The blogger of suburbia

Catnip

2012-01-31T10:51:00.002Z

Sometimes you can pop down the cinema and be confronted with a rather depressing list, options narrowed if you have forgotten your £D specs at home. With much umming and aahing, we opted for Puss in Boots (2D) – I would have gone for Aardman’s Arthur Christmas but that was only available in 3D (we never watched Arthur Christmas while it was still in the cinema in the end).

After the tired performances of the last two Shrek movies, there was some trepidation about venturing into another adventure by the same people. Puss in Boots was now the eponymous star of the show, giving him a backstory in what seemed like a prequel to the Shrek saga. Set in some vertiginous outpost of Spain’s New World empire, it follows Puss’ latest hustle, the marks being the abominable twosome of Jack and Jill and their radioactive-looking magic beans. He is thwarted by Kitty Softpaws who is working for Humpty ‘Alexander’ Dumpty (not the English civil war royalist cannon that fell from its ramparts, but the nursery rhyme figure that resulted from the incident). The three together set out to capture the beans and raid the giant’s castle but who can be trusted.

The strength of the movie - in contrast to the previous two Shreks - is not in the setpieces, enjoyably chaotic as they are, but in the characterisation that makes you care or cavil in equal measure over the protagonists. Despite being in some baked Sierra Madre-like territory, it is a welcome about turn from lush and/or swampy fairyland, much of the humour seeming fresher, as well as giving a new and appropriate angle for Antonio Banderas to polish his Zorro burr (for of course he was the hero of the modern Zorro movies). Salma Hayek as a sultry Kitty with a traumatic past, Zach Galifianakis as the constantly scheming egg whose motives expertly change (or rather are revealed) as the narrative progresses and Billy Bon Thornton and Amy Sedaris as the hideous hill-billies Jack and Jill – all are worthy ingredients to a prequel that is the recipe for a sequel. Four out of five.

The Peter (un)Principle(d)?

2012-01-30T16:00:00.000Z

Hearing the news live on the BBC Radio 4 last night at 10.15 p.m., that Stephen Hester was declining to take his bonus, I thought: ah, he doesn’t want to be another Fred the Shred, he still has eyes on a knighthood. And sure enough, a précis of his explanation a few minutes later was that he did not want to be a pariah. So the European market is depressed because of the sovereign debt crisis, sending the Royal Bank of Scotland’s share price down by a third – it’s still a failure for a supposed Master of the Universe and why should failure be rewarded? He reduced RBS’s exposure here and slashed departments and offshoots there – this is his job for which he is paid handsomely to the tune of £1.2 million. A bonus is for going beyond and above the call of duty and succeeding. It is not a mandatory payment by virtue of its name – a bonus! If bankers don’t like these new strictures, they can relocate for there will be people who can fill their shoes happily under such rules and such people will be untainted of responsibility for the banking crash in the first place.

Also, Nicolas Sarkozy has unilaterally decreed that a Tobin tax will in be in place in France by August. A 0.1% tariff on transactions will not be a serious interdict to capital flows but will make bankers think twice when they sign off a deal, particularly if it is big. Sarkozy is clearly playing to a domestic audience’s dislike of globalisation and the CAC is not on the same par as the FTSE or Dow Jones, but it is brave nonetheless and making the people who damaged national economies are made to help pay for it (sure, within narrow limits most financial institutions may have repaid their debts but not for the wider damage that rippled out). Having Merkel campaign alongside him may rebound negatively though, as it did with Putin in the Ukraine in 2004. He won’t mention it during the election campaign but if Barack Obama wins a second term, it would be useful in staunching the runaway national debt of the USA. If Mitt Romney wins in November, expect all mention of a Tobin Tax to disappear without trace.

Over (in Africa) and out

2012-01-28T21:51:00.002Z

I think the biggest problem with the Africa Cup of Nationsis neither the half-empty stadiums or the dreadful football on display (thisyear Côted’Ivoire versus Burkina Faso, for example, was not merely boring but thetechnique on display from gifted players was appalling). Nor is it the fact that this year it is beinghosted by one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world in the form ofEquatorial Guinea, with Gabon not far behind in being a kleptomaniac hereditary‘republic’. Also, that it is played inwinter can be discounted since anywhere north of the equator would have beplayed in stifling, life-threatening heat – ever since the death of Marc-VivienFoéin 2003 during the Confederations Cup, these matters have to be taken with theutmost seriousness. No, my beef is that,unlike the World Cup and European Championships, it is played every two yearsand so on a biennial basis European clubs are stripped of such players as these . Quadrennially, it would beunderstandable that Africa has certain strictures placed upon it, both from thenatural and political climates and holding it every two years also diminishesthe value of actually winning the tournament, but my reasons are largely club-motivated selfishness. I can't deny it.

Newcastle United losing Demba Ba and Cheik Tiote, whilst alsosigning Papa Demba Cissé, it has been a grievous blow to a small squad. Players of the highest calibre have beenreplaced with willing tryers who no longer make the cut or never really havedone. Then again, when the team puts ina listless performance for 75 minutes until they concede a goal, they deserveall the brickbats they will receive and even the best strikers could onlystaunch the bleeding, instead of curing outright. This was a great year for the FA Cup withboth Manchesters and a fair few other Premier League teams out but as NUFC.comsaid, the club has a reputation for footballing self-harm. Brighton and Hove Albion were abysmal againsttiny Wrexham AFC over two matches but when they were no longer the giants butthe underdogs they suddenly gained extra vigour. Newcastle by contrast, without an away win inthe FA Cup since 2006, failed to rise above the risible. Ba and Cissé are urgently required and willsoon be back in club harness but Tiote completes the picture as much as hedominates midfield and, despite ‘playing within themselves’ against BurkinaFaso, Côte d’Ivoire are most probably going to be in action for another threeand a half weeks. I, meanwhile, amdepressed for the second Saturday running.

One more reason for Putin to hate Britain

2012-01-27T09:49:00.000Z

I settled down last night, after watching the excellent documentary Putin, Russia and the West, to see if Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy lived up to the hype. Unfortunately, the documentary that I watched prior to it had more laughs.

The trails for the E4 show were promising. I have a great affinity for the absurd, whimsy and the surreal, but I sat grim-faced throughout, the odd half-smile maybe a twitch of irritation on reflection. A slideshow of paintings by Dali and others of the surrealist movement would have been rewarding. Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, also riffing on The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and Yellow Submarine, was about as luxurious as steaming crap poured into one’s eyes at a spa, all the while being assured “this will make you fell better, the best money can buy” (one spa treatment for Stephen Hester, RBS boss, please). Frankly, contracting psoriasis would be funnier.

It was akin to turning up at a house party where everyone is stoned and those who have the energy think they’re hilarious. But they’re not. Fielding is very engaging as a captain on Never Mind the Buzzcocks but taking part in a celebrity game show is much the same as an old sports pro turning pundit – it’s cash for old rope. Creating a show based on jokes that is more than will-o-the-wisp is harder. The sketches were cliché-ridden and banal – I know Richard Pryor said ‘start with truth’ and clichés have kernels of truth in them, but this is ridiculous. In a similar mould, the video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer (let alone Lady Gaga’s visual spectaculars) had more wit in four minutes than I imagine there would be in four hours of Fielding’s shtick (it’s a disaster when the adverts are more enjoyable).

In a way it was brave, overturning the fashion for observational comedy, yet it felt dated, as if stuck forty years in the past, rather than forward-looking. Even on paper, the lines would have fallen flat, spiking an offball concept from the outset. With this sentence, they would probably done an elongated skit on how words on paper always fall flat – it’s a two-dimensional format. Witness the deconstructivist material that equated a felt-tip pen drawing of Pelé with the Mona Lisa – the kind of hoary relativism and weak hokum-cum-satire that wouldn’t even make the grade as sixth-form humour (fifth-form possibly). Next week, after Putin, Russia and the West, I will be switching off.

The more things change...

2012-01-25T12:24:00.001Z

To the roll of infamy that lists Jacob ‘Howling Jake’ Smith and William ‘Rusty’ Calley, we have a new addition: Frank Wuterich. And to miscarriages of justice of which the other two benefited, we have another. It remains to be seen how harshly those marines filmed urinating on dead Afghans are treated.

Brigadier-General Jacob H Smith had been tasked with counter-insurgency in the Philippines, then a US protectorate, in 1901 after more than 40 American soldiers were killed on the island of Samar in a surprise guerrilla attack. The Filipinos had not fought the Spanish so persistently only to have another overlord imposed on them. With the racist attitudes of the time, this incensed many Americans, who saw that they were delivering progress to a supposedly benighted populace, like the good imperialists they were. Brig-Gen Smith ordered at least one of his subordinates “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn, the better it will please me.” He also insisted that any male who was ten or older was designated an enemy combatant. American troops marched across the island, razing villages and shooting people and farm animals alike. Although the majority of Smith’s subordinates were recognised as demonstrating restraint (by the Judge Advocate General of the US Army), estimates of how many died range from 2,500 (by outside sources) to 50,000 (Filipino historians).

One of Smith’s subordinates, Major Littleton Waller, was court-martialled for executing prisoners. Called as a witness for the prosecution, Smith perjured himself saying that he had not given any specific orders. Waller was acquitted on a majority verdict. Smith was tried, not for murder or war crimes, but “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” More than a century later, Wuterich (pleading guilty) was convicted of “negligent dereliction of duty.” Smith was convicted, admonished and forced to retire. He never served any prison time.

In 1968, in Vietnam, American soldiers had gone on a bloody rampage at the hamlet of My Lai killing more than 500 villagers, men, women and children. They were under the command of Second Lieutenant William Caley, himself charged with murdering 109 Vietnamese civilians there. The events were covered up for more than a year before investigative reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story. Calley was convicted in 1971 of the premeditated murder of 22 civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour. While many today would think that was the least he deserved, many Americans were furious. After the conviction, the White House received over 5000 telegrams; the ratio was 100 to 1 in favour of leniency. In a telephone survey of the American public, 79% disagreed with the verdict and 81% believed that the life sentence Calley had received was too stern. Even future Democratic president and peace activist Jimmy Carter, as governor of Georgia, instituted ‘American Fighting Man’s Day’ and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their lights on (yeah, because running down your car battery is an effective form of protest). This was one year after unarmed students were mown down by National Guardsmen at Kent State University and after the American public supported the reservists.

This was not the end though, even if Calley was the only one in the chain of command who was convicted. Only a day after sentencing, President Nixon ordered him transferred to house arrest and the appeal reduced the sentence to twenty years. A separate clemency action commuted that to ten years. In 1974, Calley petitioned a federal district court for habeas corpus at which the judge said that pre-trial publicity, the denial of subpoena for certain defence witnesses and inadequate notice of charges meant, after a few legal wrangles, that he could walk out a free man, after serving just three and a half years (along with a general court-martial and dismissal from the US Army). In 2009, at a servicemen’s club, he apparently expressed remorse, whilst insisting that he himself was given orders and he was merely following them, which on reflection, he claimed, he should not have done (how many Nazi concentration camp guards said the same). Anyone who wants to talk to him though has to produce a cheque detailing a hefty amount.

So we come to Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich (notice how as the years progress, the ranking officer convicted is lower and lower down the chain of command). After another cover-up over the massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, including three women, seven children (the youngest a toddler of one) and a 76-year old man in a wheelchair, charges against seven of the eight marines were dropped and Wuterich was sentenced to only three months (suspended) for ‘negligence’. As with Smith and allegedly with Calley, the killing spree was cited as revenge for an attack on US soldiers (in this instance by an improvised explosive device that killed a lance corporal). Christopher Hitchens dismissal of the comparison with My Lai can itself be dismissed because he was a doctrinaire flag-waver for the invasion of Iraq and would excuse any action committed there (when does being a contrarian tip into being a hypocrite?). Sure, those who died at Haditha may have been 95% fewer than those who perished at My Lai, but a massacre is a massacre – were Nazi concentration camps insignificant because ‘only’ tens of thousands were murdered at them compared to the millions at the actual death camps? (I am aware of Godwin’s law but in the case of war crimes I don’t think references to the Nazis can be avoided).

In all three cases, justice in any meaningful sense of the word has not been seen to be done. People talk about the ‘hard sell’ of Wuterich’s conviction to the Iraqis as if it were no more than a PR operation rather than, as Nick Broomfield (director of the film The Battle for Haditha) rightly said, a miscarriage of justice. This will not be an open sore just in Haditha but across the whole Middle East. All armed forces have their skeletons, the dark episodes that colour any bombastic military pride but many Americans think of themselves as the good guys, always and everywhere, sending forth munificence from their shining city on the hill. Last year, The New York Times found secret transcripts of military interviews from the investigation into the Haditha massacre. In these interviews Marines described killing civilians on a regular basis and one sergeant testified that he would order his men to shoot children in vehicles that failed to stop at military checkpoints. When Democratic Representative John Murtha, a retired Marine colonel, openly stated that Wuterich and his men killed innocent people in cold blood, he was roundly attacked by right-wingers, people of the same mindset as Rick Perry who did not want the incontinent marines in Afghanistan prosecuted. American society has come a long way since the 1960s/70s but not all have made the same journey that some of the ‘boys’ will disgrace the uniform if put in a war situation. That the acquisition of the Philippines and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq (second time around) were gratuitous just adds to the tragedy.

Inland Revenue versus football

2012-01-24T19:25:00.000Z

This week Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is engaged intwo high profile court cases. The oneaccusing current Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp and his relationship withMilan Mandaric, when they were in charge of Portsmouth FC, garners the most headlinesbut more important to football overall is the winding-up order they have servedto their old club on the south coast.

I think the taxman is doomed in its prosecution of Old ‘Arry. HMRC are not in the habit of waiting sevenyears to collect when they think they have a strong case, as Portsmouth havefound out innumerable times over the past few years. Rather I think government pressure has forceda once-and-for-all settlement so as to decide whether Redknapp can succeedFabio Capello as England manager, without a perpetual cloud hanging over thewhole situation.

As for the Fratton Park faithful, the number of chancers(one who might not even had existed) who have owned them is the disgrace of thePremier League and FA, but both pretend to see no evil and hear no evil, whilespeaking with forked tongues on the game’s governance. It would be a very sad day were such a bigclub – who have won England’s highest division twice and more recently the FACup - cease to exist (unless one happens to support Southampton). The taxman obsequiously states that it is inthe interests of all taxpayers for debts to be followed up. So what was the situation where Goldman Sachshad £10 million written off their bill or Vodafone were let off more than £1billion in charges? Clearly Portsmouth FCwas not rich enough to corrupt HMRC officials with serial wining and dining. If Goldman Sachs or Vodafone had any morals(which we know they don’t) they would dip into the savings they made to throwPortsmouth a reprieve. It is indicativeof the collapse of decency in this country where the wealthy are given all theadvantages and the poor are kicked in the teeth. Maybe the latter action would be a fittingtribute for the outgoing HMRC head who has been allowed to ‘retire’.

Driven to distraction

2012-01-23T11:08:00.000Z

Studies by scientists hailing from – where else – California, claim that the male sex drive is responsible for all wars. Supposedly aggression and bravery in men was to compete for mates and territory and belligerence was rewarded by reproductive success. It cites Chinggis Khaan’s alleged 16 million direct male descendents and the genetic code associating Scandinavians with Scottish and Irish people through the Vikings. It doesn’t mention all the idiots who lost their lives in battle, such as Charles the Bold of Burgundy (also known as Charles the Rash) who died before he could father an heir or Major General Rollo Gillespie getting so angry during a battle in the Anglo-Nepalese War that he led a reckless personal charge and taking a bullet through the heart for his troubles, with no known issue sired. Let's not forget all the common soldiery who are cut down and forgotten in a misguided offensive, such as the 30,000 Russians who perished in 1877 at the Battle of Plevna because their commanders insisted on a frontal assault or the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the blackest day in the history of the British Army. History’s genetic code written by the victors you might say but who are the victors?

These liberal Californians (are any of them men by any chance?) say that women are naturally gifted with a ‘tend and befriend’ attitude, who find it easier to enact conflict resolution. Margaret Thatcher, when urged to negotiate after Argentina had invaded the Falklands, hardly showed much of the tending and befriending character. Cristina Kirchner’s bellicose statements on the subject of the islands in the last few years show little of it either. What about Sri Lanka’s Chandrika Kumaratunga, who presided over a bitter civil war with the Tamil minority in the north? Or Indira Gandhi’s storming of the Sikh temple in Amritsar. Or David Ben-Gurion's description of Golda Meir as "the best man in the government" and who showed such steely determination in the Yom Kippur War during her tenure? History is littered with aggressive female leaders – Hatshepsut, Empress Theodora, Wu Zetian, ‘Bloody’ Mary I, Catherine the Great, Cixi, Madame Mao, the battling queens of Edward II and Henry VI and many, many more. Even more respected female figures are exceptionally headstrong – Joan d’Arc, our warrior queen Elizabeth I, Mary II who deposed her father James II, Maria Theresa, even Queen Victoria who, in 1839, refused to replace her Whig ladies of the bedchamber with Tories, so Sir Robert Peel who could not feel confident in forming a government (let's not mention her empire-building enthusiasm later). Scant consensus-building there. The scientists could claim that the female instinct is generally prevalent in the population but then they are hypocrites in talking up male leaders. I imagine they had a deep-seated theory that was personally dear to them - in essence, men are nastier than women, which is the intellectual equivalent of gossip on Ricki Lake (who is returning to talk shows later this year) - and they've set out to prove it, rather than the Popperian approach of disproving the alternatives. We'll see how the peer-review process goes. Maybe these scientists should follow their commercially minded colleagues in telling us that all food and drink is bad for us. Either that or go on Loose Women.

Hand in Mitt (the sun shines out of our behinds)

2012-01-22T20:37:00.002Z

Yesterday, Republicans in South Carolina handed Mitt Romneyhis arse (or should that be ass). He hada sizeable lead in the polls and blew it. Republicans forgive those who apologise but when the candidate in thespotlight squirms and tries to wriggle out of controversy, they hammer thetricky dicky – as Herman Cain found out, losing their trust. Romney’s evasion over his tax receipts,refusing to confirm whether he would follow his own father’s example (aprevious presidential candidate), was the keynote issue of this particular stateprimary. All the attacks on NewtGingrich washed off him as he either confidently answered them or confidentlystared them down.

It’s amazing that Gingrich has seemed buried, not once, buttwice. In the summer of 2011, his entirecampaign management deserted him, citing his unreliability with a cruiseholiday taking precedence over electioneering. They vacated the premises while he was on vacation. But he bounced back and seemed certain totake Iowa. Then the SuperPac with noofficial links to Romney absolutely savaged his record and character and hestruggled in fourth (enough to take some delegates with him though). Then, after a lull in New Hampshire, he’scome from under the radar again to upset the ‘moderate’ bandwagon. Romney still is riding high in Florida, butif Gingrich bucks trends there as well, who knows how far he could go (he needsto register on the ballot in places like Missouri though). And Barack Obama rubs his hands, rather thanwringing them.

2012-01-21T10:16:00.002Z

In my professional capacity, copytaking is an occasional,sometimes fraught, sometimes pleasurable, aspect. Owing to that relative infrequency, it hasbeen decided by a higher bod that it is to phased out from my remit. I have had some interesting copy over theyears such as direct from Basra (over a terrible line) and Kabul (Ben Farmercovering an international pomegranate fair – when I mentioned this to him as hedictated copy from Libya, it came across that this was a quixotic episode hewould rather forget). I have takenscintillating book and television reviews and recorded the scores of amateurgolf in the Midlands (the correspondent Jennifer Prentice discontinued thisafter they were not published repeatedly). A regular freelancer was John Shaw, who was always a welcome voice inhis geniality and up for a laugh, inbetween some auction news of rare orantique objects. He often gave greatbackground to the subject which was often trimmed back to a news in brief atbest (one story had a misprinted stamp over a biplane flying upside down andThe Telegraph actually sourced the picture from the auction house to accompany it). No doubt frustrated at The Telegraph notshowing enough interest in his work, he has not been heard over the phone forquite some time now.

I can’t imagine that The Telegraph will keep the out ofhours copytaking company on its books if they are removing us from such dutieswhen they were getting us for free. Cutbacks mean that in future the outside journalist will have to phoneup the relevant newsdesk in head office, which makes sense but is justspeculation on my part.

To wit, the comment report I took from Theodore Dalrymplelast Wednesday may very well be my last. Mr Dalrymple seems to not have a specific job at The Telegraph (the predictiveemail address finder could not locate him – even were he not to have access athome, he would have an account for his forays into the office), yet theDalrymple name is an important and respected one. I was gratified to see that his piece openedThursday’s comment section, not least because I had pointed out the oddrepeated word here or there and my suggested synonym had been accepted.

As often with commentary rather than news, it was designedto provoke through counter-intuitive reasoning (Jonathan Steele’spronouncements on Syria in The Guardian might carry greater weight if theyweren’t so overtly one-sided apologia for the Assad regime – if you want ‘competingbiases’ go to Fox News). Mr Dalrymple’spiece defended the captain of the ill-fated and ill-named Costa Concordia forhis decision to abandon the ship before the evacuation was complete, thoughCaptain Schettino’s incompetence was another matter altogether. We have since heard from Schettino that he ‘tripped’and fell into a lifeboat and then was taken away before he could get out –which reminded me of the sarcastic saying of someone caught red-handed in anextramarital affair – ‘oh you just tripped and fell on his dick/her pussy’,with exactly the same amount of credibility attached. Dalrymple argued that the notion of a captaingoing down with his ship was old-fashioned romanticism that a ‘utilitarian zeitgeist[the latter word being an accepted suggestion of mine]’ scorned. Schettino’s culture was responsible for hispremature departure, not because he was Italian but because he was modern. Would staying behind have ensured no furtherloss of life than that which had already occurred? Schettino would have on his conscience forthe rest of his life all those who had perished. I recognise the merits of Dalrymple’s argumentbut I personally disagree. If you takeon the role of sea-faring captain, then it is beholden of you to be the last toleave, especially if it was your mistake that caused the disaster. Like structures and material, ship’s captainsshould be stress-tested for the suitability of application to the task.

Nine is the number, football is the game

2012-01-18T09:55:00.002Z

Among many of the clichés swirling around Newcastle United is that they like their number nines up there, citing Jackie Milburn, Andy Cole and Alan Shearer (even Glenn Roeder did well with that assignment – from a defensive position). Throughout the club’s sojourn in the murky depths of the Championship, no player bore the number on his back. Andy Carroll saw it conferred upon him at the start of 2010-11 season, only for him to depart to Merseyside in the next available transfer window. Like the empty chair, this was the empty slot.

Demba Ba’s scoring prowess has made Alan Pardew exclaim that had he known how effective the Senegal international would be, BA would have been a dead cert for the number nine, instead of the current squad number 19. Now, despite claiming that he wasn’t searching for a striker this January in the wake of the breakdown in the move for Modibo Maiga, which seems like expert bluff, Papiss Demba Cissé has become part of the team and if he is three-quarters as good as the other Senegalese Demba, he will have been a worthy addition. Intriguingly, he has been allocated the number nine shirt.

It may seem perverse to sign another striker who will be unavailable for at least another month, but he is an insurance policy and, so as to avoid a potential repeat of the Carroll situation with Ba, Cissé thus has the coveted niner. Whatever comes of the release clause for Ba, whether it is activated in this transfer window (or if seems likely the next) or if the club renegotiate the contract, I imagine that Cissé has a rather firmer contract given that his previous club, the stricken Freiburg, were keen to sell him, allowing personal terms to be ramped up for the player (plus the healthy league position of United being a bonus). Like Arséne Wenger’s early years in north London, it’s another success for Graham Carr (dad to ‘Chatty Man’ Alan) and his excellent scouting network.

Rick Perry - the Abu Ghraib candidate

2012-01-16T10:38:00.000Z

Despite being a sideshow to the main event in November, in the age of the 24 hour news cycle, the Republican primary has proved ominous and entertaining in equal measure. Many on the left would love to see one of the zanier candidates face-off against Barack Obama as it would make the president home-and-hosed for a second term. He hasn’t been a great or even near-great chief executive (partially hindered by an obstructive opposition in Congress and the habitual Democrat trait of failing to get their act together), but he has been middle-of-the-road and that could rise to above-average with a major foreign policy success between 2013-2017 (Congress would torpedo any domestic reform).

The most likely challenger Mitt Romney would probably be the most acceptable Republican president since Eisenhower if he did win but he has none of Ike’s charms (or war record). Newt Gingrich may mock Mitt for uttering French (despite two years in Paris, saying Bonjour, je m’appelle hardly qualifies one as fluent) – criticising an ability to possess a foreign tongue is one of the more laughable critiques from the right of the GOP, including the lambasting of Chinese-speaker Jon Huntsman as the Manchurian Candidate – thus making him comparable to John Kerry, but the Romney/Kerry flip has some mileage. Both were seen as solid yet lacklustre candidates by their respective parties, doing nothing to energise the grassroots, with only desperation at the current incumbent driving people to vote for them. Kerry lost narrowly, Ohio reaffirming its status as the bellwether state. What are the odds for a repeat, with Romney being the fall guy?

Rick Perry seems a few bricks short of a shithouse and was busy vindicating that yesterday when he said that the marines captured peeing on dead Afghans shouldn’t be prosecuted, merely reprimanded. He doesn’t understand that like the (false) reports that Korans were burned in Guantanamo Bay, this can inflame passions and, As John McCain said, damage the war effort. Specifically, it puts American troops in more danger. To compound the damage of his words, he said it on CNN, with its enormous reach throughout the world. Excusing the bastards who had such contempt for the fallen, he went on “Obviously, 18 and 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often. And that's what's occurred here.” Taking dad’s car and pranging it is making a stupid mistake and which happens all too often through the teenage demographic. Urinating on people you have just killed is more than that – what’s occurred here is a war crime. It is against the Geneva Convention to desecrate the dead but Perry would probably dismiss as foreign meddling in American affairs from a limp-wristed, Francophone zone (if he knew where to find it on a map). Did he defend the Somalis who dragged dead Americans through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 as 18 and 19-year-old kids making a common, stupid mistake? Perry has already declared that homosexuals serving openly in the US Army have damaged the institution but it is actually everything he says that does. It is not the Obama administration with the “disdain for the military.” It is he and thankfully, according to current polling, he is going to be pissed upon this Saturday.

Live and let live

2012-01-15T14:16:00.002Z

Oscar time (like Hammer time, except with more gold, lessbaggy trousers and junk that you can touch) is approaching and all theself-publicists are gearing up to give Narcissus a run for his money. Ricky Gervais is labelling anyone who thanksGod in their acceptance speech as ‘arrogant’. For Gervias to pronounce on hubris is akin to stone throwing to be goingon in a glass courthouse where the pot is accusing the kettle of blacking-up. Indeed, his line of attack is so predictable,it’s a wonder that he doesn’t believe in a deterministic universe. He’s like the National Secular Society which,whenever it appears on a news item, is always moaning – I’d like to see the daywhen they have something unabashedly positive to say, especially that which doesn’toffend anyone (allegedly their biggest concern).

Gervais’ whines that people should have speeches writtenpreviously, targeting Sandra Bullock for praising the Divine. Seriously? Given that anyone who prepares a victory speech is seen as overweeningin their conceitedness, this is the solution for Gervais? Maybe he sees no contradiction. Is the answer for everyone nominee to preparea set of notes to which a lawyer (this is LA) makes a deposition that said textwill be said should an award come the way of the talent and so everyone can be suitablybland to cope with the strictures of the thought police?

Matthew Norman yesterday in The Telegraph declared (ofanother high-profile personality) that arrogance usually manifests itself insomeone with an extremely thin skin to make up for supposed deficiencies. Though admitting himself no psychoanalyst(curious for a Spurs supporter, who would have had, until recently, years ofintrospection), it is an interesting take. The way out for Gervais is to affect tolerance for the outlooks of thoseat the Kodak Theatre, as Hollywood (being a largely liberal lot) does for his beliefsystem when he expresses it. Winningfriends is not always a noble pursuit but neither is fundamentalism inalienating people.

Extradite this treaty to the dustbin

2012-01-14T12:51:00.001Z

Another case has come up to show that the UK is little more than a glorified staging post to US incarceration. This instance is particularly offensive as not only was the student, Richard O’Dwyer, running a search engine that linked to websites containing pirated TV shows and films – something not illegal under UK law – rather than being a pirate himself, he used servers based in the Netherlands, which means that the USA should have no jurisdiction as O’Dwyer’s website, TVShack, had no direct link to the United States.
But the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have to justify their budget with a round of heavy cuts in federal spending in 2013. The assistant deputy director (does a deputy director need an assistant – one job that can be taken off the payroll) has admitted the agency would pursue websites whose only American link was to end in .com or .net (providing a compelling case to get one’s email accounts switched to .co.uk where possible (Google doesn’t seem to offer this option)).

David Blunkett did a disservice to all blind people when he signed the extradition accord in 2003 – even the British version was worded with Americanisms. It was all of a piece of the Blair government, where it felt compelled to act in complete subservience to the George W. Bush administration in order to gain some nebulous (and ultimately worthless) influence inside the White House. The Bush’s own dogs had more influence on policy direction than Blair. But then when you’ve ended the legal statement that an Englishman’s home is his castle after 500 years on the law books, why should you be bothered about protecting your own citizens? Complaints about being the 51st state were way off the mark – the UK doesn’t even have the same rights as an American state.

Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats came to power promising a radical overhaul of the pact, especially given the US Congress’ tardy approach to ratifying their end – making it a one-way extradition treaty, another example of how absolutely pathetic Blair could be (New Labour was a hollow-sounding big nothing – anything of substance such as the minimum wage or devolution were holdovers from old Labour). Yet even though a ‘forum clause’ has been passed by both Houses of Parliament, allowing a judge to decide where best a case should be heard, it has not yet been enacted, which is ridiculous. Is the Home Office still not fit for purpose? Civil servants should get a move on or feel the wrath of their elected bosses.

Frankly, I think the treaty should be scrapped altogether, given the inequitable way it is applied. We send over anyone they request but appeals for those with links to the IRA to stand trial in the UK are met with firm rebuttals. In this case, O’Dwyer isn’t even committing an offence in the UK, so how could he possibly stand trial, unless it was in the USA? The forum clause doesn’t address that, just where a trial should take place. This Coalition is committed to free enterprise but only when Washington D.C. doesn’t veto it.

A lesson learnt?

2012-01-12T23:53:00.000Z

A good school education is one of the most important processesto drive forward a country. This is whyI am pleased to hear that Kent County Council are circumventing the rules inplace to allow the opening of a first new grammar school in Britain for 50years, that is, an existing grammar school is opening an ‘annexe’ in anotherlocality. My feelings towards the councilis that it is run by pompous, bumptious Tories and that would still be my vieweven if Medway wasn’t a separate unitary authority (please, Queen Liz, don’twaste your jubilee gift in making Medway a city – we already have one calledRochester, even though they let the city charter lapse deliberately). On this though they are right.

I am an ardent believer in the benefits of grammarschools. There are plenty of(anti)progressives that still mistakenly equate the pursuit of excellence withsocial injustice. It was probably theLabour Party’s greatest mistake of the 1960s - the drive to abolish grammarschools. Even decades later, left-wingersstill have more hang-ups than a CofE conference debating women and gay priests. The Guardian sneered in March 2011 thatworking-class kids only earn slightly more than their parents if they go to agrammar school (though grudgingly admitted that the same is true formiddle-class kids). Isn’t earning more,no matter the amount, a good thing? Thesame paper is up in arms that private schools are creating a social ‘apartheid’(a favourite Grauniad word) in society as an elite become distanced from thepopulace. Their bigoted blindness meansthey fail to realise that it is not private schools driving this wedge but themisguided anti-grammar school policies as nature asserts itself.

Several years ago, a survey was carried out looking at theone hundred most influential people in a series of fields – business, media,politics, etc – to follow on from a survey that was carried out three decadesprior. In the 1970s, the education ofthe movers and shakers was thus – a small percentage were comprehensive alumni;about a quarter who went to private fee-paying school; and a vast majority werethose who attended grammar school. Bythe early 2000s, there had been a seismic shift – the number of those comingfrom grammar schools had been crippled, being a very low figure; those wholearnt at comprehensives had more than doubled but were still quite small;however, the overwhelming majority of those who now head the elite went toprivate fee-paying schools – indeed a greater percentage than of those in the1970s who went to grammar schools. Inthe name of equality, they created worse inequality. Ideology triumphing over expertise andproving disastrous. A CulturalRevolution in more than just name.

It is common sense that such a policy fall between twostools and satisfies no-one. Plenty ofmiddle-class parents determined enough would scrimp and save just to ensuretheir children went to a good school – if they were denied the grammar option,then they certainly weren’t going to allow their kids take the comprehensiveroute. The progeny of working-classparents – who could never afford the fees – were left behind – the ladder, inmany ways, hoisted up. So the dividebetween haves and have-nots broadened immensely. Strange that they cling to Darwin as a saint,yet many liberals don’t recognise the natural selection (survival of thefittest) here – nature taking its course as defined by the obstacles placed inits way. If you dam part of a river, thewater will flow ever stronger through the open part.

John Prescott famously moaned about being ‘hurt’ after hefailed his 11+, but would he have become deputy prime minister if he hadn’tbeen driven to prove the system wrong? Would he have been elected as a shop steward, let alone an MP, if he hadsucceeded in the test? Hypotheticalsmaybe but I think there is truth present. I did enough to pass my 11+, cruising in maths, yet just scraping by inEnglish. I went to a grammar school andI didn’t fully recognise how lucky I was but time grants perspective. Those seven years were hellish – I didn’t fullyrecognise then but time grants perspective. Unlike John Prescott, my ego isn’t so inflated to think “I’m unhappy, sothe system must be wrong.” My misery wascaused by my peers but that can happen at any faculty – it was not a specificfailing of the concept of the grammar school. Letting one’s childhood traumas affect the direction of a nation is,though, heinous. Do they worry aboutthose hurts feelings in places with advanced education like Scandinavia? They dobut they build environments so that everyone can achieve in their own distinctway. They are constructive notdestructive like too many British left-wingers. There was an outcry against academies first came into being (still is),but they were an attempt to fill a natural need in places where grammar schoolswere distant memories. Let’s have noneof this Marxist bollocks about man taming nature – we are governed by thelatter, whether we like it or not. Thesystem before was not perfect but it was far better than what we have now. Where once working-class and middle-classkids could mingle and gain insights into each other’s backgrounds, now bothsides are impoverished and regard the other contemptuously. Watch us fall away in the international league tables. Bravo, you ivorytower lefties, bravo.

Handbagged but not horsewhipped

2012-01-11T18:53:00.000Z

Otto von Bismarck, the iron chancellor, posited that Germanycould either produce more guns or more butter but not both simultaneously. The film, The Iron Lady, would have you believethat Margaret Thatcher favoured the latter over the former, as one of the tourde forces has her reeling off the prices of various makes of the spread. The al-Manama military deal between the UKand Saudi Arabia (while much traditional industry was eviscerated) wouldsuggest otherwise but it is not recorded here.

A book on Bismarck, partially obscured and on display forless than five seconds, implies a kindred ruthlessness between the writtensubject and the filmed one. The IronLady is resplendent in homespun wisdom imagery, beginning with milk being taken(not snatched but the idea is there) from a shelf and this feeble, old lady beingtreated with contempt by a hurrying, uncaring and ill-mannered society – the oneshe helped shape. There is also themetaphorical flourish as Thatcher leaves Number 10 Downing Street for the lasttime, her feet awash with rose petals – this not some intrusion by American Beauty,rather that New Labour and its red rose symbol had its success paved by her andwhose free market ideology it would perpetuate dogmatically. In one scene, Thatcher decries that she wouldnever die washing a tea cup (unspokenly because her mother was alwaysdowntrodden and up to her arms in suds) and the film’s coda teases thoseobservant among us with this line.

It is not surprising that the scriptwriters (along with thedirector, women at that, to fit the theme) should take this tack, given thatthey have crafted what is, to all intents and purposes, a love story betweenMaggie and Denis. Though she dressesdown a GP, declaring that thoughts and ideas, not feelings, are of the essencebut philosophies such as monetarism or ‘Wet’ Conservatism are not broached. The story defies chronologly yet as a seriesof flashbacks (usually fatal for a motion picture) for a woman with dementia,it is clever in slicing up her life to click with the direction of thenarrative. At the moment of her greatesttriumph – victory in the Falklands War – a rapid decline in her politicalfortunes sets in almost immediately, just as the supposed fruits of herpolicies bloom, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall (though she feared Germanreunification would bring renewed militarism) and dancing with Zambia’s KennethKaunda who, suspiciously, is made to look like the far better known NelsonMandela (the end of apartheid even though she opposed sanctions against SouthAfrica?).

There were many resonant passages as history sashayedalong. From the standpoint of beingBritish living through 2011, the 1981 riots had a tremendous immediacy in thearchive footage. The rampaging police atthe time of the poll tax disturbances were no mere urban cohorts but Thatcher’spraetorian guard. The IRA bombing of theGrand Hotel was referenced frequently early on (though it would have been morepoignant to see Norman Tebbit hauled out of the rubble on a stretcher, Deniscomplaining about his ruined shoes was funny) and the bombing of Horseguards’Parade meant something to me (I was born several hours later). The moment AireyNeave hove into view, his fate was sealed and I waited for his assassination inthe Houses of Parliament parking lot by the Irish National Liberation Front,the sound of the blast shaking Altaa. That Thatcher said goodbye to him seconds before his car exploded is adramatic liberty that crops up sometimes a little too obviously (for instance,Denis proposing to her on the night of the 1950 electoral defeat in Dartford maybe true but seems unrealistically melodramatic).

One can see why the Thatcher family would shy away from atrip to the cinema. Maggie may be shownfor much of the running time as a doddery, old woman, neglected and losing hermarbles, but the boot is really put into her children. Carol is portrayed as a middle-class twit ofthe year (trying to pay for a taxi with a cash card, almost running over acyclist, etc), while Mark is a bad lad, frequently AWOL, so desperate toabandon his mother (or at least care for her) that he goes and lives in SouthAfrica. Maybe Maggie’s decision todivert government resources to find him after he got lost in the Sahara duringthe Paris-Dakar Rally Race would have been over-egging the case against him (ifthat were possible). Then again, Maggieis seen neglecting her family for political ambition – pointedly demonstratedin a 1970s kitchen with the bread brand Mother’s Pride lying on the side.

The acting was top notch throughout. Meryl Streep would be a worthy Oscar winneron this performance. Even when you thinkshe is about to slip, she pulls it out the bag as if it were the most naturalthing. Anthony Head is superb as podgy GeoffreyHowe, much distant from the toned and slim Giles, Uther and Maxwell Houseman. Richard E Grant is a bit of a hammyHeseltine, denied his Westland resignation moment (his banishment from theinner circle is only alluded to in a montage section of Thatcher strutting thehalls of the Commons). Stephen Frycontinues his many fingers in many pies (as Private Eye critiqued “Fry, Fry andFry again”), though probably feels the prevalence of his persona is starting tograte and his cameo is uncredited. JimBroadbent, who is nearly as ubiquitous, does well as Denis though the face istoo full for the starched, lean man behind the scenes (captured in thedepiction of the young Denis by Harry Lloyd) and with cadences that are moreBroadbent than Thatcher (see Ian McDiarmid’s overall display in 2009’s Margaret). Denis moreover would probably turn in hisgrave at having a ‘pinko’ act him. Indeed, the point where his hallucination chides Maggie for drinking toomuch is rich from the old soak.

I was pleased to recognise The Daily Telegraph from its backpage alone before Maggie/Meryl acknowledged it by name. It was also fun spotting the impersonatedpersonalities of yesteryear. There wasthe odd factual mistake – Maggie talking about the EU in 1990, which is deeplyanachronistic, given that the institution was not created until the Maastricht Treatyof 1993; she should have said EC or European Community in full for greatereffect. I should be a historicalconsultant. There was a curiously largenumber of retrospectives on Thatcher’s career on the television too.

There is only so much a coherent two-hour film can captureof life stretching over more eight decades. The clip from the trailer where she invites the European dignitaries “Gentlemen,let us join the women” would have been a nice counterpoint to earlier in thefilm where she has to leave a drawing room with other females, yet it ended onthe cutting room floor (the editor another woman). Though demonstrated all along, the quip “Youturn [U-turn] if you want to. The lady’snot for turning,” would have made for a decent mental checklist moment andthere is only one mention of her handbag. Her disastrous appearance at the 2000 Tory party conference (in terms ofthe impression it gave off rather than the delivery) would have made no sensein the thrust of the tale and does not make the final cut either.

Not quite up there with The Comic Strip pantomiming Thatcher’sbattle with Ken Livingstone (but streets ahead of the comedy series’ latestincarnation of her via Jennifer Saunders), The Iron Lady has plenty of pops ather (as one would expect from something partially funded by Film Four), yetalso humanises the woman, much to the chagrin of those who would regard this asa horror flick. Geoffrey Howe’s quittingof the Cabinet and verbal assault on Thatcher in the Commons was brought a newdimension for me – that of Governor Julius Vindex’s revolt against EmperorNero. Vindex had no legionary forces athis command, nor did he claim the title of Caesar himself but gained theadherence of the ultimate victor Servius Sulpicius Galba (whose carping epitaphby Tacitus ‘all would have agreed that he was equal to the imperial office ifhe had never held it’ could well apply to John Major). Thatcher was not as vainglorious as the clotNero but her personality (namely her obstinacy) was her undoing in later years asmuch as it was her success early on. Inthe end, the Iron Lady fell to rust.

Four out of five.

2012-01-10T23:19:00.001Z

Referendum-itis continues its steady pandemic throughout theUK body politic. Alex Salmond, the soleperson who makes his entire SNP party respectable, would like the UK to do theBannockburn splits in 2014, though my fear would be that it would be as painfulas the banana of the same movement. TheCoalition government in Westminster throws down the challenge of a yes or noplebiscite to be held no later than 2013. The chippy, nationalist nutjobs comeout of the Holyrood woodwork to denounce any London interference, even thoughthey need it to make an independence vote legally binding. I recall one Newsnight debate where one prominentSNP politician said she was proud to be chippy! Let us not forget under the leadership of John Swinney, their beloved partywas dead in the water. Salmond knows hehas to achieve independence in his political lifetime or he may never see it inhis actual lifespan and so he ignores the health problems that forced him tostep down the first (so far only) time.

The Conservatives are set against Scottish independence asthey want to preserve the union to live up to their former name of the Conservativeand Unionist Party (also as a connection with Northern Ireland and itsPresbyterians). Labour fear the loss ofScottish Westminster seats would cripple future election efforts and are rightto do so. The Liberal Democrats are abit of both. Salmond would love to dothe timewarp again to 1314, when Scottish independence was secured for fourcenturies at the Battle of Bannockburn and then fast-forwarding 700 years asbudget cuts start to really bite (across the whole country but that doesn’t fitSalmond’s narrative). All three majorWestminster parties hope for a repeat for the Scottish Nationalists of theBattle of Flodden on its 500^th anniversary.

I must admit, Britain’s ridiculous, expensive macho posturingby maintaining a pointless nuclear ‘deterrent’ (that would never be used exceptin conjunction with the USA which has many times greater an arsenal andprovides a nuclear umbrella to all of western Europe, except France) andtherefore keeping open the Faslane nuclear naval base, means I have somesympathy were Scotland to break away. Therewould also be the frisson of excitement as a new country fashioned its own pathin the world. I, however, always harkback in my mind to Timothy Garton Ash writing about the Czechoslovak ‘VelvetDivorce’, where he said that, after 1993, Prague and Bratislava were bothculturally poorer and less interesting. Given the great Scottish pollination in London and the Englishfascination with Edinburgh extending from Dr Johnson onwards, I well appreciatethat sentiment. My preference is for theUnited Kingdom to remain united and a stronger unit by standing together. The latest polls north of the ‘border’suggest most Scots are of the same opinion.

2012-01-08T18:49:00.002Z

Was Boris ‘whiff-whaff’ Johnson right? Do Scousers and their associates have avictim mentality? And if they do, is itjustified?

The release of documents from 1981 where Geoffrey Howe saidthat Liverpool should be left to a ‘managed decline’ has brought a great dealof embarrassment to the now ennobled politician. But it was a comment that the citycrystallised an opposition to the Thatcher government that made it like aleft-leaning republic separate from the rest of England. And small nations, real or otherwise, can bea bit chippy.

Furthermore, we have Liverpool Football Club, in the weekthat the new trial for the murder of Stephen Lawrence concluded, issuing a verysulky apology for Luis Suarez’s comments. The apology was to the media, not to Patrice Evra or ManchesterUnited. That Kenny ‘in denial’ Dalglishencouraged the squad to wear T-Shirts supporting Suarez should have been asource of profound embarrassment for anyone. But anyone who took Liverpool to task for this had a torrent of abuse onmessage boards and Twitter from narrow-minded Scousers, who can’t understandthat a person of colour might be exceptionally offended by being referred toonly by his colour. Liverpool evenquestion the credibility of Evra, even though Suarez has admitted making theabuse – it’s beyond the blackest of satire. Part of this is a result of the national consciousness to blame someoneelse for their ills rather than look in the mirror first. And then when Oldham player Paul Adeyemi was raciallyabused by a Liverpool fan on Friday, it just cultivates an image of racism rifeat Anfield as of a piece with the Suarez affair, undoing all their good work inthe 1980s. And now Stewart Downing hasbeen arrested on a charge of assault. Will the Liverpool hierarchy adopt another bunker mentality in defendingthis? Boris Johnson was vilified afterhis comment back in the last decade – why on earth Liverpool FC want tovindicate him I do not know.

2012-01-07T20:41:00.003Z

The news that Network Rail has produced a report thatdismisses all alternatives to the High Speed 2 (HS2) line from London toBirmingham is to be welcomed. When leadingbusinessmen, trade unions and minsters are agitating for something there mustbe something intrinsically right about the project. Even The Daily Telegraph is producing frontpage articles with a favourable slant (stating that the likes of Morocco andSaudi Arabia have more high speed track than the UK, let alone France andJapan).

Not being able to drive, I am an enthusiast for train travel(though train-spotting must be one of the most tedious and pointless pursuitsever to have been created – I saw a man and his wife perched on camp chairs atone mainline station, notebooks in hand, thermos flasks in easy reach – she mustreally love him). I often despair at theillogicality of encouraging more people to travel by train through fare rises(I guess the rationale is ‘it’s what the market will support’ – like BP endingtheir final salary pension scheme despite having vast profits; they’re ‘reflectingmarket trends’ – screw the market, after all it caused the global slump), but Ican find gazing out the window is even more compelling than reading – you cansee the strangest scenes. This wouldn’tbe possible under HS2, as anyone who has travelled on HS1 can testify. Yet it’s dragging us into the late twentiethcentury and won’t be completed for another decade(!) at least and that’s justto Birmingham, let alone Yorkshire and the north-west. It is needed through as there will not be athird runway at Heathrow and economic growth will be hampered otherwise.

The nimbyist Tories who will have the line cut a swathethrough their constituencies have flung up their arms but not quite up in arms againstthe Coalition. Opponents talk “it’s blahblah this and blah blah that and it’s going to run through the bottom of mygarden!” Of course, gardens in this partof the world can be several acres. It’sthe damage to house prices that they are really cross about. I can sympathise to a certain extent. I live in a road which was a leafy backwaterwhen I first moved here. Some yearslater the council – in the hands of a New Labour/Tory cabal – decided to makethe street the main thoroughfare between the hospital servicing much of thelocal area for many miles around and all the regions west of the River Medway(via the Medway Tunnel). Despitevigorous opposition, the council pushed it through (strange, you would havethough right-wingers would have cared about house values – ah well, it wasn’ttheir own properties affected). So someof the trees – ‘old stumps’ as they were talked down – were removed and theroad was widened. I should add that theconstruction violated the standard for building roads of the last 250 years bynot having a gutter between the tarmac and the pavement, so that whenever itrains the water sloshes off the road and creates a raging torrent for pedestriansto negotiate. Now oodles of carsregularly race up and down it and double-glazing windows are a must (merely toreduce, rather than eliminate the sound) – one set of neighbours chose to movebecause they felt it wasn’t the right environment to raise a child (they movedto St Mary’s Island, recently ‘decontaminated’ from radioactive and other toxicdumping – good luck with that). When thehigh winds of last week were blowing recycling rubbish across the road, forcingcars to wend and weave through the obstacle course, I couldn’t helpgrinning. It’s no wonder that the areareturned Liberal Democrat councillors until last year (and two out of threewere still elected).

Atlas Shrugged (off some of its burdens)

2012-01-06T15:31:00.001Z

The news that the USA is abandoning it strategy of being able to fight two major wars at the same time, in its drive for efficiency cuts to the military, is a seminal moment. They may spend more money than the next ten biggest spenders combined and Defence Secretary Leon Panetta may still quip about being handy in two theatres, but it is all too reminiscent of imperial down-sizing.

In the years after 1889, Britain insisted on maintaining the two-power standard, whereby the size of its navy was as strong as the next two foreign navies combined. This was a time when the expansion of empire was proceeding apace and far-flung colonies and protectorates needed to be defended. Ultimately, it was ‘navalist’ hubris, especially after Germany and America started rapidly building up their high seas fleets, for the cost became, if not ruinous, discomfiting. Splendid isolation was abandoned because British finances were not expanding as fast as the rest of the world rearmed their surface craft, resulting in an alliance with Japan in 1902 and an entente with France in 1904. The death knell was the construction of the Dreadnought in 1906, which although built by Britain, rendered all other battleships obsolete. To maintain the two-power standard Britain would have to start from scratch, an impossibility given the speed of German, French and American shipyards.

So the UK focused on protecting its interests signing another entente with Russia to resolve the Indo-Afghan border disputes and expanding its cooperation with France as a buffer against Germany. As with the USA. The latter is shifting its primary defence interests to the Pacific Rim, as the dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have exhausted it. It may have been feasible to fight two conflicts at the same time but it has proven to be not desirable in terms of power projection. It is also in a process of a ‘re-set’ in relations with Russia so it can disengage with a NATO whose membership largely do not pull their weight.

Britain was still the biggest naval spender after 1906 but its pre-eminence was being whittled away. The USA will still be respected as the only superpower but its influence is in inexorable decline, especially as Chinese and Indian agents snap up land and resources in Africa and the Middle East, just as American businessmen competed in the early 20th century with British companies in South and Central America (gaining the upper hand during World War One). Given the alternatives, a declining USA is not in the interests of the West.

Historic

2012-01-05T09:45:00.002Z

There were many positive things in the 3-0 victory of Newcastle United over Manchester United last night, not least in the intrinsic aspect of beating any opponent. But of that, more later. This is historic (not least because it has been so long). The crowning statistics are: this is the first win for the Magpies over the Old Trafford outfit for more than a decade – that a 4-3 triumph just days after September 11th where Roy Keane was excoriated for getting sent off when everyone still felt so raw; that this is the first clean sheet win and biggest scoreline win since 2000; not since 1996 have Newcastle Utd beat Man Utd on Tynseide, when a Man Utd player has not been sent off in the course of a game; it’s also the first time since before I can remember that the United of Newcastle have taken four points off Man Utd in a season. Going unbeaten against them in the calendar year of 2011 was satisfying but this is joyous.

Then there was the game itself. Another goal for Demba Ba, signing off in style in the Premier League before journeying to the African Cup of Nations (held jointly by the kleptocratic dictatorships of Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, incidentally). Thank goodness no retrospective action was taken against Yohan Cabaye after his awful challenge in the last match as, wind or no wind, that free-kicked ball was always going in. And then, to compound the humiliation, an own goal by Phil Jones. The red half of Manchester were not at their best but Newcastle played their part in shackling them, so that there was no backlash after the embarrassment Sir Alex Ferguson suffered on his 70th birthday, with his side losing at home to basement club Blackburn Rovers.

This was an important victory in terms of the season as well. It puts the Toon three points further away from the chasing pack below, notably Stoke City in eighth place. While Newcastle are now only four points away from a Champions League spot, a best of the rest seventh place and possible Europa League entrance would represent progression, at least on the pitch. While time waits for no club, with Tottenham Hotspur not applauding Manchester City to the title but going for it themselves and that Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool will be stronger next season, looking down on the rest will be most enjoyable.

Two (sent) down, more to go

2012-01-03T19:59:00.000Z

The conviction for murder of two of the suspects in the Stephen Lawrence case is a measure of restorative justice, yet given that they were already serving jail terms, it probably only means that their chances of parole from their previous felonies will not take place, given the longer punishment of this crime, institutionalising them so that they struggle if they are ever released from incarceration. But there are confreres of theirs who live normal lives, despite playing a part in that horrendous night in 1993. One of the two brothers under suspicion, Jamie Acourt, was confronted by the BBC in the street after he didn't reply to their request for an interview. He made out that he was on a mobile phone and in a hurry as if he couldn't speak to them - a ridiculous charade. As the television camera rolled, Acourt got into a car and drove off, still with phone clasped by hand and clamped to ear. This is prima facie evidence of him committing a crime - driving while 'using' a mobile phone. Even if no-one else was on the end of the phone, he only had one hand on the wheel. If the police don't act on this, it will be fishy. He may get a fine and three points on his licence; given his record, it might go to court where he could be disqualified from driving and given a £1,000 penalty. It's not quite Al Capone and tax evasion but any legal constraints laid upon him and his barbarous friends acts as another step towards some sort of justice for Lawrence, the innocent teenager who just happened to have a skin colour that some people just cannot accept through a mental defect of theirs. A change in general social attitudes - despite racism still occuring in places - is the probably the biggest tribute to Lawrence's life and the efforts of his parents.

2011-12-31T13:01:00.000Z

Another year that has passed too quickly comes to anend. Has it been a vintage twelve monthsfor cinema? Well, not unless we havebeen transported back to the 1950s or at least the 1970s. The movie year concluded for me on 28^thDecember with Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. Moriarty makes his full bow after an unseen cameo in the firstinstalment. Yet the moment early in thefilm when Reichenbacher is mentioned, I knew the archvillain’s lifespan wouldnot exceed the running time of the picture. There were sections that surprised myself such as the early revelationof the face of Moriarty which signalled that Rachel McAdams’ character wasdoomed, although it was strange to kill her off when the film had barelybegun. Moriarty’s masterplan to unite military-relatedindustry under his aegis and then kickstart a major European war in order tobecome a highly successful profiteer, was opened up to me in The League ofExtraordinary Gentlemen (having not read the Conan Doyle novels, he would beextremely prescient if he had predicted World War One). As a Guy Ritchie flick, if a gun is seen inAct One, it will be invariably used seconds later, forget waiting for ActThree. Other scenarios were welltelegraphed, such as when Holmes is comatose on the German train, the injectionthat he had used to stimulate Watson’s dog was given to the eminent doctor as ‘awedding present’. For a whole minute, Iwas thinking ‘the wedding present, the wedding present’, until Watson exclaims “Ofcourse, the wedding present.” Indeed. Game of Shadows wasalright and enjoyable, but not spectacular – multiplex fodder.

The ultimate multiplex franchise of recent years came to aclose with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two. It was a fitting end and there were moments thatelicited ‘oh’ from me. Not Severus Snapeproving that he was an undercover good guy. From the start, there was an element to Alan Rickman’s performance to indicatethat he was not all that he seemed (my sister who read the books but before shehad embarked on the seventh, dismissed this theory – well, who’s rightnow!). The nature of Harry Potter’s scarwas a huge revelation. The epic finalbattle(s) had genuinely thrilling moments. The epilogue decades into the future was very touching. When the movie was first released, I wasthere at the head of the queue at Chatham Odeon on 15^th July so thatno-one would ruin any aspects of the plot for me. As the crowd waited for the doors to open, avast gaggle of school kids were disgorged from a nearby coach and I quailed atthe thought of having this noisy rabble pack the cinema as an end of year treatby their teachers. Thankfully, they wentpast, on their way to Dickens World – an attraction which now probably makesmost of its money from school visits.

In August, while Altaa was away in Mongolia, I saw Cowboysand Aliens. With Daniel Craig speakingin short, staccato sentences, I initially presumed that his character mighthave been tailored to avoid exposing a dodgy American accent but later it is acreditable, if neutral, effort. HarrisonFord is terrific, making one pine for what he could have given for the betterpart of the last decade when his career languished in the doldrums. This film is a superior piece ofstorytelling, in addition to the incongruity of the Wild West and outer space. The high concept is frontier town meets finalfrontier. Before I witnessed it, I mustadmit I was sceptical. Even so, it raidsevery cliché of the American outback – dusty, one-street towns, stragglybandits, Apache Native American war parties – and, in that zeitgeist phrase, ‘retools’it. There is even an upside-down steamerboat, like a Mississippi Huckleberry Finn-era Poseidon Adventure. As for the sci-fi, the aliens are essentiallyour worse selves. As their mother crafttakes off, another homage, given that it is redolent of the opening of StarWars Episode IV when you think “how much more of this ship is there?” At first, the film adheres to horrorconvention, not showing the monsters so as to let the mind conjure the mostterrible, but the story narrative as it is, the hostile aliens have to be seeneventually. The distinctive feature ofopening up the chest for protrusions to grope out recalls both Alien and TotalRecall. Overall, there are some neattwists throughout and the action scenes are well-handled. This is, without any doubt, Jon Favreau’sbest directorial work to date.

2011-12-28T10:07:00.001Z

One of the dangers of updating a well-loved classic (over-used term, I know) of literature is that, in the process, one can lose the magic that made the original so special. It can apply to films – I dread the proposed, pointless remake of Robocop and JJ Abrams’ liberties place his Star Trek movie firmly outside the canon of the rest of the franchise (preferably in a parallel universe) – but to more august books and plays, shameless pandering to modern audiences more often than not leaches out what once was timeless.

Against my better instinct, swayed by the TV guide’s gushing tribute as ‘one of the highlights of the festive season’, I tuned in to an update of The Borrowers. There was a fine cast, the most prominent being Christopher Eccleston, Stephen Fry and Victoria Wood, all playing their roles expertly and the design and conceptualisation could be sublime, such as Arietta and Spiller hiding in a Nativity scene arrangement or an entire Borrower city in an abandoned Tube station. One might query therefore what made me consider it an hour and a half I shall never get back. My wife held an even stronger negative opinion.

A selected crowd of reviewers on Radio Five (Live) were near universal in their fulsome praise. Near universal? The most senior of these opinion-formers, whilst still confessing to enjoyment, had the caveat that a modern setting means relevant technology of the age with which to expose Borrowers definitively. For myself, it was not just a horrendous plot hole but the decision to ignore it completely was an insult to my intelligence.

In fact, pitfalls in the narrative were myriad as if stumbling around a dungeon composed of oubliettes. Once Pod Clock and his wife were captured, what scientist worth their pay grade does not even take a photograph of his specimens, let alone set up a video camera nearby to maintain constant surveillance of their behaviour (yet a little boy has the ken to record it on his iPhone). And to place them in a large, glass beaker without a lid of some description defies all common sense. Mummified spiders were in frozen attendance in this laboratory and arachnids would have had no difficulty in escaping, though, despite knowing next to nothing of their abilities, the captive Borrowers are plonked here. A secure guinea pig hutch can be (like a video camera) inexpensive. When thwarted with more historic inevitability than a Marxist tract (or Tom and Jerry), the humiliated boffin knows where his quarry in the form of the little boy lives. This is not followed up, however. The list of such deficiencies to the narrative was seemingly endless in the defiance of logic.

Logic is something of which Stephen Fry usually makes great play. Maybe he chose to overlook it in order to relish delivering lines as a biologist. Fine comic actor and raconteur that he is, Fry’s ubiquity is grating, as though one might be worse for wear after overdoing it on the namesake’s confectionery. This, QI, The Bleak Old shop of Stuff, a prominent talking head on Billion Dollar Hippy, other innumerable interviews, hosting radio programmes on the subject of technology, the spoken word and others and regular relays of his tweets by followers – it is no surprise that Private Eye chose to lampoon him as a cross between a Middle Eastern despot and Russian strongman in his dominance and ‘reporting’ that there were “growing international calls for a ‘no-Fry zone’.” Indeed. One can have too much of a good thing.

Of course, he was excellent in his role, as were all the cast but, ironically, that was to the detriment of the story. The characters supposedly the ‘heroes’ of the piece were insufferable and playing it to pitch perfection merely heightened how irritating their personas were – a mixture of arrogant stubbornness and vainglorious bittiness, with a dash of outrageous sneakiness.

The overt emotional manipulation was odious to myself and my beloved, not landing any connection to the point where one rooted for the ‘villains’. The little boy that helps the Borrowers is, by his actions, one step removed from feral youth. So his mother died and his father is out most of the day and night, struggling to make ends meet and his gran is about to be evicted and, and… To quote Wilde, one would need a heart of stone not to laugh but the boy’s obstreperous wilfulness makes it a bitter chuckle. Victoria Wood as the gran, inexplicably, undergoes a total personality reversal from hating the borrowers to expressing gratitude to them. So her sovereign coin is returned and then sold but think of all the grief that need not have happened had it not gone missing in the first place. Hearts of gold but not flesh-and-blood beating ones.

Possibly a child would have been less attuned to these failings, but then why screen it from 7.30 pm, concluding at 9 pm? Lunatic scheduling! Could it be that it was hoped the adults would be so engorged on food and tipsy on alcohol they would be oblivious to the flaws? Or that the nation reflected the luvvies gathered in the Radio Five studio in delighting over the superficiality of it all? Wouldn’t you feel cheated if sparkling wrapping paper turned out to be the gift? The TV guide was almost right. This was of the festive season – the present you didn’t want.

Ploy of the Rovers?

2011-12-23T11:42:00.001Z

As the English Premier League enters its busiest (I would say self-destructive, given the performances of most PL players in the summer tournaments) part of the season, there is much that is ill with the game. The misguided Anfield defence of Luis Suarez’s offensiveness towards Patrice Evra with words that hold a racist connotation. John Terry being charged with racial aggravation and FIFA’s stumbling approach to reform, unless you are Manchester City-affiliated there is little Christmas cheer (and even they have to contend with a Europe League plod in the new year).

Eccentric and callous club owners drive fans of those afflicted teams to distraction and nowhere – in Lancashire – is this more apparent than at Blackburn Rovers. While turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, it seems chickens do for relegation. Venkys, the owners of Rovers who have bought the club using leveraged loans, have kept Steve Kean, presumably as a lightning rod, though like much of their other initiatives this has been a failure. Kean’s bluffness against the torrent of abuse he receives from the stands is valiant but he is not up to the job and holding out for a payoff is not at all noble. He won’t resign, Venkys won’t sack him. It is maddening, even to a neutral. He has had 38 games – the equivalent of a whole season – and his team has amassed a meagre 32 points over that run, which is trapdoor form. This born number two should not have been manager in the first place but Venkys workings made North Korea look like a rational, well-ordered state.

The betting is that Mark Hughes will not be long in waiting to return to the club for the third time (first as player, then as manager). So much for Hughes walking out on Fulham because he believed that the London club lacked the cash to fund his ambitions. He touted himself as a big-club manager but no-one he thought worthy of his self-regard has picked up the phone. Whoopsy! Maybe he should have stayed at Fulham for another season. If he comes to Blackburn, he will be taking a backward step, illustrating starkly his failure, in a bid to relaunch his managerial prospects. He had good times at Blackburn after initial fire-fighting. With the financial situation of a club up to its eyes in debt inflicted by the owners, it would always be a precarious highwire act of fighting off the tug of gravity. Rovers have punched above their weight for a long time (on gate receipts alone) but a spell in the Championship could be a long one.

Less sublime window, more Sublime Porte

2011-12-23T11:15:00.000Z

Turkey’s hysterical reaction to the French parliament decision to make illegal the denial of the massacre of Armenians by Turks in World War One and its aftermath is a symptom of lingering authoritarianism. Just as Turks cannot accept that their intervention in Cyprus could be construed as anything other than noble, a certain militarism has infiltrated the pores of Turkish society. The French may be playing to the gallery of half a million French Armenians as elections loom, but how is it any different to the Turkish law which makes it a crime to call the genocide ‘genocide’. Winston Churchill called it an ‘administrative holocaust’ years before that term became associated with Jews in World War Two (which to distinguish is given a capital ‘H’). It is well attested by many parliaments and independent historians.

While the Germans were forced to come to a reckoning with their shameful and heinous acts, like the Japanese ruling class with their own refusal to acknowledge war crimes of the Imperial Army of Nippon (some prominent politicians call World War Two a war of ‘self-defence’ as do several school textbooks), the Turks have never really come to terms with their own horrors and have inculcated in the education system that everything that has happened was for the best. Repeated military coups and the nationalist ideology of Kemal Atatürk have infantilised the Turkish political rubric, but it is immature to deny responsibility, even if all the participants are long dead (moreover, Atatürk, the only undefeated Ottoman general was desperately striving to create a Turkish unity and identity to counteract the Greek military advances in the early 1920s – times have changed). An ethnic Armenian editor was assassinated in Istanbul by a nationalist agitator for challenging the law on this and the murderer was acclaimed as a hero by many inside Turkey. Britain has apologised for some of the wrongs of its past. Turkey should grow up or soon its attitude among nations will be the diplomatic equivalent of turkeys voting for Christmas.

2011-12-20T12:31:00.002Z

Interestingly, despite the hardline stance of South Korea’s president, as a ‘conciliatory gesture’, the south will not go ahead with Christmas lights along the armistice border. Maybe, in such uncertain times for their northern neighbour, it is more not to make South Korean military bases more visible to air attack.

The Guardian, being the Groniad, declared that North Korea was the world’s only communist monarchy. This misses the fact that Nicolae Ceaucescu adopted, in the 1970s, the royal symbols of orb and sceptre, in effect becoming a king to augment his despotism. Moreover, not all monarchies adhere to the succession of the first-born, as Cuba has demonstrated with Fidel Castro succeeded by his younger brother Raul. A correct statement would be that North Korea was the world’s only current primogeniture monarchy. What is unusual is that, for the first time, a communist country has gone through three generations of one family as successive leader.

It was reported that Kim Jong-Il died of a heart attack on his personal, armour-plated train. I wonder if it was as a result of surfeit of wild boar (as opposed to lampreys). What would really seal his royal status would be if he popped off while pooping, echoing the British and Hannoverian George II and indeed that other ‘king’ Elvis Presley.

2011-12-19T17:04:00.002Z

I wonder how many days the North Korean Communist authorities waited before daring to release the news that Kim Jong-Il was dead. Usually they get the succession sorted out beforehand, so it is likely Kim Jong-Un is a certainty to take over from his father – whatever crimes against humanity he will commit, he is unlikely to try to sneak into Japan on a false passport to see Tokyo Disneyland, as Kim Jong-Il’s elder son attempted.

State of the Geordie Nation

2011-12-17T11:37:00.002Z

The deal for striker Modibo Maiga between Newcastle United and Sochaux has been struck out, after the Malian player failed his medical. That NUFC are wary is understandable after the Michael Owen ordeal. The club, however, are short of proven hitmen, with Demba Ba accounting for more than half the goals, Leon Best having not found the net in the top flight since mid-September and full-back Ryan Taylor having more Premier League goals than Peter Lovenkrands and Shola Ameobi combined.

Then again, if the squad is not augmented (although it does need to be), it may keep some of the current members in club colours for a while longer. Andy Carroll now looks an outstanding sale for £35 million, even if all the money went into the club, none earmarked for the squad. That he was injured for a long time meant that Kenny Dalglish’s philosophy was more or less stamped on Liverpool by the time he recovered his fitness. It is all reminiscent of Real Madrid buying crocked defender Jonathan Woodgate (though Real got their revenge and their money back with Owen). The departures of Kevin Nolan and Jose Enrique are harder to justify in terms of team strength, if not boardroom politics and letting Joey Barton leave on a free transfer is because the board were too arrogant and paradoxically thin-skinned to accept his passion. The Toon had ‘problem’ players in the past – Craig Bellamy, Laurent Robert, Olivier Bernard – but those there were tantrums, the club and Bobby Robson especially always had a way of reconciling them.

There is ‘talk’ that Cheik Tiote, Fabricio Coloccini, even Tim Krul, might be sold for hefty price tags to bring in cheap as chips players as replacements, just as there was ‘talk’ that Carroll would be sold. The board call this the Arsenal model, but Arsene Wenger in his pomp never let players leave in their prime unless absolutely forced to and on such occasions – Nicolas Anelka, Marc Overmars and Emmanuel Petit (the last two as a ‘double’ signing fro Barcelona) – he obtained eye-watering sums. Only recently, with the so-called trophy drought, has Wenger found it harder to retain star players. The NUFC strategy is not the Arsenal model, it is the Wigan model, much as Mike Ashley, who has no class and for whom money is all, would hate to admit. Trouble is, Wigan Athletic are going through their golden age and every year that they are not relegated, is a prolongation of this gilded era. Newcastle United are a far bigger club – the stadium could hold more than half of the total population of Wigan, while the Athletic can barely muster a crowd that Bashar al-Assad would not hesitate in killing were they to protest against him – with a far greater history. Brushing with relegation every season so Ashley can make moolah out of his mid-life crisis investment is not exploiting the potential.

It is all of a piece, though. Derek Llambias seems to be going gene-splicing therapy to make himself a total shit, all vestige of humanity removed. He treats fans like a card-sharp caught at the casino he used to work at. He should take care to note what happened to Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Wiping St. James Park completely out of the stadium’s name on a spurious case of raising money, when it breaks all rules of marketing (in a bad way) and that the owner is the tenth richest man in English football and ninth in the Premier League was the most egregious act since Newcastle bounced back from the relegation induced by Ashley having four managers in one season. And this, on when they insisted on affixing sportsdirect.com before St. James Park, that under their reign (of terror) the name would stay, but it has been proven in court that they are pathological liars. As a result, how can anyone believe them that they stopped going bankrupt. The Shepherds and Halls were dancing on the edge of a volcano, but Sir John Hall didn’t acquire the nickname “Margaret Thatcher’s favourite businessman” through being too reckless with cash. They would never have allowed the goose that laid the golden eggs for them to be killed off (witness the spending freeze during Glenn Roeder’s tenure after the capture of Obafemi Martins). No-one though these two families could be exceeded in venality but it has not been more true of the saying ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’.

2011-12-15T23:03:00.002Z

Typical Gillingham (of the Medway variety) - an ultra-modern revamp of the train station isn't even finished yet and already someone's smashed one of the windows into a fractal spiral (and they probably don't even know what fractals are!!!). How did civilisation attain the heights it has achieved when meatheads are so prevalent? Maybe those with higher intelligence use the grunts for the more menial tasks to reach these peaks - Aldous Huxley's alphas and betas controlling the deltas and epsilons - but it's hardly conducive to cohesive society, witness the summer riots. Common humanity suggests that, no matter the political regime, those inclined to torture and brutality will always find a way to channel their desires, legally or illegally.
Or the window could have been cracked by a careless workman...

Ending a weekend in the cells

2011-12-12T15:54:00.002Z

After a pleasurable X -Factor party at Jamie and Keiko's where the hosts and guests (including ourselves) sought to encourage mirth among the rest by coming up with flip remarks about the whole show, followed by a double-screening of new to BBC3 American Dad, Altaa and I departed, having missed the worst of the rain. We pitched up at West Kensington tube station, which I think has quite a suburban feel, despite being in central London, as evinced by the Fort Knox-security to get to Jamie and Keiko's apartment. Outside the barriers were three police vans, which suggested a high-end operation in the vicinity - I didn't think it would actually be on the platform itself.
A drug dealer and his moll were surrounded by five coppers, whilst a further one looked on, noting down details in a bookpad. They retrieved from a rucksack two whiskey bottles of the Jack Daniels variety, from which one could infer that the warning to drink responsibly would have been ignored. Below where the amber liquid had been, one police officer put on a glove to take out some rather crumpled pieces of tin foil - one passenger safely on the other side of the rails (next to us, no less) was giving a running commentary to his girlfriend and with theatrical rhetoric he announced "crack cocaine!" With the woman taken away and the junkie's jacket searched, Mr Smack somewhat incongruously asked to go home to West Brompton, to which the response of the boys in blue was "you're going nowhere." Ba-boom, tssh - he walked straight into that one.
If anyone is into crack cocaine in West Brompton, London, you now know why the price has risen, as one of the supply sources has been interdicted for some months/years. Please don't rob any extra homes before Christmas though - the best present for yourself would be to get some professional help.

Return of the nasty party

2011-12-10T09:54:00.004Z

Obviously, David Cameron does not read Peter Oborne’s columns. The commentator has taken Number 10 to task for not putting family-orientated policies back in Whitehall bureaucracy that New Labour so assiduosuly stripped in favour of individual rights (at the expense of social cohesion). On another occasion, the prime minister was in defiant mood when he said there could be no comparison made between the summer rioters and the financiers who had laid low the world economy (that’s right Dave for the latter were far more destructive). His target was the BBC but The Telegraph ran it under Oborne’s byline too. And then on Thursday 8th December, Oborne said that Cameron was a strong leader because he had inner reserves of strength to be weak and not rock the European boat, that the PM was standing up for the UK’s national interest and not his own, let alone his party’s. He affirmed his genuine Eurosceptism through being critical of the Euro but in such times no-one could begrudge that. I wouldn't say he's always right - who is - but he is definitely respectable.
Yet Dave caved in to the Europhobes and their self-appointed leader Boris Johnson. Britain was the only one not to sign up to a communiqué, not a treaty but a sense of direction when all 26 other members did. Cameron’s argument that Britain was not in the Euro so had no need to attend Eurozone finance meetings lost weight when Nick Robinson (secret lemonade drinker as well secret Tory supporter?) pointed that only 17 members of a 27-strong union had the single currency, yet nine non-members still signed up. The PM just blathered about it was right that Britain was not in the Euro, ducking the question altogether.
The thing is Cameron has not just been out-manoeuvred by President Nicolas Sarkozy (with whom many will agree, when he talked about Britain holding everyone up over financial regulation when it was financial regulation that led us to the impasse), who wanted to exclude the UK from the proposal, but also by his parliamentary party. Cameron thinks he has avoided a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU, in which he would be in the invidious position of having to defend but if you appease an aggressor they just want more. The Europhobes are delighted by the prospect of a two-speed Europe as if gives them the option to try and force a vote on Britain’s changed status anyway. They are like the inter-war US isolationists that were so damaging to American foreign affairs and ultimately the world. The consistent references to Norway and Switzerland - international non-entities -highlight their true aim – complete withdrawal from the EU. Both countries have far smaller economies allowing to focus on one industry alone – Norway will still gain massive North Sea oil and gas revenues long after British fields have run out and the Swiss have world-famous banking. Indeed, Norway and Switzerland are part of the Schengen free borders arrangement. What do you say, Fraser Nelson; let’s give up our border controls and be like Norway and Switzerland?
As for the financier who said that being isolated was like missing the Titanic as it left dock, first of all he would say that given that his business would have suffered (I wonder how much tax he actually pays as well or is he a non-dom) and secondly one does not run a foreign policy through quips unless you are Robert Mugabe or Muammar Gadaffi. The Archbishop of Canterbury has already called for a financial transaction tax, variously called the Tobin tax or the Robin Hood tax. Bearded leftie some would say, but how could you expect Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Cameron and George Osborne) to endorse it. The PM says he could not possibly adopt it unless it was worldwide (i.e. it’s pie in the sky) but let’s see how hard he presses for it at the G20, where a worldwide agreement could largely be enforced. Then his true colours will emerge.
The future of Britain lies either as a servant of the USA or as a partner with European colleagues. Unlike Thatcher or Major, let alone Heath, Cameron has pushed us to the periphery. Oborne seems to believe that Cameron has done well, nay, been ingenious, insomuch as he’s avoided a party split and/or the fall of the coalition government by not going the whole hog and demanding repatriation of many ‘powers’, while allowing other EU countries to try and save the Eurozone if they want. The PM will most enjoy reading Oborne’s column today should he choose to do so. Maybe Oborne is happy that Cameron doesn't pay attention to him, given his subsequent fulsome praise. But I think Cameron is storing up trouble, for by feeding the xenophobic beast, he has merely whetted its appetite. Moreover, the phrase “if the whole world is wrong and you’re right, it’s time to look in the mirror,” while not always true, looks particularly apposite, given that four of those who signed up, promised to let their parliaments examine the ‘deal’ before giving the go-ahead. After the backbench rebellion on EU membership last month, that prospect would have terrified Cameron. To reiterate, this was not a treaty, just an agreement on a future direction. Oborne believes Cameron has achieved what was thought impossible, an idea which may have influenced his previous article affirming that the PM should side with the national over the party interest. British influence is permanently reduced and the rules drawn up will still affect us (now with no-one to even defend the indefensible actions of The City and get a compromise) - I wonder how many times US presidents will be calling Number 10 after this? We shall see how all this plays out for the future but the fat cats and their Tory friends have got an early Christmas present. Too much chocolate makes you sick though.

2011-12-08T14:47:00.005Z

Some commentators like to present the north-west of England as the heartland of football, a claim to rile other regions with long-established and cherished histories of the sport. With both man Manchester clubs (sorry Rochdale, you’re not one of them) exiting the Champions League, the backlash can begin. The two Mersey sides – Liverpool and the Liverpool Reserves, whoops, bit of Bill Shankly creeping in there; I mean Liverpool and Everton – didn’t even make the grade to enter European competition and aren’t doing great now, the Anfield outfit most pertinently given that more than £100 million has been invested in the squad in less than a year. Furthermore, three Lancashire teams – Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic – occupy all three relegation spots and, noting their size of each, there are no guarantees that they would bounce back straightaway if any or all were to fall through the trapdoor. This heart(land) is diseased.
In top European football, the responsibility rests with London to deliver for England, even though none of its clubs have won the European Cup (though Chelsea and Arsenal have both finished runners-up in recent years). For Manchester City, this is a blip as the priority until May is becoming Premier League champions. Even for Manchester United, despite failing in a group of ridiculous ease, they have gone one better than the last time they were out of elite European competition before Christmas, finishing third, not fourth as they did in 2005, thereby dropping into the Europa League. With their domestic travails (trailing in the Premier League with insipid performances, losing at home to second tier Crystal Palace in the League Cup and drawn away to Man City in the FA Cup), this could be their best chance of a trophy this season because they were not going to overcome Barcelona in 2012 at the top table.
Man Utd’s conquerors Basle (from Basel) deserve this after the former very luckily overcame a 3-2 deficit to the Swiss at Old Trafford to make it 3-3 in the last minute. They add to the exotica of the knockout stages with Apoel Nicosia becoming the first Cypriot side to make the cut. England’s UEFA coefficient vis-à-vis their nearest rivals Spain should not be too badly dented as both associations saw two clubs progress and two exit. What is interesting is that Italy is back. Three of their teams make the last 16, while Udinese pushed Arsenal close in the 3rd qualifying round. Despite Inter Milan winning the Champions League in 2010, Italian football has been in the doldrums. In fact, Internazionale getting their hands on the ‘cup with the big ears’ is the main reason why this season Serie A had four entrants to the European cream of the crop, when previously and from August 2012, they will only have a trio, losing out to Germany who will be more nervous now, with only Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen making it to the resumption in February.
Zenit St Petersburg and CSKA Moscow will be the representatives of Russia in the knockout section and their tandem will do a far better job of promoting their country on the European stage than that of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. Under their tutelage, corruption has flourished in the Federation so vigorously that they can’t even rig an election properly. It is reminiscent of the incompetence in Zimbabwe and Iran with their botched attempts at ballot fraud. It is unthinkable that Putin won’t be president next year (not least because he is still relatively popular), but United Russia, the political party that he leads (yet, intriguingly, is not a member of), has suffered a bloody nose with a drop of 15% support of the ‘electorate’ since last time. Mikhail Gorbachev, a man with 2% approval ratings in his homeland, once again makes the wrong call, on this occasion demanding a re-run of the vote. That will merely allow the authorities to get it right in stealing the plebiscite. The protests in Moscow are not even on the same scale of the Orange Revolution, let alone Tahrir Square. It was smart of the police to let them go ahead and arrest them, so they can be identified in the future. Putin’s Russia looks shabby yet it is no danger of toppling yet.

2011-12-07T11:25:00.000Z

Today is the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor (Honolulu, contrary to popular perception, was untouched, if not unmoved). A Day of Infamy. Tomorrow, is the office drinks party in Rochester. That shall be another day of infamy. I’ll hazard a guess that the carnage will only be comparable to that in Hawaii only on an Airfix scale model. Of the Death Star.

Oh, the weather outside if frightful but with the economy inside it's no more delightful

2011-12-06T11:44:00.003Z

I love the snow – the deeper, the crisper, the more even, the better. In December 2010, Medway was stuck in a knot of storm weather that deposited more than a foot of snow in two days. It caused chaos, especially in the transport sector, where grit almost ran out, vehicles frequently flipped (so much so that Newsroom Southeast had their opening montage with an upside-down car in a drift – rather more pointed than the usual bland images stitched together) and Heathrow was virtually closed. It is claimed that it contributed to half a billion pounds being wiped off national GDP.
Given that last figure and the economic chill of that we are subjected now, I will forgo a meteorological one, to give us a chance of skimming outside of a recession. There again, the Eurozone could bring the whole world down, bad weather or no. The talk of a ‘financial compact’ to sort out the structural weaknesses, makes me think of make-up covering up a myriad of sins – Germany needs to give up some cherished ideals, such as not printing money as a way out of the crisis.
As the mascara streaks as the heat is turned up, the zits that need some Clearasil action are the rating agencies. Honestly, what are they for? They are home wreckers by being nation wreckers. Standard & Poor, not content with downgrading the USA in August causing financial turmoil, are now insistent on doing it again, warning gloomily against investing in any member of the Eurozone for as a whole they might soon be downgraded. They want to be ‘ahead of the curve’ as they, along with Fitch and Moody’s, were behind the curve in giving top-notch ratings to products that were, in reality, junk. Thus having played a key role in the credit crunch and Great Recession, S&P are now trying to prolong it in a clumsy attempt to protect their reputation. Trouble is, their reputation is already shot and their cack-handed subsequent self-serving measures risk becoming self-fulfilling. Any company that is of a size to invest in sovereign debt can do credit checks of their own. It’s time to legislate the ratings agencies out of existence – the US will be sympathetic and the Eurozone may see it as one of necessity.

Following the Fox down its hole

2011-12-05T09:32:00.001Z

As is known commonly, progress for some is regression for others. Those in charge of BBC3 (digital channel of the year, probably awarded solely on the programme they did chronicling the British Army in Afghanistan) have decided to follow this line of thinking, having straplines of the next show, five minutes before time on the previous show. On Points of View, despite a flurry of complaints, the head of BBC3 said that “Straplines are here to stay.” So much for listening to other people.
Part of the problem is that they hover on the screen for so long at completely arbitrary parts of the narrative of the programme they invade. On American Dad last night, an important part of information was obscured by the strapline advertising Family Guy, until the very last moment. This is despite Family Guy savaging Fox TV in one episode for the latter’s own straplines a couple of years ago. Does the head of BBC3 even watch his own imports? Given the regularity of repeats and thus the airtime given to this ‘innovation’, is this why the funding to bring over new Family Guy in jeopardy? Closing down the avenues of dissent is a sure sign of a narrowing mind.

Milestone

2011-12-02T12:04:00.002Z

500 posts – it’s only taken my good self a little over five years to reach this mark. There have been hiatuses of months followed by intensive posting day after day. To chunter or not to chunter? Yet the question is a matter of time and convenience. If people read, let them read. If they don’t, then at least I have a digital repository of my thoughts should I ever have cause to refer to them.

2011-11-25T11:05:00.002Z

I fully agree with this analysis. Germany must cede as much sovereignty as it is demanding of the debt-ridden countries. stand together or fall apart. It was ironic that isolationist USA criticised 'war-mad Europe' given that it was its economic policies that pushed that continent into the hands of war-mongerers in central Europe. Will Marx be proved wrong again - that when history repeats itself, the first instance is tragedy, the second is farce. The evisceration of weaker European coutnries is a tragedy for its peoples.
In today's debt crisis, Germany is the US of 1931
Germany's own history shows that dictating economic decline to other nations only stores up trouble for the future, by Fabian Lindner for Social Europe Journal, 24th November 2011.
A country faces an economic and political abyss: the government is on the brink of bankruptcy and pursues fierce austerity policies; public employees take huge pay cuts and taxes are drastically increased; the economy slumps and unemployment rates explode; people fight each other on the street while banks collapse and international capital flees the country. Greece in 2011? No, Germany in 1931.
The government's head is not Lucas Papademos, but Heinrich Brüning. The "hunger-chancellor" cuts government spending by decree, ignoring parliament while GDP falls without limit. Two years later Hitler will be in power, eight years later the second world war will begin. Today's political situation is still different, but the economic parallels are frightening.
Like in today's crisis countries, Germany's key problem in 1931 was foreign debts. The US was Germany's biggest creditor, Germany's debts were denominated in US dollars. Since the mid-1920s, its government had borrowed huge sums abroad to service reparation payments vis-à-vis France and Great Britain. Foreign credit also financed Germany's roaring twenties – the economic boom after the 1923 hyperinflation. Like Spain, Ireland and Greece today, Germany's 1920s upswing was caused by a credit bubble.
The bubble burst when US financial markets collapsed in 1929. US investors and banks were hit hard, lost confidence and reduced their risks – especially their investments in European assets. Credit flows into Germany, Austria and Hungary came to a sudden halt. US investors did not want Reichsmark – Germany's own currency – but dollars, a currency the German Reichsbank could not print. The dollar withdrawal out of Germany – especially out of German bank deposits – led to the quick depletion of the Reichsbank's currency reserves.
To earn dollars Germany had to turn its huge current account deficit into a surplus. But like today's crisis countries, Germany was trapped in a currency system with fixed exchange rates, the gold standard, and could not devalue its currency. However, even upon leaving the gold standard, chancellor Brüning and his economic advisers feared the inflationary effects of a devaluation and a replay of the 1923 hyperinflation.
Without dollar liquidity from abroad, the only way the government could turn around the current account was fierce wage and cost deflation. In just two years Brüning cut public spending by 30%. The chancellor raised taxes and cut wages and social security expenditures in the face of ever increasing unemployment and poverty. Real GNP dropped by 8% in 1931 and by 13% a year later, unemployment increased to 30% and money kept spilling out of the country. The current account turned from a huge deficit into a small surplus.
But there were not enough dollars available on world markets. In 1930 the US Congress had introduced the Smoot-Hawley-tariff to keep imports out of the country. Countries with dollar debts were cut off from the US market and could not earn the necessary money to service their debts. The situation didn't improve when president Hoover proposed a one year moratorium on all of Germany's foreign debt. The moratorium was opposed both by France – which insisted on German reparation payments – and the US Congress. When Congress finally passed the moratorium in December 1931 it was too little, too late.
In the summer of 1931, German banks began to fail, causing both a credit crunch and huge public aid packages to save the biggest banks. The banks had to be closed and the government defaulted on its debts. The Hoover moratorium and a policy of fiscal expansion under Brüning's successor von Papen came too late: bankruptcies and unemployment kept rising and the Nazis gained political ground.
The parallels to today's economic situation are frightening: Greece, Ireland and Portugal have to pursue fierce austerity policies under the pressure of creditor countries and financial markets in order to turn their current account balances from deficit to surplus; Greek unemployment stands at 18%, Ireland's at 14% and Portugal's at 12%, Spain's even at 22%. And those who could help don't do enough: Germany and the German central bankers demand drastic austerity and only give piecemeal and insufficient help in return – too little, too late, now and then.
Much would have been gained for Germany in 1931 if the US – and also France – had provided the necessary liquidity for German banks and its government. Maybe the political radicalisation could have been avoided. But the US was turning isolationist. It did not want to get involved in messy European affairs.
Today Germany plays the US role. Both parliament and the government hesitate to provide the necessary help for the crisis countries: within the EFSF, Germany is willing to guarantee only up to €211bn of crisis country borrowing. This is not enough. The 2008 guarantees for the German banking system were €480bn.
Germany still insists on its current account surpluses. These are, by definition, the deficits of the crisis countries. Thus they keep these countries from earning the money to service their debts. Further, Germany fiercely opposes liquidity credits by the ECB. German economists and central banker justify the ECB's passivity with the threat of inflation. But they mix up the historical lessons from Germany's 1923 hyperinflation and its 1931 deflation and unemployment crisis.
This failure of judgment can easily backfire: Germany's reputation all over Europe is already declining, political tensions in crisis countries with record unemployment are increasing drastically and the ever more likely breakup of the eurozone would threaten Germany's economy, especially its banks and exports.
The US learnt the hard way that it had to take responsibility for the world's economic stability. The second world war was one of the consequences of the 1930s crisis that it could have prevented.
After having failed to stabilise the world economic system in the early 1930s, by 1945 the US had learned that only economic co-operation could lead to a peaceful and prosperous world. Via the Marshall plan and the opening up of its markets for European exports it allowed Europe to rebuild its destroyed economy. Meanwhile, US exporters profited from Europe's hunger for investment and consumption goods.
Until the early 1970s the US led the international trade and currency system – the Bretton Woods system – thereby guaranteeing economic prosperity, a free market with social equity and thus the economic pre-requisites for social democracy.
Both the German public and politicians should learn from history. Solidarity with the crisis countries is in Germany's long-run interest. The German government should stop abusing its power to dictate economic decline to other nations. The alternative is economic stagnation and increased tensions between European nations. The verdict still holds: those who are not willing to learn from history are bound to repeat it.

2011-11-23T09:21:00.000Z

Manchester City may have hoped to goad their Mezzogiorno opponents Napoli by wearing an away strip not dissimilar to that of strutting AC Milan (in a role reversal to England, northerners look down on southerners). That tactic failed as the amazing crowd at Stadio San Paolo exhorted their team to strain every sinew for the Napoli cause. What struck me most was such an atmosphere could be conjured in an arena with a running track. This gives the lie to Tottenham Hotspur’s PR that they had to demolish the Olympics athletics stadium in Stratford, replacing it with a purpose-built football home. West Ham’s supporters are probably one of the few such groups in the league pyramid who could transform the athletics forum into a crucible. Spurs were acknowledging that their fans just aren’t as passionate in their ability to achieve the same effect.

The passage of time is magic here

2011-11-22T11:03:00.001Z

While I like the medievalist, mythic Merlin, last time out for the episode Lamia, they surely did a boo-boo. Over three nights, three men in a village are stricken with a mysterious illness, rendering them comatose. The wife of the chief elder rides to Camelot over the course of two days. Merlin, Guin(evere) and some of Camelot’s knights take another two days to ride out there; as they ride back they free Lamia from some bandits and she bewitches them to travel away from Camelot. After the two days it should have taken them to get back, King Arthur sets out with his entourage, taking two days to reach the village. Next day, travelling back, they come across a wagon with dead slavetraders and one barely alive slave trader. Lamia broke out of the wagon, slaying his companions and leaving him for dead. Are we to believe that this fellow has lain in the same position out in the open for twelve days in a near moribund state? And that his colleagues have not begun to putrefy - sure the birds and other animals of the forest are scared of Lamia and the path she has taken but bacteria too?
Another great thing about Merlin is the stunning (mostly CGI) castles and monuments, though the number that are deserted and in no need of maintenance against the onslaught of nature and time is striking. The catch-all excuse is that magic keeps up the appearances. Hmmm. The latest one to which Lamia lures the knights even has its windows boarded up in the manner of a northern English town’s high street in the 1980s. Lamia is killed and that is the resolution of the narrative but it doesn’t bear the weight of too much thought afterwards.

2011-11-22T10:41:00.002Z

The fresh turmoil in Egypt has illustrated that a new dynamic is at play throughout the Middle East and that the army must step down from power immediately after the parliamentary elections this Monday. They won’t of course but that’s because they have become greedy for power. Let’s call the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces what it really is – a junta.
Making vague promises to step down in 2013, hoping popular anger will have dampened down by then and so they won’t need to is cynical. Fanning sectarian division by trying to isolate the Copts and cracking down on them is both cynical and dangerous – it could lead to another Iraq situation. Locking up 12,000 civilians since February via the medium of military courts is just plan nasty. Stating bluntly through their civilian proxies that they will have a veto on any military budgetary issues and on the new constitution makes a lot of Egyptians wonder what their revolution was in the first place.
Maybe the army hoped to have a regime such as previously in Turkey and still current in Thailand, when they could step in at a moment’s notice from behind the façade of democratic trappings. The iron fist in the velvet glove, a praetorian government. I remember one demonstrator in February praising the soldiery after they had protected the protestors and removed Hosni Mubarak, effusive in rose-tinted history, as he said the Egyptian army had never attacked its own people. If this was true, then it is no longer.
Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi was rumoured back in February to be even more dismissive of the idea of democracy than Mubarak. While the latter feared the rise of religious extremism with the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the ruling of the country, Tantawi, a career apparatchik, was just contemptuous of free and fair elections. In his role as interim head of state, Tantawi is unapproachable and hopes to mould public opinion through rigid control of state-run television stations and newspapers. He seems an unlikely convert to representative government, as much as Tsar Nicholas II was reconciled to governing Russia with a duma parliament. Russia had two revolutions – a popular one and a zealously authoritarian one. Tantawi (and the jailed Mubarak) should not forget that it was the second revolution that claimed the life of Nicholas Romanov and his family.

When Saturday comes

2011-11-18T11:34:00.000Z

Tomorrow, in English football, the Unstoppable Force will contest a game with the Immovable Object. In times gone by, this would have been a clash between Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United and Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea. This season though, Man Utd are still in transition and Andre Villas Boas’ Stamford Bridge are playing Keeganesque football – very attractive but far too open at the back.
No, instead it will be the revived Manchester City versus a resurgent Newcastle United, both boasting the last league unbeaten records this season in the top flight. The Magpie defence has been parsimonious in its operation, quite against type, with the meanest concession of goals in the country. Man City are no slouches in their rearguard either but their attack has been tearing up clubs around the country. Fulham have slowed them down with a draw but no-one has stopped them in the Premier League, from goals or points.
The corresponding fixture in 2010, saw an abysmal refereeing performance in favour of the home side in which the most grievous was when Hatem ben Arfa had his leg broken in two places by Nigel de Jong. The latter not only went unpunished when it should have been a straight red card but because the referee had ‘seen’ it (and had let play continue until a Newcastle player ‘committed’ a foul), retrospective punishment could not be applied. It took ben Arfa a year to recover from the injury and who knows if he will ever fully be the same again (or indeed if he will play a part at the scene of the crime). After snapping Stuart Holden’s leg and planting his studs as a karate kick in Xabi Alonso’s chest, the only sanction de Jong received after the latest offence was to be temporarily dropped from the Dutch national team. Further, Man City were given a penalty when Carlos Tevez was tripped outside the box and Newcastle denied one when Shola Ameobi had his legs hacked from under him inside. Man City won 2-1 when they should have lost 2-1 with ten men. The erring referee spent a time in the second tier for this egregious officiating.
A victory for the black-and-whites will lend impetus to an unlikely title tilt, whereas a draw will continue their pursuit of a European place (preferably Champions League). A 1-1 draw here, with Chelsea vs Liverpool on Sunday and Tottenham Hotspur vs Aston Villa on Monday will be very beneficial to the Toon. The odds are in favour of a Man City victory but not as overwhelmingly as they appeared to be at the start of the season.
The owner and managing director of NUFC will hope Alan Pardew can craft a positive result to take the heat off their devious, counter-productive and futile plan to strip the Toon’s stadium of the words ‘St James Park’. They claim it will raise money which was the same wheeze when they made it SportsDirect@St JamesPark.com. No-one came in then, no-one will now, yet they go on to say “You don’t know how horrible we can be.” What is the rationale for being nasty to fans? It makes no sense at all.

Public Enemy

2011-11-16T12:25:00.001Z

Being a public figure is a fraught business these days, even for those who only occupy barely a sliver of the reediest of limelight. The wrong word selection or poor phrasing and suddenly you’re more of a pariah than Bashar al-Assad. No wonder Herman Cain was so non-committal in describing what he would do regarding the Libyan revolution.
Robert Peston has received flak this week, not for being a stooge of the Murdochs (the BBC has rightly handed more tabloid journalistic bad behaviour to others) but for twittering the phrase “Queer Street” - as in if it hadn’t been for prudent debt-management measures, the UK would be in “Queer Street and Skid Row.” He gets a flurry of criticism from the ignorant mob and has to post dictionary definitions that show the term “Queer Street” has zilch to do with homosexuality (used by Charles Dickens, it is traditionally understood to mean someone who is in financial difficulties). Mind you, having an open-feed twitter account does expose you to the banal outrage from dulled minds that football phone-ins generate, only 24/7 instead of a few hours.
More caught in the frenzied zeitgeist of thought control, Jason Gardiner, the ‘Mr Nasty’ of the judging panel of the reality show Dancing on Ice has had to come out and defend himself for being robbed on the street. Or rather how he described his attackers (again on Twitter), saying that he had been “mugged by two hooded black youths in Stockwell who held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me, all for an iPhone.” He has been lambasted as racist by people saying it was not necessary to state that they were black. It was not necessary to state that they were hooded, a dreadful slur on all those who choose to wear hoodies. Why, even calling them youths, is tremendous insult to the young of this country. Indeed, not all muggers hold knives to throats – the mugging community must be flabbergasted at this libel.
In a similar vein, Steve Williams, Tiger Woods’ former caddie, has been excoriated for the remark at a golfers’ dinner that the win for his boss Adam Scott was a way of sticking it to that ‘black arsehole’. I would say that this is descriptive rather than pejorative. The rough-and-ready Williams could have put it better but if he had just said ‘arsehole’ without prefacing it, people would have drawn conclusions that it was Woods but it could have been, conceivably, Greg Norman or someone else with whom Williams had fallen out. But there is only one world-famous golfer whose skin colour could be termed as black and so everyone in that hall would know exactly who he was talking about. I can’t believe that Williams caddied for Woods’ for ten years yet harboured a racist underside – it’s simply ridiculous to suggest so yet commentators faint in shame at this ‘betrayal’. How about the betrayal felt by Williams, standing by Woods through all his marital and personal travails, only to be dumped unceremoniously like a sweaty shirt because Woods feels he needs to freshen things up. That explains Williams’ anger, Scott’s understanding and Woods’ stoic silence. It is all the hyper-ventilating by those in the media bubble, stirring up controversy to make themselves appear more important, as they seek to ban words that are colours from the English language.
Far more problematic is John Terry’s expletive-laden tirade against Anton Ferdinand in which the word ‘black’ is sandwiched. His excuse that he was using expletives to show that he wasn’t using ‘black’ scornfully seems bizarre. It is in this instance that the word need not have cropped up at all – it seems actively to be part of the insult. Ferdinand could be mocked for playing for a certain north-east England club last season but mentioning his skin colour in this context is out of order at the very least. If he had faced off against a, say, South Korean in another game and used ‘yellow’ inbetween very offensive swearing, it would be just as unacceptable. It is a modern trend that people can do or say racist things in earnest but call them racist and they are apoplectic or in denial. They are happy to be pejorative about others of a different race but don’t like treatment of labelling when it is applied to them. They are more offended by the term ‘racist’ than its actual validity.
On the extreme end of this was Ron Atkinson’s foul-mouthed rant about Marcel Desailly in 2004 when he thought his microphone was switched off. Not only did he use the overtly racist n-word but his whole ‘analysis’ saying that Desailly was lazy in an expression that when coupled with the n-word, one could not get a more complete picture of prejudice. Atkinson was rightly sacked from both ITV and The Guardian (the latter having an interim replacement of Andy Gray, later disgraced as an unreconstructed sexist). He may have brought through coloured players under his tutelage in the 1970s when other clubs would not but now that looks as patronising, white-man’s-burden paternalism, rather than striving for and believing in equality. Atkinson’s later bafflement that some rappers and black kids addressed each other with the n-word could not comprehend that this was an attempt to devalue the term to hurt racists and that as Atkinson’s ancestors had not been stolen or sold from their homeland and forced to work as slaves, he was forbidden from using some words. A pathetic excuse for the whole beyond-the-pale phraseology he deployed.
There is a scale and a line. Some people can be more racist than others but all racism is intolerable, as is sexism, homophobia and all forms of trying to demean. Richard Herring on his radio show examined why the first three things were off-limits to comedians but mental illness was not. The irony was that some mainstream comedians think of themselves as non-racist but use the abusive concept ‘mong’ quite freely even though its origins (unlike that of Queer Street in terms of homosexuality) are inherently racialist, believing those of an East Asian complexion are more stupid than Caucasians. This incenses me – such comedians must be of a lower-order of intelligence than their fellow humans, whatever the offender’s ethnicity.
What I don’t like is the self-righteous demagoguery against people who say or write things when seeking purely to illustrate a situation rather than aiming to be derogatory of a person’s ethnicity or such like. Len Goodman is attacked for calling his fellow Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel-Horwood “a silly little sod.” Now Revel-Horwood being gay and the term ‘sod’ in some circles an abbreviation for sodomite was not at all what Goodman was thinking of. Revel-Horwood was more piqued that Goodman was disagreeing with him rather than the put-down. In fact, until today I always thought the insult was referring to clump of earth, seeking to intimate that the person on the receiving end should be trodden all over. What a close-call that could have been for our ever more intolerantly tolerant future. Leonard Cohen once composed the song “Jazz Police” and the couplet “Jazz Police are looking through my folders/Jazz Police have got their final orders” has the ring of the times we live in. As gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell - not usually one for restraint - commented in the Robert Peston case “people are being oversensitive.” Quite.

Beware of Greeks not bearing gifts but calling referendums

2011-11-03T11:40:00.002Z

In order to try and safeguard his own political position because presumably he was hoping for re-election, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou called a referendum on the bailout despite a majority of Greeks saying that they would reject it (though 50% of Greek debt was to be written off). Maybe he was gambling that though 60% of the Greek electorate was against the EU deal, 70% were in favour of remaining in the Euro. Hence, after their all-too-imaginable explosion of fury, France and Germany tried to browbeat Papandreou into framing the plebiscite question as an in-or-out of the Euro poser. But with the Greek finance minister attacking his own boss and other memebers of the ruling party resigning, the Greek government is about to collapse which will result in a fresh general election that could ve very unwelcome for efforts to save the Euro. Let it be made clear. The default and/or withdrawal from the Euro of Greece will, despite its relatively small size in the grand scheme of things, send economic shockwaves across the world. Never was the saying that but for a nail, the kingdom was lost ever more true.

2011-10-26T16:41:00.002+01:00

One has to worry when the man essentially in charge of the direction of education in this country issues the statement “I’m a passionate Eurosceptic.” Michael Gove has rendered himself quite happily as an oxymoron, emphasis on ‘moron’. The term Eurosceptic is cover for slavering Europhobe but gives the veneer of a rational, if querying, mindset towards the Euro, the EU or Europeans in general. Yet to append passionate to it is nonsense, since one does not need to read David Hume to understand that the passion invalidates the rationalism, indeed that they are two contradictory mental approaches.
Since Euroscepticism in the UK generally expresses itself that ‘Europe is nice place, shame about the people living there’ whilst barely ever acknowledging that the United Kingdom is indeed part of the same continent, it should more properly be described as Europeanphobic or, to be generous, EU-phobic. This is before even coming onto the single currency. The Euro is anathema to xenophobic parliamentary representatives - mention joining the Euro to a member of the public will winkle out a laugh, probably quite hearty; do the same to, say, a Tory MP will induce apoplexy. The cobweb-strewn brains of Conservatives and right-wing tabloid journalists in particular (though ex-Marxists like Jack Straw are of the same bent) believe that the continental mainland is still a place of Napoleon, Hitler or Phillip II, champing at the bit to swallow Britain up into their monstrous design. They are a bit like duffer admirals issuing Jeremiads that naval cuts will endanger the Falkland Islands, even though Argentina may grandstand as a democracy but would never start another war as long as the civilians are in control of the government. The only reason there is a democratic deficit (one of the key Tory complaints) in the EU is because of the EU-phobic opposition in this country to any further democratisation as that would mean further integration, undercutting national parliaments, yet without more democratisation, they will continue to carp about a democratic deficit. It is akin to ETA trying to bomb a democratic Spain back to nationalistic Castlian dictatorship in order to justify their own existence. To fervently believe in a Catch-22 without recognising that they are doing so is a prerequisite for demagoguery of the most dangerous kind. They should look at the democratic deficit in their own minds.

2011-10-24T11:31:00.003+01:00

I'm glad for New Zealand winning the Rugby World Cup. They were always the most deserving team at this tournament to hoist above their heads the Webb Ellis trophy. They almost choked again facing their bogey team - l'equipe crotte de nez - in the French. The latter did what their Association footballing counterparts enacted in 2006 - ignore the useless coach, take responsibility into their own hands and progress to the final. Whatever, to see them was unnerving to the Kiwis as the Haka is to non-French squads. Yet, they got away with it just and ended the quarter century wait for the Best Rugby Team in the World TM to be champions of the world. I'm also happy for Graham Henry, the Kiwi coach, the culmination of a sterling career.

2011-10-24T10:43:00.006+01:00

Though not a Manchester City FC fan, their utter howking of their derby rivals Machester United 6-1 at the latter's home ground is not just joy for them but a result that is great for any team that has suffered at the hands of Manchester United. I wonder how many MUFC 'fans' will stay that way after this. Bad boy Mario Balotelli had a firework set off in his bathroom of all places on Friday - he let off a couple of fireworks yesterday, scoring the first two goals for City. Sir Alex Ferguson is on record as saying that, when his outfit lost 5-1 at Manchester City's old ground Maine Road, he went straight home after the match and buried his head under a pillow for two hours. What would he have done on Sunday afternoon once the game was concluded, given that this was at Old Trafford? That thrashing at the Road was in the old days before the team he managed were regular title contenders. What was most surprising as the result is that prior to yesterday's game, Manchester United were still favourite to retain their Premier League crown. Not any more. I bet all those pundits who suggested Manchester City would fall short after losing to their city neighbours in the semi-competitive Community Shield are eating their words now.

2011-10-24T10:32:00.000+01:00

Spooks – what a finale! I only started watching the spy series from last year, having previously ignored it. But it has held a compelling grip over me since then. The sadness at the very end was well-handled and it had a good pay-off line to sign off the show. Will be missed.

Mad Dog Put Down

2011-10-21T11:24:00.001+01:00

The death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (also Qadafi, Kadafi, etc.) is not just a seminal moment in Libyan history but global history as well. Through his idiosyncrasies he garnered international mirth, through his crimes international notoriety – simply, he was one of the most infamous of current national leaders.
Was. Past tense. Though his death will be unlamented (except maybe by unreconstructed South African ANC politicians), the manner of his death is deeply troubling. The Transitional National Council (which should resign imminently as per its promise after liberation) claims Gaddafi was killed in crossfire between the rebels and pro-Gaddafi forces but how they would they know, far away in Benghazi as they are? A BBC journalist on the ground in Sirte has, on camera, a fighter claiming Gaddafi was captured and then shot with a 9mm pistol.
It is sad that Libya has opened a new chapter in its national narrative with extra-judicial murder (Mutaissim Gaddafi, one of the sons was also apprehended alive and then somehow died later, as also occurred to the Jamahiryah’s National Security Chief). There can be no clearer summing-up of the ill-discipline rife in the rebel army that a hothead can take it upon themselves to deliver justice. As World War Two drew to a close in Europe, Allied armies took great pains to arrest as many Nazi leaders alive as possible, so the judgement of history would have a legal framework. Most faced the hangman but not all (bar one acquittal, the rest faced long prison terms), giving the whole process more credence. In Gulf War Two, Saddam Hussein was found cowering in a hole much like Gaddafi – but US troops didn’t bundle him into the back of the truck and shoot him in the head. Bar shaving off much of his facial hair to make him recognisable, they did not in obvious way mistreat him. In the end, the Iraqi courts saw fit to execute him but not before he was made accountable of many of his atrocities. Gaddafi said he would die fighting on Libyan soil and, ironically given the rebel hatred of him, he got what he claimed he wanted. A warrior’s death is far too honourable for such a monster.
One person said last night ‘you live by the sword, you die by the sword’, but revenge is a dish best served cold. There is no uncertainty and Gaddafi’s removal from the scene in unequivocal but democratic politicians deal with uncertainty and must perforce equivocate as part of governing. Years of public dishonouring in court, a daily reminder of how low he had been brought, would have been far greater punishment. The issue of who would try him – the Libyans or the International Criminal Court – is now as dead as the indicted and he can no longer spread, at the least verbally, the poison of insurgency. Yet a sour taste persists that Gaddafi was not brought to book in a crushing – for him – legal setting.
Libyans must now get on with rebuilding their country and reining in the excess that led to Gaddafi’s premature death. The whole institution of government – judiciary, legislature and executive – must be created from almost a standing start and civil society – freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience – must be encouraged to prevent backsliding into corrupt and/or undemocratic ways. There is a splendid example just over the border in Tunisia, who will be holding genuinely competitive elections this Sunday (something that should also shame Egypt into speedier action in its political transformation). We in the West can only wish the Libyans well and give them every possible assistance to complete the democratic revolution.

Tinkered and tailored to be wonderful

2011-10-19T09:59:00.001+01:00

Having neither read the book nor seen the television adaptation, I was pretty keen to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, having insulated myself from it bar that it was feted at the Cannes film festival and featured a magnificent performance by Gary Oldman as George Smiley, who is as far from James Bond as it is possible to get. While bad reviews may not fully tally with one’s perspective, good reviews tend to indicate something special.
It was a brilliant film, not least in making no concessions to short attention spans which I wholeheartedly applaud. Moreover, given what we know about KGB penetration of the British Secret Service it had a distinct air of truth. Then there was almost a roll-call of acting aristocracy not seeking to outdo each other but turning in convincing portrayals. The evocation of the 1970s was exceptional in its griminess and worn-out nature.
Having wound the gears up, like an expertly crafted music box, as everything falls into place it is amazing to behold. I was still seeing new connections emerge twenty minutes after I had left the cinema, proving that it not only stays in the mind but keeps the mind active too.

Not all (Blair)right

2011-10-14T13:43:00.002+01:00

Two articles today prove that no matter what the Comic Strip do tonight, Tony Blair defies satire in many ways. He was just a dickhead of the first order.
In this, Peter Oborne reaffirms that he is one of the most astute and even-handed commentators writing at the moment:
No, Prime Minister, Jeremy Heywood is not the man to lead our great Civil Service
It is notoriously the case that the dying days of governments, of whatever persuasion, are marked by scandals involving lax morals and the abuse of power. John Major at the end of 18 years of Tory rule in the 1990s, Harold Macmillan at the start of the 1960s, and more recently Gordon Brown: all of them had to cope with the consequence of having been too long in government.
This makes the situation confronting David Cameron unusual. Though only 18 months old, his Coalition government is already beset by the kind of problems that normally emerge at the very end of a premiership. During the past week alone we have seen Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, fighting for his career after a series of breaches of the ministerial code, and Justice Minister Jonathan Djanogly accused of serious conflicts of interest involving his family’s business connections. Meanwhile Chris Huhne, the Environment Secretary, already facing embarrassing claims that he misled the police over a traffic offence, remains unpunished after being caught red-handed feeding journalists damaging material about his Cabinet colleague Theresa May.
Yet none of these stories – not even the Fox debacle – is as worrying as this week’s huge shake-up in Whitehall, and the emergence of Jeremy Heywood as the replacement for Sir Gus O’Donnell as cabinet secretary. Just 50 years old, there is every chance that Heywood will remain in post, at the beating heart of British government, for a full 10 years.
To understand why Heywood’s appointment is so alarming, and why it sends out such bewildering messages about the future trajectory of the Cameron administration, it is necessary to cast a glance backwards.
There have only been 10 cabinet secretaries since the post was invented in 1916 by Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the Lloyd George war cabinet. Indeed, the constitutional historian Lord Hennessy dates the start of modern British government to 11.30am on Saturday, September 9, 1916, when Hankey took down the first ever cabinet minute. Once circulated round Whitehall, these minutes became what Hankey called “operative decisions” and established the power of the cabinet secretary throughout Whitehall.
In the years that followed, Hankey – and his great mid-century successors Bridges, Brook and Trend – established a massive moral and intellectual authority. Not only did they oversee the superb Civil Service machine that ran the domestic war effort from 1939-45 and thereafter established the modern welfare state – they were also formidable guardians of public integrity during the period of our history when the British state was at its most admired and powerful.
It was not until the very end of the 20th century that this system came under threat. From 1997 onwards, Tony Blair’s New Labour government keenly resented the power, as well as the delicate sense of propriety, of the established Civil Service.
Blair had little or no use for his first cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, who feebly and unsuccessfully sought to insist on the impartiality and discretion of the Civil Service, as well as the importance of maintaining boundaries between public duty and private interest.
The small coterie who surrounded Blair were just as dismissive of Butler’s successor, Richard Wilson. They ignored his advice and imposed instead a system of crony government in which due process was ignored, with integrity being lost as a consequence. It was a miserable time in the history of British public administration.
The Blairites needed allies inside the system, and fortunately there was one to hand. They were always hostile to outsiders, and at first the prime minister’s private secretary, the young and ambitious Jeremy Heywood, was regarded with suspicion. But with the passage of time Heywood was accepted as a vital member of the group of allies around Blair. Indeed, he was to play a central role as the disciplines of government collapsed and the “sofa culture” of Downing Street reached its peak.
Ordinary procedures, such as minute taking, appear to have partly ceased. This became embarrassingly apparent when the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly sought to reconstruct the process which had led to the Ministry of Defence scientist’s name appearing in a national newspaper. Lord Hutton heard how some four meetings, each involving senior officials and cabinet ministers, had taken place in the 48 hours before Dr Kelly’s name was released. In an extraordinary breach of traditional Whitehall procedure, it emerged that not one of these meetings was minuted. This was Heywood’s job, and it was not carried out.
But it was not just basic procedures that failed with Heywood in Downing Street. Standards of integrity stalled too, as The Daily Telegraph discovered when we ran a well-sourced story revealing that Downing Street had pressed for Tony Blair to be given a bigger public role in the Queen Mother’s funeral of early 2002. Heywood wrote a letter to this newspaper, in his capacity as private secretary to the prime minister, insisting that the report was “without foundation”. To say the least, this was being economical with the truth. Fundamentally, he had crossed the key dividing line between unbiased, public-spirited official and careerist political adviser.
Tony Blair, naturally, adored his private secretary and, in another blatant abuse of Civil Service rules, sought to rocket him to permanent secretary level. When this move was resisted, Heywood just vanished. Granted “unpaid leave” from the Civil Service, he suddenly emerged as co-head of the Morgan Stanley investment banking division, only returning four years later to help sort out Gordon Brown’s chaotic Downing Street machine – a job where he gained universal admiration.
It is easy to understand why David Cameron – who personally chose Heywood – wanted him so much. Heywood knows his way all around Whitehall, and is expert at delivering what a prime minister wants.
But that brief stint at Morgan Stanley aside, he has never worked outside Downing Street and the Treasury. Indeed, Heywood has no experience of the wider Civil Service, which makes his first big decision especially troubling. Sir Gus O’Donnell (and nearly all his predecessors) combined the job of cabinet secretary with that of head of the home Civil Service. There have been very solid reasons for this, not least because it has meant that the Civil Service has a proper voice inside 10 Downing Street. Heywood has turned his back on this arrangement. Precedent suggests this decision will open the way to a long, unnecessary period of attrition between Downing Street and the outlying parts of government. It is a recipe for division and chaos.
David Cameron once boasted that he was the “heir to Blair” and his choice of Heywood suggests the comparison is all too apt. Heywood is a perfect manifestation of everything that has gone so very wrong with the British Civil Service over the past 15 years – too cosy a relationship between public and private, too much dominance at the centre, contempt for tradition and the collapse of due process.
In his foreword to the new ministerial code, published last year, David Cameron wrote that “after the scandals of recent years, people have lost faith in politics and politicians. It is our duty to restore their trust. It is not enough simply to make a difference. We must be different.” These are empty words, with Jeremy Heywood at the heart of government and guardian of British public standards.

The second is an obituary for Sir Hilary Synott:
In Bad Days in Basra (2008), his memoir of the six months he spent in Iraq, Synnott recorded, in devastating detail, the chaotic reality behind the CPA’s attempts to establish civic governance; the dysfunctional relationship between the two occupying powers, Britain and America; and lack of planning and support from the government back home.
The phone call offering Synnott the post as “King of the South” of Iraq came three months after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The situation was not promising. His predecessor — a Danish diplomat — had resigned early after protesting publicly about the lack of support from his American superiors in Baghdad. “It’s a bloody mess”, the head of the Foreign Office’s Iraq unit admitted. Yet Synnott could not resist the challenge.
The reality turned out to be much worse than even he had imagined. Arriving in Basra in July 2003, he found his team camped in the squalid offices of the city’s electricity company, sleeping four or five people to a room in sweltering temperatures of up to 49C (120F). Hygiene arrangements were “unspeakable” and staff had not been informed that they were expected to provide their own soap, towels and bedding. Some even had to sleep on the floor.
Worse still, it was unclear what Synnott’s job involved. Armed with instructions covering “half a side of A4” and a general injunction to “play things by ear” and provide “leadership and direction”, Synnott struggled to establish any sort of administrative routine. He had no phone and no computer until the Americans helped him out, though he could only send reports to London by public email services.
“Everything had to be created from nothing but against a background where it was not clear what the task was,” Synnott recalled. No one in Whitehall had expected that Britain would suddenly have to take the civilian lead in the South: “Instead there had been some vague expectation that the Americans would sort things out.” Ministers “simply wanted someone in Iraq on the ground at once and were less concerned about what I should do when I got there.”
His instructions were to report to both Paul Bremer, American head of the CPA, and to Tony Blair, who had told Synnott that his job was “a challenge of prime national importance” and invited him to phone him personally if he needed anything. In fact, as Synnott struggled to establish a civilian presence alongside the British military effort in southern Iraq, he found himself frustrated at every turn by American indifference and the indecisiveness of his masters in London.
Ensconced in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Bremer made little attempt to disguise his contempt for the British. Synnott recalled that entering Bremer’s office for the first time “felt a bit like entering the headmaster’s study. I was kept waiting; then once I went in, I was kept waiting further until he’d finished reading. Then we sat down, he put his feet on the coffee-table and he delivered a reprimand to me about the behaviour of the British military.”
The CPA itself, he found, was mainly staffed by American policy wonks — “young, naive, pushy people” fired with a messianic zeal rapidly to replace centuries of tribal and religious rivalries and state control with democracy and free markets, and displaying a dogmatism that, as Synnott drily noted, “cut no ice” with the Iraqis.
By the time Synnott arrived in Basra, Bremer had already made two of his most notorious blunders: disbanding the Iraqi army and ordering a de-Ba’athification programme that, in effect, eliminated the entire Iraqi administrative elite. In Basra, Synnott’s staff were instructed to sack school headmasters on the basis that they had been party members, one American CPA official declaring that she would rather have “chaos in the classrooms than Ba’athists in the classrooms”. The British quietly ignored the instruction.
Bremer, Synnott pointed out, was a specialist in dealing with terrorism, but had no wider expertise in developing countries. Seemingly uninterested in the complexities of tribal politics, he “appeared to regard all Iraq as a suburb of Baghdad”.
Dealings with the government back home were equally frustrating. In particular, Synnott found that Tony Blair’s personal assurance that he would have everything he needed was worth little in practice; and he was furious to learn, when Blair paid a visit to Basra in early January 2004, that the prime minister would not be visiting him and his staff, despite assurances that the visit would focus on the civilian effort.
In his memoir, Synnott recalled an “intemperate” phone call with an unnamed “minder from Number 10/Labour Party” who told him via “a string of four letter words” that the press would want stories and photos of soldiers, “not foreign civilians”.
The shortcomings of American and British administration enraged the Iraqis, helping to fuel the insurgency. In Basra, where the coalition forces had initially been welcomed as liberators, the vacuum left by the removal of Ba’athist administration was soon filled by Iranian-backed Shia militias, making the task of rebuilding the country much more difficult. In and around Baghdad, meanwhile, areas that had been quiet immediately after the invasion were soon peppered by explosions and violence; sectarian violence became the norm, and as all security evaporated, al-Qaeda cells established themselves, decapitating locals and foreign workers in executions that were frequently videotaped.
If the occupying powers had succeeded in replacing a stable, if brutal, dictatorship (without weapons of mass destruction) with a fundamentalist insurgency on two fronts, Synnott was clear where he thought the blame lay: “The key decision-makers, and especially Bush and Blair, must inevitably bear ultimate responsibility both for the war itself and for the failures surrounding the process by which success might be achieved,” he told an interviewer.
Synnott was tempted to call his book “Bugger Basra”, and it was to be more than two years after his return to England before he felt calm enough to write it. “I couldn’t have written it before because I was just in such a blind fury,” he confessed. The Synnott who emerged from Basra was a very different individual from the kindly and philosophical man his colleagues recalled from earlier years.
The son of a naval officer, Hilary Nicholas Hugh Synnott was born on March 20 1945 at Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, and educated at Beaumont College, a Jesuit public school in Windsor, before winning a scholarship to Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. From there he went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to do a Science degree, and then to the Navy’s engineering college.
After spending five years in submarines, Synnott applied to join the Diplomatic Service in 1973, aged 28. After early postings to Britain’s OECD delegation in Paris and then to the embassies in Bonn and Amman, in 1989 he was appointed head of the Foreign Office’s Western European department. In 1991, as head of the FCO’s Security Co-ordination department, he was responsible for negotiating the release of the British hostages held in Lebanon, a difficult but ultimately successful task which won him much acclaim.
After three years as deputy high commissioner in New Delhi, from 1993 to 1996, Synnott returned to London as director of the FCO’s South and South East Asia department. In 2000, after a year spent as a visiting fellow at the University of Sussex, he was appointed High Commissioner in Islamabad.
Though his three years in Pakistan coincided with the invasion of Afghanistan and a deterioration in relations between Pakistan and the West, he won the affection and respect of many Pakistanis. In Transforming Pakistan: Ways Out of Instability (2009), Synnott noted that Pakistan had “paid a heavy price for other countries’ behaviour towards it, notably the West’s accommodation with the country’s military rulers in the 1980s, and its encouragement of a jihad in the service of Cold War strategic goals”.
After his retirement, Synnott became a senior consulting fellow of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, but his experiences in Basra cast a long shadow. In January this year he wrote to the Secretary of the Iraq Inquiry, responding to Tony Blair’s assertion that he (Synnott) had been “on balance optimistic not pessimistic” about the future of Iraq when he left Basra in 2004.
That judgment, Synnott underscored, “referred only to southern Iraq – the region for which I had some responsibility – not to the country as a whole”. His “optimism”, he stressed, had been based on advice he had given the Prime Minister to maintain a multinational development team in the south rather than hand control to the Iraqis. In the event, the team was disbanded and the “vast majority” of its projects failed.
Hilary Synnott was appointed CMG in 1997 and KCMG in 2002.
In 1973 he married Anne Clarke. They had a son, who predeceased him.
Sir Hilary Synnott, born March 20 1945, died September 8 2011.

You may have thought Mrs Thatcher callous, brutal and indifferent and that her policies unneccesarily caused human misery but no-one could question her integrity and so under the rules of the political game, she is worthy of being created a Lady. Tony Blair should never be given a knighthood; nobbled maybe but not ennobled.

2011-10-10T09:48:00.001+01:00

What would have been expected to have been a good weekend for England turned into a pretty poor one. First England’s football team throw away a two goal lead to draw nervously with Montenegro with Wayne Rooney sent off and the then the next day, England’s rugby union team caught a dose of the footballers’ disease and crashed out against a French side that were flat on their backs after defeat to Tonga. Complacency cost victory in both cases. The rugby meatheads thought they could just turn up and the French would fall over.
In Podgorica, England started well, but the moment they conceded a goal, instead of being a wake-up call to redouble their determination, England went into their shells. Bringing on Frank Lampard retrenched the psychological crippling effect that subsumes the team when events go against them. A draw wasn’t a disaster but it was plain to see that Montenegro could be blown away if played against with confidence. At least Rooney will have some extra recovery time when he inevitably injures himself just before the tournament, now that he misses the opening match through suspension.
Fabio Capello’s record in this qualifying campaign is in some ways better than the qualifying for the World Cup in that England are undefeated. But turn it the other way round, basing it on win ration and it is far less impressive. In 2008-09, Capello’s team won 90% of their competitive matches; in 2010-11, it is only 62.5%. Moreover, the one defeat in 2008-09 came after England had won the group with two matches to spare. Inability to keep the ball has blighted England for at least a decade – I remember the travails of Euro 2000 particularly vividly in this instance. One bad example summed it up with England conceding a throw-in after one touch from their own throw-in. They would never do that at club level and if they did they would fear returning to the dressing room.
Towards the end of the match, the camera panned across the away support of Englishness; one banner for Northampton Town with that club’s nickname was most apt for the performance we had seen – Cobblers.

Taking the chequered flag with a largely unchequered performance

2011-10-05T10:26:00.002+01:00

When the first manifestation of Cars was given silver screen billing, it was held generally to be one of Pixar’s lesser creations, given the high standard that was expected of the computer animated arm of Disney. Though a fan of Pixar from before and thereafter, I decided to eschew this release. I considered the same approach for the sequel, until a review on Radio 4’s Front Row that I heard on the off-chance was so fulsome in its praise I decided to give Cars 2 a fair hearing (and viewing).
I was especially motivated given that Michael Caine was one of the stars lending their voice, in a very postmodern way, in his role as secret agent and souped-up car as one; it won’t be long before his glamorous James Bondish performances outnumber his original ‘ordinary spy’ turn in The Ipcress File et al – the very reason he is getting such latter-day opportunities such as Austin Powers and now here.
Since the original, Paul Newman has passed on but he knew the nature of franchises (not just in film) and his character Doc Hudson has been retired altogether, though the Doc is often invoked by the slow (in many ways) tow truck, Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy), which, along with Caine’s Finn McMissile, is the dual centre of the show (like a binary solar system), leaving Owen Wilson’s turbo-charged sleekness in the form of Lightning McQueen for dust (figuratively).
Film writers are always inculcated with the need to have a twist to ‘wrongfoot’ the audience and make them re-analyse the movie in retrospect; Hollywood 101, as can also be evinced in The Green Hornet, that the chief villain of the piece (not least through their betrayal of others) must be an important, if peripheral’ ‘good guy’ and I take particular pleasure in spotting the disguised blackguard as soon as possible, though I’ll forgive Pixar’s attempt as it is meant for children also and they tried pretty hard to throw me off their tail. Once in the know, you can even detect the aural signature through a voice-scrambled message – the key in this instance is that the mysterious bad guy and the ‘good guy’ were never in the same shot.
An immense charm of Cars 2 is the cornucopia of incidental detail, the personality of each mode of transport rendered exquisitely and with so much detail on display, one’s eyes are overwhelmed with delight. Intelligence abounds such as making the brutish henchman stealth ships like sharks or giving the Italian F1 vehicle a quiff of hair via an engine duct (though, amusingly, all the young females are bald). Big Bentley skirts my objections as the British landmark tower – not just the bell – might have been renamed as such in this universe. Of course, the Queen (in the tones of Vanessa Redgrave) is a Roll-Royce, while Prince William is an S-Type Jaguar, proving the newly created Duke of Cambridge still maintains overseas glamour in his own right and not when paired with his wife.
Some of the violence meted out is horrendous, craftily pushing the boundaries of a Universal rating, given that they are cartoon cars after all. There are a few errors that I managed to spot without recourse to a bloopers website (Egypt is not immediately to the southwest of Italy, in place of Tunisia, something less forgivable after the Arab Spring) but they do not impinge on either the picture’s credibility or its fun. Cars 2 can be enjoyed by petrolheads and pedestrians alike, as well as all others in between. 4 out of 5.

2011-10-03T10:06:00.002+01:00

Newcastle United may have ridden a wave of luck as wide as the Tyne on Saturday, as they defeated Wolverhampton Wanderers 2-1 on the latter’s home patch, but as this was the first time the Magpies had not pecked out the eyes of Wolves in the Midlands while in the top-flight since 1957, it was probably needed to end the Molineux hoodoo. Anyway, in those 54 years, I’m sure the Old Gold have had their fair share of good fortune, remembering a few occasions in the last decade that went against the form book (and Newcastle).
This result made it United’s best start to the season since the near-glory days of 1995-96. Still, it must be put in perspective. Though fifteen points have been accrued in the first seven games, of the teams that finished in the top seven last season, the black-and-whites have only had to face one of them so far and that was an out-of-sorts Arsenal. A real test will come at Gallowgate when Tottenham Hotspur come to visit. Moreover, the Mapies’ pretty perch at fourth in the table is precarious. Spurs have a game in hand to go with their own twelve points and Liverpool are close behind the top four. I remember Wigan was second in the table at roughly this point in the season back in 2005 and at the end of the season they had suffered eight league place degradations. Were Newcastle to suffer the same, they would finish in the same place as last season (given the summer turmoil, maybe not such a bad result). There is an element of banking points early so as to survive after tougher moments in the season which might expose a small squad.
But, for the time being, to go into the international break on an unbeaten twelve match league and cup run stretching back to last season, it feels good to enjoy these warm times while they last.

On Match of the Day 2, we had some classic Colin Murray-isms – “If you been avoiding the TV to take in the sun and missed yesterday’s games, we’ve got them all here” – referencing the Indian Summer distinctly locates Britain as the area people watched Match of the Day and 10.30 pm was long after the sun had gone down, so why miss TV to soak it up, if it wasn’t there?!? And then claiming Rio Ferdinand was in the England list before Lee Dixon corrected it him by the simple expedient of reading the screen instead of making assumptions. What happens Colin when you assume? In your case, the only ass made is you.

2011-09-20T13:12:00.000+01:00

Eva Green’s progression from Bond girl to veteran spy is probably unique among beauties who have previous on the long-running film franchise. She has a very curious cut-glass voice, suggesting exoticism (to go with her overt eroticism), but it is a little distracting and she has not yet captured for me the easy-going naturalism she possessed in 2006’s Casino Royale. That said, in Spooks she is in a superior drama and is certainly a better showcase for her considerable talents than the largely disappointing and frustrating Camelot. I look forward to seeing her screen yumminess in future episodes whilst knowing that at any time her character might be bumped off by the screenwriters.

On other observations, I saw a one-legged pigeon (talon missing, with a stump above what would be the knee) showing that he was just as passionate about a female pigeon as a two-footed male rival and prepared to mix it up to indulge in carnality with her. Also, our cat, about to lick his hind leg paw, suddenly yawned, giving the impression that he was being very good-mannered in covering his mouth.

2011-09-13T15:58:00.001+01:00

How the might have fallen? People may be talking about the ‘return’ of English-based teams to sporting prominence in the Champions League after a dip of two years (if a representative in last year’s final can be construed as decline). But what shocks me is that while Spain and England monopolise the 10/1 or better odds of winning the European Cup, august other contenders are left gasping with the dust in their face, if the bookmakers are to be believed. Of course, the minnows from such corners of Europe as Cyprus and Belarus will be group stage fodder for the larger teams but the comparative ignominy reserved for previous winners is startling. Triumphant as recently as 2010, Internazionale are no more than 25/1 on to repeat the trick, the same as their city rivals AC Milan. Bayern Munich, defeated by Inter in that final are little better off at 20/1 to revive memories of 2001. Porto are struggling at 33/1, Benfica at 100/1, Marseille (but does that qualify) at 150/1 and poor old Ajax, four-times winners, most recently with a great side in 1994, are languishing at 200/1. That last stat regarding Dutch football is the most startling of all.

Who's the boss?

2011-09-10T10:02:00.002+01:00

Bosses, I’ve been told, derive from ancient Babylonia and the Levant, where each city had a local deity represented by a rock or carved object e.g. Babylon had Marduk. The Punic city of Sidon had Baal and this caused great consternation in the Kingdom of Israel when its monarch Ahab took Jezebel for a wife and to please her, introduced Baal worship. This was an abomination unto the Lord and thus Baal was more reviled as a name than any other. From this incident, descending millennia, through the corruption of colloquialism, the Western world has gradually turned Baal to boss. Hence, the frequent resentment of bosses has historical antecedents and is not simply the product of the modern workplace.
Horrible Bosses taps into the desire to hit back at your manager without any untoward consequences (such as losing your job). When first-person shooter ‘Doom’ was all the rage in the 1990s, computer-literate gamers were said to insert photos of their bosses onto the monsters they were destroying in a variety of ways. This film also riffs on the Hitchock thriller Strangers on a Train, as well as, pleasingly, the Danny DeVito/Billy Crystal vehicle Throw Momma from the Train. Our three put-upon ‘heroes’, played by Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day, find their office superiors so intolerable they decide to murder them but at one turn removed so each has an alibi while the other is doing the wet work.
An intriguing twist is that the bosses are played by actors incomparably more famous (maybe as it should be given the vertical relationship) than those playing their underlings. To say that Jennifer Anniston’s sex pest character was drawn from her own experiences would be libellous – less so, Colin Farrell’s dissolute coke fiend. Kevin Spacey ahs trod this ground before as he reprises his Swimming with Sharks tour de force. It’s good to see Anniston, Farrell and Spacey in a decent film, as their Hollywood acting careers have gone underground, if not into hibernation.
On the flip side, Bateman, Sudeikis and Day do things that are so inconceivably stupid, that you feel they deserve some of their misery. Day’s character is the touched cousin of Zach Galifianakis’ Alan from The Hangover. Unfortunately, their farce stretches the bounds of credibility, taking you out of the plot and back into the cinema seat, as there is only so long one can teeter on the edge of reality if surrealist is not the goal. Jamie Foxx is the one who truly masters the absurdity of his persona’s actions as real life can be ridiculous too. This movie also has subtle comedy to its merit as well, such as saving it's one 12A-mandated f-word to the very end to give a satisfying pay-off to one of the situations or proving that Indian call centres can provide a very valuable service. The head-slapping disbelief regarding some moments deters one from a return viewing but it does a fine job for the time it is running. Three out of five.

2011-09-05T15:20:00.003+01:00

With all the retrospectives on the upcoming tenth anniversary of September 11th (the aptly, if maybe a tad militarily, monikered 9/11, given the role of the emergency services in trying to save people), I find this piece by Gary Younge, utterly convincing. Lunatics did not just take over the asylum - misdirected public anger gave them the keys to the armoury.
Can the United States move beyond the narcissism of 9/11?

The unity brought about by the tragedy was intense but fleeting. The war on terror has been disastrous abroad and divisive at home.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, called in her senior staff and asked them to think seriously about "how [to] capitalise on these opportunities". The primary opportunity came from a public united in anger, grief and fear which the Bush administration sought to leverage to maximum political effect. "I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen," Rice told the New Yorker six months afterwards. "Events are in much sharper relief."
Ten years later the US response to the terror attacks have clarified three things: the limits to what its enormous military power can achieve, its relative geopolitical decline and the intensity of its polarised political culture. It proved itself incapable of winning the wars it chose to fight and incapable of paying for them and incapable of coming to any consensus as to why. The combination of domestic repression at home and military aggression abroad kept no one safe, and endangered the lives of many. The execution of Osama bin Laden provoked such joy in part because almost every other American response to 9/11 is regarded as a partial or total failure.
Inevitably, the unity brought about by the tragedy of 9/11 proved as intense as it was fleeting. The rally around the flag was a genuine, impulsive reaction to events in a nation where patriotism is not an optional addendum to the political culture but an essential, central component of it. Having been attacked as a nation, people logically felt the need to identify as a nation.
But beyond mourning of the immediate victims' friends and families, there was an element of narcissism to this national grief that would play out in policy and remains evident in the tone of many of today's retrospectives. The problem, for some, was not that such a tragedy had happened but that it could have happened in America and to Americans. The ability to empathise with others who had suffered similar tragedies and the desire to prevent further such suffering proved elusive when set against the need to avenge the attacks. It was as though Americans were unique in their ability to feel pain and the deaths of civilians of other nations were worth less.
It's a narcissism best exemplified by former vice-president Dick Cheney's answer when asked just last week on what grounds he would object to Iran waterboarding Americans when he maintained his support for America's right to use waterboarding. "We have obligations towards our citizens," he said. "And we do everything to protect our citizens."
However perverse that seems now such views had great currency at the moment, following the attacks, when many of the mistakes that would shape US foreign policy for the next 10 years were made. Terrorism will do that. "Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," writes Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. If nothing else the Bush administration had fear on its side. "The next time the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud," said Rice. "They only have to be right once. We have to be right every time."
The trouble is they got very little right. Broad sweeps of people from predominantly Muslim countries resulted in the "preventive detention" of 1,200 people; voluntary interviews of 19,000; and a program of special registration for more than 82,000 – but not a single terrorism conviction. A decade on the US ability to crush al-Qaida still depends almost entirely on its ability to negotiate with Pakistan and doing a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, where last month there was the highest US military death toll since the war began. And that's before we get to Iraq.
An effective response to 9/11 that would have truly satisfied the American public in that moment probably did not exist. A combination of diplomatic pressure, targeted intelligence-led operations and a more enlightened foreign policy was what would have been and has proved to be most successful. But following the attacks, when declarative sentences were the only ones heard and those who urged caution and restraint were compared to Neville Chamberlain, something more urgent, punitive and impressive was insisted upon.
Even now, the case against bombing Afghanistan is often met with the question: "So should we have done nothing?" As though anything short of a military response does not qualify as a response at all, and as if doing something that did not work and left untold innocents dead is better than doing something that would have been more effective but less dramatic.
Dissent to this logic in the US was initially was just that: dissent – minority views dismissed, ridiculed or even vilified by the mainstream. Shortly after the attacks ABC news anchor Ted Koppel introduced Arundhati Roy, Indian novelist and opponent of the Afghanistan war, thus: "Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight. You don't have to listen. But if you do, you should know that dissent sometimes comes in strange packages …"
But as time went on the number of dissenters started swelling. The most important single factor that shapes American attitudes to any war is whether they think they will win, explains Christopher Gelpi, professor of political science at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy. As the Iraq war floundered unity gave way to the acrimony, mistrust and mutual recrimination that characterises US politics today.
The response to 9/11 did not create these divisions – a year before the attacks the presidential election was decided by the courts – but it deepened, broadened, sustained and framed them for more than half a decade before the economic collapse. It was the central issue in the 2004 election and cast the 2008 election in terms of hope – Obama – against fear, McCain and Palin. Internationally Obama's victory marked the country's belated, more nuanced, more enlightened response to 9/11, signalling America's readiness to meaningfully re-engage with the rest of the world and the treaties that govern it.
Sadly that change in tone, style and to some extent substance has also proved inadequate. True, Obama killed Bin Laden, and his administration plans to draw down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and has retired the phrase "war on terror". But they have maintained many of the most problematic elements of that war, including Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary rendition and military commissions, while intensifying the war in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile on the right, the hubris displayed by Rice that America could simply bend the world to its will and whim has since given way to denial and occasional bouts of impotent rage. Islamaphobia is on the rise, Muslim has become a slur and Iraq, apparently, was a success.
In 2004 a Bush aide (widely believed to be Karl Rove) chided a New York Times journalist for working in the "reality-based community", meaning people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
But that's never been how the world works. And over the last 10 years reality has caught up with the rhetoric.

2011-09-02T10:27:00.001+01:00

Alistair Darling, the ‘safe pair of hands’, Mr Management personified, has allowed a leak of his forthcoming memoir (that might survive longer than most before being remaindered) that “My worry is that they [the bankers] were so arrogant and stupid they might bring us all down.” Sir Fred Goodwin (acted like he was “off to play a game of golf”), Andy Hornby (“looking like he was about to explode”) et al could not take in how monumentally incompetent they were – Masters of the Universe being sucked down a black hole – and it was left to the taxpayer to pick up the pieces. Though the memoir is being published next week, it is more than about drumming up some publicity, it is politically strategic.
This week has heard that elements of the Coalition Government are voicing concerns (no doubt passed on through their financier friends) that banking reform should be delayed. I would be surprised if Darling wasn’t fuming as he heard Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association and public face of the collective insist that banking reform must be postponed. She may have argued that the economic fundamentals were weak but she has the shameless chutzpah to sound as if bankers were some downtrodden underclass. There is not a hint of sincerity, a scintilla of apology, that the precise reason the economic fundamentals are weak are because of the tsunami of financial carnage unleashed by idiots promoted far beyond their competence (and initially abetted by politicians dazzled by the high-rolling lifestyle). In fact, this is exactly the best time to separate the retail and ‘casino’ arms of the banking giants because the global economy cannot take another banking shock. There has been a failure of nerve in Washington D.C. as Tim Geithner is Wall Street’s bitch and is trying to use Clinton-era medicine for completely changed circumstances. However, Germany and France have the banks in their sights (admittedly, not completely for altruistic reasons) and now is the time for a pan-European initiative. Osborne or Knight can’t claim that Britain will risk ruin if it acts alone because it will be in the protective blanket of the biggest economic zone in the world, of the EU.

Last day of the… what was it again?

2011-08-31T12:29:00.001+01:00

Well, so much for what was supposed to be called summer. This has to be crappiest June, July and August I can remember. A few flashes of sunshine, one or two warm days is the equivalent of one swallow. In August, having to wear a jumper and turn the radiators on for a few hours because your fingers are still freezing is a joke. This was confirmed by the news reporting that the Met Office said it was the coolest summer for twenty years., with of course regional variations being more extreme. I feel as if something has been stolen from me. You look forward to summer, putting up with the harshness of winter and a particularly drab, if dry, spring and then it never happens. Really, since the Met office predicted two and a half years ago that 2009 was going to have a ‘barbecue summer’, this country has suffered terribly for what should be the best three months of the year. Roll on 2012.

2011-08-25T16:11:00.001+01:00

As the conflict in Libya enters its final stages - with Tripoli all but captured by the rebels to Colonel Gaddafi, the Mad Dog himself in flight and his birth place now laid siege with huge irony by forces from Misurata, who were themselves under the cosh for long periods this year - the initial critics in the West of even limited UN-endorsed, Arab League-backed intervention now are trying to recalibrate their arguments, so arrogant are they that they are incapable of eating humble pie and face up to the call of “I told you so.” Simon Jenkins and Con Coughlin, vociferous in their denunciations that the war wasn’t over in a couple of hours and so intervention must be judged a failure, are some of the most egregious commentators, though they are far from alone. The Arab Spring is unpredictable and to paraphrase the famous quip about economic predictions, it might be said that war forecasting was invented to make weather forecasting look good. Indeed, with fighting still in the streets of Libya’s capital, but indeed winding down, the Guardian editorial grumbled that in narrow military terms intervention had succeeded and that a majority of people had wanted to see the downfall of the Colonel, before immediately being downbeat of Libya’s prospects post-Gaddafi, as if a failed Libya would give them vindication.
Coughlin ponders gloomily that Libya is the new Afghanistan – this despite the first rule of international relations being that everything is local. He thinks – hopes – tribes will tear Libya apart and therefore NATO should not have acted in conjunction with states like Qatar to bomb Gaddafi out of power. I think people like Jenkins and Coughlin should go and live in Syria, where they will find a very receptive official audience for their cranky, patronising spouting.

2011-08-20T11:59:00.000+01:00

The manoeuvring has not just begun, but is in full swing. Opening salvos by Boris Johnson and a few others on the nutty fringe of the Tory party, having been followed up by some kite flying of George Osborne that the 50p top rate of tax for the highest earners may soon be lowered (even though it is popular among the electorate and is not guaranteed to raise revenue given that many of the biggest economies are flat-lining – just look at the USA with the lowest tax burden on its highest earners for fifty years).
The Liberal Democrats, particularly the influential voice of Danny Alexander as Chief Secretary to the Treasury – essentially Minister for Cuts – have swung behind their original proposal of a mansion tax, to try and head the Tories off at the pass. Hitting all those whose homes are worth over two million pounds doesn’t seem particularly controversial, given that the average price of a home in the UK is around the £150,000 mark.
Yet back comes Eric Pickles, Communities Secretary, portrayed as monstrous on previous occasions by Steve Bell, insisting that there will be no mansion tax. Maybe he’s still smarting from a vigorous attempt by the Lib Dems to unseat him in 2005 and wanted to spike their guns. But his claim won’t go down well with middle Britain. “These people put a lot in and don’t take a lot out.” Hmm, would these be the bankers who started this current economic malaise, politicians who asked for their moats to be cleaned on the expenses system or spoilt footballers. All very deserving claims to be clobbered.

2011-08-17T13:14:00.002+01:00

The tragic death of a man on his honeymoon in the Seychelles comes swiftly after another honeymoon death. The latest case though in the Seychelles was rendered ridiculous by the spokesman for the police who said the shark that was responsible was both foreign and rogue. How on earth do they know that the shark does not swin through the warm waters of the Seychelles? Did they confiscate its passport? As for being rogue, I believe nature is known as 'wild in tooth and claw'. The spokesman can't claim lanaguage difficulties as the British ruled the Seychelles for 150 years and would have institued the lanaguage of English as de rigeur for all official positions.
Another one with no excuse is Gordon Ramsay, who, last night in Kitchen Nightmares USA, said in the context of location that he was English! No self-repsecting Scotsman would ever dare breath that in private, let alone on camera, even if it was pandering to geographically-challenged Americans who don't know that a place called Scotland exists.

2011-08-10T11:26:00.001+01:00

It has been shown in the past that if classical music is played at loud volume, the unruly youth disperse as it offends their hip-hop inflected ears. Pump out some Beethoven or Vivaldi (those in police helicopters could do Wagner) and watch the rioters flee. No doubt some lawyer will argue that increasing their cultural horizons is a breach of their human rights but that would get laughed out of court. Mind you, not all of the looters and rioters were NEET nitwits – of those arrested, included were a soldier who was soon to go off to Afghanistan, two policemen and many college students.
While people focus on ‘feral’ young people, it is all of a piece with the sense of entitlement that far too many of the population feel as this society becomes increasingly individualised. Look at the other end of the scale. Rapacious bankers, MPs who looted the expenses system, journalists who plumb ever deeper wells of depravity and footballers who pout and scream when they don’t get 90 minutes on the pitch or at least £90,000 a week. These are the people we are to look up to?
On Radio 4’s The World Tonight yesterday (which I listened to while missing Michael Gove’s and Harriet Harman’s bust-up on Newsnight) with Robin Lustig, Bonnie Greer came dangerously close to endorsing two parent families, before rowing back to align herself more with her liberal friends. Mr Lustig tried to introduce some balance, mentioning absence of responsible male role models or fathers but his other studio guest was even more of a bleeding heart liberal, a drama therapist no less, who insisted on the “empowerment of the individual” a minute or two after her and Greer had trashed the entitlement culture as thoroughly as some looters had electronics stores. It seems whatever evidence is provided, atomisation of society is progress.

2011-08-09T16:28:00.002+01:00

The riots that have afflicted much of London and Kent, as well breaking out in other large cities around the country have drawn interesting reasons for them from both left and right. The left-leaning commentariat portray it either as a symptom of the cuts or as The Guardian puts it “a rage against exclusion from consumerist fulfilment.” The right attacks the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ – insidious code for immigration – while of course finding some angle to attack the BBC, which in the midst of the crisis is truly pathetic). The former continues the New Labour policy of proclaiming that if everyone has material wealth they will be happy and have an investment in society, while ignoring their consistent denigration of the family, boosting individual rights over that of any communitarian ideal – very odd for socialists. The latter are repeatedly demanding that the drawbridges are hauled up, even though the youthful idiots who are causing this destruction are a speck in the sea of well-behaved immigrants (and there are plenty of white kids involved too), not a microcosm. British insularity has often targeted the ‘alien’, even when great benefits have accrued to the country from immigration – if it wasn’t for the Angles and Saxons taking over much of the island, there wouldn’t even be an English race.
If these thugs were brought up correctly then they wouldn’t be doing this. A nuclear family unit isn’t a panacea and some single parents could also do a good job, but a lot of these young fools don’t really have anything in the way of a supportive family and so the gangs become their ‘family’. Thus, some Labour politicians are saying the budgetary cuts that are closing youth centres are causing the problem but it is only because of the failure of New Labour in office to promote family and social cohesion.
Anyway, it is too late to do something immediately, what is needed is generational and Labourite short-termism (which was terrified of being portrayed as nannying) was never going to be effective. These hoodlums have now meant that Mogadishu (since the Islamist rebels retreated) is now safer than London and that is truly unacceptable. This goes far beyond the death of one gangster muppet who was both big-time charlie and small-time loser – most of the rioters will have never have heard of him. This would not be tolerated in Northern Ireland – it is time to import those measures over here. Give the police (who may be playing a political game by tacitly standing by while the riots go on in a silent protest against cuts) rubber bullets and water cannons. Make the rioters feel the full force of the law by making sure sentencing puts them away for 20-30 years and remove whole echelon of scum from our streets. If this is war, then it should be fought with vigour. The responsible people must reclaim the streets.

XXXplosive - to the max!!! (as hype would say)

2011-08-01T12:14:00.001+01:00

Watching XXX on television last night (on Fiver, with a criminal break in the middle of an action scene for an ad break) was a pleasure for which I feel no guilt at all; I just luxuriated in having time to do this. Hegel said freedom lies in the recognition of necessity and there were probably plenty of necessary things to do in my life, but Hegel never faced the possibility of a Vin Diesel action movie late on a Sunday night.
It is curious that Diesel couldn’t or wouldn’t reprise his role for a sequel, allowing his place, if not his character (who was ‘killed off’ inbetween films), to be taken by Ice Cube. Did he have a Keanu Reeves-high-minded moment? If so, with relaunching the Fast and the Furious franchise, he seems to have learnt his lesson that trashy thrillers are his stock in trade.
It was released in 2002 but in the nine years that have passed, it figured on my radar but not to an extent where I was capable of watching it. It is basically an American James Bond, with the principles of the latter taken to their logical, ludicrous point (it even has a ‘Q’ of sorts). Asia Argento, as the femme fatale, wears high-heeled boots and leather tops even in the most inappropriate of situations. At one point, Diesel does with a motorbike what Steve McQueen should have done in the Great Escape, if the latter had possessed the bottle and physics-defying abilities. He also has a souped-up car that is almost identical to that featured in the Green Hornet, making the later, disappointing Seth Rogen vehicle (in both senses) even more lame. Samuel L Jackson gives his usual gruff authority figure (unwitting training for the role of Nick Fury) with disfigurement – I was waiting for someone to refer to him as Scarface and I was not disappointed. Much of the action takes place in the Czech Republic, probably because of low film production costs in the country, but which adds a difference to a standard American romp. Australians may not give a XXXX about a certain lager but I would for this film.
Another film I saw on TV (now some time ago) was the Last King of Scotland, a fictional retelling of the heart of darkness within the Idi Amin regime in Uganda through the experiences of a made-up British medic. Played by James McAvoy against the monstrous Amin, a formidable (and, indeed, Oscar-winning) performance by Forest Whittaker, the former’s downfall is his cocksure flair for adventure and his taste for the forbidden fruit of married women (including Gillian Anderson as a long-suffering missionary), the latter’s his petulant megalomania. The end of the film has gut-wrenching brutality (meat hooks inserted into male breasts for example) though we don’t actually witness Amin’s political end within the visual narrative, just a postscript. One unintentionally funny moment in the movie is Amin talking of meeting up with Colonel Gaddafi for an African Union conference – this picture was made at the time when the West were cosying up to Gaddafi and was making a political point but with subsequent events regarding the war in Libya now, it shows up that while leopards do not change their spots, neither do ravenous hyenas change their characters – (dis)honour among thieves and villains Amin never got his comeuppance (although dying in Saudi Arabia in emasculated obscurity must have been crushing for this tyrannical attention-seeker); whether Gaddafi will receive his is moot.

Catching up with the past

2011-07-29T12:26:00.001+01:00

In an environment when even the twenty-four news cycle has been replaced by the immediacy of live website feeds and twitter, it can seem not just old hat but positively antique to discuss events that have occurred several weeks ago. Numerous films I have seen but have not commented upon – I could discourse greatly on the King’s Speech (which I saw twice) but have left it so long it has now been released on DVD. Although there are a few anachronisms and can’t believe Colin’s Firth’s Bertie (later George) would not know his family history or his father would be so prescient on events that were far from apparent at the alleged date he made it, it was an immensely engaging movie, especially for history buffs watching out for famous quotes being trotted out, dealing with triumph over adversity. Well worth the Oscars it garnered. The Fighter, although seemingly totally unconnected in time and social milieu, also dealt with someone overcoming handicaps, of their own and those that others impose. I watched it on a whim rather than any pre-determination that I would see it on the basis of hype or reviews and it was an astounding ‘discovery’. Great acting plus interesting twist on an old plot. All in all, a worthy return for director David O. Russell after a few years in the doldrums. True Grit was a flick I saw motivated by what others said about it especially regarding Jeff Bridges performance. True enough, the delivery was top notch by the cast – you really believed in the characters. My main trouble was that (aside from an irritating black line that danced across the middle of the screen for most of the running time distracting from the immense openness of the prairies – was this the only reel the cinema had available?) it all felt a bit reductive. This maybe a deliberate ploy of the Coen brothers, to suggest there are no easy resolutions and life just goes on, whatever one’s circumstances happen to be. It is a running thread through most of their productions, yet I must say, while admiring the craft, it leaves me unmoved. Even their most lauded creations, Fargo and No Country for Old Men, haven’t done anything for me in terms of engagement. Not having seen the John Wayne original, I couldn’t make a comparison.
Now, more recent, Lord Sugar probably got bored of hiring people who didn’t last their contractual period or who did but then quit the business on their own initiative to do their own thing. Then again, perhaps a reality format isn’t the best way to decide who to appoint as underlings. That is why it makes sense for him to go into business with the winner as a 50/50 partner. As usual, there were some incredibly stupid blunders by the participants. I’m glad Tom won - of the last five, he was my pick on a personal preferment though I though Susan would be a strong rival. As it was, in the final two, (after Jedi Jim fell away – I was disappointed that it was not alluded to in the review show that Jedi mind tricks only work on the weak-minded – Star Wars fans indeed), he faced off against the formidable Helen. She, however, had produced a very underwhelming business proposal and the compounded the error by at the last moment abandoning it in favour of her ‘second choice’, even though she could produce no facts or figures on the spur of the moment for this second choice. From the second she did not defend her original concierge idea to the hilt, Tom had won. So we had, in essence, a very elongated version of Dragons Den, where someone will win an investment, even though Sugar junked Tom’s plan to go into offices to stress test people’s backs and on the review show, pretty much said the chair was not what he was after, more he would be developing Tom’s nail file enterprise. For the sake of success, let’s hope Tom’s business plan doesn’t relate to the history of literature (“Byron was writing at about the same time as Shakespeare, wasn’t he”) or the Age of Dsicovery (“Columbus – he was British wasn’t he? Didn’t he discover the potato?” No Tom, Columbus ‘discovered’ America and Raleigh was associated with the potato).

2011-07-26T10:27:00.002+01:00

Many things, of varying accuracy, have been said about the Norwegian shooting and car bomb that it seems almost superfluous to comment on the horrific massacres. When the first reports came in with Norwegians describing this as their September 11th or Mumbai attacks (this was before the death toll on the island of Utoya became clear), I thought it was a little over the top, maybe reflecting that in a country regularly topping international quality of living stats, littler events in terms of numbers or carnage can be just as a shock as the more destructive previous two events. But as the full scale of the murdering hove into sight, this clearly was a close approximation to Mumbai or indeed the Oklahoma City bombing. And like Timothy McVeigh, Anders Behring Breivik was captured alive. Indeed, the latter surrendered willingly to police rather than risk a shoot-out with them that might result in his death. Also, unlike most mass shooters he did not take his own life – he is not mad in the conventional sense or even mad as angry but he is a psychopath. Although it goes against the grain of the greater openness promised by the Norwegian prime minister in the wake of this tragedy, I think it was the right thing to do to have Behring Breivik’s hearing behind closed doors to deny him the public platform he clearly wanted to use to spout his vile rhetoric.
What needs to be done is to see what can be done in response to the overall assault. The Norwegian police have a lot of explaining to do. Instead of flying by helicopter to Utoya, police special forces drove by road then took boats, taking five times longer than if they had flown there directly. Also, they miscounted - badly - the number of people who died, eventually revising it down and were so chaotic that they let this error stand for three days – for mourning families and for all society that is totally unacceptable. On Sunday morning – a day and a half after the event - police held a conference on the steps of their headquarters and almost every answer to a question was ‘don’t know’ or ‘we don’t have the details’ – it was farcical and these are the people charged with maintaining order in Norway.
There are though deeper, sinister undercurrents in European societies though, particularly Scandinavia. A lot of anti-immigration commentators after blowing smoke up the arses of the public are now seeking to cover their own. Behring Breivik was a social misfit with unpalatable viewpoints who, at some point in his life, fused these into a desire for murder. His talk of a monoculture can be dismissed – riddled with inconsistencies, ‘white’ Europeans are actually declining in number through falling birth rates and the ‘monocultures’ of South Korea and Japan that he admires are rapidly aging to the point where the retired will, in the not too distant future, place a near intolerable burden on those of working age. But in his mind he was planning a revolution and must have thought there was a groundswell of opinion on his side, if only he could provide the right conditions and he drew succour from the columns of the hard right of mainstream, high-selling newspapers (among others). It in no way justifies mass murder but influential people must be responsible in their published comments.
Much of Europe in the last decade has turned rightward and one doesn’t need to read Scandinavian fiction to realise that dark forces bubble below a seemingly tranquil surface. The eugenics programme practised by Sweden for forty years between the 1930s and 1970s is a reminder that inhumanity can occur in apparently liberal societies. The leaders of the anti-immigrant True Finns (who now hold the balance of power in Finland) even received Behring Breivik’s manifesto before the attacks and merely forwarded it on to their members as ‘something of interest’. Radio 4 has been running a programme called ‘Turning Right’ about these disturbing trends. Across Europe, east and west, there is a general fear that Europe’s time has passed and it is in decline. The elites say the best way is to integrate the EU further so that we all stand together in order to prevent us all hanging separately but the nationalist populists want to tear this down as well. Fear can drive ordinary people into doing things they would not normally do, such as voting for extremist parties. The economic uncertainty just adds to the sense of malaise and so they lash out at outsiders and minorities – those they see as other. In the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, when they broke into London the first to be slain were the Flemish merchants. No Jews were affected as they were n other parts of Europe because they had already been expelled a century before. Now, quite a lot of people would like to expel not Jews but Muslims, the ‘new’ outsiders. We have supported oppressive regimes and unfair trade deals to our general benefit (not to mention perpetuating climate change that affects the poorest) and the disadvantage of the populations of these countries but we don’t like it when the chickens are coming home to roost, as immigrants see the richness of Europe and, not unnaturally, want a part of it. Issues such as these take decades to resolve yet politicians prefer easy(ish) power to make serious effort to tackle them. Grim times.

Too much, too ridiculous

2011-07-14T10:18:00.000+01:00

When The Fast and The Furious first came out, it was regarded as a disposable, one-dimensional thriller and no-one would have predicted that it would run to five instalments, with a further sequel suggested. It is no surprise though that one of the co-producers in this latest in the franchise is Vin Diesel himself, given that his Hollywood career has been reduced to this rump (not inappropriate given the semi-clad beauties here) and outside of this venture his attempts at broadening himself has crashed and burned in the manner of any of the vehicles trashed in the course of the running time. I imagine each time of these flicks appears, it is a shot at redemption.
I hazarded to enter the cinema for The Fast and the Furious Five (they should have curtailed it to Fast Furious Five), having seen previously only a fragment of the Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, which had (as far as I know) none of the principal characters in this latest one. In the event, had worry over a complicated and contiguous plot from the other outings been a factor, it would have been redundant. Fast Furious Five is good, dumb fun. One doesn’t need to be a petrolhead to appreciate the action scenes, not to mention the stunning women that crop up with rapid-fire consistency. If anything, this is a date movie for guys in a quid pro quo with their ladies who can admire the toned beefcakes on display. Moreover, in its denouement, it resembles a high-octane, bigger-budgeted Hustle, in how the good guys fool everyone else. It is a mammoth sugar rush.
As well as being a showcase for Diesel, Paul Walker (as Bryan – I don’t know him in anything else) and the rapper Ludacris, it also gives a bearded Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson another silver screen chance, in the light of his filmology being less than illustrious. Watching Toretto (Diesel) and elite DEA agent Hobbs (Johnson) knock meathead lumps out of each other is one of the highlights – their wrangling over shattered glass shards would put John McClane to shame.
There are a few unusual touches that most Hollywood thrillers skim over – talking openly about going to church and over religious iconography may play well with a Midwest audience but still is uncommon to avoid scaring the pigeons (characterisation? Goodness me); also, throwing a pregnant woman into several mêlees doesn’t always happen.
Of course, there are cavernous plotholes that wouldn’t been out of place in a supercave, such as a conveniently disused warehouse in Rio de Janeiro – a location we will see more of in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics – that no-one else seems to know about. Hobbs, despite describing himself, in a variety of ways, as incorruptible, isn’t above a little extra-judicial killings in cold blood when it suits him. There is the unexplained tremendous thrust of some of the cars. Then there are the faceless goons who assail our heroes. Toretto and Bryan (what a name for an action figure) are sketched out as much as needs be and Hobbs’ team get similar treatment. Yet they face wave upon wave of criminals and latterly corrupt cops, who for their sins are all fodder to the meat grinder. The Austin Powers’ conundrum that these are real people, with families and friends to match. This could be especially true of the policemen, some of whom may have fallen into the wrong crowd or had some money troubles through no fault of their own. That doesn’t matter – they are treated as universally bad.
All this isn’t the point of Fast Furious Five though and it would be unfair to dwell on these factors. It’s a case of sit back and enjoy the ride.

2011-07-14T09:44:00.001+01:00

So Michael Wolff, biographer of Rupert Murdoch, was wrong – Rebekah Brooks is still in post at News International and it is now Thursday. After getting the whole of the News of the World journalistic staff to fall on her sword for her, she struggles on for no discernible purpose other than to act as a firewall between the public anger and James Murdoch, Rupert’s heir apparent (although whether that now comes to fruition is a moot point). It all reminds me of Jeremy’s Thorpe’s quip after Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ moment as he reshuffled his cabinet in the wake of the Profumo scandal: “No greater love hath a man than his lay down his friends for his life.” With the US Senate asking the FBI to investigate any Stateside nefariousness, how far will the purging at News Corp go?
If Murdoch was to survive this and divested himself of News International’s stable of newspapers, then were he to revive the bid for total control of BSkyB, even if it were referred to the Competition Commission again, it would probably pass the test of media plurality. George’s Mombiot’s public triumphalism is a little distasteful given the circumstances leading up to News Corp’s withdrawal of their bid. Everyone knows to a greater or lesser degree how the vileness and hypocrisy practised by most tabloids, not least to ‘ordinary people’, chewing them up and spitting them out once their commercial value in selling papers ceases. But the depravity of what has come out has been so far beyond the pale it has charted news depths of wilderness. So he can dance round his desk in Guardian Tower if he wants but could he keep his exultation to himself next time.

2011-07-11T09:09:00.001+01:00

While it happened on Friday evening, repeated Saturday afternoon, I’m still seething Monday morning. Though occasionally speaking a bit of sense, Matthew Parris on Friday’s Question Time was mostly craven, as his bosses at News International seek to deflect and defuse the public anger by making the scandal diffuse in dragging in all journalists. The first tack he tried was to downplay the seriousness of the allegations. Justifiably, he got a few boos for this. In response, he followed the party line of his paper, The Times, by saying all of Fleet Street were up to their necks in it, most journalists as rotten as the next. This is scandalous talk in itself. While it may be true, if it is, where is his evidence? Can’t prove it? How convenient. (Here’s a bone – it seems The Sunday Times, according to Lord Ashcroft, illegally acquired the latter’s tax receipts from HM Revenue and Customs; would like to verify this Matthew?) But the real outrage is the attitude. In what jaded and morally decadent universe does Parris inhabit, where it is not just the accepted norm to hack in the phones of a missing girl (raising hope for the family be deleting messages), those of the parents of murdered children, the families of terrorist victims and the families of soldiers who have fallen in service to their country, but to publicly back these people and causes all the while eavesdropping on what they thought was personal and intimae anguish? That is despicable betrayal from people who have expunged all their humanity.
Parris even had the chutzpah to drag in the BBC (for no good reason) and say that the whistle-blowing on MPs’ expenses reported on by The Daily Telegraph was directly comparable to the immorality, illegality and corruption within his own organisation. He may be pleasing his paymasters but by acting as apologist, he is choosing to reside in the same moral vacuum as those who committed these dreadful, dreadful acts. Oh and just for the record, Mr Parris, contrary to your declamation, your newspaper has been conspicuously reticent in reporting the whole hacking saga, as lax as a Berlusconi media organ in reporting bunga-bunga parties (do you read anything other than your own column?). The Times only piped up when this disgrace could no longer be ignored and even then casually flinging the muck around. Clean out your own stables (or would that test even Hercules?) before you criticise anyone else.

Licence revoked

2011-07-08T11:04:00.000+01:00

It really has been extraordinary – the decision to close the News of the World (although Murdoch will not forsake the Sunday tabloid market – that is a certainty). It reminds of the film A View to a Kill in which mad, evil genius Max Zorin, as part of his masterplan, is about to destroy a crucial mine with his workers inside still. The mine foreman, learning of this, protests indignantly “Mr Zorin, these men are loyal to y…” He is unable to finish his sentence as he is coshed by a Zorin associate and fall unconscious into the quarry area. Zorin proceeds to blow up the mine and machine guns to death everyone who survives the explosions and floods, maniacally laughing all along. If you replace Zorin with Rupert Murdoch, his henchman as James Murdoch and the mine foreman as editor Colin Myler, it works. “Mr Murdoch, these people are loyal to y…” I haven’t mentioned Rebekah Brooks? Well, Zorin tries to bump off Mayday as well to preserve his own position. Frankly, the brand may have been toxic but she is beyond that – Brooks is radioactive.
You may think a comparison with Elliott Carver in The World Is Not Enough would be a better James Bond reference. But Jonathan Pryce’s character was strangely insipid. The brutality, ruthlessness and casual callousness of Christopher Walken’s portrayal is a more apt.
Okay, these current News of the World staff are no innocents abroad but they weren’t involved in any illegality. I am shedding no tears at the demise of the paper, but I feel sad for those whose livelihoods were sacrificed on the altar of Murdoch’s masterplan, the acquisition of al of BSkyB.

2011-07-07T10:12:00.002+01:00

When you think ‘how could it get any worse’, it actually does. Now, it emerges that the News of the World hacked the phones of families of soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. To treat these revelations with the legalese caveat ‘if true because they are just allegations’, is akin to saying “This idea of gravity, if true, would have serious implications, but it is just a theory.” Yet still no resignations from News International. Rupert Murdoch wants to brazen it out, yet he is doing so with the public, a constituency he usually is so adept at keeping onside. He may treat Rebekah Brooks like a daughter but sometimes children must face up to the consequences of what they have done or overseen.
Robert Peston, nominally of the BBC, is such a New International bitch. He also seeks to protect Brooks when last night he ‘was told by inside sources’ that the newsroom of the News of the World was ‘out of control’ between 2003 and 2006. How convenient that 2003 was the year Brooks (née Wade) moved on from the News of the World and that period is the primary domain of the man they are hanging out to dry, Andy Coulson. It’s a little inconvenient that these hacking allegations go back from before 2003. They try to say that Brooks, then Wade, was on holiday and out of the country as if the culture that condoned this behaviour did not exist before of after her holiday plans – it is beyond credibility.
Meanwhile, Coulson is in serious trouble. Not only is the bribery of police officers an offence punishable with prison, it also emerges that in the libel case involving Tommy Sheridan and the News of the World, Coulson lied under oath in court about not paying police officers, making him guilty of perjury. It would be a scandal if this was not followed up, especially as the disgraced Sheridan went to chokey for exactly the same offence.
Coulson is the sordid individual that, on the prompting of George Osborne, David Cameron invited into the heart of his Downing Street operation. It is not enough for the Prime Minister to say “I take responsibility for whomever I employ,” as what responsibility is that (apart from embarrassment)? It is meaningless.
A bit like the PCC. Lady Peta Buscombe was torn to pieces on the Today programme. Relating how she herself has said that the PCC has been lied to by News International, the interviewer pressed her over who was the person who had lied to her and the PCC. It was like the Jeremy Paxman and Michael Howard face-off in 1997. Lady Buscombe found varieties of evasion over the exact person or people who had deceived her, making her sound ever more ridiculous. No wonder the tabloids were happy with her appointment as chair of the PCC.

2011-07-06T09:31:00.000+01:00

If governments can nationalise economically bankrupt banks, set them on a right keel and then sell them back into the private sector once the bad practices have been purged, what about morally bankrupt newspapers? It was once unthinkable that the government should intervene in taking over ruined banks, but it spared Britain from the full force of the markets that crashed into Ireland.
On another note, Socrates via Plato is again proved correct: when under serious pressure (whereas good people will unite in the common cause), bad people will end up blaming or betraying each other. News International backed David Cameron at the last general election. Now, the disgraced company is revealing that under the auspices of Andy Coulson, News of the World paid police officers for information, a flagrant breach of the law; it calls into question the judgement of the Prime Minister in appointing to the role of communications chief a man who resigned over the initial revelation of phone hacking in 2005. It is all a conspicuous attempt to divert some of the attention they have received over their degeneracy, which now extends to hacking into the phones of those who lost loved ones in the Tube and bus bombings on 7th July 2005.

See no evil, hear no evil, but read all about it

2011-07-05T10:37:00.001+01:00

It is pretty disturbing that The News of the World (and almost certainly all the other red tops and mid-market tabloids) engaged in hacking phones of celebrities and politicians on an industrial scale, but to be revealed to have hacked the phones not just of ordinary people but people going through unimaginable ordeals is of a new order of depravity. As bad as hacking into Milly Dowler’s phone was the fact that Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator authorised to conduct the illegality, deleted some of the messages so as to see who else would call, thus raising hope among the Dowlers that Milly was still alive and deleting these herself, as well as interfering with a police investigation that became a murder enquiry. Furthermore, there are suggestions that the NotW broke into the phones of the parents of one of the child victims of Soham murderer Ian Huntley. This paper was always shameless but to befriend these bereaved parents while at the same time betraying them reveals the journalists to be less than human.
Tory politicians are scrabbling to say that this has no bearing on News Corp’s bid to take over BSkyB because that is based on media plurality. But the silence of not just The Times, but the entire tabloid market bar The Independent of coverage of this on their front pages shows plurality or the ability to hear multiple voices is seriously impaired by the immorality of tabloid journalism. These newspapers are probably all guilty not just of phone hacking (hence their shying away from drawing attention to it as well as kind of honour between crooks) but a whole range of wickedness.
For those who say that this phone-hacking business, terrible as it is, is in the past and practices have changed, well, this very morning Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, has opened proceedings of contempt of court against both The Sun and The Mirror. Now, translating that dry language, these two papers for the sake of a scoop were prepared to jeopardise the murder trial of Joanna Yates and thus potentially led a murderer go free. When the police arrested Miss Yates’ landlord, Christopher Jeffries, the reporting of these two rags was so prejudicial to his character that Grieve has decided that if it had gone to court, it would have been impossible for him to have a fair trial. Since the character assassination of Mr Jeffries, a lodger in the same building as Miss Yates has confessed to the killing and understandably Mr Jeffries is suing not just the two mentioned newspapers but four others for libel. It is proof positive that the PCC (which has been sued for libel by a lawyer when defending – a newspaper complaints commission defending newspapers! – the NotW) is a broken reed, although that has been clear for a long time and that the British tabloids are out of control, punch drunk on the power and influence they wield.
Inside sources at the NotW (who either have a conscience or an axe to grind) said that those who were in charge of news reporting called themselves ‘the princes of darkness’ – maybe in jest, but the best jokes have searing accuracy. The daughter of Babylon lauded it over all and thought she was untouchable but she was laid low and everything she had laid waste. You reap what you sow. You encourage lynch mobs yet who will defend you if they come round your home, outraged at the Dowler case (and any more that might emerge). The Labour party, who you stabbed so delightedly in the back when Gordon Brown gave his keynote party conference speech by announcing you were switching your support to the Tories, are calling for a public enquiry. The full consequences have yet to run their course.
And Rupert, Rupert, Rupert. You gave your incompetent children positions of authority within your organisation and they have presided over chaos and illegality. You would never have been so careless in your pomp. Everything you have strived and built up over your lifetime, all of it will be dissipated and lost within less than a generation. The Mughals thought they were invincible yet following the death of the brutal Aurangzeb, the same fate befell their empire. Everyone who knows anything about newspapers, remembers (via popular history) William Randolph Hearst, old Citizen Kane himself, but no-one remembers who came after him.

Hardly dazzling

2011-07-04T13:04:00.000+01:00

Having heard good things about Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, I was rather disappointed when I finally got around to seeing it last night. Admittedly, missing the first forty minutes in order to watch episodes of Family Guy new to BBC Three was not ideal but I quickly picked up the thread. Now, I generally like the work of Boyle, Cillian Murphy and flavour of the month Rose Byrne, yet this production left me distinctly Earthbound.
There was plenty of religious vocabulary and quasi-religious themes to the fore but this merely felt like drapes over the whole concept to give the veneer of depth that wasn’t really there. Heliotheism has a long cultural and historical tradition, most famously in the era of the Roman Empire, when the soldierly were particularly attracted to that form of worship. However, while setting up the scenario, the film made no attempt to explore the background, bar a few swipes at psychology. In musing on the religiose aspect of his production at the time of release, Boyle mentioned that scriptwriter Alex Garland was an atheist – it shows with the ‘sun-god’ very much nuts and bolts in the physical world, rather than something transcendent. What it left me thinking most was “So this is where they got the inspiration for that Carling advert from (‘You Know Who Your Friends Are’).” It hasn’t advanced much beyond Star Trek V and Doctor Who has covered similar ground with a lot more interest in 45 minutes.
Halfway through the movie, it mutates from sci-fi exploration to a kind of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None in space. Worst of all, the climax is denuded of drama for its final two minutes.
There are clear references to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (the mysteries of deep space), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (apotheosis) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (crew get bumped off one by one by lurking monster). Another influence has to be Event Horizon which was a horror movie that was not very scary. The trouble is the lack of freshness this gave to the whole film in that broke no new ground. The subliminal images were initially incredibly spooky but were overused and lost their potency.
This is not to completely rubbish Sunshine (although, leaving aside scepticism about ‘reigniting’ the sun, space never reaches absolute zero of -273 degrees Celsius) – it was okay, but I never really felt I had missed much with those first forty minutes.

2011-06-17T14:06:00.001+01:00

There is much talk swirling around the corridors of power and the Foreign desks of newsrooms of ‘natural justice’ as we have a remarkable confluence of Ratko Mladic’s arrest, Colonel Gadaffi’s indictment on crimes against humanity, the killings by the Assad regime in Syria and the extraordinary evidence revealing proof of war crimes in Sri Lanka when Mahinda Rajapaksa and his armed forces finally crushed the Tamil Tigers. In the latter instance, 40,000 civilians died and hospitals were shelled, even after GPS co-ordinates were issues to the Sri Lankan army (though the Tigers were also guilty of war crimes).
Yet David Reynolds marking on BBC Four the 70th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Russia, was chilling as he related Josef Stalin’s mistakes and ultimate victory saying of Uncle Joe “a mass murderer who never faced justice for his crimes.” In the grand sweep of history, huge numbers of deaths can be skimmed over for they are beyond comprehension and are almost totally faceless, evocative of the quote often attributed to the Soviet Marshal “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” Reynolds’ depiction of the Georgian peasant who rose ruthlessly to the highest position in the Soviet firmament as still the gangster he was in pre-Revolutionary days, physically and vocally inadequate with a childish streak of petulance and vindictiveness, is a desperately sad tale for those who suffered under his rule. Of course, Robert Service, a biographer of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, has made clear that if the latter had been in charge maybe not as many would have died, but millions still would have done.
It gets me thinking that so many villains of the twentieth century escaped what is now viewed as routine for those engaged in murderous and abominable misrule – a referral to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Post-World War II alone, in addition to Stalin, there is Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot (albeit he died in his bed in a jungle fastness), Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko and countless more monsters. Their reputations are sundered but in their time realpolitik ruled and still doe to a large extent. It’s called natural justice but it only ever be selective.

2011-06-13T11:30:00.000+01:00

With electioneering hotting up in the bid to run the IMF, I am distinctly underwhelmed by Christine Lagarde’s bid. She may be doing the rounds, visiting countries that can swing votes her way and is the most popular member of Sarkozy’s government (not saying much), but she represents a break in the pledge to open up these jobs at the IMF and the World Bank beyond the Europe-US duopoly that has been in aspic since 1946.
Candidates have emerged from Turkey and Mexico but the most compelling one is Stanley Fischer. Israel’s central bank governor, he fits the mould of transition, irrespective of his considerable monetary expertise. Born in Zambia, student at the London School of Economic and MIT, teacher of economics at prestigious American universities and capping it all with Israel’s heritage status as an honorary European country while being firmly in Asia. He has also been president and vice-chairman of Citigroup and even has an insider track with a seven-year stint as deputy managing director at the IMF, so he will be prepared straightaway.
The trouble is he that the political fray is anathema to him, taking the high ground that a candidate should be elected on their merits rather than the votes they rack up. Very worthy but it is maybe too idealistic to succeed. Furthermore, he may have declared his interest too late, with other candidates having secured important backing already. Ultimately, it will be a cabalistic carve-up among the elites but hopefully it won’t be the traditional western European who emerges at the head of the pack.

2011-06-08T13:22:00.001+01:00

I think most people are glad that the Bahrain GP for 2011 is ‘dead in the water’. Although still to receive official confirmation from the FIA, Formula One’s governing body, the rejection of racing on the island by the teams and Bernie Ecclestone’s U-turn will give the Bahrainis greater time for ‘reconciliation’ (even if that involves reconciling ordinary citizens to long prison sentences). There was never going to be any condemnation of the heavy-handed authorities, given that they also race in China and plan to expand F1 to Russia, but at least it delivers a blow to the smoke-filled room deals that so fug the administration of football’s FIFA. FIA president Jean Todt was supposed to owe his election in large part to the ruling dynasty in Bahrain, but now can’t remember if anyone abstained in the ‘unanimous’ decision to reinstate Bahrain for the 2011 season (which isn’t the meaning of unanimous). Ecclestone, meanwhile, emerges with credit, which can’t be said often. He is a hard man and ferocious business competitor but he also cares about his image, as demonstrated by his cooperation with a biography about him.

2011-06-06T09:57:00.002+01:00

England’s performance against Switzerland was unacceptable against a Swiss team that had just lost its two main stars and in large parts was made up by novices, yet in the last ten minutes it was England who looked out of their depth. Does being sloppy and complacent induce such tiredness of itself or is it because you continually have to chase the ball after giving it away? The worst Swiss player was Johan Djourou, a Premier League player, all of England’s players were drawn from the Premier League – is there a pattern emerging here?
Once again the case for scrapping the League Cup (which relegated Birmingham for their troubles in winning it) and shunting some Premier League games into the resultant gaps to create a winter break seems unanswerable. Unless of course you’re Sky and Richard Scudamore and national achievement plays second fiddle to money. Scudamore is such an advocate of the League Cup because it creates the fixture congestion that makes a winter break impossible, lessening the pressure on him to introduce one. Selling league games when other major European leagues sensibly wind down for a while is very profitable so who cares if a player's career is ended by an injury brought on fatigue (cf Dean Ashton)? When you’re pally with the Culture and Sports Secretary and you have Rupert Murdoch guarding your back (or ready to plunge a knife into it), why should you abjure the pursuit of lucre? Apart from saving your soul, that is. In medieval fairy tales, those who betrayed their kith and kin for wealth usually suffered a grisly fate. Sadly, we live in the real world, where justice can be most elusive.

Throwback to the future

2011-06-04T09:49:00.000+01:00

To cash in on the cinema release (at least in how much they charge for the adverts), Film 4 displayed the original X-Men movie. It had the same controversial concentration/extermination camp scene at the beginning. It does have an emotional tug at the sight of a family being torn apart through no fault of their own and Erik Lehnsherr physically displaying his own love by twisting the gate. However, I’m glad I saw it first in X-Men: First Class as it has a better fit there with Lehnsherr on his mission that takes out Nazis who fled to South America as he tracks down Sebastian Shaw. In the first movie though, the comparison between Jews and mutants is a little overwrought. Having such a grand concept might have filled the scriptwriter with a sense of completion that he didn’t need to do much with the plot. Indeed, there are few movies that I can think of that do so little in the course of a feature-length running time. As a thread in a comic it might have been passable, yet here the film, by setting up so many of the characters, seems in many ways a prologue for X2, which was more fun seeing as it made better use of the time asked of its audience. I can see why one of my university friends told me he fell asleep during it. Prior to last night I had only seen the last ten minutes. All three of the original films are eclipsed by the ‘prequel’ which has effortless style, though some of the loose ends do not tie up (for instance, Professor X said in the 2000 picture he first met Magneto when he and his soon-to-become archenemy were 18, where First Class implies that their original contact was when both were 30) – in that way it is also like Batman Begins, which is not a bad position to be in, though I would be happy if they concluded the 1960s X-Men story as it is.

Classy entertainment

2011-06-03T11:21:00.005+01:00

As mainstream scriptwriters run out of original concepts (er, love retro narratives) and Hollywood retreats to old mainstays in an uncertain economy, origin movies, especially of superheroes, are all the rage. Arguably, Christopher Nolan is to blame for making the polished and highly successful Batman Begins but some retreads are threadbare.
X-Men: First Class seems to be one of the better of its kind, with many characters undergoing personal journeys (some shorter than others admittedly). As much as the movie is about the burgeoning relationship that fractures between Charles Xavier and Eirk Lehnsherr, it is also about the emotional journey of Raven who becomes Mystique. Jennifer Lawrence, who plays her, continues her good work that she did in Winter’s Bone (from what I’ve heard) allied with being explosively exquisite in her beauty, maybe drawn as such in order to provide a greater contrast with her blue ‘natural’ self (interestingly, we know from X Men: The Final Stand that blonde stunner is not her form were she human, but if you’re a shape-shifter, why not go for the best possible – she is a magnet to the eye in every scene, eclipsing Greatchester House, Xavier’s base).
Being the 1960s, the fashion enhances the characteristics of all the woman present (ugly woman seem not to have existed back then). Very close behind Lawrence, is January Jones’ Emma Frost who as a very sexy White Queen could quite easily pass as Barbarella’s villainous sister. Ms Jones has developed a habit of portraying villainesses in films after her turn in Identity, probably satisfying her range after being in Mad Men. Zoe Kravitz as Angel completes the trio of pretty mutants, with sterling support from Rose Byrne as the sympathetic CIA spook, Moira.
Michael Fassbender is a credible, beguiling Magneto as the anguished and vengeful Lehnsherr becomes. Lean and handsome, he beguiles before unleashing his ferocious fury. He is unusually multi-lingual, speaking at least four languages in German, French, Spanish and English, though he wasn’t born in an English-speaking country, so maybe that shouldn’t be a shock. James MacAvoy said he wanted to channel Patrick Stewart in his role and rare is the time you think ‘that’s James McAvoy’ instead of Charles Xavier. Kevin Bacon (after American Dad, he really does have a distinctive nose) has terrific fun as the chief baddie, Sebastian Shaw, a callous, manipulative monster who is not a little psychotic. Given that his mutation has stopped his outward ageing and his penchant for starting World War III, you wonder - through the prism of the Marvel universe – how long he has been around (indeed, what was his role in World Wars One and Two). Shaw talks about he and all mutants are ‘children of the atom’ – though Xavier, Raven and Lehnsherr seem to disprove his theory. Both sides have mutant compatriots, which means you don’t know which of these lesser-known mutants will survive (apart from Hank McCoy natch), though one who doesn’t join either is a smart, uncredited cameo by Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, who also gets to say the one f-word permitted by the rating given the film.
The historical setting in 1944 and 1962 adds extra interest to the proceedings, although the Poles may object to the location of a concentration/extermination camp as simply ‘Poland’ rather than with a qualifier such as ‘Nazi-occupied Poland’ – it is a sore point for people of that country to be lumped together with the atrocities. Even though Philip Larkin jocularly declaimed that sex wasn’t invented until 1963 (after the Profumo scandal), one gets a feel for the boundless opportunities and promise of that decade, before it turned sour from the 1970s. You can feel the freshness of the times. There is also tribute to Ken Adam with his design for the War Room in Dr Strangelove that I found most pleasing.
In the background is the Hans Zimmerish music as walls of sound whiz towards the ears, crashing like tides before building up again. Some think this is bombastic but I like it (cf. Gladiator, Enigma, etc.). I notice from the credits that Bryan Singer, director of the first two X-Men movies, is on board as producer. X2 is commonly agreed to be the best of the original trilogy, but I would say that this tops it in style alone. It is not a masterpiece but it is very good. They probably should leave the story ending where it did, but Hollywood being Hollywood, they will continue to flog it until the well runs dry.

2011-06-02T12:33:00.002+01:00

I do like Marina Hyde’s Guardian quip: “They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the FIFA family.” Forget Russia being a mafia state, it’s FIFA who are the legal racketeers par excellence. One might even find something admirable in their sheer effrontery, the quality of doggedness, were they at least half way logical in their defence. In one breath, the octogenarian Argentine FIFA Executive Committee member, Julio Grondona, breathes fire about English attacks (on the FIFA family that Joseph Blatter seems to personify) and the lies of English journalism about bribery; in the next he says he would only vote for England’s 2018 bid if they had handed the Falkland Islands over to Buenos Aires – sounds mighty similar to a bribe, that. This doddery fool then rails against the USA (the only possible link to Chuck Blazer during the entire conference) saying he wouldn’t vote for them because it would be the same as voting for England. See the logic? No, I don’t either.
Then you get the mighty grouping of Cyprus, Fiji, Benin, Congo and someone else (yes they really are that important). It’s tempting to think “Who gives a shit what Benin thinks?” but that would exemplify English arrogance. Every football federation is valid, it’s just the people who run them that makes the former Pakistani cricket chief, Ijaz ‘Eejit’ Butt, look not dissimilar to a model of rational incorruptibility.
Rather than moaning, the FA needs to start the long, hard business of assiduous networking, particularly with heir apparent as FIFA president Michel Platini. Overall, the rest of the world doesn’t much care for the internal workings of FIFA. The FA will have their work cut out.

2011-06-02T10:06:00.001+01:00

It is a truism that people make cities rather than the monuments. This is the same for The Apprentice except that it is populated by those desperately, if unwittingly, trying to make themselves look like idiots. It was a double-firing last night, quite early in the series comparatively. The episode speaks for itself, but the review section can be equally as good and this time they had worthwhile ‘unseen’ footage. Ellie Reed with a change of hair colour and a girly-girly dress (something she insisted in the main show that she wasn’t) was a far cry from the sullen blonde, moping around in the background. Even vicious editing couldn’t hide a certain repetition in language (not unlike Lord Sugar so I’ve read). She first claimed her ‘downfall’ was the result of not being au fait with marketing; then her ‘downfall’ was because she kept being put in a sub-team; thrice, her ‘downfall’ was because she didn’t put herself forward enough. Make your mind up – you’ve had more downfall than Hitler. In the end, there was justification for Ellie to go because she had been put on notice the previous week and she had not stepped up.
The next candidate with the sack placed over him was Vincent Disneur. With a surname like that, it sounds Huegenot but any French style was left on the other side of the English Channel. He was wearing a pin-striped suit – fine at the moment- with a hideous Hawaiian shirt (garish flowers on a white background) topped off with an orange tie. To look at it was like rubbing one’s eyes with alcohol. He must have sacrificed an entire sperm whale (or hijacked the one that beached on the north-east coast) to get that amount of grease in his hair. Altaa said one of her work colleagues said he had separated from his wife. Sad as a parting of the ways is, this appearance was reason for grounds for divorce. The phrase ‘all bells and no braces’ sums up his patter. Even Jedi Jim, who managed to talk his way out of a near-certain appointment in the boardroom for a second time, said his friend Vincent had more gusto than substance. Although Tom Pellerau is still in the process, Vincent has survived longer than any other candidate across the whole UK Apprentice existence without being on the winning team. Mind you, the treats have got progressively worse with each passing series. Having a tennis knockabout with celebrity sports star Pat Cash is indicative of BBC budget cutbacks. For his ‘achievement’, Vincent got a treat all of his own (if indeed it was real, given that he had his face surrounded by stars on it) – a spa session which is better (if true) than much of what the task winners get.

A Discredited Republic

2011-05-31T16:29:00.001+01:00

Given that FIFA get away with so much in general, I am enjoying it that at least Joseph Blatter (no matey ‘Sepp’ here) is squirming in his own ordure. It proves Socrates’ point (via Plato) that while good men will tend to unite around a noble cause, bad men will eventually fall out with each other, creating disorder.
The conniving and chicanery involved is astounding. It seems that to scupper Mohammed bin Hamman’s candidacy, Blatter got his ally, Chuck Blazer, to accuse bin Hamman and the latter’s ally, Jack Warner, of corruption, thus removing a serious threat to Blatter’s power. If so, it is a pyrrhic victory for although Blatter will now be, Soviet-style, the only candidate for the FIFA presidency, Warner knows where all the bodies are buried and is intent on blackmailing the (un)ethics committee into rescinding his suspension. Given the ethics committee lacklustre performance into FIFA governance (Committee: “Did you know of or were involved in any corruption.” Blatter: “No.” Committee: “Okay. Fine by us.” Five months earlier, replace Blatter with Spain/Portugal and Qatar), it is extraordinary that they did act against bin Hamman and Warner and Warner clearly feels the ethics committee is politically compromised. That they are the only source of 'authority' to which FIFA is accountable is akin to getting bent detectives to investigate criminal conspiracies.
Blatter runs as the candidate to clear up the mess in FIFA yet the Augean Stables are in such a state largely because of him. When the sponsors get jittery and FIFA Executive Committee members start slinging mud at each other, this is more than sour grapes from British journalists bitter over the failed 2018 bid. It is fascinating. It’s just a pity that the sclerotic and feeble FA is incapable of taking advantage to instigate reform. It needs to sort itself out before it can properly represent England on the world stage, which hopefully the parliamentary investigation going on will force upon it. Bleating about postponing the FIFA presidency election along with the Scottish FA (hardly a paradigm of efficiency) is the same as Lear raging at the wind with his fool. The trouble with taking a principled stand is that a lot of football associations around the world come from countries where corruption is endemic and those in high positions (such as head of a sports association) have got there by connections and nefarious means and the shenanigans at FIFA must come across as small beer. Also, they are fully aware that those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Warner, though, isn’t prepared to take the humiliation being suspended lying down. An odious man at the best of times, I am loving his declaration of war against FIFA. The email about Jermome Valcke (a man convicted in an American court of being a compulsive liar as commercial director, stepping down for a year before being brought back by Blatter in an even more rarefied role as FIFA General Secretary) was alleging that Qatar had bought the 2022 bid, according to Warner is not even the start of the tsunami he is going to unleash on world football – such a sensitive person to choose such a word a few months after the devastation in Japan.
Another intriguing facet of FIFA is that they are all men. Maybe Blatter banned women from important positions because they wouldn’t wear tight-fitting tops and shorts.

2011-05-26T16:27:00.002+01:00

Amid all the kerfuffle about who should head the IMF and Cheryl Cole being axed from the US X-Factor comes a story that dwarfs these in importance. The capture and pending extradition of Ratko Mladic is a great moment. On a par with it, is the arrest of another bogeyman from the mid-1990s, former Hutu militia leader Bernard Munyagishari, ending his 17 year flight from justice. Interestingly, both were apprehended in neighbouring countries to their homelands, Mladic in Serbia and Munyagishari in the Democratic Republic of Congo, probably because Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda were extensively scoured for them. May they both rot in jail for the rest of their lives at the very least (Munyagishari might be executed, though I think a life jail term for such a person might be more excruciating). These moments hopefully will allow the Balkans and Rwanda if not to move on from their pasts, at least lay some ghosts to rest. It has been a long time in coming.

2011-05-24T09:56:00.001+01:00

Well, I might as well combine Ryan Giggs’ alleged indiscretion with a few things to say about the conclusion of this season’s Premier League. I knew that Giggs was the player at the heart of the storm about a super-injunction a week before his cover was finally blown in the House of Commons and virtually everyone I knew was in the same camp. I am not on Twitter and not many I know subscribe to that service either. So all this flak this Liberal Democrat MP, John Hemming is receiving is as much a joke as the semantic hoops jumped by English-based newspapers before today. Ironically, Max Clifford (who else?), publicist to Imogen Thomas (the woman alleged to have had the affair with Giggs), said that if Giggs had not taken out the super-injunction (thereby naming Ms Thomas as the party that this was primarily aimed at), it may never have come to light.
Anyway, fighting fire with ice is only a temporary tactic, as once the steam clears away (as it inevitably will), you’re still going to be revealed in an unflattering way. Fight fire with fire and you may get burnt but so will the journalists who target you. Such hacks claim that no-one wants to know about them, but a rich celebrity could hire a platoon of private detectives to harass them in their private arena, even ruin their lives and families by posting anonymous fake information or doctored photos to their houses. They would never know who was doing it because I imagine they would have built up a list of quite a few celebrities they had ticked off, but subsequently they may treat others as they expect to be treated themselves.
At least two people yesterday said Giggs should not have been named as, unlike Tiger Woods, he had not cultivated an image of himself to sell things. Admittedly, Giggs was not a commercial whore, but he often boasted of how boring he was, tucked up in bed early, not going out to night clubs and such. He projected this wholesome portrait and then you get these idiots who just want to attack John Hemming flaunting their ignorance on media platforms by saying Giggs was not a hypocrite and should not have been exposed. Giggs doesn’t need to, but these studio guests are wankers.
As for the end of the season, the FA needs to be yanked by politicians, have all its vested interests shaken out of it and put on a stable footing that can so ‘no’ to the Premier League before FIFA and UEFA kick up a stink about political interference. Taking a laissez-faire attitude to the FA is no sustainable. League games should never have been staged on the same day as the FA Cup Final and now the Final is being moved to 5.15 pm from next season to accommodate more league games. It is a disgrace because the FA is in the pocket of the Premier League. That’s why it is the FA who fines clubs for playing ‘below-par’ sides - the vassal is protecting the product being sold around the world. It therefore looks foolish by bringing in a 25 player squad rule.
As for Richard Scudamore, let Birmingham City’s relegation stick in his craw. This sleazy schmoozer said there was no chance of a winter break because the League Cup was valued by clubs – this same League Cup that so exhausted Birmingham with injuries and extra games. For the bigger clubs it is just a trinket – nothing more. It needs to be abolished so a winter break can be introduced. Of course, the League Cup is just a smokescreen because the Premier League get more money for league games when all other major European leagues are on their winter breaks. Scudamore argues against all that is right and decent in football, while taking the credit for glories that would have occurred irrespective of his actions.
Newcastle United had an average season and were just several minutes away from a top half finish and non-negative goal difference. In the end, 12th place is the bare minimum of acceptability in a very weak top flight. Despite selling the main striker, NUFC have not struggled for goals, scoring the most in more than a decade at this level (even more than during seasons where qualification for the Champions League was secured). NUFC even ended up outscoring fifth-placed Tottenham Hotspur. A decent striker is needed but the story has to be counter-balanced by the goals conceded and the defence has to be beefed up as well. Mike Williamson is just a lump who we got on the cheap from Portsmouth. He’s tall and large and as a defender in the Championship is quite effective but it is not enough in the Premier League. Danny Simpson and James Perch alternating at right-back seem weak links at right back and there is no cover for Jose Enrique at left back (who might be sold anyway). The midfield of Cheik Tiote, Kevin Nolan, Joey Barton and Jonas Gutierrez, with Hatem ben Arfa to come back from injury next season seems to be the least in need of improvement, yet the first signings in the close season are midfielders (on frees of course). The manager, Alan Pardew, doesn’t exactly fill with me with enthusiasm – I don’t see him as top-drawer but it sums up a board who seem to lack ambition and sell players to those they can squeeze the most money from, no matter the impact on team shape or spirit. They claim it is the Arsenal strategy to take young talents and sell them on for a higher price after a few years. Saying this just proves they know nothing about football. Arsenal take young talents and nurture them to become high achievers, only selling them on once they are past their sell by date or have no further use. The Newcastle board are actually following the Wigan strategy, which is no surprise considering the business empires of the owners of each club. Hardly inspiring, is it – only seeking to avoid relegation. Most football fans can dream in the summer season – if only Newcastle United fans had that luxury.

2011-05-19T10:44:00.005+01:00

Big congratulations to Porto for beating Braga in last night's Europa League Final (even though I was unaware that it was going on until this morning). Andre Villas Boas, in his first season in management, wins the Portuguese league at a canter and bags the trophy of Europe's second tier competition. Who would bet against him following the path of his mentor Jose Mourinho and winning the Champions League with Porto next season? "Once I was the apprentice, now I am the master." Yet it would be Mourinho who would be Darth Vader in these circumstances.

Instructive

2011-05-19T10:23:00.003+01:00

This interview with the New York Times columnist speaks so much to me about what I've thought for ages. The idea that we are not rational but rather overwhelmingly unconscious social animals, is something that I've taken up with gusto since I read that 99% of our decisions are based on our personalities - the only occasions where we make a non-predetermined choice is when we are denied any time to think about it. Even indecision is a choice, if unconscious, to do nothing or delay doing something, that comes from who we are.
Also, I've believed for years about the deleterious effects of radical social liberalism combined with extreme economic liberalism. The Labour party of 1960s made state policy that would have been fine if it hadn't been for the Conservative policies of the 1980s (and arguably vice versa). If we want a contrast with our social disconnect, just look at the European continent which went through much of what Britain did in the 1960s but doesn't have the problems (where there are problems of isolation, such as in parts of France, there are historical reasons particular to that country). One survey that struck me a couple of years ago showed that people in the least loneliest city in the UK today feel more lonely than those in the most loneliest city forty years ago.
I disagree with the him of 2003 over the Iraq invasion, as I was dead-set against it at the time, the lies it was based upon being so transparent, but he admits he was blind on that issue so that's good too.
Anyway, I'll let Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/19/david-brooks-big-idea-society) have his head with Brooks below:

When David Brooks was a boy, he had two turtles named Gladstone and Disraeli. How come? "There's a New York Jewish culture that has a saying 'Think Yiddish, act British'," says Brooks. "My background was filled with Anglophile Jews. Jews of a certain generation, really my grandfathers' generation, gave each other names they thought would help them fit in – Irving, Sydney, Milton and Norman – and now in the US those are not English names any more, they're Jewish names. And I was brought up in that culture. Hence the turtles."

Hence much more than that. Brooks, though a 49-year-old Canadian-born, suburban New York-raised, Chicago university-educated and now so much of a stellar New York Times columnist that the White House sometimes rings him to ask what he's planning to write about, is deeply Anglophilic.

"I am very British in that I'm reticent. There's a survey of how many times people in different countries touch each other during an hour over coffee. In Rio it was 180, in Paris 120. London, zero." How about new York? "Maybe 40? I feel very at home here." We're sitting in the Cinnamon Club, an Indian restaurant in Westminster frequented by policy wonks, and he looks more diffident than the only Englishman at our table. I resist the counter-cultural urge to play footsie.

But what's important about Brooks is not so much that he acts British, but that he thinks British. His new book, The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, is steeped in the anti-rationalist philosophical reflections of the British Enlightenment. And this is no ordinary book: even before publication this week it has become, according to Times columnist Rachel Sylvester, "the must-read text for politicians searching for a new prism through which to examine the apparently intractable challenges of social immobility, school dropout rates, welfare dependency and crime". Education secretary Michael Gove believes it contains vital clues for turning around failing schools; universities minister David Willetts reckons it may help define modern Conservatism; policy minister Oliver Letwin thinks it articulates the cherished Tory notion of the Big Society. The book is so hot that both David Cameron and Ed Miliband are meeting Brooks this week, and Steve Hilton, the PM's top strategist, has invited him to hold a seminar at No 10 on Friday.

Brooks hails British rather than French Enlightenment thinkers as the guys who really understood what makes the social animal tick. While Voltaire, Condorcet and Descartes used reason to confront superstition and feudalism, thinkers across the Channel – Brooks cites Burke, Hume and Adam Smith – thought it unwise to trust reason. Rather, and here Brooks quotes Hume with approval: "Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions."

Why is The Social Animal so important if it just dusts off old thoughts of Brits from 200-plus years ago? First, Brooks argues misplaced faith in human rationality has underpinned policy-making for too long. Second, research in neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology stressing the importance of our non-rational minds can, if applied, create a better world.

Brooks says that, overwhelmingly, human decision-making is not rational but unconscious. Much of the book's pleasure consists in reading digests of experiments (such as international differences in the incidence of touching during coffee) that show how non-rational we are and yet how successful the social animal when breaking free of mere rational decision-making. The style and substance will be familiar to readers of pop psychology bestsellers such as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist: for Brooks the unconscious isn't a seething Freudian netherworld of sexual urges, but where we make the key decisions of our lives – whom to date and marry, how to vote.

Most success stories stress academic ability, IQ, hard work, he argues. Brooks rather stresses non-cognitive skills, which, he writes, is "the catch-all category for hidden qualities that can't be easily measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfilment." "By that I mean emotions, intuitions, genetic inheritance. Soft stuff, which is pretty rich given that my wife thinks I'm insufficiently touchy feely."

And what are these mysterious non-cognitive skills? Good character (energy, honesty, dependability, recognising your weaknesses and controlling your worst impulses). He also mentions "street smarts", by which he means reading situations and people, often unconsciously, and developing human relationships. He thinks these skills can be honed.

He gives examples of policy-making without non-cognitive street smarts. "When we invaded Iraq we were blind to the social problems that would be involved. We didn't realise they didn't trust us." Hold on – didn't he write a New York Times column urging invasion? "I did. I was so blind about it. In that column I wondered what Michael Oakeshott [the British conservative political philosopher] would have said. He would have said: this society is very complicated and you should be circumspect in thinking about what you can achieve, and that invading to install democracy without trust is doomed. And then I wrote: 'Having said that, I think we should invade.'"

Another example is the banking crisis, which, he reckons, happened because we trusted bankers. "Many thought we should let these rational wealth-seekers get on with it. We shouldn't."

The Social Animal's thesis is expressed through the form of a novel. He creates a couple, Harold and Erika, he from a rich background, she from a broken family in a disorganised neighbourhood, and traces them through their formative years, marriage, careers, retirement and death. The book has become a US bestseller and is worth reading – even if with mounting exasperation – since it seems to promise answers to some of western society's deepest problems: how to generate social mobility and reform a non-society devoid of mutual trust and bristling with security cameras.

No wonder leading Tories welcome Brooks. He is to the Big Society agenda what Richard Layard was to Labour's happiness philosophy and Richard Sennett was to Blair's respect agenda. "The Big Society appeals to me because I don't think appealing to people as individuals gets you far. Many social problems are caused by insufficient social capital. Kids are brought up in broken homes and crime-ridden neighbourhoods; they don't go to university because they're not attached to their schools . . . to solve these problems you need to build dense social networks. You have to get beyond treating people as rational machines who respond to the economic incentives."

Brooks thinks his book, written with the US in mind, speaks to British problems. He quotes the jeremiads of self-styled Red Tory Phillip Blond about Britain having become a bipolar nation in which a bureaucratic, centralised state presides over a fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry. "I get to where Blond is by arguing that there have been two individualist revolutions. Conservatives embraced the individualism of the market and reacted furiously if the state impinged on individual economic choice." Brooks writes that one consequence of this is chains such as Walmart closing local shops, destroying networks of community those shops created.

"There's also a liberal revolution in the moral sphere that says the state shouldn't impinge on choices about marriage, family structure, the role of women. That liberal revolution also took religion out of the public square. Together these revolutions undermine communal trust and law and order." It also, he writes in the Social Animal, led to welfare policies that "enabled lonely young girls to give birth out of wedlock, thus decimating the habits and rituals that led to intact families".

Perhaps the fact that you're a self-described socialist will appeal to Ed Miliband, I suggest to Brooks. "Yes, but my socialism doesn't value state over society. It favours a more communitarian style of politics. The point is to ensure that people from different classes feel united in a common enterprise. When I meet Ed Miliband, I might ask if my kind of socialism appeals, or if he's stuck with the old one."

My hunch is that Brooks's socialism would make Miliband queasy. In the book, he eulogises charter schools – schools that get public money but are granted autonomy from state control in exchange for producing certain results, notably targeting kids from tough backgrounds. Erika, his character from a tough background, manages to get to just such a school established by a billionaire hedge fund trader.

But aren't charter schools anti-egalitarian, don't they stop people from different classes feeling united in a common enterprise? "These schools are unequal, but in an unequal society you need that. Poor kids need different things from schools than rich kids because they often don't have the structure in their homes or neighbourhoods to give them a chance of success and most schools don't help with that."

Isn't there a risk that decentralisation undermines your socialism? "Yeah. What I want to say to David Cameron is that if you decentralise power you risk getting rid of a basic level of fairness and equality. And you risk creating separate communities that don't talk to each other." Brooks cites Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee who on Tuesday rounded on Eric Pickles's localism bill. "It was a good article because it argued that when budget deficits are cut the poor are at greater risk. Not that I'm saying cutting the deficit is wrong; it's right, but it needs not to fall on the poorest hardest."

Brooks tells me he is a fan of Anthony Trollope, something not admitted by a public figure since John Major. He recently gave a talk to New York's Trollope Society about the novel The American Senator. "In it the senator scorns British political institutions, arguing they're absurd and irrational. The Lords? Ridiculous. But what Trollope felt when he ridicules that senator, and what I share, is a belief in institutions to achieve communal goals and how wrong it is to try to impose rationalistic models on existence."

How un-American. Brooks reminds me of a reverse Jonathan Freedland. While Freedland's book Bring Home the Revolution argued the egalitarian ideas of American revolution should be imported to reform Britain's insufficiently rational polity, Brooks seems to be arguing that it doesn't matter that Britain's political institutions aren't rational, just that they need to be infused with more communal spirit and funky-sounding streets smarts. Whether that's a message Britain wants to hear is another matter.

Euroaudiovision

2011-05-16T11:16:00.000+01:00

For the first time in years, longer than I can remember doing so, I watched the Eurovision Song Contest in its entirety. The British entry Blue did respectably, concluding the night with 100 points and (just) finishing in the top half of 25 countries. It was a good single (‘I can’) but generic ultimately and on Monday morning the tune hasn’t really stuck in the mind. Which, for better or worse, can not be said of Jedward, the brothers Grime. They had a melody for ‘Lipstick’ which still twangs in the mind 48 hours later and wearing ridiculous, red-sequinned blazers boasting out-size shoulder straps, they bopped around manically, irrespective of synchronisation with the tune or each other. And they were fun, reflected in the higher placing of them over Blue.
The biggest shock was Azerbaijan winning the whole shebang. It was a pretty song but unremarkable compared to some other entries. Some might even argue that if Israel is included for its European tradition, Azerbaijan has more of an Asian heritage, any Euro inclinations deriving from long domination by Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. At least the UK can claim a small win through its British-born female lead vocalist (something that Romania did as well). It will be interesting to have it staged along the shores of the Caspian Sea though.
What was disappointing was for a European singing competition so many of the entrants delivered their verses in English. This is not exactly a new phenomenon and, of course, it is designed to garner international success but it is a shame only three non-English native speaking countries delivered their whole submission in the language they were born to (and a few others having a hybrid, parts done in English, others in their mother tongue). Maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising that France, Serbia and Spain suffered in the final vote (Spain’s performance was criminally undervalued).
I liked Hungary, Spain and Sweden particularly, though most of the songs were decent enough. All three has high-class pop as their theme. As the voting results progressed and it seemed clear which way the points were going, I hoped Sweden would take the crown but they faltered in the final reckoning. Some of the acts were amusing for their ‘uniqueness’, to put it kindly. Georgia sang with a woman who looks similar to one of the senior employees at the place I work and most of the lyrics seemed to have been hauled at random from an English thesaurus. Moldova was absolutely ridiculous with those long pointy hats and a girl in what looked like a bridal gown peddling around on a unicycle. I predicted correctly that Switzerland’s entry was so dull it would finish bottom and, duly, it did.
Graham Norton did a sterling commentary, as waspish as Terry Wogan used to be, while praising those he thought worthwhile (I reserved the right to disagree with some of his picks). The arena held around 35,000 – the size of a mid-sized football stadium I thought to myself – and that was what it turned out to be, converted very impressively. The German hosts were mainstream and inoffensive and thus the humour pandered to the lowest common denominator but they were effective in regard to the real business at hand.
So Eurovision is gone for another year, but the UK is now, hopefully, on the right track. They have the template with Blue and know that if they score between 5 - 6 points for each of the 43 participating countries they should win (Azerbaijan won with an average of about 5.1). Some states haven’t won for 40 - 50 years and that can’t be put down solely to tactical voting – this year’s top two, the Azeris and the Italians don’t have very strong connections with their neighbours (e.g. Portugual giving Spain twelve points or, a little surprisingly until you consider the ethnic make-up, Croatia and Bosnia giving hefty points to Serbia). Maybe other nations are bemused that we have followed one Irish-born compere with another and so don’t give the rights to hosting as a result (though the public face to Europe was the delectable Alex Jones when delivering the UK’s results). The UK surely has too strong a music culture to not win it in the near future.

It's balmy oop north

2011-05-14T09:48:00.002+01:00

It is one week since the Scottish National Party learned that they had gained an absolute majority under a system devised to prevent exactly that scenario. Some socialist and Marxist historians may pooh-pooh history as ‘the biographies of great men’ but Alex Salmond has lead his party almost to the sunlit uplands of independence and I would express severe doubt over whether anyone in his party could have achieved anything similar. He is, simply, the most charismatic and competent British politician of his generation
Yet he has had to risk his health to rescue his party. He relinquished the top spot on the advice of his doctors but had to step back up to the plate, when the SNP were dead in the water under John Swinney’s tenure. For the SNP to achieve their ultimate goal, Salmond has to stay at the helm. There is no-one else.
This was made clear in the interview Nicola Sturgeon MSP had with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight on Wednesday. Either she was obsessed with a referendum on independence that she was rendered inoperative to answer any other question or she was a really poor communicator. I’m guessing it was a 60/40 split respectively. In ten minutes she must have mentioned “the Scottish people will decide the best interests of Scotland” at least twenty times, contriving at one point to say it three times in the space of a single sentence. Paxman must have been in mellow mood, handing her enough rope to hang herself rather than pressing home that she wasn’t answering his questions. Again and again, he asked for specifics in different parts of policy - domestic and international – and while she occasionally broke from her trance to offer a modicum of detail, she always concluded that she couldn’t really say anything because it was “for the Scottish people to decide the best interests of Scotland.” It was unbelievably wooden and stilted. Modern voters aren’t interested in such Pinnochio politics; they just find it laughable.
There is, Westminster’s Scottish Affairs committee (Labour chaired and with a single SNP MP among its 11 members) concluded in a recent report, “a strong element of both a grievance and a dependency culture in Scottish politics.” I still remember a debate about four or five years ago, when the novelist Ian Rankin said that many Scots were quite chippy and one Scottish Nationalist piped up, querying that was anything wrong to being chippy. It is this tendency that Salmond seeks to suppress, giving the impression that he runs a party that is forward-looking, not seeking to blame anyone else. The Liberal Democrat collapse helped immensely, but their erstwhile voters chose the SNP as their home because of Salmond’s sure hand at conveying modernity and sense. All in all though, Scottish independence is still more popular in England than north of the border.

Power to the people - the opposite more like

2011-05-10T17:33:00.000+01:00

The Labourites who voted against the Alternative Vote (AV) system because they wanted to hurt the Liberal Democrats seem to be lacking mental faculties over this issue. I know that this accounts for more than half of Labour voters but there you go. These Labour agents normally have contempt for the Lib Dems, seeing them as a mere pale imitation of Labour and a ‘progressive’ distraction – not of the pure faith, but heretics. It was their clan’s leaders that were in the ascendancy in coalition talks, scorning the Lib Dems concerns and seeing them as an adjunct to further propagate Labour party policy. Having driven the Lib Dems into the arms of the Conservatives (as well as the figures not quite adding up), they are now really angry at this ‘betrayal’. They lap up the unpopularity of the Lib Dems over controversial policies and hope to go for the party’s jugular in a way they haven’t been able to do since the ‘Gang of Four’ broke away to form the Social Democrat Party (SDP) – another bone of contention towards the Lib Dems, who are the successor party to the Liberals’ alliance with the SDP. Yet in siding with the Tories to defeat the AV referendum, the real ‘progressive’ turncoats are not the Lib Dems but themselves. Their blinkered, tribal approach means they can’t see the big picture. They cut off their nose to spite their face last Thursday.
Their supposed overall leader, Ed Miliband, can see the big picture – he is a strategist, as he was in the leadership election, as he is now; not just a pretty face (some would be crueller after witnessing him congratulate Labour activists in Gravesham, Kent with considerable dried saliva clinging to his lower lip). He sees the short-term damage. To the tribalists, opposing AV is just a way to stamp their principles, even if in defiance of their party leader. To the general public, Labour looks like a divided party and that is why it didn’t do as well as expected in the local elections and in Scotland (only Wales bucking the trend).
Miliband the younger also sees the long-term punishment. The AV referendum was only Part One of electoral reform; the sweetener for the Tories to get them to vote for it was the boundary changes. Ostensibly, it is to equalise the size of constituencies and make each MP responsible for roughly the same number of voters. But it will hit Labour hardest, eviscerating their number of strongholds in the inners cities and sparsely populated areas of Wales and Scotland. There will be fewer MPs after 2015, overwhelmingly at a cost to centre-left parties. AV would have cushioned this blow for the ‘progressives’. Labour regressives (for that is what they are) think that the spending cuts will make the Colaition unpopular and one big push will return them to power and in a way that they won’t have to share it. Such a mindset kept the Tories from government for 13 years. Imagine the changes top the country if Labour are kept from office until 2023. By voting down AV, this has made that prospect a lot more likely.
I supported AV, as did virtually everyone I knew outside of my workplace, not because it represented a full stop or closure on reform but because it was fairer than what is currently on offer, which is the equivalent of the nineteenth century ‘rotten boroughs’. In 2005, Labour got a 50+ seat majority with only 35% of the vote (and only a fifth of the total registered electorate). In 2010, the Liberal Democrat share of the vote went up but their number of MPs went down – if that isn’t a broken system, I don’t know what is. The exemplar of this failing system is 1983 when the Liberals/SDP Alliance got 25% of the electorate behind them and Labour got 27%, but despite that 2% difference, Labour got 208 seats and the Alliance ten times fewer MPs. First past the post is rotten to the core. No new democracy of the last twenty-five years has adopted it. No campaigners happily turned it around without answering it by saying that none of them took up AV either. However, let us remind ourselves that in the Coalition negotiations this was all the Tories would countenance in case they lost the referendum. Even in the USA, which is hailed as a place where first past the post works given the domination of the two-party system, is failed by this process – in 2000 (forget Nader and the Supreme Court), Al Gore got a million more votes than George W Bush and still lost. A rickety two hundred-year old system designed for 13 states and three million people can’t cope with 50 states and 350 million people. First past the post is antediluvian.
The success of the No campaign has been nasty, dirty and personal. If the Yes campaign had stooped to such low tactics they might have a had a chance. Their television campaign explained the merits of AV without hyperbole; the No TV advert by contrast clearly implied that the British people were too stupid to understand AV. Add in the falsehood-peddling billboard ads and public pronouncements and you have, in the words of Lord Ashdown, a “regiment of lies.” Moreover, the Yes campaign revealed who their donors were early on, with the No campaign temporising claiming that they would unveil them on conclusion of the referendum – there is still no word but no-one of any sense truly believed such lowlifes would keep their word.
The primary aim now must be to press for a fully elected House of Lords, the nominal upper chamber. Lord Reid (or Lard Reid to give him his native Scottish burr) attacks any notion of “electoral reform via the back door.” This has-been politician therefore proves he’s not just against AV but all worthwhile democracy and will do his utmost to sully his country’s image and procedure. To keep the life experience of members of the Lords – its biggest asset – elections should be by proportional representation (the standard transferable vote) with a party list that grandees would be plucked from to sit on the benches. That should satisfy everyone interested in fairness but the narrative of politics is about winners and losers (expect the Tories to mount a rearguard action to defeat any attempt at this) – some will always try to keep as much power from the voters as possible, even if that means tricking them.

2011-05-06T17:46:00.001+01:00

Congratulations to Porto and Braga for making it to the Europa League Final and making it an all northern Portugal affair.

2011-05-05T10:19:00.004+01:00

This kerfuffle, racheted up by media hostile to Presdient Barack Obama, over the story of what happened and how it did in the killing of Osama bin Laden is an attempt to detract from a positive story, one that reflects well on Obama. The main thing is that the architect of modern-day global terrorism is now dead. Nothing else matters (although the information garnered from the compound and the hard and flash drives there could ultimately be more significant). There should have been no chances taken with him as he might have been concealing a suicide belt. Moreover, there was talk about whether 'enhanced torture techniques' amounted to torture, but there have been strenuous denials over this and even if it were the case, stringent measures should be put in place to prevent it in the future, for if information had been obtained under torture, the desire to end the pain and speak could have led the Navy Seals in to a death trap. Torture is inherently unreliable. I do think that the pictures of the dead body should be released though because the fear of a propaganda coup for jihadists is overstated – they will carry out revenge raids regardless. Yet people of importance, not all favourable to Obama, have seen the pictures and I am prepared to accept their word (given that some would use any excuse to embarrass the President, yet they are not doing so).
The really worrying question is how bin Laden lived so close to Pakistan’s elite military academy without being detected. It could be that if you’re a small animal hiding from an elephant, the best place is under the trunk nose, but it has long been known that Pakistan’s intelligence services and army face both ways in terms of Islamist extremism. At least, Baron Frankenstein regretted his creation, yet Pakistan could still expire as a result of its experiments and power play. That a country, which is a ragbag of ethnicities where the higher-ups are politically delinquent, has nuclear weapons, is what should cause the whole world concern, rather then the elimination of a largely symbolic figure and the back story behind it.

Coleman's snooker balls

2011-05-02T12:55:00.002+01:00

On the concluding day of the Snooker World Championship and on the day of a documentary regarding David Coleman, I'd just like to document Dennis Taylor doing a Coleman's Balls during an earlier commentary in the tournament. Purring over Mark Williams' technique, he cooed "Mark just floats the balls in. He's a floater." I'm sure Mark Williams was thrilled to be described as a buoyant turd in a toilet bowl that is recalcitrant to the flush, even if there was a slight click in Taylor's voice on the last syllable as he realised what he had just said.

Vivid theories, shame about the facts

2011-04-14T09:44:00.001+01:00

On Newsroom SouthEast on BBC1 last night, the magazine for local issues had a piece on a J M W Turner museum opening in Thanet (an area, I learnt, he somewhat surprisingly described as having the best sunsets in all of Europe). But then it came to a ‘Turner expert’ (I wonder how that pays its way). He ventured to explain the reason for Turner’s vivid sunsets – “I have a theory, that as it was the start of the Industrial Revolution, he [Turner] was looking towards London and painting the pollution over it.”
Poppycock!
In 1815, in the archipelago that now encompasses Indonesia, an island called Tambora exploded. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption in the last ten thousand years. To put it into context, it shifted seven times more ash into the atmosphere than Krakatoa (which itself produced striking dusks itself all over the world) in 1883 and 150 times more than Mount St Helens in 1980. The thin level of soot in the air lowered global temperatures by two degrees Celsius as the sun was partially blocked out. Fred Pearce in New Scientist corroborates that this cataclysmic event was the reason that provided Turner with such rich backgrounds to paint. Some ‘Turner expert’ Newsroom SouthEast unearthed.

Two films I saw yesterday

2011-04-13T12:27:00.001+01:00

Rango is an inventive animation that plays with your perceptions, with distinct echoes not just of westerns (e.g. True Grit), but also the films Apocalypse Now and, most pertinently, Chinatown. Clint Eastwood (and his clutch of Oscars) is cleverly referenced. It also has an eco-message (similar to the one botched in the Bond film Quantum of Solace) about tensions over water – the aquifers beneath cities like Phoenix are running dry and the extravagant use of H2O is speeding up this process. Johnny Depp is always watchable, even in dire films. Here as a lizard, he has a close encounter with his lounge lizard Hunter S. Thompson alter ego from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is a refreshing touch for all those in the know. Depp heads up a fairly accomplished cast who fall into line behind him. The action sequences are expertly handled, topping off a very smart cartoon. Four out of five.

Source Code is what used to be called a B-movie. It is moderately diverting for its running time and stepped revelations open out the movie and the characters expertly, but these float away on the evening air after leaving the cinema as there is no great high concept – essentially, it’s we keep sending you ‘back in time’ until you get the information needed to stop a mad bomber. It mentions quantum mechanics and parabolic calculus as throwaways to bamboozle our curiosities and it could end with a multiverse being created, but I’m more of the opinion it is a paradox. All very Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits, but with a big Hollywood budget. Jake Gyllenhaal is a consistently engaging actor and we have Michelle Monaghan as a beautiful, if probably flaky, damsel to save – undemanding eye candy. Plus, it is always good to see Jeffrey ‘Felix Leiter’ Wright on screen. There are also some lovely panning shots of the more picturesque parts of Chicago (a bridge that passes under the unseen helicopter reminded me of its appearance in High Fidelity). Given the rubric of the plot though, it is just a B-movie. Three out of five.

Friendly fire? More like stupid fire

2011-04-08T11:39:00.000+01:00

So the NATO planners did not know the Libyan opposition possessed tanks and so launched air strikes in error on rebel positions? I knew the Libyan rebels had tanks from television pictures and all sorts of media and I’m just a civilian! As countless people have said, ‘military intelligence’ is oxymoronic, with emphasis on the moronic.

2011-04-07T10:31:00.000+01:00

Once again, Chelsea have bad luck with a penalty appeal in the Champions League. Sir Alex Ferguson says Ramires went down ‘theatrically’; yeah, right, as theatrically as anyone who has just been chopped at the shins by a pair of leg-sized scissors. Carlo Ancelotti criticised the referee without ever impugning the latter’s partiality, avoiding Arsene Wenger’s mistake. Essentially, the referee bottled it, unable to bring himself to award a penalty in the last minute. And once again, the extra official behind the goal proved that they are just time-servers and they know it – they don’t have the courage to challenge a referee’s decision. It was an interesting experiment by UEFA but it must be concluded that the experiment has failed because these extra officials lack legitimacy, even in their own eyes.
Goal-line technology may have to wait until Sepp Blatter stands down in 2015, but Michel Platini seems only slightly less reactionary and antediluvian. Mohammed Bin Hammam is an unknown quantity, even after securing the World Cup hosting rights for his home country. Referees shouldn’t be replaced, but the ability of computers and television replays to quickly adjudicate controversial incidents is rejected, bafflingly, by FIFA high command. All other high-level sports have introduced a measure of redress to aggrieved competitors – tennis, cricket and rugby among them- but football remains in the dark ages. FIFA may fear the salami-slicing of a referee’s role to virtually nothing but cricket and tennis umpires have felt no diminution in their authority. To keep the speed of the game, video help and/or other technology such as Hawkeye should be applied to goal line decisions, penalty awards and sendings-off of players, with each team getting one appeal per game on whether offside was right or not.
Chelsea-Manchester United seemed quite dull for stretches and I abstained from most of it, tuning in just to catch the only goal of the game – Wayne Rooney’s reward for his endeavour in making the runs but it was the evergreen Ryan Giggs that made it possible – and the final few minutes when Chelsea were unfairly denied and Fernando Torres was rightly booked for diving.
No doubt about the results in the other Champions League matches. Real Madrid will face Barcelona. Real’s match against Tottenham is a dead rubber and after ITV wetted themselves at getting as close to Premier League action as they will for a long time last night, they will have a real hard job of drumming up interest for Real-Spurs. Real have been beaten five-nil this season but that was by Barcelona and Spurs are not ‘More Than a Club’. As for Shakhtar Donetsk, I imagine they could have overturned a two-goal deficit in the Ukraine, say a 3-1 defeat in the Nou Camp, but 5-1 is too much of a mountain to climb. The final quarter-final is a done deal as well, with Schalke 04 scoring five away goals against the European Champions Internazionale, crushing them 5-2. An Italian team keeping an opposing team out is no great trouble but scoring four as well is another matter, given that Serie A is in serious decline and Italian teams do not have that mentality anyway. The Germans will maintain their UEFA co-efficient above the Italians, where the former have four Champions League spots in their domestic league and the Italians only three. Sir Alex Ferguson used to have a dictum that to win the Champions League you needed to beat an Italian team (in meaning, not in the Group Stages but when it counts in the knockout stage). That moment has passed. Since 2005, it has been the case that English teams were the one to beat. Last year, the mantle was in transition. This season - with a guarantee of one La Liga representative in the final - and probably for the foreseeable future, teams from Spain will need to be defeated in order to win the European Cup.

2011-04-05T17:08:00.003+01:00

Best dentist's waiting room ever. A book in the reading list pile held the scripts (not original of course) of three episodes of Fawlty Towers. I read The Hotel Inspectors but as I came with just a few minuts to spare, I had to break my reading when the dentist aksed for me. Wish I'd turned up sooner!

2011-04-02T12:51:00.001+01:00

Unknown is a superior, if disposable, action thriller. It first brings to mind the Bourne franchise but is a better fit to Total Recall in terms of memory and identity. Most of the villains get a satisfying pay-off and I spotted, before it was revealed, the chief baddie. You really notice how big Liam Neeson is in comparison to the women in the film but it is all part of the dissonance. It is also pleasing to see the trend continue whereby Hollywood movies locate in the not too familiar (though probably cheap too) environs of Berlin.