The Ministry Of Truth

I am concerned that recent posts may have been interpreted that I am somehow feeling more inclined towards the Conservative Party.

I feel I should point out that the likelihood of the Minister voting Tory remains as remote as ever.

First of all, there’s the nepotistic sleaze.

Then there’s the hypocritical sleaze.

And Posh Boy Dave’s general ineptitude and casual relationship with the truth.  (I particularly loved yesterday’s Steve Bell cartoon for the subliminal linking of PBD’s name with the word ‘coke’.)

And then, to remove any lingering doubt, there’s what the Minister refers to as the Rod Liddle Moment: the reason why you hate the despicable cunts in the first place.

(All four stories, incidentally, come from just today’s news media, however badly this week may be shaping up for Gordon Brown.)

So let’s be clear: the Minister still definitely dresses to the left.

He merely laments that no serious British politicians inform their tailors likewise.

Genius.  Absolute bloody genius.

In the restaurant section of the weekly Parisian tourist guide, Pariscope, there is a class of restaurant defined as hors-catégorie (“uncategorisable”) which denotes the dozen or so very finest gastronomic establishments – Lucas-Carton, La Tour d’Argent, Lasserre etc. Jean-Pierre Melville is the one post-war French filmmaker who could be described as hors-categorie. He belonged to no movement or group, operating between 1950 and 1970 as a sort of lone gunman in the industry, with no contemporaries either inviting or deserving of comparison.

He occupies a unique position in French Cinema, partly in that his films are inspired almost entirely by American film noir but principally because he created a singular style of brutal minimalism which ran counter to every instinct present in French Cinema before or since. The Nouvelle Vague troika of Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, who borrowed Melville’s occasional habit of “reportage-style” shooting for their early films, were far too self-conscious about their need to make artistic statements to ever come close to matching the stripped-down, fatalistic brilliance of Melville’s best work.

Apart from his resistance drama l’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows, 1969) which on its re-release by the BFI a couple of years ago, promptly gatecrashed most major film critics’ Top Ten Films of 2006, almost all of Melville’s films deal with organised crime and in particular, heists. The depth Melville brings to these tightly-crafted genre pieces resides in the almost unbearable sense of restraint which pervades both the acting and cinematography. The actors internalise all emotion, speaking only when and to the extent that it is absolutely necessary to do so. The effect is deliberate and almost theatrical, but the action, when it comes, has twice the impact. The world he portrays is all the more powerful for what you do not see and hear than for what you do.

Few if any filmmakers in the crime-thriller genre have shown this same understanding of Cinema’s power to take the audience to a place and to keep them wondering what is happening and what will happen. By remarkable coincidence, the recent Cannes prizewinner: No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) provides what must be one of the strongest of modern examples of this. It is almost as if the audience is exhorted to feel the emotion that the actors will not display.

Those modern filmmakers who have discovered and loved Melville, in particular Walter Hill, Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch and the Hong Kong directors Ringo Lam and John Woo, manifest an obsessive need to pay homage through their work. Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is a devotional treatment of Melville’s existentialist masterpiece Le Samouraï (1967) a film which defined the brooding intensity of its star, Alain Delon. To borrow a football term, Melville was also a set-piece specialist, hence the existence of at least half a dozen contenders in his work for the title of SMIC.

It is almost be impossible to avoid the word ‘cool’ when describing Melville’s films, so I will not try. Yes, they are ‘cool’ (until something else is considered cool), but they are worth discovering because they are so much more. I’ve chosen a scene from his most famous film, Le Cercle Rouge (1970) in which the character of Corey (Alain Delon) having just been released from prison, has burgled the personal safe of the Marseille drug baron who put him there. He seeks late night recreation in a billiards club.

Blue Monday – the FTSE 100 share index is down 325.5 points on the day to close at 5,578: meltdown, crisis, panic, people throw themselves off City window ledges, Evan Davis weeps, it’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).

At the time of writing (Friday lunchtime) the FTSE stands at 5,929.  So it’s currently 26 points higher than it was on Monday morning.

Someone has this week made a LOT of money.

Unlike the bloke (who looks a lot like actor Paul Rudd) at Societe Generale, who managed to run up losses of £3.7 billion before he was rumbled.

As I’ve asked repeatedly and with increasing exasperation over my six years working in the financial services industry: what DO Compliance Officers do?

Nick Leeson is now the Chief Executive of Galway United Football Club.  Which is nice.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the week – when it was still only “shaping up to be another bad week for Gordon Brown” - I started keeping a tally of this week’s unenforced errors.

Polly Bloody Toynbee’s beaten me to the punch in today’s Guardian.  Even by the record new levels of impotence being achieved by this administration, it’s really not been their finest hour:

Blue Monday was prelude to the blackest week. The perfect storm began with the stock market tornado: never had so many lost so much so fast. Yesterday saw the first of Gordon Brown’s cabinet ministers to be brought down by undeclared donations. Here was a very avoidable calamity, if only Labour had cleaned up party funding before being devoured by it. How did Tony Blair’s woes not lead to instant reform? Global meltdown is politically manageable, but most of the government’s other woes this week are of its own making…

The very week that turbo-capitalism ate itself was the week that the government planned to give Northern Rock to Richard Branson or others, with no outright nationalisation that would guarantee taxpayers the profits as well as the risks – all for Labour’s fear of the n-word.

This was the week that the government gave even more money to the well-off, after a decade of undertaxing the soaraway rich and those very financiers who broke the banks with their rapaciousness. Long ago the then chancellor Nigel Lawson wisely aligned capital gains tax (CGT) and income tax so clever accountants couldn’t avoid tax by shuffling cash from one to the other. Foolishly, to please private equity, 10 years ago Brown cut CGT from 40% to 10%. Alistair Darling proposed raising it just a little to 18% – still lower than the 20% plus national insurance paid by any hospital cleaner.

This week he caved in to howls of protest from business, handing them back £200m. No one ever explained why business deserves tax cuts from Labour: first from 40% to 24%, and now to 18% – and for some to 10%. Buy-to-let and second homeowners get a CGT cut from 24% to 18% for no good reason – with no tax cut for care assistants and lowest earners. So did it make business love Labour? Of course not. As ever, they trousered the cash and spat back in Labour’s face.

In this same hurricane week the government for some reason chose to introduce its bill to lock up suspects for 42 days without trial, despite a mass rebellion on its back benches. And it has also emerged that 16 vast and vastly unpopular casinos will go ahead in the nation’s poorest boroughs: Brown’s noble gesture that established his moral compass turned out to mean only one casino cancelled. He said there were better ways to regenerate poor areas, so why change his mind?

In this same week Labour appeased Rupert Murdoch and co by suggesting that the BBC’s cash be cut and redistributed to other broadcasters. Labour badly miscalculated the power of wrathful lovers of Radio 3 and 4, along with the mighty popularity of the BBC – viewers and listeners rightly see a breach in the licence fee as an end of the idea of the BBC.

In this week, too, an unprecedented 22,000 police marched on the government over a pay increase that would have cost a paltry £30m. It was only the first revolt over Labour’s bid to hold down public pay to 2% while doing nothing and saying nothing about wealth: City bonuses hit some £7bn even in a crash year. The doubling of inheritance tax relief to £750,000, combined with the capital gains tax cuts, greatly fuelled inequality on Labour’s watch. In this week, even some City winners such as Sir Stuart Rose were queasily critical of the growing wealth divide between London and the rest. Labour said nothing.

Believe it or not, in this same week the home secretary said she felt unsafe walking London’s streets after dark and suggested electronic searches of children at school. Not surprisingly, no one believed that crime, including violent crime, had actually fallen by 40%, and that a smaller proportion of young people were committing offences as more stayed in education and apprenticeships. Why would Labour spend £2.7bn on Titan prisons for another 10,500 inmates if crime wasn’t rampant? In this week, too, yet another report found further education colleges starved of funds: those needing most help and vocational training get least, compared with A-level and university students.

Again in the same week, a military laptop was stolen with about 600,000 names and addresses of recruits. These losses happen often; but they resonate with our worst fears about the ill-fated ID card scheme, in deep trouble this as it was delayed for two more years – but has still not been scrapped.

Alas, in the same week Labour kicked away one great chance to restore some connection between people and politics. Dust was blown off the long-avoided review of electoral systems, which was slid into the House of Commons library on Hain resignation day with no recommendations and only a terse statement: “The government has no plans to change the voting system for elections to the House of Commons.”

So just 8,000 swing voters in key marginals decided this June 2010 election. Too late for Labour to rue the day its miserable tribalism threw away the chance to reshape politics and allow more parties into parliament, wrecking a chance to ally with the Lib Dems. If turnout was dismal in this election, it was hard to detect the difference between parties ya-booing the louder the more they pretended to be the same.

It is a shame that during this self-same week, by chance, an Ofsted report on children’s centres and extended schools gave a pretty glowing picture of their progress, almost all of them rated good or better. Here was Labour’s great landmark programme to support and protect children from birth, give them breakfast clubs before school and offer the same after-school activities and homework help that middle-class children take for granted. But Ofsted’s report went unreported anywhere, since the government itself never promoted its own best achievements.

What a week. Most of this bad news has been the government’s own fault. The opposition could only stand and gape in open-mouthed astonishment at such political vacuity and ineptitude.

As Michael White archly points out (also in today’s Harry Potter Bugle and Herald):

The curse of modern politics, where money, sex and personal misjudgment have displaced ideology at the heart of things, has struck again.

The surest sign that things are going tits up big time is when the usual bootfilling suspects run for the hills and frantically distance themselves from the imminent wreck.

Here’s a story that somehow (hmm…) didn’t make it into The Guardian or The Independent or The Times or The Daily Telegraph or onto the BBC:

Two prominent companies have pulled out of the procurement process for the controversial multi-billion pound identity card programme amid growing concerns that the government is planning to delay the roll-out of the project.

The Financial Times has learnt that the IT services company Accenture and the defence company BAE Systems have decided not to pursue contracts linked to the biometric identity card system, with IT experts warning that some suppliers are growing increasingly frustrated with the government’s indecision.

The Home Office said last night that the move by the two companies was the result of a “competitive dialogue process” with potential suppliers ahead of the announcement of a short-list of companies who later this spring will be invited to tender for contracts.

“We believe we are still on track for a framework agreement, a contract which creates a list of pre-qualified suppliers, along with a set of agreed contractual terms,” the Home Office said.

Accenture said a “mixture of political and commercial reasons” had led to its decision not to bid. BAE Systems was unavailable for comment last night.

According to the Home Office, Fujitsu Services, CSC, EDS, IBM, Steria and Thales are still interested in the identity card project.

The companies said that while the government may delay some parts of it, such as the issue of biometric cards to UK citizens, there would still be scope for other work in the near term, such as constructing the database to house the identity data.

The Home Office’s Identity and Passport Service, which is running the scheme, aims to have a list of five prime suppliers in place by May. However, the Home Office confirmed on Tuesday that the government was considering a delay in the main roll-out of ID cards to British citizens.

Leaked Home Office documents show a revised strategy in which the issuing of significant volumes of ID cards alongside a new generation of passports will begin in 2012, two years later than previously planned.

Last night the Home Office confirmed a further leak suggesting that smaller volumes of ID cards should first be issued from 2010 onwards to young people to “assist” them in opening up their first bank accounts as well as to individuals employed in “positions of trust”, such as teachers and social workers.

The British Bankers’ Association said that it had not been involved in any discussion on the use of ID cards by young people.

“This has come like a bolt from the blue,” it said.

Meanwhile, Damian Green, shadow immigration minister, said last night that the leaked documents showed that the government was engaged in an “outrageous plan” which was “staggering from shambles to shambles”.

Mr Green said: “They are trying to introduce ID cards by stealth by making them necessary if you want to work for the government, take out a student loan or open a student bank account.

“This is blackmail and a desperate attempt to bolster a failing policy.”

Now why Harry Potter,  Simon Kelner, James Harding and Will Lewis couldn’t find space in their organs for this story – not even in their late editions – remains a mystery (I gave up on BBC News some time ago) but Ministerial hats off to Lionel Barber at the FT – the only British newspaper to run the story – and the Minister’s favourite IT website The Register for picking it up.

Accenture, interestingly, have form in this regard.  Despite making a mint out of this Labour government left, right and centre, it ran screaming from the NHS’s half-baked Connecting For Health computer system just over a year ago when it became clear that neither the Department of Health nor the NHS had the first clue what it was trying to do (bar spunk billions of taxpayers’ money up a rope).

El Reg suggests something similar is happening with the ID cards scheme:

Overheard from supplier which recently withdrew from the National Identity Scheme procurement:
“Our biggest bugbear was that they [the Identity and Passport Service] still haven’t decided what it is they really want. They don’t know whether they want something that is all about security, or whether they want something that is all about customers/citizens. The two require different solutions. There’s just too much confusion still in play.”

If it looks like a turd and smells like a turd, it’s probably a turd.

Only New Labour would spend billions of pounds trying to polish it.

Fuck me senseless, I sound like Littlejohn.

I would, though, point out that the real right-wing cunts (like Michael Howard) – ie those who, unlike Posh Boy Dave, don’t change position when it’s politically expedient to do so – are and always have been in favour of ID cards.

PBD today claims that he opposes ID cards and will scrap them if elected.

However, PBD was curiously absent from the division lobbies when the first, abandoned Identity Cards Bill had its main votes in the Commons before the 2005 General Election, when he was a member of the Shadow Cabinet that officially supported ID cards.

PBD only voted substantively against ID cards for the first time in the House of Commons at 9.59pm on 18 October 2005, at third reading stage.  Coincidentally, that was the day of the first round of votes by Tory MPs to elect a new leader.

Having assumed the mantle of Tory leader, PBD’s Tories only officially came out against ID cards on 18 January 2006.

Like a dog with a bone, I’m not letting go of the Ama Sumani story.

There is an online petition addressed to our Home Secretary that you can sign.

And Ms. Sumani’s friend in Cardiff, charity worker Jane Simmons, has set up a website giving details about the various ways to donate money in support of Ms. Sumani’s dialysis treatment.

Joe Brown drifted in and out of my childhood, a seemingly permanent fixture – alongside Roy Orbison and Diana Dors – on variety shows, chat shows, Saturday morning kids’ shows and strange ITV daytime programmes that always seemed to be hosted by Mrs. Michael Parkinson.

Roy Orbison sang – though only ever Oh, Pretty Woman, Crying or Only The Lonely; Diana Dors flounced around and tried to be funny, despite obviously being hard as nails and about as charming; but I didn’t really know what Joe Brown did.

He was a cheeky Cockernee chappie who always seemed to be beaming from ear to ear while looking slightly bemused.  My mum told me he’d been a musician while she was a girl, but nobody I knew either owned or could name any of his songs.  In fact his wife Vicki seemed to be the more musically active half of the couple, a backing singer of some repute.  Eventually Joe and Vicki’s daughter Sam came on the scene as another singer of some distinction.

And until last week, that was about that.  He kept popping up from time to time (it’s a law that he’s interviewed for every skiffle documentary made and I remember he played at the George Harrison memorial concert) but I basically knew no more about him now I’m 36 than I did when I was 8.

Then I sat down to watch Pop On Trial: The 50s, part of BBC Four’s impressively and intelligently produced and generally hugely enjoyable Pop! What Is It Good For? season.  There he was again.  Joe Brown.  In the corner.  Smiling.

Stuart Maconie led Brown, author/musician/broadcaster CP Lee and – er – Pete Wylie through a genuinely charming and thoroughly entertaining hour of discussion of the rock and pop of the Fifties.

During the course of the discussion and in an absolutely self-effacing way, Brown revealed that he’d played guitar on Britain’s only truly great rock’n'roll record – the much-mourned and supremely talented Billy Fury’s 1960 gem The Sound Of Fury.

As if that wasn’t enough, he then mentioned – again, in passing – that he had played guitar on British tours by rock’n'roll legends Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent in the late Fifties!  Apparently the Musicians’ Union wouldn’t allow American singers to use their own bands and instead insisted they hired Brits.  As one of the leading British guitarists of the day, the teenage Brown was apparently a natural choice for the gig.  Mindfuck!

So, Joseph Roger Brown, the Minister salutes you.  As well as being a National Treasure for about 700 years now and an all-round diamond geezer, I have under-appreciated your talent for more than three decades and that’s too long to under-appreciate anyone with a musical pedigree like yours (even if I do still loathe skiffle).

Next time I visit my mum, I’m nicking her copy of The Sound Of Fury in your honour.

Can anyone confirm whether or not the Chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs Keith Vaz is the same Keith Vaz as The Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz?  How on earth can someone like this secure  political rehabilitation?  Has everyone forgotten 2001-2?

For the record, in March 2001 the then Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, Elizabeth Filkin, cleared Vaz of nine of 28 allegations of financial improprieties, but also accused him of blocking her investigation into 18 of the allegations and censured him for his behaviour on the remaining charge – failing to register payments totalling £4,500 from a solicitor he went on to recommend for a peerage.

Ms. Filkin also announced a further investigation regarding donations made to a company connected to Vaz by a charitable foundation run by notorious Labour donors, the Hunduja brothers.  That investigation reported a year later in the following terms:

• Mr Vaz provided misleading information to the former Committee and the Commissioner [Ms. Filkin] about the financial relationship between his family and the Hindujas.
• Mr Vaz failed to register remunerated employment in the Leicester Law Centre when he first entered Parliament in 1987. In the circumstances we do not regard Mr Vaz’s failure to register this interest as serious. A newly-elected MP could easily make this mistake.
• Mr Vaz failed to register a donation from the Caparo Group in March 1993 within the time allowed by the rules. We reject his claim his registration [in October 1994] of the second such donation, which he received in August 1994, somehow covered the first donation as well.  We do not regard Mr Vaz’s initial failure to register as particularly serious, but he should have admitted his shortcoming frankly.
• Mr Vaz failed in his duty of accountability under the Code of Conduct by refusing to submit himself to the scrutiny appropriate to his office as a Member.
• Mr Vaz recklessly made a damaging allegation against Miss Eggington to the Commissioner, which was not true, and which could have intimidated Miss Eggington or undermined her credibility.
• Miss Eggington and Mrs Gresty were interviewed by the police as a direct result of his intervention.
• Having set the Commissioner on a false line of inquiry Mr Vaz then accused her of interfering in a criminal investigation and threatened to report her to the Speaker.
• Mr Vaz failed in his public duty under the Code of Conduct “to act on all occasions in accordance with the public trust placed in (him)”. By wrongfully interfering with the House’s investigative process he also committed a contempt of the House.

The report concluded:

Of the original eleven allegations made against Mr Vaz we have not upheld eight.  We have upheld three, two of which we do not regard as serious.  If that had been all, we would have recommended an apology to the House. Regrettably two further matters have arisen from the way Mr Vaz responded to the allegations against him investigated by the Commissioner.  We have found he committed serious breaches of the Code of Conduct and a contempt of the House.  We recommend that Mr Vaz be suspended from the service of the House for one month.

The Commons decided without a vote to ban The Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz for four weeks.

Somehow, The Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz now gets to lord it up on the telly as some kind of fucking elder statesman: ID cards, police pay – you name it, he’s got an opinion about it and Radio 4 and a grateful nation has to listen.

I’m ten minutes away from voting Tory because I can’t take much more of this.

I don’t really blog togger very much these days but one story has made me chuckle.

Apparently, Spurs have bid for a third time for Rangers’ Scottish international right-back Alan Hutton after being told to do one twice before.

I like the club’s style: pester someone so much that they eventually agree to sleep with you out of pity and just to stop you stalking them.

It didn’t work for me as a teenager, but I admire their persistance.

Minister, please feel free to delete what amounts to little more than a piece of graffiti, but Liverpool really are poo.

Funny thing is, Tottenham and Newcastle fans are perennially frustrated by their respective teams’ inability to break into the top 4, but Liverpool fans don’t seem to care that they’re never going to break into the top 3 (which I would have thought would be even more frustrating).