Demotic Street Language - The Telegraph on the Money?

I stumbled across the following blog post, and while I rarely agree with The Telegraph's view on the world (rather to conservative/establishment-friendly for my taste), this "Telegraph blog post" makes a very interesting point/parallel:

Call me old-fashioned but should the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in the run-up to an election (or at any other time for that matter) say that people are “gagging for change”? As we all know only too well, Dave has had the advantage of one of the finest educations money can buy. Is it too much to expect that somewhere along the way he may have acquired a vocabulary that would allow him to make a trenchant political point without reaching into the demotic depths?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidhughes/100032397/demotic-dave-cameron-should-mind-his-language-and-remember-kinnock/

I like his usage of the term demotic - 100% correct but a very old fashioned formal term for Street Language.

I think politician should avoid try to be cool or expressing too much emotion, they will need to stay calm and focused under intense pressure, winning the general election is only the beginning not the finish line!

demoticadjectiveKnox picked up her demotic style of writing when she worked for a newspaper in Madison popular, vernacular, colloquial, idiomatic, vulgar, common;informal, everyday, slangy. antonym formal.

win-win: the doctor says a low carbon lifestyle can be good for you!

It is good to hear a high profile doctor (Consultant paediatrician and chair of the Advocacy Committee, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) extolling the benefits of moving to a "low carbon lifestyle".

I think if we took more time for the simple pleasures, things would be better. As the doctor points out, switching to a more balanced diet (e.g. less meat) is one fairly easy step and this could make many people healthier and happier :)

Another thing I would advocate is trying to buy more local produce, if you buy in season local veg; they taste great, are cheap and have a much lower carbon footprint!

My favourite supermarket has started doing bags of local veg in the summer which was great! Even better, when I get time to visit my local greengrocer there are some absolute bargains.

As well as Dr Tony Waterson's interesting piece on the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8533937.stm

I also found the following blog article very interesting:

http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2009/05/14/tony-waterston-on-climate-change-talks-at-the-commons/

Sir John Mortimer on Private Passions

Listening to on old recording (1995) of Sir John Mortimer on Private Passions. I was a bit stunned that this incredibly successful barrister should emphasise that the key for a defence lawyer is to get the jury to laugh.

Sir John Mortimer, barrister, playwright and creator of 'Rumpole of the Bailey', died last year. He was one of the very early guests on 'Private Passions', and this edition, recorded at his Buckinghamshire home and first broadcast in 1995, offers another chance to hear him talking about one of his greatest passions, music.

The more I think about the law and politics, the more dubious they seem. There is so much scope for powerful people to abuse charm, good looks, fashion, humour to sway political debate and the legal system.

As I get older, I fear that I am becoming more cynical, we appear to becoming increasingly short-sighted and dummying down?

However on the flip side, I think great progress has been made (especially in 60s and 70s) on civil liberties and the UK schools, prisons and policing becoming more humane. LGBT rights have made huge progress and we are making good progress in the UK (e.g. in the workplace taunting-gay men is now increasingly unacceptable - it happened all the time only 10 years ago)

Furthermore we are making great technological progress and hopefully we can use this knowledge to live in a more efficient way? However the 21st is going to present huge challenges. I hope our leaders will have the intelligence and integrity and reject the current trend for winning arguments in the short-term by skewing statistics, mockery, smart suits... yes this has always been there but I fear we are dummying-down and loosing out humanity.

humane |(h)yoōˈmān|

adjective

1 having or showing compassion or benevolence : regulations ensuring the humane treatment of animals.

• inflicting the minimum of pain : humane methods of killing.

2 formal (of a branch of learning) intended to have a civilizing or refining effect on people : the center emphasizes economics as a humane discipline.

DERIVATIVES

humanely |(h)juˈmeɪnli| adverb

humaneness |(h)juˈmeɪn(n)1s| noun

ORIGIN late Middle English : the earlier form of human , restricted to the senses above in the 18th cent.

Jeremy Clarkson: "alpha male" or "alpha tw*t"

I don't like Jeremy Clarkson and every time I hear his "toxic views" forced upon me in the name of humour, I think he is a sad and selfish macho man. Here are a few of things I find so upsetting about Mr Clarkson...

Clarkson scaled Ben Tongue in Sutherland in a new Land Rover Discovery for the BBC2 show, reportedly churning up fragile peat bogs and heather as he went.

The damage done will be lasting, according to the Mountaineering Council of Scotland, which says the stunt was irresponsible and likely to encourage similar destructive behaviour on other private estates.

"The virgin land Clarkson has chewed up will now take hundreds of years to be regenerated," said the council's president, John Mackenzie, the Earl of Cromartie.

"There's no excuse for this, no matter how good the Land Rover might have been. This sets a precedent and it is going to encourage even less disciplined individuals to act irresponsibly."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/nov/16/environment.broadcasting

His response to this criticism was totally un-apologetic - no surprise.

I think he is very toxic:

• Clarkson has long been noted for his pro-smoking viewpoint, with him even publicly smoking as much as possible on National No Smoking Day.
• On the environment, Clarkson is not sympathetic to the green agenda. He once said: "I do have a disregard for the environment. I think the world can look after itself and we should enjoy it as best as we can".
• He has little respect for groups such as Greenpeace, and believes that the "eco-mentalists" are a by-product of the "old trade unionists and CND lesbians" that hadn't gone away but merely found a new cause.
• Clarkson is not however a climate change denier, commenting on the effects of global warming - "let's just stop and think for a moment what the consequences might be. Switzerland loses its skiing resorts? The beach in Miami is washed away? North Carolina gets knocked over by a hurricane? Anything bothering you yet?"

Unfortunately I also think he is very influencial:

• Clarkson has been described as a "skilful propagandist for the motoring lobby" by The Economist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Clarkson

IQ and Politics: Childhood intelligence predicts voter turnout, voting preferences, and political involvement in adulthood: The 1970 British Cohort St

This fascinating story, obviously as an active member of the green party (who has previously voted lib dem) it is rather flattering.

Based on matching IQ data to voting patterns, at top at around 108 are the Greens and Lib Dems. Next at around 103/4 are the conservatives and labour and lastly at the both of the heap are UKIP and the BNP 98.

Monday 3 November 2008

Childhood intelligence is linked to voting preferences and political involvement in adulthood according to a recent study.

People with a higher intelligence in childhood were more likely to vote as adults, and were more likely to vote for the Green Party and Liberal Democrats in a general election, researchers have found.

The study, funded by the UK Medical Research Council, suggests that childhood general intelligence is associated with a person’s political allegiance as much as social class – which has been studied previously as a marker of British voting habits...

http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC005139

and from a The Guardian commentator:

If the results of general elections are anything to go by, voting Green or Liberal Democrat must be a thankless task. But now the supporters of these parties can console themselves with the knowledge that, although they may not elect a prime minister, there's a good chance that they are cleverer than the people who do.

Academic research published in the journal Intelligence compares the way people voted in the 2001 election with their IQ at the age of 10 (using data from the 1970 British cohort study). The results are fascinating.

On a party-by-party basis, the average (childhood) IQ scores for 2001 voters were:

Green - 108.3

Liberal Democrat - 108.2

Conservative - 103.7

Labour – 103

Plaid Cymru - 102.5

Scottish National - 102.2

UK Independence - 101.1

British National - 98.4

Did not vote/None of the above - 99.7

The research was based on a survey involving 6,000 people, so it's obviously pretty authoritative...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2008/nov/03/greenpolitics-liberaldemocrats

The scientist behind this study seem to come from very reputable institutions:

Childhood intelligence predicts voter turnout, voting preferences, and political involvement in adulthood: The 1970 British Cohort St

Ian J. Deary^a,, G. David Batty^{a, b} and Catharine R. Gale^c

^aMedical Research Council Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, UK

^bMedical Research Council Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, 4 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ, UK

^cMedical Research Council Epidemiology Resource Centre, University of Southampton, Southampton General Hospital, Southampton SO16 6YD, UK

Ian J. Deary BSc, MB, ChB, PhD (Edin), FRCPsych, FRCPE, FBA, FRSE, FMedSci Professor

G David Batty , lecturer in epidemiology. Epidemiology Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London WC1E 7HT

Dr Catherine Gale PhD

Principal Research Fellow

After studying Classics at the University of Cambridge, Catharine Gale worked in archaeological research. She then studied Population Sciences at the University of Southampton and joined the MRC Environmental Epidemiology Unit in 1994. She obtained a PhD in 1998 for a thesis on the role of antioxidant vitamins in determining risk of cerebrovascular disease and cognitive decline in elderly people.

The Brighton Pavilion election: Green vs Tories

The Tory party, have chosen a candidate who will be well received in Brighton. Charlotte is an attractive and stylish business lady, specialising in therapy over the internet:

• Explain your business to my Mum.

"An anonymous place where you can express what's on your mind, gain support and talk to others, to make your life happier."

• How do you make money?

"Providing co-branded support networks to organisations that wish to offer safe, anonymous and 24/7 facilitated support to their customers or employees; targets include corporate social responsibility programmes of corporates, charities, professional organisations etc - any organisations that offers support."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/jul/30/elevatorpitchbigwhitewallgi

There is no question that Charlotte represents the "nice-face" of the modern conservative party.

However the reality is that if elect she will be marginalised / ignored / "whipped into line", by a not-so-nice Tory party leadership. Even in Brighton she struggled to get elected as candidate despite her obvious appeal to the local electorate.

The current Tory party is more typically represented by the elitism, secret clubs and the worse excesses of extreme privilege... I'm sure Boris Johnson, George Osbourne and David Cameron were all exceptionally able academically and did very well in the cosy world of top public schools (Eton, Marlborough, ..), then excelling at Oxford in a world of privilege they perceived as their hard earned right.

I went to Oxford (89-92) and was an exact contemporary of David Hannah, who was then president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. David Hannah is now an MEP and has appeared regularly on Fox news, attacking both Obama'a health care reforms and the NHS:

Conservative US Republicans opposed to the President's healthcare plans have used the NHS as an example of “socialised” medicine...

Mr Hannan is a popular figure among grassroots Tories because of his strong right-wing views. His Telegraph.co.uk blog and his public harangue of Gordon Brown in the European Parliament earlier this year also made him a political celebrity in the US.

However, his agenda is at odds with the modernising message of Mr Cameron, who has repeatedly promised that the NHS would be the top priority of a Conservative Government.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/david-cameron/6025818/David-Cameron-backs-NHS-amid-United-States-healthcare-row.html

There is a clear demand in the Tory party for more private health care. In my mind, this can only lead to great inequality and injustice as is so clearly seen in our education system which does almost as much to divide a nation as it does to educate it.

So the nation is about to elect a new Tory government, dominated by Oxford educated, public-school boys who have a narrow view of the world.

I do find it deeply troubling that so many senior Tories (e.g. Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne) were members of the Bullingdon club:

Prospective new members are proposed by a current member and then subjected to a club vote. This is all done in secret. You can be "put up" and blackballed and never be any the wiser. The first a new bug knows about it is when his rooms are invaded (ideally, via the window) and ceremonially trashed by way of initiation ("they overturned some of my flower pots," recalls my source). The financial costs run to the outfit, which at close to £2,000 is safely beyond most student overdrafts. There have been rumours of wealthier members paying an annual stipend of up to £10,000....

Breakages, scraps and bust-ups seem to be a hazard of membership. Standard Bullingdon practice is for club members to pay off in cash any injured party (usually a bemused restaurateur with a private room full of broken china). It's this high-handed brand of yobbishness that has drawn most public opprobrium. It's not so much the damage that causes offence. It's the attitude, the innate sense that position and - more specifically - wealth will always be able to make good any inconvenience suffered by "civilians".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/may/09/oxbridgeandelitism.highereducation

By electing Caroline Lucas in Brighton we can have a local MP who will defend the rights of the poor, has campaigned for many years on the importance of the environment and sustainability. Caroline has many years experience of being an MEP and has used the European Parliament a forum to discuss important issues, win legal reforms and defend the rights of the poor.

The harsh reality is that the attractive face of Charlotte Verre doesn't reflect the true injustice, intolerance and arrogance of a Tory party, born out of the British empire and that still perceives Great Britain as a quasi-imperial power.

The greens will be fighting for a fairer world and some common sense, where we try and address our tough environmental and economic problems. We haven't forgotten the £1,500,000,000 the UK government has had to spend bailing out the banking sector, who within 12 months of holding us to ransom with threats of economic meltdown were paying themselves multi-million pound bonuses!! The new leaders of Tory party (Osborne and Cameron) instead of addressing the institutional problems in the city, are proposing a harsh new policies attacking the pay and pensions of low paid public sector workers. Apparently even senior Tories and FT editorials have said this is the wrong policy because of (a) the injustice and (b) it is unnecessary / unhelpful and could prolong the recession and lead to widespread strikes?

morality - Adam Smith and Market Triumphalism

The following is a great summary of Adam Smith and the limits/dangers of market triumphalism:

We’re living with the economic fallout of the financial crisis and we’re struggling to make sense of it. One way of understanding what’s happened is to see that we’re at the end of an era, an era of market triumphalism. The last three decades were a heady, reckless time of market mania and deregulation. We had the free market fundamentalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years and then we had the market friendly Neo-Liberalism of the Clinton and Blair years, which moderated but also consolidated the faith that markets are the primary mechanism for achieving the public good. Today that faith is in doubt. Market triumphalism has given way to a new market scepticism.

It’s also a time, or so it seems to me, to rethink the role of markets in achieving the public good. There’s now a widespread sense that markets have become detached from fundamental values, that we need to reconnect.

Greed is a vice in personal relations, but the whole point of markets is to turn this vice into an instrument of the public good. This is the moral alchemy that markets are said to perform. We learn this from Adam Smith who said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest”. “We address ourselves not to their humanity”, Smith said, “but to their self-love. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens”. This was Adam Smith.

It was my aunt and uncle who encourage me to download the Reith Lectures - they are fantastic.

If only the banker and city could acknowledge the limits of free-markets ...

Peak Oil and the UK's first green MP

For a couple of years I have been hearing about "peak oil" - mainly from environmentalists who slightly surprising often quote reports and studies from their "enemies" in the oil / petrol-chemical industries.

I used to partly believe the stereotype that the green party was largely made of "left wing eccentrics", with passionate ideas but not always the most well-balanced and happy people (tree-huggers as Jeremy Clarkson or my brother would say). To my slight surprise, over my 6 years in Brighton, I have got to know several of our green activists, attended meetings, been to a House of Commons Select Committee (on Carbon charging) and I found the greens to be intelligent, realistic and surprisingly happy and balanced in their personal lives. Like a folk musician explained recently in an interview (Dick Gaughan on Mike Harding's Radio 2 show) - "I want to create a historical record ... to leave a foot-print in the sand ... that there those who fought against what was wrong". Going on there is an understanding that it is going to be very difficult to change the "majority tabloid driven" views however it is important to stand-up and say what you believe in and to start to make the difficult changes which it is human nature to resist. History has shown collectively we have a tendency to ignore tough problems until it is too late. Hard chance is going to be forced on us all in a "post-peek oil world", the general public may not accept this yet but the environmentalist and right-wing oil industry already know this.

One of the side effects of the current labour party collapse is to make the UK's first green MP in Brighton Pavilion a real possibility, the last general election (2005) was close

Labour 15427
Green Party 9530
Liberal Democrat 7171
Conservative 10397

in local elections since 2005, the green party have done stunning well. Caroline Lucas is a very impressive candidate, clear, well-spoken and stylish. She could well now become the UK's first green MP. Caroline was on the World Tonight (Radio 4) this evening - talking sense but it was not easy listening - we are going to have get used to a world with less and less cheap fuel and increasing oil production in the short term will (a) not solve the fundamental problem of peak oil and (b) not going help with CO2 emissions ...

The New London Mayor: Boris vs Ken

Let’s dive straight in - I don't like Boris.

Why does Boris Johnson get under my skin? Why is he the sort of politician that I don't trust and have a strong aversion too?

Firstly to be fair, Boris is a very talented guy: extremely clever, hard working, an excellent speaker, youthful, enthusiastic, funny and well educated (actually these last two are more debatable).

However the are a lot of highly talented people in London and let’s get to some of negative images / ideas I have about Boris:

1) His politics

On numerous occasions I have heard Boris speak (mostly on radio4) and he says things which make me want to shout and scream at my radio ;-) A few ‘which really stick in mind’ are his attacks on the smoking ban, congestion charging and the Kyoto accord. The first two are in my view are excellent policies making city living cleaner, safer and greener. Over the years Boris has tuned down his opposition to these broadly popular policies. To be kind, Boris does like to play the devils advocate sometimes on these debating programs. However he has shown his true colours – an upper class fool who has little idea about inner-city and/or metropolitan life for the less affluent?

2) An old fashioned racist?

Some very disturbing headlines:

"How can the Conservative party seek to gain credibility among black people while referring to them, as Boris Johnson has done, as 'picaninnies', and Africans as having 'watermelon smiles'?”

“Boris Johnson apologised again over race issues today after he was accused of condoning an article that claimed black people have a lower IQ.”

3) Attack on Liverpool

What more I can add …

Boris Johnson has been ordered to visit Liverpool to apologise in person for his magazine article that criticised the city's grief over Ken Bigley.

The Tory MP wrote in an editorial in The Spectator that the city was wallowing in "disproportionate" grief for Mr Bigley, who was killed in Iraq.

4) Private life

In France affairs are tolerated and private life is kept private. However here in the UK, we splash sensational stories and pictures from people private lives and past misdemeanours, all over the press. I’m uncomfortable with this practice but on the other hand French politicians are notoriously corrupt and have it too easy. Clearly there is a difficult balancing act here. However I am not convinced that Boris is a decent man?

So what about Ken?

Quite simply: a good guy with good ideas for London. A very decent man …

There is one area I would like to discuss, I think Ken gets a lot of unfair press: there are a lot of conservatives who will say anything to mock him. One case of this was Ken’s comments about the paparazzi and the practice of door-stepping being like “nazi concentration camp guards”. OK nazi is a taboo word and as a seasoned politician Ken should have known not to used it (although the right-wing press who have hounded Ken on this comment also hate ‘political correctness’ – now that’s duplicity!). But basically, Ken is right, the paparazzi behave like scum.

Anyway now the votes are nearly all cast and I’m a little sad as the polls suggest that Ken will lose…

NB Tragically in the mid 90s, about year before Diana death I started predicting that the daily press houndine and car-chases around London would lead to a tragic accident. Everyday I would see the press pictures and I knew what was going on was deeply wrong and it made me sad, angry, frustrated that it was so obviously wrong and dangerous but no one was able to stop the press witch hunt - until it would be too late …

NB2 Under French privacy law, not only does this protect immoral politicians but if Diana had been French and lived in France, it could have stopped the press harassment?