Reblogged from Media Studies is Shit:

The fabulaous Unthanks singing The Testimony of Patience Kershaw from their lastest album, Here’s the Tender Coming. The song is based upon the testimony given by a young women, Patience Kershaw, to an investigation by Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission of 1842, which looked into the conditions of labor in the mines. The Mines Act of 1842 that resulted prohibited the employment in the mines of all women and of boys under thirteen . No. 26. — Patience Kershaw, aged 17, May 15. My father has been dead …

Reblogging The Unthanks singing The Testimony of Patience Kershaw because it’s beautiful and because if you missed it first time around then there is a hole in your life that only this song can fill…

Since there was nobody putting the case for the alternative, Paxman, Finkelstein and Meyer rounded on the moderate opinions of Tristram Hunt, who seemed to have some reservations about unfettered capitalism, thought the welfare state a good thing and liked cooperatives. Poor young Tristram was given a right going over, while Finkelstein’s erroneous assertion that Eric Hobsbawm had been some sort of apologist for the Soviet Union for most of his long life went unchecked by Paxman (although Hunt tried to pull him up on it) and Meyer’s sweeping and ahistorical conviction that capitalism is somehow in our nature wasn’t remarked upon, when the appropriate response would have been to laugh in her face for her staggering, crass ignorance.

When I watch Newsnight I know why we find it so difficult to imagine an alternative to capitalism: the standard of public debate is absolutely abysmal.

Let me declare my hand I’m neither a Nationalist nor a Unionist (the capitals are deliberate). But I will confess to being a unionist (lower case, this time) in the sense that I think collectivism is a good thing and relationships of warm horizontal comradeship and political communion are infinitely preferable to myopic separatism.

Alas the United Kingdom has never been a union of equals and as a consequence has long encouraged separatism and nationalism. It has been dominated by England, and more specifically the interests of London, while its constitution is archaic and undemocratic, with its Protestant monarchy, unelected second chamber, and vile class system.

There is absolutely nothing to indicate that this lamentable state of affairs will end any time soon, so it seems to me entirely understandable that there is a sizeable portion of the Scottish electorate looking to escape what Tom Nairn refers to as Ukania.

The election of a Conservative government has probably hastened the process of breaking up, and Cameron’s pronouncements this week will have accelerated the further disintegration of the very thing he says that he wants to preserve. When you can boast only one MP in Scotland, it’s bloody presumptuous to start dictating the terms of a future Scottish referendum.

Can the Union be saved? Maybe. Because this strikes me as a strange break up. I’m not sure that most Scots are conviction nationalists (I know many of them are deeply suspicious of the SNP or ‘tartan Tories’). Their proposed secession strikes me as motivated by the feeling that they are put-upon, unappreciated and unloved by the English. It’s a marriage that has little real animosity, just the growing mutual disinterest of the two parties. So, I wonder, as the dominant partner in the relationship, what would England do to preserve the Union? Cameron has resorted to bullying and hectoring. But what about the English electorate? They seem largely indifferent, if anything a more assertive Scotland has antagonised some of them.

Now, I’m sorry to employ the marriage metaphor to describe Anglo-Scottish relations. I appreciate that it is over-used but seems entirely appropriate at this time. Also this week’s events have reminded me of similar metaphor that comments on another set of UK relations that I’m more familiar with. In Pat Murphy and John Davies’s experimental film Maeve, there is moment when a British soldier and a young Belfast women are pictured engaged in a loveless embrace; he humping her in a rather mechanical manner while she stares impassively over his shoulder. The scene has always struck me as a comment on the curiously loveless relationship that Ulster Protestants endure with the rest of the UK. And Davies and Murphy seem to be asking: why would anyone tolerate such a miserable, unsatisfying political congress? Indeed.

Political unions are surely not just practical projects: they’re not just about pounds, shillings and euros. There is an emotional element to them. But if the only thing that keeps England and Scotland in the same cold house is economic expediency or fear in straitened times, then that is a sure recipe for growing mutual resentment, and a more acrimonious break up in the future.

…that every despicable, shitty regime has made a feature of the its leader’s apparent love of children and their love for him?

Pictures to promote the idea of the glorious leader as the father of all his people…

… the benign, smiling patriarch surrounded by adoring, grateful cherubs.

But these images carry an implicit message of power.

They are a reminder that everyone’s acquenscience to the prevailing social order is anticipated…

…or else.

Merry Christmas…

It was on display again in yesterday’s Guardian, where David Eastwood, Vice Chancellor of the University of Birmingham and a panelist on the Browne review into higher education, lamented that universities are ‘at the heart of a fiercely contested new politics’.

I would encourage you to read Eastwood’s article for yourself, not because there’s anything particularly interesting about his lame defense of the Browne report. It is the tone of the article and the underlying assumptions that are most striking.

Eastwood gives the game away early, exposing his patrician sensibilities, when he notes with apparent approval how:

Higher Education policy used to be developed off-stage, with university leaders, mandarins and ministers locked in serious, often fierce, but apparently seemly debate – a bit like a game of croquet, really. The process might be leavened by the odd white paper, occasionally simmered in a Royal Commission, and legisaltion would then finally pass, on the rare occasion it was necessary, without parliamentary debate boiling over.

It appears a source of immense sorrow for Eastwood that the great unwashed are now taking a close interest in higher education policy. No doubt this interest in on account of a university education no longer being considered the preserve of a privileged few and as a consequence people who wouldn’t know a croquet mallet from a golf club feel they have a vested interest in the debate.

Eastwood, on the other hand, feels that the public should keep its nose out of higher education policy-making because it’s simply beyond its comprehension. The public’s trespassing into this private world has only lead to a debate about higher education that is ‘contrived’ and ‘ideologically synthetic’.

Eastwood argues that too many people jumped to conclusions about the Browne report based on ‘scraps of misrepresentation and half-truths’. Crucially, according to Birmingham VC, the public seem to have mistaken the real issue at the heart of Browne as being the rise in tuition fees when in fact it is financial aid. Only ‘belatedly’ have people read the report and are now ‘disconcerted’ to find a ‘coherent vision’. Eastwood then claims that he has lost count of how many people have told him, ‘quietly’, that Browne was right.

There is a great deal of wishful thinking here. Who, exactly, has belatedly come to accept Browne as offering a coherent vision? And is it possible that those people ‘quietly’ telling the Birmingham VC that Browne was right are just voices in Eastwood’s head?

More worryingly, the VC’s article is indicative of a political process that assumes certain class privileges and roles. Benevolent leaders make policy in private and present it as a fait accompli to the bewildered but grateful masses. If this system fails then confusion reigns, the masses get spooked and we get scenes like those from last year when Parliament was forced to protect itself from angry students and school children, meeting behind barricades and mounted, armed police.

It takes extraordinary arrogance to tell the public that policy is better made without them; to accuse them of misunderstanding and mistaking the issues, and inventing objections; and then claiming without the slightest evidence that the scales have fallen from their eyes and people are coming around to your patrician way of thinking. But then again that kind of contempt and arrogance was built into the Browne report, which proposed to leave the future of higher education in the hands of the self-interested, individual consumer.

Just as Eastwood configures the citizen as a child-like dolt, he and Browne flatter the consumer in their lauding of student choice. But the only real choice available is implicit in Eastwood’s article, and that’s the choice cooked up behind closed doors – leavened and simmered without boiling over into the public debate that he so loathes.

There seems to be a notion in the upper echelons of universities that students, quite literally, don’t know what to think unless it is delivered with copious bullet-points on Powerpoint slides and extensive lecture notes published on-line through Blackboard or WebCT.

Since the idea of reading books became unfashionable, complex ideas like pseudo-individualisation, commodity fetishism and ideology must be defined in handy, McNugget-sized bullet-points. Foundational concepts in an academic discipline that have been debated through the pages of of hundreds (nay thousands) of books and journals, need to be reduced to one poorly constructed sentence on a slide, projected onto a lecture room wall, copied down and learned by rote. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. In many respects its an entirely adequate and necessary first step for students on the road to learning and understanding. The problem is it is too often the only and last step.

One thing I’ve always been keen to combat in the seminar room is dictionary-type definitions of concepts. Dictionaries by their nature strive to be definitive, which is fine, sometimes, but in higher education we are seeking to assess academic ability and that requires students to engage with the scholarly literature in a field, to assess it for themselves, draw conclusions and reach a considered position. The mere reproduction of dictionary definitions or bullet-points is inimical to this ambition.

In the past, when I used lecture notes and visual aids with bullet-points, most student essays were mere reproductions of the information I’d disseminated. It was as if I held the definitive answer to everything. I confess, that while I do a bloody good impersonation of him, alas, I am not God Almighty. So a couple of years ago I knocked the bullet-points, hand-outs and lecture notes on the head and told students that lectures would be illustrative but that their leaning depended largely on their own independent efforts. The results were interesting. Some students read nothing and failed or did badly: no great surprise there. But on the other hand, there was a marked improvement (I felt) in the quality of most students’ work because freed from their dependency on ‘teaching aids’ they had actually gone and read the appropriate scholarship and as a consequence their understanding of the subject grew and their knowledge had greater depth.

I may be a pinko-faggot but I’ve always assumed my job is to encourage independent adult learners – free-thinking grown-ups. I make no bones about my politics and in my lectures I present arguments based on my research and reading within the field but I make clear to students that I don’t necessarily want them to think what I think. I want them to think for themselves and that is why I insist that the lecture is a starting point from which they should begin to explore and research the area for themselves. I offer an indicative reading list but I encourage and reward reading beyond set texts. And ultimately I am not averse to ideas that contradict or challenge my own. As I impress upon students, I am interested in assessing their academic abilities, not their ability to reproduce faithfully what I said in the lecture.

This means that some of the best student work I’ve marked has flown in the face of my own conclusions, and some of it has forced me to rethink my position, which in turn impacts upon how I teach the subject in the future. I don’t think students quite appreciate that at university they are part of a community of scholars and their contribution is important and valuable.

One of the best dissertations I’ve ever read argued that advertisements are an art form: in fact the very pinnacle of capitalist art. I found this politically challenging but it was well research, the analysis was very sharp and it was cogently argued. It was undeniably first class work, no matter how provocative I found it.

I suspect that this sort of intellectual generosity and openness is one of the reasons why the Left has never seized the commanding heights of the UK economy, let alone the campus. But that’s a discussion for another day. The point I’m making here is that the independence of thought illustrated by the dissertation on advertising is all too rare among undergraduates who prefer to be ‘spoon-feed’ information. This is killing education and I suspect it is something which starts long before students reach university.

The Economist argued recently that as Northern Ireland attempts to attract foreign investment it relies heavily on one perceived strength: education. However, while the region has exceptional GCSE and A Level results this is not a sign that Northern Ireland is teeming with intelligent, ‘independent thinkers’. It seems it might have more to do with pupils being trained in passing exams. Naturally, The Economist’s principle concern is that a mere training in the art of passing exams does nothing to encourage entrepreneurship and as a consequence, it says, it is little wonder 30% of Northern Ireland’s workforce ‘toil’ in the public sector, compared with 20% in the rest of the UK.

Someone needs to give The Economist a history lesson because I doubt that Northern Ireland’s infamous ‘workhouse economy’ can be explained as an effect of its education system’s shortcomings. And yet, I share some of The Economist’s concerns about a form of ‘education’ that is instrumental.

Of course, Powerpoint, Blackboard or WebCT are not really responsible for the demise of independent learning and thinking. But their peculiar use as substitutes for in-depth reading, research and thinking is a symptom of a much deeper problem.

The mission of any educational institution is not primarily to retain and progress students to graduation, nor to compete in schools’ league tables. It is to encourage, facilitate and produce academically able, independent thinkers. Student progression and topping league tables are just by-products of that goal.

The addict-like dependency of students upon ‘teaching aids’ is a signal that we’re falling far short of education’s mission. So if education frees itself from the debilitating audit culture I’ll start using bullet-points and disseminating lecture notes again. In that context, they might have a useful role to play.

This is a ’2 in 1′ post. For some reason I just couldn’t separate them in my head. First some reflections on the pusillanimity of Northern Ireland’s contemporary political class and then recalling Bernadette Devlin (now McAliskey), elected at the age of 21 to serve as the MP for the Mid-Ulster constituency between ’69 and 74.

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After the public sector strike on Nov 30th I sent a message to my MLAs asking had they crossed a picket line that day. None of them replied. Maybe they just didn’t want to get drawn on the issue, wishing to avoid controversy. But that would be a little surprising given that Northern Ireland has a history of politicians noisily proclaiming their religious and national affiliations. Why would they be squeamish about commenting on the public sector day of action? Surely a strike by the likes of teachers, nurses and civil servants is relatively small beer to politicians that have grappled with major constitutional questions amid the thunder of antagonistic and violent traditions. Or perhaps that’s the point: pensions, pay, working conditions and cuts to public services just don’t move politicians whose hearts were forged in the furnace of Northern Ireland troubles.

Alternatively, maybe, my MLAs simply crossed picket lines and weren’t going to be held to account by some commie blogger.

I should point out that all my MLAs are unionists of one stripe or another and unionists tend to be a bit luke warm on left politics, trade unions and strike action (in my experience). Their’s is a world in which bringing the country to the brink of anarchy to assert the inalienable right of the Loyal Orders process the ’Queen’s highway’ is apparently a ‘do-or-die’ issue. Public sector pensions, clearly, is not.

It’s not just unionists that piss me off. I have very little regard for any of Northern Ireland’s political representatives of which ever persuasion. With a few notable exceptions they strike me as hapless, hopeless and I’m not sure what any of them really stand for, not anymore.

I think of them as a Mafia of the Mediocre with two wings to the organisation. There are those who earned their political reputations during the 30-odd years of violent conflict and have traded upon them ever since. ‘Normal’ politics is not really their forte and although the peace process has institutionalised and domesticated them, you still get the feeling that they’re more at home with the politics of street confrontation than the politics of government.

Then there is a ‘new breed’ of professional politician, largely ‘uncontaminated’ by the past, who were hoping to move into a career administering the much lauded ‘peace dividend’ but now find themselves confronted with austerity Ulster and angry public sector unions. They are part of that nascent bourgeoisie that emerged out of the golf clubs and garden centres in the early 1990s to push for peace. What brought them out of their self-imposed political hibernation was the chance to share in the ‘triumph of capitalism’. The biggest obstacle this was their warring country-men and women. Pacify that lot and there was surely a seat at the big table of capitalist globalisation for little old Northern Ireland. And that has indeed come to pass, put the pickings are slim as it turns out.

Today Northern Ireland’s Assembly of Dad’s Army-style veterans and ‘troubles’ draft dodgers is charged with leading the region into an uncertain future. I am full of trepidation at the thought of it. So much so that I sincerely wish that the draft-dodgers would rediscover their passion for golf and gardening and fuck off back to North Down and Jordanstown. And that Dad’s Army would rekindle the fire that once burned within them but this time put it to better use and fight for an alternative to the capitalist dystopia before us.

The North of Ireland’s once proud or ignominous history of insurrection (depending on your point of view) counts for naught. Our leaders once mobilized entire communities to bring down Stormont and Sunningdale in their day. Now all that belligerence and bellicosity is blown out and they lie prostrate at the feet of the market. I bet the British government wish they’d known sooner that all it would take to pacify troublesome Ulster was exposure to global capitalism.

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Here is something I found while rummaging around a local newspaper library. It offers a fitting contrast to the behaviour of Northern Ireland’s current crop of pusillanimous scab-politicians.

Click on the picture and it should pop-up large enough to read the text of the report. If it’s hard to read, here’s the gist…

In the wake of Bloody Sunday, the House of Commons debated the shooting dead of 13 civil rights demonstrators by British Paratroopers in Derry on 3oth January 1972. Bernadette Devlin, the Mid-Ulster MP, had been part of the civil rights march and had begun to address the demonstration when the shooting began. She was denied the opportunity to report her experience or feelings to the Commons, even though it is the convention to hear any MP who has been an eyewitness to an incident under discussion. When the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling suggest that the Paras had fired in self-defence, Devlin set upon him, punching him and pulling his hair before being dragged away. Later she expressed no remorse but said she was only sorry she hadn’t ‘choked’ him and would do it again if she felt it was necessary.

The X Factor – aimed squarely at viewers aged 16 to 24 – has helped secure Simon Cowell an estimated £200 million fortune. So far, its Saturday shows have raked in £75 million in advertising – and slots in this weekend’s final will sell for £8,000 per second. This year’s sponsorship deal – with Talk Talk – is worth £20 million. The judges’ pay cheques total several million. The show is expected to rake in £5 million from phone votes – just from the final. The show’s advertising deal with Marks and Spencer is worth several million more. Yet the X Factor can’t stump up the minimum wage – that’s £6.08 an hour – for their hard-working interns?

The enquiry comes as it was revealed by Liz Jones in the Daily Mail that the show employs 4 unpaid interns.  Jones was shocked by what she found backstage. There was apparently no sign of the contestant’s celebrity mentors. ‘You know, the judges who hug so prodigiously, who flick tears from their lashes with expensive, etiolated fingernails, who weep and grieve and encourage and impart wisdom.’ Instead Jones finds ‘the X Factor style team’!

I start in wardrobe, a freezing warehouse staffed by Laury and her team, supplemented by four unpaid interns. Bear in mind these young people work seven days a week, from 8am until gone 10pm. No wonder the interns, too, are exhausted and in tears.

But at least, as one team member tells me, ‘they are now employable’. Fantastic. Just don’t tell them about the £8,000-per-second the show will earn from advertisers for a slot in next weekend’s final.

In a country where youth unemployment has passed the 1 million mark, what possible justification can there be for TV show that generates vast sums of money not to pay it’s interns a living wage? But that’s exactly what Graduate Fog is asking.

It gets worse. The BBC reported this week that graduates are actually paying for their internships. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention you will know that this has already been covered on Media Studies is Shit back in October (scoop!). The BBC story highlights the plight of Roz Tuplin, who graduated in 2010 with a post-graduate degree in English Literature, which she thought would be good grounding for a job in the media. She figured that she’d need work experience, but after a year of trying to get a placement, she decided to pay employers £65 a day to let her through the door. In total, Roz will pay £260 for a four-day work experience placement with a TV production company in London.

And, of course, this is all happening in the week that a Geology graduate with ambitions to work in the museum sector decided to take legal action against the government for a scheme that forced her into unpaid work in an area unrelated to her ambitions. Cait Reilly was told if she didn’t take up work experience in Poundland she’d have her benefits cut.

If all the above leaves you fuming, take a look at Ross Perlin’s book, Inter Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. Perlin has been an intern himself while a postgraduate in London, although most of the book looks at the situate in the US.

He argues that the pressure on young people to take up internships is great and growing but what an internship actually means is very ill-defined, perhaps conveniently so for employers. Internships seem to exist outside of employment laws – ‘there are seldom any rules of the road, any standards or codes of conduct that are honoured – only vague expectations’.

Some of the tasks performed by interns vary from the trivial to the jaw-dropping. Perlin recalls an intern that ferried the boss’s urine sample to the doctor; carried bags of leaking garbage around in their own car looking for somewhere to dump it; shopping for full-time staff; and the absolute nadar, two students in the Netherlands, aged 14 and 15, were interns as prostitutes in the local red light district. I kid you not!!! Check here.

Perlin argues that the internship is changing the nature of education and work in the US. Entry into the white collar world increasingly depends upon undertaking an internship, many of which have taken on the character of ‘a form of mass exploitation hidden in plain sight’.

It’s a world closed to those who can’t afford to work for nothing. But even for those sufficiently ‘privileged’ to have an internship the returns are not all they’re cracked up to be. Perlin writes:

…focused training and mentoring are vanishingly rare, as interns soon discover; most ultimately learn the ropes on their own if at all, on the sly if necessary. Employers dictate the terms of hiring and employment: don’t expect protection from courts, unions, universities, or anyone else. Just as troubling is the devaluing of young people’s labor. Once you’ve started ‘spinning’ your work, it’s hard to stop. Once you’re told that your work isn’t worth anything, you stop taking pride in it, you stop giving your best. A tacit mutual agreement sets in between supervisor and intern: I’ll write the letter of reference, you make the coffee. Instead of finding dynamic, character-building, entrepreneurial opportunities, despondent interns cycle through uncompensated, impotent roles collecting nebulous lines on their CVs.

Pause now for a second and consider the life prospects of your average kid.  It looks pretty shit these days, doesn’t it? If they go to university they will leave with an extraordinary debt. But that investment won’t be enough to get them paid employment. They will need to work for fuck all to acquire some dubious work experience. They may even have to pay for the privilege. Once sufficiently ’employable’, they will in all likelihood be confronted with a private sector built on vast disparities of pay and opportunity, not to mention temporary contracts, long hours, no trade union protection and few employment rights. Training and staff development will be something that they’ll be expected to do on their own time and pay for themselves. Then they’ll work ’til they die or retire in miserable poverty.

This is a system in meltdown. It certainly isn’t sustainable. You cannot build for the future by neglecting, ruthlessly exploiting and demoralising the next generation.

There was a tremendous chorus of condemnation directed at the youths who participated in the English riots during the summer. So why the silence on the gross abuse of the young by employers now? Where are the Mafia of the Mediocre when kids are getting fucked over by bosses. Jesus, politicians were falling over each other to get infront of the cameras and microphones during the riots, ranting about feral youths and gang culture. But the scandal of unpaid work? _________________ Nothing. Granted, some of the Bullingdon boys have been busy over in Europe, where they resurrected the old bulldog-spirit, stood up to the Krauts and Frogs, and ’saved the City of London’ (as one of the Tory-vermin put it on BBC 5 Live this morning). Hurrah! Let’s hear it for the Eton Rifles. Alas, there is no sign of that resolve when it comes to looking after the young people of the UK and standing up to unscrupulous employers.

If I was young I’d be angry. If I was a parent (and I am) I’d be fearful for my children’s future. If I was a politician I’d be ashamed, if any of them knew shame…

With warm regards to everyone over at the TV Watercooler.

Now, I’m off to listen to Richard Thompson’s The End of the Rain. Try it yourself for size…

Public sector union’s march, Belfast, 30 Nov

After watching Nick Clegg on The Andrew Marr Show, promising to tackle exorbitant executive pay, I have decided that the government is in trouble on the issue of public sector pensions and they know it.

Vince Cable was sabre rattling on this very issue last month, but the appearance of the Deputy PM talking it up again on a Sunday morning is interesting. Suddenly the Government wants to be seen as evenhanded – getting tough with the private sector, having spent the run-up to the strike being tough on the public sector.

This late attempt at balance is not a signal that the government is seeking to be fair in its economic policy. It’s a sign of disarray, particularly in getting its message out.

The Con-Dem’s have been frantically trying to pull together a coherent narrative on the issue of public sector cuts for months. They started by telling us we were all in it together and as a consequence the cosseted, fat-cats of the public sector would have to take a hit with everybody else. The hard-pushed tax payer, they said, couldn’t be expected to keep public servants in a life of relative luxury, especially when the private sector - the real wealth creator that will lead us out of recession – was struggling.

Behind this message is a much nastier inference that the public sector is a parasite, sucking the private sector dry or diverting much need funds from productive sections of the economy to the non-productive.

This wasn’t a very convincing story to begin with since the people who work in the public sector are themselves tax payers and well aware of their value to the economy. On the other hand, those not employed in the public sector are probably intimate with someone who is. Many will have relatives who work in the public sector. Many will rely on the services of nurses, teachers and/or civil servants. Either way, the government has a real fight on its hands if it wants to convince anybody that the public servants we meet day-to-day are fat-cats.

Indeed, isn’t is conceivable that members of the public consider nurses, teachers etc, as being more ‘productive’ and essential to their well-being than, say, financial traders and CEOs. At the very least, most people understand that educating children, looking after everyone’s health and administrating welfare are not wastes of time and money but fundamental to any modern, competitive economy. Saying otherwise just makes the government sound stupid. And harping on about perceived, modest advantages of enjoyed by public sector workers serves only to highlight the desperate conditions endured by many in the private sector and so risks fermenting rebellion everywhere. The government had to change tact…

If the old divide and rule strategy failed to create sufficient antagonism between public and private sectors, what about dividing older colleagues from their younger work mates with a few exclusive concessions? That failed also, leaving the government looking impotent and so the story changed again.

A national strike will be massively disruptive, the government said. It will cost the economy £500 million pounds. But this narrative was born legless because the government had been making the case for months before-hand that the public sector is inefficient and bloated and non-productive. By highlighting the costs of the strike the government was now acknowledging the public sector’s economic and broader social value – a value it previously didn’t want to admit because it wanted to cut it. Now the Con-Dems looked slippery.

And so, despite the lies, the phony concessions and the misinformation, the strike went ahead and the government immediately changed its tune yet again. This time it tried to present the strike as a dismal failure, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It said that the unions’ claim that 2 million workers came out on strike was inflated but it was the Prime Minister who ended up with statistical egg on his face when he asserted that 40% of England’s 21,700 state schools were open. In fact 68 per cent of UK state schools were shut entirely, and 14 per cent partially closed. In England, 62 per cent were shut, while the figure in Scotland was as high at 99 per cent.

My own experience of the strike was that this was one of the best turn-outs I’ve ever seen. In the past I’ve had to ask colleagues to join picket lines. This time I had colleagues coming to me to volunteer: so many, in fact, that the union had more than it needed on the day. I wonder how many other workers and people found a strange disconnect between government spin and their own experience of the day?

And I wonder whether that disconnect carried over into news coverage of the event. On BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, one journalist expressed surprise that so many parents he spoke to supported the strike despite the disruption to their children’s schooling. Still, in the interests of ‘balance’ the media presented both public supporters and opponents in equal measure, as if this was somehow representative of public opinion… but that’s doubtful.

A BBC poll suggested that 61% of people believe public sector workers were justified in going on strike over pension changes. A poll for Sky News returned 72% support for the strikers and a Daily Mail on-line poll showed 84% support, which must have been embarrassing for such an anti-union paper. Granted, the Daily Mail poll result looks like a well organised campaign to infuriate the paper and its readers but still… 84% and its Right-wing subscribers couldn’t orchestrate a fightback?

Cameron’s attempts to paint the strike as a public relations failure and a ‘damp squib’ where left looking threadbare by Wednesday night.

His government is loosing the arguments and while the Tories can always depend upon lumpen-Toffs, lickspittles and liars to keep delivering the government’s dubious message up and down the country, this time it might not be enough to keep them ahead. That’s because there is another more powerful and persuasive narrative emerging from diverse sources.

There are new kids on the block that don’t look like the militant ‘folk devils’ Michael Gove tried to conjure for the public imagination last week. UK Uncut has highlighted the unfairness in the tax system and it’s a message that the public are open to, simply because it’s true. The Occupy movement is forcing the question of inequality and corporate greed onto the agenda and it is resonating with the public because you don’t need a degree in economics to see how fundamentally unfair the world is. And the leaders of the public sector unions are ill-cast as Michael Gove’s militants. They’ve been consistently articulate and reasonable advocates of their members’ cause.

The government’s message has been confused and duplicitous but it has nevertheless set the news agenda, although with sometimes cringeable results. The BBC’s Nick Robinson must wish he’d been less slavish in his devotion to government spin on the day of the strike when he manufactured an encounter between a striking teacher and a cafe owner. This was supposed to somehow illustrate the antagonism between public and private sectors. In the end it really was was a ‘damp squib’. Sure, there was no great meeting of minds but neither did sparks fly. In the end the whole episode was so awkward and so contrived looking that Robinson was left elaborating furiously to give it any substance.

Awkward and contrived: that just about sums up the government’s message.

Sometimes it’s easy to mistake the erratic and stupid behaviour of your adversary for some sort of  clever, yet indecipherable strategy. There is no cunning to this government right now. It’s simply all-over-the-place and vulnerable. The trade unions can win this one. Not only do they have right on their side but for the first time in a long while they have a narrative that is potentially more persuasive than that of their opponents.

For an alternative take on government spin, check out Academic Anonymous.

Jeremy Clarkson has since apologized. He needn’t have bothered. I for one would never have sought an apology from him and I wouldn’t (and didn’t) write to complain about his comments.

Why? Because the ‘campaign’ against Clarkson allows him, and all those mediocre men that aspire to live in his image, to revel in their sense of persecution. That’s what lies behind Clarkson’s humour; the conviction that ‘normal’, right-thinking people are besieged by deviants and queers.

Clarkson is part of a group of white, middle class, determinedly heterosexual men who feel exasperated by the behaviour of everyone who doesn’t share their mono-cultural view and experience of the world. Confronted by such social differences they seek solace in juvenilia: a self-imposed, arrested emotional and intellectual development that helps them cope with the fact that everyone is not like them.

What is really invidious about the Clarkson incident is the way in which the Left allowed it to capture the headlines and distract from the real issues. So, for instance, the first issue raised on Question Time the following night was about the Top Gear presenter’s comments on The One Show rather than the issues that lead to strike action. In this respect, Clarkson is like David Starkey, whose stupid remarks on Newsnight over the summer eclipsed any sensible debate about the English riots. Self-styled right-wing controversialists too often play the Left like a flute. By all means despise Jeremy Clarkson and his ilk but don’t inflate his importance. The best medicine? Don’t laugh with him, laugh at him.

The Harry and Paul sketch captures the Clarkson psychology perfectly.

The Stewart Lee stand-up routine about Top Gear is simply brilliant.