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? 

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.