Dislike THIS.

Facebook is thinking of introducing a 'dislike' button.

Not, it says, so that you can register your disagreement with or dislike of what someone writes. I imagine that this is because it might cause offence: no one these days likes to be disagreed with, particularly if they're wrong, when it often swiftly escalates to become a matter of that curious notion 'the right to an opinion'. Worse - I imagine -  it could be damaging to the writer's self-esteem with all the costs of medication, litigation and, who knows, self-immolation that might follow.

No, it's so that you can AGREE with them, which I had naively taken to be one of the more obviously incontestable functions of the 'Like' button.

So, for example, if I post a picture of a rich, obese American lording it over an elephant he has bravely turned into an omelette with a Krupp field gun from a mile away, people can register their shared disgust by pressing 'Dislike'.

OK, but what if I were to criticise an odious government policy or racist pressure group? Half of you may agree with my impeccable sentiments and press 'Like'; the other half may agree with my impeccable sentiments and register their disapproval of the matter under discussion by pressing 'Dislike'.

What a load of mushy - and dislikeably confusing - rubbish!

I might know exactly what I mean by 'Like' and 'Dislike', and you - and you, and you - will each know what you each mean by them too. But the meaning stops there, thus making both actions pointless in terms of actual communication, which is what Facebook is meant to enhance not diminish.

I know, let's do away with 'Likes' and 'Dislikes' altogether. Instead, let's say what we mean, not pour open minds into empty vessels.

Corbyn has a chance.

Some early, not-very-comprehensive and not-entirely-thought-through thoughts and I may come back to revise and/or add to them, but I’d like to know what people think ...

How far Labour has hollowed itself out was clearly shown this weekend when the carcase imploded.

It is no alternative to a Conservative Party which knows the price of everything but has never in my lifetime shown it knows the value of anything - even conservatism - and has prostituted a nation before the corporate kerb-crawlers of international business.

Labour under and since Blair has lost both its heart and its core voters, most of whom despise it and from whom it runs scared. It has forgotten its founding principles - socialist principles - of solidarity, mutual obligation and duty to others that also lay behind the creation of the Welfare State. Complexity has replaced simplicity, but the principles remain sound even though the world has moved on. Sadly, Labour has been so desperate to catch up that it's forgotten them altogether.

As both ballast and compensation it filled the vacuum left by its departed socialism with a shallow, mawkish and far from progressive language of social rights as claims upon others, a barely-disguised transcription of market consumerism as social policy. Victimhood has been the only thing Labour has nationalised since the 1970s, not least in the long years of fruitless opposition. It enshrined it in a bureaucratic managerialism that turns the stomach whether you suffer under it, work in it or just rage at it from the outside. A belated effort under Blair to link "rights and responsibilities" just pointed up the poverty - no, the absence - of Labour's conception of society.

Most of Labour’s traditional and potential voters, like most people in Britain and beyond, and including many socialists, are and always have been conservative with a small ‘c’. Corbyn mustn’t ignore that. People like to live in a reasonably predictable world; they like a sense of continuity in their communities; they like to know on what terms they deal with other, and they like to have a say about how it’s done. They aren’t on the whole racist and believing all the above things doesn’t make them so. Above all, far from being mere economic units, they have a pretty honest sense of what’s fair and what isn’t.

Many have turned away from Labour because they think they are unfair; that they have forgotten, ignored or perverted the principles I mentioned above. Because of this sense of unfairness, and joyously egged on by other clarions of victim culture like The Daily Mail, many who would once have voted Labour have retreated into a nasty, defensive and sullen nationalism. Others have been seduced by small-minded organisations like UKIP or overtly racist ones like Britain First. The Scots have simply told Labour to eff off, good God!

Britain has indeed become a notoriously unfair society which the historical dominance of the Conservative Party has done so much to create. We have the biggest and most visible discrepancies in wealth of any major European nation; an often squalid public environment for which many people have ceased to care and behave accordingly; low aspiration (even after all these Tory years - think about that next time a Government spokesman laments its absence in Corbyn's programme!); spectacular social cleavages between the well-educated minority and a badly educated majority; often appalling and preventable health problems. As a people we have been long and unlovingly prepared and indoctrinated for a low-skill, low-aspiration service economy while our major European competitors still actually make things – and by God it shows.

That the nation’s outrage should therefore be directed against foreigners and other Europeans instead of our own ordure is the most obvious testament to Labour’s failure to offer real opposition.

Corbyn can at last open up a debate and set out a clearly different approach. That’s to say an approach that doesn’t require Labour first to find out what the Conservatives want to do so that it can then make a few policy tweaks and then try to sell it as something fresh and different.

He can point up the real unfairnesses:  BANG! BANG! BANG! - it won’t be hard! He can direct our attention away from a narrowly economic to a broader quality-of-life approach (one of the great illusions, as I am starting to appreciate, is that happiness necessarily begins at a certain level of income – especially if you can cook).

Anyway, here are some ideas that I think might bring people back to Labour, and that may be compatible with what Corbyn believes, or might come to believe:

• Commit to membership of the European Union: we have much more to learn from our neighbours than we like to think and much to lose if, as for too long, we refuse to do so. This is no time for hair-shirted, insular British socialist exceptionalism: that is and has been part of the problem up to now.
• Commit to remaining in NATO but not to renewing Trident: they aren’t dependent on each other and the money can be better spent on the public and wider environment, and on start-ups for groups and businesses that can carry this work forward.
• Commit to the principles behind the original welfare state, which was based on contribution not unconditional access except in clearly stated cases, and explain clearly why this is. Nothing incompatible with socialism there!
• Commit to welcoming genuine refugees at the same time as (1) working internationally to resolve the Syrian and other wars and the disputes that give rise to them and (2) having, along with European partners, a clear exit strategy: that is, for refugees’ to return home when it’s safe to do so except in clearly defined and reasonable cases.
• Make the rich pay more tax, for no better reason than that they can afford it and it is therefore FAIR.
• Nationalise the railways, for God’s sake, and do it properly. If in doubt, ask the French.
• Have a school system that isn’t afraid to value what both academic and non-academic kids can offer and achieve, even if this requires streaming and even an element of separation. Because you don’t have to be academic to be a craftsman. If in doubt, ask the Germans or the Dutch.
• Support that last one with a return to MAKING THINGS.

And at this point I must hand things over to the economists, if he has any. I certainly haven't.

Storm in a pee cup.

I can't see why urinating in a mug and then cleaning it is reason not to stand for public office.

Jerry Bance, a Conservative candidate in Canada’s forthcoming election, has had to stand down for doing just that, and everyone over there is going on and on about it. He, in return, is indulging himself in the Canadian national pastime of apologising all the time.

I wouldn’t stand for public office either, but it’s not because I’ve more than once relieved myself in non-ensuite hotel rooms’ wash basins at three in the morning when I didn’t fancy performing the bishop’s waltz down a darkened corridor with no idea into whom I might bump.

It’s because I flatter myself that I’m a reasonably honest bloke who doesn’t like to lie, dissemble and pretend to believe in things I don’t.

And I rinse out those wash basins too, which brings me to the nub of my argument: SO DID HE. Had he left it there for all to see, I think he would be justifiably disqualified on the grounds of being completely bonkers as well as disturbingly malicious. But he didn't: he did what any sane and socially adjusted person would have done and washed the mug up.

Be honest: how many people ever do THAT in your office's staff kitchen? Be even more honest: DO YOU?

Anyway, given that Bance is a politician, I’d have thought there’s a good chance that his opponents might more honestly (if not more politically profitably) pin one of the above failings on him - lying, dissembling and so on - and thus do him in good and proper.

But no: in North America cheap personal attacks are the way to go, and this is common to both left and right.

Over here we are starting to heave ourselves out of our own, er, bog of irrelevance in these matters, sexual indiscretion. But we’re fast replacing it with a form of character-assassination made worse because it omits those aspects of character that really do need to be examined and neglects common, unspectacular decencies like telling the truth and washing up after yourself.

And be careful, all you up there on the moral high-ground: what goes around comes around.

The Examined Life, 6

“Sir.”

“Yes, Eusebio?”

“Churchill was a dog, wasn’t he?”

“I imagine some of the less reputable among the Germans may once have held that opinion, but I have to say it’s not one many share; in fact ...”

“But he was a dog, Sir, wasn’t he! Tell him, Sir!”

“Tell whom, Eusebio?”

“Him! He’s shtoopid, he is!”

“Why, pray?”

“He thinks he was a MAN!”

On National Stereotypes

National stereotypes are great fun if deployed only in fun, and try as I might I can't shift them. For example, as I was walking around the centre of Troyes early yesterday morning I came across a little scruffy old guy shuffling along in shabby clothes, wearing what looked like old-style NHS specs, with a few teeth missing and a distant, ill-focused but nonetheless intense look on his face.

If I'd been in Britain I'd have assumed he was an alcoholic. As it was France, I assumed he was a philosopher. Thus are histories made, told and digested.