While the critical acclaim for PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood may focus on Daniel Day-Lewis’ studiedly epic performance as oiligarch Daniel Plainview, or Johnny Greenwood’s remarkable, discomfiting soundtrack, much of the film’s cultural resonance may lie in its timely reminder for modern audiences, particularly outside the US, of the harsh nature of frontier life in the early American South and West - and its echoes in modern American politics. At the beginning of the film - loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! - Plainview is a desperate, determined loner, literally scratching for silver at the bottom of a hand-dug mine in the Californian desert. With his discovery of oil, Plainview quickly develops a thriving business and a reputation as a giant of his field.

Not a word is spoken in the film until oil is discovered; immediately afterwards, we jump forward several years to hear Plainview, now a successful oil merchant, addressing a meeting of villagers as he makes his case why they should grant him the license to drill their recently-discovered bounty. Contrasting his own background as a genuine “oil man” to speculators seeking to work as middle-men, he extols the values of the small, closely-run business:

I do my own drilling and the men that work for me, work for me and they are men I know. I make it my business to be there and see to their work. I don’t lose my tools in the hole and spend months fishing for them; I don’t botch the cementing off and let water in the hole and ruin the whole lease. I’m a family man- I run a family business. This is my son and my partner, H.W. Plainview.

As I heard this speech I found it naggingly familiar, but couldn’t place it. Then I remembered: this style - this combination of simple language with small-town values - is the language of the modern American conservative movement, and the language of President George W. Bush. The emphasis on hard work over big ideas; the use of “family” as a catch-all codeword for wholesomeness and authenticity; the contrasting of narrow competence against untrustworthy intelligence, are all hallmarks of Bush’s often mangled, but highly effective speaking style. And, like modern conservatism, Plainview’s vision of honest business needs a bogey man to appear really attractive. It’s not enough for Plainview to claim to be honest; he must be more honest, more simple, more genuine, than the ill-defined other.

Out of all men that beg for a chance to drill your lots, maybe one in twenty will be oilmen; the rest will be speculators-men trying to get between you and the oilmen-to get some of the money that ought by rights come to you. Even if you find one that has money, and means to drill, he’ll maybe known nothing about drilling and he’ll have to hire out the job on contract, and then you’re depending on a contractor that’s trying to rush the job through so he can get another contract just as quick as he can. That is the way this works.

This almost-victim mentality is vital to the conservative movement of the last 30 years. Those opposed to it are always out-of-touch moneymen, suspicious characters from immoral cities, brains with no heart. It’s a world-view with a constant undercurrent of mistrust and fear. Most people who will say they want to help you good, ordinary people, Plainview is saying, are dishonest. Corrupt. Only a few good, simple men will listen to you. Only a few share your values. And I am one of them. It’s an echo of Ronald Reagan’s quip that “government is not the answer to the problem, it is the problem”; to Karl Rove’s carefully-constructed coalition of “values voters”. Bush’s down-home simplicity -his astonishing promise on 9/11 to “catch them folks that did this” - stands in marked contrast to the slick ways and fancy words of the untrustworthy Washington elite.

The point, of course, is that Plainview’s vision is a lie. The speech, the first words we hear him utter, is a carefully prepared set-piece speech masquerading as stumbling, homespun wisdom. Far from knowing and valuing his workmen, he works them in 12-hour shifts with minimal supervision, leading to tragic, avoidable accidents. Even his status as a family man, vital to his appeal, is a lie: H.W. is really the son of one of Plainview’s workmen, killed in an accident at work. Plainview keeps him around at least in part to shore up his public face as a committed family man, rather than a driven loner, and by the end of the film their relationship has totally broken down.

As the film progresses, the lies accrue. Tipped off to the presence of oil in the town of Little Boston, Plainview goes to great lengths to hide it from the locals in the hope of buying their arid land at knock-down prices. When word gets out, he promises the earth to the villagers - irrigation, roads, funding for their church - with no intention of paying them their fair share. And his simple frontiersman persona disappears as he builds himself a gothic mansion with his new fortune.

If you’ve been paying any attention for the last eight years, you’ll be getting the similarities. Bush’s family-man values are designed to mask a youth of drug-taking, alcoholism and womanising. For all his trumpeting of simple frontier values, he’s a child of incredible privilege. The child of a president, he campaigned in 2000, astonishingly, as a Washington outsider. A man who grew up in immense wealth, who was helped to power by the nation’s richest people and has executed that power frequently for their benefit, built his electoral appeal by endlessly evoking the image of the dirt-poor, simple frontiersman.

It’s often pointed out that it’s hard for us, in the static, ancient states of Europe, to identify with the American cult of the frontier: its rugged individualism, its disdain for intellectuals, its hostility towards government. But There Will Be Blood serves as a valuable reminder that those standing up and eulogising the simple frontier life have usually been selling something in a bid to escape it. Bush’s simple-family-guy persona has its real roots not in the genuine rhythms and manners of life in the American South and West, but in the carefully constructed performance of the oil salesman. Like Plainview, Bush is an oil man through and through; and, like Plainview, he doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a sale.

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While the high-tech schemes for reducing climate change might grab many of the media headlines, ideas like this show the environmental movement at its most radical. As I’ve noted before, there are various ways in which we can hope to intervene to reduce the climate dangers inherent in our current level of economic activity. One way is to reduce the carbon emissions required for energy production, through renewable energy; another is to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions, through carbon sinks, harvesters, or, yes, giant space mirrors. These areas are where the science-fiction stuff generally comes in.

But there’s a whole other area of intervention - reducing the actual amount of economic activity involved in modern life. This is the school of thought from which ideas like the one above - from TV pundit Penney Poyzer - stem. Modern life, the argument goes, is just too modern. We have too much stuff, travel too much, do too much. We need to return to simpler times - growing our own food, sourcing goods locally, re-using instead of replacing.

Why is this apparently backward-gazing viewpoint so radical? Because it disputes the central idea of economic and political thought in the last 200 years - the beneficence of material progress and economic growth. Having ever-more, the argument goes - more choice, more gadgets, more convenience - is costing the earth.

Ideas such as these reject principles that form the very foundations of modern economic growth. First, there’s specialisation. This is the idea that, if everyone produces the products they are best suited to provide, and exchanges with others, the result will be more efficient and allow a greater quantity and variety of goods than if everyone caters to their own needs. It began the first time farmers whose land was suited to crops first traded with farmers whose land was suited to tending cattle. Now, it’s the logic that sees goods, from electronics to fruit, shipped from across the world and sold more cheaply than those made locally.

The problem, of course, is that specialisation only increases economic efficiency. A company will build its factories in China, even for goods to be sold in the West, because it’s cheaper to do so. The savings gradually get passed onto consumers, and the standard of living increases. But such arrangements aren’t generally energy efficient, or carbon efficient. Indeed, because of the high CO2 emissions associated with shipping and aviation, they’re often environmentally disastrous. Instead, the argument goes, we must rediscover the merits of doing things ourselves, and doing things locally. “Eating apples from New Zealand, wrapped in clingfilm on a polystyrene tray, when it is apples season in England is crazy,” notes an activist in the report.

The same, the argument applies, goes for the other core principle of modern economics - ever-expanding consumption. For the more than 200 years since the industrial revolution began, if not before, economic growth has been driven primarily by the pursuit, by individuals and families, of ever more complex, useful, attractive or effective devices, tools and accoutrements. Our rising living standards have been driven by this process, but the ecological cost has been vast. As a result, it has become a credo amongst many environmentalists that the paradigm of non-stop material progress is inherently flawed. Writer Annie Leonard’s short film The Story of Stuff neatly makes the point, arguing the constant pursuit of newer, cooler stuff is leading us up an ecological dead-end. Endless material progress, argues this view, is an impossible fantasy - and its pursuit has become slow-motion suicide. We must relearn to repair broken goods, consume less food, get through fewer clothes, share cars, make do with fewer shiny gadgets.

Together, these views add up to a wholesale rejection of the foundations of modern economic thinking as a response to climate change. This viewpoint is clear - implicitly or, often, explicitly - in much modern writing on the environment and climate change. “The old economics is dead,” declared the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott - a liberal, but hardly radical economist - in 2006, identifying “the impending clash between economic orthodoxy and environmental sustainability.”

Stores now sell jeans at below $10 a pair… According to the present model of economics, this is progress, just as it is to be welcomed that flights costing as little as $4 make possible stag and hen weekends in Tallinn or Prague.

But are these developments really positive? Orthodox economics says they are, because they raise the real incomes of consumers. But, according to [environmental] analysis, they are potentially very bad indeed.

It’s presented as a given that our current level of consumption is simply incompatible with the long-term health of the environment. It’s taken as read that the predicament we’re in makes a nonsense of the idea of ever-greater consumption, enabled by specialisation and trade, as the driver of progress. It’s a compelling argument. But it may be completely wrong.

Think back to a hundred and fifty years ago. City-dwellers were enjoying an unprecedented level of communication and mobility, thanks to the widespread availability of a hugely effective means of personal urban transport - the horse. There was just one problem - shit. Horse shit was piling up everywhere, making already overcrowded and unsanitary cities even more dangerous. Illness spread. Wise men stroked their chins, dwelling on how to solve the problem. Some sort of restrictions were surely necessary. The convenience of easy travel had a terrible cost to the environment. Surely, this was a convenience we couldn’t afford. No doubt, in a Victorian precursor to modern-day SUV-bashing, drivers of two-horse carts were singled out for blame.

But ultimately, of course, horses weren’t banned - they were superseded. By the tram, the tube, the bus and, ultimately, the car. Far from having to sacrifice convenience because of its nasty side-effects, city-dwellers simply found even more convenient systems that didn’t have the same problems. Technology won out.¹

The same may be possible now. As my previous article notes, in order to avoid dangerous climate change, our task is to lower our global carbon emissions to half their current rate. This may sound quite achievable; but bear in mind that, thanks to rapid improvements in standards of living in developing countries, the average level of economic activity per person is likely to quadruple over the next fifty years. Add to that a likely swelling of the planet’s population, from the current six billion to nine billion, and you’re looking at a six-fold increase in economic activity.

The anti-growth position states that this is simply too much. As the world’s poor countries improve their living standards, it argues, we must meet them halfway, lowering ours to a level more commensurate with the planet’s fragile state.

But remember the horse shit. Few would have imagined, as it piled up in the gutters, a mode of transport that could move people around in comfort without depositing faeces onto the street. Are we really so sure that technology doesn’t have the potential, now, to let us keep our current lifestyle while slashing our carbon emissions?

It may sound cavalier. But think about the maths. A six-fold increase in economic activity, and a halving of overall emissions, means we need to slash the carbon cost of a unit of economic activity by one-twelve. Doesn’t that sound plausible?

There are so many different stages at which technology can intervene. Energy efficiency - insulating buildings, energy-saving bulbs; clean energy; carbon capture. Some estimates suggest renewable energy could ultimately provide 100% of our energy needs, and that’s before you even consider nuclear. The transition to low-carbon energy production, and to greater energy efficiency, will be painful and expensive. But it’s by no means certain that the essentials of our current standard of living can’t be maintained, and improved, and extended to more of the world, without busting the carbon budget. To assume otherwise - to declare, without having properly invested in technological solutions, that we must crawl back down the developmental ladder - smacks of hair-shirt wearing martyrdom.

Take for example aviation. It’s become a standard villain of the environmental movement,as demonstrated by the ongoing protests over the expansion of Heathrow. And, in the short term, reducing the number of flights we take would be a quick way to make some impressive carbon emission reductions. But it’s going too far to conclude, as some have, that flying is simply a luxury we will have to learn to live without. Aeronautic technology advanced, in less than 70 years, from putting the Wright brothers in the air to putting Neil Armstrong on the moon. Do we really believe, with a similar level of commitment, that low-carbon flight is beyond our power?

Indeed, in general, the end-of-growth environmental school is based on a fallacy - that because technological innovation got us into this mess, further innovation can only make things worse. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Every year, technology brings us new ways to generate clean energy and reduce our need for energy, all without significantly impairing our lifestyles; from energy saving light bulbs to the IT revolution, from hybrid cars to videoconferencing, which is slashing the need for business travel.

Of course, there are excesses in our modern lifestyle - in packaging, for example, and lazy waste disposal - that we should curb, and help developing countries avoid from the start. But the view that climate change requires the end of material progress, and a return to some imagined “natural” past, is one based less on a detailed understanding of the science and more on a general disdain for all things modern. Indeed, its proponents tend to resort to other arguments as well as the environmental - that modern life is making us miserable, stressed, sick and lonely. Fair enough: its proponents may have a point, although I doubt it. But climate change is too important to be used as an argument for the latest lifestyle fad.

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Ever since Barack Obama emerged as a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination commentators have been falling over themselves to evoke the memory of John F. Kennedy. Obama’s youth, short time in the senate, and relentless message of change all stir memories of the handsome young upstart who squeaked the presidency in 1960. With the endorsement of Obama’s candidacy by several senior Kennedys in late January, the comparisons became more frequent. “A president like my father”, Caroline Kennedy called Obama. The New York Times evoked Kennedy’s most successful book when it referred to Obama’s race speech as a “Profile in Courage”.

With JFK still generally revered by most Americans, particularly the white working-class voters Obama desperately needs to win over, it’s a comparison Obama’s people are happy to see made (despite the odd snipe by commentators). The truth is, though, that John F. Kennedy and Obama came from very different places politically - and had very different concepts of “change”.

Obama’s campaign has been built on a solid platform of opposition to the Iraq war. Indeed, if Obama hadn’t been able to contrast his own opposition to Hillary’s mixed record, it’s highly unlikely his campaign would have gathered the momentum - and the money - it needed to seriously compete. With his willingness to negotiate with so-called “rogue states”, and to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, Obama has nailed his colours pretty clearly to the dove mast.

The contrast with the Kennedy campaign of 1960 couldn’t be clearer. Kennedy’s brand of change, and its attendant criticism of the preceding eight years of Republican rule, was unequivocally hawkish.

In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free. In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery… We discuss tonight domestic issues, but I would not want that to be any implication to be given that this does not involve directly our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival.

So Kennedy began the opening speech of his famous debate with opponent Richard Nixon. Granted, Kennedy discussed poverty at length in his campaign, and also lent his support to the nascent civil rights movement. But his most progressive ideas were always couched in the rhetoric of the Cold War. “The kind of country we have here, the kind of society we have, the kind of strength we build in the United States will be the defense of freedom,” he went on in his opening speech. If we do well here, if we meet our obligations, if we’re moving ahead, then I think freedom will be secure around the world. If we fail, then freedom fails.”¹

Indeed, as George Packer points out, Kennedy’s message of hope was coded to speak to insecurities bubbling under the surface of a nation allegedly at east with itself. In an atmosphere of steady-as-she-goes conservatism - the 1950s, with their fetishising of conformity, had just ended - Kennedy brought to the surface fears about the economy and America’s place in the world that had previously been unspoken. Obama, by contrast, faces a nation in turmoil, where divisions over the best response to myriad challenges have almost made civilised discussion impossible. This means his message of hope, his focus on the positive, can be much more effective.

So is the strange, and ultimately sad, Kennedy story of no real relevance to the Obama campaign? Not so fast. Because there is a Kennedy campaign that Obama has much more in common with - the 1968 campaign of John’s little brother, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Like Obama, “Bobby” built his campaign on a central platform of opposition to an unpopular war. Like Obama, he faced a fight for the nomination with Democratic party royalty whose impeccable liberal credentials had been tarnished by support for that war: vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey (Kennedy had already seen off the previous presumptive nominee, the Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson). Like Obama, he campaigned on a leftist platform - focusing on poverty, public services, and civil rights - but proved effective at transcending traditional party affiliations.

While John’s radicalism was mostly rhetoric - once he entered power, his administration became known for a gradualist approach to issues like civil rights that exasperated activists - Robert’s was genuine: in place of John’s tax cut, Robert called for substantial tax rises to fund social programs; to John’s enthusiastic Cold War saber-rattling, Robert proposed a retreat from the US’ global commitments and from the military-industrial complex that had spiraled since the start of World War II.

While Obama’s program can’t match Robert’s for radicalism, the thrust and theme of his campaign is identical. Where John sought to identify the nagging concerns of a nation grown cosy after years of peace, Robert spoke up to the desire of a nation wracked by war and division for change. Obama’s stance as the “change candidate” has a clear precedent. While the standard approach is to attempt to achieve unity through compromise, Kennedy sought to build a new consensus on ground that had previously been identified with the hard left - essentially the same trick Obama hopes to pull off, a generation later, in 2008. Kennedy’s slogan, a quote from George Bernard Shaw - “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’” - stands out as a more lyrical version of Obama’s “yes we can”.

So what can the campaign of Robert Kennedy - whose closest relatives, ironically, have broken ranks with the rest of the clan to back Hillary - tell us about Obama’s chances? Of course, Robert Kennedy was never put to the general electoral test. His campaign ended, not with a concession speech, but with a victory party - after the Californian primary on June 5. It was ended, not by polls or delegate counts, but by Sirhan Sirhan, the young Palestinian who shot the Senator in the back and head at celebrations in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Psephologists disagree about the chances Kennedy’s radical campaign would have had against the republican nominee, Richard Nixon. When I met Senator Ted Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy brothers in 2004, he confessed he was unsure whether Robert would have even beaten Humphrey, who had the support of most of congress, to the Democratic nomination. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “We had a long way to go.”

What’s clear, though, is that Kennedy had several factors in his favour which Obama can’t rely on. Both men score highly in both party and national polls among young people. But that demographic is far smaller now than it was in Kennedy’s time. The 1960s were the coming of age of the so-called “baby boom” generation, children born in 1945-7 in the postwar boom. As a result, the proportion of people in the US aged 18-25 was higher than ever. It was these “boomers” who protested in the universities, became the first hippies - and fought in the Vietnam war. These young people were the bedrock of Kennedy’s campaign.

The same is true of Obama’s campaign, but almost everything else has changed. Those same baby boomers are entering retirement, leaving America with a chronically aging population. The younger generation, by contrast, is smaller than ever, thanks to several decades of working women with easy access to birth control. And they’re less likely than ever to vote.

It is possible that aging boomers will be inspired enough by Obama’s rhetoric of change - and his resemblance to the Kennedy campaign - to carry him to victory. And blacks, who supported Kennedy in droves, are flocking to Obama. But another core Kennedy constituency, Hispanics, aren’t Obama’s to count on. Kennedy’s support for firebrand activist César Chávez made him a hero to many “Chicanos” (as Hispanics were generally called then). This constituency, unlike the youth vote, has only grown in the intervening years. But Obama’s support among Hispanics now, except the young, is poor.

With the youth vote less powerful, and the minority vote fractured, Obama may face an uphill struggle to clinch the nomination - and then, of course, the presidency. But then, few expected Kennedy’s campaign to obtain such momentum - or for the formerly overshadowed brother to prove such a compelling orator and eloquent advocate for the poor. In these more centrist days, it would be too much to expect that Obama might finish what Robert Kennedy started. But with America once more crying out for a change of direction, for a politics of compassion and co-operation, it seems possible a measure of Kennedy’s vision might be achieved.

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Those who know me will be surprised to hear I’ve been reading a Policy Exchange report recently. PE, for those who don’t keep up with the ever-growing roster of UK think-tanks, is the leading centrist (read: sane) entity amongst the conservative ‘tanks. Unlike its crazier cousins, such as Civitas and Politeia, Policy Exchange serves as more than a mouthpiece for bored minor ex-ministers and a peddler of slightly silly state-the-obvious reports.¹ Despite the concerns of the Fourth International, PE is essentially a serious enterprise. And, determined to be taken as seriously as lefties such as IPPR, PE has taken the radical step of commissioning and publishing actual academic research by actual academics.

This report, into the history of Britain’s urban policy, makes depressing, if fascinating reading. Five or six decades of urban policy, it argues, have essentially failed. Attempts to encourage, or even compel, businesses to open new factories in depressed areas simply prevented investment and may have cost the country jobs overall. Despite the interference of more than 30 different government agencies in the last 20 years, Liverpool remains plagued by poverty and crime. And while they may enhance quality of life, it’s by no means clear that cultural institutions - the current regeneration fad - bring meaningful long-term economic benefits.

Ultimately, the report argues, to try to artificially kickstart the economies of Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and other depressed northern towns is to miss the point. The cities are poor for a serious economic reason. Not just the collapse of manufacturing, which could theoretically be replaced by other industries. Quite simply, they’re in the wrong place. Northern towns developed in most cases because of their access to the sea, through harbours, rivers and canals, which made them ideally placed for international trade when most goods were carried by sea. Now that goods are increasingly carried by road, and trade is more than ever with continental Europe, it’s the South that reaps the benefits. While the Northern cities languish, one of the fastest growing towns in the UK is Milton Keynes, the former laughing stock now invaluable for distribution owing to its central location and hub-like place in the road network.

The implication of this - and the failure of government policy to transform Northern cities in a lasting way - is a radical and scary one: that any attempt to rescue Northern towns as serious cities should be abandoned. Depopulation and migration to the South should be accepted as inevitable. Rather than spending billions trying to make these economies viable sources of employment for hundreds of thousands, we should let them shrink to a more sustainable size. Once, it made sense for cities like York and Durham to be the largest in the country; no-one tried desperately to sustain their importance as the industrial giants developed. Markets made these cities large, the report seems to suggest, and markets must be allowed to shrink them again.

The government rejects the report’s findings, of course. But assuming the report - prepared by an economic historian at LSE as well as Policy Exchange’s staff - are correct, the ramifications of this are faintly frightening. The South can barely squeeze in enough houses as it is, especially in the face of local opposition. And the tasks of managing such population decline would be hugely difficult, with badly underpopulated built-up areas having to be cleared and demolished to prevent them becoming hotbeds of crime. But the vision of a topsy-turvy UK, with the South an extended mega-conurbation of London and the North a largely reclaimed rural zone, is a fascinating one.

It may also be something to consider for other countries. Detroit has struggled to cling onto its population in the face of the collapse of its manufacturing industry; its current population of just over 900,000 is around half that of the city in 1940, when it was known as the “Arsenal of Democracy.” But perhaps it has to get much smaller before its population meets equilibrium with the jobs realistically available. And what about New Orleans? As the city rushed to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, few stopped to ask if a city in the path of regular hurricanes might be better off abandoned.

As people become ever more mobile, it’s possible cities might grow and shrink in response to economic trends faster than ever before. This could mean a revolution in building, with cheap temporary buildings replacing grand civic projects. The implications of this for the quality of the built are environment are, obviously, pretty unpleasant. But it might be better than the alternative: the endless, desperate struggle to artificially inflate economies; the vast swathes of leftover and abandoned buildings, built to last generations but no longer needed.

Even if we were prepared to face the turmoil of essentially abandoning the idea of the Northern city, it’s hard to see the idea gaining political traction under Labour, with its dependence on Northern votes. And the Conservatives, too, couldn’t afford the fury massive influxes of Northern migrants would create in the South. But political opposition might not make any difference. Just as government intervention has failed to stem the economic decline of Northern cities, nor can it stem their depopulation. Manchester and Liverpool have both lost almost half their populations since 1930. Whatever the government thinks, it seems the fifty-year battle to rescue the economies of the North may have been lost.

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Album of the Year: The National, Boxer

In a year when American guitar bands continued to stand head-and-shoulders above most of their British rivals, Ohio’s The National provided a urbane, mature, and deliciously dark counterpoint to the psych-folk of artists like Spoon and Iron & Wine. Taut and fiercely intelligent, Boxer captures, instead of turning away from, the brooding anxiety that has stalked American culture in recent years. Matt Berninger’s rich voice achieves an impressive emotional impact without a shred of affectation.

Listen to “Mistaken for Strangers”

Runner-up: Jamie T, Panic Prevention

Damp squib of the year: Live Earth

Let’s face it, it always sounded a bit rum. Gigantic concerts for poverty sound illogical at first, but if they raise masses of money - or even if they influence the debate - they ultimately make sense. Gigantic concerts to stop climate change just sound wrong. Yes, if it builds awareness, it’s worth the jet flights, the lighting, the fireworks, the car journeys made by the thousands in the audience. But only a genuinely passionate, political event - at least as much so as Live8 - could have made all the excess seem justified. In the end, it was anything but. From the UK concerts being hosted by Chris Moyles - a man who probably thinks climate change is for girls - to David Gray and Damien Rice’s baffling decision to sing “Que Sera Sera”, a song that seemed to encapsulate the very complacency the concert was supposed to shake us out of - the event was vacuous and soulless from the start. Without an actually-great moment along the lines of Kanye West’s appearance at the Concert for Diana, it just felt like being stuck inside one of those green adverts full of smiling children that oil companies make.

Runner-up: Playstation 3

I-don’t-see-what-all-the-fuss-is-about phenomenon of the year: Heroes

My brother loves it. Critics like it. People who liked Lost before it got all silly like it. It’s slick mainstream sci-fi, what’s not to like? And yet, I hate it. I hate the cliched Japanese character and his absurdly wide face. I hate the uptight politician’s ludicrously square chin, the central-casting blandness of the actors playing

minor characters. The villains in Lost, as baffling as the mythology has become, remain genuinely discomforting. Malcolm McDowell spewing stock evil-genius stuff about the Survival of the Strong? The pretty, evil one eating people’s brains, for god’s sake? I just don’t get it.

Funky new web thingy of the year: Tumblr

As anyone who monitors my ever-declining rate of posts to this website can tell you, it isn’t easy finding time for regular full-length blogging. And how often do you have something really new to say, anyway? More often you just want to share something cool you’ve seen on your travels around the web. Enter Tumblr: simple, in many ways quite limiting software with one killer feature: predefined templates making it one-click simple to share audio, video or photos. The result? A lot fewer posts here, maybe, but a whole new avalanche of web-highlights shared over on my “tumblelog,” Ravindr.

Love-it-or-hate-it-you-can’t-ignore-it innovation of the year: Facebook applications

2007 was, of course, when the rest of the world finally joined me and a handful of US student friends on Facebook. No sooner had they piled in that these blasted applications came along. Suddenly I was being thrown cows and zombie-zapped by people I hadn’t seen for years. This is, obviously, rubbish. And yet, buried underneath the mile-high pile of crap that has built up since applications were allowed in the Spring, are some real gems: iLike, despite its ridiculous Apple-lite name, is great for adding songs to messages and wall posts; What I’m Listening To finally puts all that last.fm information where you need it; and apps like My Blogs, Flickr Gallery and del.icio.us let you use your profile as a hub for all your web 2.0 shreds of personality spread across the web. There are plenty more needed, instant messaging being a priority, but having hundreds of companies working on the task must be better than having just one. Now, if only someone would ask me what sort of pirate I am.

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But switch we must. Ask anybody about the steps needed to combat climate change, you’ll hear guilt over obvious infractions like cheap flights, but no real sense of roadmap to change. Or, you’ll hear politocultural prejudices mapped onto climate change: the crisis as evidence that globalisation / meat consumption / global inequality is unsustainable. In short, most people either don’t grasp the magnitude of the task in hand, or want to use it as a platform for radical changes in lifestyle which, however attractive they may be, can hardly form the core of an international governmental consensus on what to do next.

Part of the problem is that, for such a scientific issue, the climate change discussion has been discussed in the media in an almost entirely unquantified way. Do you know how many centigrades the climate is expected to increase by? How much our carbon emissions need to decrease? Without these numbers in the public debate, it’s impossible to fully grasp the scale and shape of the challenge, and therefore to be able to visualise a solution.

So let’s see if we can crunch the numbers a little, just to get a sense of the task ahead of us. Jeffrey Sachs, in his recent speech at St. Paul’s and again in his recent Reith Lectures on the BBC, offers some useful UN statistics.

Right now, the world population is just over 6 billion. By 2050, UN estimates predict an increase of 50% to 9 billion. If the level of energy consumption per person remains static, therefore, that’s a 50% increase in our energy needs by 2050.

But energy consumption is unlikely to stay static. Economies all over the world are growing fast. The average income of people on Earth is expected to increase by four times by 2050, fuelled largely by massive increases in China and India. This is wonderful news for those enjoying increased quality of life, but obviously compounds the climate problem. 1.5x the population times 4x the income equals 6 times more economic activity on Earth in 2050 than now. Assuming the amount of energy required increases with income - that each dollar of income costs the same in energy consumption in 2050 - we’re looking at a six-fold increase in our energy needs. Assuming energy production produces the same amount of carbon as it does now, we’re looking at - you guessed it - a sixfold increase in our carbon emissions.

Scared yet? Let’s really put ourselves on the ghost train. How much over safe limits is our current carbon use? It depends partly on how much hotter we’re prepared for things to get. The European Union has accepted as its climate change goal limiting change to a 2-degree (centigrade) increase. 2 degrees is still pretty scary, but it’s liveable without mass death in developing countries. Crucially, it should avoid triggering ‘vicious circle’ effects where climate change becomes self-reinforcing.

The IPCC estimates that, to keep the increase down to 2 degrees, atmospheric carbon must stabilise at around 450 parts per million. Right now, it’s about 425 parts per million. So the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, right now, is within the zone of acceptability. But, of course, it’s increasing. It’s increasing because emissions are too high. The fact that the atmospheric level is currently acceptable doesn’t mean that current levels of emissions are.

Let’s say the atmosphere is like a sink, and it’s filing with water - carbon. There’s a safe level of water - the capacity of the sink. And there’s a plughole, where the water drains away, and there’s a tap, pouring water in. But the tap is putting water in faster than it can drain away. And the sink has been filling up, slowly, and you know in a few minutes it’s going to be full and water is going to start spilling over the sides and flooding the room. But here’s the thing: somebody keeps turning the tap on, opening it more and more.

So first of all, we need to stop the guy who’s opening the tap more. But that’s not enough: the tap’s current flow is still too much. We need to start moving the tap towards “closed”. So what’s the acceptable level to aim for? Here’s realclimate.org:

Humankind is releasing CO2 at a rate of about 7 Gton C per year from fossil fuel combustion, with a further 2 Gton C per year from deforestation. Because the atmospheric CO2 concentration is higher than normal, the natural world is absorbing CO2 at a rate of about 2 or 2.5 Gton C per year into the land biosphere and into the oceans, for a total of about 5 Gton C per year. The CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is rising because of the 4 Gton C imbalance. If we were to cut emissions by about half, from a total of 9 down to about 4 Gton C per year, the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere would stop rising for awhile.

OK. So that’s the target: half of current emissions. Half of current emissions times six times the energy consumption (see above) means we’ve got to get the level of emissions associated with each unit of human economic activity down to one-twelth its current level.

Yeesh.

And yet, while the task sounds massive, it also sounds at least theoretically achievable. The problem can be tackled in several ways.

1. Reduce population growth. 9 billion is prediction, not a prophecy. Mass provision of contraception in poor countries could speed the demographic transition from a high-birth, high-mortality society to a low-birth, low-mortality society. This happens naturally with economic growth, but factors like disease have stalled the trend in parts of the developing world, like Africa.

2. Reduce economic growth. This is essentially the response of those who say we need to turn our back on many aspects of ‘progress’ and return to some kind of more agricultural lifestyle. However, it’s not limited to hippies: even the economics editor of the Guardian believes climate change may mean the end of economic growth as the world’s governing paradigm. The problem is that while we in developed countries have a standard of living where we could probably stop growing quite happily, developing countries do not. Growth-stoppers suggest promoting alternative ideas of development without the focus on industrialisation, based on local trade and subsistence. However, there is no evidence that life expectancy, nutrition and democracy can develop to Western levels without economic growth; in practice, it’s widely believed this vague ideal of rural living amounts to telling developing countries not to develop.

3. Reduce the energy requirements of economic growth. This is where insulating your roof comes in. Increasing economic activity can be mitigated if the energy use for each dollar made is reduced. This covers most energy efficiency drives, like buying local produce, taxing cheap flights, or encouraging public transport. It also covers some technological improvements, like TVs that don’t have a standby mode or decreases in petrol consumption.

4. Reduce the carbon emissions involved in energy production. This is the other key role of technology. Renewable energy, coal sequestering, nuclear, and even the humble Toyota Prius all fit into this category.

Idea one, while attractive, is difficult technically and politically (the chances of the Bush administration sponsoring a mass drop of condom kits on Africa is, go figure, not high). Idea two is radical and attractive on paper, but, in practice, very problematic. There’s a blurry line between points two and three, too - if I work from home instead of travelling to the office, I’m reducing the energy cost of my earnings, but am I also reducing my total economic activity by eschewing the transport industry? Maybe I am, but it’s still a far cry from us all running off to live in mud huts. We don’t need to grow less, I think, just better.

Either way, most mainstream suggestions for tackling climate change, from public transport to nuclear power, come under points three or four. It’s worth thinking about which category ideas fit into when you consider them. There’s a tendency to see them as mutually exclusive, which is just crazy. “We need cleaner energy!” “No, we need to use less energy!” Shut up, idiots. Patently, we need both.

These ideas are all about reducing emissions, that is to say, the flow of the tap. But there are other options.

What about climate change mitigation? The likes of Bjorn Lomberg think we need to focus less on reducing carbon emmissions, and more on reducing its effects. In the sink scenario, this is the equivalent of thinking about how much water spillage we can manage to mop up. The point, though, is of course that we need to do both. The 2 degree target still brings with it some pretty nasty effects, including sea level rises deadly heatwaves across Europe every summer - some water on the kitchen floor, as it were. We’re still looking at big changes - and this is pretty much the best case scenario, emissions-wise. So it’s hard to take seriously the idea that improving the emissions situation isn’t a big part of the solution.

And, what about planting trees? “Offsetting” has become a key part of the climate-change response of well-off liberals, as it’s one of the few ways you can simply buy off climate guilt. In our climate change kitchen, this is the equivalent of unblocking the sink - undoing some of the damage we’ve done to nature’s ability to absorb the carbon we produce.

The central challenge - to reduce the carbon emissions associated with each dollar of economic activity on Earth by one-twelfth - is indeed scary. But it doesn’t sound infeasible. Neither energy efficiency nor cleaner energy alone can do it; neither can mitigation or offsetting alone make it unnecessary. But if we do it all - the electric car and more public transport, more renewable energy and more energy efficient homes and workplaces, we might, i reckon, have a chance. Let’s run a quick thought experiment, as economists say (”wild speculation” to you and me”):

Let’s say we do manage to shower Africa with condoms, and instead of 9 billion, we get the Earth’s population stabilised at 7.5 billion. I have no idea if this is considered possible, but hey, impossible is nothing, as those annoying mountaineering boys point out in the Adidas advert. That takes us from a 1.5x population increase to a 1.25x increase. That means instead of a 12x decrease in carbon emissions per dollar economic activity, we now just need a 10x decrease.

Next let’s assume that by a combination of energy efficiency technology and lifestyle changes, we can reduce the energy required to produce a dollar’s economic activity by two-thirds. Sounds ambitious? I know. But think about it: cut all those extra flights, work from home, more multiple accomodations, more locally produced food where it’s clearly more energy efficient. It’s imaginable, at least. One-third the energy needs takes us from needing a 10x decrease in emissions per dollar of activity to needing a 3.33x decrease.

Then, imagine we reduce the carbon emissions involved in producing a block of energy - a kilowatt hour, say - by two-thirds as well. This is not too hard to imagine - a bit of nuclear there, a bit of renewable there, a bit of carbon sequestration there - it’s doable. That gets us to 1.11x - within a sliver of the target.

I’m not saying these numbers are achievable now. And they’re all subject to disagreement. But they demonstrate that’s it’s at least possible to imagine a solution. And the great thing is, these numbers take into account all the common objections. What about China and India? These numbers have accounted for that. What about the melting of the ice caps reducing light reflection? The 2-degree target bears that in mind.

Climate change has become a chorus of misery, with new problems popping up all the time. And the result has been an equally messy chorus of solutions. Nuclear is the answer! Energy-saving lightbulbs are the answer! Banning cheap flights is the answer! We badly need to start thinking about the problem as a whole, and putting together plans for solutions that encompass the categories we’ve outlined here. Despite the scariness of the challenge, knowing these figures makes me feel more, not less, confident that we can, actually, get through this. Sachs keeps quoting Kennedy, and it does seem appropriate in the current climate of fear:

Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.

UPDATE 28/05/07: George Monbiot crunches the numbers slightly differently and comes to a more pessimistic conclusion.

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on the whole, as the first year of the new tuition-fee regime draws to a close, not much has gone wrong. Applications have continued to rise. Fears that universities with large numbers of places to fill would slash their prices have proved to be unfounded. And thousands more students now have financial help. Kirsty Jones, from the finance directorate of Sheffield Hallam University, says: “Overall we feel that this year has gone well.”

Much of this stems from the 6% increase in UCAS applications last year. The chief argument of critics - that the reforms, which introduced much higher fees in exchange for the reintroduction of maintenance grants for the poorest students - would put poor students off University by threatening them with massive debt.

I’ll admit I was surprised by the rise in applications. But of course, a rise in applications alone tells us little. Was the cohort of people of UCAS application age larger this year? And, crucially, how has the socioeconomic background of applicants shifted, if at all? It’s no secret that A-level grades are improving, that the ranks of people with the qualifications for University is increasing; an increase in applications overall doesn’t mean those from poorer backgrounds are any more likely to apply. And, of course, we’ll have to wait several years before we see the effects of the increased debt burden as this generation of students enters the workplace with over one year’s salary’s worth of debt.

But all this ignores the central objection to the Government’s new model: that, like the previous model with reduced fees, it simply doesn’t supply students with enough money. My year at University (1999-2002) was one of the first under the initial reforms, and there was an Alice in Wonderland quality to the mathematics under which our living budgets were decided. A student from the poorest background, whose parents were expected to make no contribution to their education costs, would pay no fees and be able to receive £3,600 a year towards their living costs. I recall sitting down at some point in my first year - probably around the same time my cashcard first got declined - and working out my situation. Halls rent, including some meals, was £2450 a year. That left £1150, or £32 for each of the 35 termtime weeks, spending money. This is at a time when friends at home who hadn’t stayed at University were earning £150 temping - and recieving a similar level of feeding from their parents as I was getting in halls. In the second year, things were even worse - because it was paid over the full 52 weeks, rent at £45 a week came to £2340 - almost as much as halls. Now, I had £36 a week - and I had to eat, too. To eat, travel, pay bills, buy books, clothes, phone home, and - naughty! - perhaps actually go out every now and then. A ticket home for the weekend could leave me unable to eat for the next week.

How did anyone in the Government ever think this was workable? Universities desperately tried to discourage us from getting part-time jobs, while banks and credit card companies swooped in to fill the gap - in addition to, in several friend’s cases, hardship loans. Is it really a coincidence that, a few years on, we’re seeing record number of redundancies from credit card debt? Of course, we were all supported by our parents, too - even those whose parents the Government had decreed not required to contribute to our living costs, often because they were paying our fees. And if you could get to the front of the mile-long queue at the temp agency, you might just manage to get a holiday job. Still, the gap between the money available and the real costs of living - to even a pale impersonation of the lifestlye of our working friends - seems so stupidly large, it’s astonishing this arrangement was ever implemented. And what’s so astonishing - what made me really angry - was that this penury stemmed from the tight upper limits on our loans. We weren’t saying the Government had to give us money. We accepted we were going to borrow. Why limit the interest-free borrowing to such ludicrously low levels, and effectively force us into the hands of commercial lenders?

So with the Government bleating proudly at the bursaries and grants built into its new system, I naturally wanted to look at the actual numbers. Fortunately, the NUS - who we demonised in my day for their cosying up to the Government over funding reform - have done the number-crunching for me.

Let’s accept the default figures, which seem reasonable in their estimate of student spending. As much as horrified ministers like to pretend otherwise, the truth is that students do wear clothes, and use mobile phones, and get trains to visit each other in their parent’s houses in the holidays. Accept the default numbers, click the little ‘OK’ at the bottom, and you get the result: a £725 surplus! Great! Off to Spain for the holidays!

Now look back at those income numbers. £3000 to cover fees, good. £3205 loan to cover living costs, OK. Family contribution or grant, £2700, fine*. Bursary, £300, yep - that’s the statutory minimum for Universities to provide to students recieving full maintenance grants. But what’s this? Part-time / vacation work, £2500.

Hmm. Let’s see. There are, at most Universities, 17 non-term weeks in the year: 4 at Christmas, 4 at Easter, and 11 in Summer. It’s hard to obtain temp work at Christmas, although those with longstanding arrangements with supermarkets or shops might have a better chance. And of course, it’s assumed you’ll be working heavily on revision and essays. Let’s say you manage to get two weeks’ full-time work (37.5 hours a week) at Christmas, and three weeks’ at Easter. And let’s be really optimistic, and assume you get to work 10 of your 11 summer weeks. No lazy summer afternoons in the park for you, youngster. And let’s - realistically - assume you do all of this at the minimum wage, currently £4.45 an hour for 18-21 yr-olds. 4.45 x 37.5 x 15 = £2503.

My God! It actually works. If everything goes to plan - your parents pay up, you get work, the loans, grant and bursary all come through on time, and you stick to reasonable spending limits, you can get by without accruing a huge overdraft or working part-time in term-time. And if your University is one of those that provides more than the minimum bursary, you could work less.

This doesn’t invalidate some of the wider criticisms of the system: the deterrent effect of heavy debts, which we still aren’t sure about; the risk of serious problems if one of the above factors, notable parental contribution, falls through. Still, I’ll stand up and admit it: I was wrong to argue that the latest reforms would make a bad situation worse. While the debt burden is worse now, the ludicrous penury of student life in the early noughties - and the bank and credit card debt that too often went along with it - should be heavily reduced. I’d still rather see education funded through progressive taxation, or failing that, a graduate tax. And I’m certainly still horrified to hear elite Universities lobbying for the removal or raising of the fee cap, and right-wingers for the end of interest-free loans. But I will admit that this time, it appears, the Government’s sums do add up.

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You can’t show it on a screen, but the print version had a nifty mirror effect on the TV screen. Whether the grey-eyed executives picking up a copy at their local CVS feel like they’re reinventing the internet remains to be seen, but either way, user-generated content (UGC - not to be confused with the cinema chain) had well and truly arrived on the cultural map. As well as its Time cover, it had its coffee-shop friendly bible: Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, describing how a top-down model of media dominated by large producers was about to be supplemented - and usurped - by a near-endless supply of independent content. The difference, of course, was money. Letting people upload videos from their mobile phones had always seemed like a good idea. But not necessarily one with a lot of money to be paid. The moment Google dropped $1.65bn into Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s laps, that changed.

Now, no sooner has an internet trend reached cultural penetration, then traditional media begins hamfistedly to try to get in on it. Web 2.0 was to prove no different. Quickly, fevered speculation began about how best to bring UGC to TV. Never mind the fact that this had been happening ever since the popularisation of video cameras - think You’ve Been Framed! - now a new generation of UGC-TV cropped up, led in the UK by Trouble Homegrown, an offshoot of the teen cable channel.

Now Britain’s first entire channel focussed on, if not quite dedicated to, UGC, has launched. Named - slightly craply - Current TV, it’s been onscreen less than a month, and I just discovered it tonight lurking on Virgin Media channel 155 (it’s also on Sky 229). At first glance, it’s predictable YouTubeTV - a succession of three-to-five minute films, many made by viewers, strung together by pretty, dumb, mildly trendy young hosts. And it makes no attempt its internet-me-too roots, even calling its mini-shows “pods.”¹

But watch a few minutes of Current TV, and it’s clear this is a little more than bedroom video on the big screen. First of all, the quality - if not creatively, than at least in ambition and production values - of the content. In one hour, I saw a brief documentary about Glasgow’s “neds,” another comparing Iraqi opnions of the American occupation, and another on an American community gym, all slickly edited and complete with graphics. And the filmmakers weren’t all the 14-yr-old boys every user-centred website depends on. The “pod” showing when i first stumbled upon the channel featured a stocky, goateed man in sunglasses and a beanie hat doing martial arts on the beach. “Hang on,” I thought, “that looks like The Edge.” Of course, all goateed men in shades and beanie hats tend to look like The Edge. But, as it turns out, The Edge it was - in a four-pod day-in-the-life documentary made by bandmate Bono. Now, Bono hasn’t always been selective in his embrace of new media forms - think the ill-fated plans for a Zoo TV cable channel in the early 90’s. Nevertheless, it’s a big step up from films of people falling over drunk.

But it’s not just the production values that makes Current TV surprisingly impressive. It boasts something that’s inreasingly rare in mainstream new media: ideals. Current seem serious about political and news content, with an army of so-called “vanguard journalists” delivering quick-fire images and commentary from inside everything from China’s prostitution industry to African mineworking conditions. And the user-generated content, too, has real political bite. The aforementioned pod on Iraqi views of the occupation (made by Iraqi independent media group Iraq Eye) delivered more of an Iraqi perspective on the occupation in three minutes than I’ve seen in the mainstream news in the last year, while a brief introduction to the growing Nigerian film industry was a classic example of the kind of broader coverage of Africa - more than just starvation, war and misery - that many have been crying for more of in mainstream media.

It was clear that Current wasn’t just a low-budget startup. The tip-off came in the credits of Bono’s film: “thanks to Joel Hyatt and ‘Big’ Al Gore.”

Al Gore?

It turns out (praise be, Wikipedia!) that Current TV is, in fact, the invention of the world’s favourite loser himself. I do recall, after the 2000 election, Gore rumbling about the need for an independent new cable channel to challenge the conservative domination of the news media. It turns out Current is an evolved version of that idea. It also turns out it’s been onscreen over 18 months in the US. Think about that for a second - the pod-based format was invented before YouTube even launched. Far from a quick cash-in, Current seems to be the true TV equivalent of web 2.0, drawn from the same ideas but independently developed. What’s more, it trumps it on ideals. Gore’s plan from the beginning was to give space to independent voices. The YouTube founders just wanted somewhere to put videos to show to their friends.

Of course, ideals and TV are a difficult mix. This Nation article recounts the evolution of the concept - from a well-meaning grassroots network to the slick MTV-with-brains we see now. Being the Nation, of course, it goes way over the top.

“Less and less they’re trying to run a company with a social mission,” says Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism and a member of Current’s board of directors. “They want something that’s new and interesting and economically viable.”

Interesting! Economically viable! The fascists! Current’s three-minute format certainly doesn’t allow for in-depth, nuanced reporting, and the previews of saw of “vanguard journalism” certainly privileged get-it-on-camera correspondence to proper reporting. But while I’m a huge fan of big-’n'-balanced documentary, it’s not the only way to expand the horizons of the traditional media. Rather than “MoveOn.org in prime time” - which, let’s be honest, sounds horrendous - Current has the potential to offer something much more powerful: a TV analogue to the blogosphere. The messages may be quick and simple, but they will hopefully come from a bewildering range of sources - providing a forum for, as Current put it, “any story that traditional news media won’t touch because it’s too big, too small, or too something.” The high standards required by TV transmission, as well as the quasi-democratic selection process (pods uploaded to the website are voted on by users, but it’s not clear how much influence this has on selection), will inevitably silence some voices. But given the number of 9/11 conspiracy movies on YouTube, it’s hard not to think, “good.”²

Current TV isn’t going to change the world, and it isn’t going to infiltrate everyday life to the staggering extent of YouTube. But perhaps that’s not the point. What it is is the first new TV channel I’ve seen in years that’s genuinely different. Isn’t that reason enough to be excited?

Current TV: www.current.com and www.uk.current.com; Sky 229; Virgin Media 155

1. You have to really think about this to see just how horrible it is. The “pod” in iPod means, essentially, what the word pod means - a small, cute vessel. For all the overuse of the suffix since - and I say this as the proud owner of a knackered Korean “GoGoPod” MP3 player - that sense has generally, until now, been retained. But if you apply the word to content, as Current have done, it becomes totally meaningless.
2. They will, of course, also face a host of potential problems over political evenhandedness or otherwise. Do they show the well-produced pod in favour of Palestinian terrorism? What about the one expressing sympathy with al-Qaeda?

Hat tip: Josh

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A celebrity zombie, yesterday

Celebrity culture is dead. It may seem strong and healthy, but inside, it’s rotting. And soon we’ll all be running from the smell.

Don’t get me wrong: there will always be stars. There always have been, since the first silent movies. But around ten years ago, something changed. We didn’t care any more if our celebrities were talented, or clever, or beautiful. They only had to be famous.

Soon, a seemingly endless parade of lucky nobodies filled our screens. They made it any way they could: flirting on Big Brother, masturbating pigs, marrying stars – or better still, sleeping with stars who were already married. They got drunk, got dumped, and got divorced. They were snapped with lines up their nose and their pants round their ankles. And we lapped it up, every last column inch of it.

But the humiliation of Jade Goody was the beginning of the end. Our girl next door, who had won over the nation just five years before, was undone by the very things we’d grown fond of: her stupidity, her insecurity, and her big, loud mouth. Now, the tragic, sordid death of Anna Nicole Smith, just months after the birth of her daughter, has slammed the final nail into the diamante-encrusted Versace coffin. This joke isn’t funny any more.

Celebrity culture was the creation of a society that was peaceful, prosperous – and bored. After 9/11, in the midst of a bloody and seemingly never-ending war, a bunch of gobby boys and girls having sex and falling over doesn’t seem so entertaining any more.

Don’t get me wrong. When the first reality TV stars came along, they were like a breath of fresh air. Chubby, shy, skint, with crap clothes, they were just like us. It seemed like ordinary people deserved to be famous too.

But sooner or later, fame reveals your true nature. Like stars, ordinary people aren’t always funny or loveable. We’re often boring, plain, and stupid, and sometimes racist and nasty. But unlike the stars, we don’t have talent or looks to hide behind. Hold us up to the glare of the spotlight, and we just look dirty.

So bye-bye, kiss-n-tell culture. It’s time to start celebrating real star quality – from the beauty of Penelope Cruz to the raw talent of Forest Whitaker. Fame is a precious thing, and we control who gets it. Let’s use that power a bit more wisely in future.

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I got a posh new phone last week. It plays music, it does email, and it takes pictures, just like iPhone. But because it can play software made by other companies, it can do lots more besides, like play recorded TV or tell me where the traffic jams are. It can even tell me all 99 names of Allah!

Apple’s iPhone won’t do any of this, because it only runs the software Apple provides for it. Unlike other phones, it’ll only work on one network. And it looks like it’s going to be extremely expensive. And yet, it’ll fly off the shelves. After all, look at the iPod. It can’t play songs downloaded from some of the most popular music stores, only from Apple’s, and it costs far more than many rivals. But still, a whopping 70% of the mp3 players sold worldwide are iPods. Why? Because it’s so easy to use, your granny would love one.

Business is supposed to be all about choice. More ranges. More options. And the Government has got in on the act, saying that letting us choose our hospital will help fix the NHS.

But choice just makes things complicated. Apple’s products are easy to use precisely because they don’t give you a choice of software, or music store. It all works together because it’s all made by one company. Just ask Apple’s arch-rival Microsoft – after spending years making software that works with the biggest range of mp3 players possible, now they’ve given up and made a device of their own.

The more choice you have, the more confusing life becomes. Remember when, to call directory enquiries, you just picked up the phone and dialled? Now, you have to choose from hundreds of competing services, each with different charges and gimmicks. Now, fewer people use directory enquiries than ever before.

So, before the government thrusts any more “choice” down our throats, they should take a lesson from Apple. Make it simple, make it a pleasure to use, and we don’t give a damn about choice. If it works for phones, why not for the NHS?

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This Christmas, 2006, I am boycotting “Fairytale of New York.”

I told you you’d be shocked. Allow me to make myself very clear: I take this action not through boredom, sickness or dislike of said heart-of-gold drunken yuletide anthem. Quite the opposite. I’m doing this because I like it far too much to see it meet the fate of every other Christmas song: overplayed, irritating, redolent of tired, forced fun.

I remember when “Fairytale” first came out. The first time I heard it, I hated it. I was eight, for heaven’s sake; I wanted synths, beats, and preferably a little mini-rap for the middle eight. I really wasn’t ready for MacGowan’s lazily anguished snarl, or MacColl’s lilt for that matter. And yet, after my first listen, something stayed with me. By the next day I’d listened to it several times, learned the words, and put it on a tape I was making for a friend (along, if I remember correctly, with “Pump Up The Volume” by M/A/R/R/S, which must imply something).

For a long time, “Fairytale” remained, if not a secret passion, at least a pretty cliquey one. In the oh-so-ironic 90s, unashamed party ‘classics’ like Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody!” went down better than dark old “Fairytale.” I heard that it was kept from video appearances on Christmas Top of the Pops specials by the word “faggot,” but I’ve no idea if that’s true. Certainly, it was a badge of honour to admire the song over the array of Christmas crap out there. This, after all, was the decade when the coveted slot of Christmas number one was competed for almost entirely by novelty acts - from Mr. Blobby to Bob the Builder. I’m not saying that liking “Fairytale” made you some sort of musical guru, but it was a marker of discrimination. Like Radiohead, nobody who was really interested in music would dismiss it, and nobody who was basically more interested in football could really enjoy it.

I remember exactly when I realised that things had started to change: when, in 2000, I heard that likeable-but-dull Irish warbler Ronan Keating* was recording the song as a B-side to his single “The Way You Make Me Feel” - not, regrettably, a Michael Jackson cover, but a cliche with lyrics so mind-meltingly clichéd I’ve often wondered if they were the product of some drunken songwriter dare. Although I’ve never heard Keating’s actual version (with Clannad harp-n-vocalist** Maire Brennan), just the news of its existence made me sad to my core. The one genuinely meaningful Christmas record - the only one that portrays the contrived optimism of the festival in its true context, the misery and bitterness of winter - softened, made saccharine, safe, granny-friendly. Never mind that it’s about an elderly, drug-addicted couple whose dreams have been crushed into dust. It’s about Christmas! Let’s turn the violins up in the mix!

Then, even as Ronan’s cover was bothering the charts - and the ears of Radio 2 listeners - Kirsty MacColl died. Amidst the heartfelt (and well-deserved) tributes that flooded in from fans who’d long loved Kirsty for her tragic sensibility, unique voice, and sometimes biting wit, there were many who talked as if all she’d ever done was “Fairytale” (I’m talking about you, Duncan Connors). From that moment, the song began a quick ascent towards national treasure status. It topped a VH1 poll of the greatest Christmas song in 2004, and has done so every year since. When a colleague in my office recently started a poll on a popular gay networking website about the best Christmas song, it shot to the top. It’s just been re-released for the second time, and is currently at no. 10 in the charts. There are 64 versions of the song on YouTube, ranging from the official video (starring, incredibly, Matt Dillon) to a version by the parents of someone called Sam.

Perhaps I should be happy to see such a great song so popular. But I’m not. “Fairytale” was an aquired taste for a reason: it’s dark. It’s difficult; it contains a vision of Christmas that isn’t dominated by food and things.

He’s an alcoholic shambles, who spends Christmas Eve in a police station. She’s a bedridden junkie. The only hope on the horizon comes from his recent gambling victory (”Got on a lucky one / Came in eighteen to one / I’ve got a feeling / This year’s for me and you”). We all know he’s going to piss it away; that his cheerful Christmas optimism (”I can see a better time / when all our dreams come true”) is a grotesque annual ritual. And the song’s final verse, while it initially seems to bring resolution, in fact offers the protagonists only a weary resignation:

I could have been someone
(Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you)
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you

In the end, their complete dependence on each other is all that holds them together: their dreams may be dead, but they huddle, shivering, warming themselves over the ashes.

This is an odd candidate for a feel-good Christmas anthem. And yet, in the words of one EMI staffer,

Fairytale Of New York is an adult answer to Jingle Bells. It’s difficult to remember a Christmas party without a drunken singalong with The Pogues.

Is it too elitist to suspect the millions of people who round off every Christmas party with a “drunken singalong” haven’t fully appreciated the dark bitterness of the story? And of course, there’s the depressing irony of watching drunk people imitate MacGowan’s alcoholic drawl.

And the Pogues aren’t helping, cheerfully performing the song with any passing female singer, not to mention Shane’s mum. And, of course, re-releasing the song any time they’re short of beer money. Think I’m being harsh? Note that Warner encouraged the single’s current re-release “because a whole new generation of fans have heard Shane through his association with Kate Moss and Pete Doherty.”

Now look, I’m not unrealistic. I understand that when fine things become hugely popular, a little of their meaning is inevitably lost; and to stand in the way of it is not only Canute-style arrogance, but pretty close to snobbishness. But that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it, and it doesn’t mean I have to take part. Hence, the boycott. Before I’ve heard it once too many; before it conjures up images, not of postwar Manhattan with its dazzling lights and freezing tenements, but of work colleagues puking on my shoes; before I learn to associate it with that heady mix of plastic packaging, junk food, cheap wine and lazy nostalgia that is Christmas for childless adults. Before I see it on a bloody advert for holidays in New York, I’m having this Christmas without “Fairytale.”

It hasn’t been easy so far. It was mercifully forgotten at the work Christmas party, but when we had people round for an early festive dinner on Sunday, I had to smilingly ignore several requests. Several times, when Christmas shopping on Saturday, I felt myself bolting a shop without my planned purchases when I sensed the festive soundtrack CD was drifting Pogues-wards. Just today, a colleague put it on on his computer towards the end of the day, minus headphones, so the whole office could enjoy it crackling out of tinny, tiny speakers. I quickly stuck in my earphones and shoved on anything else.

I don’t, to be honest, know how much longer I can last. But I’m going to keep trying. “Fairytale” is a disarming, mature, evocative story, a real adult Christmas song, not to mention one of the most eloquent ever portrayals by an Anglo-Irish writer of the Irish-American urban immigrant experience. It deserves better than to be a drunken singalong, an afterthought, “even better than Slade.”

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A couple of days ago I went to see the Michael Clark Company’s mmm…. at the Barbican. Michael Clark is endlessly referred to as a “former enfant terrible of dance,” because his shows in the 1980’s used to have overtones of sex, and frequently nudity. And I was aware that Leigh designed many costumes for Clark in the 80’s, and even appeared on stage in a couple of shows.

mmm… is a two-part show, like its predecessor at the Barbican O. Both feature a first half set to punk music and second halves set to the music of Igor Stravinsky - Apollo for O, The Rite of Spring for mmm… . I’d never heard The Rite of Spring before, although endless repetition of the story of its riot-inducing premiere had given it almost legendary status in my head. And I was genuinely astonished by the jerking discordancy of it. But Clark, showing a contrariness that has stood him in good stead over the years, took the opportunity to spin a warm tale full of love and humour.

As much as I enjoyed the dance, though, I enjoyed the costumes more. A succession of simple bodystockings mingled with orange leather skirts and furry purple muffs - but far from the tacky campery that may conjure up, the results were thrilling. From the opening costumes - black lycra bodystockings with the sleeves and upper torsos replaced by cut-off white t-shirts - every costume teemed with internal contradictions. In the second half, several dancers wore beige bodystockings with green leaf patters on the chest. Doesn’t sound like much, but the effect was to achieve a sense of pastoral simplicity without interfering with the cleanly modern lines of the general look of the piece - a sort of modernist Puck image.

Then Michael Clark came on, dressed as a toilet.

OK, not dressed as a toilet. But in a costume that incorporated a toilet seat. In a horizontal orientation, around his neck, so that his head appeared to be rising out of a toilet. And the lycra of the outfit, skin-tight around the waist and legs, rose out to the rim of the seat, essentially making Clark a toilet on legs.

Hmmm, I thought to myself. I sniff a bit of Bowery.

And I was right! In fact, several of the costumes from the show were Bowery’s. The show was revived from its original incarnation from 1992, to which Bowery contributed (O premiered in 1994, just before Leigh’s death, and I don’t remember seeing anything in the revival that smacked of his style - but then, I didn’t know about him then). Both the toilet-thing, and a large white faceless blob-creature that ran around earlier, were, I’m sure, Bowery designs (it turns out Bowery “played” the blob-creature in the original).

Once the show was over and I delved into the programme, the connections started to become clear. There Leigh was, credited with “original costumes.” The show’s main costumes credit, however, went to Clark and to Stevie Stewart. Stewart, it turns out, was one-half of Bodymap, the highly influential 80’s fashion house that created most of Clark’s costumes and whose defining characteristic was the figure-hugging lycra the show featured. The other half of Bodymap, David Holah, was Clark’s lover for some time in the 80’s; apparently, they lived in a council flat in Camden, a jarring of that strange time, post-punk, when the country’s most creative individuals neither started, nor became, rich. That Holah’s name no longer appears anywhere near Clark’s work is, presumably, an indicator of some huge schism at some point in the past. A site that appears to belong to Holah does feature a page on Clark, which oddly shares its text with Clark’s entry in Wikipedia. Thanks to the magic of Wikipedia, it’s impossible if the entry has copied the site, or the other way round.

So we have some sort of complex costume-triangle: Boy meets boy, boy and female friend design costumes for boy, boy and boy split up, female friend remains involved in costume making, when not