Wembleyshambles

Kate Moss didn’t turn up but Pete Doherty did and Babyshambles turned in a set last night that made it worth the trip to that graveyard of English footballing aspirations called Wembley. (I said nothing about the Croatia game here last week and don’t intend to do so now. But Belarus, Andorra and Kazakhstan – the ninth biggest country in the world, bet you didn’t know that . . . aren’t you just itching for them to show us how it’s done in the World Cup qualifiers?)

I was told a possibly apocryphal tale by two lads in the Sports Bar across from the Wembley complex that the last time they’d been to a Babyshambles gig, on the Jools Holland show, Doherty’s failure to show resulted in his replacement with James Blunt of all people. Doherty himself remarked from the Wembley Arena stage: ‘They said that QPR and Babyshambles would never play at Wembley.’ Which might have been a good joke if it wasn’t for the fact that QPR have played there at least four times to my knowledge, including twice in the same year in 1982, when the FA Cup final against Spurs went to a replay.

But let’s not begrudge Doherty his moment of gloating. Given another chance to prove he can perform after a series of drug-induced disasters, he and Babyshambles seized the opportunity. Which is more than be said for the shambles of a football team who failed to turn up last Wednesday.

So Watt

No doubt Gordon Brown is telling the truth when he says that he had never heard of the property developer, David Abrahams, now revealed as Labour’s third biggest donor, before the weekend. And it may well be true that Labour’s former general secretary, Peter Watt, was the only party official to know about the circumstances behind Abrahams’ secret donations to the party.

So what.

No individual, and certainly not the party general secretary, acts in a moral vacuum. This is not a one-off error of judgement. Rather, it is only the latest example of an organisation that, despite the much-vaunted personal integrity of its leader, has lost its moral bearings on such issues.

It’s not that the individuals concerned are personally corrupt (no Labour politician has stood to gain a penny from any of the various party funding controversies of the past decade). But yet again, the need for cash has been allowed to override what ought to be the normal reservations about accepting money from dubious sources or in dubious circumstances.

From the extraordinary decision to accept Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone’s £1 million donation at the same time that Tony Blair’s first administration was granting a Grand Prix waiver on the tobacco advertising ban, through the ‘blind trusts’, the secret loans and the ‘cash for honours’ debacles, to the current ‘I hate politicians but you can put my name to a couple of hundred grand if you want’ farrago, the Labour Party has lost all sense of financial probity.

If you are going to use the devil’s money to do god’s work (or something like that), then at the very least you must do so transparently and honestly. Better still, you should avoid all large donors altogether and put a cap on donations.

But then you’d have to look for your funding from other sources instead. It would mean a renewed dependence on trade unionists who pay the political levy. It would mean having to recruit new members to replace the 200,000-plus who have left in the past ten years. And it would mean giving people a reason for paying out their hard-earned cash.

When it came to a choice between individual party members and trade unionists on the one hand and a tiny number of rich donors on the other, New Labour knew which it preferred. And so did its general secretary Peter Watt.

The price of war

‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.’

Never have Dwight D Eisenhower’s words been more apposite than they are today, as the world counts the cost of George Bush’s continuing ‘war on terror’.

Earlier this month, the US Congress joint economic committee put a figure on that cost: a cool $1.6 trillion (that’s $1.6 million million) for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone when factors such as interest on money borrowed and long-term health care for the wounded are added in.

That works out at around $21,000 for every family of four in the US, as the Democrat-controlled committee reported. Or, if you prefer, around $27,000 apiece for every man, woman and child in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republican critics of the report have disputed its figures, which its authors argue could double over the next decade. But it doesn’t take a congressional committee to work out how even a fraction of that sort of money invested in the labourers, scientists and children of Iraq and Afghanistan would have yielded a far better return against terrorism than spending it on bombing, invasion and occupation.

Nor does the price of US arms spending end there. This autumn the Senate agreed to a $459 billion budget for the Pentagon in 2008 – almost 10 per cent up on 2007. That’s another $6,000 or so from every family in the US. And it doesn’t include the projected $190 billion needed in 2008 for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (another $2,500-plus per family), which is already one third up on the original estimates.

We’re some way short of those gargantuan sums in the UK. But estimates in March put the cost of the Iraq war to the defence budget here at £5.3 billion. That’s about what Unicef estimates it would cost for a comprehensive worldwide immunisation programme for children.

Is this the worst album chart ever?

The UK music business surpassed itself this week with what could well be the worst album chart ever. Not necessarily because the music itself is invariably bad – although an awful lot of it is, often terribly so – but because it marks a new low in unoriginal, regurgitated, artificially inseminated, lowest-common-denominator crap.

I’ve nothing against X-Factor winner Leona Lewis, who has stormed to No 1 with the fastest-selling UK debut album of all time, beating the first-week sales of the Arctic Monkeys’ 2006 debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, by 12,000 copies. But the raison d’etre of the X-Factor (Saturday night viewing figures and Christmas CD sales) requires that, first, you eradicate anyone who can’t appeal to everyone, then you smooth over the rough (and original) edges of whatever raw talent is left, and finally the Granny That Is In All Of Us gets to vote for the one with the sweetest smile. Cutting edge creative, it isn’t.

And nor is what follows Leona in the charts. No 2 sees the Spice Girls recycled. At No 3 there is Westlife. Led Zeppelin come straight in from the grave at No 4, separated by only Celine Dion at No 5 from another resurrection act in the Eagles at No 6. (The Eagles, for Lennon’s sake, the ultimate ‘Only in it for the money’ band – haven’t they made enough already? Frank Zappa, where are you when we need you?)

You want more? There’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung – over and again. There are ‘best of’ compilations of one sort or another from Whitney Houston, the Rolling Stones, Beautiful South/the Houemartins, David Gray, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Van Morrison and McEffingFly. There are ‘comeback’ albums from everyone from Take That to Cliff Richard (with Craig David doing yet another remix of the same old beats in between). There’s even an album from Daniel O’Danny Boy Donnell and Mary Duff. And three from Amy Winehouse, who can certainly knock ’em out.

Dammit, I even like some of these people. It’s just that there was more variety on a 1960s’ BBC radio playlist.

Respect: take your pick

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn't go to either the 'official' Respect conference or the 'Respect Renewal' rally on Saturday. Nor did most members of Respect. Even on the highest estimates of the numbers attending, there were no more than 600 or so shared between the two events, with Andrew Murray of the Stop the War Coalition, Sami Ramadani of Iraqi Democrats Against the War and Derek Wall of the Green Party among a small group of hardy souls who attended both.

Cheerleaders for each side nonetheless regarded the turnouts as triumphs for their respective groupings. The Socialist Unity blog, for example, saw the Respect Renewal gathering as a 'huge success . . . with a truly representative cross section, young and old, men and women, black and white and Asian, Muslim and christian [the blogger's choice on which words to capitalise, by the way] and those of no faith, socialists from different traditions.' There was, apparently, 'a general mood of optimism, and also a realism about the tasks ahead, and the need to reach out and make new friendships, and alliances.'

There's another rash of 'ra-ra-ra' triumphalism about Respect Renewal on the Mac Uaid blog, as well as a report, of sorts, on the Respect conference.

Lenin's Tomb, meanwhile, is a pillar of optimism from the other side. Lenin saw Respect as 'very alive' and produced detailed accounts of a range of conference speakers to prove it, including Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union. Serwotka managed to attend two other left-wing gatherings in London that same day, those of the Labour Representation Committee and the Socialist Party, but boycotted Respect Renewal on the gorunds that George Galloway and friends are 'witch-hunting socialists'.

There are further detailed reports, on both the Respect conference and the Renewal rally, on the Socialist Worker website, but by now I expect you've lost whatever revolutionary fire was in your belly and could do with some light relief. Whatever you do, don't start reading the comments on these blogs or you'll lose the will to live. Not so much how many angels can dance on a pinhead as how many people the Bishopsgate Institute is permitted to accommodate in 'theatre-style seating'.

Got any lettuce?

A rabbit goes into a butcher's and says, 'Got any lettuce?'

The butcher says, 'No, this is a butcher's. We don't sell lettuce.'

The next day, the rabbit goes in again and says, 'Got any lettuce?'

The butcher says, 'No, this is a butcher's. We don't sell lettuce.'

The next day, the rabbit goes in again and says, 'Got any lettuce?'

The butcher says, 'No, this is a butcher's, and if you come in and ask for lettuce again I'll nail your bunny ears to the wall.'

The next day, the rabbit goes in again and says, 'Got any nails?'

The butcher says, 'No' and the rabbit says . . .

'Got any lettuce?'

Stanley's coming home

Stanley's coming home, he's coming home, he's coming ...

Hang out the bunting, break open the brandy. My daughter's phoned to say that she and her baby Stanley can go home. Until today it had been uncertain when he'd be cleared to come out of hospital. Now the doctors have said they can continue the tests and monitoring on an outpatient basis, while his drugs can be administered by his mum and dad. It means going back to the hospital every day but since they only live across the road that's no major problem.

No doubt there are more downs and ups to come, but today the sun is shining and all is well with the world.

More childish by the day

Today I managed to run the RAF Henlow 10 mile road race 38 seconds faster than I did last year – which means, in my self-deceptive way of looking at things, that I’ve managed to defy the ageing process for another 12 months.

Actually, I think I’m getting younger – okay, make that more childish – by the day. An early registration got me the number two on my running vest, which meant that everyone thought that I was one of the elite athletes or a group commander or something. I was so taken with the salutes from the men in the guardroom that I couldn’t help but play along with it all. It was only when someone started quizzing me about how many sorties I’d flown in Iraq that I made my excuses and headed for the start line.

I’ve also had it pointed out to me that I’ve been behaving like an over-excited 15-year-old on Facebook. I’m a sucker for all those applications that invite you to do things like have a food fight with your friends or answer a few questions to find out how many vices you have in common with people you’ve never met. Someone listed me among the three smartest people they know on a Q&A thingummy today – and you know what, I was flattered by it, even though I’ve never actually met the man.

Mark Steel, the SWP and Respect

One of my abiding memories of radical left activism in the UK came at the fag end of the 1984-85 miners' strike. It was a bitterly cold February morning - even London was snowbound - and I'd joined a mass picket of a coal-fuelled power station.

The strike was beginning to fray at the edges; even previously solid pits were seeing the first trickle of strikers back to work. Men who had given their all, exhausted all they'd got, physically and emotionally, were being driven to think the unthinkable.

We knew in our hearts that the strike was close to being broken. The coal stocks at the power stations had remained dispiritingly high. Electricity supplies had continued uninterrupted. If we couldn't shut down a single power station, or bring about a single power cut, even during the worst cold snap of the winter, what hope would there be with the onset of spring?

And then I heard the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, and the leader of the Labour left, Tony Benn, rallying the troops. One last heave was the gist of their message. The coal stocks were about to run out, they said explicity. The coal board and the government was on the verge of defeat. Two weeks later it was all over: there wasn't even enough strength left in the movement to negotiate the terms of our surrender.

Now I'm sure Scargill and Benn didn't see their rallying cries as dishonest, but that is certainly what they were. And I've felt ever since that one of the major failings of the left, in Britain and worldwide, has been its failure to acknowledge the scale of the defeats it has suffered over the past few decades. Those defeats have been both tactical and strategic, practical and intellectual. And few people who have remained true to any kind of alternative socialist vision of society have been honest enough to admit as much.

It doesn't really matter whether this is self-deception or outright lies. Until the left has the intellectual honesty to face up to the scale of its many defeats and failings, it doesn't have a hope in hell of moving beyond them.

From time to time, I come across people who define themselves as being of the left who have the personal and political honesty to confront these issues. Among others, I've found the Red Pepper bloggers Pennyred and Probablyblonde to be a breath of fresh air in this respect. And now, too, I can add the Socialist Workers Party stalwart, author and comedian Mark Steel to my list. The following is how he opens a commentary for the SWP internal bulletin about, among much else, the current split in Respect. It's such a refreshing read that I've posted the whole commentary on the Red Pepper forum.

Ah, the British left - what do we do to ourselves?

When I joined the SWP in 1978 I was instantly impressed by so many aspects of its ideas and methods. But one of the most decisive sides to its character was its honesty. We were proud of what we could achieve and what we could influence, but wary of the exaggerations. In particular, Tony Cliff exhibited an almost impudent scepticism towards any stories that appeared too glorious to be true. But one result of this outlook was that every success reported, no matter how apparently tiny, was genuine and a source of enormous pride.

How desperately we need a return to that honesty today. For by whatever criteria you wish to use, our party has shrunk to a shadow of the size it was even a few years ago. In many areas where the SWP once represented a chaotic pump of activity that connected with all that was vibrant, energetic and rebellious in the city, now the meetings are tiny, bereft of anyone under forty and attended out of duty. Not many years ago, in most towns you were never far from a line of hastily slapped-up Socialist Worker posters, so they were almost an accepted part of any city centre, and there must be people who supposed the council was obliged to ensure they stayed up, on grounds of maintaining local heritage. But you'd have to conduct a diligent search now to find anything of the sort ...

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A fool for Sinead

Another night on London’s South Bank, one of my favourite places on earth, where I’ve made a complete fool of myself over Sinead O’Connor, one of my favourite women on earth.

It’s not the unrequited crush I’ve had on her ever since I first heard her sing ‘I Want Your (Hands on Me)’ – to me personally, of course – around the time Neil Kinnock lost his first election in 1987. I’ve learnt to live with that. This time it was her relationship with Shane MacGowan, who happens to be one of my favourite singer-songwriters on earth.

She’d included ‘Big Bunch of Junkie Lies’ (one of my favourite songs etc etc) in her set at the Festival Hall. And as I was driving a group of friends home we ended up discussing who it was about, whether it related to the infamous incident when Sinead called the police on a drugged-up Shane and whether MacGowan could have been the musical genius that he is without also being so screwed up.

I had opinions on all three. I wasn’t convinced that ‘Junky Lies’ was about him directly; I thought Sinead called the police out of concern for him because she couldn’t think of anything else to do; and I felt that certain kinds of genius virtually require that the person concerned is a total mess in other ways.

I’d noticed that the woman in the back of the car who’d come to the concert with one of my friends wasn’t saying much, but put it down to the fact that we’d only just met. When we’d taken her home, I learnt the real reason for her silence: she was a long-term lover of MacGowan’s, who was probably wondering why this idyiot was talking such crap.