100 days until I run 100 miles ...

The trouble with the countdown to the London 2012 Olympics is that it’s a constant reminder of how many days I’ve got left until I’ll be running the 100-mile ‘Ultra Tour of the Lake District’. Today it’s 100 days to the Olympic opening ceremony, which means that I’ve got 100 days left to catch up on training, stock up on calories – and try to rope in some sponsors to make attempting to run those 100 miles worthwhile.

Which is why I decided it's about time I did something about it.

That 'something' includes an occasional return to blogging. So, for anyone who is interested in why I don't spend too much time on here any more - something to do with an Olympic-year challenge of running 2012 miles in various events in 2012 - my Plattfooted blog is the place to go.

London riots: talking sense

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

Lakeland 100: the easy bit

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

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 ...

Bog hopping across Britain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Londone

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

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