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.