The upside down world of boxing

The media have reacted with horror to professional heavyweight boxers David Haye and Dereck Chisora trading punches at a press conference in Munich on Saturday night following Chisora's loss to Vitali Klitschko in a WBC title fight.

According to insiders in the the boxing world, both men now face substantial fines and suspensions.  Chisora was also arrested by German police on assault charges, Haye having given them the slip for now.  The two boxers have allegedly brought the noble art of professional boxing into disrepute with their impromptu pugilism and will no doubt be punished for it.  Boxing promoter Frank Warren, who ironically has already lined up what may now turn out to be a comeback fight between Haye and Chisora  in London later this year, said he was "absolutely disgusted" by the set-to while the head of the British Boxing Board of Control is quoted as saying: "I am extremely disappointed... it does not do the sport any good."

But what is more distateful and inhuman: punching someone because they've wound you up or because you've been paid a lot of money to do so?

The price of beer

The Government is again thinking about introducing a minimum price for alcohol. It says such a policy could reduce binge drinking by teenagers and the number of alcohol-related deaths every year, despite a lack of evidence for either assertion.

CAMRA also supports minimum pricing, in the belief that binge drinking teenagers and alcoholics will stop buying their booze at supermarkets and off licences and start drinking in pubs under the watchful eye of landlords, thereby boosting the on trade on which cask beer and therefore CAMRA depends. There are lots of problems with this scenario. Unless the minimum price was the equivalent of pub prices, people would just spend a bit more on buying booze in supermarkets and off licences. And even if it were that high, the pubs that benefited might well not be ones which sell cask beer.

The real discussion we should be having about beer price is the amount the Treasury takes in VAT and duty. CAMRA rightly calls for these to be cut to reduce the price of beer.  I not only think they should be cut but that the indirect taxes such as VAT and beer duty should be scrapped altogether in favour of progressive income tax (i.e. the rich paying more).  Alongside that, the Government should introduce maximum pricing for beer so that the benefits of cutting or removing duty ends up in drinkers' pockets rather than on the balance sheets of breweries.

What to do with Abu

The Islamist miltant Abu Qatada who was released from a high security prison earlier this week has spent much of the last decade either in custody awaiting deportation or under house arrest, as he is again now.

Qatada apparently cannot be put on trial as it would jepordise the safety of MI5 officers who gave evidence, although why they can't do so from behind a screen ot by video link with their voices disguised I'm not sure.  It may also be that the evidence against him would if presented in open court endanger ongoing MI5 operations.

The Government's preferred option of deporting him to his native Jordan, where he has been found guilty in his absence of terrorist offences, has so far been blocked on the grounds that the Jordanian government might torture him or reconvict him with evidence obtained from others by torture. Similarly, his extradition to the United States where he is also wanted on terrorist charges is unlikely to go ahead unless a guarantee is given that he won't be executed or given a whole life sentence.

Given that he cannot remain indefinitely on bail conditions that amount to house arrest and allowing him to operate freely in Britain is out of the question, a deal whereby he is deported to Jordan with an assurance that he isn't tortured seems the most likely outcome.  Failing that, perhaps the Government could go for the Napoleon on St Helena option and send him and his family to a remote British territory under armed guard.  I hear the Falklands are lovely this time of year.

Whitney Houston, 1963-2012

The body of the singer Whitney Houston, found dead in a hotel room in Los Angeles last weekend, has been flown back to her native Newark, New Jersey. Although the coroner's report may take several weeks to complete, it seems likely that her death was the result of an addiction to drugs and alcohol.

Even if her music was a bit too commercial for my tastes, there was no denying the power of her voice in its prime, rooted in the gospel singing of the African-American church. The explanation for Houston's untimely demise offered by most of the media centred on the idea that as a young woman she had been unprepared for the pressures of in the music industry and as a result had turned to drink and drugs.  I'm not so sure about that.  As the daughter of a professional gospel singer, a cousin of Dionne Warwick and goddaughter of Aretha Franklin, she was pretty well placed to understand the music industry she entered as a nineteen year old. And it seems more likely to me that she drank heavily and took large amounts of drugs because she enjoyed it and had the wealth to do so.

Last orders?

CAMRA are looking to appoint a "endangered beer style co-ordinator" in order to ensure the survival of styles of beer it deems are at threat of disappearing, including "old ales, mild, barley wines, stouts and porters".

Leaving aside the argument as to whether some of those are even styles of beer in their own right, it seems a bit over the top to me.  Unlike the wheat ale, heather ale and herb-flavoured beers whose disappearance Martyn Cornell discusses in his superbly-researched book Amber, Gold & Black, there are no technical or legislative reasons why any of these beers might stop being produced.

Mild experienced a precipitious decline in sales in the twentieth century and it is unlikely porter will ever again be sold in the quantites it was in eightenth and nineteenth century London but the expansion in the number of cask breweries and of bottled conditioned beers means that there is probably more mild, stout and old ale being produced in those forms than at any time in the last fifty years.

Suarez and the handshake that wasn't

In her novel about racism in the US Deep South of the 1930's To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee has the lawyer Atticus Finch tell his daughter Scout, after her first day at school with the children of impoverished backwoods bigots, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

 

In Atticus Finch/Gregory Peck mode, I've been trying to put myself in the mind of the Liverpool fans who have supported their Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez after he was found guilty by the FA of racially abusing the Manchester United defender Patrice Evra and his refusal at Old Trafford on Saturday to shake Evra's hand before the match.

 

Things that, however irrelevant, one-sided or just plain wrong, might make the attitude of Liverpool fans understandable from their point of view and explain, if not justify, their wearing of Justice for Suarez T-shirts and subsequent booing of Evra could include:

 

• The FA/media/Government being biased against Liverpool Football Club and in favour of Manchester United (or even anti-Liverpool and pro-Manchester);
•  The reputation of Evra for being confontational and deliberately provoking opponents;
• Alex Ferguson and United fans using the dispute to score points against Liverpool, and in particular their manager Kenny Dalglish;
•  That Suarez not only had the right not to shake Evra's hand (even if he had said beforehand that he would) but that to do so would have been hypocritical;
•  That the word "Negro" can be used in Uruguay in a friendly context as the equivalent of "pal" to either white or black people.

 

The last point is to me the crux.  The other things can be argued over but it is impossible to maintain that the repeated use of the word "Negro" by Suarez to Evra (there is no dispute between the players or clubs that it was used and repeatedly)  took place in a friendly context rather than the heat of a Liverpool-Manchester United match and a confrontation between Suarez and Evra.

It is of course a common narrative on the far-right to turn the victims of racism into culprits. As well as exposing and challenging that poison, we also need to eradicate the poverty and lack of education that serve as its breeding grounds.

 

 

 

 

 

Twisting the night away

The future of the famous Twisted Wheel club in Manchester is under threat.

The Twisted Wheel was a leading soul and R&B club whose stage in the 60's hosted, among others, Arthur Conley, Edwin Starr, Junior Walker and Solomon Burke.  Along with other clubs like Blackpool Mecca and the Wigan Casino, it helped launch Northern Soul, the movement that revived the careers of dozens of obscure, bemused but highly delighted US Southern souls artists who now found themselves playing to massive audiences in the industrial towns of North West England. It closed in 1971 (a victim of the drive by "God's Copper" James Anderton to close down late night clubs that also wiped out Manchester modern jazz scene). Now a gay club, Legends, it still hosts a soul night a couple of times a month, run by a promoter from the original Twisted Wheel, which attracts hundreds of people, some of them travelling from abroad.

The building is now in danger of being knocked by a developer who wants to build yet another hotel.  Manchester City Council's whole redevelopment of the city centre in the last decade or so has involved allowing the building of dozens of indentical hotels and upmarket flats, many of them now empty as a result of the economic downturn.  It is a policy that has seen the Hacienda nightclub turned into apartments and developers threatening to knock down the early nineteenth century Briton's Protection pub.

What the council and developers who want to knock down historic pubs and clubs in the city centre and replace them with a swathe of apartments and hotels ignore is that the people who move into or stay in them might just want to go out for a drink or a dance at night.