Lenore Skenazy and free-range kids

I spent a day at the Battle of Ideas in October partly so I could hear Lenore Skenazy speak.

Skenazy is an American journalist and campaigner who writes the Free-Range Kids blog. (Having no children of my own I am, of course, an expert on such matters.)

She was an entertaining speaker, but I cannot find a video of the session she took part in. So instead here is a brief one where she sets out her ideas.

Is there a future for liberalism?

This is the opening session from the Battle of Idea last Saturday. I did not arrive until after it had taken place.

The blurb on Youtube runs:

Classical liberalism has very few friends on either side of the Atlantic. The ideal of free speech is frequently trumped by the claim that it must be regulated in order to protect the powerless. Even the liberal principle of tolerance has been criticised for being too judgmental. 

In this compelling panel discussion filmed at the Battle of Ideas 2015 at the Barbican, Professor Frank Furedi, Dr Katrina Forrester and Steven Erlanger discuss with a packed audience where this leaves liberalism today. Furedi’s call for a new judgementalism is inspiring. Claire Fox Director of the Institute of Ideas is chair.

Jan Svankmajer: Jabberwocky

The second session I attended at the Battle of Ideas was on children's literature.

What I chiefly remember from it is an extract from a film of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky made by the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer - not least because I belong to a generation that was made to learn that poem (but few others) off by heart.

That extract was shown by Dr Thomas Karshan from the University of East Anglia, who led the session. I think the video here gives the full version,

Svankmajer later annotated the whole of Alice and you can find clips from that film on the net .

Listening to Dapper Laughs

I arrived at the Battle of Ideas at lunchtime on Saturday and found there was a debate on comedy and offence starting shortly in one of the Barbican's cinemas.

It sounded my sort of thing, so I went along.

When I got there I found Dapper Laughs was one of the speakers.

If it had been any other event there would have pickets or I would have been called "Tory Scum" or spat on by Guardian columnists. Because it was the Battle of Ideas I just wandered in and found him there.

I got the memo. I have written for the Guardian and the New Statesman. I know I am meant to hate Dapper Laughs.

It's just that I have never heard him perform.

I did not rush back to listen to him either. I have reached an age where I don't like many comedians.

When you are younger, comedy matters immensely. It helps form your own sense of humour and even your view of the world. When I was in the sixth form (that's years 12 and 13 by my calculation) we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.

Today I will admit to liking Alexei Sayle and Stewart Lee, and that is about it.

So I shall review the Dapper Laughs I saw on Saturday.

The first thing to say is that he was intensely irritating. When you look at local papers from the 1950s, you see that if a well-known comedian was in town he felt compelled to pull a face when he was photographed to prove how funny he was.

That approach has crept back in (think Mel and Sue saying "Bake!" in a range of achingly funny voices) and Dapper Laughs has certainly bought in to it. He spent the whole debate mugging to the audience and punched the air if someone agreed with him.

And for those who worry about manspreading - personally, I grew up in an era when radical politics involved something more than telling people to sit up straight - he contrived to take up three chairs.

But his arguments were better,

Because, he told us, he is not Dapper Laughs, His name is Daniel O'Reilly. Dapper Laughs is a character he plays. He is making fun of men's sexism, not celebrating it.

And before you dismiss that, remember how annoyed you get if some right-wing commentator fails to appreciate all the layers of irony in Stewart Lee's act - Will Self wrote well about him the other day - and assumes that something he says in his act is his real view.

As the other panelist, Tom Slater, pointed out, we middle-class liberals celebrate our ability to navigate Lee's shifting meanings but assume that a working-class man who hears a joke about rape will assume rape is just fine.

Well, maybe. But I find arguments that rely on affecting outrage on behalf of some other group inherently unconvincing. Too much education debate today takes place between people pretending to be outraged on behalf of teachers and people pretending to be outraged on behalf of parents. The real issues never get discussed.

So that was Dapper Laughs. Or "Dapper Laughs".

I did not rush to watch his videos when I got home. I expect I would hate him. But then I hate most comedians these days.

19 October on Liberal England

19 October 2012

Liberal Democrat Voice has chosen five of its own posts from 19 October in different years.

Back in the old days, in the noughties, when the internet was in black and white, on for only three hours in the evening and closed down at 10 sharp with the National Anthem, these memes were the lifeblood of blogging.

In those days we were interested in other bloggers just because they blogged, and we took ourselves a little more seriously.

So join me as I journey back in time to see what Liberal England said on 19 October.

2014. I chose Stranger on the Shore by Acker Bilk as my Sunday music video. Two weeks later he was dead. The police couldn't prove a thing.

2013. Rather like today, I had just been to the Battle of the Ideas. I took the opportunity to photograph the disused platforms at Barbican station.

2012. Down in London for work, I photographed St Pancras in the autumn sun.

2011. The Daily Mail announced that Mike Hancock had resigned from the cabinet. He had, thank goodness, never been in it. What he had resigned from was the Commons defence select committee.

2010. I quoted evidence that A levels had got easier: "No wonder that York, like many other UK universities, now runs remedial classes in basic skills for students who know their stuff on their specialist subject, but don't make the basic grade for numeracy and literacy."

2009. My review of The Liberal Moment by Nick Clegg reached chapter 6. Never accuse me of not being a party loyalist.

2008. I asked if the Shropshire Star had driven Lembit Opik mad.

2007. In my House Points column for Liberal Democrat News I argued that Ming Campbell had been right to resign as Lib Dem leader and had a go at Mock the Week: "For 10 or 15 minutes they unleashed a tirade against Ming, all of it based on the assumption there is something inherently funny about being old. If they had attacked a woman or someone who was gay or black in the same way they would never have worked for the BBC again."

2006. I marked the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising.

2005. An anonymous wit had suggested that David Cameron was "born with a silver spoon up his nose".

2004. I didn't blog on 19 October - I don't recall the world coming to an end. The following day I quoted a tribute to Conrad Russell by Nick Clegg ("former Lib Dem MEP for the East Midlands and PPC for Sheffield Hallam"): "He was a striking, slightly beguiling figure. He walked with an intellectual's stoop, invariably with a cigarette in hand. A shock of white hair was permanently standing to attention above an angular, slightly hawkish face."

So that is Liberal England on 19 October. Music, railways and even a little politics.

Now what about your blog?

The Battle of Ideas

I spent the afternoon at the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican. Thanks to the organisers for the press pass - we bloggers still get the odd perk.

Among the speakers I heard was the wonderful Lenore Skenazy and the less wonderful Dapper Laughs. I shall write up the three panel debates I attended over the next week.

There is a second day of the Battle of Ideas tomorrow.

Disused platforms at Barbican station

I was down in London for the Battle of Ideas today - more about that soon.

But this is much more interesting. These are the old Thameslink platforms at Barbican station, which have been out of use since 2009. The current rebuilding of Farringdon station for Crossrail and the improved Thameslink service meant that the branch to Moorgate, which these platforms at Barbican served, had to be closed.

Saturday at the Battle of Ideas

I spent Saturday at the Battle of Ideas, an annual two-day intellectual event put on by the Institute of Ideas, It is best described like a party conference without the main hall –  you are offered is several streams of enticing fringe meetings throughout the weekend.

And the lack of partisanship is welcome. Last year, for instance, I listened to a panel that included Anne Atkins. She is not to my taste, and I suspect she was not to the taste of most people in the audience, but she was received with perfect politeness, which is something hard to imagine at a Labour or Liberal Democrat event.

The Institute of Ideas grew out of the website Spiked, which in turn grew out of the magazine Living Marxism (LM). In the days before the internet that magazine brought a welcome draught of libertarianism to the debate, even if those ideas are now pretty commonplace.

And Living Marxism grew out of the old Revolutionary Communist Party. For this reason some see the group of people around Spiked and the Institute of Ideas (Clare Fox from The Moral Maze is now the best known amongst them) as sinister. But I once wrote a couple of articles for Spiked! and never received any Serbian slush money.

My complaint against Spiked these days is that it offers contrarianism by numbers: you know it will take the consensus view on any subject in the news and argue the opposite. But at least these people are being good Marxists in wanting to see the capitalist system developed to its fullest, because Marx himself argued that revolution would not come until that stage has been reached.

Anyway, Saturday. The event took place at The Barbican in London, and everything they say about the place being a maze is correct. But I managed to navigate it tolerably well even so.

After collecting my free press pass I entered the room halfway through a discussion with Frank Furedi (another key Spiked! and LM figure), Zoe Williams from the Guardian and David Lammy the Labour MP.

When I came in the discussion was cantering on Lammy’s recent book Out of the Ashes: Britain after the riots. In it, someone was arguing, Lammy recognises that the last Labour government’s attempt was trying to do too much – attempting to “nationalise society” – yet he ends by calling for the state to have more powers.

Zoe Williams was having none of it: Labour had not nationalised society but privatised it. Look at local authority children’s homes. Perhaps this is another instance of Calder’s Second Law of Politics: the more power the government takes for itself, the more arbitrary the exercise of that power becomes. So Labour took on too much and found it had to make some functions over to the private sector.  We should not be so surprised that those functions were chosen more or less at random.

I found Lammy more impressive than I expected, with his emphasis that poor children need help that goes beyond the purely academic if they are to make their way in life. He also said that if you come from a middle-class family and have good parents and a good school then a little gangsta rap will do you no harm.  But if that is the only influence you are subjected to then you are in trouble.

Given the labyrinth of the Barbican, I decided to stay in my seat for the next session. This was a panel discussion on parenting that included the filmmaker Roger Graef. The panel contained a wide variety of views, which was good in its way but meant that there was little meeting of minds. If a theme emerged it was in the contributions from the floor that suggested that, yes, some families did need professional help, but that the most extreme cases were being treated as though they were typical and showing that no parents could cope.

After that I wandered off to a pub for lunch, unwinding a ball of wool behind me as I went. When I returned I happened upon a discussion on the situation in Syria.

Then I went to a session on “Telling off the grown ups”. Again the panel held a very diverse set of views, but this time the discussion took off. And a lot of it chimed with my fogeyish view that our modern concern to hear the views of children is in part due to our lack of confidence in ourselves as adults.

Finally, I listened to Frank Furedi talking about the Jimmy Savile affair. I have long been an admirer of Furedi and his 1997 book Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation in particular. Its analysis of the way that our preoccupations with abuse and risk have harmed society and left us feeling no safer was acute and prophetic when you looked how Britain developed under Blair.

But on Saturday Furedi offered a canter around these themes without really engaging with the strangeness or enormity of the Savile story. Only when he touched upon the absurdities of celebrity culture did he add something new

Still, Saturday was a good day and I am grateful for the free press pass I was given. If you find yourself frustrated by the tribalism of party politics, the Battle of Ideas offers a welcome change.