Of Innocence and Experience

October 26, 2013

A picture of innocence. The girl on the front cover of Girl A: the truth about the Rochdale sex ring by the victim who stopped them (Ebury Press) is rosy cheeked and clear eyed. Long straight hair, long fringe, hiding behind it.

Demur increases the allure; like 16-year-old Kate Moss in her first-ever front cover for The Face (Corinne Day’s ‘The 3^rd Summer of Love’ photoshoot, July 1990).

Of course the book cover photo is not the real Girl A (neither did she write the book, which was ghosted byDaily Telegraph crime reporter Nigel Bunyan). But it is her real voice on the radio this morning (Today BBC Radio 4): Manc/Lancs accent flat as Lowry’s matchstick men, telling a terrible tale of repeated rape; singing her song of horrendous experience.

She’s being played again. This is not to say it’s as before, in smelly rooms underneath naked light bulbs with her half-clothed and sobbing at the bulk of brutal men. But she is being passed around the media, obliged to give a performance of innocence betrayed, for one interviewer/reviewer after another.

Again, she thinks she’s playing it. Previously, she must have counted up the free food and vodka and one or two good times, thinking she was coming out on top – until she was lying underneath, getting her comeuppance.

Now there’s another lot playing her for all they can get. Having written off her ‘chaotic’ kind the same way the police did (they’re all slags until proven otherwise), Girl A’s story is being used as the antidote to middle class cynicism: mea culpa, mea culpa, these working class girls were innocent all along; we were so in the wrong.

Uncomfortable, yes; but middle class therapy, nonetheless.

Girl A has been moved from the Rochdale sex ring to respectable hand wringing; both times the object of someone’s else’s self-interest. read more

Social Workers Prefer Blondes

October 20, 2013

The old-fashioned face of Maria, the four-year-old found in a Roma settlement in the Greek town of Farsala. Not pinched by poverty: cheeks almost chubby. But the eyes are half-cowed and half-bullish; same with the set of the mouth. Maria’s tight-lipped half-smile is daring and humble at the same time. She looks partly like an archive photo from Victorian London; though compared to Dickens’ Little Nell she’s more bolshie and much less sentimentalised.

Who is Maria? Disregarding everything except her expression, she might be the twin sister of the truculent boy who used to be the pin-up for Track Records, photographed with what appeared to be – shock! horror! – a massive joint in his hand.

All around the world there is shock! horror! at Maria’s ash blond hair versus the uniform of gypsy poverty she is dressed in. Cheap blue trainers, grey leggings and matching top, plain white vest poking out from underneath; grubby fingers and plaits seemingly dipped in something darker. Oil, perhaps; to keep the nits away?

Excited by the prospect of her having been abducted or trafficked, charity officials and social workers are buzzing around Maria like flies. She may be better off as a result of their intervention, away from the non-stop giggle-gaggle of excitable children in the Roma settlement; and the equally excitable adults. But there are numerous, negative side-effects of the institutional process she’s now being entered into. Who knows if it’s for the best?

And who knows why young girls’ faces are writ so large? Western media have just met a girl called Maria, and the sudden elevation of her face follows on from their ongoing adoration of Maddie McCann. Meanwhile as part of the Belfast Festival, the face of a six-year-old female has just been ploughed into an 11-acre field. Two thousand tonnes of sand, two thousand tonnes of earth and a shed load of satellite technology – all in order to mark out a young girl’s face across the land. read more

‘Hideously White’ – Ha, Ha! But That’s Only Half The Story

October 19, 2013

It’s tempting to say of Greg Dyke: hoist with his own petard. The former Director General who once complained that the BBC was ‘hideously white’, is now at risk of a white-out. The only man ever to put a Rat (Roland) on a sinking ship (TV AM: he turned it round and made a tidy profit), may be pushed out of his nearly new role as chair of the Football Association (FA) after complaints about his hideously white appointees to the FA Commission on the future of the English game.

In an open letter to his chief critic, ‘Greg’ (just don’t call me ‘Gregory’) even cites his ‘hideously white’ comment as proof of his bona fides.

Greg – I know you won’t mind me calling you that, ‘cos that’s the down to earth guy you are – have you never heard the saying: ‘those who live in glass houses’? Just glance at a looking-glass…..

But if it’s easy to have a go at Greg for being right-on, man of the people, down with the black and ethnic minority communities – only to have it blow back in his hideously white face, it’s hard to accept that this is what became of the generation which saw television as a genuinely popular medium; the people’s window on the world.

Their rise was imbued with widespread hope for the extension of social democracy; their demise represents its dramatic contraction.

Black and white David Frost, close-cropped hair and skinny ties, in the 1960s the most intelligent man in TV. Greg Dyke’s seven-year ascent from junior researcher to head of London Weekend Television, delivering entertainment and current affairs in full 1970s colour: not bad for a Whispering Bob Harris lookalike.

Intelligence was everything – among these broadcasters but also on the part of the audience they were broadcasting to. Patronising – a whole way of life for their successors – is just what they didn’t do. read more

America: the country for old men

October 13, 2013

Old men and their tired faces. Pouchy cheeks and droopy eyes. Advised to watch their cholesterol and get the prostate checked.

On Thursday, America will be prostrate before its creditor nations unless by then the elderly men of Capitol Hill can agree to raise the Federal Government debt ceiling.

Shouldn’t be too difficult, gentlemen, deciding how much more we are allowed to ask to borrow; especially since our creditors cannot afford to refuse. We are, proverbially, too big to be allowed to fail.

Cut to Jim Yong Kim, lively and elegant in his cutaway collar. The chair of the World Bank is speaking about the dire consequences of American default – if it were allowed to happen on Thursday. Born in Seoul, raised in the Mid-West, former principal of Dartmouth College, nominated by President Obama – no less, he is Korean-American, surely symbolising this century as a co-production between East and West. Or if next week is truly telling, perhaps he already represents the changing face of power. Power having acquired distinctively Asiatic features, whereas until now it’s been too early to tell.

Gentlemen, we are, proverbially, too big to be allowed to fail.

Yet fail they might if they don’t sort themselves out in four days. Perhaps there will be an agreement before then, in which case the questions asked will be cut back to just one: what took you so long? But the answer to this question is also the reason why the default deadline may well go unmet.

Washington’s Congressmen have been ta(l)king so long because they’re in a double bind: if they act like the far-sighted, can-do country they used to be, this would entail substantive recognition of their current status as a dependent nation, increasingly reliant on the surplus produced elsewhere. On the other hand, as long as they lack the courage to look into this abyss, they also lack the gumption to get that crucial deal together. Aside from politicking in the West Wing and shenanigans on Capitol Hill, this is the existential crisis underlying Washington’s imminent debt crisis. read more

And Not A Drop To Drink

October 12, 2013

They may have tipped it over themselves, rushing to one side of the boat – these boats that have no name, never mind the hundreds crowded onto them – in a pointless attempt to attract the attention of the Coastguard plane flying overhead. Pointless because the plane would not have been there at all, if it hadn’t been dispatched to track the progress of this overcrowded vessel.

Migrants, migrants everywhere, and all they do is sink. Another 50 died yesterday; 300 the week before. Close enough to Italy’s outlying island of Lampedusa for their African bodies to be recovered from the wine dark sea and treated like Europeans – the Europeans they were never allowed to become.

In the makeshift morgue, untidy plastic sheeting – stiff limbs poking out at random – gives way to neat rows of well-made coffins. White ones for the little black bodies of children. An extra large casket for a mother and her new born baby. Umbilical cord still attached, the body of the babe was found inside the dead woman’s leggings.

‘And she wrapped him in swaddling clothes….’

Leggings, jeggings; pushing and shoving. To get on the boat; to get off when it starts to sink. The whole, tawdry business of trafficking and signing up to be trafficked.

Now this: nativity scene drowned out; epic story of Homeric proportions; matter of life and death.

From the outside, it’s difficult to make sense of it. Those orderly rows of coffins which say, in their orderliness, ‘welcome to the EU’ – ludicrous.

Perhaps the survivor who was treading water with his baby in his arms and watched his son drown because he simply didn’t have enough hands – perhaps he knows whether the glass is half full or half empty.

But that’s copping out. How would that man, of all people, be able to achieve a sense of perspective? It should be me, from this distance. read more

Getting To Know Me, Part Three

October 6, 2013

I picked somebody up off her bike after she crashed, and she told me I was an action hero. Insisted I wasn’t at all geeky, even if she was a bit dazed at the time. I’m not funny! Last month I found it hard to oppose making war on Syria, but I did it. When I first sought election as MP for Doncaster, I sat down to tea with a local Labour activist called Molly, and I was asked how I could possibly know anything about the lives of the people living in that constituency; still less represent them. Because I learned my values from my mother, I said. I didn’t have it easy when I was elected Labour leader, because there were repercussions for my family. Recently I have been campaigning again, standing on my pallet – mine is a pallet not a soapbox. Standing on my pallet I have answered questions from all sorts of people – angry people, hard-pressed people. I went into politics to help these people. And now I’ve come off the conference stage to find my late father’s name defamed. I repeat, I learned my values from my parents. They taught me to understand I was brought into the world to help people, OK?

No, Ed Miliband stopped short of claiming apostolic mission. But only by a few syllables. Sure wasn’t shy about personal influences and individual characteristics: I-this, I-that, I-and-the-other. Me and my mother. So much I-contact you’d be forgiven for thinking that the leader’s speech to party conference was less of a manifesto of what he (third person singular) could do for us (first person plural); more like a further exercise in validating, verifying, volumising the first-person.

Bigging Up Ed (again) only makes him a Big ‘Ead.

(Of course, that’s not what I intended. Not at all what I meant. I really did not mean to give that impression. I have been misinterpreted. I insist that the record must be set straight. I….etc etc.) read more

Westgate: What A Carry On

October 6, 2013

Kenyan policeman running into Westgate Shopping Mall, automatic rifle in hand. Shaft of sunlight catches him on the arm. He’s caught again a few minutes later: bullet in the belly.

But the scene is more loopy than Looper. People are dying……in episodes of Trollied or outtakes from Carry On films.

Fugitives running for their lives through Westgate’s ‘first world interior’. What an engorged mouthful Carry On‘s Kenneth Williams would have made of ‘in-teeer-ior’. Up your first world interior, Julian. Pad-Pad-Pad their feet on the hard wearing, non-staining floor tiles as seen in shopping malls the whole world over (Westgate’s could have come from Manchester’s original Arndale Centre, the one the IRA blew up). Rat-Tat-Tat sounds like a door knocker on Come Dine With Me; but they’re slithering to the floor with fatal gunshot wounds. Splayed out on the hard-wearing, non-staining floor tiles – just wipe away blood in seconds; while stocks last. Whereas 9/11 remains apocalyptic – always en vogue, Westgate Mall was banal. To maintain the aesthetic standards of the September issue, you sad, sick terrorists must recruit your own Anna Wintour. Without a white witch acting as editor in chief, instead of carrying on the terror you’ll find yourselves appearing in Carry On Terrorism. Ha-Ha-Ha.

Washington Side Story

September 21, 2013

As he left the stage at the end of his mid-week press conference, having talked cautiously out of the corner of his mouth for half-an-hour – because ‘sly old fox’ is a description he prob’ly wouldn’t object to, just as he was passing in front of the Stars and Stripes, the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Bank, a cerebral banker and Princeton academic by the name of Ben Bernanke, did a little skip.

Ben Bernan-ke, who announced that the Bank would continue subsidising the US economy to the tune of $85 billion dollars a month, prompted the markets to tick up-ke.

Let us now praise Uncle Ben, they said, for his unexpectedly good Offices. By the end of the week, however, the House of Representatives was threatening to vote down further government borrowing. This would send the American economy into a ‘tailspin’, warned President Obama; his smooth tenor voice shrilled to sandpaper as he said it. Wall Street duly dipped.

Without reaching another crisis like the ‘credit crunch’ – no flick knives in the alley nor blood on the boardroom floor, the up-ticks and downbeats of the American economy look set to singalong indefinitely.

(Apologies to Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim for faint echoes of their West Side Story.)

Cast In An Evil Role

September 12, 2013

Free at last, actor Michael Le Vell walks down the steps outside Manchester Crown Court. Left hand in trouser pocket, which says, only a little too loudly: I’m a cool kinda guy. Legs a little further apart than strictly necessary, which says: my balls are big so they do need more room. Acquitted on all 19 counts of child sex abuse, after two years of ‘hell’ who can blame Le Vell for strutting his stuff? Still less for going down the scally pub as soon as he scally could.

Le Vell now lives in Hale (the posh end of Greater Manchester), but hails from Newton Heath, a couple of miles north of Manchester city centre. The area was first industrialised as far back as the 1820s. It would be a hundred years, and more, before L.S. Lowry depicted Le Vell’s recent forebears as matchstick men (going to their wartime work in the Mather Platt factory).

For 30 years Le Vell himself has painted a picture of working class manhood, playing the part of car mechanic Kevin Webster (avec moustache = gay icon) in the longest-running British TV soap opera,Coronation Street. He says he doesn’t let his children watch the show if Kevin is caught up in a racy scene, in case they become confused about who their father is. But after 30 years in character he too must have difficulty distinguishing himself from….himself.

On trial, a.k.a. on stage in a Manchester courtroom, once again Le Vell became two personae in one person: the guilty man and the innocent party. Only the jury had the power to tell them apart. After his acquittal, we all know which of these was real. But there is something about the wider situation today which means that the doppelganger never altogether disappears.

Those now facing sexual abuse charges are drawn from all walks of public life – MPs (thin ones, fat ones); various actors; a host of radio hosts, starting with Jimmy Savile, anti-Christ. Odds are not all of these are guilty men; but it’s a dead cert that we’re all now involved. Even if each of us were to stand trial and be acquitted of anything-you-like, in today’s climate we are liable to remain the man who beat the charges and dodged the accusations – till next time. read more

Everywhere

September 10, 2013

At the TUC conference, earlier today. On stage behind Labour leader Ed Miliband, even the hand-picked phalanx of ‘ordinary people’ found it hard to focus on his speech. Young woman of colour, top-right, wore the same expression as my students: I’d-rather-be-texting. White man, front row, gurning on camera. Really! Meanwhile Mr Miliband said his set piece, reciting lines rehearsed too often; making robust gestures – hey, look at my robust gesture – which were mannered and effete.

Westminster, a day earlier. Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the public accounts committee, grilled BBC Trusties and ex-executives about excessive redundancy payments. Already in the pink (living well at public expense must be patterned on Lord Patten), they wriggled and turned red-in-the-face. Hodge herself seemed to be tinted yellow: her skin toned in with her purple top for maximum day glow effect.

On different days in different places, it varies from lacklustre to lurid; but the slow liquidation of British institutions is everywhere irreversible.

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