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It’s been ten years since Labour came to power, say the Tories, and it’s high time they did something about families. Fathers are behaving irresponsibly, and this is causing their teenage kids to run riot around South London with an arsenal that would embarass a rebel militia. Bad parenting is causing bad kids that will grow up to cause even more social problems than now.

Step back a moment – let’s say that the kids are 15 to 18; they would have been born between 1989 and 1997, five to eight years before Labour came to power. I would suggest that these are Thatcher’s grandchildren; born to parents who had grown up in the relentlessly selfish era that saw large parts of the country in wretchedness, not just because their jobs went, but because those that kept their jobs saw their wages going less and less far and because there was not a social security system in place and because schools and training were cut back and those that fell into the prison system were given little chance to better themselves.

As much as it is the current Government’s responsibility to deal with the current problem, its roots lie in the past.

xD.

It takes me about ten minutes to read London Lite – less time than it takes me to reach the end of the Aldwych – on the bus in the evening, not to mention the fact that it’s a rubbish read from the publishers of the Daily Mail.

Page seven, in a DoughtyStreet-style piece of attack dressed up as journalism, talks about rising taxi fares in London. They will go up 3.2% from April 14. The CPI measure of inflation was 3.0% in December and 2.7% in January.

The two people that London Lite uses to comment are Brian Cooke of London TravelWatch and Bob Oddy, general secretary of the LTDA:

Brian Cooke, chairman of passenger watchdog London TravelWatch, said it was right that cab drivers received an annual cost of living increase that was based on a wide range of measures.

“We are quite happy and content with this, although we do begin to wonder whether a fresh look needs to be taken at the higher rates charged mid-evening and late evening,” he said.

“With London becoming a 24-hour city, we need to ask whether these quite large premiums are still appropriate.They’re not cheap and there has to be this balance. Clearly it’s in Londoners’ interests to use public transport as much as possible.”

Bob Oddy, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, said: “The reason the increase is very reasonable is because of diesel fuel. Although it was riding high back in the summer, it’s been dipping pretty much ever since. It’s an important component of the fares.”

Mr Oddy said concern about rising fares was “hype”. “The average passenger doesn’t complain. Why are cabs all full if they’re too expensive to use?” he asked.

Neither London TravelWatch or the LTDA can be called huge fans of Ken; moreover, the print version cuts out most of the comments of both. Ken became Mayor in 2000 – seven years ago – and has raised taxi prices eight times. Taxis are a luxury and rising fares at night are to encourage taxi drivers to come out – you know, capitalism or something.

Then, on the interactive bit Page 8, Kevin of London comes out with a classic letter:

Much gang culture is attributable to the absence of a stable father figure and proper family unit. And now, what does the Government do? Gay adoptions? It may sound controversial but perhaps this is a further step backwards. Kevin has cleverly identified a problem – the lack a father figure and the lack of a proper family unit.

His solution, though, is rubbish. If the problem is the lack of a father figure, gay adoption will provide, er, two father figures. A proper family? Do you mean a heterosexual family? I will accept, for the purposes of argument alone, that a heterosexual family may be better than a homosexual family. Does Kevin think that homosexuality is so bad that it is preferable to be brought up by a single parent? Is a proper family one that’s exactly like his?

thelondonpaper is slightly better than London Lite, but I’m going back to reading a book on the way home from work. These are not newspapers – page three is about Kate Moss getting into a small car – but gossip rags with sidelines in scaremongering – see the insightful article on bird flu on pages 12 and 13 – and dressing up bias as news. I’m looking forward to Iain Dale‘s column.

Update 2138: I’m going to call the PCO in the morning and ask for the fares tables since Ken came to office and do a little comparison with inflation.

xD.

“They accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.”

– Nelba Blandon, Nicaraguan Interior Ministry Director of Censorship

I went to Kew Gardens today with Alice and Ahmed and my new camera, a Canon EOS 400d. More pictures later, but I thought this was quite good.

xD.

At an event organised by LSE Labour, I heard Hazel Blears speak last night on feminism as part of the LSE SU’s Women’s Week.

Anyone would think there’s a deputy leadership election coming up – Hillary Benn on the Tuesday, Hazel Blears on the Wednesday.

I thought Hazel did well; for one thing, she actually spoke on the topic of women in politics and made the very valid point that the headline improvements for women in politics – Clinton in the US, Royale in France and Merkel in Germany – don’t do anything to hide the fact that few women are councillors and that, although we are at parity in the Welsh Assembly, there are concerns that in Scotland where women have stood down, men are replacing them and we are moving away from parity; as soon as you take your eye of the ball, things worsen.

In answer to a question from yours truly, Hazel did say that legislation on equal pay audits should go into the next manifesto.

I was actually pretty impressed – she comes across as hardworking, knowledgable and as really caring about her area and the Labour party. However, I am not convinced that she would be the best person for the job. I have a feeling that there would be cosmetic changes and some more fundamental changes in party organisation, but I don’t think there would be the root-and-branch look at Labour on the ground. There was, I felt, a lot of generality and identification of problems but no concrete means of solving those problems and moving forward.

xD.

I’ve just watched Ingmar Bergman’s classic film, The Seventh Seal. I went though a period a little while ago of buying DVDs on Amazon’s second hand shops, so they were cheap and allowed me to feel good about myself by having that sort of film collection.

Anyway, the film. First off, it’s beautifully filmed. Some of the scenes are iconic, foremost of which are, of course, the various shot of Death and the protagonist, Antonius Block, playing chess. Bergman said that the image of a knight playing chess with Death for his life come from a 1480s painting in the church at Täby in Sweden. The image of death portrayed by Bengt Ekerod has also become a classic and echoes down, being picked up, I would say, as the Emperor in Star Wars and as Fear in the Star Trek: Voyager episode, The Thaw. I know that Star Trek is seen as being geeky, but I really don’t care – I will return to this in another post, though.

Other images come through in the film beyond the chess game. One of the images that really resonated with me was that of the knight speaking at a confessional to who he presumes is a priest about his encounter with death and his chess strategy, thus revealing his position to Death, who he realises is the priest. Bergman’s use of light and shadow is beautiful in and of itself, but the meanings behind single frames are potent indeed. One that stuck in my mind is this:

Block has not yet realised that the priest to whom he confesses is Death, but there are several overlaying symbols that encapsulate the film. Bergman is critical of priests throughout the film for using the plague that is sweeping the land, but this moves it on rather.

First off, the knight is trapped by the bars, away from the ‘priest’. I won’t repeat the centuries-old debate about rood screens and separating the commoners from the priesthood, but this is a depiction of the church as an iron barrier between what humanity, depicted by the knight, seeks and the consolation of knowledge – knowledge that is defined as important by the church.

There is, of course, the fact that the knight mistakes death for the priest. To Bergman, the priest is implicitly death; not to say that the priest directly causes death, but causes a death-in-life by trapping people in their concern about death and a belief in god that they promote to their own benefit – although the priest leads the flagellants, and gains status at least from it, he himself does not take party in the flagellation, preferring to make end-of-the-world predictions and crude rantings about not knowing when you’re going to die.

The obsession that the knight has with god and death comes from the church; it is the church that sent him on his crusade for ten years. I do wonder if there is something in Jöns, the knight’s servant, being atheistic and fatalistic because he had no choice but to follow his master while Block chose, after a fashion, to go on the crusade.

Ultimately, though, Block’s only counsellors are Death, through which he gains the opportunity to commit a meaningful act in allowing the family of artists to escape, and Jöns, through whom he gains an understanding that you can’t change everything and some things, even though they are awful, you can at best only mitigate.

I wonder if the same applies to me; am I trapped into a way of thinking because of my upbringing, in terms of environment, culture and education? I have, at times, tried to think whether an action is moral/good/whatever by thinking from a sort of tabula rasa position but I often end up with positions of which Protestant Christianity would approve. Does the indoctrination of the Church mean that we will end up accepting the moral lessons of all or part of our upbringing as default and convince ourselves that that position is, a priori and possibly without god, right?

Anyway, I shall sign off with a picture of Death.

xD.

Every Monday during the university term at ULU, I play for a team called the Kim Jong-il Appreciation Society in the pub quiz league. Said team has won the league for this term, the prizes being cocktails top trumps, playing cards, a keyring, a hangover eyemask and a hipflask, all branded with Jack Daniel’s (except the keyring, which is Smirnoff). Best of all, though, was a case of beer for each of the six people in the team.

Amusingly, the Jack Daniel’s Cocktails Top Trumps has, on the back, a warning that it is not suitable for children under three. Give that four-year-old a Manhattan.

Just for the record, the final points were:

28 – We Are Scientists
33 – Five Geographers but one of them’s Lost
49 – Lego Fan Club
59 – Team Titwank
68 – The Winning Team
72 – The Left Bollock Collection Fund
83 – Fat Kids are Harder to Kidnap
85 – The Hollow Brains
89 – The Kim Jong-il Appreciation Society

xD.

Dennis Skinner is pro-choice. He is sufficiently pro-choice (and, I suspect, keen to expose some of Parliament’s more arcane procedures as such) to organise a three-hour filibuster using the issuance of a writ of election, amongst other tricks, to prevent restrictions on abortion. It should be noted that this was constitutional trickery to prevent constitutional trickery,

The Speaker at one point had to come out with the classic

No, I shall not take a point of order. I shall take the closure motion. I ask the House to listen carefully to the Question. The Question is, That the Question, That the Question be not now put, be now put.

Anyway, here is the debate in all its glory.

xD.

At the risk of being shot down by an uberblogger, I have to take issue with Iain Dale’s argument that the centre ground is the common ground, mostly because I don’t think either exist.

The centre ground is, presumably, the bit in the middle. The middle of what, I hear you cry. It could be between Labour and the Conservatives. Immediately we run into the problem of both parties having wings and factions.

A redraw might have extra axes closer to or further from the line between the two major parties for the LibDems, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Greens and the rest. Straightaway, we’re seeing that there have to be multiple axes where you can talk about centre ground between two or three parties across the broad sweep of policies, but as you add others in

Moreover, the common ground and the centre ground is not the same thing. The centre position between a unitary state and Scotland and Wales becoming independent might be a federation composed of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, London, Yorkshire, the North West, Midlands, East, South and South West. That would probably not be acceptable to many people – the centre ground is not the common ground.

Talking of devolution, I believe I’m right in saying that Nye Bevan (and do please correct me) was in favour of states’ rights in the USA because it was the only way to achieve socialism and a unitary state in the UK because it was the only way to achieve socialism. The more left-wing position is here the same as (if for different reasons) the right-wing party. Equally, Tam Dalyell, poser of the West Lothian Question, opposed devolution.

The common ground is what parties accept as the playing field. We should have, in some form, an NHS etc. The centre ground is an abstract that may not have any philosophical coherence and may be so unpalatable that it is emphatically not the common ground.

xD.