Tag: Tony Blair

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No way-sis

 

From wikipedia.org / © Will Fresch

 

I’ve just Googled ‘the universe’s smallest sub-atomic particle’ and been told that, from what we currently know, the title belongs to those classes of particles known as quarks and leptons.  So, let me say that even a quark, or a lepton, is considerably bigger than the amount of enthusiasm I can summon about the news that legendary 1990s rock band Oasis have reformed and will embark on a five-city / 17-gig tour of Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland in the summer of 2025.  (The tour has already sold out, which suggests some folk are more enthusiastic about the reunion than I am.)

 

Oasis have not been a thing since 2009, when the arguing, quarrelling, sniping and feuding that’d always featured in the relationship between the band’s two mainstays, Mancunian siblings Noel and Liam Gallagher, finally went supernova – as opposed to going Champagne Supernova – resulting in the band’s break-up and the pair not sharing a stage or studio since.  From 2009 until recently, they’ve only acknowledged each other’s existence by flinging insults.  Liam, the younger and less cerebral Gallagher, has frequently called his older brother a ‘potato’ and referred to his post-Oasis band the High Flying Birds as the ‘High Flying Smurfs’.  Noel, meanwhile, has memorably described his little brother as “a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

 

Oasis first appeared on my radar in the mid-1990s, when I was working at Hokkai-Gakuen University in Sapporo, capital of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.  A student approached me one day and inquired if I was ‘Bra’ or ‘O-aaa-sis’.  (No, I’m not trying to indulge in Sofia Coppola-style mockery of how Japanese people speak English – I’m simply describing how the student, with her pronunciation, sounded to me at the time.  I’m sure my Japanese sounded even weirder to her.)  I realised she wasn’t referring to a lady’s undergarment but to British rock / pop band Blur.  She was also talking about Oasis, with whom – if the British press was to be believed at the time – Blur were locked in the bitterest and most vitriolic rivalry since the Hatfields and the McCoys.  (Noel Gallagher once remarked, “I wish Blur were dead, John Lennon was alive and the Beatles would reform.”)  Not very familiar with either band – there was no Internet in those days and it was much harder to keep up with events in the UK – I visited Sapporo’s Tower Records soon after and bought a couple of their albums.

 

How would I answer that student?  Was I Blur or Oasis?

 

© Creation Records

 

The Oasis album I bought was 1994’s Definitely Maybe and by my reckoning it’s a very good record.  It’s not particularly innovative, with the ghosts of the Beatles, T-Rex and Slade never far away, but it has several memorable toe-tappers and stompers like Columbia and Supersonic and one genuinely great track, Live Forever.  The latter made me think that if I was a teenager, I could seriously fall in love with these guys.  The song encapsulates those feelings of hope and optimism you have in your teens, no matter how humble or ordinary your origins, about your whole life being ahead of you and great things possibly awaiting – no more so than when the refrain kicks in near the end, “Gonna live forever!”

 

The songs of rock’s previous big thing, the Seattle-centred grunge movement, had been introspective, melancholic, downright miserable at times, and on April 5th, 1994, less than five months before Definitely Maybe’s release, its biggest star Kurt Cobain had blown his brains out.  So, in Britain at least, young music fans must have been ready for something more joyous.

 

Hope was also in the air politically.  After a decade-and-a-half of Britain being ruled by the Conservative party – peachy for anyone living in booming, investment-heavy south-east England, crap for anyone living in the now-post-industrial rest of the country – and with the current Tory government of John Major looking clueless, a brighter future seemed to be on the cards.  The Labour Party was reinventing itself as ‘New Labour’ and, mindful of the prevailing Zeitgeist, its shiny, photogenic young leader was keen to rub shoulders with Oasis, Blur and other representatives of the country’s burgeoning new rock scene that’d become known as ‘Britpop’.  That smiley, nice-seeming Prime Minister-in-waiting was called Tony Blair…  Well, okay.  We know how that worked out.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Raph_PH

 

I also acquired Blur’s Parklife (1994) and liked it less.  If Oasis drew on the Beatles for inspiration, then the spark for Parklife-era Blur was another 1960s British band, the Kinks.  This resulted in a number of chirpy, quirky songs that I found irritating and made me agree with Noel Gallagher, who slagged them off as ‘chimney-sweep music’.  That said, the title song (‘Shite–life’ as Liam once dubbed it), which has actor Phil Daniels babbling non-stop while singer Damon Albarn shouts “Parklife!” every so often, has been stuck in my head ever since.  Even today, when I find myself in a work-meeting with a superior who drones on endlessly, their voice dripping with meaningless corporate jargon, I have to fight off the urge to shout “Parklife!” at half-minute intervals.

 

Anyhow, though I  regarded Blur’s album as the weaker one, I still liked them.  This was because I could remember seeing them live – at London’s Brixton Academy back in 1992, when hardly anyone had heard of them, on a bill that also included the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.  I thought they’d been all right.

 

So, during the Blur vs. Oasis wars, I ended up neutral.

 

The 1990s continued.  So did Oasis, Blur and the Britpop craze, which spawned dozens of bands I only have vague memories of now: Cast, Kula Shakur, Ocean Colour Scene, Heavy Stereo, Sleeper, Echobelly, Dodgy, Menswear, Mansun…  Actually, I’ll admit to having a strange fondness for Mansun’s song Take It Easy Chicken.

 

© Creation Records

 

In 1995 Oasis unveiled their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which went on to sell 22 million copies worldwide and became one of the decade’s most acclaimed records.  I wasn’t impressed, though.  The opening number (and first single) Roll with It seemed shockingly generic to me – no wonder Damon Albarn nicknamed them ‘Oasis Quo’ – and it also spawned one of the world’s worst jokes: “Why did Oasis choose soup on the menu?  Because they got a roll with it.”  Some people adore the anthemic Don’t Look Back in Anger and Champagne Supernova but I’ve always found them overwrought.  And while initially I thought the ballad Wonderwall was quite nice, I got sick of it after hearing it for the 10,000th time.  (My partner and I were in a restaurant a fortnight ago when, from a speaker, Liam started intoning, “Today is gonna be the day…”  We groaned and rolled our eyes.)

 

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s huge, if in my opinion undeserved, success meant Oasis became even more of a rock-and-roll behemoth, doing all the customary rock-and-roll things.  Cocaine-fuelled excess?  Check.  Infighting?  Check.  Disappearing drummers?  Check.  Hanging out with Johnny Depp?  Check.  Marrying Patsy Kensit?  Check.  With so much going on, it was inevitable that the band’s third album, 1997’s Be Here Now, would (a) be presaged with more, over-the-top hype than ever and (b) prove a bloated disappointment whose sales were only a third of those of its predecessor.  It brought the band’s ascendancy to an abrupt end and helped pop the bubble of Britpop itself.  Afterwards, Oasis made more albums and I think I’ve heard most of them.  But I can’t remember a single song off them.

 

© Creation Records

 

The band’s boorish, obnoxious image put me off them too.  And when people criticise Oasis for boorishness and obnoxiousness, it’s basically Liam they’re complaining about.  While some of the abuse he’s doled out raises a smile – grumbling, for instance, that Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine “sounds like someone’s stood on her f**king foot” – there’s other stuff he’s said and done that just makes him seem like an arsehole.  An incident at Q magazine’s awards ceremony in 2000 where he heckled Kylie Minogue by yelling ‘lesbian!’ at her is also a reminder that, over the years, a fair amount of homophobia has issued from the younger Gallagher’s gob.

 

Yet, despite this, many journalists and critics have given Liam an easy ride – even when they’ve been on the receiving end of his loutishness.  One possible reason why is the belief that because he comes from an ‘authentic’ working-class background in Manchester, Liam is somehow the ‘authentic’ voice of the working class.  Therefore, if you criticise his antics, you’re being ‘class-ist’.  Indeed, this argument has re-ignited in the wake of the news about 2025’s reunion tour.  The British media is suddenly full of commentators accusing other commentators, ones not delighted by Oasis’s return, of being snobbish and anti-working class.

 

But I don’t think any of this holds water.  For one thing, I’ve known working-class people who’ve also been unimpressed by Liam’s yobbishness.  And, in my time, I’ve seen plenty of middle-class and upper-class people make knobheads of themselves, and their social status didn’t make me think they were any less arseholey than the Oasis frontman.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Alexander Frick

 

Tellingly, Mark Lanegan – singer with 1990s grunge band the Screaming Trees and somebody whose upbringing in Ellensburg, Washington, sounds much tougher than the Gallaghers’ in Manchester – didn’t have a high opinion of Gallagher the Younger.  In his 2020 autobiography Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan recalls how in 1996 the Screaming Trees supported Oasis during a North American tour.  At the tour’s start, Liam accosted Lanegan with a mocking cry of “Howling Branches!” – Howling Branches, Screaming Trees, get it?  Lanegan described his response thus: “‘F**k off, you stupid f**king idiot’ was my brief blasé retort, spoken as if to a bothersome mosquito.”

 

This was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  Lanegan came to detest Liam so much that he wrote: “I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t beaten, knifed, or shot him to death by now, such was the reckless, witless, and despotic nature of his insufferable façade.”

 

So, I wasn’t subject to even a fleeting moment of temptation to spend hours in a Ticketmaster queue and shell out eye-watering sums of money to see Oasis perform next summer.  As far as I’m concerned, the band have only one really decent album behind them.  Besides, I’m not sure they’ll even make it through the tour.  Noel may well bail out before the end, deciding that occupying the same airspace as his tosser-ish brother again is more than his sanity is worth.

 

© Food Records / Virgin Records

 

Finally, returning to the old Blur-Oasis rivalry, I have to say I’m now in the Blur camp.  I think they’re the better band because, in the end, they’ve produced more good songs that Oasis have: This is a Low (1994), He Thought of Cars, The Universal (both 1995), Beetlebum, Song 2, Death of a Party (all 1997), Coffee & TV (1999), Out of Time (2003)…  Incidentally, given that Oasis were always supposed to be hard-men northerners while Blur were poncy, studenty southerners, the video for The Universal, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), makes Blur look far more disturbing than their Mancunian adversaries ever looked.  Damon Albarn and co. make great Droogs.

 

But if I had to choose one band that represented the peak of Britpop, it wouldn’t be Blur or Oasis.  No, it’d be Sheffield’s Pulp, led by the sublimely sly Jarvis Cocker.  Pulp’s Common People (1995), for instance, brilliantly captures one of the indignities of being working class – that of having moneyed people trying to ‘slum it’ by hanging out with you in order to look cool.  No wonder that in 2004 Common People received the ultimate accolade – William Shatner sang a cover version of it.  I can’t imagine the former Captain Kirk ever wanting to wrap his tonsils around Wonderwall.

 

© Island Records

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Now expose it to garlic, holy water and sunlight

 

From wikipedia.org / © Eva Rinaldi

 

A while ago on this blog, I conducted the following thought-experiment.  Imagine that current trends result in the world becoming a globally-warmed, war-ravaged hellhole inhabited by only a few surviving remnants of humanity.  But those remnants somehow manage to lay their hands on a time machine and realise they can send an assassin back in time, in the manner of the James Cameron / Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Terminator (1984).  Who would they have their assassin target in, say, the late 20th century to change the course of history and prevent the world from turning into crap?

 

As I mused at the time, “The young Donald Trump?  The young Vladimir Putin…?  Neither.  I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the one the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after…  Rupert Murdoch.”

 

Wizened 92-year-old media mogul Murdoch was recently in the news because he announced his decision to step down as head of News Corp and the Fox Corporation in favour of his son Lachlan.  Murdoch certainly looks his age, but it sometimes felt like he was going to live forever and keep running his media empire forever.  Regular nocturnal blood-meals sucked from the throats of helpless victims are evidently good for the constitution.  That said, lately, the old monster had begun to look a little vulnerable, both in his business dealings and in his personal life.

 

April this year saw his Fox News network fork out nearly 790 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought against it by the voting-equipment company Dominion.  This was after the network told outrageous porkies about the company switching votes in the 2020 US presidential election so that Donald Trump wouldn’t win it.  Among the guff peddled by Fox was the claim that the company was owned by Venezuelans and had experience of swinging elections for the late Hugo Chavez.

 

Meanwhile, though old Rupe had once wooed the ladies with confident charm, like an extremely shrivelled George Clooney, he’s also looked less sure-footed on the romantic front recently.  In 2022, he ended his fourth marriage, to Jerry Hall, by unchivalrously sending her an email to inform her that she’d been dumped.  Hall was unsurprisingly miffed, as during the Covid-19 pandemic she’d gone out of her way to ensure her aged husband stayed isolated and avoided getting the virus, which for someone of his years would probably have been a death sentence.  Earlier this year, he announced his engagement to former radio host Ann Lesley Smith, but this lasted just two weeks.  That’s even shorter than a Liz Truss premiership.  Apparently, Murdoch started to panic at Smith’s loopy evangelical-Christian pronouncements, which included the assertion that Tucker Carlson was ‘a messenger from God.’

 

But you can’t keep an old horn-dog down.  Rupe is currently engaged again, this time to Elena Zhukova, who was once married to the Russian billionaire – don’t mention the ‘O’ word – Alexander Zhukova.  At this rate, Murdoch will have got himself betrothed 16 more times before he reaches treble-figures.

 

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

 

Now that Murdoch has stepped back from the media-controlling activities that have kept him busy for the past 71 years, ever since the age of 21 when he inherited an Adelaide newspaper, the News, from his dad, what legacy does he leave?  If he had a shred of conscience, morality and decency – which of course he doesn’t have, which makes this an academic statement – he’d surely howl in despair and incarcerate himself in a Trappist monastery for the rest of his days to do penance for his multiple sins.  Or just top himself.  Murdoch’s media operations have, over decades, caused massive harm to the well-being of humanity.

 

He pushed the rapacious neoliberal agenda of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, with its credo that greed is good, the market should be worshipped and the financial safety nets and infrastructure that held societies together, and looked after their most vulnerable members, weren’t worth bothering about.  Thatcher said it all when she declared in 1987, “There is no such thing as society.”  His outlets have gone to great lengths to ignore and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence that manmade climate change is happening and poses a terrifying threat to our civilisation’s future.  In Australia, a country that’s already baking and burning as the climate catastrophe unfolds, Murdoch newspapers like the Australian and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph cheer-led right-wing moon-howler Tony Abbott into power in 2013 – Abbott once dismissed climate change as ‘absolute crap’.  And in the USA, Murdoch has used Fox News to build up a vast, paranoid, delusional, far-right-wing ecosystem whereby millions of gullible people now accept the lies of Donald Trump as gospel truth.  Fox could very well see to it that Trump wins the presidency again in 2024.  At which point, the world’s biggest superpower will make the transition into authoritarianism.

 

Murdoch is truly the man with the reverse-Midas touch.  Everything he sticks his finger in turns into manure.  Yet this never seems to stop him generating huge amounts of money, so he’s happy.  No wonder his son James, that rare thing indeed, a Murdoch with a conscience, quit the board of News Corp in 2020, sickened by the horrors his old man had empowered.

 

In the UK, Murdoch has long exerted his toxic influence through the swathe of national newspapers he owns: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday.  His reign of terror began when he acquired the Sun in 1969.  The history of that particular tabloid since then, when it hasn’t devoted itself to gleeful, lowest-common-denominator stupidity with headlines like ‘WEREWOLF SEIZED IN SOUTHEND’ and ‘FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER’, has been an unrelenting saga of horribleness.

 

In the 1980s, when the Sun was under the stewardship of the repugnant Kelvin MacKenzie, it revelled in homophobia and gloated over the AIDS epidemic, which it dubbed the ‘gay plague’ and insinuated straight people had nothing to worry about.  It catered for the ‘dirty mac’ brigade with its ‘page three’ girls, at least one of whom, Samantha Fox, was only 16 when it displayed her topless.  And it lied through its teeth about the behaviour of Liverpool football fans at the 1988 Hillsborough Disaster, to cover up the failings of the police that day.  That led an embargo of the Sun in Merseyside, which is still in force now.  If only the British population generally treated the rag with the same contempt that the Scousers do.  (I also admired the attitude of the late playwright Dennis Potter, whom the Sun dubbed ‘Old Flaky’ on account of his crippling psoriasis.  When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he named his cancer ‘Rupert’.)

 

More recently, the Sun provided a platform for Katie Hopkins, someone even more repellent than MacKenzie, who likened migrants to ‘cockroaches’ and advocated the use of gunboats to stop them.  And its incessant abuse of the European Union, European countries and European people (‘frogs’ and ‘krauts’ to a man and woman) climaxed with the newspaper’s enthusiastic support for Brexit – ‘BELEAVE IN BRITAIN’, its front page declared on the day of the referendum in 2016.  It was no surprise that Murdoch welcomed Brexit, regardless of the economic, diplomatic and reputational damage it inflicted on the UK.  He famously commented that while he could impose his will on one country’s leader, at No 10 Downing Street, he wasn’t powerful enough to do that with the combined force of 28 countries’ leaders, in Brussels.

 

From dailysabah.com / © Sun

 

Meanwhile, during the noughties, the Sun’s sister paper, the News of the World, under the editorship of flame-haired gorgon Rebakah Brooks, was so determinedly on the sniff for a good story that it hacked into the phones of, among others, murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, dead British soldiers and victims of the 2005 London bombings.  This proved too much for even its ghoulish proprietor and he axed the News of the World in 2011.  Mind you, he soon replaced it with the Sun on Sunday, so not much changed.

 

With the Sun leading the way, Britain’s other, supposedly more ‘respectable’ right-wing newspapers – the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express – happily dived into the same midden of lies, slander and xenophobia, with the result that over the past half-century the popular press in Britain has done much to cheapen public discourse, making it shrill, prurient, mean-spirited and pig-ignorant.  Murdoch can also take credit for inspiring the birth, or spawning, of alleged news channel GB News in 2021, which clearly wanted to become the British equivalent of his ghastly Fox News.  The conspiracy theories it peddled about the Covid-19 pandemic and Covid-19 vaccines, often voiced by that havering bawbag Neil Oliver, mirror the work Fox News did in the USA to make people resistant to vaccinating themselves against the virus.  The fact that Murdoch was one of the first people on the planet to get the vaccine, yet he happily let his media outlets promote scepticism of it among their audience – who tended to be older and more at risk from Covid-19 – shows his ethics are non-existent.

 

Sadly, in Britain, non-Conservative politicians are so frightened of Murdoch’s newspapers that they feel obliged to cosy up to him.  In the late 1990s, Labour Party leader Tony Blair got so thick with Murdoch that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids.  In return, the Sun displayed the front-page headline ‘THE SUN BACKS BLAIR’ prior to the 1997 general election that saw him win power.  Murdoch’s newspapers subsequently supported Blair during his participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an operation founded on lies and resulting in disaster.  I have no doubt that Keir Starmer, the current Labour Party leader, and basically Tony-Blair-lite, will prostate himself before Murdoch in a similar, craven manner.

 

Though the Nosferatu-esque Murdoch is no longer at the helm of the media empire he’s built, he’s made it clear that he still intends to exert influence from the sidelines.  And his son Lachlan is such a piece of work it sounds like that empire will conduct its business with even more malevolence in the future.  The fact that Lachlan has just appointed Tony ‘climate-change-is-crap’ Abbott to the Fox board doesn’t bode well.

 

When Murdoch informed his employees of his decision to step down, he told them to “make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in.”  Really, Rupe?  Improve?  You did nothing to improve the world.  Rather, your shitty news outlets helped turn it into a sewer.

 

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

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The butcher boy

 

From leftfutures.org

 

One feature of growing older is that every new day seems to be an anniversary of some sort or other – an anniversary of something you did, or something you experienced, or something big or small that you witnessed happening in the world.  For instance, just last Friday, March 17th – St Patrick’s Day 2023 – I realised it was 30 years exactly since some friends and I went to see the great Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers at Glasgow Barrowland.  Both Stiff Little Fingers and the Barrowland, I’m pleased to report, are still on the go; and their histories have been happily entwined during the three decades since.  As the latter’s Wikipedia entry reports: “Northern Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers have played sold-out concerts at the venue every St Patrick’s Day since 1992, and recorded their Best Served Loud album there in 2016 to celebrate 25 years at Barrowland.”

 

Even if it reminds me of how ancient I am now, that’s at least an anniversary of something I remember fondly.  However, there’s nothing fond I remember about the event that today, March 20th, is the anniversary of.  It’s now been twenty years since Western military forces, mainly American and British ones directed by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, blasted their way into Iraq.

 

The invasion was launched in order to depose Saddam Hussein who, it was claimed, possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction.  It transpired, though, that these WMDs didn’t exist and it became obvious that Bush and Blair had spun a web of lies beforehand to make people believe that they did.  In the two decades since the invasion, those WMDs haven’t been the only things to not exist.  The Iraq Body Count Project has calculated that, up until 2019, between 183,535 and 206,107 Iraqi people have stopped existing too.  Their deaths have been a result of Bush and Blair’s actions – of the invasion, the bungled Western occupation and its chaotic aftermath.

 

George Bush once donned a flak jacket, posed on the deck of an American aircraft-carrier and boasted that the ‘mission’ in Iraq was ‘accomplished’.  That seems a very long time ago now.  Mind you, through the dubious involvement in the supposed occupation and ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq by outfits such as Haliburton, the debacle succeeded in lining the likes of Dick Cheney’s pockets very nicely.  I suppose that was the real point of it.

 

Of course, the Iraq War helped to put some coinage into Tony Blair’s pockets too.  Thanks to his support for the second-most right-wing and incompetent president in American history, the former PM was for a long time revered in Republican sectors of the USA and he made more than a few bob on the public speaking circuit there.  (He also profited from a dodgy job negotiating the movement of oil between Iraq and South Korea.)  I suppose his popularity in America reduced his pain at being less admired in other parts of the world.  For instance, I was working in India during the worst phase of the ‘official’ Iraq War – Abu Ghraib and all that – and whenever I read the Indian English-language newspapers, his name seldom appeared in a sentence without being accompanied by the words ‘poodle’ or ‘lapdog’.

 

I’d never trusted Blair.  His big smile and ingratiating, want-to-be-your-pal manner struck me as phoney, especially compared to the plain-speaking, no-nonsense demeanour of his predecessor as Labour Party leader, John Smith, who died unexpectedly in 1994.  However, up until 2003, and having recently endured 18 years of Conservative government, I’d consoled myself with the thought that “At least he isn’t as bad as that other lot.”  He headed a political party that claimed to have some conscience, principles and scruples, the supposed antithesis of Maggie Thatcher and her cynical gang.  But events in March 2003 changed my opinion.

 

To be fair, in Britain, it wasn’t just Blair who willed the invasion into happening.  He had the support of many in his party, though with a few noble objectors like the late Robin Cook, and the Tories backed him to the hilt.  In fact, among the Westminster-based parties, it was only Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats who showed some spine and opposed the bloody thing.  It goes without saying that the majority of Britain’s predominantly right-wing newspapers were cheerleaders for it too.

 

From wikipedia.org / © William M. Connelly

 

And, though people still talk about the anti-war protests on February 15th, 2003, which saw the biggest ever political demonstration in London’s history take to the capital’s streets (and was the subject of Ian McEwan’s rather annoying 2005 novel Saturday), I’m afraid to say it had the support of a good chunk of the British population as well. Before and during the initial invasion, I was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but for personal reasons I also spent a lot of time down in East Anglia.  Nearly everyone I know in Newcastle – Labour supporters to a man and woman – was horrified by what Blair was doing.  But down south, it was a different story.  I heard people saying it in pubs, and saw it on stickers in car windows.  This war was right, Saddam Hussein was going to blow us up with his WMDs, we needed to hit him before he hit us, we had to support ‘our boys’, and if you were anti-war you were unpatriotic, a coward, a traitor.  It was the mentality that, nearly 80 years earlier, had seen young men humiliated by getting white feathers if they didn’t sign up to fight amid the mud and bloodshed of the trenches.

 

Everything that happened in Iraq was a reprehensible failure – morally, politically, even in terms of making ground against Osamu Bin Laden in the supposed War on Terror.  (It took a Navy SEALs raid in Pakistan during the Obama era to put an end to him.)  In Britain, it loosened the Labour Party’s hold on power and paved the way for the David Cameron government and its disastrous austerity policies.  It also shook the public’s faith in politicians and what they saw as ‘the establishment’ and, arguably, helped lead to the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, which was Britain’s other huge, idiotic mistake of the 21st century.  But all this never dented Blair’s belief that invading Iraq with Bush was the correct thing to do.  He was right and those millions of people who came onto the streets to protest against the invasion were wrong.

 

A lot of this, I suspect, was down to Blair being a devout Christian.  Since God was on his side, he reasoned, his decision to back Bush must have divine sanction.  Bush, of course, professed to being a Christian too, although I couldn’t imagine the gimlet-eyed Texan being as zealous about it as Blair.

 

Actually, Blair’s Christianity puts me in mind of something said by the late William S. Burroughs in his spoken lyrics for the Bill Laswell song Words of Advice for Young People: “If you’re doing business with a religious sonofabitch, get it in writing.  His word isn’t worth shit, not with the good Lord telling him how to f**k you on the deal.”

 

From unsplash.com / © Levi Meir Clancy

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Scorpion tales

 

From wikipedia.org / © Eva Rinaldi

 

Here’s a hypothetical question I’ve heard many times. If you had a time machine, would you travel back in time, find the young Adolf Hitler and kill him?  In Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone, for instance, the hero puts this question to an old man who lost his son in World War II.  The old man replies that he’d stick a knife in Hitler’s heart “as far as she’d go… and then I’d twist her… But first, first I’d coat the blade with rat poison.”

 

Recently, whilst looking at the dire state of the world and feeling fearful about the future, I’ve wondered about a variation on the time machine / Hitler question.  In the future, after manmade climate change has decimated the environment and pig-ignorant ‘populism’ (i.e., fascism) has run society into the ground, who would the remnants of humanity choose to eliminate if they had a time machine and could send an assassin back to, say, the late 20th century?  Who would they remove from the timeline in the belief it’d change history for the better?  The young Donald Trump?  The young Vladimir Putin?

 

Neither.  I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the guy the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after… Rupert Murdoch.

 

Murdoch’s media operations have, over the last five decades, caused massive damage to human well-being.  He promoted the voracious, greed-is-good, market-über-alles destructiveness of neoliberalism with his support for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.  He’s done his best to ignore, distort and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence for manmade climate change.  Via Fox News, he’s created in the USA a paranoid, xenophobic, extreme-right-wing ecosystem whose millions of inhabitants believe Donald Trump’s lies and will probably vote him again, or someone even worse, into power in 2024 and turn the world’s biggest superpower into an authoritarian state.  Yes, Murdoch has seemingly had a finger in everything shit that’s happened in modern history, in everything’s that propelled humanity further down the road to hell.  No wonder Murdoch’s son James resigned from the board of News Corp in 2020, sick of the oceans of toxicity created by his father.

 

It says little for Britain’s newspaper industry that Murdoch owns a swathe of its national titles: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday.  These played a prominent role in influencing the 2016 vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, which led to the economic, diplomatic and cultural shambles of Brexit.  No surprise there, either.  The ghoulish old Antipodean tycoon once famously remarked that he could intimidate one country’s leader, in No 10 Downing Street, into following his wishes, whereas he couldn’t intimidate the combined might of 28 countries’ leaders represented in Brussels.

 

From dailysabah.com / © Sun

 

But Murdoch constitutes just one head of the hydra that is Britain’s predominantly right-wing press.  Among the newspapers sold nationwide, only the Guardian, Daily and Sunday Mirrors and Sunday People could be described as having a political stance leaning any way towards the left.  Elsewhere, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, right-wing and totally honking mad, are owned by the billionaire Frederick Barclay.  Resident on the island of Brecqhou, which is administered by Sark in the Channel Islands, Frederick and his late twin brother David once tried to avoid Sark’s tax-inheritance laws by having Brecqhou declared independent of it.  That’s ironic considering the Telegraphs’ vehement opposition to Scottish independence.

 

Another billionaire, the non-domiciled Viscount Rothermere, owns the equally right-wing Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.  About the Mail, I once wrote: “…you might just view the never-ending diet that the newspaper serves up of ignorance, prurience, grubbiness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, snobbery, racism, misogyny, Little Englander-ism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, immigrant-bashing, anti-intellectualism, tittle-tattle, curtain-twitching, pseudo-scientific quackery, petty-bourgeois fulmination and general all-round barking right-wing insanity and conclude there’s no hope left for the human race and try to book yourself a one-way passage on the next space probe to Mars.”

 

And let’s not forget the Daily and Sunday Express, near-clones of the Mail titles, though aimed at an even more demented readership who are additionally obsessed with Madeleine McCann, Princess Diana and the British weather.  These used to be owned by millionaire and one-time porno magnate Richard Desmond, but are now the property of Reach plc, which publishes the Mirror.  Presumably, Reach hasn’t tinkered with the Express formula because it’s decided to milk those barmy readers for money while they’re still alive.

 

Over the past few months, Britain’s right-wing newspapers have been fighting the corner of Boris Johnson, ever since they realised the fragility of his premiership.  As PM, Johnson hasn’t been so much skating on thin ice as clog-dancing on it.  It’s transpired that during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the UK had been put in lockdown, Johnson and his cronies turned No 10 Downing Street into an endlessly partying, boozing frat-house that paid zero heed to the strict non-socialising rules imposed on everyone else.  (Intriguingly, Murdoch’s Sun, usually the gobbiest of Britain’s tabloids, has kept relatively quiet about ‘Partygate’, as it’s been dubbed.  This may have something to do with James Slack, the Sun’s deputy editor, being Johnson’s Director of Communications at the time when No 10 was boogieing away the lockdown blues.)

 

The self-serving, scurrilous, mendacious Johnson is a creature of the self-serving, scurrilous, mendacious British press. He started off working at the Times, until he was sacked for fabricating a quote, then found employment as the Telegraph.  Max Hastings, then-Telegraph editor, has since said of Johnson: “…he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.”  As the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Johnson wrote wildly exaggerated pieces on how the evil EU was imposing spiteful and stupid regulations on plucky little Britain.  These helped fuel the Euro-scepticism that birthed the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and eventually won the 2016 referendum in favour of Brexit.  No wonder the right-wing press barons love Johnson – he’s one of their own.

 

From twitter.com/bbcnews / © Daily Mail

 

Unsurprisingly, their coverage of Partygate, in which they’ve tried to defend and big up the lawbreaking blond oaf, has been nauseating.  First, there was the insistence, made most forcibly by the Daily Mail, that Johnson’s breaking of his own Covid laws was unimportant because Russia had just invaded Ukraine and, well, DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON?  More recently, they’ve dedicated their front-page headlines to ‘Beergate’, the hoo-ha over the Labour Party leader Keir Starmer – or, as he’s known in the right-wing press, ‘HYPOCRITE STARMER’ – having a beer and curry at a constituency office in Durham last year while lockdown rules remained in force.  Starmer claimed no rules were broken, but the local police have, under pressure from the media, launched an inquiry into the incident.  The assumption in the editorial offices of the Mail and the rest is that if Starmer is found to have broken lockdown rules too, their beloved Boris will get off the hook for his own, proven misdemeanours.  (He’s already had to pay one fine for a lockdown breach and more fines are likely on the way.)

 

Starmer has just declared that he’ll resign as Labour Party leader if the police do issue a fine to him over Beergate.  This was evidently intended to put some clear, blue, moral water between him and Johnson, already fined but not resigned.  However, if he thought this would earn him some credit from the newspapers, he was mistaken.  The Mail promptly responded with the headline: STARMER ACCUSED OF PILING PRESSURE ON POLICE.

 

The more I think about these rags, the more I think of the fable about the frog and the scorpion.  The scorpion stings the frog to death, even though this will condemn it to death too, because it’s in its ‘nature’.  It’s what it does.  It can’t not sting.

 

The poisonous right-wing nature of much of Britain’s press is a headache for the Labour Party.  How can they ever get a fair hearing when those newspapers are programmed to blindly support their Conservative opponents no matter how corrupt, venal and idiotic they become?  A quarter-century ago, Tony Blair’s policy on this was to cosy up to them.  He got so thick with Rupert Murdoch, the Scorpion King himself, that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids.  In return, the headline THE SUN BACKS BLAIR appeared on the front page of Murdoch’s number-one British tabloid prior to the 1997 general election, which saw Blair win power.  But such sycophancy has its downside.  If you get too close to the likes of Murdoch, you end up either stung to death, like the frog in the fable, or with so much poison in your own system that you become toxic yourself.  The latter outcome happened to Blair.  I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind describing ‘El Tone’ as a paragon of virtue in 2022.

 

Still, I don’t have much sympathy either for the supporters of the last Labour Party leader, the atypically left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, who blamed negative British press coverage for all their hero’s woes.  Yes, aware that Corbyn represented a threat to the wealthy, powerful interests of their owners, those newspapers bombarded Corbyn with every slur going, that he was a terrorist sympathiser, an anti-Semite, a traitor, whatever.  But Corbyn, whom I’ve always regarded as a decent bloke, engineered much of his own bad luck.  He was a hopeless communicator.  He seemed to be living still in the 1970s, when he’d been a compadre of old school socialist Tony Benn, and never responded to the attacks made against him with the imagination and agility necessary in the changed media landscape of the early 21st century.

 

Actually, there’s proof close at hand that, to be successful, a political party doesn’t need to be backed by the majority of newspapers, and can triumph despite most newspapers stinging at it continuously with their scorpion-tails.  In Scotland, only one newspaper, the National, supports the Scottish National Party’s policy of Scottish independence.  The other Scottish newspapers – north-of-the-border editions of the right-wing ones I’ve just discussed, such as the Scottish Sun and Scottish Daily Mail, and locally published ones like the Scotsman, Herald and Daily Record – oppose the SNP and leap at any opportunity to excoriate it and its leader Nicola Sturgeon.  (It’s noticeable how, in the headlines of the utterly wretched Scottish Daily Express, the British PM is always referred to as ‘BORIS’ whereas the Scottish First Minister always gets a contemptuous, misogynistic ‘STURGEON’.)

 

From bbc.com/ © Daily Express

 

Yet the SNP have been in power in Edinburgh for the past 15 years and have topped the polls in eight Scottish elections in a row, most recently the council ones on May 3rd that saw them increase their number of councillors by 22.  A large part of this is surely down to Nicola Sturgeon herself.  Whatever you think of her politics, it’s hard to deny that – unlike Johnson – she speaks like a normal human being, communicates her meaning clearly and generally exhibits some semblance of empathy and integrity.  Obviously, this influences a sufficiently large number of Scottish voters, who choose to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears over the crap they read in the newspapers.

 

Let’s hope that, when the time comes, British voters as a whole choose to do the same.

Posted on

It’s time Putin’s pals were put in the bin (Part 2)

 

© Cold War Steve

 

Continuing my rant about miscreants who support Putin and / or are generally making arses of themselves during the current crisis in Ukraine – this time miscreants in the United Kingdom.

 

Vladimir Putin – presently stuck in a big, bloody hole he’s dug for himself in Ukraine, but still determinedly digging, using thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives as his shovel-blade – has never been short of pals in Britain.  Back in 2001, soon after Putin had won his first presidential election in Russia, and not long after the start of the second Chechen war, which saw the deaths of at least 25,000 civilians, a third of Chechnya deemed a ‘zone of ecological disaster’, and most Chechens left suffering ‘discernible symptoms of psychological distress’, then-British Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Tony Blair jetted out to Moscow and cosied up to Putin.  El Tone praised him for showing ‘real leadership’ and giving ‘strong support’ in the ‘fight against terrorism’.

 

Even today, Blair is hero-worshipped by certain centre-right politicians and commentators in Britain.  Ironically, while later Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is commonly loathed and belittled as a traitorous, anti-Western, lefty scumbag, it’s worth recalling what Corbyn said about Blair’s visit to Moscow in 2001.  “When the Prime Minister… meets President Putin this evening, I hope that he will convey the condemnation of millions of people around the world of the activities of the Russian army in Chechnya and what it is doing to ordinary people there.  When images of what is happening are translated into other parts of the world, many people are horrified…”  Exchange ‘Ukraine’ for ‘Chechnya’ and you realise how Corbyn’s words resonate in 2022.

 

No doubt nowadays Blair keeps his mouth shut about Putin’s supposed statesmanship.  But another well-known British politician is less reluctant to express his admiration for the warmongering Russian ogre.  Right-winger, Europhobe and wannabe broadcaster Nigel Farage has said of him: “I wouldn’t trust him and I wouldn’t want to live in his country, but compared with the kids who run foreign policy in this country, I’ve more respect for him than our lot.”  Meanwhile, the donkey-faced, and full-of-donkey-shit, Farage has made copious appearances on Russia Today, coming out with such gems as the claim that Europe’s modern democracies have been run ‘by the worst people we have seen in Europe since 1945’.  Worse even than Putin?  Yes, I’m sure Nige thinks so.

 

By the way, let’s not forget Aaron Banks, Farage’s compadre in the Vote Leave campaign that managed in 2016 to tear the UK out of the European Union, possibly helped by a wee bit of Russian funding.  In 2017, Banks did his bit for the Putin cause by tweeting: “Ukraine is to Russia what the Isle of Wight is to the UK.  It’s Russian.”

 

Elsewhere, there’s multiple evidence suggesting that Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, if not totally in love with Putin’s habit of inflicting atrocities on neighbouring countries that annoy him, is certainly in love with the wealth of the Russian oligarchs who surround the man.  Recent claims about the amount of donations the Conservative party has received from such oligarchs have ranged from 1.93 million to 2.3 million pounds.

 

Johnson seems particularly enamoured with members of Russia’s mega-wealthy elite.  In 2018, while he was serving as Theresa May’s foreign secretary, he was seen stumbling about an Italian airport suffering from a hangover, and lacking his security detail, after attending a shindig thrown by Russian media magnate Evgeny Lebedev at his castle near Perugia.  Lebedev subsequently received a peerage and now, technically, is ‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’.  Johnson has sheepishly denied allegations that he used his influence to secure the peerage for his buddy.

 

© Private Eye

 

Though late last week the British government announced it was freezing the assets of seven Russian billionaires (including Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich) with close ties to Putin, this only came after weeks of prevarication.  Originally, it looked like the UK wouldn’t be clamping down on dodgy Russian money until late in 2023, which would have given those likely to be affected a good year-and-a-half to sell their assets and move their money off British soil.  Even with this new change of heart, Abramovich and co. have already had a fortnight’s grace-period to shift some of their wealth.  Basically, Johnson’s regime is reluctant to do anything that might sully London’s reputation as a haven for dodgy money.

 

Summing up the absolute state of the Conservative Party on this issue is its wretched co-chairman Ben Elliot.  Simultaneously, Elliot’s been sourcing donations from super-rich Russians and been offering services to them in Britain through his ‘concierge’ company, Quintessentially.  “Quintessentially Russia has nearly 15 years’ experience providing luxury lifestyle management services to Russia’s elite and corporate members…”, ensuring that from “restaurant bookings to backstage concert access, a bespoke lifestyle is at our clients’ fingertips.”  So drooled the blurb on Quintessentially’s website until recently.  Then, suddenly and mysteriously, this obsequious drivel was deleted from it.

 

While we’re heaping abuse on the British government, we shouldn’t overlook the smirk-faced Priti Patel, who – until another apparent U-turn last week – seemed determined that the Ukrainian refugees Britain was allowing in should be vastly outnumbered by the Russian oligarchs it was welcoming with open arms.  At one point, while other European countries had taken in Ukrainian refugees in the tens of thousands, the UK had dished out a mere 50 additional visas to them.

 

Besides Patel, it’s worth castigating government minister Kevin Foster, who advised people fleeing Ukraine to apply to Britain’s ‘seasonal worker scheme’, which would allow them to spend their time in the country picking fruit.  Such humanity, Kev!  Also, some hatred should be directed towards whatever nasty piece of work in the Home Office complained to the Daily Telegraph that Ireland had allowed in too many Ukrainian refugees.  All those shifty Ukrainians, claimed the anonymous source, would “come through Dublin, into Belfast and across to the mainland to Liverpool”, thus creating “a drug cartel route.”

 

Needless to say, Britain’s resident community of publicity-seeking, rent-an-opinion gobshites have fastened onto the Ukrainian crisis like flies fastening onto a cow-plop.  George Galloway, that fedora-wearing gasbag whose rhetoric seems to weave between old-school socialism (when he’s in England) and hardline British nationalism (when he’s in Scotland), and who’s a fixture on the Russian-owned Sputnik radio channel, tweeted recently: “Me, Farage, Hitchens, Carlson and Rod Liddle are a pretty broad front of people who think NATO expansion to the borders of Russia was a pretty bad idea.  Maybe pause and think about that?”  When I paused and thought about it, my immediate thoughts were: “George Galloway, Nigel Farage, Peter Hitchens, Tucker Carlson, Rod Liddle…  Wow, what a team!  Couldn’t Marvel make a superhero movie about them?  Maybe call it Arseholes Assemble?”

 

Hilariously, Galloway’s Putin-sympathetic stance has ended all unity in the All for Unity party, the staunchly pro-UK outfit he set up in Scotland prior to the last Scottish parliamentary elections.  Jamie Blackett, the party’s former deputy leader, and also the Deputy Lieutenant for Dumfriesshire and a Daily Telegraph writer, recently disowned his old boss and announced the disbanding of the party.

 

Meanwhile, Neil Oliver, the alleged Scottish historian and talking head on right-wing outlet GB News, lately delivered a bewildering monologue, the gist of which was: “I’ll be honest.  I don’t know what’s happening in Ukraine.  I don’t understand it either.”  Oliver’s professed ignorance of the situation didn’t stop him talking about it for nine minutes, however.  It’s also strange that when it comes to Putin and Ukraine Oliver is so hesitant to climb off the fence, considering how quick he’d been in the past to condemn, say, the Scottish National Party (‘disastrously incompetent’, ‘small’, ‘not worth bothering about’), or the Black Lives Matter movement (‘anarchists and communists’ eating ‘into the built fabric of Britain’).  Very strange indeed.

 

One other thing bugging me about Putin’s current horror show is how certain people have pounced on it and tried to use it to promulgate the right-wing agendas they’ve been pushing for years already.  Take the ‘culture wars’, in which Putin’s ‘anti-woke’ position had until recently won accolades from Western pundits on the right of the spectrum.  Well, now that Putin is officially a Bad Lad, they can’t praise him directly anymore.  Instead, they’re pushing the narrative that woke stuff no longer matters during the crisis that good old Vlad, sorry, bad new Vlad has created.

 

Here’s the absurd Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, recently opining: “The outbreak of war has shone an unflattering light on our society… Watch issues like LGBT, net-zero, Partygate, Black Lives Matter and farcical ‘Stay Safe’ Covid restrictions all fade into well-deserved insignificance now that war is back.”  According to Pearson, in other words, now that Putin’s behaving like a c*nt, we should all stop fretting about being civil to our fellow human beings, about preventing them from dying of Covid, about preventing the planet from burning up, and about our leader Boris Johnson being a lying, unprincipled sack of shite.

 

And here’s the barmy Spectator pundit Lionel Shriver, writing: “Decolonisations, contextualisations, gender-neutralisations – it’s all a load of onanistic, diversionary crap, and the West having shoved its head up its backside is one reason that Putin feels free to do whatever he likes.”  Though I suspect Putin would still have attacked Ukraine if fewer people on Western social media had been using the pronouns ‘they’ / ‘them’ in their profiles.

 

One last thing for which Britain’s right-wingers must be thanking Putin is the attention he’s diverted from the looming issues of manmade climate change and the dire state of the environment.  Thanks to the headlines being dominated by Ukraine, not much attention has been given to, for instance, the apocalyptic floods that have stricken Queensland and New South Wales.  And, somewhat inevitably, the afore-mentioned Nigel Farage is currently trying to relaunch his political career by demanding a new national referendum – this time, not about the UK’s membership of the European Union, but about the British government’s supposed adoption of Net Zero policies to combat climate change.  Farage, of course, wants us to vote against them.

 

I wonder why he’s doing this.  Could he be thinking of a country that helped finance his previous, successful referendum campaign?  Or could he be thinking of an oil-exporting country that would stand to gain if Britain gave up on green energy and became wholly dependent on fossil fuels again?

 

I can’t possibly think of a country that falls into both categories.

 

© The Jewish Chronicle / twitter / @ VirendraSharma

Posted on

Ian McEwan’s Saturday: Tony Blair and tone-deaf

 

© Vintage

 

“The butcher boy gets a bauble,” was my reaction to the news that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was to be made ‘a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter’, whatever that means, in the Queen’s New Year Honours List.  I call Blair ‘the butcher boy’ because of his role in the invasion of Iraq, which happened during his watch in 2003.  The invasion was launched to depose Saddam Hussein who, it was claimed, possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction.  However, these WMDs turned out to not actually exist and it became obvious that Blair and his invasion partner George W. Bush had spun a web of lies beforehand to make people believe that they did.

 

And it wasn’t just the WMDs that didn’t exist.  Since the invasion took place, up until the beginning of 2021, due to ‘coalition and insurgent military action’ and subsequent ‘sectarian violence and criminal violence’, between 185,000 and 209,000 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have stopped existing too – their deaths the direct and indirect results of Blair and Bush’s actions.

 

Actually, I’d been thinking about Tony Blair and Iraq before word came through of Blair’s ennoblement, because late last year I read Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday.  This describes 24 hours in the life of a middle-aged, London-based neurosurgeon called Henry Perowne, starting on the morning of Saturday, February 15th, 2003.  In real life, that date saw the biggest political demonstration in British history.  A million people took to the streets of London in an anti-war protest organised by the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Muslim Association of Britain.  Blair, of course, had a messianic belief in his own rightness and ignored the many arguments against war voiced by the protestors, and just over a month later Britain joined the USA and its allies in starting hostilities against Iraq.  The demonstration forms a backdrop to the events in McEwan’s novel and the forthcoming invasion is prominent in the thoughts and conversations of its characters.

 

I was a big fan of McEwan during my youth.  This was while he was in a weird, morbid, modern-gothic phase and wrote the novel The Cement Garden (1978) and the short stories collected in First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978).  Thereafter, McEwan became more wholesome and respectable and found success and acclaim as a writer of mainstream literature.  Saturday is only the third novel I’ve read by McEwan since he stopped being ghoulish. The others were The Child in Time (1987), which I enjoyed with some reservations, and Atonement (2001), which I thought was excellent, although a later allegation of plagiarism tarnished it a bit for me.  However, while I’ve generally reacted positively to McEwan’s work, I found Saturday problematic.  It seemed naïve in the statements it was making.  Also, its depiction of its central characters I found downright annoying.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Thesupermat

 

The day described in Saturday begins before dawn.  Perowne gets out of bed and notices an object that he first assumes is ‘a meteor burning out in the London sky’. He realises, though, that it’s a plane with an engine on fire, which makes him wonder if he’s witnessing an act of terrorism – terrorism being on everyone’s minds since events in New York a year-and-a-half earlier.  But it turns out that he’s seen an accidental fire on board a cargo plane, which manages to make an emergency landing at Heathrow.  Reassured, he gets on what’s been planned for the day ahead.

 

His first engagement is at a sports centre where he has a game of squash with his anaesthetist, an American called Jay Strauss.  Then he visits his mother, stricken with dementia in a care home, and does some shopping for a family gathering at his house that evening.  In addition to Perowne and his wife Rosalind, the get-together is attended by their daughter Daisy, son Theo and Rosalind’s father, the quaintly named John Grammaticus.  Later that night, he gets an urgent request from Strauss to perform some emergency surgery: “We got an extradural, male, mid-twenties, fell down the stairs… a depressed fracture right over the sinus…  I want someone senior in here and you’re the nearest.  Plus you’re the best.”

 

However, two more incidents make the day darker.  On his way to play squash, a distracted policeman allows Perowne to drive along Tottenham Court Road, officially closed off for the anti-war demonstration – with the result that he prangs another car coming out of a side-street, whose driver didn’t expect him to be there.  When he gets out to speak to the other car’s three occupants, Perowne realises the men are criminals, ready to beat him up if he doesn’t immediately pay for the damage their car has suffered.  But he also notices that the leader of the trio, a man called Baxter, is showing symptoms of a serious neurological disorder.  Using his knowledge of the illness, Perowne is able to distract and disorientate Baxter long enough to get back into his car and escape.

 

But that isn’t the end of it.  That evening, just after Perowne has welcomed his family into his house, a vengeful Baxter and one of his henchmen burst in and hold them at knifepoint.  There ensues violence, threatened violence and sexual humiliation, before Perowne and his son Theo manage to repel the invaders.  Baxter is thrown down some stairs, knocked unconscious and taken away in an ambulance.  When the phone call comes from Strauss, Perowne realises the injured man he’s being asked to operate on is Baxter, who traumatised his family a short time ago. As he prepares to leave, Rosalind demands, “You’re not thinking about doing something, about some sort of revenge are you?”

 

“Of course not,” Perowne replies, and proves to be as good as his word.

 

As McEwan was in 2003, Perowne is in favour of the Iraq invasion.  He’s not as gung-ho as Strauss, who grumbles about the protestors, “They dislike your Prime Minister, but boy do they f*cking loathe my President,” or indeed as Baxter, who snarls at them in an aside, “Horrible rabble.  Sponging off the country they hate.”  But to his daughter Daisy, who takes part in the day’s demonstration, he says: “No rational person is for war.  But in five years’ time we might not regret it.  I’d love to see the end of Saddam.  You’re right.  It could be a disaster.  But it could be the end of a disaster and the beginning of something better.”  Perowne has been influenced by the testimony of an Iraqi patient of his, an academic called Miri Taleb.  Saddam’s secret police once arrested Taleb and subjected him to ten months of physical and mental torment: “Even on the day of his release he didn’t discover what the charges were against him.”

 

Elsewhere, McEwan’s descriptions of the anti-war protestors seem a bit patronising: “The general cheerfulness Perowne finds baffling.  There are whole families, ones in various sizes of bright red coats, clearly under instructions to hold hands; and students, and a coachful of greying ladies in quilted anoraks and stout shoes.  The Women’s Institute, perhaps…  The scene has an air of innocence and English dottiness.”  Mind you, years later in an interview with Channel 4 News, McEwan admitted that he’d changed his opinion about the war and felt that the marchers in 2003 were ‘vindicated’.

 

From aa.com.tr

 

While I read Saturday, I tried to work out the significance of the villainous Baxter.  Was he a metaphor for Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime?  Or was Baxter’s intrusion into the Perownes’ home a metaphor for terrorism, erupting without warning in everyday life, destroying all notions of normality and security for its victims?  And what’s to be made of Perowne’s eventual decision to do the decent thing, operate on Baxter and save his life?  I got the impression Perowne represented McEwan’s ideal of an enlightened, democratic, liberal West, intervening in Iraq but doing so with everyone’s best interests at heart, including the Iraqis.  Unfortunately, the ‘ignorance, arrogance, neglect, stubbornness, panic, haste and denial’ displayed by Iraq’s Western occupiers following the invasion, which rapidly turned the country into a failed state, showed this to be a pipe dream.  The USA, Britain and their allies were a hell of a lot less benevolent, magnanimous and expert at what they were doing in Iraq than Henry Perowne was in the operating theatre.

 

If the political statement McEwan seems to make in Saturday is wishful thinking, certainly in hindsight, I was more troubled by the lack of self-awareness displayed by the main characters.  Fair enough, as a London neurosurgeon, Perowne is going to be a wealthy man.  His car, McEwan notes, is a “silver Mercedes S500 with cream upholstery – and he’s no longer embarrassed by it.  He doesn’t even love it – it’s simply a sensuous part of what he regards as his overgenerous share of the world’s goods.”

 

But his son Theo is an up-and-coming blues guitarist.  His mother arranged for him to get lessons from Jack Bruce, no less.  “Through Bruce, Theo met some of the legendary figures.  He was allowed to sit in on a Clapton masterclass.  Long John Baldry came over from Canada for a reunion…  By some accident Theo jammed for several minutes with Ronnie Wood and met his older brother Art…”  So, while most kids his age are worrying about entry-level jobs, rents and college fees, Theo, through his family wealth and connections, gets stupendous opportunities to develop his skills playing music – ironically, a type of music that was invented by impoverished black people living in America’s rural south.

 

Similarly, Perowne’s daughter Daisy is a graduate of Oxford University and a poetess who’s just had a collection of poems published.  It no doubt helps that her grandfather, John Grammaticus, is a famous English poet who lives in a chateau in France.  Though both lauded and loaded, the old man is bitter about how the world has treated him: “John minded when Spender and not he was knighted, when Raine not Grammaticus got the editorship at Faber, when he lost the Oxford Professorship of Poetry to Fenton, when Hughes and later Motion were preferred as Poets Laureate, and above all when it was Heaney who got the Nobel.”

 

I may have missed it in Saturday, but I don’t remember the Perownes reflecting on their good fortune, on having so much in a world where many people have so little.  It’s especially galling that Theo and Daisy, whom we’re supposed to like as characters, don’t acknowledge their luck in having fulfilling, creative lives, doing the things they enjoy doing, that most people their age can’t have because they lack the wealth, security, support, time and connections.  Perhaps once, back when many of Theo’s British-blues heroes were youngsters from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, Britain offered some social mobility and the arts weren’t necessarily the preserve of the elite.  But that’s hardly the case in 21st century Britain, when money, poshness and who-you-know seems to be prerequisites for careers in music (Florence Welch, Mumford and Sons, James Blunt), acting (Cumberbatch, Hiddleston, Pattinson, various Foxes) and literature (while the 2003 and 2013 Granta lists of ‘Best Young British Novelists’ showed some ethnic diversity, about 60% of those novelists had still attended Oxford or Cambridge Universities).

 

I’d assumed McEwan would use Baxter, who’d obviously never had the opportunities gifted to Theo and Daisy, as an instrument to comment on this when he crashes into the Perownes’ comfortable world.   However, the ‘home invasion’ section of Saturday is relatively brief and the bitter commentary I expected didn’t appear.  Baxter gets strangely emotional after he forces Daisy to recite a poem to him, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, but that’s all.

 

This muted acceptance of the advantages enjoyed by the Perowne family irritated me most about Saturday.  In this respect, it seems as tone-deaf as Tony Blair was about the war that the novel ruminates on.

 

From change.org

Posted on

Believing their own Ka-bul

 

© Nations Online Project

 

I’ve watched the copious, vivid and harrowing news footage of the chaos in Kabul while the USA and its allies attempt to end their occupation of Afghanistan and withdraw. I’ve also listened to the reactions of Western politicians and political pundits to that chaos.  Not for the first time, I find myself thinking of the lines from the poem To a Louse by Robert Burns: “O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! / It wad frae mony a blunder free us / An’ foolish notion…”

 

In standard English: “Oh would some power the gift give us / To see ourselves as others see us / It would from many a blunder free us / And foolish notion…”  I suspect that if governments could see their policies as others see them and, indeed, if all human beings could see themselves as others see them, the world would be a far better place.

 

Before I continue, let me make a few things clear.  I don’t think the USA and its allies were sensible or indeed, had much right, to go into Afghanistan in the first place.  This was especially since the Taliban were willing to hand over Osamu Bin Laden, whose masterminding of 9 / 11 had sparked the war and invasion in late 2001.  And yes, I accept that the Taliban were and no doubt still are a bunch of bad bastards.  But if George W. Bush, Tony Blair and co. were really serious about usurping them, and replacing them with a functioning democracy, and transforming a country as notoriously hostile to outside influence as Afghanistan into a modern nation, they should have invested huge amounts of capital, manpower and infrastructure once they’d taken over.

 

But of course, any chance of that happening evaporated as soon as Bush, Blair, etc., drunk on their own military firepower, steamed into Iraq.  While the Iraqi debacle unfolded, diverting attention and devouring resources, Afghanistan was neglected and left to fester.  Anyway, as they say, that’s all academic now.

 

I also see the handling of the withdrawal as a fiasco. The fiasco includes the mind-melting ineptitude of the current incumbent in Blair’s old job, Boris Johnson, who thought the falling of the city of Kandahar into Taliban hands would be a good moment to pop off to Somerset for a holiday; and of his ultra-hapless Foreign Minister, Dominic Raab, who apparently felt consolidating his tan at a five-star beach hotel in Crete was more important than getting on the phone and attempting to help evacuate Afghan interpreters who’d been working with British forces.

 

And the predicament that many Afghans find themselves in, those who’ve worked or had dealings with the Western powers and their troops, institutions and agencies during the occupation since 2001, is a tragedy.  The West didn’t so much as build a nation in Afghanistan as erect a house of cards, and clearly little thought was given to the fate of the West’s local employees and clients should that house of cards collapse and control revert to a vengeful Taliban.

 

The fact that the situation was a house of cards must have been blindingly obvious to anyone bothering to take a smidgeon of an interest in Afghanistan over the last two decades.  I’ve known a few people who’ve worked there or had to visit it, and their descriptions – of having to undergo lengthy safety / security / survival courses before being allowed anywhere near the place, of being ensconced almost 24/7 in fortified bunkers cheek-by-jowl with battalions of Gurkha soldiers, of being cocooned inside the armour of military vehicles and helicopters when they did venture outside – made it sound like a surreal experience, part Fort Knox, part Siege of Ceuta, part Alice in Wonderland.  How could any society where outsiders felt so unsafe that they had to behave like this be considered sustainable, let alone normal?

 

Not only has there been little preparation made for evacuating the West’s Afghan colleagues and clients in the event of the unmentionable – inevitable? – happening and their suddenly becoming targets.  There’s been little willpower too, which is unsurprising given the reluctance of Western politicians, as exemplified by British Home Secretary Priti Patel, to countenance the entry of large numbers of refugees into their countries.

 

Incidentally, I wasn’t surprised at the excuse I heard for why certain groups of Afghans shouldn’t be helped to flee the country and escape to Britain. This was because, it transpired, they hadn’t actually been employed by the British Embassy, British NGOs, British companies, whatever. No, they’d only been employed by outsourced contractors that these British agencies had drawn upon.  They themselves weren’t really British employees.  (At least now, in the face of public revulsion, this abhorrent attitude seems to be changing.)

 

Subcontracting is the great ‘get-out-of-jail’ card employed by Western outfits working in the developing world.  On one hand they can loudly proclaim their Western, democratic values.  On the other hand, they use the subcontracting argument to avoid paying many local people working for them anything like a decent, livable wage, avoid giving them proper workers’ rights, and so on.

 

Many Western politicians and commentators have lamented about these people being thrown to the wolves, and rightly so.  But there’s also a massive hole in the narratives they’ve been spinning.  They make it sound like the withdrawal has been a betrayal of everyone in Afghanistan and now the entire Afghan population is wailing piteously as the Taliban prepare to take over again.

 

Really?  I have no doubt that the occupation benefited a small section of the population, in the cities.  However, it’s enlightening to read this article from 2020 on foreignpolicy.com that takes an all-too-credible look at rural Afghanistan, at the region of Nangahar to be precise, where Trump had the devastating MOAB bomb deployed in 2017.  The journalist interviews a young local man who’s just decided to throw his lot in with the Taliban.  “Omari’s family is part of the 90 percent of Afghanistan that lives below the national poverty line of $2 per day, according to the Afghan Ministry of Economy. Three-quarters of Afghans live in rural areas, where even basic services are in short supply; the Ministry of Education this month revealed that 7,000 schools across the country don’t actually have buildings…” Omari views the existing government as corrupt and expresses what seems to be a widespread belief that having the Taliban in charge at least can’t make things any worse than they are now.

 

One analyst quoted in the article describes Afghans’ reasons for enlisting in the Taliban thus: “In large part, recruitment seems to stem from family and tight community connections… Individual motivations are extremely diverse and range from revenge against the government or foreign occupiers for killed relatives or comrades to limited alternative opportunities in some regions to recruiting pressure from the organization.”

 

“…revenge… for killed relatives or comrades…”  Many Western politicians and pundits seem neurotic in their desire to avoid any possibility that their forces in Afghanistan were anything other than the ‘good guys’.  No doubt many servicemen and servicewomen from the US, UK and elsewhere believed they were in Afghanistan to make things better for the people living there.  Yet there’s plentiful evidence to suggest ordinary Afghans had reasons for not viewing their supposed Western liberators as angels.  There are specific reasons – see last year’s Brereton Report in Australia, which suggests some 39 Afghan civilians were murdered by Australian special forces. There are general ones too – for instance, a US study indicated that approximately 700 Afghan civilians were killed in airstrikes by the US and its allies in 2019 alone.

 

In addition, the West was determined (though it utterly failed) to wipe out Afghanistan’s opium / heroin trade, which in 2018 accounted for a third of the country’s GDP.  Opium poppies were the country’s biggest cash crop by far.  This can’t have endeared Western forces to Afghan farmers, especially as the countries sending those forces did little to rethink their own drug policies, which inadvertently fueled the demand for and drove the profits of the trade.

 

From unsplash.com / © Tim Cooper

 

“You can’t,” some Western strategists might say glibly, “make an omelette without breaking eggs.”  Or as the recently-departed, presumably now-roasting-in-hell Donald Rumsfeld once put it, “Stuff happens.”  But the carnage and the attendant shoulder-shrugging did nothing to win those all-important Afghan hearts and minds.

 

At the moment there’s an awful lot of breast-beating going on about the turn of events in Afghanistan. But I suspect those Western breast-beaters would be in for a shock if they saw themselves as many ordinary Afghans see them just now.

Posted on

George, where did it all go wrong?

 

© The Belfast Telegraph

 

Last Thursday saw the Prime Minister of England – sorry, Prime Minister of Britain – Boris Johnson arrive in Scotland for a one-day charm offensive.  This was intended to remind Scottish people of how lucky they were to be part of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the ‘mighty’ union as Johnson grandly put it, and dissuade them of any mad notions of voting for Scottish independence, which, according to recent opinion polls, 54% of them are now minded to do.  Determined to press the flesh with the maximum number of Scottish people during his visit, Johnson flew into the bustling Caledonian metropolises of the Orkney Islands and RAF Lossiemouth.  A little unfortunately, the Orcadian mainland is home to a small settlement called Twatt, which led to some unkind quips being made on social media about there already being ‘one Twatt in the Orkneys’.  It was also slightly unwise for the PM to parley with some local fishermen and pose for photographers holding a pair of clawed, antennae-ed crustaceans, as social media was soon heaving with comments about how he ‘had crabs’.

 

But Johnson isn’t the only British political chancer to have foisted himself upon Scotland recently, proclaiming the message that red, white and blue unionism is good while Saltire-waving indie is bad.  For July 2020 has seen the return to Scottish soil of one George ‘Gorgeous’ Galloway.  Or to give him the title that immediately appears when you type his name into Google, ‘George Galloway cat.’

 

It’s hard to believe now, but once upon a time I considered Galloway one of the good guys.  Well, one of the goodish guys at least.  This was while he served as Labour Member of Parliament for Glasgow Hillhead, later Glasgow Kelvin, from 1987 to 2005.  For many years Labour MPs formed the bulk of Scotland’s representation in the House of Commons, but apart from a few high-fliers like Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Donald Dewar and George Robertson, destined for cabinet jobs under Tony Blair, they were an uninspiring lot – a big, grey Scottish-accented blob whose only function was to shamble through the voting lobbies at their party’s bidding.  They were nicknamed the ‘low-flying Jimmies’, though to my mind they were a living, if barely sentient, definition of the Scots word ‘numpties’.

 

However, the Scottish Labour MPs contained a small but interesting awkward squad.  The squad included the admirably his-own-man Tam Dalyell; and the very leftward Ron Brown (who shocked the British establishment by heading off to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and then on his return warning that it probably wasn’t a good idea for the West to fund the Mujahideen, later to morph into the Taliban); and the trio of Dick Douglas, John McAllion and Dennis Canavan, all of whom would later end up estranged from the Labour Party and end up supporting the cause of Scottish independence.  Plus, of course, the ultra-awkward George Galloway.

 

Galloway was too left-wing for traditional mainstream Labourites’ liking, which was fine by me.  I also approved of his constitutional stance.  Though he didn’t go as far as espousing independence for Scotland, he advocated a large measure of home-rule for the country within the framework of the UK.  And when John Major’s Conservative Party won the British general election in 1992 and dashed hopes of a devolved Scottish parliament being set up for at least another half-decade, and a campaign movement called Scotland United was formed to maintain pressure for the creation of such a parliament, I wasn’t surprised when Galloway became one of the movement’s leading lights.

 

From twitter.com/thoughtland

 

To keep the issue in the public consciousness, Scotland United held rallies in Edinburgh and Glasgow.  I participated in a couple of these, though I can’t remember Galloway addressing the crowds.  I do remember, however, one Saturday marching down to Leith Links in Edinburgh where, after speeches, we were treated to a gig by the Scotland United-supporting pop / soul band Deacon Blue.  At one point, singer Ricky Ross pointed out the nearby premises of Leith’s Conservative and Unionist Association and started singing a cover of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which contains the pertinent lyrics, “…how does it feel / To be on your own, with no direction home / A complete unknown…?”  The memory makes me nostalgic.  Trying to establish a Scottish parliament by having Deacon Blue sing Bob Dylan at the Tories.  Those were the days.

 

Still, it was already clear that Galloway had a dodgy side.  From 1983 to 1987 he’d served as general secretary of the British charity War on Want and stories of his antics during a conference in Greece – Galloway confessed to getting to know some local ladies ‘carnally’ – led to embarrassing tabloid coverage.  I seem to remember one newspaper reporting his attempts to justify his behaviour with the headline I BONKED FOR BRITAIN.  This presumably helped give rise to Galloway’s nickname ‘Gorgeous’.  Meanwhile, his simultaneously smooth and self-righteous manner caused a lot of people I knew, even ones who shared his politics, to profess that they hated his guts.

 

During the next two decades, following Galloway’s exploits was a seesawing experience.  He’d do something crap, then redeem himself by doing something impressive, then blow his restored credibility by doing something crap again.  At the crap end was his grovelling to the Iraq despot Saddam Hussein, which in 1994 saw him utter the famous line, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”  Later, Galloway claimed, not very convincingly, that he’d aimed this line at the long-suffering Iraqi people rather than at Saddam himself.

 

But he deserved kudos for his opposition to George Bush Jnr and Tony Blair’s misguided, mendacious and ultimately catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003.  He denounced Bush as a terrorist, got himself expelled from the Labour Party, sued and won against the Daily Telegraph after it claimed Iraqi agents had secretly paid him with cash from the United Nations Oil for Food programme, and then squared up to a US Senate committee investigating the Food for Oil programme in 2005.  The senate confrontation was probably his finest hour.  He gave those senators a mauling.  “…(I)n everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right,” he declared, “and you turned out to be wrong.  And 100,000 have paid with their lives, 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies.”

 

Though he’d  torched his bridges with the Labour Party, Galloway managed for a time to defy Enoch Powell’s famous adage that ‘all political lives… end in failure.’  He formed the Respect Party, stood for election in the London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and won it from Labour.  He stood down as MP there following a schism in the Respect Party, but in a 2012 by-election pulled off a similar stunt by winning Bradford West from Labour.  Both constituencies had sizable Muslim communities and there were copious allegations about Galloway dishing religious-related dirt on his opponents – that in Bethnal Green he’d played up the fact that the Labour incumbent, Oona King, had a Jewish mother; that in Bradford West he’d raised the issue of the Labour Party’s Muslim candidate drinking alcohol; and that in the run-up to the 2015 general election he’d accused his Labour challenger, another Muslim, Naz Shah, of supporting Israel and lying about an arranged marriage.  But Shah had the last laugh because she won Bradford West back for Labour.

 

© Channel 4

 

True to form, Galloway’s 2005 triumph in Bethnal Green was soon negated by his idiotic decision to take part in the 2006 series of Celebrity Big Brother.  This resulted in such colossally cringy moments as George, no longer so gorgeous, dancing in a leotard beside the late Pete Burns of the band Dead or Alive, or pretending to be a cat and licking cream off the lap of actress Rula Lenska.  Hence the word ‘cat’ popping up beside his name on Google searches.

 

More seriously, Galloway secured a job as a host on the Iran-government-funded Press TV in 2008 and that same year earned himself the ire of gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell for claiming that a gay man executed in Iran was punished for ‘sex crimes’ rather than for being gay.  He landed himself in more hot water in 2012 when he defended Julian Assange against rape charges by describing having non-consensual sex with a sleeping woman (after consensual sex with her when she was awake), which Assange was accused of doing, as ‘bad sexual etiquette’ but ‘not rape’.

 

Galloway’s support for Assange was evidence that, as the 2010s progressed, he was increasingly happy to clamber onto any bandwagon that he thought would boost his profile.  So he campaigned vociferously for a ‘no’ vote in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence – ‘just say naw’.  Mind you, he was scathing of his ex-comrades in the Labour Party who’d joined forces with the Conservatives in the anti-independence Better Together movement.  “If you ever see me standing under a Union Jack shoulder-to-shoulder with a Conservative,” he told Prospect magazine, “please shoot me.”  Remember those words.  Prior to the referendum, I watched him in a televised debate and discovered that, like a cartoon character, he’d now acquired a costume, a rarely-off-his-head fedora, and a catchphrase: “That is nonsense on stilts!”

 

© The Jewish Chronicle / twitter/@VirendraSharma

 

Perhaps upset that his contribution to saving the United Kingdom didn’t result in ennoblement by a grateful David Cameron – he could have been Lord Galloway of Nonsense-on-Stilts – George then threw his lot in with the Brexiteers and campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016’s referendum on that matter.  This spawned some nauseating photographs of him, a supposed socialist, posing with Nigel Farage, ex-City of London spiv, immigration dog-whistler and Donald Trump’s biggest British fanboy.  That said, pictures of Galloway embracing the extreme right-wing nutjob Steve Bannon at a debate in Kazakhstan in 2019 were even more mind-melting.

 

The increasing number of causes that Galloway hitched himself to seemed in inverse proportion to the number of votes being cast for him in elections.  A 2011 attempt to get into the Scottish parliament saw him win a less-than-awesome 3.3% of the vote in Glasgow.  His performance in the 2016 London Mayoral contest was even worse (1.4%) and attempts to run in English constituencies in the 2017 and 2019 general elections had equally dire results.

 

Now George has a new wheeze, which is to run in next year’s Scottish parliamentary elections as head of something called Alliance for Unity, of which he says: “We have only one goal – to get the SNP out.”  To this end, Galloway has declared himself willing to work with even the Conservatives.  Yes, this is the man who a half-dozen years ago invited folk to shoot him if they ever saw him do that.

 

He intends to stand in the south of Scotland, a rural, down-to-earth area where I can’t see many people falling for his self-serving, narcissistic brand of bullshit.  Maybe he figures he stands a chance because he shares a name with one of the regions there, Dumfries and Galloway.  And who does he really expect to vote for him?  Not Scottish independence supporters, obviously.  Labour supporters will hardly vote for someone so willing to climb into bed with the Tories.  And the hard-line loyalists / British nationalists who increasingly form the main support for the Scottish Conservative Party these days will hardly be enamoured with someone who’s said of Northern Ireland: “There is no Northern Ireland.  It is six counties in the north of Ireland.  It should have never been in the British state in the first place.”  Nor will his urging of Arabs to kill British troops in Iraq in 2003, one of the final straws that got him chucked out of Labour, win him their admiration either.

 

George Galloway may still look, talk and act like the cat that’s got the cream.  But I suspect he’s now used up the last of his nine lives.

 

© The Sunday Mail / From pressreader.com

Posted on

Millennium Dom

 

From the Cyprus Mail

 

Spin doctor Dominic Cummings, the Svengali to Boris Johnson’s Trilby, the Rasputin to Johnson’s Tsarina Alexandra, the organ-grinder to Johnson’s dancing monkey, the puppet-master to Johnson’s, well, puppet, has become Britain’s Most Hated Man.

 

That’s because everyone in Britain now knows that Cummings didn’t just break the coronavirus-lockdown rules that he himself helped draw up for the population, but pulverised them.  The Gollum-like governmental advisor apparently believed that rules exist only for plebs and he, as a superior being, had a divine right to flout them.  In late March he drove his wife and child 260 miles from London to his parents’ farm near Durham in northeast England, while his missus was displaying coronavirus symptoms.  He developed symptoms soon after.  Also, while in the northeast, he drove 30 miles to local tourist attraction Barnard Castle, an action he subsequently justified by claiming he’d done it to check if he could drive safely even though the virus was affecting his eyesight.  I guess that’s the equivalent of a brain surgeon performing an operation to check if the palsy he’s been suffering from isn’t making his hands shake too much.

 

I should say not quite everyone in Britain is baying for Cummings’s blood, for I’ve noticed a few right-wing folks complaining on social media that Cummings has been the victim of a stitch-up by Britain’s hideous lefty mainstream press.  Such people regard Cummings as the Messiah, thanks to him being Campaign Director of the Vote Leave movement in 2015-16 and playing a major role in getting Britain out of the European Union.  According to them, the lefty newspapers that have it in for poor Dom include that notoriously socialistic organ, the Daily Mail.  Looking at the state of the comments posted by those fulminating right-wingers, I just hope they cancel their subscriptions to the Daily Mail and invest the money they’ve saved in taking punctuation courses where they learn how to use apostrophes correctly.

 

Anyway, reading the screeds of print written about Cummings in the past week, I’ve been reminded that Cummings first made a name for himself during a little-remembered episode in recent British political history.  It happened shortly after the advent of the new millennium, in a part of the world where I was living.  I’m talking about the referendum on setting up a regional assembly in northeast England, held in 2004.

 

Soon after Tony Blair’s New Labour government arrived in power in the late 1990s, devolution was implemented in the non-English parts of the United Kingdom, with the creation of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd and Northern Irish Assembly.  This left England as the only part of the UK without devolved government, which caused some awkward anomalies.  How, for example, could Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish politicians turn up at the British parliament and vote on issues affecting the English population, when English politicians weren’t allowed to attend the three devolved parliaments and have a say on equivalent issues affecting the populations there, like health and law enforcement, entrusted to those parliaments under the devolution settlement?

 

The Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Act of 2003 was meant to restore constitutional balance.  It was envisioned that, eventually, eight regional assemblies would operate across England.  As England had a population five times the size of that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, a patchwork of small English assemblies would ensure that too much power wasn’t concentrated in a single, huge English assembly.  And the first English region to get the chance to approve the establishment of its own assembly was northeast England, which had an all-postal ballot on the matter on November 4th, 2004.

 

Cynics would say that the northeast was given first say because it seemed highly likely to do what the government wanted it to do.  It was deeply pro-Labour at the time and contained Tony Blair’s constituency, Sedgefield.  Also, it seemed the English region with the strongest local identity – a place that’d want its own assembly making decisions on its behalf rather than having decisions imposed on it from faraway London.  At the time I was living in the northeast’s biggest city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and, without wishing to confuse the city with the region, I have to say the Geordies of Newcastle did seem a complete race apart.

 

I’d spent most of my youth in Scotland, where devolution had been a burning political issue for a generation.  There’d been a referendum about establishing a Scottish parliament back in 1979 and a majority had voted in favour of it.  Due to some disgraceful rule-bending by the Labour government of the time, though, it was decreed that the majority wasn’t big enough and the parliament wasn’t delivered.  Soon after came the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which massively reshaped the economy and culture of the UK in the 1980s.  Most people in Scotland didn’t vote for Thatcher but the existing constitutional set-up left her free to do what she wanted with the place – a sorry state of affairs that resulted in the nadir of the Poll Tax, imposed solely on Scotland in 1989 as an experiment to see how it was likely to go down in the rest of the UK.  A great ‘what-if’ of Scottish political history is how a Scottish parliament, if one had been created at the end of the 1970s, might have stood up to Thatcher.  I certainly can’t imagine things being any worse than they were.  Anyway, it seemed to me a no-brainer that people in northeast England should get their own assembly in 2004.

 

However, in the run-up to the referendum, I realised my devolutionary enthusiasm wasn’t mirrored in the Geordies and north-easterners around me.  This was largely due to the influence of the anti-assembly campaign North East Says No, chaired by local businessman John Elliot and with a certain Durham-born, Oxford-educated character called Dominic Cummings as one of its prime movers.  The anti-assembly campaign whipped up resentment against the proposed establishment.  It warned that an assembly would be an unnecessary extra layer of government, diverting yet more public money into the pockets of yet more politicians – and diverting it away from areas that really needed it, like health.  “More doctors,” declared one of its ads, “not politicians.”  Actually, that sounds familiar.  Didn’t Dom peddle a similar message in a more recent political campaign?  Although in Newcastle in 2004 I didn’t see it emblazoned on the side of a bus.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

It didn’t help the assembly’s cause that the senior politician entrusted with overseeing its creation was deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who famously had not one but two princely Jaguar motor cars at his beck and call and generally wasn’t known for his frugality.

 

Cummings’s anti-assembly message certainly got through.  With hindsight it was scary how many left-wing, liberal-minded people I knew in Newcastle, who’d normally have detested everything Cummings stood for, unconsciously parroted his rhetoric.  I remember in my workplace a Russian woman, who had British citizenship and the right to participate in the referendum but wasn’t too clued-up on local politics, asking a colleague for advice on how to vote.  The colleague, a Guardian-reading progressive if ever there was one, promptly told her the assembly was a nonsense and to vote against it.  Meanwhile, my best mate in Newcastle, also no right-winger, dismissed the proposed assembly as a ‘white elephant’ designed to ‘line politicians’ pockets’.

 

It didn’t surprise me, then, when Prescott and company lost the referendum and a majority voted against the assembly’s establishment.  It did surprise me how emphatic that majority was – of those who bothered to vote, 78% voted against it.  And that wasn’t only the prospect of a north-eastern assembly killed stone dead, but the prospect of any future devolution in England generally.  No politician would touch the project after that whipping.  Dominic Cummings had secured his first and, alas, not his last big victory.

 

Although Newcastle is pictured by some as a drunken hellhole where ghastly nightclubs are pillaged by stag and hen parties clad in little more than jockstraps and G-strings while freezing easterly gales howl around them from the North Sea – an image that admittedly isn’t wide of the mark if you venture into the city’s Bigg Market district on a Friday or Saturday night – I thought it was a great city.  I thoroughly enjoyed my time there during the first half of the noughties.  It had some great pubs (away from the Bigg Market), a good live music scene, decent shops and easy access to libraries and galleries.  You could generally find whatever it was that floated your boat, be it antiques markets or creative writing groups or comedy shows or whatever.  And I loved how you were mere minutes away from some of the most scenic landscapes in England.  And the Geordies were great company.  Indeed, I would have stayed for longer if the money I was earning in my job there hadn’t been so crap.

 

Looking back, though, I was probably lucky that I left Newcastle when I did and avoided the years of austerity that were inflicted on it by David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010 onwards.  The newspaper reports I’ve read about what happened to Newcastle make grim reading – slabs of money hacked off its budget every year, a total of some 300 million pounds lost by 2019, with a resulting cull of libraries, youth clubs and children’s centres and a general neglect of public services.  Even the city’s lollipop men and ladies weren’t spared – their numbers declined from 64 to seven in the space of five years.  Would a north-eastern assembly have been able to protect the city against some of this savagery?  Like the hypothetical 1980s Scottish parliament and Margaret Thatcher, I doubt if it would have made things any worse.

 

 

Incidentally, I think the missed opportunity of the English regional assemblies will contribute eventually to the breakup of the United Kingdom.  Occasional senior Labour politicians – Gordon Brown especially – still talk up the prospect of a federal UK as a way to keep Scotland British.  With their parliament nestling amid a bunch of similar-sized English ones where power is equally distributed, the Scots, the theory goes, will neither feel neglected nor get ideas above their station.  They’ll accept they’re fairly treated and accept their lot as happy Brits.  That might be true in an alternative universe, but it isn’t going to happen in this universe.  There won’t be a properly federal UK because people in England, as 2004 proved, aren’t interested.  And with so much power entrusted to dolts like Boris Johnson in London, I can’t see the Scots putting up with the existing constitutional status quo for much longer.

 

Modern right-wingers adore Dominic Cummings for what he’s supposedly done to restore British sovereignty.  But he’s actually done more than most to crock the whole concept of Britain.  Thanks in part to his exploits, including those in 2004, Britain as a union of four nations is doomed.  Dom-ed, in fact.