Douglas Adams wrote about in The Restaurant At The End of the Universe: all the ingredients were there but the audience was slightly lacking. Literally: despite the publicity's exhortations to sign up for the various elements as numbers were limited, the total turnout was in the 30s at most. So I felt a little sorry for the authors (Ken MacLeod, Ian MacLeod (no relation) and Adam Roberts, plus several others of whom I hadn't previously heard because I don't read many graphic novels, or what Pratchett affectionately calls Big Comics). They are eminent and popular authors, and here they were in a cavernous space talking to tiny numbers of people: 5 of us in the Banks kaffeeklatsch. The day before, Adam Roberts (who writes cerebral SF and is a Professor of 19th Century literature and culture) gave a TEDx talk in Parliament to 1000 people. Yet here he was, discussing Kant and reading from his new novel, in which a cow mournfully (spoiler: and unsuccessfully) tries to persuade the man with the bolt gun that cows should be Turing Tested before meeting their ends in the abattoir. Roberts is interested in culture's representations of animals and aliens as (perhaps necessarily) anthropomorphised devices to talk about ourselves: the truly alien couldn't be comprehended. He read the piece in an Ermintrude voice, and I mentioned philosopher Peter Singer's article Heavy Petting, in which he suggests that bestiality really isn't so bad in comparison to just killing animals for fun and food. It's a provocative and enjoyable piece. 

Apart from the author stuff, I went to a panel which discussed whether SF is 'mainstream', which was very enjoyable. There's no answer of course: SF is certainly on prime-time TV, elements of SF surface in other popular genres, and literary fiction sometimes appropriates SF themes and tropes. Yet what is the mainstream? Is it critical approval? Canonical acceptance (I set books on academic courses: am I one of the 'them' who approves or disapproves?) Sales? What's so great about being mainstream anyway? Is anything mainstream in an era of targeted marketing and ever tinier sub-genres? Certainly there's an element of any genre's readership which defiantly rejects being popular – very reminiscent of my other hobby, record-collecting. Some people would rather their favourite music was never heard by the 'sheeple', which I think is a moronic attitude. I mostly listen to music that isn't popular, but I regret it: I'd rather my favourite singers and authors made a living than starved to death in a garret to increase my cool quotient amongst a tiny band of obscurantists. 

I also bought a couple of books and was given a couple more. Who could resist a pulp-homage zombie attack novel set at a Star Trek convention? Not me, especially not for a shiny £1. I also bought a book in which a man in search of a fabled lost Carry On film finds himself joining a shadowy underground army of resistance fighters. Can't remember the title, but it sounds promising. 

And I won a raffle prize - at 37, I'm no longer a loser in life's lottery! A copy of Ian MacLeod's Wake Up And Dream in a slipcase, signed in a limited edition of 100. It's very beautiful and I'll cherish it, though I really don't like the wider culture of limited edition things. I spent quite a lot of money buying the only copy of his The Summer Isles I could find, which was also highly limited, signed etc etc. Very lovely, but I wish an edition was freely available to potential readers who don't have money. The same goes for beautiful William Morris work, De Morgan tiles, or the new collection of James Joyce work in progress, Finn's Hotel: copies range from €350 to €2500. Beautiful things, whether they're books, wine, hand-knitted jerseys or paintings are expensive and slow to make, but when the objects become fetishes, they offend my democratic instincts, especially when they're valued solely for their rarity rather than their intrinsic cultural value. 

Of course this was also an opportunity. These three writers are amongst my very favourite contemporary authors and we had the chance to chat to them without any pressure or time constraints. I bagged them all as future guest speakers at the university too: we're trying to strengthen our cultural activity and these authors can contribute strongly to the sense that there's intellectual life here. A larger event wouldn't have afforded these possibilities, yet I was acutely aware of the social boundaries slightly blurred by the  accidentally-intimate scale of the proceedings. We turned up for the quiz which was meant to round off the evening: it didn't happen, and probably 12 people stayed in the bar. My little group of academics. Some non-academic fans. The authors. I didn't feel comfortable joining the authors' group because it felt intrusive, especially as we'd spent the entire day talking to them about their craft, the process, their ideas, Iain Banks and so on. And yet the other fans had no such compunction and enfolded the authors into their circle. Perhaps it was the financial relationship which inserted the awkwardness: we'd paid for their time during the day's events, so I felt quite strongly that stepping into their social space was presumptuous, as though it communicated a sense of 'I've paid £25, so I have the right to engage in drinking banter with you whether you like it or not. '. This, by the way, is why I oppose student fees so much: a customer/provider relationship is alienating. It erects social and intellectual barriers between what should be a unitary group of truth-seekers. 

So there I was, slightly absurdly drinking 4 yards away from the main attraction of the day, studiously keeping myself to myself. I can't speak for my colleagues of course, let alone the authors and the fans so I have no idea how they perceived the social situation but I was well aware of the absurdity. Perhaps I'm just too middle-class and repressed for ordinary social interaction. Mark Corrigan's spirit is most definitely hovering above me as I type this. Perhaps that's why I read SF: the classic loser's choice of reading – or it used to be until the nerds took over the levers of popular culture, to the bewilderment of people like my parents who spent my teenage years trying to ban SF from the house. 

OK, I should stop now: this is a rambling and random collection of thoughts. Futura: fun. Great to meet and talk to interesting, thoughtful and talented authors. A social minefield though. And now it's time to go to the launch of a history of The Hegemon. Which includes photographs taken by, well, me!

Political Smackdown!

No need for commentary from me: just a classy smack-down for my arrogant and out of touch MP, Paul Uppal:

Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West, Conservative):
On the issue of fact and fiction, I respectfully say to the hon. Gentleman that this comes in the context of a week when the shadow Chancellor, directly answering the question of whether Labour spent too much, said, “No, I don’t think we did.” That is not fiction; that is fact. This debate comes in that context.

Christopher Leslie (Nottingham East, Labour):

The hon. Gentleman seems to think that the problems of the global financial crisis were caused by too many police officers, nurses, teachers, hospitals, new schools… I am only trying to answer the question, Mr Amess. I am trying to be as helpful as possible to the new guru of No. 10’s policy unit. I envisage him sitting at the table there with many of the new fresh-faced Members as they produce detailed papers that are then ignored by the Prime Minister weeks later. I wish the hon. Gentleman luck. I hope he has some influence in that new august body and that when the reshuffle comes he does as well as the Minister assumes he will.

While I'm at it, Mr Uppal claimed last week that removing rights from workers in exchange for a few shares would transform employees into 'employers', referencing his own business experience. However, Mr Uppal is very reluctant to discuss what his company does and how it works. From what I can tell, Pinehurst Securities is enmeshed with his family, employs very few people and is merely a property speculation company. Are his unrelated employees shareholders?

 If he's so keen to enfold employees into the corporate structure, why does he require them to give up their health and safety protection, right not to be discriminated against and so on before British workers are permitted to rise above the status of wage slave?

 The truth is that this is a scam. It's another way of degrading working conditions for the poor, while providing a massive tax-avoidance loophole for the rich. Imagine you're signing on at a high level for a bank. You sign away your employment rights in exchange for a massive chunk of tax-free shares. You know that you don't need statutory protection: you can afford high-powered lawyers if working life takes a turn for the worse. Meanwhile your employers have found a way to pay you £50,000 without troubling the HMRC. Win-win. Unless you're one of the minimum wage drones Mr Uppal thinks are wrecking the economy.

No Love for Johnnie

What images are conjured up by that sort of title? For me, it's 1950s kitchen-sink drama. I'm half right: Wilfred Fienburgh's novel was published in 1959, shortly after the left-wing Labour MP's death in a car crash, aged 38. They say 'write about what you know', and this tale of Johnnie Byrne, socialist firebrand MP alienated by his party's rightwing leadership must surely be a thinly-disguised biographical tale. Mind you, from this summary it's a shame more Labour MPs didn't read it in the dark days of New Labour. I'm currently reading Bob Marshall-Andrew's caustic, outspoken memoir of his 13 years as a despised civil liberties-defending MP, hated by Blair and the rest of the leadership. I wonder if he's read No Love For Johnnie?

I haven't started reading it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Who could resist a novel reviewed as 'the most utterly cynical book on any subject that has ever been written'?

Fienburgh was one of those almost extinct species: an MP who'd worked with his hands. He was a manual labourer whose (unspecified) war service gained him an MBE and an entrée to political life, first as a researcher and eventually as a London MP. Very much a figure of his time, he quickly developed a sideline in TV and newspaper appearances and apparently enjoyed what we'll euphemistically call a rounded social life. He was also a progressive socialist thinker and progressive author of political tracts and manifestos. Yet No Love For Johnnie (later filmed) seems to express the disillusionment felt by many on the serious left about parliamentary politics and the Labour Party in particular. 

The syndicalists always said that the workers' representatives will always lose sight of their interests once they get to London, don a fine suit and dine out with the opposition. Certainly the Labour Party as an institution has very rarely, if ever, come close to being a socialist party. 1945 was a high point, and the oft-slated 1983 Manifesto (once called the 'longest suicide note in history') looked pretty good, but it's always been too boxed-in by fear of the Mail, Tories and global business. Which is why we're in the state we are…

Fired up!

Morning everybody. Did you enjoy me taking a day off from blogging yesterday? Or notice? It was a combination of exhaustion and business. I nearly got locked in the office at 10 p.m. the night before, having got caught up forensically examining Booz Allen's Code of Ethics, under which they fired Edward Snowden for leaking details of the NSA's Prism programme of spying on everyone, everywhere.

Then yesterday we had a series of meetings including one with the External Examiners – academics from other universities who analyse our curricula, assignments, marking, content and all the other things which constitute a course. It's the most important way we ensure that we're up to scratch intellectually and pedagogically. Weirdly, it was fun: we talked about all the things academics moan about in general, they praised the things the university is about to abolish (like the marking scheme) and we talked about individual modules. It was like being released after years in a hostage cell: words like 'imaginative' and 'sophisticated' were being bandied about. Our best undergraduate students, we're told, are almost operating at MA level, while even the mid-range ones are very strong compared with other universities. It's just so good to hear some validation now and then: we don't often get an outside perspective and it's easy to get caught up in the quotidian annoyances, losing sight of the genuinely good work we and our students do.

Somehow, perhaps dazed by all the praise (for my colleagues' work) I landed (well, volunteered for) the job of scanning and uploading all my colleagues' REF material: the chapters, articles and books which will be assessed in the programme which determines which universities will get research funding over the next few years. I suppose it's only right: I'm not in the REF exercise because too much of my suddenly free-flowing research is due out next year rather than this time (which is infuriating) but I can't help thinking that in a research-oriented university, academic staff wouldn't spend their time doing this kind of work. There's nothing demeaning about it, but having spent all these years training to produce research, it's not a great use of my salaried time. That said, the REF leaders for my subject group have spent the best part of two years doing this sort of thing, at great cost to their own research outputs, so it's time someone else took on some of the burden. They also serve who stand and photocopy…

At completely the other end of the working spectrum, I helped out with an MA class on Popular Culture the other evening which was probably the most fun I've ever had in a classroom. Or perhaps just the most fun I've ever had, which may give you a little more insight into my psychological condition. I was so enthused that I even took a picture of one of the whiteboards we filled:

Led by my colleague Steve with me chipping in and restraining him from playing yet another illustrative Grateful Dead track (he's a barely-reformed hippy), the subject was the dialectic relationship between postmodern religion and aspects of popular culture, and the ways in which they've affected each other: discourse, ritual, architecture, music and so on. With two of us and three students, we spent three hours talking about Victor Turner's work on rites of passage, Orientalism, the fascinating ways in which Western capitalist technology is used to construct a romanticised version of tribalism (a side-effect of postmodern discontent), Harry Potter and the Sorting Hat, rave culture, why Richard Branson is such an awful enemy of enlightened values, Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, Electronic Dance Music and trance, coffee bars and Tea Ceremonies, performativity, Foucault's notion of heterotopia (i.e. that people experience the same event in different ways), shamanism and techno-shamanism, ritual spaces, places and times and most of all, liminality and its essential place in human experience. All soundtracked by the direst music you can possibly imagine. Still: heavy metal next week. The relief…

So it's not all drudgery round here: my enthusiasm has been thoroughly rekindled by that class and I'm raring to go. I've just received the final proofs of one of my publications to check, and I'm spending the day doing final edits of another, having received the readers' reports. Today will be a good day. Once the after-effects of last night's curry with the external examiners subside…

Ethics? Schmethics!

OK, it's 8.30 p.m. and I'm still in the office (been co-teaching a fantastic MA class), but this caught my eye. Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the NSA surveillance presentation has lost his job:

Booz Allen issued a statement on Tuesday saying that Snowden had been fired for "violations of the firm's code of ethics".

One of the things I teach here is a course called Media and Ethics. We start with Kant and Mill and build up their two ethical notions (ontological and utilitarian) and then examine the behaviour of media, PR firms and readers/audiences through these paradigms.

One of the things we talk about is whether corporate Codes of Conduct such as that espoused by the Chartered Institute for Public Relations practitioners are anything more than propaganda. After all, the various versions of the CIPR code have huge loopholes which silently acknowledge the impossibility of serving your client faithfully and having a rigid moral code. One of my colleagues writes about this in relationship to the discourse of professionalism. Certain jobs are seen as more than paid gigs and require the practitioner to adhere to higher moral codes than the rest of us. Lawyers for instance aren't just answerable to their clients: they have to uphold the law as the impartial arbiter of disputes, which is why they can't deliberately lie in pursuit of their client's case. Doctors swear to 'do no harm' and to treat patients without regard to who they are. Academics have a duty to 'The Truth' (though most of us deny it exists) and a complicated set of values which stop us passing students on the basis that they've paid their fees.

PR operatives aren't professionals in this sense: they have no higher moral code or duty to society, as a group, though of course individuals I'm sure are essentially honest. But the fact remains that the CIPR code is meaningless: you don't need to be a member to be a PR operative; it's full of loopholes, and nobody has ever been sanctioned under it. Not even Max Clifford. But it looks serious and persuades clients that they're in good hands.

Which brings us to Booz Allen and its 'code of ethics'. The one Edward Snowden has been fired for. Luckily, Booz Allen has put it online. If you think this is a shrewd PR move to make them look less like the rapacious henchmen of unrestrained state power, you'd be right. It's even got smiling Asian people, black and several smiling women on the front to show that when it comes to multicultural semiotics, Booz Allen is totally ethical, man. One of them even further down the page looks like he might be a little bit gay! Wow. Booz Allen's like the most swinging total surveillance corporation in the world!

This is such a slick bit of PR. Smiling happy multiracial employees. 'Our' values, like they're central and natural to Booz Allen's soul. And of course it's a Green book. Because green = gentle and harmonious and natural. Actually, this might be a little bit of a teensy error: the other Green Book I can think of is by one Colonel Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. He used to press it on every visitor. You can read it here.

But let's have a look inside. Here's a lovely graphic of their core values:

Sadly, it's prettier than it is honest. Client Service, for instance, is not an ethical concern. In the current case, Booz Allen has helped the US Government spy on all its citizens and most of the rest of the world. Why? Because it was paid for. Is Entrepreneurship an ethic? Most people would struggle to define it, but very few definitions would associate it with multi-billion dollar mega-corps, or find an ethical angle. Respect, Fairness, Integrity, Trust, Professionalism, Excellence and Teamwork are of course like babies and sunshine: hard to oppose in general, though often a bit whiffy and unpleasant when examined closely. After all, all these things might well mean 'spying on millions of citizens industriously and excellently'. It all depends on the context of these terms: to whom does Booz Allen answer? The only operative response is that phrase 'client service'. None of these other terms conflict with Booz Allen taking government money to abolish the privacy of citizens. It is, in fact, a meaningless and evasive list which isn't about ethics at all: it's about evading any discussion of ethics. Neither Kant (who believed that moral choices had to be instinctive and inflexible) nor Mill (who believed moral choices were determined by calculating their outcomes) would recognise this as an enunciation of moral principles.

What words are missing? For me, any commitment to 'honesty' and human rights. Of course they are: Booz Allen wouldn't make any money if its employees applied ethical standards to its daily operations. But let's look at the company's extended definition of these terms (click to enlarge):

The word 'honest' does appear, but only under 'professionalism', and only as a device for improving relationships between employees. There's no recognition of an ethical code beyond operational efficiency. Under 'Integrity', we find 'representing the truth', which sounds promising. It's not culturally relativistic and appears to protect employees - but the context implies strongly that this is about, again, the employees daily conduct. It's more about not phoning in sick when you have a hangover than enabling the oppressive state. Other clauses are so circular that they're meaningless: apparently behaving ethically means to 'adhere to the firm's ethics', which wouldn't test the moral boundaries of Charles Manson as far as I can see. Is 'insisting on excellence' an ethical value? What, I ask you, is 'doing what is right'? To me, Edward Snowden did what is 'right', but this list is clearly about being an obedient and efficient employee, not about adhering to any wider moral code.

The whole thing is subverted by Client Service, which makes it clear that the highest ethic is Doing What You're Told Without Question To Make Money From Your Clients, Whatever They Want.

On the other hand, if I was Edward Snowden's union caseworker, I'd be contesting his dismissal on the grounds that he has completely fulfilled the Entrepreneurship requirements: he has taken risks, engaged in creative thought and action, inspired millions of us with a shared vision, and taken on new responsibilities and skills. Well done Edward!

Check out these two clauses:

We can forget about the 'values based, inclusive' bit because they're just boiler-plate, or filler. But Edward has certainly shown 'independent thinking', 'continuous learning and individual initiative'. Perhaps too much for the company's liking. What he's breached is the 'pride in a client-centric organization focused on results'.

Let's look at Booz Allen's case studies. Here's Angela Cole. She's won an award.

With a military background and a husband on active duty, Booz Allen’s value system mirrors my own. My parents ingrained the golden rule in me to treat others as you want to be treated, so I have both a high standard and clear expectations for how I behave and what I expect of others. Most of my colleagues are the same way. That’s powerful, working with so many people so willing to not only do the right thing, but go the extra mile along the way. As a firm, we are quick to own up and step up. 

—Angela Cole, VIP Award Winner 2012 (San Diego, CA) ProfessionaLism 

Sounds promising, doesn't it. She's tied in to American military culture. Couldn't be more honest coughMyLaiGuantanamoBagramcough. She wants to do the 'right thing'. She goes the extra mile, she owns up and she steps up. It sounds exhausting.

It also sounds like utter bollocks. Of course military values aren't inherently ethical. The military take orders and commit crimes. That said, the military have legal and moral constraints in a democracy - such as the Geneva Convention. Angela may move in military circles, but she isn't a public servant in the way that a soldier is. She works for a company and so is free of such constraints: which is the entire reason why the US Government (and the British) are so keen on privatising military activity. No scrutiny, no high standards, no scruples. Just business.

And the fact that all these unspecified 'right things' are listed under the discourse of professionalism means that Angela is protected from serious moral choices. She won't have to decide whether spying on your porn fetish is wrong. She simply has to do 'the right thing' by her fellow employees – not by her fellow humans. It's just a Personnel thing.

Having read the whole document, it's very clear that the philosophical notion of ethics is entirely absent from Booz Allen's code. It has to be. Instead, we get a lot of sometimes sensible, sometimes meaningless rules about how to behave at work - the vast majority of this document is about not cheating on your expenses. The nature of the work is not up for any sort of discussion. Check out this section:

Q: What should I do if my job manager is asking our team to do something that does not violate the laws or our policies, but I do not think it is ethically correct?
A: You should constructively discuss the issue with your manager. don’t be confrontational or assume that your manager knows everything that you do— or that you know everything that he or she does. understand that where no violation of law or policy is involved, you may need to agree to disagree and comply with duly-given instructions. if you are the manager in this situation, consider the employee’s concerns with an open mind and, depending on the situation, respond to the employee, take the matter under further consideration, or raise the concerns to your leadership. As appropriate, explain the final decision to the employee. 

It explains what you should do if you have ethical qualms. What you should do is shut up. The Company Knows. Anything that is legal, is ethical (and let's not forget that the NSA is apparently operating under a secret interpretation of the Constitution, running its requests through a secret court on the occasions it bothers to go to court). You are not capable of moral choices. You must obey. This is entirely contradictory to the fine-sounding words about individual responsibility and growth: it's an explicit warning that the individual is inherently dispensable.

There are more uplifting sections but there's always poison in the rose:

simply because something is lawful does not mean that it is right or would reflect positively on us, individually or as a firm. indeed, upholding our commitment to ethical business means that we will voluntarily refuse to do something— even though it is allowed legally—if it is not consistent with our Core Values.

In another clause, one imagined ethical doubt is:

“This helps only the client—not me or the firm”

Whether or not an action fails to benefit the company is not, as far as I can remember, in either Kant or Mills' texts. Supplying Zyklon B clearly helped its makers but I don't think that selling it to the Nazis to murder millions of Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah Witnesses and others is quite what we mean by 'ethical'. Clearly Booz Allen just doesn't consider the things they do within any ethical framework: there's nothing in any of the company's statements to suggest they thought twice about the NSA gig, despite this 'commitment to ethical business'. I'm also worried that their concern in this paragraph is not the innate morality of an action, but whether or not it 'would reflect positively on us'. That's not ethics: that's PR.

I wish I was Edward's union caseworker. I'd love to get my teeth into the Non-Retaliation Policy:

Q: What does it mean when we say that there are no “negative consequences” for raising issues or reporting misconduct?
A: it means that we do not tolerate retaliation in any form. Retaliation includes actions such as termination of employment

Sadly, I'd lose. As this document proves time and again, 'ethics' and 'values' don't relate in any way to any concept of universal morality. Ed's broken the rules on internal behaviour, not proper morality. The core values only protect people who blow the whistle through company procedures, which are explicitly drawn up to stop employees developing moral qualms about the company's raison d'être. Complain about sexist comments? You might be protected.

you must act to protect the firm when you observe, or have a good reason to suspect, that someone is violating the law or regulations, our Green Book, or a firm policy.

Complain about industrial spying on innocent people? Guards!

I love this bit:

where we determine illegal conduct related to our business has occurred, we voluntarily disclose it to the appropriate authorities unless disclosure is prohibited by applicable law.

Clear? They'll report themselves for breaking the law, unless it's against the law to confess to breaking the law (and anyway, this doesn't cover Constitution-busting work where the client is the state). 

But let's get to the exciting stuff: p. 27 and Confidentiality of Client and Third Party Information. This should be good!

The best way to protect client information is to not take possession of it. Each of us must restrict receipt of client information to only information that is reasonably necessary to propose or conduct an engagement even if greater information access is offered.

How does this relate to the wholesale theft of billions of people's phone calls Tweets, sexts and so on? Er… it doesn't. You and I aren't clients. The US Government is. We're the product. Though they're very keen to stress that they really don't want identifiable details of medical patients:

unless contractually required for our work, we do not accept personally identifiable information from our clients.

'Unless contractually required', that is. And that, my friends, is why these words, and your visit to this site, have been noted and recorded by Ed's successors and colleagues.

And of course Booz Allen is very keen to protect the privacy of its own employees (except for when they use the phone, web, iTunes etc.):

Booz Allen employees may not disclose any non-public firm information (including personal data regarding employees) to any third- party except as authorized by the firm. each of us must exercise extra caution when handling an employee’s personal data. We do not disclose current or former employees’ personal data to third-parties other than confirmation of employment dates and position without prior written consent from the employee or former employee unless the information is required to fulfill a legitimate business need—such as employee benefits—or as required by law.

Er… within very vaguely drawn limits:

No expectation of Privacy: You have no expectation of privacy regarding your use of any firm or client-issued IT assets. We reserve the right to monitor and inspect your use of firm IT assets at any time without notice to you and without your consent. Clients may also perform similar inspection or monitoring in connection with the use of their IT assets. Also, remember that all data stored on a firm IT asset is owned by, or licensed to, the firm, and clients may have similar ownership rights to data stored on their IT assets.

Next time you read a Booz Allen statement to the press about this affair, think about this:

in communicating via any public channel, Booz Allen truthfully and accurately represents itself while respecting its confidentiality commitments to its clients, employees, suppliers, and others. We do not make statements to any third party that are untrue, inaccurate, or omit relevant information that make the statements misleading.

Yeah. Right. And the consequences of any breach are?

 It couldn't be clearer. Lawyers, doctors, teachers are professions because they have a duty which transcends the client. Booz Allen doesn't. It was paid to breach the human rights of millions of Americans and it did so. Yet Edward Snowden is the one who gets fired for breaching 'ethical codes'.

I'm angry (though not remotely surprised) about the NSA activities: all our governments and many corporations do it, or want to. But I think this is also an instructive event for all of us. We're surrounded by Codes of Conduct, Ethical Values, Mission Statements etc. etc. etc. We never read them, even when we sign them. We think they mean something. They don't. They're carefully constructed to persuade us that we can relax: our morality is outsourced and we never have to examine our conduct again - our employers have taken on the responsibility for us. And when we engage with other organisations, we assume their codes mean something. They don't. They're just diversionary tactics. All that matters is the law (which is easily circumvented) and our own values, a muscle deeply in need of more and frequent exercise. 

Your thoughts?

(Apologies for the scruffy formatting: Blogger won't save any of my edits and keeps messing up the presentation).

Dead tree news

I've massively cut down my book purchasing over the past couple of months in an effort to read more than I buy. It's working: I'm down to buying a couple of books per week and reading three or four. And of course some of those I buy are for work rather than pleasure. Amongst those, I've received today two political novels for an eventual project on contemporary political fiction. I made sure that these two were second-hand copies, as I wanted to be certain the authors wouldn't receive a single penny of my money. You'll understand when I tell you.

Boris Johnson, Seventy Two Virgins
Simon Walters, Second Term.

Yes, Boris Johnson the unpleasant and bafflingly popular part-time mayor London, who wrote a comic novel about Islamic terrorism – something a better man might now regret, though I doubt he gives it a moment's thought. Still, I assume there are some vigorous sex scenes and some top-quality Latin gags. The other novel is also a peg-on-the-nose job: it's a thinly-veiled attack on Labour by the political editor of the Mail on Sunday. Actually, that's putting it kindly. When I think of the Mail, in all its vicious, lying, distorted, racist, misogynist, hypocritical, self-interested, vicious, paranoid, humourless 'glory', Simon Walters' byline is the one that floats in front of my eyes. I am not, shall we say, looking forward to reading this work. Though I have no doubt it will be interesting, in the same way that some historians find Goebbels interesting.

You can spot the poor quality of Second Term by the plugs on the back: none by literary critics of course, but praise from the frankly disgusting Amanda Platell (you'll enjoy that link), reactionary tabloid blowhards Peter Oborne (now elevated to the Telegraph, which says more about that paper's decline than it does about Oborne) and Trevor Kavanagh, and Norman Tebbit, a man who would have fitted well into an Oswald Mosley administration.

Perhaps it's a week for bad books. I've just read Margery Allingham's The China Governess, which I thought was a baffling mixture of dubious ideas, convoluted plot, social mores which I found baffling and good writing, and Veronica Roth's Divergent and Insurgent. The latter two I read as part of my ongoing attempt to consume every post-apocalyptic teen novel available (for eventual articles). They're decent page-turners, with a dislikeable protagonist, which I perversely enjoy. But like too many of these authors, there's no indication she's read any other authors' works to acquire a modicum of style or elegance. It's just one damn sentence after another. What she has read are the Harry Potter novels and The Hunger Games: the basic plot merges a divided America and a society based on the Sorting Hat. Everyone's divided into affinity groups at 16 through tests: Amity (nice, non-confrontational: Hufflepuff), Erudite (arrogant, too clever for their own good: Slytherin or Ravenclaw), Abnegation (self-sacrificing: Gryffindor/Hufflepuff), Dauntless (thrill-seeking, brave, none too bright: Gryffindor + Slytherin) and Candor (total emotional honesty whatever the cost). The plot isn't much cop either: some terrible sciencey woo basically designed to mirror the on-off mostly-chaste romance between the 'troubled' protagonists and showcase Tris's conflicted emo psyche. Then added to that: a background hum of Christian proselytising (not hugely obtrusive, but I was far from surprised to see God profusely thanked in the endnotes) and frequent and blatant endorsements of guns and the death penalty. Roth's the new big thing in American teen dystopias – looks like the Tea Party has its youth outreach program working overtime.

And in case you think you can escape: it's going to be a big film trilogy with Kate Winslet as one of the Big Bad Characters made by Lionsgate, producers also of the Hunger Games and that despicable reactionary religious propaganda Ender's Game.

I have to say that having grown up in the last days of the nuclear shadow (I'm still a proud member of CND) and living my adult life under the very real threat of catastrophic climate change, I'm getting rather bored by the stream of mostly-American far-fetched dystopic novels. There are some clear, politically-informed ones, such as Paolo Bacigalupi, Canadian Cory Doctorow and others, but the ones like Roth's which perpetuate extensions of tired old Big-State paranoia and promotion of Guns'n'God are looking less and less relevant. Give me, instead, the quiet beauty of Rosoff's How I Live Now, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Oryx and Crake series, JG Ballard, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, anything by Gwyneth Lewis, Malorie Blackman (the new Children's Laureate), Adam Roberts, Simon Morden, Ernest Cline, S. D. Crockett, Philip Reeve, Ken MacLeod, Marcus Sedgwick and even Stephen Baxter.

The pressing issues I see are climate change, social segregation due to capitalist exploitation and information science/misguided corporate techno-utopianism/surveillance (no, not Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and yes, this week's headlines are proving me right). The authors whose works I rate deal with the social, personal, cultural and economic effects of these with a sense of urgency and – mostly – leftwing ideology which I think is appropriate, whereas Roth and co present individualist worlds in which the State is automatically repressive, individual freedoms (basically, the freedom to consume and shoot people) are paramount and which deliberately retail political mythology rather than confront pressing issues, which is what SF is for.

It's not that I don't see the aesthetic qualities in fiction by right-wingers: I'm a huge fan of Evelyn Waugh, for instance. It's just that the sheer wrong-headedness of rightwing speculative fiction gets in the way of my appreciation of the writing.

Paul Uppal: Citation Needed?

In a welcome return to Parliamentary debate, my secretive millionaire MP is stoutly defending tax breaks for the seriously rich (i.e. him) in the midst of the worst depression since the 1930s. Most of it, as you'd expect, the usual vacuous attack lines generated by Tory HQ. And of course he can't find room for the employment statistics for the constituency, which would show a drop in employment in every quarter since he was elected, if it's anything like the neighbouring constituencies. 

But as usual, little Paul over-reaches himself. Yet again, he's discovered some constituents who utterly agree with him and – despite being young and not members of Parliament – display a firm grasp of Parliamentary language:

My constituency has a rich industrial heritage, but many young constituents come to me and say that at so many points in the history of the constituency they have been dependent on the public purse and whatever quango or mechanism. I think people are looking forward to some aspect of private sector entrepreneurship to provide a route out of the poverty that exists in so many of these industrial constituencies.

So these young people make an appointment with Mr Uppal (you can't drop into his surgeries unannounced) to discuss political history? I'm not quite sure how 'young people' can have suffered this Oppressive State Nightmare at 'many points in the history of the constituency', nor do I believe that any young people see themselves as trapped in a cycle of dependence - especially as Mr Uppal's government removed the only support available, namely the Educational Maintenance Allowance. Unless he's suggesting that the young unemployed people of this city believe that they'd be free to save the economy if only the state wasn't forcing them to accept unemployment and housing benefit. 'Let Us Starve' they chant as they parade through the city. 'Homelessness Makes Us Strive' is another of their favourites.

The idea that individuals and the economy are being held back by the minimal state support for individuals is simply an ideological talking point. The only bright spot in this city is the foundation of a Jaguar-Land Rover engine plant. Paul finds room to mention it:

 Jaguar Land Rover is bringing private sector investment into my constituency for the first time

Firstly, I strongly doubt that this is the 'first' private sector investment in the constituency. Ever? This is just nonsense. The place has lots of companies, many of them international corporations. There is no possible way that this could be true. Anyway, turning to Jaguar Land-Rover: it's not actually in his constituency for a start. Is this project the product of entrepreneurial, private sector energy? Not if you read the newspapers it isn't:

The regeneration project is a joint venture between Advantage West Midlands, Wolverhampton City Council, Staffordshire County Council and South Staffordshire Council.

The lesson of this benighted city is that the private sector has failed. It used to be an industrial powerhouse, but failure to innovate and to invest, couple with a determination to reduce wages and export jobs, has left the city destitute. The idea that the state has squeezed out the private sector is utterly ridiculous: the Dark Place has lost jobs and hope throughout the past 30 years: precisely the decades of Thatcherite free market economics (practised by both main parties) and the deluded discourse of entrepreneurialism. Who brought Jaguar-Land Rover here? It wasn't JLR on its own: it was the taxpayers of this area through their local councils and the taxpayers of this country through Advantage West Midlands: JLR was essentially bribed to come here.

Paul Uppal has been free from the constraints of the state: family money enabled his very successful business career in property speculation - precisely the kind of activity which has bankrupted this country without employing a single person or creating any wealth beyond his own enrichment.

Uppal is, I think, either a liar or fantasist. I just don't believe that these 'young constituents' exist beyond meetings of the local Conservative Party. And his economics go no further than the concerns of his political career. It's time for another letter:

Dear Mr Uppal,
I note your recent speech in parliament expressing the desire of 'many young consituents' to escape dependency on the public purse and quangos. Could you please enumerate to me how many young constituents have expressed this desire and how they experienced this 'at so many points in the history of the constituency' given that they are 'young'. To what organisations and mechanisms do you think they are referring

Secondly, could you please make public the unemployment statistics for the constituency since your election in 2010? I gather that constituency break-downs are provided for each Member of Parliament and that other MPs in the city make them public. 

Finally, I note that the biggest investment in the city for some years (Jaguar Land Rover) was achieved through the incentives provided by Wolverhampton City Council, South Staffordshire Council, Staffordshire County Council and Advantage West Midlands. Given your professed opposition to quangos and state subvention for the private sector, will you be lobbying for an end to this taxpayer support? 

Yours,
Plashing Vole

The Surly Worm: and other politicians' fictional horrors.

Hello everybody. I'm having the morning off to do some actual academic research. A conspirator and I were talking about books by politicians, and books by people who became politicians. I wonder if there's a paper in a serious literary examination of them. (For reasons of space, I'm going to ignore all the aristocrat-politician-poets of the early modern period. 

Interestingly, most politician-novels are by Conservatives and conservatives. Perhaps their usually superior classical education gives them greater facility with words, or perhaps the arrogance required to think they have a greater facility with words. Maybe Tories have more time on their hands than Labour politicians, whom I suspect are less moneyed and more engaged in grass-roots work. Lewis Jones's novel Cwmardy's Foreword rather defensively stresses that it was written in moments 'snatched' from the insanely busy life of a Communist activist and councillor. There's certainly something individualistic and ego-centric about novel-writing, whereas socialist politics used to be about the collective - hence there's a large and interesting library of novels which attempt to represent the collective experience within the confines of a form which privileges the individual. 

I think this is why so many Tories write political thrillers and bonkbusters. They're ideologically aligned with the concerns of popular fiction: individual men and women, good or bad, triumphing with some style and having a lot of sex along the way (I'm assuming this is compensating for their utter unattractiveness). Tories believe in the Great (or Evil) Man theory of history. For instance, left historians see Hitler as the nexus of and expression of more profound historical forces: individualist conservatives see him as uniquely evil (sorry, historians, for this facile summary, I know it's more complex than that). The result is that Tory novels often focus on mischievous, driven, selfish individuals, such as Chief Whip Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs' truly terrible House of Cards series. 

Who's out there? Well, the earliest ones are Whig MP Horace Walpole's delicious Gothic thriller The Castle of Otranto (1764), and later on Benjamin Disraeli's 'Condition of England' novels Tancred, Sybil, and Coningsby, and also Vivian Grey. Disraeli was a fascinating character: dissolute bisexual love life, literary talent; Jewish outsider (converted to Anglicanism at 12, but the social stigma remained)… and Conservative Prime Minister! I must confess to having only read Sybil, but it's a corker - it gave us the term 'Two Nations' to describe the gulf between rich and poor: he may have been a Tory, but by modern standards – depressingly – Benjy would be considered well to the left of the Labour leadership.  Oh, and I shouldn't forget Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister, who produced a lot of epic poems in the 1820s: The Nun of Arrouca is, well, not exactly a classic. There's also Henry Brougham, a fascinating character. He co-founded the Edinburgh Review, writing on everything from literature to science. As a politician, he fought for electoral reform and the abolition of slavery, ending up as Lord Chancellor. He also invented the brougham, a type of carriage. He didn't write novels, but his output of reviews, criticism, autobiography etc was prodigious. He also apparently sent out his own death notice out of curiosity: he wanted to read his own obituaries. 

The other politician novelist of the early days was Matthew Lewis, author of The Monk. A slave-owner, diplomat, MP and author, Lewis wrote this Gothic horror in a few weeks while bored senseless as an attaché in the British Embassy to The Hague. Is it political? It is in the sense that it reflects the anti-rationalist, Romantic and emotional reaction. It's also fairly predictably anti-Catholic and therefore anti-European. It's also enormous fun. When I did my degree, we had a few lectures about the Augustans, in which the Gothic tradition was mentioned as a rather downmarket and unsavoury sideshow. Naturally I immediately read all the Radcliffe I could. After that, it was on to Otranto and then the real filth, like The Monk. Highly recommended. 

After that, a lot of the politician novelists get a bit respectable. I'm going to give an honourable mention to Trollope here: he was a civil servant whose only attempt to get elected ended in corruption, scandal and fourth place. But his work (currently very unfashionable) at its best captured the wider social movements in which politicians became caught up. Big, pointed, serious (but often funny) novels - great holiday reads, even if John Major did like them. 

Into the twentieth century and we get some interesting characters, some of them not even Tories and some of them novelists who became politicians. The thriller writer John Buchan was briefly MP for the Scottish Universities before becoming Governor-General of Canada. Winston Churchill wrote Savrola, which is apparently awful, while CP Snow, Maurice Edelman (amongst other texts, Disraeli in Love) and Wilfred Fienburgh were all serious-minded Labour supporters who served as MPs or as Ministers in the Lords. 'Bitter' and 'louche' Fienburgh's No Love for Johnnie, about Johnnie Byrne the serious socialist MP embittered by a rightwing Labour administration, was even filmed with Donald Pleasance. I haven't got round to reading or watching Johnnie yet (sadly there are no clips on Youtube), but I'll let you know what it's like. It sounds very relevant to our own times. I've read some of Snow and Edelman's work: they're sober, thoughtful, interesting and very much not like later politicians' works. 

The Liberals also had a couple of writer-MPs: AEW Mason, now largely forgotten, and Hilaire Belloc, the very interesting if slightly ephemeral novelist, historian and poet of, amongst other things, Cautionary Tales for Children, which still amuse. Mason's school contemporary Anthony Hope also stood as a Liberal candidate, but lost. Still, he went on to write The Prisoner of Zenda, so he doubtless got over it. 

After that, I'm afraid we get to the truly ghastly. With one exception: Chris Mullins' A Very British Coup, in which the Establishment quietly deposes a socialist PM is a bit paranoid (it was written in the early 80s) but rather good, and has been adapted for TV twice. The rest of the generation now active is frankly awful. Take, for instance, Jeffrey Archer's novels, which are not quite as fantastic as his real life yet feel like they last even longer: poor quality plots designed to emphasise the Ubermensch qualities of special people - Tory to the core and an insult to literature. I read several in my teens while I was ill one summer. Even then I knew they were rubbish. Despite being imprisoned for perjury, this former Tory MP is still a Lord and gets to speak and vote on the issues of the day. 

Who else? Well, Douglas Hurd, the Etonian Foreign Secretary, has written novels since the 60s, often in collaboration with others, and some apparently decent histories. The thrillers he wrote before achieving high office were notable for what Mark Lawson calls 'rough and inventive' sex scenes, and his post-politics novels have followed the same path: gold lettering on the cover, implausible dialogue and glamorous sex on the inside. Only with political plots derived from his time in high office. What worries me about thriller writers who become Ministers is their understanding of the world. Did Hurd think the world was about titanic battles won in the bedroom, the casino and the knife-fight? Or is that what he wanted?

His close contemporary - but otherwise total opposite – is of course Edwina Currie, the loud minor minister famous chiefly for having an affair with John Major, for an egg safety scare, and now for her political thrillers. What is it about politicians and thrillers? Does it satisfy a gap in their working lives, or do they regret the years in sub-committees? The truth of political lives is that they're mostly really boring. Very few get to 'push the button' or unseal an 'Eyes Only' document that changes the world. Those that do (looking at you, Blair) are usually unstable fantasists who change the world for the worse. Perhaps Blair hasn't written a novel because there's no lack of self-deluding fantasy in his real life. No need for fiction. Anyway, Edwina's output doesn't stray far from the dictum that one should write about what one knows. Her debut was A Parliamentary Affair. 

'Then he came at her again. More urgently and hungrily, pushing his tongue down far into her mouth, reaching for her, clutching her body. There was no stopping now. He groaned and whispered her name.'

If you dare: here's Currie reading from her masterwork. Beware: bananas and breasts appear in the first sentence. Here's the opening of the Independent's review:

ANYONE who supposes that Edwina Currie's amazing first novel is the usual sort of kill-an-hour-on-the-beach codswallop had better think again: it is much, much worse than that. It seems extraordinary that the only political objection to the book so far has concerned the use of the House of Commons portcullis on the computer-enhanced calves of the cover girl. As a corny political saga it is not all that much worse than Jeffrey Archer, but it has huge hidden shallows and is a whole lot sleazier. Big-selling schlock-busters such as this usually want adjectives for the paperback, so here are a few: breathless, stupid, vain, petty, shrill, self-indulgent, cynical, vulgar and insulting. Will they do?

Though to be fair, Currie's protagonist is a Tory hypocrite: family values on the outside, enthusiastic adulteress on the inside.  And it is a useful compendium of clichés. Whenever you write a sentence in your own novel, check that Edwina hasn't used it, and you'll be fine. 

There are plenty of other contenders. Michael Dobbs's House of Cards was turned into a hugely successful TV series, centred of Whip Francis Urquhart who murders his way up the ladder and conspiratorially drops his catchphrase into the ears of journalists and readers: 'You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment'. Frequently quoting MacBeth and other literary characters, Urquhart appears to dignify the political-thriller genre, but it's a facade. The TV series was far superior to the novels which – I discovered last year – are nigh on unreadable. Like most Tory politicians who turn their hands to fiction, the novelist they most admire is Jilly Cooper. This is a mistake. Jilly is a noted Tory and she writes largely about the ruling Tory classes, but she can't write a sentence which wouldn't make a literate 7-year-old wet his pants with embarrassment. Like Currie, no cliché is left unexposed. Perhaps they should take a tip from Tory peer PD James, whose crime novels are at least elegantly written, even if they are based on a profoundly Tory (i.e. reactionary, bitter, patronising) world-view. Don't, on any account, read James's Austen-crime sequel Death Comes To Pemberley, which is by a long chalk the worst book I've read in recent years.

I haven't yet read any of the others. There's Louise Bagshawe, who as Louise Mensch was briefly an MP, though she didn't write novels during her 2 years in the House. Her novels are usually consigned to the chick-lit category, though I disapprove of the term. One day I'll read one, though I don't expect her work to be any more profound or convincing than her political pronouncements. Nor have I read Boris Johnson's Seventy-Two Virgins or Iain Duncan Smith's novel. Boris Johnson's book is interesting because it's a political comedy – perhaps not unexpected, but at least it's a change from the thrillers his peers have produced, and indicative of his mental landscape and approach to life. Only he and Chris Morris would make comedy from Islamic terrorism (in Boris's novel, they invade Parliament). Though after the Lee Rigby murder, he might not be so keen on people quoting from it. Duncan Smith's The Devil's Tune is sub-Archer from the sound of it: global plot, clichéd derivative title and hilarious reviews, such as this one from the Telegraph:

"And I honestly wish I didn't have to say this, because it feels like kicking a man when he is down... but, really, it's terrible. Human sympathy strains in one direction; critical judgment the other. Terrible, terrible, terrible."

You know you're in trouble when Ann Widdecombe, awful Tory minister and another novelists writer (though not, thankfully, of thrillers) can only say: 

The Devil's Tune by Iain Duncan Smith is scarcely the greatest literature of all time but as a thriller and easy read it will while away a plane journey (or, at 400-plus pages, a couple of plane journeys) perfectly pleasantly...the dialogue is severely cliché-ridden but people do have a habit of talking in clichés.

while Currie remarked that 'It's not exactly Tolstoy, is it?', which is a bit bloody cheeky because I'd be very, very surprised if she'd ever read any Tolstoy, let alone produced anything even remotely comparable. Yes, her books have words, covers and page numbers just like Anna Karenina, but the resemblance stops there. Currie also hailed Anne Widdecombe's debut as the product of 'a perceptive but warped mind'. Which may well be true. Widdecombe's work seems to echo those forgotten 19th-century 'improving novels' by genteel spinsters: removed from all cultural context and without any reason to exist as anything other than Christmas presents from the unimaginative to the almost-dead. 

OK, finally (as I'm sure you're all utterly bored by now), let's look abroad. The good ones first: Maria Vargas Llosa and Pablo Neruda had political careers of sorts, so we can include them. Havel was a playwright. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, French President, wrote a seriously weird novel which seemed to imply that he had an affair with Princess Diana. His great enemy Mitterand wrote erotic short stories. Lots of unsavoury and/or untalented Americans wrote novels as thinly disguised propaganda: Newt Gingrich is a prolific Confederacy apologist in his Civil War novels, but hello too to Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart and Barbara Boxer. 

But I'm going to leave you with two final texts. The first is Sisters, by Lynne Cheney, wife of the future Vice-President. Set in the Wild West, it's a transgressive tale of (very chaste) lesbian love shot through with literary references to female friendships, lynchings, murder, knife-fights and Injuns: confused, badly-written but surprisingly feminist. You could buy a copy for £35 or so, or read the PDF for free. Here's a little taste.  

"The sampler you have began with Mrs. Barbauld's hymn--know it will be a gift I shall treasure always. How well her words describe our love--or the way it would be if we could remove all impediments, leave this place, and join together as the Ladies of Llangollen did. Then our union would be complete. Our lives would flow together, twin streams merging into a single river."
Sophie kept looking at the note when she had finished it. She had no idea what the reference meant, who the Ladies of Llangollen were, but it didn't matter. The note was clear. Miss Travers wanted Helen to run off with her, to leave James, perhaps the children, so they could go away together. But surely she couldn't have been serious. This was fantasy, wasn't it? But even if it were, Sophie argued to herself, this was fantasy of a sort one did not expect to find in correspondence addressed to one's sister. A woman pleading with another woman to go off with her--one might suppose it the plot of a French novel! But even as the thought occurred, Sophie knew it wasn't quite correct, because the letters were so unselfconscious; the writer seemed to have no awareness she suggested anything shocking. The ingenuousness reminded Sophie of something, but she couldn't put her finger on what it was. 

Interestingly, one of Cheney's later novels sees a Republican vice-president die of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress. Dick Cheney, of course, had heart problems while in office. And shot a friend in the face. 

Finally, here are a couple of lines from Graham Perrett's The Twelfth Fish. Perrett is a Labor MP in Australia, and the novel is his debut. Described by his own mother as 'way too rude', he held off publishing the sequel in case it scandalised the electorate and lost him his seat. Forget the unkind things I've said about the others: here we hail political fiction's own William McGonagall:

"Karen attacked my surly worm with gusto" (p167)
"I started to worry about Cylla's jaw muscles cramping' (p155)
"Methodically commencing fellatio" (p167)

 I'm wondering about a paper on The Aesthetic of the Politician's Novel. Given this standard, it'll be short…

Enjoy your weekend.

Time to abolish benefits for the working class

Hear me out: it's really simple and it's really socialist (this is a positive word in my lexicon).

Read this: it's about the State of California's move to fine Wal-mart $6000 per employee who uses the state's minimal medical care. It's $6000 because that's how much each employee costs California. Wal-mart doesn't pay its workers enough to live on. It encourages them to use food stamps and other state assistance to make up the gap between what it pays them and what it costs to actual stay alive.

It's the same here in the UK. We have a 'minimum wage', which is set by the government. Very, very weirdly, it's much lower than the 'living wage', the amount calculated to be that required to survive.

The gap between the two is profit for employers and a massive loss for the taxpayer. By providing benefits for people who work (i.e. most of the people who claim social security), we aren't helping them. We're subsidising corporate profits. We're also using taxpayers' money to prop up the economy: maybe this is a little Keynesian, but I'd prefer corporate profits to be recycled into the economy as pay rather than ship them offshore, as Amazon and friends do.

It's so simple. We just vote to equalise the minimum wage with the living wage. Bingo: companies have to pay their employees more, taxpayers don't have to shovel money directly into corporate shells in the Cayman Islands. We could spend our taxes on schools, trains and street lighting, or (if you're a Tory), just pay less tax. We'd probably be healthier and happier too: people who take home a decent wage will lead healthier, happier lives. People who have to depend on the bureaucracy and suspicion of the social security system have a much harder time. And we'd have a much simpler and smaller social security system.

There really is no downside.

The revolution has not been televised.

I don't know about you, but I've been following the so-called Turkish Spring with some interest. I have friends in Istanbul, and Turkish politics are really interesting. I'm a bit torn, too: my political instincts are with the protestors on the streets, and Erdogan's dictatorial style and conservative politics are pretty repulsive. However: he's a democratically elected prime minister with a lot more support than Western media reflect: Turkey is a huge country with a very, very conservative 'silent majority'. I also think that it's important to see democratically elected Islamist governments survive. Turkey's army sees itself as defenders of secularism, rather than democracy, and it's intervened to overthrow governments before. If religiously-inclined voters are refused a legitimate route to democratic power, with whatever checks and balances remain, they'll turn away from democracy entirely. Look at Iran and Algeria.

Democracy isn't served either by Erdogan cracking down according to his whims and prejudices, nor is it served by protestors claiming a mandate they clearly don't have. This is not a revolutionary situation: a majority is not being oppressed by a minority. A minority is being punished for highlighting the abuse of power by an authoritarian regime and their resistance is heroic, but this isn't a Turkish Spring. It's a call for democratic renewal.

Does that sound mimsy, liberal and confused? Well, I am all those things so I don't mind so much.

It's also a useful case study in the entwinement of power and the media. Look at this photo I culled from the web.

On the left is CNN's Turkish feed. On the right is CNN's international output, both at 1.06 a.m. on June 2nd. It's a beautiful example of the global news' corporations complicity with authority, and of their hypocrisy. More concerned with shareholder value and access to lucrative markets, CNN has chosen to selectively repress the major story of the moment, hoping that we won't notice. The Turkish government's happy, and those of outside the country assume that the news is the news everywhere.

It's not just CNN of course: I'm sure most other global news outlets censor their output for commercial and political reasons. The most famous example was Murdoch's decision to drop BBC from his Star satellite in the 1990s to ensure continued access to China, but I have no doubt the BBC does the same. And of course all our web sources behave even worse: tailored Google searches in China and the like. Even Plashing Vole is affected: my address suddenly acquired a '.co.uk' terminal rather than '.com', solely so that 'contentious' content can be blocked on a country-by-country basis. Just in case I mention that I think our arms-buying customers in Saudi Arabia run the most repressive regime on the planet. Oops! Bye, Riyadh! I still love you! 

So anyway, be very wary when corporate information dealers tell that they oppose 'doing evil', or that (in James Murdoch's phrase), 'profit is the only guarantor of free speech'. They're the ultimate in cultural relativists. CNN no doubt will defend itself by saying it is reporting on Turkey and has done its job to the best of its abilities. It has a fairly comprehensive website on the situation (I have no idea whether Turks can view it) which even – and this amuses me hugely – a section headed Do Turks Have Freedom Of Speech?

Last month, Emma Sinclair-Webb, from Human Rights Watch, said that one of Turkey's "most fundamental human rights problems is in fact intolerance of free speech."
"Politicians regularly sue journalists for defamation. Editors and publishers are mostly unwilling to permit much criticism of the government for fear of harming their bosses' other business interests," Sinclair-Webb said.
"The European Court of Human Rights has found over and over that Turkey has violated free speech. But prosecutors, courts, and government figures are still applying different standards to Turkey, muzzling views they don't want to hear," she said.

What a shame that CNN didn't see fit to mention its own role in voluntarily censoring its own work. I notice too that the author of the report carefully didn't answer the question, preferring to cite other people's opinions. CNN isn't some cyclostyled rag which can be shut down by cracking a few heads: CNN is a big bad corporation which would cause a global outcry should Erdogan interfere with its coverage. But this is never going to happen because 'news values' don't drive its agenda: business interests do. The Turkish government doesn't need to censor CNN, because CNN is perfectly happy to censor itself rather than annoy the powers that be.

Lord Northcliffe once said this:

News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising. 

CNN, its competitors and its search equivalents aren't news. They're just advertising. Or as Fred Friendly once said:

Television makes so much [money] at its worst that it can't afford to do its best.

And while I'm at it with the quotes, two more which are relevant to the situation:

The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they follow. Bigness means weakness.
Eric SevareidIf the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.
Daniel Moynihan 

Keep them in mind even when you can't see the evidence.