The Swedish Model

As previously noted, Britain is on the road to becoming the new Sweden. Just two months ago, the ghastly Polly Toynbee wrote an article effectively bemoaning how long it would take her messiah, Grodon Brown, to remould Britain on the Swedish model. Incredibly, which is to say in the face of all that history has to teach us about the perils of trusting government, she writes, with all appearance of a straight face and earnest intent:

Brown will not turn Swedish in one spasm. It took the Social Democrats nearly 70 unbroken years of steady progressive government to reach this civilised state of relative equality, high living standards, excellent public services - and high happiness ratings. It needs citizens who want to travel that way. It needs trust in government, which semi-anarchic Britain and its poisonous rightwing, anti-state press forever undermines.

The irony of having such wilfully ignorant, prejudiced, ostrich-like remarks published on the internet, that triumph of deregulation in the face of state interference to which were the state still running the telecommunications systems in this country our access would be both unreliable and desperately slow, is almost certainly lost on Pol, who is unlikely ever to have read this article by Nick Herbert which outlines the situation in Sweden far more dispassionately (and therefore accurately) than Brown's head cheerleader would ever be capable of. Eww, Polly in a cheerleader's outfit. What a thought. I'm tempted to Fisk her entire article, but I think it can be dismissed in its entirety by pointing out that 70 unbroken years of one party rule is generally a terrible thing for a country, particularly as statist a party as Sweden's Social Democrats. Your colours are showing, old 'been.

Tempting and delightfully easy as ridiculing the Seventies throwback Polly Toynbee is, this is not the thrust of my point today. Anyone with the merest independent streak to his thinking knows that the Swedish model is a thin disguise for the wholesale purchase of votes from supplicants (as Janet Daley says, if you pay people to be poor, you'll never run out of poor people) rather than any truly "progressive" policy. But since Brown's independent streak pretty much runs out of steam after wanting to be PM because he "stood aside" for Blair in the Labour leadership election of 1994 (and is he actually foolish, arrogant and hubristic enough to believe that this entitles him to become PM by right of inheritance? Can he possibly give any credence to the notion that had he become Labour leader in 1994 there would still be a Labour Premiership to inherit at all?), he's charging ahead with this remodelling, which brings me to the less savoury aspect of the Swedish model.

Like Britain, Sweden has taken in hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the last twenty years, and their experience of combining the multiculturalist ethic with an overweening welfare state does not appear to have been a happy one.

Just one of the many pages linked from that page is this one. Or as Polly says, "how it would raise spirits if the chancellor would suggest Sweden as the chosen model for his coming time."

You wanna incur the wrath of ... whatever, from high atop the ... thing?

I've been slack here lately for a number of reasons. I suppose the first one is that recently everyone seems to have come round to the whole Labour-hating horse I've been flogging for years (or months, to be more accurate, in terms of this blog). It's not so much fun when most people would agree with what you write. I've also has less time available at my computer, and it's enough work simply to read the stuff I want to read, let alone to write about any take I have on it. A friend of mine was given his notice at work recently, and not before time in my opinion: not because I think they should have fired his ass a long time ago but because they never gave him anything to do, and had he been generally less timorous on such matters he would have quit months ago. The reason I know this is that when I, gloriously "between projects", log into Gmail around noon, he'll be online and will immediately hit me up on Gmail chat. All well and good, except very quickly the impression is formed that when I sit at my computer, unemployed, I'm busier than he is. I have more shit to do at my computer than he does at his, and he's getting paid!

So, a few links then.

Believe in nothing, until it has been officially denied.

Someone's off-message! Your job's none too safe!

I need to watch things die, from a good safe distance.

I had a big eulogy half-written out for this, but it just sucks too much to write about. Maybe another time.

Looking forward to the National Identity Register, then.

At present, the West Wing line making me laugh the most, including the title of this post, is:

SAM: The GAO needs a little housekeeping, and that's my nickname, okay? I'm "The Housekeeper."

TOBY (interrupting): Hey.

SAM: God, that's a terrible nickname ... I'm not going with that nickname any more.

Whispering Death

I caught Sajid Mahmood's opening spell yesterday afternoon. My knowledge of such things is incomplete, but I wouldn't be surprised if he were the first Muslim to play for England, as Monty Panesar recently became the first Sikh. Both had pretty ausipcious débuts: Panesar's maiden Test wicket was that of his boyhood hero Sachin Tendulkar, but Mahmood's yesterday was surely dreamlike for him. Presented with his first England cap that morning by Andrew Flintoff (the man he beamed in the nets in 2004), he waited 21 overs in Sri Lanka's first innings before being tossed the ball. His second delivery was cracked for 4 and he dropped the ball as he began his delivery stride for his third. Yet at the end of his second over, he was edged to slip and the safe hands of Marcus Trescothick. Another wicket in his third, and a run-out and a third wicket in his fourth over left him with a first Test spell of 4-2-9-3. Can't complain.

He looks the part too. Although his run-up is somewhat less extravagant, he is similar to Michael Holding in the sense that he fairly jogs to the crease like a medium pacer, only to unleash a fearsomely fast delivery. Sky Sports, absurdly, billed his as "fast medium". His loosener was 84mph and his was the fastest delivery of the day at 90.2mph. Allan Donald, at one time considered the fastest bowler in the world, rarely got much above 90, so I don't know what kind of crack the Sky Sports team is on. (Mind you, they continue to give David Lloyd gainful employment, so their mental deficiencies can't be too surprising.)

Well done Saj.

Internment Acquisitions?

For some reason I have an undefinable reservation about expressing delight at the imprisonment of these four. Perhaps I'm just wary of becoming a hang 'em and flog 'em type. Nonetheless, as someone whose family has been a target of these self-righteous pricks, I am extremely pleased. My stepfather used to run a company that worked with HLS, and found that the cost of doing legitimate business with a leading pharmceutical research institution whose work has doubtless saved, eased and prolonged hundreds of thousands of lives was to have his credit cards cloned and unwanted goods and services ordered and paid for on it, as well as to have his phone number published in Tweaky Self-Importance Monthly so that "campaigners" could phone us up and harass us whenever they were having trouble maintaining erections. None of this, of course, comes even close to the kind of distress foisted upon the family of Gladys Hammond, so I can only assume that those people are even more pleased about this sentence than I am. Long may they remain there.

The BBC, of course, has managed to report this news without actually reporting it, if you see what I mean. Rather than report that extremist terrorists with no respect for common decency and no concept of human compassion have been put away for many years, they report that the case "didn't help animal rights". In the words of Leo McGarry, I would think! (It's all in the delivery though.) Note how they manage to squeeze the "campaigners'" message into the third paragraph, yet it's not until the fourth that it's even mentioned that they pleaded guilty. Plus ça change....

I need to watch things die, from a good safe distance.

So, a week between posts (apart from that one earlier). Pretty slack.

This week being what it was, however, I'd expect not to make any posts. Had I been writing this blog five years ago, there'd've been no posts for about a month after May 14th. Five years ago next week, Tool's Lateralus was released and I went into hibernation: the only logical, the only conceivable course of action in response to this event. As the follow-up to the greatest, the most terrifying, the most beautiful, the most agonising and the most exhaustively cathartic record ever made - Ænima - Lateralus could only be greeted in such a manner. I listened to it compulsively for weeks, forsaking all else. I believe I've mentioned this before.

But if its release was epochal, it could never live up to Ænima in the long run. Staggering though it is, in all its fearful fury, cool rationality and boundless hope, it could never live up to Ænima. It gives me goosebumps and what certain irony-free Tool fans like to call Toolgasms every time I listen to it: Ænima makes me want to die. There will never be anything like Ænima from any band ever again, not even Tool, and the inevitable disappointment Lateralus caused me, for all its brilliance, has lowered my expectations for the new one.

A little too much, actually. I've simply been lazy and uninspired this week. I've not been sequestered somewhere absorbing each and every note numerous times on the first day. I've had it a week and I've listened to it twice.

I do like it though, I think. My friend asked me what I thought, mid-way through the first listen. I said, "I'll let you know in a couple of months." At least.

Clod-hopping

Much hoo-haa recently about the BNP, with everyone pretty much conforming to type. As previously mentioned, Labour tried desperately to energise its base by predicting that "eight out of ten" voters in certain boroughs might vote BNP. (In fact, it was eight out of ten "families", which raises interesting questions itself. I thought the family-as-block-vote gag was only pulled by those least likely to vote BNP, but whatever. Apparently the white working class, too, likes to discourage independent thought in its children. No wonder Labour keeps getting elected.) As a piece of electioneering, it was generally held to have been an unmitigated disaster (in terms of generating free publicity for and sparking debate about the BNP and thus fixing their name in voters' minds), so no change there for Margaret Hodge. The BBC forgot it was supposed to be impartial and had David Dimbleby destroy Nick Griffin live on air. The Conservatives appeared to have all undergone procedures to remove the words "asylum" and "immigration" from their vocabularies, thus ensuring that any stray Labour votes from the white working class really would go to the BNP. The Lib Dems continued their policy of studied irrelevance, neither gaining nor losing much ground in all the fuss. And everyone continued to insist on referring to the BNP as a far-Right party.

This suits Labour, of course, since the Conservatives are (or at least used to be) a Right-wing party, and nothing is more likely to frighten centrists or swing-voters away from the Conservatives than the idea that they're essentially of the same stripe as the BNP. It suits the BBC, too, for the same reason. As long as this fatuous meme can be perpetuated, half the battle against the Conservatives is already won.

It's slightly alarming that I have to reply on the cadaverous Lord Tebbit to back up this argument, but mostly I do. There was a brief exchange of correspondence in the Telegraph, in which Tebbit pointed out the fallacies inherent in the description of the BNP as Right-wing, Unison General Secretary Dave Prentis displayed his ignorance (as befits a trades unionist) and reflexive acceptance of said fatuous meme, and Tebbit elaborated, with a little back-up.

Then Toby Roberts got in on the act. I've never heard of him before (I rarely read the Sunday Telegraph), which is clearly because he's not that bright and isn't allowed to write for the serious papers very often. His article consists almost entirely of a cheerful description of his background, before carefully constructing an elaborate straw man argument and tearing it down quite emphatically. In the last paragraph (the only part of the essay that contains any actual propositions) he concludes that because the BNP "would institute legal distinctions on ethnic grounds ... would make policy by labels [and] ... really are haters", they must be an extreme Right-wing organisation. This doesn't contradict anything said by Tebbit, of course, but that didn't stop him descending into abuse. Tebbit's point was only ever that racism, in and of itself, is not Right-wing any more than it is Left-wing. It is simply racism. The BNP takes its racsim and dresses it up in Left-wing policies. Ah, fuck it: Tebbit said it better anyway. But I'll just quote the best bit:

The fact, which even the most confused clods should be able to understand, is that nationalism, racism and anti-semitism are not uniquely of the Left or Right but can be found on either side of the spectrum. The misunderstanding of this goes back to 1939, when Hitler and Stalin were allies, and the Communist Party in Britain opposed the war with Hitler by fomenting strikes in the mines and the docks.

Our efficient propaganda machine labelled the Nazis "Right-wing", both to counter the far Left's efforts to assist Stalin's ally Hitler, and to help Attlee bring the Labour Party into Churchill's wartime coalition.

Labour, and the Left in general, has been buying into this misapprehension ever since, and has been persuading the voters to do so too. Freddy Salinger isn't deceived.