Reply to Mike Smithson on PoliticalBetting.com

People who know me know that two of my great passions are gambling (mainly horses) and politics so I'm naturally an avid reader of PoliticalBetting.com.  Despite being a LibDem the author and proprietor Mike Smithson is generally pretty astute and a smart reader of the political winds.  I'm also proud that be briefly helped support my alma mater, The University of York in its fundraising efforts.  

However, it has to be said in a post today Mike has called things totally wrong in his suggestion that paid-for political advertising should be introduced to the UK.  

Mike advances a number of arguments in favour of his basic position;

1) Engagement: "Surely if we want to encourage more people to be interested in the political process then the full range of communication tools should be available to those who are seeking our votes?"

2) Young Voters: "If there’s an issue, as there is, about involving the younger generations in the political process then the parties should be able to reach them by being able to advertise on the TV channels that they watch. It would make for very different General Election campaigns"

3) Distortion: "It completely distorts election campaigning leading to the theatricals of poster unveilings in order to create something visual for the TV bulletins"

He then lobs in a final throwaway line about the impact of money, "At the same time we need tougher political funding rules."

I'm going to look at each of these in turn - using the experience I had in America in the run up to the November elections to explain why I think Mike is totally and utterly misguided.  

I'll take 1 and 2 together.  Simple facts: we are watching less TV and young people are reducing their viewing by more than the total population.  Using the total viewing summary data from BARB and using the most recent data and the the earliest data available (2009 and 1992 respectively) for the last complete week in April (the week we're in at the moment) you can see that in w/e 26th April 1992 average daily reach (ie, how many people watched TV) was 81.8.  By w/e April 25th 2009, the average daily reach was 76.7%.  This is decline is likely to have accelerated even further since then with increasing broadband penetration.  Young people are watching even less TV: 'Younger People Are Watching Less TV'.  TV advertising is increasingly irrelevant as companies switch their spend to digital or experiential marketing.  I do this for a living so I know.  

Argument 3: Even if it wasn't increasingly irrelevant I love the false opposite of suggesting that allowing for TV advertising of political messages would reduce the amount of 'distortion' in politics.  Everyone knows how vicious the political advertising gets in America - I had a small experience  of this when I was driving through California back in October - you can read it here.  

Finally, and for me, the most compelling argument.  No-one, literally no-one (except Smithson), wants political TV advertising in the UK.  Frankly, almost no-one in the US with the exception of TV companies and big lobbyists want it there!  Every time I talked politics with people in the US I explained how the UK doesn't have TV advertising and the universal reaction was, "that would be great".  See here, here and here for some contemporary context.  

The huge spend in American elections is well know but this article really brought home for me: "A total of £31m ($49m) was spent by all parties in the last general election in the UK two years ago - making US spending 120 times as much, and 23 times as much per person".  This means that candidates are in thrall to the big donors and spend more time raising money rather than either governing or listening to their voters.  

The poisonous impact of big-money in US elections is horrific enough but it doesn't even drive up engagement or turnout!  "The average turnout for [UK] general elections between 1918 and 2010 is a respectable 73.3%".  In the US turnout over a similar time period hovers around mid to high fifties.  So a country with spend 23 times higher and with a direct election for a president (rather than kind-of proxy elections for a Prime Minister) is around 15ppt poorer at turning out to the polling station.  

Political TV advertising: irrelevant, unwanted and ineffective.  Just say no.  

Book Review: The Unfortunates

The Unfortunates by B S Johnson

I was at a gig the other week, seeing Eels at Rock City who are one of the first bands that I remember buying a record by.  I was reminiscing to my friend about the day that I still distinctly remember of going to buy the CD in Coulsdon (where I grew up) on the Monday after school - I had five one pound coins in my wallet and I know that I could get a further £5 from the cash machine outside the TSB next door to the Woolworths.  Two now defunct brand names you won't find on our high streets any more.  Thanks to my somewhat unusual method of keeping my CDs not in either alphabetical order nor chronological order of release (pace, High Fidelity) but in chronological order of purchase I know that this is the thirteenth album that I ever bought.  

Because I still love the physicality of CDs and vinyl almost as much as I love the printed word, and in a slightly-late and somewhat off-kilter tribute to Record Store Day I thought I'd do a book review of a novel that celebrates the physical form in a word of Kindles and downloads.  

The other reminiscence I've been indulging in a lot at the moment is, of course, for my trip to America.  Being back in the daily grind of WorkOne and WorkTwo (see the footnote here).  I think the best memories in some ways are for the travel rather than the arriving: in particular for the day I spent driving, flying and travelling by train in California.  

I'm currently reading and hugely enjoying a book that celebrates the physical form par-excellence, is a semi-autobiographical reminiscence and is set in Nottingham.  What's not to like!  B S Johnson wasn't ever a household name in his lifetime and certainly isn't now but appears to be having something of a renaissance  especially around this novel in particular.  

The novel's main conceit is that it can be read in any order through the chapters being entirely loose in the binding.  The first and last chapters are marked as such but the others can be shuffled and read in whatever order you desire.  

The power of the reminiscence and the fading or growing of memories and re-ordering of them in our minds is of course a hugely powerful force in the novel and is enhanced by the pseudo-random order of the chapters.  Some of the chapters are only a page long, others a couple of dozen.  The action centres around a football match in an unnamed Midlands city which is usually understood to be Nottingham and I enjoyed in particular trying to place some of the locations identified - or spotting how things have changed in the forty or so years since the novel's setting.  Johnson was a jobbing football journalist and so spent a lot of time bouncing around the country to different cities reporting on different games.  The merging of different cities and locations is one that has become familiar for me as the memories of my America trip start to fade a little: "But I know this city!  This green ticket-hall, the long office half-rounded at its ends, that ironic clerestory, brown glazed tiles, green below, the same, the decorative hammerbeams supporting nothing, above, of course!  I know this city!  How did I not realise when he said, Go and do City this week, that it was this city?".  The match and its reporting are mixed up with stories of Tony, the narrator's dead friend and includes flashbacks (or are they not flashbacks, I'm just reading it in the "wrong" order?) to their times together.  

(Incidentally, I like the way that 'City' = The football team from a particular city but 'city' = the conurbation itself.  I always laugh when people at work talk about football from the weekend and refer to 'City' or 'County' or 'United' and expect you know what they're talking about.  This is, of course, just an excuse to link to my favourite 'IT Crowd' episode of all time, "Are We Not Men", couple of good clips here if you've not got time for the full episode at the first link)

The non-linear narrative of The Unfortunates is all part of the experience of reading the novel but it does make for a challenging read - there are lots of moments when it isn't at all clear what is going on.  I'm naturally going to struggle to give clear page numbers or references to the quotes below, but give the book a go and you'll find them in time...

Jonathan Coe has written a very helpful introduction to the edition I have which includes the following passage: "So, what exactly was taking place on 'the inside of his skull' as Johnson went about the task of reporting his football match that Saturday afternoon?  Memories of Tony were unfolding, certainly, but not in a structured, linear way, and they were interrupted at random by the action on the pitch and his attempts to start writing his match report.  It was this randomness, this lack of structure in the way we remember things and receive imrpessions that Johnson wanted to record with absolute fidelity.  But randomness, he realised, is 'directly in conflict with the technological fact of the bound book: for the bound book imposes an order, a fixed page order, on the material'.  His solution, as always, was simple and radical: the pages of The Unfortunates should not be bound at all".  

"Always, at the start of each match, the excitement, often the only moment of excitement, that this might be the ONE match, the match in which someone betters Payne's ten goals, where Hughie Gallacher after being floored nods one in while sitting down, where the extraordinary happens, something that makes it stand out, the match one remembers and talks about for years afterwards, the rest of one's life.  The one moment, the one match.  A new beginning, is it?".  The inevitable bathos that follows this passage is no less crushing for its predictability: "But already I suspect the worst of these two sides, now as they kick off I doubt they can play well enough to make this a memorable match...".  I'm no football fan so don't know if this is an accurate representation of what it can feel like at the start of a game but I recognise the pain of anticipate as encapsulated in the John Cleese line in Clockwise, "I can cope with the despair, but it's the hope that kills me".  

"June rang on the Saturday, was it, or the Thursday before, no, quite late, we had already arranged to go, though what arrangements could we have needed to make, saying that there was no need for us to come down, on Sunday, for he had died that evening, had not recovered consciousness that morning from his sleep. but previously there has been the opposite of a relapse, three days when his mind has been virtually normal, for which she had been grateful, June, it had seemed like a miracle, though he still could not move, his mind had come back and they had talked very seriously about everything, for the first time had talked about death".  This is one of the very short chapters: that passage is the totality of that chapter.  

"Time!  It's after two!  I must get to the ground then, how my mind has taken off.  Now, how to get to the ground, yes, always take a taxi in a strange city, no, not that again, in any case I have not seen any taxis here, except at the station and that's a long way away, but I did see buses with boards up for the ground at the Council House square, yes, and I ought to be able to find my way back there, yes, down there, through this alley, or crack, as some would call it, a paved alleyway, wet, it must have rained while I was having lunch, slightly, or they have washed it down no, what irrelevant absurdities I find myself thinking, just, the pavement is wet, I must take appropriate care not to slip as I descend, past shoppers, still at it, this is their great day, of course, wives and daughters arm-in-arm after camiknickers, matching, no doubt, twinsets, similar gallivanting.  Radio shops, now no doubt called television shops, the half-dozen sets going, different programmes, show-jumping and swimming, those apologies for sport on television, while the only sport most people want to watch is soccer, the only real sport, the best, the pathetic ends they go to on Saturday afternoons to cover up the fact that they are not showing football".  Later in this chapter (one of the longer ones) we get to see some of the writing of the match report the narrator is filing - a further post-modern trope (writing about writing: metafiction) in this fascinating book.  

This isn't a comforting read; it's challenging in both form and content.  But it's one that I highly recommend giving a go.  

Final Report

One of the conditions of my Scholarship that helped me to go to America is that I write a formal final report.  I hardly lacked material for this - between the blog posts I did on the road, almost a complete notebook of contemporary records and what I still have buzzing around my head I mainly had to think about editing it down to a managable length!

I finally finished it this weekend and sent off to the Trustees so if you fancy over 8000 words of deathless prose then you can read it here.

Running Man

As my biography on this site notes, I am most definitely an occassional runner.  I've done a couple of half-marathons but they were five or more years ago - more recently I've been limited to plodding around the occassional 10K.  My half marathon times were pretty slow - 2hr 40mins seemed to be my best effort.  That said I've lost the thick end of two stones (10.8kg in new money) since then so I'm sure that I'm faster across the tarmac than then.  

Being very competitive, when I got wind that some colleagues at work were doing the Rushcliffe 10k this March I couldn't resist getting involved.  I'm all paid up and entered and my helpful (read, provocative) colleague left an eight week training schedule on my desk just before Christmas.  I studiously ignored this schedule until this morning when I knew that I needed to face into the training or I'd be a sweaty mess on the day (no guarantee that I won't be, but trying to minimise the chances).  

My objective come the race is to cover the distance in under an hour so was a little trepidacious this morning not only because of the snow underfoot but also because I'd had a lengthy lay-off since at least before I went to America.  For me, going for a run means that I progress through a very curious arc of emotions - something close to: hope; fear; acceptance; enjoyment; fatigue.  Making two and three as short as possible and four as long as possible is always the key! 

In the end I felt pretty good - managed just under 8.2km (measured thanks to the excellent http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/) in around 55 minutes so the 60 minutes mark for 10k is well within grasp.  

Of course, this is all really an excuse for buying a load more kit...

Book Review: Slaying the Badger

(The first in an occasional series of book reviews.  This is designed to both get me to read more books and to enable me to write more regularly too.  Expect a mix of novels, social history, nerdy science and, just sometimes, sport).

Slaying the Badger by Richard Moore

I was talking with my new boss the other day at Work One (see the footnote here for my distinction between 'Work One' and 'Work Two') about how I like to operate at work, what my values and principles are, all stuff that I love (mainly because it means that I get to talk about myself) and we got to talking about the Tour de France.  Now, anyone that follows my Twitter during June and July knows that I'm a huge TDF fan but not everyone might realise that I use it as my one "sporting metaphor" at work.  I usually get very turned off when people try to engage me with football metaphors: "we're down two nil in the eighty-fifth minute, we need a super-sub" or "I'm just the skipper on the pitch, I need all the other ten men to get behind the ball too".  Bleugh.  

But for some reason the Tour is a totally resonant gold-mine for me of how I want my team to behave, lead and perform.  I could go on for hours but three examples should do;

- Cycling is a team sport but it's also an individual sport.  Each team has a leader and the rest of the team (the "domestiques") are paid to support him.  This means that you competitors whose job it is to support and shelter their leader and that alone - this could be anything from: giving up your musette (feed bag) if the leader misses picking his up on the move; pacing the leader back to the pack if they stop for a wee or have a problem; all the way up to giving up your bike if the leader's bike has a failure.  There's a wealth of things to think about there for work and other things you do in your life - how are you acting as a domestique in service to others?  When are the team leader?  When do these roles change?  (On the last point, the best example of this is Bradley Wiggins as winner of the Tour leading out his team-mate Mark Cavendish for the stage win in Paris in the 2012 Tour - leader turned domestique for the day.  

- The above, combined with the fact that to "just" be a domestique still means cycling 200km+ a day, every day for three weeks pretty much blows my mind.  These are world-class athletes and they not only sublimate their ego and own ambitions to the service of the team leader but put themselves through agonies to do it.  Legends.  

- But probably the thing that I love the most about the Tour (and it's similar to why I love cricket) is the way that there are competitions within competitions and the balance of power and advantage can switch one way and another many times within a day.  A rider might break away from the pack and be supported by a rider from another team during that lonely 150km because that helps their team to achieve something they want.  Sometimes this is explicit with deals being done ("support me today and I'll set you up for a stage win tomorrow") on the wing and sometimes it's more serendipitous.  

I was talking with my boss about all this and it turns out he is also a big cyclist and TDF fan and said he'd lend me a book he'd been reading.  He did and I read it over Christmas and it's highly recommended by me for general sports fans or cycling aficionados.  

It tells the story of the 1986 Tour which featured a see-saw battle between the new wave, represented by Greg LeMond and combative old-guard in the shape of Bernard Hinault (the eponymous 'Badger').  It's a cracking read that moves at huge pace and colours in the history and context of the race to make it fit together.  There is a wealth of interviews with the key participants including LeMond and Hinault and their coaching teams.  

The paperback edition (as linked above ) also has a fascinating epilogue that explores and justifies the author's designation of the 1986 race as the "Greatest Ever" in the subtitle to the book.  The final passage touches on a few of themes I talk about above so I thought I'd quote from it at length;

"The reaction from one reader prompted me to think about another aspect of the story, an obvious one but one that I hadn't given much consideration to because it seemed so obvious.  The reader, Gabriel Karaffa from New York, notes that the 1986 Tour was a 'stark example' of so many different people 'pursuing their own agendas'.  The problem, of course, was that so many of the dominant players - from the charismatic, wealthy team owner to the coaching genius to the two strongest riders - happened to be in the same team.  In cycling, perhaps more than any other sport, this is a recipe for conflict.  Because, as Karaffa notes, 'cycling was not originally a team sport, but it evolved into one ... The problem with this, of course, is that only one rider can win the general classification ... Were it to completely convert to a team sport, all events would be decided by team classifications'.

Those of us who follow cycling closely accept that it is a team sport and rarely reflect on how unnatural this is.  Perhaps it's best described as an individual team sport.

But it is an aspect of the sport that cuts to the heart of the 1986 drama.  Neither Hinault nor LeMond was drawn to cycling in order to become a member of a successful team.  Teenagers do not embark on the road to a career as a professional cyclist harbouring dreams of becoming a domestique.  The team role is something that is forced on the majority of riders by their own limitations.  For those without limitations - Hinault, LeMond - it is a nearly impossible compromise."

This neatly encapsulates the excitement at the heart of the sport for me.  We saw some of this in the 2012 Tour with Cavendish (a cyclist built and conditioned to win) being de-prioritised by Team Sky to make sure that Wiggins won the race.  This led to Cav leaving the British (dream) team to join Omega-Pharma-QuickStep where the operation will be built around him to win the Green Jersey.  

Roll on 29th June!

Ghost of Christmas Past

During the interregnum that inevitably features between Christmas and New Year I took the radical (for me) step of going shopping in the January sales.  As I was staying with my parents down South for a few days I had the somewhat unedifying choices of Crawley, Brighton or Croydon.  I finally decided to go to Croydon as I'd been working in store before Christmas in Crawley so didn't really fancy going back and the train down to Brighton felt like a bit of a drag.  

It was only as I got off the train at East Croydon station that I started to think about how long it was since I was last there.  I reckon it's close to a decade which was a bit sobering.  For the uninitiated  I grew up and went to school in this part of the world - so always have half an eye out for news from this unloved London Borough that I called home until I was 18.  I never really 'came home' after University - I lived for a year in York after I finished with my studies and then moved to Nottingham for work. 

Anyway, train done, I wandered down towards the town proper from the station and started to feel oddly nostalgic.  But then you know when you go back to somewhere or something that it totally familiar to you but then it turns out not to be quite the same as you remember it?  Very dislocating when you're convinced that something has moved.  For example - I often frequented (after the age of eighteen, obviously) 'The George' pub on George Street but if you'd asked me if Croydon's tram ran down that street I would have sworn that it ran on a parallel road.  As I say, very odd.  

I spent many happy hours as a teenager browsing the serendipitous racks of Beanos record store (I love the bathos of the phrase in that article, "STUFF marketplace officially closed on 30 April 2010 due to too little business") and owe my love of Elvis Costello's 'Armed Forces' and the lost genius of The Beekeepers (seriously, if you want a treat then get can a copy of 'Third Party, Fear and Theft'; it's brilliant) to that place.  So I was naturally very sad when it closed down and this meant that my CD shopping was restricted to popping into 101 Records.  They were handily enough having a half price sale so was able to make progress on my Dylan completism for relatively little money.  

I'd somehow created a further false memory for myself that Croydon was included in Owen Hatherley's smart and provocative book, 'A Guide To The New Ruins of Great Britain'.  I've just checked and it's not but you should read this book anyway anyway, not least for the chapter on Nottingham. 

 

For a much maligned placed architecturally, Croydon does have some gems of Modernism that have a real place in my heart - Apollo House and Lunar are famous for (i) being hilariously dated by their moon-landing inspired names, (ii) now housing the UK Border Agency so a key first destination for many migrants to the UK and (iii) appearing many times as filming locations for 'Peep Show'.  But whilst structurally the town was looking much the same, the changing face of the shops and rest of the streetscape was striking.  The closure of Allders has obviously hit a blow at the heart of the community and I kept expecting to find other shops that had long gone and moved away.  Sad.  

Finally, and on a more upbeat note, there are some good signs of regeneration and redevelopment happening.  An active BID (a model that works well in Nottingham too) looks to have put together some good plans and is certainly very visible.  And there are some great looking plans for East Croydon station (itself an iconic cantilevered building) that will improve its links to the rest of the town.  

Just a collection of thoughts really but hopefully a little treat for my midlands friends...

Public Service Announcement

I've been having a think about the future of this blog.  I originally set it up for when I was in America and I loved the time that I had to think and write whilst over there.  I've really missed this time (hello, having two jobs) and also the stimulus to write since I've been back but want to find some way of getting this back.  

I've decided (as a mini-New Years Resolution) to find time to do more writing and so have made the decision to keep the blog going but retitle it as "Notts and Bolts".  It's going to be much less frequently updated than when I was in America but hopefully a bit more wide ranging about things that are going on in and around Nottingham that I find interesting.  

I've also spent a lot of the Christmas break writing my final report for the Nottingham Roosevelt Travelling Scholarship which once it's finally finished I will upload here for anyone that's interested.