Campaign Diary: Lost count of the days! Some fine people and the excellent cake girls

War Memorial at Cullingworth

Another day out and about - glorious sunny weather (although the garden tells me it could use a shower or two) and plenty of smiling folk about. Here are a few I met:

• Attractive Asian woman supervising the refurbishment of a semi-detached house in Cottingley - very cheery and keen to move in (although from the look of it a bit to go yet).
• Lady in curlers chasing me down the street (well sort of) to tell me about the ongoing campaign to keep the heart surgery unit in Leeds.
• Rather annoyed bloke - not at me but at the idiots who threw an egg at his door while he was away. Quite a job to scrub it off. Why do kids do this sort of thing?
• Doug - who runs the police contact point in Cottingley which we hope to persuade them to keep open. A really useful service provided for just a few quid each year

And in all this I've found little seething anger at the government - some genuine concern about specific services and particular issues but none of the rage that pundits (left-wing ones at least) speak about. The angriest conversations have been about pensions, council tax and the smoking ban.

However, the day's highlight came in the early evening at home. Three girls - 15 years old or so - knocked at the door selling cakes. Not for a charity, not as some school project. But simply to make some money. I approve of this - initiative, production and chutzpah. These girls deserve to succeed - and probably will.

....

Where have all the bloggers gone?

****

Since it has become all the rage to discuss why all those libertarian swearbloggers have disappeared from the world of blogging I thought maybe to add my tuppence worth of comment. I was going to set it all to music - perhaps adapting Pete Seager's immortal words:

Where have all the bloggers gone, long time passing?

Where have all the bloggers gone, long time ago?

Where have all the bloggers gone?

Gone from the Internet every one

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?

To be fair, the (ever-so-slightly-smug-and-self-satisfied) comments in CiF and elsewhere do point to one truth:

We no longer have a mendacious, incompetant, nannying and offensive government under the direction of perhaps our worst ever prime minister.

And it’s pretty hard to be so cross with David Cameron – such a nice bloke (although my close friend and colleague Huw feels very differently about David’s sidekick, George).

But there’s another reason. Sheer boredom.

It seems to me that there’s a natural limit to the blogging game – assuming that it’s done for personal satisfaction, pleasure or, of course, as a safety valve for explosions of rage. We can only make the same point so many times before we begin to feel like Douglas Adams’ bowl of petunias.

If the only thing you feel motivated to blog about is the total uselessness and stupidity of government (and, dear reader, you will know I have some sympathy with this position) then eventually you’ve actually said everything there is to be said – that governmental uselessness has been described over and over again - in technicolour and in detail - and, if the folk out there haven’t got it yet, they are clearly lacking in little grey cells.

Now I can hear you thinking. Surely, there will come a new cadre of aggressive, sweary bloggers dedicated to the overthrow of the “Coalition”? Surely left-wing bloggers will take up where the right-wing bloggers left off. And maybe those left-wing bloggers will be more libertarian in outlook? Maybe. But maybe not – and here’s why.

Obnoxio, Constantly Furious, Mr Eugenides and others were angry at what the Government was doing to their lives. It was the cameras, the speed restrictions, the food rules, planning regulations, police behaviour, smoking bans and obscene levels of punative taxation. It was the personal aggrandisement, the quangocrats, the inflated salaries, the lack of accountability, the waste, the vain belief that there is ever any justification from stopping something just because you disapprove of it.

These were direct attacks by the Government on the bloggers' lifestyle, their choices. And this was what motivated the outpouring of anger and bile.

Some left-wingers might be so motivated but most – I suspect – will talk instead of how the bad “Coalition” is affecting the lives of others. And the anger displayed is a faux-anger compared to the indignation of attacks on me and mine. The emphasis will be on shroud-waving and the weilding of begging bowls rather than a defence of individual rights - or more importantly the individual rights of the blogger concerned.

Were left-wing bloggers to adopt the stance of attacking attacks on their lives – well they'd stop being left-wing bloggers and become….

…a new generation of right-wing, swear bloggers.

....

The stress, pain and anger of a crowded world - thoughts about the future from the past

****

“The incidence of muckers continues to maintain its high: one in Outer Brooklyn yesterday accounted for 21 victims before the fuzzie-wuzzies fused him, and another is still at large in Evsanston, Ill. Across the sea in London a woman mucker took out four including her own three-month baby before a mind-present standerby clobbered. Reports also from Rangoon, Lima and Auckland notch up the day’s total to 69.”

So goes part of the first ‘Happening World’ in John Brunner’s wonderful, new wave SF novel, ‘Stand on Zanzibar’. And it’s odd that the events in Cumbria took my mind straight to this matter-of-fact piece of fictional reportage. The banal manner in which Brunner introduces the ‘mucker’ to the reader is really quite frightening – we’re talking precisely about the sort of event that still today causes us such shock.

In part, Brunner was trying to describe how dehumanising mass population becomes – crowdedness breeds more stress, more risk, more chance of someone running amok. And from this event, a feature of the crowded world, comes the idea of the ‘mucker’, a person – young, old, male, female, white, black, yellow – who snaps and runs riot. Brunner does not explain or analyse, he just presents the ‘fact’ dispassionately. We don’t get to explore the details of the individual cases – we just get the event in stripped down form: “…accounted for 21 victims…”

Stand on Zanzibar is intended as a warning that with numbers come more of these (and other) events – partly a simple response to there being more people and partly a greater incidence descending from the impact of those numbers on our psyches. I’m not sure I agree with Brunner’s analysis but his presentation of the dehumanising effect of crowds is both depressing and revelatory.

Crazed incidents of murder have been a feature of human society for a long while – anyone who meander the by-ways of folk music will be struck by just how many songs there are about murder. So when we look at the events of yesterday – shocked, stunned, perhaps angry – we need to ask two questions: firstly, is this just another tragic, horrible murderous rampage or something else – something preventable; and secondly, does the event speak of a human condition stretching back through history – thankfully a rare condition?

For what its worth – and I’ve made no study of these matters – I feel the answer lies somewhere between. Blaming the gun is a fruitless diversion but trying to appreciate – and maybe on occasion notice – how the stresses, the agonies of everyday life can unhinge someone might prove a more purposeful response. Supporting scientific enquiry (and I don’t mean the ‘crackeresque’, pseudo-psychiatry beloved of the media) into the motives, reason and proximate causes of the rampages – these ‘muckers’ – might prove of some value. Although, I guess the chances of preventing some future incident in some other unfortunate place are pretty slim – if not non-existent.

Right now, the best we can do is to give a thought to others suffering – to pray if that’s your thing. And to hope that those damaged by the event can gather themselves and come to terms with what has happened. And, at some point, get on with the ordinary lives that cause such stress, pain and anger.



...

An Angry Tory writes....

Do you get angry sometimes? In our household anger is an ever present danger – usually brought on by the reading of a broadsheet newspaper or the watching of some television news programme. It is the “WTFFFFFFFF are those idiots doing now” kind of anger. The “Basil Fawlty banging his head against the wall” kind of abject despair at the total lunacy of those who pretend to govern us.

And, dearly beloved reader, we have a General Election coming up. A chance to express our anger through the planting of a livid cross against the name of the Tory candidate. A chance to rid ourselves of the most discredited, incompetent, self-serving and mendacious government since the 18th Century.

And when we’ve expressed that anger…let’s hold our breath…and hope…and pray (if that’s your bag)…that Mr Cameron will do what he says he’ll do. And as we exhale let us – very loudly and persistently – hold the new Tory government to account. Let’s demand some proper Tory stuff:

Less government – as Tories we know our governors can’t manage their way out from a rice pudding so let’s get the private sector working in proper markets to start delivering the standard of healthcare, education, transport and local government that the amount we cough up in taxes would justify

Less politics – as Tories we find politics boring and would much rather be making or spending money. So let’s have fewer MPs, Lords, full time councillors, quangocrats, so-called businessmen brought in to show the public sector how to be efficient, MEPs and all the other multifarious suckers on the taxpayers’ teat

Less law – god knows we don’t want to get like the USA and become a country run by and for lawyers. Let’s have more juries, more lay tribunals and fewer expensive supreme courts, Euro courts and other parasites on the body of society.

Less planning – and not just the town and country variety (although that serves to benefit no-one – not the public and not the developer: just bloody bureaucratic rules) but all the other attempts to guess the results of what millions and millions of ordinary people do in making billions and billions of private choices.

…if we get these things Britain will be a better place. And if we shout loud enough we will get that better place - if we don't stay angry the "great and the good" will win again.