Facebook registered its five hundred millionth member this week, that’s five hundred million, the sort of figure you usually associate these days with the gloomy economic forecasts of a government that likes to make the voters flesh crawl.
The social networking site which launched in 2004 has added a hundred million members in the past six months alone. At this rate the whining claim made by the few teenagers not allowed to go to the digital party that ‘everyone’s on Facebook’ might soon be true.
The site has, in its short history, had its fair share of controversy, focussing mostly on its refusal to install a ‘panic button’ to allow younger users to report incidents of possible online grooming by paedophiles not to mention the vile tribute site to murderer Raoul Moat that briefly appeared last week.
Even so Facebook has been that rarest of all things, an online business that actually works, putting it ahead of other such sites like Myspace and Bebo, the only site that comes close to matching its appeal is Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter share something else apart from the love of the internet generation; the near universal loathing of the British media in its red top and broadsheet incarnations. Both are cited as destructive forces threatening to turn the next generation into dead eyed zombies, this week the BBC devoted a whole slot on its news channel to a debate over whether or not social networking sites are robbing teenagers of the ability to communicate in the ‘real world’ that never rose much above the level of the saloon bar.
Its possible to see in this the ugly face of an old moral panic dressed up in shiny new digital clothing. I’m old enough to remember when colour television, video recorders and Channel Four were all at various times seen as harbingers of imminent social chaos. With the exception of the television channel that gave the world Big Brother the threat was noticeable only by its failure to materialize.
At the risk of sounding like the sort of reactionary who started the rumour in the first place if today’s teens are fatter, more insular and less chatty than their parents were at the same age then I blame the parents, and not just for letting them sit in front of a computer all day.
It was parents not teenagers who turned a proper caution about the risk of abuse into a paranoia that has poisoned the trust that is the mark of a civilized society. It is parents who have become so obsessed with risk that climbing trees and even crossing the road unaccompanied is something many youngsters don’t experience until they leave home and go to university.
No prizes for guessing who it was that turned a generation of children into pampered pets ferried from Pony Club to piano lessons and back again without ever experiencing the combination of boredom and longing that make life’s good times truly memorable. You guessed it; the parents and while they were at it they turned the education system into an obstacle course of mostly meaningless tests so that they could brag about their little darling’s grades even though the education the poor creatures received as a result was almost totally without value.
Faced with that sort of pressure on a daily basis is it any wonder that a whole generation seems to have retreated into the safety of the virtual world?
I’m no lover of Facebook, as I pointed out last week their response to the furore over the tribute to Raoul Moat was both pious and irresponsible, but when it or anything else is damned by a lazy and self serving media egged on by the political establishment it is a devil for whom I am able to have a fair degree of sympathy.
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Friday, 16 July 2010
No more heroes-just thugs like ‘Moaty.’
Piles of filling station bought flowers mouldering in a heap, attached to each one a card professing love and admiration for someone the people who laid the flowers have never met, it’s raining and the writing on the cards is starting to run. This could be outside Kensington Palace in the summer of 1997 or just about anywhere in the wake of a newsworthy tragedy at any time since.
In fact the tributes turning into mulch on the municipal grass are lying on a riverbank in the Northumbrian town of Rothbury and have been laid in honour of Raoul Moat, a low rent thug turned celebrity murderer.
It feels like taking a dose of cod liver oil served up on an oversize silver spoon but I find myself agreeing with David Cameron when he said at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday of this week: ‘I cannot understand any wave, however small, of sympathy for this man.’ Like Mr Cameron and most other people I am able to see Moat for what he was ‘a callous murderer, full stop, end of story.’
The trouble is that for a large section of the population the full stop Moat’s miserable life came to last Friday night is part of a different and very disturbing story. One that paints him as a heroic rebel and was celebrated by a Facebook page with 35,000 members, most of whom left illiterate comments supporting Moat for standing up to the authorities.
The page has since been deleted but not before a spokeswoman for Facebook had piously told the press that since the site encourages discussion of issues in the media: ‘we sometimes find people discussing topics others may find distasteful, however that in itself is not a reason to stop a debate from happening.’ Thank you for clearing that up, I know how free speech works, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about just what some people use their freedom to speak about.
Ok granting the status of ‘legend’ to men like Raoul Moat is nothing new, in the eighteenth century huge crowds turned out to cheer highwaymen to the gallows and people sang ballads about their crimes that turned them into decaffeinated romantic heroes for people who had never heard of romanticism. Later cinema audiences thrilled to the gun toting antics of screen gangsters such as James Cagney and Edward G Robinson.
The difference between those instances and what we’re seeing here is that an integral part of the myth of the highwayman or the gangster was that sooner or later they faced the consequences of their actions, be that at the end of a rope or lying on the steps of a church as their moll tells a stone faced cop that they ‘used to be a somebody.’ Lionizing a criminal is silly but harmless subversion so long as it is framed by an understanding that in real life people have to be answerable for their actions, when that breaks down things turn deadly.
Yes Moat had his problems, someone should have listened to his pleas for psychiatric help, the police were guilty of some degree of grandstanding during the week it took to corner him; but this can never excuse what he did.
Even though most people in Britain didn’t write messages of support to Raoul Moat on Facebook or lay flowers at the shrine erected in his honour we should all share some of the blame for his being turned into a hero in the first place, not least because we have all conspired in turning the notion of heroism from a Homeric ideal into a label applied to inept footballers, self indulgent celebrities and now violently dysfunctional thugs.
If the lionization of a man like Raoul Moat is really the sort of ‘legend’ our society wants to tell itself at the start of the twenty first century; then we’ve got serious problems.
In fact the tributes turning into mulch on the municipal grass are lying on a riverbank in the Northumbrian town of Rothbury and have been laid in honour of Raoul Moat, a low rent thug turned celebrity murderer.
It feels like taking a dose of cod liver oil served up on an oversize silver spoon but I find myself agreeing with David Cameron when he said at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday of this week: ‘I cannot understand any wave, however small, of sympathy for this man.’ Like Mr Cameron and most other people I am able to see Moat for what he was ‘a callous murderer, full stop, end of story.’
The trouble is that for a large section of the population the full stop Moat’s miserable life came to last Friday night is part of a different and very disturbing story. One that paints him as a heroic rebel and was celebrated by a Facebook page with 35,000 members, most of whom left illiterate comments supporting Moat for standing up to the authorities.
The page has since been deleted but not before a spokeswoman for Facebook had piously told the press that since the site encourages discussion of issues in the media: ‘we sometimes find people discussing topics others may find distasteful, however that in itself is not a reason to stop a debate from happening.’ Thank you for clearing that up, I know how free speech works, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about just what some people use their freedom to speak about.
Ok granting the status of ‘legend’ to men like Raoul Moat is nothing new, in the eighteenth century huge crowds turned out to cheer highwaymen to the gallows and people sang ballads about their crimes that turned them into decaffeinated romantic heroes for people who had never heard of romanticism. Later cinema audiences thrilled to the gun toting antics of screen gangsters such as James Cagney and Edward G Robinson.
The difference between those instances and what we’re seeing here is that an integral part of the myth of the highwayman or the gangster was that sooner or later they faced the consequences of their actions, be that at the end of a rope or lying on the steps of a church as their moll tells a stone faced cop that they ‘used to be a somebody.’ Lionizing a criminal is silly but harmless subversion so long as it is framed by an understanding that in real life people have to be answerable for their actions, when that breaks down things turn deadly.
Yes Moat had his problems, someone should have listened to his pleas for psychiatric help, the police were guilty of some degree of grandstanding during the week it took to corner him; but this can never excuse what he did.
Even though most people in Britain didn’t write messages of support to Raoul Moat on Facebook or lay flowers at the shrine erected in his honour we should all share some of the blame for his being turned into a hero in the first place, not least because we have all conspired in turning the notion of heroism from a Homeric ideal into a label applied to inept footballers, self indulgent celebrities and now violently dysfunctional thugs.
If the lionization of a man like Raoul Moat is really the sort of ‘legend’ our society wants to tell itself at the start of the twenty first century; then we’ve got serious problems.
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Spare the rod to promote learning.
Sit up straight! Stop sniggering at the back of the room! Head teachers in England are to be given greater powers to search pupils suspected of bringing weapons into school and given clearer guidance on restraining disruptive students as part of a government drive to improve behaviour.
They’ve certainly got their work cut out, according to Ofstead behaviour in one in six schools is no better than ‘satisfactory’, last year 8130 students were permanently excluded from school, 2230 of those were excluded for violent assault on a teacher or another student. Bad behaviour, it seems, isn’t just a problem; it’s a full blown epidemic.
Announcing the plans Schools Minister Nick Gibb said there was too much ‘low level disruption’ in schools and that his aim was to ensure that parents were able to feel ‘the classroom to which they send their children is a safe place where that can learn.’
Alan Steer, a former education advisor to the Labour government, welcomed the proposals, including granting anonymity to teachers against whom allegations of assault have been made, but described elements of the programme such as the use of after school detentions as ‘fluff.’ The real way to improve student behaviour was, he said, ‘to continually raise the standards of teaching.’
Chris Keates of teaching union NASUWT also expressed concern about the use of ‘reasonable’ force to restrain disruptive students, saying it might put teachers at risk if malicious allegations made by students who ‘know their rights but not their responsibilities.’
There is no question that discipline is an important part of the learning process, but in what appears to be an attempt to play to the gallery of popular opinion, the government risks making the mistake of thinking a ‘tough’ teacher and a ‘good’ teacher are one and the same. They aren’t, as anyone who didn’t go to Eton knows only too well.
We can all remember the tough teachers, every school however liberal had at least one, from our schooldays, martinets who ruled with a rod of iron, but were they the teachers from whom we learnt the most? Probably not, as Alan Steer points out discipline can make a students stay in their seats, but only good, meaning engaging, teaching can make them learn and want to go on doing so throughout their lifetime.
Sadly the sort of teaching that engages students imagination, often because it strays from, but never entirely abandons, the set curriculum and even, horror of horrors, encourages them to think for themselves has been the biggest casualty of the slow collapse of our education system over the past quarter century. Schools long ago stopped being seats of learning and became instead vast machines dedicated to churning out statistics for bureaucrats.
Bad behaviour is the most noticeable price we pay for allowing this to happen, particularly amongst boys for whom sitting cooped up in a classroom is a form of torture when what they most want to do is be active. Even the well behaved students lose out under the current system because rather than learning how to value knowledge and use it as a buttress for independent thought they learn instead how to regurgitate key words and pre digested answers. Useful skills if you’re going to be a junior minister, but not in any other field.
By all means give teachers the power to impose discipline in their classrooms, but if we really want to solve the problem of low level disruption the government has to take the bigger step of setting them free to engage their students in something more than just preparing for an endless round of exams.
They’ve certainly got their work cut out, according to Ofstead behaviour in one in six schools is no better than ‘satisfactory’, last year 8130 students were permanently excluded from school, 2230 of those were excluded for violent assault on a teacher or another student. Bad behaviour, it seems, isn’t just a problem; it’s a full blown epidemic.
Announcing the plans Schools Minister Nick Gibb said there was too much ‘low level disruption’ in schools and that his aim was to ensure that parents were able to feel ‘the classroom to which they send their children is a safe place where that can learn.’
Alan Steer, a former education advisor to the Labour government, welcomed the proposals, including granting anonymity to teachers against whom allegations of assault have been made, but described elements of the programme such as the use of after school detentions as ‘fluff.’ The real way to improve student behaviour was, he said, ‘to continually raise the standards of teaching.’
Chris Keates of teaching union NASUWT also expressed concern about the use of ‘reasonable’ force to restrain disruptive students, saying it might put teachers at risk if malicious allegations made by students who ‘know their rights but not their responsibilities.’
There is no question that discipline is an important part of the learning process, but in what appears to be an attempt to play to the gallery of popular opinion, the government risks making the mistake of thinking a ‘tough’ teacher and a ‘good’ teacher are one and the same. They aren’t, as anyone who didn’t go to Eton knows only too well.
We can all remember the tough teachers, every school however liberal had at least one, from our schooldays, martinets who ruled with a rod of iron, but were they the teachers from whom we learnt the most? Probably not, as Alan Steer points out discipline can make a students stay in their seats, but only good, meaning engaging, teaching can make them learn and want to go on doing so throughout their lifetime.
Sadly the sort of teaching that engages students imagination, often because it strays from, but never entirely abandons, the set curriculum and even, horror of horrors, encourages them to think for themselves has been the biggest casualty of the slow collapse of our education system over the past quarter century. Schools long ago stopped being seats of learning and became instead vast machines dedicated to churning out statistics for bureaucrats.
Bad behaviour is the most noticeable price we pay for allowing this to happen, particularly amongst boys for whom sitting cooped up in a classroom is a form of torture when what they most want to do is be active. Even the well behaved students lose out under the current system because rather than learning how to value knowledge and use it as a buttress for independent thought they learn instead how to regurgitate key words and pre digested answers. Useful skills if you’re going to be a junior minister, but not in any other field.
By all means give teachers the power to impose discipline in their classrooms, but if we really want to solve the problem of low level disruption the government has to take the bigger step of setting them free to engage their students in something more than just preparing for an endless round of exams.
Saturday, 3 July 2010
A farewell to ‘New Football.’
As it turned out we didn’t have to worry about penalties because the Germans managed to beat us four one in ninety minutes. On Sunday afternoon as the nation sat sulking by the BBQ you could have been forgiven for thinking that it was the summer breeze ruffling the red and white bunting above our collective head, in fact it was the death rattle of ‘New Football’, the slightly older sibling of New Labour.
The similarities between the two are really quite uncanny, they both have their origins in a defeat that changed everything, owe much of their success to the influence of Rupert Murdoch and now resemble an awkward artefact from the nineties we’d really rather like to forget about.
Don’t get me wrong in ‘New Football’, in its way, did a lot of good, when Bobby Robson’s team lost to Germany in the semi final of Italia 90 football was a sport in a seemingly terminal decline, the injection of television money that followed the creation of the Premier League in 1992 allowed crumbling grounds to be transformed into modern sports venues with the toilet facilities to match.
New Football brought new people to the game, mostly middle class families, as a result the hooligan element which had been bringing the game into disrepute for the previous couple of decades were pushed to the sidelines. They haven’t gone away, but now we can see them for what they always were, a collection of pathetic Neanderthals dragging their tattooed knuckles along the ground on a long march to nowhere.
The trouble with New Football, much like its political sibling, is that its excesses and distortions of reality will be better remembered than any good it might have done.
The stock in trade of the Premier League and its subsequent incarnations was, from the start, high grade hype, no game could be merely important it had to be billed as an epic contest in which the fates of entire nations would be decided. As a result hype rapidly turned, as it so often does, into hubris, and even journeyman players started to believe themselves to be members of a ‘golden generation.’
As for the elite players, the likes of Rooney, Lampard, Beckham et al, they seemed to morph overnight from being people who were like the supported paying on the turnstiles in every respect apart from what they could do with a ball at their feet into jaded superstars watching the world they thought owed them a living sweep past the tinted windows of their top of the range Bentley’s and BMW’s.
They forgot the most important thing about success in sport or any other field, that achieving it has more to do with hard work than innate talent. By the time the current World Cup rolled around they believed themselves to have a divine right to win, then came the worst campaign mounted by an England team since we first entered the contest in 1950 and hubris turned into halitosis overnight.
New Football might be dead, but football is very much alive and kicking, there will always be people who surprise in themselves a desire to wear a replica shirt and stand in the rain watching their team grind our a goalless draw. The relationship between players and supporters, in the UK anyway, has changed forever though, the gods have failed and if they want the rest of us to keep the faith they will have to transform themselves back into ordinary mortals who don’t demand rewards and respect as their right.
Football may not have come home after all, but it has come back down to earth with a bump; in the long run that may be no bad thing.
The similarities between the two are really quite uncanny, they both have their origins in a defeat that changed everything, owe much of their success to the influence of Rupert Murdoch and now resemble an awkward artefact from the nineties we’d really rather like to forget about.
Don’t get me wrong in ‘New Football’, in its way, did a lot of good, when Bobby Robson’s team lost to Germany in the semi final of Italia 90 football was a sport in a seemingly terminal decline, the injection of television money that followed the creation of the Premier League in 1992 allowed crumbling grounds to be transformed into modern sports venues with the toilet facilities to match.
New Football brought new people to the game, mostly middle class families, as a result the hooligan element which had been bringing the game into disrepute for the previous couple of decades were pushed to the sidelines. They haven’t gone away, but now we can see them for what they always were, a collection of pathetic Neanderthals dragging their tattooed knuckles along the ground on a long march to nowhere.
The trouble with New Football, much like its political sibling, is that its excesses and distortions of reality will be better remembered than any good it might have done.
The stock in trade of the Premier League and its subsequent incarnations was, from the start, high grade hype, no game could be merely important it had to be billed as an epic contest in which the fates of entire nations would be decided. As a result hype rapidly turned, as it so often does, into hubris, and even journeyman players started to believe themselves to be members of a ‘golden generation.’
As for the elite players, the likes of Rooney, Lampard, Beckham et al, they seemed to morph overnight from being people who were like the supported paying on the turnstiles in every respect apart from what they could do with a ball at their feet into jaded superstars watching the world they thought owed them a living sweep past the tinted windows of their top of the range Bentley’s and BMW’s.
They forgot the most important thing about success in sport or any other field, that achieving it has more to do with hard work than innate talent. By the time the current World Cup rolled around they believed themselves to have a divine right to win, then came the worst campaign mounted by an England team since we first entered the contest in 1950 and hubris turned into halitosis overnight.
New Football might be dead, but football is very much alive and kicking, there will always be people who surprise in themselves a desire to wear a replica shirt and stand in the rain watching their team grind our a goalless draw. The relationship between players and supporters, in the UK anyway, has changed forever though, the gods have failed and if they want the rest of us to keep the faith they will have to transform themselves back into ordinary mortals who don’t demand rewards and respect as their right.
Football may not have come home after all, but it has come back down to earth with a bump; in the long run that may be no bad thing.
Friday, 25 June 2010
Is this the end for the Liberal Democrats?
On Tuesday Chancellor George Osborne delivered what he described as his ‘unavoidable’ emergency budget, outlining cuts to public spending and tax rises aimed at dealing with the ballooning deficit; they were he said ‘tough but fair.’
Tough? Talk about public school understatement, capital gains tax up to 28%, child benefit frozen for three years, add to this the cuts in spending on welfare and to every departmental budget apart from those of the NHS and for overseas aid and you can see the bad times not just starting to roll but damn near turning into an avalanche.
Much of this is necessary to fill in the black hole caused by the spending policies, roughly translated as if a project isn’t working throw some more money at it, of the last government and all of it will be unpopular. There are also questions to be answered about the long term effects on society, particularly on the most vulnerable of its members.
Acting Labour leader Harriet Harman, in a speech containing the sort of passion that was so sadly missing when she was in government, attacked the budget as ‘reckless’. She poured scorn on the plans to raise VAT from 17.5 to 20%, something both parties forming the coalition had fought shy of in their election manifestos.
This was, she said, ‘the chancellor’s first budget but we have seen it all before, it is the same old Tories, hitting hardest at those who can least afford it and breaking their promises.’
Often mocked as a shrill metropolitan liberal with little idea how ordinary Britons live Harman made a telling point, however hard the chancellor tries to persuade us otherwise this budget will hit people on low and middle incomes disproportionately hard for the simple reason the they, unlike the rich, don’t have access to accountants and tax lawyers who will find the loopholes that will keep their costs down. All of which makes you wonder why Ms Harman didn’t throw her hat into the ring as a candidate for the Labour leadership, maybe she’s waiting for the winner of the current race to coma a cropper before sweeping in to ‘save the party’. A risky strategy since in politics people who await much tend to come away with little.
Harriet Harman saved the most vicious of her attacks though for the Liberal Democrats, saying their presence in the coalition government was a ‘fig leaf’ for long held Tory ambitions to cut the size of the state. Fears, she said, that the UK would follow Greece into economic and social turmoil were,’no alibi’ for their complicity in sanctioning such a harsh budget.
Again Ms Harman, an unlikely carpenter at the best of times, has hit the nail squarely on the head. This might not be the budget that breaks the coalition, but it could very well be the one that breaks the Liberal Democrats as a party, much to the benefit of David Cameron’s Tories.
On Tuesday George Osborne may have played the wicked fairy at the christening by making the new government a gift of an ‘age of austerity’, but in the longer term it is Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander (a Lib Dem) who will have to play the real bad guy. It is he who will catch the flack in and out of the commons when ministerial budgets and local services start to be cut.
Before the election the question was whether or not Nick Clegg has the steel to grasp the chance of taking his party into government for the first time in almost a century as part of a possible coalition. The chance came and buoyed up by a positive performance in the televised leader’s debates he grasped the nettle, the unfortunate thing about nettles is that they tend to sting.
The cuts, if they work and so far the credit rating agencies have been positive, which in this context probably matters more in the short term than public opinion, will still be deeply unpopular with most members of Clegg’s party. For this they will pay a heavy price at any future by-elections and could see a steady drifting away of disaffected members as the Labour Party did when Tony Blair junked most of its principles, before too long it might not be a case of the Lib Dem’s propping up the Tories so much as the Tories holding out a lifeline to a party on the brink of oblivion.
It is no small irony that the big chance for the Liberal Democrats to move into the political big time could also be the almost certain guarantee of their demise as a party.
Tough? Talk about public school understatement, capital gains tax up to 28%, child benefit frozen for three years, add to this the cuts in spending on welfare and to every departmental budget apart from those of the NHS and for overseas aid and you can see the bad times not just starting to roll but damn near turning into an avalanche.
Much of this is necessary to fill in the black hole caused by the spending policies, roughly translated as if a project isn’t working throw some more money at it, of the last government and all of it will be unpopular. There are also questions to be answered about the long term effects on society, particularly on the most vulnerable of its members.
Acting Labour leader Harriet Harman, in a speech containing the sort of passion that was so sadly missing when she was in government, attacked the budget as ‘reckless’. She poured scorn on the plans to raise VAT from 17.5 to 20%, something both parties forming the coalition had fought shy of in their election manifestos.
This was, she said, ‘the chancellor’s first budget but we have seen it all before, it is the same old Tories, hitting hardest at those who can least afford it and breaking their promises.’
Often mocked as a shrill metropolitan liberal with little idea how ordinary Britons live Harman made a telling point, however hard the chancellor tries to persuade us otherwise this budget will hit people on low and middle incomes disproportionately hard for the simple reason the they, unlike the rich, don’t have access to accountants and tax lawyers who will find the loopholes that will keep their costs down. All of which makes you wonder why Ms Harman didn’t throw her hat into the ring as a candidate for the Labour leadership, maybe she’s waiting for the winner of the current race to coma a cropper before sweeping in to ‘save the party’. A risky strategy since in politics people who await much tend to come away with little.
Harriet Harman saved the most vicious of her attacks though for the Liberal Democrats, saying their presence in the coalition government was a ‘fig leaf’ for long held Tory ambitions to cut the size of the state. Fears, she said, that the UK would follow Greece into economic and social turmoil were,’no alibi’ for their complicity in sanctioning such a harsh budget.
Again Ms Harman, an unlikely carpenter at the best of times, has hit the nail squarely on the head. This might not be the budget that breaks the coalition, but it could very well be the one that breaks the Liberal Democrats as a party, much to the benefit of David Cameron’s Tories.
On Tuesday George Osborne may have played the wicked fairy at the christening by making the new government a gift of an ‘age of austerity’, but in the longer term it is Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander (a Lib Dem) who will have to play the real bad guy. It is he who will catch the flack in and out of the commons when ministerial budgets and local services start to be cut.
Before the election the question was whether or not Nick Clegg has the steel to grasp the chance of taking his party into government for the first time in almost a century as part of a possible coalition. The chance came and buoyed up by a positive performance in the televised leader’s debates he grasped the nettle, the unfortunate thing about nettles is that they tend to sting.
The cuts, if they work and so far the credit rating agencies have been positive, which in this context probably matters more in the short term than public opinion, will still be deeply unpopular with most members of Clegg’s party. For this they will pay a heavy price at any future by-elections and could see a steady drifting away of disaffected members as the Labour Party did when Tony Blair junked most of its principles, before too long it might not be a case of the Lib Dem’s propping up the Tories so much as the Tories holding out a lifeline to a party on the brink of oblivion.
It is no small irony that the big chance for the Liberal Democrats to move into the political big time could also be the almost certain guarantee of their demise as a party.
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Football and what it says about who we are.
We’re football crazy, we’re football mad, at the risk of being branded a heretic I’d like to admit to being less than impressed by the World Cup and the tournament is only a week old.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a despatch from the cultural high ground, far from it; I count myself as being a lapsed football fan. Like anyone who has ever called themselves a lapsed anything I may no longer fully believe, in my case in the doctrine that my club or country really is by far the greatest the world has ever seen, but I’ve no desire to abandon the faith entirely.
It’s just that certain things about the World Cup and football in general get under my skin and it’s probably cathartic to write them down.
For a start I dislike the way football colonises the media every time there is a major tournament, this would just about make sense if England actually won trophies now and again but they don’t, in fact not winning is what defines them as a team. The sports where we do regularly come away with the honours, think swimming at the last Olympics for a start, are usually all but invisible when it comes to television coverage.
There is also the small matter of the extent to which football is taken, and takes itself, seriously. Early last week I heard a normally sensible presenter on Radio 5 asking if following his schoolboy error goalkeeper Robert Green could ever be forgiven. I’d like to pretend there was a hint of redeeming irony in the question; but there wasn’t.
Then there are the songs, ok so we’ve finally evolved out of the stage where it was thought acceptable for out of tune footballers to release a record before the tournament, but we are plagued instead by endless ‘unofficial’ World Cup songs, each one more tuneless than the last. Even these though are musical masterworks compared to the two football related songs that have become alternate national anthems, I mean, of course ‘World in Motion’ and ‘Three Lions’, respectively crimes against music committed by New Order and The Lightening Seeds.
Both songs pretend to be inspiring recognition of past mistakes and a determination to make sure things are different this time in team and listeners alike. In truth they do nothing of the sort; they are, instead, hymns of praise to the dull stasis of being mediocre.
It would be impossible for me to write another word about the present World Cup without mentioning the ultimate achievement of human evil that is the vuvuzela. An instrument that looks like a coaching horn moulded out of day-glow plastic and when played en masse produces the sort of sound you would expect to hear were a riot to break out in a beehive. If the ninth circle of hell has a house band it has a large and noisy vuvuzela section.
Having said all the above this tournament and football in general has the ability to tell us much that is worth knowing about the sort of country we live, although like most things that are worth knowing they tend not to make you feel all that comfortable once you know them.
Despite the hype and the flag waving two poor games have shown the golden generation of England players up to be needy, complacent and guilty of the sin of mistaking being busy for being efficient and taken by surprise when other countries don’t follow suit. It’s a mistake you can see being made over and over again in the economic history of Britain since the war, we didn’t believe people on the other side of the world could make goods that were cheap and of good quality, until they did and our manufacturing sector went down the tubes.
There is nothing like a World Cup for highlighting the smallness of the current crop of politicians. If you don’t believe me try the following thought experiment, try to think of a prime minister before John Major who was in the habit of sending messages of support to England’s football teams, or any other sports team for that matter. I can’t, but every one since has all but addressed the nation wearing a replica top and clutching a can of beer in a desperate attempt to show they’re in touch with we ordinary folk.
It’s a myth of course, in truth football makes the political classes nervous because it is the one mass movement they have failed to infiltrate and make passive with fines and endless petty regulations. Look at a football crowd and you can still see king mob on the march and that has always scared people in positions of authority.
They look at the flags of St George being carried by football supporters or flying from windows and cars and, because they inhabit a cosy gated community of the mind, have no way of telling where an expression of national identity ends and bigotry begins. As a result they fall back on the knee jerk reaction of seeing every flag as being attached to a bigot.
While it would be naive not to recognise the way the far right has appropriated the flag ordinary people who are often far less prejudiced that the metropolitan who write for broad sheet papers have done much to wrest it back from the thugs in recent years. Putting out more flags though is only a baby step towards defining what it really means to be English at the dawn of the twenty first century.
To do that we have to recognise that real patriotism is reflective rather than reactive, meaning understanding what unites us instead of just what makes us different from everyone else. At a time when looming public spending cuts could further fracture our atomised society achieving that may prove to be a more important prize than winning the world cup.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a despatch from the cultural high ground, far from it; I count myself as being a lapsed football fan. Like anyone who has ever called themselves a lapsed anything I may no longer fully believe, in my case in the doctrine that my club or country really is by far the greatest the world has ever seen, but I’ve no desire to abandon the faith entirely.
It’s just that certain things about the World Cup and football in general get under my skin and it’s probably cathartic to write them down.
For a start I dislike the way football colonises the media every time there is a major tournament, this would just about make sense if England actually won trophies now and again but they don’t, in fact not winning is what defines them as a team. The sports where we do regularly come away with the honours, think swimming at the last Olympics for a start, are usually all but invisible when it comes to television coverage.
There is also the small matter of the extent to which football is taken, and takes itself, seriously. Early last week I heard a normally sensible presenter on Radio 5 asking if following his schoolboy error goalkeeper Robert Green could ever be forgiven. I’d like to pretend there was a hint of redeeming irony in the question; but there wasn’t.
Then there are the songs, ok so we’ve finally evolved out of the stage where it was thought acceptable for out of tune footballers to release a record before the tournament, but we are plagued instead by endless ‘unofficial’ World Cup songs, each one more tuneless than the last. Even these though are musical masterworks compared to the two football related songs that have become alternate national anthems, I mean, of course ‘World in Motion’ and ‘Three Lions’, respectively crimes against music committed by New Order and The Lightening Seeds.
Both songs pretend to be inspiring recognition of past mistakes and a determination to make sure things are different this time in team and listeners alike. In truth they do nothing of the sort; they are, instead, hymns of praise to the dull stasis of being mediocre.
It would be impossible for me to write another word about the present World Cup without mentioning the ultimate achievement of human evil that is the vuvuzela. An instrument that looks like a coaching horn moulded out of day-glow plastic and when played en masse produces the sort of sound you would expect to hear were a riot to break out in a beehive. If the ninth circle of hell has a house band it has a large and noisy vuvuzela section.
Having said all the above this tournament and football in general has the ability to tell us much that is worth knowing about the sort of country we live, although like most things that are worth knowing they tend not to make you feel all that comfortable once you know them.
Despite the hype and the flag waving two poor games have shown the golden generation of England players up to be needy, complacent and guilty of the sin of mistaking being busy for being efficient and taken by surprise when other countries don’t follow suit. It’s a mistake you can see being made over and over again in the economic history of Britain since the war, we didn’t believe people on the other side of the world could make goods that were cheap and of good quality, until they did and our manufacturing sector went down the tubes.
There is nothing like a World Cup for highlighting the smallness of the current crop of politicians. If you don’t believe me try the following thought experiment, try to think of a prime minister before John Major who was in the habit of sending messages of support to England’s football teams, or any other sports team for that matter. I can’t, but every one since has all but addressed the nation wearing a replica top and clutching a can of beer in a desperate attempt to show they’re in touch with we ordinary folk.
It’s a myth of course, in truth football makes the political classes nervous because it is the one mass movement they have failed to infiltrate and make passive with fines and endless petty regulations. Look at a football crowd and you can still see king mob on the march and that has always scared people in positions of authority.
They look at the flags of St George being carried by football supporters or flying from windows and cars and, because they inhabit a cosy gated community of the mind, have no way of telling where an expression of national identity ends and bigotry begins. As a result they fall back on the knee jerk reaction of seeing every flag as being attached to a bigot.
While it would be naive not to recognise the way the far right has appropriated the flag ordinary people who are often far less prejudiced that the metropolitan who write for broad sheet papers have done much to wrest it back from the thugs in recent years. Putting out more flags though is only a baby step towards defining what it really means to be English at the dawn of the twenty first century.
To do that we have to recognise that real patriotism is reflective rather than reactive, meaning understanding what unites us instead of just what makes us different from everyone else. At a time when looming public spending cuts could further fracture our atomised society achieving that may prove to be a more important prize than winning the world cup.
Saturday, 12 June 2010
Britain’s got money worries.
Last Saturday a gymnastics troupe called ‘Spellbound’ won ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ and are no doubt going to follow in the footsteps of last year’s winner ‘Diversity’ by achieving if not world domination then a lucrative tour of provincial theatres.
I was going to hail their as the most impressive balancing act of the modern age until their crown was stolen early this week by David Cameron. The balancing act he’s going to attempt is, if possible, even more gravity defying than being thrown vertically up in the air to such a height that all the audience below can see of you is the soles of your feet; he’s going to try and pay off Britain’s debts without wrecking the economy.
Those debts, he claimed in an announcement made on Monday were so high that in five years time Britain will be paying £70 billion just in interest on the debts run up as part of a ‘public sector splurge’ by the previous government. Tackling them, Mr Cameron said, would ‘affect our whole way of life.’ Make no mistake chummy Dave had left the building and hard nosed David was in charge of things now and for the foreseeable future; the bad times are about to start rolling.
In the bleakest, and, I fear most honest, section of his speech the Prime Minister that because the legacy of debt left by the outgoing Labour government is ‘so bad the measures to deal with it will be unavoidably tough, but people’s lives will be worse unless we do something now.’ He didn’t promise us nothing but toil, tears, work and sweat; but the message was clear that we’re going to get it anyway.
Responding to the statement on Radio Four’s Today programme Shadow Chancellor Alistair Darling dismissed the claim made by David Cameron that the Labour government had covered up the extent of the debts it was leaving behind as ‘nonsense.’ He went on to criticise Chancellor George Osborne for not grasping the importance of maintaining growth and paying down the country’s debts.
More worryingly for the government the unions have been making threatening noises about resisting any cuts to public services made to pay down the national debt. Dave Prentiss of UNISON called the cuts a ‘chilling attack on the poor the sick and the vulnerable’, fighting talk that could well be backed by a summer of strikes likely to further damage our battered national credit rating.
This is where the ‘big society’, first of all in the shape of the consultation George Osborne has invited us all to take part in about where the axe should fall, becomes a solid entity instead of a nebulous entity in an unreadable book by Philip Blond.
Nobody knows what it will look like yet, but we won’t like it much and it will be less like the ‘big state’ than its enthusiasts hope. It will have its own set of prejudices and pet projects and be run for the most part by upper middle class people who mean well but are fundamentally clueless about the way their ‘clients’ live, what they want and what they fear. Does that sound like anything to you? To me it sounds like a return to the dead end that was Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ to me; and that didn’t end so well did it?
And Another Thing:
I’d like to think Diane Abbott made it onto the ballot paper in the race to be the next leader of the Labour Party on merit alone, but I just can’t convince myself that it’s the truth.
New Labour is no closer to really accepting diversity of opinion, the real issue here rather than race or gender, than it ever was. All that has happened is an election defeat has made it expedient to patronise rather than threaten the shrinking left wing of the party.
After the ballot the party leader will be a pale, stale, Oxford educated male all primed to lead them onto the sunlit uplands of political irrelevance. I hope that I’m wrong about that because were I still a party member Ms Abbott would get my vote, but I’m probably not.
I don’t know what effect the new, angry, Fabio Coppello had on the photographers he berated for taking pictures through the window of the England dressing room, but he frightens the life out of me.
What could be behind his transformation from Mr Cool into Mr Angry, my guess would be that after a run of lacklustre performances in the run up to the tournament he has realised, a little late for such a clever man, that despite his best efforts English footballers just aren’t as good as their African, South American or mainland European counterparts.
I was going to hail their as the most impressive balancing act of the modern age until their crown was stolen early this week by David Cameron. The balancing act he’s going to attempt is, if possible, even more gravity defying than being thrown vertically up in the air to such a height that all the audience below can see of you is the soles of your feet; he’s going to try and pay off Britain’s debts without wrecking the economy.
Those debts, he claimed in an announcement made on Monday were so high that in five years time Britain will be paying £70 billion just in interest on the debts run up as part of a ‘public sector splurge’ by the previous government. Tackling them, Mr Cameron said, would ‘affect our whole way of life.’ Make no mistake chummy Dave had left the building and hard nosed David was in charge of things now and for the foreseeable future; the bad times are about to start rolling.
In the bleakest, and, I fear most honest, section of his speech the Prime Minister that because the legacy of debt left by the outgoing Labour government is ‘so bad the measures to deal with it will be unavoidably tough, but people’s lives will be worse unless we do something now.’ He didn’t promise us nothing but toil, tears, work and sweat; but the message was clear that we’re going to get it anyway.
Responding to the statement on Radio Four’s Today programme Shadow Chancellor Alistair Darling dismissed the claim made by David Cameron that the Labour government had covered up the extent of the debts it was leaving behind as ‘nonsense.’ He went on to criticise Chancellor George Osborne for not grasping the importance of maintaining growth and paying down the country’s debts.
More worryingly for the government the unions have been making threatening noises about resisting any cuts to public services made to pay down the national debt. Dave Prentiss of UNISON called the cuts a ‘chilling attack on the poor the sick and the vulnerable’, fighting talk that could well be backed by a summer of strikes likely to further damage our battered national credit rating.
This is where the ‘big society’, first of all in the shape of the consultation George Osborne has invited us all to take part in about where the axe should fall, becomes a solid entity instead of a nebulous entity in an unreadable book by Philip Blond.
Nobody knows what it will look like yet, but we won’t like it much and it will be less like the ‘big state’ than its enthusiasts hope. It will have its own set of prejudices and pet projects and be run for the most part by upper middle class people who mean well but are fundamentally clueless about the way their ‘clients’ live, what they want and what they fear. Does that sound like anything to you? To me it sounds like a return to the dead end that was Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ to me; and that didn’t end so well did it?
And Another Thing:
I’d like to think Diane Abbott made it onto the ballot paper in the race to be the next leader of the Labour Party on merit alone, but I just can’t convince myself that it’s the truth.
New Labour is no closer to really accepting diversity of opinion, the real issue here rather than race or gender, than it ever was. All that has happened is an election defeat has made it expedient to patronise rather than threaten the shrinking left wing of the party.
After the ballot the party leader will be a pale, stale, Oxford educated male all primed to lead them onto the sunlit uplands of political irrelevance. I hope that I’m wrong about that because were I still a party member Ms Abbott would get my vote, but I’m probably not.
I don’t know what effect the new, angry, Fabio Coppello had on the photographers he berated for taking pictures through the window of the England dressing room, but he frightens the life out of me.
What could be behind his transformation from Mr Cool into Mr Angry, my guess would be that after a run of lacklustre performances in the run up to the tournament he has realised, a little late for such a clever man, that despite his best efforts English footballers just aren’t as good as their African, South American or mainland European counterparts.
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