Christmas

...is a time for repeats.

Two more of the damn things

Liverpool and Lyme.

Autumnal

A short autumnal piece has been added to Think of England: The Bonfire Men.

Pastoral

A poetic warning on the dangers of walking in the countryside has been added to ThinkofEngland.co.uk: Up Lansdowne Lane.

Beer Garden

A new poem, called Beer Garden, has been added to ThinkofEngland.co.uk.

…But is Born Again

The most enjoyable (for me) and apparently most popular thing to come out of TofE has been the poetry.

I have put the best poems, and some new ones, on a new website: http://www.thinkofengland.co.uk/.

This is an ongoing project, and I intend to use this blog to flag up additions as they emerge.

(If you are interested, you could subscribe to the feed – thus saving you the need to check up on this site when it isn’t doing anything much.)

Think of England dies

Following the month-long intermission, it seems unlikely that Think of England will be continuing in its traditional rip-roaring, nearly-daily form. As such, I apologise to the people who’ve been kind and bored enough to read the blog and demand more.

I suppose the concept of ‘demand’ is really the problem. Blogs are curious things – they start (and continue) as vanity projects/outlets for quiet loudmouths, but can end up being almost a moral duty and a daily grind. I don’t have the time now to spend on writing lots of posts, and the time and energy that I do have should really be spent on more profitable (literally and literarily) pursuits.

Brit will continue to post comments on other blogs, but a lot less prolifically.

For the record – this is not about the Islamophobia thing, though that did help put things into perspective.

Thanks to all who have contributed, with a special mention for my ex-fellow Duckians, and a very special mention for Peter and David. I’ve spent more time locked in forthright argument with them than with anybody else alive (apart from my sister), despite actually agreeing with them on nearly everything that I think is important.

TofE may be back at some point. Never say never and all that.

Andrew

Intermission

There will be an intermission while Think of England recovers its identity.

Thank you for your patience.

Double Hitch ties Shirley up in knots

The Hitch is currently doing the rounds in Blighty, principally plugging his latest Dawkins-esque God-bashing book, but stopping last Thursday to appear on Question Time. Like Bryan Appleyard, I find QT almost unwatchable these days on account of the thicko audiences and their shameless manipulation by applause-triggering politicians). But this was a rare good one, with an all-star line up of the Hitch, his mad brother Peter and the always-enjoyable Boris Johnson.

The lot of them team up to give the crapulent Shirley Williams a well-deserved kicking for her craven criticism of Salman Rushdie's knighthood on the grounds that it causes offence to Muslims.

Nobody could possibly admire everything Chris Hitchens says - that is the point of him. But when he's good, he's very very good. (Note for bigots: watch to the end for a nice distinction between Islamist nuts and real Muslims. Peter Hitchens later makes the equally true observation that the 'protests' in Tehran - Union Jack burning etc - are entirely stage-managed, and if you pulled the camera back from the 'crowd' you would see it consisted of at most a dozen pillocks.)

Talking of crazy Germans

The Berlin Wall may be long gone but communist East Germany lives on in the form of lovingly maintained Trabant cars and now an old-fashioned hotel.

"Ostel" takes its guests back to some time before 1989 - an era of ugly brown and orange wallpaper, spartan furnishings and Politburo portraits.

The hotel, which opened in Berlin in May, offers guests a choice of rooms in the style of the old eastern bloc.

The "Stasi Suite" is more expensive than the budget "Pioneer Camp".

The hotel is a former East German Plattenbauwohnung - the kind of mass-produced concrete apartment building that came to symbolise life in the communist bloc.

In the reception four clocks are another throwback to the "socialist" camp, showing the time in Moscow, Berlin, Havana and Beijing.


First as tragedy, then as postmodern irony.

Goodbye Lenin is a fantastic film about ‘Ostalgie’.

Alien nation

A lawyer who landed an out-of-this-world job defending people who have suffered at the hands of aliens has started his first major case.

Former industrial law specialist Jens Lorek announced last year he would defend those whose close encounters with outer space visitors left them physically and mentally shattered.

Now he has his first client - hotel chef Paul Hoffmann, 23, who claims he was kidnapped by aliens and has never been the same since.

… The chef closed his bank account, squatted in an empty property in Dresden and bathed nude - "as ordered by the aliens" - in a municipal fountain. When police caught him naked on a bike, he was sent to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital.

Lorek thinks that police acted wrongly and is demanding his client's release. He has brought a lawsuit against the city in which he places the blame for his client's behaviour on "things unknown".

.."The state is socially responsible, even for alien shamans, if they cannot protect them from abduction.Aliens stick needles in their victims' genitals and interfere with their organs. Since 1961 there have been tens of thousands of alien abductions."

This story has everything: crazy yanks Germans, improbable law suits and aliens.

So can anyone finally explain this one to me: what is it about Americans and alien abduction?

Are there any parallels for this sort of mass national delusion? Voodoo in West Africa? Socialism in France? The belief that the national football team can win something in England?

Bernard Manning was a racist comedian

and now he's dead.

I think that about covers it.

Out of the frying pan, into 60% of the national median

Around 600 illegal immigrants die every year in a bid to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to southern European coasts, said Malta’s Home Affairs and Justice Minister Tonio Borg while addressing European Union (EU) Interior Ministers conference on Tuesday.

The Minister pointed out that since the beginning of 2007, Malta has saved 315 shipwrecked immigrants attempting to enter Europe by sea, 250 of whom were taken on board Maltese ships in a fortnight.

While criticizing the present state of affairs, Dr Borg added that "It is unbelievable that on the doorstep of Europe we are having this tragic situation and not enough is being done."

Malta has urged the other 26 EU member states for the setting up of a burden-sharing system under which illegal migrants rescued or intercepted by EU ships outside of European waters would be taken in by the bloc's countries.

You have to wonder about these crazy Africans, packed like sardines into tiny fishing dinghies to make perilous journeys to Europe. Don't they know they're only going from the relative happiness of their absolute poverty, to the misery of the west's Relative Poverty? Really, we should be going the other way....

Men's needs

For the trendier, White Stripes-loving section of Think of England's readership, I was going to point to a simply corking new song by the British twin-based band The Cribs.

Men's Needs has been nagging away in my brain for a couple of weeks. But then I discovered that the video is an X-rated shocker with nudity, vegetables and decapitation. For goodness sake, don't watch this.

Nailing relative poverty

Government strategy for tackling child poverty is penalising two-parent families, a think tank has suggested.

The study by Labour MP Frank Field for Reform says tax credits discriminate against working couples and discourage single parents from finding partners.

Nearly a quarter of children in two-parent families live in relative poverty - almost the same as when Labour came to power in 1997, he said.


There’s something rather satisfying about seeing New Labour hung on its own ‘relative poverty’ petard. Ever since that ridiculous Unicef report I have taken the trouble to give the concept of relative poverty a long hard stare, and have also read some pretty good attacks on it (such as Jamie Whyte’s ‘Bad Thoughts’ – recommended).

The Unicef debacle helped in that it came up with an obviously wrong conclusion: that children in Britain were ‘poorer’ than children in genuinely poor countries. So given that the conclusion was wrong, there must have been something wrong with the way the conclusion was reached.

Since then, it has come to my attention that New Labour came to power in 1997 promising to end child poverty, which they said affected one in four children. I don’t remember questioning this clearly absurd claim at the time, so let’s do so now, since Labour has apparently failed to reduce it.

What is ‘poverty’? To my mind, poverty is a word with a meaning. It has connotations. It conjures up an image of a level of hardship whereby such things as food, clothing and housing are difficult to come by. Children in poverty would probably be unhealthy and uneducated. They would have no access to luxuries such as all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. Cars, holidays, mobile phones, satellite television and extensive DVD collections would be but distant dreams.

Does this sorry state describe one in four British children? It does not. So New Labour’s ‘poverty’ must mean something different to my ‘poverty’. In fact, it turns out that a household is ‘poor’ if its income is less than 60% of the national median after housing costs are deducted.

One big, fat objection should begin screaming in the face of any intelligent person at this point. If this is how you define poverty and you are in it, then the Government could lift you out of it by actually decreasing your material wealth – so long as they also decreased the wealth of everyone richer than you by a sufficiently larger amount.

But even ignoring this, using household income in isolation as a measure of real poverty is stupid, especially for Britain. This is because we live in a state with considerable welfare benefits (it would be even more stupid in France and slightly less stupid, but still stupid, in the US).

In Britain, the state will pay for a ‘poor’ child’s education, health, housing, and give allowances for food, clothing and bills.

Suppose Peter is a ‘poor’ child because his household income is only 35% of the national median, and David is non-poor because his is 70%. Would this make David twice as well off as Peter?

Peter and David could live in the same street, go to the same school, the same dentist, wear the same jeans and eat at the same MacDonald’s. Their lives would be virtually identical, except perhaps David might go on slightly nicer holidays – to Benidorm instead of Bognor, perhaps. Yet Peter is adding to the ‘poverty’ stats and David is adding to the rich stats.

An analogy would be this: suppose Jeff gets £1 a week pocket money and Martin gets £2. If we only count this income, Martin is 100% richer than Jeff. Martin is a prince and Jeff is a pauper.

But both Martin and Jeff’s parents spend £100 per week on their schooling, clothes, food, doctor, tennis lessons and haircuts. So Martin’s real spending capacity is £102 and Jeff’s is £101 – a measly 1% difference. Clearly, it is absurd to call one a prince and the other a pauper just because Martin can buy an extra can of Irn Bru every week.

But this is just the logic on which the relative poverty merchants operate.So why do it? Why use the term ‘poverty’ for one in four children instead of ‘those who live in households where income in isolation of welfare and benefits is less than 60% of the national average after housing costs are deducted’?

Because ‘poverty’ is an emotive word with the kinds of connotations of shoeless street urchins I mentioned earlier.

I am a decent human being and if you ask me if I think we should do something to help end ‘poverty’ I will say yes. But if you ask me if I think we should do something to lower the number of people whose income is less than 60% of the national median, then I’ll have to think about that one. I might ask: can’t we just keep making everybody richer?

The BBC uses the word poverty in its relative sense because it provides nice headlines (“Poverty crisis!”); leftists use it to try to prove the failures of capitalism, and New Labour used it because they were idiots.

Blink

The current series of Dr Who has been a bit uneven - there was one pretty weak episode about Daleks and the Empire State Building - but this weekend's story, Blink, was perhaps the best I've seen.

It had a time travel story that was easy to follow, and the scariest baddies ever: they can only move when you can't see them, but when you blink, they move very quickly indeed...