The Audacity of Pope

Matt Zarb-Cousin is a beautiful snowflake

2012-02-06T21:00:00.000Z

LabourList article. I ended up getting into a Twitter argument with Craig Woodhouse. He's definitely an idiot.

Snowflakes are unique. Each is completely beautiful in its own way.

Then they fall to the ground and they all look the same. They conform. They sell out. Those unscrupulous, spineless, yellow-bellied Judas Iscariots. They are the Lib Dems of the weather world. This weekend, it wasn’t the roads that were treacherous, or the “conditions”, it was the pathetic, compliant snowflakes themselves.

I suppose, perhaps, it’s because of some sort of societal pressure. “Don’t think about staying unique forever,” young snowflakes are told, “No single snowflake ever made a snowball, or killed a man in a horrific avalanche. Just look what happened to your Uncle Graupel; he said that thing on Twitter about fairtrade bananas and when his time was up, he melted sad and alone, in the sea.”

There it is. A tenuous link between the weather and something that has happened. Each as much a non-story as the other. It’s snowing? That’s not a lead story. A Parliamentary researcher to a Shadow Minister for Justice has made a joke about the Queen being a scrounger? I was honestly so bored I stopped listening before that sentence finished. Not even the Shadow Justice Secretary. Matt Zarb-Cousin works as a researcher for a guy who works as part of a team for the guy whose job is being Not The Justice Secretary.

What Matt did was to make a joke about the Queen, a very wealthy lady who receives her money from the taxpayer, by using the kind of language the reactionary right wing press use to demonise very poor people who receive their money from the taxpayer. The reactionary right wing press then lived up to their name. It seems a shame to explain Matt’s joke, but I’d become a little worried that some people hadn’t “got it”.

Craig Woodhouse, who wrote up the story for the Evening Standard, appears to be one such person. Then again, that’s understandable when you take into account that he is an idiot. I say this, because he clearly doesn’t believe that Matt using his Twitter biography to say that all views are his own – and therefore, not necessarily those of his employer – means that you can’t then use those views as a reflection of his employer’s. A little ironic then, that Woodhouse chooses to use his own Twitter biography to state that he is “tweeting in a personal capacity”. In the unlikely event that Craig Woodhouse ever says something interesting then we can naturally assume it is a reflection of the views of Alexander Lebedev. Woodhouse defended his story on Twitter by pointing out that the Queen’s 60th Jubilee means that it is 60 years since her father died, making Matt ’s comments “insensitive ”.

If she finds that insensitive, we better cancel those Diamond Jubilee celebrations pronto. Those fireworks are gonna look pretty bloody macabre now.

It feels like a story that has been proffered by journalists to people as something that could potentially be offensive. When they asked Matt on Twitter whether he still worked for Andy Slaughter, it wasn’t because so many people had been offended by what he’d said; they were trying to bring the comments to a wider audience in order to find people to be offended. Once that happens, you’ve got your story. Paul Waugh, one of the first to comment on it, later tweeted about Network Rail’s directors foregoing their bonuses as a “proper story ”.

Of course, Matt Zarb-Cousin is Not A Story. It’s a shame he must have had a bad day because of it. He didn’t deserve it and it’s a sad indictment of the political age we’re falling into. People in politics shouldn’t be interesting. They can’t anymore. Being unique might be nice at first, but eventually you have to conform, or you won’t get anywhere. Today Matt was strung up on a lamppost (very possibly the one next to Tom Harris), so everyone could see what happens to you when you dare to be different. When you decide to use your Twitter account to have an opinion rather than some boring, empty platitude about doorknocking. When you decide to phrase your views in a funny way so that maybe, just maybe, someone who isn’t interested in politics might be interested in what you have to say. Heaven forfend we actually try and engage with people.

One wonders if Charlie Elphicke, the backbench rent-a-gob no-mark Tory MP who decried Matt’s tweet as “a shameful slur” will ever have anything interesting to say. What I think is really sad, looking at him, another faceless mannequin of the politico production factory in this country, is that he might once have been a snowflake.

Yellow snow and excuses

2012-02-05T17:58:00.000Z

LabourList article. It had been snowing. Contains Joyce references and bad satire.

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

As shoppers fled Oxford St yesterday evening, one might assume that, somewhere, George Osborne was looking at a weather forecast and sighing relievedly, his soul swooning at the gentle sound of snow against his window, falling faintly against the dead economic growth.

“What a shame,” he can say, “that the only thing that my excellent plan for growth is not prepared for is snow! Well, snow and weddings.” And the British people will understand, because we are told to fear snow, and the “treacherous conditions” they bring, particularly to roads. Which reminds me, someone tell Chris Huhne not to go driving in this weather. Or in other types of weather.

For a flat city with a largely underground transport system, I always find it wonderful to see how little snow can bring London grinding, shuddering and skidding to a halt. Foolish Nazi bombers! Had they known that they needed only to coat the capital with a light sprinkling of snow in order to break the spirit of the inhabitants and ruin its economic infrastructure, we might all be speaking German now. Especially if, in retaliation, we had responded in kind over Dresden. Dresden, I am told, deals with snow fairly stoically. Angela Merkel would not dare blame poor economic figures on snow. She would be laughed at more than a German would laugh at someone falling over in snow, which is something a lot, as they invented it, I believe.

But Osborne will blame snow. He has to. He knows that snow is a justifiable excuse for anything in the UK and that, as much as people may complain about ungritted roads and dire public transport, if they were left to their own devices, they would just stay inside. So, albeit unhappily, the Government are forgiven for their icy incompetence. In fact, people are left to their own devices and they do stay inside, hence the virgin snow on the pavements of the West End’s shopping district last night. A Ghost town. City of the Dead.

It’s sad to think we’ve allowed Osborne this excuse. It’s sad to think of the smile on his face as he tells we must eat the yellow snow. The yellow snow that used to be a snowman. The snowman we made together and that he and his friends kicked over and made yellow. Sad to think that, as we share together the pissy remains of our deceased mutual friend and look down on two frosty lumps of coal on the ground, George Osborne smiles because he knows we’ll swallow it. He can tell us it’s for our own good. He knows more snow will come and cover the traces of what went before. That there’ll be more snowmen made and dismantled. And that he can make us eat the yellow snow again. His will smile as he hears the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead yellow snowmen, as they are forcefed to their loving creators.

Getting a massive yacht for the Queen

2012-01-22T18:06:00.000Z

LabourList article. There had been something in the news about getting the Queen a massive yacht. I tried to use the words "massive yacht" as much as possible.

“A yacht. A yacht? Really, a yacht? You want to leak it that we’re going to buy the Queen a yacht?”

“Yes. Just to test the water, as it were.”

“Don’t joke, Michael. And stop winking. Are you serious about any of this?”

“Absolutely! I’m sure it will work.”

“It just sounds like it might feasibly backfire terribly.”

“I really don’t think it will. Either way, we won’t actually buy a yacht. No harm done.”

“Are you sure? I really, really have a bad feeling about this. I think it could go horribly wrong. Labour are getting terrible press, will this not push all the attention onto us?”

“What’s the point of all their bad press if we don’t know how far we can push it? Saying something mad like this is a great idea.They’re at each other’s throats every day. Len McCluskey’s spitting feathers. Given a choice between Red Len mauling Red Ed and and Red Ed trying to maul you, what do you think the news stations will cover? They’re a shambles, they don’t have a clue. Their completely ineffectual! I honestly reckon we can get away with saying we’re going to get the Queen a massive y...”

“You didn’t say it was going to be a massive yacht!”

“It has to be a massive yacht!”
“How massive?”
“Really massive. £60 million pounds worth of massive yacht.”

“£60 million?! You’re insane Michael. You’ve got tourettes. You’re a tw*t. This will never work. We can’t get away with saying we’ll spend £60 million on a massive yacht for the Queen.”

“We can get away with saying we’ll buy the Queen a massive yacht. By the end of the week, I bet our poll lead will be even bigger.”

“If this comes back to bite us, you’re going straight to Culture, Media and Sport.”

“Trust me, Dave. If we get away with saying we’re going to buy the Queen a massive yacht, we can get away with anything. Privatising the NHS is going to be a doddle.”

“You’ve gone mad with power.”

“People like us don’t go mad with power. We were born for this.”

“I don’t know, Michael...”

“Massive yacht, Dave. Massive yacht. For the Queen.”

“...You know what? Do it! Say that we’re going to get the Queen a massive yacht!”

“This is going to be hilarious, Dave. If we can do this, we can literally get away with anything.”

“Hell yeah! If this works, I think I might actually get the Queen a massive yacht.”

“Genius.”

Economics by homeopathy and the elasticity of reality

2012-01-15T18:29:00.000Z

LabourList article.

I didn’t see Ed Balls’ speech to the Fabian Society Annual Conference yesterday; I was a work.

Well, I wasn’t at work. Strictly speaking, I was asleep. But I did go to work yesterday and, anyway, I deserved a lie in.

Not that I have to give an excuse not to have been at a Fabian Conference. It’s just that this article, like most other articles appearing on political blogs this weekend, will at least make reference to the speech given by the Shadow Chancellor. In fact, most other articles about the speech will probably be written by people who weren’t there either. They might even be written by people who got their idea of what the speech said by reading other articles by people who weren’t there to hear first hand what the speech said. People who don’t even write political articles (I know, weird, right?) might read an article about the speech that is a fifth or sixth hand account of it.

This is economic alternative by homeopothy. Is it working for you? Do you feel better? Perhaps it’s just a placebo. Oh dear, some seem to have suffered from an allergic reaction. Dilute it some more. Make it seem like it’s saying what they want to hear. Then they might like it. Is this palatable for you now? No more than a drop of what’s actually there. Now it tastes like water. Now you’ll like it. It’s just water. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s water. Nothing will change. Water.

Usually, I feel more engaged with what’s happening. It’s because I want to be engaged. I’m interested. But as I groggily flicked through my Twitter timeline late yesterday morning, I felt removed. Not plugged in or turned on. Copped out. Not just in that I wasn’t there, but that the reality of the situation shifted depending on who was interpreting it. Ed Balls is a Tory now. He supports the cuts. He is a Blairite agitator. He’s not gone far enough. He has had a brush with reality. Nothing has changed. Water.

This fiscal conservatism will strike a chord with the public. Once the public recognise the nuanced clauses of his argument, they will respond. This muddled economics will leave the public dazed and confused. The public demand a socialist alternative. Water.

What to believe?

I feel out of the loop. This must be how the world looks from inside the Westminster bubble, wiping their suit sleeves on the glass to get a clearer view. What is this? A universe of contradictions. The paradox of a single moment. The elasticity of reality. What to make of it? What to believe? This is what Kafka warned about.

I know what I want to believe. I don’t know if it’s true. Someone let me know. Give it to me straight. No water.

Let there be discontent

2012-01-08T18:42:00.000Z

LabourList article.

“Are we too unkind to Ed?” pondered David Talbot, on this very website, only two days ago. Meanwhile, as Political Scrapbook covered Blackbustersgate, it was noted that “Poor Ed” has had “one of those weeks”.

Even before Abbottgate (which, without wanting to generalise, sounds like the kind of place white people would live), it had been decided this was a bad week for Ed Miliband. From there, it only got worse. Definitely “one of those weeks”. The problem is, “one of those weeks” is starting to feel like the standard. When won’t it be one of these weeks, I wonder?

Writing “Blackbusters” instead of “Blockbusters” could have happened to anyone (and Muphry’s Law ensured that we were temporarily trapped in a vicious circle of spelling errors), but when it happened, it felt sadly predictable that it would be on Miliband’s feed. It is, unfortunately, exactly the kind of thing that would happen to him. He is a bad luck magnet. Negative press gravitates towards him. Often seemingly out of nowhere, each new story hurtles into his face like an asteroid, causing yet another awkward photo.

Every time he speaks he seems to upset someone. Every time a shadow cabinet member says anything, even if it’s something Ed Miliband agrees with, it’s a Blairite plot. Trade Union leaders don’t seem to like him much anymore. The newspapers never did. There are even manoeuvres to get rid of him in order to replace him with his brother in five years time, apparently.

As Mark Ferguson pointed out, everything that anyone does or says is viewed through the prism of attacking or backing Ed Miliband. For many Labour loyalists, it seems the prism is even smaller: he’s always under attack. It’s him against the world and, no matter how many times he tells the Guardian he’s a man of grit and steel, he can’t take on the world. Just look at him.

Here lies a problem. We’re not being too unkind to poor Ed; we’re starting to pity him.

This is a dangerous situation to be in. People back Ed because they think no one else is. Standing up for people who can’t stand up for themselves in itself, this is no bad thing. It’s what makes us who we are as a Party. It’s what helps define us and to me, it’s a sign of compassion. But two years ago it left us rallying around a leader who was vilified in the press daily and couldn’t connect with the electorate. It was the same backs up against the wall, Us vs The World attitude. Letting Ed go the same way would do no one favours. Saying “Game on” ad infinitum is not a strategy for victory.

Let’s not jump on anyone who isn’t being unfailingly nice about Miliband. Let’s not attack the three Labour MPs today who have hardly said the most controversial things about his leadership. Everyone who points out that the last week has not gone well is not an enemy. Everyone who thinks the past year has not gone well is not an enemy. If you don’t let people be critical friends, then they just stop being friends.

Let there be discontent. It’ll help us, honest.

My predictions for 2012

2012-01-01T17:45:00.001Z

LabourList article. Some of these predictions or the ideas behind them are recycled from my predictions for 2010. They weren't much funny the first time.

2011 was one of the most unpredictable years on record. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not true; it was every bit as unpredictable as every other year, but lots of newsworthy things happened that people wouldn’t have dared predict a year ago today.

Fortunately, I’m braver than any coward you were reading a year ago, so here are my predictions for the next 364 days:

- Owen Jones will write a follow-up to Chavs called Trots: The Demonization of the Middle Class.

- In a blogpost (who for, I do not know), Dan Hodges will claim he has used the Large Hadron Collider to come back in time and warn us all about the electoral abyss the Labour Party face under Ed Miliband in 2015. The police pick him up in the early hours of the following morning on Whitehall, telling someone he needs their clothes and their motorcycle.

- At a G8 meeting, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy have a fight. Merkel pulls Sarkozy back by one arm, shouting “He ain’t worth it, Nici!”

- Nick Clegg will… something, something, something. No one cares, and by this time next year, we’ll have forgotten who he is anyway.

- After realising that, after two years in power, the most David Cameron has ever been held to account is that guy from the One Show asking him how he sleeps at night, Ed Miliband will step aside for Adrian Chiles. The PLP will rush through their overwhelming, unchallenged support for him before anyone can point out what a terrible mistake they’ve made.

- Blackburn Rovers will be relegated.

- Syria will change its Facebook status to “It’s complicated”.

- At a fortunately timed by-election, Adrian Chiles will become Labour’s newest MP in order to properly fulfill his role as leader of the opposition. The CLP had rushed through their overwhelming, democratic support of his selection. On a timetable set by Labour Party HQ. On a shortlist of one.

- Nick, erm, whathisface, you know… leader of the Lib Dems? What’s he called? Anyway, doesn’t matter. He does something. I forget what.

- Andrew Lansley announces plans to cut hospitals. All of them. “We’re going to turn them into unused mansions people aren’t allowed to squat in,” he announces, gleefully.

- At his first PMQs, Chiles uses his first question as Leader of the Opposition to ask David Cameron what he likes to do in his spare time.

- The Olympics happen. Whoever is London Mayor says it goes well. The one who lost says it goes badly. They both have points.

- As a result of being absolved of any wrongdoing by Essex Police, Chris Huhne is given a well deserved promotion to Foreign Secretary.

- The summer brings more riots to London, this time more politically motivated, as participants in the unrest rally around Nigel Farage’s calls to leave the EU. Commentators put this down to poor refereeing during England’s Quarter Final defeat to Portugal in Euro 2012.

- Labour leader Adrian Chiles will pledge to take Miliband’s ‘blank sheet of paper’ to its logical conclusion by entering the next election with a no policies whatsoever. The triumphant crescendo of his conference speech is: “Go home and don’t prepare for anything. Zilch. Nada. Nothing!”

- Rather than the usual standing ovation given to a leader’s conference speech, Labour members’ react by simply slapping their own foreheads.

- Front page of The Independent on Thursday the 4th October will report how a loud facepalming noise emitting from Manchester the previous day produced a sonic wave that will affect weather patterns in Borneo.

- In his Autumn statement, George Osborne uses the word “die” 327 times, unprecedented for a Chancellor’s budget speech.

- Riding high in the polls, David Cameron calls Parliament to dissolve. He needs over 50% of MPs to support a motion for a General Election. With the public and several of their frontbench team having forgotten who leads them (Sarah Teather calls him “Nigel Clough” on Question Time the week before), the Lib Dems do not back the proposal. However, with a buoyant Labour Party reaching a heady 14% in the polls (third, behind the SNP), Adrian Chiles orders a three-line whip on Labour backing the bill.

- Gnereal Election called for December 12th.

- During a patriotic speech to people outside a BHS in Macclesfield, in which he claims to bleed the colours of the Union Jack, David Cameron cuts himself with a shard of glass to reveal he does actually bleed the colours of the Union Jack. People vomit and flee the scene.

- The following day, Alex Salmond will also make a patriotic speech by a river in Dundee, in which he claims to only bleed the colours of the Scottish flag. Just as he is about to cut himself, he inadvertently revers to the river as a “Loch”. People vomit and flee the scene.

- The day after that, the leader of the Liberal Democrats also has a speech.

- The Labour Party romp to victory in the General Election, with 87% of the vote. The first piece of legislation to be passed is the abolition of the monarchy, effectively making the office of Prime Minister the President of the United Kingdom.

- LONG LIVE ADRIAN CHILES, OUR BELOVED HEAD OF STATE.

- Kim Jong-Un will kill us all.

We can tick them off as we go. Now, pass the berocca.

Bottom at Christmas

2011-12-18T18:07:00.000Z

LabourList article. I thought this was quite a thoughtful piece, but unfortunately an article in the Indy quoting the Master of Bland, Tom Scholes-Fogg was published the same day and I probably got lumped in with him. Also, I live in London, not Blackburn, which is why I mention that was in Blackburn. Otherwise that would have been a rather banal opening to the third paragraph. The idea of comparing Miliband and Kean was recycled on The Commentator website a few weeks later.

Blackburn Rovers were bottom at Christmas.

In the history of the Premiership, only one club has survived after being bottom of the league going into the St Stephen’s Day fixtures, and even then it was the fewest points a team has ever stayed up with. Depending on the result of Tuesday’s derby match, it’ll either be Blackburn Rovers or Bolton Wanderers occupying last place next weekend.

That’s not the kind of cool 2011 political fad of ‘occupying’, by the way, the kind Cambridge Defend Education would do because they think someone might disagree with them or that Ed Miliband would support – I mean a different kind of occupying. The bad kind of occupying.

I was in Blackburn last weekend and morale is low. For us Rovers fans, times are bleak. History is against us. The graphs do not make good reading. The team is managed by Steve Kean, a man who seems to have some noble ideas (he likes flowing, attacking football) that arguably pay off to some extent (only six teams have scored more goals), but who, ultimately, is not a football manager. His tactics don’t work. He’s awful at interviews. When faced with criticism, he claims that those against him are part of the 1%. He looks a bit like a waxwork of Brad Friedel, who played for Rovers when they were good, that has melted.

About a year ago, the decision to give Kean a job he is not capable of, against the will of most fans, was made by the select group of owners who bankroll the club. They have not only shown little idea how to run a football club, but have also driven out anyone who did. Yet they are brimming full of fancy ideas of what the manager should do. “Sign Ronaldinho!” they said, “Get David Beckham to come to Blackburn! Then everything will be better!”

Of course, in the real world, these players were never likely to sign for us – nor, in fact, would our problems have been solved if they were (although that might be an allegorical blog post for another time).

There might have been a good victory recently, but that was more a reflection of the quality of the team rather than any tactical masterstrokes. Especially against Swansea. It doesn’t change anything.

Blackburn fans have begun to embrace what seems to be the inevitable. We’ll be bottom at Christmas. We’ll be relegated and the manager will finally go. Then the owners might pull out, but without top-flight status and appearing to have only a small fan base to tap into, the club will struggle to attract new investors. The success of the 1990s and 2000s will look like a blip. We’ll be back where we spent most of the 20th century: the lower leagues.

Opposition.

The graphs don’t make good reading for Labour supporters either. Ed Miliband might encompass some noble values, but they’re not ones delivering results. Labour may have won Feltham and Heston this week, but that is more a reflection of the quality of candidate and hard work of members than a victory for the leader. Especially as we won it at the last General Election. The party polls do not look good (6 points behind in today’s ICM) and Miliband’s personal polling is even worse: half of all voters think he has no good qualities.

I don’t wish to labour the point, so I’ll let you stretch the rest of the analogy as far as you wish, allowing for political leanings and football allegiances.

Blackburn Rovers fans are in revolt; they want the manager gone. Many have been saying that for a long time now. It’s come to Christmas though, and it looks too late.

The Labour Party is not in revolt, though many have been calling for Ed Miliband to go for a long time now. For Labour, the festive season is not yet here. But it will come.

And we can’t be bottom at Christmas.

"Angry? We are." Embarrassing? They are.

2011-11-28T17:50:00.000Z

LabourList article on cringey posh trots. There was a sentence in the last paragraph that didn't make sense so I have amended it to include the word "tossers".

"Angry? We are."

So begins ‘About Us ’ page on Cambridge Defend Education’s website, their rhetorical question perfectly illustrating what little interest they have in listening to other people.

Oddly, it also seems to expect that any visitors to the site are angry. No pleasantries, just straight to the business of being outraged. No time, even, for a fully structured sentence: putting “Are you” in front of the word “angry” would waste valuable time that could be spent being apoplectic about the thing they are keen to tell you they are angry about. Not even about in particular at this point. Not “Angry about cuts?” or “Angry about fees?”. No. Just “Angry?” Angry about anything? You’re in the right place. Did you accidentally stumble across this site after slamming your face repeatedly into the keyboard in an act of inexplicable pent-up rage? You’re one of us now.

On Tuesday, Cambridge University was hosting a debate with Universities Minister David Willetts, who was to open proceedings with a statement about what he felt universities should represent. Just as he got to the stage, however, one man in the crowd stood up.

“Dear David,” he bellowed, by way of interruption. Then he paused, allowing his accomplices within the crowd to repeat his strong opening line. “The future does not belong to you.” Another pause followed, and sections of the crowd again dutifully repeated. This technique of repeating even the most banal statement of the original speaker is apparently known as a ‘People’s Mic’, presumably to make a contrast with the kind of electrical microphones used by rappers, stand up comedians and trade unionists, all of whom are millionaires. “This is an epistle,” the people continued, before adding, unnecessarily, “which is addressed to you.”

This was the self-proclaimed ‘epistle’ of the Cambridge Defend Education, entitled ‘GO HOME , DAVID ’. I have checked, by the way, and the capitals are not optional. After a few minutes, Willetts left. By the time the CDE got to their closing, “Go home, David./ And learn your gods anew”, he would have been pulling onto the motorway, probably pleased to be able to get home so soon. The poem (I think it’s supposed to be a poem) has lots of lines like “learn your god anew” and not many actual facts or arguments.

There’s a lot about religion and gods that build up to that last sentence. There are bits that don’t make much sense. There’s a bit about a car that they are“clambering” into the driving seat of, before saying that the car metaphor (that they introduced, for no reason) “betrays” Willetts and that, actually, they have no ambition to get into the driving seat. That they’ve already clambered into. The driving seat of a car that they don’t want to be souped up. The driving seat of a car that they don’t want to be souped up, driving down a narrow road. With a horizon that’s vanishing. So “look elsewhere for your metaphors, David”. Yeah, David!

One of their biggest grievances seems to be that David Willetts has already made up his mind about the legislation that he’s introduced. Now, as much as I dislike the reform to higher education, I would say it’s at least fitting with his values. Whereas shutting down a debate because you think that someone won’t agree with you at the end does not follow with the kind of free speech you claim to support. “Nothing is up for debate here;/ your mind is made up;/ you are not for turning”, said the people who didn’t allow the debate to happen.

This is why I accused them of “hilariously unaware, pretentious tosspottery”. They refuted this, claiming it was “hilariously self -aware tosspottery”. Well, there we are. We’ve entered an age of post-protest. Meta-anger. They have staged a purposefully bad protest. In a time when everyone is irrelevantly occupying any piece of space, Cambridge Defend Education have realised that the only way to really get any attention is to do something so monumentally rubbish that no one has any option other than to give it attention. I hadn’t realised this was the new Footlights performance piece. It’s reminiscent of ‘Do you weep , Mrs Thatcher ?’. And that was written by a fictional thirteen year old.

They are still there now, occupying the space they never let David Willetts speak in. An insular, close-knit and small-minded group of self-important tossers, Cambridge Defend Education represent the unthinking, hypocritical left at its worst. In their ‘About Us’, they say “we will listen to each other”. It just seems a shame they won’t listen to anyone else.

Racism in football

2011-11-20T19:44:00.000Z

LabourList article. Racism is bad, yeah? Unfunny, pious, boring, worthy.

“Why is it that if a man kills another man in battle, it’s called heroic, yet if he kills a man in the heat of passion, it’s called murder?” That’s a quote from the 1992 film Wayne’s World. It will be relevant later.

Wolverhampton Wanderers beat Blackburn Rovers 3-0 in the 1960 FA Cup Final. During the match, Rovers full-back Dave Whelan became a victim of the ‘Wembley hoodoo’ which haunted the stadium during 1950s and ‘60s, and broke his leg. He recovered, and continued to play football, though they say he was never the same after the injury.

During his recovery, he bought a stall on Blackburn market. Fans wanted to make sure Whelan could make a living while he was out of action (and in those days, footballers weren’t paid a great deal) and the little stall did very well. It did so well, in fact, that he retired a few years later and turned it into a chain, before buying the company we now know as JJB Sports.

It’s a nice story and a reason I’ve always liked Dave Whelan. Even if he is a Tory.Indeed, if one was so inclined, I’m sure there is a blogpost to be written on how Labour should try to win the support of working class small business owners.

But a couple of weeks ago, Whelan weighed in on the racism debate that’s currently engrossing English football. It was an unfortunate foreshadowing of FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s stupid comments this week.

“If a white man insults a black man that’s big, big, news.” Whelan said, “But if a black man insults a white man, that’s nothing, and it’s expected.”

It’s not dissimilar to the defences given to Ron Atkinson a few years ago, when he used the n-word whilst commentating on a Champions League football match, unaware that he was still on air. Part and parcel of the game, and all that…

But it isn’t. Not anymore. Football has come a long way. Dave Whelan is a relic of a by-gone era, in this country at least. His comments are not a sad indictment of football in this country, but a reminder of how far we’ve come.

Sepp Blatter’s point was that football players can be driven by adrenaline and frustration to do and say things they wouldn’t otherwise do. It’s the “killing a man in the heat of passion” defence, quoted above. He might actually have a case, up to a point. I remember during a match against Birmingham City, the former Blackburn captain Andy Todd kicking French World Cup winner Christophe Dugarry up the bum, something he might not have done outside the heated parameters of a football match. But although adrenaline may be an excuse, it isn’t one that’s acceptable. In the end, you are to be held fully accountable for your actions, no matter how you arrived at them. It’s something that – thankfully – the English FA recognise.

Worryingly, Blatter’s words, unlike Whelan’s, do seem to reflect a wider problem in football outside of the UK. When Luis Suarez, the Liverpool player, allegedly racially abused Patrice Evra during a game, there was no suggestion he might be dropped by Uruguay. Ditto Sergio Busquets by Spain, when a similar allegation was made by Real Madrid player Marcelo.

Following the Suarez incident, fellow Uruguayan Gus Poyet leapt to his defence, saying Suarez was no racist and that England had to try and understand different cultures, rather than think they were right all the time. Spain has a notoriously poor reputation for tackling racism, fining clubs pittances when their fans racially abuse opposition players and their national coach Luis Aragones only a days’ wage when he attempted to “motivate” Jose Reyes by making racist remarks about Thierry Henry.

Over here, when a Blackburn Rovers fan was caught making monkey noises at Dwight Yorke during a match, he was banned from the ground and taken to court. Ron Atkinson can no longer get a job in football.

These are the kind of things we should keep pushing, especially if it means that one day we can get to a point where the New Statesman has to stop regurgitating under a different name its seemingly bi-annual blog about lefties having to dislike football. We’ve still got a way to go in this country, but we’ve certainly come a long way and we’re still miles ahead of loads of other countries. Cameron should have gone further this week and called for Blatter to resign. The UK has done more to tackle racism in football than most other major footballing countries over the past 20 years and for this, oddly, we should be proud.

Let us now push the rest of them to catch up.

My eulogy to Silvio Berlusconi

2011-11-13T21:11:00.001Z

LabourList article. This was written the evening Silvio Berlsuconi resigned as Italian Prime Minister, and was published the next day. Dylan Moran has also described Berlusconi as "so crooked he sleeps on a spiral staircase".

The comedian Dylan Moran once described Silvio Berlusconi as a man “so thoroughly corrupt, every time he smiles an angel gets gonorrhea.”

I find it hard to believe that a character like the resigning Italian Prime Minister exists in the modern world. He seems more like a crass caricature of a sleazy Italian waiter in a 1970′s joke than a real person, let alone a successful politician. He’s not so much a relic of another era as he is a towering pyramid of political incorrectness, a wonder of the modern world, priding himself that time has not eroded his obnoxious stone walls. You’ve heard about the official No.10 petition to get Jeremy Clarkson as PM? It’s like that happened, if Jezza had found a fast car that was actually fuelled by testosterone, explosions and saying “Phwoar”.

He can’t possibly be real. He’s the funniest concept Roy “Chubby” Brown isn’t talented enough to have thought of.

Here is a man who owns half of the media in Italy, as well as AC Milan, who seemingly viewed the occupation of Prime Minister as an excellent chat-up line for his grand-daughter’s friends. Yet the people of Italy clearly felt he had their best interests at heart. To be honest Italy – and I don’t want to be harsh here – he’s reflected quite poorly on the lot of you. I don’t speak much Italian, but I don’t think I ever want to know what “bunga bunga” actually means.

The Berlusconi stories eclipse anything we’ve had in British politics. There’s a video of him on YouTube pretending to have sex with an unwitting traffic inspector. He appointed a former weather girl on a TV channel he owned as Equalities Minister (she’s, er, no Harriet Harman). He apparently once said that if asked, 70% of women would want to have sex with him, while the other 30% would say “What, again?” He reportedly called Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, an “unf*ckbale lard arse”. Earlier this year he went on trial for allegedly paying an underage girl for sex. Wikipedia has a section for ‘Trials involving Silvio Berlusconi’. His biggest crime of course, according to the Daily Mail, was that he and Tony Blair got on well. Crook.

I don’t have internet at home at the moment, so I can’t actually fact check any of these things. I’m pretty sure he owns AC Milan and that he’s just resigned, but everything else is pretty much up for debate: it’s all simply hearsay. My favourite story is that in one of his houses he has a marble statue of Superman with his own face on. True? No idea. Plausible? I’m sold.

It doesn’t really matter what is true any more because the idea of Berlusconi reigns. He’s an arrogant, incompetent chauvinist. If he had a Euro for every time he faced a vote of no confidence, he’d have two statues of Superman with his own face. And here, inexplicably, lies the reason for his departure from office: the Eurozone crisis.

The reason Berlsusconi had got as far as had in the first place was because of his image. He was a bit of a rogue, a ladies’ man. People knew what they were getting. Perhaps they just became jaded. The scandals washed over them because, in the end, that’s Silvio! What did you expect?

Ultimately, it had to be something largely out of his control to do him in. Once you’ve developed the kind of public persona that he cultivated, then your immunity to criticism spreads. No one’s surprised when the country goes to the dogs when the PM’s spending all night chasing skirt and, hey, they’d already let him off for that. It would be hypocritical of them to start blaming him for not doing things like run the country properly if they’re going to let him off for all the other stuff that means he can’t run the country properly. It was a vicious circle with an immortal stood in the middle. It had to be something huge to bring him down. That’s why he’s been Italy longest serving post-war PM.

Beware of politicians with this quality. If they can shrug off a scandal without apologising, you’ve let them go too far. The nearest thing we have here is Boris. Labour should be worried about this. Not just in London next year, but for years to come. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Boris could well be the next Tory leader and if he can shrug off stories of mistresses and Bullingdon antics now, then they will hardly come back to bite him later. He’s been a useless mayor, but he’s ahead in the polls. The Berlsusconi effect is already taking place.

I hear he’s getting a marble statue…

First Baffled and Outraged episode

2011-11-10T16:05:00.001Z

A few weeks ago I started a Goldsmiths College radio show with my good friend Scouse Tom. We have an hour long slot every Wednesday at 3pm. We make lots of jokes about news and things, ad play four or five excellent songs. If you want to listen live, you can do at Wired Radio. I'll post up every episode here and on the official Baffled and Outraged blog.Unfortunately, as novices, the first six minutes of this episode are missing. The rest is pure gold though. We talk about whether Gadaffi was a hipster and interview Bryan Adam, amongst other things. The first few episodes have pretty poor sound quality on songs, but we hope to sort this out by episode 4.

War of ideologies

2011-10-31T16:11:00.000Z

LabourList article. I tried to approach this from a fairly neutral perspective, as I felt it'd be a little hypocritical if I came across as overtly New Labour. That didn't matter to my good friend, the mad lefty failed PPC for somewhere in Surrey, Tom Miller, who trolled me in the comments. I rushed the ending because I had to go to college and think the last line is pretty poor.

There's a war coming.

Sorry to have come to Hallowe’en clad as the Harbinger of Doom, an oracle of calamity, but there we are. If you look around, it’s hard not to feel that the structures that hold our world in place are crumbling; the fabric of our society is coming apart like bits of rotting zombie flesh.

Unsustainable energy supplies. Environmental pollution. Climate change. Famine. The list could go on but, y’know, it’s Monday.

The seventh billion person has been born today (probably). What kind of place have they arrived in?

Here, of course, the biggest worldwide issue that currently affects us the most is still the economy. To sort this out, we have the undead Cameron, who feeds on people’s forgotten memories of the 1980s, and Count Osborne, who sucks all life out of flailing economic growth. They do this, I’ve heard, due to their ideological stance.

No retreat! No surrender to disappointing quarterly figures! Onwards, to austerity and to freedom!

To be locked in to such a rigid dogmatic path might be something of a hindrance. There’s no wiggle room. If I can be allowed to add anything to the political philosophy debate I’d like it to be that strict economic ideologies show serious weakness in the wiggle room department. In exactly those words. If we are obliged to refer to the Coalition’s economic plan as “ideological cuts” at every instance then my idea of opposing that would be to take a different approach and then, basically, kind of, see if that works. Maybe not in those words, though.

For others, however, the perfect way to counter the “ideological cuts” is to take a different ideology and then ruthlessly stick to it. Fight fire with fire.

This, unfortunately, is where the war I speak of happens. Some see this time of insecurity as the battleground for the greatest ideological warfare of all time. The one to end it all. It’s socialism versus conservatism. The dividing lines are drawn. You’re either with us or against us. There’s no third way. In the red corner, with an apparent 99% of the population, it’s the Progressive Majority! In the blue corner, weighing in with 75% of the wealth, it’s the Vanguard of the Elite! It’s Marx and Hayek, bare-knuckle, behind the bike sheds after school. Ties off, sleeves up, I’ll hold your coat. Winner takes all.

It’s this kind of attitude that worries me. Down this path lies heroic failure. It’s the kind of thinking that led Tony Benn to hail Labour’s performance at the 1983 General Election as a “remarkable development” because so many people voted for proper socialism. 1983. Remarkable indeed.

I know some people look at events here and worldwide and see a radical shift in public attitude towards the left, but I’m afraid I don’t. At any rate, it would be far to early too pin our hopes on the fluttering red flag. I’m sorry, I wish I had your ability to see all your own values reflected in news events that would seem to suggest the opposite, but I don’t.

I’m not calling for a tack to the right, I just want us to remain open-minded. In the world I see, there are lots of problems and most people don’t know how to solve them. In fact, most people probably don’t even have a basic political philosophy that they can apply to every situation. We, the Labour Party, the Left, whatever, should try and reflect this. We have our values, sure, everyone has lines they won’t cross. But we’ll approach problems pragmatically.

In his acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president in 1960, Kennedy said he felt the American people expected more than the usual cries of indignation or attack: “The times are too grave, the challenges too urgent, and the stakes too high to permit the customary passions of political debate.”

It feels like the world is falling apart like bits of rotting zombie flesh. But it’s not impossible to fix.

Red Dave Cameron's fat tax

2011-10-16T13:32:00.000+01:00

It's hard to keep up with all the stupid things the government is doing. They're like a drunk teenager desperately trying to give the impression of sobriety, trying to explain why their best mate is snoring loudly on the settee without using the nonsensical lie about the cat from last week. At the same time as frantically trying to reassemble the National Health Service they knocked over on the way in. Still, as long as their parents don't find out about leaving their house keys and wallet in a bin they should be ok.

In all of this, it would be easy to miss Cameron's floated idea last week that the government might bring in a ‘fat tax': a tax on fatty foods in a bid to tackle obesity. But no one really cared, except for Terry Wogan. There were bigger fish to fry. Or Foxes, as it turned out.

I, however, was a little taken aback. It seems like the kind of proposal that, had it been suggested by Miliband, would have had the press rubbing their hands with glee at the chance to run another ‘Red Ed' headline.

And you know what? They'd have been right to do so.

A tax on fatty foods is exactly the kind of narrow-minded left wing approach Labour needs to avoid. It's the reactionary response of the unthinking left. "There's a problem? Let's tax something! Can we tax people per cubic centimetre they take up? What can we tax?! QUICKLY, GOD DAMN IT." It's a natural response for too many, in this case appealing only to the smug foody types you can be sure it won't affect. It appears to take little notice of either cause or result.

People need to get past the idea that there are one-solution-solves-all policies. It's comforting to think that many problems can be solved with one swift piece of legislation, but it just isn't the case. Such a simple approach to tackling a problem is crass at best; you may as well call this ‘A modest proposal for the prevention of obesity'.

It's a government peering over a pair of half-moon spectacles, eyebrows raised, and intoning "I really don't think you should be doing that" in the kind of condescending manner that makes you want to have a deep-fried burger with a crisp and chocolate relish.

I'm no libertarian. I am not the kind of person to go around complaining about the smoking ban or describe tax as "legislated theft". I think things like ‘political correctness' and, more pertinently, the ‘nanny state' are used as pejorative terms for overall positive actions. It's not hard to support these ideals if you consider the alternatives. But I'd prefer if we treated people like grown-ups while we were trying to help them. Let people know what's unhealthy, sure. Tell them how they should eat if you think it'll help. But don't make them. I don't want to end up in a world where only the rich can afford to have a greasy takeaway or drive a car, because the government deems those things "bad" and has taxed them accordingly.

But here we are, not with it being suggested by someone on the left, but by our Conservative Prime Minister. It is then, perhaps, surprising that Cameron would ponder this at all; he has never struck me as being Red Dave. Perhaps I've been caught unaware, and it has been unilaterally decided that fat people caused the global financial crisis, so now it's theirs to fix. Maybe the economy is not growing because they keep sitting on it. That £6 billion hole in Osborne's deficit reduction plan used to be filled with jam sandwiches. Or have people been taking the phrase ‘fat cats' too literally and this is actually a proposed tax on bankers? Because, frankly, fictitious cats have had a tough time this past fortnight.

Or perhaps Cameron was trying to call Miliband's bluff, waiting for Ed to pledge his support, and then drop it. Let it be Labour's left lurch. Nothing to do with us, guv.

It would be good if Miliband could come out and say that a fat tax is a dumbass idea. It's yet another example of Cameron punishing the poor. Prices are going up anyway and wages aren't, why would we take more money out of the ordinary person's pocket? In Denmark they've tried this and the price of a small packet of butter has risen by 25p. Scientists can't even agree if it's helping. People can't afford it.

But Cameron and his pals won't have thought of that. It's quite hard to think of stuff like that with a traffic cone on your head.

Chris Martin is a dead parrot

2011-10-09T16:29:00.000+01:00

LabourList article.Original, unpublished title.

A few years ago my brother and I bought my Dad a Coldplay CD for Father's Day. This was, may I add, my brother's idea. The night before Father's Day, we were sat in our front room when Chris Martin came on the telly. I can't remember what for. Some chat show maybe, or to tell us that we were killing the planet and that he and his wife live in a house where the electrical items are powered by their own self-worth.

"I hate Chris Martin," said Dad, "and all that terrible music he makes."

It's one of those moments in life where you have a crushing reality check and time stands still. You're brain flits between numbness, gawping at the enormity of the situation, and going into desperate overdrive, grasping hopelessly for increasingly bizarre solutions. These moments have a unique beauty, in retrospect at least.

"Er, didn't you buy one of their albums?" ventured my brother, interrupting my silent prayer to St Jude to remind me that I could always plead the ignorance and blame him. He is older, after all.

"No! I would never buy one of their albums! It's like listening to a beige wall with pictures of Iain Duncan Smith blu-tacked on." From there, he was off on one. There wasn't anything positive he had to say about Coldplay. And he had a lot to say.

The next morning, he did his best to convince us that when he said he didn't like Coldplay, he simply meant he didn't like Chris Martin as a person. The music was, of course, perfectly acceptable. Watching him stand there trying to force a weird metonymy between Coldplay and Martin was like watching George Galloway's infamous "indefatigable" defence in reverse. A comparison I'm sure Dad will love.

It's an age-old style of defence in politics; one that runs in direct opposition to Denis Healey's first rule of holes ("If you are in one, stop digging"). It is the defence of not just failing to acknowledge that you are in a hole, but denying that any such hole exists. Or claiming that you aren't ignoring the elephant in the room, there isn't one there, and anyway the elephant proves your point. It is a defence used on numerous occasions by our own dear Chancellor. The problem is, it just doesn't work.

This week, there was the announcement from the Bank of England that £75billion will be pumped into quantitative easing (in non-wonk speak, just printing money basically). This puts George Osborne into a bit of a pickle, because he now has to ignore what he said two years ago. Not everything he said two years ago, but probably the bit where he said that quantitative easing is "the last resort of a desperate government when all other policies have failed". Unless he is going to go down the brave route of saying that the current government is rubbish.

His previous experience of the ‘Dead Parrot' defence (arguing a position in the face of all facts) comes from when he supported Labour's spending plans until 2008 when, almost overnight, they became the reckless excesses of a bloated state, responsible for the entire financial crisis. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George (sadly not the one sitting in No. 11 now) makes a big speech to everyone in his office about how much he hates his job and quits. The next day he realises what a terrible mistake he's made and tries to go back to his desk like nothing has happened.

It's an aversion to facts when they become politically inconvenient that we see often within politics, particularly, by its nature, in opposition politics. In opposition politics it's all too easy to say what is popular rather that what is possible. It's a type of politics that ensures unpopularity in office. When Thatcher invoked the Dead Parrot sketch to describe the Lib Dems, she was more right than she knew: it's a style typified by the Liberal Democrats. Tuition fees, anyone?

Clegg & co. are already doomed. There is no hope for them now. They loved promising things they could never deliver, safe in the knowledge that they'd never be relied on to do so. Cameron and Osborne may be wishing they were less cavalier about what they said, but that won't matter if they can get growth started.

The trick for Labour over the next four years is to score points off the Coalition without slagging off Coldplay. Just in case.

Coffee drinkers

2011-10-02T16:25:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. One commenter said that large swathes of this piece could be submitted to Private Eyes 'Pseuds' Corner'. I felt this was a little harsh.

I did something for the first time the other day. I texted the actor Mark Ferguson* asking if they wanted to get "a coffee". I've never drunk coffee in my life. I'm more of a teadrinker. In fact, I am actively not a Coffee Drinker. It's not just the taste; it's everything about it. I don't like how Coffee Drinkers have to know so much about coffee and what beans they like. I don't like that they seem to treat it with such reverence, like members of a weird cult. I don't like the way Coffee Drinkers can't function without it. And I really don't like the way coffeedrinker (as one word) doesn't look like a word in the way that teadrinker definitely does. ‘Teadrinker' looks like it could feasibly be a thing. You could buy one. It would be grey and say ‘Teadrinker' on the side in a 1970s font. Your grandma would have one in the corner, but she'd never use it. They would be made by a company that Ed Miliband would describe as "a good business".

But Coffee Drinkers are definitely a thing. A concept. They are a broad, self-defined group of people. You can drink coffee and not be a Coffee Drinker: you are merely someone who drinks coffee. Coffee Drinkers are serious about it. They drink things like light soya frapuccino dark with an extra shot and sprinkles. They are mid-twenties to mid-thirties graduates with city-based office jobs and aspirations.

At the last election, they didn't vote Labour.

Actually, I don't know if that's true. I haven't studied any polling data. But describe a Coffee Drinker to a wonk and I bet they'll be able to tell you how they did vote.

Wonks, however, won't think of a group of people like that as Coffee Drinkers. They have these boring names for different groups with numbers and letters. So coffee drinkers would, in polling data, would be BC1 or something. But no one thinks of themselves as being social grade C1. This, I reckon, is becoming a problem.

When you start thinking about a group of people in terms of a label they that haven't ascribed to themselves, especially something as dispassionate as ‘social grade D', you run the risk of forgetting that it's people you are dealing with. Not a block of people with the same views, who act in a uniform style, but real, different people.

When people say that politicians are all the same, that politicians don't care about us, this is what they mean. It's because politicians can forget that people are more than numbers.

Take Diane Abbott's reasoning for sending her son to a private school, for instance. One reason was that such and such a number of black male teenagers get involved in gangs when at school. Some people will think this is responsible parenting. She has seen what happens when people get involved in gangs and has seen a way to prevent that happening to her son.

Others will not have thought that. Others will have heard this reasoning and will have seen a politician who has made a decision based entirely on figures. What they'll think is that she has seen that X amount of black boys get involved in gang culture at state schools and viewed her son and the state schools he could have gone to as part of those figures. On these terms, it looks like an equation, removed from emotion. A Politician's Decision.

I've not met Diane Abbott or her son, and I'm not attacking her parenting skills. This is just an example of how people view politicians and how they think decisions are made.

Ed Miliband, of course, is a massive wonk. That shone through in his speech on Tuesday. It felt like different parts were aimed at different NRS social grades rather than at different people. Potential voters rather than persons.

I'm not asking for fewer wonks. I'm not asking wonks to not be wonks. I love wonks! I think wonks are great! We need you, wonks! Hell, I would be a wonk if I could, but you have to be smarter than I and have more of a passion for graphs and stuff than I could ever muster.

What I'm asking is for us to think about people. Think about the Coffee Drinkers. And before anyone pops it in the comments, I'm not talking about Motorway Man or anything like that. The Motorway Man does not exist, except possibly as a 1930s German comic book hero. No one thinks of themselves as a Motorway Man. I want us to think about the Coffee Drinkers, the Sopranos watchers, the iPad owners, the KFC eaters, the Dappy fans. The Teadrinkers.

*Mark is, of course, not an actor. He is the editor of LabourList. But he was once described in The Independent as an actor and prefixing it to his name gives a very pleasing rhythm to proceedings. Also, I get the impression he doesn't like me doing it.

Slightly more than 28 days later

2011-09-11T16:18:00.000+01:00

LabourList article.

During the London riots a month ago, I was doing a week of very early morning delivery shifts at the shop I work in on Oxford St. Strolling down a deserted Oxford St in a bleary-eyed, dawn haze is an odd experience. Sorry I can't come up with a better word to describe it than ‘odd'. Nothing else really seems to explain it; I toyed with ‘weird', but that wasn't quite right. ‘Uncanny' is maybe better. It looks just like Oxford St but something is different. Vacant. Inexplicably wrong.

In honesty, I found the emptiness a little unsettling, which is definitely ‘weird' considering how much I hate going down there when it's busy. When I can't get to sleep some nights, I often end up worrying that I might wake up and suddenly be a cyborg, but not realise until I get off at Oxford Circus tube station and all the colour suddenly drains from my vision and big red words flash across my eyeline saying "ENGAGING INDISCRIMINATE SLAUGHTER MODE". Because that would definitely happen if I was a robot. I don't want to murder these innocent shoppers, but I know it would happen. Bloody dawdlers, faffing about and getting in my way when I'm trying to get to work. It's difficult to know whether I worry about turning into a homicidal cyborg because I'm lying awake at night, or whether I'm lying awake at night because I'm worried about becoming a homicidal cyborg.

The uncanniness certainly wasn't helped by the fact that all the shop windows were bare. In an effort to put off any potential looters, visual teams in the high street stores had moved all the mannequins and clothes away from the windows. Perhaps the media had stressed that it was "youths" rioting so much that people had started to believe it was infants running amok, who would easily believe that there were no goods to be found if they couldn't see them.

That week, as we unpacked boxes upon boxes of clothes in the windowless basement stock room, all we talked about was why the riots had happened. We came up with enough reasons, but, in the end, none of us really knew. We weren't so much clutching at straws so much as inventing straws for us to clutch at.

With the Home Affairs Select Committee searching for answers this week, I could have been back in that basement. Politicians are in such a clamour to show they want to understand why the riots happened, that they are chucking reasons around with gay abandon, like bricks through a cornershop window.

Boris has backed up Ken Clarke's hypothesis that the unrest was committed by a feral underclass, which is exactly the kind of sneering, snobbish pomposity that lead to the 'Nasty Party' nickname.

You might have thought Ken Livingstone, as the world 's greatest detective, would use his sleuthing skills to get to the bottom of it all. However the dust had not settled, let alone been swept away, before he found himself on Newsnight blaming the cuts.

On the other hand, he has been going around London with his Tell Ken events, of which the sole aim is listening to people, but if his Twitter feed is anything to go by, he is fortunate enough to be told exactly what he wants to hear.

A society in the violent throes of a moral decay and the government's austerity budget were both blamed in our basement too. Parents can't hit their kids so they can't control them. When you shut down the youth clubs, where do you expect these kids to go? To my ears, both sound equally preposterous.

But then, so does everything. Whether it's an uprising of the proletariat, a simple case of opportunistic theft and mindless violence, the glorification of violence in rap music and video games, a culture of greed epitomised by MPs' expenses, an attack against vilification by the meeja, a reaction against stop and search powers or justice for Mark Duggan, I'm afraid nothing quite seems to add up.

Alone, they are as scant justification as blaming the riots on people turning into cyborgs overnight without realising or a rage virus spreading across the country. Actually, with 20/20 hindsight (as Boris would say), I should have made this article a comparison to zombie films. Sorry.

Many of the reasons listed above may well have contributed to the riots (except for parents not hitting children, that definitely didn't) but gobbing off about what you think caused it isn't going to help. You might as well be in a stockroom basement.

Actually, I've changed my mind about all of this. Ignore everything. They are cyborgs.

The summer that never was.

2011-09-05T16:13:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. Possibly the oddest thing to have appeared on the website. I'd had a couple of sleepless nights where I'd been reading Oscar Wilde's fairytales ('The Selffish Giant', etc.). I reckon this came as a result of those things.

A sallow-faced man watches television alone in a lampless room. The curtains are drawn, a bleak sunlight seeping in around the edges. He takes a bite out of an empty sandwich.

The news is on. Newspapers have been prying into the lives of the bereaved, trying to find a story. They nearly ruined an investigation into the disappearance of a young girl. They've been paying off police. It makes everyone frown.

Now Ed Miliband is on. He is standing in a school playground. He is frowning. He is explaining why all this makes him frown. Children are stood about fifteen yards behind him. They look confused as to why there is a man stood in their playground. This makes them frown. It begins to rain and they go inside. Ed Miliband gets wet. The rain runs down the frowny contours of his face and falls from his chin like droplets of judgement on News International's moral depravity.

"Summer is coming," notes the man, "Silly season must be here."

Days come and go, but the man does not move from his place in front of the television. The news is always on. Frowning faces forever fill the corner of his room.

Rupert Murdoch, a man whose face sags in a perpetual frown, is giving evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. People are frowning at him. Another man, saddened by everyone frowning, tries to cheer them up by throwing a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch. Everyone frowns more.

In his room, the man rolls his eyes. "Foam pies! Silly season is nearly upon us."

More days go by. The man does not move from his seat in front of the news. Images of frowning faces are now interspersed with big red numbers and arrows pointing down.

The foam pie man is now in jail. Now people are rioting in the streets. Their faces are covered; the man presumes they are frowning. The people throw flaming bottles and set homes on fire. Everyone frowns.

"They say the answer for throwing a brick or flaming bottle into someone's livelihood or home is the same as for throwing a foam pie and hitting only yourself!" chirps the man. "To be sure, silly season is at the door."

Again, the days pass: now David Cameron is standing in front of a faux-graffitied wall, talking about the riots. Cameron has a suntan from his five holidays. The man in his dark room has to turn down the brightness on his television. Cameron's orange face is frowning. He is saying that the riots are pure criminality and that those who were old enough to commit them are old enough to face the consequences.

"This is all so silly!" the man scoffs. "Bullingdon Cameron! Perhaps violence is only excusable when it isn't borne out of personal economic adversity. I feel silly season may be here."

The man stays sitting on his settee as dawns brim and dusks fade. The red numbers on the news look more alarming as the down-pointing arrows grow larger. Scientists explain that a belt of antimatter surrounds Earth and aliens could possibly wage war on the human race. A poll shows Labour 's lead slipping as we approach conference season.

"Conference season?" the man mutters to himself. He walks to the window and opens the curtains.

Behind him, on the television, they cut to the weather. The weatherman is explaining that the summer never came.

But September has arrived.

Reprehensible journalism, a corrupt police force, politicians in the pocket of a media mogul, riots across the land, a global financial meltdown, an ominous belt of antimatter and an imminent alien invasion.

"I must have dozed off during silly season."

People not giving a toss is the key to success

2011-08-28T16:02:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. Original, unpublished title. This post was described by Guido Fawkes as "the most insightful article ever to appear on LabourList". The comment may have been sarcastic. Was the 10th most read LabourList article of 2011!

On the first evening of living in halls of residence at university, me and the group of strangers I was now living with sat around our kitchen table exchanging stories about our lives that were craftily engineered to make us appear cool and interesting. My big piece was a (true) story about getting into a barfight with Bob Geldof, with some facts altered to make me appear witty and erudite opposite the yobbish prat Geldof. Obviously, factual alteration was minimal.

At one point, the girl flatmate told us she’d been working in Sweden over the previous few months.

“Ah,” I said, seeing a way for me to form a bond with a person I had to live with, “What did you think of recent general election results in Sweden? Interesting, no?”

The response was like something from a Western. The Ke$ha song that had been buzzing out of the crap speakers in the corner stopped. Eyebrows were raised quizzically. A half-smoked cigarette fell out of a slack jaw. Hands clasped together in awkward turtles. Crockery spun towards the floor and shattered into a thousand dispassionate pieces. The door behind me opened in a breeze, letting in a tumbleweed which rolled into the centre of the room, paused, apparently sentient and seemingly embarrassed, then disappeared out the window.

“Erm, yeah... Fionn, will you put the iPod back on? And put something better on.”

Watching Celebrity Big Brother this week (not out of choice, you understand), Sally Bercow appears to have fallen for the same misconception as I that normal people care about politics. From what I gather (having only caught moments when I occasionally look up from reading Camus) she kept trying to talk to Paddy Docherty (of Big Fat Gypsy Wedding fame) about feminism. Paddy Docherty of Big Fat Gypsy Wedding fame does not appear to understand why or care that Sally thinks it’s wrong of him to refer to his wife of 34 years as “my woman”.

Sally was evicted from the house first. Shocker, eh?

Ed Miliband has recently tried to start “a national conversation”. As part of this the general public have been invited to a day of Party Conference. Definitely not because they want to bulk up numbers at a conference no one wants to go to, but because huge conference halls are ideal locations for conversations on a grand scale.

To make this work, we all need to remember that people don’t care. We have to bear in mind that people just don’t give a toss; it’s the key to success.

Of course we have to listen to people, there’d be no point being a political party if we didn’t. In trying to prove that we will, the national conversation is a good idea. However, the problem with listening to the masses is that you can only hear the ones who can shout louder than the rest. It is a little known fact that up until the final draft, the Sermon on the Mount included the line: “...but if you’re not careful, the gobshites will inherit the Earth.” This is the dreaded road the pre-Coalition Lib Dems went down. Up until they had to face up to the real world, they were a spinning weathervane of supposed public opinion, their vapid policies only having to pass the single litmus test of how well received they would be on Question Time.

The national conversation is a noble idea, but must be handled with caution. Despite how many on the left may hope that a Tory Government and the recent unrest may mean the average person will be more politicised, it is not to be. Don’t push the conversation, let it flow naturally. And don’t pay any attention to loud people.

The Dark Newt Rises

2011-07-31T12:32:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. I really enjoyed writing this because it meant I got to write a lot about Batman. I wrote it months in advance, but scheduled it for the week I was on holiday so that I didn't have to put up with people on Twitter who like Ken Livingstone retweeting it.

It's the early hours of Friday, October 22nd 2010 and the announcement has just come through from Tower Hamlets that Lutfur Rahman is the newly-elected Independent mayor of the borough. Ed Miliband looks out onto the Thames from a rooftop in central London, his brow furrowed. There is the distant sound of a police siren.

"I want to be clear on this," Ed intones, turning to face a corner of the roof that is dark, blocked from the streetlamps below, where a lonely hunched figure stands. "In our... zeal... to bring Johnson to justice..." The figure looks down, the tails of his unmistakable beige linen costume flapping behind him in the cold night breeze, "I'll let you bend the rules, but we cannot break them."

The figure stands silently in the shadows, looking away.

"Ken, I have to have your word."

The figure turns from the darkness, his face finally, if only slightly, illuminated. Ken Livingstone unenthusiastically nods: "Agreed."

Now, before anyone accuses me of going off on a Hari, I'll make it clear that that isn't true. These words were not spoken to me, nor were they spoken by Ed Miliband and Ken Livingstone. It actually happened in a scene from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's seminal graphic novel, Batman: The Long Hallowe'en. I chose to recreate this scene to help prove a point: that, despite what many see as his faults (and God knows I'm no fan), Ken Livingstone is the Batman.

Batman is a great figure for the left. Bruce Wayne, the man behind the batty mask, was born into wealth but suffered tragedy at an early age. He decided then to use this wealth to help the less fortunate. Since the political, judicial and policing powers in his home of Gotham city were corrupt, he turned himself into a symbol of hope for the disenfranchised; changing the broken system without making compromises to it.

Despite his parents being murdered as a result of petty street crime, he was able to see the bigger picture. Wayne was able to see that the petty street crime was not the main problem, but a cause of a much larger problem.

Before his time was fully occupied by insane costumed supervillains, he made it clear who his real enemies were. In Year One, just two months after first deciding to become Batman, he breaks into a dinner party of Gotham's self-serving political elite, telling them only:

"You have eaten Gotham's wealth. It's spirit. Your feast is nearly over."

Red Ken and the Caped Crusader were both at their true apex in the 1980s. It was the decade that Livingstone was leader of the GLC and that all of the best Batman graphic novels were made. Forget Mayor of London or Hollywood blockbusters, the ‘80s gave these men success in the roles they were really made for.

Following the abolition of the GLC, Livingstone began a 14 year stint as a backbench MP, a role he is less-suited to and was surely never really happy in. By the end of this period, Ken had been expelled from the Labour Party. At the same time, Batman suffered from a string of terrible films that did great damage to the superhero's reputation. These movies were developed with the specific purpose of being mainstream; a role Batman is not suited to and will never be happy in. By the end of this period, Empire magazine's number one worst film of all time, Batman & Robin, had been made. The Batsuit had Batnipples and the Dark Knight had been taken from his fans.

Now, before we can get onto the real nitty-gritty of this article, the stuff that'll really make you sit back and wonder what Ken Livingstone does at night, I'll throw a few more easy similarities at you. There's the tongue-in-cheek, campy names for things: I'm sure the modern day equivalent of Robin hanging upside down from the Batcopter to hand Batman his Shark Repellent Batspray is Tom Copley manning the phones on a Kensday Kenvassing. Then there's the iconic associated modes of transport: the Batmobile and the bendy bus (a Kendy bus?). There's even their biggest foes: the Joker and, er, Batman's nemesis, whatever he's called. The Joker's anarchist tendencies surely have more in common with Boris Johnson's supposed libertarian streak than Obama's strain of timid social democracy.

You could even go so far as to look at Batman's tendency to be suspicious and even pick fights with other members of the Justice League. Although, having said that, Batman does end up fighting Superman at the climax of The Dark Knight Returns in 1986. Now, I like Neil Kinnock as much as the next Labour Party member, but him being Superman is a tenuous link too far, even for me.

Neither made their true return to the fold until the mid-part of the last decade. Firstly, Livingstone was readmitted to the Party and won his second term as London Mayor in 2004, a year before the Batman film franchise was rebooted with the excellent Batman Begins. This allowed fans to forget previous crimes and flock back rather than hide their copies of Arkham Asylum behind a more socially acceptable X-Men DVD or retrieve their Ken stickers from a drawer underneath spare Labour Rose leaflets.

During the 2008 film The Dark Knight, Batman becomes increasingly unpopular with the public, eventually shouldering the blame for something he didn't do and disappearing. Next summer, in the third installment, The Dark Knight Rises, he will inevitably return to Gotham in a wave of public approval to put right what has gone wrong over the past four years.

Livingstone became increasingly unpopular with Londoners in the run-up to the mayoral election in 2008 and had to shoulder some of the blame for the 10p tax fiasco, despite that having nothing to do with him.

Will next summer be his third installment?

It is May 2012 and a woman walks along a lonely Chelsea street. She looks up to the night sky and sees something bright, shimmering against the thick city cloud. It is a sign. It means he is back. It means the Dark Newt has risen.

It is a red circle, with a white ‘C'.

Fleeting moments of happiness

2011-07-17T15:35:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. I wrote this on my phone, early one morning, on the bus to Latitude Festival. My sister was unhappy with her first appearance in an article of mine. Rebekah Brooks was arrested minutes before it was published.

On Wednesday, I was at the arrivals lounge of Heathrow Airport, as made famous in the opening scene of the landmark cinematic event 'Love Actually'. It was a fitting place for me to be, as the voiceover for the scene is that of the Hackgate sleuth, Hugh Grant:

"On 9/11, none of the phonecalls made from the aeroplanes, as far as I am aware, were of hate," he bumbles, over footage of people hugging, "they were all of love."

A sweet, tender sentiment, for sure, but one that rather worryingly implicates our brave knight in the phonehacking scandal.

First Andy Coulson and now this. Can we trust no one? Are there no more heroes? Are the pedestals of virtue on which we laud our saints constructed merely of hypocrisy, lies and the shattererd remnants of our trust in public figures?

At Heathrow I was meeting my sister, coming back from 18 months in Australia. What Grant fails to mention is the amount of time you spend at the arrivals gate waiting around, checking the board and going "That's a lot of money for a bottle of water" in the tiny WHSmith.

After all the waiting, there is of course the bit with the hugging and the happiness and love and that, but it's all very fleeting. When you've been waiting ages for something, you are often unsure what to do with it once it's happened. Especially at a place like the Terminal 4 arrivals gate at Heathrow. "Hey! It's great to see you! ...Shall we go to the car?"

Take the resignation of Rebekah Brooks on Friday for instance. After waiting for so long (probably less than a fortnight really, but god it felt like ages didn't it?) for it to happen, once it did there was a faint sense of...not anticlimax exactly, but a sort of confusion and aimlessness.

What happens now? If we have no control over events (and let's face it, we don't), then we are stuck in a cycle of waiting. Now we wait for Brooks and the Murdochs to appear before the DCMS Select Committee*. Then when that happens, we'll just wait for what they say I suppose.

You go to the arrivals gate at Heathrow and you won't be struck by the beauty of love. You'll see a lot of bored people waiting, irritated by the expensive water and rude people who push in, interrupted only by fleeting moments of happiness. We're all trapped in a terminal arrival gate, just waiting for stuff to occasionally happen. Right now, for instance, I am on a bus to Latitude Festival from a place called Diss. We're going to see my girlfriend's favourite band, Suede. She's been waiting a long time for what I'm sure will be too much of a fleeting moment...

The News of the World is dead. I spit on its grave

2011-07-10T12:26:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. I may have been overexcited about the demise of News of the World. It was exciting, though.

In one scene of the mid-nineties indie film Clerks, the two main characters discuss the morality of the Rebels destroying the evil Imperial Army's Death Star in the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi.

The argument for it being a bad thing is that this Death Star is still under construction when it is destroyed, after the original was blown up during A New Hope. So, for a job of that magnitude, outside contractors must have been brought in: they had nothing to do with the Imperialists, they were just normal people trying to bring a wage in for their family.

In Clerks, a roofer jumps in at this point and says that he thinks that personal politics comes into play in such situations, concluding: "Any independent contractor working on that Death Star knew the risk involved. If they got killed, it's their own fault."

If you hadn't heard, today is the last edition of the News of the World. Oh, you had heard? Sorry, I just wanted to make sure.

Now, as a blogger for Political Scrapbook, I played as small a part in the online campaign to get advertisers to boycott the News of the World as it was probably possible to play. I am insurmountably proud of that. As much as you can be cynical about this, and say "They were planning this for months" or "There'll be a Sun On Sunday" or whatever, the fact is News International would have not wanted to get rid of the News of the World and the decision was rushed through on Thursday. It was discontinued because normal, decent people forced companies into a position where they just couldn't advertise in that rag anymore.

In my mind this is a good thing.

Anger has been directed at NewsInt for the fact so many innocent people, be they journos, secretaries or designers, have lost their job due to the demise of the paper. This, of course, makes sense. There is no joy to be found in gloating in someone's joblessness.

Unfortunately, there is a ‘but' here. Because, although it is sad that those people have lost their jobs, when it really comes down to it, it was us who called for the advertising boycott that pushed it over the edge and I am very, very glad that the News of the World will no longer exist. The British media is better for it. It sends a huge message that we won't put up with what has come to pass as journalism.

Don't think I'm blaming them rather than Brooks or Murdoch; of course I am not. Rupert Murdoch is an awful human being. Well, awful humanoid looking soulless demon. Thursday was not the first time the entire staff of a newspaper he owned were told they had no job. He is the ugly, ruthless, immoral and greedy side of capitalism many of us fear. I do not hate him so much that I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire; I undoubtedly would. But, given the chance, I would probably piss on him if he wasn't on fire, so perhaps that doesn't tell you much.

We destroyed the Death Star! Don't go on at us about the deaths of independent government-contracted roofers! It was the bloody DEATH STAR!

In the end, these people worked for the News of the World. It's been public knowledge for years that phone-hacking had happened there and I'll bet a hell of a lot of people who worked there knew already what we only discovered this week. These people decided to work there, no doubt aided by the fact it was a very successful newspaper. But frankly, after what has happened there, it doesn't deserve to exist anymore.

A friend one told me he that the water around an iceberg would have to be colder than the iceberg itself or it would melt. The culture of illegal activity had to be supported by many more around it who maybe had nothing to do with it. For example, today's edition carries not a single mention of phonehacking. Seriously. The people who work there now, although hard done by, did not feel it newsworthy to have a single mention of not only the reason the paper no longer exists, but the biggest story of the week.

The News of the World is dead. I spit on its grave

The Pretenders

2011-07-04T20:22:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. I had no idea what to write about the week I did this. Mark, the editor of LabourList, put it up as soon as he got it. It went up at 8:15pm on the Monday. I am LabourList's Sunday columnist. Sorry Mark.

Late on Saturday night I got a text excitedly saying that I should write this week’s article about the similarities between the Klitschko brothers and Miliband brothers. Unfortunately I don’t like or know anything about boxing. I am deeply suspicious of anyone who does. Therefore, this will not be about the boxing.

I have, however, been assured that there is much humour to be found in comparisons between the two sets of siblings, so perhaps you can imagine that’s what I’ve written about if you prefer. But then if you don’t like what you’ve imagined I’ve written, you can’t blame me in the comments section. Although I’m sure you will anyway. You fickle, fickle people.

Obviously though, people can like whatever sport they choose. It’s absolutely fine for George Osborne to watch tennis instead of watching the further economic turmoil unfold in Greece, or for David Cameron to like football, if that’s he wants to pretend.

Pretending has been something of a theme this week. Johann Hari was discovered as having done a lot of pretending. Michael Gove tried to pretend that he hadn’t spent most of his time as a journalist on strike. Brendan Barber did a wonderful job of pretending not to be annoyed when I, covered in trade union stickers, asked him who he was as he came off the stage after delivering a speech at London Pride. And Ed Miliband pretended he was a robot, built for the sole purpose of commentating on boxing, by moralistic but ultimately limited inventors:

“These strikes from Klitschko are wrong. David Haye has acted in a reckless and provocative manner and I urge both sides to put aside their gloves, get around the negotiating table and stop it happening again.”

“But Ed, striking each other is largely the point of boxing so surely you, as a robot designed for the sole purpose of commentating on boxing, must recognise this? Without boxing you wouldn’t even exist, it seems odd for you to reject it.”

“These strikes are wrong...” (Repeat until they turn the cameras off.)

When Damon Green, the interviewer, told Miliband’s team that he was writing a blog about the experience, he was apparently told that they were fine with it, as it was “getting the message out”.

Now, I’m no political strategist (shocking, I know), but I can’t help but think that repeating something to the point where it become meaningless, where it is just a stock response to any question, where the words are simply sounds floating in an ether, bubbles of nothing slowly popping in a bath of emptiness, is not “getting the message out”. It’s the equivalent of teaching Father Jack to say “That would be an ecumenical matter”.

The biggest problem is that it made Miliband look so... politiciany. He appeared impervious to reality, like a previously benevolent super-being who’d become disinterested in the human race. Watching it again, it is hard to to believe this is a man who was ever championed as “speaking human”. Maybe he was just pretending.

Two Half Times in Hell

2011-06-26T12:16:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. Original, unpublished title, referencing the Hungarian film that 'Escape to Victory' was based on. Occasionally the headlines I give have reasons behind them! Enjoyed writing this.

For a few short years, I was the manager of the Ukrainian football club Dynamo Kiev. Under my leadership we won four league titles, two Ukrainian Cups and three Ukrainian Super Cups. This was done on a shoestring budget. Dynamo were not, as far as I knew, in any serious financial trouble but Ukrainian football has never been a particularly lucrative market.

In what turned out to be my final match as Dynamo Kiev manager, we beat Manchester United 2-1 in the Champions League final and held the European Cup aloft for the first time in the club's history.

That summer, to honour my achievement, the club erected a statue of me outside the Lobanovsky Dynamo Stadium.

But I wanted more than this. I wanted to build a side that would be remembered. The Porto side that lifted the trophy in 2003 will only be remembered as the place that Jose Mourinho first came to prominence. The Liverpool team of two years later will only be remembered outside of the Mersey area (for they are a famously nostalgic people, trading on past glories) for the dramatic comeback of the final. I did not want this for Dynamo. I did not want us to be a mere footnote in history; I wanted us to be greats.

Unfortunately, the board did not share my aspirational vision. The transfer budget, to be fair, was more than modest, but the player and staff wage budget was, frankly, risible. I requested it be increased.

The board refused.

I floated the idea that the transfer budget be cut, so that the wage budget could be raised. This proposal was dismissed out of hand. Eventually, I reached the end of my tether. There was no way I could keep our best players and bring in fresh talent to build on this squad if I had my hands tied with such a small wage budget. After much thought, I made the board an ultimatum: either you trust me and let me have a larger wage budget, or I walk.

As I left the meeting with the board that gloomy July afternoon, my resignation reluctantly tendered, I passed the newly-built statue of myself, smiling, arms aloft, celebrating the greatest moment in Dynamo Kiev's history. I looked up at my own face, immortalised in alloy metal, and watched a snowflake gently land on my face, melt, and roll down my cheek like a tear. My own eyes were red as fire with weeping. "I've got a brass neck on me," I sobbed, ruefully.

Now, that only happened within the fictional world of the football strategy game Championship Manager 2003-04. I have never even been to Kiev, which may explain why in my imagination it is likely to be snowing there in mid-July. But so involved do I get in these games that should I ever visit the capital of Ukraine I would half expect to find at statue of me there.

Last week, in the real world, the Parliament Square protester Brian Haw sadly passed away. It does not need me to say that cancer is an awful disease, one that has affected too many close to me. My heart goes out to those that counted Haw as a friend.

However, calls led by John McDonnell for there to be a statue built in Brian Haw's honour are completely wrong. Haw was not a man who cherished democracy and free speech as much as many would like to think. It also occurred to me, upon meeting him and hearing the testament of others who have crossed his path, that he did not encompass many of the values projected onto him by parts of the liberal media. He was also a tad bonkers.

For some, perhaps many, he was an emblem of the anti-war movement. As long as Haw was there, the anti-war movement was not dead. They could carry on their daily lives uncompromised while he gave up everything for the cause. But these people have not seemed to consider what kind of mental state a person has to be in to wilfully leave their family and live on a busy central London street for a decade. For them, the logical conclusion of the end of the protest against war in Iraq in 2003 was to go home. For Haw the logical conclusion was to stay on the street for 8 more years.

When a friend of mine (a friend who is considered well on the left of the Labour Party, if you are the kind of person for whom that matters) met Haw a few years ago, Haw punched him in the face. His crime? To innocently ask, during a conversation with one of Haw's hangers-on, "Isn't the judiciary self-regulating?" The peace activist chinned my comrade, told him to "F**k off" and denounced him as a stooge of the state.

Last summer, I was a regular visitor to the ‘Democracy Village' while they were under threat of eviction, doing a half-arsed job of being a video reporter for Political Scrapbook. The Democracy Village was set up to protest against the UK's involvement in the Middle East. Yet it was abundantly clear that Brian Haw had no time for these people, or indeed any protest happening on Parliament Square that didn't solely involve him, a megaphone and pictures of dead children to scare tourists. It was at this time that his website was altered, so that the tagline read: ‘THE Parliament Square Peace Campaign', with extra emphasis on ‘The'. No one else.

On one visit, myself and my editor approached Haw to see if he would share some thoughts with us. He did not. He just shouted at us. Some were swearwords, the rest was incoherent. We ran away.

Far from being a protector of democracy, Haw was the unelected self-chosen protest king of Parliament Square, immovable by the elected powers of Parliament or London Mayor. Parliament Square belonged to him and even those who shared his beliefs were not welcome. If you didn't share them, then you were merely a stooge of the state, deserving of an earful. Or faceful.

Yet John McDonnell was a character witness for Brian Haw, and sure John McDonnell is an honourable man.

So, should a statue of Haw stand aside Mandela, who helped end apartheid in South Africa? Aside Lincoln, who abolished slavery? Aside Churchill, who held back the tide of fascism in Europe?

A statue of me in Kiev would be more fitting.

Philip Davies, bellend

2011-06-19T12:07:00.000+01:00

Andy Cole retired from international football in 2002. He had played only fifteen games for England during a six year period, in which he scored a solitary goal. He said this was so he could concentrate more on representing Blackburn Rovers; a truly noble aim. The world shuddered with indifference.

During his maiden speech, the Conservative MP Philip Davies superfluously announced that he would not join the Conservative front bench. He said this was so he could concentrate more on representing his constituents; a truly noble aim. In fact, this may be the second most noble thing a human being can aspire to do, after representing Blackburn Rovers. This announcement was an event so insignificant that even Andy Cole failed to shudder with indifference.

Sometimes, when people say something so obtrusively bigoted that I suspect they have been misquoted or misinterpreted, I will Google their name to get a better judge of their character. When Philip Davies suggested in the commons on Friday that people with learning difficulties or disabilities should work for less than the Minimum Wage I decided to do this, for good measure.

When I wrote about the whiney pop singer Adele a few weeks ago, someone from the Taxpayer Alliance said it was an article "full of vitriol" and had been "fuelled by hate". Now, Philip Davies is definitely a much worse person than Adele, so I can only imagine what the response will be this time.

If what he says is true, and that he concentrates on speaking on behalf of his constituents in the Chamber, one can only assume that the people of Shipley in West Yorkshire spend an inordinate amount of time blacking up. They probably get into all sorts of no doubt hilarious situations where some taxpayer-funded lesbian Diversity Officer from Nigeria comes and tells them they should stop daubing swastikas on cars.

For it appears that Davies is a fully paid up member of the Anti-Political Correctness Brigade, or Campaign Against Political Correctness as it is more commonly known. He has previously said that foreign aid is "stark raving mad" but has "never understood" the offence caused by taking boot polish to one's own face. He is a man who ponders aloud whether it racist for a police officer (Sorry Philip, I'm sure it pains you every time someone uses that non-gender specific politically correct phrase) to refer to a BMW as "Black Man's Wheels". He wonders that ALOUD. As if the answer might feasibly be "No".

It's not the first time he's waded in on the minimum wage debate either; he made almost identical comments two years ago that went largely unnoticed outside of the business section of the Yorkshire Post because a) he is Philip Davies and his views hold no value, and b) most of us didn't have Twitter then, did we?

He claims that his pronouncement comes as a warning so that he might help disabled people, but admits that the NMW has an "all party consensus". This, he says, is usually "a reflection that a policy is well meaning and popular". But still wrong, obviously.

It must be a sad life being Philip Davies. It must be like living in a world where everyone is doing their utmost to reject all notions of common sense. Like a world where the Thought Police are real, telling you what you can't say, what you can't do, what spurious generalisations you can't make, what you can't colour your face in with. Like a world where for some reason people have feelings that can be hurt by the words and actions of others.

Like a world where he is the only sane man in the asylum, and all the inmates are earning minimum wage.

In Downing Street, David Cameron is sat by the phone, recalling Philip's maiden speech ruefully.

It's leaked all over our Balls!

2011-06-12T13:04:00.000+01:00

People said they thought this was interesting, but weren't sure whether it had a point. I feel like that about most stuff I write. The 'Project Volvo' stuff was a splash in one of the papers about a Brownite plot to oust Blair, involving Ed Balls.

I was reminded, amidst all the “revelations” this week, of the Labour leadership election of 2010. Remember that? The one that appeared to defeat all previously held notions of time by being so dull as to last longer than the year in which it happened.

Very occasionally, somewhere between David Miliband’s empty platitudes and Diane’s insistence that actually everything the party ever did in government was awful, something vaguely interesting would happen.

To end the televised Newsnight debate for instance, Paxman asked the wannabes who their favourite Labour leader was, or who was the best leader that never was? Abbott and Burnham went for John Smith, David Miliband foreshadowed his own nearly-man future by choosing Tony Crosland and Ed Miliband unimaginatively chose Attlee.

It was Ed Balls who did something interesting: he chose Blair.

It seemed odd at the time and remains so now. Indeed, the most intriguing aspect of ‘Project Volvo’ is Ed Balls’s flat denial of any plots to oust Blair when all common knowledge and evidence suggests otherwise. We know Balls was never his biggest fan. It’s like watching a Shaggy video, or a bad panto:

“There wasn’t a plot!”
“Oh yes there was!”
“Where?”
“Behind you!” etc.

I can see why he wants to pretend none of it happened. The documents are all a bit teenage diary: ‘Project Volvo’ is every bit as cringey as your fourteen year old self thinking up possible names for your future band (for a long while I was obsessed with the idea of a band being called ‘El Dorado’ to really stick it to the money obsessed public, fawning over a shallow ideal that didn’t exist. Take that, IDIOTS!).

Who has leaked them, though? Some say it was that most bitter of species, the Blairites. I believe this was the view of George Galloway on the radio on Friday: frankly an amazing insight into a party he hasn’t been a part of for almost a decade. To back up this point of view is the leak of the David Miliband speech that never was (which, even as acceptance speeches go, is hardly The New Frontier) and a “close friend” of Miliband Sr telling a Sunday newspaper that he still wants to be leader. Balls certainly has enough enemies in this wing, having spun against many of them himself. It may well be too late for him to call for the unity within Labour, when for years it was he who played a major part in “the difficult and painful times” he reminded us of the other day.

“You made this bed, Mr Balls, now you must sleep in it. Yes, I do realise there is a horse’s head in it. Perhaps you shouldn’t have put it there.”

At any rate, the Blairite conspiracy seems unlikely. During parts of Labour’s time in government, the Blair and Brown camps would barely talk about policies, let alone the strategies they were concocting to get one over on each other. While Brown was PM, the few that regularly plotted against him would hide away in offices that were tucked away in the labyrinthine towers of Parliament, leaving in groups of no more than two so as not to arouse suspicion. These are not groups who tended to share their plots.

Or maybe they did. Maybe that’s why they always failed. Maybe Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt sat in Hoon’s office that fateful evening and Hewitt mumbled: “In retrospect, telling Nick Brown was a mistake.”

On top of that, it would be an odd time to launch an all-out media attack. Balls is consistently the best performer in the Shadow Cabinet and Ed Miliband, although at times flailing like a bloody useless Magikarp (“It had no effect!”), is still in far too strong a position for any serious challenge on his leadership to be mounted.

So we could well presume it was the Tories. It may not rid them of Balls, their bogeyman, but it has got the spotlight off them temporarily and has got everyone focussed on Labour’s big split.

It’s all very odd, from the Progress magazine front page on which Balls declared “I’m firmly New Labour”, to the timing and content of these leaks. All, I think, we can know for sure is that this isn’t the end. There is more to this story, and it’s coming right up.

Ed Miliband needs to convince the electorate to have sex with him by using a Rubik's Cube

2011-06-05T12:57:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. Original, unpublished title. I have also changed the word "sat" in the first line to "sitting".

Travelling southbound on the tube around 11pm on Tuesday night, I found myself sitting opposite two teenagers about 15 or 16 years old. One was a slightly overweight, geeky boy, the other a slim, slightly embarrassed looking girl.

Clutched in the boy’s hand was a Rubik’s cube, which he appeared to be using as a flirtation method. “Right, so from here,” he enthusiastically explained, “you just need to turn it three times this way, once this way and then this one back this way. Yeah?” The girl replied, without looking, “Yeah.”

The boy sensed he was losing her, but knew it was too late to change from his chosen approach of seduction. Panicking, he looked her in the eyes as he explained what he was doing, asserting himself, trying as hard as he could to win her interest back around. He’d practiced this; he wasn’t going to get girls through good looks or charm, so he was going to focus on what he could do, and by God could he do Rubik’s Cubes. (I’ve been there, although my personal talent was a near-encyclopedic knowledge of ‘alternative’ music circa 2005-07. My Dad says his was learning to open a box of matches and lighting one with one hand.)

Then came one of the most beautifully sad, human moments I have ever seen.

The boy looked away from the girl and back down to the Rubik’s Cube. A look of terror and confusion sank into his face. “I... I don’t know what I’ve done... I’ve done it wrong,” he admitted.

He looked crushed. He’d had his chance and he’d blown it. His Rubik’s Cube solving ability was his best shot at impressing the girl and he’d messed up. He looked back towards her, his pleading eyes losing hope. She had her hand over her mouth and there were tears in her eyes and her body was convulsing uncontrollably. She was laughing.

Seeing this gave the boy a rush of excitement. He was an endearing failure! He could live with that. But even as he began to laugh with her his face showed signs of his coming dilemma. Where does he go from here? Does he stop with the Rubik’s Cube? Does he carry on doing it badly, playing the fool? Or would that be dishonest? Maybe he should turn it around, work out a way to fix it, and build up to a climactic ending by sorting out the mess he’d made and appearing a hero? Sadly, the train pulled into Tooting Broadway and I got off.

The boy’s predicament, however, left me thinking of an old Harold Wilson quote:

“The Labour Party is like a stage-coach. If you rattle along at great speed everybody is too exhilarated or too seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.”

Ed Miliband seems to find himself in a similar predicament. With his infinite policy reviews on infinite amounts of blank paper, he has dared to stop and encouraged people to get out and argue.

A master of the Rubik’s Cube himself, where does he go next? After poor results in Scotland a month ago, LabourList’s ‘State of the Party’ poll this week suggests that the grassroots are split about, well, everything: Libya, the ‘Progressive Majority’ and Miliband himself.

At the moment Ed is playing the long game. There are four more years to go and he doesn’t want to tie himself down to anything too soon. But he might need to start making some signs of where the Party is heading. You can’t laugh on tube forever. At some point the girl stops giggling at your geekish clumsiness and you have to move on. Do you play the easy game and keep messing up the Rubik’s Cube, or do you try to win her around by fixing the mess, even though she thought that was boring before?

In the week he returns from his post-marriage holiday I don’t want to be the one to say this ugly, clunky cliche, but I can’t see anyway around it: Ed, the honeymoon is over.

PS. I fully accept any criticism that this article relies mainly on the metaphor that Ed Miliband is a prospective boyfriend, then concludes with one suggesting he is a newlywed. Sorry.

...on Adele

2011-05-29T12:59:00.000+01:00

LabourList article. Adele has since said that she wants to leave London. Whether this is down to tax rates or her embarrassment at being savaged so brutally in this article. Probably one of my own favourites.

I’ve long been unsure about the 50% top tax rate as a permanent fixture. I’m unconvinced by its economic implications and worry that it sends a message that aspiration is A Bad Thing. I don’t worry about it much, obviously, I probably spend more time worrying about whether I’m killing the planet when I leave the tap on brushing my teeth.

And what you’ll increasingly find is that gaunt, pale celebrities will appear in interviews, clutching a frayed-edged shabby blanket around their shoulders for warmth and nibbling on a stolen, rotting onion as they explain how they’re taxed so much they’re barely able to live. Tracey Emin, who, lest we forget, can’t afford a cleaner and has resorted to living in a tent, threatened to move to France when she heard how much she’d have to pay, presumably whilst scavenging through pub ashtrays for discarded cigarettes that still had some tobacco in.

This week the singer Adele bemoaned about the tax rate, probably while cradling a haggard-looking dog in Elephant & Castle underpass. “The trains are always late,” she cried, seemingly unaware that people are required to purchase expensive tickets before boarding the privatised mode of transport.

Having discovered that Adele attended the publicly-funded BRIT School for Performing Arts, I can’t help but feel that maybe she has a point when she says taxpayer money is wasted. After all, she has so little imagination that she can’t think of any other name for her albums other than her own age. She might as well scrawl ‘Adele aged nineteen and a bit’ onto each one one in crayon, with a crudely-drawn picture of herself. For those of us who don’t think “most state schools are sh*t”, finding out that having her middle-of-the-road, sub-Winehouse, soul music for soulless people career was taxpayer-funded is a bit of a kick in the teeth. It’s like when your big brother makes you hit yourself with your own arm. Or discovering that the millionaire Prime Minister of a government whose main focus is the slashing of public-spending has spent nearly £700,000 on refurbishing his house.

Et tu, taxes?

But by far the biggest revelation was that when she got the tax bill for her first album, 19, she couldn’t believe she had to give away £4 million. Rather than feel upset for a nineteen year old having to pay £4 million in tax, what struck me was that she was moaning that she only had £4 million to keep. Now 21, and with her second album (wait for it) 21 just released (don’t buy it), she is now worth £6 million. So, while most twenty-one year olds will worry how they might pay back their student debt, or get a job in a climate where 20% of young people are unemployed, Adele has to worry about only being the ninth richest popstar in Britain and Ireland under 30.

Every time another of these curmudgeonly-faced celebrities opines about just how hard done by they are, I can’t help but feel that maybe they should be taxed a little more. Maybe, for top-earners, tax should be put up by 1% for every time they moan about how much they’re taxed. Like a teacher who stands at the front of a noisy class at the end of a day, saying “It’s your own time you’re wasting”, maybe we should keep tallying up how much their tax is going up while a celebrity whinges, saying "it's your own time you're wasting...On hospitals, making schools better, keeping streets safe and your own success."

If Charles Dickens made electoral systems, they'd probably be the least fair electoral systems in the world

2011-05-08T20:49:00.001+01:00

LabourList article. Original, unpublished title. I can't remember why I thought this would be a funny headline.

If this week is remembered in years to come it will surely be as the week that America arrogantly attempted to upstage the UK’s local election and referendum coverage by killing Osama bin Laden. Thankfully, the death of Osama (or Obama, if you are Fox, Sky or the BBC) was overshadowed by a bit of straw from Bury.

In a similar way that the bin Laden’s frustration at his own failure to convert the western world to Islam may be compounded by the revelation that his burial at sea may not have been in accordance with Sharia Law, the news that a council election in the north west wasdecided by the candidates pulling straws after polling the same number of votes was an insulting disposal for the decaying remains of the Yes To AV campaign.

Don’t get me wrong, I support AV and I actively campaigned for it. Well, I supported in that if people mentioned it in the pub I would tell them I support it. And sometimes I wore a ‘Yes to AV’ badge. But that, admittedly, was it.

I always felt it was a losing battle; Britain is a country that seems to pride itself on its quirks. That’s why we have a monarchy; allow pictures of topless women on the third page of our most-read newspaper; have the metric system for some things and imperial for others and have red phone boxes in central London that still work despite their sole purpose being for tourists to have their picture taken in them.

This means that when it really comes down to it I think the people of Britain quite like the thought that we can still have elections that deliver a party with a majority despite receiving fewer votes. When it happens in the US, of course, it’s mental because they only ever have two candidates, but here it’s the kind of thing we would embrace with a roll of the eyes and a cup of tea. Then again, making major decisions on the flip of a coin is something psychopathic comic book villains do in the United States, but here we make those people Chief Counting Officers. Even I can’t help but feel amused that someone has become an elected councillor through an act of drawing straws, which she appears to have kept, presumably for posterity reasons: “See this kids? These are the bits of straw which deemed me better to represent the people of Ramsbottom than my Tory opponent.”

I imagine the Yes To AV campaign team are now feeling tired and dejected right now. My only piece of constructive advice for them would be to have a rest and take another leaf out of bin Laden’s book and watch The IT Crowd.

If I can take a sole piece of good news from this week, it is that it looks as though Frank Miller’s plans for Holy Terror, Batman! will have to be shelved.

Nick Clegg's anal intrusion

2011-04-30T12:28:00.000+01:00

This was my first column article for LabourList. I think it worked in setting me apart as a political blogger. The "Calm down, dear" fiasco was one of the main stories of the week and Cameron ended up apologising for it at Tory Conference 2011.
A comment left underneath this post said "Mens sana in corpore sano. Looks like Mr Pope has an unhealthy body." It made me laugh. This was the original, unpublished title.

One thing many commentators noted about David Cameron’s “Calm down, dear” fiasco was the contrasting reactions of Nick Clegg and George Osborne on either side of him.

The Chancellor gave his now familiar forced laugh. It’s the kind of mocking laughter that keeps bullied children awake at night. The laughter not of the bully, but of the bully’s stooge, echoing around the chamber of the child’s mind, compounding whatever humiliation has been handed to them. Laughter not caused by amusement, but by the heady feeling of power and superiority. It’s a laugh perfected by Richard Hammond.

Nick Clegg, on the other hand, remained stony-faced, as though he hadn’t heard the Prime Minister’s, er, “gag”. He tried to remain expressionless, but there w\as something else in there. It was something we haven’t seen in Nick Clegg for almost exactly a year now: something human. I replayed those few seconds again and again, trying to work out precisely what it was I could see. I know those frames by heart now. His eyes glaze over, he winces slightly, he looks the other way and scratches his knee. I found myself obsessed with those few seconds, I knew there was something in there.

Then Cameron said “Listen to the doctor.” The phrase made me grimace and I suddenly knew exactly what it was I was looking at. It was as if I’d been treated with the Ludovico Technique, for the moment Cameron said those words I was able to look at Nick Clegg’s eyes, peel back the glazing and see inside, into his soul (I can confirm that he does indeed still have one - it looks like the picture of Dorian Gray). And I knew exactly how he felt.

The reason Cameron’s words had such a Pavlovian affect on me was because of the last time I had visited the doctor myself. I had gone for consultation about what we shall call, for reasons of privacy, taste and childish humour, “bum problems”. As I divulged further details to my GP, she confirmed what I had been worried about: that to see what the problem was she was going to have to put a finger up my bum.

As she had a poke around, I led on my side, with my pants around my ankles, on an uncomfortable bed in a doctor’s surgery in south east London, staring at a blank wall. My eyes glazed over, I winced a bit, I clenched (my teeth), I looked away and my knee began to itch. One side of my mind tried to concentrate on anything other than quite how uncomfortable I was at that moment whilst the other side, all too aware of what was happening, kept trying to convince me that all of this was absolutely necessary.

Looking at Nick Clegg sat on the green benches that Wednesday afternoon I think I can safely say that his thought process was almost entirely the same. For me, on the doctor’s bed, those five seconds seemed to last five years. I can’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for Nick Clegg, whose next four years seem destined to be a composition of uncomfortable five seconds. He will wince and he will clench. He will look away and pretend he’s somewhere else. He will keep convincing himself that all of this is absolutely necessary.

As I pulled back up my trousers and tried to pretend that the last remains of my dignity were not laying shattered in the tiny bin with that crumpled, lubricated glove, my doctor told me that everything was fine, nothing to worry about.

It was all completely unnecessary.

I get kettled, accidentally

2010-11-26T11:39:00.000Z

Interesting note about this not mentioned here: before I found my flatmate Mark, I bumped into and was looked after by Jonnie Marbles, who later went on to pie Rupert Murdoch.

My post for Labourlist after the last student protest got a bit of a mixed reception. I heartily condemned the occupation of Millbank Tower, the criminal damage that took place and any notion that these actions were representative of our movement. Some felt I was ignoring the anger of the masses and disenfranchising them further, whilst others agreed with my view that smashing stuff up is not a legitimate tool of political debate. This doesn’t mean I’m any less angry about the coalition’s plans, it’s just that as a naturally bookish type, I’ve always been inclined towards more reasoned argument than physical confrontation.

That’s why, as the protest on Wednesday approached, I’d made the decision not to do anything. From my understanding, the argument appeared to be that we were all going to skive off lessons, to show you just how much we value our education. In honesty, I still don’t understand what feasible argument there was behind the ‘mass walkout‘. Besides, I have Wednesdays off.

As it happened though, I needed to travel from south of the river to Leicester Square on Wednesday afternoon. This involves going through or around Whitehall, where, I read on Twitter, protestors were already being kettled. It’s one thing not to join the protest, but if I agree with its aims and support this movement, then to actively seek an alternative route to avoid it would be reprehensible to my own morals.

So, off I pottered across Westminster Bridge, ominously littered with riot vans, seemingly lying in wait. Up further I saw the first of many police lines, this one preventing the march from moving off Whitehall and onto Parliament Square. From that position it certainly didn’t look out of hand - I didn‘t find out about ‘the van incident’ until much later. I asked an officer, who was preventing people from joining the crowd, how far back the protest went. “Bit further than the pub,” she replied. A little disappointing, really. But I decide I should walk around. It’s too quiet here and I want to show some support to those contained.

Ten minutes later and Big Ben had struck 3 o’clock. I was on the other side of the crowd, beyond another police line by the Cenotaph, where there was another reasonable crowd, with a fire within it. For a while, nothing happens, other than chanting abuse at Nick Clegg, Then there’s a small explosion (an aerosol can?) and people start running, away from the kettle, the police line and the fire. It’s clear it wasn’t the bang that caused the running, it appeared more orchestrated, but it isn’t clear what did. As I turned to follow this crowd up Whitehall, I saw that another police line had closed in.

And that was that. I couldn’t leave.

From here, the police essentially (to stretch the kettle analogy slightly) poured us into the other kettle through a spout (honestly) they’d formed at one side to form a much larger, single kettle. There we would stay, like a school of angry salmon (students? Fish kettles? No…), for many, many hours.

As I’ve said, I wasn’t there from the beginning, so I can’t comment on the first round of kettling, which I believe began at around 1pm - if you want to read about that, I can’t recommend Laurie Penny’s New Statesman blog enough. What I can say is that it was inevitable that police tactics would be more heavy-handed this time. But that doesn’t make it acceptable to try and make amends for such suspicious complacency at the last event by overreacting in such a bullish manner at this one. In the end, I only wanted to spend around 15 minutes there before I went off to do my errands for the day; I was detained for seven hours. That’s longer than the average school day for most of the pupils there, and most of them were there well before me.

Once inside, it quickly became apparent that many of these school kids had adjusted triumphantly. I am now hugely embarrassed to have walked away from an attempted break-in and occupation of a building, which I later discovered to be the home of Arcane School (Charities & Voluntary Organisations), having now seen those inspiring photographs of schoolgirls trying to stop people from trashing the police van. If these are the women the Mail referred to on the front page yesterday, then I am happy for them to lead us. If only I was that brave.

Soon after, I was fortunate enough to find a couple of my friends and together we huddled in a roadworks trench around a small fire (one of many) some schoolchildren had lit, using homework diaries and discarded copies the Socialist Worker as fuel. Further along, dubstep blared from a huge pair of speakers someone had brought as I listened to them swap horror stories over the campfire of what the cuts and raising fees would mean to them in basic, personal terms. This maturity from some so young was wonderfully juxtaposed with older protestors across the road, who had managed to rip a bus ticket machine out of the ground and manage to inexplicably set it alight, the flames at times threatening to completely engulf the shattered remains of the bus stop it belonged to.

Unfortunately, there is only so long that crap left wing newspapers and the emblematic incineration of class timetables can keep fires going and eventually we were cold, with nothing to do except mill about and try and take turns at guessing what songs we were humming to take our minds off the cold and the hunger.

As the hours passed, we traipsed to all corners of the containment area under advice from officers that that was where the mythical exit lay. It was clear they were either consistently misinformed or lying. Rumours kept going that we’d be out soon, but the longer it went on, the further away our release seemed. The only respite from this came when we got to shout “Liar” at the reporters who stood there, doing their bits for the various news channels with the rest of us, claiming police were letting us go. As soon as they’d done their reports they left. We didn’t, because we couldn’t.

At this point, I have an admission to make. You have to understand, I hadn’t intended to be there. I hadn’t prepared for it. I was kettled by accident. I’d been there for hours already. In a kettle they don’t have toilets. I needed to go. I couldn’t hold it in. It wasn’t an act of rebellion or a metaphor for what the regressive coalition are doing to the young people of this country. It was just human necessity. I’m not proud.

I had a wee in the street.

At 7:29pm, after it had been dark for many hours, we were huddled on the cold, metallic barriers outside one of the government buildings, demoralised and shivering. Then the dubstep stopped, and through the sporadic, unfocussed chants we heard the unmistakable sound of ‘One Step Beyond’ by Madness pumping through the amps.

Now, I’ve never been a dancer, I’m too gangly, dyspraxic and joyless. But I danced my heart out. Dancing became so much more than I ever thought it could be. As we stood there, getting boogy with the kids (I spent so long with them, I’m even picking up the lingo) it served so many different purposes. It warmed us, far better than any paltry or toxic fires had done. It took our minds off the hunger. It lifted our spirit and unified us. We were protesting through the medium of dance. Madness, The Specials, Rage Against the Machine, The Clash, Hendrix, NWA, The Beatles, A Tribe Called Quest, The Strokes - I could write a whole blogpost twice as long as this about the music alone. We quickly regained the humour that we’d lost throughout the day (Is “Clegg & Cameron can suck my Ed Balls” the most disturbing protest sign ever?) with choices of song. ‘I Fought The Law’ was a personal favourite. The law had won this time, we knew that, but that didn’t mean they’d broken our spirit.

Every time a song finished, the police had closed in a little bit more. The bus stop was no longer in danger of being set alight, two portaloos had arrived and the police had moved 300ft nearer. It was like a surreal, menacing game of musical statues. They slowly, but surely, ushered us into a queue and, after seven hours of being trapped on Whitehall and two and a half hours of dancing like I’d never danced before, they let us out.

Just before we were set free, I asked a copper why they’d kept us for so long. He said they needed to examine the CCTV footage of who had been causing criminal damage, get good pictures of their faces and apprehend them as they let us out in groups of fives. Again, I wasn’t there at the beginning, but I know people are claiming the kettling tactics began before any violence had broken out and in the group I was part of, I’m not sure what damage had been done other than starting a fire on the tarmac before we were kettled.

Big Ben struck ten as we, who had railed against the corrupt capitalist system so hard, entered McDonald’s hungrily.

When I went to my first student protest against 9k fees

2010-11-12T16:23:00.000Z

This was the first time I wrote for LabourList. I don't think it's very good.

Retraction: One good thing about retrospectively adding blogs is that I can retract all the stupid things I say. In this I have a pop at Arthur Baker, not without reason, but in a drunken, very unfair and left-wing manner. For this I apologise. Fortunately, Arthur saw the funny side of this and we're now good mates.

My Students’ Union held an “emergency meeting” last Wednesday, to cast some light on how proposed Higher Education cuts could affect our college and so that we could have a discussion about the SU’s campaign to resist them.

So along I went; my hair too long, wearing a red scarf emblazoned with political buttons, a pair of hole-ridden converse and a girls’ cardigan, feeling every bit the lefty student. Finally, I was ready to throw off the shackles of being a left-centrist and embrace the world of boycotts and berets.

As I sat down in the lecture room, flyers were passed around. “Can we change the world through Parliament…” they asked, “or did Guy Fawkes have the right idea?” I must’ve unconsciously drifted far across the political spectrum if terrorism is left wing now. In fact I’m pretty sure it’s still pretty abhorrent to us.

The speakers began. Ed Marsh, an NUS officer, spoke passionately about quite what these cuts would mean. He said we had to take to the streets in peaceful protest, as many of us as possible, to show we weren’t going to take this, that this isn’t what the country voted for. He stirred the sense of justice within me and gave me hope that we could have a rally that would have a strong, uniting message. What he was saying was my politics. I didn’t have to pretend to be anything.

Then the other guests spoke. Tirades about breaking capitalism. Spiels promoting revolution and shunning “reform”. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat as Simon Hardy, a Westminster student, used the word “war” nine times in his short speech and impressed upon us the importance of breaking police lines at the demo to show how serious we are.

Once debate with the audience started in earnest, I felt compelled to speak. I said I felt this language wouldn’t help, that opposing higher fees and swingeing cuts wasn’t radicalism. By suggesting that it was and implying that holding these views means you advocate a militant uprising to overthrow the system will only serve to alienate moderate students who feel these measures are going to compromise their education. I was met with something of a mixed response. I did not join them afterwards in their occupation of Deptford Town Hall.

So, as I attended the rally, there was a small part of me that feared that people with bonkers views might ruin it. For a long time, I needn’t have worried.

The first problem I experienced was going down Whitehall. Only the road heading towards Parliament and Millbank had been closed off for the demonstration, meaning we were at a standstill for around forty minutes. I don’t know whether this comes down to bad organisation from the NUS or police, or whether someone just completely underestimated how popular this march would be. After the better part of an hour of gridlock, it’s not surprising some broke through the barriers onto the other side of the road. As I apprehensively followed my friends I half expected riot police to appear out of the sky on horseback and baton me in the face.

The police however, a small presence, did nothing. NUS stewards begged and pleaded us to come back over.

The next problem we encountered was a sit down protest on Parliament Square. This time, very few people were disobedient, fewer than a hundred, but enough to cause another jam. The police were a bigger presence here, but I didn’t see them do anything. NUS stewards were apologetic to those caught up and urged us not to join in. Most protestors seemed annoyed by the break-offs and just tried to make their way past, down towards Millbank:

“We didn’t come here to sit down, we came here to stand up and march.”

As we got towards Millbank Tower, a man excitedly approached us. “The Tory HQ is just there,” he gushed, “and a few of us have gone inside to say hello. Why don’t you go and cheer them on?”

No sooner had he left, than another NUS steward approached us, beseeching us to stay on the other side of the road and keep on towards the speeches. There was a look of despair in her face. It wasn’t hard to see why. Behind her, a crowd had gathered; smoke billowing amongst them, panes of glass wobbling behind them.

We didn’t join the crowd. As many others did though, we watched on for a while from across the road. We watched them break glass and spray paint anarchy signs and cause explosions. Journalists on Twitter have since implied this showed a support for their actions. Journalists who also watched on, with their camera crews, who filmed this footage so that millions of others could watch - but it was us encouraging this behaviour, not them, despite the fact that the person who appeared on the front of nine national newspapers on Thursday was surrounded solely by photographers.

The group who invaded Millbank Tower, the more outside who vandalised the building and started fires, the more still who cheered them on and the much larger group that watched on in impartiality, however, were incomparable in terms of size to the crowd outside of Tate Britain who watched Aaron Porter deliver his speech. This was the group that had made it past the sit-in and the vandals, the group who just wanted to show that they think everyone deserves an education.

It is not those people have set our movement back. It’s people like Simon Hardy, for his incendiary rhetoric. People like the ones who gave him a platform. People, like the Campaigns Officer from my university, who signed this petition. People like London Young Labour officer Arthur Baker, who wrote this piece at Liberal Conspiracy. Even, I would go as far to say, as this piece on Labourlist by Cllr Alan Laing.

I can barely believe I have to write this. The Labour Party needs to be the moderate alternative to the cuts. We need to propose a credible answer to the coalition. You want to smash windows? There’s plenty of unelectable left wing alternatives. Get out, and let us get on with being a rational opposition. There’s no need to debate how far we condemn their actions and how far we harness their anger. We need total condemnation of their actions and make it clear that we are the home of moderates in the fight against cuts and higher fees. If terrorism means to intimidate for political purposes through violence, then what I saw at Millbank Tower was terrorism. It’s not left wing and it has no place in our party.

I saw what happened on Wednesday. Some who caused trouble were students, yes. It’s undeniable. But contrary to what some would have you believe, it was a minority, they were all extremists and they are unrepresentative of our movement.

As a student, I will fight to make sure that the people who suggest otherwise have no influence within our movement. Until we achieve that, we’ll make no progress.

Goodbye, and that.

2010-06-29T19:01:00.000+01:00

I'm going to keep this blog live, but I'm afraid it will fall into disuse from now on.

If you really want, you can still see me write at Political Scrapbook, which will have me posting to the same extent I did here, but being updated more regularly as it evolves into a wider authorship. Just don't call it a coalition.

My first few posts for Scrapbook are here.