Philobiblon

From the Child Poverty Action Group:
* Benefit fraud is at an all-time low, costing £1.1bn a year – less than 1% of claims.
* Overpayments cost £1.9bn a year
* £16bn goes unclaimed
* Tax fraud each year costs £15bn

Sir Peter Gershon, who is now advising Cameron on “efficiency savings”, provided the analysis that allowed the Tory proposal for scrapping most of the government’s planned national insurance increase, and told the Financial Times that up to 40,000 public-sector jobs would have to go. He also chairs General Healthcare Group, Britain’s largest private healthcare company.

A number of the business people signing up for the Tory anti-National Insurance increase letter – “including the bosses of mining group Xstrata, SAB Miller and Tullow Oil, have only small UK workforces, and so cannot claim their companies would be hard hit.”

Nice work if you can get it: “Matt Emmens, the chairman of Shire, the pharmaceuticals group, received £10m last year, even though he has only a part-time role”. Perhaps they could cut drug prices instead?

The proportion of MPs who went to comprehensive schools is likely to fall even further after 6 May: from 46% to 30%.

In the UK, the pregnancy rate among teenagers aged 15 to 19 years is 27 per 1,000. In the Netherlands, the pregnancy rate for teenagers of that age is five per 1,000. Both nations become sexually active at the same age, but while 85% in the Netherlands use contraception the first time they have intercourse, its 50% in the UK.

The UK ranks 17th in the league table of industrialised countries for the number of asylum applications per head of population (in a very powerful piece about the dreadful Yarl’s Wood detention centre.

And finally the best piece of comment I’ve read this weekend – Will Hutton on how business as usual just won’t do.

What started this chain of thought was the less-than-wonderful Dyson Airblade, which after colonising the loos at work seems to be spreading like some slow-moving cockroach to public facilities around London. It looks hi-tech, and makes grand claims, but has more than a few drawbacks.

First, it sounds like a 747 warming up, which rather destroys any peace and tranquility the facilities might previously have had, as well as making impossible those convenient little business chats that enable you to casually float some extra work for someone without marching up to their desk. It also removes the larger drops from your hands, spraying them around your feet and the floor, without actually drying your hands, and leaves a large puddle to gently ferment on the floor.

Then I got to thinking about my laptop computers – probably while I was wrestling with one. The best one I’ve ever had was a little 12 inch or so Toshiba that I bought back around 1997. Since then I’ve been through a Dell (never again – it died beyond hope about five days after a one-year warranty ended), an MSI Wind (which died hopelessly within warranty and after a month away for major repairs came back and is still struggling on, but with a hopelessly noisy fan that almost rivals the Airblade), and an Acer (“blessed” by some regular total-freeze-up problem that seems incomprehensible and irrepairable, and a keyboard that couldn’t be a better fluff collector if you’d designed it for that purpose).

Then I think of a set of nearly new lifts I know that are out of order more often than in, and have recently acquired the laughable mechanical voice addition saying “express service”, as they take you from one floor to the next very, very slowly.

Yet I regularly leaflet in Bloomsbury mansion blocks using some delightful, reliable lifts that are certainly Edwardian. And I’m old enough, just, to remember when you expected an electrical appliance to last decades – more or less the lifetime of the young setting-up-a-household buyer – and trust it to do what it was supposed to without adding minor miseries to your life.

It’s not just designed obsolescence, although that’s certainly part of the problem. More, it’s the mad desire for innovation and change, driven by the desire to sell new stuff, every year, which means that change for change sake is taking us away from functional, sensible designs into mad, barely functional excesses.

I’m reminded of the wonderfully prescient Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, and the Nutri-Matic, which “made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic examination of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”

Come to think of it, I know a high-tech machine that while it doesn’t quite make those claims, certainly delivers a hot brown liquid designed to appear like tea, while tasting like dishwater…

An heretical thought: Once a good sensible design for a practical need is devised, why change it?

Dare I suggest a towel? Adams certain thought it a practical and useful object.

Robert Harris’s 2007 The Ghost was a political roman a clef par excellence – in its unflattering picture of Tony Blair it piled outlandish premise on outlandish event, until it came to present an astonishing lifelike image of the man.

His latest, Lustrum, is a different beast – still about politics, but the politics of the dying days of the Roman Republic. It’s a well-trodden tale, with Cicero at its heart, and the giant characters of Pompey, Caesar and Cato stalking around – familiar at least in broad outline to anyone with a touch of classical history in their education.

As far as we know, it is true to life in outline, and makes reasonable deductions about the points of controversy, and the motivations of the main characters, so there is at one level no real surprises in the novel, despite its thriller-like opening with a mutilated body.

What it is, above all, is a superbly well-told, gripping tale, presented to us by a classic narrator, Tiro, Cicero’s slave secretary – a man who has his own hopes, dreams and passions, yet whose life is entirely centred around his master’s. He’s that unfashionable thing these days, an honest, intelligent, caring narrator – and the Cicero he, and we, see is true to the nature of the political man that history has handed down to us – intelligent, skilled, marked by the classic flaw of a “New Man” eager to play up his own importance, yet ultimately buffetted and scarred by forces beyond his control.

Politics of our own day, as the latest British polls show, is turbulent, fast-moving and often surprising, but Rome was in another class of mercurial altogether – a single clever speech, a quip even, could swing the Senate, or a huge mob – Prime Minister’s Questions has nothing on this.

Harris is interesting in his treatment of the women characters. In a story primarily set in the Senate, in the senator’s studies and the streets, they can’t be central, and Tiro doesn’t often see them in detail, but the portrait of Terentia, Cicero’s wife, no paragon of virtue, but an intelligent, strong-minded, often independent woman is an attractive one.

In the shadow of The Ghost, it is tempting to read this as yet another view on British politics. Yet if there’s one real lesson from it – which applies very clearly to the present moment, although the first man to which it should apply, Gordon Brown or David Cameron, is not yet known, is the dictum attributed to Enoch Powell – “all political careers end in failure”.

Given that as I write this I’m preparing to stand for the Westminster parliament, I might take that as depressing -but I’d rather take away a slightly different Ciceronian message – that you’ve got to try, and put your heart and soul into the effort. And be prepared to fail…

Welcome to this weekly roundup – you might have noticed there’s an election almost on, so to start this week, a look at some of the events you might not have read about in a weekend one-story deluge…

Plaid Cymru had its pre-election conference. Welsh Ramblings was focusing on the coverage of the public sector, particularly pay, while the Monmouth Blog has been celebrating some excellent media coverage for its MPs.

The Green Party has also had its conference over the weekend (declaration of interest, I was heavily involved) and on Green Despatches you can find a roundup of the blogging action. It was backing the “Robin Hood tax” – something that A Very British Dude has strong feelings about, as does the Britblog’s founder, Tim Worstall.

The Devil’s Kitchen is less than impressed with the Pirate Party and its view of copyright issues.

Now I suppose there are some other parties that I should cover, so let’s start cheerfully, with the way James Purnell didn’t resign, although how a guest blogger on The Socialist Way thought he should have.

Turning on the Tories, on Mark Reckons there’s an account of the woes of the soon-to-be ex-MP Andrew Mackay. And Cath Elliot on Too Much To Say for Myself has some scathing thoughts about a slightly misplaced – one spot only – decimal point in the Conservative figures on teen pregnancy.

Also related to politics, Mr Eugenides is less than impressed by Scottish rail workers, on The Melangerie, Phil is concerned about the definition of Hooverite economics, and Jonathan Calder on Liberal England mixed nostalgia, a damp suit and a bit of politics to pleasant effects as he reflects on the Market Harborough swimming pool.

Neil on A Place to Stand looks a little further afield, towards the former Irish Tiger, suggesting the economics may not be as bad as suggested, and Laura on The F-Word has been contemplating a government move to allow faith schools to opt out of effective sex education.

Now there’ll be plenty more where that came from for the next ten weeks, so let’s get right away from politics to explore the weird and wonderful range of British blogging topics.

Starting with something completely different, Airminded, subtitled “Airpower and British society, 1908-1941 (mostly)”, hosts the military history carnival. And Elizabeth Chadwick has been revisiting the surprisingly short siege of Framlingham Castle – in 1216, in case you were wondering…

Penny Red is reflecting on what you need to do now to get into journalism, while Greener Leith is reflecting on what you need to do to get a phone box removed (and maybe one day the bin too!)

Barkingside 21 is working to save access to local history and Chris on Capital Nature is counting London birds.

Diamond Geezer has been visiting the real Albert Square and the Onion Bag Blog has dropped in on the new year celebrations in China Town.

And that’s all for this week…. host next week will, I believe, be Matt Wardman.

You might be surprised by some of the links here: the way the Britblog works is that nominations are made, and the host is generally obliged to use them – and to use them without undue editorial bias.

I was very pleased to chair on Friday what many afterwards said to me was a powerful session on the Green Party policy on sex work, which is, in short, in favour of the New Zealand, decriminalisation, model, which aims to protect the safety and wellbeing of sex workers by ensuring that they receive the coverage under employment law and under criminal law as anyone else, and that the stigma against them is minimised.

Catherine Stephens, of the International Union of Sex Workers, said that estimates suggested 80,000 people were working in the sex industry in the UK. Estimates for street sex work range from 3,000 to 22,000, and the Home Office says a maximum 4,000 women are trafficked. “So between 70-90% are non-trafficked off-street workers: an invisible majority who have no reason to the attention of the authorities or rescue organisations.”

Catherine said that streetworkers were generally accepted to be some of the most vulnerable people in the UK. “Street sex work shows a high prevalence of problematic drug and alcohol use, a correlation with a background in care, frequent low educational achievement, homelessness and a host of other problems.”

She added: “These women – referred to by a recent Home Secretary as a “blight” – are criminalised under the Street Offences Act of 1959. That’s now had a 50-year trial period and signally and completely failed to solve the problems associated with street sex work. However, recent legislation has intensified the existing approach, including defining “persistence” for soliciting: twice in three months. That gives this profoundly vulnerable group of women the opportunity to have contact with the police four times a year without fear of arrest.”

Yet even those women working indoors were, Catherine said, threatened by current legal conditions, which ensured that while prostitution itself was legal, many acts commonly associated with it were not. “Working indoors, the only way to be free of the risk of prosecution is to work for yourself in complete isolation. No current legislation actually targets coercion, violence, abuse or exploitation. Two people working together fulfils the legal definition of a brothel, so the law builds in isolation at the most fundamental level. … Would we be safer working together? Yes. Is that legal? No.”

“It is vulnerability which creates victims, not sex work itself, and the law makes us vulnerable.”

This was a powerful argument, but I think the most striking contribution was from Thierry Schaffauser, who has worked in the sex industry for sex years, in Paris and London, and is an activist with the IUSW, president of the GMB sex workers branch and I am International Relations for STRASS, the French sex workers union that includes more than 300 sex workers. (He also stood for Les Verts in local elections in Paris. (And he has also written on Comment is Free.)

He said: “I am happy to be invited to speak today because most of the time political parties don’t want to hear sex workers’ voices and even less if it’s a male sex worker although male and trans workers represent easily 30% of the sex industry in London.

“…When you are convinced to know better for others what is good for them, this means oppression. The only experts on sex work are sex workers themselves.

“The portrayal of sex workers as poor victims, sex objects, commodities, slaves, drugs addicts, victims of Stockholm syndrom and post traumatic disorders. All that, is not meant to help sex workers. But to deprive us our capacity to speak for ourselves and to allow false experts to present themselves as saviours and to confiscate our voice.

“…Anti-prostitution activists say that we are not workers. They say that we don’t sell our labour but our body. This is still the same strategy to deny our agency and intelligence. But this is also to prevent solidarity with other workers and exclude us from the labour movement. We can’t separate ourselves from our body. We all have to use our body in a way or another to work.

“…My body is more than just my sex. Being penetrated doesn’t mean that I give my body. The most important organ I use when I have sex is my brain. Being paid for sex doesn’t make me an object, at least not more than when I was working for minimum wage for a boss and that my legs and my back were hurting after 40 hours a week of work.

“What makes me an object is political discourses that silence me, criminalise my sexual partners against my will, refuse me equal rights as a worker and citizen, and refuse to acknowledge my self-determination and the words I use to describe myself.”

Since I tried to make my first ever batch of preserves, at the age of 43, I’ve been musing on how much knowledge my grandmother had that she took to her grave, because I failed to learn it from it.

Sure, when I found myself with a very large pumpkin, home-grown, a feat achieved rather more by good luck than good management, I could look up a recipe for pumpkin chutney on the internet. I could look up the process for sterilising jars, then sterilising their contents, and off I went. But there are aspects of such things that are by far the best learnt from watching and working with an expert. (The onion definitely needs to be chopped small, I learnt, too late…)

And I’ve no doubt that my grandmother was an expert. She lived in a classic Australian house on a quarter-acre block, and the whole of the extensive back yard was devoted to fruits and vegetables. Well into her 70s, she tended that garden, producing an extensive range of produce that she stored and preserved in a wide variety of forms.

Not that I often ate it as a child, although there must have been great quantities of it. But I was taught to regard this lovely, homegrown, almost-zero-food-miles produce as embarassing, laughable even. “Proper” food came out of a supermarket freezer or from a can or bottle. Homegrown was a sign of embarrassing poverty and failure. (And it required skilled labour to process.)

Many other aspects of my grandmother’s life were also a cause for family embarrassment. She almost never threw anything away, and bought very little – the house was furnished with the furniture bought on marriage, and every potentially useful item – string, wrapping paper, bits of wire, were carefully arranged in drawers, available for use whenever required.

This all required thought, organisation, planning, system – things that I failed to learn from her.

Yet now, as I try to live an increasingly “green”, environmentally-friendly life, I’m forced to reinvent the knowledge that was second nature to my grandmother.

I’m trying to cut to almost zero my use of throwaway plastic containers, where it be Chinese takeaway or packaged berries, bottled soups or coffee cups. Yet I doubt my grandmother used in her life as any as I still use in a year, much as I try to cut down.

Whenever she left home, she took a packed lunch wrapped in paper, and a thermos of tea. There might have been a tin or two of soup in the cupboard for emergencies (when she was ill), but basically she cooked everything fresh, from scratch. And if berries weren’t in season on the bush outside, she went to her preserves.

I remember her telling me a story, very late in life, she was probably in her nineties by then, about a pair of scissors she was still using. As I recall the story her sister had been cutting some flowers, and had accidentally left these scissors in the newspaper in which the clippings were thrown on the compost heap. A couple of days later my grandma realised what had happened and rescued the now rusty implements. She soaked them in oil, then sandpapered off the rust, and here there were, perhaps eight decades later, still in effective use.

I was too young then, and perhaps too wrapped in consumer culture, to really grasp what I suspect she was trying to tell me, about more than a pair of scissors: get quality things, treat them with care, and make them last a lifetime.

And yet there’s also a darker, feminist moral in my grandmother’s life – she had made much of it, yet she lived as a virtual slave, her fine cooking, food-growing and preserving going to the service of a husband who treated her very poorly, who dropped his dirty clothes on the floor for her to pick up, and ordered a cooked breakfast every morning.

I certainly would never wish to be using the skills she had, should I be able to reconstruct them, for such a purpose, so as we do return, as we must, to these skills, this careful, preserving lifestyle, there’s something we’ve got to be very careful to do differently than did this early 20th-century generation: these must be skills for everyone to learn, everyone to exercise – men, women, and children too.

Was pleased to see in the Independent a very decent piece on the England women’s rugby captain, which only occasionally slips into the “gosh, girls are really playing” mode.

Catherine Spencer’s comment about not being recognised without mud in her hair takes me back to my rugby days – well my one rugby season.

I played for the really-not-very-good University of New England (Australia) team, which only made up the numbers with some “friends of players” who’d been talked into it without wanting to be there. Which meant when you got to the wings there were some players really not at all keen to tackle anyone.

I was No 8, a position for which I was way, way too slow, but we had a surplus of second rowers, which was probably where I belonged.

The mud line reminded me of my sporting fame moment when the local television stringer – who’d worked for me when I’d been news editor of the local daily paper – turned up to film a game, and was absolutely delighted to film me at the end of it, with a face as red as a desert sun, and hair that had reached the indescribable stage. (I do hope that tape has been safely confined to history, since I was also so high on adrenaline I was probably incoherent.)

Probably fortunately, I’ve forgotten the score of our biggest thrashing, when we played Newcastle Uni, which actually had Australian team members playing for them. One of them was a centre, who I recall only from the back, chasing her fruitlessly down the field…

File under nostalgia…

When I went to the launch of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet before Christmas, the London Review of Books shop in Bloomsbury was packed to the last usually-quiet corner, even though it was a foul, stormy evening. It was a curiously mixed crowd – environmental campaigners from the “respectable” (generally no dreadlocks) end of the movement, lots of civil servants with folding cycles, and a few real “suits” from the Treasury, as well as the usual large (since the crisis, enormous) collection of hopeful interns from just about everywhere.

Launching the book, Jonathan Porrit said, “This book is so subversive it won’t be allowed through the doors of Defra.” He gave a telling account of the launch of the report from the Sustainable Development Commission from which the book is a development: “No 10 in an unnamed street had gone ballistic. It was the weekend the G20 was in London to talk about kickstarting growth. It fell into a deafening media silence. It is a complex message and hard for people to get their head around.”

But, he said, there had been great public interest. The volume of downloads had been huge, and public meetings around the country had been held to discuss it. In Bath, 200 people had crowded into a small room and had two hours of intense discussion.

I’ve finally had time to read Prosperity Without Growth and while it is a sober book of economic theory, not flashy nor overtly radical in its language – it even contains a few traditional economists’ equations – I can now see why its ideas are so hard for traditional economic thinkers to stomach. And yet they are so obviously sensible.

The idea that there are ecological limits on the planet is one of the starting points – okay that even some traditional economists are starting to get a handle on, although as Jackson explains, none have developed any sort of macro-economic theory that starts to take account of the value of the natural world and the services it provides us – that flashy stuff like air to breathe, water to drink and soil to grow things in.

His use of Amartya Sen’s “capability for flourishing” (forced into polite academic notice by the writer’s Nobel Prize) is also within the range of most forward-thinking bureaucrats and academics. He quotes Sen on what this means for people’s functioning: “Are they well nourished? Are they free from avoidably morbidity? Do they live long? Can they take part in the life of the community? Can they appear in public without shame and without feeling disgraced? Can they find worthwhile jobs? Can they keep themselves warm? Can they use their school education? Can they visit friends and relations if they choose?”

So far, so in the environmental mainstream. But it is when Jackson starts to look at carbon decoupling – the idea that economic growth can continue so long as its carbon emissions (and implicitly or explicitly its other environmental impacts) are greatly reduced. Jackson makes it very, very clear that this is nonsense. (And this is where, as the Earthscan MD Jonathan Sinclair Wilson said at the launch, the Al Gores and Sir Nicholas Sterns are.)

“In a world of 9 billion people all aspiring to Western lifestyles, the carbon intensity of every dollar of output must be at least 130 times lower in 2050 than it is today. By the end of the century, economic activity will need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere, not adding to it. Never mind that no-one knows what such an economy looks like. Never mind that decoupling isn’t happening on anything like that scale. Never mind that all our institutions and incentive structures continually point in the wrong direction. That dilemma, once recognized, looks so dangerously over our future that we are desperate to believe in miracles. Technology will save us. Capitalism is good at technology. So let’s keep the show on the road and hope for the best.”

Jackson takes to task even those generally “green” economists who have suggested adopting a service-based economy looks like a way out. He stresses that they mean something much more than the few Western economies we have now that have been so labeled (which mostly means they’ve exported the manufacturing jobs and their resource usage). What about these “new” service economies? Jackson says:

“So what exactly constitutes productive economic activity in this economy? It isn’t immediately clear. Selling ‘energy services’, certainly, rather than energy supplies. Selling mobility rather than cars. Re-cycling, reusing, leasing, maybe. Yoga lessons, perhaps, hairdressing and gardening, so long as these aren’t carried out using buildings, don’t involve the latest fashion, and you don’t need a car to get to them. The humble broom would need to be preferred to the diabolical leafblower, for instance. The fundamental question is this: can you really make enough money from these activities to keep an economy growing? And the truth is we just don’t know. We have never at any point in history lived in such an economy. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t. Again, having a convincing macro-economics for such an economy would be a good starting point. But it sounds at the moment suspiciously like something the Independent on Sunday would instantly dismiss as a yurt-based economy.”

But Jackson says, there is still something here, in the valuing of jobs and activities that clearly do add to human flourishing, and that yet traditional economics dismiss as “inefficient," “unproductive.” “Their labour productivity is ‘dismal’ — in the language of the dismal science.
This is where Jackson, unusually in the book as a whole, lets his heart hang out:

“We’re getting perilously close here to the lunacy at the heart of the growth-obsessed, resource-intensive, consumer economy. Here is a sector which would provide meaningful work, offer people capabilities for flourishing, contribute positively to community and have a decent chance of being materially light. And yet it is denigrated as worthless because it’s actually employing people … it shows up the fetish with macro-economic labour productivity for what it is: a recipe for undermining work, community and environment.”

And, as he’s explained earlier, it is the hunt for and success in achieving “improved productivity” that is one of the drivers of the desperate seeking of economic growth – for without it, and with the “improved productivity,” unemployment grows. Yet of course, as Jackson points out, there is another alternative in a non-growing economy – working shorter hours. (And he quotes the sociologist Gerhard Bosch: “One of the fundamental pre-conditions for the working time policy pursued in Germany and Denmark was a stable and relatively equal earning distribution.”)

And in the economic model Jackson is working towards, he suggests restricting working hours is likely to be one of the key levers of economic management.

Another change he suggests is needed is in balance between investment and consumption. He looks at the need to balance new investments in energy efficiency and fossil-fuel replacements:
“If we invest too slowly, we run out of resources before alternatives are in place. Fuel prices soar and economies crash. If we invest too fast, there’s a risk of slowing down the economy to the extent that the resources required for further investment aren’t available… If the savings ratio is increased and more of the national income is allocated to investment, the flexibility to achieve the transition is higher.”

Which is where Jackson gets even deeper into politics:

“The ecology of investment will itself have to change. Investment in long-term infrastructures and public goods will have to be judged against different criteria. And this may mean rethinking the ownership of assets and the distribution of surpluses from them. … The public sector is often best placed to identify and protect long-term social assets. Public sector rates of return are typically lower than commercial ones, allowing longer investment horizons and less punishing requirements in terms of productivity.”

He acknowledges that traditional industries will have to continue, if on a much reduced scale, and in significantly different ways: “Manufacturing will need to pay more attention to durability and repairability. Construction must prioritize refurbishment of existing buildings and the design of new sustainable and repairable infrastructures. Agriculture will have to pay more attention to the integrity of the land and the welfare of livestock. Financial intermediation will depend less on monetary expansion and more on prudent long-term stable investment.”

He sums up the three clear principles he wants this economy to operate on:
• Positive contribution to flourishing
• Provision of decent livelihoods
• Low material and energy throughput

And his main economic levers are:
• Structural transition to service-based activities
• Investment in ecological assets,
• And, working time policy as a stabilizing mechanism.

You can see why UK bureaucrats might have filed this in the

"too-hard" file. It says: go back to the drawing board, forget everything learnt in Economics 101 and thereafter, and create an entirely new model for the economy. All previous assumptions must be re-examined. That’s a tough assignment, and as Porritt said at the launch, bureaucrats usually want to know what they can do about a report on Monday.

But while Jackson clearly doesn’t have – and doesn’t claim to have – all of the answers, he got a start here of an entirely new thinking as well as some practical suggestions. For example: if you hear someone proclaiming an innovation as great for productivity, ask questions (and if it means workers won’t spend 10 hours a day breaking rocks, great, but if it means a machine replaces a person doing a decent, proper job, ask why? then ask again).

Is it possible to write about the fall of the West Roman Empire without making it a lesson about your own day? Since at least Gibbon, that’s been the reason for covering the final centuries of Rome’s pre-eminence, and Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West is no exception.

What does make Goldsworthy’s work different is that he attempts to tell the story of the empire in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, then draw the conclusions, rather than allow the explanation to infuse through the whole text, as was the case in one book I’ve recently reviewed, where the overconsumption of energy was the theory of choice.

Goldsworth has thus produced a rather old-fashioned narrative history – emperor follows emperor, usurper knocks out usurper, and the swirl around. That has its strengths – if you want to get the latest historical thinking on, say, the “end of Roman” Britain, Goldsworthy is drawing on the latest archaeology and thinking.

He’s clearer than many in setting out the structure of late 4th-century Roman Britain, “a diocese under a vicarius based in London and responsible to the praetorian prefect. The diocese was subdivided into either four or five provinces…The Comes Britanniae commanded a force of comitatenses consisting of three infantry and six cavalry units…The Dux Britanniarum commanded units of limitanei, mostly stationed in the north and including the garrisons of some named forts on Hadrian’s Wall. Finally, there was the ‘Count of the Sexon Shore’ controlling limitanei based around the east and south coasts.”

On the vexed subject of the “Saxon invasion” (did it happen? did it involve significant numbers? were the existing populations pushed aside?) he’s sensibly agnostic, noting that the academic fashion has swung, probably too far, towards denial. He challenges recent interpretations of “mixed” Saxon and Briitish cemeteries, noting “considerable caution needs to be used before assuming that a particular object automatically denotes someone of a particular race. Brooches were both functional and valuable. ..In the end brooches and belt buckles were there to hold up clothes more than to express identity.”

This section is relatively analytical – and addresses one of those questions that history can’t help worrying at – but the careful narrative approach in other sections can get rather monotonous and repetitive.

To take just a couple of pages: In March 238 the proconsul of Africa was proclaimed emperor, in resistance to the newish Maximus , who was too preoccupied in the west to deal with an attack by Ardashir a couple of years before. The Senate in Rome rejoiced, and accepted the usurper, but within weeks the governor of the neighbouring province had defeated his son and co-emperor in battle, and Gordian hanged himself. But the Senate couldn’t go backwards, so selected two of their number, Balbinus and Pupienus, as co-emperors, and they were immediately forced to co-opt a third, Gordian’s young grandson, aged just 13. Maximus got bogged down in fighting, then his troops killed him, but they didn’t fancy the two senators either, and soon killed them too, leaving the teenager as titular head of the empire, to be married to the daughter of his Praetorian Prefect Caius Timesitheus, effective ruler. He died at age 19, either at the hands of the Persians, or his own troops after a defeat by the eastern enemy.

It might make a good board game, but it is hard to get interested in this fast-moving, if shortlived, cast of characters, about which we learn little. So while as a reference this is a handy book, it wouldn’t be the best thing to take on a long train trip when seeking an engaging read.

So what of its grand theory? Well as you might expect from a narrative historian chiefly concerned with political history, it concerns political structures. Goldsworthy argued that the marginalisation of the senatorial class in the third century meant that the possible range of emperors, or usurpers, was greatly widened, and emperors had to fear practically anyone who got some sort of influence over some troops.
(more…)

Here we are again – another week, another crop of political debates.

But let’s leave those for a while: start with some almost forgotten, frequently glossed-over history – Philip on English Buildings has been looking into the Sheela na gig at Kilpeck, Herefordshire. And yes, I might be a little biased in putting that first, since I was writing about them back in 2004, (but at least it proves I can truly wear a “veteran blogger” tag!)

Stay on architectural decoration, Ornamental Passions has been taking a close look at the frieze decorating the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, now the Odeon cinema, Covent Garden. Walking right around the building: parts one, two, three, four, five. What you get is a complete snapshot history of theatre.

And while we’re on institutions frozen in stone, here seems an appropriate place to point you towards Two Doctors questions for the Anglican church.

Flowing on (sorry!), we get to an introduction to the world of the narrowboat from Bristling Badger.

We can’t, however leave politics as in the bash and stoush stuff for too long, so let’s start with Charles Crawford’s interesting take on the Chilcot inquiry: is the inner, inner circle, dumping on Blair’s inner circle? And what should we think about that?

Staying traditionally political, Dodgblogium has a short and snappy take on the non-dom Zac Goldsmith.

Then getting down to street-level politics, Jim from The Daily (Maybe) was taking his (practical) hat (and coat) to the streets of London for The Wave, and summing up the subsequent reporting.

Staying with practical politics, Matt Sellwood looks at the issues raised by a community squat in Hackney.

And then hit the rails as Jonathan Calder on Liberal England considering one (of the many) problems with privatised train companies.

Meanwhile Kate on Cruela blogs points out the incredibly obvious problem with a police anti-rape campaign. Really, in the 21st century, blaming the victim? and Jo on A Week is a Long Time, looks at the latest abortion figures. Where is the role of men being included in this debate? she asks.

And on The F-Word, Laurie Penny says transphobic feminism makes no sense.

And on Go Litel Blog Go, Backwatersman is considered about the character of Bercow. No, not the Labour one…

Also, David Herzig guest blogs, on Is there more to life than shoes, about the Swiss minaret referendum. And Prodicus offers his graphical take on the climate change debate.

Okay, enough of the politics, back to real life: Random Acts of Reality explains ambulance life as it really, really is. Not great!

And The Magistrate takes on the blogging policeman on the issue of sentencing. This is what you call seriously lively debate.

Then, sorry, this is London, but an issue of public information: where has the London Evening Standard gone? Diamond Geezer finds there are heaps in some parts of the capital, and none in other parts.

But to finish off, let’s have some Christmas cheer – and Ruscombe Green reports that Stroud started the festive season in fine style, even if it was all a bit much for an old canal horse.

You might find in the roundup that I’m linking to places I wouldn’t usually link: that’s the rules of hosting, you take the nominations as you find them, and leave your readers to draw their own conclusions. Not always a comfortable rule, but, I think, a good one. More on the roundup.

Most cultures around the world have a Noah’s ark-style story – of a great inundation that consumes the whole planet. One rare exception is the eastern parts of the British Isles. Which is odd, because the archaeologists have recently established that just off the east coast of England there was a great lost land, an area greater than the existing UK, you might even call it a culture, which disappeared completely beneath the waves only around 6,000 years before today. One explanation for this loss might be that the repeated invasions of the east coast in the historical period disrupted regional myth cycles, in contrast to the continuity of Celtic cultures of the west coast.

But one effect of this historical disruption is clear: it makes Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland particularly fascinating and gripping – slightly odd really, when you consider that this has the dry-sounding subtitle of “Research Report No 160 Council of British Archaeology”.

You’d have, however, to be a very dry sort indeed, not to be captured by the tale of the gradual unfolding of knowledge of an entire lost world in Europe – a world that the geological surveys of oil companies and pipe-laying firms has enabled the experts to map, and the archaeologists to reconstruct. Some of the seismic data is a bit on the technical side; some of the images (and the council deserves credit for producing such a finely and voluminously illustrated as well as accessible monograph) are only for the expert to really judge, but they do bring alive this story of a lost – and possibly one day recoverable – culture.

The name Doggerland comes from the Dogger Bank, a relatively shallow area in the North Sea from which fishermen have for decades been dredging artefacts – including some finely carved tools and weapons.

Europe’s Lost World takes the unusual step for something labelled a “research report” of following the gradual unfolding of knowledge of Doggerland, starting with the work early in the 20th century of Clement Reid, who in a little book called Submerged Forests identified the potential archaeological value of buried lands: “In them the successive stages are separated and isolated instead of being mingled.”

The report then goes on to look at what is known from the land of the sites of the period – the Mesolithic, the intermediate culture that it says has traditionally been neglected between the deep mysteries of the Paleolithic and the excitement of great change into farming of the Neolithic. The authors here make a now fashionable claim that at least some of the peoples of the time were considerably less nomadic, and built grander structures, than has traditionally been thought.

They look in detail at the site of Thatcham in Berkshire, centred around a hut about 6m in diameter. (It is impossible now due to erosion to know whether this was solitary or part of the group.) “All the evidence suggested that the house had been maintained and rebuilt on several occasions by a family group, perhaps six or eight people, and that it served several generations of hunters… burnt bone fragments included wild pig, fox and, possibly, a domestic dog. Marine shellfish, particularly dog whelks, were also present on the site.”
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David Horspool’s new popular history has an interesting thesis: that the English are a rebellious lot, always champing at the bit to overthrow their rulers. It’s always good to challenge popular conceptions – by European tradition the French have the role of bloody rebels, while the English are the phlegmatic, unchanging, unchallenging lot, working slowly if not always steadily towards an agreed constitution so complex it can’t even be written down.

And in The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking, From the Normans to the Nineties, Horspool covers, as the title suggests, a lot of ground, and finds some solid support for his thesis, particularly up to the “Glorious Revolution” (or Dutch invasion, whichever you prefer). He also identifies a perhaps particularly English formulation for rebellion: “this isn’t against the king, it is to save the king from the evil councilors surrounding him”.

The idea of the English as rebellious is not itself new; as Horspool points out Thomas Paine in Common Sense calculated that since the Norman conquest there had been “(including the Revolution) no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions”. Not a new idea then, but one that keeps coming up.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, however, the text suffers from some disappointing flaws. One is that it trails rather dutifully but uninspiringly through all those medieval aristocratic squabbles, not just Simon de Montfort and Perkin Walbeck, but rather lesser known figures such as Roger Bigold and Sir John Oldcastle. For such exciting, dramatic, blood events, the writing is surprisingly flat, and the half chapter or so per rebellion formula fails to inspire.

Horspool is also very unclear about what he means by “rebellion”. A lot of the time he is talking about attempts to overthrow the regime, but sometimes he’s simply talking about standing out against the king’s will, from Thomas a Beckett to in modern times, where the thesis gets really stretched, he trails through the suffragettes and the Greenham Common protests. Certainly the participants in both these movements were rebels in the most general sense, but to group them with some medieval aristocrat setting out his stall for the crown really fails to work.

This perhaps is a book that covers around 500 years more than it should. About half-way through it, Horspool himself identifies a major change in the way the English look at revolt, with the arrival of Protestantism, and specifically the doctrine of obedience to the Crown as a religious duty. Horspool writes (in one of his livier passages):

“The theory took time to catch on. When Matthew Parker, who became Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury, went to preach, as an up-and-coming evangelical churchman, to Kett’s rebels at Mousehold Heath in 1549, it was his theme of submission for the common god which almost caused a riot. Though the rebels immediately demonstrated their evangelical credentials by being so distracted by the singing of a new English version of the Te Deum that they allowed Parker to get away, at this time the association of Protestantism and obedience was not yet commonly accepted. ..Increasingly, however, it would become a keynote of English Protestant thinking, and one widely disseminated by preaching and in treaties, pamphlets and biblical exegesis.”

If Horspool had stopped here, the book would have been a lot more coherent. Certainly after this he finds interesting events – and quite a few disproving the always rather weak claim that “the English don’t build barricades”. But had he covered the medieval period – thematically perhaps rather than chronologically, and used those conclusions to perhaps reflect on more recent events, this might have been a much better, more coherent book. What is on the page here is rather a useful handy reference to rebellions, rather than a book you really want to sit down with to read through.