Anyone with an interesting, provocative opinion will never have their letters published by the close-minded, moronic editors of our major newspapers and magazines. They didn't get where they are today without being experts in brown nosing and backside licking. Here are a selection of my unpublished letters.
Dead letters.
No reply.
Ignored.

To the Editor of The Independent

The Death of Real Newspapers, 5 Aug 2007

Sir: Whatever happened to ‘quality’ British newspapers? In the last few days, The Independent has treated us to such cretinous delights as Revealed: the real reasons why people have sex (Reason 1 – Attracted to the person!); Thirty Ways To Win Back Your Lover (something to do with Pete Doherty and Kate Moss); and Eurostars (telling us where A-list stars go on holiday). Any of these articles could easily have featured in The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, or even The Sun. Recently, Richard Rorty and Jean Baudrillard, two of the world’s greatest thinkers, died, yet outside the obituary columns not a word appeared in the British press to mark their passing and review their ideas. No, all available column inches are now reserved for mindless trivia. Of course, none of this would have surprised Baudrillard. As he rightly recognised, contemporary newspapers are mere simulations of real newspapers, written by simulated journalists and edited by vacant, simulated editors. These days, no one would ever consult a newspaper for actual news. And why would they bother reading the endlessly recycled opinions of ‘star’ columnists? The Internet provides vastly superior information, and specialist magazines (Philosophy Now, for example) can still engage meaningfully with important ideas in a way that newspapers can only dream of. So why bother with newspapers? They serve no purpose any longer and this is reflected both in their relentlessly declining circulations and the fact that they are all converging on an identical format, concerned solely with celebrity gossip and fashion (for intellectually compromised female readers) and sport (for the anti-intellectual male readership). In what way is The Independent independent? As far as I can see it ought to be called The Conformist because, under its present editor, it manifestly doesn’t have anything to offer that we can’t find in every other so-called newspaper. Here’s an article suggestion – Ten Reasons Why The Independent can still be called a newspaper. Oops, I seem to be stuck at Reason One. Perhaps Tony Blair was onto something for once in his life. 

To the Editor of The Independent

Why inheritance tax should be raised to one hundred percent (17 Aug 2007)

Sir: John Redwood, voicing the opinion of the Tory grassroots, advocates the axing of inheritance tax. If Redwood and his like had even one meritocratic bone in their bodies, they would take precisely the opposite stance and call for inheritance tax to be raised to one hundred percent for everyone. No one should be allowed to use the wealth they have acquired in their lifetime to transmit a posthumous, anti-meritocratic advantage to relatives. As the great Scottish-American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, once the richest man in the world, said, ‘By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life. It is desirable that nations should go much further in this direction. Indeed, it is difficult to set bounds to the share of the rich man’s estate which should go at his death to the state, and by all means such taxes should be graduated, beginning at nothing upon moderate sums to dependents, and increasing rapidly as the amounts swell.’ Carnegie was strongly of the opinion that enormous legacies to children were harmful to those children. More importantly, they are harmful to the state because they provide an unfair, anti-competitive advantage to some people. We would stand some chance of creating a meritocratic society if we attacked the main obstacle standing in its path – the family. The family is a subversive unit within society which always seeks to promote its own interests over those of the state. Inherited wealth frequently sustains incompetent and undeserving family members, furnishing them with a lifestyle their merits to do not justify. The Tories, the party of the family, will do everything in their power to prevent the emergence of a just society in which individuals must rely on their own talents and can expect no favours or privileges from others, and in which they are explicitly denied use of wealth that they themselves have not created. The Tories ought to heed Carnegie’s great moral warning: ‘The man who dies rich dies disgraced.’

To the Editor of The Guardian

Re current A-level debate (19 Aug 2007)

Sir: Every summer when exam results are released, debate rages over educational standards. More pupils than ever are achieving excellent results, we are told. The real question is this: if we have a vastly better educated population, where is the evidence? Would an educated society be addicted to binge-drinking, fast food, tabloid newspapers, soap operas, celebrity culture, Reality TV, lads' mags, fashion, social networking websites, mobile phones, football etc? With all of these highly qualified individuals in our midst, wouldn't we expect quality newspapers to massively outsell tabloids, TV schedules to be filled with philosophy, science and art programmes, and for dumbed-down TV to be shunted to minority cable and satellite channels? Wouldn't we expect our leading intellectuals to be paid £130,000 per week rather than premiership footballers? Wouldn't smart people be more famous and revered than actors and pop stars? Wouldn't sales of books dealing with complex ideas be soaring? None of these things are happening, so how can anyone say with a serious face that our education system is producing well-educated individuals? The truth is that Britain is an unintellectual and anti-intellectual nation and the education system is the main culprit when it comes to generating the cultural wasteland we inhabit. It has failed to instil a genuine love of learning and ideas in our schoolchildren. They are taught to successfully pass exams; they are not taught to think. Most are materialistic and contemptuous of the world of thought. 'The unexamined life is not worth living,' said Socrates. Most Britons would tell Socrates to hurry up and finish his hemlock. Nowadays, passing exams is practically meaningless. In my schooldays I excelled at passing exams with high grades but I didn't become well-educated until I started reading Nietzsche in my early twenties. It was only then that I realised what it actually meant to be well educated, and saw how far I had to travel to reach that status. A few pages of Nietzsche were worth the entire education I received at school. It infuriates me that I was forced through the exam-passing sausage machine instead of being exposed to the inspiring ideas of the greatest thinkers. I couldn't care less that a pupil has fifteen GCSEs at A-grade and five A-levels at A-grade. I still wouldn't consider them smart unless they could show me a sign that they were capable of doubting everything they'd worked so hard to learn. We have to escape the tyranny of exams and focus on whether or not our schoolchildren can think rather than merely regurgitate material they've learned by rote. Where are the educationalists to promote a fresh and radical debate about our school system? I suspect anyone with any integrity and passion for ideas has long since fled the corridors of educational power. We'll know that educational standards are rising the day we discover that people are clamouring to be labelled 'intellectual'. I suspect we'll be waiting until Doomsday.

To the Editor of The Guardian

Re Mark Ravenhill’s article in G2 (25/6/07)

Dear Sir,
In Mark Ravenhill’s latest article (‘The Cult of the Story is destroying our culture from within. It’s time to start fighting back.’ G2 25/6/07), he advocates burning Robert McKee’s book Story. Personally, I’d rather burn my copy of G2 since Ravenhill’s article is a shameless, embarrassing, almost word-for-word regurgitation of one of his articles from last year. He seems to think that by bolting on new paragraphs at the beginning and end, he can fool us into believing that this is new material. Since he’s clearly run out of things to say, shouldn’t he now spend more time with his family, or whatever other activity burned-out writers traditionally engage in? I would suggest that McKee’s book is a must-read for any writer learning his craft and hoping to avoid the strange cult of the tedious, self-indulgent writing of many playwrights who are manifestly incapable of assembling a compelling story to engage their audience’s interest. And one thing McKee definitely doesn’t advocate is cutting and pasting from old articles to insult the intelligence of his readers.

Competition for The Independent: A leaving present for Tony Blair Mon, 25 Jun 2007 

I’d buy Tony a Samsung Hyperreality TV (patent pending) fitted with BlairvisionTM, a full set of spinning accessories and a lifelong hype licence. It’s permanently tuned to the Emperor’s New Clothes channel and guarantees that every viewer believes everything Tony says. BlairvisionTM: it was the future once. (No refunds.) 

Letter to Gautam Malkani, Commissioning Editor of The Financial Times

The Unknown Voice: A Journalistic Experiment, 16 May 2007

In your capacity as an FT commissioning editor, I wonder if you would be interested in conducting a journalistic experiment. Much of the ‘intellectual’ debate in Britain revolves around a coterie of opinion formers who probably regularly bump into each other at dinner parties. Their opinions are well-known, predictable, and ultimately sterile. They inject no fresh ‘notes’. How can a wider, more productive debate be encouraged if the number of feature writers is kept heavily restricted? If someone with no ‘name’ and no writing credentials could appear from nowhere and produce radical features that stimulate new and different debates, wouldn’t that point to the need to routinely allow more voices from divergent backgrounds to enter the magic circle?

I have assembled a series of twelve ‘State of the Nation’ feature articles which seek to undermine, in a thought-provoking manner, many of the most cherished institutions of the UK. The features are:

1. Hypersex: We’re All Kinky Now. (This uses Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality to argue that the sexual nature of Britain is radically changing and relationships, especially marriage, are likely to collapse in the hypersex world.)

2. The Lonely Crowd: The Multicultural Fallacy. (This employs David Riesman’s seminal work The Lonely Crowd (1950) to analyse current trends in the world and the UK, and to show that multiculturalism confronts an insurmountable problem in the shape of the incompatibility between ‘tradition-directed’ and ‘other-directed’ communities.)

3. UK PLC: A Confederacy of Dunces, Clones and Psychopaths. (This uses the Peter Principle, the Negative Selection Principle, the Law of Unintended Consequences, the Procrustes Principle and the Psychopath Principle to illustrate that the UK will inevitably underperform, and Gordon Brown’s new administration will collapse in disarray just as Blair, Thatcher and Major’s did.)

4. The Deserved Death of Democracy. (This argues that cynicism with politicians and politics has reached alarming levels because the inherent problems of democracy can no longer be concealed. Is it possible to replace democracy with apolitical meritocracy?)

5. Brand Values: The Winner-takes-all Society. (This reflects on how ‘brands’ are producing ridiculously simplistic approaches to life and allowing successful brands to win everything while other brands, which may be of higher quality, wither on the vine.)

6. Celebrities: The Zeitgeist made Flesh. (This asserts that celebrities are more than just famous – they actually embody the spirit of the times. Is a culture based on the zeitgeist and nothing but the zeitgeist superficial in the extreme, and bound to end in catastrophe?)

7. The End of Crime. (Is crime the product of highly dominant individuals being brought up in deprived circumstances and, having had all legitimate means of expressing their dominance cut off, being left with no choice but to turn to crime? If we handled highly dominant individuals correctly could we eradicate crime?)

8. The Scientific Cure for Politics. (Given the astounding success of the scientific method, why isn’t it applied in the field of politics too? If it were, would conventional politicians become redundant?)

9. Why the Human Race will always be Stupid. (Humans have no ‘organ of truth’. Is it possible that they in fact have no relationship with truth at all? Nietzsche relentlessly attacked conventional attitudes to truth. He wondered if humans were far more susceptible to lies and delusion. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen trashed the idea that the majority could ever be on the side of the truth. Are we an entirely deluded species?)

10. Do Novels have Personalities? (How can a book be loved by some and hated by others? It gets us nowhere to simply dismiss this question as a matter of taste (whatever that may be). Is it in fact related to how are brains are wired, which may in turn be reflected to some extent by our Myers-Briggs personality classifications? Is the publishing industry dominated by people of a certain Myers-Briggs type, and does that mean that anyone who doesn’t belong to this type doesn’t have a prayer of being commissioned? And are certain sections of the population being denied the sorts of books they would like to read because the books they enjoy aren’t rated by commissioning editors?)

11. The Welfare State: Modern Danegeld. (Is the modern welfare state simply a means of preventing an unruly underclass from becoming so desperate that it is forced to revolt, as happened in the French and Russian Revolutions? In other words, are the affluent middle classes paying the underclass just enough to prevent them from attacking, just as English kings paid off marauding Danish Vikings? They don’t wish to interact with the underclass, just to be left alone by them.)

12. The UK: A Freudian Madhouse. (Freud famously defined the personality in terms of Id, Ego and Superego. Can the use of these terms be extended to society as a whole? Are there cultures that reflect Superego influences (Islam, Catholicism etc), some that are rampantly Id influenced (the binge-drinking, promiscuous, instant gratification culture of modern Britain), and should we be consciously aiming for a moderate Ego-directed balance of the two extremes?)

If you’re interested in initiating this experiment by commissioning these polemical feature articles, I’d be delighted to hear from you. (I’ve deliberately said very little about myself because that, in a sense, is the whole point – why do I need to be a ‘name’ to write good material?) Otherwise, thanks for your time.

Letter to the Editor of The Bottom Line (BBC R4), 4 Feb 2007

Hi,

I have a challenge for you that goes right to the bottom line in terms of business success. The challenge revolves around the issue of whether it's possible to use the well-known Myers-Briggs personality categorising system to accurately predict the types of people likely to be found in particular industries. If certain industries are self-selecting in terms of personality type, does this lead to systematic and costly bias in the way these industries do business?

A good illustration is the publishing industry. I believe the publishing industry is inherently opposed to certain personality types and thus fails to provide an adequate service for the excluded types, and massively underperforms as a consequence.

Because of the small numbers of key personnel involved in this industry, the hypothesis should be relatively easy to test. Publishing is, first and foremost, about commissioning. A vast amount of material is submitted to publishers, but only a fraction is commissioned. Who are the people who determine what gets commissioned? They are the London-based literary agents (probably consisting of no more than two hundred people) who filter most of the material, and then the small number of commissioning editors (probably no more than fifty people) who have long lunches with the agents and then decide to take on board certain projects, usually by paying large advances, which are often not recouped. My hypothesis is that literary agents and commissioning editors belong to a narrow range of Myers-Briggs personality types (meaning that they form a kind of closed shop). The four 'literary commissioning' Myers-Briggs types (out of sixteen possible) are: ENFJ, ENFP, ESFJ and ESFP. My further hypothesis is that as a direct consequence of having these particular personality types, these people are predisposed towards commissioning projects that have special appeal for them (but, crucially, hold little appeal for many of the wider public, most of whom belong to different personality types that are not being catered for). 

To prove or disprove this hypothesis, all that is necessary is to try to get all of London's literary agents and commissioning editors to take a Myers-Briggs test (surely well within the capabilities of BBC researchers). A second test would be to find out to which Myers-Briggs types the people who are commissioned belong. My hypothesis is that these would also largely belong to the ENFJ, ESFJ, ESFP and ENFP types (with a few of their introverted counterparts thrown in i.e. INFJ, INFP, ISFJ and ISFP). In other words, the publishing industry is really a vehicle for promoting the tastes of ENFJ, ESFJ, ESFP and ENFP Myers-Briggs types. Since the vast majority of people do not belong to these types, is it any wonder that the publishing industry has a catastrophic record in terms of reliable commissioning and being able to predict what books are likely to succeed?
Another small group that could be readily tested are entrepreneurs. If entrepreneurs invariably belong to a narrow range of Myers-Briggs types, this would have a huge impact on how we would go about identifying the next generation of entrepreneurs.

To the Features Editor of The Independent

17 Jan 2007

Hi,

I am a regular reader of The Independent. I wonder if you would be interested in taking a polemical feature on the publishing industry, entitled 'Do Novels have Personalities?' (An alternative title was 'The Publishing Industry - The Last Refuge of the Charlatan.') My article posits that the literary establishment consists of a small group of people with similar personality types who, on the whole, use the publishing industry to promote their particular tastes rather than paying appropriate attention to the tastes of the general public.

The article is 2500 words long. I have no previous track record as a freelance contributor. The beginning of the article is shown below. I appreciate that you rarely publish items by unknowns, but perhaps I'll get lucky. If not, then thanks for your time anyway.