Category Archives: Politics

A quick visit to Absurdistan

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Our times are so rich in absurdity that it’s almost embarrassing. Not because public figures embarrass me when they’re being ridiculous. I love that. It’s the embarrassment of being given too much good stuff. You know—this can’t all be for me.

Some historian (don’t ask who; I almost never know who I’m quoting) said that revolutions happen when countries become ungovernable. I heard this back in (I’d guess) the early sixties, which were really an extension of the late fifties. I was not only living in the U.S., it had never occurred to me that I’d live anywhere else. Life looked infinitely stable and my imagination couldn’t stretch far enough to understand how a country could be ungovernable.

Now though? No problem. Neither of my home countries is at that point yet, but I have no trouble imagining it.

Irrelevant photo: hydrangea.

Irrelevant photo: hydrangea–an apparently stable one.

So, what’s falling apart?

Let’s start with the Labour Party, which is in the middle of a highly public nervous breakdown and recently kicked out a member—no one prominent; just a member—over a Facebook post.

What did the member write? “I fucking love the Foo Fighters.”

She also posted something about animal-free cosmetics and veganism, but the Foo Fighters quote gets top mention in everything I’ve read about it, so apparently that was her real transgression.

Since I’m a thousand years old and not only never listened to the Foo Fighters but don’t even feel bad about it, I went to YouTube and—well, you know what it’s like when your expectations are set by a band’s name? I mean, what’s foo anyway? A weapon? An ideal? If it’s an ideal, are they for foo or against it?

What does it all mean, bartender?

Anyway, I figured that if they were fighting with, for, or against foo, they’d scream a lot, and I hate screamy bands. But they don’t scream. At least not compared to punk or new wave, both of which I survived, although I didn’t listen to any more of either one than I absolutely had to.

The Foo song I listened to (most of) starts with a single guitar, and it’s not even over-amped. True, the lyrics do mention an arsonists’ choir, the chorus does use the word fuck—a lyrical word if there ever was one—and by the time the other guitars and the drums get to work it does all get kind of loud, but are our sensibilities really so delicate that somebody should be thrown out of a political party over it? Or was the problem not that the member loved the band but that she fucking loved it?

I’m old enough to have worked on an underground newspaper, back in the late sixties, that lost a printer because one article used the word fuck. But that was a long time ago. Surely times have changed.

By now, of course, I’m wondering how many readers I’ll lose over using the word fuck so much here. Be strong, folks. It’s just a word. We’re not even talking about sex.

What’s behind this member getting the heave-ho? If you’re not British, you need some background: The Labour Party used to be leftist. Then it went centrist under Tony Blair’s leadership. Or center-left, but most definitely center. (There are nuances to all this that I’m skipping over and/or don’t know. It’s a quick summary, so don’t worry about them. Unless, of course, you want to comment about them, which would be wonderful.) By the time Blair moved on, the party machinery and most of its Members of Parliament were solidly rooted centrists. Then a bunch of stuff happened and I’ll skip over it or this would go on forever but at the end of it all Jeremy Corbyn—a leftist—was elected the new head of the party. If you’re American, you can think of him as Bernie Sanders, but with a beard and an accent you won’t hear in American election battles.

To people who feel disenfranchised or disengaged—okay, to some of them—this was exciting stuff and the party picked up a raft of new members. Some are my age and left the party over the Iraq War, but others are young and new to politics. Still others are—oh, never mind. We’ll toss them in with the nuances and the stuff that would take too much time to go into.

Parties usually like having members, but this batch threatens to bring change, and the MPs and party bureaucrats are furious—at Corbyn, at the new members, and probably at Bernie Sanders for being a point of comparison. Or for quite possibly liking the Foo Fighters. Or for not having a beard. Who knows. They’re not in a good mood and this isn’t the best time to ask. So they set up an election that was supposed to force Corbyn out but Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey of British Political Opinion reports they’re going to lose. Massively. Even though they’ve kept a whole bunch of new members—presumably Corbynistas and possibly even Foo Fighteristas, but who can tell since no one’s asked?—from voting.

So throwing someone out for posting that she fucking loves the Foo Fighters? Hell yes. It won’t tip the election, but you have to know it felt good to whoever made the decision. Before, that is, it got into all the papers and made the party look incredibly silly.

Without getting heavily ranty here, I want to say that I don’t fucking love the Foo Fighters, but I don’t hate them either and I do swear a lot and if anyone would like to throw me out of the party for saying so, I’d just love it. I can’t think of anything more entertaining. And if you’re going to toss me out for any of that, let’s do it as publicly as possible, okay?

But it’s not just the Labour Party, or even just the left, that’s having a nervous breakdown. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation is also turning on itself, although it’s not clear what the fight’s about.

This being a gun organization, one person has “been accused of saying” (notice how wishy-washy that wording is; everyone involved denies saying everything) that “the only thing that cunt wants is a bullet between the eyes.”

Another “is said to have said,” “I swear I will kill you, you cunt.”

I’d like to point out that both threats are grammatically correct. Grammar’s important when you’re threatening people. You could add a comma after “I swear,” but the rules of punctuation have loosened up in these degenerate days of ours and it’s not strictly necessary. Besides, they were spoken threats, so that’s some reporter doing the punctuation.

In addition, the threats are either sexist or extremely sexist. There’s a certain type of man who thinks that possessing female body parts is inherently humiliating, and although in my experience people who are called cunts tend to be female, since—. I don’t really need to explain that, do I?

I didn’t think so. Anyway, as far as I can figure out the British are happy to call both men and women twats. That may carry over to calling people cunts. I’m not sure and I look forward to someone enlightening me on the subject. The point is that the article I read is worded so that I can’t be sure if the target’s male or female. Or, now that I think of it, even if it’s one person or two.

It’s an odd thing, but calling a man a cunt is offensive whereas calling a woman a cunt is considerably more offensive, at least if my reactions are anything to go by.

Back to our story, though: All this is happening in a country with minimal gun crime and strict gun laws, where shootings are genuinely rare. But it’s okay, kids, because guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

The lone moderate in the fight is quoted as saying—sorry, as allegedly saying—“You will live to regret this.” I have no idea what the this is, but someone is said to have “breached fiduciary duty.” In other words, money’s involved.

Money’s almost always involved, isn’t it?

Just to clarify things, a staff member (who very sensibly didn’t want to be named and who may be male, female, both, or neither) said it’s not clear who’s resigned and who’s been suspended but that the situation’s toxic and anyone who questions “them” gets a threatening letter.

Who’s them? No one’s named in the paper and we might just want to stay out of this fight.

Anyway, the BASC says its primary aim is to foster “a strong and unified voice for shooting.” That’s good, because I can’t think what they’d be like if they weren’t unified.

Refugee camp in Calais

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Refugees in the Calais camp are going hungry. I don’t like using this blog for fundraising, or to talk about politics (as opposed to making fun of politics and politicians, which I love doing) but this sounds like a crisis. So no jokes today. Sorry.

The French authorities have been trying to close the Calais camp for some time, and one of the actions they’ve taken is to close down its restaurants, including one that fed unaccompanied children. As if that wasn’t enough of a problem, the number of refugees keeps increasing while Europe dithers about what–if anything–to do them. This puts an additional strain on the kitchens that are still operating. To cut a long story short, they need money.

The Refugee Community Kitchen writes that it needs to double its food output. “Conditions in the camp are abhorrent and the team at Refugee Community Kitchen strive to ensure that everyone who wants it can at least receive one large, fresh, nutritious, hot meal every day.”

If you can make a donation, they have a fundraising site that I think will accept various currencies. Some people I know are also using this site to send sleeping bags and other much-needed gear to the camp directly. As far as I can tell, this one only accepts pounds.

For a glimpse of what the camp is like for children, take a look here.

A quick visit to political absurdity

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In these dark times, it’s comforting to know that the waters of political absurdity are forming such a gorgeous ocean.

In the U.S., the Republican convention’s in full swing. Ohio—the state that hosts the city (Cleveland) that’s hosting the convention—allows people to carry guns openly and to carry concealed weapons if they have a permit. Mind you, the police can’t stop someone and ask if they have a permit for a concealed weapon. They can only ask if they have some other reason to stop them—say a tail light that’s burned out.

What would the police do without burned-out tail lights?

I’ve read that the Black Lives Matter movement is boycotting the protests outside the convention, feeling that their movement was being hijacked by the protest organizers, but I’m guessing that both the city government and the police were already edgy about the Black Lives Matter movement anyway, and became more so after cops were shot in several cities. The shootings don’t seem to have been by movement activists but they were surely related to the anger that fuels the movement.

So let’s guess that Cleveland’s cops, and possibly the city government, are less than happy knowing that firearms are washing around legally.

So what does a nervous city do? It establishes a zone around the convention center and bans a variety of other things there, including toy guns, umbrellas with sharp tips, knives, ropes, and tennis balls. It sounds like the weapons from a game of Clue (or Cluedo, in British). Inside the convention center, the Republican Party itself has banned fresh fruit. And canned fruit. And—what will the National Rifle Association say?—real guns.

So, to sum up, you can carry a real gun near the convention center but not a toy gun. Or a tennis ball. And you cannot attack the candidate with a sharpened banana.

Update: I just read that when a number of armed blacks (as opposed to armed whites) began showing up on Cleveland’s streets, the head of the police union asked the governor to suspend the right to carry arms openly. “I don’t care if it’s constitutional or not,” he’s quoted as saying.

I have some sympathy for cops operating in a world that’s awash in guns, but this serves as a reminder that very little in the U.S. is racially neutral.

In a deep bow to the state of the world’s economy, the convention’s being held in the Quicken Loans Arena. Quicken Loans is a mortgage lender. I don’t know that there’s anything dodgy about it, but I can’t get the phrase subprime loans out of my head. I’d weep if I weren’t laughing so hard.

Meanwhile in the U.K., Boris Johnson—one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, whose career briefly looked like it was over when his fellow Brexiteer Michael Gove destroyed his chance of being Prime Minister—held his first press conference since being appointed foreign minister. It was a bumpy ride. He was asked if he planned to apologize for the less than diplomatic thing he’s written and said about world leaders. What did he say? In the one comment that’s (more or less) quoted, he called Obama half Kenyan and a hypocrite. We’ll let that stand in for the rest. Having followed Johnson a bit in the papers, I have no doubt there’s plenty more.

In addition to his diplomatic skills, Johnson’s known for playing fast and loose with the facts—he lost his first journalism job for faking a quote and went on to make a career out of exaggeration, distortion, and various other forms of inaccuracy—and reporters took him on for some of the “outright lies” he’d written. I’m not sure who I’m quoting there. Presumably one reporter, not all of them.

Fun. But not half as much fun as his references to the crisis in Egypt, by which he apparently meant the crisis in Turkey. And in case you think it was a slip of the tongue, he said it twice.

So that’s Britain’s new foreign minister. Turkey, Egypt, you know, what’s the difference? They’re all a bunch of foreigners.

Sleep well tonight, my fellow citizens of planet earth. The world’s in good hands. And I’ll be back on Friday with something less political.

As Britain leaves the European Union, part 2

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The bizarre news just keeps on coming.

On Wednesday, I learned that although one of the big complaints about the EU was the fishing quota, the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations has announced (now that the vote’s been taken) that fishing quotas aren’t likely to be any larger after a Brexit. “The reality is that most of our stocks are shared with other countries to some degree or another,” the organisation said.

I wonder if it would have made a difference if they’d said that before the vote. Quite possibly not. It’s not like a huge number of people make their living fishing anymore, but the fishing quota was a highly emotional issue that seemed to stand in for a lot of more amorphous resentments.

Also on Wednesday, Nigel Farage, the rubber-faced head of the U.K. Independence Party, which has been pushing for a way out of the EU for years, made a triumphant speech to the EU Parliament, telling them, among other things, that none of them had ever held a real job. Behind him sat Lithuania’s European Commissioner—a heart surgeon—holding his head in his hands.

And on Thursday? The Labour Party continued its self-inflicted meltdown, with MPs doing their best to publicly humiliate their elected leader. Meanwhile Boris Johnson, the leading Brexit campaigner and frontrunner for leadership of the Conservative Party, announced that he wasn’t in the race. Why? No idea. Speculation around here is that either (a) he’s trying to preserve his reputation by letting someone else figure out what to do next or (b) someone knows something juicy about him.

I’m not sure it’s relevant, but he and Michael Gove have been so close through this campaign that the shoulder seams on their suits were stitched together, and Gove’s wife accidentally sent an email that she meant for Gove to a member of the public instead.

Who forwarded it to the press. Who did what the press does and published it.

I’d like to break in here and remind everyone—and I speak as a fiction writer—that you really can’t make this stuff up. If you do, no one will read it. It’s too damned improbable.

What did she tell him? Among other things, not to sign on as a supporter of Boris’s campaign until he got a specific job offer.

Senior civil servants are worried that a new body to coordinate the Brexit strategy won’t have the expertise or the resources it needs. You’d think someone would’ve been exploring the possibilities long before the referndum, but apparently not. Instead they seem to have said, “Hey, if it happens we’ll just, you know, wing it.” Only they probably didn’t sound quite so American.

As Gary Younge points out in a long article on how this all happens, the country effectively lacks both a government and an opposition.

And finally, in a completely different country, the president of Belarus has urged citizens to “get undressed and work till you sweat.” Or maybe he told them to develop themselves and work till they sweat. According to the Guardian, in Russian develop yourselves sounds a lot like get undressed. My Russian, unfortunately, doesn’t include either get undressed or develop yourself, although I can say “hello,” “how are your grandparents?” (which might actually be great-grandparents; it’s all a little hazy), and “this is a beautiful day today” or something equally awkward involving day and beauty. None of which is even remotely helpful. It sounds massively improbable that the two phrases would sound so much alike, but take a look at what’s happening in Britain and you’ll see why I’m prepared to believe pretty much anything.

Anyway, citizens have started posting pictures of themselves naked at work with strategically placed work-related equipment. As one Instagram user said, “The president said this was necessary.”

Patriotism, my friends, takes many forms. As does protest. And satire? That’s only limited by the human imagination.

As Britain leaves the European Union

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What’s going on with Brexit, you ask? It’s been strange over here, and it’s getting stranger.

First the prime minister set up a referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union. Why? Because he wanted to shut up the anti-EU wing of his party, the Conservatives. Clever move, Dave.

Then the whole thing went wrong, the Conservative Party dissolved into an internal arm wrestling match, and the country voted to leave the EU. Clever Dave announced that he’ll resign as soon as someone in his party wins the arm-wrestling match, which is now about who gets to replace him.

Bye, Dave.

Moody and irrelevant photo: a man watching the fog roll in.

Moody and irrelevant photo: a man watching the fog roll in.

Then the MPs who belong to the Labour Party, who you’d think would be out celebrating the Conservative-on-Conservative war, called for a vote of no confidence in their own leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who they’ve hated from the time he was elected because he’s from the left wing of their party and they’re not. They blame him for not making a stronger case for staying in the EU.

Corbyn, who was elected by a large majority of the party membership, refused to resign. The Labour Party dissolved into an internal arm wrestling match. Actually, it started when Corbyn was first elected, but it’s gotten worse now.

In the meantime, the Scottish National Party announced that it will demand a second referendum on Scottish independence. Most of Scotland voted to stay in the EU and now they want to leave the UK so they can.

Then they read the small print on something or other and announced that the Scottish Parliament has the power to stop the UK’s exit.

Who knew that? Apparently no one.

A petition calling for a second referendum got so many signatures that the government web site that was hosting it broke down. In almost no time, it had several million signatures. Then a bunch of them turned out to be bogus. Still, that leaves a hell of a lot that aren’t.

It turns out that the petition was started by someone who supported the Leave campaign but didn’t expect it to win. It was hijacked, he said, by Remain supporters.

Well, yes, dear. both sides of that sword were sharpened.

Dave—who, you remember, is resigning—says he won’t make the formal moves that will trigger the British exit. He’ll leave it to his successor. But the EU is calling on the UK to get on with it and end the uncertainty. They’re not in a good mood about all this, and they’d like the UK out of the room, please. The sight of us is bringing back ugly memories. But no one can trigger the Leave process except the country that wants to leave and that country–us–is stalling.

One of the promises of the Leave campaign was that if Britain left, it would save so much money that it could spend £350 million a week on the NHS, which is seriously underfunded at the moment. A few days after the vote, however, all references to that disappeared from the campaign’s website. The top Leave campaigners have all developed amnesia and don’t seem to remember saying that.

Meanwhile, the pound’s fallen to either a 30-year low or a 31-year low, depending on when you turned on your radio. The stock markets have gotten hives.

Polish immigrants reported being handed leaflets telling them to leave now. Assorted other incidents of harassment against Muslims, Poles, and in one incident foreigners in general have been reported, although in that particular incident there may not have actually been any foreigners present. A man in the supermarket started yelling about foreigners and questioning people about where they were from.

Keep in mind that when I say harassment of Muslims and Poles and foreigners, what I really mean is people who might be Muslims or Poles or foreigners, because it’s not always easy to tell. The same thing happens when people start pushing gays around: A few extra people who aren’t gay always get swept in because someone thinks they might be.

It’s hard to tell who to hate these days, you know? This may actually be good, because it reminds people who aren’t in any of those categories what it’s like to be the target of that kind of venom. Some very ugly forces have been unleashed in this campaign.

A lot of the Leave campaign was about “taking our country back.” Who from? It was a kind of fill-in-the-blank slogan. From whoever you think took it from you. For some people, that was an urban elite, because this was a heavily anti-elitist campaign—run by an urban elite who hope to take power from a different urban elite. For other people, it was foreigners, or Muslims, or Poles, or Eastern Europeans in general, or Asians or Africans, or people whose ancestors were Asian or African. It took some of the ugliest threads of the culture and brought them out into the open. Suddenly they felt respectable. Want to yell at foreigners in the supermarket? Want to yell at a young Muslim woman on the bus? The country just told you you could.

It didn’t, but never mind. A certain number of people feel like it did.

The part of the Leave camp that I’m sympathetic to is made up of people whose lives have been bulldozed by globalization. Steady jobs disappeared, industries have moved abroad, and people are left broke and lost and angry. They want to take their country back too. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ll get it. Not this way.

According to a Guardian article, the Bank of America and Pimco, which I never heard of before, are “warning their clients that the gulf between rich and poor could add to the anti-establishment backlash,” and they consider the Brexit vote part of that.

The queen, by the way, is due for an automatic £2.8 million raise in pay unless the formula that calculates what taxpayers owe her is changed. That’s not related to leaving the EU, but I thought I’d toss it in anyway.

Here in Cornwall, where money’s tight and the EU has invested a lot and where the vote leaned heavily toward Leave, the Cornwall Council turned to the national government asking if they’d match that investment. Part of the Leave campaign’s promise was that once the UK didn’t have to pour money into the EU, it could be spent here.

To which I can only say, don’t count on it. The NHS won’t be getting any £350 million a week. If Cornwall gets any equivalent of the EU investment, I’ll be surprised, she said in a massive display of understatement.

One of the main Leave campaigners, Boris Johnson, wrote in the Telegraph that, basically, nothing good will change and only the bad things—the British involvement with the EU’s bureaucracy—will drop away.

And no one will get colds or flu again, ever.

I’m paraphrasing heavily, but I think I’ve caught the spirit of the column.

Commentators are starting to comment that the Leave campaigners don’t have a plan. We might have been wise to ask them about that a bit earlier, although I doubt it would have changed the vote.

I haven’t written about the referendum until now because it was hard to find anything funny about it. Now, though? It’s still not funny, but the situation’s weird enough to give me something to work with.

I apologize for not giving you links. There are too many. I’m overwhelmed. And in no time they’ll be outdated. In fact, I’m publishing this before my usual Friday deadline because it’ll be out of date otherwise.

Fasten your seatbelts, kids. I don’t know if it’s going to be bumpy, but it’s going to get very, very strange. E.A. posted a photo on Facebook of a man holding a sign that says, “Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to hold a referendum with the same people who came up with ‘Boaty McBoatface.’ “

The British sense of humor

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Do you stay up nights worrying that the British have lost their sense of humor? Put those fears to rest, folks, because it’s alive and well and utterly bizarre. Let’s start (and mostly stay) with the political landscape. What other country boasts an Official Monster Raving Loony Party, a Church of the Militant Elvis Party, and a yogic flying party (which isn’t its official name and the party doesn’t think it’s funny, but we’ll get to that)?

Let’s start with the Monster Raving Loony Party, which was founded by Screaming Lord Sutch and someone with a less interesting name so never mind him. Sutch ran in 41 elections as a candidate for various parties. One of the early ones was the Go to Blazes Party, but then he perfected the art of party-naming and remained a Monster Raving Loony for the rest of his life. The highest number of votes he ever got was 1,114. He’s now gone to that great election campaign in the sky, where I’m sure he’s getting all the votes he deserves (I have no idea how many that would be), and the current leader is Howling Laud Hope.

Irrelevant photo: Birds nesting in postal box, by D.L. Keur. Some of you will have already seem this--I posted a link last week. But D.L. was kind enough to email me the photo so no one can escape. Thanks, D.L. Much appreciated.

Irrelevant photo: Birds nesting in postal box, by D.L. Keur. Some of you will have already seen this, since I posted a link last week. But D.L. was kind enough to email me the photo so no one can escape. Thanks, D.L. The world’s just a smidgen better because a few extra people get to see this.

The party’s policies include fitting air bags to the stock exchange in preparation for the next crash and marking any puddle deeper than 3 inches with a yellow plastic duck. I can’t find it on their web site, probably because I didn’t look closely enough, but I read somewhere else that they want to address global warming by fitting air conditioners to the outside of buildings.

Folks, this is what the world needs: A realistic approach to global warming and the instability of the economy. With yellow plastic ducks.

I can’t explain why the party’s made Official part of its name. Did someone start an unofficial one? Was there a split, with both sides accusing each other of not being true to the party’s principles? Did some part of the membership hold that only puddles deeper than six inches needed to be marked with plastic ducks, or that the ducks didn’t need to be yellow? Until someone goes to a convention and reports back (or on a lower level of commitment, contacts them and asks), the mystery will remain. If I had a shred of respect for myself as a journalist, I’d do email them, but the truth is that I’m no journalist.

Remind me: What do you get out of reading this blog?

Moving on, the Church of the Militant Elvis Party is led by David Bishop, whose name can’t compete with the leaders of the Monster Raving Loony Party. Maybe that’s why he’s also registered several Elvis-themed campaign groups, including the Bus-pass Elvis Party, the Elvis Defence League, and the Elvis and the Yeti Himalayan Preservation Party. I’m not sure what the difference is, in this context, between a political party and a campaign group, and I seriously doubt it matters.

In 2005, the party ran a candidate in Erewash, which is a real place and, sadly, not pronounced Earwash. Based on the usual Google search I do when something’s this earthshaking (hey, I go all out for this blog), I learned that “most people” around there pronounce it Errywash—like ferrywash, but without the F.

I didn’t find any mention of how not-most people around there pronounce it, but it does make a person wonder.

The same search taught me that I can get the wax micro-suctioned out of my ear for just £25—or £35 if I’d rather have it done in the privacy of my own home, because I might feel a little, you know, private about my ears, even though I do walk around with them hanging out for all the world to see. Whoever’s offering that price doesn’t know where I live or they’d charge more.

I’m not usually followed around the internet by earwax ads, so I couldn’t help wondering if the great googlemaster thinks I don’t know how to spell ear or if the great googlemaster just has a sense of humor.

But we were talking about the Church of the Militant Elvis Party. Bishop ran on a promise to (among other things) go to the North Pole and yell at the icebergs to stop melting. He campaigned in a red cat suit, claimed he was heckled—I can’t think why—and got 116 votes. In 2010, his platform included digging moats around houses. No, he didn’t volunteer to dig them. It’s only by following the implications of his campaign promise that I got to the verb dig, and I may be assuming too much. What I read actually said he wanted to introduce them. House, meet moat. Moat, meet house.

Job done. It’s quick, it’s cheap, and it keeps the campaign promise.

Finally we come to the Natural Law Party, which grew out of the transcendental meditation organization. If I remember correctly, some decades ago they trademarked their name and insisted that it be spelled with initial caps and followed by the letters TM, not because that’s an abbreviation of transcendental meditation but to mark that the name was trademarked. I was working as an editor at the time and I wrestled bare-handed with issues of this sort on a daily basis. And lived to tell the tale. So what could I say but, “Oh, yeah? How you gonna make me?”

I said that to myself, mind you, since no one else cared. But that sort of thing mattered to me. And it still does—enough for me to lower case the organization’s name even though capping it would make sense. It is an organization. That is its name. Names are capitalized. But hey, if it matters that much to them, I’m happy to do the opposite.

It’s a good thing I’m writing about political parties instead of running for office. Power goes right to my head.

The Natural Law Party seems to take itself seriously. As well it should. According to the BBC article I linked to just above, “It promised in 1997 to create an ‘ideal quality of life – prosperity, creativity and happiness [for all]’, crime would be reduced by creating coherence in national consciousness, and defence would depend on an integrated national consciousness to make Britain invincible.”

The logic of that sounds as shaky as the grammar, but apparently that would all happen through meditation and yogic flying.

“Yogic what???” you ask.

Why yogic flying, silly, which if you watch the video you’ll learn consists of bouncing around on a mattress with your legs pretzeled across each other like the Buddha’s.

I’m not an expert on the Buddha, but I’m quite sure he didn’t bounce around on a mattress. I don’t think anyone had gotten around to inventing bouncy mattresses back then.

When the Natural Law Party withdrew from the electoral process, it blamed the negativity and cynicism of the electorate. The BBC kinda thought it might have had something to do with how much money it cost them to run each campaign. But hey, that’s cynicism for you.

Enough politics. A final note, to prove the British sense of humor extends from politics into real life: I took a load of brush clippings to the dump the other day (that’s the tip if you’re British), and a guy who worked there helped me empty the car. They do that there if they have the time. It’s very nice, and they’re very nice, and even I managed to be nice. After we’d tossed the last bits of greenery, I found a snail in the back seat.

“Want a snail?” I said for no reason I can quite explain, although I’ll offer a few alternatives. Pick the one you like: It was there. Thanks didn’t seem like enough and I hadn’t thought to bring brownies. I’m a wise-ass and my mouth doesn’t always consult my brain.

“Thanks,” he said after only the smallest hint of hesitation, “but I’m trying to give them up.”

While we’re (marginally) on the subject of thanks, I owe many of them to—argh: someone for suggesting this topic, sending me a couple of initial links, and telling me about the Church of the Militant Elvis Party, thereby enriching my life significantly. (I already knew a bit about the other two but hadn’t thought of writing about them.) We exchanged several comments and I enjoyed the conversation. You’d think I’d know who it was, wouldn’t you? It’s really rude not to remember but I thought (a) that wouldn’t happen and (b) if it did (I know what my memory’s like and I never completely trust it) I could just pick it up from the comments section.

Yes, indeed I could, but which post were we exchanging comments at the end of? None of the ones I checked, and I zipped through a lot of them. So whoever you are, forgive me. And let me know who you are. Please. I’d meant to post a link to your blog, if only I’d been bright enough to leave myself a trail of virtual breadcrumbs, and I can still do that in a follow-up post.

Finally, if anyone wants to push me in the direction of a topic, please do. I don’t promise to write about it–some topics work for me and some just don’t, and I still haven’t found a way to predict which ones will set me going. But I love getting suggestions. It’s the Comments section that makes this so much fun to write.

Boaty McBoatface: an update

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If you live in Britain, you probably already know that the will of the people–or, more accurately, the will of 124,000 people, because there’s no such thing as a unanimous people, is there?–has been trampled by the boot of humorless bureaucracy.

And who said journalistic objectivity was dead? That opening was a model of objectivity.

If you want the back story–all in the finest tradition of balanced journalism, of course–you’ll find it here.

The new research ship will not be called the RRS Boaty McBoatface but the RRS David Attenborough. Or–no insult to Mr. Attenborough, who I like as well as I like any other TV presenter–the RRS Snore. In an effort to placate the baying public (or to faintly indicate the ability to detect a joke when in proximity to what seems to be one), one of its remotely operated subs will be called Boaty. Never mind that a sub isn’t actually a boat. Neither is a ship. Or that the public isn’t actually baying.

As long as I’m arguing for my own objectivity, let me interrupt myself to say here and now that I don’t much care what they name the ship, I just like the silliness of it all.

Someone’s already started a petition to rename the ship. When I checked it had 297 signatures. So not a mass movement at the moment, but it’s still worth a newspaper article or two.

But we’re not out of absurdity yet, because a parliamentary committee is getting ready to hear evidence from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), which was behind the vote it so spectacularly lost control of. I gather it’ll be asked whether the public engagement was a triumph or a PR disaster.

Isn’t it interesting that they can’t tell the difference? And that of all the problems in this battered world, this is worth their time?

I can’t end without mentioning that NERC isn’t to blame for not choosing the run-away favorite name. That was the science minister, Jo Johnson, who seems to be invisible to parliamentary committees–a spell Harry Potter would envy if he’d chosen a career in politics. NERC’s crime was to turn public opinion loose in an uncontrolled form. I hope they don’t lose their funding for it.

Boaty McBoatface, an unwritten constitution, and the will of the people

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The contest to name the new polar research ship has now closed and Boaty McBoatface was the runaway winner with 124,109 votes. The next most popular name (Poppy-Mai, to commemorate a sixteen-month-old girl with incurable cancer) had only 34,371. It’s Bloody Cold Here came in fourth with 10,679.

So is the government going to respect the will of the people? Probably not. Admit it, you wouldn’t have bet much on the chances, would you?

Irrelevant photo: a Cornish dry stone wall.

Irrelevant photo: a Cornish dry stone wall.

Science Minister Jo Johnson announced that “the new royal research ship will be sailing into the world’s iciest waters to address global challenges that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people. That’s why we want a name that lasts longer than a social media news cycle.”

Those two sentences don’t entirely hang together, but never mind. If you stick a wad of that’s why in between them, they give the appearance of connection and hardly anybody stops to think, Icy waters? Social media cycle? Wait a minute, what do they have to do with each other?

Besides, the name’s already lasted longer than your average social media cycle. Adopt it that and it’ll last longer yet. Furthermore, you’re the guys who created a contest on social media. What did you think was going to happen?

Oh, stop arguing, Ellen. They’re not listening.

So is anyone upset by this? Well, as the Guardian headline so mildly put it, “Tyrants have crushed the people’s will.”

The Guardian doesn’t go in for overstatement and never will.

And a Guardian letter writer asked how, if you can’t trust the people to choose the name of a ship, you can trust them to decide whether or not to leave the European Union.

We’ll let those two comments speak for the nation, okay? I’m sure it’s a representative sample.

In case you need to know this, Science Minister Jo is male, in spite of the way he spells his name. This may be one of those British/American things, because a Robert Burns poem mentions a Jo whose full name is John Anderson (“John Anderson, my Jo”). (I’m using the British mostly lower-case headline and title style here, which feels entirely weird when the only lower-case letter in on my. Never mind. That’s a digression within a digression.) The news story referred to this Jo—Jo Johnson—as he, reasonably enough, but since the Guardian, even if it doesn’t go in for overstatement, used to indulge in typos so freely that it was known as the Grauniad, I wondered if the S in she had gone a-wandering among the fields so green, and I fact-checked it.

Don’t laugh. The little bit of fact checking that I do here—you know, when something truly important comes up—keeps me from spinning off into outer space.

After all that, I didn’t end up referring to Jo as either he or she, but having fact-checked it, I couldn’t let all that work go to waste. Hence this meander through waves of irrelevancy and bad metaphor, after which we’ll return to our point if we remember what it was—and who, in addition to me, we is made up of.

Our topic, girls and boys, was the people’s will, so I hope you’ll allow me to say this: Boaty McBoatface, you were a great ship, even if you continue to be an imaginary one. Your memory will never be sullied by the failures encountered by real ships. And your name will forever appear in the italics proper to all great ships, even if it never graces the prow of a research vessel.

Wanna bet a hundred rowboats, sailboats, and fishing boats appear around the coasts of Britain sporting that name?

So. With the important stuff out of the way, we can now turn to our second news update, which has to do with the doctors’ strikes. I’ll run through as quick a summary as I can manage in an effort to keep anyone who isn’t British—oh, you know I have to say it: on board.

Quick summary: Tyrants crush the people’s will.

No, that was about Boaty. Sorry.

Longer quick summary: Our darling government has been screwing around with a beloved British institution (beloved and the screwing around are not exaggerations; darling is written with a snarl), the National Health Service, to the point where the NHS is now in serious trouble. At some point in the screwing-around process, the government decided to put a category of hospital doctors—called junior doctors, although they aren’t all that junior, but this is complicated enough, so let’s not get into that—on a seven-day schedule. Since it’s not funding the NHS well enough to keep the current five-day service from crumbling at the edges—well, I’m bad at math but even I see some problems here. To oversimplify vastly (sorry: I wrote a longer and infinitesimally more nuanced summary but it made pretty grim reading and I dumped it), the answer is to stretch the doctors even more thinly over the NHS drum.

The two sides negotiated for a while and when that broke down the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, announced that he’d go ahead and impose the new contract. The doctors announced a series of one- and two-day strikes and five of them initiated a lawsuit, arguing that Hunt has no power to impose a contract.

So that’s the background. The latest twist is that Hunt’s response to the suit no longer talks about “imposing” the contract but about “introducing” it.

No big thing, I’d have thought, but I’d have been wrong, wrong, wrong. The doctors’ lawyer—sorry, let’s get all British here and call her a solicitor, because that’s what she is. Think of it this way if you’re confused: A solicitor is a lawyer; a barrister is a lawyer with chocolate sprinkles, in a waffle cone and a wig. Did that help?

The doctors’ solicitor says, “If the secretary of state was pretending to have a decision-making power but in fact only had the power to make recommendations…the secretary of state will have acted unlawfully by purporting to exercise a power he never had.”

Ouch.

The government is claiming he has the power to introduce the new terms under the 2006 NHS Act. But to impose the new terms? Where is that written? This begins to sound like a constitutional issue, doesn’t it? And that’s why I dragged you through all that not-terribly-fun background. Because Britain has what it likes to call an unwritten constitution, which is made up of past laws, unwritten conventions (these govern procedure), common law (that means precedent), and a random collection of written documents ranging from the Magna Carta (1215) to the Human Rights Act (1998) to a scrap of paper I lost in the mound on the floor beside my computer (2016).

What fascinates me is how you challenge or defend a politician’s power to do something when you have to argue it on the basis of an unwritten constitution. Do you read every case law that might be vaguely relevant? Every statute? How many pages is that? What if you miss the important one? How do you find out about unwritten conventions? Better yet, how do you prove you didn’t make them up? Or that someone else didn’t? They’re, um, not written. Do you do a quick recon on the Magna Carta to see what it had to say, in 1215, about the National Health Service, which wouldn’t be created for another 800 or so years? Will anyone notice that I lost that scrap of paper? Does the future of the NHS rest on my lousy filing habits? Only time will tell, folks. It was on lined yellow paper, with a strip torn off the bottom where I jotted down a phone number. If you see it, let me know ASAP, okay? It could be important.

Making fun of the House of Lords: an appreciation

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One of the joys of living in Britain is that you get to make fun of the House of Lords, and I’ve had at least my share of fun with that and probably used up someone else’s portion as well, but a recent (okay, not so recent; it’s taken me a while to get around to this) article in the Guardian’s weekend magazine made me wonder if the chamber may serve some genuine purpose.

But let’s go for the ridiculous first. I learned from the article that the House of Lords has a blue carpet that you can only walk on silently. If you stop and stand on it, you get told off. I’m not sure how you walk on a carpet noisily—maybe you need spurs—but you can’t do that either. The house’s senior official is called Black Rod, but his full title is the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod. He comes to work in pantaloons and wears a ruffle where a twenty-first century male would wear a tie. Or—well, he probably wears street clothes until he gets to work and then changes. Absurd as the get-up is in the House of Lords, wearing it on the bus would be worse. (I’d love a photo, though. Rush hour. People hanging on the poles. Frilly tie. Pantaloons. I don’t know what kind of shoes you wear with that.)

Irrelevant photo: Minnie the Moocher and Fast Eddie, in a moment of bliss.

Irrelevant photo: Minnie the Moocher and Fast Eddie, in a moment of bliss.

When the lords vote, they line up in corridors, one for Content (adjective, not verb, with the accent on the last syllable) and one for Not Content. Their names are ruled off a list and they’re then counted off by a peer holding a drumstick (“musical, not chicken,” added the lord who described the procedure). When women first joined the Lords, they weren’t allowed to address the doorkeepers.

Why not?

Because.

In case anyone’s interested, I’m capitalizing Lords when it stands in for House of Lords but not when it applies to members of the house, unless the name’s included, in which case it becomes a title and is capped. Is that baroque or what? Normal usage is probably to capitalize it both times but it just seems too damn worshipful and, good (L)lord, I can’t do it. Besides, a lot of Brits capitalize all sorts of words that I’d leave lower case. I suspect they’re overdoing it not just according to American usage but to British as well, but it’s so widely done that it must mean something. Maybe that they’re closer to the German roots of English than Americans are. Or maybe capital letters are on sale and no one’s told me.

I should rush out and Buy and half Dozen.

But back to the Lords: The speaker sits on a woolsack (the current speaker is, apparently, short enough that her feet dangle) and the clerks are equipped with both white wigs and iPads. Is that a great combination or what?

The lords meet in a room built to seat 240 members and there are now 859. Of those, 92 are hereditary. Under Tony Blair, there was a massive cull of hereditary peers; they’re what’s left. Why them instead of some of the others? Haven’t a clue. Other peers are appointed for life and the theory is that they’re experts in one thing or another—science, history, law, medicine, chutney, building blocks—but they also include party hacks and donors, former civil servants, a cheese maker, a children’s TV presenter, a rock star or two (or seven, but who’s counting?), former MPs, 26 bishops (whose bench is the only one that has arms), and the occasional stray novelist.

Peers are nominated by political parties and can be nominated by the public as well. Good luck with that, public. If anyone wants to nominate Wild Thing, go ahead. It’ll be interesting. The governing party gets to make more appointments than the parties that aren’t governing. Are you surprised? Then the appointees have to be approved by an independent commission (exactly how independent it is I’m couldn’t say, although I could take a reckless guess or two), which can make its own nominations, and the list is then approved by the prime minister. I don’t know if he gets to do any final tinkering or not. After all that, the queen waves her magic feather over it. Of 45 appointments in August 2015, 26 belonged to the party currently in office, the Conservatives. One of them is a former MP (that’s Member of Parliament, in case you don’t speak British) who stepped down in 2010 after the public learned that he’d claimed the £2,200 he spent for cleaning his moat on his expenses.

So yes, the system’s working perfectly. They don’t seem to have appointed the guy who got caught claiming the cost of a floating duck island for his country house.

The average age is 69, but the lone Green peer is quoted as saying “You can’t die in parliament. You’re not allowed.” I’d put that down to comic overstatement, but since we’re dealing with the House of Lords it’s probably not.

When the Lords were considering a bill that many people thought would have a disastrous effect on the National Health Service (it passed, and we were right: it has), several friends and I divided up the list of lords who we thought might be swing votes and wrote to all of them. I learned from this that some of them are elderly or ill and don’t show up anymore. They’re not required to, although they’re paid only for days they show up. Last I heard it was £300 a day.

A person could live on that.

I also learned that the peers aren’t provided with a clerical staff. They answer their own mail or they don’t. Mostly they don’t, but one member, Baroness (that’s what the women are called; the men are called Lord) Someone or Other, emailed back. And I emailed her back and she wrote back again and we argued the bill endlessly and purposelessly, since it quickly became clear that neither of us was going to change the other one’s position. It was all I could do to keep from asking, “Why are you writing me? Don’t you have a country to run or something?”

Anyway, she assured me that the bill would work to the benefit of the entire universe and that the sun would shine twenty-five hours a day and Britain would bask in eternal summer. I later saw her name on a list of peers who had investments that should have barred them from voting on the bill (but didn’t), since they were conflicts of interest.

I comfort myself with the thought that when she was writing to me she wasn’t accomplishing anything else.

But. Some of the peers interviewed in the Guardian article made a good case for the Lords having a use.

“A lot of bills are not debated at all in the House of Commons,” one said. “They fall to the House of Lords.”

A lot of the MPs barely even read them.

In the Lords, a certain number of members will actually read the damn things, line by line by dreary line, instead of just voting as their party tells them to. For one thing, they have the commitment and time. For another, since they’re appointed for life they can, if they want to, be independent of their party.

Still, the Lords is an unelected body, and that’s a dangerous way to govern.

The Lords has less power than the Commons (don’t ask; it’s as complicated as the rules governing carpets), but it can in some situations slow legislation down and in others amend or kill it. Since the British system gives a hell of a lot of power to the party that holds a majority in the Commons, the Lords is the only brake the system has. The current gridlock in the U.S. has made me understand what’s wrong with the checks and balances system the U.S. Constitution created. All it takes is one party dedicated to stopping the other for everything to grind to a halt—as long as that party is large enough and ruthless enough. But the British system has made me understand what’s wrong with efficiency. The governing party has a huge amount of power, which can be equally destructive if the governing party’s ruthless enough. The Lords is the one place it may (emphasis on may) not entirely control. Unless it’s in office long enough to stuff it with donors and hacks.

I don’t know what the answer is. But as long as the senior official wears a frilly tie and you can’t stand still on a blue rug, at least we get to laugh about it.