The Brexit Hall of Lame: Theresa May

The Brexit Hall of Lame: Theresa May

Part three in the tedious series

Theresa May, née Brasier, was born on 1 October 1856. Daughter of the Male Vicar of Trumpton and a mother who was prominent in the Camberwick Green Conservative Party, Theresa May would later channel the influences of both herr parents by translating the teachings of Jesus Christ into political sermons with such themes as Hate Thy Neighbour, Blessed are the Piss-Takers, and The Dark Parable of the Do-Gooder Samaritan. Young Theresa Brasier spent herr childhood happily destroying the livelihoods by trampling their wheat crops into the ground while dreaming of one day being a grown woman with the power to destroy entire families, communities, and even countries. She did a degree in Geography at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, a subject that has no known connection with her husband’s work for the Capital Group financial company or its special interests in tax havens and lucrative weapons markets in a variety of the world's war zones.

In 1997 Thereza May became MP for Maidenhead, Berks, and in 2002, according to the sensible, none-of-your-PC-nonsense authors of her Wikipedia and biography.com entries, “the first female Chairman of the Conservative Party.” She famously said at the time that the Tories must “no longer be known as the Nasty Party” and must therefore rebrand their divide and kill politics as “One Nation Conservatism” and “Compassionate Conservatism.” When herr younger, less experienced, but more male, well-born, and hoggosexually well-connected colleague David Cameron Twat became Prime Minister ahead of herr, he appointed herr Minister for Women’s Inequality and Secretary of Hate at the Home Office. She quickly lost interest in the first appointment and resigned it in order to focus more closely, as Home Secretary, on destroying the Police Force and on creating a Hostile Environment of “Fuck Off” vans, illegal deportations, and depriving lifelong taxpayers of NHS treatment for the crime of contracting cancer while Black.

Herr hateful deeds were rewarded by a Tory Party that voted herr their leader and therefore Prime Minister following the resignation of the dunderheaded, ham-faced pie who’d led the country to catastrophe and who she should have been effortlessly able to outshine. She could, for instance, have pointed out that the blunderingly ill-conceived EU referendum was won by a toxic combination of professional charlatans, blatant liars, bigots, outright Nazis, internet trolls, Steve Bannon, and Vladimir Putin, and even then with a Yes from only 52 percent of voters, a minority of the entire electorate, minorities in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and a small minority among young people suddenly facing the elimination of their birthright citizenship and the evaporation of a lifetime of all kinds of opportunity. She might have thereby laid the ground for the soft brexit that many leavers expressly voted for and that might have won the support of at least some remainers. But no. She said instead that “Brexit means Brexit,” a phrase that simultaneously evokes the spirit of telling-it-like-it-is while meaning absolutely nothing. And indeed no one knew what it meant because not a single one of the sub-Baldricks of the Leave campaign had detailed an actual plan for any particular kind of brexit, however arrogantly and aggressively some of them now insist on the “Will of the People” for the death-inviting insanity of No-Deal. She might also have pointed out, after the Nazi posters and a spike in hate crimes the referendum engendered, including the murder of MP Jo Cox by a brexiter who called her a traitor as he killed her, that it was time to heal the nation’s wounds. But, again, nein. Instead, she used her position of national leadership to accentuate division, amplify hate, and further provoke violence with dog-whistle sloganeering about “Citizens of Nowhere” and “queue jumpers.” She thus instantly further alienated the near half the nation that voted remain and even some leavers too. And, even then, she retained the unquenchable enmity of the fundamentalist Imperio-Isolationists who *now* came out as favouring the kind of Mental Brexit they’d previously and mendaciously denied they ever wanted or would ever happen. Feared on one side, therefore, and hated on the other, with the principled support of no one, and with nothing but the highly contingent loyalty of those who sought herr patronage, Thereza May had rendered herrself politically undead almost before stepping into Number 10.

After that, things got worse. Following categorical promises not call a General Election, she called a General Election. In the process she lost herr slim Tory parliamentary majority and had to form an alliance with some corpses from the seventeenth-century Irish Plantations, who she personally dug up from their graves and placed on government benches that now more closely than ever resembled a sit-down version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. Britain’s first undead leader thus became its first basically dead one, Thereza Mayhem’s appearance now so skeletally gaunt as well as angular and ungainly that she became entirely indistinguishable from her own Gerald Scarfe cartoon. Yet, nothing if not resilient, she staggered on blindly down herr hell-bound highway anyway—slowly yet relentlessly, bandages dragging at herr feet, strong and stable arms outstretched in front of herr, hands dangling limply from herr wrists—with a premiership so inconceivably demented that an infinite number of Shakespeares speed-typing until the End Times would not be able to conjure up such a clusterfuck of despair-inducing evil-intention, ineptitude, and catastrophe.

Thereza Mayhem’s deeds in this world, alive, undead, and indeed dead, have destined herr to a Special Circle of Hell where she will spend Eternity repeatedly screeching untenable demands at queue-jumping Citizens of Nowhere while being continuously kicked up the arse by a Honey Monster and laughed at by a gazillion cackling Michael Govelins, each one of them wearing a Jacob Rees-Mogg mask complete with evil monocle.

Thereza Mayhem, former Hate Secretary, late and indeed possibly the last Prime Minister of the country formerly known as the United Kingdom.

The Brexit Hall of Lame: David Cameron

The Brexit Hall of Lame: David Cameron

The second in the series.

David William Donald “David Cameron” Cameron was born on 9 October 1966. A pie, and yet also somehow a slice of ham with a face like an arse drawn on it, David Cameron was able to transcend his inherently mediocre capabilities in part thanks to his father’s augmenting a family fortune dating to ancestor King William IV through astute investments in the Channel Islands, Switzerland, and Panama. David Cameron also rose to great heights with such apparent casual ease due to centuries of carefully cultivated affirmative action for the well-born designed to normalise and perpetuate advantage for the few and disadvantage for everyone else. Young David Cameron thus attended the private and exclusive Heatherdown School in Wankfield, Berks, and then Eton “College,” Berks, before going “up”, as they say, to Brownose College, Oxford. There, he joined the Bullingdon Club, a strictly exclusive chaps-only society whose now famous initiation ceremony involves inductees inserting their members into the mouths of dead pigs, and whose members are reputed for drunkenly destroying restaurants, burning £50 notes in the faces of homeless people, and making life-time connections in business and politics that ensure they always give each other first dibs on top jobs ahead of their more able and better qualified but less hoggosexual peers.

From such materially privileged and yet in other ways deeply humble origins, David Cameron oozed his way into government before slithering into employment with an astonishingly posh PR firm and then, with this invaluable life experience under his belt, crawling back into politics again in 2001, this time as MP for Witney, a “Very British Problems English Poshness” Cotswolds Theme Park where all the people are named Cholmondley but pronounce it Chumley, all the towns’ names begin with “Chipping” and end with “-ington,” and all the houses are made of biscuits. He then became leader of the Conservative Party after speaking out loud for more than a few minutes without reading his notes, which in that environment is regarded as a spectacularly impressive accomplishment. And then he became Prime Minister, as one does, because, after the thousandth financial crash in a row caused by the profligate greed of financiers in collaboration with excessively pro-business government, the country decided it needed a new government that was even more excessively pro-business and that would make the poor pay for the reckless irresponsibility of the rich. Except of course the country did not decide that at all. The majority in fact voted for a combination of moderate-campaigning Tories and progressive-campaigning “Liberal” “Democrats” led by Nick “Nick Your Vote” “Nick Your Bedroom” “Nick Your Benefits” “Nick Your NHS” “Nick Your Education” “Nick Your Pension” “Nick Your Future” “Nick Nick” “Ole Nick” Clegg. Yet these two and their members collaborated in defiance of their mandates in the most vindictively right-wing government the country has (until now) had since the reign of William the Bastard.

David Cameron was fond of referring to the results his reverse-social-engineering as the “Big Society”, despite actually making society significantly smaller through a harrying of the poor that killed 120,000 of its members between 2010 and 2014 alone, according to a British Medical Journal study. More important than that for David Cameron, though, was his belief that using terms like “Big Society” made him sound intelligent. Indeed during his premiership he was frequently seen performing very deep thinkinessness by walking toward television cameras while squinting his eyes and stroking his chin, although, to be fair, he may actually have been genuinely attempting to summon up the focus he needs to walk for more than a few metres without inexplicably falling on his arse like some kind of bum-faced Norman Wisdom.

But what really secured David Cameron’s historic disrepute was his summoning all his rich-boy entitlement and recklessness by gambling that a referendum on leaving the European Union would gag UKIP and the Imperio-Isolationist wing of the Tory Party, but then getting his stupid arse kicked by, among a massive gallery of liars and lunatics, a fascist Man-Frog, a racist version of The Honey Monster, a bullshitting glove puppet made by an inexpert five-year-old, and a “haunted Victorian pencil” (in the perfect words of James O’Brien). Like the financial crash, Brexit will result in disaster-capitalist economic and social policies that will impoverish and kill many of the people who will be lied to and will vote for it all anyway. But killing the poor and otherwise vulnerable while laughing and stuffing their top hats with cash is what Tories have always done and will always do, so David Cameron deserves no special credit on that account. What really makes David Cameron Britain’s shittest-ever Prime Minister except the next one and the one after that is taking his county’s international image as a whitened and emposhened version of Love, Actually, and transforming it into a highly distressing mash-up of Monty Python’s Upper Class Twits and The Bunker. The new image is obviously more factually accurate, but will nevertheless damage Britain’s diplomatic and trading ties with everyone except, in ascending order of evil, Bond Villains, Saudi Arabia, and the US Pharmaceuticals Industry.

David Cameron reacted to his creating the most monstrous catastrofuck in British peace-time history by immediately resigning as Prime Minister and as leader of a Conservative Party that preaches Personal Responsibility for other people. He later resigned as an MP, thereby abandoning his Witless constituents as well. As the most astute analysis of these developments puts it: “what’s happened to that twat David Cameron ... he’s in Nice with his trotters up.... Twat” (Dyer, D., 2018).

David William Donald “David Cameron” Cameron, former MP, former PM, twat. Twat.

The Brexit Hall of Lame: Nigel Farage

The Brexit Hall of Lame: Nigel Farage.

Last year I did some ranty facebook posts about brexit. Now I've resurrected this blog, I'm putting them here. I'll also eventually finish the series, incorporating such giants of the political and intellectual world as "haunted Victorian pencil" (James O'Brien) Jacob Rees-Mogg, six-form blunderkind Dominic Raaaaab, and Crunchie munching airfix soldier Mark Francois. We'll start, however, with Kermitler himself, Nigel Furhrage.   

Nigel Paul Farage, born on 3 April 1964 in Downe, Kent, is a descendant of French Huguenot refugees and is the great-great grandson of Nicholas and Bena Schrod, Germans. Nigel Farage’s hatred of foreign food, languages, and people, plus his allegedly foreign and possibly Putin-sourced funding (currently being investigated by various non-BBC journalists and the FBI), his massive public-funded BBC platform, his six-days-a-week LBC talk show, and his plucky-underdog anti-elitism, have made him the most enduring and powerful force in twenty-first century British politics.

Nigel Farage co-founded the United Kingdom Independence Party in 1993 and was its leader from 2006 to 2009 and 2010 to 2016. He was first elected UKIP Member of the European Parliament for the constituency of Fatherland and Gammon in 1999, then re-elected in 2004, and reelected also in 2009, and reelected yet again in 2016, on the grounds that the European Union is run by unelected bureaucrats. He has stood seven times for various seats in the UK Parliament, and failed to be elected there on every single occasion. He was a leading member of LeaveUK in the EU Referendum campaign of 2016, his anti-immigrant “Breaking Point” poster patriotically resembling a well-known item of Nazi propaganda. He left UKIP after its referendum triumph and joined Leave Means Leave in 2018, and then formed yet another new Brexit Party, although it is little more than a vehicle for separating bibulous gammons from their money. And just when you think he’s finally disappeared, he’s fucking well back again, his amphibian face bobbing up to the surface of your TV screen yet again, wide-mouthing more lies about the EU, about immigrants, giving word-for-word predictable reasons why he’s supporting this foreign fascist or that one, why he’s fighting yet another election, why he’s resigning from this hate party or that one, why he’s joining or forming this new hate party or that one…. Nigel Farage is the unflushable turd of English nationalism.

Nigel Farage’s belief in blood-based tribalism may be accountable to the fact that he doesn’t have the brains to pour piss out of a boot if you told him the instructions were written on the heel (President Lyndon Johnson). His apparent ignorance of how this belief system might assign him and his progeny to an eternal inheritance of French-German mongrel status may be accounted to the fact that he doesn’t have the brains not to pour piss out of a boot if you told him the instructions were written on the insole (me). But there may be complementary explanations for his stupendous perversity as well. The sad desperation of a man named “Farage” to appear “English” may have its roots in an anxious parentage and upbringing that was posh but not quite not posh enough, in the finely graded English class divisions and conflict so perfectly captured by David Croft and Jimmy Perry in the needy prickliness of Captain Mainwaring in his confrontations with the aggravating easiness of his social superior Sergeant Wilson. Farage’s father was called Guy Justus Oscar Farage, a spangly Gilded Elevator of a name entirely suited to a man with the manners and tastes of Donald Trump. Apparently too much of a drunken oaf even by the standards of the Bullingdon boys, Guyus Justusus Oscarus Farageus once lost his stockbroker license and had to go selling antiques like some kind of witlessly charmless and hideously unsexy version of Lovejoy, although after learning his lesson the big boys let him back into the city because money. Guyus Justusus Oscarus Farageus sent the boy Nigel to Dulwich College, a posh private school in London, rather than Eton, the posher private school in Windsor, Berks. According a typically cringe-worthy and shamelessly arse-licking BBC profile, Nigel “decided” not to go to university, but being, in his own words, “good at selling things,” he followed daddy into The City as a commodities trader, spending a spell in the pay of Credit Lyonnais Rouse. Apparently too much of a petty crook even for the stockbroker belt, he was, as his father had been, humiliated at the hands of his social superiors by being busted by Surrey Trading Standards for illicitly using UKIP magazine to hawk videos of himself for £5 a pop.

Nigel Farage might have learned from these experiences to kick against the pricks at the top of the British class system, but no. Presumably because, despite everything, he still loves massive pricks and wants indeed to be an even bigger one himself, he dedicated his life instead to blaming others for his smallness, misdirecting his accusations of “elitism” and kicking sideways and downwards at those he considers beneath him in his fantasy league of human worth. His class-based resentments started turning tribalist and racist as early as his sixth-form days, when his teachers expressed concern over his abandonment of standard Thatcherism in favour of full-on fascism. He dismissed these accusations as a liberal-elite conspiracy against him based on nothing more substantial than his expressed admiration for Enoch Powell. But he truly found his goose-stepping groove following the Maastricht Treaty, abandoning the snooty Tory Party and shedding his City clothes to refashion himself as Britain’s mustard-trousered Mussolini, the green-shooting-jacketed Maréchal Pétain of Vicious England, the leather-riding-booted Obergruppenführer of the Framley Fox Hunt.

Nigel Farage’s pathetic outsider-looking-in self-contradictions and hypocrisies don’t end with his immigrant-background English-fascism and his petit-bourgeois anti-snobbery. A staunch critic of the EU’s democratic deficit, his record as an MEP consists of little more than a right-winger's wank-bank of videos of his ad hominem and often personally abusive orations made for no other purpose than to upload to his YouTube channel for the advancement of his personal profile and broadcasting career. A staunch opponent of UK taxpayers’ money funding the EU, he’s made a living from it for 17 years, and indeed aims to do so for many more, given his distinct discreetness concerning the £39 billion Brexit divorce bill because that’s his comfy fucking pension right there. A staunch opponent of EU financial corruption, he’s been criticised often and occasionally busted for trousering overly generous EU expenses. A self-proclaimed Fisherman’s Friend, he was arsed to turn up for precisely one out of 42 meetings during his three years on the EU Fisheries Committee. A staunch believer that the Will of the People must be obeyed, he once said that the EU referendum was merely advisory and that a mere 52-48 victory for Remain should lead to a second referendum. A staunch opponent of “globalisation” by such conspiratorial organisations as The EU and The Jews, he’s a prominent albeit second-tier member of an International Cabal of Wealthy White Supremacists, referring to scab-faced Nazi Steve Bannon as “my kind of chap,” to Donald Trump as “a great silverback gorilla” after revelations of the latter’s serial and serious sexual assault habit, and has unofficially nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize (I absolutely shit you not). A staunch opponent of foreign interference in internal politics, Nigel Farage personally campaigned for Trump, standing with him in a Gilded Elevator in Trump Tower alongside others also now declared “Persons of Interest” in the FBI investigation of illegal funding in the 2016 US election, and has spoken in support of Marine Le Pen, and expressed the hope that Norbert Hofer would be elected president and would call an anti-EU referendum, until the fellow fascist told him to fuck off and stop interfering in Austria’s internal politics.

But perhaps nothing measures up to the cognitive dissonance that must surely rupture the space-time continuum itself whenever Nigel Farage looks in a mirror and contemplates himself as a member of the Master Race. In order to sustain his own belief system, what he must see staring back at him is Arnold Schwarzenegger, rather than, say, a weedy little man-frog who smells of cigarette smoke and beery farts. But, with this, as with everything, he is wrong. Nigel Farage, for instance, is a man whose head is so physically small and strangely narrow that it is the perfect embodiment of his attitudes and opinions, an apparent cranial-cerebral confluence so perfect in its biology and its visual symbolism that it could almost convince the most rational mind that there is not only science but even art in the bone-headed practice of phrenology. Maybe he thinks his own physicality does indeed prove this theory, but then he'd have to admit he's small- and narrow-minded, which would present him with an intellectual conundrum that would make his tiny little head explode in a sorry little ppphhhttt on the mirror. But the coup de grace is this. In the middle of Nigel Farage's tiny little Donald-Trump-hand-sized head is a face that in repose resembles nothing more than that of a frog, and is thus as hilarious a rebuke of his own Master-Race theories as the physiognomy of bonk-eyed Nazi-activist and YouTube-chef Nick Griffin, and indeed also of the original brown-eyed, brunette, and comedically mustachioed leader of the blond-haired Master Race and incarnation of screaming, arm-waving genocidal mania himself. And yet there he is, Nigel Farage, the most enduring and powerful force in twenty-first century British politics. And here we are, giving him everything he’s ever fucking dreamed of.

Nigel Farage has been married twice, to an Irish woman and a German woman, both of whom divorced him. His four children will retain EU passports after Brexit and, probably unlike yours, will continue to enjoy all the benefits offered by Freedom of Movement throughout the European Union. A private aviation enthusiast, on 5 May 2010 Nigel Farage was involved in a terrifying plane crash, which he tragically survived.

Nigel Fuhrage, unflushable turd.

My REF story; or, Confessions of a REFFail and REFugee

This Thursday, 18 December 2014, at the end of a long term and just in time for Christmas, sees publication of the results of the Research Excellence Framework (formerly called the Research Assessment Exercise). If the name doesn’t immediately tell non-academics precisely what this thing is, as indeed it may not, then it’s a survey of the quantity and quality of research done by academics in UK universities. Except for the fact that it isn’t. But it pretends to be, and based on that pretense it does a vast amount to damage to many individual academics, to most universities, and to all of UK Higher Education in general. It diverts research and writing away from the risky and the long-term in favour of the safely and the rapidly publishable. Even then, problems with assessment of “outputs” means that many results are wrong, enough of them to call the whole vastly time-consuming and expensive exercise into question. Yet those results will nevertheless be used to justify career-ending decisions for some academics by senior managers who are exempt from the REF by virtue of being senior managers, and institution-breaking decisions by ministers who are either ignorant of or hostile to academia or both. Follow the following link to see Derek Sayer of Lancaster University explain in detail what a hilarious-if-it-weren’t-so-serious farrago the REF is: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/one-scholars-crusade-against-the-ref/1/2017405.article

One of the points that Professor Sayer makes is that the REF has become such an all-consuming monster that universities now run on-going internal REFs throughout the five-or six-year intervals between censuses to determine who will be entered in those national censuses. These internal REFS are, as Professor Sayer says, “highly divergent,” but a common feature in the run up to 2014 is that universities use your own departmental colleagues, and a “critical friend” from outside, to peer review your putative entries (of which there must be four—books or articles, whichever, but the key thing is there must be four of them), and then grade them on a scale of 1 to 4 to determine your REFability. The problem is that this involves “frequently ad hoc and generally anything-but-transparent staff selection procedures [by] individual institutions.” As Professor Sayer explains, this means “peer” reviewers are often not, and indeed usually not, actually peers.  They may be colleagues whose fields are closest to your own, but usually not close enough that they would be asked to review your book or your article for an academic journal. The institutional pool is just too small. And the “critical friend” from outside may happen to be in the same field as one or two members of the relevant department, but cannot possibly be qualified to comment on the quality of the work of every member of any department or even subsection of a department (medieval, early modern, or modern). Plus, book and article reviewing for publishing houses and academic journals, besides being done by actual peers who know your field, is normally also done double-blind, to prevent any kind of abuse. Not for internal REFs, though, where you don’t know who the reviewer is—but they do know who you are.  In short, then, your REFability rests on the judgments of people who are mostly inexpert in your field and who may have something against you personally or more generally against your sex, gender, sexual orientation, skin colour, religion, class background or whatever else. And that REF judgment may affect your future career development, even to the point of determining whether you have a future career or don't.  Yet, as Professor Sayer also says, the process’s “victims are often reluctant to speak on the record and universities hide their selection practices behind firewalls of confidentiality.”

It was this point, and the Times Higher Education twitter hashtag #MyREFstory, that got me thinking I should tell my REF story.  Professor Sayer tells his, from the point of view of someone who was all set to be a REF success, but, to his enormous credit, requested not to be entered into an exercise he considers so flawed as to be a fraud--his university denied his request and then rejected his appeal against the denial, so he was entered after all.  My REF story, though, is different.  It is one of a REF reject, one of the REF Riffraff, if you will.  One of the victims who has been reluctant so far to speak on the record.  But Thursday’s coming, and there are many who are still too vulnerable to speak out.  I’m not vulnerable any more, for reasons explained below.  So this is for all the REF Riffraff who still are and who can't speak for themselves. 

My former university adopted exactly the same internal REF procedures described above, with all its inherent problems. I submitted my publications to it: an eight-volume edited collection of documents about the British-American Empire published in Pickering and Chatto’s Major Works series; an article published in a well-rated journal in my field; and a monograph published by Palgrave Macmillan. The problem with the document collection was a problem with the REF in general—that edited document collections don’t fit into the REF definition of research publications. In fact, the collection required a lot of research, has three historical essays in it, headnotes for every document, explicatory footnotes, and it’s a published thing; eight things in fact.  But whatever....  So I was on the back foot there already. The article got a 3, which made it REFable.  But the book was rated a 2 by the internal reviewers, not REFable for most universities, including my former employer. And here’s where problems with the internal reviewing system begin.  First, the article, which got a 3, was based on some of the same material as one chapter of the book, although the book and indeed the relevant chapter in the book took a different approach, with more research included and wider conclusions drawn than was the case with the article. Yet the book got a lower mark of 2.  But these anomalies are often the outcomes of subjective judgments (a subjectivity that is admitted in the REF rules, but only, as Professor Sayer shows, as a pretext for disallowing appeals against decisions).  So I want to leave that aside now and focus instead on the processes by which judgments, whatever they are, are arrived at. 

As is generally the case (I am not singling out my former institution), my peer reviewers weren’t peers. In a department of just over 30, with expertise ranging from classics and ancient to contemporary history, the early modern cohort to which I belonged numbered seven. Include the nineteenth century, into which my book went, and we’re talking 10 people max.  None of them are specialists in American history, none of them would be asked to review my work for book publishers or journals. I thus refused to participate in REF reviewing. If I'm not qualified to review my colleagues' work for a journal, how can I be qualified to review it for the REF?  Two of my "colleagues" were not of the same mind, however, and gave my book that non-REFable score of 2, with all the career-threatening possibilities that carries with it. Career-threatening for me, that is, not for them: they will gain a marginal career advantage for gamely collaborating with the REF. And, as above, as is common, they did this anonymously. At best, this creates a work environment that is utterly inimical to collegiality—you don’t know who among your colleagues did this to you, so you can’t trust anyone.  Except of course that you pretty much do know who did it.  You can’t be absolutely sure, but in a field of 10 at most--where you can eliminate some on the grounds that they had other roles that precluded peer reviewing and others who you know are too honorable to ignorantly do a “number two” on anyone else’s career prospects--then you’re not left with many candidates to choose from.  The department and university cannot guarantee the anonymity it promises to even its closest collaborators, and anyone who thinks it can is being very foolish indeed.  No matter how much paper-trail burning they are urged to do to protect themselves from the Freedom of Information Act (as detailed in the Sayer article), the departmental world is simply too small to hide in. These potentially corrupt and corrupting factors are other reasons wny I refused to particpate in the REF reviewing process.  

But it’s all worse than this anyway. One-way anonymity, no matter how imperfect, still allows for all sorts of abuses. Or at least suspicions of abuses, which is still deeply corrosive.  I’m not saying I was judged on anything other than the real or perceived quality of my work. I accept that my “peers” genuinely believe my book is shit. But if they wanted a “professional” disguise with which to stiff a “colleague” for some other reason, they had the perfect opportunity to do so. And in turn they handed the perfect opportunity for the non-anonymous then Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research to stiff someone he has more than once referred to as a “Midlands peasant,” had he wanted to.  Of course I am not saying he did anything other than simply follow the guidance of my peers in the internal REF, or that his comments about my background were anything other than mere inconsequential banter. My rejection may have been for another entirely professional reason too; my refusal to participate in REF reviewing, for example.   

To my particular ex-university’s credit, senior managers promised that REF entry (and presumably non-entry) would not affect people’s future careers. Given the same senior managers’ form for changing their policies, however, and given that they know that we know they move goalposts all the time and do it with impunity, these promises have no more practical (or moral) value than barefaced lies.  And indeed already my former colleagues are being asked to include their REF entries on Professional Development forms, and have been told that promotion boards can take these forms into account.

So, anyway, predicting these changes, I was not accepting that 2 for my book.  Luckily for me, the department’s “critical friend” had recommended a 3 (though, given their equal inexpertise, this is of no more worth than the 2s), and so had the two members of the department charged with overseeing the internal REF (both among the department’s early modernists and nineteenth-century historians, but still not Americanists). The Head of College confirmed the 3, and that’s the matter of record, but I was out of the REF anyway--due to some crossover between the article and book (notwithstanding that this happens in the normal course of academic publishing, and notwithstanding there being differences between the article and book anyway), and due to the inability of this massive and vastly expensive Research Assessment Framework to categorise an eight-volume document collection as a research publication.

As a result of being a REF reject, I could now be facing a very uncertain future.  But because of REF, and for other reasons I’ve blogged about here before, I decided a while ago to seek academic work overseas.  Happily for me, in 2013, I got the French "habilitation" that qualified me to apply for professor posts there, and in 2014, a few weeks after learning ly REF rejection, I got my current job as Professor of American Civilisation at Jean Moulin University in Lyon, all of which rather helped with the old self-worth issues that might otherwise have come with that rejection. Of course, not everyone can escape as I have.  But I hope my REF story adds a little bit to the due discreditation of this appalling exercise, or Framework, or whatever stupid thing they call it in the future.  And that if you too are a REF reject then it doesn't really mean a thing about you. I hope others will add their stories.  And then, as much as I can’t believe this thing has gone on as it has as long as it has, equally, I cannot believe it cannot be stopped.

 

 

The idea that arts and humanities are “useful for all kinds of jobs . . . couldn’t be further from the truth”, says Nicky Morgan, the UK Education Secretary.

I have blogged several hundred times on the issue of “employability” in UK Higher Education. The latest effort, just last week, is here, and at the start of it are links to the several thousand other posts I’ve written on the subject: http://sonofsar.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/eew-gew-new-development-in-ideological_24.html

But in case you don’t want to read these several million posts I will sum up the key arguments now.  1. “Employability” is not about getting students into jobs. If it was, the time and resources put into it would be invested in University Careers Offices in which there are people who are experts on how to get jobs, as opposed to people who are experts on other things and have other things to do, such as teaching, researching, and writing. The policy of “embedding employability” in academic curricula thus suggests that 2. “Employability” is actually about indoctrinating students in neo-liberal economic ideology and behaviour, an “agenda” even more amply revealed in attempts to embed “entrepreneurialism” in curricular and even in extra-curricular activities. And 3. While there is nothing wrong with helping students get jobs via teaching “transferrable skills” such as how to write, speak, and make arguments more effectively etc., and via writing references for them and so on, there is something deeply wrong with embedding employability and entrepreneurship in places where free thinking is supposed to be. Something that in my view betrays the very principle of education, a betrayal that in turn corrodes the foundations of a free and democratic society.

Of course there are many people who don’t agree with me. Some reject my arguments because they think that embedding “employability” and “entrepreneurship” is just about jobs and isn’t about neo-liberal ideological indoctrination. Others might agree with the arguments but reject the conclusion that the employability and entrepreneurship agenda should be explicitly and loudly resisted because there’s little they can do about it, and in any case they must obey as the current HE environment explicitly and loudly threatens them with unemployability (though I know many of these people are quietly subverting the agenda by simply requiring students to think in various ways anyway). And others may agree with my arguments but reject my conclusions on the grounds that employability and entrepreneurship are the very essence of free thinking and are the actual foundations of a free and democratic society.

Now, there is no point in me addressing the people in category three. These free-market Stalinists are as unpersuadable of my views as I am of theirs. And, of course, as an advocate of free-thinking, I have to admit that they are entitled to their stupid opinions. To the others, though, there is one more argument against “employability” and “entrepreneurialism” I would offer. Or, rather, I’ll let the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan argue it for me, here (though you’ve probably seen it already): http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-secretary-nicky-morgan-tells-teenagers-if-you-want-a-job-drop-humanities-9852316.html

Here, the UK Education Secretary is quoted as saying: “If you wanted to do something, or even if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, then the arts and humanities were what you chose because they were useful for all kinds of jobs. Of course, we know now that couldn’t be further from the truth – that the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock the door to all sorts of careers are the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths).”

So, there it is. The argument I haven’t made yet is easy enough to see from this: there is no point in trying to appease or collaborate with the promoters of “employability”, at least for the arts and humanities. For all the efforts made at my former UK HE College of Arts and Humanities and other similar institutions to promote employability and to be seen to be promoting employability, and there has been *a lot* of effort, the Education Secretary—the Education Secretary—still says that the idea that the arts and humanities are “useful for all kinds of jobs . . . couldn’t be further from the truth”. You don’t even have to agree with me that employability and entrepreneurialism represent a neo-liberal ideological plot to see that it is highly dangerous to flirt with an undeniable instrumentalism in which a degree is seen as a route to work rather than (and not as well as) a pathway to intellectual growth and good citizenship. And it’s clear enough that obedience to these doctrines is not going to promote the survival of these disciplines or the employment of those who work in them.

So what can you do? Keep on subverting surreptitiously for sure. But perhaps it’s time for more open resistance to this ideological agenda, or at the very least to this instrumentalist fundamentalism. Maybe lobby heads of department, heads of colleges, and even senior managers and Vice-Chancellors. Possibly lobby the union not only about defending pay and pensions (important as they are) but about defending what universities are supposed to be for. Maybe join and act with The Campaign for the Public University [http://publicuniversity.org.uk/]. Or even perhaps write trillions of blog posts or letters to and articles in newspapers about the value of free education. It’s alright for me, you might think, as I’ve fled to France from these and other developments in modern UK HE, and of course it’s harder to kick against a system you’re still in. To be fair, though, I did write about a bazillion blog posts before I left, and I was prepared to risk being unpopular with certain people for something I believe in so strongly (or madly, if you prefer). After the Education Secretary has spoken the words above, however, I’d suggest that the biggest risk now lies in staying silent.

 

 

Ooh, ha ha, look at the French economy! (Don't look at the British one!)

There has been a lot of France-bashing lately. One notable recent example involved Andy Street, boss of Penguinosexual retail outfit John Lewis. And there’s another one in today’s Sunday Telegraph. Here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11218338/Life-in-France-Now-is-our-winter-of-discontent.html

Let’s leave the Street incident behind, in part because his words reveal him to be a ludicrous buffoon who deserves no further attention, and in part because although the other one comes from the Telegraph and would normally therefore deserve exactly the same amount of further attention, it is actually written by a French person, namely Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. We can therefore be sure that the opinions therein are not merely the unpleasant emissions of a xenophobe, and we can take them seriously as a genuine critique of the state of things. Moutet is very clearly a Sarkozist, an ultra-Sarkozist, actually. Her one criticism of the former and probably next President of the Republic is that his “reforms and cuts” were “timid”. Her critique, then, is an ideological one, not a bigoted one. Great, good, and fine, but it doesn’t make it a truthful one.

That’s not to say there isn’t truth in some of Moutet's words. François Hollande is, she writes, “a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the incestuous, elite civil service school that shapes most French political and economic leaders.” Fair enough. And, apart from the risible comparison to an unelected, despotic Soviet regime, she may be right that “The Brezhnevian intricacies of the tight circles of power in France” in which the “énarque” Hollande “only hired other énarques in his cabinet” and “even narrowed it down to giving three dozen top jobs to the friends he had made in his very own ENA class, between 1978 and 1980” is a serious problem for France.

Yet there is also contradiction and confusion here, as her support for David Cameron is apparently undiminished by the Bullingdonian intricacies of the tight circles of power in England, in which the Etonarque Cameron only hired his chums from Eton and Oxford (apart from the one who went to Westminster school and who the others thus call oik, and never mind that the British private school elite is by all accounts a good deal more “incestuous” than the French ENA one).

There is also omission and the trickeries it tries to hide. While Moutet is right that the French have a problem with too many voters attracted to the far right, including many working-class voters, she nevertheless makes no mention of Britain’s identical problem. Presumably because the explanation may at least in part be that Hollande and self-styled Blairite Manuel Valls have lost touch with their grassroots supporters in the same ways that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband have. By moving to the right. But, of course, pointing out that there is no genuinely socialist alternative to the main parties in their modern centre-right manifestations does not fit well in a thesis that blames the Left for the popularity of the Far Right.

There is also, if you’ll excuse the technical terminology, total bullshit. Such as Moutet's claim that “The French, especially in the public sector, go on strike on the flimsiest of pretexts.” No. No they don’t. No one gives up pay, inconveniences others, and risks their jobs on “the flimsiest of pretexts.” Not even the French. They may strike more often than the British, though not as often as many British and even some French people think they do. But when they do, it’s to stop their wages and working conditions being driven down to, say, British levels. And that's no flimsy pretext at all. Moutet may not like their 35-hour weeks, decent pay, and job security, but most French people who have them seem to like them very much indeed.

I could go on and on in the vein of the above, and a Sarkozist could go on and on rebutting me, and we could both could go on and on in an endless cycle of reciprocally unconvincing interpretations of the facts as each of us sees them. But my main point here is not about facts anyway; it’s about tropes. Because what Moutet does in this article is pile up exactly the same tropes about the French economy and French society that British French-bashers so often do. And not just the xenophobic British. These tropes are repeated so often that they have become truisms even among thoughtful British people. Which of course is exactly the point of rhetorical tropes. They are axes that you grind until they eventually become axioms. The tropes, the axioms, are these. That France is a soviet republic (if you think I’m exaggerating, I refer you back to the Brezhnev reference). That the French go on strike for the “flimsiest of reasons”, despite only working 35 hours a week and enjoying “golden contracts”. And that for these reasons France has higher unemployment and lower economic growth than Britain, France is sclerotic, France has no future, and the French are angry and alienated.                   

I’ve addressed the first and second of these points already and my imaginary Sarkozist interlocutor and I could argue them out all day long. In any case, they’re only the premises for the final and concluding points, the ones about economic performance and the future. And it’s these conclusions that really matter, despite the disproportionate amount of time the French-bashers spend on the premises. In fact, the reason the French-bashers spend so much time on the premises is probably precisely because their conclusions are so very shaky they can’t stand up on their own. Let's look at them a little bit.

First, yes, Britain’s unemployment is lower. (Slightly.) Because successive British governments, the current one and its supposedly leftist Labour Party predecessor, have colluded with business interests in driving down wages (and simultaneously legally disabling trades’ unions so they can get away with it), to the point that many British people with jobs still require state welfare and Big Society food banks to survive. (So much for the anti-statism of the right.)

Second, yes, Britain has higher economic growth. (Slightly. For now.) Because Britain has sold off or is selling off its public infrastructure to the same private sector that is impoverishing poorer working people. And privatisation is even impoverishing the better-off as well. Take my own university sector. British students now pay £9000 a year in tuition fees, and that, plus their maintenance costs and years of lost income when studying, will impoverish large sections of the future middle classes. Except those whose parents are rich enough to pay for their educations for them. And except for those who never earn enough to repay their universities, leaving a massive black hole where the British Higher Education system used to be.

France is sclerotic? The sclerotic metaphor always amuses me, given its implications of poor circulation and movement. Which brings me to transport. Some French-bashers have actually started criticising the French transport system and other of the nation's essential services. Take Moutet: “the country's vaunted infrastructure – trains, even the electrical grid – has started falling apart, because maintenance is neglected in favour of paying a workforce with golden contracts.” Well, the French transport system may not be perfect, but it is not falling apart and it still makes Britain’s look like that of a fourth-world country of centuries ago. You can get caught in traffic jams in France, my home city of Lyon is notorious for it, but you can often drive around for weeks without seeing road works. As opposed to Britain, where you have to allow two hours to go to the bog in case they’ve coned off your hallway. Again. I commute to work on a E1.50 ticket for Lyon's integrated transport network that lets me use all the buses, trams, metros, and trains I can get on and off of in an hour if I feel like it. And the buses, trams, metros, trains, and stations are clean and safe. And there hasn’t been a strike in the 10 weeks I’ve been here. All thanks to the ministrations of a combined state-run and state-regulated private economy. In Britain, on the other hand, it costs a billion pounds for a ten-hour, two-mile journey in a filthy, stinking train full of vomiting drunks that you will thankfully avoid anyway because the service has been cancelled. Again. All thanks to the non-ministrations of a privatised sector in which maintenance is neglected in favour of paying shareholders with golden bonuses. Also, I’d like to ask Moutet who owns much of the privatised British electrical grid. Why, it’s EDF, the French state-run energy corporation.

France has no future? France has its poor people, for sure, but it still has a large well-paid and job-secure working class. If you don’t believe me, I refer you back to Moutet’s and others’ complaints about the over-paid and overly-secure French working class. Also, French students pay about £200-300 a year in tuition fees. Not a big problem for most to pay off. These working- and aspiring middle-class people are the future consumers of the French economy. That's the same future in which more and more British working-class people will not spending money but will be begging for survival at food banks. And the same future in which British middle-class people are not spending the money they earn because so much of it gets deducted to pay off their student debts. And as well as cash, the French people of the future will have capital, because the French state hasn’t sold all the country’s infrastructure off to the greedy and the can’t-be-arsed-to-maintain-or-fix-it. For those bits it has sold off, it forces private buyers to look after workers and service users, rather than sacrifice them for the sake of the limitless greed of shareholders and in fetishistic pursuit of deregegulation. So, France is poorer than Britain for now. But France’s future looks fine once the current economic slump is over (which, lest we forget, was caused by unregulated private enterprise, not by the state or by the poor who the Cameronites and Sarkozists and their many supporters in the media seek so hard to blame). Britain’s future, on the other hand, can most charitably be described as post-apocalyptic.

The French are angry and alienated? Yes, many of them are. And often with good reason. But, also, anger and alienation are the political default positions of the French. Which I think is a good thing, on the whole. Unless they vote in a Presidente Le Pen, in which case it’s a terrible thing. I just hope the Left gets itself organised and recovers enough if not all of those voters who think Le Pen is the only answer to the problems of the many who are unemployed or who aren’t well-enough paid and who don’t have "golden contracts". But I’ll bet even these French people aren’t half as angry and alienated as many Britons are going to be, when those Britons stop reading those distracting articles about how France is a soviet republic, that the French are overpaid, underworked, and always on strike, that France has higher unemployment and lower growth than Britain, that France is sclerotic, that France has no future, and that the French are angry and alienated. When they finally look away from all these “look-over-there, not-over-here” tropes and notice what has become of … Britain.  

 

Kubla Cam. Or, a vision in a dream. A Frackment.

I originally did this as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his appearance before my Lord Leveson. Apologies to the wonderful Samuel Taylor Coleridge."  I now revise it slightly as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his indebtedness to his fracking friends, and the unrelated £500,000 paid by them unto the fracking Tory Party, and other sundry accomplishments." 

Kubla Cam. 

Or, a vision in a dream. A Frackment. 

In Bullingdon did Kubla Cam

A stately restaurant destroy:

Where Barf, the lumpy river, ran,

And damage measureless to normal man

Was nothing to Bozzer, me, and Oik.

So 10 Downing Street is fertile ground

From walls and towers gilded round:

Outwith were gardens with sinuous drills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And there were forests ancient as the hills,

We vend to fracking friends with glee.

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A fracking place! As holy and enchanted

By tory wailing for her demon-giver

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was fracked:

Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

And chavvy grain beneath the fracker’s flail:

And ’mid these dancing rocks once and ever

It stank up momently the sacred river. 

Five miles meandering with mazy motion

Throught wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the money measureless to normal man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ’mid this tumult Cam heard from France

Avaricious voices Totally prophesying cash!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From underneath the jubilee,

It was miracle of enterprise,

A darken'd dome where sleep and freeze

Those I force to work for free!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of asylum hope’d for.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such deep delight ’twould win me

That with music loud and long

I could build that dome in air,

But instead I sent the scrounger home

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashman eyes, his floppy hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on you and me hath fed
And fracked the milk of Paradise.