Don't piss in the kettle

Since last posting here, I have become a full time dissident.

We did not rise early on Thursday. There was no need to: the Commons wouldn't be voting until 5pm and the protest began at 12. We were marching to stop Nick Clegg from bringing off his latest and most dastardly plot. The crowd assembled at ULU. Above us was the Apache helicopter off Wikileaks, ready to gun down with relish anyone seen carrying a beach umbrella. Around us people were handing out flyers giving advice on what to do if we were arrested and earnest men were debating the relative merits of mutualism and collectivism; speaking much as if the matter would have to be settled by the end of the day, by which time we would have seized all major offices of state and it would be necessary for us to install some new form of government (or indeed non-government).

There was also a stall selling the Socialist Worker. My friends and I have long taken issue with the Socialist Worker's "F**K FEES" slogan.

"You should have courage in your expletives," my friend told one of the people running the stall.

"That's actually an old argument," he replied, "You know it's actually illegal to display obscenities and actually you can be prosecuted for it."

That's the spirit.

Soon we were marching. My two friends and I had with us blackboards and chalk. On these we wrote withering, ironic phrases which we angled at passing media people. "Don't piss in the kettle" (accompanied by a picture of a kettle) was an early favourite.

We marched and marched and marched and when we reached the north side of Parliament Square we stopped. Now, it was apparently at this stage that we "deviated from the agreed route": we were supposed to carry on up Whitehall then turn right and have a rally up by the Hungerford Railway Bridge.

There are two things that it is worth saying about this. One, most of us had not heard anything about any agreed route and it seemed as though the way up Whitehall was blocked. Two, the proposed rally point, up by the Hungerford Railway Bridge, is about three quarters of a kilometre from the House of Commons and isolated from politically iconic buildings.

The green on Parliament Square was protected by temporary fencing but some people broke it down on the south side of the square and soon we had all piled in. As a crowd, we were pushing to the west towards the Palace of Westminster. Some sort of battling was going on at the front but, back where we were, we practised our chants and drank whisky-laced coffee:

"Whose streets? Arse treats! Whose streets? Arse treats!"

This went on for some time and people began settling in, making fires from placards and so on. It seems perversely radical to burn your own message.

Then, for reasons few of us understood at the time, we all abandoned the eastern front and tried to scarper off down Victoria Steeet in the south-west corner of the square (I learned later that we were trying to avoid being kettled and that this was the last way out of the square). It was in that corner that the Met had stationed its most ill-tempered employees. It had hoisted some on enormous horses.

There was a certain amount of stick and smoke-bomb chucking going on. Soon, there were cries of "make way, make way" as young girls bleeding from the head were carried back through the crowd. My friend, who is taller than me, said that from what he could see, one of the police officers was a special maniac and might have been responsible for this.

Then there was a cavalry charge. Trying to stay upright in a terrified crowd of hundreds of people while carrying a blackboard and fleeing charging horses as fast as you can is difficult. The Python Terry Jones used to say that he was tickled by the use of 'run away!' as a military command and enjoyed putting it in the script of Holy Grail as many times as possible. On Thursday, it was the only command I had any use for. When I turned round I saw two figures standing among the horses holding each other. They each looked about four and a half feet tall. This little phase was later reported by Sky News as "Mounted police attacked by protesters".

As the crowd reformed, the mood changed. Time to redaub our chalky palimpsests with more serious-minded, horse-themed slogans. My friend came up with "We met at the riding club". I had "Courses not horses". The fences around the green had been supported by concrete blocks; people were now smashing these into smaller pieces to hurl at the police lines. While I watched someone doing this, a man said to me that he thought throwing lumps of concrete was going too far. I suggested that so long as they were very small lumps – gravel-size, say – it might not be that bad. Another man explained to him that he only had these reservations because he is English: in continental Europe they do this sort of thing all the time and everybody thinks it's fine – indeed, it is fine (he said).

It became clear that getting out on to Victoria Street was no longer possible. We drifted back to the green for a slow simmer in the kettle and waited for the outcome of the vote, which was to be announced some time after 5.30pm. We ate some homemade samosas and someone set fire to a plastic booth creating a vast column of black smoke. The air was seriously acrid and choking from this point on.

We had a little radio and were able to announce that the bill had passed to some nearby people. No reaction. We booed a bit and then set about trying to leave. This turned out to be impossible and one of my friends became separated from the other two of us.

Twenty minutes later, I spotted him in a surging crowd of hundreds of people running away from a police baton charge. I pulled him into the relatively calmer waters at the edge of the Treasury building. No sooner had we achieved this reunion than we became the front line. We were some of the only people standing between police lines and people trying to break a Treasury window. A strong light shone on us from a helicopter far above.

The crowd began doing some fairly unusual multi-tasking. One eye had to be kept on the agitated police line but the other eye was needed to appraise the work of the window smashers who, at this stage, were doing a clearly inadequate job. For one thing, they were hitting the central and most boingy window panes. For another, they were using blunt pieces of concrete. People began shouting advice: "smash the wood!"; "no, smash the glass and then pull out the frame!"; "get a run up!".

Eventually, some masked men turned up with a big metal pole and began lancing the window. "Sorry, sorry. Excuse me," was their cry as they came through the crowd.

A light came on inside the room, suggesting that there were police inside. This was a bad window, the crowd decided. There is a board behind it and, even though we've got through the glass, there'll be no getting through that board. Next window!

The next window had no board behind it and was helpless in the face of seasoned lancers. The blind was ripped out and burned. Hurrah! said the crowd.

My friend asked me what we would do if people started going in to the Treasury. Would we go in? There was no time to answer this question: the police had picked their moment and were charging full pelt with their batons, whacking everyone in their way. Disarray ensued. My friend and I were briefly part of a sit down protest. "Sit down! Everyone sit down!" we were yelling. Then the police charged again: "Fuck! Don't sit down! Don't sit down!"

Running away, we discovered a man smashing a Treasury door. With a little bit of help from others, he was through and people began streaming into the building. Time for that question again: are we going to go in? But, within seconds, everyone was streaming out again, as if repelled by a dragon.

Then began a long fight against the police officers inside using a piece of fencing. People smashed the windows around the door and chucked in bangers. Some people managed to grab truncheons. People hurled themselves at police shields. A masked boy opened a window that seemed to have been unlocked. Back in the audience, between 2 and 10 metres away, we were busy contextualising. Storming the Treasury: the most significant bit of civil disobedience since the poll tax riots, or even the Chartists. A new 1968.

The debate disbanded as police made another baton charge. At this point, we were in danger of being crushed between two separate police lines so we headed away from the Treasury down towards the Supreme Court. In this, the most quiet part of the square, we encountered a Financial Times journalist. She wanted to know what was going on but refused to go any nearer to the noisy section. We could have told her anything.

Further along, a pasty man who was bleeding from the head in two places was wobbling on his feet and asking police if he might be allowed to leave in order to attend hospital. The police told him that they were not going to let him through. Where had he got that bandage? they asked him. He had got it at first aid tent on the green, his friends told them. The police were suspicious of this. The pasty man's companions were in a mood of perfect consternation:

"What's the quickest way we can get him to hospital? Please get him an ambulance."

"All the ambulances are gone and I can't let you through."

After a lot more of this a police medic let him through.

Towards the abbey, another police officer was moving batonless through the kettle rounding up tired people who wanted to leave. He proposed letting us leave in small groups from the south-east corner. We stood in a crowd in that corner for a long time. The police guarding the barriers said they wanted young girls. The bored crowd offered this virginal sacrifice with no resistance but still we were not allowed to leave. An hour later, the police told us that they wouldn't be letting us out after all. Terrible service.



We moped around at the barriers by the parliament. A while later, the police were up to something. Hundreds more were pouring in from the House of Lords end. They had dogs. As they formed their lines, someone played the Imperial March from Star Wars through a megaphone.

Then some good news: we were to be set free! Simply head up to Westminster Bridge and we'll let you out. Thank you, police. Very kind. We read our what-to-do-if-you-get-arrested slips and walked on to Westminster Bridge. The police line ahead of us halted and a new one formed behind us. Much colder out on the bridge. People made some fires and started doing the hokey cokey.

Someone with a radio said that the news was reporting that we were refusing to leave. We did a lot of non-political, 'let us go'-themed chanting.

Someone else with a radio said that we were being held in the cold in order to allow Prince Charles to get to the Palladium safely. This was angry-making news.

Some time after 11, they started letting us out. When we got home, we found that the news was only interested in the Charles and Camilla paint business.

Maximum solidarity

I have been thinking long and hard about how to optimise passive solidarity with striking tube workers. All week in fact. Is it more solidarious to make a big deal of the pain the associated disruption caused you or is it more solidarious to take it in your stride? The point of the strike is disruption; a successful strike is disruptive. In which case, it is important to stress that the strike caused you lots of trouble – this should count as praise of the strike. This is generally the line taken by all those goofs the Evening Standard finds on the street and recruits for 20 words of moaning.

The trouble with those goofs is that they all too often go on to suggest that the strikers are of their essence very bad and should be prevented by emergency legislation from enacting any further heinous withdrawal of labour. This is where they go wrong.

I have devised an equation for constructing strike-sympathetic comments to provide to newspapers:

Stress enormous painful disruption caused + Express sympathy for strikers themselves = Maximum optimal solidarity

Also, who are those 'volunteers' who appear in Underground stations during strikes? Are they picket line-crossing tube workers or are they general purpose anti-strike fans? What is their fucking game?

Very Good Speech

I have done a painting to commemorate Gordon Brown's very good speech to Citizens UK yesterday.



You can also watch the very good speech right here.

Election Prediction

Brown will get extradited to China over this bullying shit.

Cameron will bottle it and get caught trying to flee wearing a false moustache and carrying an old suitcase full of ladies' underwear.

Boris will see this as his chance and "form-up" in the manner of the Power Rangers to become over three hundred feet tall. He'll stride down the wider streets of London saying, in his booming giant's voice, "Who would dare not vote for me?"

In the end no one votes for him and he'll skulk off out to sea grumbling.

At this point Brown will return having grown a big horrible beard because he's been tortured. He's just in time to stop the nuclear bomb!

Everybody throws a big party for Brown.

Westminster

Oliver Cromwell peers down from his plinth outside the Palace of Westminster. Below is sprawled a lion and Cromwell is hoping that thing he heard about lions being no good at climbing is true. The lion is wearing a passive expression and appears to be more interested in watching the armed police officers who loiter nearby like extras in a mid-noughties docu-drama about a biological terrorist attack. Those used to observing cats hunting would recognise the lion's apparent lack of interest in Cromwell as a common tactic of feline misdirection.

Inside, the palace is strikingly ecclesiastical. The implication seems to be that the authority wielded here is derived directly from God and the building is an apparatus for conducting His will. Tall unadorned stone spaces act as resonating chambers and divine vibrations are picked up in rooms all over the building where they are translated into statutes, motions, addenda and so on.

The Right Honourable Keith Vaz feels these vibrations as he sits as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee. On the menu today: antisocial behaviour. MPs sit primed to scrutinise the issue. On the wall: a grand portrait of Joseph Stalin, or, at least, what looks like one. Louise Casey of the Home Office is to be interrogated regarding her role in addressing antisocial behaviour.

Her message is clear. The problem of naughty children is of a second order kind; the problem is the parents. We tackle this problem best when we intervene early and when we educate the parents. Indeed, we should intervene early in other ways too; the police should be vigilant in tackling low-level crime. The word 'zero-tolerancing' is used.

Despite this clarity, one MP is unimpressed and, during his set of questions, accuses Casey of taking us "all around the houses".

The discussion moves on to examine more specific things to do with youth organisations and the simple measures that could be taken to improve the way they work: having youth clubs open a Friday evening rather than a Wednesday evening is one example.

This bores Vaz and he pipes up with his own line of questioning.

"What about spin?" he asks, "Has there been a problem of spin with antisocial behaviour?"

The statistics say that crime is down, replies Casey.

Vaz invites Casey to dispel the rumour in the Evening Standard that she would like to stand as a Labour candidate for London mayor. She says that the rumour is "nonsense". She is free to go.

Next, three people representing youth organisations. Their message is slightly different. Dysfunctional families are part of the problem, yes, but really the problem is of a third order kind: it is the problem of intergenerational poverty. This ideological shift elicits murmurs and shuffling in their seats from the MPs. Also, a little nodding.

One of these three is a young man recently released from prison. He is now involved with a charity called User Voice.

Vaz leans forward, "Why did you commit your crimes?"

The young man talks of not feeling connected, of not feeling that he and his friends were part of the same society that he saw depicted on the news. He has seen Vaz on the television but feels no connection to the people in the suits.

"You're in a suit!"

At first it is difficult to tell where this ejaculation has come from: everyone speaks into microphones and their voices seem to emanate from the same place. Soon it is clear that it was David Davies MP (not to be confused with former Tory party leadership candidate David Davis MP) who spoke.

The young man ignores this and continues to describe the perspective of youth. He felt that he did not want to be part of the nine-to-five world.

An unabashed Davies rallies, "Neither do we!"

The committee sits for another hour or so. Outside and along the river in Whitehall Gardens, palm trees shiver and pigeons perform synchronised aerial drills to stave off the cold.


While I know the names of all the people that spoke before the select committee that day I haven't included them here in case they Google themselves and end up finding this nonsense.

Also, while the work of select committees is, as far as I know, always entirely public I don't know where I stand legally as regards writing about this so I've tried to be careful. Certain things – particularly the order of events and the characterisation of Keith Vaz – are fictonal.

I was there while on work experience with Inside Housing and the reporter I was with wrote something about the meeting as well.

Glib Bullshit

A sense of humour is to women what democracy is to neoconservatives. While women may say that they like a man with a sense of humour, what they really mean is that in a choice between Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt with a sense of humour they would choose Brad Pitt with a sense of humour. While neoconservatives say that they value democracy and want to spread it all over the world, what they really mean is in a choice between oil from Saudi Arabia and oil from a democratic Saudi Arabia they would choose oil from a democratic Saudi Arabia.

Thus, despite their claims to the contrary, women apply a strategy of Kissingerian realpolitik to their love lives and neoconservatives go for hunks.

Merry Christmas!

Floreat Vaizeum

When I left school and met for the first time that strange breed of people who might be best described as people who did not go to my school, I was shaken. These were people who used words like wicked and mate without joking and who understood none of the usual cultural signifiers – so that when I referred to the Lucas Reunion or 'the sort of person who stands on the steps at the back of the school' they had no idea what I was talking about.

What's more, they would not accept that my way of talking is simply The Globally-recognised Natural Language of Man spoken in the Normal Accent. It is the way that God spoke when once He walked among us and it is the language in which He will proclaim His judgment.

I soon realised that these people were too stubborn to be taught the correct way of things and I set about trying to justify myself to them. Chiefly, this meant that when I was drunk I would begin to talk about schools – your school, my school – and also why all this meant that I am "not actually that posh".

In the mornings after these bouts of misrepresentation and pontificating I would feel an unbearable shame. It felt as if a demon had reversed the usual progress of fecal matter through my body, transfiguring it into terrible words and letting those words issue noxiously from my idiotic mouth.

This happened so many times I can't remember but gradually I mastered the demon and, with considerable effort, I banished him. I would still talk embarrassing nonsense shite when drunk but not about schools and not about class.

Many years passed. I remained always vigilant, fearing his return. But he did not return and I began at last to form a shaky understanding with these people who did not go to my school: a little wool for some corn; they taught me their names for the sky and the clouds and for the rain that falls with the seventh moon; I showed them a compass and demonstrated gunpowder.

And then the demon returned. He has visited twice in the last month and I felt as wretched as ever I did in those early days.

The demon's return has coincided with the re-emergence of the rhetoric of class war in British politics kicked off in awkward and jowly fashion by Gordon Brown and his "playing fields of Eton" jibe. Over the past fortnight we have been given the chance to see British politicians squirming and being forced to give protracted defences of their background in an effort to demonstrate that they are not that posh.

It is thus that I have come to realise that the business of justifying your privileged background is an essential skill that must be learned by all members of the governing class. It may be torturous and there may be a great shame to be felt in doing it but in the democratic age the old elites cannot expect to remain in power any other way. The only shame is in doing it badly: the demon is not laughing at you; he is admonishing you.

Ed Vaizey MP is an unrivalled expert at this game; in his deft hands it becomes an art form. He was titled from birth, attended a major public school and then Oxford. He is, in other words, as posh as it is possible to be and still be able to stand unassisted. And yet here he is in this video sitting down and making a convincing argument that, despite all this, he is not that posh.



He was not always such a master: I remember that the "About Ed Vaizey" section of his website used to make clumsy reference to his having attended a state primary school.

American politicians do this better than anybody else. Not only have they convinced their electorate that they are not posh, they have convinced them that they live in a classless meritocracy. George W Bush managed two terms as president regarded as a humble everyman despite being descended from vampires and educated at a school at the centre of the Earth run by Freemasons.

Thock, Conservative

This is a rough version of my proposed new advert for the Conservative party. I originally had this idea two years ago.

Ideally, I would like the there to be a sound of cricket ball against cricket bat (to give that familiar 'thock', so redolent of Tory values) rather than the wicket sound that we have at the moment. Also, I think that it would be better without the commentators at the end and more prolonged, polite applause.

If anyone knows where I can find such sounds I would be very grateful if they told me.

Please let me know your thoughts.

James Delingpole

Have you heard of James Delingpole? He is a right-wing journalist, author and blogger who specialises in denying man-made global warming and defending the charitable status of private schools. He is in many ways the archetypal absolute cunt; an aristo-fetishistic dickhead and slithery sassenach poster boy for Scottish independence.

But before deriding him in this way, it would be well for me to remember that I am the same me who had watched the TV version of Brideshead Revisited three times by the age of nineteen and who spent my first year at a redbrick university holed up in my room with another slightly posh boy, a bottle of port and cigars as if we were the country's last Old Etonians awaiting the bayonets of the Revolutionary Guard.

Why do I bring up this Delingpole? Well, it is because I have been reading some of his columns along with the columns of his pal Daniel Hannan (the Conservative MEP who caused a stir a few months ago by criticising the NHS on Fox News) and some other Telegraph stuff in order to toughen up my political opinions. It was my hope that by putting my political opinions through a mangle of palatable, broadsheet, centre-right opinion my political opinions would emerge a man.

My political opinions have survived this onslaught of comment quite unscathed but this has nothing to do with their robustness. Were my political opinions founded on rational thought then they might be susceptible to argument. But they aren't; they are founded on a sort of socio-aesthetic taste and are immune to argument. By that wilfully obfuscating, stupid word 'socio-aesthetic', I mean that these are opinions that appeal to me because of their position in society, the other people that hold them, their history and their stylishness. This exposure to the almost reasonable face of conservatism has not changed my beliefs but has caused me to think about how facile those beliefs are and suspect that everyone else's are just as shallow.

It seems to me to be somewhat arrogant to think that you hold your political opinions because you are sufficiently brainy do have divined the best and most fair mode of government. Whatever you think and whoever you are there are probably millions of other, smarter people than you who think something else.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera suggests that political opinions are usually based on a kind of kitsch. What we get passionate about is the particular flavour and associations of our political opinions; their superficial accoutrements.

On further self-examination I think that I barely even hold these superficial opinions. Mainly, I don't give a shit about anything at all. Having spent most of their lives in leafy, cosseted childhood, exposed to the real world my wispy, effete opinions might easily be devoured by that dark spectre of downward social mobility.

It is fitting therefore that my conclusion on Delingpole (who elsewhere has been dealt pure vitriol and been dubbed a twat) is utterly trivial. He appeared recently on a remarkable documentary called When Boris Met Dave talking about his Oxford days; days he seems to be having trouble getting over. He was roundly mocked as a Sebastian Flyte wannabe and he accepted all this with good humour and oh-so-British self-deprecation.

I am not above warming to a bit of self-deprecation and, as I explained above, I have some understanding of the potent effect of Brideshead on a certain kind of teenage brain. So my trivial conclusion is that he is a ponce with something other than bien pensant liberal views but basically clubbable.

And I have learned that I have no opinions worth talking about (notwithstanding Foulsist Robotarianism). So fuck.

JSA-holes

I've changed my mind about something. While studying a Social Policy module at university I discovered that the government now refers to people who claim benefits as 'customers' as opposed to 'claimants' or 'recipients'. This is an example of New Labour's mania for translating everything into the language of commerce. This tactic may originally have been a way of selling social democratic policies to people who would who would not have voted for Labour prior to 1997 but that purpose has been forgotten and such words serve to propagate free market ideology.

Or so I thought! On Wednesday, I went to a Back To Work session at the Job Centre Plus. It was a PowerPoint presentation given by a woman who explained that the session is a new government wheeze and attendance is compulsory for everyone on Job Seeker's Allowance. She rattled through it very quickly and I became disproportionately annoyed when anyone prolonged the experience by asking questions.

She referred to us as 'customers' throughout as per the JCP jargon. In this context the word seemed to inculcate the idea that the JCP was a place that provided us – customers – with a service. The JCP is not simply an office for signing on. The focus is on getting a job not on getting free money.

A 'customer' sounds like someone with rights, someone to be treated with respect. So while putting the emphasis on the search for work as opposed to claiming money, the use of the word 'customer' does not force responsibilities on us; it helps direct us towards responsibilities – possibly this is consistent with all that Nudge shit.

The word 'customer' is not as stigmatising as a word like 'claimant'. In a capitalist society such us ours it is the customers who are important; if the 'claimants' are not 'customers' then they are something else. They are apart, they are needy, and they have taken enough already – we owe them nothing.

I would rather be a customer than a claimant. So all of you sitting there in your fucking ivory tower universities, getting your fancy degrees, listen to this lesson from the university of life!

***

You're not allowed to do work experience while you're on JSA. I think that I need more work experience to have any chance of getting the sort of jobs that I'm after. You can do voluntary work but not work experience.

The Tories, of all people, are considering changing this for the under 25s. The government says that the tax payer ought not to be paying for weeks of unpaid work; the company should pay. But in the absence of any legislation that says that companies must pay interns and when hardly any companies pay interns, internships are too costly for most people. Certain jobs, particularly in the media, are for this reason off-limits for people whose parents cannot support them while they are not being paid.

On JSA you are required to do three 'things' a week to look for work. It would be quite easy to be doing more than that while also doing work experience. There could also be an understanding that you would stop your work experience if offered paid work.

Cocaine

This business was in the news yesterday. Apparently the efforts of drugs enforcement agencies across the world have resulted in an increased wholesale price for cocaine. Prices on 'the street' have remained stable but the purity of the drug has declined. In 2004 the purity of the cocaine seized by police was on average over 50 per cent; it is now just over 30 per cent.

We might imagine (arguably naively) that certain drugs are illegal because we must be protected from the harm that they can do us. The primary reason for enforcing the drug laws must be to prevent us from acquiring these drugs and thus protect us from harm. It is not certain that the rise in the wholesale price of cocaine is causally related to the authorities making it more difficult for those that trade in the drug; the decrease in the strength of the pound may also be a factor. It could be that this is an ill-founded claim made to create good PR for drugs enforcement worldwide. But if the rise in price can be put down to enforcement, it seems that the effect of enforcement has not been to protect the public from a harmful substance but to make the harmful substance that the public are managing quite easily to acquire more harmful by reducing its purity.

This may not be the only the only effect of work of drugs enforcement agencies (cue wild conjecture): it may be that their activities are making the business of trading in drugs more perilous than it already is by frustrating supply routes. Perhaps it has resulted in more drugs-trade-related deaths. If they have been at all successful then it will have resulted in more people having to spend time in jail, more people's lives being branded criminal.

If these are the effects of enforcing the drugs laws then what is the point? How can making cocaine more dangerous be good news?

In Portugal, there are no criminal penalties for possessing personal quantities of drugs. This policy has been successful in reducing the number of people taking drugs and increasing the number of people with drugs problems seeking treatment.

Decriminalising the trade in drugs would be another thing entirely. It is fraught because it would mean that governments themselves were selling or, at least, sanctioning drugs. But if the only effect of enforcing the current drugs laws is to make taking drugs more dangerous and not to decrease their availability, it may be time for the authorities to desist. If the trade were decriminalised then young people would not find themselves inducted into an illicit market and made criminals.

It would be impossible for a country to do this unilaterally. But it seems that much of the harm done by illegal drugs is a product of their being illegal and it must be worth thinking about changing this state of affairs.

I have not previously known what I think about the illegality of drugs. In this piece I try on an opinion that is fresh and new to me. It should not be taken that what is written above is the pure revealed essence of What I Think On The Matter.

Robot Future

I hinted in the previous post that I would elucidate on my true politics. It is a programme called Robot Future and it is revolutionary in its scope. Robot Future is achieved through the following phased process:

• Global IQ Test. Everyone in the world is subjected to an IQ test. Those who score in the top 20 per cent of this test or who already have expertise in artificial intelligence are immediately set to work developing robots, robots to fulfil our every need.
  
• The rest work in agriculture and industry supporting the robot developers. The robot developers can recruit as many people as they deem necessary to perform tasks that help them in the development of robots.
• If anyone dissents however inconsequentially and for whatever reason they are killed immediately. NOTHING MUST JEOPARDISE ROBOT FUTURE.
• Once all the robots have been developed no one need ever work again. Robots work behind the scenes and cater for every human need.
• The education system teaches a lot of philosophy and (as pupils will never have to work) they are instructed on how to live well.
• They are also taught about the appalling atrocities that were committed in the robot development stage. THESE MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN AGAIN.

I also constructed a less violent version of this plan but I decided that it is unworkable. It was based on an insight of Bertrand Russell's in In Praise of Idleness. He notes that in the entire course of human history the development of new technology has always been seen as an opportunity to produce more rather than to work less. (In the same book he recommends that the human race be accommodated in Oxbridge-style colleges). My revised version of Robot Future (called Robot Future v.II) involved directing all future technological developments at less working rather than more producing so that eventually all work would be undertaken by machinery. I decided that since an iron fist would be needed to bring about this change of attitude we would as well to go with the assured iron-fist route of Robot Future v.I and get it done quicker.

Karl Marx was of the opinion that as the forces of competition increased the proportion of capital outlaid on labour-saving machinery the rate of profit will fall. This, thought Marx, will lead to the eventual collapse of capitalism. I have no idea how this relates to Robot Future. Sorry.

Under Robot Future all humans will live as members of the idle rich. They will be free to pursue their interests, do nothing, grow carrots, hump, read Middlemarch, build kick-ass sand castles. Some people will be worried that without employment these humans will be unable to find fulfilment. This may indeed be the case for some of the first generation of Robot Futurees who were used to the to the old way of doing things. But the subsequent generations, with the benefit of the outstanding robotic education system, would not have this problem. According to Alain de Botton in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work the idea that we are to find meaning in our day-to-day employment is new. Other cultures have sought happiness in their leisure time.

What I need now is recruits. We'll start by lobbying the UN and so on but if that fails we will need to take more drastic action. It began here.

I apologise to people that I have bored with this theory before. But, then again, why did you read it all?

Citadel del Fouls

I know someone who (if only he had the vocabulary) would call me a champagne socialist. Instead, when he briefs against me he struggles to properly describe the kernel of no-goodness at the heart of my withered soul. He lumbers around near to what he means to say. And he's pretty much got it right. The fullest expression of my ideals would probably be in communism. I imagine a state of affairs where people have a monk-like indifference about the relationship between the nature of the work they do and how much they receive in return. That society's credo would be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". The trouble is that this quixotic dream shrivels in the cold bath of cynicism, apathy and greed that is the rest of my psyche. It is only used for the purposes of buying newspapers and judging others.

(My real politics – after several years studying the subject – may most accurately be termed Foulist-Robotarianism. I may write about that at another time).

In addition to this, I am an atheist. This probably has its origin in early childhood but it has been galvanised more recently by friendships with evangelical Christians. You can take the horse to a Christian Union quiz social but you can't make it accept Jesus as its own personal saviour, as they say. In fact, the horse will be apt to resent any further attempts to make it accept Jesus.

In spite of this I have no trouble imagining what my beliefs would be were I either politically right-wing or religious. For some reason I have well-developed ideas about what I would think and the sort of things I would say that sit in my brain like the developer levels on Goldeneye; unplayable except with a GameShark (I suppose I am using the GameShark here as a metaphor for a life experience that is sufficiently harrowing for it to wholly change my values and beliefs, which is a strange thing to use a GameShark for).

If I were a right-wing sort of person I would think the following things. There is a moral value to hard work and personal responsibility. It is good to get up early. Despite this people should, more often than not, be left to their own devices. High rates of income tax for the very wealthy are not dreadful because most of those guys are Daddys' boys who don't deserve those jobs but it's a pretty raw deal for people who did work their way up. The Royal family do not interest me. Our economy isn't built on social workers. Business and greed are not synonymous. It's good to see someone running their own shop; real pride of ownership; not like these lackeys in the supermarkets. We can't all just be selling each other car insurance; some of us need to make stuff.

Were I a man of religion I would eliminate superstitions as much as possible. No demons, no miracles, no visions, no angels, no ark, no Eden, no virgin birth. God is imminent; he is everywhere and he is everything. In death, we all come to know God, we are God and we are one. No more sui generis Fouls, no more sui generis you. It is blissful; like looking into the sun and it not hurting. The blinkers are off and we know everything. Supreme gangsta shit, we dream gangsta shit. No judgment and no punishment. We know the nature of our crimes and we now ourselves and everyone else.

It's difficult to know what these phantom ideologies are for. The right-wing one definitely has a voice in my head like an unimpressed father. And I feel that I ought to apply his standards about working hard to my own life if not to anyone else's. The religious ideas are perhaps meant to be an aesthetic improvement on my friends' Christian beliefs. They are more modern with sharper lines and a more metallic finish. Perhaps these alternative and unused beliefs exist in preparation for the well-publicised process of a person's views becoming more conservative as they get older.

I got that picture of a (right) wing from a Conservative blog but I had to flip it horizontally... because they'd used a fucking left wing. It was under the heading "What next for the right?"

*Update: having looked at it again I can't tell if that is a right or a left wing. So they may not be idiots.

The BNP

If there’s one thing that we’re supposed to be good at in this country it’s discriminating against people on the basis of their class. Why is it then that we have got ourselves into a position where on June 4 we might be sending a new BNP MEP off to Europe? Thanks to proportional representation, if the BNP get 8.4% of the vote in the North West of England in the upcoming European elections then they will have a seat in Brussels. At best this will be colossally embarrassing; at worst it’s the first step on the road to full-blown Naziorrhoea.

The BNP is not representative of the working class. But the working class have more justifiable reasons to feel aggrieved about immigration than the middle class do. Table 1 shows that respondents to the 2006 British Social Attitudes survey who identified themselves as working class were less inclined than respondents who identified themselves as middle class to agree that people from abroad who settle in Britain have a right to call themselves British.

These data do not show a huge divergence between the two groups but I want to keep going with this blog post and it has no foundation other than the lazy generalisation that working class people are more likely than middle class people to be concerned about immigration and support the BNP. Moreover, I was quite taken with the opening sentence of this blog when it came to me; it is for the sake of its preservation that I proceed.

The experience of immigration for working class and middle class people is different. For middle class people immigration means North Indian Frontier Cuisine, great sushi and Slumdog Millionaire. For working class people it might mean increased competition for jobs and sending your children to a school where 40% of the pupils do not have English as a first language.* Some people will have more thoroughgoing reasons for being in favour of relatively open immigration but middle class people who approve of immigration for whatever reason must be aware that they are can scarcely help but be complacent given that it is unlikely that it will adversely affect their lives.

In the coming years I look to the Tory party who have behind them centuries' experience in ignoring and marginalising everyone other than the elite. If they bring any of that skill to bear then I'm sure they could crush the BNP. In the meantime we do not have a Tory government to rely on and we will have to find other ways of halting the BNP at the European election. Students that have moved away from home to go to university have an opportunity to vote in local elections where they go to university as well as back home. This has always seemed to me to be a appallingly undemocratic state of affairs and I have not previously taken advantage of this loophole. I could have voted for the congestion charge in Manchester but because I am unlikely to remain in this region after I graduate I felt that it would be unfair for me to express my will in the referendum. I might like to have a say in the presidential election in the US but it is right that I am not allowed to.

Incidentally, this was not a view shared by the Guardian who in 2004 launched Operation Clark County and encouraged readers to send letters to voters on Ohio advising them on who to vote for.

However, this might be just the time to put this undemocratic set up to good use. If we were able to mobilise tens of thousands of middle class students with no interest in the future of the North West to vote for anyone other than the BNP then it might be possible to stop the BNP gaining a European seat. Such an effort in indeed being organised by Hope Not Hate. It seems that in Britain today we still have a political set up that allows us to keep the marginalised disenfranchised if only we have the courage to use it.

I should add that I was inspired to write this BNP blog because an article about the BNP kept my article from getting the top spot on the Most Popular section of the Student Direct website. A far right forum called Stormfront encouraged BNP sympathisers to troll the message board for the BNP article to create the impression that the BNP is more popular and has more internet presence than it actually does. It is my opinion that it is their fault that my article was never on the top spot and it has nothing to do with the BNP article being better, more interesting and more thoroughly researched than mine. They're going to be sorry they crossed me, eh?

*These claims are not based on any real research; I made them up so you should take them with a pinch of salt. I recommend Maldon sea salt. The advice on how much a pinch of Maldon sea salt is is contradictory; you should keep your own counsel. The Maldon sea salt box says, "Its pronounced and distinctive 'salty' taste means less is required, an advantage for those who wish to reduce their salt intake." On the other hand, Nigella Lawson says that it is less salty than table salt and you should use more.