PLATTITUDE

London riots: talking sense

2011-08-08T23:39:00.002+01:00

Breaking my long silence on here, this woman says what I've longed to hear these past few days

Lakeland 100: the easy bit

2010-10-05T08:29:00.005+01:00

That's the easy bit done. This summer I entered the Lakeland 50, which was by some measure the toughest run I've ever done. Today I put my name down for the Lakeland 100, which is actually 103 miles and reckoned to be more than twice as hard. I now have over nine months to prepare/regret my decision. Last year's winner, Stuart Mills, reckons that 'the key to performance is simple, remain positive, do not let any negative thoughts develop'. He clearly hasn't been watching the Conservative Party conference.

Sharing the pain

2010-10-02T16:45:00.000+01:00

Next time you’re asked what savings you would make to reduce the budget deficit – for which read what services you would cut – be bold. Answer: none. We don’t need to make any cuts, not a penny.

Even if you accept the dubious premise that we have to take action to reduce the budget deficit now, before the economy’s safely out of recession, there’s more than enough money around to make the draconian adjustments announced in George Osborne’s June budget. And we can make them without a single penny being taken away from public spending or a single person being any less well off than they were last year.

Fanciful? Only if you believe that the ever-accumulating wealth of the few hundred people who have most in our society must forever remain untouchable, even as the modest incomes and spending of the many millions who have least are pared to the bone.

In fact, we can balance the books of Britain’s public finances in a way that would affect no more than 1,000 or so people at most – and even they could be left massively better off than they were in 2009. Just do the sums.

George Osborne’s avowed objective is to reduce the budget deficit from £149 billion in 2010/11 to £116 billion in 2011/12. That’s a lot of money taken from you and me. But £33 billion is barely two fifths of the increase in personal wealth enjoyed by the 1,000 richest people in the UK last year.

According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2010, the top 1,000 saw their fortunes rise by £77 billion on 2009. Half of that would pay for all of Osborne’s budget measures, with a few billion to spare – and it would still leave the super-rich £38.5 million apiece better off on average than in 2009.

If we’re really ‘all in this together’, as David Cameron likes to insist, that’s the sort of pain I’ll be prepared to share.

And now the video ...

2010-09-22T23:40:00.005+01:00

Bog hopping across Britain

2010-09-20T07:05:00.002+01:00

Back in London after successfully completing the six-day, 156-mile TransBritain ultra, amazingly feeling stronger and getting faster as the race went on. I even managed to come joint first in each of the final two stages, so I'm delighted with that.

I also discovered on getting back home that I got third place in my age group in the Regent's Park 10k summer series, for which I win £15, free entry to the next series (worth £60) and a medal! So there must be life in the old bones yet.

Lee Chamberlain, who won the TransBritain and is going for the John O'Groats to Land's End running record at the beginning of November, has done a report of the event. That's his photo (above) of me and Steve Keywood, who came second, lost in a bog on the last day.

I'm still raising sponsorship for Teach Africa and Cystic Fibrosis Trust. Thanks to everyone who has donated already - and you can do so here if you want:

Teach Africa and Cystic Fibrosis Trust

Blair's apologies

2010-09-11T16:49:00.005+01:00

Tony Blair’s unwillingness to say ‘sorry’ over Iraq is now so firmly entrenched that it has become part of his character armour. But he does use the word – 38 times – in A Journey.

He says he is ‘sorry about what happened’ to John Prescott over his fist fight with a fox hunter during the 2001 election campaign. He is ‘desperately sorry’ about the death of Roy Jenkins. He is ‘very sorry’ to lose Alan Milburn as a minister. He is ‘really sorry’ for David Blunkett over the affair with his secretary that sees him turfed out of office. He even says he ‘felt genuinely sorry – no, I really did’ for Jacques Chirac when London won the 2012 Olympics bid over Paris.

My favourite TB ‘sorry’, though, is the one he feels for junior defence minister Tom Watson after Watson signs a round-robin calling for Blair’s resignation in September 2006. ‘I have heard from the media that Tom Watson has resigned,’ Blair declares in a gloriously petulant official statement before announcing that he ‘had been intending to dismiss him’ anyway. ‘Actually, later I felt sorry for him and regretted I had done it,’ Blair writes in A Journey. You can almost see where his tears have left their mark on the page.

Me, myself, I

2010-09-10T10:39:00.004+01:00

There are, according to a crude count done on my bootleg ebook, 5,843 uses of the word ‘I’ in Tony Blair’s account of his years in office, A Journey. If you include his 1,172 uses of the word ‘my’, 992 uses of ‘me’ and the many hundreds more instances when he refers to himself in the third person, it works out at about one mention of the author in every other sentence. And that’s not counting the 2,478 times he talks about ‘we’, often royally.

That’s some going, even for an inevitably self-serving political memoir – or, as Blair himself cringeworthily prefers, ‘letter (extended!) to the country I love’. (His use of exclamation marks, incidentally, isn’t quite as extensive as some reviewers, such as Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer, have suggested: a mere 50 all told, well short of 21st-century textspeak standards.)

Three of Blair’s first-person references appear in one telling sentence – the one you fancy he would pick as his epitaph if forced to make a choice. ‘All I know is that I did what I thought was right.’

Blair’s repeated return to this simple refrain suggests that Labour’s most successful ever leader (‘I won three general elections. Up to then, Labour had never even won two successive full terms’ – note who did the winning) still doesn’t understand what most of us learn at primary school: that doing what you think is right is not actually good enough if you happen to be wrong. ‘Please miss, I really did think it was right to set fire to the classroom when that nasty bully wouldn’t go outside.’

I don’t suppose there is a leader in history who consciously did what he thought was wrong. There’s invariably some form of philosophical contortionism that will provide apologias for the gravest of crimes. Tony Blair’s – and the world’s – tragedy is that a little less emphasis on the ‘I’ and a little more listening to others could have led to him doing what was right and not just what he thought was right.

The state Will's in

2010-09-02T16:41:00.003+01:00

I’m getting increasingly irritated by the recent self flagellation of the baby boomer middle classes. Francis Beckett (65 in May) started it with his What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us – How the Children of the Sixties Lived the Dream and Failed the Future, published in July. Since then a shedload more of them have been jumping on the bandwagon, with ex-Observer editor Will Hutton (60 in May) one of the latest leading the charge.

Hutton’s mea culpa has him plead ‘guilty as charged’ in a self-indulgent Observer piece toying with his angst at turning 60. ‘Having enjoyed a life of free love, free school meals, free universities, defined benefit pensions, mainly full employment and a 40-year-long housing boom, [the boomers] are bequeathing their children sky-high house prices, debts and shrivelled pensions,’ he writes. ‘A 60-year-old in 2010 is a very privileged and lucky human being – an object of resentment as much as admiration.’

Speak for yourself, Will.

Depending on where you draw the line, I might just qualify as a boomer, though I came of age in the 1970s rather than 1960s, just after the Labour government had told us ‘the party’s over’ and just before punk and the winter of discontent gave way to Thatcher. But apart from the free school meals, I don’t recognise too many of the privileges that Will seems to think we all shared. Precarious employment, a rented flat and no pension is how my share of the spoils stacks up.

Not that I’m complaining. I’m forever conscious of the fact that those of us fortunate enough to have grown up in the west, in the latter half of the 20th century, got a damn good deal historically.

What I object to is this idea of generational privilege. At most 10 per cent benefited from free university education. And only those who were able to buy at the right time in the right places benefited from the property boom. As for full employment, try telling that to anyone who had the experience of looking for work in the old industrial areas at any time from about 1974 onwards.

It’s not a generational thing but, as ever, a class one. So, please, just because you’re one of the minority of baby boomers who went to university, made a fortune from property inflation and got gold-plated pensions, don’t keep talking about everyone else of the same age group as if they shared in the same privileges. Or as if they did nothing to try to make things fairer.

Not much faster than walking

2010-07-26T14:35:00.003+01:00

I've done a flat 50-mile run before (along the Thames) and I've done a fair few hilly 50-mile and over walks. But I've never attempted a hilly 50-mile run. So this weekend, as part of training for the TransBritain Ultra in September, I did the Lakeland 50, which is the little brother of the Lakeland 100 event, which boasts (if that is the right word) a 75% drop out rate among enrants.

The 50 misses out the highest Lakeland peaks but it still manages 12,000-plus feet of ascent, or 'four Sca Fells' as a fellow competitor put it. And every bone in my body can now confirm it.

Still, I managed to finish in 13 hours 48 minutes and 46 seconds, despite falling badly before the first checkpoint and going badly astray on the the fells after the last one. 'Not much faster than your walking pace,' according to my daughter. Yeah, thanks Rachel. Next time I'm taking you along.

Just like watching Brazil

2010-06-30T10:18:00.004+01:00

I've just got back from China where, among other things, I took part in a World Cup 7-a-side knockout tournament as an honorary Brazilian. It will almost certainly be the only time in my life that I wear a Brazil football shirt in a competitive match. But although I got in a few tackles against the Spanish team who beat us 4-1 in the group stage, I'm afraid it was more John Terry than Plattinho.

The journey home included a drugs search at the airport (something to do with the human growth hormones for my grandson - try explaining that to a Chinese customs officer). And now I find I have a gaping hole in my diary where the weekend's World Cup quarter final used to be. I might end up having to go see Bob Dylan and Pete Doherty at Vince Power's Hop Farm Festival instead.

A run for your money

2010-06-29T10:40:00.002+01:00

Okay Steve, you do a bit of running, they said. So how do you fancy running across Britain with us this September? Six marathons in six days - 156 miles, give or take the odd detour - starting at Robert the Bruce's cave in Scotland and finishing at Ruthin Castle in north Wales? We'll take in the Lake District and the highest peaks in England along the way to keep it interesting. We'll provide the meals, and we'll even carry your tent for you - as long as you carry the rest of your gear yourself

Tell me more, I said. Like can I retire if it gets too hard?

Of course you can, they said. As long as you don't mind letting down those schoolgirls in the biggest slum in Nairobi, the ones whose education you'll be running to raise money for. Kids who know the real meaning of words like 'tough' and 'challenge' - and half of whom, statistically, won't see their 25th birthday.

How could I say no? There's more about the charity here: http://www.teach-africa.org/

I'll post more about the TransBritain Six-Day Ultra and me as the event approaches. In the meantime, please help get my fundraising off to a flying start by donating now.

Thanks.

The only shirt for the World Cup

2010-05-26T22:28:00.000+01:00

There's only one shirt to wear this World Cup.

A unique commemorative football shirt to honour the Makana FA. This extraordinary football association was formed by prisoners on the notorious Robben Island. Imprisoned because of their opposition to apartheid, they organised their own league and cup competitions as the Makana FA, as football became a symbol and tool of the prisoners' refusal to surrender their human dignity to the prison authorities.

Makana never had their own strip, until now. Specially designed, complete with Makana FA badge, by Philosophy Football, the shirts will be presented to former prisoners on 17 June when over 100 England fans will join them on Robben Island.

Limited edition, you can get yours from Philosophy Football

Politics as usual

2010-05-15T06:47:00.000+01:00

For an election that was supposed to mark the demise of the old two-party system, the outcome of 6 May 2010 has gone a long way to restoring it. Even if reformers win the promised referendum on a new alternative vote system, it’s nothing like proportional representation (indeed, it makes it even harder for minor parties to get elected). And it won’t stop the polarisation of votes towards the two main parties that is an almost inevitable consequence of the Lib Dems going into government with the Tories.

Without having to do a thing, Labour has re-established itself as the only meaningful alternative to voting Conservative across virtually the whole of the country. The three Plaid Cymru MPs and one Green may merit a left vote in 2015 but no one can now justify voting Lib Dem if they want to keep the Tories out. As for backing anyone else – well, there is no one else. In Scotland there may still be the Nationalists but even there, when it comes to the next Westminster election, everyone knows it will have to be Labour or bust.

There were reports in the weeks after the election of the Labour Party receiving up to 4,000 membership applications in a day. There is certainly little evidence of the demoralisation and despair among party activists that followed previous defeats. Some even spoke of a ‘liberation’ or the sense of euphoria that comes from surviving a car crash you’d expected to be far worse with only a broken leg. The affiliation of Cleggite liberal democracy with the centre-right rather than the centre-left of British politics, in combination with the passing of the New Labour old guard, seems to have opened up a fresh sense of possibility in Labour and reversed the steady stream of desertions. The party is beginning to look as though it could be immensely more invigorated in defeat in 2010 than it was by the post-Iraq war victory in 2005.

The same cannot be said of the various shades of left electoral alternatives that stood for election, locally or nationally, on 6 May. Here is to be found only unrequited effort and crushing, abject failure – unmitigated by the narrow, exceptional and quite possibly unrepeatable election of Caroline Lucas for the Greens in Brighton. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (if ever there was a title designed to limit potential electoral support, this might well have been it) proved an outstandingly successful mechanism for squandering activists’ time, money and aspirations. A desperate 12,275 votes garnered from 41 constituencies (299 votes apiece, or 0.0004 per cent of the national poll), works out so low that you’d have to wait for about 35 jam-packed double-decker buses to go past before you found a single TUSC voter, squeezed between the pushchairs and the shopping trolleys and invisible to everyone bar himself on the crowded lower deck.

Respect mustered 33,251 nationally in what will probably be its swansong; the Scottish Socialist Party potted a paltry 3,157 – a far cry from the 117,709 constituency votes (6.2 per cent) it won in the 2003 Scottish Parliament election; and even the Greens’ 285, 616 (fewer than one in every hundred voters) pales in comparison with the British National Party’s 563,743 (1.9 per cent) or UKIP’s 917,832 (3.1 per cent).

In electoral terms at least, there really is no left alternative to Labour.

Happy 65th birthday Christy Moore

2010-05-14T17:02:00.001+01:00

A belated happy birthday to Christy Moore, who was 65 on 7 May. The grand auld man of Irish music (and much, muchmore besides) was performing at Sligo on the day, and had this to say in his occasional 'Chat from Christy':

Early on a man stood up and asked me "Would you like to go back to the beginning". I did not know whether he meant the beginning of the gig, the song or this very life itself. (It was that kind of night) I thought long and hard for all of 4 seconds and realised that I was perfectly content to live in that very moment. The room was full to the gunnels, Declan Sinnott to my right was poised to make music and we had a basket full of songs to sing. In relation to my working life, this is as good as it's ever been. Perhaps the question was spurred by today being my 65th birthday. For 45 of those years I have been singing for my supper. It has been, and continues to be, a most privileged existence.

The link is to Christy's 'Taking Tea With Pinochet', which seems apt with her party having just wormed its way back into power.

The BNP's black and white ministers' show

2010-05-13T08:53:00.000+01:00

My favourite election headline appeared in the Croydon Guardian: ‘BNP “too racist” for black vicar.’ Reverend James Gitau, 63, from West Croydon, joined the BNP and went on the campaign trail on 10 April with Nick Griffin. A pastor with the United Holy Church, Gitau came to Britain in the late 1990s. He issued a press release at Misterseed.com, a website for diaspora Kenyans, in which he declared: ‘BNP is the only party which boldly speaks against sodomy in public . . . condemns use of contraceptives . . . abhors our children’s abortions etc etc . . .’

‘It is true that the old BNP policy was to send all black British citizens back to their original countries, Gitau continued. But he reckoned that ‘the new BNP embraces all races from the minorities’. To prove the point he went campaigning alongside Griffin and another BNP vicar, the party’s Lincoln candidate Reverend Robert West. Like Gitau, West has a thing about gays, branding them ‘dirty and disgusting’ during his election campaign and opposing ‘perv partnerships, which are an abomination in the sight of God and must be ended’.

The Daily Telegraph, reporting on the appearance of this black and white ministers show in Barking and Dagenham, described how West would shout ‘It is not racist to love your country!’ as Gitau stood next to him and ‘Every time the Rev Mr West shouts a slogan, Gitau shouts, “Hallelujah!”’

West’s brand of ‘Christian’ bigotry managed to bring out 1,367 people prepared to vote for him in Lincoln. But the BNP declined to allow Gitau to stand for it in Croydon Central, where it already had a perfectly acceptable white bigot in place in its candidate Cliff Le May. He wrote to London Mayor Boris Johnson telling him to ‘stop ruining our community by stuffing New Addington with violent immigrants who have no right to live among decent civilised white people’ and called the Conservative candidate Gavin Barwell a traitor to his ‘race and nation’ for his party’s immigration policy.

Faced with the likes of Le May, Gitau decided that the BNP was a bit too bigoted even for him. He stood as a Christian Party candidate instead, winning 264 votes – which was still more than 19 of the 41 Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidates managed, by the way.

Bloodied but not beaten

2010-05-11T16:50:00.000+01:00

Were you up for Nick Griffin? It wasn’t actually a ‘Portillo moment’, which has to be unexpected as well as pleasurable, but the chunderings of the Fat Fuehrer (‘It is going to be too late for Barking but it is not too late for Britain’) were a joy to behold. The BNP’s Barking battering, where it lost all 12 of its councillors as well as being beaten into third place in the parliamentary election, was the highlight of a good night for anti-racists, which saw the far-right party lose all bar two of the council seats it was defending.

We shouldn’t get carried away, though. The BNP may be doing a good impression of a party on the verge of implosion as elements turn on a leader who picked up 3,500 fewer votes than the BNP council candidates in the wards that make up Barking. But while its defeat in Barking was spectacular, as it was in its second major target area, Griffin’s former ‘jewel in the crown’ of Stoke-on-Trent, its overall performance was one that any socialist electoral alternative at the moment would die for.

Nationally, the BNP won 563,743 votes (1.9 per cent) in 338 seats. That compares with 192,746 (0.7 per cent) votes in 117 seats in 2005. In other words, the BNP averaged 1,663 votes per candidate in 2010, a slight increase on the 1,647 votes per candidate it achieved five years ago.

The party’s absolute vote has held up well, and it has established small bases for itself across wide swathes of the country. Away from the headlines, in 10 seats in Leicestershire, for example, it got between 3.2 and 6.5 per cent of the vote, saving three deposits saved and getting 18.1 per cent (745 votes) in a Leicester City Council by-election. In Bradford, its candidate Paul Cromie was elected with 2,212 (30.8 per cent), beating the Tory by 15 votes on a 66 per cent turnout.

The BNP’s large-scale loss of councillors on 6 May was due in large part to the higher turnout from holding council elections on the same day as local elections, rather than reduced BNP votes. Even in Barking, many of the party’s councillors would have been re-elected if the turnout had been the same as in 2006. All but one of the Green and Socialist Alternative councillors in Lewisham, and Green councillors elsewhere in London, were defeated for the same reason.

The BNP may be bloodied but it is far from beaten yet.

Enough said

2010-05-06T10:54:00.000+01:00

Londone

2010-04-25T18:22:00.000+01:00

Twenty-five years after I first tried to get a place, finally running the London marathon was all that it is cracked up to be. I’ve done a few marathons before, including big-city ones (and running along the narrow cobbled streets past the Trevi Fountain in Rome takes some beating), but I’ve never experienced an atmosphere like this one. Even the backstreets were lined with people shouting, clapping, cheering, singing (a special appreciation to the guitarboy and girls belting out ‘I’ve got two tickets to Iron Maiden baby’ from Teenage Dirtbag somewhere around Deptford, and to the Greenwich Labour Party’s jazz band, who seem to have been going since almost as far back as the original marathon). And I saw Richard Branson dressed in his butterfly wings – though it was a big disappointment after the event to discover that the Virgin Unite runners weren’t anything to do with the cabin crews’ trade union.

There’s not much I can add that hasn’t been said elsewhere at enormous length on the subject except that it was definitely worth the wait and ‘doing London’ is something that everyone should experience at least once in a lifetime.

Between the wars

2010-03-30T17:25:00.003+01:00

Another from Billy Bragg in Germany in 1985 - as relevant, and I think good, today as it was then.

Take the A13 trunk road against the BNP

2010-03-30T16:52:00.005+01:00

There are various versions of Billy Bragg's 'A13' around but I don't think you can beat this one from a youngish Billy on tour in Germany in 1985. I've long since lost count of the number of times I took the A13 in the 1980s and 1990s. My girlfriend's family lived in Barking and (no offence Barking, I'm sure you understand) we sometimes longed to do as the song suggests and:

It starts down in Wapping
There ain't no stopping
By-pass Barking (Billy Bragg's birthplace) and straight through Dagenham
Down to Grays Thurrock
And rather near Basildon
Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-On-Sea,
Chalkwell, Prittlewell
Southend's the end

Like my home town of Stoke, Barking has become better known than it should have because of the success of the far-right British National Party in gaining seats on the local council. As in Stoke, the BNP is pouring resources into its general election campaign there, as well as trying to build on its local council base. So I dare say I'll be driving down the A13 to support old friends and family in the borough who'll be doing their best to stop them.

The people at Philosophy Football have produced another of their fine shirts (above), inspired in part by Billy Bragg's 'A13', to support the anti-BNP campaign. You can buy it here.

Rome: one run is not enough

2010-03-22T21:23:00.000Z

To Rome to run the marathon, mark the equinox and see some of those sights that I already know so well from the history, art and politics books. The city stinks of dog shit, there’s more graffiti than you can shake a can at and the Aventine, where the urban poor have congregated since antiquity, has a third world-like population of rough sleepers. The posters for the end-of-month regional elections here declare that ‘real communists don’t vote for the Partito Democratico’, the main, centre-left opposition to Berlusconi.

But Rome is everything you could ever want of the eternal city. It’s like walking around the stage set of European history, from the platform on which Julius Caesar’s body was cremated 2,064 years and one week ago today to Mussolini’s Via dei Fori Imperiali near the Colosseum, where the marathon began and finished.

The whole 26.2-mile (or 46.165-kilometre) route is as much like a massive tourist trail as a competitive road race. We even take in the narrow cobbled streets past the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps, as well as St Peter’s Square on the day that the Pope stands accused of turning a blind eye to child abuse. At one point a man running in front of me stops, looks around and starts taking photos. Another runner asks someone in the crowd to take a picture of her posing in front of a statue. It’s worth the entry fee just to experience the streets of Rome reclaimed by human feet from usually ever present motor car

This year’s Rome marathon was dedicated to Abebe Bikila, the two-time Olympic marathon gold medallist from Ethiopia who ran – and won – the 1960 race here barefoot. It was a deliberately strong anti-racist statement from the marathon organisers in a city where many of those rough sleepers on the Aventine are African refugees and asylum seekers who have been on the receiving end of a resurgence in far-right political sympathies over the past few years.

Realistic ambitions

2010-03-16T18:09:00.000Z

It’s probably unwise to make predictions about the coming election, especially when you have form in this area. In 1992 I chose for the front cover splash of the election-week New Statesman, which I then edited, a story by Sarah Baxter headlined ‘Yesterday’s man’. ‘So long John, it was nice knowing you. With these words, the public is preparing to bid John Major farewell,’ her piece began. As we now know, it was five more years before we could finally say goodbye to him; the Tories won their fourth consecutive election victory with what is still the highest-ever election tally of 14.09 million votes.

I think I’m on safe ground, however, in saying that Labour will attract nothing like that level of support this time around, even if it does somehow contrive to pluck a fourth election win from the jaws of what has seemed for most of Gordon Brown’s premiership to be certain defeat. The party had already shed four million votes from its 1997 high water mark of 13.5 million by 2005, leaving it only 770,000 votes ahead of the Tories. Its 1992 losing tally of 11.56 million would be regarded as a stunning achievement in 2010.

All the talk, as I write this, is of a hung parliament. This is not just being wished for as a less-bad alternative to an outright Tory victory. It is seen as desirable in its own right by constitutional reformers who dream of a Lib-Lab pact ushering in a more proportional voting system, an elected second chamber and enhanced civil liberties.

Desirable though these reforms may be, we should beware the perils of such an outcome. The majority of the electorate, whatever its mistrust of the Tories, is none too keen on the continuance of this government. Nor does the Labour Party, on recent behaviour, deserve to remain in office. Divided and embittered, at war within its own ranks, its principal parliamentary actors have long since lost all sense of unity of purpose – or indeed much sense of any kind of purpose save that of power. To hold onto it with a minority of seats and in all probability the support of barely one in three voters and fewer than one in four of the electorate at large would be to invite disdain. It would diminish democracy, further undermine public faith in parliament and stoke up future support for a new populist politics of the far right – which is a much more frightening risk facing us over the coming decade than the Cameronite brand of Conservatism.

In the absence of an overall majority, the continuation of Labour in government – even, perhaps especially, a coalition government – would quite likely be merely the prelude to a more crushing defeat a little way down the line. For the left, it is hard to see how this election can be about anything but damage limitation. Backing the campaigns of good sitting MPs and individual candidates (most, though not all, of them Labour); working for the isolated breakthrough of left, Green or independent candidates in that handful of seats where they have a chance of better than derisory votes; preventing the far right from getting its first foothold at Westminster; trying to minimise the scale of the inevitable Tory advances; and above all preparing for the long, hard political slog ahead, both within and beyond the electoral arena – these should be the realistic limits of our ambitions, and the essential, rudimentary platform for any future recovery.

A council named sue

2010-03-07T09:12:00.003Z

‘CRACKPOT councils are wasting thousands of pounds . . . by suing THEMSELVES over parking tickets,’ was how the Sun saw it. And it really is as barmy as it sounds. At least half a dozen councils are known to have issued tickets against their own vehicles – and then refused to pay them. My own local council, Islington, took one case to the parking appeals tribunal, won and then asked for costs to be awarded against itself. The adjudicator Gerald Styles refused on the ground that the council could not ‘act wholly unreasonably or vexatiously against itself’.

The Sun sees all this Alice in Wonderlandish absurdity (great film, by the way, but Tim Burton’s scriptwriters can’t match Carroll) as straightforward evidence of what it used to call ‘loony’ local authorities. Actually I think it has more to do with the madness of running public services as you would profit-maximising private enterprises. If you contract out parking ticketing to companies with more interest in making money than keeping the traffic moving, they will employ traffic wardens on pay structures that depend on them issuing as many tickets as possible. And if you insist on ‘internal market’ accounting procedures that force one council department to pay another if it so much as uses a paper clip that isn’t part of its inventory, the reductio ad absurdum of this neoliberal accounting arcadia is that they will end up suing each other to sort out any differences.

Michael Foot: Labour's saviour

2010-03-03T16:32:00.005Z

Two posts on the same day about people dying. And with spring definitely poking its nose up outside, it doesn't seem right.

He's not often given credit for it, but for better or for worse, Michael Foot saved the Labour Party in the early 1980s. Any other leader would have steered so far to the left or right as to have fractured that already fragile coalition for good. Foot held it together at a time when one false move could have lost it for good.

Whether or not that was a good thing in the long run depends on your view of the labour movement, all that it was and all it has become. Apart from that, I've nothing to add to what Neil Kinnock put so eloquently here.

‘Why ever have you come back here?’

2010-03-03T16:15:00.002Z

My mum and dad’s neighbour died at the weekend. They’ve lived next door to Gerda and her husband, Fred, for 30 years, long enough for Gerda to remember my mother’s mum, who died in 1983, and for her to have known my daughter as a toddler. At 88, she was a crucial half-generation older than my parents. A young woman at the outbreak of the second world war, she became a part of that vast movement of people who were refugees by its conclusion.

In our last conversation, she told me again (we had spoken of it several times before) about the long trek through occupied Germany that took her back to her home village in Silesia when the war ended. Her mother’s reaction when, exhausted after a journey of more than 100 miles into the Soviet-occupied zone, Gerda finally knocked on her door was to say to her: ‘Why ever have you come back here?’

Gerda was one of the very few Germans I ever met who was an adult during the war and willing to talk freely about it. She told me once that Hitler had been ‘all right in the beginning’, saying that he had provided jobs and stability. We were never going to agree about that, but like many Germans she had paid a heavy price for her youthful acquiescence to the Nazis – including, though she never spoke about it directly, at the hands of the Soviet victors.

The transfer of most of Silesia to Polish sovereignty after the war meant that her family joined the eight million Germans who were uprooted in the east. That she was able to find a home and acceptance and to raise a family in England with an English husband always struck me as a fine example of reconciliation and tolerance.

She died of lung cancer, after an illness of just a few weeks, which adds poignancy to the fact that so many of our chats took place when she was having a fag outside at the back. I’ll miss her and the personal connection she provided to an important part of my own and our continent’s past.

Spring in the air

2010-03-01T07:49:00.002Z

Thirty miles in two days, all of them run in cold, sleety, driving rain. I ran 17 yesterday in full fell running gear and still felt uncomfortably cold on the ridge above Berhamsted, where I was participating in one of the Gede Valley Harriers' London Marathon training runs (five quid to enter, tea and cake at the finish and some of the coldest, wettest, most seriously appreciated marshals in the country). I've rarely experienced lowland weather quite like that, and the stretch of the canal towpath where the puddles merged seemlessly with the canal itself was something else.

Today's a bright, sunny, blue-skied morning in London, though. The birds know that spring is about to burst upon us, and you get the feeling that as soon as the temperature rises a little it's going to arrive like a sprinter, not an old-boned, feeling-the-cold crock of a distance runner like me.

The nice guy comes first

2010-02-28T07:23:00.005Z

If there's one capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-nail aphorism that I'd like to expunge from the English language, it's that ugly, untrue US apeshit about 'nice guys come last'. It's been wheeled out again over the John Terry/Wayne Bridge drama, where Bridge's withdrawal from the England team has been taken as an indication that, unlike Terry, he hasn't got it in him to succeed at the highest level and Terry's 'mates' have been letting it be known that he was always regarded as something of a 'bottler' in the dressing room.

Forgive me for just a little whooping and cheering yesterday, then, as bottler Bridge gave tough guy Terry a lesson in dignified, focused and disciplined football while the ex-England captain continued with the schoolboy calamities that increasingly characterise his current form. Nice one, nice guy.

All we are saying ... is give us some cash

2010-02-27T19:59:00.004Z

Sean Lennon has been getting his knickers in a Twitter over criticism of the use of his father's image in those Citroen car ads - the ones with the badly synched actor's voice purporting to be John. Sean's mum Yoko authorised the use of the clip of John, even though the only advertising campaign he ever endorsed in life was the one for world peace in 1969.

Sean reacted to being told that he and his mum were 'a talentless pair of leeches' who had 'sold out John's name' by approving the ads with a ferocious series of ripostes via Twitter:

'Lennon fans don't ATTACK his widowed family. His widow and her son. How offensive is it to REAL fans, to publicly attack his wife and child?'

'You are speaking to his flesh and blood. You're a "peasant as far as I can see".'

'When dad died, it was Lennon fans who saved me with their love and support. You are not them, you are just another asshole.'

The best response, I thought, was from the fan who posted the message to Yoko: 'Imagine, three years with 0% interest, isn’t that how the song goes?'

Vertical rush

2010-02-25T10:37:00.006Z

One man went past me wearing what looked like ski boots and I heard a rumour that the fastest finisher had got to the top in 3 mins 53 secs. If so, that's not far short of four steps or 30-odd inches a second.

Still I was pleased to get to the top of Tower 42, the former NatWest Building in the City, for Shelter's Vertical Rush event before breakfast this morning in 8 mins 52 secs. That meant I missed my friend Fiona's offer to double my sponsorship if I did it inside eight minutes, but she cheated by having me shift heavy boxes of magazines around north London to tire me out yesterday.

I've never been that high in London before, except in a plane, and the view from the 42nd-floor champagne bar (minus the champagne, alas) is certainly worth seeing. It's no longer the highest point in the City of London, however, as I discovered looking out of its windows. The adjacent Heron Tower (pictured), still under construction, has a few steel girders going higher still, and when it's finished it will be 100 or so feet taller than Tower 42.

You can sponsor me for doing Vertical Rush and the London Marathon in aid of Shelter here.

Football owes me

2010-02-24T13:41:00.004Z

Forget about that £170 billion budget deficit that the banking crisis has lumbered us with. 'Premier League clubs owe a staggering 56% of Europe's debt,' says the headline on today's Guardian football pages. 'A Uefa report has revealed that 18 Premier League clubs owe £3.5bn in debt, more than the rest of Europe put together,' the story continues.

Get a grip, you football subs (as in editors, that is). The 'rest of Europe's debt' is an awful lot bigger than that.

Vanessa Redgrave, the prince and that curtsey

2010-02-23T10:03:00.000Z

It was disconcerting to see Vanessa Redgrave's deep curtsey to Prince William at the Baftas. She didn't quite kiss the ground on which he stood but an inch lower and she would have got her nose dirty.

'Is she taking the piss?' asked the person with whom I was watching her receive this year's Academy Fellowship. 'I don't think so,' I replied as the woman who was once the most famous Trotskyist in Britain turned to young Billy and fawned: 'I would like to say, your Royal Highness, how much I admire your father for his intelligence, humility and kindness.'

Was this really the same woman who for years was one of the leading lights in the Workers Revolutionary Party, and who created an uproar at the 1978 Oscars with an acceptance speech (for best supporting actress in Julia) that laid into 'Zionist hoodlums'?

An interview with Redgrave in the Daily Telegraph before the Baftas suggested that 'like the Prince of Wales, her high-mindedness comes from her status as royalty – in this case theatrical'. That may explain her affinity with the royals, despite her reputation as a radical. So too might the pioneering example of Princess Diana in her support for AIDS charities, since Redgrave's first husband, Tony Richardson (the father of Natasha, Redgrave's beloved daughter, who died in a skiing accident last year), died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1991.

But did she have to curtsey quite so low?

Out of the comfort zone

2010-02-22T12:06:00.001Z

Every so often in life it's good to do things outside your comfort zone. Today I signed up for something that is so far outside mine that I'm announcing it here to make sure that I don't try to sneak out of it later.

I've decided to do this year's Trans-Britain Ultra event in September. It’s a six-day, six-stage ultra race starting near Gretna Green and finishing in Ruthin, Wales, via Cumbia and North Yorkshire, covering 156 miles and five (or is it six?) peaks along the way.

I feel exhausted just typing the details. Oh, and did I mention that you carry all your gear (apart from a tent) on your back?

I’ll be doing it to raise money for a charity, Teach Africa, which works with teenage girls from the slums of Nairobi. The race organiser, Steve Adams, set it up in 2005 and I have a personal interest in supporting it because I lived in east Africa for a time during 2002-2003.

I also have a personal interest in another charity that I’m doing a double challenge for over the next couple of months. I was homeless for a time when I was younger and became very actively involved in squatting and other housing campaigns. I went on to work in short-life housing for a few years and edited the housing charity Shelter’s magazine Roof for a short time at the beginning of my career as a journalist and writer.

This Thursday (25 February) I'm doing the first leg of a double sponsorship challenge for Shelter. Vertical Rush involves running up 42 floors, 900-odd stairs, to the top of the highest building in the City of London. Two months later I’m using my oh-so-precious London Marathon place, held over from last year when I had to pull out due to injury, as the second leg of the challenge.

You can support my Shelter fundraising here. More about Teach Africa later.

Size isn't everything

2010-02-20T20:21:00.004Z

He was half my size and a quarter my age but he was a damn good pacemaker, even if it was only a 5k run in the park.

I beat him on the sprint finish, though - still got it in me, you see ...

Oh yes, and I came first (of three) in my age category.

Anarchist voices

2010-02-17T18:07:00.001Z

The deaths of Colin Ward, aged 85, and John Rety, 79, within a week of each other at the beginning of February have deprived the British anarchist movement of two of its most original and influential thinkers. I first came across them through squatting campaigns in the 1970s, by which time they were already veterans of that pre-Sixties’ generation of political activists who kept a left libertarian flag flying before it became fashionable to do so.

Both men contributed to Squatting – the Real Story (Bay Leaf Books, 1980), a book for which I was the main writer. Colin wrote a chapter on the post-war seizure of army camps, hotels and other buildings, when tens of thousands of ex-servicemen and their families laid down a challenge to the 1945 Labour government to deliver on its promise of decent homes for all. John, who was a key squatting activist in Camden Town, gave generously of his time, knowledge and activist energy in assembling the history of the later squatting movement that emerged in Britain from the late 1960s.

Indeed, the survival of Camden Town as we know it today owes much to the resistance initiated by John and his partner Susan Johns in 1973 to their eviction by a property developer from the shop they ran at 220 Camden High Street. At the time, companies associated with Cromdale Holdings owned a quarter of the properties in the area; 50 shops were empty pending redevelopment. John and Susan’s squatting of their old shop acted as a catalyst for the fight to save the high street, which was eventually won. Their daughter, Emily Johns, is today a co-editor of Peace News, continuing the radical tradition of her parents.

For me, Colin and John were key communicators of the message that there was life on the left beyond state socialism. From housing cooperatives to allotments, from holiday chalets to garden sheds, Colin’s approach to ‘anarchy in action’ (the title he chose for what is still the best – and certainly most readable – book on the subject around) was rooted in the practical and everyday in a manner that made his most utopian of visions seem no more than ordinary common sense.

John’s anarchism sparkled most fully in his love of poetry and commitment to live performance, notably at the Torriano Meeting House, first squatted as his home and subsequently becoming a community arts centre, which provided early platforms for artists as diverse as Emma Thompson and John Hegley. There was a delicious irony in his late flourish as poetry editor for the Morning Star, that one-time bastion of the British Communist Party.

I was too young to enjoy Colin’s editorship of the journal Anarchy and John’s of the paper Freedom at the time they were published. But the back issues I saw later helped to inspire in me a belief in the potential of small-circulation publications with often esoteric interests to have an influence way beyond their immediate readerships. That's one reason why I continue to be associated with such publications today.

No place for women in gynaecology

2010-02-15T15:42:00.004Z

Wendy Savage, who managed to combine bringing up four children with a career as Britain's first female consultant obstetrician, has been nominated for a lifetime achievement award by the British Medical Journal. A lifelong campaigner for women's rights, her support for pregnant mothers being able to choose their method of delivery, including home births, led to a lengthy suspension from work and an accusation of incompetence in 1985. An inquiry cleared her of all charges.

Sexism, bordering on outright misogyny, was never far from the surface in the various criticisms levelled against her. Indeed, Savage told Tom Foot in the Islington Tribune this week, that when she first came to London to pursue her chosen profession, her senior consultant told her: 'There's no place for women in gynaecology and obstetrics.'

The results of voting for the award, which finishes today, will be announced in March.

It was 20 years ago today

2010-02-11T00:02:00.008Z

What were you doing, assuming you are old enough, 20 years ago today? For those of us of a certain age and political persuasion, 11 February 1990 was one of those days that will remain forever engraved on the memory. After 27 years in captivity, Nelson Mandela was finally freed from his apartheid prison cell and so began one of the most remarkable – and peaceful – overthrows of oppression in human history.

The newsreels from that time still have the power to bring tears to my eyes, as does the song that – more than any other – epitomised the worldwide campaign for his release: ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by Special AKA (the Specials, who are now performing again, though sadly still without Jerry Dammers, the song’s composer and the band’s inspiration). You can revisit it in all its power and righteous glory, with dancing to die for, in this video.

It’s worth recalling that only three years previously the Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher led a party that preferred apartheid to those fighting for equal rights. ‘The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo land,’ she said in 1987.

The shirt (pictured) is Philosophy Football’s anniversary celebration of the cause, available here in aid of Action for South Africa, the successor to the Anti-Apartheid Movement

This interview, with ITN's Brian Widlake on 21 May 1961, is also worth revisiting. It is believed to be the first filmed interview with Mandela.

Stop Uganda's gay death law

2010-02-10T12:15:00.003Z

Uganda’s parliament is preparing to pass a brutal new law that would punish gay people with prison, even death.

Initial international criticism drove the president to call for a review. But after a well-funded and vicious lobbying effort by extremists, the bill looks set to be passed - threatening widespread persecution and bloodshed.

Opposition to the bill is rising, including from the Anglican church. Ugandan gay rights advocate Frank Mugisha writes: 'This law will put us in serious danger. Please sign the petition and tell others to stand with us – if there’s a huge global response, our government will see that Uganda will be internationally isolated by the proposed law, and strike it down.

With the decision expected in days, only an irresistible wave of worldwide pressure will be enough to save Frank's life and many others. At the very least we can all sign this petition, and then forward this appeal:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_rights/?vl

The petition will be delivered to Uganda's President Museveni, members of the review committee and Ugandan embassies worldwide this week, before it’s too late, as well as to key donor governments.

The bill proposes life imprisonment for anyone convicted of having same-sex relations and imposes the death penalty for 'serial offenders'. NGOs working to prevent the spread of HIV could see their employees imprisoned for up to seven years for 'promoting homosexuality'. Even members of the public face up to three years in jail if they fail to report homosexual activity to the police within 24 hours!

The bill’s advocates claim that it defends national culture, but some of its strongest critics come from within Uganda. The Reverend Canon Gideon Byamugisha is one of many. He says: 'It is violating our cultures, traditions and religious values that teach against intolerance, injustice, hatred and violence. We need laws to protect people -- not ones that will humiliate, ridicule, persecute and kill them en masse.'

http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_rights/?vl

Avatar cowboys and Indians

2010-02-09T18:40:00.003Z

I finally caught up with Avatar today - at the London IMAX and the biggest screen in Britain, so it was worth the wait. After all the hype I was ready to be disappointed but instead I was awestruck. My dad tells the story of seeing colour for the first time at the cinema at a wartime screening of the Wizard of Oz, which switches from monochrome Kansas to Technicolor Oz when a tornado blows Dorothy over the rainbow. We're too familiar with CGI and special effects, high definition television and psychedelic colour schemes for anything to have quite the same impact today. But it was still pretty damn impressive - and the baddies, who had all the characteristics of the brain-dead, money-grubbing, gun-toting, planet-wasting stereotypes that we lefties love to hate, got their come-uppance in the end. Cowboys and Indians for the 21st century - except that this time the Indians win.

Excessive research linked to depression

2010-02-03T09:44:00.000Z

I'm depressed. 'Excessive internet use linked to depression, research shows,' says the headline in the Guardian. Well, blow me down with an email.

You could just as well write 'Excessive drinking linked to depression' or 'Excessive TV watching' or 'Excessive ironing' - or excessive just about anything (except football, of course, you can never be excessive about football). We all know that.

It's obvious, isn't it? You're depressed, you're more likely to spend more time than is good for you doing something that isn't necessarily the most balanced way to get pleasure out of life. QED.

So why does it take a Leeds University research project, detailed interviews with 1,319 people and a paper in the Psychopathology journal to tell us the bleedin' obvious? And why does the Guardian consider this to be newsworthy, particularly when the statistical analysis boils down to the responses of just 18 people (yes, eighteen) who are deemed to be 'internet addicts'?

Corrugated iron, corrugated iron, brand new corrugated iron

2010-01-30T19:11:00.002Z

A couple of dozen poets and three and a half hours of poetry, even in aid of Haiti, stretched my love of the English language this afternoon. It was worth the attention span, though, not least to hear Carole Ann Duffy's closing rendition of Premonitions, dedicated to the memory of U A Fanthorpe but written with the memory of her mother's death in mind.

Gordon and Sarah Brown were the unadvertised openers of the event, with Gordon announcing that the government had today decided to buy up every piece of corrugated iron in the country and ship it to Haiti to provide shelters for the homeless. This prompted Duffy to remark later that they should send the lead off Tony Blair's roof as well.

It reminded me of an old squatters' song we used to sing in the Seventies to the tune of Any Old Iron. Composed by Tony Allen, veteran of the Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Squatters Estate Agency and the godfather of alternative comedy, it went something like this:

Corrugated iron, corrugated iron, brand new corrugated iron,
Yer 'ouse looks neat, talk about a treat
Corrugated iron from the chimney to the street
No water, no gas and the mains all slashed
Can't even have a fire on
And the only thing you've got in yer window box is
Corrugated iron

Aidez Haiti

2010-01-29T20:16:00.004Z

Philosophy Football's latest shirt 'Aidez Haiti' offers another way help raise much needed funds for Haiti, this time via the TUC Aid Eathquake Appeal. All profits from the shirt will go to the appeal for emergency relief and long-term rehabilitation of the victims of the Haiti earthquake.

Photographer Jess Hurd is someone Philosophy Football has worked with in the past year, collaborating on exhibitions. Recently returned from the earthquake zone, she warns that her photos should be viewed with caution; they are extremely harrowing, view them here.

For background on how a natural disaster is made much worse by avoidable human impoverishment, read Seumas Milne here;and for how the Haitian people have been cruelly misrepresented by the media, read Andy Kershaw's powerful antidote to the standard misrepresentations here.

Sign up for Haiti

2010-01-29T00:01:00.000Z

Carole Ann Duffy, the first female poet laureate, is leading a 'Poetry Live Aid' for Haiti at Westminster Central Hall on Saturday at 2.30pm. She'll be joined by her predecessor Andrew Motion, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, John Agard, Dannie Abse and a dozen or more others. At £10 it's got to be the best value event in London this weekend as well as being in aid of one of themost important causes of the moment.

Meanwhile, I've just joined 300,000 other people in signing a petition for the cancellation of Haiti's US$1 billion debt. Haiti's people should not be made to pay back loans made to unelected dictators years ago even as they struggle to recover from the earthquake.

You can find out more or sign the petition here

http://www.avaaz.org/en/haiti_cancel_the_debt_12/98.php?CLICK_TF_TRACK

The petition below will be delivered to the IMF and G7 finance ministers at their crucial meetings in coming days.

The beautiful game

2010-01-28T08:26:00.004Z

I'm boarding up the windows in anticipation of this afternoon's Algeria v Egypt African Nations Cup semi final in Angola. Arsenal v Tottenham has got nothing on this one, and after Algeria's explosive World Cup qualifier victory over the Egyptians in Sudan last November the north London Algerian community celebrated with a fireworks display to match the Beijing Olympics.

Chelsea and the Ivory Coast's Didier Drogba is only one of many players and officials who have been complaining about the condition of the pitches in Angola, blaming it for a glut of injuries and poor quality play. Excuses, excuses. I saw one pitch with a road cutting it in two when I lived in east Africa for a while, and another with a tree growing near the centre circle. The quality of play was still higher than you get on our local astroturf.

As for bad conditions, Didier should try playing in Peru, where the the Estadio Daniel Alcides Carrion de Cerro de Pasco stadium is not only about 4,300 metres above sea level but has some, er, challenging weather conditions to boot:

Shanghaied: the missing bottle opener

2010-01-25T22:55:00.006Z

Now where did they put that bottle opener?

I found Piers Morgan's ITV programme on Shanghai (called, with all the catchy headline-writing skills you'd associate with a former Daily Mirror editor, Piers Morgan on Shanghai) both entertaining and informative. One hundred and sixteen thousand multi-millionaires in the city? I'd have put it no higher than a hundred thousand.

But Shanghai is obviously growing too quickly for the print media to keep up. Morgan's article for the Mail on Sunday, basically a rehash of the TV commentary, was accompanied by a photo of the Shanghai skyline that was not only missing the smog that is a virtually permanent feature of the city. It also omitted the tallest building in China, the Shanghai World Financial Centre, aka the Bottle Opener. This now towers over the Jin Mao Tower (third building from the right in the MoS photo, above right) and will soon itself be surpassed by the Shanghai Tower, as shown in the model (above left).

Not everyone has a mobile phone

2010-01-22T12:08:00.002Z

Brown wins election

2010-01-20T16:04:00.001Z

Google ‘Brown wins election’ at the moment and you get 20.6 million results, which is rather more than most Brits would have expected to see in 2010, when our Gordon finally faces the voters. It’s also about 20 million more than you get for ‘And the lights all went out in Massachusetts’, incidentally, which is of course how most liberal Americans would view the Republican victory in Teddy Kennedy’s old seat.

Or is it? If you take a look at what Tom Jensen of the US pollsters Public Policy Polling has to say on the subject, it seems that Scott Brown only won because most voters thought he was a liberal. According to PPP’s research, ‘Among voters who thought that Scott Brown was either a liberal or a moderate, he won 79-18. Among voters who thought that he was a conservative [the Democratic candidate] won 63-32.’

The lesson there – that the right wing wins when it presents itself as moderate – hasn’t been lost on David Cameron’s Tories, who will continue to present a saccharine face to the rest of us until they’ve got their wellied feet through the door of No 10.

Meanwhile, the man with the biggest egg on his face over the Massachusetts result is the BBC’s Mark Mardell. He stood firm in the face of contrary polling evidence and the views of most commentators on the spot, with his opinion that ‘I don't actually think [the Democrats] will lose the seat’ in an article written in the very week that they did.

Where's my airbrush?

2010-01-17T09:58:00.003Z

Many more (and make your own) here

Capitalist roaders

2010-01-10T15:32:00.005Z

Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower was the tallest structure in China, at 468 metres, until 2007, when it was topped by the city’s World Financial Centre (better known as the Bottle Opener because of the trapezoid opening in its upper floors). It’s a mere blade of grass now that the Burj Khalifa in Dubai has checked in at over 800 metres but its ‘space module’ viewing platform is still as good a place as any to watch the human race going to hell in a handcart.

Not so much a handcart, of course, as a motor vehicle. There are around three million of them now in Shanghai, clogging the city’s streets and expressways faster than China’s extraordinary engineering abilities can construct new ones to accommodate them. Looking down from the top of the Pearl Tower on the day that the Copenhagen climate talks crashed, I found it hard to imagine the world’s leaders ever getting to grips with the full enormity of the climate challenge. High above the car-choked metropolis that is in the vanguard of China’s economic miracle you can see only skyscrapers and smog and more skyscrapers and roads stretching out in an endless procession across the east China plain where the river Yangtse disgorges its polluted waters into the sea.

Spending a month in China at the end of last year, I was simultaneously torn between, on the one hand, an awestruck admiration at the sheer scale of the Chinese achievement in raising their cities, at least, to developed-world status in the blink of an historical eye; and, on the other hand, a deadening sense of impotence at the sheer scale of the environmental catastrophe that is following in its wake.

The air pollution in Shanghai, four-fifths of it caused by cars, is so bad that it’s been likened, in all seriousness, to smoking up to 70 cigarettes a day. For every one of the 3,000-plus skyscrapers that have gone up in the past two decades, there is an historic building or neighbourhood that has been flattened. And most of those skyscrapers, awe-inspiring and aesthetically-stunning though the best of them may be, are already showing signs of the design and maintenance flaws that blight high-rise developments worldwide. Cold in winter and blistering hot in summer, they consume energy like a panda gets through bamboo. And for all that the city planners boast that there are now nine square metres of open space per Shanghai resident for every four that existed 20 years ago, there is nowhere outdoors in the city that you can escape the constant drone of the traffic, see clear open sky or breath clean, fresh air.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those who believes that the people of China (or India or Brazil or anywhere else, for that matter) should forgo the development that has already raised 190 million people out of poverty in order that the west doesn’t have to worry about global warming. But there is a real dilemma here.

For all the obligatory green noises that accompany every official statement (the line in the Chinese media after the failure in Copenhagen was that China would continue to try to save the planet on its own), the kind of rampant capitalism on display in Shanghai is about as far removed from sustainable development as you can get. In the absence of cheap energy, the whole shebang would come – probably literally – tumbling down.

The problems arising from China’s huge-scale, top-down rush to development are unlikely to be solved other than by huge-scale, top-down environmental initiatives of the kind that can make small-scale, local environmental actions seem all a bit pointless. If this sounds like a recipe for inaction and despair, it isn’t meant to be. If even a part of the technological genius and socio-political will that transformed the paddy fields and marshland around Shanghai can be turned to environmental objectives, there is no limit to what might be achieved. In the meantime, it is good to be back breathing the clean air of England once again.

Elf-published

2009-12-25T15:56:00.004Z

Go on, admit it, there’s nothing you like better over the Christmas holiday season than to sit down with a steady supply of sensory stimulants and get stuck into a good old detective story.

The trouble is that it’s sometimes hard to reconcile books with titles such as Ten Little Niggers (written by a woman with a deep prejudice against ‘sallow men with hooked noses’) with the PC protocols of our day.

Enter my friend and erstwhile collaborator Mat Coward, who has just published a socialist detective story set in ‘London in the near future: transport is horse-drawn, food is rationed, fuel is scarce and wastefulness is illegal.’ As well as providing the requisite gripping yarn, Acts of Destruction is both witty (‘Is it a murder?’ ‘Well it’s a crime, if only illegal disposal of a body’) and wide-ranging in its incidental detail.

Just as you’d expect from someone who moonlights as the Morning Star’s gardening correspondent, an indefatigable pro-smoking campaigner (who once sent me a 100,000-word anti-anti-smoking tract when I was a couple of days into an attempt to stop), and one of the elves (that’s what they’re called) who provide the material for Stephen Fry’s QI programme.

You can buy the book on Mat Coward's website

McElderry and the Machine

2009-12-22T16:07:00.003Z

I’ve been engaged in a series of heated debates following my coming out in print as a fan of The X Factor (see Plattitudes, Dec 2009). Some people now approach me with the sort of ‘sorry but you’re soiled’ look that they’d normally reserve for Trots-turned-Tory or people who pull the whiskers off pussy cats. It’s no use telling them that when it came to the choice between Rage Against the Machine or X-Factor winner Joe McElderry for the Xmas Number One, my political colours were nailed firmly to the mast.

What surprised me more was the friend who turned on me with the sort of venom I’d last witnessed when her boyfriend slept with her sister. When I punched the air in delight at the Ragers’ improbable triumph over Simon Cowell’s pop machine, she rounded on me: ‘I thought you liked The X-Factor?’ How could I possibly take pleasure in ‘a bunch of privileged hippie college kids posing as anti-capitalists’?* Didn’t I care that they were spoiling it for working-class Geordie sweetiepie McElderry by denying him the same Xmas Number One status as the previous four X-Factor winners?

That was before I was mugged by the Alexandra Burke fan club. The 2008 X-Factor winner, she lives a short walk from me and half the neighbourhood takes it as a personal affront if you don’t think she’s the best singer since at least Leona Lewis. I made the mistake of saying to one member of the Burke posse that actually I prefer her mum’s music (she used to sing with Soul II Soul). This year I plan to be out of the country when The X-Factor comes around.

*According to the Privileged Hippie College Kids Monitoring Service, Rage Against the Machine score 68% (grade B-plus, borderline A-minus) on the PHCK index. Vocalist and lyricist Zack de la Rocha (who gets an extra mark for that so-Sixties’ hippie forename) is the son of a political muralist father, who was brought up by his anthropologist (Ph D, University of California) mother. Guitarist Tom Morello was brought up by his teacher mother; his (absent) father was the brother of Jomo Kenyatta and Kenya’s first ambassador to the UN. Bassist Tim Commerford’s father was an aerospace engineer and his mother a mathematician. Drummer Brad Wilk has said that witnessing how material wealth corrupted his father made him value the simple things in life.

Bigger than Christ

2009-12-01T15:51:00.002Z

The most striking thing about the new statue on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square is how big it is. When the other 2,399 participants and I did our hours on the plinth as part of Anthony Gormley’s One and Other project last summer, a recurring feature of the experience was how small we felt – or looked – when we were up there. Not so with second world war hero Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, who stands five metres high in his fibreglass feet, towering above the mere mortals passing by below.

I’m not sure why Sir Keith has been built so large, if not simply to bludgeon home his achievements in comparison with the plebs who stood there before him. The bronze cast statue of him that will be permanently installed in nearby Waterloo Place when his six months on the plinth are up will only be 2.78 metres tall – still larger than life but not quite so intimidating as the one that is currently making Lord Nelson look small in his own backyard.

One of the things I’ve liked about the use of the previously empty fourth plinth, since it first became home to six-monthly residencies of statues and other artworks in 1999, has been the human scale of most of what has been attempted there. My favourite remains Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, a white marble carving of Lapper, who was born with no arms and shortened legs. Even at 3.6 metres and 13 tonnes, it seemed simultaneously small and vulnerable and beautiful and strong.

The first statue to appear on the plinth, in 1999, was Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo, a life-sized figure of Christ, dressed in a loin cloth and crown of barbed wire. It looked tiny, lost and lonely up there. We have come full circle with Sir Keith Park, brave and deserving of our attention as he may be.

The new Chartists

2009-11-30T15:43:00.001Z

Despite the best efforts of campaigners, the last time that electoral reform really fired up the British public was when the Suffragettes were strutting their stuff. So while I’m a longstanding supporter of proportional representation and most of the other constitutional changes that reformers have been seeking, under one banner or another, at least since Margaret Thatcher showed what could be done with a minority of votes under an ‘elective dictatorship’, I’m not convinced that the vast majority of voters give a spoilt ballot about it. You certainly don’t hear many people down the pub saying, ‘You know, I’d give Gordon Brown another chance if he promised us a referendum on the single transferrable vote system.’

Campaigners need to ‘reach people where they are’, as the focus-group philosophers like to put it, if they are to get them interested in reform. And since on Saturday and Sunday evenings for the past few months, a large chunk of the nation has been slumped in front of its flatscreens arguing the toss over which X Factor contestant will provide this year’s Christmas Number One Single, where better to advance the case for reform?

The X Factor has courted its share of electoral controversy this time around with arch autocrat Simon Cowell declining to use his judge’s vote to dump the ‘vile creatures’ (his description, in case you were watching Strictly) John and Edward. So, with public trust and confidence in light entertainment entrepreneurs at an all-time low (more than 3,000 viewers complained to ITV about the Jedward farrago), it’s clearly time to put reform high on the Saturday-night agenda. Let’s call it Charter 09 and start collecting the signatures now.

1. Elect the judges Who voted for Simon Cowell anyway? Let’s put the judges through the performing-monkey hoops of a knockout vote each week as well as the performers.

2. One viewer one vote Anyone with a mobile phone and plenty of money can spend their weekend voting over and again for their preferred contestant. ‘Vote early, vote often’ might have been good enough for Mayor Daley but there should be no place for multiple voting in our model TV democracy.

3. Single transferrable vote Every year contestants go out of The X Factor as a result of viewers not voting for them because they think they are too talented to be voted out. A single transferrable vote system would ensure that the least popular act would go out each week.

4. No property qualifications So no charge for mobile phone votes and an alternative means of voting for those who don’t own (that’s you, dad) or use (and you, mum) a mobile.

5. Right of recall Just because someone wins The X Factor doesn’t mean we should be stuck with them forever. A right of recall if they incur our disfavour should be accompanied with the ability to force them to do £20-a-head gigs (as much as you can eat thrown in free) at Maidstone’s Pizza Express, which is where we last heard of the first X Factor winner Steve Brookstein.

6. Public hangings Only one judge and two contestants per series (this isn’t Fox News after all) but if you want to be popular ...

The real value of art

2009-11-20T16:00:00.000Z

In the same week that some of the brightest and best of Bristol’s urban artists came to north London to showcase their talent this autumn, BT contractors painted over one of the brightest and best pieces of urban art in the neighbourhood.

Crowds gathered on Upper Street, Islington, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the elusive artist Banksy when Bristol’s Crazy Fools Gallery took over the Library (a bar, not a library) for a weekend exhibition. Neither Banksy nor his rumoured self-portrait, valued unviewed at £250,000, turned up. Instead we got ‘Portrait of an Artist’, which had a very fine old-fashioned, gold-plated frame enclosing a portrait of an artist (from behind and not very good) at his easel painting what looks like an alien escapee from a lava lamp. The price tag was still a quarter of a million.

Not far from Upper Street, but in a less salubrious part of town where art investors fear to tread, BT was responding to a ‘complaint about graffitti’ by painting over a portrait on one of its cable boxes of teenager Ben Kinsella, who was murdered at the spot in June 2008. The portrait (from the front and really rather good, even without a gold frame) was the tribute of an anonymous street artist and was much appreciated by Ben’s family and friends. They at least have a sense of the real value of art.

Roll call of irrelevance

2009-11-15T16:01:00.000Z

Put away the excuses and spare us the extenuating circumstances: if ever there was a measure of left-wing failure in current British politics, it was the abysmal showing of every variety of left-green alternative to Labour and the SNP in the Glasgow North East by election. For the British National Party to fall just 63 votes short of beating the Tories into third place in what should be the Scottish left’s heartland shows just how far we have fallen from the heady days of the 2003 Scottish Parliament election, which saw the election of seven Scottish Green MSPs and six Scottish Socialist Party MSPs.

‘The Labour-SNP conflict was fought with a complete obliviousness to the big issues voters face both locally and nationally,’ wrote Gerry Hassan in the Guardian. ‘Glasgow North East has the highest unemployment claimant count in Scotland, the second-highest incapacity levels and is rated the second unhealthiest place in the UK. Neither party touched on these issues in the campaign.’

Despite this, the voting returns for the various left candidates read like a roll call of irrelevance. David Doherty, for the Scottish Greens, did better than most with a paltry 332 (1.61 per cent). Louise McDaid, for the Socialist Labour Party, managed less than a coachload (47 votes, 0.23 per cent). The Scottish Socialist Party’s Kevin McVey got 152 (0.74 per cent), a long way short of the 798 (3.86 per cent) obtained by the agent of the SSP’s acrimonious collapse, Tommy Sheridan, now fighting under the Solidarity banner.

The BNP’s 1,013 votes (4.92 per cent) is a long way short of seeing stormtroopers on Sauchiehall Street. But the fact that left-greens can’t put together a deposit-saving campaign under these most favourable of by-election circumstances is yet further proof, if it is needed, of the need to get our electoral act together if the anti-establishment tide is not to be harnessed even more effectively by the far right.

Wake-up call on climate

2009-09-22T08:54:00.000+01:00

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?

2009-09-03T18:33:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-02T21:39:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-01T10:58:00.000+01:00

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

2009-08-21T17:32:00.005+01:00

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?

2009-08-20T13:03:00.003+01:00

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

2009-08-08T11:46:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-22T13:36:00.000+01:00

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

2009-07-08T07:27:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-06T17:12:00.002+01:00

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.

Nice work ...

2009-05-14T13:00:00.000+01:00

An erstwhile journalist of my acquaintance, now ensconced in that great gravy train on Thames, once gave me advice about how to prosper in both journalism and politics. ‘Always have your next job lined up and your expense claims up to date,’ he said. I’m sure he’s always conducted himself with the utmost propriety when it comes to MPs’ expenses but I don’t see his name at the bottom end of the league table of low claimers.

I do, however, see the name of one Rt Hon Tony Blair down there as the second-lowest claiming MP in the 2007-08 financial year. He’s sandwiched between the veteran left-winger Dennis Skinner, now in his 40th year as MP for Bolsover, and Philip Hollobone, the Tory representative for Kettering and the cheapest of Westminster’s 646 MPs at Westminster, who claimed barely a third of the £135,600 a year average.

Tony claimed £64,064 expenses for 2007-08, including £5,772 to cover the cost of staying away from his main home (that would be Downing Street, if you remember, so a lot of people would no doubt have been happy to pay for him to stay away a lot longer). Which sounds extremely modest by most MPs standards – until you realise that he quit parliament in June 2007, less than three months into that financial year.

Taking aim at Nelson

2009-05-12T17:30:00.000+01:00

I have put in a bid for a place on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. At the time of writing, there are 11,037 applicants for the 2,400 one-hour slots in Antony Gormley’s living monument to the people of Britain, which runs for 100 days beginning in July – so the odds are rather better than for winning the National Lottery (one in 13,983,816 to win the jackpot, one in 56.7 to win a tenner, since you ask).

Coincidentally, I was interviewing Bob and Roberta Smith the other day for Channel 4’s Big Art Project. Bob was one of the shortlisted artists who lost out to Antony Gormley in the contest for the next artwork to stand on the empty Fourth Plinth. So I was thinking of offering him my hour, if I get it, to display his rejected artwork, Faîtes L’Art, pas La Guerre (Make Art, Not War), an illuminated peace sign, powered by wind and solar energy.

Failing that, and the too obvious option of holding down a pigeon for an hour and crapping on its head, I’m planning on donning a liberty cap and dressing up as the French sharpshooter who took out Nelson in 1805. I’ll need a musket and four musket balls for full dramatic effect. (‘If I don't kill him with these three, I'll blow out my brains with the fourth,’ the French sniper is reputed to have said as he set about his task.) But when I’m done it will be some sort of revenge for my country having been on the wrong side in the wars against revolutionary France – and a reminder that the man whose monument celebrates him as a hero of the Battle of Trafalgar should also be remembered as the Butcher of Naples for his vicious subjugation of the Jacobins there in 1799.

Gays and Muslims

2009-05-08T13:02:00.001+01:00

As a headline-grabbing finding, you couldn’t get a much more dramatic – or, from a left-liberal perspective, troubling – statistic than the Gallup poll revelation in May that not one of the 500 British Muslims surveyed thought that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. Such unanimity is virtually unheard of in opinion polling, where even the whackiest of viewpoints usually finds some sort of minority representation.

It was noteworthy, therefore, that the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK) weekly newsletter was recently promoting a piece by gay Muslim film-maker and activist Parvez Sharma on the UN ‘Durban II’ racism conference, where western delegates walked out en masse in protest against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli, Holocaust-doubting views. Sharma clearly got the nod from MPACUK because he chose to direct his criticism against the walkers-out more than against Ahmadinejad, of whom he said only that he ‘made provocative comments which were in poor taste’. But the fact that a campaigning self-proclaimed gay Muslim could feature in such a forum without an outpouring of wrath against him holds out a little hope that perhaps that Gallup poll finding is not as unequivocal as it appears.

Dirty swine flu

2009-04-28T15:50:00.001+01:00

Swine flu pandemonium 1976 vintage. Just make sure you boil that bacon thoroughly ...

30 April: Just corrected that spelling because, as a good friend and informant points out, 'pandamonium ... would be a large black and white bear who spends all its time complaining, when in fact they spend all their time eating bamboo and sleeping. Never met such lazy, good for nothing bears as Pandas.' Maybe, but at least they never gave us panda flu ...

Belgium isn't boring

2009-04-21T11:07:00.000+01:00

This is dedicated to my sister, whose renditions of Do-Re-Mi, complete with actions, are legendary in the pubs of Stone and well beyond.

Second sex

2009-04-19T10:24:00.000+01:00

‘It isn’t only about sex, you know.’ I’ve heard the refrain so often that it’s almost become convincing. And now there’s even a brave new virtual world of political activism and protest being built in online fantasy worlds such as Second Life to justify spending all those hours in front of a computer screen.

Second Life, if you haven’t come across it yet, is a free 3D virtual world where people who have enough time left over from their first life can reinvent themselves and interact with other people via avatars. Once you’ve set up your avatar, you can do all sorts of things that aren’t only about sex – like selling Red Pepper, attending online protest meetings or picketing SL’s digital Israeli embassy, if you’re so inclined, although it has to be said that most of SL’s avatars seem to have other inclinations.

As a hardcore online junkie, old enough to remember rooting around on something called the Undernet and communicating via Internet Relay Chat, and a recovering SimCity and Civilisation addict, I had successfully steered clear of SL since its foundation in 2003. My willpower cracked, though, when a friend insisted that I accompany her on a sort of Motorcycle Diaries-style trip to check out the revolutionary potential.

Let’s say I got distracted.

It started with an invitation to the BadGirlz Club, progressed via a beach resort and continued into a castle occupied by, inter alia, vampires, zombies and aficionados of the cult of Gor (a kind of medieval BDSM fantasy world in which stepping out of character to have a quick laugh at the absurdity of it all gets you kicked out of the club faster than you can say ‘Yes Master’). Before I knew it, my avatar had acquired a shaved head, some very fetching skull tattoos, a single ‘elf gauntlet’ and the tightest pair of gay of gayboi pants you could ever imagine squeezing your bum into. Oh yes, and erm, a box of nine penises.

What do you do with a box of nine penises, I’m sure you’re asking. The answer is: you wear them. Not all at once, of course, and you do have to use a bit of virtual jiggerypokery to unpack them from the box first – as I only discovered after walking around SL with a box labelled ‘Nine Penises’ attached to my avatar’s pelvis for the next couple of days.

My friend, meanwhile, had decided she was up for a sex-change operation. This was after she had refused an offer to spend 155 Linden dollars (SL’s very own currency) on something called ‘seclix rave pacifier’, which supposedly ‘simulates real life pacifier dipped in MDMA’ and is advertised in SL as ‘drugs without the crash’. She spent the money instead on a special, just-like-real-life penis, which came with handy instruction manual.

‘How to adjust the penis size?’ was one of the Q&As, to which the answer is: ‘Wear the penis. Right click it and select “edit”. Click the button “Stretch”. Now use the white blocks to adjust the size. Note that the penis can be made bigger, but not smaller.’

Neither of us has got very far in fomenting a Second Life revolution just yet. But we have a fine collection of penises, if anyone is interested.

Would 'Gotcha!' have been the best tweet ever?

2009-04-01T11:26:00.004+01:00

Nice 1 April story about the Guardian going over entirely to Twitter ('OMG Hitler invades Poland' etc). I hear the Sun considered the idea but turned it down: WTF do you do with 140 characters?

England People Very Racist?

2009-03-07T08:17:00.003Z

I try to avoid reading reviews of things before I have had the chance to make up my own mind. I’m far too contrarian and end up spending far too much time trying to see things differently to the critics.

It was impossible to avoid the charges of cartoon caricatures, racist stereotypes and malevolent wisecracking levelled at Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, currently showing at the National Theatre, however. Commentators ranging from shadow children’s secretary Michael Gove to East End playwright Hussain Ismail were lining up to diss it. Gove called it ‘dramatically appalling ... It made Alf Garnett seem sophisticated.’ Hussein called it ‘racist and offensive ... I went to the first night ... All I could see was a sea of people laughing at immigrants.’ Even theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh, no PC stalwart he, accused it of ‘defaming refugees’ and ‘[fanning] the ever ready flames of prejudice.

So I went prepared to don my contrarian hat but with more than a sniff of disquiet about my person as the audience laughed its way through a sequence of comedy routines dealing with successive waves of immigrants – French Huguenots, Irish, Jews, the occasional Afro-Caribbean and Bangladeshis – to Bethnal Green, in London’s East End. Each wave was shown to resent the next; and each ethnic group was the target of the sort of humour that does indeed depend on a high degree of racial and cultural stereotyping.

Was it funny? Most of the audience – and I – certainly thought so. And I don’t think it was only in what Nicholas de Jongh called ‘the slick, cruel, abusive style that Bernard Manning perfected ages ago’. Context is everything, though, and it helps to have some Irish blood coursing through your veins if you find yourself laughing out loud at the Irish’s purported penchant for keeping a pig as part of the family, inter-marrying with your cousins and breeding one-eyed babies as a consequence. ‘Mother always told us not to go with strangers.’ I’m not sure I would have wanted to be laughing at that one if my Irish companion hadn’t been pissing herself already.

I found the treatment of the last great wave of immigrants, Bethnal Green’s Muslim community, more difficult to laugh along with. There seemed to be an undertow that was saying that every other group of refugees has ended up integrating and becoming as indigenous as the English, but that this one was different. The BNP character in the play says to an Afro-Caribbean: ‘It’s not about race any more, it’s about culture.’ The Afro-Caribbean ends up packing his suitcase and heading off ‘home’ to Barbados.

My companion and I argued the toss about the play for at least an hour afterwards. We both agreed that the group to come out worst from it was the white working class, whose primary recurring role throughout this portrayal of 400 years of East End history was that of murderous, racist thugs. That’s an unfair caricature – and it wasn’t very funny.

Dynamite shoes

2009-02-27T21:19:00.002Z

He breathed in air
He breathed out light
Adrian Mitchell was my delight

Roger McGough introduced Radio 4’s Poetry Please commemoration of Adrian Mitchell with this reworking of Adrian’s own tribute to Charlie Parker, whose ‘Lover Man’ opened the programme. Over the next half hour, some of Adrian’s many friends and fellow poets remembered him and read from his work.

Jackie Kay chose Adrian’s ‘Back in the Playground Blues’ about his childhood experience of bullying. Michael Horovitz took us back to that biggest poetry gig of all time, when Adrian spat out ‘Tell me lies about Vietnam’ (actually titled ‘To Whom It May Concern’) at the Albert Hall in 1965. Andrew Marr picked up ‘A Puppy Called Puberty’. And John Hegley gave us ‘Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow’ (‘Number One, patriotic: I didn’t lay down my life in World War II so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow; Number Two, snobbish: Unfortunately Samuel Beckett is using it’).

There was also Jonathan Price (‘Death is smaller than I thought’), Michelle Roberts, Carole Ann Duffy, Brian Patten and John Agard. And most of all there was Adrian’s wife, Celia, reading ‘The Doorbell’, which Adrian had written for CND in 2006. Celia said she had chosen because ‘it is about war and destruction and we met and fell in love because we were both wearing CND badges and we saw each other across the room’:

There, on the doorstep, stood the War.

It filled my front garden,

filled the entire street

and blotted out the sky.

It was human and monstrous,

shapeless, enormous,

with torn and poisoned skin which bled

streams of yellow, red and black ...

The War had many millions of eyes

and all wept tears of molten steel.

Then the War spoke to me

in a voice of bombs and gunfire:
I am your war.
Can I come in?

Roger McGough rounded off with a clip of Adrian and his daughter Sasha singing: ‘Poetry glues your soul together/ Poetry wears dynamite shoes.’ Sasha tells me that she and Celia have agreed to do some of Adrian’s regular gigs this year, including probably the Latitude festival, with Sasha singing and Celia reading his poems. Celia says they’re thinking of a big public commemoration for Adrian, maybe at the Hackney Empire in the autumn.

I’m sure they’ll be unmissable. In the meantime, you can listen to the whole of the Poetry Please commemoration at http://www.topicdrift.com/qt/PoetryPleaseAdrian.mp3

Pictured: Philosophy Football’s t-shirt, with which Adrian was delighted and distributed to various friends and family members, is available from http://www.philosophyfootball.com

Safe skating

2009-02-24T16:56:00.002Z

'Skater-haters should hobble back home to take their medication and watch Countdown.' Seventy-one-year old Geoff Dornan of Southport, who's just been fined £300 plus £1,800 costs for 'dangerous skating' in Southport's main shopping street, sounds like someone who's spent most of his adult life just waiting for the opportunity to live out Monty Python's Hell's Grannies sketch for real.

You've got to hand it to Geoff, who admits to having had 'heated discussions with [his] fellow geriatrics' about his skating activities and reckons that they're just jealous that he's still up to it in his eighth decade. He's certainly a decent skater, as the CCTV footage shown in court demonstrates. And pretty 'safe' too, as I'm sure the skating community would agree. Eighteen hundred quid for arguing your side of the case is steep by any standards.

Jade Goody: enough said

2009-02-17T11:50:00.002Z

Somewhere I have copies of the articles I wrote back in 2002 and again during the 'Shillpa Poppadom' affair in 2007 sticking up for Jade Goody. I was going to dig them out and revisit what I'd written about class prejudice and Britain in the light of Jade's diagnosis with terminal cancer but it all felt a bit self-serving and inappropriate when the poor woman is dying, albeit in the full glare of the media spotlight.

Now Michele Hanson has said it for me and I don't have to worry about going over it all again myself. I have a mental image of a bile-filled Sun front page, however, that won't easily be laid to rest. I hope all those who were behind the Goody hatefest will pause for just a moment to reflect on it now.

A bad week for public art

2009-02-11T17:54:00.003Z

It’s been a bad week for public art. First, the worst of the five entries – Mark Wallinger’s far too literal statue of a bloody big horse – wins the competition for the Ebbsfleet Landmark. And today, Manchester City Council announces it’s going to pull down Thomas Heatherwick’s spectacular B of the Bang sculpture over ‘technical problems’ – i.e. fears that it might fall down anyway.

A shame because both outcomes will only confirm the philistines in their view that monumental public art is just a big waste of time, particularly in a recession.

Money for new wellies

2009-02-10T10:33:00.006Z

My friend Amy has been emailing everyone she knows on Facebook to ask for money to buy some wellies. You'll understand why when your read her letter. I'm sending her some (money not wellies), and if you want to do likewise you can find her here. 50p for every pair of shoes in your possession (double for men)?

That is right, I am emailing you to ask for money.

I am returning to Cambodia next week to shoot some footage, which will hopefully lead to me raising loads of money for people with nothing.

There are an estimated 25,000 orphans with HIV in Cambodia and only two orphanages to care for them, one homes 70 kids and one, where I worked, homes 30. 100 orphans being looked after out of 25,000- that is rubbish.

One of the first places I am visiting is Steung Meanchey, the rubbish tip on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (see clip on my profile page), where many of the children who live and work there are orphans, 70% are HIV+, some have no clothes and most have no shoes.

Foot injuries from needles and glass are very common. I have managed to get some local chemists and doctors to donate medical supplies and I plan to go to the tip armed with my surgical gloves and patch up their feet, then ... I am going to put all those bare feet in Wellington Boots to protect them. And I am asking you to give me money for those Wellington Boots.

'This is the closest thing to hell on earth I have ever seen,' said an aid worker I spoke to, 'I don't know how people can let a place like this exist.'

Maybe it's because people don't know? Well now you do.

If everyone I am friends with on Facebook gave me £5-£10, I would be able to put shoes on the feet of every bare-foot-orphan at the tip. No joke, it doesn't cost much over there and there are about 400 orphans in need of shoes.

When I think about all our spare shoes together, bloody hundreds, what a waste, I wish I could take them over, but I can't carry them all so give me your money instead please. Help your friend Amy put shoes on orphans feet. Go on it will make you feel good.

Feel the love, it is almost Valentines Day and flowers die anyway.

Amy xxx

Paul Ross: the perfect picture

2009-02-09T09:05:00.000Z

'If you only buy one 20 inch canvas print of Paul Ross this year, this is the one to get.'

'I recently purchased this poster, and while it's lifelike, well made and had a certain, portly charm to it, I have since found out that it's actually *cheaper* to hire Paul Ross to come over and stand against a wall, whenever you feel the need to look at him.'

Those people at Amazon didn't know what they were starting when they opened up their website to customer reviews. Paul Ross has a particularly high satisfaction rating.

The Thames trotted

2009-02-08T08:40:00.000Z

It’s downhill all the way from the Prince of Wales pub in Iffley to the bandstand on the green at Henley. Got to be, hasn’t it, or the Thames couldn’t flow so fiercely over the weirs on its way between the two.

One thing that running teaches you is that there’s no such thing as flat. Even a millpond must have its hills hidden somewhere. And there’s no such thing as downhill all the way either, outside a Tory government.

The Thames path (or national trail, to give it its due) saves its hills on this stretch of the river until you’ve already passed the 30-mile mark, when it takes you up the valley sides between Goring and Whitchurch. It rises to all of, oh, 62 metres, which wouldn’t even get you halfway up the London Eye but feels like you’re taking the staircase to the top of Canary Wharf (twice) when you’ve already been running for about six hours to get there.

Starting a 50-mile run from a pub, with a roaring open fire and a selection of fine ales, and finishing at a bandstand, with snow on the roof and ice on the floor, seems arse about tit when you think about it. But, my, did it feel good to get there. Ten and a half hours, just under, and I didn’t go over on the snow and ice once.

A Thames Trot

2009-02-06T16:07:00.000Z

I’ve just received an email to tell me that tomorrow’s ‘Thames Trot’ is on, despite the weather. The name is the organiser’s idea of a joke, since it’s a 50-mile event along the river from Oxford to Henley. It’s my longest-ever run (though I’ve done 100km as a walk) and every bone, muscle and tendon in my body has started hurting since the moment they heard that it is happening.

Suddenly I feel sick to the stomach and don’t know whether to go equipped with ice axe and crampons or kneepads and skates. I must say that even ignoring the distance, the idea of running on ice is about as appealing as swimming in treacle. And I’ve got to drive to the Prince of Wales pub in Iffley for the start in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

Earlier this week a friend sent me a link to a BBC news report in which:

‘Margaret Morrissey, of the Parents Outloud campaign group, said the decision to keep thousands of schools shut for a second day sent the wrong signals to children.

She added: “We are giving children the message that when things get difficult you should just stay at home and have fun.”’

‘What’s wrong with staying home and having fun when things get difficult?’ my friend asked.

I reckon that by this time tomorrow nothing could appeal to me more.

Riot shields into sledges

2009-02-04T16:03:00.002Z

On balance, I think I’ve probably forgiven the school caretaker who destroyed the best skating rink I’ve ever known by putting salt down in the school playground way back when we had real winters and no one cared if a few kids cracked the odd bone or two. I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with Camden Council deciding to lock shut its parks when the snow fell this week, though, because, in the words of council leader Keith Moffitt, ‘I’d rather you were criticising me because some children couldn’t build a snowman than because a child had died on a frozen pond.’

We climbed over the fences into Waterlow Park anyway, giving the older kids a leg up and tossing the toddlers over to be caught on the other side. No one died on a frozen pond (or in it, for that matter), but it would have been our fault and not Councillor Moffitt’s if anyone had.

I’m not sure who would have been held to blame if anyone had died on nearby Hampstead Heath, which has a lot more ponds but can’t be locked shut because it doesn’t have gates restricting access. In any case, the revellers on the heath in the early hours of Monday morning included a platoon of police officers, who turned up with their riot shields – which they proceeded to convert into the coolest makeshift sledges in the capital. If only life was always like this.

Medusa's daughter and the golliwog

2009-02-03T13:32:00.001Z

In the league table of personal insults, calling someone a ‘golliwog’ ranks about on a par with calling them a ‘muppet’. Even as a racial insult, it’s not quite the sort of epithet that you hear bandied about at BNP meetings (though they do sell golliwogs in BNP t-shirts at some of those meetings, apparently).

Nevertheless, if Carole Thatcher had said it on air, I don’t suppose there would have been much disagreement about her being taken off air as a result. Nor do I think there can be much disagreement with The One Show presenter Adrian Chiles, Jo Brand and others for picking up Medusa’s Daughter over her use of the word during an after-show conversation in which she blabbed out her ‘off-the-cuff remark made in jest’ to describe a tennis player in the Australian open.

(Why the widespread coyness, by the way, in naming the tennis player concerned? I couldn’t find one mainstream news outlet prepared to say who Thatcher was talking about. Didn’t any of them think it might have been instructive to get his opinion on the subject?)

I don’t think it suggests any degree of sympathy for the use of racially-based epithets, however, to feel that the reaction to Thatcher’s foot-in-mouth has been just a little OTT. When the Beeb doesn’t have the bollocks to broadcast a Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for Gaza, it feels a mite disproportionate to start acting all macho over an ex-prime minister’s gobby offspring.

Making do with Lewisham

2009-01-31T13:28:00.000Z

Never mind the BBC and Sky’s refusal to screen the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for Gaza. They’ve done more to publicise the appeal by rejecting its broadcast than ever they would otherwise.

On a more modest scale, Chris Boddington has been doing his bit for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians by asking people to sponsor him to stay in the London Borough of Lewisham for the next five years. That’s presumably on the basis that if the people of Gaza are besieged in an area of roughly 360 square kilometres with a broken economy and few services, he can make do with a rather smaller but more prosperous part of south east London.

Actually if you read the small print he’s only promising to ‘reside’ there and he says that should he ‘fail to complete the challenge, you will of course be within your rights to go [to Gaza] and ask for [your money] back’. Which doesn’t show quite the commitment to the cause that some have displayed, but MAP is worth a donation anyway if you missed the address for the Disasters Emergency Committee.

White socks for the convict's opera

2009-01-26T10:07:00.002Z

My career as an actor, singer and member of a pioneering boy band peaked in a sailor’s suit on the stage of Liverpool’s Neptune Theatre at some point in the 1970s. There were a few of us loosely associated with the Liverpool Youth Theatre who got roped in as members of the chorus in a production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Written in 1728, it’s currently enjoying a short sold-out season (anyone give me a ticket for old time’s sake?) at the Royal Opera House, where it’s been billed as the ‘world’s first musical’.

A variation on John Gay, The Convict’s Opera, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, is also touring the country at the moment with its mix of songs old and new and performances good enough to wow any West End stage. I caught it in Salisbury, being in that part of the world for back-to-back trail marathons around Portland and Stonehenge over the weekend. Very bruised and aching limbs were not enough to deter me from the chance to revisit my teenage triumph (somewhere my mum has a Liverpool Echo photo of the sailor-suited boy band), especially since I managed to wangle a front-row seat with plenty of room to stretch out.

Mistake. Sometimes you go to the kind of theatre where audience participation is de rigeur or you know the ‘fourth wall’ is only there to be broken down. Sometimes you go only to reminisce, relax and be entertained. It was only at the start of the second act, when the The Convict’s Opera’s leading convict was leaning over the edge of the stage, fixing me in the eyes and asking to loud and very camp dramatic effect what my name was, ‘little boy’ (yes, he really did add that suffix), that I realised that, for a few minutes at least, I was going to be back in Gay’s opera again as a comic prop.

I have a pre-prepared get-out script running in my head for occasions such as this. It goes something like, ‘My name is Michael Barrymore. I’d love to get up there with you, but I’m so dangerously unpredictable that you really wouldn’t want me to. And anyway, I’ve only been let out of the unit for a couple of hours on the understanding that I don’t go anywhere near bright lights, and I really must take my medication now. Why don’t you talk to one of them [gesturing to the empty seats in the rest of the auditorium] instead?’

Unfortunately, the brain was far too slow (all that pounding on the paths of Salisbury Plain). And so it was that ‘Sailor Steve’ (far too slow to make the obvious ‘seasick’ joke) was press ganged into a centre-stage appearance as a convict-ship crew member, where he was lathered up for a public shaving with a gleaming cut-throat theatrical razor, doused with a bucketful of glittering clown’s water and then made to walk the plank back to his front-row seat with all dignity demolished.

And I was wearing a pair of white running socks, which the spotlight illuminated exquisitely between the comfy trainers and scruffy Levis. White socks at an opera, I ask yer …

A patriot for Aretha

2009-01-21T08:28:00.001Z

Aretha Franklin does it for me every time. So if it’s ‘My country ‘tis of thee’ that she’s singing, even if it isn’t my country, I’m a patriot. And yesterday I was a British-American patriot.

The pessimist, the sceptic and the cynic in me have all struggled to keep pace with my inner Obama on that incredible journey to the White House. Mostly, they’ve managed to keep in touch, albeit at a distance. Yesterday, though, they got left behind somewhere in the deep recesses of leftist soullessness – because soul is what you would have to have been without not to be moved by this occasion. It is one of those great, shared global events, like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the release of Nelson Mandela, that I am glad to have lived to see.

It’s sometimes hard to grasp the fact that it is only four decades, barely half a lifetime, since the civil rights movement tore down the legal barriers that kept black Americans segregated and oppressed. Or that it is only two decades since Barack Obama’s predecessor in the office of president and his equivalent in the UK were the principal defenders of apartheid outside South Africa itself. If so much can change so quickly, why not believe that so much more can yet be changed?

1,000 years of pop

2009-01-16T09:25:00.004Z

Suppose you had to sum up 1,000 years of popular music in a couple of hours worth of songs. Which would you choose?

That’s the task Richard Thompson set himself when Playboy magazine asked various musicians to pick their top ten songs of the millennium in 1999. While most of those asked didn’t go back much further than their own lifetimes, Thompson decided he’d call Playboy’s bluff and do a real thousand-year selection. It wasn’t printed.

Thompson is currently touring the UK with his latest choice of songs, which range from medieval madrigals and ‘colloquial Renaissance Italian dance music’ (you can really dance to it, as it happens), via Richard the Lionheart, Henry Purcell and W D Yeats, to Gilbert and Sullivan and music hall – and all that before he even starts on the last hundred years.

In London last night, he had Stick (brother of Brownie) McGhee’s ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-Oh-Dee’ stand for the rock ‘n’ roll canon. The Kinks’ ‘See My Friends’ (reputedly the first piece of Indian-influenced western pop music after Ray Davies was inspired by fishermen chanting outside his hotel window on a trip to the east) represented the 1960s; Abba’s ‘Money, Money, Money’ the 1970s; the Korgis’ ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime’ the 1980s; and – here it gets a bit weird – Nelly Furtado’s ‘Maneater’, complete with medieval church Latin interlude, brought us up to the present.

Encoring with a medley that climaxed with ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ put the Beatles – justifiably, I think – at the top of Thompson’s charts. But if I had to pick one song that will still be featuring in selections in another 1,000 years, Cole Porter’s 1932 classic, ‘Night and Day’, which he once said had been inspired by a Moroccan call to prayer, and has been covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to U2, would be a choice I could happily live with.

Wearing your politics on your chest

2009-01-08T13:37:00.001Z

Philosophy Football’s splendid t-shirts have been getting the sort of free publicity that the big corporations would pay serious fortunes for on Celebrity Big Brother. The former Scottish Socialist Party MSP Tommy Sheridan, who is still awaiting trial on perjury charges arising from his £200,000 libel victory over the News of the World in 2006, must have packed a whole suitcase of them to take into the Big Brother house and has been wearing them virtually every day. He’s even got some of the other housemates to model the shirts, including La Toya ‘My contract says you can’t film me without make-up’ Jackson, who was sporting one featuring Nelson Mandela.

Philosophy Football’s Mark Perryman says Sheridan must have bought some of the shirts ten years or more ago as they’re no longer available. You can still buy one of my personal favourites, though: the Bill Shankly shirt, which Sheridan modelled the other day. (‘The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.)

And the ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ have just produced one that Mark says ‘is partly inspired by one of the hundreds of hand-written anonymous placards carried at the 3 January demonstration in London. The Palestine 09 design expresses vividly the cycle of despair that has turned the tiny Gaza strip into a war zone of Israeli reprisals using its overwhelming military might.’ Priced at £16.99 and helping to raise funds for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, it’s available from http://www.philosophyfootball.com/

Phil Jeffries

2009-01-05T08:33:00.005Z

The Reaper claimed a rich crop of lefties at the end of 2008, Adrian Mitchell, Harold Pinter and Aubrey Morris among them. One of those who died was an old friend of mine, Phil Jeffries, with whom I participated in many housing and other struggles in the 1970s and 1980s.

Phil died, aged 55, on 14 December of a particularly virulent form of lung cancer – killed no doubt by the trademark roll-ups he crafted with the same meticulous care that he brought to his speciality legal work in the service of various community-based campaigns. Latterly he’d been most active around the King’s Cross railway lands development, but I knew him best from his time as an unpaid campaigner with a forensic legal eye on behalf of squatters, short-life housing residents and other badly-housed or homeless people. Literally thousands of people over the years have owed the roofs over their heads to the unsung work carried out by Phil and others around him. A long-time peace activist, he also helped found the Peace Movement Legal Support Group and establish the legal framework within which nonviolent direct action could flourish.

Last year, as the London Fire Brigade’s statistician, he and two colleagues brought the same attention to detail to bear in tracking down a hoaxer who had made 885 false 999 calls from public phone boxes in 45 days. Phil’s analysis of the pattern of calls predicted where the culprit would strike next, leading to his arrest.

Diana Shelley, Phil’s partner for 32 years, has written a tribute about him on the kingscrossenvironment.com website. ‘His final act, as a scientist dedicated to improving life for everyone,’ she writes, ‘was to leave his body to the London teaching hospitals. This means there will be no funeral, but details of an event to celebrate his life will be posted here when available.’

Spot the difference

2009-01-04T09:34:00.000Z

‘Tories poll lead cut to five points as voters turn back to Labour,’ the Guardian headline declared just before Christmas. ‘Labour has cut sharply into the Conservatives’ lead as voters turn to the government to protect them from the economic storm, according to a new Guardian/ICM poll … Today’s poll is in line with other recent surveys, making it clear that the opposition has crashed back to reality after a triumphant summer, and David Cameron is not seen as the man to revive the economy,’ it reported.

Seven days later, in the same paper: another poll, another headline. ‘End of the “Brown bounce?” New poll puts Tories five points ahead of Labour,’ this one pronounced. ‘Poll suggests that David Cameron would win a huge majority at a general election …’

Apart from the fact that the second poll was carried out by ComRes for the Independent, it’s hard to spot any difference between the two. The first poll had the Tories on 38%, Labour on 33% and the Lib Dems on 19%; the second saw the Tories on 39%, Labour 34% and the Lib Dems 16%.

We all know a week is a long time in politics, but from Conservative crash to Cameron landslide without any intervening change in voting intentions is as clear an indication as any of why it’s best not to look for too much insight in the froth of opinion poll punditry.

Time Team, Roman temples and apostrophes

2009-01-02T13:00:00.004Z

The new series of Time Team, the 16th, starts on Sunday with the discovery of a Roman temple complex in a field in Hertfordshire. It’s something of a triumph for the friendly family archaeological show because every previous attempt to identify the site of a Romano-British temple has yielded only muddy holes in the ground. On this occasion, the team has come up trumps with not one, not two, nor even three temples but at least four of the things, thereby going one better than the proverbial London bus, which only manages to arrive in bunches of three.

The Time Team website, of which I’ve been editor for the past ten years, is also enjoying a minor triumph, having survived the current carnage that is Channel 4 to celebrate its second decade in the virtual digging business with the start of the new series. The cuts at the channel mean that it has done so in much diminished form. We won a Bafta (for interactive entertainment) with the website in 2002, but certainly won’t be repeating the achievement any time soon. With almost everyone I’ve ever worked with at Channel 4 now having either left already or been made redundant in the run up to Xmas, we few freelances who somehow survived the cull cling to the scattered bits of wreckage of what used to be the organisation’s public service remit wondering how long it’s possible to stay afloat when even the lifeboats and lifejackets appear to have been dispensed with.

Sunday’s programme comes from one of those places that must drive the apostrophe pedants to apoplexy. The village of Friars Wash (population 113) has got by very nicely, thank you, without the aid of an apostrophe ever since the original friars (or friar) did their washing there (or not, depending on your view of how the placename originated). Rather like Barons Court and Earls Court in London, which are always good for throwing the Lynne Trusses of this world into confusion. Earls Court is almost invariably apostrophe-less, except on the tube map, where someone bunged one in between the 'l' and the 's'. Incorrectly, as it happens, because if you want to be pedantic about it, it should be Earls’ Court, as the reference is to the Earls of Oxford. In the case of Barons Court, there’s no baron – or barons – so make what you will of that one.

As for Friars Wash, don’t be surprised if Channel 4 gets it wrong in the TV listings and trailers. There’s no one left there to check such things.

A year of change

2009-01-01T14:53:00.001Z

Happy 2009 - and here's to a year of, erm, change (we can believe in).

Adrian Mitchell

2008-12-21T22:33:00.004Z

I’ve just returned home after a weekend of unseasonally mild weather spent trail running to learn of Adrian Mitchell’s death. The first message on the answerphone bore the news, the tone of the first words enough to know what was to follow.

I’ve known Adrian and his wife of 47 years, Celia, for a long time, and in one of those twists of life that make some think beyond coincidence to meaning and fate we’ve had much more than usual to do with each other these past few weeks. Celia and I have been engaged in wrapping up the Medical Aid for Iraq charity, of which we have both been officers since the first Gulf War. And I had been trying to get Adrian to pick up his journalistic pen again (his writing career began in journalism), specifically to write about David Tennant’s Hamlet as he’d seen all the great Hamlets of the past half-century.

As it happened, Tennant injured his back, so he wasn’t playing the part at the press night. Adrian said he was too ill to write anyway, spent the next day in hospital and was ‘desperately trying to rest’ – a notion that barely entered the vocabulary of a man who felt an almost moral imperative to fulfil every request to appear, no matter how remote the venue or small the audience. His unwillingness to rest, his reluctance to miss a reading almost certainly delayed the diagnosis and exacerbated the consequences of the pneumonia he developed this autumn. And as if his writing, his performance and his other work was not enough, he remained a tireless campaigner in the cause of peace.

In his last email to me, a week before his death, he wrote of ‘trying to get Ian Hislop to set his hounds on the New Statesman for regularly printing full page colour adverts for BAE Systems and asking his investigators to trace the effect of the ads on the editorial side of the Statesman’. I had made Adrian poetry editor of the New Statesman when I edited the magazine in the 1990s, and his was an importance influence on my editorship well beyond poetry. From Benjamin Zephaniah to Brian Patten, and from Alex Comfort to Paul McCartney, Adrian’s pages – like the man himself – sparkled with enthusiasm, commitment and verve. I’m glad that in what I never dreamed would turn out to be my final email to him, I took the time to tell him how those pages were among my proudest achievements at the Statesman.

The world will miss him, and my heart goes out to Celia and their family.

Postscript: I've just unearthed one of five poems that Robert Graves wrote in his seventies and Adrian published as part of a 'Poetry Extra' in the NS in 1994. It seems absolutely fitting to Adrian's memory:

How is it a man dies?

How is it a man dies
Before his natural death?
He dies from telling lies
To those who trusted him.
He dies from telling lies -
With closed ears and shut eyes.

Or what prolongs men's lives
Beyond their natural death?
It is their truth survives
Treading remembered streets
Rallying frightened hearts
In hordes of fugitives.

Virgin Killer: ban this image now!

2008-12-10T09:21:00.012Z

You can find the Scorpions' Virgin Killer image of a naked girl that has been causing all the fuss 32 years after it appeared as an album cover by doing a simple google search, if you're so inclined. You should even be able to access it on the Scorpions' Wikipedia page again without any problems now that the Internet Watch Foundation has lifted its ban on the page, which was adhered to by most big UK internet service providers.

Unfortunately no one is currently proposing a ban on the image that replaced that of the girl, which I'm sure you'll agree is a disturbing picture of 1970s' rock idols at the peak of their perverted powers, with no redeeming 'artistic' context of any description. It's enough to make you thank The X-Factor for giving us the straightforward kiddie-porn of Eoghan and Diana and, gawd help us, JL 'it's just like the Beatles' S.

Alas, poor Tennant lovers

2008-12-09T23:31:00.004Z

Sorry Adrian, Celia and everyone else I know who had tickets to today's press night of Hamlet starring David Tennant, but I just can't help feeling a little smug sadistic satisfaction at the fact you had to make do with his understudy instead.

I'm sure Edward Bennett, who normally plays Laertes, was brilliant. I'm told he got a standing ovation at last night's preview, after all. But let's face it, it's David Tennant who people have been paying up to £300 a black-market ticket to see (though I have seen the odd bargain - restricted view, no leg room, back of the upper circle, that sort of thing - going for £70-80 a time on ebay when no one's looking). And I've no doubt they'll be extremely miffed to find that they forked out all that dosh for someone who's never even appeared in Dr Who. It almost makes up for the fact that I never managed to buy or blag a ticket, on the press night or otherwise, for myself.

Polygamy, oral sex and the imam

2008-12-07T17:51:00.001Z

There’s been a minor furore in Holland about the controversial Hague imam Jneid Fawaz, who has a Q&A column on his mosque’s website advising Dutch Muslims about what they can and cannot do. The furore arose over his advice regarding polygamy.

‘It is not obligatory to ask permission from the first wife and it's not one of the requirements that the first wife gives her permission,’ Fawaz wrote, apparently ignoring the fact that having more than one wife is illegal in Holland.

Fawaz would have been on sounder legal ground if he’d suggested making use of the Dutch samenlevingscontract or ‘cohabitation contract’, which is available to multiple partners (of either or both sexes). It does, however, require the consent of those entering into it.

Meanwhile, for Islamophobes who may be concerned that Muslims’ use of the worldwide web is limited to hard-line propaganda and terrorist networking, there is possibly reassuring news from Fawaz’s website statistics. These show that what drives web traffic among Muslims is no different from among non-believers. The most-read of Fawaz’s Q&As all concern sex, with the top two concerning the imam’s opinion on whether oral sex (15,000 hits) and sucking a woman’s breast (12,000) are permitted under Islam.

US election not over yet

2008-12-03T16:38:00.003Z

A month after the elections were done and dusted in most of the United States, they've just found 171 new ballot forms in Ramsey County's Maplewood Precinct 6 in the Minesota Senate recount. Here the Democrats' Al Franken still harbours hopes of defeating the Republicans' Norm Coleman and adding to the pro-Obama majority in Washington. Of the new votes, 91 went to Franken, 54 to Coleman and 26 to other candidates, with the result that by Tuesday evening Coleman's lead had been cut to 303 votes. The eventual result now hinges on 6,003 ballots that have been challenged by the two candidates, with a roughly equal number being challenged by each of them.

You can judge a selection of the challenged ballots for yourself here. But if these examples are anything to go by, the final result is unlikely to change by much. The first ballot was challenged by the Coleman camp on the grounds that since the voter had plumped for McCain and Palin in the presidential election it was obviously a mistake that he or she had gone for Franken in the Senate election. And, just to make sure that the Republicans couldn't take the irrational high ground, the rejection of the second ballot on the grounds of overvoting was challenged by the Democrats, who insisted that it showed a clear preference for their candidate.

May contain nuts

2008-12-01T22:00:00.001Z

Where do you stand on grey squirrels? Bushy-tailed rats, bird-molesting monsters, shooting’s too good for them?

‘These foreign interlopers, not even European,’ as one letter-writer to my local paper had it recently, have out-eaten and out-bred the native red squirrel (not to mention spreading the squirrel parapoxvirus, to which they are immune but which kills the reds) to the point where they have all but wiped out the indigenous population in most of England and Wales. That and a large number of our native birds, too, including the London sparrow, if you believe their enemies (personally, I suspect the cats).

And now Rupert Mitford, the 6th Baron Redesdale, has set up the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership (so-called ‘because if we called it the Grey Squirrel Annihilation League people might be a bit less sympathetic’), with a reported 900 volunteers across the country, to trap, shoot and otherwise exterminate the grey invaders. He’s even been trying out traps in my neck of the north London woods.

I’ve been at war with the greys for years. They eat my bulbs, steal the bird food, empty out the window boxes in winter and bite the buds off everything in the spring. Should I care? Why are the red ones cute and the grey ones a menace? Why do we want more sparrows and fewer pigeons? And is it really true that when Redesdale passes on his shot squirrels for food they have to carry the label: ‘May contain nuts’.

Abolishing the congestion extension: an odd idea of democracy

2008-11-27T17:20:00.001Z

Boris Johnson beat Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral contest last May in big part because a lot of people wanted the right to drive their vehicles wherever, whenever and as fast as they like. Now he’s taking the first step towards paying them back for their support by announcing the abolition of the western extension to London’s congestion zone.

Actually, bicycle-riding Bojo didn’t have the ungreen guts to simply abolish the zone off his own bat. He disguised the decision as the product of a public consultation exercise. And he warned those who were ‘consulted’ that abolition would cost a lot of money, cause a lot of congestion, pollute the air in London even more than it is already and generally make life more difficult and unpleasant in the city. So he could palm off all responsibility for this environmental disaster in that bumbling Bojoish manner with a ‘Look, I did my jolly best to make the environmentalist case but the public just weren’t having it and who am I to ride my bicycle roughshod over their democratic verdict?’

The problem is that Bojo’s consultation exercise, in which he promised to ‘listen to the people of London’ and go along with whatever they said, has about as much to do with democracy as a phone-in talk show. Those who bother to express their views are those who feel strongest on the subject.

So, unsurprisingly, it’s those who were being made to pay more for the privilege of driving their petrol combustion engines through any semblance of a sensible transport and environmental policy who shouted loudest. Out of 28,000 responses (London’s electorate numbers 5,044,962, by the way), 67 per cent of individuals and 87 per cent of businesses said get rid of the zone, let us drive for free. You’d have had a similar response if you’d proposed abolishing car insurance.

Much less well-publicised has been the response to Transport for London’s mini-opinion survey on the subject. This was organised to see how representative the responses to Bojo’s consultation exercise were.

The answer is: hardly at all. In the TfL survey, only 41 per cent of individuals (out of 2,000 surveyed) favoured getting rid of the western extension and only half of businesses (out of 1,000). Thirty per cent of individuals favoured keeping it as it is and 15 per cent said they would keep it but make changes to the way it operates (such as easing restrictions in the middle of the day).

On a crude reckoning that makes a 45:41 per cent majority in favour of keeping a modified scheme – which is an odd sort of popular mandate for its abolition. If Bojo goes ahead with getting rid of it – and incurs all the costs of doing so, including the removal of signs and cameras and road marking and all the rest, as well as the estimated £70 million annual revenue loss – let it be clear that it is his decision. He should not be allowed to hide behind some floppy notion of the ‘people’ having spoken.

BNP membership list online (2)

2008-11-21T10:45:00.000Z

Council bans Christmas

2008-11-20T15:34:00.003Z

Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without the familiar seasonal reports of local authority killjoys trying to ‘ban’ it. And like the Christmas displays in the shops, which the laws of commerce now require to be in place before the first leaves fall from the trees, the reports of the bans start earlier every year. This year it was the city of Oxford that was first in the media firing line with the Oxford Mail’s ‘Council set to axe Christmas’ headline on 1 November setting the tone for a spot of ‘political correctness gone mad’-style bureaucrat bashing. The Mail even managed to rope in Sabir Hussain Mirza, chairman of the Muslim Council of Oxford, to lead a chorus of non-Christian, pro-Christmas complaint.

‘This is going to be a disaster. I’m angry and very, very disappointed,’ Mirza moaned. ‘Christmas is special and we shouldn’t ignore it. Christian people should be offended and 99 per cent of people will be against this.’

Against what, exactly? A prohibition on plum puddings and carol singing, a la Oliver Cromwell circa 1649?

Hardly. Instead, it seems the charity Oxford Inspires took the outrageous decision to call this year’s city centre festive lights switch-on a ‘Winter Light Festival’, with the idea of incorporating Hannukah, Diwali and maybe a midwinter solstice bonfire or two. There are still going to be Christmas carols and a Christmas tree and people getting outrageously drunk and shagging each other at office parties and all the other things that make up a traditional Christmas, so it’s hard to see where the axe is falling.

Anyway, as Oxford Inspires spokesman Tei Williams commented, ‘The ceremony takes place on 28 November. It's hardly Christmas if it’s November.’