I Won't Say I Told You So

That's how the song goes anyway.

It could, of course, have been written by the ICG for those mugs who voted in support of an application by Thames Water to expand its stinky Mogden operation back in 2009 on the grounds that (a) it would "reduce smell" and that (b) the London Borough of Hounslow would be able to exercise "more control" over the selfish, relentlessly profit-driven activities of the water utlity through the watered-down and thoroughly useless Section 106 agreement that Thames condescended to sign as part of the approval process.

The ICG told the sorry shower that comprised the Sustainable Development Committee that the grounds were flawed on two counts. Namely (a) it wouldn't reduce the smell but would increase it, and (b) the London Borough of Hounslow has never had any intention of exercising any kind of control or restraint whatsoever over Thames Water, which imposes its odours on the surrounding community with absolute impunity.

Guess what happened?

The following is an excerpt from a letter written by the resident-led Mogden Residents' Action Group (MRAG) to Isleworth councillor Ed Mayne on June 10th:

"Residents are thus astounded to learn that, without any consultation with MRAG or community groups, the Council elected of its own volition, to remove the out of hours call centre for victims to ring so that Environment Officers can take 24/7 H2S readings and thus build a case to enforce Abatement Notices. Residents were led to believe that this call centre and the associated costs for Council Officers to investigate complaints is funded 100% by Thames Water as a pre-condition of the S106 agreement and it was agreed that this would remain in place until 2013 when the upgrade of Mogden is completed. Why then, and on whose authority was this vital function removed just before the summer months when odour escaping the Mogden premises is at its most severe?

"You will also be aware that residents requested, and were granted GBP 150,000, within the S106 agreement to enhance and beautify the environment around Mogden in residential areas most affected by Mogden's mismanagement and negligence over the last 14 years. We have repeatedly requested information on when consultation with residents will commence in order to define how the £150K will be spent, but we have received no response."

So there you have it, so supportive is the Head of Environment at LBH of the residents who pay his not unsubstantial salary that he has withdrawn an important facility that was provided as a condition of acceptance for the expansion project at no cost at all to the borough!

And what have the elected members, who are supposed to be running the council, done about it?

Well, Councillor Mayne has offered to facilitate a meeting between residents and the new Lead Member for Environment, Councillor Colin Ellar, and this offer is in the process of being responded to.

We can only hope that Councillor Ellar and his administration will take the necessary measures that we would have taken had our coalition partners backed us post-2009 to sort out the utter disgrace that is Hounslow's Environment department for once and for all.

Cameron's Big Cut "Idea" Will Only Backfire on the Tories

By Polly Toynbee

Attacking the under-25s might help poll ratings for now, but the real causes of high housing benefit costs lie elsewhere

Behind in the polls, David Cameron cleaves to his one truly popular policy: cutting welfare. Pollsters say people want it cut even more. His speech hits every button, stirring up those on quite low incomes against those on very low incomes, dividing and ruling, distracting from the lifestyle of the rulers. With the rottweiler tendency on his backbenches growing restless, he throws them the vulnerable to chew on – all those luxuriating in the "culture of entitlement" on £71 a week unemployment pay. Politically, it works well – for now.

A red mist of despair poured from children's and disability charities, stunned at yet another assault on those they try to defend. Already the £18bn benefit cut is "without historical or international precedent," according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Cameron's 17 "ideas" may not all see the light of day, but another £10bn will be cut: housing benefit and US-style benefit time limits yield the big money.

Few people realise that 88% of benefit cuts are still to come, with two thirds of disabled children to lose large sums. Housing benefit cuts, driving thousands of families miles from their homes and children from their schools, have only just begun. Without yet knowing the perverse effects of these cuts, with chaos about to engulf the Department for Work and Pensions on the work programme and universal credit, Cameron shoots from the hip.

He sounded plausible, and his sweeping tour of benefits seeming common sense to many. Every system since the Poor Law faces the same dilemma – how to help the needy without weakening work incentives, how to tell a "sturdy beggar" from a hard-luck case and give them enough to live but less than a low-paid job. There are no satisfactory answers – but Cameron's "ideas" are the harshest ever proposed. How knowingly he misled in almost every example he gave, as he pitted "those who work hard and do the right thing" against those on benefits, deliberately disguising that these are mainly the same people. Most of the poor drawing benefits are cleaners, carers, caterers – the 62% living below the poverty line, working hard yet needing benefits to survive.

Cameron's focus on the ever-rising housing benefit bill omitted key facts. The Smith Institute reports that 95% of the £1bn rise in housing benefit this year is paid to people in work. Only one in eight people drawing the benefit is out of work; the rest are low earners. The cost is not about feckless people but the housing crisis, the failure to build social, rented or private housing over the last three decades. Shortage makes rents rise faster than earnings, and faster than price inflation. Cameron's plan to peg housing benefit to prices, not to inflation, will be devastating. Shelter reports that if prices rose as fast as rents since 1971, a chicken would now cost £47.51. Nor is there any sign housing benefit cuts will cause rents to fall: rents are still rising as landlords turn away benefit tenants, easily finding others in this starved market.

 "Labour spokesmen's lack of visceral indignation on this was dispiriting. Confronting popular prejudice with facts is politically dangerous, but bravery wins plaudits too."

In a familiar litany of charges against the workless, single mothers, drug addicts (only 4%), he summons up a familiar portrait of the multi-child household, beloved of television documentaries, seeking worst cases to be entertainingly put right by Ann Widdecombe. Every society will always have enough of those to keep the cameras happy. But the dull lives of cleaners juggling childcare and jobs make bad TV, as do dull statistics that give the lie to the idea that moral turpitude drives the escalating benefits bill.

Low wages and lack of housing are the root cause. A living wage would lift the burden off taxpayers and put it on to employers. Regulated rents and a great housebuilding programme are the way to cut the housing benefit bill. The government prefers mass removal of the workless to low-rent areas with no jobs.
 
Cameron's plan for the under-25s to stay at home springs from his own social milieu, where empty nesters rattle around in echoing home counties mansions, easy for returning children to commute to first jobs. But take housing benefit from 380,000 young people, and what does the student from Middlesbrough College do at the end of their course if they can't move to where the jobs are, get a room, get started? Stay at home and be unemployed for ever. Even in work, the 205,000 under-25s with a child will have to separate, each to move back to their parents. With benefits as well as wages cut in depressed areas, the north-south divide will gape yet wider, with no chance of moving.

Let's hear no more from Cameron about social mobility. If this proceeds, Alan Milburn should resign as social mobility tsar, since nobody will be going anywhere. Bright but poor graduates will be sent home and everyone will stay where they were born. Labour spokesmen's lack of visceral indignation on this was dispiriting. Confronting popular prejudice with facts is politically dangerous, but bravery wins plaudits too.

The dumbfounding spectacle of this wealthy prime minister kicking away slender supports of the weak will be an abiding image of the man and his party. In the longest recession, with 2.6 million out of work and 1.4 million part-timers desperately seeking full-time jobs, the sheer effrontery of suggesting over-generous benefits keep them out work is beyond belief.

Cameron may saw with the grain of public opinion now, but by the next election, enough of those now clamouring for cuts will have seen their effects at first hand. The British Social Attitudes Survey records how public sympathy for underdogs ebbs after Labour benefit increases – but soon rekindles under Tory harshness.

Reproduced with acknowledgements to The Guardian on Facebook.

A Celebration of Community

As I think I said in a previous post I am not a flag-waving type nor a particularly fervent monarchist.

Nevertheless I did venture out to the Jubilee celebration party in Isleworth's Chestnut Grove, partly I guess to support my father who had been involved in helping to organise it and partly because it was the road I grew up in.

I'm glad I went along. For a little street of some 40 or so dwellings the turnout was incredible, fortified as it was by the participation of some neighbours from Cleveland Road and Twickenham Road and some moved-out former dwellers.

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s Chestnut Grove had been a typical suburban, owner-occupied, semi-detatched residential neighbourhood. Typical at that time, of course, meant Sunday roast-eating, Crossroads-watching, "respectable" - and white. It won't have been the only street in England, nor even in Isleworth, in which the news that an Asian family would be moving in was met with a certain amount of fear and trepidation. Not hatred nor even hostility per se, but an intangible feeling that this development would be in some indefinable way "bad" for the neighbourhood and that things would somehow never quite be the same again.

Fast forward to 2012 and the moral triumph of the integrated society was as evident in Chestnut Grove as it could ever possibly be. The well-intentioned but ignorant fears of yesteryear had well and truly given way to a new, inclusive sense of community, the bonds that join it every bit as united and as powerful as they had been back in the sixties and seventies but with the old concerns - what I have called "the fear of difference" - replaced by a new and very real sense of togetherness.

This was not "tolerance", a word that suggests putting up reluctantly with others for the sake of a quiet life, but a real unity that pervaded the whole street. I chuckled inwardly as I watched some quite elderly people, those very residents who had been so concerned by the prospect of demographic change all those years ago, dancing to the bhangra bearing expressions of real celebration and joy.

The other emotion induced within me by the occasion, and not a little by the sangria, was one of real anger at the knowledge that communities such as this are still not trusted to determine their own destinies. Still considered in constant need of steering and guidance by self-appointed political elites who for some undefined reason believe that only they know what is best for them.

Those local politicos would have been welcome at the Chestnut Grove street party, but as individuals wanting to join us not as politicians wanting to direct us.

I recall a street party in Orchard Road, Brentford back in 2006, shortly after the local elections of that year which had seen six ICG councillors elected. If I recall correctly we all attended, but as members of the public going along to support an initiative by fellow residents. We didn't have our impending presence announced with a fanfare of trumpets. It was their activity - the residents'. Not ours.

Whatever the occasion may have been about officially I like to think the Chestnut Grove street party was above all a celebration of community. An audacious flaunting of our unbroken and unbreakable spirit. Communities such as Chestnut Grove need no controlling or directing. We are free spirits, and that is the way it will always remain.

What If...?

Brentford Labour Councillor and former Deputy Leader Ruth Cadbury has an interesting item on her blog on the recent elections to the Greater London Authority (GLA), with a useful breakdown of voting patterns in the London Borough of Hounslow on a ward by ward basis. You can read the whole article by clicking here.

Whilst I don't believe the results from a London-wide election can be accurately projected onto the local elections to be held in 2014, they do give us some indication of how the ICG could expect to fare if, hypotheically, we were to contest them (the figures given are the "Party List" votes which probably give us a more accurate picture for the purposes of analysis, certainly more so than the beauty contest that was the Mayoral election itself).

On a similar turnout to that that we are likely to witness in 2014 Labour achieved 1094 votes in Isleworth and 1088 in Syon, the two wards which returned community councillors in 2006. These figures exclude the postal votes, which were counted separately. Allocating those postal votes proportionately from the overall total the Labour vote increases to around 1470 in Isleworth, and 1460 in Syon.

The Conservative vote is especially interesting. Just 653 people voted Conservative in Isleworth and 777 in Syon. Adding the postal votes calculated in the same manner as with Labour those figures increase to 916 in Isleworth and 1089 in Syon.

Both Labour and Conservative totals are those achieved in what was more or less a straight fight between the two (the minor parties, including the Lib Dems, shared a fairly small proportion of the overall votes cast). In other words, it is the vote the two big parties can reasonably expect in the absence of a challenge from within the community.

In both 2002 and 2006 votes for ICG candidates in Isleworth ranged between 1065 and 1266. In Syon in 2006 they ranged between 1329 and 1417. I have deliberately ignored the 2010 totals, which were higher, as the turnout was distorted by the fact of the general election being held on the same day.

Bearing in mind that the turnout in 2014 is likely to be similar to that of the GLA election, the suggestion is that any community candidates would take their votes largely from the political candidates, and proportionately this would mean for the most part from Labour and the Conservatives.

Could the ICG expect a similar vote to that which it achieved in 2002 and 2006? The feedback and general support that we are picking up from across the community leaves me in no doubt at all that we could. So what does this all mean?

Well first of all it means that, with or without a community intervention, the Conservatives have no realistic chance of making any headway in either Isleworth or Syon in spite of their bizarre bragging on Internet forums in the immediate wake of their defeat in 2010. If the ICG doesn't contest, Labour wins.

Secondly, it suggests that the ICG would, if it were to involve itself, probably be the bookie's favourite to win all six seats back. 1400-odd votes less a good few hundred lost to the ICG equals something decidedly short of the likely ICG total.

Possibly though this wouldn't be enough to seize the balance of power on the Council, as was the case last time. In the west of the borough there are a number of seats in which representation is "mixed" and current trends, coupled with the Conservatives' general lack of a gameplan other than a pie-in-the-sky aspiration for achieving an overall majority which would appear to be based solely on wishful thinking rather than any form of strategic planning, would seem to point to Labour gains in 2014, especially with the Conservatives being the major party of government. Even without Isleworth and Syon Labour currently holds 29 of the Council's 60 seats. A couple of gains in the west would secure them overall control in any event. But with a majority of, say, three seats the party would be extremely vulnerable to any eccentricites and deviations on the part of any of its own people. Party loyalty and organisational obedience would be put to the test like never before.

Like I say, this is all strictly hypothetical. The ICG doesn't have to contest elections. There is more than one way to skin a cat - if my very vegetarian daughter would forgive me such an expression. What it does mean however is that we remain in a position to use our clout within the community to wrest concessions at a time when some cutbacks are inevitable and when decisions will have to be taken between dependent and non-dependent services by an administration which institutionally feels more kindly disposed towards people and organisations that are dependent upon them. The hugely successful demos around Isleworth Library and St. John's Community Centre, coupled with our continuing active support for Isleworth Public Hall, are cases in point.

Another Isleworth Councillor on the LBH Executive

At the Annual Meeting of Borough Council on Tuesday (it's to all intents and purposes a kind of AGM but doesn't appear to have an official title) another Isleworth councillor was promoted to the Council Executive.

Councillor Sue Sampson is now the Council's Lead Member for Performance and Customer Care, joining fellow Isleworth member Ed Mayne who remains Lead Member for Community Safety and Regulatory Services (the former half of that portfolio having been held by yours truly between 2006 and 2009).

Meanwhile Syon councillor Steve Curran holds what appears to be a rather large portfolio as Lead Member for Education, Housing and Human Resources and his ward colleague Theo Dennison has the influential task of chairing the Sustainable Development Committee (with Councillor Curran as his Vice Chair).

It is pleasing to see our own local representatives having such an input and playing such an important role. I am particularly pleased for Sue as I feel she is suited by temperament for the post for which she has been chosen, and I say this notwithstanding some of the disagreements we've had over the negative electioneering methods with which she has been associated in the past, a thing which to be fair was to some extent a cultural trait inherited from some of her predecessors.

I am sure she will make a success of her new appointment and I wish her all the very best.

The full list of appointments can be viewed at the London Borough of Hounslow website.

Lance Newbigging

I was sad to learn at the weekend that my good friend and former work and ICG colleague Lance Newbigging passed away last Friday.

Lance and I were colleagues at Skycaps at London Heathrow Airport between 1989 and 1991. He would have been around 62 at the time and was regarded by many of the younger porters with affection as a kind of father figure, often bestowing the benefit of his advice based upon the legal training that he had received as a younger man in his native India.

When I lost my job there in 1991 as a inevitable consequence of an ongoing conflict with the appalling management at the company Lance took my part, which led to his own arbitrary dismissal not very long afterwards. Skycaps, run at the time by a company called Valet Services Limited, was a flawless example of the kind of "hire 'em, fire 'em" set-up that the present government is keen to reintroduce under the guise of "competitiveness". Lance and I spend many a happy afternoon together at the Industrial Tribunals, then based at London's Russell Square.

When the ICG was set up a little while later Lance liked what we were doing and joined up. Prior to that he had briefly been a member of the now-defunct Hounslow Residents' Group (HRG) but preferred the ICG model. As a passionate union man its more socially progressive outlook was more to his taste. Lance stood as a candidate for the ICG in 1998 in the old Spring Grove ward.

I had not seen Lance for some time prior to his passing, although we had spoken a few times on the telephone. I would have dearly loved to have visited him and naturally regret not having done so, however with five jobs and counting it was a physical impossibility (I did not see my own parents for six months from November last year and they live less than a mile along the road!). It is sad, but I guess inevitable, that there are some who are retired and lead a sedentary lifestyle who simply (and rather stupidly) just assume that everybody else is in the same position as themselves.

Lance, I know, understood this. He was a very intelligent man. Our friendship was one that went back a lot longer than some others and when we spoke recently we spent a good deal of time reminiscing about our times at Skycaps and about the extraordinary events of 1998 which set the wheels of a whole era in motion.

Lance was very well known, and respected, in his locality. One particularly powerful recollection I have is of boarding a 116 bus in Bedfont after having spent a good few hours at his home, working no doubt on some tribunal case and being sustained with tea and curry by him and his late partner Daphne. Lance had walked me to the bus stop to see me off (and, I'm sure, to have a crafty ciggie). As I paid my fare the driver looked to the stop behind me and asked me "Is that Lance?".

I responded in the affirmative, and for much of the journey back to Hounslow he explained to me how Lance had helped him to save his job when he had fallen foul of his own employers.

It will probably never have occurred to Lance how widely missed he will be. My heartfelt condolences go out to his family and loved ones.

Greece is the Word

I admit to some amusement over the current situation in Greece.

I am not anti-EU. I am, however, deeply opposed to the way in which faceless bankers and unelected powers behind the scenes appear to be pulling the strings ever more openly on the world scene, and am a tad frightened by the fact that they no longer seem to feel the need to even try to hide the fact. We have whole countries now being governed by "technocrats", completely bypassing the whole democratic process with barely so much as a murmur being heard in protest.

The faceless ones are demanding that Greece implements an austerity package to comply with the terms of their bailout. In other words, despite not being answerable to the Greek electorate nor even Greek they assume for themselves the right to determine Greek political and social policy.

But there was one very small impediment to their plans that appears to have seemed to them so irrelevant that it may have been entirely overlooked, and that was that the Greek electorate didn't actually want the austerity programme imposed on them. That electorate took a savage revenge on the international financial establishment by massively rejecting Pasok, the party that had dominated Greek politics for most of the past four decades, leaving it with just 41 seats in a parliament of 300.

Now the financial powers that be are left scratching their heads wondering what went wrong, and in the absence of a coalition with a working majority Greece may be heading back to the polls to see whether it can get it right the second time around.

Sadly voters in the UK are unable to exercise a similar power of veto as the faceless ones have effective control of all the major political parties, as well as the mainstream media which is able to downplay or to rubbish any attempt from beyond the approved parties to challenge their hegemony.

And so, whilst we enjoy a veneer of democracy and indeed even retain the right to bomb and invade other countries which may feel inclined to do things differently, in truth the international financial establishment enjoys a stranglehold which it doesn't yet have over the good people of Greece.

No doubt they will think of something to avert their Greek tragedy, but it has been fascinating to watch all the same. Interesting times.

Isleworth and Syon Conservation Action Group

Yet another new community-based organisation has sprung up in the locality. It is called the Isleworth and Syon Conservation Action Group (ISCAG), and the clue to its programme is very much in the title.

Tomorrow (Sunday 29th April) ISCAG will be holding a Grand Sale to raise funds at the Park Road Allotments behind All Saints' Church, from 1.30 till 4.30 pm.

There will be children's activities, homemade goodies, bric-a-brac, a book sale, a plant sale, Temptation Alley dog competition and a raffle.

If you are available please pop along and support this worthy activity.

Isleworth: Remembering our History, Defending our Future

Christine Diwell and ICG Chair Ian Speed lead a 
massive residents' campaign to save Isleworth Library

I spent an interesting few hours last week attending the Annual General Meeting of The Isleworth Society (TIS) at Isleworth Public Hall. Although I have been a member for many years it was the first AGM that I had been to for quite a while as it almost invariably seems to clash with something else in my chaotic life schedule.

AGMs in general are, as a rule of thumb, fairly mundane affairs in which the business of electing a Committee and of hearing last year's minutes is conducted to the exclusion of anything remotely interesting to any but the anoraks. TIS AGMs, however, do not follow this rule. Instead once the routine business is done there are tea and snacks, a raffle, and then a "Part Two" which is an integral feature of the meeting.

The elections to the Committee confirmed the current incumbents in situ, which now includes Paul Fisher who was co-opted a few months back and whose continued membership of the Committee was unanimously supported. Although he is not the first ICG member to take up office in TIS he is undoubtedly the most high profile, and his welcome elevation would appear to endorse the ever closer working relationship that the two groups enjoy. A relationship which one must say is something of a "no brainer" when one considers the convergence of interests that exists between us.

On this occasion "Part Two" comprised a fascinating talk by TIS Secretary Christine Diwell, whose great talent for holding an audience seems to grow with every presentation she makes. Even though I had heard much of the talk on a previous occasion my attention was as undivided as it had ever been.

I could not help but be struck by the sheer size of the meeting and the support that it drew from around the Isleworth community. Although the ICG is the larger of the two groups in terms of core membership we could only dream of bringing out half the number for one of our AGMs that TIS achieved last week. That TIS was also able to use the event to generate probably a three figure sum for its funds only served to underline the professionalism of the whole enterprise.

It would also be fair comment to say that the attendance was from the senior end of the age scale, and whilst both TIS and the ICG aspire to recruit more active young people I feel it would be wrong to underestimate the power of the grey activist base - retired, affluent by comparison and, in this day and age, still surprisingly capable when it comes to pushing out leaflets and participating in such things as community clean-ups as well as relentless lobbying.

It occurs to me that the ICG would appear to have morphed organically into an "action arm" of a wider movement, a movement that is given depth and meaning by the activities and the powerful presence of civic organisations such as TIS. It provides a potent combination, and in my view is a model that communities around the borough that find their independence and their unique character under threat from the soulless and unrelenting attentions of the planners and the politicians should seek with some urgency to replicate.

Are you a Luddite?

By Tom de Castella

They burned down mills in the name of a mythical character called Ludd. So 200 years after their most famous battle, why are we still peppering conversations with the word "Luddite"?

It's a popular retort to someone struggling to operate their new smartphone or refusing to buy the latest gizmo: "You're such a Luddite."

There is another word for it - technophobe - but it doesn't convey the same sense of irrational hostility to the modern world. So where did "Luddite" come from?

In the midst of the British industrial revolution, skilled textile workers feared for their jobs. An uprising began in 1811 when Nottinghamshire weavers attacked the new automated looms that were replacing them.

The workers took inspiration from a fabled General Ludd or King Ludd living in Sherwood Forest. His fanciful name may have come from a young Leicestershire weaver called Ned Lud, who in the late 18th Century was rumoured to have smashed two stocking frames.

The machine breaking spread to West Yorkshire wool workers and Lancashire cotton mills, in what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called "collective bargaining by riot". Machinery was wrecked, mills were burned down and the Luddites fought pitched battles with the British Army.

The response of the state was brutal. Machine breaking became a capital offence. At trials in York, 17 Luddites were hanged and another 25 transported to Australia, while in Lancaster eight were hanged and 38 sentenced to transportation.

One of the most serious incidents happened two hundred years ago this month. About 150 Luddites armed with hammers and axes attacked Cartwright's mill in Rawfolds, near Huddersfield. The authorities shot two of them dead and the attack was eventually repelled.

For Katrina Navickas, author of Loyalism & Radicalism in Lancashire 1798-1815, they were working class heroes. Trade unions had been banned in 1800 and here was another way for workers to defend their livelihoods.

There's no doubt that the Luddites have been romanticised, says Dr Emma Griffin, author of A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution. They are thought of as the first workers to destroy their machinery, yet this had been going on for years. What marks the Luddites out was that they were better organised than their predecessors, she says.

But both historians agree that today's use of "Luddite" is wrong. To use the term for someone who ignores Twitter or refuses to move from analogue to digital TV is a complete misrepresentation, says Griffin.

"We use it for people who are hostile to technology, who don't want to get a mobile phone," she says. "But what concerned the Luddites about technology was that it was going to cut their wages."

An accurate modern example, according to Griffin, is the 1986 battle of Wapping when print unions picketed Rupert Murdoch's new hi-tech newspaper offices in protest at the computerisation they feared would make them obsolete.

So how did the word evolve so much?

The first recorded usage of Luddite in the Oxford English Dictionary is for 1811. But its catch-all anti-tech meaning appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon. According to the OED, it wasn't until 1970 that the term was used - by the New Scientist - to describe technology refuseniks.

But soon this meaning was everywhere. In 1984 the novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote an essay asking "Is it OK to be a Luddite?" for the New York Times Book Review.

The debate has never been quite resolved, for the desirability of being a Luddite is a matter of personal taste. A common boast in the 1980s was that one couldn't programme the video. But for others "Luddite" is a useful putdown for Neanderthal technophobes that can be laced with different quantities of humour or contempt.

"Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did?", Pynchon wondered in his essay. "I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors."

And yet a neo-Luddite movement sprang up. The most extreme expression of this philosophy was the bombing campaign of Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, who was sentenced to life imprisonment. His manifesto, which was eventually published by the New York Times, said that the "Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race".

Today with digital technology enlivening or intruding on - depending on your view - day-to-day experiences, the term is more popular than ever. People nostalgic for a time before mobile ringtones had colonised train carriages may class themselves as Luddites.

But whereas once it was cool for kids not to understand science, the tide now appears to be with the nerds and geeks. Luddite may sometimes be a fond term but its adherents are on the losing side.

The sheer variety of situations in which "Luddite" can be used would astonish the attackers of Cartwright's Mill were they to resurface today.

In recent years, the term has been used for opponents of planning reform, ID cards, Tesco and goalline technology. Prince Charles is a target, as is the novelist Jonathan Franzen - after an attack on e-books and Twitter - and Oasis were once described by fellow band Bloc Party as "repetitive Luddites".

Historians may bridle at such an inexact use of the word but it's too late, says Mark Forsyth, author of The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language.

"There's absolutely no point historians getting indignant about language. It's never going to stop changing - they're trying to hold back the tide like the Luddites."

And "Luddite" is not unique. Many historical terms are bandied about casually, losing their precise meaning. "People have a "cavalier" attitude," Forsyth points out. "There are 'puritans' all over the place. And 'bolshie' is a bit of a classic."

None of this means that contemporary Britain is awash with supporters of Charles I, hardline Calvinists or Bolshevik revolutionaries. But these colourful terms add to the richness of the English language, he says.

For lexicographer Susie Dent, the evolution or "transferred" meaning of "Luddite" reminds her of how "philistine" has changed. "The figurative sense to mean an uneducated or unenlightened person is from 1825. Before then, the first transferred sense was an often humorous reference to a group regarded as one's enemies."

These new allusions are quite common, she says. "But what always strikes me is their endurance, centuries beyond their original application."

Navickas makes a point of correcting people, albeit in a lighthearted way, when she overhears them misusing "Luddite". And yet she is thankful for the frequent sloppy usage, as it keeps these textile workers' memory alive.

The rural equivalent of the Luddites were farm workers who took part in the Swing Riots of the early 1830s. Ricks were burnt, threshing machines destroyed and tithe barns attacked. But no-one remembers this now for they never developed a recognisable brand, she says.

So however grating it is to hear an iPhone refusenik invoking the weavers of Nottinghamshire, Navickas is glad that "Luddite" remains a popular part of everyday speech.

The irony is that as the speed of technological change accelerates, the term "Luddite" has never been more necessary.


Reproduced with acknowledgements to BBC News Magazine

Don't Tell 'Em Pike

I've been getting some stick from the Conservatives over the past week or so on the Chiswick W4 community forum. They would appear to be becoming a little tetchy over the fact that I take the opportunity to post there from time to time to remind Chiswick people of the incidents that led to the deterioration of the erstwhile good relationship between their Group and ours during the last months of the 2006-2010 Conservative/ICG coalition that managed Hounslow Council - when it is relevant to a topic that is being discussed, naturally.

I say "managed" because, in spite of the ICG's best efforts, the authority was still led by chief officers when we handed the chains of office back to Labour in May 2010, and needless to say that is still very much the case today.

Those incidents included the Mogden betrayal (made worse by a shameful officer-produced feature in the council's HM Magazine arguing the Conservative case for expansion against the ICG's contrary case), the effective non co-operation of chief officers with the ICG aspects of coalition policy and the discovery of a proposal discussed by the Conservative Group to try to split the ICG asunder following the May elections by offering coalition terms to some of our elected members and not to others should the distribution of seats have permitted.

I have rehearsed all of these incidents before and don't intend to go into them in detail again. None of them are denied by our former partners and they have if nothing else taught us an abject lesson about how political parties operate in general, and that this kind of low politicking is by no means confined to Labour.

But I would remind those who feel the need to taunt us over our election reverse (that these people can effectively celebrate their own defeat gives us some clue as to the limitations of their own ambitions), and make threats against us, that every action has a reaction.

Many Conservative members of our acquaintance are unhappy with the way things have turned out, and for obvious reasons. I am advised that this is the case in Chiswick as well as in Isleworth, and I would guess it applies elsewhere in the borough too. It may be that many of those people will reflect upon the prospect, brought about by their own local party officials, of what will effectively be permanent Labour domination of the local authority for the forseeable future and will be open to persuasion that there is a better way.

It may be also that the many channels of communication through which that conversation may be had will become increasingly open to us.

If there is one positive to emerge from the election defeat of 2010 it is that it has taught us to consider our whole long-term strategic approach and not just the two-dimensional business of delivering leaflets and winning votes. And there has never been more of an appetite for independent civic engagement than there is today.

Just thought I would mention it, Captain Mainwaring!

Bradford West - Aberration or Portent?

"You politicians. Conservative. Labour. Lib-Dems. Over my lifetime, and I am 65, you have sold the assets of this country to overseas masters, and you have sold the people of this country down the river. And still you play junior fart club between yourselves. Why don't you recognise that you are all finished. Come the next General Election, you will each get a share of the lowest turn-out ever. You will all be virtually wiped out. Surely George Galloway's triumph has shown that very few people are listening to you anymore. Your political parties and your posturing and political pimping no longer mean anything."

These comments were posted on the hugely popular ChiswickW4.com community forum by a regular poster just a moment ago.

I would dearly love that his sentiments were true. Party politics continues to give an increasingly bad account of itself (some of the political posters on that forum are a particularly shining example of everything that is sick about our political process today). George Galloway's astonishingly resounding victory at Bradford West should give anybody who values democracy and integrity in politics, whether they happen to like Galloway or not, a sense of hope that the voting public is finally beginning to shed its chains.

But my enthusiasm is tempered by a sense of deja vu from past events that are by no means dim and distant. Shortly before the most recent general election in May 2010 there was a general sense that people were getting fed up like never before with the party politicians. The expenses scandal, both locally and nationally, left a very foul taste in the mouths of those who ought to be able to look to their self-proclaimed political masters for inspiration and example. There was much talk from the pollsters of a Lib Dem bounce (okay the Lib Dems are establishment party politicians as well, but a move to them would be a move away at least from the Janus-faced beast that is the two-party duopoly).

So what happened? As always the two major parties were given the lion's share of the support. The Lib Dem lion roared scarcely at all. At local elections all over the country independents and small parties were buried under a tidal wave of general election ovinity. In Brentford and Isleworth the much discredited Labour MP lost her seat to her Conservative opponent, but with a percentage swing against her that was actually lower than the national average.

So was Galloway's extraordinary victory in Bradford an aberration, or a sign of things to come?

Was, indeed, the triumph once again in 2010 of the two-headed monster an assertion that it will always ultimately triumph no matter what, or was it the swansong of a dying political establishment?

The last throes of a dying animal - violent, dangerous, but ultimately futile?

The common determining factor throughout is the mass media. It was the national media that teased us and tickled or palate with its mock indignation when our politicians were discovered with their collective snouts embedded firmly in the trough before the same mass media, as the general election drew closer, overwhelmed us all with news and images from the big party campaigns and persuaded us all that there really was no alternative after all.

It was the national media that lured voters to vote nationally, even at the local elections.

It is worth noting that the same national media all but ignored the parliamentary by-election that took place in Bradford West.

So I sound a note of caution, but that does not mean there is no hope. For the national media too is fast taking on a different character, with the Internet inducing more interactivity, the explosive growth of social networking and the steady but constant growth of alternative news channels. Just as the power of the two-headed monster over our political life is waning, so too is the relative influence of those who have traditionally controlled our sources of news and information.

The important thing is that politics is heading in the right direction, with politicians of all shades finding it necessary to at least pay lip service to localism and public engagement. Many of us are impatient for this process to reach its logical conclusion, but reach it one day it most certainly will.