RIP Ken

From watching interviews with him and reading his obituaries, the film director Ken Russell who died yesterday aged 84 appeared to be someone who combined a passion for film making with good humour and a lack of pretension.

I must confess that I've never seen any of his films, save for a few clips which were shown again yesterday.  This is partly because as far as I know most of them haven't been shown on TV for years, if at all, either because of their content or the critical panning they received. 

Hopefully following his death TV channels will show them so that we can see his artistry in full.

Düsseldorf versus Cologne

I'll be in the Rhineland next week visiting Düsseldorf and Cologne.

The two cities are about thirty miles apart and have a sharp rivalry going back hundreds of years. Coming from Manchester, I know about rivalries with cities thirty miles downstream but whereas the competition between Manchester and Liverpool centres on football and music, the Rheinland one is expressed most clearly over beer: Alt in Düsseldorf and Kölsch in Cologne. 

Maybe this is because Fortuna Düsseldorf are a bit like Manchester City, bouncing up and down the divisions not winning anything, and neither city as far as I know has been the centre of a music scene like Merseybeat or Madchester, but I still can't think of any other two cities so close together which denigrate the beer produced in the other.  I've not been to the Czech Republic but I don't think the competition between Pilsen and Prague beer extends to calling the other one undrinkable.

For the record, I like them both (heretical in the Rhineland),  but if I had to pick one it would be Alt.

From the North (part two)

I don't think I'll be watching this later.  It appears to be just a collection of clips cobbled together to make a promo film for the BBC's move to Salford.

The BBC's invitation to join "a host of stars as they recall their favourite TV moments and celebrate the distinctly northern flavour" falls as flat as a Southern pint when you realise that they're talking about Dragon's Den, A Question of Sport, It's A Knockout, Mastermind and Songs Of Praise. They may have been filmed here but what they mean by their "distinctly northern flavour" is beyond me.

Beer and the tie

The FT takes a gloomy view of the Government announcement yesterday that it doesn't intend to change the tie, the arrangement by which pub tenants are restricted to buying beer from the owners of the freehold. CAMRA is also against the tie.

There are two issues here, pub companies that own freeholds but don't brew beer and breweries that have an estate of tied estates.  It is the former that cause problems for tenants by hiking beer prices and rent but the latter who would suffer most from the abolition of the tie.

CAMRA should be careful what they wish for: the existence of pub companies is largely the result of the Beer Orders of twenty years ago that forced breweries to offload large parts of their tied estates.

Bankers doing God’s work?

I just watched the programme When Bankers Were Good, presented by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop.

Hislop's argument is that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bankers were sober Quaker types like the Barclays who only loaned to respectable businesses and were generous philanthropists who made charitable donations to feed and house the poor, in contrast to the bankers who work in the deregulated, risk-tasking City of today.  It's a similar argument to Ed Miliband's about "predatory" and "productive" capitalism.

The problem with all this is that as a result of all kinds of complicated financial devices like credit default swaps and bundles of sub-prime mortgages, "predatory" and "productive" capitalism has become inextricably intertwined to the extent that even the banks themselves are unaware of their liabilities to each other.

Just as banks and joint-stock companies characterised the early development of capitalism, so the international finance system that has grown up since World War II characterises its current stage.  Attempts to turn the clock back and retreat behind national borders are neither possible nor desirable.  The answer is to bring international finance under democratic control.

Hislop also concedes at the end of the programme that the philanthropy of the Victorian bankers only had a marginal impact on poverty and that it was progressive taxation and the welfare state that began to narrow the gap between rich and poor in the twentieth century.

An A-Z of Murdoch's crimes

Watching the Leveson Inquiry into press standards earlier, I started thinking about how most murky or destructive things can be linked to or traced back to Rupert Murdoch. 

The list of crimes he is directly or indirectly responsible for and their victims is a long one and in many cases the name alone is enough: the anti-union laws (which he exploited to bring out his scab titles at Wapping in 1986 before getting Blair to  promise he would keep at the News International conference on Hayman Island, Queensland in 1995 in return for the support of his British newspapers in the 1997 election),  the Dowlers (whose murdered daughter's voicemails a News of the World employee deleted, leading them to think she was still alive), families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and people killed in the London tube bombings (phones hacked by News International employees), Fox TV, Hillsborough, journalists (whose union the NUJ he derecognised after the Wapping dispute, meaning that News International reporters are no longer covered by its Code of Conduct),  the McCann's (News International bought a copy of the diary Kate McCann kept following the abduction of her daughter Madeleine in 2007 from the Portuguese police and published it in the News of the World), the NUM in the 1984-85 strike, printers (sacked en masse with other newspaper workers in the 1986 Wapping dispute), Sky Sports (which charges cricket, football and rugby league fans to watch matches previously shown live on free-to-air TV and dictates changes to kick-off times which mean they have to take time off work or travel at ridiculously early or late times),  The Sun, the Tea Party (promoted by Fox TV), Margaret Thatcher.

I'm sure I've missed lots of his other crimes and victims but the charge sheet above is enough to convict him I think.

From the North

Like many people born in Manchester in the 1970's, I first heard of Shelagh Delaney as a teenager when The Smiths put her on one of their single covers (left) and lead singer Morrissey championed her work in interviews.

Delaney, who has died aged 71, is best known for her play A Taste of Honey, later made into a film by Tony Richardson. Apparently she wrote it while on two weeks holiday from Metro Vicks, the massive engineering factory in Trafford Park where most of my family also worked in the 1950's and 1960's.

Delaney was part of the British New Wave realist film movement in the early 60's, many of whose leading lights were like her Northern and working-class: fellow Salfordian Albert Finney and Bolton's Shirley Ann Field (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Hull's Tom Courtenay (Billy Liar, written by Keith Waterhouse from Leeds) and writers Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving) and David Storey (This Sporting Life), both from Wakefield and respectively a miner's son and ex-rugby league player. It also coincided with the start of Coronation Street on TV.

Here's a homage to Delaney by another member of Manchester and Salford's Irish diaspora:

The talented civil servant

I've just received the magazine of my trade union, PCS.  Along with other public sector unions, PCS will be striking at the end of the month over Government plans to attack our pensions and most of the issue is understandably given over to that issue.

There's a bit at the back though about Sarah Millican, one of my favourite comedians, who it turns out is also a former civil servant. 

It got me thinking about other famous former civil servants.  As well as Millican, there are comedians Phil Jupitus and Paul Merton and Mancunian musicians Morrissey and Ian Curtis.  I'm sure there are lots of others I can't think of just now.

So what is it about former civil servants? Are we overrepresented in entertainment and if so why? Does the civil service attract talented people or is it the experience of working in the civil service that provides comedic and artistic material? 

I know when I worked in the civil service we used to laugh at the lyrics of this song knowing that Morrissey had been a civil servant himself.

Police and thieves

I listened to this programme on Radio 4 before about the police strikes of 1918 and 1919 in Liverpool and London, presented somewhat imcongruously by the Tory ex-Cabinet minister Michael Portillo.

One thing it blew out of the water was the idea that in the past everyone respected the police and private property. In Liverpool, there was mass looting of shops when the police struck for higher pay and recognition of their trade union.  The strikers also found that the support they expected to get from trade unionists wasn't forthcoming as dockers, railway workers and seamen remembered the beatings they'd had at police hands in the 1911 transport strike.

Although large numbers of strikers were sacked after the walkout (and then blacklisted by MI5), the police did get higher pay as a result, albeit not trade union recognition - the Government instead set up the Police Federation and expressly forbad it from striking.  As Portillo noted, the reliablity of the police to the State came in handy when the Tories were beating down the miners and printers in the 1980's.

GPs and sicknotes

The government has a plan to cut the amount of time people take off work sick.  They want to stop GP's writing sicknotes and hand the job over to an "independent assessment service", presumably a private company who get paid for the number of people they refuse a sicknote to. 

The plan is based on two ideas, neither of which is true: that lots of people go off sick from work long-term (as opposed to a "sickie") when there's nothing wrong with them and that GP's give sicknotes to people who they know are not sick.

I've got a couple of ideas to reduce the amount of time people take off work sick: make workplaces healthier and cut NHS waiting times. 

Five years ago, I was off work for over a year as a result of an industrial injury to my knee.  After seeing my GP, it took six months to go for a scan and another six months for an operation.  At the end of two months physio I returned to work. As a doctor said to me, if I'd been Wayne Rooney I would have had the scan and op on day one and after physio been back at work after a couple of months.

Of course, the government won't do either of the things that would reduce work-related sickness as the first would require strong trade unions in every workplace and the second taxing the wealthy to pay for decent public services.

Guardian of human rights?

The Guardian, which prides itself on being a liberal newspaper, defending democracy, tolerance and human rights, carried an advert yesterday for holidays in Uzbekistan, the "heart of Central Asia".

Those lefties at the US State Department describe Uzbekistan as "an authoritarian state with limited civil rights". Not that you'd know it from the advert of course which extols "the towering fortresses of Khiva and Bukhara and the glorious Islamic architecture of Samarkand".

The Guardian's spinelessness clearly extends to keeping the customer satisfied.

Time to split from Sepp

The comments by FIFA President Sepp Blatter that footballers who are racially abused by opponents in "the heat of the game" should accept a handshake from them at the final whistle and forget about it were totally predictable given his track record on such questions.

English football has thankfully largely moved away from such attitudes as a result of campaigns against racism by players and fans and a decline in racism in wider society since the 1970's.  The same cannot be said of Italy, Spain and Russia where racist abuse is routinely directed at black players, something which FIFA unsurprisingly turns a blind eye to.

Rio Ferdinand in lambasting Blatter on Twitter made a good point: if it's acceptable for players to racially abuse opponents "in the heat of the game", why isn't it OK for fans to do so as well?

Given the massive corruption that runs through the internal politics of FIFA, an attempt to reform it from within seems doomed.  The best thing would be for England and other countries to withdraw from FIFA and set up a new international football federation with its own World Cup.

Keeping it simple in the Rhineland

In three weeks time I'll be in the Rhineland visitng Düsseldorf and Cologne.

One of the things the brewpubs in the Altstadt of both cities get right is the simple service system.  You sit down - or if you're in a hurry lean against a standing table outside - and then wait for one of the blue-aproned waiters (Köbes) to pass with a tray of small glasses of Alt or Kölsch.  A glass is put in front of you, a pencil mark made on your beermat and when you've finished you pay the waiter.  No queuing at the bar, no ordering and no need to decide what to drink given there's just one beer, served by gravity from a seemingly endless supply of wooden barrels.  And some pretty tasty meat-based snacks to go with it.

It makes me wonder whether it would work here.  On the face of it, there seems to be no reason why not but somehow I don't think it would.

No, no, no

I won't be going to see the new film about Margaret Thatcher when it's released in the New Year.  You need a pretty strong stomach just to watch the trailer.

The plot seems to have been pulled straight off the Hollywood shelf: grocer's daughter from small town braves male chauvinism to reach the top.  The producers claim that the film is a "compelling story of ..a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world." No mention obviously of the millions of lives smashed apart as a result, from the miners, printers, steelworkers and dockers thrown out of work to the hundreds of thousands of young people with no hope of ever finding a job. 

As we return to recession and mass unemployment under the Tories, young people who see the film might at least learn who was responsible for creating the dog-eat-dog society they now have to live in, hopefully just in time to celebrate Thatcher's death with the rest of us. I've had a bottle of champagne on standby for months now...

Goodbye Dr No

The news that the Rev Dr Ian Paisley is to stand down as a preacher in the Free Presbyterian Church he set up in 1951 is hardly surprising given that he's 85.  He has already stepped down as moderator of the church, a MP, Northern Ireland First Minister and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party in the last couple of years. It's certainly less surprising than him becoming First Minister in the first place, let alone one seemingly on friendly terms with his deputy, former Provisional IRA Chief of Staff Martin McGuinness.

Paisley always reminds me of what a Catholic priest I know used to joke: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was No."  Those who see his career as a question of showmanship are only partly right.  Beyond the political stunts - like heckling the Pope in the European Parliament in 1988 - and the Bible thumping preaching was a conviction politician who actually believed what he said he did.  In many ways, his unbending Ulster Protestantism was more suited to the seventeenth than the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.

This song by The Dubliners allegedly about Paisley sums him up.

Never on Sunday

This time in a fortnight, Manchester City will be playing Liverpool at Anfield in the Premier League. Forty-eight hours later, both teams will be in London to play Arsenal and Chelsea respectively in the quarter-finals of the League Cup. The reason for this quick succession of matches? Sky Sports wants to show the Liverpool v Manchester City match originally scheduled for three o'clock on the Saturday afternoon at four o'clock on Sunday.

Politicians have finally broken free from the grip of the Murdoch empire; it's about time football did.  The clubs could play on the Saturday as planned and let the Premier League do what they want.  The League itself could have refused to move the game, offering Sky another one or just saying "sue us".  Fans could refuse to buy tickets (Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish has already told their fans he'll be putting out a second-string team at Stamford Bridge on the Tuesday night so they might want to reconsider travelling away), and also think about cancelling their Sky subscriptions which give Murdoch the cash to lord it over the Premier League in the first place. I've never subscribed to Sky, both on principle and for cost reasons. If  I want to watch a match, I go to the pub.

That joke isn't funny any more

The first episode of Ricky Gervais' latest comedy, Life's Too Short, had one funny scene I thought, the one where lead actor Warwick Davis went to see his accountant.  It seems he's on a downdward curve from the cringingly funny The Office through the sporadically amusing Extras.

I know it must be difficult to repeat a hit or sustain success.  Another of my favourite comedies, Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, also seems to have fallen a bit flat in the middle of the current series, when the characters relocated from LA to New York.

David started out as a writer for Woody Allen who has also slipped from his stellar seventies films Annie Hall and Manhattan and the bittersweet Hannah and Her Sisters to OK ones like New York Stories and now stuff that doesn't even seem to be written as comedy. 

As someone once said of Allen, real art consists of being able to mine the same seam without it ever becoming repetitive.  The other side of that coin is that if you're in a hole, stop digging.

What's in a name?

I shouldn't really be surprised that the name of Newcastle United's ground has been changed from St James' Park to the Sports Direct Arena, after owner Mike Ashley's sporting goods company.

Newcastle plan to sell the naming rights to their ground and decided that the name St James' Park is "commercially unattractive". 

Newcastle have played at St James' Park since 1892.  The millions of fans who have passed through its turnstiles since then would laugh at, refuse to believe or vocally protest at the way Ashley has so deliberately spat on that history.  And I can't see the current fans calling the ground anything other than St James' Park, whatever its official name now or in the future.

No borders

Home Secretary Theresa May continues to flounder over allegations that she ordered immigration officers to relax passport controls for both EU and non-EU nationals.  Labour has predictably jumped on the issue to claim that "Britain's borders aren't safe under the Tories".  What very few people question is the need for immigration and passport controls in the first place.

Immigration controls are usually presented as natural and having always existed.  Neither of these things is true  In Britain, immigration controls date from the Aliens Act 1905 which resulted from an anti-semitic campaign by the far-right British Brothers League to restrict Jewish immigration from the Russian Empire. 

It is true that if the entire population of the world decided to move to London tomorrow, it would cause problems in housing, transport etc.  But how likely is that if immigration controls were scrapped?  As it stands, the entire population of the rest of the European Union (somewhere between 400-500 million people) have the right to live in Britain, as did all Commonwealth citizens up to the 1962 Immigration Act and as have Irish people since Ireland gained its independence in 1922.  The actual numbers of immigrants has largely depended on the economic conditions in the countries they came from, the demand for labour in Britain and access to cheap long-distance transport.

The fact that the EU allows free movement of its (mainly white) citizens but restricts entry to Arab, African, Asian and Hispanic people outside it is clearly racist.  The fact that Britain is an island also probably has something to do with the obsession about controlling borders.  The Schengen Agreement means that citizens of France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and other EU countries can travel between them without a passport. 

And let's not forget that the immigration laws are routinely used to intimidate and victimise migrant workers, as in this case of a cleaner and RMT member currently facing deportation.

What's a Greek earn?

To misquote another Mancunian, last night the only thing I saw on Channel 4 was a Dispatches programme about the economic crisis in Greece.

It was a lot like one of those tabloid stories that consists of a bold claim in the headline that soon unravels when you read the story. While there was some mention of tax evasion by the rich and the siphoning off of public money by corrupt officials, the main thrust was that it was Greek workers who were to blame for the crisis.

Outrageous examples of the feather bedding our Greek brothers and sisters enjoy highlighted by the programme included retiring on a decent pension at a young enough age to enjoy it, earlier retirement for those doing heavy or dangerous work and being paid for working overtime. With crazy practices like that, no wonder Greece is in a mess.

There was also a sleight of hand in proclaiming loudly at the top of the programme that as a Greek bus driver earns about twice the average wage, that's the equivalent of £40,000. Near the end, it was quickly mentioned that as average wages in Greece are lower the difference - if there even is one - is much smaller than first suggested.

There was a quick mention of the collapse of the international banking system having something to do with Greece's sovereign debt crisis as banks hiked the interest rates on bonds they had issued but it was clearly a side issue compared to Greek workers receiving a living wage, decent pensions and overtime pay.

Good riddance Lord Gould

It's a commonplace argument that you shouldn't say anything critical about someone when they die, however dishonest, unprincipled or objectionable they were in life.  It's a view that I completely reject, as I shall now demonstrate.

Lord Gould, the advertising man the Labour Party hired in the mid-80's as a pollster and strategist, has died aged sixty-one after a long illness.  His track record has been predictably eulogised by other "architects of New Labour" including spin doctors Lord Mandelson and Alistair Campbell as well as Tony Blair.

Mandelson claimed that "Philip was as brave in his illness as he was in his politics, always doing things differently."  In fact, the opposite is true.  Gould pioneered the use of focus groups and policy making according to opinion polls rather than principle.  His so-called "bravery" in politics consisted of transferring the techniques of the advertising agency to it, adopting or dropping policies not according to what he thought right but the whims of media-influenced public opinion.  Given that  media was largely owned by Rupert Murdoch, another toxic influence on New Labour, Gould's role in the labour movement was akin to the cancer that killed him, spreading a life-threatening poison.  Rather than "doing things differently", he helped to ensure that the 1997 Labour government was a continuation of the Thatcher-Major governments that preceded it, maintaing the anti-union laws and bowing down to big business over the minimum wage.

Blair, Campbell and Mandelson are right that Gould's legacy will outlive him.  For those of us who have to live with that in terms of a hollowed out Labour Party, the only reason to join his funeral cortege would be to make sure the coffin lid is firmly nailed down.

In Berlin steht ein Hofbräuhaus

The famous Hofbräuhaus beer hall in Munich has opened a franchise in Berlin for the first time. As well as the Bavarian original, there is also a Hofbräuhaus in a dozen or so other cities including Melbourne, Las Vegas and Seoul.

Like most people who've been to Munich, I've visited the Hofbräuhaus. Built in 1589 for the Duke of Bavaria, it's an impressive building both from the outside and walking around the massive rooms inside. I bought a pen from the gift shop but didn't stop for a beer, despite it being supposed to be good if a bit pricey.

The Hofbräuhaus pulls in tourists by the coachload who think they're experiencing authentic Bavarian entertainment. What they actually experience is large groups of American, Australian and Japanese students singing drunkenly along to the oompah band. I'll give that a miss thanks.

The upside of the Hofbräuhaus being such a tourist trap is that other more authentic beer halls and gardens like the Löwenbräukeller, or my favourite the Augustinerkeller, are relatively untouched by the snapping hordes and I can sit in the shade of the trees with a Maß of great beer inflicting my German on the waiter and locals without Hank from Pittsburgh and his twenty mates providing a chorus. We're all tourists of course but you don't have to behave like one or travel in large groups of your compatriots.

The other reason some people steer clear of the Hofbräuhaus is its Nazi connections. This I think is less fair on the place. OK, the Nazis did hold their first meeting there in 1920 but the year before it had also been the headquarters of the shortlived Bavarian Soviet Republic. The Nazis met in other pubs too, including the Löwenbräukeller and the Bürgerbräukeller where they staged the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

The main problem I have with the Berlin Hofbräuhaus is the falseness and soullessness of pub chains, whether they be German or the much more prevalent fake Irish pub. One of the saddest things I've ever seen is a group of tourists sitting in one such place in Düsseldorf's Altstadt, drinking Guinness amidst the usual plastic paddwhackery just yards from some of the best pubs and beer in Germany.

Ireland, changed utterly

I can't believe I'm going to write the next sentence.  Ireland has broken off diplomatic relations with the Vatican.  Just a couple of years ago, that would have seemed as inconceivable as Ian Paisley becoming a Catholic or Manchester City winning the European Cup.

The news isn't entirely unexpected.  Earlier this year, the Vatican recalled its ambassador after the Taoiseach Enda Kenny attacked the Church's role in covering up child abuse. 

The official reason for closing the Irish embassy at the Vatican is to save money.  But given that the amount involved is under a million pounds a year - less than Charlie Haughey, the spectacularly corrupt Taoiseach in the 1980's, spent on posh French shirts - it seems almost certain that it is a result of the Church covering up child abuse.

More evidence of the new mood in Ireland came in last week's presidential election when the openly gay senator David Norris beat the staunchly Catholic candidate Dana into sixth place by almost sixty thousand votes.

Beery German fun

Ahead of my trip to Germany next month, I've been looking at the websites of pubs and breweries in the cities I'll be visiting.

The thing that strikes me is not only how attractive and well-designed most of them are, like Pfaffen in Cologne, but also the wit a lot of them contain, like Füchschen in Düsseldorf, ironic given the standard English view of German humour.

The website I could watch all day though is the one for the famous Augustiner brewery in Munich.

Paying for our pensions

The announcement by the Government that it will not force public sector workers within ten years of retirement to work longer to get their pensions is clearly an attempt to divide both trade unions and their members ahead of the planned strike on the issue at the end of this month.

We have been here before: last time the Government attacked public sector pensions, in 2005, the unions accepted a deal whereby existing staff would still be able to retire on a full pension at 60 while new staff would have to work to 65.  The folly of allowing that two-tier workforce to be created is now becoming clear.

The Government's plan for public sector pensions is based on three lies:

1. everyone is living longer

Life expectancy overall may have increased but it still varies widely, both between men and women and more importantly by class: poorer people, including low-paid manual and admin workers in the public sector, die younger.

2.  public sector pensions are too high

As a member of the Civil Service Pension Scheme who worked in the admin grades for ten years, I can vouch for the fact that given it's based on your earnings, low pay means a low pension for most public sector workers.

3.  the money isn't there to pay for them

This is part of the broader argument that the Government has to slash public services, jobs and benefits and hold down wages and pensions in order to pay off the deficit.  That is a political decision rather than an unavoidable choice, as is the decision as to whether or not we tax the enormous wealth of the City and the super rich in order to pay for decent public services, wages, pensions and benefits.

Why Stan just doesn't get it

Stan Kroenke, Arsenal's American owner, has used his first interview with a British newspaper to outline why he thinks US owners have been good for English football, and specifically to defend the Glazers' ownership of Manchester United.

"We have a whole different philosophy in the States...in the States you would never get this dialogue. 'He took money out of the club.' So what? ...A lot of owners in the US do," he argues.

While US sports fans may be relaxed about owners using clubs as a personal piggy bank, or even relocating the "franchise" to another city to increase revenues, we are rightly not. 

Maths has never been my strongest subject but a quick look at the figures easily disposes of Kroenke's argument that the Glazers' owenership of Manchester United has been good for anyone apart from the Glazers.

The Glazers bought United in 2005 with loans of £660 million from Wall Street hedge funds secured against the club's assets.  Since then, the club has bought Dmitar Berbatov for £30 million and sold Cristiano Ronaldo for £80 million.  More recent signings like Javier Hernandez and Ashley Young were for undisclosed fees but are thought to be well within the surplus created when Ronaldo joined Real Madrid.  So contrary to what Kroenke seems to think, the only thing fans are paying for in the now eye-watering prices of season tickets and match tickets is the interest on the Glazers' loans.