Budget 2010: Make the best of us, not the worst

For me as for many, I suspect, the merchant bankers snagged by TV news cameras supping in Corney & Barrow last night (could have been any C&B, didn't matter) looked altogether too relieved and thirsty and ready for the weekend. Not that I didn’t want the markets to approve the ‘Unavoidable Budget’™, you understand – au contraire. I was just fantasising that the markets' handmaidens might have to feel as sober and filled with foreboding as the rest of us, at least for an evening.
Because I have no imagination I couldn’t foretell any of yesterday’s Budget except for what had been leaked, plus the surety that Nick Clegg would be talking it up weasel-style in front of a camera and his imaginary legion of fans. I almost didn’t want to buy outright the Krugman thesis that we are on the brink of a historic error, austerity in a time of weak demand. And I didn’t fancy going along automatically with Alastair Campbell’s tribal reading of the runes: “...George Osborne puts the fragile recovery at risk with his ideological onslaught on public services, by pretending the economy is worse than it is, and using the quisling Lib Dems as political cover.”

However, it seems clear today that the poorest areas and people in this country have been disproportionately hit by Osborne’s cleaver. As Tory minister Bob Neill put it with such candour a few weeks back, "those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt." (Eh?) Anthony Painter gave a strong response today: “any group that disproportionately relies on benefits will be marginalised, plunged into poverty, and facing despair. This is not the way it’s meant to be. Not in a decent, relatively wealthy society. The basic post-war compact on support and advancement for all in exchange for doing the responsible thing was broken yesterday. Not only lone parents, but also those who are poor, mentally impaired or incapacitated, the disabled, certain minority groups, and anyone relying on benefits to get by.”

Now, to say quickly - I do appreciate the rebuttal that to live 'disproportionately' on benefit is not right for any capable and able-bodied person, and in those cases should not be encouraged/tolerated. I agree that the public sector contains waste (and by that I include the NHS) and that Labour was going to have to cut big too. I’m not in fear of 'Bankrupt Britain' but I can feel the horror in the concept of interest on national debt exceeding the economy’s growth rate. I just haven’t ever trusted the Conservatives to do the harrowing – they’ve never been notably skilful at it. But I agree with Hopi Sen that it’s not a case of 'whether' but of ‘whose public sector pensions and pay should be cut.’ (Even John Redwood seemed to show some appreciation of the case for exemption of the low-paid public servant on Newsnight last week.)

And still, the thought of 25% less spending by government departments is stomach-churning. Surely paying more tax would be cheaper? This blog favoured the D. Miliband ratio of spending cuts to tax rises (2:1) rather than what looks like the 77-23 split of G. Osborne. That would be what’s properly called ‘a progressive alternative’, if the tax rises were sensibly applied to some of the sorts of ‘middle and high-income earners’ who were feeling so cheery round the bars of Broadgate and Exchange Square last night. But, but… I also acknowledge and defer to what John Rentoul described the other day as: “a strong “tree” bias (“Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that man behind that tree,” as Andrew Dilnot, formerly of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, once surprised me by chanting in a television interview).” And if everyone with taxable earnings between £37K and £150K is to be taxed at 40%, and at 50% above that, then that’s about as much income tax as I would have thought proper or permissible.

I do understand the thinking and appeal of a firm smack from government so as to teach that Britain should ‘live within its means.’ But the other day John Redwood did that quaint Tory thing of comparing the nation’s economy to a domestic household knuckling down to unavoidable frugality: ‘I know it is asking a lot for an outbreak of commonsense by public sector CEOs in councils and quangos. But can they spare us the crocodile tears and the parade of the bleeding stumps? Can they do what any household or company does when faced with a few percent off their income? Just get on and manage it in the least damaging way possible.’ Redwood’s analogies, however, were all drawn Margaret-style from good Grantham housekeeping: (‘You can holiday nearer at home… eat in more than in the local restaurants… draw some money out of the savings account... buy more of the value items at the supermarket, and put more vegetarian dishes into the home menus.’)
I’m sure a great many Britons have come to terms with the end of their excessive consumption based on borrowing, and so would fit Redwood’s model. If you are a company, though, then you just have to fire a proportion of your staff. And if you are someone who never earned enough to have significant savings, or weren’t reared on a middle-class diet, and did all your eating indoors on ‘value items’ anyway… What commonsense homily has John Redwood got to tell you then?

Labour has to offer an alternative, of course. No sitting on the hands. I further agree with Hopi Sen that this alternative ‘needs to be built on creating growth’, ‘we need to create jobs to grow’, and so we ‘need to be talking about measures to support private sector job creation and these can’t be simply extensions of State Aid.’ For sure, with all these benefit cuts we’re looking at a big reserve army of the unemployed. But, really, where will the jobs come from? Can anyone say? They’re hardly going to emerge blithely when people are afraid to spend, businesses afraid to invest, and our imagined export markets are outbidding each other in the austerity stakes, Germany 'leading by example' etc.

Over to you then, D. Miliband...

English Soul: Steve Winwood

BBC4 has been building up a superb library of documentaries about rock ‘n’ roll music, and has just aired another one, English Soul, devoted to the career of Steve Winwood. Still, I’m struck by how many of these docs tell the same sociological story, i.e. how in 1960s England a lot of young lads – mainly working class or petit bourgeois, mainly from the north and the midlands (or, yes, the outskirts of London) – wanted very much not to do what their Dads had done. That willed difference is an old story, yes, but in the 1960s it had a brand new outlet in popular music.
Moreover, these lads’ Dads (or Mums) quite often had musical instruments about the house – the working-class way of making your own entertainment and all that. But whereas Mum & Dad were raised on music-hall and might conceivably have appreciated Lonnie Donegan or Cliff Richard, the key to the needful difference was these lads' youthful worship of black American music and musicians, the love of blues and R&B, the desire to imitate its sentiment, its feel, its authenticity. Thus Eric Clapton in the BBC4 doc, remembering how he marvelled at the vocal skill of the young Steve Winwood – that he could sing like that, as opposed to what must have been his actual life experience. He ‘sounded black’, ‘like Ray Charles.’ (The doc went on to reveal that 60-ish Steve now talks with the clipped vowels of a long-time multi-millionaire country gent, whereas his brother Muff is still a cast-iron Brummie.)
When I was at the age (17) that one has a ‘favourite song’, quite often something a bit moody/melancholy, the one for me was ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ by Blind Faith (which I first heard over the end credits of Kevin Reynold’s terrific movie Fandango, sadly neglected now as it was then.) The song was written and sung by Steve Winwood. When Winwood was 17? Well, he was enjoying knocking The Beatles off the top of the pop charts with ‘Keep On Running’, recorded with The Spencer Davis Group. And – you get my theme – when I was 17 Winwood was enjoying a solo US number one with ‘Higher Love’, a pop-'soul'/dance tune that rhymed ‘fire’ and ‘desire’ and was packaged in the Arif Mardin mode of the day whereby everything – keyboards, horns, drums – sounded programmed and spring-loaded and utterly inorganic… except for the voice.
After ‘Higher Love’ for Winwood came ‘Roll With It’, another sing-a-long hit that, if I remember right, was licensed to advertise Michelob beer. I well remember Keith Richard giving his hoarse opinion of the ambition of that record to Rolling Stone at that time: ‘Ahh, come on, Steve...’ In English Soul Winwood talks half-apologetically about ‘going along with things’ for commercial reasons at various points in his career. He was a prodigy, so he was doubtless offered at least as much as he could initiate creatively. What size of an artist has he been? The definitive answer is presumably in the new box set Revolutions. For my part I confess I prefer a master songwriter/musician who sings his/her own stuff, however flawed (cf. Warren Zevon, who actually covered Winwood’s 'Back in the High Life', albeit a little awkwardly) to a great singer who settles too much into familiar grooves and co-authored lyrical clichés. But for Winwood’s Blind Faith songs alone – also ‘Sea of Joy’ and ‘Had to Cry Today’ – on top of all the Traffic stuff and the solo material – I admit I remain a keen fan.

World Cup 2010: The cream also rises

This World Cup is getting good, people. Argentina were admirably patient tonight in their disposal of Greece, inspired by their entirely-correctly-rated talisman, whom the coach properly kept in the starting XI ("I think it would be a sin", Maradona told the press, "not to give Messi to the people, to the team...") Brazil and Portugal showed their essential beauty to best advantage the other day. Holland are safely through and capable of better. I keep everything crossed for Germany and for Spain. Right then, who’s left…?

Sean Whelan, blogging from the World Cup for NUFC site True Faith, is presumably one Mag who’s shouting for The Ingerland, if we judge by the ‘we’ in his screed below. But on that basis his opinion of David Beckham’s presence on the England bench can be taken as less one-eyed, or more rounded, than mine (which is that Beckham is, quite clearly, one of the most disastrous liabilities ever to appear for England at (5!) major finals.) But forget me - come in, Sean:

‘David Beckham is p***ing me off. The players must be getting annoyed with him. If you’re not playing well, you don't need that self-obsessed whopper moaning on the bench. He's only there for his own benefit, he needs to be seen at the World Cup to promote the Beckham brand. He's a footballer, not a chief executive, so why wear a three-piece suit? Hair immaculate, the bloke's a w***er. He stopped being a serious footballer when he left Man Utd 6/7 years ago to become a bit part player at Madrid. As for going to America, well, it's a joke. He should be doing what Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs are doing at Man Utd. Scholes shows Beckham up for what he is; a flash c*** - more concerned with fame and fortune than football. I wish we had a Roy Keane in the squad just to grab that perma-tanned phoney by the throat and tell him how it is...’

The English Summer, forever fleeting

A great friend of mine once told me feelingly how much he hated arranging his family’s summer holiday too far in advance: ‘You get it booked then you wait and it never comes’ was his existential complaint. Thus, the burden of hope and expectation that falls on an English summer, and the shadowing sense of inevitable disappointment - some of which I find myself feeling whenever I see Magritte's famous 'Empire of Light' (pictured).
This morning London bathes in high June heat, pools of shade and light glinting off any exposed hard surface. It’s the longest day of the year, and for me that always comes too soon, feels like a premature curtain drawn down on the possibility of ‘Summer.’ ('Dark nights coming now, just you watch...') But maybe it’s part of the process, the turning of the earth, the subjective experience of Time.
21 years ago this month I sat my Eng Lit A level paper, composing my no-doubt deathless responses to a set of classic texts that included The Great Gatsby: the sort of novel a young person should read regardless of curriculum, and which will linger in the mind of any reader. Today is the day in the calendar when I always think of that enviable nameless sylph at one Gatsby soiree who says:
"In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year... Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."
I only wish I could be so negligent… For me, though, the tenor is more in line with Tom Waits as ‘Benny’, the ponderous soda fountain proprietor in Francis Coppola’s Rumblefish – my favourite movie when I was 14, and still a cracker, I assume:
"Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. Y'see, when you're young, you're a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years here, a couple of years there... it doesn't matter. Y'know? The older you get you say, "Jesus, how much I got left? I got thirty-five summers." Think about it. Thirty-five summers..."
That many? Still, what are we waiting for?

World Cup 2010: Come back, number ten...

Glimpsed in South Africa (courtesy of Getty images): the maestro, Zizou - brooding, quite likely, on this tournament's dysfunctional Domenech-led French team, as opposed to the previous tournament's dysfunctional Domenech-led French team, whom Zidane nonetheless managed to drag, as if single-handed and Sisyphean, to the brink of a second golden trophy. Would that he were out on the field this time too, doing (some of) that voodoo only he can do...

Not yet glimpsed in South Africa: much quality or verve or excitement, despite the outbreaks of local enthusiasm. I don't require the glut of goals so much as the quality play, from sides looking a bit less glum and gone in the legs (so speaks the Supreme Athlete, from his bathchair...)

The home nation's impending exit (barring a great result against the dysfunctional blah-blah French) is a major downer. Spain's misfire last night has me gloomy, too. My man in black-and-white, Jonas Gutierrez, is being played by Maradona as a defender due to Argentine injury bother. And I don't intend to spend the next 3 weeks just cheering on Miroslav Klose (another version of My Kind of Player.) What's wanted is a bit of magic from The Man in the #10 Shirt - yes, shirt of Zidane, Maradona, Platini, Pele, Puskas. That's where the inciting genius is usually found. So play up, Kaka, Messi, Podolski, Fabregas, Sneijder! Make sure you'll all be around come the knock-outs, then go do that voodoo that you do so well...

Labour's Newsnight hustings, and a clear choice

Wanting to assess the performances of the Labour leader candidates on Tuesday’s Newsnight, I had to struggle to see past the truly wearisome MC-ing of Jeremy Paxman, who managed to be snide, peremptory, and unclear – who also, in the chief scripted bit of ‘humour’, thought it witty to characterise Diane Abbott as some sort of high school cheerleader. Eh bien, nice work if you can get it.
Still, moving on. It seems the main thing people say for Ed Balls is that he would be a 'combative performer' at the despatch box. Cameron will be dreaming of such combat, with a man who has the tense, breathless quality of bluster, and is now completing the feat of talking out of both sides of his mouth.
I confess the apparent popularity of Ed Miliband For Leader has so far been a mystery to me and, having had my head sunk in my hands through most of his contributions last night, I only hope it ends up proving a mystery to 'EM' too.
Andy Burnham did better, got in some sharp points with seeming conviction. A caveat for Andy, though: I’m a proud northerner too, and I (and, I believe, others) wouldn’t vote for you solely or even partially on those grounds. Pack it in, eh?
On the subject of Diane Abbott, nothing occurs to me, other than in respect of her curious attribution of the ‘seeming’ public concern over immigration to an actual concern over housing and jobs – as if immigration were not an actual factor in the actual pools of the latter resources. I guess Diane must feel the working class of England continue to labour under false consciousness.
So, to Diane’s champion, and my pick, David Miliband. He said many impressive things and said them impressively, on the need for economic growth, for hard choices in foreign policy, for keeping a cool head on civil liberties and about the size and role of the state. We glimpsed a touch of prideful stiffness in this seemingly irreducible need to don the mantle of Anthony Crosland, but it’s quite forgivable, especially when Paxman (who attended Cambridge and whose own public service amounts to 30-odd years of sneering at elected politicians from a padded BBC chair) leapt in to thumbnail Crosland as some sort of sad ‘intellectual’ loser. Again, nice work, Jeremy. Rave on, our David.

The Saville Inquiry

Strange to recall that nearly nine years have passed since the day I called in as a visitor to the Saville Inquiry in Derry. It was on Monday, June 25 2001, that I stepped inside the Guildhall, out of a sunlit Derry afternoon, and found a breathtaking technical operation in progress. The Guildhall’s Gothic main chamber had been converted into what Richard Harvey – barrister representing the family of Jim Wray, a victim of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – called ‘Courtroom Starship Enterprise’. Sixty lawyers sat in attendance, a great nest of black crows: three for each victim, plus a group representing the paratroopers. Each was fitted out with a personal computer and a lectern from which they could question the witness, and such was the crowd in the chamber that each QC found himself gesturing to get the witness’s attention so that proceedings could commence.
Large screens were suspended from the oak-beamed ceiling, displaying close-ups of highlighted transcript passages, contemporary photographs, and even a VR recreation of the Bogside, reviving the long since demolished Rossville Flats. As a witness testified, they could refer to a virtual panorama of the Bogside, move around 360 degrees, even draw on the screen with a marker in the manner familiar to us from sports programmes on TV.
Taking the stand during my visit was Ms. Susan North, an Englishwoman in her mid-50s, elegant in a cream dress, pearls, and a hennaed bob. Her job as assistant to photo-journalist Fulvio Grimaldi brought her into the Bogside throng that day. When the shooting started she and others sought refuge in the Rossville flats. To get into a particular flat she had to step over the body of 17 year old Kevin McElhinney, shot dead as he tried to crawl to safety in a stairwell. Once in the flat, she and Grimaldi had to dive for cover as incoming shots were fired through the window. Ms North’s tape recording of this gunfire was played in silence that day at the Guildhall. Much argument ensued about a pretty well inaudible remark transcribed as ‘Let me get the bombs out first’: Ms North remembered hearing or seeing nothing of the sort. She did meet a man with a pistol in his pocket, who was afraid of being ‘lifted’, as they say in the North. And in the streets she saw more fallen bodies, people who’d been shot – five dead, three wounded. ‘Even the most hardened person’, she told the Tribunal calmly, ‘could not fail to have been touched by the monstrous scene.’
David Cameron’s speech to the Commons this afternoon, relaying the main findings of Saville’s Inquiry, moved me considerably. Not that I have any personal stake in the matter, you understand – it’s simply to do with the accumulated tensions of it, which anyone can feel who has read and reflected on the history.
It’s reckoned that ‘The Troubles’ claimed 3526 lives, and certain parties will insist on arranging these names in columns and imagining that a slide rule can show beyond doubt which side was more sinned against than sinning. The poet Thomas Kinsella lamented the tragedy very well albeit at what turned out, sadly, to be a very early stage in the conflict: ‘There are too many dead, on all sides, and it is no use pitting them hideously against one another.’
What we now know for a fact is that in the Bogside district of Derry on Sunday, January 30 1972, at the culmination of a march by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against internment without trial, unarmed Catholic demonstrators were purposely shot dead by soldiers of the First Battalion Parachute Regiment under Colonel Derek Wilford. We know this now in spite of the subsequent inquiry of Lord Chief Justice Widgery, who decided swiftly and erroneously that Wilford’s men had met IRA gunfire as they entered the Bogside, and that several of the thirteen rioters then ‘dropped’ by Para sharpshooters were themselves armed.

Crusaders and Citoyens

I don't really 'do' links on this blog, a disposition I've suddenly come to see as unfortunately solipsistic, given the promiscuous tendencies of one's everyday web-crawling habits. Still, return visitors here (that's you two, sit up straight) will probably have figured out which online writers I consult on a regular basis; and, yes, in respect of British politics, that would be John Rentoul of the Independent, Philip Stephens at the FT, Oliver Kamm & (with some lingering resistance) David Aaronovitch at the Times, and the widely-read blogger Hopi Sen.
So, this afternoon I was very gratified to have my opinion of the David Miliband campaign noted by Hopi Sen, who also had some kind words to say about Crusaders. The term 'comrade' is something else I don't 'do' on account of its now-ruined context (though I could still accept citoyen); and I would be getting ideas above my station to factor myself into any fancied club of 'co-thinkers'. But in politics, as in all parts of life, when it comes to convictions freely expressed then common ground is a fine thing to find.

David Miliband: Not what you'd call an operator

Good grief… The ill tidings came by Twitter this afternoon: “Good news re Dianne. Thanks to my supporters who helped put her on ballot. Important day for debate and diversity in party.”

This blog wants David Miliband to win the Labour leadership contest, and hopes DM wants DM to win it too, because one could be forgiven for doubting as much, given his weird keenness to force an additional opponent onto the ballot paper.

DM’s nominating of Diane Abbott and urging of some of his own followers to do likewise seems to me a weirdly unimpressive stroke. If DM really believed Abbott had a deserved claim to lead the Party then I expect many supporters of his might reconsider their view of his own worthiness for the job. If DM believes Abbott will hive off first-preference votes from his brother and from Ed Balls, and/or that Abbott’s fan club will suddenly look on him favourably as a second choice then I wish him all the best with that manoeuvre, but find it somehow off-putting. And if DM believes that a female and/or non-white candidate is essential in any contest of this sort then I reckon he’s listening to the wrong sort of sanctimony, i.e. that of Labour NEC chair Ann Black (“If the choice is between three or four white male ex-ministers in their 40s, however able, it will be seen as lacking the full range of diversity which Labour seeks to reflect.”)
One wants Labour’s genuine diversity to be apparent, sure, but a leadership contest is not meant to be proportionally representative - leadership skills aren't distributed that way, and leaders aren't people who need a leg-up or a fix to get on the playing field. Your Party leader must emerge as someone who could impress the country at large as a potential Prime Minister, whether the job started tomorrow or in 2015. But then my troops may be overcommitted on this score, so to speak, as someone who admired David Miliband’s performance as Foreign Secretary, and who didn’t vote for Diane Abbot back in 1997 when she was my local MP. (She didn't seem to me the most socialistic candidate, only the most otiose.)

The fact that the Tories are loving this nonsense doesn’t stop them from making worthwhile points, the Spectator’s James Forsyth noting that Abbott ‘will spend the contest making jokes at the expense of the four white male Oxbridge special advisers turned politicians she is running against.’ That would be fine if we could trust that a commensurate number of gags will be had at Abbott’s expense – her career has been risible in some notable ways – and yet somehow I doubt any of them will have the nerve, stifled both by the rules of the game that allowed Abbott in and the fear of being seen to beat up on the media-friendly underdog.
Still, any ‘I Agree with Diane’ tendencies will, I hope, be resisted. For one thing, you will never be sure if Diane Abbott means what she says: the evidence to date is not good, but one also hopes that conclusive proof need never be furnished. For the meantime, though, I second Hopi Sen’s query about whether or not ‘ the chance to look noble on Twitter was really worth it.’

Cosmopolis (UEA): In academe's grey groves...

Good sport at the UEA Cosmopolis events last Saturday. I enjoyed my platform on fiction and politics with the eminent Giles Foden, chaired with some panache by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, author of What If Latin America Ruled the World? Giles said some especially intriguing things about thinking his way into Idi Amin's head for The Last King of Scotland. At Giles' prompting Oscar tasked both Giles and I to propose how we might fictionalise a) the Israeli Gaza flotilla debacle, and b) the BP oil-spill debacle. (My responses were, a) in the voice of a ghost, or else an IDF soldier slipping down a rope, and b) in the voice of a seagull...) Otherwise, I enjoyed expounding as always, on such beloved subjects as Mailer (his 'left conservatism'), George Steiner (poetry after Auschwitz, and Hitler depicted in his Portage to San Christobal of A.H.), and Brecht (the idea of pageant as 'illuminated history', offering a take on 'the truth behind it all.')
I also ended up chairing a fun session with the film/TV producer Judy Counihan, on the subject of how to pitch one's film script/idea to market, a concern on which I personally have begun to feel the pressing need for advice from someone of Judy's calibre...
Norwich itself struck me as a nice spot on my first visit. UEA is a campus college, and funnily enough I'd never been to a real campus before. But it was all very familiar. As the literary agent and novelist Derek Johns remarked to me and others in surveying its brute-concrete/dry-grassland aspect - 'Y'know, James Lasdun's dad did all of this...'

Bookhugger column #3: Fit to Wear the Shirt

Newly posted on Bookhugger, with the World Cup coming down the pipe at us, this month's literary musing of mine is on the very serious matter of books about football. Let me say straight up, there are too bloody many of them, and most of them are bloody rubbish. But the good ones are really, really good. In the piece I reiterate my admiration for the gifts of such artists as Gordon Burn, Ian Hamilton, Richard Williams, Leopoldo Luque, Kenny Dalglish and Zinedine Zidane; and I rehash my by-now-even-to-me-tiresome dislike of the English national team - an antipathy that would be dissolved instantly (if but temporarily) were Fabio Capello sufficiently distracted to pick Bensham's Andy Carroll up front and put Steve Harper from Easington in nets.

Dennis Hopper 1936-2010

Adios then, Dennis. Back when I heard the sad news of his terminal illness I had already written what was, I suppose, a sort of obituary. Tonight, learning he was gone, just a couple of other things occurred to me. One is a funny opinion given me once by Los Angeles policeman Dennis Fanning, who was technical advisor to Hopper on his LA gang movie Colors:

"I didn’t think I was going to get along with Hopper. I figured Hop’s a drunk, a druggie, a sixties radical – all that shit... Well, I got along ****ing famously with Dennis. Because we had the same stories, we just came from different sides of the fence. But we played in the same ballpark - dopers, cops, crooks - we play the same game. It’s the ****ing civilians who are outside the arena..."

Quite. And then Hopper in his own words, after I asked him once about whether he felt an artist was in some sense obliged to spend time on the dark side of life, or of their own self. His reply:

"Well, I think anybody who looks at our society and decides they want to be an artist, they have to go down that path - I think. I don’t see another path. I’m sure there are others. But if you start with Edgar Allan Poe and go to Norman Mailer, or you start with Vincent Van Gogh and you go through Jackson Pollock, or you start with Dylan Thomas and you end up with Bob Dylan – it seems that the dark journey is for the young, and in some way they feel they have to purge themselves, like the artists of the generations before purged themselves. Looking for that perfect yellow… I always thought Van Gogh was too drunk to find the yellow. Couldn’t even find the tube, man. [Whereupon Hopper laughed his famous laugh.] Maybe he was mixing the yellow with absinthe..."

In short, life was too short to be a civilian... Hopper wound up wearing v-necks and playing a fair bit of golf, sure, but his 'dark journey' was longer and stranger and more venturesome than most would dare undertake, and so it was a good thing he came back. He walks on somewhere still, I hope...

The photo above is, of course, by Warhol.

The Strangely Familiar Case of David Laws

I’m not one of those Labour voters sitting about waiting for this Government to collapse under the weight of its own hyperbole and sanctimony, bearing down as these must on the jerry-built foundations of the Coalition. We are in a deep economic morass, and 'strong and stable' governance is indeed needed, by whatever constitutional means and political talents can be found. David Laws was, evidently, more than competent for a posting as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, but it’s now clear that circumstances should never have conspired in his favour, and for reasons further to those that first seemed obvious (i.e. those arising from the outlandish notion of Liberal Democrats in government.) No, what’s got Laws – as he must have expected, right up to his recent ramrod posturing for cameras and at the despatch box – is that paying out of public money in rent to a long-time companion, albeit in a relationship that Laws would otherwise have denied to the world if pressed to, in the strange conviction that this was his entitlement.
I’ve never understood why those 'Orange Book' Lib Dems didn’t just flounce off and sign up to the Tories, of whom they were natural kinsmen. The Coalition showed me, at least, that the ‘National Interest’ offered them a convenient cover to make that furtive dash across the floor. Laws, of course, was among the fleetest of foot in that respect. Now we learn that Section 28 was always a huge barrier for him in reconciling to the Tories. Well, not so big, as it turned out.
I expect Laws will get another ministerial job in time, if he wants it – that’s the usual way. Otherwise he could go back to the City, from whence he came. No-one ever asked him to serve the public weal, and had he applied for the job then most of us would have said ‘Obviously, first up, don’t join the Liberal Democrats.’
There seems to be a lot of sympathy about for the 44-year-old Laws’ sad, self-inhibiting refusal to let his family know about his sexuality; in any event, since everyone else in his life and around Westminster seem to have known Laws was gay he will, one trusts, feel better soon, not having to lie and fiddle around this key part of his identity. And maybe the risible Nick Clegg will now keep his pompous mouth shut for a while about the 'New Politics' (?!), and the Liberal Democrats’ crusading embodiment of same. Tonight that fundamentally white, well-heeled, curiously self-repressive shower of a party look older than ever, as if it were 1963...

Bravo, Danielle Hope

It's rare enough on these TV 'talent' shows that the most interesting and authentically promising talent should make it through to the final rounds, much less be successful in the final reckoning - hence three cheers for Danielle Hope.

Esquire (June 2010) and the Bill Hicks story...

The June 2010 'Sports' issue of Esquire has been on stands a fortnight, and includes my penultimate film column for the mag, a write-up of the new documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story. I'm a big fan of Hicks, honest Injun - yet it occurs to me that anyone reading the Esquire piece might not believe it. I daresay I sound a bit iffy, a bit niggly. In part that's what an 800-word ceiling does to you: the nuance is sometimes lost, other times a great swathe of what you might really want to say simply doesn't fit. But on reflection I think I spent too many of those 800 words having a mild and pointless dig at the cult of Hicks. I do think his work has inspired too many glowing estate-approved documentary products, too many bad rock songs, too many slackly-assembled biographies. And he is one of those comics who are so great that they can leave their admirers parroting the material like scripture... But, whoah, whoah, what am I saying? There I go again... The main fact is, Hicks was a genius comic, and he died too soon - they shouldn't die, people like that. End of story.
David Letterman is quite a funny man too, if a rum cove at times, and he made himself something of a villain in the Hicks legend, by cutting (on grounds of 'taste' and network sensitivities) what would have been Hicks' final TV stand-up spot from his Late Night show in 1993. In 2009, Letterman invited Hicks' mother Mary onto the show, to apologise for his original misjudgement and loss of nerve, and to debut and showcase the previously excised Hicks performance. It's on YouTube, and is of course hilarious. But below is Letterman's opening apology, which I find very moving, in spite of the audience's uncomprehending chuckles.

How Impress the Working Classes of England?

I spent the daylight hours of Election Day just gone doing a little bit of footwork on behalf of my brother David’s attempt to be elected a local councillor under the Liberal Democrat banner in Holloway ward, Islington. (En route to the morning shift I’d called into my elder daughter’s school and voted Labour across the board for Hornsey & Wood Green, so I felt I had both my family-over-party principles and my general karmic wellbeing in good order.) The photo above is a small souvenir of an interesting day, David and I with another of his friendly volunteers of the day, Kenny.
David polled an excellent 1940 votes, every one of them earned by his own hand and, evidently, on account of his good works in the locality over recent years. But in the end – and this became clear during the day – Labour had got its usual vote out with extreme efficiency, and their three councillors were returned, as was their local MP Emily Thornberry – one of the night’s dearly-fought prizes for Labour. In fact, this was rated one of the party’s model campaigns of Election 2010, as evinced by much post-mortem analysis, such as this from Jessica Asato at LabourList:

“In Islington South, voters weren’t swayed by the Cleggmania which was expected to grip the seat. Instead, the years of community campaigning by Emily Thornberry paid off, combined by assiduous door to door contact - the mountains of literature which the Lib Dems used failed to sway the electorate… There are other explanations for the victories in these seats - not least because most of them were metropolitan, and some of them had larger than usual ethnic minority populations. But we can't underestimate the impact of full time campaigning which they embraced.”

Interesting, as always, that 'metropolitan' and 'ethnic minority' remain coded Labour still. Moving on, Chris Smith made this bolder assertion on the New Statesman blog:

“Labour London… has created a formidable fighting machine and is buoyed by election results thought impossible a year ago. It is the kingmaker that will decide if David Miliband will take over… The political map of the capital now has a solid core of red. It controls eight more Labour councils, having gained more than 180 councillors. Westminster seats were secured despite Ashcroft cash; the party held Hammersmith - home of the Conservative easyCouncil project – plus Westminster North and Tooting. And it won the marginals of Harrow North and Enfield.”

London, maybe... but the South East is back to being a big headache for Labour, indeed Southern England more generally. John Rentoul offered the following dose of salts:
‘A correspondent emails with the numbers. Total number of seats in Southern England excluding inner London: 220. Total number of Labour wins: 12 (5 per cent)..."

The enigmatic James Purnell develops this thought in the Times today:
“Labour’s voters showed [their] party a lot of love on May 6. Despite everything, the core vote came out. People voted Labour in inner cities. There was even a swing to Labour from the Tories among ABs. But there’s bad news too: an 18 per cent swing to the Tories among C2s. The list of lost seats reads like a weekend supplement on holidaying in Middle England — Hastings, South Ribble, Worcester…”
I find myself a bit troubled by the pat-ness of this 'C2' thing (the 'A' and 'B' thing too.) Liam Byrne was going on about it in the Guardian the other day too, and some commenting reader asked if he calls people ‘C2s’ to their faces? It was only this morning that I decided to check out for myself how these famous social grades are properly defined. I found the following on Wikipedia, based on ‘Chief Income Earner's Occupation’ (though ‘living on benefit’ is counted at the bottom of the scale, while the upper end doesn’t factor in that layer of the upper class who don’t actually need to earn by dint of inherited wealth.)

A, upper middle class: Higher managerial, administrative or professional.
B, middle class: Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1, lower middle class: Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2, skilled working class: Skilled manual workers
D, working class: Semi and unskilled manual workers
E, Those at the lowest levels of subsistence: Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners and others who depend on the welfare state for their income
You don't hear politicians using those D and E terms too often, do you? And there's a lesson there. Were I a skilled manual worker (indeed, a skilled anything...) I think I’d be fairly narked to hear my political convictions and voting intentions being bundled into some tacky plastic carrier bag marked 'C2'. Purnell, of course, is not standing, cannot stand, for the Labour leadership, and Byrne is said to be making up his mind, but any serious candidates need to get this part of the rhetoric right, I reckon.

Waking up to the ConDemNation

A dear and erudite friend texted me this morning with his customary wit and wisdom: 'I haven’t felt that sick seeing those two public school ****s standing in that garden since sometime around 1989… Cromwell would be ****ing outraged.'

True, and I do like to feel a bit of loathing and fury myself, it’s good for the soul in the right measure. And yet, over the whole comical Con/Lib business I think I could keep my shirt on - were it not for this outrageous fixed-term stitch-up. 2015 before we get a chance to return a verdict on these jokers? Unless there’s a 55% no confidence vote? C’mon you Con/Lib ****s - you're having a laugh. Jack Straw called in right on this morning’s R4 Today: "completely undemocratic and totally unworkable."
"Let's say this rule was passed where you require 55 per cent of the Commons vote to have an election. What if 51 per cent of the Commons was against any confidence in the government and was refusing to pass legislation? You then get into the extraordinary position where parliament could not be dissolved...but government would be completely unworkable."

To my mind Jack Straw hit quite a vein of form in the latter years of New Labour, and he writes well in today’s Times about the present and future dilemmas:

"Our overall result was not good — the second-lowest share of our postwar vote. But expectations had been so low that there is real relief that we did better than anyone expected even three weeks ago, when polls put us in the low 20s, below the Liberal Democrats. Palpable relief, too, among so many colleagues in marginal seats who never expected to be back… Above all, relief that we have to stand on our own, sort out our future without being engulfed in the miasma of a coalition deal with the Lib Dems… [A]lliances are not, in the end, a matter of calculus but of chemistry. It doesn’t work between Labour (new or old) and the Liberal Democrats... So what of our future?... First Labour must take the lead in defining its record, and in honouring Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s legacy. If we don’t, our opponents will seek to do so in a pejorative way… Second, we must avoid the visceral divisions that followed our 1979 defeat, putting us out of power for 18 years… Third, we must look carefully at the message of the election. It was broadly good in Scotland and Wales, not bad in conurbations and towns such as mine, but in what the psephologist Peter Kellner describes as the motorway corridors in England, it was far from good. Getting back the vote of “decent hard-working families” is imperative... The good news is that all of the potential candidates get this…"

I hope so, Jack, I really do.

Lib-Labbery: The Eve of Destruction

On occasion this blog is as guilty as any of clinging to certain comforting delusions as though they were nursery blankets. Moreover, it delights to see Rupert Murdoch (inter alia) in an impotent rage, and his Sun newspaper groping around on the toilet floor trying to relocate its famous sense of ‘humour’.
But the unhappy truth remains that Lib-Labbery cannot work, or certainly not in this curious moment that we’re living through. The British people won’t wear it, not based on this arithmetic. It’s said that coalitions can grievously wound the smaller party, and here I wouldn’t mind so much, but I can only see the larger party getting gored in the process too. I do believe Labour has to regroup around a bit of the forward thinking and reforming instincts that Tony Blair first advanced and then got utterly distracted from while he was PM. I also think that process will be much assisted by Miliband or Johnson as leader. But I can’t see it being conducted anywhere other than in Opposition. If Labour and the Lib Dems have so much in common, let them work that out together fruitfully in a time and place when the people aren’t waiting for a government to get formed in the midst of an economic horrorshow. I was never too keen on David Blunkett or John Reid while they held high office, but I must concede they’ve talked a few truths in their time while I was finding certain lies more consoling. They’re both right on the present issue, I’d say: I can't see that Labour will be forgiven for this particular effort to retain office - if, by whatever crazy contortions, it actually comes off. The Con/Lib notion at least makes sense by dint of numbers, though Clegg must see the ruin that will await his party then. But it seems to me, however glumly, that the proper course is Cameron now rolling up those much-vaunted sleeves of his and forming a minority government. On a purely tribal level, I think this will also, in the long run, prove the least worst option for Labour.
The photo above is (c) PA/Getty.

Crusaders for the telly?

From The North, 'the blog of author/journalist/broadcaster Keith Topping' reports (you'll have to scroll down, like) that Ruby Films has "lined up the writer of An Englishman in New York to adapt acclaimed state-of-the-nation novel Crusaders for a potential Channel 4 drama. Brian Fillis, whose credits also include the BBC4 biographical dramas The Curse Of Steptoe and Fear Of Fanny, is developing a script based on the 2008 book, the fiction debut of biographer and screenwriter Richard T Kelly. Crusaders follows a young clergyman who attempts to build a new church in a run-down area of Newcastle upon Tyne. His plans are complicated by battles with an ex-bouncer, an MP and a former classmate at his theological college who questions his faith."

The key word is 'potential', of course, we can only see what we shall see. But you can bet I wish the excellent Brian Fillis all the very best with that script he's developing...

Cosmopolis: UEA, June 5 2010

In a month's time the University of East Anglia will play host to Cosmopolis: The International Gathering of Storymakers (first annual...), billed as 'a festival of words, images and sounds to celebrate and explore the universal human practice of making stories.' Well, I'm up for that. In fact, I'm booked as a speaker. The event in which I'm participating is billed like so:

"The Politics of Storymaking (Lecture Theatre 2, 11:10): With electioneering voices now hoarse and politicians dizzy from spin, the novelists Giles Foden (The Last King of Scotland, Turbulence), Richard T Kelly (Crusaders, Sean Penn: His Life and Times), and the editor of New Statesman magazine, Jason Cowley along with a special guest, will discuss how stories and successful politics are inextricably linked."

Of course, stories and unsuccessful politics are pretty solidly linked too (I write as a Labour voter...), so I expect that side of the coin will also get an airing in what I hope will be a lively discussion. Pleased to see the Norwich Evening News have picked it up too...