politics

Not a lot of people know this

A felt pen drawing of journalist Julie Burchill — Julie Burchill

I have a tiny internal Julie Burchill living in my head, against whom I check all my ideas.

(UPDATE: this might be the NME article, but the text in the scan’s too small to read. It’s from 25 October 1980)

Really. She’s a tough critic too – I don’t think she’s actually liked an idea yet. She took up residence a long time ago, when I read one of the prickly and brilliant pieces she wrote for the NME about ‘rock’s rich tapestry’, an idea she despised because it summed up all the soft, wooly, wholegrain eclecticism of ‘serious rock’. In the article (I wish I could find it online, or even the date it was published) she famously said: “the only things that matter are the Sex Pistols and Motown.”

This is the kind of sulphurous pop Stalinism that she went on to apply to… well… everything, in various top jobs in the grown-up press ever since. We don’t get on at all, me and my tiny internal Julie Burchill. She’s a sort of judgemental Jiminy Cricket: I’m soft and accepting, she’s tough and intolerant. I think we should treasure variety and strangeness and she thinks that’s evidence of valueless decadence. I like complexity and openness and she likes simple, common-sense solutions. But still, she persists. Intellectually I know she’s wrong (and bitter and cruel too) but emotionally I fear she’s right and that the world really is as bleak and pointless as she says it is. So I go on consulting her and she goes on trashing my mushy relativist bullshit. When will I learn?

Building Magazine on why construction needs migrant workers

Gordon Brown’s announcement of a larger quota for desperately needed overseas construction workers is cue for a good piece from Building magazine about migrant workers on UK sites. The article focuses on the experience of workers on the huge Paternoster Square development, next door to St Paul’s Cathedral in The City – from Italy, Hungary, Zimbabwe and Germany. This is the kind of access only a prestige trade title like Building could get but it’s crying out for a longer treatment – five workers from four nations on one well-run site is hardly an in-depth survey.

The magazine’s coverline sums up the UK building trade’s attitude to migrant workers: “The indispensibles: why construction needs migrant workers”.

Churchillian in more ways than one

Ed Richards, principle advisor on Telecoms and new media to the Prime Minister until he took a job at Ofcom last week, reveals Tony Blair’s decisiveness on Broadband Britain:

“First, I want you to tell me what this broadband thing is. Second, I want you to tell me why it’s in crisis, and third, I want you to sort it out…”

Take-up for broadband is pretty impressive now, even from a very low base. According to NOP, a quarter of UK Internet households will be on broadband by the end of 2003. Blair’s Churchillian approach might actually be working.

edemocracy spiked!

Spiked is run by the survivors of Living Marxism magazine, the high profile and often entertaining voice of the British Revolutionary Communist Party during the nineties. The magazine was finally steam-rollered by a law suit in 2000 but these guys were always more switched on than the rest of the factional hard left so it’s no surprise to see them back with a stylish, readable web site and now a series of debates on the entirely relevant theme of IT after the crash.

Spiked’s mission is the debunking of trendy ideas – in politics, science, business, anywhere really. But this is really just classical entryism – a subtle and accessible way of doing the important work of blowing away our ‘false consciousness’ and reasserting the eternal oppositions of the class struggle – labour vs capital, state vs individual etc. (I can’t find a trace of the political party itself. Was it wound up? Surely it can’t be this lot?).

I guess the logic of the project is that debunking is infectious: for every orthodoxy persuasively overturned there is a potential convert to the larger cause. There really is nothing so satisfying as a cogently argued rubbishing of the status quo – whether it be climate change (it’s not happening), edemocracy (it’s just more state coercion) or testicular cancer (it’s no big deal).

As a strategy it’s obviously working. If tonight’s meeting was anything to go by, they’re frequented by plenty of non RCP people, many of whom may have no idea what Spiked stands for and little or no sympathy with their goals (like me). More subtle still, with no actual political party to push, Spiked can rightly claim to be entirely independent and new recruits are recruits to a way of thinking rather than to a political creed. Very postmodern.

In this debate, Charlie Leadbeater, advisor to number 10 and prominent optimist, argued that informal, self-organising digital networks (like this blogging thing) might present a way of holding governments and trans-national institutions to account. Influential forecaster James Woodhuysen, for Spiked, disagreed – entertaingly, as always. edemocracy is phoney – worse, it’s a barely disguised attempt to reinforce state control, provide new channels for coercion and permit governments to steamroller dissent. All of this communication is just a smokescreen, a clever distraction from the real business (in ‘the real world’) of production – substituting participation for real power. This programmatic emphasis of production over communication (content over form, real over imaginary) is sooo last century and, obviously, neglects the actual, objective reality of networked communications, though. Communication in the 21st Century is production.