The Joy of Six 1536

"Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of right-wing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grown ups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured." This seems a good day to air again this Neal Lawson theory.

Prem Sikka on the curse of the finance industry: "Private equity takes over existing businesses with finance from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and wealthy individuals seeking higher returns. It acquires control but injects little share capital. Takeover targets are loaded with the secured debt, often routed through opaque offshore entities, and are expected to pay it off."

Matt Gallagher says the Online Safety Act is forcing us to hand over personal data to unregulated overseas corporations with questionable privacy records.

"Behind every great director ... is a great editor – and as the tributes paid earlier this month to the late Marcia Lucas, Oscar-winning editor of Star Wars: Episodes IV to VI, and former wife of creator George Lucas, reminded us, that editor is often a woman." Bethany Elliott investigates a familiar dynamic in male-dominated Hollywood.

Carrie Marshall goes to see the B52s.

"She grows smaller. Was she approximately human-sized in her wearing-a-pinny-and-doing-the-laundry phase, but then hedgehog-sized at the end? In the final image, she is a completely naturalistic hedgehog4. She looks like a little brown aubergine. So it's possible that at the end of his story – shudder – Samuel Whiskers has grown bigger." Sam Leith is worried: how big are Beatrix Potter's animals?

Globalisation and the death of Pigling Bland

The sun rose while they were crossing the moor, a dazzle of light over the tops of the hills. The sunshine crept down the slopes into the peaceful green valleys, where little white cottages nestled in gardens and orchards. 

That’s Westmorland,” said Pig-wig. She dropped Pigling’s hand and commenced to dance.

Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Pigling Bland


Under a headline beginning "No, we haven't banned books of pigs...", Jane Harley from the Oxford University Press has an article on the Guardian website that shows they pretty much have banned new books on pigs:

What we do ... is consider avoiding references to a range of topics that could be considered sensitive – in a way that does not compromise quality, or negatively impact learning. So, for example, if animals are depicted shown in a background illustration, we would think carefully about which animals to choose. In doing so we are able to ensure children remain focused purely on their learning, rather than cultural characteristics.

All of which shows that, if Beatrix Potter were writing today, she would not have much chance of placing The Tale of Pigling Bland with the OUP.

But the villain here is not Islam or Western fears of offending Muslims, it is globalisation,

If your goal is to produce a book that is inoffensive in every culture, it is not surprising if you come up with something rather anaemic.

Back in the 1970s, good Liberals wanted a greater role for the market as a counterweight to centralised power. We wanted choice and innovation.

Today, however, things are more complicated than that. What the market often gives us is homogenisation - for more on this debate see George Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society, which I have blogged about before.

The same tension can be found in attitudes to the European Union. Do those of us who support continued British membership because we want to extend the global market or because we hope the EU will act as something of a bulwark against it?

It often seemed that Liberal Democrat MEPs took the former view when voting in Brussels and the rest of us tended to the latter when campaigning locally.

Let us end with the side words of Winston Churchill, as quoted by a Guardian commenter:

"I am fond of pigs, Dogs look up to us, Cats look down on us, Pigs treat us as equals."

Six of the Best 482

A desperately moving post by Kate Gross, who died on Christmas morning.

Nick Sparrow asks how reliable online polling is: "pollsters are not innocent observers of public opinion, but active participants in the political process; not only reporting public opinion but helping to shape it. Participation that, the British Population Survey suggests, may rest on some very shaky foundations."

Living on Words Alone has videos of David Steel talking about the closure and reopening of the Waverley route,

How did roasting vegetables become a thing? J. Bryan Lowder explains.

"At a children’s birthday party,,, I inadvertently caused a ruckus when I launched a game of 'pin the tail on the Fierce Bad Rabbit,' reading aloud that Potter story in which a selfish bunny is menaced by a 'man with a gun' who shoots off his tail and whiskers. It tuned out that many of my fellow parents had not yet decided to “allow” their children to know that guns exist." April Bernard on the dangerous genius of Beatrix Potter.

Meanwhile Maurice Sendak, as Colin Marshall shows, once worked on illustrations for The Hobbit.