Hannah Swithinbank

Ok, so, #Trafigura

I feel like I want to write something about this, because not only was it a pretty big deal in the big picture of British media and politics, it felt like a pretty big deal for me and my engagement shifting from interested and theoretical to faintly active (I mean, it’s not like twittering uses up many calories but it *is* still participating in a discourse). It was also a little sobering, because although I would normally count myself as pretty engaged in current affairs, I hadn’t heard anything about the incident in the Ivory Coast or about Trafigura (I mean, I might have seen a Trafigura logo on a board at a rugby match, but I hadn’t heard of them). Time to read more papers and watch more Newsnight, clearly.

Anyway, I first heard about the Guardian’s initial ‘This is all we can’t tell you about some stuff that we can’t tell you’ report late on Monday night – I can’t remember, but I suspect someone tweeted the link. My initial reactions were (a) that’s really weird, (b) how can it happen that a paper can be barred from reporting on parliament and, (c) that’s a very canny piece. But I didn’t quite realise how canny, and off I trotted to snoozeland. Only to wake up the next morning to find that #trafigura had exploded on twitter. And bang, my plan to spend my morning applying for JRFs disapparated in a cloud of retweeting and reading and participating. Sure it was head and finger business, but I actually really enjoyed the buzz of business after three years of sitting in libraries and offices slogging through books and thesis writing. It’s not that I don’t enjoy my academic-y-ness, it’s just that I really really like the bit where my academic interests hit the actual real world and has the potential to be functional in some way that I’m just beginning to try and work out. (On which subject, of interest and participation and new tech and its role in enabling participation, you should read Hannah Nicklin’s post about Louder, a new online space for campaigners, it’s really exciting).    Even if I stay in academia (and my future plans are still pretty up in the air), I don’t want to get lost in my little ivory tower – and I really like that the internet has the potential to make it so much harder for that getting lost to happen.

But back to #Trafigura.  It’s been said that Carter-Ruck’s claim that the Guardian would be in contempt of court (over their injunction) if they reported on Parliament would have been ruled against when they got to court, so twitter wasn’t necessarily a big factor – but I think it must be seen as a factor in getting Carter-Ruck to step back before going to court.  That’s a lot of popular pressure – and more importantly, a great rise in unpopularity for your law firm and your client that you might think you could offset by backing down in advance of being removed.   And I really liked the way the word spread on twitter – it was essentially well-mannered outrage, which sounds silly, but honestly, you’re more likely to make something happen and LAST if you don’t swear and jump up and down on people’s heads.  It was a spread of information – which is, of course, exactly what Carter-Ruck and Trafigura didn’t want, so in this case the medium really worked for the issue.

I also quite like the way it’s worked politically – yes, the Prime Minister jumping on a bandwagon that is already rolling, in his call to investigate these super-injunctions (but I happen to like the bandwagon).  But it was a bandwagon that actually started where it should have started – in good journalism by the likes of the Guardian and Newsnight, and in a question by an MP who actually decided he cared enough to ask the Justice Secretary a question about the injunction banning publication of references to a report (this one, here, on wiki-leaks).  The dog did actually cause the tail to wag, created a broader public discourse and got some traction on the issue.  This is good – long may it continue.

Oh, and you can see Newsnight’s report on #trafigura, here.

Failure to Engage

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson’s latest blog post is interesting. Turns out even politicians and party members don’t show up to listen to a roll of speeches at conventions. Colour me surprised. Even at academic conventions the best part of panels is often the Q & A session.

But here’s the problem – if even the above mentioned hacks aren’t engaged with the main substance of these conferences, why the hell would anyone else be? If, even when you join a party you’re not getting to discuss or debate the issues, because the leadership are too scared of being seen to be uncertain or disorganised, what is the point of joining at all?

If decisions are made by those who show up, and the number of people showing up is getting ever smaller, what happens to the quality of decision-making?

The BBC and other media cover all the conferences, so you get some sense of the broader debate between the parties, and in parliament, thank heavens, they all still yell at each other a lot. But how do the parties come to their decisions? Well, right now it seems like two or three guys in a room with a lot of polling data. Which is a pretty crappy way to decide anything, even with the wonders of modern statistical analysis and polling. Plus, what about the things they don’t poll on? John Zaller once asked, “If the public had an opinion and there was no pollster around to measure it, would public opinion exist?”(1) It might not as an entity, but it would as individual opinions; but would these actually ever get reflected in policy-making? Almost certainly not. And is that really representative democracy?

Dear Politicians,

Do you remember that line in exam questions? It used to feature notably in maths and science. SHOW YOUR WORKINGS. When the media and the public are interested in debate and dissent, it isn’t (just) because all they want is scandal and gossip. It’s because that’s the most interesting bit – the bit that shows HOW and WHY you got to the policies you did. To take the exam analagy to the edge of sanity, it enables those of us marking you to decide whether we want to give you points for your workings, even if we’re not totally convinced the end result is right. Maybe if we get to ask you some more questions about it, you could fix that. If you know, you had workings that you could build on. The workings, the debate and, yes, even the dissent are the bits that make the answer – your policy. If you miss them out, you’re over-confident, and we don’t know we can trust you. So bring ‘em back. K?

Me x

(1) John Zaller (1992) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge) p.265

More seriously

All this increasing the tax on alcohol and/or pay by the unit stuff it rubbish. Yes, it would be nice to move British drinking culture away from binges towards sensible, relaxed drinking where you can still walk in a straight line when you go home, and don’t vomit. However, is making people pay more really going to make them drink less, or is it just going to make them have less money?

Educating the younger generation of the problems of binge drinking = good. I can get behind that. I think it’s the job of parents as well as of schools. I don’t quite have clear ideas of how this can be done, but I’m pretty sure that charging more money for booze is going to be ineffective. As for those who are aware that epic amounts of drinking will gradually lead to epic fail on the part of the liver and other accompanying anatomical elements? Well, let us make up our own minds as to whether we do that or not. We are grown up enough to make up our own minds about self-destruction.

Clearly I am developing objections to the nanny-state.

Things I discovered last year…

1. There’s tension involved in travel, even when you go on your own. The ‘why am I here’, ‘what’s my purpose in life’, am I just jumping through tourist hoops’ kind of tension. I think it happens every trip, and yet, when you come back you just sort-of forget about it. So, just learn that when it happens you should consider stopping seeing the things you’ve got on your list that you want to see – even if you really really really want to see them – for an afternoon and find a park or a sofa to sit and read a novel, or write screeds of nonsense working through your tourist-monkey issues, or email all the folks at home. And then go out the next day and get over it – chances are you’ll find something wonderful that makes you think that even if you are being a tourist-monkey, it’s probably worth it (hello, Kinkaku-Ji and Nanzen-Ji, Kyoto.

2. There’s more tension involved in watching other people travel – especially to historically sensitive places like Auschwitz. You have to work through that too – normally with the aid of pen and paper, but you’re allowed to talk to other people about it, ‘cos it’s not just emo-esque self-indulgent wank. It’s something worth thinking about. What kind of photos should you take in such places?

3. Japan. Despite the emo-tourist-monkey-ing moment, and the wearying aspects of spending three weeks in what is, pretty much Wonderland, with only a very few people to speak English too (damn my lack of Japanese), it was wonderful. And though when I came back I initially thought that it probably wasn’t going straight to the top of the list of ‘Places I’ve Been, Loved, and Want to Go Back To,’ it’s rapidly moving up the list. Mostly, I want to see Hokkaido.

4. David Mitchell. This is a vague corollary to the above, since I initially picked up Ghostwritten because I was looking for stuff to read about Japan before I went, and its first chapters are set in Japan. And then I fell in love with this wild and wonderful author, and found myself reading all four of his books (Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, number9dream, and Black Swan Green) between about March and September.

5. Various other authors, but most particularly Iain M. Banks and David Foster Wallace. I read The Algebraist at high speed whilst in Bulgaria for a wedding, but did at least manage to put it down for the duration of said wedding. Now I have a pile of Banks’ sci-fi to read, and am currently deep in The Player of Games. I came to DFW at the end of the year, sadly. Having heard so much about his work after his suicide, and hearing Joe mention that he was reading Infinite Jest, I borrowed a book of non-fiction essays from J, which contatined ‘The Host’, a DFW essay about conservative talk radio in the States. I’m hopelessly hooked, I’ve just finished Consider the Lobster, and ordered Infinite Jest, and I’m so sad that ever thing of his that I read takes me one step further to there being no more new DFW to read. I wish I’d discovered him earlier.

6. That despite the above, and my generally cultural snobbishness (Whaddya mean, you’ve never read Dickens???), I do have a soft spot for cultural candyfloss to leaven the load from the old brain-pan at times. It’s probably no coincidence that my affection for the awfulness of the Twilight series, and the insane camp colour of High School Musical Three: Senior Year hit me mid-supervisory crisis this autumn and further developed as I reached a point by Christmas where I was, quoth supervisor, “Written Out.” It’s also no coincidence that after a week away from the PhD I’ve started devouring non-fiction essays, high powered sci-fi and Simon Schama’s latest book, The American Future: A History.

7. Rhetoric isn’t ‘just words’. I knew it already, but after nine months of watching the US elections whilst concurrently writing a doctoral thesis about political thought and expression, all of which involves rhetoric, I have a much better understanding of it and what you can do with it, and what I don’t want to see the people running for things doing with it.

8. Economics matters. Still don’t understand it though. Paul Krugman is my guru. But I should probably pay more attention.

9. See above, re. physics and maths, which are really interesting, especially at that point where they meet theology and philosophy, but you need to have the basics down first. If only all physicists could write like Neal Stephenson did in Anathem.

10. It can still be hard to work out which friends you should make the effort to hang onto, and which you probably shouldn’t, but you shouldn’t get out of the game all together. Every so often you end up with the ones who come to visit for New Years and spend time drinking tea, reading novels and making up ludicrous top trumps games with you.

Parliamentary Democracy

I was trying to frame some thoughts about the recently emerged situation with the Speaker of the House of Commons and the police raid. And then I realised, I don’t really have any coherent thoughts about this. I know so very little about the emergence of British Parliamentary Democracy, and what I do know is all in bits and pieces. I know I’m interested in it, but I don’t really know anything about it.
So now I know I’m pretty horrified at the teaching of history and civics in British schools – and indeed at university. The survey courses I took before specialising at honours completely skipped the English Civil War, skimmed over the Restoration, featured a bit part by the Glorious Revolution before mostly ignoring the arrival of the Hannoverian monarchs in favour of dealing with the international wars of the eighteenth century. And nineteenth century history was mostly social history – but yet not really featuring the Reform Laws at all.
However, that doesn’t really help me improve my knowledge. So if someone could recommend me a good book or two on the subject for starters I’d be grateful.

But back to the present crisis. ‘Tis interesting – and not just in a ‘last week on The Devil’s Whorethe Speaker told the King to sod off because he wasn’t giving up his MPs’ kind of way (incidentally, I’ve not seen this week’s Devil’s Whore yet, so no spoilers…) But I like the idea of the Speaker as kind of the guardian and guide of the House of Commons.
I was also interested that the cabinet members I’ve heard on the radio are being very careful to avoid criticising the Speaker – and not only in a ‘we don’t really care that the Tory MP got arrested’ way, but also in a ‘don’t want to criticise a key element of the parlimentary system’ way. Which is doubly interesting because Labour have been busily getting rid of the Lord Chancellor, but the Speaker is safe.

But mostly, it’s interesting because you could – if you were careful – criticise the man but not the office: “The Speaker should be doing this [xyz] but Michael Martin did not, and therefore he’s not a good Speaker.” Which would make the man the problem, not the office he holds. I’m not saying that this should be done, or that this is the case now, but that you could. And that Labour aren’t suggests they might not be too concerned about problem with police raiding the palace of Westminster, and making off with documents and MPs belonging to the Tory party. I wonder what their response would have been if they were the opposition? Or what the Tory response would have been if such an action had been carried out during the Cash-for-Honours affair?

pretty neat

Go to tag galaxy and type stuff in. Try, say, ‘Obama’, ‘cos you get a lot of results.

OMG it's so addictive.

Super Obama World

Statement of the Day

Today my supervisor says to me:
“I feel really sorry for Sarah Palin, she has such a big head and no brain inside it. It can’t be comfortable going through life like that.”

I’m back from Spain and re-embarking on the thesis. I begin by setting aside 120-odd years of scholarship on the Roman constitution.

Oh Man.

Please tell me that this is not the new England shirt. I adore the sight of Paul Sackey scoring tries, but I’m not sure that I adore that shirt. Please tell me that it’s just a change strip because the Pacific Islanders were in white. Please. It looks like an Arsenal shirt. Ugh.

In other news, Spain is lots of nice things. Among other stuff, the hot chocolate is amazing, clearly, and the food is all kinds of good things. I have been taking lots’n'lots of pictures, as ever, but I forgot my camera cable, and so ye cannae see any of them till I get home on Wednesday. Or as my father said, “So the world can expect a deluge of Madrid photos then, can it?” Well, just my world. I very much doubt refugees in the DRC will be paying attention.

I have been to Toledo, and Segovia, where I managed not to hug the aqueduct, and to Salamanca, where I found the frog on the carved front of the university and therefore will clearly be getting married in the next 12 months, as that’s apparently what I get for finding the frog. Whoopeeeee. I have also played in the three main art galleries, and discovered that I am ok with modern art up until about the middle of the twentieth century, and then I start going, ‘ugh’ or ‘hmm, I do doodle like that in Friday seminars.’ Early Miro, good. Late Miro, well, I don’t dislike it, but I don’ understand how it qualifies as art. And some of the other stuff in the Reina Sofia. Just ugh. But the second floor stuff, the early twentieth century, I liked that. And Guernica is most impressive, and looks quite different when you actually see it full-on in HUGE size, rather than in poster-size on your roommate’s half of the wall. I liked the Thyssen-Bornemisza best though – despite being completely unable to pronounce it. Lots of lovely things, including Kandinsky, and a very very lovely Pissarro, which is a sibling of the Pissaro I adored in the RA’s ‘From Russia’ exhibit, and which I cannot even find a postcard of anywhere. It is Rue Saint-Honore: Rain Effect, on the right. I love love love it. (The other is Avenue de l’Opera: Snow Effect, apparently it lives in St Petersburg most of the time.) Apart from the contents – which did also include a fab exhibition called 1914! The Great War and the Avant-Gard – the museum itself is just so pretty. Yay for pretty museum architecture.

Finally, of course, I did follow the US election, completely failing to sleep properly, because I am that kind of person (the kind of person who stays in the same location watching a sporting event if the supported entity is doing well, because clearly it brings luck), and ended up checking the web at 5.30 am in time to catch McCain’s concession speech. Big yays from me for Obama winning, clearly. And now I’m following the transition a bit, and being very amused that after the Obama-being-like-Santos-who-was-based-on-Obama West Wing tale, Rahm Emanuel, who was apparently an inspiration for Josh Lyman in the West Wing, has been appointed Chief of Staff, which is the job Josh ended up with in the Santos administration. I am focusing on this amusment in an attempt to remain in denial about the fact that I find Emanuel oddly attractive…

Hola Hola

I am in Madrid – going off to Segovia today to see an Aqueduct. But I thought I should post, since it is the US election day, and I (and this blog) has been obsessed with it for months. May tomorrow be a new day.