Continue to Ask Al Anything

[Filuwaúrdjan]

These things having returned and the thing being to start a new thread for them, well...

...I have a lot of opinions about a lot of things and am I always correct. Ask away.

Might well answer some of the outstanding questions from last time round as well. We shall see.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Do you speak Welsh either as first or second language?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Do you speak Welsh either as first or second language?

As a second language of variable fluency with a very strong Ffestiniog accent, which is a little problematic because normally anyone hearing that would assume 'first language'. It's all a bit complicated: basically I've known pronunciations, word-order and principles of sentence structure (inc. 'mutations') since childhood, but most vocabulary has come later. I speak it a lot better than I write it.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Opinion of A.E. Housman?

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

Well I still haven't gotten any answers to my questions...

1. Which country's politics (excluding the UK and the US) do take most interest in and why? What are some fascinating facts about that country's political system and history that you think people who are not as familiar with it should know about?

2. As you have stated in this thread you have a special identification with the traditional Social Democratic Labour-movement and its history. Which modern day incarnation of a Social Democratic / Labour Party in the world do you think still best embody that traditional movement and its values and what do you think they have done right that the British Labour Party has done wrong? 

So now my question obviously is, why won't you answer my questions? What exactly are you trying to hide Alun???!!!

[OSR stands with Israel]

- Favorite and Least Favorite Labour Party Leader in your lifetime

- Who are you supporting in the 2020 Democratic Primary

- Favorite Movie and Why

- What was your reaction when England won the ICC World Cup

[All Along The Watchtower]

Who is the most hilarious criminal/politician and why is it Nawaz Sharif and not Donald Trump?

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Have you seen the horrible musical comedy film based on The Singing Detective?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Who is the most hilarious criminal/politician and why is it Nawaz Sharif and not Donald Trump?

Because only Nawaz managed to get caught because he was idiotic enough to forge documents in a font that did not exist at the time the documents were supposedly created.

[Frodo]

If Jeremy Corbyn fails to win the December 12 parliamentary election this year, will this be the last we will see of him as Labour Party leader?       

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm still waiting for an answer to my (admittedly very long and multi-pronged) question from the previous thread.

[Zinneke]

What's your favorite city as an urban historian?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well I still haven't gotten any answers to my questions...

1. Which country's politics (excluding the UK and the US) do take most interest in and why? What are some fascinating facts about that country's political system and history that you think people who are not as familiar with it should know about?

2. As you have stated in this thread you have a special identification with the traditional Social Democratic Labour-movement and its history. Which modern day incarnation of a Social Democratic / Labour Party in the world do you think still best embody that traditional movement and its values and what do you think they have done right that the British Labour Party has done wrong? 

So now my question obviously is, why won't you answer my questions? What exactly are you trying to hide Alun???!!!

1. This is quite a long list: I suppose, India, Pakistan, Germany, Austria, France, Poland, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the Scandinavian countries, quite a few places in Africa, and some of the countries in the West Indies. There's also a secondary list of countries that I'm very interested in but have larger knowledge gaps; Indonesia, Turkey, Afghanistan, etc. And a tertiary list as long as my arms (my arms are very long).

The reasons vary, but mostly it just comes down to an admittedly childlike fascination with different societies, different peoples - and these are places that I'm generally interested in for entirely non-political reasons as well.

Some random selections for interesting and important facts: that India is essentially a democratic Empire, the Raj with the Muslim majority provinces hived off, and can't be understood without that; that Israel is best understood as a 'second world' (i.e. postsocialist) society, that your own country's politics during the political period it remains best-known for was in practice dominated by the politics of land.

2. I don't think any of them are doing particularly well at that, but this is not surprising. The essential problem is that, in the West at least, they won (the working class as it was was fully incorporated into the polity, the scope of the State was extended towards providing social benefit as a matter of right, class society was, in effect, dissolved), and they've never been able to come to terms with what to do next. And so as institutions they have all become increasingly mannered,  increasingly out of step with society as it is, rather than society as it was sixty years ago.

3. Anyone who knows how far the rot goes will be eliminated. Be very careful about what you say next.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Have you seen the horrible musical comedy film based on The Singing Detective?

The American film with Robert Downey Jr. and Mel Gibson? No. And I have no intention of seeing it either. I do, however, appreciate the cosmic irony of a bad film being made based off Television's Hamlet, given one of the subplots in it!

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

1) Would you agree that internal migration is an understudied driver of electoral movement in the UK? It strikes me that there's a tendency to discuss, say, the student vote, or constituencies in London and the South swinging away from the Tories as though the voters somehow sprang fully-formed into existence, when in the past, these voters might have been padding out Labour majorities in constituencies in the North and Midlands, but now they have moved out to get their degrees and/or pursue employment elsewhere, leaving an older, more conservative cohort more likely to own property in those constituencies?

2) What do you make of the unification of the Polish left and how would you assess its medium-term prospects?

[Lord Halifax]

If you had to live a year in either Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds or Sheffield, which one would you choose and why?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Opinion of A.E. Housman?

Not a great poet, not even the greatest poet from Bromsgrove,¹ and there is a temptation to dismiss his poetry as sentimental light verse (doing so would not even be inaccurate as it absolutely is sentimental light verse), but to do so would be quite wrong as there is a certain something there, isn't there? Dennis Potter description of The Land of Lost Content² as an 'aching little verse' gets to the heart of the matter: there is to Housman, at his best, a sense of yearning for a lost something. Exactly what is less clear; innocence is the obvious answer, of course. But some of those verses are not innocent - there is nothing innocent about On Wenlock Edge or Bredon Hill, for instance. A lost rural England? But Housman was not a man of the countryside and did not even know Shropshire particularly well when he started work on the collection that made his name. The intangibility of the yearning at the heart of Housman's poems is the key to what power they have, and they do really have some: perhaps the inability to isolate the precise nature of that yearning is the whole point.

Curiously, the formal weakness of the poems actually enhance this effect, lending them a strangely delicate aspect: they are like cobwebs or intricate frost patterns. Of course this also makes them very hard to read out loud effectively: so delicate are they and so unprotected by a robust formal structure that that it does not take much for them to lose their power. It is all too easy for the reader to overwhelm the words with dramatic intent, rendering them meaningless. Conversely, their formal simplicity makes them a lot easier to set to music than most twentieth century English poetry.

What is very peculiar is that these sensitive and delicate poems were written by a man as brutal as Housman, a notorious bully and sadist in his professional life. It is hard to believe, reading about the man, that he could have written the sort of verse that he did, and yet there it is. I am never entirely sure what this means, and neither is anyone else (not even his biographers), except that it clearly means something; something that, perhaps appropriately, will always be distant and intangible, no matter how we might long for clarity.

<sub>1. Though as the other poet of note from that town happens to be Geoffrey Hill (!) that does not really say much about the merits or otherwise of Housman as a poet!

2. A line from which - 'blue remembered hills - provided him with the title of a 1979 Television Play, one that famously concluded with Potter reading the poem out as a coda.</sub>

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If Jeremy Corbyn fails to win the December 12 parliamentary election this year, will this be the last we will see of him as Labour Party leader?    

There's a mild degree of ambiguity around it all, but he has more or less confirmed that if the election is lost, he goes.

[Frodo]

If Jeremy Corbyn fails to win the December 12 parliamentary election this year, will this be the last we will see of him as Labour Party leader?    

There's a mild degree of ambiguity around it all, but he has more or less confirmed that if the election is lost, he goes.

Then that should clear the way for London Mayor Sadiq Khan to run as head of the Labour Party. If he wants it, that is.  

Which leads me to my next question -if Jeremy Corbyn loses this December and steps down by early next year, how good are Sadiq Khan's chances of becoming Labour Party leader?  

[afleitch]

What's your favourite Scottish politicians living or dead (probably dead...) from each party.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you had to live a year in either Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds or Sheffield, which one would you choose and why?

I wouldn't particularly object to any of them, but Sheffield has the advantage of being nearest to family (in Nottingham and Doncaster) and is also the closest to pretty countryside. Manchester would, I guess, come second for similar reasons (there's a direct train to the nearest station to home) and because it is by far the strongest in terms of cultural amenities.

[morgankingsley]

Are you an AI

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

While I'm aware that your area of knowledge is concentrated in a few key areas, I feel it's in my best interests to ask a professional historian: any recommendations on Cold War and post-Cold War global history?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Opinion of A.E. Housman?

One of my very favourite poets! Yes, I agree with Al that he's not a Great Poet on account of the rather adolescent thought and sometimes banal structure of his poems, but Housman is comfort food for me in my dark moments ("And luckless lads will wear them/When I am dead and gone"). I most value Housman in his shortest poems outside of A Shropshire Lad where the spirit of the Greek Anthology he took inspiration from is distilled to its best advantage. Housman's greatest quality to me is that ability to find that epigrammatic couplet that floors you. Even if he often can't integrate them into the poem as a whole, in every one there's always that absolute killer line which cuts you to the quick.

OH, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passes by,  
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they ‘ll say that I
Am quite myself again.

When green buds hang in the elm like dust  
And sprinkle the lime like rain,
Forth I wander, forth I must    
And drink of life again.
Forth I must by hedgerow bowers    
To look at the leaves uncurled
And stand in the fields where cuckoo-flowers    
Are lying about the world.

These are perfect poems.

[Lord Halifax]

What would be the most realistic way to make the UK economy less regionally unbalanced?