The New Statesman

Simon Hughes has used his guest spot in this week’s New Statesman to bring us glad tidings. ‘For liberals, there are good reasons to be cheerful’, he says. ‘For the first time in more than 60 years, a new year breaks with the proud and progressive Liberal Democrat successors to William Beveridge and Jo Grimond in the government of the United Kingdom’.

This is the Simon Hughes who is my MP. Member of Parliament for the newly-and-oddly-renamed constituency of Bermondsey and Old Southwark (does the ‘old’ refer to the Shakespeare’s Globe or the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, I wonder?); a place with more council housing than any other national voter district in Britain.

The Simon Hughes who has only been the Liberal MP for this part of London because of three decades’ support from traditional Labour voters. The Simon Hughes who became an MP as the result of a by-election in which his ‘liberal’ party, in cahoots with the Murdoch press, ruthlessly exploited the sexuality of his young left-wing opponent.

The Simon Hughes who is a decent enough local representative, will turn up for the opening of an envelope, and will always arrange for a personal reply to any everyday complaint.

The Simon Hughes who is so desperate to get a whiff of the coat-tails of power, that he can contort to such an extent that he thinks that readers of a left-wing weekly, along with the council tenants of Bermondsey and Old Southwark, will rejoice that he and his fellow heirs to the Beveridge tradition are sustaining the government that, by any measure, is about to make the rich richer and the poor much poorer.

The Simon Hughes who has never, and will never get my vote.

The luxury of uncertainty

Will Self  memorably recalled his father’s words on entering his forties. “Allow yourself the luxury of uncertainty”, advised Self Senior.

I think about that phrase more and more. Having been a proud dogmatist for much of the eighties and nineties, I’ve noticed recently how relaxing it is to say ‘I don’t know’, or ‘well, people see these things differently’ or ‘ I guess you have to try and understand what makes him like that’.

A friend of mine – I should qualify that by saying ‘girlfriend’, as I still know not a single man who would be capable of this utterance – said to me, ten years or so ago, ‘can’t we just have a glass of wine each, then put the cork back and have some for tomorrow?’.  I had never heard such nonsense. Opening a bottle came with the certainty that an hour later it would be finished.

I set out on New Year’s Eve this year with the relative merits of West End celebrations versus bed by midnight by no means clear-cut. The tube journey to Oxford Circus and the five-minute walk to the 100 Club were sufficient to convince me that despite Wilko Johnson’s bluest rhythms, eleven-fifteen was home time. 

The southbound Bakerloo was living proof of Sartre’s maxim that ‘hell is other people’, but I was through the front door by five to twelve. I watched the Thames-side fireworks on Sky News, sitting in bed with a glass of decent Bordeaux, and must have been asleep by twelve-fifteen.

The next morning, mustering at Tulse Hill for Palace’s ritual New Year’s Day humiliation (the new year's first certainty), my long-time partner in football-related suffering seemed surprisingly perky. He’d been watching the History Channel when Auld Lang Synes were slurred and unwanted kisses slobbered.

Looking at our sleep-deprived, alcohol-paled offspring struggle to stand on the packed train to South Bermondsey, I reflected on the notion that Dec 31^st has to be an Unforgettable Night Out, and luxuriated in my indifference to it.

I’ve now got one of those fancy wine-bottle stoppers. It’s plugging a half-full Bordeaux.

There but for the grace of ....?

I saw some great gigs in 2010. Off the top of my head; Primal Scream, Wilko Johnson, Little Barrie, Mose Allison, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Ian Siegal, The Blockheads, Goldfrapp, Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, The Slits, and the Alabama 3. Some memorable moments, but none to match emotional impact of September’s South Bank show from Edwyn Collins.

I loved Edwyn’s band Orange Juice in the early eighties. When everyone else was hiding behind fringes and trenchcoats, playing dark industrial funk, OJ were deliberately frothy and playful, using chord structures that drew on vaudeville and musical theatre, and lyrics that refreshed the lexicon of young love.

In 2005, Edwyn suffered a catastrophic brain haemorrhage. His family and friends are told that if he recovered, there will be little left of the man they knew and loved. Unable to move half of his body, he can’t use or understand language, and has lost all ability to order thought and process.

Watching Edwyn shuffle onstage using a stick, announce his set in a speaking voice that still bears the mark of his paralysis, then sing songs that were part of my teens in a baritone as rich as ever made me – and, I suspect, the majority of those present – ponder the bizarre lottery that is our physical health, and reflect that ‘there, but for the grace of …….’.

I’ve just read Falling and Laughing, by Grace Maxwell, Edwyn’s wife, about -briefly - her life as a pop star’s missus and manager, and - at great length - her painstaking role in his long recovery. As at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, an enormous lump appeared in my throat, and I had to battle to hold back the tears.

Such is the degree to which the victory of science over nature has developed our expectations, come the onset of bad weather or natural disaster, the nation unites in allocating blame. Twenty-four-hour news shifts seamlessly from airport-bound holidaymakers expressing their ‘disgust’ at the ‘disgrace’ of their delayed light to Florida to Pakistani familes of  ten just starting their second winter under corrugated iron.

Science hasn’t yet given us the formula for luck. Watching Edwyn perform, you suspect that he might just think he’s the luckiest man on earth. Then you’ll wonder what that makes you.

Time for cuts........

My last postal delivery of 2010 included Southwark Housing News, a sixteen- page full-colour magazine produced six times per year for all tenants and leaseholders.

Given that the Coalition insists that it is delegating to local councils the authority to decide what to cut, perhaps someone could carry out a serious research of what is spent on ‘promotion’ and ‘marketing’ and why?

How many meetings of how many officers does it take to devise the text and layout for each one of those of leaflets destined to sit unread in town hall foyers? Where is the evidence that anyone, anywhere, ever attended a service as a result of picking up a leaflet?

Who spends an afternoon’s-worth of Council Tax-payers money creating the wordsearch puzzle that adorns the back of Housing News – and how many entrants does the competition entice?

I’m not sure that the efficacy of the medium is ever thoroughly analysed. Too often, these productions are the publicly- funded outlet for a frustrated bureaucrat’s repressed creative tendencies; the means becomes the end

Nowhere is the profligacy of some spending departments better illustrated than in the propaganda process. This is not the Ratepayers’ Alliance speaking, it’s the voice of someone who believes that the essential job of defending local democracy is made ever-more difficult by such obvious and capricious waste. If just one council job is saved by a leaflet and magazine moratorium then that’s public money well saved.

Little Society

Whilst acknowledging the incredible feats undertaken in 2010 by: Crystal Palace FC (staying up on the last day of the season in the most dramatic of do-or-die denouements), the anti-BNP alliance in Barking and Dagenham (despite what you may have seen on Channel 4, it wasn’t Mrs Hodge and her two helpers alone who ran Griffin out of town), the Daggers (a Pub Team from Essex in the same league as Wednesday, Charlton and the Saints), and, of course the Liberal Democrats (2003’s ‘left-of-Labour’ party now propping up the most upper-class elite since McMillan)…the story of the year has to be that of the Chilean miners.

The last two review-of-the-year articles that I’ve read have both stressed the significance to their survival and escape of God. Granted, poor latinos, along with the disadvantaged in many other parts of the world, have long been able to reconcile their religious faith with progressive politics. What these commentators seemed at such pains to avoid is any refernce to the iron discipline of the trade union culture so crucial to the mental and physical strength of the group.

The concept of society has been under attack ever since Thatcher denied there was any such thing. Her ideology was specifically targeted at those institutions that bind people together and value solidarity. Cameron's Big Society is an oxymoron - a veil that hides the transfer of collective responsibility to individuals.

The latest round of train-fare rises was greeted on Five Live with a predictable round of ‘good – I don’t use trains…transfer the burden from the tax-payer to the fare-payer… why should I subsidise the network?’ texts and emails. Why  indeed?  Because a key feature of a civilised society is a an efficient railway system that gets people where they need to go at a reasonable price. Society is all about providing for the needs of those less fortunate, and this is far too significant a duty to be voluntary.

Looking back at the incredible story of Los Mineros, we see a Little Society in which the strong saw as their first priority the needs of the weak, where the group took from each according to their ability and gave to each according to their need.  Individuals all may have said their own private prayers, but the minute-by-minute sustenance of hope came from the strength of the group.

I wonder why no-one wants to use those values as the model for a New Politics?

Just Giving?

Francis Maude, Paymaster General, worth an estimated £3m, has proposed that we should all be giving 1% of our income to charity as a matter of course, when use our bank cards, apply for driving licences and passports or fill in tax returns. It appears that this may be a feature of that as-yet-shapeless dread, the Big Society.

Rather like the speech in which Cameron stated 'well-being can't be measured by money' or any of the odious Toby Young's Free School nonsense, my outrage was instantaneously subsumed by a sense of existentialist terror, a little like the moment in The Shining when the shot of the manuscript - an endless repetition of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" - confirms that Jack has gone stark staring nuts. The difference is that here, it's not a chilling realisation of insanity crystallising, it's the final  and conclusive evidence that they do not have a clue about 95% of the nation(s) they are governing.

Do people in high-rises in Stoke get up in the morning and think 'never mind that I haven't got the money to give the kids breakfast, the beauty of our surroundings and the quality of our culture (verbatim Cameron) give me such a sense of well-being, I'll go and volunteer somewhere for the day'?

Do folk stacking shelves at Dagenham ASDA get home in the evening and then think 'I know what, our kids really need a better education; I'll ring a few of my mates and we'll submit an application to Michael Gove to set up our own school'?


Maude, almost fantastically, states 'there's an absolute social norm that if you go to a restaurant you expect to tip between 10 and 15%'. Of course, we all do. You often get stuck behind the family in the queue at the Burnely KFC drive-in as they get try to calculate the appropriate percentage of their Bargain Bucket-for-six bill.

I predicted that we were in for a hung parliament on the basis that however disastrous were the final days of Gordon, White Van Man and the rest of the Sun readership wouldn't let themselves be tele-transported back to an age where Eton ran the show and the rest of us were 6 inches shorter, died 20 years earlier and were condemned to counting well-being on the basis of how much was left for beer on a Friday night.


Short of tattooing 'Out Of Touch' on their foreheads, how much further does this foul collection of poshboys need to go before the penny drops?

Welcome to koolblog

Like most things we do at this time of year, those of us who have been oppositionalist by instinct for the better part of four decades will scoff at the illogicality of new year's resolutions.

Just as we ask 'why should  the birthday celebrations for a man who may well have had considerable personal charisma and a nice line in aphorisms but was definitely not the result of a virgin birth be the only point in the year at which we eat turkey?',  we'll construct an equally materialist analysis of the relationship between the Gregorian calendar  and the size of our beer bellies and make cynical asides about those who'll turn up at the municipal baths on Sunday with new mirror goggles, do 4 lengths of splashy front crawl and disappear for the rest of the year.

And then we'll make a resolution. Or ten.

One of mine is to stop talking so much rubbish. And instead write some of it down. Hence koolblog.

If it's anything like what goes on in my head, it will embrace a lot of politics; rants about hypocrisy, cant and injustice. There will be stuff about music, things I've heard and witnessed and felt. There will be thoughts about things I've read in books and papers and online. As the true highs and lows in life are experienced primarily through football, that's bound also to figure prominently. And then there are the completely random observations and obessions that float in and out of one's mind when you're working, or driving, or running or walking in the greatest city on earth.  

I read so much moronic junk online , and am astonished on a daily basis that so many people are arrogant enough to think that anyone might wish to know the contents of their shopping list, their thoughts on football matches they didn't attend, or precisely how many terms of abuse they can't spell properly. And of course, I am now in the process of producing what will inevitably form part of someone else's moronic junk heap. But I'm not on Facebook, I don't talk nearly as much bollocks in nearly as many pubs as I once did, and the Independent still won't give me a Saturday column.

Hence koolblog.