The Song Remains The Same

As we prepare to say hello to a new football season, it is time to say goodbye to this blog. The final post of this sprawling thing which has been a part of my life (as well as the lives of at least 3 other people) for some 5 or 6 years heralds another few months of footy related money, mayhem and madness across the land. Already, the almost indecent spectacle of Burnley taking on Blackpool, whilst at the same time the England cricket team watch the rain at Old Trafford, signals the 125th anniversary of the football league. Typically (in football as in everything else) we seem unable to learn even the most basic of lessons from the mistakes of the past. Doubtless, yet more clubs will suffer the fate of Coventry City, whose fans will have to make the trek to the Sixfields Stadium to watch their once mighty heroes slug it out in the dark web that is the bottom of League 2. At the same time, requiring an almost supernatural ability to deny empirical evidence, (Un)Real Madrid are reportedly offering to pay £100 million to sign Gareth Bale.

One hundred million pounds.

Take a second or two to think about that if you will. Madrid is the capital city of Spain, a country – we are told – with 50% plus youth unemployment and a debt crisis so massive it threatens to bring down the monetary system of the European Union, if not the entire world. Who can make sense of that? Where does the money come from? But then, it seems increasingly plain to me that making sense of anything in the world today is an impossibility. While those who tell us the real news are skulking in embassies or airport lounges, or are about to begin 130 year long prison sentences, we have ‘news’ items dedicated to telling us that Peter Capaldi is the next Doctor Who.

The real news must be: the disgraceful, shameful and worsening way in which asylum seekers are being treated. Truly desperate people, often escaping from situations created by the power-brokers in Washington, Moscow and Westminster, snubbed, abused and denigrated. As if laughing in the face of The Nazis – A Warning From History, the Home Office sends out ad vans telling people to ‘go home’ and then tweets pictures of those it has detained on suspicion of being ‘illegals’ by dint of the colour of their skin. We then find out that said Home Office has no idea of how many immigrants (illegal or otherwise) there are in the country, and it redacts an independent report into the situation, yet has been able to contribute £400,000 to the programme UK Border Force. I found this to be a quite astonishing piece of information.

The real news must be: that we as British citizens are not allowed to read the ‘black spider’ correspondence of HRH the Prince of Wales. We are not permitted to know the reasons why he has met with ministers on 36 occasions (including seven meetings with Herr Cameron himself) since the Coalition took office. The Attorney General, Dominic Grieve says this is because the spider correspondence might give the public the impression that Prince Charles is not scrupulously aloof from party politics. There is no reference to the huge tracts of land Charlie owns, the Civil List payment he receives, or his Duchy Originals fine food empire. Now, if anyone other than, say, Lewis Carroll can make any sense of that, I will eat my hat.

The real news must be: the value of wages in the UK has dropped by 5.5% (a sharper decline than in the virtually defunct state of Portugal) since 2010, which is coincidentally the same timeframe as Prince Charles’s 36 meetings mentioned above, and marks the beginning of the Coalition’s assumption of power. During this time, the pay of those (almost entirely male) business leaders who sit in boardrooms has risen thus: 2010 – a 55% increase; 2011 – a 49% increase; 2012 – a 10% increase; 2013 – a 14% increase. One news report I read said that boardroom pay is increasing seven times faster than average, but as the recent figures show a drop in the value of wages of 5 and a half per cent, this is hardly surprising. Despite all the current bluster about bankers’ bonuses, the median pay of a FTSE 100 business leader is still being reported as between £3.7 and £4.8 million pounds, with full remuneration for the top 10 bosses around the £9 million mark, right up to that old rogue Bob Diamond, who trousered £21 million not so long ago. And, with every Byron burger Gideon consumes, the chasm between these guys and the ordinary working man and woman yawns still bigger.

The real news must be: that the Trussell Trust (I don’t trust the Trussell Trust, but enough of that for now) has reported a huge increase in people using their food banks. They say that almost 350,000 people were given emergency food supplies in the twelve months up to May this year. Lord Freud, a suitably appointed millionaire to deal with the issue of poverty, stated that this increase is not related to cuts in benefit payments, but is down to the fact that folks just want free food, almost as if these places are victims of their own success. Iain Duncan Smith, another millionaire, then claimed that this rise in the use of food banks was down to ‘increased awareness’ among people, and could in no way be linked to the benefit cuts. He surpassed himself in this one, even managing to piss off the head of the Trussell Trust by saying that they agreed with him on this point, which they definitely do not.

The real news must be: that the Israeli government has just authorised over 1,000 new settlements on land which even it agrees belongs to the Palestinians. They have done this in total defiance of international law and overwhelming public opinion, but worse than that, they have done this while sitting at the table with the Palestinian Authority (although of course, this is not the elected government of the Palestinians) and Senator John Kerry, purporting to be conceiving a new nine month plan for peace. If the life of any baby were to be given a smaller chance of success, it would surely have to be one begun in sub-Saharan Africa. Barack Obama – funny guy – sits with his kill lists and his drone fleets, his intelligence on literally everything that we do, increasingly irrelevant as the next round of electioneering fundraising begins to kick off.

Goodnight. And may your god go with you.

Promises promises

I told you! It was worth the effort, wasn't it?

These things take time (and I know that I'm/The most inept, etc., etc...) and you can't hurry love. Excuse me. Mere mention of what Phil Collins did to the Supremes number fills me with the urge to defecate.

In the meantime, a little filler, a small piece of guilt absolution in the blog confessional if you will.

Whilst taking a coffee at the Pret opposite the Chandos near Trafalgar Square the other day, I was approached by a lady who bore a passing resemblance to Timmy Mallett, wearing as she was large white plastic framed glasses and pink tights (though I'm not 100% sure that Timmy wore pink tights, I'm not denying the possibility) if perhaps a slightly shabbier version.

"Excuse me sir," she said in (I think) an Italian accent, "Cen you pliz..."

I impatiently waved my hand towards her, whilst shaking my head and continuing to peer at my BlackBerry. It wasn't the first time I had seen her in operation, and I told her so.

"You've asked me before!" I snapped, my tone a little more aggressive than I had intended and she was clearly taken aback, replying angrily:

"I 'even't esked you! I... I..."

"Yes you have." I said firmly.

Seeing that I was unmoved (also - truth be told - I was hopeful that the scene would not escalate further as the people at tables around me were turning to stare) and would stubbornly gaze at the BB until she left me alone, she turned away and made for someone else.

"Excuse me, sir. My purse..."

Whether egged on by my stern refusal to donate to the lady's cause or not, I couldn't say, but the chap she had approached - sharply shaved head and sharp business suit, on the way to a sales pitch somewhere, I reckoned - took exception to her entreaties and a commotion started. I couldn't make out what the man had said, but the woman launched into an impassioned defence of her dignity. She was an artist, not a beggar. He had not right to treat her like a piece of dirt because she had been unlucky. He was not a worthwhile human being, and she hoped one day that he would understand how hard life can be when everyone tunred their back on him in his time of greatest need.

I had turned from observed to observer in a few moments; glad that the attention had been diverted from me, but sad that I had participated in such a mean-spirited piece of pantomime.

Who cares?

The almost total lack of response to my last post clearly cannot be anything to do with the writing style, which was, I'm sure you'll agree, as sharp and incisive as ever. As with my beloved MeFi (which is admittedly US-centric, so posts tend to raise interest if they're about US politics (I couldn't help seeing the similarities between that interview and the hilarious Steve McClaren dodgy Dutch piece, BTW) Apple, Google or gaming) I've noticed that - alas - poverty doesn't sell sell sell.

So who does care? Really.

GB has been talking (the usual shite) about demanding price cuts at the petrol pump, while Ed is simultaneously bleating on about reducing carbon emissions by 80%. It just doesn't wash. As my dad said:

"If you put the whole lot of 'em in a sack and shook 'em up, you still wouldn't get one decent one out of it."

This very issue was being mooted on the Moral Maze last night on Radio 4 (yes, I really do have a crazy life) and I was unsure what the conclusion was. That's the trouble. There's often a great deal of fascinating discussion, but nothing ever seems to come of it. It's all talk. Plus, I fell asleep before it finished.

At least the footy will keep us interested. Up the Potters!

Poor game

Thanks to just about every football pisstaker for this picture.

As my contribution to this year's Blog Action Day, which is focused on poverty, I thought I would write about something close to my heart - football. Specifically, the obscenity of footballers' wealth and the almost insuperable differences between their lives and not only those in the Developing World, but even the ordinary fan who pays through the nose to watch them and their pony trickery. I have blogged previously about Anton Ferdinand's taste in watches, and am more or less constantly amazed when I hear that someone can possibly be earning £100,000 (or is it even more these days?) in a week. I know that, in the way of these things, we should always strive to take a positive direction forward, but I hope my innate cynicism will be forgiven.

Poverty is, as any self-respecting A Level Sociology student will tell you, a relative concept. Liz Jones wrote (surprisingly well, I thought) in the Mail on Sunday at the weekend - I was early for the supermarket opening and happened to pick up a copy in the cafe where I was waiting for it to open, OK? - about Ethiopia, and a bleak picture she painted indeed. If one were to compare the current fears of the man on the Clapham Omnibus about the value of his 3 bed semi in Surbiton, or his winter break in the Alps, such a story truly throws these things into sharp perspective.

In these historic times, we are seeing many very strange things. A man who made a fortune selling video games pays £18,000,000 for a trip into space, the Formula 1 circus stages a night-time Grand Prix in Singapore with a carbon footprint akin to a sasquatch with elephantiasis, and of course, Manchester City are poised to spend countless millions on buying every player on the planet while the rest of the developed world is at real risk of losing their livelihoods and the developing world continues to try and survive on handfuls of rice. Or worse.

With the supposed demise of the fat banker, it is in the football world that the most egregious expenditure is now taking place. Football has not been particularly good at the PR aspect of charitable work with the poor. The various organisations that run the game are really not doing enough. The campaign recently launched by FIFA for the South Africa World Cup - '20 Centres for 2010' aims to raise $20,000,000 for 20 football centres across Africa by 2010, with FIFA and its sponsors donating $500 for every goal scored during the World Cup qualifying matches, and the fans also able to give as they see fit. Nice to know that the England/Kazakhstan match will have raised $3,000, while the parsimonious Taffs contributed a big fat zero. When set next to the mind-boggling sums currently being shovelled into the banking system, $20,000,000 is - almost literally - nothing. Even when set against the ludicrous fee paid by City for Robinho, it isn't a huge amount either.

The English FA is even worse. When I was searching through their website for the Social Responsibility section (not easy to find, let me tell you - try it for yourself) I was a little surprised to find a piece about sailors from HMS Endurance helping out some children in Ghana. I'm not sure what that has to do with the FA. Uefa yielded nothing, I'm afraid to say, so I gave up.

Mostly, it seems that individual players have done more than the organisations, and especially when those players - such as the great George Weah and Nwankwo Kanu - have themselves been personally enriched by the game, but still remember their roots. Otherwise, when these megastars reach the end of their illustrious careers, we have the choice of listening to them drone on at Half Time, or of going to their themed bars on the Costa Del Sol.

So, where do we go from here? Would I recommend that any footy fan who would like to see the game do more in the cause of fighting poverty and its causes drops a few quid in the FIFA bucket (no doubt, in reality, there's some sort of credit card arrangement, but you know what I mean...) when they squeeze through the turnstiles in Minsk? I don't think so.

My advice? Carry a banner which, despite your gut feeling, doesn't say Sack the Board or Lynch Ashley, but instead says something along the lines of Eat The Rich.

Waiting

Thanks to www.jaunted.com for the image above.

I have been suffering from writer's block over the past week or so, and offer my apologies for the lack of posts. The block was brought on by two things:

1) World events were developing so rapidly that most of what I was writing was immediately subsumed by the tide of reality.

2) Work has been insane, with the instigation of the new Department of Energy and Climate Change having a major impact on my brain and body.

I can't see either of those things easing off any time soon, but I have been determined to contribute to the Blog Action Day on poverty taking place on October 15th, so I am preparing a post for that now. These are apt times to be talking about poverty, sad to say, as are all times.

But please excuse me first while I take some duck tape and lash it around the mouths of Sirs Bono and Bob Geldof.

Toodle-oo.

Day of the Dead

Once a week they come, as if emerging from the mist - though there is no mist. There are those who stand, for a minute or so, and then slowly pace forward and back. Others sit on benches, alone, staring into space; clutching crutches and crumpled Primark bags. Yet more congregate in twos and threes, talking in quiet voices. All are waiting.

Voluminous beards uncombed, black eyes and fat lips, swollen cheeks and sores and gnarled, filthy hands with striated nails too long, which are clung to tenaciously by a deep black line of dirt. But it is the eyes which are as always the truest reflectors of the 'lives' led - hopes dashed and trust betrayed forever. Always guarded, somehow shadowed, and yet pleading silently for recognition as they wait.

Almost all are men, though there is occasionally one female, her gender discernible only by her dirigible breasts.

The pacers pace, and edge towards the invisible barrier, but they never cross. These desperate ones, who are outside all the structures of society, are still bound by the forces which shape it, and will not enter into the land of super-heated milk and caffeine - even though no locks or chains are there to keep them out. All they do is wait.

Safe inside the imaginary cordon sit the fortunate members of the club, heads studiously bent over the morning paper, or babbling into mobile phones, stuffing apricot croissants into their mouths and washing down the sweet dough with a sloosh of latte. Lighting up just one more ciggy before the final trudge into the office and another day of...