Was everything rubbish in the past?

This weekend's Guardian has a piece called A Brief History of IPA

The repetition of myths about India Pale Ale is pretty much to be expected and is rightly challenged in the below the line comments but the thing that really struck me - and is also challenged by one of the commenters - is the idea that decent cask beer has only become widespread in the last decade.

Maybe, as the writer claims, parts of London were a beer desert until then but in Manchester where I cut my drinking teeth as a teenager in the late 80's there's always been plenty of decent cask beer, mainly from local breweries Holt's, Hydes and Robinson's, and when I went to Stoke as a student in the early 90's pretty much every street corner had a pub on it selling cask, most of it, unsurprisingly, from Staffordshire breweries Banks's, Bass and Marston's. I can remember drinking well-kept cask beer in London back then too.

There's a word for this that I'm struggling to remember. You could call it new-ism: the idea that things are better now than they ever have been. The opening of new breweries and specialist beer bars and rediscovery of beer styles in the last few years is something to be celebrated, but not at the expense of claiming that the beer and pubs of the past were uniformly rubbish.

Give me land

Today's Guardian has an investigative piece about supermarket Tesco buying up land and leaving it empty, either to stop competitors opening stores near their own or in anticipation of its value increasing, and BBC2 also broadcast a documentary last night showing how house building companies operate along similar lines.

We all know how pubcos use restrictive covenants to stop rivals buying pubs they sell off as unprofitable, ensuring that they become houses, shops or other businesses; I wonder what an analysis of Land Registry records like the one the Guardian has carried out on Tesco's property division would show about their "land banking" activities.

Death at the sales

Seydou Diarrassouba, the teenager from South London stabbed on Oxford Street on Boxing Day in what appears to have been an gang-related incident, and Anuj Bidve, the postgraduate student shot in Salford in the early hours of the same day and whose killing is being treated as racially motivated by the police, were as far apart as you can imagine. One a petty criminal awaiting trial for theft; the other a middle-class Indian with a well-paid career ahead of him.  But their deaths were united in one respect: consumerism.

Both men were killed as a result of the Boxing Day sales: Diarrassouba was stabbed after an argument broke out out in a trainer shop and Bidve at 1.30 a.m. while walking through the Ordsall estate in Salford in order to be at the front of the queue at a shop in Manchester city centre.

The BBC and other media outlets talked of the "traditional Boxing Day sales", despite them having only started in the last decade.  Politicians also seem confused about whether consumerism is a good thing or not.  Last summer, it was blamed as one of the factors that led to the looting of shops in riots across England. Now, the ability of the British economy to avoid recession is apparently dependent on the amount of money people spend in high street shops.  The supposedly liberal Guardian even ran an editorial blaming the train drivers' union ASLEF for putting "thousands of jobs at stake" after its members struck on Boxing Day over bank holiday pay.

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.

Every sentence a lie

I was tempted not to read the article in today's Guardian about Libya by their Stalinist columnist Seumas Milne.  I knew a) exactly what it would say and b) it would be awful even by his low standards.

Reading it, I kept in mind Trotsky's remark that every sentence Stalin wrote contained a lie, and some of them two.  It works with this article too, try it for yourself.

The real puzzle is why the supposedly liberal, human rights promoting Guardian allows its coverage of international politics to be written by an unrepentant Stalinist.

A river runs through them

The Guardian today ran a short piece about the move of BBC programmes to "Salford Quays in Manchester".  As you might guess from the name, Salford Quays is in Salford, not Manchester.

It's a common mistake. I've lost count of the number of times I've read "Salford, Manchester" and seen references to Coronation Street (based on a street in Salford) as a Manchester soap. I can sort of understand the mistake if people are not from the area.  But for a journalist on a national newspaper, the former Manchester Guardian no less, to make it is just sloppy.  It's as bad as saying the House of Commons is in the City of London.

Salford and Manchester have been separate cities since the 1200's.  Salford has its own university, cathedral and rugby league team.  And just to make the division clear, the two cities are separated by the River Irwell: like the other twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, you need to cross a bridge to get from one to the other.