Wake-up call on climate

On 21 September 2009, at more than 2600 events in 135 countries across the globe, people used their mobile phones to join together to issue a wake-up call to world leaders on climate change. The breadth and creativity of events was breathtaking (a world away from the old-style 'Whaddawewant?' chanting) and the message broke through to leaders and international media.

Wot, no spliff?

Whatever is the world coming to? Telegraph blogs editor Damian Thompson, who lives in Notting Hill, had a predictable moan about this year's Carnival: it's too big, in the wrong place, blacks and whites don't mingle (not with him maybe).

And then he shows how with it and street the new Notting Hill Tories are trying to be by complaining that 'I was struck by the shortage of spliff being smoked today. My theory: the stuff is now so ubiquitous that Carnival-goers no longer get excited about scoring and then being able to smoke it outdoors without being arrested. Call me a fuddy-duddy, but the clean air smelled wrong, like a Catholic church from which incense has been banned by a trendy priest.'

That's him in the picture, by the way. The idiot grin is a dead giveaway.

The Black Album

The headline in the London freesheet on my way to Hanif Kureishi’s new play The Black Album read ‘Racists Kidnap Muslim Leader’. Noor Ramjanally, from Loughton, Essex, was reportedly abducted from his home at knifepoint by two men, bundled into the boot of a car and driven to Epping Forest. There he feared he was about to be murdered when one of the men said ‘Let’s do it here.’ Instead, he was warned, ‘We don’t want [your] Islamic group in Loughton. If you don’t stop, we’ll come back.’

Ramjanally has been the target of a hate campaign, including the firebombing of his house, since starting a regular Friday afternoon prayer meeting in a Loughton community hall in March. It’s the sort of overt, spilling-over-into-violence bigotry that frequently goes along with far-right electoral success. The BNP has four councillors in the area, whose leader Pat Richardson denied his party’s involvement in the attacks on Ramjanally with the comment that ‘firebombing is not a British method. A brick through the window is a British method, but firebombing is not a way of showing displeasure.’

It is indeed a brick rather than a firebomb that goes through the window of a Pakistani butcher’s home in The Black Album. But the effect of such attacks, and the lower-level, everyday racism encountered especially – and, since 9/11, increasingly – by Muslims of Asian origin in Britain is no less incendiary.

It is this anti-‘Paki’ sentiment that provides the backdrop to Kureishi’s play, which is based on his second novel, written in 1995 and set in 1989, when the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie called on Muslims to murder the author and his book The Satanic Verses was being burnt in Bradford and other cities. The Black Album relates the rise of a militant, political Islam, told through the prism of Shahid, a young student, newly arrived in London, who had been so scarred by his experience of racism at school in Sevenoaks that he had wanted to deny his own identity and be a racist himself.

Shahid, like his creator Kureishi, feels himself disconnected from both the society in which he resides and the one from which he came. Like Kureishi, his love of literature takes him into a world of the imagination that distances him from others in his family and ethnic community. Even so, he has an immediate bond with his new Muslim friends in London, Chad, Hat and Riaz – ‘the first people he had met who were like him; he didn’t have to explain anything’. The novel follows their radicalisation in the face of the toxic cocktail of racism and the seemingly empty hedonism they encounter in a London whose youth are revelling in the drug-fuelled euphoria of rave culture following the ‘second summer of love’. The play takes us forward a further decade, to the suicide bombers of 2005, finishing with a literal bang as one of the characters dons a rucksack and blows up himself, the set and everyone on it.

I was left wanting more from Kureishi, who remains one of a very small number of writers of Asian Muslim origin who has made the crossover into the British literary milieu. The Black Album as a play felt too trite and obvious (the opportunistic Labour council leader was little more than a silly parody of George Galloway). Caught between the racists and the Islamists, I can’t help feeling that the likes of Kureishi have been cast adrift. The kind of cultural fusion that his work represents seems to find itself on ever more uncertain ground, speaking to an almost entirely white liberal audience – not so much a bridge bringing together different traditions as a no man’s land being bombed from both sides.

The Black Album as novel finishes on a life-affirming note, with Shahid and his college lecturer lover Deedee agreeing that they will continue with their ‘adventure’ together ‘until it stops being fun’. The fun has clearly stopped long before the end of the play.

Enough already

To the Globe Theatre for the revolution. Or two revolutions, to be precise: the American and the French. A New World, Trevor Griffiths’ account of the ‘life and loves’ of Tom Paine (that well-known printing error, as the play reminds us – the ‘e’ was a misspelling), is all the more compelling because the audience is so sparse and the actors seem to be playing to us personally.

There’s no one at all up in the gods and only three of us in our lower gallery bay – half as many as made it to the great radical’s famously ill-attended funeral. Abandoned by his erstwhile admirers for his denunciation of organised religion, the man whose pamphlet Common Sense sold 150,000 copies in its first printing (in a country whose population was less than two million) died and was buried in obscurity. I hope Griffiths’ play, which finishes its run on 9 October, doesn’t suffer the same fate.

I suspect the low attendance when I saw it was due to the mass abandonment of London, if you weren’t going to the Notting Hill Carnival, over the August bank holiday. This is the best time to be in the capital, with school closures and other holidays taking up to a quarter of the traffic off the roads and reducing the population by an unmissed million or more. For a little while, you can breathe and you get a sense of why the latest population projections, published in the week before the bank holiday, are such bad news, despite what some would have us believe.

There are now 61.4 million of us in the UK, two million more than in 2001, with most of that increase crowded into the little corner of our island that includes London. We’re on course to hit 70 million within a generation. You don’t have to be a racist banging on about immigration to think that’s enough.

Stop the lies about our health service

First, let me declare an interest. Both I and my grandson (who was born prematurely, has been in and out of Great Ormond Street children's hospital and will require continuing treatment for the rest of his life) have received the sort of care from the National Health Service that would have been beyond the means of the majority of people in the US. Like the vast majority of people in the UK, I'm proud of the NHS and I'm sick of those wealthy vested interests that try to run it down.

Now let me urge you to sign up to the message below to the people of America. About 80,000 people have done so already; it will take you a couple of minutesto join them.

UK to US: the truth about the NHS

Barack Obama's movement for change in the US is at risk of collapsing - in large part because of lies about healthcare in the UK!

It's incredible, but Obama's health plan, and with it his entire presidency, could be derailed if big corporations and the radical right manage to convince Americans that the NHS is a nightmare rationed service that refuses to treat patients and abandons the most needy, such as Stephen Hawking, without care.

We need a huge popular outcry to show the truth - how proud and grateful we are in the UK to have a public healthcare system that works, despite its imperfections. Sign on to the message to America and forward this link - if enough of us sign, we'll cause a stir in US media and help change the debate: http://www.avaaz.org/en/reform_health_care_uk

US healthcare is run by large corporations - it's the most expensive in the world, but ranks 37th in quality, and 40 million Americans can't afford any care at all. It's an awful system for people, but corporations make enormous profits, so they're fighting to keep it. Industry lobbyists are ramping up their smear campaigns right now to make sure the Obama plan is dead on arrival when Congress meets in September. Americans are hearing a constant barrage of propaganda that the NHS is a nightmare. Let's say it ain't so.

Myths about the proposed health care reforms http://www.communitycatalyst.org/projects/national_reform/alerts?id=0066

Extreme tactics of the conservative right http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/health/policy/04townhalls.html http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-08-17-voa45.cfm

Paul Krugman on health care
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=2&scp=31&sq=health&st=cse

The extent of the health care lobby
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aZdbr0YXz5jI

Health insurers stocks rise as health care plans fade http://www.reuters.com/article/hotStocksNews/idUSTRE57G4BU20090817?sp=true

Cricket: better than sex?

First day of the last Ashes Test and those ever-imaginative people at Philosophy Football have diversified into cricket. This means that you can now add this t-shirt, inspired by the late cricket fanatic and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, to your whites - or ritually burn it, as the mood takes you, when England's batting again collapses at the crucial moment.

Cricket has drawn a surprising number of left-wing writers to the crease over the years, from CLR James to Mike Marqusee and ex-New Statesman editor Peter Wilby. But cricketers themselves often lack the same way with words. Former England captain Mike Gatting was once asked if he felt vindicated when a test victory followed a period of press criticism. 'I don't think the press are vindictive,' he replied. 'They can write what they want.'

A trip to the Tower

My friend is on a mission. At the top of the Oxo Tower on London’s South Bank is a public viewing platform overlooking the Thames. You have to go through the eighth-floor Harvey Nichols restaurant to get to it, and the restaurant has been colonising it with tables and chairs as part of its bar space in recent years. But it’s there as a condition of the original planning consent for the restaurant (which sits on top of possibly the best-positioned social housing ever built) and the public has a right of access.

When we visit, however, the restaurant has attempted to close off the area altogether for a private function. My friend isn’t having it. ‘Am I embarrassing you?’ she asks me in an aside as she harangues the bar-tender and anyone else within shouting distance about public access and threatens to bring 60 students along on a field trip as part of the planning course she teaches.

‘No,’ I lie. Actually I’d prefer a slightly quieter defence of our traditional liberties, but she happens to be in the right and I have no intention of moving from our position looking out towards St Paul’s, ‘private’ function or not. We assert our right to be there for as long as I can stand it (an hour on the plinth is more than enough public attention for one summer) and having made the point move on.

If you value public rights of access you have to use them. I recommend making use of the Oxo Tower public viewing facility next time you’re nearby. Just take the lift to the top floor: the view really is worth it.

Michael Jackson, the Elgin Marbles and the Guardian

Twitter crashed under the sheer volume of messages, and Google traffic jumped so dramatically that the company thought it was under attack from hackers.

But on the Guardian website, (which remains Britain’s most-visited newspaper website, with 27,194,840 unique visitors in May, according to the latest figures), the news of Michael Jackson’s death made only number three on its ‘Most Viewed’ chart for the seven days ending on Monday 29 June, which includes the weekend when Jackson died.

The most viewed? The USA v Brazil confederations cup final live-as-it-happened commentary, believe it or not. Even more remarkably, an arts diary poll on whether it is time to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece came in at number two.

The poll, which drew 380,000 viewers and 130,000 voters, yielded an Albania-under-Enver Hoxha style result, with 94.8 per cent in favour of their return and 5.2 per cent against – which suggested something of a fix.

And so it proved. Forty thousand came to the poll via various Facebook campaigns; 6,000 more came from a single email circular. Half of those who voted came from Athens, which normally accounts for 0.4 per cent of Guardian website traffic.

Not that the Guardian minded; it’s all grist to its online advertising mill. By July the cricket was dominating its ‘Most Viewed’ charts. There was room, however, for one Jacko story, a classic of its kind: ‘Paul McCartney "not devastated" over Michael Jackson will.’

One and Other

Stephen Bayley called it ‘art for the Facebook generation’, which is kind of flattering when you’re old enough to remember waiting lists for telephone lines. But I got my hour on the ‘people’s plinth’ in Trafalgar Square on the opening day of Antony Gormley’s ‘One And Other’ project and I am now officially a work of art in the same portfolio as the ‘Angel of the North’ and ‘Another Place’.

I’d already ditched my idea of spending the hour as the sniper who shot Nelson by the time the day came around. This was partly because I decided against re-fighting 200-year-old wars when there are more than enough present-day ones to be going on with, and partly because I’d not properly considered the logistics of getting hold of an authentic Napoleonic musket, let alone brandishing it in the heart of 21st-century London. The National Theatre props department ‘doesn’t do guns’ (though it does do a very tempting line in steel cutlasses); and the most promising theatrical outfitters went very cold on the idea when I couldn’t answer their questions on security and police licences.

Other possibilities came and went (lying down for the hour so that no one could see me was one of them). But as soon as I got to the square I realised that what the public wanted from this latest manifestation of public art was a performance not a statue, living or otherwise. So, armed only with a blackboard and a bag of chalk, I did my best to find the lowest artistic common denominator and scribbled a succession of unethereal messages for the Twitter generation watching online (www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/steveplatt, if you have an empty hour to fill).

One of them said ‘I’m better at football’, which prompted a particularly snooty bystander to remark ‘Well that says it all.’ ‘The real art’s in there,’ she added, gesturing to the National Gallery on the north of the square. And maybe it is, but I bet the Fourth Plinth project has got more people talking about art than the Littleton Pilaster Saints, much as I love the gallery’s latest acquisition, ever did.

Taking the plinth

Life is what happens when you're busy blogging on other matters, to paraphrase John Lennon. And life has been coming at me in a bit of a rush over the past few months, which is why I haven't spent very much of my time in the blogosphere for a while. More of that another time (if I ever manage to find the time). For now, hello again, I'm back: you might have seen me in Trafalgar Square.