Stupid Empiricism and the Conservative Party

The Crosbyisation of politics. A phrase that hardly rolls off the tongue and is, therefore, unlikely to remain a fixture of the British political lexicon for long. But what it describes is true enough. Between now and May 2015, everything conceivable will be hauled out from their dirty tricks box and thrown in Labour's path. So much for Dave's pledge to end Punch and Judy politics. Now, of course, I'm the last one likely to let the Tories off the hook. They do not have to bring politics down to the gutter level, there is always free choice. But their decision to go with a strategy that will smear, lie and traduce Labour and its allies in the broader labour and cooperative movements is heavily conditioned. There is no social force with its invisible hand up their collective arse, but the situation they find themselves in makes negative campaigning appear the attractive, if not most realistic option available to them.

Even the Man in the Moon knows the Tories are in deep trouble. Political parties as mass membership organisations corresponding to certain constituencies of interests have taken an almighty hit all across Western Europe. Labour is weathering this trouble but is more or less treading water. If it wants to secure its future, it needs to do something about it. But the Tories, well, they are beset by intractable problems. An ageing and dwindling activist base, a menacing pretender to its right, competing claims to its record, and policies starting to owe more to mercury-laced milkshakes than anything else; only a miracle or colossal stupidity on the part of their opponents can save them in 2015. The Tories are right to be anxious, and anxiety has a tendency to cause desperation.

If you open it up, you'll find nothing new cooking in the policy oven. Just a few neoliberal warm ups and burnt offerings from decades past. Privatise this, deregulate that, whip up some tiresome xenophobia and hold a suicidal referendum on the EU. It's so grey and dull, it makes John Major look colourful. Dave can't even be bothered to wrap his agenda up in a fluffy, cutesy but utterly vacuous big idea any more. The Tories are politically exhausted, a largely spent historical force about ready to topple into the grave. All it needs is a good shove and they could be out of power for a very long time indeed. Not all Tories know this, but deep down they feel it. If victory eludes them in 2015, it's curtains.

With nothing to offer, but a self-interested need to cling to power, lying and mud-slinging is all the Tories have left. Between now and election day, they will pull out all the stops. No mistake is too small. No opposition difficulty is too minor for them to cry foul and point the finger. Even if flinging crap, as they have been doing with the Paul Flowers/Co-Op Bank debacle, ends up leaving the Tories a bit whiffy.

It's going to be dirty, that much we know. There's absolutely nothing new in saying this. But why are the Tory troops so eager for such a fight. Reading Twitter feeds of apparent grassroots Tories these days is like a glimpse into group think, of a hive mind that makes your typical Borg Collective resemble a Randian utopia. Attack lines - uniformly negative, uniformly petty, uniformly attacking Labour on a sub-political level - fed by Tory Press HQ are faithfully repeated. It's a good job tweets are not in audio as the Tory mantras would sound like the shittest Gregorian chants ever. Yet there is something about the Tory mindset that is particularly amenable to this sort of behaviour.

'Empiricism' isn't a lefty swearword that gets much traction any more, but it should. Quick crash course in a few lines. Empiricism is the philosophical perspective, if it can be described as such, that holds knowledge is primarily or solely the result of sense impressions, or, of experience. Great if you're interested in experimentation by observation. Not so great if you're using theoretical models at a certain level of abstraction to describe social or natural phenomena. Sociology and Cosmology tends not to among empiricism's biggest fans, for obvious reasons. There are, of course, different permutations of empiricism. And its emphasis on philosophical scepticism is a handy corrective to those who get caught up in building abstract theoretical schemes to the detriment of analysing and explaining. Why it is handy here is that a species of the school applies to the outlook of diehard Tory activists and MPs. There is empiricism. And there is stupid empiricism.

Allow me to illustrate by way of example. A stupid empiricist values the evidence of their own senses, and nothing else. Wet summer and rough winter? Climate change doesn't exist. Half a million job vacancies? Why isn't unemployment 500,000 lower than the published figures. Bedroom tax a problem? No it isn't, I don't know anyone affected by it. And so it goes. Stupid empiricism is an absolute security blanket that denies nearly all knowledge and evidence that contradicts their worldview. It's egoism gone mad. The sovereignty of the individual taken to extremes. It therefore follows that everyone and everything else that doesn't not chime with stupid empiricism is wrong and likely to be an enemy of common sense, if not civilisation. Locked up in their philosophical bunker, certain in their own ignorant certitude, the substance of the arguments they fling at the Labour Party and anyone else they dub the enemy doesn't matter. They don't care about the Rev Paul Flanders and the Co-op. They don't care about what happened at Falkirk, except they make for handy grenades. The messy truth, the nuance of detail do not matter. It's about damaging a movement they know to be wrong. There is no point engaging with such people either. Stupid empiricism has inoculated them against reason, against the rules of evidence. They are the political equivalent of pod people.

Stupid empiricism is not the sole preserve of the unhinged Tory grassroots. It's reached all the way into the Cabinet. How else to explain their pursuit of policies that are self-evidently damaging, their mania for cuts that cost the public purse more in the medium-to-long-term? Yet more proof of their decadence.

Labour are absolutely right to not engage with this nonsense. Tying Labour up in irrelevant side-issues is part of the Tory strategy and distracts from offering positive alternatives. Labour has shown time and again it can lead the political agenda positively, as it has done with phone hacking, Syria, energy price freezes, and payday loans - to which George Osborne has caved just today. The best way to deal with the smears and lies is carry on pushing our own timetable, and leave the Tories to make themselves look even more unpalatable.

Read more ...

Lange - Drifting Away

Every lecturer I've ever known has told their students not to leave their work to the last minute. And yet, without exception, every lecturer I've ever known leaves it to the last possible moment to churn out their papers and their lectures. Who then am I to go against this inglorious grain? It does mean there will be no proper blogging tonight. So here, have a ditty.

Read more ...

Day of the Doctor - Review

The weird thing about Doctor Who is it's more than the world's longest-running TV serial, it has become part of British culture. As such the 50th anniversary episode was, before broadcast, feted not so much as an event airing simultaneously to a global audience, but a monument. Was Day of the Doctor worthy of the hype?

Well, no. Nothing could be, really. But it did a job of work. Whizz-bang special effects abounded. The rubbery monsters were a nice homage to baddies past. Loose plot lines were left unresolved (what did happen to those human/Zygon negotiations?) Daleks. And Tom Baker! All made for a canon-defining story, and Steven Moffat and team can have themselves a few tots at the after show party tonight. It was fun, jolly and entertaining.

Me being me, there are two quick points about those "deeper" things pseudo-intellectual blogs like this one tend to fixate on. First, must I go on about Steven Moffat and women again? I'm afraid I do. I've written about this on a couple of occasions, and this is just a tiny morsel of the Gallifrey-sized library of comment sitting on the internet. It's not just me saying Moffat has issues with the portrayal of women, it's hundreds of thousands of Who fans. On this occasion, women were positioned either as ciphers for weakness and indecision. Or both. Take the cameo from Good Queen Bess. Elizabeth I is portrayed as a saucy, bosom-jiggling minx who can't wait to jump on the Doctor's bones. De ja vu much? I would also have been very surprised had he not used the "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman" line, which he did in vintage Moffat fashion. Come on, seriously, it's like she was plucked from a Carry On, complete with the unreconstructed dodgy gender politics. 

Then there is Billie/Rose/Sentient computer programme and Clara. It has been canon since the 2005 reboot that the Doctor is the sole survivor of his people (apart from The Master, of course) and that he is haunted by his "necessary" genocide of the Time Lords. Necessary, because it was to save the universe from the Daleks. Day of the Doctor takes us to the moment where John Hurt, the missing "war" Doctor is about to press the button. He is joined by his two future selves - the David Tennant and Matt Smith iterations - so he does not do it alone. Pulling them back from the brink is the indecision, the consciences represented by the women. Their resolution, their grim conviction that destroying their civilisation is a necessity is dissolved by Clara's tears and weaponised Rose's visions of hope amidst the suffering. And so a new plot is hatched in which the Daleks are wiped out, but Gallifrey is whisked away and frozen in a pocket parallel universe to be retrieved by the Doctor at some unspecified future point.

It's a good job they did, of course. Though quite how Peter Capaldi is going to play a happy Doctor no longer burdened by historical guilt will be interesting. But why did the indecisive role have to fall on Clara and Rose when Matt's hipster Doctor carries enough self-doubt around to out-miserable Morrissey? Especially when moments later he exclaims he'd been thinking about the plan they go on to put into action for centuries. An innocent slip of the script? Or because it's only women who do conscience? Who fans are too familiar with Moffat by now to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The second point is how thoroughly Moffat has ploughed into the canon. Not that a show's mythology is sacred, or is a big deal anyone but the keenest of fans. Yet how he has treated it is telling. With Russell T Davies, the Time War was the reboot's jumping off point. No more Time Lords. No more Daleks (though, thankfully, he soon got around that). We were told that both species were erased from the history of the universe and secured in a continuity known only to the Doctor and the viewer. This way, Davies could set off and build a new mythology on his inheritance while being respectful with what went before. It acted as a clear punctuation, a break separating the old from the new. So old enemies came back and were updated, but that's as far as it went. Moffat, however, has twisted, pinched, tinkered and rewritten the canon Davies took care to bury away in a bunker of plot points. And so, paying little heed to previous continuity, three episodes into his reign the Mark Gatiss-authored Victory of the Daleks properly brought them back as bad 'uns. More audacious was last season's finale, in which Moffat inserted Clara into key points within previous Doctors' stories. This included suggesting that the Hartnell-era Doctor might want to take off in the TARDIS. And finally in Day of the Doctor, the mythology established over the last eight years is done. The key psychological flaw in the character was done away with.

Taken together Moffat has stamped himself all over the work of the last 50 years. He is to Who fandom what Margaret Thatcher was to the post-war settlement. Davies was the man who brought the series back, but it will be Moffat who will leave the most indelible of marks. Were Moffat to disappear to spend more time with Benedict Cumberbatch, his successors are unlikely to have as profound an impact on the show as he. His rewriting of the mythos will echo down the decades, much like the Doctor himself.

Read more ...

Capitalism, Asperger's and Autism

It's common sense that the oppression of women, of black and minority ethnicities, of LGBT folk all have histories. Things change. The same is true of disabilities. People with some form of physical or mental impairment have been variously treated over the centuries. Incarceration, sterilisation, and extermination were visited on disabled people over the course of the last century. But things, in Britain at least, began changing around the 1970s. Attitudes shifted. Thanks to activists with disabilities and their allies, efforts were made to integrate disabled kids into mainstream schools. Legislation was passed outlawing disabled discrimination. Adaptations were made to make society at large less dis-abling for those with impairments. The soon-to-be-replaced Disability Living Allowance is a small contribution from the state in recognition that being disadvantaged in a society made for able-bodied people comes with extra, unseen costs to the citizen. And now, thanks to the government's attacks on social security, support for the disabled those important advances are under threat.

The point remains, the nature of the inequalities and prejudices disabled people face are different today than they were 30 years ago, and 30 years before that. But impairments too have a history. Short-sightedness wasn't much of a problem for the overwhelming mass of humanity in agrarian societies. It became an issue with the advent of mass literacy, but has been mitigated by technologies developed to overcome them - spectacles, eye surgery, etc. Impairments are therefore shaped, positioned, tweaked and coded by wider social forces. As physical and mental incapacities they have existed for as long as there's been humans knocking about - but what they mean and their consequences for someone with them vary according to the kind of society they live in, and its level of development.

This in mind, allow me to venture a hypothesis. I'm no mental/cognitive health specialist. What I know about the autistic spectrum and Asperger's Syndrome is very little. It's a complex area that is still being unravelled. But that isn't going to stop me advancing a touch of speculation on the main sociological question these two conditions raise. That is why have Autism and Asperger's only recently been codified as a social concern? It could part be media curiosity, part the growth and spread of the internet, and part visibility attained by the disabled rights movement. The inescapable trope of the autistic genius might have a role, too.

But I think something deeper could be going on, something to do with structural shifts in the advanced capitalist countries. Short-sightedness and Dyslexia were not social concerns prior to industrial capitalism. The point came when the demands of capital required something more than able bodies to work in its dark, satanic mills - it needed basic education to record and pass on information at all levels. Since then, particularly over the last 30 years, manufacturing has taken a battering. The old industries have fallen back and in its place are what we used to call tertiary industry: the service sector. This sector, from retail to investment banking, from call centres to consultancies, all absolutely depend on social relationships. Of course, thus it ever was. But now is different - the direction of travel clearly is capitalism's growing dependence on the wealth that can be mined from relationships. Hence the massive values of social media firms who've yet to make a single penny of profit. Hence the obligatory 'person spec' placed alongside graduate job adverts. Hence the growth of consultancies selling team-building experiences and organisational engineering. Hence the concern with Autism and Asperger's.

For Autistic and Asperger's people, the economic shift to service finds them singled out as disabled individuals. In front of the new emphasis on relationships, on the complexity of social cues and the (personal and commercial) premiums on networks; they are the newly dis-abled. And this is a very recent shift. Just 20 years ago when I was still at school, I can think of two boys who today would be diagnosed as autistic and with Asperger's. But back then, they were merely written off respectively as naughty and slow, and dim and simple. Their symptoms existed, but they had not been specially codified by the powers that be. Now, they would.

Therefore, could it be the case that the coincidence of capitalism's shift-to-service and the codification of Autism and Asperger's to a disability of social concern has deeper roots?

There is an alternative explanation, but again related to changes in political economy. We know Britain is in the midst of a mental health epidemic. One-in-four of us suffer with a mental health problem during the course of a year. Thankfully, the stigma attached to mental health is beginning to lift and it is starting to be talked about. Partly, this is because these problems are so widespread. Why should we be surprised that more insecure and pressured work situations lead to stress, anxiety and illness? That low wages, crushing debts and attacks on social security screw people up? It is reasonable to assume that more job security, more stability would have the effect of decreasing incidences of mental ill-health. But also, with capital's emphasis on relationship and service, any health problems impacting on its capacity to do business on that basis is bad news. It's a concern. A social problem. So, is it possible that the relatively recent problematisation of Autism and Asperger's is a subset of a wider recognition of a crisis around mental health?

Read more ...

Stoke North: After Joan

I was privileged enough, almost by chance, to be at Stoke North Constituency Labour Party's meeting last Friday when Joan Walley announced her retirement. But no sooner had the story gone public the speculation began about who will fill her shoes after 2015 - assuming, of course, Labour wins in that part of the world.

On this matter, as an ordinary member in Stoke-on-Trent Central I have no nag in this steeplechase. Besides, it would be rather inappropriate if I was to back a particular candidate. I do not have any weight to boast of and, quite rightly, the members of Stoke North would tell me to sling my hook. But that doesn't mean I won't enjoy watching a good contest. Given the "safety" of the seat, the attention it's likely to attract locally, regionally and nationally, and the utterly scrupulous reputation of Stoke North's officers, it will be a proper competition. It's certainly going to be fairer and more open than the last one I closely watched.

Disclaimer time. These are my opinions. I don't have any inside track.

That out the way, Tony Walley has published his thoughts, so I'm not going to repeat what has already been said. Tony is right that it will very likely be an all-women's shortlist for the seat. When a woman steps down from parliament or a local authority, the National Executive Committee usually decrees that the seat will be reserved for a woman candidate. Some don't like it, but then again there's a reason why Labour has many more women representing it at all levels than the other parties.

I am a stickler for accuracy, and I think there are a couple of things Tony's got wrong in relation to one of the potentials - Ruth Smeeth. Firstly, as a Hope Not Hate coordinator Ruth has been in and around Stoke plenty of times. The anti-fascist work she and others put in during the 2011 local elections certainly helped make sure the local council chamber was a fascist-free zone. Second point, I did see Ruth out on the campaign trail last week. But that wasn't her first appearance. According to our by-election candidate Candi Chetwynd, she had been on the knocker and delivering leaflets before Joan said she had spoken to anyone about her decision. Unless Ruth is psychic, the idea she had privileged knowledge holds no such water. But is Ruth interested? Hers is just one name among many that's been doing the speculative rounds.

Others? I've heard about the rest Tony has mentioned. But there's more. I would be very surprised if my old mucker, Alison Wedgwood, isn't considering throwing her hat in the ring. I successfully campaigned with Alison in Bentilee in 2011 against the BNP, and I have no doubt she aspires to the Big House. After all, she was a Labour PPC for the Wrekin - a place the truly dedicated go for an electoral rite of passage! I wouldn't be surprised if a few words of encouragement are coming her way from my ex-boss either.

Another doing the rounds is Mabel McKeown. Who? Mabel was a member of Ken Livingstone's campaign team in London and is a former advisor to deputy party leader Harriet Harman. She also has a rather famous mum, but I'll leave that for the reader to google. I gather that she's a favourite in Unite's national office too, and recently lost out to Rupa Huq for Ealing Central and Acton's Labour nomination. Of all the names getting spun, Mabel's is the only one I don't know. All this said, now that Tessa Jowell has also announced her retirement in 2015 could it be that a vacancy much closer to home will catch her eye?

In all likelihood there will be many so-far-unnamed considering their applications, and there's plenty of time. The selection process proper doesn't open for another couple of weeks yet. But I shall be there, sat in my ringside seat with the lappy on my knee ready to blog it all for posterity.

Read more ...

Stoke Labour and Political Crisis

If I had a penny every time someone said "Stoke Labour is in crisis", you could sink a copper mine in my pocket. Time after time, the local press and the minute Stoke local politics bubble has breathlessly claimed the three constituency parties making up our fair city are in chaos or turmoil. And so today, almost a week after not winning a by-election contest; after Joan Walley, the well-respected MP for Stoke-on-Trent North announced her retirement at the next election, and after the resignation of Local Campaign Forum chair, Tony Walley from the party following a series of bust-ups with Council Leader Mohammed Pervez; you now find me sitting alone among the embers of a burned out shadow, of the charred beams and brittle ashes of a collapsed party.

But you don't. As per, the talk of calamity and disaster is so much hyperbole. This isn't to say all is rosy in the Potteries garden. Of course it isn't. There are some very difficult problems besetting Stoke's Labour Parties. Examining the reasons why Labour is in the position it's in requires calm, sober reflection. The excitable rantings of do-nothing but know-everything party members on other fora are best left alone - they don't bring anything to the table. We need to analyse. Dig down.

Luke Akehurst observed in his most recent weekly overview of local by-election results, that Stoke local politics are "extremely idiosyncratic". Yes, they are. The reasons for this ultimately lie in the city's fractured political economy. The industries that built our city - mines, steel, pots - they're either history or much reduced. Like everywhere else, gone are the days of the job-for-life or leaving school for good on the Friday and starting work at the pot bank come Monday morning. But the relatively recent collapse of these industries - the mines and most of the pots went in the 90s, the steel in the 00s - has thrown the civic and political culture, the local ways of life, into profound crisis. Trade unions have withered and so has the Labour Party. The Tories, who until the late 90s had a social club in Stoke Town centre, have evaporated and condensed in seats on the city's edge. The path from the shop floor to political office is no more. And the new jobs, which have not been replaced the old like-for-like, are low paid and precarious. Call centres. Retail. Warehousing. Difficult to organise. Difficult to rebuild local politics with.

So what, some might say. Shock horror, Stoke isn't "special". Most Midland and Northern cities have gone through the same. Stoke's pain is pain Northampton, Nottingham, Bradford, Burnley, Sheffield, and dozens of other places have experienced. And I wouldn't disagree. There is, however, an important factor unique to Stoke-on-Trent. The overwhelming bulk of these islands' towns and cities are concentric, with a clear core around which are organised districts, suburbs, and satellite communities. Stoke isn't. The city is a federation of six towns, each with their own town centres and distinct identities. In the post-war period, this poly-centric character was compounded by the building of more-or-less self contained suburbs within the city limits. And there's also the small matter of Stoke being contiguous with Newcastle-under-Lyme, again with its own fierce sense of self-identity and - generally speaking - more affluent resident profile. Mix in Kidsgrove to the city's north and you have a conurbation of just over 350,000 people.

Yet the unique character of the North Staffs urban sprawl has held it back, economically speaking. Concentrating retail and other commercial services in a clearly definable city centre clusters together businesses, and drives people and business into the core areas. It is literally a case of the more, the merrier. But the advantages of this concentration has passed Stoke by, as its businesses are dispersed across different and not easily-accessible town centres. Effectively each town centre competes with one another both for local business AND funding from the City Council pot. These centres also have to compete with Newcastle town centre too. There's no easy way round this, as the one city strategy pursued by Labour and the local authority has shown time and again. Stoke has to find a way to overcome its fragmentation. But fragmentation is coded into the city's political DNA.

The collapse of the relationships that previously sustained local politics, and the insularity of the city's towns, suburbs and wards are a heady brew. Especially when economic regeneration comes into conflict with these remaining senses of identity. Also, feel free to stir in a widespread anti-politics sentiment (itself conditioned by the devastation wreaked on Stoke's economy) and a resigned antipathy toward the influx of East European workers, and you now have an idea of the background against which local politics has to operate.

Hence, last week's by-election. It is true that Labour's contact rate is low. It is also true that the achievements of Labour's Duncan Walker, the remaining councillor in the Baddeley, Milton and Norton ward aren't as well publicised as they could be. And there's the small matter that the former incumbent, an ex-Labour councillor who resigned from the party for "principled" anti-cuts reasons, has just got sent down for 16 months after stealing and defrauding my CLP of £10k. That publicity isn't what you would call "helpful". Now, it is tempting to note that the Tories topped the poll in this three-member ward back in 2011, when there was a swing across the country toward Labour and so believe we didn't have much of a chance. But no, Labour should have done better. It should have been a victory worthy of the energetic campaign my comrades Candi Chetwynd & co put in. But it wasn't.

The main message coming from the doorstep from former Labour voters was their anger and frustration with the local authority, which we've been running for two-and-a-half years. The perception is that Labour doesn't give a monkeys and doesn't listen. So the now-notorious decision to build a new Council HQ in Hanley (the nominal city centre for outsiders) to kickstart a new business park right in the heart of the city - and thereby maximising the economic benefits of clustering - is taken as evidence of folly as its budget is slashed to the bone by an uncaring and vindictive government. Folly, and trampling all over the city's unique identity. Why should Hanley get the investment while Stoke, Burslem, Tunstall, Fenton and Longton are left behind? goes the argument.

Labour also gets to carry the can for a high-handed, alienating and widely-believed-to-be-incompetent City Council bureaucracy. Its scandals and incompetencies are PR disasters for Labour. For example, in its costings for the new Council HQ the officers responsible overlooked the amount needed to kit out the new buildings with the innards, furniture, and other fixtures. Its less than robust tendering processes, its contempt for the third sector and housing associations, and the unceasing churn in personnel all reflect badly on my party, which in turn doesn't go down well with the electorate - to put it mildly.

But in a way, none of this should be surprising. Labour may be the only city-wide political party, but the dramatic changes of the last 20 years have hit it hard. The talent who would have worked their way up through the unions have been scattered to the four winds. The 2011 council was, in a number of ways, Labour's Year Zero. To recover, it has to bring stability to Stoke's economy. It has to allow people to feel secure in jobs that pay better and value people more than most of the fare that is currently on offer. If Labour can manage this which, to be honest, is not entirely within its gift - locally speaking - then the labour movement can rapidly make up for lost ground, and with it a renewal of our local parties can be carried through. This requires long-term planning and projects that will contribute to the city's economic health over a long period. So, junking the new council HQ may be popular, but would not help Labour's prospects in the long-term. The British disease afflicting our rulers has always seen short-termism win out over foresight and planning for the future. Stoke Labour has to have the courage to break with that, decisively.

Chatting to an old comrade on Saturday night at a post-election bash, he told me that Labour lost 15 or 16 seats when it decided to build the Potteries Museum. A similar number fell when it piled money into transforming a vast industrial wasteland to the west of the city into the 1986 Garden Festival, which in turn went on to become an out-of-town shopping and business park. These both bought long-term gain for the price of short-term pain.

The snipers and the gripers will never be happy. But Stoke Labour could be and must do better. Even with its problems and the continued issues with the City Council, it is on the right course. Stoke's political crisis won't be sorted out until its economic crisis is dealt with, and that is exactly what Labour is addressing.

Read more ...

A Slow Few Days

It's one of them (thankfully) rare moments. Up until Wednesday I am absolutely rammed with work so don't be surprised if blogging is very light. But there is stuff bubbling under, such as pieces on the Baddeley, Milton and Norton by-election here in Stoke, a 'new stage' of capitalism, and the collapse of generational difference - among other things. I bet you can hardly contain yourselves.

In lieu of blogging, here's a ditty from 2009.

Read more ...