The Wintle Blog

Out of nowhere this month there erupted onto the media stage the figure of Phillip Blond, until recently an unnoticed lecturer in theology at the University of Cumbria, now installed as “Philosopher King” of the Tory party, guru to David Cameron, and founder of a new think tank called ResPublica . Armed with a social theory called “Red Toryism” (a bit of a cocktail out of Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Catholicism) Mr Blond believes he has the right prescription to fix Britain’s so-called “broken society”, but first, he wants to tell us what’s gone wrong. He writes pungently. In an essay called The Ownership State he denounces the modern economy’s fixation with: “...a purely market driven approach, whose domination of the speaking parts [in the corporate narrative] is so complete that in the middle of the greatest management meltdown in history, management responsibility for the financial crisis is entirely shielded from question. Resource allocation, risk, product design, accoun...

Four doors down, someone often flings his windows open late at night or in the early hours and plays I am the Walrus , repeatedly and very loudly. You know the song? Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come. Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday. Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob It doesn’t really bother me. The nights have got cold, so now we have our doors and windows shut. And anyway, after about half an hour a nearer neighbour starts shouting obscenities in such a rage that the broadcast stops. Before that, as the Walrus chugs along with the velocity and resonance of an old steam locomotive, I tick off various background choruses: “oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper,” which my Dublin grandmother would have recognised, and “smoke pot, smoke pot, everybody smoke pot,” which she wouldn’t. These were added by an easy-listening group of the time called the Mike Sammes...

He sat unshaven at one of the bar’s outside tables, in sunlight, nursing a beer and a cigarette. Sometimes he trembled. It certainly looked as if this wasn’t the day’s first drink, nor its last. This was Sascha Anderson, perhaps the most extraordinary exhibit in the gallery of extraordinary characters portrayed in the BBC’s feature-length documentary, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall . In East Berlin, when the GDR still reigned, he was a poet, a radical, a firebrand – among the most influential figures in the city’s subversive underground. He was also an informer for the secret police, the Stasi. “Were you a good spy?” he was asked. He laughed shyly. He sighed and swallowed. He looked everywhere but at his interviewer or the camera. For a quarter of a minute he said nothing. And then: “In the place that I was, I was the top informer. I have the feeling that I wasn’t just an ordinary spy.” Now a confessional moment – he looks straight at the interviewer. “Of course, I told them everyt...

In the first week of July, 1980, the world would have been destroyed if computer systems had been left to their own devices. Here’s the novelist Christa Wolf, writing her diary in what was then East Germany, on the very brow of the face-to-snarling-face confrontation between capitalism and communism: “Meteln, July 8. Twice in the past week, the US computer has sounded the alarm: Soviet rockets are flying towards the United States. In such a case, we are told, the President has twenty-five minutes to make a decision. The computer (we hear) has now been switched off. The delusion: to make security dependent on a machine, rather than an analysis of the situation possible only to human beings”. From the fact that we’re still here one can deduce that human intervention – probably a red-phone call between White House and Kremlin – overrode the intentions of the machine and prevented our annihilation. But now fast-forward almost thirty years to the recent RSA Europe 2009 Conference in London,...