Quantum of solace?

Solace

Data is fear, fear data

'It was all going well until about 18 months ago. That, to me, was when everything changed in education. It went crazy. Free periods were no longer about spending time on my classes and the future of our department. After school time stopped being about giving children extra help and running extra-curricular clubs that would nourish their passion for my subject.

'Suddenly, those things were no longer important. What was important now was data. Six times a year we were required to fill out little boxes about every single child we taught. Not meaningful comments designed to help children progress, just grades and numbers in boxes.

'The columns swam in front of my tired, admin-hating eyes. Instead of being trusted to manage our departments' assessment programme, we had to do "work sampling" every half term, as though our colleagues were not trusted professionals. It felt like sneaking. And worst of all, we were expected to produce formal exams for every single year group at the end of every term. Every term! That's seven meaningful exam papers every term in a practical subject that gets one period per week of teaching.

....

'You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned Gove yet. Well, that's mainly because I actually think that it's not just about him. It's about the way that schools have reacted to his changes. From what I can see, the main way is with knee-jerk panic. No pedagogical thought and intelligent debate went into the decisions at my school. It was fear. Education has become a horror film in which senior leadership teams are just trying to keep the wolves from the door by any means possible, and it's happening everywhere.'

Footnote: I know if it should be 'data are...' but the is data the glomerate beast, not intelligible bits of information.

The rule of law in the UK

http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2013/11/11/renewable-energy-ambitions-of-the-scottish-ministers-trounce-the-law-of-the-land/

Time future contained in time past

In 1975, when the future US President Obama was in his mid teens, Senator Frank Church's Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities published its reports.

"The Committee finds that the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the "national security" the law did not apply. While intelligence officers on occasion failed to disclose to their superiors programs which were illegal or of questionable legality, the Committee finds that the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law.

"Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.

...

"While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the "national security" or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a "potential" for violence -- and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave "aid and comfort" to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.

"The imprecision of the targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the Bureau to define the subjects of the programs. The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor, included "a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black." Thus, the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a Black Nationalist-"Hate Group."

"Furthermore, the actual targets were chosen from a far broader group than the titles of the programs would imply. The CPUSA program targeted not only Communist Party members but also sponsors of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee and civil rights leaders allegedly under Communist influence or deemed to be not sufficiently "anti-Communist". The Socialist Workers Party program included non-SWP sponsors of anti-war demonstrations which were cosponsored by the SWP or the Young Socialist Alliance, its youth group. The Black Nationalist program targeted a range of organizations from the Panthers to SNCC to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other black student groups. New Left targets ranged from the SDS to the InterUniversity Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy, from Antioch College ("vanguard of the New Left") to the New Mexico Free University and other "alternate" schools, and from underground newspapers to students' protesting university censorship of a student publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them."

Asymmetry

Amongst the newspaper revelations of the truly vast quantities of personal communications that are hoovered up electronically by the US National Security Agency and by our very own GCHQ at Cheltenham (neighbours of the Ladies' College and no slouch at these things) comes, almost predictably, first the official assurance that our GCHQ "scrupulously" observes the law and secondly the unofficial insider's assurance that the "analysts" are not actually sitting down with a cup of tea and a biscuit to listen in on your two-hour conversation with your granny. No, this monument of electronic data is sifted by computers for tell-tale signs of suspect terrorists or serious criminals who are about to blow up your granny, rob her of her life savings and radicalise her pussycat.

Nevertheless the stuff is there, cosily within the security service's reach and any individual in the future who for any reason became the object of the state's ssupicion or dislike could find themselves hideously exposed.

Elsewhere in the same newspaper is the revelation of the fact that yet another long-term police insider mole, who penetrated an environmental protest group, in this case Greenpeace London, in between fathering a few children in his relationships with female activists, had a major role in writing the pamphlet for which McDonald's spent years and millions in the famous McLibel case prosecuting the two other authors and therby trashing their own reputation.

One remembers other instances where police or perhaps security surveillance has been focussed on apparently harmless individuals (never mind that they were also innocent ones) in the most doggedly persistent and trivialising manner. It would seem that the characteristics of the Stasi are the natural tendency when the state begins to spy on its own citizens. Why should it be any different when it is done with computers rather than hidden microphones and binoculars?

Meanwhile, in this topsy-turvy world, we hear that the arch spy has filed espionage charges against Edward Snowden.

Postscript - information gathering:

Peter Francis, a former undercover police officer turned whistleblower, said his superiors wanted him to find "dirt" that could be used against members of the Lawrence family, in the period shortly after Lawrence's racist murder in April 1993.

He also said senior officers deliberately chose to withhold his role spying on the Lawrence campaign from Sir William Macpherson, who headed a public inquiry to examine the police investigation into the death.

Francis said he had come under "huge and constant pressure" from superiors to "hunt for disinformation" that might be used to undermine those arguing for a better investigation into the murder. He posed as an anti-racist activist in the mid-1990s in his search for intelligence.

"I had to get any information on what was happening in the Stephen Lawrence campaign," Francis said. "They wanted the campaign to stop. It was felt it was going to turn into an elephant.

"Throughout my deployment there was almost constant pressure on me personally to find out anything I could that would discredit these campaigns."

Postscript 2:

Beyond the detail of the operation of the programme, there is a larger, long-term anxiety, clearly expressed by the UK source: "If there was the wrong political change, it could be very dangerous. All you need is to have the wrong government in place. It is capable of abuse because there is no independent scrutiny."

Terrorist, terrorism, terror, security

“The collection is broad in scope, because more narrow collection would limit our ability to protect the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it may assist counter terrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities.”

Jame Clapper, United States Director of National Security

Swivel eyed loons 1

Michael Gove, secretary of state for education, champions the government's relaxation of planning controls because "we cannot think of our built environment without thinking of beauty" and we should welcome the prospect of new Chatsworths, NashTerraces of Regent's Park, Edinburgh New Towns, and Salisbury Cathedrals that the government "reforms" are about to unleash upon us. These new buildings of "grace and beauty'" will not only "ravish the eye and lift up the soul" but will provide new affordable housing for thrifty, aspiring, freedom-loving, socially mobile families. (Why be mobile when you live in a Chatsworth?) "No-one who believes in social mobility, in aspiration, in pro-family policies, in thrift and in freedom can be anything other than delighted by the release of more land for housing." The fact that "too few modern buildings can aspire to real beauty is a challenge to the architectural profession". That is the architectural profession which he has recently shouldered out of the business of designing new schools. The property developer "profession", hitherto bound hand and foot by those wicked mediocre architects, is not mentioned, but it is believed to be as delighted as Mr Gove.

If not now, when?

'[British Foreign Secretary] Hague has yet to make a statement since Obama's pledge [to renew his effort to close Guantanamo], but Tory MP Jane Ellison revealed that, during a meeting with MPs campaigning for [Shaker] Aamer's release, he had raised the option of upping the ante through a public plea.'

'Concern is rising about the health of Aamer, who has spent more than 80 days on hunger strike.'

'Aamer's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said he was growing increasingly worried about the seriousness of his physical condition. Last week Stafford Smith twice attempted without success to contact Aamer via US authorities, prompting fears that Aamer, who is significantly beyond the point at which a hunger strike can cause "irreversible cognitive impairment", may be seriously ill.'

'Aamer, who has been held for more than 11 years, was cleared in June 2007. US documents dated November 2009 told him that the "United States government intends to transfer you as soon as appropriate arrangements can be made".'

Unite and Rule - or Division Time?

I did not hear the radio interview with our Chancellor of the Exchequer where he defended his claim that the recent conviction of Mick Philpott, who was drawing over £50,00 in state benefits for his seventeen children, for the manslaughter of six of them in a house fire of itself demonstrated the necessity of restructuring the welfare benefits regime.

Mr Osborne, however, is quoted as having said "I don't set out to be divisive – actually far from it,  ... I think a lot of the things that I've been saying … are in tune with what the great majority of the country think and experience in their everyday lives."

I have to wonder how in touch Mr Osborne - or any member of the government - actually is "with what the great majority of the country think and experience in their everyday lives", although no doubt he is surrounded by advisers whose professional task is to tell him their version of it.

One doesn't have to wonder about (rather than wonder at) how in touch the majority of the country is with the facts of the welfare system. Surveys have shown that public opinion majorly overestimates the cost of welfare, its generosity to claimants, the extent of abuse, the proportion of the total cost that goes to the unemployed (as opposed to, for example, pensions), and the amount that this country spends compared with other European states.

Yet it is that confident phrase "I don't set out to be divisive" that strikes me most. I can imagine it being proclaimed equally sincerely by any aspiring populist dictator - including, I cannot help but reflect, Hitler, one of whose most often repeated phrases was "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer". Here and now in Britian we have a Coalition, though not one nation.

The people united come first. Then may come the horrors. Not, of course, that Mr Osborne is indulging in anything like Hitler's strident rhetoric, but, when appeals to the popular will gain political precedence over reasoned appeals to the public benefit, we are entering dangerous territory.

It is noticeable how often, at other times, Mr Osborne and his conservative goverment colleagues couch their appeal to a public described in a particular way, as "strivers" or "those who want to get on" or "hard-working families" (vintage New Labour), implying clearly that those whose views or opinions matter are those who already agree with the government's vision of society and the direction changes to its structure should take - fellow travellers on the road to political reform and the big, if not comprehensive, society. It echoes the late Mrs Thatcher's underlying question, "Is he one of us?" Yet she was a populist of a different stamp. For all her genuine belief that she was battling in the interests of her country and countrymen and women, Mrs Thatcher never shrank from identifying an 'enemy within'. Her politcal heir and successor, Tony Blair, with his fixation on the middleground was also aware that his social vision was not entirely comprehensive, and it is a rarity indeed to find a politician who is genuinely concerned to unite the country across real existing divisions, or, who, when the going gets tough, is not prepared to take political advantage from majority disdain for other elements in society.

One people. The phrase with great historic currency in the United States is rather different: "One nation under god" although it was only in 1954 that Congress, with President Eisenhower's encouragement, put god in there. The daughter of the original author, in 1892, of the pledge of allegience, socialist minister Francis Bellamy, actually objected to the change. In another small irony, illustrating the difficulty of keeping these national tokens unsullied by any fortuitous association with rival, abhorrent regimes, the salute to the flag devised by Bellamy at the same time had to be changed during the second world war because it appeared too similar to the arm extended Nazi salute. 

"One nation" also has British political currency, as "one nation conservatism" and the tradition introduced to our social debate by Benjamin Disraeli, but the idea now has more campaigning appeal to the Labour than to the Conservative party, the latter famously mocked now for another once seemingly appealing slogan that "We are all in this together."

As yet the "condition of England question" has still to be explicitly revived by any politician.

Do you hear me now?

Go ahead, make my day

"I did not take steps to stop the CIA's use of those techniques. I was not in the chain of command of that programme ... I was aware of the programme. I was CC'd in on some of those documents, but I had no oversight of it. I wasn't involved in its creation."

"It's the idea of giving any president unfettered power to kill an American without checks and balances that's so troubling. Every American has the right to know when their government believes it's allowed to kill them." Senator Ron Wyden

Brennan said drones are only used as "a last resort to save lives" but agreed that "we need to optimise transparency while at the same time optimising secrecy" over the killings.

Background reading

I am no expert on north Africa or on any of the groups that our Prime Minister refers to:

"We face a large and existential terrorist threat from a group of extremists based in different parts of the world who want to do the biggest possible amount of damage to our interests and way of life," he said. "Those extremists thrive when they have ungoverned spaces in which they can exist, build and plan."

Yet I can glean enough information to see that the version of events in Algeria presented to us by our politicians and most of our press is largely a mixture of simplification and falsification.

The Algerian government and military are presented to us simply as a tough act with great experience of dealing with terrorism, who might nevertheless have benefitted from British 'intelligence' about illegal and terrorist activity in north Africa. The region (now that the west is adandonning Afghanistan to its fate) is presented to us as a kind of vacuum. Because it does not have a functioning national state government of the type we are accustomed to in the west, there can be no social or economic structure worth taking account of. Yet,

Smuggling has been around in the southern Sahara for as long as trans-Saharan caravan trading has existed, in other words, since time immemorial. The transport of goods from north to south across the Sahara and vice versa is the prerogative of desert people, most notably the Arabs, or Moors, and the Touareg. Members of certain families and clans are caravan traders almost by birthright, and the desert road is in their blood. Nice distinctions between the legality and illegality of different types of cargo matter less to these traders than to the distant governments under whose authority they are supposed to operate. ...

In bygone colonial and pre-colonial times, trans-Saharan trading was often dominated by large Arab families and clans, especially the Cha’ambi from the Tidikelt, the Ahl Azzi of the Touat, the Berabiche clans who lived in the deserts north of Timbuktu and the Kounta who lived on the eastern shores of the Niger bend, north of Gao. These families would trade across the desert with each other, turning the Sahara into one unified economic, social and cultural space. Their activity created links and ties that have survived and gradually mutated into the trading or smuggling networks of today. ... Not only trade goods, but politics, religion, tribal loyalty, power and influence are determined by those ties, making the Sahara one of the most complex regions in the world to understand. This economic and social unity of the Saharan space also explains why the borders imposed on the region at the end of the colonial era were so problematic to livelihoods and connections and so often despised by desert people.

Into this empty space, it is assumed, a distinct transnational corporation, known to us as Al Qaida, inserts itself, rather as a western corporation might move in to exploit and trade in newly discovered natural resources. This intruder is capable of directing, controlling and 'radicalising' the previously inchoate forces of the region (which hitherto had been harmlessly engrossed in killing and robbing each other) so that they become an 'existential threat' to our western civilisation and way of life, and thus the new targets of the 'war on terror'.

The Americans were convinced that the Sahel was becoming a crucible for anti-western terror groups inspired by Islam. Pondering the anti-american topography of the globe, they noticed that a huge contiguous swathe of central Asia, east and west Africa was becoming ‘radicalised’, from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen, into Africa via Somalia, the Sudan and across finally to Niger, Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. With that strategic and remote point of view so favoured by intelligence analysts and their political clients, this banana shaped chunk of earth was seen as a homogenous battleground, with each territory within it linked to the others by dark and hostile forces.

Of course it is undeniable that many of the progenitors of these anti-western terror groups inspired by Islam had been brought together in the mujahideen struggle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which the west had so assiduously encouraged:

Reagan was determined to make Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam. Therefore in 1986 he decided to provide the mujahideen with portable surface-to-air Stinger missiles, which proved devastatingly effective in increasing Soviet air losses (particularly helicopters). The war in Afghanistan cost the United States about $1 billion per annum in aid to the mujahideen; it cost the Soviet Union eight times as much, helping bankrupt its economy.

Yet now they should "be on notice they will find no sanctuary, no refuge, not in Algeria or anywhere else, not in North Africa, not anywhere … they will have no place to hide". This is a world seen not as a collection of societies, habitats, communities, but as a battleground, a global chessboard on which pieces are moved, and taken, at will.

At the level of overt policy and action our governments seldom if ever engage with the world as it is and as those involved in its daily social or economic activities actually experience it. They engage instead with a convenient construct, to which all experience and analysis must be fitted. (It is not of course a failing unique to governments: citizens struggling to understand economic and social disintegration in the west may create in their minds a similar monolith and come almost to welcome each new confirmation of gloom and despair: the illusion of understanding is all that is left.) At the same time governments, directly and indirectly, employ vast and varied companies of actors pulling levers and triggers to create events in supposed pursuit or destruction of those political and economic constructs.

Events, dear boy, events; but somehow they have become more malign. No more 'ungoverned spaces' is what we apparently need: never mind how unadept we have shown ourselves in governing spaces on our own doorstep. Perhaps the Algerians, who of course owe much to European colonial history, can show us how to do it.

This follows gradual attempts by Paris to turn a page in its bleak relations with Algiers. Hollande visited Algeria last month, offering a qualified apology for the harm France did to the country during its 132-year rule, and calling for greater economic co-operation between the two countries. This co-operation was to include an increased emphasis on the kind of deals that allowed multinationals such as Total and BP to tap into Algeria's oil and gas riches. ...Co-operation on Mali is clearly a move by the Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, to respond to Hollande's hand of friendship. Despite years of relative isolationism and mistrust, Bouteflika believes his country's future lies in increased participation in a profit-driven global economy and specifically trade with western neighbours.

Soak the rich

Our deputy prime minister and leader of the fast fading Liberal Democrat party, anxious to differentiate himself from his coalition government partner the Conservative party, proposes that universal benefits for old people should be means tested.

It is impossible, he says, to justify giving free bus passes to multimillionaires. I am sure the common man will cheer when all the multimillionaires are turned of the Number 39 and that the Treasury coffers and bus company receipts will boom prodigiously.

With political debate of this quality from our leaders we need not fear. No doubt Mr Clegg would say he is just using a colourful expression to catch the voters' attention, but the effect is to embed a proposal in the political agenda, from which it then becomes difficult to remove it, without consideration of its actual practicality or specific effects, a tactic increasingly favoured by government politicians when proposing ideas with little public endorsement that require them to take what they are fond of describing, in a self-congratulatory way, as 'difficult decisions', by which they mean decisions likely to be unpopular, although usually with people who would not have voted for them anyway.

Facts on the ground

According to at least one UK newspaper, president Obama in Newtown issued the "strongest call for change in gun policy of any political leader in a generation", but he did so without once uttering the words 'gun' or 'control'. A representative of one US gun-owners' group interviewed on BBC radio opined that legal restrictions on gun availability were not only unneccessary (with the expected idea that it is people not guns that kill people) but completely impracticable - impracticable not just because largely unfettered gun ownership is widely held to be a constitutional right, but simply because there are too many millions of guns (almost as many guns in private ownership as the population of the country) and gun owners for restrictions to be implemented. What is needed, he said, is better mental health treatment.

So guns join the growing mountain of facts on the ground, whether on the arid soil of the middle east or in the verdant pastures of the financial industry: Things which oppress the rights or enjoyment of others but which, whatever their merits or demerits, are beyond the community's judgement or remedy.

There is, I think, a growing tendency for people not to bother to defend what are said to be injusticies but simply to say they exist and are not going to be changed - and so there is no point in discussing them. It is the mentality of that ugly internet injunction to 'get over it'. It is a tendency also, it seems to me, extending to future rather as well as existing situations: we can do it and so we shall. It is something which, as a blatantly explicit rationale, we have been, in western societies at least, unaccustomed to in post-war years,

The long arm of the law 4

Orgreave, Yorkshire, 1984

Mick Antoniw, Assembly Member for Pontypridd, is also pushing for an inquiry, noting that in relation to Orgreave: "No action was taken against the police in respect of fabrication of evidence or the attempt to pervert the course of justice."


Vera Baird, police and crime commissioner for the Northumbria area, said her experience as a barrister during the strike suggested that potentially there were hundreds of cases where police might have perverted the course of justice. She herself dealt with two or three cases a week during the strike, many involving "invented allegations, copied notebooks and allegations from officers that weren't even at the scene".


Baird, solicitor-general during the last Labour government, who represented a number of miners at Orgreave who were acquitted after police tampered with evidence, said: "It was scandalous. There were an awful lot of cases."



"At Orgreave in 1984, police officers on horseback and on foot were filmed beating picketing miners with truncheons, but South Yorkshire police claimed the miners had attacked them first, and prosecuted 95 men for riot and unlawful assembly, which carried potential life sentences. All 95 were acquitted after the prosecution case collapsed following revelations in court that police officers’ statements had been dictated to them in order to establish evidence of a riot, and one officer’s signature on a statement had been forged."

The long arm of the law 3

Ministers have agree to pay more than £2m to the family of a prominent Libyan dissident abducted with the help of MI6 and secretly flown to Tripoli where he was tortured by the security police of the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.


The Saadi family had accepted a settlement of £2.23m, the high court heard on Thursday. The government paid the sum by way of compensation and without admitting any liability.

Evidence of the UK's role in the operation – believed to be the only case where an entire family was subjected to "extraordinary rendition" – came to light after Gaddafi's fall in 2011.

CIA correspondence with Libyan intelligence, found in the spy chief Moussa Koussa's office in Tripoli by Human Rights Watch, states: "We are … aware that your service had been co-operating with the British to effect [Saadi's] removal to Tripoli … the Hong Kong government may be able to co-ordinate with you to render [Saadi] and his family into your custody."

The operation was arranged in 2004 at the time of Tony Blair's "deal in the desert" with Gaddafi, after which UK intelligence services helped track down and hand over his opponents.

Another Libyan victim was Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was rendered alongside his pregnant wife. A letter from the MI6 head of counter-terrorism Sir Mark Allen to Koussa, also found in Tripoli, said: "I congratulate you on the safe arrival of [Belhaj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya. I know I did not pay for the air cargo [but] the intelligence [on him] was British."

The long arm of the law 2

David Cameron has apologised to the family of the murdered Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane and agreed that there was state collusion between police officers and soldiers and his loyalist killers...

One of the security force whistleblowers in the Finucane case, the ex-military intelligence officer Ian Hurst, who belonged to a secretive army unit running agents inside the UDA, said there was little chance of either police or military handlers or their loyalist informers facing the courts. He has faced charges of breaching the Official Secrets Act for leaking information about the role of army intelligence in running agents within the UDA who committed crimes including the targeting of Finucane.

The Circumlocution Office

Not an estate agent

'The Circumlocution Department,' said Mr Barnacle, is not responsible for any gentleman's assumptions.'

'May I inquire how I can obtain official information as to the real state of the case?'

'It is competent,' said Mr Barnacle, 'to any member of the - Public,' mentioning that obscure body with reluctance, as his natural enemy, 'to memorialise the Circumlocution Department. such formalities as are required to be observed in so doing, may be known on application to the proper branch of that department.'

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit


The Circumlocution Office is still extant.


John Vine, the chief inspector of immigration, said UKBA [United Kingdom Border Agency]'s programme to deal with 147,000 outstanding asylum "legacy cases" – submitted before March 2007 – was far from resolved. The asylum seekers concerned have been left in limbo for an average of seven years.

The operation to deal with them was so inefficient and poorly managed that last winter more than 150 boxes of mail, including correspondence from applicants, lawyers and MPs, lay unopened in a room in Liverpool. At its peak, there was a backlog of more than 100,000 items of post, including 14,800 unopened recorded delivery letters and 13,600 unopened first and second class letters containing crucial information and documents about cases.

No to ID or no to iphone?

Not long ago there was great turmoil here about government proposals to issue what would effectively become a compulsory identity card linked to an extensive database of personal information. After much dispute, between the notions of state encroachment on personal autonomy and privacy, and blandishments of increased social efficiency and 'if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear', the political classes (to whom it appealed across the waning party political spectrum) backed off.

Now it seems, if we have a little patience, Apple will do it for us, as the iphone knows where we are, what we want, how we pay and goodness knows what else besides. Fingerprint technology is about to make it all 'secure' - secure against outsiders doing bad things to us and secure against us doing what we are not meant to do. Glitz it up - that's the message to politicians. Just another piece of out-sourcing (Apple, the greatest corporation in human history since the Holy Roman Empire and twice as holy, is probably better at that than governments).

As politicians increasingly throw in the towel (or their lot) with big corporations (which, of course, have everything to hide and nothing to fear, except from their fellows, and 52 per cent of which according to that tendentious source of conspiracy theory nonsense, the World Bank, conceal the full extent of their income from governments) - and note David Cameron's quiet introduction of ex-investment bankers into government ranks in his recent reshuffle (no wonder he doesn't want to 'reform' the house of lords, that handy back-door - revolving or not - for government recruitment - Lord Green is still lying low in his ermine) ... where was I?

A Gold for language

Samuel Johnson said of Dryden, after Augustus's comments on Rome, that he found our language brick and left it marble. Where has 'Locog' left it?

We can perhaps pass by the use of 'ceremony', 'the performance of some solemn act according to strict form',

Ceremony

but who was it who not only coined that horror and misnomer, 'team GB', but obliged everyone from the BBC outwards to use it slavishly?

Whenever I hear 'team GB' now triumphantly cited by a politician, David Cameron or Boris Johnson (no relation, thank God), I cannot avoid thinking it contains a clear implicit meaning that some people are in the team and others are not. And we are not talking now of sporting teams. It's the modern updating of Mrs Thatcher's declension of the world according to whether one is 'one of us'.

The takeover of individual effort and triumph by officialdom and state is pretty blatant - nothing new there.

Fritz Schilgen 1936

And perhaps we should be thankful that it goes no further than a driving ambition to compell all school children to undertake two hours of competitive sports a day, to make them into what Eton made Boris Johnson is today, rather than just provide public sporting facilities for the nation at large.

Our future Prime Minister?

Now that the Olympics are triumphantly over, Dan Hodges, who describes himself as 'a tribal neo-Blairite', supporter of John Reid and David Blunkett, voter for Boris Johnson, has some team reflections. He writes, in his Daily Telegraph blog, with, apparently only half his tongue in his cheek (it doesn't look as if that's where he usually keeps it):

And so they return. Slipping home under cover of darkness, casting furtive glances over their shoulders lest they be spotted by the final nocturnal Olympic revellers, they are back amongst us. The London 2012 naysayers.

But now, as silence falls across the Stratford Stadium, whither the Harpy’s cries? Are they too ashamed? Too scared? Or do they think we have all forgotten?

Never. The last two weeks have brought the nation, indeed the world, together. And now is neither the time nor the place for the extended Olympic family to be roaming around, meeting [sic] out summary justice to the 2012 Quislings.

Or 'Never, never, never', as one of his perhaps other multi-political-cultural heroes might have put it.

Will we be dealing with these naysayers by putting an London Olympics Triumph Denial Act on the statute book? No doubt his erstwhile great leader would support it.

Does he know what a harpy is - 'a rapacious, plundering or grasping person' - sounds moree like the infamous International Olympic Committee to me. And 'whither' their cries, or 'whence' - or even, if he wished, 'wherefor'? Perhaps they have become directed missiles.

He doesn't know the difference between 'meet' and 'mete', but does he know what a Quisling is, or was? Boris seems the better candidate for the description, especially given the slighly embarrassing Nazi associations of the early revived Games. I hasten to add that I don't mean to imply that Boris is a Nazi.

Yet the whole Olympic presentation (the 'ceremonial' bit) seems to have been infused with strange misreferencing of our past. (Maybe that's a required quality for the 'modern' Olympics, Clio and Euterpe both, perhaps the whole band.)

So we could have an opening pageant of our national history that struck many popular chords, including the National Health Service, but, apart from that, gave no kind of acknowledgement of our imperial past that must have been formative in the inheritance of many competitors there.

But for Dan Hodges,

... they are in the minority. And in keeping with the spirit of London 2012, over time, we will come to forgive them. Forgive, yes. But we will never forget.

Well, some forgetting is easier than others.

My Spectre around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way;
My Emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my sin.

‘A fathomless and boundless deep,
There we wander, there we weep;
On the hungry craving wind
My Spectre follows thee behind.

‘He scents thy footsteps in the snow
Wheresoever thou dost go,
Thro’ the wintry hail and rain.
When wilt thou return again?

’Dost thou not in pride and scorn
Fill with tempests all my morn,
And with jealousies and fears
Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

‘Seven of my sweet loves thy knife
Has bereavèd of their life.
Their marble tombs I built with tears,
And with cold and shuddering fears.

‘Seven more loves weep night and day
Round the tombs where my loves lay,
And seven more loves attend each night
Around my couch with torches bright.

‘And seven more loves in my bed
Crown with wine my mournful head,
Pitying and forgiving all
Thy transgressions great and small.

‘When wilt thou return and view
My loves, and them to life renew?
When wilt thou return and live?
When wilt thou pity as I forgive?’

‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan:
Hast thou no sins of thy own?
O’er my sins thou sit and weep,
And lull thy own sins fast asleep.

‘What transgressions I commit
Are for thy transgressions fit.
They thy harlots, thou their slave;
And my bed becomes their grave.

‘Never, never, I return:
Still for victory I burn.
Living, thee alone I’ll have;
And when dead I’ll be thy grave.

‘Thro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell
Thou shalt never, quell:
I will fly and thou pursue:
Night and morn the flight renew.’

‘Poor, pale, pitiable form
That I follow in a storm;
Iron tears and groans of lead
Bind around my aching head.

‘Till I turn from Female love
And root up the Infernal Grove,
I shall never worthy be
To step into Eternity.

‘And, to end thy cruel mocks,
Annihilate thee on the rocks,
And another form create
To be subservient to my fate.

‘Let us agree to give up love,
And root up the Infernal Grove;
Then shall we return and see
The worlds of happy Eternity.

‘And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
“This the Wine, and this the Bread.”’

Evidence base

"I've got no scientific evidence for this at all, but I think it really does make a difference."

"There is no accurate assessment of the figures on this..."

Tony Blair, justifying the £9million (or whatever) cost of the London Olympics.

Perhaps he's right, but how starkly it contrasts with the evidence-based, payment-by-results rhetoric and approach of most modern government in this country.

But of course there is no reason to look for consistency in the way our world is organised. We - 'ordinary' people and policians alike - focus on and celebrate the individual triumphs of athletes in these games whose organisation and presentation is dominated by big government, big organisation and big commerce. At least the opening ceremony wasn't outsourced to G4S by competitive tender or produced by a government task force.