Government consultants working for free

City firms are doing government work for free in the hope of getting future contracts when times are easier and the public aren't looking:

On one recent government contract five contractors all bid to undertake the work for £1, he said. But Downey also acknowledged that there was a degree of self-interest on the part of firms, which are expecting a resurgence of consultancy in government in the near future.

It's like medieval nobles showering the king with gifts, knowing he'll repay them ten times over with other people's possessions.

We have an opportunity

K-punk on UK student protests:

the ruling class are counting on the street militancy fizzling out as suddenly as it flared up. We have an opportunity here, not only to bring down the government - which is eminently achievable, (keep reminding yourself: this government is very weak indeed) - but of winning a decisive hegemonic struggle whose effects can last for years. The analogy that keeps suggesting itself to me is 1978 - but it is the coaltion, not the left, which is in the position of the Callaghan government. This is an administration at the end of something, not the beginning, bereft of ideas and energy, crossing its fingers and hoping that, by some miracle, the old world can be brought back to life before anyone has really noticed that it has collapsed.

The Guardian don't really explain their reasoning on this, but apparently an "Unemployed lorry driver living with his wife and three children in inner London, paying £320 a week rent" stands to lose 7,136 from the cuts.

Long-grain pontiff

I'm less than overwhelmed by Michael Bracewell's book England is Mine. I do have to admit, though, that he has a nice turn of phrase -- even if it is in a style that must have landed him in Pseuds Corner:

So pop, despite itself, became arty. English society, high on the new convenience foods, allowed English culture to develop a kind of boil-in-the-bag popism as the successor to the beans on toast of social realism. [80]

[slightly less entertaining on re-reading, when I realise that "boil-in-the-bag popism" probably means music rather than the Bishop of Rome]

Johann Hari on good form:

something stranger still is happening in The Election That Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Every day in this country, two big forces artificially drag the British government way to the right of the British people, making it enact policies that benefit a small, rich elite at the expense of the rest. We are not supposed to notice this, never mind try to change it. Yet suddenly, in this election, those forces have been exposed.

Comment on post-election PR in the UK:

I’m afraid that this has been predicted in every close-looking election since … well pretty much since Labour rose to power a century ago, without ever coming close to occurring.

England is Mine

Bracewell's "England is Mine" turns out to be excellent page by page, but a bit of a letdown overall. He's taken as his basic thesis something entirely vagye and anodyne, namely nostalgia for the countryside within English culture and pop music. He calls this "Arcadia", although it's unclear what makes this a peculiarly English form different from the adoration of an imagined countryside that is present in just about every country in the world. Likewise, the breadth and commonness of the subject makes it hard to trace any intellectual ancestry for the views he describes: who is to say whether different longings for "Arcadia" are directly related, or just parallel expressions of the same common human urge?

That said, I'm only on page 37; all this could well be resolved later.

Or, as Helen puts it: Your goal for this election period is to challenge apathetic non-voters. This has got to stop being a socially acceptable position to take.

remember, every time Cameron talks about disillusionment with politics, what he's really saying is "lefties, don't bother coming out to vote". I'd bet money that this is a conscious strategy to keep the left home on May 6th.

"until less than ten years ago, the locks on RAF nuclear bombs were opened with a bicycle lock key. " [BBC]

Admittedly, this looks like a case of auntie spinning their info as far as it'll go. e.g. no bicycle lock itself, necessarily, just the same kind of key.

More optimism from Hari, this time idolizing JJ & co:

It works. Look at Britain. Three years ago, eight new coal power stations were being planned, and the third runway at Heathrow was all but inevitable. A few thousand heroic young people took direct action against them. Now all the new coal power stations have been cancelled, and the third runway is dead in the water. Here in the fifth largest economy in the world, they have stopped coal and airport expansion. Politicians felt the heat. That was done by a few thousand people. Imagine what tens or hundreds of thousands could do.