May 2010

For anyone interested in what was cut from Iain Sinclair's recent piece 'The Colossus of Maroussi', the out-takes have been published on his official unofficial website.

Craig Venter has created life. Or at any rate half-life: a synthetic copy of the goat-pathogen Mycoplasma mycoides. Neither creating an artificial genome nor transplanting a genome from one bacterium to another are world firsts – Venter’s team have done both before – but doing both at once is a breakthrough. In Venter's words: ‘It’s the first self-replicating cell on the planet that’s parent is a computer.’ Hidden in its genetic folds are a web address, the names of the 46 scientists who worked on the project and a few choice quotations, all written in a secret code. There’s this from American Prometheus, a biography of Oppenheimer:

Adaptability. That's the quality that got homo sapiens to the head of the evolutionary queue to destroy the planet. The great apes couldn't manage it, though viruses are sneaking up on us in their sneaky way. Adaptability: making the best of a bad job. Cue the Paddy Power Novelty Bet: First to become extinct in the great BP Oil Spill race. Which species will you bet on? Not looking good for the Kemp's Ridley Turtle or your winnings, at 4/5. Brown Pelicans (presumably now sticky black) are a better bet at 8/1. Very likely the adaptability factor (what fun and profit can we get out of this misery?) is in inverse proportion to your distance from the Louisiana coast. A local fisherman or fish probably less likely to take a punt than me sitting in my Cambridge eyrie.

If that's a little depressing, click back at the top of the page from 'First to become extinct' to the higher category of BP Specials and the odds on Next CEO of BP.

Every week of my language degree, we were set a few paragraphs of a novel to translate into French. Someone in Graham Greene would be having a conversation about the sort of country one doesn’t bother learning the French word for; someone in Iris Murdoch crossed a bridge over a river that bubbled and fizzed untranslatably or, at a particularly low point, Bertrand Russell combed out the concept of liberty in a way that should slide comfortably into French but refused to for me. Perched on the edge of a sofa in a book-lined study, each of us would offer up a sentence to be dismantled by a tutor who had decided on the best version 25 years earlier.

Despite the bad memories, I will be dusting off my dictionary for a live translation event at the British Museum next month (it's part of the London Review Bookshop's World Literature Weekend).

There's an oddly fawning interview with the work and pensions secretary in today's Guardian. Iain Duncan Smith is apparently a 'politician with no personal ambition' whose only aim is 'to help the worst off'. He's got all sorts of schemes to get people off benefits and into work, improve their quality of life in the process, and, in the long term, save the government a great deal of money. What a miracle worker. There's some indication even in the Guardian, however, that the Tory noises about making everyone better off and Britain a fairer place are too good to be true.

On 22 September 1979 at about 1 a.m. GMT, a US Vela satellite passing over the South Atlantic detected a double flash of light in the vicinity of Prince Edward Island. The satellite had been launched in 1969 in order to detect atmospheric nuclear tests. When a nuclear weapon explodes in the atmosphere, the heat of the fireball strips the electrons off the atoms and molecules of the surrounding air. For a fraction of a second the ionised air is opaque, until the blast blows it away. The resulting double flash is the signature of a nuclear explosion. At the time the Vela had successfully detected 41 such explosions. Guy Barasch of Los Alamos, the laboratory which ran the Vela programme, concluded that ‘naturally occurring signals would not be mistaken for that of a nuclear explosion’ and that

The World Cup in South Africa is on the brink of chaos. Transport and electricity workers, realising the fabulous blackmail possibilities of tournament disruption, are either already on strike or threatening strikes during the event and other groups of workers are poised to emulate them. The state electricity company is so worried about the power supply that it is handing out warnings that it may cut power to many users in order to guarantee that the floodlights don't go out on games. Householders have been told that they may need to switch off all appliances except their TVs (so that they can receive announcements of coming power outages). Sex workers have been making loud and angry declarations that security regulations are being invoked to cramp their trade. South Africa's police chief has announced that he is hoping against hope that the US team will not get through the opening round since that will signal President Obama's arrival and an enormous increase in the security load.

When I used to cover Liberal Democrat party conferences, the late-night curious journalist could wander the hotel in Harrogate or Torquay, push against a glass door and, at 1.30 in the morning, find a dozen of the delegates in workshop mode, discussing the minutiae of land valuation tax or the single transferable vote. The spirit of earnest still flourishes among them. Their assault on compulsory ID cards and biometric passports lifts the heart. What makes it twitch is Nick Clegg’s invitation to the People to tell the Ministry what reforms it wants. We are getting far too much of ‘the People’ at present.

Wynne Godley, who died last week, wrote half a dozen pieces for the LRB. 'Saving Masud Khan', published in 2001, was 'the story of a disastrous encounter with psychoanalysis which severely blemished my middle years'. A year earlier, he wrote a piece about the fragility of the US economy in which he observed: It seems fair to conclude, at a minimum, that the high level of debt now poses a risk. And in 1992, he wrote presciently about the flaws in the Maastricht Treaty:

The United States had elections this month too. Most of Tuesday's ballots were primaries; one was a by-election, for the House seat long held by the Democrat John Murtha, who died three months ago. Murtha became famous in 2005 when he called for US troops to get out of Iraq. His antiwar position was a surprise: he was never especially liberal, and his district was anything but. Pennyslvania's 12th Congressional district is on the border with West Virginia – it's coal and steel country, except where it's rural, and its median residents are socially conservative, white people who support the Democrats (if they do) thanks to their unions. PA-12 was the only one of America's 435 Congressional districts to choose John Kerry in 2004 but John McCain in 2008; the by-election seemed to present low-hanging fruit for Republicans, and polls had it too close to call.

The shade of Earl Russell, ‘Finality Jack’, still moves among us, and his name is Clegg. The deputy prime minister’s brief in the new administration is political reform, whose compass, he promised in yesterday’s statement, will be wide – as wide as Russell’s vaunted ‘final’ settlement of 1832. Clegg describes the electoral system as ‘broken’. The Electoral Reform Society branded the general election result ‘unrepresentative’. The criticism is invited by the umbrella labelling of the electoral reform statutes of 1832, 1867, 1884, 1918 etc. as ‘Representation of the People’ Acts. The complaint that the system is unrepresentative is levelled indifferently at the simple plurality voting system (‘first past the post’), and at the remaining ‘pale, male, stale’ demographic in the House of Commons. These two complaints are distinct. Clearly proportionality defangs the first charge, of unrepresentativeness, or at least those forms of PR that make seats won directly proportional to votes cast. But it doesn’t fix the Commons’ dominance by middle-aged white males.

Since the publication of his UN report charging Israel (and Hamas) with war crimes, Richard Goldstone has been subjected to a well-orchestrated delegitimisation campaign by Israel. Most recently, new 'revealing information’ was disseminated to the press, accusing the Jewish Zionist South African judge of sentencing 28 black South Africans to death during the apartheid years. 'The judge who sentenced black people to death,' said the speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, ‘should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists.'

The ongoing character assassination of Goldstone isn't an isolated case, but should be seen as part of a large-scale state-branding exercise by Israel. In 2004, the Foreign Ministry hired a number of international PR firms to improve Israel's global reputation. In the words of Ido Aharoni, the head of the ministry's brand management team:

In the coalition negotiations between the three large British parties, both the Tories and Labour offered the Liberal Democrats the possibility of changing to the Alternative Vote electoral system, and in the end David Cameron committed himself to holding a referendum on the issue. This was assumed to appeal to the Lib Dems because the AV generally favours centrist parties: very few Labour or Tory voters would cast their alternative vote for the other but large numbers of both Tories and Labour voters would give the Lib Dems their second preference vote. In particular it is assumed that AV would cement the ‘progressive alliance’ of Labour and the Lib Dems as the majority of both their voters would cast their second preference votes for the other. In fact AV might well not do that.

Most media coverage of the showdown in Bangkok has focused on the increasingly tough tactics of the security forces. On Thursday, a sniper shot and fatally wounded Khattiya Sawasdiphol, a rogue general who’d allied himself with the red shirts, while he was talking to a reporter. Following that shooting, security forces fired live rounds at some groups of protesters (who at times shot back with their own weapons). At least ten people were killed and scores wounded. Yet the army’s show of force is evidence of serious underlying weaknesses.

A Saturday morning, the first in my 40th year, I’m at the Mountain View Cemetery for ‘The Final Disposition Forum: De-Mystifying Death, Funerals, Cemeteries and Ceremonies’. I’ve come to face my fear of being buried in Vancouver, where I’ve lived for the past decade. I arrive late, the film A Family Undertaking has already started. On screen a set of cold-looking turned-out feet. The acoustics are terrible. But the feet are a good set, the ubiquitous final set. I am reassured, when my moment comes, I too will have a set of absolutely dead feet.

So the Lib Dems have caved on Trident, immigration, the euro and voting reform. Quite a list. True, you can't have power without compromise, but too much compromise starts to look a lot like powerlessness. At least they've won a concession from the Tories on income tax: according to the BBC, in their summary of the coalition's policies, there will be a ‘substantial rise in income tax allowances for lowest paid from April 2011’. Hang on a minute, though. Can it be that the public broadcaster has fallen for the new government's spin? Because, as it happens, raising the personal income tax allowance won't benefit the very lowest paid:

The St George’s Cross was flying above Southwark Town Hall as we filed into the waiting room to take our seats. About sixty people from all over the world – Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, France, Afghanistan, Uruguay, Colombia, China – were already there. I had come to watch my wife become a British citizen. She sat, like the other prospective candidates, holding her letter from the Home Office, wrapped up against the London weather. Although most of the assembled group already looked quite well integrated into British society – one was wearing the uniform of a Transport for London official – none of them seemed at home with the climate yet. ‘We are all here for a citizenship ceremony this afternoon, is that correct?’ the council registrar asked. A general mutter of assent. ‘This is a formal occasion so no jeans, no trainers. If you need to go home and change, you can do that now.’ No one had mentioned a dress code. Naturalisation is an arduous process that requires masses of documentation, costs hundreds or even thousands of pounds in legal and Home Office fees, and typically takes years: it seemed a bit tough suddenly to throw up this last hurdle. Fortunately the only inappropriately dressed person was me.

There is agitation abroad in the land to put a likeness of Ronald Reagan on the face of the $50 bill, supplanting that of Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War hero and two-term president of the United States. Grant was a mixed bag; presidents almost always are. Consider Andrew Jackson, the face on the $20 bill, and nowadays a most familiar face since the advent of cash machines. Next time you’re in Oklahoma, why don’t you ask a Cherokee, probably an older one, not attached to an iPod, about Andrew Jackson.

This election campaign was always likely to end with photos of David Cameron standing on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street. The story had far more twists than anyone can have expected, but it’s ended up at the place where it’s been heading for some time. Still – quite a ride. The final flurry was the flurriest of all, with Brown’s resignation and the accompanying offer of a deal on PR bouncing the Tories into increasing their competing offer. At the same time, many Labour figures began to panic at the prospect of being shoehorned back into power via a coalition of arguable legitimacy. Some comments here have pointed to Britain’s rich history of unelected prime ministers. The history is indeed there, but I don’t think it’s relevant in the current circumstances. An unelected PM coming to power in a minority coalition in the most hostile media environment a Labour premier has ever faced: that’s an unprecedented formula, one which threatened to crash the party through its core-vote electoral floor.

Considered purely as a piece of politics, both the content and the timing of Brown’s resignation were masterly. He gave the Tories time to not-quite make a deal – four days, the same amount of time Wilson gave Heath in 1974. Then he did two things which fundamentally alter the equation for the Lib Dems: he removed himself as problem and he made an offer on the alternative vote and PR which the Tories can’t match.

The sloppy administration of the general election – long queues at polling stations, voters locked out, not enough ballot papers – has rightly caused outrage among those affected and may yet cause legal or other problems. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise. I used to assume that the system in the UK was relatively clean and efficient. Of course, no one is perfect, and every election is followed by police investigations into dirty work of one kind or another. Before election day this time I counted six press reports of police investigations, most but not all concerned with postal votes, once described by a judge as ‘an invitation to fraud’. But I began to look at our system more sceptically after being an official observer at five elections in states of the former Soviet Union. I was part of a team run by the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, the members of which agreed in 1990 that it would be a good idea to observe each other's elections.

No news yet. In with all the extraordinary excitement and unprecedented constitutional upheaval, I’m also starting to get a little bit bored. Apparently the mood-music or hint-music is that they’ll reach a deal today. According to the Guardian, ‘Cameron is understood to have told senior Tories that he would not be offering a referendum on electoral reform under his government’. That has to mean no deal, surely? But according to the FT, ‘The Lib Dems are demanding that Mr Cameron moves immediately to introduce a version of electoral reform – the so-called alternative vote – as a sign of his intention to carry out more far-reaching reforms over time.’ He’s also trying to insist on fixed term Parliaments.

As far as I can tell, there’s very little actual news at all in the papers today. Yards of speculation and comment, but hardly any actual news. The only thing I can find is a Sunday Times report that the Lib Dems and Tories are discussing a ‘preferendum’, to set a menu of options for electoral reform before voters. This would happen during the next Parliament, as a precursor to a referendum on whichever specific reform the voters chose:

‘This election result is not viable,’ Vernon Bogdanor said yesterday afternoon. ‘There will have to be another within months.’ (At least I think it was Vernon Bogdanor – it may have been David Butler or Peter Hennessy. It was a long siege in front of the TV, and apologies all round if I have misattributed. Constitutional experts don’t look alike but they do sound alike, I suppose because they are men from a similarish background who tend to be say-ing similarish things.) That had the ring of truth. What’s going on at the moment, with everyone busting them-selves to look serious and statesmanlike, is known in the American Senate as a ‘gravitas frenzy’. But the underlying realities are what they are. A Labour-Lib Dem pact will not work. Their combined totals only get them to 315, 11 short of a majority. Labour lost the election and the Lib Dems would be crazy to look as if they were putting Brown back in office. They would also be crazy to put Labour back in while the leadership issue was unresolved; the public wouldn’t swallow a second consecutive Labour prime minister for whom they hadn’t voted.

Well that was a downer. It’s a good thing that the Labour party didn’t suffer a generational wipe-out of the sort which seemed possible a couple of months ago. But the prospect of real structural change seems remote today, as the parties jostle and try to find a way of stitching up the Lib Dems with a referendum on electoral reform that they are sure to lose. It’s a paradox of our shitty system that the disappointing Lib Dem share of seats (on an increased share of the vote) ends up with them having more power than they’ve had in many decades. As for that system:

Britain decides! Or maybe it sort-of decides! Maybe it decides that it can’t quite make up its mind! But that counts as a decision too! A corker of a point from yesterday’s politicalbetting.com. It’s such a strong and simple point that I can’t believe I’ve never heard it made before. Here it is: only once since 1945 has the UK gone from a majority government of one party to a majority government of another. Which election was it?

In Germany a man married his cat when he learned from the vet that she was dying.The article say that it's illegal to marry animals in Germany, which suggests that it might not be illegal to marry animals somewhere else. As it was, he went through a form of marriage with puss (or Cecilia as she is known to her husband) officiated by an actress. I've heard of people marrying people who are dying because they need to make sure of taking care of any children, or to avoid death duties and family problems over inheritance. The article doesn't say whether the cat had an independent income, or whether there were children or kittens between the German and his pet.

When you get in the groove of talking about the general election, it’s easy to forget that for a lot of people it’s barely taking place at all. Of the 650 Parliamentary seats, not more than about 150 are truly in play. If you’re living in the other 500, your vote barely matters. A few hundred yards up the road from where I’m writing and I’d be in Battersea, a Labour-held marginal which is one of the Tories’ top targets. About 300 yards the other way and I’d be in Streatham, a once-safe Labour seat which is now 75th on the Lib Dem target list. It would be in play if Labour had a total meltdown, and Clegg paid a campaign visit there a couple of days ago. Labour activists talk about it as a marginal seat, which not so long ago they didn’t do. About a mile in a different direction and I’d be in Tooting, which is an important marginal because it is the Tories 112th target seat. That’s significant because if the Tories win Tooting it means they are right on the cusp of power: Tooting would need a 6.09 per cent swing and the national figure the Tories are aiming for is 6.8 per cent.

The LRB on general elections past: 2005, 2001, 1997, 1992, 1987, 1983.

I don’t know what kind of demographic targeting apparatus the Lib Dems are packing in this election, but it seems to have determined that there are votes to be had from readers of the Saturday Guardian with a taste for the great masters of modernistic gloom and a relaxed attitude to not namechecking Nelson Mandela. The evidence:

Staff in the philosophy department at Middlesex University were told last week that they were being shut down. You won’t have read about it in the papers. The numbers are small – just six full-time faculty, a hundred or so students – and it would be easy to imagine that this was the sort of trimming that every university will have to undertake as they respond to Peter Mandelson’s announcement, in December, that cuts of £950 million will be made to the university budget over the next three years. Easy to imagine, too, that the departments forced to close will be those that aren’t doing so well: they will have falling student numbers or mediocre research ratings, perhaps a poor track record attracting grants. Philosophy, though, is the highest-rated research subject at Middlesex; in the most recent research assessment exercise in 2008, the department was ranked 13th out of 41 institutions in the UK, ahead of Warwick, Sussex, Glasgow, Durham and York, and first among the post-1992 universities. Undergraduate applications are healthy; its MA programme is the biggest in the country. Explaining why, despite all these things, philosophy had to go, Ed Esche, dean of the school of arts and humanities, told staff that reputation made no ‘measurable’ contribution to the university: it couldn't be allowed to interfere with their calculations. What, then, does matter?

With everyone and his Labour dog calling for tactical voting, the always-good-value Tim Harford made an important point on the Today programme this morning. He says that about 10 per cent of voters report having voted tactically in previous elections. That might not sound like much but in most constituencies it is usually more than enough to determine the difference between coming first and coming third. The important point, though, was the one he made next:

So, 72 hours to go, and the polls are pointing with a quavering, accusatory finger at a hung Parliament. Or maybe it’s a confident, optimistic finger – anyway, that’s where they’re pointing. YouGov has the Tory/Lab/Lib Dem projection as 34/28/29, ICM has it as 33/28/28. UK Polling Report looked at all five of the polls published on Sunday, four of which showed some momentum for the Tories after the third debate, and all of which showed the Tories as falling short, with the lowest projection 264 seats and the highest 315 (the target, remember, is 326).

Last Monday, the Belgian prime minister handed in his resignation to King Albert II and another Belgian government fell. The cause: the withdrawal of a small Flemish party from the Christian Democrat Yves Leterme’s five-party coalition. New legislative elections have yet to be called but in the meantime Belgian politicians have managed to find something they can all agree on. On Thursday, the lower house of parliament voted almost unanimously (136 deputies out of 138, with two abstentions) to ban the wearing of the full Islamic veil, or niqab, in public places. The legislation doesn’t anywhere actually mention the veil – merely forbidding 'all clothing completely or mainly hiding the face' – but no one has suggested that it’s aimed at motorcycle couriers or people whose idea of a good night out is a masked ball.

Last Thursday John Mearsheimer gave a talk at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC, entitled 'The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews v. the New Afrikaners': The story I will tell is straightforward. Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans – to include many American Jews – Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa.

Yesterday I mentioned some of the various bizarre, horse-tradey outcomes which might arise from a super-close electoral result. Here’s one of my favourites: that the Tories win either 323 or 324 seats. This result would leave them one or two short, because there are 650 seats so the winning line for a majority is 325. Except that because the five current (and presumably future) Sinn Féin MPs don’t take up their seats in Westminster, the winning line for a majority in the Commons is in fact 323 seats. 1991, IRA lands a mortar in the garden of Downing Street during Cabinet meeting; 2010, political wing of IRA ensures that the Tories have a functioning Parliamentary majority. That strange ghostly noise is Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera either laughing or turning in their graves, it’s hard to tell.

One way of mapping the difference between electoral systems is to plot them on a continuum between fairness and clearness. The two qualities tend to have a negative correlation. Countries in which each individual vote can plausibly be said to have some bearing on the outcome – i.e. countries with a system which is to some extent proportional – are fairer. But they often end up with coalition governments. Countries with some version of first-past-the-post tend to have clear electoral outcomes which in effect disregard the relevance of many votes. The German, Italian and Israeli (for instance) electoral systems are fair but not clear; the British electoral system is the epitome of a system which is unfair but brutally clear. In theory. Not this time, though:

Good to hear that the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health has stopped its operations with immediate effect. Disappointing, though, that the reason is not because its founder has taken on board Oliver Wendell Holmes's views on homeopathy – 'a mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameful imposition' – but because of a more mundane alleged deceit: two people have been arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering. When Holmes wrote his essay in 1842 he believed that homeopathy would soon go the way of touching for the scrofula – another Royal Cure – and Bishop Berkeley's Tar Water ('good for so many things').