Sociological Images have got a graph up from David Nutt's work on drug harm in Britain.  The rankings are very interesting, but so are the differences between 'harm to others' and 'harm to users'.  Let's pause for a moment in a dream of sensible policy.

Over at the C of E, Thinking Anglicans are reporting that 50 clergy are set to join the Ordinariate.  Some of them will be retired.  The Church has 1338 ordination candidates in training, at last count.  (Just a thought with which to read the inevitable Church in Crisis! headlines.)  Back to the flying bishops, Liturgy wonders if the faux-bishop will be having a faux-farewell? 

The IDS welfare white paper has hit and The Spectator has helpfully read it and come up with one of those ten things you need to know lists.  A big part of the whole thing is the replacement of a raft of welfare payment possibilities with a universal credit system.  But, from what I can tell, the changes won't be coming in until 2013 and will take until 2017 to be fully up and running.  What might happen then if the Coalition doesn't exist anymore? 

Dan Hodges wonders who will be Ed's guru.  I'm pretty interested in the suggestion that there might be a Labour turn to Bauman. 

An independent commission on high pay has been launched.  It is called the High Pay Commission.  It will tell us that high pay is too high.

Simon Schama (The history tsar?) has come up with 6 bits of British history that every student should know.  The Guardian book blog is challenging readers to come up with 6 of their own.  I shall think on.  What do you think? 

Ah, the Comprehensive Spending Review. 

Surely it was a Shakespearian drama of our times.  George O, costumed in hair and grin, cutting determinedly at the national budget, looking to save a buck or billion.  Nick and Vince (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?) squirming and smiling and not going to Oxford.  Grizzled Tories peering at the books and recoiling in 'orror from wot Gordon 'ad done.  And Ed, who had done none of it. 

Now I've kept my academic nose clean of politics and economics, so I'm not about to engage in any of the nitty-gritty analysis about whether this £ or that £ will do x or y to this or that group.  There are plenty of political bloggers for that.  And they have charts. 

As an anthropologist, I get to say that it's all about the people, man.  The problem is, I'm in not-so-sunny Melbourne; I'm not on the ground, scribbling frantically in my trusty notebook and taking the pulse of the nation West Yorkshire.  So other than my usual line about contemporary economic uncertainty and the possibilities for a turn to the past, I'm all out of revelations on the people front.

But I still want to talk about the CSR.  It's a big thing.  It's a big thing in that we don't actually know what the consequences down the track are going to be, and in that sense it is probably the biggest thing that the ConDem Coalition have done thus far. 

The response, in at least some quarters, has been weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Maybe some of that has been warranted; Tory wingnut pleas to dispense with the minimum wage and, y'know, post-Victorian labour laws, and left-of-left laments for the overnight obliteration of the entire North ... not particularly. 

What has been established is that the CSR disproportionately cuts at the poor.  That sucks; it really, really stinks.  But, this is a Tory government and in an era where even the leader of the Labour party is offended and distressed by the 'red' epithet, was anyone seriously entertaining thoughts that George Osborne was going to come charging out of Nottingham Forest firing arrows?  Even Friar Tuck is off signing up to the Anglican Covenant these days. 

I don't mean to suggest that this means we should say "oh well then" and be pleased we're in a semi-detached with a nice new sofa and an eco-wotsit.  Nor am I a great believer in that "real world" so often bandied about by those who have a cubicle all of their own (fancy!). 

But, the global political-economic system in which we find ourselves is not, and never has been, structured for equality.  In that it has created (or compunded) losers, the CSR is a product of that system.  It could not be anything else. 

And it is profoundly unfair. 

And it has benefited many of us. 

What are we actually willing to do about it? 

There's been a lot of talk by and about Ed Miliband and Labour's 'new generation'.  This new generation seems literally to have appeared overnight, so much so that I feel compelled to make a rubbish joke about Ed M's evident fertility. 

Simon Hoggart commented that for New Labour party history began in 1997, and it seems that (are we to call it New Generation Labour?) there is a similar effort going on here to start Labour history anew in 2010. 

Call it politics, call it a new leader, call it media soundbites ... but the ways in which people understand histories is my schtick, and I'm calling this really rather interesting in that respect. 

In Stranded in the Present (2004) (googlebooks), Peter Fritzsche argues that the possibility of making history, or of history beginning anew, grew from the French revolution.  The revolutionary calendar is a great example here; time literally began again.  If we take the revolution as the first act in modernity, then this imagining of history becomes symptomatic of modernity.  Modernity, says Fritzsche, thus takes for itself a unique consciousness of (and obsession with) change. 

It's kind of like there's a big video player at modernity HQ, and history becomes a succession of tapes shoved in and out of it. 

So I'm suggesting here that it might be possible to read New Generation Labour, to read the rhetoric of change and renewal, as something very much bound up in modernity's historical imagination.  I'm not suggesting that Ed M is the French revolution (though Gordon Brown did bear a certain resemblance to the Bastille), rather, he's really quite normal. A man of his era, you might say. 

Apparently there's been some news over the weekend.  Something about two brothers and a fight for a red rosette, and it wasn't even on Emmerdale.  So, Ed Miliband ... new leader of the Labour party.  Jackie Ashley assesses the situation, and noted political commentator Archdruid Eileen (welcome back from Wessex) has more up-to-the-minute analysis. 

The other big news of the weekend was that he of the beard, Rowan Williams, gave an interview in the Times.  It's behind a paywall (and not the sort that involves signing up to a set of 52 weekly envelopes) so I've not seen it, therefore I don't know how the Times render into type the sound of parishioners being merrily thrown under a bus.  The Church Mouse suggests +Rowan can't hack the interview game, and Charlie Peer reckons a bit of being true to oneself wouldn't go amiss either.   

I'm not sure whether three lines for the new Labour leader and four lines for the AB of C is a sign of my judgment.

On a completely different note, guest Savage Mind Simone Abram looks at whether ownership is transformative, asking: 'Does owning more than one home make you an even more respectable citizen?'.  My answer is a definite yes, but I mean yes socially, rather than yes ethically.