Love and Liberty

Our Liberal Democrat Conference stay in Brighton has started well; already this morning I’ve had a smashing breakfast and an interview, alongside Gareth Epps. This was with Shaun Ley for The World This Weekend, so tune in to Radio 4 at One O’Clock to see if any of it’s broadcast. On top of that, Richard has already declared this trip to be our “Best holiday ever!” He’s fallen in love again, though (if you’re wondering why I’m not sobbing into the keyboard) it’s with our hotel’s super-fast wi-fi Internet connection, which makes our home dial-up seem powered by a crank-handle.

Back home, Richard has a PC that’s probably about half a dozen years old; mine’s three years old, but as of last week Millennium has a shiny new laptop, pictured in yesterday’s Diary. For the first time, then, we have a computer at Conference, and Richard cannot be more delighted that our hotel (the swankiest at which we’ve so far stayed) has free wi-fi Internet. On Friday he was trying to work out how our excessively slow dial-up connection would ever download a service pack for the new machine estimated to take between 209 and 255 minutes to come through; yesterday, he just sat here goggling as the whole thing sped through in about 10 minutes as we watched the final of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

Yes, I know. We’re not normally reality TV junkies, but we saw an early edition of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? and then had it reinforced when visiting each of our parents last month and our Mums had it on. So we’ve watched the odd one since, usually sitting there scoffing like Statler and Waldorf, though of course neither of us can hold a tune in a bucket. We decided early on that only two of them had any star quality; one was voted out some time ago, apparently for her middle-European accent (because an Austrian nun would, of course, sound much more like Julie Andrews). Fortunately, the other one we reckoned had real stage presence won last night. Her name’s Connie, and she looks a little like one of the cast of Deep Space Nine, a show Richard liked because it told a complex and political story rather than being as shallow, worthy and dull as the other Star Trek series of the time – apparently most Star Trek fans dislike it for exactly those reasons. But anyway, Connie is feisty, powerful and a little bit raunchy; as I said, star quality, but I goggle at the thought of her playing a nun… Plus, of course, the show had the lovely John Barrowman, who shares all those qualities, though rather more raunchy than ‘a little’.

Still, it wasn’t all nuns last night. We arrived in Brighton, found our hotel, registered, said hello to the charming Rob Fenwick and I introduced Richard to one of Millennium’s slightly bemused competitors on the shortlist for tonight’s Blog of the Year Awards. Millennium is rather worried about this; he’s very nervous of speaking in public (so, uncannily, is Richard. I’m the only gobby one in our flat). Then Richard spent several hours in rapture over the computer connection, able at last to shoot Cybermen on the BBC website and to see the lovely Councillor Tall wink at the camera in near-real time in his latest vidcast.

Our hotel has a huge atrium, with a great wall of rooms stacked to one side of it like an indoor cliff or a giant honeycomb. We’re in one of them, which is good news and bad news; it means we have natural light despite an ‘indoor’ view, but it also means that one day this week we’re bound to forget not to do what we would at home and wake up, throw the curtains open and flash half the guests over breakfast. We managed to avoid that this morning, and the huge cooked breakfast was particularly fine.

Before breakfast, however, I had that early interview with Shaun Ley on the hotel sofa. It was all very relaxed, and of course I’ve known Gareth for years; there must be something about our flat, as a few months ago Newsnight picked out Millennium and me as the two Lib Dem blogs to plug, while I didn’t have the heart to tell The World At One they’d selected me and our ex-lodger. We were asked, as is everyone, about the tax debate later in the week, and I wonder which of our answers are going to make it on air. Gareth introduced himself as a member of the Federal Policy Committee, so (having not thought to prepare an introduction) I just reacted to that thought by describing myself as “a former Vice-Chair of the Policy Committee, but now I’m just a blogger.” Richard afterwards told me I’d cleverly both pulled rank and claimed greater independence, which sounds so clever I might even remember to do it on purpose some day. Actually, the “just a blogger” was immediately contradicted by Shaun Ley; the BBC are reading Liberal Democrat Voice avidly after just a week, picking up both Gareth and me from comments and articles on tax there, and think blogs are brilliant – they no longer have to just ring round random people in the hope one will have something interesting to say (is this the end for Lord Greaves? muses Richard). So if you want to start your own Lib Dem blog and also aspire to get the odd ‘mainstream’ interview, now sounds like a good time.

I did have to smile, though, at the end of the interview. Mr Ley seemed happy, but his colleague – producer? Editor? Recording technician? All three? – wanted me to say something more. “You said some really interesting things about pensions on the phone yesterday,” she told me. “You didn’t mention them today.” “You asked me about them yesterday,” I pointed out. “And this morning I was answering the questions I was asked, rather than coming in with a script.” Is it really unusual for politicians to have to be prompted in this way, I wonder?

Former US President Jimmy Carter was interviewed on last night’s Newsnight. When I was a boy, he was the first politician I remember finding insincere; it was that dazzling smile. Unlike that other great smiler Mr Blair, my opinion on Mr Carter has become more positive. His smile now seems more saintly than salesman, adding to his moral force against ‘subservient’ Mr Blair:

“no matter what kind of radical or ill-advised policy was proposed from the White House, it seems to me that almost automatically the government of Great Britain would adopt the same policy, without exerting its influence.”

I didn’t like Mr Blair to begin with, of course, but I’ve got no fonder of him as his smile has faded into that scary-eyed stare. Mr Carter’s smile is gentler, but still ready, and he’s remarkably bright-eyed at 81. If I didn’t think such things were nonsense, it’d be easy to look at the two men and come to just the right moral judgement about their lives at a glance. At the same time Mr Blair is claiming that to disagree with him is “madness” and “anti-American,” this deeply sane-seeming old man gave the lie to it, speaking for real American values in bringing a very measured, kindly and wise sort of devastating condemnation to our Prime Minister.

President Carter left office in defeat and disfavour; since then, he’s had a sharp rise in public esteem for his tireless work in international peace and justice, even winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Freed of the burdens of office, he comes across as wise and gentle, with the very considered tone of his statements making them all the more damning. He thinks Mr Bush and Mr Blair are sincere men, but that they’ve made the wrong decisions, most of all

“The ill-advised abandonment of the war against terrorism to substitute the war in Iraq.”

He regretted that “in the past there has been a very strong voice from London in the shaping of a common policy” between two great democracies, but that now

“I have been really disappointed in the apparent subservience of the British government’s policies related to many of the serious mistakes that have been originated in Washington.”

He carefully considered all sides when asked about Mr Blair’s claimed influence on American policy:

“There may have been influence exerted behind the scenes, but I haven’t seen the evidence of that… But then, when the British have a public news media appearance, there seems to be a total acquiescence to whatever America proposed at the beginning. I haven’t seen the corrective effect of British disagreement with what the White House has proposed. It may be there, it hasn’t been evident to the public.”

I think that middle sentence is the key one in judging how much ‘influence’ there has been, and that it’s all been from Mr Bush and onto Mr Blair.

Mr Carter’s interview also touched on his new book (yes, I know), Faith and Freedom, in which he takes a rather different line of Christianity to that of Mr Bush and Mr Blair. Describing himself self-deprecatingly as a Baptist and “a part-time political participant,” he quoted Thomas Jefferson’s remark that Americans should “build a wall” between religion and government, and is deeply disturbed at the rise of the Religious Right – though using such a pejorative term isn’t his style.

“I worship the Prince of Peace,” he gently testified.
“I don’t worship the Prince of Pre-emptive War.”

I don’t usually add pictures to this blog, but I notice it’s my 150th post, so… Remember that smile?


 

There’s another reason I remember it from my youth (or possibly from the 22nd Century)…

Labels: American Politics, Comics, Iraq, Pictures

Predictably heavy debate on Liberal Democrat Voice over the 50p tax rate inspired me to rattle off an article about what sorts of things Liberal Democrats tend to disagree on, and where the fault lines are in our values. It’s been published there this morning and looks particularly at the International Law debate next week, where the paper seems a victory for the ‘interventionists’ over those who consider intervention imperialist or impractical. Hearing the news today, I’ve just written here about abortion, sex education and family policy. Hmm, what’s the next nettle patch for me to stick my hand into?

I may not be standing for public office at the moment, but this seems to be one of my more recklessly indiscreet mornings. I could continue to make new enemies and wind people up by writing on, say, drugs or Israel and Palestine, but I notice that since I wrote the last piece, Blogger has gone down. It wasn’t an attempt to cover my tracks, honest. By the time you read this, I assume it’ll be working again, but – despite having recently seen a ludicrous story that I’m tempted to fulminate about, in which busybody town halls were planning to ban men from going topless in public – perhaps I should spend the time waiting for it to start working again packing clothes ready for Conference, rather than trying for an ‘incensed of the blogosphere’ hat-trick by writing about public nudity (again).

Two stories about family policy top the headlines this morning. The rate of abortions is still rising despite increased availability of the ‘morning after pill’, with a family planning expert warning in the British Medical Journal that contraception is a better way to avoid unwanted pregnancy (surprise). Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton is also to make a speech on the importance of “traditional, two-parent families” – though his interview about it on the Today Programme suggested that’s less of a right-wing dog whistle than it sounds, or, shamingly, than the ‘family policy’ that the Liberal Democrats are now proposing.

I went to a Catholic comprehensive school, and we were frequently told of the evils of abortion. I was even briefly a member of anti-abortion group ‘Life’, though the school (and it was a very good one) seemed to regard the heavier pressure group SPUC as a bit scary and tended not to have them about. Since then, I’ve listened to a lot of arguments about abortion and changed my mind almost completely on the subject; I’d been moving away from a knee-jerk opposition to abortion for some time by my late teens, but I think it was a conversation with a friend who’d had an abortion herself that finally decided me.

I remain able to see the other side of argument, and would still prefer to see the number of abortions decrease, which won’t endear me to some people. I don’t believe that a foetus is the same from conception as a baby – but I can understand those who do, and I sigh if someone who genuinely believes they are arguing against murder is called ‘illiberal’ for that view. Like the question of when you’d count a foetus as a baby, the question of who’s liberal and who isn’t on abortion has a fuzzier dividing line than either ‘side’ tends to make out. What I can’t support is taking away the right from someone to make their own moral decision, let alone making life harder for women in an already hard situation, whether by forcing them back to the horrors of backstreet abortions or by exporting the ‘problem’ to other countries for women who can afford it.

So if the law is the wrong answer, what is a Liberal who is uneasy at rising abortions to do? Make themselves unpopular with everyone, really. Abortion should be a free choice, but no-one does it for fun; some abortions are fairly traumatic physically, and for a great many women they’re more traumatic emotionally. Instead of adding to that trauma with the law, the Liberal way to reduce it is surely to reduce the need for abortions: better sex education, without parents being able to deny their children such a basic piece of life education because they want to enforce their own beliefs; much easier availability of free contraception, including stopping starving STD clinics of funds because they never come up as popular in public consultations (gee, wonder why?); and stop lashing out at people as feckless, shameful and – Labour’s latest view – criminal for having babies if they aren’t married. None of which is a high priority for most policymakers, and none of which will remotely please the religious pressure groups who want abortion banned (on top of which, I’d rather early abortions were easier to obtain, as they’re clearly far less traumatic). Still, it’d probably be more effective at getting abortion numbers down than angry protests or ministerial hand-wringing. I fought my first General Election campaign in 1997, incidentally, when one of my opponents was a ‘Marian’ candidate campaigning to ban abortion; I was the only ‘main party’ candidate who would speak to him. I told him I thought he was wrong and told him my views – slightly to my surprise, he gave me some credit. More predictably, his acolytes hissed and protested.

I thought the government was going to lash around with some more illiberal lawmaking, or at least more stigmatising of anyone not in a nuclear family unit, when I heard the headlines this morning. While I didn’t agree with everything John Hutton said, though, he turned out to be more thoughtful than I’d expected. Politicians telling people what sort of families they should have are invariably wrong, and usually find it’s they’ve hung a ‘kick-me’ sign on their parties, but he mostly avoided both. Yes, he was still conflating averages with outcomes, seemingly unable to see that if more children in ‘stable’ families do well, that’s not the same as saying all single-parent or cohabiting families are worse for kids than all married couples. He didn’t consider the question that cohabiting couples may not magically become more likely to stay together if they’re encouraged in some way to marry, either. But much of his interview was fairly measured, and he went out of his way – not just when pressed – to talk about how families come in different types, we can’t turn the clock back, financial incentives to get married didn’t stop soaring divorce rates (which have now apparently stabilised, a piece of good news I’d not heard before), and he even spoke in glowing terms about civil partnerships. If at the end of it I wasn’t remotely sure what he was proposing, at least I wasn’t snarling in the way I do at most of his colleagues.

So why is it that a minister in an authoritarian Labour Government that’s always trying to tell people how to live their lives (even from before birth, now), talking on an issue where the headline – doubtless supplied by Labour’s spin doctors – is blatantly a right-wing dog whistle, still manages to sound not unreasonable when pushed to the detail? And how come his speech is far less of a right-wing dog-whistle than the Liberal Democrats are currently giving out on families?

The Liberal Democrats’ Section 28-friendly new policy paper Stronger Families, Brighter Futures pays the barest lip service to “different shapes and sizes” rather than making any statement on equal opportunities. While Mr Hutton praised civil partnerships as a way to help gay families support each other, meaning families made up of two adults, the Liberal Democrats will on Monday morning be asked to vote to say that you’re not any sort of family if you don’t have kids. This policy paper then explicitly excludes same-sex relationships – section 2.2.1 is about ‘Supporting strong relationships’ “whether married, cohabiting or living apart”. Time was, we used to be pioneers on the policy of civil partnerships, and now we believe they should be socially excluded. But it’s not just same-sex couples; gay parents and kids growing up gay are just as invisible. I hope the Daily Mail’s proud of us, because I’m certainly not.

Yesterday I expressed some doubts about the gap between the hetoric and the proposed action in the Diversity and Equality Motion due to be debated in Brighton. I’m not the only one. James Graham recommends outright opposition rather than scepticism, while Peter on Apollo at the Liberal Review today points out the perils of overly emphatic wording. James was also single-handedly responsible for the Reflecting Britain pressure site about diversity in the party’s representation, which he’s now updated with an appeal for ways in which to take it forward and his own assessment of the party’s ‘Diversity and Equality Review’. I hadn’t realised that it was entirely James’ work when I was a bit snide about it yesterday, so that’s another reminder not just of the importance of diversity, but of not sending a comment straight away when feeling crabby. Perhaps I should stick a post-it above my screen saying, “Count to thirty before you click ‘Post’.”

Some of Mr Blair’s most devoted and, indeed, deluded acolytes have started up a new site to keep the sacred flame alive. Somehow I can’t see the same transubstantiation of Blairism into a holy cult that happened when the Conservatives raised Thatcherism to Thatchianity to atone for the sin of slaying their god-empress, but those behind Keeping the Faith evidently differ with me on that (as on so many, many things). You’d think it was the quintessence of the self-parodying site, but I tip my hat to The Sandals Are Off for pointing out that it has indeed been parodied.

Keeping-the-Faith’s most striking feature for me was its list of Mr Blair’s Top Ten:

Tony Blair’s top 10 achievements since being elected in 1997:

1. Told us that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction
2. Told us his political beliefs were Labour, and then got into bed with the USA’s NeoCon administration
3. Invaded Iraq – despite international opposition, and without a UN mandate
4. Interfered with the BBC when they dared to run a story criticising his handling of the justification for the invasion
5. Refused to condemn Israeli bombardment of civilian areas of Lebanon
6. Passed his controversial Education Bill with Tory support, when his own MPs wouldn’t back him
7. Proposed compulsory ID cards for all British Citizens
8. Did we mention the invasion of Iraq?
9. Where are the WMDs Tony?
10. George W Bush is only allowed to serve two terms. Since Tony wants to be so like him, why is he still here?

I know that the ‘Ten Good Reasons to Vote Liberal Democrat’ at the last General Election were not regarded with unalloyed enthusiasm, though I quite liked them, but there’s an advantage to a list of ten when making an attack. It may not be easy to remember ten positive points, but ten both strikes people as a logical number and, presented with a list of ten ‘bad things’, gives the impression of an overwhelming number of faults. They may not all be easy to remember, but the effect of ‘There’s loads of it and it’s all terrible!’ remains, and is very difficult to counter.

That was the theory behind my attempt at a ‘viral marketing’ e-mail in 2001. I was a candidate at that General Election, and while I didn’t put this out on a leaflet, I did send it to lots of people; some of them even passed it on, though I don’t think it was really funny enough to be a ‘hit’. Though a lot of them are now historical curiosities, showing how the political landscape has shifted since the days of Labour spendthriftiness and before Iraq, perhaps some enterprising and wittier Lib Dem blogger might come up with something similar to circulate next time…

‘Watchdog’ asks: “Should you have voted Labour?”

We often have complaints from people who’ve bought a duff product from some cheap con-artist, wondering what they can do about it. Here’s our latest easy consumer quiz to check if YOU’VE been swindled.


CONSUMER QUIZ: “SHOULD I HAVE VOTED LABOUR IN 1997?”

A lot of people are claiming that their Labour Government is faulty, and want an exchange. Try this simple questionnaire to see if you’ve had a problem.

1. Should there be the highest secondary school classes for 20 years? – YES / NO
2. Should pensions go up by just 75p a week? – YES / NO
3. Should the Tube be privatised? – YES / NO
4. Should patients lie on trolleys in corridors instead of hospital beds? – YES / NO
5. Should police numbers go down and violent crime go up? – YES / NO
6. Should the government tax more and spend less than the Tories did? – YES /NO
7. Should poverty rise by half a million in four years? – YES / NO
8. Should the government impose student fees? – YES / NO
9. Should Tony Blair still be smiling like that all the time? – YES / NO
10. Did ‘things only get better’? – YES / NO


If you answered YES to most of the above, congratulations! You have the Labour Government you voted for. Please pay them again for more of the same.

If you answered NO to most of the above, your vote needs refunding. Tests have proven that, despite its flashy packaging, your Labour Government is cheap and made with all the same ingredients as your old Conservative Government. You should take it back and get a new government. Labour have short-changed you, when you wanted a real change. Try the Liberal Democrats next time – a slightly more expensive brand, but it does just what it says on the tin.


Coming in next week’s ‘Watchdog’ quiz:

Do you believe you can get something for nothing?
YES / NO
Do you think you can have big tax cuts and lots more spending at the same time?
YES / NO
Have you forgotten what happened when John Major promised all that?
YES / NO

If you answered YES, then congratulations! William Hague’s Conservatives and their magic money from the pixies are waiting for your vote!

Labels: British Politics, Iraq, Labour

At last, he admits it: Star Wars really is called ‘Star Wars’. Early in 1978, my Dad, my brother and I queued literally round the block to see a new film which, as I and every six-year-old knew, was called Star Wars. It’s the only time I’ve ever queued for a film and still not got in to see it – in fact, the only three times. On the third occasion, having left early to go into central Manchester to make certain we got to see Star Wars, we’d reached the doorway of the cinema when we were turned away. Being taken to see a badly Disneyfied version of a great British children’s tale in the far less full cinema next door was little compensation.

When we eventually got to see Star Wars, we loved it, and must have seen it at least half a dozen times at the cinema alone (and who knows how many on video, when that came along). It was the greatest film ever, and only one little boy – well, not so little, in fact – didn’t think so. His name was George. Of course, the critics didn’t think so either, but we hadn’t heard of them back then, and we’d heard of him. Since the film took America by storm in 1977, George Lucas has never stopped tinkering with it; a nip here, a tuck there, at least two sequels / prequels that are less movies in their own right than straight remakes… I can understand the urge to keep tinkering with what you’ve created to get it exactly right, but there’s a time to move on. And besides, when I look at a blog piece I’ve published, think, ‘Ooh, that’s not right’ and sneakily add in yet another sentence, at least I don’t re-post the whole thing, call it a ‘Special Edition’ and expect you to read it all over again (even with Richard, I only point out the extra bit).

Some of George’s changes make it look a little better, some make you think he’s lost his marbles (secret code for those of you who were at school when Star Wars came out: what was the Star Wars figure everyone agreed was the coolest, so much so that when mine’s head came off I went all the way to Buxton to find a new one? Exactly. But he still didn’t shoot first), but there’s one that he’s insisted for a quarter of a century wasn’t a change at all.

Mr Lucas has claimed for decades that the first film made for this saga was always called ‘Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’. ‘No it wasn’t,’ said everyone who went to see it. ‘Yes it was,’ said Mr Lucas. ‘Look at your video.’ ‘No, it wasn’t,’ we all replied. ‘We know what we saw, and besides, if that was true, why would seeing ‘Episode V’ at the start of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ have been such a surprise?’ ‘You’re wrong,’ said Mr Lucas. ‘You can’t have seen it enough.’ ‘I went to the cinema ten times,’ we replied, ‘and on seven of them we even got to see the film. But even when we were stuck outside because the cinema was full, we could read the title on the posters, right down to the small print. And we bought the comic books and even the novel that you yourself wrote, and there was no mention of this ‘A New Hope’ bobbins in any of those.’ ‘Enough!’ cried Mr Lucas. ‘I made it, I know, and I have all the original prints locked away in a great big cupboard, so you’ll never be able to prove me wrong.’ Sometimes I wondered if he might even be telling the truth, and that part of the title had mysteriously vanished from our collective consciousness in the same way that we have all somehow always known that Ben Kenobi fought Darth Vader on a volcano planet and that’s how he got all burnt, but none of us can remember where we first read or heard it.

Yesterday, a set of DVDs were released which I suspect are selling spectacularly not because of the ‘main features’ but those films found on the ‘bonus discs’. After years of people clamouring for them, at last George Lucas has given in to reason popular demand and issued the films as they were originally released, and Richard and I watched just the first couple of minutes of Star Wars last night. There it was; or, rather, there it wasn’t. That majestic theme; that still awesome moment as a huge Star Destroyer crawls into view from the top of the screen; that thrilling 20th Century Fox fanfare without ‘Subsidiary of EvilCorpTM’ plastered across it; the word ‘Lucasfilm’ appearing in plain green, rather than 73 shades of pixie dust. But, most of all, at last the proof, the admission: “STAR WARS It is a period of civil war....” and no sign of Hope.

But Mr Lucas still can’t resist trying to make us think the ‘new’ versions are better. They’re stuck on the ‘bonus’ discs; they’re only a ‘limited edition’; and, for some insane reason, the picture quality fails to make the most of DVD. Look at all his other releases, and you’ll find they’re anamorphic discs – that means the picture automatically fits to your screen to make maximum use of the available size. The original Star Wars on DVD doesn’t. It wastes most of the picture with… Blackness. This film pops up on screen in an old-fashioned 4x3 frame, with heavy black bars at the top and bottom to imply widescreen. Just as it looked when it was released on home video like that a quarter of a century ago, the actual picture looks tiny and lost in the middle of the screen. Our TV allows you to zoom in on the picture, but while that means you have to squint less, it shows up the lower resolution; yes, when those famous words scroll up the screen, you can now see the lines that make them up.

The only explanation I can think of is that Mr Lucas is trying to make us associate these original films not with the awesome power of a giant cinema screen that originally made our jaws drop, but with watching it on a poky little telly in the early ’80s while the ‘Special Editoons’ remain grandiose. Those of us buffs likely to be bothered by seeing the original prints are likely to be those who’ve got great big, extravagant, energy-guzzling widescreen TVs – yes, we have – and blowing up a titchy image like that on a bigger screen makes it look small. He’s trying to say, ‘These movies aren’t good enough. You should watch my nice shiny new ones. These should only be run on little TVs using grotty home video; they don’t deserve your rectangular monsters and shiny silver discs.’ If I look closely, he’ll probably have digitally painted in lots of old-fashioned video drop-out lines, just to ram home the point.

But you know what? I bet we’ll still watch it more than the new ones.

Labels: DVD, Fandom, Film, Reviews, Star Wars

With a certain visible degree of social and physical homogeneity between the Liberal Democrat Leader and his Deputy, pressure is coming for a change in the Party President quite apart from Simon Hughes’ record in the job. Many want our next President to be a woman, and this isn’t just a platitude that evaporates when asked to name a choice; thanks to a particularly strong set of new women MPs, both online polls currently show a majority of those endorsing a potential candidate have picked a female one. There’s also a Conference debate next week on diversity in Parliamentary candidates.

Stephen Tall’s main site currently puts Paddy Ashdown in the lead at 23%, with Lynne Featherstone close behind on 20% – but together, the women candidates add up to 60% of the votes cast in his poll (while he calls it “A two-horse race”, however, I wouldn’t put money on either of those two actually standing). While Lynne took a dramatic early lead in yesterday’s voting on the newly launched Liberal Democrat Voice site, ‘our place to gossip’, she’s now dropped back there from 40%+ to 26%; still in the lead but no longer a ‘one-horse race’. In second place, interestingly, is again Paddy Ashdown, trailing on 19%. This time there is a ‘None of the above’ option which has so far taken 13%, which means that although the potential female candidates listed don’t take a majority of the votes cast, at 45% they do have a combined plurality. Incumbent Simon Hughes languishes at just 6% and 4% respectively. However, if several women candidates were available to vote between in an actual Presidential election, would people transfer between them on the basis of gender, or based on their programme for the job and their general perceived positions? And never mind that; will any woman candidate at all actually stand?

Remember, opinion polls are bobbins, but they’re fun to talk about, aren’t they?

All other things being equal, I’d prefer a non-Parliamentarian in the job, too, but this close to the election only an MP can have the profile to be a serious contender – unless of course a TV-friendly councillor, say, were to save both Ming Campbell and an adorable little baby from drowning off Brighton Pier, then swing a vital Conference vote with a barnstorming and hilarious speech while still dripping (Stephen, pack your water wings just in case).

The crucial factor here is not just the vague wish to have a woman at the top of the party, but that since the last election we have for the first time a significant number of female MPs widely fancied as potential challengers. The question still remains of how to get more women MPs into Parliament, and indeed more people from other under-represented social groups. Conference will see another debate next week, and thankfully things have moved on from the sterile arguments over how we should correct the wrongs of discrimination by inventing more forms of discrimination, and now the party has made some impressive breakthroughs in getting women elected, it’s starting to take a look at how other groups fare too.

Peter on the Liberal Review has pointed out that, as with previous attempts to alter the gender balance of otherwise remarkably similar white, middle-aged, middle-class and married candidates, this motion on Diversity and Equality makes no mention of economic inequality, just as Meeting the Challenge decides on our behalf that economic inequality is the only one worth talking about. However, vague as it is, described by Mark Valladares as “entirely reasonable if almost entirely lacking in detail,” it does at least not only make some of the right noises but, crucially, promise further consultation about what concrete action to take, rather than allowing the party to sit back and say ‘OK, done that’. I do not intend to speak on this motion, having made myself quite unpopular enough in the past by single-handedly sinking a constitutional amendment on ethnic minority candidates which did indeed promise no future action and whose warm but meaningless words would have allowed the party to sit back and say ‘OK, done that’, as well making a rather distressed speech the last time we had a big row on this subject.

The fact remains that we had some success at the last General Election in getting women MPs elected, and should keep up the pace, but we’ve been far less successful in other respects. A couple of years ago we won our first MP from a visible ethnic minority since the 19th Century, only to lose him at the General Election. At the same time as the party was singing of our new female Parliamentarians from the rooftops, it didn’t bother even to tell the gay press that we’d elected our first ever out gay MP, let alone share the news with anyone else. Since then, of course, two other MPs have been outed as bisexual, and the reaction of both the press and the party has been horror at this ‘scandal’. My own view is that – providing everything is done with informed consent – we should shrug our shoulders at what anyone gets up to in bed and wish them good luck. Unfortunately, it seems the party is still mortally embarrassed instead, and that the chances of a gay man or lesbian being selected for a winnable seat, still less one of those ‘scandalous’ bisexuals who – heavens! – likes sex but isn’t in a long-term relationship, are correspondingly even lower than usual.

In that light, and in light of the way non-heterosexuals have been airbrushed out of several policy papers this year, it may be instructive to examine the ‘Diversity and Equality’ motion more closely. Back in 1997, we had a last-minute row over including the word ‘bisexual’ in the Manifesto; I proposed it and the several other gay men on the FPC at the time voted with me, but several worried-looking presumed heterosexuals kept ‘them’ out, including the senior MP to whom I had to explain what a ‘bisexual’ was (and without using the words ‘your agent’). Since then, Manifestos have been more inclusive, but now bisexuals have evidently become too scary to mention again even in the one thing on the Agenda that ‘dares’ to mention other people who aren’t heterosexual. Here is the well-meaning, hand-wavy, fuzzy-wordsy part:

Conference affirms that the under-representation of women, people with disabilities, black and minority ethnic people and lesbian and gay people in elected public office is unhealthy for democracy and good decision-making and that the Liberal Democrats must play their full part in correcting this imbalance.

And here is the bit where action is to be taken:

Conference agrees that the gender, disability and ethnicity of selected candidates should be considered when assigning target status to UK parliamentary constituencies, and instructs the Federal Executive to work with the State Parties to consider how best to ensure equality and diversity at all other levels of candidate selection.

Can you spot the difference, girls and boys?

No.

This Autumn there seem two big topics of conversation among Liberal Democrat bloggers on our party’s direction: the slightly random choice of ‘a 50p tax rate or not’, and the Party Presidency. Simon Hughes was elected two years ago, and for the first time in fourteen years, it appears the incumbent President will be challenged when nominations close on September 27th. It’s a major test for Simon, and also perhaps for the Lib Dem blogosphere, where Simon appears to have minuscule support in polls and not a single public backer. How much does blogging reflect the wider party?

The President of the Liberal Democrats is elected by all member-ballot to be “the principal public representative of the Party” and to chair the party’s Federal Executive, in effect deputy leader of the party in the country while the MPs elect a Deputy for the party in Parliament. I wish Simon Hughes had made a success of it, but I don’t believe he has. While he’s intermittently shot off ideas, some good, some bad, he seems to have had little concept of how to put most of them into practice, and this job is about organisation, not just soundbites. He’s an outstanding, even inspirational constituency MP, but he doesn’t seem to have put in the same sort of work as President.

Poor old Simon. Back in the mid-’90s, he was honorary President of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students. For various reasons, he was pretty bad at it (so was I, when I unwisely found myself in the same post a few years later. But I’m not foolish enough to stand for President of the wider party). His predecessor had done two terms and been re-elected unopposed, but when Simon stood for re-election he faced the ignominy of having to beat ‘Re-Open Nominations’ on the ballot paper, and only doing so by a whisker. At the time, I was accused of running a RON campaign against him, one of those rumours I was never able to trace the start of. I’d actually taken him to one side a couple of months earlier and warned him of the ways in which he was winding people up, but no-one else from LDYS was around at that particular time to witness it and, when it came to the vote, I both voted for Simon and urged others to do so. Stealthy plotting isn’t really my style so, after the odd comment in the last couple of months on others’ blogs, I’m saying outright on mine that this time, Simon should not be re-elected, though despite the feeling on the blogs I suspect almost anyone who takes him on (should he decide to run again) faces a tough fight.

I’m very fond of Simon and, on form, he does a more inspiring speech than any one of the other candidates I’ve seen on offer (and yes, though Simon’s speeches are very variable, at his best he can even be better than the two previous Leaders being touted for the job). Unfortunately, there’s more to the Party Presidency than that. He’s famously not well-organised, which may not be the best qualification for being the head of the Party organisation, and seems to have tried to over-compensate for that by throwing his weight around and taking a number of arbitrary actions with little regard for the Party Constitution; the most notable, perhaps, was creating all his Deputy Presidents, a fine bunch of people but not really a group for one man to make up on the spot.

However, the main reason I have to argue against Simon’s re-election to this job is that he made very clear what his aim in the job was – to double Liberal Democrat membership. During his two-year term, membership has in fact marginally declined; that’s certainly not Simon’s fault, but making a grand promise but having absolutely no idea how to put it into effect and doing nothing to try and achieve it once in office is entirely Simon’s responsibility. If someone stands for re-election, they should be tested on the standards of their previous manifesto. I don’t believe people should be able to say any old rubbish to get elected and face no comeback, so Simon’s pledge has come back to bite him. As a result, I’m looking for a candidate who gives the impression of knowing what they’re doing.

Who would I back? Well, that’s the problem. Impossible to say, until I know who’s standing and what their programme is. It’s not good enough just to say Simon’s not earned re-election; someone hugely inspiring might be touted but, if I know what they’re promising is a load of nonsense, why dump Simon in their favour?

Assuming candidates emerge who have a clue, with the Leader and Deputy Leader both authoritative, incisive, older men seen as on the Lib Dem ‘right’, I’ll take a lot of convincing to go for, say, someone over 60 and male. Surely we can manage a diversity of ideas as well as of at least age or gender (ideally both) at the top of the party? So, instinctively, I’d prefer to back a woman candidate, again depending on what they have to say. There are at least two or three being suggested that I might well support, depending on which poll’s choice of options you buy, and I could happily back one of the men, too. Let’s hope we do get a real choice.

I’m waving sleepily this morning at Liberal Democrat Voice, Rob Fenwick’s new nearly-official-but-still-gossipy Lib Dem ‘place to talk’. Do pop over and have a look; I should warn you that, while neglecting here for a few days, I’ve been writing a piece for this new site. It’s Lib Dem Conference in a week, and I’d carefully read through key papers Fairer, Simpler, Greener and Trust in People: Make Britain Free, Fair and Green. My copies are now covered in red biro, from which I drafted an article in which you can read what I make of them, It’s About Money.

I don’t know what to make of Liberal Democrat Voice yet, but I hope it’ll take off. A place for us to debate without having to sign up to a particular service provider, an information digest, a source of gossip… Looks a handy bunch of things. The party’s main website is useful but, blimey, it’s dull (for Lib Dem news I normally just look at Colin Ross’ blog, as he takes most of the official press releases and converts them into something that doesn’t send me to sleep).

I suspect the big talking point to start with won’t be my policy analysis, but who’s to be the next Party President (or ‘Simon Hughes hit by lightning bolt!’ as the graphic suggests. Perhaps he should have listened to Lembit). Stephen Tall’s poll has already made it clear there’s not a lot of support for incumbent Simon Hughes should he stand for a second term (currently languishing in seventh place), and – as that job is effectively deputy leader of the party in the country – it could be a crucial fight if there’s a challenge for re-election for the first time since the early ’90s. But it’s not just gossip; there are PPC ads (ooh!), local by-elections (gosh!), Mark Pack’s Ming Campbell: the Movie (strewth!) and, to show how serious it is, Rob has abandoned his normal pouting portrait to pull a very serious face indeed on the front page.

Usually when I’m writing an article, I start off with a few notes, write through and then just read it through before posting to correct mistakes. The only attention I pay to word counts – you’ll probably have guessed – is the first 100 (hello, Lib Dem Blogs ‘trailer’). This time I started with over 8,000 words of notes and gradually worked out the article from them, then after a day off and some helpful feedback, rewrote the whole thing from top to bottom. Along the way I took out most of my analysis of the tax paper, then cut down what I had to say on the Meeting the Challenge paper to focus on my two big problems with it – a muddled message, and economic determinism. Yes, not only does this mean you have the chance to see what one of my pieces looks like if I’ve actually thought about it for a week rather than dashing it straight out (ooh, what a treat!), but it means it could have been at least three times as long (possibly over Mr Fenwick’s dead body).

Huge thanks to the fellow Lib Dem blogger who supplied detailed comments on wording, sentence structure and the bits that didn’t make a lot of sense, all at short notice; thanks also to Rob’s editorial suggestions on how to cut it down from well over three times his suggested length to a mere two and a half times what he’d asked for. Both were kinder than I was to a booklet by Paddy Ashdown on which I was once asked to give my youthful views; I helpfully supplied 20 pages of notes for a 32-page publication, starting with changing the title, and caused his then Head of Office to tell me “You were only asked to comment on it, not rewrite the whole f*****g thing!” My name was misspelt in the published version, which I suspect may have been getting their own back…

Labels: Blogs, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats

Radio 4 has two daily half-hour comedy slots; while their 6.30pm comedies have been variable, The World at One continues to provide belly-laughs. Today this sketch show was given over to a linked series of skits on the ‘Labour Party’, including egregious boot-licker Tom Watson’s sudden, hilarious attempt to pose as a man of principle (“I love you, Tony, but I must push you under a bus for the good of the country and, particularly, my re-selection”), with the punch-line from the Prime Minister that, yah boo, he was going to sack him anyway. Of course you were, Mr Blair. That’s why Mr Watson was summoned to the Chief Whip and told that he’d have to withdraw his name from the round-robin letter calling on Mr Blair to resign or that his position would be untenable as a government minister. If you want to pretend someone’s only gone because you were going to sack them, best not to have got your hatchet-person to plead with them to stay just the night before, eh?

Mr Watson followed the usual resignation protocol of writing a chummy letter professing his undying love while sticking in the knife: “The Labour Party has been my life… My loyalty to you personally, as well as to the Party and the values we stand for, has been absolute and unswerving… My pride in what our government has achieved under your leadership is beyond expression… The party and the nation owes you an incalculable debt… So it is with the greatest sadness… For the sake of the legacy… It is with the greatest regret… Yours ever…” It’s a surprise that we haven’t heard about the tearstains, or that he missed out “I come not to bury but to praise you.” Mr Blair didn’t praise Mr Watson. If ever there was a sign of a Prime Minister in a tailspin and fearful for his political life, it’s when he stoops to slagging someone off directly (yes, astoundingly, he let himself be quoted on the record instead of via spin doctor), coupled with the obvious lie about sacking him. “I had been intending to dismiss him but wanted to extend to him the courtesy of speaking to him first… [He] was disloyal, discourteous and wrong.” And, besides, he smells, Mr Blair might have added in similarly dignified and statesmanlike manner. Not that Mr Watson’s weasel words offered much dignity; he spent so much of his letter saying how right Mr Blair had been on everything that the only remaining reason left for calling on him to go was that Mr Watson hoped to keep the policies by changing the unpopular face.

With a junior minister and a PPS already gone simply over the issue of Mr Blair not going fast enough, I wonder how many more will be gone by the end of the day? Or by Labour Conference? I don’t want to get my hopes up, but it looks like Mr Blair’s latest piece of spin is unravelling fast – it’s blown much of his remaining authority while satisfying nobody. Odds must be shortening on a putsch, perhaps as early as the Labour Conference, but don’t hold your breath – the courage of Labour MPs has never been something I’d bet the farm on.

On the other hand, the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean Popular Front must be feeling enormously grateful to the Labour Party for the grown-ups providing a distraction from their own playpen squabbles. If Labour are in a ludicrous state, the various warring Scottish Socialist tribes are beyond parody, especially when the Leader of the big splitters uses the name ‘Solidarity’. Oh, my sides.

As the tide of even Labour MPs sick to death of him reaches unmanageable proportions, Mr Blair has ‘signalled’ through a few close friends (and he can only have a few left) like David “Damn, I’m not ready to challenge Gordon” Miliband, Minister for Social Nationalisation Hilary Armstrong and of course Rupert Stavro Murdoch that he’ll soon be off. He’s not said it himself, of course, because he’s now so pathologically incapable of anything but spin that even his leaving announcement needs a get-out clause. And he still can’t see why even his own party are all shouting, “Get out!”

Newsnight last night had an amusing graphic of Mr Blair ascending into Heaven, chest emblazoned with a giant Blue Peter badge like a home-made Superman. No doubt that’s what he believes his exit will be like, but the memo fantasising about his triumphal departure “on a wave of euphoria” where he leaves “the crowds wanting more” is almost as delusional as his in-house report that claimed Labour were being hurt in elections because “people love Tony and they’re angry that he’s going to go.” The only wave of euphoria possible for Mr Blair the shop-soiled messiah is should he announce a shock, instant resignation to surprise and delight everyone; but on his record, most people probably think that, having left himself wiggle room by ‘revealing’ the date only through spin, it’s more likely he’ll make a shock announcement that he’ll be staying on later than the half-promised next July (I can easily believe he’d try it, though nothing could more certainly precipitate that long-delayed palace coup).

If his leaving is to be announced half a dozen times, each time as if it’s divine revelation rather than a crumb from his table – the same way New Labour has run every policy announcement in office – then the euphoria will long be past when he eventually staggers out of office, months after Labour is punished in yet more waves of elections. As for leaving “the crowds wanting more…” With the chances of that having left the building by 2002 at the latest, which new mad Labour policy initiative will see out Mr Blair’s dying months in office? He’s probably deluded enough to think he can invent time travel, but on Labour’s form, odds-on they’ll be rolling out mind control instead. Should that method of commanding applause go as over time and over budget as most grandiose Labour projects, his much-delayed departure will be greeted only by sullen apathy and “Go, already,” like a ham actor carrying on his death throes for ten minutes when everyone else wants to get on with the drama.

One of the most striking things about Mr Blair’s impending departure is the absence of calls for him to stay from those who have most to gain from a longer term in office; I refer, of course, to his political opponents. From a partisan Liberal Democrat perspective, I should want Mr Blair to remain Labour Leader for as long as possible. Ten more years! Yet I don’t, and every Lib Dem blog is hungry for his defenestration (see, for example, Stephen Tall’s much classier Auden-inspired headline). It can only be an example of unselfish cleaving to the national interest, when every day that Mr Blair stays means that the biggest focus of bitter resentment against the Labour Party remains in place; that no-one can properly set a future direction that might just get them out of that mess; and constant sniping on the verge of a Labour civil war, all of which will be hugely damaging to Labour prospects. He’s had an effect on his party remarkably like that of Mrs Thatcher on hers, broadening its appeal to give three General Election victories but in the process dragging the party to a right-wing ideology and both ending up so convinced they’re right that they just don’t know when to call it quits, even when they’ve become desperately unpopular. Like Mrs Thatcher’s, Mr Blair’s legacy will be a poisonously divided party where the true believers will take anything his successor does as a betrayal.

Back in Autumn 1990, an edition of Spitting Image finished with the Tory Cabinet singing ‘Go Now’ to Mrs Thatcher, with only Neil Kinnock – his backdrop a chart of plummeting Tory opinion polls – imploring her to stay. Today, a partisan Liberal Democrat is in the same quandary; however much we want to see the back of the Prime Minister, will jettisoning him give this contemptible Labour Government another chance, as the Tories managed under Mr Major (yes, even he was regarded as ‘the bright new thing’ once)? Well, I doubt it, as Mr Brown is hardly a fresh face, and has been the architect of even more of this Government’s policies than Mr Blair. He’s in it up to his neck. I can’t believe the relief of no longer having to look at that smile or hear that preaching tone won’t do Labour some good, though, yet even so I’d rather he went tomorrow – or, ideally, this morning. I just want rid of Tony Blair as soon as possible, and leaving party politics to one side for a moment, the sooner he goes the healthier British politics will be. He is a source of poison, and that simply isn’t good for anyone.

Labels: British Politics, Iraq, Labour

I’ve spent today writing a 1,000-word article; while most people would work up to that number, obviously I tapped in 8,000 of notes, then started chipping away in a manner almost completely unlike that of Michelangelo. Taking a break, and as it’s three hours ‘til Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, it’s been time to potter on the Internet; some fabulous things about comics, Tony Benn agreeing with Lib Dem bloggers, a splendid anti-Labour song, Rob Fenwick on fibbing… Then I fell asleep on the keyboard and, while getting qwertyface, dreamt someone was mad enough to propose me for Lib Dem President.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is gripping television, despite being very, very slow. Everyone’s just so terribly watchable, particularly Ian Richardson doing every bit of acting ‘business’ known to man and Alec Guinness stealing the scene merely by putting his glasses on. If you’ve not been following the repeats on BBC4, there’s still time to catch the last two tonight and tomorrow; the final episode, of course, unmasks the mole, but tonight has the best scene of all those awfully good scenes. With strong support from Michael Jayston, Alec Guinness as George Smiley faces off against Bernard Hepton’s Toby Esterhase. Three spies, one small room, no flashy action, and absolutely mesmerising as within a few minutes of Smiley’s implacable interrogation by voice and eyes alone Esterhase cracks completely. Even though we have the DVD (worth buying, but look for a sale offer; with a solitary extra and no picture restoration, the BBC did it on the cheap and so should you), we’ve been putting on the odd episode anyway and I suspect we shall tonight.

In an earlier episode, Smiley visits each of those ‘next in line’ in the secret service on behalf of the ailing and possibly demented and messianic man at the top, only to be rebuffed by all three, none of whom think Control any longer has anything to offer them and all of whom are looking to his obvious successor for favours instead. While Smiley’s return from the wilderness to flatten Toby Esterhase through his sheer presence is the first and most stunning of the scenes where he turns the tables on each of those who denied him, I couldn’t help but think of mad-eyed Mr Blair. I wonder who he’s sending out to his formerly loyal followers, and what favours offered to plead for more time at the top are being rebuffed by those scenting the smell of death in the Labour Party?

Alec Trench Lives!

Meanwhile, though not wishing to steal Quaequam Blog’s thunder, I’ve been reading 2000AD long enough to remember hackneyed author Alec Trench, and I’m delighted to have found a tribute to him (thanks to Dave Bishop’s blog article Beware the Pagan Acid-Spitting Plesiosaur). Alec Trench’s Thrill Pitcher randomly generates ‘pitches’ for new graphic epics, made from cut-up old 2000AD characters; so, for example, your strip might have anti-heroes where

“He’s an umbrella-wielding curvacious telepath with New Wave hair. His ex-lover is a pagan axe-wielding bounty hunter on his death bed. They must save London from an invasion by thinly-disguised Soviet stereotypes!”

It’s inspired by They Fight Crime! which uses the same sort of random snippets to create a thrillingly quirky crime-fighting series (well, it would) in which, for example,

“He’s a bookish pirate waffle chef on a mission from God. She’s a chain-smoking insomniac mermaid with a birthmark shaped like Liberty’s torch. They fight crime!”

Reminds me of Richard and my pitch for a crime series, Russell and Russell, in which a dry-witted and penetratingly intelligent history professor solves crimes by recognising that the offence was committed in exactly the same way in 1647, assisted by his lovely, excitable Welsh super-TV-writing sidekick… Richard may frown that I’ve blown that story.

With the V For Vendetta DVD in the shops and its grumpy author taking his name off the credits, as usual, Mr Bishop has also publicised a way of removing Alan Moore from his own graphic novels. Marvel at his famous creation Watchmen, as scripted by, er, Marvel maestro of mayhem Stan Lee…

It’s still not as funny, though, as the lovely Rob Fenwick pointing out that Newsnight’s Daniel Pearl is a fibber. Apparently I wasn’t alone in not getting a reply from the soon-to-be-ex-editor.

Out With the New

And, at last, as Mr Blair gets ready to deliver his most barking speech yet – well, all right, the competition’s fierce, but it has to make the shortlist – backed up by Social Nationalisation Minister Hilary Armstrong, Tony Benn’s trundled out to agree with Lib Dem bloggers that it’s scarily authoritarian. Shame they can’t find a current Labour politician who’s willing to criticise the policy instead of just gossiping about the personalities, isn’t it? As you say goodbye to the Summer, sit back and watch a brilliant anti-New Labour song that lemony Rob Morris has found on YouTube. I’ve got the single somewhere…

Labels: Comics, Conrad Russell, Ian Richardson, Labour, Michael Jayston, Spies

When I was a boy, this time of year meant two things – going back to school, and the return of Doctor Who to our screens to sweeten the pill. A bit of me can’t help but still expect the same, so I’ve been watching Horror of Fang Rock, a Doctor Who story that originally started broadcasting on September 3rd, 1977. It does exactly what the title suggests: a storm-tossed island; a spooky, solitary lighthouse; shipwrecked socialites suddenly stuck in And Then There Were None; Tom Baker versus a googly monster. It’s also the series’ story most about social class.

It’s not just schoolboy memories that make Autumn a good time for Doctor Who. The new series is a huge hit in the BBC’s Spring / early Summer schedules, bringing in a solid eight million viewers to a slot and season where they’d been struggling to get three; of course they won’t change it. But for a show where much of its purpose is scaring children, it feels right to be shown as the nights are growing darker. It’s simply the perfect time for Doctor Who. Horror of Fang Rock is particularly appropriate for this feeling, set all on one dark and stormy night and almost in real time, but also perhaps the most ‘end of the summer holidays’ of any Who story. What could be more ‘British Summer’ than a trip to the seaside (or at least off the South Coast) when the weather’s horrible; cold, wind, fog…? I also have strong personal seaside associations with the story, from missing the first episode because we were out at the Doctor Who Exhibition and Blackpool Illuminations to buying the book the following Summer in St Ives. Ah, sun-kissed family holidays; next time I visit my Mum and Dad, I must look up the snapshot that most vividly recalls them, of my brother and I standing on Land’s End in the driving rain and bitter wind, in kagouls, holding ice lollies in our numb fingers because it was Summer, damn it, and we were going to ‘enjoy ourselves’ on pain of frostbite.

“Last time that Beast were seen on Fang Rock – eighty year ago, now – two men died that very night…”

Horror of Fang Rock isn’t an inspired but a craftsmanlike, ‘textbook’ tale; if you wanted to show someone how to do Doctor Who, this could be a teaching example, with a claustrophobic feel of ghosts and murders, a monster, a sense of history, characters sketched distinctly within just a couple of lines, and an extraordinary economy of both plot and the cash required. On top of scaring the kiddies, it has a moral, too: ‘being greedy gets you killed, and you deserve it!’ Made five years later, it would have looked like a critique of Thatcherism and yuppies, even featuring a greedy, amoral Tory MP, and that’s not the script’s only target. It was written in a great hurry to replace a vampire story nobbled by BBC executives as they prepared to show a ‘prestige’ Dracula adaptation that they didn’t want this upstaging, so it’s difficult not to see the names ‘Fang’ and ‘Harker’ (a character seen hammering in stakes) as two fingers up from the author for being nobbled, plus walking dead and parasitic aristocrats. It’s solidly entertaining, with the monster the only aspect reputed not to be very good; well, I thought it looked great climbing up the lighthouse and drew it incessantly when I was five or six. David Tennant’s said to like the story, and this year’s Victorian werewolf tale Tooth and Claw owes an awful lot to it (though you’d have thought if it was being done again today, rather than period horror it could be a murderously interactive version of Big Brother: lots of votes to get Adelaide slapped again, or ‘Skinsale wins the diamonds, but he’s out of the tower…’).

The DVD

Before I look at the story in more depth and to provide a gap in case you don’t want it spoiled for you, it’s out on DVD, too, and as usual with Doctor Who the picture’s been cleaned up a treat and there are some entertaining extras. The commentary’s a mix of bitchy (from grumpy author Terrance Dicks and companion Louise Jameson, describing Tom Baker with terms like “difficult” and “for all his faults”) and enthusiastic (one of the guest actors, who says “I didn’t know any of that. I was just having a good time”). There’s a good anecdote about Louise throwing her knife as skin-clad companion Leela, though it’s a shame Terrance says how much he liked the book cover, showing the Doctor in front of the lighthouse, wearing a bowler hat and with a coil of rope over his shoulder; it’s a striking piece of art, but does rather remind you that the DVD cover is an inferior copy, simply with bowler removed and a ‘meteor’ added.

The two main extras are personal documentaries, with 14 minutes on Paddy Russell – A Life in Television. One of the first two women directors at the BBC, she gives an impressively acid-tongued interview, though it’s less “A life” and more ‘The bits of Quatermass and Doctor Who she worked on and that we think people buying this will be interested in seeing’. More satisfying is the 35-minute Terrance Dicks – Fact and Fiction on the story’s author, a former script editor and prolific novelist for Doctor Who. It gives a good overview of his work, mostly with a selection of other authors, of books as well as both old and new Who, and at the bar with producer Barry Letts, alongside whom he was the main creative force behind the Jon Pertwee stories. It’s very engaging, with lots on the Third Doctor (there’s a great anecdote about Barry, unfamiliar with budgeting, allowing a director to film a lorry hijack with motorbikes and a helicopter), his BBC classic serials like Oliver Twist, and his hundreds of books, Doctor Who and otherwise (the Who novelisations of which Terrance was the prime writer sold over eight million). One of the best contributions is from New Adventures and now new series author, the lovely Paul Cornell, who talks about Terrance’s command of structure (“like maths, or music by Bach”) and how he built the foundations of modern Who. Paul’s almost certainly the subject of Terrance’s anecdote about a writer on the new series being put through eight or nine rewrites, an approach he very much dislikes – though he does appear to have enjoyed multiple rewrites on another of his stories, The Five Doctors (the first story released on DVD and with no extras, so there’s quite a bit about it here), seeing it as a “jigsaw puzzle” and bitching about Cybermen. He describes himself at the end as “Professional,” which sums up this terribly dependable author; he really wasn’t, as Louis Marks calls him, “the genius of Doctor Who,” but Paul’s “structure” comment isn’t to be sniffed at for a great nuts and bolts man who could tell a story the way few others could. Oh, and it ends with an amusing montage of the same recurring line…

The Story (Spoilers)

It opens with a portent of doom, and, blimey, there aren’t many Who stories with more doom to go around. When Leela spies out a rock pool, you realise that not even the fish can survive in this adventure. All the characters are well-drawn to fit very precise dramatic functions, with the Doctor moody and powerful for almost the last time before the actor turns it into The Tom Baker Show, and Leela getting pretty much her last decent script. A terribly underused companion, she’s an intelligent and adaptable member of a tribe that’s degenerated from a lost colony; she starts out learning from the Doctor in an Eliza Doolittle way, but then a new producer takes over and she becomes ‘a stupid savage who wears as few clothes as possible, whatever the weather’. This is the turning point, as she’s starting to get a bit dim, but is still allowed a frock and then a sailor’s jumper for the weather (Tom’s Doctor, too, gets a bit of a change of clothes to fit in with the location for the last time). Still, she gets to celebrate the death of an enemy in a startling way, and when the insufferably wet “secretary” finally gets too much, Leela famously slaps her, a moment nominated by one William Berridge for use in the adverts UK Gold used to run of a short comedy moment repeated to the slogan “TV you want to see again and again”. On the downside, faced with superstition, she announces that “It is better to believe in science”; instead of learning to think and understand, she’s simply got a new dogma.

An Edwardian Adventure

It all starts off with three lighthouse-keepers, innocent young Vince, superstitious old Reuben and practical, enthusiastic Ben, who’s obviously the first to die (making way for replacement men with moustaches in Part Two). They set the standard for characters here by talking in lines that are jolly well-crafted but pure exposition, arguing about the merits of oil versus electricity, or mentioning King Edward. That helps date it securely between 1901 and 1905, as Skinsale, who turns up later, is plainly a Tory MP (not just his greed but his army background and implied aristocracy suggest it, and his name-dropping of Bonar Law and Salisbury makes it certain) with a minor position in the government before the Liberals booted them out, as he’s responsible for some form of government contract or treaty in order to leak it. With several of the Doctors known for wearing “Edwardian” frock coats, naturally in this, the series’ only televised “Edwardian adventure,” no-one’s wearing one. Still more ironically for anyone who’s ever seen my hopeless dress sense, I’m credited in Lance Parkin’s mind-bogglingly authoritative reference book of Doctor Who timing aHistory for identifying not the politics, but the fashions. Still, if you read people saying it’s “1910” (as material at the time of production put it) or “1900” (to tie in with the mystery of Flannan Isle and Wilfrid Gibson’s poem about it, misspelled in the novel), they’re wrong, OK?

Anyway, Vince is rather endearing, embarrassed when Leela changes her clothes in front of him and deeply distressed at Ben’s death. He really makes a single death mean something, so it’s unfortunate that there’s about to be a glut of them – and he ends up being the only one I’m sad for when he’s killed, too. Along the way, though he calls the Doctor “Sir,” the Doctor calls him “Mr Hawkins”; one of the class-based elements of the story is that everyone else addresses him as in inferior (as the ‘honest working man’, the script seems strongly on his side against the rapacious upper classes). That even extends to old Reuben, who starts off aggressive and curmudgeonly. There’s a great gag when the older keeper’s initially suspicious of our heroes as possible foreign spies and the Doctor mutters “Incontrovertible.” “And don’t start talking your own lingo to each other,” Reuben snaps, “I won’t have that!” It’s a part with other levels, though, as not only does he have a pile of racy postcards in his room for the Doctor to find, but he spends half the story not being quite himself. Reuben’s convinced that local legend the Beast of Fang Rock has returned, but the “meteor” the story opened with wasn’t an omen but a spacecraft carrying a Rutan, a gelatinous alien sea creature a little like a giant green poached egg that can take on the form of those it’s slain – in this case, Reuben. That sets up a clever line you might not get on first watching, as “the old keeper” shambles past and Skinsale observes, “Looked a bit done in, I thought.” ‘Reuben’ looks terribly evil as the Rutan, and while the climax of Part Two (actually his death scream) seems underwhelming at the time, its pay-off is in the terrific third cliffhanger, as the Doctor finds the real Reuben’s body, dead for hours, and Tom chillingly underplays his realisation that ‘Reuben’ is the alien wearing his shape:

“Leela, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I thought I’d locked the enemy out; instead, I’ve locked it in. With us.”

Sex, Money and Politics

The cliffhanger at the end of Part One isn’t all that exciting, featuring an unconvincing shipwreck, but it does bring in the rest of the cast, complaining all the way. A society boat has foundered, and all the ‘fancy people’ have motivations of social survival which are entirely plausible but work against their physical survival. While Lord Palmerdale and his friend Colonel Skinsale MP are doomed by their greed, Palmerdale’s secretary Adelaide has no title and is consequently hypersensitive to her social status. Vince rushes to look after her, and though she’s momentarily grateful, she then pushes him away with a “Thank you, Hawkins,” asserting her position at a moment of vulnerability. She spends the whole story ‘protesting too much’; if her parents were of Vince’s station, no wonder she distances herself. She also spends most of the story as a braying snob complaining so loudly that almost everyone gets fed up with her, Palmerdale included, but her relationship with him is one of the few elements of the story that’s not entirely obvious. None of the actors play it this way (she even leaps into Skinsale’s arms at one terrified point, rather than her employer’s), but the script keeps suggesting Adelaide is Palmerdale’s mistress; she’s his Lordship’s “fancy woman” to the coxswain, she’s used to him getting things for her, and when she loyally calls him kind and generous Skinsale sniffs “Oh, to you, no doubt.” She also puts Leela down in a vaguely racist way for looking a bit sexual, again suggesting that with her taste for the ill-informed vituperative defence she was born too early, and would be an instantly recognisable figure from Internet message boards. On the other hand, there’s a moment where Palmerdale’s chatting Vince up with an offer to give him fifty pounds to relieve his “lonely life” that makes you wonder if perhaps she is just his secretary after all…

UPDATE – EXCLUSIVE! For any of you who wonder whether the script really did write Adelaide as Lord Palmerdale’s mistress, despite none of the actors playing it that way, I met Terrance Dicks in March 2008 and asked him. He replied:

“Oh, yes – I think she is his mistress. But they’re all keeping up their Victorian façade, you see.”

Palmerdale and Skinsale are the easiest characters to get the measure of, though I’m always amazed when people like the Colonel. They get some of the most exposition-dense while still being listenable introductory dialogue ever heard to get you up to speed on them, with Palmerdale’s boorish but strangely informative “Oh, not one of your army stories, Jimmy – they’re even more boring than your House of Commons anecdotes!” a classic of its kind. Lord ‘compensation culture’ Palmerdale who’s just raced his ship onto the rocks enters trying to make it all the fault of the lighthouse staff (quite funny, and very modern), but he’s mainly there to be an avaricious financier who’s just bought his peerage – how very unlike Prime Ministers today – and show the nasty, naked face of greed against Skinsale’s posher, smoother charmer who’s actually just as greedy, but not as good at it. When his Lordship exclaims to Vince, “Look, I’m a businessman. How could there be anything wrong?” you can almost hear the author and script editor cackling at the side of the set. He’s bribing the young lighthouse-keeper to send a message to his broker, based on urgent government insider trading that he’s been given by Skinsale to pay off the latter’s IOUs.

Palmerdale is often called “greedy” and Skinsale an “affable old soldier” (About Time 4), but the Colonel’s an even more selfish git, just with better presentation. When he sabotages the telegraph to stop Palmerdale calling the mainland, he’s selfishly endangering everyone to protect not his honour (he’s sold that) but his reputation, after gambling – for money – funded by insider trading and possibly treason, depending on which particular secrets he sold. He just assumes he should get away with it. He’s a worse snob than Adelaide, because with him it’s the casual arrogance of the aristocracy rather than loud affectation, and he is at the very least criminal, arrogant and greedy – he surely wasn’t about to give the proceeds of his gambling to charity. Given all his IOUs and that he dies on one last throw of the dice for diamonds, he’s not even any good at gambling (Richard observes that he gets done in because the love of money is the Rutan of all evil), but that’s not exactly a saving grace. When Palmerdale gets waspish and sneers at his friend’s taste for high living, Skinsale cheerfully recalls giving him privileged information to pay off his debts and shows great amusement at escaping the consequences of his criminal betrayal, warning the ‘cheated’ other off exposing him, while he fixes his bow tie.

“I’m an officer and a gentleman, Henry. You’re a nobody, a jumped-up little money-grubber for all your title. Besmirch my good name, and I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got.”

Like most of Skinsale’s noble bearing, even that’s a bluff; MPs couldn’t sue anyone from 1688 (presumably the corollary of being able to say anything in Parliament with impunity was that anyone could say what they liked about you) until the Bill of Rights was amended in the 1990s for another corrupt Tory, and look what happened to him.

Just This Once, Everybody Dies!

You’ll have gathered that this is an unusual Doctor Who story, in that everyone bar the Doctor and his companion die. With such well-crafted and economic writing, the ‘socialite’ subplots woven tightly into making the main plot more effective, it’s unusually difficult to find a plot hole, but one does come along when the Rutan gets a perfect chance to kill the Doctor and, obviously, doesn’t. Encountering the Doctor on the stairs near the end, instead of instantly tentacling him to death as it had with everyone else, the plot just stops while they chat for five minutes for no apparent reason. Given time, the Doctor rigs up things to shoot it with, which then raises the question, why doesn’t it go up the side of the lighthouse and round the back of them at the end, rather than again face a weapon that’s already wounded it? And, for that matter, as almost everyone’s already dead by the time the Doctor fights back, why is it that he wanted them in the lamp room as “easiest to defend”? It’s also the hardest to escape from, with potential attacks from both stairs and gallery. Why not barricade the crew room and fix the wireless, or, better yet, get them to the TARDIS? I’m also never that impressed by the Doctor’s “Leela – that’s a beautiful notion,” about what just boils down to ‘blowing things up’, which turns out to be the solution in every story this particular season (that, and name-dropping the Time Lords). With the Rutans the old enemies of already-established Doctor Who monsters the Sontarans, supplying a handy sweep of existing backstory for them, this story (in outline if not style) also bears a remarkable resemblance to The Sontaran Experiment, featuring survivors of a crashed ship stranded on a bleak rock, horrible experiments as the sole alien examines humanity for weak spots, a traitor on the inside… Though, in fairness, the Doctor driving off the alien battle fleet after killing the lone scout at the end is carried off with a good deal more oomph than the earlier story’s muted brinksmanship.

Horror of Fang Rock comes straight after The Talons of Weng-Chiang, an effusive extravaganza of entertainment Victoriana, and is far less rich and multi-layered. No, it isn’t as outstanding as that story, but it succeeds by taking a very different approach, not epic but minimalist, scary and effective (to take a leaf out of Tat Wood’s About Time comparisons of Who with pop, it’s as sly and stylish a riposte as Let Me Roll It is to How Can You Sleep). It takes a bunch of colourful people, sticks them in a very dour, enclosed space from which there is no escape, and kills them. People came back from the holidays in 1977 to find this opening a new season of Doctor Who by playing shamelessly to the series’ strengths. A new producer had just taken over for what was to be the least assured season with Tom Baker’s Doctor (with the new boss’s real gift in lightness of touch, this tale is oddly like the ‘horrific’ previous season but with far fewer jokes), and while after this they decided to attempt a space epic every week on tuppence ha’penny, this probably quite cheap story has the best ‘look’ of the season. It shows you don’t need much expense or even, it appears, that much inspiration to pull off solidly professional Doctor Who; while I wouldn’t pick it out as a particular favourite, it’s satisfying because they did a small-scale story and simply got it right.

Labels: Doctor Who, DVD, History, In-Depth Doctor Who, Reviews, Tom Baker

Tony Blair yesterday announced that he will clamp down on ‘problem children’ “pre-birth even.” With Mr Blair’s government having made over three thousand activities newly illegal since 1997, it was only a matter of time before officers were told to cut out the messy business of waiting for criminal activity to be committed and wait with a pair of dinky little cuffs after the midwife gives the newborn a slap. They won’t have to wait for teenagers to protest, ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse, sonny.’ Has Mr Blair finally gone quite mad?

In my teens I used to enjoy listening to my Dad’s Tom Lehrer LPs, albums of satirical songs like Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, We Will All Go Together When We Go and The Masochism Tango (of which more later). Mr Lehrer gave up writing his songs in the early 1970s, after Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for bombing Cambodia; he claimed his satire was unable to compete with real life. When Mr Blair makes this sort of comment, I think I know how Mr Lehrer felt.

In an interview reminiscent of the film Minority Report, in which people are locked up for crimes they haven’t yet committed but which the authorities – it turns out unreliably (gasp) – believe they will, Mr Blair told the BBC that parents who refuse to take “advice” about children who will grow up to be a “menace to society” will face sanctions. A new meaning of the word ‘advice,’ there, invented because

“there are children that are going to grow up in families that we know perfectly well are completely dysfunctional, and the kids a few years down the line are going to be a menace to society and actually a threat to themselves”

(my italics). I wish I had such a perfect and personalised knowledge of the future as Mr Blair. Perhaps it comes directly from God, as it’s certainly not come from any government department or intelligence service under him with a predictive or investigative role. Mr Blair’s blithely absolute faith in the ability of his government to predict every aspect of people’s lives and then direct them better than people can do themselves is gobsmacking. Even aside from the libertarian arguments, all the practical evidence is that the state has an abysmal record in running people’s lives, not least those of children and the most vulnerable in society, and that’s without even looking in particular at Mr Blair’s own disastrously but incompetently authoritarian record.

As Andy Mayer wrote recently, Mr Blair’s government has newly made over three thousand activities illegal since it came to power. The figure was officially 3,023 on the 18th of August, but it’s no doubt higher by now (perhaps someone should have a site with one of those pop-up counters). That’s nearly one a day, with two-thirds by unscrutinised ministerial order rather than Parliamentary debate, and exposed by Lib Dem Home Affairs Spokesperson Nick Clegg as

“a frenzied approach to law-making… an obsession with controlling the minutiae of everyday life. The result? A country less free than before, and a marked erosion of the trust which should exist between the Government and the governed.”

The process is accelerating, too, with the number of new offences rising from 160 in 1998 to 346 in 2000 and 527 in 2005. There is no way even to count the astounding number of new and random ‘crimes’ invented under the ASBO, for which the burden of proof has been set at ‘gossip’. To put it all in perspective, even the Daily Mail thinks the Government’s unthinking law factory is barking. Announcing that people are a “menace to society” before they’re born is a logical end to the process, but I thought it’d be a few more years before they turned into Judge Death.

Norman Lamb, Ming Campbell’s Chief of Staff, has said of the Prime Minister’s latest swivel-eyed control freakery that

“Empty threats to pregnant mothers will do little to restore confidence in a government that has failed to tackle poverty, crime and social exclusion for the last nine years.”

After reading the debate around the ban on possessing images of ‘violent pornography’ in the last few days on the Lib Dem blogosphere, it’s a relief to find myself on the same side as Lib Dem MPs.

There have been several thoughtful and eloquent postings on the subject of the proposed ban regarding ‘violent pornography’, few on the side of Lib Dem MP Sandra Gidley, who entirely understandably takes the well-meaning position that the first response to anything nasty should be to ban it, because surely no-one could really like nasty things and imposing nice things instead is really only for their own good. I don’t take that line, in part because I just don’t like banning things and in part because I don’t think it will do any good, but almost certainly will do great harm. In particular, I found myself nodding with Gavin Whenman’s response to Sandra, with Iain Sharpe’s typically principled and considered analysis, as on obesity earlier in the week, and with Femme de Resistance on the issue of consent. Surely the issue of informed consent is absolutely crucial to this debate, and it’s why child porn is always wrong but even ‘extremely unpleasant’ adult porn is altogether different.

I heard a pathetically cowardly interview with some Government muppet advocating a ban while denying all responsibility on The World At One on Wednesday. However many times he was pressed, he couldn’t say that he agreed with a single argument behind the ban, instead constantly saying that Parliament had settled its view in 1959 – 1959! – and that they were acting on the results of consultation, in which most people had predictably said they didn’t like that sort of thing. Why not just say ‘the Daily Mail told me to do it, guv’ and have done with it? For goodness’ sake, take some responsibility when you’re making a decision about such a desperately difficult, tragic subject; surely responsibility is the crux of the issue.

These periodic moral panics about porn, film or television are a desperate need to find an excuse ‘out there’ for terrible acts, whether it’s smut, society or Satan, but it’s not smut, society or Satan that commit the crimes. Banning the possession of pornographic images defined – however it ends up being defined – as ‘violent’ is made to sound like it’s closing a ‘loophole’, but if someone is tortured or murdered, including if it should ever happen during the making of pornography, that’s very much against the law already. Will a new law against people looking at their computers stop such terrible tragedies? Unlike Mr Blair in his delusional world, I don’t know with certainty, but there’s no evidence that it will. Will it result in completely innocent and consenting people having their lives destroyed by being branded and imprisoned? It has before. As soon as I heard this, I thought of Operation Spanner and wondered why the government was going down the same road, the same expense, the same broken lives, the same cruel stupidity all over again.

The terrible crimes are already crimes; the consenting acts simply shouldn’t be. Mr Blair and every person in his government, who have all colluded with creating thousands of new crimes in an attempt to look tough but making no-one feel safer, should consider what they’re doing. Their actions, unlike many they have legislated against, are not victimless. When, as many of these ‘crimes’ do, they criminalise people for doing something to which all concerned have given their informed consent and which is no-one’s business but their own, the harm is not done by the ‘criminal’ but by Labour’s perverse, wicked and thoughtless laws.

Meanwhile, the ‘Naked Rambler’ is locked up again, at enormous expense and to no public good. Sigh.

Labels: British Politics, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Stupid Ideas

Listeners to the Today Programme, the BBC’s helpful device for waking up the nation by driving us to the point of apoplexy, will have heard an exchange this morning on the merits of homeopathy. I’ll say up front that I believe this branch of ‘medicine’ to be complete bollocks. There is no shred of evidence to back up the idea that you strengthen an effect by diluting it into undetectability; all tests point in exactly the opposite way. Despite this, a government agency is now allowing the makers of ‘homeopathic remedies’ to print that they are helpful with some ailments.

I’m sure that many people feel better with homeopathy. Belief is very powerful in helping your health, but it’s not the only factor to consider. I have no problem with homeopathic ‘practitioners’ saying any old rubbish if it makes people feel better, as long as they don’t tell their ‘patients’ not to take treatments that have been through the rigorous testing processes that homeopathy shies away from. Where it gets dangerous is when people are led to believe that actual cures or doctors who practise based on evidence should be ignored in favour of placebos, which leaves ill people getting more ill through a confidence trick.

But what about side effects, you ask? Indeed, the homeopathic salesman on Today claimed that the products he was peddling had no side effects, and this was the only claim of his that I believed. I’ve had prescription drugs that have had side effects. In some cases, I’d really rather have been spared them, but I always read the leaflets carefully, just in case, because I know that if something is powerful enough to do one thing to my body, it may well be powerful enough to do something else less welcome too. As Richard said, of course homeopathic ‘medicines’ have no side effects – that’s because they have no effects at all. If something is diluted down a million times until it can’t be detected, it’s complete, utter, bald-faced rubbish to claim that that makes it work at all, let alone that it’s magically more powerful. In fact, the proper doctor on the programme was exasperated enough to compare it to advertising witchcraft.

Let homeopathic ‘medicines’ be tested to the same standards that all other medicines are – if they work under strict experimentation, fine, let them advertise what they’re good for. But it’s permitting a lie to fool the public if these ‘medicines’ are allowed to make claims without proof in exactly the way that no other medicine can, or even any other advertising. Why should these superstitious nonsenses be given special treatment? And if they’re not superstitious nonsenses, why can’t they prove it? In addition, as Richard pointed out, if homeopathic ‘treatment’ is about treating the whole person and you can’t take the ‘remedy’ in isolation, what earthly good is it supposed to do you to buy the stuff over the counter without seeing a ‘practitioner’? Why do they need to make advertising claims if everything has to come as part of personal consultation? This whole business sounds, unsurprisingly, like the homeopathic industry are trying to have their cake and sell it. To put it pejoratively, what’s the good of snake oil without a snake oil salesman?

I think I have the solution. I’m perfectly happy for homeopathic ‘remedies’ to carry writing in which they boast of their effect. The text should just be strictly set at one-millionth the size of that on proper medicines. If the theory of homeopathy is true, that should make the advertising far more effective, and everyone will be happy.

Oh, and on their regular slot for Evidence-Free Platitude For the Day, a man was droning on about the new book on Charles Kennedy to the effect that biographies were more accurate than autobiographies, or, as he sneeringly referred to them, ‘memoirs’, and piously expressed the view that the Gospels were therefore reliable while, thankfully, “Jesus never wrote an autobiography” (and by implication all who do are creating the work of the Devil / making themselves out to be bigger than Jesus. Jesus never used a computer, either, so if you’re reading this, you’re already damned. And as for Jesus’ many radio broadcasts…). Richard seized on his stupidity in assuming that biography is by definition less partisan than autobiography, as if there’s no axe to grind in, for example, the book about Charles. My reaction came from the other end of the telescope, and drew on my religious upbringing. For Christians, this idiot failed to realise, Jesus is God, and the Bible is nothing less than the revealed word of God. Or, to put it in lay terms, it’s his autobiography.

Labels: Quackery, Religion, The Today Programme