Re-Renaissance

James Blake - Retrograde. He’s back.

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:52:00 +0000

James Blake - Retrograde.

He’s back.

More Degree Work

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:37:00 +0000

This time a feature looking into how a polling station in Bettws, Newport achieved a 0% turnout during last November’s Police and Crime Commissioner Elections.

APATHETIC ABOUT OUR APATHY

Shame heaped upon the land of our fathers. And in the community 19th century Chartist leader John Frost married Mary Geach, at tiny St David’s Church, now perched in hiding at the edge of one of Europe’s largest modern housing estates.

Frost would go on to lead the ‘Newport Rising’, maybe five thousand men marching on the city’s Westgate Hotel to liberate Chartists imprisoned for demanding their democratic rights. Working men who fought for their suffrage, laying the foundations for the political voice every one of us takes for granted today.

So what irony that it should happen in Bettws. The police and crime commissioner (PCC) elections in England and Wales may have achieved the dubious honour of the lowest number of people ever to vote in a poll nationwide, but a 0 per cent turnout is striking nonetheless. Even if it was in one polling station in one small community on the outskirts of Newport.

A perfect metaphor for how far we have fallen. From Chartist rebellions to sofa rebellions. Freedom fighters to complacent layabouts who can’t be bothered to get off their arses to vote. And what do we expect on the council estate backwaters of south Wales? Bettws - an emblem for British political apathy.

Well, not really. I mean Bettws doesn’t exactly bang the drum for democracy, but in this case, as local MP Paul Flynn explained to me “There were a number of exceptional factors.” What is true is that the Malpas Cricket Club polling station in the Bettws ward of Newport had a 0 per cent turnout on the day of the PCC elections. Precisely no one went along there on ‘Super Thursday’ to put a ballot in the box to elect the police and crime commissioner for Gwent. This may have been the story you saw in the national news.

It’s not that those voters went to other polling stations on the day. Newport City Council confirmed that as in other parts of the country polling cards were distributed to the homes of people in that area of Bettws to inform them of the polling station they had been allocated to, and that was their only option if they wanted to vote in person.

But that’s if they wanted to vote in person. Newport City Council was also keen to stress that 15 voters who could have voted at Malpas Cricket Club that day had already submitted postal votes. Which left them proud to announce that the turnout for this polling station with postal votes included was “well above the national average for that election.”

Are you following the maths here? Newport City Council were not wrong to suggest that the turnout including postal votes for this polling station was “well above the national average”, which stood at 14.9 per cent at final count. “Well above” may have been stretching it a little as the turnout including postal votes at Malpas Cricket Club was 21 per cent. But seeing as they only received 15 postal votes this means that the total number of voters attached to this polling station was a whopping - 69.

That’s right, in total, 69 voters failed to exercise their democratic right at Malpas Cricket Club on PCC election day. And in fact that figure is unfair to the 15 who voted via the red box rather than the ballot box, so we’re talking a grand total of 54 who chose to insult the memory of their Chartist ancestors. Percentages may be striking, but they can be deceiving.

Numbers tell a story though. This was a new polling station for Bettws, the fifth in a ward with 5,387 registered voters. Which begs the questions, when you have over 5,000 people able to vote why would one of your polling stations only be designed to cater for 69 of them?

The answer, according to Newport City Council, was that a new housing estate, called Foxglove Meadows, had been built nearby, and this new polling station had been chosen specifically to cater for the people who lived there. But local Labour councillor Val Delahaye didn’t buy this explanation.

“It’s a polling station we’ve never used before for any election, and I don’t know why they used it because literally no one lives near it,” she told me. When I mentioned Foxglove Meadows she countered “It’s not even near being fully occupied yet - it’s not even finished being built yet!”

Independent Bettws councillor Noel Trigg was equally bemused. “You ask anybody in Bettws and no one knew it was a polling station,” he said, later admitting “I found out there was a polling station when no one voted there.”

When asked why the local council would have put a polling station next to a brand new housing estate that not many people lived in yet Ms Delahaye pondered “I don’t know if the person didn’t go out there and have a look?”

The ward’s other independent councillor Kevin Whitehead thought the new development might have prompted a “knee jerk reaction” at the council, especially as the next nearest polling station was just 300 yards further down Bettws Lane at the local secondary school.

A knee jerk reaction might be a generous description, as it indicates that some kind of nervous response prompted this decision. The reality may be less exciting and more depressing. Perhaps, as Ms Delahaye predicted, the council just didn’t bother to check where this polling station was? When political apathy reigns supreme it’s not just the voters who are apathetic.

Mr Trigg, who could recount in great detail the glory days of his light heavyweight boxing career, said of the PCC elections “I didn’t bother about it. It’s no good me saying yes to something I know nothing about.” A local democratic representative for the area, yet he didn’t vote. He was unaware of the polling station he was supposed to attend, but based on where he lives it is quite possible he contributed to the 0 per cent turnout.

The local assembly member for Newport West, Rosemary Butler, who also happens to be the presiding officer of the Welsh legislature, made the effort to send me an extensive email of her thoughts on the democratic disconnect and her work to deal with this issue nationally. She had failed however to look into the details of the situation in Bettws, such was her concern for the promotion of local democracy.

Most heartening of all were the views of local MP Paul Flynn. When asked if he was concerned about low turnouts in elections generally he replied “It’s not worth exercising a single brain cell on, if people don’t want to vote they don’t want to vote.”

“If people are motivated to turn out generally they are people who are motivated to understand the reasons they are voting, but if you get 100 per cent turning out you get people who resent voting or who have little interest or probably little knowledge of the electoral system, and you’re likely to get stupider results.”

“It’s just as good as an MP to be elected with 5% of the votes as 95% of the votes,” he added. Stirring words from a bastion of democracy. The Chartists would be spinning in their graves. Newport rise again!

It’s not that voter apathy wasn’t the big issue of the PCC elections, and many polls before that. And of course even when 54 voters fail to care enough to walk to their local ballot box to decide who runs the police force in their area it’s a big problem. But when the electorate are so consistently indifferent to democracy perhaps those in politics are becoming apathetic about their apathy.

To the point where a national government promotes a set of elections so poorly that they get the lowest turnout in a post-war history.

Or a local council unthinkingly plonks a polling station where there is no one to vote.

Degree Work

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:45:25 +0000

Haven’t posted here for a while and my excuse is I’ve started a masters in Political Journalism at City University in London and have been working full time to pay it all off. But that’s no excuse at all really so I thought I would post some of the stuff I’ve been writing during my degree here. The first article is a piece of analysis of the recent PCC elections and the second is a comment piece about journalist and FOI campaigner Heather Brooke.

NO WINNERS ON ‘SUPER THURSDAY’

‘None of the above’ was the big winner, as had been predicted for weeks. But the scale of apathy about the so called ‘Super Thursday’ combination of police and crime commissioner (PCC) polls and by-elections wasn’t forecast by even the most cynical political commentator.

At final count the PCC elections in England and Wales have a turnout of 14.9% and therefore the dubious honour of beating the record for the lowest number of people to vote in a peacetime national poll.

Another lowest peacetime turnout record, this time for by-elections, was set in Manchester Central, where only 18% of registered constituents came out to elect Labour’s Lucy Powell as their new MP.

A few more voters cared enough to come out in Corby, the largest turnout of the day at 45%, where Labour’s Andy Sawford took Louise Mensch’s old seat from the Tories with a 12% swing, prompting Ed Miliband to declare that “Middle England is turning away from David Cameron”.

But even Corby demonstrated the electorate’s exodus from mainstream parties, with UKIP beating the Liberal Democrats to third with their highest share of the vote ever in a by-election. The Lib Dems were condemned to the embarrassment of losing their deposit for the seat.

Voters shunned mainstream party politics at these elections most vividly by not voting, but there were also an unusually high number of spoilt ballots, pointing to the possibility that many were marked in protest.

The success of independents at the PCC elections was yet another rejection of the big three parties, and from North Wales to Kent there was a trend towards voters looking for candidates with experience in policing when they did bother going to the ballot box.

This has drawn the criticism that in several areas the PCC elections will leave police authorities in the same position they were before democratic reform, with former police officers and police authority chairs once again overseeing the police.

And with turnout so low questions are already being raised about whether the new Police and Crime Commissioners even have a mandate to get things done when they take office next Thursday.

The government has responded by insisting that any democratic mandate is better than no democratic mandate, and turnout will improve in future elections as people understand better what PCCs do for them.

But many have asked why the Tories did not do more to promote one of the flagship policies of their manifesto and the blame game will continue as the post-mortem begins into one of British democracy’s most pitiful days.

F.O.I. FETISHIST, CLOSET LIBERTARIAN

Heather Brooke, darling of left and right alike. Slayer of corrupt, money grabbing politicians fiddling expenses. Or at least a successful botherer on the subject, inspiring a Westminster mole to leak MPs expenses files to the Telegraph for a mere, token £110,000. Of that much we can all agree.

But who is this woman and why did she care enough to devote five gruelling years of her life to this subject? Grander sums are spent on worse things by governments. Presumably she is not against duck houses per se, or cleaning one’s moat. When you see her speak however you get a sense from her that the very concept of public money raises the blood pressure a notch.

The story she tells is an old fashioned duffle coated journo flicking through files in dark rooms on rainy winter nights. Speaking at a guest lecture at City University London she recounts pouring through receipts for allowance claims for local politicians in Washington state in her early twenties. Her scoop was the abuse of frequent flyer miles for personal purposes. It was no mortgage flipping, but it inspired Brooke.

Because Freedom of Information (FOI) is her thing. It’s not just that journalistic drive for a good story. There’s something deeper. Famously Tony Blair’s greatest regret in government was not the Iraq War but the Freedom of Information Act of 2000. Brooke calls this Blair’s ‘Animal Farm moment’, barely concealing her disdain for those with power. ‘It has a corrosive effect on people if they’re not careful… there’s so many books that chart that idealism, the rise to power and then their ultimate corruption’.

Power in the hands of the state though. Government databases and CCTV. When questioned on the corrupt practices of powerful private enterprises she insists ‘A company’s ultimate sanction is it goes bankrupt’. She adds ‘The difference with a government is it’s a monopoly’ and tops that with ‘I can’t change my police force like I change a mobile phone contract’.

Brooke is only worried about the data Google and Facebook hold on us all when they become ‘de facto agents of the state’. ‘I’m not too fussed if it was just Google’ she says ‘Because Google’s priority is to make money, that’s all it cares about… fine.’ Fine, but I think I’ve heard this somewhere before.

An FOI fetishist undeniably, but methinks Ms Brooke is also a closet libertarian. Too much suspicion of everything done in the name of the state, and too little suspicion of anything done in the name of money. When we all jump on the bandwagon of holding public figures to account, consider who has their hands on the reins. Are they driving us down a road to no more government in our lives? If so that could be a one-way route with no return.

Bjork - Virus (Hudson Mohawke Peaches and Guacamol Remix) One of...

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:55:00 +0100

Bjork - Virus (Hudson Mohawke Peaches and Guacamol Remix)

One of those tunes that makes you stop your conversation because hairs are raising on the back of your neck. It did for me when HudMo played at the Gilles Peterson Worldwide Awards back in January. I’ve been raving about it ever since, despite not being able to find it anywhere, in that way that you only can when you know a song is the best tune of the year and it doesn’t matter that you can’t even prove it with a dodgy rip off the radio.

I urge you to go see this man DJ, and hear this song in the way God intended. A while back, after the riots in fact, I called Hudson Mohawke’s Scud Boots ‘Music to rebuild a society to’. This tune can go on the album of the same name. A true Re-Renaissance man.

What’s The Big Idea? Podcast: Occupy London Part 2 Last...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:57:00 +0000

What’s The Big Idea? Podcast: Occupy London Part 2

Last week I posted the first part of a podcast documentary myself and my friend James Shield began to make back in late December about the Occupy London protests. Above is the second part to stream, and below this text is the episode in full, uploaded to SoundCloud, and available to download as an mp3 if you’d prefer to whack it on you Itunes or Ipod for later listening (other companies are available…)

For more information about the What’s The Big Idea? Podcast please visit: http://bigideapodcast.org/

What’s The Big Idea? Podcast: Occupy London Part 1 Several...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:44:00 +0000

What’s The Big Idea? Podcast: Occupy London Part 1

Several months ago I wrote an article for this blog entitled Occupy Labour Party Conference, comparing my experiences at my first Labour Party Conference last Autumn to my experiences at the Occupy London protest at St Paul’s Cathedral. I concluded the article writing ‘…if Labour really is looking to be a broad church, as they repeatedly seem to stress, they have lost part of their congregation. They only have to look outside St Paul’s to find it again. They might even find me there too’.

Turns out that was a rather prophetic post, as just after I published it myself and my friend James Shield decided to make a podcast documentary about Occupy London, and I found myself visiting its protest sites multiple times over the course of a week in late December.

The podcast was supposed to be about what Occupy was for, straight from the horses mouth, and whether it would work. It very much ended up being about the people there, and the stories of how they found themselves camping in the centre of London for several months during the winter of 2011/12. We wanted it to sound like the innovative NPR documentaries Radiolab and This American Life, approaching British politics in a slightly less staid, stiff upper lipped way. Producer James has taken a pretty good shot at it if you ask me. I swore a couple of times on tape to seem down with the kids.

Occupy London was evicted from its site outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and from its Bank of Ideas site in the heart of the City of London, on February 28th 2012. Whilst this podcast was recorded in late December, it remains relevant as a reflection of the people that were part of that protest, who defined what Occupy was, and ultimately wasn’t.

Above is the first of two parts. Let me know what you think.

Portico Quartet - Ruins The newly re-jigged quartet embrace the...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:19:55 +0000

Portico Quartet - Ruins

The newly re-jigged quartet embrace the electronic drum machine and come out with something which sounds like The XX mixed with Four Tet and Radiohead and topped off with their own inimitable jazz stylings.

Even better is that after you listen to this track and like it you can download it off Real World Records for free here, simply by telling others over the internet how grateful you are I showed it to you. Which you would have done anyway I suspect. You’re welcome.

Lowkey - Hand On Your Gun Political UK hip-hop. But it’s...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:22:00 +0000

Lowkey - Hand On Your Gun

Political UK hip-hop. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. In fact it’s good. Lyrically very smart. I went to see Lowkey in a fundraising concert for the Fortnum145 last Friday and the crowd got pretty intense, and as is always the case with hip-hop artists, or really people in general, I don’t agree with everything Lowkey says. But I do agree with the lyrical content of Hand On Your Gun. And as for the tune below, Voices of the Voiceless featuring the brilliant Immortal Technique, the beat agrees with me.

Word of warning. The Hand On Your Gun video concludes with some pretty shocking footage. If you are offended by it, ask yourself what you are really offended by.

Occupy Labour Party Conference

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 21:18:35 +0000

For people who are truly interested in politics, it’s not just an interest. It defines the food you eat, the clothes you wear, where you work and even sometimes your relationships with other people. When your political beliefs change I imagine it is somewhat like losing faith. You don’t just stop going to church, you fundamentally see things in a different light.

The church comparison is an apt one, because I visited my first political congregation just a few months back: the main hall of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. I was attending conference for the first time in an attempt to regain my faith in the party. I was brought up in the Labour church, and despite doubts have remained throughout my life. In my teenage years I was even a relatively devout Blairite, a defender of the Iraq War, an apologist for top up fees and PFIs. Better an electable left of centre party than an unelectable left wing one I preached. But in my heart I always believed we would return to our roots eventually. New Labour shifted parts of the political discourse to the left, opening up the opportunity to once again focus on building the ‘New Jerusalem’, I argued.

A Catholic losing their faith might take pilgrimage to the Vatican. I chose the Labour Party conference. Like many a visitor to the Vatican my visit only confirmed my doubts. Spending my first day without a pass outside the secure zone I saw nothing but men in suits. Politicians in suits, businessmen and lobbyists in suits, young men in suits because their ambition is to be one of the former. I attended political debates open to the public but not attended by them, and void of inspirational ideas that breach mainstream political discourse. Even as a paying member of the Labour Party I felt deeply uncomfortable and unwelcome in my surroundings. Inside the secure zone was not much better. Again men in suits, with a few more women this time, also mostly in business attire, milling around hallways and bars looking important. Fringe meetings with a token rushed contribution from an MP who had barely read the brief. A Young Labour policy forum with Liam Byrne which was genuinely insulting in its brevity and irrelevance. And then there is the conference hall. The best that can be said of it is at least people go casual and aren’t necessarily there to boost their career prospects. However, the hall truly is an exercise in preaching to the converted. Speech after speech from Labour members from around the country with the same party approved ideas, the same buzzwords. Something about Labour investment over the last decade. A joke about the Bullingdon Club. A rallying call to get behind our leader and take it to the Tories. Rounded off with a slightly more polished version from a shadow cabinet member to conclude the proceedings.

Contrast this experience with my trip to a real religious relic, St Paul’s Cathedral, to visit Occupy London a weekend ago. Yes the place smells of cabbage from the free Hare Krishna food on offer throughout the day. Yes the smell of cabbage is mixed with a slight whiff of urine emanating from the portaloos. I admit if I was to make political decisions on smell alone I probably wouldn’t be down there. On a more serious note there are a good few homeless people at the camp now, and others with mental health problems. It is not always the most comfortable experience being around people with those sorts of issues, but in my view the fact that they feel at ease in the camp amongst the people protesting there is an excellent reflection of the values of Occupy London, and the compassion that lies behind those values. The Labour Party conference was certainly not setting up welfare areas for the homeless and destitute of Liverpool.

Occupy is messy, both in a physical sense and a political sense. This is what tends to happen when there is a genuine exchange of ideas. Their Tent City University puts on free talks by innovative and often reputable political thinkers. Members of the public walk in off the street to see what’s going on. In the background you might actually hear people having a political discussion rather than sipping on cheap wine and exchanging phone numbers. Or at very least they might be doing both. Occupy is certainly no schmoozefest. Unlike the Labour conference you don’t go there to network. There are no careerist ulterior motives. I accept that some people are just as intimidated by hippies as I am by suits, but most of all at Occupy I don’t think there is a sense that you have to hold back talking about your true political beliefs. Obviously the protest attracts certain types of predominantly left-wing people, but in the very nature of the space there is engagement with the general public, and there have even been efforts to engage in discussion with the very 1% that Occupy is challenging.

But ‘so what?’ you might say. The Labour Party conference and Occupy London are two very different spaces with two very different aims. The conference is attempting to rally together a group of people to ultimately elect a political party to power, whilst Occupy is a discussion point, a place of protest, with different political pressures to the ones that arise when you are engaged in the electoral process. Well my point is that a lot of people like me are no longer inspired by the model of political change offered by the major political parties. The biggest contrast I can offer between the Labour Party conference and Occupy is that unlike the occupation the conference was not actually a political event. It was a rally. It was a PR event. But there was little in the way of real political thought, political discussion, and even political action. Some of us, who are interested in and passionate about politics, are looking for those things, and not just every 4 years when an election comes around. The most striking thing about the conference was the dogmatic focus on getting Labour elected again. There is rhetoric, but no real consideration, of Labour as a genuine political movement, enacting change in local communities in the time between people going to the ballot box. Occupy has sprung from a gap in the political market. There are a good few people out there who have seen that Labour are not selling them anything of substance right now and have exited the shop. Occupy have decided to sit in the space they have vacated.

The Labour Party is not concerned. I am a lefty nutso. Too young to understand the realities of the world. At worst in the same breed as Militant and to be chastised and pushed out of the party. At conference, for my sins, I attended a Progress fringe meeting entitled ‘Green to Red: How can Labour stop the Greens Spreading?’. Party luminaries such as Douglas Alexander seemed to believe that the main reason Labour were losing council seats to the Greens in places like Brighton was because students were being offered free tea and biscuits. Progress members laughed and sneered. Myself and a few friends squirmed in the corner. We knew that the real reason Labour was losing support to the Greens was because of the people in that room, and their attitude towards people like us. Maybe they don’t care, and maybe their polling tells them they are right not to. But if Labour really is looking to be a broad church, as they repeatedly seem to stress, they have lost part of their congregation. They only have to look outside St Paul’s to find it again. They might even find me there too.

Just watched this week’s Frozen Planet, which if you...

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:34:41 +0000

Just watched this week’s Frozen Planet, which if you haven’t seen you must, if only to be able to defeat anyone who ever argues against the BBC license fee with only two words. Those words being ‘Frozen Planet’, rather than the two you were thinking of.

Then came across the above video via my brother, which is just astonishing, and completely captures the feeling of joy and excitement that seeing the most amazing things in the natural world provides to pretty much every human being, I think, or at least hope.

We can be inspired by all sorts of things. Beautiful paintings. Political movements. A well constructed shot in a film. A well written line in a play. But it only takes a bunch of birds to randomly decide to fly in otherworldly formations for us to be utterly awestruck. One could take that to mean we shouldn’t bother, we’ll never live up to the standards the rest of the natural world sets. I say videos like the one above give us something to aim for.

Lucas Santtana - Super Violão Mashup World music and electronic...

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:01:06 +0000

Lucas Santtana - Super Violão Mashup

World music and electronic music is about to collide and become the coolest thing since boat shoes. Mark my words hipsters, you read it here first.

Fear

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:59:44 +0100

From the movie A Single Man (2009), written and directed by Tom Ford.

Performed by Colin Firth.

‘Will Britain Get Through This Recession?’ 1992-3 ‘Help’ 1992-3 from Signs...

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 20:18:00 +0100

‘Will Britain Get Through This Recession?’ 1992-3

‘Help’ 1992-3

from Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say

Gillian Wearing OBE (born 1963)

Also on display at Tate Liverpool as part of This Is Sculpture, despite quite clearly being photographs. Someone sack the curator!

Clearly I am posting these because they say something I want to say rather than what the people photographed want to say. Obviously I am doing that to highlight this tension within the piece. Obviously.

Head No. 2 1916, enlarged version 1964 Naum Gabo...

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:25:00 +0100

Head No. 2 1916, enlarged version 1964

Naum Gabo (1890-1977)

Currently on display at Tate Liverpool as part of the excellent DLA Piper Series: This is Sculpture.

Can Advertising Be Art?

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:22:00 +0100

This blog is not sponsored by French Connection, but yes, that is an advertisement for French Connection. A sweet one. With a cover version of possibly my favourite RnB tune of the year, Look At Me Now by (horrible human being) Chris Brown, as its backing soundtrack.

It is such a well shot, well edited, amusing yet sexy piece of film that it got me thinking about an argument I had several years ago with a friend of mine spurred on by the advert posted below.

We agreed that the film itself, advertising the Sony Bravia LCD television, was inspired. A beautiful concept, with wonderful camerawork and a gorgeous soundtrack, audaciously carried out without computer effects. It was so good in fact that I felt it could be classified as a work of art. This was where my friend and I parted our ways, as he insisted that advertising could not be art. Advertising is bastardized by its impure capitalist aims he argued. Its ultimate goal is never to broaden the mind, or incite real emotion, make us laugh, cry or think. Advertising is always ultimately about selling a product, and its cynical use of artistic techniques to achieve this does not make it art.

I stand by my opinion that advertising can be art. Whilst it is more romantic to imagine that art always emerges from subversive elements in society challenging our conceptions of power relations, historically that is simply not true. The Renaissance is a perfect example. Most of its greatest works of art were funded by the patronage of the richest and most powerful men in Italy, with many even being commissioned by the Catholic Church itself. We can read into the hidden humanist messages of these paintings today, but they were the advertisements of their time, promoting the solitary multinational brand of the day, Catholicism.

Despite this there are few who would argue that the works of the great Renaissance painters are not art. Perhaps in years to come the corporations of the 21st century will commonly be regarded as repressive engines of power, as has happened with other powerful institutions throughout history. And yet perhaps we will also recognise, as we have done with the Catholic Church, that even repressive engines of power can at times contribute positively to the development of art and culture, even if they do so in their own interests.

Probably we will never talk of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci in the same breath as ‘that Honda Accord advert’, or even its director, but even if less inspired, it rouses a similar sense of wonder, a characteristic of many great pieces of art.

PJ Harvey - The Words That Maketh Murder Appropriate, given the...

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 01:24:00 +0100

PJ Harvey - The Words That Maketh Murder

Appropriate, given the post below.

Like many lazy music fans who missed it the first time around, two weeks ago on the way to work I logged onto Spotify and whacked on the previous night’s winner of the Mercury Music Prize, PJ Harvey’s album Let England Shake. If you’re an even lazier music fan who hasn’t heard this album yet, sort it out. It’s fantastic. Alternative rock meets William Blake. A genuine anti-war album.

I’m going to start an government e-petition to get the track below instated as our national anthem. Director Seamus Murphy has made 12 music videos, one for each song on the album, presenting his own images of England. The ballroom dancing in The Words That Maketh Murder is just perfect, but it is the shot of the road map of England against the floral furniture patterns in The Last Living Rose which to my mind is a more distinctive visual representation of this country than St George’s flag itself.

During the UK riots I tried to stay off social networking sites...

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:33:00 +0100

During the UK riots I tried to stay off social networking sites because emotions were high and I was fearful that I would say something I would upon reflection later regret. I accidentally made one exception to this, getting in an argument on Twitter with Communist/Anarchist activist group @BloomsburyFight about the use of the word thug. I had described the rioters as thugs in an earlier tweet and they called me up on the word, arguing that it had historically racist connotations dating back to imperial India. I argued that in modern usage thug does not have racial connotations, an argument that I would still stand by, but @BloomsburyFight also called me up on my derogatory labelling of the rioters, something I was much more uncomfortable about.

This blog is dedicated to @BloomsburyFight because without them I would never have listened to This American Life’s recent episode Thugs, first broadcast on NPR a month and a half ago. This American Life is comfortable with using the word thug, so @BloomsburyFight may have to avert their ears at times, but their exploration in particular of how the word is being used in horrific ways in post-revolutionary Egypt may interest them.

It is ‘Act Two’ of the episode that particularly fascinated and moved me however. It is an exploration of Ton’Nea Williams’ attempt to rescue a kid who she works with in a juvenile detention centre from a life of crime. If you’re looking for a heartwarmer turn away now because it’s not the usual Hollywood ending. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the interpretations and conclusions of reporter Laura Beil towards the end of the piece, but the report is certainly hair-raising and thought-provoking. Ultimately it left me asking, can you ever really know someone?

Not Now Darling: What Memoirs Really Tell Us About The Politicians That Write Them

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:46:00 +0100

The truth will set us free. Or at least one must hope as a Labour supporter. This week Alistair Darling became the latest of the New Labour set to release memoirs on their time in government. The revelations are as shocking as they are totally predictable. Gordon Brown was ‘brutal and volcanic’. Tony Blair described dealing with Brown as like ‘having dental treatment without anaesthetic’. Ed Balls was Brown’s attack dog, with his violent poodle sidekick Shriti Vadera, and his wife Yvette Cooper doing the reconnaissance work. David Miliband was up for deposing Brown and becoming leader, and Darling was down with that. They bottled it, allegedly on Darling’s part down to ‘residual loyalty’. Brown was not so loyal to Darling, we now have confirmation that he tried to boot him out as chancellor in 2009. Most unsurprising of all is that a climate like this did not make for good government. Coupled with genuine ideological disagreements about the economy, Darling describes a ‘permanent air of chaos and crisis’ at the top.

So who cares? We’ve heard most of this before. There are extra details here and there that add to the overall picture of the times. The extent of ideological divide within the Labour party over solutions to the economic crisis is made slightly clearer, but not any more clear than the bumbling economic messages that have come from the party in a year where we have seen both Blairite Alan Johnson and Brownite Ed Balls as shadow chancellor. Perhaps some in the Labour party were clinging on to that last remaining source of pride of our final years in power, that we at least saved the banking system and brought the country back from the brink of economic depression. But now Mr Darling has even seized that from us. The process was a chaotic mess, riven with infighting, and essentially we were lucky that the cards fell in the right place at the right time.

So overall we haven’t learnt much, except possibly that things were worse than we thought. Even that things are worse than we thought, because many of the characters in the story of Labour’s demise from power still play a part in Labour’s narrative today. In the Observer last Sunday Andrew Rawnsley acknowledges that this memoir is not helpful for Labour right now, but argues that Darling has done ‘his party a service’, reminding them of the problems of the past and the traps they are still falling into at present. The truth worshippers of the world will side with Rawnsley. The truth must always prevail they argue, for it will lead to better outcomes for all in the long run.

I understand this argument, and often support it. Wikileaks is a perfect example. Criticised for jeopardising security and possibly even putting people in danger, I stand on the side of those who argue that exposing the secrets of the powerful challenges established practices, and can lead to long term reform for the good. Perhaps Alistair Darling’s memoirs will have the same effect. Already articles have been written this week challenging the ‘danger of big-man politics’, and it is conceivable that the more the absurdities of the working practices of the most powerful people in Britain are revealed, the greater public outcry there will be, and the stronger the chance of change.

Unfortunately in this case my partisan nature stands in the way of banking on this long term hope for the future. I cannot help but feel that Darling has put another serious dent in the electability of the Labour Party. But there is another feeling about the release of these memoirs that I cannot shake, and that is to do with the motive behind their publication. It reminds me of a question that often arose over the moral quandary of the Iraq War. Some, for obvious reasons, were totally opposed to military action. However, others, even on the left, did not object to the principle of invading Iraq to free them from a clearly brutal dictator, and yet questioned the motives. Why now? Why Iraq? No blood for oil.

This is obviously not to compare the release of Alistair Darling’s memoirs to the invasion of Iraq, but it is to question his motives for publication. In his interview with Andrew Marr on Sunday Darling insisted that he has written the book to pass on an important lesson of government: without a credible economic strategy a political party cannot remain in power. In other words, previously better coined by Bill Clinton, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’. No shit Alistair. Was releasing this blitheringly obvious insight really worth the downside of dumping your party in the dirt, and handing Messrs Cameron and Osborne enough ammo to divert the Labour message for another few months of their experimental economic mess? Could you not have had a private word with your buddies in the shadow cabinet to remind them of this? I fear this was not the real reason Darling released these memoirs now, and the real reason says a lot about him and the generation of politicians that he is part of.

Politicians have released memoirs before, but none so soon after government, and so brutally honest and destructive as the New Labour set. Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair, core figures of the New Labour years, and each set of diaries or memoirs more cutting than the last. To be fair all gave Gordon Brown the grace of government, but then let loose with total disregard for the future of their political party. A political party they know full well is tied up in the past. Most frustratingly a political party which should be fighting a winning battle right now against a Coalition facing more political protest, civil unrest, and negative economic indicators than your average year and a half old government. It’s clearly not the only issue, but Labour is being held back by its past, and the figures of that past are not doing the party any favours.

They would stress the importance of learning the lessons of history. They might even say that they were attempting to positively influence the present direction of the party. But they could do both without bitchy asides and stories of temper tantrums. Those are there for headlines, serialisation deals, and then book sales. Blair may have donated his advance and profits to The Royal British Legion but I’m sure his speaking tours made up for it. A generation of Labour politicians that put individualism at the heart of the party has made the ultimate individualistic choice, to sell out their colleagues, friends and the political party to which they have devoted their life’s work, because book sales are better now than they would be in a decade. You could read these memoirs to gain an insight into the values of New Labour, or you could read into the fact that New Labour’s core figures chose to publish them now.

Tinariwen - Tenere Taqhim Tossam (Four Tet Remix) Makes you...

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:35:40 +0100

Tinariwen - Tenere Taqhim Tossam (Four Tet Remix)

Makes you feel like you’re in the middle of a funky West African drum circle where Four Tet has snuck in a laptop and a subwoofer.

So much cross-border collaborative musical innovation right now, especially pushed forward by the electronic community. Damon Albarn’s musical collective DRC Music have produced another example below. It’s the essence of Re-Renaissance.

A wonderful BBC Radio 4 documentary called Soul Music tracking...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:35:00 +0100

A wonderful BBC Radio 4 documentary called Soul Music tracking the power of a song, from its writer to its singer to its subject, and all the others it touches along the way.

A particularly lovely song for this episode, Wichita Lineman, made most famous by country singer Glen Campbell, his full version below.

This episode took on a particular resonance when I saw this report on the BBC One O’Clock News this afternoon, detailing Glen Campbell’s preparations for his farewell tour. Not unusual for a 75 year old country music legend to bow out of the game after so many years at the top you might say, but when you consider that Glen Campbell is an Alzheimer’s sufferer, his farewell tour takes on a new significance. Truly touching stuff.