Konnie Huq knew she was going to be wrestled for the Olympic torch, and stopped the procession to make things easier for her attacker.  She is a known Leftie, of course, so these latest anti-establishment antics are hardly a surprise.  I bet her agent’s fingerprints were all over the incident, designed to push Ms Huq’s name deeper into our humble minds.  The propaganda exercise has started.  Reliable comment, as always, from Donal Blaney.

Alternatively, China is oppressing Tibet and its own population in a disgraceful manner, and a pro-Tibetan freedom protester managed to get in front of live cameras: his actions were beamed around the world.  Not condoning the potentially illegal behaviour of the protester, it remains a matter of fact that he was a protester, not a stunt man employed to further a childrens’ television presenter’s career.

Due to my near total disconnect with the news over the past few days, as well as in order to evade another leviathan comment, I shall address the issues raised by Douglas here in my first post proper for far too long.

It occurs to me that the part played by environmentalism in the Green policy book is often more minor than you would imagine. It occurred to me years ago that at times they were effectively socialists devoid of any connection to Marx beyond a focus upon the “Environment”, with even that being entirely other to his understanding of it. Ali, our resident critic of the party suggests that “but also that a heavy tinge of green is ladened on,often for no reason” but my suggestion would be that this is more a matter of form than anything else. They genuinely care about social justice but their purpose is environmentalism so all else seems rather off topic. In order to make it part of their remit they must perform some occasionally rather uncomfortable and somewhat tenuous stitches to their ideology but that is something that should cause you to pity their predicament rather than dismiss their suggestion. So long as the policy is sound that it’s presentation is through an inappropriate green filter is rather an irrelevance. When the Greens talk of matters rather unrelated to environmentalism I agree with them entirely, for instance with effectively ever suggestion that Douglas lists. Occasionally the two inter-lock to result in a truly glorious fusion of pragmatism and environmentalism that makes of a potentially highly confrontational ideology a firmer position for consensus politics than most parties could ever hope for.

Douglas’ comparison to the Liberal Democrats was illuminating here and it is worth bearing in mind that that party is a union brought about by the threat posed by two parties being upon the left that were not Labour rather than any great love amongst the Liberals and Social Democrats. So if it had been the environmentalists who had joined the SDP rather than the once great, longstanding Liberal Party I suspect that the outcome would have looked much like the Greens do today. They are concerned with social justice and various suitable things of that nature and have effectively become cuddly socialists.

Ali’s second criticism of them was a far finer point and one which related to the pragmatic practicalities of their political existence, rather than their guiding philosophy. I consider the latter to actually be more sound than that of many of the far more popular parties, including those which are represented in our parliament. As ever, though, such things are not decided by amateur political theoreticians but instead the public. Popularity is what matters here and we should consider the actual chances of them reaching power, or at least a position of greater influence, rather than merely whether their manifesto is suitably consistant and pretty.

So it is stated: “The principle of Greenism has been adopted by every reasonable party,” which is entirely true and a phenomenon severely underrated and underconsidered. This is not the place for that, though and I shall return to it later. For the time being let it be known that I could not agree more. Here, however, we reach a point of discord: “and the Green party should recognise its role as a pressure group is diminished by seeking electoral success. They sacrifice the cause for the sake of ego, which is a great shame.”

Now firstly let us deal with the notion that the Green success makes their involvement with the political decision as actual potential operatives rather than external influence imposers an idiocy and entirely egotistical. If all were as presented then I would go further to suggest that they are now superfluous and, for the moment, need not exist. This would be true if all of the other parties truly had embraced environmentalism but, as Ali puts it, “The principle of Greenism has been adopted”, while in many instances what is lacking is the policy. This leaves them, at least, with work to be done.

This could be done by serving as a pressure group but this risks them becoming one amongst the multitude. Many had attempted to raise and emphasise green issues but it must be remembered that the reason that they are the fore of British politics in the way they are can be linked back to the initial effort of the Greens to crack electoral success. In the 1980s they shocked all with their success at local elections, one similar to and often compared to the UKIP insurgency at the last European Parliament vote.

This was a high tide for the Greens but it also brought an issue almost entirely brushed aside by the mainstream parties to the fore and laid the path for the cross-party consensus {at least in rhetoric} upon matters environmental.

Very well, it would then be said, they were necessary historically then. They had their purpose and it was served and we would not be where we are without them. The public does not desire them to progress and as such they should cease to approach their activism as they have and act as do others. Besides from the obvious weakness of most other special interest groups operating without deep party ties {and the feebleness of even them when discussing the Liberal Democrats} there is another, more meaty point. The public may not be against the Greens, but instead the system.

Another piece by Hari seems worth referencing here and given that the Greens are receiving my consideration in the Mayoral election solely because of an alternative to the ghastly FPTP system being in place. So please give this a read and mull over the possibility of the Green Party being worth sustaining simply to keep ticking over until a proportional replacement is introduced. Under the current system their hopes of cracking parliament are based around the increasingly futile dream of taking Brighton, the sole location in the country where they have established themselves as 2nd place.

In other European nations though there have been established Red-Green Alliances but this snug fit largely depends upon a system other than the distorting filter of First-Past-The-Post being in place. Without it the results are obvious and immediate here: Livingstone and the Greens are already open allies. Some similar arrangement being made in parliament is easy to imagine.

Perhaps the chances of FPTP being altered are slim. It is doubtful that pressure for it from yet another party that would benefit immensely were it to be introduced will do much to ease this or increase its likelihood. But if it does get changed the notion of a Green Party being swiftly pulled together purely for the occasion seems rather preposterous.

Although the success of the single-issue rush staged two decades ago will not be repeated under the present system a party steadily building its local support and making all efforts it can to hammer out some form of policy between environmentalism and socialism in the interim between electoral reforms that will show their popularity for what it is rather than what the FPTP reveals and then build upon it seems not an entirely disagreeable sight.

Certainly more pleasing than another baying noise machine that acts entirely without democracy, internal or otherwise, and operates entirely in order to alter the minds of already elected officials rather than making efforts to convince the public as a whole. There need not be a choice between technocratic and populist Greenism but I certainly know which I prefer.

I doubt that many of you missed the controversy over James Watson, and at the time I read a firm defence of his views {well, most of them, strangely enough not the one’s where he said anyone who hires black people knows that they make poor employees, but then this wasn’t StormFront…} that at the time I found sadly convincing.

However Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, writes a strong case against him and all other “IQ fundamentalists” which is worth reading. Above all he made it clear to me exactly how the “Cultural bias” deplored by the IQ tests critics is present and the disastrous impact that its presence can have upon people attempting to use it as the sole source of their information and the folly of perceiving it as the optimum. Apparently it is partially a matter as simple as it getting harder each time it is updated and this not being accounted for.

If that is not your sort of thing, or once your done, read the same author’s piece on ketchup. Really, you should.

For a long time, the Spectator team have been ranting on their Coffee House blog about spending power.  Inflation, Gordie tells us, is 2%, yet inflation in the products that matter is well over twice that.  Sure, house prices are falling so inflation looks to be dropping, but every-day products as widely ranged as oil and bread are rocketing in price.  Wages are stagnant, and spending power is seriously dropping.  Fraser Nelson’s post from 8 January is a typical example.

It is interesting, then, to find Lenin’s Tomb making a similar argument.  Lenin’s Tomb, for the uninitiated, is a blog dedicated to keeping Leninism alive through “leninology”.  It promises to raise the corners of your mouth every now and then, apparently unintentionally.

Brown is being attacked from both the left and the right on what amounts to misleading (if not deceiving) the fine citizens of this country.  Spending power is falling.  Real inflation is rising at an incredible rate.  And all the while, Brown is pretending that the economy is doing just fine.

My chief reason for thinking Brown should have called an election last year was that he would otherwise be seeking re-election while facing a recession.  It looks like I am going to be proved correct.

Here is a handy little image showing the relative wealth of the candidates. Unfortunately a few are so poor as to be invisible but perhaps that makes the point even more clear.

Romney is rich, filth. Just to put things into some sense of proportion: the estimated wealth of all three Democratic front-runners piled into one is $90.6 million, while Romney’s alone is $294.6 million.

So why isn’t he winning? The obvious suggestion is that that is his personal wealth, rather than the money accumulated for a run. But this is not good enough: in addition to being partially self-financed he has accumulated a vast amount of donations from the typical sources. He seems suitably…Flexible for the billionaires that generally finance such endeavours and while most see his shift of ideology to exactly what votes want him to be as base opportunism and a worrying lack of actual earnestness the backers consider a suitable reverence towards power.

So of all the campaigns only Giulini’s even verges on being as financially lubricated and the others are minuscule by comparison, record breaking web-based fundraiser extravaganza or no record breaking web-based fundraiser extravaganza. McCain’s managed to almost bankrupt itself in the middle of last year and Huckabee has been using what Romney probably used to earn in an hour or so to fund his entire campaign.

And yet, and yet…

Romney seems to have become this elections equivilant of the Liberal/SDP coalition back in the ’80s: coming second just about everywhere and thus getting fucked over merciless by the FPTP system. The only difference being that Romney deserves it.

So what does this tell us? That the vast amount of money at his disposal is not enough, I suspect. That slickness and vast funds do not a winning campaign make and no matter how many adverts you bombard hapless viewers with if you are a reneging two-faced flip-flopper who distorts and reforms to fit the mould desired of him by whoever he is performing to then you may make a damn fine used car salesman {a common comparison} but will struggle to get popular enough to be voted in.

Much the same is true of everyone’s least-favourite ex-feminist Hillary Clinton, who had much more money than Obama after a few wealthy backers and a Hollywood entourage puffed up her coffers with maximum-donations and used a tactic of filling every television screen available as regularly as advertisement breaks would allow in Iowa, yet still received a pumelling.

It is possible that this could not hold true: perhaps Hillary or Mitt will resurge in the fashion that McCain remarkably did. But if New Hampshire’s outcome is a victory for Obama and a second triumph over the state for McCain then, especially given Huckabee’s savaging of Rich Romney in Iowa, we will be forced to the conclusion that the purchase of votes is not possible, scotching a long-standing legend that has bolstered cynics the globe over for many decades. It would seem that extreme wealth can give you economic power, control over the media if you are dedicated enough, but falters when in terms of political.

Which could have some very pleasing implications closer to home…

Enough about American politics - let’s come back to a subject closer to home: drugs in the UK.

Apparently, in the last 14 years there have been 400 deaths from Ecstasy.  With at least half a million pills taken each weekend, it doesn’t take long to realise that Ecstasy isn’t that bad.  The Times website has an interesting article.

Drugs are bad.  Ecstasy is bad.  You shouldn’t take it.  But we surely must recognise the relative harm of drugs like Ecstasy compared to, for example, alcohol.  Why is Ecstasy illegal?

As some of you may be aware, recently the BBC has been running (yet another) tawdry and dull drama on Robin Hood. This one is even worse than the norm for such shows. Hood’s men look like a carbon copy of the Arctic Monkeys. Gisborne is an egotistical leather-fetishist. Maid Marion is a feminist half a millennia before Wollstonecraft. And, of course, it’s all a pan-European plot to take over Good(e) Old(e) England.

As usual, Hood is portrayed as a heroic proto-socialist, deeply concerned with the suffering of the oppressed peasantry. He steals from the rich, gives to the poor and clearly hates the feudal system. He and his men will crush those aristocratic spongers and restore those starving serfs to their natural freedom.

Of course, it’s all a bit of fun. But, at the back of my mind, the niggling pedant won’t shut up. What are they making Hood out to be this time? An egalitarian? Oh no, not again. Why?

You see, the problem is that I just can’t see the myth of Robin Hood as anything but deeply conservative. Yes, he is somewhat unusual for a medieval nobleman. Yes, he respects the peasantry. Yes, he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. But when he steals, he does so not as a social revolutionary, but as a conservative monarchist seeking to restore an idealised version of the distinctly un-egalitarian feudalism.

At first, this probably sounds an odd statement. After all, superficially, Hood is deeply egalitarian, committed to an unofficial form of progressive taxation (Keynesian banditry?) long before the advent of redistributive taxation. But let’s have a look at some common details of the myth, and see if that vision stands up to scrutiny.

First, let’s examine the typical relationship between Robin Hood and the Merry Men. Robin Hood is a nobleman – albeit a disinherited one. He is, we presume, of Norman descent, used to telling peasants what to do, and closed to new ideas on his social status. He is, after all, almost obsessed with taking, “his,” land at Loxley back in many versions of the story. This is symptomatic of the medieval nobility’s complex of blood, honour and belonging which ignores the fact that the peasants, who work and live on the land, really have more right to it than them. He is not a leveller.

The Merry Men, meanwhile, are peasants. They are from the oppressed classes. They have no reason to love Robin from the start. Indeed, they really couldn’t be blamed if they turned around and told the upstart nobleman Hood to go – or if they just killed him and took what money he had left.

But they don’t. Instead, they accept his supreme leadership, rarely questioning it. What does this say? That peasants should take aristocratic orders – even when both are outside the law. More than that though, it says something else. Before Hood came along, the Merry Men were nothing. They were a gang of small-time thieves achieving nothing but the occasional mugging. Then Hood comes along, and they simply succeed. What does that say? That peasants are incapable of success without noble leadership.

Very egalitarian.

Now, let’s have a look at the wider relationship between Hood and the peasantry. What’s Hood doing with them? He’s protecting them from aggression, abuse and assault. He’s giving the needy food and money when starving. He is a nobleman, acting in a vaguely philanthropic fashion, while receiving the allegiance of his men – the essence of ideological paternalism.

What he is not doing is encouraging social revolution. Is he encouraging the peasants to stop paying taxes? Is he encouraging them to think, act or live for themselves? Is he calling for an end to the principle of oppression? No. He is seeking to restore the relationship between the nobility and the peasantry to a stable level in line with the theory of feudalism.

And what about his attitude to the King? In the versions where Prince John is one of the villains, Hood also fights for the usurped King Richard. He defends not only the practice of monarchy, but the principle – he wants a pious, godly monarch who will correct the imbalance of stability and authority created by John and his cronies. Robin Hood fights for the King.

So, in most stories, Robin Hood is not a leveller, not an egalitarian and not a republican.

What is he then? That’s quite simple. He’s a feudalist. In most cases, he’s not aiming for a social revolution, but a restoration – to a (non-existent) golden age of paternalism where the feudal system worked for all.

What many people seem to forget is that feudalism wasn’t (in theory) a system designed to squeeze every last drop of blood from the peasantry. It instead represented a system whereby, in return for their fealty and labour, the nobility would protect the peasantry, from attack by the sword, from starvation by charity, and from damnation by piety. They were not meant to levy crippling taxes, or brutalise the peasants, or crush them so badly. If the aristocracy did, they had broken the, “sacred,” relationship.

With this in mind, Hood’s purpose is more clear. In attacking the Sheriff, he’s attacking a man who’s broken the bond of trust between Lord and Bondsman. In defending King Richard, he’s defending the true, good King on the throne by divine right. In feeding the peasants, he’s doing his duty as a paternalist nobleman and protecting them in hard times. He is, in essence, acting like the perfect feudal nobleman.

Of course, his view of feudalism is hopelessly naïve and, ultimately, plain wrong. If nothing else, the enduring popularity of Robin Hood type ballads throughout the Middle-Ages maybe indicates that the relationship was more of less constantly broken.

There are some different versions of Robin Hood, of course. Early ballads in particular often portray Hood not as a nobleman, but a yeoman, fighting a sheriff who was just doing his job. This could justly be termed as vaguely class based, perhaps – the yeoman-rebel fighting the authorities because they were the authorities.

But, in the long term, versions of this sort appear to be in the minority. Certainly, the majority of surviving Robin-Hood ballads, dating mostly from the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, are concerned with the more familiar paternalist-hero. Interestingly, this period is the one where the relationship between the monarch and people advocated in feudalism was visibly dissolving. The advent of Protestantism meant that the Divine Right of the King and nobility came under question. Bad harvests and a Little Ice Age meant that people were often hungry anyway. And a Civil War began in part because the monarch had moved in a popular view from protector to oppressor, and was acting like a tyrant.

So there we have it. Robin Hood: feudalist, monarchist and conservative.