News

Not much to report. A fellow cricketer and I have gone the whole nine yards building a portable batting cage from scratch. The budget is threatened by the need for a large yet affordable industrial polypropene mat on which to play. The rest is largely made of plumbing and tent pegs.

• point one
• point two

As if to make one of my recent posts seem more dramatic than it was, I’ve gone and got myself a job. Being vastly underqualified, I can see the time currently spent researching rubber flooring manufacturers being replaced with ‘Marketing for Dummies’.

Blogging is Strange

It is a strange thing to maintain a blog. Most people would not choose to keep a diary for public perusal, but what often happens is that before long one realises that they are writing a diary for an audience. This leads to one of two things: surgically honest confessions (with the chance of catharsis), or the construction, in any capacity, of a kind of avatar — a cyber personality. This avatar may draw upon aspects of reality, but it need not.

It is most similar, perhaps, to a weekly column. However, it does not involve the tacit understanding – of public and newspaper – that there are certain current affairs or topics with which the writer will engage. There is plenty of creative licence, but even this kind of writing must pass the editors before becoming print copy.

Where and when does the editing happen with blogging? If it is a personal blog, it can well mean self-censorship; not of the Orwellian kind, but of the type seen in in the age of social media. The distortion of lifestyle engendered by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler and a host of other ‘platforms’ is well known to the millenial generation, but do we understand it? I’m not sure. The pace with which new features, apps and gadgets designed to get more of our personal lives out there, is often higher than we can process. And it has really all happened in the space of a decade. The appeal of these products is of course globalisation, the desire to spread news, ideas and media across the internet, across the world, instantly.

Not being an experienced blogger, this global activity does seem to be the most strange thing yet. I am under no illusion that my blog gains worldwide attention, but with the mere possibility of that happening comes the idea that it is in some way public property. The difference between it and vlogging, for example, is significant. With the latter, the creating subject actually becomes the object — they edit how the viewer views the vlogger’s own account of the world. But what the viewer sees is real in the sense of being real-time footage. With blogging, however, the authority of the writer is sovereign: there is no way of distinguishing an accurate account of thoughts from interpretation of it which could have been added or woven in at any later stage.

Again, this happens all the time in various kinds of writing, but not since the proliferation of vanity publishing has this sovereign writing entered the public sphere in such volume. Even then, access to this was and is limited to those few who could afford it. The internet has clearly changed everything in this regard. Blogging is a business, even a reliable source of income for some, because despite the inherent freedom it becomes entwined with advertising and the ‘lifestyle’ industry. It is no coincidence that alongside the hyper-globalisation of social media there has arrived this new focus of cyber-commerce.

One can sell a lifestyle on a blog as a product, as volume of clicks for the resulting advertising revenue through services like Google Ads. You of course only really benefit if your blog sees a good amount of traffic. There is no way to guarantee this, apart from the gradual morphing of one’s work into ‘content’. Content is targeted, it is optimised to rank higher up on search-engine enquiries, to be relatable and unique.

All of this is a thousand miles away from my little personal blog though, right? Yes and no. There is a value placed on content, be it the surgically honest kind or the targeted work of my online avatar. Especially the latter. Its value depends on its relationship to those millions of other internet users who have access to it. Its artistic or sentimental value works in much the same matter — in making a blog public, its global potential equates to the fracturing of this sovereign subject into dozens, or hundreds, or millions of these relationships. 

Not only this, but with these relationships comes the ability for instant reaction, criticism and interpretation, both on the same platform and with the very same level of public exposure. Thus a secondary censorship occurs, this time in response to the critics or comments. As the fractured subject, then, one is made to confront and consider their own principles and opinions. This shapes how their honest cathartic self, as well as their avatar, subsequently appears.

But sharing is caring, isn’t it? More global = more betterer. So the wizards of Silicon Valley would have us believe. More views, more likes, more criticism: this is what the world needs. It is certainly what business desires.

Stepping into cyberspace is a modern anxiety, and one look at my strangely distorted Facebook profile, even my well-scrubbed LinkeIn page, confirms that a representation of my true self has been lost, de-centralised in the vast unconsciousness of the internet. But then, it was never there in the first place. In conclusion, then: blogging is very strange. And I have too much time on my hands. That last bit is true, I promise. 

  

Immigrant; Unemployed.

It was one of those moments vital in the unveiling of adulthood – a sharp jolt of tough love to check the ego, and, of course, like every other such (rare, I must add) occasion, Dad was spot on:

[referring to my idleness/greed during the first year of university] “What have you been doing?! Pissing money away. You need to get a job.”

[meek, already defeated] “I’ve been working hard at uni and stuff!”

“I can tell you now that when you graduate, no-one is going to care whether you get a first or a second.”

No-one is going to care.

So, here I am in Berlin with C, the degree and not a great deal else. I had a job during my last year of university: it kept my head above water financially but did nothing to allay the guilt.

I had an interview the other day. There was no doubt that I was a weaker candidate for the position; for one, I did not do a marketing degree, and the kind man made this clear in a kind manner. I’m a punt, a long-shot. So I’m still applying, becoming less hopeful and only wiser as to the number of cafés both with internet and within cycling distance.

Perhaps it is a wistful, somewhat Marxist outlook on higher education, but there can surely be little doubt that the commodification of bachelor-level degrees is no good thing. Traditional academic disciplines are made to compete with academic and vocational disciplines. The latter have use- and exchange-value in entering a trade or profession, but their being equated with certificates which have little or no use-value outside the academic environment means that both feed into the Great Sea of Arts & Humanities graduates, who, we are told, are all created equal. We are also told, indeed it is blasphemous to refute in present-day Britain, that education is meritocratic, and that you can achieve through both routes.

This is no longer true. Historically, middle-class professions have been the preserve of those with degrees, formerly from red-brick universities plus Oxbridge, and now from all universities. According the above model their degrees held a high use-value. Now consider the wider problem of social mobility, the elephant in the room: 7% of all children in secondary education attend fee-paying schools; 45% of university undergraduates attended fee-paying schools.

The result is a disproportionate number of graduates who have been given the freedom of choice in their degree subject (alongside huge amounts of the famous self-belief instilled by private education); who have chosen the traditionally academic disciplines of their parents and social milieu, and who enter the race for middle-class professions as well as those more qualified to do the jobs. The use- and exchange-values of their degrees have diminished as their number has increased and as the number of more vocational courses has increased.

The kind interviewer said he would get back to me within a couple of days.

I’m Back Yäy

Back again in Berlin, and it feels different this time. A year has passed, studies have finished, but it has little to do with that I think. It just feels like another home, despite Berliners having remained Berliners. Whatever may come, it will have to be conducted in the other tongue.

The substantial thump with which our confirmation of registration documents were stamped confirmed in a very substantial manner our official arrival (“So did you get married in the interim?” – [shaking of heads, nervous smiles] – “Shame”). C confirmed as before her commitment to the Evangelical Church, so you can imagine my surprise when her findings later that evening revealed that this would entail an additional levy on any future earnings, eliciting a stream of impious expletives. Having not suffered a reverse crisis of faith, my status as obdurate heathen went unmentioned.

Mum and youngest sister came to stay for a couple of glorious days, one of which was spent wandering through Park Sanssouci in Potsdam. The Neues Palais stands out a touch garish in comparison with the beautiful Schloss Sanssouci and attending gardens, a view clearly shared by Hohenzollern scion King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who in memory of his ‘Great’ great-grandfather had the the place restored and enlarged. This was presumably to provide space for his Romantic musings upon how to restore and enlarge Germany to The Holy Roman Empire of yore amidst Europe-wide social revolution. As these dreams withered, the gorgeous vines and fig trees continued to flourish on the terrace tumbling down to the Hauptallee, and brother Wilhelm I took the reign(s) to steer Germany back to a more respectable form of world-domination.

Notes from a Strange Island

Spring appears to have taken off, and whilst the tree-lined avenues unfurl into bloom Berliners amble to the parks, clutching beers and joints. There are wafts of green expectation more pungent than cannabis smoke, however: Berlin is urging for the sun to pierce through the haze and bathe its parks in a pinkish light; for its awnings to be rolled back and cafés to spill out onto its pavements.

It has taken C and I quite a while to realise that we live on an island. Quite a tropical one, as it turns out.

As I have mentioned before, the unique history of the city produces an atmosphere of intoxicating freedom. However, research is still being conducted (by us) to establish whether this is merely an illusion: for all of its vibrancy and embracement of youth-culture, certain issues nibble away at this image. For one, its insidious bureaucracy which, to be fair, is as much a nationwide feature but which borders on neurotic; this is married, unhappily, to a technophobia completely at odds with the the explosion of tech and media start-ups driving its economy. Perhaps to spite the counter-culture/slacker attitude of young Berliners, especially from the Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain-Neukölln hipster-belt, local council administration, public services and even banks positively revel in their backwardness; nothing can be achieved online; even the telephone lines at the national public-broadcasting institution have been jammed solidly for the past week.

One reaches the conclusion that Berliners are afraid of any type of information which flies through the air, hiding subversively in radiowaves: ATMs will charge up to €5 unless licensed by your own bank and the vast majority of shops, cafés and bars do not accept cards, VISA or otherwise. I received a letter from the cinema in Potsdamer Platz informing me that although my card payment for the popcorn (more expensive, I think, than the film) had gone through, 6 weeks later I now had an invoice for payment in arrears. The transaction had been processed so much later that my funds were at that point insufficient, rather than on the day of the film, when they (just about) weren’t.

And when one explores the trendy areas by foot, something altogether unexpected happens. A disproportionate amount of Kinderladen (children’s shops) appear; or rather, at first their number seems unnecessary. This is, after all, one hop from Berlin’s central sprawl. But, if one looks closer, there are babies and toddlers. Everywhere. As far as the eye can see there are fathers with the front-sling-pouch-thing; infants racing each other along bicycle paths, their younger siblings hitched to the back of Mum’s bike in the wheeled teepee which is so popular here. I had previously thought my own mother’s term ‘spring babies’ to be a term created for her own children, but living on the Kreuzberg-Neukölln border at this time of the year is like following an urban version of Lambing Live; £279 here would buy the Beeb digs for a month…

And so the dream of a hippie-topia has not been experienced by that many of the residents since the days of David Bowie, when heroin and squats were cool. In 2014, rents and living costs are relatively low; social security is decent and the majority of people who live in the central zones do not have to pay tribute to Moloch to do so (coughLondonParis). Which brings me neatly to Berlin’s pièce de résistance: tramps and their dogs. Homeless persons are numerous across the capital, and almost all of them crazy in the feral, spitting-and-cursing sense. They also all have well-trained, polite dogs, which gives the bizarre impression that in fact their faithful hounds are actually looking after them. And they are, in a way. German dogs pay tax. No, really – they do. Which makes it fair in a strange way that the dogs who are working hard, leading their boozy beggars from one U-Bahn stairwell to the next, receive financial support from the government. Most of the money seems to be spent keeping their charges plied with lager, which seems unfair but just goes to highlight their loyal nature.

C and I made our way to Görlitzer Park the other day, intent on coaxing the sun out with our presence. It seemed to work, and even by mid-morning warm air was drifting through the cherry blossoms along Wiener Straße. After basking for a while I noticed just such a dog. Its human was lying semi-conscious on the grass below a tattered mackintosh. The terrier was struggling to release a rubber quoit from his grip, but it appeared to be futile. The youngish man would not let go, and so the dog began doing tricks of its own accord: lie-down, roll-over, paw, bark. Finally it performed a quick-fire medley of these tricks in a different order and finished by licking its human until he threw ring away down the bank. The terrier tore after and retrieved it, only to find that his playmate had snoozed off.

Moments away, two separate drug-deals was occurring, to which no-one payed a great deal of attention. The park functions as the city’s cannabis trading floor, coming alive in the sunny months. There appears to be little the Polizei can do about it, so organised is the network of the dealers. With a sentry stationed on every entrance, it was not long before the presence of plain-clothes fuzz was detected. They scattered, dissolving into the surrounding bushes to collect their wares and vanish. The scene was watched lazily by around 50 Berliners, a couple of them rolling joints expertly on their elbows and pointing at the fall guy, a poor sucker in handcuffs who had suffered a clumsy case of racial-profiling and was eventually released to the policemen’s public embarrassment.

Along the north side of the park, atop a lofty eight floors of tenement block in the now baking sunshine, a middle-aged Turkish man drew up a chair to a modest square table, unfolded a newspaper and sipped a cup of coffee.

Treptower Park

It seemed to be a brightish Sunday morning, although this particular McDonalds in Alt-Treptow was subject to a frosty atmosphere which gave little sign of abating.

In my defence, the public transport cock-up was not due to my usual navigational conceit, but a mistake jointly made and jointly suffered for; a wrong turn from the bus stop took us on a detour looping back on ourselves. After about 500 yards of this dreary part of town, any shred of urban wanderlust had wilted into a hungry resolve to reach Treptower Park and just nestle in some sunny grass – even grassy sunshine would do. The golden arches appeared; we stumbled in and, in my impatience, members of the jury, I did knowingly butt in, overruling C (not unkindly) to make it a take-away order…

And so, chicken-burgers clenched in fists, we made our quiet way up to Puschkinallee, the central vein running through the park. As you cannot walk for long in this city without some reminder of its traumatic recent history, we duly came across a memorial to the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who fell in the last decisive battle of 1945. It was built here in the Soviet sector from 1946-49, and upon completion the grand boulevard leading to it, suitably called Kastanienallee (‘Chestnut Avenue’), was renamed after the great libertarian Russian writer who spent his entire life in abject opposition to Tsarist rule, drifting abroad from censorship in a dichotomous relationship with his heimat like a Heinrich Heine of the Caucasus.

In 1978 busts of the first German astronauts – or Kosmonauten, as those across the Iron Curtain preferred to call them: “navigators of the universe” – were erected in the park as an inspiration to aspiring young scientists and engineers (of which there were many). During its time at the heart of the socialist satellite state, this leafy part of East Berlin was dedicated to the youth, hosting the 3rd and 10th World Festival of Youth and Students (Motto: ‘For Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship’; hosted by the FDJ, the socialist equivalent of the Hitler Youth); the same youth which would grow older and more disillusioned, rise up and catalyse the fall of the Berlin Wall, leading eventually to the break-up of the Soviet Empire sorry, Union. When the weather turns warmer and we return to the park, I might look upon the statued man, triumphant atop a broken swastika, helpless child in one hand, sword in the other (really?), and try to bring the ideologies, propaganda and hogwash under one blue sky. Unsuccessfully.

The rest of the park was actually fairly nondescript, with the notable exception the Insel der Jugend (‘Isle of the Youth’), the views from which of the surrounding lake made the whole trek finally worthwhile as we basked on its banks, flicking mistletoe berries at the passing boats:

Homage to Catatonia: Teutonic Stares

It’s time to talk about German staring.

I feel there is too little discussion even among my Anglo-Saxon friends here in Berlin about this, but for those many who have never been to Germany it must suffice that goggling is common here: on the metro, in cafés and shops, even walking down the street. The gaze is hard to illustrate – a mix of vague mistrust and the kind of inquiring look with which one might address a tropical fish at the aquarium. There is trepidation in the eyes, certainly, though falling short of the you’re-not-from-round-here gawp one would receive walking into next village’s pub.

When working before university at a German vineyard I was assured (as it were) by the host family that this trait was a part of everyday life and told not to be worried by it; in any case it was something which mainly happened to disabled people. Wait, what? Yes, several of us have witnessed it: crippled old men or the blind, subject to looks of wonder and disbelief from grown Germans. Far from an expat niggle, this is an issue which transcends national characteristic and glides into the behavioural sphere. To my gut feeling it is anti-social, not simply because my parents, like most, told me it was rude to stare, but because it implies some sort of barrier, behind which the starer may or may not be making some secret judgement.

Moreover, there exists a philosophical conclusion that a stare becomes a stare only once somebody notices, be it the recipient or a third party observer. This is the essential part of this rather petty gripe: once the stare(s) come to your attention (and they will), they don’t even flinch. Gaping back appears to be the only way to induce a reaction, which produces a ridiculous scenario from which you can only walk away feeling like a lairy thug, when in reality your pride is hurt, and insecurity begs you to check whether that toothpaste lip-liner applied itself again this morning (C suffers from this – no known cure).

I suppose it is too much to expect societal change with a phenomenon so deeply entrenched, and an article exploring its roots would be at best culturally insensitive. I wouldn’t presume that this gawking appears nowhere but Germany; I merely wonder why, in a people with whom we actually share a good deal, it is so obvious. Whilst we’re on the topic of national stereotypes, I feel odd to say that I would not mind so much being stared at by an Inuit, or a pygmy tribesman from Papua New Guinea; it is the queer familiarity I feel with my ancestral buddy from the continent – Jurgen, say – which rankles, as he sits there nursing his soy latte, regarding C and I, enraptured not so much by our conversation (understandable) as by the heads talking: Berliners in general seem to have neither strawberry-blonde hair, olive skin nor green eyes in abundance, treating such attributes with suspicion (hint: only the hair is mine). In far-flung corners of this country, less dense or international than, say, a capital city, one could put it down to the yokel-factor. Aber Berlin nicht.

I should grow thicker skin, and some bigger cojones too while I’m at it, no doubt. The problem is that, as I stride into yet another Neukölln café they look like they’ve just seen my cojones and aren’t that impressed. Christ, all I wanted was to sit down over a cup of tea and complain politely about my host nation, WHY ARE YOU ALL STARING?

SO 36, Berlin

In order to raise this awful thing from the dead there shall have to be some retracing of steps, not least some physical ones. Between then and now the real meat of the academic year has been digested: in an arbitrary style which emerges time and time again the Humboldt University divides its calendar in two, the ‘Winter Semester’ occupying the best part of six months and its summer successor just three; this is for no apparent reason. So the complete and utter failure to update this blog has coincided with the drawing out of this eternal term, and with it all of the iniquities and frustrations of the German system of higher education. But more on that later.

What should really be the focus of this interim period is the way in which Berlin has welcomed and wooed every one of us. I find the only way to put it down is this: more than any other city I have known or passed through, there is a sense that its modern history has distilled some spirit of euphoria or liberation within its walls, something that will never leave it; its features, the landmarks and streets are actually fragments of scar tissue which distort the very notion of it being one city. Perhaps for this reason it appeals to romantics – in virtually every other country on earth the capital is a main organ of the nation, pumping life through to other cities and provinces. Berlin has been besieged; broken and then reassembled; cleft in two, one half marooned as an exotic island and left to starve, the other a nerve centre of industrial-level surveillance; and finally, the two parts soldered together once more, a gate connecting two fundamentally opposing cultures. There is freedom in the air – it was felt by hordes of West German students who left their distant homes in the 70s to enter the city and thus (as West Berlin was not legally a part of West Germany) avoid obligatory national service. It was felt on 9th November 1989. It is a city dislocated in time and geography: after the war Stalin decided to poach parts of Poland for himself, shifting its boundaries as well as those of Germany, exiling Berlin from its previous central location to the far north-east.

And so we come to the post-wall era, and our experiences here in the various districts. That spirit of the old West Berlin, with its hippie youth culture and easygoing yet fragile capitalism, is preserved remarkably in the make-up of the city’s south east region. Whereas on a larger scale it is easy to run a rough divide from north to south which the wall traced, once zoomed in you can see how it wriggled about tortuously, sometimes making as if to loop back on itself. The border followed nothing more sophisticated than postcode lines, i.e., divided East from West German ones. It did not make for an easy transition, as suddenly busy roads became dead-ends, whilst tenement blocks, if they were in the way, were boarded up and eventually demolished. The districts of Neukoelln and Kreuzberg were in West Berlin yet extended as a sort of bulwark south-east under the rest of East Berlin. I live in this little pocket and, as I have noted in other posts, I love it for many reasons. Peter Millar describes it coming to Berlin for the first time in 1981:

There is were areas such as Kreuzberg, which had the largest Turkish population of any city in Europe, and in mid-summer felt and smelled like the back streets of Ankara, with doner kebabs roasting, coffee brewing and old men jangling worry beads in doorways.

This is not dissimilar to what it feels like today, this odd marriage of now almost native Turks (some of the schools here have a 90% proportion of Turkish pupils) and an underground-bohemian-counterculture mixture of drifters and students. Its eastern half (SW 61) is directly below the central Mitte district and more affluent. Its counterpart (SO 36) is the area leading up to the old wall-divide, from which wealthy ethnic-German West Berliners recoiled and built a community around the more easterly Kuerfuerstendamm, the glitzy highstreet nestled under the Tiergarten, Berlin’s central park.

And so with the inexorable spread of gentrification eastwards, these areas become trendier, yet the house prices do not rise proportionally – the spirit is youthful and all around our streets are young families, Kindergartens with children spilling onto cobbled pavements, students and, as if to emphasise the age gap, old Turkish ladies tottering about with minute dogs in tow. The assumption is that natural growth of the city will drive up rents and push these low-earners further afield. But this is not any city, certainly not a London or a Paris. It is a city of symbols, no longer the seat of an empire or hedonistic hub of 20s world-fashions, but a haven for artists and misfits.

My excuse will be, of course, that I was simply too busy falling for this town to write about it. But in fact that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

Cheap and Nasty and Proud.

The Berlin night out – now there is something odd. It begins at around 10 and goes through until 7 or 8 in the morning. At first it was confusing and a bit tiring, but now it makes sense and it turns out the place is well set up for it. The metro runs 24 hours and it’s quite normal to sit outside a bar at 5am and discuss Fußball, events in the city or the distasteful amount of cultural tourists and students from abroad, ruining the neighbourhoods. As I touched on in the last post, Berlin is and was always poor and sexy. But it must be poor to be sexy, because moneyed people seem gauche here. And so the average weekend night is conducted in a low-key bar with spartan interior and €2 beers, otherwise you aren’t doing it right – you won’t earn your Döner.

The man who developed this famous kebab died a couple of days ago, and his legacy is important for Berliners. The simple combination of chips, doner and mayo/garlic sauce/pink goo is unbeatable and resonates with the salty, protein-rich diet of Germans. So many boxes of this weighty mess are eaten every night here – it is the dish of the dark hours, and it will be your friend if bouncers will not. It is cheap, and there are no chains, so it is cheap everywhere. It seems to reflect the soul of this town, where people are drunk and mad, but love their city and will live and drink in its dilapidated places and listen to rubbish music and eat its filthy produce and do it all until the sun rises.

But it is addictive and endearing, and that’s not just the MSG talking.

Fleet Street Pull Your Socks Up: We Expect Better

There are so many intriguing things you could explore in a piece about the city of Berlin. It seems there is always a district that needs attention due to either a) an influx of more well-off people or b) a terrible decaying of population, living standards and perhaps the emergence of the new Left (ok) or the new Right (bad) as a result. You could get right to the nut of the construction boom at the start of the 20th century and see how it bloated the city space to accommodate the workers, pushing down rents for decades and exacerbated the contemporary gentrification-pains. That’s without ever touching on the Wall. Naja, you could write some top-drawer stuff on that. Maybe later.

But what is really interesting, and more worrying, is the current state of British mainstream media. In particular how two papers are dictating and polarising debate of current affairs. They are, of course, The Guardian and The Daily Mail (DM). Depressing most of all is how they divisively and shamelessly appeal to the core interests of what they believe is the liberal, socially-concerned (Guardian) or hard-working ‘average’ Briton (DM), the latter most odiously portrayed by Paul Dacre in a recent article for the enemy publication. Their opposition is presupposed, and the killjoy left sniping at the obtuse right is nothing new. But I can’t help but feel that such a poisonous media atmosphere not only obstructs the informative aspect of newspapers (imagine that), but risks further alienating readers and contributing to the increasingly un-cooperative, untrustworthy state of national politics. And this comes from someone who is proud of the British institutions of a free, critical press and the lively Commons. Criticism is essential, the spine of democracy.

But it is not holy. It is not itself immune to close inspection. It is lazy to assume that any praise or (more likely) vitriol is generally for the good. There are rules when it comes to criticism – concerning the lengths to which it can applied and, more importantly, concerning its alignment with partisan sympathies. Equal standing for all opinions form a pillar of free society, yet in a media where the responsibility for honest, constructive reporting is consistently shirked, the result is desirable for no-one: a dumbed-down, attention-seeking element creeps in – it adds members to the tribe so that’s good, right? Both the DM and the Guardian make great use of the internet to make their content more accessible, attractive and vulnerable – the ‘comments’ sections underneath articles opens them quite rightly to a forum of debate. But if the DM must pepper their more serious articles with a host of grotesque celeb-weight-gossip and vacuous tabloid rubbish, how can they expect their criticism and stances to be valued? How can they claim to represent and sympathise with the average Briton (is there such thing?) when they degrade their readership with intolerance and propaganda? It is condescending.

Similarly, the left slips frequently down to their level. Principles such as liberalism and progressivism are only great when they are regulated and are themselves tolerant. To pollute them with an aggressive agenda only reduces their impact. It is just as patronising and offensive to be shown government-reactionary pieces (with no solutions offered), as it is vile, stupid immigrant-scaremongering. Much column space in the Guardian is devoting to defending their heroes – Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden – that they end up promoting their role as just representers or bold uncoverers. Yet this falls short of good criticism in that it is not enough to report, to craft a position from the prominence given to certain individuals or causes. They must be justified.

It is frustrating, if only that in order to aggregate the News, one has to trawl through numerous publications and inefficiently rule out the various journalistic bias of each piece in turn. I would like to see a newspaper show real courage and take on both sides of the battle; show the intelligent people of Britain that a balanced view does exist and tell the News like it is. This means employing idealists and realists, conservatives and liberals. Hell, they might even be the same people. It can be done.