From (London) Sunday Times letters , 25 May 2008:
WHY is the abortion time limit linked to the time when a premature baby could, with sufficient medical intervention, survive? I fail to see the relevance (Family planning is one area in which we don’t need MPs’ help, Simon Jenkins, Comment, and Don’t mess with abortion, Rachel Johnson, News Review, last week).
If one set of doctors do their utmost to help a much-wanted premature baby to survive, why does this affect the work of another set of doctors doing their utmost to help a woman who does not want the child?
Whether, and until what stage, a woman should be entitled to an abortion is, of course, a matter of opinion. But whether the child could survive should not be a consideration.
Sarah Plummer
Tadcaster, North Yorkshire
Well and pithily said, Ms Plummer! You join the tiny band of commentators who have spotted the nudist tendency of the emperor in the increasingly flabby debate on abortion. (And a double hurrah if you're the same Sarah Plummer who did the supertitles for Fidelio at Glyndebourne.) But three lusty cheers if you have been reading Ephems on the same subject, for example here: all recruits to the cause are more than welcome.
It's surprising (to me, anyway) that some of the liberal contributors to the abortion debate, Polly Toynbee and Zoe Williams among others, have pointed out the fallacy in the viability test but have done so almost in passing, instead of making it the centre-piece of the counter-attack against the priests and other luminaries of the anti-abortion lobby. If the viability test is allowed to continue to go unchallenged even among the pro-choice reformers, the end result, once medical science succeeds in developing a newly fertilised human egg to full term in a laboratory, will be the reinstitution of the old total ban on abortion at any stage of a pregnancy — which is what most of the anti-abortionist obscurantists really want, but are too shy to say so.
Brian
Sheep and goats can readily be told apart by the remedies they propose for the steep rise in petrol and food prices. Sheep demand government action to bring down petrol prices, for example by suspending or even permanently reducing tax and duty on petrol ('gas' in US parlance): examples are the London Sunday Times, and Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Goats recognise the positive benefits of higher petrol/gas prices in their environmental effects, encouraging the search for alternative and cleaner sources of energy, more sparing use of private cars and commercial lorries (trucks), an end to under-priced commercial flying with its appalling pollution, and an acknowledgement that the forces of supply and demand, however much distorted by the OPEC cartel and futures trading speculators, but reflecting the rapidly growing demands of economic development in Asia, will win out in the end; so they advocate government action to help those who are hardest hit by high prices and least able to pay them from their own resources, as urged by the economists, Barack Obama, and Simon Jenkins on the same page as the Sunday Times editorial advocating the opposite –
Record oil prices provide a tax windfall running into billions of pounds. This should be passed back immediately to motorists in cuts in fuel duty. [Sunday Times editorial, 25 May 08]
and
The government has been pressed for years to increase the cost of petrol and other fuels to cut consumption and help to save life on Earth. That is precisely what the market is now doing. Yet rather than applaud, ministers feel they must do the opposite and make petrol cheaper. The AA and others demand that the autumn increase in petrol duty should be postponed and millions of bank holiday motorists are told that Gordon Brown “feels your hurt”. [Simon Jenkins, Sunday Times, 25 May 08]
Senator Obama is one of many who has pointed out that any reduction in petrol/gas duty or tax is likely to be immediately offset by a corresponding increase in prices set by the big oil companies, thus effecting nothing more than a transfer of resources from government (i.e. the public's) revenues to the billions of dollars of profits accruing to the oil companies. Abolishing stamp duty on house purchases would have the same effect: stamp duty is already factored in to the price asked by the vendor after calculating what the market is likely to bear, so its abolition will simply enable the vendor to increase the asking price and the likely profit accruing to himself, at the expense of the exchequer.
Much the same goes for higher food prices. Those who have been bemoaning the low levels of reward and incentive going to farmers in the poorest countries of Africa and Asia should now be welcoming the more realistic rewards going to food producers world-wide, reflecting the reality of increased demand, especially from China, India and elsewhere in Asia. The remedy lies not in a doomed attempt to hold prices down by artificial interventions in the market, such as scatter-gun subsidies to consumers both rich and poor, but in the encouragement of an expansion of food production, especially in developing countries, by the application of appropriate technology. (Vegetarians are also entitled to point out that the high proportion of global grain production going to feed cattle and other livestock for consumption as meat is incredibly wasteful, when that grain could feed incomparably more people than the resulting meat can ever do. But I'm selfishly too fond of my roast beef and bacon and egg to act accordingly, comforting myself with the self-serving justification that individual eco-gestures are a waste of time in the absence of coordinated collective action on a large scale.)
As petrol and food prices have been going up, they have passed house prices on the way down: house prices are falling both in the UK and the US. Those who have been lamenting the manic house price boom of the last decade or so, giving hundreds of thousands of house-owners the illusion that they have become rich without having had to lift a finger in the process (thus encouraging a huge credit bubble), and making life impossible for would-be first-time house buyers, are now emitting piteous cries bewailing the difficulty of getting a mortgage, the rise in evictions of those who can't any longer keep up their mortgage payments, and the viciously anti-social — and short-sighted — behaviour of the sub-prime mortgage lenders in the US and Europe who have been taking absurd risks and creating predictably bad debts, and then concealing the risks by packaging them up and selling them on to idiots too greedy for instant profit to take the trouble to find out the scale of the risk they are taking on. All these are indeed proper subjects of condemnation, but once again the remedy is not to reduce, suspend or abolish stamp duty or other taxes on house sales, which will merely increase demand for houses (as observed earlier, benefiting those selling houses at the expense of the public purse) without any corresponding increase in their supply, thus driving house prices up again: the remedy should be to use the tax system to transfer money to those in need of houses and least able to afford them, from the richest beneficiaries of higher energy and food prices and of the sub-prime mortgage racket.
Simon Jenkins again, a Conservative writing in a hyper-Conservative newspaper:
The worship of central bankers over the past decade has been shown for what it was, a mere shift of blind faith from one group of fallible tunnel-visionaries to another. They have proved no better defenders of the public interest than their forebears during the great crash of 1929. The sickening spectacle of those responsible walking off with millions of pounds of other people’s money in bonuses has rightly put bankers akin to mafia racketeers in public esteem.
The fall in house prices to a more realistic level, and the end of reckless lending on inadequate security to high-risk borrowers who can't afford to service their loans, are both welcome and beneficial. The object should be to act to help those who are hardest hit by these price movements, both up and down, not to try to work on the prices themselves; and to fund help for the most vulnerable out of the proceeds of much higher taxes on those, companies and individuals, who have paid themselves millions of other people's pounds and dollars through the exploitation of bad risks and market forces, involving absolutely no wealth creation on the part of billionaire profiteers. In Britain this would mean an end to New Labour's shameless schmoozing of big business and the mega-rich. Is Gordon up for it?
Brian
I discovered only recently that the 'contact' facility of this website and blog, whereby anyone could click 'contact' at the top of any page to send me a message, had not been working for some time, although it seemed to be. My trusty website guru, who has now rather dismayingly decamped to Ethiopia for, probably, three years, succeeded in fixing the problem before he left, and it should be working again now.
Apologies to anyone who has tried to send me a message via 'contact' during the last goodness-knows-how-many months and is understandably aggrieved at receiving no reply. If your message is still relevant, please try again now, using 'contact' at the top of the page — or else send me an e-mail addressed to brianbarder [at] compuserve [dot] com, omitting the brackets and spaces.
I should also apologise for the fact that the website's 'Search' facility has also been out of order for a considerable time, for different reasons. The website's non-resident guru hopes to be able to fix that from Addis Ababa whenever he has a spare moment and an internet connection, which might not be for some time.
Brian
I have been reading Barack Obama's first book, Dreams from My Father — skipping rather rapidly through the second half of it because it was due to be returned to my public library and I didn't give myself time to read it properly, an omission soon to be repaired. Many commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have been very considerably impressed by this book (written, of course, before 
Sen. Obama launched his candidature for the Democratic Presidential nomination). So was I. It is a very striking chronicle of a deeply complex young man's journey from confusion and loneliness to self-knowledge and the discovery that he could relate the most unusual complexity of his ethnic make-up and upbringing to the state of the American nation and its future. Joe Klein, himself no slouch in the political writing department, is quoted in Wikipedia as having written in Time magazine that Dreams from My Father "may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." (Klein's article about Obama is worth reading in full. But of course so are many others like it.)
Many things about this book came as something of a surprise to me, despite my having already read so many articles about Obama (haven't we all?). Although his Kenyan father spent relatively little time with Barack jnr. before his death, he has obviously played a major role in his son's voyage of self-discovery — bigger than I had realised. So has Obama's awareness of the importance of Africa in his genes, and also his awareness that he differs materially from most other Afro-Americans in not being descended from slaves, in not having experienced the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, and in the immediacy of his African heritage. There are other significant things that set him apart from a vast majority of other Americans, white as well as black and brown: not least among them his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia as well as in the US, and his lengthy visits to Kenya to establish relationships with his African relatives. Such a cosmopolitan background, movingly and extensively described in Dreams, is evidently central to the person he has become, and it's so different from the American norm that his ability to inspire the empathy and affection of millions of ordinary Americans is the more remarkable.
At the same time, Obama's qualifications for the highest American political office are also impressively mainstream: Harvard Law School, editor of the Harvard Law Review, experience in the state Senate of a major State as well as in the US Senate, work as a community organiser in the most deprived areas of Chicago, a beautiful and brilliant wife and the obligatory pair of beautiful daughters. He writes revealingly and movingly in Dreams about his controversial relationship with the radical pastor, "Reverend Wright" (or as we in the UK would call him, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright), convincingly putting that issue into a positive perspective.
There are sixteen passages from Dreams on a website here which give something of the flavour of the book. Whether or not Barack Obama becomes the next President of the United States, his book is obviously required reading by anyone who wants to know more about this remarkable figure, who has emerged so unexpectedly from outside mainstream American politics, marginalising in a few months the woman who for the past two years or more has been the front runner for nomination as the Democratic Party's Presidential candidate, and placing himself in pole position to be the first black President of the United States.
Who would have predicted even a year ago that the Presidency could be almost within the grasp of an American with an African father (and a Muslim grandfather), educated in a Muslim and a Catholic school, much influenced by an Indonesian step-father, who describes in his own memoirs how he was at one point in danger of becoming a drug addict, born and partially educated in the outermost margins of the US in Hawaii, a voracious reader of radical black literature (and much else) who was almost destroyed by the loneliness and isolation of his uniqueness but who came to develop out of that adversity an inspiring political personality as a unifier and reformer? To quote the Guardian cliché, you couldn't make it up.
None of this means that Barack Obama, if nominated and if (a much bigger if) able to defeat both the vastly experienced McCain and a mountain of racial prejudice, would necessarily turn out to possess the inner steel, physical and moral strength, ruthlessness and serpentine subtlety, required to be an effective liberal reforming President. In conventional political terms, none of these qualities has been severely tested in the Senator's life and career to date. But he has demonstrated unusual strength of character and determination in converting the experience of discrimination, apartness and loneliness into a vision of unifying reform and his special personal role in achieving it that just might change the world. I started out as a supporter of Hillary Clinton who doubted if there was much hard-core political substance to her black challenger. I have now come round to the view (confirmed by but not originating in Dreams from My Father) that if Barack Obama is not given the chance to show what he can do as President of the United States, it will be a kind of tragedy, not just for him, not just for the United States, but for all of us. It will be a huge gamble, and one that might well not come off. But it's a gamble that looks increasingly important to take.
Update (14 May 08): Please now read Jonathan Steele's important article in today's Guardian about Barack Obama and his likely foreign policies if elected President in November. Steele writes of Dreams from My Father:
It's a beautiful book. One wonders whether any would-be US president has been so good a writer. More importantly, has any other candidate grown up with such a direct encounter with a country under massive political repression or seen the cynical face of the US empire? The Republican nominee John McCain accuses Obama of not having national security "experience", but what experiences do he or Hillary Clinton have which compare with Obama's? They were raised in the usual American cocoon of believing that the values behind the country's anti-colonial beginnings still guide its international behaviour. Obama, by contrast, knows the US has run a global empire for at least the past half a century. His mother taught him, he writes, "to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterised Americans abroad". [emphasis added]
Carl Lundquist's comment on this post (below) is also interesting reading, especially coming from an acknowledged Republican and McCain supporter; so are some (but not all!) of the comments so far appended to Jonathan Steele's article in Comment Is Free.
Brian
A month or two ago I submitted a letter to The Observer about abortion, pointing out that the pro-choice lobby (those in favour of recognising women's right to choose what to do about an unwanted pregnancy) was making a big mistake by tacitly accepting the anti-abortion people's proposition — that abortion should be allowed, if at all, only up to the point when the foetus has developed sufficiently to be theoretically viable outside the womb: the viability test. The Observer didn't publish my letter so in March I put it on this blog instead.
Later, on 27 April 2008, The Observer published a letter (not apparently available online) about abortion signed by David Steel (Lord Steel of Aikwood) and 27 others — a letter to be taken seriously in view of Lord Steel's status as the father and prime mover of the great abortion reform Act of 40 years ago, which at last legalised abortion in certain defined circumstances, and largely put the back-street abortionists out of business. The Act licensed abortion up to the 28th week of a pregnancy, the point at which the foetus was regarded at the time as becoming viable. But, in the words of David Steel in an article in The Independent newspaper on 30 April 2008, reflecting the same approving assumptions about the viability test as those made in his Observer letter three days earlier, –
The one thing we [sic] did change since 1967 was that we agreed in 1990 that the presumption of viability at 28 weeks was out of date and should come down to 24 weeks. The BMA, the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and the national body representing neonatal paediatric specialists have now, on the basis of powerful recent research, concluded – and they are backed up by a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report – that there has been no reduction in the threshold of viability to below 24 weeks. The expert medical professional bodies are of the view that there should be no further reduction in the upper time limit and I believe that politicians should be guided by them.
In response to the Observer letter (and the Independent article which made the same point) I had another go at a letter for publication, with the same result (i.e. this one wasn't published either!):
David Steel (letters, 27.04.08) has done more than anyone else to civilise our abortion law, so it's especially sad to see him and 27 others relying on the deeply flawed foetus-viability test as the main reason for keeping the present 24-week cut-off point for legal abortions.
There's no basis in ethics or logic for the claim that once a foetus achieves theoretical viability outside the womb, aborting it should be forbidden: why should viability suddenly invest the foetus with the rights of a developed person (which it isn't) and suddenly revoke the right of the mother to control of her own body?
Anyway, viability is a fluid concept, varying from person to person and place to place: medical science will inevitably make viability possible earlier and earlier, eventually to the moment of conception, at which point applying the viability test will make all abortion illegal once again. Changes in medical science can't affect the moral status of a foetus, nor deprive the mother of her rights. We really need to abandon any association between viability and the time when abortion ceases to be permitted; otherwise Lord Steel's great achievement will soon come to nothing.
Those, including pre-eminently the Roman Catholics, who want abortion banned altogether, opportunistically latch on to the viability test (which is anyway inconsistent with their own theological position) as a way to reduce bit by bit the period during which abortion is legally permitted, knowing that as advances in medical science makes a foetus 
theoretically viable outside the womb at an ever earlier stage of its development, eventually permitting a fertilised human egg to be developed in the laboratory immediately after conception, the inevitable outcome will be the prohibition of all abortions at any stage of a pregnancy. We shall be back to square one, back-street abortionists and all. Yet (as I pointed out in my blog post of 16 March) David Cameron for the Conservatives, the responsible Labour minister, and now David Steel himself, have all committed themselves to this fallacious and retrograde principle.
Acceptance of the viability test is logically misguided and extremely dangerous in practice. Rejecting it entails abandoning an assumption which, almost unbelievably, has guided policy for both the pro- and anti-choice camps for forty years. It's surely time for those who believe in a woman's right to control over her own body to jettison it before it's too late. We should be guided, not as Lord Steel proposes by doctors or scientists, and still less by the priests (none of whom is any better equipped to make a judgment on the issue than anyone else), but by our liberal and ethical principles, if we have any.
Update (11 May 08): I was relieved to see this in Polly Toynbee's Guardian article on 9 May:
So the Mail prints pictures of thumb-sucking foetuses with stories of four miracle babies that survived extreme premature births. Never mind that the whole notion of viability has no rational connection to any limit on the date for abortions: from the moment of conception every zygote is potentially viable. But "pro-lifers" reckon if they can win the argument in principle that a "viable" foetus can never be aborted, then some day, when the science permits, they will win an outright ban.
Exactly so. Yet the swelling discussion of this issue on radio and television and in the print media, as the parliamentary debate draws near, is almost entirely conducted on the assumption that the viability test is decisive. It's mystifying that even the pro-choice lobby — with a few valiant exceptions such as Polly Toynbee — seems content to fight this battle on ground of the mediaevalists' choice.
Brian
Boris Johnson's victory over Ken Livingstone in the election for mayor of London ought to have come as a surprise, but in the end it didn't. By any normal standards Livingstone's eight years in office, in the biggest directly elected political job in Britain, were remarkably successful. The improvements in London transport, especially in the buses and the marked easing of traffic congestion in central London, have been very significant; there has been a big increase in visible policing; a very high proportion of new housing has been in the "affordable" category; whatever you think of the Olympics coming to London, the opportunity has been seized to allocate very large amounts of money to the regeneration of a big area of London badly in need of it; and unexpectedly large amounts of money have been extracted from central government for other London needs as well. Every one of these achievements has depended heavily on Livingstone's personal political following and the clout this has given him in his dealings with his sworn enemies in the Labour Party, Blair and Brown, the latter both as chancellor and as prime minister. He has exploited this clout with immense skill, a politician to his finger-tips.
So why did he lose to an amateurish Tory politician who has never run a big organisation in his life, who was a failure on the opposition front bench, who's disaster-prone and has an undisciplined tongue, whose views as expressed in many newspaper columns have been offensively illiberal, insensitive, sometimes verging on racist, whose background as a product of Eton and the Oxford University's Bullingdon Club sets him apart from ordinary people, and who is widely regarded as an amusing buffoon — an image he has taken much care, until the last four or five weeks, to cultivate?
There are several reasons for this result, all of them coming together in a fatal merger at the worst possible time for Ken Livingstone:
1. Any candidate representing the Labour Party was bound to be badly damaged by the deep unpopularity of Gordon Brown and his government, itself attributable to the economic downturn, a series of blunders dating from the non-election after Brown took office, Brown's uncharismatic personality and inability to communicate an impression of humanity, continuing casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan and the abandonment of Brown's initial undertaking to bring most British troops back from Iraq by around now, his obstinacy in ploughing on with such widely opposed measures as the extension of the period of detention without charge to 42 days, ID cards and their obtrusive national data-base, the renewal of Trident, and so forth; and the general absence of a sense of purpose or direction. Brown, once seen as tough and decisive, is now widely perceived as a ditherer, obsessed with detail and micro-management at the expense of any strategic vision.
Against such a background, it's striking, not that Livingstone lost, but that he won a so much bigger share of the total vote than the national average won by Labour in the simultaneous local elections across much of the country. He still commanded a remarkable personal following, continuing to run ahead of his party. But this time it wasn't enough. No Labour candidate could have won this time.
2. The obverse side of Livingstone's personal following is the visceral dislike of him felt by substantial numbers of otherwise perfectly rational people. Individual criticisms of him almost all prove, on close inspection, to be either unfounded or relatively trivial. He has always enjoyed indulging his sometimes rather puerile itch to épater les bourgeois (probably in the process gaining as much delighted approval from some Londoners as prim condemnation by others); he has surrounded himself with cronies of whom some have seemed fairly shady, and sometimes prolonged his loyalty to them beyond their sell-by dates, although there seems precious little evidence that their advice to him has led to identifiable failures on his part; and he has been badly hurt by revelations that some of the more questionable social and other development projects funded by the London Development Agency have failed, more or less expensively, although the proportion of total funding represented by the failures is probably considerably smaller than in many other comparable institutions that finance small-scale start-up projects. A general air of sleaze, even corruption, has been sedulously fostered, although even Livingstone's bitterest critics haven't suggested that he has gained personally from any misspent funding or that he has ever had the slightest interest in the fleshpots or ceremonial ego-trips that sometimes seduce those in high political office.
3. There has been a widespread feeling that eight years as mayor are enough and that it's "time for a change", that lethal slogan used by those long excluded from office: some have assumed, although without any obvious supporting evidence, that Livingstone must by now be tired, have run out of energy and ideas, begin to personify the adage that "all power corrupts" (as Lord Acton didn't, as we all know, actually say). The doctrine that high political office should be distributed upon the principle of Buggins's turn seems to me fundamentally absurd: whether it's time for a change in any particular case depends entirely on what the change will consist of. The sole issue for London voters last week was, or should have been, whether Livingstone or Johnson, on the available evidence, was the likelier to do a better job for London as mayor. And the evidence unmistakeably pointed to Livingstone as the better bet. But the itch for change conquered reason. This is politics as entertainment, bread and circuses for an electorate with a severely limited attention span. It might even be said that in his defeat by Londoners who had hitherto elected him, he suffered the fate of Aristides the Just [1].
4. Livingstone was the victim — the only adequate word — of an almost unprecedentedly vicious campaign of slander, innuendo and mendacity waged unremittingly against him by London's only paid-for evening newspaper, the Evening Standard, owned like the far right-wing Daily Mail by Associated Newspapers which in turn had a commercial interest in backing Johnson (as the likelier candidate to renew Associated's franchise for distributing its free news-sheet outside London Transport Underground stations: Livingstone had encouraged a rival enterprise). The author of the most wounding smears and accusations has been Andrew Gilligan, himself the victim of Alastair Campbell's campaign against the BBC at the time of the Hutton Iraq Inquiry. Gilligan owes a debt of gratitude (and personal friendship) to Boris Johnson who employed him after his ejection from the BBC; the result can be seen in a long row of Gilligan's scabrous headlines directed at Livingstone in the Standard. There's no possible doubt that this single-minded campaign inflicted terrible wounds on Livingstone: those who didn't buy and read the Evening Standard, or who bought it but never got beyond the headlines, were inevitably influenced (perhaps subliminally) by seeing those same headlines plastered all over news-agents' billboards right across the capital. The treatment, and destruction, of Neil Kinnock by the right-wing press in the 1980s was positively benign by comparison.
5. Lastly, there has been much misunderstanding (and some misrepresentation) of the nature of the office of mayor. This is intended to be a much more personal form of authority than the familiar British pattern of the first among equals, the prime minister or committee chairman who owes his position not directly to the electorate but to his own colleagues who have chosen him, continue to assess his performance, and can get rid of him and substitute someone else if they like. By contrast, the London mayor is directly elected and is directly accountable to those who elected him, not to the London Assembly (dominated by the opposite party) except in the most general terms: the Assembly has no power to depose him in the way that the house of commons, and in practice the Cabinet, can depose a prime minister. Unlike a prime minister or committee chairman, the mayor appoints his own senior staff, including the heads of London's main agencies: they are not appointed from the ranks of the elected Assembly. They are responsible to the mayor and not principally to the Assembly. The comparison is with elected mayors of cities, towns, villages and communes in France and the United States, not with Chairs or Leaders of County or Borough Councils, still less with prime ministers, in the UK. This profoundly democratic system is what has made possible the radical changes and reforms introduced by Ken Livingstone, which could never have been piloted through a maze of collegiate committees, councils and assemblies in the old county council system. But when Livingstone has exercised this unique personal authority in precisely the way that the system envisages and requires, he has been commonly, and wrongly, perceived as dictatorial, as abusing his powers to an almost corrupt degree, and as misusing his position to act without the consent at every point of the elected Assembly.
So Livingstone's defeat came, in the end, as no great surprise. If he had won against such enormous odds it would have been a major sensation. Some have suspected that his heart wasn't anyway in it: that he was tired, wanted a rest, secretly didn't mind having the huge burden of governing London transferred from his shoulders. Personally I doubt if this is really what he wanted. As I have noted in response to a comment on an earlier post, I saw Ken Livingstone at a local meeting (attended by about 70 to 80 people, predominantly Asian and including many OAPs such as me) three days before the election and was reassured to find him vigorous and fluent as ever, concentrating on his plans for the future (if re-elected) rather than on the past. He paid tribute to the Labour Party which had given him the fullest possible support: "I couldn't have asked for more." I gather that earlier in the campaign he had been suffering from bronchitis and had largely lost his voice. At this meeting he seemed to have fully recovered and was his usual relaxed, informal, energetic self, the absolute opposite of arrogant, full of ambitious plans and ideas. He would only predict that the result would be very close and that it could go either way: but I think the subtext was that by then he expected to lose, for all the obvious reasons. Whether deep down, on an almost subconscious level, he was actually quite happy to lose, it's impossible to know. I don't think anyone in whose blood politics runs as richly as it does in Ken Livingstone's ever really wants to lose an election, although I suppose on a certain level the prospect of some leisure time must come as something of a relief. He's over 60….
I realise that this overwhelmingly positive view of Livingstone will arouse strong opposition from many of Ephems's regular readers, including several close friends and at least one even closer relation. The Comments facility below this post is, as ever, open to them, as well as to those who like me take a more charitable view. Let a thousand flowers bloom! But on such a subjective issue I shall try to abstain from responding to hostile comments here, relying on this post to define my views. I shall of course enjoy reading comments, caustic and all, and may even profit from some of them: who knows?
[1] "In one anecdote about Aristides, known as "the Just", who was ostracised [sent into exile from Athens for ten years by a vote of the people registered on an ostrakon, or shard of pottery] in 482, an illiterate citizen, not recognising him, came up to ask him to write the name Aristides on his ostrakon. When Aristides asked why, the man replied it was because he was sick of hearing him being called "the Just". Perhaps merely the sense that someone had become too arrogant or prominent was enough to get someone's name onto an ostrakon."
— Wikipedia
Brian
