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The M Word

Oct 10

Posted by Jeff in Society | 34 Comments

One thing that I have never really ever understood is why, when vegetarians make food, they often make food in the shape of hamburgers or sausages. Surely when there is free rein to arrange your lentils and chick peas in any order you wish, then something far removed from the meat eaters is preferable, at least in name if it not necessarily in shape.

Each to their own of course but I have something of a similar outlook when it comes to the potential contradiction in terms that is ‘gay marriage’. Is it necessary for civil partnerships to converge entirely towards straight marriages? If there is a difference, should that difference be recognised in the nomenclature?

The furore around John Mason’s recent motion was a different issue, that was the seemingly non-existent threat of priests being ‘forced’ to run services for couples of the same sex. A potential next issue is the wording of any law and whether the phrase ‘gay marriage’ should be on any Bill or Law that comes into force. That is perhaps a question for linguists and I daresay someone like Stephen Fry is the best placed to define what the meaning of ‘marriage’ actually is, historic and currently. I personally have certainly always taken it as meaning the coming together of a man and a woman in matrimony, holy or otherwise. I note from headlines that Alex Salmond takes a different view and I do wonder how David Cameron and the majority of the Tory benches see it, quite possibly central to how inflammatory the debate may be.

Do words change over time? Should they? I guess they do for some and don’t for others, with me personally being in the former category but not all thinking any less of those in the latter. Of course, marriage may always have included the meaning of two people promising their lives to each other, it’s just been suppressed, often brutally, for centuries.

Nonetheless, views are what they are, as frustrating as they can be for some. If a man was to suddenly insist that people called him a woman (without any transgender operations having taken place), then that would be patently absurd, surely? However, if a significant number of people have a fixed view that marriage, the meaning of the word marriage, is a man and a woman agreeing to be together for the rest of their lives, then the same absurdity can be understood from their perspective, if you’re generous enough to see it.

Of course, an argument for widening the definition of marriage, if that is even needed in the first place, is that it is clear what the meaning is. Two guys saying they got married doesn’t need any further explanation, two guys saying they have just had a civil ceremony usually does. (Does a civil partnership come with the same rights as a heterosexual marriage? It should do but I don’t know. A gay marriage, of course, would, or, again, at least should.)

I do worry that it will be in Scotland that this argument will surface first. If Alex Salmond can imagine marriage to mean the coming together of any two people for the rest of their lives and the church is inflexible in its view that marriage can only involve a man and a woman, by definition, then I don’t really know what happens next and it is clear from recent press that the church intends to make a big stink about this.

So, to avoid any verbal bricks that may be coming my way, I insist that I have no problem with looking at marriage in a different light as time goes on (veggie burgers too for that matter) but a debate around the meaning of a certain word is probably just around the corner and that’s worth thinking about.

Holyrood’s finest hour?

Oct 4

Posted by The Burd in Holyrood, Society, Westminster | 13 Comments

It’s time for the Scottish Parliament to show its mettle.

Tomorrow, Holyrood will debate welfare reform.  Hopefully, the Scottish Government will lay its delayed Legislative Consent Motion (LCM) before the Parliament and everyone will agree to the highly unusual step of appointing three scrutiny committees for the process, one lead and two secondary ones.  This will enable evidence to be laid and heard from the widest possible range of contributors and allow Holyrood to determine whether and how it allows Westminster to legislate on devolved matters contained in the legislation.

Such is the potential impact to Scotland and her people from the measures in the UK government’s welfare reform bill that nothing less will do.  If ever the SNP wanted to pick a fight with Westminster, if ever Labour wanted to return to the hallowed ground of class politics, if ever the Liberal Democrats wanted to point up differences with their English brethren, if ever the Scottish Greens wanted to champion the cause of inequality, if ever the Scottish Conservatives wanted to show that leopards can change their spots, then this issue is it.

I blogged at the ither place that “the scale of change heading down the tracks from the ConDems’ systematic dismantling of the welfare state is almost overwhelming”.  I don’t think I was over-stating the case.  For if the ConDems get their way, nary a household nor family in Scotland will be unaffected by some aspect of the bill.  And not for the good.

Everything is up for grabs and for months, voluntary organisations have been trying and largely failing to influence the process at Westminster.  The old labyrinth of benefits will go, to be replaced by a universal credit.  No bad thing in itself, for everyone has been crying out for fairness, transparency and simplicity in the benefits systems for years.  But it is the application of conditionality, time limits and sanctions for not taking up work or work-related activity – with no exception allowed – and the cutting of income and raising of threshholds making benefits harder to access that will cause increased complexity and real problems for claimants.  Though these measures will, of course, slake the thirst of the right wing media which has helped pave the way for public acceptance of these changes with its damaging, inaccurate and misleading denunciations of people on benefits as workshy fraudsters.  But anyone losing their job – and over two hundred thousand people in Scotland have in recent months – will be affected.

Families with disabled children will be particularly hard hit from changes, as will cancer sufferers and those with complex and longterm mental health problems.  Housing benefit changes appear to benefit no-one.  Lone parents, kinship carers, unemployed young people, people unemployed for more than a year, people seriously injured in an accident, young carers, children, women reaching retirement age, people with multiple and complex disabilities, people with mild and moderate learning disabilities, homeless people, war veterans with health problems, large families, separated parents, families with a young baby and low income families in work – all might find themselves worse off.

This matters because if tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Scots are made poorer and more vulnerable as a result of benefit changes, the pressure on services like health, social work, education, housing – and on charities that work with vulnerable people – will rise, at a time when funding for such services is being stretched and cut.  Real hardship could result.

Moreover, the bill cuts across whole swathes of devolved issues and even interferes with the independence of Scots family law, through the child maintenance reforms.  The devolution of certain parts of the welfare state, including council tax benefit, parts of the social fund and the new benefit Personal Independence Payments for disabled people, will create additional work for the Scottish Government and potentially add new burdens to the public and voluntary sector, without, of course, Westminster providing appropriate funding to help smooth the way.

And everything that involves a concession or a benefit-related discount or access, such as fuel poverty measures, or is in fact, a devolved benefit, as free school meals and clothing grant vouchers are, will require to be reformed, again creating additional work for the Scottish Government and where new regulations are required, for the Scottish Parliament too.

To date, the Conservatives have not been listening:  concerns about the impact of measures and attempts to amend provisions have been ignored.  The shape of the bill has changed little since its introduction in the Spring, with the Conservatives aided and abetted in their selective deafness by the Liberal Democrats.  At committee stage in the House of Commons, scarcely a murmur never mind a protest could be heard from Lib Dem members:  that will be the civilising influence at work again, then.

And the political point is this:  Scotland did not vote for this UK Government.  These changes are being imposed with missionary zeal on a population which did not ask for them, and would not want them if it had a choice.

Changing the shape and impact of the bill’s measures is proving impossible through the front door, so it’s time to try the back.  Holyrood can do something here.  It can do its best to change the worst aspects of the bill in which it has a devolved interest.  If it was feeling particularly brave, it could try to stop the bill in its tracks and refuse to consent to allow Westminster to legislate on the matters that properly belong to its jurisdiction.

Wednesday signals the start of the process that might end in an unprecedented denouement and a constitutional crisis:  already many voluntary sector organisations are calling on MSPs to refuse the LCM.  No one knows what might happen if Holyrood said no thank you, not this time.  But that is for the end of the process.  In the meantime, the Scottish Parliament must devote all its available energes and resources to poring over every aspect of this bill, so it can make an informed decision.  Time is short – the bill is now at its Lords stages, which the UK Government has also gerrymandered by creating a grand committee which makes it harder to amend the bill, and will be done and dusted by Christmas – and minds must focus.

It’s time for Holyrood to show the Scottish people what it is made of.  It’s time for the parties to lay aside childish things and act in concert, in the public good.  It’s time to abandon tribal loyalties and politics.  Work together, create a consensus, speak up and speak out.  Then stand together and stand up for Scotland.

Holyrood, your country needs you:  this could be your finest hour.

 

 

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What ever happened to England?

Sep 18

Posted by Jeff in Society | 35 Comments

I don’t really know how far back I started thinking of this post, months at least, but I do know when the tipping point was.

A few weeks ago I was merrily travelling back to London from Edinburgh on the East Coast rail line when the English-accented train conductor checked my ticket. As I had been sure I was booked on the 3pm I wasn’t prepared for his response of: “This ticket is for the 2:30pm. You’ll have to buy another one. That’ll be £146.”

Now, I can put to one side as off-topic the ludicrously extortionate charge of £146 for getting on a half-empty train when you’d paid to be on the half-empty train 30minutes in front of you. I can incorporate that financial blow better than some but that works out as three full days of work on the minimum wage (on top of the £60 for the original ticket). I can also look past the factor that some people are just doing their job and, to an extent, following rules and guidelines can’t realistically be avoided.

What really scunnered me was the abject lack of compassion from the conductor; the stony faced passive patience while I absorbed the news, protested and then got my wallet; the lack of even a flicker of consideration to say, as he could so easily have done’ ‘look, don’t worry about it, but check your ticket next time’. I searched his eyes for any of the above. There was nothing, nothing at all.

The disappointment at that crushing soullessness was compounded the very next day as I sought to return a pair of £70 roller blades for store credit in as-new condition that had been bought a few days earlier but were the wrong size (and the correct size wasn’t available). I had to speak to three different members of staff, increasing in seniority, the third of which I had to go ten verbal rounds with before he’d grudgingly make good on my statutory rights. Staggering out of the store I thought to myself – ‘It shouldn’t be this hard to just get along. I shouldn’t be so constantly disappointed in other people?’.

At what point did so many of us decide that our allegiance, our duty of care, was to ‘the man’ rather than our fellow man? Why do so many of us in this country look like cracking a smile would actually break our faces in two?

I know it’s a cliche to say that London is a glum, joyless, armpit of the nation but living here I have increasingly lost the resistance to believe otherwise and I just wonder, not to mention worry, just how widespread this problem is. Is the UK stuck in a joyless rut? Is it, as I suspect, largely confined to England?

After all, who would choose to be English these days, given tbe choice? What is marking the nation out as being the place to be, the people to be, in this 21st century? It’s not its diet, its sporting prowess, its politics, its equality or its media surely. And it’s certainly not the pride in the badge, wrestling as Englanders are to reclaim their flag from the EDL.

There’s a reason why recent successful English TV is period drama, Jane Austen and Sherlock Holmes. Nothing has taken its place since, unless you want to include the gritty Shameless, skinhead-focussed This is England or the long line of tv comedies happy to snidily glorify how rotten everything is out there. Jimmy Carr and Al Murray are not standing at the end of England’s rainbow.

Culturally the warning signs are there too. PJ Harvey won the Mercury Music Prize the other week for her album ‘Let England Shake’, an album that The Guardian describes as ‘an opaque exploration of Englishness delivered in a high, keening voice’. I’ve listened to the CD and heard it live and, as a PJ Harvey fan, I was surprised that it won. I would wager that the delight that someone so talented was taking the first faltering steps at untangling what England is played a part.

It may be a similar story for the admittedly sublime West End show Jerusalem, returning for a second run after sweeping the board at the Tonys. The play is a no holds barred view of what England was and has now become. There is no conclusion as such (how could there be), unless you count the main character getting beaten to a pulp which, metaphorically, isn’t so far from where England currently resides.

This could all get put down as a xenophobic rant, former SNP member kicks out at the English, ‘cybernat on the loose, out of tne way!’ but I really do think there’s a deep existential crisis going on south of the border, more so than anywhere else although maybe I’ve just forgotten that Scotland’s in as just a perilous condition and I don’t know enough about anywhere else to make a fair comparison.

After all, is it fair to take one example of jobsworth twattery and gross that out across a nation? Possibly not but I really do think that there is a linkage at play here. A person not knowing why they are doing the job they are doing, how it fits into the wider context of their country and how that collective whole in turn is not providing the contentment and satisfaction of their dear and pleasant land. Well, from small problematic acorns grow mighty oaks of despair.  

I can only go by the generalisations of the people that I’ve met and worked with but my conclusions thus far are that the English are slightly yobbish, snobbish, rather selfish workaholics that don’t really know how to enjoy their leisure time without indulging in copious amounts of alcohol. Hopefully I have an unreflective sample size but I can only go by what’s before me.

Not that Scotland differs so much, less snobbish and less yobbish perhaps but we’re not even picking the low hanging fruit when it comes to defining our nation. One small example, I think it’s a terrible shame that with some of the best coast, landscape and mountains in our back garden, only a slither of Scots learn how to surf, golf or ski. Cost is not necessarily a barrier. The more people who did them, the cheaper they would be.   

That said, Scotland benefits from having a better grasp of who she was, who she is and what she could be in the future. England is a bit lost when it comes to all three, hence the English cultural scene embarking on a period of questioning introspection.  

In which direction is the collective heave of England going? I would like to know as I’ll be doing a little bit of the pushing for the next wee while. For me, England at its best is wild moors, picturesque villages, fine tailoring, hearty meals at gastropubs, the fading grandeur of beach destinations, the mutual respect for distinctive regions from Geordie to Kerbow, passionate support of a football team that’ll never make it out of non-league, the self-aware pomp of last of the Proms, Fry-esque eloquence, majestic behind-the-curtain diplomacy, fierce pride in the NHS and simply enjoying a cup of tea. 

That’s not a bad start. 

However, there must be an increasingly concerning reason why the English don’t have a word for joie de vivre, fair dinkum, craic or gie’n it laldie.

And, what admittedly may be underpinning all of this, by George I want my money back.

Nous Sommes Tous Américains

Sep 11

Posted by Aidan in Democracy, International, Society | 31 Comments

Like most folk, I have a very clear memory of when I heard. One of those bright, chilly September days. I was sitting at my desk in the small meeting room me and my team mates had commandeered as an office. The phone rang, my wife was on the line, wasn’t unusual for her to call around then. We’d gotten back from visiting her parents in Boston a couple of weeks before and she was still shifting back into a UK sleeping pattern.

“Somebody’s flown a plane into the world trade centre”

“What? Like a microlight?”

“No, a plane. A big one. Go find a TV.”

I went through to the kitchen, where my two team mates were playing pool and told them what happened. I remembered somebody had moved the TV from the kitchen to the main open plan office for Wimbledon and it had never been moved back. The person who’d done it had probably been laid off in the round of redundancies that had happened while I was on holiday, the dot com collapse was in full flow and I’d found out maybe 20 of my friends had lost their jobs in back channel email.

BBC1 had interrupted it’s programming and was showing News 24. I’d never seen that before, usually it didn’t start until the wee small hours. It was going to become a familiar sight over the next weeks and years. Smoke was billowing out, the presenter didn’t seem to know much of anything. People started gathering round the small, black CRT with rabbit ear antennae on top of a filing cabinet.

And that’s where the memory starts to fade. A few people asked what was going on, I don’t remember if we watched the second plane hit or if it was after that. I think we did, but it might have been a repeat. I’ve seen that footage so many times over the last 10 years I can’t trust that. I do remember grimly remarking about how my parents-in-law had lunch with us at the airport gate in Boston and thinking how different and relaxed airport security was there compared to the UK. A metal scanner, a bag check.. nobody asked for your boarding pass until you tried to get on the plane.

What I do remember is sitting in the smoking room while the towers burned, calling my wife and chewing over what had happened with the other half dozen regulars in there, and the half dozen more who joined us. It didn’t take long to realise that, regardless of insane project schedules, nothing else was getting done that day.

And so I spent the next few hours alternately smoking and on the internet trying to find friends and family.

I remember getting home and sitting on the floor, having wired up the monitor and keyboard to the server I remember the heat from the computers and the early ADSL modem, and staying up late talking with folk in the US, and smoking. A lot. A friend describing the amount of ash and dust that was billowing past her window in New York.

A few days later we had a company meeting in the kitchen to discuss it. Then now faded memories of Kenya and Yemen were fresh and along with the sorrow for the deaths and the fear of future attacks there was a dread of what the response would be and what that would mean for the people in the countries the US would retaliate against.

Kate adds:

It’s one of those memories where everyone will remember where they were when it happened.  I was at work, in a meeting.  A very important meeting with very important people.  All the way through, our mobiles were humming and vibrating.  We ignored them.  Important stuff to discuss, two hours worth, which in the end produced some very worthwhile results for some of Scotland’s most marginalised people.

The boss’s landline rang as soon as she switched the ringer back on.  Her boyfriend was almost incoherent.  He worked in high finance and had business associates in the towers.  Effectively the message was turn the TV on, the World Trade Centre is on fire.

I’d left the room at this point, not wishing to intrude on a private conversation.  A shriek beckoned me back.  We stood there in open-mouthed silence, trying to compute the images on the screen with the fragments of information we had.  It was discombobulating actually.  The whole office suddenly whirled, with everyone up from their desks and in and out of each others’ offices.  The internet crashed.  News sites were jammed.

And so it continued for the afternoon, with everyone trying to work out, find out what was going on.  But work beckoned, so dipping in and out was the best that could be managed.

I do remember an uneasy, fearful quiet settling eventually.  A sense that what ever it was, it was huge, an event of such enormity, it was difficult to grasp.

And most folk going home early.  I picked my bairn up from school, came home, switched the TV on and spent the evening holding my wee man close, flicking constantly between channels, tears rolling down my cheeks most of the time.  Still trying to sort through the snippets from the day and make sense of it all.

In the days afterwards, the mood was strange.  Subdued but with everyone being kind and rather gentle.  Everything slowed, and the facts leaked out.  Not just the World Trade Centre, but the Pentagon.  The astonishing bravery of firefighters especially, but also, all those others who ran in the wrong direction, to try to save.  The unbearable sadness of all those final messages home.  The tragedy of so many ordinary lives made utterly extraordinary by circumstance.  By being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Everyone had an opinion on what, how and why.  It was the only topic of conversation.  But in amongst all the conspiracy theories and the almost unbelievable truth, a universal realisation.  That everything had changed.  That things would never be the same again.  And so it has proved.

Malc’s recollection:

I’ll be demonstrating my youthfulness by comparison here, but on 11 September 2001, I was 17 and in my final year at Keith Grammar School.  It was a Tuesday afternoon and we had P.E – which various members of my class frequently missed.  Thus one of my friends was sitting upstairs in the cafe watching on TV as the attacks happened.  When the class was over, he came down to the hall to tell us what had happened.

P.E was the final class of the day for me, but we were due to head to Aberdeen to a schools public speaking competition at the end of the school day.  The bus left at 4, so when the bell went I ran to the school’s computer room and  got myself to the BBC website to see what was going on.  Even at that stage I knew I was watching a world-changing event, though we didn’t know the whole story.  At that point, the details were still hazy – the Twin Towers had been hit, but they were still standing, and there was no news about the other two planes at that point.

What remains with me are two clear memories after that.  The first of those was the school bus to Aberdeen.  Strangely enough, for a public speaking competition – even though there were only 3 of us involved – we took around 25 pupils with us as support.  I’d never been on a quieter school bus – especially when the news came on the radio.  There were younger kids on the trip too – 12/13 year olds who would usually be joking around – and even they were quiet, desperate to find out what had happened.

The second memory is from the following day at school.  Our sixth year was quite a small group – around 40 or so pupils – and so a few of us had a free period and were sitting around in the common room.  It was very quiet – a very strange, subdued atmosphere for a school common room.  Someone brought a US flag which we hung up in the room.  I remember a few of the folks were quite upset so we decided that – just as a group of 20 or so, when we were all together – we’d go to the hall and observe a couple of minutes silence.  A small gesture, meaningless in its simplicity and its practical implications.  But it was something that at that point in time, we could do.  And even though none of us – I don’t think – had any physical connection with any of the victims of the attacks, we had felt a connection with America that day, and that was a connection we felt, as a group, we had to commemorate.

As a politics undergraduate, and subsequently an International Relations postgrad, specialising in Terrorism, the events were a key influence on my area of study.  Making sense of it at the time – as a 17 year old – was impossible.  Making sense of it 10 years later, with an MSc in the subject isn’t any easier.

Iz it cos of Rap? – The UK Riots

Aug 18

Posted by Guest Blog in Society | 14 Comments

Another great guestpost from Alex MacDonald:

Dreda Mitchell, the writer, broadcaster and teacher claimed in a BBC News television debate that she uses rap music to “teach children a variety of literary devices”. The controversial debate focused on a shift in recent culture and featured historian, David Starkey and the author of ‘Chavs’, Owen Jones.

During the debate, Starkey claimed that British culture had totally transformed, “chavs have become black, whites have become black, and gangster culture has become the fashion.” These words caused widespread online debate, and provoked comments from Labour leader, Ed Miliband, who described Starkey’s argument as “disgusting & outrageous”. Starkey claimed that Black culture, including rap music, “glorifies” the rioting that the world witnessed in the UK recently.

But were the comments actually outrageous?

I had a very brief opportunity to interview Dreda Mitchell after her appearance on the BBC; I asked her what her thoughts were regarding rap music.

Alex: ‘are the lyrics “move bitch get out the way hoe” considered to be a positive literary device for children?

Dreda: “I use well chosen socially conscious rap lyrics and they work really well especially with re-engaging boys.”

Alex: “Ok, well would you agree that some rap lyrics are harmful? Do these not affect the kids just as much as the productive lyrics you promote?”

Dreda: “I use Nas’ song ‘I Know I Can’ which is great to use to teach the literary device of theme in writing.”

Whilst I did not receive a direct answer to my second question, I did feel that any response would have been controversial. When we analyse rap, we can see that it does not have the cleanest record for being clean. However, rap music is essentially urban poetry (rhythm and poetry), and urban poets for the most part are known to perform about their lives and experiences. Would that therefore not make rap an excellent annotation of society and culture?

My initial thoughts from this conversation were that if lyrics need to be “well chosen” then clearly there are lyrics that need to be filtered out. These censored lyrics are usually condescending, derogatory and chauvinistic: a fitting example would be “move bitch”. If rap lyrics need to be so carefully selected, then clearly there is a lyrical problem with most rap songs. Or are the public just a bit prude when it comes to black music?

I have a keen ear for rap. It is one of my favourite genres of music, however, I have learnt to take the lyrics with a pinch of salt. As I am white and middle class it can be said that I am not a traditional target for rap music, but we aren’t really traditional with music anymore. In the contemporary era, everyone from age 1 to 100, and people from all backgrounds technically could listen to rap. It is consistently on the radio and its lyrics and image are gradually becoming more and more acceptable to the wider public.

So is Starkey right? Is the combination of Black music becoming more accessible, separate cultures coming together, and the influence of rap “glorifying” rioting enough to shatter communities? Does listening to rap subconsciously make me participate in Black culture, and is Black culture violent and if so, does that make me violent? What of the message it promotes?

Does rap music glorify rebellion and promote destruction or does it simply reflect? How do we feel about rap towards women? Does rap music create the illusion of women as objects? What about music from the rock band KISS, did that not also? What about Hustler magazines and the Miss World competition, all in their own right they have a way of creating the object illusion.

Rap music doesn’t tell me to stand up and riot, at least no more than rock music and certainly not as much as punk music and heavy metal. And who says that black people do not listen to other genres of music apart from rap? It is quite possible that some black people do not like rap music. So what then? Whose culture do they belong to? Are they less likely, according to Starkey’s theory, to commit criminal offence?

Although rap, rock and other genres of music promote certain problematic issues, they are all problematic yet necessary together. They all promote an integrated culture, they promote heritage and diversity, yet they are enjoyed by all. It is true, modern rap is not the easiest thing in the world to defend especially with such lyrics as “move bitch”. But suggesting that one culture’s heritage is the reason for the chaos is nothing short of ‘Ludacris’.

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