Posts Tagged ‘idiocy’
Monday, June 28th, 2010
This could be applied to the England players as well but is more appropriate to all the idiotic pundits whose collective self-loathing of themselves and the country immediately emerges after the sort of disaster that England suffered yesterday.
People are queuing up on phone-ins and message boards to come out with garbage along the lines of England produces inherently technically poor players who are only motivated by money. Total bollocks. Admittedly, Capello committed professional suicide by selecting some poor (Johnson, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Milner, Upson), underconfident (Green, Carrick, Heskey) and unfit (Rooney, King) players — and in the case of Barry a combination of all of those. Capello also made some idiotic team selections and substitutions.
Nevertheless, players like Rooney, Gerrard, Lampard, Cashley Cole, Lennon and Terry (and perhaps some others) are the among the best players in teams that include players who have shone in the World Cup. Brazil and Argentina contain players who are good but not head and shoulders above those they have played with in the Premier League — Heinze, Tevez, Gilberto Silva — and some who weren’t even good enough for Man City — Elano, Ronaldinho.
To say England as a whole lack technical ability is rubbish. Everything about the performance was psychological. The players were mentally weak — capitulating easily because, for some reason, they lacked any confidence. The defence was nervous and panicky, sat way too deep and the midfield dropped back accordingly — leaving the two up front isolated. There was no organisation or leadership on the field and certain players have to be held personally responsible — Gerrard’s performance looked like panic personified — he hit about three shots from long range in total alarm at having the ball anywhere near the goal.
And anyone who thinks the appointment of that referee — who has past form for exactly the same ‘errors’ — was just unfortunate chance is either totally naive or, like almost all football journalists, part of a self-preserving conspiracy to maintain the illusion at all costs of results being determined solely by honest endeavour on the pitch.
Tags: England, Fabio Capello, idiocy, stupidity, World Cup 2010
Posted in Football | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 19th, 2010
Even the day afterwards, I’m stunned by the level of incompetence shown by England against Algeria. I’d watched the USA comeback against Slovenia and was encouraged that a win against Algeria and just a draw with Slovenia would ensure qualification provided Algeria could be beaten by two clear goals (more than they’d lost by to Slovenia).
I’d also thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the Hop Pole on Thursday night and watching the imploding France side being dismantled by Mexico. But England were even worse…
It’s difficult to think of a worse performance that I’ve seen by any team ever — even when non-league teams play Premiership teams in cup games or the champions of Andorra or Lichtenstein play in the qualifying stages of the Champions League.
For most of the match England could neither pass the ball nor retain it — countless times the Algerian players stepped in and dispossessed the likes of Heskey, Lennon, Lampard, Johnson and, worst of all, Rooney. There were also staggering displays of cowardice and loss of nerve — most particularly from Gerrard who a few times had the sort of opportunity that he regularly buries for Liverpool. Three of the team came from Liverpool — who’ve had their worst season in many years and lost a shocking number of matches. Surprisingly the right hand side of the defence was from Liverpool who conceded the third lowest number of goals last season and the left was from Chelsea, who shipped second least — Man Utd let in the lowest number which makes one wonder why Wes Brown was left behind. He couldn’t have been any worse than Carragher. Neither Carragher or Terry have any pace so they committed the classic England mistake of defending too deep and stretching the team. (How many offsides were there? Not many.) This leads to all sorts of sins, particularly defenders aimlessly hoofing the ball forward.
Barry played so deep as to be a sweeper so with Gerrard supposedly out left and Lennon isolated on the right we were left to Fat Frank to be the midfield — something that would be a challenge for him even in his Chelsea form. As it was, the game totally passed him by. He’s got to be dropped for the next match — accommodating this perpetual international level underachieved totally disrupts the team.
Rooney even said on television that he’d rather play as the only true forward and here was the proof he was right — Heskey was clueless — even popping up on the right wing at one point. Why? It’s typical of the media to try and build up Rooney as the villain of the piece for mouthing off about the fans. I tend to think fans should boo more, especially at England. They’re paying (a lot) to be entertained and the players should be reminded who pays for their over-lavish lifestyles — but at least Rooney was showing some frustration and anger. The likes of Fat Frank were just rabbits in the headlights. At least Gerrard admitted that England were crap.
Tags: England, Fat Frank Lampard, Gerrard, idiocy, rubbish, stupidity, Wayne Rooney, World Cup 2010
Posted in Football | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
What doesn’t seem to be mentioned in most analysis of this disastrous election aftermath is that the current mess is related to Nick Clegg not being in control of his party. You don’t have to read very carefully between the lines to realise that Clegg and his negotiating team put together a deal and it was rejected by the Lib Dem parliamentary party.
It’s obvious that for all Clegg’s high-blown talk of putting the country’s interests first, his MPs are a bunch of self-serving, deluded opportunists who are such a disgrace to democracy that they fail to appreciate the startling concessions on PR that they have already extracted from both main parties. Their dogmatism makes even Gordon Brown look a model of enlightened flexibility. They should have made it clear before the election that, in the case of a hung parliament, the likes of Paddy Ashdown would go round spreading poison designed to sabotage any deal with the Tories. Had they been honest about being so willing to enter a coalition with Labour even in the face of such dubious parliamentary arithmetic then they would surely never have won seats in places like Burnley — or Redcar where disgust at Labour’s lack of action in preserving local steel manufacturing jobs saw a massive swing to the Lib Dems.
It can now be seen that Clegg positioning himself as the new, honest face of politics was a cynical joke. In retrospect it seems obvious that he can’t deliver the support of his own party for one of the options he refused to rule out and, as the extract from my blog post two days before the election shows, he was absolutely disingenuous by implying he could deliver an agreement either way (or, as he implied, to the party with most seats and a larger share of the vote) . What Charlie said two days before the election:
Charlie Mackle just had two tweets featured on the listener reaction page to Jeremy Vine’s interview this lunchtime with Nick Clegg: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/jeremy-vine/election-debates-2010/liberal-democrats/ (one is at 1203, the other at 1242).
Both are about Clegg’s failure to spell out what he would do in the event of a hung parliament…I think he’s making a huge rod for his back by effectively deceiving some people into voting for him…One thing that the Liberal Democrats trade on is that they tend to be all things to all people — and even more so this election…campaigning in some seats as the anti-Tory party and in others as the anti-Labour party depending on the incumbents…If Clegg does not explicitly say which party he’d support in a hung parliament then his only plausible course of action would be to support the party with the largest number of seats — that’s the only real democratic outcome…Virtually any scenario is such a complete mess that it makes the case for electoral reform where the parties would have to be far more explicit about working with opposing parties once elected.
I still think it’s potentially as likely as not that Clegg will form a coalition with the Tories as Labour but the point is still valid that he is a weak leader who has failed to take his party with him — there would certainly be dissent from both Lib Dems and far-right Tories to such a coalition. However, the reasonably comfortable majority they would achieve would mean this was tolerable. Clegg is having to balance splitting his party against acting in the national interest. Cynical, tribal politicians like Brown would have no trouble deciding which way they would move but Clegg put himself on a moral pedestal which would make him look a supreme hypocrite if he put party over the needs of a stable government.
If the Tories were acting out of pure self-interest in the long-term they ought not to regret their actions if the Liberal Democrats and Labour put together this desperate coalition. After all, whoever is in government is going to have to impose some monumentally unpopular decisions or risk the country being trashed by the markets Greek style. It would be more justified if Labour carried the consequences for its own ineptitude and the Lid Dems suffered for their contempt of the electorate’s decision. When the ramshackle coalition collapsed then the Tories would likely obliterate both of these unprincipled parties — and rightly so. The problem is that we’d all suffer economically in the fall out.
I don’t particularly welcome the prospect of a Tory minority government or Tory-Lib Dem coalition either BUT any other outcome is so violently contrary to a sense of democracy and natural justice.
And it wouldn’t help the Labour party in the long term as the likes of David Blunkett have argued (Lib Dems ‘acting like every harlot in history’). I really don’t understand what motivates them apart from the naked desire for power for its own sake and the privilege and patronage that filters down to the activist and crony levels. That may explain the deeply depressing, anti-democratic attitude of Labour and Liberal activists whose tweets and comments on phone-ins seem to revel in glee that they think this gives them an opportunity to show the electorate they were wrong. I heard one on Radio Five last night. To the question, ‘didn’t Labour lose the largest number of seats since 1931 and get the lowest share of the vote since 1983) the activist said ‘Yes. But look at the NHS and how much money they’ve spent on that — and made it better as well.’
The point about a progressive coalition that consists of anti-Tory votes is risible and contemptible — fair enough if all those parties had stood at the election on a ‘progressive coalition ticket’ BUT THEY DIDN’T.
I’m encouraged that Caroline Lucas has indicated she wouldn’t sign up to a coalition and would support other parties’ policies on a case-by-case basis. I would have voted Green in my constituency had they fielded a candidate but would be exceptionally disappointed if she ended up being the one MP who perpetuated this financially and morally bankrupt regime.
Tags: anti-democratic, election, Gordon Brown, government, hypocrisy, idiocy, immorality, New Labour, Nick Clegg, politicians, progressive coalition, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 10th, 2010
I thought about posting a blog about the machinations in Westminster by the defeated coalition of losers but I thought better of it as it might risk blowing my blood pressure if I said what I really thought.
Tags: election, Gordon Brown, hypocrisy, idiocy, New Labour, Nick Clegg, politicians, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
As someone brought up in the borough of Rochdale, I never thought I’d see a Times headline like this.
The Times 29th April 2009
The incident with Gillian Duffy, who’s so typical of a Rochdale woman of that age it’s untrue, bears out the comments made in this blog about Brown’s personality (‘Vote Dalek‘): ‘Brown’s big weakness [is] that he has the arrogance to think that he knows better than anyone else about how they and others should live their lives but he also fatally compounds that arrogance by not having… the humility to realise that he’s often (usually?) wrong… he’s an anointed Prime Minister whose bullying supporters prevented even a leadership contest in the Labour party.’
Brown’s lack of self-knowledge and the thin skin that has led him to avoid criticism and opposition was shown in his misunderstanding of how his conversation went with Mrs Duffy. He came over ok — she raised lots of issues and he was (for him) reasonably charming and patient. If anything, it helped him — he looked more genuine than either Cameron or Clegg.
His comments afterwards were, therefore, quite stunning. He obviously didn’t enjoy even this mild confrontation and firstly looked for someone to blame (his tone of voice on ‘who’s idea was that?‘ was frighteningly menacing) and then insulting any perceived opponent with knee-jerk insults. In the politically correct circles where Brown has cultivated his cronies and in which his spin doctors move to insinuate that someone might possibly be racist (even if they’re not) is the trump card that shuts down all other argument. It’s reminiscent of remarks that I think were attributed to Clive Solely years ago (though I can’t track them down) along the lines of old people’s views should be dismissed on the grounds that many of them might be racists. In fact, it’s quite a prized debating skill to try to twist and misrepresent an opponent’s views to try and then brand them as racist — something the likes of Mandelson like to do. This sort of sophistry is exactly what fuels the disconnection between the political classes (and liberal broadsheet readers) and the mass of voters — and this incident has turned the spotlight on it.
The immigration issue is a sideshow. She hardly mentioned it and it wasn’t in a racist context — Brown’s ‘British jobs for British people’ panders to a more xenophobic agenda. What Brown’s dismissive insult of ‘bigot’ showed was the Labour party’s apparent contempt for its ancestral core vote — the working class (it’s somewhat fatuous to label them ‘white’ as historically they couldn’t be anything else). Brown should listen to those like John Cruddas in his party who warn that the perceived disenfranchisement of the working class risks stoking support for far right parties.
Gutless ministers like Jack Straw, David Milliband and Alan Johnson now deserve to reap the consequences of supporting such a spectacularly flawed politician as Brown purely out of personal ambition. Mandelson must also now realise his support of Brown has been political suicide. What a shame. The image of the 66 year old everywoman so totally humiliating the prime minister is such an apt epitaph for New Labour and its self-interested tolerance of sleaze. It’s so apt rather proud that someone so unassuming from a place Rochdale dealt this blow and it make me rather proud of where I come from.
Tags: Gordon Brown, hypocrisy, idiocy, John Cruddas, New Labour, Rochdale, stupidity, The Times
Posted in Life's Frustrations, Media | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Generally, I take a view about the impending election to be pretty consistent with that of the Economist– that Labour deserves to lose the election but the Tories haven’t done enough to win it.
On balance this really should be an argument for change but the perverted, risk-averse, ‘better the devil you know’ side of human nature may swing it unfairly in Labour’s favour.
Tags: Gordon Brown, government, idiocy, New Labour, politicians, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations | No Comments »
Monday, March 15th, 2010
I’m starting to get worried. We’re not in the official election period yet and I’m already starting to get apoplectic about Brown’s behaviour. Perhaps if I get things off my chest earlier then I can have an election-free blog (little hope of that).
Here’s just a short taste of the way his world view seems to be twisted to serve his own vanity.
Firstly, the BA strike. Despite his party taking more funding from Unite than any other donor he’s cynically pocketed that and made a facile declaration of support for the aggressive tactics of BA management — clearly without taking the trouble to realise that their tactics are deliberately undermining the democratic and lawful ability of worker to engage in industrial reaction. What is so “unjustifiable” at a union scheduling industrial action when it has a mandate from the staff involved of about four to one in favour. It would be unjustifiable if it did not. Moreover, BA management made a calculated offer that it knew it would withdraw as the union had to call industrial action within a certain period of the ballot result. Basically Brown does not want a strike in an election period and he is prepared to compromise the principles on which the whole history of his party has been founded so he can limp on further like a wounded animal.
Secondly, his comments on continuing on as Labour leader if the party loses its overall majority are to use his own words ‘deplorable and unjustifiable’. According to the BBC website said: ‘I think I owe it to people to continue and complete the work that we’ve started of taking this country out of the most difficult global financial recession.’ This is completely deluded as which people does he owe anything to — that suggests that someone voted him into his current office. However, no-one has voted for Brown as Prime Minister — not even the spineless parliamentary Labour party voted him as leader. He has no mandate from anybody and it’s his own vain, ego-driven self-appointment as saviour of the world economic system that he’s deluded himself into thinking he’s a duty to continue.
His grip on reality seems to be as removed as his many enemies in the Labour party would have us believe.
Tags: BA, Gordon Brown, government, idiocy, stupidity, vanity
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
According to the Sunday Telegraph, New Labour, in the hopefully unlikely eventuality that their pernicious blight be cast over the country again from May, is to abolish the House of Lords. One good thing about this is that they will presumably have to get rid from elected office their unelected legions of cronies, faceless bureaucrats and, of course, that barely human specimen of meretricious mendacity — Mandelson. (Maybe they will create a loophole by allowing the undead to continue to serve in unelected office?).
After this week I will be extremely happy to see the back of Lord Adonis — the unelected Transport Secretary whose background from Oxford university onwards is even more privileged and cloistered than that of Cameron and Osborne — he followed teaching at Oxford with journalism on the FT and the Observer and, unsurprisingly according to Wikipedia, hides away from the hoi-polloi in the New Labour ghetto of Islington. This technocrat academic has maybe been handed the transport brief as no politician who wanted a hope in hell of getting themselves elected would want to be an apologist for this government’s lamentable lack of delivery in this area — belatedly getting Crossrail started and finishing the St.Pancras Channel Tunnel link that was started by the Tories and very little else except the ultimate cheapskate innovation of getting us to drive on motorway hard shoulders.
In the last few days he’s announced (or been reported to be about to announce) three things that would keep me blogging for a month.
1) The route of the High Speed 2 rail line — with its bizarre combination of tunnelling through London up to Amersham and then despoliation of the Chilterns and Aylesbury Vale from there on.
2) His ludicrous and partisan siding with the BA bully boy management in the cabin crew dispute. Someone should whisper to this sheltered egghead that he’s actually in a government that’s supposed to represent organised labour. Maybe the title of the party is a bit too obvious for his large brain to notice. Perhaps someone from Unison should remind him in a traditional working class way of the history of his party.
3) The proposal reported in the Sunday Times to reduce the drink-drive alcohol limit to effectively zero. This proposal sums up the cynicism and headline-grabbing ethos of this rotten administration as it anyone who understands human nature (by definition not most New Labour ministers) could predict that this is likely to lead to more, not less, drunk driving.
My anger about all three of these points goes beyond normal politics. Were this a genuine party of the left, rather than a bunch of self-serving parasites in thrall to global capital, then I might have more patience with them. Yet what really galls me about Brown’s Labour is that they offend something very basic and fundamental about human nature — they are complete hypocrites. They fail in almost every test of competence of their own administration yet they take every opportunity to preach to us plebs about the error of our own ways and are forever trying to interfere and assign blame in the minatae of social life. (It’s no co-incidence that Brown’s character determines that he does the same in government and his disastrously over-complex economic policies.) This wouldn’t be so bad if they had any integrity themselves but they are obsessed with appearance and perception to the detriment of reality — forever passing laws that they fail to implement. In some respects it’s the behaviour of an arrogant, totalitarian elite — even if it is fronted by meek and nerdy Adonis types.
More detail on each point above anon.
Tags: alcohol, BA, cynicism, government, idiocy, Lord Adonis, middle classes, New Labour, Peter Mandelson, stupidity, totalitarianism
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Either the top BBC management are incredibly stupid or they’re trying to be too clever by half — and, quite possibly, they’re both. Why on earth do they think that axing BBC Radio 6 and the Asian Network is a strategic course of action?
By its charter, the BBC has to primarily cover public service obligations that commercial broadcasters arguably won’t undertake but it also feels it can’t be too elitist if it’s levying a regressive tax of £130 per household for its services. Interestingly, the range of programming on channels like Sky Arts and, to a lesser extent, Classic FM and many US cable channels like HBO shows that it’s possible to produce commercial broadcasting that doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence. In fact the most crass, dumbest programming that can be viewed on any remotely mainstream channel (such as on Freeview) is BBC3 – inspiration of gems like ‘F*ck Off I’m Ginger’, ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’, patronising rubbish snippets of news presented by ‘cool’ presenters who no doubt got the job through their father’s connections down the lodge, repeats of ‘Eastenders’, various programmes where people film their genitals for an hour, ego-trip hagiographies of BBC programme makers (‘Dr Who Confidential’) and where the only half-decent programming is destined for BBC2 anyway. It’s almost entirely absolute total rubbish but is considered inviolable by the idiotic BBC management as it’s targeted at the sacred Yoof market — people who the BBC commissioners completely fail to understand despite their obsessive pursuit of the demographic. You have to end up watching Stag Party Channel on Sky at midnight on a Friday to see anything equivalently witless to the general rubbish pumped out by BBC3.
So this expensive pile of insulting crap remains untouchable whereas a couple of cheap radio stations that serve less fashionable demographics are to be wiped from the schedules. I’m not sure what the Asian Network has done to offend the BBC management so much. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it but it appears to be a more public service orientated station than its untouched equivalent — 1Extra. This would appear from its publicity to be focused on the sort of music that Radio One provides quite a substantial outlet for and pirate stations in London even more so – and it seems to address a far narrower audience than something generic like the Asian Network. 6 Music falls down because it’s meant to serve those too grown up for Radio One (surely anyone over about 13?) and those not old enough for Radio 2 (over 35s apparently). I thought the targeting of those two stations was simpler — Radio One is for single people and Radio 2 for marrieds or equivalents (just listen to any dedication that comes in on Radio 2 — it always mentions a wonderful spouse). At heart it’s a fairly serious music station, despite being hijacked by the egos of ‘look at me I’m a rising star’ merchants like George Lamb or that Lauren Laverne, 6 Music is playing the sort of slightly less commercial music that a public service broadcaster ought to play and the last thing that should happen is it to be closed down. Radio One is far harder to justify, as is Radio Two.
People have speculated the whole thing is a cynical exercise in creating a grass-roots movement to ‘save’ 6 Music — perhaps the BBC realised that the crass stations they want to preserve like Radio One and BBC3 wouldn’t generate such almost universal sympathy and goodwill? Yet, if they’ve been cynical enough to do this, they’ve only just drawn further attention to the rubbish that they’ve been too weak to consider touching.
All I can say is that they’d better not even hint that they’re threatening BBC4.
Tags: 6 Music, BBC, BBC3, BBC4, cuts, demographics, idiocy, management, radio 2, Radio One
Posted in Media | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 29th, 2010
A reactionary friend and I had an e-mail conversation about how hypocritical it is for the media to bewail the calibre of politician we have. They are one of the main reasons why politicians have become discredited — it didn’t take too long for the spin doctors and interview coaches to teach politicians how to avoid the elephant traps the likes of Paxman and Humphreys set for them and how easy it is to manipulate lazy journalists into following a set agenda. In short we have politicians who evade and distort because we have a news media that is devious and generally lacking in ethics (see Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe).
There was a fantastic example of biased reporting which pushes a narrative set by politicians yesterday. The BBC website reported a fact that may astonish most people in this country –alcohol consumption per capita is going down – and going down quite rapidly. What the BBC report didn’t even mention was the figure for overall average consumption figure: down to 12.2 units per week in 2008 compared to 13.5 in 2006 (buried in a Reuters report). This is, according to my calculations, a 9.6% drop over two years. The BBC report described this as ‘slight’. In what other context would a 10% decrease be described as ‘slight’? I can guarantee that if the figures were the other way round and showed an increase of the same magnitude that there would be the lead story — ‘Alcohol consumption going up by 5% a year!!!!’
Instead the BBC deliberately broke down the figures by class to report that professionals were drinking more than the working class — 13.8 units — sensationalising the findings to suggest a growing crisis but not supporting this with evidence of any increase at all.
While this is a good news story that belies the general narrative that we are fast becoming a nation of drunks, the BBC was careful to conflate this with reports that drink related deaths are increasing. Alcohol related deaths rose from 8,724 in 2007 to 9,031 in 2008 — now that’s an increase of 3.5% in a year — which is obviously something to be concerned about but is smaller than the slightly less than 5% fall (allowing for compounding) in average consumption. Was that 3.5% increase also reported as ‘slight’? No. It was used as the headline for the web page.
Moreover, the number of total deaths in 2008 according to the ONS is 509,090 which makes alcohol related deaths 1.7% of the total. Again, because these are avoidable then this is obviously way too many but I doubt a headline that says nearly 2% of people in the UK are killed by booze would grab so much attention. (I would guess the man or woman in the street would think it at least double or even quadruple that). However, at a steady rate of growth of 3.5% (compounded) it would take another 18 years for the number of alcohol related deaths to rise by 50%, which would be around 4% of the total number (making the assumption that all other trends continue).
At least the page later conceded that consumption had been falling since 2002 and because the deaths are largely concentrated in older people who have, almost by definition, been drinking for many years that the positive trend of lower consumption will take a similarly lengthy period of time to show in the mortality figures.
Of course a rise in alcohol related deaths is very bad news and should be reported but so should the facts that show that overall this country is getting more sober and in general taking a more sensible attitude to drinking, albeit there may be more extremes in number of genuine problem drinkers and a large number of teetotallers.
Yet the way the Department of Health and other lobby groups put out a drip feed of press released that are regurgitated by lazy journalists shows that the media is complicit in completely misrepresenting a positive story into scaremongering. We might expect some of the tabloid press to do this but for the BBC to be so complicit is quite shocking.
Tags: alcohol, alcohol consumption, BBC, government, idiocy, journalists, lies, ONS, statistics
Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
‘My arse,’ as Jim Royle might say.
Radio Two listeners are having to pick the supposed best album of the last 30 years out of the motley list below. Maybe the list is selected from only the people who can be bothered to turn up to receive the award at the Brits? It’s difficult to imagine a bigger bunch of crap — who on earth shortlisted this rubbish? In many cases the album isn’t even the best that the artists concerned has made.
A Rush Of Blood To The Head – Coldplay: they might be a decent band if they got a singer. I thought ‘Viva la Vida’ was ok but most of Coldplay is pretentious whining — cock rock for middle-class students.
No Angel – Dido: this is actually a very good album and balances the pop influences of Rick Nowells (Stevie Nicks, Belinda Carlisle) with the trip-hop influences of her brother’s band Faithless. At least with names like Dido and Rollo, they had to admit they were posh — not kids off da street like most middle-class musicians. Because of inverted snobbery by middle-class music journalists the only people who were allowed to admit they liked Dido were those who had impeccably ‘street’ credentials — like Eninem, who knew a good tune when he heard one.
Diamond Life – Sade: this one is good too. It has the mark of a good album in that some of the non-single tracks are equally memorable as those that got in the charts. It’s got a lot of period charm.
Hopes And Fears – Keane: I don’t know anything about this one or Keane, in fact, apart from their song ‘Spiralling’ was ok.
What’s The Story Morning Glory – Oasis: a load of over-hyped, third-rate bombastic imitiations of Beatles tracks
No Jacket Required – Phil Collins: unbelievable — ‘Face Value’ was genuinely an album of its time with a single that has endured (even if the drumming gorilla didn’t save Cadbury’s). ‘No Jacket Required’ was loveable geezer Phil at his showbiz worst.
The Man Who – Travis: I’m the man who can’t remember anything about Travis, let alone their supposedly brilliant album
Rockferry – Duffy: OK but largely a throwback to the 60s in musical style — is imitating 40 year old music something that makes the best album of the last 40 years. At least it isn’t Amy Winehouse.
Urban Hymns – The Verve:I bought this on cd when it first came out, listened to it once and then never bothered again. Good opening tune but wasn’t it derived from the Rolling Stones?
Brothers In Arms – Dire Straits: like the Phil Collins selection, not their best album — they did some decent stuff a few years earlier but this is stadium formula bloat-rock.
Seems like whichever nerd put the shortlist together selected their favourite album (probably Keane or Travis) and then put it up against a load of other dross to ensure it wins — while milking Radio Two listeners for phone votes. It will be interesting to see how the women artists compare. I think anyone with any independent taste should organise a Rage Against the Machine campaign to make Dido’s ‘No Angel’ the top album of the last 30 years. It’s certainly the best there but that says everything about the competition.
I’ll try and think of my own list.
Tags: 80s music, Brit Awards, cock rock, Dido, idiocy, middle classes, Phil Collins, radio 2
Posted in Music | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
The Quaker founders of Cadbury’s will be gyrating in their graves after the company — an original model of benevolent capitalism — has been sold out by its management to bland global capital processed cheese makers. It might be an appropriate epitaph for the era of New Labour — so much meaningless bluster and posturing (such as came from Mandelson’s reported hostility to the bid) ends up being utterly cynical and worthless.
Maybe it’s appropriate for the times. The Cadbury family cared enough about the people who worked in their Bourneville factory that they built houses (with gardens) for their Victorian workers and set up other countless benevolent institutions for their workforce.
New Labour have been mystifyingly craven towards global capital so it’s perhaps appropriate that they impotently preside over the destruction of one of the last companies that seemed to offer a compromise between the naked greed of capital and the humane welfare of the people who worked in that organisation.
If ever there was an award for meaningless, misleading and insincere prattle it should go to Mandelson’s words on Cadbury as reported in ‘The Times’: ‘Lord Mandelson, who was unable to intervene in the bid process, nonetheless warned Kraft last month: “If you think that you can come here and make a fast buck you will find that you face huge opposition from the local population . . . and from the British Government.”’
Let’s see what he does rather than says.
Tags: Cadbury, corporate strategy, global capital, Gordon Brown, government, idiocy, Mandelson, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 2 Comments »
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
The working classes built the Labour Party through their struggle to seek representation through the union movement and to stand up to the amorality of global capital. Gordon Brown is in the ironic, and shameful, position of leading an incarnation of the party that has taken this working class vote disgracefully for granted. Intelligent MPs such as Frank Field and John Cruddas appreciate that much of the micro-engineering of the benefits system, so beloved of Brown, has wrecked the moral values of a strong working-class culture. The cabinet is now full of arrogant, condescending privileged, middle-class meddlers who have no inking of the self-reliance that used to be the foundation of working-class communities. To them, it is inconceivable that anyone would want to stay working class. The vanity of the New Labour elite is such that they believe everybody should aspire to be just like them. They erroneously conflate poverty with class and seem to believe that the country will thank them for destroying the working class. In its place everyone would either be middle-class or part of the underclass. Such is their unshakeable conceit that they don’t realise the political flaw of this strategy — the new middle-classes will tend to vote Tory and the underclasses will display the same apathy to the democratic process as they have to their own lives (preferring to become Brown’s clients as he dispenses skewed benefits) and not vote. The overall effect is that Labour has set on an unwittingly self-destructive mission to eliminate its own core vote.
However, Labour has always been able to rely on the vote of one significant part of the electorate — students. Even the spoon-fed, waited-upon offspring of the indulged middle-classes often realise its in their own self-interest to vote for a party of the left when living their pretend impoverished student existence for a year or two. That’s not counting all the crap spouted by politically correct university lecturer ideologues (again out of self-interest, conscious or subliminal) that probably sways a few impressionable student voters.
Yet following its success in destroying its working class core vote, Labour (if Mandelson still fits that description) sneakily chose the run up to Christmas, when they no doubt thought all students would be pissed, to declare war on this loyal part of their vote.
The scale of the cuts proposed is quite shocking and promises to demean higher education even further in this country. I had experience of the rubbish that undergraduates had to put up with in this country about 10 years ago — hundreds of students in a lecture theatre, negligible contact time with lecturers, widespread use of group work that allows skivers to be carried, large-scale plagiarism and so on. This was in a university that had a decent reputation for certain subjects (such as business). When I was an undergraduate I used to go for weekly tutorials with a lecturer and three or four other students. Even so, by international standards, universities in this country are relatively good — see how many international students are attracted to them (a good job as they have kept the sector solvent up to now).
Unfortunately the New Labour philistines have now made the cynical calculation that higher education funding is something that can be cut now but the resulting decline in quality won’t be immediately apparent.
Compensating for the lack of funding won’t be possible by bringing in gimmicks like two-year degrees and cutting holidays — an example of hypocritical scum Labour spin doctors going for the gutter vote by pretending students will need to work harder and not drink as much. Dave Prentis of Unison is right in suggesting this will have a long-term effect on the country’s competitiveness of destroying exactly the sort of knowledge based economy that we were meant to be relying on now Thatcher and New Labour have outsourced all manufacturing to China. No-one should really be surprised about this as this government has no conception of the long-term. Long-term thinking to them is the time it takes before the headlines appear in the next day’s papers.
It wouldn’t be so bad except this government encouraged a huge expansion in higher education in the first place — with a target of 50% of 18 year olds going into full-time education. I tend to think this was more motivated by removing a huge demographic group from the unemployment figures than by altruism. (Quite clever making them go into debt to do it as well.) Now, having massively expanded the university sector to cope with the huge influx of students, the government is actually penalising them for taking on too many students.
It’s predicted that whole universities will close or merge and the more expensive courses will disappear (ironically those which tend to teach skills that aren’t available elsewhere like advanced science and engineering). It’s also anticipated that the UK will end up with a two-tier system with a small, elite group of universities funded to carry out research and a large number of chav universities that ‘teach’ large numbers of students in a cheap and nasty way. Of course, access to the two parts of the sector will be entirely unequal — with those from privileged backgrounds playing the system and swanning into the good universities (with maybe a bit of token equal access thrown in for ‘the kids from the inner cities’) whereas the majority of students will be funnelled into the sausage factories. It will be just like the good old days to the large numbers of privately educated cabinet ministers from privileged backgrounds themselves, such as the privately educated Harman and Balls.
Tags: Gordon Brown, government, higher education, idiocy, middle classes, New Labour, politicians, stupidity, universities
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Thursday, December 17th, 2009
The Facebook campaign to make ‘Killing in the Name’ by Rage Against the Machine the Christmas number one is another demonstration of the amazingly puerile applications of internet technology and a continuing reminder of the enduring collective idiocy of the human race. (Maybe it’s appropriate that this should be shown in the run up to Christmas — a time when we should reflect and take stock.) It’s also typical of the counterproductive type of demonstration that only serves to re-inforce the importance of what is being protested against. It brings further publicity to the X-Factor and will only make Simon Cowell even more money as all Joe’s fans go out and make sure they buy the record in case he’s in danger of not making number one. (Perhaps Cowell thought up the whole stunt?)
It also makes money for the band themselves. They seem to be stuck in a timewarp where they think swearing on live radio or television is some sort of subversive act. Since Bob Geldof’s famous rant during Live Aid, which surmounted the Sex Pistol’s famous swearing a few years earlier, there have been no barriers left to push — anything else is just gratuitous. Madonna’s swearing during Live 8 was just a cheap and nasty attempt to seem ‘edgy’ and ‘dangerous’ when, in fact, it was just a desperate load of bollocks designed to make a bit of money from doing something incredibly easy.
If people want to be subversive then do something that takes genuine effort and wit — not do something that anyone else capable of speaking in English could do. Also, those who want to demonstrate how radical they are should do something that has a bit of risk attached. Once upon a time perhaps swearing might jeopardise a musician’s career. Now it’s almost expected of them. Rather than swearing they should perhaps have a go at the real sacred cows.
Tags: Bob Geldof, idiocy, Live Aid, Sex Pistols, swearing, X-Factor
Posted in Life's Frustrations, Music | No Comments »
