Brown Love & Brown Hate.

The past 24 hours have revealed a great deal about the country.

Firstly, how easily the media can get suckered by Alistair Campbell and the Labour spin machine. It was, of course, foolish of National Bullying Helpline founder Christine Pratt to stick her head above the parapet. Not only did she breach the confidentiality of those who rang the NBH up, but she also did so without realising how easily she could be smeared, discredited and used as a smokescreen for the real issue - whether Gordon Brown is fit for office.

But then aren't we all compromised? We've all got secrets, connections and circumstances that can be used against us. (Ask Boris Johnson, for example.) Those taking part in the public flaying of Pratt might consider at some point how vulnerable they are in turn. It could happen to anybody - especially when spin doctors are looking for a distraction. This is the psychology of McCarthyism and Witch Hunts, but Christine Pratt should still have paused before acting, if only because it is such a distraction.

That is no excuse, however, for the bullying she has in turn endured. Britain is a nation of bullies, as this blog has pointed out, but in a subconscious way that seems oblivious to the irony of bullying resulting from a story about... bullying.

Still, as Rod Liddle and Brendan O’Neill demonstrate, a nation of bullies must, by necessisity, blame the victims, if only so they can tell them to Grow Up, Suck It In, Pull Themselves Together, Live With It, etc. This seems to be the main problem with exposing Brown as a bully - you get the impression that a large segment of the public sort of agree with bullying, in part because it's always good sense to side with the bully, but also because there is an unspoken loathing of the weak. As Nic Cohen said of the thuggish 'comedy' panel show, Mock The Week:

Similarly, Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable. [SOURCE]

And as AA Gill noted (while pretending that this is only an English rather than a UK-wide trait), even joy and laughter is tainted by this pack sadism:

English humour is the sound of the bullies. The overtold story of the English underdog overcoming the big man with laughter is simply not true. The English constantly use their humour as an indiscriminate bludgeon... The humour of embarrassment and the joy of classroom teasing is a national sport, and its very ubiquity is its open-palmed “What, us?” defence, because at some point everyone suffers for it. Obviously there’s no harm meant. If you beat up only Pakis, you’re a racist, but if you beat up everyone it’s only having a laugh. And anyway, they should be able to take a joke. [SOURCE]

This presumably explains how Brown the Bully is presently being spun as Brown the Victim. If he really were on the skids, there would be no mercy for him, as John Major, Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot's own skewerings demonstrate. And how else to explain tonight's spectacle on Channel 4 News, where lumpenprole grotesque, John Prescott, jowels wobbling away, tried to convince the nation that his party did not have an issue with bullying by, err, trying to shout down Krishnan Guru Murphy and smearing Pratt without her being there to give a response. He could do this because he had an entire political machine behind him, launching a violent counter attack like, well, a bully who's just been shoved back.

But that's not the only factor at play here. There's the herd-like falling in to line of the most insubordinate of lefties, all piling in on Comment Is Free, Harry's Place and Socialist Unity to spread the shit, repeat the spin and generally defend a man they claim to hold in contempt. Why? Because they're scared that the Tories might get in, and individual values mean nothing when there's a turd wearing a red rosette vs. a twat in a blue rosette. This is the origins of every betrayal by the left in this country - a set of strongly espoused beliefs behind which only tribalism and accompanying blood feuds really matter. At least Bob Piper is consistent, one supposes.

The only question now is whether the public will fall for it, as they seem to have fallen for the 'Pity Me!' narrative engineered last weekend, and see Brown the victimiser as instead Brown the victim. Or perhaps he truly has been wounded and so they will swarm around him like sharks, eager for more blood. The fact that The Sun has described Brown as 'The Prime Monster' suggests the latter, whereas the muddled coverage by the BBC suggests the 'narrative' is still up for grabs. Perhaps the matter will die, as the government hopes, or more shit will float to the surface. After all, it wasn't so long ago that Brown was shoving wavering Labour MPs into the 'Yes' lobby during the climax of the ID Card Bill showdown of 2006. The fact remains that Brown's bad behaviour has been common knowledge for a while - it's been in the public domain long enough to suggest that a bastard can stay a bastard just as long as he remains a powerful bastard.

But this all gets in the way of the real question: Are Andrew Rawnsley's allegations true, and if not, why has Brown merely issued denials and not libel wits? That in itself speaks volumes.

In The Brown Stuff.

For those who didn't know, journalist Andrew Rawnsley has just published a book that makes pisspoor Prime Minister Gordon Brown look like an unstable, violent and mentally incompetent nincompoop. Do we really deserve to be lead by a man like this?

...During one rage, while in his official car, Brown clenched his fist in fury after being told some unwelcome news and then thumped the back of the passenger seat with such force that a protection officer sitting in the front flinched with shock. The aide sitting next to Brown, who had just told him the information that provoked the outburst, cowered because he feared "that the prime minister was about to hit him in the face".

Rawnsley writes that "the cream upholstery of the seat-back in front of Brown was flecked with black marks. When having a meltdown the prime minister would habitually stab it with his black marker pen"... [Source]

Whether Brown is a liability is pretty much like asking if being set on fire really hurts. But how can such a man stay in power? Well, like most abusive arseholes, he actually depends on his victims to make excuses for him, to let him off the hook.

According to Rawnsley, O'Donnell was so disturbed by the effect on those in Downing Street that he took it upon himself to try "to calm down frightened duty clerks, badly treated phone operators and other bruised staff by telling them, 'Don't take it personally'". [Source]

Yep, don't take physical assault or mental abuse personally. Tsk, don't you realise you're simply making things worse? Never mind that this is the sort of behaviour that leads to tribunals or criminal prosecutions.

Even Rawnsley himself seems sucked into this bizarre psychology, that leaves the victim both vulnerable and complicit in their own abuse. It's not his fault, he just gets angry sometimes! Why, he can be a good man sometimes..!

However, the book does show the softer side of the prime minister, recounting how he is capable of being incredibly solicitous towards colleagues at times of family emergency and bereavement. [Source]

Yeah, that makes up for manhandling people, throwing phones, being horrible to female staff and acting like a deranged thug. And then there was his single-handed rescue of the world economy which, err, shackled us with even more debt, inflation and unsustainable public expenditure.

In today's serialisation, you can also sample part of the account of the financial crisis during which Gordon Brown displayed some of his positive attributes as a leader. In October 2008, even those cabinet colleagues and civil servants who were otherwise in utter despair about the prime minister were admiring of the boldness and imagination with which he reacted to the crisis by producing a blueprint for saving the financial system which was broadly copied around the world.

One wonders if one should laugh or cry at this point.

Of course, the truth is that Brown, like all abusers, ultimately only has the power others allow him. By making excuses and clinging to the vain myth that this unpleasant, stunted man can actually do anything good rather than spiteful or myopic, we allow him to continue to ruin our country, poison our culture and plunge us ever deeper into penury. Gordon Brown has helped make the Tories electable. What else need be said?

Yet More US School Paranoia.

Remember, spying on teenagers behind a bush or with a pair of binoculours is weird. Whereas, spying on teenagers via school computers is perfectly acceptable. Rememeber, it's for your own good:

A school district in Pennsylvania spied on students through web cameras installed on laptops provided by the district, according to a class action lawsuit filed this week.

Lower Merion school district, in a well-heeled suburb of Philadelphia, provided 2,300 high-school students with Mac laptops last autumn in what its superintendent, Christopher McGinley, described as an effort to establish a "mobile, 21st-century learning environment"...

...The district retained remote control of the built-in webcams installed on the computers – and used them to capture images of the students, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this week.

The ruse was revealed when Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton high school, was hauled into the assistant principal Lindy Matsko's office, shown a photograph taken on the laptop in his home and disciplined for "improper behaviour"...

...n a letter posted on the school district's website, McGinley said the district had installed on the laptops a security feature that allowed the webcam to photograph the computer operator in the event the laptop is lost or stolen. He said that following the suit's filing, the district disabled the feature amidst a review of technology and privacy policies. He said the feature was activated only to help locate a lost or stolen laptop.

"The district never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever," he wrote. "We regret if this situation has caused any concern or inconvenience among our students and families."

You only get such sincere apologies from people who've been caught out. It does raise a pertinent question though, especially in the CCTV-sodden UK (and London, where you can't scratch your nose without being spotted). Why do we so easily submit to surveillance, even though we don't know who's at the other end? Paranoia makes us vulnerable to the real thing, it seems.

Intolerable Zero Tolerance.

While this blog likes to stay firmly in the UK, and in London, sometimes there is a news story from abroad that compels it to vomit out epic torrents of outrage and bile.

This is one such story.

Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.

Alexa's hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and - the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl - her classmates.

"They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn't believe it," Alexa recalled. "I didn't want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I'm a bad person."

Still it's a slippery slope from just scribbling on a desk to going tonto in the canteen with an AK-47, amirite? Alexa, it's obviously for your own good that you're humiliated in front of your classmates and be so traumatised you then spend the next three days "throwing up". America has to make sure its children are safe and don't live in fear!

After all, according to this prize plonker, Zero Tolerance is A Good Thing:

Kenneth Trump, a security expert who founded the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, said focusing on security is essential to the safety of other students. He said zero tolerance policies can work if "common sense is applied."

Two things spring to mind. Firstly, there's some weird double think going on if you can honestly combine 'common sense' and 'zero tolerance'in the same sentence. One suggests moderation and nuance, whilst the other signifies extremity and a simple minded black-and-white morality.

Secondly, there's something pretty dodgy about having a URL, as Ken Trump does, like http://www.schoolshootingexpert.com/ - hardly reassuring, is it? It presumes the worst case scenario and suggests you should too. So does having a company named: "National School Safety and Security Services" which offers "school security and emergency preparedness training". And it's not meant to be reassuring, because here we have the commodification of panic, where our darkest fears are sold back to us. Worse, like most products, we are not just being sold the solution but also the problem - we are being convinced to be afraid.

And yet school shootings and other such events make the news precisely because they are so rare, and so newsworthy. The mistake we make with the news and which the news lets us make is to assume the unusual is in fact everyday or ever-more likely. But it's not - you are very unlikely to die in a school shooting in the US, at least if the Center for Disease Control is to be believed. Meanwhile, in the UK, 40% of road deaths are in the 15-25 group (who only have about 12.5% of all driving licences issued). Back in the US, drivers in the 15-24 age bracket consitutute only 14% of the population but account for 30% of all injuries amongst male drivers - in 2008 alone, this amounted to the deaths of 3500 young people, compared to 323 deaths from school shootings between 1992-1997.

One death is always one too many, but where is the outrage for all those who die young and in an RTA? The ugly truth is that while school shootings are exciting, rare and - from a journalistic perspective - 'sexy', deaths in traffic accidents are mundane, everyday, and of little interest (except for those directly effected.) Perverse but true - not all dead teenagers are equal. Such irrationality leads the debate and in doing so distorts our view of it.

This brings us back to Zero Tolerance, which seeks to apply extreme responses to extreme events to the everyday and the typical. It should go without saying that this is absurd, but since when has reason ever counted in debates like this?

The real question we should be having is whether schools are the healthiest environments for children to grow up in, whether leaving our young in a state of perpetual in loco parentis really helps much, or whether a 19th century model of top-down, hierachical learning really is the best way for children to learn. But that's another blogpost, another rant, another day.

Doctor Who: The End of Time - An 'I Can't Be Arsed To Write Much' Review.

Last night's Doctor Who - was it good? Yes, no and maybe - but you're a walking corpse if those last five words didn't break your heart and the Tennant/Cribbins double act didn't leave you in awe. At its best, which I'm happy to say was most of the time, it recaptured the initial magic and excitement of the far too quickly forgotten Eccleston era. It was an end worth mourning.

Anyway, these two very disparate reviews HERE and HERE say pretty much what I was going to write anyway, so read them instead. Let us now prepare to be enthralled or horribly disappointed as Laird Moffat and his Time Toddler begin their reign.

Winter in Harrow.

A view of the park near the University of Westminster's Harrow Campus and Northwick Park hospital, as taken from the platform at Northwick Park Tube station.

Labouring The Point About The Tories.

The overall consensus is that the Conservative Party will win the next UK General Election, due to take place some time next year. What puzzles many pundits, however, is what the opinion polls say. The Tories are in the lead but only by a margin of around 10%, which will translate into either a workable Tory majority in parliament, a small majority for them or, possibly, a hung parliament, and this lead will fluctuate ever more as the election draws near.

Political commentator Peter Oborne believes this is because the Tory leader David Cameron is not inspiring enough of the electorate, that Team Cameron is not invoking the sort of passion that Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher did. I believe however that the answer is more prosaic. We are delusional and ghastly, ghastly hypocrites.

Labour survives against the odds because we want it to be something it's not. There is an odd mix of nostalgia for a time that never was and a blind faith in the never-never that explains why Labour hasn't ceased to exist. Lots of its supporters, and indeed the rest of the public, murmur dewy-eyed epithets over Labour achievements: the Welfare State, the NHS, the People's Party, the minimum wage, increased public spending...

The other half to this is a vain, always disappointed belief that all it takes is one good Labour government, Goddammit, and we'll all be living in a paradise free of poverty, waiting lists, despair or fear. This mentality is akin to blighted peasants in the Middle Ages praying for a better life in the next - it all seems much more feasible than facing up to the now and how to remedy it with what we have. Gordon Brown is simply a modern version of the hypocritical, corrupt, whoring local priest that everyone feels sorry for because deep down they really want to believe he's a good man and that at least he means well.

But for some reason, while odious acts like ID Cards, the Iraq War, Labour Sleaze, John Prescott in his many manifestations and - not to mention - the Winter of Discontent, rationing carrying on into the early 50s, political militancy, betrayal of values, shrill lefty dogma, the Orwellian Ministry of Works, student top-up fees, an appalling record in government and punitive taxes all upset people, they don't seem to dominate the public imagination as examples of villainy as the Tories do.

For that matter, while everyone curses the Tories, they don't really factor in things like economic booms, rising home ownership, unions made to behave, higher living standards and so on. True, these are often double edged swords, but so are many of Labour's contributions, and it seems odd that we focus more on the Tories' failings despite benefiting from the good things they have done as well as Labour's own positive contributions.

It all comes down to guilt. We feel that we should be Good, and in a post-war British context that means Left of Centre, redistributive and nice and fluffy (many people seem to think these all go together). Which is what Labour represents, or at least what we'd like it to represent. But on the other hand, we feel like we have to be pragmatic, self-serving, ruthless and money grubbing, all of which the Tories represent in the popular imagination.

Hating the Tories helps us ignore the sneaking suspision that we might need them, that their 'nasty party' vibe is actually how the world works and, let's be honest, reflects a lot of the miserly, small-minded, shallow and vindictive elements of the British character. We're ashamed of this, so vote in or support a party that we believe reflects our less savoury urges and then spend the rest of the time hurling invective at it.

And this is why we remember Tory excesses more than Labour excesses, because they confirm comforting beliefs and prejudices and also let us pretend that that a Blakeian Jerusalem is just round the corner. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair didn't just vote themselves in - the electorate and its own dishonesty has much to answer for, which is probably why screaming 'TORY BASTARDS!!!' makes us feel so much better.

The ultimate example of this cognitive dissonance is how we've remembered the old Liberal Party. Which is to say, we broadly haven't. We've forgotten minor details like the extension of the franchise (without which Labour would be stuffed like a turkey), social reforms, an end to child labour, removal of power from the Crown, the aristocracy and the Church and, lest we forget, the earliest incarnation of the bless'd Welfare State. Why is this? In part, it was a long time ago and our memories are, naturally, self serving. Labour has become the forlorn hope of a 'better' future, as previously mentioned, so another reforming force in British politics just confuses many people, or it rather muddies an easy, convenient political narrative that people can buy into. It also rather gets in the way of the dualism we've come to rely on - evil Tories, goody Labour, but the Liberals..? This is why the Lib Dems will probably remain the 'third party' for the foreseeable future. We don't strictly speaking want a third choice, beyond a handy protest vote or a sop to politics we know will never be realised.

For what it matters, Labour will probably lose simply because enough of the country wants or needs a change and because they've upset just too many of those voters who would normally support them. The next step will be for Labour to elect a leader we can invest our vain hopes in, who can gleam in the purity of opposition and who can let us keep believing that the Promised Land is but an election away... And the Tories? Well, they say electorates get the governments they deserve.