A rather excellent excerpt from the BBC’s Test Match Special today, in which Jonathan Agnew tries to get on with commentating on a cricket match while Geoffrey Boycott completely fails to get the hint about when some topics of conversation should be quietly dropped - especially when you’re on live radio and have about a million listeners.
Right-wing people always seem to enjoy quoting a line that’s usually attributed to Winston Churchill:
“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”
As with many things he’s quoted as having said, Churchill didn’t say that. As the Churchill Centre points out, that would have been enormously disrespectful to his wife Clemmie, who was a lifelong Liberal. Besides, Churchill himself was 30 when he crossed the floor of the Commons and joined the Liberals, and was over 50 before he crossed the floor for a second time back to the Conservative benches.
Even if Churchill never said this, the quote sticks in peoples’ minds, and is often used as a faintly condescending way of saying “Ah, not being a Tory is just something you’ll grow out of once you’re old enough to understand how things really are in the world.” It’s repeated often enough that the general assumption has become that as you get older, you get more right wing because you have a family to look after, or because you have more money having worked for a while, and these things naturally make you more inclined to self-centredness.
By these assumptions I should now be a raging Daily Mail-reading Tory. But I’m not. If anything, I’ve moved towards the left since I was younger. I would never have said I was even right of centre, but in the last years I’ve moved to the left. But why?
Firstly, the money thing. Yep, I have more money now than I did 20 years ago. I’ve got a good, steady job in the private sector which pays me more than I need to pay the bills and keeps my family well. But at the same time, I know how much tax I pay and I’m now far more aware than I used to be of how little money some other people have to look after their own families. That makes me ashamed and makes me feel massively fortunate and privileged.
I also know that there are some people who are paid inordinately more than me but who, if they play their cards right, probably don’t pay much more tax than I do and might even pay less. If I could afford to pay more tax to make sure the people at the bottom of the pile are better looked after, then they certainly can damn well afford to pay quite a bit more tax to help the people who they probably don’t even know exist. Giving to charities to help relieve poverty is one thing, but it’s a band-aid placed on a wound that’s already bleeding. On the other hand, taxation for the purpose of running a compassionate welfare state is like charitable giving on steroids. The public sector is best placed to administer social assistance for those who need it, to make sure people are cared for when they’re sick without bankrupting themselves, and that their kids are not hungry. A welfare state makes sure people don’t get into the situation where they have to go to charities for support. It does these things enormously efficiently, and a single donation in the form of an income tax bill does more to keep more people’s heads above water than a year of shoving money in tins. A few percent on income tax for people on higher incomes to make sure the welfare state, education and the NHS are properly funded? Sounds good to me. People on higher incomes are getting more out of society, so it seems only fair to give more back.
Secondly, ah, family values. How dare people want to undermine the sanctity of marriage? Getting married was one of the best things I’ve ever done and it’s one of the things that both made me happy at the time and continues to make me happy. Marriage is companionship, sharing, a commitment, and a bunch of other stuff. Before getting married I didn’t really think much either way about the whole issue of marriage equality - after all, living together was pretty much the same as marriage, right? Actually being married for a couple of years turned all that on its head. It now seems simply illogical to me that marriage between two people should be arbitrarily restricted to couples of the opposite sex. A marriage isn’t made by your chromosomes, it’s made by a willingness to express a commitment and to stick with that commitment. So… nope, not really very right wing there either.
But I have kids! Surely I’ll feel the natural instinct to keep as much possible for myself because my kids have to have all the possible advantages, right? Well… no. Having kids focuses a laser beam on life. I’m lucky. I have a beautiful one-year-old daughter who, right now, wants for nothing - we can keep her healthy, clothed, warm, clean, fed, and supplied with a few brightly coloured objects to play with. Sure, in a few years we’ll probably have to have a talk when she asks for a car or something, but that’s some way in the future. And I know how very, very lucky I am to be in this position. Now I have a child of my own, every story I read in the paper about child poverty or child abuse or child neglect is like a knife in the heart. I hate reading them. Some of them I can’t even bring myself to read. Knowing how many people out there have an enormous struggle just to provide the basic needs for their children… well, there’s the ol’ guilt again.
So yes, experience of life has changed me politically, but it’s damn well not changed me in the way society seems to assume I should be changed. I’m tempted to misquote a misquote of Churchill myself -
“If you’re a Conservative when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a socialist by the time you’re 35, you have no soul.”
The sloganeering of the modern right, with its simple statements of blame and self and insularity, may be easy to digest and appeal to younger minds.. but well.. you’ll grow out of it.
I must have been bored this evening - but if you find yourself stuck in 1981 and need to make stings for the ITV “Watch It!” children’s TV strand (maybe you want to make your own Tiswas titles?), here’s the relevant bit clipped from Paul Keogh’s Dragster and given an 8% speed-up to give it the right pitch and tempo.
It’s even in stereo, but if you’re stuck in 1981 this won’t be an issue as NICAM stereo won’t be officially launched in the UK for about another 10 years. Come to think of it, MP3 codecs will be a while away too, so you should dub it onto tape before you go.
After all, I hardly ever posted to the thing. Why keep Movable Type around just for that? Take it away, the cloud.
The surreal Westminster story of the day concerns the blocked election of Labour MP Cathy Jamieson - who has knowledge and experience of issues related to the current excitement - to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee which today will be grilling the Murdochs. Select committee appointments are generally uncontroversial and unopposed. In fact, there’s even a cross-party committee which agrees on the party makeup and membership of each select committee. So when the appointment of Cathy Jamieson was agreed upon by that committee and was put to the House as a quick petition last night, everyone was remarkably surprised when an obscure Tory backbencher shouted “NO!”, thus objecting to the appointment and referring it back for resubmission or debate.
It’s even more surprising that this happens the night before one of the most important sittings the DCMS Select Committee has ever had, leaving it one member short. Even more surprisingly, the obscure backbencher concerned - Nick de Bois, member for Enfield North - has apparently never met Ms Jamieson. There is no history between the two. An admittedly cursory look at Hansard suggests that de Bois has neither a history of showing an interest in culture, media and sport or a tendency to attend the House during the wee small hours (the latter is just going on his last few speeches, so I might be wrong there).
So why, on a day like this, would a random backbencher stay at the House until after midnight - not participating in any of the other business of the Commons, according to Hansard - just to shout “NO!” when the motion for Ms Jamieson’s appointment was moved? If the objection was somehow party political (which is unlikely, given that he was going against his own parliamentary party’s specific agreement to appoint her) why did he not also object to the other select committee appointment that was nodded through immediately after his intervention? And why, moreover, did he not object to Ms Jamieson’s somewhat less urgent appointment to the committee on member’s expenses only minutes earlier?
The government (his own party..) has moved to have the Commons reconsider the nomination and it will no doubt go through given the cross-party support it has - but this is not going to happen before the Committee meets this afternoon.
de Bois has so far been silent on the matter, which is strange considering that @nickdebois is a prolific Tweeter on political matters.
Why did he deliberately and knowingly go to so much effort to nobble this sitting of the DCMS Committee? The rabbit hole continues to go ever deeper..
Not watching Eurovision this year.. it’s just way too long.
Okay, let’s look at the evidence:
Straggly beard
Lives spartan existence
Extremely leery of the latest technology
Employs absurdly longwinded techniques for reading web pages
Highly fundamentalist beliefs
At odds even with many sympathisers
Although widely considered irrelevant is still a hero to many
Doesn’t celebrate Christmas
Does not own a cellphone due to fears of being tracked
Occasionally issues statements that leave people scratching their heads and trying to divine what they actually mean
I can’t work out whether that bunch of Navy SEALs got Osama bin Laden or Richard Stallman.
The occasional post about things the author thinks is interesting, although the author doesn't have a single body piercing and is therefore not qualified to engage in Internet punditry.
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Mowser
