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In musical terms, I had a peculiar summer: centred around four long interviews with the ex-members of Slade, the raw material for a feature in Mojo magazine. One-time guitarist and glam titan Dave Hill was like a one-man sub-plot in Saxondale; bassist and co-songwriter Jim Lea had required 20 years of therapy to get over the compromises involved in vast success but seemed to now be OK; and drummer Don Powell had moved to Denmark. Noddy Holder, meanwhile, met me at a London hotel and gave me three enlightening hours, which peaked with his explanation of their career-defining 1973 hit Merry Xmas Everybody. It was no work of yuletide hackery, he insisted; rather, it was intended to raise the country’s spirits in the midst of industrial meltdown, power outages and Ted Heath.

A week later, I pulled up at a set of Hereford traffic lights with Slade’s Greatest Hits on the car stereo, which duly reached the song whose chronic familiarity had long since bred indifference . But not this time: suddenly, I was about six years old, the 1970s were in full grim effect, and – even though it was mid-August – it was Christmas. “Look to the future now, it’s only just begun,” advised Noddy. And, in instinctive tribute to Slade’s shining genius, I actually – no, really – shed a tear.

John Harris

Happy whatever to you and yours.

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Davide, the great big bastard, has passed on the ‘What are the seven best things you did this past year?’ meme. It’s spreading faster than the clap at the Sun’s Christmas party.

Anyway, it’s going to be difficult to do this without sounding horribly smug and self-congratulatory so I might as well just get on with it. In no particular order…

• Getting asked to write for these guys. Like having Jim fix something for me.
• Getting asked to curate this.
• Getting an apology from former Tory leader Michael Howard. (He bumped into me with his bag at Victoria tube station.)
• Teaching my two kids to sing ‘French Foreign Legion‘ by Frank Sinatra by the simple expedient of subjecting them to it at every opportune moment. Now, a truncated troop of Von Trapps, we entertain ourselves by sweetly braying the crooning monster’s finest moment. (obligatory ‘I love my family’ entry)
• Oh, I don’t know. I found a forgotten fiver in a jacket pocket.
• Breaking the bank at Monte Carlo.
• Helping to kill this meme by not passing it on.

Update: I’m offering a new service: Meme Killer. If you have any annoying memes which you feel obliged to pass on but in fact hate, send them here and I will drown them like superfluous kittens.

Update update: Nosemonkey also nominated me. He’s an even bigger bastard. He insists I come up with another seven. Here goes.

• Having a go on Nosemonkey’s mother. Seven times.

The Prime Minister’s announcement this week that he wants a proper job after he leaves Number 10 was met with some approval. ‘It’s about bloody time,’ was the sane person’s response. ‘Whatever I do afterwards, it has to have real purpose to it,’ said Tony of his retirement plans. If he’d only said that all those years ago when he gave up being a lawyer to become a politician, we might not be in the mess we are now.

Meanwhile the Blair Premiership continued on its meandering, meaningless way, like an elderly, senile and incontinent tomcat looking for somewhere to pass away with a scrap of dignity. The Middle East was Tony’s destination to sprinkle the seasonal magic fairy dust of peace on earth and goodwill to all.

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Policy is replaced by narcissism. So, we stay in Iraq, not because we think we can win, but because it shows our enemies the kind of people we are. We scream about the War on Christmas, not because there is one, but because it’s a cipher for our thoughts about immigration. We fight a war on drugs, not because it’s winnable, but because it paints society’s disapproval of narcotic intoxication. We battle “benefit fraud”, not because it’s a sound strategy, but because we disapprove of people sitting on their arses all day at our expense.

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Sorry if you’ve missed the advent calendar but I suddenly remembered I bloody hate Christmas. However, the thought that calling Christmas ‘Winterval’ might annoy the small-minded cheered me up a bit, so the calendar’s back.

Today’s door (possibly Not Safe For Work) comes courtesy of Not Saussure, who you really should be reading if you aren’t already.

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During the Israel-Hezbollah war, Israel was accused by Human Rights Watch and numerous local and international media outlets of attacking two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances in Qana on July 23, 2006. Following these accusations, some websites claimed that the attack on the ambulances ‘never happened’ and was a Hezbollah-orchestrated ‘hoax,’ a charge picked up by conservative commentators such as Oliver North. These claims attracted renewed attention when the Australian foreign minister stated that ‘it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax.’

In response, Human Rights Watch researchers carried out a more in-depth investigation of the Qana ambulance attacks. Our investigation involved detailed interviews with four of the six ambulance staff and the three wounded people in the ambulance, on-site visits to the Tibnine and Tyre Red Cross offices from which the ambulances originated to review their records and meet with supervisors, an examination of the ambulances that were struck, an on-site visit to the Qana site where the attack took place, and interviews with others such as international officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross who were involved in responding to the attack on the night it happened.

On the basis of this investigation, we conclude that the attack on the ambulances was not a hoax: Israeli forces attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances that night in Qana, almost certainly with missiles fired from an Israeli drone flying overhead. The physical and testimonial evidence collected by Human Rights Watch disproves the allegations of a ‘hoax,’ made by persons who never visited Lebanon and had no opportunity to assess the evidence first-hand. Those claiming a hoax relied on faulty conjectures based on a limited number of photographs of one of the ambulances.

more here

There’s been two dismally cock-eyed performances from the Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in the last week.

First up was an interview in the current New Stateman. Such interviews are generally pretty soft, yielding very little new or interesting and you can see why cabinet ministers queue up to do them.

But the interview with Beckett is different. On the matter of nuclear proliferation, ‘[t]he more we question her, the more confused Beckett becomes.’ On Iraq ’she offers little clarity’. Asked about extraordinary rendition:

We ask her whether she is confident that the Americans are now keeping her fully informed. She pauses, looks in vain to her aides for assistance, and then haltingly offers the following: “We are being told the things we need to know, which are the things that affect us. I’m confident of that. I would never venture to say that any of our allies has no secrets from us. Why should they not have secrets? We have secrets from them.” Her advisers shuffle uneasily in their seats.

Unfortunately, the interview is immediately dated by its description of the Foreign Secretary as ‘”Safe Hands” Beckett, the unflappable stalwart of the Today programme’. Today’s papers are all over her, shall we say, eccentric performance on Radio 4 yesterday morning. (Listen again, here – RealPlayer required). Mark Steel nails it in today’s Independent:

How about this for a piece of prose. Margaret Beckett, asked on radio yesterday whether she opposed the latest report that claims the war in Iraq has made the world more dangerous, said: “Well, yes, I might well, um, yes, it’s a very serious, um, discussion and it’s not, um, er, one for doing in two seconds early in the morning, but I would say that a lot of these contentions are flawed, er, but certainly the underlying thesis that we’ve been because it’s not just in America or Iraq the argument is that we don’t have any influence in Europe.”

Amongst other contradictions, she then went on to describe the ‘45 minutes from doom’ scaremongery that softened us up for cluster-bombing Iraq as having ‘little relevance‘.

Are things worse for this government than the outward signs currently indicate? Its behaviour over the last few months suggests nothing so much as that of a man who’s found he has just six months to live: blow the savings, run up the overdraft, insult some friends and lie to the rest – all because you know you’re not going to be around much longer.

The government has bowed to privacy concerns about a new NHS computer system and conceded that patients should be allowed a veto on information about their medical history being passed from their GP to a national database.

Following a Guardian campaign against the compulsory uploading of personal details to the system known as The Spine, Lord Warner, the health minister, will announce a plan that would allow individuals to review and correct their records and withhold them from the database.

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A brutal moment came last Tuesday for the 15-strong team from the Serious Fraud Office, led by assistant director Helen Garlick. The team’s leaders were ordered down to Lord Goldsmith’s offices in Buckingham Gate with their boxes of files. These contained the fruit of more than two years’ digging into allegations that huge Saudi bribes had been paid by arms group BAE Systems to get weapons deals.

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Thursday, this week, was not the country’s proudest day, that much is certain. First, tens of thousands of Daily Express readers’ hearts were broken when it was announced that Diana was killed mundanely by a drunken French dickhead and not offed thrillingly by crack MI6 assassins under the orders of Prince Philip. Then we were told that our post offices – 2,500 of them – are to be culled like so many poor unfortunate badgers.

And then, despite the planet sweating like George Bush at a spelling competition, the Government announced that both Gatwick and Stansted airports are to get new runways. And then the Government announced that moody arms deals and ‘the national interest’ with Saudi Arabia trumped bribery investigations and human rights. You know, trivial stuff like that. After another body was identified in Ipswich, the announcement that Tony Blair was questioned by police as part of a corruption investigation – the first Prime Minister in history to be so – was the crowning turd on a big stinking pile of them.

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Let’s face it, we love the Saudi government. Apart from the tenants of the Whitehouse nobody makes us swoon quite like the gentle souls that are the House of Saud. We woo them with multi-billion pound arms contracts and they blow up our skirts with oil and unspecified help in The War Against Terror. We then coquettishly blink away from their human rights abuses, even when they’re committed against our own citizens. It’s a match made in heaven.

It’s been a long, stable relationship; one to make Iain Duncan Smith, with his fretting for the institution of marriage, proud. The two countries tied the knot in 1985 (although they’d been courting since the mid 1960s) after signing a pre-nuptial agreement. The deal was known as Al Yamamah – ‘The Dove’ – for that added dash of romance.

With doves of course being synonymous with peace, it was therefore obvious that Al Yamamah involved us selling the Saudis billions of pounds worth of weapons. Now, the British arms industry is special; our other so-called strategic industries – shipbuilding, coal and steel for example – have been gently ushered into oblivion and their workers ushered into call centres or onto incapacity benefit.

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More on this hopefully later, but in the meantime here’s the initial dirt. They certainly pick their moments. And other depressingly overused epigrams.

Remember this?

Saudi Arabia has given Britain 10 days to halt a fraud investigation into the country’s arms trade – or lose a £10 billion Eurofighter contract.

Well, it took just a little over ten days. Here’s this:

The Serious Fraud Office is discontinuing its investigation into a multi-billion pound arms deals with Saudi Arabia, it has been announced.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said the decision had been made in the wider public interest, which had to be balanced against the rule of law.

‘It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest,’ apparently. Just what this wider public interest entails other than the massively subsidised (at the UK taxpayers expense) jobs in the British defence industry and the flogging of weapons to an oppressive regime, isn’t clear.

From now on, upon hearing the words ‘rule of law’ trip from the mouth of a New Labour hack, the urge to spit will be nigh on irresistible.

More festive cheer courtesy of Tim Ireland.

You are cordially invited to a public carol service in Parliament Square at 7pm on Wednesday the 20th of December 2006.

This inclusive service will contain both Christian and secular verse, and is expected to last no more than an hour.

Candles and song sheets will be made available, with donations going to Medical Aid for Iraqi Children.

Please note that if you attend this carol service, it will classify as a spontaneous demonstration (of faith, hope, joy and/or religious tolerance) and there is a possibility that you will be cautioned or arrested under Section 132 of the Serious and Organised Crimes and Police Act (2005).

Click here for more information.

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Merrick says very nice things about The Blog Digest:

There’s all you want from decent blogging; unbridled personal opinions expressed with eloquence and verve, ignored angles on big stories, entirely ignored but important stories, poignancy, stridently defended partisanship and scalp-tinglingly good swearing.

…

Half an hour browsing the book and the lifelessness of much of the mainstream media is painfully obvious to the point where I find it difficult to be arsed with it.

He also links to some of the pieces in the book so you can get an idea of what’s in there.

I like this idea a lot.

Blogs are like newspapers in, at least, this one respect: the most popular aren’t necessarily the best. I read quite a few blogs whose writing makes me want to spit (they’re so good) but their visitor stats make me want to weep (they’re so poor).

Although, as has been said before, when it comes to blogs it’s largely a question of who is reading them rather than how many (the other writing opportunities that Chicken Yoghurt has brought me are inversely proportionate to my visitor figures, for instance), wider exposure doesn’t hurt anybody.

I hold the – possibly naive – view that, with blogging being a peer-reviewed medium (via linking, comments, trackbacks etc), the quality will, generally, out. Blogpower is another way of helping that process along.

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This can’t be said enough when ‘embattled’ Christians/Jews/Muslims/A N Other Faith start banging on about how their religion is under threat/attack/a cloud: Isn’t your God supposed to be, like, omnipotent. If he’s as all powerful as you claim he is, won’t he be able to shrug off a few people calling Christmas ‘Winterval’ (if such persons exist)?

You know, if he’s the one true God and all that.

If you’re so sure of your facts, why worry? (‘the facts are always more interesting,’ as religious rent-a-gob Ann Atkins said on Radio 4 this morning.)

Facts. If being a good Christian (in the current instance of ‘Christmas Under Attack’ faux-hysteria) is about being honest and truthful, why try to further your agenda via lies and right-wing demagoguery?

Or is this more about one’s personal vanity rather than God’s delicate sensibilities? ‘Oh, look at me ostentatiously defending my faith. Aren’t I a good Christian? Watch me spend money I haven’t got on crap I don’t need in order to honour the baby Jesus’. If that’s the case, somebody needs to go back to Sunday School.

And what the hell was Jack Straw, thinking about:

If I may speak on [the angel] Gabriel’s behalf, I’m very clear on his view for 2006. Put the tinsel in the office.

You know, I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find tinsel mentioned anywhere in Nativity story. This guy used to be Foreign Secretary and now he’s claiming to speak on behalf of an angel. Did he ask Gabriel’s advice on the eve of the Iraq war, do you think? Let’s hope not because it would put the whole notion of divine omniscience into question. That’d shake your faith rather more than a bout of fictional political correctness gone mad, wouldn’t it?

What is wrong with this country?

(The always excellent Oliver Burkeman has yet more. The poor sod deserves a medal.)

Update: Jeff Randall, on the other hand, is hysterical. And I don’t mean synonymous with ‘hilarious’. Don’t forget, he got paid for what looks like an article inspired by urban myths he found on Google. Had he been a blogger he’d probably now be considering retirement after the deluge of abuse that he would have doubtlessly received (and indeed does receive, of a fashion, in the comments under his piece – the comments agreeing with him are another matter and yet further evidence of how squalid white middle-class people are when they try to fool themselves that they are oppressed).

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Let’s face it, as a nation, we’re on a bit of a downer at the minute, aren’t we? Where once Britain produced ships and steel and coal, we now produce buy-to-let landlords and website designers and call centre workers.

So, is it any wonder that Tony Blair wants to put some oomph back into the country’s spirits. Sure, our manufacturing industry is in the toilet and, thanks to the Iraq war, we’re a laughing stock on the world stage, but at least we’ll still be able to rain hot, radioactive death down on our enemies for generations to come. As if raining hot, ordinary death on our enemies hasn’t got us into enough trouble in the last few years.

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“We’re not going to have a war, we’re going to have the appearance of a war,” says the cynical spin doctor in David Mamet’s screenplay for the 1997 movie Wag The Dog, about an imaginary conflict created to whip up support for an ailing president. But he might equally have been talking about the 2006 war on Christmas – a war that tells us much about the growing politicisation and sense of entitlement among religious groups in Britain, but which turns out to have been almost entirely invented.

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