Workers’ Playtime

…it’s worth doing well

20 February 2026 – 12:23

I’ve got two mottoes as an academic (emeritus). The first came to me fully-formed one afternoon at work, when I was (unusually) doing some marking in the office. A student’s essay had unexpectedly raised a fundamental issue in criminology – the difference between a measure’s reliability and its validity, maybe, or the difference between consequentialist and deontological justifications for a criminal penalty. I could have just ignored it – it wasn’t what the essay was about, it wasn’t going to do much either way in terms of marks, and I had a lot of other essays to do… but no, I realised, I couldn’t just ignore it. “Am I going to add a comment specifically to get into that issue?” I muttered to myself. “Of course I am, I’m a fucking intellectual!”

Then I burst out laughing: my motto, ladies and gentlemen, albeit one that I’ve never actually used where anyone can hear. (Maybe a coffee mug? Or maybe not.) Self-respect and awareness of the qualities I can offer; an equally clear awareness of how little those qualities tend to count for on their own; and an obdurate insistence that I’m going to continue to offer ’em anyway. It’s an attitude with obvious negatives as well as positives, and I don’t particularly recommend it – even if you are – but I can’t deny that it resonates with me.

As for the other motto, let me introduce to the poet James Thomson. I currently volunteer for Oxfam, pricing and writing brief descriptions of books for their online shop. In a donation of antiquarian books we recently received, I found a copy of The Captive Chief and other poems by James Thomson, second edition, 1871. It was a fairly expensively produced slim volume, half-bound, embossed in gold to the spine and with a coat of arms in gold on the front cover. Moreover, it was dedicated by the author – something which invariably makes books a bit more desirable – although the dedication did have the slight disadvantage of being “from the Author” rather than including an autograph.

But who was the author? There have been several poets called James Thomson; Wikipedia knows of three. Given the date of 1871 and the dedication, it didn’t seem likely that it was James Thomson (1700-48), author of “The Seasons”, or James Thomson the Scottish weaver poet (1763-1832) (of whom I had not heard). It looked as if the date would work for James Thomson (1834-82), author of “The City of Dreadful Night” and a prolific writer of verse and prose throughout the 1870s. I assumed that this was the person we were dealing with and started writing the online catalogue entry accordingly.

Then I had to say something about the dedication, which first required making head or tail of the dedication: it seemed to say “To the Reed of Reynolds Hole”. Reeds plural, maybe – Thomson had for some reason dedicated his book to a family rather than a person, perhaps the family of the local squire? And where was Reynolds Hole, anyway? I googled and discovered that it wasn’t a ‘where’ but a ‘who’, namely this gentleman: Samuel Reynolds Hole (a.k.a. “the Rev’d S. Reynolds Hole”), Anglican clergyman, popular preacher and prominent amateur horticulturist. I thought I should also say something about the coat of arms stamped on the front. I couldn’t make out the first word of the motto, but it ended “VEL AUREA NOLO” – something about not wanting gold? Google was my friend again, confirming that “FRAENA VEL AUREA NOLO” – “I want no chains, not even of gold” – was the motto of… Samuel Reynolds Hole.

So far, so good. But how had the London clerk and hack writer James Thomson crossed paths with Samuel Reynolds Hole? Not impossible, but it didn’t seem very likely. I looked more closely at the book and noticed that the prefatory author’s note – opening with a defiant acknowledgment that these were “poems of a working man”, however played-out (in 1871) that sub-genre might be – ended “JAMES THOMSON, SHAWDEN”. I’d never heard of Shawden, but it didn’t sound like an area of London. I also noticed a printed dedication: the author begged leave to dedicate the book to “Lady Fairfax”, noting that he had “served” her ladyship’s father and grandfather.

This definitely wasn’t sounding like James “City of Dreadful Night” Thomson. If anything, James “the weaver poet” Thomson was starting to seem more likely – or he would have done, if only he hadn’t been dead for nearly forty years when the book was published. Once again I used a popular search engine, this time searching for various combinations of “Fairfax” and “Shawden” – although it seemed like a long shot, as I was ruefully aware that Lady Fairfax’s father and grandfather would have borne a different name. But I was lucky: I found a portrait of Lord F. in full military regalia, with accompanying text that confirmed that his wife had been one of the Pawsons of Shawden Hall in Northumbria.

Armed with this information I went in search of James Thomson again, and found what appears to be his sole footprint on the Web: a partially digitised copy of an anthology titled 100 Modern Scottish Poets, published in 1880. From here I learned that James Thomson – my James Thomson – was born in 1825 in Rothes, near Inverness; that he had lived south of the border for the previous thirty years, and worked at Shawden Hall as the gardener (hence, perhaps, the Reynolds Hole connection); and that he had published a well-regarded poetry collection called Northumbria. I got the impression that this was the same collection as The captive chief under another name, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

And that was it: that was all the information about James Thomson (b. Rothes 1825, d. ?) that I was able to wring out of the Internet.

I suppose I should say something about the poetry. It’s not great, to be honest. There are a couple of poems in Scots, including a parody of “A Man’s A Man For A’ That” bathetically celebrating Scottish food, but mostly these are poems in quite conventional forms, written in conventionally ‘poetic’ and archaic language. The relative isolation in which self-taught writers work allows some true originals to come through, but it also makes it more likely that less original writers will be followers of trends rather than leaders.

Now, the work I put in to cataloguing this book accurately has a specific purpose and a short life expectancy: once that book sells, its record will be deleted and all those words will be lost, like tears in rain. Moreover, while I’m sure that there are people out there with a scholarly interest in vernacular poetry of the mid-Victorian period, I’m less sure that anyone’s interested in highly conventional and literary vernacular poetry of the mid-Victorian period – and I very much doubt that anyone out there is collecting the work of James Thomson (of Rothes and Shawden) (1825-?). In profile terms, the other James Thomsons are practically Simon Armitage by comparison.

Which raises the question of whether what I did was worth doing. It didn’t necessarily make the book any more likely to sell, or to make money for Oxfam. It would probably have been more saleable, and at a higher price, if I’d allowed myself to remain in ignorance and attribute it to the City of Dreadful Night guy.

But that would have been wrong; that would have been doing half a job or doing the job badly. This collection was written by James Thomson of Shawden; he was who he was, just as Samuel Reynolds Hole was who he was; my catalogue entry (and this blog post) is a small, and as far as I could guarantee it accurate, contribution to the stock of relevant knowledge.

Which brings me to my second academic motto: in the immortal words of Alan Bennett, “if a thing’s not worth doing, it’s worth doing well”.

By Phil | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Palestine Action in the High Court

16 February 2026 – 12:35

Like many other people, I was delighted to read that the High Court had found in favour of the appeal against the proscription of Palestine Action as terrorist. You can find the full judgment here (pdf), but do set aside some time if you’re planning on reading it; it’s a High Court judgment, not a press release. This from Doughty Street Chambers is a thorough and reasonably clear summary. For commentary, I recommend DAT Green (good on the intersection between law and politics in the case) and Mark Elliott (more ‘legal-minded’ and a bit more sceptical).

Having read (as they say) the whole thing, I think the judgment is fairly solid, and I’m cautiously optimistic about its chances of being upheld – and ultimately put into action, not least with a repeal of the proscription).

Here are some thoughts. This post originated as a thread on Bluesky, but it’s heavily reorganised and revised here.

Update (18/2/26): I have added a brief reply to arguments raised by Gabriel Tan and Dane Luo.

Direct action, not terrorism

The High Court’s key finding was that Palestine Action is not a terrorist group but a direct action group – although the judgment also suggests that Palestine Action claimed to be engaged in civil disobedience, a claim which it disputes. Either way, it’s pretty clear that direct action is what Palestine Action engaged in, and (pace the High Court) they don’t appear to have claimed otherwise. Quite the reverse:

If you’re looking for a definition of direct action, that phrase “seeks to make it impossible” is a good pointer. If you carry out direct action you aren’t protesting in the hope that X will stop doing Y, you’re acting directly in such a way that X can’t do Y. Direct action tactics tend not to be legal; they generally involve breaking the law and subsequently going to prison. At least, they involve going to prison unless

– the perpetrators don’t get caught
– a jury declines to convict
– the government declines to prosecute
– the government changes the law

All four of these have been known to happen, and that tells us something about direct action as a type of offending. I mean, a jury isn’t likely to refuse to convict someone standing trial for street theft. If there’s a rash of phone thefts, say, the police may give up trying to do much about them, but you wouldn’t expect the Ministry of Justice to state that phone thieves would never be prosecuted, still less to change the law to legalise phone theft.

So: direct action isn’t like ordinary crime. It’s always political, almost always highly contentious, and generally aimed at preventing something which – the participants believe – should itself be a crime; a greater crime, by definition, than doing a bit of property damage trying to prevent it. And governments sometimes end up agreeing (usually without much fanfare).

When it comes to legitimising direct action, though, judges don’t tend to take the lead. This judgment’s no exception. Instead of going anywhere near the question of whether Palestine Action’s direct action might be legitimate, the High Court tackles the much easier question of whether it constituted peaceful civil disobedience.

There’s an awful lot of paraphrasing and reading between the lines here. “The submission” (which isn’t quoted) “rests on an assumption” that Palestine Action’s direct action was “synonymous with civil disobedience”? Really? This assumption seems to have been inferred by the Court; likening Palestine Action’s actions to the Civil Rights movement isn’t quite the same thing.

Still, the Court is to be commended, for resisting the government’s assertion that Palestine Action isn’t a peaceful protest group but a terrorist group, and especially for refusing to take those as the only possibilities. This is all the more striking given that the Court effectively directed itself not to consider “direct action”, the obvious third option. Ironically, a more open-minded and protest-friendly judgment – one that noted our tendency to endorse direct action tactics retrospectively, from the Suffragettes to Stop The Seventy Tour – would have been more welcome to the government, as it would have given an Appeal Court judge an obvious opening. The judgment’s avoidance of any kind of endorsement of Palestine Action, or of direct action generally, makes this key negative finding – that Palestine Action is not a terrorist group – all the stronger.

The Appeal: Grounds 8 and 5 (unsuccessful)

Palestine Action appealed against the proscription on eight grounds, of which four were permitted to proceed; these were handily, if not particularly memorably, numbered as Grounds 8, 5, 6 and 2. Ground 8 was that the Home Secretary should have notified them, giving them a chance to appeal, before making the proscription order. The Court points out that this would tie the Home Secretary’s hands in making any future proscription order – which might actually be against a terrorist group, and then where would we be?

A bit of a catch-22, really: “we can’t give you the chance to appeal against being branded a dangerous terrorist – what if you were a dangerous terrorist?”. In a judgment that’s centrally concerned with the difference between being labelled as a terrorist group and being one, it’s a shame the Court didn’t manage to peel the two apart in this respect.

Ground 5 – “failure to consider relevant matters” – also fell; the Court thought that it covered ground that was also covered in Grounds 6 and 2. To which, as they say, we now turn.

Ground 6: Discretion, but Constrained Discretion

Ground 6 concerns whether the Home Secretary followed her own policy in proscribing Palestine Action. There’s some discussion of different meanings of ‘proportionality’ (which I confess I didn’t entirely follow; I was glad of the Court’s rather disarming conclusion that it couldn’t affect the judgment either way), before we get this crucial passage:

There are two separate issues here: the Home Secretary’s discretion, as guided by existing policy; and the range of activities considered under that policy.

Firstly, the Home Secretary’s exercise of discretion. (I’ll warn you now, this part is a long one.) The Home Secretary has a power to proscribe, not a duty. That must mean that not every organisation which can plausibly be said to be involved in terrorism ends up being proscribed; there are other factors to consider.

There are four key points here. Firstly, the Home Secretary doesn’t automatically proscribe everything that looks like a terrorist organisation; there will always be edge cases, organisations that might qualify as terrorist from a certain angle but aren’t really candidates for proscribing. But, secondly, while she chooses to proscribe or not at her own discretion, it isn’t unfettered discretion: she can proscribe an organisation because (a) it’s involved in terrorism and (b) it poses an active threat, but not because (a) it’s involved in terrorism and (b) never you mind. Here are some of the factors which will be considered:

This is Home Office policy, going back to when the Terrorism Act was first passed. It’s not rocket salad; the Home Secretary should ask, among other things, “how big is it?”, “how bad is it?” and (if the first two questions don’t get anywhere) “are other countries banning it?”.

Thirdly, the nature of the policy is to limit the Home Secretary’s discretion: “to constrain use of the discretion so that not all organisations that meet the concerned in terrorism requirement will be proscribed” (italics added for clarity) – and all the relevant considerations have the same function. Implicitly the Home Secretary is asking herself and her advisors a series of negative questions – e.g. “are we sure that the nature and scale of the organisation’s activities aren’t too insignificant to justify proscription?”. And, while the policy allows the Home Secretary to consider other factors, the nature of the policy means that the other factors should also be of the same type.

Lastly, the tests applied by the policy are, implicitly, tests that can be failed: both logically and as a matter of real-world experience, it is always possible to look at what’s apparently a terrorist group and conclude that it’s not worth the bother for the UK government to proscribe it. What that means, though, is that the question isn’t really “how big is this organisation?” but “is this organisation particularly big (as compared with other organisations that aren’t proscribed)?”. And likewise, crucially, with those additional factors: the Home Secretary isn’t free to say “here’s an additional factor weighing in favour of proscription”, but needs to be saying “here’s an additional factor weighing in favour of proscription in this specific case“.

In short: proscription is at the Home Secretary’s discretion; that discretion needs to be exercised according to stated considerations; the nature of those considerations is to limit the choice to proscribe, specifying when it should and, in particular, when it shouldn’t be made; and the judgment required by those considerations is always relative, as it justifies the inclusion of one group in comparison to others which may have been excluded.

There’s no debate over whether Yvette Cooper, the then Home Secretary, took into account factors [1] to [5] above. The point at issue concerns the additional factors which she and her advisors also took into account.

(3) is a bog-standard “how bad is it?” criterion, while (4) to (6) are “side-effects of proscribing” questions. (The section 11-13 offences referred to here are the ‘membership’, ‘expression of support’ and ‘wearing or carrying an item suggesting support’ offences. The question of whether proscribing would (5) deter people from committing those offences or (4) place an enforcement burden on the police has now been answered fairly conclusively.)

(1) is the problematic element (and to a lesser extent (2), although that doesn’t say much on its own). The problem is that “proscribing organisation X will make it significantly easier to disrupt” is always true: proscribing Palestine Action would make it easier to disrupt its activities, but so would proscribing Reform UK or the Women’s Institute. So this is the wrong kind of ‘consideration’; it’s a consideration that shouldn’t be allowed to weigh in favour of a discretionary decision to proscribe in a specific case, because it will be valid in every case. To put it another way, it’s legitimate for a government to say “here’s how bad this terrorist organisation is, and therefore we’re proscribing it, which will give us powers to disrupt it” – but not to say “this organisation’s so bad we need the powers to disrupt it, therefore we’re proscribing it as terrorist”.

So a benefit of proscribing Palestine Action is cited, wrongly, as a reason for proscribing Palestine Action – in fact, the main reason. We see this again in the Proscription Review Group’s advice to the Home Secretary:

and again, perhaps inevitably, in Yvette Cooper’s statement justifying proscription:

When I quoted paragraphs 82-4 (some time ago now) I said that this section of the judgment raised two separate issues, and Cooper’s statement highlights the second one: the range of issues considered. To save on scrolling, here are those paragraphs again:

“The power in the 2000 Act is to proscribe organisations because they act in ways that mean they are concerned in terrorism, not because of other activities that fall short of terrorism. The nature and scale of an organisation’s activities ought therefore to concern only those activities that amount to terrorism.”

This is surely correct; thinking otherwise would open the door to rampantly opportunistic uses of counter-terrorism legislation, allowing the government to target an organisation it wanted to suppress by fitting one or a few of its actions to the (notoriously capacious) 2000 definition of terrorism and then arguing that the organisation should be proscribed because of all its other undesirable activities. “Regardless of whether this instance itself amounts to terrorism, such activity is clearly intimidatory and unacceptable”… is the kind of thing that a Home Secretary abusing counter-terrorism powers in this way might say.

Ground 2: interference with human rights

So that’s Ground 6, whether the Home Secretary followed her own policy in proscribing Palestine Action (and no, in a court of law it’s not open to the Home Secretary to say “but cynically using whatever powers I could lay my hands on was my policy!”). The other ground on which the High Court found against the government was Ground 2, relating to interference with human rights guaranteed under the European Convention. This can (with any luck) be dealt with a bit more briefly. The rights in question are those guaranteed by Article 10 – freedom of expression, including the right to receive and impart information – and Article 11 – freedom of association and assembly. Quite clearly, making it a criminal offence to (oh say for instance) sit on the ground holding a home-made sign reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” impinges on rights under articles 10 and 11. (It should be noted, for completeness’ sake, that there is a specific immunity from prosecution on the ‘membership’ and ‘support’ offences for anything done in relation to applications for deproscription made to the Home Secretary (as well as appeals against refusals to deproscribe to the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) and appeals to the Appeal Court against decisions of the POAC). I don’t know if there’s an active application to the Home Secretary to deproscribe Palestine Action (or an active appeal to the POAC, or to the Appeal Court against the POAC); if there is, it might be possible to hold a sign expressing support for it without falling foul of the law. Alternatively, of course, it might be considered that supporting a legal appeal doesn’t amount to doing anything in relation to it; in that case your sign, however carefully worded, would only “arouse reasonable suspicion that [you were] a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation” and get you in lumber under section 13.)

The rights under articles 10 and 11, it should be noted, are qualified rights, which governments may restrict for purposes such as public safety and the prevention of crime. More directly relevant here is Article 17, which provides that human rights may not be exploited so as to abuse human rights: death threats aren’t covered under freedom of expression.

Does article 17 get the government out of trouble? The (current) Home Secretary thought so.

You’ve got to admit it’s neat: protesting in support of Palestine Action and against their proscription isn’t protected by articles 10 and 11 because it “amounts to the expression of support for or association with terrorist activity”, because Palestine Action is proscribed. But here again the government was writing itself a blank cheque: if protests in support of a terrorist group are not covered by articles 10 and 11, and if proscription makes a group a terrorist group, then criminalising protests against a group’s proscription will never cause any interference with articles 10 and 11. Which is nice, for the government. It’s also an argument that would apply just as well, and in just the same way, if the government had proscribed Reform UK or the WI. And once again, the High Court was not impressed.

You need to look behind the label, in other words, and ask whether supporting terrorism is actually what the people being criminalised because of the proscription are doing. You also need to consider – a crucial point which the Court correctly highlighted – what the proscription is deterring people from doing; potentially much larger numbers of people.

The judgment goes on to cite journalists and academics as people who might be especially ‘risk-averse’ in this area, although the discussion of that point ends up largely walking it back and stressing the need to think about interference with rights in concrete terms. I think this is fair enough; it’d be nice if the judgment were a bit more strident in defence of free expression, but then it’d be nice if it admitted that direct action can sometimes be a legitimate tactic. It’s a High Court judgment, you take what you can get. Besides, as far as academia’s concerned it’s probably correct to say that the impact of the proscription wasn’t all that great: speaking as an academic who used to teach on terrorism and counter-terrorism, I think academics have been used to watching their step for some time now. I’d be more concerned about the proscription’s potential effect on students. (Many of my Asian students, in particular, were noticeably self-censoring five years ago – and quite a lot has happened in the last five years.)

Concluding and looking ahead

So: the High Court acknowledges the interference with articles 10 and 11, dismissing the government’s attempt to cover itself with article 17. The proscription did have the effect of interfering with rights to free speech and free assembly; that interference wasn’t justified by the terrorism or support for terrorism that it prevented. That justification could only apply if Palestine Action were a terrorist group – and “Palestine Action, terrorist group” was effectively a legal fiction, which only existed by virtue of the proscription itself. To say that the chilling effect of the proscription on free speech and assembly was justified under article 17 would be to say that it was justified by the proscription itself.

This, to recapitulate, was one of the two grounds on which the High Court found against the government. The other (Ground 6) was the “Home Secretary’s policy” ground: the Court found that, in guiding her discretion whether to proscribe Palestine Action, the Home Secretary had justified the proscription by reference not to the reasons for proscription but to the benefits of proscription, taking into account factors that would always apply, and consequently couldn’t justify a specific decision. To make matters worse, the benefits of proscription – the powers to disrupt Palestine Action that it would give the government – were presented with reference to Palestine Action’s activities in general, with specific reference to incidents which (as the government freely acknowledged) did not amount to terrorism. Reduced to its essentials, the government’s case was “we’re having trouble with this group committing crimes, we need to escalate to treating it as a terrorist threat” – and the government’s powers under counter-terrorism legislation don’t permit that.

Not that the law or the government is helpless against Palestine Action, even were they to be de-proscribed:

The Elbit trial did recently end in acquittals and failures to convict, admittedly – but it’s hard to imagine that counter-terror charges would have found a more co-operative jury. On the contrary, it looks as if the government’s recourse to proscription, and the subsequent legal victimisation of Palestine Action activists and supporters, may have massively backfired.

Will the decision to strike down the proscription of Palestine Action stand? The government has said it will appeal, but the current Home Secretary’s statement to that effect (on X, of course) doesn’t suggest they’ve got many shots in the locker:

The Court has acknowledged that Palestine Action has carried out acts of terrorism, celebrated those who have taken part in those acts and promoted the use of violence. It has also concluded that Palestine Action is not an ordinary protest or civil disobedience group, and that its actions are not consistent with democratic values and the rule of law. For those reasons, I am disappointed by the Court’s decision and disagree with the notion that banning this terrorist organisation is disproportionate. The proscription of Palestine Action followed a rigorous and evidence-based decision-making process, endorsed by Parliament. The proscription does not prevent peaceful protest in support of the Palestinian cause, another point on which the Court agrees.

I don’t know why Mahmood (or her advisors) imagined that listing her points of agreement with the judgment made her statement stronger. (She surely isn’t thinking of appealing on the basis of an error of law, arguing that the High Court misdirected itself. That would be courageous in the Yes, Minister sense of the word.) If anything it makes it weaker: yes, the High Court acknowledges that Palestine Action “has carried out acts of terrorism” and “is not an ordinary protest or civil disobedience group”; yes, the High Court notes that the proscription “does not prevent peaceful protest in support of the Palestinian cause”. This is all common ground! Mahmood’s actual challenge to the High Court seems to amount to

[1] disagree with the notion that banning [Palestine Action] is disproportionate. The proscription of Palestine Action followed a rigorous and evidence-based decision-making process, endorsed by Parliament.

To which the High Court – and, you’d think, any Appeal Court judge – would reply, “Firstly, the judgment sets out why and how it’s disproportionate; secondly, it was an evidence-based process, but based on the wrong evidence (as the judgement explains)”.

But we shall see. The government may even have factored in a defeat in the Appeal Court, allowing them to chase it up to the Supreme Court – who are both more likely to look under the bonnet of things like the Home Secretary having a policy constraining her own discretion, and (as currently composed) more deferential towards government justifications and invocations of raison d’état.

So it’s not over yet. But round 1 has gone against the government, I suspect rather to their surprise. I’ve known some bad Friday 13ths, but Friday 13th February was a good day: for Palestine Action, for the right to protest and for the rule of law.

Postscript: Tan and Luo on discretion

An interesting argument against the High Court’s conclusion on Ground 6 has been put forward by Gabriel Tan, and developed further in a blog post co-authored with Dane Luo. Tan and Luo highlight the fact that the High Court’s judgment was based not only on policy (rather than statute, or any other legal instrument), but on what the Court took to be the required interpretation of that policy – despite the requirement to interpret it in that way having to be inferred, as no such guidance appeared in the text. Put this way, this seems rather a weak basis for overturning a lawful order.

Similar points have been made by Mark Elliott (indeed, this is why I referred to his commentary as ‘sceptical’) and by Alan Greene, who usefully sets the controversy over this policy in the context of a broader trend towards the use, and exploitation, of ‘soft law’. But Tan and Luo go further. Tan objects to the High Court’s assumption that the purpose of the Home Secretary’s policy was to limit her discretion, and as such that the ‘considerations’ set out in the Home Secretary’s policy document (and by extension any additional considerations brought into play) must be negative conditions, restricting rather than enabling:

The better view is that the policy’s purpose (if necessary to assign it one) is simply to guide (a neutral term) the discretionary power to proscribe, rather than inherently being there to limit them. The fact that the consequences of proscription is [sic] not a factor limiting the power to proscribe therefore does not prevent it from being rationally considered in the proportionality balance.

Secondly, Tan objects to the argument that the operational benefits of proscription, applying in all cases, cannot be an argument in its favour in a specific case:

The fact that operational consequences and advantages of proscription, including the applicability of the s.11-13 offences, applies in every case of proscription does not make it any less of a relevant factor in favour of proscription. Indeed, it may be said that failure to consider this as a relevant factor within the proportionality balance would constitute failure to take into account a relevant consideration.

On the other hand (and thirdly), if benefits peculiar to a specific proscription are required, Tan and Luo argue that the High Court was incorrect to conclude that the Home Secretary did not cite any: on the contrary, Yvette Cooper’s statement to the House of Commons (quoted briefly earlier in this post) gave details of Palestine Action’s escalating campaign of politically-motivated criminal violence; she concluded by stressing the need for the government to have sufficient powers to disrupt these activities.

These are an interesting couple of posts, which seem to me to highlight a genuine area of weakness, even confusion, in the High Court’s reasoning. Unfortunately, Tan’s contribution highlights this confusion while also compounding it. I’m referring to the High Court’s assertion (or inference) that the purpose of the Home Secretary’s policy was to limit her discretion, countered by Tan with the assertion that the policy’s purpose is to guide discretion (if indeed it need be considered to have any purpose at all).

It seems to me that this is a troubled area of the High Court’s judgment, but that Tan’s response does little but add more confusion. If I may be allowed to resort briefly to common sense, the Home Secretary’s policy document is not a poem or an art installation; as a policy document it has to be considered to have some purpose. That purpose, moreover, is a purpose that bears in some way on the Home Secretary’s exercise of the discretionary power to proscribe – more specifically, on her discretionary choice whether or not to exercise that power. Once we grant that point, and take account of the fact that the considerations involved in the policy are specified in a non-exhaustive list, some of the distinctions made by the High Court and relied on by Tan seem less salient. Most obviously, the distinction between decision constrained by certain factors and one guided by those factors surely loses its sense if the decision-maker not only had a free choice among the factors specified, but was free to specify alternative and additional factors.

From his conclusion that the Home Secretary’s policy acted to guide rather than restrict discretion, Tan inferred that – pace the High Court – the considerations involved in the Home Secretary’s policy could include enabling as well as restrictive conditions. But this also seems to me to be a distinction that makes no difference. If the question governed by the policy were how to police a proscribed organisation, the difference between permissive and restrictive conditions would be highly salient. Suppose a policy specifying (restrictively) that a particular policing agency must not commit civil or criminal offences in the course of its duties; a court might well rule that the executive could not consistently add the (permissive) condition that the agency might do whatever was necessary to assure public safety. But if the question, as here, is whether to proscribe an organisation, the distinction between permissive and restrictive conditions falls away: to say that the Home Secretary may proscribe an organisation on the grounds of the threat it poses or the policing advantages accruing from proscription is identical to saying that she must not proscribe any organisation that does not pose a substantial threat, or where the policing advantages accruing from proscription are not anticipated to be great enough. In insisting on the interpretation of relevant considerations as restrictive, and disqualifying the “benefits of proscription” consideration on that basis, it seems to me – from the eminence of my one-year Graduate Diploma in Law (with Distinction mind you) – that the High Court stumbled; Tan is right to argue that factors phrased in ‘permissive’ terms are not barred from consideration in the policy. However, this stipulation has little effect, as any factor bearing on a decision to proscribe can be phrased in ‘permissive’ (you may act when…) or in ‘restrictive’ (you must not act unless…) terms. In particular, and pace both Tan and (for different reasons) the Supreme Court, the benefit of the consequences of proscription is “a factor limiting the power to proscribe”: the less benefit can be identified, the less likely it is that proscription will be justifiable.

However, this is not to say (with Tan) that the benefit of the consequences of proscription can be cited as a relevant consideration. Of course, any government making a proscription order anticipates benefits from so doing, generally (although not necessarily) operational benefits; which is to say, enhanced capacity to pre-empt, criminalise, counter and mitigate the actions of the group proscribed. Tan makes hay with the seemingly absurd idea that the Home Secretary should supposedly be debarred from citing this fundamental benefit as a reason for the proscription which makes it possible. But this is to misrepresent the High Court’s position. The key point here is that any factor cited as a consideration in favour of proscribing a specific group should apply to that group specifically, and not to any group imaginable. Any consideration that counts towards the proscription of any and all groups cannot be cited as a consideration in favour of proscribing any particular group; this includes the operational benefits that can be reaped from doing so. That such benefits will be delivered in practice – in other words, that the powers associated with proscription will be used, and not left to lie on the statute book – is a relevant condition, but a threshold condition: no group should be nominated for proscription unless this condition is met.

So: operational benefits can be cited as a reason for proscribing a group – as a consideration, this is not debarred by its ‘affirmative’ or ‘permissive’ character – but the Home Secretary must be able to cite specific benefits associated with the proscription of the group in question, and not merely the benefits which necessarily accrue from proscription. Which brings us to the operational benefits of proscribing Palestine Action specifically. And, as Tan and Luo point out, the Home Secretary did in fact set these out at some length. However, in the view of the High Court what the Home Secretary described was not the actions of a terrorist group.

Under the Terrorism Act 2000, a terrorist act is one that has a political motive, involves ‘serious violence against a person’ or ‘serious damage to property’, and is ‘designed to influence the government … or to intimidate the public or a section of the public’. (Many other acts – and threats – may also qualify as terrorist, but this is the relevant core definition.) Now, I have only heard of one act of ‘serious violence against a person’ ascribed to Palestine Action; it would be decidedly odd to label a group as ‘terrorist’ exclusively, or almost exclusively, on the basis of property damage. (Or maybe not; we all denounce the planned campaign of terrorism for which Nelson Mandela was convicted, after all, not to mention the arson and explosive attacks carried out by those notorious terrorists the Suffragettes. Don’t we?)

But even if we assume that the ‘act’ component of the 2000 definition can be met by property damage alone, problems remain. Although the Home Secretary was clearly invoking the definition when she told the House of Commons that “Palestine Action has committed acts of serious damage to property with the aim of progressing its political cause and influencing the Government”, the High Court concluded that those acts were a small minority: the great majority of Palestine Action’s acts do not rise to the level of terrorism. (A pedant might also note that, even in those actions which could be plausibly argued to involve ‘serious damage to property’, there is generally no intention to ‘influence the government … or to intimidate the public or a section of the public’. Direct action is about intervening to prevent wrongdoing, not influencing wrongdoers.) And if a group’s actions don’t rise to the level of terrorism, the benefits to the government of dealing with them through counter-terrorist legislation are neither here nor there. In the words of the High Court:

The same applies to any consideration of the benefits of proscribing the organisation.

Tan and Luo make some good points, particularly on the weight the High Court puts on its distinction between restrictive and permissive considerations. But when the smoke blown up by their posts has cleared, the High Court judgment is still standing.

By Phil | Posted in anti-imperialist, armed struggle, legal matter, police and thieves, political violence, thinly-veiled schadenfreude | Comments (0)

Lon Fuller, Narrower

12 February 2026 – 15:12

I retired (early) in 2022, but I’ve carried on writing; I had two papers published in 2024 and two in 2025, a sustained work rate I never actually achieved while I was employed. Admittedly, my draft of one of the 2025 papers (“Kelsen and ‘primitive’ international law: Three solutions and a problem”) came in at approximately double the required length, and the two 2024 papers (“Hans Kelsen, international law and the ‘primitive’ legal order” and “Rationality and/or Retribution: Making Sense of Kelsen’s Evolutionist Turn”) both began life as offcuts from it. Still, it’s good to be making something out of those ‘extra’ sections rather than just leaving them to sit on my hard drive, and I ended up being quite fond of those two papers. The first one in particular: responding to a particularly searching reviewer’s report took me in some directions I hadn’t been expecting, requiring me to draw on (among other things) a whole series of legal papers available only in French. (Oui, je sais lire français, pour ce que ça vaut; anche italiano e (con meno facilità) Deutsch und español. My conversational French and Italian are pretty poor, unfortunately, and the other languages even worse; if the question is “do you speak…”, the answer has to be No. But reading, and a bit of writing, I can do, pour ce que ça vaut – ce qui, d’après mon expérience, n’est pas grand’chose. Hélas!)

Anyway, I think I’ve said what I wanted to say about Hans Kelsen, international law and Kelsen’s concept of the ‘primitive’; in the unlikely event you’re curious, dear reader, google one of the titles above (top tip: the one beginning “Hans Kelsen” is in Jurisprudence, and it’s Open Access). So that’s three of my four publications in the last two years.

Continue reading →

By Phil | Posted in academe, legal matter, politics, research | Comments (0)

To let eleven brothers know

18 January 2026 – 11:27

In December I read (or finished)

Harlan Ellison, Greatest Hits
Is “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman” in there? Yes. “Shatterday”? Yup. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”? Of course. “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”? Certainly. “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin”? Er, no actually; perhaps it didn’t win anything (the Contents page scrupulously lists which awards different stories won in what year – and it is quite a range of years). But most of the big hits are here; even the lightly fictionalised memoir “All The Lies That Are My Life”, if you like that sort of thing, which I don’t particularly. I do like a good sf short story, though, and Harlan Ellison was a great writer of sf short stories – bearing in mind that (a) quite a lot of his greatness was down to uniqueness, so there is an element of winning at a game he’d invented, and (b) in any case, he was nowhere near as great as he thought he was. Or, indeed, as his admirers think he was. This book comes with three separate introductions – by the book’s editor Michael Straczynski, Cassandra Khaw, but Neil Gaiman – and several pages of endorsements; read it all and you’ll see the same stories about Ellison’s feminist and anti-racist credentials three times. But there’s no denying that some of the stories are terrific.

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You
“Academic returns to school where she’d studied to teach a class, and successfully reopens the case of a girl in her class who was murdered, aged 16.” All the reviews I’ve seen seem to be reviewing that book – and it’s an interesting book, with lots to be said about it. (The recurring riff on news stories about women’s rape and murder – it was the one where she…; it was the one where she…; it was the one where she… – is horribly effective.) But Makkai’s actually doing something rather different. It’s not irrelevant that the narrator’s a successful podcaster (!) as well as an academic, that she’s been invited to teach a class in podcasting, and that she puts some of her 16-year-old podcasting students on the case; the wild volatility and voluntarism of social media play into how the story unwinds. In fact it’s more like “podcaster obsessively pursues a former teacher whom she blames for the murder of a classmate, enlisting podcasting students in her support”. While she’s at the school her ex-husband, coincidentally, gets “MeToo’d”; she thinks the charges are ludicrous, but her attempts to point this out to the good folk of Twitter dot com do not go well (an entertaining and horribly believable passage). Repercussions from the ensuing social media firestorm and from her attempts to reopen the case end up costing her her boyfriend, her main source of income and her health; meanwhile, her contract at the school’s coming to an end. End of part 1.

At the beginning of part 2, a few years have passed and all of this has gone away – the pile-on, the obsessive fugue and their real-world consequences. Not only that, the schoolkid podcasters have grown up to be student podcasters and the case has been reopened. Not only that, but it’s been established that the teacher the narrator’s been obsessing over – and intermittently addressing throughout the book, hence the ‘you’ of the title – wasn’t the killer, although he was sleeping with the victim. At the end of the book the narrator’s undaunted in her pursuit of the teacher, who was clearly an abuser – and who she still blames, indirectly, for her classmate’s murder. Her conviction that she needs to track him down and denounce him is unchanged; it’s certainly untouched by any reflection on her earlier conviction that he was the killer. In short, the book begins as a heroic story about using online media to take on male violence, then turns into a horror story about what the consequences of doing so might be – but then turns back into the heroic story. It’s either much more complex and self-ironising than the book I’ve seen reviewed or much less successful – possibly both.

Randall Munroe, What If?
I picked up both What If? books in a local charity shop a while back, and have been reading them last thing at night. If you know What If?, and xkcd more generally, it’ll need no introduction. If you don’t, you probably should. Let’s just say that the “what if”s Randall specialises in aren’t of the “what if inflation went above 5%?” or “what if Netflix bought WB?” variety; a more typical example is “What if the entire continental US was on a decreasing slope from West to East. How steep would the slope have to be to sustain the momentum needed to ride a bicycle the entire distance without pedaling?”.

Jane Gardam, A Long Way From Verona
The story of Jessica Vye, who is in her early teens in the early 40s (Gardam was born in 1928), and in her own words “[is] not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine”. She’s something of an outsider at school; she’s introverted and unconventional, has violent mood swings, and believes herself to be different from most people (able to ‘read’ other people’s emotions, unable to tell a lie). She’s a bright 14-year-old, in other words. Her ‘violent experience’, I should say, was hearing a writer who visited her school; he agreed to read her writing and later wrote back to her, “JESSICA VYE YOU ARE A WRITER BEYOND ALL POSSIBLE DOUBT!” (“This experience changed me utterly”).

And then, and then… It’s hard to write about this book briefly, or without quoting chunks of it. One key event is Jessica’s chance encounter with an escaped Italian POW (the girls have been warned that there is a ‘maniac’ on the loose). He doesn’t assault her but does give her a look “that I had absolutely never seen before, or not in faces looking at me. It was a liking sort of look but a queer liking-look … sort of excited, as if he had found something.” Later, just after narrowly escaping death in a bombing, she writes a long poem called “The Maniac” and knows at once, and for the first time, that she has written something good. (Gardam, wisely, doesn’t quote from the poem.) Like that “sort of excited” expression, the events of the book combine great intensity with an odd kind of innocence; we feel that much stronger emotions are at work than Jessica realises, but also that they are going to need to stay repressed if Jessica is to get through either adolescence or the war.

I don’t know if I’ve conveyed this, but it’s a lovely book: an easy and charming read, but engagingly real and with a powerful emotional undertow. There’s an obvious parallel with I Capture the Castle, but if I had to choose between them I’d take this one; I felt that Jessica Vye was dealing with bigger stuff than Cassandra Mortmain, and cared more about where she ended up.

Michelle Paver, Rainforest
In which a deeply repressed middle-aged man joins an archaeological expedition into the rainforest, hoping to study nothing more emotionally loaded than insects, and becomes embroiled in local belief systems concerning the life and death of trees, animals, people; especially people. Especially people and especially death. Meanwhile he’s reliving his unsuccessful relationship with the much younger Penny, which began as mildly embarrassing and rapidly turned much worse; he stalked her and may have caused her death. The two plot strands develop side by side but don’t really connect, frustratingly. By the end of the book our man has a very different attitude to the rainforest, its people and their beliefs – and has the scars to prove it – but he still seems to believe that “Penelope” was the love of his life and that he was guilty of nothing more than romantic exuberance.

Magnus Mills, Screwtop Thompson
As well as short and oblique novels, Magnus Mills has written short stories; they’re mostly very short and very oblique, bordering on downright unsatisfactory. (One story here goes one better on Andrew Michael Hurley, as it reads like Robert Aickman’s “The Hostel” with all of the eeriness and grotesquerie left out.) The mood is generally sunny and undramatic; there are some very vividly realised characters and incidents, but they don’t really bear retelling (it would be like retelling amusing incidents that happened at work). Mills does in prose something similar to what Morandi did as a painter, paying minute attention to things we only half-remember or half-notice.

Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman, An Advancement of Learning, Ruling Passion
Christmas presents, all of which I’d read by the end of the year. These are the first three “Dalziel and Pascoe” novels, dating from the early 1970s. The first book, revolving around a rugby club, is rather grim: Hill is at pains to impress on us that we’re mixing with plain, ordinary, working Northerners, and that plain, ordinary, working Northerners are awful people. “Which of us has our desire or, having it, is gratified?” Nobody here; every male character is having an affair with another man’s wife, or wishes he was, or in some cases both. The plot’s not great, either; Hill succumbs to the temptation, which I’ve lamented here in the context of Sophie Hannah, of setting up a bizarre and improbable murder scene and then explaining it with a bizarre and improbable murder. It’s powerful, though; it’s definitely got something. (Something that makes you want to have a wash afterwards, though.) The second book, set at a teacher-training college, lets Hill indulge a vein of sheer fantasy. The (cold case) murder scene, again, is utterly improbable – whose body was under what? – but the villain is so vividly weird that this seems nothing but appropriate. A charismatic youth who reads Crowley and John Allegro, publicly deflowers virgins and calls all his male friends “love”; as ruthlessly self-seeking as Linus Roache’s cult leader in Mandy, as commanding as Yaxley from The Course of the Heart and as beautiful as Ivor Swann from Ruth Rendell’s No More Dying Then (which came out in the same year as AAoL, so presumably neither of them influenced the other). It’s not how I remember the Students’ Union. The best of these three books, encouragingly, is the third, which begins with Pascoe leaving on holiday a day late after Dalziel insisted he take a look at a series of robberies; he drives to the other end of the country to stay with some friends, only to find three of them dead and the fourth missing. Both cases grow more complicated as Pascoe grows more exhausted and confused, strung out by the demands of his dual role – a detective in Yorkshire, a witness down south. He becomes convinced that the two cases are connected somehow; it’s a mark of Hill’s growing skill that he shows this conviction not to be entirely irrational – but mostly. Sometimes a loose end is just a loose end.

They’re quick reads (evidently); not especially demanding, but engaging enough to keep you going. The characterisation – no-nonsense old-school copper Dalziel, ambitious college-educated Pascoe – is fairly broad-strokes: Dalziel in particular is a comically awful unreconstructed Yorkshireman, who seems to get grosser (physically and in his manners) as these three books go on. Pascoe is a graduate, young and single; as such he has two main character traits, namely using long words and being constantly horny. Like some films shown on Talking Pictures, these books contain “1970s social attitudes”, particularly towards women; at one point Hill also makes Dalziel a howlingly obnoxious racist, but thankfully seems to have decided not to pursue that line of character development. Some of the sexism on display is clearly Reginald Hill’s own, though; there is some really woeful stuff in the second book about women with large breasts, a topic on which he does not appear to agree with Ian Watson. Boys, please!

Also in December, I watched these films:

Knives Out (Rian Johnson 2019), Wake Up, Dead Man (Rian Johnson 2025)
Recent TV adaptations of Agatha Christie often seem to start by throwing out the sexism and racism, then casting around for what else they can throw out – we won’t need all these characters, surely, and nobody will miss that sub-plot – before finding some way to make the Radio Times call them ‘edgy’. You can end up with something that looks like an Agatha Christie but without the tone, the mood or the plot. Compare Knives Out: a pure Agatha Christie whodunnit – an impossible murder, a roster of vividly-drawn suspects with different motives for murder, a flamboyant detective and a satisfying resolution – without the inconvenience of having to be based on an actually-existing Agatha Christie. Wake Up, Dead Man is a return to form after the Avengers-esque detour of Glass Onion; it features an impossible murder, a roster of vividly-drawn suspects with different motives for murder, an ever more flamboyant detective and a satisfying resolution. Also a sketchy but compelling essay on the nature of Christianity, but that’s just the cherry on top.

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi 2025)
What’s this about? It’s about someone who was tortured in an Iranian prison, later meets his torturer by chance and decides to kidnap him and take his revenge; it’s about what happens next, a picaresque accumulation of episodes (and people) as the main character drives around town, looking for anyone who may be able to confirm or deny that he’s got the right person; and it’s about how that question’s resolved; and what happens after that; and… Some parts are upbeat, almost comical; some grimly satirical; some heartbreaking or horrific. Each successive tonal shift is justified, but the cumulative effect is dizzying, and I’m not sure how well it all fits together. (But maybe that’s just what you get if you try to write seriously about contemporary Iran.) It’s a powerful piece of work, anyway.

Eternity (David Freyne 2025)
This is another film that’s satisfying while you’re watching it but doesn’t quite gel. The setup is that, on dying, you arrive in Heaven physically restored to the age when you were happiest, then have a week to choose in which themed ‘world’ you’ll spend, well, eternity. Which has definite comic potential, in a Loki-ish style; the film-makers get a lot of mileage out of background shots of trade-fair-style booths advertising the different worlds (“Smokers’ World – Because cancer can only kill you once!”). But the question they layer on top of that – what if you knew, with absolute certainty, that the time you were happiest, and/or the time your partner was happiest, was before the two of you had met? – is deadly serious (cf. 45 Years). It boils down to ‘if you had to choose between seeking your own happiness above all else and building a relationship, what would you do?’. In that perspective, it’s a bit of a design flaw that Heaven is built exclusively to prioritise the former.

No One Will Save You (Brian Duffield 2023)
What if what appeared to be a home invasion was actually an alien invasion? What if you went into town and nobody would help, because they’d all been possessed by aliens? And what if nobody would help because they just didn’t like you? An unusual and promising setup, but the film’s a bit underdeveloped, I think partly because of a distinctive but odd stylistic choice. Nobody ever seems to talk to themselves in films, even alone in their house (“now where did I… of course it’s there, I left it there, get a grip Edwards!” – just me then?). The protagonist of this film is no exception – and she spends a lot of time on her own. This seems to have inspired the director to go the whole hog: there are two (2) lines of dialogue in this film, both of them imagined. All actual communication is handled through “oh”s, “uh”s, waves and curls of the lip. An impressive exercise, but it didn’t have any obvious connection with the plot, which I think would have worked a lot better with a few more words on the soundtrack.

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow 2025)
A nightmare scenario – an ICBM launched at the USA from an unknown source – played out to its nightmarish conclusion, in 19-minute sections covering the same time period in different settings, moving upward from the early-warning radar station to the White House. It’s not clear precisely what’s happened at the end, but it almost certainly isn’t anything good. Idris Elba is the President and plays him as well-intentioned but tired and out of touch – a nod towards Biden, perhaps. So things could be worse – or rather, things are worse.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson 1992)
It was Christmas Eve. We watched The Muppet Christmas Carol; what else were we going to do? It was wonderful; it always is.

The Housemaid (Paul Feig 2025)
A twisty domestic (ho ho) thriller, school of Fatal Attraction or (especially) Single White Female. Can the unknown woman coming into the household be trusted? Is the impossibly glamorous man of the house all that he seems? Is his wife the person she appears to be? Who’s actually in charge here? No, no, no and the answer may surprise you. I’ve got a soft spot for Paul Feig (particularly A Simple Favour, which I genuinely and unironically like a lot). This isn’t one of his best – I mean, it is basically trash – but it is a lot of fun; it hits a distinctive, slightly manic note early on and sticks to it. Don’t be fooled by the BBFC warning of ‘sexualised nudity’, though; this harks back to the 80s & 90s in some ways, but not in treating sex scenes as a way of displaying the lead actress’s body (or, in the case of Working Girl, hoovering scenes). The sex scenes here are frank in what they show but positively demure in how they show it. (It’s almost as if those scenes weren’t being shot as male fantasy any more.)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier 2025)
The main character’s a theatre actor; the other main character’s her estranged father, who’s a film director and has just reappeared in her life. He’s making a film about his mother, who committed suicide when he was young, and wants her to play the lead role. She refuses to take the part; her father casts an American actress… There’s more to the setup than this, and at first it seems that the film’s going to be impossibly complicated; it works, though, because of the simplicity and intensity of its themes. It’s about the relationship between the main character and her sister (who acted in one of their father’s films, once); it’s about the father’s attempts to express his feelings, to make amends, to defy the passage of time – attempts which are shown to be well-intentioned but delusional and self-serving, even self-indulgent (shades of Wallis Island). It’s about the past, about family, about how they made us and scarred us, and how we got through. Stellan Skarsgård is great, but both Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (as the daughters) are amazing; you could be watching two real sisters. A film of the year; strongly recommended – especially for anyone else whose father used to make long, rambling phone calls at inconvenient times. It didn’t get to me like Clare Foy singing “Always on my mind” in All Of Us Strangers – few things have – but the scene in which the father earnestly attempts to make contact with his daughters without actually listening to them (“I know how you feel! You’re creative, like me!”) really reminded me of the old man. (Sorry, Dad. Miss you.)

By Phil | Posted in 2025 in culture, culture, everyday life, fillum, friction, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

The £10 Box: Fourth Quarter

9 January 2026 – 14:53

Many years ago, visiting my local Oxfam bookshop, I spotted and promptly bought the £10 Box: an old fruit box containing 40 hardbacks, all of them Science Fiction Book Club editions, dating from 1968 to 1979. It’s an interesting scoop from a very productive period for sf. The plan was to read – or in several cases re-read – the books, and put down a few notes about them as I went along. Not a difficult task, but it stayed on the ‘pending’ list for quite a while; put it this way, the original plan was to post my book reviews on rec.arts.sf.written. Still, it’s done now! Here’s a rundown of titles 31-40.

Terry Carr, Cirque (1977)
A far-future fantasy with barely the tip of a toenail in hard sf. Cirque, a city on a future Earth, sits on the edge of the Abyss (literally). The large cast includes an alien millipede which can ‘remember’ the future as well as the past, and which has come to Earth to see what is about to emerge from the Abyss (as it knows it will, since it remembers seeing it). There are also (among others) a priestess of the Five Elements, a City Guardian and a ‘holopathic’ telepath (who selects and rebroadcasts particularly noteworthy subjective experiences). On the surface it’s picturesque fantasy, but the central device of a creature emerging from an Abyss is decidedly odd (as is what happens when it does emerge). There seems to be a distinct message being conveyed here, even a suggestion of allegory. I couldn’t really make out what the message was, though, unless it was simply that fear of monsters creates monsters (monsters – from the Id!). As I said on reviewing it, “it’s ambitious and substantial … but it’s also very, very odd”.

C. J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith (1978)
My difficulties with fantasy continue. I didn’t get on with this one either, although it has a fairly substantial hard-sf frame and no hint of a message or theme. (There’s no pleasing some people.) The planet of Kesrith is an inhospitable imperial outpost, about to be handed over to humans by the regul, who have hitherto garrisoned it with mri. The regul are long-lived, leathery-skinned bureaucrats, like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and the Vogons, and have a tendency to kill their young if they don’t measure up; the mri (who seem to be reptilian rather than humanoid) are colony-dwelling warriors, like a cross between Samurai and naked mole rats, and have a tendency to kill everyone, including themselves. We spend time among all three – especially the mri, whose vocabulary tends to the solemn and grandiose and for whom there was in me but little patience. I mean, it’s not stupid by any means; there’s lots of interesting stuff going on, particularly if you like learning alien languages on the fly. I just didn’t feel it had much point.

Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes (1979) 5*
I’d read this once before, and was happy to revisit it. The ‘home’ register of this book – the voice in which it starts and ends – is Keith Waterhouse-ish mock-heroic social realist comedy, but it doesn’t stay put: while there are passages of very English, almost Pythonesque humour, there are also passages of all-too-human grotesquerie and tragedy, reminding me of John Berger’s The Foot of Clive. And there’s outright horror, even gore (one character is murdered and another loses a limb); there’s a chapter consisting of a report written by aliens, in a version of English they’ve pieced together from observation of Blackpool; there’s a brief biography of a poet, showing how his style changed and developed through the years. It all, somehow, fits together. The central conceit – an alien race piloting structured craft of approximately the size and shape of a ladybird – is probably a physical impossibility, but that hardly seems to matter. Quoting my review: “[the] plurality of registers and styles seems to me very much of a piece with the fact that it’s science fiction; it’s as if the essential absurdity of the premise … makes conventional expectations irrelevant, making it possible to head off in all these different directions”.

D. F. Jones, Xeno (1979) 1*
Do you know Xeno? No? Me, I know Xeno.

It begins with a thriller-ish plot involving aeroplanes disappearing and then reappearing after weeks or months, with the crew and passengers unaware of any lost time. People hold urgent meetings and say things like “But surely you don’t mean–”. Then the narrative divides between an international task force working on the lost-time episodes and a group of passengers on one of the vanishing planes, who start to come down with a mysterious illness – or is it? It transpires that it’s actually a parasite, which has transferred to humans from whatever entity has been messing about with planes (the task force concludes, oddly, that this will have been a divine or semi-divine being, albeit not God Himself, who is by definition perfect and therefore does not have parasites). The alien parasite is a physical organism; it’s very keen on reproducing and very hard to kill, and routinely kills its human hosts. So, er, we’re all doomed. Sorry about that. It’s a weird, disjointed, cosmically pessimistic work, which is also characterised (like many works by male authors in this period) by staggeringly awful portrayals of women: for example, the character who spends several minutes every morning standing naked in front of a mirror and admiring her own body. Ben Elton once speculated that the reason why women were under-represented in the professions was all the time they must waste, looking at their breasts in the mirror and going “Phwooah! Wa-hey! Don’t get many of those to the pound!”. This is basically that, but done straight. 1979, ladies and gentlemen.

Xeno? No-no.

Christopher Priest, An infinite summer (1979) 5*
Not all British sf writers from the late 1970s… I’d read this at least twice before, and was more than happy to revisit it. There are five stories here, of which three are set in Priest’s Dream Archipelago and one in Surrey. I’ve always loved Priest’s style, which could be a dictionary definition for ‘deceptively plain’; without fireworks of any kind, he takes you inside a consciousness that isn’t your own and subjects it to strains – things that seem unbearable, or impossible, or unbearably desirable – that it can barely cope with. There’s a lot of loneliness and isolation in the five stories here, a lot of romantic and sexual desire, a lot of lost time; there’s one story that’s basically about the male gaze. Above all, there’s an intense subjective portrayal of how those things feel, and what they do to you. There are elements of hard sf here, but Priest uses them to establish scenarios through which those feelings can be articulated and re-experienced, in all their complexity and strangeness. This is sf at its best.

Spider Robinson, Telempath (1976)
This book is set in a dystopian future, where a (literally) viral hack to the human sense of smell has made society unliveable and led to a general flight from the cities, as well as a rather drastic reduction in the population (although this isn’t dwelt on). Also, it turns out that there are aliens on Earth – or in the Earth’s atmosphere – only we never knew they were there before because we couldn’t smell them, you see? And, and then it turns out that the aliens are telepathic, only you can’t get make telepathic contact with them unless you really chill out, OK, and also you’ve got to be empathetic. So of course young people are particularly good at that – I mean, the whole empathy / telepathy / alpha wave thing – but especially when they’re stoned, right? (Weed has a very distinctive aroma, or so I’m told, and it would really honk if you had an artificially ultra-sensitive sense of smell; the book doesn’t dwell on how that’s managed, though.) By the end of the book a happy ending is in sight; everything is fixed (or soon will be), by the power of youth, empathy, meditation and marijuana. (While at university, “Spider entertained at campus coffeehouses and gatherings, strumming his guitar and singing in harmony with his female partner”, according to Wikipedia. You don’t say.) All snark aside, I did actually like this a lot. It’s just a big bag of stuff, but it’s held together by sheer authorial biro.

Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)
This is a fix-up of five stories, most of them previously published, about Dave Surgenor and his colleagues in the (interplanetary) Cartographical Service. It’s a lot like a reimagining of Poul Anderson’s David Falkayn stories, ten years on and without the mercantilist politics. Like those stories, a lot of these are high-concept exercises: the Cartographical Service specialises in mapping planets that are uninhabited, lifeless and as such safe for visitors, and three of the stories here test those assumptions in different ways. Falkayn was also, not to put too fine a point on it, relentlessly horny, and the other two stories here are mostly about GURLS hem-hem. In one the all-male crew of Surgenor’s ship are supplied with sleep tapes inducing realistic erotic dreams, which has the unfortunate side-effect of increasing testosterone-fuelled behaviour in waking hours – partly because, unlike p0rn, they’re so realistic as to induce emotional attachment. In the other, the ship has been joined by a lone woman, former Crackerjack presenter Christine Holmes (are you sure? Ed.), just before a mission which goes so badly wrong that everyone seems to be doomed within a matter of days; more than one of the crewmen sees her as his last ever chance of a shag and tries to act accordingly. Dave, our point of view character, is sceptical of the tapes in the first story and protective without being creepy in the second, but both stories are basically about The Woman Problem. (Which Dave solves! At least, he asks Christine out when they get back to Earth.) Authorial attitudes here don’t rise to the level of “what were you thinking?” (Anderson, D.F. Jones, Ian Watson, others), but we’re definitely at “well-intentioned but oh, mate”.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1977/1972) 5*
An astonishing piece of work. I’m going to cheat and just quote my original review:

This is, most obviously, a gritty thriller about people living on the edge of the law, dealing with interfering bureaucrats, untrustworthy rivals and the dwindling comforts of home life – although it’s also an adventure story, stretching our heroes to the limit as they negotiate the unpredictable perils of a strange landscape. At the same time, it’s a horror story, vividly evoking what it feels like to deal with – and fail to deal with – things that are beyond your capacity to understand, but won’t go away. It’s also a political allegory about colonialism and how it drains the vitality of colonised societies, even while it appears to bring material wealth. And it’s a desperately sad novel about young people growing up, making new commitments and discovering unwelcome truths about one another, and about themselves. It’s all of that, and it is – and could only be – sf.

It’s a literary novel, it’s a thriller, it’s an indictment of colonialism, it’s an Aickmanesque ‘strange story’. It builds and builds, although it’s written (and was published) as four separate stories – builds to an appalling double gut-punch of a conclusion, when we discover something terrible about a central character and he discovers something even worse about himself (but neither of them is a surprise). Frankly, this book justifies the existence of sf.

Incidentally, it’s 143 pages long.

Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975) 1*
Like Xeno, this novel involves a lot of important men having important meetings – although they’re scientists rather than soldiers and consequently go on at much greater length. Like Xeno, it has two separate plots, one of which has weird theological overtones. On one hand, there’s a whale which has been implanted with a human consciousness, out there somewhere (they did it with computers); unknown to its human handlers, it’s now starting to join in the world-wide network of whale communications, which is a thing. On the other, a scientist has proved scientifically that the Big Bang was immediately followed by an even bigger collapse, that the entire observable universe is only an echo of the expanding universe that might have been, and as such that God doesn’t exist – or rather, that God definitely does exist, but not in our universe. The reaction to this news is a worldwide crisis of faith, riots, collapsing governments etc – and that’s before the whales find out about it.

Like Xeno, in other words, it’s downright weird, but not in a good way. And it’s also like Xeno in relentlessly and degradingly sexualising its female characters; one fantasises about being raped by Hell’s Angels, while another, whose large breasts had made her a popular cheerleader, now “approached cetacean psychology with the same cheerful bounce”. Not all British sf writers from the late 1970s – but definitely some of them.

Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and other stories (1978) 5*
This book made a very pleasant change (I didn’t read it straight after The Jonah Kit, but I did read it straight after Xeno…). My only slight negative – well, a query more than a negative – is whether some of these stories are sf at all; Wilhelm goes considerably further out, in genre terms, than (e.g.) Christopher Priest, and many of these stories would look right at home in an anthology of “strange stories”, post-Aickman or post-Highsmith. But I like strange stories – and sf that’s generically in the borderlands – so no harm done. Several stories seem to be in dialogue with earlier works – including a particular story by Patricia Highsmith – which I also liked; Wilhelm takes those earlier models in some interesting directions. But above all, Wilhelm writes about real people, of both sexes. I don’t particularly hanker after stories in which people spend a lot of time thinking about dresses, but by God it makes a pleasant change from having them contemplating their own boobs.

Ten books, including four 5* reviews and two 1*s. Four 5*s seems generous, but there’s only one here that I might consider demoting – and one (Roadside Picnic) which would deserve a 6th star if one were available.

Next: I’ll probably write a blog post about politics or something. But I will go back for one last look at the £10 Box. If you have been, thanks for reading, and watch this space.

By Phil | Posted in blogology, culture, friction, skiffy, the £10 Box, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

Through the tumbling leaves

3 January 2026 – 17:05

I’ve fallen a bit behind on my monthly books & films posts, but here’s November 2025.

In November I read the last two books from the £10 Box:

Christopher Priest, An Infinite Summer

C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith

Reviews on blog.

I also read (or finished)

Nicci French, The Red Room
A quick, enjoyable read, as I’d expected. I was late to Gerrard/French completism, so I missed out some of their earlier novels and didn’t catch up for a while; this one is the fifth of their 27 novels to date, from 2001. NF don’t exactly write to a formula, but there are certainly recurring elements. The central character here is a woman recovering from trauma; she has a hunch about a murder investigation, and makes a nuisance of herself in trying to get the police to take her seriously; she meets a man who she trusts, but maybe shouldn’t… I mean, stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. This (early) iteration works pretty well, though; the character of Michael Doll – the sex-starved obsessive stalker who may (or may not) also be a murderer – is particularly strong.

Lynn Steger Strong, Flight
Having been through the awful process of dividing up a dead parent’s possessions with siblings, I expected that a novel about a family gathering to contemplate just that would resonate. It didn’t, really, and by the end I was disengaged and rather bored. For one thing, this is basically a ‘Christmas family reunion’ story – nobody’s too bothered about the division of assets, apart from a dispute about the house itself which people are mostly too polite to raise. There are far too many characters (everyone involved brings along their partners and kids, each with their own back story), and some of the American cultural reference points were surprisingly alien (yes, even in 2025). Every time they had a meal there was at least one dish that baffled me; there’s a scene in a bar where people order a basket of fried cheese, which sounds impractical on more than one level. Oh, and one of them’s an artist who makes wooden birds, and one of them’s a social worker who has a client who has a kid who seems to have run away, hence ‘flight’, you see.

Andrew Michael Hurley, Saltwash
I enjoyed reading this a lot more than the previous book, but it was a much bigger disappointment; it read as if it had started life as a short story and probably should have stayed that way. It was basically Robert Aickman with some, but not all, of the eeriness and grotesquerie left out – in fact to a large extent it was Aickman’s “The Hostel” with, etc. Hurley’s slightest work by some way.

Holly Seddon, 59 Minutes
This is just silly; maybe not quite as silly as the Janice Hallett (see below), but getting there. I’m going to ‘spoil’ this one, because any spoiler-free description is likely to make it sound interesting; it’s for your own good, basically. So, it’s the end of the world: nukes are going to fall, across the south of England, in 59 minutes’ time – that is, 59 minutes and counting! Three parallel narratives, with countdown time stamps, follow different characters, all of whom are running round (as my mother used to say) like little mad things. The separate narratives of Carrie, Frankie and (oddly) Mrs Dabb converge and intersect, and as their clocks all tick down to zero… never mind, it was a false alarm! The early warning system got hacked! As you were, everybody! It also turns out that Mrs D’s seemingly parallel narrative has been in a different timeframe all along: her story’s taking place ten years after the event, and she’s been running around panicking for a completely different reason. Also, she’s one of the main characters from the other two strands (hence the ‘Mrs’ malarkey). Bah, is what I say. Also, what kind of hackers does this world have, if they can not only get a fake nuclear alert sent out but disable all the systems that would have rapidly shown it was false?

Adam Roberts, Lake of Darkness
I know Adam, slightly, mainly through the World Of Blogs. He’s a really interesting writer and thinker, particularly in the short story form, although I haven’t always got on with his novels. (Or with sf novels generally, to be fair; I’ve always felt that sf has a natural affinity with short stories.)

As with The Thing Itself and Purgatory Mount, I felt that there was a lot going on here; unfortunately, as with Purgatory Mount I wasn’t entirely sure what it all was. I don’t know Gilles Deleuze from a rhizome in the ground (ho ho), so there’s probably a lot in there that I missed. (Many readers didn’t feel they missed so much, or else didn’t worry about what they were missing. I didn’t need to look up any words, I can say that much.) The book’s also narrated (like the ‘frame’ sections of Purgatory Mount) in an oddly arch, “Listen with Mother” voice, supposedly motivated by the sheer alienness of the far-future situation from or in which the story’s being told. It grated on me, as messing with the omniscient narrator tends to do; when I was reading Gravity’s Rainbow I remember at one point flicking ahead to try and establish when the narrative would get back to ‘normal’. I think I just prefer novelistic prose to err on the side of plainness, third-person narration especially. (I’m not – for all Adam’s advocacy – a fan of Anthony Burgess.)

The two central conceits of this novel can (I think) be summed up in two sets of paired assertions:

Nothing can possibly continue to exist inside a black hole; certainly not life in any form.
Or can it? What does ‘inside’ mean in this context anyway?

and:

The people of a post-scarcity utopia would simply play happily forever, like children.
Have you spent any time with children? That sounds awful!

To be honest, I don’t have a great deal of time for point 2.; my response to those two rhetorical questions would be “No, it can’t” and “It means ‘beyond the event horizon of the said black hole, as opposed to anywhere else in the rest of the universe’, as you very well know”. So the revelation that something, or someone, could and did exist in there – followed by the revelation that the black hole’s ‘inside’ was in fact always already ‘outside’, because of the effect of Infinite Mass on Space and Time and Topology Itself! – left me a bit on the cold side. I don’t object to people going to place A at time X and encountering an immortal superhuman being which has been confined there since the dawn of time; if it’s good enough for Doctor Who it’s good enough for me (exceptions apply). I do baulk at having them (at time X, at place A) encountering an immortal superhuman being which is immaterial and indifferent to time and space, and which has in fact always been already everywhere – and no amount of Socratic questioning (“ah but when you think about it hasn’t it always already been there, hmm?”) is going to unbaulk me.

I am quite sympathetic towards point b., though – I do think a post-scarcity utopia would, ironically at first sight, leave a lot to be desired. However, the burden of Lake of Darkness seems to be that what a p.-s. u. would lack is hardship and loss, and that this could be remedied by reintroducing conflict (courtesy of the dweller in the black hole). This, as an assertion about post-capitalist society, seems about as wrong as it could be. Conflict per se will never need to be reintroduced, it seems to me: scarcity of some kinds is ineliminable, which in turn means there will always be competition and hence conflict. (Indeed, the narrative includes some interesting speculations about what the denizens of utopia would find to do all day, making it clear that not everything would be possible all the time for everyone: there would be priorities to set, which inevitably means that there would be disagreements over those priorities, hence conflict.) Black Hole Dude, to identify him no more spoilerishly than that, specialises in ego-driven ruptures of communal social accord – and who hasn’t occasionally, self-centredly, found communal accord a bit boring? But there’s nothing stipulating conformity, let alone enforced conformity, in the specs for a post-scarcity utopia: you can always disagree, and disagree again, and at worst you can always walk away. The rupturing moves – selfishness, lies, violence – don’t bring anything to the party; they don’t even make conflict work better. If you could engineer anti-social behaviours out of society – and the wager of utopia is that you could – there’d be no need to reinvent them. What you would need are means and procedures for resolving conflict. What a viable anarchy would (still) need, in other words, is law.

Zooming back out, it is worth lingering for a moment over those two conceits, and just how disparate they are; scratching those two itches in a single narrative is quite something. It’s a really interesting book. Didn’t agree with it, of course, but that in itself is quite an interesting thing to say about a novel.

Janice Hallett, The Examiner
Dreadful. As a recovering academic, I thought a post-graduate course might be an interesting setting for Hallett’s “found documents” approach. It’s not. The course and its students begin by not resembling any I can imagine, and end by revealing themselves to be something else entirely. (No spoilers, it’s really not worth it.) Also, Hallett reuses the “improbable thing hidden improbably inside another improbable thing” plot device from The Christmas Appeal; perhaps she thought nobody would have read it. On the plus side, it only took me an evening to read, and it’s cured me of any wish to read any more of her books. Fool me, er, four and a half times… well, anyway.

Also in November, I watched these films:

Anemone (Ronan Day-Lewis 2025)
A small film, rather stagey in a Sam Shepard style (two men in a room, brooding silences alternating with furious monologues). If this had been directed by Ronan Smith, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been co-written by and starred Daniel Day-Lewis, and it might well not have been made. Which would have been a shame; it works well enough, the acting’s genuinely powerful and there’s some great cinematography. I think the guy’s got a future in the business (as well as a father).

Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay 2025)
Sometimes the opening shots of a film make me think, “It’s OK, we’re in safe hands here”. (Sometimes the feeling’s more intense: the opening shots of Todd Haynes’ Carol made me cry.) I had this feeling – that, whatever else, the film-maker knew what they were doing – watching Sentimental Value, and Conclave, and Anemone, and this film. I’m reluctant to overrule my own gut feeling, but the film actually seemed like a bit of a mess; I wasn’t at all sure what it was doing, or whether it succeeded. Films portraying mental illnesses which seem to be shaped to the demands of the film rub me up the wrong way (Sky Peals, Hard Truths), and this certainly didn’t ring true to me as a portrayal of post-partum depression. It brought out the awful, seductive appeal of dropping out of role and calling out phonies, like a more aggressive Holden Caulfield, and how destructive (and self-destructive) such a move can be. Was that what it was about? Not sure.

And Then There Were None (Peter Collinson 1974)
Rock-solid plot, great cast, beautiful location – what could go wrong? The script (mediocre), the staging (wooden), the editing (alternately under- and overactive) and the acting (woefully under-rehearsed); that’s what. A TV movie, and not one I’ll seek out again.

Ballad of a Small Player (Edward Berger 2025)
What did the director of Conclave do next? He adapted a short novel, by cult author Lawrence Osborne, about “Lord Doyle”, a con man and compulsive gambler who inexorably loses everything in the casinos of Macau; he got Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton on board, and the film was released through Netflix, less than a year after the release of Conclave. It’s a terrific novel – it steeps you in “Doyle”‘s consciousness, to the point where the urge for another bottle of champagne and another round of baccarat seems entirely reasonable, or at least like one that’s not worth resisting. The film opens it up and builds up several smaller parts, not always successfully. But Colin Farrell is magnificent; you’d give him a very wide berth (for multiple reasons), but he’s magnificent.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies 1988)
I’m so glad to have seen this on the big screen, and so sorry not to have seen it before. Astonishing film-making, the kind of thing that lives on in your mind; if Country and Western is “three chords and the truth”, this is the truth on 35mm. People’s lives seen as a passage through spaces articulated over time – it doesn’t sound like much spelt out, but done well it’s amazingly powerful. The long shot of the stairs near the beginning of the first part sums up family life, as parents experience it, better than I’ve ever seen it done.

Keeper (Osgood Perkins 2025)
It’s not on the level of The Monkey – which I described as, among other things, “a treatise on mortality dramatised by Peter Jackson circa Braindead” – but this was a lot of fun. “Hi, I’m your new boyfriend and you can definitely trust me!” is a fine old sub-genre of horror film, as is “Things in the woods? Who told you there were mysterious ancient things in the woods?”. Smoosh them together, add gore and grunge and here we are.

The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović 2025)
The films to which Peter Bradshaw and Isaac Feldberg gave their maximum ratings both sound great; they don’t sound like the same film, though, and neither of them sounds like the film I saw. (Feldberg does describe the film as ‘glacially paced’, among other ice-related epithets; I wouldn’t have said that was a good thing, but there you go.) I can’t help feeling a bit “Emperor’s New Clothes” about this one. You can talk about David Lynch and Black Narcissus and use words like ‘oneiric’, or you can say that ‘teenage runaway becomes film extra, talks to star, dreams of stardom’ is pure 50s Hollywood – and the 50s treatment would have fitted in a bit of establishing exposition and wouldn’t have skated so lightly (see what I did there?) over practical questions (were her family looking for her? where did she live while she was an extra, and how?). Meh; all the ‘meh’. (Tout le ‘bof’.)

The Hitcher (Robert Harmon 1986)
We end the month with another old movie making an appearance on Channel 5 or Great! Movies or somewhere – and, unlike Distant Voices, Still Lives, I did see this in the cinema at the time. In a casting decision that will surprise no one, the role of a nameless, motiveless psychopath quietly enjoying the death and destruction he causes is played, rather brilliantly, by Rutger Hauer. It’s great; basically one long car chase, like a shlockier version of Duel.

By Phil | Posted in 2025 in culture, culture, everyday life, fillum, friction, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

The £10 Box: An Infinite Summer, The Faded Sun: Kesrith

1 January 2026 – 18:12

So, farewell then £10 Box!

The £10 Box was an old fruit box containing 40 hardbacks, all of them Science Fiction Book Club editions, dating from 1968 to 1979, which I bought from my local Oxfam bookshop for a tenner several years ago. This is the last in a series of twenty posts each reviewing two of those books; the first was posted in April 2024. All reviews are linked at the end of this post.

Christopher Priest, An Infinite Summer (1979)

I had already read three of the forty books in the £10 Box; this is the third (these were the other two). It was a joy to revisit; in fact I’m fairly sure this isn’t the first time I’ve re-read this book. It’s a collection of five stories, written separately and over a period of years, as Priest is at pains to point out in his Introduction. He also stresses, however, that they have been revised for this collection and “placed … in a deliberate order, with a purpose that I hope will become clear on reading”. Challenge accepted – at least, this makes me feel a bit better about writing up each story in order.

The title story is the only one set in this world – more specifically, it’s set on the banks of the Thames, between Richmond and Isleworth, in times ranging from 1903 to 1940. The story begins when the main character’s life – and his incipient romance with, as far as his family are concerned, the wrong girl – is interrupted by tourists, taking pictures; tourists from an unknown time and place, whose ‘instruments’ fix their subjects in a three-dimensional tableau, invisible to the wider population and frozen for a period that may be days long or stretch into decades. Sometimes you’re the main character, sometimes you’re local colour.

“Whores”, the shortest story here, is set in the Dream Archipelago. A soldier, invalided out of the front line after prolonged exposure to the enemy’s hallucinogenic chemical weapons and still suffering intense synaesthetic flashbacks, goes in search of R&R. He is warned to steer clear of the local girls, but don’t they always say that? To say the story’s frank about sex would make it sound much more wholesome than it is, but it’s certainly frank about male desire and where it can lead – or rather how it can override any concern for where it’s leading.

“Palely Loitering” has a steampunk alternative-Victorian setting reminiscent of the world of Hello Summer, Goodbye; a faster-than-light starship is a key plot driver, although nobody shows much interest in it (the central character least of all). But: suppose that there was a park with a lake, and one of the bridges over the lake took you forward in time by a day while one took you back a day; suppose that, as a young boy, you discovered that jumping the last few feet to the bank propelled you much further into the future; and suppose that you fell in love with a girl you saw there… We’d probably use words like ‘stalking’ now, admittedly, but here the effect is sweet, often comical and rather charming.

“The Negation” is another Dream Archipelago story; its main character is also a soldier in a war involving the weaponising of hallucinogens. While “Whores” portrays a sullenly defeated population in tropical heat, the setting here is wintry and oppressively authoritarian. Against the brutalities of government repression and endless war, the story floats the possibility that art can conquer all, the possibility that a decisive political action is far more effective and the possibility that both of these are consoling daydreams.

“The Watched” is a third Dream Archipelago story, which shares something different with “Whores”: a male viewpoint character who is, frankly, rather excessively horny. The first time I read this story I didn’t particularly notice this – I was young enough to think that, if one’s girlfriend happened to have a shower, one might well find oneself standing outside and imagining how “twin streams of droplets would fall from her nipples [and] a tiny rivulet would snake through her pubic hair” (to quote the first page of the story). There’s a lot of sex in this story, but it’s mostly “sex” as in “looking and fantasising”, not as in “sexual activity” (let alone “sexual relationships“). Really, it’s about male desire considered as a desire to possess through looking, and where that can lead. Also, and not unrelatedly, colonialism, tech bros, the surveillance state…

If I said that these stories were about the sense that we can only live in time, or the sense that we’re all alone but want to make a connection, or the sense that we don’t know what’s going on, it would sound a bit banal. But they are, and their (and Priest’s) strength is to inhabit those feelings and bring out their complexity and weirdness. On examination, it’s not so much that we don’t know what’s going on (for instance), more that what we do know is fundamentally inadequate to the task of telling us what’s going on; or, more precisely, that any kind of approach to a grasp of what’s going on probably begins with the realisation that nothing we think we know is adequate. Stay with ideas like these long enough and your head starts to spin. Stories like these, similarly.

C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith (1979; first published 1978 (this is described as the ‘First British edition’))

Shame to go out on an off note, but I didn’t get on with this at all. There’s a lot that’s interesting about it, to be fair, starting with the setup. The regul, an alien race with their own interplanetary empire (and their own factions warring for control), have made peace with the advancing human race. They are now on the point of withdrawing from the planet of Kesrith: a planet which they have garrisoned with warriors from the mri, a second alien race whose society is warlike and rigidly organised. We spend time with all three species – humans, regul and mri – and learn a lot about conditions on the inhospitable surface of Kesrith and aboard the (for humans) equally inhospitable regul spaceships.

I’ve got two problems with this. One is that Cherryh is plainly fascinated by the mri, a fascination which I didn’t really share – not for want of trying on her part. Cherryh’s far too good a writer to resort to info-dump exposition, but over the course of the chapters set among the mri we learn a lot about their caste-based society, their living arrangements, even their language.

Moreover, there’s something orientalist, in a vaguely Samurai mode, about the mri: lots of honour, flashing blades, solemn oaths and pronouncements. Solemn pretty much everything, in fact. The English used to translate mri dialogue and thought processes is consistently heightened, which is to say, stilted and archaic; it’s also liberally studded with untranslated terms. Here’s a sample:

He had in him a gathering certainty that, whatever the evidence of his eyes and the testimony of the regul, Medai had not laid down his life willingly. The dus, so close to a kel’en’s mind, was miuk’ko and grown so thin that it could pass shrine doors, and the body of Medai, once solid with muscle, was thin as the mummified dead.

I guess some readers find this style of writing sonorous and impressive. I just found it got in the way. (Even a proud member of an unvanquished warrior caste doesn’t think “I have in me a gathering certainty”, surely.) As for the dus and so on, by this point in the book a reasonably alert reader will know roughly what a dus is, who the kel (grammer) are and even what’s involved in going miuk’ko ~~down in~~ – and I suppose there’s some pleasure in being called upon to be that alert reader. But, again, I find it makes the text a bit of a slog; I think it would have worked better, both for ease of reading and as a defamiliarisation strategy, if Cherryh had stuck with familiar terms and let readers discover that a ‘beast’ (say) wasn’t quite what they’d assumed.

My second problem is that I can’t see what all this is for. It’s a well-written, thoughtful and detailed story about future humanity’s engagement with two vividly-imagined alien races – well, one and a half; the regul are rather like a three-way cross between the Vogons, the Slitheen and Jabba the Hutt (although in fairness they do pre-date all three*). It’s high-grade storytelling. But is that enough? The entire book is also the setup for a larger story to be played out over parts two and three – but if this isn’t enough, would three books of it be any better?

I guess this goes back to my recurrent trouble with space opera. I just think sf can do more – even (or especially) while doing less, at least in the way of world-building. (Imagine what Chip Delany could have done with the interactions of the mri language and caste system, or Kate Wilhelm narrating the ghastly gerontocracy of regul society.) The contrast between this and the previous book is stark. Cherryh’s book gave me something to think about the whole time I was reading it – but Priest’s made me think more deeply about things I was already thinking about.

*Two definitely and one almost certainly; C.J. Cherryh could just about have heard the first episodes of HHGTG before she’d finished this book, if she was still working on it in March 1978 and if she visited the UK in that month.

Full list of reviews (with * rating and SFBC # where present)

Poul Anderson, The Trouble Twisters (1963, 1965, 1966) #141
John Brunner, Timescoop (1969)
Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (1967) #142
Terry Carr, Cirque (1977)
Louis Charbonneau, Antic Earth (1967) #133 1*
C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith (1978)
D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1975) 5*
Michael Coney, Winter’s Children (1974)
Michael Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975) 5*
Richard Cowper, Breakthrough (1967) #136 5*
Richard Cowper, Phoenix (1968) #147
Richard Cowper, Worlds Apart (1974)
L.P. Davies, Twilight Journey (1967) #134
Samuel Delany, Babel-17 (1966) #140 5*
Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes (1979) 5*
Harry Harrison, War with the Robots (1962) #138
Philip E. High, Invader on my Back (1968) #148
D.F. Jones, Xeno (1979) 1*
Damon Knight, Three Novels (1951, 1954, 1957) #139
Charles Logan, Shipwreck (1975) 5*
J.T. McIntosh, Six Gates from Limbo (1968) #144 1*
R.W. Mackelworth, Firemantle (1968) #151
Barry Malzberg, Beyond Apollo (1972) 5*
Judith Merril (ed.), Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction (1966) #131
Larry Niven, Inconstant Moon (1973)
Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, The Dynostar Menace (1975)
Frederik Pohl, The Age of the Pussyfoot (1965, 1966) #166
Frederik Pohl, The Gold at the Starbow’s End (1972)
Christopher Priest, An Infinite Summer (1979) 5*
Spider Robinson, Telempath (1976)
Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)
Robert Sheckley, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (1971)
Curt Siodmak, City in the Sky (1974) 1*
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1977) 5*
Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (1968) #135
Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975) 1*
Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and other fictions (1978) 5*
‘Patrick Wyatt’, Irish Rose (1975)
Roger Zelazny, The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth and other stories (1971) 5*
Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown, The Cassiopeia Affair (1968) #149

Key to Star Ratings

5*: you should definitely read this; read the review to see why
1*: you should definitely not read this; read the review to see why not
No star rating: read the review and see what you think

By Phil | Posted in blogology, friction, popular singing groups, skiffy, the £10 Box, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

Yer Blues(3): Why a branch?

23 December 2025 – 17:13

At the moment the main topic of discussion in Your Party circles – at least, the ones I know about – is branch formation. Political direction, recruitment, campaigning, democratic accountability, undoing some of the damage that the leaders of the project have insisted on doing to their own reputation and ours – all these things will be easier to achieve once we’ve got ourselves organised in an actual, officially legitimated branch of Your Party.

Well, perhaps. But what do we mean by a branch?

Most fundamentally, a branch is defined by geography. If Party A has members in a lot of different places, it will make sense for Party A to set up branches in those places. The area covered by a party branch is inversely related to the size of party membership. If more or less everyone’s a member, it will make sense to have a branch for every street; if an organisation’s got members worldwide, but not very many of them in any one country, national branches (or ‘sections’) will be in order. Your Party has members throughout Britain, and has their details on a membership list (or so we’re told). It would be fairly straightforward to sort the membership list by post code, and from there it’s just a matter of grouping post codes together: every YP member in Manchester could be declared a member of the Manchester branch tomorrow. Alternatively, everyone in the Manchester Withington constituency area could be declared a member of the branch for that constituency; we could probably even go down to ward level, as the Labour Party (for one) does.

A branch considered only as a geographical unit wouldn’t really amount to anything – what would all those members do next? We can start fleshing out the definition by thinking of a branch as an interest group. ‘Interest’ here may mean ‘collective self-interest’ or just ‘finding something interesting’; either way, once you’ve identified everyone in a geographical area who considers themselves to share that interest, it’s reasonable to think they might want to meet up. The interest group is then defined by whatever it is they do to pursue their shared interest; crochet lovers get together to do (and talk about) crochet, trade union activists get together to do (and talk about) trade union activism. And when the nature of the shared interest is membership of a party, party members get together to do (and talk about)… party-member stuff.

Does that need to be defined any more precisely? Can we trust in the shared ethos and philosophy of the party, allow each branch party to be shaped by the particular shared interests of its activists, and let the national leadership get on with it unless and until they say something unacceptable? (I suspect this may be the stop where Green Party activists get off.) Or should we begin with a clear idea as to what party members should do – and how they should relate to the party hierarchy and its national representatives?

One option is to see a party branch as an electoral support system. The starting assumption here is that the party has an electoral candidate in a given area; party members in the branch for that area are there to try and make sure they get (re-)elected. And that goal defines what party members do. Campaigning in elections, canvassing voters before elections, canvassing voters in between elections to make the pre-election canvassing run more smoothly: when I was in the Labour Party, that was the bread and butter of branch activity. Indeed, there was very little else that my branch actually did – at least, very little of any political consequence.

This doesn’t sound like a great idea; it isn’t really possible for Your Party, in any case. At present all Your Party’s MPs and councillors are all either former independents or defectors from Labour; I don’t know who any future candidates will be, or how (or by whom) they’ll be selected. If we had a slate of Your Party candidates I’d be happy to canvass for them, once in a while, but that’s a long way off.

Another option is for a party branch to function as – or ideally to grow out of – a community organisation. The idea here is that a locally-based organisation could bring together activists in the area, across or outside party lines (initially at least), and that similar local organisations could federate, regionally and ultimately nationally, to form a new and more representative kind of political organisation. Bottom-up approaches like this seemed to be endorsed at different times by Jamie Driscoll (of Majority and the Green Party) and by Jeremy Corbyn who, after being re-elected as an independent in 2024, promised to build local mechanisms of feedback and accountability in his Islington constituency.

The problem with this model is self-evident: whether the existence of the new party is made to depend on the presence of community organisers or of active independent politicians, the short-term result will be extreme unevenness, leaving much, probably most, of the country untouched. This is not a recipe for building a national party; it’s not really a recipe for building anything, but (at best) for giving something an opportunity to grow – and in all probability to grow “vaster than empires and more slow”. (And, not to get all electoral-support-y, but there is going to be another General Election within the next few years, not to mention council elections next May.)

We could also embrace the “local branch/central hierarchy” structure and think of the party as a transmission belt. In this model (developed originally by Palmiro Togliatti), transmission is two-way. The party transmits the grounded radicalism of workers in struggle upwards to keep the leadership honest, preventing compromises and sellouts; at the same time, the party transmits the more developed programmes and longer perspectives of the leadership downwards, preventing hasty or adventurist action. It’s a two-way transmission of both ideology and discipline. The membership keep the leaders up to date and tell them what not to do (not to settle for less, not to sell out under-represented interest groups); in return, the leadership keeps the members focused on the longer term and tells them what not to do (not to make demands that can’t be met, not to alienate potential allies).

We might ask why having a transmission belt matters: if we’ve got a common philosophy and shared values, why do we also need the leadership’s thinking to be informed by what the members are doing, and vice versa? The answer is class, and the fact that any Left organisation is always at least partially prefigurative. In this model, the members whose radicalism is transmitted up the chain aren’t considered as random individuals who happen to be party members; they’re people active in trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, campaigning charities. In short, they’re people actively building alternatives and challenges to capital and its status quo – and it’s the knowledge and experience built in those struggles that needs to inform the leadership’s decision-making.

I think something like this is in the minds of a lot of the people pushing for the establishment of YP branches. But the devil’s in the detail. The party transmits the leadership’s perspectives downwards, fair enough (although right now we could actually do with a steer on the leadership’s perspectives, beyond the perspective that things are generally going swimmingly). Transmitting the radicalism of workers upwards, though: how? How does the branch constitute itself as having a voice, and how does it make that voice heard?

An answer to that question – although not, I think, a very satisfactory one – is to build a formal apparatus for enabling branches to communicate with the centre, and integrate all branches into it. This leads to one last way of looking at party branches, which is to see them as hierarchical nodes. A vote in the ward party decides (or reaffirms) its position on policy A; delegates from the ward party argue for that policy at the level of the constituency party, where delegates from other wards vote for or against it; constituency parties send delegates to the national conference, where they argue for the policies they’ve adopted at national level. Ultimately, by filtering the most popular options upwards through multiple layers of electoral competition, the base governs the centre, steers party policy and determines who represents the party. The logic is simple, and will be only too familiar to anyone who’s been a member of the Labour Party (although Labour Party democracy hasn’t actually worked like this since the 1990s at the latest).

Two points need to be stressed here. Firstly, the corollary of these bottom-up mechanisms of accountability is a degree of democratic centralism: once a position has been adopted by a party centrally, the leadership has the right to expect that the position will be binding on the party at large (as does everyone who worked to commit them to the policy in question). What this means is that, once a debate or a candidate selection is settled, it stays settled, whatever an individual branch may feel about it (let alone an individual member); at least, it’s settled until the next appointed time for these issues to be debated. As well as governing the centre from below, these mechanisms discipline the membership from above.

Secondly, to say that bottom-up control begins with the branch ‘deciding’ its position is a bit misleading. While the branch is the base layer of the whole hierarchical structure, it’s also a hierarchical structure in itself: majority votes decide what position a branch will back, but those votes are the object of intense factional organising – never more intense than when undertaken by the faction that won last time round. Moreover, given the previous point – that settled issues stay settled – a member is unlikely to see a branch as a hive of debate; it’s more likely to present an image of mute, apolitical unity, with serious debate on policies and personnel seen not as a normal democratic function but as a threat to be fought off. You say “the branch reaffirmed its position”, I say “there were stirrings from the opposition, but the branch’s ruling group won the vote after they’d phoned round and got their friends out”. Potato, potahto.

To recap:

The branch is an interest group: party members in particular areas get together and do, collectively, whatever they feel party members in their area ought to be doing.
The branch is an electoral support system: party members in particular areas get together and work to get their party’s representatives elected and/or re-elected.
The branch is a community organisation: party members are campaigners in particular areas, who get together to form a party out of a national federation of these organisations.
The branch is a transmission belt: campaigners in particular areas get together and work to keep the party’s leadership aligned to the priorities of the working class in struggle.
The branch is a hierarchical node: party members in particular areas get together and compete among themselves to represent their branch and to commit it to particular policies.

Labour Party branches, in my experience, are mostly amalgams of 1, 2 and 5. By contrast, the ideal image of a Your Party branch, when the party was first proposed, was a combination of 1, 3 and 4: local, grassroots, community-based activists would be in the driving seat, whether they were organised independently of YP or not. We can see traces of this way of thinking in the proposal, approved by YP’s recent founding conference, to give YP members the ability to form a local branch, subject to the real-time agreement of 20% of the branch’s membership in the relevant area. While this provision might seem to have an obvious flaw – how can you mobilise 20%, or any significant %, of the branch’s membership if you haven’t got the membership list? – this can also be seen as a safeguard. If you’ve got a community organisation (model 3) you can contact like-minded people through that; if not, you can reach out to workers in struggle (model 4), who will either join YP on the spot or already be members. If you don’t know where to start with either of those routes, well, maybe your area isn’t ready to form a branch.

Meanwhile back in the outside world, preparations for forming branches are proceeding apace – and not only branches; there are already cross-branch co-ordinating bodies bringing together delegates from individual branches (although I’m not sure what the status of those delegates is when they haven’t been elected, not least because their branches don’t actually exist yet). The thinking seems to be that building a hierarchical node (and occupying positions within it) is a good idea in itself, irrespective of whether YP is or isn’t in touch with what’s going on in the area, and hence irrespective of whether the prospective branch is likely to be able to function as a transmission belt. In some cases, the drive to form these – both the individual proto-branches and the cross-branch networks – has been pushed by members of some of the small non-electoral socialist groups that have committed to working in YP, notably the Socialist Workers Party and their offshoot Counterfire. Which suggests an additional, more cynical definition:

The branch (like the party itself) is a position of influence which may be occupied by one of a number of rival groups and factions, amplifying their voice and their ability to intervene in the broader struggle.

I’m not a member of Your Party; the anxiety which the period of rival membership portals caused me, and the relief I felt when I considered the possibility of not joining, made my decision for me. For those who are – and those who, like me, are still on the party’s periphery – I think the branch formation process is going to be critical; I think we should do whatever we can to make our local branch(-to-be) more like a transmission belt to whatever’s going on locally, and less like a hierarchical node in a structure like an organisational chart, all ready for local party veterans to move in once they can swing the necessary votes. I am absolutely not in favour of barring members of revolutionary socialist groups in general from YP, or even the Socialist Workers Party in particular. However, I am also absolutely not in favour of rerunning the Socialist Alliance/Respect/Left List débacle with Zarah Sultana in the role of George Galloway – and I think this is a genuine danger if we give free rein to time-served party activists in search of positions of influence, and let YP branches drift into the hierarchical node form. I hate to say it, but I really think we need to go to the people, or at least think seriously about what that would mean. (It’s not language I like using – I can’t honestly say I’ve never been a Maoist, but it was a very long time ago – but when they’re right, they’re right.)

PS Which also means that I’m not in favour of drumming up enough names to reach the 20% threshold out of our existing WhatsApp lists.

A branch is not a WhatsApp list.

By Phil | Posted in awfully deep, class, pinkoes, politics, the local news | Comments (0)

Good honest October

14 December 2025 – 15:03

In October I read – or finished reading – two books from the £10 Box:

Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams

D.F. Jones, Xeno

Reviews on blog.

I also read (or finished)

Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
My favourite Pynchon, of the five I’ve read; I spent much of September re-reading it, in preparation for watching One Battle After Another (see below). I needn’t have bothered from that point of view, but I’m still glad I did. On re-reading I found the mood of the book quite different from what I remembered, though. Curiously, I found that the mood of Anderson’s film chimed, not with the book I’d just read, but with my earlier vague memory of it – by which I mean, a mood of laid-back, good-humoured but rock-solid radicalism, Costa-Gavras filtered through The Big Lebowski and The Blues Brothers. By contrast, on re-reading it I felt that Vineland‘s not about battles but defeats – at best, the lulls between defeats. Its ending is upbeat, but I closed the book feeling that all its most sympathetic characters and situations, from the saddest and most chaotic or compromised to the glimpses of possible hippie Arcadias, existed at the pleasure of forces far more powerful than they, in the crevices and interstices of a repression so vast and so successful as to have become invisible. Pynchon loves his characters as well as the (genuine) radical history on which he’s grafted them, but he loves them fondly, indulgently, like children. The writing’s amazing, though. There’s a wonderful passage midway through a dramatic confrontation within a chapter-long flashback, when the narrator suddenly throws forward to show the two characters confronting each other in the book’s narrative present, just two middle-aged guys at a barbecue, one cautiously broaching the topic of what had gone on in the old days – It got pretty wild back then, didn’t it? I think you even thought I was a police informer! Yeah… crazy times… All this, before we abruptly spool back to the time of the flashback and realise that that barbecue is never going to happen. There’s also a striking example of a plot-resolving deus in machinam. (No, I don’t mean in machina.) Nobody else writes like this.

Sophie Hannah, The Telling Error
As the next few titles demonstrate, after finishing Vineland I was in the mood for a quicker read. I like a bit of cosy crime, and I keep getting suckered in by Sophie Hannah’s mysteries, mainly because of their intricate and outlandish setups. I should know by now that what you get is 300 pages of people running around like headless chickens, followed by an equally intricate and outlandish solution. There’s a mnemonic for the compass points in order which goes Never Eat Shredded Wheat; I feel as if I ought to be able to do something similar with Never Read Sophie Hannah, but NRSH isn’t really anything.

Henning Mankell, An Event in Autumn
A ‘cold case’ novella and my first exposure to Wallander. Quite Sjöwall/Wahlöö-esque, both in the grim and mildly political resolution to the case and in the rather dogged “The middle-aged man sat down at the table. He felt overwhelmingly tired and he realised that his shoes were leaking.” narration. Good, but not much fun.

Nicci French, The Unheard
Unlike Sophie Hannah, Sean French and Nicci Gerrard are quite good at setting up situations that don’t make sense, but then giving them explanations that do. This wasn’t their best; it was written during lockdown, and I think you can see both stress and haste in the generically ‘Nicci French’ cast of characters (the charming boyfriend, the sceptical police officer…) as well as the details that are left hanging at the end. A good read, though.

Karen B. Golightly, There are things I know
A novella narrated by Pepper, an eight-year-old boy who is very good with some things (especially numbers) and very bad with others (crowds, loud noises); he tells us how a strange man had picked him up from a school outing, claiming to be his uncle. As adult readers we know that things could go very bad at this point, but the abductor seems only to want to replace his own son, who died at a similar age. I was reminded of Walker Hamilton’s All the little animals, a favourite book of mine when I was a few years older than Pepper. It’s an episode rather than a story in its own right, but really well told; if Golightly were to incorporate it into a novel three or four times its length, I wouldn’t complain.

Malcolm Devlin, Engines Beneath Us
A short story and a very powerful one, in a mode that can best be described as working-class Aickman (see also Ray Newman, below). It only rarely crosses the line between terror and horror – which is to say, between ‘creeping dread’ and ‘grue and squick’; it might have been stronger if it hadn’t done so at all. Definitely an author to watch out for, though.

Mick Herron, Clown Town
Some of Herron’s later Slough House books – including the generally wonderful The Secret Hours – have shown signs of narratorial cynicism, self-consciousness, fourth-wall breaking and suchlike symptoms of fatigue. This latest is lively enough, thankfully (although Jackson Lamb does at one point say the words “here we go again”). There’s a bit of London Rules in there, a bit of Real Tigers, even a bit of The Secret Hours, but it’s coherent enough to work in its own right. I was a bit disappointed to be left with a cliffhanger, though – and not just a cliffhanger, but a cliffhanger that could have been designed to be resolved by Goodreads feedback (how many “OMG I can’t believe that X” threads and how many “OMG I can’t believe that Y“?).

Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin
Freelance journalists like to see their work in print, so the life of the freelance obituarist is particularly unsatisfactory – although, this book suggests, that may be better than the alternative. A black comedy from Ukraine (post-independence, pre-invasion). I’m still not convinced about the penguin – although, if the truth be told, I probably wouldn’t have picked the book up without it.

Ray Newman, Intervals of Darkness
Journalist, IT guy and beer authority Ray Newman has been writing horror fiction for a while now, working (like Malcolm Devlin) in a “working-class Aickman” mode; in Newman’s case there’s also an sf-like element of formal experimentalism and more than a touch of the Online Weird (creepypasta, Scarfolk etc). Did I not mention folk horror? Bit of that too. The stories here are powerful and eerie, and I look forward to seeing what Newman does next; I don’t think he’s quite settled on a style yet, but his voice is distinctive. The story that’s sunk the deepest hook into me is one that I’ve read twice – which, when you think about it, is a very good sign.

Also in October, I watched these films:

Dead of Winter (Brian Kirk 2025)
Minnesota. Snow. Shots fired. A frozen lake. A desperate woman. An old woman goes ice-fishing. A girl runs through the snow, screams, is pulled to the ground. Emma Thompson, playing her age, with what sounded like a pretty good Minnesota accent. A decent thriller, elevated by its unusual setting – the cold is practically a character – and its majority-female featured cast. (And that accent.)

The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal 2021)
In which a young female academic (Jessie Buckley) goes to a conference in the entourage of a much older male professor; meets another male professor who she hears lecturing (he opens his paper with a bilingual pun about Bourdieu, which has them in stitches); goes to bed with him after insisting that he first recites Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”, from memory, in Italian; and leaves her husband and two pre-school kids for him, before leaving him to live alone for three years. That’s one narrative strand; the other is the same woman twenty years later (Olivia Colman), now a successful academic and on good terms with her adult daughters, but apparently still a bit traumatised by all the above. (I imagine the husband was fairly miffed as well.) As much as I like both the lead actors, I found the main character hard to sympathise with (the kids do seem truly unbearable, to be fair). It didn’t help that the academic stuff might as well have been taking place on the moon; it made more sense when I realised that the film was based on a book by Elena Ferrante. (Italian academia is weird.)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson 2025)
Just to reiterate, Pynchon’s Vineland isn’t about the Weather Underground – let alone a Bizarro World Weather Underground that somehow maintained a huge network of sleepers and sympathisers for decades after it stopped operating – and I’m really not sure why this film is. (Or, while I’m being picky, why the nuns aren’t Buddhist.) I liked it as a film, but I wasn’t blown away; I think I didn’t like it nearly as much as I would have if it had seemed like an approximation either to Vineland or to the reality of American radicalism (which, come to think of it, Vineland is a lot closer to). It’s significant that Perfidia Beverley Hills’ mother is a cipher called Gramma Minnie; the book’s equivalent, Frenesi Gates’s mother Sasha Traverse, is a key link between Frenesi and a whole history of Pacific Northwestern labour radicalism. But I do love the fact that Perfidia’s daughter Willa was played by an actor called Chase Infiniti: none more Pynchon.

Urchin (Harris Dickinson 2025)
A young man begging on the streets is offered food, but beats his benefactor up. We understand that he wants money for drugs, but the brutality of the attack (which we only see later) poses its own questions. He gets clean in prison; when he gets out he’s set up in a halfway house and started in a job. However, this all comes crashing down when a restorative justice session with the man he’d beaten up evokes feelings that he has no way of dealing with. A sweet-natured but hardheaded film about what it means to fall through the cracks – although I think it would have been stronger if the main character (played by Frank Dillane) hadn’t been so polite and well-spoken.

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro 2025)
Rather long, and very unevenly paced. My daughter informs me that in the book the monster’s story is three times the length of Victor’s story, whereas in the film they’re both long, but pretty much equally long; this may account for the odd sense I sometimes had that the film was both dragging and rushing through the material. (How one goes about learning to read when one knows nothing about alphabetic writing and one’s only companion is blind remains a mystery.) As ever with del Toro, it looks great: there are some heartbreakingly beautiful scenes, and some set-piece sequences that aren’t so much stunning as staggering. I don’t think that’s enough to make it a great film, though.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg 1977)
This isn’t the version I saw when it came out; we spend more time with Richard Dreyfus’s irritating family (boo) and less with the pile of mashed potatoes (also boo). I liked it a bit better than I did then, but still wished that it didn’t so often look like a TV movie. Having spent long enough reading about ufology to recognise several of the early scenes from actual reports, I also feel that the question of whether Flying Saucers Are Real is at the very least interesting, and shouldn’t be answered in the affirmative for the hell of it. I felt, as I often do with Stephen King, that the proposition “there’s something out there” is far more effective if you can add “or is there?”.

Good Boy (Ben Leonberg 2025)
A horror film made over several years on “very minute lolly” (Mark E. Smith), and shot as if from the perspective of a dog – not literally from the point of view of a dog, but showing the world as a dog sees it, perhaps. That the dog sees its owner encountering strange and formless threats wasn’t much of a surprise, nor (mild spoiler) that the owner ends up dead. That the character had begun the film seriously, perhaps terminally, ill was more unusual, and suggested to me that the film might have been aiming for something which would have been really impressive if it had brought it off. (There was something out there – or was there?) A near miss, anyway, and definitely a director to watch out for, if he can scare up some funding.

Orlando (Sally Potter 1992)
Spotted on MUBI and re-watched 33 years on. I enjoyed it a lot. Just the sight of Heathcote Williams – let alone the sight of Heathcote Williams in two different parts – took me back to a vanished world; a world where it seemed perfectly natural for political, formal and cultural radicalism to go hand in hand, and to strike sparks of vivid beauty along the way. Or perhaps it wasn’t a world so much as a scene, even a coterie; perhaps the reason Potter’s film-making often struck me as “school of Jarman” isn’t a matter of artistic affinities or bare-bones budgets, but simply that her film was rooted in the same scene as his, literally among the same group of people. Perhaps that’s also why there never really was a school of Jarman (more’s the pity). Terrific film, though.

Good Fortune (Aziz Ansari 2025)
Aziz Ansari is a working shlub struggling to survive in the gig economy; Seth Rogen is a millionaire tech bro with some personal responsibility for the gig economy; Keanu Reeves is a well-intentioned but not very bright angel. What follows is an odd sort of amalgam of It’s a Wonderful Life, Trading Places, Sorry To Bother You and Bill and Ted. It’s not original, but it is engaging, sharply written and a lot of fun; Keanu as angel is terrific, and even Seth Rogen is less irritating than usual.

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt 2025)
In interviews, Kelly Reichardt has reacted very badly to questions about specific elements of this film, preferring audiences to go in as unprepared as possible. In one interview she was asked, delicately, why the scene with the ladder was as long as it is, and seemed to take exception to even being asked to confirm that there was a ladder in the film. Which is a shame, as I would love to know why the scene with the ladder went on so long – particularly when this doggedly vérité approach to (some) individual scenes goes along with editing of the overall narrative that’s tight to the point of being elliptical, leaving key information withheld and significant characters unintroduced. I didn’t think the film being set in the 1970s justified shooting it in misty shades of autumnal brown and prussian blue, either. Josh O’Connor was good, though.

The Last Sacrifice (Rupert Russell 2025)
“I didn’t realise that you wrote poetry. I didn’t realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry.”
Substitute ‘documentaries’ and you’re there. We attended a special screening of The Last Sacrifice, followed by a Q&A with the director. His aim was to make a documentary about Satanism, witchcraft and black magic in the British cinema in the 1970s, and the two-way relationship which these films purportedly had with real practices of Satanism (etc), being influenced by that reality and influencing it in turn. He wrote the film in a credulous, Channel 5 “but was there a more sinister explanation?” style, and had it edited like a trailer (on his own admission). 94 minutes is a long time to be watching montages and jump cuts; the opening ten minutes, introducing the film and edited like a trailer on speed, nearly made me walk out. During the Q&A the director also revealed, artlessly, that he’d only seen The Wicker Man a few years ago and had started getting into folk horror after that, and that he didn’t for a moment think that any of the various wouldbe sorcerers in the film could actually do anything supernatural. Which made me feel that the film, on top of being incoherent, sensationalist, confused and over-excited, was a massive missed opportunity. A film on the same subject made by that person – a newcomer to folk-horror magic and a sceptic about real-world magic – could actually have been interesting. Anyway, I don’t think it’s been released, so you’re unlikely to come into contact with this film; but if you do, avoid.

By Phil | Posted in 2025 in culture, culture, everyday life, fillum, friction, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

Not one of us

20 November 2025 – 16:55

There was an unexpected blast from the past on Bluesky the other day:

To be clear, if you think that 'objecting to someone who looks at this mural and goes "can't see the problem" is some kind of smear, congratulations, you are a racist!

— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T11:12:24.376Z

Point: the racism of current Labour government policy (to which Stephen Bush rightly objects) was facilitated by the labelling of the anti-racist Corbynite Left as racist and the subsequent defeat of an anti-racist Labour Party by Boris Johnson‘s Tories (to which Bush contributed).

Counterpoint: in 2012 Jeremy Corbyn culpably “[couldn’t] see the problem” with Mear One’s Freedom For Humanity mural; this demonstrates that he was (and is) a racist, and hence that the “anti-racist opposition” was no such thing – and demonstrates it so clearly and conclusively that only another racist could object.

Spoiler: I agree with the first poster and strongly disagree with the response. (At least, I strongly disagree with everything after the semi-colon, which I really don’t think is tenable – and let’s not even mention what’s after the en-dash.)

It’s worth pausing to think about what kind of claim is being made here. The response only works if we assume, not only that Corbyn’s response was racist and/or revealed him as a racist, but that one form of racism was just as important as the other. In other words, it only works if Corbyn’s racism was as serious a problem as the unfolding panorama of government-endorsed racism that we’re currently seeing – and, more to the point, as serious as all the predictable negatives of a Boris Johnson-led Tory government (from hard Brexit on). A Labour Party with inadequate policies or a disappointing leader (imagine that) would still be worth supporting as an alternative to that. Really, the argument has to be that the racism some people inferred from Corbyn’s response to that mural was disqualifying: made it impossible to vote for his party.

This isn’t a novel idea; we already know that Corbyn was disqualified – a lot of people who might otherwise vote Labour felt strongly motivated not to vote for him, or for any government he would lead. Having campaigned for Labour in 2019, I clearly don’t agree with this position – I’m not even sure I understand it – but it is where a lot of people are coming from (even now). And, while it’s possible that for some people Corbyn’s comments on that mural were the final, clinching piece of evidence, I don’t think anyone’s mind was made up on the basis of those comments alone – or that anyone’s mind will be changed now by anything I say about them. There are those of us who believe Corbyn and Corbynism to be anti-Zionist but not antisemitic, and then there are those who believe them to be both – or else that the two are in some sense the same thing. Reinterpreting a single piece of evidence is unlikely to move anyone from one camp to the other.

But let’s crack on anyway. What were Corbyn’s comments – and what was he commenting on?

The mural, as you can see in Stephen’s post above, shows six grey-haired and -bearded men apparently playing Monopoly, in front of an image of the eye in the pyramid (as seen on the US dollar bill), on a table formed of the bent backs of naked, faceless people. I say ‘playing’, but five of the six are sitting quietly, staring ahead expressionlessly; the sixth is counting his money. The figures are blobby and caricatured, although they’re not well enough executed to be recognisable (and/or the subjects aren’t well enough known). Three, including the one with the money, have large, bulbous noses.

The mural was painted in 2012, and rapidly came under attack for the perceived antisemitism of the depiction of the six men, seen as caricatures of “Jewish bankers”; the local council duly got it removed. On one level this was unfortunate; it certainly misrepresented what the artist was trying to do. Given that the figures appear to be caricatures, it’s reasonable to take the artist’s word as to who they’re caricatures of; the answer appears to be that they’re meant to represent Walter Rothschild, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Paul Warburg, Andrew Carnegie and Aleister Crowley. (The artist’s own comments refer to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Walter’s eighteenth-century forebear, but the caricature is fairly plainly of Walter (the original addressee of the Balfour Declaration). This – and the fact of there being multiple Rothschilds – will be relevant later.)

So: Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Warburg, Carnegie, Crowley. One of those names is not like the others, and we’ll return to that. More to the point, only two of those individuals – Warburg and Rothschild (the figure with the bundle of money) were Jewish. In the words of the artist (heavily edited for length and clarity),

I chose to depict the likenesses of … robber barons, specifically Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Warburg, as well Aleister Crowley … These wicked banksters have indeed been playing a game of monopoly on the backs of the working class. … [I don’t] believe there is some jewish conspiracy creating and controlling our money … So to conflate my anti-capitalist message with antisemitic rhetoric … is very ill-intended … It was also [my critics’] interpretation, and never mine, to point out ‘hook noses’, ‘crooked noses’ and other vile Nazi, Third Reich antisemitic propaganda

Of course, this only amounts to a very qualified defence of the mural. The then mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, said that “the images of the bankers perpetuate anti-Semitic propaganda about conspiratorial Jewish domination of financial institutions” – and those tropes are still evoked if there are only two Jewish financiers in the lineup, or one. Authorial intention is only relevant up to a point. “It’s a banker, they deal in money!” “It’s Walter Rothschild, that is what he looked like!” Valid points, but you still end up with someone who looks stereotypically Jewish clutching a wad of banknotes. When it comes to public art, one hook-nosed banker grinding the faces of the poor is one too many.

Still, that is what the artist thought he was doing – which may explain why, when he posted on Facebook objecting to the plan to remove the mural, he did not mention the antisemitism accusation, or any other reason for the council to want the mural removed. The local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, commented as follows:

“Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller destroyed Diego Viera’s mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.”

I think it’s probably fair to say that, if a constituent had written to Corbyn asking his views on the Man at the Crossroads mural project, the reply would have spelled ‘Rockefeller’ correctly and got Diego Rivera’s name right. In other words, this looks like an off-the-cuff response, suggesting that Corbyn had probably not thought very deeply about the mural – or looked at it closely enough to see why anyone might object to it. He may simply have thought he was looking at a variant of the “Pyramid of the Capitalist System“, with the eye in the pyramid representing the almighty dollar.

What happened next? Nothing. The mural was painted over, the artist complained and the world turned; nobody even objected to Corbyn’s comments. At least, nobody objected until nearly three years later, when the Jewish Chronicle – acting either on information that they’d sat on for three years or on a remarkably in-depth search of the new Labour leader’s social media presence – ran a story about the mural and what Corbyn had said, contacting his office for comments “about his support for a clearly antisemitic mural remaining on display”. No comment was forthcoming and the story died again – until late March 2018, with the Salisbury attack in the news and the tide running against Corbyn, when Luciana Berger revived it and demanded a response. On receiving it, she and others (notably those Labour stalwarts Gavin Shuker and Ian Austin) promptly demanded a better one.

Here they both are:

In 2012, Jeremy was responding to concerns about the removal of public art on grounds of freedom of speech. However, the mural was offensive, used antisemitic imagery, which has no place in our society, and it is right that it was removed.

“Jeremy thought that removing the mural raised freedom of speech issues. At the time he hadn’t noticed the antisemitic imagery, which overrides those considerations and means it was right to remove it.”

This was considered grossly inadequate (too brief? too impersonal? no apology?) and Corbyn duly issued a second statement:

In 2012 I made a general comment about the removal of public art on grounds of freedom of speech. My comment referred to the destruction of the mural Man at the Crossroads by Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Center. That is in no way comparable with the mural in the original post. I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on, the contents of which are deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic. I wholeheartedly support its removal. I am opposed to the production of anti-Semitic material of any kind, and the defence of free speech cannot be used as a justification for the promotion of anti-Semitism in any form. That is a view I’ve always held.

“I got it wrong and I’m sorry; you guys were right, the mural’s really bad; the free speech argument doesn’t come into it; and no, I’m not just saying all this now because I’ve been found out.” That about covers it – at least, if we assume that it’s at least possible that the original comment was made in ignorance, in error or in haste. It’s hard to see what more Corbyn could have said – or why what he said wasn’t enough.

But of course his critics didn’t want more, they wanted something different. They didn’t want him to explain that he’d inadvertently fallen short of a shared standard of behaviour, but to admit that he’d never shared that standard in the first place. What they wanted, in other words, wasn’t an apology but a confession. Thus Stephen Pollard stated (wrongly) that the creator of the mural had confirmed that the six figures were intended as antisemitic caricatures, building to claims that “[t]he Jewish caricatures were the entire point of the mural” and that “[t]he obvious truth of the matter is that [Corbyn] liked the mural”. How then to deal with Corbyn’s apology and disavowal, which Pollard quotes in full? Simple: it’s all lies. “Mr Corbyn protests that he cares about antisemitism ‘and all forms of racism’, in the formulation he insists on using. Mr Corbyn is a liar.”

Now, you don’t talk to, or about, a political opponent in those terms; you couldn’t, you’d have nobody left to talk to before long. (There’s a reason why “Liar!” is the worst possible insult one MP can use against another.) You assume good faith, just as you assume other forms of common decency (including not being racist); you make that assumption irrespective of whether you actually think the other person’s truthful, honest and so on. You make that assumption; if your opponent falls short, you challenge them and demand an explanation; you accept the explanation as itself being made in good faith, and the world continues to turn. To call someone a liar is to say that you aren’t assuming good faith – which means that you can’t work with them, ever. Between political actors, it means that you want the other person gone; you think they shouldn’t be in the political sphere in the first place. In Mouffean terms, it turns agonism into antagonism. (The opposition between political opponents – even opponents committed to one another’s total defeat – is agonistic; the opposition between the political sphere and people excluded from it is antagonistic. Usually the relationship between the Labour Party and even its bitterest opponents remains agonistic.)

But the rejection of Corbyn’s apology made it inevitable that he would be called a liar – in point of fact, to listen to somebody’s explanation for why you might have mistakenly assumed them to be X, and then continue to label them X, is to call them a liar. More broadly, to say that your explanation for your actions doesn’t count is to say that your words and your thinking don’t count: whatever game we’re playing, you’re not a full part of it. It’s antagonistic, and as such it’s a treatment that most people in politics would never dream of giving one another – not least because they’d never want it visited on themselves.

What do I think about Jeremy Corbyn’s views on that mural? Well, I think he’s an elected politician, and as such he deserved the benefit of the doubt when he said that he hadn’t looked at it closely and so forth. Yeah, but what do I think he really thought? I think that you can’t ask that question if you think of Corbyn as a legitimate political actor. I also think that delegitimating him – turning him from an agonist into an antagonist – had, and continues to have, baleful effects on our political discourse, and that it wasn’t justified, by his comments on that mural or anything else.

There is something interesting about that mural, though. A few years ago Bob Pitt got curious about it – why that particular lineup? why Crowley, of all people? – and did some digging. It turns out that the image of Aleister Crowley has a similar source to some of the other odd features of the mural, notably the eye in the pyramid – and, I would argue, the weirdly static, trancelike quality of the central tableau. It seems that Mear One is not a conventional Leftist but a devotee of the work of David Icke. According to Icke, “Rothschild Zionists” run the governments of the US, the UK and Israel, and hence the world; the label does not refer to Jews or even to Zionists, but to a secret society which has worked to further the interests of the Rothschild family over the centuries. All five of the bankers featured in the mural have been nominated by Icke as “Rothschild Zionists”; Icke’s personal mythology also has an important place for Aleister Crowley, “Satanist, Freemason and Illuminati operative”. Consider also the odd passivity of the people on the bottom level, as well as the fact that the six figures in the middle are doing nothing more consequential than playing a game, and that Rothschild himself is the only one of the six to show any movement. All this attests to this belief system’s lack of dynamism: history in this vision is not the history of class struggle but the history of unchanging, unending control, exercised at an almost supernatural level. It’s a highly idiosyncratic, borderline-psychotic belief system, based on a weirdly literal re-reading of old antisemitic tropes but without anything to say about real-world Jews. And no, Corbyn didn’t spot this, but then neither did anyone else before 2022.

Returning to the Bluesky posts that we started with: I think the honour of the “anti-racist left” is largely intact. Off the top of my head I’d define racism as “treating people differently, and/or advocating that people should be treated differently, on the grounds of their supposed race, with one or more out-group of people denied the dignity and respect afforded to members of the in-group”. The OED goes further:

A belief that one’s own racial or ethnic group is superior, or that other such groups represent a threat to one’s cultural identity, racial integrity, or economic well-being; (also) a belief that the members of different racial or ethnic groups possess specific characteristics, abilities, or qualities, which can be compared and evaluated. Hence: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against people of other racial or ethnic groups (or, more widely, of other nationalities), esp. based on such beliefs.

The sense in which the policies and rhetoric of the current government are racist, like the sense in which much of Boris Johnson’s better-known writing is racist, is pretty straightforward. On the other hand, Corbyn and the movement he briefly led were known for their vocal opposition to racism, and for anti-imperialist internationalism more broadly. Can the mural affair outweigh that? Assume (being as charitable as possible to the critics) that the mural made a definite nod to antisemitic iconography and that there’s something suspicious about Corbyn’s failure to notice this; assume that a comment with suspicious omissions, made in 2012, is telling evidence of Corbyn’s trouble with Jews between 2015 and 2020; assume that there’s no other relevant evidence regarding Corbyn, Jews and antisemitism.

When all those assumptions – some of them counterfactual – have been made, what have we got? Certain beliefs about Jewish people’s “specific characteristics, abilities, or qualities” do seem to have fed into the depiction of Walter Rothschild, even if the artist denied it; and Corbyn’s comment in 2012 didn’t call this out. But this doesn’t get us very far; remember the assumption of good faith and common decency under which agonistic political conflict operates. More, surely, is needed in order to overcome the assumption that Corbyn – that any random MP, Left or Right – doesn’t think it’s appropriate to portray a historical Jewish banker as having a large nose, clutching a wad of money and physically oppressing the poor. And even if we assume that the question can legitimately be asked, we can’t overlook the fact that it has been answered, with a resounding No.

So no, the case for Corbyn’s antisemitism isn’t proved by his comments on that mural. In fact those comments can only be considered as possible evidence of antisemitism if you call him a liar – and in that case you can basically call him what you like (you aren’t going to believe his denials); you’ve already excluded him from the respect due to a political opponent. The “Corbyn’s antisemitism unmasked” reading of the mural brouhaha isn’t straightforward or self-evident; it’s tendentious, selective and above all hostile. Relative to Corbyn’s exclusion from political legitimacy, it’s a symptom, not a cause.

Writing as I am in November 2025, the last thing I’m currently inclined to do is defend Jeremy Corbyn. But it really seems to me that his biggest sin – the one thing that made him persona non grata in respectable politics – was his unhesitating and consistent opposition to the imperialism of Britain and its allies. Among other things, this found expression in an opposition to Zionism which guided his approach to Israel/Palestine, although he always fought shy of articulating it – wrongly, I think; equivocating didn’t reduce the hostility his beliefs aroused, and made him seem evasive and untrustworthy. For some people – Pollard included – this could not be forgiven or tolerated; it had to be either elevated to the status of a career-ending defect or assimilated to the racism which was already seen in those terms. Others found his stance on Ireland unacceptable, or the possibility that a Corbyn-led Labour government would seek justice for victims of the British Army in Afghanistan and elsewhere – or simply the fact that he threatened existing centres of power in the Labour movement. (Needless to say, I don’t share these objections or sticking-points; on the specific point of anti-Zionism, I don’t believe a Corbyn-led government would have posed any danger to the security of the Middle East, still less to Jewish people in Britain.) Whatever the issue, Corbyn’s opponents could find common cause in labelling him, and the movement behind him, as utterly beyond the pale; a label that eventually, after much effort and several false starts, stuck.

A successful Corbyn-led Labour government was always a distant prospect; much of the opposition to Corbyn came from within the Parliamentary Labour Party, making it highly unlikely that a Corbyn government elected in mid-2017 would have made it as far as… actually they might have made it to the end of 2019, so never mind. Anyway, there wasn’t a viable, battle-ready alternative government of the anti-racist Left ready to go in 2017, still less 2019. But it would have been good to give it a try; I can’t believe the results would be anywhere near as bad as what we’ve got now.

By Phil | Posted in bitterness and spite, decent left, history, pinkoes, politics, Uncategorized, zionism | Comments (0)

Yer Blues(2): The local news

10 November 2025 – 14:14

1. Where I’m Coming From

As (very) long-term readers will know, I joined the Labour Party in 2015, shortly after voting for Jeremy Corbyn in the ‘registered supporters’ section of the leadership election. Like most people, I didn’t expect Corbyn to win. I committed to becoming a full member after the election in any case, in the hope of taking part in the bottom-up revitalisation of the party that his campaign seemed to herald.

He won, of course, which was great, but even after that I couldn’t see much sign of the party being revitalised. Certainly not locally; I went to a party meeting or two and found the vibe rather routine and self-satisfied – very much as if Corbyn’s election hadn’t changed anything. I stopped going and went back to social media. Then, about six months after I’d joined, I got a call from an unknown number. “Is that Phil? I believe you joined the Labour Party recently… Could I just ask, do you support Jeremy Corbyn?” And a big sigh of relief when I said Yes.

The thing is, you can’t revitalise the party from the bottom up as individual members; you need to do it collectively. But you can’t do anything collectively unless you can bring enough people together – and to do that you need to know who those people are. The local party leadership, of course, knew perfectly well who had joined the party recently and how to get in touch with them – but the local party leadership didn’t intend to use that information (other than to invite the newcomers to party meetings and socials), and they certainly weren’t going to share it. So left-wing members wishing to contact similar – and knowing damn well that several hundred similar had recently arrived – were reduced to scrounging contact details from a whole variety of sources (a Momentum appeal on Facebook in my case), and tentatively asking unfamiliar party members whether, no offence intended and don’t take this the wrong way, they might perhaps be a supporter of… the person just elected leader with 59.5% of the vote.

As well as holding the mailing list, the local leadership clique had the incumbency advantage. This is a killer for anyone trying to win the votes of less informed and/or less motivated voters; think of it as the “seems to be doing a reasonably good job, seems nice enough and lots of people seem to support him/her” advantage. In my ward, at least, they also had a strong networking advantage – as I discovered the day a perfect stranger, who I’d seen at the odd meeting, wandered up to me at the bus stop and asked if I was still working at the same place. We had quite a nice chat, but I never found the words to say “who are you and how do you know me?”. (The person in question would later be Chair of the local branch; talking it over with a friend in the Left group, we worked out that our mutual friend was probably the father of a kid who’d been a friend of one of my kids, five or six years earlier (hence “are you still” etc, I guess).) One way and another, anyway, the clique were several steps ahead of us, so – despite theoretically having numbers to spare – we never did manage to revitalise the Labour Party in Chorlton. We got close once, relatively early on, but not close enough (search term: “rinsed”).

2. Where We Got To

I’m not going to say that the real revitalisation of the Labour Party was the friends we made along the way – we were defeated by the Labour Right, repeatedly, and it wasn’t good. But I did make friends along the way, and that’s not nothing. Specifically, I became part of a network of people in the Withington constituency, mainly organised through a range of WhatsApp groups. (The Withington constituency includes Chorlton, Didsbury, and Old Moat as well as Withington itself.) While to begin with we were all members of the Labour Party, under Starmer’s leadership some of us were expelled and most of the rest drifted away. When a few of us met up in person a couple of months ago, it was quite noticeable that almost nobody was still in the party – nobody, that is, apart from the people who’d managed to get elected to the council before the tide went out.

But the network endured – even when it had outlived its original purpose of organising within the Labour Party – and the first meeting of people interested in Your Party in the Withington constituency grew out of this network. The first thing we did was introduce ourselves – yes, the old ‘go round the circle and say something about yourself’ routine – but, rather brilliantly, we were instructed to keep things moving by only giving three pieces of information: our name, our pronouns and our political affiliation. So I can say with some confidence that there were people there from RS21, Counterfire, the Socialist Workers Party and another couple of groups, as well as several like me whose group affiliations are in the past (Socialist Society/Socialist Movement 1987-95, Labour Party 2015-24 and, er, that’s it).

The rest of the meeting was more practical. With a bit of help from facilitators we surfaced several issues and clusters of issues, enabling people to form sub-groups to pursue them – in the meeting and, more importantly, afterwards. I thought I could make the biggest contribution to the group focusing on party structure, which at that point I saw as three inter-related questions: how the new party should be structured (branches etc); how it actually was structured, if only by default (i.e. who was running the show and how); and how members could feed back their ideas on (a) into the apparatus of (b). As we’ll see in the next post, this question isn’t so much difficult to resolve as difficult to define at all, and there’s scope for an awful lot of bootstrapping and recursion – how to set up structures to enable not-yet-branches to hold the not-yet-centre accountable for the mechanisms it establishes for the formation of true branches empowered to hold the centre to account… To take only the most obvious issue, there’s no easy answer to the chicken-and-egg “the centre is accountable to the branches”/”the branches are authorised by the centre” question. But it’s probably not realistic to take the process as slowly and incrementally as it really deserves to be taken, and I suspect the knot is going to get cut one way or another (and probably without any input from me).

We also began planning for a public meeting where Your Party would be launched on the people of Withington: this, rather than the meeting of our (literally) self-selected group, would mark the true foundation of YP in Withington constituency. What follows is almost entirely second-hand, as I wasn’t involved in planning this meeting – in fact I didn’t even go to it. Digressing slightly, I had a strong emotional reaction to the 2017 election – and an equally strong reaction to the 2019 defeat, which hit me like the loss of a friend. (Which, for anyone lucky enough not to have experienced bereavement, doesn’t mean ‘I felt very sad’; I did, obviously, but it was much worse than that.) My response to the launch of the YP mailing list was euphoric – echoes of July 2017 – and I went to the inaugural meeting on a high. After that, though – and particularly after the membership portal débacle – I started getting 2019 flashbacks, and started keeping a bit of a distance from YP for the sake of my own wellbeing.

The meeting was held in a bar’s function room; misgivings about meeting on licensed premises (would we put off observant Muslims? would the meeting be disrupted by drunks?) were addressed by having the towels put on during the meeting. In passing, I think these worries may have been a bit overdone. It seems to me that there aren’t likely to be many people interested in the explicitly non-religious Your Party who are also sufficiently devout not to want to set foot in a pub – and I strongly suspect that there’s a swathe of people on the Left who would actually prefer at least some of their meetings to be held in pubs.

Anyway, the lack of booze didn’t stop the meeting being a success in the obvious ways; it was well-attended and there were plenty of contributions from the floor. What turned out to be more problematic was a decision that had seemed like a no-brainer: both Corbyn and Sultana were going to be in the Northwest around the time we were meeting, why not get one of them along? A date was agreed with Sultana, the meeting was advertised on social media and tickets flew out. Which was great, except that having Sultana’s name on it made the meeting attractive to a slightly different, and much wider, range of people – and we didn’t have any way of limiting attendance to potential members of a Withington constituency YP branch. In retrospect I think we could have thought more about the potential mismatch between online organisation, publicity and ticketing, on one hand, and organising a face-to-face group within the geographical unit of a constituency, on the other – and between a meeting of Withington YP supporters and a YP supporters’ meeting in Withington.

Hindsight’s a wonderful thing! In any case, what took place was by all accounts the second kind of meeting, not the first. People did try to use the Q&A constructively, by getting answers from Sultana to some of the difficult questions – particularly around party structure – but without much success; she’s a politician, after all. At the end of the night it was a successful meeting, but it wasn’t the founding event for a party branch; the branch, at the time of writing, remains un-founded.

But what do we need a branch for? See next post.

By Phil | Posted in big stuff, pinkoes, the local news | Comments (1)

The £10 Box: Somerset Dreams, Xeno

2 November 2025 – 15:35

The £10 Box was an old fruit box containing 40 hardbacks, all of them Science Fiction Book Club editions, dating from 1968 to 1979, which I bought from my local Oxfam bookshop for a tenner several years ago. This is the nineteenth – the last but one – in a series of twenty posts, each reviewing two of those books; earlier reviews are linked at the end of this post.

Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and other fictions (1979; originally published 1978)

The name of this collection initially put me in mind of Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex, and the psychedelic-bucolic strain of British sf more generally. But Kate Wilhelm’s Somerset isn’t an English county; it’s a small town in rural America, possibly in Wyoming (some of the place names, although not others, seem to match). This Somerset is a small and declining town; it used to be on the route between two towns (well, the back route), but since the river flooded and took the bridge out you only go to Somerset if you’re going to Somerset. And, as with Royston Vasey, if you do go to Somerset you may never leave; more to the point, you may never want to leave…

There are seven other stories here (or ‘fictions’ if you like), all between ten and 30 pages. ‘Planet Story’ is set on an alien planet, and suggests that we may not have considered the implications of that word ‘alien’; ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis’ (from 1976) gives us a couple (and a society) hopelessly addicted to a reality TV ‘survival’ game. (Meanwhile back in 2025, a site called DirecTV has a list of the 15 “most popular Outdoor Survival TV Shows available to stream right now”.) ‘Mrs Bagley Goes to Mars’, the only previously unpublished story, has a title that both is and isn’t self-explanatory; I was reminded of authors like Joanna Russ and Josephine Saxton.

So Kate Wilhelm clearly had a way with titles. Otherwise the stories just mentioned are unusual; very little here is unambiguously set in the future, in space, among alien beings or w.h.y. Policing the boundaries of sf is a mug’s game, always liable to fall back on defensive positions like ‘sf of the old school’ – or if all else fails ‘hard sf’ – so I’m not going to say that any of these stories aren’t sf; I will say, though, that many of them border on Robert Aickman territory and would fit well in a collection of psychological horror stories. It seems that what interested Kate Wilhelm was altered states of consciousness and how they could be induced by – or induce – altered states of reality; uncanny edgelands, which you may stray into on an alien planet or in a suburban garden. It’s also worth noting that ‘Mrs Bagley Goes to Mars’ wasn’t the only story that reminded me of another work of fiction; ‘State of Grace’ evoked an equally (and differently) uncanny story, Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Empty Birdhouse’, while the Twilight Zone episode ‘Mirror Image’ seemed to lie in the background of ‘The Encounter’. I should stress that I’m not suggesting plagiarism, but something more like a creative dialogue: all three stories are quite unlike the material they seem to riff on, and take similar setups in very different directions.

The other great strength of these stories is that, however eerie their scenarios are, they are about believable relationships between believable people, male and female. (Believable people in awful situations and believable relationships being stretched to the limit, but still.) Which is rarer than you’d think, at least if you’re reading 1970s sf written by straight male authors (for another example see below). When a female point-of-view character acknowledges a man’s interest in her and treats it as a minor irritation, or simply does something normal like planning meals or talking about clothes – I would say it makes a refreshing change, but more specifically it’s a relief: you feel you can stand up straight. I wouldn’t call Kate Wilhelm a feminist writer on the basis of these stories (hence ‘Mrs Bagley’ drawing my attention), but she did write about real women (and indeed real men), for which much thanks.

D.F. Jones, Xeno (1979)

I wondered briefly whether D.F. Jones had been a woman using initials so as to go undetected in the male-dominated world of sf/f (cf. C.J. Cherryh, J.K. Rowling, U.K. Le Guin), but Xeno quickly dispelled this suspicion. In fact the author’s full name and style was Commander Dennis Feltham Jones OBE, and he wrote eight books, published between 1966 and 1981 (the year of his death, aged 62). SFE notes, in appropriately dismal tones, that his later novels “succumb with excessive ease to a slick gloominess”, dissipating his work’s “initial glum panache”. So don’t get your hopes up for this one – certainly not for a happy ending.

The book starts well enough, with a military plane going missing – just blipping off the radar – and reappearing, to the utter bafflement of the pilot, four months later and five thousand miles away. Then we go behind the scenes of US military intelligence, and the pace immediately flags: we see a lot of square-jawed military men being called to urgent meetings, where they exchange lines of the “Surely you’re not saying…”/”That’s exactly what I’m saying!” variety. Then a Russian plane vanishes and subsequently reappears (“But Colonel, surely you’re not saying…”); then an American passenger plane. The authorities keep an eye on the people who were on that plane, who seem initially to be uncannily healthy – but then they start falling ill, and developing subcutaneous cysts that resemble eggs…

This book has a lot in common with Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (an earlier 1* review); in this case I’m not suggesting either plagiarism or creative dialogue, at most a certain shared underlying nihilism. Like The Jonah Kit, this book’s plot has two separate drivers: the lost time episodes and what may have caused them fade from view halfway through, with the rest of the book being about the mysterious infection and its ramifications. Like The Jonah Kit, it indulges in some rather weird theological speculations: people interpret the lost time episodes and the subsequent alien infestation in terms, not of alien contact, but of contact with a semi- or quasi-divine being, which has somehow passed on a parasitical infection while playing its inscrutable games with aeroplanes. This would not be God, you understand – God is by definition perfect and hence could not be carrying parasites – but something intermediate between humanity and God: a cosmic angel, perhaps, or an intergalactic saint. The point of this digression seems to be the problems it causes for the Communists (“‘But God does not exist!’ Tatyana cried desperately.”); it’s still decidedly odd. And, like The Jonah Kit, it’s extremely dark, with a far-future frame story that holds out very little hope for the planet.

Then there’s (sigh) the sexual politics, which are from another era (a final similarity with The Jonah Kit) – although, given that Jones was born 25 years before Watson, you could argue that his attitudes were from another era in another era. Either way… oh dear.

Essentially a simple, cheerful girl, Shane de Byl was bright enough to know that she had no great brain. … She knew she had a fine body, and the instinct to enjoy it and to use it for its proper function, children. But not just yet.

Proper function. Right. Moving along… oh, we aren’t moving along.

Secretly, she delighted in her body, watching its magical progression from puberty, from skinny flatness to ample, gentle curves.

Secretly, you say – as in “we’re not going to hear about it”? Nope. Jones is just getting warmed up, and I do mean ‘warmed up’:

Every morning, flanked by a mirror on one side, an open window on the other, she had her private session of self-admiration, turning this way and that, craning her neck to see her herself from all angles, conscious of the fresh air that added to her awareness by its chill touch.

Yep, that’s definitely something that a real woman who is a real person would really do. Every morning.

Shane de Byl is the closest this book gets to a love interest, although ‘love’ may be pushing it.

One of the most powerful and satisfying experiences known to humans is sex, and Jaimie and Shane had plenty of that. In basic, earthy terms,

Please, D.F. Jones, spare us the basic, earthy terms.

In basic, earthy terms, Jaimie screwed the hell out of Shane on every possible occasion.

How nice for them. Jaimie is a doctor; he had first met Shane when he treated her broken leg. He wasn’t in the habit of picking up his female patients, you understand; the idea wouldn’t even cross his mind, generally speaking.

Generally speaking, doctors regard their female patients’ bodies with a detached eye. Often, a body that looks wildly exciting displayed on a dimly lit bed appears very different on an examination couch under cold light.

Call me politically correct, but I would have thought the difference between a sexual relationship and a doctor-patient relationship was more relevant than the quality of the light. Anyway, to examine Shane’s fractured tibia Jaimie would only need to look at her lower leg, wouldn’t he?

But there can be exceptions. Doctors are trained to observe: Jaimie Scott, 28 and unattached, could not help noticing her sensational figure, or the fact that she was a genuine blonde.

OH D.F. JONES NO. As I said, I wondered briefly if D.F. Jones was a woman using initials so as to go undetected in the male-dominated world of sf/f; only briefly.

Like The Jonah Kit, this is a weird, disjointed disaster novel with cosmically doomy overtones, written by an author who seems half in love with the disaster. Like The Jonah Kit, its sexual politics are truly dreadful. And, like The Jonah Kit, it’s getting one star.

Reviews so far (with * rating and SFBC # where present)

Poul Anderson, The Trouble Twisters (1963, 1965, 1966) #141
John Brunner, Timescoop (1969)
Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (1967) #142
Terry Carr, Cirque (1977)
Louis Charbonneau, Antic Earth (1967) #133 1*
D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1975) 5*
Michael Coney, Winter’s Children (1974)
Michael Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975) 5*
Richard Cowper, Breakthrough (1967) #136 5*
Richard Cowper, Phoenix (1968) #147
Richard Cowper, Worlds Apart (1974)
L.P. Davies, Twilight Journey (1967) #134
Samuel Delany, Babel-17 (1966) #140 5*
Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes (1979) 5*
Harry Harrison, War with the Robots (1962) #138
Philip E. High, Invader on my Back (1968) #148
D.F. Jones, Xeno (1979) 1*
Damon Knight, Three Novels (1951, 1954, 1957) #139
Charles Logan, Shipwreck (1975) 5*
J.T. McIntosh, Six Gates from Limbo (1968) #144 1*
R.W. Mackelworth, Firemantle (1968) #151
Barry Malzberg, Beyond Apollo (1972) 5*
Judith Merril (ed.), Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction (1966) #131
Larry Niven, Inconstant Moon (1973)
Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, The Dynostar Menace (1975)
Frederik Pohl, The Age of the Pussyfoot (1965, 1966) #166
Frederik Pohl, The Gold at the Starbow’s End (1972)
Spider Robinson, Telempath (1976)
Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)
Robert Sheckley, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (1971)
Curt Siodmak, City in the Sky (1974) 1*
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1977) 5*
Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (1968) #135
Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975) 1*
Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and other fictions (1978) 5*
‘Patrick Wyatt’, Irish Rose (1975)
Roger Zelazny, The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth and other stories (1971) 5*
Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown, The Cassiopeia Affair (1968) #149

Key to Star Ratings

5*: you should definitely read this; read the review to see why
1*: you should definitely not read this; read the review to see why not
No star rating: read the review and see what you think

By Phil | Posted in blogology, friction, popular singing groups, skiffy, the £10 Box, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

Yer Blues(1): What’s Bin Did

31 October 2025 – 12:21

This is the first in a brief series of posts about the “Your Party” project. Like a lot of people, I was initially very enthusiastic about the project; like a lot of people, I don’t think things are looking great at the moment. But first, some background.

Back in July, Zarah Sultana MP announced – to general surprise – that she was leaving Labour to co-lead the formation of a new party, together with Jeremy Corbyn. There had been rumours that a new Left party might be in the offing, but this was the first official announcement that a party was actually being formed. Expressions of interest in the new party were invited and duly flooded in – I think the counter got up to 800,000 before updates stopped appearing.

Corbyn confirmed the news (albeit not immediately), and for a while everything looked rosy. However, nothing seemed to be happening about turning those expressions of interest into membership – or turning the initial announcement into a party that people could become members of. There was a disquieting silence from the leadership on these issues – and on most others, including who the leadership actually were.

On the 18th of September an email broke the silence: a membership portal was opened and announced to YP supporters. However, three hours later another all-supporters email disowned the portal (call it Portal 1), portraying it as little better than a phishing attack:

This morning, an unauthorised email was sent to all yourparty.uk supporters with details of a supposed membership portal hosted in a new domain name. Legal advice is being taken. That email should be ignored by all supporters. If any direct debits have been set up, they should be immediately cancelled.

Ouch. Sultana – for it was she – responded by acknowledging that she’d acted unilaterally in opening up membership, and said that she’d been frozen out of YP collective decision-making by a “boys’ club” of Corbyn and the other Independent Alliance MPs. In one message Sultana talked about taking legal advice herself, and for a while things were looking extremely rocky; she retracted this threat later, fortunately.

Six days later, a new membership portal (call it Portal 2) was announced in another email, headed pointedly “Official: Your Party Membership Now Open!”. Subsequent communications have made a point of referencing Sultana as well as Corbyn, and we’ve been given to believe that relations between the two are at least civil. However, membership data collected from Portal 1 has still not been merged into what’s now the YP membership database; the money paid by would-be members via Portal 1 (which runs to several million pounds) is also in limbo, being held by MOU Operations, a separate company from YP. On October 27th people who had joined via Portal 1 were invited to contact YP and let them know that they’d already paid a sub. Two days later, in less happy news, a story attributed to anonymous YP sources appeared in the Guardian, claiming that YP intended to take legal action against MOU to recover the missing millions (MOU’s response is here).

I haven’t joined; if Portal 1 had been left open I might have been tempted, but the infighting that immediately erupted made me feel I’d be better off sitting this one out for a while. (The 29th October Guardian story does nothing to change my mind.) Even before Portal 1 had been disavowed, though, I was uncertain about the whole process of joining the new party, given that the new party didn’t yet exist – although, without members, how could it? There’s an awkward chicken-and-egg relationship between founding the party and inviting people to become members. On one hand, there’s not much point joining something unless you know what it is and what it’s for: this would imply that the party should be founded first and then opened to members. On the other hand, any new left party should be – and this party in particular is specifically intended to be – guided and controlled from below, by its members: this would imply that nothing should be done in the way of founding the party until after everyone’s joined. Obviously both of these conclusions are impractical; we need somehow to split the difference. The approach being taken so far is to designate the new party’s first conference as its founding event, and to stress that only paid-up members will be eligible to attend – more precisely, that attendees will be randomly selected from the paid-up membership (the principle of sortition, as seen (on a much smaller scale) in jury selection). The wording of Portal 1, in fact, said very little about becoming a member (and what we would be becoming members of), stressing instead that only by taking out membership would you be eligible to be selected for the founding conference.

The conference, it was announced some time ago, is to be held in November, and that remains the commitment (yes, this November). The timetable seems to have been set by working backwards from May 2026, the imperative being to get something recognisable as a party – and preferably not still called ‘Your Party’ – up and running in time for next year’s council elections. However, a two-day conference can’t be expected to write a party constitution, or even scrutinise a draft constitution. Ahead of the conference, therefore, YP’s founding documents have been published in draft form; regional assemblies are being held at which they can be discussed and amendments proposed, while an online ‘crowd editing’ tool has been launched. But the devil’s in the detail. What were originally described as ‘mass’ assemblies are materialising as meetings of around 200 people, who divide into groups to discuss allocated sections of the founding documents. (The principle on which sections of the documents are allocated seems obscure, to put it kindly; one group in an assembly in the East of England found itself called on to discuss how the new party should operate in Scotland and Wales.) Groups then feed back to the room. Comments and amendments are collected by the facilitators, but there’s no time for plenary discussion; as such there’s no attempt to consolidate the contributions made by different groups or to arrive at any overall positions. It seems that the only people getting any kind of overview, or having any chance of synthesising different positions, are the facilitators – a group whose membership and qualifications for the role remain obscure, but which in any case is evidently not very big. As for the ‘crowd editing’ tool, anyone expecting something like the Google Docs multiple-editor experience will be disappointed: apparently anyone will be able to propose amendments, but nobody will be able to see anyone else’s amendments – except the leadership group, presumably, who will be able to pick and choose which to apply. The size of the YP membership, and the range of skills and experience that members can bring to it, has rightly been seen as its key asset; the assemblies and the ‘crowd editing’ tool could have been designed to neutralise that asset.

The founding conference for its part has been trailed as having a projected attendance of 13,000, made up of two separate groups of 6,500 attending on each of two days – or possibly four groups of 3,250 each attending one session (there’s been no official clarification). These numbers are, frankly, insane. Figures this large aren’t required in order to make the meeting representative; random selection does that for you, above a certain (fairly low) limit. Presumably the idea is to accommodate some (most?) of these people online, although that’s scarcely problem-free (a free Zoom account has a limit of 100 participants in a session). In any case, even if 3,250 people could be beamed down at 9:30 a.m. (and beamed up again at 1:00 to make room for the afternoon shift), the deliberative potential of a meeting of that size would be basically nil – as would the chance of any individual member getting to address the meeting. (Both of which would be pretty minimal in a meeting of 325, to be fair) There’s a strong whiff of the stage army about this proposal – of a conference which functions like a rally, endorsing by acclamation decisions that have been hammered out elsewhere. Which, again, gives the impression of a leadership that’s happy to have a mass membership, but doesn’t want them getting any ideas about running the show.

As for who actually is running the show, this article by Archie Woodrow from September is a good starting-point. It appears that early preparations for building a new party were dominated by Collective, a group associated with Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project in which Karie Murphy, formerly of the Leader of the Opposition’s office team (LOTO), plays a major role. The group was expanded following dissent among participants including Jamie Driscoll (the former North of Tyne metro mayor who now leads the Majority group) and Andrew Feinstein (who stood against Keir Starmer in the 2024 election); the dissenting group circulated a Memorandum of Understanding (unpublished) and established a company, MOU Operations. Following the Portal 1 débacle (in which the directors of MOU Operations have denied any involvement), relations with the MOU group appear now to have broken down; as a result, presumably, the narrower group centred on Corbyn is back in charge.

Officially – according to the email which launched Portal 2 – the leadership group in fact consists of the Independent Alliance. Which is to say, Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the opposition and the second longest-serving MP in the House of Commons; Zarah Sultana, who is 32 (today – happy birthday, Zarah!) and was first elected to anything in 2019; and four MPs elected in 2024 as pro-Gaza independents, defeating Labour incumbents. With the best will in the world, those four – a former Liberal Democrat councillor, a former Labour Party member and two people with no political history at all – aren’t going to have the resources to mount much opposition to someone with Corbyn’s depth of experience. Mind you, six months ago I would have said something similar about Sultana – and she’s effectively bounced Corbyn into first launching the party and then opening party membership, and is now freelancing on party policy. What seems to have happened is that Sultana’s recognised that Corbyn’s key tactic is delaying and refusing to give a definite answer, and decided to neutralise it by simply going round him. It’s working so far, but it’s not a recipe for a productive working relationship longer-term. But then, neither is Corbyn’s heel-digging – which reminds me of a line by Philip Larkin about how people look at him and think he’s got what he wanted, when in fact he’s only succeeded in not getting what he didn’t want.

All in all, things don’t look too hopeful. It’s disappointing, and disillusioning, and perhaps more than anything else it’s frustrating. Even while writing this post I’ve had the urge to write some formulation like “…which raises some interesting issues”, and immediately felt wretched – the whole point of actually launching an actual party was that we were actually going to do something, like we did in the late 2010s, instead of writing blog posts discussing the issues raised by X and the implications of Y, like we’ve been doing ever since. (NB previous sentence may contain rose-tinted view of 2015-19 period.)

Still, the story’s not over yet. And neither is this series of blog posts (plenty of issues still to be raised!). Next: the local news (Your Party in Manchester Withington constituency).

By Phil | Posted in cheery thoughts, legal matter, pinkoes, politics | Comments (0)

Do you remember?

26 October 2025 – 09:37

In September I read – or finished reading – two books from the £10 Box:

Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes
Terry Carr, Cirque

Reviews here.

I also read (or finished)

Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping
The history of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian future America is pretty well mapped out now, from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes through to Catching Fire. While plenty of people will be happy to spend some more time in Panem, any new story can only really be set in the period between Songbirds and The Hunger Games. Haymitch’s origin story is a natural choice – but it’s also a story that has fairly burdensome conditions attached. Whatever happens, it can’t involve a rebellion – at least, not one that has any effect or is remembered by anyone; by the end of the book, moreover, Haymitch himself needs to be a burnt-out, cynical alcoholic, or heading that way. The action is well handled and there are some interesting sidelights on Hunger Games characters, but the narrative arc is, frankly, a bit of a downer.

Bernard C. Blake, At the Change of the Moon
At the Change of the Moon, discovered (in the British Library) and reprinted by horror writer and editor Johnny Mains, was one of a handful of books by Bernard C. Blake (1882-1918). Blake wrote this when he was 19; he seems to have given up writing in his mid-20s. In form it’s a linked anthology: confined to their hotel by a storm, two men vie with each other in telling tales of insane people they have known. It’s an odd choice of theme, and not entirely successful: it makes for narratives that are weird and unsettling without being eerie or otherworldly. In other words, we’re never in any doubt that the deranged logic of the accounts we are reading is the product of a deranged mind; this is a security we rarely have when reading Robert Aickman or Arthur Machen. The book itself is very short, but it’s supplemented with other writings by Blake as well as pictures of Blake and a lengthy introduction. It’s clear that this was a labour of love for Mains, in bad as well as good ways; there were a few places where I thought the book could have done with another pair of eyes. It’s a fascinating rediscovery, though; I wish Mislaid Books every success.

(Only four books completed in September! A lot of my reading time was taken up with something I didn’t finish until October.)

Also in September, I watched these films:

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau 1974)
“Contains nudity,” warned Talking Pictures TV. True: during the opening montage of 1970s central Manchester (fascinating in itself) a woman in a long coat, waiting to cross the road, throws off her coat and runs naked through the traffic. (She’s never seen again, nor does anyone else strip off.) It’s an Italian production, with dialogue added in post-production; this and the highly approximate geography give the film an additional layer of weirdness. The main action is set somewhere out in the country, and follows the Night of the Living Dead template: zombies are killing people, but the local police are more suspicious of the scruffy hippies who try to report them. The discovery of what’s creating the zombies gives the story a nice ‘green’ twist, while the ending is, if anything, even more downbeat than that of NOTLD. It’s not, however, set in Manchester (the opening sequence apart) – or indeed in a morgue. (It also went out as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue and Don’t Open the Window. No one in the film ever opens a window, or gets advised not to.)

Eddington (Ari Aster 2025)
A town divided against itself during the pandemic – divided to the point of civil war! It sounds like it could make an interesting film – darkly satirical, cranking up the tension, showing up stupidity and pig-headedness of all kinds while retaining sympathy for the human beings involved… a Britannia Hospital for the pandemic. The trouble is, a film like that wouldn’t spare anyone or anything, on either side – and it’s far too soon to both-sides Covid. (My internal monologue, in at least one scene, was “Put the mask on. Put the mask on. Put the bloody mask on.”) Moreover, while Britannia Hospital shows that it’s possible to take a tous azimuts approach to satire, it also shows its cost: the need to take on everything results in a film that’s bleak to the point of despair and structurally disjointed (just ask Mick Travis). In any case, in this film Ari Aster isn’t just taking on his audience’s beliefs; he’s taking on every assumption we bring to the film, including assumptions about pacing, tension and narrative coherence. Eddington wrong-foots us so often, and to so little constructive effect, that I’ve got to assume it was deliberate; what Ari Aster was trying to achieve is another question.

Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky 2025)
A fast-moving, enjoyable heist/double-cross movie; very post-Coen Brothers in its pacing and editing, and in the way it always seems on the point of tipping into absurdity (the Orthodox Jewish gangster brothers come very close). Austin Butler’s central character frequently gets beaten up, and the violence generally is rather crunchy and unpleasant; given that the film overall is about as serious and grown-up as The Double Deckers, this gives it an odd, slightly fetishistic quality. But it’s never less than watchable; Butler (who appears in Eddington as an annoying Youtube personality) makes a likeable – and very watchable – amiable shlub, while Mat Smith plays a lowlife punk with a lowlife Mohican (and, oddly, a rather unconvincing British accent). The titular ‘stealing’ is nothing to do with theft – it’s a baseball reference (and there’s more baseball in the film than I really needed). Still: overall, good stupid fun.

The Thursday Murder Club (Chris Columbus 2025)
I’ve read The Thursday Murder Club, obviously; my weakness for the less serious fringes of crime fiction has been well documented here. It’s not gritty; it’s not harrowing; it’s not gruesome; it does not abound in heart-stopping narrative tension or savage authorial anger. In short, it doesn’t have any sharp edges. Or so I thought – but Chris Columbus has evidently found some, and he’s filed them right down. As well as almost everything being wrong – the location, the casting, the plot, the dialogue – the film is cosier and more fluffy than you could imagine. I don’t give up on films, but in this case I was sorely tempted. To be fair, it is worth hanging on to see Richard E. Grant, who seems to be visiting from a different film. I imagine his audition went something like this:

REG: …who’s witnessed horrors, and he’s shut his eyes to them so as to survive, but he’s also shut down the core of his being – his heart if you will – and he’s slowly becoming ever more aware of the unbearable cost of doing so… I don’t know, I’m just throwing out ideas…
CC: Sure. And you’re cutting roses all through the scene. When can you be off book?

Jaws (Steven Spielberg 1975)
We saw this at a 50th-anniversary screening; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it, and it was well worth seeing on the big screen. But it is about a shark. Spielberg had a great cast, and he had the sense to let them stretch out and do a bit of acting; the action scenes are great, too (although it would have been better if we’d never seen the shark full-length). But it’s an adventure story about some guys hunting a shark; that’s what it is, that’s what you get. The difference between this and Jaws 2 is one of quality, not kind.

Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel 1987)
“So, half the film is going to consist of some people eating a lovely meal – I mean, a really lovely meal – but only one of them says anything nice about it. The others don’t say anything, but you can see they’re enjoying it despite themselves, and it becomes a life-changing experience. Although they are all very old, so, you know.”
– And…?
“No, that’s pretty much it.”
– OK, what about the other half of the film?
“The other half is everything that leads up to it.”
File under Shouldn’t Work (But Does); a genuinely enchanting film. (In fairness, it is a really lovely meal.)

Steve (Tim Mielants 2025)
It’s the mid-90s, and Steve (Cillian Murphy) is the head teacher at a special school: specifically, a residential school for boys excluded from mainstream education after going through the criminal justice system. It’s not an easy job, and Steve doesn’t get through unscathed. The boys are loud, assertive and unruly, in much the same sense that Niagara Falls is damp: they’re unbearable, and I found myself unable to perceive the good that Steve sees in every one of them. Or rather, I should say – this being a drama rather than a documentary – that the boys are very convincingly unbearable: there’s a stellar cast playing members of staff, but the teenage lads playing the pupils are extraordinary. It’s a bit like The History Boys, if at any time there was always at least one of them breaking stuff, yelling with rage and frustration, attacking somebody or just shouting “Wanker!” to relieve the boredom.

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos 2009)
Perhaps not the oddest film I’ve ever seen, but well up there. The premise – a couple raise their children to believe that they can’t ever leave their house and garden – is no odder than Room or The Village, but the execution is doggedly, claustrophobically bizarre; in its single-minded conviction and intensity it’s reminiscent of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End (and that was a musical). An example is the titular “dogtooth”; this refers to canine teeth, and to a key element in the family’s personal mythos. The children will be old enough to venture beyond the garden, the father assures them, when one or other of their (adult) canines drops out; however, it’s not safe to leave except by car, and they won’t be old enough to learn to drive until the missing canine grows back again. “Nothing odd will do long” (Samuel Johnson), and on the evidence of Dogtooth this Lanthimos character certainly isn’t going to have a long career. (Johnson was referring specifically to Tristram Shandy – which, he said, “did not last” – so perhaps this wasn’t his finest critical hour.)

Rogue One (Gareth Edwards 2016)
I watched this years ago and couldn’t remember anything about it, except that it was a Star Wars prequel and had something to do with the Death Star. Then we watched Andor, which is just wonderful; real politics and believable characters in the Star Wars universe, who would have thought it was possible? Having four series concertinaed into the second season is a tragic missed opportunity, on a par with the cancellation of Firefly. Anyway, we watched the final episode of Andor and gradually realised that there wasn’t going to be an ending, as it was setting up for Rogue One to start in medias res. So we watched Rogue One again… and, a month later, I couldn’t tell you anything about it, except that it was a Star Wars prequel and had something to do with the Death Star. It was enjoyable to watch – if you want an action movie with lots of SFX, Gareth Edwards is your director – and Diego Luna was in it, as were Genevieve O’Reilly and Ben Mendelsohn; the gang was all there, but in comparison to Andor they just didn’t have much to do. Maybe one day there’ll be a Star Wars film with the seriousness of Andor; I’ll be right there. (Top tip: fix it so Alex Lawther can come back.)

Islands (Jan-Ole Gerster 2025)
Tom is a tennis coach living on Fuerteventura. Someone asks him where he goes for holidays, but he doesn’t really have holidays; he’s on court all day, and at night he goes to the local club and drinks till he passes out. The way he insinuates himself into the life of a wealthy couple, who have hired him to coach their son, evokes another Tom, but he’s no Ripley: he has no goals, seeming to act entirely on impulse. He sees that there are tensions between the man and the woman – she says that he made her give up work, that he mismanaged her father’s business; he says that he thinks he isn’t the boy’s father. And then the man goes missing. What’s happened? Why is the woman confiding in him? What will happen now? Where next for Tom? The key thing to keep in mind – which Tom fails to do – is that he lives on the island; they’re only there on holiday.

By Phil | Posted in 2025 in culture, culture, everyday life, fillum, friction, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

The £10 Box: Cirque, Blackpool Vanishes

16 October 2025 – 14:49

The £10 Box was an old fruit box containing 40 hardbacks, all of them Science Fiction Book Club editions, dating from 1968 to 1979, which I bought from my local Oxfam bookshop for a tenner several years ago. This is the eighteenth in a series of twenty posts, each reviewing two of those books; earlier reviews are linked at the end of this post.

Terry Carr, Cirque (1979; originally published 1977)

Terry Carr (1937-87) is best remembered now as an sf editor and fan, but he also wrote short fiction and three novels; SFE describes this one as “ambitious and substantial”. It’s also very odd, and I’m not entirely sure it’s not an allegory. (Neither of which – the possibility that it is an allegory and the fact that I’m not sure – counts in its favour.)

It’s set on Earth, but not an Earth that’s in any way recognisable; the book’s subtitle is “a novel of the far future”. This Earth is a galactic backwater: the book opens with the arrival of a “foreigner from Aldebaran”, a giant millipede. Although it’s off the interplanetary beaten track, Earth does have features to draw tourists, one in particular: the Abyss, a hole miles across whose lightless depths no one has ever fully explored. The question of how this works – wouldn’t the depths of the Abyss get a bit hot and magma-y? – isn’t explored either, nor the question of how it got there. Nor does Carr do much in the way of callbacks to the Earth we knew; in particular, whereabouts on the globe the Abyss has opened up is left unclear. Carr makes an exception in the area of religion: we’re told that there are Christians on Earth, along with Moslems, “several Hassidic Zen sects” and devotees of newer belief systems, including Centrists (who believe that all life emanates from the Abyss) and worshippers of the Five Elements.

The titular Cirque is a city perched, literally, on the brink of the Abyss; a river runs through Cirque and disappears, in a spectacular cataract, into the Abyss. For the good people of Cirque the Abyss is a double asset, a tourist attraction and a rubbish dump (and how often can you say that?). But something big is about to happen; more precisely, something big is about to emerge. People are getting premonitions, people are seeing glimpses. The millipede, whose species can see their own future as well as their past, knows for certain what’s going to happen, and has in fact turned up to witness it. (How did it know to come to Cirque? Simple: it was going to come to Cirque, so it remembered what would happen when it did.)

There’s a large-ish cast of human characters, including a priestess of the Five Elements, who is convinced that an all-devouring thing of evil is about to emerge from the Abyss, and a City Guardian, who sees the potential arrival of a large wild creature in more practical terms. We also meet a ‘holopathic’ telepath, who experiences the thoughts of everyone in Cirque and rebroadcasts those that seem particularly interesting or important, like a switchboard manager on a telepathic phone-in. (This is a job that requires a very particular set of skills, and burns out those who have them in a matter of years.) Yet another character uses drugs to induce a controlled form of dissociative identity disorder, and cycles through multiple versions of herself every day. It’s a very mobile narrative, both between characters and literally, in the sense that characters spend a lot of time on the move. Quite a lot of the book, in fact, takes place in boats – either the slightly fairground-esque remote-controlled boats on which tourists navigate the town’s river or the flying boats in which the more daring tourist can go a little way into the Abyss (going more than a little way into the Abyss may not be advisable).

Slight spoiler: something does emerge, and it is big. It doesn’t devour the world, though – the millipede would hardly have gone to Cirque in that case. (Yes I know. Just go with it.) I won’t try to describe what happens next, other than to say that the characters’ different perspectives on the ‘beast’, as well as their telepathic abilities, turn out to be crucial. It’s not that the beast from the Abyss is revealed to be a monster from the Id, but… it’s not not that. The millipede is happy, anyway, and founds yet another new religion, venerating causes and causality – concepts of which, from its trans-temporal standpoint, it had previously been sceptical, but which (for reasons that aren’t entirely clear) have struck it with the force of a revelation during the climactic events.

So it’s ambitious and substantial, right enough, but it’s also very, very odd. Maybe there’s a deeper – quasi-allegorical – meaning, but if so it’s hard to see what it would be, other than that empathy is good and fear is bad (it leads to anger, or so I’m told). It’s hard to quarrel with Joachim Boaz‘s laodicean conclusion – Vaguely recommended for fans of SF allegories.

Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes (1979)

This is one of two or three books in the £10 Box that I’d read before. Re-reading it wasn’t a chore. It’s sf in the vein of mock-heroic social realism, a bit like Keith Waterhouse in his bleaker moments. It runs the gamut from pastoral through black comedy to fleshy grotesquerie; there are moments of real horror and passages of equally genuine pathos. There’s also a poet, whose work we read at some length; unusually, the poetry’s not played for laughs, and some of it’s pretty good.

What happens? Blackpool vanishes. For the people of Blackpool – and for visitors like the Watts, a cantankerous elderly couple who have come to Blackpool for a week because they always go to Blackpool for a week – nothing changes, except that all the routes out of town are blocked and the sun doesn’t move in the sky (although, as the Mayor points out, this will do wonders for Blackpool’s daily sunlight figures). For those outside the entire town is replaced by a giant sphere, embedded in the ground – a sphere which is somehow both invisible and opaque. For anyone who was on the borderline when Blackpool vanished – well, that’s an unfortunate place to be.

We meet Aldridge, a civil servant whose longed-for promotion has turned into a dead-end posting in rural Boddington, where he’s responsible for the Alien Beings Section. Aldridge has been unofficially sharing information – including information from a correspondent in Blackpool – with an enormously fat and prodigiously intelligent confidant, ~~PyecrafMycro~~Marcroft. We see quite a lot of the book through the eyes of Tom Standish, an homme moyen sensuel whose dreams have thus far outstripped his achievements, and who comes into the possession of Marcroft’s papers. There’s also Aldridge’s daughter, who teaches at the local secondary school; her pupils include Georgie Prentice (“usually known as Porker”), whose mother has history with Aldridge’s odious boss Barnet.

And then there’s Aldridge’s correspondent, Stone. (Francis has an odd, arresting way with names: an Aldridge here and a Wentworth there, but then you run up against “Stone”, “Miss Nym”, “Pulse”.) Stone’s life has been dominated by UFO sightings: at unpredictable moments – sometimes years apart – he has seen daylight discs, alien craft in groups and swarms. Crucially, he has realised something that never seems to have occurred to earlier spotters: as with Father Ted’s cows, those (sun, moon, stars) were far away, but these were small. Blackpool has been under reconnaissance, for at least the fifty years of Stone’s adult life, by minuscule alien beings in tiny craft. Nobody else seems to see what he does, or – more importantly – interpret what they see as he does; Stone rapidly gives up trying to communicate his discovery conventionally, and writes about it in poetry. We read eight of Stone’s poems, with dates ranging from 1926 to the narrative’s late-70s present; their development over time reminded me of nothing so much as Nick Drake’s songwriting, developing from the conventional imagery of “Fruit Tree” to the concentrated resonance of “Fly”, and on to the stark plainness of “Know”.

It’s all very ably done: you could read this book for the pleasure of watching Francis delineate the grotesqueries of his characters and set them up in different places and combinations. But there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s about having a career, and what it means to have a satisfying career; it’s about things left unspoken, and what happens when they finally are spoken. It’s about sexual jealousy and guilt, and the lingering, corrosive effect they can have – even on the very old; even, indirectly, on the very young. It’s about the horrors of old age; it’s about being young and directionless; it’s about having a good life, and how hard that can be. Although its characters and incidents are variously ludicrous, grotesque, pathetic and horrible, it’s about everyday life – which, after all, can often be all of those things. This plurality of registers and styles seems to me very much of a piece with the fact that it’s science fiction; it’s as if the essential absurdity of the premise (tiny little aliens make Blackpool vanish) makes conventional expectations irrelevant, making it possible to head off in all these different directions. Strongly recommended.

Reviews so far (with * rating and SFBC # where present)

Poul Anderson, The Trouble Twisters (1963, 1965, 1966) #141
John Brunner, Timescoop (1969)
Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (1967) #142
Terry Carr, Cirque (1977)
Louis Charbonneau, Antic Earth (1967) #133 1*
D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1975) 5*
Michael Coney, Winter’s Children (1974)
Michael Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975) 5*
Richard Cowper, Breakthrough (1967) #136 5*
Richard Cowper, Phoenix (1968) #147
Richard Cowper, Worlds Apart (1974)
L.P. Davies, Twilight Journey (1967) #134
Samuel Delany, Babel-17 (1966) #140 5*
Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes (1979) 5*
Harry Harrison, War with the Robots (1962) #138
Philip E. High, Invader on my Back (1968) #148
Damon Knight, Three Novels (1951, 1954, 1957) #139
Charles Logan, Shipwreck (1975) 5*
J.T. McIntosh, Six Gates from Limbo (1968) #144 1*
R.W. Mackelworth, Firemantle (1968) #151
Barry Malzberg, Beyond Apollo (1972) 5*
Judith Merril (ed.), Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction (1966) #131
Larry Niven, Inconstant Moon (1973)
Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, The Dynostar Menace (1975)
Frederik Pohl, The Age of the Pussyfoot (1965, 1966) #166
Frederik Pohl, The Gold at the Starbow’s End (1972)
Spider Robinson, Telempath (1976)
Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)
Robert Sheckley, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (1971)
Curt Siodmak, City in the Sky (1974) 1*
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1977) 5*
Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (1968) #135
Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975) 1*
‘Patrick Wyatt’, Irish Rose (1975)
Roger Zelazny, The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth and other stories (1971) 5*
Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown, The Cassiopeia Affair (1968) #149

Key to Star Ratings

5*: you should definitely read this; read the review to see why
1*: you should definitely not read this; read the review to see why not
No star rating: read the review and see what you think

By Phil | Posted in blogology, friction, popular singing groups, skiffy, the £10 Box, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

On barons and libraries

9 October 2025 – 14:11

Here are two thoughts that occurred to me recently. They’re not obviously connected, but I’ll see if I can do something to tie them together when we get to part 3.

1. There Are Always Barons

Even the most autocratic ruler has to delegate. Kings and queens are all very well, but no one can actually rule a country on their own (there’s Dunbar’s number to think about, for one thing). They may delegate in ways that give occupants of the lower levels in the hierarchy little or no autonomy, making them effectively mouthpieces of the sovereign, but they will delegate to someone. There’s a persuasive argument, put forward by Lon Fuller (and probably others), that rigidly controlled delegation drastically reduces the efficiency of the overall system – that even an autocrat will be better, more efficiently, served by allowing some play in the organisational joints, meaning that an effective autocrat is a contradiction in terms – but I’m not concerned with that here. Good or bad, there is always delegation.

However much, or little, autonomy they have, there are always barons. Barons may reach their position by different routes. They may have started out as rulers in their own right – local sovereigns, in effect – whose territories were later absorbed into the overall sovereign’s domain; the sovereign may even have emerged out of their ranks. In one sense there’s a big difference between barons of this type and those who are raised and appointed by the sovereign – who are ‘created’, as they say, to answer the sovereign’s requirements. We could reserve the term ‘baron’ for the first-among-equals kind and call the centrally-appointed-governor type something else; ‘prefects’, perhaps. But for the purposes of the current argument they can all go in the same category. My sense is, in any case, that the function of these two groups is quite similar, and the nature of that role – to administer a population and keep the peace in the sovereign’s name – is such as to demand attentiveness both to the sovereign’s requirements and the happiness of the population, encouraging barons to become prefects and prefects to become barons.

There are always barons; there’s always somebody whose job it is to assert the will of the sovereign to the people, even impose it on them. What you won’t always find is anyone asserting the will of the people to the sovereign. (I stress ‘asserting’. A baron who’s good at their job will communicate the will of the people upwards, and a sovereign who’s good at theirs will want to hear it. But, if you’re the sovereign, hearing from a baron that the people are on the brink of revolting is very different from getting that same message from the people.)

In other words, there are always barons, but there aren’t always democrats. We have democrats now, of course: what else was the Labour Party founded for? Right across the political spectrum, in fact, we tend not to think of our politicians as barons; we think of them as democrats, representatives of the people. And it’s true that the MP for Manchester Central and the Mayor of Greater Manchester have a better claim to democratic legitimacy than the High Sheriff of Lancashire. But they’re both part of a governing apparatus; as such they’re only functioning as democrats when – and to the extent that – they’re implementing, or demanding, measures demanded of them by their voters. The rest of the time – when they’re working in ‘top down’ mode – they’re not democrats at all: they’re barons, and as such no different from the various unelected ‘senior figures’ in which our political system abounds (party apparatchiks, Prime Ministerial appointees and the unchanging, irremovable ranks of the “great and good“).

In particular, there’s nothing democratic about a politician pursuing policies for which their supporters didn’t vote, or simply continuing to develop the policies of a previous government. The fact that those politicians ultimately derived their position from a democratic vote doesn’t change this. Democratic legitimacy isn’t like a Blue Peter badge, gained once and displayed ever after; in fact it’s not a property of a person at all, even in their capacity as holder of a political role. What is or isn’t democratically legitimate is what those individuals do and say. And, just as barons take on the attributes of prefects (and vice versa), a democrat elected into the role of a baron will come under immediate and sustained pressure to act like a baron and think like a baron: by all means listen to your constituents’ complaints, pass them upwards if they merit it, but don’t get carried away thinking that they’re telling you what to do. You’re far more important than that: you’re a member of the government!

MPs, Mayors, even local councillors: none of them will operate as democrats unless at least one of two conditions obtain. One is a genuine commitment on their part to work democratically. The other condition, by far the more important of the two, is the regular assertion of democratic demands to them – which in practice means the existence of mechanisms for articulating those demands, telling representatives what their voters and supporters want from them. We need better MPs (although I’m sure yours is lovely), but more importantly we need better mechanisms for articulating popular demands: for keeping democrats democratic. Otherwise, whether politicians start out as rough-edged democrats or as TV personalities will ultimately be irrelevant: they’ll all be buffed to a baronial shine, as they are socialised on and into the job. As my English tutor in college once said, people who say they’ll “show you how to do it” are really offering to “show you how to do what you do because that’s how you do it”. And in British politics, the baronial element of “how you do it” has been being practiced for an awful lot longer than the democratic element.

2. When It’s Ajar

On a separate subject, we visited our local library the other day. It was unplanned, and I ended up borrowing five books without having my card on me, which was neat. All it took was for a member of staff to take my details, look them up on two separate PCs, key in the 13-digit number that was eventually displayed, then hit several separate keys for each book. (Rather hard, I thought, but by then perhaps that was understandable.)

But this isn’t about IT. Two things struck me about the library, that Saturday morning. One was how busy it was; the place was buzzing, with free tea and coffee on offer in one section, kids playing and running around in another section (well, mostly in that section), and people sitting reading the papers in the middle area. They’ve had a refurb recently, which included replacing the rather nondescript children’s section with an area clearly designed for (small) kids – complete with a slide – and in terms of footfall it’s really paid off.

The other thing that struck me was that we were the only two people in the place looking at books. I’m not saying the noise put people off, or the occasional two-year-old underfoot – I’ll admit that the ambience was a big change from libraries as I’ve known and loved them, but it didn’t stop me browsing (five books borrowed). The thing is, looking at books didn’t seem to be what anyone else had come there for.

Which got me thinking. Say there’s an institution with a core competence: not necessarily what it does best or what its people most love doing, but the thing that only it does; the thing that, if it wasn’t there, wouldn’t get done. Suppose you run a textile museum specialising in, and offering expert insights into, a type of woollen cloth which was once widely produced in the local area and is now largely forgotten. You’ve got a café, but it’s small – but then, the premises are small, and the rest of the floor space is taken up by exhibition space, curators’ workshops and offices. The whole place is looking a bit dingy these days, to be honest; it’s all in need of sprucing up.

You get a grant to renovate the premises – great news! But then someone proposes channelling the money into expanding the café, redecorating the galleries with whatever’s left. The textiles are the core function, the café is strictly an extra, and up to now you’ve been able to operate on that basis; now, you’re told, things have changed, and you need to embrace that change.

What is it that’s changed, though? Is it:

The nature of the core function (the extras are no longer extras, full stop)
The nature of the business (extras are no longer extras, for the well-being of this institution)
The nature of the audience (extras are no longer extras, for them)
The sustainability of the audience (the extras are still extras, and they’ll complement the core function)

In other words, which of these are we saying?

“Textile appreciation used to be very much a solitary pursuit, but now it’s much more social – after people have looked at fabric samples all afternoon they want somewhere to sit and have a chat and a pot of tea.”
“In this world it’s all about footfall: the curators are lovely people, but if we’re going to get people through the door we need to offer more than a lot of old shawls.”
“Textiles are great, textiles are brilliant – I’m just saying that younger people won’t set foot in the place unless they can get a decent cup of coffee.”
“A really good café can bring people in from miles around – and once they’ve seen the galleries, some of them’ll come back!”

I think that argument 1, while the example above is fairly silly, is the strongest of all of these; certainly it’s the only one that institutions absolutely need to pay attention to. Returning to libraries, books are still pretty much books, but the whole ‘reference’ function of libraries has been at best transformed, at worst made obsolete, by pervasive Internet access. Sometimes the nature of an institution’s core function does change, and the institution needs to change with it. Which isn’t to say that arguments made in this form should always be taken seriously – see silly example above.

Argument 2 is at the opposite pole to argument 1, despite the superficial similarity of the phrasing (above). Rather than embrace the core function in principle (while asserting that the way it is carried out needs to change), argument 2 starts from the managerial and/or commercial needs of the institution. In any institution with a core function, particularly those with trained and professional expert staff, the core function is, well, core. The institution will need to be able to keep its lights on, hitting a minimum threshold of commercial viability (or whatever shadow measure of virtual commercial success the managers of non-fee-charging institutions are held to) – but a minimum is what it is. In argument 2, though, commercial viability and the core function have swapped places: keeping the punters coming has become the core function, while the original core – the thing that only you do – is simply a lingering contractual obligation, to be performed up to an agreed service level alongside other, more productive stuff.

Argument 3 seems a less drastic contrast. Indeed, superficially it looks persuasive, even democratic: you may be able to study textiles all day on a Tracker bar and a swig from a water fountain, but we’ve got to listen to our visitors! On closer inspection, though, it’s incoherent: if the core function is still the most important thing, you can’t really argue that that it needs to give ground to the provision of extras. It’s an unstable hybrid of arguments 1 and 2: either the core function is still paramount but now includes extras (argument 1), or providing the extras is just as important as the core function (argument 2).

Argument 4 takes a more upbeat approach: the core function is still the core function, and there’s no conflict between it and the extras, because the extras will attract people who will use the core function! In practical terms I think this is highly unlikely to work, unless the extras are very carefully chosen – and how likely is it that you’ll be able to offer ‘extras’ that are both (a) complementary to your decreasingly-popular core function and (b) popular in their own right? Again, this is basically splitting the difference between arguments 1 and 2, attempting to argue that the business has fundamentally changed but not so as to dethrone the core function.

So no, I don’t think the renovation money should go on the café. Well, maybe some of it. We can envisage an extended version of argument 1 (argument 1a): even if the core function hasn’t changed, that minimum threshold of commercial or pseudo-commercial viability still needs to be hit, and there may have been a change in what that minimum threshold requires. But even this – the argument for at least getting a coffee machine to supplement that old tea urn – needs handling with caution. Once you cut loose from argument 1, argument 2 is always lying in wait (it’s all too plausible in our society), and there are no reliable stopping-points between the two.

As for what I saw last weekend in the library, I don’t think there was much of an argument-1 or even argument-1a justification for the changes that have been made – any justification for having all that activity take place in a library. I think a managerial variant of argument 2 had won hands down: essentially I wasn’t in a library, I was in a (hitherto under-utilised) council-run public space with certain shareable resources, including books. And that space was being very effectively used, to the general satisfaction of all concerned. But that’s the thing about argument 2: it tends to deliver, because it works by redefining what ‘deliver’ means. And that redefinition can happen quite gradually, by way of arguments that seem entirely reasonable (e.g. arguments 3 and 4).

3. Faced With The Choice

I think what the two parts of this post have in common is that they’re both about the path of least resistance, and an odd disconnect in the way we think about it. We recognise intellectually that people, in a whole range of situations, tend to take the path of least resistance, or at any rate one of the paths of lesser resistance. But the idea of taking the p. of l. r. is still stigmatised: we assume that you or I would make the right choice, would choose the best out of several equivalent options.

The disconnect is in the failure to take into consideration the key fact about paths of lesser resistance: they’re easy to take. Some things – some options, some ways of achieving a desirable result – are easier than others, and doing easy things is easier than doing hard things. Indeed, all other things being equal, the fact that one option’s easier than the other is a good reason for taking it.

In practice all other things generally aren’t equal – but there are always easier and harder options, and easy options (to restate the point) aren’t called that because they’re shallow or ill-thought-out, but simply because they’re easy to take. And, to add yet another statement of the obvious, consistently taking the hard option is hard. Particularly when the easy option is well-argued, and the hard option seems dogmatic or puritanical.

Keeping a library focused on books – or a museum on curation, or a university on research – isn’t at all the same thing as keeping an MP (or a mayor, or a councillor) focused on the needs of their voters: one’s about asserting professional and craft standards over commercial requirements, the other’s about asserting democratic demands over the requirements of government. But, as things are, they’re both hard choices [sic]. More importantly, they’re choices that need to be made over and over again: the countervailing pressure to take the easy option is always there. As a wise man once said, there is no final victory, as there is no final defeat; just the same battle, to be fought over and over again.

By Phil | Posted in awfully deep, Britain, cheery thoughts, culture, everyday life, history, pinkoes, politics, the local news | Comments (0)

In the Curiosities of Art

25 September 2025 – 16:07

In August I read – or finished reading – three books from the £10 Box:

Spider Robinson, Telempath
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers

Reviews on blog.

I also read (or finished)

Paul Hanley, Have a bleedin guess
Hex Enduction Hour was the Fall’s sixth studio album (fifth if you’re not counting Slates) and almost certainly their best; it really ought to have a volume in the 33 1/3 series (and Stewart Lee in fact proposed one). Instead it’s got this, by one of the people who were there – drummer Paul Hanley. Essential reading for anyone who didn’t tune out a bit during the last two sentences.

Paraic O’Donnell, The Naming of the Birds
A welcome sequel to 2018’s The House on Vesper Sands, this is a mannered piece of high-Victorian Gothic whose central mystery never quite emerges into the light; this may be for the best, as what we do see is quite bad enough. According to the Guardian reviewer “O’Donnell’s virtuosic style, a mashup of Henry James and Frankie Boyle, is worth the admission price alone”. I’m not sure I’d reach for quite those comparators, but the pairing does capture Paraic’s distinctive combination of delicacy and viciousness, and perhaps an underlying combination of passion and bitterness. Champagne for my real friends! (I used to know Paraic – not especially well, and it was some time before he started publishing. But I thought he was a brilliant writer then, and nothing’s changed my mind.)

Stephen King, You Like It Darker
Actually, Stephen, the way I particularly like it is shorter. One of the ‘short stories’ in this collection is over 140 pages long; allowing for page & font size, it may actually be longer than Roadside Picnic. (It isn’t better than Roadside Picnic.) Only one of the stories here really gave me the creeps, and – perhaps unsurprisingly – it was one of the shorter ones. They’re all fun, though, and pass the time quite agreeably – even if some of them pass more time than they really needed to.

Mick Herron, Reconstruction
Why has a nervous gunman called Jaime taken a class of primary school children hostage? Who is “the lady at the school” and why does he want to talk to her? Will the Security Service get involved (if they aren’t involved already), and how will things turn out if they do? And why ‘Reconstruction’? Now read on… An early Herron, pre-Slough House; there’s a character called Bad Sam Chapman, but there isn’t any real overlap with the later books. As you might expect, though, this is very, very readable.

Sam Knight, The Premonitions Bureau
This is a fascinating true story – or rather, this is a book about a fascinating true story. The book itself is a pamphlet padded out to book length, with results that reminded me of a colour supplement feature: lots of pictures, lots of background detail and human interest, one big idea and all the narrative drive of a milk float. It’s still an interesting subject, though. When a psychologist sets up the titular bureau, aiming to collate seemingly-prophetic dreams and find out how many of them come true, what does he achieve? If we assume that premonitions show things that are definitely going to happen, what could he have achieved – even if we could know the future, would we want to?

Richard Osman, We Solve Murders
I don’t remember a lot about this. There’s a widower who likes pub quizzes; there’s even a pub quiz. There’s a high-end security firm, and a lot of international travel involving their clients, who include a fabulously wealthy novelist who lives on a private island. There’s a gangster who’s stayed one step ahead of the law by the simple method of saving his money instead of splashing it around, and who now lives in a country mansion called No Comment (when visited by the police he, well, taps the sign). It’s fine. It passed the time. (And I remembered more of it than I thought I would, which says something.)

Gillian Flynn, The Grownup
This is a pamphlet not padded out to book length; it’s a short story, and not a particularly long one. It’s basically The Turn of the Screw rewritten by Patricia Highsmith; I enjoyed it a lot.

John Cooper Clarke, I Wanna Be Yours
I first saw John Cooper Clarke supporting Be-Bop Deluxe at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1978. The band’s fanbase tended to the hippyish, and he was not a popular support act; I remember people shouting “Get off!” throughout his (short) set, as well as someone repeatedly calling “Blue Oyster Cult!” (as if the management might have had them in reserve for such an eventuality). This, it turns out, was typical of his experience on that tour: “Some nights, they even screamed curses and blamed me for the ills of society.” I think it’s that line that sold me on the book; it’s not all written at that level, but enough of it is. “The main consideration is what a poem sounds like. If it doesn’t sound any good, it’s because it isn’t any good.” Words to live by, or at any rate write by – and not just for poems. On the down side, for about a third of the book (and from about 1975 to 1990) Clarke is a junkie. At one point he and Richard Hell, who had both had support slots on an Elvis Costello tour, apologise to each other for leaving the end-of-tour party early, only to meet again forty minutes later, at their supplier’s (“We could have shared a taxi.”) Addiction doesn’t make for a varied narrative, or a very engaging protagonist; unfortunately, when the younger Clarke finally succeeds in getting clean 2020 Clarke seems to lose interest, despatching the next thirty years in two concluding chapters. The book was already quite long enough, to be fair – I mean, I started reading it in March (you don’t want to overload on the prose, so it’s chapter-at-a-time stuff).

Also in August, I watched these films:

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman 2025)
The future-retro design is great, from the metal LPs used for recording to the superhero loungewear the Four spend much of their time in. The film opens with an in-universe highlights reel of the Four’s achievements, which looks superb; I’d happily have watched a full-length version of that. This film, though, is disjointed, unengaging and implausible (unless we’re meant to think that the Four are a bit dim), and in places weirdly misjudged: if you’re going to have a woman go into labour in your film, you can’t then make the labour two minutes long, squeaky-clean and about as painful as sneezing.

Weapons (Zach Cregger 2025)
It was a good summer for horror films; we saw three in August (out of which two featured adults controlling children by supernatural means and two featured VHS recordings of mysterious rituals). This was probably the best of the lot. All the children in one primary school class have got up one night, run away and never come back, as if called by some invisible Pied Piper. The film tells several overlapping stories, circling around and eventually approaching this central mystery; one is a Twilight Zone-like story of the underside of small town community spirit, one has the frantic energy and dark humour of Uncut Gems. Although the film has – and earns – an 18 certificate, violence features very briefly. That apart, I was reminded of Monkey in the way this film approaches horror through comedy, then uses horror to tell a bigger story – in this case, something about loss and trauma and the fragility of familial ties. After seeing it I didn’t think it quite hung together, but it’s very much stayed with me; I think it’s a substantial piece of work.

Bring Her Back (Danny and Michael Philippou 2025)
A very different horror film, albeit one which also earns its 18 certificate. A partially-sighted girl and her 17-year-old brother are taken into foster care; their carer (Sally Hawkins, manically upbeat even by her standards) already has one child in her care, a young boy who is apparently mute. Hawkins’ character has recently lost her own daughter, who drowned in her backyard pool. The film’s constructed with a relentless logic that makes even the most gruesome and terrifying developments seem grimly inevitable; retrospectively, even the summary I’ve given here seems to give away the entire plot. Very nasty but very powerful; a big step forward from Talk To Me.

The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme 1991)
It wasn’t quite time to go to bed and we saw this had just started, so we thought we’d take a look. We went to bed two hours later. While I don’t know how it would strike a first-time audience in 2025, for us it still worked.

Together (Michael Shanks 2025)
Our third horror film of the month. She has a new job where she’s appreciated, and generally has her life together. He wants to play in his band; he supports her career, but worries that if he supports her too much he’ll never do what he wants (“When I’m dying I don’t want to see someone else’s life flashing before my eyes,” says a friend, helpfully). She would like to remind him that he’s thirty years old and doesn’t have a job. She kind of proposes, he kind of refuses. They move to the country (better for her job, worse for his band). They row, they fall out, they sulk. They haven’t slept together for a really long time. Then they fall into this mysterious cave while they’re out walking, and from then on, what do you know, they’re inseparable! The rest of the film – apart from the very end – is in the trailer (and on the poster, even), so it’s worth spending time on the setup. The rest of the film is good – body horror all the way – but it’s a bit clunky having “the horror” over here and “what the horror’s actually about” over there.

Fedora (Billy Wilder 1978)
So there’s this actress who kills herself by throwing herself under a train (not really a spoiler, it’s in the pre-titles sequence). And (flashback) there’s a Hollywood producer who’d gone to see her – not easy, as she lived as a recluse on a Mediterranean island – hoping to persuade her to come out of retirement. And (flashback) they’d had an affair once, many years ago, after he’d seen her boobs and seemed unimpressed (a very 1970s meet-cute) – although (different flashback) the only man for her is Michael York (as himself, kind of). But (back to the first flashback) she may not be a recluse by choice; is she being drugged? And who is the mysterious Countess, in whose villa she is living? It is, as the kids say, a lot. After I watched Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes I took my temperature, feeling slightly rough, and discovered that I was running a 40-degree fever; I was fine when I saw Fedora, but in my memory it has that same lurid, overheated, disjointed quality.

Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding 1932)
Many stars, many stories. Joan Crawford is a fast girl, Greta Garbo is Garbo. John Barrymore is the original of David Niven in plausible-cad mode, Lionel Barrymore is the original of Alec Guinness in Last Holiday – although his vulgarity and lack of polish is played much more broadly and more at his expense. Contains early-1930s social attitudes, you could say; certainly it wasn’t going to be possible for much longer to make a Hollywood film in which every character had a German name.

Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor 2025)
There’s a certain linguistic register which you see a lot on social media, and which puts me in mind of the early stages of student socialising: it combines a plain- or technical-sounding vocabulary with stilted and obviously non-spontaneous phrasing, making every sentence sound as if something’s going on between the lines. (“Would you like some tea?” “Tea would not be disagreeable at this moment.”) The characters in Sorry, Baby talk like this All. The. Time.: imagine Frances Ha but with the two leads replaced by Tim Key’s character from The Ballad of Wallis Island. (OK, stop imagining Frances Ha. Yes, I know it’s lovely. Come back here, we’ve got a review to get through.) The diction is so unlike anything recognisable as vernacular speech, it gets a bit like watching language lessons: 1. Meeting Friends. 2. At the Seminar. 3. Requesting Help. 4. At the Police Station. 5. Accepting Help. 6. Your Friend’s Baby. The subject matter is grindingly awful (apart from the bit with the actual baby, I should say); the film’s very good at showing how trauma goes on – and on, and on. I just found it very difficult to get past the language. But I suspect Victor wasn’t thinking of the film’s effect on 60-year-old British men. (Or indeed of Tim Key.)

Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas 2016)
This is a very odd film. The main character is a personal shopper for a supermodel – a role which seems to involve travelling all over the world for fashion shoots, selecting garments from high-end retailers, then either returning them afterwards or (quite often) telling the retailer which ones the model would like to keep and trying to get out of paying. She doesn’t have much of a life, partly because of the demands of the job and partly because she’s obsessed with her deceased twin brother, and with the possibility that he will try to make contact (as they had both agreed they would). It’s conventional to say that films of ghost stories leave open both the possibility of a true haunting and the possibility that the character being haunted is delusional, but I’ve never seen a film wedge both possibilities open as firmly as this one does.

By Phil | Posted in 2025 in culture, culture, everyday life, fillum, friction, up to my eyes | Comments (0)

Fuller, narrower, and more critical

22 September 2025 – 12:36

When I first got into legal theory I was very taken with Lon Fuller’s The Morality of Law; Fuller was actually the second legal theorist I ever read, after Pashukanis. Although any reasonably focused and analytical reading of TMoL – to say nothing of Fuller’s responses to critics – shows Fuller’s argument to be full of holes, wider reading has left me with the inconvenient conviction that he was onto something. Not the idea of a ‘morality of law’, that is – and certainly not the idea that lawyers make law through an intuitive engagement with the meaning-laden fabric of the law, which those literal-minded positivists could never understand – but… something. I’m still getting to grips with what that was, though.

Here are a couple of abstracts, showing how my thinking on Fuller’s evolving. One’s for a paper that you can, if you’re interested, read here; the second, longer one is for a round-table event planned for November.

Fuller, Narrower: A New Reading of Lon Fuller’s The Morality of Law

In Lon Fuller’s The Morality of Law, Fuller identifies eight criteria which legal systems must meet and argues that they constitute an inner morality of law. Fuller argues that meeting these criteria to some minimum degree is necessary to law as a practice; that meeting them more fully produces better law; and that the minimum threshold value cannot be specified in theory, but only through a good-faith effort to make law well. Presented as a challenge to legal positivism, these claims met a hostile critical reaction, which Fuller did not effectively counter. However, Fuller’s critics focused mainly on supporting assumptions grounded in Fuller’s moralised conception of law, rather than on the core claim that conformity to formal criteria is associated with substantively better outcomes. This paper suggests that this core claim may be sustainable independently of Fuller’s moralised assumptions, identifying an association between law, the eight criteria and respect for personal freedom of responsible action. By reference to recent developments in counter-terrorist and public order law, departures from the criteria are shown to be associated with decreasing respect for personal freedom of responsible action; this supports a modified Fulleran association between conformity to the eight criteria and the quality of legal outcomes, and hence a modestly value-laden model of law.

Knowable legality: ideal or irrelevance?

This paper develops an account of law as a mode of social organisation, definitionally distinct from modes such as custom, administrative direction and command. Law’s distinctiveness lies in its address to its subjects, considered as rational agents capable of understanding authoritative guidance and freely ordering their own activities accordingly.

Law’s mode of organisation, deriving from the form of subjectivity which it addresses, has inherent in it qualities of generality, intelligibility, followability and justification. Law’s generality enables it to guide rather than direct. Law’s intelligibility means that its guidance is unambiguous and that general rules are sufficiently coherent for specific guidance to be derived in novel situations. A law is followable in the sense that subjects have a justificatory rationale which motivates them to follow it, independent of sanctions for non-compliance.This further entails the criterion of justification: where no valid rationale exists or can be shown, any law should be liable to amendment or withdrawal.

This model of law’s nature can be considered both as constituting an ideal and as setting a threshold – albeit a floating threshold. Any recognisable instance of the social institution we call ‘law’ will be characterised by generality, intelligibility and followability, developed to the standard regarded as requisite in its social setting. Further development of these qualities will facilitate the particular mode of social organisation characteristic of law, shifting the institutions and practices of ‘law’ further away from unlawlike modes of organisation. This represents a non-moralised version of Fuller’s argument for the ‘internal morality of law’.

To call for the law to be more fully or widely ‘knowable’, on this argument, is to call for it to be more distinctively ‘lawlike’, approximating more closely to this model of law and legal subjectivity. Laws will be more knowable to the extent that they are more general, minimising the need for specific conditions and qualifications; more intelligible, obviating the need for specialist interpretation; and more followable, their rationale motivating law-compliant behaviour by according with law’s subjects’ beliefs and desires.

The tendency of this critique is to preserve or restore the law’s integrity as law. This may be a politically liberal programme, asserting the interests of the legal subject over and against those of the state. State authorities can benefit from clothing command and administrative direction in the forms of law: departures from generality, intelligibility and followability, making law less knowable and disadvantaging law’s subjects, may be functional to the requirements of government,. However, this may also be a conservative programme, resisting progressive attempts to impose rules and distinctions which are not generally ‘known’. More fundamentally, the question of whether or not law’s address to its subjects is ‘lawlike’ has no purchase on – or relevance to – the question of who those subjects are. Ironically, the ideal of a wholly knowable legality sketched here may be compatible with very great iniquity.

By Phil | Posted in academe, just me then, legal matter | Comments (0)

The £10 Box: Roadside Picnic, Ship of Strangers

20 September 2025 – 14:30

The £10 Box was an old fruit box containing 40 hardbacks, all of them Science Fiction Book Club editions, dating from 1968 to 1979, which I bought from my local Oxfam bookshop for a tenner several years ago. This is the seventeenth in a series of twenty posts, each reviewing two of those books; earlier reviews are linked at the end of this post.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1978; originally published 1977 (English translation), 1972 (Russian original))

Both these books are in the form of a ‘fix-up’, a novel comprising a series of unconnected pieces with a shared setting and recurring characters. The similarities end there, however.

Roadside Picnic is astonishing. (I hesitated for several minutes before beginning this review, because that was the only thing I could think of to say about it. It’s… astonishing.) It’s one of the best works of science fiction I’ve ever read, one of the books that justify the existence of sf as a genre.

A couple of reviews ago I noted that Michael Coney was (justifiably) proud of having written “a love story, and a war story, and a science-fiction story, and more besides”, something he could only do within the discipline of sf. The Strugatskys didn’t provide an authors’ note, but if they had done it would have needed to be considerably longer. This is, most obviously, a gritty thriller about people living on the edge of the law, dealing with interfering bureaucrats, untrustworthy rivals and the dwindling comforts of home life – although it’s also an adventure story, stretching our heroes to the limit as they negotiate the unpredictable perils of a strange landscape. At the same time, it’s a horror story, vividly evoking what it feels like to deal with – and fail to deal with – things that are beyond your capacity to understand, but won’t go away. It’s also a political allegory about colonialism and how it drains the vitality of colonised societies, even while it appears to bring material wealth. And it’s a desperately sad novel about young people growing up, making new commitments and discovering unwelcome truths about one another, and about themselves. It’s all of that, and it is – and could only be – sf.

What’s it about? It’s about alien artifacts – and frankly it puts every other account of alien artifacts in the shade; of those I’ve read I think only M. John Harrison’s Light comes close. There’s a Zone, just outside a sketchily-portrayed American small town; there are several Zones, in fact, situated along a straight line across the globe, but we’re only concerned with the American one. (Which, understandably, doesn’t feel very American – it feels quite East-European, in fact – but the authors can be forgiven for not wanting to combine alien contact with actually-existing socialism.) The Zones have been visited by alien beings of some form. We know nothing about these beings, and in fact only know they were here at all because of what they left behind: the Zones, areas which now have strange and often dangerous properties.

The Zones also contain alien relics, in the literal sense – leavings, things discarded, like the remains of a roadside picnic. What sort of relics? Things that defy the laws of motion, things that defy gravity, things that defy general relativity. What sort of relics? Empties: pairs of copper discs “with a space of a foot and a half between them”, like a canister with no sides. What sort of relics? Witch’s jelly: a substance that can be contained in porcelain but goes through metal and plastic “like water through a sieve”, and turns everything else it touches into more of itself – everything, including living bodies. What sort of relics? The Golden Ball, which grants wishes. But that’s ridiculous; everyone knows the Golden Ball is just a legend, just a stalker’s tale.

‘Stalker’ was the name of the film Tarkovsky based on this book; the Strugatskys actually used the term ‘stalker’ (сталкер), presumably transliterated from English, in the original text. The main characters in the book are stalkers: people who venture into the Zone and bring back artifacts to sell. (The word ‘stalker’ has since entered the (Russian) language, being applied to people who venture into the ‘zone’ at Chernobyl.) A stalker’s life is not an easy life, or a long one. But if everyone who comes into contact with the Zone is contaminated by it – and everyone is, although not in the same way – at least stalkers get something out of it. Or so stalkers tell themselves. The Zone exceeds everything stalkers can bring to it – their physical abilities, their intelligence, their imagination, their desire – and by the same token takes everything from them. It gradually becomes clear that stalkers’ determination to cheat the Zone has only made them its greatest victims; gradually, and then suddenly.

As I was saying, this is an astonishing piece of work. It consists of four separate stories (prefaced by a fictional interview) and was originally published over four issues of a (literary) magazine, but it’s emphatically not a true fix-up; the story it tells is far too complex and coherent for that. Chilling, thought-provoking, moving, atmospheric, immensely powerful… but I’ve gone on long enough.

One other thing is worth mentioning: the page count, which is 143. The next time you’re tempted by a multi-volume saga, do yourself a favour and read this instead.

Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)

This, on the other hand, is a fix-up and makes no bones about it (“Portions of this novel have appeared, in substantially different form, in Analog, If and Universe”). Although it’s divided into twenty chapters, Ship of Strangers is basically an anthology of five stories about the awkwardly-spelt Dave Surgenor and his colleagues in the Cartographical Service. Surgenor, aged 36, is looking forward to retiring from the Service in the first story, and walks away from it at the end of the last; that’s as close as we get to a story arc.

The Cartographical Service, in this universe, has the job of mapping newly-discovered planets on the edges of ‘the Bubble’ of known space, but only those that are known to be lifeless; inhabited worlds are left to the Diplomatic Service. Or so we’re told; it’s not clear what the diplomats do with planets that only support plant life or algae. (Maybe there’s a third government agency for worlds without intelligent life; the Herbaceous and Zoological Service, perhaps.) The worlds the Cartographical Service surveys are empty and dead, in any case.

Or… are they? One story features an alien race which had died thousands of years ago, but which can travel freely in time; in another, a shape-shifting alien being masquerades as a survey vehicle returning to the ship. A third, strongly reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s high-concept stories, sets up (‘contrives’ would be another word) a situation involving several hundred formerly-dormant alien missiles which can be disabled if one of them is shot twice, so as to resolve it with the Birthday Paradox. The other two stories are set on board ship. One proposes a new class of quasi-stellar object to rank with the quasar and the white hole: a ‘dwindlar’, in whose vicinity the universe ceases to expand and contracts instead. Being in the vicinity of a dwindlar seems to threaten dire consequences for Dave and friends, but (spoiler!) shrinking to a dimensionless point turns out not to be terminal. (I wasn’t at all sure about the physics of this one – if the dwindlar was contracting the entire universe to nothing, surely it shouldn’t matter whether you were anywhere near it or not. Best just to go with it.) Lastly, there’s a story about how the guys of the Service, getting lonely on long missions, use a machine that gives them vivid and realistic dreams to, um, release the tension (“A Trance-Port isn’t an erotic dream machine,” says one character to another, protesting a little too much). Discussing their respective Trance-Port experiences proves to be a bad idea, and ructions ensue, culminating when a crewman with good IT skills feeds one of the Trance-Port tapes to the ship’s AI, Aesop. Shaw takes this plot twist in an unexpected direction, though: as the story ends, Aesop is still harking back to its romantic dream experience, while Surgenor has already started thinking about football and Christmas instead.

As this last example suggests, Shaw’s interest is much more in the characters than in the sfnal mechanics of the stories. The “~~sex tape~~Trance-Port” story is mostly about the testosterone-fuelled butting of heads among the crew, while the “time-travelling aliens” story centres on an ill-tempered rivalry between the crew and the Diplomatic Service – one of whom appears to have been involved in an accidental genocide, and is touchy about being reminded. Most strikingly, the ‘dwindlar’ story is also the story of what happens when the crew’s joined by a woman, a rare occurrence in the Cartographical Service (“most women” didn’t think there was any point mapping uninhabited worlds, Dave muses); when it appears that the ship will never return home, she becomes the object of unwelcome and increasingly abusive attention. Not from Dave, though, as he’s a good guy (and duly asks her out when they do get home). It’s an interesting subject, but the treatment’s marred by the sense that nobody involved – the crewmen, Dave, even Bob Shaw – ever quite stops looking at the character and seeing a girly, womanly, female, feminine dame.

“This is SF in the grand traditional manner,” says the blurb. Up to a point. It’s superficially in the same area as the Poul Anderson collection, but without his characters’ blithe self-assurance and with much more interest in the characters and their interactions. Spacemen have feelings too, in other words – although you’ll have to look elsewhere if you want to know about spacewomen.

Reviews so far (with * rating and SFBC # where present)

Poul Anderson, The Trouble Twisters (1963, 1965, 1966) #141
John Brunner, Timescoop (1969)
Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (1967) #142
Louis Charbonneau, Antic Earth (1967) #133 1*
D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1975) 5*
Michael Coney, Winter’s Children (1974)
Michael Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975) 5*
Richard Cowper, Breakthrough (1967) #136 5*
Richard Cowper, Phoenix (1968) #147
Richard Cowper, Worlds Apart (1974)
L.P. Davies, Twilight Journey (1967) #134
Samuel Delany, Babel-17 (1966) #140 5*
Harry Harrison, War with the Robots (1962) #138
Philip E. High, Invader on my Back (1968) #148
Damon Knight, Three Novels (1951, 1954, 1957) #139
Charles Logan, Shipwreck (1975) 5*
J.T. McIntosh, Six Gates from Limbo (1968) #144 1*
R.W. Mackelworth, Firemantle (1968) #151
Barry Malzberg, Beyond Apollo (1972) 5*
Judith Merril (ed.), Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction (1966) #131
Larry Niven, Inconstant Moon (1973)
Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, The Dynostar Menace (1975)
Frederik Pohl, The Age of the Pussyfoot (1965, 1966) #166
Frederik Pohl, The Gold at the Starbow’s End (1972)
Spider Robinson, Telempath (1976)
Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)
Robert Sheckley, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (1971)
Curt Siodmak, City in the Sky (1974) 1*
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1977) 5*
Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (1968) #135
Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975) 1*
‘Patrick Wyatt’, Irish Rose (1975)
Roger Zelazny, The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth and other stories (1971) 5*
Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown, The Cassiopeia Affair (1968) #149

Key to Star Ratings

5*: you should definitely read this; read the review to see why
1*: you should definitely not read this; read the review to see why not
No star rating: read the review and see what you think

By Phil | Posted in blogology, friction, skiffy, the £10 Box, up to my eyes | Comments (2)

Why are they like this?

16 September 2025 – 17:49

The Labour Party’s account on X tweeted 21 times in the first week of September. Five tweets are positive: one about how the government’s ‘delivering’, plus a four-tweet thread about support for families. One tweet attacks the Tories for their record on asylum-seekers; one attacks the Greens for being anti-NATO. The other 14 – two-thirds of the total – are attacking Nigel Farage; not on policy grounds, but for being ‘unpatriotic’ and for being ‘all complaints, no answers’. There’s even a link to a Web site from which you can download a fake ‘Reform manifesto’, highlighting gaps and contradictions in what Farage and other Reform representatives have said (the document’s called “no-idea.pdf”). Would a Reform government round up and intern immigrant women and children, or just the men? Would they send British prisoners serving life sentences to El Salvador, or just to Estonia? We don’t know! Silly old Nigel, he doesn’t seem to know either!

The idea seems to be that Reform-leaning voters, having been suckered into downloading what purports to be a leaked copy of Reform’s manifesto, will read several pages of “well they say this now, but they said this before” and decide not to risk voting for them. This seems, frankly, unlikely. Catching people out in changing their answers is a favourite pastime for lobby journalists, but for most of us it’s not that big a deal. And what the document rather conspicuously fails to do is highlight the horrors of the policies Farage is (probably quite deliberately) being vague about. It ends with “20 Questions for Reform”, all of which are requests for clarification on what Reform would do and how they would do it. For instance:

Would Reform ban the burka, or not?

Would Reform send violent criminals to El Salvador, or not?

and, perhaps my [least] favourite,

Where would Reform put the detention centres it wants to use to house asylum seekers?

I initially thought this stuff was crying out for parody (where would they even get all that Zyklon-B?), but on reflection it’s quite bad enough as it is. Apparently the Labour Party would have no problem with a plan to intern undocumented migrants, just as long as it was detailed and fully costed.

Why are they like this? When Farage proposed deporting Afghan refugees into the arms of the Taliban, why was it left to the Greens to point out what an appalling proposal this was? Why does Labour keep responding to far-Right provocations with “yes-and” answers – “yes, people don’t like asylum hotels, and Labour are going to shut them down”; “yes, we love the flag too, it brings us all together”. We’ll shut them down by speeding up the asylum process, you understand. The flag brings us all together – not just White people, do you see? Oh, you’ve stopped listening. Never mind.

Labour is handing the ideological agenda to Reform UK. Why? Why is Zack Polanski the only prominent British politician to say publicly that Britain needs immigration, that asylum seekers are a small minority of migrants and that most of them have a valid claim to, well, asylum? Why is Labour at best vitiating its fightback against Reform UK with excessive caution – at worst, tacitly endorsing Reform UK and hoping to win on ‘competency’ points? It’s certainly not because it’s working– Labour’s polling has dropped 13% since the 2024 election, and that’s from a level of 34%. The leadership includes people who like to be known as pragmatic, even cynical, in their ruthless focus on building Labour support – but if they were half of that they would have changed course months ago. Whatever the strategy is, they must really believe in it.

But what is it? Here are six possibilities.

1. This Is What They’re Like

Q: Why is Labour in government so disappointing?
A: Why were you expecting anything better?

It’s a strong argument. From April 2020 to July 2024, Keir Starmer suggested clearly and repeatedly that he would be leading a right-wing government. It was frequently argued that this was tactical: it was the price Labour had to pay to win back voters who had deserted Labour in 2019, or to avoid being monstered by the Tory press, or to win Tory seats, or… Whatever the specifics, the rationale was the same: trim to the Right tactically, win the election, govern strategically from the Left! But there was – and is – very little evidence of the reforming centre-left agenda which the right-wing tactics would supposedly make possible. It’s much simpler to conclude (as a number of Left posters on Bluesky frequently argue) that a right-wing government always was the goal: that the summit of Starmer’s ambition was a government that cut public spending, cracked down on disorder and wrapped itself in the Union Jack – like British governments generally do – but with him in Number Ten.

So that’s Answer 1: they’re being generally very right-wing because they are generally very right-wing.

There’s obviously a lot in this, at least as far as the classic Conservative / Labour Right agenda is concerned – national security and economic growth first, everything else second. The government’s proposals to gut environmental protection laws, for example, fit right into this template. (Although for a party that was trying to appeal to patriotism, “a country that protects rare and endangered animals” would work a lot better than “a country that builds roads and houses, screw you, hippies”. Complicated business, moving Right.) But the kind of nationalistic fervour we’re seeing now, with street-level mobilisation against immigrants in general and refugees in particular, has never been mainstream. Both Labour and the Tories have a long record of opposing this kind of politics and denouncing those who try to exploit it, both outside and inside their own parties. What’s changed?

2. No One Driving

One explanation is non-political, resting on the state of the Labour leadership – in particular, its unusual dedication to top-down managerial control. The effects of this culture are amplified by a lack of experience of senior-level responsibility among the people involved, and in some cases a lack of capacity for flexible and independent thought. Unless Keir Starmer (or someone speaking authoritatively for him) has spoken, Labour’s comms people literally don’t know what to say – and they either don’t feel able to fill in off their own bat or don’t dare. Hence the recent non-response to Farage: nobody had said that Labour wouldn’t send Afghan refugees back to the Taliban, after all, so the only safe option was to say nothing.

Answer 2: they’re not saying anything to oppose the Right because they aren’t saying anything at all.

Again, I think there’s a lot in this; I wish I didn’t, because it suggests that the Labour leadership is in a deeply unhealthy state, in need of renewal for capacity-building as well as cultural reasons. (NB I wrote the last sentence before Paul Ovenden resigned. Looking at it today (16/9/25), I’m tempted to replace the last clause with “in need of sweeping out with an iron broom”, but perhaps that’s a bit extreme.) But it can’t be a complete explanation. To see why not, suppose that, with Starmer temporarily unavailable, Labour were asked to respond to a statement by Jeremy Corbyn advocating that Britain leave NATO. Do we really think that “Labour sources” would say nothing in response, or reply with banalities about what it would all cost?

There’s no possibility of Labour endorsing anything coming from Corbyn, and nothing to be lost by shooting it down in flames. But apparently this isn’t the case for Nigel Farage. Why not?

3. Drifting, Drifting (just not drifting Left)

Another problem with the Labour leadership’s evident lack of capacity for government is that it deprives the government of any overall direction – and in the absence of direction, governments are liable to drift. But not, necessarily, in just any direction. Prominent members of the current Labour leadership spent anything up to four years working to undermine the then leadership of the party (at this stage I don’t think this is a secret, still less a conspiracy theory). The experience will have hammered home something which was already a fairly strong element of Labour Right culture: hatred of the Left. Crucially, this is a hatred of both the Left as people and the Left as a tendency. Labour’s leaked report – documenting the culture among Labour’s permanent staff in the Corbyn years – is informative. Just as George Osborne could be called an oik by his fellow-members of the Bullingdon Club, on the grounds that he went to St Paul’s rather than Eton, so a Labour staffer could be labelled a “Trot”, not because he’d voted for Corbyn in the 2015 leadership election, but because he hadn’t voted for Liz Kendall. (Who got 5% of the vote. You know how Corbynites were supposedly a small, unrepresentative group who tried to take over a democratic party? Every accusation’s a confession.)

Anyway, I’m sure that the ‘oik’ thing barely rankled with George Osborne at all – and didn’t leave him with a lifelong, smouldering resentment of e.g. David Cameron and Boris Johnson – but, as a general thing, this stuff really isn’t just banter. In a group united by hatred of the Left, you don’t ever want to be the furthest-Left person – in the group, in the room, in the conversation; even between you and one other person. More to the point, you don’t want to give anyone any reason for saying you’re further Left than they are. But this means that ‘going left’ is taboo, in any situation – talking about policy very much included. So, in policy terms, having gone Right once, you’re likely to go Right again – and to go further Right. In this view, Labour Right ideology works a bit like Maxwell’s Demon, deriving free energy from the random motion of gas molecules by selecting molecules moving one way rather than another (little bit of science, my name’s Brian Cox, goodnight). If any movement to the Left is precluded, even directionless drift and random responses to events will translate into a slow but steady march to the Right.

Answer 3: they’re going Right because they can’t go Left.

If this is the case, the Labour Party’s basically a lost cause, at least until everyone with this mindset follows Mike Truk, Karl Dandleton and Paul Ovenden out of the door. Even the ones with permanent contracts. But it’s not a complete explanation: the march rightwards is going further and faster – and more enthusiastically – in some areas than others. Specifically, the areas most strongly associated with Reform UK.

4. Split the Vote, Win the Vote (or: re-fighting the last election)

During the last election campaign we heard a lot about ‘hero voters’, the bizarre and frankly rather distasteful label for (2019) Tory voters who were prepared to vote Labour in Conservative seats. Targeting these voters led to Labour seats – and Labour voters – being neglected, resulting in some safe seats becoming considerably less safe or even being lost; this was spun after the fact as “vote efficiency”, as if positively repelling voters in Islington and Leicester had always been part of the plan. But in any case, those ‘hero voter’ Labour gains from the Tories – even without the losses to independents – wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough to win the election. If the Tories had only lost votes to Labour, only 20-30 of Labour’s gains from the Tories in England would still have changed hands; something similar but less extreme applies to the Lib Dems. In other words, if “hero voters” had been the story of the 2024 election, Labour would have made 55-60 net gains (most of them outside England); the Lib Dems would have made 30-odd gains instead of 64, and the Tories only around 50 losses. This would have put Labour in the mid-260s in terms of seats and taken the Tories down to the 300s, leaving them as the largest single party but without a majority – 2017 all over again, eh?

In reality, Labour made 211 net gains and the Tories 251 losses: something else was working harder. Two things, in fact: Tory losses to abstention and to Reform UK. The Tory vote was down overall by seven million, only half of which went to Reform UK; most of the remainder, we can be reasonably confident, stayed at home (there were some Tory-Labour switchers, but not very many in the scheme of things; Labour’s total vote was actually slightly down on 2019). A few Tory seats were lost to Reform, but their effect was nugatory, particularly given Reform UK’s indifference to Parliament. The split in the Right vote – and its weakness as a whole (the lowest since 2005) – enabled Labour to get a landslide out of what was also a very low vote. In many cases, Labour made gains while taking fewer votes than they had taken in the same constituency in 2019. (Hyndburn 2019: Labour vote 41.5%, down 12% since 2017; Labour loss. Hyndburn 2024: Labour vote 33.5%, down 8% since 2019; Labour gain. Work that one out.)

So, like the emergence of the “efficient vote” line, I wonder if Labour’s reluctance to attack Reform UK during the election campaign was a tactical response to feedback on how the campaign was going. And I wonder if, given the undeniable fact that the 2024 election resulted in a Labour landslide, it’s now received wisdom in leadership circles that that’s how you beat the Tories: not by poaching right-leaning voters from them, but by creating the conditions for Reform UK to do so, ensuring that the Right vote stays split.

Answer 4: they’re not risking boosting Reform UK and its agenda, they’re deliberately boosting them.

This would be an appalling strategy for Labour to adopt – not so much unscrupulous as immoral, and self-defeating for Labour in any but the shortest possible term. I only raise it as a possibility because, well, [gestures towards All This].

But if this is the approach being adopted by the leadership, it’s surely time for a reassessment. Standing back (at best) while Reform UK made inroads into Tory territory might have won one election, but it’s not going to win another. Apart from anything else, the conditions have changed – thanks in part to this strategy from Labour. The Right vote in the 2024 election was split 23% Tory to 9% Reform (32% total) at the start of the campaign and 24% / 12% (=36%) by the end. Reform UK support drew level with the Tories’ (23% / 23%, 46% total) in January of this year; the two parties are currently averaging 17% and 31% (48%). The Right vote is steadily regaining strength and steadily becoming less split – and more dominated by Farage.

Is that really what the Labour leadership want? Or do they still think Labour could retrieve the situation by moving further Right?

5. In Search of Lost Heartlands (or: re-fighting the last election but one)

In 2019, Labour lost 60 seats, 48 of them in England. In 2017 Labour made 27 gains in England (36 total) but also six losses. Yes, there were losses – and all of them in places that were Labour strongholds (Copeland), industrial heartlands (Mansfield) or at any rate definitely up north somewhere (Walsall). This is presumably why, in the run-up to the 2024 election, Keir Starmer talked repeatedly about winning back the voters Labour had lost “over the last two elections” (despite having previously said that Corbyn’s legacy was something to build on.)

The myth of the Red Wall (TINRW) purported to explain what had happened: the 2019 election had supposedly been lost by a surge of previously-loyal Labour voters to the Tories, their “social conservatism” overcoming their waning class loyalties (and presumably those six losses in 2017 had led the way). It’s true that Labour lost a lot of seats in 2019, many of them in surprising places – or at least, what look like surprising places when viewed from London and without looking too closely at their electoral history. And it is true that there are some previously-solid Labour constituencies where Labour lost particularly heavily – 17 of them by my count; a less right-on Labour Party might, perhaps, have held those seats. But the numbers alone say that this was a small part of the story of 2019. The Tories only needed nine seats for an absolute majority; a Labour strategy that saved those ‘Red Wall’ seats, and lost the other 43, would still have led to a crushing defeat.

I think the ‘Red Wall’ myth flourished not only because it helped pin the defeat on Jeremy Corbyn, but because it played into a belief that’s endemic on the Right of the party: that Labour voters are fundamentally right-wing. Real Labour voters, that is; traditional Labour voters, “our people”. Not so much on the “bosses and workers” front or on schools and the NHS and the old age pension, but… well, everything else. Anti-social behaviour, all that. Immigration, all that. Don’t mention human rights, you’ll be there all day. Lovely people, salt of the earth, but… well, don’t come round our way with your Pride flags, that’s all I’m saying. For Labour to lose sixty seats while led by someone who challenged this world view – not only by speaking out on those supposedly taboo subjects but by maintaining that ordinary working people were actually with him – was a dream come true. (Nightmare, I mean. Nightmare come true. Obviously.)

How to get those losses back? If there was a group of issues on which long-time Labour voters were likely to lean Right, it could make sense to tiptoe around those areas, while attacking the Tories on everything else and promoting Labour policies as a positive alternative. But this could only work while three conditions held: the list of ‘culture war’ issues was reasonably short (ideally just bringing back racism and hanging); the Tory Party was on the same side of the ‘culture war’ as Labour, or at least could be relied on to leave those issues alone; and the Tories dominated the Right. Unfortunately, the first of these conditions ceased to apply a long time ago – anything can be a ‘culture war’ issue, and many things now are. The second was already fraying under Thatcher, and disintegrated completely under Johnson.

So Labour under Starmer shifted to a strategy of trying to own the Right pole of those divisive issues – raising the flag, supporting our troops. In the name of appealing to former Labour voters, this handed the ideological agenda to the Tories, pre-emptively neutering Labour’s attacks on them, or confining them to issues of competence and delivery. But there was worse to come. The idea, remember, wasn’t that long-time Labour voters held centre-right views – if they did they’d just vote Tory. The assumption was always that “our people” held far-Right views – views that weren’t being expressed anywhere on the mainstream political spectrum. Until they were. An organised, articulate, seemingly popular far-Right party is Kryptonite to this kind of Labour Right mentality: Labour can’t mount any kind of ideological challenge to it, because it’s where our people are. Our voters aren’t on the Left – 2019 proved that (actually we always knew that). So if they’ve deserted us, we can’t go Left to get them – we’ll have to go Right. How far Right? However far it takes!

Answer 5: they’re moving on to Reform UK territory because they think the Right is where the (real, traditional) Labour voters are.

Or is it more cynical than that?

6. Taking Rainy Fascist Island (By Strategy) (or: re-fighting the last election but two)

If you talk to anyone on the Labour Left about the 2017 election, you’ll be reminded that Labour made 30 net gains – the best performance for a Labour opposition since 1997 – and increased their vote share by 9%, taking 3 million more votes than in 2015. If you talk to anyone on the Labour Right about the 2017 election, on the other hand, you’ll be reminded that Labour didn’t actually win (“And here’s me without a pen,” as Barry Cryer used to say). If you can find anyone else who remembers that election, they’ll probably mention the Tories’ appalling campaign – the dementia tax, the coughing fit, the letters falling off the wall…

What nobody usually mentions, due to it not really suiting anyone’s agenda, is that on some measures the Tories in 2017 did extremely well. The Conservative Party in 2017 took 13.6 million votes, 42.3% of the vote – up from 11.3 million and 36.9% in 2015. This was the party’s highest vote since 1987 and its highest vote share since 1983; indeed, 13.6 million was more votes than Labour took in 1997, the year of Tony Blair’s landslide victory. The question of why this huge rise in votes didn’t translate into seat gains has a twin, the question of why Labour’s 40% and 12.9 million votes didn’t translate into a Labour victory (compare 2024: 33.7%, 9.7 million, 211 net gains). Labour were too strong for the Tories not to make losses, but the Tories were too strong for Labour to win (campaign, schmampaign).

So there’s another thing that nobody ever says about 2017: the problem with Corbynism wasn’t that it was unpopular; the problem was that it was polarising. Attracting three million voters to Labour ought to have been enough – but it won’t be if you’re also motivating two million more people to vote Tory. I wonder if that’s what’s going on now: if Labour strategists have quietly – and belatedly – learnt the real lesson of 2017, particularly when compared to 1997 (when Labour’s vote was up two million compared to 1992, but the Tory vote was down 4.5 million). To win from opposition Labour need to encourage their supporters but also discourage the Right’s – don’t make them think they’re in a Battle with the Left, make them think it doesn’t make much odds whether they vote or not. New Labour did this by emphasising all the common ground they had with Conservatism, and the extent to which they’d made a break with ‘old’ Labour values. Now, however, the Right is dominated by Reform UK, so repeating those formulae (support for business, no opposition to NATO, etc) will only do half a job. Like it or not, depolarising the next election is going to mean Labour talking the same language as Farage – and reassuring his followers that they’ve got nothing to lose by voting Labour, or by staying at home.

Answer 6: they’re moving on to Reform UK territory because Reform UK now dominate the Right, and that’s the only way to avoid the next election being fought as a Left-Right battle which the Left is bound to lose.

Answers 5 and 6 both suggest that Labour is deliberately adopting Reform UK’s agenda, either in search of their lost (“culturally conservative“) voters or in a bid to make the next election less polarised and hence easier for Labour to dominate. So, will it work? Firstly, what kind of question is that? Will it work for Labour to repeat far-Right talking points and adopt the far Right’s policy agenda? Never mind whether it would work, it’s a truly terrible idea. Secondly, no, it can’t possibly work. Farage supporters don’t have a list of policy priorities, they have a list of grievances, things that aren’t good enough – and a leader who amplifies those grievances and suggests new ones. You can’t reassure people when they don’t want reassurance – least of all when you personally are one of the things they’re aggrieved about. (I just searched for “keir starmer dpp” on X. I don’t recommend it.) If Labour did move on to Farage’s turf, all that would happen would be that Farage would promptly outflank them on the Right, while the likes of Rupert Lowe and Ant Middleton scrambled to outflank him. The Labour leadership’s apparent confidence that the party can annexe the Reform UK agenda without Farage simply shifting further Right makes them seem bizarrely naïve, if not downright stupid. Like Winnie the Pooh telling Piglet that Jagulars can drop on people without hurting themselves because they’re “such very good droppers”, I feel that someone should quietly explain to Keir Starmer that Nigel Farage is a Very Good Outflanker.

But none of this is as important as the point I started with. If this strategy failed, it would be a terrible idea and put Labour in a really bad place – whereas if it worked, it would be a terrible idea and put Labour in a really bad place.

Why Are They Like This?

Reviewing the candidate answers above, I think it’s true that the government is run by right-wingers (answer 1). People like Reeves, Streeting and Kendall have never made any secret of their priorities; as for Keir Starmer, while it’s certainly not true that he’s never claimed to be left-wing, since being elected leader of the party he’s made very few concessions to the Left. I also think it’s true that the larger government and Labour Party apparats are characterised by control-freakery and populated by people happy to be subjected to it (answer 2), and that making their bones fighting the Left has left them incapable of giving a left-wing answer to a right-wing challenge (answer 3), even when that’s what’s needed.

All of that would give us a borderline-incompetent government, obsessed with Labour Right shibboleths such as NATO and free enterprise, quick to denounce any attack from the Left but strangely wooden in responding to the Right. But that’s not all we’ve got, is it? If we’re specifically looking at how the government chases Reform UK to the (far) Right, we need some more factors.

The remaining possibilities are rather less flattering. (Seriously; answers 2 and 3 say that senior Labour people have given themselves tunnel vision fighting imaginary Trots and that they weren’t very independent-minded to begin with, while answer 1 just says that they’re quite right-wing. It gets a lot worse from here on.) I think Labour strategists did see the rise in the Reform UK vote during the 2024 election campaign and broadly welcome it, on the grounds that it would drive the Tory vote down (as indeed it did); I think it’s also more than possible that this strategy is still basically in place (answer 4), either on the grounds that Reform UK, being more extreme than the Tories, are easier for Labour to fight, or just because nobody’s told them to stop it yet (see also answer 2). This reckless cynicism and electoral opportunism, in the face of resurgent fascism, would be quite unforgivable.

I also think that the Labour Right do tend to think of the core Labour vote as White working-class reactionaries, who need to be appeased from time to time by throwing them a bone on issues like immigration. This would lead logically to reading the 2019 result exclusively through the Red Wall myth – and reading the rise of the Reform UK vote since the 2024 election as evidence that Labour’s core voters have deserted them (again!), and need to be courted by ever more concessions on the issues Reform UK has made its own (answer 5). Believing that your own voters have repugnant views, and not challenging them, is a bad look (see the comments here on Labour seats with substantial BNP votes in 2005 and 2010); pandering to those views opportunistically is even worse. But turning pandering to racists into strategy – dragging the Labour Party onto extreme Right territory, in the face of very strong evidence that a winning Left-wing coalition is possible – is truly disgusting. Nor is it any less disgusting if it’s done out of electoralist calculation (answer 6).

Whether any one, or more, of answers 4-6 is plausible – and which one(s) – really depends on just how low your estimation of the current Labour leadership is. I recently learned that Peter Mandelson “has reportedly remained a mentor and friend to [Morgan] McSweeney” – something I don’t recall ever being ‘reported’ before, even when the spotlight was turned on McSweeney – so mine is very low indeed.

But I still haven’t answered the question: why are they like this? Promoting the worst enemy of your party and its supporters so as to damage the second worst enemy (answer 4), abandoning established policies and fundamental principles to gain votes (answer 5) or adopting far-Right policies so as to defeat a far-Right party (answer 6): they all have something in common. (So does policing yourself never to say anything left-wing and/or think independently, for fear of being bullied (answers 2 and 3).) What they have in common is cynicism: a cynically instrumental approach to politics, and to political policies and programmes, and to political ideologies.

This is a damning judgment in itself – if that’s your attitude to politics, what the hell are you doing in politics? Isn’t that just the kind of attitude we all found so deplorable in Boris Johnson, only cosplaying Malcolm Tucker instead of Billy Bunter? It’s also incredibly dangerous – as we’re now finding out. In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

In this post from 2020 I argued that different Labour leaderships have articulated different ideologies, and combinations of ideologies; in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, the key ideologies were

an ideology of human equality, of every person (anywhere in the world) mattering as much as any other; and an ideology of constructive empowerment, of mobilising people to make the world a better place … call them “Equality Everywhere” and “Let’s Get To Work”

Starmer, I suggested, was flirting with “something close to the diametric opposite of the ideologies Labour upheld under Corbyn”:

I think a lot of the grudges being sedulously borne in our society can be brought together under a heading of “When’s Our Turn?” – yes to patriotism, tradition, the armed forces and support for pensioners (they’ve done their bit); no to internationalism, cultural innovation, human rights lawyers and hand-outs for scroungers (let them do some work for a change). And, if I’m right, that’s the direction Labour is heading.

I went on to argue that Starmer might not want to own or promote that discourse, just to mimic it and borrow some of its appeal for his own political project – but that what he wanted didn’t really matter:

the process that has been begun under Starmer’s leadership could end up giving us a patriotic, nostalgic, troops-supporting, pensioner-friendly Labour Party.

And the rest. Well played, lads.

One final, perversely optimistic note: what I didn’t anticipate at the time was how unpopular such a Labour Party would be; when I wrote that post Labour were averaging 39% in the polls (Conservatives 40%, Reform UK 2%). After the 2024 election I wrote a post-mortem concluding presciently

I fear that we’re heading for a Britain with three main parties, all of them wrapped in flags and all of them competing for the votes of people who remember proper binmen. And Labour probably won’t even be the biggest one.

But even then Labour were averaging 33% in the polls (Conservatives 22%, Reform UK 19%). Labour’s seven-day polling average hit 20.3% at the end of August, and hasn’t recovered much since. 20.3% is the lowest seven-day average since June 2019, when three polls in a row put Labour on 19% or 20%; this was the time of the last Euro elections, with the Brexit Party and the Lib Dems both riding high. Other than that brief and anomalous episode, Labour’s polling performance has never been as bad as this; not under Corbyn, not under Michael Foot. Whatever it is they’re selling, people aren’t buying. A change of course is surely going to come – even if it’s not under the current leadership.

(Personal note: I’ve been referring to “the current leadership” since 2020. I’m beginning to feel vindicated.)

By Phil | Posted in Britain, cheery thoughts, new labour, pinkoes, politics, the Right | Comments (1)

Workers’ Playtime

…it’s worth doing well

Palestine Action in the High Court

Lon Fuller, Narrower

To let eleven brothers know

The £10 Box: Fourth Quarter

Through the tumbling leaves

The £10 Box: An Infinite Summer, The Faded Sun: Kesrith

Yer Blues(3): Why a branch?

Good honest October

Not one of us

Yer Blues(2): The local news

The £10 Box: Somerset Dreams, Xeno

Yer Blues(1): What’s Bin Did

Do you remember?

The £10 Box: Cirque, Blackpool Vanishes

On barons and libraries

In the Curiosities of Art

Fuller, narrower, and more critical

The £10 Box: Roadside Picnic, Ship of Strangers

Why are they like this?

About

Posts

Comments

Categories

Search

Back pages

Still haven’t found

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

About

Posts

Comments

Categories

Search

Back pages

Still haven’t found

Is it raining again?