YOUR FIFTEEN MINUTES ARE UP

Raoul Moat: it’s a name for a character in a comic novel, isn’t it. Perhaps one by David Lodge or Tom Sharpe. Come to that, so is Derrick Bird, especially spelt that way. Well, perhaps not now.

I tended to avoid coverage of Moat’s week on the lam in Northumberland, as far as I could. So I don’t know whether commentators were drawing clever parallels with Derrick Bird’s rampage through Cumbria last month. But somehow I doubt it. Bird is last month’s chip paper.

For my readers who do not or are not able to follow what now passes for news on television and radio and in the papers in Britain, the tale is easily told. Raoul Moat, a bouncer and small-time criminal, was released from gaol at the turn of the month, despite giving every indication that he intended his former girlfriend no good. He promptly shot and wounded her, shot and killed her new man (whom he believed to be a police officer), shot and gravely wounded a traffic policeman, went to ground for a week and was cornered for some six hours at the end of which he fatally shot himself.


Moat in the media's eye

Derrick Bird, a taxi driver, shot and killed his twin brother, then led police on a frenzied chase across Cumbria, killing eleven more people, some of whom he knew, some evidently at random, before shooting himself dead. By a curious coincidence, Cumbria County Council has offices in the small town of Brampton. In Moat Street.

The media calculate that there is a strong public appetite for stories like this, particularly ones that are decently contained. Had Moat held off the police well into a second week, he would have lost his place as the lead story. As it was, he timed it nicely to allow the result of the World Cup final to become tonight’s pressing report. His death almost closes down his news value, save for the fact that his brother is now giving the media an extraordinarily fanciful account of what he reckons took place in Moat’s last hours, though of course he wasn’t there.

Such stories hold little interest for me. I’d much rather have proper reporting of the spy-swap negotiation, the details of the government’s botched cancellation of school rebuilding projects and other real news. I can’t be doing with the question upon which the media harp – “why did he do it?” – because I know perfectly well that if they essay an answer it will be of the most banal kind, psychology got out of a total ignorance of either the particular circumstances of the case or the accumulated literature of psychopathology.


Derrick didn't get to do bird

During the days and days of coverage that succeeded Bird’s killing spree and death, BBC reporters several times observed in so many words that what the residents of Whitehaven most fervently desired was for the media circus to go away. But as so often when they talk of the media, they mysteriously exclude themselves from it, as though nobody in their right mind could possibly object to several BBC camera crews recording everything that moved, researchers collecting endless pointless vox pops in the street and a succession of senior correspondents doing grave think pieces to camera. Clearly, the BBC reporters implied, what the good folk of Cumbria really didn’t want was tabloid reporters trying to work up something salacious. I suspect that the BBC and other television news outfits rubber-necking on the assumed behalf of the nation was no less unwelcome.

What makes one situation a major candidate for a nightly fiesta of “human interest” overkill and another only worth a paragraph in a weekly local newspaper? There were 648 homicides in England and Wales in the twelve months to March 2009 (the figure for the following twelve months is due out this week). Interestingly, only 38 of them were shootings, the preferred method of Bird and Moat.

Meanwhile, the child murder rate runs at more than fifty per year but only a very few receive the attention accorded to Peter Connolly – “Baby P”. No one knows how many children go missing each year – the definition of “missing” is elusive and the police and other authorities have difficulty amassing reliable statistics – but there cannot be much doubt that the coverage accorded to Madeleine McCann in the first weeks of her alleged disappearance was vastly more extensive than that lavished on any before or since. Without belittling the ordeal of the McCanns, there was clearly a certain iconography about the case of their child that commended itself to the media, from the relatively exotic holiday setting to Mrs McCann’s gambit in always carrying her daughter’s “favourite” toy. Kate and Gerry McCann were themselves highly skilful at keeping the story bubbling.


McCanny Scots

It’s debatable whether the McCanns exploited the media or vice versa, just as you can argue that, in such cases, the media is satisfying a public appetite or creating it. News professionals of my acquaintance have hung on every word of the Moat, Bird, Baby P and McCann stories, professionals for whom, you might think, the real substance of news was the playing out of the fates of the Con-Dem coalition, the Labour leadership, the Obama administration, the tottering rules of Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi, the perilous government of Zimbabwe, the fractious coexistence between Russia and her former satellites, the defiant regimes in Jerusalem and Tehran and the still new, still scorned leadership in the European Union. I don’t mind admitting that those Shakespearean dramas engage me much more than the pitiful soap operas unfolding in picturesque little northern towns.

GETTING THE MESSAGE ACROSS

On June 9th, I sent a bunch of policy proposals to the five candidates for leadership of the Labour Party. I declared in my covering letter that "I represent no lobby, faction or interest but myself. I am not even a member of the Party but I have long supported it at the ballot box and I always wish it well". I made brief quotes from each of the candidates' statements reproduced in The Guardian eight days earlier, describing them as "what I call 'Mom-and-apple-pie' politics, full of warm generalities against which no one even mildly small-l liberal could argue" and I asked "are you all interchangeable or just too timid to make concrete, radical proposals that the others might shy from?" I concluded: "The coalition has proposed that we must think the unthinkable. For Labour to be outflanked in imagination and boldness would be nothing short of a tragedy. I hope my contribution is useful and will be taken in the spirit in which it is offered".

Only the office of David Miliband has so far responded to the document, in warm generalised terms. Not a peep from any of the others but we live in an age when the elementary courtesy of an acknowledgment of receipt is no longer thought necessary, even though email avoids the trouble of signing, putting into an envelope and posting such an acknowledgment. Following an excellent article by the former Labour MP Tony Wright in The Guardian last Wednesday, I have also sent him a copy. Dr Wright is now based at the Institute of Public Policy Research, the function of which is to do left-of-centre thinking.

For the record, I post my proposals below. Some of these notions will be familiar to the more devoted of my readers and of them I beg their indulgence.

POLICY PROPOSALS for LABOUR

I am 63. In only the first four years of my life has there been a Labour government that made a fundamental and lasting difference to the life of the nation. Subsequent Labour governments have certainly made contributions to the lives of various groupings, but almost entirely in the realm of social policy. And none of these achievements – the Open University, say, or civil partnerships – is unthinkable under a relatively enlightened Tory government. What is more, many of the most far-reaching measures – reform of the divorce and abortion laws and abolition of the death penalty, for instance – have only succeeded by the stamina and determination of backbenchers introducing Private Members’ Bills.

Both Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson invoked Lenin’s phrase about the need to take over “the commanding heights of the economy”. Attlee achieved more by that measure than did Wilson. Some 18 months ago, when the Brown government began to take significant stakes in high street banks, I dared to think that this dream might come to pass after all. But the imperturbable city easily frightens ministers with its patently empty but apparently convincing talk of the need to remain independent, just as with its sophistry about attracting “the best”. Someone who will only work for a salary to which is attached a seven-figure bonus is not interested in service, only in self-service. Personal greed is not some kind of measure of financial acumen. In any case, under a global financial crisis, how can any self-important trader be sure that there are jobs elsewhere ripe for the picking? The city plays many bluffs that need to be given short shrift.

When it is being “pragmatic” – a favourite term of Wilson’s that has been taken up by Cameron (and John McDonnell and Andy Burnham) – Labour risks offering merely a less economically competent alternative, to which voters turn when the Tories are exhausted and corrupt (1964, 1997). But Labour must present itself as creative, energetic and fearless. Just before the last televised debate, I wrote to Gordon Brown, recalling the catalogue of Labour’s achievements that he presented to conference a year or two ago; it brought the hall to its feet. I urged him to rerun the list in his television peroration. I still argue that Labour needs to think positively about what it has done; but even more so about what more it must do.

The following proposals are radical. Many of them will of course have been discussed at policy meetings but few if any of them have, I think, been advocated publicly by frontbenchers. But all the leadership candidates have spoken of the need for the party to listen so I hope some practical, imaginative suggestions will not come amiss.

Bring public transport back into public ownership and make it free

Transport accounts for a greater proportion of expenditure for the poorest in society than for the richest: since 1997, bus and coach fares have risen 24 percent above inflation, whereas overall motoring costs have fallen 14 percent in real terms. Public transport accounts for far less pollution than does private. Road building destroys more valuable land than does rail extension. For all these reasons, a properly integrated transport policy requires that the bus, coach and tram network, the underground system and the railways be brought back together under public ownership and run for service rather than for profit. Then all public road, underground and rail travel should be free to all at the point of delivery, not merely for over-60s. There would be a major saving in infrastructure and staffing in the removal of the ticketing operation. Redundancies may be offset by the expansion of services (including through the night) and the commensurate recruitment of more drivers. More security and information staff would be appropriate too. On the railways, the ending of first class tickets could be cushioned by the provision of more “quiet carriages”, from which under-18s, mobile phones, personal sound systems and alcohol would be banned. More staff would be necessary to enforce such regulations.

Once there is a free public transport system, measures can be put in place to encourage the public to use it rather than to rely on their own cars, on taxis and, within the UK, on air travel. Road tolls must be introduced, graded according to the number of occupants of each car, so that car-pooling is strongly encouraged. Many more routes through unsuitable areas should be denied to all but public transport and essential business. Surcharges on vehicular fuels could favour commercial vehicles over private and much more strongly advantage unleaded petrol. A judicious combination of tax advantages and cost grading could offer incentives to companies to favour rail freight over road haulage; perhaps in time freight too could travel gratis on the railways, thereby encouraging firms to relocate close to the rail network and disused lines, stations and depots to be reactivated. Naturally, specific tasks and needs delivered by road vehicles would be exempted (GPs, emergency services).

There would be long-term savings in the reduction of, inter alia, wasteful traffic jams, the dominance of carbon-emitting vehicles, the undermining of buildings and the continuing need for roadworks and expansion. Fewer people would be killed or maimed in road accidents too. The public may well rebel at the notion of “the driver being penalised again” but government needs to be strong enough to lead a change in the culture.

Bring the utilities back into public ownership

I am far from being alone in decrying the conduct of the enterprises that have taken over the utilities, the ownership of many of which is now in the hands of foreign companies and shareholders who have no concern for British consumers. It is a nonsense that, for instance, the “big six” power companies can act as a cartel; that water in Scotland is administered by Thames Water; that British Gas perpetually harass us to accept them as our electricity supplier when so many improvements could be made in their service of gas; that BT cannot attend to network faults for its own customers until the time has elapsed (by Ofcom fiat) that it notionally takes to see to such a repair for the customer of a rival company.

In practice, many utility companies enjoy a practical monopoly in the areas where they operate and their charges relate not so much to market forces as to the often fanciful claims that they make for their commitment to modernisation and the safeguarding of resources. But what consumers most fervently deplore is the colossal greed that these companies betray in their scales of charges. The most recent quarterly gas bill for our four-bedroom house is above £825. All the utilities are gratuitously overpriced and these prices of course hit the poorest disproportionately.

The last Labour government wanted to propel the Royal Mail into the same culture of profit-before-service, and very unpopular the proposal was too, particularly because the efforts to stem the service’s losses have already greatly reduced the quality of its performance. Moreover, the departing CEO, head-hunted for an even more lucrative post at ITV, has been allowed to plunder Royal Mail to the tune of £3.5million as his “golden handshake”. Now the coalition government plans to execute the part-privatisation policy. When the Tories first split off the telephone system from the Post Office, they neglected the fact – or most likely didn’t even know – that the only reliable, unvandalised public phone boxes (this was long before the spread of mobiles) were those to be found in post offices. And these boxes were all promptly ripped out. The great practical virtue of public ownership is that it permits of integrated systems.

Government need not be fearful of the resistance that companies would offer to take over. Labour has long experience of nationalising private industry. Shareholders are routinely advised that the value of their investments may go down as well as up and the losses that stakeholders in utilities will claim to have sustained by what they denounce as a “state grab” will be as nothing compared to the value wiped off shares during the downturn over recent months. The public can only gain by the public ownership of the public utilities.

Overhaul the criminal justice system

If the courts stopped committing those convicted of non-violent crime to prison, there would be no need for capital expenditure on new gaols. Financial crimes could be countered by punitive financial penalties over a commensurate number of years (those convicted would have their finances regularly audited by court-appointed accountants and would be obliged to lead a palpably circumscribed life). Other white-collar crime, burglary and petty offences could be penalised by rigorous regimes of community service. It serves no purpose to incarcerate the likes of Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer, the royal correspondent of the News of the World or people who have failed to pay their television licences. Prisons too often act as universities of crime, dispatching their “graduates” better able to break the law than when they arrived. A programme of emptying gaols of prisoners who constitute no danger to the public ought to be drawn up within days of coming to power.

There should be a new test imposed by the courts on all those found guilty of violent or coercive crime: is this convicted individual objectively a danger to the public? If the court finds this to be the case, the presumption should be that the offender, whatever his or her age at the time of conviction, will be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure until past the age of 60. The concept of parole would be abolished. Incarceration should be reserved for those so convicted by the court. This way society benefits from – rather than paying the keep of – supervised restitution from all but its most recalcitrant and antisocial transgressors.

At the introduction of this new test, it could be made clear that the carrying of an offensive weapon would be a strong factor in determining whether an individual were deemed a danger to the public. A couple of exemplary convictions of 17 year-olds for a minimum of 43 years, allied to a wide and sensitively handled weapons amnesty, ought to have a profound effect on the safety of the streets and the gang culture in British cities. It follows that some crimes, even though clearly serious, would not necessarily carry the additional judgment of the perpetrator being a danger to the public – a crime passionnel, for instance – but rapists, child molesters, muggers who use violent assault, armed robbers, large-scale drug dealers and indeed dangerous and drunken drivers would be subject to this test. There ought also to be a presumption that any driver found guilty of killing or maiming or even endangering members of the public while in charge of a vehicle would at least be banned from driving for the rest of his or her life, whatever the impact on that person’s means of earning an income. This is another cultural change that a government ought to be strong enough to lead.

There are many different kinds of pollution that require to be tackled through government regulation

There will always be vested interests and cranks who refute climate change – the Holocaust-deniers of a “final solution” that threatens the planet’s very survival – but most political leaders across the world do recognise the peril in which we have placed ourselves. Whether there is the political will sufficiently to address the challenge is another matter. International capital is notoriously protective of its own short-term interests and will fight viciously to eschew what it deems burdens and restraints imposed on behalf of prospects and populations that do not register on its balance sheets. The efforts to turn the tide of global destruction depend largely on the governments of China, Russia, India, the United States and Latin America but European nations can certainly lead by example.

Environmental damage is too readily committed and too lightly dismissed. The law in Britain should be changed so that where, for instance, waterways are impaired or cancer clusters are found in the population, the onus will fall on the enterprises accused of responsibility to prove that their own systems and tests are such that they can only be blameless. The possibility of being found guilty by default will oblige all organisations whose activities might conceivably leach toxins into the environment critically to review their preventative measures.

There are other sorts of pollution that require imaginative government intervention and regulation. The intrusion of noise and light, not only in built-up areas, is growing unchecked. The physical and mental health of countless individuals is undermined in subtle and profound ways by the increasing inability to enjoy darkness and quiet. Two false gods are given precedence here: the god of personal freedom, who demands that we must be allowed to impose our noise on others; and the god of security who must be appeased by the driving out of dark places. In each case, personal freedom and security is paradoxically reduced because the health (and therefore the freedom and security) of the victim is undermined.

Another pollutant is advertising (including the disguised promotion that is excessive packaging). The intrusion of marketing onto every possible platform has a long-term impact on the population, especially the young who are taught to believe that telling the world how flawlessly fabulous you are is the route to success and that only by conducting yourself as the modern equivalent of a sandwich-board man can you achieve anything. By its nature, advertising promotes both excess and blind acceptance, two psychologies of dangerous exploitability. Government should intervene.

Significantly increase duty on items that damage public health and ring-fence the income for the NHS

Whenever governments attempt to intervene in private activities that have a deleterious effect on those who pursue them (and, though this is routinely ignored in the argument, on others too), people complain about “the nanny state”. Oddly enough, the same people scamper to nanny NHS when they begin to suffer the diseases caused by smoking, drinking, obesity and so on. This point might usefully be made more often.

Recurrent proposals for price controls and consumption restrictions, advertising and sponsorship bans and other such measures (ones that also punish responsible consumption and adversely affect enterprises that are innocent third parties) are always fiercely fended off by vested interests. Rather than fixing a minimum price for alcohol, a simpler measure would be to revoke the licences of all supermarkets and non-specialist chains to sell alcohol and indeed smoking materials. This would also be a useful counter-balance to the over-mighty supermarkets that have driven so many off-licences, pubs and newsagent/tobacconists out of business. Many young people find an off-licence a rather more daunting outlet than a corner Costcutter with its discounted plonk and strong beers.

Then a Labour Chancellor might impose new, swingeing duties on smoking materials and alcohol that are strictly and accountably ring-fenced for payment direct to the NHS, so that smokers and drinkers may know that they are contributing towards the treatment that they will themselves require. A similar imposition might be made on processed foods, using a sliding scale dictated by objective nutritional assessments, with more stringent tests and surcharges imposed on catering supplies, the contents of which are not (but could be and should be) vouchsafed to consumers. If that works well, all foodstuffs that cannot demonstrate that they are organic might subsequently be surcharged in the same way. Food producers will have an incentive to put themselves in a position where they can demonstrate the healthy nature of their ingredients and processes. This is taxation as organic carrot rather than as resented stick.

Then government should introduce punitive surcharges on those whose drunken behaviour necessitates the calling out of emergency services. Specific spot charges for the handling of incidents need not be the thin end of a wedge of general charging for police and/or paramedic services; rather, voters generally would welcome knowing that they are not having to pay for the clearing up after anti-social indulgence in town centres. This would be a targeted surcharge that would also win a lot of votes.

Ensure an equitable system of income tax

It is a puzzlement that, over the last thirteen years in power, Labour never managed to close the many loopholes in the taxation system that allow those who can afford smart accountants to avoid paying their dues. Tax avoidance is a major industry in Britain but it should not be beyond the wit of either Treasury or HMRC number-crunchers to scale it down significantly, if not eradicate it altogether.

Meanwhile, the issue of “nom doms” has greatly exercised politicians and commentators on all sides. The question of whether someone who lives abroad for tax purposes should enjoy status privileges in Britain is, to my mind, an irrelevant and misleading question. Where someone designates her or his principal residence is far too manipulable a matter. After all, the proprietor of The Daily Mail lives to all intents and purposes in Wiltshire but, by some sleight of hand, pays tax as a resident of Paris at a much more favourable rate than do run-of-the-mill Wiltshire multi-millionaires. Those who bear the onerous task of owning The Daily Telegraph from their tax exile in Monaco must laugh to scorn the fainthearted level of graft in the Westminster village, that has been so comprehensively uncovered by their organ. Moat-cleaning indeed! Why not acquire a Channel Island? That’s a vastly more cost-effective scam.

The problem of nom doms is readily solved. Income should be taxed not on the basis of where the earner lives but where the income is earned. Better yet, follow the practice of the IRS in the United States: tax without reference to either the location of the earner’s domicile or the country of the income’s origin. To avoid taxation, Americans have to renounce their US citizenship and even after that their US income is taxed on the same basis as that of a guest worker. If Americans can live with such a system, Brits sure as hell can too.

No doubt there would be a degree of departure from these shores among those unwilling to submit to contributing an appropriate proportion of their wealth to public provision. Such people merit a one-word response: “Goodbye”. If, to continue owning several mansions and a private jet, they are obliged to be based in a country where, beyond their gated communities, they are surrounded by abject poverty, that is for their consciences to reconcile. But it is a self-serving myth that our industries cannot survive without greedy, grasping individuals. They can and will survive (the BBC will go on after Jonathan Ross, for instance) because there are always people who are thoughtful as well as talented, who want work that is stimulating first and lucrative only as may be, and who will choose to stay in a decent society that diligently cares for all its members.

Revivify manufacturing

Britain’s manufacturing base was destroyed by Margaret Thatcher: everybody knows that. But Jim Callaghan’s Selective Employment Tax, if not starting the rot, certainly helped it on its way. This was a piece of government intervention in business that calculatedly favoured service over smokestack industries. The result is that financial arrangements are sold, planners are advised and shelves are stacked in Britain, but things – machines, materials, objects – are made in eastern Europe and the Far East. People still think of factories, plants and workshops as providing “real” jobs, and offices, shops and call centres as nothing to inspire pride in work and job satisfaction. Tangible products bear powerful magic.

David Cameron talks airily about Britain being a “broken society” without looking hard for the origins of this breakdown. Job security – in service industries as well as in manufacturing – died under Thatcher. The taking-over, asset-stripping, franchising, Friedmannite free-for-all of those days ensured that no brand can be relied on any longer or can even be understood to mean what it seems to mean, even outside of manufacturing (for Coutts read RBS; for Selfridge’s read Weston; for Manchester United read Yankee fraudsters). Fifty-five years of covetousness-inspiring advertising (“it takes the waiting out of wanting”) pumped directly into people’s homes, as decreed by Churchill’s 1950s government, has had a profound effect on the public’s sense of entitlement. If you undermine people’s sense of who they are and then encourage them to think they’re somebody else, it’s little wonder that they start to get narky.

With a judicious combination of investment and incentive, government can begin a revival of manufacturing that would recreate a true sense of community wherever it is located. Tax breaks for firms that do not outsource to countries where labour is grossly underpaid would help to rekindle domestic output. Britain used to glory in a skilled workforce and could do so again. New demand for apprenticeships would keep young people out of the clutches of both the gang and the cheap booze cultures. Almost a million now registered as out of work are aged between 16 and 24; almost half of the black people in that demographic are unemployed. Nick Clegg was “lost for words” according to the Birmingham student who confronted him on youth unemployment during the election campaign.

Clearly Britain can never again be “the workshop of the world” but she has no need to be a parasite, the eternal middleman whose only contribution to trade is to add to its cost. As international capital shows so little interest in investing in British skills, government will have to take on the task. But we shall need to start by bringing on the skills in the first place.

The promise of “education, education, education” must be fulfilled

Jonathan Swift (wise in all things) originated the notion that “parents are last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children” [Gulliver’s Travels chap VI]. It is a Tory mantra that parents alone ought to decide what education is available for their children; Labour should set its face against such a nostrum.

Education is not a branch of business and its nature must not be determined by the (imagined) demands of the market. Nor should private capital be allowed to penetrate any deeper into schools and universities than at present. But equally education needs to be freed of the growing infrastructure of quotas and league tables. These yardsticks are far too reductive. Teaching is an art, not a science, and does not lend itself to mechanistic measures. Politicians need to be willing to trust teachers and head teachers; they will certainly be rewarded by perceptible advances in the overall quality of the school system.

The thrust of education is to widen the horizons of pupils, to present them with the rich variety of society, culture, history and intellectual enquiry and to encourage them to ask questions. Supernatural superstition, by contrast, seeks to confine minds to narrow paths, to prescribe a fixed Weltanschauung and to proscribe alternative views, to require unquestioning fealty. Accordingly, the very notion of “faith schools” (a contradiction in terms) ought to be banished from the Labour lexicon. Any teaching that smacks of indoctrination should be disallowed in all publicly funded education establishments.

Centres of study outside the state system need to be closely monitored too. The unfolding revelations about child abuse in the Catholic church give government an opportunity to impose more rigorous vigilance on convent schools and seminaries, including a requirement that such institutions introduce their pupils to wider supernatural notions and, more important, to rational, science-based readings of history, nature and psychology. For the security of the indigenous population, Islam must not be permitted to build a network of madrasahs here (or indeed to shape a foothold for Sharia law). The presumption ought to be that the education system is wedded to the dissemination of factually-based knowledge and formally neutral on matters of interpretation. To those who claim angrily that “this is a Christian country”, the present Archbishop of Canterbury’s calm adumbration of a separation of church and state [New Statesman interview, December 22nd 2008] may be pointed out.

Create an environment in which people do not need to feel that incomers of any kind get preferential treatment

The general election of 2001 was the first in which I did not vote Labour (I only returned to the colours this year when it seemed really necessary). There were two reasons for this disaffection; I will come to the second in due course. The first concerned the immigration policies being pursued by the Blair government that, poorly represented as they clearly were by ministers, appeared to be imposing cruel restrictions on asylum seekers. As the sitting MP in the constituency where I then voted happened to be the immigration minister, it suited my purpose to register a protest. I am pleased to record that the swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats in that seat in 2001 was exceeded only in the constituency of the then Lib Dem leader, Charles Kennedy, and proud that the reaction in the area was strongly to liberalism rather than to racism. After I had moved out of the constituency, the Lib Dems took the seat in 2005 and retained it this year. (Labour’s majority in 1997 had exceeded 20,000).

Seasoned politicians know that how things look is at least as important in politics as how they are (something apt to be forgotten when MPs try to fend off scandal: for instance, the long-running expenses saga and the Lord Levy/“cash for honours” debacle). While it is a relief that support for the BNP appears to be in retreat across the country, the widespread fear of immigration, however unjustified that fear may be, needs to be recognised and addressed. Politicians have a duty to pursue measures that may not be taken to legitimate xenophobia or racism. How policy in this area is presented – how it looks – is quite as critical as what it is.

It would be reasonable to impose upon local authorities the obligation to pursue policies concerning housing and other benefits that favour citizens who can demonstrate that they have local roots. Where people imagine that (im)migrant workers are permitted to “jump the queue”, there is resentment that can turn ugly. The criteria to be used would speak to history and longevity and their use would have the added effect of encouraging incomers to seek legitimacy.

Ed Balls is clearly right to seek a Europe-wide solution to these issues. Little in recent times has been more perplexing than the phenomenon of the refugee encampment at Sangatte, Pas-de-Calais. Why did so many asylum-seekers, having already reached the security and stable job-market of France, yet risk life, limb and arrest by attempting to cross to Britain? Why was European policy not sufficiently co-ordinated for this shaming spectacle to be unnecessary?

If British policy towards economic refugees and asylum seekers differs significantly from that of other EU member states, it is proper for Britain to take up the matter. The free movement of workers within the EU clearly needs to be revisited. In an era when, for instance, British university students have been and are being impoverished by the system of loans, it is cruel to deprive them of the traditional supplementary jobs in bars and restaurants by allowing those jobs to be taken by incomers from the new member states.

That Turkey is a Muslim country is not the only reason to oppose her membership of the European Union – although it is a sound one: Islam is highly inimical to many strands of tolerance that have been hard won across Europe since World War II. But Turkish membership will bring a whole new influx of migrant workers into western Europe with all the potential for localised racial tensions that such a change will surely bring.

Successive British governments’ attitude to Europe has been highly equivocal and has prompted the electoral scepticism that it deserved. Labour ministers contrived to fight the European parliamentary elections of 2009 almost entirely without mention of Europe or its parliament. Labour was rewarded with a third place behind UKIP, with strongly pro-EU Lib Dems fourth. The arguments made by interests that oppose European membership are patently meretricious and will bear no serious economic challenge. But these arguments are rarely engaged by EU apologists, who appear to take the view that they know best and hence that the electorate should not worry its pretty little head. From Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins on, advocates of the European Union have rarely deigned actually to make the case to the electorate. It is true that the British media carry minimal coverage of European affairs. That is not an excuse for European enthusiasts to allow scepticism to take root among the public by default.

Rather than as English, I see myself as a citizen of the world. Not many do so; certainly no politicians that I can name off-hand. (Michael Howard’s Tory Party fought a European election with the designation “The Conservative Party, putting Britain first” on the ballot paper. What does it mean?) The day will come, in this marketing age, when the declaration “I love this country” will be deemed a sufficient platform from which to seek office, as it certainly is in the US (viz John Edwards). After all, we live in a time when some British politicians imagine that an undertaking to “take” an issue “forward” amounts to a statement of policy. Of all politicians, Labour ones should be ready both to talk and to listen to the electorate as to adults, acknowledging the voters’ keen concerns but taking the time to try to ameliorate them and to put them into context. Pace Margaret Thatcher, we are not about to be swamped. We should say so.

We must significantly reduce our armaments and disengage from international military adventuring

The abiding reason why, for the first time, I did not vote Labour in 2001 was that Mr Blair had by that date already taken this nation to war on more occasions than any other leader in history, monarch or minister, and his incursion into Afghanistan and his second into Iraq were then still in the future. I had not enthusiastically voted Labour in 1997 in order to offer a blank cheque for death and destruction.

Whatever one’s moral stance, no activity is remotely as extravagant as waging war. The cost of materiel dwarfs the equipping of any other enterprise and we know well enough that the generals are never satisfied with what they are given. We need those resources to fund the other policies put forward in these pages. Moreover, no activity inflicts more damage, both immediate and lasting, on the planet. So indeed does the absurdly expensive training for war (as anyone knows who lives under RAF flight paths). And the numberless war casualties are largely innocent bystanders with no means to protect their homes or to find refuge.

Troops sent to the frontline, whom it is sacrilege ever to criticise, are routinely brutalised and commit atrocities they never imagined before joining up. We are righteous in condemning the cavalier behaviour of the troops of other nations – those of Israel most lately – but will concede no ground to critics of our own and permit the military (and the police) to continue to act as judge and jury on their own catastrophes (think of Deepcut Barracks). Yet, to our age-old shame, successive governments treat those who return maimed from action in a pitifully shabby fashion, and this has been a stain on our society for centuries, as Kipling testified.

What is the argument in support of our continuing to act as a moral police force, strutting around the globe and breaching the sovereignty of other nations with our interventions, invasions and attempts at “regime-change”? It is proposed that this somehow guarantees our own security. But it is no coincidence that Islamist terrorist attacks have occurred in New York and Washington, Madrid and London, rather than Bern, Oslo, Tokyo or Wellington. Aggression abroad and vulnerability at home are in a chicken-and-egg relationship. Who can seriously doubt that our continued presence in Afghanistan acts as recruiting sergeant for the Taliban? These guerrillas see themselves as freedom fighters, much as did the resistance to Hitler in Europe in World War Two, and in the same way they attack through the ambush, the crude bomb and the sniper. We condemn in our enemy what we applaud and memorialise in our ally.

Unable to learn from experience, we continue to plunge into unwinnable wars that armchair generals assure us will be over in a fortnight. We are soon mired in gore from which we can contrive no withdrawal acceptable to our own amour propre. The elegant and shrewd diplomat Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan likes to quote this saying: “The gentle art of saving face/May yet destroy the human race”. So we are told the Gaza blockade must continue or Hamas will “claim victory”. So what if they do?

Why does Britain remain in the Nuclear Club? Like everyone else, we call our nuclear capacity “defence”. Realistically, Britain is so strategically situated that it is unthinkable for either Europe or the United States to allow us to be seriously threatened. In the European Union, only France also possesses nuclear capacity. Germany’s key role in international affairs does not appear to be diminished by her lack of a nuclear profile. Two independent nations physically straddled by the US – Canada with Alaska to her north, and Mexico with Hawaii to her west – co-exist without being required by Washington to go nuclear. Insofar as Britain might be a target for nations developing nuclear weapons, her own nuclear capacity may just as readily be ascribed as a pretext or as a deterrent. Our oldest and closest ally is, after all, the only nation ever to deploy nuclear weapons against another country. Possession does not preclude first use.

Britain could take herself out of the nuclear equation. Further, she could lead a decisive initiative for global peace. She could forego her UN veto and membership of the Security Council, at the same time urging the other members to follow suit. She could propose a major rewrite of the UN charter, which remains almost exactly as written in 1945. The only way to give the UN actual power would be to ensure that no nation has greater power than the UN itself. The UN should be enabled to order the immediate cessation of hostilities between member states and to suspend any member state that pursues hostilities. Other members, including those sympathetic to any rogue state’s cause, must be impelled by charter to suspend all trade dealings with the suspended member. The UN must have the resources to assume control of negotiations between parties. If both sides are taken out of benefit of membership, the issue of “blame” becomes futile and UN negotiators begin with a level playing field. But waging war must be against the UN’s bedrock principles and in practice a gambit that is made impracticable because each of the warring nations thereby becomes an international pariah and is accordingly hard pressed.

No one suggests that such a scheme would be an easy sell: to the Chinese, to the Americans, to the Russians or indeed to the British electorate. But what is the point of political power if not to aim for the impossible and to change the world?

[Since I wrote this section of the document, Simon Jenkins has argued that the entire defence budget is unjustifiable and that the armed services should be wholly and immediately wound up (The Guardian June 9th). Taken together, his argument and mine make a powerful case but, given the nature of its core vote, the Tory government is never going to carry out such a policy. Labour can and must].

Labour needs to rediscover its core values

The abandonment of Clause IV by Tony Blair in 1995 was the central plank of what was characterised as “New Labour” and, it was argued, would make Labour more acceptable to the electorate. What it really achieved, of course, was to make Labour more acceptable to international capital (personified in the man whom Mr Blair seemed to believe was the key to his success, Rupert Murdoch). International capital is itself less acceptable to the electorate than it was fifteen years ago. It is widely perceived to be responsible for the despoliation of the planet, the exploitation of wars and the impoverishment of many countries particularly on the African continent, along with the destruction of small businesses and the standardisation of shopping areas, the plundering of football clubs and the corruption of all professional sports, the quality reduction of broadcasting (especially in Britain) and the constant bombardment of advertising and promotion.

That successive Labour governments have made no discernible impact on the redistribution of wealth raises the embarrassing question of what the Labour Party is for. Not just to fend off the temporary effect of a recession, surely. Had I been a government minister, I would have tendered my resignation when Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling did not make agreed levels of pay restraint a basic condition of the bank bail-outs that they offered on the tax payers’ behalf.

Since Cameron became Tory leader, there have been many occasions when Labour dismayingly seemed the most right-wing grouping in parliament. Labour ought not to favour cutting into the culture of benefits. It always used to be that the left supported benefits even when some people received them who didn’t need them and the right supported cuts in benefits even for people who could not manage without them: it was a key test by which one told the left from the right. But that distinction has become blurred in both directions. New Labour has grown more prepared to let deprived people swing in the wind and the Tories have become more anxious at least to give lip service to the welfare state (this conversion will be sorely tested over the coming months). But in Labour philosophy, it ought to be better that we risk losing the supposed talent of asset strippers and financial speculators than that we starve a whole class of people that might generate all sorts of talent.

A sure test of a government’s instincts is the stance of the Home Secretary. How disturbing it is that so many of the most reactionary holders of this office have been Labour: Sir Frank Soskice, Merlyn Rees, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid and, in most unexpected ways, Alan Johnson.

It is simplistic to argue that, insofar as we surrender our liberties, the enemies of the state have won. but there is more than a germ of truth there and it needs to inform all measures proposed and taken. The policy of introducing ID cards was one that greatly damaged Labour’s reputation. Apart from all the civil liberty objections, there was the obvious danger that some future government would see a source of revenue in offering for sale the information gleaned through these cards, not to mention the sorry record of government agencies in protecting confidential data.

Dismantling much of the surveillance state ought to be on Labour’s agenda too. Britain’s infrastructure of surveillance is, as so often noted, the most extensive in the world, yet so many recent cases have shown that the surveillance simply doesn’t work. Whether it is Britain’s tradition of a chronic lack of maintenance skills or the public’s slyness in avoiding being seen while at nefarious activities, the investment is clearly not worth it.

Labour will not quickly recover the trust of the electorate until it clarifies the distinctions between itself and the Tories. If it appears to cosy up to big business more readily than it requires big business to make sacrifices for the benefit of all, it will merely be fighting the Tories for rich donors and a small sector of the electorate. If it is not prepared to take bold steps in order to redistribute wealth and power, it will only be able to offer itself as a differently able version of the Con-Dem coalition. The voters will be more likely to settle for the cabinet of millionaires that they already have than a bunch of half-hearted free-marketeers.

NEVER UNKNOWINGLY RUDE

I have gravely offended a friend. That is, of course, if I am permitted still to use the term “friend” in relation to him. I was “rude”, it seems. He has told me this often enough for me to accept that this must be his settled conviction. I don’t think I’ve been rude at all. Like all things, this particular fracas has to be seen in context. I will try to give a flavour of the context and then you may be the judge. The exchanges in question have all taken the form of email.

My (hitherto) friend is in the way of being a bit of a writer. Recently he wrote a piece on spec for the newspapers and he sent a copy to me. Candidly, I thought the piece was pretty awful and wholly misconceived but I didn’t tell him that. Having said how I was out of knowledge and sympathy with the subject of the piece – in other words, to give him to understand that I wasn’t really qualified to judge – I then concluded with a short paragraph beginning “If I may say so – and I know you bristle at criticism – I think that …” and then made a mild and entirely constructive suggestion as to how he could improve the piece. I ended with: “Still, you ’av a go, sir, you do ’av a go”.

I have no way of knowing if he took tut at this (as I thought) entirely light and friendly approach to giving him the benefit of my opinion based on thirty years of being a freelance journalist. Whether he incorporated my suggestion or managed to place the piece or was at all grateful for the help I offered he never vouchsafed.

Now this is a man about whom I have written before on this blog. At that time, I hadn’t heard from him in a long while. This was, it seemed to me, not entirely unconnected with the fact that I had lent him a tidy sum of money and the agreed date for its interest-free repayment was some time passed. He had moved house (several times, it seemed), he had changed his phone number and email address and people who knew him could not direct me to him. So I wrote about him and I named him.

Eventually the sum was repaid – not without extra outlay by me in the form of expenses incurred – and connection was renewed, though I still have no address or phone number for him. A couple of times, he has asked me to alter the reference earlier on this blog. The first time I ignored the request. The second time – quite recently – I addressed it. I will not now use his real name so let me hereafter refer to him as Colin. It’s the sort of name he deserves.

Before I repeat the burden of my demurral to his request for a blog rewrite, let me add some context. Colin has a page on Wikipedia. When I first looked at it, I thought it read rather ickily, as if written by himself or his agent. Wikipedia itself evidently thought so too because, subsequent to my first reading it, the site has appended two announcements at the top of the entry. One, decorated with a pair of scales, says: “A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view”. The other, led by a large exclamation point, says: “This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources”.

In asking me to remove the material on my own blog, Colin calls what I wrote “suppositions and not at all true”. I responded thus: “I don't feel the slightest bit inclined to alter my posting for these five reasons:
1) You may not care for it but I don't believe anything in the piece is unjust, unfounded, malicious or mendacious.
2) The number of people who will have read it is vanishingly tiny. I have had about 7,500 visitors to the site, many of them returning, many of them staying only for a few seconds, a huge number of them just wanting to view the picture I ran last year of Tiger Woods' wife (which puts it all very much in perspective). Only two searches to the site have used your name as a searching criterion and both those searches, I would submit, were done by you (I don't get informed who visitors are but I do learn how they come, from whence and why). If anybody other than you reads that piece in the future (which is a very, very remote possibility), it won't be anyone who will use it as an excuse not to commission you, believe me.
3) Nobody who knows you will have read it. Even fewer people who know you will read it in the future. Put your moniker in Google and tell me whereabouts on the list is a link to that piece (I don't know myself because I haven't looked but I'm confident it won’t be in the first 5,000).
4) If you want to be concerned about something about you on the internet, attend to your Wikipedia entry. That seems to me a) vastly more likely to bring people who want to know about you, especially people in the biz who might do you some good and b) vastly more likely to make such people think you're a flake and not to be trusted.
5) I don't as a general principle approve of rewriting published documents other than in very exceptional circumstances. Anyway, it would be a chore and I have enough to do just now. You're lucky I squeezed you in at all”.

Reading that again ten days later, it seems to me to be forthright and comprehensive but neither unduly unfriendly nor uncalled for.

At the end of his reply, which largely dealt with other matters, Colin wrote “I guess there is not much I can do to get you to remove those comments. But why does my Wikipedia entry suggest I’m a flake?”

I found this question pretty astonishing. It seemed to me to suggest that he needed a wake-up call. My reply went on to other matters but began with this paragraph: “The editorial comment that the monitors have placed on your Wikipedia entry acts as a caveat emptor. It strongly suggests that they think this is a self-promotional entry rather than an objective one. That's what anyone who doesn't know you will assume (people who already know you already know that that's exactly what it is). As a consequence they (the people who don't know you) are likely at the very least to think twice about you. If you reckon that does you less damage than a passing reference buried in an obscure blog, you're putting your vanity way before your commonsensical approach to the business; and you're a lot dumber than I took you for”.

Reading that again now – and, as is my practice, I read it over several times before sending it, very different from Colin who never looks over his emails and habitually sends stuff that is full of typos and often phrased so obscurely that I cannot glean his meaning – it seems to me to be the robust good sense of someone looking out for a friend. I didn’t think I needed my usual cautious approach – “if I may say so – and I know you bristle at criticism” (see above).

Back came Colin: “Well the Wikipedia page was actually built by someone I used to work with at the BBC, and done out of kindness, as he was aware of such things are [sic] Wikipedia long before I was. Look I know this won't do anything to rebuild our friendship, but I do have to quote my partner on reading the first paragraph of your email: "why the hell would you let anyone speak to you like that?" I have always had the utmost respect for you Stephen as you know, and as I have admitted before I have also found you brusque to the point of bloody rudeness on occasion. But I really can't put myself in the firing line for this sort of thing any more. I know you are as staunch a believer in good manners as I am, so I really must register my upset at the way I am being spoken to here. If you don't think you are being unnessarily [sic} rude then fair enough, but I have to be allowed to say how I feel. xx”

I found this perfectly outrageous. My first instinct was to write back thus: “Why would I give a tuppenny fuck what your fucking girlfriend says? Is she a fucking professor of moral philosophy? Has she read the whole fucking correspondence? Over the years, my partner has made many sarcastic and disobliging remarks about you, but I’ve never quoted a single one of them at you because a) I don’t need reinforcements; b) he is biased in my favour and therefore not what I would consider a reliable witness; c) he’s never met you and only knows from what selected morsels I share about you and hence he simply and literally doesn’t know what he is talking about”.

However, I didn’t write that. Instead, I wrote: “Before I buckle under the lash of your partner's rush to bitter judgment, let her consider these questions:
– Does she know that my email was in response to your query ‘why does my Wikipedia entry suggest I'm a flake?’?
– Has she seen the Wikipedia page in question?
– What is her own considered view of the impact of the two cautionary notes flagged up there by the site monitors on the expectations of anyone visiting that site in the hope of learning something about you?
– Can she find it within her to see that only someone with your best interests at heart would be trying to knock sense into your head about this matter?”

Incidentally, I nearly declined the invitation to refer to the woman in question as Colin’s “partner”. I have never met her and don’t know her name; indeed this was the first time he had referred to her. Colin is, if his own account is to be credited, a serial womaniser and very few of his relationships, as far as I know, have lasted past three months, but I depend for this intelligence wholly on what he has indicated to me over the years. This one, the professor of moral philosophy, may be The One for ought I know but, as I say, she was news to me. David and I, on the other hand, have been together for thirty years. I submit that my own use of the term “partner” is justified.

Colin began his next email thus: “I do appreciate that, and it was nothing to do with what you said, it's to do with the way you say things. There's just no need to be so brusque about everything. I sincerely appreciate you have my best interests at heart and your advice is always welcome, but so often it comes across as unnecessarily violent”.

Brusque, rude, violent … it comes hard to a congenital pacifist to be called violent, especially “unnecessarily violent” (I’m not sure I would know how to identify necessary violence). I felt a little sarcasm was called for. My next email began: “Isn't it a lovely day? The birds are singing. The fish rise to the food with a will. There's a slight breeze. The dogs are sleepy and not very keen to walk round the field. Of course, the nights start drawing in now. It'll soon be deepest February. Oh god, sorry, I've turned unnecessarily violent. Even brusque. What a heartless bastard”. I then complained about something he’d written to me on a different matter that was perfectly impenetrable in these terms: “It's said that a true gentleman is never unknowingly rude and when I am rude to you it's because I bloody well intend to be, but I'm not sure you realise how bloody rude it is to toss off an email without reading it through, correcting the mistakes and making sure that it is coherent. But then if I whinged about that, you'd think I was giving you a hard time” and I ended “So, what did your girlfriend have to say about your Wikipedia page?”

Colin replied: “I just don't see the need to write in that tone. I don't mean to sound like Derek Batey when I say this, but I simply can't imagine anyone reading an email like that and not finding it bewilderingly hostile”. By this time, I felt I was being lectured about how I should conduct myself and I resented it. Back I came: “Oh I say, do chuck it, Carruthers, old man. If I felt hostility towards you, I wouldn't write at all. But if you keep on with this dreary bleating, I shall indeed start to get hostile. And I don't particularly appreciate being told how to write. You need to be able to face robust knockabout to survive in this business. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen”. And I added: “I ask again: what did your girlfriend say about your Wikipedia entry?”

Uncharacteristically, I heard nothing for four days. I had been reading a novel set in New York, where Colin had, a year or so back, had a play mounted off-Broadway but was never able to go and see it. So I wrote again: “You're not actually sulking, are you? Oh puhleeze. If, as we all hope, you are eventually going to make it properly in New York, you will have to grow a thicker skin. Manhattanites are brutal and robust and take no prisoners. Sensitive types don't last five minutes.
I'll tell you a New York joke:
– How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?
– OK, how many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?
– None of your fuckin' business.
You still don't tell me what your girlfriend says about your Wikipedia page. This is because she agrees with me. Am I right or am I right?”

Colin came back: “No of course I'm not sulking, I just have been busy the last few days. It's not as if I work for the BBC any more and get paid to send emails all day!
I actually have a thicker skin than you may thick [sic], but (and this is my final word on the subject) whether I do or not is no excuse for rudeness. This isn't the Eighties for fuck's sake.
And no, my girlfriend didn't agree with you about Wikipedia, she just said ‘I wouldn't let anyone speak to me like that’. But you don't think you were being rude so we'll have to agree to differ. Life’s too short”.

Perhaps I was being over-sensitive now, but I thought this was Colin eating his cake and having it too, so I replied (in full): “The next email you send me which contains either of the words ‘rude’ and ‘rudeness’ will be deleted unread. If you think I'm rude, you haven't lived”. And that’s where it stands at the time of writing.

Colin ended his most recent email to me with the following request: “Would you read something of mine if I send it to you?” It takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Well, it does mine. Perhaps it doesn’t yours. I’m always very reluctant to read friends’ stuff because what they want is an unequivocal cascade of praise and there’s not much point in your reading their stuff if nothing less will do.

Some years ago, a friend in the biz asked if I would look over the first few chapters of the autobiography she was writing. I said that there wouldn’t be any point in my doing so if she didn’t give me carte blanche to be entirely candid. No, no, that was exactly what she required. I read the material, largely enjoyed it and write her a six-page letter of notes. The most damning criticism I made was that she had written too generously about others and left herself and her own feelings out of the narrative too much.

I heard nothing from her. Three or four years went by and I never knew whether the book was published. Then I fell over it in a remainder shop and bought a copy. She hadn’t included me in the acknowledgments. Before I had read it, she invited me to a party at her house. I arrived before more than half a dozen others were there, none of them people I knew, and we stood about making aimless small talk. Then another guest arrived, the hostess brought her in and announced loudly enough to shut everyone up: “Now, Steve, I want you to meet this old friend of mine. You see, she really liked my book”.

Given the evident sensitivity of Colin, I’m not sure I can face the potential nuclear winter of making any comment at all about his latest piece of writing. As he wrote just two days ago, life’s too short.

WHAT ABAHT the STRIKERS?!

I know precious little of football. I didn’t watch any of the World Cup matches. Had I been caught up in the tournament, I am sure I would have followed the South American teams, who seem to exhibit a flair for and relish in the game always singularly lacking in the English and apparently in some of the other European sides this time too.


Tevez scored for Argentina against Mexico in the World Cup yesterday

Paradoxically, I take a mild academic interest in results, always checking the progress of the teams from the county where I was born and brought up: Northampton Town, Kettering, Rushden and Diamonds. When the last named is referred to on television, it is always mispronounced. It’s not “Rush-ton”, it’s “Ruzh-den”. Northampton are known as The Cobblers, in recognition of the area’s traditional industry, now almost entirely departed. None of these teams troubles the headline writers very often. That George Best scored his double hat-trick in a cup match against Cobblers is more apt to be invoked than the little club’s famous defeat of Arsenal in a different cup year. Cobblers spent one season in the top flight – I remember a report on them for Sportsview in which a young Frank Bough motored up the M1 to interview the legendary manager Dave Bowen. They were relegated with a higher number of points than any previously downgraded team had ever won.

I may not know much about football, but I know a thing or two about capitalism. From what I see and hear, the many commentators now being wise after the event about the “problems” of the England side are obsessed with trivia. “Capello refuses to resign ahead of crisis meeting with FA chairman” declares a headline in The Guardian’s sports section; reporters are so self-important that they expect announcements at press conferences before any of the powers-that-be have been consulted, rather as they expect cabinet ministers to reveal the date of the next general election in media interviews. But the identity of the manager is not the key to raising England’s game or that of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.


Girls playing urban soccer in Peru

What has gone wrong, it seems to me, is that capitalism noticed that football was a killing waiting to be made. Rupert Murdoch saw that a man like himself with bottomless pockets could pretty much corner the market in televising routine as well as big occasion matches. By selling the advertising within and around the broadcasting of live games at a premium rate, he pumped up the price of football. The clubs themselves began to rent out everything visible to the cameras as platforms for advertising. So-called player power, whereby the players took on phalanxes of agents and media consultants and held out for grotesque transfer fees, quickly turned the Premier League into one where most of the players were multimillionaires.

Awash with broadcasting money, the big clubs became easy prey for speculators and asset-strippers who saw them as cash-cows to use as a hedge against debts. Foreign businesses, not constrained by British regulation, bought in heavily and landed all the big clubs with staggering levels of debt.

That this ludicrous situation has been allowed to come about is because the running of the game has been so ham-fisted. The Football Association, the Football League and the Football Conference have allowed the boards of the Premier League clubs and the agents of the international star players to ride roughshod over the best interests of the game as a whole, out of an unregulated desire to make quick and easy profit. The bankrollers of football, like capitalists everywhere, are not concerned about the long-term good of the field in which they operate, only about the short-term benefit of the share-holders.

The result is that the grassroots of the game have been pitifully starved of support. The bringing on of young local players was handled more professionally half a century ago by retired professionals and other sharp-nosed volunteer scouts than it is now. Nobody is suggesting a fantasy return to some Corinthian ideal, just something other than an asylum where the inmates have taken over.

The FA needs to put its foot down or, if necessary, to be given the new powers to put its foot down. There should be a swingeing levy on every transaction (broadcasting rights, advertising deals, transfer fees, wages, golden handshakes), the proceeds of which are invested directly into the game at schoolboy and girl level, developing the skills and attitudes of young players with coaching of the highest quality. The FA should place a cap on the number of players that a club may acquire from overseas, say five at any one time. The current Chelsea squad (as of a fortnight ago) was 52 strong; just ten of them are English-born. It’s 14 years since the club had a fulltime manager who was English and until that time every manager in the club’s history had been English or Scottish, with Danny Blanchflower’s brief tenure in the late 1970s as a single Northern Irish exception.


Metropolitan street football in Brazil

But there is clearly a cultural problem too. In any poor country, you see small boys spending all the hours of daylight kicking a ball about in any open space, however confined. Across the main road that runs past our house, there is a housing estate with plenty of greensward. Though plenty of the households have children and many of the houses were hung with the flag of St George until yesterday evening, it’s pretty rare that you see much football played on the greens. Two or three times a summer, there might a dozen or so boys playing quite hard between two improvised goals. More often, two or three are mucking about with a ball and one goalmouth. But it’s a relatively rare event, certainly not as frequently as once a week. No doubt this generation of kids thinks of games as something you play on a screen, sat on your arse. The football they play is doubtless more likely to be Wii than WW.

HERE COMES EVERYBODY

Tony, my best friend at school and my earliest writing partner, left a year before I did to study English and drama at Birmingham University, a good move as it transpired. I stayed on an extra year to do scholarship entrance to Cambridge, in vain as it turned out, but that’s a tale for another day.

One weekend, Tony rolled up in his battered old jalopy, flourishing two tickets for a concert. Granted parental permission, I jumped into the passenger seat and we motored off to London down the M1, still something of a novelty in 1966 for country bumpkins like us.

My musical education had been somewhat piecemeal up to this point. My recent forebears had all been musical in their various ways. One grandfather was a silver bandmaster for forty years, the other a village choirmaster for forty years. My parents met in the local amateur operatic society, she in the dancing chorus, he a decent light tenor, well suited to playing the hero’s friend but not actor enough to lead a cast. He had a local triumph as Detlef in Romberg’s The Student Prince. My mother had studied piano to a pretty good standard – her plaster bust of Wagner I still have – and she obliged me to take lessons in my turn.

But we did not own a gramophone until I held out for a Dansette-type record player for my 13th birthday, putting pressure on my Dad by starting to buy singles in anticipation, even without the wherewithal yet to play them. As I grew more serious in the Vth and VIth forms, I started to read reviews of new classical releases and to supplement my pop stuff, soundtracks and show albums with haphazardly chosen grown-up music, everything from Bach to Pfitzner, from Mendelssohn to Mimaroglu.


Gustav Mahler

There was also a school record library, a motley of purchases, donations and swag. This collection exactly reflected the serendipitous nature of my own growing collection of LPs, save that some of them were so old that they were 10-inchers and even 78s. I borrowed indiscriminately and, having set up my reel-to-reel tape recorder to copy from my record player, I soon had half the school’s haul on audio tape.

The composer whose work we were to hear in London was not represented in the school collection. He was Gustav Mahler. Both Tony and I had liked what we had read about this late romantic but had still not heard a note of his work. Mahler had become fashionable over recent years, rediscovered thanks as much as anyone to the American conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein, whose own music was greatly under Mahler’s influence. Bernstein had recorded several of Mahler’s massive symphonies in the States and Europe and now he was coming to London to record the 8th symphony after giving it in concert at the Albert Hall.

Lenny Bernstein was also a persuasive advocate. He was a gifted teacher and talker and, in an era when “mass communication” was the only way to go, he made for terrific television, whether talking or conducting. I had a recording by him of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony that had a bonus EP of a talk on the work by Lenny. Not many people could get away with a phrase like “Beethoven the gigantic one” and still not seem a fraud. In a Sunday Times review that I vividly recall of another Mahler concert, Desmond Shawe-Taylor remarked that “Bernstein concluded with a left and a right that had Mahler sprawling against the ropes”. That sounded just the kind of conducting that got me going.


Otto Böhler's famous silhouettes of Mahler in action

The 8th, a grand choral work, was known as “the Symphony of a Thousand” because of the massive forces involved. The Albert Hall gig was to be populated by the London Symphony Orchestra at full stretch, the London Symphony Chorus, the Leeds Festival Chorus, the Orpington Junior Singers, the Highgate School Boys’ Choir and eight soloists. We knew we were in for a show but we couldn’t guess quite what a show. From the electrifying crash of the opening, a thunderous octave leap on the giant Albert Hall organ, immediately followed by the roaring invocation of the massed voices – “Veni, veni, creator spiritus!” [“Come, creator, holy spirit!”] – we were, as comparably impressed teenagers would say now, blown away.

The whole first section of the work, lasting around 25 minutes, is a switchback ride of emotion, power, retreat and renewal, packed with exquisite melody and daring orchestration. The second part, a realisation of the climactic scene of Goethe’s play Faust, is more than twice as long and rather more measured and discursive before returning at the end to the tumult of the earliest bars. By that end, we were mentally, physically and psychologically shredded. It was the most enthralling experience, not least because of the dynamism of Bernstein’s conducting.


Lenny gives it his all

Afterwards, we slept in Tony’s car parked in the Kensington side-street where, the previous year, Winston Churchill’s life had drawn to its close. Next morning, we breakfasted in the café of a nearby hotel. We were served by a very chirpy waitress with whom, by curious coincidence, I enjoyed an affair a decade later (oh yes, I cruised both sides of the street in those days. I always cherish Gore Vidal’s famous answer to the question “was your first sexual experience homosexual or heterosexual?” – “I was too polite to ask”).

Naturally, when the double album of Bernstein’s version of Mahler’s 8th was released the following year, I rushed out to buy it. I still have it but it is so worn down by constant playing as to be unbearable. My CD replacement is a rather embarrassing item from a series called ‘The Royal Edition’, all works conducted by Lenny but decked out with watercolours by the Prince of Wales who, you can bet, has not listened to the Mahler as often as I have. But the piece has had an important function in my life. If ever I felt sad or defeated or confused or in any other way negative, all I needed to do was to lie on the floor and play Part I of the 8th, very loudly and preferably in darkness. After that, everything seemed possible.

Over the years I got to know and love all of Mahler’s music. Though the individual pieces are all large-scale, it’s as assimilable a body of work as Jane Austen’s, as opposed to the sprawling canon, across several genres of, say, Haydn or Bernard Shaw. Mahler was, after all, only ever a part-time composer, making his living as a conductor, primarily of opera. He was born in July 1860 so, next month, we mark his 150th anniversary. Next May will be the centenary of his death; he lived only four years longer than Schumann whom we think of conventionally as having “died young”.


The musical prodigy at 5 or 6

It is evident that Mahler was, with Keats, “half in love with easeful death”. Mortal terror stalks his music. Seven of his eleven siblings died in childhood, including his closest brother. One of his two beloved daughters also died in childhood, giving a retrospective poignancy to his most agonised song cycle, Kindertotenlieder (I am listening to it as I write in the rapturous rendition by Kathleen Ferrier with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter). Soon after Maria’s death, Mahler learned that his own heart was defective and that his prospects were not good. He was working on the 8th symphony at this time. Always superstitious, Mahler deferred writing a further symphony because of the notion that nine was the most a composer could complete – Beethoven, Spohr, Schubert, Dvorak and Bruckner had all died without completing a tenth. Instead he wrote Das Lied von der Erde, which has an unmistakeably symphonic structure. After that, he dared to write a huge and magnificent 9th symphony before, inevitably, leaving an unfinished 10th (it has been superbly realised in performable form by Deryck Cooke and, subsequently, in several other versions).


Mahler in his late 20s

That Mahler was driven and a mass of contradictions is both clear and not to be wondered at. A Bohemian Jew, he converted to Catholicism in order to carve himself a highly influential role in the life of a city devoted to music, Vienna. The extent of anti-Semitism in late 19th century Vienna can only be imagined. Like the cliché of an opera conductor – perhaps he inspired the cliché – Mahler was autocratic, perfectionist and relentless. He made many enemies. His tenure at the Vienna Opera, like all his conducting posts, was wracked by quarrels, resentments, resignations and outrageous ferocities both suffered and inflicted. He would flee to a succession of summer retreats to compose, but his symphonies and song cycles received mixed responses. His greatest triumph, the last of his lifetime, was the world premiere of the 8th in Munich on September 12th 1910. The composer was denied the savour of its reception, however, for he discovered on the eve of its performance that his adored wife Alma was faithless with the architect Walter Gropius. Despite this blow, Mahler dedicated the symphony to Alma.


Alma Mahler

Mahler’s music resounds with the sounds and flavours of the world around him. The quality of gemütlichkeit, so beloved of the indulgent Viennese, thrives alongside the doom and despair. Band music of all kinds – from military marches through town band tunefulness and funeral dirges to oompah corniness – passes through the sound picture. The music of the Viennese café and salon, of street players and folk singers, of the church choir and the klezmorim rub shoulders with the particular writing for projected voice that Mahler studied so closely for his work in the opera house. Forerunning geniuses – Bruckner (his teacher), Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner – inform his taste and his decisions, as do his extensive readings in philosophy and theosophy. Had he lived, I have no doubt that jazz and the new forms pioneered within a very few years of his death by the likes of Stravinsky and, in Vienna itself, Schönberg would have contributed to his joyous eclecticism and perhaps indeed he would have made the obvious move into writing for the opera house, though it is hard to see any librettist surviving such a collaboration. More than any other ingredient, the summer sounds of nature that surrounded him while he wrote in the Austrian countryside fed into his aesthetic.


Contemporary caricature of Mahler's aesthetic

It’s a rich and dense fabric that he weaves. Mahler isn’t for everyone and certainly not for those who take a more ascetic view of art. At the time of the ‘60s revival, I remember Kingsley Amis remarking that he couldn’t bear Mahler’s stuff. Given Amis’s own politics, character and world view, I felt comfortably in the correct camp (and anyway, isn’t Lucky Jim one of the most overrated of novels?). Mahler appealed to me at that time because I had a young man’s passion for artists who created teeming worlds. I remember a Sunday newspaper headline over a piece about James Joyce’s writing: “Here comes everybody”. That was what I loved in Joyce and Günter Grass and Lawrence Sterne and Dickens and later in Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Lawrence Norfolk; and what Mahler’s crowded canvases also seemed to offer.

In the fifty years before that Bernstein-led revival, Mahler’s reputation had dwindled while the Baroque was rediscovered and the classical composers took their place at the centre of the repertoire. A few conductors kept his name known on the continent – Willem Mengelberg, Hermann Scherchen, Karel Ancerl, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Jascha Horenstein – and in Britain – Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli, than whom no two conductors could be more different in style and approach. But none did more to fan the flame than Bruno Walter who worked as Mahler’s assistant at the Vienna Opera and who was perhaps unique in refusing to hear a word said against the maestro. After Mahler’s death, Walter conducted the world premieres of both Das Lied von der Erde and the 9th symphony at Alma’s invitation and, a quarter of a century later, made the first recordings of both works. A later recording of Das Lied with Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak is among the finest recordings of great music ever made. Walter, whose long life ended in 1962, once said that the two greatest musicians he had ever known were Mahler and Ferrier and that perhaps Ferrier – that hugely loved English contralto who died so tragically young – was the greatest of all.


Bruno Walter

In recent years, Mahler recording has become a vital industry. No conductor worth his or her salt foregoes the opportunity to record not just a favourite from among these symphonies that were once thought too demanding and exhausting to attempt, but the whole canon. Since Luchino Visconti drew on it so extensively for the soundtrack of his movie Death in Venice of 1971, the Adagietto of the 5th symphony has turned into Mahler’s “lollipop”, an extractable sweetmeat for busy people to swoon at momentarily. But the movement has from the get-go been teased out as a crowd pleaser. Sir Henry Wood introduced it into a Prom concert as long ago as 1909 and Lenny Bernstein extracted it for the memorial mass given in New York for Senator Robert Kennedy.

What Mahler himself and the scornful Viennese haute bourgeoisie would have made of it all is anyone’s guess. Secure in the Pantheon, his last laugh would at least have been heard by the famously scandalous Alma, who married and divorced Gropius and who outlived even Bruno Walter by two years. For his part, the erudite composer would have read his Hippocrates and so would have known that ars longa, vita brevis.


The maestro on the podium

GETTING ONE’s KICKS ELSEWHERE

Perplexingly, thousands of people seem to be travelling around the country promoting syphilis …

Like many others, I greeted the end of another season of football last month with relief but now I discover that we are in for even more of the wretched stuff than ever from this weekend onwards and, if the team representing England manage to progress past the first rubber, for weeks thereafter. I read that England’s opening match is against the USA and, as a student of history, I happen to know that the same nation’s then team defeated England in the same cup sixty years ago. Then, as now, England and her apologists presented themselves in a miasma of hubris and richly deserved to be taken down several dozen pegs. Like all thoughtful people, I shall be fervently hoping for a repeat of that result. With luck, Master Rooney will be sent off for calling one of his opponents a despicable cad.

Whatever else the South African World Cup will be, it will certainly be a festival of cliché. Which dumb and exhausted phrase will win the ultimate prize, I wonder? Look out for “a rasping shot”, always an impenetrable favourite among commentators. But I would put folding money on “44 years of hurt” as combining the proper level of hyperbole with the appropriate overlay of surrealism. This phrase refers to the fact that England last won the Jules Rimet trophy on home soil in suitably controversial circumstances in 1966 and has not come notably close to winning since. It isn’t so much “hurt” that is the problem; by any criterion, it’s a combination of incompetence and inflated expectation.


Matt in last weekend's Telegraph

The fact is that Britain doesn’t invest remotely sufficient resources in the game at grass roots level to have any prospect of bringing on world-beating native players a decade from now. Half a dozen of the premier league teams are potentially richer than any comparable businesses in the world because of the wealth drawn from television rights, yet they are impoverished by asset-stripping foreign owners and grotesquely inflated rates of pay offered to players, the majority of whom do not qualify to play for this country.

That England’s prospects are objectively so poor doesn’t deter anyone, especially those seeking to cash in, from talking up the notion that England “can” win. (It always seems to me a fake argument; of course England “can” win because they are playing. Aberbaijan can’t, because they’re not). Last time, at the outset of the competition, Radio Times ran a mock-up of the England players, topped by David Beckham, flourishing the trophy. At least the editor (so far, at any rate) has had the basic sense not to repeat this absurdity.

Whenever “Ingerland” (as the fans evidently chant it) plays in one of these international tourneys, thousands of men with unusually small willies buy pairs of massively expensive flags of St George (no doubt stitched for next to nothing by starving peasants in the Far East) and attach them to their otherwise unremarkable motor vehicles, from which said flags flap in the breeze like wounded birds.

On a previous occasion when Ingerland were playing in one of these continuously hyped events, a friend and his son came to lunch and then asked to be permitted to watch “the match” on our television that afternoon. The son (a grown-up) was wearing an Ingerland shirt, though he lives in South Africa and is indeed half South African (his father is wholly South African but of East European Jewish origin). We reluctantly concurred on condition that we were not required to enter the television room for the duration.


Rooney: "cad"

Ingerland were playing Portugal. I didn’t have the heart to point out to the son that he was in fact wearing the favour of the patron saint of Portugal. St George has enjoyed this status in Portugal rather longer than he has in Ingerland. “Säo Jorge” was a Portuguese battle cry as early as the first half of the 14th century. George’s origins are disputed: some sources say he was born in what is now Turkey, others Israel or Palestine or that he may have been Lebanese. At any rate, it seems unlikely that he ever came to Wembley or was what I understand is termed a “Man U” fan.

The flying of George’s flag – a very simple thin, red cross horizontally laid on a white ground – indicates that the team is unquestioningly supported by the owner of the car (or indeed of the house for, as at Yule, otherwise ugly and depressing houses are now festooned with flags and bunting). What none of these unthinking buffoons considers is that, Portugal aside, there are many other communities and causes to which George is patron and therefore to which, unwittingly, they are attaching their reputations. In Brazil – like Portugal, a potential rival for Ingerland in the imminent tourney – George is quite as hallowed a saint as Sebastian. George is also the patron saint of Georgia, of Slovenia, of Moscow, of Beirut, of North Ossetia, of Milan and several other Italian cities, of Aragon, of Kerala, of Gozo and of Malta. There are St George’s Day celebrations in Canada, Belgium, Palestine, Serbia, Bulgaria and Catalonia.


The Jules Rimet trophy: but the players would rather have the cash

The Boy Scouts have George as their patron saint. He also gives his blessing to farmers and agricultural workers, shepherds and sheep and butchers; to horses and horsemen, cavalry and saddle-makers; to soldiers, knights, archers and armourers; and to leprosy, plague and skin diseases. Oh … and to herpes and syphilis. Clap for George!

I've just signed this petition at Avaaz.org:

"We call for an immediate, independent investigation into the flotilla assault, full accountability for those responsible, and the lifting of the Gaza blockade."

Please join me in signing here:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_flotilla_3/96.php