Not for the first time, the Guardian has gone at a letter submitted by me with a hacksaw, or perhaps an axe, before publishing it (here) on 29 April 08: but better an amputee than nothing at all, I suppose.
Anyway, just for the record, here's the text as submitted:
The modest complexities of the electoral system for the London mayoral elections on Thursday, plus widespread distaste for some aspects of Ken Livingstone's personality and record, shouldn't obscure the realities facing voters (Ken, with all the caveats, April 26). Boris Johnson, lacking concrete policies, experience of administering anything, and attention to detail, and with his many reactionary views, seems likely to be a disaster for London if elected. His election would also boost the Tory Party's prospects at the next general election. Livingstone is the only candidate capable of beating him.
Under the preferential system of voting, unless either Livingston or Johnson gets 51 per cent or more of the first preference votes, in which case he's elected (which is unlikely), all other candidates apart from Livingstone and Johnson will be eliminated, and any of their second preference votes cast for Livingston or Johnson re-allocated to them: so the outcome will probably depend on which of the two gets more second preference votes from the rest of the field. Whatever the merits of the LibDem and Green and some other candidates, a vote for any of them except Livingstone (or Johnson!) will be wasted. So will second preference votes for any of the other candidates.
If your first preference vote is for Livingstone or Johnson, there's no point in casting a second preference vote for anyone else, because neither of those two will be eliminated. A first or second preference vote for any of the other candidates, or a failure to vote at all, amounts to a vote for Johnson, because withholding your vote from the only candidate who can beat Johnson must boost Johnson's chances. The inescapable conclusion is that if you don't want Johnson as mayor, the only rational course is to vote for Livingstone, regardless of what you think of him, preferably as your first preference but failing that as your second. (I have no connection whatever with the Livingstone campaign.)
The Guardian's version does have the benefit of brevity, so perhaps it's clearer: but quite a lot is sacrificed — I would think that, wouldn't I? — and I regret the syntactical blunder introduced into the second sentence of the Guardian's version. However, I hope the general thrust has survived.
A comment on my recent Ephems post on the subject accuses me of "peddling the line that ‘only Ken can beat Boris,’ [which is] the way that Ken tries to squeeze out Brian Paddick’s vote." I'm puzzled by this. The statement that "only Ken can beat Boris" is surely an incontrovertible statement of fact, not a 'line'; and if acknowledgement of the fact has the logical effect of "squeezing out" the votes for Paddick, the Liberal Democratic Party's candidate, that's just too bad for Mr Paddick. Even if Brian Paddick had fought a scintillating, constructive and inspiring campaign, which unfortunately for him he hasn't, it would still be the painful truth that a first preference vote for him is a wasted vote because he can't avoid being eliminated as soon as the first preferences have been counted: and a second preference vote for him is even more conspicuously irrelevant, since he will have been eliminated before the second preferences can be re-distributed.
It's not his fault that he's going to come third, and that only the first two will survive to receive the other candidates' second preferences (or at any rate those second preferences given to Livingstone or Johnson). As Leo Durocher is supposed to have been the first to say, nice guys finish last — or, what is the same thing in this case, third. Paddick himself, while ritually pretending to believe that he's going to be elected mayor, implicitly acknowledges that he's going to come third (or worse) and thus get eliminated, when he recommends that those who give him their first preference votes should give their second preferences to whichever of Livingstone or Johnson they think the less appalling. Paddick's second preferences will only get re-distributed when Paddick himself has been eliminated.
(If I'm wrong and Paddick turns out to have come first or second by winning more first preference votes than either Livingstone or Johnson, thereby avoiding elimination and surviving to receive his second preference votes from the other candidates, I shall have the doubtful satisfaction of being in excellent company as I wipe the egg from my face; and in that event, I shall keep a close watch on the sun in case it starts to set in the east after all these years.)
Brian
This is for registered voters in London, England.
How to vote in the London mayoral elections on Thursday (May-day)? It is not difficult to decide. It's going to be either Ken Livingstone, the Labour incumbent, or Boris Johnson, the Tory challenger. Whether you think Livingstone is a good socialist lefty or an arrogant opinionated shifty s**t is completely irrelevant. It's not a beauty contest; not even a personality contest. The only question is whether you think it would be a good 
idea to deliver London into the hands of Johnson, a man who has never administered anything; who appears to have difficulty mugging up briefs written for him on even quite straightforward subjects; whose opinions as reflected in his columns in the right-wing Daily Telegraph, and editorials in the Spectator, are in some cases offensive to decent liberal opinion and in others simply offensive, period; who is prone to massive errors of judgment from which he seeks to escape by playing the buffoon; who is alarmingly typical of his background — Eton, and the foppish and reactionary Bullingdon Club at Oxford; who, because of his ignorance and incompetence, is at the mercy of his minders and fund-raisers, all right-wing Tories, many (including the owners of the London Evening Standard which has run a disgraceful smear campaign against Livingstone) with big business interests which Johnson would almost certainly defer to in his decisions and policies as mayor; who would have little chance, as a right-wing Tory, of extracting for Londoners the indispensable billions of pounds of public money from a Labour government with an interest in seeing him fail (whereas Livingstone, with a massive personal political following, plus a proven record of progressive success and of independence from his party leadership, has been spectacularly successful in this complex and sophisticated task); and who (Johnson again) would probably prove equally unsuccessful in extracting public money for London from a Conservative government in the gruesome event of a Conservative victory at a general election during the next mayoral term of office, since he is in hock to his party's bosses, not remotely independent of them.
Like him or loathe him (and there are grounds for either or both), Livingstone by almost universal consent has done an unexpectedly excellent job as mayor. Some of the cronies who work for him seem to be an unsavoury bunch, but there's no evidence at all that their politics or their advice have had a negative effect on his administration. The improvements to London's transport system effected by Livingstone have been spectacular, against all odds, and there's more to do, which he shows every sign of doing. His plans for financing tube modernisation, deliberately frustrated by Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer, have turned out to be enlightened and right, as against Brown's which have proved an expensive flop. His housing policies are practical and progressive. His influence on policing policies and practices in London has been strikingly positive. Even the Evening Standard with its squalid defamations has failed to lay a glove on him in policy terms; and its personal vilifications can be dismissed as completely irrelevant.
So the choice is not hard, even if you regard it as being between two undesirables: political choices are often a matter of selecting the lesser of two evils, or the least of several. And there's no escaping it. If you vote for a third candidate — the Green, for example, or the relatively inoffensive LibDem candidate, the former policeman — and if also you don't give your second preference to Livingstone, you are in effect voting for Johnson for mayor, since you will be withholding your vote from the only candidate who can beat him. The same applies if you don't vote at all, or if you spoil your ballot paper: you might just as well vote for Johnson. There's only one way to help save London from potential disaster on a grand scale, and that's to give your first, or at any rate your second, preference to Livingstone. Hold your nose while you do it, if you must: but for London's sake, do it!
Brian
Faithful visitors to my website (http://www.barder.com/), host to this blog, will have noticed that it seems to have expired, although some of its individual pages are still breathing and available, e.g. via links to them from earlier blog posts. I have appealed for First Aid to my web guru, who however is currently somewhat preoccupied with packing up for three years' hard labour in Ethiopia, so it may be a little while before normal service is restored, if ever.
Meanwhile, as you'll have gathered if you can read this, Ephems continues to function. I just hope it isn't about to succumb to the same life-threatening condition as its aged website parent — although if it does, that might actually allow me enough time to read one or two of the books that continue to pile up beside my bed, untouched by human hand. Books! – remember them?
Anyway, in case you fancy browsing again among the infinite riches of http://www.barder.com/, keep clicking away on the link, and who knows? maybe some day it will pop up again as if nothing had happened.
Update (25 April 08): Web guru has obtained a diagnosis (unintelligible to me) from the server and expects to effect a cure over the weekend. Ephems not apparently under immediate threat.
Update (27 April 08): Web guru has succeeded, after much manipulation of rogue code, in restoring my home page in all its slightly dated glory, including links to other pages. Grateful thanks for that — and a loud raspberry to the software people who changed the code without telling anyone.
Brian
From Simon Jenkins's article in the Guardian of 18 April 2008 about the original of Betjeman's delightful verses, "A Subaltern's Love-song", written in love-sick praise of the young, healthy, tennis-playing home counties girl Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, who died at 92 as Mrs Jackson the other day:
To be sure, Hunter Dunn inhabited a world that today could hardly seem less poetic, that of Camberley golf clubs, tennis rackets, Hillmans, blazers, lime juice and gin. Nor did she evoke from Betjeman any great verse, many of the lines being close to doggerel. I have never understood "furnish'd" by an Aldershot sun, that is also "westering, questioning". It suggests a preference for sound over sense, as does the line, "How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won". The rhyming of walk with talk, and shorts with sports is equally plodding. [Emphasis added.]
Guardian letters, 22 April 2008:
I enjoyed Simon Jenkins's piece about Joan Hunter Dunn (Comment, April 18). But what on earth is wrong with the rhymes that he denounces as "plodding": "walk" with "talk" and "shorts" with "sports"? I think we should be told, should Jenkins be so bold.
Brian Barder
London
It's of minuscule interest, perhaps, that the Guardian made two tiny changes in my letter as submitted: in the first few words I had referred, accurately and I thought courteously, to "Sir" Simon Jenkins; and in the last few words I had written "should Simon be so bold", which was perhaps unjustifiably familiar on my part. And I should have remembered that journalists of independent spirit (of whom Simon Jenkins is undoubtedly one) don't always like to have public attention drawn to their gongs. For once I have no complaints about the Guardian's editorial meddling with my deathless prose (or verse).
But I still don't see what's wrong with those rhymes, which are not obviously any more plodding or clunky than any of the others in Betjeman's poem — er, verses, all true and in some cases ingenious rhymes.
PS: If you visit this web page you can click on a little red 'play' triangle in a small blue frame and hear John Betjeman reading the whole piece to an appropriately enthusiastic audience, as well as seeing the full text of it.
Brian
According to Paul Helmke, writing in The Huffington Post, Senator Barack Obama –
supports limiting handgun purchases to one per month
I suppose that this will cook the goose of his presidential campaign: the notoriously powerful gun lobby in the United States won't put up with that sort of left-wing commie authoritarian extremism, even without John Wayne and now Charlton Heston to bang the drum for them.
Up-date (9 April 08): The following comment by Tony H, and my appreciative response to it, put this in a quite different light:
Brian,
This has, I think, nowt to do with preventing individuals from buying their weapons. After all, Obama's next Primary is Pennsylvania, where gun ownership is off the radar.
It's all to do with trying to prevent gun smuggling and preventing guns getting in the hands of criminals…really.
Remember this is the States!
In the 1990's New York "firearms dealers", who were unable to buy wholesale quantities simply drove down to Virginia, filled up their cars with guns..helped by local citizens…..and drove back to NY to flog the things on the streets.
South Carolina enacted a "one gun per month" law and smuggling ended overnight.
There's a stub here on WikIt
Brian writes: Ah! Mystery solved: thanks, Tony. And apologies to the good if diminutive Senator.
Brian
I don't usually use this blog to reproduce whole articles from the press, but on this occasion a Guardian story about the rule of law in the United States seems to justify it, being almost beyond comment — especially at a time when we in Britain are convulsed by the debate over whether to extend from 28 to 42 days the maximum time for the detention of terrorist suspects without trying or even charging them. So here's Elana Schor's report from Washington in the Guardian of 3 April 2008, headed Memo exposes US powers on interrogation:
The US justice department extended the sweeping wartime powers claimed by George Bush to military interrogators, giving them freedom from criminal laws when questioning al-Qaida suspects, in a 2003 memorandum released yesterday.
The brief, provided to the Pentagon days before the invasion of Iraq, allowed slapping, poking and shoving without legal consequences. Maiming a detainee, defined as disabling or cutting out the nose, eye, ear, lip, tongue, or limb, was deemed a defensible interrogation tactic if the military could prove it had no advance intention to maim.
The 9/11 attacks allowed the military and White House to invoke a broad right to self-defence, the brief argued. "The defendant could claim he was fulfilling the executive branch's authority to protect the federal government and the nation from attack after the events of September 11, which triggered the nation's right to self-defence," read the brief, written by former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo.
The memo was revoked nine months after it was sent, but the Bush administration has built on its arguments to assert exemptions from US and international law during interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere overseas. Referring to Bush as "the sovereign", Yoo gave him the right to override laws "at his discretion".
The 81-page brief was released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which fought the administration in court to secure the release of documents.
The American Civil Liberties Union's press release on this incredible document is here, and the full text of Mr Yoo's 'memo' is here (PDF). The ACLU press release notes that –
To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at: ww.aclu.org/torturefoi.
A real coup for Freedom of Information. And it should be good for sales in the US (and perhaps elsewhere) of the T-shirts emblazoned with "01.20.09: Bush's Last Day" across the chest. "The first thing we must do is kill all the lawyers," as Dick the Butcher says in Shakespeare's Henry VI.
Brian
More Grauniad and Observer oddities — see the last collection here.
Writing in the Guardian of 31 March 2008 from Memphis, Tennessee, about Martin Luther King, Gary Younge (does his name rhyme with scrounge, or tongue?) quotes a remark about American businessmen being happy to sit down to dinner at the place where Dr King was assassinated, a comment apparently made by the splendidly named circuit judge D'Army Bailey. The judge must dread being the subject of a Spoonerism. Wikipedia, predictably, provides some delightful examples of Spoonerisms, including the classic remark allegedly made by the good Doctor S. to a lady at a reception, predicting her imminent descent into insanity by reference to Alice's Hatter: "You'll soon be had as a matter of course".
Gary Younge used to be the Guardian's New York correspondent, but now he seems to function exclusively as the paper's race affairs correspondent, and a rather good one too. According to his Comment is Free profile he is now "a Guardian columnist and feature writer based in the US", which obviously gives him an enviable amount of scope. In the same article he identifies a certain Andrew Young [sic] as 'one of [Martin Luther King's] aides', which perhaps does less than justice to the man who has been, in the words of his Wikipedia entry, a "U.S. congressman and mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, and was the United States' first African-American ambassador to the United Nations", as well as having been a prominent civil rights activist in his own right. However, perhaps a degree of reticence about the now venerable Andy Young's eminence was in order, since Mr Younge [sic] attributes to him a striking grammatical solecism: referring to Martin Luther King's opposition to the Vietnam war, Young (not Younge) is supposed to have said, "As a Nobel prizewinner we expected people not to agree with it, but to take it seriously." Alas, even with that royal 'we', old Andy can't claim to be a Nobel prize-winner, however much he may have deserved it.
* * * * *
Do you remember Obama's prominent aide, Samantha Power, having to resign from Barack's team when the Scotsman newspaper published an interview with her in which she described Hillary Clinton as "a monster"? –
"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win. She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.
Ten days later, on 17 March, the Guardian's Media section published short interviews with four media pundits who stated their views about the ethics of publishing a remark which its author said, immediately after making it, was "off the record". All but one of the four attempted, with varying degrees of persuasiveness, to defend the action of the Scotsman in publishing the remark despite the clear caveat which accompanied it. This seems to me on a par with the almost universal attitude of the media to public servants who salve their private political consciences by leaking sensitive government secrets to the media — often referred to as "whistle-blowers", as if enjoying the prerogative of the referee, even though self-appointed — on the principle that their private political opinions override their duty of loyalty and confidentiality to elected ministers. It's obviously in the media's interests that treacherous public servants should feed official secrets to them for publication (it makes a good story and sells newspapers and advertising), just as it's in the media's interests to betray those who give them interviews and ask that parts should be "off the record" — i.e. purely for the background information of the interviewer and in confidence. How media people with such flexible ideas of right and wrong have the brass neck to write sanctimonious editorials wagging their fingers at elected governments, lecturing them on what they 'must' do, is a continuing source of amazement.
* * * * *
Talking of sanctimonious editorials, the Observer's first leader on 30 March 2008 (with its wrong-headed heading 'Brown should not rule out a Beijing boycott') surely broke all records for sanctimony, loftily lecturing the Chinese government on what it 'has to' do if it wants to be accepted as a world power:
If China wants to be fully accepted as a major actor in the international community, then it has to behave as a responsible stakeholder in its actions. That especially includes its actions towards its territories like Tibet. This is not only important in terms of its internal affairs. It is also vital in the upholding of international law, multilateral institutions and a common framework of human rights to which the world adheres. The world needs China to take these issues seriously, whether in Tibet or Darfur, and to recognise that it will be held to account if it does not.
Almost everything about this is hopelessly misjudged. The idea that China is not yet "a major actor in the world community", a country with a population of more than one and a quarter billion — more than one in five of the population of the world, and rapidly growing — together with a huge and expanding economy, and a permanent member of the Security Council, is frankly bizarre. Anyone anywhere in the world but in Britain reading the Observer's homily would be bound to wonder where it thinks it's coming from, given Britain's own recent record on "upholding of international law, multilateral institutions and a common framework of human rights": this from a newspaper which actually supported the US-UK aggression against Iraq that flouted international law and gravely undermined the world's primary international institution. Physician, heal thyself! Then the advice to Britain's prime minister to consider boycotting the Peking[1] Olympic Games is recklessly ill-judged, with Britain scheduled to host the games only four years later and thus dangerously vulnerable to Olympic boycott politics. But above all, the whole tone of the editorial is hopelessly arrogant and impertinent. Quite apart from anything else, do the Observer's leader-writers not understand that China, like all global great powers (the American neo-cons, Britain at the peak of its imperial power), doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks about it, provided that it is feared and respected?
The Observer's second leading article on the same day ("A shameful way to treat women prisoners") was impeccably liberal as to substance, but contained one striking sentence:
On any given day, around 1,000 women in English and Welsh's jails … are on remand.
It's easy to see what has happened here. No doubt the original draft referred to "England's and Wales's jails" — or even, heaven forbid, "England's and Wales' jails"; and some cub sub-editor, perhaps on work experience attachment, felt uneasy about that apostrophe-s after a non-plural word ending in 's', and decided to play safe with "English and Welsh" instead. But the Observer, unlike its daily sister paper the Guardian, has a week to proof-read and fact-check its copy, and someone really ought to have spotted this, especially in an editorial column.
* * * * *
Sorry, but I haven't quite finished with the Observer of 30 March. This same doomed issue prominently featured a long article by Max Hastings in support of the campaign by the reactionary Tory clown Boris Johnson to be elected Mayor of London. Max Hastings is always worth reading for his insights into what an intelligent Tory is thinking, but on this occasion he seemed to be writing strictly in his capacity as a former editor, not only of the Daily Torygraph, but more particularly of the London Evening Standard, the newspaper which even more than any other organ of the right-wing populist press pursues a virulent vendetta against Ken Livingstone, London's controversial left-wing Labour Mayor. Published to coincide with the launch of the Conservative party candidate Johnson's campaign to replace Livingstone as Mayor, Hastings's article was based on some curiously contradictory propositions: (1) that Livingstone had been a rather good and successful Mayor whose major reforms Hastings reluctantly approves of, (2) that Johnson, well known personally to Hastings, variously described as "a callow white lump in formal evening dress", "a façade resembling that of PG Wodehouse's Gussie Finknottle", one who in a tight spot "evoked all his self-parodying skills as a waffler", was a person whose "indiscipline made him ill-suited to [political] office", leading Hastings to advise him to stick to journalism; but (3) that "the Tory candidate has it in him to become a London hero, if he can avoid impaling himself on his own extravagances and we should add, given the record, his willy." As endorsements go, this must be one of the most heavily qualified; but an endorsement it is undoubtedly meant to be. But why in heaven's name is the Observer, supposedly a newspaper of the centre-left, printing this piece of Tory election propaganda, however contorted, designed to help launch the campaign of one of the most improbable, reckless, irresponsible and far-right buffoons ever to run for high political office in this country? It's a mystery.
* * * * *
But much can and should be forgiven the paper which is accompanied every Sunday by the outstandingly good Observer Review, containing week by week some of the best film (especially), theatre, dance and book criticism of the non-specialist British press. Henry Porter's weekly crusading journalism in the Observer in the defence of human rights and civil liberty has long been required reading. And in last Sunday's Observer the article by John Gray about the coming international struggles for increasingly scarce oil and water, the context without which it's impossible to make sense of the Iraq misadventure, was absolutely compulsory and compulsive reading.
* * * * *
It would be unfair to end this chronicle of Observer misfortunes and misjudgements without a closing word about the once-great Sunday Times, now dragged sadly down-market by Rupert Murdoch and his minions. One of its oddest features is its weekly 'Style' glossy magazine, apparently aimed at well-heeled and socially ambitious women with more money than sense. Most of it amounts to little more than a series of articles and photographs advertising absurdly expensive women's clothes, beauty treatments, 'alternative medicines', and other such follies. It's full of sign-posts to what's fashionable this week and what's no longer 'in'. Two regular exceptions are the witty and faintly raunchy spoof agony aunt column at the back of the magazine by "Mrs Mills", and the camp but also generally witty essay by A A Gill, concluding each Sunday with an often waspish restaurant review that pulls no punches. Last Sunday however Gill's piece included a wonderful Malapropism, which must have had Gill tearing his hair out when he saw it in print (he presumably dictated his copy down the telephone to another of these work experience trainee hacks):
The menu looks like the Ivy's, but it's a reprieve of Marco's best bits.
Or did Gill really mean reprieve and not reprise? Perhaps some ingenious reader will suggest an interpretation which makes sense of this memorable sentence as it was printed. Meanwhile it remains a puzzle that a broadsheet paper which makes some claim to seriousness continues to fill a whole page of its Style magazine with an astrology column by the improbably named Shelley von Strunckel (surely someone out there has a sense of humour after all?). 'Ms von Strunckel' plods through the signs of the zodiac with the usual vague warnings and predictions, cautiously unverifiable as always, but at the foot of her page of rubbish, in smaller print, this rather objectionable advertisement appears:
Have a personal consultation with an astrologer! Shelley's hand-picked team are among the best in the country. Call 0906******* now, or text SHELLEY (space), followed by your burning question, to 8****. Calls cost £1.50 per minute and are recorded (ICSTIS regulations). SMS costs £1.50 per message plus standard network rates. Readings are for guidance only and you must be over 18. Service provided by Telecom Express. Reader helpline: 0870 *******, open 9am-5.30pm GMT.
Numbers are for UK callers only. Calls cost 60p per minute (phone) and £1 per minute (fax). Fax helpline: 0870 *******. Cost of calls from mobiles and other networks may vary. Approximate call duration: 5 minutes. Lines are updated weekly. [Asterisks substituted for the published numbers -- BLB]
So even the 'reader helpline' and 'fax helpline' use premium cost telephone numbers which produce a modest income for the advertiser as well as the hapless caller's telephone company. The 0906 number for calling Ms von Strunckel, at £1.50 a minute, produces an income for that shrewd lady which isn't even modest. What idiots the editor of Style magazine, and Ms von S., must take their readers for!
* * * * *
[1] I might consider starting to call Peking 'Beijing' when those who already do so begin to call the capital of Italia 'Roma' and the capital of Rossiya 'Moskva'. Until then, Peking is good enough for me. (I might also hang on for Deutschland, Firenze, Venezia, Sankt-Peterburg, Den Haag in Nederland, Bruxelles in La Belgique and København in Danmark, as well as waiting for the French to stop calling London Londres and England Angleterre.)
Brian
