UK

UK / writing — No Comments
1
Apr 09

Balls to the British novel

Stoop:

All of the rave reviews that often accompany your work tend to say that you’re a great “crime” writer, that you are rewriting the “crime” genre – crime this and crime that, basically. It’s not something I wholly agree with – there are crime elements to your novels but I think your work is more literary than its given credit for. I just wondered if it irked you at all, the tag you have of being a “crime writer”?

David Peace:

Not really – Dostoyevsky wrote crime; Kafka wrote crime; Brecht wrote crime; Orwell wrote crime. Dickens. Greene. Dos Passos. Delillo etc. But anyway, to me, these days “literary” just means British writers with their Creative Writing MAs wanting to write the “Great American Novel” and filling bookshops with unreadable shite, with no plots, no characters, no balls, no heart and, above all, no British Voice. The best work is always done in the margins and the genres: Burroughs and Ballard in Science Fiction; Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore; and I’m proud to share the same section of a shop as Ellroy, Mosley, Pelecanos and Rankin.

(H/T: k-punk on the television adaptation of the Red Riding sequence.)

(Bonus: A Mindless One on why David Peace should be writing Hellblazer.)

politics / UK — No Comments
26
Jan 09

The missing state

On Global Dashboard, Alex Evans asks what are we missing? He’s been doing the rounds of “an extensive series of horizon scanning events to feed into the current revision of the National Security Strategy“, and has ended up here:

Having been to a few of these events, I must admit to being less than convinced that the sessions are really breaking out of the comfortable groupthink that can so easily characterise futures work… For me, the really stand-out risk that barely got a mention in the events I attended was the possibility that serious erosion of states’ capacity and legitimacy undermines their ability to respond to all the global trends that we were discussing… there is nonetheless a worrying set of drivers on the table that raises questions about whether, in (say) 5 years’ time, we’ll be starting to think that states just don’t have the legitmacy and capability they need to manage 21st century challenges.

The problem is simple. The National Security Strategy is a state product, and these consultations are happening within the state framework – and this means that these discussions assume the state and proceed from there. Non-state actors (whether corporate, non-governmental, criminal or private individuals) don’t assume the state – they assume their own interests and start from there. Never the twain shall meet, and that’s why this round of discussions is leaving Alex cold.

The state is a means to an end. If it is no longer an effective means – if it’s not possible to reach your end solely within the state framework – then people are obliged and entitled to seek alternatives. Now that might (and often does) lead to outcomes that are not desirable for the state because they further undermine its legitimacy, but that’s a byproduct. The problem with state-led discussions of these challenges is that they mistake the byproduct for the main aim, and then proceed to treat the actors involved correspondingly.

Needless to say, there have been people who did not believe that states have “legitimacy or capability” ever since states began to form. That the state does have legitimacy and capability is merely a story that the state tells its citizens – it might be true or it might be false, but it isn’t an inherent feature of the state that it possesses either, and once the facade slips, there may be no going back…

politics / UK — No Comments
4
Dec 08

Your DNA should thank the ECHR

People should be dancing in the streets at the news that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled unanimously that an individual’s DNA should not be kept on record if they have not been convicted of any offence. However it’s likely that – like most of the news relating to the government’s attempts to gather more and more data on citizens – it won’t register on most people’s radar.

Predictably Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said that she was “disappointed”, and went on to claim that

DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month. The government mounted a robust defence before the Court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice.

This is the usual line from the government – the law and order cover story always plays well to the tabloid gallery. Unfortunately her belief that a comprehensive DNA database will help to solve more crimes has – as far as I’m aware, and I welcome any correction – never been supported by any evidence, while the Nuffield Council on Bioethics consultation suggested that

Britain has the biggest DNA Database in the world, but making it bigger is not helping to solve more crimes. Collecting more DNA from crime scenes has made a big difference to the number of crimes solved, but keeping DNA from more and more people who have been arrested – many of whom are innocent – has not. Since April 2003, about 1.5 million extra people have been added to the Database, but the chances of detecting a crime using DNA has remained constant, at about 0.36%. (via Genewatch)

If you want to do something about this yourself, I strongly recommend joining NO2ID, who pursue this issue tirelessly, although not in a creepy stalker-ish way, and watch out for people who claim that they’re going to keep you safe by treating you like a criminal.

iraq / politics / Sought My Company Voluntarily, Now Regretful / UK — 1 Comment
27
Oct 08

Escaping scrutiny

When reading about government proposals to peer ever more deeply into the lives of their citizens, I suggest that you apply a variation of Rawls‘ original position to decide whether any given measure will be for the better, or for the worse. The question is this:

If you did not know whether the government proposing this measure was a benign liberal democracy or a malign totalitarian dictatorship, then would you want this measure to be implemented?

All is well when cuddly-wuddly New New Labour proposes these measures, and people nod and hum and let it slide. If it was the Burmese military regime, I wouldn’t be so bloody sanguine about it, would you?1 The question to ask is not whether your government is benign or malign, but whether this is the sort of information that you think the government should have in the first place.

  1. Perhaps you would. [↩]
politics / UK — No Comments
23
Jul 08

Still no black in the Union Jack

The soaraway Sun: touchingly incompetent with Photoshop or just plain racist? You decide.

Not only has The Sun removed the skipper on the left, they’ve also removed the boat’s engine. Prince William, drifting around the Caribbean during a hurricane. Extra laughs:

Prince William’s campaign to try on every uniform Britain has to offer is a wow - next week it’s baker, then butcher, then cub scout, before a week as a traffic warden in Slough, then a few days as a Beefeater before ending the summer as a lap dancer.

HT: The Daily (Maybe)

business / UK — 3 Comments
1
Apr 08

Probably, your chocolate fountain is broken too

BA should have scheduled the grand opening of Terminal 5 for 1 April, since – to nobody’s great surprise – it’s been a joke. Personally I like a joke, but not when people have to pay for the privilege of being the butt of the joke in question. The front page of the British Airways website has this prominent sign:

This is very moving – that plane looks positively distraught as it turns away from our accusing eyes – but it’s not entirely clear what they’re sorry for. Are they merely sorry for the inconvenience to passengers, a casual expression of solidarity which extends as far as a 260×140 pixel graphic on their website? Or are they more deeply sorry – perhaps filled with sorrow at being so utterly incompetent – an existential cry for forgiveness from the gods of aviation?

Willie Walsh, BA’s Chief Executive (but not for long *cough*), had this to say:

We are sorry for the disruption and inconvenience caused to customers whose flights have been cancelled or whose bags have been delayed.

Question answered. Slap a graphic on the website and pray those 400 “volunteers” show up to sort the 15,000 bags we’ve got in “temporary storage”. The gods of aviation can suck my – I’m sorry, is this microphone still on?

What burns me up is that the chaos at T5 may jeopardise the chocolate fountain that I was promised by Executive Club Manager Sarah Keyes in a personal email to me. Let me add that this was only the latest in the long string of personal emails that we have exchanged, and leave it there. Never let it be said that I allow my personal feelings to affect my harsh but fair judgment on the affairs of man.

politics / religion / UK — No Comments
24
Mar 08

Without Christianity, my job is doomed

Easter Sunday passed without incident here, mainly since it was only Easter for the Catholics, and everybody ignores them. Oh, except I worked out how the Shroud of Turin was formed – Jesus must have been under for 3 weeks rather than 3 days, because my filthy bedlinen has definitely taken on the print of my body.

Too much detail.

Anyway, religion was on my mind last week as I joined the discussion on euthanasia at Cranmer and OurKingdom – and thanks to everybody who contributed to those discussions, particularly David at Britology Watch. As I said in my original post, this is one of the few areas where the religious insist that their views on life be taken as the standard for everybody else, but to their credit most of the commenters on those other threads presented credible non-religious cases against legalising euthanasia.

Paying a visit to Britology Watch, I revisited the “controversial” statements by Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali following Archbishop Rowan Williams’ prolonged bout of stupidity “controversial” statements. Have you noticed that comments by the clergy only get labelled as controversial when they try to say something about politics? That’s probably because of the separation of church and state that we have – no, wait, that’s the US I’m thinking of.

In an interview with Bishop Nazir-Ali, I was greatly amused by these lines:

The real danger to Britain today is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. When you have such a vacuum something will fill it.

That “moral vacuum” metaphor should be put out of its misery as soon as possible, since it manages to be simultaneously banal and meaningless. Continue reading →

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