After a pause of a few days, CJ has returned to writing down his thoughts on ghosts. These are an ongoing attempt by him to sort out his ideas on the matter. This is not an easy matter, as scholars – scientists, theologians, and philosophers, whether sceptics and believers, have been arguing about what ghosts are, if they exist, down the centuries. CJ in this series of blog posts follows the line of the founders of the Society for Psychic Research that ghosts are a kind of hallucination broadcast telepathically by a mind. It’s the same idea that provided the great 19th century writer L. Sheridan LeFanu with the basis for his short story ‘The House and the Brain’. In this latest post, CJ ponders the vexed question of ‘Phantasms of the Living’ as the SPR put it.
Along with investigating ghosts as the spirits of the dead, the SPR also investigated and compiled records of cases where the apparition was of a living person. These were full, so full, in fact, that Gurney, Podmore and Myer, three of the founders, published a book devoted to them, Phantasms of the Living. This comprised two volumes with a total of 1,400 pages. It is one of the books CJ recommends that serious researchers into ghosts should start before moving on to later works, such as Hilary Evans excellent Seeing Ghosts.
Looking through the surveys done over the past century of the appearance of ghosts and apparitions, it appears that there has been something of a change in the phenomenon. It may surprise the modern reader to known that in the census of hallucinations, of those that were recognised there were rather more of the living than of the departed: 32 per cent of the total number of recorded cases compared to 14.3 per cent. In 1948 Mass Observation carried out a survey for Donald West. Of the cases they recorded, only 9 per cent were of the dead while 40.5 per cent of the living. Both of these surveys also recorded cases were the apparition wasn’t recognised: 41 per cent in the census of hallucinations and 31.5 per cent in the Mass Observation’s survey. Mass Observation were a peculiar outfit. They were a group of anthropologists who lamented that ethnographically we knew more about other societies, the primal cultures over which the empire ruled, than we did ourselves and so set about the anthropological study of the British themselves. How they didn’t get arrested with some of their antics I honestly don’t know. This included studying how long it took men to urinate in lavatories to how long it took women to undress for the night. Most of their studies were much more ordinary and socially acceptable than those two examples, and I do wonder if the men making these studies ended up being beaten up or in court trying to explain to a judge that their suspicious activities weren’t voyeurism but serious science.
Back to the spooks. Over the next few years this situation was reversed. Of those ghosts the percipients recognised, the majority were of the dead. The postal survey carried out by the Institute of Paraphysical Research in 1968 and 1974found that of the 28 per cent of cases where the apparition was recognised, two-thirds were of the dead. Another postal survey carried out in 1974 by Erlendur Haraldsson found that only 11 per cent were phantasms of the living, and 31 per cent of the dead. He also cites the findings of ASSAP treasurer Becky Smith, whose survey found that 25 per cent of recognised apparitions were of the living. However, only 16 of the cases in her survey were of people recognised by the percipient. From the available information it appears that there was a change in the phenomenon between 1948 and 1968, but this may be illusory. We naturally don’t know how many of the apparitions in the unrecognised cases were of the living and dead. It’s possible that the real figures may be different, but this is impossible to know because the percipients didn’t recognise the people whose shades they saw.
One of the explanations the SPR put forward for the appearance of ghosts of the living was that they were crisis apparitions. These are broadcast telepathically by people undergoing an emergency or crisis, including their own deaths, to their loved ones. CJ notes that this feels like a natural explanation due to the fact that we are used to ghosts as distressed or seeking help. He could have added here that this type of apparition seems related to the doppelganger or fetch of traditional fairy lore. The term ‘doppelganger’ is German for ‘double goer’ or perhaps ‘double walker’. They were supernatural doubles of individuals, and it was considered an omen of that person’s death if one was seen. One of the explanations advanced in the 16th or 17th century for them was that the bodies of seriously ill or dying people exuded vapours, which coalesced into a replica of the original. After this person’s death, the fetch then went to join the fairies in their hills.
Becky’s suggested solution to this apparent change in the phenomenon is that the publicity surrounding the publication of Phantasms of the Living or the SPR’s hypothesis that ghosts were created telepathically made it more likely that people would report instances where the apparition was of someone still alive. The fact that Sheridan LeFanu uses the idea in his ghost story shows that it had permeated some way into popular ideas about spooks, at least among that section of the public that read ghost stories.
Another possibility CJ considers is that these are cases of mistaken identity. He cites an instance where he himself was struck by the astonishing similarity of a young woman drinking a milkshake in an ice cream parlour on Cheltenham High Street and that of a young female friends who had sadly passed away from lung cancer. It’s quite possible that some cases of doppelgangers and apparitions of the living are indeed due to mistaken identity. There is a limit to the number of different faces human biology can create, and so, in the words of the popular saying, ‘everyone has a double’. Well, possibly not everyone, but a few. There are cases of people who are physically identical but who are completely unrelated. I was once mistaken for someone who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture’s laboratory outside Bristol.
CJ ends his piece by wondering how many of us can visualise ourselves, and that it’s probably easier for someone to project an image of somebody else than of themselves. He therefore believes that if the ghost of a murdered girl is seen, it probably comes from the minds of other people, such as the murderer or the girl’s relatives and loved ones, rather than the girl herself. Could it come from folklorists thinking of the tale? And so could we build a ghost?
This takes us into the realm of the ‘Philip’ experiment, in which a group of psychical researchers constructed an entirely fictional entity, ‘Philip’, with whom they tried to make contact during seances. They succeeded, which seems to suggest that it’s possible for living experimenters to create entirely fictional communicating spirits, spirits that have never lived and which don’t exist outside of the imaginations of the researchers.
Related to this is an apparition that haunts the house of one of the American pulp writers. I’ve forgotten the details, but the pulp writer wrote a series of stories of a tough crime fighter. Visitors to his house since his decease have seen a dark, shadowy figure haunting it. One of the British Marvel magazines, in which this story appeared, posed the question of whether the writer’s intense concentration had resulted in the psychic creation of this apparition. I can’t remember who the writer was, but one of the writers on that magazine was Alan Moore, a titan of British and American comics as well as a ritual magician. This was about forty years ago, but it may be that whoever wrote the article based his supposition on the experiences of Moore and others.
Now, I respectfully differ from CJ in that I don’t think there is a single, one-size-fits-all solution to the question of what ghosts are. The telepathic hypothesis may explain some ghosts and apparitions, but not all. It certainly offers a solution to the old sceptical question that if ghosts are the souls of the dead, why don’t they appear naked? A few naked ghosts were reported in 17th century Quebec, but apart from that the vast majority of spooks appear clothed. I also agree with CJ in that we don’t really know offhand what we look like, although obviously we have no trouble recognising ourselves in mirrors. I dimly remember reading back in the ’90s in one of the papers that scientists had discovered that subconsciously people think of their appearance as it was when they were in their 20s. In the Welsh medieval classic, the Mabinogion, the inhabitants of Annwn, the land of the dead, all look like young people of 30 with the exception that their hair is white. And according to some Spiritualists, at least from what I’ve read, on the after death plane we age backwards, becoming young and vital once again. Despite this, most ghost reports seem to be of the person as they were in life and seem to show that age, no matter how young or old they were.
There have been a number of attempts to solve the problem of ghosts and their appearance. Terry Pratchett in Mort explained it with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. Mort is Pratchett’s third book following the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. In it, a young lad gets recruited by Death to take over the Grim Reaper’s job. One of the souls he collects is that of a witch. At the woman’s death, the morphogenetic fields maintaining her appearance collapse, and she goes from aged crone to beautiful young woman before finally become a floating light ready for her next incarnation. The idea that our post mortem appearance could be due morphogenetic fields is interesting, though somewhat different from the theory as it was propounded by Sheldrake. I doubt Pratchett was serious about it though. My impression is that he was a Humanist, although when he was suffering from the Alzheimer’s that took him from us, he said that he could feel the presence of his father reassuring him that everything was all right. He was serious about his own writing, and clearly loved Fantasy literature, but he was also much less than respectful towards it. He couldn’t tell whether he was writing it or satirising it. At a talk he gave at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature back in the ’90s he described himself as ‘a giant hairy maggot crawling over its [Fantasy’s] corpse’. He certainly didn’t seem to believe in magic, which he found far less interesting that science, which had produced wonderful things like street lights. And it all came from the brains of monkeys, as he said in a Beeb programme on him. It seems to me that when he cited morphogenetic fields, it was as a literary device rather than a serious proposition.
Another suggested solution, proposed by the German physicist Gerd Wassermann, was an alternative form of matter, shadow matter. This could explain the ghost phenomenon, though as it stands it’s purely theoretical and so the Magonians concluded that it was another case of trying to explain one unknown with another. Nevertheless, this week there was an article in one of the journals suggesting that along with the objects of the normal matter in the universe there was an invisible, dark matter mirror universe. If ghosts are composed of exotic matter, could this dark matter universe somehow be their origin and domain. If so, what would be the physics in which this normally invisible substance becomes visible during a haunting?
I’ve also wondered before now our consciousness, our sense of self, also includes our appearance and our clothes. We do have a sense of our own bodies. For example, if we lift an arm up, we’re aware that we have done so, and although we may not always consciously be aware of it, I wonder if at some level we’re also aware of our clothes. It could be that it is this awareness of our bodies and our clothing that results in ghosts being visible and clothed in hauntings.
Another idea is that ghosts may be the product of Platonic Ideal Forms. Plato believed that apart from raw matter objects were shaped by transcendent ideal forms, somewhat like the idea a sculptor has when carving stone. Apart from the general ideal forms, there are transcendent forms of individuals as they are at any given time. Their matter may decease and decay, but their ideal form continues and is intelligible and perceptible to those with psychic gifts.
Returning to CJ’s suggestion that ghosts may be impressions of a person’s appearance as seen by another, it may be able to test this. If this is true, must an observer be in the same position as the person, whose observation generated the spook, in order to see it? Would a person in a different position not see the ghost at all, or would they see the ghost from the same perspective as the first person? For example, suppose a ghost appears in a room directly facing the entrance door. Would someone also have to be in this position to see it? Suppose there was a second person occupying a position sideways to the ghost. Would they also see the ghost facing them straight on, as the person who made the original observation saw it, and which the observer at the entrance door sees it? Or would it see it sideways, or not at all. If they see it sideways, then either there was another person there, whose telepathic impressions are still generating the ghost, or the ghost isn’t a telepathic impression from an observer.
This experiment reminds me of my experience viewing an exhibition of holograms at the Ideal Home Exhibition in Bristol in the summer of 1980. Holograms in this sense were three dimensional photographs made by lasers on glass. It was a strange experience, as when you moved from one to another the image would suddenly materialise in front of you out of, it seemed, thin air. Would something like that occur to the observer of a ghost that had been created as an image by another observer, long since departed? As he or she adopted the position of the original observer, would the ghost suddenly materialise just as the holograms did when someone moved in front of them?
CJ is raising some serious and definitely thought-provoking ideas in his series of blog posts, ideas which deserve serious consideration.
I came across this video from the Tolkien Road podcast channel on YouTube yesterday, and am putting it up because it’s a very succinct and powerful response to the claims occasionally made that Tolkien must have been anti-Semitic and a Nazi. Because the creator of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings based Middle Earth on Germanic and Celtic legend. The National Front tried this nonsense in the 1980s. One of their grotty little magazines carried an article ‘Tolkien: Ringbearer of Racial Nationalism’. The Absurder picked this up, and published an article very effectively showing that such claims were rubbish. Tolkien was very much a Conservative and something of a reactionary. He famously said that touching your forelock to the squire didn’t do him a lot of good, but was very good for you.’ On the other hand, his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, speaking at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature a decade or so ago, said he was probably a Tory anarchist like Auberon Waugh and, had he lived, probably wouldn’t have vote for Maggie Thatcher.
The presenter describes how Tolkien was approached by a German publishing house for permission to publish the Hobbit in 1938. But they wanted to know if he had any Jewish heritage. Tolkien wrote back to tell them that, unfortunately, he had no ancestors from ‘that gifted race’. The presenter says that this was very courageous, as people knew that war with Nazi Germany was coming and that by sending this reply Tolkien was marking himself out as an enemy of the regime.
When Czechoslovakia was invaded and annexed, Tolkien publicly commented on the misery and vileness of the Nazi regime. And during the War, in a letter to his son, Michael, he described how he hated that ‘ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler’, who had ruined and perverted northern European lore and culture that had contributed so much to civilisation.
As something of a fan of Tolkien myself – I really enjoyed the Hobbit when we read it at junior school, as well as the films of it and the Lord of the Rings – I am very glad to put up this refutation of these claims and the attempts by the squalid characters of the Nazi right to appropriate one of Fantasy’s greatest writers for themselves.
More from our favourite internet non-historian. History Debunked put up a piece today criticising the Haye-on-Wye literary festival for heading downmarket in the name of diversity. They’ve had a change of director, and according to him, the festival has been judged to be ‘too White’. And so make it more inclusive, they have included the Black rapper Stormzy and Dua Lipa, another pop star, who’s of Albanian heritage. He argues that there are plenty of Black and ethnic minority writers, like Vikram Seth, who he says is miles better than other, White writers, but they tend to be quiet, thoughtful types and so not calculated to appeal to the new demographic the Festival hopes to reach out to. This is an ominous sign, according to Webb, because the inclusion of those two has started a trend in which literature will be second place.
Okay, so I did what Gillyflower has advised me to do, and decided to check what was actually going on at Haye-on-Wye. I took a glance at this year’s programme. There seems to be a number of the thoughtful, serious ethnic writers Webb talks about, including a Black author talking about his decades of writing on the topic of race. I didn’t find the event with Stormzy, but I did find the one with Dua Lipa. She’s there talking about her life and career, but the programme also says she champions books and reading on her Service 95 podcast. This puts a slightly different complexion on it than Webb’s discussion. She’s there not just because she’s a pop star, but because she’s also a literary woman as well. If there’s an issue there, it’s the same one as when Mariella Frostrup started presenting a literary review programme on the Beeb. Is the presenter too lightweight? Well, if it takes a popular media celebrity to get people to stick their noses into books, I don’t care. And it doesn’t mean that the people who go to see her won’t also go and see some of the other, more high-brow speakers. I can remember hearing Terry Pratchett talk at the Cheltenham Literary Festival years ago about how the directors of that festival looked on him with disdain as if he were going to talk about fixing motorcycles when he began speaking there. When the Discworld books came out there was massive sneering at them from the literary establishment, including the panel on the late Newsnight Review when Tom Paulin showed his real literary prejudice against genre fantasy. But this was just literary snobbery and Pratchett became, at least in my biased estimation, one of their most popular speakers. British culture didn’t fall because he spoke, and it hasn’t prevented me nor anybody else going to see some of the other, rather more serious speakers. I don’t think the inclusion of Dua Lipa will do the same to British literary culture either.
And if we’re on the subject of popular music, I notice they have a Jazz band playing. I know that Jazz now occupies the same highbrow cultural niche as classical music, with radio programmes about it like Late Junction and Freeness appearing on Radio 3. Duke Ellington was also their composer of the week a couple of decades ago. But Jazz is popular music with its own clubs, if now massively overshadowed by pop, rock and the other genres. But I can’t imagine anyone complaining that the Festival would be turned overwhelmingly towards Jazz instead of literature because of the band’s inclusion.
If there is a problem with the Haye-on-Wye Festival, it may well be the same one Private Eye’s literary column identified years ago with the Cheltenham literary festival. The complaint then was that a large proportion of the speakers were celebrities, such as TV personalities, who had written a book but did not make their main living from literature. People like, I presume, the actor David Walliams, who has written a string of children’s books. I haven’t heard that criticism repeated, so I assume that despite the influx of media celebs, British literary culture has still held firm. I don’t doubt that the Haye-on-Wye Festival will still uphold literary standards with the appearance of Stormzy and Dua Lipa. The Cheltenham Festival has held poetry slams which have included rap as well as British Afro-Caribbean poetry, and it’s still going on.
This week is the Cheltenham festival of literature. It’s an annual event when novelists, poets, illustrators and increasingly TV and radio personalities descend on the town to talk about and try to sell the books they’ve had published. There can be, and often are, some great speakers discussing their work. I used to go to it regularly in the past, but went off it after a few years. Some of the people turn up, year in, year out, and there are only so many times you can see them without getting tired of it.
Dawkins, Atheism and Philosophical Positivism
One of the regular speakers at the Festival is the zoologist, science writer and atheist polemicist, Richard Dawkins. The author of Climbing Mount Improbable, The River Out Of Eden, The Blind Watchmaker and so on is appearing in Cheltenham to promote his latest book, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide. It sounds like a kind of successor to his earlier anti-religious work, The God Delusion. According to the accompanying pamphlet for the festival, he’s going to be talking to an interviewer about why we should all stop believing in God. There’s no doubt Dawkins deserves his platform at the Festival as much as any other writer. He’s a popular media personality, and writes well. However, his knowledge of philosophy, theology and the history of science, which forms the basis for his attacks on Christianity, is extremely low, and defenders of religion, and even other scientists and historians, who are just interested in defending their particular disciplines from factual mistakes and misinterpretations, have shot great holes in them.
Dawkins is, simply put, a kind of naive Positivist. Positivism was the 19th century philosophy, founded by Auguste Comte, that society moved through a series of three stages in its development. The first stage was the theological, when the dominant ideology was religion. Then came the philosophical stage, before the process ended with science. Religion was a thing of the past, and science would take over its role of explaining the universe and guiding human thought and society. Comte dreamed of the emergence of a ‘religion of humanity’, with its own priesthood and rituals, which would use sociology to lead humanity. Dawkins doesn’t quite go that far, but he does believe that religion and science – and specifically Darwinism – are in conflict, and that the former should give way to the latter. And he’s not alone. I heard that a few years ago, Alice Robert, the forensic archaeologist and science presenter, gave a speech on the same subject at the Cheltenham Festival of Science when she was its guest director, or curator, or whatever they term it. A friend of mine was less than impressed with her talk and the lack of understanding she had of religion. He tweeted ‘This is a girl who thinks she is intelligent.’
War of Science and Religion a Myth
No, or very few historians of science, actually believe that there’s a war between the two. There have been periods of tension, but the idea of a war comes from three 19th century writers. And it’s based on and cites a number of myths. One of these is the idea that the Church was uniformly hostile to science, and prevented any kind of scientific research and development until the Renaissance and the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek texts. It’s a myth I learnt at school, and it’s still told as fact in many popular textbooks. But other historians have pointed out that the Middle Ages was also a period of scientific investigation and development, particularly following the influence of medieval Islamic science and the ancient Greek and Roman texts they had preserved, translated, commented on and improved. Whole books have been written about medieval science, such as Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine, and James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers. Hannam is a physicist, who did a doctorate in examining the development of medieval science, showing that, far from retarding or suppressing it, medieval churchmen were intensely interested in it and were active in its research. Medieval science was based very much on Aristotle, but they were well aware of some of the flaws in his natural philosophy, and attempted to modify it in order to make it conform to observed reality. The Humanists of the Renaissance, rather than bringing in freedom of thought and scientific innovation, were actually a threat. They wanted to strip philosophy and literature of its medieval modifications to make it correspond exactly with the ancients’ original views. Which would have meant actually destroying the considerable advances which had been made. Rather than believe that renaissance science was a complete replacement of medieval science, scholars like Hannam show that it was solidly based on the work of their medieval predecessors.
Christian Theology and the Scientific Revolution
The scientific revolution of the 17th century in England also has roots in Christian philosophy and theology. Historians now argue that the Royal Society was the work of Anglican Broadchurchmen, who believed that God had created a rational universe amenable to human reason, and who sought to end the conflict between the different Christian sects through uniting them in the common investigation of God’s creation. See, for example, R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press 1972).
Christian Monotheism and the Unity of Physical Law
It is also Christian monotheist theology that provides one of the fundamental assumptions behind science. Modern science is founded on the belief that the laws of nature amount to a single, non-contradictory whole. That’s the idea behind the ‘theory of everything’, or Grand Unified Theory everyone was talking about back in the 1990s. But this idea goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Aquinas said that we must believe that the laws of nature are one, because God is one. It’s the assumption, founded on Christian theology, the makes science possible.
Atheist Reductionism also a Danger
When The God Delusion Came Out, it was met by a series of books attacking its errors, some of them with titles like The Dawkins Delusion. The philosopher Mary Midgley has also attacked the idea that science can act as a replacement for religion in her books Evolution as a Religion and The Myths We Live By. On page 58 of the latter she attacks the immense damage to humanity atheist reductionism also poses. She writes
Both reductive materialism and reductive idealism have converged to suggest that reductivism is primarily a moral campaign against Christianity. This is a dangerous mistake. Obsession with the churches has distracted attention from reduction employed against notions of human individuality, which is now a much more serious threat. It has also made moral problems look far simplar than they actually are. Indeed, some hopeful humanist reducers still tend to imply that, once Christian structures are cleared away, life in general will be quite all right and philosophy will present no further problems.
In their own times, these anti-clerical reductive campaigns have often been useful. But circumstances change. New menaces, worse than the one that obsesses us, are always appearing, so that what looked like a universal cure for vice and folly becomes simply irrelevant. In politics, twentieth-century atheistical states are not an encouraging omen for the simple secularistic approach to reform. it turns out that the evils that have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of.
Darwin Uninterested in Atheist Campaigning
Later in the book she describes how the Marxist Edward Aveling was disappointed when he tried to get Darwin to join him in a campaign to get the atheist, Bradlaugh, to take his seat as a duly elected MP. At the time, atheists were barred from public office by law. Aveling was impressed by Darwin’s work on evolution, which he believed supported atheism. Darwin was an agnostic, and later in life lost belief in God completely due to the trauma of losing a daughter and the problem of suffering in nature. But Darwin simply wasn’t interested in joining Aveling’s campaign. When Aveling asked him what he was now studying, hoping to hear about another earth-shaking discovery that would disprove religion, Darwin simply replied ‘Earthworms’. The great biologist was fascinated by them. It surprised and shocked Aveling, who hadn’t grasped that Darwin was simply interested in studying creatures for their own sake.
Evolutionists on Evolution Not Necessarily Supporting Atheism
Other evolutionary biologists also concluded that evolution has nothing to say about God, one way or another. Stephen Jay Gould stated that he believed that Darwinism only hinted at atheism, not that it proved it. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who published his own theory of evolution in Zoonomia in 1801, believed on the other hand that the development of creatures from more primitive forebears made the existence of God ‘mathematically certain’.
Frank H.T. Rhodes of the University of Michigan wrote in his book Evolution (New York: Golden Press 1974) on its implications the following, denying that it had any for religion, politics or economics.
Evolution, like any other natural process or scientific theory, is theologically neutral. it describes mechanisms, but not meaning. it is based upon the recognition of order but incorporates no conclusion concerning the origin of that order as either purposeful or purposeless.
Although evolution involves the interpretation of natural events by natural processes, it neither assumes nor provides particular conclusions concerning the ultimate sources or the significance of materials, events or processes.
Evolution provides no obvious conclusions concerning political or economic systems. Evolution no more supports evolutionary politics (whatever they might be) than does the Second Law of Thermodynamics support political disorder or economic chaos.Â
(Page 152).
Conclusion
I realise that the book’s nearly 50 years old, and that since that time some scientists have worked extremely hard to show the opposite – that evolution support atheism. But I’ve no doubt other scientists, people most of us have never heard of, believe the opposite. Way back in 1909 or so there was a poll of scientists to show their religious beliefs. The numbers of atheists and people of faith was roughly equal, and 11 per cent of the scientists polled said that they were extremely religious. When the poll was repeated in the 1990s, the pollsters were surprised to find that the proportion of scientists who were still extremely religious had not changed.
Despite what Dawkins tells you, atheism is not necessarily supported by science, and does not disprove it. Other views of the universe, its origin and meaning are available and still valid.
The I newspaper yesterday reported that the physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, is set to play the Book in a new radio series of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Entitled ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Hexagonal Edition’ the series will commemorate the original show on Radio 4 back in 1978, featuring the original cast.
I loved the original series of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the first two books based on the show, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. However, I lost interest in it after the third book. I tried reading the fourth, only to give up. I think by that time Douglas Adams himself was growing tired of writing them. I’ve heard someone say on an interview that he was only lured back to write his last Hitch-Hiker book by the publisher’s promise that in it he could destroy every possible Earth in every possible universe. So I’m not sure I’ll listen to it, especially as the series is being carried on by other writers.
I also wasn’t impressed by Adams’ expressed contempt for the genre he wrote in. Back in the 1990s he was interviewed on the radio by Paxo, who said his book was Science Fiction, but different. It was good. Adams replied by saying that he didn’t write Science Fiction. Which is odd, because that’s what Hitch-Hiker is. But I guess Adams wanted to avoid being pigeonholed as a genre writer.
At that time the prejudice of the literary establishment towards Science Fiction and Fantasy was much stronger than it is now. I can remember seeing Terry Pratchett speaking at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, saying how the organisers looked on him as if he was going to talk to people about fixing motorcycles. There’s a clip of the BBC arts programme, The Late Review, in which the Oxford lecturer and poet, Tom Paulin, and a female litterateur are asked to review one of Pratchett’s books, where they both make very disparaging remarks. The woman states that she felt like writing across it in big lines ‘I cannot read any more’. Paulin compared it to lifting up a stone to find all these weird people doing weird things underneath it. And going further back to the 1950s Brian Aldiss commented in The Trillion Year Spree that at that time, despite being championed by Kingsley Amis, pornography had a better reputation than Science Fiction amongst the literary elite.
Pratchett had to fight against that literary snobbishness throughout his life, but is now being taken very seriously by critics. I think Adams avoided it. Back in the ’90s he and Hitch-Hiker were the subjects of one edition of the South Bank Show with Melvin Bragg. But perhaps the price of that critical acclaim was his denial that he wrote Science Fiction at all.
But other people are different, and so I’ve no doubt that there are millions of Hitch-Hiker fans out there, who will be delighted to hear the news. They know who they are. They’re the people, who bought merchandising, like the Hitch-Hiker bath towels. This was a large, white bath towel with the text from the HHGG talking about how every Hitch-Hiker really needed to know where their towel was on it. I found one of those in Forever People, the comics/ SF shop in Bristol. The show’s fans are also the people, who organised conventions with dubious names like ‘Slartibartday’, after one of the creators of the Earth, Slartibartfast.
Hawking is in many ways an ideal choice for The Book after the death of Peter Jones, who was its original voice on Radio 4 and then in the BBC 2 TV series. He already has an electronic voice to fit the character of an electronic book, and is a world famous space scientist and advocate of space colonisation. But you wonder how massive his ego will be after playing a publication, which the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes as, amongst some people, having displaced the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom.
This is another great piece from RT. It’s their version of that section on the British mainstream news shows, like Andrew Marr and the morning news, where they go through the papers with a guest commenting on stories of interest. In this piece from RT’s Going Underground, main man Afshin Rattansi’s guest is Lembit Opik, the former Lib Dem MP for one of the Welsh constituencies. Opik lost his seat at the election some time ago. Before then he was jocularly known as ‘the Minister for Asteroids’ by Private Eye, because his grandfather was an astronomer from one of the Baltic Countries, and Opik himself took very seriously the threat of asteroid Armageddon in the 1990. I can remember meeting him at a talk on ‘Asteroid Impacts’ one year at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, where he and the other panellists, including Duncan Steele, an Australian astronomer who now teaches over here urged the world’s governments to set up an early warning system to defend Earth from such catastrophes.
Here, Opik picks out the stories from the papers about how Britain has lost its position as the seat, or with a member on, three international regulatory agencies as a result of Brexit. We no longer have a candidate sitting at the International Court of Justice. The European Medical Agency will go to Amsterdam, and the European Banking Authority will go to Paris. Opik makes the point that all these agencies are leaving Britain, as there’s no point in them being here if we’re not in the EU.
There’s a bit of lively, spirited disagreement between Opik and Rattansi, which doesn’t seem to be entirely serious. And in fact, the tone of their conversation makes me wonder if they didn’t have quite a good lunch with liquid refreshment. Rattansi is something of a ‘Leave’ supporter, and says in reply that they can go. We don’t want them. And perhaps if the International Court of Justice actually worked, we could prosecute some of those responsible for war crimes.
Opik’s next story is about a ruling by the Tories that animals don’t feel pain, and have no emotions. Which he points out will amaze anyone, who’s ever had a dog or seen one howl. He and Rattansi then comment about how this is all about the Tories trying to make it easier for themselves to go fox hunting, and for Trump and his children to kill more animals.
Opik then goes on to a funnier story, which nevertheless has a serious point. Documents released to Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act have shown that Britain lobbied Brazil over obtaining the rights for Shell and BP to drill for oil in more of the Brazilian rainforest. This is a serious issue. What makes it funny is that the government tried to redact the information. However, they got it wrong, and instead of blacking out the embarrassing pieces of information, they highlighted them instead in yellow marker. Which they then sent to Greenpeace’s head of operations. Opik then goes on to make the very serious point that this is information, that the government was trying to hide from us.
The last story is from the Independent. It’s about the finding by one of the peer-reviewed British medical journals that the Tories’ austerity policy is responsible for 120,000 deaths, in what has been described as ‘economic murder’. Opik’s sceptical of this claim, as he says he’s seen stats misused like this before. Rattansi counters in reply by saying that it does come from a peer-reviewed medical journal. Opik does, however, accept that Tory austerity policies have harmed some people, but is sceptical whether its 120,000.
These reports show that Britain is losing its influence on the world stage as a result of voting to leave the European Union. There’s even the possibility that we will lose our place on the UN Security Council if Scotland breaks away. It’s also interesting to hear Rattansi remind Opik that David Davis, the Tory MP, claimed that Britain wouldn’t lose her position as the base for various international agencies and ruling bodies if we left the EU. This is another failed prediction from the Tories. Or another lie, if you prefer.
As for the Conservatives ruling that animals don’t feel pain, the Independent states that this is ‘anti-science’. Absolutely. I think anyone, who has ever kept a pet knows that animals do feel pain, and do have emotions. Or at least, creatures like birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. My guess is that they’ve passed this ruling not just as a way of making the return of fox hunting easier, but as part of an attack on a whole range of animal rights legislation, which they probably see as a burden on farming and industry. Like whatever legislation there is protecting the wellbeing of farm animals or regulating vivisection. And it is very definitely an ‘anti-science’ ruling. It seems that new discoveries are being made regularly showing how animal cognition and mental abilities are much more sophisticated than we previously believed. For example, crows are able to make and use tools. They’ll use sticks to open tin cans, for example. This amazed scientists when they first discovered it, as tool use was previously considered to be confined to primates. And in yesterday’s I there was a report on the finding by scientists that sheep can recognise human faces. And yes, the I has also carried several stories over the years about how scientists have found that dogs really do have emotions. When I read these, my reaction was ‘No sh*t, Sherlock!’ It’s very obvious that dogs do have emotions. But not, apparently, to the baying anti-science morons in the Tory party.
Mike put up the story about medical researchers finding that Tory policies have killed 120,000 people in the UK. I don’t entirely blame Opik for being sceptical, as there have been similar claims made that have been vastly inflated. However I don’t doubt that this is true in this case. We have over a hundred thousand people forced to use food banks, and millions of people living in ‘food insecure’ households, where they don’t know when they’ll eat again. Even if poverty and starvation do not directly cause their deaths, they are a contributing cause by leaving them vulnerable to other factors, such as disease or long-term illness, hypothermia and so on. And there are at least 700 people, who have been directly killed by the Tories’ austerity. These people died of starvation, or diabetic comas when they could not afford to keep their insulin in a fridge, or in despair took their own lives. They’ve been commemorated and their cases recorded by Johnny Void, Stilloaks, Mike at Vox Political, and the great peeps at DPAC.
Many of these poor souls actually left notes behind saying that they were killing themselves because they couldn’t afford to live.
But the DWP has refused to accept it, and blithely carries on repeating the lie that there’s no link between their deaths and austerity. And certainly not with the murderous sanctions system introduced by David Cameron and Ian Duncan Smith.
Rattansi was right about the failure of the International Court of Justice to prosecute the war criminals, who led us into the Iraq invasion and other wars in the Middle East. But nevertheless, there was an attempt to have Bush, Blair and their fellow butchers and liars hauled before international justice for their crimes against humanity. A group of British, Greek and Canadian lawyers and activists tried to bring a prosecution, and the lawyer in charge of looking into the case was, at least initially, interested. Then American exceptionalism won out once again, and the US placed pressure on the court to throw out the case.
Being tried for war crimes is just something that happens to other, lesser nations, you see.
If there were any true, international justice, Blair and the rest of New Labour and Bush’s vile neocons would find themselves in the dock, like the other genocides and mass-murderers who’ve been punished. And I’d just love to see Cameron, Smith, Damian Green, Esther McVie and Theresa May join them for their ‘chequebook genocide’ against the disabled.
But unfortunately that ain’t going to happen. However, we can at least get them out before they kill many more people.
I’ve been posting various articles this week attacking Hillary Clinton and the lies she’s been spinning as she promotes her book, What Happened. This is her account of how she failed to be elected the first female president of the US in 2016, losing to the fake-tanned, bewigged maniac now determined to plunge us all into a new Cold War. Killary was in Australia one week, where one Ozzie journo caught her telling five whoppers when she was interviewed on ABC. She has since come to England, where she’s been speaking at the South Bank Centre and at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.
She’s going to appear on the Graham Norton Show tonight, Friday 20th October 2017, at 10.35 pm. The blurb for the programme on page 114 of the Radio Times states
Hillary Clinton talks to Graham about the US presidential campaign, as detailed in her book What Happened. Jeff Goldblum, Gerard Butler and Jack Whitelaw join her on the sofa.
Another piece on the previous page, 113, adds rather more information.
This time last year Hillary Clinton had her heart set on the Oval Office and probably expected to spend her evenings on a White House sofa. How on earth has she ended up on Graham Norton’s couch instead? She’ll tell him “What Happened” while discussing her new book about her annus horribilis.
Here’s hoping Clinton doesn’t try to describe 2016 after a glass or two of Norton’s house reserve, though. He’s never one to resist a red, white and blue gag.
As with so much, you are not going to hear the unvarnished truth from Clinton because, to paraphrase the old Hollywood line, ‘she can’t handle the truth.’ The simple truth is that many ordinary, working Americans were sick and tired of the poverty and massive income inequality the Reaganite neoliberalism championed by her and Bill had created. They were sick and tired about public programmes being cut, while money was poured into the banks and big businesses that were already bloated from public money anyway, and which had profited massively from the economic mess they’d created. They were sick and tired of American imperialism, of seeing their finest young men and women sent off to kill and be killed in countries which, with the exception of Afghanistan, had not attacked America on the orders of a lying president, just as Brits are sick and tired of the same neoliberal policies and the same militarism heavily promoted by the Clinton’s fan and George Dubya’s poodle over here, Tony Blair. These wars are being fought not to defend America or promote democracy, but simply to despoil and loot these other nations for the benefit of western, chiefly American, multinationals.
She lost because Americans were sick of rising medical bills, which a growing number simply can’t afford, even after Obamacare. And far from being the traditional image of the welfare recipient as an unemployed scrounger, the majority of these poor around the developed world are working people, who are now paid so poorly thanks to Thatcherite doctrines of pay restraint, that they have to work two or three jobs simply to keep their heads above water, go on welfare, or, in Britain, subsist using food banks.
And the American public, Blacks and Whites, also remembered how she exaggerated the threat of crime by young Black men, in order to push through highly punitive legislation that now sees something half of the Black American male population go to the slammer. For the profit of the privatised prison system, of course.
American women saw through her faux-feminism, in which she tried to present herself as campaigning for all women, when in fact she was a bog-standard corporate insider, despite her repeated claims that she had to be an outsider, ’cause she was female. Killary represented nobody but herself and the other, rich, entitled women like her. She was perceived as massively corrupt, massively insincere, and profoundly unsympathetic to the plight of ordinary working people.
But Killary can’t handle any of this, and so has been running round blaming everyone but herself. She’s blamed Bernie Sanders, the genuinely left-wing Democrat she and the head of the Democratic National Convention, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stitched up and from whom she stole the nomination. She’s also blamed the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, who was a stronger feminist figure. Both she and Bernie promised Americans Medicare for all. She’s blamed it on a culture of misogyny. While this does exist, her claim that she was being bullied because of her gender by Sanders’ supporters is another lie.
And she’s also ramped up international tension by blaming the Russians. Because WikiLeaks published internal Democrat party documents showing just how corrupt she was. She’s claimed that Russian hackers were responsible for this, when in fact the former British diplomat, who took custody of them for WikiLeaks, said that they came from a Democrat Party insider.
And Killary has absolutely no business screaming at others and accusing them of corrupt dealings with Putin’s Russia, when this is exactly what she and her husband and the chief himself, Barack Obama, did. A little while ago, the New York Times broke the story that before she signed off on a deal, which saw uranium mines in Kazakhstan and a fifth of the uranium processing industry in America itself taken over by a consortium of Russian companies, the Clinton Foundation received $145 million from individuals connected with these companies. And her husband, Bill, was given $500,000 for a speech he gave to a Russian bank.
One of her aides, Brodnitz, pointed out in an internal document for her campaign that this affair would damage her electoral chances, and put people off voting for her. Now the American paper, the Hill, has also published a piece reporting that the FBI was investigating her and Bill for two years for this, but the Department of Justice only decided to release the details to the public after the deal had gone through. Thus, Obama had actively connived at preventing her and Bill’s possible prosecution for it, until after the deal had been made. And very profitable it was too for her and Bill, though possibly not for the American taxpayer.
In the video below, the American comedian Jimmy Dore and his co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano, the Miserable Liberal, discuss this latest revelation of Killary’s corruption and double-dealing.
This is just more evidence that Bernie should have got the nomination. If he had, he would have been the far stronger opponent to Trump. And we just could now have a genuinely progressive, Democratic government. This would, in turn, have been a filip to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party over here, as well as genuine left-wingers and Socialists elsewhere in the world.
But this would have been too much for the corporate hawks running Congress to stomach, so they gave it instead to Killary. Who then lost to an even worse candidate, Trump, but one who was better at articulating popular American hopes and fears than she was.
I like Graham Norton. He’s a genial host, although I’ve long stopped watching his show. I dare say he’ll get Killary to talk at length about her book, and she’ll spin and lie about the reasons she lost, just like she’s been lying to interviewers and the paying public all over America, Australia, Britain and the rest of the civilised world. I dare say that Norton will ask her some awkward-ish questions, but they won’t be so awkward that they’ll embarrass her or stop her making similar appearances in the future.
But I doubt very much he’ll ask her about her very real corruption scandals, like the above relationship with the Russians or the handsome payments she got from Wall Street in return for protecting them from further regulation.
In this short clip from RT, presenter Afshin Rattansi asks John McDonnell about the party’s policy regarding arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Both he (McDonnell) and Jeremy Corbyn have both said that arms sales to Saudi Arabia should be suspended because of their use against civilians in the war in Yemen. Rattansi then asks him if he doesn’t find it odd walking past posters for BAE Systems. McDonnell replies that their stance is that Britain has an arms trade, but we must stop selling arms to human rights abusers, like Saudi Arabia. And this has to stop immediately, because people are dying.
I find it grossly immoral that the Labour party has accepted sponsorship from BAE, which has for decades sold arms to every dictator and butcher on the planet, as well as desperately poor states, who don’t need them, can’t maintain them, and whose purchase diverts money that could be better used on welfare or development programmes for their people. They are also responsible for making weapons that are illegal under international law, such as electric shields and batons.
Unfortunately, big business has wormed its way into the sponsorship of the Labour party, and Tony Blair was as fully supportive of the merchants of death as the Tories were. McDonnell’s statement that he and Corbyn won’t sell arms to the Saudis and the other repressive regimes around the globe sound like a restatement of the late Robin Cook’s ‘ethical foreign policy’, which became a dead letter almost as soon as Labour got into power.
Cook was, in many people’s eyes, the man who should have been head of the Labour party instead of Blair. Speaking at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature nearly two decades or so ago, Giles Brandreth said that when he was a minister in Major’s cabinet, Cook was the man they were most afraid would lead Labour because of his ‘forensic intelligence’. He was genuinely further left, and Private Eye opined that Blair included him in the cabinet because ‘it was better to have him in the tent p*ssing out, than outside p*ssing in.’
The Tories, Lib Dems, the Beeb, the rest of the media, and big business are terrified of Corbyn and McDonnell. This strongly suggests to me that they are afraid that Corbyn, unlike Blair, means what he says. And McDonnell is right: the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia needs to be stopped now. The war hasn’t just killed the people hit by the bullets and bombs. It’s also created a famine that may kill 7 million people.
The Saudis have butchered innocent civilians in factories, mosques and schools, simply because they’re Shi’a. They were also responsible for the 9/11 attack that plunged us into the War on Terror and which was falsely blamed on Iraq. They have also funded and supplied other aid to ISIS in its trail of murder and chaos across the Middle East. I’m aware that the Saudis have turned against ISIS after they released a video trying to encourage the people there to rise up against their rulers. Even so, my guess is that support for the jihadis is nevertheless very strong. Any guns and other ‘wonderful kit’ – in the words of David Cameron – we sell to the Saudis therefore has a strong chance of being passed on to the fanatics to be used against our troops.
There are thus very strong humanitarian and selfish reasons for not selling any further weapons to the Saudis.
The news today has been dominated by the Chilcot report, and its findings about the launch of the Iraq War by Tony Blair. In this video from Owen Jones, the author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, gives his view on the moral and possible legal culpable of Blair for starting a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, destroyed an entire nation, and caused the entire Middle East to descend further into chaos and carnage.
He states that the report’s publication and its conclusions gives him no satisfaction, but it does vindicate what opponents of the war had said. He quotes a Labour MP, Simpson, who used to be his boss, who stated that Blair was desperate to join Bush in a war regardless of the cause; that the country was being pushed to war. He notes that Chilcot has also confirmed that the intelligence reports, which formed the basis for Blair’s decision to go to war, were ‘flawed’. He quotes Christian Aid, a charity, not a political organisation, who also opposed the war because they believed it would lead to further internal violence in Iraq, and that Iran would seek its own advantages. Jones notes that at the time the anti-War protesters were attacked and vilified by a press determined to promote the war. He also urges his viewers not to be taken in by Blair, when the man the Italians dubbed ‘The Scrounger’ (but in Italian, obviously) says that it’s all obvious in hindsight, but couldn’t be known at the time. Jones makes it very clear from all the above that it was very clearly understood by the war’s opponents at the time how dreadful it would be and the terrible consequences.
Jones states that the report doesn’t conclude whether there is a legal base for prosecuting Blair. He hopes that is the case, and that there will now be moves to see if such a trial is possible. But even if he isn’t legally liable, he is morally culpable. He, and the media that enabled and promoted the war, have to live with that. And the consequences of this conflict will be with us for decades to come.
Jones is correct, and his video is cut with shots of anti-war protests and demonstrators. It’s refreshing to see on this video quotations from the Labour and Left-wing protesters against the war, like Jones’ old boss, Simpson, and the late Robin Cook. Cook resigned because of the war, and was arguable the man, who should have led the Labour party. I can remember seeing Simon Hoggart, the journalist and compere of the News Quiz on Radio 4, Giles Brandreth, a former Tory cabinet minister, before he became one of the faces on The One Show, and Brandreth’s Labour opposite number, talking about political diaries at the Cheltenham Literary Festival one year. Brandreth said that Cook was the man the Tories were dreading would lead Labour, because of his incisive, forensic intelligence. At the time, here in my part of the West Country, most of the voices raised in protest were Tories. On the local news this evening the Bridgwater MP, Tom King, and two other Tories have appeared commenting on the Report and how they were against the war at the time. This is true. Peter Hitchens, the former Marxist, now right-wing journo, has always made it very clear that he despises Blair for starting wars that have sent good men and women to deaths for absolutely no good reason. And while I don’t like Hitchen’s views on the return of the death penalty, or his tough stance on law ‘n’ order, I respect him for his views on Blair. I am much more suspicious about other members of the Tory party, because of the way they threw their weight behind Maggie’s and Major’s wars – the Falklands and then Gulf War I. I wondered at the time how much of their opposition was due principle, and how much was simply because Blair had stolen their mantle as the ‘war party’, just like he stole so much of Conservatism. Their opposition to the war did have some effect. One of my friends, who’s actually very left-wing, started reading the Spectator for a time, because it ran articles by a leading Tory – possibly Matthew Parris, but I couldn’t swear to it – attacking the war. It’s good to be reminded that there were those on the Left as well, who marched and protested against it. And not just the supporters of George Galloway.
As for the intelligence that Blair used to take us to war, Chilcot is too kind, or perhaps just understandably cautious, when he refers to it as ‘flawed’. It wasn’t. It was deliberately doctored. And from what I understand from Lobster – which is a vociferous opponent of British intelligence services – the pressure to inflate and distort the evidence came, not from the intelligence services, but from Blair and his cabinet.
Jeremy Corbyn has made it very clear that he wishes to prosecute Bliar for war crimes. I don’t know if that will ever happen, as I can imagine the political and media class closing ranks very quickly to shut down that possibility. But the Chilcot report does show that Bliar is morally, if not legally culpable, as Jones points out. The rhyme was right:
Blair lied:
People died.
And the tragedy and injustice is that people have gone on and will go on dying, long after Blair has receded from public life.
Last week or so Mike over at Vox Political put up a piece about the Tories wishing to abolish Short money. This is the funding given by the state to opposition parties. I’m not actually surprised the Tories want to get rid of it. They’re authoritarians anyway, who hate any kind of opposition. But I’m particularly not surprised they’ve decided to attack Short money, as it’s one of the issues criticised by Quentin Letts in his 2009 book, Bog Standard Britain (London: Constable and Robinson Ltd).
Letts is the parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Heil. He’s been one of the panellists at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and also on at least one edition of Have I Got News For You. Here’s what he has to say about it in his book:
Our political class has a horror of losing its perks. Nothing new. In 1970, soon after losing the general election, Harold Wilson was seen queuing for a taxi late one night outside the Members’ Entrance to the Commons. Friends of Wilson were distraught. A few days earlier he had been Prime Minister but there he now was, waiting for a cab like the rest of humanity. Instead of seeing this, as they should have done, as eloquent testimony to the ephemeral nature of elected office, Harold’s cronies secured him a state-paid limo and chauffeur.
We have been paying ever since for Leaders of the Opposition to be thus pampered. In 1974, having regained the premiership, Wilson returned the compliment by slipping the shadow cabinet a wad of public money. This ‘Short money’, named after Edward Short, the Labour minister who presented the proposal to Parliament, is now worth some £7 million a year to the Opposition parties. short money was given on the premise that an Opposition would be improved by having researchers who could prepare meaningful policies. It would result in better government. Nice one! In practice, Short money allows an Opposition to save its money for election campaigning. This creates an arms race of electoral fundraising which in turn results in dodgy donors being given undue pre-eminence over the political parties’ mass membership. Short money also allows Opposition spokesmen to keep large retinues which makes them feel important and saves them having to do so much thinking for themselves. Result: an overblow secretariat, lazy parliamentarians, hefty bills which have to be picked up by the taxpayer. Short money is an expensive con. All it has done is expand a professional political class. And all because socialist Harold’s friends thought it was improper that he should have to queue for a taxi. (pp. 219-20).
Letts’ party political bias is evident here. He despises ‘Socialist’ Harold Wilson, for having money given to him and his party after he left office. I’ve no idea whether the story about the limo and Wilson waiting at a taxi stand is true. I assume it is. But that’s not the reason the Tories want to get rid of it, nor is the explanation that it’s all about curtailing the bloated retinues and pomp of the political class. If that were the case, then Cameron would be happy to see greater clarity of the political process through the Freedom of Information Act, and by quite happy to see MPs’ expenses scrutinised by the press.
In fact, the opposite is the case. Cameron and his hand-picked cronies, including Jack Straw, are doing their best to rip the guts out of FOIA. They don’t like people challenging government decisions, and particularly not when it comes to MPs’ expenses. Hence the government got very huffy when the Independent asked for them under the Freedom of Information Act. Campaigners and journalists making such requests have been told that the Act is to allow people to understand how government decisions are made, not for them to challenge them. So shut up, run along, and do what we tell you. We’re back to the old slogan of Mussolini:
Believe.
Obey.
Fight.
As for forcing parties to rely on their grassroots’ members’ subscriptions, rather than contributions from wealthy donors, that’s a load of hogwash as well. The Tories are raking huge wads of cash from their backers in business, as well as corporate largesse from courtesy of lobbyists. And they have absolutely no interest in what their ordinary members have to say. The local, constituency parties have complains again and yet again that they are ignored at Westminster. The effect of corporate funding on the parties has been that they’ve all shrunk, both Labour and the Tories. The Tories are now under 100,000 members. That’s a massive fall for the party that was, not so long ago, Britain’s largest, with at least a quarter of million members.
They simple fact is that the Tories want to stifle the opposition anyway they can. And they’re trying to do it by starving them of funds. This explains the latest Tory attack on the union levy. And simply by their attack on the Freedom of Information Act, it seems to bear out that the Short money must actually be doing the task for which it was intended, namely, allow the Opposition to frame policies better. That’s clearly a danger as they’re trying to stop people using the Freedom of Information Act, not just by narrowing even further what may be released under it, but also by raising the fees charged.
This is clearly a very, very frightened government.
Well, if Cameron wants to play that game, then I suggest Labour also plays it too. Mike suggested that Labour should immediately cease any co-operation with the Tories, such as the pairing agreement, which states that if one Tory MP can’t make it to a debate, his Labour opposite number must be drop out as well. The Tories only have a majority of 16. Let’s make it impossible for them to govern.
Way back in the 1970s and ’80s, any government that consider cutting Short money could count on being told by the Mandarins in Whitehall that the policy was ‘very courageous’. Meaning, to those who used to watch Yes, Minister, that it was likely to lose them election. Let’s put that into practice, and make sure that it does.
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