Day 5335: The Corbynite Manoeuvre

Monday:


For those of you who don't speak "geek" (are there really such people reading my diary?!) "The Corbomite Maneuver" is that episode of "Star Trek" where Captain Kirk threatens to blow himself and his ship to bits rather than admit that he can't win.

Of course, it's really a BLUFF, as the miracle element Corbynite does not truly exist…

(It ISN'T one of the ones where they travel back in time to the Nineteen Eighties… but it COULD be.)

On the other fluffy foot, the enemy captain, the balloon-headed Balok, turns out to be an empty sock puppet too. It's all WEIRDLY TOPICAL!

A load of Balok

Hard Labour appear to have discovered a completely new corner to paint themselves into.

Mr Jeremy Corbyn, previously self-effacing standard bearer of the left, presently discovering – like all potential revolutionaries – that he really, really wants to be able to order people about is leading the polls to be the next Labour Loser.

EITHER, he will win and command the support of less than a tenth of his Parliamentary Party (as even fifteen of the people who nominated him have since recanted; bet Labour are SO pleased to have put SO much effort into replacing Lynne Featherstone with a Corbyn-nominating useful idiot)…

OR he will come substantially first in the first round of voting and only be beaten by a centrist/Blairite/neoliberal fascist running-dog (choose your insult of preference) candidate, potentially Yvette "the snooper" Cooper having come from THIRD and overtaken Andy Crash-and-Burnham with transfers from Liz Kendall Mint Cake and then overtaking Corbyn with transfers from Burnham.

This, it has to be said, at the very least would make Mr Milipede's last minute crown-snatching from his brother look FAIR and LEGITIMATE.

(Which, Daddy Alex points out, is clearly why Yvette and Andy are trying so hard to persuade Liz that she should bail out; they will have a better PERCENTAGE in the first round if she's just not there, which will look better when – they calculate – they win on transfers.

Plus they probably reckon they've a better chance of picking up support from people who would have put Liz Kendal "1" – Liz and her campaign manager, by current polling – if voting for Liz isn't an option. If you've got a vote you are more likely to use it, and so pick either Yvette or Andy; if Liz is on the poll, then you might just stop voting after giving your first preference to her.)

The rise of Mr Corbyn has been compared (whether it is fair or not) to the current pole position in the polls for Dame Donald of Trump in the Replutocratic Primaries in Americaland. Just as the Prima Donald is a throwback to the land before treating people with respect, so Uncle Jezza, the new Santa Clause Four, is a throwback to the land before treating people's choices and aspirations with respect.

The intellectual comparison is, of course, laughable. But they ARE both, in their ways, a SYMPTOM of our troubled politics and economic hardship, with the people to whom they appeal reaching out for a comfort blanket of NOSTALGIA, for the certainty and ideological purity even that a SUPERFICIAL view of the past suggests existed there and no longer does.

It is what you might call the CATHOLIC view of political history – we lived in that ideological EDEN before the millennial FALL. Lord Blarimort cast here as the SERPENT. (And like the Catholic view of ORIGINAL INNOCENCE and the FALL into SIN (or indeed SPIN), it is based on MYTH not truth; politics was ALWAYS dirty and compromised.)

In a way, Mr Corbyn is the completely logical outcome of Hard Labour's problem with their own history and the economy. They've spent five years in denial about the events that led to the crash, their spending record – and record spending – running a deficit during a boom, stoking the boiler of an already-overheating economy with cheap borrowing while taking their eye off the banking regulation ball.

Many in Hard Labour won't or can't admit that the Coalition by implementing austerity budgets took the only possible course of action – as did every other government on the face of the planet; as in fact, Labour would have done themselves (as they even SAID until the day they lost the 2010 election and with it any direct accountability or sense of responsibility).

Corbyn's rejection of Liberal Keynesian economics – of balancing the books over the cycle, automatic stabilisers in the downturns and surpluses in boom time – in favour of old-style Statism and the Command Economy appeals to everyone who wishes that there was a better, purer way.

(I don't believe in "there is no alternative"; but I don't believe that the failed policies of the past ARE that alternative.)

Again and again the same zombie arguments keep shambling out from Labour and their supporters: Labour's overspending didn't cause the crash. Or more simply "blame the bankers", "blame the Tories", "blame anyone… in fact… other than ourselves".

Failing to take responsibility is at the heart of Labour's failure to move on from 2008, and their failure to develop a new programme based on credible economics. Corbyn is NOT about taking responsibility and moving on; quite the reverse, he's all about saying we were never wrong in the first place, reassuring them that the Satanic Blairimort was an aberration (for not spending ENOUGH money!), and making them feel better about themselves (and never mind all the people they will fail by putting their own feelings first).

The World that Corbyn wants to take us back to, one of full employment in mass industry – reopening the coal pits, for heaven's sake – DOES NOT EXIST. If fact it's only going FURTHER AWAY! Full employment will get less and less plausible as more and more jobs become automated – self-driven cars mean robot lorries and no more truck drivers (and the tube drivers will strike once too often and go the same way too). And that's merely the beginning.

We need to plan NOW for an economy where we all share the proceeds of innovation and growth, not just those with the capital to buy themselves a secure income from robot labour, before we all end up serving coffee to the 0.0001% in branches of Trump-Branded EvilCorp.

The #LibDemFightback is the place to start.

But we NEED the Official Opposition to get their act together too.

But when the response of Labour activists to THEIR OWN ELECTION POST MORTEM is to call it "Bull…", they might just not be in a place to do so.

Right now, the Tories are running rampant, blaming victims of wars (often ones Great Britain is complicit in starting) for threatening their home comforts, selling off banks to the advantage of their friends and doing unspeakable things to education and health, and all the while shredding the Constitution, probably tearing the Country apart, for their shoddy advantage.

They are behaving like they believe there is no tomorrow. Probably because they know that for them there isn't one. They are acting like they think they will never win an election again. And quite probably – in spite of all the column inches saying they cannot lose in 2020 – they are right, they can and they will. The chances of May's election fluke being repeated are vastly reduced by the Liberal Democrats simply refusing to lie down and die.

The only thing that might save them, in fact, is that this Leadership contest is making Labour LESS electable than in 1983.

Day 3739: Money

Monday:


I suppose we all like to THINK that we could take a one pound coin to the Bank of England and swap it for one pound coin's worth of gold. But if you take your pound coin to the Bank of England, all they will give you in exchange is… ANOTHER pound coin.

Of course, a moment's thought will explain why. If Great Britain, a trillion pounds in debt, were, like a dragon at Gringotts, sitting on a great big hoard of gold, wouldn't we, um, sell it to pay off the debt?

Oh wait, Mr Frown already did that.



There is a theory that money exists just because the Government SAYS that it does.

This is what is known as "Modern Monetary Theory" or "MMT", and I have recently been reading a small tome (pdf) by one of its proponents, a Mr Warren Mosler.

It's a bit like discovering a SITH HOLOCRON.

You can see how the ideas of the "other side" are put together – there is a LOT in there that clearly informs the what I call "thinking" of Mr Bully Balls, for example – but you can't quite help but feel oddly REPULSED because there's clearly SOMETHING not quite right, even if you can't put your fluffy foot on what it is!

(And I thought that MMT was a kind of TANK for BATTLE DROIDS in STAR WARS, but it turns out that's an "MTT" or "Multi-Troop Transport". Though as it happens, the Wackypedia disambiguation for "MMT" offers up both "Modern Monetary Theory" AND "Magical Mystery Tour". You can make your own jokes up, really.)

Now you SHOULD bear in mind that Mr Mosler is a RESPECTED and WORLD-RENOWN economist with YEARS of study and thought behind his works. Also he's a candidate for the US Senate. And I am a stuffed elephant. Admittedly an AWARD-WINNING stuffed elephant, but even so.

And what he has to say READS very PLAUSIBLY.

But my rule of thumb is if it sounds too good to be true it almost certainly IS too good to be true. And this doesn't half sound like the MAGIC MONEY TREE.

Money does NOT grow on trees. Unless you are the survivors of the Golgafrinchian "B Ark" that crash-landed on prehistoric Earth in Mr Douglas Adams' "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy". They adopted the LEAF as their currency and all became instant millionaires. Although there was a small problem with inflation. As we will see, this is a not untypical outcome of creating money from nothing.

Anyway, I'm going to try to explain some of the things in his theory and why I think they must be wrong. But you may prefer to read him in his own words and decide for yourself.


In this theory, since money exists because the government says it does, then taxation is just the government saying that some of the money – your money – does NOT exist any more. Similarly, government spending is just the government creating new money, as and when it needs it. And there is NO CONNECTION between the two.

Thus the government can never go bankrupt. Do you see the attraction for Hard Labour?

When the government taxes you, claims Mr Mosler, all it does is change the numbers on your bank account. When the government spends, all it does is change the numbers on the bank account of whoever it is paying.

Mr Mosler likens this to the scoreboard in a football game. (I suspect he means an AMERICAN football game, but it still counts.) When one team scores, the ground staff change the numbers on the scoreboard. They don't need to have a supply of "goals" beforehand; they just "create" the score at the point when it is needed.

This leads to the BACKWARDS-SEEMING notion that the government does NOT raise taxes in order to have money which it can spend, but instead SPENDS so that people will have money which it then collects again in taxes.

Oh dear; Daddy says his head has just turned inside out!

let me try and give you Mr Mosler's explanation:

The government demands tax from people (under threat of punishment) and only accepts payment in its own special tokens (what we call "the currency" which is "pounds and pence" to you and me or "dollars" to Mr Mosler).

This means that people have to OBTAIN currency, which they can only get from the people who create the currency, i.e. the government themselves.

Which, in turn, means that people EITHER have to work for the government directly OR produce something which they can trade with government employees in order to get the required tokens to settle their tax bill.

So, the government "creates" all the money and "puts it into the economy" (spot the Bully Balls phrase). Private business just "re-circulates" the money inside the economy like a big tumble-drier full of notes. And then the government destroys some of the money by taxation.

The illogical logical consequence of this is that if you want to GROW the economy… the government should almost always run a deficit.

(Further counter-factual arguments that follow include: "running a trade deficit is good because imports are a real benefit and exports are a real cost(!)"; and "leaving our debts for our kids is fine – they'll still enjoy all the benefits of the goods they produce because they can't send those goods back via time travel to settle our debts now(!)" – to which I have to reply: "no, but they CAN send them to CHINA to settle the debt. You IDIOT.")

Now, this is all rather like that optical illusion of those monks walking up the endless stairway. It LOOKS like it makes sense, but surely there's something WRONG somewhere.

And I think that, actually, it has the same PROBLEM as the monks' stairwell: it's a system with NO INPUT. Or, as Daddy Alex puts it: a perpetual stagnation machine!

Suppose EVERYONE goes to work for the government. The government can create the money to pay everyone and everyone can pay their taxes, and what happens? Everyone starves to death.


Look, let's just step back a second and ask the IMPORTANT question: what IS this thing called "the economy" anyway?

Well, it seems to me that "the economy" is basically a machine for turning WORK into GOODIES.

Most people have some basic needs: food, shelter, James Bond DVDs and so on.

At the most basic level: you COULD go out and fix all of these things for yourself: you could catch your own food; you could build your own shelter; you could make your own cine-camera and film yourself performing your own James Bond script… or is that just me?

This is called a SUBSISTENCE economy, or TOO MUCH EFFORT.

A step up from that is that YOU could go and gather food while YOUR FRIEND could stay behind and build shelter. This is a (slightly) more efficient use of both your time. AND it is the most basic form of ECONOMY: you put in your labour getting food and get out BOTH food AND shelter; your mate puts in labour building shelter and gets out BOTH shelter AND food.

You've both turned your work into more goodies.

It should be pretty obvious how you extend this to a BARTER economy: you and your friend might have EXTRA food left over – suppose you're especially good at gathering apples, you might have more apples than you need or want. So you can take off with some of your EXTRA apples and see if you can't find someone with something they might be willing to SWAP. Perhaps you find someone who's really good at growing potatoes.

So now, you've put in your work gathering apples and you've got apples AND shelter AND potatoes.

BARTER allows for more complicated economies to develop. If you aren't spending all your time gathering your own food and finding your own shelter then you can SPECIALISE: for example you can become an expert in making TOOLS. The tools themselves might not feed or shelter you, but they enable someone else to be BETTER at getting food or making shelter. So you make them a tool, and they use it to increase the stuff they get from their labour, and in return give some of the excess back to you.

[Even today, this is why trade is GOOD – and why exports are NOT a cost; you've converted your labour into goodies which you swap for other goodies and everyone benefits.]

So you can see how this is a BETTER sort of economy, but it's still a bit CUMBERSOME. Carrying, say, a flock of sheep around with you to exchange for stuff is a bit of a chore, not to mention fiddling with the small change.

Eventually, it occurred to people that carrying around small chunks of VALUABLE stuff – mainly lumps of gold – was more convenient.

Now, a chap called King Croesus of Lydia came up with the idea of making regular sized lumps of gold so that you could easily count out different amounts depending on how much things were worth. And he decided to have his face stamped onto each one – well, he was king, after all. This was the invention of COINS, and also why we still talk about being "as rich as Croesus" – because for a while at least he did literally own all of the money in the world.

Of course it helped that his kingdom of Lydia – in modern day Turkey – was sat on a great big deposit of gold to make coins out of. Well, electrum, actually, which is a naturally occurring alloy or what we call gold mixed with silver, though HE called it gold, and so invented debasing the currency at the same time that he invented a currency to debase!

Unfortunately for King Croesus, Lydia was also slap-bang in between Greece and Persia and – with all that gold – a very tasty target for invasion; Croesus made the SLIGHT strategic error of pre-emptively attacking the vast Persian Empire who promptly obliterated him. Still, they quite liked this "coins" notion.

So, once the idea had caught on, money in those Ye Olden Dayes was worth its weight in gold mainly because, Croesus electrum aside, it WAS gold. Or silver. Or copper. Or sometimes shiny shells. Or even leather belts. I'm drifting…

This was called COMMODITY money, because the money itself was an exchangeable commodity or what experts call "useful stuff". The economy was now basically "BARTER PLUS": that is, LIKE barter but with a sort of agreed exchange rate based on the value of the stuff you made your coins from.

This was quite a lot of FUSS, though. The coins were HEAVY and cumbersome and even if people DIDN'T try to cheat you by mixing their gold with silver (or some copper or tin or lead or whatever), it wasn't always easy to be sure you were getting the weight of gold you thought you were. Different kings issued coins in different weights so they ought to be worth less or more than each other, but some traders were a bit crafty about that too.

So, to get around all this, someone came up with the idea of PAPER money. And as most people probably know, it was the CHINESE who thought of it first.

There is a famous episode of Doctor Who where Mighty Kublai Khan gives Dr Woo some of his new paper money. And this was worth real stuff: these notes were basically written I.O.U's, which could be exchanged for the stated amount of gold, silver or silk and wily old Kublai was as good as his (printed) word when it came to his money.

Unfortunately, his descendents were less trustworthy: running short of resources, they just PRINTED extra currency and carried on spending, resulting in nasty case of HYPERINFLATION – a situation that brought down their dynasty and that the subsequent Ming Dynasty only got out of by abolishing the currency all together!

Nevertheless, Kublai Khan's cash was an early example of what we call FIAT MONEY. Now, that's NOT currency that you can exchange for a small Italian car. It is money where the VALUE does not depend on what it is MADE of, but on the PROMISE that it is worth what it says it is worth. Fiat comes from the Latin for "let it be" as in "let it be worth THIS".

Ultimately – or at least as ultimately as the 21st Century – this evolves into our system where we don't even need the paper, and the promises are recorded as electronic scores inside banking machines.

Now, I think I can see how this FIAT system LOOKS like it's the government just wishing money into existence with a "let it be"; even more, I can see how the electronic recording of money makes it LOOK even more like Mr Mosler's football scoreboard.

But I think that those resemblances are SUPERFICIAL.

You can't ACTUALLY exchange your goals on the scoreboard for anything else.

Or, on a deeper level, the rewards of the players ARE determined (in the long run) by those numbers of goals scored, so in a way they DO exchange goals for exchangeable currency… BUT, that currency is paid for from the receipts that the club got at the gates (and from television rights) so in a way the ground staff DO have a supply of "goals" before they put the scores up on the board. Money goes in – the money is "turned into goals" for which the players labour – and then the scores are turned back into money which goes out again. There's just not a simple linear relationship between these flows.


Money is essentially a DEBT: it represents the VALUE that we are OWED for the labour and resources that we have put in (or maybe that someone else, our Daddies perhaps, put in and then gifted to us); and/or it represents the VALUE of goodies we expect to get OUT in return. And that is why we are able to swap money for goodies. Or for that matter vice versa if, for example, you produce James Bond DVDs and want my pocket money.


Suppose *I* choose to create a currency. It WOULDN'T have any VALUE because no one else would BELIEVE in it.

I could call it the CURRANT. It'll be a decimal currency: ten currants equals one BUN. Actually, currants are delicious and nutritious and that's in danger of being a COMMODITY CURRENCY that MIGHT have actual value. I'm drifting again…

Mr Mosler suggests another example of a family where the parents issue the children with coupons for doing chores under the rule that the children have to pay a "tax" of ten coupons or face punishment. But again, that's another system without input. Not to mention sadistic! The parents obviously have to go out to work to support themselves and their kids, even if they just go hunter-gathering. So that's NOT like a government "creating" currency. The kids get food protection, shelter "for free" from their parents. Probably not James Bond DVDs from THESE parents, though, the swine! Again, that's not ANYTHING like the way that real governments or real economies work.

"But," says Dr Freud, "literally infantilizing everyone EXCEPT ze government – zat IZ, how you say, revealing."

No government just sits down and CREATES an entire currency from scratch just by issuing it. Even when introducing a NEW currency – like when the Euro arrived in 1 January 1999 (yes, the single currency is two years older than ME!); or when pounds and pence replaced pounds shillings and pence on 15 February 1971 (yes, our "grand historic traditional pound" is two weeks YOUNGER than Daddy Richard!) – the new currency is swapped for old currency. So in theory (if not always in practice) the VALUE – or if you prefer the DEBT for LABOUR put in – gets carried forwards intact.

So if governments DON'T create all the money, where DOES the money come from?

Well, there's a bit of a CHICKEN and EGG thing going on: because there IS money in circulation, we BELIEVE people (governments or banks) when they gives us more money.

Look, there is more money IN CIRCULATION than is just the spending of the government.

If I was a farmer with a corn field, I could EAT some of my corn, TRADE some of my corn and KEEP some to PLANT next year. I don't need ANY input of "money" government.

Suppose that the person that I want to trade my corn with DOES want to pay me with money. Must they have got that money from the government? No, they could BORROW it from a bank. The BANK (not the government) creates the money. It also creates a DEBT that will have to be paid off with some WORK sooner or later. I ACCEPT the money because I BELIEVE the bank's promise to back up the money with assets, that is that the bank will get hold of the promised labour or goodies for me either directly from my trader or indirectly from someone else who has created a similar debt.

So we've added some VALUE to the economy (my corn) and added MONEY to the economy (as a debt my trader – or someone – will have to repay, backed up by the bank's promise to make them) and the government had nothing to do with it.

In fact there is a case for saying that the value of money is not created by the government but by the fact that the banks will accept it in settlement of debts. Or ultimately that any of US will accept it in settlement of debts.

And thus, the level of money in circulation has built up over time.

The labour put in by our parents and grand-parents and great-grand-parents and so on has built up some assets that endure. Even if the VALUE of those assets is concentrated into the hands of a very small number of people (starting with the government, formerly the King), the DEBT for that Labour (i.e. the MONEY) has been spread about rather thinly.


Since the first introduction of Fiat Money, what has tended to happen is that currencies have swung between being hard guarantees of convertibility into assets to open ended government promises depending mainly on how much money the government needs in circulation compared to how much people TRUST the government.

For example, after World War Part Two, and particularly remembering the inter-war inflation in Germany, trust in governments was very LOW so governments had to stick to the Gold Standard, essentially promising that they would always swap actual gold for currency if asked.

At the start of the Nineteen Seventies, President Tricky Dickey Nixon BROKE the Gold Standard and said US Dollars would no longer be a straight swap for gold.

He did this because too many people (mainly the Swiss) kept asking him for the metal stuff and it's just a bit AWKWARD for governments to have to hold a great deal of gold in reserve, on the off chance someone happens to ask for it. Just ask Mr Frown. Ahem. It doesn't earn you any interest, just sitting there glittering, and its value can fall relative to other investments (although recently it has performed better as people see it as a long term safe store of value because it's basically indestructible, unlike – as 2008 reminded us – the stock market).

More importantly, gold is in short supply which tends to limit the amount of money backed by gold that any (or even all) government can issue.

And governments have MORE assets than just their gold. Foreign currency reserves; debts; chunks of land. And one way of looking at assets is that they are basically something that you can convert into money later, whether that is gold or land that you can sell or a debt that you will get repaid. So from that point of view, FUTURE TAX REVENUES are "something that you can convert into money later" so sometimes governments look at their future tax revenues as ASSETS too. They issue money as a DEBT, a promise of goodies or labour, and they get the goodies or the labour to clear that debt IN THE FUTURE.

When it came to breaking the Gold Standard, it was a bit dodgy for a while, but basically people ACCEPTED that America had a basically strong economy and would be good for paying the debts. And the perceived value of the Dollar stayed good.

So governments CAN "create" money, but only in the same way that banks can "create" money i.e. because HISTORY means that they have assets and because we BELIEVE them when they promise they will swap the money for a share of those assets.

The government's ability to create money relies on our COLLUSION; money is created by our BELIEF that the debt will be settled, not by the government's say-so.

And we have already seen what happens when people DON'T believe their government when it creates money by its say-so: you get hyperinflation. It brought down the Yuan Dynasty in ancient China. It brought down the Weimar Republic in pre-war Germany. And today you can see the enormous strains being placed on the Euro because the governments of Greece, Ireland and now Portugal have lost credibility.




Money has been described (by Iain M Banks fictional ultra-smug post-scarcity society "The Culture" and/or their dragged-up Doctor Who cousins "The People") as an only-slightly-better-than-the-most-inefficient method of rationing in a society with limited resources. And the hardly-any-less-smug* Federation of Star Trek also claim to have abolished money. To which I say, yes, but you're FICTIONAL.

We have to live in a world where resources ARE limited. And that applies to governments too. So even if a government COULD create infinite MONEY, there is a strictly FINITE amount of resources it could obtain with that cash. So there is a FINITE VALUE to that money.

And, as Mr Dougie Adams would tell you, any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no difference: which is why printing money makes it worthless.

PS

*Daddy Alex couldn't disagree more! He says the Federation are far MORE smug – and with much less to be smug about! Also, they may CLAIM to have abolished money, but that doesn't stop them trading "gold pressed latinum" with the Ferengi when it suits them.

Daddy suggests that when Space Commander Sisko goes to the bar and says "give me a drink", Mr Quark says, "that will be one slip of latinum," rather than "your word and a shower of your imaginary Federation pixie dust? That'll do nicely…"

Obviously, that's NONSENSE. Space Commander Sisko would BULLY Mr Quark into giving him a drink or else the LIGHT and AIR gets TURNED OFF.

Though that DOES raise an interesting point: Mr Quark IS charging his customers for drinks, and for time in his only-to-be-used-for-wholesome-and-morally-uplifting-entertainment holosuites. So is he getting his power for replication and holograms for free from the station? If he is, do the Federation MIND him profiteering off their back? Even when THEY are the ones being charged for DRINKS? And if not, what do the "we don't use money" Federation DO with the rent they charge him?

Mind you, the Federation clearly have both technology ("replicators") that can make literally anything from thin air, or rather energy AND apparently inexhaustible supplies of cheap energy** to power them with. Under their "Prime Directive" they refuse to share this technology with their neighbours. So they have a society with limitless resources surrounded by (relatively) poor neighbours and no immigration problem… which makes you wonder what just what KIND of a society it might be.

PPS

**Daddy reckons that the Federation has some sort of perpetual motion machines, and wonders if it might not be the replicators themselves – and you know he might be sort of right: if the replicators can replicate ANTI-MATTER (and why wouldn't they be able to?) then your onto a winner.

You would need to put E=mc2 of energy IN, but you could annihilate the anti-matter with an identical mass of matter to get 2xE=2 mc2 or twice as much energy OUT.

Even allowing for a bit lost to inefficiency, that would be almost limitless free energy so long as you can keep your reactors topped up with matter in the form of any handy planets, stars, or annoying neighbouring civilisations who bug you about sharing the technology…
.

Day 3050: Start Wreck

Saturday:


ooo EEEE ooo!

Open hailing frequencies and set phasers to POPCORN! We've been to see Star Trek, the latest big screen adaptation of the adventures of Captain Quirk and his crew. This movie is EASY to sneak into, so long as you have TRANSPORTER TECHNOLOGY to BEAM you into the FRONT ROW!

We even got me a STAR FLEET UNIFORM for the occasion!

Red Shirt! That's GOOD isn't it?

Anyway, this film had produced universal happiness and positive responses everywhere, so I shall let Daddy Richard write a review.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong…?

(spoilers follow)

Why did I come out of JJ Abrams' cartoon space romp with a sense of dissatisfaction? I tried talking it over with Alex.

Was it the direction? No.

Reviewers of Star Trek seem to have a penchant for referencing Abrams' previous big-screen adaptation of a cult Sixties series, namely Mission Impossible III. There's a tendency to describe MI-III as "underrated". It isn't underrated; it's just bad. It starts off like a rocket (and the opening gags, both in the German wind-farm and the Vatican, are good and original) but it rapidly runs out of fizz, as Tom Cruise jumps off yet another tall building and the ending trails away like an afterthought, or a task on The Apprentice where they've left no time to complete the final reel.

Thankfully, Star Trek is nothing like that. It was pacey, interesting if occasionally a touch ADD frenetic, but more importantly it started with a bang, before grounding us in the relationships of these people and building to a satisfying conclusion.

Was it the acting? Certainly not.

Karl Urban is uncanny in the role of DeForest Kelly, capturing his spirit perfectly: brilliant, irascible, capable of great acts of friendship and human enough to make mistakes. Zachary Quinto is always a delight to watch, even if his Spock couldn't quite escape the shadow of his Sylar (the Vulcan should never, ever have a "hint of a smile" expression, particularly not when it's a superhuman serial killer's trademark). Leonard Nimoy, however, is perfect, almost Zen-like in his portrayal of the old Spock, who has been though it all and achieved a balance and inner peace between his human and Vulcan heritages. Zoe Saldana, while completely different to the incomparable Nichelle Nichols (Alex says he saw something of a similarity in the eyes, occasionally), brought a beautiful fresh strength to the character, and was granted substantial sub-plots around her relationships with both Kirk and Spock. Like Mat, I was pleasantly surprised to come out without wanting to kill Simon Pegg, although it's irresistible to imagine David Tennant's Doctor saying to him: "No, no, don't do that!" (And just when did Scotty become the comic relief, anyway?) Anton Yelchin does not have the charm of Walter Koenig. He has his own charm, and should be allowed to play more of that, and not get lumbered with the "Wictor Wictor" jokes. Likewise, John Cho does not have the charm of George Takai. In the absence of character, they gave him a sword fight. (A clue: that is not fencing.) And Chris Pine did perfectly well in the role of Ethan Hunt.

Did the recasting itself matter? Alex said that he had long since come to terms with the idea that this was Star Fleet Muppet Babies. I can understand that people might find this tricky. For years Star Trek has prospered by finding new crews to fill its starships, finding new combinations to explore. But that in itself becomes formulaic: the emotional one, the logical one, the captain in the middle – they've rung different changes on these through The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and the rest. Another crew would just be Kirk, Spock and all in drag again.

And of course the idea of going back to the beginning is to reach out beyond the core audience. It's to tell a story for those with a vague memory that goes Star Trek/Kirk/Spock space stuff. That's what means that doing a Star Trek movie with another new crew, even one that had – say – George Takei as Captain of the Excelsior or Jonathan Franks commanding the Titan, wouldn't work. It wouldn't be in the sense of folk memory Star Trek.

Was it the visual effects, then? No, on the whole they were spiffy.

The shape of the Enterprise, allegedly more curvaceous than is seemly, didn't bother me in the slightest.

Having said that, all those different shaped starships, with wings and multiple nacelles and the rest, bugged me out enormously. There's no sense that this Star Fleet of ships have evolved with a history. The USS Kelvin, from 25 years earlier, looks right it looks like a less advanced design from which the Enterprise will later emerge. But the fleet that leaves for Vulcan with the Enterprise, they're just a mish-mash of designs as though someone took a look at the design board and said, "Let's do EVERYTHING!"

And it wasn't exactly a problem, but boy did the fleet going to warp look just like something out of Star Wars. With Ambassador Spock's flyer looking suspiciously like the Gungan Bongo Submarine from the Phantom Menace, of course.

The big spiky Romulan ship is a very nice big spiky Romulan ship, much nicer than the one in Nemesis and one that might vaguely have come from the same culture as the Romulan Warbirds of the Next Generation era. Vaguely. Its interior was rather "mysterious vast alien space", somewhat after V'ger, but it worked well enough for running and jumping around.

The transporter effect has a very nice feel to it, like little particles flying into place as they build you up from a giant jigsaw. Sulu's retractable sword was rather silly but the effect worked, in fact the whole diving onto the mining platform sequence was brilliantly done.

And Saturn was lovely. Even if ploughing into it (or possibly Titan) at warp speed ought to have made more of a "bang!"

Perhaps it was the plot? Hmmmm, that depends…

Back in the Twentieth Century, as radiation-powered super-turkey "Godzilla" (US abomination version) was hitting cinemas under the slogan "Size Matters", Lucasfilm, then putting the finishing touches to "Star Wars, Episode I, will this title never end, the Phantom Menace", briefly put up on their website the vainglorious response: "Plot Matters".

But look how well that turned out!

The Phantom Menace is, as any fule nose, the third movie from the Lucas' stable with the same plot as Return of the Jedi and Star Wars, just with first muppets and then CGI frogs standing in for the Rebel Alliance for the "blow up the spherical-spacecraft-in-orbit at the end" bit.

But to my mind "plot" just means the sequence of events that the characters have to pass through; story is the thing that you care about, it is, if you'll forgive the cliché, the journey that the characters go on, not just the places they visit (and, yes, I'm aware that E M Forster may have had it the other way around).

JJ Abrams has apparently never seen the immediately-preceding movie in the franchise, Star Trek: Nemesis. Which is a shame, or he'd have known that his plot – Romulan with big spiky ship plans to go Death Star on the Earth while riffing on The Wrath of Khan – was oddly familiar.

(It is, as I said, a very nice big spiky ship. But even so…)

But is that what is important? When, because they are telling different stories, the whole character of the two movies couldn't be more different.

Star Trek: Nemesis is all shades of grey – not the moral dilemmas, the colour palette. Grey uniforms and gloomy shadows are the order of the day. It's as if it's self-consciously trying to feel end-of-an-era; far from being a meditation on aging (as the similarly plotted Wrath of Khan) it sometimes seems like an attempt to just wrap everything up. With the cast all starting to get a little bit too old for this sort of thing and on television Enterprise bolding journeying to the bottom of the ratings, there was much talk of "too much Star Trek".

In contrast, Star Trek (2009) is full of primary colours and brightly lit, whether it's the stark whites of the bridge or sunlit Vulcan or also-sunlit San Francisco. Even the ice-planet Delta Vega is brilliant white with a dash of scarlet space-monster.

And it's all about beginnings, opening with Kirk's birth (in battle, no less) and his joining the Star Fleet Academy and Spock's decision to join Star Fleet, and then on to the "first mission". Everything is about the future opening up to these people, whether it's Spock's cautious, logical planning or Kirk's gung-ho barrelling into it.

Positivity suffuses this movie, and that's a good thing.

In fact, it's a bit of a laugh, even though the whole of the backstory is palpably dreadful: the galaxy being threatened by a supernova is pulp SF of the worst kind, shockingly misunderstanding the differences in scale between these two phenomena. If you are going to use real science terms, it is too much to ask the writer for a ten-second search on the Wikipedia?

And even Nimoy can't save exposition as dreadful as "suddenly, the worst happened… Romulus was destroyed!"

What? How? What? Was it Romulus' own star that was going supernova? You do know that a supernova is an exploding star, don't you, JJ? So this solution to save the galaxy by turning it into a black hole… not looking much good for Romulus anyway, was it? Also, you've forgotten Remus altogether, haven't you. (Which is ironic given that in part, Star Trek: Nemesis was about how pissed the Remans were that everyone kept forgetting about them.)

None of that really seems to matter, though, when were racing along with such glee.

Meanwhile, "Red Matter" scores huge marks on the "drive Lawrence Miles nuts" scale, being clearly drawn from the same well as the mysterious, all-powerful and probably imaginary "Red Uranium" macguffin from "This Town Will Never Let Us Go". "Nahhh," says Alex, "surely it's from Bugs' Red Mercury!"

And clearly someone has been using the Infinite Improbability Drive in this universe, because the chances of Spock marooning Kirk not merely on the same planet as but within walking distance of where Nero has marooned the time/dimension-warped Ambassador Spock has to measure in the "ooh, that's a bit unlikely" range.

(Also, we get a flashback of Spock looking up and seeing Vulcan implode in the sky above him which is clearly ripped off from staring up at the Death Star explosion at the end of Return of the Jedi. Now, I'm not much of an astronomer, but neither Mars nor Venus are that large in the Earth's sky… so we're basically saying that Delta Vega is Vulcan's moon. And therefore, very much likely to be heading into that same black hole any time now.)

(Of course, back in the "real" universe of classic Star Trek, in "The Man Trap", there's a lovely flirtatious scene between Spock and Uhura where she asks him if he's never gazed up at the moon. "Vulcan has no moon," states Spock unemotionally. I suppose now, instead of the classy "I'm not surprised, Mr Spock," Uhura will have to answer "No, you berk, because it got foomed with the rest of your stupid homeworld". Sigh.)

And there are some good sci-fi ideas, even "Star Trek" ideas, in the mix too. That the Romulan invader isn't an almighty warship from the future, merely a mining ship that came back in time by accident is really quite smart. Imagine a super-tanker from today finding itself confronting the Pirates of the Caribbean… yes, you're quite right, the pirates would have cannons and the super-tanker wouldn't. But the Romulans are a pretty piratical bunch themselves, maybe they're happy for their merchant fleet to carry torpedoes.

Similarly, when Spock starts behaving in a fashion that has Alex going, "er, er, I'm sure even Star Fleet wouldn't let him do that" (though remember, we've seen Star Fleet's "correctional planets") the film has an answer for him: he's quite right, and Kirk proving to Spock that the Vulcan is emotionally compromised is a key turning point.

Mind you, you would have thought that somebody could have mentioned to the director that time/space anomalies are not exactly the cutting-edge of "new" among the Star Trek stories of this world.

Add to that, they even "hang a lantern" on the whole cliché when young Kirk says to old Spock: "isn't going back in time to give yourself the answer cheating?"



Was it that it wasn't "Star Trek" enough?

Well, in the sense that Star Trek ought to be about exploration, new worlds, new civilisations rather than big space battles then that is true.

But it's also true of Star Trek's II and VI which are arguably the best of the breed.

Ironically, Star Trek, The Motionless Picture (new life form), Star Trek III, the Search for Plot (strange new world) and Star Trek V (where no one has gone before) are closer to what Star Trek ought to be about than the, er, good ones. I'll kind of let Star Trek IV get away with it because treating 1980s California as a "strange new world" is part of the joke.

What many people would say, though, is that Star Trek is about the human relationships of the crew. In that sense, The Wrath of Khan (Kirk deals with growing old, his own metaphorical Kobyashi Maru) and The Undiscovered County (Kirk faces his own prejudices) are very Star Trek.

Judged by that standard, this movie was a little hit-and-miss. The drawing together of the crew, Kirk's instant friendship with McCoy contrasted with Uhura's coolness and Spock's outright animosity, form a solid backbone, but it equally lacks a true emotional through-line. Kirk is a cocky bastard right from the start (especially in the Anakin Skywalker sulky-teenager scene – what exactly was that supposed to add?) and is still a cocky bastard at the end. He doesn't appear to learn anything, and the other crew members don't so much come to admire him as acquiesce to his Captaincy. No, that's unfair: the do come to admire him, just for no particularly obvious reason. Maybe they all have Stockholm Syndrome by the end.

Was it the pick'n'mix approach to continuity, then?

I have to admit that this may have left me irked. It's funny little things, things that are out of place, or rather in place for no reason other than to say "hey, I watched the DVD of The Wrath of Khan".

Young Spock gets to play Saavik to his (sort-of) older self when he complains "you lied" and Nimoy gets to find new ways of saying "moi?". Similarly, Spock gives the young Scotty the secret of his big discovery, just as Scotty gave the inventor of transparent aluminium the secret of his big discovery back in The Voyage Home. And when Sulu tries to put the Enterprise in gear for the first time he stalls her, just like the Excelsior did in The Search for Spock. And Romulan commander Nero (you're kidding, right? No, that is his name) tortures Captain Pike with those beetle/scorpion/bug things from Ceti Alpha Five that kept Khan amused.

Is this homage or just grinding lack of originality? Am I supposed to be impressed by these "kisses to the past" or just think that you're rummaging through the series' locker for the good bits to pilfer?

Returning to The Wrath of Khan, though, the recurring motif in the film is the Kobayashi Maru test, which Saavik takes at the start and Spock passes at the end. During the film it is revealed that Kirk took the test three times and on the third go, he beat it. He beat it by reprogramming the computer, by cheating, but nevertheless he beat the unbeatable test because – and this is the message of his life, but more importantly almost the whole point of Star Trek – he doesn't believe in the no-win scenario. Optimism wins.

As a key plot point in a movie about facing the inevitable and not giving up your optimism, about going through hell and feeling young at the end, that is a thing of legend.

It is crushingly banal to actually show us the test.

Worse than that, to show us a test where "cocky bastard" Kirk is completely cock-sure that he is going to win and doesn't bother to hide it and, worse, where his win is so blatantly a cheat. The simulator hiccoughs and the Klingon warbirds' shields are down. Excuse me? He might as well have just stood up and announced "Computer, execute Kirk Hack Code One!"

(And while we're on the subject, Klingon warships are called "battlecruisers"; it's Romulan warships that are called "Warbirds". Why does this bug me more than the similar error of calling the Klingon scout a "Bird of Prey" from Star Trek III onwards?)

Alex puts forward the idea that in the "real" Star Trek universe the "real" Kirk did beat the test with a solution that was worthy of a "commendation for original thinking". But this Kirk is different: he's had a different upbringing without the influence of his father. The George Kirk of this universe died on the USS Kelvin. So this Kirk is arrogant and cocky and responds aggressively and not necessarily wisely. And so, rather than beating the test, he's actually doing this so blatantly as a deliberate act of defiance, a massive "giving the finger" to the test he doesn’t believe in.

And this, I think, brings us to the answer we arrived at as to why this Star Trek, which I enjoyed, which amused me, entertained me, even moved me occasionally, left me with the feeling that it was hollow.

The problem for me is not the convoluted time travel / dimension jump to a parallel universe plotline. It's not that the approach to continuity is either slipshod or worse deliberately slipshod.

The answer that we settled on is slightly more subtle than that.

It's that the film makes a point of using its plot, in fact the entire point of its plot is to say: "hey folks, we're in a different Universe so the continuity doesn't apply to us!"

There is a point to watching The Wrath of Khan beyond seeing Enterprise and Reliant duke it out – brilliantly choreographed, and far better than anything here, though that space battle is.

There is no similar point to watching JJ Abrams' Star Trek.

Allow me to digress…

In the long twilight of Doctor Who, between the Paul McGann movie and the Russell Davies renaissance, there came a massive two-book story by Lawrence Miles called "Interference".

In the midst of an adventure where the eighth Doctor gets locked up interminably (again) and Faction Paradox kidnap his companions, where the better bits are in fact an extended adventure for K-9 and Company, seemingly incidentally the Doctor crosses his timeline with that of his third incarnation. And then at the end of the story, the third Doctor gets shot dead and regenerates. Without ever going near Metebelis III. With nary a whiff of a Giant Spider.

"Interference" is a story with… issues. Should it be mentioned in our flat, we will often immediately quote either Sutekh from "Pyramids of Mars" – "There is…[voice trembles with rage] …Interference!" – or Professor Bernice Summerfield from "The Shadow of the Scourge" – "Damn! Interference!"

Funny story: "Goddess, that Interference is awful" says I, loudly, at the Fitzroy Tavern surrounded by Who fans. "Oh yes, why?" says the terribly nice author standing immediately behind me who was, frankly, ever so good enough not to hit me for bad-mouthing his book…

My problem at the time with "Interference" centred on the fact that I was assuming that there was supposed to be a causal connection between the actions of the Doctor in his eighth self and the change to the fate of his third self. And there wasn't.

(Actually, apart from the Doctor appearing as a ghost to his earlier self, there is another connection, namely the eighth Doctor's companion Fitz who, by a route too ludicrously circuitous to describe, arrives a thousand years later in the third Doctor's adventure as the villain. But he doesn't cause the third Doctor to be there, nor does he materially affect the course of events nor make any use of foreknowledge to change things. So, as I say, the eighth Doctor's adventure doesn't cause the change in the third Doctor's story.)

But what Lawrence was trying to do, and what he patiently explained to me, was that he wanted to be able to write past Doctor stories where anything could happen because we were not constrained by "knowing how everyone died".

Well now, in part I would fault that because it slightly presupposes that the only merit in a book is in not knowing how it will end, which kind of negates the pleasure of re-reading something. And there's a great many tragedies written where you know what the ending is going to be. But really, I would say, if that's what you want to do, then just call it "Doctor Who Unbound" and do it! Don't lumber yourself, and all the rest of us, with a hundred and sixty thousand words of justification for why you are allowed to do it.

Furthermore, since nobody else was onboard with Larry's ideas, we were left with a great big lurching paradox (that wasn't an actual paradox, says Alex, because that nothing from the future caused it; it was merely a contradiction) that no one knew how to handle, eventually leading a year later to the range editor wiping all continuity and blowing up Gallifrey – a process known colloquially as "foom".

And that's pretty much what JJ Abrams has done in this movie. He has made it quite explicit that Ambassador Spock does not travel back in time; he travels to an alternative reality, one that is very similar to the Star Trek universe, but where everything is slightly different.

And, of course, he underlines his point by giving Vulcan the "foom" treatment. It is impossible for Ambassador Spock to come from the future of this universe because the black hole that brought him here was formed by Red Matter made at the Vulcan Science Academy. On Vulcan. Which no longer exists.

So basically, this isn't Star Trek… this is Star Trek: Interference.

To which again I say: that's nice, but did you really need a hundred and fifty million dollars to tell me that?

Day 1933: DON'T beam me up, Scotty!

Wednesday:


Thank you to Mr Joe for showing me this long wibble about TELEPORTATION, which is Greek for the carrying of televisions. My fluffy brain aches now!

It seems to me, though I AM only a fluffy elephant, that the way that STAR TREK's transporter works is VERY DANGEROUS. It looks to me like it is just one of their copy-stuff-machines [R: replicators] with a PHASER GUN stuck to the business end.

So poor old Mr Spock is SHOT DEAD every time he goes down to the orange planet and a new copy of him is made at the other end!

Because the new copy has all of Mr Spock's MEMORIES up to the point where HE GOT SHOT! Then copy Mr Spock does not realise that he is only a copy. But the original is still a pile of SMOULDERING ASHES waiting for Mr Scotty to dust the transporter pads!

If you think this does not work like this, then think about the episode where the transporter – which should properly be called the DISINTEGRATOR-COPIER-KILLER MACHINE!! – produced TWO Captain Quirks for the price of one. That is a special offer that even ASDA don't do! Where does the second Captain Quirk come from if the machine is not a COPIER???

There is ALSO an episode in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (or the REALLY BORING ONE as I call it) where DOCTOR PULASKI (who was MUCH better than Doctor Beverly Spaniel) gets REALLY OLD by mistake, but they use the DISINTEGRATOR-COPIER-KILLER MACHINE to make her young again. If it wasn't LETHAL this would be instant IMMORTALITY for everyone in the Federation! Just remember to keep your old hair! Clearly the only way this can work is if it makes a BRAND NEW Doctor Pulaski and just makes her THINK she is the same as the (way) old one. Who is now fried as well as old.

Anyway, the WHOLE principle behind the Star Trek transporter is IMPOSSIBLE because of QUANTUM MECHANICS. Actually, if you want to see my Daddy Richard go a REALLY funny colour, just say "Heisenberg Compensators" to him!

[R: you might as well talk about the "switch off physics" button froth, foam, gnash etc]


A much safer way to travel would be to use WORMHOLES. Not ones made in the ground by actual WORMS (though you can if you want too!) but bits of SPACE-TIME that are folded up like Chinese Origami or Swedish Self-Assembly Furniture. Essentially this means building a kind of tunnel or bridge through the fifth dimension (or HYPERSPACE) so that you have a short-cut from point A to point I.

Of course, in practice this tends to need spinning cylindrical black holes the length of the solar system. This is a BIT difficult as there are not many of those lying about the place. But like most things I expect that they will get smaller and cheaper once people start working on it. wormPOD nano will be all the rage one day, I BET!

I used to think that this was how the STARGATE on, erm, STARGATE worked, but they have talked about breaking you down into energy for the journey and putting you back together at the other end as well. Which makes it just a DISINTEGRATOR-COPIER-KILLER MACHINE which fires your copy through a wormhole.


A third way, avoiding all of that tedious mucking about in HYPERSPACE, would be to use a property of Quantum Mechanics called Quantum Entanglement. (This is NOT anything to do with Mr Blair and cash for peerages.) There is this thing where PARTICLES and ANTI-PARTICLES form pairs so that even if you separate them, if you affect one it also affects the other. Because there is REALLY only one set of information that describes the pair, then the second particle "knows" what happens to the first simultaneously and this does not break the famous rule that no information can travel faster than light (because no information has).

What you need to do is persuade all of the information that makes up YOU to stop being recorded in your particles and switch simultaneously to your quantum-entangled anti-particles and you will instantly be somewhere else. In fact there is a very small probability that this could happen to you anyway!

HOPEFULLY this does not involve killing you since it is almost exactly the same as your particles NOT deciding to suddenly move the information that is you to somewhere else and that happens ALL THE TIME.

However, you WOULD need a way of controlling QUANTUM PROBABILITY to make this work, and for that you will need a BRAMBLEWEENY 57 Sub-Meson Brain. And a REALLY strong cup of TEA.