Deadly Present

 

Dolly

Susan Hill

(Vintage)

 

Quiet Edward and headstrong Leonora are sent to spend the Summer at the home of their eccentric Aunt Kestrel in the English fenland. During the time they are there they encounter something unearthly that will reach its cold dead hand far into their adult lives.

This could be the set-up for a children’s story, or the sort of potboiler bought to read on the beach by people who avoid bookshops outside of holidays and Christmas. In the hands of Susan Hill, it is something altogether more disturbing.

Drawing on the tradition of M R James she delivers a tale of unsettling events in a remote and atmospheric place. One that is shaped by a morality that is as harsh as it is inescapable.

All this in just 152 pages, less space than it takes for writers with more burnished literary reputations to clear their throats.

It is possible to read this book in a couple of hours, the story it contains is sure to stay with you for far longer. When it comes to producing that most English of literary forms, the ghost story, Susan Hill has the chops to stand comfortably alongside the greats of the genre.

Good Reads 23^rd July 2024

 

Escaping From The Echo Chamber

 

Silo

Hugh Howey

(Penguin)

The silo is the whole world and the only things outside it are desolation, chaos, and death. At least that’s what the people who have grown up within its curved walls have been led to believe, most of them anyway. A few brave souls have dared to question the prevailing orthodoxy and usually paid a heavy price for doing so. Raised as an engineer in the ‘Down Deep’, the mechanical heart of the silo, Jules is the latest and maybe the most resourceful iconoclast willing to risk it all to uncover the truth.

Silo, and I say this from the perspective of someone who isn’t by nature a fan, is the sort of novel that gives fantasy a good name. One that reminds its readers that the best books in the genre are always about the here and now as much as somewhere on the far edge of Never-Neverland.

Hugh Howey draws on an impressive range of influences to create a world that is entirely believable in its physical and intellectual claustrophobia. These include Plato’s cave and E.M Forster’s seminal novella The Machine Stops, both of which suggest a world in which the inhabitants are starved of accurate information about what exists outside their confined surroundings, and so have filled the resulting vacuum with distorted imaginings.

The silo itself could be seen as a metaphor for our highly stratified society, with the blue-collar mechanicals of the Down Deep separated physically and culturally from the more white-collar upper levels. Authority, such as it is, is compromised by a technocratic elite operating by their own rules to achieve their own ends. It would be hard to read this without thinking of America in the age of culture wars, rampant inequality and a dream turned sour.

The above could make Silo sound like a dry and didactic read, it is anything but that. Hugh Howey is a practiced hand at delivering fantasy novels that excite, engage, and have the capacity to make his readers think. In Jules he has created a central character who appealingly combines courage, resourcefulness, and a fierce determination to live by her own high moral standards in an often painfully compromised world.

Silo is the first in a trilogy of novels and develops its ideas and storyline in a way that makes the other two installments worth looking out for.

 

 

 

Deadly Secrets

 

The Ghost Orchid

Jonathan Kellerman

(Century, 2024)

 

The dead bodies of the heir to a business empire and his even richer married neighbour are found by the pool of a property in Bel Air. First impression is that an illicit affair has come to a violent end, but there is no sign of forced entry and the killer left behind no forensic evidence. Just the sort of case that is the stock in trade of homicide detective Milo Sturgis and psychologist Alex Delaware.

Jonathan Kellerman has been writing novels featuring Alex Delaware for close to forty years, which is a remarkable achievement. Even more so since each new book is as fresh and enjoyable as the last.

The same is true with The Ghost Orchid, Kellerman takes Sturgis and Delaware into the darker recesses of American life, in town like LA where regular reinvention is almost mandatory some secrets cannot be buried. Not permanently anyway, sooner or later they will float back to the surface, sometimes with deadly consequences.

As ever the psychological insights into what drives people to commit unspeakable acts are scalpel sharp and the setting in a golden state where success and squalor rub shoulders brilliantly realized. In Delaware and Sturgis Jonathan Kellerman has created not just a pair of returning characters with massive readers appeal, he has also given us the picture of an enduring friendship between two men with minds supremely attuned to their chosen profession.

The Alex Delaware novels have been bestsellers for decades, as Kellerman and his two most enduring characters move into their fifth decade, they are well on the way to becoming classics of the genre too.

 

 

 

Charity offers local people the opportunity to improve their reading skills.

 

Reading is a vital part of everyday life and something that many people take for granted, yet it is something with which 2.4million adults in England have difficulty [1].

Read Easy North Staffs, the local branch of a national charity helping adults improve their literacy skills and their lives have added 8 new coaches to their team and are now able to support more people.

The new coaches will join a team of volunteers offering one-to-one support to readers in venues around the city including libraries and community centres. All the sessions delivered by Read Easy North Staffs are provided free of charge.

Team Leader Sue Bell said, “Read Easy North Staffs is so fortunate that so many valued volunteers are able to offer a few hours a week to help someone less fortunate than themselves to develop their reading skills.”

Adding that she urged “any adult struggling with reading to come and join one of our friendly and supportive reading pairs”.

Having difficulty reading is something 1 in 10 adults in Stoke-on-Trent experience, speaking to the Sentinel in 2022 Neil Ginnis, a reading coach for Read Easy North Staffs said that “simple things” like shopping or filling out forms can be problematic if you struggle to read, and that these problems are compounded by essential services increasingly moving online [2].

People who struggle with literacy can experience a range of challenges, including being more likely to be unemployed or in low paid work, and feeling disempowered and socially isolated [3].

Read Easy is a registered charity providing a volunteer led reading coaching scheme for adults in communities across the UK. Readers and coaches meet for two half hour sessions a week and work through phonics-based reading course Turning Pages together.

Speaking about their experiences, readers described how learning to read opened up new opportunities and improved their self-esteem.

Peter said learning to read had been “the best thing” he had ever done and that he now enjoyed writing his own stories and poems [5].

Sarah said she was now able to read bedtime stories to her children and that was “the best feeling in the world” [6].

For media requests please contact:

Adam Colclough

Press officer Read Easy North Staffs

Mobile: 07776432636

Email: colclougha@aol.com

Anyone who wishes to contact Read Easy North Staffs either to join a reading pair or for further information can contact them using the following:

Andrew 07391 962 565

Janice 07437 163034,

or email nsadmin@readeasy.org.uk

[1] https://readeasy.org.uk/about-us/why-we-exist/

[2] https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/one-10-adults-struggle-read-7677503

[3] https://alt.org.uk/impact-of-illiteracy/

[4] https://readeasy.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/

[5] https://readeasy.org.uk/success-stories/peters-story/

[6] https://readeasy.org.uk/success-stories/sarahs-story/

 

 

State of the Nation

 

The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain

Darren McGarvey

(Penguin)

 

It would be possible to fill the library of a small university with books outlining the problems besetting twenty-first century Britain. Most are written by journalists, academics, or politicians, all of whom occupy a space that is at one remove from issues at hand.

Darren McGarvey provides a diagnosis of our multiple ills from the yawning inequality gap and the trauma induced by contact with the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the welfare state, to political disengagement and social isolation that is as cogent as it is shocking. The difference between his book and that of other would-be social commentators is that he does so from a basis of proximity, painful lived experience of being outside the charmed circle of middle-class life.

Proximity and its importance to understanding where we are and how we got there is central to the argument he makes. It is something the ‘political class’, ‘metropolitan liberals’, the ‘establishment’, or any other catch all definition lack. They inhabit a world of privilege and comfort that makes it near impossible for them to imagine let alone empathize with the challenges facing many working people.

He lays out just how overwhelming those challenges are in forensic detail, detailing amongst other things the hoops benefits claimants are forced to jump through and the prejudices inherent within the education system. In doing so he raises the critical and often malign influence of something that other commentators fight shy of mentioning in the drawing room of current political discourse, class.

Behind the problems we face now and the bigger ones waiting just around the bend is a concerted and decades long assault on the working class by those at the top of the pile. It has infected every corner of national life from the high table of politics through a corrupt and debased media to the legions of petty bureaucrats bustling around our town halls.

This is not though an internet rant extended to book length, McGarvey, rightly savages the Tories for inflicting harmful austerity policies on the most vulnerable people whilst feathering the nests of bankers and corporate raiders. He also turns his fire on the Left, both the mainstream version represented by the Labour Party, which after winning a landslide majority under Blair in 1997 squandered the chance to bring about real change, and the radical Left for preferring arcane internal disputes and intellectual posturing to doing anything genuinely revolutionary.

Refreshingly McGarvey does all this not from the lofty heights of personal certainty, he writes with painful awareness about the compromises and not infrequent faux pas he has made as someone from ‘humble origins’ trying to make his way in a social landscape dominated by middle class sensibilities. If only other pundits were willing to show as much vulnerability and humility our public discourse would be a lot less fraught.

McGarvey has been likened to George Orwell and it is a comparison I am sure he is flattered by; however, he would likely point out one massively important difference. Orwell was educated at a public school, for all his compassion for the suffering of working people his voice, both spoken and on the page is the RP one of an insider, so despite his best efforts was his mindset.

Darren McGarvey represents something else entirely, something that is shamingly almost unique in the babble of political commentary, the authentic voice of the person on the street. Sometimes bluntly to the point of being rude, often hauntingly eloquent, and always painfully honest. That is what makes what he has to say worth listening to.

Good Reads, Thursday 18^th January 2024

 

 

Only The Lonely

 

 

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing

(Cannongate)

 

“I want to be alone”, is the line that made Greta Garbo legendary rather than just famous, and it gives her a walk on part in Olivia Laing’s fascinating study of loneliness, something we all experience, but don’t fully understand.

She appears as a sort of living urban myth clad in a fur coat and men’s shoes wandering the streets of New York still looking for the solitude that she professed to want so badly. Decades after the cameras stopped turning, she was still being hunted by people keen to catch a glimpse of the world’s most famous recluse.

Laing describes in this sensitive and learned book the conundrum at the centre being alone, that it is a both a spiritual and physical experience. You can be surrounded by people and feel utterly disconnected from life.

Drawing on a wide range of references including social science, psychology, and the arts, as well as her personal experience of solitude, Laing explores this curious state and the impact it has had on individuals and wider culture.

Touching in the process on the paintings of Edward Hopper and the multi-media adventures of Andy Warhol, both of whom fashioned careers that brought them critical approbation and lasting fame from art that was rooted in their deep personal loneliness. She also draws on the New York subculture of the sixties through to the nineties that provided a place of acceptance for a disparate community of artists, musicians, and party animals until first AIDS and then gentrification swept it away.

Loneliness, as the truism goes, is something that anyone can feel, but it cuts deepest into the lives of those who have already been pushed to the outside by the narrow constraints of mainstream society. Some may be able to parlay the dislocation into creativity; many more end up trying and failing to self-medicate against it through unwise personal choices.

In an age when the devices that supposedly connect us seem to be actively working to drive us apart, we are all starting to feel a bit like Hopper’s Nighthawks. If you’re sat at a diner counter looking for the meaning of your existential angst in the dregs of your coffee, The Lonely City might help to explain your situation.

 

 

Film screening highlights the threat posed by climate change.

 

Local climate campaigners are joining with the YMCA to show a film made to highlight the threat of climate change.

The free screening will take place in the in the charity’s iconic Sky Room on Tuesday 12^th December and will coincide with the COP 28 summit.

Of Walking on Thin Ice (Camino to Cop) is a 55-minute film directed by Ben Wrigley following the story of climate activists who walked across England and Scotland to attend the COP 26 summit in November 2021.

The COP 28 (Conference of the Parties) summit will take place in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) between 30^th November and 12^th December. Convened by the United Nations (UN) it brings governments who signed up to the original UN climate agreement in 1992 together to discuss how to limit and prepare for future climate change [2].

In a joint statement issued in early November Chief COP 28 Negotiator and COP 28 President Designate Dr Sultan Al Jaber said the summit must ‘accelerate practical action on mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and climate finance and build a fully inclusive COP28 that leaves no one behind’ [3].

Concerns have been expressed about locating the summit in one of the world’s top 10 oil producing nations and appointing as its president the chief executive of the UAE’s state-owned oil company.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, speaking at a youth protest during the COP 26 summit in Glasgow in 2021 said world leaders had held 26 summits, producing “decades of blah, blah, blah, and where has that got us? [4]”

Of Walking on Thin Ice suggests one way by which individuals and communities can change that narrative.

More than a thousand people shared part of the journey with the activists and the film, which has been described as an ‘immersive and poetic’ experience, has been shown at venues around the country [1].

On the evening there will also be music, a clothes swap, and stalls from local environmental organisations in the YMCA café, refreshments will be available provided by Newcastle-under-Lyme Fairtrade group.

Local arts group B-Arts will also be there offering people the opportunity to make their own pledge cards based on environmentally friendly actions they plan to take in the year ahead.

The Radical Art Collective will also be holding a Greed Actually evening at The Block in Longton in partnership with the North Staffs Climate Coalition on Thursday 14^th December.

They will be giving people to make and send cards to the greediest CEO’ s to thank them for their contribution to consumerism and climate change.

In September NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York published data showing that the summer of 2023 was the hottest since records began in 1880. The months of June, July, and August combined were warmer than any other recorded summer.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said the record temperatures would result in “dire real-world consequences”, including increasingly extreme weather that would “threaten lives and livelihoods around the world” [5].

The film show will take place at Hanley YMCA, Harding Road, Hanley, ST1 3AE, on Tuesday 12^th December, doors open at 7pm with the screening starting at 8pm.

The Radical Art Collective Greed Actually event will take place at The Block, Unit 6, Longton Exchange, on 14^th December between 7pm and 9pm.

 

[1] https://www.improntafilms.com/camino-to-cop26---of-walking-on-thin-ice.html

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67143989

[3] https://www.cop28.com/en/joint-statement

[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49918719

[5] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3282/nasa-announces-summer-2023-hottest-on-record/

 

 

 

Venables was the last link between the old football and the new ball game it has become.

 

In the way these things happen I first learnt of the death of former England manager Terry Venables from one of those automated signs that relay bus times, adverts, and headlines to passing shoppers.

Venables was, an obituary published by the BBC said ‘one of football’s brightest minds and most innovative coaches’ [1]. Going on to say ‘He may have been an acquired taste to some with his colourful personality and well-chronicled life in business but never by those who played for him, where Venables is regarded with virtually unanimous respect and affection for his superb man-management style and his razor-sharp tactical acumen’.

Dagenham born Venables started his career with Chelsea in the 1960’s, going on to play for Tottenham, QPR, and Crystal Palace and won two England caps. He managed Crystal Palace, QPR, Barcelona, Tottenham, England, Australia, Middlesbrough and Leeds United.

Most famously of all in his two years as England manager he led the team to the semi-finals of Euro 96.

Following the announcement of his death tributes poured in from players and managers.

Former England captain Gary Lineker described him as “the best English coach we’ve had’, going on to compare him with Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola.

Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou told Sky Sports he "If you are asking about a person who embodies everything this football club has always wanted to be, it is Terry. It wasn't just about the way he managed or coached; it was the person he was”.

Current England manager Gareth Southgate, who was given his first England cap by Venables and went on to play in the Euro 96 team told the BBC "He was open minded, forward thinking, enjoyed life to the full and created a brilliant environment with England that allowed his players to flourish and have one of the most memorable tournaments in England history” [2].

Sport, and particularly football, tends to attract hyperbole, every match is a ‘epic’, and any player who hangs around at the top level is a ‘legend’. At least until he or she proves to be human and therefore fallible.

Just occasionally though the hype is justified and never more so than when a personality who was genuinely a legend passes away. As with the death of Bobby Charlton a few weeks ago [3] the passing of Terry Venables is, to borrow a quote from the grab bag of cliché, the end of an era.

Although they were very different as individuals, Charlton was an elder statesman of the game with the manner to match, Venables came across, in the best possible way, as a barrow boy done well enjoying his fame and the opportunities that it brought, they were both living links to football as it used to be.

The working man’s game played in stadiums that rose above terraced streets in towns dominated by factory chimneys and pitheads and watched by crowds in flat caps and mufflers. Where the players had a pint in the bar after the game and sometimes really did get the bus home with the fans.

A hard game enjoyed by people who worked hard and played hard, romanticizing either feels disrespectful.

 Venables started his playing career just as football stopped being something talented lads, like my late father, were told wasn’t something they could make a living out of and became a means by which the most talented could become rich and famous. As a manager he bridged the eras between the ‘old football’ of Brylcream and a fag at half time and the modern age when players, like Hollywood starlets, have their own chef, stylist and fitness guru.

Again, romanticization feels wrong, the newfound fortune and fame ate up young men who hadn’t the wherewithal to withstand temptation, leaving in its wake a sad litany of names, Best, Merson, Gascoine, et al remembered for squandering their talents. Clubs were all too often if not complicit in than at least culturally indifferent to the toll taken by dissipation.

Venables did, as the comments from his former players testify, care about their welfare. He also avoided the vilification heaped inevitably on the heads of football managers by treating journalists as if he liked their company. In return they refrained from adorning his head with various vegetables whenever England hit a run of bad form.

Now he’s left the pitch for good the obituaries are, rightly, tinged with genuine regret, something that cannot be recovered has been lost.

Football has changed, modern players are sober, modest about their wealth and refreshingly willing to use the platform provided by their fame to promote good causes. Managers are more likely to present as slick CEO types or technocrats happier with spreadsheets than people, in their company Terry Venables would seem as out of place as a Model T Ford in the parking lot of a corporate headquarters.

There will always be great players, some of them in the current England team, and managers will be awarded the laurels of greatness, so long as they keep winning, Gareth Southgate, who owes so much to his former bass may be among their number.

Fame and fortune will always follow those who can play a game that is beautiful and cruel in equal measure, if Southgate and his team ever do win the World Cup, and they very well might they could even parlay it into immortality. It is unlikely though that they or any of their contemporaries will ever inspire quite the same amount of affection as ‘El Tel.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/67537649

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/67537553

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/football/64628874

 

Unsettling Tales for Today

 

Animals At Night 

Naomi Booth

(Dead Ink, 2022)

 

A woman takes the body of her dead mother on a macabre farewell tour prior to carrying out a DIY burial, the owners of a dairy farm encounter an ancient curse, and a young woman is haunted by the sight of a dead hare she sees lying at the roadside.

Anyone worried about the health of the short story as a literary form need only read this collection to be reassured that it is fighting fit. Booth, already the author of three acclaimed novels, has crafted a set of tales that demonstrate empathy, imagination, and a knack for unsettling her readers.

Booth writes about a world that is recognizably the one we occupy, but that has been tilted out of kilter somehow. A place where the mundane and the weird rub uncomfortably together inhabited by people who have been pushed to the margins of their own lives.

On the strength of this collection of stories and her novels, Naomi Booth shows the potential to become one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary British fiction.

 

 

 

 

Halloween has nothing on the Tory horror show playing out at the COVID inquiry.

 

Most of us probably believed in the bogeyman when we were children and then, as the good book suggests we should, put away childish things when we became adults. What though would happen were that creature to be unearthed years after the event and obliged to sit in an uncomfortable chair answering questions about just what it had been up to lurking under beds and at the back of wardrobes back in the day?

That’s what watching Dominic Cummings squirming about as he was faced with the content of his expletive laden emails and WhatsApp messages at the COVID inquiry this week felt like.

It was not a pretty sight. The one-time mover and shaker who was going to dissolve the Whitehall ‘blob’ and replace it with something funkier looked shifty, seedy, and just a bit pathetic. Like a dodgy trader being door stepped on a consumer rights TV show and making a dash for cover with his tail between his legs.

On the way he spilled some shocking beans about the toxic mixture of over confidence and lack of preparation that characterized the Johnson government’s approach to the pandemic.

The former prime minister emerged from this as a pretty unsavory character, lazy, arrogant and at times downright callous. Something demonstrated by his jaw droppingly crass comment that the COVID virus was just nature’s way of dealing with elderly people.

There was more toxicity on display later in the week when former senior civil servant Helen MacNamara gave evidence to the inquiry. She described a culture of casual sexism and macho incompetence operating within Downing Street presided over by Boris Johnson.

Things were rounded off by Lord Stevens, who was the chief executive of the NHS during the pandemic, dropping the bombshell that then Health Secretary Matt Hancock wanted to have the power to grant or deny treatment to patients, overriding medical advice, if the NHS became overwhelmed. Thankfully that awful day never arrived, but just think about his eagerness to be a bargain basement angel of death next time you see him gurning at the camera in his latest desperate attempt to be a ‘celebrity’.

Compared to the cast of grotesques masquerading as a government during the greatest crisis this country has faced since 1945 the ghosts, ghouls and vampires associated with Halloween looks about as frightening as a party of maiden aunts holding a tea party.

Who now could hold to the view that Boris Johnson was one of the lads, a bit of a laugh, at worst a lovable rogue? The clown mask has slipped to show the scowling rictus of arrogant entitlement that was always there underneath.

This is the man who partied the night away while the elderly people of whom he was so dismissive died alone in care homes. Who when challenged about his actions twisted and turned to avoid responsibility, parroting out lies that were so absurd as to be insulting.

Johnson is and always was a nasty piece of work, out to serve his own interests and to dodge blame for the resulting chaos. No wonder he gathered around him a such as cast of sycophants and chancers, birds of a feather flock together, and some of them are vultures.

It should be remembered though that it isn’t just the failings of one group of individuals that should be held up to the light to show how dirty they are. The whole Tory ideology is morally bankrupt.

From Mrs. Thatcher saying there was no such thing as society, through Norman Tebbit telling the unemployed to get on their bikes and look for work to Lee Anderson telling people made destitute by austerity they can feed their families for 30p a day they have sought to make selfishness and brutality into virtues.

The result is the divided, angry, and increasingly impoverished country we see around us.

Boris Johnson likes to play at being a historian it is fitting then that history should recognize him as the most incompetent prime minister in the history of the office. It is time for the ideology of which his government and its excesses are the end product to be consigned to its dustbin too.

 

The curtain has come down on plans for an arena in Hanley.

 

Storm Babet may have had all the pyrotechnics, but those in the Stoke-on-Trent with ears to hear it may have caught another and quieter note in the cacophony. It would have sounded like a choir of frustrated voices saying in unison “really, again?”.

They would have been responding to the announcement by the city council late last week that plans for a 3,600-seat arena on the site formerly occupied by Hanley bus station.

This would have been the centre piece of plans to transform the 10-acre site by building housing, a hotel, and the arena. Developers promised the latter would be a ‘striking and contemporary’ building in which big name acts would be queuing up to perform.

The whole package would have been named Etruscan Square and, again in the words of the developers, would help to ‘stimulate sustainable growth of jobs and employment, bringing people into the city’.

Economic realities have led to the masterplan being downgraded with more of a focus on housing and a cautious exploration being made into the possibility of building a ‘multi-purpose sport, leisure and entertainment facility’ on the site. Which sounds a lot like Smithfield speak for a slightly larger than average community centre.

Speaking to the Sentinel last Saturday council leader Jane Ashworth said that the existing planning permission for the former bus station site puts the council in “a good position to work with developers to build the new homes that our city centre is in real need of”.

Adding “building new houses here is a fantastic signal to developers that this is a key site to invest in”, this will “support further phases of work to bring new leisure and entertainment facilities to the site”.

Plans to build a multi-storey car park on nearby Meigh Street have also been shelved.

Anyone with a memory going back some twenty or so years will recognize this as a route the city has been down more often than a holidaymaker who has missed the turning that always foxes them on the way to Llandudno. The former bus station site has been the graveyard of several grand plans for regeneration, including building a £170million shopping centre and the misspelt and misbegotten City Sentral leisure complex.

I have a very clear memory of visiting the civic centre on one occasion and happening to come across the scale model of one of these plans gathering dust in the corner of an office. The Stoke equivalent of Ozymandias’s face lying half buried in the sand.

The tone of Councillor Ashworth’s comments suggests that the penny has dropped a little sooner than it has with previous administrations. Pipe dreams are all very well, but they make a poor basis for practical plans to regenerate the city centre, something that anyone who has visited it recently will agree has to be a priority.

That won’t happen on the back of a hare-brained plan cooked up by council leaders egged on by ‘consultants’ with a wagon full of snake oil to sell. It won’t happen in isolation either.

To bring about the regeneration of Hanley a rising tide must lift the other five towns too, and a tidal wave of investment must lift the whole region up at the same time. We all either rise together or sink together, there is no middle option.

Currently it is every city for itself with the larger ones rich enough to employ staff to work solely on spotting and winning funding opportunities having a distinct advantage. Smaller cities, like Stoke, end up fighting it out over crumbs and in the long term everybody loses out.

This is no way to regenerate a region, to do that what is needed is a plan to improve public transport links, build decent affordable housing and address deep seated social and economic inequalities. One that has been created by people who understand the different challenges faced by each town and city in the region, and that prioritizes pragmatism and cooperation over self-interest and competition.

Otherwise, Stoke-on-Trent and every other town and city in the West Midlands will be trapped in an endless cycle of being sold plans like Etruscan Square and its predecessors as a shining city on a hill. Only to discover when they get closer that they are just a false front propped up on scantlings.

 

 

 

The Working Class Are Back And They're Mad As Hell

 

The Revival of Resistance

The 2022-23 strikes and the battles still to come.

Mark L Thomas, Jessica Walsh, and Charlie Kimber

(Bookmarks, 2023)

 

The past year has seen British workers take industrial action more often than at any time since 1989 with teachers, nurses, rail workers and even barristers downing tools and taking to the barricades.

For the first time in decades union leaders like Jo Grady of the UCU and Mick Lynch of the RMT are national figures. Lynch even provided a line misquoted by hacks of all stripes when he said the ‘working class are back’.

It is unquestionable that after years of managing decline the trades union movement has regained something like relevance. Thanks in large part to the shock therapy unwillingly inflicted on the body politic by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a cost-of-living crisis all landing in the space of three years.

As Thomas et al argue this presents an opportunity to bring about economic, social, and political change the like of which only comes around once a century. Unfortunately, if it follows its past form in similar circumstances the union movement will let the chance slip through its collective fingers.

To blame is a mixture of learnt helplessness stemming from four decades of neo-liberalism being the dominant force in economics and politics, and the inherent bureaucracy of the trades union movement. Resulting in timid national leadership reining in grassroots action, something the recent crop of strikes have frequently circumvented.

Thomas et al make a case for bypassing a moribund leadership in favour of grassroots organizing that looks back to the origins of the union movement, whilst making full use of the opportunities provided by social media to bring members together to coordinate local action.

This call for rank-and-file union members to follow the courage of their convictions rather than the compromises of the leadership and paid officials is made more powerful as the Labour Party looks set to form the next government.

Already striking unions are urging members to moderate their demands for fear of spooking floating voters and snatching disappointment from the jaws of victory. Experience suggests that if, as looks all but inevitable, Labour win the next general election union members will then be promised ‘jam tomorrow’ endlessly in return for being quiet and compliant today.

Although marked by compromises and failures of courage the strikes of the past year and a bit show the unions still have a viable role to play in the struggle for workers’ rights. The authors of this pamphlet make a cogent and compelling case for how much more could be achieved were that struggle to be led by grassroots members instead of paid officials with positions and pensions to protect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Art to sound out an environmental crisis.

 

Environmental concerns are centre stage at the British Ceramic Biennial this year, both in the work of the artists being presented and a minor public relations faux pas over the use of clay from HS2 in the public engagement area.

 

The main exhibition is taking place in the chilly, not just in aesthetic terms, surroundings of the former All Saints Church in Stoke-on-Trent. An arts and crafts place of worship built with potter’s money when the city was the world centre of ceramic manufacturing, now reinvented as an arts space.

 

The environment, specifically the harm done to sea life by the overuse of marine sonar is the subject of Sounding Line by Mella Shaw. She combines sculptures representing whales ear bones, the clay used to make which has been infused with material taken from the carcasses of whales washed up on the shore of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides with a video of one of these sculptures being returned to the see and ropes that vibrate at different frequencies. This makes for a powerful representation of the impact human activity has on some of the oldest inhabitants of our planet.

 

Outage by Rebecca Griffiths continues the environmental theme by imagining a future landscape where remnants of the nuclear power industry have been dredged up from the sea. The piece was developed during her residency at The Red House in Aldeburgh near to the site of the Sizewell B power station. Griffiths has created a series of enigmatic shapes that could be pieces of some vast machine that has either decayed or been destroyed in an accident that are being reclaimed and eroded by the sea and the creatures living there. A timely reminder, perhaps, that for all the damage blundering humans do nature will always hold the whip hand by playing the longest game of all.

 

Also of note are Sequenced Ceramics by the Copper Sounds collective, a collection of pots, beaters and scaffolding poles hooked up to some clever technology that looks like it was made by Heath Robinson’s cool great grandkids and produces sounds reminiscent of Brian Eno in his pomp. Boundary by Nichola Tassie (pictured) which examines ideas around physical and social boundaries and Looking North by Dan Kelly informed by his intimate relationship with London and the tall buildings dominating its skyline.

 

The Metal Men Are Coming

 

Menace of the Machine: The Rise of AI in Classic Sci-Fi

Edited by Mike Ashley

(British Library)

 

They’re coming for us, the mechanical men with murder in their metal hearts! As this hugely enjoyable anthology demonstrates, they’ve been on their way for over a century at least.

Drawing on the unparalleled collection held by the British Library Mike Ashley has put together a collection of astounding stories that make their readers think as well as providing entertainment.

The titans of the genre, Clarke, Aldiss, Asimov et al are, naturally, represented alongside lesser-known names. Stand out stories include ‘But Who Can Replace A Man?’ by Brian W Aldiss, ‘Two Handed Engine’ by CL Moore and Henry Kuttner, and ‘The Machine Stops’ by EM Forster.

The latter was, for this reader, the most pleasing of surprises. Who would have thought the author of Howard’s End and A Room With A View could have made such a good fist of writing a sci-fi novella. It’s a real shame he never repeated the experiment.

As should be the case with a science fiction anthology, most of the stories fizz with ideas. Some of which, such as the dangers of humanity becoming dependent on technology and the ability, in ‘A Logic Named Joe’ by Will F Jenkins, of a device resembling Alexa to provide us with too much information for our own good are highly pertinent.

One question that has been nagging this reviewer is that given CHATGPT is out there hoovering up data and there and these stories are all in the public domain. Is this the sort of book you want your smartphone or chatbot to read?

Good Reads, Wednesday 30^th August 2023

 

 

 

Festival to mark the death of Chartist Josiah Heapy

 

Local trades unionists will join musicians and other performers to commemorate the death of Leek born Josiah Heapy in the Burslem Chartist riots of 1842.

The First Stoke Chartist Festival will take place behind the town hall on Market place on Sunday 20^th August and is a co-production organized by New Vic Borderlines and the People’s History Association of North Staffordshire (PHANS).

Support, including the loan of a fire engine converted into a mobile stage previously used when Jeremy Corbyn visited Hanley, has been provided by unions including Unite, the FBU, and Unison.

New Vic Borderlines is an award-winning community arts program that uses theatre to give a voice to those who have been marginalized [1].

Director Sue Moffatt has written a play based on the events surrounding the Chartist riots and the death of Josiah Heapy that will be performed on the day by members of the community supported by three professional actors.

In keeping with the Chartist theme trades unions active in North Staffordshire will be present to provide information about the work they do to support working people today.

There will also be stalls run by local groups including Period Power, NORSCARF, and community support charity Better Together as well as craft activities and a display of work relating to Chartism done by students at local schools.

Josiah Heapy was born in Leek and died on 16^th August 1842 when troops broke up an open-air Chartist meeting taking place on Swan Bank, Burslem, causing a riot that resulted in damage to several prominent local landmarks [2]

In the aftermath of the riot 146 Chartists were imprisoned and 54 were transported to Australia.

The Burslem Chartist riots have been described as the ‘Potteries Peterloo’ after the more famous riots in Manchester [3]. In 2019 a successful campaign saw a commemorative plaque unveiled in Burslem near to the spot where Heapy was killed. A street on a nearby housing development has since also been named after him.

Jason Hill, a member of PHANS who also took part in the campaign to have a street named after Josiah Heapy said the festival will “honour” Josiah Heapy and other trades unionists who “fought for the freedoms that we take for granted today”.

He emphasised the important role played by Heapy and other Chartists in creating the trades union movement in North Staffordshire and nationally.

He believes the festival will “raise awareness of this important episode in the history of Burslem which, sadly, seems to be largely forgotten today."

The festival will feature speakers, including Chrissie Gibson a living relative of Josiah Heapy, music, poetry, and performances of the play at various locations around the town.

The festival will take place on 20^th August at Market Place, Burslem, ST6 4AT between 11:00am and 4:00pm.

For further information contact:

Sue Moffatt: smoffatt@newvictheatre.org.uk

Aida Haughton: ahaughton@newvictheatre.org.uk

 

[1] https://www.newvictheatre.org.uk/education-and-community/borderlines/

[2] https://markwrite.co.uk/2018/08/02/josiah-heapy-burslem-1842/

[3] https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/we-proud-josiah-want-tell-2927408