Obsolete

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

The Jess Phillips enigma.

Poor Jess Phillips. Poor, poor Jess Phillips. All she wanted was to break the mould. All she wanted was to not be one of those politicians. All she wanted was to not mouth the same old platitudes, to be 4 real, yo. She would talk about her family, her friends, bring her personal life into her politics. She would answer a straight question with a straight answer, regardless of if the answer got her into trouble. That's all she's been about.

And what did she get in return? A load of abuse, being repeatedly told to "shut up bitch", and no doubt other even more offensive things. Displaying her personality, she now realises, only leads to trouble. Those politicians who spout the party line, they just learned quicker than she did. The backlash you get for speaking your mind simply isn't worth it. Much better for all concerned to just regard each other as homogenised blocks. Politicians are all the same, the public are all the same, and nothing as a result changes. This is the realisation Jess Phillips has reached.

Phillips is angry, upset, bitter, and more than a little disingenuous in her short video polemic for the Graun. You'll note that she puts far more emphasis on her deciding to do personal, which is far as I'm aware entirely uncontroversial, and none whatsoever on the err, actual controversial statements she has made, which are only alluded to. Considering her first real burst into the media and political universe was as a result of telling Diane Abbott to fuck off, a jibe which united most opinion hacks and MPs in delight at someone saying what they've always wanted to, this seems a bit of an oversight.

To give Phillips the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she didn't realise she was being set up as this new controversialist, one of those MPs hacks turn to knowing they'll get good copy out of them. Perhaps she thought they liked her purely for being herself. Perhaps she didn't notice fellow MP of the people, always ready with a quote for the tabloids John Mann bigging her up as potential future PM. Perhaps she didn't see articles like this one from Matthew Norman which is so full of itself you aren't sure of whether or not he's taking the piss. That said, as Norman notes, Phillips is funny, as a quick glance at her Twitter feed shows.

Which only increases the mystification at why she has to make herself out to be a victim. Yes, there are a lot of people out there who aren't very bright who will take things literally, as some did to her interview with Owen Jones where she said she would knife Jeremy Corbyn in the front if she thought if he was leading Labour to disaster. Some though at that point were beyond tired with the constant sniping at Corbyn and whingng in general about the Labour leadership. Then others noted how this seemed to be the start of a pattern where Phillips would say things she knew would be controversial and then act as though she was mortally wounded by the response.

Phillips' Corbyn remarks and Abbott insult were in actual fact the least controversial of her various interactions with the press and the rest of us. If you say things as a politician that it's clear others will disagree with you about, you have to up to a point accept the criticism that comes your way. If for instance you comment that Corbyn's failure to appoint a woman to one of the "four great offices of state" was "low-level non-violent misogyny", ignoring that he appointed more women to shadow cabinet positions overall than had ever been the case before, then there's going to be blow back. If you go on Question Time and say that "a very similar situation to what happened in Cologne could be described on Broad Street in Birmingham every week where women are baited and heckled", you have to accept some are going to respond noisily and angrily. I'm reasonably sympathetic to Phillips on the latter point, as the response from the police inadvertently backed her up (merely the 5 serious sexual assaults on Broad Street in 12 weeks), but an orchestrated and organised campaign of sexual assault isn't comparable to drunken cretins and man children acting lecherously, little difference as it makes to the victims.

Phillips indeed did respond to the criticism after her misogyny remarks, accepting her "phraseology" was probably clumsy and that Corbyn wasn't a misogynist, but that her overall point was correct and she wasn't going to shut up. In fact, she considers herself the equivalent of Corbyn, being principled, keeping on banging on. Only to now almost 2 months on instead conclude that it's not possible to be a Corbyn, to be different and succeed, as it's just too tiring being shouted down.

If Phillips wanted to be a little more reflective instead of dramatic, as she herself accepts she is, then she might have added an extra argument. That yes, there are a few politicians out there who manage to be outspoken and not just communicate in soundbites, but they tend for the most part to be supremely unpleasant and respond to the criticism they get in kind. We're seeing it over in America, we see it to a lesser extent with Nigel Farage, whose they're all the same shtick could not be more tiresome.

As it is from Phillips: while it's not always the case, the "we're all the same line" often amounts to the person who says it not being willing to engage or not being bothered enough to. She could also have noted how despite the complaints, those same voters keep on putting their x in the box for the same old people, and how those who do resist by voting for someone other than the big two are punished by our winner takes all electoral system. It's not just a conspiracy of the establishment to keep things as they are: voters tell everyone that politicians are all the same, then punish parties that go through spirited internal debates for not speaking with one voice.

If you wanted to be less charitable, you might conclude that Phillips knows full what she's doing, that she enjoys the attention and positive write-ups as any MP with a sizeable ego would, but is still affected by the nastiness of the few on Twitter. Those even less charitable might connect this with the previous attempts to present the criticism she has received as trying to silence her entirely, the irony of those complaining about being silenced usually doing so as often and as loudly as possible always lost. This would be unfair, as this genuine MP does seem to be genuine in her disappointment at not being able to change things as she hoped. Still, as pleasant as Phillips appears personally, it might be an idea to recall the advice of those political sages, the Arctic Monkeys:

Assuming that all things are equal / Who'd want to be men of the people / When there's people like you?

Labels: cynicism, Jess Phillips, Labour, media analysis, politics

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3/02/2016 10:39:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

The politicians we deserve.

You know, part of me really wants to look at the latest cash for access scandal, or whatever it is you want to call it, see the MPs ensnared, indulge in a bit of schadenfreude and leave it at that. Couldn't have happened to a nicer couple of politicians, barring Nadine Dorries, John Hemming or a whole load of others you could name. Good old "Rockets" Rifkind, who made a career out confusing people into thinking his innate pomposity was gravitas, and had never seemed happier than as chairman of the government's committee for whitewashing the intelligence agencies. As for Jack Straw, what more is there to be said for the torture authorising (allegedly), prison building, dictator fawning war criminal? Well plenty, but let's not extend ourselves too much.

Except the whole thing's a bit well, underwhelming, isn't it? If you thought the previous sting by the same people was lacking in evidence of any wrongdoing as opposed to the suggestion there could be in the future, which memorably saw Stephen Byers describe himself as a "cab for hire", this one's even less convincing. Dispatches could barely fill its half-hour time slot with the secret recordings of Rifkind n' Straw, and instead went to the expense of showing what both look like in cartoon form, presumably to eat up some time. As previously, it was more they looked dodgy as filmed by hidden cameras, as most people will shot at an angle, something Newsnight dared to suggest, than anything else. Then we heard the familiar boasts and exaggerations, which an awful lot of people will make if there's the possibility of some lucrative work in the offing. Straw had "gone under the radar" to a former Ukrainian prime minister for a client, using a mixture of "charm and menace", neither of which are qualities you'd normally associate with the Blackburn MP.

Rifkind was even more effusive. You'd be surprised how "much free time" he has, despite his parliamentary commitments, and in any case, he considers himself self-employed rather than, err, a public servant. Not apparently realising the seriousness of having seen pound signs before his eyes, he then went on the Today programme and informed the listeners of BBC Radio Middle Class you can't expect people of his calibre to get by on a piffling £67,000 a year. Most probably nodded sagely and then switched over to Grimmy.

"Rockets" has since claimed he's been terribly stitched up, and that he wouldn't for a moment have dreamed of lobbying on behalf of a Chinese firm in his capacity as an MP. Instead his suggestion of contacting ministers without revealing his motives was to be done in a private capacity, one would have to assume, or at least would have been his explanation to the standards commission, since rendered fairly academic by his decision to stand down at the election. Straw has long since announced his "retirement", although he clearly believed he was due to receive a peerage, as he would be able to help "even more" as a Lord. There is perhaps a more prima facie case of breaking the rules for Straw in that he hosted the meetings in his parliamentary office, but hardly the most serious when compared to, ooh, signing off on the rendition of people back to Gaddafi's torture dungeons.

It's never so much the details in these exposes though as it is the sheer fact MPs have been caught looking comprised at all. It just invites the "snouts in the trough" and "all the same" lines we've heard beyond the point of tedium. It's also distinctly odd that we have such double standards over individual MPs' interests as opposed to those of their parties: conferences barring the Lib Dems' long since ceased being about policy and instead became an opportunity for a week of lobbying. The Conservatives for their part advertise how they can be influenced, as pointed out before: just the £50,000 "donation" gets you access to the Leader's Group, where you can schmooze with Cameron and Osborne of an evening a couple of times a year. Just the other week they were auctioning off "prizes" such as going for a run with Iain Duncan Smith, shoe-shopping with Theresa May, or a back-scuttle in a bus stop with Boris, as though such activities would be the only subject up for discussion. Everyone points and laughs for a day or so, a few say how corrupt it all is, and then it's back to normal.

Only as we're so close to the election Labour's seized on the idea of trying to get an advantage where there almost certainly isn't one. Miliband's suggestion of imposing a cap on earnings from outside interests to 10 or 15% of an MP's salary seems to be neither one thing or the other: it won't put an end to the claims of MPs' being bought, while it could have the perverse effect of stopping MPs from being able to work as barristers, GPs, or carrying on running a family business as some currently do. As suspect and self-serving as the yelps from those extremely well renumerated for directorships and "advice" to businesses are, the last thing we want is a further professionalising of politics when that other cry is MPs don't have a clue as they've never had an ordinary job.

It's easy to be cynical about politics, as this blog proves on a daily basis. £67,000 a year for working a number of hours broadly comparable to that of a teacher is more than a decent wage, not far off 3 times the national average. Or at least it seems that way on the surface. Factor in constituency work though, the arcane Commons practices currently being spotlighted in the BBC2 series, the way so many seem to think the absolute worst of their representatives, not always wrongly, and how in the current media environment you are essentially never off duty as it were, your every move and comment there to be scrutinised, filmed and tweeted, and you'd have to be either a masochist or a true believer in the idea of public service to want to be an MP.

This isn't of course to excuse Rifkind or Straw, god forbid, who proved to be just as gullible and potentially grasping as plenty of other mortals, but the last thing needed is further restrictions on individuals when the entire system of political funding is so open to abuse. Hence why it's possible something akin to Miliband's proposal could yet become law while all sides will continue to prevent the reform of party funding. Frankly, we often get the politicians we deserve.

Labels: cynicism, Jack Straw, lobbying, Malcolm Rifkind, political scandals, politics

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2/24/2015 09:13:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

The internet makes you stupid.

Back in those heady web 1.0 days, there was a site called Something Awful (and there still is, just the cool kids have long since moved on). Its tagline was and again, could still be, the internet makes you stupid. As this was back when the net was still mainly used only by nerds, gamers, autodidacts and bored office workers rather than your grandmother and her bridge group, it was a fairly cutting if not meant entirely seriously barb at the numbskulls who read the site and populated its forums.

Jump forward all these years and a few people seem to have noticed that hey, this internet thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. In fact, you could say that it's making people even stupider than was believed possible. There are now so many listicle articles online that a whole section of rainforest in Brazil has been cut down to make way for the world's biggest ever server hub to host just them. A scientific study has found that if a mouse so much as catches a glimpse of a screen displaying Buzzfeed, it causes a complete loss of spatial awareness that can last for up to 5 hours. Likewise, YouTube's most subscribed user PewDiePie has been identified as the common factor in a whole range of pet suicides, with goldfish jumping up out of their tanks rather than listen to him scream again, their incredibly short memory no apparent protection.

Add in how Twitter is the Stasi for the Angry Birds generation (© Stewart Lee), Facebook is mostly used for talking to people you don't want to, with a sideline in slut-shaming and/or stalking your exs, as they often go hand in hand, while Instagram gives new meaning to the word narcissism, and you'd be hard-pushed to claim the net isn't a fresh hell we just like to pretend has enriched our lives. Unless of course you're Holly Baxter, in which case you more or less accept the above, then say actually the internet is a great leveller, a meritocratic paradise as without it she wouldn't be able to pay the rent.

To which the obvious response is Baxter is indeed the very epitome of meritocracy in action, as is Pewds. So long as you can do something reasonably competently in a specified niche, whether it be writing click-bait with a vaguely feminist edge or let's plays with the kind of commentary that entertains pre-teens and teens who've been held back a year at school, there's an extremely remote chance you can make it in this brave new media environment. For every Baxter however there are thousands of frustrated and bitter commentators who imagined their searing political insight might lead somewhere, only to come to realise they may as well be howling at the moon. And for every PewDiePie or Yogscast, never mind a Zoella, there are umpteen vloggers or let's players whose total views can be counted on the fingers of the participants in a Dominique Strauss-Kahn orgy. Much of their material will also be far superior in content to their erstwhile rivals, but hey, dem's the breaks.

But, but, but I hear you spluttering, what about all the money raised thanks to the internets, the very fact it provides somewhere for subcultures to thrive, how without it we'd never have discovered that band, seen that film, gotten that STI from the one night stand made possible by Tinder? Haven't you said before the web can be a sanctuary for those bullied and repressed, as much as it can mean there's no escape from those same oppressors? Isn't the very idea of a life not lived online now completely alien to your average teenager, both for better and worse? And, moreover, isn't it a bit naive if not well, stupid, to complain about the hypercapitalism of the internet and its monopolistic tendencies when it had its origins in the goddamn Department of Defense?

Duh. The problem is the only kind of shades of grey the internet likes are contained in those Twilight fan-fiction originating books. Everything is turned up to 11: a television journalist lies about coming under fire in Iraq, and soon he's getting photoshopped into being at the last supper, because that's funny, right? The internet can't possibly be a bad thing, just as social networking can't possibly be a bad thing, because look it's not all trolling and celebrity inanity and identity politics and pointless arguing. Besides, it's the old media, and the old media is always wrong and biased and wrong.

As if to prove the point, Andrew Keen's book of course recognises there will always be your Holly Baxters and Dapper Laughs and Sam Peppers, but Baxter was responding to what she thought was his argument, just as I'm responding to what I think are their arguments. The reality is the internet reflects life in general, even if some of us use it to escape from that reality. The key difference is the web sees far more in the way of rebellions than we do offline, as it's a whole lot easier than manning the barricades. Just don't take that as an indication of there not being the same anger, disappointment or even apathy just below the surface at the state of the world. Such rebellions don't though discriminate, and often shout things we don't want to hear. Life in general is a bit shit, and so too is the internet. And that's all there is.

Labels: Andrew Keen, cynicism, Holly Baxter, INTERNET REVOLUTION, media analysis, social networking websites

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2/10/2015 10:04:00 pm | Permalink |

Monday, August 04, 2014

Funeral march for agony's last edge.

WORLD LEADERS ATTEND WWI CENTENARY EVENTS

REMEMBRANCE AND LEARNING THE LESSONS THE MAIN THEME

"MOST ENDURING LEGACY IS OUR LIBERTY," SAYS DAVID CAMERON. "WE MUST NEVER FORGET."

KEY QUOTES:

"When you think that almost every family, almost every community was affected, almost a million British people were lost in this war, it is right that even 100 years on, we commemorate it, we think about it and we mark it properly." -- David Cameron.

“The first world war will serve as a reminder of the brutality of conflict for generations to come and a reminder to those in power to avoid entering war unless it is absolutely necessary.” -- Ed Miliband.

"Thanks for fucking up the Boche while we got our shit together Belgium." -- Prince William.

"I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can't help it — I enjoy every second of it." -- Winston Churchill

In other news:

Fighting in Libya rages three years after Western intervention

Fighting in Iraq rages eleven years after Western intervention

Insurgency in Afghanistan continues thirteen years after Western intervention, recount in disputed presidential election goes on

Fighting in Gaza rages as politicians umm and arr over what is and isn't disproportionate at the same time as resupplying the Israeli military

REMINDER:

Turn your lights out tonight between 10 and 11 to demonstrate your depth of feeling for the sacrifice made by those who fought to secure our freedom. If you find your attempts to knock yourself out aren't working, please tweet @lightsoutcompliance with your location and a NHS-sanctioned unconsciousness consultant will visit to ensure your conformity with this entirely voluntary and by no means redundant gesture.

Labels: cynicism, history, mockery, politics, WWI

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8/04/2014 05:26:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Here's to you, Mr Robinson. (And the Quilliam Foundation.)

It's been an eventful few weeks for Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation, or as I've taken to calling them, the Quill.i.am Foundation. Apart from writing a guest post for this blog on his revolutionary tweeting of the Jesus and Mo cartoon, an act that sparked more of a spat over how broadcasters and newspapers also censored the horrendously unfunny web comic than it did over how Nawaz had received death threats for saying he didn't find it offensive, he's also been deeply concerned at the treatment ex-EDL leader Tommy Robinson has been subjected to in prison.

Not for Nawaz a simple denunciation of the alleged deliberate leaving of Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, in a room with three men who took a disliking to his face at HMP Woodhill. No, such an incident required an open letter to the Lord Chancellor and the justice secretary (PDF) expressing his disquiet, as well as how he was worried it could reinforce Robinson's "perceived grievances" against the state and undo all his good work in persuading Robinson to quit the EDL in the first place. You see, "decapitating" the far-right street protest organisation had clearly been in the public interest, and Nawaz dreads to think what might happen if Robinson wound up dead.

Just how in the public interest Nawaz believed his good deed in extracting Robinson from the EDL to be, despite Robinson not retracting any of his previous statements, was revealed in a freedom of information request to the Department of Communities and Local Government. Despite Nawaz claiming that Quill.i.am had not received state funding since 2010, something undermined by another FOI request which showed that, although much reduced, they had still received a substantial grant for the following year, on the very day as Robinson was presented to the press as having left his inciting days behind him Nawaz was begging the DCLG for funding to help facilitate Robinson's defection. He obviously couldn't continue to live off donations to the EDL, so why shouldn't the state recognise such an important contribution to community cohesion and cough up?

Strangely, despite the polite request, the DCLG demurred (pay wall). Without wanting to surmise too much about why the DCLG decided not to donate to the keep Tommy Robinson/Stephen Yaxley-Lennon in the manner to which he was accustomed fund, it's difficult not to suspect that like some of us, they might just have felt the entire Damascene conversion was not all that it appeared. With Robinson now detained at Brenda's pleasure, something that both he and Nawaz must have known was likely, and with the EDL already falling apart, having failed to capitalise on the murder of Lee Rigby, it was the perfect time for Robinson to claim he was leaving because he couldn't control the "extremists" any longer. As Nawaz reveals in his letter, it's also clear how desperate Quilliam was, without a budget to fund their most high profile act of deradicalisation. Deprived of state funding it's unclear how the thinktank is staying afloat, although that's far from unique as many other thinktanks also refuse to disclose who their benefactors are.

Due to a lamentable oversight, the letters to the department were however published with Nawaz's personal mobile phone number not redacted. Such a breach of privacy would be unacceptable even if Nawaz hadn't been receiving threats, regardless of the credibility or lack of them. All the same, Nawaz seemed to put the blame as much on Jason Schuman, who had also placed an FOI request, as Richard Bartholomew notes. Threatening legal action or responding to criticism with insults is something Quilliam has a record for: Craig Murray faced down just such a threat, while Vikram Dodd was attacked after he revealed Quilliam had secretly profiled Muslim organisations for the government.

As Sunny Hundal argued back then, government funding of certain groups and not others only increases suspicions, and Nawaz's begging for money for having "turned" Robinson does everything to reinforce those prejudices. For an organisation that started off so promisingly, Quilliam's reputation now lies in the gutter. To have a chance of recovering it will almost certainly need new leadership, and with Nawaz the prospective Liberal Democrat candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn, there's a ready explanation available should he feel it's time to move on.

Labels: cynicism, EDL, English Defence League, Islamists, Maajid Nawaz, politics, Quilliam Foundation, radicalisation, Tommy Robinson

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2/11/2014 11:31:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Meet the new boss.

Put yourself for a moment in the shoes of Tommy Robinson, or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, or whatever the now former leader of the English Defence League's real name is. From once being a small time member of the BNP, he succeeded in creating an organisation which became the most powerful far-right street movement since the National Front. You can't properly enjoy such a position of influence though when you're constantly assailed by your opponents as being a racist dedicated to undermining community cohesion, to the point where your friends are (allegedly) refused service just for being with you, or indeed when you apparently get ejected from a Milton Keynes casino on the grounds that you're a thug and therefore not welcome at the roulette wheel. Why anyone would want to be in a Milton Keynes casino in the first place is a good question, but let's leave that to one side.

When the Quilliam Foundation then offers to reinvent you as an completely legitimate political commentator, why on earth wouldn't you take them up on it? After all, you already made an abortive attempt to get involved in a political party, so why not square the circle and form a new campaigning organisation almost exactly the same as the EDL, merely without the embarrassing street protests that made you so notorious and loathed? What's more, Quilliam for their part will ignore all the evidence that makes clear you're still a thug who's read a few far-right blogs and books and so knows that Islam simply must have a reformation, and instead present you as someone who merely needs "encouraging" in your "critique of Islamism". Who wouldn't sign up when a (formerly, see update below) government-funded think-tank simply decides to forget that you deliberately conflated Islamic extremism and Islam in general on innumerable occasions?

Where Hope Not Hate offers cautious optimism, I give you absolute cynicism. Because that's exactly what this hilarious move by both Robinson and Quilliam is, the height of cynicism. If Robinson had truly long been worried about the extremism lower down the ranks in the EDL, he wouldn't have joined the balaclava wearing idiots who thought it a good idea to confront the police on the night of the murder of Lee Rigby, nor would he less than a week ago have humiliated himself by attempting to intimidate one of the authors of EDL News, instead going to the abode of a completely different Gary Moon.

The reality is that the EDL had reached a dead end, as was evident with the failure of the Tower Hamlets march. Just a matter of months after Lee Rigby's murder, a crime they had long predicted and which they tried their darnedest to exploit, they couldn't even manage to equal the numbers that had marched through the borough a couple of years ago. This was despite attempting to portray the area as being under sharia law, and challenging the ban on marching through Whitechapel itself.

On a personal level, as alluded to above, Robinson had become too notorious to lead a normal life when he wasn't with his beer-swilling mates encouraging and fomenting hate. After all, what is this country coming to when the leader of a far-right organisation whose members have been convicted of countless offences can't pick his children up without getting nervous glances? Abandoning a moribund movement with the help of a counter-extremism think-tank while not renouncing a single thing you've previously said makes absolutely perfect sense.

As for that other moribund organisation, Quilliam, it makes sense for them too. Having started out promisingly, it quickly showed itself to be intolerant of criticism and more than happy to denounce Muslim organisations it decided were Islamist in nature, regardless of what others saw as a positive contribution to their local communities. Being a counter-radicalisation think-tank is also rather difficult when your raison d'etre has plunged down the political agenda; Quilliam has been pretty much reduced to commenting on Islamist movements abroad, which while a public good considering the lack of specialist knowledge elsewhere, doesn't realise justify continued public funding, if indeed they are still receiving it.

"Persuading" Robinson and Kevin Carroll to abandon their movement suits both sides. It means Robinson can join up with his even more extreme pals in America, as now seems likely, his baggage with the neo-Nazis among the EDL a thing of the past, while Maajid Nawaz can claim he's pulled off something that will benefit the country as a whole. In fact, he's handed legitimacy to a convicted criminal still facing further charges, and who hasn't altered his virulent views as much as looked to rebrand them. The problem they now face is that this discredits them equally, and Quilliam has a lot further to fall than Robinson does.

Slight update: Maajid Nawaz says that Quilliam hasn't received public funding since 2010, as Spinwatch suggested above. We don't know who does fund Nawaz and friends however, as despite the promises made on their website, you won't be able to find any annual reports there.

Labels: cynicism, EDL, English Defence League, Islamists, Maajid Nawaz, politics, Quilliam Foundation, radicalisation, Tommy Robinson

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10/08/2013 09:43:00 pm | Permalink |

Monday, August 13, 2012

Reality bites.

Well, the less said about the closing ceremony the better, yes? There are after all enough innate contradictions in Jessie J's Price Tag dirge without her arriving to sing it in the back of a Rolls-Royce, in surroundings which confirm that err, yes, it really is all about the money.

Musical apocalypse aside, even a hardened pessimist such as myself has to admit the last two and a bit weeks have been both a success and thoroughly enjoyable. Despite the media's overwhelming positivity though, the Graun's poll on whether it was all worth it is hardly as conclusive as portrayed; 55% compared to 35% thinking it was is a percentage that will soon fall if, as expected the Olympics hasn't done as much for the economy as the coalition insisted it would. The far from universal euphoria will soon fizzle out (And check also the depressing numbers that, while supporting multiculturalism, still think that immigrants don't bring anything positive).

Some of the waste involved has been obscene, none more so than the ridiculous levels of security. According to the police up until Friday they had made a grand total of just less than 250 arrests, the vast majority of which were for ticket touting. Would a minister now like to remind us just why there was a need to put missile silos on the top of blocks of flats, or indeed why we had to have the Zil lanes that went almost completely unused? There was also no need whatsoever to close off vast swathes of land surrounding the areas where the events where being held, but such were the restrictions we were told were necessary.

As should now be obvious, the only thing the Olympics is really about is the sport. If they provide something resembling a legacy to deprived parts of London then that's a bonus. Instead, apart from the left over buildings and arenas, the one other likely to remain is yet another poxy unneeded shopping mall. Much of the responsibility for this does have to be levelled at the Blairites who convinced themselves the Olympics was just what London needed, and whom inevitably fell completely for the commercialisation of everything. Remember Tessa Jowell introducing the horrid logo, informing us all that this was a "iconic brand"? Everything followed on from there, and if we needed any further confirmation then the "VISA party" to mark the closing of the Beijing Olympics provided it.

Considering those involved in the planning then, that everything went almost entirely smoothly barring a few minor hiccups to begin with was a bonus. A successful games wasn't enough though, 65 medals for "Team GB" or not. Heaven forfend that everything built specially for the games should then be handed over to local communities to enjoy and run, as that would just be a waste. Hence the early sale of the Olympic village to the Qataris, and more is likely to follow. When David Cameron sets a ludicrous target of bringing in £1bn in investment, he sets himself up to fail. Everyone enjoys a change for a couple of weeks, being in a different city that bends over backwards to welcome the foreign guests and athletes, and then they move on to the next one. This is what the modern Olympics is about, as Sydney, Athens and Beijing have demonstrated. Rather than indulging in fantasies, we could have been realistic. For all the excitement and achievements of all and sundry, it's now back to earth with a bump. Still, hows about Jess Ennis, Mo Farah and Usain Bolt, eh?

Labels: Blairites, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, cynicism, London, London 2012, Olympics, politics, sport, Tessa Jowell

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8/13/2012 12:44:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Let's do something very British: make the best of it.

I apologise in advance if this shocks anyone, but I have a confession to make. I didn't watch the opening ceremony live. I'll just let that sink in for a second.

Yes, it's true. I took one look at the pre-released extract of the nurses dancing and thought, nope, don't think I'll bother. And on that, I stand by my initial opinion: fine sentiment, not quite as good execution. As for the rest, well, it was crap, but it was crap in the best possible way. Certainly nowhere near as crap as China's reprise of 1936, or worse yet, the handover segment from the closing ceremony last time round (my predictions for the opening ceremony were thankfully not proved correct, although I was, sadly, part right about Amy Winehouse). It still had to involve the Queen, David Beckham and Seb Coe, but dear old Brenda seemed bored near to tears by the whole thing, while Seb talked out of his foot as could be expected. The bits that nearly raised it above crap were the forging of the rings and the inspired decision not to give the lighting of the cauldron to one person; I'd had a horrible premonition it was going to be Brenda doing the honours.

Some people, naturally, wanted to read far too much into it. Not just Aidan Burley, who dug himself a hole so deep he must be somewhere near Australia currently, but also Pollyanna Toynbee, who laments that Danny Boyle's vision of a "deep-dyed social democratic nation" is being torn apart by the coalition. Fair enough, the current government is a disaster, but are we really deep-dyed social democratic? Let's not kid ourselves here. That it also annoyed a certain section of right-wingers who detected socialism, political correctness or any of the other modern British "cultural evils" in it says far more about them than it does about Boyle's direction or Frank Cottrell Boyce's script. Indeed, if anything it reflects how they've become out of touch, rather than it being the other way around.

If the media as a whole appeared to love the opening, then we could perhaps have relied on the Mail to play at least one discordant note. Given the chance to sound off in the Mail Online's RightMinds comment section, Rick Dewsbury managed to make all the other criticisms and complaints seem insignificant by comparison. It wasn't just the celebration of the NHS when it's a system that occasionally fails, it was the completely unrealistically portrait it painted of mixed-race relationships:

This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up.

Almost, if not every, shot in the next sequence included an ethnic minority performer. The BBC presenter Hazel Irvine gushed about the importance of grime music (a form of awful electronic music popular among black youths) to east London. This multicultural equality agenda was so staged it was painful to watch.

Almost immediately realising this was just a teeny bit beyond the pale, the piece was quickly edited so something approaching the opposite was stated:

This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but such set-ups are simply not the ‘norm’ in any part of the country. So why was it portrayed like this and given such prominence? If it was intended to be something that we can celebrate, that two people with different colour skin and different cultural heritages can live harmoniously together, then it deserves praise. But what will be disturbing to many people is top-down political manipulation – whether consciously or unthinkingly – at a major sporting event.

Before the Mail realised it was on a hiding to nothing and the piece simply disappeared. Luckily, John Walker managed to capture it before it disappeared down the memory hole. That perhaps not everything in the ceremony was meant to be taken literally, as the last time I checked nurses no longer wear those sort of uniform, and James Bond is, err, fictional, seems to have passed some people by.

It is after all possible to think the opening was better than it could have been and enjoy the sport while still loathing the ridiculous levels of security, the areas being closed off for the duration to the public, the privileges demanded by the Olympic "family" and the sponsors, and the likelihood that there will be no real legacy to speak of despite all the promises, as Andrew Gilligan points out. It is an incredible waste of money, but let's make the best of it while it's on, eh?

Labels: cynicism, Danny Boyle, London, London 2012, Olympics, sport

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7/31/2012 07:11:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Outsourcing the blame.

There's one thing about the G4S Olympic security fiasco that seems to have passed everyone by: government ministers have barely directed a single word of criticism at the company itself. Take a look at Theresa May's second statement to the Commons yesterday, and if you can find her so much as saying G4S are a bit crap then you win a cookie. What she did claim was that the Home Office had absolutely no idea that G4S was unlikely to be able to fulfil its contract, and that it was completely untrue that James Brokenshire had been told about it in advance. While the hapless Nick Buckles didn't quite contradict the equally hopeless May, during his evidence to the Home Affairs select committee he did say officials knew about problems with "scheduling", and that he had had contact with Brokenshire. There was however confirmation from Buckles that the government was first told there could be a problem on the 3rd of July, 12 days before May made the announcement to parliament last Thursday, and also supposedly only the day after she herself was told there was likely to be a shortfall.

Fairly obvious is that for whatever reason, G4S and the government have drawn up something resembling a non-aggression pact. No minister has so much as criticised Buckles, let alone called for him to resign, and seemingly in return, Buckles didn't say anything today to throw the spotlight back on the government. Indeed, he took the ire of the committee entirely on his own shoulders, as part of an apparent masochism strategy. Yes, he agreed that the entire thing was a shambles, even though Theresa May had denied that was the case last week, and he accepted that this was a disaster for G4S's reputation, which is quite saying something considering the company's history. He won't though be resigning, and the company will still be taking the £57m management fee it so richly deserves, regardless of how astonishing someone as jumped-up as Keith Vaz thinks that is.

Neither it seems will Theresa May, or for that matter anyone at Locog, who signed the contract in the first place be losing their jobs. That G4S had never before provided over 10,000 security officials for one specific event was no barrier to their being awarded the contract, and besides, as far as they were concerned it wasn't for the money involved, as they'd only be making a measly £10m profit had everything gone smoothly. It was more to simply be involved with the games, as nothing provides a boost quite like being the company responsible for the pat downs everyone entering the various events enjoys. Instead that job will now fall partially to our wonderful armed forces, who are as MP after MP stood up to say yesterday the finest in the world. You might think that the finest soldiers in the world deserve better than to be tasked at the last minute with clearing up the mess left after an outsourcing disaster, able to take the holidays they'd booked in advance, or even say get married, but apparently not.

Truly key it seems to the coalition is that the outsourcing bonanza continues. It is after all relying on the privatisation of vast swathes of the public sector in order to bring the deficit down, or so it's claimed. Really going to town on G4S wouldn't have helped anything when they're expected to be the main beneficiaries of the outsourcing of back office police work, or indeed the contracting out of probation, to say nothing of the continuing selling off of the prison estate. That unfortunate things like the death of Jimmy Mubenga take place is to be expected, and the guards who restrained him will not now face manslaughter charges anyway, as his death could have just as much been caused by "a combination of factors such as adrenalin, muscle exhaustion or isometric exercise", to quote the CPS decision not to prosecute. No one truly believes the Olympic shambles has compromised security, even if ministers and the likes of Seb Coe keep saying it hasn't in an apparent attempt at proving the opposite, so what's the fuss? Just sit back, enjoy the circus, and you'll soon forget this ever happened.

Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, cynicism, London, London 2012, Nick Buckles, Olympics, politics, sport, Theresa May

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7/17/2012 07:36:00 pm | Permalink |

Thursday, July 12, 2012

And so it's almost here.

There is no question, Theresa May informed us today, of the security of the Olympics being compromised. Well, no, there clearly isn't. When you've already got more troops in evidence around the Olympic park than we currently have in Afghanistan, with another 3,500 now required to make up for the numbers G4S haven't been able to provide, missile silos on roofs, fighter jets on standby and an assault ship moored on the Thames, London is nothing if not secured. What it's being secured against isn't entirely clear, seeing as the threat level remains stubbornly at "substantial" rather than the critical setting it was at for years under New Labour, but you can never be too careful. And for those with a conspiratorial mindset, can it really just be a coincidence that there are thousands of squaddies in London just in time for the anniversary of the riots, considering how critical our holidaying politicians were of the Met's initial response?

As for it being a shambles, well, what else is new? Also mysterious is that it's only now that commentators are being fully critical of the entire set-up: the obscene sponsorship deals, which meant that workers at the site could only buy chips with fish at vendors other than McDonald's, until Locog stepped in (although customers, i.e., those that have bought tickets and should therefore within reason be allowed to do whatever the hell they like while in attendance, will still only be able to buy chips on their own and with anything other than fish from McDonald's), the sell-off of the Olympic village to the Qataris, as they clearly haven't bought up enough of the capital already, the "VIP lanes" for officials and general travel chaos that will ensue, and of course, the almost constant presence of Seb Coe and Boris Johnson on our screens.

Oddly enough, the one thing that has gone well so far has been the torch relay, if you can manage to overlook its origins at the 1936 games and how the Chinese last time round used it as propaganda bludgeon. Yes, we've had to put up with the likes of Will.i.am bearing it despite his contribution to the musical apocalypse, and how it isn't so much a relay as a bus tour of England with occasional stop-offs, but it really does mean something to those ordinary people chosen to hoist the flame aloft, even if it is only for 300 metres. As for everyone else, it's impossible to know to how we'll remember the games until the err, actual sport begins. I suspect once everything gets going that the events themselves will go off without any hitches, while everyone trying to do something that isn't connected to what's going on at the venues around the country can go hang for the duration.

The truth is it was ever thus. All things going well, after the games the Olympic stadium is likely to be the new home of West Ham United; not so in China, where the magnificent Bird's Nest stadium has been little more than a tourist attraction since, or in Greece, where most of the other venues have been decaying since 2004. The entire point of the Olympics and indeed the World Cup in the modern era seems to be to provide long-term benefit not to the hosts, but to the sponsors and organisers. If there are some positives for the localised area where they're hosted, then that's just a bonus. Despite the initial scaremongering, few would disagree that the dual hosting of the Euros by Poland and Ukraine this summer was something of a triumph, but whether that will translate into long-term benefits through an increase in tourism is doubtful in the extreme.

Politicians who would never of dreamt of spending £9bn solely on regenerating the East End have naturally oversold the games from the beginning. What was a vastly expensive New Labour vanity project has become a happy diversion for the coalition, hoping above hope that everything goes well, that it boosts the economy a little and might just manufacture a feel good factor. Yeah, right. There were also additional bonuses, at least according to Seumas Milne, one minister saying the Olympics were a "tremendous opportunity to showcase what the private sector can do in the security space". Well, quite. Mainly though, as long as there aren't any more disasters, it'll fill the papers during the silly season with nonsense (no change there then) overwhelming any stories about how useless the government continues to be. And considering the year they've had, that'll be enough. Whatever conclusion the rest of us reach will be irrelevant, as our views have been from the beginning.

Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, cynicism, London, London 2012, Olympics, politics, sport

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7/12/2012 09:11:00 pm | Permalink |

Friday, January 07, 2011

What does £50,000 get you these days?

A quick one: £50,000 (and just check those terms and conditions; you can't claim the reward if you're related to the person eventually convicted, even if you turn him or her in) goes into £40,000,000, the Sun and News of the World's operating profit in 2008-09, eight thousand times. Even in the incredibly unlikely event that the paper has to payout the reward, it won't have even began to consider making such an offer without being certain that it either could recoup or has already recouped that amount from extra sales as a result of its coverage of the Joanna Yeates case.

This isn't to say that there isn't a pure motive lurking somewhere in the Sun's offer of such a substantial reward, and if it does indeed help to catch her killer, no one is going to quibble. It does however encourage the paper to keep up the sensationalist, tasteless and potentially contemptuous coverage which has characterised the entire tabloid media's pursuit of the story so far, even if the trail goes entirely cold, as it did so fatefully three years ago in Portugal. So even if it is somewhat an attempt to make up for the disgraceful coverage of the arrest of Chris Jefferies, it will almost certainly lead to further such prejudicial content. Everyone's a winner. Apart from Jo Yeates, her friends and her family, and anyone else subsequently arrested as a suspect and later released without charge. Can't help and please everyone though, can you?

Labels: crime, cynicism, Joanna Yeates, Scum-watch, Sun-watch, tabloids

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1/07/2011 10:34:00 pm | Permalink |

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Insert rhyme or "joke" about labour here.

Westminster was rocked to its foundations yesterday after the revelation that a woman is expecting a baby in September.

One source, speaking to Obsolete through a speculum, raved: "This changes absolutely everything. Never before has a woman been pregnant during a general election campaign. The manifestos of all the main parties will have to be completely rewritten as a result. How can Gordon Brown possibly continue with his message of Labour investment against Tory cuts now?"

The nation's press were equally awestruck by the developments. Many were so stunned that they genuinely thought that rhyming Sam Cam with "mam" was amusing, while the Daily Mail settled upon "SAM'S HAVING A BABYCAM!", in an apparent reference to Babycham, which absolutely no one got. Pages were filled with the political implications of the leader of the opposition's wife having a child, the Guardian noting in a by no means pretentious aside that "the fact she will be pregnant will give her presence on the campaign trail greater piquancy". This unfortunately resulted in the news about small matters like parliamentary corruption being shifted to page 94, to give space to Zoe Williams to write about how this changes everything in an entertaining and certainly not interminable fashion.

There was also certainly no ulterior motives in the announcement being made yesterday. That on Sunday there was an embarrassing photoshoot featuring Glam Sam Cam (soon to be mam) in the tabloids, something knocked entirely off the news agenda with the news of the pregnancy, was just a coincidence, and an unintended side effect. No one would ever be so cynical with such happy news.

One thing was however cleared up yesterday. Everyone had previously assumed that David Cameron was referring to his wife when he discussed his "secret weapon". It's now apparent that he was in fact talking about his cock.

Labels: Conservatives, cynicism, David Cameron, mockery, Samantha Cameron

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3/23/2010 09:36:00 pm | Permalink |

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

The problem with the election of Obama for our own parliamentary equivalents is that it doesn't exactly show them in the most flattering light. Here's a master of oratory who's managed to inspire millions to go to the polls, and here's our bunch, left looking like a stood-up date on a particularly filthy evening. Whilst we've learned the lesson the hard way about charisma and the apparent "everyman" quality, you're still left absolutely bewildered, wondering where our own personal Obama might suddenly come from. With no suitable candidate in sight, we instead have to make do with both Gordon Brown and David Cameron fighting over which of them is most like Obama, reminiscent of two little boys at school squabbling over who the new girl likes the most.

Appropriately enough, the anti-Barack Obama decided upon today of all days to stick her head above the parapet and talk about something she clearly has absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever. I'm talking of course about the walking, talking, Labour-vote destroying robot which is Hazel Blears. Hazel Blears deciding to talk about political disengagement is a little like getting David Irving to talk about the problem of Holocaust denial; Blears, with perhaps only Tony McNulty for company, is the epitome of everything that an member of parliament should not be. She's loyal to the point of willing to sacrifice herself instead of the leader, or at least was to Tony Blair; she refuses to answer any question with anything resembling a straight answer; she has not a single apparent ideological bone in her body which might explain why she's joined the party she has; and when faced with overwhelming odds against her, she starts making things up. These might all be qualities which are essential to rise up the ranks of almost any political party today, but for those of us who actually want our representatives to have some specialist knowledge of any subject whatsoever, excepting motorbikes, or heaven forbid, even be more intelligent than we are, Blears and her friends, overwhelmingly Blairites, incidentally, are everything that is wrong with our politics as it stands.

All things considered, it therefore takes quite some chutzpah to imagine that you're suitably qualified to lecture anyone on political disengagement. Blears isn't interested in just why people are politically disengaged; she wishes to apportion blame. Predictably, it's not the fault of the politicians themselves for having indistinguishable policies, all the charm of a wet Sunday night in Salford or for prostituting their wares to the gutter press, but rather the media itself and additionally, bloggers.

Says Hazel:

Famously, Tony Blair called the media a "feral beast" in one of his last speeches as prime minister. But behind the eye-catching phrase was a serious and helpful analysis of a 24-hour broadcast media and shrinking, and increasingly competitive, newspaper market which demands more impact from its reporting – not the reporting of facts to enable citizens to make sense of the world, but the translation of every political discussion into a row, every difficulty a crisis, every rocky patch for the prime minister the "worst week ever".

Serious and helpful as in spelling out the bleeding obvious, as your humble narrator set out at the time. The liar in chief himself had to have balls to come out and attack the feral beast, having used said beast to get elected and then stay in power, but he of course didn't attack those most responsible for the cynicism with which politics in this country greeted, the Daily Mail and Sun, because if he had they would have chewed up said balls and spat them out in double-quick time. No, he instead attacked the Independent, which nobly stood up him to over the war and many other things, for daring to put its opinions on its front page, something the other tabloids had been doing for decades. Disingenuous could have been a adjective invented to describe Tony Blair, but he at least made the speech on his way out. Blears you would have thought still desperately believes she's on the way up.

In any event, Blears' claim that somehow it's just the media that exaggerates differences of opinion and bad days is simply nonsense. Blair himself was again partially responsible for this: he demanded and expected complete and utter unstinting loyalty. Read Alastair Campbell's diaries and see how he complained bitterly whenever the Labour party resisted his latest wheeze on principled grounds, with him condemning his colleagues for not "being serious". Blair went for such an uncompromising stance both because he wanted to be seen as the indomitable, strong leader, but also because the media had a hefty role in ensuring that Neil Kinnock never became prime minister. Campbell and Blair himself didn't want to see a Labour prime minister on the front page of the Sun again on election day inside a light-bulb, but the ends, suppressing all dissent and Faustian pacts with the likes of the Sun never justified the means. Politicians have themselves to blame as much as anyone else.

Blears continues:

And I would single out the rise of the commentariat as especially note-worthy. It is within living memory that journalists' names started to appear in newspapers; before then, no name was attached to articles. And in recent years commentary has taken over from investigation or news reporting, to the point where commentators are viewed by some as every bit as important as elected politicians, with views as valid as cabinet ministers. And if you can wield influence and even power, without ever standing for office or being held to account by an electorate, it further undermines our democracy.

As Unity has already argued, this is the equivalent to suggesting that only politicians are allowed to have complete freedom of speech. Blears is correct in suggesting that comment has swelled as investigations and genuine journalism has declined, and that the Guardian's maxim, that comment is free but facts are sacred has irrevocably broken down, but the idea that commentators are viewed as valid as elected politicians is abject nonsense.

As is her follow-up point:

The commentariat operates without scrutiny or redress. They cannot be held to account for their views, even when they perform the most athletic and acrobatic of flip-flops in the space of a few weeks. I can understand when commentators disagree with each other; it's when they disagree with themselves we should worry.

Even before the advent of the blog, commentators had to deal with letters in green ink as well as to the editor, and also the occupational hazard of appearing in Hackwatch in Private Eye, not to mention being parodied by Craig Brown, as many of those considered to be the most influential have been. Half of blogging is mocking what the mainstream thinks, or disagreeing with it, especially the likes of Polly Toynbee, so ruthlessly watched and baited by the right online. The only way in which Blears' statement makes sense is if you remove the word "commentariat" and replace it with "tabloid press", but she's hardly about to start attacking them.

There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office.

Ah yes, that's it; what's wrong with our politics is that politicians themselves don't have enough space to inculcate us with their philosophy and policies. Once they have we'll realise just how wrong we are about the lack of difference between them.

She then gets onto those of us pathetic and vain enough to run blogs:

This brings me to the role of political bloggers. Perhaps because of the nature of the technology, there is a tendency for political blogs to have a Samizdat style. The most popular blogs are rightwing, ranging from the considered Tory views of Iain Dale, to the vicious nihilism of Guido Fawkes. Perhaps this is simply anti-establishment. Blogs have only existed under a Labour government. Perhaps if there was a Tory government, all the leading blogs would be left-of-centre?
There are some informative and entertaining political blogs, including those written by elected councillors. But mostly, political blogs are written by people with a disdain for the political system and politicians, who see their function as unearthing scandals, conspiracies and perceived hypocrisy.
Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.

If Blears thinks that Guido represents vicious nihilism, then she presumably hasn't read the finest of our swear bloggers, more's the pity. She does have something resembling a point regarding how the most popular blogs are right-wing; partly that is obviously because the government is nominally left-wing, but it's also because the left is far more disparate than the right tends to be in this country. As Unity has again already stated, politicians' blogs are almost notable only for their dreariness, with perhaps only Tom Watson and Tom Harris, excluding Bob, rising above it. Blears sees most bloggers as having a disdain for politicians and the political system, but while some are only concerned with the propagation of their own political world view, there are hundreds if not thousands of others who blog because they care about that self-same political system, and think that the current lot are debasing it through their very actions. Of course Blears would see this as a threat: she's wholly satisfied with how things are at the moment, where loyalty to the party counts above what is actually best for the country. She likes how this government has not been held to account for the Iraq war, for the complete abandonment of those that it was elected to defend, and for being in complete subservience to the City over everyone and everything else. Bloggers, for all their faults, and they are myriad, are the future. Barack Obama and the Democrats in America recognised this, and they treated them as more than equals. Instead of learning from their harnessing of the web, Blears only sees the dangers rather than the opportunities. She dares not imagine that she and her party are the problem, not the solution.

Labels: bloggocks, clueless Blairites, cynicism, gutter press, Hazel Blears, media analysis, political disengagement, politics, spin

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11/05/2008 10:28:00 pm | Permalink |

Monday, August 25, 2008

A portent of things to come.

At times, this moniker I've chosen doesn't seem quite right. For someone who apparently thinks of this isle as septic, I seem remarkably unconcerned about its current state. After all, I repeatedly argue that despite the claims of the Conservatives and the tabloids that our society, for all its faults and deficiencies, is not broken. I never fail to marvel that those predisposed to empty, shallow patriotism actually seem to hate this country far more than those constantly accused of betraying it and bringing it to where it is now. My own pointless, self-serving, delusional rage is directed at other targets, for better or worse.

The Olympics ought to have been everything I've been institutionally designed to loathe. Orwell effortlessly exposed the essential pointlessness of the ranking of one person better than another at some insufferable activity in his Sporting Spirit essay. What he would have made of the obscenity which is the Premier League - where one player who can kick a ball into a net slightly more accurately than another and is in return paid more than some people will ever earn in a lifetime for less than two hours' work - is difficult to imagine. 16 days of this garbage, at immense, unimaginable cost, courtesy of one of the most despicable regimes on the planet - and that's just the IOC, never mind China - should have been over two weeks to forget.

And yet, you couldn't help but be overwhelmed by the show which the Chinese put on at both the opening and closing ceremonies. Yes, this was undoubtedly something which only the most vile dictatorship could both organise and justify, where a slightly less attractive child was elbowed aside lest anyone be horrified by her slightly not straight teeth, where the "Great Leap Forward" was strangely absent from the presented version of Chinese history, and where the contemptible idea of "protest zones" actually resulted in two old women being sentenced to re-education through labour, but you could simply not object to the Chinese having the right to put on such a show. It would have been great to have seen some more protests, especially from athletes themselves, putting further to shame those who criticised those who attempted to stop the torch relay, but when they were such onerous potential punishments for those who did, you can't blame them either for not doing so.

For those of us who went against the grain and wanted the Olympics here as much as we'd like to spend the rest of our lives in the company of Tessa Jowell, it sets a challenge, as does the success of our athletes. Somehow, whether we like it or not, or want to or not, we have to at least put on something which if not equal to the last couple of weeks, at least doesn't embarrass us by comparison.

The problem therefore is that we have such complete incompetents, morons and nonentities in charge at the moment. Behold our 8 minutes yesterday at the closing ceremony. It was never going to be great, let's face it, but it would have been nice if it hadn't been the unmitigated disaster that it was. Uncomfortably, it also has to be admitted that this is not the result of the aforementioned individuals in charge. This was British "culture" writ large, or at least the popular side of it: a double-decker bus, which for some unfathomable reason unfolded itself; a winner of a fucking talent contest; an old man playing a song from the 70s, badly; the most overrated and unaccountably famous man to have ever walked on a pair of legs, kicking a football to no one or to nowhere in particular; a dance troupe performing the worst routine the world has seen since the Black and White Minstrel Show was cancelled; oh, and who could possibly forget the smug, rotund twat that couldn't even wave a flag properly?

This, world, is our island nation. In fairness, Marina Hyde says that she watched the last few handovers and that they were no better than our meagre effort. The funniest thing though is that Boris Johnson and Downing Street were so flabbergasted by the "mistake" of the video which accompanied our 8 minutes of madness featuring Marcus Harvey's child hand-print painting of Myra Hindley. Out of the entirety of our show, that could quite easily be classified as the finest moment, a genuine work of art, going against public opinion which annoyed all the right people.

That ought to be what we base our own games' ceremonies around. Not puerile, semi-ironic stereotypical nonsense which just shows the West as a whole to be completely out of ideas and beholden only to the cult of worthless celebrity, but genuinely innovatory and potentially avant-garde politicking which ignores the advice of those who have already brought us so low. This is where those in charge will fail us; would any other country on the planet put in charge of the games a woman who can't remember little things like whether her husband was taking out a new mortgage, or a man who could rival Tory Boy himself for wit and intellect? A taster for what's to come, apart from in China itself, was presented outside Buckingham Palace. This was the "Visa 2012 handover party", just to prove that the curse of sponsorship will not just be confined to the games themselves. And what a line-up they put on! Not content with just one unspeakably awful band being involved, they chose three just to be sure: The Feeling, Scouting for Girls and McFly. You know that something has gone terribly, horrifically, child-murderingly wrong when the best artist on the bill is Katherine Jenkins; and one opera performer wasn't enough either, as she just had to be joined by Il Divo. And all around, that 2012 logo, so brilliantly conceived at immense cost by Wolff Olins, set to haunt our nightmares for the next four years and beyond.

If you think that things are bad now, it's worth remembering that within 2 years it'll be the new Blairite Conservative party that'll be in charge. David Cameron, in his past life spent his time defending the shit on a stick served up by Carlton, so at least he'll be handy when it comes to the abortion to follow. As for his taste in music, he informed Dylan Jones that he had purchased albums by both Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse and couldn't choose between them. Alongside him will be the snot-nosed cocaine-hoovering Gideon Osborne, with a face so punchable that by then the entire country would choose to have him become Team GB's newest and least trained boxing sensation. You can imagine it already, can't you? The countries parading to the strains of "She's so Lovely", followed by the main event, where the corpse of Winehouse is re-animated for her last ever gig. Septic isle indeed.

Labels: China, cynicism, London 2012, Olympics, we're all doomed

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8/25/2008 09:24:00 pm | Permalink |

Thursday, March 13, 2008

We are ruled over by vermin.

I don't think the title is too hyperbolic in line with this latest despatch from our glorious home secretary:

More than 1,400 rejected Iraqi asylum seekers are to be told they must go home or face destitution in Britain as the government considers Iraq safe enough to return them, according to leaked Home Office correspondence seen by the Guardian.
The Iraqis involved are to be told that unless they sign up for a voluntary return programme to Iraq within three weeks, they face being made homeless and losing state support. They will also be asked to sign a waiver agreeing the government will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraqi territory.

Let me just try and get this straight. We have had a major part in creating the current "situation" in Iraq, a situation which has left at least 150,000 dead, resulted in 4,000,000 refugees, and is still killing untold numbers every week in bombings, assassination attempts and sectarian warfare, a security situation which means that our troops continue to remain in Iraq just in case they're needed and also to protect American convoys travelling to Baghdad, with the Foreign Office advising against all travel to Iraq except the Kurdish autonomous area, an area recently invaded by Turkish troops fighting the PKK guerillas, with Mosul increasingly being a major area of conflict between the salafist jihadists and the American forces/Iraqi National Guard, and the very ministers that voted for this war are now going to send up to 1,600 individuals back to a country in a state of war, a war which we started, a war which our own head of the armed forces said we were only exacerbating by our continued presence?

Jesus wept.

We still haven't even provided the support and refuge we promised to the Iraqi employees and translators that served our troops and are now increasingly threatened by militias which are delighting in trying to find them and kill them for their "treachery". What hope do those left behind, apparently forgotten but given fine words by those in Westminster now have that we're apparently to send these "failed" asylum seekers back to their very possible deaths unless they take the option of destitution instead? None of this though seems to matter to the heartless individuals that took this decision, concerned only with providing ministers with figures showing that asylum claims are going down and that deportations are going up, all in order to appease the screaming tabloids when can never be bought off.

Politicians worry about the apathy and cynicism of the electorate. When those self-same politicians take such apathetic, cynical decisions that put lives on the line, can they really have any objection when they're dismissed as all the same and all only in it for themselves?

Labels: asylum seekers, cynicism, Home Office, Iraq, Iraq disaster, our new overlords, vermin

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3/13/2008 11:35:00 pm | Permalink |

Friday, November 16, 2007

Scum-watch: The day in a life of the tabloid.

Occasionally, you can get a complete picture of the world view of a newspaper simply by reading just one issue of it. While with most, especially the broadsheets, you might broadly know what it's in favour of, to really understand its exact philosophy you'd have to study it over a number of days, if not longer. Today's Sun, in one sense, is a masterpiece of gutter journalism: it gets its message across, leaves no nuance, uses the most alarmist, provocative and brutal language, and when it needs to, or doesn't need to, it lies and systematically distorts.

The report on Lord Chief Justice Phillips' speech to the Howard League for Penal Reform is partially the result of the tabloid conundrum: how do you convert a speech running to 26 pages in a PDF into a minor article of just over 200 words? The answer is that you only focus on a tiny piece of the actual speech, that of Phillips quite reasonably saying that the prisons are full to bursting and that Labour is chiefly responsible for that fact. On that, the Sun would broadly agree; what it doesn't agree with is that Phillips dares to believe that there is a better option rather than that of building ever more prisons, something he goes into at length in the actual speech. All this adds up to in the Sun's reportage is that he compares the price of 30 years' imprisonment to how it could be spent on education or health, one of his weakest arguments, considering that only murderers or terrorists are ever sentenced to 30 years, while ignoring his more coherent and forceful points about prisons in general. Then examine the language: rather than those in prison being offenders or criminals, they are variously either "villains", a Victorian way of describing them if ever there was one, or "crooks".

To further make clear the Sun's own viewpoint, the same journalist who wrote the report also submits a short "comment" piece, on the same page. In his words, "a record 80,000 villains are off our streets and behind bars," and when making the distinction between prison and other punishments, he describes the alternative to prison as "fines and soft community sentences." The latter part of Phillips' speech is dedicated to community punishments, which the Sun deems soft, and how they can be strengthened, yet none of this is deemed important enough to be distilled to the reader, presumably because it just might undermine the journalist's quavering indignation about it all: "Once again, the Lord Chief Justice has shown how out of touch he is. Ordinary people WANT crooks to be banged up." Phillips is so out of touch that he himself went on a day's community punishment "undercover" to see what it was like, and he describes his experience during the speech, something that a Sun hack is never likely to do, except to expose how "useless" they are. The statement that ordinary people WANT crooks to be banged up is the Sun pretending to be speaking up for the commoner, when there is no evidence to show that the general public do want "crooks" to banged up. Indeed, a recent Grauniad poll found the country split down the middle on whether the solution was more prisons. The Sun does have previous on distorting Phillips' public utterances; this time, rather than coming out with it in the actual report, it does it by its side instead.

Next up, the Sun reports on our friend Robert Stewart who was caught having sex with his bicycle. Another lesson in tabloid language: like with the various adjectives for criminals, he's a perv, a weirdo and an oddball. He might quite possibly be all three, but whether he ought to be humiliated any more for what he did is another matter.

Following on from prison and sex, the Sun settles on another best-seller and a moral panic to boot: the kids are most certainly not all right. Taking the government's survey of 115,000 10-15 year olds (PDF), it selects only the most troubling data from it and leaves all the rest on the editing floor:

"BINGE drinking, drug use and smoking is RIFE among Britain’s schoolchildren, an alarming new survey reveals.

At least one in seven kids aged 12 to 15 has dabbled with illegal substances, it found."

It starts by removing the 10 to 11 year olds from the equation so that the figures are even more potentially scare-worthy. The survey asks how many have taken an illegal substance in the past four weeks for example, with 80% saying they've never taken drugs, 7% saying they haven't in the last month, 9% that they've smoked cannabis, 3% solvents, 3% other drugs and 6% prefer not to say. Doesn't look so frightening then, does it? That's the thing with statistics, they can be incredibly easily manipulated, something that the Scum has accused the government of doing, but which it seems also more than prepared to do itself. It does this partially by converting the percentages into one in however many, which the average layman is less likely to easily understand, so that those who have taken a Class A drug becomes 1 in 30, which is almost meaningless unless you put it the context of it being the equivalent of around one child in the average class taking such a substance. It also doesn't make clear that the figures refer to in the last month, so it becomes "takes", giving the impression that they're regular users when that might not be the case at all.

Half of kids aged between ten and 15 admit to underage boozing and a fifth regularly get drunk. And more than one in five has smoked a cigarette.

Again, the question here was have you ever had an alcoholic drink, not just a sip. Unsurprisingly, 48% said yes. Most 10 to 15 year olds would have at some point in their life had a drink, and some parents might even encourage the continental approach of a glass of wine or similar with a meal, but the Sun converts innocent or supervised drinking into "underage boozing". More potentially worrying is that 40% of those over 13 admit to being drunk once in the last month, but the Sun strangely doesn't use that stat. 73% say they have never smoked a cigarette, which again, doesn't get an airing.

Tories last night claimed the figures were more proof of Britain’s “broken society” under Labour. Shadow children’s minister Tim Loughton said: “Gordon Brown is in denial about this problem, and his Government is unable to offer any solutions to it.

Finally then, we get the standard quote from the opposition political party capitalising on the more troubling parts of the survey. If anything, it actually provides plenty of evidence against the Tories' bullshit about the "broken society"; the biggest worry is exams, with 51% concerned by them, rather than bullying, which worries 25%. It certainly doesn't suggest that there has been a moral breakdown, or that today's children are any worst behaved than earlier generations. The best summings up are provided by the chief inspector of schools, and amazingly, Ed Balls:

"The survey presents much that is positive about life for children and young people today. However, it is also clear that more needs to be done to address children and young people’s worries and concerns about how safe they feel; about exams and tests; and about what would help them learn better and where they need to go for help when they have a problem."

"This survey shows that the majority of children and young people in England today feel happy, safe, enjoy life and are doing well at school. But the survey also shows challenges and pressures that we need to address with decisive action."

Right, so we've had crime and prisons; sexual perversion; kids on drugs and booze; what's left? Of course, immigration!

THE NUMBER of migrants coming to Britain has hit a record high – as officials admit underestimating figures AGAIN.
Some 591,000 arrived last year – up from 327,000 a decade ago.
Of the 400,000 leaving to go abroad, just over half were UK citizens – the first time that figure has gone above 200,000.
The figures were published as officials said the number of arrivals in 2004 and 2005 was 41,000 HIGHER than predicted.
Earlier this month ministers admitted 1.5million migrants had come to Britain since 1997 – TWICE their original estimate.

Here the Sun is hedging its bets ever so slightly. The number of migrants arriving here last year was a record - but only by 5,000 on 2004's figure. When you take into account that the net migration figure that year was 244,000, as compared to last year's 191,000, due to the rise in emigration, 2004, the year the A8 new European states joined, was in actual fact when the highest net number of migrants arrived. The Sun doesn't comment on the emigration figure, which includes just less than half of those who had already come here to work going back home, probably because that undermines the idea that all those who have migrated here have stayed. Figures for those who come here for less than a year then return home aren't kept; they're counted in, but not counted out, which also distorts the figures somewhat. Instead of pointing out how the figures of those migrating here have now dropped for two years, and that the emigrant figures suggest that we're now becoming a revolving door rather than a permanent stop for migrants, the Sun brings back up the mess up from earlier in the month, but gets it wrong. 1.5 million migrants have taken up new jobs since 1997, not have simply come here.

After all of that, we have the very voice of the Sun itself, just in case you can't detect it in any of the above. As the Sun often does, it returns to one of its very favourite themes - and lies about it. (Again, the article seems to have disappeared into the ether with it changing to tomorrow's leader rather than leaving a permanent entry, so you'll have to trust me on what it said.)

RABBLE-rousing Abu Hamza has used our liberal system of justice to get away with murder — almost literally.

Which is completely untrue to begin with. He hasn't got away with anything - as his current stay in a prison cell demonstrates. If the Sun's really so outraged by how long Hamza escaped justice for, it perhaps ought to take it up with the security services, who were more than aware of what Hamza was up to and might well have even had an agreement with him regarding how as long as he didn't advocate violence against the UK itself they left him alone.

Three of the four 7/7 Tube bombers were radicalised while attending the Finsbury Park mosque where he spouted his evil creed.

This is the real lie. There is no evidence whatsoever that the bombers were radicalised while visiting the Finsbury Park mosque; indeed, if they ever did attend it. The only source that has ever alleged that three of the bombers listened to Hamza was the Times, in just one story the day after Hamza was sentenced. No other newspapers have seen fit to investigate and follow up this potentially explosive revelation, which is usually the sure sign of it being untrue.

Convicted 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe-bomber Richard Reid were fans.

Established facts? In the Sun? Amazing!

It was only after a campaign led by The Sun that he was locked away for inciting murder.

Ah yes, it was the Sun wot did it!

Some might balk at this post and wonder what the point of it is meant to be. After all, tabloids are meant to be provocative, entertaining, and strong, unrelenting voices: not all of us are going to want the staid tones of the Times or the Grauniad, or the pompous handed down opinions of the "commentariat"; that's why so many enjoy swearblogging and fisking, preferably with gratuitous insults. That's all more than fair, and I'm certainly not suggesting that they should be stopped from doing any of the above. It's also probably true that the tabloid press are not any worse than they've ever been; certainly, they have to now crouch pieces that would previously have been openly racist and bigoted in less certain terms, or cushion the blow through mealy-mouthed language which actually adds up to the same thing. It has to be remembered however that the Sun is still the highest selling newspaper in the country, shifting over 3 million copies. For some people, this newspaper is the main source of news, or the only source of news for those who aren't that interested. Through such openly biased, unfair and in some cases plain wrong reporting, a completely false image of this country comes across. As the quote at the top of this blog suggests, the very nature of the press affects the nature of politics, and who can argue that the Sun, or its owner, doesn't wield power that most politicians themselves would kill for? The examples in this post are just a small snapshot of how it sets about setting its own agenda on just one day. Isn't it time, rather than just blaming the politicians for the cynicism with which the public views politics, that we examine the fourth estate's role in furthering the disconnect that seems to be becoming ever more pronounced?

Labels: cynicism, fucking liars, Lord Phillips, media coverage, media reporting, moral panics, scaremongering, Scum-watch, Sun-watch

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11/16/2007 09:06:00 pm | Permalink |

Obsolete

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

The Jess Phillips enigma.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

The politicians we deserve.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

The internet makes you stupid.

Monday, August 04, 2014

Funeral march for agony's last edge.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Here's to you, Mr Robinson. (And the Quilliam Foundation.)

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Meet the new boss.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Reality bites.

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Let's do something very British: make the best of it.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Outsourcing the blame.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

And so it's almost here.

Friday, January 07, 2011

What does £50,000 get you these days?

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Insert rhyme or "joke" about labour here.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

Monday, August 25, 2008

A portent of things to come.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

We are ruled over by vermin.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Scum-watch: The day in a life of the tabloid.

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