Martin Meenagh blog

The Corby Judgment There was, literally, iron in the air when I was growing up. Before the steelworks closed in 1980, my father worked in the steelworks in Corby. After the arc of his publicanism finished, he returned there to his last job, selling newspapers and breakfast to the tubeworkers as they left their shift. Later, I worked in the tubeworks for a summer too; I still keep my hard hat from there, on a shelf near a biography of Lord Denning and my barrister's wig. Anyway, when I was little, vast, giger- alien -style pipes and refineries several storeys high loomed above my granny's immediate horizon, behind the houses in Stephenson way. I remember when they were detonated, and how the past decades of many peoples' lives went with them. Even then I could sense it. Mary from Australia, who regularly comments on this blog, once pointed out that I had a taste for melancholy, and in part it began there, in those moments of industrial despair. Corby went from a prosperous, ...

I'm off to see some old friends... And frankly, real life at the moment is beyond blogging. When, however, has the act of living and the experiences therein actually been believable? Here's a song from my childhood, and which is part of my inheritance, I suppose. My internet is back on at home, so normal blogging will soon resume. I spent a good part of yesterday giving a talk at the LSE, which has made me think, and I'm sure the blog will be getting the worst of it! August being August, I thought that I would add this ballad of the futility and barbarism of war. Our leaders and commentators should be made to learn it, whilst watching Paths of Glory or Un long dimanche de fiancailles on a loop.

Explaining Oil Price volatility As when I looked at who owned the dole offices the other day, I think that it would help readers confused by some of my meanderings to go to sites that try to follow money. In the case of oil markets, for instance, I have been holding forth on how peak oil--the end of oil at viable prices--does not just mean rising prices, but disrupted and volatile prices. Low ones make discovery and refining uneconomic; high ones make supply and distribution (and purchase) problematic. This matters because, from the fertiliser that grows food under lights powered by oil to the wrapping and plastic that protects it, and the petrol that gets you to it, we have built a society around oil. Oil prices aren't just about complicated supply, complemented with refinery numbers and operation. They are also affected by demand; and one of the most significant things in the history of the past two centuries has been the return in our own time of economic sovereignty and dominan...

Enjoy the Summer The image is the house of cards, by Jean Baptiste Chardin. It betrays my ignorance, but I was entranced by the picture when I saw it, I think in the national gallery, months ago, and confused Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin with the businessman of the same shorter name. I think that the confusion arose because I mixed galleries, having seen the Isfahan/Persian exhibition at the British Museum earlier this year. They both lived at a time when most people were shafted by life, too. Here's some filler from the great Robert Hughes about the former. Google for the paintings, as usual. Everywhere I turn these days there seems to be the sound of pennies dropping, shoes falling, and understanding breaking out of just how serious the crisis the world faces is. Gloomy predictions of decline are a common western trope, possibly because we tend to use the idea that we are not the people we were in order to behave badly or to socialise the consequences of our moral choices. I...

Links and Things I've added the baseline scenario website to the links. It is an economics website that I have enjoyed, along with Chris Dillow's page ,and Nouriel Roubini's RGE monitor, for some time. I often see their articles more or less passed off on national newspapers, but not their depth of knowledge or perspective, with which I do not always agree. It's interesting to me how many economists are revealing themselves to be fairly radical socialists, though possibly implicit in the whole idea of social science. It's good to get out and about. I took four friends from my Berkeley alumni course out to the Churchill Museum in London today, and found it pleasantly changed since the last time I went three years ago. It's always a pleasure really. I like drunken and slightly disreputable contrarians with brains and hearts. However, there were large sections on painting, on the social reforms and insurance policies Churchill promoted as a Liberal, and on the in...

The Olympics Act 2006, ss.19 and 22 One of the very first posts that I ever wrote concerned the way in which Britain, as opposed to the United States, had a tendency to prostitute its public space to advertising. It seemed that very few places were ever protected from the blight. Now--and I can scarcely believe that I am writing this--people are beginning to wake up to what can be done in the name of protecting the intellectual property of big advertisers and firms. Specifically, under sections 19 and 22, police will be able to enter homes and remove anything--even of a non-commercial nature--which is deemed as a danger to the contracts entered into during, and presumably before, the Olympics of 2012 in London. A Secretary of State will do the designating. I mean--my God. They bully you with ludicrous parking restrictions, fines, and taxes; they create cultures that snatch your children; they extract money from you and refuse to remove your rubbish; they steal from your bank accounts, ...

The Shocks So Far Were Precursors.... And I am not being mad-gloomy. California still does not have a budget and if it gets one today things are not going to be pretty . Pennsylvania is now paying people partial paycheques and encouraging short-term loans via political pressure for its own workers. The big American states are in fiscal trouble, which means that the worst predictions by the likes of me last year are starting to get a grip. America's congress might, like the grand old duke of york, be busy ordering millions of dollars up and down imaginary hills; but a battle of America is on in the States. In Britain, at least half a million people have had to accept less pay or cuts in hours, which as far as I am concerned is unemployment. Officially, over two million people are unemployed; when one takes into account a fair portion of those on incapacity benefit, those whose incomes have now fallen so that bills have become a burden, and those who have not, possibly because of r...

Regina Benjamin, Surgeon-General Designate The post of Surgeon General of the United States, in theory, could do some good. The role is one of representing and administering the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. They can be despatched in emergencies, and hold the nominal rank of Vice-Admiral, as well as a role (overplayed in recent years) of being an advocate for health strategies. The job, which inherted roles dating back to 1798, can be traced back to 1871. My own opinion of the role is that I'm not keen on health 'hectoring', but that people should have warning about good and bad things placed in front of them, based on available science or statistics, and allowed to make up their own mind. Of course a federal government should have some residual capacity to coordinate emergency relief too. That's a constitutional duty. Today, President Obama has nominated Regina Benjamin to the post. She comes from a tough background, kept her nonprofit clinic...

For Those of you who like your opinions and your language very strong... The Exile is back. I warn anyone of a conservative or fragile disposition now that he's regenerated and about to lay into the social workers, the right, the modern left, Oliver Kamm, the United States Armed Forces and the Mexican police in inimitable Mancunian style, all with the aid of 'soft' pornography and funny youtube videos. Do not go there if you are easily offended, or can't give as good as you can get. His blog is not apt to remind one of tea with Bertie Wooster and St Thomas More, though in real life he is a very amiable man over a pint. Otherwise, welcome back to the blogosphere, Exile.

Commodore Bob's Challenge and a whole lot of loving I found the image of the emergency smileyphone on a site called offcolorfilms.com. Bob from Brockley has challenged 'Dr Meenagh'--me--to list seven things I love, and then tag seven people. I think the latter a greater challenge than the former. Let's see...I guess I should confine it to things that I would, in any mad conceivable fantasy, imagine dying for or seeing worked into a fantasy of paradise after me. I'm going to cheat. 1. My mother, brother and sister, and then my wider family. 2. My girlfriend, and My closest friends. 3. London. 4. The Holy Roman Catholic Church, and Catholicism. 5. Proper western civilisation, which is books, music, a good breakfast, and dinner. 6. The United States of America, the Land of Israel, and the Irish Republic. As seen from Donegal. 7. Reading, thinking, teaching, and talking with open-minded people. A slightly less portentous list of second-order things would be; 1. Pies, wi...

Who Owns Dole Offices? You would think that, what with national insurance now being a tax and all, that the job centres and dole offices that are metastasizing to deal with the unemployment crisis represent some sort of modern version of the welcoming state, justifying all that money they take from you. Think on. I thought that, in an idle moment at a party yesterday, I'd have a chat--don't worry, its not my normal patter--about the PFI at a person in a corner who couldn't escape. This, several glasses later, led to the revelation (to me) that the department of work and pensions owns none of its buildings but doesn't pay for them by the private finance initiative either, or indeed by a public private partnership. It maintains some sort of quasi-private leaseback. It turns out that public property at the DWP, almost as soon as Labour entered power, was transferred to a company called Trillium in 1998. 650 properties, and 1.6 million square kilometres, went to that compan...

Global Temperatures and the Sun The picture is of course one of my old favourites--Christ as Sol Invictus . One of the most suspicious things about the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, from a science layman's point of view, has been the insistence of some of its adherents that it is simply a product of a perfectly natural gas and of a mooted process in the atmosphere. Real scientific debate has been set to one side; consensus has been elevated as some sort of proof; and truly mad, and misinformed policy decisions have eaten away at liberty and public spending as a consequence. Many in the media and political class seem to have gone for the extrapolation of temperature from the 1990s to an expectation of imminent doom. This has a consequence of dramatising their lives, and articulating the combination of narcissism and Lacanian breakdown to which the official mind of our society seems to be heading, under pressure of money and intellectual collapse. However, this breezy ...

Europe needs desperately to fix education This country, as with most of the continent, is facing a multiple and growing crisis. Unemployment, fiscal collapse, monetary incontinence and low relative productivity are going to work through our system alongside a grotesque lack of credit in a highly destructive way. We lack the savings and resources to see us through. Britain is about to have a crisis in graduate education. A country which lacks its own plumbers and electricians and which has become top-heavy in financial and service industries is about to find itself without the flexible wherewithal to retrain people. The graduates and school-leavers and homeowners who will be thus failed will join the pressurised, and the indebted, and the repossessed. Some will struggle through; some will have a terrible time. Many of the universities to which they went will have an awful time too. Many are technically insolvent, or near it, and unsure of what they should be. Why not square the circle? ...

Brian Meenagh My father died twenty three years ago, at around one on the fifteenth of July. He was thirty nine. He was on a golf course, with my brother. I have spent the day teaching in Merton, and at various champagne receptions and high table. Beneath a tree in the gardens, near the wall, I smoked a cigar--an honduran negra--and twirled some bourbon around a glass, thinking of a day which I remember as yesterday, and of a man who died, under a name assumed in Northern Ireland, on the hottest day of a summer long ago. Not a day passes when I fail to think of him, nor one where I fail to pray for him. This evening, on a path Duns Scotus may have trod, I poured a little Jack Daniels onto the gravel, thinking of Yeats' poem of Christ Church ghosts; Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell And many a lesser bell sound through the room; And it is All Souls’ Night, And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come; For it is a ghost’s right...

Why it will take a lot to lose the republic.... Just have a listen to this charming, inspirational and open speech. I found it whilst writing up some things, and had Arnold in the background talking all over the place in Winnie-the-Pooh discursions and biting chunks out of life. He's just burbling away to a group of people at California State University about education and freedom, and, well, what a smart, driven man he is. That chap is a force of nature. Some of those kids in the audience must have had subsequent tough times lightened by the talk. Unfortunately, Californians have spent years at every level doing their level best to ruin the golden state, and the republic is suffering too. Many of Governor Schwarzenegger's aspirations from two years ago have been severely compromised. The fact that America can contain men like him, though, suggests that not all is yet lost. I do like this speech.

Monday Morning Spot the Difference Here's a CIA document released under the US Freedom of Information Act from February 1983. It is entitled 'USSR : Hints of Prolonged Stay in Afghanistan. Apparently, Nazi-style insurgents required a security effort which would have to be sold on the basis of Soviet patriotism. Here's a website concerned with the first Anglo-Afghan War ; the second ; the third ; and a modern journalist who appears to think that the fourth is winnable, or at least who did in 2003. (Here, by way of aside, is the late Mr Harold Macmillan in 1955 refusing to touch the Afghan border with a barge pole ). Madness; to keep doing the same thing over and over again thinking that it will improve. Eternal recurrence; the Nietzschean hell that exists when faith and hope are disallowed by the momentary prisons of our concerns. Go on. Spot the difference.

Sometimes, a little light does fall in. The picture is Raphael, Justice, on the Stanza Della Segnatura ceiling . I keep encountering people who are being consumed by the recession, and despite the fact that my present circumstances are quite pleasant--I've just returned from a nice meal and a chat over a cigar on Merton college wall--I can't help but feel bad for people. I don't like gloom. Things aren't all about me, of course, and each time I pointed out what was going on over the past two or thee years, I did try and suggest some partial solution, or at least that it was not beyond the wit of people to see the peculiar set of circumstances confronting this culture. I wish that all was happy in the garden; but around us, the cold is closing in. Still, there is a certain pleasure in seeing that those previously insulated are beginning to feel the heat of a little scrutiny, in some place far removed. The scandal that Christopher Booker has been drawing attention to--of...

How American healthcare works.... And no, I am not an expert. But I've just talked with one. Physicians charge what they want; insurance companies tell them what they will get. The difference between the two is in some states recycled as write-offs. The money not taxed is then spent on insurance against lawyers and lawsuits, many of whom are burdened by debts. To stop this, some states are instituting tribunals that are presented as alternatives to court, but with a constitutional appeal to a court if necessary. The lawyers do not like this. Nor do the insurers. States side with the lawyers, and in addition give tax breaks to tort rewards paid out by the insurers, who need the threat of them to get business but who need them to be rarely successful, so as to make money. Pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, charge physicians whatever they like for drugs that have been around for years and which could be generic. They then lobby Washington, and get the federal preference for 'bun...

Is there any sense in trying to regulate financial markets? There is a premium in blaming financiers for the crisis in which the west faces itself. They're a comfortable target, and most people have a sense of the arrogance or personal destructiveness of the industry. Things that are arcane, or which are in essence ephemera, such as derivative markets, credit-default swaps, and market-to-market pricing are little understood, and easily transferred to metaphors of fraud and villainy. As I write, the political establishments of Britain, Europe and America are rushing to institute new regulations for financial markets. They suggest that this action--which looks remarkably like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted--is in fact sensible, because the way in which 'markets' behaved in the past is a key to the present and the future. Markets don't exist. Relationships exist, some of which are best left to the clear if hard rules of the deep private sector, some of ...

That 1930 Feeling Right, we're less than a year into the great recession and already some of the more excitable people in the press and business are declaring victory even if mad Jose/Marcus Aurelius Biden isn't . Consumers and homeowners too, divorced from their government and from the time to acquaint themselves with economic reality--because they are trying to pay off debt or keep a job or a roof over their heads--are behaving with a certain grim determination. People may be in the well, but there's a magnificence to the way they're gripping the bricks and trying to haul themselves out regardless of the political and media class. That group, equally, seems to have convinced itself in the English speaking world that misdirected efforts against skilled immigrants and some sort of weird psuedo-Buddhist mega-debt are the way forward. But they aren't. I do wonder if the worst is not yet to come. For instance, any economics teacher worth their salt will tell studen...

Sarah Palin, 1962 In 1962, Richard Nixon lost the California Gubernatorial campaign. His career looked in pieces; the press had run a typically tough race against him that he interpreted, sensitive as he was, as vicious. He declared the result the end of his last ever campaign, and stalked away in ill-advised public disgust . Immediately, Nixon began planning a comeback. All those bad things about the thirty-seventh president were always accompanied by things one could admire. The soaring grasp of foreign policy, the determination to understand the currents of American life, the frustrated orthodoxy of a mid-twentieth century man, all these things were there that night. Nixon was more than his caricature. Last Friday, watching the--what is the word? Self-defenestration? autoimmolation? of Sarah Palin, I wondered at what America had lost. There's a story about Nixon and, I think, Len Garment climbing over a wall in the fifties and sleeping in a Summer House together rather than bein...

Oxford, July 6 2009 I am writing from a comfortable room overlooking Magpie Lane, just outside of the Merton walls. I sat on those walls just a few moments ago, smoking a Dark Sumatra cigar after high table and chatting with a Virginian about the US. Frankly, reader, I am amazed to be here, but then again, the Vietnamese coffee I'm drinking--a gift of a class of students from that republic--and the day I've had flitting between the wilder parts of the British establishment and my own life should on their own have inured me to anything. My life is factually quite strange, but I thank God for the chance it gives me to teach. The ostensible reason I'm here is to teach a course on Winston Churchill and the end of the British Empire, but I find myself, well--not to be too pretentious or confessional--regenerating in a city I was angry with when I left it three years ago to go to the bar. They say, in the library to my left, that the ghost of Duns Scotus walks around, and I find ...

Light Blogging Sorry to my one demented reader for the light blogging over the past weekend. I am off to Oxford tomorrow to mix some law teaching with a seminar for Berkeley at Merton College for three weeks. A busy weekend and a deep disaffection with the news all around has stopped me writing for a while. I have no complaint; everywhere I look the economic waters are lapping around people, though not threatening all equally. I at least am keeping my coracle afloat, even if I have to bail out a bit sometimes. But, well, I'm anticipating fun, so will be in high spirits and writing away by tomorrow, I'm sure. In the meantime, I found this lovely video of medieval music on Laban Tall's site. It is enormously relaxing, and I thought that I'd share it.

Songs on a Summer Morning I've been listening to Buffy Sainte-Marie, (yet another thing I have Radio 2's Terry Wogan playlist to thank for) who makes me think of lots of things. Folly, mostly. For example, her songs were sufficiently haunting and threatening that Lyndon Johnson took time from his breakdown to write--on white house stationery--thank you notes to radio stations that wouldn't play her, apparently. By contrast, Lincoln, whom most warmongers like to compare themselves to, exposed himself to poetry and agonised over the civil war. Have a listen to The Big Ones Get Away , below, and tell me it doesn't make you think of Ella Wheeler Wilcox' It Might Have Been , or at least the sentiments therein. We will be what we could be. Do not say, "It might have been, had not this, or that, or this." No fate can keep us from the chosen way; He only might who is. We will do what we could do. Do not dream Chance leaves a hero, all uncrowned to grieve. I hold,...

The Crisis Intensifies As I write, no doubt fevered negotiations are going on to preclude over a dozen of the United States from bankruptcy. California and Indiana , in particular, seem to be in the trouble that I suggested some time ago would have come along from the combination of the credit crunch, fiscal irresponsibility over decades, and the collapse of AIG, regardless of depression-level GDP falls. The British government is moving to nationalise a successful train line which has recently been run into the buffers by privatised management, and many of my fellow citizens are hoping against hope for some miracle to save them from repossession. Just walking across Eel Brook Common this morning was a revelation of the sort I keep having; people to the left and right, sitting on the grass or benches, on their phones wondering where their pay was or how they were going to make it through the month. It was tin pan alley with tantalum.... Meanwhile, in defiance of all logic and sense, g...

A Country of Government Yobs The illustration depicts Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Children, Schools, and Families, Edward Michael Balls. English national character during the repressed Victorian period up around the second world war was an aberration from that perceived before and since. I was reminded of this by a section of one of Ray Megarry's Miscellanies-at-law this morning. In it, Megarry takes the comical Norman French of a 1663 indictment in Sir Charles Sydlyes case to recall the tale of a naked man on a covent garden balcony showering others with empty bottles; He was fined 2000 mark, committed without bail for a week, and bound to his good behaviour for a year, on his confession of information against him for shewing himself naked in a balcony, and throwing down bottles (pist in) vi & armis among the people in Covent Garden, contra pacem, and to the scandal of the Government...he was charged with several misdemeanours encounter le peace del Roy & que ...