Supermarkets and the cost of living

I spent last week working on a tender to get work from a supermarket.

Sadly enough I must admit that sometimes I get a bit of a kick about putting these things together – it’s a throwback to the days of writing essays – with the same essential ingredients of bluffing and bullshitting. With an added frisson, albeit a self deluding one, that if successful we are getting one over on ‘The Man’ – and of course paying the bills for a few more months.

The quasi-profession of ‘procurement’ has its own bullshit ethics of ‘fairness and transparency’. One consequence is that if any of the parties tendering have a question to ask then it is published, along with the answer, for all the other tenders to see. So after a week of bullshitting away on my tender I got to see the questions from ‘the competition’.

The answers let slip a few things that the supermarket hadn’t been quite so transparent about initially. Such as for every piece of work they gave us - we would have to pay them an ‘admin fee’ ; or that we had to employ a couple of staff to work in their head-office at specified wages way below what we would normally pay. Or that we would also have to pay the supermarket rent for the space taken up by the desks of our staff in their building. Or finally that they wouldn’t actually be paying any of the bills themselves – their suppliers would be picking up the costs and it was down to us to get the money out of them.

Imagine trying to negotiate such a deal in any other situation, say when buying a car or a house. Particularly if you weren't told about the 'hidden catches' up front - you would be sorely tempted to punch the cheeky fucker's lights out, or at the very least you'd walk away as quickly as you could. So I did the next best thing and immediately pulled out of the tender. The Bastard Supermarket seemed genuinely perplexed and offended.

I feel sorry for the poor sods who do win the contract - it will go one of two ways; if the company is a medium sized one – like ours - it will run the work at an increasing loss and so grind itself into the ground within a couple of years. Or if it’s a large one it will try to off-shore the work to a studio in India , Eastern Europe or wherever else labour is cheap that month. That's precisely what's going on in our industry when small businesses have to swim with the sharks. In any case, in a couple of years the Bastard Supermarket will have sucked everything it can out of the relationship and declared a new tender for fresh victims.

Blake’s 'dark satanic mills' may have been the universal symbol of old -style capitalism.If you want the equivalent for our own ‘post-industrial we’re all consumers now’ society – it’s the supermarket.

The night the music died

On this day, an unbelievable 29 years ago, drummer John Bonham died - marking the end of what at the time, and still to this day, I believe to be the ultimate rock band.

I was a teenage head-banger at the time - and it is almost impossible now to convey the intensity of attachment we felt to just about every aspect of the band and its music.

It’s the human condition that over time we lose that intensity and forget how it is to be 15. Occasionally I now see glimpses of it in in my own daughter who at that age – although the metal obsession was/is probably a boy-thing.

It will always be one of my strongest and strangely warmest teenage memories – the night Bonzo died my friends and I sneaked into the local bikers/rockers pub. Grown men were weeping into their beards and the juke box played Led Zep all night. We retired to the car park where we sat in the cold night air with a few cans of Special Brew listening to Tommy Vance’s rock show tribute on a crappy little radio; the three of us sharing the moment.

Nowadays the pub is a fucking Harvester and I hear that arch smug-tosser Jeremy Clarkson is a big ‘Zeppelin fan - all of which depresses me deeply, but still; ‘The Song Remains The Same’.

Hypocrisy

Our governments tell us that the Taliban is such a threat to the people of Afghanistan that air-strikes in villages where they are hiding are justified – in fact they are really for their own good. They also say that the Taliban is such a threat to the peoples of the western world that sending our young people to fight and die in a far off inhospitable country is justified – if fact it is a humanitarian duty.

But when some of those same victims of the Taliban, filled with stories of the peaceful and prosperous West, actually come here, and risk so much in the journey to do so, our governments don’t want them. They are treated like criminals and end up in detention centres to be ‘processed’ - or living like hobos in canvas shanty towns like something our of Steinbeck’s novels.

And then our governments break up these unofficial camps and herd them into official state-run ‘camps’ that may look neater but are actually far more sinister. From there the ‘processing’ will inevitably result in some children being separated from their families and some people being returned to the very places they are fleeing from.

Yesterday’s pitiful scenes of the French riot police breaking up the refugee camp near Calais are in reality just another piece of ‘collateral damage’ from the War On Terror.

What gives the CBI a right to an opinion ?

Back in the dim and distant past when I was a student activist, student unions would be criticized for having policies on all sorts of things which we were told were none of our business. And from time to time there would really be a stink if students tried to donate money to worthy clauses like the striking miners.

Occasionally there was a smidgen of truth in these criticisms - back in the eighties passing resolutions supporting the armed struggle in Nicaragua or declaring the union bar a nuclear free zone were often a political fig-leaf for future New Labour careerists to ignore more pressing matters closer to home. But generally I would say that if ever there was a time to have an opinion on anything and everything it is when you are a student.

The same cannot be said of the CBI sticking an unwelcome nose into higher education.

Their proposals to allow free reign to market forces in universities is an outrageously reactionary piece of cheek on their part. To suggest, as they do, that university numbers be drastically reduced, that student loans are no longer subsidized, and that only 'useful' subjects are promoted would not only take higher education back to before the 1960's, it would introduce a new strain of philistinism unknown even in the elitist bad old days.

What make the fat cats of the CBI presume to think that have the right to say anything about higher education in the first place ? Only a mistaken belief that they are the true creators of wealth in society and therefore can dictate how this wealth is spent - or more appropriately 're-invested'. How fucking presumptious and arrogant of them: By sheer weight of numbers, by hard work and by tax, it is working people who create the wealth and whose children are getting the educational opportunities (albeit at a cost) that would have been unthinkable for the vast majority only a couple of generations ago.

And to add insult to injury when the CBI dare to question the numbers of students in higher education and to ridicule some of the 'new' subjects studied - it was the same industrial bosses who in the Thatcher era attacked the unions and with them the apprenticeship system. These were the bedrock of the skilled working class and thanks to this attack this group has now become an endangered species. So for their offspring going to university - even if it is to a former polytechnic for a so-called 'mickey mouse' subject - is the only option now of securing decent 'life chances'.

I thank my lucky stars that I was able to go through higher education in an era when it was still free at the point of consumption - I now fear for my own kids.

Haringey Food Festival

My part of London doesn’t get much of a good press. Green Lanes, the site of the Haringey Food Festival, earned national notoriety a couple of years ago with a running gun battle between Turkish and Armenian gangs. It also features regularly on those reality TV shock-shows – I seem to remember one about the local environmental health team and another about the Met Police’s robbery squad.

But it is also one of the few genuinely 24hour streets in London with cheap restaurants, cafes, bakeries and fruit-and-veg stores selling exotic foods from South and Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. If you wanted to celebrate the diversity of this borough then closing the street and having a food festival there is a pretty effective way of expressing it.

As I stood in the street on Sunday afternnon, taking in the sun , sipping a can of Red Stripe and tucking into some Curry Goat whilst listening to my daughters’ school steel band, it occurred to me that I would like Cameron and the shire-smug-ites who talk about ‘broken Britain’ to come and have a look at this. And the likes of the English Defence League and all those Essex-geesers that I work with who ‘want their country back’.

We may well have fuck-knows enough problems in Haringey and in many respects we do tick all the boxes of ‘broken society’ - but in spite of it there is genuinely a community here. And a community does not have to look like Ambridge for it  to work: I see over at Penny Red she is saying something much along the same lines.

I also feel saddened that such is the nature of life in London that after twenty years of living here I am still on the periphery of this community. Spending most of my waking hours working somewhere else – even when it’s only a couple of boroughs away - it is inevitable that your hometown becomes a dormitory.

Something that the anarchists make much of, and which I have to say I agree with, is that the very act of being a community is itself political. Especially in these times when so many will deny us this.

Shit you can't make up

Seen this morning on my ride in to work - graffiti-ed very neatly on a newly painted shop-front in Camden:

Peasants beware
Abolish banal thinking
Embrace only radical thoughts and oppose capitalist pigs.

I'm not sure if this a quote from Mao - or a made-up piece of ironic genius - or maybe just that term is about to begin and the students are back in town.

Brighton Burn Up

To Brighton for the end of season run the ‘Brighton Burn Up’. I took the ’89 Sportster as I did for the start of the season 'Southend Shake Down’ back in April. Now that the gearbox is sorted, this time it was rather less like trying to control a bucking bronco. Brighton is a helluva lot nicer than Southend but for me, taking in a detour to drop in on my parents, it was a 180mile round trip. That’s a long way to go for some very average fish and chips.

As always getting there was the thing and the arrival a bit of an anticlimax really – a saunter down the esplanade to check out the rows of something like 10,000 motorcycles and then jump on my bike and head home. It wasn’t a day to take your time and lounge in the sun - because there wasn’t any. In fact I discovered that I was decidedly chilly even in my new supposedly super-warm reproduction World War Two Tankers' Jacket.

Interesting bikes were in a small minority - plenty of Harleys to be seen but I was surprised that with the exception of a handful of old Shovelheads mine was one of the oldest. And tattiest. Some nice old 60’s British café racers and their counterpart Vespa and Lambrettas, ridden by revivalists and some old boys who looked that they had actually been around for the original bank holiday shennanigans back in the day. I can’t help noticing that old age wears better with the rocker look than it does with the mod look. Over sixty, paunchy and trying to look like Paul Weller doesn’t really cut it – but good luck to them anyway – anyone who can keep a 40 year old two stroke machine in running order deserves some respect (even if it is Lambretta).

That’s it really – nothing spectacular to report. There is something very British about these runs to seaside towns. I’m sure I’ll carry on doing them out of some misplaced sense of tradition but I can’t help thinking that really I’d have been happier just riding on my own to some sleepy and deserted place on the coast. For some people biking is primarily a social activity but in my own case I think the appeal is in the solitude and the quiet – even with the noise of a big V-Twin engine heard through an illegal exhaust.

Rover & The Phoenix Four

Who would have thought that it would take four years, 800+ pages and £16million to come up with a report that the Phoenix Four – owners of MG Rover – didn’t do anything illegal; they just acted like big businessmen do ?

Only four years after they brought the business for just £10, the last British-owned car manufacturer closed down and 6,500 jobs were lost. In the process The Four trousered £42million between them and even now they haven’t shared any of the pain arising from the collapse that left a hole in the manufacturing heartland of the West Midlands.

A year on from the Lehman Bothers’ collapse, a distinction is often heard being made, sometimes even on the Left, between evil ‘finance’ capitalists who get huge and undeserved bonuses for doing speculation at no personal risk and honest ‘manufacturing’ capitalists who actually make stuff and employ the people. But the Phoenix Four weren’t Gordon Geckos in red braces – three were engineers by background and one was an accountant. It still didn’t stop them from behaving like greedy cunts who were out for themselves.

The usual moral justification given for capitalism is that it rewards the entrepreneur for taking risks that are for the good of society as a whole – creating jobs and ever-new products and services. Maybe at the time of the industrial revolution this was true to some extent - although if you were employed in a factory or mill from the age of 10 risking life and limb you could be forgiven for not seeing the bigger picture.

But with capitalism these days, rather than inventing something, risking everything to develop it and working hard to produce it, with just a bit of financial sleight-of-hand in the book-keeping, you can still make the money and stick two fingers up at the people who made you rich.

It’s the system you see and it takes a pretty rare individual to buck it.

The end for 'No Platform'

The news today that the BBC are to allow the BNP onto question time is something of a watershed for Anti-Fascists. 'No Platform’ has been around for such a long time that it is in danger of becoming a mantra. At times I confess that I have been guilty of joining in with that mantra. But in reality it is/was a tactic not a point of principle.

‘No Platform’ makes sense when it can be used to freeze the Fascists out of our communities – as happens when they find that they can’t book rooms managed by local groups . Putting forward ‘No Platform’ to be adopted as the policy of these groups is an opportunity to raise all the political questions about who the Fascists really are and what they represent.

But ‘No Platform doesn’t make sense when it is tantamount to calling for a state ban or some kind of prescribed list. That just plays into the hands of Fascists when they portray themselves as persecuted tribunes of the politically dis-enfranchised. Even worse state bans are lazy liberal -thinking – the same kind of thinking that believes it is enough to proclaim that ‘the British National Party is a Nazi party’ and call upon voters to support anybody rather than the BNP.

The reasons for dropping 'No Platform' isn’t, as some are claiming, because some dubious electoral successes give the BNP a democratic mandate, or because they are now just another party with the same rights to freedom of speech as any other. The BNP are the same hateful bunch of Fascist thugs they have always been. But the simple truth if it is that the politics of the BNP today are not those of the Mosleyites in the 30’s, or the NF in the 70’s, or Combat18 in the 90’s. Nor is the threat they now pose. (In many respects it is a worse threat because of the vacuum of class politics created by New Labour).

And the same tactics used in the past won’t work now: So by all means confront them physically when the opportunity arises and it isn’t counter productive, by all means expose their links with head-banging neo-Nazis - but above all; take up the issues of jobs, services and housing in the communities where they are building support.

Letting Nick Griffin onto Question Time isn’t going to do this of itself - but it plays more of a part in the process of challenging them politically than standing outside waving a placard and chanting that this ‘shouldn’t be allowed.’

Still mentioning the war

Born in the mid-60’s to parents who were teenagers at the time of the Second World War I seem to have grown up in the shadow of that conflict. And not just because of family war-stories. I think everyone of my generation grew up with the Airfix kits, reading “Commando” comic books, playing ‘war’ in the playground and watching the black and white films on a Sunday afternoon.

Even today, 70 years after, turn on cable TV and I can guarantee that at just about any time of the day or night there will be a couple of documentaries on the war. And in the week where we celebrate (?) the outbreak of war, Vera Lynn is back in the charts.

Why does it have such a strong hold on us?

Well it wasn’t just the movies that were black and white. Like no other conflict before or since it seems like a ‘just war’. Historical context* will quite correctly qualify that with Britain’s attempts to cling on to empire in the East, and with the cynical division of Europe as a prequel to the Cold War. But Nazism and the Holocaust are the trump cards that make it a war that had to be won. And won not by professional armies but by entire nations.

This makes it unique; the Great War before it had something of the same character, but few can now see any moral basis for the conflict - so when we remember it we do so only as tragedy. And wars since 1945 have been scary Cold War spill-overs like Korea or last throws of empire like Vietnam (or the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan). In any case whatever their morality, the nature of modern warfare is now such that it is unlikely we will ever see mass-conscription and People’s War again.

Perhaps it is precisely because of this we still hark back to the Second World War; with the ambiguities and ideological vacuums of own times the war years provide a more certain moral compass. That, and the living memory of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

NB * If you want this context - have a look at this piece by Peter Taafe or the debate over at Socialist Unity - what I am taking about here is our enduring perception of it as a People's War - which is in many senses as important as the reality.

Relics on holiday

Back from holiday in France - the tan is already fading and the prospect of returning to work looms. Now that the days of motorcycle touring - historical blitzkriegs on two wheels - have gone, our family holidays are a compromise. I trade sitting on a beach in the afternoons with a spot of cultural tourism in the mornings. For a staunch ex-Catholic this means that I visit a surprising number of churches - even the dullest market town can usually be relied on to have a a historic church. Here's a fairly typical example:

On one particularly hot day we were in Saint Maximin - the gothic basilica there is built on a much earlier Gallo-Roman church and surprisingly for somewhere that is a place of pilgrimage the church is simple and uncluttered inside. On a hot day with its tall cool walls, the high vaulted ceiling, the light diffracted through the windows, and the waft of incense you can understand how, from the point of view of a sweaty, stinky and simple medieval peasant, a sense of spirituality was easily conjured up.

But before you get carried away with this - go and have a look at the crypt which contains the principal reason for the basilica's existence - the relics of Mary Magdalene. There's a big cult of Mary Magdalene in Provence, apparently she brought Christianity to the area having been cast adrift in a boat from Palestine along with her brother Lazarus. According to the legend the boat had neither sails nor rudder so it was from any point of view a stroke of luck that she made it there.

It was also quite a stroke of luck that when Charles of Anjou in the 13th Century decided to build a church and a Dominican monastery at Saint Maximin, he should unearth a much earlier chapel containing a sarcophagus with the remains of Mary Magdalen. By a previous legend these relics had been somewhere up north in Burgundy, but conveniently there was an inscription explaining that they had been hidden there from the Saracens. The Saracens had of course raided Southern France and tended to take a dim view of the veneration of old bones thinking it all a bit primitive and barbaric, not to say idolatrous. Anyway, presumably Charles couldn't believe his luck so he built a huge basilica which attracted pilgrims for centuries (and maybe these days Da Vinci code conspiracy nuts). In the process he and the Dominicans* undoubtedly did very well out of the whole thing.

A typical medieval tale really - a bit harder to compute is that apparently to this day every July the grotesque relic is taken out the crypt and paraded around. Maybe those Saracens had a point.

*(As a side note; the old Jewish quarter of the town remains, not far from the basilica, along with a plaque explaining that the Jews lived here until the 15th century under the protection of the Dominicans - given the role of the Dominicans as the storm-troopers of the Holy Inquisition you can guess that this was probably a mafiosi style of 'protection').

Authenticity / Snobbery

Somebody called me a ‘socialist snob’ the other day. They meant it in jest but there was more than a grain in truth in what they said.

I’m certainly not a snob in the conventional social sense but I will confess to being something of an intellectual snob about ignorance, or more precisely Ignorance. Not just the absence of knowledge but rather the wearing of it as a badge of pride and all the small mindedness and bigotry that goes with it – it’s to be found in all classes.

It could be said that I’m a snob in all my ‘ex-curricula’ interests too. I'd prefer to think of it as a desire for the authentic but it offends me if something that I’m passionate about becomes sold-out - devalued or degraded and ‘popularised’ for commercial reasons. I should know that under capitalism nothing is sacred if a quick buck can be made out of people’s shallowness and their need for cool validated.

So, I get pissed off at ‘McDojos’ in the martial arts. I get pissed off at the strictly weekends-only ‘RUBs’ in the bike scene. And I get pissed off that tattoos have become a must-have fashion accessory for certain media-types. Here in Soho now the coffee bars are full of them – guys and girls on fixed wheel push-bikes with ‘ironic geek’ haircuts, messenger bags and Macbooks – they all claim to be some sort of up-and-coming creative but nobody is sure what the fuck they actually do for a living. And they are sporting full sleeve tattoos and the latest craze - neck tattoos. Tossers.

This particular rant was prompted by me finding the blog of Shanghai-Kate one of the original pioneers of the tattooing revival that sets the record straight on ‘Tattoo culture’ as a fashion statement – and the Ed Hardy t-shirts and the Sailor Jerry Rum.


My distaste for disposable pop has also got me called a 'musical fascist' but I'll leave that one for now ...

Madness Of The Mob

I went out at lunchtime to pick up some reading for my annual holiday next week. I generally travel extremely light but at least half my luggage is taken up by having to have something to read. Ironically amongst the second hand books I picked up in the Charing Cross Road was a £3 copy of Charles Mackay’s ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ – a nineteenth century curio of essays about various outbreaks of mass hysteria, including the Crusades, With-hunts and the South Sea Bubble.

Then I got back to work and saw the online bile unleashed at the news that the abusers in the Baby P case – Tracy Connelly and Stephen Barker – had been named.

It is quite likely that at some point in their incarceration they will be attacked as Ian Huntley was by some fellow prisoner - and if this is the case I personally wouldn’t blame whoever does it. But I see no contradiction in having this natural emotional response on the one hand and on the other expecting a more dispassionate and reasoned official attitude from the state and the legal system.

So I am profoundly depressed at the generally fuck-witted reactions to the court order that suppressed the release of the abusers names. Apparently 68,000 digital-vigilantes have signed up to a Facebook page that not only called for the abusers to be named but also for them to be tortured and then hanged.

It’s a cornerstone of our Anglo-Saxon legal system that the identities of the accuser, the accused and the convicted are in the public domain – unless there is good reason why this should be otherwise. Such as in rape cases. Or where witnesses may be intimidated. Or where there’s another trial pending that could be prejudiced and invalidated. Or where the welfare of other innocent parties, such as children could be compromised.

In fact it was precisaly because of these last two very credible reasons that the court order to suppress the identities was issued in the first place. These criteria no longer apply – the other trial has now taken place and new foster homes have been found for Baby P’s siblings. So the order has been lifted - and rightly so, but not because a howling mob whipped themselves up into a cathartic frenzy of public self-righteousness.

Some time in the future there will be a discussion as to whether a ‘Mary Bell solution’ should be applied if and when the abusers are deemed fit for release. Unsurprisingly, not knowing enough about the case, I don’t have an answer to that one. But reading about the sober way in which that case was handled back in the 60's I can only depressingly observe that as a society our propensity for ignorance and hysteria seems to be increasing.

Great Train Robbery. Great Computer Hack.

In between the self-righteous cries that Ronnie Briggs should rot in prison and the claims that he was a diamond geezer, lies an inconvenient truth – in our society political expedience trumps ‘justice’ every time – and the powers-that-be simply don’t like to be made to look daft.

When the train robbers were sentenced in 1964 their biggest crime, apart from having literally committed the biggest crime (to that date) of nicking £2.6million, was of making the state and establishment look stupid. This was the end of the Macmillan era and the establishment was feeling a bit threatened on all fronts by cheeky chappies who didn't know their place. So the train robbers all got 25-30 year sentences – by the way the average rape sentence is under 12 years.

(And just for the record, despite the outraged voices from the Daily Mail: The train driver, Jack Mills, who had undeniably been attacked in the robbery, was still alive at the time of the sentencing and didn’t die until four years later - from leukemia not as a result of his injuries).

And when in an extraordinary move a few weeks ago Home Secretary Jack Straw over-ruled the parole board’s recommendation that Biggs be released, the decision was again not based on the individual rights and wrongs of the case but on a desire to be seen to be tough on crime and a fear off offending Middle-England.

There’s a surprisingly similarity with the present Gary McKinnon case: The extraordinary no-questions asked extradition arrangement with the US (that is not even reciprocal) has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with proving the UK’s reliability as an ally in the war against terror.

That - and McKinnon being a UFO obsessed computer nerd who has managed to embarrass the scary and shadowy great minds of the Pentagon by hacking into their IT network. So he will now face a 60 year sentence in the ‘states.

The bankruptcy of justice is even clearer here than it was in 1963– there really are no victims to this ‘crime’ and the perpetrator is not even a ‘lovable villain' but a vulnerable individual with Asperger’s syndrome.

Still - as always embarrassed authority must have a whipping boy.

An everyday incident

I am wary of men who describe themselves as Feminists. I don’t have any problem with being supportive of an issue that isn’t strictly your own; but there’s something akin to those white liberal Muswell Hill-ites who claim that they identify with immigrants and asylum seekers because their maternal grandmother came to this country as a refugee after the Russian Revolution.

I’m also not comfortable about agonising and intellectualising over what people think rather than what they do. I had all that as a kid with the Catholic thought-police, and there is something about ‘sexual politics’ which is rather similar.

But then again every now and then you see something, a small everyday thing, that makes you stop and just think ‘what the fuck ?’ Take this morning:

I am sat on my bike stopped at a pedestrian crossing. Alongside me a white van pulls up with two blokes in it. Now I don’t make any claims to be a looker myself, but even so I can safely say these fellas are not in good shape. Late middle age, overweight and generally ugly as fuck. A young woman crosses the road in front of us. She is conventionally attractive – blond, tanned, petite but curvy and wearing a short skirt. So ugly blokes in van give a couple of toots on the horn, leer out of the window and shout ‘wahey’. The woman looks nervous and/or embarrassed and speeds up her pace. Then the moment has gone.

What exactly just happened there ? Did ugly blokes think that somehow the woman was going to have a road-to-Damascus moment and suddenly say “I never realised it until you sounded your horn but I now know that I am strangely attracted to ugly middle aged blokes’. Or were the ugly blokes just trying desperately to re-assert their heterosexuality to each other or themselves ?

I don’t know - and that way lies psycho-babble. But I do know that they made me cringe. See - maybe I’m a Feminist after all.

In defence of newspapers

The best that can be said of any British newspaper is that it is ‘slightly better than the others’. This can certainly be said of The Observer who most recently notoriously disappeared up its own liberal arse in arguing that the invasion of Iraq was a progressive thing. But I am still saddened to see that the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper is now rumoured to be closing .

Partly this is sentimental because ink runs in my blood; both my dad and grand-dad having worked at various times on Fleet Street. But also because the decline of newspaper buying and reading is another symptom of dumbing-down.

I am not talking here about the poor or the uneducated, the people who have been most by-passed and un-represented by the political system in recent times. I am talking about those who are literate and educated and who most mornings on the way to work will happily fork out for an over-priced coffee but insist on reading only free-sheets like Metro, London Lite and The London Paper. Vacuous celebrity gossip, soap updates and a reactionary digest of the news for the hard-of-thinking that make OK Magazine look like the London Review Of Books.

I have the excuse that it’s difficult to read a newspaper on the way to work when you commute on a motorcycle. But whenever I take a train, and every weekend I almost feel an obligation to read a newspaper. In fact taking an hour to mull over the papers on Saturday and Sunday is as close as I come to a weekly ritual observance ... and a pleasure too.

I acknowledge that the print media is not primarily where I get the news anymore: at home it’s the radio and the TV, at work it’s the internet. But whether it’s reading the analysis or the features, or even if it’s just getting increasing pissed-off with the lifestyle columnists at least I’m taking a small amount of time to look beyond my immediate environment and engage with the wider world. No other media does this in quite the same way.

Political correctness gone very wrong

No - this blog hasn’t turned into a Daily Mail editorial written by Jeremy Clarkson.

I haven’t written anything previously about the Defend The Four campaign because in all honesty I had nothing original to add. The disciplinary charges brought against the Four were all too obviously a politically-inspired use of use internal procedures to discredit, and more importantly remove from office, left activists who dared challenged the UNISON leadership.

The UNISON leadership know it, the Four certainly know it, and so do the vast majority of trade unionists: The barring of the Four from holding office has nothing to do with the supposed racism of using an image of the three wise monkeys in a leaflet attacking the leadership and everything to do with their campaign for democratic reform of the union and for disaffiliation from the Labour Party.

But just for the benefit of anyone who genuinely doesn’t know, or for apologists of the UNISON leadership (some of whom disgracefully claim to be on the Left) the origin of the ‘three wise monkeys’ is in Japanese Buddhism. The monkeys actually have names; Mizaru, Mikazum and Mazan. They are commemorated at the Eighth Century Tisho-gu shrine and their cult is honoured elsewhere in the East. In fact Ghandi had a particular devotion to the three monkeys, and a statute of them has been erected in Gujarat to mark the site of his famous salt march protest.

In recent times the image of the three monkeys has been used satirically to symbolise ‘looking the other way’ in order to preserve a clean conscience – in Christian terms ‘doing a Pontius Pilate’. This may be from a misunderstanding of the image – of it may be from a subversion of the sanctimony of religious authority. Possibly Buddhists could feel aggrieved by its misappropriation but in absolutely no fucking way can it be said, as the UNISON leadership claims, to be a racist image of black people.

From Stalin to Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, the recourse to organisational and procedural measures in a witch-hunt to remove your opponents from the fight is a sign of political and ideological bankruptcy and failure. (I now await accusations of insensitivity on my part from any witches and other Wiccans).

London (1992) Revisited

I am home alone at the moment – the family having debarked on a trip to visit the grandparents up north. In such circumstances I usually fall into an unhealthy pattern of staying up too late and drinking too much on my own. As I did last night making some inroads into a bottle of 12 year old malt – a recent present from a very old friend. My cable is down at the moment so I am raiding a stack of long neglected DVDs for my late night entertainment – last night I dug out, possibly for subconscioulsy sentimental reasons another present from the same friend, one from many years ago – Patrick Keiller’s ‘London’.

Made in 1994 before the onset of reality-TV and attention deficit disorder media, the film essay with its silent static camera work and dead-pan voice over has an unashamedly art-house feel to it. It covers a year in London – 1992 – through the eyes of two fictional characters – the narrator and his friend, Robinson. In a series of ‘expeditions’ they criss-cross the city on the pretext of some fairly obscure historical / literary quests. And along the way they document the state of the capital.The prevailing mood is one of decline and an abandonment of a sense of the future.

Reading reviews of the film from the intervening years since it came out they all seem to be saying – rather smugly – that things haven’t turned out as badly as Keiller predicted after all. But that of course was pre-recession – watching it last night again I felt the opposite.

In 1992 the Tories had been in power for 13years and people were talking of a one-party state, an IRA bombing campaign had created a climate of terrorism-scares, and the slump had begun with the developers of Canary Wharf – that temple of 80’s Thatcherism – going into administration. The final round of pit closures that finished the work of the miners’ strike was met with one of the biggest protest marches of recent years. Greeting the news that John Major has secured another election victory for the Tories, the fictional character Robinson predicts;

" his flat would continue to deteriorate and his rent increase – he would be intimidated by vandalism and petty crime – the bus service would get worse – there would be more traffic and noise pollution and an increased risk of getting knocked down – there would be more drunks pissing in the street when he looked out the window – there would be more children taking drugs when he came home at night – his job would be at risk and subject to interference – his income would decline – he would drink more and less well – he would be ill more often and would die sooner – for the old or anyone with children it would be much worse – the public transport system would degenerate into chaos – there would be more road schemes and hospitals would close – as the social security system was dismantled there would be increased homelessness and crime – with the police more often carrying guns …"

Commonwealth - wot ?

Some fuss in the news today about the anniversary of the Commonwealth. It is from 1949, following Indian independence, that the modern new-look Commonwealth – the “Commonwealth Of Nations’ rather than the ‘British Commonwealth’ dates.

I have to confess that I struggle with the idea of the Commonwealth.

The PR spin of the Commonwealth would suggest that it is part multi-cultural jamboree and part the United Nations without all the arguments and those awkward problematic countries.

In reality the Commonwealth is a mechanism that allows a small island off the mainland of Europe to continue to punch above its weight on a global stage. Whereas the British Empire painted a large part of the atlas red by the use of gunboats and district commissioners it now does it more subtly with diplomacy and cultural influence. Or on occasion, with an iron fist in the velvet glove when the ‘constitutional’ role of the monarch is used to shape political events - as it was in Australia in 1975.

Of course there is more to it than that, the Commonwealth was driven by all sort of other factors: It managed to preserve some of the jobs for the otherwise redundant imperial functionaries. It assured that the royal family had an itinerary of places to go on holiday cruises (state visits). It gave Britain the opportunity to win medals at the Commonwealth Games in events that otherwise we would have had no chance in at the Olympics.

But most importantly when the British Empire was being dismantled in a wave of national liberation movements after the Second World War it gave a vehicle for assimilating some of the more moderate nationalist leaders into the establishment.

I am at a loss as to why such a wildly inappropriate name as ‘Commonwealth’ was chosen though. The Commonwealth – the real original seventeenth century one – was a glorious period of radicalism when the old order was turned upside down and we actually had, for all too short a time, a republic and a constitution. Even during the Second World War, a radical party - influenced by Christian Socialism, in some ways to the left of Labour - took the name of the ‘Common Wealth Party’.

Wintson Churchill, reactionary old git though he may have been, did at least know his British history and argued that because of these radical associations the name of Commonwealth was not an appropriate one for The British Empire Version 2.1. Incidentally he was similarly outraged when a warship and a type of tank were named after Cromwell…

Social mobility isn't social justice.

A ‘social mobility czar’ sounds like an oxymoron but Alan Milburn seems to be now cast in that role. With the publication of a Sutton Trust report on social mobility, or more precisely the lack of it, it might seem that New Labour is putting the issue of class back on the agenda.

The report shows that in terms of social mobility, Britain has gone backwards. The professions and senior management are dominated by the products of fee-paying schools (not to mention much of the front benches). The likelihood of a working class child ‘advancing’ are apparently now lower than they were in the 1960’s.

‘No shit Sherlock’ is the response of most of us who live in the real world.

So far the debate hasn’t really touched on how our society and its economic system inevitably creates social inequality. It hasn’t even really tackled the issue of fee-paying private schools, the biggest perpetrator of unequal life chances on a scale that sets this country apart from every other country in Europe. Rather than attack the existence of these schools the report looks suspiciously like a preamble for the reintroduction of selective state schools and the ‘golden age’ of Harold Wilson’s meritocracy.

I know a bit about social mobility myself. I’ve moved ‘up’ via state comprehensive to Oxbridge then ‘down’ by taking a career amongst the diminishing ranks of the skilled working class and then ‘fuck knows what direction’ by ending up as a director of a small business. I often feel more confused than emancipated and the only certainty is that I don’t fit in well in any particular category. Even so on balance I’d rather live under a meritocracy than a system where the old-school tie dominates.

But a meritocracy doesn’t abolish inequality it just provides a different mechanism for it – and something of a safety valve.

The period in British history when there was possibly the greatest social mobility was at the start of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. A small but significant layer of skilled master craftsman became entrepreneurs and factory owners. Another layer of skilled craftsman lost their livelihood and status and joined the unskilled working class. The largest section of people exchanged the stability they had experienced for centuries as a rural semi-peasantry for the uncertainty of wage labour in the new urban factories.

There was never a better time to get rich quick, or, within a couple of generations to enter the ranks of the ruling class. It also was - for the majority of people; the labourers and the factory fodder - probably one of the grim-est, shittiest and most unjust periods in which to be alive.