Morning music
Vysotsky musings
I happened to find an old Vysotsky CD in the car. Playing it as I drove along, I found myself musing on Vysotsky. I was actually unaware, until I looked more closely at his Wikipedia profile, that he was half-Jew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vysotsky#Early_life. Surprising, perhaps, in view of his occasional lampooning of Jewish types and/or accents in some of his songs.
When I got slightly involved with the Soviet and Russian milieu in the late 1970s and then 1980s (though only in and/or from the UK; I never went to the Soviet Union, and first visited Moscow only in 1993), it struck me rather unpleasantly what a decadent society had grown up in that part of the world. In particular, the excessive drinking of some Soviet citizens (mainly men) and also the heavy smoking (especially though not exclusively men). Not everywhere, certainly not everyone, but enough to rot the society from within. That, and corrosive cynicism.
Vysotsky was to some extent the personification of all that. That is not to take away from his great talent as a singer-songwriter, but that sort of unhealthy lifestyle was, in my view, a large part of the reason why the Soviet Union collapsed so completely so unexpectedly, just as its semi-toleration of underhand dealings, criminality, and (largely Jewish) underground business activity in the 1970s and 1980s led, in the post-collapse 1990s, to the glitzy tasteless Russia of the (mostly Jewish) “oligarchs” under Yeltsin and, to a lesser extent Putin, and to the gangsterism rampant in the 1990s (though far less so now).
Andropov was probably a highly unpleasant man, and extremely repressive, as well as possibly half-Jew (it is not certain), but I think that he saw the train coming down the tunnel at Soviet society, and decided to stop it. His unexpected death really sounded the death-knell of Sovietism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Andropov
Tweets seen
I read a Daily Telegraph piece about “middle class” homeless people (i.e. people who had good jobs, decent houses or flats, and then didn’t). The article waxed eloquent about the pressure on social housing etc, but the words “immigration” and “migration” did not appear; not once.
As Hitler said of many during the Weimar Republic period, “they want not only their daily bread but also their daily illusion“…
While FPTP voting would still be cheating Reform of nearly half of its potential seats under full proportional voting (156), those figures would give Reform about 95 seats, according to Electoral Calculus (Con 219, Lab 207, LibDem 67, Greens 6, SNP 22 etc). Thus Reform would be the “kingmaker”, though even then the Cons would have to agree with another party to get over the 326 line, or even the ~315 practical line.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html
In fact, as Goodwin implies, the only factor that keeps the Cons even as high as 26% in the polls is the pensioner vote. That may reduce by 2029; we shall see. A result of Reform 26%, Con 24%, Lab 23% would result in a Commons with Lab 195, Con 174, Reform 149. Still unfair and illogical, but on that showing, Labour would be unable to form a government even with LibDem, SNP and Green support, whereas a Con-Reform coalition could, just about.
If Reform, Con, and Lab all got 25% (others as given), then the result would be Lab 245, Con 188, Reform 93, LibDem 69, SNP 22, Greens 6.
I myself tend to think that Reform’s star is waxing, but the others waning, so a result somewhere in the area(s) above is not unlikely, with 3 or even 4 parties having almost equal success.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 