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Inspired by the petty and not so petty cruelties with which the government attacks those economically least able to weather measures of austerity, George Monbiot is looking for ideas that ‘can make hope more powerful than fear’ and inform a new progressive politics. He points to two such ideas, land value taxation and basic income, and you may see for yourself why he rates them as he does. Here I want to note a striking feature of the explanatory framework Monbiot adopts in proposing these two ideas.

They’re needed, according to him, as a follow-up to the ideas of, in turn, communism and ‘freedom from want and fear through the creation of a social security system and a National Health Service’, which in the past acted to mobilize popular hope but have both now run their course, albeit in different ways. And such mobilizing ideas are needed, more generally, (a) because, if the ‘decent majority’ can be governed by a ‘brutal, antisocial minority’, this situation is enabled by the minority’s controlling the story (through wealth-favouring media etc), and (b) because of the long historical legacy of enslavement, bondage, fear of economic power and arbitrary authority. These still influence how ordinary folk think and react. Something is needed to ‘shake people out of this state’.

Now, here’s the extraordinary thing. One of the reasons for the failure of the communist idea, for Monbiot, was ‘the simplistic binary system into which they [Marx and Engels] tried to force society; their brutal dismissal of anyone who did not fit this dialectic’. And yet his own perspective on society and history includes the following thesis:

Most of the world’s people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of journalism.

Perhaps Monbiot hopes this proposition will be sustained by his two uses of the word ‘most’; exceptions to the good people/bad people dichotomy can always be accommodated. But, though I will not hazard any guess about the differing proportions of inveterate bastards to be found in different communities, strata of the population, professions, institutions, and so forth, I do not think his thesis is a good advertisement for journalism if that is what many years of journalism truly teach. Whether as the cause or the effect of power, there are – in my own counter-hypothesis – other much stronger correlations than between power and inveterate bastardhood. Class origin, educational and other types of opportunity, political skills, personal ambition, dedication and organization, a certain idealism, and many other qualities strike me as being more pertinent than the degree of individual nastiness to the holding and exercise of power. From common observation, moreover, it would seem that all communities and all milieus have some significant share of bastards (if that is how we are to characterize such individuals), as they do also of people who are decent, honest and kind. If you’ve been around self-styled progressive politics for any length of time you will know that organizations from this quarter are no exception in either department.

The worst thing about this ‘simplistic binary system’ of Monbiot’s is the way it squares with a certain self-flattering image on the left that has been one of the sources of intolerance, illiberalism and, at the limit, indefensible violations of people and their rights; and has contributed thereby to sullying its reputation. It is the idea that righteousness is all on our side. We are the good ones, and they are the scum of the earth. No matter, then, what is done in the cause of our justice. This is a damnable conceit.

Elly Griffiths was born in London, studied English at King’s College London and worked in publishing for 15 years. She wrote her first book (The Italian Quarter, published under her real name, Domenica de Rosa) when she was on maternity leave. Three other books followed, all on Italian themes. She was inspired to write about forensic archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway when her husband gave up a city job to retrain as an archaeologist. Her agent told her she needed a ‘crime name’ so she became Elly Griffiths. The first Ruth book, The Crossing Places, was shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year and won the Mary Higgins Clark award. The latest book in the series is Dying Fall, published in January 2013. Elly lives near Brighton with her husband and two children. Here she writes about Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

Elly Griffiths on The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone is so often hailed as the first detective story that it’s hard to remember that the crime at the centre of the book is not a murder but a theft. The trappings that have become so familiar to the murder mystery are all there: the grand and isolated house, seething with the repressed emotions of both servants and guests; blackmail; an ancient curse; the tell-tale stains upon the clothes. That Wilkie Collins creates such a doom-laden and portentous atmosphere around what seems to be a simple case of robbery is down to a sort of literary sleight-of-hand. The victim is not a beautiful woman but an equally lovely and ill-fated diamond and the stains are of paint, not blood. But the effect is the same. As soon as Wilkie Collins introduces us to the locale, the wonderfully evocative Shivering Sand, we know that we are dealing with something beyond mere smash-and-grab.

The last of the evening light was fading away; and all over the place there hung a still and awful calm… The inner sea lay lost and dim, without a breath of wind to stir it. Patches of nasty ooze floated, yellow-white on the dead surface of the water.

It’s all there in a few lines: fading, awful, lost, dead. It’s only the phrase ‘nasty ooze’ that reminds us that we’re sharing the perspective of family retainer Gabriel Betteredge. And this is another of the novel’s felicities – the multiple voices. The story is told by (amongst others) Betteredge, the family solicitor, the main suspect and the detective. The device means that not only do we see events through the narrators’ eyes but, to some extent, we also share their values. The loss of the diamond is so much more devastating when described by the faithful Betteredge. And what could be better than to have a key scene witnessed by the sweetly vile Miss Clack, for whom even eavesdropping is a sacred duty? ‘A martyrdom was before me. In justice to myself I noiselessly arranged the curtains…’

Sergeant Cuff can lay claim to being the first policeman hero. He is both brilliant and eccentric – two characteristics we have come to expect in our detectives. ‘His walk was soft; his voice was melancholy… He might have been a parson or an undertaker, or anything you like, except what he really was.’ Only Collins could describe someone’s walk as soft. Cuff is also the first fictional policeman to conduct anything like a forensic investigation, when he examines the household’s night-clothes for spatters of paint. This was undoubtedly influenced by the real-life Road Hill House murder, where the detective (Mr Whicher as in The Suspicions of…) caused a scandal by examining the family’s linen. Except that Whicher, of course, was searching for spatters of blood.

Cuff is such a wonderful creation that, again, it is a shock to realize that he retires halfway through the book, with the case still unsolved. Lady Verinder employs him at her own expense but then, when his investigations bring him uncomfortably close to the truth, dismisses him. This seems impossibly haphazard to our eyes but was, in fact, how Scotland Yard worked at the time. Yet, like all the detectives that come after him, Cuff is gifted with uncanny powers of deduction. He guesses the identity of the diamond thief and writes the name in a sealed note to be opened by Betteredge. His discussions with Betteredge, as the latter strains to follow the detective’s enigmatic clues, mimics the relationship between crime writer and reader. In The Moonstone Wilkie Collins lays down the rules for the genre – the clues are all there, if you can follow them. The chase is on. As Betteredge describes it:

Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach… and a nasty thumping at the top of your head? It will lay hold of you… I call it the detective-fever and I caught it in the company of Sergeant Cuff.

Cuff casts a long shadow. It was not until after my first crime novel was published that I realized that it featured a character called Sergeant Clough. The novel has sometimes been praised for its descriptions of isolated marshland on the Norfolk coast. I know that this sense of a doomed landscape comes, not just from modern-day archaeologists like Francis Prior, but from Wilkie Collins and his terrible, wonderful Shivering Sands. Yet it was a quotation from a lesser-known (but equally brilliant) Wilkie Collins book that stayed with me when I was writing The Crossing Places. In No Name, the story of sisters fighting for their inheritance, he writes:

Nothing in the world is hidden forever. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned…

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

I’ve spent a fair bit of time on this blog saying why apologies dismissed by others as meaningless, because the apologies were made by people not alive at the time of the wrong for which they were apologizing or not implicated in it, were in fact both meaningful and justified. I want to say, for a change, why I think one particular individual’s apology for his own recent misconduct is pretty worthless.

The individual in question is Lord Ahmed who has lately apologized for a television interview he gave in Pakistan in which he said that Jews were responsible (£) for his imprisonment for dangerous driving:

In the Urdu-language television interview, Lord Ahmed claimed that Jews “who own newspapers and TV channels” placed pressure on the British courts to punish him more severely than was warranted by his offence.

Ahmed’s apology for this is given unreservedly, but what makes it next to worthless, in my view, is that it contains nothing that explains, for himself or others, what led him to blame Jews for the misfortunes he had brought upon himself. ‘I don’t really have any explanation or excuse’, he says; and he discounts, in particular, the suggestion put to him that his anti-Semitic outburst was given out to an audience he thought might be receptive to it. He has nothing to offer, for his own part, but this:

It must have been a twisted mind that said those things.

Or, to put it another way, it wasn’t him. So, he’s not taking responsibility by acknowledging what there might be in his make-up or his thinking which led him to what he said – something he must try to overcome in future. No, it’s just a momentarily ‘twisted mind’, for he himself is ‘not anti-Semitic’. Taken over then – inexplicably – by demons. Pull the other one.

A feature in today’s Graun on left-handers in sport brings home to me a dereliction on my part: I have never picked a Test XI composed entirely of lefties. I have offered XIs of both writers and philosophers. There was also the Feuerbach XI. And my friend Bob selected a team of food-related cricketers. But an XI of Test left-handers – this has been sadly neglected. I make amends below.

I have confined myself to cricketers who played after the Second World War, which means that I’ve seen all of them play, most of them in the flesh, one or two only on TV. I had better say also that this is my XI, and you may not judge it to be the best one possible under the above – postwar – constraint. One selection here may be particularly controversial. But you are free to pick your own left-handers’ XI, as I hope, indeed, you will.

1. Graeme Smith (South Africa)
2. Trevor Goddard (South Africa)
3. Graeme Pollock (South Africa)
4. Brian Lara (West Indies)
5. Allan Border (Australia)
6. Gary Sobers (West Indies)
7. Clive Lloyd (West Indies – capt)
8. Adam Gilchrist (Australia – wk)
9. Alan Davidson (Australia)
10. Wasim Akram (Pakistan)
11. Derek Underwood (England)

The disputable selection here is Trevor Goddard. There are plenty of left-handed opening batsmen with a much better batting average than he had. But Goddard also took 123 Test wickets at an average of 26.22 and, with Adam Gilchrist coming in at number 8, this team is not short of batting. David Gower can be twelfth man.

The second International Jazz Day takes place on April 30 this year, featuring musicians from all over the world. Leading up to that is the whole month, which has been designated Jazz April: ‘Whoever you are, wherever in the world you live, there’s a way for you to help spread the word about jazz…’ As the man (Ken Burns) said:

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

It’s also great music. In April I shall be listening to (even) more jazz. (Thanks: DA.)

Telling us that it’s now possible to get the recordings of nearly every note that J.S. Bach composed – ‘the equivalent of 155 CDs’ – on one USB memory stick, Richard Morrison writes (£):

For some people he is a conduit straight to God – or at least a means of experiencing, vicariously, an extraordinary spiritual uplift, even if you aren’t religious. Others marvel at his unearthly genius for counterpoint.

He (Morrison) also tells that Bach used to smuggle girls into his organ loft, a fact to be relayed tomorrow in ‘Bach: A Passionate Life‘ on BBC2. A combination of the sublime and the down to earth, if I may so express what possibly went on in that loft. The world is a place of many parts.

It is a truth universally overlooked that the only number in the world larger than the number of people on the anti-war march in London on 15 February 2003 is the number of those who have said, implied or emoted what a body blow to democracy in this country it was, and to the civic sensibilities of the young, that the marchers were not listened to. Well, here’s a shock for everybody of that second number, the larger one. It would appear that a majority of the British public support the [scare-quotes]war on terror[/scare-quotes]:

A majority of Britons support the “targeted killing” of terrorists, both overseas and at home, according to a YouGov poll.

The survey, carried out for the defence policy thinktank RUSI and launched in London on Tuesday, finds 54% of the public support assassinating individual terrorists abroad, against 31% who object. Killing terrorists in the UK is backed by 52%-34%.

Will those of the we-marched-but-sob theory of parliamentary democracy now be lining up to insist on the war on terror taking its course with full drones? I somehow think not.

Further to Obama in Jerusalem, here’s a piece by Gershom Gorenberg setting out the importance of the president’s speech. ‘One speech’, he writes, ‘doesn’t make a peace process. But as the beginning of a process, this speech was a revolution.’ (Via Jeff.)

In line with what is now a clear trend, the Daily Telegraph is about to start charging readers for access to its website:

People will be allowed to read just 20 articles a month on the paper’s site for free. If they wish to read more then they will be able to choose between two digital subscription pages…
…..
This metered model is favoured by newspapers across the US – notably at the New York Times – and Canada. It is also employed in Britain by the Financial Times, but the Telegraph becomes the first general newspaper in the UK to introduce it.

By contrast, The Times and Sunday Times site is protected by a full paywall, restricting all access… unless users pay for a subscription.

One feature of the New York Times paywall that is specific to it, so far as I know, and worth mentioning, is that the paper allows free access to a certain category of ‘visitor’:

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.

As a blogger, I obviously have an interest in recommending this enlightened practice to other newspapers. But then people at the NYT must think that there is an interest on its side too in encouraging blogger and social network links to their site.

From a piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker:

Today, in 2013 – a decade later – it’s not fashionable to suggest that the American invasion of Iraq served any useful purpose. It was a catastrophe, born of original sin – of lies and exaggeration and trumped-up intelligence. How many times have you heard that this week? There are a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, more than four thousand Americans killed, and a bill for a trillion dollars. Indeed, the near-universal certainty that America’s war in Iraq was nothing but bad is as widespread and unbreachable as the notion, in 2003, that Saddam had to go.

But what are we to make of Iraqis like Al-Musawi? Or of torture chambers like Al Hakemiya? Where do we place them in our memories? And, more important, how should they shape our judgment of the war we waged?

I’d say: Ask the Iraqis – that is, if anyone, in this moment of American navel-gazing, can be bothered to do so. My guess is that the answers would be richer and more surprising than the one-dimensional debate we are engaging in at home.

Read the whole thing if you’ve the stomach for it, and see if a ‘nothing but bad’ judgement is sustainable. (Via Mick.)