bristling badger

simon mann: the toff gets off

2009-11-06T14:22:00.001Z

Simon Mann - a person who'd fit any decent working definition of 'international terrorist' - has been pardoned and released from jail in Equatorial Guinea, 16 months into a 34 year sentence for his attempted coup in the oil-rich nation.

To recap,

Neo-colonialist mercenary leader Mann was caught with a planeload of weapons and ex-apartheid South African special forces on their way to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea...

Mann certainly wasn't going there on any humanitarian mission. As with his previous campaigns, it was about clearing out one group so a grateful government - irrespective of its attitude to human rights - would bestow lucrative mineral rights upon him.

For a more detailed account of the activities of Mann and his friends around the world, check out my article Simon Mann: A Very English Killer.

During his trial in Equatorial Guinea, Mann sang like the proverbial canary and implicated 'Sir' Mark Thatcher (who pleaded guilty to involvement in a South African court) and plot-chief Ely Calil.

On his release, Mann said

I am very anxious that Calil, Thatcher and one or two of the others, should face justice.

I'm relishing the thought of it happening - oh please let plot-funder Jeffrey Archer have another spell in jail - but I cannot muster any faith that it'll come to pass. The establishment insulates its members well.

Indeed, this was shown in Mann's favour by Guernsey courts' refusal to allow the Equatorial Guinea government access to Mann's account records and safe deposit boxes, despite strong evidence that these contain hard and damning evidence of the plot.

Meanwhile, a vicious mercenary is now free to enjoy his millionaire's lifestyle and work on his book deal and film options.

sacrilege

2009-10-29T12:27:00.005Z

The phenomenon of the one-hit wonder is often talked of in terms that imply they had only a single moment of talent, as if commercial success is somehow a measure of creative worth. Sometimes that's true but often it's not.

Poor old Jeff Beck. He spends years being one of the foremost guitarists of his generation, fusing white backbeat pop-rock with real searing blues, yet what's the only track of his that everyone knows? Hi Ho Silver Lining.

Other one-hit wonders leave you amazed that anyone wanted to listen to anything they ever did in the first place. In the 1980s there was a swathe of blokey guys with guitars, the sort of sub-Bryan Adamsers who were clearly surrounded by an entourage of coked-up yesmen telling them they were some kind of Springsteen.

One of these was Rick Springfield. If you're 40ish in the UK, you may vaguely remember his only half-hit here, Jessie's Girl.

For those of you who don't, and indeed those of you who do but could do with a reminder about why you have no clear memory, here's the video. It's a great piece of unintentional comedy, just look at how this negligible tosser takes himself soooo seriously.

And if that was where we could leave him, well, what's the harm? I'll tell you the fucking harm. To explain the damage and my personal grudge, let's go on another one almost-hit wonder detour.

The Church are one of my favourite bands ever. For thirty years they've been making music of great beauty, mystery and intelligence, generating luscious opiate warmth yet with a tremendously potent sense of undefined unease and longing. Rich, soulful, beautiful.

In the late 1980s they had their fifteen minutes with a single called Under The Milky Way. Mercifully for them, their albatross-song isn't a Silver Liningesque anomalous novelty, it's actually pretty representative of their work.

If you're American you probably know it, but in Europe nobody has really heard of it unless they were into what we then called Alternative Music. I get genuinely surprised when I mention The Church to anyone and there's any kind of recognition at all. In the last couple of years there's been some sharper folks that at least know the song thanks to its use in Donnie Darko.

But anyway, Rick fucking Springfield. He just won't let it lie, he still makes albums, and guess what he's applied his one dimensional croak to?

And that's not actually the bad news. The song's had a sort of pincer movement performed on it.

We live in an age where any decent song is rapidly reduced to being just a corporate shill. Advertising, the most evil concept ever, debases anything you love in order to make you buy things you don't need from people you don't like.

The Cure's Pictures of You sells computer printers ('these pictures of you, I almost believe that they're real' - geddit? See what they did there?).

Stuart Maconie said of Frank Wilson's supreme northern soul belter Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)

If you want to know what the magic of Northern Soul is, get yourself a copy... and allow yourself to be swept away by its life-affirming, luminous, lump-in-the-throat beauty and effervescence.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no ailment or depression so profound and weighty that two and a half minutes in the company of this fabulous tune won't lift and banish.

These days it's the soundtrack for fried chicken adverts.

And of course, everything you ever cared about, from The Jam's harsh description of urban deprivation Town Called Malice, to Nick Drake's magical gossamer Pink Moon to Led Zeppelin's frenzied Rock n Roll, sells fucking cars.

Here's the new ad for the Lincoln MKT.

I'm off to put my head in the oven.

anti-coal on a roll

2009-10-26T16:05:00.001Z

I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants

- Al Gore

Good point, but why wait for the new-build? As Richard Bernard said a week ago outside Ratcliffe on Soar power station as a thousand people attacked the fences

With Kingsnorth now shelved the time is for us to look at existing coal-fired power stations and say that coal has no future, fossil fuels have no future, it's time to close them down.

And as Kingsnorth settles in the sidelines, it's also time for other prospective builders to step into the firing line and see that every attempt to build new stations will come with a bumper pack of activists.

At 4.30am today protesters occupied Npower's flagship coal station in the UK, Didcot in Oxfordshire. Splitting into two groups - one shutting down the coal conveyor belts, another scaling the chimneys and abseiling inside so they can't be used - they say they have supplies to last them 'weeks, not days'.

One of them explained

N-Power, the company that runs this power station, is now the foremost advocate for new coal in the country. They want to build 30 new coal power stations in Britain and Europe. They expect to get planning permission for Hunterston in the next few weeks. We’re saying to them that we won’t leave until they cancel all their plans for new coal.

Hunterston - like Kingsnorth, at a site where an old station's being decommissioned - lost its major investor only a week after Eon announced the Kingsnorth climbdown. The owners, the Peel Group, say they'll press ahead anyway, possibly with money from Royal Bank of Scotland.

Meanwhile, the fact that RBS is now in public ownership means that, as Mark Thomas pointed out, they should be compliant with the government's stated carbon objectives, and ditch their £16bn of carbon-extractive investments. Indeed, a bunch of NGOs are in the High Court right now trying to force that to happen.

But today's action isn't just at Didcot. It's been a very active day for the coal-focused domestic extremists elsewhere too.

As Npower's station forcibly powered down this morning, up at Shipley in Derbyshire protesters occupied an opencast coal mine producing coal for - it's them again - Ratcliffe on Soar power station.

Meanwhile at Mainshill in Scotland, where there's an ongoing protest camp defending woodland under threat from a proposed opencast coal mine, access roads were barricaded and people locked on, ensuring no logging work can be done.

The changes we need are only going to happen if we force them to. The burgeoning climate justice movement glows with bright potential, but time is short. Those activists Npower are going to get sick of? That's you, that is.

And this coming weekend there's a weekend of info, action and whatnot at Mainshill.

everyone move to leeds

2009-10-16T17:23:00.006+01:00

David Cameron may bang on about Broken Britain, but there's clearly an oasis of Dock Greenesque peace and social harmony in West Yorkshire.

There is a complete absence of domestic violence, street robbery, rape, large scale tax evasion and drunk driving in Leeds. There is scarcely a dropped fag butt and no standing around looking shifty or visible flouting of building regulations. We can be certain of this.

Why else would their local CID take the time to call at houses this afternoon just to let the residents know that the police think some people at the address were planning on going on the Great Climate Swoop protest tomorrow?

When detectives are telling you that some of your friends might be going to go somewhere in another constabulary where some people might be engaging in peaceful direct action, surely they've already solved all the reported crime, polished all the Chief Constable's silver buttons, sharpened all the pencils, done the lotto syndicate and all that day's crosswords and are now just gormlessly drumming their fingers on their impeccably tidy desks dreaming up stuff up to do.

kingsnorth is cancelled

2009-10-07T23:44:00.001+01:00

Despite the government's enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow, it's reported that Heathrow's owners have decided not to build it.

When the government said it would give the go ahead to the runway, I thought it might make it harder for them to say yes to the new coal power station at Kingsnorth. It didn't occur to me that, like BAA with Heathrow, E.On might lead the way themselves.

Tonight, Kingsnorth was effectively cancelled by E.On.

The decision by E.ON marks an end to one of the most bitterly fought environmental campaigns in British history. The admission, which emerged after an unplanned and off-the-cuff remark from one of the company’s German officials, will be greeted with delight by environmentalists

Too right it will.

"This development is extremely good news for the climate and in a stroke significantly reduces the chances of an unabated Kingsnorth plant ever being built," said Greenpeace executive director John Sauven.

"The case for new coal is crumbling, with even E.ON now accepting it's not currently economic to build new plants. The huge diverse coalition of people who have campaigned against Kingsnorth because of the threat it posed to the climate should take heart that emissions from new coal are now even less likely in Britain."

He added: "Ed Miliband [the environment secretary] now has a golden opportunity to rule out all emissions from new coal as a sign of Britain's leadership before the key Copenhagen climate meeting. With E.ON's announcement he's now got an open goal."

storks on a lamp post

2009-09-28T16:38:00.000+01:00

george orwell titled

2009-09-15T10:18:00.001+01:00

Not, of course that Orwell was titled in the ennobled sense of the word. He made clear that he had no time for that sort of thing, and as the establishment of the day was decades away from trying to garner any Cool Britannia relevance by giving honours to edgy people, they were unlikely to have offered him it in any case. Governments of the 1930s didn't suffer anything like the Benjamin Zephaniah OBE debacle.

I have a deep love of George Orwell's writing. His shining clarity of mind, his articulate bluntness, his fearless radical perspective, the way that most sentences of his journalism seem like they start with a silent, 'oh for fuck's sake, any idiot can see that...'.

The early novels are interesting, and there is much of his social analysis and commentary in ones like Coming Up for Air and Keep The Aspidistra Flying, but it's his non-fiction that really dings my bell, especially the essays and journalism.

It wasn't written for posterity but to make a clear topical point and it's that freshness and fire - so familiar to us in an age of broadcast media and blogging - that makes it really shine.

Additionally, he was a highly educated person who turned his attention not only to the highbrow topics but also to then-ignored areas, pioneering what we'd now call cultural criticism. His essays on boys comics and The Art of Donald McGill (about the norms and implications of scenes depicted in saucy seaside postcards) get the same incisive thought and illuminating opinion as his writing on Gissing.

So on the occasions when I've been asked where someone should start with Orwell, I recommend an anthology of his essays. But it recently occurred to me that there is a side of his writing that's pretty rubbish. His titles.

Early books have, at best, drab and uninspiring ones like A Clergyman's Daughter, Down and Out In Paris and London or Burmese Days. The title of his reportage of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, is pretty odd when you think about it. Indeed, there's a letter from Orwell to his publishers conceding that he couldn't think of a title and at least that choice lets them put something on the cover.

The only ones that seem smart, intriguing and clever are Keep The Aspidistra Flying and The Road to Wigan Pier.

Even late on, Animal Farm is another dull and functional one, whilst 1984 is such a potent book that any number of evocative superior titles readily suggest themselves in place of the peculiarly vague one he actually chose.

At least he did better picking a name for himself. He was born Eric Arthur Blair, and seemingly chose a pseudonym so he wouldn't be too closely associated with what he felt was his awful first book, the superb Down and Out In Paris and London. (I know someone who worked in a bookshop who was once asked for George Orwell's 'Dining Out in Paris and London', a very different image).

After rejecting publishing it under the name X, he had a shortlist of H. Lewis Allways (surely ludicrously stuffy even in the early 1930s), Kenneth Miles, PS Burton and George Orwell. Imagine if we were having to refer to Allwaysian ideas.

Worse still, imagine if he'd been proud of Down and Out in Paris and London and kept his legal name.

Britain has a quarter of the world's CCTV cameras. We have a government trying to get us used to ID culture by encouraging the absurd Challenge 25 policy for buying alcohol. It amounts to us blithely sleepwalking into, er, a Blairite nightmare.

god hates amputees

2009-09-02T22:03:00.002+01:00

For Christians, prayer is an important part of communicating with God and asking for help. Some of them are quite happy to have Pray At The Pump meetings in American filling stations, and they take credit for the lowering of gasoline prices.

Lots of Christian churches, not just the far-out ones, have healing services. Even more commonly, Christians pray to God to heal sicknesses in people they care about.

Leaving aside the arrogance of presuming that God doesn't know what he's doing and shouldn't have let anyone be ill, I'm more interested in another issue it raises.

Many Christians really believe in God's power to heal the sick, and a sizeable proportion of them believe they've seen it work. So why doesn't he ever heal any amputees? I've been searching the interweb for answers.

amputees don't need to be healed. removing the limb is often what saves a persons life. People are born missing limbs and live content successful lives. Why should we be " healed" when prosthetics and other devices allow us to live successfully.

I know a lot of amputees and none of them have prayed for their limbs to grow back. If anything when I lost my leg my family prayed that it would come off taking the cancer with it.

Yes, amputation can save their life, as it did with the cancer sufferer who wrote that reply. Which brings us not only on to why God would let them get cancer, but why he can't get the cancer cured without the need for amputation.

Yep, we now have prosthetics. But that only applies to a minority of amputees even today. What about the ones not rich enough to buy those, or all those who lived before the advent of prosthetic limbs, why didn't God help them a bit more?

Even if there were universal access to prosthetics, it's rather like the Alf Garnett line about God being benevolent by blessing the poor-sighted with two ears and a nose so they could wear glasses.

The idea that all amputees are having lives just as good as if they had all their limbs - well, excuse me while I rush off to get my legs taken off then. Praise the lord and pass the landmines.

There's a Christian who guesses

perhaps God doesn’t restore lost limbs (or other body parts) for the very reason He doesn’t raise people from the dead – it’s not time (yet)... The raising of the dead and the restoring of limbs (whether for those who lost them due to injury or birth defect) is for the resurrection.

I don't think we're looking for the exact same leg to be stuck back on, surely growing a new one would do. Certainly the resurrection of the long-dead is a hell of a thing to achieve, but as living people can readily and automatically regenerate blood, skin, hair, fingernails, bone and many other bodily tissues, there's no reason why it couldn't come from the living body of an amputee.

Another Christian suggests

Perhaps God chooses not to convince the world of his existence through acts of power

Not only does God bang on in both testaments with exhortations to prayer and his power to answer them, but, for fucks sake; sending the messiah! Having that messiah go round publicly healing the sick, then raising that messiah from the dead! If that's not a show of power - and specifically medical miracles - what is?

Our man also suggests that perhaps

he reveals miracles to those who already believe, and to those who disbelieve he never reveals more than they are able to explain away

Are we saying no true believer amputee has asked for a limb back? Or are we saying that it's happened but they've kept quiet about it?

In which case, why have so many other miraculously cured people been very vocal about their good fortune and used it as leverage to try to make suffering humans turn to the lord? He only ever cures blabbermouthed blind people and secretive amputees?

Then I found whydoesgodhateamputees.com. As well as having a page patiently, clearly and convincingly covering all the arguments about amputees and why it leads us to the conclusion that god is imaginary, it's part of godisimaginary.com, perhaps the best anti-monotheistic place I've ever come across. It doesn't just lob bricks from outside, it takes the stated beliefs, the bits of bible we get quoted, and then walks us through all the reasons why they don't make any sense at all.

There's something wonderful about setting out to uncover an idea only to find that somebody's done it with greater clarity than you could ever have managed.

climate camp vs newbury

2009-08-29T19:30:00.003+01:00

I'm sat here on Blackheath, site of Wat Tyler's rabble-rousing for the Peasants Revolt, among the roused rabble of the Camp For Climate Action, ready for the pedants revolt.

This afternoon I bumped into an old comrade from the Newbury Bypass and we inevitably compared the two events.

The Climate Camp, like Newbury, is composed of a disproportionate number of young adults, especially students. Indeed, yesterday I had a journalist trying to get the old gimmers like me to grumble about it.

Personally, I've no prejudice against being educated, and given the fact that students are the most likely to have the summer free and least likely to be shackled by mortgage and family commitments, it's not surprising they are here in force. The protests against the Vietnam War and in Tianenmen Square were led by students. I don't think that invalidated them in the least.

But anyway, this young demographic have no memory of the older struggles, and many talk of Newbury in the way we old 'uns speak of Paris 68. It's easy to get all rose tinted along with them, but me and Tot Hill veteran Martin just thought about it properly. There is nothing we can remember about Newbury that Climate Camp doesn't blow out of the frigging water.

There are complaints that Climate Camp's politics are diluted, that it's become a liberal lobbying group awash in NGOs and reformist ideas. Yet Newbury was actively supplied by Greenpeace, supported by many Friends of The Earth groups, and both NGOs often felt like they were entitled to speak on behalf of the campaign. There were nimbyists, conservative conservationists, those who just talked of other ways to move the absurd quantity of traffic instead of having any thought-through systemic critique. Climate Camp draws the demarcation much more clearly and speaks for itself a lot louder.

All radical movements we venerate had their woolly end. This doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it does mean that their presence isn't indicative of an all-encompassing woolliness. Check your suffragette, civil rights or anti-nuclear history, they all had it. The Climate Camp remains overtly radical. The first thing you see coming up the hill or going past on the 380 bus is the entrance banner saying Capitalism IS Crisis.

The programme of workshops and discussions shows the position as against the growth economy. The influx of newbies - half the people at the opening plenary hadn't been to a previous Climate Camp - means many have to be walked through the ideas to join it up, but the enthusiasm for that perspective is startling.

Last night I was in a mass meeting of over 500 people talking about economics beyond capitalism, who understand that not only is there no way the climate crisis can be tackled while capitalism is intact but that as well as immediate action we need to be thinking about the broader abstract cultural issues. And not in a stuffy drywank way that thinks economics is something for economists any more than we believe politics is just for politicians.

The Camp has involved itself with those irritant backbench Labour rebel MPs and the LibDems keen on civil rights, but that hasn't necessitated any move to their parliamentary freemarket politics. At Newbury we fought alongside titled tories, fox hunters, all manner of fuckheads who we'd give stick to on any other day of the week.

At Newbury the police totally decided their own agenda. Here, we have them on the back foot, kept off site despite their threats and desires. Newbury had a huge contingent of those who felt that if we only talked to the police as human beings they'd somehow not defend the forces of destruction. Those at Climate Camp who haven't had experience of the police often feel that way too, but it's easy to disabuse them of the notion and, as a site and group, there is no way the Climate Camp would behave like that.

Climate Camp out-media the police, indeed they are as savvy as people can be with the mainstream media, way more sussed and successful than Newbury, normalising radical perspectives in a far more effective way.

There is a total absence of the dippy new-age bullshit that saturated Newbury. People chanting at trees to ensure they couldn't be cut down and that sort of gubbins. Climate Camp may be idealists, but they're realistic and practical ones. My favourite kind.

And they're not just practical in the application of ideology but in the most obvious sense. The ability to equip everyone with the kit needed to allow the real work of talking, thinking, networking and planning to happen is amazing. They tipped a fully working eco-village illegally and secretly into a field in a few hours.

At Newbury we tolerated all manner of brew-crew lairy fuckers. We had no idea how to include them and get them to be a co-operative element of the campaign, nor any idea how to exclude the tiny number of irredeemably disruptive people. Climate Camp stops most of that bother before it even starts, and the Tranquility team sort out much of what does happen, and even then the process is so collectively and democratically understood that often people don't call in the experts but sort it out themselves.

And part of the reason we put up with those munters was the fact that they would dependably be there, and we needed the numbers. The idea of thousands of people coming together, of a movement pulling in hundreds of new people every time a big event happens, was simply unthinkable.

To put them in the middle of the Met's home turf, retain control and get on with the real business of educating, agitating and motivating one another for action - not as a single focus but an ongoing culture of action - would have been an insane joke. The sheer weight of numbers is gobsmacking.

It's never in the bag, all movements make mistakes and all movements need continual vigilance and tweaking if they're not to be co-opted or diluted or burned out. But on those fronts and all the others listed above, Climate Camp is the real deal.

It's not that they're some sort of great guru overachievers pulling it out of a hat. It's the culmination of a lot of lessons learned from sites and campaigns over the last 20 years, and indeed Newbury was part of that experimentation and refinement process. It is clearly on the current front end of all that and its awareness and creativity are immense. It has, as Newbury did, that feeling that this isn't something these people are doing but something they are, that this is a rolling network rather than an event.

Newbury was an amazing campaign, an inspiration to others around the world and a radicalising force for a huge number of people. At the time it felt fractious but righteous, chaotic and dicey but cool as fuck to be in the middle of. Climate Camp is all that and more.

climate camp's cross-dressing cops

2009-08-25T10:04:00.001+01:00

The police are very much on the backfoot now they're widely believed to be over-reactive, intimidating and violent.

Half of UK adults think that policing of environmental protests is too heavy handed or involves too many officers, according to a YouGov poll of over 2,000 people conducted on behalf of Christian Aid.

Of those surveyed, 18% said they were put off joining protests in future because of their fears about how demonstrations are handled and 33% said that filming protesters is an invasion of privacy.

In response, the police are engaging in - to use a Mandelsonism - an attempt at political cross-dressing. Police say they'll be using 'community style' policing at this week's Climate Camp in London.

Chris Allinson, head of central operations at the Metropolitan Police, said around 500 officers will be needed everyday to police the camp.

Which community gets one officer for every two or three civilians? The only one I can think of is prison.

“Every cop on an event is a cop who is not one the streets policing London,” he added.

Couldn't have put it better myself. Aren't there any incidences of mugging, domestic violence or child abuse in London that might be worthy of their attention?

And even as he talks his cuddly community policing guff, Assistant Commissioner Allison refuses to rule out kettling.

All this comes as the Climate Camp activists suing the police for the G20 reveal that police notebooks admit punching protesters in the face and smacking them with the edges of shields, and in the week where the Home Office said the police could be issued with a new higher-powered taser, the weapon used to threaten sleeping climate camp protesters in April. They're going to have to work harder if they be convincing in their new teddy bear persona.

Why are the Camp having to sue? When there is such clear evidence of assault why are the officers who beat people not disciplined, sacked and publicly prosecuted? Why is the officer who planned and ordered the attacks at the G20 not named and imprisoned?

This closing of ranks is proof that the new touchy-feely stuff is just crass window dressing. If they turn on the charm to the media then people will think it's all OK now, and they can avoid any real reform and get back to intimidation and breaking heads.

So, unconvinced that the police's Twitter account marks any change in principles, Climate Camp responded with an open letter to the police, and for good measure made it into a wry pisstakey infomercial.

mosh or be elsewhere

2009-08-24T12:21:00.005+01:00

I just bought tickets for Motorhead at Leeds Academy. The person at the box office said there were 66 left for standing and just over 100 left in the seats.

This means over two hundred people have chosen to buy seats even though there's room in the stalls.

Who the fuck are these people? Excepting those with a relevant disability, anyone who would prefer seated tickets for Motorhead shouldn't be allowed any tickets for Motorhead.

Top of the list for my first decree when I'm president of the world.

the great climate swoop

2009-08-19T13:33:00.005+01:00

As the Copenhagen talks to create a successor to the Kyoto Protocol loom closer, the imperative for action grows.

On the 17th and 18th October there will be a mass action to shut down a coal-fired power station in England. Which one? That's not decided. It'll be Drax or Ratcliffe and, with the kind of brazen cheek you normally only get from Class War or Plane Stupid, there's an election going on to see which one people want to hit. At a festival recently I saw a stall with voting cards and a proper ballot box.

There are very good reasons to go for Drax in Yorkshire. It's the largest source of CO2 in the UK. Most countries don't emit as much as Drax.

Ratcliffe is far filthier per unit of energy produced, though. It's owned by Eon, a global giant in carbon terms, the company pushing to build Kingsnorth, the UK's first new coal station in a generation. And frankly their bullshit about how their solar panels make them an 'integrated' power station (contributing a fraction of a millionth of their output) is the biggest load of horseshit I've ever heard and they deserve a big slap for that alone, even before anyone starts saying 'clean coal'.

Either way, whilst the small bands of people doing audacious actions are good it's about time there was a mass publicly announced one. There is no more important element in reducing carbon emissions than stopping coal. If you know that there's no way we'll stop coal by hoping for the goodwill of governments and the energy industry, then you know you've got to do something.

So, sign up to the Great Climate Swoop. 17th October. See you there.

news from nowhere

2009-08-17T14:00:00.001+01:00

William Morris' 1890 novel News From Nowhere is that thing I have a deep love for - a blunt and blatant rant against a social evil given barely enough fictionalisation to make it something other than straightforward polemic.

In John Waters' Cecil B Demented he has a gang of outlaw film-makers kidnap a Hollywood star to rail against the Hollywood studio system. In Bruce Robinson's follow-up to Withnail & I, How To Get Ahead In Advertising, although the plot concerns a crisis in an advertising exec's life it's really about a broader evil, it's about consumerism.

Morris' conceit in News From Nowhere is to have a nineteenth century man awake in the post-revolutionary twenty-second century.

He doesn't pick on a social evil in the narrow context, but the whole profit-driven, acquisitional, possessive consumer culture. Written a year before Oscar Wilde's magnificent The Soul of Man Under Socialism, it seems very much a companion piece. Big dreaming, deeply compassionate, wildly revolutionary yet profoundly humane.

That it seems so pertinent now could be either depressing (five generations and much of it has gotten worse) or inspiring (a masterpiece dismissed as sentimental claptrap then but is clearly utterly fucking visionary from where we stand now).

This bit hit me right between they eyes. A twenty-second century man explains to his nineteenth century visitor what the problems were back then.

===========

"The labour-saving machines? Yes, they were made to 'save labour' (or, to speak more plainly, the lives of men) on one piece of work in order that it might be expended - I will say wasted - on another, probably useless, piece of work. Friend, all their devices for cheapening labour simply resulted in increasing the burden of labour.

"The appetite of the World-Market grew with what it fed on: the countries within the ring of 'civilisation' (that is, organised misery) were glutted with the abortions of the market, and force and fraud were used unsparingly to 'open up' countries outside that pale.

"This process of 'opening up' is a strange one to those who have read the professions of the men of that period and do not understand their practice; and perhaps shows us at its worst the great vice of the nineteenth century, the use of hypocrisy and cant to evade the responsibility of vicarious ferocity.

"When the civilised World-Market coveted a country not yet in its clutches, some transparent pretext was found - the suppression of a slavery different from and not so cruel as that of commerce; the pushing of a religion no longer believed in by its promoters; the 'rescue' of some desperado or homicidal madman whose misdeeds had got him into trouble amongst the natives of the 'barbarous' country - any stick, in short, which would beat the dog at all.

"Then some bold, unprincipled, ignorant adventurer was found (no difficult task in the days of competition), and he was bribed to 'create a market' by breaking up whatever traditional society there might be in the doomed country, and by destroying whatever leisure or pleasure he found there. He forced wares on the natives which they did not want, and took their natural products in 'exchange,' as this form of robbery was called, and thereby he 'created new wants,' to supply which (that is, to be allowed to live by their new masters) the hapless, helpless people had to sell themselves into the slavery of hopeless toil so that they might have something wherewith to purchase the nullities of 'civilisation'.

"Ah," said the old man, pointing the dealings of to the Museum, "I have read books and papers in there, telling strange stories indeed of civilisation (or organised misery) with 'non-civilisation'; from the time when the British Government deliberately sent blankets infected with small-pox as choice gifts to inconvenient tribes of Red-skins, to the time when Africa was infested by a man named Stanley, who-"

"Excuse me," said I, "but as you know, time presses; and I want to keep our question on the straightest line possible; and I want at once to ask this about these wares made for the World-Market—how about their quality; these people who were so clever about making goods, I suppose they made them well?"

"Quality!" said the old man crustily, for he was rather peevish at being cut short in his story; "how could they possibly attend to such trifles as the quality of the wares they sold? The best of them were of a lowish average, the worst were transparent make-shifts for the things asked for, which nobody would have put up with if they could have got anything else. It was a current jest of the time that the wares were made to sell and not to use; a jest which you, as coming from another planet, may understand, but which our folk could not."

Said I: "What! did they make nothing well?"

"Why, yes," said he, "there was one class of goods which they did make thoroughly well, and that was the class of machines which were used for making things. These were usually quite perfect pieces of workmanship, admirably adapted to the end in view. So that it may be fairly said that the great achievement of the nineteenth century was the making of machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience, and which were used for the production of measureless quantities of worthless make-shifts.

In truth, the owners of the machines did not consider anything which they made as wares, but simply as means for the enrichment of themselves. Of course the only admitted test of utility in wares was the finding of buyers for them - wise men or fools, as it might chance."

curiously specific

2009-08-12T20:19:00.000+01:00

Come with me to Southampton Road in the market town of Ringwood, and ponder as I have.

How exactly did they decide how much to charge an unauthorised motorist for parking their car?

You can almost hear the disagreement in the meeting and the dissatisfied harrumphing at the compromise figure agreed upon.

planes, trains and tory numpties

2009-08-06T12:19:00.003+01:00

Just because the Euro elections are over doesn't mean you don't get political leaflets through the door. The Conservatives' parliamentary candidate for Leeds North East, Matthew Lobley, has been dishing out some.

Down there at the bottom we see that

the next Conservative government would invest in a High-Speed Rail link connecting Leeds to London, Birmingham and Manchester...

Matthew commented,' This will be great news for Leeds, reducing travel times and so supporting our Leeds economy and jobs. For too any years we have seen Leeds, the finance capital of the North, miss out to Manchester"

Missing out to Manchester? Would that be the Leeds that's had two-hour train journeys to London for a decade or two while equidistant Manchester only got that upgrade a couple of years ago?

Meanwhile, with no sense of irony or conflict, on the back of the leaflet we get this lament:

the news that BMI has scrapped its flights between Leeds and Heathrow is hugely disappointing to Leeds people.

Firstly, I wonder what proportion of people in Leeds ever used a flight to London. Of this tiny number, what subgroup could describe themselves as 'hugely disappointed' that the service was axed? Would anyone guess it was more than a sliver of a fraction of one percent of the amount needed to qualify as being representative opinions of 'Leeds people'?

The government has just announced a swathe of high-speed rail links with the explicit intention of killing off domestic flights, saying

For reasons of carbon reduction and wider environmental benefits, it is manifestly in the public interest that we systematically replace short-haul aviation with high-speed rail.

But this is seemingly not an issue to Lobley, a man who manages to talk about future energy policy without reference to carbon, and on his website only manages to mention it once, as "global warming", complete with quote marks.

For him, it's just that we need journey times cut. That'll make the train compete with the plane. Except the normal train already does.

Matthew and those hugely disappointed Leeds citizens will be relieved to know that Flybe have picked up the service and fly from Leeds to Gatwick.

Choosing a date and time at random, the 14.05 flight on 9th September from Leeds to London takes an hour and ten minutes. Add the minimum 30 minutes check-in time and it's 1.40. And that's before we recognise that the train terminates right in the city, whereas the flight leaves from outside Leeds and lands a good half an hour's journey away from actual London.

The 14.05 train takes 2 hours 17 minutes. So, there's nothing in it timewise and the train's almost certainly the better option on that front.

Not so with the price, however. The flight costs £24.99 including taxes. The train costs £84.00. What can we do about this incentive to take the high-carbon option?

In January 2007 David Cameron suggested

I think what we need to have is we've got to make sure that air travel more accurately reflects all of the costs. And, if you like, what the Economist would call the externalities, the pollution cost. I think that is important. And I think that would lead to a fairer competition between, between rail and air travel, particularly within the UK.

On 13 September 2007 the Conservatives published their Quality of Life report. The same day, in light of the report's recommendations, it was reported that

David Cameron will finally bite the bullet on green taxes today by backing the imposition of VAT on aviation fuel on domestic flights

Less than two weeks after the 547 page report was published, Cameron had read it and removed his teethmarks from the bullet.

We’ve put forward some different options, we’ve now looked at that and decided the right option, which is to not do VAT on domestic flights, that VAT on domestic flights was not an option.

So, if nothing else, at least Lobley's in line with his party leader, sticking his fingers in his ears and going lalala about aviation emissions.

organic food isn't a health fad

2009-08-02T13:05:00.002+01:00

Last week the Food Standards Agency published a report showing that organic food has no nutritional advantage over crops produced by conventional farming.

It was swiftly criticised for not looking into the negative effects on health of the agrichemicals in non-organic food. It's kind of like saying that as neither of the two people in front of you is patting you on the head they're being identically nice, because we haven't looked down to check if one of them is kicking your shins.

The Soil Association took issue with the report, citing - from the studies used by the report itself - positive nutritional differences for organic food. But they, and the reporting in general, miss the major point. There are other very important reasons to eat organic.

As a nation, we're used to food health scares. In the wake of botulism, salmonella and all the rest we were sold GM crops as a possible threat to the wellbeing of those who eat it. It's certainly something to be looked into, but the indisputable detrimental effects of GM crops are corporate control of the food supply and - what even the pro-GM governments trials proved - the detrimental effect on wildlife.

By the same token, non-organic farming is not just a health issue for those eating it today. When, some time in the next generation or so, we pass the point of peak oil and the price rockets upward forever, we're going to need alternatives. The oil-derived agrichemicals we rely on for today's bumper monoculture harvests are going to become prohibitively expensive. Developing advanced organic methods is a sound investment for keeping our cupboards full in future.

It's not just giving ourselves a headstart of good techniques either, it's also preventing regression. Conventional farming uses vast quantities of artificial nitrate fertilisers. About a third of them are actually consumed as food. The rest enters the nitrogen cycle on the land and water. This run-off is having a major impact on biodiversity.

Organic methods rely on interaction with wildlife, by comparison conventional farming assaults it. Destroying biodiversity today hobbles our ability to use it for organic methods in future.

And by the way, how come farming practices that are only used in some of the world, and even then are only two generations old, are 'conventional' and everything else is, by implication, unconventional?

Do agribusiness folks have a different dictionary to me?

The first time I stood in an organic vineyard I knew it was different. There were flowers growing between the rows of vines, flowers in full bloom. The air was alive with the sound of buzzing insects, insects that lived among the flowers, zooming around the vines searching out the pests that prey on grapes.

I was witnessing nature's system of checks and balances in full operation. The vines themselves turned their leaves to the sun, with a sheen on the leaves I hadn't seen in conventional vineyards. Above all, there was a different atmosphere - of life, of vitality. It was such an exciting moment.

- Hilary Wright, The Great Organic Wine Guide

There is another very major reason to eat organic. A significant amount of those fossil-derived nitrate fertilisers breaks down into nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 298 times stronger than CO2. Eating organic means less climate change.

Far from being a selfish health fad, it's about promoting a responsible method of food production for all and tackling the most urgent crisis we face. And it gives us an opportunity to do that with every meal we eat.

veneration and defecation

2009-07-28T23:28:00.003+01:00

Jim Bliss recently marvelled at what we can learn about a culture from its choice of statues. London, he notes, has a great diversity of figures,

But mostly it’s soldiers. Lots and lots of soldiers. Men who excelled at killing people from beyond the city walls, or who were cruelly killed by people from beyond the city walls. And we invite them back to stand silently among us. One of them stands atop a pedestal so high, you can’t really see him clearly.

He explains that Dublin, by contrast, has revolutionaries and perhaps the zenith of modern statue making, Phil Lynott.

But there is a backhandedness in statues that, whilst not making me enjoy being surrounded by giant models of killers, does give a bit of subversive balancing.

George Melly was once asked where he'd like a statue of him to be erected and he said he hoped there wouldn't be one. As those who do get them are inevitably and unendingly shat on in effigy by pigeons, a visitor from another planet might think they were the ancestors we most revile.

As Malcolm Reynolds said

It's my estimation that every man who ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sonofabitch or another.

But there's a hierarchy element too. George Orwell declared

What I like best is the careful grading by which the honours are always dished out in direct proportion to the amount of mischief done – baronies for Big Business, baronetcies for fashionable surgeons, knighthoods for tame professors.

By the same token, it's not only Reynolds' point that the bigger a fucker someone was the more likely they are to have a statue of them, but also that we'll make the statues on a greater scale and in greater quantity.

The plethora of grand guano targets of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington mean they're probably the most shat on people in British history.

There was a great hoo-hah about disrespect when a Mayday demo gave the Churchill statue a grass mohican. Yet this sort of thing is standard treatment for statues. Again, that martian might think that all statues were a form of bonfire Guy, seeing the founder of the NHS Aneurin Bevan with a traffic cone on his head. Or the one in Leeds where, in addition to his perenially repainted boots, the puffed up pomposity of the Duke of Wellington has just been augmented with a Homer Simpson mask.

It's as if Two Minutes Hate would be too genuinely angry, these figures are more dismissed than that, they get a Few Seconds Arsing About.

Wellington's statue is one of four on Woodhouse Moor, and collectively they spell out another form of disrespect. Wellington, Victoria and Robert Peel originally stood in Victoria Square outside the town hall, but were moved in 1937 to make way for a car park.

The fourth is Victorian industrialist and mayor of Leeds Henry Marsden whose statue gives the name to the area called Monument Moor. It was called Swing Moor prior to Marsden's arrival in 1952, when he was moved there from a city centre road junction where he was a hindrance to the increasing amount of motor traffic.

As I recently said about these statues on my Hyde Park History blog,

we used to venerate these folks in the city centre, but we've sidelined them to a peripheral park in order to make way for increased traffic. Collectively, then, they stand as a monument to the motor car.

Their moving is not a sign that we've stopped venerating things, just a physical acknowledgement of the change in what we worship.

fuck you liberal democrats

2009-07-24T09:43:00.004+01:00

Having recently set out what I think poetry shouldn't do, here's an instance of what it can be well used for.

Poetry should come from the heart and speak the truth. Or, as a real poet said,

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
- Leonard Cohen

The Speaker's Forum is a phenomenally interesting space at Glastonbury Festival. You get a broad range of political and countercultural figures there, not just declaiming to the adoring masses but having involved Q&A sessions. You can find someone good and get them to expand on an idea that a mass-media interview would never allow, or you can cross-examine on an issue that they're dubious on. This year saw Ben Goldacre, Tony Benn and Glasto godfather Michael Eavis.

I was in a team who did performance poetry there, and we were interestingly scheduled. On the Saturday we were before Mark Thomas, which was cool, and appropriate in a flattering way. But on the Sunday we were on between Daily Mail astrologer Jonathan Cainer and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

It was obvious that Clegg would be doing a touchy-feely greenwash performance, and so I hastily composed a poem to do at the end of our set to undermine his bullshit.

There's already been a back-and-forth in the comments of an earlier post about the confrontational attitude of the poem. It comes across as angry, and that's for a very simple reason. I am angry. The LibDems are neo-colonialists who masquerade as responsible green sustainability folk.

Wakey wakey time. Rampant freemarket capitalism is not neatly compatible with tackling social injustice and the environmental crises caused by overconsumption. It creates and exacerbates them.

Those, like the LibDems, who pretend we can have perpetual economic growth whilst dealing with those fundamental problems are - in the phrase used in the performance's preamble - the agents and engines of destruction.

And whilst the poem is certainly angry and aggressive, it's not puerile. I think I did quite well in avoiding rhyming Liberal Democrats with twats.

There were a couple of people filming it (both of whom had batteries fail) but the various clips have been spliced together to get a complete version.

For completeness' (and googlability's) sake, here's the text of it too. Performance poetry rarely reads well on the page, the rhymes aren't at regular intervals nor does it stick to a single meter de-de de-de de-dumming along.

The wording's been tweaked a little (the original was done written in hurry with all the distraction and brain-inhibiting factors associated with proper festival enjoyment).

FUCK YOU LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

Everything in this is absolutely true.

I learned about environmental action fast
I was given a masterclass
Up the trees that were in the path
Of the infamous Newbury bypass
It was an issue so clear-cut
A plan that was so far gone
That before it was built the Tories who ordered it
Admitted that they were wrong.
But there were two voices in favour then
Unrepentant to this day, in fact;
Newbury's council and MP David Rendel
Both of them: Liberal Democrats.

LibDem councils were at it again in Kingston on Thames
Taking on tree protesters there to defend
Mature poplar trees the LibDems said that
Spoiled the view for new luxury flats.
No prizes for guessing who won, protesters or interests vested.
The copse was cut down, the monies moved in and the protesters all got arrested.

When it came to GM then the LibDems
Volunteered themselves as biotech's friend.
The people wanted modified crops
To be banned, and the trials to stop.
In Westminster, where they had no power
The LibDems said we should go no further
But at the the same time in Scotland, in government,
They voted unanimously in favour.

With Manchester airport's second runway
In Stockport, where they held no sway,
The LibDems said such a monstrous plan should be fought
But in Manchester council, who own the airport,
The LibDems gave it wholehearted support.

I'm from central Leeds and the other year
The LibDem council of our city
Came up with a plan to spend 170 grand
To make my local park look pretty;
Turn it into car parking spaces.
Well, you should've seen our faces.
Not even their rigged 'consultation'
Was enough to allay our consternation.
The LibDems bullshat and backpedalled
And tried to win a spin gold medal
Saying it could have shrubs and nice coloured tarmac
But that risible attempt to fudge it
Isn't the punchline - no, that's the fact that
The 170K was the 'Parks Renaissance' budget.

The Green Party quit the city government
Not for the park but an environmental crime even greater
The LibDems plan to choke their voters
With a PFI waste incinerator.

They say now they were always against the war
But those who remember 2003 know the score
They were proudly "not the all-out anti-war party" then
They just wanted approval for war from the UN.
Not against the war, just after one more vote,
And the reasons for the war?
Well they said - and I quote -
It was "ridiculous" to say it was all about oil
No, Saddam's a bad man with WMDs on his soil.

When the troops went in the LibDems said
We shouldn't object to this war crime's colossal violence
Their leader said, I quote again,
"Now is the time for silence".
Well if you feel shamed and stained
By the threat of mass murder in your name
You've got to shout louder when troops go over the border
So fuck you, Liberal Democrats, and your collaborators gagging order.

They're the same when it comes to climate change
Whatever they try to spin
I though Chris Huhne was just a buffoon
Their environmental spokesman
But then I saw him dodge and weave and lie
And I knew he was really a man on a mission
To hand governance to corporations
Like every other mainstream politician.

He said he's against carbon rationing
Cos it'd take too long to implement
As if it's quicker to wait for elections
That'll bring us LibDem government.

The LibDems, Huhne said, won't stop airport expansion
No matter what devastation it may bring
"There's a contradiction in you wanting to relocalise life
Yet have a central ban on things".
So you see, it's not stupidity
But something much more sinister
"I don't want to see things run from some
office in Whitehall," says the man who wants to be a Minister.

The LibDems policy paper called "Setting Business Free"
Says they "start with a bias in favour of market solutions". Why's that? Me,
I start with a bias for effective solutions
And ones that are sustainable and fair,
And if the markets have taught us anything
It's that we won't find those values there.

If there's ever any conflict
Between anything and profit
Then the holy market doctrine doth decree
Profit wins every time
And the losers are
Social justice and sustainability.
When they say they want to "cut red tape" they mean the regulation
That stands between corporations and employee exploitation,
The accountability of directors, and environmental devastation.

So if profit isn't primary to you join me
In saying this one thing, that's
'Shove your "Manifesto For Business" up your arse,
Liberal Democrats'.

Opposition politicians
Always promise everything to everyone
We saw it from Labour before 97
Now we see it from Cameron.
Being in opposition most places most times
Makes it easy for LibDems to claim compassionate intent
But look at where they've been in power
And you'll see that they're no different.

So you freemarket fucks, you'll be judged
Not by your spin but by your acts,
We know who you are, we've seen what you do,
And we know that yellow isn't green, it's blue
Fuck you from here to Timbuktu,
Liberal Democrats.

save vestas

2009-07-21T14:11:00.001+01:00

The government proudly announces its low-carbon roadmap and talks of a Green New Deal. Yet it's happy to bail out high-carbon dinosaur companies like Land Rover whilst standing by as the UK's only wind turbine factory goes bust.

Production at the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight is due to stop on 31st July. But active resistance has been growing, and now workers have occupied the factory.

Only last week they said they would create 400,000 green jobs. How can the process start with 600 of us losing our jobs?

Now I’m not sure about you but we think it’s about time that if the government can spend billions bailing out the banks – and even nationalise them – then surely they can do the same at Vestas.

The people of Vestas matter, and the people of the island matter, but equally importantly the people of this planet matter. We will not be brushed under the carpet by a government which is claiming to help us.

We have occupied our factory and call on the government to step in and nationalise it. We and many others believe it is essential that we continue to keep our factory open for our families and livelihoods, but also for the future of the planet.

If you can get to the Isle of Wight

They'll be happy to see you at the gates, and there are also several demonstrations planned on the island. The factory is off Dondor Lane, Monks Brook Newport, Isle Of Wight, PO30 5WZ (Google map)

Meeting: Wednesday 22nd July, 6.30-8.30pm at the Methodist Church Hall, Quay Street, Newport. Setting up a campaign for Vestas workers’ families and Isle of Wight residents to show their support for keeping jobs at Vestas. The families and communities campaign will be very important in keeping spirits up through this stressful time. For more details call 07775 763750.

Demonstration: St Thomas Square in Newport at 5:30pm on Friday 24th July

If you can get to London

There is a demonstration planned for tomorrow, Wednesday 22nd, called by Campaign Against Climate Change.

Wednesday 22nd July, 6.00 pm
Outside the Department of Energy and Climate Change, No 3 Whitehall Place, London
(off Whitehall, Charing Cross tube)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=99987963950

It's possible that more will follow next week (keep up to date on the Save Vestas site).

If you can't physically be at either place

You can still help pile on the pressure and save the factory. The Vestas workers call on us to

Bombard the energy minister Ed Miliband with phone calls and emails. Tell the government that this closure cannot go ahead!

Ed Miliband’s e-address is ps.ed.miliband@decc.gsi.gov.uk
His phone number in his Doncaster constituency is 01302 875 462
and at Westminster, 020 7219 4778.

Flood him with calls for the Government to take over the Vestas factory and keep it producing, under new management.

Friends of the Earth have an easy auto-email thingy to petition Lord Mandelson

Messages of support can be sent to the workers at savevestas@gmail.com

There have been so many chances for action against the causes of climate change, here's a chance to fight for a solution.

There are only days to go, and we can still win if we act fast. Do it right now.

what would sid say?

2009-07-20T21:55:00.001+01:00

Was anyone as goosed as me by the incongruity seeing Boris Johnson, mayor of London, cuddling Barbara Windsor?

Not just for their disturbing physical similarity but politically?

It's a real Mandela and the Spice Girls moment ('Having spent several decades imprisoned as a reviled revolutionary, I really really really wanna zig-a-zig-ah').

Ken, if you want the job back try canoodling with Sam Fox.

technofixation

2009-07-16T17:58:00.006+01:00

Well it's been something of a lefty papers week for me.

The Independent gave a glancing mention of my performance of Fuck You Liberal Democrats at Glastonbury. They got it wrong, I didn't call the LibDems 'fucking shit', nor even as they actually spelled it '****ing s***'. (Can we really not say the words in full? Even though Google says there are 3,110 instances of 'fucking' and 6,580 instances of 'shit' on the Independent's website?). Don't believe what you read in the press, then.

I did call them 'freemarket whores' and direct two fuck yous at them, mind.

But anyway, the other mainstream lefty press thing. I got a whole post on the Guardian's environment blog.

They've just had a weekend of 'hearings' from 20 people with ideas for climate solutions. A panel then chose their ten favourites, and there's a big chunk on the Guardian's site, including a little article and short video presentation on each idea.

Some of them are technological and plausible, such as concentrated solar power (this week saw a big jump forward for that).

There is also Professor Stephen Salter's outrageously dangerous and wacky idea of squirting seawater into the air to create clouds and thereby reflect more sunlight. I've written about that before. Even the Guardian gets defensive mentioning it.

anyone tempted to dismiss his plan as the product of a crank who has spent too much time in the shed would do well to note that Salter was the man behind the Edinburgh Duck, a pioneering 1970s design for harnessing wave energy.

Which is akin to saying that because Isaac Newton's work on physics still towers over the field today, we should also give credence to his extensive writings on demonology. Or that, given the revolutionary impact of the Sinclair ZX81, the C5 is a riproarer. You can't make chicken soup out of chicken shit.

One of the other ideas on the Guardian site is 'carbon conversations', essentially just talking to people one on one and getting round the psychological barriers that prevent people from changing their lifestyles. The pilot schemes have been very effective, making people halve their emissions.

When we talk of jobs in the New Green Deal we tend to think of strapping folks erecting offshore wind turbines, but it could be something as simple and cheap as an army of carbon conversation counsellors, halving personal emissions in a very short space of time for minimal outlay.

Anyway, I wrote a follow-on piece. I'd love to have ripped into Salter's ideas, but there was a butcherly word limit. It's about how technofixation cannot solve the crisis and the underlying cause of climate change, economic growth, is the real issue.

It's on the Guardian's environment blog under the snappy title Swapping Technologies Fails to Address the Root Causes of Climate Change

iceland's hydrogen bus stop

2009-07-15T10:01:00.003+01:00

Last year I wrote a piece called Hydrogen: Not The Vehicle Fuel of The Future.

Amongst the things I mentioned was the way that Shell had touted its hydrogen powered buses in Iceland as some sort of pilot scheme for the rest of the world. I gave reasons why Shell were - undoubtedly knowingly - wrong.

Iceland is not only peculiar because it is sat on more renewable energy than it can use (a few huge hydroelectric plants and a hell of a lot of geothermal energy); it is also little more than a city state. It has a population the size of Bradford and two-thirds of them live in one city. So all you need is three or four filling stations and you’re covered. That simply cannot be scaled up to the UK, or anywhere else. The rest of us need a different solution.

There's a punchline to it. According to a recent New Scientist article

A trial of three hydrogen-powered buses ended in 2007, when two were scrapped and the third was consigned to a transport museum.

glastonbury 2009

2009-07-12T00:33:00.004+01:00

Sorry it's a bit late. It's turned into that summer hecticness of trying to have a normal amount of life crammed into the time between going to festivals and gatherings, and keeping up with the allotment.

But yes, Glastonbury. It kicked major ass. As always. If you don't have a good time at Glastonbury then it's your own fault and I've no sympathy with you.

The thing people ask when you get back, and indeed the stuff you usually offer in your account to others, is about what bands you saw. At Glastonbury, the bands are great and all but they're not the point.

GUNS N ROSES GUYS

One of the highlights was getting caught in the rain and ducking into a clothes stall. Looking out, one of the stalls opposite had Sweet Child of Mine come on to its impressively loud system. Three blokes in straw hats and ponchos stopped and rocked - air guitar, devil horns, the works - as raindrops the size of tennis balls pounded them.

Behind them, the stall holders were also belting it out and grooving. This is the sort of weather that people complain about and rush in from, but not here. People didn't give a fuck and revelled in their unfuckgivenness.

Then it struck me that the guys didn't know they had this line of stallholder backing singer/dancers, and indeed the backers couldn't see the other stalls and had no idea that they were part of a chorus line. Basically, this was a random, spontaneous, joyous, hilarious show that my crew were loving but the performers didn't even realise they were putting on.

Then it struck me further that there was no way I could describe this to people unfamiliar with festival magic without it sounding fucking awful.

'You watched muddy munters air guitar to dinosaur metal? Yeah, wish I'd spent 175 quid on that'.

WHITE JUMPER GUY

Then one night in the small hours we ended up in one of the tents in the Green Fields and some band were on that I can barely remember. About five of them, a bit folky, female singer. I think. Certainly, it was sit down music.

But then this guy gets up on the dance floor and starts galloping round it, flailing and running and twirling and stooping, like the way a five year old responds to music at a wedding. I literally laughed until my ribs hurt. It concluded with a pile-on of him and his mates.

He goes to sit down but a chorus of us onlookers cheered him until, bemused but unbowed, he got back up and carried on.

White jumper guy was one of the most brilliant performers I saw and, again, it was spontaneous, silly, but with this underlying bursting joy of life element that made it really captivating.

THE POLICE

The cops were running their usual protection racket. 'Nice festival you've got here. Seems peaceful now but, well, it'd be a shame if someone told the licensing authorities it wasn't. Of course, for a consideration, we could make sure that doesn't happen'.

Then, having secured their money, they have to show they're spending it. Cops on horses cost a lot more than those on foot, even though they're completely unwieldy where I saw them in the crowded central area between the Pyramid and Acoustic stages.

Then you can do some random searches for drugs. Last year two people were busted selling magic mushrooms in the stone circle field. As with the M5 arrestees, they got what seem to me to be unusually heavy sentences. Mushroom stash holder (twelve wraps on him) got nine months, and his mushroom tout partner got six months, even after explaining that by the time it came to sentencing she was pregnant and would have to give birth in a young offenders institution.

This year they excelled themselves by arresting someone in the stone circle field for public nudity. As the Glastonbury daily paper said, it's rather like arresting someone for urinating in a public toilet.

Aren't you glad you live in a country so free of domestic violence, tax evasion and racially motivated attacks that the police have nothing to do so they squander their resources on beating up peaceful protesters and busting people having a good time who do no harm to anyone?

I'm reminded of that thing the Levellers said in the 90s, that Glastonbury is more of a benefit for Avon and Somerset Constabulary than it is for Greenpeace.

MICHAEL JACKSON

The news of Michael Jackson's death filtered through. At first we thought it was a rumour. At the Earth First! Summer Gathering - especially in the years before people all had mobiles - there'd be an annual rumour of a celebrity death. Several times it was the Queen Mother, and there was to a be a national day of mourning on Monday so we can all stay a day longer.

When my brother texted me unbidden about Jackson I confirmed it to my compadres, but they didn't believe me. I should've taken bets. My tent was next to a path and all night there were people walking past discussing it. There was a levity to their conversations that really dislocated me.

The next day more than one friend made reference to child abuse, and one of them insisted that Jackson had been convicted. As opposed to having a prosecution say he'd touched up Macaulay Culkin without asking Culkin. Who then turned up for the defence and said nothing like that had ever happened, but as two people who'd had their development arrested at an early age by massive stardom, there was a bond they shared that was difficult for outsiders to understand.

It was quite some time before I spoke to anyone who felt as I did. I'm not grieving in any way, but where was everyone else's respect for the talent and work of the man? Everybody loves - like really loves - some Jackson songs.

I've always adored the Jackson 5 stuff - DJing I Want You Back guarantees a cheer from the floor at the first slammed note - and the disco stuff was just magnificent, but it took me a long time to get my head round Thriller. I was basically wanting it to have the sort of deep groove of Don't Stop Till You Get Enough or Can You Feel It.

The breakthrough was realising that Jackson was becoming more and more alienated and on Thriller the music, the lyrics, the whole vibe has this uneasy, awkward darkness set amidst a contrasting polished soul sheen. Look at it with the eyes that see the great alienation in Bowie's early work and it makes sense.

Anyway, where were we?

BJORN AGAIN

Many years ago they opened the Pyramid Stage on Friday morning with Bjorn Again, and it was great that they repeated the masterstroke this year. Genius scheduling.

Normally the Pyramid starts with someone not many people are really into. Anyone really popular would have better billing. But open with Bjorn Again and you get everyone rocketed up, massive crowd, hands in the air belting out every song, defiant in the rain, determined to have a big daft time.

Although I do have to say that they're starting to look a bit haggard as they're older than Abba ever were. In fact, they've been going for longer than Abba too. Time for a Bjorn Again tribute band. Rebjorn Again?

SPINAL TAP

One weirder than Bjorn Again (up to 11?). Spinal Tap have been going longer since the movie than they supposedly had been in the movie. And the new album has songs on it they've just finished that appeared in the movie as snippets. So we were treated to the full Gimme Some Money and (not on the album but available as a free download) Saucy Jack, as peculiar and wrong and hilarious as the idea suggests, with some killer unexpected comedy rhymes that would shame Danny Chivers.

Sadly there was no Listen To The Flower People but we did get Stonehenge, complete with dwarves dancing around a small triathlon, this time an inflatable (a nod to Jagger's infamous inflatable phallus?). They finished with a mighty Big Bottom, with Jarvis Cocker on second bass getting the theatrical spanking from Derek Smalls.

And - perhaps weirdest thing of all - in some strange smothered but discernible way, at times they did genuinely rock.

THE SPECIALS

I saw the Specials twice on the recent reunion tour. Blisteringly energetic, focussed, with a body of songs that still prickle and bite and are more relevant now than any time since they were written, they were not only on fire but really necessary. Stupendous.

NEIL YOUNG

I knew this would be my one chance to ever see this angry guitar buzzard, so I had to take it. Right down the front from before the Specials, up close enough to see everything properly. The first hour was varied, swinging wildly from his abrasive grungescapes to the elegant organic acoustic pastoralism.

But the second hour sagged a bit. I realise this is probably more me than him. Festival memories have a much greater subjectivity level than normal life. I remember seeing Spiritualized at Glastonbury in 93 and thinking it was like one long gorgeous unfolding drone chord that enveloped us for an hour. I heard a recording of that gig and the dynamics are phenomenally varied, nothing like what we experienced out in the spliffing fields.

Having been stood up for over four hours, an hour of that involving a lot of volcanic skanking to the Specials, I was aching and had a bladder like the Millennium Dome. I was seriously thinking of getting bunked over the front barrier, but with a performer as bloody-minded and unpredictable as Neil Young, I had tremendous FOMS so I stayed. Good call. The last fifteen minutes are as good as anything I've ever seen.

He closed the set with an utterly scorching Rockin In the Free World, a song I've not heard for years and every bit as barbed and driven as I remember but with that extra grind of his current sound, and a squillion false endings that made it push harder each time.

Then the encore. The simple chords and rhythm so out of context that you don't quite believe you're hearing it. A Day In The Life, coming from a deep black cloud of guitars.

And it's a song from 1967, when Neil Young was first making records. It captures all that idealism of the hippie generation he was spearheading, with the mean souring of heavy rock that followed and somehow has all the rock n roll since affirmed in it, a sort of sacramental distillation of the last 40 years of guitar rock, in a song that wasn't even originally rock n roll.

It dissolved into a glorious cacophony with Young wrenching the strings from his guitar, leaving minds blown.

Incidentally, the next day in London Young had McCartney come out and do the song with him. While that makes for a really special occasion - and McCartney's 2004 Glastonbury set is one of the best gigs I've ever seen - it dimmed something that Young's Glastonbury performance shone with. McCartney's cheery mugging for the audience and stage-mateyness with Young detracts from that snarly electric fire that is the core of Neil Young's energy, that serrated grit that makes his work cut straight through from his heart to yours.

SPRINGSTEEN

This is probably my biggest subjectivity spinout. I'm pretty sure it was one of the great Glastonbury gigs, and if I'd had the energy and been really there it would surely have blown my head off. As it was, I was really tired and watching it sat on bins halfway up the hill.

Even from there, the energy was contagious and absorbing. He is, as the bard Danny Chivers said, one of those artists you feel you totally see through their work.

The honesty, the integrity, the faith, the optimism and the melancholy, they all combine in a coating of muscular rock. Beyond his relentlessness there was something captivating, that sense that he is unable to waste a second on stage, that total world classness that, when you see it live, makes you realise why people like him, Bowie and Prince are given that level of acclaim.

ROLF HARRIS

The JazzWorld stage is on a massive field. I have never seen that field full before this year. I could barely get on it and, not long after I tried, they stopped people coming in because it was so full. For Rolf Harris. Teedle-eedle-eedle-um.

MADNESS

Sunday afternoon, everyone's a bit musiced out, it's always a good time for something warm and bright. Van Morrison's pulled that off more than once.

Wherever you go, whoever you meet, everyone loves Bob Marley. Not just likes, tolerates, but really loves his stuff. It's the most universal music yet conceived. In Britain, Madness have something of a similar position.

They come from 2 Tone ska, the first multicultural music invented on these shores, but they have that music hall element that makes people loved here too. Even something like Sergeant Peppers, bold and experimental as it was, is chock full of music hall sensibility. The Kinks. Lily Allen. Blur. We love it.

They delivered as dependably as ever, but picking a set with a lot of those second division songs - The Sun and The Rain, Shut Up, Wings of A Dove - that, when you do dig them out, add depth and texture to them and musically stand alongside the belters.

Normally with an old band there's no way the new stuff can match up, you haven't carried it in your heart most of your life, and often it's a bit lacklustre and half-arsed. But the new ones they played really bounced, clever, lyrically strong and fresh. I've never got on with Madness albums after the first one, the singles stood out and the rest felt a bit fillery, but the new one will definitely be getting eartime from me soonly.

NICK CAVE

Oh man he rocked. I was expecting his presence, but somehow thought it'd be more stately. Instead it was hard, distorted, potent snarly fucking rock. Staggeringly good, all the more so viewed through the zing of MDMA and port. Beyond anything even still-relevant old guys like Young do, Nick Cave keeps pushing forward, never reaching the bottom of the well.

In the week when I saw Cave, and footage of The Church doing new songs on their current American tour 30 years on (oh my fuck please let them come to Europe next), it shows that some artists really can just keep evolving without compromising their vision, their integrity or their high standard of work. Suck on that, Spandau fucking Ballet.

NICK CLEGG

The Nick Clegg. Leader of the Liberal Democrats, speaking in the Green Fields. It was a fair bet that he'd be telling everyone how lovely and green his party is and other complete fucking lies.

I knew that there wouldn't be time in his Q&A to list the vast catalogue of anti-environmental, pro-war, pro-freemarket capitalism things the LibDems have done. However, if I made it rhyme and did it in the poetry slot just before he came on, well....

I thought I'd reflect my level of ambiguity and allusion in the title of the piece. So it's called Fuck You Liberal Democrats and I got to do it with Clegg stood behind me. Got cheered and booed in equal measure, which seems fair enough. I'll type it up and post it here soon.

SHANGRI LA

The successor to Lost Vagueness is far greater. The weirdness, the baffling twisted eye and brain candy is inspired, warped, brilliant.

My favourite part was the alleyway of shops, a covered Blade Runneresque market, corners all over so you're utterly disorientated and feel that it goes on forever, grimy, bare piping all around, then inexplicable stalls. A room of blue lights and mirrors with a mermaid - a live one - grooving in the corner.

A shop with babies in jars behind the counter that straps you into a dentists chair, puts an outsize helmet on your head full of speakers that block your vision while playing distressing sounds - animals, alarms, children screaming - as people flick, tweak, nudge, dry hump and prod you. And rifle your pockets for your phone and ring your mates in an east European accent to tell them they're operating on you.

Like Guns n Roses Guys, it's another one I knew describing it would divide people into those that get festivals and those who don't.

And the weather? Didn't matter.

green britain day

2009-07-10T17:33:00.001+01:00

Today is Green Britain Day, sponsored by power company EDF.

Under the government's Renewables Obligation, electricity suppliers must source a minimum amount of their power from renewable sources. This year, that's 9.1%.

EDF get only 6% of theirs from renewables, and must therefore pay a fine or buy credit from other people's certificates of renewable generation. They get 49% of their electricity - above the UK average - from coal, the most carbon intensive form of generating power yet devised.

Corporate Social Responsibility will continue to be little more than PR for as long as it is easier and cheaper to spin than to change.

- Corporate Watch, 'What's Wrong With Corporate Social Responsibility' report.
(PDF here, buy hard copy here)

political policing

2009-07-08T11:33:00.003+01:00

A senior police officer investigating Ian Tomlinson's death suggested that - even though the officer in question has come forward - the person who attacked Tomlinson might not have been a police officer at all, it could have been a member of the public who nicked police uniform and riot gear.

That would be the officer who Channel 4 News pieced together on duty for ten minutes before he struck Ian Tomlinson

And - oh surprise - now we're being told the officer who assaulted Ian Tomlinson had a history of misbehaviour and shouldn't have been in the police. One bad apple.

The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee say the problem was caused by untrained officers going off at the deep end. Once again, watch the attack on the Climate Camp. Is this officers losing their cool individually? Or the ordered methodical use of violence against unarmed peaceful people?

I said at the time

Look at the video of Ian Tomlinson. Look at the casualness of the officer who attacks him. Look how the colleagues are completely unsurprised...

This was not an officer losing his head in the fury of a riot. It’s calm, slow and premeditated.

This was not one bad officer taking the law into his own hands. This sort of assault was endemic that day. I saw it hundreds of times with my own eyes, and I was at the more peaceful climate camp protest, and left before it got kettled then attacked with dogs and batons in the evening.

This sort of assault is what the police do when they’re deployed on this provocative political mission. The difference here is that it was caught on camera and the victim died.

Or, as Alice more concisely put it, 'Ian Tomlinson - it happens all the time'.

There is, however, one other major difference apart from the fatality, and it's not in the events of the day but in what's happened since. The media and public have realised that this is how police operate.

This week's Panorama was an excellent report covering the key aspects of modern political policing; the intimidation, the randomised violence, the collusion with private companies, the FIT teams.

One minor criticism would be the way it got the senior officer to say he 'didn't know' what happens to information gathered and got a force to say it was kept for seven years, yet didn't go into the police database of protesters.

Furthermore, there was something else a bit between the lines. As FITWatch said

there was a whiff of good protester/bad protester from the beginning. Although not overtly stated, the implication was that it was alright to use these tactics against the real “extremists”.

This not only didn’t cover the rather obvious question of what defines domestic extremism and whether this is an acceptable definition – NETCU themselves agree there is no legal definition and basically infer it to mean anyone who engages in direct action – but whether this treatment of protesters is right regardless of their beliefs.

But these are very minor quibbles over an excellent illuminating and refreshingly honest programme. It's a rare thing indeed to see a piece of TV about protest that is recognisable and authentic. This week's Panorama is one such thing, and I strongly recommend watching it. It's viewable online for a year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lmd3s