Against diets

"Ye are the salt of the earth", Jesus told his disciples. I've thought more than once that there's an entire generation growing up that were they to hear this, they'd fail to understand that he was doing a bit of a self-esteem raising exercise here. Because in Middle Eastern climes the reference to salt would be immediately be understood to connote good things: salt as an essential preservative was nothing less than a giver of life.

Whereas today the notion that these disciples must have been a pretty toxic bunch would be the most likely message the youth of today would draw from such a comparison - which brings me to this story, a parable of our times you could say:

"A mother of two has won more than £800,000 in damages after a radical detox diet left her brain-damaged and epileptic, it emerged yesterday. Dawn Page, 52, was told to drink an extra four pints of water a day and reduce her salt intake in order to prevent fluid retention and lose weight. Within days of starting the "amazing hydration diet" she began vomiting uncontrollably but was assured by nutritionist Barbara Nash this was "part of the detoxification process". Mrs Nash even urged Mrs Page – who weighed 12 stone – to increase the amount of water she drank to six pints per day and eat fewer salty foods. But Mrs Page, of Faringdon, Wiltshire, suffered a massive epileptic fit brought on by severe sodium deficiency less than a week after she started the diet in 2001. She was rushed to intensive care, but doctors were unable to prevent permanent brain injuries."

Salt: generally most of us consume too much but if you don't get enough, you'll die. An obvious point this isn't. Not these days.

The story also illustrates the way in which modern food fads like to ignore the basic mechanisms the body has to tell us when we need something. Not getting enough fluids? The mechanism that usually comes into play here is called thirst.

Today when it comes to food, assuming no basic knowledge should be the default position. Lemme give you another example. One particularly obnoxious pupil I taught last year, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, convinced himself that he was fat. So he didn't eat for three days. He asked me - and I swear this is true - if not eating can make you tired.

I said, "Of course it can, disagreeable cretin. Food has calories in it, calories are units of energy - so if you don't eat, you'll lack energy. Moron."

Then I bitch-slapped him with my revolver.

Ok, I didn't really. I did try to get the whole calories point across to him though. In fairness to him, while he was and is a complete asshole, in today's world he could be forgiven for not knowing this because we have as with the salt thing a whole generation that think calories per se are evil - rather than what they are: something we actually need.

And this is where we are, it seems to me: there are a lot of things that while most of us consume too much of them, are actually necessary to keep body and soul together - but this fact has eluded an astonishing number of people.

Like fat, for example. It's not intrinsically evil - you do actually need some, y'know.

Here's some free food advice: eat a balanced diet with fruit, veg, carbs (these too actually not evil) - and protein. Yes you need this too - amazing the number of vegetarians there are who don't get this. "The vegetarian diet is so healthy", they bleat. Not if you're not getting enough protein it isn't - but I digress...

Wanna lose weight? Eat less and/or take more exercise. That there is such a thing as the 'diet industry' is testimony to the fact that there are an astonishing number of people who don't get this. Thing is, it is in their interests to perpetuate a situation where people don't get this - so that they can continue to sell their mental food regimes. The idea that there are any foods that are intrinsically evil is a damnable lie. But what are intrinsically evil are faddish diets. I don't know this from experience but it's something I've always instinctively known is true. Who the fuck can live on these programmes that were clearly designed for tortoises or rabbits or something? No human being. This is why people go on them, lose the weight and then put it on again. No, no - this is no way to live. If you want to lose weight, you have to change your lifestyle permanently - and attempting to eat a calorific content appropriate for a fucking cockatiel just ain't sustainable in the long-run.

There's something else as well: don't want to lose weight? My advice would be to not let it worry you. Or at least not let this weird notion going around these days that what you eat and how much you eat is something that is imbued with moral significance. That self-regarding actions can be thought of otherwise is indicative of an illiberal spirit of the age, I feel. I'll illustrate this with a degree of honesty about myself that I'll no doubt regret later. Slim, toned, fairly fit is where I find myself at my age. Take exercise, all that shit. But as I still also treat my body as a repository for various noxious chemicals, this has slightly less than fuck all to do with healthy living and mostly to do with a narcissistic attempt to delay the comedy of evolution for a few more years so that I can still persuade women younger than myself to sleep with me. Because if there's any truth in the saying that everyone gets the face they deserve by the time they're fifty, I'm gonna look like shit having a bad day. So until then, I'm making the most of it. Nothing moral about this in the slightest - if anything commensurate with the opposite.

But I prefer this to going around hectoring people. I'll have another drink instead. Because alcohol, to the chagrin of the puritans, isn't bad for you - it's just that so many of us consume too much of it.

Against workfare

This term 'workfare', originally coined in the United States, describes a welfare system where the able-bodied unemployed are compelled to work for their benefits. Although sketchy at the moment, this seems to be what the government is proposing.

Here Johann Hari declares himself in favour on two grounds. One is that a system that allows people to languish on benefits for years erodes the work-ethic and as such does the welfare recipient no favours. The other related point is that if we don't confront this fact, the Conservatives will introduce a much more punitive system.

I had intended to dismiss this second point with a single sentence: being harsh with people to pre-empt the Tories being even harsher with them isn't a good reason for doing anything. But it occurred to me this needs fleshing out a bit for if he is serious about this as a Tory-defeating strategy, what he is advocating here is triangulation. With regards to welfare, it's worth taking a moment to consider what the implications of this has been in the United States. It wasn't Nixon, Reagan or Bush Snr who promised to end 'welfare as we know it' but President Clinton. One of the ironies of his presidency is that he achieved precisely the sort of thing his rightwing critics advocated - but gained no credit for it because he was perceived as being on the wrong side of the 'culture wars'. Ending welfare as the Americans knew it was exactly what he did, for he terminated a federal government responsibility to provide relief to the able-bodied unemployed that had been established since the New Deal. This has laid the foundations for the 'Wisconsin model': Johann rightly criticises this punitive system but fails to make the connection between this and the sort of triangulation he is advocating.

But what of this erosion of the work-ethic, which is the central thrust of Johann's argument - as it is of most critics of the current system? Of this business of people living a life on benefits he says:

"This isn't what the Welfare State was intended to look like. You were not supposed to fall asleep in the safety net and raise your kids there so they know nothing else."

This is quite correct. Beveridge, when constructing his famous report, envisaged the experience of living on unemployment benefit - as it used to be called - to be a temporary affair. But it's worth remembering why: Beveridge imagined that unemployment benefit would cover those temporarily afflicted by seasonal and frictional unemployment. The more severe problems of cyclical and structural unemployment were something he thought could be solved through the then fashionable doctrine of demand-management. Easy to understand why these ideas should be in vogue in a nation emerging from the experience of total war; easy to understand how they came to be dashed on the rocks of experience, as indeed they were in a seventies Britain trying to cope with the combined challenges of newly-industrialising countries and oil-shocks.

Which brings me to this: to me there are two questions that Johann doesn't really grapple with here. These are: what causes unemployment and how does welfare system work? I can't pretend to give a comprehensive answer to either of these questions but I do want to suggest a couple of things that are missing from what I consider to be a fundamentally moralistic, and therefore flawed, analysis of these social and economic problems.

Of the first, I think this has to be acknowledged: unemployment is not a function of the morality of the poor - it is a function of capitalism. You don't have to buy into the vulgar Marxist notion of capitalists conspiring to create a reserve army of unemployed labour to bid down wages. You don't even have to be a Marxist of any kind to recognise what I consider to be two incontrovertible facts that can be verified from economic history. The following should, in my view, be accepted as a bare minimum:

a) Mass unemployment has been a periodic characteristic of capitalist economies from their genesis simply because they lack any inherent mechanism to prevent it.

b) To maximise profits, capitalists using the best technology available will economise on labour wherever possible.

These leaves workers who are available to move into areas where they can produce goods and services for which there is greater demand - but it is the transition that is the problem. This is what economists call structural unemployment. Now, in making this transition, we are asked to believe that it is self-discipline and moral character that is causing the difficulty here and it is on this point I have the greatest disagreement with David Cameron and his New Model Tories - and by extension with Johann Hari in as far as he with him. And while he would no doubt strenuously object, agree with him he does. If you've read the piece linked above, you'll have read the morality tale about his pal 'Andy' who started smoking spliffs at school and never bothered getting off his arse after that. An anecdote perhaps - an anecdote certainly but we are assured this is no isolated case:

"Go to the place where I was born – Glasgow East, site of the potentially Brown-busting by-election this Thursday – and you will see them spreading before you in great concrete estates of poverty. You can taste the ennui in the air. Ask the kids what they want to do when they grow up and they shrug with heartbreaking indifference and say, "Dunno"."

I'll decline the injunction to 'go there' on the grounds that I've already been there. Taught there - and in this capacity it's a case of swallowing the 'ennui'. But there's no point in making this observation without asking why this is. There's the problem of unemployment, which won't go away no matter how many people get on their bikes - but there's something else as well and it has to do with how our welfare system works.

It is characteristic of Victorian piety to demand from the poor a moral fortitude that their critics neither exhibit themselves, nor expect from their peers. This is why, for example, David Cameron can smoke weed and snort coke and all that happens to him is that commentators admire the way he deflects 'unjustified' questions about his 'private life'. But the left-behind society has no such privacy.

The other curious thing about our society is that we are asked to believe it is only the well-off and the rich that respond to incentives to work. Don't tax incomes or profits too much lest you incentivize inertia, the Thatcherites told us. Very well - so why doesn't this apply to the poor, the low paid, the unemployed? I can't claim to set the world to rights but I can make a small suggestion: we might want to consider reforming a system that has a marginal benefit withdrawal rate starting at 100%, falling to something around 80% when you break into the 'applicable amount' and your housing benefit starts to disappear. Then there's the rate of marginal tax once you break out of the benefits threshold altogether. Maybe a minimum citizens income might be an idea? Not sure about this myself but right now I'm thinking it would be preferable to this notion that the poor should be forced through 'community service' to genuflect towards the work-ethic.

Because the poor are different from us: they have less money.

Labour and the Catholic vote

I came across this article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft via Paulie. Here's the thrust of the argument - you can read the rest yersels:

"Whether or not the Government holds Glasgow East on Thursday, this by-election helps explain why Labour retains a bedrock of support in Scotland. Religious faith may have faded, but sectarian loyalties remain: Glasgow East is a Catholic constituency, and Labour is the Catholic party."

Paulie suggests that it might be 'over-simplified'. I prefer 'largely bollocks' and since Wheatcroft's 'aren't the natives strange?' argument has been repeated elsewhere of late, I thought it might be worth explaining why.

Not all the article is bullshit. Wheatcroft rightly points out that "the Tories have been gravely damaged by the eclipse of political Protestantism." But he doesn't follow through the logic: Scottish voters, in the main, have long since abandoned the habit of voting on sectarian grounds; it is class that is the overwhelming determinant of voting behaviour - as it is in the rest of the country.

Any residual sectarian voting has been neutralised by the shift in the main parties' position on Northern Ireland: Major pursued a peace deal; Labour abandoned its previously rather silly policy of a 'united Ireland by consent'.

This leaves us here: there is absolutely no question that the Catholic Church is deeply interwoven into the fabric of Scottish Labour but I can't say this firmly enough: despite what commentators would have you believe, despite what the clerics wish was true - there is no 'Catholic vote' in Scotland. Certainly not the kind that can swing a constituency.

Catholics are more likely to vote Labour in the way that all religious minorities, with the exception of Anglicans, are - which is to say only slightly and while I'm too lazy to produce any data to support this, if this religious influence were controlled for income, I doubt it would register at all.

There is precious little evidence that Catholics even agree with the Vatican on issues like abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research and the like - still less that their voting behaviour is influenced by them. Anyway, the convention in British politics - thank God, if you'll pardon the expression - is that Parliamentary votes on these questions are a non-partisan affair. Do all these London commentators think Glaswegian voters are so ignorant as to be unaware of this? Probably. But they're wrong.

I'll predict that Labour will hold Glasgow East. The reason for this has nothing to do with the proportion of Catholics amongst the electorate and everything to do with the proportion that are poor. Whether you like it or not, the working class are still more likely to give their vote to the Labour party. This is not the 'broken society' but the left-behind society and this is why you don't have to be Nostradamus to predict that the voters of Glasgow East will deliver a big 'fuck off' to Cameron and his decaffeinated brand of Victorian piety.

I'll also predict that whilst losing, the SNP will substantially increase its share of the vote. This will have nothing to do with the SNP's opportunistic and unscrupulous attempt to ingratiate themselves to the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland. I tell you this: if you've lived in Glasgow for the last twenty years or so, you can't fail to have noticed the increase in prosperity here. More people are working, own cars and houses, go on foreign holidays, eat out - shit like that. But the thing is, rising prosperity has actually made these areas worse in some ways for the simple reason that as soon as folks get sufficient income, they get the fuck out of there. Because hair-shirts are only the choice of garment for those middle-class people who aspire to be downwardly-mobile, in my experience.

So there's a fair amount of people who would like to give Labour a kicking on Thursday - but still more that possess a memory. The Tories hate Glaswegians. We hate them right back. This is why they don't have a prayer in this by-election. Fuck all to do with religion - everything to do with them being bastards. The SNP will do better with their boring, whining, mono-causal explanation for everything but not well enough. Because they used to get called the Tartan Tories; those of us that possess memories understand that this epithet was given for good reason.

Prepare for death

There is something comical about this government's assumption of cradle-to-grave competence. Provided they haven't identified you as a criminal in the womb and ASBOed your foetal ass, they can ensure you have a fulfilling, non-food wasting, exercise taking, non-smoking, obesity-avoiding life.

But as you live and move and have your being in this society that the government has 're-built', take care that in your bliss you forget not that one day, perhaps sooner than you think, you're going to die. It is because people are, in the government's estimation, generally insufficiently prepared for the Grim Reaper, that they have come forward with this initiative:

"Funeral homes and crematoria will be encouraged to hold open days as part of a government plan to help people better prepare for death.

Ministers believe such events will make death and dying less taboo subjects, and will encourage more people to make wills and plan for where they want to spend their final days."

You read it here first: the task that the government has set itself is nothing more or less than to make death 'less taboo'. Good luck with that. I think you'll find your only slightly less esoteric goal of 'raising aspirations' a walk in the park compared to this one.

More Glasgae East stuff

Parochial of me, I know. It's just that I'm so impressed with all the attention the place has been getting. Particularly from the Tories, given that the proverbial snowball in hell has good prospects compared to those of the Conservatives in Glasgow East.

In a distressing turn of events, the Scottish Tory leader has popped into the gym in the hope that this will boost the campaign.

This is bad for two reasons:

1) The very idea of Annabel Goldie working out leaves a disturbing image lingering in the mind.

2) Do her actions indicate some knowledge on her part that her going to the fucking gym to spread Cameron's distinctively sickly and decaffeinated version of the gospel of Self-Help is actually going to swing a few voters?

Are there really people out there who say to themselves, "I wasn't going to vote Tory but now Annabel has donned her leotard, I've changed my mind."?

Surely if such people exist, they should be killed. Several times.

Fortunately I don't think they do and it's just that Ms Goldie is completely out of her fucking gourd.

It has been noticeable the way this little by-election has brought out the parties true colours:

Scottish Labour? Incompetent, disorganised, fucked-up selection procedures, producing a candidate that looks like she was baptised in bad vinegar. No change there, then.

Tories? Have been attributing poverty to the moral deficiencies of the poor since anyone can remember; clearly the effort of being all nice and tumble-dried has exhausted them and they've reverted to type.

And as for the SNP:

"The SNP candidate in the Glasgow East by-election sparked a fresh row over Scotland's future last night, when he warned the Nationalists might not accept a No vote in a referendum on independence.

John Mason, who is a Glasgow councillor, said the SNP could go on asking the people in successive referendums until it got the answer it wanted – a view which puts him at odds with Alex Salmond, the First Minister."

I have to say, it must be tough coping with the contradictions of being a nationalist: on one hand, you're in mystical communion with the Scottish volk; on the other, there's the small problem of what to do if and when they've failed to appreciate their manifest destiny, despite your best efforts to outline your vision of a nation made more sublime by lots more state-sponsored kitsch.

Keep asking the question, is what you do.

In fairness, Alex Salmond only thinks the question needs to be asked every generation. With Mr Mason, the Will to Plebiscite beats more urgently in his breast, inflamed as it is with something one can only describe as passion:

"When you ask someone to marry you, sometimes you have to persist," Mr Mason said during a campaign visit to a community health shop in the Barlanark area of the constituency.

Paulie's the only blogger I know who gets this. The rest of you think referendums are a Really Good Idea because they're more Democratic.

This is because you're all mental. Politicians have referendums when they think they're going to win - and even when they lose, they really do have the brassneck to keep asking the same question until they get the answer they want. They've already done this in Ireland already and now pressure's being put on them to do this again.

I digress...

Anyway, can someone tell me how journalism works? Because I don't get it. When Cllr Mason was coming out with this drivel about referendums being like importuning your love with offers of marriage, was there no one on hand to say, "You analogy doesn't hold because what you're asking for is a divorce, you stupid prick!"? Or there was but this kind of thing is considered impolite? I wouldn't know but it shouldn't be.