HAS THE LEFT LOST THE PLOT?

By julesallen in All posts Comments Off Tags: , , ,

There is a creeping feeling that the Left will never learn. If we look at the current presidential candidates from the Left in France and the US, Segolene Royal (who has secured the nomination for the Parti Socialiste) and Barack Obama (fast becoming the front runner for the Democrats), we’re entitled to scratch our heads. Put bluntly, in a post-Blair world, the Left is expecting the French to vote for a woman and the Americans to vote for a black man. When you look at the prevailing cultures of these two countries, this feels like asking a lot.

If you look at the candidates’ politics, then Royal is as neo-Blairite as a socialist politician could be and Obama’s opposition to troops in Iraq is populist while the rest is cover-all-bases centrist. But can we really expect people in these countries to look beyond the obvious?

The British Labour Party surely showed the way to secure power for the Left – a pure white bread middle class candidate with safe credentials. That way, thick people can feel safe voting for them and everyone else can sub-consciously feel the same way.

Well, no. These candidates are precisely what these countries, and Democracy, needs.

For what it’s worth, I think both will lose – be sacrificed on the altar of progress – but if Obama gets the nomination, an awful lot will be gained for the precedent set. The first black American candidate, the first woman through to the second round of voting in France. The French will rue the election of Sarkozy (as the Americans did Bush) but the seed of enlightenment will have been sown, the beginning of the end of centuries of backward thinking.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , ,

I caught Radio 2′s 1pm news bulletin while in a cab.  Needless to say, the most important news item in the world today is that it has snowed in the south east of England.

As part of its in-depth reportage of this vital event in history, the BBC Radio news department was broadcasting interviews with toddlers on the grounds that “recent mild winters mean that some children are experiencing snow for the first time.”

In other news: genocide, war, torture, starvation, poverty, yada, yada and yada.

Here’s Tom with the weather.

The Boomtown Rats’ second number one

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , ,

It takes a lot to get my dander up at all these days, let alone at 8.15 on a Monday morning but Jackie Ashley in today’s Guardian has managed it.

Tony Blair should not quit… No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses. Having called for Blair to hang up his boots on several occasions, mainly because of the disaster that is the Iraq war, I don’t believe he can walk off just now. To do so – despite the support for that idea from many in his party and, overwhelmingly, from the public – would be an admission of guilt over the loans-for-peerages affair. He, like the rest of us, must wait to see if there are more developments from Scotland Yard.

If I’ve understood Ms. Ashley’s argument correctly, there is apparently such a thing as being so unutterably appalling at your job and so mired in shady dealings that you can disprove the theory that nobody is indispensible.

This may finally explain my career trajectory.

Gordon Brown is not pushing him to stand aside immediately, and there is nobody else with the heft or willpower to make Blair bring forward his own timetable. Furthermore, a Blair resignation this month or next would actually make life harder for his party. It isn’t all farewell speeches. Even some of his harsher critics say he is needed for the final push to get the Northern Ireland parties back into a reconstituted assembly before the deadline of March 26. Once that is done, it would be sensible to announce to Labour’s national executive committee exactly what his timetable will be, almost certainly involving stepping down after the May elections. That way he takes the rap (and rightly so) for the May election results, and still leaves time for the new leader to bed in well before the autumn conference season.

No.

Just no.

Fuck right off.

If Gordon Brown doesn’t fancy the challenge of some unfavourable local election results, he’s not up to the top job period and we should hand it to someone who is.  Only the Northern Ireland argument holds any water whatsoever: Billy Liar can stay until then but then that’s that.

Mr. Tony Blair has landed himself in this mess.  It is the cumulative result of his refusal to accord appropriate respect to Parliament, to the British electorate, to the law, to the United Nations Charter and – above all – to the truth.  A man so selfishly, mendaciously cavalier with other people’s lives does not deserve to choose the timing of his exit: he deserves The Gong Show treatment.

Mr. Blair may have delivered three election victories (though, under the leadership the Tories had in 2001 and 2005, he should arguably have won even more decisively than he did) but he has not delivered three successful administrations.

Even if one accepts the hypothesis that Blair’s first Government did more good than harm (and I have been known to so when in a very good mood and after a couple of glasses of particularly agreeable sherry) it still failed to meet 48 of 229 manifesto pledges, including failures to reduce waiting times for cancer treatment, reduce the number of cars on the road, hold a referendum on proportional representation, eliminate mixed sex hospital wards, and – ahem – “tackle the unacceptable levels of anti-social behaviour and crime on our streets”.  That administration also saw the unravelling of the “pretty straight kind of guys” facade thanks to the like of Peter Mandelson and Keith Vaz and breathed its last upon a funeral pyre of hundreds of thousands of burning cows.

In 2001′s manifesto Labour flat out lied about university tuition fees and thus began the slide towards today’s farce.

There should be no room in British politics for liars, delusionists and zealots.  It follows, therefore, that there is no longer any room in British politics for Mr. Tony Blair.

“It does me good like it bloody well should.”

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , ,

Maybe they’ve realised that they’re a minority interests channel and this particular activity therefore doesn’t fit within their remit…?

Channel 4 has postponed transmission of its “wank week” programming in a bid to avoid further controversy in the aftermath of the Celebrity Big Brother racism row.

The network’s short season of three late night documentaries about masturbation was to have been broadcast next month, but has now been taken out of the schedule.

They are expected to be broadcast at a later date, but it is understood they may be broadcast separately and certainly not as part of a branded wank week season.

There is said to be concern at senior levels within Channel 4 about the negative publicity the masturbation documentaries have already attracted.

Mr. Pitiful

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A couple of months into this venture it has surprised me how little I have posted on the subject of music, given its dominance in my life.

For instance, the failure of my 250Gb LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface on Monday night, taking with it (among other things) my 125Gb iTunes music library, was the first event of 2007 to reduce me to an incoherent blubbering mess. A large part of my weekend will be spent seeking to rectify the situation; if that venture proves unsuccessful, a large part of my February salary will be spent engaging the services of a data recovery outfit. (And before any clown mentions the word “backup”, I have a backup: I just haven’t refreshed the backup for a couple of months, that’s all.)

When the Minister’s wife had her iPod “burglarised” last week, she was a bit miffed but got on with life.  If the Minister’s iPod had gone, we would have had to have a lengthy period of official mourning and at least a couple of days off work.

Yesterday, a colleague’s early morning remark had The Beatles’ A Day In The Life replaying in my head all day long, with particular emphasis on that final E major, three-piano chord (which, incidentally, sounds amazing re-mastered on the new Love album when played loud through a pair of these).  Today, for reasons that are not entirely obvious, the Minister’s internal jukebox is stuck on Joe Tex’s Show Me (“Show me a man that’s got a good woman/I’ll show you a man that goes to work hummin’…”).

The recent news of The Police’s reunion caused a little frisson in my corner of the open plan, while word of Crowded House’s imminent new album and tour rendered all efforts at work for the rest of that day entirely futile.

To a large extent, it starts and ends for me with The Beatles: if you’re going to strand me on a desert island with a solar powered iPod that only has enough room for a dozen or so albums, please make them the official Beatles releases.  If Apple’s Superbowl advert on Sunday night heralds the launch of a Beatles iPod, as widely rumoured, there’s a decent likelihood I will be queuing overnight to get one.

After The Beatles come a plethora of acts and genres that fill up the rest of the My Top Rated playlist.

I am currently going through something of a soul phase. (If we’re talking Lottery win-sized Wish Lists, have a butcher’s at this. The 1966 release is out now: in that year, 75% of all the singles Motown released made the charts. Re-read that last sentence again and then have a bit of a lie down.)

While Tamla Motown went for – and located with absolute precision – the commercial pulse, the smaller, less showy Stax label was really where the soul was at.  And whether Motown likes to admit it or not, there would have been no What’s Going On had it not been for the likes of Respect Yourself.

Imagine this:

In spring 1967 British audiences got the opportunity to experience the Stax Revue for the first time. The 13-date tour boasted a wealth of the label’s talent – Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Arthur Conley, Carla Thomas and Eddie Floyd – performing with the musicians who had recorded dance-floor and jukebox favourites such as “Knock on Wood” and “You Don’t Know Like I Know”.

In an age when the word is overused to the point of meaninglessness, to witness the Stax Revue must have been amazing.

I’m waffling.  I don’t know where this is going.  This is why I don’t write about music – I can’t. 

There’s an interview in the new issue of Mojo with George Martin in which he is far more eloquent about music’s etherealness.

Anyway, the above extract is from an article in today’s Independent by Gavin Martin celebrating Stax’s 50th anniversary. It’s worth reading.

And there’s a new series called Soul Britannia from the team behind 2005′s wonderful Soul Deep, starting tonight on BBC4.  Could be good.

I’ll get back to Joe Tex now.  S.Y.S.L.J.F.M…

Hackney

By BigBrother in All posts 2 Comments Tags: , ,

How journalism works, part 93592.

It was the classic Mail on Sunday double-page spread: “Shot and pushed in a ditch … How the Nazis slaughtered all but one of Natasha’s family”.

The feature told the story of BBC presenter Natasha Kaplinsky’s family, and how her grandfather Itzak was the only survivor.

However, the BBC has taken issue with one or two minor points in the story.

The corporation says that Itzak was not in fact Natasha’s grandfather.

And that it isn’t true that all of the rest of her family were killed.

And that it also isn’t true that those who did die were slaughtered in one mass execution by the Nazis at Slonim in Poland.

And just to ensure that the BBC completely disputes the story from the outset, the corporation has told the Mail on Sunday that it is far from certain that those family members who did die were “shot and pushed in a ditch”.

I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up.

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