Time was that if you typed:

“I’d like to throttle Bill Gates for his monopolistic business practices”

into Microsoft Word and then checked the phrase against its built-in thesaurus, it offer the following phrase in response:

“I’ll drink to that”.

Theories about fifth columnists within Gates’ business empire were unfounded. A few quick experiments was enough to demonstrate that any phrase beginning with “I’d like to” would generate the line “I’ll drink to that”. With any dumb string match, comparing a sequence of letters to similar sequences within a database, there is the potential for serendipity. Those suggested substitutes of similar letters may deliver unexpected but revealing meaningful commentaries on the world around us. Take the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as an example. He was one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. Heidegger wrote cryptic texts that are almost unreadable, crammed full of familiar old words given esoteric new meanings. How appropriate then, that the spellchecker returns ‘headgear’ in response to the Heidegger’s surname. This was a man who turned people’s minds inside out and stuffed them with new mental apparatus - metaphorical head-gear if ever there was.

More modern examples of spellcheck serendipity include the name of seemingly the world’s most popular man, Barack Obama. The spellchecker thinks his name should be ‘bema’, which means a raised platform in a synagogue from which the Torah is read. Obama is not Jewish, but he does have quite a way with delivering sermons. Obama’s erstwhile and would-be future opponent, the Republican Sarah Palin, generates some rather more straightforward hits. The word ‘pain’ is offered, perhaps referring to feelings she inspires in so many. ‘Palling’ is offered, which reflects the diminishing support for her as a result of her never-ending gaffs and scandals. Another suggestion is ‘plaint’ which means protest or complaint, something which has become the raison d’être for Palin with respect to Obama’s plans for health care. The spellchecker also has an eye for current affairs on the British side of the Atlantic. Foreign Secretary David Milliband’s name prompts the response of ‘mulligan’, meaning a do-over shot in golf. Milliband looks set to lose his job as British Foreign Secretary, should Labour lose the general election as expected. However, this week we discovered he is on the list for that most ideal do-over for failed European politicians - a plumb job with the EU. In Milliband’s case he may be offered another Foreign Secretary position, but this time for the whole of Europe. What a ‘mulligan’ that would be for a man who was mediocre at playing the same role for Britain.

Casting an eye over the rest of the world, we find that destiny may have played a hand in forcing Afghan President Hamid Karzai to run in a second election after overwhelming evidence of polling fraud in the first. The spellchecker proposes ‘karma’ for Karzai. We should all hope that Iraqi Primeminister Nouri al-Maliki will live up to spellchecker’s suggestion and be the man to ‘nourish’ his troubled nation back to health and prosperity. Spellchecker is less optimistic when it comes to the Far East. It fears that Chinese vice-premier Xi Jinping, likely to become China’s leader in 2012, might be ‘jinxing’ the hopes for progressive reform in the world’s largest country.

Turning to the stars of screen and stage, spellchecker seems to regularly hit the nail on the head. Angelina Jolie is doubtless ‘jolly’ about being married to Brad Pitt, loaded with cash, surrounded by children of all hues and adored the world over. The spelling suggestion for Beyonce is ‘become’, a very appropriate choice for someone whose manners and dress are always becoming. Mick Jagger has for many years been a ‘jigger’ on the stage, given his jerky dancing moves. And Johnny Depp’s film career may deservedly be described as both ‘deep’ and ‘dippy’, especially when he collaborates with director Tim Burton.

It was with trepidation that I completed my exercise in contrived serendipity by reading the spellchecker’s runes for myself. Typing my own surname into MS Word, I discovered spellchecker identifies me as a ‘prizeman’. I may not have received any awards yet, but I will interpret the sign from spellchecker as a very good omen…

When an accident occurred during an F1 Grand Prix, Murray Walker, the motor racing commentator would sometimes tell the audience “we can’t see what’s happened from where we’re sat.” The reason Walker could not tell who came off at turn 11 of the Hungaroring is that he was in a BBC studio in England, watching the same television pictures as everyone else. Therein lies the irony of sports commentary. The purpose is to tell you what is happening. Apart from when listening on the radio, the same goal can be realized by using your own eyes. But watching television sport without commentary is like watching a modern-day movie made in black and white. Some people will never overcome that gnawing feeling that something is missing.

For the most popular sports, commentary has expanded exponentially. The commentator, once the lynchpin of television sports presentation, is now a bit part player. Time was that you used to only hear commentary, talk about events as they happen. Now every major sport is immersed in talk about what will happen before it does, and talk about why it happened after. Commentary is submerged in punditry. When once a retired footballer would buy a pub and serve stale beer to his hangers-on, he now learns to wear a tie with an enormous knot, gets media training, and reinvents himself as a television personality.

As a consequence of the shift from talking about events as they happen, to just talking, the entrance qualifications for talking about sport have changed. It used to be necessary to be good at talking, specifically at continuously something interesting and coherent in response to changing events. Now, the major qualification is to have once been a sportsperson. The idea is that having been a sportsperson, you have some special insight on the events. That may be true to a point, but most sports people are individuals with exceptional gifts of strength, stamina, speed, balance and agility. That does not mean they have two brain cells to rub together, had the foggiest idea what they were doing, why they were good at it, or the least bit of ability to explain it to others. Thanks to this trend, it is not unusual to hear halftime conversations that go something like the following…

Steve: Gary, do you think the blues will be happy coming in one-nil up?

Gary: Yes, Steve. But they’d have been happier to be two-nil up, no doubt about it.

Steve: It’s been one of those halves where the team on top is the one that takes its chances.

Gary: You’ve got to take your chances when you’re playing at this level. Albion didn’t take their chances. The blues did take their chance. The funny thing was that the lad took what was the hardest of the chances he had, after missing three or four easy ones.

Steve: Once again, it all comes down to taking your chances…

Gary: It does, Steve. And not just chances but half-chances. Sometimes you don’t even get a chance, so you’ve got to take your half-chances too.

Steve: And Albion didn’t make many chances.

Gary: No. To make chances you’ve got to take a chance or two. They’re sending in balls from deep and the defenders will gobble them up all day and night. The blues are working hard and they’re making it hard for Albion and that’s what we saw right from the kick-off, right up to when the ref blew his whistle and they came in for halftime. To be fair to Albion, the blues have played with two solid lines of four in defence and midfield, and they’ve not let Albion have a chance in this game.

Steve: Albion have shown they can make chances in their other games.

Gary: They have, and I’m sure that’s what the gaffer is telling the boys right now. The final ball’s let them down, but with the chances they’ve made in other games, you’ve got to back them to score sooner or later. But at this rate, it might not be today. Saying that, we’ve seen games like this turn in an instant and like the great Brian Clough used to say: it only takes a second to score a goal. Another goal, from either side, will definitely change the game.

Steve: What else do you think the manager’s telling Albion in their halftime talk?

Gary: I think he’s probably saying that there’s no need to panic. They’ve got forty-five minutes to come back. They need to be patient and find a way to inject some more urgency in their passing and overall play. They’ve not been the top team so far, but even the bottom team can be the top team on any given day in this league. We’ve seen it many times before, but I’d be surprised if we see it today. The main thing is they need to score first to get back into the game.

Steve: If they go two down, it’ll be a mountain to climb back.

Gary: That’s right Steve. They’ve done well for a newly-promoted team, but they really need to score first to stand a chance in the second half. If they go two down then you’ve got to think they’re out of it. But with the goalscorers they’ve got, they can never be ruled out completely.

Steve: Is it too soon to make a change?

Gary: I don’t think they need to make a change. The young lad on the wing is causing them problems when he runs at his opposite number. He just needs better delivery into the box. The strikers aren’t getting fed and if you don’t feed them they become invisible. There was a ten minute spell when the guys upfront looked bright and seemed to be getting on the front foot but the rest of the time they’ve not got their foot on the ball and that’s why they can’t get a foothold in this game.

Steve: That’s the game of football for you. Now what about the referee - is he having a good game?

Gary: There’s been some tackles flying in which makes it hard but he’s keeping the game flowing which the fans like to see.

Steve: And the penalty shout?

Gary: Definitely not a penalty. He won the ball cleanly and the lad went over too easy for my liking. If you’re going to criticize the ref you have to question why he didn’t give a yellow card for simulation. This ref never tends to hand out many cards unlike other refs, which I like to see, but makes the players very confused. The players are crying out for more consistency. That’s all that anyone can ask from the men in black. If a player falls that dramatically in the box, and it’s not a penalty, you’ve got to card him. We’ve seen them given in other games and it’s the lack of consistency that makes it hard for players to tell what are the rules on pretending to be fouled in the box. They just want to know what the rules are and if they’re allowed to pretend to be fouled in order to win a penalty decision. The refs really need to sit down together and decide what the rule’s supposed to be so players know where they stand when falling over in the penalty area.

Steve: Do you think they might throw on Hobson, who’s not played for six weeks but is fit enough to sit on the bench?

Gary: Hobson gives them something different. The question is his sharpness. Without playing he won’t be sharp but you don’t get sharp unless you’re playing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t come on until the last ten minutes, especially if they’re still down.

Steve: And what do you think of the blues’ new signing, the lad Kinzamann from Kaiserslautern?

Gary: He came here with a big reputation but I’m disappointed, to be honest. It looks like he’s struggling to keep up with the pace of an English derby game. This isn’t a derby game but it’s as good as a derby game.

Steve: I think the teams are about thirty-five miles apart. It’s not technically a derby game, but I know what you mean. It’s just like a derby game with everyone running around at a hundred miles an hour. And Albion would only have spent a half hour on the team coach, coming down the motorway this morning.

Gary: There’s a lot of huff and puff. There’s a lot of commitment on show. Typical English game with everyone diving in, hard tackles and no time on the ball. It’s what makes our football so entertaining to watch. Some of these new foreign players struggle to adjust to the pace when they first arrive. But the lad Kinzamann had that moment early on when he showed he’s got some silky skills, so I’m hoping he’ll be better in the second half.

Steve: Would either team be satisfied with a draw?

Gary: I don’t think so. This game’s a six-pointer. If it’s a draw, then the teams only get two points between them and that means they’ve both lost a potential four points. Even at this stage of the season, you can’t afford to drop four points in a single game.

Steve: Every game counts.

Gary: It does. There’s thirty-eight games in a season, not ten games or six games or twelve games but thirty-eight games in a season. And that’s not counting cup competitions. I think they’ll both be glad that they’re not in Europe which would mean even more games.

Steve: This league’s a marathon.

Gary: Exactly. These days, football is literally a marathon. That’s what makes the result in every single game so much more important. That’s why they’re playing this league game like it’s a cup game. In the league what matters is how many games you win and how many you draw. You can’t afford too many loses so you’ve got to aim to win every game, especially these games because you can’t expect to win against the top four. But with the blues at home, they know they’ve got to beat a side like Albion to stay up, and so far they are beating them which is all the fans can ask for.

Steve: The game might be unlocked by that little bit of skill or a mistake in the last ten minutes.

Gary: If the game is still one-nil going into the final ten minutes, then what happens in those ten minutes could definitely change the result in a big way. And then there’s stoppage time too.

Steve: So they’ll both be trying to win.

Gary: I’d bet my shirt on it.

Steve: And it looks like an expensive shirt too.

Gary: [Laughs] Thanks Steve.

It is tempting to denigrate the low end of punditry, but the high end of pre and post match analysis is now supported by an extraordinary array of technology. Pundits like Andy Gray of Sky’s Football coverage, and John Madden when talking about American Football, are now supported by gizmos that make even Bill Gates drool with envy. They have chalkboards, replays, hawkeyes, highlighters, snickometers, speed measurers and even computer simulations to help explain such basic things as how one team managed to score despite the best efforts of the other team to stop them. The investment in technology is so impressive, you have to assume there has been a knock-on stimulus to other sectors, in the same way that the space race resulted in teflon pans and pens that write upside down. Right now you imagine there is an American general somewhere in Afghanistan, marking on a touch sensitive screen the plans for how his team of troopers will make a touchdown run into Al Qaeda’s endzone.

Whilst some pundits have masterful analytical skills of a kind that were sorely lacking at Lehmann Brothers, the average pundit has descended to the level of former sports stars who can be trusted to dress smartly, speak coherently and avoid getting drunk until the show has finished. But then, they did let Gazza have a go at it, so even those expectations are not universal. More and more televised football games has created such a vacuum for former footballers that even Stan Collymore gets to share his insights with the rest of us. If even can talk sense about football, perhaps he should have told himself to score more goals during those long years of underachievement out on the pitch.

Journalists have been frozen out and their skills are no longer needed in front of camera, thanks to the seemingly endless rise of the professional sportsperson and amateur personality. The idea that being good at a sport is correlated to being knowledgeable or understanding a sport is laughable, as demonstrated by the modest playing careers of coaches Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. That makes no difference to the television producers, who want stars with name recognition. Knowing what you are talking about is a secondary consideration. The problem for the stars is that they must eventually wane, and make room for the more recently retired. Only an organization like the BBC has the charity to keep Garth Crooks in work, and former footballer and pundit Gavin Peacock saw the writing on the wall and decided to pursue a higher calling, studying divinity and training for his new vocation with the church. As they get older, the bigger stars realize that anecdotes about their old sport and old chums tend to age as well as George Best’s liver. Lineker had the sense to diversify the range of sports shows he hosted, and Ian Wright diversified into mainstream light entertainment. Amidst all the hard-headed business nous, there is less of the engaging whimsy and eccentricity that makes Peter Alliss the Wogan of golf or made Murray Walker the Norman Wisdom of motorsports.

Occasionally, though, sheer numbers will deliver an unusual new flavour amidst the rotten apples that dominate punditry. When Mark Lawrenson reformed his double act with Alan Hansen, migrated from the centreback pairing of Anfield to the sofa pairing of Match of the Day, he seemed like Hansen-lite in every respect. Most of the time he made crappy self-indulgent chit chat about historical episodes in his life and those of the fellow players around him. Entertaining this may be, but relevant to presenting sporting highlights, it is not. Lawro’s witticisms were reminiscent of Richard Whiteley on a bad day. But as the anecdotes have run out, a new Lawrenson has emerged so seamlessly that it is impossible to identify where the transition began.

I first noticed the new Lawrenson when he was moved from the comfort of the studio settee to being the live commentary sidekick of John Motson. Normally sidekicks are there to pick up the slack with some knowing insights when the principal commenter needs a respite or someone to bounce off, or when the action lulls. They barely need to watch the game, and only need to come out with all those staple clichés that can only be excused because the former player has been there and done that. Lawrenson’s approach was radically different. He watched the game and talked about it. And he really did watch it. Whilst the normal viewer is befuddled why Motson is clueless about the events on the pitch (’the ref’s blown the whistle, I’m not sure what for…’) Lawrenson would know perfectly what was going on (’the ball flicked up off the midfielder’s heel and it struck the right back on the hand’). On top that, after all the lazy self-indulgent matey chat in the studio, putting Lawrenson next to Motson, and making Lawro talk about real events in a crisp manner as they unfold, has revealed a command of language at least the equal of the Scouse defender’s command of the offside trap. Lawro not only knows what the word ‘perfunctory’ means, something that cannot be said of many professional and university-educated people, but he is unafraid to use it. On returning to the sofa, Lawrenson has now cut the smalltalk, let the vocabulary off the leash, and found the way to weld information to entertainment. At one time, Lawrenson made even Ian Wright seem profound. Lawrenson is now the Hemmingway of pundits, except with added quips. Which goes to show that sports punditry, like so many other things, can sometimes be a game of two halves.

If I told you what I did today, you probably would be left unimpressed. Rather obviously, I spent a part of today writing a blog. Let us avoid any metaphysical musings of over whether the blog-writing should be described in the past or present tense, and move on to some of the other things I did today.

• Waking up.
• Eating a Belgian chocolate biscuit purchased from Marks & Spencer.
• Suggesting ways to highlight public opposition to the extradition of Gary McKinnon
• Watching Aston Villa play Chelsea on the television.
• Flossing.
• Asking if the water supply had been turned off.
• Resending an email twice.
• Surprising someone whilst they cleaned the toilet.

This list is neither sequential, nor exhaustive. Apart from the tenuous connection to Gary McKinnon’s plight, none of it could be considered newsworthy. But who determines the worth in the newsworthy? Not me. Everything listed above is news, at least per the Merriam-Webster definition of ‘news’:

Main Entry: news
Pronunciation: \ˈnüz, ˈnyüz\
Function: noun plural but singular in construction
Usage: often attributive
Date: 15th century

1 a : a report of recent events b : previously unknown information [I've got news for you] c : something having a specified influence or effect [the rain was good news for lawns and gardens — Garrison Keillor] [the virus was bad news]
2 a : material reported in a newspaper or news periodical or on a newscast b : matter that is newsworthy

What I did is news. I mean, none of what I did was reported in a newspaper or news periodical or on a newscast. But it would be rather circular to assert that something cannot be news until it has been reported in a news outlet. That would mean news journalists could only find out what to report by checking what has been reported elsewhere. Which is probably how some of them work, but we can skip that topic for now. What I did was news because the events were recent and you did not know about them (assuming you are not party to the creeping surveillance society and that none of you were spying on me earlier today). News can be news even though you might not feel it newsworthy. If you had to tell a child that their dog had died, it would certainly constitute news, but there is no demand to extend newspaper obituary pages to cover pets.

The worthiness of the newsworthy is subjective. I defy anyone to watch a 24-hour news channel for a full 24 hours without questioning the inclusion of at least one story. The news supposedly relates the latest about the important and the interesting, but important and interesting to whom? Both the Financial Times and The Sun report news, but there are few stories in common. A lot of people are upset by the death of Stephen Gately. However, I feel no better informed because I now know the name of a Boyzone singer whose life I had largely been unaware of. I have no particular reason to know more about his funeral arrangements than those of the thirty-eight who died because of the Lahore attacks a few days later.

The significance of entertainment news stems from the fact people care about being entertained. But entertainment news is now a misnomer. Nowadays, almost all news is entertainment. Real news might consist of the announcement of the wedding of friends, the loss of a family member or a change in the law that changes the way you do your job. It is unlikely that the news will never tell you this news. The news only tells people what is relevant to them when talking about changes in taxes or the latest reform of education policy. Traffic congestion only gets reported when people are already stuck in traffic jams, and nobody finds out they have been hit by a power blackout by switching on the TV. Mass media news is dominated by stories that people find interesting despite, or perhaps because, of their irrelevance to the personal circumstances of the audience. Newspapers could be better described as stuffpapers because they tell the story of how stuff happens. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp might be better entitled Gossip Corp because of how much it spends on generating speculation. And if the US had proper laws to stop false advertising, then the Fox News network would now be called the ‘Why Anyone Who Voted for Obama is Wrong Network’.

There is another common observation that much of what fills news output is not news but commentary. But after a blog post commenting on how there is no news in the news, I cannot complain about that.

Yesterday I received another letter from Prince Karl Zeis, member of the royal house of Delfthia, and long-time fan of Halfthoughts. Prince Karl often hobnobs with the world’s elite. But I was flabbergasted by the contents of his latest missive. Opening up the envelope, I first found a short note scribbled by Prince Karl in his own hand, which read as follows…

Dear Eric,

I think you will enjoy this. With his wife so busy overseas, these days William can be relied upon to diligently keep up his correspondence. But even I was surprised that he wrote back so promptly, and I think it would do no harm if you shared this with your readers. William is such a good sport. If I was him, I think I might be a tad narked, if not positively fuming. Enjoy!

Yours Sincerely,

Prince Karl Zeis of the Royal House of Delfthia

Enc.

There were also a photocopied page within the envelope. I unfolded it, and I saw this, a letter to the Prince from Bill Clinton, former US President! The text of the letter went as follows:

October 9, 2009

Dear Prince Karl,

It’s great, as always, to hear from you. Before I go any further, let me clarify one thing. I believe you misheard me during our last phone conversation. I said the United States was now Obama’s nation, not an abomination. I have full confidence that the President will soon get this big deficit under control and turn the economy around, making it every bit as strong as when I left office.

To answer your first question, it brings me great pleasure that President Obama, my wife’s boss (or is that my boss’s boss?) was honoured by the Nobel Peace Prize committee. He deserves it, and I asked Hilary to pass on my congratulations next time she’s briefed on how to support all his extraordinary diplomatic efforts. Barack’s a real peacemaker, as he showed when he went back on those things that were said by his campaign team about me being a racist and about Hilary’s foreign policy credentials being exaggerated. The extraordinariness of his efforts are beyond question. He did more in his first two weeks in the Oval Office than I did in two terms. It took me eight years to cut our nuclear warheads by a third. My biggest multilateral accomplishment was a ban on nuclear arms testing – and that was with jolly old Boris Yeltsin on the other side of the negotiating table. Boris loved a drink and a laugh. In contrast, Obama plans to rid the world of nukes and he’s going to do it by disputin’ Putin, and disarmin’ Ahmadinejad. If that ain’t extraordinary, I don’t know what is. In recognition of the extraordinary goals he set himself, it’s proper that the Nobel committee give him some extraordinary encouragement up front, meaning the award of the Nobel Prize so early in Barack’s Presidency is not extraordinary at all, but really very ordinary.

Admit it, Karl, your second question is a little cheeky. No, I don’t feel left out. Jimmy Carter proved he’s a nut for diplomacy, and Al Gore turned a boring Powerpoint presentation into one heck of a popcorn movie. I can tell you I’ve seen Al’s film twice and I didn’t fall asleep on either occasion, whereas I normally read Al’s books in bed for precisely the opposite effect. I don’t deserve an award. All I ever did was help free some journalists in North Korea, sent the US military into former Yugoslavia because Blair and the Europeans couldn’t stop the genocide by themselves, was the first President to visit Vietnam since the war and tried to bring peace between the Palestinians and Israelis with the Oslo Accords. So no, I don’t think that Friday’s announcement in Oslo by the Norwegian Nobel Committee means they’ve forgotten what I did. You can’t assume that just because you’re a Democrat and a President that the Nobel prize is a foregone conclusion. The Norwegians are obviously thinking ahead to the lasting peace that Obama is sure to deliver in the Middle East, and the hope and inspiration he brings to everyone in Africa. I got my ass kicked when those Somalis shot down our Black Hawks, so I’m guessing Obama’s family ties will be the magic ingredient necessary to foster reconciliation all over his dad’s continent. Let’s hope Nobel runner-up Morgan Tsvangirai is equally inspired by the example of Obama’s tireless self-sacrifice. Poor Morgan lost his wife and grandson in those unfortunate accidents earlier this year, but I’m sure he was cheered up when Barack talked about how the Obama family had helped to put this relatively unimportant award into perspective.

Yup, it’s not easy to spread peace in this world. I tried my best, but too many people objected to how I did it. To my mind, peace and loving must go together. Thing was, people said that when it came to the loving, I was a bit too hands-on!

Sincerely,

Bill Clinton

So there you have it. Congratulations to Barack Obama on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Like Winston Churchill once said, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”. There is no doubt that, so far, Barack Obama has kept his end of the bargain.

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George Orwell wrote about Salvador Dali:

“One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.”

In recent weeks, I have been struck by an analogy. Professional musicians are turning into new miners. I do not mean that they squeeze into dark holes and come out all sweaty and dirty, though I am sure plenty of them do. I mean that they are embarking on a great struggle, but one I think they have no hope of winning.

Twenty-five years ago, the coalminers of Britain’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) went on strike. They fought bitterly and they were desperate, but ultimately the strike ended in shattering defeat. They were not without popular support. Pictures of Police brutally clashing with pickets gained them favour, though this was balanced by stories of the harassment meted out to the strikebreakers who went back to work. In the public consciousness, the miners were defeated by an implacable opponent: Prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In the Ridley Plan, her colleagues had already outlined some of the essential steps to be successful when faced by a national strike by the coalminers. These included building up stocks of coal in advance and contingency planning for the import of coal at short notice. There was no doubt that the easiest way to envision the strike was as a battle of wills between Thatcher and the NUM’s leader, Arthur Scargill. The reality, though, is a little subtler.

Thatcher made vital decisions that allowed her to successfully confront the miners, instead of caving in to their demands for fear of power cuts, but she also had more powerful forces on her side: the tide of economic necessity. Put simply, British coal was more expensive than other fuels available for power generation. Cutting the cost of national subsidies would make it easier for Thatcher to cut taxes. Cutting the cost of electricity bills would reduce the cost of living and hence also buy her support. In a democracy, a major national strike needs to be seen in terms of overall imperatives. A politician that delivers power cuts is unlikely to maintain popular support, but a politician that delivers reduced taxes and reduced household bills is likely to gain support. It is a simple equation, but no less valid for its simplicity. Thatcher made a political calculation, and it paid off for her. In contrast, Scargill made the wrong calculation, and the cost of that error was the subsequently more vicious dismemberment of the British coal industry.

Recording artists are embarking on a similar crusade to that of the miners. Like miners, they have long depended on the state’s institutions. They do not work for a nationalized industry like the coalminers did, but they do rely upon an economic model that needs to be upheld by laws that are especially favourable to them. For most of the population, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that flattery is the only recompense available when the product of your mind is copied by someone else. Most ideas cannot be patented, or copyrighted, or trademarked, or protected in any other way. Though it is called intellectual property, the ‘intellectual’ element of such property is very narrowly defined, so that there can be a useful test and way to enforce laws that control who can exploit it for economic gain. If I copy an exact string of words I infringe copyright, but not if I relay the gist of a story. I break the law if I repeat a song note for note without giving the compensation due to the rights owner, but I do not break the law if I am inspired to write a similar song. This imbalance between the laws that govern exact copies and the absence of laws to govern similarity tends to favour people who already have wealth and power and can therefore have privileged access to distribution networks. The wealth and power of successful recording artists depends on a pillar maintained by the state, the institutions of law and order that govern what we may or may not do. Without copyright law, and the levers of the state necessary to enforce it, there would be no copyright infringement and no way to make money from owning copyright. But like the coalminers, there is an economic threat that musicians now face, and just like the miners, they are unwilling to do so. They have also slipped into the same trap as the miners, insisting that their fight is a moral one, when the truth is that the battleground is the economy.

The law only works if the great majority of people are willing to abide by it. The wonder of democracy is that we can replace governments without bloodletting, but even the worst tyrant can be overthrown. Authority for every law, every institution of the state, depends on the acceptance of the people. The horror of Orwell’s 1984 is that the state might penetrate not just into your home, but into your mind, in order to control you. We expect some things to be inviolable, including our own minds. That there are limits to law is a maxim. Where to draw those limits is a question of practicality as well as morality and economics. Like any other practicality, the answer to the question can change because of new circumstances. We find that through history, it is often morality that changes to suit practicality, and not the other way around. Nuclear stockpiles to kill every human are morally repugnant, but we can expect more and more nations to join the nuclear club for purely practical reasons, and the moral justification is always the same: “if them, why not us?” Cloning, slavery, education and child labour, pensions and the treatment of the elderly, democracy, feudalism, the role of women in the workplace - all have been the subject of moral debates and all of those debates are seen through the prism of what is practical at any given point in time. As practicalities change, so morality changes with it. Slavery for farming would be repugnant now, but is not so obviously repugnant in a time where there are no machines to bear the brunt of farming work. Expecting genteel ladies to work was also repugnant at one time, until the First World War made it essential to utilize every human resource at the nation’s disposal. The same is true of copyright, yet like the coalminers, the musicians are living in denial about the consequences for the economic model that rewards them for their work.

Just like nuclear proliferation, which we can abhor and try to delay but recognize as inevitable just because of the spread of technology, copyright abuse will inevitably increase. When copying involved taking a book and writing it out again in longhand, then there was no need for copyright law. Now that copying has been completely divorced from physicality, and that we live in a world with a globally connected network to share digital content, and there are people in the world with the nous to write software and implement solutions to solve problems they want to solve, copyright abuse is inevitable. Its abuse is inevitable thanks to the glorious hypocrisy in the heart of every human being: the belief that laws are there to protect them from other people, not there to stop them doing things they want to do. Everybody thinks like that, and no end of ‘education’ will stop people ’stealing’ music so long as they feel the cost of music on the free market is too high, and the damage done to the creative artist is little or none. Any very many people do feel like that. So whilst the economic imperatives are different to those that savaged the British coal industry - we are talking about ease of access for a limitless and free ‘black market’ in music, not the relative cost of extraction and the kilojoule content of coal versus gas - the economic imperatives exist and cannot be ignored.

The musicians, like the miners before them, are living in denial about economic change. One can sympathize. Nobody wants to believe that their chosen path has been invalidated by forces outside of their control. If you make a career decision in your teens, it will be painful to recognize that it was based on outdated economic assumptions by the time you reach your late twenties. A retreat to an argument for morality is as misguided as the miners believing they could successfully demand subsidies from the rest of society. In a way, they can, because they can try to make it so difficult to change that people put up with long-run inequity rather than a shorter period of more severe turbulence and trouble. The price of doing so is inequity; musicians are demanding to be raised up and protected by society that does not offer similar protections to everyone else. Plenty of ideas receive no legal protection. Copyright does. This inequity most of us would agree is tolerable. But that this inequity needs to be backed by surveillance is a demand too far. A law that cannot be enforced without spying on people in their homes is a law that belongs in Orwell’s Airstrip One, not a law that belongs in our Britain. And we know that copyright can no longer be effectively enforced without surveillance. That makes it a law that should not be enforced, because the morality of protecting the right of musicians to enjoy the economic benefits of their labour is outweighed by the morality of protecting all citizens from surveillance by authoritarian forces. If anything, the musician has become far more morally reprehensible than the miner ever was. The miner just expected to get paid more than the true value of the coal they produced, and if they do not get it, they would cut everybody’s electricity until the government backed down. Unfortunately for the miner, there were no power cuts and the strike went on far longer than the average miner could afford to live without pay. In contrast the musician expects not just the state, but unrelated businesses to pay the price for the surveillance they demand. And they do expect surveillance of everybody in the UK. Electronically monitoring who does what on a network is surveillance of everyone who uses it, no matter how much ignorance and subterfuge is offered by musicians in order to make it sound more reasonable.

One of the reasons to dislike Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM who lead their ill-fated strike, was his authoritarian tendencies. There is little doubt he was loved by many of his union’s members. He was seen as a man who worked hard for the cause of miners, was honest and faithful. But when he called for a national strike by coalminers, the NUM lacked the facility, or interest, to ballot its own members on whether they wanted to strike. Now I see Lily Allen in much the same light as Scargill. She has the same ability to inspire love and devotion in some, but suffers the same deficits when it comes to an excess of pride and a lack of humility. Allen is a would-be leader for the musicians, and for much of the rest of us. In recent weeks, she has been the most outspoken of the increasingly politicized fight to protect the economic interests of recording artists. What Allen lacks is an interest in listening to points of view that are different to her own. I have never met the woman, but I draw inferences from her behaviour. She started a blog to persuade people to her point of view, but tore it down after she received ‘abuse’, by which she means she did not like being pointed out as a hypocrite. Allen then went on a media rampage, threatening to quit music and appearing in The Sun to immodestly explain how she ‘understands the internet’, with the implication presumably being that anyone who disagrees with her must not really understand the internet, although there are many learned individuals from all walks - lawyers, academics and even musicians - who sincerely believe copyright is in desperate need of reform. This media blitz was cleverly and pointedly designed to distract attention from the revelation, made prominent on Michael Masnick’s Techdirt blog only hours earlier, that Allen had infringed the copyright of other musicians herself. When she was unknown and trying to get attention, she made ‘mixtapes’, digital music files that spliced her music with that of other artists, in the hope that they would be downloaded and help her to gain popularity. Embarrassingly for Allen, the mixtapes were still available for download on LilyAllenMusic.com, even whilst Ms. Allen was denouncing the evil of ’stealing’ from recording artists by abusing their copyright. When the hypocrisy was about to get mainstream press attention, the mixtapes were finally pulled from her website and she went into overdrive - talking about anything and everything except her own infringement of copyright laws that she now rather pompously considers to be sacrosanct.

If you want the proof of Lily Allen’s copyright infringement, I downloaded the files from LilyAllenMusic.com to ensure the evidence was never lost to the public domain. If you want, you can listen to Lily Allen’s mixtape1 and mixtape2. I know that by offering these files I am guilty of copyright infringement myself. The funny thing about morality is that sometimes the morally right thing is to break a law in order to highlight a greater moral wrong. I am not deaf to the pleas from celebrities to protect the interests of hard-up old session musicians, but I am cynical about them. And I am not persuaded that heralding an era of unprecedented spying on the private individual is a price worth paying to ensure the poorest musicians earn a little more money. A better solution to the poverty of some who work in the music industry would involve the richest musicians earning a whole lot less, but the music industry has been incapable of finding solutions like that. That makes them as selfish as much of the rest of humanity, including the people who want to download music for free.

To borrow from Orwell, one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Lily Allen is an attractive artist with a talent for catchy songs, and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a musician is that he or she makes music. If it makes us want to whistle or dance, it is good music, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. Yet even the best celebrity in the world deserves to be pulled down if they use their celebrity to turn the internet into a prison camp. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

And Lily Allen is wrong about music dying. Music lived before copyright. It will live after copyright. People make music with no profit motive, even in these crazy materialistic times. Take a listen to this sensational song by Dan Bull, which rather amusingly analyses Lily Allen and her arguments…