A thought struck me when reading about the latest crackdown in Tibet that we’re going to turn a blind eye to so as not to spoil the running and jumping about in Beijing this summer.

The monks from the Sera monastery were surrounded by more than 1,000 armed police who fired tear gas into the crowd and used electric prods to disperse the protesters.

If Tibet were permitted to enter a team this year they’d clean up. You’ve never seen anyone do the 100 metre dash like a Tibetan monk with a Chinese riot cop after him.

We should borrow the tactics. Chase Dwayne Chambers with an electric prod. That’ll make the bugger run. Every time our hockey team miss the goal, tear gas them. That’ll focus minds. Drag our gymnasts about by their arms. They’ll be extra limber. That way, we might even win a medal or two.

I know it sounds harsh, but we must tolerate all manner of abuses to make sure this year’s Olympics goes off without a hitch. Running and jumping and our national honour demand it.

The US State Department’s 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices is out.

In it there are both brickbats and bouquets for those at the sharp end of The War Against Terror. A feedback sandwich you might say.

“Despite President Musharraf’s stated commitment to democratic transition, Pakistan’s human rights situation deteriorated during much of 2007,” said the annual report released on Tuesday.

‘Six of of ten, see me’, in other words.

The US itself doesn’t feature in the State Department’s list. I think it’s like the Eurovision Song Contest where you’re not allowed to give points to your own side.

So, it’s down to others to judge the US government on its human rights record. How’s it getting on? Well, it’s a little hard to say.

The U.N. investigator on torture said on Tuesday the United States had denied his request to visit U.S.-run jails in Iraq and insisted a visit could help clear its legacy of the prison abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib.

It’s a canny tactic and one that Andy Abraham should adopt in Belgrade later this year. He could refuse to perform his soulless, insulting piece of dreck. That way nobody can judge if it’s any good and he can declare himself winner at the end.

This Guardian doodling thing is a direct steal from the vastly superior kid’s Anti-Colouring Book. The Guardian have just made it appealing to adults. Mature infantilisation - that’s an oxymoron you could build a society on. Oh, we already have.

Not only that, but the page in the Guardian’s pale imitation that wants you to write and rewrite ‘I love my job’ until ‘you really believe it’, is just evil if you ask me. I’m going to give my copy to the first call centre worker I meet, you know, to cheer them up.

I realise I’m in an ever dwindling group, but this idea that white people in this country are somehow oppressed is a load of old crap. It’s pure perception created by the right-wing media and vote-grabbing politicians. And BBC 2’s White season looks like shaping up to do the same.

If you ask me, a venture that advertises itself using tasteful, epic photos of Enoch Powell and promotes wife-beating drunk George Best as a ‘working class hero’ is automatically suspect. Even the name ‘White’ is gratuitously provocative, gratuitously divisive.

Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to reality television show freaks, to anthropological curiosities in National Geographic. Here’s some knobbly-faced salts of the earth in a Bradford working men’s club. Here’s every little-brained, little Englanders’ worst nightmare, a white girl in a hijab.

Here come the Poles to steal our jobs, women and dignity. Let’s take a trip to putative BNP launchpad, Barking. If the programmes don’t feature some wildlife footage of scantily-clad honkys puking in a gutter outside a nightclub, I’ll run round the town with my trousers round my ankles.

Not only that, what’s the appeal to working class viewers? Where are the stories of working class boys and girls done good? Where’s the message of ‘you can do it too, if you pick up a book or go to a night school class or join the Open University or whatever’. Where’s the tales of ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’.

Where’s the aspiration? Not the woolly, fuzzy, meaningless kind as espoused by Gordon Brown or David Cameron but the proper, concrete ways for working-class people to escape their so-called oppression.

I don’t want to play the prolier-than-thou card but I was the first person in my family to go to university from generations of steelworkers, coal miners and farmers. It’s doable. Forget the academic side of it. The independence, the social skills, the new outlooks and ways of thinking you get are beyond price. And that’s before we mention making friends who teach you how to hold your drink. Why further and higher education isn’t sold like that is a mystery to me.

Whatever happened to ‘God helps those who help themselves’ or ‘I’m a lucky person and the harder I work, the luckier I get’? The notion of the dignity of the poor is repugnant, but this wallowing in a perceived victimhood is equally difficult to watch and the BBC should be ashamed for fuelling it.

There are escapes, if you feel you need to escape, even small ones like the public library or BBC4 or having Wikipedia’s daily article emailed to you (thanks, Chris). Night classes are cheap, and cheaper if you’re on some kind of benefit. We need broader horizons not narrower views.

(Christ, that last line was terrible but I hope you get the gist.)

Poor Margaret Hodge. You have to feel sorry for her. She sees anti-intellectualism and knee-jerk nationalism stalking across the land like fifth and sixth horsemen of the apocalypse and thinks, ‘I’d like some of that action.’

She made the mistake, however, of choosing the wrong target. If she’d laid into that nest of communists, the complacent, middle-class bastion Radio 4 or the pernicious, inquisitorial, politically correct Race Relations ‘Industry’, she’d have been quids in and a grateful nation would have carried her around on their shoulders. But no, she rashly chose the Proms.

The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events – I’m thinking in particular of the Proms, but it is true of – is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this. I know that this isn’t about making every audience completely representative, but if we claim great things for our sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect that they will do that wherever they can.

She’s right when she says ‘this isn’t about making every audience completely representative’. It’d be difficult to do that without herding a demographically balanced crowd into the Royal Albert Hall at gunpoint every September. This is about changing the content of the event to make it more appealing to a broader audience. In other words making the common dominator that bit lower.

(more…)

There is much to say about the tawdry stunt of Prince Harry in Afghanistan. That the MoD should gleefully leap on the opportunity to produce such revolting propaganda is only to be expected.

That the media, after all this time and all it should have learned, lapped it up like a dog returning to its own vomit, should be more surprising but isn’t really. There’s a twinge of sympathy for the Prince, I suppose - he’s a puppet in all this. But then that was the role allotted to him at birth and he’ll be one until he dies.

You think he’d be aware of that by now. The fact that he says that he needed to go to Afghanistan and call in air-strikes in order to feel ‘normal’ would suggest not. The way this has been choreographed down to the minutest detail I’m amazed we’re not seeing photographs of the less-than-private shits Harry boasts he’s been taking over the last ten weeks. Fancy that, a member of the royal family needing to defecate! Lawks! I fort that kind of fing was only for the loiks of me and you, Mary Parpins.

Anyway, Marina Hyde in the Guardian says it all better:

On the one hand, it was nice to see Prince Harry in a British army uniform, as opposed to one of Hitler’s. It’s a little bit like Pokemon, really. I’m hoping he’ll give us a highly collectible Hutu warrior snap soon. Gotta catch ‘em all! On the other, is there anyone over Pokemon-playing age who believes it was really worth it? The sheer number of man-hours and money lavished on allowing one young man to experience job satisfaction is mind-boggling. It has to be the most fatuous use of Ministry of Defence resources since Geoff Hoon.

According to the executive director of the Society of Editors, who helped establish the controversial media blackout, it was not designed to mislead readers and viewers but to ultimately give them “a deeper insight into a new side of Prince Harry”. But how completely intriguing. And yet, is he basically still a fairly dim, fairly affable chap, you might ask? It would appear so. But he’s being fairly dim and fairly affable in Afghanistan. Or rather, he was until the news broke, at which point a detailed, prearranged plan to get him out - how many logistical brains are wasted on this nonsense? - was mobilised. So at least we have an exit strategy for Prince Harry, if not for the actual war.

Wouldn’t it have been cheaper and caused less damage to the psychological well-being of the nation to just give him an X-Box and a copy of ‘Call of Duty’?

I like it that Internet hack Matt Drudge got his Prince Harry in Afghanistan ’scoop’ from Australian supermarket rag, New Idea.

He’s moved on from the literally soiled goods of Monica Lewinsky’s dress to the literary soiled goods of second hand stories.

Join the Jim Bliss Fifty:

It goes without saying that I’ll be avoiding the writing of Steven Wells from now on (any music writer who can write: “If a band are any good at all they’ll play their best toon first. And that toon will deliver a killer hook in the first 30 seconds…” clearly doesn’t have the faintest idea about music, no matter how many singles he reviewed for the NME). And I’m unlikely to encounter Benedict Brogan again until the next time his drivel is highlighted by a decent writer. But between them, they’ve dragged the reputation of mainstream journalism even further into the pit of filth in which it’s been wallowing. And I’ll be reading The Guardian’s Arts Section with a little more scepticism in future. Can we assume their book reviewers bothered to progress past Chapter 1? Did the film critic walk out after the first five minutes? Seems like it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Read the rest

There’s a protest on the roof of Parliament about the proposed third runway at Heathrow airport. Benedict Brogan, political editor of the Daily Mail, isn’t happy. He picked up one of the paper aeroplanes the protesters were throwing to find…

…it’s a photocopy of an email from someone at BA to a Dept of Transport official about something complicated that I can’t be bothered to read…

…thus neatly summing up the problem with most modern journalists: things are complicated and they can’t be bothered. Any government minister wanting to sneak something dodgy past the Daily Mail now knows what to do: get folding.

We know New Labour and dignity parted company some time ago, but they will insist in continuing to poo on the reputation of politics in this country. Here’s Former Home Secretary and serial resigner David Blunkett using his ’skills’ to their full potential. That is, whoring them to a fifth-rate television channel:

In what is billed by Five as a “bold social experiment”, Banged Up will see Blunkett head up the “parole board” of a “prison” that mixes reformed offenders with young people on the cusp of a life of crime.

Just what makes Five think Blunkett’s an expert on prisons is anybody’s guess. Former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham described Blunkett as ‘not fit’ to be in charge of Britain’s prisons. I wonder if Blunkett will become hysterical and order his televisual charges to be machine-gunned if they fail to do his bidding.

He talks of the programme ‘creating a grasp of reality’ which is at least in keeping with the New Labour ethos of fabricating truth. I wonder if we’ll see the true reality of British prisons: racist and Asian prisoners mixed together, two suicides a week, and 70 per cent of Blunkett’s lags being mentally ill. And for added realism, in the second series, 75 percent of the ‘young people on the cusp of a life of crime’ will be invited back.

Anyway, never mind that. How about a sequel called Knocked Up where Blunkett impregnates married socialites? The possibilities are endless. Cocked Up with Blunkett trying to apply for a job when his Criminal Record Bureau check wrongly brands him a nonce.

Made Up where Blunkett examines the Blair government’s case for war in Iraq. Blown Up where Blunkett has to help clear unexploded British cluster bomblets from an Afghan village.

How about some ideas in keeping with Blunkett’s level of dignity? Pissed Up where each week Blunkett and a celebrity see who can wee the highest up a wall. Or Zipped Up where Blunkett has to use a public urinal while wearing boxing gloves.

Then there’s Dried Up where Blunkett ponders where his credibility went. And Time’s Up where Blunkett puts us all out of his misery and retires.

(Thanks to Derrick for the link.)

Update: Then there’s Softened Up where Blunkett is kidnapped, flown to Syria and then water-boarded. And Ripped Up where he examines what ten years of New Labour has done to 800 years of civil liberties.

There’s not much to add to the story of the missing draft of the Iraqi dossier finally being released. The New Statesman, who have been following the story all along have some good coverage.

The general lack of media coverage and analysis across the board was a little surprising considering some of the more high profile casualties were newspaper editors and BBC director generals. But then I suppose ‘Compliant media treated like dickheads and used as propagandists by still-at-large war criminals‘ is a story most editors would balk at.

I doubt many of them wanted to be reminded - and to remind their readers - of their complicity. Journalists, eh? What was it Humbert Wolfe said?

So, 99 per cent of the respondents to The Sun’s survey on capital punishment are calling for its return. That’s ‘nearly’ 100,000 people.

The Sun’s been struggling with its circulation of late but let’s be generous and say it sells ‘nearly’ three million copies a day. That being the case, The Sun’s survey reveals that just 3.3% of its readership supports the return of capital punishment.

Or 0.16 per cent of the entire population.

It’s a trick they’ve used before, of course. And you can’t really blame them, this being a better* headline…

…than this…

* ‘Better’ in this case meaning its ability to shift more copies, and nothing to do with its accuracy or quality.

Update: Tim does a better analysis.

Jane Garvey, the new presenter of Women’s Hour says Radio 4 has ‘a massively middle class bent‘. Now, Garvey came to her new job from Five Live’s Drive, an execrable programme where she exchanged inanities with the woeful Peter Allen over a platudinous presentation of the day’s events*. On that form, I’m left thinking that Garvey’s definition of middle class starts with people who get out of the bath to go to the toilet.

You know, I’m not a particularly well-educated or well-read person. I’m not what you’d describe as an intellectual. But one thing I am, in my own way, is a self-improver, an auto-didact. The government wants us to be drones, repeating our allotted task in order to service the economy until we die. You want to smell the roses? You’re going to have to grow them yourself.

I listen to Radio 4 not because I’m middle class - I’ll kill any man who describes me as such - but because it’s didactic. And massively entertaining. Five Live is rotting my mind. Five of the sweetest words in the English language are ‘Victoria Derbyshire is on holiday’. Garvey’s suggestion seems to be that instead of elevating the lower classes, Radio 4 should sink to their level. She can fuck right off, frankly. And the mouth-breathers she rode in on.

Jesus, even an ill-educated prole like me can see the cultural desertification that’s creeping up on us. As Jim Bliss said about the reaction to Rowan William’s speech - it’s anti-intellectualism. And the frustrating thing is, it wouldn’t take much to reverse it. My life was improved forever when, as a student in Huddersfield, I found the second-hand bookshop in the town centre. The prices were cheap enough for speculative purchases and very soon I’d put down the James Herberts and the Frederick Forsyths and was reading Thomas Hardy, Joseph Heller, Umberto Eco, Graham Greene. The world suddenly seemed massive and inspirational.

I know life’s hard and day are long and people are knackered but just once I wish someone would put down that novel about the SAS and pick up Catch-22 (it’s about war ‘n’ shit). Or drop The Da Vinci Code and pick up Foucault’s Pendulum (it’s about conspiracies ‘n’ shit). Or Our Man in Havana (it’s a comedy spy thriller ‘n’ shit). They’re more of a challenge to read, granted, but then they don’t talk to you the way Five Live talks to you either.

Try an Elmore Leonard - they’re like crack. When I discovered his books I read a dozen on the trot. His plots, characters and writing are like nothing else. And he doesn’t sound like Patricia Hewitt sending you to bed without any supper.

If Robert Sharp’s right and we only get time to digest 624 books before we die, why not try a little chateaubriand between the burgers? Try Radio 4 between 6.30 and 7 pm on a weekday or on a Saturday morning (skip Fi Glover though, she’s from Five Live and shit as well). Turn off Victoria Derbyshire’s daily racist and yahoo magnet and go and smear yourself with your own faeces instead. Trust me, you’ll feel like an intellectual titan.

* In the run up to the Iraq war, I remember one day them going on and on about a dead badger than had been painted over by someone painting double yellow lines on a road. On and on and on and on and on and on they went about this sodding badger. I emailed in and said: ‘We might be at war soon and you keep going on about a badger? You’re at the cutting edge of the news agenda.’ And they read it out!

One of the bigger questions for me about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech about Sharia law is: do I really care?

As a bitter ex-Catholic and concrete-certain athiest, at my harshest I regard all this little more than the captain of one set counter-Enlightenment values speaking out on another set of counter-Enlightenment values. Let them get on with it, people in Britain are caring less and less about religion, and we’ll all be foaming at the mouth over something else this time next week.

But then you see the array of forces ranged against the Archbishop and it’s difficult indeed not to immediately and automatically jump to his defence out of an obligation of pure opposition. It’s a knee-jerk reaction of its own. Indeed, knees have been thrashing so furiously over the last few days, it makes you sorry they weren’t all wired up to a fancy new knee dynamo. You could have lit Birmingham for a week. If we could have harnessed the pig-ignorant self-righteousness as well, we could have powered Scotland as a bonus.

Just look at them though, queuing up to have a pop at Rowan Williams. The ‘I’m not racist but’-ers and the ‘I am racist, and’-ers, the bandwagon jumpers and the vested-interests, the wilfully ignorant and the woefully ignorant, newspapers with no more care than tomorrow’s circulation, minority audience 24 hour news channels trying to outdo each other, radio phone-in shows and speak-your-brains comment boards entertaining the barely articulate and the barely literate, those who use political correctness as a stick to beat rather than words to sooth.

Then there’s the fools, tools and mules, bloggers, muggers and self-tuggers, demagogues, demi-demagogues and attack dogs, the has-beens, never-beens and wannabes, the purblind, unsound of mind and the axe to grind. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. How many, you have to wonder, have read the speech or heard the interview? Or have a view of Sharia law beyond some vague imagining of hand-chopping and women-stoning?

The thing is, the beauty of all this is that the people trying to knock the Archbishop’s hat off don’t have to have heard or read Rowan Williams’ views. They’re all confident in their safety in numbers. They can think to themselves, ‘well, someone here must have heard him and read him, so I don’t have to’, ignoring the motives of a lot of the people at the head of the throng. The wisdom of crowds, my arse. It’s a mob, pure and simple: most of them are simple and very few are pure. Hmmm, it turns out the Archbishop is a weapon with a multitude of uses - you can use him as a stick to beat anyone you like.

And now ‘they’ are talking of getting rid of Williams. Be careful what you wish for. Always keep an eye on the guy second in line. Do you want to ditch Gordon Brown only to get Jack Straw, an altogether more terrifying prospect? Ditch Cameron and risk a Gove or similar? Ditch Williams and get a Nazir-Ali? That said, those alternatives would be a boon to the legion of Islam-baiters who turned up this week. Straw with his fear of the veil, Gove with his Celcius 7/7, and Nazir-Ali with his ‘no-go areas‘.

And in the middle are Britain’s Muslims, the vast majority you never hear from, never see, and who - one would swear - just want to be left alone to get on with their lives. I wonder how many are feeling just that little bit less welcome and just that little bit more wary right now. Someone should tell them that as long a they continue to serve us our curries and keep their convenience stores open all hours (and whatever else it is popular imagination permits them to do) and seek no influence on ‘British’ ‘values’ - the glory of which we’ve seen on full display in the last week - they’ll be safe enough.

Update: Daniel Davies, as ever, rocks.

Update updated: Blimey! (via PDF.)

Me and the Mrs are off to London for the day and while I’m there I’ve set myself a little project.

Tom at Blairwatch has a string of headlines about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s unfortunate statements of yesterday (I say unfortunate not because I necessarily disagree with him but because he seems to have massively underestimated the response he was going to get from lazy journalists, political vested interests and wannabe demagogues).

The headlines, according to Tom, are majorly wide of the mark. I’m not going to comment further until I’ve allowed myself the luxury of listening to the Archbishop’s interview on the radio and read his speech. It’s an odd notion, admittedly, but I’m going to see if it works.

In the mean time, my project is to spend the day informing myself via nothing else than news bulletin and newspaper headlines to see how utterly ill-informed and mentally unbalanced I am by the end of the play. It’s dangerous, I know, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take to in order to get a feel for how media commentators and politicians operate and make their money.

I’ll attempt to document the journey with photos and notes. Wish me luck.

Remember Anna Mikhailova? She was the student journalist who, while on work experience, outed the Girl With A One-Track Mind.

Such resourcefulness has stood the cub reporter in good stead.

The Collings and Herrin podcast is ace.

I’ve owned this book for years…

…but looking at it this morning, I’ve only now realised how Dredd found the courage to defeat the invading army of Sovs.

He was pissed.

This guy is almost entirely right in what he’s saying. It’s just that he’s got absolutely no right whatsoever to be saying it,

I can’t shift this new tune by Nick Cave:

Cave lives in Brighton. I can help thinking that he’s seen me out and about because he’s definitely stolen my moves for this video.

(Via Warren Ellis)

The Independent’s website has had a makeover. It’s all right, nowt flash, and certainly better than the previous monstrosity. And let’s hope it’s a bit more robust than the last one which was up and down like a bride’s nightie. (Yes, I know I’m one to talk but then I’m not a multi-million pound media outfit).

There’s just one thing. The Indy’s web designers, in their wisdom, have changed the structure of the site’s permalinks again (they did the same with the last revamp as well). This means that any previous deep-linking from blogs or other sites to articles on the Independent’s website no longer work. Idiots.

Oh, boo hoo…

The government has abandoned plans to impose a pre-9pm ban on junk food TV advertising when it unveils its new anti-obesity strategy tomorrow, safeguarding more than £200m a year in TV advertising revenue.

No doubt there will be those who are upset, though I’m not sure why. Anyone who thinks they can appeal to an advertising executive’s sense of morality clearly needs to see a doctor.

You’d have more joy asking it to levitate above Birmingham than expecting the advertising industry to set aside the entrenched hatred of humanity that allows it to be so successful. And as for expecting this government to raise our kids, well, it’s doing such a good job with everything else, isn’t it?

So, what’s the solution? I’m afraid most people aren’t going to like it. Don’t want your children watching adverts trying to sell them an early death? Then don’t let them watch the channels showing those ads.

This might come as a surprise to some but there are television channels out there that don’t show adverts. Apart from that one that shows the Fantastic Four cartoon and Captain Scarlet, the commercial channels aren’t really worth watching anyway, are they?

Take some personal responsibility (remember that?). The kids nagging for a mechanically recovered burger or a bucket of antibiotic-and-abscess chicken? Say no. Go on, try it. Advertising execs aren’t forcing you to watch the adverts or buy the slop. They’re just laughing themselves sick in swanky bars while you and your porcine brood are blaming everybody but yourselves.

‘Michael Barrymore is to return to the limelight playing Spike Milligan in a stage drama about the comedian’s life,’ according to the BBC.

What next? OJ Simpson as Nelson Mandela?

There’s no denying that the Beijing National Stadium is an impressive building. Gordon Brown certainly seemed to enjoy his press conference there over the weekend.

The thing is, I can’t say I’m taken with the colour of the stadium as it is. It’s a sort of dirty grey. How did they get it like that? Was it Beijing’s smog (that Gordon mentioned it in passing during his photo opportunity)? Maybe the builders mixed into the concrete the ashes of their colleagues who’ve been killed (that Gordon didn’t mention in passing during his photo opportunity) during construction?

I don’t know about you, but dead builders seem quite a high price to pay for a bit of running and jumping about. The Chinese regime obviously think it’s a price worth paying to help rehabilitate its international reputation.

I suppose Peter Hain is too old to start digging up sports pitches again?