Notes from the Panopticon

The World’s Toughest Kiwi

"If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is.": Mark Twain 1835-1910

Last time I visited New Zealand, the film "The World's Fastest Indian" had just been released. Based on a true story and celebrating of a real life eccentric, it starred Anthony Hopkins as Burt Munroe, an elderly Kiwi from Invercargill. He lived alone in a small community where everyone was very close. His reputation was mixed: admiration for his mechanical skills; distaste for his gardening practices (he used to pee on his lemon tree).

I had been told that, if I wanted to understand New Zealand, all the clues I needed were in that film. The main character had a passion for motorbikes; he owned an old Indian (a brand more famous in its day than Harley Davidson is now) and constantly tinkered with it. He used imagination, improvisation, and above all very little money, to tune it up so it went very fast. He learnt of the speed trials for motorbikes on the salt flats of Utah and determined to prove that his was the world's fastest Indian. But he had to do it all on a tiny budget.

His three problems were the flakiness of his machine, his lack of money to fix problems, and his small town background. He did not understand procedures, or rules, or safety regulations. He was accustomed to a world where people made things up as they went along and everyone had a chance.

The two qualities which made it possible for him to break the barriers were his innate charm and his naïve refusal to accept that what seemed to him the obvious solution to any problem might be against the rules. He also possessed an indefatigable ingenuity; he allowed nothing to get in his way.

This story captures a quality that continues to live on in New Zealand. A friend, a nurse, told me about a patient who arrived at her hospital with a serious cut across most of his head. He was 78.

An enthusiastic hiker, he had gone on a three day tramp, alone in the wilderness. His wife was due to pick him up at the end of his trip. So she was surprised to receive a call asking her to pick him up a day early. He had been crossing a river using stepping stones when one of the rocks came loose and rolled away, throwing him into the water. He gashed his head on a rock and the water was so deep he had to swim, but he still had the strength to throw his sodden pack onto the bank and climb out after it.

He mopped up the blood on his head and made a dressing for the wound by ripping up a T shirt. He set about gathering wood and making a fire, despite the fact that much of the wood was green. He painstakingly dried the content of his backpack over the fire, including his mobile phone, and then set off to climb a steep hill to find a mobile phone signal. From there, he telephoned his wife but he still had to walk tens of kilometers to reach the road.

It was his wife who told him how badly he had injured his head. But instead of going straight to the hospital, he insisted on going home to take a shower. His next port of call was the Department of Conservation, where he reported the danger of the loose boulder. Only then did he agree to go to hospital. And when he arrived in the emergency department, he asked for some sutures so he could stitch his own head.

Tough bunch the Kiwis.

Picture credits:

http://www.indianmotorbikes.com/features/munro/munro.htm

www.blacksheeptouring.co.nz/

Christian Right

Rough old week means I have not been able to finish either one of a couple of articles I have on the go. However, a new and good friend has opened my eyes to exactly how grim the Christian Right in the US can be. I need to do more research to fully understand what this misguided movement is doing to America and to the world. A while ago, I came across this Matt Davies cartoon which captures the essence of their creed.

I hope to be back in business next week if nothing else happens and the Christmas season doesn't overwhelm me.

The Sharks and the Jets

The last few weeks have given an insight into the silly, testosterone-fuelled, adolescent nature of our political class. With the smell of an election in the wind, they spent the time braying at each other, calling each other chicken, and striking menacing poses.

Neither side felt particularly confident, so the poses were particularly nauseous and infantile. But they were not unusual. When will politicians grow up and behave in a way that earns respect instead of behaving like gangs of louts?

The press does not help – journalists stand about and egg the idiots on.

And we're supposed to take elections seriously.

The political animal – right or wrong

"I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me." ~ Dudley Field Malone (1882 – 1950)

At last! Controversy! Thank you Common Sense for replying to my post, and especially for disagreeing with me. It forces me to think some more and take stock of my ideas. One day, no doubt, I shall be presented with an argument that makes me change my mind and I look forward to that. But not today. Here is the comment in full:

I seem to think that you bristle when you feel that bloggers are dismissed out of hand as a breed. Yet you lump all politicians together and throw them into the fiery furnace. Did you never hear of a politician you had any time for? Nelson Mandela? Franklin Roosevelt? Willi Brandt? Nye Bevan? Itzhak Rabin? By and large, we get the politicians we deserve, the ones who, like the poor immigrants who service the public sector, are prepared to do the dirty jobs that we are too delicate to face – such as taking responsibility for the dull business of keeping the national show on the road and, sometimes, making the tough decisions that people who don't have to think much about it resent in a knee-jerk way. If you don't like it, put yourself up for public office. Do better. Otherwise you are merely an anarchist or (worse) a blogger whistling in the wind. Oh and by the way, I didn't sign your petition because I thought there was some merit in the argument about health and safety. If the flowerbed tender had been hit by a driver who hadn't seen her, that driver would have been entitled to feel aggrieved and that it was her own fault. The authorities have to make decisions that affect everyone. Just because a local busybody feels her freedom has been curtailed doesn't mean that the authorities are fascists or indeed that they are wrong to cleave to their decision. If you think that's officialdom gone mad, you must have spent most of your life avoiding organisations of every kind.

 

Smaller discussion first.

The wearing of a peaked cap, real or metaphorical, does not stop an individual from being a busybody. Some of the

restrictions imposed by health and safety officers are silly and need to be scrutinised. So do many of the restrictions placed on everyday life by officials making their own interpretations of enabling legislation.

There is a growing body of academic evidence which supports the view that a person stops behaving normally when placed in a position of authority. This explains atrocities like Abu Graib; ordinary decent people feel that their official position allows them to treat others without considering their humanity. On a less vicious scale, the phenomenon happens everywhere and every day in the enforcement of petty regulations by the bureaucratic process.

Iraqi translators who worked for the British army are being refused asylum when their lives are under threat and many have already been killed. This is a nasty but bang up-to-date example of how the moral compass can be lost by those who work in an official capacity. Power goes to their heads.

I shall be writing more about Philip Zimbardo and his Stamford Prison Experiment, as well as his own review – 36 years on – of this groundbreaking work (in his book The Lucifer Effect). This provides incontrovertible proof that the phenomenon exists and is universal. What Zimbardo has to say about how the experiment, and his part in it as designer and controller, affected his life should make us all sit up and take notice. His insights offer hope and understanding. There is a real chance that – if we wanted to – we could devise strategies for controlling the more beastly aspects of human social behaviour.

If you read my text carefully, you will see that I rarely say that bureaucratic actions should be stopped, simply that they should be thought through better, that decision processes should be transparent, and that there should be simple procedures to achieve redress.

And that brings me to the bigger issue: my attitude to politicians. I get a lot of flack (you are not the first to complain), so I revisit my thinking regularly and I agree that at one level I must be wrong. There must indeed be people who go into politics for good reasons.

I also have to admit that the fire which fuels my distrust has subsided with the departure of Tony Blair and his familiar, Alistair Campbell. I see Tony Blair as a political version of Jordan. He bemused people with his charisma just as she bemused people with her chest. Whatever one thinks of Gordon Brown and his policies, he cannot be accused of being vacuous or of not being a serious thinker. Whether or not he is a conviction politician does not matter. He is competent, he has a track record, and when he sets himself a task, he usually gets it done with limited negative fall-out. The fact that he believes the constitution should change in a direction that I would like is an added extra (although not far enough, I hasten to add.)

One of the aims of my blog is to examine ways in which democracy, a fragile system, can be strengthened so that incompetents like Blair and his sidekick can be stopped before they do too much harm. And one of my themes is that the separation of powers, which is at the heart of all serious democratic models of government, should be preserved and extended. No-one has a monopoly on wisdom and the spreading about of ultimate authority is an indispensible safeguard.

An aspect of this, covered in "Cheerleaders", is that MPs should have a separate role from the government executive. They should represent their constituents (i.e. act on their behalf) more seriously, keeping a watchful eye on what the government is doing, instead of blindly cheering them on or constantly attempting to put a spoke in the wheel depending on their party affiliations.

Now back to my problem with politicians. Common Sense provided a helpful parallel between politicians and immigrant workers. I should like to offer another. But I must put up a big warning sign here. It is a powerful simile to illustrate what I mean, no more and no less, and you must not take it any further than that.

If you want to find a concentration of paedophiles, you might look for them at work in children's homes or in other places where children are gathered together away from the supervision of their parents. This does not – of course – mean that everyone who works in these places is a paedophile, or even that a high proportion of them are. But these places are magnets for people with paedophile tendencies.

Now, if you want to find a concentration of control freaks – people who enjoy interfering in other people's lives and telling them what to do – you might well look at the political classes and the places where they gather. As with paedophiles, this does not mean that everyone there is a control freak, but the political process is a magnet for people with controlling ("I know best") tendencies.

I would further argue that, unlike working in a children's home where an ordinary person stays ordinary, working in politics engenders an intoxication with power in all but the strongest.

So my parallel is between uninvited and inappropriate fiddling with private parts, and uninvited and inappropriate fiddling with private lives (if you see what I mean).

Personally, I find power distasteful. I enjoy my life and I believe it is up to others to enjoy theirs with minimal interference if they harm no one but themselves. So the option of seeking office is anathema to me. To go back to Common Sense's parallel, I would prefer to clean lavatories with the immigrants.

Late in life, I became interested in thinking through my ideas about the political world. And I now realize how much my thinking has been influenced by Karl Popper, whom I have not read for at least 35 years. But his ideas have stayed with me. Openness and opportunity for all is what I would like to see and, for much of my life, I have watched it grow in fits and starts. I grieved when I saw it crushed underfoot by unthinking men such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

You can link to Common Sense here.

Philip Zimbardo has a website here.

Jeremy Paxman has written a fascinating analysis of the inner working of the politician, body and soul.

More information about the Iraqi translator asylum issue here.

The link to my article Cheerleaders is here.

 

Victory by Athol Fugard, starring Richard Johnson, Pippa Bennett-Warner and Reece Ritchie, director Cordelia Monsey

"Oft expectation fails, and most oft there

Where most it promises; and oft it hits

Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits."

-William Shakespeare (1564-1616), All's Well That Ends Well

Athol Fugard's play Victory in the Peter Hall Season at Bath's Theatre Royal is short and sour. The anger that was Fugard's muse during the apartheid era has been replaced by despair.

It is easy to understand his disappointment. He had risked much as a white liberal working and waiting for the overthrow of the apartheid regime. The thrill of seeing his objective achieved as Nelson Mandela walked free and universal elections took place must have been euphoric. But then he had to face the realisation that political change made little difference to the day-to-day lives of many of his black compatriots.

The new regime has done little to improve the economic welfare of the country. On average, it can be classed as a middle-income economy but the reality is that South Africa has one of the highest rates of income inequality in the world. It also faces an epidemic of HIV/Aids, with 20% of its adult population infected, and is having to cope with an influx of refugees, especially from Zimbabwe (a country which provides a stark example of what South Africa could have become).

The government's efforts to expand the economy by increasing the rate of privatisation and by cutting government spending is opposed by organised labour, one of the reasons why growth has not been strong enough to reduce the unemployment rate. Poverty, unemployment and lack of economic empowerment are still endemic among disadvantaged groups. And corruption is a serious problem.

It is not only white liberals like Fugard who have to live with disappointment; at least they have the option of moving away. The people who remain in the slums have little to look forward to and perhaps this is why crime has exploded. South Africa has the second highest level of violent assaults in the world per head of population, and the second highest level of murders. It is top in murders with firearms, top in rapes.

With this background, it is not surprising that Fugard's play is so bleak. A young black couple attempt to rob the house belonging to Lionel (Richard Johnson), a liberal white man. Vicky (Pippa Bennett-Warner) is the daughter of Lionel's dead housekeeper. She was born at the time of Nelson Mandela's release from prison and named Victoria, a symbol of the hope that came with the creation of the Rainbow Nation.

Lionel has recently been widowed and, in his despair, he failed to answer Vicky's calls for help as she faced poverty, abuse and hopelessness in the slums. So she has brought her boyfriend Freddie (Reece Ritchie) to steal money which she saw in the house as a little girl. Freddie too is facing poverty and hopelessness; in his mind, the only way forward is to join the gangs of Cape Town.

Fugard has waited thirteen years to write this play which is based on an incident in his own life. He is remarkably honest. It is difficult to admit that the hopes of your entire life have been dashed, which is what he has done in a thinly-veiled allegory for the despair that has replaced the hopes of South Africa's first free election.

One wonders if Lionel is actually Fugard himself, who has now abandoned his home country to live in California – just as Lionel has abandoned Vicky. He recognises that his liberal ideals failed to change the reality of life for the majority of South African blacks.

It must have been hard to hold up the banner of freedom against the vicious white supremacist regime, but Fugard's socialist liberal ideals which helped defeat apartheid no longer offer a better future for the country. Free market ideology has been successfully espoused throughout much of the East (including Communist China and socialist India) as the route out of poverty. But in Africa and the Middle East, regimes cling on to the discredited economics of the 1960s and 1970s, and are surprised when poverty remains and social unrest erupts.

The despair of Fugard's play belongs only to the text. The director (Cordelia Monsey) has brought the best out of an excellent cast. Johnson, Bennett-Warner and Richie present three tortured individuals whose lives are filled with disappointment. They have no hope for the future.

Picture credit

news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/entertainment/1910559.stm 

http://theater.nytimes.com/ref/theater/hirschfeld/index.html?rf=date%2Fdetail_15.html

Foot and Mouth 2007: Moment of truth* for DEFRA

Experience teaches only the teachable ~ Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)

DEFRA (aka the Department for the Elimination of Farming and Rural Activities) now has an opportunity to demonstrate that it has changed its spots.

It has long been vilified as one of the most intrusive and inefficient arms of government. Its insatiable bureaucratic demands, and the inability of its different sections to coordinate and share information, mean that farmers are subjected to repeated inspections and duplicated veterinary visits.

Despite all this data collection, DEFRA has proved itself unable to operate efficiently. In 2006, because of its chaotic office structures, it was months late in distributing the payments due to farmers; at one point, it admitted having 400,000 tasks left to complete. Most farmers were forced to borrow money from (and pay interest to) their banks in order to cover the shortfall.

Farmers have complained bitterly at the extra paperwork imposed by DEFRA's implementation of the animal passport scheme. Now, at last, there is a chance to show that all the pain has been worthwhile. DEFRA should have, at its fingertips, all the information it needs to nip the foot-and-mouth outbreak in the bud. It should be able to trace the exact movements of every single animal that has been affected. It should be able to identify every single animal with which the affected herd has come into contact. And it should be able to do this more or less instantly. If not, all the effort that has gone into the passport scheme has been a waste of time and money.

This time, there is no excuse. In 2001, decisions were made by the Blair government which, as ever, framed policy first and thought about it later. It failed to consult the reports prepared (at great expense) after the 1967 foot-and-mouth epidemic and therefore learned nothing from that experience. Now DEFRA has the animal passport information to hand, while lessons learned from the 2001 epidemic are comfortably within living bureaucratic memory.

If DEFRA fails to deal with the outbreak effectively, the minister in charge (Hilary Benn) should resign. There should also be a wholesale clear-out of the higher echelons of DEFRA. Gordon Brown should make it clear that he expects an exemplary response. Failure should not be tolerated. However unpleasant this crisis may be, our new government should see it as an opportunity to break with the past. It must ensure that the civil service does its job effectively; it must force it to face up to its responsibilities.

* el momento de verdad, or moment of truth, is – rather appropriately – the point in a bullfight at which the matador is expected to make a clean kill.

Picture credit:

by Steven, aged 9 - one of many pictures submitted by children affected by the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic.

www.visitcumbria.com/footandmouth.htm

The Waltz of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh starring Peter Bowles and Maggie Steed

It is not the lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 –1900)

Chichester Festival Theatre's revival of Waltz of the Toreadors (in a new translation by Ranjit Bolt) is played unashamedly as a farce – and a good thing too because its farcical elements made the audience laugh out loud. At a deeper level, the characters are a uniformly miserable bunch.

Anouilh classified this play, written in 1952, as a pièce grinçante (grating), roughly equivalent to Bernard Shaw's plays unpleasant. The play is set in 1910 and Peter Bowles plays General Leon Saint Pé, whose life has been blighted by one big mistake: he remained with his wife instead of following his heart with Ghislaine, a girl with whom he had danced (the Waltz of the Toreadors) 17 years before. Saint Pé had spent those years salving his wounds by rodgering every servant girl who crossed his path, while his wife feigned paralysis to retain control over her husband. She saw him as her object, her possession, although she responded to his moral (but unconsummated) infidelity with Ghislaine by conducting a series of affairs of her own. Meanwhile, Ghislaine wasted her youth, remaining pure and waiting for Saint Pé for 17 years.

Existentialism was the intellectual core of French culture in the mid-20th century and Anouilh was an author of his time. His story is an existentialist parable: you must act in order to validate your existence – otherwise you are nothing. But beneath this philosophy lies the romantic notion that, by acting on feelings engendered by a passing moment of happiness, you will find true fulfilment. In fact, this is no more than an escape from reality, from the need to make the best of the hand you are dealt in life.

The essential theme of the play is therefore an empty one. The resolution – that Ghislaine finds happiness with Gaston (the General's secretary) who grabs his existential opportunity when she throws herself over a balcony and lands on his head – is both trite and unbelievable. The director, Angus Jackson, was right to play for laughs, but he failed to pull off his idea of turning Saint Pé's daughters into a pair of pantomime ugly sisters.

It was Maggie Steed who rescued the play. Her appearance as the General's tortured wife was magnificent. She injected humanity into the suffering of a woman who found herself trapped in a loveless marriage and was unable to distinguish ownership from feeling. Her performance was a startling contrast to the wooden performances of most of the cast who struggled to convey emotional depth in a wordy text.

Picture credit

http://www.russianparis.com/litterature/authors/anouilh.shtml 

Campbell on TV

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken ~ David Hume (1711-1776)

In the television version of his diaries, Alistair Campbell revealed far more than he intended. The three things that I took away from the programmes were:

• Campbell is a vain and deeply disturbed individual who should never have been entrusted with such power
• Tony Blair's poverty of judgement in picking his friends places Campbell in the company of other star choices (Bush, Berlusconi, Blunkett, Mandelson, as well as Cherie's indispensable confidente, Carole Caplin)
• A large part of Labour's (and Blair's) failure to engage the public in positive aspects of its policy agenda was because of Campbell's paranoia and exclusive focus on danger.

His strategy wreaked havoc because, instead of deflecting attention and cooling the impact of events, his actions poured petrol on the flames. His uncontrolled ill-temper and contempt for those who opposed his views enraged his victims who, in turn, sought every opportunity for revenge.

A telling moment was when he showed sympathy for John Prescott and the notorious egg/punch incident. Clearly, Campbell would have done the same, but more restraint is required of a Deputy Prime Minister or Chief Press Secretary.

The culmination of Campbell's career was his involvement in the dodgy dossier, the Gilligan incident, the death of Dr David Kelly, and the Hutton Inquiry fiasco. Campbell had drawn his friend Blair into territory where it was impossible for him to win. Whatever Blair said, whatever he did, he would not be believed. Campbell was his Svengali and he wrecked any moral authority Blair might have had.

The style of the diary is self-serving and pathetic, as shown by the empty note of sympathy for Dr Kelly's widow. But Blair chose to listen to him and, even after Campbell resigned, said that he would telephone him every single day. Campbell was his crutch, so indispensable that Blair insisted that he attend cabinet meetings. He needed Campbell in the same way that Cherie needed Caplin. Hole in the head comes to mind.

Blair and Campbell were a double act, although it is difficult to decide which was Laurel and which was Hardy. It is easy to imagine Campbell muttering "another fine mess you've got me into", but it was Campbell who sexed up the dossier (whatever Hutton concluded). Neither man had the innocent charm of Laurel and both shared the self-importance of Hardy. Their performance would have been comic if it had not been tragic.

Campbell's role in politics was a sorry episode which did much to undermine trust in public life, and in the men and women who populate that world. A sad story of a talented but flawed man, driven by a need to succeed in achieving narrow goals, diminished by an uncontrollable urge always to be right.

Picture credit:

www.weirdwildrealm.com/f-laurel-hardy.html 

Lady Chatterley’s Connection

"Marijuana is taken by .....musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type... ~ Harry J. Anslinger, Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1948

When I heard Jacqui Smith and a catalogue of other ministers putting their hands up to having smoked cannabis in their youth, saying they were wrong and that the war on drugs must continue, a shiver ran up my spine. Forty seven years ago, the barrister Mervyn Griffith-Jones made his case for the prosecution of Lady Chatterley's Lover. "Is this a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?" he asked. This question shocked the public and effectively ended the "one law for THEM and another for US" society, a society which denied respect and independence both to women and to the great unwashed.

Is that attitude now returning? Those ministers – some of whom had the benefits of an education system which allowed children of ability but no money to gain access to opportunity – are drawing the ladder up behind them. And now they are saying, "I experimented with drugs and survived, but let's close the door on the youth of today".

What will it take to prove that the current drug strategy is as much a failure as Prohibition was in the US in the 1920s? It has created the same raison d'être for organized crime. It is also filling the prisons, contributing to social exclusion, and placing a strain on the NHS.

What will it take to tear up this failed policy and look at new ways to control the use of drugs? And what will it take to persuade those ministers that their own experience is relevant. Cannabis did them no harm (if they had been caught, it would have wrecked their careers and we would not have the benefit of their abilities in the higher echelons of government – oops, I did not mean to go there, but what the hell, it's on the way to being true and these ministers might turn out OK).

A large number of media celebrities – welcomed into Downing Street by Tony Blair and hobnobbing with the royals – get away with being part of the drug culture and still manage to live rich and fulfilled lives. It's a cliché, I know, but treating people like children, telling them what they can and can't do, makes them behave like children. Treating them like adults, on the other hand, will give them self respect and a desire to behave in a more mature way.

So ministers, ask yourselves, "What is it about me and Elton John and Kate Moss that is different from every other man and woman who strays into drug taking?" Think again, please. Try to find a better way.

Picture credit:

http://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/Catalogues/Works/tabid/57/frmView/Record/itemID/31993/Default.aspx

The art of the blog: a reply to Polly Toynbee’s article in The Author based on her Bagehot Lecture

…it behoveth him to have a vigilant eye to the proceedings of great princes, and to consider seriously of their designs ~ Sir Walter Raleigh (1554 –1618)

Before I started to publish this blog, I asked a friend for comments. She was very upset by what she read, believing it to be carping and critical. I took her comments to heart and have softened my tone and moderated my language. At the same time, she berated me for not voting because she believes that voting is the right way to take part in the democratic process. My opinion of political parties, however, is unchanged. Based on their behaviour and their attitude to the electorate, my feeling remains – a plague on all your houses.

Instinctive sympathy for the political process

My friend directed me to an article in The Author magazine by Polly Toynbee, "The art of the column", which I read with interest. Toynbee offers two golden rules for columnists:

• "If you are going to try to explain the world of politics to the world outside you need to have a strong instinctive sympathy for the political process and for the politicians who face the very difficult task of getting anything done"
• Spend … "a good long time as a reporter first … both a general reporter and a specialist in some particular subject … for politics is not about the miasma of Westminster … it is about policy and the real world."

Attack on the blogosphere

Toynbee's attack is on colleagues who are "overtly and strongly opinionated" and on the "alternative Rory Bremner voice (that) has become mainstream". She says there is a risk that the style of the blogosphere, its "unmediated sound and fury" coming from "unknown sources with unknown intentions", is "forcing conventional columnists to shout louder, to take up contrarian postures for the sake of it."

Towards the end of the article, she provides some good advice, referring to "the skill of crafting a column with a beginning, a middle and an end, a coherent argument, at least three facts that readers won't know, and information gleaned from talking to the leading players in the case."

Once you have gutted what Polly Toynbee is saying, it comes down to "clear off you amateurs and leave the job to us professionals, you contaminate us". And maybe she has a point. Tony Blair was an amateur when he leapt straight into the job of Prime Minister – and look how we, and more tragically the people of Iraq, have paid the price. This is despite the fact that Blair was ably assisted by Alistair Campbell, a professional journalist who had passed through Polly Toynbee's career development mill. Yet it was only at the end of Blair's career that one glimpsed how much he had done for Northern Ireland and how admired he was in Sierra Leone. With a professional journalist at his side, how did he fail focus public attention on these not inconsiderable successes?

Two objections

I have two greater objections to Polly Toynbee's position:

• First, she turns inclusion in the cosy, inward-looking, elitist world that is professional politics into a virtue for the columnist. How would she cope if the BNP, UKIP or an extreme Islamic party became mainstream? (Not out of the question – let us never forget how quickly the Nazi Party took power in Germany in the 1930s).
• Second, she places emphasis on the moderating effect of working for a newspaper, its editor and its publisher . My thoughts may come from an "unknown source", but I can assure her that I have never worked for Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch.

On one point I must agree with her – "… if you fail to be entertaining no-one will read you. It takes bravado to go out there and tell the world what you think." Finding readers is many, many times harder in the blogosphere. The blogger does not have the benefit of passing traffic as Toynbee does from the comfort of her newspaper column.

But even without readers, I benefit from the process of writing. With its discipline, I clear my thinking and there is always the faint chance that some passer-by may read and be interested in what I say. I have no illusions.

Incandescent fury

My original motive for starting to blog was an incandescent fury at having to live in a country led by the shallow and inconsequential Tony Blair, whose mindless actions led to the deaths of tens of thousands in Iraq and the erosion of civil liberties and the right to free speech at home. Only fundamental constitutional reform will protect us from another leader of his ilk: simultaneously besotted by his own convictions and propelled into knee-jerk policy-making by a hysterical and hostile press. I am heartened that Gordon Brown sees a need for constitutional reform and I now watch and wait for a better future.

Smell of competence

Polly Toynbee's article, and my friend's original criticism, have made me focus on what I can bring to the party. I want to do better than Richard Littlejohn who sees his job as "sitting at the back and throwing bottles". I try to look at what people do and not at what they say. For example, my wife and I have often argued about the merits of Gordon Brown. Whatever criticism was made against him, I was unable to get away from the fact that he has run the economy much better than any Chancellor in the twentieth century. He just smells of competence. His first days as prime minister feel right too. I will not make a firm judgement until the honeymoon period is over – I am only too well aware that politicians are masters of the finesse. I could not care less about his performance in Prime Minister's question time. For the moment he is making the right noises. If he follows through with liberating policies, with opportunities for better, freer lives, and if he doesn't view the public as potential criminals who need to be watched or as children unable to look after themselves or to make their own choices, I shall breathe a sigh of relief.

I am however, cautious about his reputation for bullying, autocracy and bad temper. But again, his willingness to give up power, first to the Bank of England and now to the Commons, belies this reputation. And if his bad temper was the result of watching the moronic antics of the Blair/Campbell double act, I am inclined to sympathise.

Unnoticed in the stalls

I find I have digressed but hope the diversion has strengthened my defence of blogging. I have one big advantage over Ms Toynbee and other political columnists – I am sitting here and watching from MY vantage point. I might not have a front row seat, but from up here in the gods I occasionally spot things – juxtapositions of actors, things happening off stage – that may go unnoticed in the stalls.

One more point: in democracy, no-one is an amateur. We all pay our taxes or receive our benefits, we all have a right to vote (or in my case not to vote), and we can all have our say, despite Blair's efforts to stifle free speech. The internet has yet to settle but it has the potential to be massively democratising, to become a moderator of the power of the cosy elite to which Ms Toynbee is privileged and proud to belong.

And finally, to show that I have been paying attention, here are three facts that are not well known. In the 2005 general election:

• For every 96,482 votes, the Liberal Democrats won one seat
• For every 44,306 votes, the Conservatives won one seat
• For every 26,031 votes, Labour won one seat

So what is there to sympathise with? To my mind, these figures – alongside other weaknesses – seriously undermine the legitimacy of the political process.

I have slipped in a few harsh words here and there to satisfy Ms Toynbee's prejudice against bloggers.

Picture credits:

www.safecom.org.au/lawrence03.htm

www.lboro.ac.uk/.../pages/07-commending.html