Short Story Competition

Came second in the contest- pretty close! So with no further ado...

Witch Hunting in the Bowels of England


It was the first Thursday of May 1646 that I went up Primrose Hill to meet Colonel Digby’s men. ‘Apothecary, you are to help us with the Lord’s work.’ It was not the Colonel but a man in all black. ‘I am Hamilton, Witchfinder appointed by our goodly Parliament. Satan does his work not just through misled Kings, but also in every village in England. That is why this God-fearing body of Trained Band, under Colonel Digby, will help me cleanse the lands we see from here of Satan.’

Hamilton continued: ‘We need you, Apothecary, to see if men are using true or false medicines. The latter are Satan’s work. If you spot them you are to tell me of their providence.’

‘Colonel, I have addresses to visit. Satan has caused much mischief around Chalk Farm Tavern, a place of much debauchery and dissoluteness. Order your men to march.’

The Colonel, an old Trained Band officer, ordered his men down the hill. I walked alongside Hamilton. I knew a lot of Presbyters like him in the City.

‘So how do you spot a witch, sir? I have read many books on the matter.’

‘Apothecary, I learnt my trade all over Europe. I find that witches are just poppets of Satan and if you find him in them, they just crumble. I use a method, approved by Scotch brethren, in Yorkshire and Ireland, where Papists blame potatoes, the evil wretches.’

I was pondering Hamilton’s words when we reached the first house where he said Satan was active. ‘Master Bourne, come out. Your wife says you harbour Satan!’ A haggard fellow opened the door. ‘She is telling lies again, just because I prefer the tavern’s company to her nagging and cavorting with other men.’

‘Are you calling your good wife a whore, sir? Let us see if you are possessed by Satan.’ Hamilton brought forward a sharp spiked mace. ‘Behold Satan, leave or you will feel the vengeance of the Reformed Church!’

A loud farting noise came out of Bourne and much unpleasantness followed. ‘Leave me alone! It is just the beer!’

‘Confess or you will hang at Tyburn and be crow sport.’

As six bodies, including Bourne’s, were left to hang outside Chalk Farm Tavern, I asked Hamilton: ‘So that is how you know Satan is inside a man?’

‘Verily. Satan may set a face hard and still, but he cannot stay quiet. Satan needs to move and make noise and when threatened by good Christians he cannot hold himself. Apothecary, some of the science you hold to says other, but it is nonsense. For science cannot purge the soul or the bowels of evil doers.’ I fell silent.

Though for Parliament and God, I did think Hamilton spoke nonsense. However, it seemed the Colonel and his men approved Hamilton’s method and had no qualms about executing those he said had Satan lurking in them. For three weeks we marched to nearly every corner of the land between Primrose Hill and St. Albans, dispensing Godly justice to Satan’s familiars. Colonel Digby made sure we did not abuse the hospitality of the locals, though some did wonder in earshot of me why all Satan’s familiars these days appeared to be men.

I was not called onto do much apothecary-related work, though some men needed painkillers to sleep. The fourth Thursday of May we executed three in the mudtrack locals call West Hampstead. Next morning we marched on Cricklewood, full of surly drunken types. The Colonel’s men used musket shot on four score troubling fellows. After twelve died and Digby threatened the rest that the New Model would arrive by dusk, we marched to the Red Lion by Kilburn Priory, a well-known stop on Watling Street. We had not partaken ale during the campaign but both Digby and Hamilton agreed that a few to celebrate our efforts would not harm.

It was to be more than a few. Our discipline went at the Red Lion. With Hamilton praying, Digby and a few of his men sat at my table.

‘So Apothecary, do you believe Hamilton that farting is a sign of Satan?’

‘Not all the time, Colonel, for our victuals can play a part. Hamilton is a man of God, though, he must know more than us.’

‘Well, boys, we would not be allowed ale if he was a true man of God, for I have been belching and worse since I had my first sip today. I am full of Satan! Hamilton must know!’ He ran to the side room in the inn where Hamilton had gone to pray.

‘Presbyter, do you think Satan owns my buttocks…’ Digby opened the door to see Hamilton on the floor, with the late Bourne’s wife astride him.

‘Save me, she is possessed by Satan…she is full of him!’ screamed Hamilton. The Colonel then heard, he told us afterwards, the worst breakage of the wind in his life.

‘Thou merely talketh turds, false prophet!’ shouted Digby, whose sword sliced both their heads off in moments.

That night our drunken rabble of ninety-seven was no match for the three hundred New Model horse of Captain Croft that had just subdued Cricklewood. Most of the survivors were led off to Tyburn. Due to my medical knowledge I was allowed to help the few injured troopers and tell the whole sorry tale to Croft.

‘Farting the work of Satan? Then all of England is damn’d!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is nonsense, false doctrine that should be suppressed and a capital offence to promote. Apothecary, please say nothing of this, unless you want to join Digby and the others entertaining the mob.’

I swore immediately on King James’s Bible not to say a word. Though for many years, indeed unto the days of the Glorious Revolution, I was occasionally visited at my shop on Philpot Street by the weak-stomached, fearing it was the Devil’s work, and asking me questions about the 1646 ‘Crusade For The Bowels.’

Mid-Summer Blog Post

By way of explanation...

I am very aware that I have not written something on the European Elections, as promised in my last post. In my mind I am having a big debate in recent weeks about where this blog is going & what I want from it. Should it concentrate on current, day-to-day stuff or be a bit more about political theory and big ideas? Should I make a serious effort to be more cultural in my posts? What is the blog trying to achieve and who is it meant to reach out to? (Apart from present company!)In short, I need a re-think and I need time to do so. Otherwise there would be no point in carrying on.

I am off to Nice in a couple of weeks time for my annual holidays. Going to visit Monaco (to see if it does seem smaller than Hyde Park!), Cannes and maybe cross over into Italy. One big consequence is that I am currently re-learning my French (1981-86 GCE O Level Grade D; 1998-99 GCSE Grade A) so that I can survive without constantly saying 'Parlez-vous Anglais?'. As I want to make a decent fist of this, it is taking up a lot of my spare time. Consequently, I'm leaving the big and final decisions about my blog until after my grand vacance.



Nice at Night- Bigger Than Hyde Park..


Refreshed and relaxed, I hope to start again seriously with this blogging lark towards the end of July. Before I go, I do hope to post my short story for the latest (well, the first since early 2007) short story competition at work. I will wait until the result (or at least until voting has finished) before it appears here. I think it is good- but I would say that!

In the meantime (and one of the reasons that my guilty conscience forced my to put something up here today), I saw this today about the nature of blogging. It made me think: just by keeping going, I am a blogging success!


The long tail of blogging is dying: The popularity of blogging seems to be fading as people turn to the easier aspects of social media: status updates and tweeting
Charles Arthur, The Guardian, 25 June 2009

Blogging is dying. Actually, no, let me qualify that. The long tail of blogging is dying. I say this with confidence. That confidence is based on two things: my anecdotal, but wide-ranging, analysis of what and how people remark on content from this section, and the surveys carried out by Technorati – which provides the Guardian with the feedback data that appears on our web pages. The interesting question is, what has replaced that blogging?

First, to my anecdotal analysis. Since the relaunch of this section in September 2005, we've included blog pingbacks among the "letters" section, recognising that people might not want to write a letter, or even send us an email (to tech@guardian.co.uk) when they have an opinion about something we've written. Instead, they might write a post on their own blog. Since January 2006 I've automated the process of searching for those blogposts. (Put simply: collect the links from the section – which I do anyway, stored on a MySQL database on my laptop – then input them into blog search engines via a preconfigured script.)

I'd then follow these posts. There were always a certain number of splogs – spam blogs – which simply pick up keywords and dress them with Google AdSense adverts. Boring, but easily ignored. Then there would be the blogs that copied entire articles – annoying (it denies us page views and advertising revenue), though usually they're easily persuaded not to persist. Then there would be those who had read the piece and had comments and insight, which we could extract for inclusion in the Letters and blogs section. Of course, the number of physical letters we received about what appeared here was absolutely tiny: months would go by without any arriving. Email remained the principal source, though blogs quickly began to make up the majority of content.

But recently – over the past six months – I've noticed a new trend: fewer blogs with links, and fewer with any contextual comment. (I'm defining a blog here as an individual site, whether on Blogger or Wordpress or an individual domain, with regular entries.) Some weeks, apart from the splogs, there would be hardly anything. I didn't think we'd suddenly become dull. Nor was it for want of searching: mining for blog comments, I use Icerocket.com. Technorati.com and Google's Blogsearch.

Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they've all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com – though it's still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it's a "retweet", echoing the headline. The New York Times also noticed this trend, with a piece on 9 June about "Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest", which pointed to Technorati's 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, "that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned".

I see it: NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn't been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown. Why? Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it's to easier things that people are turning. Facebook's success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can't index it to see who's talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone's Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.

PS Another conundrum I am wrestling with is how to integrate my Facebook postings and musings with those of this blog...Tootle pip for the mo!

Bits on books, publishing, bookshops & writing

I will turn to the European/Local election results and the implications for British politics/the next General Elections in the next few days, as I am still trying to think matters through.



In the meantime I'm bringing together a few articles about writing and the world of books. Without sounding too alarmist, it seems that the traditional business models for writing, publishing and selling books are going through a challenging period. This surely cannot be blamed on the existence of the Internet and economic downturns alone. Moreover, I'm not too enamoured by the thought of e-books. I like the fact that with dead tree (hopefully recycled) books you can fold pages, scribble in ink, pencil or marker pens or read them in the bath or on the toilet without much chance of getting electrocuted. However, perhaps I am a member of one of the final generations to think like this.



Anyhow, onto the articles. First of all, have we seen the death of the professional writer, or at least of the writer who can live by writing alone? Ian Jack seems to think so.

The age of the gifted amateur has returned: The woes of publishing make it easy to forget that Fielding, TS Eliot and others were part-timers
Ian Jack, The Guardian, Saturday 2 May 2009

We are in the twilight years of a certain kind of paid employment: the business of inking words on paper, to be read by a large audience that is largely unknown to the author. The crisis in newspapers is especially acute. But neither is book publishing immune. Advances against royalties are tumbling, staff have been cut, publishers take far fewer risks. The recession offers only a small part of the explanation. The fact is that generations are now growing up with the idea that words should be read electronically for free - a new human right - which has grave consequences for the people paid to compose and edit them. Writers and journalists like me, old enough to know manual typewriters, tend when we meet to congratulate ourselves on having seen "the best of it", meaning the years when a career could be based solely - mortgage secured, lunches enjoyed, etc - on small or large acts of English composition, often flawed.

This way of living reached its full bloom only recently, between the late 1980s and early 2000s, when the enormous expansion in newspaper pagination and a burst of new lifestyle magazines increased the demand for wordage and publishers bid against each other to pay out large advances (the sums look incredible now - £500,000 for a first "literary" novel) for no other reason, it sometimes seemed, than to give an editorial director crowing rights over his rivals. What nobody considered (certainly not me) was that paid authorship rested on certain technical, social and legal developments, old but far from ancient, that were about to be undermined and overtaken by a new technology that was much more democratic. In other words, that paying an author to read his work wasn't an unchallengeable habit set in stone, like buying bread from a baker, but the result of two German inventions, moveable type and the rotary press, and two British ones, copyright law and that first large audience for print known as "the reading public".

Before Gutenberg devised his letterpress, literary production lay in the hands of scriveners, and writing was a spare-time hobby sustained by the patronage of the church or aristocrats. For a long time, the printed book did little to change this. Among writers, the play offered the best chance of a full-time writing career because a play had paying audiences - Shakespeare got a tenner for Hamlet whereas more than 60 years later Milton earned only a fiver from the first printing of Paradise Lost. By the 18th century, reading had spread from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Alexander Pope received £5,000 for his translation of the Iliad when an agriculture worker's wage was 10 shillings (50p) a week, while Daniel Defoe wrote his way out of debt and had enough left over to set himself up in a country house in Stoke Newington.

But these were exceptions. Patronage declined, and the writer at the end of the 18th century was often poorer than his equivalent had been at the beginning. Books were luxury items. A literate craftsman on £1 a week was hardly likely to fork out 13s 6d for a copy of Tom Jones, which meant that its author, Henry Fielding, depended for his living on his post at Bow Street magistrates court.

Only with the swelling of the British middle class did writing become a real possibility as a career. In 1812, the editors at the Edinburgh Review reckoned that there were "probably not less than 200,000 persons who read for amusement and instruction, among the middling classes of society". The Review paid its contributors well; it was anxious to establish the writer as a professional. Walter Scott is the most famous example of a new breed, exchanging a legal salary of £1,300 for a series of furiously written novels that sometimes earned him £20,000 a year, a lot of which went into building his Gothic castle in the Scottish Borders. By the time Dickens, Balzac and Dumas were producing their highly profitable serial novels, the triangular foundations of the modern book trade - author, publisher, bookseller - had already been laid. Writers got advances against unwritten work and then flattered booksellers at "trade dinners" to persuade them to up their orders. A bestselling author could make a small fortune for his publisher: Byron for John Murray, Dickens for Chapman & Hall, the word of God for William Collins, who bought a country house and a steam yacht by selling 300,000 bibles a year.

Until now, remarkably little about literary production has changed. Some authors - JK Rowling is the modern Scott - generate big profits, while others - let's think of Ian McEwan as Byron - certainly earn enough to keep wolves from their various doors. A misleading idea has arisen, however, that writers generally can earn enough money to do nothing else. The idea is ignorant of history, of TS Eliot keeping himself comfortable on academic stipends and a publishing house directorship, of Angus Wilson superintending the reading room at the British Museum. It may be that we have it because authorship is now so visible, with the author turned into a small celebrity. But we can all be authors now and publish ourselves on the web. What you might call the moral and aesthetic case for writing - to think, imagine and describe and then communicate the result to an audience - can be satisfied online. It just doesn't make any money. The age of the gifted amateur is surely about to return.

At British and American universities, this future has to be kept as a woeful secret. A great paradox of the age is that while newspapers continue their inexorable decline and publishing cuts its costs, journalism and creative writing degrees have never been more popular. Year on year, journalist applicants stood a quarter higher at 13,229 for courses beginning this autumn. Creative writing can now be learned at nearly every British institute of higher learning. Figures are hard to come by, but Britain is probably turning out about 1,300 "creative writers" every year.

Why do young people apply? Because they think they can be the next Zadie Smith. Why do universities encourage them? Because money can be made from fees. Is this responsible behaviour? We need to weigh the smashed hopes of creative writers against the financial needs of their tutors, who are themselves writers, and earning the kind of money that writing would never supply. A closed little dance: tutors teach students who in turn teach other students, like silversmiths in a medieval guild where a bangle is rarely bought though many are crafted, and everyone lives in a previous world.

So if the world of the professional full-time writer is under threat, whither the book and book industry?



The decline and fall of books: Traditional bookshops are closing; vending machines are churning out novels; and e-books are the new paperbacks; so is this the final chapter for the book industry?
Nicholas Clee,The Times, May 7, 2009

Like so many prototypes of supposedly revolutionary inventions, the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) fails to impress. Sited in a branch of Blackwell's in Charing Cross Road, London, the machine resembles an oversized photocopier with extra bits. Can this be part of, as a Blackwell's executive has claimed, “the biggest change since Gutenberg”?

It is an attractive idea. Wouldn't it be marvellous to go into a shop knowing that if the book you wanted was not in stock, you could get it printed specially for you? Or that you could browse the catalogue and get copies of whatever you fancy in minutes. Blackwell's claims that the EBM offers 400,000 titles, which are digitised texts from libraries and other sources. On receiving an order, the machine takes about 20 minutes to set up the file and then prints a perfectly acceptable paperback book in five minutes. A 400-page book costs about £9. Those produced from digital files look good; those produced from books that have gone through a scanner look a bit rough.

On May 6, Amazon unveiled a new Kindle e-reader (a widescreen version of the handheld device for reading electronic books). “You never have to pan, you never have to zoom, you never have to scroll. You just read,” said Jeff Besos, Amazon's chief executive, at the New York launch. It is yet another indication that the book industry could do with a new way of distributing and selling books.

Booksellers are struggling to make a go of shops with large ranges of slow-turning stock, and they are paying prohibitive rents. Leading publishers are gambling scary sums of money on books by top authors and celebrities and struggling to underpin their lists with less glamorous titles. Authors, unless they are talented or lucky enough to make the bestseller lists, look on as these firms' ever fiercer battles over dwindling margins eat into royalty payments.

No doubt future generations of the EBM will be less clunky. Then the machine will be well adapted to conform to the theory advanced by Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail. Businesses would thrive, Anderson argued, by supplying deep ranges of items, many of them selling in small quantities to niche audiences. Amazon is an example. The internet retailer promotes bestsellers heavily, with deep discounts. But it really scores in offering a huge catalogue of titles - many more than a terrestrial bookshop can stock. Even more profitable is Amazon's Marketplace business, through which it acts as a middleman for sellers of second-hand and out-of-print books.

The effects of Amazon's activities can be seen all around Blackwell's on Charing Cross Road, once the heart of London bookselling. Now only Foyles, Borders and Blackwell's remain. Blackwell's specialist neighbour, Sportspages, is long gone. Another specialist, the crime and science-fiction bookshop Murder One, closed recently, blaming competition from the internet. The art booksellers Zwemmers and Shipley have disappeared too, and the women's bookshop Silver Moon survives as a department within Foyles. Murder One was a great shop to browse in. But even the most conscientious supporter of independent bookselling must have found Amazon too tempting to ignore. Buy from Amazon and you start getting recommendations of new titles. If you made a trip to Murder One you could not be confident that, for example, every title in Andrew Taylor's Lydmouth series would be there; they are all on Amazon, though some are second-hand.

A visit to Blackwell's on a weekday afternoon illustrates another problem for terrestrial booksellers. There are fewer than ten customers in the shop. They have the run of thousands of square feet of selling space and of thousands of titles. Many of these titles attract buyers just two or three times a year; and those long-awaited sales may bring in no more than the price of a paperback. Meanwhile, Blackwell's is paying premium rents.

Booksellers have managed to make profits from this bizarre business model by balancing new titles, which sell quickly, with deep ranges of stock. The bestsellers pull in customers and generate instant turnover and profits; the backlist ensures continuing custom. The problem now is that profits from the bestsellers have sharply declined. The abandonment of retail price maintenance on books in 1995 allowed supermarkets and Amazon - the only retailers to achieve substantial growth in their book businesses in the past few years - to discount bestselling titles at levels that specialist booksellers struggle to match. As a result, independent bookshops have largely given up selling celebrity memoirs and other mass-market titles. Waterstone's, as the biggest bookseller in the country, has to try to compete, but by offering far deeper discounts than it would like. In its last set of financial results, Waterstone's profit margin was less than 3 per cent. Its latest strategy is the “Discover” campaign, an effort to promote its shops as unrivalled places to find expected or unexpected gems.

From the producer's end, the economics of the book business are just as challenging. The leading publishing houses are international giants, hungry for bestsellers, which are very expensive to acquire. Last autumn, Transworld had a huge hit with Paul O'Grady's memoir At My Mother's Knee. This spring, the company signed up a further volume from the chat-show host, but reportedly had to double its previous advance, to £2 million - because O'Grady, or his agent, wanted to match the sum that Dawn French had received for her memoir, Dear Fatty. So Transworld has paid twice as much for a book that will probably sell half as well. Another company found itself similarly penalised for success: to buy a second novel by the author of an unexpected bestseller, the publisher was asked to pay a sum equivalent to the profit it had made on her first book. It meant that the new book was almost certain to be unprofitable unless it reproduced the earlier success. It didn't.

In spite of the scary economics, celebrity books and other blockbusters have made a lot of money for publishers in the past few years. Will our appetite for such books be as strong in a credit crunch? It must be doubtful. Publishers are praying that the trend can survive, however, because the economics of the rest of their businesses is also looking dodgy.

The publishing model has a lot in common with the bookselling one: in theory, the bestselling titles bring in the turnover and profits and the rest of the list provides the bedrock of the business. But publishing the so-called “midlist”, or any book that does not come with some kind of marketing angle, has become more difficult. A book has to be “promotable”: the author will be young and attractive, or have an interesting CV; the work will tell an extraordinary story. Biographies of literary figures outside the top rank, or novels with undemonstrative virtues, do not cut it.

The reason why Tindal Street Press - an Arts Council-funded imprint in Birmingham - was able to publish Clare Morrall, the Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, and Catherine O'Flynn, the Costa award-winning writer, is that no big publisher saw the potential of these authors' novels. (They do now: Morrall is with Sceptre and O'Flynn with Penguin.) Some acclaimed authors have moved to small houses: Maggie Gee (formerly HarperCollins), for example, is now with Telegram Books, and Tibor Fischer (formerly Chatto & Windus) is with Alma Books.

Practices that have been normal in the book industry for years are becoming unsustainable. You pay an author an advance - say £15,000 - that is probably too large, even though it is too small as recompense for what may have been a year's work. You print 1,000 hardbacks and manage to sell 800 copies to booksellers. Lorries bring them to your warehouse and take them out again to the shops. The book gets a few reviews, but no recognition from prize jurors. Half of the copies come back and they, along with the 200 that never left, get pulped. A year later, the paperback comes out. Richard and Judy fail to recommend it, the booksellers do not select it for their three-for-two promotions. The lorries go to and fro again and more books get pulped. No wonder publishers are looking for new authors through low-cost ventures such as HarperCollins' Authonomy, a self-publishing website, and Macmillan New Writing, which pays no advances.

This is where digital technology, such as the EBM and electronic devices, including the Sony Reader, comes in. Printing thousands of books that sit in warehouses or on booksellers' shelves, only to be pulped, is unsustainable. But remember the long tail: there may be a demand, albeit “niche”, for these texts. It makes sense to create digital files that can be downloaded or printed according to demand.

This prospect causes book industry figures to look with alarm towards their counterparts in music, where digital downloading, legal and illegal, has caused turmoil. It seems that consumers expect digital books to be cheap. But giants such as Penguin and HarperCollins will not be able to remain profitable if all their books cost less than, say, £10; and authors' rewards from these books, unless sold in large quantities, will be trifling. Worse, many consumers expect digital content to be free. While digital piracy is a minor problem for the book industry, it will grow.

Perhaps the digital revolution will decentralise publishing and bookselling, as Gutenberg's movable type did in the 15th century. Publishing, printing and bookselling may come together again. Will the bookshop of the future consist of a few hundred bestsellers and a print-on-demand machine? At Blackwell's, such a prospect required an imaginative leap. The EBM would print only some out-of-copyright works and those only if purchasers knew exactly what they wanted. The customers' terminal in the store was not functioning: you had to ask the bookseller to search for a title. The copyrighted works that various publishers are making available had not yet come through, and there was no search function on Blackwell's website.

A Gutenberg-style revolution is not, on this evidence, expected in the next few months. But if you are a lover of well-stocked bookshops, then you should enjoy them while you can.

Nicholas Clee is the joint editor of the book industry newsletter BookBrunch and the author of Eclipse (Bantam Press)

Perhaps it is not the future of the book we should be worried about, but the future of the serious book:

You can't be serious :Celebrity memoirs, declining libraries, the web and now the recession have all spelled bad news for publishing. Once thriving genres such as political and literary biography are ailing. Is it the end for quality non-fiction? Andy Beckett, The Guardian, Saturday 16 May 2009



Imagine dropping that in the bath...

Colin Robinson has been in publishing since 1976. He has worked for fusty companies and radical ones, for earnest independents and empire-building corporations, for Britons and Americans: as an editor, always involved in the slightly precarious business of putting out serious books. But recently he started noticing something about the way books are treated that disturbed him. "Here in New York" - Robinson lives in a fairly intellectual part of Manhattan - "books are quite often left out in the street. If people are moving, they don't take their books with them."

There may be a harmless explanation. Manhattan apartments are small. Some people always get rid of books once they've read them. Yet Robinson has some cause to see the phenomenon as a symptom of something ominous. On 3 December last year, despite what he describes as an editorial list "filled with erudite, well-written books", he abruptly lost his job at the American publisher Scribner.

So many other editors were sacked in New York that day, it almost instantly became known in the closely connected worlds of American and British publishing as "Black Wednesday". In recent months, such culls have become grimly routine in many industries. But among those who write, publish and sell serious non-fiction - the biographies, histories, travel and science books researched and written with a degree of subtlety for a general audience - the bad news seems to have been building up since long before the current recession.

The range of titles stocked by British libraries has been falling for decades. The net book agreement, which in effect subsidised the British book business, has been dead for a decade and a half. In that time, book retailers have concentrated increasingly on the genres that are easiest to sell. Book prices have collapsed. Within many publishers, sales and marketing considerations have come to trump editorial ones, and most authors of serious non-fiction have had to accept smaller advances and smaller print runs.

Meanwhile, review space for their books in most newspapers has shrunk. The time their work spends on the shelves of bookshops has shortened. The competition for readers' attention - from the internet, from secondhand books sold online, from the seemingly ever-expanding celebrity culture - has sharpened. Bestsellers and "brand-name authors" squeeze out less established titles and writers more than ever before. Supermarkets and chain bookshops squeeze out independent booksellers. The number of books published in Britain - well over 100,000 a year and growing, five times as many as in 1970, which is far more than in comparable countries - means that all books fight for air. The computerisation of British bookselling, more advanced than almost anywhere in the world, casts an increasingly cold eye on serious books' commercial performance.

At the same time, wider cultural shifts - the evaporation of the idea of a literary canon, a less deferential attitude to experts, changing reading habits in the digital age - may be making serious, would-be definitive books less attractive to a broad public. Once-thriving serious genres such as political memoirs, literary biography and literary travel writing all appear to be ailing.

"The fat years of the printed word are over," says John Sutherland, the academic and author of several books on the history of publishing. "Even if books get dirt cheap, readers simply don't have the time or motive to invest in them. The old cultivated readership is not as solid as it was. The safe library sale doesn't exist any more. There's been a loss of authority in the serious book." A former bookseller who is now a freelance literary publicist says: "There are plenty of good books going missing. Books that take five years to write. Publishers used to put them at the front of their catalogues. Nowadays the print runs are tiny for these books, about 2,000. Publishers say they can print more copies, but if they're printing 2,000 of something they're not going to get behind it. Because of publishers' falling profit margins, production values have gone down on some of these books. You're seeing paper that's turning yellow before it gets out of the shop. You've got publishers and literary agents blaming the bookshops and vice versa. You've got people going to literary festivals who'll pay £10 for a ticket to an author event but won't pay £20 for a history book."

Neil Belton, an editor at Faber with a long track record in serious non-fiction, is almost as bleak: "The book trade and publishing industry has embraced its inner philistine. The bigger book chains have semi-withdrawn from interest in serious books. The number of publishers that are committed to trying to bring these books to an audience is smaller. When they are interested in serious authors, the big publishing conglomerates are often chasing only the very big names, people established in their fields." The literary agent Peter Straus, previously a publisher at Picador, is also worried: "It is more and more difficult to place good books. Retail's changed. Advances have come down in the last two years. So many books haven't sold. There are too many books published. The harsh realities of the market will impinge on certain writers, certain publishers, certain agents."

In his 2000 polemical history The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, the veteran American publisher André Schiffrin calls this process "market censorship". But one person's market censorship is another person's market realism. Clare Alexander, like Straus a well-known agent previously involved in serious publishing, gives an example. "Between about 2003 and 2006, a lot of agents and publishers thought history was the new rock'n'roll. The advances people were paid were ridiculous: £100,000-plus for books that were not going to sell. Now the same sort of books are getting probably about £30,000. Some of the advances in serious non-fiction used to be seriously out of kilter."

Until 2006, Scott Pack was the head buyer at Waterstone's, Britain's most dominant bookshop chain. "Historically, publishers have published too much of this [serious] stuff," he says. "Fifteen years ago, there were tens of millions of pounds of unsold stock sitting in bookshops. A publisher would put out a book on Henry VIII, say, and distribute 10,000 up and down the land. Then the publisher would be sitting there saying, 'We sold 10,000 - didn't we do great?', when really only 2,000 copies of the book ever sold. Nowadays bookselling is more professional, more commercial. It's not as nice ... A bookseller can return unsold books to the publisher after three months. Or if the book is in a three-for-two promotion, after four weeks ... But we see much better what the true sales of serious books are."

Pack argues that those who fear for such titles in the modern marketplace are being snobbish and pessimistic. "In the last 10 years, the British book industry has been selling more books. More people are reading than ever before. Some of those extra readers are buying the kind of books you find in supermarkets - misery memoirs, mass-market crime - so, yes, the market share for heavyweight non-fiction will be smaller ... There used to be a lot of noise around these books. They were books made for great reviews. But people didn't want to buy them."

Currently writing a book blog called Me And My Big Mouth, Pack is practised at making populist, intellectual-baiting arguments. Elsewhere in our interview, he dismisses upmarket publishers and reviewers as "the intelligentsia" and unsold books as "dead stock" and "rubbish". Yet he insists that it is still perfectly possible for a good, serious book to find a readership: "The vast majority are stocked in ones and twos. They can stick around, pick up word-of-mouth, sell steady."

How such gradual success can be achieved given the ruthless stock control of the book chains is not something Pack explains. Yet some publishers of serious titles share his optimism. "The market for really good books has not diminished," says Stuart Proffitt, the publishing director of Penguin Press, identified by Schiffrin and others as a rare example of a corporate-owned publisher making a success of upmarket books. Proffitt cites Rosemary Hill's erudite biography of the Victorian architect Augustus Pugin, published by Penguin to great acclaim in 2007. So far it has sold more than 17,000 copies in hardback and paperback combined, according to Nielsen BookScan, the US market research corporation that records British book sales. David Kynaston's history of the Attlee era, Austerity Britain, has sold 65,000 copies; Kate Summerscale's reconstruction of a Victorian murder investigation, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, more than 305,000; Richard Dawkins's anti-religious polemic The God Delusion more than 687,000.

Proffitt concedes that such successes take more effort than they used to: "You have to think more carefully than ever before about every aspect of a book's publication, how it looks, how you communicate its existence." But he insists that the fears for serious books are overblown. "People in the book business are always saying there's a crisis and we're going to hell in a handbasket."

On that point, at least, Proffitt has it over the doom-mongers. Book publishing is a melodramatic business: unpredictable, characterised by very public successes and failures, with even its seasoned practitioners consequently subject to sudden mood swings. In 1934, Geoffrey Faber, one of the founders of Faber, wrote despairingly: "The market is glutted. General publishing is therefore fast degenerating into a gambling competition for potential bestsellers." In 1979, the senior American publisher Jonathan Galassi warned that serious books were becoming "high-risk ventures for modern publishers who have inherited the overhead[s] of big business along with its management techniques and managers, and who have become increasingly reluctant to invest even very modest sums in projects which promise little in the way of immediate return". Non-academic publishing, he went on, may become "nothing more than the calculated marketing of slickly packaged materials, another 'leisure-time' industry ... unconnected to ... the intellectual and cultural roots of the society it purports to serve".

Today, such prophecies look both uncannily accurate and too apocalyptic. On the ground floor of the flagship branch of Waterstone's in Piccadilly, central London, the categories of goods on sale are listed on the wall as follows: "Bestsellers. Gift Wrap & Cards. Humour. Indoor Games. London. Magazines. Maps. Travel. Travel Literature." A huge, mural-sized poster advertising an in-store event by the entertainer Rolf Harris dominates the main entrance. Where books are on display, many of them are in the three-for-two promotions that, once restricted to deals on baby wipes or orange juice in supermarkets, have become central over the last decade to the operation of British chain bookshops.

But there is still serious non-fiction here and there. In recent weeks, there was a place in the front window for Iain Sinclair's chewy new history of Hackney, and a prominent table of thoughtful titles picked by Nick Hornby, including What Good Are the Arts? by the academic and critic John Carey. Esoteric history, the extended critical essay - both titles come from genres whose commercial prospects have been repeatedly written off.

And yet, something is undeniably shifting in the climate for serious books. You can see it in the Piccadilly Waterstone's and in the other cavernous chain bookshops along nearby Charing Cross Road, the traditional heart of British bookselling. Carpets and shop-fittings are worn. Shelves are half-filled. Customers are sparse, even on a weekday lunchtime. There is less bustle, less atmosphere, in these shops than when they opened a decade ago. There is a sense that good times have come and gone.

Good times have never been the norm for serious books in Britain. "From its very beginning, the publishing industry relied on books which could command a large market," writes John Feather in his still-relevant 1988 study A History of British Publishing. "The economics of production ... meant that it could not do otherwise." The 19th century brought mass literacy and a countrywide network of bookshops and publishers, but the business became ever more narrowly focused on producing commercial titles and selling them at a discount. "Booksellers could only afford to stock the most popular and fast-selling," writes Feather, "and had no space on the shelves for ... perhaps more worthwhile works which would sell more slowly and in smaller numbers. The bookshops ... were being squeezed out of business as a market mechanism for serious literature." By the 1890s, so many bookshops had closed and serious books were becoming so marginalised that a consensus formed that book discounting should be banned: the net book agreement was the result, and came into force on 1 January 1900.

For the next three-quarters of a century, British publishing and bookselling were diverse, slow-changing enterprises, relatively tolerant of high-minded books and "ramshackle to the cold business eye", as John Sutherland put it in a 1978 study of the book business. The arrival of state funding for libraries further softened the environment for cerebral writers. In 1965, Britons borrowed 10 books for every one they bought. "With any serious non-fiction book," says Clare Alexander, who entered publishing in 1973, "you knew you could sell 1,500 to the libraries." This enabled mainstream publishers to profitably put out books whose high-street sales were barely in the hundreds - and whose content can seem startlingly uncommercial by current standards. In 1975 Jonathan Cape published Leninism Under Lenin, a labyrinthine theoretical work by the Belgian Marxist historian Marcel Liebman. An equivalent work nowadays would be issued in Britain by a small academic press.

Yet the old British book business had its downsides. Bookshops were often dusty places, glacial in their book-ordering processes and off-putting to young or less educated customers. Even the influence of libraries, Sutherland argues, was not always benign: their preference for books that could be read in a fortnight, the standard lending time, helped keep postwar British writing terse and cramped.

But the tweediness of it all can be overstated. In 1935, in the middle of the depression, Penguin introduced the mass-market paperback to Britain, sold at first through branches of the brash American-owned chainstore Woolworth's, prefiguring today's supermarket book trade. Penguins were initially criticised as crassly commercial and middlebrow, yet soon became seen as a new, accessible form of quality publishing. In the late 1940s, the Better Books chain pioneered the idea of the bookshop as a bright and appealing space, "a social centre with a coffee bar, poetry readings and other literary events", notes Randall Stevenson in The Oxford English Literary History. Meanwhile, wider social changes, such as the growth of higher education, and technical bookselling ones - the introduction of "tele-ordering" in 1979, allowing books to be ordered in days rather than weeks or months - gradually created a bigger potential market for serious titles.

In the 1980s, that market finally materialised. Tim Waterstone was an unemployed man with six children who had already been a tea broker in India, a manager for a brewer and, most recently, the overseer of a disastrous attempt by WH Smith to set up a subsidiary in America, for which he had been fired. In 1982, he used his severance pay and money from friends and relations and the NatWest bank - the latter through the Conservative government's loan guarantee scheme for entrepreneurs - to set up a bookshop in a prosperous part of west London, which was relatively unaffected by the early 1980s recession. The rest of the Waterstone's story has long become bookselling legend: the new shop's daringly deep and heavyweight stock; its unfusty decor and helpful staff; its armchairs for browsers and friendly opening hours. For the next decade and a half, Waterstone's added branches, evangelised for "serious culture", as Waterstone characterised his books, and made literary biography and enigmatic travel writing seem viable high-street products.

New readerships appeared. "In the 90s," says Sutherland, "just before the pension penalty for early retirement came in, there was a mass retirement of teachers. Suddenly, there was a vast number of extremely competent readers who had a lot of time."

The book boom, too, was part of a broader cultural surge that produced the Independent, Channel 4 and scores of new television production companies. The free-market country being created by Margaret Thatcher, however much liberal writers might deplore its harshness, was opening up new possibilities for serious culture, while the non-market mechanisms that protected it, such as the net book agreement, remained largely in place.

During the 1990s this happy equilibrium between commerce and art in the British book business began to break down. By 1989, Waterstone's, like many new 1980s businesses, found that it had expanded too fast and borrowed too much money. Waterstone sold his bookshops to his old corporate foe, WH Smith. Gradually, over the next dozen years, the shops began to stock a narrower range of books.

To a certain extent, Waterstone's was responding to wider developments. Bestseller lists had been published in Britain since 1974, but it was only in the 1990s, with the belated installation of electronic point-of-sale technology in most bookshops, that accurate sales figures for every title became available. Meanwhile, British publishing, which had seen many of its old independent firms taken over by big corporations in the 1980s, had become much more business-oriented. By the mid-1990s, Neil Belton says, "a lot of bigger publishers were ambivalent about the net book agreement". Together with many booksellers, they thought that the freedom to discount titles would improve their profits. In 1995, the agreement in effect collapsed.

That same year, Amazon started selling books via the internet - making even the most rarefied titles universally available, at least in theory, but also offering books at deep discounts and beginning slowly to drain bookshops of their customers. By 2000, British bookselling was beginning to resemble its 19th-century self again: highly competitive, more interested in clever price promotions than clever books. That summer, Waterstone's sacked the manager of its popular Manchester branch, Robert Topping, for refusing to narrow his eclectic stock in favour of bestsellers.

Nine years on, Topping is still in bookselling. He owns and runs two shops, one in Ely in Cambridgeshire and one in Bath. If you like serious books but usually go to the chains, visiting a Topping shop is initially a shock, but then deeply reassuring. "Topping & Company Booksellers of Ely" says the archly old-fashioned sign above the door. Inside, the front of the shop is full of solid biographies, footnoted histories, books on classical music, painting and religion. There are no price promotions, no author posters, no prominently displayed celebrity titles; just plain but expensive-looking wooden bookshelves, neatly jammed with books from the floor to the ceiling and covering every wall through three storeys of small rooms. If you are looking for a John Banville novel, there are seven titles, rather than the couple you usually find in a modern bookshop. If you like the late JG Ballard, there is his genial recent autobiography but also The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). There are newspaper reviews carefully cut and mounted on a pinboard.

Topping is a vicar-ish man in cords and spectacles, but he is not some airy nostalgic. "In the age of the internet, you have to have as wide a stock as you can," he says. "I have to pay the bills myself, so I can see if it works." The computerisation of bookselling, he goes on, ought to help rather than harm serious books: "Distribution is faster, ordering is faster, so a shop can buy single copies and then restock." Is there any sort of serious book that he does think is becoming obsolete? He looks blank for a few moments. "There is this thought that the three-volume life doesn't work these days ..." He pauses again. "Does it work? I suppose not ... But if you believe enough, you can make a book sell."

His shop is busy. Topping chose its site carefully: Ely is a pretty place full of tourists and retired academics, 20 miles from the nearest chain bookshop. But he thinks location is not central to selling serious books: "My hunch is you could do this anywhere."

Belton agrees. "I don't see any evidence that readers are unwilling to grapple with serious ideas in book form, as long as the book is readable. You always hear nonsensical things: 'People aren't interested in science books any more. People aren't interested in history.' That's so wrong. There will always be new subjects, new syntheses, in every field." Peter Straus adds: "In the early 90s, people said political memoirs didn't sell, and then there was Alan Clark's diaries. Anything's possible if the book's good enough." Clare Alexander says: "I don't think the readers of serious books have disappeared. What's happened is a breakdown in delivery. From October onwards - a quarter of the year - bookshop budgets are absorbed by celebrity books."

Some aspects of the life of a serious book have probably changed for good. Anyone who has been writing them for mainstream publishers in the last decade, as I have, will have sensed the new pressures and opportunities: to get your book into the shops at the optimum time of year, to be realistic about its commercial prospects, to promote it through the ever-multiplying media. Randall Stevenson, who is the head of English literature at Edinburgh University, is an advocate of picking your way through dense postmodern texts, yet he senses a new deference in non-fiction to impatient readers. "I read popular science, and it drives me round the bend, all the attention-grabbing and cute fact boxes." The packaging and titles of serious books may also sugar their contents a little more than they used to. Colin Robinson says: "There's quite a retro quality to even the most serious books now. Novels with an old-fashioned soldier on the cover. Books called The Lost City of X."

The internet could have something to do with this. The American scientist Maryanne Wolf, in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), shows that how we read, and what we are easily able and therefore willing to read, is not set, but depends on the kind of texts we are used to interpreting. "I do wonder," she writes, "whether typical young readers view the analysis of text and the search for deeper levels of meaning as more and more anachronistic because they are so accustomed to the immediacy ... of on-screen information."

This may be too pessimistic. Research into the internet's effect on reading is in its infancy. Despite decades of predictions to the contrary, the appetite for demanding non-fiction has survived the advent of newspapers, radio and television - and, in Britain, a popular culture with a particular ability to absorb talent and themes that in other countries would be channelled into grand state-of-the-nation volumes. In fact, many publishers think the noise and immediacy of the web will make slow, quiet immersion in a book seem more, not less, appealing. And books, unlike most digital media, are not directly dependent on recession-affected advertising revenues.

Other economic and social trends remain favourable: the growth of higher education; the proliferation of literary festivals; the falling costs of book production. Tellingly, more people than ever are writing books. "People are infatuated with the romance of writing," says Sutherland. "I can't tell you how many students of mine I recommend an agent to." Dying artforms tend not to attract so many new practitioners.

The crisis in serious non-fiction has probably been overdone. There is a crisis in British bookselling, thanks to the internet, the recession and the particular competitiveness of the British high street - Alexander cites the ever-increasing rents for retail premises. Some non-fiction genres, such as literary biography, are in decline, at least for now. But other serious genres, such as economics and nature writing, are on the rise. Most types of book go through these cycles of boom and bust. In unsettling times, books that try to explain the world may flourish.

In truth, it is too early to tell: serious non-fiction takes time to research and write and sell. But in the meantime, it may be a good idea for authors of such titles to be realistic about their place in the economic order. As John Feather writes in his history of British publishing, before Waterstone's, before agents and advances, before the invention of the modern book business: "The medieval author worked for himself, for God or for a patron, or indeed for all three." I'm not sure that career path would be so popular now.

I tell myself and others I would like to be a full-time writer. However, I fear if I was to become one, I would get detached from the 'real world' and quite possibly end up like Martin Amis. That is a fate I would wish on few!



'I've read the new Martin Amis.' 'Neither have I.' (to use a Peter Cook-ism)

I think writers, like Denis Healey said of politicians, need a 'hinterland' outside their profession, or they get trapped in their own bubble world. The thought of having to write, as opposed to wanting to write, does not appeal to me much (unless the money was really good!). So I will keep writing, when I feel like it, and one day I might just hit the jackpot.

PS There is another short-story competition at work. I've submitted something, which I will publish here once the results are out, towards the end of the month.

He came he saw...

Apols for the lack of any posts in recent weeks. Partly illness, partly busy with other stuff, largely because I feel anything I say will be left high and dry by the way political events are going in Britain. I've decided that, with the European/local elections on June 4th that it might be safer to leave things until after the results for them come out.

Suffice to say, I will be voting No2EU, Yes2Democracy on June 4th.

Socialists For Small Government?

From Chris Dillow's Stumbling and Mumbling blog:

Shrink the state: a leftist aim, April 17th 2009

David Semple thinks the left should join American tea parties, which protest against high taxes. I think I agree. The desire to shrink the state should be a leftist aim. I say so for four reasons.

1. Big government cannot be redistributive government. If the state is raising 40% of GDP in taxes, it must tax the worst off, simply because the rich, even in the UK and US, aren’t that rich or plentiful.

This pdf gives us the numbers. Table 2 shows that the tax system - leaving aside benefits - actually adds to inequality. This is because direct taxes cut the Gini coefficient by 4 percentage points, but indirect taxes add 5 points to it. And table 21 shows that the poorest fifth of households with children pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than the richest 10%: 37.2% against 33%.

2. A big state hurts the worst off. Right-wing nut jobs might pose as victims of “ZaNuLabour.” But whether we look at Purnell’s welfare plans, repressive anti-immigration laws or the policing of protests, it is ordinary people who are the real victims of an overly powerful state: newspaper sellers, poor foreigners, the unemployed and ill. The left should be on their side.

3. When the state has lots of power, there’ll be a big fight to control it. And it’s the rich and powerful that win such fights. Why do you think banks get big bail-outs whilst ordinary workers are flung onto the dole with little compensation?

4. Belief in big government rests upon the notion that there’s an elite of leaders which has the wisdom and know-how to manage our affairs from the top-down; this is why New Labour found common cause with corporate bosses - both share the same ideology. But it is an utterly anti-egalitarian notion. It is also utterly wrong.

British State Degeneration...and English National Regeneration?

This weekend I saw two articles by two of my favourite political writers: Peter Oborne and Paul Kingsnorth.

Peter Oborne's The Triumph of the Political Class
is a rollocking good polemic about the degeneration of British political life in recent decades. He is possibly the only Daily Mail columnist ever to favourably cite the Noam Chomsky/Edward Herman 'propaganda model' of the media as a good explanation of how British political life works!(p.265) My main problem with Oborne is that he persists in hoping that a David Cameron Government would improve the quality of public life. My own opinion is that, like the annual Soviet grain harvest figures, British Governments tend to be worse than the last one, better than the next one...

The Tories must avoid the cult of the celebrity prime minister: Parliamentary democracy has been supplanted at Westminster by a regime of media hype, spin doctors and skulduggery
Peter Oborne, The Observer, Sunday 19 April 2009

Even when he was prime minister, Stanley Baldwin was in the habit of taking long journeys by train. He seems never to have been molested on these trips. However, on one occasion, he became conscious that a fellow passenger was staring at him rather intently. At length the man introduced himself. "Remember me?" he declared. "We were together at Harrow in the 1890s. What are you up to now?"

The agreeable notion that a sitting prime minister could travel on his own by rail, unrecognised except by a former schoolfriend, seems implausible today. The Baldwin anecdote does, though, reflect a fundamental truth about the constitutional role of a British prime minister. He or she is not the head of state and therefore has no symbolic public role. Constitutionally, the prime minister is all but impotent. Power is legally vested in the hands of cabinet ministers. That is why it is Nye Bevan, health secretary in the great postwar Labour government, and not prime minister Clem Attlee who is remembered as the founder of the National Health Service.

The modern notion of a celebrity prime minister, permanently surrounded by an army of flunkeys and operating out of a great command centre inside Downing Street, is novel. Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and John Major were all closer to Stanley Baldwin's idea of government than the structure that prevails inside Downing Street today. It is not fully understood how quickly this idea of a celebrity prime minister has arisen - and to what extent it represents a revolution in British government.

National leaders from Baldwin to Major did their best to respect the rule of law. Celebrity prime ministers are actively hostile to historic freedoms and civil liberties. Traditional prime ministers understood and appreciated due process. Celebrity prime ministers see it merely as an encumbrance and resent the civil service disciplines of impartiality, scruple and properly noted cabinet meetings. Traditional prime ministers always sought to govern through parliament - Baldwin would spend hours in the chamber of the House of Commons. Celebrity prime ministers have tried to cut out the Commons. Instead, they have enfranchised the media and turned it into an ancillary arm of government.

A good way to illustrate this is to examine Michael Dobbs's powerful study of high politics in the 1980s, House of Cards. The most menacing and potent figure is the fictional chief whip, Francis Urquhart. It is he who bullies, bribes, manipulates, blackmails and schemes. In Armando Iannucci's superlative film about British high politics in the first decade of the 21st century, In the Loop, the chief whip has been written out of the script. Urquhart has been replaced by the sinister spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker. All the same blacks arts are at work; however, the battlefield has changed. Urquhart applied himself to parliament, Tucker bypassed the traditional institutions of the state and was only concerned with the media and its other methods of control: access, favouritism, information and the creation of an elite corps of client journalists.

For a British prime minister in the age of parliamentary democracy, the key figure was his chief whip. Today, we have moved on to a new constitutional arrangement, beautifully labelled "manipulative populism" by the civil rights campaigner Anthony Barnett. In this new environment, the crucial aide is the press officer, whose job is to burnish the image of his leader, while using smears and other secret tactics to punish and marginalise political opponents. Tony Blair and his gifted assistant, Alastair Campbell, brought this methodology to something close to perfection in the 1990s. "Go around smiling at everyone and get other people to shoot them," as Tony Blair advised the future foreign secretary David Miliband when he started to contemplate a career in politics.

Gordon Brown insisted when he became prime minister that he was going to turn his back on this debased political methodology. He pledged to bring back cabinet government, respect civil service impartiality, restore the primacy of parliament and to abandon the dark political arts at which the team of political assassins around Blair had so excelled.

Perhaps Brown genuinely meant what he said. It is impossible to say. Whatever the reasons, and some of them may have been understandable, he ended up remaining loyal to the Blair system of manipulative populism. Brown retained the alliance with the Murdoch press which lay at the heart of the Blair system of government, as well as an inner circle of cronies and spin doctors, of whom Damian McBride was the most noteworthy.

McBride's methodology contradicted everything that Brown publicly claimed to stand for. Before entering Downing Street, Brown told an interviewer: "I studied history. It is fascinating. There is a Namier school of history, which is less to do with ideas of popular concerns and all to do with manoeuvring of the elites. I do not accept that. I think that the real story of decision-making in politics is about ideas and ideals."

McBride, said by tutors to have been a brilliant student who could have embarked upon an academic career, is an indirect product of the Namierite school. He studied history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, under the guidance of Maurice Cowling. Cowling was an inspirational teacher. However, his particular scholarly contribution was to take Namier's pessimism about human nature, scepticism about political ideas, and dogmatic insistence that public events could only be explained by reference to narrow personal interest, to their ultimate conclusion. His most important book, The Impact of Hitler, argued in spellbinding detail that the British reaction to the rise of fascism in the 1930s could only be understood in terms of squalid calculations of partisan advantage. Cowling, who enjoyed disturbingly close connections to Tory central office, has been the mentor of a variety of other political figures. Among them are John Major's defence secretary Michael Portillo, the rising Tory star Michael Gove, and Mike Ellam, the current Downing Street press spokesman. It is Brown's tragedy that he has become a prime minister on the Namierite model.

This is also a national tragedy. This weekend, British politics has reached a dead end. Parliament is disgraced, thanks to the complicity of all three main parties in the abuse of the system of expenses, and the willingness of Labour peers to make a market in parliamentary legislation; the report is expected this week. Meanwhile, Downing Street has been caught out fabricating lies and calumnies about opponents. As a direct result, trust in politics has sunk and far-right parties such as BNP are on the rise.

The great question is whether David Cameron's Conservative party is capable of offering a different methodology. The signs are mixed. At Westminster, the Tory party has been complicit in the theft of taxpayers' money by ministers and MPs through exploitation of the expenses system. There is every reason to suppose that when Commons expenses are published in a few weeks' time, just as many shadow cabinet ministers will be exposed as ripping off the taxpayer as members of the government. Cameron would doubtless like to sack the offenders. Were he to do so, he would soon find that he has no frontbench left.

The opposition chief whip, Patrick McLaughlin, a former miner, may be a decent man, but inside the Tory party, the director of communications, Andy Coulson, is the more powerful figure. Like Blair and Brown, Cameron has chosen to govern through Iannucci's tight inner clique rather than Dobbs's traditional system of parliamentary democracy. I have no evidence of any kind, and nor do I have reason to believe, that Coulson operates through smears, let alone the filthy and shameful lies that Damian McBride and Derek Draper hoped to put in the public domain.

Yet Coulson is the former editor of the News of the World. During his time as editor, it was discovered that his royal correspondent was spending very significant sums of money to hack into the private conversations of members of the royal family. The royal correspondent went to jail, while a very perfunctory Press Complaints Commission investigation cleared Coulson of any knowledge of what was going on.

Coulson was much in evidence alongside Cameron and George Osborne at a party thrown at the West End nightclub Tramp by Rupert Murdoch's media fixer Matthew Freud two weeks ago. You can understand why Cameron likes Coulson. He is a highly intelligent man who is thoroughly familiar with the debased architecture of 21st-century public discourse. Cameron, who once boasted that he was the "heir to Blair", may have concluded that this is the only route to power.

But at this grim moment in our national life, Britain doesn't just need a change of personnel at the very top. We urgently need a new decency and morality in government and to get rid of the stinking and corrupt regime that has brought the idea of British democracy into such deep disrepute over the last few years.

So while 'There is Something Rotten in the State of Denmark', can meaningful change come from below? Can England and the English be mobilised to provide an alternative to Westminster's games with the City of London and Whitehall? This is a subject Paul Kingsnorth wrote about in Real England, which is another great read (though he slags off JD Wetherspoons at length for being bland- surely any firm that sells real ale cheap and converts banks into pubs cannot be all that bad?!).



Forget St George. It's time to celebrate Wat Tyler's Day: Levellers and Diggers have been replaced by binge drinkers. Has the glorious flame of English radicalism gone out?
Paul Kingsnorth, The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009

In case you didn't know - and that would put you in the majority - this Thursday is St George's Day. If recent years are a guide, traditional English cultural activities on display will include tabloid articles about councils refusing to fly the George Cross in case they offend Muslims, liberal handwringing about whether the whole thing is racist or not, and a proud display of massive indifference from everyone else.

The English, these days, do indifference well. To some, this is a good thing: it saves England from the kind of bombastic and sometimes sinister flag-worshipping patriotism that the Americans, for instance, go in for. Whether good or bad, it is certainly nothing new. Almost a hundred years ago, in 1915, GK Chesterton published probably the most famous poem ever written about the English, The Secret People, which comes back again and again to the same line: "But we are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet."

The English, some would have you believe, have never really spoken much. Those who view St George's Day with suspicion often claim that this is an essentially reactionary nation, whose people remain in thrall to a dying monarchy, a rose-tinted vision of the past and the collected works of Jeremy Clarkson.

But England, like any nation, has many faces. And if there is an English tradition worth celebrating on this St George's Day it is not our past triumphs in commerce or empire, but our tendency towards rebellion, dissent and resistance - a glorious tradition that, if we are not very careful, could soon be defunct, just as we need it most.

The English radical tradition can compete with that of any other nation. We, after all, killed our king before the French; we had our revolution before the Americans; and we fought against the invasion of the nation by a foreign king and his posse of robber barons before the Scottish.

From the resistance to the Norman conquest through to the great rebellion of 1381 that almost destroyed feudalism, the radical flowering of the civil war, the movements against enclosure, the machine-breakers and rick-burners of the early industrial age, the Chartists and the Tolpuddle martyrs, the Suffragettes and the early Labour movement - every ratcheting up of power and exploitation in England has been met with an angry and often successful reaction from its people. There is nothing indifferent or quietist about this version of the English story. This is a nation that it feels good to be a part of.

So where has it gone? When we need it most, why do most of us seem to have abandoned this spirit of resistance and liberty? Why do we live in a nation of CCTV cameras, email surveillance, DNA databases and masked riot police, watching in silence as more and more of our fundamental liberties are stolen by our own government?

Culturally, we are seeing the strip-mining of much of what makes England unique. Our independent shops and our local pubs disappear in their thousands every year. Our rural communities are ravaged by second homes, our high streets are carpet-bombed by superstores, our orchards and our small farms are rooted out at rates unprecedented in our history. We are selling off our health service and our schools. We are told that an ever-rising GDP justifies all of it.

Meanwhile, the English are the victims of a constitutional con trick that allows English legislation to be decided by Scottish and Welsh MPs, but not the other way round. Thus the English are lumbered with, for example, university fees and a market-based health service, despite the majority of England's MPs having voted against both these things; Scottish and Welsh MPs voted in Westminster to impose them on an unwilling England, despite their own people having rejected the same measures at home.

And what are the English doing about all this? At local level, some are bravely resisting these trends; but most of us seem too busy shopping. There is no rebellion in the offing, no revolution; not even a spate of rick-burning. Has the flame of English rebellion guttered out?

"In all societies," wrote George Orwell in 1940, "the common people must live to some extent against the existing order." Orwell reckoned that the spirit of English dissent had been reduced to "something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities." In the 21st century, this probably means binge-drinking and vandalising speed cameras.

But the times demand more. England is still under the cosh of what William Cobbett, one of our greatest radical writers, called "the Thing" - a voracious capitalist system with an ever-greater appetite. It is not too late to rediscover the righteous anger that coursed through the veins of the Levellers and the Diggers, of Wat Tyler and Thomas Paine. But one thing is clear: if the people of England don't speak soon, there may be little left worth saying.

Police State-Lite?

'If you want to know the time, ask a policeman...'

I didn't go on any of the demonstrations in London around the time of the G20 Summit a few weeks back. I had half a mind to go on the march on the Saturday before the summit, but I did not get bed until the early hours on Saturday morning and did not get up until Midday...! On the whole demonstrations alway seem to consist of a slow walk (and I'm not a slow walker!) followed by listening to (a fairly predictable) speakers who shout through a megaphone with a pretty poor PA system something you knew already. That does not inspire me. If we had a genuinely democratic political system where people knew that voting or signing petitions would have an important, or even decisive, say on the policies of the state, there would be little need for people to go on demonstrations. Perhaps I am being a naive democrat saying that, but being labelled a 'naive democrat' is one cross I can easily bear. However, people are increasingly losing faith in the political system so I expect the numbers of people wanting to air their grievances in public will increase. One thing that did annoy me in media coverage was those people writing/phoning/texting/e-mailing in complaining about the cost to 'the taxpayer' of policing all the demonstrations. I'm not sure how much it all cost, but it was pretty small beer compared to the cost to 'the taxpayer' of bailing the banks out, wasn't it? People who think there should be no demonstrations or marches should go and live in North Korea (along with people who say living in Britain is 'just like living under communism.' Five years in a North Korean labour camp would help them regain their sense of perspective).

Furthermore, I am not an enthusiastic demonstrator as I have no wish to be hit by a police truncheon and no wish to be 'kettled'. Being stuck for hours in a confined space by lines of police does not appeal to me at all. It seems demonstrators need to revise their tactics. Reading the linked article above, it is clear that the police have no desire to lose control of events in central London as they did during the Poll Tax riots on March 31st 1990. They have moved on in operational terms, just as they did in terms of tactics from the miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974 to the one in 1984-5. 25 years ago, Arthur Scargill thought NUM 'flying pickets' just had to turn up at power stations, coke plants etc and they would close. They did not expect the police to turn up en masse in riot gear a la the French CRS. This is how ruling classes stay ruling classes; when they come under serious threat they change tack and tactics (ditto with the recent jettisoning of 'free market' ideology with barely defrosted pseudo-'Keynesianism' straight from the outside freezer).

However, ruling classes and their institutions can screw things up too. After the death of Ian Tomlinson and various other film and photographic evidence of police 'excesses' (I'm using English understatement here) towards demonstrators, public distrust of the police and moves towards 'police state-lite' must increase. Hopefully coverage of recent events in London may even jolt the cosy assumptions of those who say 'If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide.' (which sounds like an IngSoc slogan from the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four). Or at least they may see that, now that it is a criminal offence to photograph police officers, their complacent phrase should also apply to the police.

However, enough of my witterings. Two articles I saw recently caught my eye...

Put enough cameras on the police and even the serially deferential wake up: The flowering inverse surveillance society can end the myth of faultless policing that survived 1,000 deaths in custody
Marina Hyde, The Guardian, Saturday 11 April 2009

Who watches the watchmen? Or, to translate Juvenal another way: who polices the police? The answer this week was a New York fund manager, of all unlikely superheroes, who provided the Guardian with key footage of the minutes leading up to the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests in London. The man came forward because "it was clear the family were not getting any answers".

If there is anything to feel optimistic about today, perhaps it is the hope that we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of sousveillance, the term coined by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, and it emphasises "watchful vigilance from underneath", by citizens, of those who survey and control them.

Not that turning our cameras on those who train theirs on us is without risk. Indeed, one might judge it fairly miraculous that the man was not forcibly disarmed of his camera phone, given that it is now illegal to photograph police who may be engaged in activity connected to counterterrorism. And as we know, everything from escorting Beyoncé to parking on a double yellow while you nip in to Greggs for an iced bun can now be justified with that blight of a modern excuse - "security reasons".

Yet it will by now have dawned on even the most dimwitted Met officer that it is increasingly impossible for them to control the flow of information about their activities - to kettle it, if you will - no matter how big their army of press officers putting out misleading information in the immediate aftermath of any event may be.

Did the Met genuinely think they could prevent the emergence of a far more joined-up picture of Tomlinson's passage through the City of London that afternoon, much as they thought they could suppress the details about Jean Charles de Menezes's tragic final journey? If so, their naivety is staggering.

Yet it's odd how often it has been the little ways in which the state attempts to keep tabs on our behaviour - tracking devices on wheelie bins and the like - that have most alienated those who previously bowed to authority. Also captured on film and published yesterday was an amusingly British act of defiance - a pyjama-clad householder blocking dustmen into his road by standing in their path, after they had declined to empty his neighbour's bin of five pebbles.

As Tomlinson's death shows, though, it's not all Victor Meldrew-meets-Passport-to-Pimlico larks. Indeed it is something of a shame that certain elements of society have only recently woken up to the possibility that the police might not be the faultless, justice-dispensing force of establishment myth, and only because - in the cases of De Menezes and Tomlinson - they have seen it with their own eyes, or at least enough of it to provoke a suspicion that was hitherto absent.

The serially deferential dismissed the Blair Peach outcry as lefty agitating. They did not make a point of seeing Injustice, the brilliant and desperately depressing 2001 documentary about deaths in police custody, of which at the time there had been 1,000 in the previous 30 years, without a single conviction.

But they are undeniably more cynical and inquisitive now, and it is interesting that for many previously deferential Brits, the Countryside Alliance march a year later, in 2002, was such a watershed. Here, peaceful marchers who considered themselves fine, upstanding members of law-abiding communities, were genuinely shocked and appalled at the manner in which they felt police treated them during the demonstration.

It is hard to say whether this sea change in the amount of trust people are willing to put in their alleged protectors will be reflected in the judgments of those with the power to call those protectors to account. The De Menezes jury chose notably to believe the civilian witnesses who countered the police line and said that officers had not shouted "armed police" before they shot.

Then again, the Independent Police Complaints Commission had apparently failed to interview the police officer who attacked Tomlinson 48 hours after he had come forward, with anonymous Met sources briefing that the man had not known it was him till he saw the footage, and collapsed upon realising it was. It is up to you how you interpret that memory hole. Maybe the attack was merely a forgettable instant in a trying afternoon. Maybe he had seen so many lone men walking with their hands in their pockets truncheoned that day that his own crack of the baton didn't stick in the mind.

Either way, perhaps the IPCC should interview the officer no matter what sort of funk he is in. After all, from what little we know of him, he would surely agree that there are no excuses for dawdling.

But we have no means of chivvying the IPCC along, alas - of giving them a metaphorical shove in the back, or a notional truncheoning. So in the meantime, let's note that a day which started out protesting about a very different them-and-us situation has reminded us that there is more than one attritional show in town. And sometimes, New York fund managers are on our side.

The police should take note: little brother's watching you
John Naughton, The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009

The attack on Ian Tomlinson was the Metropolitan Police's "Rodney King moment". King, you may recall, is a black American who, in March 1991, was savagely beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers after being stopped for a speeding offence. A resident videotaped the proceedings from his apartment. The Los Angeles District Attorney charged four officers with use of excessive force. A jury acquitted three of them and failed to agree about a verdict on the fourth. Six days of rioting followed, in which more than 50 people died and $1bn of property was destroyed.

The assault on Tomlinson will not spark off a riot, but nobody should underestimate the outrage it has generated. And from the instant the video footage - shot by an American bystander using his digital still camera - appeared on the Guardian website, it was clear that we had reached a pivotal moment. Consumer technology had given citizens a serious tool for recording how policemen behave.

It also brought to mind the case of Blair Peach, the young New Zealand teacher who, on a demonstration 30 years ago, was clubbed by a police officer and died the day after of his injuries. Nobody was ever tried for the assault and the coroner recorded a verdict of "death by misadventure".

There was no "citizen journalism" at the time of the Peach case. Nobody had a cameraphone or a digital camcorder, because they hadn't been invented. And the incident wasn't recorded by any press photographer or film crew. So the cop who attacked the young teacher escaped scot-free.

In a normal democracy we would expect that the technology which revealed what really happened to Tomlinson would stimulate a reassessment by the police about how they conduct themselves. Accidents will happen, terrible things are sometimes done in the heat of the moment, and political demonstrations attract their share of violent and disturbed people, but from now on the police will have to reckon with the possibility that anything they do will be recorded and globally published. At one time, they - and the authorities they serve - were the only ones with CCTV and face-recognition technology, the ones with the sole prerogative to videotape and photograph demonstrators. Now this technology is in the hands of consumers.

The police have two choices. Accept that digital technology will make them accountable for their actions or try to control the technology. In any normal society there would be no decision to be made. But since 9/11 the threat of global terrorism has given the state - and its security apparatus - carte blanche to take whatever measures it deems necessary. And it has imbued in every uniformed operative, from "Community Support" officers and the bobby on the beat to the bored guy in the airport checking your toothpaste, the kind of arrogance we once associated only with authoritarian regimes.

You think I jest? Talk to any keen amateur photographer. As a group, photographers have been subjected to increasingly outrageous harassment by police and security operatives. (For a partial list of incidents see bit.ly/22VFRX). Try photographing a bridge, public building or a police car parked on a double-yellow line and you will have a goon demanding your camera, image card or film.

Better still, ask John Randall, a Tory MP who recently told the Commons how one of his Uxbridge constituents, a Mr Wusche, photographed properties he thought were in bad repair to pass on to the council. In front of one building was a police car containing police community support officers who had parked on a double yellow line as they popped into a sandwich bar.

Randall told MPs that "one of the PCSOs went over to Mr Wusche" - who fled fascist Italy in his youth - "and told him that he must immediately delete the photographs. When Mr Wusche asked why, he was handed a notice and pretty much cautioned. That upset him a great deal".

It upsets me too. And I expect that when the fuss over Ian Tomlinson's tragic death has died down, we will find that the Nokia N82 and the Canon Digital Ixus have joined flick-knives, knuckledusters and coshes on the list of "offensive weapons". Welcome to New Labour's National Surveillance State.

Finally, if you think tourists may be put off from visiting London by the current image of the police, you may want to peruse Madam Miaow's thoughts on the matter...