A Viable Alternative?

Just a quick note here about the whole AV (Alternative Vote) debate going on here in the UK. I'm voting 'Yes' btw.
My initial thinking was, being a bit of a Leftie and living down here in Southern England, voting has often seemed a bit futile (except when I lived in Brighton or Lewes, which are Green and Lib-Dem respectively). Look at the map - it's almost all Conservative down here and yet I know almost nobody who votes for them. I'm not crying electoral fraud, it's just how it is, at least under the first-past-the-post electoral system. We lefties simply have no voice in Parliament down here. So initially I just thought they needed a bit of a shake-up. What the heck, I thought. It's all anarchy.

One of the problems I suspect is that being left of centre is not a simple either/or situation. There are all sorts of shades of opinion and debates going on about public services, human rights and the environment. The debate is ethical and ideological as well as economic. On the other hand, I don't think I'm terribly wide of the mark if I say that being Conservative is relatively simple - It's the economy, stupid. Conservative voters basically just want to know how much tax they'll have to pay. As a result the left wing vote is always to some extent split between Labour, the Lib-Dems and the Greens, where the right-wing vote really isn't.

So my support for AV now is based on the idea that Labour voters are likely to put Lib-Dem or Green candidates second and third on their ballot slips, Lib-Dems are likely to put Labour or Green, Greens would likely put Labour or Lib-Dem. None of them is likely to put Conservative as a second or third choice.
I'd concede that the Conservative vote might to some extent be split by those who like to blame foreigners for everything (As if the British Government never passes stupid laws. As if British people would never work illegally or claim benefits they were not entitled to.) and who therefore vote for UKIP or the BNP but they're frankly a bit of a joke, at least down here. Most right-wing people here trust the Conservatives to bash the EU and the immigrants.

What this means, if I'm on the right track, is that under AV, left-wing voters might be more likely to get the representation at the polls that they actually warrant. I have no idea how many more non-Tory MPs this would give us in parliament, but it's got to help. It might at least mean that the Tory candidates can't ignore us if they want to stand a chance of getting that second or third place on the ballot slip.

Sure it would be nice if we Lefties could get organised, stop squabbling among ourselves and form a big single-minded party like the Conservatives, but the whole Conservative way of thinking is based on the simple-minded notion that politics is a simple us/them, red/blue, dumbed-down tabloid sound-bite, first-past-the-post competition.
It's not, or it shouldn't be.
That view of Politics gets them into power, but it doesn't make them right.

Who will cast the last stone?

I was standing behind an old gent in the queue at Barclays a couple of days ago. He was talking at the woman behind the counter about current events in Libya and Egypt - how it's always been the same - the Muslims, fighting amongst themselves. He was out there in the forties apparently - in Suez. 'These Africans' he said 'they need a dictator to keep them in line.' (He didn't say 'These Fuzzie-Wuzzies' but I felt the term was in the air.)
As he turned to leave I wanted to say to him 'and yet the most mindlessly brutal wars in history happened only a few decades ago among us 'Christians', in Europe', but of course I didn't. He wasn't giving us a piece of penetrating political analysis. He was just having a go.
It wouldn't even be worth reporting if I didn't feel though that his views were widely held in this country and across Europe. Lady Warsi's point a few weeks back about the tacit acceptability of anti Muslim prejudice among otherwise respectable, intelligent, middle-class folk strikes me as having a lot of truth to it (although, here in Mid Sussex, where ethnic minorities are less obvious unless you visit a take-away, the role is generally reserved for the gipsys.)

I'm not saying that there isn't a heck of a lot of bad stuff going on in The Muslim World at the moment, and has been for some time. It's disingenuous to claim, as the more Politically Correct among us like to do, that anti-terrorist measures should not 'target' Muslims. At the moment, like it or not, if you meet a terrorist, they're likely to be a Muslim. (This is absolutely not the same as saying 'If you meet a Muslim, they're likely to be a terrorist'. Some people don't seem to be able to tell the difference between these two statements.) At this moment in history, what terrorism is being carried out is being carried out mostly by Muslims. At other times in other places it's been the Catholics or the Protestants or the Anarchists or the Communists or the Fascists (who could conceivably be lumped together under 'Atheists'). Nobody is exempt. Everybody has been at it at some point in history. At the moment it's Islam's turn. Likewise armed insurrection and brutal dictatorship. Oppressed nations today would have found Tudor and Stuart England remarkably familiar with it's political killings and brutal repression of ethnic and religious minorities at the whim of the local despot.

Probably the only blameless nation until very recently would have been the Jews - universally reviled and used as scape-goats throughout history - only after the end of World War two did the Christians finally in any serious way face up to what had been happening and even then we managed to lay all the blame on a couple of maverick regimes (Fascism and Stalinism) when in fact they were just the latest examples of something that had been going on for millennia - almost as long as the Jews had existed. After the war Judaism accrued an unprecedented level of good-will and sympathy from Christians which is why now there is a widespread sense of betrayal and disgust (though we do not admit it openly for fear of being seen as anti-Semitic*) at what is being perpetrated by the Israelis against the Palestinians. Apparently it is widely believed among ordinary Christians that the Israelis and Palestinians are more or less equally to blame for what has happened in the Middle East. (Some even seem to be under the impression that 'The Occupied Territories' are Israeli lands occupied by Palestinian Muslims.) The treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis during the founding of Israel included genocide, deportation and incarceration in prison camps and shows that the Israelis had learned nothing from the events of the previous decades except how to subjugate a weaker nation on the grounds that they were The Chosen People and that this was The Promised Land (as if that argument should hold sway over anyone of any other faith.) To this day Israeli casualties are a tiny fraction of Palestinian deaths (something like 100:1) - hardly surprising when the former are armed by the USA and the latter are armed with what amount to heavy duty fireworks.

The nations of Europe have been at each other's throats throughout much of recorded history. It was the Europeans that carried out The Crusades and the Inquisition, built the concentration camps and the Iron Curtain - genocide and torture comparable with anything anywhere else in human history. And then we exported it across the Atlantic and obliterated the people we found there and bought Africa into slavery. The Americans went in for racial segregation, anti-communist witch-hunts, eugenics, weapons of mass destruction and mass incarceration of ethnic minorities on a scale only seen in modern times in third-world countries. The greatest threat not just to peace but to life on earth came to an end only twenty-two years ago after more than forty years' stand-off between two 'Christian' nations and their allies. (I'm talking about The Cold War of course.) I'm not anti-American by any means but as the dominant nation on earth at present they must stand up and take most of the flak for how things are, both at home and wherever they meddle in the local politics abroad .

For a long period, when the Christians were squabbling and bickering (ostensibly about what Jesus wanted them to do, but in truth about who controlled what land) the Islamic world was a place of relative peace and civilisation. When the Christians took a break from the carnage it was the Persians who had kept safe the legacy of classical learning. Left to our own devices we probably would have burned the lot and dismembered everyone connected with it.

But I don't want to give the impression that I am an apologist for all things Islamic. They have plenty to answer for, including genocide, torture, oppression of women and religious minorities, despotism and war. (There's no need to go over the details.) Global terrorism is only it's most obvious and contemporary feature. But faith has been used to excuse violence everywhere and throughout history. Violent extremism is no more intrinsic to Islam than to Christianity or Judaism or indeed Atheism.

Of course the obvious retort is that none of that could ever happen again here in England. We're moved on haven't we -  civilised, democratic, affluent. We'd never stoop to that kind of intolerance and brutality. Of course not.
It's all these immigrants that's the problem...

* which I am absolutely not. I am against militaristic regimes and the oppression of minorities.

An Only Child - part 1

Kingston Beach at low tide

I don't dislike children - contrary to what some may think.
I do dislike it when people are loud and selfish and don't put things away after they've finished with them, and when they insist they know what's going on when in fact they don't. I also have problems with people who make a huge fuss when things don't go their way. The fact that this describes a large proportion of most 'normal' childhood behaviour doesn't seem to bother most people but it's always struck me as odd. Indeed, most adults seem to see it as typical or even healthy and hardly worthy of comment. Why do I feel so differently about it?

I had a pretty good childhood back in the sixties and seventies by most standards. I was pretty content as long as I had some paper and pencils or plasticine or Lego to play with. I was mostly into dinosaurs. I had full and complex relationships with my cuddly toys. I spent hours hunting wildlife (mostly slugs and beetles), digging holes and building camps in the garden - a wilderness of nettles, brambles and raspberry canes and other miscellaneous junk. The soil was full of broken glass from a wrecked greenhouse but I hardly ever cut myself and never seriously. I never played on the lawn. Both the house and the garden were pretty immense by today's standards so it was easy to stay out of sight. I had collections of stamps, seashells, Airfix models, and then tropical fish and house plants (which got me into gardening just before I left home). I spent hours down on Kingston Beach hunting marine life. It was just across from the end of the road. I knew all the little twittens and wasteland around the town and then as I grew I spent a lot of time over the harbour and I walked and cycled as far as Steyning and Ashington. I looked at my dad's books (non-fiction - mostly wildlife) and listened to his music (from Louis Armstrong to Holst, from Westside Story to Tubular Bells). We had cheap camping holidays and big family Christmases. We didn't have a telly for years.
Don't assume from this that I come from a posh background. My dad was an electrical fitter and shop steward at the power station, like my mum's dad before. My dad's dad was a lorry driver amongst other things, and they were all from around Shoreham. Mum did home help and bar work. The big house on Victoria Road, Southwick was cheap because it was a mess. At the time it was cold and dusty and decidedly eerie at night. It was not an attractive house. Back then there was no housing shortage and everyone wanted the new bungalows on the Downs behind Shoreham. Dad fixed the whole thing up himself (with help from friends and relatives) because we couldn't afford to pay plumbers and electricians and carpenters. He learned to do everything himself. Today a three storey, four bedroom house with a lounge and a dining room and a conservatory and probably a third of an acre at the back would be a different matter. Nowadays you'd pay the better part of half a million for it, pull it down and start again.
And don't imagine that Southwick was a picturesque idyll. It has a rather impressive village green and some very venerable buildings near by, but the bulk of the town is fairly anonymous. Travelling from Brighton to Worthing along the coast road you'd hardly know it from all the other places along there - Hove, Portslade, Fishersgate, Shoreham and Lancing. Kingston Beach, which lies within Shoreham Harbour, is a mud flat at low tide with only shallow muddy pools among the pebbles and rubble. There was a remarkable variety of life down there none the less. Back then, without a property boom, demolition sites could sit empty and grow weeds for decades. I hunted grasshoppers and lizards among the rubble and played jungles in the Buddleia and Japanese Knotweed.
It's unimaginable now that a child as young as seven or eight would be let loose in that environment, but I was. I don't think I ever had a major accident. I was very careful. I knew my limitations. One day a man stopped his car near me in Southwick Square and asked me to get in. I simply said no and walked away. Mum had told me, if a stranger spoke to me to go into a shop.
Most of the time I remember I was left to my own devices. I don't remember particularly being lonely or feeling neglected. Sometimes I envied my younger brother because he always had friends around, but then, if he didn't have company he didn't really know what to do with himself. I on the other hand rather resented people interrupting and interfering.
I don't ever remember being deliberately naughty or mischievous. With my family there would have been little point in pushing it so I didn't try. They were not nasty about it - just firm. There would have been no point arguing. I did not live in fear though. I learned to be sneaky. My mum was somewhat anxious and controlling so it was best simply not to ask permission. She preferred not to be distracted from doing what she had to do so it worked both ways. My brother and I never really felt the need to fight and my parents never rowed so we weren't used to raised voices in our house and I still hate to hear people arguing. When we visited friends and relatives their children always seemed to be throwing tantrums or sulking. Everything seemed to be a battle for them and I stayed out of their way. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I was the eldest by many years of all the children in our family circle. My brother wasn't born until I was three and we  therefore had very little in common. All our friend's children came along after that. There was no child care or nursery school so I didn't meet another child my own age until I went to school aged five. That's probably why meeting 'normal' kids was such a shock and something I've never really come to terms with.

Anti-competitive practices

How many times do I hear it said that competition has just got to be a good thing? We need to be more competitive and raise standards they say. Competition must be introduced in the health service and education. Doing things just because they need doing is anti-competitive. How long before doing your own housework or giving to Oxfam is outlawed as anti-competitive – denying other people the opportunity to make money cleaning your house and feeding the poor? In business, competition is how you ensure that you get the best.


I can’t think of any other area of life where this would be considered a sensible way to get the best out of people, except maybe sports. In an art class or at a party or even in an office you wouldn’t expect the best results from the most aggressive, controlling, ruthless person there – quite the opposite. (If materials were scarce they might be the only one to produce anything at all, but materials are not scarce – no matter what they tell you. It’s just that some people – the most aggressive, controlling, ruthless ones, hog it all and force the rest of us to squabble over what’s left.)


It’s always assumed that the winners must, ipso facto, be the best. It’s an equation that seldom gets questioned and one of the basic tenets of Free Market Fundamentalism. But it can’t be true. People have different talents. There are all sorts of expertise out there – in my field there are plant propagators, plant breeders, garden designers, gardeners, pest and disease experts, various technologists, writers and so on and so forth. Each has various areas of specialist knowledge – some scientific, some artistic, some commercial, some practical. There are also character traits and outlooks appropriate to their roles – patience, attention to detail, creativity, physical fitness, love of nature and so on, and yet to compete successfully in the market the gardener must be preoccupied chiefly with management, money and publicity. Materials will need to be as cheap as possible. Labour must be as unskilled and low paid as possible. The ‘Products’ ideally should be as gaudy and short-lived as possible so that the customer comes back for more.
In my experience the modern commercial horticultural business is often run by rich retired business people who think they know about plants. (Sometimes they employ actual gardeners but play down their role and pay them very little.) Highly competitive people typically believe they are more knowledgeable than anyone else on their staff but have no real idea of what it means to be an expert in anything (except making money). It's almost impossible to convince them otherwise. Their self-belief is unassailable.
The characteristics that go to make up an expert nurseryman are not the same as those that go to make up a commercially successful nursery owner. In my experience there is very little overlap. People who really care about plants are generally not ruthless careerists. And yet it will be the latter that ends up running the garden centre and putting the real gardeners out of business. In the free market you can be the very best gardener in the world with a generous mix of the qualities mentioned above, but unless you are a good competitor you will get nowhere. On the other hand you can be a good competitor and a mediocre gardener and do very well indeed. (The same applies in almost any area of commerce. I just happen to know a bit about horticulture.)
Being the winner, in practice, is not at all to do with being the best man, but with making the other man the loser.
How then does competition lead to higher standards?


There was an episode of Grey’s Anatomy some while back where Christina Yang (who is proud to tell everyone that she is highly competitive) says that limiting the length of doctors’ shifts is wrong because it favours the weak. It doesn’t. It allows doctors who are in every other way excellent (or possibly better) to work. The requirement to be able to work twenty hours straight is an artificial criterion caused by bad management (like the artificial scarcity mentioned above) that trumps all other qualities. It doesn't matter how good you are - if you can't stay awake you are out. Who knows, perhaps Christina Yang is not the best doctor. Perhaps she is only the best of those that can function without sleep.


Sport is held up as the paradigm of healthy competition. Sport is all about winning after all. Here it is truer than anywhere else that the one who wins is the best. The winner of the gold medal for the one hundred metres sprint at the Olympics really is the best sprinter in the world, isn’t he? Well no. For a start he’s only the best of those who could afford to take the time off to go through the training regime – not a trivial consideration in very poor countries. So in fact he’s only the fastest of the rich kids, which doesn’t sound quite so impressive.
But even beyond that, sheer physical prowess is not the only thing. There’s a lot of psychology involved. A weaker athlete might win by intimidation or bluffing. This may be more of an issue in other sports and games. A weaker chess player can make a stronger one concede defeat by manipulation. Ok, it’s just a game. Sports are entered into voluntarily, unlike the market, which is most emphatically not ‘just a game’. Everyone must take part or starve – a fact many businessmen seem to forget.
In business almost all the success is down to bluffing and manipulation, marketing, pricing and power, and only tangentially about the sheer quality of the goods and services - assuming the customer is well-informed enough to know the difference (more about that another time.)
Competition therefore favours entirely spurious qualities and ignores the real – it’s the Law of Unintended Consequences again.


A highly developed competitive spirit is supposed to be a sign of strength. Women are attracted to it in men apparently. I just wonder though why those men seem to have so much to prove. You see them sometimes when you’re out driving. You’re doing the speed limit (or if you’re honest, somewhat more) and yet this guy’s still got his nose up your arse, trying to get you to go faster. Or you can watch him tailgating the guy in front – his brake lights flashing on and off. What’s he trying to prove? Does he think he looks cool? Does he think we’re all going ‘Wow! Now there’s a Real Man.’ Maybe he’s just mad. Maybe (giving him the benefit of the doubt) it’s an emergency. Then you see him overtake on a bend and you know, if it wasn’t an emergency before, it very soon will be. To me a highly developed competitive spirit is a sign of inadequacy. (There are also those city gents who drive their Jags everywhere at forty mph – presumably to let the rest of us know they’ve arrived. Either way they seem overly preoccupied with impressing the rest of us. Or maybe they're just very old.)
The free market is like a road system without speed limits or traffic lights or roundabouts.
Most people consider themselves to be above average drivers.


Of course I'm not proclaiming that henceforth there must be no competition. I understand that quite a few people rather enjoy the odd kickabout of a weekend and I myself am quite partial to the occasional game of scrabble. Nor am I saying that competition cannot improve services and keep prices down. Some people seem to respond to that sort of motivation. But it can't be trusted. It has a logic all it's own that has nothing to do with what people actually need or want. Like natural selection, to which it is obviously related, it has no forethought and no conscience. It just does whatever works and doesn't care what it extinguishes along the way (including itself). And yet we have elevated competition to the level of a universal panacea for human shortcomings. 'Make them fight' we say. 'Let's see who's the better man.' But instead we only find out who's the most devious, the most amoral, the most venal. And once they have taken what they can, what can the rest of us do but squabble over what's left?
I like the analogy of the football crowd. Once one person stands up everyone behind him has to stand up in order to see. In the end no one can see much more than they could before but everyone's more uncomfortable.


So if you’re planning a garden you don’t just accept that the whole place is going to be taken over by brambles and bindweed. No, if you’re a keen gardener, chances are that a lot of the plants you want will require special treatment and protection. Your veg will need extra nutrients and protection from pests and diseases. Those prize alpines will fail if they get shaded out or overcrowded. No gardener thinks that the best thing is simply to let the biggest most aggressive weeds take over on the grounds that it ‘maximises growth’. The word ‘weedy’ is usually applied to weak and needy people but in the garden it’s the invasive and the opportunistic we need to weed out...

The Free Market Fundamentalist

There was Nigel Lawson on Start The Week on Monday - telling us essentially not to worry about climate change because it'll all blow over probably. The important thing is to keep making money. After all,he said, it's making money that causes climate change and er... Where was I?

Nigel I suppose is one of them there Free Market Fundamentalists. I don't know all the details of what his own personal views are and frankly  I don't care, but I've got a fair idea what he thinks - heck, I grew up with these people. He's a type. He'll do for my purposes.
They were debating Protectionism (the restricting of free trade between nations to protect local jobs and/or prices.) Dambisa Moyo was arguing that some protectionism might be necessary if certain developing nations are ever to get their local economies off the ground. Nigel was against, basically because it's not Free Trade, and anything other than totally Free trade is anathema. No restrictions, no regulations, just Free. Anything less would be the start of 'The Slippery Slope'.
Slippery Slope arguments are almost always bogus. In almost every area of life we have to accept that there are shades of grey and we have to make judgement calls, but not for Nigel. People like Nigel like things to be all or nothing, black or white. Simple yes/no answers. Are you with us or are you against us? The ability to make quick uncompromising decisions and stick to them no matter what is taken as a sign of strong leadership and sound judgement. (Look at his old boss for example.)
No doubt Nigel likes to think he's being Realistic - that it's just Human Nature - 'Common Sense'. People like Nigel like to tell the rest of us what we're like (and not just some or part of us, but all of us, deep down, even if we can't admit it) - that we're ruthless, competitive and obsessed with power and material wealth. We might coo over our own children but otherwise it's dog-eat-dog out there. It's the Law of the Jungle - survival of the fittest. And therefore it's Natural. And what is Natural is right isn't it? We all know what is Natural - the Sociobiologists and Evolutionary Psychologists have looked at our closest relatives - the apes and monkeys (and any other species that seem instructive) and confirmed what we always knew about ourselves - ruthless self interest, xenophobia, racism, sexism, internecine warfare...
The Conservatives see themselves as the Natural Party of Government. The reason Thatcher achieved so much is because she took away the restrictions on what would happen 'naturally'. People again mistook this for sound political sense and strong leadership, when what she actually did was squash the resistance, who never had that much power in the first place (unless you count not collecting the rubbish and letting the lights go out, which I agree is a nuisance) and let the powerful become even more so.
The idea that what is natural is good is a very popular philosophy among everyone from hedonistic New Age Hippies ('If it feels good do it') to libertarian Social Darwinists ('Sod you Jack, I'm alright'), but Ethics 1.0.1. when I was at university (Ok, Brighton Poly) told us that 'Is' does not imply 'Ought.' In other words you cannot logically derive what ought to be the case from what is the case. Even if human nature is ruthless, competitive, and obsessed with power and material wealth (and that's a big 'if'), that does not make it right. There is this other thing - ethics, or morality, that tells us how things should be.

Of course, our Nigel would tell us that what he advocates is how things should be as well - because the Free Market is the only guarantor of improved living standards for all, which has got to be good, right? Climate change, mass migration and the odd genocide in Africa is just a temporary glitch.
And he's sort of right in a way. I will argue elsewhere that life for unprecedented numbers of us is safer, healthier and longer than it's ever been at any other time in human history, and a lot of that is due to medical, technological and social advances made possible by capitalism. (Ok, I don't entirely buy that but give them the benefit of the doubt.)
But even if that has been true in the past, is it possible or even likely that it will continue to be true in the future?
Again the 'strong leadership'/'uncompromising decision making' school of political thinking would counsel us not to be pessimistic. Doubt is a sign of weakness.

But doubt is reasonable. Already we're coming to the end of the resources and space we have available to an exponentially increasing human population. Already, we talk about places like China and India - home to vast fractions of that population aspiring to Western standards of living and we already know that for everybody to live to US standards would require, I don't remember the exact figure (probably it's not an exact figure) but it's something like five or six Earths' worth of space and resources. And if climate change takes hold in even the more modest ways predicted there will be less space, not more, to house and feed the world's population, never mind all the other species we share the place with. (That the problems are not certain is no excuse to assume that there will be no problems, as Nigel appears to.)
And yet Nigel simply believes that there won't be a problem because growth in the economy and advances in technology will make everything fine.

As a burgeoning Leftie back in my teens I was routinely accused of being naive and unrealistic. Left wingers also tend to be the ones accused of living by dogma and ideology instead of in 'The Real World'. And yet our Nigel looks at the future described above and says 'Growth and Technology will solve everything.'
Technology is going to have to make us the equivalent of five or six earth's worth of energy and resources in the next  fifty years. And the only way to make this happen apparently is to free up the economy. As his old boss would have said 'There is no alternative'.
Now who's the naive dreamer? Now who's living by dogma?

But what's the alternative? Anything less than unrestrained (wild) Western style growth and development is holding back progress, and the pursuit of happiness. Aspirational is the key word here, and who can deny it? Who does not want to aspire to greatness? It's the one thing the previous government and this agree on - the right to aspire - to want more than the previous generation - to do more - to have more. Who can argue with that?
Well I can. Most of us in The West are already pretty comfortably off materially (People in Ulster telling us their problems with the water supply recently made it 'like living in the Third World' not withstanding.) The fact that we don't seem to be any happier is another thing I'll come back to in another post.
But why are we framing our ideas of Aspiration only in material terms? Surely there's more to life. We've been sold the idea that any pass-time that doesn't involve buying the latest this or the most advanced that is just a bit 'Sad', but is spending so much time at work doing something you don't really care about for someone you don't respect, just to earn the money to pay someone else to do things for you that you could do for yourself if only you had more time, really all that liberating (or aspirational)? And can we really afford to have half as many people again as there are now expecting to live that way?
GMOs are a good example. Normally they are, at least partly, promoted as solving the problem of malnourishment in the developing world. And yet there is already enough food in the world to feed everybody (and well - not just on gruel). The reasons we don't feed everyone are economic and political. GMOs won't change that. Like most new technology, GMOs will mostly be used to provide more choice (aspirations) for those who already have more than they know what to do with.
There is an alternative to growth then, and it's the 'R' word - redistribution. But who wants that? How anti-aspirational is that?

Well Nigel doesn't want it, that's for sure, because the truth is that all this stuff about Capitalism improving life for everyone is Bullshit. (Technically, the difference between Bullshit and Lies is that the bullshitter doesn't care whether what he says is true or not, as long as it serves his purposes.) There is no moral agenda in the Free Market. Nigel Lawson advocates the expansion and deregulation of the Free Market because he wants to make money. Deep down he may even know that there's very little chance of Growth and Technology bringing the benefits to the world he predicts, but he doesn't care. He simply calculates that he will be on the right side of the razor wire when the day comes.

Bank Stains

Not surprised this morning listening as usual to the Today programme on Radio 4 to hear of the bankers once again awarding themselves vast bonuses. Well who wouldn't, in their position? If you're in charge of the money, and no one can stop you, well you'd just take everything you could get your hands on wouldn't you. There's no need for any clever economic theory. This is simply what happens when a small sector of society (I hesitate to call them an elite) is essentially outside the law. They do what they want - and they want money.
That's no surprise either. To get where they are they don't have to be especially intelligent (I mean no more than a nurse or a teacher) they just have to be into money. No surprise then that those most interested in money end up with far too much of it.
They claim of course to be smarter than the rest of us (they've got more money, so that proves it) when in fact all they have is an area of expertise, as many of us do. Theirs happens to be making money. I'm not saying this isn't a crucial role in society, only, can it really be that much more crucial than everything else?

The world being as it is, what a person deserves hardly enters into the conversation. In the free market, we get what we can afford, or what we are in a position to demand, and so it is with wages. It all depends on scarcity. If what you have to offer is rare you can demand more for it. But is the kind of talent needed to work in The City so incredibly much rarer than almost anything else? The way they talk about themselves you'd think they were practically superhuman - with an uncanny ability to function without sleep, an almost god-like ability to withstand stress, and a quasi-omniscient understanding of how the world works. Wow! They're almost too good to be true.

I could say something similar about other high-earning groups - doctors, lawyers, footballers, heads of large corporations, but almost immediately we get into questions about what they do to justify their money. Doctors, probably most uncontroversially get a lot of money because they save lives and we're all grateful for that. We also take into account the length of time they trained and the number of hours they have to put in, especially early on in their careers.
Lawyers are a similar case. If you get into trouble with the law your life could be not worth living without proper representation. Lawyers also go through lengthy and costly training. Unfortunately paying lawyers is a less straight forward 'good' than paying doctors. It's as if we were required to undergo a lot of medical treatment that we weren't entirely sure was necessary and were then forced to pay whatever the doctor happened to come up with. In short, we're not at all convinced that lawyers really deserve what they charge, which often seems extortionate, but we have no choice, because we don't understand  what they do and they all charge more or less the same anyway.
Any profession that involves a specialised training has the rest of us at a disadvantage - even plumbing. We simply have to trust them to know what they're doing and not to rip us off.

Sportsmen and women and other entertainers do what most of us do for fun, but for cash, which doesn't sound very onerous. Certainly there's long hours of training and rehearsals, a lot of travel, a lot of meeting other celebs, but generally the salaries of the best paid entertainers are justified in terms of revenues, both from ticket sales and merchandise. There is a fairly straight line between a celebrity's name and the stuff associated with them that people want to buy. Top entertainers are also considered, by definition, extremely scarce, so they can command very high prices. Whether, for example, good singers or footballers really are that rare is doubtful but because we make them compete, it gives the illusion that only a tiny number are really worth looking at, and everyone else is mediocre or rubbish.
More reasonably, careers can be brief in the sports and entertainments industries, so it makes sense to make as much as possible as quickly as possible. (They could just save it up and then get a job like normal people, but that's not very rock'n'roll I suppose.)

Heads of large companies justify their money in other ways. Long years of training is definitely optional and may be considered detrimental by some, in favour of just some sort of 'common sense', or 'business acumen' or 'killer instinct' or whatever you want to call it. Certainly such people are often very driven and single minded (but then, so are train spotters), ruthless and manipulative almost to the point of psychopathology. They justify their income (if they feel the need to justify it at all) in that they tend to see their enterprise as entirely their own work, with the staff as mere human resources. It's their firm, they worked hard and long hours to make it what it is - therefore it's their wealth, to do with as they alone see fit. Of course the firm might sink without trace and they might lose everything, so they see the ability to take risks also as a justification for taking whatever they can, whenever they can. There's a lot of luck involved too, so there's a large element of gambling.

There is also the emergent property of The Going Rate - a level of remuneration that is accepted as normal. In theory the free market should bring this down to an affordable level as businesses try to undercut their competitors, but in practice it can result in an arms race as companies try to outbid each other for scarce resources, such as talented staff. This is ostensibly why UK banks have been unwilling to reduce exorbitant bonuses - because they are afraid they won't be able to compete for employees with other parts of the world. As a result the going rate has rocketted. This probably also accounts for the inflated prices of legal advice, medical care, bank charges and a whole lot of other unusually expensive items. You'd almost think there was a conspiracy.

So what do we have so far? Being important to society, training and expertise, scarcity, brief career, risk taking, going rates.
A lot of this is bogus. I could not justify charging an extortionate rate as a gardener on the grounds that I was afraid I wouldn't be able work in a few year's time. Many people train hard and work long hours all their lives for almost no return at all, and gambling is just gambling.
In fact only two things on the list really count - being important to society, and scarcity, but they are completely at odds. The former might be considered a left wing approach, the latter, right wing. Those most committed to the free market consider supply and demand the only factors worth taking into account when considering the price of anything, including labour. It doesn't matter how long you work or how hard, or how crucial to the smooth running of society, if you are easily replaced, you can't expect much in the way of remuneration.
Most ordinary people on the other hand will quickly bring in questions of how vital a person's job is, how hard, dirty or dangerous it is. (How tedious it is should probably be included. The hardest job I ever had was on the tills in Sainsbury's before the days of bar code readers. The job was incredibly boring and repetitive but you couldn't drift off for a second. A friend of mine had an agency job standing at a conveyor belt all day watching vitamin pills go by, looking out for misshapen ones. He lasted a week I think. At least with weeding I can think about other things.) The more menial the job, the more easily the workers are replaced, and therefore the less money they attract, and yet if I had to say whether bin men, or hospital cleaners, or potato growers or merchant bankers were the more crucial to society...  well. Its certainly not obvious.
The question is even more pointed when you think about footballers or TV presenters. We routinely use the language of fairness and deserving when we talk about wages but the economy does something completely different. This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about Economic Reality as opposed to Real Reality. Bankers talk about deserving their money too - they tell us how stressful it is and what long hours they work, but lots of people have stressful jobs and work long hours. My Brighton friend has spent a large amount of his working life in group homes for adults with various kinds of 'challenging' (i.e. violent) behaviour and you can be sure he didn't get millions in bonuses. For most ordinary people, the greatest stress is the fear of losing your livelihood. (There seems to be a belief that low paid people don't care so much because they have less to lose!) Entrepreneurs and financiers on the other hand pride themselves on being risk takers. They love that stuff. If remuneration is compensation for stress it follows that they should be paid less, not more.
The most well paid people among my friends design websites, write press releases or do research for London companies. In fact it seems that those with the most fulfilling creative jobs also get the most money. Pay is not in any way 'compensation' for hard work.

The difficulty for those who would argue that banker's pay is undeserved is the argument that they get paid what they do because they bring in all this revenue, and bin men just don't create that much wealth. If a market trader is involved in a deal that brings in millions or billions - shouldn't he or she be rewarded? This relates exactly to the sports celeb who's name sells millions in tickets and merchandise, or the businessman who risks his house to build a company. Shouldn't they get their cut, for what they did? Isn't that fair? Don't they deserve it?
Frankly I'm not sure. I don't think so, but I'm not sure as yet why not.
When it comes down to it, they haven't actually done that much, any of them, in pure hard work and intelligence terms - not more than a lot of other much less well paid people. Their relatively ordinary amount of effort and intelligence nevertheless can produce massive returns. Probably remuneration should be related to productivity. If I grow more plants - I sell more plants - I make more money. An employee who comes up with an idea that saves his company a fortune should be rewarded. I'm not convinced though that this logic can be extended indefinitely. For bankers, the relatively small amount of work is completely unhitched from the magnitude of the results. Plus bankers, unlike entrepreneurs, are usually in a 'Heads I win, tails I don't lose' situation. The risk is actually rather low.

And there are consequences. The massive wealth of the minority does directly mean that others go without. Even within the UK, the buying power of the few means that most people cannot afford to live in the capital. Natives of rural areas have to move to the town and commute to work in the country because houses are bought up as second homes by the rich. Globally the spending power of the rich nations means that resources are wasted on those who already have more than enough instead of going to those in need. We are all in the West somewhat guilty but the gargantuan extravagance of this bloated minority should be liable for far more of the burden. Instead they pay lawyers and financial consultants to ensure that they pay no tax whatsoever - a luxury the rest of us cannot even imagine. They should be made to pay, or better - not given such ludicrous sums in the first place.
The world is not infinite. It is a closed system - a zero sum game. What is gained by one is lost to another, or in this case, many others. Growth and technology will not save us.
And these people run the world for Christ's sakes, or soon will. Surely we don't want the most powerful people in the world to have the emotional intelligence of spoilt toddlers?

But wouldn't we all, given the opportunity, do the same thing? If we could make millions by doing almost nothing for a few years - wouldn't we all do it?
Of course we would.
But perhaps the issue is that we shouldn't be faced with those sorts of opportunities.
No doubt there are many sordid things we might be tempted to do, given the chance (and if the law turned a blind eye). But that wouldn't make them right.
And there is such a thing as resisting temptation - unfashionable as that might be.
Most people, I believe, think that the pay should reflect how valuable and how hard the job is - that remuneration should be properly deserved, and individually tempted as they may be, they believe that the kinds of incomes we see in certain areas of the economy at the moment are at least undeserved and unfair, and at most, a wank-stain on the underpants of humanity.

Responsibly Sourced Nudity

I use porn. I’m not proud of it, but then, I’m not ashamed of it either. I can’t remember how it came up in conversation but my metrosexual friend (he's from Brighton) says he avoids it (the online stuff anyway) because he’s worried about the sick things that go on in the Sex Industry.

No doubt he has reason to worry. We all thought slavery had been abolished but it turns out that was only the kind that ended in the American civil war. Apparently the number of slaves in the world today is higher than it’s ever been (probably partly because the population’s higher than it’s ever been, but anyway) and a large part of that is as a result of the trafficking of women and children for the Sex Industry, but even without that it's pretty much assumed that there’s a lot of god-awful stuff going on. 

For example, most days I listen to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 (and I look at porn too – sometimes at the same time. How pervy is that?) and they discuss porn from time to time, and seem to consider it synonymous with all that is violent, degrading and exploitative – a crime against women and threat to childhood.

But, going on the internet, spending an hour or so, maybe once a week (I suspect it would be more if I was younger) looking at online porn, I just don’t recognise the description. I’m not saying there isn’t ugly stuff there. Perhaps it’s even the majority, or a sizable minority but it doesn’t seem like that. Most of it seems to be just people taking their clothes off and having sex. I don’t know. I haven’t carried out any statistically rigorous surveys but it just doesn’t seem like the nasty stuff’s very common – not unless you go looking for it. If you do go looking for it I dare say it’s easy to find, but you do have to go looking for it. You have to make a conscious decision. Kids are unlikely to find it just by putting a perfectly innocent search term in Google for example, whatever they may have told their parents.

But I’m not saying it’s a thing of great beauty and refinement either. As in any area of commerce, most of it is just crass, commercial, unimaginative junk. Mostly it’s pretty boring. As in most businesses the purveyors (perviers?) have a fairly clear idea of what sells and what sells is very predictable. If you’ve visited one of the many free porn sites (I will never be sending them my card details) you will know that there are usually a number of categories there for you to click on. They’re an interesting window into the soul of humanity, or at least, masculinity. Women are categorised by hair colour – blondes, redheads, brunettes, which is interesting in itself. It wouldn’t be the first thing on my list but there you go. Race is another popular criterion - Asian or Black most obviously but also Latino (Latina surely?) or Indian. Then there’s age – ‘nubiles’ or ‘teens’ (usually pretty obviously in their twenties or older – rarely genuinely young girls unless you specifically go looking for them), then there’s MILFs (‘Moms I’d like to F**k’. Seriously...) which is women in their late twenties to forties I’d guess, and then ‘mature’ which can mean anything beyond that. Then there are various body shapes you can have a look at. Big Boobs are an obvious one, much being made of whether they’re ‘natural’ or fake. (Women might be interested to know which of these is the more popular. In fact a survey of the stats of porn site activity would probably give a very honest insight into what men actually prefer. I suspect the former) but there are sections for small breasted girls too, also skinny girls (from the merely slim to the anorexic) and fat girls (BBW? I don’t know what it stands for) varying from the curvy to the morbidly obese.

It’s pretty much all full-frontal but you can go for shaved or hairy (sometimes frighteningly so.) I dare say there are similar categories if you want to look at men but I’ve not felt sufficiently motivated to do the research. Beyond that you can look for Shemales, pregnant women, dwarfs and other miscellanea often gathered together under the heading ‘Bizarre’ – another area I’ve not really looked at in any detail. My tastes, it turns out, are fairly vanilla.

Then there’s the act itself. ‘Hardcore’ is a bit of a misnomer. It seems to be pretty much assumed among those who don’t know what they’re talking about that this is the nastier (and hence harder), more violent stuff, when what it actually means (and from what I can gather, what it has always meant) is people having full penetrative sex (and what could be more natural and normal?) Then there’s anal and oral sex of course, Threes and Foursomes, Swingers, group sex and ‘Partying’ but since I don’t like looking at men (for whatever reason) I’m generally not that interested. ‘Lesbians’ is another matter. Here I can look at women having sex without a man in sight which I think has got to be a good thing. Much of it seems to be simulated and designed for men to look at but unless I’m very easily deceived, by no means all.

‘Masturbation’ and ‘toys’, as you’d expect, is women playing with themselves (or the male equivalent presumably) mostly with various sorts of dildos, vibrators, or sometimes with the fruit and veg or a bottle. It can get fairly ‘Bizarre’ here too though, with ‘F**king Machines’ and ‘Fisting’ (I’ve not stumbled across any bestiality but then I’ve not looked) but it’s mostly fairly uncontroversial.

Beyond that there’s various sorts of public nudity and sex, much of which is fairly tame exhibitionism or just plain old fashioned streaking or naturism. There seems to be a premium on images of women 'caught unawares' by hidden cameras in the bathroom, or when they’re drunk or asleep or simply forgetting to keep their legs together when they sit down but I suspect a lot of candid ‘Upskirts’ and ‘Drunk Girlfriends’ are posed.

This brings in the whole genre of ‘Amateur’, ‘Natural’ or ‘Reality’ porn. Again, Women’s Hour does seem to assume that your typical male (ie me) would prefer the airbrushed, pneumatic, peroxide blonde porn star in the fluffy crotchless knickers to looking at the girl next door when I suspect it’s quite the opposite. I suspect that for most men, that classic porn star look belongs with the Shemales and the swingers in some seventies time warp. Which reminds me – there’s always the ‘Vintage’ section you can go to for a spot of nostalgia. The most controversial aspect of ‘Amateur’ porn nowadays of course is the ease with which, not having to send their films to Boots to be developed any more, young girls can take and upload images of themselves; and how easily these can find their way from their boyfriend’s (or ex boyfriend’s) mobile onto those of everybody else at school and beyond onto a ‘Revenge’ site. Concerns about consent are obvious, especially when the girls in question are teenagers. Most ‘Amateur’ porn though appears to be at least as consensual as the regular stuff. I’ll come back to this.

Then there’s BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism) and beyond. This varies enormously from harmless and titillating games with ropes and spanking, to some fairly rough and public sex, to some seriously unpleasant stuff which I can’t look at even if it is consensual. Some sites seem to go out of their way to show the participants smiling and happy afterwards to demonstrate the point but this is obviously the area (along with underage sex) that causes most concern for those who consider themselves ‘anti-pornography’, and quite rightly.

There’s other perhaps more peripheral categories – underwear, goths, celebrities, various sorts of non photographic art work, but I think I’ve covered most of the important stuff.

So now I’m going to take the genuinely abusive and non-consensual stuff out of the equation. This maybe seems an unorthodox move – for isn’t this at the heart of the matter? Well no, I don’t think it is. As far as I’m concerned, forcing people to do violent and/or sexual things without their free and informed consent is immoral and illegal - End of, as they say. No one underage should be involved (and in my opinion the age of consent should be raised) and those made vulnerable by reason of poverty or mental illness, dependence or addiction or isolation should have the full protection of the law, and those exploiting them convicted. I consider myself lucky that I’m not interested in looking at images of anyone that is not doing what they’re doing from choice, but even if I did like that stuff I hope I’d have the moral integrity to be against it anyway. For those who do need such stuff, life must be extremely difficult but that’s no excuse. They simply can’t be allowed to act on their tastes and if they do they should be locked up until it can be proved that they no longer pose a threat, and I don’t know how you prove that.

But my point is that this sort of thing does not appear to characterise the bulk or even a significant proportion of the porn industry’s output. Looking at the images, reading interviews and talking to women in unguarded moments, I simply do not recognise that description. Certainly, much of what I see is unimaginative, crude and commercial. I’ve said that. I feel the same way though of much of what turns up in the music charts or in high street stores. Fast food, holiday resorts, Reality TV and instant coffee – it’s all pretty much a travesty of the way life could be but people apparently like things to be cheap and cheerful. They like things to be quick and convenient and not too challenging. They like things to be predictable. And of course the workers in all of these industries are to some extent exploited. It’s in the nature of capitalism. There’s no such thing as a fully free and informed decision.

What that does for the extraordinary thing that is human sexuality is possibly lamentable, but it’s done the same thing for food, travel and entertainment. Unless you think there’s something sacred about sex, it’s really not very remarkable.

This of course is at the heart of the matter. The anti-porn lobby as with most sex controversies (sex before marriage, homosexuality, sexual abuse and prostitution) depends to some extent on seeing sex as, if not sacred, then ‘special’ in some way.

I suppose for most people sex has a special place in life, but it’s interesting that they don’t often feel the same way about, for example, food. It’s worth remembering that such mores are very culture specific. People’s who go around practically naked all the time in, for example, New Guinea, are not perpetually trying to hump one another, whilst the sight of a woman’s ankle in Victorian England or apparently some parts of modern Arabia can induce apoplexy and riots. But I’m talking about modern Britain here (I’m not qualified to talk about anywhere else). Sexual mores have changed a great deal in the last fifty years but there is still this strong urge to treat sex as if it is something very special. Sexual morality has gone from something very prescribed - only to be practised under the strictest legal framework (ie a marriage between a man and a woman) with transgressors under threat of public opprobrium and legal sanction to, in the sixties, something that could be enjoyed, Joy of Sex style, among any consenting adults, in any number of positions and with all sorts of props. Even so it was supposed to be an expression of deep feelings, a coming together of two souls, a deeply private moment, a rite of passage. Women took part willingly in pornography, group sex and sadomasochistic games even then but it was considered a highly questionable thing to do. Feminism in particular but probably the majority of women generally, disapproved, and suspected that there was something deeply wrong with them. It was simply unthinkable that such women could possibly have made anything like a free and informed decision. Some branches of feminism would have ascribed ‘False Consciousness’ to any woman in the sex industry who claimed to enjoy (or even just be ok with) what she did. She simply had to be deluded.

Such attitudes persist in present day Woman’s Hour and in my friend’s fears, but the world has changed.

Feminists believed, back in the seventies, that if women had a more equal place in the workplace, in government and in education, that the world would be a more nurturing, sensitive, spiritual place, for those were the qualities traditionally associated with women. The old macho, aggressive, materialistic, competitive ways would be tempered by the woman’s touch. And so they have been, to some extent. Back then, before the sixties, a man would not be seen in the street pushing a pram, let alone claiming paternity leave. A man could not tolerate the mention of the word ‘menstruation’, far less go out and buy his girlfriend some tampons. But when women moved into traditionally held mens’ roles, they did not feminise them and make them more sensitive and fair. They themselves became more ruthless careerists and aggressive consumers. And the same thing has happened in sex. Women have not civilised the male sexuality but have moved in on it and look like becoming as obsessed with superficial attraction and immediate personal gratification as men ever were. Of course there are differences – men always did stupid things to get girls’ attention – getting into fights, participating in extreme sports, taking too many mind-altering substances. Girls take too many mind-altering substances, take their clothes off and dance on tables. Sometimes they allow their friends to take pictures of them doing it.

Perhaps we’re getting to a stage where sex is stripped of all sense of the forbidden (and hence in my opinion, much of the fun) to become a mere bodily function, to be carried out only more or less riskily. No doubt it will always be pleasurable but a large part of the excitement has always been in the edginess of it – the fact that, frankly, it was all a bit naughty. Sex will presumably always be, at a basic level, pleasurable and satisfying, as it is for other animals, but it is one of the triumphs of human culture that it can also be incredibly rude and powerfully erotic. Presumably it’s necessary to have some strictures in order to enjoy the transgression. I don’t know how to balance that one.

To use a food analogy, I dislike McDonald’s because it makes eating into a bland functional commodity, like going to the toilet. I fear that there are children out there, raised on oven chips and turkey twizzlers who will have no idea what else is possible and will not have the mental equipment to find out. Ultimately it’s their choice of course but I still think it’s depressing.

I should drop in a note here about the two arguments for prohibition around non-marital sex usually trotted out. The first is unwanted pregnancy. Bringing unwanted children into the world (or indeed having an abortion, pro-choice though I am) are among the deadliest of sins in my estimation (the latter a necessary evil justifiable only to avoid the former) but it is worth pointing out that the kinds of sexual behaviour most demonised are those that couldn’t possibly lead to pregnancy – notably homosexuality and masturbation. Internet porn has got to be the ultimate in risk-free intercourse. Secondly there’s sexually transmitted infection, which is a very real threat but compares well with other risky recreational pursuits, such as going out drinking, driving a motor bike or travelling in Africa. The possible risks may be serious but there is no moral outrage involved when your friend tells you she is going back-packing in Botswana – only fears for her safety and the suggestion of sensible precautions. Women being photographed naked or filmed having sex, is simply not all that life threatening.

Feminists who feel the need to make a political stand (the aim of which would be to change the law presumably), are I think underestimating women. They may not approve of what girls do but sex simply does not have the same power to destroy that it used to have. Once, being discovered in some sexual indiscretion could destroy a girl’s reputation for ever and see her disowned and on the street and this is still true in some parts of the world, but here and now, appearing on a porn site may be embarrassing for a girl, especially for her relatives but it is not necessarily or even likely to be her ruin. She may see it as an extension of what she does anyway – snogging her girlfriends at a party, getting off with strangers on Saturday night or running up the street naked in Ibiza. Why not do it properly? Why not get paid for it. It’s just a bit of fun. It’s a laugh, or so I gather. I've never felt this way about my own sex life.

I don’t know how good I am at detecting what’s really going on under the surface, just from looking at people’s faces. I know when I trawl the porn sites I sometimes come across the faces of women and girls who quite obviously don’t want what’s happening to them. I guess some men like that sort of thing. For me it’s a miserable and disturbing sight, but I don’t see it very often. Mostly the gazes and postures seem stereotyped, unimaginative, asexual in even the most explicit poses. They smile at us men, or feign orgasm, hold their vulvas open or try to lick their own nipples. It’s contrived, commercial, boring, but it’s a job. One thing they don’t look is traumatised. I like to think I’d notice. It’s as sincere as the smile of a receptionist, or the greeting of a call centre. They get paid to do this stuff but it doesn’t say anything about them.

A small minority though, the ones I look out for, actually seem to be getting a bit of a kick out of it. They think it’s sexy, naughty, fun. I like to think I can tell. If not then they’re bloody good actors.

This is what Woman’s Hour, for all its excellent qualities (it’s one of my favourite Radio 4 shows) and it’s contributors cannot overtly admit (despite the occasional featuring of burlesque dancers, swingers and page three girls) – that some women at least (and possibly quite a lot of women) like taking their clothes off in public and having sex with strangers, and not just to please their men. They find it a turn on. It’s part of their sexuality, and they’re not much worried about the consequences, because for the most part, there really aren’t any.

But (they insist, the detractors) pornography really just simply isn't like that. The majority of pornography simply is violent, degrading and exploitative.
All I can say is it doesn't look that way to me, but even if this were the case, my point would be that we should support the minority that aren't rather than condemn them all. That there weren't many suppliers was not an argument for not buying for example free range eggs, or fair trade coffee. Perhaps we should start some sort of certification scheme - Responsibly Sourced Nudity, or Safely Harvested Sex but I suspect the main participants might be a little too safe - even for my tastes (we don't want it too wholesome after all do we).
In practice though we are going to have to trust our instincts to spot when the participants are not happy with what's going on or are too young to know better, and to go elsewhere.
And if you're still not happy with that I suspect you are one of those who simply believe that pornography is wrong. In which case I can't help you.

So anyway, where was I? Amateurbustylesbianexhibitionistas.com... Yay!