Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Eight

Years ago in UCD, when I was invigilating exams, I worked with a Polish girl who'd grown up in Berlin. In exasperation at the unpredictable nature of the Irish climate, she remarked that she often thought there should be an EU directive that'd insist on a common meteorological system throughout the Union.

-- And whose weather would we use?

-- A bit from everyone, she said.

-- But that'd be rubbish, I replied, sure there's nothing we have but rain.

-- No, she smiled. You have the most rainbows.

I thought of this today on seeing the Brother's photo of the glorious rainbow that greated him as he arrived this evening in Bangor Erris, in County Mayo. Gorgeous, isn't it? But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We left the Brother last week in County Galway, way out in Eyrephort at the end of the Sky Road west of Clifden, having completed a day that rivalled any he'd ever had in the saddle in his life -- and given that he's cycled to Istanbul and across America, that's saying a lot. The rain hammered down on Friday, and the setting was too gorgeous to flee from, so he stayed put and painted Toulouse, which in this case wasn't the French city but was in fact his hostess's dog, looking more than a little like the Brother's own DogDog, and a jovial companion for a walk along the beach.

He squeezed in a bit more sketching on Saturday before setting off, cycling along the coast and then cutting inland past Kylemore to Killary Harbour. On the way there, and in the most beautiful of surroundings, his gear cable broke, and to his twofold astonishment, he found that he had a replacement from when his American cycle kit of fifteen years earlier, and that he was able to fix it! The fjord being apparently devoid of Twitterati, he took the advice of one of his Twittering friends and stayed overnight at the Killary Adventure Centre, just west of Leenane, it being conveniently free of children who'd all headed off to Westport.

Sunday morning saw him bidding farewell to Leenane and cycling into Mayo, his fourteenth county; he had the roads rather to himself, with the county's attentions being on Croke Park, where Mayo was facing Kerry in an All-Ireland football semi-final. As Kerry's DatBeardyMan said after the Brother crossed over, 'ooh Mayo no less. Today you will be painting mostly misery'.  And indeed, despite a promising first half, the day was Kerry's, the Kingdom winning 1-20 to 1-11.

North the Brother cycled, through Delphi -- not, not that one -- and up to Louisburgh by Clew Bay, where he turned and cycled along the bay's southern shore, marvelling at the myriad islands and the Reek overlooking them all, as he made his way to the home of his Lecanvey hosts, there to shower and rest and refuel with tea, and to paint at Lecanvey Pier, listening to the sea while looking across the bay to Croagh Patrick.

As I've mentioned before, follow the links. This looks better in colour. Especially the sky.

Properly online again, as part of his apparent plan to acquire half the country's WPA keys, and following an online discussion about the value of cycling helmets -- after his American experience, the Brother's an ardent advocate for the things -- he posted a picture of the thrilling Connemara scenery in which he'd tended to his fourth puncture of the trip a couple of days earlier. This inspired a Twitter discussion in the dead of night about the merits of various kind of tyres, with one person singing the praises of 'bomb-proof' Schwalbe Marathons, saying he'd cycled 25,000km on one pair and suffered just ten punctures in total! 

Monday was a day for more painting, and one of the most beautiful sunsets one could imagine, and chicken pilaf, and Guinness. And, no doubt, tea. In the dead of night, with the bleakness of The Road on the telly, the tyre conversation of the previous evening was resumed, and in the course of all the chatter, a very kind person said she'd send over some new tyres from Dublin! It's nice to see such kindness in the real world with our screens filled with cannibalism and desolation and abandoned shopping trolleys. That's how it starts, you know.

On Tuesday the Brother was away again, making his way to Westport through just a few miles of scenery that he drily described as being 'a bit too nice', saying he was getting tired from looking and trying to take it all in. He took this as an opportunity to try some mounted commentary, as enabled by Bernie Goldbach's lapel microphone a couple of weeks back, describing his views as he pedalled towards the town. In Westport he stopped in the shadow of Saint Patrick -- no, not the one wielding swords on horseback -- to drink some tea and ponder a painting before heading out to stay with two of his Twitterati friends, and to smile fondly at seeing one of his paintings on display.

Wednesday saw him stationed a couple of miles south of Westport, sitting on a hill looking down at the town and painting a panorama for his hosts. It sounds as though there was a phenomenal amount to take in, but he made a valiantly vibrant attempt at a Moyhastin Panorama, painting almost till dark and then taking a trip to Boheh Stone to see the Rolling Sun, though getting there too late, arriving as it reached the bottom. Still, there was a second lovely Westport night, there to chat and have a pint in Moran's, to paint, and plot in the darkness.

That reminds me. Somebody online opined during the last week that the Brother sleeps while he cycles, so that he can paint through the night. It's a fine Chuck Norris style 'fact', and one worth repeating, even if it'd leaving you wondering how he manages to see the things he later paints. I wish I could remember who it was who said that, though as things stand all I can say with confidence is that it wasn't me, it wasn't the Brother, and it wasn't John Lee, who wrote a nice little piece about the Brother for Irish Central, beginning by contrasting the old-fashioned and radically modern aspects of my brother's exploits:

'So quaint -- itinerant artist pedaling through the Irish countryside, paying for a night’s lodging with a deftly done painting -- all so very analog. But it’s digital that drives this clockwise, one-man, two-to-three month, slo-mo, 32-county, social media cycling and painting tour of Ireland.'

It's worth a read, and not just for the lovely embedded video.

Anyway, that takes us today, and the Brother leaving beside a handprint or three as he said farewell to Westport, with his hosts wishing him and his knees well, and having to skip Newport for now -- he'll be back soon -- in order to get to Bangor Erris. Barring places he visited in week one, this'd be the part of the country he's visited that I know best. He set off via Mulranny, looking towards Corraun as he went, and then turned north.  On the way to Bangor he sheltered from the rain and admired the Paul Henry sky, and then carried on through the most magnificent scenery imaginable, stopping for tea at Ballycroy, and revelling in some of the most beautiful rain he'd ever seen with the setting sun of the golden hour backlighting the landscape. And then, as I said, there was that rainbow.

Tomorrow he should be staying in one of my favourite places in, well, the world, and then after that he'll be carrying on, one way or another*, to Sligo and beyond. I hope he's keeping track of how many kilometres of road and acres of canvas he's covered, not to mention how many mugs of tea he's downed. Those'd be figures to admire. Still, in the absence of hard numbers, it's worth keeping in mind just how far he's come, in the fourteen counties he'd graced to date with his pedalling presence.

As usual, this is the point where I say that if you think there's any chance at all he might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live, and if you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, and especially if you're in one of the spots he currently doesn't have a host, you should let him know. He doesn't require much: somewhere to lay his head, food to eat, limitless tea, and to know where you are. Just send a message to Ireland's first digital nomad™ -- the tour's about people and pixels as much as it's about painting and pedalling, after all.

You can follow the Painting Tour on the Brother's blog and especially on Twitter, using the hashtag  #paintingtour. His Facebook account's worth a shout too, but Twitter's where most of the real action is, even if it's sometimes reduced to musing on singing Cavanmen or undead action in the Middle East**. As I've said a few times now, I wouldn't bother following him on Google Latitude, though, given its habit of placing him at seemingly random locations in the past.

* As Debbie Harry would say.

** And I quote, 'While I'm at it, here's a crap undead joke: Where do zombies go on their holidays? Bahrainnnnnnn, of course. Urrrrrrrrr...'

Update: It seems the line '@eolai sleeps on the bike as he cycles. He stays in people’s houses to stay up all night painting,' was the brainchild of Galway's Allan Cavanagh. Thanks to Grannymar for having preserved it, and having alerted me to the fact.

Devalued A-Levels -- A (barely) International Perspective

Grade inflation is a boringly predictable topic in the papers and online every August. The big question among those who note the incessant improvement in exam results is whether the exams that mark the end of secondary education have gotten easier over the years, or whether -- as some will maintain -- it's simply that teaching has improved, such that students learn better. I know people in both camps.

It's hardly surprising that people should have concerns. A-Level results, which were generally consistent from one to the next until the 1980s, have improved now for 29 straight years. Back in 1982, 68.2 per cent of students passed their exams and one student in eight got one A in their A-Levels. Nowadays, 97.8 per cent of students pass their A-Levels and one student in eight gets three A's.

This is usually the point at which someone pops up to blame Labour for this, possibly doing so implicitly by treating 1997 as kind of Year One for grade inflation, focusing on how the highest grades rose every year between 1997 and 2010, with this rise suddenly being arrested this year.

This claim isn't so much inaccurate as misleading, as it requires one to ignore the general upward thrust in the top grades for more than a decade prior to 1997, and the fact that the number of students passing the A-Levels has risen every single year since 1982. I'm not saying that matters didn't get worse under Labour, but again, as with so many of Britain's problems, the phenomenon predates the era of Blair and Brown by some way. Radical grade inflation had been a clearly discernible problem for years before Labour came to power. Just look at the chart!

The stability in results that marked the A-Levels prior to the mid-eighties was a direct result of them being marked on a selection basis, rather than a criterion basis; they were marked on a curve such that, say, only the top 10 per cent of students could be awarded an A in any given subject, irrespective of their actual score on the paper. During the eighties the system shifted towards a criterion basis, such that nowadays the awarded grades are based more on individual performance rather than on comparison with peers.

(There's a comparative element in the marking even now, but it's relatively minor.)

In principle this is more objective that norm-based selection marking and should allow for results varying significantly from year to year, based on the ability of any given year's students. In practice, however, one could be forgiven for wondering why the results keep on improving... especially when research at the University of Durham has found that a 1980s 'C' grade is the equivalent of a modern 'A'.

I'm often baffled at the tendency to conduct these debates in bubbles, without reference to other countries. There's a lot to be learned by comparing countries with each other, not least because it involves recognising that there are standards other than our own.

I can really only speak with any authority about the Irish system, so let's just run with that as an example. The fundamental thing to grasp here is that Irish students have always done more subjects than English ones: whereas a typical English student did three A-Level subjects, a typical Irish one did seven or even eight. For example, I studied Maths, English, Irish, German, History, Geography, Accounting, and Applied Maths. We went for breadth over depth, leaving specialisation to third level education. Our marks in no more than six subjects are considered when allocating university places.

When I did my Leaving Cert, back in the day, I gave serious thought to applying to go to university in the UK. There were no fees in British universities, after all, unlike Irish ones.** Anyway, one of the things I learned back then was that the standard way of translating Leaving Cert results into A-Level ones was a straightforward two-for-one equation, such that, for example, British universities would consider six Leaving Cert subjects with a results profile of AAAABB to be the equivalent of three A-Levels with a profile of AAB. The opposite arrangement applied for British students applying to study in Ireland: Irish universities regarded each A-Level  as being the equivalent of two Leaving Cert subjects.

It's not like that now. In fact, it hasn't been like that in some time. I remember my then girlfriend getting annoyed six or seven years back when I explained to her how Trinity College in Dublin had downgraded the value of the A-Levels relative to the Leaving Cert. I dread to think what she'd think if I were to tell her that UCD, my alma mater, now explicitly regards the modern 'A*' result as the equivalent of an 'A' result of even a couple of years back, with the current 'A' being only marginally better than the older 'B'.
 

Broadly speaking, Irish universities now take the view that from the viewpoint of University entry requirements, a British 'A' is no longer twice as valuable as an Irish 'A'; on the contrary, it's roughly one-and-a-half times as valuable. A British 'B', which used to be worth two mid-range Irish 'B' grades, is now worth a mid-level 'B' grade and a bare pass, or two low-level 'C' grades. Take a look at this chart, comparing the points awarded for Leaving Cert, A-Level, and AS-Level grades, and leaving out such complexities as bonus points being offered for higher level Maths.

Confused? Okay, well try putting meat on those bones. What does this mean? Well, let's assume you got three A* results in your A-Levels. That'd give you 450 points. Would you like to know what UCD courses you'd not get onto with 450 points? As things stand this year, just based on the first round of offers, 450 points wouldn't be enough for any of: Architecture; Science; Actuarial and Financial Studies; Human Nutrition; Veterinary Medicine; Radiography; Physiotherapy; Health & Performance Science; Biomedical, Health and Life Scences; Children’s & General Nursing; Midwifery; English; History; Psychology; Law; Business & Law; Law with French, History, Politics, Philosophy, or Economics; International Commerce; or Economics and Finance.

And I'm not even getting into what you'd need to get into Medicine.

To have a decent chance at any of those subjects, you'd need three A* results and an AS result in something other than your main three. And General Studies doesn't count for points. For what it's worth, almost all of those require you to have done English, Maths, and at least one other language to GCSE level as the most basic requirement to be allowed do the course, and there are strict requirements barring certain A-Level subjects from being presented together: for example, you cannot present both English Language and English Literature, or both History and Classical Civilization, or both Environmental Studies and Geography.

Trinity College Dublin uses basically the same system, likewise evaluating candidates on the basis of either four A-Levels done in one year or three A-Levels done one year in combination with an AS level done the previous year in a different subject, albeit with a smaller range of barred subject combinations.

Lest you think this is just a matter of Irish universities being arsey, take a look at how the British Universities compare the two systems.

It's basically the same, isn't it? The agreed line seems to be that an Irish Leaving Cert subject, which used to be regarded as worth half an A-Level, is now regarded as worth about two-thirds of one. And this isn't because the Irish standards have risen...

We have to be fair, and admit that the old way of weighing the two sets of examinations against each other was far from systematic, but I think most people would agree that it was broadly fair. If it was any way accurate, then we're looking at a serious problem. The value of the A-Levels seems to have collapsed by a quarter relative to the Irish Leaving Cert, at a time when it is widely recognised in Ireland that the value of the Leaving Cert has itself been slipping. What this means for the real decline of the value of the A-Levels and British education in general doesn't really bear thinking about, but given how OECD and ONS figures show that literacy, numeracy, and cognitive skills in general have either declined or at best improved in a marginal way, I really think some facts need to be faced.

One thing we need to do is not merely to consider whether the A-Levels are fit for purpose, but to consider what their purpose is. Is it to stand in their own right as a certification of having completed secondary schooling to a high level, or is it to act as an entrance exam for third level education, or is it both? If it's either of the latter options, then it mightn't be a bad idea to introduce a percentile score alongside grades, so that university admissions can be conducted on the basis of data far more precise and meaningful than what is currently available.

If it's the former, or the other hand, then maybe it'd make more sense to concentrate less on examination than on education, so that the real emphasis would be placed on what children are learning. And no, Mister Toad, that doesn't just mean indoctrinating children with stuff we're obsessed with.

** Sic transit gloria mundi and all that.

The Things You Miss...

Feeling that being shackled to the desk isn't doing me any good, about a week or so back I started cycling again. While never even a tenth the cyclist my brother had been in his prime, I used to be fairly keen on being in the saddle, at least as a means of getting to and fro, and a couple of years back I went through a phase of cycling in the mountains (or hills, if you must) south of Dublin, covering up to a hundred miles in a day when the mood took me.

I'm not quite there yet, not least because even if I'd built up the stamina for that I'd still lack the time, but still, I'm enjoying starting back towards that. I've plans for some serious ground-covering once the current project's put to bed.

Today wasn't a huge ride by any definition -- just 32 miles -- but given that I was dying after just 19 a week or so back, this is progress. I went south, beyond Congleton, getting as far as the village of Moreton Cum Alcumlow, cataloguing  roadkill as I went*, and turning back as I reached this.

No, I had no idea what I was missing. This is because my bike can't fly. Life would be easier, and perhaps more interesting, if it could.

* In total: one fox, one cat, one rat, one mouse, one hedgehog, one squirrel, two rabbits, four birds including a pheasant, and two unidentifiable lots of dried and bloodied fur. Only the fox and the cat were offensively fragrant. There's a distinct whiff to roadkill.

Saints and Sinners, Warts and All...

Given Michael Gove's habit of enthusing about a new idea every ten minutes or so, and equipped as he is with the most protuberant of eyes, I often think he'd do well in a tweed suit and goggles, driving a motor car, shouting 'poop poop!', and telling all and sundry of his magnificent plans. It's not that he's a fool -- far from it -- but that I think he'd be better off having fewer ideas and thinking them through properly.

I was reminded that the other day, with the Guardian reporting on how the University of Edinburgh's Tom Devine is deeply opposed to the Secretary for Educations plans to remodel how history is taught in British schools, or English ones at any rate:

'I am root-and-branch opposed to Gove's approach. It smells of whiggery; of history as chauvinism. You cannot pick out aspects of the past that may be pleasing to people.'

Somehow I'd missed this story when it first reared its propagandist head last autumn. Here's Gove in Parliament back in November:

'The changes we are making to the national curriculum and to accountability, through the English baccalaureate, will ensure that history is taught as a proper subject, so that we can celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world, from the role of the Royal Navy in putting down the slave trade, to the way in which, since 1688, this nation has been a beacon for liberty that others have sought to emulate. We will also ensure that it is taught in a way in which we can all take pride.'

Now, if this honestly reflects what Michael Gove thinks history is for, and what it's about, and indeed what he thinks British history really consists of, then he should be kept a long way away from the history curriculum. While schools-level history shouldn't be an exercise in national self-flagellation, neither should it be a glorification of the march of history or a celebration of how wonderful our respective countries are. Despite Niall Ferguson's moneyspinning screeds, history isn't about propaganda. It's not about cherry-picking the bits you like, so that you can celebrate the good things your country has done. 

It's messier than that. Hell, life is messier than that.

Paying for Patriotism

Chesterton wrote a wonderful short essay once upon a time called 'Paying for Patriotism'; I first read it in the posthumous collection The Common Man. It's very short and well worth quoting in full:

'Somebody was recently remonstrating with me in connection with certain remarks that I have made touching the history of English misgovernment in Ireland. The criticism, like many others, was to the effect that these are only old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago; that the present generation is not responsible for them; that there is, as the critic said, no way in which he or I could have assisted or prevented them; that if anyone was to blame, he had gone to his account; and we are not to blame at all. There was mingled with his protest, I think, a certain suggestion that an Englishman is lacking in patriotism when he resurrects such corpses in order to connect them with crime.

Now the queer thing is this: that I think it is I who am standing up for the principle of patriotism; and I think it is he who is denying it. As a matter of fact, I am one of the few people left, of my own sort and calling, who do still believe in patriotism; just as I am among the few who do still believe in democracy. Both these ideas, were exaggerated extravagantly and, what is worse, erroneously, or entirely in the wrong way, during the nineteenth century; but the reaction against them today is very strong, especially among the intellectuals. But I do believe that patriotism rests on a psychological truth; a social sympathy with those of our own sort, whereby we see our own potential acts in them; and understand their history from within. But if there truly be such a thing as a nation, that truth is a two-edged sword, and we must let it out both ways.

Therefore I answer my critic thus. It is quite true that it was not I, G. K. Chesterton, who pulled the beard of an Irish chieftain by way of social introduction; it was John Plantagenet, afterwards King John; and I was not present. It was not I, but a much more distinguished literary gent, named Edmund Spenser, who concluded on the whole that the Irish had better be exterminated like vipers; nor did he even ask my advice on so vital a point. I never stuck a pike through an Irish lady for fun, after the siege of Drogheda, as did the God-fearing Puritan soldiers of Oliver Cromwell. Nobody can find anything in my handwriting that contributes to the original drafting of the Penal Laws; and it is a complete mistake to suppose that I was called to the Privy Council when it decided upon the treacherous breaking of the Treaty of Limerick. I never put a pitchcap on an Irish rebel in my life; and there was not a single one of the thousand floggings of '98 which I inflicted or even ordered. If that is what is meant, it is not very difficult to see that it is quite true.

But it is equally true that I did not ride with Chaucer to Canterbury, and give him a few intelligent hints for the best passages in The Canterbury Tales. It is equally true that there was a large and lamentable gap in the company seated at the Mermaid; that scarcely a word of Shakespeare's most poetical passages was actually contributed by me; that I did not whisper to him the word "incarnadine" when he was hesitating after "multitudinous seas"; that I entirely missed the opportunity of suggesting that Hamlet would be effectively ended by the stormy entrance of Fortinbras. Nay, aged and infirm as I am, it were vain for me to pretend that I lost a leg at the Battle of Trafalgar, or that I am old enough to have seen (as I should like to have seen), ablaze with stars upon the deck of death, the frail figure and the elvish face of the noblest sailor of history.

Yet I propose to go on being proud of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Nelson; to feel that the poets did indeed love the language that I love and that the sailor felt something of what we also feel for the sea. But if we accept this mystical corporate being, this larger self, we must accept it for good and ill. If we boast of our best, we must repent of our worst. Otherwise patriotism will be a very poor thing indeed. '

This, I think, is a very sensible attitude. We cannot take pride in the heroic deeds of our ancestors unless we also feel shame in their villainous ones. True patriotism -- and true history -- must paint our portraits as we are and as we have been warts and all.

1688 and Slavery... seen with both eyes

Putting that another way, I think British schoolchildren should indeed learn the role Britain played in suppressing the Atlantic slave trade; they should also learn how Britain first became rich through that selfsame slave trade, and at a cost of so much African life and liberty. 

Likewise, they should indeed learn about the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688, but what they should learn shouldn't be limited to how the 1689 Bill of Rights played so important a role in underpinning the American colonists' shirking off of their British yoke. They should learn too of how the Revolution was a deliberate attempt by Parliament to block religious liberty and to shore up a uniformly Protestant state; further they should learn that the Glorious Revolution marked the last time Britain was successfully invaded by a foreign army.

And yes, it was. The Dutch forces outnumbered those of the Crown, and the Dutch viewed the invasion of Britain and the usurpation of the English and Scottish crowns as a way of precluding an Anglo-French alliance against them. It means nothing that Parliament invited them in; it's regularly been the case that invasions occur because some in a country tell foreigners that their support would be appreciated, and given how few people had elected that parliament, I don't really think it's tenable to claim that it had any democratic legitimacy. Oligarchic legitimacy, maybe.

In short, if Gove's willing to have British history taught in a warts and all way, then that'll be great. But if he wants to airbrush it, well, I really hope this idea gets packed away back into Michael Gove's Big Box of Whims.

Perennial Problems in Shelving Books

G.K. Chesterton and T.H. White shared a birthday, so it seems somehow apt that the author of The Once and Future King had been an ardent admirer of the author of The Man Who Was Thursday. White was an English teacher in 1936, when Chesterton died, and the story goes that the day after Gilbert's death, White addressed his students. 'Boys,' he said, 'G.K. Chesterton died yesterday. P.G. Wodehouse is now the greatest living master of the English language.'

I'm not wholly convinced that Wodehouse was a greater wordsmith than James Joyce, who was still alive at the time White decreed Wodehouse to be Chesterton's successor, but I take his point. I hardly think it possible to overstate Wodehouse's brilliance, and I think Douglas Adams got it spot on in introducing Sunset at Blandings when he said:

'Master? Great genius? Oh yes. One of the most blissful joys of the English language is the fact that one of its greatest practitioners ever, one of the guys on the very top table of all, was a jokesmith. Though maybe it shouldn’t be that big a surprise. Who else would be up there? Austen, of course, Dickens and Chaucer. The only one who couldn’t make a joke to save his life would be Shakespeare.'

If anything, Adams understates Wodehouse's brilliance, perverse though that seems given the company with whom he ranks him:

'He doesn’t need to be serious. He’s better than that. He’s up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness.'

Adams focuses on Wodehouse's magical mastery of style, recognising him as a true musician, but -- and in this respect he is surely channelling his own strengths and weaknesses -- he pays no heed to Wodehouse's superlative command of structure. It's notoriously difficult to summarise a Wodehouse plot.

Anyway, this sprang to mind the other day, when I was browsing through the hillock of Spectators that adorns our bathroom floor, and came across an article about Kim Philby and his reading habits, as revealed in recently-discovered letters he'd written between 1984 and 1987 to Bowes & Bowes, a Cambridge bookshop. The article divides the books into nine categories, these being 'Modern Fiction', 'Memoirs', 'Travel', 'Literary Criticism', 'Popular Novels', 'Thrillers and Spy Fiction', 'History', 'Espionage', and 'Fitness'. In most categories each book is named, but 'Popular Novels' and 'Thrillers and Spy Fiction' are merely listed by author, with the number of book by each author in parentheses.

The result is that whereas the text elsewhere suggests that the one John le Carré book Philby bought was The Honourable Schoolboy, we're left guessing at which of Dashiell Hammett and P.G. Wodehouse's works he'd ordered.

I'm not sure whence this taxonomy derived. Why rank Wodehouse as a mere 'popular novelist'? Was it the journalist who wrote the piece who made that decision? After all, in any English bookshop nowadays, Wodehouse is securely fastened amidst amongst all the other canonical works of modern fiction, rather than being pigeonholed in 'Humour'; Hammett usually bilocates between 'Modern Fiction' and 'Crime'.


Truth be told, I hate the whole idea of genre fiction; or, rather, I hate the snobbish tendency to treat some books as though they're genre fiction and to treat others as though they're better than that, and are free of any genre constraints. Jane Austen wrote nineteenth-century chick-lit, Alexander Dumas wrote airport novels before there were airports, Kim is spy fiction, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a fantasy, The Name of the Rose is a detective novel, and who's to say that stories about frustrated academics or embittered milkmaids or youths on the threshold of manhood aren't genres in their own right?

Some months back I met some friends at home in Dublin, and a mutual acquaintance came up in conversation. 'Am I imagining things,' said one friend, 'or did you have a huge argument with him in my house once, with him trying to say that The Lord of the Rings wasn't a fantasy novel?' Indeed I did, I said. You're not imagining it. He seemed to think that because it was good, then it couldn't have been a fantasy.

There seems to be a mentality in play whereby works in commonly-recognised genres can be anointed as 'serious fiction' and treated as though they're distinct from their genres. Sometimes, and especially nowadays, this is simply down to marketing, of course, but more broadly, it seems to be something that we do. Rather than recognising the truth of Sturgeon's Law -- that 90 per cent of everything is crud -- we decide that such genres as horror and fantasy are intrinsically and completely worthless, such that any work done in those genres must be rescued from the pit as soon as they're recognised.

Most people will freely recognise that The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth are all science-fiction novels, but if anything they tend to see them as a kind of proto-science-fiction, foundational works that were later corrupted by the pulps. Much the same will be admitted, after some thought, about Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

But what of such dystopian classics as 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451? What of Cold Comfort Farm, Lord of the Flies, Slaughterhouse 5, A Clockwork Orange, The Handmaid's Tale, The Children of Men, Cryptonomicon, The Time-Traveller's Wife, Never Let Me Go, or The Road?

I really don't think this is a case of Science-Fiction people claiming classics as part of their field to give themselves credibility. In my experience, real science-fiction people are happy enough to brandish their acknowledged classics: Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, Foundation, The Stars My Destination, The Left Hand of Darkness, Stand on Zanzibar, Rendezvous with Rama, The Drowned World, Lord of Light, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Flowers for Algernon, The Man in the High Castle, and so forth. If anything, I don't think science-fiction fans should be so shy. 

If bookshops are going to insist on treating science-fiction as literature's embarrassing cousin, then those who love the genre should do their damnedest to have some of the genre's pinnacles restored to their rightful place. And that's nothing compared to what the fantasy aficionados could do.

Me? I don't really care. When the day comes for me to be able to put all my books into one place, all fiction will be together, alphabetically shelved, with no quarter given to genre. It's hard enough classifying non-fiction.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Seven

Last Thursday, as you'll surely remember, the Brother brought his sixth week on the road to an end, clocking up a mighty ninety kilometres in the saddle as he pedalled his way into Galway, his thirteenth county.

Friday saw him waking in Ballinderreen, squinting at the screen with morning eyes in a house impressively garnished with his paintings, one of which is one of my favourites. The highlight of the day must surely have been a most peculiarly Celtic episode, with eight cattle running down in a street into a garden, only to be driven off by a small boy, wielding a hurl and accompanied by a dog. If that doesn't get you thinking about Cuchullain, well, your imagination's clearly not as prone as mine to flights of legendary whimsy. Appropriately enough, given the profoundly Irish nature of  Friday's highlight, as a guest-gift for his hosts he gave them a painting of the Poll na mBrón dolmen in County Clare.

He downed tools at half eight on Friday evening, and by ten he was in Galway City, there to stay with a man who advised him to bring lots of grey paint as it was hammering down. Galway had always been envisaged as the halfway point in the Brother's travels, where he'd take stock and make new plans; given time pressures and the need to get back to base in time for the Lucan Festival in a month or so's time, it's already starting to look as though Laois and Offaly may have to be forsaken; I guess we'll see, though.

Meanwhile on Twitter, others began to plot what they'd do on his return to Dublin, with a swift consensus being reached of a night in the Gravedigger's pub by Glasnevin Cemetery, though that conversation soon spiralled off into tales of Parnell being buried above a cholera pit, of Gravedigger's regulars gathering  on Brendan Behan's birthday to toast him with pints at his grave, and of Behan himself having come from a family of painters less artistic than the Brother.

Saturday was given over to painting the city from above, with Long Grass serving as his table, as ever.

Sunday in Galway City looked nice, thought the Brother: suspiciously so. Indeed, others soon warned him that Met Éireann had already been darkly hinting at ominous sounding 'weather from the west'. Still, he painted and pondered and cycled by the Corrib, and even gave some thought to going to bed early, having spent the previous four nights scorning sleep as best he could.

Monday saw Twitter reports of the Brother's doppelganger being spotted wielding a banjo and disembarking from a Chinese bus; or was it him? It was, he said: he'd a side gig where he engaged in sudden global travel to spook people by appearing and playing that music from Deliverance. Off he went to the Claddagh to try to paint in the rain, but to no avail; up with the paint but the rains came down and washed it away. And no, it wasn't anywhere near as delicate an operation as in the Flake advert -- down the rain hammered, washing the paint right off the canvas, through the hairs on the Brother's leg, and away. The end result, to be fair, wasn't without its unintentional charms, but still, the Brother took shelter, and spent the evening happily curled up on a dry couch.

Yes, I know I should be able to see beyond the Giraffe, but after that story, I just can't!

Tuesday was a day for walking, and for painting, and for making a second sally at the painting his previous day's inclement conditions had so thoroughly thwarted. I like this painting of the Long Walk as seen from the Claddagh, and though it's the sky that entrances me most, I can't help but smile at the giraffe down the end. 

Yesterday, then, saw him leaving Galway city, admiring the views as he went, and pedalling out past where TG4's based in Ballinahown, into Connemara. Long a lover of Connemara -- it was in Rosmuc that the Brother went to Irish college back in his summer holidays when I was but a whelp -- his plan was to make it past Pearse's cottage and then stop overnight in whatever random B&B he found. In the end, having cycled what our dad would call 70 kilometres -- that's 43 miles in old money -- he had to settle for the second B&B he tried, the first one having turned him away. Still, in the end there was tea to be drank and a shower to be indulged in, and all was well.

You should be following the links, btw. They take you to better pictures than this, and in colour too.

And today? Well, today must have been a great one, with him cycling out beyond Clifden on what he's saying is a candidate for his greatest day ever on a bicycle. Given the roads he's ridden and the sights he's seen, that's saying a lot, but I have no idea quite what's made this day so special, other than his views at breakfast, and his lakeside painting somewhere. It seems the route took him from Kylesalia to Loughaconeera and back, and then onward through Kilkernin, Carna, Glinsk, Cashel, and beyond Clifden on the Sky Road, heading out to Eyrephort. I've been doing image searches online to see what he might have seen, and have been bursting with envy, but that's just a stop-gap. I look forward to seeing what he saw, rendered in pixels and especially in pigments.

If you're new to this story, or even if you're not, it's well worth reading today's piece about the Brother on New Tech Post. He explains a lot about his relationship with Twitter, and how it has driven the tour, and about how wonderfully welcoming the Irish Twitterati have been:

'It’s great fun as a concept in a pub. There are times when my knees don’t think it’s that much fun. The overly-ambitious aim is thirty-two counties. That might not happen. If it doesn’t, fine. I’ll have met loads of people and painted lots of pictures and cycled around. 

The people of Twitter have been fantastic. From being taken for a drive to buy supplies, to giving me things, to packing me lunches, people have gone way, way above and beyond, it’s been fantastic.'

You should read the whole thing, and then follow the Painting Tour on the Brother's blog and especially on Twitter, where the hashtag's #paintingtour. His Facebook account's worth a shout too, but the real fun's on Twitter. As I've said a few times now, I wouldn't bother following him on Google Latitude, though, given its habit of placing him at seemingly random locations in the past. And perhaps most importantly, if you think there's any chance at all he might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live, and if you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, and especially if you're in one of the spots he currently doesn't have a host, you should let him know. 

Just send a message to Ireland's first digital nomad™. This is why it's called social networking.

A Proposed Activity, not a Proclaimed Institution

Right, so yesterday's post was longer and more rambling than ever. I was really just thinking aloud. Sorry about that. This'll be rather more to the point.

Having watched yesterday's Merkel-Sarkozy joint statement and press conference in a state of some confusion, I was bothered in its aftermath by the Guardian's tardiness in reporting on it, and then appalled to watch Tonight with Vincent Browne (without Vincent Browne) on TV3, it basically being a frenzy of Germanophobic hysteria, starting with this ridiculous opening:

'Good evening. I'm Declan Ganley, standing in for Vincent Browne. Behind closed doors in Europe today, leaders of France and Germany made a decision with immeasurable consequences for the people of Ireland. Tonight the Irish Government is scrambling to make sense of it. Does this spell the end of what's left of Irish sovereignty, and is there an alternative?'

And then, following an absurdly scaremongering questioning about the death of democracy in Europe, Lord Alton weighs in, saying:

'This is about creating a greater Germany. Let's not beat about the bush. This is what this about. There's been an agenda that's been running now for many years, where people want to create a sort of United States of Europe with Germany in the driving seat, and I think that's the agenda we're seeing being driven on, under the cover of the fiscal crisis that's been affecting the whole of Europe.'

And so it began, with the next panellist babbling about 'the first step in the destruction of the Common Market', misrepresenting the statement as a 'diktat' with 'conditions set in stone', and a third panellist saying 'this has been about the United States of Germany for a very long time'.

Suffice to say the show was more polemic than discussion, with only the most tentative attempt at balance, and all the while with the Twittersphere muttering darkly about spiked helmets and a 'Franco-German Empire'. Given his record with Libertas and its lies about the Lisbon Treaty, Ganley shouldn't have been allowed chair a discussion such as this.

We can all see that the Euro's in dire trouble. Even the British Conservatives think that its collapse would be disastrous for everybody, such that George Osborne's been advocating the raising of Eurobonds for the Eurozone countries based on a common -- or at least a co-ordinated -- fiscal policy, arguing that greater Eurozone integration is necessary if the single currency is to continue to work. Some degree of fiscal co-ordination had been foreseen when the common currency was first proposed forty years ago, but for whatever reason when the currency was being forged the countries that embarked on the project disregarded that economic reality. It's time now to face facts.

A More Sober Analysis...

Jason O'Mahony puts the Irish dilemma in starkly accurate terms on his blog:

'But now we have to confront the reality of a higher standard of living through cheaper Eurobonds and German supervision, or a lower standard of living, exclusion from the bond markets for the short to medium term, but keeping total control over our very modest resources. What will we do?

[...]

We need to be cool and calm about this. There is an argument that we would be better off staying out, keeping our fiscal sovereignty, and if we are willing to pay the price of having far less money to spend on public services, then it’s a strong one. But one thing is certain. Indignant guff ain’t gonna buy us any chips at this table.'

That's the option, and in considering it we need to think about why we joined the EEC in first place back in the day, signing up to a process of 'ever closer union'.

... In the Best Traditions of Realpolitik

Though I'm sure there's been some great work done since on the topic, it's well worth taking a look at what Joe Lee says about the Irish accession process in his Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. Lee quotes with approval those hard-headed diplomats and civil servants in the Department of Foreign Affairs who took the view that those who banged on most loudly about our sovereignty being a pearl of incalculable price didn't have a clue what they were talking about.

True independence, in international affairs, is defined by freedom of movement, and the more options a country has, the more free it can be said to be. Arthur Griffith argued more than a hundred years ago that political sovereignty is meaningless without economic sovereignty, and the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time of accession to the EEC took that ball and ran with it. Lee says:

'Defining sovereignty as "the freedom to take autonomous decisions and actions in domestic and foreign affairs" the White Paper asserted that "as a very small country independent but with little or no capacity to influence events abroad that significantly affect us", Ireland enjoyed very little effective economic sovereignty.'

Our economy was in thrall to the British one, and dependent to a lesser degree on the decisions made by other European countries. Our only hope was to take our place at the European table and to have some say -- however small -- in the collective European decision-making process. What's more, by doing this we could diversify our trade, weaning ourself of our dependency on the UK, thereby increasing our range of options. By surrendering a small amount of nominal sovereignty, we would in practice hugely increase our sovereignty.

And so it proved, until Irish banks borrowed far too much money, and the Irish government guaranteed all money that had been loaned to those banks, not realising that by doing so -- and by not reneging on this arrangement once the reality of what it entailed became clear -- it was condemning Ireland to a condition not a million miles away from indentured servitude.

What Are They Talking About?

So, what have Sarkozy and Merkel said? Well, in truth, they haven't said a huge amount, and you'd never think, to hear the hyperbole and screeching from some of Ireland's more europhobic commentators, that Merkel had to be dragged to this position, as further European fiscal integration isn't exactly a vote-winner in Germany!

They've proposed that economic and fiscal policies in the Eurozone should be coordinated more than hitherto, that serious efforts should be made to facilitate this through twice-yearly meetings of the European heads of government, these meetings being chaired by the president of the European Council, that Eurozone countries should institute constituitional limitations on deficits into their constitutions, and that a pan-European tax should be introduced on financial transactions. They've resisted the idea of introducing Eurobonds just yet, though they remaining open to the idea in the long run, and they intend to work together to coordinate their own national tax policies.

That's all.

Firstly, I don't think anyone should be getting upset about two countries agreeing to work towards harmonising their own taxes. If we believe in our own sovereignty, it seems unfair to deny Germany and France the same thing; we can hardly object to countries deciding on their own tax policies. Will this make it harder for Ireland to resist pressure to join in this harmonised tax arrangement? Maybe, but what kind of an objection is that? Is it really tenable to say that Germany and France shouldn't be allowed to harmonise their taxes unless Ireland says they can do so? Can a government representing 4.5 million people really dictate the domestic policies of two other governments representing 145 million people?

Second, why all the screaming about a European Economic Government under a European President? Well, the clue here lies in the translation, which is why I got rather frustrated when the press conference was on; I wanted to read official transcipts not listen to immediate and perhaps innaccurate interpretations.

The word 'government' can mean either an institution or an activity; sometimes the word 'governance's is preferred in reference to the activity, as this is clearer. It's striking that while Google throws up about 35,500 results for the phrase '"true economic government"',  it throws up almost as many -- 31,000 -- for the far more precise phrase '"true economic governance"'. It's clear that what Sarkozy and Merkel were suggesting was not a new institution, but simply a meaningful activity, and one coordinated to some degree by elected heads of government rather than by unelected bankers. Indeed, this should be common sense: surely we can all see that while two meetings a year would hardly constitute an institutional government, it might at least suggest some effort to steer things. 

As for Van Rompuy's presiding over these meetings, well, doesn't this make sense? The President of the European Council is really only a chairman -- the French word Presidente in this context really just means that, in that he presides over meetings. It's been Europhobic propaganda that's established the position in the popular mind as an 'unelected President of Europe'. Having Van Rompuy chair the meeting would free the heads of government from that deliberately neutral role and allow them to focus on arguing their countries' cases.

And finally, don't forget too that these are just proposals. There's nothing to stop -- say -- Italy, Spain, and Portugal from getting together to put forward their own ideas for how things should be handled, or even Ireland announcing its own plans. There's nothing to stop countries working together in the Council to block proposals they don't like. There's nothing to stop countries from using their veto if need be. And, at least in the case of Ireland, there's nothing to stop us from refusing to amend our Constitution in accord with other people's wishes, unless they're our own too; we might, after all,  think it a good idea to live within our means.

This is a negotiating position, nothing more. No need to panic.

Trying to Make Sense of Madness

I found it baffling a few months back when, in a discussion about apologetics with some Evangelical friends, one of them insisted -- with specific reference to the Gospel according to Matthew -- that the Evangelists were the best historians of the ancient world, and on my blinking, challenged me to name some better ones. I'm afraid I fumbled my response, trying to explain that it's daft to treat all four Evangelists as though they're historians, and that in any case you can't simply put ancient historians into boxes labelled 'accurate' and 'inaccurate' with a special section for 'most accurate'. All else aside, some historians are more accurate on some things than they are on others; Appian, for instance, is probably pretty reliable on the Third Punic War but is an embarrassment on the Second Punic War. 

I should, of course, have said that of the Evangelists only Luke really seems to have been a historian by any definition, in that he talks of having collated and weighed up his sources; that's not to say that the others are of no historical value, which I certainly don't believe, just that they're not historians. And then I should have talked about what ancient historians actually did.

Writing Pragmatic History

Unlike Appian, the second-century BC Greek historian Polybius is widely regarded as an excellent historical source for the Second Punic War and most of the matters he covers, and though he certainly has failings, he's generally recognised as a first-rate historical thinker. He scorns romantic and anecdotal historical writing, and tries to grapple with the big questions of how and why did things happen. With particular reference to wars, Polybius explains their origins in terms of three things:

• An arkhē is a beginning, the first action of a war.
• A prophasis is a pretext, an alleged -- but largely or wholly spurious -- reason for going to war.
• An aitia is a cause, an underlying factor or reason that genuinely influences the decision to go to war.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the aftermath of last week's riots, thinking too about how the riots seem to have been a cascade of distinct -- if related -- events. Legions of causes have, of course, been advanced to explain the riots; Nelson Jones at Heresy Corner has compiled an amusingly comprehensive list.

Things can be Paradoxical without being Oxymoronic

I don't think we should jump to the conclusion that apparently contradictory arguments can't both be right here. There were a lot of riots and a lot of rioters; it's entirely plausible that what was a pretext for one riot was the cause of another.

As an example of apparently contradictory explanations, it's wholly possible, for instance, that both police brutality and police timidity were factors in causing the riots: the death of Mark Duggan, and the police's failure to deal properly with Duggan's family following his death could well have at the very least provided pretexts for the initial Tottenham riot, while frequent stopping and searching of black youths surely bred a deep-seated resentment that would have been causal in nature, both in the case of the first Tottenham riot and subsequent ones;  on the other hand, the impotence of the initial police response to the first Tottenham riot could well have itself had a causal effect, leading to more riots, which in turn were so feebly handled as to encourage other rioting.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

I also think we really should keep in mind that individual rioters may have had individual reasons for why they ran amok. Lots of us have by now heard the clip of giggling Croydon girls revelling in the previous evening's rampage, saying such things as:

'Like, it's the Government's fault... Conservatives!... It's not even a riot - it's showing the people we can do what we want... Yeah, that's what it's all about -- showing the police we can do what we want, and now we have... It's the rich people, the people that have got businesses and that's why all of this has happened, because of the rich people. So we're just showing the rich people we can do what we want.'

Let's be frank. These girls were speaking for themselves; we don't know if what they said reflected the views of the other rioters and looters in Croydon, let alone the rest of London or elsewhere in England. Nobody's conducted a survey of the rioters, asking them they're motives -- no more than anybody seems to have been compiling demographic data on those rioters who've been thus far convicted or at least charged in court. We're relying on anecdotes in the hope that they're representative. Still, it sounds very plausible that this was a common attitude. Civilization is, in no small part, a confidence trick, and once the frailty of our bulwarks against savagery is revealed -- as they were on the first night of rioting -- it's hardly surprising that the fences would be smashed down everywhere.

David Starkey, of course, has agreed that what happened wasn't rioting, embracing instead the description of it as 'shopping with violence', and there does seem a strong case that what went on was, in large part, a looting rampage led by gangs that recognised the impotence of the police and rallied their troops using modern communications, but with large numbers of auxiliary looters -- people who weren't gang members but who just joining in. This BBC report certainly ventures that tentative explanation, though features an interview with one Londoner who -- afraid to show his face -- poses a very blunt question:

'If the media are saying these are mindless thugs that are creating this situation, why are these mindless thugs? What is creating a young man, born and bred in this society, to grow up and become a mindless thug?'

This is a good question, and indeed is the most important question we need to answer if we want to prevent this from happening again. We need to diagnose the problem before we can cure it.


Clusters of Causes

It's striking that most explanations I've seen ventured to explain the riots tend to fall into, roughly, nine categories.

• The most banal and meaningless explanation, of course, is to say that the riots were caused by 'criminality'. This is ludicrous, and explains nothing. What is criminality? Criminality is the quality of being criminal; as such, the riots and looting weren't caused by criminality; they were examples of criminality. This 'explanation' tells us nothing. It's like saying that the Battle of the Somme was caused by war, or that the Omagh Bombing was caused by terrorism.

• More ridiculous, if less self-evidently so, are those attempts to blame the riots on social networking and mobile phones. Modern technology was used to summon the troops, like those beacons in the Lord of the Rings, but that's a far cry from saying it caused the riots. Twitter and Facebook and Blackberry Messenger no more caused the riots than horses did the American Revolution; as Malcolm Gladwell says in The Tipping Point, word of mouth is still the most important form of human communication. Likewise, it's absurd to blame riots on face-coverings or hoodies or knives; that's like saying that Battle of Britain was caused by aircraft.

• Racism -- or at least perceived racism -- and in particular the actions of the police prior to the first riot, has been  cited as causes of the first riot, and some subsequent ones. There's merit to this, certainly, though it doesn't work as an explanation of, say, what happened in Manchester. More broadly, though, stop-and-search is an approach directed not against black people so much as against youths in general; the police may well have good grounds for this, of course, but I think it'd be naive to expect people not to be annoyed by such hassle. We shouldn't be surprised by backlashes.

• More fundamentally, in terms of immediate causes of the riots, I don't think we can shirk all those simple human explanations, especially with reference to people who seem to have got caught up in them: herd behaviour, crowd psychology, peer-group pressure, brain chemistry and mirror neurons, the exhiliaration of crowds, and the sheer madness of the moment. I've had it wittily and rightly put to me recently that 'the IQ of a mob is the IQ of the stupidest person present divided by the total number of people.'

• Sheer opportunism clearly lay behind much of what happened. The walls of civilization aren't very strong and aren't always as well-garrisoned as we'd like. Once it became apparent that it was possible to riot, it's hardly surprising that people rioted. They did it because they could. That sounds too obvious an explanation, but I've no doubt that there's a hell of a lot of truth in this.

• There are, I think, deeper causes that we can all accept as well, related to a culture of acquisition and conspicuous consumption, the influence of such aggression-glorifying media as gangsta rap music, the growth of gang culture, and hereditary joblessness. The question, of course, is why these phenomena have developed, and in trying to answer that, Left and Right tend to draw from very different wells.

• Those on the Left tend to see the deepest root causes of the riots as being rooted in class divisions, the devasting effects on Britain's social structure of free-market economic policies, the failure to replace sold social housing, the corralling of the poorest and most vulnerable into ghetto estates devoid of positive role models, the stigmatising of the poor, and the poor's sense of hopelessness and abandonment. I've already talked about this, and basically think this analysis is correct, if incomplete. I have, however, little time for other aspects of analyses I've seen coming from the left: I don't think people have rioted because of cuts or any other current government policies. On the contrary, I think they're only vaguely aware of what current policies really involve.

• On the right, however, there have been a whole battalion of radically different explanations, many of which come down to a crude attempt to claim that a criminal underclass of morally illiterate children grew up under fourteen years of Labour government. Some of these relate to the education system, blaming comprehensive schools and the lack of corporal punishment, while others blame teenage pregnancy, absent fathers, single mothers, and a supposed lack of ability or will on the part of parents to discipline their children. It's common for these explanations to scorn political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, liberalism, socialism, and a belief in rights without a complementary belief in duties; a general theme is a collective breakdown in respect, and typical of these arguments is the line that Britain's poor are lazy, having been drugged senseless by an all-providing welfare state.

• There are those on both left and right who say this is, ultimately, a question of morality, or perhaps beyond morality, of Sin. I've heard it argued that the rioters haven't been brought up to know the difference between right from wrong, or that they know it but don't care, or that they know it but see it as meaningless in a world they regard as being stacked against them and in favour of corrupt bankers and politicians. It's as though most recognise that the riots were -- let's be frank -- sinful, but some identify the main sin driving them as having been greed whereas others see it as envy.

So that's nine causes or clusters of causes, of which I think seven are credible, one absurd, and one meaningless. I'll come back to the arguments of those on the Right in a day or so. They need serious consideration. I don't think myopic analyses are really going to help us here, with the Left refusing to engage with points made by those on the Right, or vice versa.

Would 'Right to Buy' have passed Cameron's 'Family Test'?

 As you'll see from the comments on yesterday's post, my contention that the Right to Buy scheme has contributed in no small way to the transformation of social housing into ghettoes of despair has not gone unchallenged:

'I thought the facilitation was to allow residents to buy the council house they lived in rather than continuing to rent them; the idea being that those who owned their own home would be more involved with, and attuned to, their neighbourhood and community. I don’t see then why this led to a regression from “stable families” in “stable neighbourhoods” to “ghettoes of intergenerational deprivation and despair, with no visible way out for those left behind.”

[...]

If people who bought their council houses were no longer regarded as being part of those in "social housing", then clearly the remainder that then constituted the social housing group would consist of a statistically higher proportion of the unemployed and one-parent families. But this in itself is a mere statistical realignment, not a change in the reality of who lived where and in what community or neighbourhood.'

These are understandable criticisms, so I'm going to stay my planned topic for today in order to try to answer them.


Before Thatcher
It would, I think, be absurd to argue that all was perfect in the world of social housing in 1979, when Mrs Thatcher came to power. About a third of all British housing was then owned by local councils, much of this housing having been hastily built during 1960s slum-clearing campaigns. Many of these estates were built in line with the architectural fads of the time, with flats in high-rise buildings joined by raised walkways and with underground car parks. In hindsight it's easy to see why such arrangements were a recipe for disaster, with crime and vandalism swiftly becoming rife, and people refusing to move there unless they had no choice whatsoever.


The Right to Buy Scheme
When the Right to Buy scheme was introduced, Michael Heseltine declared that it would lay 'the foundations for one of the most important social revolutions of this century'. He was right, but not quite in the way he meant.

The Right-to-Buy scheme was in many respects a very good thing, enabling lots of people to own their own homes, something which I think we probably all recognise as desirable, even if -- as Labour argued at the time the scheme was introduced and for several years afterwards -- it was economically profligate. However, while acknowledging the good the scheme did, we shouldn't gloss over the scheme's dire though wholly unintended consequences.

The first thing to grasp is that while the scheme allowed tenants of council houses to buy their homes, it did not allow for a significant or systematic construction programme, and councils were prevented from reinvesting in social housing. The nation social housing stock fell from more than 6.5 million in 1980 to below 5 million in the mid-nineties. Labour, though divided on the issue, subsequently relaxed the rules barring reinvestment in new social housing and eventually encouraged the building of new properties, but the damage had been done.

Crucially, this reduction in stock has not been spread evenly across the country, such that -- say -- a third of all properties in every single housing estate or block of flats was bought by the families living there. On the contrary, stock reduction has varied nationally, regionally, and even locally. The remaining social stock is disproportionately concentrated in areas with lower property prices and employment opportunities than elsewhere, and is notable for being of a generally lower quality than those properties which have been bought.

While the earliest tenants to avail of the Right to Buy scheme tended to be relatively affluent families from the skilled working class, centred on middle-aged, married couples, it was more common during the nineties for buyers to be younger tenants with stable incomes, buying their homes with a view to selling them quickly and moving out, such that their neighbourhoods became increasingly transitional and unstable.

The Right to Buy was hardly ever exercised on estates that were already rife with problems or were in areas of high unemploment, with no more than one property in twenty in such estates being bought, such that 'problem estates' remained in the hands of local authorities. The social composition of these estates became far more homogenous than before the introduction of the Right to Buy scheme. The reduced social housing capacity forced authorities to allocate housing on a basis of strict need, such that the poorest, most vulnerable, and often least-educated of people -- many of them having recently been homeless -- were concentrated together in unpopular and unstable run-down housing estates. Rather than housing a mix of people, including families headed by skilled manual workers or public servants such as policemen and nurses, they became dilapidated ghettoes of the poor and desperate, overwhelmingly inhabited by the young and the elderly, typically on low incomes and dependent on benefits.

A large quantity of social housing stock owned by local authorities was transferred into the hands of housing associations, these being less shackled than the authorities in how proceeds from sales could be reinvested, and being able to build new estates, such that the amount of social housing owned by housing associations now approaches the amount still held by local authorities. Unlike local authorities which are run by elected counsellors, however, housing associations are largely unaccountable, such that their increasingly marginalised and stigmatised tenants have next to no say in how the estates where they live are run.


A Living Tapestry of Men and Women
In her famous 1987 'there is no such thing as society' interview, Mrs Thatcher said some important stuff, worthy of real consideration. Thatcher's acolytes have a self-deluding tendency to gloss over what she said, while her opponents tend to misrepresent it, scorning a caricature of her argument. What she said is worth engaging with, and I just want -- briefly -- to look at two passages in the interview in connection with the social revolution brought about by the Right to Buy scheme. Early in the piece she said:

'... when people come and say: "But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!" You say: "Look. It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!"'

I think she's correct, of course, but I also think that such arguments have next to no moral or rhetorical force in homogenous ghettoes where everyone is on benefits, and where there's nobody to point to as examples of those people who are supporting other people. Sure, if you're familiar with the idea of the Good Samaritan, you'll know that your neighbours aren't just the people on your street, but even then arguments like this need a human face. It's no good saying that 'other people are supporting you', if you and those 'other people' don't go to the same schools, don't worship in the same churches, travel on the same buses, drink in the same pubs, or even talk to each other occasionally. It's not good saying that 'other people are supporting you' if you believe those same people look down on you as failures -- even as scum.

Later in the interview Mrs Thatcher said,

'... when we have got reasonable housing when you compare us with other countries, when you have got a reasonable standard of living and you have got no-one who is hungry or need be hungry, when you have got an education system that teaches everyone -- not as good as we would wish -- you are left with what? You are left with the problems of human nature, and a child who has not had what we and many of your readers would regard as their birthright -- a good home -- it is those that we have to get out and help, and you know, it is not only a question of money as everyone will tell you; not your background in society. It is a question of human nature and for those children it is difficult to say: "You are responsible for your behaviour!" because they just have not had a chance and so I think that is one of the biggest problems and I think it is the greatest sin.'

If it takes a village to raise a child, then we really need to give some thought to the kind of villages our society has created. By removing the leaven of hope and aspiration -- stable families, married middle-age couples, and skilled workers and public servants -- from our social housing, Right to Buy has effectively resulted in Britain's social housing being reserved for those with the worst problems, such that social housing estates are ghettoes blighted by intergenerational illiteracy, ignorance, broken relationships, drug abuse, alcoholism, child abuse, violence, vandalism, gangs, and a desperate lack of facilities, opportunities, or hope.

Roughly a sixth of Britain's population lives in social housing, in neighbourhoods that, as Will Hutton puts it, 'are caught in a self-reinforcing loop of decline'. Given this, I think Mr Cameron might have done well today to think of what his predecessor had said about children not having had a chance when he so swiftly dismissed the attitude he characterised by saying:

'People aren’t the architects of their own problems, they are victims of circumstance.'

Sometimes -- to a large extent -- they are. That doesn't excuse anything, of course, but it does help explain things. We need to diagnose illnesses properly before we launch at patients with dictats, drugs, and scalpels.