Philobiblon

A group of clearly and openly rightwing UK (well actually probably London) bloggers is started what looks like a seriously funded internet TV politics channel, 18 Doughty Street, which as Channel 4 points out (looking rather worried, as well they might be) isn’t subject to the same regulation as broadcast TV. They say they will be openly right wing but open to other voices – so it will be interesting to see how it works out …

And will there be a broadly leftwing equivalent?

From the inbox: the latest report of the excavation of Old Nisa, a Partian site in Turkmenistan, has been posted. Some lovely architectural detail…

Someone just described me as having “more projects than a four-armed paper-hanger”. I like it. It is apt; perhaps a little too apt, but then the best images slice in a little.

What a lovely combination. The London Library has a small display of some of the life membership application forms that it has received over the years – there are all the usual ones you’d except, from Bernard Shaw to Virginia Woolf, but also featured is “Mrs Harley Moseley”, who joined in 1956 from St Mawes, Truro, Cornwall, listing her occupation as “pigkeeper and poet”.

Google has failed me on this one … can anyone supply any info?

Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of a delightfully subtle dramatic exploration of Trevor Phillip’s “passive apartheid of the countryside” remark – White Open Spaces. Get your ticket soon – I suspect judging by the press night audience reaction word of mouth will make it a near-sellout.

It has been sitting in my to-read pile (which hasn’t yet quite taken over the house) for a long time, but I’ve finally got around to reading Maureen Duffy’s The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn. It was published first in 1977, although I’ve been reading the preface-updated 2000 paperback. Since it is such a popular topic I’ve no doubt aspects of the account have been modified by subsequent research, but it is an excellent read, and a decent piece of what in 1977 was real recovery work.

I’ll share just a little part that appealed, talking about her play Sir Timothy Tawdry:

Dellmor: Gods what an odious thing mere coupling is!
A thing which every sensual animal
Can do – as well as we – but prithee tell me,
Is there naught else between the nobler creatures?
Flauntit: Not that I know of, sir – Lord he’s very silly or very innocent, I hope he has his maidenhead; if so and rich too, Oh what a booty were this for me!

By introducing the brothel and Betty Flauntit’s attempts to get Bellmor for his money, Aphra Behn has made a parallel between prostitution and forced marriage …

Bellmor: Will you now show me some of your arts of love?
For I am very apt to learn of beauty – Gods -
What is’t I negotiate for? – a woman!
Making a bargain to possess a woman!
Oh, never, never!

You can see why later, more genteel generations had troubles with Aphra – suuch bluntness wouldn’t come back into fashion for centuries.

(Apologies to the people to whom I promised this a week ago. I hope it is worth the wait…)

When I moved to Bangkok early in 1995 the events of 1992, in which some of Thailand’s brightest and best youngsters had given their blood in the cause of democracy, were the great unmentionable that hung in the air. Yet there as hope. There was a decent man as prime minister – Chuan Leekpai – and if he’d made the necessary accommodations to the voters in appointing some members of his cabinet, well nostalgia for the technocrat government of Anand Panyarachun (appointed by the military in 1991 but distinctly independent-minded) was tinged with acceptance that this was the price of democracy. Regarding military rule the attitude was clear: Never again!

Gradually, however, over the five years I lived in Thailand, the mood soured. It was not that there was any longing for military rule. But there was increasing cynicism and despair as a succession of elections (more or less annual – forced by political manouevring) produced a depressing run of prime ministers, from the ex-road contractor Banharn Silpa-acha to the thuggish former general Chavalit Yongchaiyudh to the final one of this democratic round, the just deposed Thaksin Shinawatra. (Chuan had another go before Thaksin.) As The Economist commented in 1996 (November 23), “Elections … often produce the best government money can buy, rather than a good one.”

Thaksin was, for Thailand, a new sort of prime minister – very much from and of the Bangkok super-wealthy commercial class. But experience elsewhere suggests that even successful businesspeople find the transition to dealing with the slippery uncertainties, the necessary horsetrading, of politics, difficult. I was at the Foreign Correspondent Club on the night Thaksin addressed it as ”likely next PM”. It wasn’t a success. He speaks excellent English, but had been given a poorly written speech full of multisyllables. The club members are an anarchic lot, and quickly bored; many soon migrated to the back of the room and started playing pool and chatting. Thaksin was visibly angry. That’s not culturally usual in Thailand, and it wasn’t a good sign of a flexible, democratic character.

Yet Thailand’s troubles in trying to maintain a democratic regime cannot be blamed on any one man – even one as rich as Thaksin, who recently sold his family firm, tax-free, for $1.9bn. After all, this is the 18th coup since 1932 – there is something institutional about the Thai polity that allows, perhaps even forces, the military to step in at regular intervals – and it is not solely for the obvious reason of protecting their own interests.

The country is deeply, fundamentally split between city and country, educated and uneducated, in ways that make selecting a reasonable parliament a tremendous challenge. Bangkok isn’t the problem. It has a tremendously sophisticated, aware populace, led by an elite that is strongly attached to democratic ideals. I watched the city during the election campaign of 1995, when it voted with astonishing solidarity to keep the Chuan government of “angels”, as the press had, not entirely accurately, dubbed it. But it mattered not a jot.
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Talking to a friend yesterday about all of the free newspaper distributors in London.

(For those unfamiliar with the backstory – Metro, distributed from racks in Tube stations in the morning, has been joined by two evening freebies thelondonpaper and Londonlite, while the Evening Standard now has a free version handed out at lunchtime. All of which means if you pass by Euston Station, as I do quite often, you could collect enough newspapers in one day to have destroyed a small forest.)

I haven’t seen any overall figures, but the Tube is certainly seeing the effect, to the tune of a 43 per cent increase in newspaper waste.

There really is a problem that these days material objects are so cheap, they are literally given away…

Catherine Bennett in the Guardian today has a very good piece exploring the relationship between Tony Blair’s conference mother-in-law jokes (so c. 1950), and the fact that no woman is being even mentioned as a possible candidate to stand against Gordon Brown. (Despite the fact that all of the research shows that electorates warm more easily to women candidates.)

But if that’s a bit depressing, there’s also a profile of Ségolène Royal, who is a very serious candidate for the French presidency.

Let’s see … Germany has a female chancellor, France could have a female president … Britain has a … Foreign Secretary I suppose would be the highest Cabinet-ranked woman. Not what you’d call spectacular.

And rounding out the good news, in China, it has been decided to officially recognise female descendants of Confucius. Not perhaps likely to have much practical effect, but an important symbol of giving importance to females, and perhaps girl-children in particular.

I think I should say at the outset that it you are feeling a bit down today you really shouldn’t read this post.

Some notes from a fringe session at the Green Party conference entitled “after the crash”.

Seven possible causes of a “crash” were identified:
1. Economic cycles
2. Peak oil
3. US economy
4. Iran war
5. Climate change (an explosion of Katrina-like events)
6. Avian Flu (or another epidemic) *
7. Unknowns …

The initial speaker, Tom Lyons(sp?), a former Reuters commodity writer, focused mainly on the US economy: “The aggressive stance of the US government is not at all unconnected with the growing weakness of the economy. It is not hegemonic, as it was fifty or sixty years ago,” he said. Cited particularly was the current account deficit, which “has to be paid for sometime”.

Currently it is being supported by China, Japan, Taiwan and the rest of Asia. They are supporting the “hoover effect”, by which goods and services are sucked in to support the US way of life (or at least the way of life of the rich). So China et al buy Treasury Bills.

But the problem is, given the declining level of the US dollar, these are a declining asset. And it cannot even be sustained at the level it is now. There’s a problem for Europe too, since the economy has a dependence on the US export market.

For the majority of poor countries the crash has already happened – in the 1980s’ debt crisis. Since then the IMF structural adjustment programme has ensured that the cost of the speculative lending boom of the Sixties and Seventies was borne by the poor states. So we have arrived at this distribution of income: GDP person par parity – US $34,320 and Sierra Leone $470 (UNDP 2001 figures).

On these figures the c. 30 developed states at the top are racing ahead, while the states at the bottom are stagnant. Their problem is commodity prices: from 1977 to 2001, 46 basic commodities (agricultural and mineral) have fallen by an average of 2.5% per year.

The worst is “hides and skins”, very important to the poorest states, which have fallen by 4.8% per year, while coffee has fallen by 5.1% per year. The number of “least developed states”, using an eighties classification, has risen from 25 to 50; only one country, Botswana, has got out of the condition.

Dr Richard Lawson, author of Bills of Health, said the likely effects of a crash, whatever its cause were: business failures, mass unemployment and mass poverty, social conflict and unrest, and wars might be promoted as a “cure”.

How to cope? “This is when green economics really cuts it for real” – a localised economy would supply the essentials of human existence. Greens should get involved in work on emergency plans.

Not sure which speaker said this, but an interesting thought: One possible US action would be to withdraw quickly from the world, as Britain withdrew very quickly from the empire after World War Two.

Update: Frank’s comment below leads me to add an additional note – it is not suggested that the “cut it for real” comment means the speaker wants this to happen. The emphasis was on trying to stop “the crash” happening (except where it has already happened) – first by understanding the situation. This was perhaps intended as a push to work harder to stop it happening, plus a “what to do in the worst case scenario” point.

* Personally I discount avian flu and similar on the ground that while indeed it could happen, this is one area where virtually all that can be done is being done, and due to that it is less likely to happen than ever before. Worrying about it is a bit like worrying about an asteroid.

I’ve just been pointed to a potentially very useful resource on energy issues from a broadly Green perspective, Energy Bulletin – well worth adding to the “to read” list, and I’m not saying that because one of my Guardian blog pieces just appeared on it.

The teachers took us to the hall, saying they were under instructions not to tell us what we were going there for. Once there, we weren’t allowed to leave – teachers were posted at the doors.” The lecturer was Barbara McGuigan, an American evangelist and founder of the Catholic charity Voice of Virtue International. “She told us that if we had an abortion we’d go to hell for ever, and she showed pictures of foetuses aborted after 12 and 20 weeks. Some of the girls were in tears, but no one was allowed to leave,” says Michael.
McGuigan also told them that homosexuality was a “disorder”, that a person who was homosexual must adopt a life of chastity, and that no unmarried couple could have a successful relationship.

This is at a Kent, Catholic (of course) school. One recently taken over in the merger of three, successful institutions to form this one, unsuccessful one. (Story in the Education Guardian.)

And the treatment of the pupils sounds very like false imprisonment to me – as does attempts to force pupils over the age of 16 to attend Mass.

Still, the positive side is that at least we can be sure most of the pupils will be put off religion, hopefully for life.