“The noises of destruction, flying all around…”

Over the past three days, two different types of rioting has been going on. The first, and far more serious, looting has been the smashing, looting and burning of scores of businesses across London. The second type is people pilfering these events and projecting onto them their own particular prejudices and causes. This has happened on both left and right, but particularly the left.

What these riots have done is show just how authoritarian the instincts of some of the British public can be. This is not just from the “usual suspects”: even supposedly bleeding-heart Liberal Democrats like Simon Hughes and Evan Harris have advocated the use of water cannon and sending in the army respectively. We’ve even had a contribution from Roger Helmer, everyone’s favourite Tory MEP. When he’s not arguing that homophobia doesn’t exist, or that women are responsible for their own rape, he’s tweeting this:

http://twitter.com/#!/RogerHelmerMEP/status/100813764512845824

Because, of course, the only proper response to mindless violence is more mindless violence.

None of these options seems particularly wise. I’ve written before about why using water cannon would be a dangerous and bad move, whilst David Allen Green has a good post on why the army should not be called in: they do not have the relevant training, and it didn’t exactly work out in Northern Ireland (Bloody Sunday, anyone?). The solution now seems to be that we’ll arm police with plastic bullets. They are “non-fatal”, apparently, but using them just doesn’t seem sensible. One stray bullet and we’ll have riots for another week at least.

We also have a large section of the left which seems perfectly happy to drop any notion of personal responsibility and go instead for political points-scoring and anti-cuts rhetoric. Ken Livingstone has been one of the more egregious examples of this, especially on Newsnight yesterday.

Much of the response has blamed these riots on cuts or poverty. These explanations don’t quite stack up with the available evidence. The Guardian has reported that many of these rioters are organising on Blackberrys. Rioters who can afford Blackberrys doesn’t sound like the urban poor rising up to me. Not in a country where people are starting to turn of fridges because they cannot afford the electricity.

Also, the cuts haven’t happened yet, so it’s not as if these protests were about service provision specifically. There’s been a lot of looting but nothing about Sure Start, Youth Centres or Citizens Advice Bureaus.

From the reports that have been coming in, it seems that there are three kinds of people participating in the riots, so it’s slightly more complicated than is suggested at first sight.

The first, and by far the smallest, group are the only ones to whom you could ascribe any “political” motivation. It includes people like this:

[H]ere’s a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

The TV reporter from Britain’s ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard,  more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

Concerns over police tactics, for instance, was an issue even before Mark Duggan was shot in what is becoming ever-muddier circumstances. It may perhaps have started over that, but what has followed has shown that, at root, most of these rioters aren’t “political”.

Others will argue otherwise. Adam Ramsay for instance wrote that these riots were political because “every act is a political act”.

I disagree. If everything is political, then nothing is political. The aims of the majority of rioters were not political.

Compare this violence to the rioting that started during the student fees protest in November. Then, the smashing up of Millbank and only contained to that one building. Which was at least relevant on a fees protest, as it was the  Conservative Party HQ, even if the violence itself was unjustified.

Contrast this to the rioting that has happened over the past few days. It’s not establishment buildings that have been targeted, but businesses. Even small family businesses, such as House of Reeves in Croydon. The shop was owned by the same family for five generations, survived two world wars, but did not survive a gang of out-of-control youngsters.

This brings us to the second group of rioters: violent thugs. I don’t know if “mindless” is the right word. How do you describe people who will help an injured, dazed teenager to his feet and then steal from his bag?

If “mindless” is not the word, perhaps “endemic” is. Evil maybe.

What seems to be happening is that violence that is generally confined to a few no-go areas around the city has spilled out across London and elsewhere. Probably because people can – the police are in many cases not able to stop them, and this only gives them motivation to continue.

The third, and final category, is people who want free stuff. I hope you’ve all seen by now the pictures of people who’ve been looting for, er, Tesco Value Basmati Rice, or tweeting about how they won’t get caught for stealing tracksuits, because they’re pathetically amusing. Some people seem to have used the opportunity to go and do a spot of opportunistic stealing. As was said yesterday by a friend, “Young people in the Arab Spring fought for freedom, democracy and the right to self determination. Our young people loot and destroy for Ipads and Blackberrys.”

So the roots of the riots were not political. Some of the responses are not political either. I have been greatly heartened by, and do not want to politicise, the amount of people who went out with brooms to reclaim their city:

or who served tea to police on riot shields:

This was not political; this was people just being nice and caring for others.

Part of the response, however, has to be political. Riots do not happen in a vacuum. There are obviously myriad social problems to address, and countless ways in which they can be tackled.

The best left-wing soundbite on crime remains Tony Blair’s “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”. We can focus on the causes of crime soon enough in the months and years ahead. For now, let’s concentrate on ridding the cities of rioters and cleaning up the mess they’ve left. Only then can we focus on how to rebuild them.

The Murdochs at the Select Committee: what you missed

Committee member: What is your name?

James Murdoch: That’s a very good question, and I intend to answer it in full. I’m afraid I don’t have the full answer to hand at the moment. You must remember that my name is one of a many number of names that I have to remember at any given time. I was given my name soon after my birth in December 1972, but I have no direct knowledge of what name may or may not have been given to myself. News International have set up an internal investigation to ascertain exactly what the name on my birth certificate was, and I am afraid that I am unable to give a fuller answer to that question until that investigation has reported back to me.

Member: What is your favourite colour?

James Murdoch: I do not have any direct knowledge of what colours I prefer to others. I may have given the Committee the impression that I preferred blue to green, but that was a statement given without full knowledge of the facts. When I gave that answer I was relying on assurances given to me by a police investigation, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to comment more at this stage.

Member: What is your quest?

James Murdoch: I have no direct knowledge of that. There is no evidence that I, or anyone else at News International, knew anything about the nature of the quest. We are presently fully engaged with the police to find out exactly what our quest is, and will of course fully co-operate with them in their enquiries to find out this information.

Member: Thank you James Murdoch. You may pass. If I may, I’d like to talk to your father. What is your name?

Rupert Murdoch: I’d just like to say that this is the most humble day of my life.

Member: Thank you for that, sir. Now would you please answer the question?

Rupert Murdoch: (Pause) What?

Member: What is your name?

Rupert Murdoch: (thumps table) I wasn’t told that information by my senior colleagues at News Corp!

Member: What is your favourite colour?

Rupert Murdoch: How was I supposed to know? Thinking about colours only takes up 1% of my time. I had no idea such categorising of colours was going on. I wasn’t told anything about any colours.

Member:  What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Rupert Murdoch: That’s the first I’ve heard of swallows. I wasn’t told anything about the velocity of swallows at the time. Now, of course, I know all about the velocity of unladen swallows. We are co-operating with the police on this matter and any swallows found to have committed any serious crime should face the full force of the law.

Member: I’m afraid that’s the wrong answer.

*trapdoor opens, Rupert Murdoch falls off bridge, only to have his fall broken by a pie-wielding idiot from a prominent group of pie-wielding idiots*

Guest post by God: His resignation statement over phone hacking

God called a Press Conference in Heaven today, in which he resigned over his role in the phone hacking scandal. Paperback Rioter reproduces the full text of the statement below. You can read more from God here.

It is with deep regret and a heavy heart that I resign from my position as God and Supreme Being over life on Earth.

I am very proud of my achievements in my role, which I have held for about 5000 years (but who’s counting?). I created the universe. Saw it through some tough times (like the Bodyline controversy). There are many things I will look back proudly on.

However, I must accept responsibility for the phone hacking scandal that happened on my watch.

I can honestly say, though, that I had no idea of the scale of the phone hacking that was going on at News International.

I know I am meant to be an omnipotent being, all-seeing and all-knowing, and therefore it is right to ask me why I had no knowledge of the scale of the abuses at the News of the World and other newspapers. The fact is that the Metropolitan police conducted an investigation and concluded that the phone hacking was merely the work of one rogue reporter. There was no reason for me to disregard their professional opinion.

What I find particularly distressing is the link between myself and Andy Coulson. People keep saying that I should have done more to warn David Cameron about appointing Andy Coulson as his Director of Communications.

Yet I am not sure what more I was supposed to do. I sent three wise men to warn him of the dangers of hiring Coulson. Nick Clegg, Alan Rusbridger and Paddy Ashdown.

All of whom were sent by Me to warn Cameron. But he took no heed of My warnings. I accept My responsibility, but it seems that Cameron does not accept his.

Nevertheless, I must accept my role in this affair and must therefore reluctantly resign. I do not wish to comment on the rumours that a News International paper hacked into my voicemail.

Hackgate: When Life Imitates Yes, Minister

Events are unfolding too quickly for them to be written about. At the moment all I can think to do is to post this from Yes, Minister. It’s from The Whiskey Priest. If you don’t have it on DVD I’m sure you can find some dark corner of the internet where you can watch it:

Bernard Woolley: So what do we believe in?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: At this moment, Bernard, we believe in stopping the minister from informing the Prime Minister.
Bernard Woolley: But why?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Because once the Prime Minister knows, there will have to be an enquiry, like Watergate. The investigation of a trivial break-in led to one ghastly revelation after another and finally the downfall of a President. The golden rule is: Don’t lift lids off cans of worms. Everything is connected to everything else. Who said that?
Bernard Woolley: The Cabinet Secretary?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Nearly right. Actually, it was Lenin.

So let me get this straight…

The police are investigating both the police who were investigating the journalists and those journalists themselves. And those journalists were bribing police officers and hacking phones. The police, or the journalists, or neither, covered up the bribes and the phone hacking. And it now turns out that the journalists were hacking the phones of the police officers who were investigating them in the first place. As well as apparently hacking the phones of 9/11 victims, Gordon Brown and the Queen. And this somehow also involves David Cameron because he appointed one of the chief hackers his head of communications and is good friends with another one of them.

Hell, if that makes sense, I don’t want to BE sober. *brain melts, reaches for absinthe*

The power of cricket

I have never understood those who belittle the importance of sport. Often these people tend to be irritable lefties who write about how football is the opiate of the masses, and a distraction from more important issues. This piece from Laurie Penny is a quintessential example of that genre. If that doesn’t make you sufficiently annoyed, there’s another similar piece, also from the New Statesman, here.

Anybody who doubts the power of sport, and specifically cricket, to do good, or who thinks that somehow sport and politics can be kept apart, should probably read Beyond a Boundary for starters. The core of the book is about Learie Constantine, the great West Indian cricketer, and about how he “revolted against the revolting contrast between his first-class status as a cricketer and his third-class status as a man”. In a similar vein, although I haven’t seen the film, you could probably do a lot worse than watch Fire in Babylon.

Alternatively, a good place to start would be Kumar Sangakkara’s Cowdrey Lecture, which he gave at the MCC yesterday. You should listen to it if you have a passing interest in any of the following:

• Cricket
• Politics
• Terrorism
• Class
• National Identity

And not necessarily in that order.

Sangakkara is one of Sri Lanka’s greatest ever cricketers, and the first Sri Lankan to be invited to give the Colin Cowdrey Memorial Lecture, which began in 2001. As a Sri Lankan he is well-placed to talk about the role of politics in sport. After all, as Sangakkara says in his speech (p. 13) no Sri Lankan team can take the field without the approval of the Sports Minister. Which sounds incredible doesn’t it – imagine if Jeremy Hunt had the final say in England’s team selection, rather than Fabio Cappello. Yet this shows the enormous power cricket has had to unify Sri Lankans behind a common cause.

It is this power that I want to touch upon in this blog. Sangakkara spoke very courageously against the “partisan crones” running Sri Lankan cricket, and has generated both headlines here and enemies back home. He also spoke movingly about the history of Sri Lanka, about their struggle with civil war, and of how the Sri Lankan team bus was attacked by terrorists when touring in Pakistan. However, these are all topics that shall be left for another day, for this blog is about the power of sport. Sangakkara said that during the 1980s the Sri Lankan government was fighting the terrorist LTTE. “Each and every Sri Lankan was touched by the brutality of that conflict.” Many thousands died. Parents travelled separately so that if one of them died, the other could look after the children. He goes on: (p. 6)

People were disillusioned with politics and power and war. They were fearful of an uncertain future. The cycle of violence seemed unending. Sri Lanka became famous for its war and conflict.

It was a bleak time where we as a nation looked for inspiration – a miracle that would lift the pallid gloom and show us what we as a country were capable of if united as one, a beacon of hope to illuminate the potential of our peoples.

That inspiration was to come in 1996 [with Sri Lanka’s win in the Cricket World Cup of that year].

Sri Lanka’s captain was Arjuna Ranatunga, who battled the elitism that had existed in Sri Lankan cricket. Before getting Test status in 1981, Sri Lankan’s cricketers hailed mainly from the elite schools that had been funded originally by British colonisers. Sangakkara notes that before 1981 80% of Sri Lankan cricketers came from these privileged English schools, but the 1996 World Cup-winning side contained not a single player from one of these schools. The victory in that competition opened up cricket to the masses even more so that had happened previously. These players played cricket the Sri Lankan way:

We were no longer timid or soft or minnows. We had played and beaten the best in the world. We had done that without pretence or shame in a manner that highlighted and celebrated our national values, our collective cultures and habits. It was a brand of cricket we were proud to call our own, a style with local spirit and flair embodying all that was good in our heritage.

Most importantly of all (and this is a long quote): (p. 9)

The 1996 World Cup gave all Sri Lankans a commonality, one point of collective joy and ambition that gave a divided society true national identity and was to be the panacea that healed all social evils and would stand the country in good stead through terrible natural disasters and a tragic civil war.

The 1996 World Cup win inspired people to look at their country differently. The sport overwhelmed terrorism and political strife; it provided something that everyone held dear to their hearts and helped normal people get through their lives.

The team also became a microcosm of how Sri Lankan society should be with players from different backgrounds, ethnicities and religions sharing their common joy, their passion and love for each other and their motherland.

It is the passion of ordinary Sri Lankans, as well as the knowledge that cricket has the unique power to unite a society divided by civil war, that Sangakkara has in his mind every time he walks out to bat when wearing his distinctive helmet. It’s a fantastic story, of triumph over civil war as well as race and class divisions. What’s more, (p. 16)

[T]he conduct and performance of the team will have even greater importance as we enter a crucial period of reconciliation and recovery, an exciting period where all Sri Lankans aspire to peace and unity. It is also an exciting period for cricket where the re-integration of isolated communities in the north and east opens up new talent pools.

The spirit of cricket can and should remain and guiding force for good within society, providing entertain and fun, but also a shining example to all of how we all should approach our lives.

Hopefully it shall be a story with a happy ending.

Could Laurie Penny really look Kumar Sangakkara in the eye and say that “Mistrust of team sports as a fulcrum of social organisation comes naturally to me”? I hope not.

Better dead than Red Ed

John Lennon once infamously said of Ringo Starr that he wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles. In a similar vein, you could probably say of Ed Miliband that he wasn’t even the best Labour leader in his own family. His decision not to support the strike that is happening today is a reflection of that.

750,000 public sector workers are striking today. Their rationale is rather simple. It is claimed repeatedly by David Cameron that public sector pensions must be reformed because the present system is “unaffordable”. In actual fact the amount we will be paying less for public sector pensions, as a percentage of GDP, will decrease even without any reforms.

These pensions are not gold-plated. The recent Hutton Report on pensions (the above graph is from p. 23 of that report) had this to say:

The Commission firmly rejected the claim that current public service pensions are ‘gold plated.’ The average pension paid to pensioner members is around £7,800 per year, while the median payment is around £5,600.

In the civil service pension scheme, for instance, most workers receive a pension of less than £6000 per year.

(from False Economy)

It’s hard to disagree with Dave Prentis when he describes these pension pots as “a cushion against poverty in retirement”.

What the pension reforms effectively mean is that employees will contribute more for their pension and receive less out. That, as False Economy argues in the blog I linked to above, is essentially a pay cut. Or, as another blogger puts it, as a tax to pay off the deficit.

It’s true that these pensions are better than those received by the vast majority of private sector workers. Apart from, obviously the very rich. As the TUC briefing makes clear (p. 3):

In 2007/8 tax relief cost £37.6 billion – almost ten times the net cost of unfunded public sector pensions. This tax relief is heavily skewed towards the well off. 60 per cent goes to higher rate tax payers and a quarter of tax relief — nearly £10 billion a year – goes to the one per cent of the population who earn more than £150,000.

None of this seems like an argument to further hit public sector workers, who are already facing a pay freeze for two years in times of high inflation and what could amount for some to a 10% cut in pay.

So it’s easy to see why some public sector workers have decided to take the most extreme action possible to try and protect their already-eroding living standards.

And what was Ed Miliband’s response?

The Labour Party I lead will always be the party of the parent trying to get their children to school, the mother and father who know the value of a day’s education.

On behalf of those people I urge unions and ministers to get back around the negotiating table and sort this out…

The public deserve better. All sides need to get round the table and back to negotiations.

And he tweeted today:

http://twitter.com/#!/Ed_Miliband/status/86377287989207040

For a start, it’s only a one-day strike. It’s not like the teachers have padlocked the school gates, starting singing The Internationale and taken to the streets until the government falls. If closing schools for one day affects children’s education so adversely, why was the decision taken to close schools for the royal wedding? Or close scores of them so that they could be used as polling stations on May 5th? To criticize a one-day strike because it’s hugely detrimental to children’s education seems disingenuous, to say the least.

I know that’s what many of the small socialist groups giving out leaflets on the march today, as well as people like Laurie Penny, want them to do.
But this strike isn’t about a revolution. It’s ordinary working people who have taken a democratic decision to strike in order to defend their pension. It certainly isn’t the start of an insurrection.

You can extend it to a march of people who wish to reverse the government’s economic policy. In which case, what about the parents who work at courtrooms that may be closed, who rely on Sure Start centres that may be cut, the parents that work at businesses like Thorntons and Habitat who are now feeling the pinch of the current economic climate? How is Labour going to stand up for them?

Ed Miliband’s decision not to support the strike doesn’t even make sense from a political point of view. I can only assume he’s done it because he doesn’t want to be seen as “Red Ed”, in thrall to the unions, but this seems to be mistaken. A majority of people have consistently said they are in favour of workers striking to protect terms and conditions. So Ed has ignored polls, alienated the unions who fund Labour, disappointed a lot of members and Labour’s core supporters, all for what? To stop a few bad headlines in the Daily Mail. There’s only one response for that:

And don’t even get me started on this God-awful performance.

I do think that Ed Miliband’s words say something about the existential crisis that Labour is in at the moment.

It’s becoming very difficult to answer the question of who exactly Labour is for, and what its core values are. There are those that Owen Jones calls the Blairite ultras, and Con Home calls the thoughtful leftwingers, who are essentially Blairites and believe Labour should support the cuts in their entirety. On the other extreme, there are some members of the no-cuts brigade, with every shade in between. All have different opinions on why Labour lost 4 million votes between 1997 and 2010, and all have different opinions on how Labour best wins them back.

At the moment it feels like he’s trying to please all sections of the party whilst appeasing the right-wing tabloids, and ending up pleasing nobody.

This blog will have much more to say about the direction of Labour. At the moment though, I get the feeling that this incident will have done Ed Miliband more harm than good.

Paperback Rioter’s exclusive interview with just about everybody who has something to say about Johann Hari

Paperback Rioter has had a quiet few weeks. Today, I can finally reveal what has been happening in that time. I’ve been travelling the country interviewing journalists, bloggers and activists for this post on the Johann Hari plagiarism scandal.

First I met with the writer of Deterritorial Suppport Group, who were the first to expose Hari’s idiosyncratic interview technique a few weeks ago. They compared Hari’s interview with Italian communist Toni Negri with a book written by Anne Dufourmentelle called “Negri on Negri”.

DSG found that Hari had copied and pasted quotes from Dufourmentelle’s book and inserted them into his own interview with Negri, complete with atmospheric descriptions of the interview.

For instance, here’s Johann Hari on the subject of memory:

And here’s Dufourmentelle on the same subject, pp. 100-101:

Johann on crime:

Whilst here’s the Dufourmentelle book on crime, p. 25

I met with the writer of the piece in a Brighton pub. Over a pint of the local bitter, I asked what the significance of this was. After taking a sip of their beer, he replied:

It’s rather ironic that an article whose main premise is that Negri negates a “truthful memory”, essentially attempting to fabricate history to fit his own political agenda, seems to be based upon an encounter in the ICA which is almost entirely fabricated.

Is it really that serious? After all, Hari is quoting Negri accurately. He’s not being misquoted here, is he?

My interviewee sighs.

To take Negri’s answers to entirely different questions, and recontextualise them around Hari’s agenda, which involves the sustenance of the very systems of power that falsely accused and imprisoned Negri for decades of his life as a political prisoner in Italy, seems especially disingenuous.

DSG’s post was picked up upon by journalist Brian Whelan. He also found that Hari had been copying and pasting quotes, in an interview with Gideon Levy.

I met up with Brian to discuss his findings, which were the catalyst for the story gaining greater traction. I asked him what exactly Johann Hari seemed to be doing with his interview.

He appears to be passing off copy-pasted text from Levy’s writings in Haaretz and interviews with other hacks as an exclusive interview. Also, Hari seems to be freely creating mash-up quotes out of disparate statements levy has made over the years. This is definitely not the practice of an award winning hack.

After pausing to drink his coffee, Whelan fixes me with a stare. “If the Indy really did send him to Scotland for these quotes I think Hari’s editor needs to sit him down for a chat.”

I met with Johann in an Islington coffee shop to discuss these accusations. He was very honest about what he had been doing in his articles. Sipping a latte, Hari explains that

Occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that, say, Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview.

Surely this is dishonest? You can’t just copy and paste from another reporter’s interview, and pretend you got those quotes, can you?

Since my interviews are intellectual portraits that I hope explain how a person thinks, it seemed the most thorough way of doing it.

That’s not an interview, is it, because it’s not an accurate portrayal of what was said? Here Hari became quite animated.

After doing what must be over fifty interviews, none of my interviewees have ever said they had been misquoted, even when they feel I’ve been very harsh on them in other ways.

I’m a bit bemused to find one blogger considers this “plagiarism”. Who’s being plagiarized? Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own – whereas I’m always making it clear that (say) Gideon Levy’s thought is Gideon Levy’s thought.

These are comments echoed by Guardian Science writer Ben Goldacre, who said to me in a telephone conversation that “it’s not plagiarism, but it was a bit unstylish”.

However, very few mainstream journalists seem to share the view that what Hari did was acceptable. I spoke to New Statesman journalist Guy Walters, who has also written about Hari’s lifting of quotations, at the magazine’s offices in Old Marylebone Road and asked for his views.

This is straightforward dishonest reporting. Hugo Chavez never said those words to Mr Hari. He said them to Mr Anderson. And Lally Weymouth.

Now that Johann Hari has apologised, does he think the story will end there? He shakes his head, ruefully. “This one, like phone hacking, is going to run and run.”

I put Hari’s remarks to Esther Addley, a senior news writer at the Guardian, at the paper’s offices in Kings Place. In an outraged tone, she said,

I’m astonished by that response. It’s dishonest, pure and simple. I know of no journalist I respect who considers this ‘normal practice’. I consider it indefensible.

Another blogger I spoke to, at Fleet Street Blues, said that the remarks said much about Hari’s interviewing technique.

The main art of being an interviewer is to be skilled at eliciting the right quotes from your subject. If Johann Hari wants to write ‘intellectual portraits’, he should go and write fiction. Do his editors really know that the copy they’re printing is essentially made up?

Hari also said to me that one of the main reasons he used quotes from another source was to tidy up what a writer was said.

If somebody interviewed me and asked my views of Martin Amis, instead of quoting me as saying “Um, I think, you know, he got the figures for, uh, how many Muslims there are in Europe upside down”, they could quote instead what I’d written more cogently about him a month before, as a more accurate representation of my thoughts.

This defence cut no ice with Jamie Smith, a journalism blogger and Wannabe Hack:

Other journos have said they tidy up quotes from interviews. Yep, that’s standard practice. But it’s totally different to what Hari has done in his columns. He’s falsified situations, painted a picture in the reader’s mind of an occurrence that never happened.

It seems that Hari’s editor, Simon Kelner, does not share these criticisms. Speaking to him at the newspaper’s office in London, he said that

Johann had suffered enough with the vilification he’s had on Twitter. He wouldn’t face any disciplinary action, apart from being spoken to at great length.

Paperback Rioter will have more on Hari-gate as the story unfolds.

CLARIFICATION

It has been alleged that the interviews I claim took place never actually happened. Some bloggers have suggested that I’ve completely made up meeting the people I claim to have interviewed in this piece. So just to clarify: what I have done is quoted their words as they expressed them in writing, rather than how they expressed it in my non-existent interview with them.

Below is a list of places that I have quoted from. If you think there’s a better way to interview people than simply copy and paste different bits of what they’ve said and pretend they said those things to you, please let me know in the comments.

https://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/hari-karihackery/

http://brianwhelan.net/post/6972324037/is-johann-hari-a-copy-pasting-churnalist

http://brianwhelan.net/post/7039951732/time-to-come-clean-johann-hari

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/06/chavez-hari-interview-goodbye

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100094268/busted-johann-hari-is-guilty-of-shoddy-journalism/

http://fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/2011/06/independent-columnist-johann-hari.html

http://johannhari.com/2011/06/29/my-response-to-yesterdays-allegations

http://johannhari.com/2011/06/27/interview-etiquette

http://wannabehacks.co.uk/freelancer/2011/06/29/jamie-smith-hari-plagiarising-row-misses-the-point

http://twitter.com/#!/bengoldacre/status/85696763125694464

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/29/johann-hari-row-political-says-simon-kelner

AC Grayling is proof that you can be very clever and very stupid at the same time

At first, I wasn’t sure if there was any point to adding to the deluge of blog posts about AC Grayling’s plan for a new “elite” university. Enough pixels have been wasted on The New College of the Humanities than is surely merited. However, it cannot do any harm to give this nauseatingly awful idea as good a kicking as possible, just to make it never gets off the ground.

The NCHUM looks like a scheme destined to end in tears. It can’t award degrees, nor call itself a “university college”, which is how the NCHUM styled itself when it launched last week, nor even conduct any research. It’ll only take about 350 students. Two of its “star turns” are only going to give one lecture a year, which is far removed from the NCHUM’s claim that the 14 star turns “will contribute personally to your educational experience”. It’s also not clear how this scheme will break even. Apparently £10m has been raised, and the college hopes to break even by its third year of running. The NCHUM is financed by venture capitalists. They, surely, are going to want some return for their cash aren’t they?

I’m not really sure what AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson and the rest hope to achieve with this college. I suspect that it’s probably the ability to earn a bit of cash, though Grayling has, it seems, higher motives. This is what he wrote in an e-mail to the President of Birkbeck’s Student Union:

A civilized society ought to pay out of the communal purse for the highest quality education for everyone, from the earliest schooling to high education. I hold that view, as I take it you do. But our society has chosen to pay for things other than the humanities and social sciences in higher education; it has turned over to universities the task of funding those subjects, and yet has done it in an unsustainable way because the true cost of educating to a very high standard is much greater than the fees universities will now charge…

You can have two reactions to the fact that the Coalition government (in fact: any of the three main parties) will neither fund universities adequately out of general taxation, nor allow universities to charge the true economic cost: you can protest in the hope of getting them to reverse their policy, or you can accept the profound unlikelihood of the latter, and seek another way of keeping high quality humanities education going over the long term.

 

He seems to have decided that “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. It’s a good job Grayling didn’t take this approach to civil liberties. Instead of defending our liberties, he’d be on Newsnight demanding that terror suspects be jailed for two years without charge, rather than writing article after article criticising Labour’s assault on liberties.

If we accept Grayling’s good intentions at his word, then he’s being incredibly foolhardy. I don’t recall him ever criticising any government for cutting university funding, or introducing tuition fees. The only article I can find on universities for the Guardian is this one, where he attacks Peter Mandelson for suggesting that universities should provide more contact hours. In that, he argues that students should be essentially left to their own devices: despite that, the NCHUM boasts of a staff-student ratio of 1:10 and that it would give “personal attention” to students.

Dominic Lawson has written one of the better articles on this scheme. In it, he says:

One academic blogger [has labelled] this as a place for “Tim nice but dims whose parents are prepared to spend a fortune having them fall asleep listening to lectures by AC Grayling”.

Yet what harm does this do? If parents wish to spend their money in this way, why shouldn’t they?

Sarah Churchwell wrote something similar, in response to Terry Eagleton’s wonderful polemic, in which she basically argued that we should give this a chance.

I disagree. We shouldn’t “give this a chance” or let rich parents buy university education for £18,000 a year just because they can. That’s because the NCHUM seems to be part of the commodification of higher education. As university fees keep going up and up, students will surely see a good degree as their “right” – something they have “bought” – as opposed to something to be earned.

This has certainly happened in the United States, and has been increasing in Britain since the tripling of university fees (albeit going by anecdotal evidence). I know of talented doctoral students who are going to drop out of academia because they are tired – already – of teaching students who see a good degree as something they have bought, like a pair of jeans or trendy new sportscar. Some lecturers are now reluctant to go to graduation ceremonies – usually the high point of the university calendar – lest they get accosted by parents who are unhappy that their child has not received their 2.1 that they “paid for”. The simple fact is that a university education should be gotten on the basis of academic ability, not the ability to pay £54,000, as would be the case for the vast majority of students at the NCHUM.

Although Grayling wishes the NCHUM to follow the American model, that’s not what it’s doing. It took – of all people – the head of a privately-run university in Britain to point it out. From the Dominic Lawson article:

Buckingham’s ferociously libertarian principal told me that Grayling’s new college “is just a bunch of opportunists trying to make some money. They are not giving up their day jobs in the academic state sector. These left-wing intellectuals will just be making easy extra money, funded by venture capitalists”. But weren’t Professor Grayling and his band of “left-wing intellectuals” just doing what Kealey had long urged – to emulate the American system? Not a bit of it, said Kealey: “The great US humanities colleges are entirely charitable foundations, not profit-making bodies. Grayling’s lot are just going to be working to make a return for the venture capitalists backing them — and taking a slice of the equity themselves.”

Grayling says that he wants to improve university standards. Yet this is not the way to go about it. This is as likely to raise standards in universities as Oz Clarke selling bottles of WKD to upper-class schoolboys at £18,000 each is likely to stop binge drinking.

Chris Huhne has got a terrible lion up his end

Chris Huhne briefing lobby journalists

Chris Huhne is right in it, if reports in the Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday are to be believed. This is from the Staggers blog on the New Statesman:

Following last week’s story that Huhne asked an associate to accept penalty points he incurred for a speeding offence in 2003, the papers have followed up with the fresh claim that Huhne recently called the person involved to warn them not to talk to the media about it.

In what the MoS grandly dubs a “conspiracy of silence”, Huhne is said to have told the person: “The story they are trying to stand up is that ‘Cabinet Minister persuaded XXX to take points’. The only way they can stand that up is by getting you to talk to them. There is simply no other person who could possibly tell them whether it is true or not.”

The rest of the blog is rather interesting stuff. There’s also a section in which Chris Huhne gives advice to the other party on what to do if they are contacted by journalists:

If called by journalists, Huhne says, you should “Just say, oooh, terribly bad line, terribly sorry, bad reception, I’ll talk to you later — and hang up”.

An excellent idea, and a completely original one, too.

As luck would have it, Paperback Rioter has received a transcript of a secret phone call made from a Sunday Times journalist to Chris Huhne. I have posted the audio onto Youtube here, and below, for the first time, is the full transcript, exclusively on Paperback Rioter:

*Phone is ringing. Chris Huhne answers*

Chris Huhne: Chris Huhne speaking.

Sunday Times Journalist: Hello Chris. I’m just calling about the story that you asked an associate to accept penalty points which you incurred for a speeding offence…

Huhne: No I’m afraid the line’s very clllkkkkkk ppppprrrrrr…

Journalist: Chris Huhne? Chris Huhne, hello?

Huhne: *Scrunches bits of newspaper by the telephone. Then bashes phone on table four times* Schnell schnell kartoffelnkopf!

Journalist: I said there’s a terrible line at my end. Please call me back at once.

Chris Huhne: *blows raspberries down the phone* *Sings* A wandering minstrel wandering reeeeeleeelium. Gale Force Eight. 

*Chris Huhne puts the phone down*

Nick Clegg: Come on, Chris! What was the message? I’m on tenterhooks! Do tell!

Chris Huhne: Well, as far as I could tell, the message was: he’s got a terrible lion up his end, so there’s an advantage to an enema at once.

With such skillful evasion tactics, I remain confident that Chris Huhne will remain in his cabinet post.