Engagement is not Appeasement: why we should hang in there with the EU

There’s a lot of fuss in various media about those who have dared to suggest the UK is a middling sized European power with little sway in the big, Real World, outside of it’s involvement in the EU and it’s [tenuous’ links to the US through the ‘special relationship’ are anti-patriotic defeatists.  And by saying we should be fully involved in shaping the EU rather than standing on the ever barren, icy side-lines in our Union Jack waistcoats clutching an Airfix model of a Spitfire, makes us appeasers.
I don't see any appeasing going on here at all however.  But I do see though- in a few isolated places of hope- a good dose of reality being swallowed.

The machinations of the EU may at times seen like the Mafia and it admittedly leans towards the autocratic rather than the democratic, but remember we have a press dominated by rabid anti-European hysteria [and that's putting it mildly] that permeates UK society so completely with it's unreasonableness- and often OUTRIGHT LIES- that it's difficult sometimes even for the most open-minded to develop informed judgements.

Whatever, hyperbole about the EU being ran like the Mafia doesn't help, nor is there the imminent threat of a new USSR on our doorstep etc etc etc.   Even if you take that concept on board, this government and Cameron's actions at the summit DID NOT amount to us standing up to the EU.  IT AMOUNTED TO US RUNNING AWAY.

There's lots of talk about Cameron using a veto last week to stop the EU in it's tracks.  It was nothing of the sort.  A veto stops things; he stopped nothing.

We have to be very careful not to get hysterical about the evils of the EU.  Just bear this in mind: after centuries of slaughtering each other in Europe, the EU has delivered over sixty years of peace, where talking has replaced warfare.  In an alternative universe, Cameron and the other leaders of Europe in all probability have left that summit last week, and returned to their capitals to ready their troops for warfare.  REAL warfare, with 21st century weapons.

I think to have the threat of that reality being reduced to the almost completely implausible is a huge endorsement of the success- and need- for the EU, don't you?  So lets be show our real bulldog spirit by getting stuck into the EU and working to shape it more in our image, rather than running away and daydreaming fantasies about returning to our [long lost] empire days.

How Sarkozy made the UK Billy-No Mates in one quick master class of political intelligence

 

L’Épouvantail is unashamedly a pan-European enthusiastic; the EU may be imperfect and lacking often in basic, democratic instinct, but as the recent summit proved, sitting around a dinner table talking about problems, and then going home to face the politicians and press at home with sound bites, is preferable to them leaving the table and going home to ready the troops.

Well Cameron seems to be enjoying the adulation of his party at the moment, but after seeing his body language at and after the summit, I strongly suspect in ten years time when his memoirs are published he will pin-point that summit and this week when he realised he'd made a huge mis-calculation, and it spelt the beginning of the end of his political career.

Cameron made an horrendous mistake at that summit, and through his inexperience as both a domestic and international politician, has put the UK in a very, very disadvantaged position. When all the flag waving and jumping up and down singing Rule Britannia has stopped, more and more people will realise just that, as the true consequences of us effectively being booted out of the EU decision making process becomes all too clear.

As said above, L’Épouvantail  is not a huge fan of the way the EU has developed in recent times;  for years it’s been clear that it naturally inclines towards beings run by a technocratic elite from behind closed doors, and their European Project is hugely ambitious, massively bank-rolled, and very, very powerful. But the only way we can oppose the excesses of this behemoth and it's un-democratic instincts, is by being at the heart of the EU and making our voice heard, because believe it or not, we ARE listened to and supported an awful lot in EU affairs by other member states than our shameless, lying, rabidly beyond-all-sense-of-reason-and-proportion anti-European media care to report [an anti-European press incidentally ran almost exclusively by non-Europeans and tax exiles by the way, but that's another issue].

The EU's member states are not structured in a Them against Us way at all; in fact in it's day to day running, many of 'them' are on our side.

Although it’s appreciable how hard Cameron's job was, somehow he has managed to achieve the worst of all possible outcomes, and allowed Sarkozy in particular, to change that day-to-day face of the EU around, and make us the villainous, outcast, Billy No-Mates. Cameron has been totally outclassed on the world stage here, and we really, really should be careful about how much celebration we indulge in, because our country is about to enter a dark period where our politicians are not up to the job of protecting us adequately, and we are going to be very quickly dominated by a European super-state which, without us having a voice within it, will potentially become increasingly autocratic and that- in the long run- will make the world a much more dangerous place.

The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism by Colin Crouch

Just as it appeared with the financial crisis of 2007-08 that Neo-Liberalism had taken a firm, apparently fatal knock-out blow and all us, as we saw it lying on the boxing ring floor, were about to wake up and finally able to see the odious ideology for all the sham and elitist self-serving twaddle that it is... well back it bounces all shiny and new, ready to fight another round as if secretly pumped with steroids to help it along the way.

Well not exactly secretly; the political elite makes no bones about it's love affair with Neo-Liberalism; in fact our political class on not just both sides of the Atlantic but now the Channel as well, are well and truly incorporated within the ideological clutches of the Neo-Liberal behemoth and, because of that, it's not difficult to feel as if the developed world in the 21st century is going to remain thoroughly fucked for the foreseeable future.

But let's not feel too pessimistic on this wonderful summer's day as the rain streams down outside and our wonderful government- the very same one that last year was telling us we were nearly bankrupt from ridiculous socialist policies, but can then find a billion quid to bomb civilians with in Libya- crows about a successful campaign of war in the ME.  Let's turn to this rather excellent work in question.

Colin Crouch’s book takes it’s cue from George Dangerfield’s 1936 classic ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England,’ in which Dangerfield tried to explain the sudden collapse in the early 20th century, of the political ideas and a party that had dominated the late Victorian Age and pre-WW1 Britain. With Neo-Liberalism, he does however turn this analysis on it’s head; his aim is to explain why, following a huge economic and political crisis based fairly and squarely within the ideologies of Neo-Liberalism, it hasn’t collapsed and, indeed, hasn’t just survived but is getting back on it’s feet again determined to get back to business as usual.

This resilience of Neo-Liberalism is a fascinating phenomenon and a rich seam of socio-political analysis to mine, and Crouch does an admirable job of it. He charts the fundamental aspect of Neo-Liberalism that is simple but rarely acknowledged- either through myopia on the Left, or wilful masking and divertive myth-making on the Right, that actually existing- as opposed to ideologically pure- Neo-Liberalism is in no way as devoted to free markets as it relentlessly professes to be.

Crouch clearly explains how the trans global corporation is the true embodiment of Neo-Liberal economic theory, and that in reality has nothing to do with maintaining open, free markets in a democratic, ‘libertarian’ political structure free of overt influence from the state. It is more to do with transferring power from the state- which by definition is believed by Neo-Liberals to be at best inefficient, at worst corrupt and nothing but self-serving, as well as naturally erring towards the creation of monopolies at the expense of consumer choice- to the private sector. but the shape of this private sector is not one of a raft of competing small-medium size enterprises, but that of a small number of increasingly inter-related, planet-striding corporations. He also interestingly explains a key aspect of Neo-Liberalism that the ideology uses at the core of all it’s arguments to explain away this process: when cornered on such issues, they carefully describe the process of corporatism as one of enhancing consumer ‘welfare,’ not consumer 'choice.' So, as long as wealth is being created somewhere in the system- even if it is concentrated amongst only a select few- it enhances consumer welfare no matter what.

The irony of this anti-state rhetoric- that everything characteristically wrong with the state in Neo-Liberal analysis has in fact, been merely transferred to the private sector- is still strangely lost on many people, but Crouch successfully shows us how this is in fact the reality of the 21st Century. At the core of Neo-Liberalism is not the urge to free everyone from the shackles of a nanny state into a vibrant world of competing privately run firms, but the direct aim to privatise power into a small group of the global elite. And this privatisation process can be seen at work relentlessly around us day in day out. The turning of private, corporate debt into public debt in the aftermath of the 2008-09 crash; the switching of corporate failure and market inefficiencies into an issue of overtly expensive and un-necessary public services; the process of now moving that public state debt onto the ordinary citizen through forcing them further into debt; the eroding of their living standards by high inflation/low interest rates etc., and so it goes on…

Colin Crouch has therefore provided us with a timely, much needed and erudite analysis of how a political ideology that, in the ‘normal’ state of affairs would be on it’s knees gasping it’s last breath, has perversely emerged stronger from it's crisis primarily because unlike in previous crises, where the key players where toppled by world events- such as the Keynsians in the 70s- the key players and proponents of Neo-Liberalism, namely the corporations, were saved and maintained by the state to get back to what they do best: creating profit for themselves and themselves alone.

Not just the Left, but the moderate Right needs to understand this, and must get to grips with the neo-Liberal phenomenon and fully understand it before our social democracy and values are made even more difficult to repair, and this book is a good starting point from which to do just that.

The Tenderloin by John Butler

Well how time flies and 2011 becomes subject to some sort of time dilation effect whereby months become weeks and the hours in a day become nothing but blinks and frowns…
The Tenderloinis a district in San Francisco don’t you know, and this book, just about to be published in the UK  has passed by my jaded eyes recently.
Now then if I had a pound for every book cover that had the hyperbolic statement `a spectacular new Irish talent' splattered across it, I'd be a rich scarecrow.  So it was with such a grumpy attitude I approached this book and unfortunately [again], my reservations were well founded. Someone like John Butler may have contributed to The Irish Times, San Francisco Chronicle and written/directed shorts for the Irish Film Board etc etc etc, but a good novelist and subsequent debut novel it does not necessarily make.....
The basic premise of The Tenderloin is promising; it charts the early dot.com years in California, as seen through the eyes of an Irish émigré, even if it is another case of the Irish apparently being able to drift effortlessly into and around the US penniless and without employment, when the rest of the western world has to queue for green cards.
The central character, Evan, arrives in San Francisco in 1995 as a 21 year old virgin. He at first bums around not doing very much feeling intensely lonely, gets a job in the lower reaches of a flash, start-up dot.com business where he develops a crush on his [male] boss. He then has to struggle [well a bit anyway], with his [perhaps] latent homosexuality, loses connection with his best friend who he'd travelled to California with and alienates Roisin, another close friend who had travelled out to team up with them, and then goes home.  
And that's about it.
There are some hints at the absurdity of this huge, new business model as neoliberal ideology finally hit its stride in the early 90s, but no sense of any real insight into its true nature, and I think that is a massive missed opportunity, and there are plenty of others like that in this novel.
To be fair there are some truly touching moments of insight in the book though. For example Evan in his loneliness starts following families [at a distance] into Fisherman's Wharf some evenings, just to try and glean some innocent, familial warmth from them. He casually tells someone about this in a bar but ends up getting cold shouldered as some sort of pervert. This is a clever illustration of how you can feel deep disconnectedness in a foreign country and the insular, judgemental nature of our culture these days. There is also a genuinely funny scene where Evan has an encounter with an ice sculpture, and a nice set piece when Evan is out sailing with his boss and wife and things go awry, but these parts of the narrative where Butler hits his stride only added to my frustration with the book in its entirety, and the nagging feeling that it could all have been so much better.
The book really only takes off as an intriguing novel at the very end, where the perspective changes from Evan to his friend Roisin, which fascinatingly puts Evan into a wholly new perspective, with his proto-alcoholism laid bare and the hint of life and people going in circles-cycles. These final few pages are Butler really writing and are very, very good, and the sole reason I had to in the end give this book three rather than two stars. In fact if you do start reading the book, it is worth hanging in there for the final sequence alone.
To be honest, at the end of the day I think the book has been published too soon, with probably only 75% of the editing/writing process done properly. And I read the final advanced copy, so it is not work in progress. It is also telling that the publisher's blurb informs us proudly that there is a lot of movie interest in it, and that makes sense, because in the end, one can't help feeling it has been written with the focus firmly on a screenplay first, and as a rounded novel second.
One final thing: technicalities. Butler uses that technique so beloved of the Celtic fringe: the use of hyphens instead of speech marks. It takes great skill and attention to detail to pull this off, which writers like Roddy Doyle and Niall Griffiths on the whole manage to do, but this author doesn't. The whole flow of the narrative is broken as you keep having to work out who is saying what to who, and unfortunately it makes the whole book more laborious to read than it should be. It really is a technical trend in contemporary novel writing that should be put quietly to sleep.
So on the whole,
despite the publishers blurb, Butler isn't a new Brett Easton Ellis or Nick Hornby. He doesn't have the droll irony and cool detachment of BEE, nor has he the metrosexual `confused but well-meaning' gentle humour of Hornby. In the end he has produced a book more like something a committee might write and, ultimately, is as a result strangely soulless.
Now looking back over this review I feel as if maybe I have been a little harsh; there is the potential for a great book in here somewhere and I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it at all, because Butler can write emotively and with a fair degree of charm when he wants too. But it's been wasted in this book, and it may once again be down to the poor quality control [a.k.a. laziness] of some of our major publishers these days, who seem unprepared to push further the writers they have signed up, or even look for extraordinary writers to define the new century we are all hurtling through.

When I Fever Dream it is in Mathematics [of that you can be sure]

 

cold sweat slapped on my body as if carelessly

but with

paradoxical studied abandon by a pastry brush

a pastry brush of

demented purpose and I have solved

issues of mathematical complexity

with the mental agility of a bat flying radar-down

cruising with eyes alone

for a laugh

then there is

my propensity for influenza-induced equational dexterity

a novel way to solving brain aching conundrums such as

inter-dimensional matter transference well well well

I know how now yes I do

of that you can be sure

I worked it out in my fever it’s all down to a certain number

all you’ve got to do is bracket it

and

do the good old

( )

and square it by a -3

wish though

I could remember the

number in the

brackets

she was right I should at all times keep my trusty

Blackpool Zoo Pen and Notebook handy on the bedside table

I have only myself to blame and now to the other

dream

I can see a house in the distance it’s a big bugger

a bit ramshackle but the equations hold together

the gutters are integers the chimney is a cosine

and the caretaker a fraction of the man I always wanted to be

there he is tending the garden of prime numbers but

the green house, the one

full of near-extinct logarithms has had most

of its glass panes broken but that is another issue

another story for another lifetime

and my ancestors are stood there in front of the house

they are beckoning me encouraging me

and all that stands between my good self and my ancestors are

a large number of topiary figures

some shaped like small birds ones a wren

defo [and a neat little wooden gate swings]

the rest the rest they are an assortment of jungle animals

an elephant laurel bush a lion hawthorn

a large alligator

privet

and I look and look and think it all looks like too much effort

and then

WAKE UP

Raise a flag of vengeful calculus

and

radiate.

http://vimeo.com/9669156
WE HAVE BAND enjoy enjoy enjoy