July 2005

What to say about the G8 summit?
Cost 12million pounds, 22million dollars. 8 white men will decide the fate of 8 million Africans in a luxury hotel in Scotland. That’s modern democracy for you.

For all those who slagged off Live8 and Bob Geldof – ask yourself what you are doing for Africa, and for political awareness?

I have become wary of criticising others who are doing everything they can, even if I don’t agree with the ‘everything’, or with the methods. Trying to change things is better than saying that nothing can be changed.

Meanwhile, it is unlikely that George Bush will agree to anything that can really help Africa, but that would mean not helping America, and he has already said that he will not compromise the lifestyles of the American people. So no Kyoto on climate change, and no energy conservation measures that will brake big business, and on change to extraordinary trade rules between Africa and the USA, where there are no import duties on bulky raw materials – like coffee beans and cocoa – but high duties on processed goods. This means that price paid for coffee to drink and chocolate to eat goes to the processor (Americans) not Africa, who can only supply the raw material. Clever eh? It’s called Free Trade.

Listen America is worse than Europe here but not that much worse, and Tony Blair is going to try to make sure that Europe follows Bush’s example. How a Socialist Prime Minister can use his presidency of the G8 to commission a study into the ‘viability’ of the ‘social model’ in Europe is beyond me. By that he means can we afford pensions, shorter working hours, employment rights, health and safety provision, curbs on excessive profits that hide the true cost to the environment, etc etc. What he wants to do is throw back our world into some nightmare of economic growth at any cost – the Thatcher-Reagan years all over again.

Desperate. Ugly. Stupid.
At least we all know George Bush is a neo-con warmonger who believes that God is telling him what to do. Tony Blair pretends to be a Labour leader.

What a world…
Meanwhile Bush has promised more cash for Africa, but only if there is no corruption, no insider deals. Did anyone mention Halliburton, Enron, and Martha Stewart?
Sorry…

I have said before that this is no time for the Liberal Left to be shirking its duty. We have to get out there and say NO. And we have to keep saying NO, and we have to offer real alternatives; ones that respect people and the planet, and anyone who tells you that you cannot respect people AND the planet, that you cannot have a decent, caring society AND economic growth, that you cannot have healthcare and welfare AND profit, is lying. You cannot have excessive profits, you cannot have unrestricted economic growth, but you can have a fair world.

I am off to Brazil this month, to the FLIP literary festival in Parati, and I’m going to be giving a lecture called The River of Life, from the Romantics to Rio, Art and the Environment.

If you happen to be in Brazil on Friday the 8th, come along to Parati. I’m told it’s a lovely place.
You see, I think it’s Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lake Distric in 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads, that is the real beginning of Environmentalism, and an confessed sense of the meshing between Nature and Human Nature and their interdependence. How do we best understand this, ask Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their answer is, through art…
More than that, well, you’ll have to come along.
I’m sure I’ll do it in other parts of the world later.

From the important to the not-important.
The British Library will be archiving my site for the next year as part of a pilot project for Web content. That’s fine by me, but it appears not to be fine by everyone on the Message Board, though quite why there is such a fuss about stuff pasted up there being securely held by the British Library, of all venerable institutions, I do not know. My feeling is that if anyone wants their stuff excluded from the pilot archive – don’t put it on the Message Board. Alternatively, complain to Tom@pedalo, and if there are enough people fretting about this, we will just EXCLUDE the whole Message Board from the archive – it is easy to do.

I don’t care either way. It’s your message board, but it is my site, and my site is being archived for a year, and that’s that.

Blimey – as if life wasn’t busy enough… moan, grumble, etc.

What news? Well, from mid-July I shall be starting a new fortnightly column in the NEW Times Books pages. I shall alternate with David Baddiel, which will be fun. The column will be posted on the site – but obviously after the event, but it will be regular new content, and yes, it will be archived by the British Library!

By the way, for people abroad, The British Library is not a lending library. You have to a reason to be a member – research, for instance, and you need two letters of recommendation. Normal copyright laws apply to users, though the BL itself is not subject to normal copyright laws. The BL holds books, papers, letters, newspapers, actually everything, as it has a mandate to be given free of charge a copy of anything it wants. The tricky question of what to do with Web content will partly be answered by the pilot project. And, no, neither myself, nor Pedalo, receives any money at all from the BL, though what business that is of various types on the bloody Message Board I do not know!

My site is FREE, it takes no advertising, it doesn’t sell its mailing list, and STILL some of you making FREE use of the message board are having a moan. It is true I am really fed-up about this, but like most things, it will pass, because I know that on the whole, the site works well.
Right, no more of it!

What’s the point of writing at all if you have no ambition for the form and no passion for language – subject matter is not enough. (One day someone will explain that carefully to the organisers and judges of the Orange Prize, who think that what a book is ‘about’ is everything that a book is. What happened to literature then? Oh sorry, boys do that, girls do women’s magazine ‘issues’).
Let’s get the ambition back huh?
Well Ali Smith has it, so that cheers me up.

That’s it this month. More in sunny August which will hopefully be less annoying than rainy July.
And then I read a poem, and as always, I feel better.
Try it for yourself at home.