…how else can one explain this video on YouTube?
It’s been up for a few days and I just got round to watching it. It’s pretty amazing. Pretty amazing that anyone with Gordo’s interests at heart could have watched it and honestly believed it would be a good idea to put it on the internet.
Look at it. Look at that unsettling grin; it creates the same kind of response as I feel towards horror-film clown masks, which smile with fixed cheerfulness while bludgeoning old women to death. I honestly believe this video could scare young children.
The facial contortions are desperately off-key. He’s talking about MPs’ expenses reform – hardly an obvious source of mirth – and yet he looks like he’s rehearsing a role as an air hostess. Why is he doing this?
And, perhaps more interestingly, why did he choose an online video hosting site, much of whose audience probably barely recognises his name, to make a major policy announcement? Call me staid, but would not parliament have been a better bet?
An innovative policy for tough times
IN what must be a terrifying prospect for his family, Alistair Darling is apparently preparing to fight Lord Mandelson over the business secretary’s £2,000 car scrapping scheme.
A bit hopelessly, I wish him well – I will be gutted if Lord M gets his way on this.
Just a year ago, such a scheme would have been the best thing to happen to me since the death of our neighbours’ annoying chihuahua.
Assuming the £2,000 voucher is redeemable against new motorbikes as well as cars – which I will do – it would have saved me a fortune. Or I would have got a much faster motorbike.
Either way, I would be a lot happier now. Or dead.
Instead, I will get nothing from this scheme (unless I take to stealing 10 year old cars and turning them in for profit – a real possibility if the journalism industry continues its slide into oblivion).
Still, I like the idea. I would like to see it extended to address other social ills – how about a Nintendo Wii for every knife or gun handed over by the under 18s? Open to abuse, I admit, but bound to make our streets safer and help the economy.
Or B&B vouchers for anyone scrapping a caravan? Sure to reduce congestion, clean the environment and win the hearts of motorists everywhere for whoever brings it about.
Lord Mandelson has resurrected an ancient form of manipulation – bribery – and turned it into an innovative crisis response policy. Where would they be without him?
Stuff the decisions, what were they wearing?
A humourless acquaintance suggested to me that the reporting of the G20 hoopla this week was sexist, because of the media’s wrapt focus on the WAGS’ clothes and accessories.
I had to agree – why are the men not entitled to this level of sartorial scrutiny? The financial crisis is big news, but do we not need to know what the triumphant Gordon Brown wore to seduce this $1tr package from his fellow leaders? Could we not have been told who designed Manmohan Singh’s fetching headwear? Should not the wardrobe of Silvio Berlusconi at least – head of a nation of aesthetes – been properly vetted by the style gurus of the world’s press?
Surely these things matter? We could have found clues as to their intentions regarding the lofty decisions to be taken: ‘Hu Jintao wears a sobre navy single-breasted jacket by Larousse, possibly signaling his intention to give way over tax havens…Kevin Rudd’s decision to go for the double-windsor knot has given rise to speculation that he will veto any attempt to create an international regulatory code…’ etc.
I suppose I could not afford to emulate noted beaux like Nicholas Sarkozy, but at least a forensic dissection of the style choices of more oafish members of the gathering would have shown me the faux pas to avoid.
Instead, I remain groping in the dark like most men, entirely unsure how I should dress if I am suddenly to find myself in charge of a powerful country.
We are indeed a long way from equality.
Jacqui Smith: probably not going to lose her job over expenses
THERE was a time, my parents assure me, when a headline about political ’scandal’ could be trusted to deliver on its tantalising promise. A golden age when politicians whispered state secrets into the ears of prostitutes, perjured themselves in grand and public style, and bribed Arabian kingdoms to prop up our death industry – and newspapers could be relied on to find such things out and reveal them.
Whether it is because our politicians have got more noble or our journalists less so, that age seems to be expiring.
The running ’scandal’ of recent months is so desperately overcooked it is surely no longer appealing to anyone. Headlines such as the Birmingham Mail’s
Jacqui Smith porn scandal: “Business as usual” for Smith
do their best to breathe life into this dead horse, but are laughably hyperbolic when the boring facts are laid out.
Far from being
Bare-faced fraud that taints every MP
as the Mail predictably claims, Jacqui Smith’s expenses are a fairly uninteresting example of someone doing what most people do – pushing, but not breaking (knowingly, at least), the rules to get the most of what they’re entitled to. It was the same with Tony McNulty and it has been the same with almost all similar cases that have been reported in the past year.
Newspapers imply that this repetitive story is justified by the depth of public feeling on the issue, as in the Telegraph’s latest editorial on the issue.
But nobody I knew seems surprised by or interested in the ’scandal’, and it is interesting that none of the Jacqui Smith stories feature on Telegraph.co.uk’s ‘most viewed’ stats for today, or indeed for the whole past week.
So why do we keep hearing about MPs’ expenses, especially as we are about to witness the most important gathering of international leaders in a generation?
Perhaps it has something to do with the ease of access to the relevant information, which is apparently being offered for sale to journalists by ‘businessmen’ after the processing of MPs’ receipts was outsourced to a contractor.
MPs’ salary and expense details are a gold mine of easy stories for hard-pressed journalists – if they go, hacks will miss them as much as MPs will.
Havana Marking, director of Afghan Star
This week I spoke to a young woman with possibly the coolest name I have ever heard – Havana Marking.
She has recently returned from Afghanistan, where she has been filming Afghan Star, a documentary about a Pop Idol-style reality TV competition that has captured that country’s imagination and become a smash hit.
Being a reality TV star in any country is a risk. As countless Big Brother hopefuls have shown, we love to hate Z-list celebrities, glorying in their public humiliation and laughing at their inevitable slide into anonymity.
Young Afghans pack a room for another episode of Afghan Star
But Jade Goody’s recent experience makes clear, our opprobrium is half-hearted. No one nurses a serious grudge against reality TV stars because, ultimately, no one really cares.
A Marking’s moving documentary makes clear, that is not the case in Afghanistan. There, wannabes who take up the mic on a reality TV show risk not just public embarrassment, but death.
Afghan Star, showing in screenings across London next week,follows four young contestants as they compete for glory in Afghanistan’s answer to Pop Idol.
It is a portrayal not of the light-hearted frivolity we have come to expect of the format, but of a shattered nation’s struggle for cultural freedom in the face of violent repression.
The show’s enormous popularity was overshadowed by death threats against its contestants. Public singing and dancing, especially by young women, outraged conservative Muslims, who protested angrily at Afghan Star’s supposed blasphemy.
The film captures the severity of the mood when a market trader says darkly of Setara, a 21-year-old girl from Herat who was ejected in the seventh round: “she deserves to die.”
Marking is adamant that all the female contestants were risking their lives to perform. She also also risked violence to make the documentary, along with various forms of discomfort, but she brushes them aside:
“It was amazing. Everyone’s very proud and excited someone was interested in something cultural rather than just crazy terrorists and war. So in a way I had quite a receptive audience. I had a bodyguard, translator, cameraman. It was amazing. Conditions are tough there, security is a problem, electricity is scarce and everything’s limited but there’s a spirit and energy that gets you through that – I’m not a high maintenance sort of person and It was an amazing experience to film there.”
The product, she says, is simultaneously a work of art, journalism and politics: “It’s all those things put together; that’s the beauty of documentary. You’re trying to tell an atmospheric story, but hopefully you give a gripping portrayal of the real world as well.”
It is a world few Britons have ever seen, where reality TV looks somehow far more meaningful.
“In one sense it’s the same, but the poverty is more. People are far more desperate, they have more to escape from and to lose. It’s a different context, and it’s way more moving because of that.”
Judge for yourself:
U2 had a good week last week, making it to the top of the UK album chart for the tenth time since their formation.
Clearly, Bono’s critics who recently demonstrated against the band’s tax-avoidance have not impressed the Great British public.
In fact, I virtually never hear the subject raised in Britain, even though it seems to come up all the time in Ireland – some people really get quite intemperate about it.
Which is understandable, I suppose, given the enormity of Bono’s ambitions in the world. Tax avoidance doesn’t sit well with anti-poverty campaigning in most people’s eyes, no matter what he does for charity.
Given the prevailing climate, in which airing public resentment towards the super-rich has become a national sport, I was surprised none of this came up in British coverage of this latest chart success.
Anyone wanting to get into the nuts and bolts of U2’s finances should read this exhaustive analysis.
overzealous wheel clamping
I have been forced to put the DVLA in my book of profound grudges after a particularly cruel visit from one of their wheel clampers last week.
Picture the scene: my dad and I have spent the day in hospital with a family member who is dying (literally). We leave at around 8pm and walk the mile or so to the car, parked in a quiet part of Halifax where there are no restrictions. We are about to make the 70 mile trip home, but the car is clamped. We then have to pay £260 immediately to avoid the charge rising to £360 overnight, but we are told the car cannot be unclamped until the following morning. We can either get a hotel, get a train (a three hour journey at that time), or get a cab. Then, of course, we have to get back to the car the next day to retrieve it.
This happened because my dad’s tax disc was out of date. Fair enough. Obviously it is right and proper that the DVLA should take action against drivers who drive untaxed vehicles, which is a crime. But wheel clamping is extreme. Why not just send a fine by letter? It’s not like they don’t have your details. What if we had been going to catch a flight? What if we had been 500 miles from home? What if we had been trying to get to a hospital? There are any number of situations where wheel clamping amounts to a punishment utterly disproportionate to the misdemeanour. After all, like many people caught with out of date tax discs, my dad had no idea it was out of date and no intention of dodging the tax, which he has been paying without issue for decades.
It’s obvious that in most circumstances clamping is more legalised extortion than honest deterrent. It is, depressingly, to be expected from private landowners, who are entitled to use clamps to prevent unwanted parking on their land. But the DVLA should have no part in it.
I have now asked them, via FOI, to tell me what, if any, revenue they derive from clamping operations, and will post the response here. If anyone else has had a visit from the clamp fairy I would love to hear about it.
RIP
A friend of mine has been asked to write a piece on how the ‘final crisis of capitalism’ is a vindication for Karl Marx.
It looks like he will find it difficult – as we chatted it through the other night, we realised that it is nothing of the sort.
The interesting thing about the ‘crisis of capitalism’ – I submit – is just how meek public criticism of the system has been.
We have had a lot of anger towards individuals (typically bankers – Marina Hyde’s fulminations are particularly gratifying) but talk of system overhaul or structural change has restricted itself to the regulation of capitalism, rather than its replacement.
I don’t think I have yet heard a single interesting proposal from serious commentators of the left advocating an alternative to capitalism as the basic organising principle of our society.
Take the latest headline about the possibility of nationalisation for Lloyd’s. I just heard John Mann MP, of the Treasury Select Committee, on Radio 4 talking about it. He was careful to stipulate that nationalisation, if used, would be a temporary measure only – a patch-up, rather than a fundamental rethink about government ownership of business. A friend at the Treasury told me that the prevailing feeling there about taking on outright responsibility for running a bank is one of great anxiety.
Or we can look at the Guardian’s latest bombshell: the Tax Gap series on corporate tax avoidance. It is excellent, exhaustive, important journalism, but hardly radical – I doubt many people have been surprised that our ‘national champions’ have been screwing us all by avoiding paying their fair share. Will Hutton, one of the left’s really big thinkers, has used his latest comment on the series to argue that the current climate undermines the classic arguments made in favour of tax avoidance by its beneficiaries. Again, it is very laudable, but hardly a paradigm shift.
So talk of a ‘final crisis of capitalism’ is probably hogwash. The debate today is not about capitalism vs anything else, it is about the space we allow capitalism to operate in. We have moved on. Far from being resurrected, Marx is being forgotten.
The credit crunch appears to be squeezing news lists as well as budgets.
A dry-sounding but nonetheless important hearing being prepared for by Germany’s constitutional court seems to have been largely unreported so far.
On 10-11 Feb, the court is to decide the significant question whether the Lisbon Treaty is compatible with Germany’s constitution.
Clearly, if they decide it is not, the Treaty’s chance of ever coming into force will be severely, perhaps fatally, wounded.
I suppose the tide of economic calamities filling the news has made it easy to ignore such fripperies; the Lisbon Treaty is held up at least until a second Irish referendum in Autumn in any case, and almost no British journalist, I suspect, understands it.
Still, it is a reminder for politicians, especially conservative ones, that this elephant is still very much in the room.
Especially now that Ken Clarke has returned to front-bench politics, how long before a plucky journalist begins once more to poke it?
