tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27066489595875626182024-03-05T18:56:32.248-08:00Generation VentWedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-15929965130237246202019-04-11T08:42:00.003-07:002019-04-11T09:10:55.432-07:00"Ooh Look, A Foreign Film!" - The Colour Of Pomegranates and Zoological Cinema<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I had a strange experience at the cinema recently. It made me think about the weird way Western cinephiles treat certain films.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I wanted to see Pajaranov's The Colour of Pomegranates. Mainly, because I knew it's respected - critics voted it the 84th best film ever in the last <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b6e73c109" target="_blank">BFI poll</a> - and a quick wikipedia check told me to expect an "art" film, told "visually and poetically rather than literally". Interesting!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8p2GP5C3PVauzqQP3ioYHeiPvDWbF7cntHrdyZVPPyvaJnXg9iI_xi9t2SJrNXsCpZMDhpDadWv3lGpLWSZ7VPorUa2XguZrdC6oMT3Oj5aHn63cLExajxTC71PIvvk1FB_pvEsTsZpA/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.45.15.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8p2GP5C3PVauzqQP3ioYHeiPvDWbF7cntHrdyZVPPyvaJnXg9iI_xi9t2SJrNXsCpZMDhpDadWv3lGpLWSZ7VPorUa2XguZrdC6oMT3Oj5aHn63cLExajxTC71PIvvk1FB_pvEsTsZpA/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.45.15.png" width="222" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So I trudge along to the cinema, and read their write-up of the masterpiece. They had this to say:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>A breath-taking fusion of poetry, ethnography, and cinema, <a href="https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/search_results/keyword/sergei+parajanov" style="color: #231f20; text-decoration-line: none;">Sergei Parajanov</a>’s masterwork overflows with unforgettable images and sounds. In a series of tableaux that blend the tactile with the abstract, <a href="https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/search_results/keyword/the+colour+of+pomegranates" style="color: #231f20; text-decoration-line: none;">The Colour of Pomegranates</a> revives the splendours of Armenian culture through the story of the eighteenth-century troubadour Sayat-Nova, charting his intellectual, artistic, and spiritual growth through iconographic compositions rather than traditional narrative. The film’s tapestry of folklore and metaphor departed from the realism that dominated the Soviet cinema of its era, leading authorities to block its distribution, with rare underground screenings presenting it in a restructured form.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sounds exciting! Waiting for the film to start, I hopped on Google to see what the 'great minds' of cinema have to say about it. With eerie consistency, all their comments do exactly the same things:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">1) stress the purely visual aspect of the film,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">2) mention next-to-nothing about the content of the film other than the protagonist's name, job and nationality</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">3) inevitability veer off into some insinuations and sweeping statements wherein the phrases "Soviet" and "Authorities" are placed as close as possible to each other. [These don't always feel <i>meticulously</i> well-researched and mostly come off as a cheap attempt to titillate by</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> portraying the film as "controversial", just as so many marketing campaigns for Clockwork Orange, Realm of The Senses, etc. so tediously do - but with the added bonus that in this case the "controversial" label will conjure up - i</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">n a liberalism-sodden mind - </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">d</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ramatic images of gulags and Stalin personally strangling his 100 zillion victims or however many they say it is now]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Some examples: <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5826-a-feast-for-the-eyes-in-los-angeles" target="_blank">Criterion</a> say it's a "feast for the eyes". It's "<a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5826-a-feast-for-the-eyes-in-los-angeles" target="_blank">entrancing</a>" and "<a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5826-a-feast-for-the-eyes-in-los-angeles" target="_blank">surreal</a>". "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/07/the-colour-of-pomegranates-sergei-parajanov-london-film-festival-2014" target="_blank">Dazzling</a>", in fact. Full of "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/07/the-colour-of-pomegranates-sergei-parajanov-london-film-festival-2014" target="_blank">fantastical imagery</a>". "Dreamlike" and "painterly", says <a href="https://www.filmsite.org/timeoutD.html" target="_blank">Time Out</a>. Antononioi says it's filled with "stunningly perfect beauty". Martin Scorsese tells me I'm about to "<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/07/the-colour-of-pomegranates-sergei-parajanov-london-film-festival-2014" target="_blank">witness images and visions “pretty much unlike anything in cinema history”."</a> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Wow. Sounds great. Images and visions of what, though? Images <i>denoting</i> what? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because.... er... at risk of sounding like the nerd here, that's what an <i>image</i> is, isn't it? A visual <i>representation</i> of something? So what do these amazing images <i>represent</i>? Surely one of you film brainiacs is about to tell me what all these stunning images are <i>about</i>? Or are they just amazing? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #121212;"><span style="background-color: white;">Sure enough, a</span></span>s I wander through the online information, scholars are falling over each other to tell me that the film "<span style="color: #252525; letter-spacing: -0.4px;">draws upon “Ukrainian, Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani visual and musical culture", that it's full of "stylistic flourishes" and that the "</span><span style="color: #252525; letter-spacing: -0.4px;">imagery flows out of the tradition of Persian miniature painting". </span><span style="color: #252525; letter-spacing: -0.4px;">But where is the scholar who will tell me something about the <i>content</i>? Nowhere, apparently.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.4px;">I don't find one article discussing anything about Sayat-Nova's life, the life which Pajaranov chose to immortalise in this film. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.4px;">Which seems strange, perhaps? Or maybe not. Because, what all Western cinephiles seem to agree on is that the content of this film are irrelevant to appreciating or understanding it. This is not just implied (by the constant repetition of words like "dazzling" and the conspicuous absence of any discussion of the content): it's actually acknowledged and <i>advocated</i>!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: -0.4px;">The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/07/the-colour-of-pomegranates-sergei-parajanov-london-film-festival-2014" target="_blank">Guardian</a> admits, without a shred of shame: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>"The Colour of Pomegranates can be a bewildering experience for western viewers or, indeed, for anyone not steeped in the history of the region in which it is set, but the magnitude of Parajanov’s cinematic achievement is clear to see."</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #121212; font-family: "guardian text egyptian web" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">In perfect agreement was Time Out, saying: </span></span></span><br />
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<i>"Much of its meaning must remain essentially specific to the culture from which the film springs, and no one could pretend that it's all readily accessible".</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170320233921/http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9801EED71638F935A35753C1A966948260" target="_blank">New York Times</a> tells me the film is "eye-catching, hynoptic and almost wholly <i>obscure</i>" and agrees that "<span style="background-color: white;">the film is <i>elusive</i> in any circumstances. However, anything this purely mysterious has its magic."</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So that's put my mind at rest. There's a complete consensus on 2 things:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A) I'm going to be bewildered by this strange foreign film.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">B) but it's still amazing, pretty much <i>because</i> of how it won't make sense!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In fact, here's Scorsese, the patron saint of foreign-film enthusiasts, to put us at ease even more:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i style="color: #121212;">"I didn’t know any more about Sayat Nova at the end of the picture than I knew at the beginning, but instead what Parajanov did was he opened a door into a timeless cinematic experience.”</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqqwOxreQt14UCHwy7SbUm2XnqHodQYw3UUlu2OoDq5PapR61syNV57DKMoUpTK-YKti9wPveIwEJj_faGyuxRQLltGhHP4E0DWZOupEUltQl7AyH2kQ6dPu_itzrV7ZukOVZGJcBFZeY/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.49.47.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="337" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqqwOxreQt14UCHwy7SbUm2XnqHodQYw3UUlu2OoDq5PapR61syNV57DKMoUpTK-YKti9wPveIwEJj_faGyuxRQLltGhHP4E0DWZOupEUltQl7AyH2kQ6dPu_itzrV7ZukOVZGJcBFZeY/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.49.47.png" width="259" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So that's fine then. I don't have to get what the director's <i>trying</i> to say! I don't have to think about such tedious things as what it might <i>mean</i> to its makers and intended audience. That would be stupid!</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I'm supposed to just sit back, unplug my brain and enjoy the experience. Like a dog wagging along to the bright colours on the TV screen. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, just before the film starts, there are several slides of information that come up on the screen. Lots of white text on a black background telling me the stuff I need to know just before we get into it. Honestly, I've never seen so much information before the film before.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And what did this tell me? Nothing. All it did was discuss at length the intricacies of some 'tussle' between Pajaranov and the censors over the name of this film. Apparently the "Soviet censors" thought the title inappropriate and changed it to the Colour of Pomegranates, although, the screen now defiantly tell us, the original title "Sayat-Nova" is "how the film is known across the world". Except it's not, though, is it, because I just bought a ticket to see something called "The Colour of Pomegranates"? </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But more importantly, I <i>don't care</i> who titled it what at which stage of it's life! How incredibly tedious! Imagine if the Fast and the Furious franchise thought we wanted to read 500 words of text about the debates they had between the names "2 Fast 2 Furious" or "Paul Walker In a Car Again".</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But anyway, for some reason, the words "Soviet" and "authorities" parade around in front of us on screen for a few minutes, hoping for some applause and someone in a MAGA hat to shout "down with commies". Nobody does, so it all feels a bit pointless. Nobody there was as angry at the USSR as the screen assumed we all were?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But eventually, the film starts. And guess what? It is <b><i>quite clearly </i></b>telling the story, in chronological order, of this poor poet's life. This <i>real</i> poet's <i>real</i> life which Pajaranov researched and brought to the screen. A troubled, tragic, romantic, religious and violent life, by the way. But a life that the Western film establishment have decided is completely <i>irrelevant</i> because they'd rather look at the bright red colour on screen and think about how great it would look on a scatter cushion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The film tells Sayat-Nova's life story from his birth to his death! It's divided into chapter headings called things like "Meeting the Angel of Death (Poet Buries His Love)"! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And yet still none of you cinephiles thought this was maybe a clue as to what was going in that particular sequence? And a clue that -contrary to Mr. Scorsese's approach - we actually <i>are</i> intended to follow the film!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8eGiOdEvDuvjffsw7T5_sQuuxOQJq-5Thmtu2I7vtbt6x-fwOpmhH7ntLRnG7lxJV5wbNFcg5DJWzCzB-iyEcnkBA3NEoTZQx5ZBywle5XH8yfmLruXuaGlFHp3EbVI6gsemWhl6KjoI/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-09+at+19.09.02.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1280" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8eGiOdEvDuvjffsw7T5_sQuuxOQJq-5Thmtu2I7vtbt6x-fwOpmhH7ntLRnG7lxJV5wbNFcg5DJWzCzB-iyEcnkBA3NEoTZQx5ZBywle5XH8yfmLruXuaGlFHp3EbVI6gsemWhl6KjoI/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-04-09+at+19.09.02.png" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">None of you thought that these hand-holding explanations might be there to help make it less "bewildering", or at least hint that it's not supposed to be "bewildering"? You really, Scorsese, you really are sticking with your of the whole thing as essentially <i>random</i> images, their meaning unimportant?</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_oCQXPPH5okUbbTV0SKnjap6LflhSd60JJvYTKkV3PYYXOHSRXHtDOmUAs9PZaIkEPQtAthNMnUrDXz1GhlxCtyCyIGlHE8cNO4Xs9F9owUr2NiI-f6lxK8dNzsz7W2AFQFVAYlDrSR8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-09+at+19.37.11.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1280" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_oCQXPPH5okUbbTV0SKnjap6LflhSd60JJvYTKkV3PYYXOHSRXHtDOmUAs9PZaIkEPQtAthNMnUrDXz1GhlxCtyCyIGlHE8cNO4Xs9F9owUr2NiI-f6lxK8dNzsz7W2AFQFVAYlDrSR8/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-04-09+at+19.37.11.png" width="320" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When watching it, it's immediately obvious that Pajaranov <i>doesn't</i> want his audience to be confused and baffled and left behind by his artistic decisions. He is of course aware that this isn't the cinematic language we are used to (he's not an alien), and creates signposts so that we can follow. For example, before one sequence we are shown a title card with the title "Poet's Dream", and even has the subtitle: "He Returns To His Childhood And Mourns For His Parents".</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I mean, why would Pajaranov include this if he was intending his audience to be "baffled"? It is <i>so</i> helpful, so clearly part of an effort to transport the viewer into the head of the Sayat-Nova character and understand something of how he feels.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But what <i>really</i> makes you despair at the Western film establishment's refusal to engage is the final sequence, which is prefaced with a title card announcing: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After this we see an arm stabbing a dagger into a cloth, and red liquid running down it. Hmm, red liquid? Could it be that Pajaranov is trying to tell us something, trying to ... perhaps ... narrate something? No, it's just a dazzling image, stupid! I'm probably overthinking it!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Next up, we move to another Visual Feast!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9RlN7hPweW6no3a5CAstGO9Fv5cZncwzcvueTLlzJXdzt6AweBISDTWl14cHW3J-mb13jLVTY1An9MTv7JwItV0LyK_NqFS3IM7JYDDIKM-1DnTlwETCbatqzPOoBU_ASyTY0PiisYE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-08+at+13.23.04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="629" data-original-width="1063" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil9RlN7hPweW6no3a5CAstGO9Fv5cZncwzcvueTLlzJXdzt6AweBISDTWl14cHW3J-mb13jLVTY1An9MTv7JwItV0LyK_NqFS3IM7JYDDIKM-1DnTlwETCbatqzPOoBU_ASyTY0PiisYE/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-08+at+13.23.04.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sayat-Nova, the man who's life we've been watching throughout its ups and downs for the last 2 hours, is kneeling down, in what looks like maybe underwear? Or maybe those are pyjamas? Either way, it's not an outfit that screams 'powerful', is it? It's way more Christ at Golgotha than Britney at the VMAs when she had that snake. And what's that other 'dazzling image' alongside him? It's ghostly female figure (who, by the way, was holding a dagger in the shot before), pouring gallons of red liquid over his neck and torso?! Fascinating!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Now, considering this is happening in a sequence entitled "the poet's death", do we think that maybe Pajaranov is trying to represent something here? Is there any way that copious red liquid, all over a person's body and white clothes, can sometimes mean something?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Could it possibly be... say this quietly so you don't disturb Mr. Scorsese over there, he's having a lovely time grinning at all the bright colours!... b</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ut could this red liquid possibly be <b><i>blood</i></b>?!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Don't be stupid. No, that red liquid could be anything! Pajaranov just made it red so it would be a visual feast for the viewers! </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It could've just been cranberry juice! Maybe Sayat-Nova had cystisis and that pouring-of-red-liquid thing represented the gallons of cranberry juice he had to down to keep it under control! We'll just never know cos it's a Foreign Art Film, and therefore it's bewildering and we'll never know the artist's intention.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And is there any way that this shot, immediately following the red liquid one, could be construed as hinting towards something to do with martyrdom? Just because like...we know Sayat-Nova's been living in a Christian monastery for all his life, and worship has been a big part of the film, and now he's lying there with his arms outstretched, cruxifixion style, looking like every white Jesus ever painted? Could that be what's happened here?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Don't be silly! It's just a "dazzling" image! Who cares what it's saying! Scorsese, meanwhile, is busy counting the number of candles in the shot, because it'll send him off to sleep nicely.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of course, though, Pajaranov <i><b>was</b></i> telling a story here. In fact, Sayat-Nova was murdered, aged 83, in 1795, in the monastery where he lived. An invading army, led by the Shah of Iran, captured the area and demanded he convert from Christianity to Islam. He refused and was beheaded.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Once you appreciate this simple biographical detail, readily <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayat-Nova#Legacy" target="_blank">available</a> to anyone with the internet, then the death sequence becomes very much more poignant and dramatic. And, moreover, the allusions to matrydom and the life of Christ become even more obvious.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And, once you know this, you see how true it was when a close friend of the director <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2014/02/27/parajanovs-influence-still-spreading-on-90th-anniversary-a32541" target="_blank">said</a> Pajaranov's cinema is actually "simple and only appears to be complex". </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In other words, yeah some surreal things happen involving chickens and candles which make it all more dramatic, but that scene where it looks like a guy is covered in blood and dies? Yeah that's supposed to be about a guy covered in blood and dying.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But you would never realise this, because you would never be given simple biographical facts, if you approach the film through the Western cinephile establishment. They don't tell you this. The cinema showing it, the articles about it, the BFI, the slides shown immediately before the film - none of them saw any merit in telling us about what Pajaranov was saying in this film. They all just write something effusive about <i>how</i> Pajaranov says it - specifically, how <i>unusual</i> and <i>different</i> is the way Pajaranov says it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And I'm fascinated by this.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Ooh look, a Foreign Film!</span></b></h2>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The way the Western film establishment venerates this film, adores it, but then pays no attention to its content, is strange.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But it's not an unfamiliar pattern of behaviour from the West.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the key things at work here is the fact it's a 'foreign' film, and not just a Bergman or a Godard: this is from Armenia! And full of 'traditional' dress, song and culture! Therefore, for Western cinephiles, it's the product of an alien world, and this cannot help but be a influence on why it's received how it is.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Orientalism? Definitely. Orientalism and 'bafflement' have always been closely intertwined. As Fanon records in A Dying Colonialism, the French in Algeria were obsessed with the Algerian women's veils, to the point where it was assumed that all Algerian women were veiled because they were hiding some rare beauty. Pajaranov's "unusual cinematic language" - along with the unfamiliarity of the culture depicted in the film - is absolutely the veil here. The Westerner is convinced that what's behind it is absolutely amazing, stunning, exceptional - the 84th best film ever made - even though he's never really <i>seen</i> it. He's never even done the cursory Google required to actually follow the film's narrative - never thought that it could have a voice thoughts and words with which to speak for itself, but its inscrutability excites him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There's also, more prosaically, the colonial obsession with the unfamiliar. There's something zoological in this non-watching of Pomegranates by Western cinephiles, something a bit unpleasantly colonial-anthropological, something a bit Sarah Baartman. They all come along, see Pomegranates do its thing, and comment on how different it is. Then, after all that excitement, they go back to more normal 'things'. an object of exotic curiosity, to inspire open-mouthed excitement and awe. And then moved on from.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It feels all a bit similar to when, at the Oscars this year, a white woman told Jason Momoa to perform for her "one haka move". </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_4ssv5pOz3LgBpArhCK93-GG2-NEhh2YeLBlvE4vxD7Gyek5hidBICV1cMjrJJ69mcXi9_fhX3yF_wMJPd1BY9lqCvai8_eGAJp95jdQxPD_6w-1HS8M01KtVvjTmU5BJw4_TcYwvuZY/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+12.38.24.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="696" data-original-width="1252" height="353" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_4ssv5pOz3LgBpArhCK93-GG2-NEhh2YeLBlvE4vxD7Gyek5hidBICV1cMjrJJ69mcXi9_fhX3yF_wMJPd1BY9lqCvai8_eGAJp95jdQxPD_6w-1HS8M01KtVvjTmU5BJw4_TcYwvuZY/s640/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+12.38.24.png" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If Momoa had done it, would this have meant anything to the white woman? Of course not! But it would look cool and different! And that's exciting! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The retention of Pomegranates in the canon, the excitable praises sung in its name, at the same time as the total non-engagement with its content, seems to be driven by the same impulse as this. The same impulse as wanting to have a black person on your diversity panel at the office. Once you've appointed them, they are <i>there, </i>visibly. No one can say we haven't been adventurous! But we're not particularly interested in what they have to say.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Cinema always needs exciting images to fill the screen - the majority of which are just there as decoration. Often these decorative elements are made up of human bodies, which are not there to focus your attention on and listen to, but to just to make an impression. And of course, there tend to be some predictable biases in the kinds of people who end up as merely an image on film, rather than a character. As Haile Gerima puts it, Africans are "put in the background" of Western films, "they are part of the landscape and used for a function -like to bring orange juice to the master - and they walk out of the scene. We are underdeveloped characters. Our sex life, our feelings of love and hatred are not explored because they don't see us as a part of society".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With Pomegranates, the Western cinephile establishment is doing with a whole film exactly what Western film directors do with non-white actors! Pomegranates has been placed "as part of the landscape" of the canon; the landscape of Western cinephilia. It has to be <i>there</i>, registering on your consciousness, otherwise you don't know enough about films. But it doesn't have to be engaged with. Because, even though Pomegranates contains a love story, bereavement, mountains of sadness and a violent martyrdom, the film is not treated as "part of society", as a human story we can relate to. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There is another possible element as well, pointed out by the strange words of critic Gilbert Adair, who says that Pomegranates "gives us the impression, somehow, of predating the invention of the cinema". Does it? Because they're in unfamiliar costumes, and you don't see anyone on smartphones? But that's the same as in Lord of the Rings? </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A film which seems to "somehow predate cinema"? Yeah, or just a film set in the past?</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Adair's words are a classic piece of Emperor's New Clothes criticism: say something completely meaningless, based on a half-arsed thought you haven't even been bothered to think through, and then insert the word "somehow" in the sentence in place of of any actual explanation for this 'opinion'. Thousands of Western cinephiles then read it, nod, and agree, because at least Adair's saying <i>something</i> about the film, while the rest of us were just silently gawping at the colours wondering what we're <i>supposed</i> to make of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Adair's feeling that Pomegranates is almost pre-historical (sandwiched between, as usual, the highest of praises), is very telling. I think what Adair is saying is that really, in his heart of hearts, he didn't enjoy it, and he would have preferred something with a bit more pace, plot and characterisation, and maybe some more <i>meaning</i>. Really, he thinks it is <i>inferior </i>to the films he's used to in all these four respects. But, his better nature tells him, it is only inferior because it comes from a <i>different</i> place and time, where things were not as <i>developed</i> (here is where his feeling that it <i>predates </i>cinema<i> -</i> rather than just existing outside normal cinema, is particularly revealing). And that <i>difference</i> makes it exciting and interesting to him - even if he didn't enjoy it per se.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This reminds me of a strange story Walter Rodney tells in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"there were many colonialists who wished to preserve in perpetuity everything that was African, if it appeared quaint or intriguing to them. Albert Schweitzer, who was in charge of a dirty unhygienic hospital with dogs, cats, goats and chickens running around, under the guise of fitting into the African culture and environment...[a friend of the doctor said this arrangement was] not always defenisbile on hygienic grounds [but] the mixture adds considerably to the charm of the place".</span></i><br />
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I believe Scorsese and Adair's enthusiastm with it is genuine, but the really fascinating weird thing here is that they actually think Pomegranates is shit! Part of the 'charm' of Pomegranates for these guys is that they think it's shit!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pomegranates is a film which, in their minds, lacks/predates things like plot and character and pace and ability to get a message across! It's like a cave painting by an early man. Obviously it is <i>shit</i>, but that's not the point! It's exciting because of how shit it is!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This suggests another way <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">to read Scorsese's comment that "<span style="background-color: white; color: #121212;">I didn’t know any more about Sayat Nova at the end of the picture than I knew at the beginning". </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #121212;">This joke is actually quite a profound insight into how Scorsese processes the picture. He sees the film as not having much educational merit, not very good and effectively saying things. Scorsese is really tousling the hair of little Pajaranov, mocking him affectionately, saying "you're not very good at actually getting your point across, are ya? But we love you all the same!"</span></span></span><br />
<h2>
Art Will Vegetate</h2>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In 1892, the anarchist Kropotkin had a grumble about art in the 'modern' world. For the ancient Greeks, he said, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">an artist's work "was connected with the life itself of the city". An artist "endeavoured to express the spirit and the heart of the city" and "spoke to his fellow citizens, and in return he received inspiration; he appealed to the multitude in the same way as he did the nave." Those were the days!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In contrast, Kropotkin was appalled that "Greek statues <i>lived</i> in the Acropolis of their cities, and are now stifled beneath the red cloth hangings of the Louvre!" Until this is corrected, "</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">art can only vegetate"!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The key word here is <i>lived</i>. Kropotkin's right: some art really <i>lives</i>, and some doesn't. A child can detect this. A football chant being picked up and sung by thousands - living art. A meme, recently finished on MS Paint and posted to Twitter to be liked and customised by hundreds of others - living art. A Basquiat, bought for millions and sat in some millionaire's house - that's not alive. That's vegetating art. That's art that's been castrated, captured and overpowered by capital. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Visit the British Museum if you want to see art that is so far out of context that it's lost all its original meaning and now signifies nothing so much as British naval superiority.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Being an anarchist, Kropotkin misses the fact that this development hasn't just happened as some punishment from god, or because time has elapsed. Works of art have become commodities under capitalism, and are treated as such. Even if they weren't originally intended to be commodities (and are thus fictitious commodities like land or labour, to use Polanyi's term), they have <i>become</i> commodities. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And, once commoditised, this is</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> how colonialism/capitalism treats art: it plucks it from its context, from the real relationship between artist and audience, and removes it to somewhere else, where it can be stared at by people who have no idea what it means. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And those people, staring at things they have no idea about, instead of doing it to communicate with an artist and with the rest of the artist's audience, for the sense of belonging among a community and all the other quasi-magical things an artwork can do for people, they are doing it as bourgeouis art-consumers. And the psychology of the bourgeois art-consumer is the same as the psychology of the bourgeouis in every other respect: an obsession with posession, a grasping, competitive individualism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As Marx noted, "</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only </span><em style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">ours</em><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"> when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., [you could add "seen"] – in short, when it is </span><em style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">used </em><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">by us. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">In the place of </span><i style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">all</i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"> physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of </span><i style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">all</i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"> these senses, the sense of </span><em style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px; word-spacing: 0.2em;">having." </em></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I think this is exactly what happens with a lot of bourgeouis art consumption: they are not feeling anything when looking, not being moved by it, or caring much, they are just <i>having </i>the artwork. This might not mean literally <i>buying</i> it for themselves - it could mean buying a ticket to see it in an exhibition or cinema. But this purchase makes the bourgeouis art-consumer feel that they have <i>possession</i> of the artwork, and that brings them satisfaction. That artwork is done now, seen, off the list. Mine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And, living in the ongoing era of conspicuous consumption as we do, what you posess needs to be compared to what everyone else posesses. We are jealous of our movie tastes, proud of our sophistication, "guilty" of our "pleasures", we invent categories like low-brow and high-brow so we can differentiate between people we want to possess the same things as and people we definitely don't want to posess the same things as.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Is the cinephile's obsession with lists a symptom of this? Why else compile lists all the time if you're not wanting to complete them, conquer them, to <i>have</i> all the films, to know you've got them under your belt.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Again, let's return to Adair's comments on Pomegranates. Although it's clear to everyone he didn't enjoy the experience, he notes "<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">no historian of the medium who ignores </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The Color of Pomegranates</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"> can ever be taken seriously". </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">So there you have it. In this imaginary competition to not be the dumbest film critic in the room, Adair can console himself with the fact he has not "ignored" Pomegranates. He's been there, done that, places the flag pole in the ground, claimed it for himself! </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(The irony being, of course, that he's not really </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">seen</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> any of Pomegranates)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All this helps illuminate another reason Pomegranates is both adored and ignored: because that's what bourgeouis art-consumers do with all art!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kropotkin was partly wrong, though, because he didn't understand class and history. It's not the case that all art is "vegetating". Kropotkin sees <i>all</i> art as having gone down the pan now we're in the modern world, and only capable of being revived after an imagined anarchist revolution, when communities will be recreated. But that's not the case, is it? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We all live in communities of various kinds, even under capitalism. The bourgeouisie have not dissolved <i>everything</i> in cold, calculating egotism, we all still do millions of things for free and for fun which have no relation to capital. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And even if, as Kropotkin laments, we don't not all belong to a homogenous Greek city state (because slave-owning societies, famously, are good at homogeneity), most of us today <i>do</i> belong to something. A class? A race? A profession? An generation?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And within those groupings, art - without the interference of capital - can achieve its function of creating communion among an audience and between an audience and artist. That's why there <i>does</i> <i>exist</i> living art, that really <i>lives</i> and speaks to its audience. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is why the art under capitalism that has has the most impact, that most excites people, is that which speaks to them as a member of a <i>particular</i> group with particular characteristics! There are no films that speak to <i>all</i> of us, because we belong to different classes and, as Kropotkin points out, as a whole we have "no common interest save the enriching of [our]selves at the expense of one another".</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmkBxEBdV1ftjPJaZMrDs8n0BhXqzGwMmXPpwjhNSufavJRN98UDBnPkYbJJvhVWRPUZFgrJ6jVt0D-IbbEN-yAi8QJPdPlZQBvvBTbJ-ptkTnW84GHg2rGvaisDRcRa9uEG7JZDA36Hw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+15.30.24.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="750" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmkBxEBdV1ftjPJaZMrDs8n0BhXqzGwMmXPpwjhNSufavJRN98UDBnPkYbJJvhVWRPUZFgrJ6jVt0D-IbbEN-yAi8QJPdPlZQBvvBTbJ-ptkTnW84GHg2rGvaisDRcRa9uEG7JZDA36Hw/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+15.30.24.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A group of dysfunctional, proud, competitive men, confused and betrayed by the changing world, limited social skills, loyal to each other but suspicious of everyone else, especially the women they're trying to sleep with (but not listen to). No, I'm not talking about an alt-right messageboard, but it's obvious precursor, lad-cinema! (see also: Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, and the comically inferior British effort, The Inbetweeners)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But there <i>is</i> Superbad, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Anchorman - a triad which speak directly to the young horny/angry man demographic, and were therefore watched, rewatched, quoted and loved to ridiculous extents when I was a teenage boy, taking up a big place in the lives of people and their friendship groups. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There's Kidulthood, doing the same thing for UK teenage city life. There's It's a Wonderful Life, speaking to the petty bourgeouis and their simple-but-satisfying suburban lives. And there's a new generation Marvel and DC movies giving certain young kids cinema they can live.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Every demographic has their own <i>living</i> art. Except cinephiles. They don't like the living stuff. They like museum cinema.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Things Have Content As Well As Form! A Contemporary Pandemic</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As discussed above, the reactions to Pomegranates are as old as whiteness itself. But perhaps there is a something else layered on top, more peculiar to the postmodern age?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After all, when Scorsese says has no idea what the film's about but he still loves it, is this not exactly the same as when people look at Damian Hirst's fucking stupid shark in a tank and say "brave!". Is it not the same as when people looked at Andy Warhol, openly taking the piss out of them all, and just say "yes, a tin of soup, I <i>get</i> it!".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alternatively, is Scorsese not the same as the people who look at the Brexit question and decide they would give up their right arm and their villa in Tuscany just to remain in the EU because the EU "<i>represents togetherness</i>" or some vague symbolic shit, without paying the slightest attention to the EU's politics, history or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/the-list-34361-men-women-and-children-who-perished-trying-to-reach-europe-world-refugee-day" target="_blank">racism</a>.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjongiLltbCLB7WhTb2pAmkYXFs2zm-f81Yh8gIndcVSyshlTumPA9MajUGKtljHLGq1xypKi9mAYxQJZmoTDjTAyGJiVnqqXYE7WHK7E8XjOrRnqxczn9C7Xgdh7ssaygHrAExxWVzORg/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+11.41.14.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="558" data-original-width="560" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjongiLltbCLB7WhTb2pAmkYXFs2zm-f81Yh8gIndcVSyshlTumPA9MajUGKtljHLGq1xypKi9mAYxQJZmoTDjTAyGJiVnqqXYE7WHK7E8XjOrRnqxczn9C7Xgdh7ssaygHrAExxWVzORg/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+11.41.14.png" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Is Scorsese not just the same as the people who turn to politics and <i>like the look of</i> Beto O'Rourke, Macron, Blair, David Miliband or whoever the latest liberal darling is? That is, they see Beto O'Rourke, with his his shirt sleeves carefully rolled up to a focus-group-tested extent, doing his best "I'm a regular guy" squat, and they genuinely like it, because "this is what our leaders should <i>look like</i>".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">People like Jess Phillips, Anna Soubry, Boris Johnson, Jacob-Rees Mogg have carved whole careers out because people like their <i>attitude</i> more than anything particular they say or do. "Oh that Anna Soubry/Jess Phillips doesn't take any nonsense does she? I <i>like</i> her, she seems <i>gobby</i>."</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXjeB1yAyEptF_Ec8DTjzt3KEYf46ciRsYOmceRVl64pCpAd964uxQQgJf_rTWSZtZmwcg5WTxq3uaoc5ZI8oBZxyb5lY5loUhieorMvtAjz7tf3MNO-z75AGO0iDleVymTdYjkSJZ93Q/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+11.45.48.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXjeB1yAyEptF_Ec8DTjzt3KEYf46ciRsYOmceRVl64pCpAd964uxQQgJf_rTWSZtZmwcg5WTxq3uaoc5ZI8oBZxyb5lY5loUhieorMvtAjz7tf3MNO-z75AGO0iDleVymTdYjkSJZ93Q/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+11.45.48.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="548" data-original-width="787" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXjeB1yAyEptF_Ec8DTjzt3KEYf46ciRsYOmceRVl64pCpAd964uxQQgJf_rTWSZtZmwcg5WTxq3uaoc5ZI8oBZxyb5lY5loUhieorMvtAjz7tf3MNO-z75AGO0iDleVymTdYjkSJZ93Q/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+11.45.48.png" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I guess in politics you have a double effect of image-fetishisation, because the bourgeois political commentator both loves how how the image looks <i>themselves</i> and, secondly, imagines that the image will "go down well with" the Ordinary Person In The Street (which, they seem to forget, is a projection created by their own brains (and <i>that's</i> why these imaginary ordinaries are all so racist!)). Hence we get a deluge of meaningless chat about how "this will play well in Doncaster" or "this won't play well with the base", all based on absolutely nothing but the bourgeouisie's lazy assumptions about what people in different constituencies think.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b><i>It seems endemic, in contemporary culture, to forget that politics has form as well as content.</i></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This, I believe, is a symptom of the postmodern condition - meaning that since the apparent triumph of the Washington Consensus, the fall of the Really Existing Socialism and the spread of globalised neoliberalism we now imagine ourselves at the end of history, with no alternatives possible or necessary. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We have stopped believing in any grand narratives (Lyotard's definition of postmodernism) and "forgotten how to think historically" and have no "perception of the present as history" (Jameson), that is, a story which is ongoing and will develop change. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ebN9j3uO8wO-sOeenh1FRCLicxWDTPeAB_CKDnQUmNCAczzgMUWg-8VVY_Hu1dWe0IB8Yc6bcCPtfQduN_W44KF9HzTqj85eunF0cykDTXQ75VNO_WBovHbkaoid9GkbN4rFee83KZs/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+15.46.04.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="565" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ebN9j3uO8wO-sOeenh1FRCLicxWDTPeAB_CKDnQUmNCAczzgMUWg-8VVY_Hu1dWe0IB8Yc6bcCPtfQduN_W44KF9HzTqj85eunF0cykDTXQ75VNO_WBovHbkaoid9GkbN4rFee83KZs/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+15.46.04.png" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This has a profound effect on how we think about everything. Politics becomes a question of having the best technocrat to manage the economy, which explains the ecstasies people get themselves into over whoever the latest Obamalike messiah is; struggle and disagreement starts to be read as an unpleasant intrusion on political life rather than its nature - because all problems and contradictions are assumed to be solved. This is why all the liberals are complaining about politics being "shoutier" whenever someone expresses an opinion.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Class disappears, and you get politicians <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/jan/15/uk.politicalnews1" target="_blank">declaring</a> that we're "all middle class now" because, with no ongoing history, you don't need any classes to be the protagonists in it. The critic Jean-Louis Comolli says that this collapse of the old narrative of emancipation, in which the working class were the protagonists, is the reason why films, novels, song and politics don't seem to have any need for working class people any more!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We also have an "omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for dead styles and fashions" (Jameson) because we aren't creating anything new, aren't moving forward.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic8_rCKCB5p_-lG9J-VMo4S3NKKAjSFOd78EGzPnOQvNzfB1QQA0yCgvbmivJ5KHsXa-DfgfmA0tG2N6hZFLSdnJbvZJV7JpoYPtbhOn5Vuhpa57bKxfzJgXlfNHFPYsowqmseUfJbc8o/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.08.35.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="230" data-original-width="329" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic8_rCKCB5p_-lG9J-VMo4S3NKKAjSFOd78EGzPnOQvNzfB1QQA0yCgvbmivJ5KHsXa-DfgfmA0tG2N6hZFLSdnJbvZJV7JpoYPtbhOn5Vuhpa57bKxfzJgXlfNHFPYsowqmseUfJbc8o/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.08.35.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All news therefore becomes a case of saying "oh dear" at sad <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8moePxHpvok" target="_blank">events</a>, because there's no bigger story which could explain these sad events and make them appear as part of a history (and also because they are not what we expected to see at after the utopian ending of history in 1991!). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Therefore we're particularly bad at seeing the history, the struggle, the disagreement - in other words, the content - in anything where it's not blindingly obvious. We 'don't see struggle' just like, and for the same reasons, that the standard white liberal "doesn't see colour". Because we have consigned all the struggles to the museum where we expect them to stay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And this tendency bleeds tragically into Western cinephile's misunderstanding of cinema. This is the fate of Pomegranates: it tries to tell a Fanonian story about cultural survival in the face of domination, martyrdom and resistance to subordination, but no Western cinephile was listening to that. Honestly, I found out after watching that the 3 different colours that you see used as dye are the <i>national colours of Armenia! </i>You couldn't have a much more painfully obvious political message! And yet all the politics goes straight over the head of Western cinephiles because they're the kind of people who judge Barack Obama on his "tan suit" rather than his bloodthirst.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKNrVPQyvds_fjXzU0s-dyJdV_L9hJUYMdc5C4C1Vabppc5c7budQpfe70dANtcygTrm-o2EJBATUQUnK2WihldkXfin3PzCvh0SAzs7i5VfLFBl9TTS2dY9wGPCD12GPWELEtEWlHJSY/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+15.48.02+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1280" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKNrVPQyvds_fjXzU0s-dyJdV_L9hJUYMdc5C4C1Vabppc5c7budQpfe70dANtcygTrm-o2EJBATUQUnK2WihldkXfin3PzCvh0SAzs7i5VfLFBl9TTS2dY9wGPCD12GPWELEtEWlHJSY/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+15.48.02+1.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Red, Blue and Orange - in that order - are the national colours of Armenia, as seen in the flag below. Apparently Scorsese didn't even wonder <i>if</i> there was some meaning when he saw these three colours being conspicuously presented in a definite order in the film. He just thought "ooh that's a nice blue, we should get a sofa like that" and then fell back to sleep.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyijxMJt6zgQ5PrxdWNIBz5b0OOdcF38_4INlpHIrFKxQETqs3p8HAxx5mCkMRqxNHPSiZrPA5maZuiUfV3VTimAXjGXVC3ZaMcCYzBbNkGAXfpvw7hdtrTgOCHmJ3zwALqudEI7ysV8U/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+15.49.50.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img border="0" data-original-height="109" data-original-width="212" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyijxMJt6zgQ5PrxdWNIBz5b0OOdcF38_4INlpHIrFKxQETqs3p8HAxx5mCkMRqxNHPSiZrPA5maZuiUfV3VTimAXjGXVC3ZaMcCYzBbNkGAXfpvw7hdtrTgOCHmJ3zwALqudEI7ysV8U/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+15.49.50.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But if Pomegranates gets a raw deal because contemporary bourgeouis liberals can't see history, there are plenty of films that get an even worse deal from Western cinephiles. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Earth (Zemlya)</i> is a 1930 Soviet film by Dovzhenko about collectivisation, the arrival of tractors on farms and the struggle against kulaks in Stalin's USSR. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoWh1SgQxH3U1N730-UHoI2ZKRCis537OJPe7DAnB1QQTkwwi8IfVIhBVt4eJ2U9JIyCbmuJkBIopMRF3HuLkD3SeOYkMvZDRV7xWUMqtEso22_Z4RFVAIEIltgZ3xK_v5I-ZOoiG4N34/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.30.06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1280" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoWh1SgQxH3U1N730-UHoI2ZKRCis537OJPe7DAnB1QQTkwwi8IfVIhBVt4eJ2U9JIyCbmuJkBIopMRF3HuLkD3SeOYkMvZDRV7xWUMqtEso22_Z4RFVAIEIltgZ3xK_v5I-ZOoiG4N34/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.30.06.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The way it's treated by the cinephile establishment is <b><i>hilarious</i></b>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The BFI's one-line summary is this:</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAV6VgBrryUjv2b3KCejwN7ACpIu6iuIymjXRsp__JAlGkQ9B29HKWPHRTiVDA8YTp6xCGMKUHN2G0t5d4EUoK9lZtqIiSpW4z8HpYkiYE4NN27wgbYO3JdVrMYsQpsy5QZuj3oXrHeZ8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.31.41.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="695" height="490" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAV6VgBrryUjv2b3KCejwN7ACpIu6iuIymjXRsp__JAlGkQ9B29HKWPHRTiVDA8YTp6xCGMKUHN2G0t5d4EUoK9lZtqIiSpW4z8HpYkiYE4NN27wgbYO3JdVrMYsQpsy5QZuj3oXrHeZ8/s640/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.31.41.png" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You hear that, yeah? <b style="font-style: italic;">Instead </b>of making any propaganda, he made a nice, neutral "hymn to nature". In place of politics, he made a film about nature! How cute! A bit like Attenborough! He showed that mean baddie Stalin, didn't he! No politics in our films, thank you very much!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Except Earth is <b><i>the most political film it is possible to make</i></b>. And it shows Stalin's policy of collectivisation as something very helpful and uplifting to everyone except a parasitic class of selfish kulaks (who say they won't part with "their" land). The final line of the whole film, spoken to a whole crowd of sympathetic villagers, is "the glory of [our farm's produce] will fly all around the world! Like that communist airplane of ours up there!"</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCWJAohQN1ZTFwhPmx3jzNaW2dvnm8JyLlsmH-Pr0MqenIjDJEnEXyvud7V9d1-z40gFXdLwibOIE_zyAjS4VNmQMn0I5QM7zAEjwBi21TmgRK-2fdkE9yg9YJNgBBBjPTCqNDVjIDXC0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.35.06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1280" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCWJAohQN1ZTFwhPmx3jzNaW2dvnm8JyLlsmH-Pr0MqenIjDJEnEXyvud7V9d1-z40gFXdLwibOIE_zyAjS4VNmQMn0I5QM7zAEjwBi21TmgRK-2fdkE9yg9YJNgBBBjPTCqNDVjIDXC0/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-11+at+16.35.06.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It's hilarious that people from the BFI just ignore this and talk about how nice the apples look.</span><br />
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<b>'Experimental' Techniques Are Not Just For Attention</b></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, yes, Pomegranates is 'surreal', I guess, in the sense that not everything on screen looks like how normal life looks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But, as Zadie Smith once pointed out, and Boots Riley so capably demonstrated in Sorry To Bother You, making your art 'surreal' is sometimes the best way to convey <i>realistically</i> how it feels from the protagonist's perspective. Smith once took issue with an interviewer asking about the "experimental aspects" of her writing, and asking if they are imported and borrowed from writers such Foster Wallace, and Smith patiently ignored the shallowness of the question and explained:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"We should be a bit wary of labelling certain techniques 'experimental' as if it's just a set of tools one picks up to lend whatever you're writing a trace of hipster cool... <i>Everything I do is an attempt to get close to the real, as I experience it, and the closer you get to the reality of experience the more bizarre it SHOULD look on the page and sound in the mouth because our real experience doesn't come packaged in a neat three act structure</i>. For me, Joyce is the ultimate realist because he is trying to convey how experience really feels. And he found it to be so idiosyncratic he needed to invent a new language for it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pajaranov evidently had similar intentions in mind. This is why he includes a lot of clearly allegorical depictions of how life 'felt' for his Sayat-Nova character, rather than how it literally 'looked'. For example, shots such as this - </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicnec62NPE-VGGbny_h9I7R7TzZMA0JUq8BS_W2iCZdX-WeQh22fyx26Wf_c7zO02ATlUejGf1YN_zIIIQwGZCVQXQQ3PoNp9JxCH4iaToLdZI2N7WngjSJOY_JjFt9Fp4QG29JdRaNio/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-09+at+19.17.26.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1280" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicnec62NPE-VGGbny_h9I7R7TzZMA0JUq8BS_W2iCZdX-WeQh22fyx26Wf_c7zO02ATlUejGf1YN_zIIIQwGZCVQXQQ3PoNp9JxCH4iaToLdZI2N7WngjSJOY_JjFt9Fp4QG29JdRaNio/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-09+at+19.17.26.png" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">...clearly convey the idea that Sayat-Nova grew up "surrounded by literature" - as the succeeding scenes confirm. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But Pajaranov's shot conveys this simple idea do in a far more creative and succinct way than the more literal cinematic alternative would - where, for example, you might see an Einsteinian montage of furious, ceaseless reading with a fast-paced backing track. Or, if you're the makers of Harry Potter, you could forego even <i>that</i> use of cinema's narrative potential and just have your character repeatedly <i>say</i> she reads a lot.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF7SINAJCsR3IAVWpytwFyN4XfF4MuNPovacpGVvTwZ0OcMr19Y9AiMC1CCkkuSEJ8bpjIKriSsVrHtOOcAwClr7C_iaqj5P64l-2KNKoxXMjSjQccOciHMPUMrCQ_atJeP3Og3jHv7bk/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-09+at+19.30.02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1280" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF7SINAJCsR3IAVWpytwFyN4XfF4MuNPovacpGVvTwZ0OcMr19Y9AiMC1CCkkuSEJ8bpjIKriSsVrHtOOcAwClr7C_iaqj5P64l-2KNKoxXMjSjQccOciHMPUMrCQ_atJeP3Og3jHv7bk/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-09+at+19.30.02.png" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">See! There's a big book in her hands, and in case you didn't notice it, the character says she's been reading it! That's how you know she reads a lot! This is what Martin Scorsese would consider a "comprehensible film", in which it actually <i>is</i> worth listening to what they're saying, rather than just nodding along to the moving images like a cow.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But crucially, Pajaranov's surreal shot perhaps represents the <i>authentic</i> <i>experience</i> of being "surrounded by literature" much better than a more literalist, realist montage from conventional cinema could. After all, this is how the human mind works: it collects a series of images and recalls them, not in any logical order, or with any care for physics or geography - but in the order our brain connects them! How many of us say that our childhood felt like "one long stream of..." one thing or another: family arguments? Family meals? Disney films? Football? New Labour politicians doing war crimes?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pajaranov's rooftop festooned with open books performs not just a more <i>visually</i> <i>interesting</i> job than the conventional cinematic equivalent, but also a more <i>accurate </i>one. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is what I think Western cinephiles are missing when they work themselves up into hysterics about how it "looks" different. Yes, it does look different, but Pajaranov is an artist trying to tell a man's life, he wasn't just trying to give you some moving wallpaper for the evening. There was a <i>reason</i> it looked different.</span></div>
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WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-42179306615988579922018-07-20T08:59:00.001-07:002018-07-20T09:12:25.318-07:00Icons under Postmodernity<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/CheHigh.jpg/220px-CheHigh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Image result for guevara" border="0" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/CheHigh.jpg/220px-CheHigh.jpg" /></a>Who are the icons of the 21st century?<br />
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Will this century produce a Guevara? A Malcolm X or Dr. King? A Garvey? A Stalin, Mao, Sankara or Fanon?<br />
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And it's not just 'revolutionary' politicians we seem to lack. Can we imagine blond boys of Durham University worshipping David Cameron and Sajid Javid shrines, in the way they currently adore the Iron Lady?<br />
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Mandela, Gandhi and Mother Theresa: name-dropped by Western liberals the world over, who imagine them to represent some nebulous cult of Niceness. Can we imagine any such heroes being canonised on this side of 2000? Will anyone be joining the pantheon of saints of popular imagination. Malala Yousafzai? Remember when she was in the news for a bit!?<br />
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Equally, when we want to call something evil, we currently liken it to 'Hitler' and 'Nazis'. In 50 years time, are the ultimate insults going to be that someone is a Kim Jong-Un, a Saddam Hussein or an Osama Bin Laden? Of course not. And it's not just because we disagree with the Pentagon's view of who the baddies are. We also won't be calling people Erdoganian, Trumpesque, Maylike or Merkelian. It just wouldn't have the weight.<br />
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Cecil Rhodes and Simon Bolivar have had countries named after them. Ho Chi Minh and Lenin had cities. Who on earth could you even name a cul-de-sac after now, without making everyone who saw it feel deeply sad?<br />
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In 2060, will Beyonce be as talked about as Michael Jackson is now? Maybe. But who's our Tupac and Biggie? If Bob Marley is forgotten, will we have anyone to make posters out of? Migos? Rhianna? The Biebs?<br />
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Even the idea of being an icon is a joke. We play the fun game of pretending Corbyn is an icon, like in this appalling photoshop, clearly executed by a toddler or pensioner -<br />
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<img alt="Image result for corbyn che guevara" src="https://www.chargrilled.co.uk/t-shirts/prodimages/staticimages/square/k0checorbyn_k_Red.jpg" /><br />
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... or when DJ Khaled's wants to say something's good.<br />
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There will be no icons of the 21st Century, only celebrities.<br />
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Celebrities signify nothing. What they mean is entirely subjective. While we are forced to draw on elements of truth about their lives/opinions, we have licence to mould their meaning into what we want it to be. We accept them into our lives as blank canvasses we project onto. They consent to this because it builds their support. Like the Queen during Apartheid, they keep tactically quiet so as to never alienate anyone.<br />
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This is what separates icons from celebrities. Headteachers who give emotional assemblies about Mandela might completely mangle and misrepresent what Madiba actually believed - but they at least have to accept that he means something to do with antiacism, and you can't untangle him from that.<br />
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Whereas Beyonce is there for the taking. She is ours. You could choose to deliver an assembly on how she's either an 'inspirational independent women' or a 'black role model', or an 'ingenious capitalist' or a 'fun pop star' and there's nothing in her public image that prevents you from completely ignoring the other three perspectives. Walking into Beyonce and Jay-Z's London gigs, I was surprised how many posh blonde families have come up from Surrey for the day out. Are they here for the black feminism, or the Fanonian insight? Nah, they're here to see <i>their</i> Beyonce. Just as we know that Lady Gaga isn't gay, and she means a lot to plenty of straight people. We know this even as we decided that, <i>to us</i>, she is our gay icon.<br />
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"The world has shrunk" is about ideology as well as technology. There is now no space for outsider perspectives anywhere in the world of ideas. This is because of 2 simultaneous developments. Firstly, many people in the last century, from Thatcher to Kenyatta, promised to lead the way to an ideal world. Their obvious failures created disillusion and a reluctance to follow any subsequent pretenders. At the same time, capitalism continued to expand into every corner of life, swallowing up and subsuming everything it came across. Environmentalism's been monetised, anti-consumerism's been monetised. Antiracism has been monetised. Dissent in general has been monetised, in huge media machines that make millions from indulging our dissatisfaction: making us click on the things they know we hate - whether its multiculturalism, corporations, capitalism or racism.<br />
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And Beyonce? She is adored for entertaining us. Like a sub-editor at the Mail or the Guardian, she uses a bit of 'politics' here and there to keep us entertained She know it excites us to hear arguments being made. Dissent is used by the neoliberal matrix of entertainment.<br />
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Neoliberalism was once acknowledged as one of several ideologies, with its own iconic defenders and advocates (Thatcher, Reagan). It's now become the ubiquitous backdrop that is expected, and found, in every corner of life. It has outgrown all the dissenting ideologies, subsuming them so that feminism, environmentalism, socialism can be sold.<br />
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This is why there are no icons any more. Because there's no space for an alternative system, an alternative answer.<br />
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This also means that, without an alternative, those who advocate for the status quo don't have much to contrast themselves against. What use is a Thatcher figure when there are no unions to fight against? Of course Cameron seems wet compared to Thatcher, because who was he up against? No one.<br />
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Everyone in his era agreed with him. It was just a question of exactly how racist to be to migrants or how quickly to starve the poor. He cannot be viewed as a brave vanguard leader or crucial actor in geopolitics. He is just a boring managerial clone which blends into the background.<br />
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Prior to the postmodern mode of capitalism, people used to be excluded because of things they were born with - race, sex, class, sexuality. Under the postmodern mode of capitalism, this wouldn't work, because it requires us to consciously believe in essentialism, ordained hierarchies - basically, in the sort of grand narratives no one believes in anymore.<br />
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'Being racist' has not been rejected because it is <i>wrong </i>exactly<i>;</i> it's just embarrassingly old-fashioned to believe in anything like that any more.<br />
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Instead of excluding bodies (Foucault), we now manage opinion (Chomsky, Fisher, Deleuze). Technology has developed to assist this. Everyone has the vote now, so they need to all be steered towards the same page, or chaos would ensue. Hard power to soft power. From excluding people to including them, provided we've ensured their compliance.<br />
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Look at who we consider outside the normal range of opinion, today's 'extremists'. Mad Corbyn and the 'loony left', stupid Trump and his deplorables. Le Pen, Orban, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez. These are on the very fringes of the politics which are discussed publicly. And, at the most extreme, all that they want to do is slightly accentuate the world's white supremacist border policies or slightly increase levels of welfarism (which buys neoliberalism's consent). They are all <i>mainstream career politicians</i> from <i>major parties</i>.</div>
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It feels like dissent has stopped, change has stopped, history has stopped.<br />
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Under neoliberalism, the system promises us all so little, that our consent is unbearably fragile. One result of this, as Fisher/Badiou discuss, is consent is built on the fact we're not as awful as some other countries. Another result is that we do not really enjoy entertaining the possibility of change. It is much more psychologically comforting to think that it just has to be this way, that there is no alternative. That other avenues were tried (in the famously tumultuous 20th Century), and all ended in disaster. This reluctance to believe that things could be different means we don't want a Garvey, a Guevara, a Sankara. Because we don't feel like history's moving forwards, so there's no hope of moving towards alternative worlds.<br />
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<br />WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-11056116346285549802017-10-26T06:14:00.003-07:002017-10-26T06:14:34.741-07:00Garbled History: George and the Dragon at the NationalAs has been discussed <a href="https://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/is-this-actual-nationalist-propaganda.html" target="_blank">elsewhere</a>, Rory Mullarkey's <i>George And The Dragon </i>is a play which forces you to think about the playwright's intention and meaning.<br />
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Act One and Two are set in medieval and industrial England. In both, the English are an essentially good people, but a malevolent "Dragon" rules them, ruining their lives - until St. George kills it and frees the people to be happy. Act Three is set in contemporary Britain, where the "Dragon" is now, for some reason, "within" all people, and cannot be slain, so the people decide to live as they are, and reject St. George. The reason for this difference is vaguely explained as being because "people have changed" by Act Three.<br />
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How can this narrative, overall, be interpreted? The only message I am able to untangle is this: it was possible in the past to remove problems, but <a href="https://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/rory-mullarkey-sneers-and-grumbles-in.html" target="_blank">in contemporary Britain it is not. We just have to live with them. </a></div>
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Mullarkey is not saying that the problems were never removed in Act One and Two - because they <i>were </i>removed, by both slayings of the dragon: these led to temporary utopias. Also, it is not the case that all of Act One and Two were illusory: their events are remembered and referred to by several characters in Act Three. So the people of England <i>really were </i>freed from their external problems in previous eras, but no longer can be - because of something about how those problems are now <i>internalised. </i></div>
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This means Mullarkey, like Marx before him, is attempting to develop an overarching narrative of history's progress, and pinpoint landmarks within it. Good idea, Mullarkey! That never goes wrong. </div>
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<img alt="Image result for marx" src="https://cdn-ed.versobooks.com/images/000010/993/Karl-Marx1-d9076c70d7110a86690306d6cc7a16bc.jpg" /></div>
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No-one who has ever come up with a plan for history's progression has ever ended up getting it wrong - not Marx, not Hegel, not the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history" target="_blank">Whigs</a>, definitely not Fukuyama! </div>
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And, whereas Marx has communist utopia at the end of his historical progression, Mullarkey has - for some reason - a society in which, uniquely within human history, evil can no longer be expunged - evil is more insidious. And that society, that Fukuyaman end-of-history, just so happens to be the present day. His evidence for evil's ascendancy in recent years is, I think, mainly the increase in binge drinking and video games - and I'm not even joking.</div>
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So Mullarkey genuinely believes there's something unique about 21st century society which makes it harder to get rid of evil. Wow. A historical understanding that is Fukuyamanally shit. </div>
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WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-82933457571346926452017-10-26T06:11:00.000-07:002017-10-26T06:17:23.636-07:00Is This Actual Nationalist Propaganda? George and the Dragon at the National<i>Is it an interrogation of nationalism? Or is it just actual, racist, antisemitic, nationalist myth making? I think all the </i><i>clumsy, thoughtless metaphors a</i><i>dd up to something closer to the latter. </i><br />
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<i>George and the Dragon</i> is a three-act play in which Mullarkey is trying to comment on the overall sweep of history, on <a href="https://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/rory-mullarkey-sneers-and-grumbles-in.html" target="_blank">contemporary British culture </a>and on "our relationship with evil".<br />
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Oher online reviews describes this play as 'examining' national myth making. I don't think it does: I think it <i>indulges </i>national myth-making and leaves the myth-makers unexamined. The structure of the play vindicates the national myth-makers, the patriotic believers in England's essential goodness, and those who would like to believe England is/was unique and special.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What would this idiot make of George and the Dragon? I imagine he'd quite enjoy it, and that's the issue.</td></tr>
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Act One and Two are set in medieval and industrial England. In both, the English are an essentially good people, but a malevolent "Dragon" (representing first feudalism, then capitalism) rules them, ruining their lives - until St. George kills it and intrinsically good English people to be happy again.</div>
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Let that sink in. </div>
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That is the genuine plot.</div>
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It is not followed by any subsequent contradiction. </div>
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Imagine being sat in a theatre for 90 minutes watching this. Feudalism, and then 'Victorian capitalism', have been killed by St. George - and the English, who had always been intrinsically good, are set <a href="https://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/garbled-history-george-and-dragon-at.html" target="_blank">free</a>.</div>
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Does that not sound a bit North Korea? Or a bit Enoch Powell? This is definitely the kind of patriotic bullshit Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson could share some racist jokes over. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Image result for green and pleasant land" 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" style="cursor: move; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If this picture makes you feel something twingeing in your chest, and you're about to burst into a rendition of Elgar, then this is the play for you. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Mullarkey's point seems to be that the native English are perfect, and their problems arise solely from corruption by external forces which need to be slain. Congratulations, dickhead, you've just invented xenophobic nationalism <i>and </i>antisemitism in one go!</div>
<div>
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<div>
Seriously, Rory, surely it occurred to you? This plotline is the kind of thing Leni Riefenstahl would be commissioned to make. It's the national myth dozens of despots have relied on, and millions of people in human history have actually believed, and used to justify prejudices. And the one prejudice it rings most clearly of is antisemitism. So if you're going to give voice to Mosleyian ideas at the National Theatre, you'd better be doing this, Rory, just so you can mock those ideas?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But no, Rory, you don't take the piss of these ideas, do you? You actually write a story that confirms them. Because, Rory, in your story, after "the dragon" is killed, life <i>does </i>get better for the English, doesn't it?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And, instead of being aware of these connotations, you soldier right into antisemitic tropes, not wanting anything to get in the way of your pantomimic national myth-making. Your human embodiment of "capitalism", played by Julian Bleach - all Faginesque leering and top-and-tails opulence - reeks of tropes about Jews and money and power which we don't need to see repeated. And your play remains wedded to this narrative framework in which Bleach's external corrupter, who continues to look a lot like an antisemitic drawing of a Jew, <i>is </i>scary to the audience. He descends from a ceiling, lit up in a solo spotlight, and roars at the audience. I mean, how <i>else </i>am I meant to interpret that? You cannot claim to be mocking our fear of the outside corrupter of the English; you are encouraging it.</div>
<div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An antisemitic caricature, very much like the one currently on display at the National</td></tr>
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I imagine you would answer that the dragon is not a literal being, but is in the minds of the English all along? But this is really a matter of semantics: you write as though the English are innately and originally pure, and then corrupted by an externality: whether that externality is a concrete bad person or a bad idea doesn't matter. This is pure McCarthyism: root out the poison, which has come from outside, into our people's heads. You still chose to embody the evil 'idea' as a possibly Jewish magnate pantomime baddie.</div>
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I don't believe Mullarkey perceives these connotations. But only because I'm not convinced he's thought very much at all about these metaphors, or is using them very effectively to drive home any kind of point.</div>
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Read any online review of the play, and you'll find a critic keen to tell you that Mullarkey "was inspired by" (read: copied) Evgeny Schwartz' 1943 play <i>The Dragon</i>. In that play, the "Dragon" of Russian Tsarism is slain, and then replaced by the "Dragon" of Stalinism. Fair enough, Schwartz. You've used a metaphor there to communicate a clear and precise analysis: that the Russian revolution led to a state as despotic as the one it overthrew. Great. Point made. Same analysis as in Animal Farm, but at least you've found an original way to say it.</div>
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Mullarkey's analysis is, on the other hand, nonexistent. What is he trying to say here? That the people of England threw off the shackles of feudalism and lived happily for a few years, but then were yoked again under the shackles of capitalism? Because if that's your analysis, it sounds like a drunk first-year student who hasn't read Marx trying to impress girls. What the hell kind of economic system do you imagine people lived in in between "the evils of feudalism" and "the evils of capitalism"? And what kind of system do you imagine you are living in now? When do you imagine we threw off the yoke of capitalism? What is this nonsense about the evils of "the system" being suddenly cured by an external, white, upper class hero? How are you putting that white-saviour nonsense on the stage and then not mocking it? Or are you trying to say capitalism erodes individuality even more than the feudalism that preceded it? Because it's a bit fucking ambitious to attempt to make such a heavyweight economic-historical point in a play which is 90% about fighting dragons. </div>
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All of this might sound like I'm trying to read too much into it, but you didn't give your audience the choice. You made a "dragon" tell us "he was the system" and then get killed when George destoys the statutes that uphold "the system". In Act Three, I've no idea what Mullarkey wanted the Dragon to represent, but <a href="https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/saint-george-and-the-dragon-review" target="_blank">reviewers </a>are falling over each other to claim it's "Brexit", because they too, saw that you wanted it to mean something. Time and again, I tried to just settle into my seat, buy into a character - any character - and enjoy the storytelling. But you wouldn't let me do this, Rory. You are adamant that we must listen to your points, wherever they are. The allusive language always returned, in lines like "the dragon is in us all". You can't not search for meaning in this play.</div>
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And let's be honest, Rory, if you take away all the meaning - if it really was just a play about dragon-killing - it would be a pretty weak story wouldn't it? "Man kills dragon twice then can't do it a third time." Not a very satisfying Shrek movie, that. You need it all to <i>allude </i>to something, Rory, otherwise you've just got a fairytale that ran out of puff. You would have just subverted the whole fairytale genre purely in order to remove the enjoyment.</div>
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I think what's happened, Rory mate, you wrote in the metaphorical significance of the Dragons, didn't you, and then you kind of forgot to follow the metaphor stuff through? I think you've got carried away with the actual Dragon-slaying storyline and you're enjoying the sub-Carry On fun that you think you can have on a series of historical adventures. </div>
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" 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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There is more than a dash of Carry On's brand of silly, thoughtless historical adventure in Mullarkey's play. The problem is Mullarkey doesn't settle for that, and keeps trying to make it say something serious too.</td></tr>
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The reason I think this is that you poured so much energy and love and care into the actual swashbuckling. This was not ironic swashbuckling. This was not even sincere swashbuckling which is then cleverly upended by a self-contradictory ending. This was genuine swashbuckling, with both the 2 first acts providing the audience with a self-contained, traditionally-structured heroic story, for which we are never offered any alternative frame of reference other than the obvious one: a happily-ending underdog story. </div>
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A typical 'joke' in the play runs like this: George returns from killing a dragon, covered in blood. When he removes his armour, the red blood has created a cross on his white clothes, in between the armour, forming a St. George cross. The villagers then fly this fabric as a flag. And there you have it. The St. George flag. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Image result for st. george cross" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31u4dAhUA%2BL._SX300_.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
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What are you doing here, with this joke, Mullarkey? What is the substance behind this joke? Why are we positing hypothetical creation-myths for the St. George cross? There are only two possible reasons a playwright would do this joke. Either:</div>
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a) They genuinely would like a play to contain a half-joking, knowingly-fabricated creation-myth for the St.George flag. This is the Andrew Leadsom/American tourist option. The option whereby the playwright wants us to say "ooh yeah, isn't it fun to think about where these bits of our national culture could have come from. I know they didn't but imagine if the St. George cross came from that, that would be awesome!". This is the option that would appeal to a jibbering flag-waving simpleton.</div>
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Or ...</div>
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b) Because you want to mock the Andrea Leadsoms who would prefer option A. And that, if that were your reason for the joke, I would enjoy. Is that what is going on here, Rory? Are we mocking patriotism for its flimsy foundations? Is it like the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym-k5viJ7tA" target="_blank">joke </a>in Life of Brian where they all start worshipping a gourd by accident? Maybe you are actually assuming that all your audience find flag-waving a bit silly (which, in Britain in 2017, I think is a bit optimistic, but I admire your optimism) But if your intention really is to mock the baseless myth-creation of patriots, then I think you could have gone in a bit harder than just suggesting "your St. George flag was probably designed by accident!" You haven't mocked the flag-wavers very well there? You've told them something that they might actually quite like - that the flag was born out of bloody struggle. If you wanted to use your incredible platform to mock national myth-creation, then where was the follow-through, Rory!? How was that reflected in other jokes and in the moral and narrative framework of the play!? What you needed to have was some ironic moment where a pompous idiot stares up at the St. George cross with pride and comments on how carefully it's been designed or something? (Geddit? Even though it was designed by accident) Do you get me? Or you could had hordes of people worshipping George's blood-splattered cloak as a relic or something? I don't know, I'm not a comedian, but you only really did half the joke there, man. It's like if you said to me in person, "do you want to hear a joke? Why is the st. George cross flag red and white" And I said "why"? And you said "because St. George killed the dragon". I'd just be like "what? Is he alright? Is he actually into all this St. George, flag-waving patriotism stuff?"</div>
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Maybe it's one of those 'jokes' where really, it's not a joke - <i>just </i>a reference to something. You know those ones? Like Peter Kay built a whole career out of. You just show us something we recognise on stage and we're supposed to clap like seals because we recognise it. "Oh look, that's clever", we're meant to say. Well apologies Rory, if that was the spirit it was intended in, because I just sat there waiting for the punch line about it.</div>
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I could see it's a St.George's cross on the white linen, Rory. Just like I could see you were playing with the fairytale genre. Just like I could see that the dragon represented something....</div>
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But I was waiting to see if you had anything to say about that...</div>
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WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-24287406368421263052017-10-25T20:03:00.000-07:002017-10-26T06:19:31.625-07:00Grumbly Grandad's View of the World: George and The Dragon at the NationalI can't believe it.<br />
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I stare, open-mouthed, at my phone screen in the lobby of the National Theatre.</div>
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Rory Mullarkey - writer of the play I've just watched - is just THIRTY years old. No. That's impossible. </div>
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I don't mean because he's so good - although some of his dialogue <i>is </i>very good. </div>
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But I thought he had to be much older than 30 because of how he <i>thinks</i>. I feel like I've watched a play by the country's most curmudgeonly grandad. You don't get the impression that Mullarkey very much likes British society "these days".</div>
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<i>George and the Dragon</i> is a three-act play in which Mullarkey is clearly trying to say something about the <a href="https://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/is-this-actual-nationalist-propaganda.html" target="_blank">overall sweep of history</a>, and about contemporary British culture. Despite striking set design, just feels like a pantomimic, sub-Blackadder re-run of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, if it had all been directed by the Daily Mail.<br />
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Act One and Two are set in medieval and industrial England. In both, the English are an essentially good people, but a malevolent "Dragon" rules them, ruining their lives - until St. George kills it and frees the people to be happy. Act Three is set in contemporary Britain, where the "Dragon" is now, for some reason, "within" all people, and cannot be slain, so the people decide to live as they are, and reject St. George.<br />
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It is made clear on several occasions that THE DRAGON IS A METAPHOR FOR SOMETHING, so heavy-handedly that they might as well have written it on a fist and punched us. But I persistently tried - perhaps unwisely - to understand what the play wanted to say.</div>
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<img alt="Image result for george and dragon national" src="https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_mobile/public/10510_l-r_reuel_guzman_boy_john_heffernan_george_and_gawn_grainger_charles_in_saint_george_and_the_dragon_c_johan_persson_website.jpg?itok=-nVGtwE9" /></div>
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It's in Act Three, where Mullarkey turns his hand to something resembling "state of the nation" playwriting, that his views is most manifest. </div>
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And this is why I can't believe he's 30: his take on "contemporary Britain" feels like the kind of thing your grumbliest grandad would come out with after boshing too much Daily Mail. It's dominated by concerns with "ladette" drinking culture (drunk women from a hen do make several appearances, for no reason), pre-teens playing violent computer games and football fans fighting in pubs. </div>
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And it all feels like a bit of a throwback. His idea of "British society" seems to be entirely based on fly-on-the-wall documentaries from the mid-2000s about "working class culture". </div>
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It's as if Mullarkey doesn't actually live in the UK in 2017, but has instead learned about it exclusively through watching Channel 5 programmes with names like "My Life On 30 Pints A Day" or "The Boy Who Died Because He Had Such A Fat Arse" or "Living With My Cunt Husband".</div>
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He's obsessed with the kinds of things <a href="http://viz.wikia.com/wiki/Major_Misunderstanding" target="_blank">Major Misunderstanding</a> would moan about. The whole string of media-fabricated "national epidemics" which was fodder for the blame-the-poor paternalism David Cameron <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/eu_referendum/results" target="_blank">rose to failure</a> on the back of. All the things Matt Lucas and David Williams once read about in the Times and used in their campaign for the extermination of working class life entitled "Little Britain".* </div>
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Basically, all the things that your racist grandad sees in contemporary Britain (and believes are evidence "we're going to hell in a handcart") are the things which fascinate Mullarkey. I'm surprised he didn't include a brief section about "happy slapping", having just found out about it from a 2003 article your Uncle Keith emailed him, with the all-caps subject line reading "YOU WONT BELEVE THIS!!!"</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Rory Mullarkey off to complain to the BBC, for some reason, having just found out that youths in "hoodies" ride mopeds these days. And by "these days" he means 2003, which is the year he still reads articles from.</td></tr>
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The weird thing is that, in a normal play, it even wouldn't matter much if the playwright felt antipathy towards her society. Because a normal play would focus on about half a dozen characters, right? All of which the playwright would have some empathy with? That's what literature does, right? Make you feel a bit better by bringing you into communion with some characters you like a bit?</div>
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Not so with Mullarkey. He refuses to give us even one believable, fully-formed character to focus on, and instead drags us back again and again to his sweeping "sketch" of general society, thereby preventing us from ignoring his sneering, tabloidy generalisations. He wants to sketch the 'character' of English society, as if there is such a thing. And our society is not something he appears to have the facility to understand, let alone write about.</div>
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As Mullarkey stretches his canvas as broad as it will go, the characterisations become more thin, laughable and tabloid. At one point, a younger man in the pub challenges an older man's jingoism, yelling "WHAT ABOUT THE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE BRITAIN ENSLAVED!". This is the first time in the play any English person has questioned England's essential goodness. Therefore, I think in Mullarkey's head, it was supposed to be a significant line. Maybe Mullarkey wants to say something about how England contains an element of post-imperial self-doubt, is generationally divided, and is both racist and obsessed with criticising racism. But again, it is as if Mullarkey has never met real people. It is as if he has just read about "leftie student types" in the Daily Mail, and wanted to include them in his play because they fascinate him anthropologically. It is as if Mullarkey has no interest in such people as human beings. The younger man screams this crude Russell Brandism in a pub, during a football match, in a way that literally has never happened IRL in the history of the world. There is no investigation into why he felt like shouting this. The man is a tabloid caricature, complete with Che Guevara T-Shirt and desert scarf. He looks like someone's fancy dress costume for a party with the theme "uni bellends".</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Image result for russell brand" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Arthur_Russell_Brand_%285622506846%29.jpg/220px-Arthur_Russell_Brand_%285622506846%29.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It is a little known theatre-industry fact that the peak of Rory Mullarkey's research for his <i>George and the Dragon</i> play was googling "left wing bellend" and finding this picture.</td></tr>
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And all of it - the ladettes, the pub-goers, the computer gamers, the football fans, even the politicised student, are all treated by Mullarkey with a condescending contempt. A misanthropy runs through it, especially in his decision to paint contemporary Britiain as a binge-drinking multitude - and his lack of interest in creating, among this huddled mass, even one plausible, rounded, sympathetic character, even for a moment. No one has clear motivations or an authentic voice. Everyone is just an idiot. And they're all at war with every other idiot. A child is even given a long, whingeing monologue which -ironically - complains about how everyone's always complaining. Way to ruin the "<a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WiseBeyondTheirYears" target="_blank">wise child" trope</a>, Mullarkey. Apparently everyone in 2017 is always complaining about other people "walking too slow or walking too fast".</div>
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And this is what makes it jar horribly when at the very end Mullarkey executes a sharp U-Turn and asks us to buy into his "happy ending resolution". Mullarkey's conclusion, heavy-handedly hammered home, is this: <i>contemporary humans are imperfect. We must let go of any hope of perfectibility and be content to live as we are</i>. Cue music by Pharrell Williams, everyone smiles and goes back to their lives happy, the National Theatre bring out an inspirational calendar with this message printed on every month over the top of a picture of a different waterfall - at least I think was the idea.</div>
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And this message at the end makes perfect sense; it is something any thinking person realised around the age of seven. It is of course unhealthy for an individual, or society, to maintain impossibly high expectations - this is why both Buddha and Stoics taught that managing expectations is the only way to ensure happiness; why every existentialist tract is 99% about persuading you to let go of any hope.</div>
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However, this message rings a bit hollow from a playwright who has just spent 60 minutes sneering at Britain's moral turpitude. And you can't really preach "embracing our imperfections" when the Britain you've shown us is not just "imperfect", but unrelentingly bleak! Not one redeeming act of tenderness was in your version of 21st Century Britain. Where was your "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088939/quotes" target="_blank">colour purple</a> in a field"? Where was your <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7363579-a-few-seconds-more-and-the-negress-will-sing-it" target="_blank">moment </a>where Sartre hears the singer?</div>
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And, more importantly, it makes no sense to preach "love-your-imperfections" in the context of the play's overall narrative, which as we've seen, suggests that Englanders were not <i>always </i>beyond salvation. They have been saved <i>twice</i>, in fact! </div>
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But Mullarkey just thinks that "these days", as everyone's most tedious male relative loves to say, "it's all got worse". </div>
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If, Mullarkey, you wanted to write a play with a "love-your-imperfections" ending, why did you give us Act One and Two, in which the imperfections are, in the manner of <a href="https://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/is-this-actual-nationalist-propaganda.html" target="_blank">all good racist myths</a>, vanquished?! "Killing the dragon" did help the English people in Act One and Act Two, didn't it? After getting rid of the dragon, everything got better for a while? So the entire moral and narrative framework of your story suggests that it <i>was </i>possible, and helpful, to rid a nation of evil - but is not any more.</div>
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If you'd staged Act Three on its own, you'd (maybe) have staged a reassuring play about how we have to embrace our imperfection. But when you stage it with Acts One and Two, you're now saying that ideally, you would remove imperfection and things would be better, but for some reason in the 21st century <i>only</i> you can no longer kill off imperfection so we're just gonna have to settle for a shit life. A more shit life than they used to have in the good old days, after the two dragon-slayings. A life shitter than, according your story, the majority of world-history.</div>
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Why have you singled out the humans of the 21st century for a telling-off, grandad? Can we chill out?</div>
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<i>* This was back in the bad old days, though, before Matt Lucas followed in the footsteps of the uncompromising antiracists <a href="https://www.essence.com/videos/essence-live-katy-perry-apology-cultural-appropriation" target="_blank">Katy Perry</a> and <a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/1480512/the-source-digs-up-tape-of-eminem-using-racial-slurs/" target="_blank">Eminem</a> and Became Woke. Lucas has now had the messianic realisation that blackface is not appropriate, for which the media has rightly given him the appropriate amount of credit: i.e. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/05/matt-lucas-little-britain-black-up-society-empathetic" target="_blank">all the credit</a> in the universe.</i></div>
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WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-90090259218482166962015-05-05T13:22:00.000-07:002015-05-05T13:30:45.799-07:00Support the CoalitionSupporting the Coalition is fine. If you're planning to vote Tory, Lib-Dem, UKIP or not vote on Thursday, you're supporting the Coalition. That's fine - as long as you do it because you really hate the welfare state. If you support the coalition because you really hate the idea of helping the poor and vulnerable then, fair enough, I can't argue with you. If it's because you really hate all state intervention and welfare, the NHS and benefits - every victory of post-war democratic socialism - then fine - you've chosen your party quite prudently.<br />
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But please don't support the Coalition because you think they are better with the economy. That is just a lie. They have borrowed more in 5 years than Labour borrowed in 13. They are leaving us with 0.3% quarterly growth when they inherited 1% quarterly growth - yet claim to have caused recovery. Their cuts actually cut off recovery and caused negative growth in quarters of 2012. They are terrible with the economy, because it's not their primary concern. Their aim is to roll back the state - to cut back everything until the world is just a market.<br />
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I don't mind if we all all democratically decide that the NHS is a bad idea. I don't mind if I get outvoted, and the collective will of the British people declares that we no longer want things like hospitals, schools, welfare, councils, a police force, an army, a fire service, and roads. If we declare, en masse, that we reject the very principles of taxation, society and politics.<br />
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But I'm worried that's not really what people think. I'm worried people actually don't support the Coalition because of who the Coalition are; they support what they think the Coalition is. They support the coalition because of misinformation. They do it because they are lied to. They support the Coalition because they want to support the best managers of the economy - when these are not in reality the saviours people think they are.<br />
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So support the coalition - but only if it's because that's what really want. Please don't support the coalition because you've been misled. Don't support them for a made-up reason. To support them because of one of the lies is supporting them because Murdoch and Harmsworth and Lebedev told you to.WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-42364037001218504132015-04-29T10:19:00.000-07:002015-04-29T10:22:10.037-07:00Cameron Is A Really Horrible Boyfriend. He Ruins Your Self-Esteem So You Never Leave Him<br />
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David Cameron is like the world's most horrible boyfriend. He never does anything for you, and he doesn't even pretend to be a nice boyfriend. He just tells you "you'll never get anyone better". That's why Cameron has so <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/attacking-snp-is-nothing-new-all.html" target="_blank">savagely attacked everyone</a>, and done little else.<br />
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We talk about "apathy","disengagement", and how disillusioned voters now think "they're all the same", as though it were a politically neutral sociological phenomenon, that has spontaneously arisen. In reality, mass disillusionment was a clever electoral tactic, which has been disseminated by the right-wing press. They they knew this was an uninspiring Tory party, with no positive message and an uninspiring austerity agenda. Therefore, all alternatives had to be savagely discredited from 2005, so they looked even worse.<br />
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Depressing our expectations and optimism was helped by the widespread disillusion that followed from Iraq, Blair, the crash, the bailout, the MPs' expenses scandal and the character assassination of Gordon Brown. Even after all this, Cameron only just scraped in, failing to win a majority which, says one insider, made many Tories<a href="http://www.totalpolitics.com/campaigns/4713/general-election-2010-the-conservative-campaign.thtml" target="_blank"> "furious"</a>. It's easy to see why they didn't win. The electorate didn't actively vote <i>for </i>the Tories; Cameron's uninspiring war of attrition against Gordon Brown did not excite voters. It just begrudgingly convinced them change had to happen.</div>
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Lowering our expectations has been very effective. It has put people off Labour just as much as the Tories, so that Cameron could then - so he thought - win in 2015 by just <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/did-conservatives-save-economy.html" target="_blank">claiming to be the more adept economic steward</a>. For example, just woeful 23% of people think the current government have the best policies on the NHS - the <a href="https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3535/The-NHS-remains-the-most-important-issue-facing-Britain.aspx#gallery[m]/0/" target="_blank">most important issue</a> to us today. You'd think this would be cause for an instant overthrow. But it isn't, because only 36% of us think Labour - the party which founded the NHS - has the best NHS agenda.</div>
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National negativity is what has kept Cameron supported. The message is clear: <i>we might not be that great, but all politicians are terrible. Your safest bet is us.</i> There Is No Alternative. That is the core of the Conservative message since 2005. </div>
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Because of this despondency, the Conservatives still retain substantial support, despite the fact people are unhappy. 47% <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/28/rich-poor-divide-harming-britain-poll" target="_blank">think</a> the country has got more unfair under the coalition - and only 12% think it has got fairer. Substantial majorities of us support measures to reduce inequality: 65% of us support the idea of a wage cap to prevent bosses earning more than 65 times what their lowest paid employees do. Labour and the Green Party offer a number of policies to address inequality - the mansion tax, non-doms, wage cap, the bankers' bonus tax. And yet neither of these parties has 65% of the vote. <br />
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We want more equality but we don't vote for the parties that promise to tackle it? Why? Probably because of our woeful, carefully engineered <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/what-we-really-need-in-2015-is-end-to.html" target="_blank">cynicism</a> about politics: 63% of us think Labour will "say anything" to get elected. Therefore, we don't even vote for the parties that promise to address the issues we feel need changing!<br />
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This is the real coup of Cameron's era. He doesn't have to inspire us, he doesn't have to be lovable, and he doesn't even have to address the issues that we think should be addressed. He doesn't have to worry about not being popular - because his rivals have all been made just as unpopular too. We've been convinced that there are no alternatives, and we don't have a hope in hell.<br />
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Cameron is that horrible boyfriend who ruins your self-esteem so you never leave him. You know he doesn't make you happy any more, but you don't think you could do any better.<br />
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We don't think we <i>ever could have</i> an honest politician, good public services, economic equality and security. We've got uniquely downcast national expectations. We don't really believe that it's <i>possible </i>to be well-governed; though of course it is. </div>
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The current national cynicism is stifling, and makes it hard to believe in better alternatives. Or, we imagine that the only alternative would be something stupidly reactionary, such as UKIP.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_eXT5kCozybXopMRMPM-zFcAUIlrClmfmTt1nhs6I8Rgp-JGb2ewTgfS4kgM28BhgndKJwvXvIyoY-Y_b9SqZR2TtBsSOsuB_L5nY4gMDQO_ALN94f9RfIOQ7Z0slAo-DZy2Bh3nImy0/s1600/As+other+3+drop+off.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_eXT5kCozybXopMRMPM-zFcAUIlrClmfmTt1nhs6I8Rgp-JGb2ewTgfS4kgM28BhgndKJwvXvIyoY-Y_b9SqZR2TtBsSOsuB_L5nY4gMDQO_ALN94f9RfIOQ7Z0slAo-DZy2Bh3nImy0/s1600/As+other+3+drop+off.png" height="444" style="text-align: center;" width="640" /></a></div>
But, by driving voters hopes downwards, Cameron accidentally pushed them towards a Pandora's box of alternatives. Voters' expectations in politics were depressed - and it helped Cameron get one term in office - but then thousands decided to do something about it, and voted elsewhere. UKIP they have bled the Tories of votes, so that they end up no more popular than the rivals they have sought so hard to malign. Hence the current stalemate. Hopefully, that is a sign of people reasserting the fact that they <i>do </i>deserve a government that they actually <i>like.</i></div>
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However, </div>
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Leaders Shouldn't Follow Public Opinion. The Public Are Stupid. They Should Challenge Public Opinion And Change It.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But Simon Jenkins has a strange <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/18/david-cameron-george-osborne-budget" target="_blank">opinion</a>:</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"Only fools criticise (or praise) politicians for what they say. It is what they do that counts."</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="color: black;">Polly Toynbee has a similar opinion on Ed Miliband. He might </span><span style="color: black;"><i>say</i></span><span style="color: black;"> he’s going to continue austerity, but he isn’t </span><span style="color: black;"><i>really</i></span><span style="color: black;">. He wants to save public services, so he's only going to balance the budget by 2020 - so he <i>doesn't </i></span><span style="color: black;"><i>have to cut at all</i></span><span style="color: black;">. This Toynbee sees as a disguised blessing. Miliband just can’t come out and </span><span style="color: black;"><i>say </i></span><span style="color: black;">that spending cuts are unnecessary, because </span><span style="color: black;"><i>everyone thinks they are</i></span><span style="color: black;">. </span><span style="color: black;"><i>He has to play by the rules.</i></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="color: black;"><i><br /></i></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">Closet fairness. Secretly, he cares about the poor and vulnerable, and wants us to have a fair country. But he won't say it too loud because it isn't popular enough to say that. It's more popular to shriek hysterically about the deficit. </td></tr>
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="color: black;"><i><br /></i></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But what kind of a leadership is this? Should leaders dishonestly kowtow to popular opinion? Should they follow the direction in which popular opinion is already moving, until they gain enough power to – in some degree – enact their actual beliefs? Leaders shouldn’t be play by the rules; they should make the rules.</span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Certainly, courting public opinion is what Blair did. And he's a paragon of virtue and integrity. Thatcher had won the cultural battle over public discourse in the 1980s, demonising Trade Unions and the working classes, and turning greed into a good. Tony Blair didn’t try to challenge this – he just went with the flow. He turned Labour into the country’s second Thatcherite party, so that he could win votes from the neoliberalised electorate. This is why Thatcher said her greatest achievement was creating New Labour. And why many think they no longer have a choice. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Firstly, we need leaders to challenge public opinion because public opinions is so often <i>wrong</i>. The shrieking media keep us in such a state of blind, confused hysteria that we very often work on the basis of <b>what we’re told; not what’s true</b>. <a href="https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3188/Perceptions-are-not-reality-the-top-10-we-get-wrong.aspx" target="_blank">We think</a> that 15% of girls under 16 become pregnant every year, for god's sake. Come on.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Secondly, if we don’t challenge discourse and opinion, you are not a leader – just a technocrat. And you will never have as much impact as those who do. The society we live in is made up of more than just the laws that constrain us; it is the beliefs that animate us.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium; line-height: 0.64cm;">It highly important politicians lead and address public opinion. This is why we have </span><i style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 0.64cm;">leaders</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium; line-height: 0.64cm;">, rather than anonymous technocrats. In fact, it is arguably more important to change discourse than to change laws. Laws can be repealed a year later. It is only by changing </span><i style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 0.64cm;">discourse</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium; line-height: 0.64cm;"> that really deep, broad and long-term changes in society happen.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Millions currently feel no qualms about avoiding tax. </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">This can’t be changed merely by punishing it and making laws. You’ll never catch them all. A far more effective – and cost-efficient – way to change behaviour is to make people want to behave differently. Let’s make tax avoidance </span><b style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: large;">despicable</b><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="400" src="http://www.thejc.com/files/imagecache/body_portrait/Stanley-Fink-3023.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="265" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stanley Fink: "I did what any Average Joe would do - I put some of the £180million I made in hedge funds into a Swiss Bank account. so I don't have to pay for plebs like you to be kept alive by the NHS".</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Former Tory chair Stanley Fink is a politician who decidedly does not shrink from entering the culture war. He pronounced in the Evening Standard this year, that “everyone avoids tax”. This kind of sermon sets a paradigm. It normalises and justifies a certain way of thinking. If we hear enough that we are entitled to avoid tax, we are sure to. How many millions will be lost to the treasury in tax avoidance by the words of people preaching tax avoidance? It’s impossible to quantify, but important to ask.</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/images/Mugs.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="249" src="https://www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/images/Mugs.png" width="400" /></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thankfully, Miliband’s rhetoric on tax avoidance is strong – he evidently wants to challenge this idea. But to do it well, he needs to challenge a lot more misconceptions.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Tax is seen as a burden. L</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">et’s make paying tax a noble privilege. Let’s argue that tax is the price you pay for living in a civilisation which cares about you. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Similarly, the NHS is already a beloved institution; let’s make Jobseekers’ Allowance just as adored – it is the safety net that we are lucky to have. </span><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Let’s stop assuming GDP growth is how you measure improvement, and make equality the test of a healthy economy. </span><span style="font-family: Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Let's challenge the negativity towards immigration, because in reality it brings in 34% more to the Treasury than it takes out. Let's not let the Daily Mail win that argument, just because they shout louder. They have no facts on their side. Let's "stand up for migrants" as the Green party do. Also, if possible, let’s challenge the hatred of Westminster and make the word ‘politician’ conjure up images of passion and dedication. </span></div>
WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-77433242934025391972015-04-28T08:43:00.000-07:002015-04-28T16:05:38.029-07:006 Things The Papers Don't Tell You<h3>
<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">1. Immigration <i>brings money into</i> the UK</span></h3>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Nigel says benefit tourists are coming over here, using our "international health service". The Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration have</span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.cream-migration.org/files/Press_release_fiscal_costs_benefits.pdf"><span style="color: blue;"> tested this idea</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">, through <i>research</i> of the<i> facts </i>(an interesting way of working which Nigel thinks is 'bloody foreign nonsense').</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Between 2001 and 2011, EU immigrants to the UK contributed 34% more to the budget than they took out. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In the case of non-EU migrants, they paid in 2% more (through taxes) than they took out. Overall, immigrants brought in an extra £20bn to the Treasury's budget. We have more to spend on the NHS, thanks to immigration. Thank you, migrants!</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">2. Immigrants are not all benefit tourists</span></h3>
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Immigrants are actually 45% less likely than UK citizens to claim <a href="http://www.cream-migration.org/files/Press_release_fiscal_costs_benefits.pdf"><span style="color: blue;">benefits</span></a>. <span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: red; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: x-large; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">3. Public spending is not all going to lazy alcoholics on Jobseekers allowance</span></h3>
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55% of the welfare budget goes to pensioners, who haven't suffered from any cuts. Of the money that does go to Jobseekers allowance, they are not all Benefits Street delinquents. Just 0.3% of people on benefits have been on them for over 5 years. There is not a "culture of dependency”.<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">4. You are not alone in thinking that it doesn’t <i>feel</i> like a recovery</span></h3>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">47% of us think the </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/28/rich-poor-divide-harming-britain-poll"><span style="color: blue;">country</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> has got less fair under the Coalition. Just 12% think it has got more fair. Pay has gone down by between 5.9 - 9%, depending on how you <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/british-workers-suffering-worst-decline-in-real-wages-on-record-9789942.html" target="_blank">measure</a> it. These are <i>not</i> the “good times”.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">
5. It is not entirely Labour's fault that the 2008 crash happened</span></h3>
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Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, was asked if it was Labour's fault that the banks were unregulated, allowing the crash to happen. He said:<br />
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"I am not going to talk about individual parties’ culpability because I think the real problem was a shared intellectual view right across the entire political spectrum and shared across the financial markets that things were going pretty well”.<br />
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All mainstream politicians were fairly blind to the risks in the banking sector. The Tories blame Labour, calling it “Labour’s Great Recession”. But most the deregulation had been done by Thatcher and Major, and in 2008 the Tories were not exactly screaming for more controls on the banks.<br />
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In fact…<br />
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">6. The Tories wanted there to be less regulation of the banks in 2008.</span></h3>
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In 2007, Cameron endorsed a <a href="http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/2007/08/17/ECPGcomplete.pdf" target="_blank">report</a> which called for “the regulatory burden” on banks to be "reduced year on year”.<br />
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<br />WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-82946069269228419952015-04-27T09:06:00.000-07:002015-05-02T10:34:15.516-07:0012 Myths We Need To Call Bullshit On<span style="font-size: small;">
There have been some massive porkies flying around recently, so let's set the record straight...</span><br />
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">1. Labour did not create the national debt through public spending</span></h2>
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<a href="http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn92.pdf" target="_blank">Total public spending</a> was 39.9% of national income when Labour came to power in 1997. They swiftly <i>reduced</i> this figure to 36.3% by 2000. It then grew, which was largely inevitable because of the growing and ageing population - but only to 41.1% by 2007. So after that decade of Labour tax and spend - total public spending had gone up by just <b>1.2% of national income.</b></div>
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It was actually the crash that caused public spending to boom - not Labour policy. The crash and bailout increased the deficit to £158bn, and made public spending skyrocket <b>up to 48.1% of GDP.</b></div>
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39.9% in 1997. 41.1% a decade later. Then, after the bailout, up to 48.1%. </div>
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It's wasn't by paying for benefits and nurses that we got such a national debt.</div>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">2. The last Labour government did not ruin the economy</span></h2>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></h3>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In 2009-2010, the
<a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/did-conservatives-save-economy.html"><span style="color: blue;">economy swiftly recovered</span></a> from the
2008 crash. In Labour's last year in power, GDP grew by 2%. This was
because of Labour's VAT cut - which the IFS says had a "substantive"
effect on causing </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/4479"><span style="color: blue;">recovery</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">, and Labour’s 2009
bailout, which was praised by </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/opinion/13krugman.html?_r=0"><span style="color: blue;">economists</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> as having "defined the worldwide rescue effort".</span><br />
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<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX5YRLWcvucX2SuiyUZYnVYHkRk55MO7wVJvsSh6HK-EtX4tMJdoIohtMtdAnxPHYiKbTWrwKwUhWh_MKx1F1Cl5Bkbw8RP6eyMrW2aCgH3jbejuYqHfwhqtaYfvPhq4JuSMIIwUH10rU/s1600/GDP+Growth+2008_1+-+2010_4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX5YRLWcvucX2SuiyUZYnVYHkRk55MO7wVJvsSh6HK-EtX4tMJdoIohtMtdAnxPHYiKbTWrwKwUhWh_MKx1F1Cl5Bkbw8RP6eyMrW2aCgH3jbejuYqHfwhqtaYfvPhq4JuSMIIwUH10rU/s1600/GDP+Growth+2008_1+-+2010_4.jpg" height="201" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">After the 2008 crash, GDP growth steadily recovers under Labour, until the Tories take power and growth falters</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">3. Cameron's
government did not "save the economy"<o:p></o:p></span></span></h2>
<br />
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</div>
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The Conservatives
strangled this recovery as soon as they came to power. They announced
"tough" </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10371590"><span style="color: blue;">cuts</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> and a VAT increase and then -
sure enough GDP growth suddenly halved, then fell to zero. By 2012, the
economy was shrinking again during some quarters and, in 2013, the UK lost its AAA credit rating. In this quarter we just left - some 7 years since the crash - growth has again <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/apr/28/uk-economic-growth-slows-ahead-of-general-election" target="_blank">dropped</a> to 0.3%. That's <b><i>lower than when the Tories took power.</i></b></span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></h3>
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<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW6NPw_nNGG3zI0PZ9Z7d_aAmJcPj9020e3R8EZQkEeaeCkvT1TtHFYDvJkFWGQ0uAz9luI7CBedgS8m8E62VlixjNIQZ-I1T9F17VcvJPl-18vrPTTqrYWHCzvOX2NKP8MhkNUcd5RFs/s1600/Annotated+GDP+Growth+2010-2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW6NPw_nNGG3zI0PZ9Z7d_aAmJcPj9020e3R8EZQkEeaeCkvT1TtHFYDvJkFWGQ0uAz9luI7CBedgS8m8E62VlixjNIQZ-I1T9F17VcvJPl-18vrPTTqrYWHCzvOX2NKP8MhkNUcd5RFs/s1600/Annotated+GDP+Growth+2010-2013.jpg" height="267" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"The "<a href="https://www.conservatives.com/ShareTheFacts/post?name=breaking-2-million-jobs-created-since-2010&id=12112550-cdc5-442a-9783-89e2524a6c99" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2600cc;">measures David Cameron has put in place to... build a stronger, healthier economy</span></a>" ensured that the steady growth stopped soon after they came to power, and the economy shrunk by 2012</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</o:p></span></h3>
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<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></h3>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">4. The UK did not need
Osborne’s cuts in 2010<o:p></o:p></span></span></h2>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">The </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/apr/21/western-economies-too-weak-for-spending-cuts-imf-warns"><span style="color: blue;">IMF</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> and the </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/economy-debate-gordon-brown"><span style="color: blue;">OECD</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> both said the UK economy was too weak for spending cuts in
2010-2011. Oliver Blanchard, of the IMF - said cutbacks were "playing with fire". Osborne announced £81bn of </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11579979"><span style="color: blue;">cuts</span></a></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> anyway, and the recovery
stopped. Maybe the IMF and OECD were correct..? </span><br />
<br />
<br /></div>
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</div>
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</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">5. You do not always have to cut spending in order
to reduce national debt<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></h2>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The way out of a recession - and to rebalance the budget - is not necessarily to make cuts. You can spend a lot of money, and still reduce the debt as a percentage of GDP. Clement Atlee's government, while spending millions on an NHS and welfare state, <i>reduced</i> <a href="http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/downchart_ukgs.php?chart=G0-total&year=1900_2011&units=p&state=UK" target="_blank">national debt</a> by 40% of GDP.</span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<img alt="Attlee, Clement" src="http://media-1.web.britannica.com/eb-media/64/6064-004-FE2393DC.jpg" /></div>
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</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">6. The UK did not need
a VAT increase in 2010<o:p></o:p></span></span></h2>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><br />
</span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">As mentioned, when Brown <i>reduced</i>
VAT, this was proven to help recovery. However, Osborne increased
VAT to 20%. Little wonder the recovery was stopped in its tracks. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">7. Osborne has not 'got borrowing under control'.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></h2>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Osborne borrowed
more in 5 years than Labour borrowed in 13 years. He has borrowed £219bn more
than he said he would. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> <img src="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/files/2013/11/Screen-Shot-2013-11-21-at-14.41.361.png" /></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p>All this is partly because...</o:p></span></div>
<h2>
</h2>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">8. Osborne has increased spending</span> </h2>
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Osborne pretends he has squeezed
spending, and claims this is why we recovered. In reality, we haven't recovered all that well. And if we have survived, it's because - thank god - he has not been able to decrease spending too much.
After his initial devastating attempt to cut in 2010, Osborne U-turned, and has
increased spending every year, from 693bn up to £702bn, then £714bn,
£722bn and £731bn this year. For comparison, Brown's public spending in 2009
was 635bn - which would be just 704bn in today's money, according to some estimates. So Osborne has
increased real-terms public spending by 27bn. This is inevitable, because of the growing and ageing population. The difference is: Osborne has just made sure <i>some</i> people face cuts.</div>
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</div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">9. The Tories have not done all they can to
balance the budget<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></h2>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">False. By giving away
tax cuts, the Tories had lost out on £24bn by just 2013. This is 48 times
the amount of money they <i>gained </i>by introducing the bedroom tax. Giving
away tax gifts has cost the Treasury dear.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">It’s no surprise then,
that…</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: red;">10. Osborne has <em>increased</em>
the national debt<o:p></o:p></span></span></h2>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">We all know the
Coalition has made savage cuts. But they only did that so they could decrease
the national debt, right? Wrong. <strong>Osborne has increased national debt by
26.1% of GDP</strong>. National debt is now <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/12/in-graphs-george-osborne-fought-the-debt-and-the-debt-won/"><span style="color: blue;">rising</span></a> at £3000 per second. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">As we all know, the
last Labour government were a bunch of profligate maniacs, who got a
disgusting sexual thrill from borrowing money, and ruined the economy in an
orgy of irresponsible idiocy. However, they only increased the national debt by
11% of GDP – and that was largely because they had to bail out the banks. <strong>Osborne
has managed to increase national debt by more than twice that.</strong></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<br />
<h2>
<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">11. Scottish people have the same political rights as English people – and slightly more than animals!</span></h2>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span></h3>
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</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Despite what you might hear, Scottish people have exactly the same political rights as other people - and even more than most breeds of cow! If Scottish people want to vote for a certain party - such as the SNP - then they are allowed to. If that party ends up having a lot of MPs, and forming a coalition government with another party - that is allowed too. This would be just as legitimate as when English people voted Lib-Dem, and then the Lib-Dems formed a coalition.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span></h3>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a data-ved="0CAcQjRw" href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=scottish+people&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fpeople%2Fnews%2Fandy-murray-stays-mum-on-issue-of-scottish-independence-9180121.html&ei=wqA_VcqKOtHKaLfggPAI&bvm=bv.91665533,d.d2s&psig=AFQjCNECJQ8lzMF-2rg3ierqk37WQkBDlw&ust=1430319664239689" id="irc_mil" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk;irc.il;" style="border: 0px currentColor; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img src="http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article9180127.ece/alternates/w620/16-Murray-EPA.jpg" height="300" id="irc_mi" style="margin-top: 106px;" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">DANGEROUS: But Allowed to Vote, and have a say in the running of the UK.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></h2>
<h2>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"></span></h2>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">12. The SNP could not "hold Labour to ransom”</span> </span></h2>
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</div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Ed Miliband has ruled out a formal coalition with the SNP ages ago, and has now also<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/26/ed-miliband-rules-out-confidence-and-supply-deal-with-snp"><span style="color: blue;"> ruled out</span></a> a looser "confidence and supply" deal with them. So there will be no "coalition of chaos". The SNP will have have less influence over a Labour government than the Lib-Dems currently have over the Tory government - and we all know that's not a load of leverage.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">In parliament, though, Labour would need extra votes on top of its 270-odd MPs. The 54 SNP MPs would probably provide these, because they agree with Labour's ideas. </span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Both want to address inequality quickly (Miliband's got the ban on non-doms and the bankers' bonus tax; Sturgeon recently scrapped the SNP's commitment to lowering corporation tax). Both parties agree with each other - so the SNP do not <i>need</i> to hold Labour to ransom: Labour already have a <a href="http://theconversation.com/a-deal-between-the-snp-and-labour-looks-easier-than-ever-to-strike-heres-why-40567" target="_blank">similar ethos</a>.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Most importantly, as Sturgeon says, "this election is about getting rid of the Tories". Her party <i>want</i> Miliband in power. So they would not, and could not, threaten Miliband. If he doesn't do what they want, what are they going to do? Walk away away and let him lose power? That would mean another Tory government. The SNP couldn't stand that. So they have to support Labour.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> <o:p></o:p></span></h3>
<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;"></span></h3>
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td><img alt="The new Conservative Party poster" src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03272/poster_3272606b.jpg" height="249" itemprop="image" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">"DO AS I COMMAND! Or else I will...I will...erm...I will put the Conservatives in power? Oh wait, hang on, that would make me physically sick."</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><strong><br /></strong></span>
<b>The reality is very different to the story we're told. Labour spending on public services did not give us a national debt; their once-in-a-generation banks bailout did. And this policy, and Brown's other decisions, helped the country recover again by 2009-10. So no, Cameron, this is not your recovery. This recovery - if it exists at all - begun under Labour, and you promptly crushed it. </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Osborne made cuts for the poorest, while making tax cuts, increasing borrowing, and adding to the national debt. There has never been any plan to cut the debt, or be more 'careful' with finances. The Tories have never been the ones we should "trust" on the economy. They lie about what they are doing, and make hopeless mistakes. All because they seized, in 2010, an opportunity to stop helping ordinary people, and build a more unfair country - which they think we all need.</b>WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-19614382857448733872015-04-25T12:03:00.000-07:002015-04-27T06:09:25.201-07:00The Press Let Liars Get Away With It<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">"COME
ON YOU YOU VILLAS!" screams Dave Cameron, every Saturday, on the
terraces of the OLD ANFIELD ROAD. He's a massive fan of the WEST
VILLA, better known as the MIGHTY CHERRIES! Also - did he mention -
he can see off a can of FOSTER'S SPECIAL BREW in 2 seconds and his wife's got
TRIPLE D BOOBS. Not to mention, his dad used to be in The Who, and he
can do a wheelie on his BMX with NO HANDS. He's
brilliant. A totally ordinary bloke's bloke who is definitely a
person.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Grant
Shapps, on the other hand, is not any of these things. He is
"elsewhere" when these things happen. Elsewhere? Elsewhere
from reality? Elsewhere from this dimension? Inhabiting a shady
dimension of multiple shifting identities, as the many-headed dragon
who owns a number of plastic surgery and identity-changing
businesses.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It
is absolutely hilarious that the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/15/grant-shapps-admits-he-had-second-job-as-millioniare-web-marketer-while-mp">liar </a>Grant
Shapps edits the Wikipedia entries of his rivals, and even more
hilarious that he's been caught. When trying to deny it, he is so bad
at it that he very,very <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpdBAALiTlo">unconvincingly </a>repeatedly tells
us he was "elsewhere at the time". He thinks we are
genuinely so stupid that we will believe there is one, single, magic
portal in the countryside through which Wikipedia can be accessed -
and that slippery Shapps was several miles away from it.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It
is even more hilarious that someone in Conservative HQ spent a whole
day trying to decide which football team they would make David
Cameron pretend to support, and decided Aston Villa would win him
votes. Then, today, he tried to keep up the ridiculous pretence that
he's a FOOTY BLOKE - and got the team wrong, accidentally
pretending to support <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32463038">West
Ham</a> instead.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBqc0vQ5lDlfdl8dXb3tHs441_qmMsubeYwivLMj9t3Dgb3tWPvUIVpxfdLTpUx-ZMPbaDZy38hqtXFto2Y0SAiIvMCDeb4jSJbnoRawmyulnlwPIi4ugw1llUffXi9BDIr7PyLgzcdcQ/s1600/Shapps.png"><img align="BOTTOM" border="0" height="208" name="graphics1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBqc0vQ5lDlfdl8dXb3tHs441_qmMsubeYwivLMj9t3Dgb3tWPvUIVpxfdLTpUx-ZMPbaDZy38hqtXFto2Y0SAiIvMCDeb4jSJbnoRawmyulnlwPIi4ugw1llUffXi9BDIr7PyLgzcdcQ/s1600/Shapps.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<td width="460"><div align="CENTER" style="border: currentColor; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">One
of the many murky identities of Grant Shapps, who - on this
occasion - was not elsewhere</span></span></div>
</td>
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</center>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">They
are both massive liars. But it is not surprising. We already
knew many politicians lie (<i>but not
all)</i>. It is a systemic, inherent flaw
of <i>representative</i> democracy that it encourages and
almost requires lying. Our electoral system gives power to the
winner of a popularity contest; winning the favour of voters
becomes the first and main skill of any politician. Chicanery and
exaggeration are important parts of this. There is every motive to 'lie'.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Our
democracy is also a massively unfair playing field, in terms of
controlling discourse and opinion. Politicians, who are very
well-informed, and for whom politics is a full-time job, have to to
persuade and convince voters, who are less well-informed, and who
cannot make politics their full-time job. This is an unfair
advantage, and leaves all the resources needed to control
popular opinion (time and political insight) controlled by
a few. This gives them the opportunity and <i>means </i>to bend the truth to their advantage.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.66px;">Representative democracy encourages truth-bending. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.66px;">Moreover, when we</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span lang="en"> hate politicians for bending the truth, we are barking
up the wrong tree. "Democracy can only work if all the
parties are telling the truth", says one <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/apr/16/are-you-bored-with-the-general-election">online
commenter</a>. "They should be forced to tell the truth",
agrees another, suggesting they should be hooked up to a lie detector
by their "knackers". </span></span></span></span><br />
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">But
it is a mistake to believe there is only one objective "truth".
The topics politicians talk about are political history, sociology,
philosophy, ethics, demography and geography. All of these are areas
in which disagreement and debate flourish at academic level. These
issues are open to interpretation.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It's
futile to try and view, or discuss, matters 'without any bias'. We're
all, always, interpreting something 'with a slant'. We all have to be
selective in the evidence we bring to bear on our interpretation,
even if only because if we used <i>all </i>the available
evidence on a topic we would be reading, and writing, all day. </span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The
fact an analysis comes with a perspective does not make it any
less <i>true</i>. It just means that the analyst is engaged, and
has made the effort to find an interpretation for the facts he
examines. As Zizek says, "<i>truth is partial</i> -
accessible only when takes sides, and is no less universal for this
reason".</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">All
we can do about bias is be <i>aware </i>of it and <i>interrogate each other's </i>interpretations,
so that biased views do not become mistaken for and accepted as
objective <em>truth</em>. This is the principle behind the idea of academic peer
review and the legal system.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It
would be ridiculous to chastise a prosecution lawyer
for <i>only </i>offering a selection of evidence which
suggested the defendant was guilty. That is the prosecution lawyer's
necessary job. But the prosecution lawyer operates within a carefully
constructed framework of antagonistic forces. The defence lawyer will
interrogate the prosecution lawyer's interpretation of the facts, and
ask whether it is a reasonable one, given the evidence. He may offer
an entirely different interpretation of very similar facts, or offer
an interpretation using different facts.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It's
the same with politicians. It's ridiculous to expect David Cameron to
tell us every minute detail, in everything he says. He tells us that
the economy is 'back on track'. What he doesn't says is "the
economy is now back on track, 7 years after the crash, after a
double-dip recession, and after we suffocated the burgeoning 2009
recovery". See? There I go, doing it again. Offering a partial
interpretation of the facts. I can't help it. Impartiality is
impossible.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Because
politicians, like all of us, are always biased, it is very important
that what they say is rigorously interrogated. Most of us are too
busy to do this full-time, because we have jobs to go to, friends to
have fun with and football teams to support LIKE THE MIGHT WEST
VILLA, AMIRIGHT DAVE! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOONN YOU REDS!</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Therefore
it's very important that a thorough, investigative media do the
interrogation for us. And yet they are tragically supine. A
politician says something and they slavishly report it, as though it
were automatically a valid and reasonable opinion. Journalists report
tantrums of politicians as if these tantrums are news. Far too many
'news' stories go:</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<h2 style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Immigration
is a problem..</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">.</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">(says Farage). </span></span></span></h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Yesterday,
the Evening Standard reported that Ed Miliband was in a "storm"
over comments he made about drowning migrants. "Ed Miliband was
today accused of trying to "weaponise drowning migrants" in
a row". Accused by who? David Cameron, it turns out. A row
between who? The Tories and Ed Miliband, it turns out. </span></span></span></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><br />Well
there's a surprise. What you're reporting there, Evening Standard, is
that the Tories criticise Labour. Well noticed.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">HORROR
as man says people drowning is a bad thing</span></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">This
is not journalism. Journalism would have been asking whether Ed
Miliband's comments were flippant and offensive or not. It was a good opportunity to ask another good question, too: which issues are so grave that should
politicians give up debating, and unite together in agreement on?
Remembrance Day and the World Cup seem to be the main ones; are there any others?</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Journalism
should be at one remove from the politicians' messages - it
should examine them, not just repeat them. The journalists should be doing the defence barrister's job, or that of the peer reviewer: hold up one interpretation to scrutiny, and see if it withstands criticism. Instead, they allow <i>one </i>version of the truth - one necessarily partial interpretation - to become widely accepted as though it were objectively true. It is not the politician's fault that their interpretation is partial: everyone's is. It is the journalist's fault, though, for making that one opinion become common currency, without a challenge.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.66px;">When David Cameron says Ed Miliband is a dick, this <i>opinion</i> is not examined, but is passed onto us, as though it were fact. The same vice versa. We end up thinking they are all dicks. Politicians have negative opinions of each other, and these are fast-tracked down to us, as facts, without any filtration.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">No wonder people
have no faith in politicians. As well as stoking up hatred of
politicians, the press have totally failed in their duty to
interrogate the messages emanating from Westminster. This means we
have all believed total nonsense, and then later found out it was
nonsense, and felt disillusioned. It also means - since political rivals necessarily have to bad-mouth each other a lot - that we end up hearing a lot of uncritical, unexamined character assassinations of politicians, and consequently 63% of us think they'd all "do anything to get into power".</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It
also means that liars (Cameron) and idiots (Farage) have been able to
disseminate total nonsense. And, because of that, voters have no clue
about the issues they are supposed to be voting on.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The
public to, on average (out of a sample of 1015 in a 2013 <a href="http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3188/Perceptions-are-not-reality-the-top-10-we-get-wrong.aspx">Ipsos
Mori survey</a>) think that 24% of benefits are fraudulently claimed,
rather than the reality: 0.7%. They also thought 31% of us, on
average, were recent immigrants, rather than 13%. Laughably, they
believe on average that 15% of girls under 16 become pregnant </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i>every
year</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">! </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i>That’s
4-5 in every single year 11 class, every year! Can you imagine?</i></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
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A lot of people assume Britain's <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/what-we-really-need-in-2015-is-end-to.html" target="_blank">political disillusionment</a> stems from Tony Blair's New Labour project. For example, Peter Oborne says "<a href="http://www.bluelabour.org/" target="_blank">something went horribly wrong with British politics in the 1990s. The modernisers drained the meaning out of political engagement</a>". Certainly, Blair was slick, and his Iraq lies did incredible damage to public trust. But maybe it's the Cameron era - not the Blair era - which really ruined British politics.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">1. Cameron's Era Is The Era Of Uniquely Negative Politics</span></h3>
Most governments in postwar Britain have had a mission. Atlee built the welfare state; Macmillan carried on with massive Keynesian housebuilding projects. When Thatcher came to power, although her slogan was "Labour Isn't Working" - this wasn't all she had to say. She was quick to offer and promote an alternative solution: freemarket neoliberalism. Then Tony Blair swept to power with a similar, new vision: neoliberalism fused with welfarism. A neoliberalism with a bit of heart. We'd still let corporations trample all over you with grindingly low pay. But we'd give you tax credits to make up for it.<br />
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But Cameron is rare in that he has offered us no positive vision. <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/attacking-snp-is-nothing-new-all.html" target="_blank">He has instead offered us only criticisms of others</a>. No other PM would make criticism of his predecessors his main message throughout an entire 5-year government. No other PM would think "There Is No Alternative" is an encouraging and vote-winning slogan. No other PM would still be shrieking in the 2015 debates that "there was no money left" in 2010. No other PM would have used his final speech in Downing Street to fire shots at Labour again, saying he is "turning the country round" after the Labour chaos. Any other Prime Minister would be talking about where we were <i>going</i> by now, not just ranting about how bad it <i>had been</i>. No other Prime Minister would have used the same speech to attack an imaginary "economic chaos" under Miliband. No other political <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/attacking-snp-is-nothing-new-all.html" target="_blank">campaign</a> would have made the top EIGHT out of EIGHT stories on its website ALL about the terror posed by the SNP - and forget to include any of their own actual policies.<br />
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Cameron is the UK's first entirely negative politician. It seems to have had some effects...<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">2. Cameron's Era Is The Era Of <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/what-we-really-need-in-2015-is-end-to.html" target="_blank">Woeful Cynicism</a></span></h3>
63% of us think they will "say anything to get to power".<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">3. Cameron's Era Is The Era Of Small Parties</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Mangal; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN;">In <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbcGhOdG0zTG1EWkVPOEY3OXRmOEIwZmc#gid=0" target="_blank">1984</a>, only 2% of people supported a party other than the big three: Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. . By the late 1990s, it averaged around 4-5% of people. By December 2005, when Cameron took over as Conservative leader, it was at 7%.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Mangal; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Mangal; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN;">Then, under Cameron - as he preached that There Is No Alternative - millions more have decided that there <em>should </em>be an alternative. As the graph shows, the proportion now supporting a non-mainstream party has soared to 27% last June, and 24% now. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Mangal; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN;"><br /></span>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9oOBiB6QcIBaMHai5SHdlBowI7hs93KumiF9UeikADwPfvneiFiyU5F0wEO8LHBZ_aWde-MovPA397J1FjqXj9Ir0y0gbXnmeBnlUD4hQHnN_5SCG5mRI-_oHDj-OXlLT3_CxlxpBwCI/s1600/Rise+in+support+for+non-mainstream+parties.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9oOBiB6QcIBaMHai5SHdlBowI7hs93KumiF9UeikADwPfvneiFiyU5F0wEO8LHBZ_aWde-MovPA397J1FjqXj9Ir0y0gbXnmeBnlUD4hQHnN_5SCG5mRI-_oHDj-OXlLT3_CxlxpBwCI/s1600/Rise+in+support+for+non-mainstream+parties.png" height="384" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: small;">Rise in support for parties other than Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Source: <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbcGhOdG0zTG1EWkVPOEY3OXRmOEIwZmc#gid=0" target="_blank">Guardian/ICM</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">4. Cameron's Era Is The Era When No Party Is Popular Enough To Win</span></h3>
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Partly because of the rise of small parties, the Cameron era is the also era of coalition governments. Don't mistake this as a sign of <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Mangal; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN;">increasing dialogue - it is a result of the fact people are so <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/what-we-really-need-in-2015-is-end-to.html" target="_blank">cynical</a> and negative about politics that not one single party can get as much support as even John Major got. </span><br />
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All the non-mainstream parties - UKIP, SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Greens, the Trade Union and Socialist Congress (who field 130 cadidates) and Yorkshire First (fielding 14 candidates) and Socialist Labour (fielding 8 candidates in Wales) - present themselves as radical alternatives to the traditional politics. That's why they produce posters like this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfRiqO2kFDLW1zK7WWSbTWT4F7TNzlgpdKDD5AKuweIw_7nqTbzgf2xut3cYG5PiprCO0JiUpao5pU2f8EaWNJ06vXUSrXpXq0Qni4WdTrAec2LsJOQoBdRp9J4LSEAwYJZhack6hhm40/s1600/Sod+lot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfRiqO2kFDLW1zK7WWSbTWT4F7TNzlgpdKDD5AKuweIw_7nqTbzgf2xut3cYG5PiprCO0JiUpao5pU2f8EaWNJ06vXUSrXpXq0Qni4WdTrAec2LsJOQoBdRp9J4LSEAwYJZhack6hhm40/s1600/Sod+lot.png" height="320" width="230" /></a></div>
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Surprisingly, 4 out of 5 UKIP voters think that the gap between the richest and poorest should be the government's top priority - and the fact they produce these posters - strongly suggests that the rise of small parties is an anti-establishment movement, one borne out of the prevailing disillusionment that the right-wing press have so carefully fostered. The graph above could be interpreted as a crude measure of increasing <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Mangal; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN;">disengagement, dissatisfaction and disillusionment. It represents the failure of <em>any</em> party to gain substantial support. This is the decade of mass lowering of satisfaction with the status quo. </span></div>
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WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-6718641513498999742015-04-24T12:29:00.001-07:002015-04-29T09:35:53.887-07:00All Cameron Does Is Attack Others<div style="text-align: left;">
This week, the Tories' negative campaign plumbed new depths of combative aggression. As Cameron appears to give up (look at the sheer not-giving-a-toss you can see in his eyes in every speech: he wants to quit, say <a href="https://twitter.com/afneil/status/590614154387529729" target="_blank">Tory insiders),</a> they resort to something unprecedented. On their website dashboard, which previously provided multiple reasons to vote blue, the first <i>eight </i>top stories are now the same argument: "The SNP will hold a weak Ed Miliband to ransom".</div>
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Boris rams the point home, saying: <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/boris-attacks-the-chopsmacking-relish-of-snp-for-taxing-london-10194798.html" target="_blank">“There is a kind of chop-smacking relish with which the SNP <em>and</em> Labour in Scotland approach the idea of taxing the sassenachs in London and the South-East in order to pay for things in Scotland.”</a> Worryingly, Tories are not even attacking a single political rival anymore; they're attacking the entire Scottish electorate, and its right to participate in politics and benefit from tax raised across the UK. Rather than running a pro-Tory website, they are anti-Scotland one.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv8gl2_Tz_M-UH9jFiztOPc-RDWxnjRiyuRJwryODZwGqe6O5xhTMpnhlohOvH3AfFoNAngCRfWWi4Weh4T6fZXdEeTjp3yFX8rGjUou-FUaoXQqJhLTWY5m7FSrAd-1bLbHuZex2ScAE/s1600/3+SNP+pieces.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv8gl2_Tz_M-UH9jFiztOPc-RDWxnjRiyuRJwryODZwGqe6O5xhTMpnhlohOvH3AfFoNAngCRfWWi4Weh4T6fZXdEeTjp3yFX8rGjUou-FUaoXQqJhLTWY5m7FSrAd-1bLbHuZex2ScAE/s1600/3+SNP+pieces.png" height="241" width="400" /></a></div>
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This is unsurprising, though. If there's one thing that's certain about <span style="font-family: inherit;">Cameron's Conservatives, it's that they've always defined themselves by what they are </span><em style="font-family: inherit;">not</em><span style="font-family: inherit;">, rather than what they <i>are</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A</span>lways on the attack, rarely providing a positive message and vision; t<span style="font-family: inherit;">he most inspiring part of the Tory message, since 2005, has been "the others are terrible". They've given us the era when politics was mainly about hating others, not any passion for your own cause.</span><br />
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Tony Blair may have made politics all about self-promotion. But David Cameron has reduced it to mere enemy-degradation.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>1) Not Gordon Brown </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">First they were </span><em style="font-family: inherit;">not </em><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gordon Brown; their campaign was little more than character assassination, with even the Tory press</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/article-492382/David-Camerons-playing-blinder-dont-write-Gordon-Brown-just-yet.html" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">them </a><span style="font-family: inherit;">conceding that Cameron's "</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">genius is that he manages to illuminate Mr Brown's weaknesses, and somehow make them appear more egregious than they are". </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Cameron would, in every comment, </span><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/uk-politics-video/7654099/BBC-Leaders-debate-David-Cameron-Nick-Clegg-and-Gordon-Brown-clash-on-benefits.html" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">spend more time</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> belittling and attacking Brown than suggesting alternatives. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>2) Not 'Profligate Labour'</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Then they were <em>not </em>the 'terrible mess Labour have left us'.Never before have a government berated the previous government so much. The main Tory narrative for their entire premiership has been the myth that "Labour ruined everything". As <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/11541290/Ed-Balls-Labour-note-saying-money-had-run-out-was-a-joke.html" target="_blank">Cameron </a>reiterated in the 7-way debate, "<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; line-height: 21px;">there was no money left. Let's think about the consequences of that, think about the consequences of what we inherited and what we had to do". </span>The focus on historic failures allowed them to retain support, despite not offering anything positive, as Cameron admits (although he euphemistically describes it as making "difficult decisions" and "<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; line-height: 21px;">efficiencies in government spending" - nicer phrases than "driving one million to use food banks").</span> Theirs' was never a government sustained by hope, aspiration and drive - merely by acceptance. People don't love and embrace austerity - they just believe the Tory line that "There Is No Alternative".</span> <em>I know we're uninspiring and depressing - but you're stuck with us.</em><br />
<em><br /></em><b>3) Not Ed Miliband and the SNP</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Recently, their selling point became that they were </span><em style="font-family: inherit;">not </em><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ed Miliband. Their hate campaign against Ed didn't work - because not every voter is a 10-year-old bully who wants to - so now they have became </span><em style="font-family: inherit;">not </em><span style="font-family: inherit;">the SNP. </span>Miliband was childishly bullied; and Murdoch <a href="http://linkis.com/independent.co.uk/hxe00" target="_blank">chastises</a> his journalists for not being cruel <em>enough</em> to Ed. Even the one self-promotional message that the Tories occasionally flirted with (that they are safe guardians of the economy) was always delivered as an attack on Labour; a contrast with their hopeless profligacy. <em>We are not outstanding accountants; we are just better than Labour at it.</em><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitq0eTT_-dFyjs9vVY07KKWuSv6rS_IL462_hjJyOt80AH02Mcblo_JMTu_LbTOe0z_5VnQW-11f2HKwyCkq0igr_irwhcipXOPfqVcaZiIRELCT3PwsfudCJtM2ZZj2exs-ZrmnU5Wh8/s1600/o-ALEX-SALMOND-CONSERVATIVE-PARTY-POSTER-facebook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitq0eTT_-dFyjs9vVY07KKWuSv6rS_IL462_hjJyOt80AH02Mcblo_JMTu_LbTOe0z_5VnQW-11f2HKwyCkq0igr_irwhcipXOPfqVcaZiIRELCT3PwsfudCJtM2ZZj2exs-ZrmnU5Wh8/s1600/o-ALEX-SALMOND-CONSERVATIVE-PARTY-POSTER-facebook.jpg" height="319" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A poster from the CONSERVATIVE PARTY . Sorry, but where is the information about THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY? What reasons are you giving me to "vote conservative"?</td></tr>
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<em><br /></em>
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<b>Where Was <i>The Conservative </i>Message? </b><br />
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Cameron's Conservatives have always had to go on the attack, because they don't have anything to defend. They have never had a strong vision, aims, or values. They briefly pretended to be Green Conservatives, then reached for the 'Big Society' fig leaf. They worship Thatcherite neoliberalism, and are therefore anti-statist, which is hardly a political philosophy for a <i>state's government</i> can espouse. When you haven't got a substantial, positive message, all you can do is drag your rivals down and perpetuate the cycle of negativity.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4nuyNVtJWYoI5XKddahu8xjSzbh7OLUYG9bSX_52B3EXKV967EzmbfvdWG25EuyVuYvegotSqj0GlG5HBHZoatH6Y5GstaJZuN8ty92XXnAwftNSSDJl_L4k1EoBFNPt2ugynTM1H9ls/s1600/Cameron+cropped.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4nuyNVtJWYoI5XKddahu8xjSzbh7OLUYG9bSX_52B3EXKV967EzmbfvdWG25EuyVuYvegotSqj0GlG5HBHZoatH6Y5GstaJZuN8ty92XXnAwftNSSDJl_L4k1EoBFNPt2ugynTM1H9ls/s1600/Cameron+cropped.png" height="297" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Looking as impassioned, visionary and inspiring as ever</td></tr>
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Tony Blair may have emphasised style, but he also had a big idea: New Labour was a novel synthesis of socialism and neoliberalism. Cameron's lack of beliefs or passion, on the other hand, is why he doesn't want a third term, and <a href="https://twitter.com/afneil/status/590614154387529729" target="_blank">doesn't even want to win this second term</a>. He is just - quite literally - a Public Relations consultant, and his attack skills are good. They have ruined several enemies, and they are ruining British politics.<br />
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Instead of Cameron, we need a visionary leader: a person with ideas. We need someone who's going to do a lot more than just belittle and berate their rivals. We deserve better.<br />
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WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-44163440566403425112015-04-24T09:35:00.004-07:002015-04-29T09:38:57.767-07:00No One Like Politics - And It's Really Depressing<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNMODENaYUZUMXzYoGmPqF4CElOvbwi4AIyUUCdQzP3X5bqMqBONfN-rxPqLQdCoirNqCKiWHN4o6P1S0WPVt3l3mRPhn3UvsB-EYaQE5bCqLmIvPqIGTEpSb9diNvMslp6xUXHIwal6U/s1600/220px-John_Major_1996.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNMODENaYUZUMXzYoGmPqF4CElOvbwi4AIyUUCdQzP3X5bqMqBONfN-rxPqLQdCoirNqCKiWHN4o6P1S0WPVt3l3mRPhn3UvsB-EYaQE5bCqLmIvPqIGTEpSb9diNvMslp6xUXHIwal6U/s1600/220px-John_Major_1996.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This man - yes, this man - was more popular than <em>any </em>politician today</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Mangal; mso-bidi-language: HI; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN;">In this election, they're neck-and-neck, but only because they're both stuck with just a third of the electorate's support. A third!? Whoever gets into power will have been <em>not</em> <em>voted for</em> by two thirds of us - a vast majority that any politician would envy.<br />
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To put this in perspective - it's not unreasonable to expect more. It is quite possible to unite and inspire at least half an electorate in common cause – the SNP are currently <a href="http://scotsnewsonline.info/11650/poll-confirms-record-snp-support/" target="_blank">doing so in</a> Scotland, where they have 49% of the vote. In the last German election, the CDU/CSU <a href="http://www.electionresources.org/de/bundestag.php?election=2013" target="_blank">won</a> 45.% of the first votes, and 41.5% of second votes - and this from an impressive voter turnout of 71.5%. Even among Brits, it is possible to inspire a majority to like you. Shortly after getting into power, Tony Blair's Labour government had 62% <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbcGhOdG0zTG1EWkVPOEY3OXRmOEIwZmc#gid=0" target="_blank">support</a>. Even John <a href="http://www.ukpolitical.info/1992.htm" target="_blank">Major</a> - a man created in a lab by scientists trying to identify the physical limits of drabness - won 42.3% of the vote!<br />
<br />Not only do only a third of us support our next leader, but even <em>they</em> are doing it reluctantly. AYouGov poll finds that only 58% of labour voters and 49% of Tory voters say they would be "proud" to tell others who they're voting for. UKIP supporters are even more shy - 39% of them would be "proud" - suggesting that the drift to non-mainstream parties is not done in spirit of positive optimism - it's just another symptom of the same disillusionment.<br />
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Moreover, Cameron's net approval rating is zero. Miliband's is -18. It is not a bit woeful that o<i>ut of 70 million people, we haven't managed to put forward one person who more of us see as a good leader than a bad one.</i><br />
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Thirdly, the number of us who actually think well of political parties are consistently lower than the numbers of us who will vote for them - proving that many are voting in a spirit of reluctant despondency. Just 24% of us think Labour "keeps its promises", and 23% think the Tories do (Ipsos-Mori). 63% of us say, for both those parties, that they "will promise anything to win votes". 43% think they are divided. A minority (44%) think the Tories have a good team of leaders, while the figure was woefully low for Labour (28%) - showing that the attack on Miliband has resonated.<br />
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On individual issues, too, there's a dearth of optimism. The NHS is currently seen as <a href="https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3535/The-NHS-remains-the-most-important-issue-facing-Britain.aspx#gallery[m]/0/" target="_blank">the most important</a> issue by voters, but only 36% think Labour have the best policies on the NHS, and 23% think the Tories do.<br />
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The most important symptom of all this negativity and disillusionment is the meteoric rise of alternative parties - who now have 24% of the public's support, compared to an <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbcGhOdG0zTG1EWkVPOEY3OXRmOEIwZmc#gid=0" target="_blank">average</a> of 10.3% in 2010.<br /> </span><br />
It won't be easy to dispel this suffocating negativity. If anyone's going to, it's important not just to challenge the status quo, but to do so in a non-Cameronian way. It should be done with positivity and a passionate emphasis on what we <em>are </em>about. It cannot just be about berating what exists.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWJKMKwJXIxwktmRJFfZRSN5zK-Nw9U_5vlfOzQwUwj5qpwzpoPOOXh3cDTwkEwissY9OCA8SfTHDOwoDjqZz5X3X9QFupfi-frvJ73LxKhqFdy0gqQPI0Jlo3TVEUgbVuuGimzMb_8sk/s1600/Harry+Styles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWJKMKwJXIxwktmRJFfZRSN5zK-Nw9U_5vlfOzQwUwj5qpwzpoPOOXh3cDTwkEwissY9OCA8SfTHDOwoDjqZz5X3X9QFupfi-frvJ73LxKhqFdy0gqQPI0Jlo3TVEUgbVuuGimzMb_8sk/s1600/Harry+Styles.jpg" height="243" width="320" /></a></div>
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That's why, hilarious as it is, the <a href="https://twitter.com/twcuddleston" target="_blank">#Milifandom</a> is so encouraging. It's far from just teenage silliness. It is, according to its founder, <a href="https://twitter.com/twcuddleston" target="_blank">"a movement against the distorted media portrayal of Ed</a>". It is a reaction against the current habit of hating your enemies, and doing nothing else. In doing so, 17-year old Abby strikes a positive note and attacks on the front foot: she enthusiastically tweets policies and reasons <em>to</em> vote Labour. She doesn't mention rivals; they don't seem to interest her. What she's driven by is the exciting prospect of the potential <em>good</em> that could happen. <br />
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One of the only positive things on which Ispos-Mori can find a majority agreeing (albeit a very slim majority) is this: "52% of us think Labour understand the problems facing Britain". Ed has that, at least, and the backing of the Milifandom. He's got <a href="http://www.bluelabour.org/" target="_blank">Blue Labour</a> as a source of political philosophy, and a campaign which has focused more on fairness than anti-Tory diatribes. He is perhaps the leader with the best chance of steering us away from the <a href="http://generationvent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/attacking-snp-is-nothing-new-all.html" target="_blank">era</a> of attacking all the enemies until you're the only one left standing.<br />
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WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-26526630157906707512015-04-23T13:14:00.002-07:002015-04-23T13:14:56.642-07:00The ES Magazine's "Body and Beauty Special Issue"About bloody time! So glad the ES Magazine have finally got around to doing a "Body and Beauty <i>Special Issue</i>".<br />
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It's absolutely criminal how little the glossy magazines scrutinise women's bodies and about time one of them finally broke the silence. An entire issue devoted to the topic is exactly what Britain needs.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3yd8UWAbSaKVzzw51RvrWbZQQ46G2bG_0lhp8spRus-0rUOY1343tHLRq7UdrsjdaVb1cvxRz5fDdf88XiUB68p_Qm08WaZpBphuj1RqSit24aEGdYX29uhWthUmr6bresBTG1m1Tvvo/s1600/ES+mag.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3yd8UWAbSaKVzzw51RvrWbZQQ46G2bG_0lhp8spRus-0rUOY1343tHLRq7UdrsjdaVb1cvxRz5fDdf88XiUB68p_Qm08WaZpBphuj1RqSit24aEGdYX29uhWthUmr6bresBTG1m1Tvvo/s1600/ES+mag.png" height="320" width="246" /></a></div>
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<br />WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706648959587562618.post-56629267835811760032015-04-19T11:28:00.001-07:002015-04-19T11:46:43.814-07:00Did The Conservatives Save The Economy?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<img alt="Prime Ministr David Cameron launched the Conservative Party poster at an event in Halifax on Friday" src="http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/01/04/2460760F00000578-0-image-a-50_1420375144284.jpg" height="250" width="400" /></div>
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The Conservative Party tell you to vote for them because they have saved the economy. They take all credit for the economic recovery, claiming it has happened "<a href="https://www.conservatives.com/ShareTheFacts.aspx" target="_blank">because of the measures David Cameron has put in place to back businesses and build a stronger, healthier economy</a>". They claim <a href="https://www.conservatives.com/ShareTheFacts.aspx" target="_blank">"our plan is working and securing a brighter future"</a>, and that for this reason they are the trustworthy guardians of the economy.<br />
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In contrast, they tell us that <a href="https://www.conservatives.com/ShareTheFacts/post?name=wrecking-our-economy-no-laughing-matter&id=029199f7-eafb-4806-b1da-527ca5f655d9)." target="_blank">"Labour have learned nothing from when they were last in power – when they wrecked the economy"</a>and describe the global crash of 2008 as "<a href="https://www.conservatives.com/ShareTheFacts/post?name=dont-risk-economy-ed-miliband&id=55f2e368-4722-48e5-b660-a0c5f48803f2" target="_blank">Labour's Great Recession</a>". (I can't wait to see the look on Obama's face when he realises he spent $700 bn of US taxpayers' money on clearing up a recession entirely caused by the Labour Party of Britain)<br />
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The Tories' narrative is very simple. Labour caused the crash. The Conservatives cleared up the mess. The Conservatives saved us from Labour chaos.<br />
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This narrative has clearly been accepted by many. In the 7-way election debate, Clegg received a round of applause from the audience for demanding that Miliband apologise for "crashing the economy". In one poll, 46.8% of the public said they <a href="http://labourlist.org/2013/06/nearly-half-of-all-voters-dont-trust-labour-on-the-economy-our-exclusive-poll-reveals/" target="_blank">"don't trust Labour with the economy"</a>. Ispos Mori still find that 37% of voters think Labour <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/10/election-2015-polls-show-nhs-poses-greatest-challenge-for-tories" target="_blank">would do a worse job with the economy</a> than the Tories.<br />
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<b>Is it true? Did Labour ruin the economy? Did the Tories fix it? </b></div>
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Cameron says that he is the saviour of the economy, the reason we are back on track. So let's be generous to Cameron, because things aren't going brilliantly for him. So let's allow him to forget about every worker and every employer who found a way to make ends meet in the last 5 years, and let's allow him to claim credit the recovery that happened under his government. In fact, let's be extra generous and look at some graphs showing how the country under him!</div>
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This graph from the ONS shows the horrendous dip in quarterly growth of UK GDP around the time of the 2008 crash. But then - as we're all expecting - I'm sure it'll show growth starting to increase again as soon as the Conservatives take charge. Oh dear. Maybe not.</div>
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<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibmecvaH2optBDVq9DngoJzPJKov2i2DFd8zKHesJduRzpSDtxyx3bMoxKUJEO8tT43GKP3F0c1N_yP-M2Q1dALTKC2CrTGUIUpVrslKczXkx9BwY6R1WrwO9WK-KseoSba1o-XLGUa8o/s1600/GDP+Growth+%25+2008+-+2014.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibmecvaH2optBDVq9DngoJzPJKov2i2DFd8zKHesJduRzpSDtxyx3bMoxKUJEO8tT43GKP3F0c1N_yP-M2Q1dALTKC2CrTGUIUpVrslKczXkx9BwY6R1WrwO9WK-KseoSba1o-XLGUa8o/s1600/GDP+Growth+%25+2008+-+2014.png" height="321" width="640" /></a></b></div>
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If we're being honest, it looks an awful lot like growth is steadily increasing after the crash, while Labour were in power. Then, in mid-2010, our Conservative saviours come to power and the growth rate instantly drops, then looks very wobbly for a while before sinking back into negative figures. And nowhere, at any point under the Conservative government, does the quarterly growth rate quite reach as high as it was when they came to power.</div>
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This following bar chart allows us to better see the state of the economy around the crash. There's certainly a nasty period of contract up until halfway through 2009. And then what happens? Labour plunging us further into the depths of misery, I expect. You know what they're like, the stupid idiots.</div>
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<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Xkj-mKUDx_FaauzqSFWVwPb2N6ZyiHPlkXFxTvrXr0U__ae7pifQfTdwxGgXKHbpKdAXRlb0yULWHhqiK8v6tkVgQ5ozOBPQkZuym50AbfSUY1fkTLz02YEC6Zzb6Tz-GoN5KSwnzDc/s1600/GDP+Growth+2008.1+-+2010.4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Xkj-mKUDx_FaauzqSFWVwPb2N6ZyiHPlkXFxTvrXr0U__ae7pifQfTdwxGgXKHbpKdAXRlb0yULWHhqiK8v6tkVgQ5ozOBPQkZuym50AbfSUY1fkTLz02YEC6Zzb6Tz-GoN5KSwnzDc/s1600/GDP+Growth+2008.1+-+2010.4.jpg" height="321" width="640" /></a></b></div>
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Oh wait, no. That actually looks quite a lot like steadily increasing growth throughout Labour's last year in power. In fact, if I didn't know better I'd say that every quarter the growth rate increased, until the Tories came to power and the growth suddenly halved, then fell to zero. </div>
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In Labour's final year in power there was a 2% growth in GDP In fact, in Alistair Darling's final three months as Chancellor, GDP grew by a whole 1% - a growth rate not matched in any quarter under Osborne's government. If I was feeling really reckless, I might actually suggest that the decisive crisis-management of the Labour's fiscal stimulus in 2009 allowed the country, even by 2009, to return very swiftly to a tolerable level of growth.</div>
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Let's have a look at what happened to growth rates once Saint Osborne had his trusty hands back on the economy, from May 2010 onwards. Everything will be alright now, surely? The only way is up, when you've got the trusty Tories in charge.</div>
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<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6FTR-y41XpNugubkx-zdkcMtRUu80mEG_biQXpNpmBfXLYAbaF8ZzcXtf32UqwVL0oBKAsLCfMwMp9Vf4S6joDu2g9T7_PCuvlrxMWYpq1VaZ18aP3ALkFjBGVUEeOWwD8diTsWiPAzc/s1600/GDP+Growth+2010-2012.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6FTR-y41XpNugubkx-zdkcMtRUu80mEG_biQXpNpmBfXLYAbaF8ZzcXtf32UqwVL0oBKAsLCfMwMp9Vf4S6joDu2g9T7_PCuvlrxMWYpq1VaZ18aP3ALkFjBGVUEeOWwD8diTsWiPAzc/s1600/GDP+Growth+2010-2012.png" height="312" width="640" /></a></b></div>
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Hang on. That's weird. Call me a maniac, but it looks a little bit like growth rates fall off, then return, then fall off again and go into minus figures. But that doesn't sound like "<a href="https://www.conservatives.com/ShareTheFacts/post?name=2-million-more-people-now-work&id=905fa70d-2c8d-4414-9dc3-6e1f03f8d932" target="_blank">the Conservatives' strong leadership and clear economic plan</a>"? I thought that the Conservatives brought stability to the chaos? They know what they're doing, don't they? I mean, they're all ruddy good chaps, aren't they?</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3kFIS9OBaXlW-Uq3ceCKCXuXnP8aJiBTLqBuWmy-XU-w2U_NG-b1VOnnFz7L7qrFfXMc29PGoM33X9RJ0RWAsxqNN6bjXbr22IspKtVTJ2bmQzHiYLMEMbbpatfAjryLv5X46grFUg-w/s1600/Annotated+GDP+Growth+2010-2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3kFIS9OBaXlW-Uq3ceCKCXuXnP8aJiBTLqBuWmy-XU-w2U_NG-b1VOnnFz7L7qrFfXMc29PGoM33X9RJ0RWAsxqNN6bjXbr22IspKtVTJ2bmQzHiYLMEMbbpatfAjryLv5X46grFUg-w/s1600/Annotated+GDP+Growth+2010-2013.jpg" height="425" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">To explore and play around with this data - http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth</td></tr>
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The reality is that Labour steered the economy towards recovery:<b> 2% yearly growth</b> in their final year of power. It was only in Osborne's hands that the country was plunged back into
recession, from which it has only just recovered. By
the second quarter of 2012, the famous "<a href="https://www.conservatives.com/ShareTheFacts/post?name=breaking-2-million-jobs-created-since-2010&id=12112550-cdc5-442a-9783-89e2524a6c99" target="_blank">measures David Cameron has put in place to... build a stronger, healthier economy</a>" had successfully ensured<i> <b>the economy was actually shrinking again</b></i>.<br />
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It is the most outrageous myth to claim "<b>Labour ruined the economy; the Tories fixed it</b>". A more honest summary would be "<b>the economy was steadily growing again, until the Tories came to power". </b>The economy stopped growing steadily from May 2010, and reverted back towards recession. Growth became more erratic, and in some quarters the economy shrunk. The Conservatives did not save the economy. The economy did not need saving. And, rather than help, the Conservatives strangled growth and recovery.<br />
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WedgwoodLhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00098905326178964538noreply@blogger.com0