What’s incredible about the Gurkhas is that they’ve enjoyed near universal support for their cause across the political spectrum – except for the Cabinet, of course. Putting right the travesty – and backdating it – is incredible news, and this footage on the BBC is, I think, is Nick Clegg’s finest moment – made all the more delicious for the thorough upstaging of David Cameron. Oh dear oh dear, there will be trouble ‘t mill.

In fact, compare and contrast – Brown’s finest moments are when disaster strikes. Nick’s finest moment has been celebrating something really good. I’d like to remember this as the one brief shining moment in 2009 where something good happened in politics. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be cheered up by a political story in the news.

In fact, it seems so obvious that this is ‘a good thing’  that you can’t quite believe Brown handed such a gift to the opposition – pointlessly opposing something universally popular seemingly without any possible justification or reason. I’ve been searching for an answer as to why all day, not really able to understand until, suddenly, it hit me:

This is like the manager that doesn’t want to employ the ‘black guy’ – not because he’s racist, he’s definitely not racist, oh no – but the customers, well, they might not like it. What can you do? It’s nothing personal. 

See, it’s the Nationalism, stupid. British Jobs for British Workers, and all that. Brown and Labour in general is desperate to avoid handing the BNP – it always comes back to the BNP these days – any soft targets to kick. They’ve already changed so much of their strategy to tackle the threat from the BNP, why should we be surprised that this process continues?

Specifically one can imagine BNP leaflets being shoved through the door announcing, “see! they can find the money for these furriners but nuffin for the indiginous whites!”

What’s baffling is that while this particular reason doesn’t make much sense, the only other explanations are too horrible to contemplate: Brown deliberately wanted his Government to be seen as mean to foreigners, directly competing with the BNP with dogwhistle racism.

Or worse still, he will eventually begin accusing the Lib Dems and the Tories of ‘putting foreigners first in a time of national crisis’ himself. That could get very nasty indeed. 

Anyone willing to defend the Government’s position on this? Care to put forward some other reason that I might have overlooked?

Gordon Brown has never met a disaster he didn’t like, except one.

Terrorist attacks, global financial meltdown (and death of a beloved celebrity voice of a generation of course) – nothing seems to warm the cockles of our ambulance chasing Prime Minister more than people getting frightened and irrational, turning to the Dear Leader for strength and certainty.

These days I can’t shake the impression of Brown as being the nation’s love-smitten stalker, eager to exploit whatever crisis comes up in order to insinuate himself into our lives, to be needed and loved because of the lengths he’s willing to go to in order to prove his love and devotion. You can’t ignore me, he implores. You need me.

So the BBC’s Desperately Exciting Lead Story of Brown’s Terribly Important Cobra Conference Call … from poland no less, about the terrible nightmarish crisis of a couple of people with flu and the thing that’s not a pandemic and isn’t going to engulf is all in doom and death, is the quintessential Brown. When disaster strikes in your life, there’s Brown, hand outstretched, asking if we’re ready to accept his love.

If that doesn’t creep you out, there’s the less obvious and slightly more ominous side of this: The implication that if you don’t accept Brown’s love then death, mayhem and poverty await. Sure, you could never love Brown, but perhaps… just perhaps… you could do worse, right? I mean, he’ll look after you.. and… would it really be so bad? Really? I mean, if it’s choice between death and poverty or just giving up and marrying the stalker?

And some of us… we take the sweets, and the gifts, and the favours, even though we can’t stand the man and we know we’ll never love him like he loves us. Others are more certain: Look, we say. Just fuck off, you weirdo.

Me? I hate these disasters. I hate the way Brown uses these moments of weakness in the public to assume the character of caring Father of the Nation. How other people’s misfortune invariably turns in the best headlines he ever gets.

There’s only one disaster Brown doesn’t like, and that’s the personal disaster that’s befallen his ambitions for the Premiership. To have never reached the position of Prime Minister would, in retrospect, have been the ultimate kindness – one he doesn’t deserve. No, he’s someone who’s bullied his way into a job he’s not remotely suited for and it’s his destiny to suffer the consequences  - in gut wrenching slow motion, to be cringed over and regretted for the rest of his life. “Be careful what you wish for” has never been so salient.

Go on, ask me what I think of the new “Equalities” bill. 

The Bill also aims to tackle discrimination against the elderly and people from working class backgrounds.

Hey, Harriet. Here’s some ideas for you. Why don’t you devise a National Accent, a new version of received pronounciation based on the Yorkshire accent. Come up with a National Dialect, too, and use the school system to enforce this so that all children emerge from school speaking with the same accent and dialect. 

While you’re at it, try to limit the number of words taught to children down to what those in the bottom sets might be reasonably expected to be familiar with by the end of their ‘education.’ This will, of course, mean making it illegal to sell books to children, or to allow children to be exposed to the internet, and children’s books will need to be removed from the library. I’m sure a few children will be resourceful enough to get their hands on books, but if you ban dictionaries and make sure it’s illegal for parents to help children learn non-curriculum vocabulary then, after 16 years, all children will emerge from schooling with roughly the same accent, dialect and vocabulary.

Another advantage the middle classes have is in the ability to pay for better quality clothes for their offspring. No-one wants to go down the Chinese road of a National uniform, but I’m sure Jeff from the Clothes Show could design something really stylish that, if people are reasonable about all this, will see that it takes away a source of pressure and angst for a great many people who can’t dress well, and are unfairly judged because of this.

But, see, I’m an old fashioned totalitarian. I like to bring about equality through taking away the ability to be different, but you Harriet, you’re much more sophisticated and have these new advanced techniques that rely on manipulating people’s perceptions rather than actual reality. 

You want to make it illegal to spot the difference. You want to encourage people to train themselves to be blind to difference, to make it a crime to be able to tell that you’re looking at an old person or a young person. I can’t tell the difference. What difference? I thought I was looking at the same person!

See, how did a word like “discriminate” which literally means nothing more sinister or evil than, “to recognise the difference between; distinguish” turn into something sinister and evil?

I dislike people making invalid assumptions about individuals based on the individuals membership of a particular grouping – everyone should be judged as individuals… but they should be judged and people, employers should be allowed to judge for themselves, surely?

What differences are we allowed to notice? Or are we heading for a world where jobs are like school placements – it’s whether you’re in the catchment area, first come first served and a few lottery systems here and there?  Obviously that would be madness. Let’s make it simpler – why not have the Government record people’s skills and capabilities and anyone wanting to recruit would go to the State and be sent someone. No interview. No application, just – blam – here you go, there’s your new employee. Standard National Wage to apply, with 40% going to the Government. 

Let’s do that, eh? That’ll end discrimination once and for all, and Equality will be achieved. 

What could possibly go wrong?

George Lakoff is a Professor of Cognitative Linguistics and was, for a short time, the darling of the Daily Kos scene, coincidently at the same time I was very much interested in this new “Progressive” movement in the states – you know, the one that ended up with Obama going into the White House. That movement. 

I thought this Lakoff fella was the bee’s knees too. I had both his books, “Don’t think of an Elephant” which is useful for pointing out a useful rule in political discourse – never, ever tell people what you’re not, because it plants the idea in their heads and that’s all they can think about. I also had the more academic book, “Moral Politics” which investigated the subconcious world views of both liberals (in the Liberal Conspiracy sense of the word) and conservatives, and the metaphorical constructs that make those world-views complete and coherent. 

Lakoff was (and presumably still is) concerned with the way that the Conservative movement in the US were expert at using metaphor in political language to ‘frame’ debates within a conservative world view to win arguments by default, and proposed the concept of reframing using alternative metaphors designed to hook into the liberal world view, so that progressives could win by default instead. 

He argued that consistently applying these ‘liberal’ frames and not falling into the trap of using conservative frames, they wouldn’t be constantly undermining their own arguments. For example, ‘tax relief’ is a conservative frame, it suggests that tax is a burden to be relieved. When a progressive uses ‘tax relief’, they subconsciously undermine their arguments to want people to pay more tax for, and to use the technical term, “sound like dickheads.”

Chris Huhne fell into this trap during both his Leadership bids, constantly referring to one of his pet metaphors of “the broadest shoulders should carry the heaviest burden (of tax)”, which, you know, doesn’t really sound very cool. Why’d you want to burden people, Chris? 

But I’ve digressified. Oh, see, I’ve been writing about American politics for an hour and I’m already doing Bush-Speak. I’ve digressified again, too. 

So, being very much impressed and enthused in the way only activists can be, I made a concerted effort to apply the theory (and the metaphors) in the real world, using some of the ideas in Focus leaflets, and found something curious: In focus leaflets they sounded like typical political bullshit and had a net negative effect, but they had a powerful effect on Labour supporters when used face to face. I mean, really powerful. It made a few people become uncomfortably obsessed with me, thinking I was the second coming and insisting I had to stand as an MP. I ended up hiding in my flat not answering the phone at one point. I’d unleashed this horrible monster and I just wanted it to go away.

What did stick though was probably the most important political revelation of my life: conservatives aren’t evil people. They believe what they believe and think what they think because they believe wholeheartedly that they are doing the Right Thing, that they are acting from a moral position. This, as ridiculous as it sounds, blew my mind, and opened the door towards empathy and understanding of other people’s political beliefs, and a reassessment of my own moral high ground and opinions.

That I got this from someone desperately trying to help the progressive movement is just the law of unintended consequences again. And, eventually, I realised that both these ‘world views’ were utter nonsense, that to decide policy based on metaphors is a stupid thing to do and is everything that’s wrong with modern politics. Fighting truthiness with truthiness? Lakoff needed to go in the bin.  

But it allowed me to start thinking rationally about my politics for the first time, to not feel afraid of exploring certain concepts or ideas -realising that neither ‘side’ had a monopoly on morality, or even on ideas, and so I arrived at the conclusion that liberalism for both the brain and the pocket was the only political creed for me. There’s no metaphorical world-view for that in Lakoff’s books.

That’s because it doesn’t depend on metaphorical world views, doesn’t depend on subconscious appeals to ‘common sense’ – instead was based on reason and rationality – which for me is the moral way of approaching politics. Appealing to people’s brains instead of their hearts. Apparently it’s impossible. According to conventional political wisdom, all you lot are far too cretinous to understand intellectual arguments and insist on having all messages communicated through cartoon characters, preferably in the form of a song, or a picture of a child with a tear running down her face.  Christ you won’t even buy insurance unless it’s being sold by something animated, will you? Don’t make me send Charlie Brooker round your house because he gets a lot angrier about this infantilisation of our society than I do, and I’m flippin’ furious about it. 

But, hey, let’s exploit it. The plan is quite simple – sell the British public Liberalism by saying absolutely nothing and leaving all communication to a cartoon dog singing, “happy happy happy”, the new infuriatingly annoying Ringtone sensation! Vote Happy Happy Happy Happy!! 

Well, assuming it’s moral to do such a thing.

Update – I of course take full responsibility for what I write, but I really need to avoid ever writing posts after midnight. This was one of many such mistakes:

Laurie Penny seems to be a well respected blogger in the Red blogosphere, yet this piece in Liberal Conspiracy slapped me so hard I decided to respond here.

She complains,

…what we need to talk about urgently is when, precisely, it became good form to treat people on low incomes as if they were an entirely different, morally deficient species of person. When did it become alright to call the poor ‘evil’?

Digital fingers (ha! I made an etymology joke!) are pointed in the direction of Orwell Prize winning Nightjack, specifically this post called, “http://nightjack.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/the-evil-poor/”

Of course, one could argue that “The Evil Poor” is simply a sensationalist modernisation of the “indolent poor” or the “undeserving poor”, as a name gifted to a subset of people catagorised as “poor” by people who do such things.

But let’s not quibble over semantics. Let’s quibble over perceptions of reality. See, unless I’m very much mistaken, what Nightjack has is actual experience of the reality on the ground.

Whose perception of reality are you going to trust? Now Nightjack will suffer from the same problem that all police officers have, which is that they see the very worst elements of society all the time, while normal people, especially middle class kids living in a theoretical bubble world of Marxist dialectics can live in blissful ignorance.

To my profound embarrassment I spent 7 years of my adult life in a horrible council estate where the reality of what life is like there slowly dawned on me. Illusions were shattered and my desire to ‘help’ these people was exposed for the ugly, futile, middle class guilt that it was.

Laurie writes:

I am a twenty-something trying to make it in the big, bad world of journalism

Now I know journalism has changed, but I would argue that romantising the poor and failing to report reality as you find it is not very good journalism.

What Nightjack writes reflects the reality of the world as I – and many, many others – have experienced.

I recommend Laurie starts by getting herself down to a council estate to discuss her political beliefs and opinions with the first gang of pissed teenagers she come across. Then she should go door to door, canvassing the opinions of residents who’ve got the misfortune to live anywhere near an off-licence and ask them what they think. I challenge her to listen to them rather than write off their opinions and feelings as a political irrelevance, or ‘brainwashing’ by the media. That’s what I thought at first. I thought my job was to figure out a way of turning these people around. I’m sincerely ashamed about that these days.

It’s not about ignoring poverty or pretending it doesn’t exist – it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The difference is that the part of my brain that used to want to help, that wanted to be kind and generous and make a difference got bludgeoned to death after having, “FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING CUNT” shouted at me by a gang of chavs at a bus stop. Things like that tend to make an impression. Suddenly I ‘got it.’ It’s probably one of reasons I so rarely sound like a stereotypical Lib Dem, I expect. Except I don’t just want the police to go flying in to smash their faces in – I want real systemic changes to stop yet another generation growing up like this.

Orwell would not spin in his grave at Nightjack’s well deserved award. Nightjack, in contrast to Laurie, is observing the real world the way it really is and reporting it to us, in the very finest traditions of journalism. He does it with style and character and writes in the most absorbing and compelling way.

Laurie, has some skill as a writer – I especially liked, “I find a have a lot of month left over at the end of the money”, but her appeals to our charity ring hollow because, basically, and without wishing to seem too rude, and whilst wishing to avoid cliché, the way she reports the world is from the inside of her own head, not from reality. She should take a long, serious hard look at herself and ask what she really knows about council estates and real poverty and real disadvantage, and why she feels qualified to lecture anyone about what they should and shouldn’t do or should and shouldn’t care about.

Has the quality of socialist debate gone down, or has it always been like this? How was I ever impressed by rhetoric like this? The mind boggles.