Déjà vu

The experience of perceiving a new situation as if it had occurred before. It is sometimes associated with exhaustion or certain types of mental disorder. Collins English Dictionary.

The experience of déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of "eeriness" Wikipedia.

What a mess. Quite how the General Secretary of the Labour party thought that it was not in breach of the Government's own transparency laws to accept donations through a third party beggars belief. Of course we need to keep things in perspective - our's is not a corrupt political system by international standards and this looks like oversight and incompetence rather than any kind of conspiracy. There is no hint here of peerages for sale or of favours for donations - it looks much more like an odd ball character setting up some strange arrangement to hide his identity which inexplicably the officers of the party went along with.

Poor Gordon - he had no knowledge of this and he genuinely wanted a break with the past. But yet again our disfunctional system for financing democracy has plunged a government into crisis, with the Met for the second time at the door of Downing Street.

Where now? The basic outline of a reformed funding system has been in the ether for a while - but has not been approved because on the one hand the Tories don't want caps on spending outside election periods at constituency level, and Labour doesn't want caps to apply to union donations, for fear it will mean the end of the party-union link. Both are going to have to compromise now - otherwise we will be back here again, with serious consequences for public trust.

So, we need three things. First, on the supply side, we need a cap on individual donations so that there can be no suspicion of anyone buying influence. Matthew Taylor today suggests this could be as low as £1000. Radical - and I think right. This will encourage parties to reach out to a broader range of people and would encourage them to recruit larger numbers of members and supporters, rather than desperately chasing after a handful of millionaires.

Second, on the demand side, we need a cap on spending at the national and the constituency level. The parties should agree not to use billboard advertisements or other expensive distractions that fuel the arms race - or as Taylor suggests, these should just be banned.

Finally, we need state funding to replace the money lost through the donations caps. The way to legimitise this in the eyes of voters is to implement the Power Inquiry's recommendation to give people an option on the ballot paper to select a party to which they can dedicate their £3 share of public funds.

What about union donations? There are two ways forward. One is that Labour accepts the cap on individual donations covers unions too. This wouldn't break the link as the unions could transfer the sum of each individual member's contributions. Some fear however that it might dilute the link because it would reduce the amount the overall amount the unions give.

The alternative to that is that we recognise that each of our two main parties have different social bases and allow parties to set their own individual caps - which would allow Labour to set the level higher to allow block union contributions to continue. This arrangement could be regulated by the Electoral Commission, which could force a party to set a lower cap if it led to a serious inequality in funding.

Let's hope the police investigation is swift - and that the days of rich men bearing gifts is over.

A shameful act

It is utterly shameful that the Oxford Union has given a platform to Griffin and Irving tonight. The Union says this is about free speech. It is not. Freedom of speech means that fascists are free to express their hateful ideology, they can stand in elections (as they do), they can distribute literature, they can hold meetings, they can stand in the street and spout their abhorent views - so long as they do so within the law, which prohibits incitement to racial and religious hatred. That is what is entailed by freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech does not mean that institutions like the Oxford Union have a duty to give these vermin a platform. What the Union and people like Evan Harris MP are arguing for is not free speech - but a kind of free speech maximisation, which is something different. Their argument is that we - the rest of society - have a duty to provide a megaphone and a platform from which these extremists can speak, that we all have an obligation to run around helping every extreme voice get heard. We have no such obligation. They are free to speak - but we have no duty to help them.

A world class football pitch

There's been a lot of talk over the last few days of the clash between club and country. Steven Gerrard has become the emblematic figure at the centre of this particular narrative - he was shocking against Croatia, but scored an astonishingly good free kick against Newcastle yesterday. Gerrard symbolises what people suspect to be true of our national team's players as a whole - that they'd rather perform for their club than their nation, that Premiership and Champions League glory simply matter more to them than winning for England.

I can't really believe this to be true. The 1966 team are totemic figures in our national psyche - fifty years on and every small boy knows their names, they are fed to us like our mother's milk. I can't believe that the likes of Lampard, Gerrard and Owen don't want to go down in history as comparable national heros. Winning the World Cup surely remains the highest accolade in international football and everybody knows it. Becoming European Champions can't be far behind.

I guess the issue is rather that, like the rest of us, they simply don't think they can win - their confidence is low and they don't try as hard. This contrasts with their world class club sides, four of which are among the best in Europe (admittedly not something that could be said in 1966).

The premiership is currently the best football league in the world - there's no question about that. One only has to go travel around Asia to see it's international appeal - I remember driving through Malaysia once and just thinking how surreal it was that the main motorway was lined with billboards showing a nervously grinning Steven Gerrard, as if he were some kind of strange young god. Liverpool is Malaysia's team - Singapore supports Man U. It's odd, but its true. Our fixtures are of course set to ensure the big teams can be shown live at a decent hour over there.

The premiership is watched more than any other league across the world - and this is the way it is so successfully marketed, it is a world league that happens to be played in England. It sustains this on the back of a relatively flush domestic market, Sky deals with global reach and, as a consequence of that, a mountain of cash that attracts the world's best players and coaches. Why on earth did Juande Ramos, leading a team like Sevilla, want to come and manage Tottenham? There were boardroom issues in Spain - but fundamentally he is just earning a lot more money at White Hart Lane.

We hear in today's papers that Jose Morinho has always considered international management to be something for the latter end of your career, after the daily pressures of club management have worn you out - except for the England job. Why?

With England there is a different motivation, different players. It's a special country with a special culture of football.

...according to a close confidant of 'the special one'. Might also be because they'll pay you an absolute shed load of cash.

The Spanish league is probably the premiership's nearest competitor - Italian club football is widely regarded to have gone down hill in recent years - and after that what is there? The Bundesliga? Ligue 1?

The Premiership's position might also be something to do with the fact that the TV coverage provided by Sky is, although I hate to say it, actually very good - and much more dynamic to watch than its Italian or Spanish counterparts. Things like this shouldn't be underestimated in terms of gaining a global TV audience.

So, world class football is played in England every week, but we have a second tier national team. A causal link? Cue calls for quotas? It seems like a bit of a leap to me. After all the presence of so many world class players should give English players the opportunity to play alongside and against some of these international class acts. Moreover the big clubs like Man U, Chelsea and Liverpool regularly play the key figures from our national team - they're not charities, they wouldn't do this if they didn't think they were any good.

Is it all down to grassroots failure? Clearly that is important, though let's be clear what we mean. Is it about money and facilities, that are lacking because we spend all our money on foreign players? People seem to have been blaming a lack of investment at the grassroots for every sporting defeat in this country for as long as I can remember - we need to invest more in the young game, it's not like when I was a kid, they've sold all the school pitches etc. I suspect people have always said this, just like they've always thought politicians can't be trusted or that young people don't have enough discipline. I detect a bit of sepia tinted nostalgia here - is the youth game really more under resourced and less well run today than it was in the 1950s and 60s? I find this hard to believe. Do the Croations spend more than we do on youth football? No. There is, however, an interesting piece by Jamie Jackson in The Observer today where he identifies big differences in how we coach - basically we play kids too young in 11 a side games on big pitches, so clearly room for changes - though it's odd that no one in the FA seems to have noticed until now (apart from apparently Trevor Brooking).

But in the meantime we clearly need a coach who can inspire a poorly performing crop of players who on paper should be doing well. That's why if you gave me a choice between Fabio Capello (who has a great record, but was widely reviled in Madrid for much of last season for playing boring football) and The Special One, I'd go for the Special One everytime. The difference is the ability to motivate a dressing room - and the important factor of Morinho speaking the language, which in this particular line of work has to be important. Or if not him a Harry Redknapp/Alan Shearer also looks tempting.

Who should choose the new coach? Well, there's a post in and of itself. I simply can't believe that the former chairman of the Tory party Brian Mawhinney has a role in any of this - it beggars belief.

The art of the non-prediction - there's more, there's more, it's the way I tell 'em

So I'll nail my colours to the mast. Mr Brown could become the Steve McLaren of British politics. Something is going to happen, something quite nasty. What, we must wait and see.

Matthew Parris, The Times 24th November 2007.

So, colours well and truly nailed to the ol' mast then.

The art of the non-prediction

This is not the end of Gordon Brown. But many more episodes like this and it will be seen as the beginning of the end.

Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer 25th November 2007

That's brilliant. Thanks.

Do you want drama?

...well if you want f***ing drama, I'll give you f***ing drama!

So proclaims Russell Brand before downing a glass of vodka, smashing it on his head, plunging it into his chest and raking it up and down his arms - all on stage in front of a pub full of people.

There are few autobiographies written by people in their thirties that are worth reading - not enough of interest happens to most people, even famous people, in their first three decades.

The same can't be said for Russell Brand's My Booky Wook, published last week. As Brand says of his formative years: 'my childhood is so jampacked with melodrama and sentimentality...that you'll doubtless use these very pages to mop up your abundant tears'. And it's not only Brand's childhood that was tragic - his whole life has been a pretty eventful affair.

To cut a short story even shorter: Brand's parents separate when he is six months old, he hates his step father, his father (despite Brand clearly liking him) is unsupportive, his mum becomes very seriously ill at various points, he gets excluded from a series of educational institutions, he smokes dope and drinks heavily from about 16 onwards, he harms himself pretty regularly, he gets kicked out by a series of girlfriends and he becomes a junkie.

So, there is a lot going on - but its not just the eventfulness that keeps the reader engaged - Brand is extraordinarily and admirably honest. If he left anything out for fear of offending anyone or making people think badly of him, then I'd hate to discover what it was. We learn in great detail about his first efforts at masturbation, about the time he thinks he loses his virginity, and about his bad behaviour with prostitutes.

Sex is a big theme - simply because he has a lot of it. At the age of seventeen he flies with his dad to South East Asia and spends the whole time in brothels with his father picking up prostitutes. Here he discovers a physical activity he is good at - and continues performing prolificly throughout. The Sun declares him at one point 'shagger of the year'. Quite a plaudit. But Brand's rampant sexual appetite also leaves him lonely - he drives girlfriends (if any of them are ever around long enough to be described as such) up the wall with constant philandering and drug use. By the end of the book he gets put through therapy for sex addiction - though we never find out whether this is successful.

Another big theme is substance misuse on a grand scale - he appears bascially to have been out of his head for most of his adult life, taking drugs on a daily basis. By the time he gets into his twenties he starts on what he calls 'man's drugs' and becomes addicted to heroin. He lives a strange existence - trying to hold down a job as an MTV presenter while at the same time having a foot in London's seedier underbelly of junkies, dealers and prostitutes.

While he dismisses other drugs for making him nervy, in heroin he finds solace:

Heroin gets the job done. What it mainly does is take you right out of reality, and plant you somewhere more manageable. In short, it contextualises everything else as meaningless...it makes you feel lovely and warm and cosy. It gives you a great, big, smacky cuddle and from then on the idea of need is no longer an abstract thing, but a longing in your belly and a kicking in your legs and a shivering in your arms and sweat on your forehead and a dull palour on your face. At this point, you're no longer under any misaprehension about what it is that you need: you don't think 'nice to have a girlfriend, read a poem or ride a bike' you think 'fuck, I need heroin'.

Throughout the book you find yourself wondering whether there's something else going on that is driving him close to the edge - and we later find out that he is likely to have been suffering from manic depression. A lot of other things now start to make sense - both to Brand, looking back, and to the reader. The self-harm, the drug use, the sex addiction - even his creative hyperactivity - can all seemingly be explained by this simple diagnosis. Behind the bold exterior and eccentric showmanship (he had a mouse living in his hair for a month at one point, which is, to say the least, a little strange) there is a very fragile young man.

Its only when a strong paternal figure in the form of his current agent comes along that things get put right - he goes through rehab and has been off drugs and booze ever since.

This is plenty of humour here - he is constantly getting into scrapes. He is sacked for turning up to work dressed as Osama Bin laden on 12th Septmeber 2001. He gets chased through the streets of Istanbul after trying to get a refund from a pimp. Yet behind the countless calamities, there is an underlying bleakness here, a very troubled soul sheltering under a narcotic blitzkrieg.

You have to admire Brand for writing such an honest book - and by the end you genuinely get to like him, for all his faults. This is because he shares a lot, you feel you know him, like a crazy cousin.

Do you want drama? After reading this, I don't think so.

Exit, voice and courtesy

It is hardly original to note that online discussion is having a radical impact on our political life - the horizontal nature of on line fora undercuts off-line hierarchical structures, the ability of anyone with a broad band connection to set up their own blog or comment on others is democratising journalism and 'comment', the capacity for global real time interactivity shrinks geographical distance...blah blah blah.

But there is also an uglier side to online discourse - I've stopped reading the comments made on Comment Is Free articles because, in amongst the gems (and there are real insights, genuine attempts to engage in sensible discussion and flashes of cutting wit) so many of them are ill thought-through, rude, borderline racist and mysogenistic.

This is of course a consequence of the lack of any social sanction for being a complete arsehole online. In any other walk of life if you are rude to somebody you tend to suffer some consequence - they stop talking to you again, they tell other people that you are an insufferable cretin etc.

But anonymity means that you can say what you like, however unreflective, rude and unpleasant and simply walk away. If I promise to water my neighbour's plants when they're away and then just can't be bothered and they all die, no doubt my neighbours wouldn't trust me to do it next time, and would think worse of me for it. If the horrible people who regularly spend their mornings posting sexist comments in response to articles by Polly Toynbee or Jackie Ashley were identifiable they would likely be sacked, their friends (if they have any) would look on them differently, there would be penalties to pay.

Now I actually don't agree with Polly Toynbee who suggests that CiF contributors should be identifiable - the internet does pose real questions about identity and privacy. Many people would doubtless feel constrained to make genuine political points for fear, perhaps, that they could be used against them in a job interview or such like. A lot of people who don't work in politics or the media don't like to have their political views published and potentially held against them in other spheres of their lives. Getting rid of anonymity would therefore significantly reduce the openness and democratic nature of such fora.

I don't have any magic solutions by the way - I just think its depressing that in the absence of social sanctions basic norms of politeness and courtesy quickly seem to break down, that it is the fear of punishment that keeps so many of us in line, rather than any genuine sense of ethical obligation. It seems to back up a rather bleak rational choice model of human behaviour.

Alternatively of course, it may just be that the prevalence of rude people on the internet is because most socially well adjusted people have better things to do with their time than contribute incessantly to these fora. So, it's not that the relatively nice people I seem to interact with day to day are secretly going home and posting snide and insidious little anonymous comments on various political websites, but rather that they don't post anything at all. CiF is therefore just another example of the 'usual suspects' problem we experience with most democratic fora - dominance by a shrill and unrepresentative minority.

That leaves me with some optimism.

Teen fightclub

Apparently - and I've never done this - if you type 'fight' into the search bar on You Tube, you will be exposed to a whole new world of teen violence. There are all sorts of viscious fights on display - many of them set up for camera and posted for comment. Of course, there have always been fights and bullying in schools and among young people. I remember school fights as great almost gladatorial spectacles - an almost primeval chant of 'scrap, scrap' would emerge from the ether and be passed by word of mouth around the school until it had become an inescapable dulling throb in our ears. We would all run down to the football pitch where two likely lads would be squaring up. If we were lucky there would be real punches, some blood and one or two neutrals would join in to liven things up a bit. Boys like fighting, and they like watching other people fight.

But of course thats no reason why adults should not seek to prevent it. It's bad, people get hurt, sometimes very badly. And one can't help concluding that these fights on You Tube are put on precisely for show - there is a sub culture of young boys assessing the quality of the violence, comparing fights and seeking to out do each other. This is peer-reviewed bare knuckled boxing on a mass scale.

So, it seems the existence of You Tube may be amplifying young people's innate instinct to want to kick each other in. I say this as someone who has never believed that video games make people more violent - because by and large it is a displacement activity, people enjoy it and do it precisely because it is not real. Occasionally you get the odd copy cat nutter, but with those people there are much more profound issues in their lives that have led them down a misanthropic and violent path.

But this does seem different - real fights are being staged for people to watch on mobile phones or on You Tube. So what do we do about it? Should we do anything? I'm an instinctive liberal - I recoil at the idea of banning or censoring things. I prefer to leave it to people's better nature to exercise a bit of responsibility. But its clear in this case that self-regulation isn't working. There is the option on You Tube for people to submit content as offensive, of course, and You Tube would presumably take a video down if it doesn't match their 'community guidelines'. But no one ever reports this stuff and ther eis masses of it - I presume because people like me, or I suppose most readers, or my Gran, who might be offended or concerned, don't regularly type 'fight' into the search engine and spend our evenings watching this stuff.

Of course in practical terms it is just very difficult to regulate the internet. If You Tube acted to clamp down on this stuff then presumably it would crop up on other sites. But nevertheless you have to think they have a responsibility to do more. Most of the internet is owned by a tiny handful of big companies, who make multi-billion dollar profits. Surely they have the capacity to do more to enforce their own guidelines? They couldn't eliminate it, but they could have a lot more people watching out for it. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist or George Monbiot to think that they don't take stuff down because they don't want to lose users and advertising revenue.

Interestingly - and I didn't know this until recently - Ofcom has no remit to regulate the internet, which seems very odd given how pervasive it is compared to film for instance which is very closely regulated to protect children from offensive content. Maybe Ofcom should have the power to fine companies like You Tube for failing to invest in enforcing their own guidelines?

Finally, I hope I haven't encourged any of you to check out these sites and join in. I'm assuming I don't have many young readers with an as yet unfulfilled penchant for gratuitous violence, but you never know.

Thank you Richard and Judy

Not words I ever thought I'd hear myself say, but there we are. According to today's Guardian we have them to thank for the fact that big publishers are about to drop the hardback book.

I have been mildly irritated by the fact that new books come out with hard covers first for as far back as I can remember. This is mainly of course because they are twice the price of paperbacks and I have never earned enough money to stop thinking 'I'd quite like to read this, but I'd better wait until the paperback comes out'.

But it's also in part because of the physical experience of reading books - I am a destroyer of books, I like to attack them. It is probably quite a disturbing perosnality trait, but I derive quiet satisfaction from looking back on a throughly used and abused paperback book. It seems to say - there, you've finished it. Hardbacks are also difficult to read one-handed as they are not as easily bent in two.

These are minor and embarrassing matters, I admit, but human progress is largely constituted of small victories. So, nice one Richard and Judy.

If you were forced to choose...

...between a Question Time debate involving Chris Clegg and Nick Huhne and a late night 'controversial' discussion programme, seemingly on immigration, with a panel including Nick Ferrari (grotesque), Vanessa Feltz (OMG), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (on the right side but fundamentally annoying) and David Aaronovitch (help!), which would you go for?.....probably the Libs on the basis that sleep is better than cutting your own throat to the sound of the commentarichat

Anyway, thats why I'm going to bed....