Disingenuous
Holiday Reading | Backword home | Redoubled Efforts
Saturday, 24 November 2007
[Warning: this is a semi-drunk post without -- so far -- a conclusion.]
I’ve just been watching the X-Factor (I actually voted tonight, an occupation I usually consider restricted to morons, for Rhydian; worryingly, I got through first time) where Simon Cowell defended his girl group Hope because they’d sung a solo song (which I, being a few million miles behind popular culture hadn’t heard before) and given the lead vocal to one member while the rest, to paraphrase Louis Walsh, "oohed and ahhed". But Cowell chose the song. Everyone’s criticism but his was that one member was carrying the rest. His response was: it’s a solo song: they can’t sing it as a group. This is true, but it goes round the point. I’m glad that the voting thing has done so well in the commercial sphere; I’m a lot less pleased that spin has caught up.
Last night, I went to the Cardiff Beer Festival with DL (who I know I’ve mentioned before). I also met up with a colleague, KH, whose wife is studying for a PhD, and I introduced them, because DL works at Cardiff University and knows about these things. But KH’s 19-year-old son was there (in a hoodie boasting ’Made in the 80s’ in Frankie-Says-Arm-The-Unemployed script) and glasses with lenses in the shape of beer glasses, and he recognised DL from school sports days (DL’s son was in the same year). But after a long, rather strange diversion concerning school sports and whatnot, we got back onto PhDs. I said that tables of average earnings definitely showed that they were a worthwhile investment. Gordon Brown, I suggested, had a PhD. DL did not know that and didn’t believe me. Indeed, the Number 10 site bears him out. No mention of a PhD. (Brown went to uni at 15 there, however.) Wikipedia however, notes that Gordon does have a PhD. I believe the second source. I know Gordon Brown is a clever, studious, hard working guy. While I used to like him (I don’t now), the PhD goes with the character. Why the omission? I suspect it’s a kind of inverse snobbery. But Simon Cowell (him again) was in the tabloids (probably a Murdoch) when he spent some outrageous sum on a car. That doesn’t shock the proles, but a reward for perseverance and effort as well as brains (characteristics I look for in a politician) would turn them off. WTF? Really, WTF? Cowell spends half a million (IIRC) on a vehicle - which is more than most houses and pretty much the average wage in the country over 20 years - when 5% of that gives you something faster than speed limits anywhere outside Germany. And this is news? I like Cowell, his radioactive teeth and flat-top which doesn’t quite fit scare me, but I think he’s a geek pretending to be a smoothie, and I relate to that.
This brings me to the other thing I meant to blog: this shit. This made my blood boil, so I apologise in advance for incoherence.
We must also ensure that we develop and strengthen our appeal to aspirational voters, including those whose lives have been made more comfortable by Labour economic success over the last ten years.
I flatter myself that I’m an articulate guy. I used to be a Labour member, and I think roughly this: the Labour Party (as it was and should be and may be again) is an aspirational party. We were for, in Gordon Brown’s phrase, "Education, education, education." We were relaxed (another New Labour term) about people giving their earnings back to the Treasury, because education allowed them to earn a lot more (and benefit the nation: well educated countries do very well to the best of my knowledge), so they kept more than they would have under a different system. OK, not all of them would have (though the poor do better under traditional Labour). We’re not about having more cars than your neighbours. If you want that, fine, but that’s not a voting thing.
There should be no no-go areas for Labour in Wales.
But why not? We’re predicated on the class war. (Lousy use of words, but the moving finger and all that.) We’re not the friend of everyone or the Red Cross, we’re on one side of a war. We don’t like the bosses and the factory owners and they don’t like us. Is that too Marxist for you? We can afford not to win their votes (especially as many of them aren’t citizens or subjects or whatever we are, and so can’t vote). My idea of aspiration is more like Educating Rita. Knowledge is, if not power, freedom. This is what the left should be about.
Um, I seem to be back. Bad news for all.
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