Lies, Damned Lies, and Nick Clegg’s Dirty Little Mouth

Another day, another government disaster, so it seems.  Everyone’s “favourite” dissembling pisswizard, Nick Clegg has come out to criticise “scaremongering” over the Coalition’s plans to introduce surveillance of email and web use. To see why it’s so insulting that it should be Clegg who has trotted out to deliver the latest defense of the indefensible, one only has to consult pages 93 and 94 of the LibDem 2010 election manifesto (remember that?), which make very interesting reading:

Liberal Democrats believe it is an individual’s right to live their lives as they see fit, without discrimination, with personal privacy, and with equal rights before the law.

Decades of Labour and Conservative rule have overthrown some of the basic principles of British justice and turned Britain into a surveillance state.

Not to mention that they wanted to:

End plans to store your email and internet records without good cause.

But it wasn’t just Clegg banging on about this. Oh no! David Cameron was concerned about it too. See this section from p79 of the Conservative 2010 manifesto?

Wherever possible, we believe that personal data should be controlled by individual citizens themselves. We will strengthen the powers of the information Commissioner to penalise any public body found guilty of mismanaging data. We will take further steps to protect people from unwarranted intrusion by the state, including:

  • cutting back intrusive powers of entry into homes, which have been massively extended under Labour;
  • curtailing the surveillance powers that allow some councils to use anti-terrorism laws to spy on people making trivial mistakes or minor breaches of the rules;
  • requiring Privacy impact assessments of any proposal that involves data collection or sharing; and,
  • ensuring proper Parliamentary scrutiny of any new powers of data-sharing.

It seems odd how two parties, so committed to the privacy of the individual and the threat of the creeping state should now, suddenly decide to completely change their tune, enter into the collusion they have and propose the shambles they have put on the table.  Immediately, of course, the Home Secretary, Theresa May sang from the prepared hymn sheet, claiming rather disingenuously that it would help bring “criminal paedophiles and terrorists” to justice, utterly forgetting to mention everyone else. She also played the single most heinous card of all:

“ordinary people” would have nothing to fear from the government’s plans.

Does this sound familiar? It should. These were the exact tactics used by the previous Labour government when proposing similar measures, which both the Conservatives and Lib Dems attacked as being fundamentally undemocratic and another step towards a “Big Brother” society.  The stench of the hypocrisy emanating from the government front benches is overpowering.

For your information, Mrs May,  I am an “ordinary” person, with an ordinary job and an ordinary life.  While I have nothing of any consequence to hide, I certainly have plenty to fear. From you and your kind.  I fear that my privacy is being trampled upon, and valued little if at all.  After all, it is not just the content of messages that are important: the existence and location of the message itself is valuable information to someone.  I object very very much to having this information made available to the government as it sees fit, and for the security services to have access to my private communications at will.  It seems to me to be nothing more than an affront to my right to privacy and a unilateral renegotiation of the relationship between me, a citizen, and the state; this right to privacy is itself enshrined in law, in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and thus in the UK Human Rights Act. It is highly questionable whether the restriction put in place would be “in accordance with law” or reasonable. At the risk of needless escalation akin to Godwin’s Law, this fairly quickly puts us into the Chinese league of intrusiveness and distrust of our own people. The great danger of this of course, is that when people feel like they are being treated like criminals, they start to act like them.

Back in the year 2000, when the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act made its iniquitous progress through Parliament, we were assured, by no less than Jack Straw (the then Home Secretary) himself, that its use would be exceptional, and unusual, and that great care would be taken not to abuse the power vested in it. What happened? Before the end of the decade it seemed that everyone and his cat could use the powers to obtain data. I have the horrible suspicion that this could be the same.  We are told there will be “a  debate”  by Clegg.  Putting aside the idea that anything Clegg says can be trusted for just a second or two, one has to wonder if this idea of “debate” is the same as that which took place about university tuition fees, or the Health and Social Care Bill.

Then of course, there are the practicalities of actually doing it. The scale of this surveillance is pretty staggering, and difficult. Not to mention very expensive. Who’s going to pay for it?  Why, we are, of course. Admittedly, it will trickle down as the ISPs are forced to put expensive systems in place to monitor every minute of our online lives, and they in turn will pass this cost down to us, but we will pay for it, with higher bills and charges.  It will place additional strain on networks that are still lagging behind many of our major competitors.  We will be forced to pay for our own privacy to be continually and continuously violated. Never mind the content of our communications, which will be little better protected, but the connections themselves are also useful information about us. Collecting them too is a violation and the lazy, trite defence proffered by the permanently hapless Home Secretary forgets to mention that the resourceful and the malicious (who are supposedly the targets here, remember) will simply navigate around these problems, leaving the rest of us to suffer the consequences.

A  cynic might argue that letting this squirrel out now means that, come the Queen’s Speech in May, this will be old news and the public won’t care that much.  Setting aside the not trivial issue that no one is able to believe a single thing that comes out of the Deputy Prime Minister*‘s mouth now, the danger is that it also gives more time for a much more concerted and vociferous opposition campaign to rally, and for them to turn public opinion. And yet another PR disaster to rack up with the growing ranks already there. They do this at their peril.

*Given the amount of time Nick Clegg is spending in the Cabinet Office “shaping the running of government”, it is becoming all too easy to see Deputy Prime Minister as little more than a glorified Office Administrator. His low profile over the last week seems only to confirm that he is wheeled out to be the human shield for the policies the Lib Dems should really oppose, but now will swallow to keep their grubby hands grasping at the illusion of power,  just like poor Tantalus. Principles are sold all too cheap, it seems.

Fear and Loathing in Bradford West

Mercy me! That by-election slipped under the radar, didn’t it? Until last night, at least. In the cold light of this Friday morning, who should feel most unsettled by last night’s rather weird happenings in West Yorkshire and George Galloway‘s momentous win?

Labour:

Well, for Ed Milliband, the writing’s on the wall. Bradford West was a safe Labour seat, in West Yorkshire, supposedly one of the safest Labour heartlands in the whole country. And with a local, decent quality Muslim candidate standing, one would have thought that the odds on a Labour hold were pretty good. You can blame local factors and the extraordinary circumstances of a Galloway campaign that pushed many good buttons, but that simply cannot conceal the fact that Labour were utterly unable to energise the electorate in any way.  This is a very bad sign. After the week the government has had, if Milliband can’t use that then he is doomed. To illustrate how bad things are, think back to the little PR stunt pulled in Greggs in Redditch with Ed Balls. In an attempt to score points on Cameron, they allowed themselves to take part in one of the most comedically uncomfortable photo ops ever. It was as staged ansd insincere as it looked and everyone could see it, just as clearly as they could see through David Cameron‘s distaste for even saying the word “pasty” at his  arse-clenchingly awful news conference attempt to dig himself out of a deepening hole. For Labour, May’s local elections, and the London Mayoral election, are vitally important. Anything other than massive Labour gains is likely to seal the Millibot’s death warrant.

The Coalition:

On Radio Four’s Today programme this morning, Baroness Warsi was rolled out to deliver the usual, “this is a disastrous night for Labour” drone. Well, perhaps so. But there’s should be absolutely no smugness on the government’s behalf. Looking at the polling, the combined vote for both the Conservative and LibDem candidates (that’s the incumbent government, just to remind ourselves) was a pitiful 13% – around 1 in 8 of those who voted. That’s both of them. Put together.  That can be seen as nothing except a disaster for them either.

The Conservative polling is perhaps not a shock: they will blissfully ignore this, but do so at their peril. Bradford has been a write off that last night has only managed to confirm. If things go well for Alex Salmond in 2014 in Scotland, the Conservatives will face a Northern England forever hardened against them, and likely to be be very, very fractious indeed. Meanwhile, they may even start to struggle in their own southern heartlands. Economic policy is affecting their core vote too, and May might be a significant sign of just how unpopular the party may be becoming, even there.

For the LibDems, however, things are bleaker still. Only managing to scrap 4.6% of the vote is pitiful. Their national stance is hardly cause for celebration either. The traditional left-leaning constituency they have had has been utterly alienated by their Faustian pact. The other key thing about Pastygate is how much it has angered the LibDems’ key power base in the South West, at a time when they need friends more than ever. They have been skewered by Cameron: they can’t distance themselves from the current mess that the government is, and can’t veer too far from their new script without looking even more untrustworthy than they are already, if that were possible. The next election is likely to be a bloodbath for them, but their most immediate problem will be the oncoming storm of May’s local elections.

Mainstream Politics generally:

For me, the big message last night is that all of the mainstream parties generally are the ones who should be very worried. The public loss of confidence in them is seismic. Putting aside the whole Galloway circus for a moment, there seems to be little confidence that the major political parties are able to navigate us through the current situation. There’s little trust in politics and politicians in general because the issue of funding (very current) and even access, patronage and expense are all still there in public minds, even if the media have moved away. There seems to be a growing, and hardening, antipathy to the current political system. There are many reasons for this, but part of it is the extreme disconnection that is felt between the leaders of the political parties and the people they represent. This has been felt pretty keenly over the last week since the budget, and the whole issue of Pastygate seems to be just a tiny thread to stitch together a much wider patchwork of interconnected issues relating to it.

It would be easy to write this off as a one-off, and to say that come General Election time things will fall back into a normal pattern. But it might be wrong. Labour’s power base in Scotland is fading, and with changes to the Scottish settlement a distinct possibility, the political map of the UK is undergoing change, but it’s almost as if too many people don’t want to admit either that the problem exists at all, or its scale. The political mainstream is now difficult to differentiate, seeming like a self-selecting and self-serving caste. Economic policy seems intent on punishing the poorest people and regions for the mistakes of others. Even more cuts are coming, as well as NHS reform that is likely to fundamentally change the way it works. This by-election result might just be another sign of the turbulence in Britain that is to come.

Nunthorpe City Limits

Bottle of Notes

Bottle of Notes

And so Middlesbrough loses another bid to be granted city status. I’d like to say this came as a surprise, but if I did I’d be lying.  According to the BBC:

The Cabinet Office would not say how it reached its decision about how to award City Status.

But in 2010, when it launched the competition, it said that among the things it would consider would be the history of a town, its vibrancy, identity and community.

It’s hard not to be disappointed. Chelmsford is England’s newest city, together with Perth in Scotland and St Asaph in Wales (and some new arrangements for Armagh in Northern Ireland). Although Chelmsford is Essex’s first city, it seems odd that other towns, like Gateshead or Bolton (quite aside from Middlesbrough), which had good cases have been passed over. In fact, it seems that the choices are all slightly off -kilter in some way.

What is remarkable now is that Teesside must now be one of, if not the single largest urban conurbation in the UK not to contain a city of any description. If you count Hartlepool, the Teesside region contains nearly half a million people. Without it, the figure drops to just under 400,000. And if ever a place needed some form of relief from the coalition’s clueless economic pounding, it is Teesside.

The plain fact is that, on its own, a Middlesbrough bid for city status is never going to succeed.  Maybe it’s because the assaults on the town over the years have hardened a siege mentality that others interpret as insular. Maybe the town’s ambitions are simply not great enough any longer. Who can say?  But for city status to be conferred it looks like there would have to be a concerted bid by both Middlesbrough and Stockton for joint status. It just about works for Budapest, so why not for the People’s Republic of Teesside?

Happy New Year

It’s a well-worn cliché that dark, cold January is a month filled with gloom and despond after the revels of Christmas and the New Year. Far be it from me to overturn such a glorious and experimentally verified truism, so I won’t even try. I’m dealing in good old fashioned dour northern misery and anti-Thatcherism this time.

Otto The Autopilot

David Cameron, yesterday

I’ve only just seen this Grauniad article from January 4 that talks about the moves to rehabilitate Margaret Thatcher’s political reputation. From a personal point of view this is both futile and unneeded in equal measure. For her political descendants, like  Boris Johnson (like a Labrador in human form), and Dave “Otto the Autopilot” Cameron, no rehabilitation is required. In the political classes, the Thatcherite view of the free market has effectively triumphed. This applied to Blair too; even Brown, a man derided by the right, ended up viewing the economy through a prism constructed by  Thatcherism.  At the same time, amongst those she damaged most, Thatcher will never be forgiven. Ask someone in Glasgow, Teesside, Liverpool or the coalfields of Durham and Yorkshire (amongst many other places) what they think of Margaret Thatcher, and listen to the splenetic torrent that washes back over you in reply. Never in living memory has a political leader been so divisive and corrosive to the country.

In the course of his article, Seamus Milne writes:

But her authorised biographer, the high Tory Charles Moore, has no doubts about the The Iron Lady’s effective political message. The Oscar-bound movie is, he declares, a “most powerful piece of propaganda for conservatism”. And for many people under 40, their view of Thatcher and what she represents will be formed by this film.

This quote made me laugh on so many levels.  The first is the laughable suggestion that anyone under the age of 40 would be remotely interested in watching a movie about this fossilised, vicious harridan. The second is the sentiment, echoed by Cameron only this week in a platitudinous, content-free smugfest, that the Thatcher template is not one he intends to disavow. All the Prime Minster’s announcement provided was a yawning sense of déjà vu, as economic instruments that had failed vast swathes of the country in the 1980s were rolled out again by those without any clue of what they were doing.

This yawning sense of disconnection was reinforced on last night’s Question Time, where both Baroness Warsi and the aforementioned Charles Moore helpfully managed to demonstrate the old adage that, “it is better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and confirm it”,  just by opening their mouths repeatedly. Moore managed to be splendidly patronising to the audience in his answer about the plans to privately fund a new Royal Yacht.  Then the thought occurred to me that, with all the money sloshing around on the government benches, maybe the chaps could have a small whip-round to pay for it themselves?  Warsi was no better on the question of an estuary airport for London. I though London needed an new airport like Birmingham needed an high speed rail link, but a very sharp member of the audience pointed out that you could build the airport in Birmingham and actually give HS2 a purpose.

While the previous paragraph might seem like a bit of a ramble off the thrust of this post, it just helps to illustrate that the priorities and the worldview of the government are already so out of kilter with everybody else.  I could talk at length about this, as it seems I haven’t even started about Scotland, HS2, disability benefits, or the futility of sending William Hague to South America on a diplomatic mission when he’s as welcome there as Ebola right now. But these are for another time, because the mammoth in the room is still the economy (here’s where I get back on thread, folks).

Current economic policy is still predicated on the austerity drive that has been demonstrated to be ineffective and, in fact, actively harmful. The deficit is actually getting worse because the economy is starting to shrink; Osborne doesn’t really want to talk about that, but the latest wave of retail failures are not helping.  Like the scorched earth Pol Pot economics of the 80s, there is no Plan B in the minds of policy makers. The cure for our economic woes is rather like treating someone with a sprained ankle by amputating their leg to the knee, and its just as foolish.

Still, soon it will be spring. And we’ll only have to listen to the build up to the Olympics for another 4 months. Yay.

Dave Gorman – Middlesbrough Town Hall (November 11 2011)

It’s been a while since I saw Dave Gorman: about eight years, in fact, looking back at the promotional material for Googlewhack Adventure (which, if you haven’t seen yet, I advise you to go and buy immediately).  Because I liked Googlewhack Adventure and, to be honest, lots of the other stuff he’s done, I was really looking forward to this slight departure from other stuff of his I’d seen before. Previously, Gorman’s approach has been to pretty much deliver a lecture, based around an overarching theme or project. But with gags. Lots of gags.

Not this time. True, there were plenty of gags. Very good gags in fact, so you won’t be disappointed. This time, though, there’s no real great theme, just a collection of topics and thoughts, joined together like most other stand up shows. The big difference here is the use of Powerpoint.  He’s made use of Powerpoint a fair amount in the past, so it helps a couple of the early one liners if you’ve seen him working the medium before.

Now, I use Powerpoint a fair bit: I teach in a university, so that’s not much of a surprise. But Gorman is a master at it. Lots of the fun in his comedy seems to come from the misdirection of flow, leading you to an unexpected punchline, which is delivered using the Powerpoint mechanism (well, that and the brief spasms of almost primal rage that crop up from time to time).  There are lots of people using Powerpoint out there who should watch this as an object lesson in how to do it.

But, the key point in amongst all this is: yes, he’s funny. Very, very funny, and so is his show. You should watch it. It’s great. nnd so is the support act, Jay Foreman, evne though he looked a lot like Daniel Radcliffe in the spots at the end of the evening playing Land of Hope and Glory as DG’s accompanist. Buy his CD, it’s well worth a fiver of your money, even if you only listen to track 20.

Mike Harding – Middlesbrough

Back when I was a kid, my Dad worked with a bloke everyone called “Jeff”, even though his name was actually Trevor. Jeff was a funny bloke, was a pretty good darts player (even managing to play on TV against pros). But Jeff liked his folk music, and had a load of records. He also liked his comedy. And on one occasion he lent my Dad a couple of Mike Harding albums. So, at eight years old, I first heard the Rochdale Cowboy. I remember staying up late to watch his shows on BBC2 and being struck by this strange bloke with the loud dungarees and John Lennon glasses. And the albums have stayed with me. I could probably recite huge parts of them, having listened to them so often; the word “wassock” often punctuates my speech.

So when he announced he was doing a comedy tour for the first time in well over a decade, what else could I do but buy a ticket (well, three actually. One for me and one each for my parents, who are still fans). And last night was the night he landed back in the Boro, in the Middlesbrough Theatre. I love the “Little” Theatre: it has a lovely,warm, cosy atmosphere. I’ve seen a few shows there and have always enjoyed being around. The capacity is around 450, and last night it was full. The audience were mostly my folks’ age, but there were a few younger ones there, like me. I make my way over to say hello to BBC Tees‘ Bob Fischer in the foyer before the show, just so he’s aware who the idiot who sends all that rubbish into his show actually is. Bob’s a very nice chap.

The show is billed as Me, a Guitar and Some Daft Stuff. That’s not quite true: there are two guitars and a mouth organ too, but nothing else that you’d call frills. But that doesn’t matter when you have someone who can spin a yarn like Mike. The first thing he does is one of my favourite things of all: My Brother Sylvester, his version of which, to this day (I discover later) isn’t available because he’s being prevented from buying back the copyrights to some of his earliest recordings,  Early on, he drops the obligatory local references into his opening stories and the audience laugh in recognition; we’re with him already. There’s a mix of old favourites and crowd pleasers we can all join in with, a mix of familiar stories and newer observations before, all too soon, it’s time for the interval and some very nice Honey and Ginger ice cream (no suicide juice for me, I’m driving).

After the restart the pace continues, but is punctuated by the one serious song of the night, a beautiful version of his own song, Bomber’s Moon. At this point the audience are so quiet, to quote the man himself, you could hear a cockroach fart. And then the fun continues some more. Finally, all too soon, it’s time for the last song, a rousing audience participation number. There are no encores, he explains, because he doesn’t like the pretence of waiting behind the curtains to see if the applause is loud enough. Instead, he’ll spend the time more usefully out front, signing stuff and chatting with fans.

I buy a copy of Flat Dogs and Shaky Pudden to go with the copy of Komic Kutz I brought for signing. The queue is bright and good natured, though we could be there for longer as its so easy to chat with him. Many do, as they swap news of shared friends or memories.  After my folks do, I get my CD’s signed and shake his hand to say thanks. And that’s it: off home we go.

It pleases me no end to realise that someone I admired hugely as a kid and who had a major influence on me in a lot of ways turns out to be such a decent and lovely bloke. I’ve heard this from other places of course, but it’s nice to have it confirmed for yourself.