Thursday, July 30, 2015 

Send in the clowns.

Amid the continuing delays at the Channel Tunnel, MPs and media alike today demanded that the military be deployed to help stem the crisis.

"The army must be sent to Dover," said MP Davide Davies.  "Every year this problem gets worse.  Swarms of disgusting British tourists force their way into France, disrespecting our culture, our women and our language.  They sing songs asking where were we during WW2, get drunk, urinate in the streets and dare each other to have sex with goats.  Any benefit from the money they spend is outweighed by the carnage that follows in their wake, which we then have to pay to put right.  It's a completely false economy."

The extreme right-wing newspaper Le Courrier meanwhile had its own take on the factors behind the tourist surge.  "It's the benefits, stupid.  The British government pays so much to feckless layabouts that they feel entitled to come over here with all their friends.  Not that it is just the evil poor.  The problem is exactly the same at the other end of the scale: villages in the south have been bought wholesale by the dreaded "champagne socialists", leaving nowhere for our children to live.  When exactly will we start looking after our own?"

More sanguine voices have been at pains to point out France in fact plays host to relatively few British tourists, and that they mainly head through the country to other destinations.  "Spain is by far the worst affected, with Marbella, Benidorm and Ibiza swamped by a mixture of social classes," commented TV host Antoine de Caunes.  "We get off lightly compared to places like San Antonio, where braying trustafarians party alongside your common garden permissives, who are more than willing to give dozens of blowjobs in exchange for a single shot of Sambuca.  Back in the old days we would have made a highly amusing little short film about that, complete with silly accents."

The reaction in Britain has so far been muted.  Premier David Cameron declined to comment, while the Sun refused to be drawn into a slanging match. "It's the silly season, so the French media is just indulging in its only sure sellers: bigotry, xenophobia and casual racism," commented a spokesman.  "We're above that sort of thing."

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7/30/2015 07:27:00 pm | |

Tuesday, April 28, 2015 

Me and Stephen Hawking we laugh.

You can't help but be struck by the Tories' lack of serendipity.   The economy is meant to be their trump card, their "jobs miracle" an unquestionable fact.  Of course, the recovery they stalled for two years would be put in jeopardy if Labour were to get in and rack borrowing up again, whereas there wouldn't be any negative effects from the Conservatives front-loading their proposed cuts in the first years of the next parliament in their quest for a surplus.  You know all this.

How desperately unfortunate then that the GDP figures for the first three months of the year are so disappointing.  They are just a snapshot, based on incomplete data and may well be revised up.  All the same, that without the boost provided by the drop in oil prices and corresponding low inflation the economy would be all but flatlining is not the news the Tories were expecting at this stage.  Their response, the only possible one, however counter-intuitive, has been to say this just proves the last thing needed is a change of government or the instability of an inconclusive outcome next Thursday.  Clearly what's needed isn't just the certainty of a Conservative majority, but the impact the further austerity proposed would have on growth.  This is assuming the Tories mean what they say, which is open to doubt considering Osborne slowed the retrenchment programme in 2012 when the economy was double-dipping (since revised away to mere stagnation rather than a second recession), in spite of all his denials of adopting a Plan B.  We can though only go by what they say, rather than what a government not hell bent on an ideological shrinking of the state would do in such circumstances.

The further evidence this was precisely what the Tories weren't banking on is this is their designated "economy" week.  They would have known all too well today would see the ONS publish the latest statistics, and so clearly went ahead presuming their boasts of having rescued an economy on the brink would be further reinforced.  Oh and dear.  

Not that it will likely make much difference when actual news is the last thing on the mind of a press that has long gone past the point of embarrassment when it comes to serving up what's given to them by the Conservatives: the Mail today dredged up a two-year old story on Miliband somehow being a Stalinist for daring to suggest more use of compulsory purchase orders to help get more houses built.  The Times meanwhile declared there are 10 days to save the union, just as there were however many days in the past to save the pound, save the NHS, save Jennifer's ear and so on.  Considering the Conservatives have been going out of their way for the past two weeks to suggest a vote for the SNP is somehow illegitimate, with the two parties almost in cahoots in their attempt to squeeze Labour even further in Scotland, it's an odd line for Cameron to suddenly take.

Equally strange is Cameron feeling entitled to say who his opponents should or shouldn't be interviewed by.  Considering Dave's idea of an interrogation is less Paxman and more Philip Schofield, such is his preference for the sofa of This Morning as opposed to the rigour of appearing on say the Today programme, not to bring up the whole avoiding anything resembling a debate that wasn't a waste of time, it's a bit rich to declare Ed Miliband a joke for agreeing to an interview with Russell Brand.  Apparently Cameron hasn't got time to hang out with Brand, although he did find room in his schedule for the chuckleheads at Heat magazine to ask him a few truly important questions, such as whether Sam prefers pink or brown.

Brand, it cannot be said enough, is a gimp.  He goes after the easiest of targets, has no interest in anything beyond the shallowest understanding of what he talks about, does so in the most infuriating way imaginable and has, up to now, undermined any good he has done by supporting causes like the Focus E15 mothers and generally raising awareness by telling those about to shafted the most by a Conservative government not to vote.  As soon as he gets bored or gets a better offer than spending his days making money from Google via the YouTube partners programme for the Trews channel he'll be off doing something else.  

For Miliband to agree to be interviewed by Brand is nonetheless exactly the sort of thing he should be doing: he has absolutely nothing to lose at this point, and, if as the Graun is suggesting it's finally got through Brand's thick skull that not to at least offer a suggestion as to whom his viewers should vote for if they're going to would be a betrayal, then all the better.  Moreover, detest Brand's way of expressing himself as I do, I'd much rather listen to him and Miliband having something resembling a normal discussion on how to tackle tax avoidance than the cringe inducing falseness showcased in Labour's abominable "Ed Miliband: a Portrait" political broadcast.

Still, if tomorrow's front pages are anything to go by, we've reached the stage in the campaign where cries of anguish about what supposedly isn't up for debate, as exemplified by the Mail last week having the gall to claim immigration was the great unmentionable, have given way to straight ad hominem attacks.  Do you really want this clown ruling us, asks the Mail, the paper owned by the non-domiciled Lord Rothermere.  Oh for the chance, the mere possibility, of being able to say it was the right-wing media wot lost it.

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4/28/2015 11:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, April 07, 2015 

An election campaign broadside on behalf of all lazy Brits.

If you're me (and if you are, why is it you haven't killed yourself yet?), then on an almost weekly basis events will occur that make you declare you don't want to live on this planet anymore.  Kardashian hair colour changes treated like the second coming of Christ, Wayne Rooney goals celebrated in the same way as parents do a child taking its first solid dump, newspapers still focusing on the way politicians eat, as we just can't forget how Ed Miliband failed to take sustenance from a bacon sandwich in the approved fashion, all result in the survival instinct dithering just that little bit more.

And then something like yesterday's Sun front page comes along.  There are times when every single piece of information on a front page can be wrong, and yet it can still be completely unobjectionable, or you just roll your eyes and look away.  There are times when every single piece of information on a front page can be wrong, and it's so objectionable that more than 25 years later those affected by it complain if the editor responsible is given any sort of platform.  Then there are times when a front page has apparently been put together by someone who has been home-schooled by parents who have only ever communicated with their child through the nexus that is Google Translate.  The process of translating English to Albanian and then back again results in the child learning something vaguely resembling English, so they pick up the rudiments, but not much more.  To everyone else their work is completely indecipherable, and yet despite all the obstacles in their way they managed to get a job working for the country's leading tabloid newspaper.

At some point in the future, most likely in thousands of millennia, when Earth is discovered by an incredibly advanced race of creatures that have managed to overcome all the barriers in the way of intergalactic space travel, only then is it likely will there exist life on this planet that can explain just what was going through the minds of the Sun journalists behind yesterday's the REEM TICKET splash.  Every single thing about it is wrong.  The paper that objected so strongly to Emily Thornberry "sneering" at white van man declares that two reality TV stars speak for "hard-working Brits".  The headline, that no one, not even the people who claim to know what "reem" means, will be able to say makes sense.  The introduction to the article, that declares Joey and Amy to be TOWIE stars, except both left the show a while ago.  The photographs, that show two individuals not so much wearing make-up as the make-up wearing them.  And, of course, their "broadside" itself, which amounts to Joey, who just so happens to be making a programme on the election and so has been going behind the story to get to the real heart of our democracy (he's already met Nick Clegg) declaring that MPs need to like, grow up, and Amy, who thinks benefit scroungers need to have their mansions bombed.

It was though a long weekend that went from the ridiculous to the ridiculous.  On Saturday the Telegraph reported the contents of a "Foreign Office" memo that detailed how Nicola Sturgeon had supposedly told the French ambassador she'd "rather see Cameron remain as PM".  Immediately Sturgeon responded she had done nothing of the sort, and demanded an inquiry into how this forgery had escaped into the wild.  We've since learned it likely came from the Scotland Office, leaked by a civil servant, but not before various people claimed with all seriousness this was a conspiracy by the security services to damage the SNP.

Predictably, the reality is almost certainly far more prosaic.  It's highly unlikely Sturgeon was so loose-lipped, as indeed the full memo itself says.  The memo records what the French Consul-General says he was told by the ambassador, so it's the account based on what someone said to someone else to someone else about a conversation conducted via interpreters.  Something almost certainly was lost in translation.  Sturgeon may well have said she didn't think Miliband was prime ministerial, and probably said she expected David Cameron to remain as PM; as for whether she expressed a preference, probably not.  When you then take into consideration that the Telegraph has, as Private Eye has reported, thrown its lot in fully with the Tories for the duration, it makes even less sense for it to have reported something so helpful to Labour and damaging to both the SNP and the Tories, unless this was a leak not from the Tories but a civil servant with other sympathies.

We'll have to wait for the inquiry to report to see if it does shed any night, but it has nonetheless shown both the credulousness of some who've recently aligned with the SNP and the cynicism of the older warriors.  Of course Sturgeon and most within the SNP would prefer David Cameron to remain as PM, as they've prospered like never before under his tenure.  For a party that has been in power in Scotland for 8 years to still be presenting itself as the outsiders and managing to pull it off is frankly alchemical.  Sturgeon and Salmond's new line is about breaking up "the Westminster old boys' network", as if they're somehow new brooms rather than seasoned campaigners, while the rhetoric about "locking out the Tories" is calculated to the nth degree, designed to appeal to those still zooming while scaring the likes of the Mail.  The last thing they want is any kind of arrangement with Labour, with all the unquantifiables that would entail, no longer able to claim to be protecting Scotland when cuts are inevitable.  What's truly hysterical and must delight the SNP leadership are useful idiots like Adam Ramsay, who claims it'll be all the fault of the "selfish" behaviour of Jim Murphy and Scottish Labour when the Mail and Telegraph "rewrite the constitution" and install Cameron in Number 10 regardless of the election result.

Finally then to Tony Blair's flying visit to Airstrip One to declaim on how leaving the EU would be terrible for all those who don't have boltholes in one of the Middle Eastern kleptocracies.  Two things made apparent from his intervention: first, that despite everything the media still absolutely loves Blair, and as proved by his donning of a high-vis jacket, the de rigueur uniform for anyone wanting to rule, he still deeply wishes he was PM.  Quite whom he was meant to be appealing to though remains a mystery: regardless of the strength of his argument, and on the EU and quite possibly the EU alone he remains convincing, the Blair fan club is now so tiny as to be made up almost entirely of said journalists and fellow politicians.  We might have the poor man's Blair as our current PM, but most seem to have agreed to strike that fact from the record.  As for Blair himself, lovely as it would be to conclude that it's down to how he's haunted by his actions that he's slowly melting, you instead suspect his conscience remains clear.  As must those who can still be found to applaud and frot a man with absolutely no shame.

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4/07/2015 11:18:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 29, 2014 

Boy, 4, has the mark of Murdoch.

The parents of a boy, 4, were horrified when a "mark of Rupert Murdoch" appeared on his forehead.

Tracy Gardner and Nobby Torchwood spotted the dollar symbol as they got their son, Keith, out of bed one morning.

The sinister sign of the evil one is proving a devil to explain.  The imprint has baffled his parents, teachers and even the family's GP, all of whom are apparently as thick as pig shit.  Or we might be making this background detail up.

Shocked Tracy, born yesterday, of Salem, West Norwood Cassette Library, said: “It’s a nightmare. Some people have said it’s the symbol of Mammon — the sign of the worship of money above everything else — which has been very upsetting.

“Just looking at it made me shake thinking the soul of that terrible man had visited my boy.  Something or someone had made the sign on him but we just can't explain how, as neither Nobby or I have the power of independent thought, believing instead everything we see on Channel 5.”

Wondering if it might be a skin infection or rash, they took Keith to their GP, Dr. Nick Riveria.

"He too was baffled.  He recommended we take him for an MRI scan, privately, as the NHS is very pushed at the moment.  We didn't however have the £5,000 to spare."

Worried Tracy put a picture of Keith on Facebook, where it soon received 5 likes, and attracted a comment from among others, Tom Watson MP.  "Clearly this boy has been touched by a presence not unlike the one that made me start believing the claims of ludicrous Tory MPs of the 1980s.  We need a public inquiry into this right now."

Other MPs have also since raised their concerns, as parliament is in recess and they have to keep tweeting in order to give the impression they're doing something.  "What possible justification can there be for calling the Sun a newspaper," Abraham Shelley didn't ask, "when it publishes trash not even the cheaper knock-offs of Take a Break would touch with a ten foot pole?  That's the real issue, especially when the parents of the boy obviously sold the story and don't care about their or his privacy in the first place."

THE SUN SAYS

Our story is totally justified on two grounds.  First, it's the silly season, and the rest of the press are filling their pages with similar guff.  It's not as though there's civil war in Libya, massacre after massacre in Gaza or conflict in Ukraine we could be reporting on.  That costs money.

Second, every time there's OUTRAGE about something we just get more attention, clicks and subscribers.  Last time we checked Mail Online has 190m unique visitors a month, despite Twitter and the chattering classes hating the paper with a passion.  You're feeding us, you gullible, keyboard slamming morons.

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7/29/2014 05:52:00 pm | |

Wednesday, October 23, 2013 

How discrimination still works.

Is there anything the media loves more than a good scare story, particularly when it involves the other?  When it also plays on the desperation of those who have lost a child, the cynicism takes the breath away. The story from Greece of little blonde girl found with a Roma family she has no biological link to doesn't have any significance outside of eastern Europe whatsoever, and yet thanks to global coverage of this truly shocking discovery the authorities and charities have received thousands of inquiries from those who hope the child may be theirs.

Quite apart from how the case seems likely to lead to Fritzl style demands for every Roma child in that benighted country to be investigated, something of great help to the Golden Dawn movement, the last thing it ought to have inspired is raids elsewhere. Just as we had idiots a few years ago who thought every blonde child in a foreign clime with parents of the wrong skin colour could be Madeleine McCann, so it seems the garda acted after a numbskull thought a gypsy couple couldn't possibly have produced a blonde girl. 48 hours later, and after the Mirror had splashed on the "panic", it unsurprisingly turns out the child is theirs.  The parents now seem certain to take legal action.  Rather than offer an apology, the garda has instead restated they "take extremely serious all reports received from members of the public concerning child welfare issues", which seems to suggest anyone acting upon prejudice and age-old racist assumptions still has a friend in the Irish police.

The Roma really are the last racial group it's socially acceptable to discriminate against.  Nor is it just in Europe, as a headline in last weekend's New York Times made clear, asking whether the Roma are primitive or just poor.  The body of the article is in fact, as you would expect from the NYT, a perfectly sensitive account of the attitudes towards the Roma on the continent, but the idea the paper would run a headline asking whether any other racial group is primitive or just poor, or cultured or just rich is laughable.

As Joseph Harker writes, whereas we now have endless discussions about whether or not a celebrity of one kind or another has said something racist, with what seems like an incident every month or so, the latest being the ridiculous mini-furore last week over Roy Hodgson's use of an old joke as an illustration, we don't seem to want to talk about genuine discrimination.  There was almost no wider coverage of BBC London's investigation into letting agents that suggested some were more than prepared to abide by stipulations from landlords that they couldn't let to those of an Afro-Carribbean background.  It's even more surprising when allegations of misogyny are thrown around in regards to the silliness surrounding a fucking baking reality show, and so much was made of the way women who come into the public eye were being treated on Twitter.  Like with so much else, we focus on the ephemera and neglect that which lurks just out of our line of sight.

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10/23/2013 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, September 18, 2013 

It's not over till the tremulant sings.

There are few more terrifying lines to come out of a politician's mouth than "we should have a national debate [about this]".  It's the ultimate sanction for every ignorant pub bore in the land to get on the phone to 5 Live and share their wisdom with the world, usually in the most belligerent and arrogant terms.  It's an invitation to newspapers and columnists to do much the same, publishing their informed stupidity for the man on the street to hastily flip over on the way to the sports page.  And of course, it's also the perfect subject for many tortured blog posts, none of which reach any firm conclusion and will go unread by everyone except the writer's dog.

Yes, we are yet again discussing the veil.  Or the niqab, as few still want to give it its proper name.  That saying the veil is confusing because it encompasses all the different types and styles of hijab Muslim women wear doesn't seem to matter, as niqab is obviously an alien word.  Nor do we ever seem to get any sense of perspective: the number of women who wear the niqab in this country is probably in the tens of thousands, if that.  Those who wear it also tend to be clustered in localised areas, due to either those who emigrated from one country choosing to settle in the same area, or the mosque they attend.  Despite living close to an area with a sizeable Pakistani diaspora, I think I've probably seen only one or two women wearing it over the years.  It really isn't anything approaching a major problem or issue.  It may be in those few communities where many do wear it, but making it into something it isn't doesn't help in the slightest.

We keep returning to the subject because it excites opinion about "the other" in our midst.  I disagree with those who refer to it as mark of separation, as I don't believe that many of those who wear the niqab do so to cut themselves off from the world at large; we however do see it as such because it so goes against our sensibilities about how we communicate and interact with each other, to say nothing about the aesthetics of shrouding yourself when plenty take the first opportunity they get to shed unnecessary clothing.  It also feeds into the whole tendency some have to instantly begin complaining about how if we couldn't live as we do here back in their "home land" that they shouldn't be able to import their ways either.  That this confuses governments and states, often authoritarian and completely unrepresentative, with the people they rule over naturally doesn't enter into the equation.

The Heresiarch superbly covers just about every argument and counter-argument there is for and against either tolerating or putting restrictions on the wearing of the niqab.  My view is the classically liberal, boring, one that mostly it should be decided on a case by case basis.  In the specific instance of "D", as she is being referred to, I think Judge Peter Murphy has been too willing to accede to what looks like special pleading on her behalf.  It might be different if "D" wasn't charged with intimidation, but I see no reason whatsoever why she should be allowed to cover her face when not giving evidence when she is in an enclosed space in a court of law.  She's not in public, she's facing a serious charge and the jury and judge should be able to see her reactions to the evidence given against her if they so wish.  She could still wear a hijab, so it's not as if she's being asked to completely discard her religious beliefs, just her specific interpretation that modesty means a complete face covering.  I don't accept that would in any way infringe her rights under the HRA or ECHR, as France and Belgium have both banned the wearing of the niqab in public completely, and as yet there has been no ruling on whether that is in breach of Article 9.  As a letter in the Graun points out, it seems ridiculous that we can be tying ourselves up in such knots over this when judges and the police continue to persecute the naked rambler in what has turned into an absurdly wasteful battle of wills.

On the other controversy over the weekend, that of Birmingham Metropolitan College dropping its ban on the niqab almost as soon as it was introduced, it's not quite as clear cut.  I have no problem with schools banning the niqab, whether for pupils or teachers, but when it's a 16+ institution where attendance is by choice, being more forgiving of personal beliefs or idiosyncrasies in dress ought to be the way to go.  You can understand the safety aspects of a ban, but that's hardly an insurmountable problem when everyone will soon get used to who does and doesn't normally wear a niqab.  Such a policy would surely also further understanding rather than the opposite; giving those who choose to wear it the possibility of only attending Islamic institutions doesn't help anyone in the long term.

The thing that most annoys is that as before, this entire episode was began by a politician claiming that they were speaking up for those who are being forced into wearing the niqab.  Apart from there being little to no evidence for this being the case, even if such a statement was accurate it rather ignores the fact that far more women and girls will have little to no choice when it comes to wearing the hijab.  One of the most depressing sights I've seen in recent times was a double page spread of photos of London schoolchildren in the Graun, and the number of girls pictured that were already covering their hair, despite not having yet reached 10 years of age.  We don't however question the hijab as opposed to the niqab, as we mostly accept it as an inherent part of Islam (internal differences considered), personal dislike for the practice or religion in general aside.

What we really don't need is the front page of the Sun DEMANDING action, even if those DEMANDS weren't completely outrageous.  Legislation isn't needed, unless it really does become a major issue in courtrooms, where hopefully Judge Murphy's compromise won't necessarily set an overall precedent.  Banks and other places can come up with their own policies without parliament intervening, as the Border Force or whatever it's called now already has.  Within reason we ought to be able to walk around in public wearing what we please; just as I often wear a hood in the winter and usually cover my mouth as well, which some claim intimidates them (although I'm just about the least intimidating person to walk on a pair of legs), so if someone wishes to only have their eyes visible out of adherence to a scripture written hundreds of years ago, they can.  If it does no harm to anyone else, live and let live.  And tone down the rhetoric.

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9/18/2013 07:58:00 pm | |

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 

Anthems for a 17-year-old girl.

One thing almost completely buried (ho ho) by the passing of Margaret Hilda Thatcher (and credit where credit's due to both David Winnick and Glenda Jackson for refusing to go along with the consensus in today's tribute debate) has been the remarkable treatment meted out to Paris Brown, the unfortunately named 17-year-old appointed to be yoof crime tsar by Kent's police and crime commissioner.  Try to put aside the fact that Brown's mission was supposedly meant to be to bring the police and young people closer together, as "they used to be", or that almost no one wanted the PCCs in the first place, and instead marvel at the sheer laziness, cynicism and callousness involved in the Mail on Sunday's attack on someone still not old enough to cast a ballot herself.

You might recall that back in 2009 the Scottish Sunday Express ran what was quite possibly the most ill-judged and despicable newspaper piece in many years.  Written by Paula Murray, the article "exposed" what it described as the "shame" of the survivors of the Dunblane massacre, who now having reached 18 were daring to live their lives the way almost every other 18-year-old would. Murray had scoured their social networking profiles for the slightest evidence of "bad" behaviour, whether it be drinking, swearing, sex, getting tattoos or even into the odd fight, and instead of being told by her colleagues or indeed even her editor that this was just about the most appalling breach of privacy imaginable, Derek Lambie went ahead and splashed it on the front page.  Deserved opprobrium duly landed on the heads of all involved.

Four years later, and we have the first major evidence that the politicians and public figures of the future are likely to be damned for what they put on their Twitter or Facebook pages potentially decades previous.  The hatchet job performed on Brown is still astonishing though, both for the vehemence of the attack and the sheer breadth of what the MoS decided to focus on.  Understandably, most attention was focused on Brown's comments on "pikeys" and her description of everyone on Made in Chelsea as "fucking fags", but the paper also saw fit to draw attention to the fact that Brown talked of how the "worst thing about being single" was "coming home ... horny and having to sleep alone".  A young woman daring to express sexual desire in a public forum? How dare she!

Regardless of when she made some of the tweets, and as Brown swiftly deleted the account we can't check whether she did make some when she was 14 or 15 and not recently, there really isn't much here to get even slightly outraged about.  No, it isn't clever to say you're glad your little brother hit someone who gave his friend a black eye, nor should it be acceptable to call people fags or faggots regardless of the changing meaning of the word, although it should be remembered programmes like Made in Chelsea are produced with the intention of winding people up.  As for her attack on "pikeys", it's fairly apparent she was using the word not as an attack on gypsies directly, but in the sense it's came to be used in as shorthand for thieves in general.  Still not anywhere approaching OK, but are there many who can say that at Brown's age they didn't also make such sweeping condemnations of people, or even use racist language?  I know I can't.

Quite apart from the hysterical hypocrisy of the Mail stable of newspapers condemning someone's non-PC comments on race relations and gay rights, what really rankles is that they chose to draw attention to some of her more introspective, vulnerable tweets, including one where she's obviously criticising herself for how she has sometimes behaved when drunk.  17-year-old has on occasion had a drink! Hold the front page!

It was hardly surprising then when, presumably pressurised into doing so, Brown sat across from the PCC Anne Barnes apologising for the messages while crying her eyes out, all in front of the TV cameras.  I don't think I've seen a more pitiful sight in quite some time; a young person thought she was doing something to help those her own age, and was duly rewarded for it with the kind of attack usually reserved for those who have in some way or another attracted the Mail's ire.

Brown shouldn't have had to resign, but almost certainly had no option. Joe Jones says she have been fully vetted, with her social networking profiles looked at, yet is this really the kind of territory we're now getting into?  When teenagers can't even be allowed to make mistakes or say stupid things for fear they might later have them picked up on, we're in clear danger of creating a generation of politicians who are so desperately dull and have such indistinct opinions that the public becomes even less enthused with the system than they currently are.  Whatever you thought about Thatcher, she believed in what she was doing.  Plenty of those now growing up have the potential to be outstanding future leaders with similar qualities, and are presumably exactly the sort the Mail on Sunday would approve of.  If we're going to attempt to kill them off before they even get started because of daft things they've done on the internet, our democracy is going to be a very dry place indeed.

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4/10/2013 06:51:00 pm | |

Monday, October 29, 2012 

Sex quiz, hot shot!

There is without a shadow of a doubt an art to writing tabloid headlines.  They might make you groan, laugh or despair (hi), but you can't deny there's a certain talent to constructing a pithy, informative summation of a larger article in a highly limited space.

At times though this lack of room means they can get it terribly wrong.  The Sun was criticised a few years back for splashing on "BONKERS BRUNO LOCKED UP", both for the lack of understanding of mental health problems, but also because people rather like Frank Bruno.  The other problem is that despite the heyday of the tabloids being long gone, they insist on continuing to use archaic language which makes little sense when hardly any one uses it in everyday conversation.  

In tabloid parlance professors or scientists are boffins, women under 50 are girls, those sent to prison are caged, a child who commits any kind of offence, criminal or not, is a yob, and probably also evil, while a celebrity on a beach in a bikini photographed by a paparazzo is invariably showing off her curves or leaving little to the imagination.  Taste or respect also rarely enter into the equation: witness the Daily Star's front page treatment of a notorious murder case, the paper going with the legend "MY SEX WITH SALLY ANNE'S DEAD BODY", as though it was just another arrogant boast from a minor celebrity of their latest conquest.

Today's Sun front page then informs us of "GLITTER's 10-HOUR SEX QUIZ".  The paper presumably isn't implying that the police spent almost half a day asking him questions about sex in general and then awarding him points for the ones he got right, and yet that seems to be exactly what it's saying.  This isn't about taking things too literally, but that only a tabloid newspaper would ever describe a police interrogation as a "quiz", which rather underplays the seriousness of the arrest, just as only a tabloid or a satirist would use "grill" as a synonym for question, as the Sun does in the sub-heading underneath.  Most of the information required is in fact in the first heading: ex-pop star arrested.  Beyond that, all it needs to present is who and why as succinctly as possible, and arguably even the why isn't necessary when the story's been in the news for a day already.  Both the Mirror (Glitter: first of many) and the Star (Get dressed Glitter.. You're nicked!) managed it, in language easily understandable, even if the use of "nicked" by the Star comes across as more than a bit 70s.
 
This isn't to ignore the argument that this colourful language is all part of the charm and culture of a sub-set of the press, and that readers in general understand it perfectly well and even like it.  If though the BBC (or indeed ITN or Sky) were to suddenly decide to start asking their broadcast journalists to send in reports using similar terminology, the very same papers that abuse language in such a way would be the first to complain about dumbing down and the dreadful message being sent to our youngsters, not yet inculcated in how to like talk proper.  The point surely ought to be that it's perfectly possible to write with brevity and skill while not traducing a language which, fabulously flexible and constantly evolving as it is, can only be stretched so far before it breaks entirely.

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10/29/2012 07:05:00 pm | |

Tuesday, August 28, 2012 

Stay classy, Matt Bendoris!

Call it fantasy, but my lack of recent posts on the standards of journalism at the Sun hasn't been down to not looking, rather that Dominic Mohan has turned out to be less sensationalist and overall far better editor than Rebekah Brooks ever was. Last week's antics over Prince Harry aside, that is, so let's not jinx it now.

We may well then have to rely on the Sun's Scottish edition to be reminded of the bad old days. Enter Matt Bendoris, chief feature writer, and his rather sad apparent medical condition, priapism. Unleashed upon "Scots violin queen" Nicola Bendetti, Bendoris turns on the charm:

STUNNING violinist Nicola Benedetti becomes as tightly strung as a Stradivarius when pop babe Rihanna’s name crops up.

I must have hit a bum note after asking why the sexy Scot doesn’t make more of her fabulous figure — when she suddenly flies off on one.

Ah yes, becoming tightly strung and flying off on one at the suggestion from a tabloid journalist that she sexs her act up a bit. Nothing in the slightest bit chauvinistic here, nope.

So I guess Nicola won’t be posing for the lads’ mags anytime soon. Pity, because she looks fit as a fiddle when we meet at Edinburgh’s plush Sheraton Hotel.

The classical musician is wearing skinny jeans which show off her long legs. She’s also busty with a washboard flat tummy, tottering around 5ft 10in in her Dune platform wedges.

Frankly, you get the feeling that Nicola Bendetti would have been better treated by one of the lads' mags. Sure, they would have leered at her, asked her to get her kit off and posed exactly the same questions, but for the most part they don't insult their interviewees:

But Nicola doesn’t always take the bonniest photo — she’s beaky in pics sometimes, which is weird because in the flesh she’s an absolute knock-out.

Class, pure class. One suspects that Matt didn't mention to Nicola at the time that he feared he had been sent to interrogate a pelican, so it's natural he let his relief out in the piece itself. And what relief!

Nicola says: “It’s eight years since I won Young Musician of the Year. In the next eight years I’d hope to be a better violinist and I’d like to have started a family. I’ll be in my early 30s so I would probably like a baby or two by then.”

Better get busy making sweet, sweet music, Leonard. Lucky boy...


With the cliche quotient duly filled, Matt no doubt made his excuses and left. Whether there was a mess to be cleared up once Matt had returned to base, perhaps the cleaners at the Scottish Sun's offices can be persuaded to get in touch.

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8/28/2012 05:07:00 pm | |

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 

All aboard the Lulz boat.


The media, just in case you haven't noticed, is a strange beast. The people behind it get terribly excited about sexy, new things like "hacking", even if they have even only a very rudimentary knowledge of the subject; then they suddenly remember that the people behind it are mostly bedroom or basement dwelling virgins with greasy hair and bad teeth, qualities they share with a fair few bloggers (is this right? Ed.) and realise they could be next. Best then to spray around negative epithets in a similar fashion to someone who's just had their Facebook profile hijacked and their picture changed to goatse.

This Sun article is just such a glorious example. Even before Ryan Clearly had been charged with any offence his entire life story was gracing the pages of the Daily Mail and Sun, although quite where and how quickly they managed to discover that he had been suspended from school from disruptive behaviour at the age of 5 and had attempted at suicide at the age of 10 it's difficult to know. We're told that this geeky, nerdy oddball turned his sparsely decorated bedroom into the "centre of a global hacking movement", at the same time as which he was apparently attending an unnamed university even though his mother also said that he suffers from agoraphobia and hasn't left the house in four years.

Lulz Security, the group Clearly has been linked to, thought this a rather rum do. "If you don't kick, hit or throw some kind of sports-related object at least thirty-five times a week, you are a filthy recluse to The Sun", they tweeted, although as yet they haven't turned their sights on the paper, which is something of a shame. The group themselves are denying that Clearly had anything other than a extremely loose connection to them; they used his IRC server as one of their bases, and that was about as far as it went. Indeed, despite the briefings and claims that Clearly was a key member or even the only member, something which was always laughable, the charges brought against him tonight only back up LulzSec's denials, and the Met have not claimed, officially at least, that he was part of the group. Apart from controlling a botnet, he's accused of turning it on the websites of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and its British partner, as well as the Serious and Organised Crime's internet base, which was brought low on Monday. While LulzSec claimed responsibility for bringing it down, whether Clearly's (alleged) attack came after or was done in conjunction we simply don't yet know.

What is clear is that the media for the most part still doesn't know its arse from its elbow when it comes to anything even vaguely related to either internet subculture or online security. Hacking remains the catch-all term, even when Clearly hasn't been charged with any actual hacking, such as the recent security breaches which have befallen Sony or any other number of those targeted by LulzSec, most of which were achieved through relatively simple to pull off MySQL injections, or other vulnerablities. As LulzSec themselves tweeted, the DDoS attacks they've launched are "of course our least powerful and most abundant ammunition". Likewise, while LulzSec does seem to have emerged from Anonymous and the two, despite alleged ructions, are still working together, how far the links now go back to eBaum's World* is difficult to tell. True, the group's attitude and its effective mission statement are all based around the insouciant, uncaring, unforgiving nature of Anonymous, but this has now gone far beyond the targeting of specific groups which threatened internet freedom or had withdrawn their services from Wikileaks.

Certainly, in the current hilarious if it wasn't so serious climate where the United States has just declared that internet attacks on it could be responded to militarily, LulzSec's Operation Anti-Security proclamation urging assaults on any government that turns against them seems to be an open invitation for a mass party vanning. With the war against terror beginning to wind down, the good old military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about needs to persuade governments of a new threat, and cyber attacks seem to be what they're latching onto. That this threat is even more imaginary than the much feared waves of suicide bombings that were meant to follow September the 11th, and even less dangerous than the average bedroom jihadist doesn't seem to matter; the defence budget has to go somewhere.

Easy as it is to approve of LulzSec forcing governments and corporations to put far better safeguards in place when it comes to the collection of their users' personal information, even if you don't find favour with their far less agreeable encouragement of Facebook or Paypal account hijacking with the data they've posted, it's difficult to see what it will end up achieving in the long run. For underneath the claim that they "don't give a living fuck at this point" at the potential for them to be "brought to justice", you imagine that if some of them do end up serving long stretches of prison time, as those in the US definitely are threatened with should the full force of the law be brought down, they certainly will later on. Then again, this could be the troll to end all trolls, us having been the victims of the "lulz lizards" all along. In any case, I'm just a loser posting shit I think matters, and someone will be shortly be along to tell me that my shit does not matter.

*Rules 1 and 2, people.

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6/22/2011 11:59:00 pm | |

Friday, December 03, 2010 

They just don't get it, do they?

Extracted from the Sun's unintentionally hilarious leader on you know what:

A gap of more than 60 years between hosting World Cups is unfair on the world's greatest footballing nation.

Well yes, but surely Brazil can put up with waiting another four years.

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12/03/2010 10:26:00 pm | |

Thursday, December 02, 2010 

That strange feeling of deja vu.

The response to Fifa deciding not to award this septic isle the 2018 World Cup has been a joy to behold. There's nothing, it seems, quite like being denied a month long carnival of bullshit and hyperbole to bring out the absolute worst in people. The sight of those who turned up to the gatherings in various towns and cities to await the decision reacting in the most petulant fashion imaginable to Russia winning, out of the same draw as booing the opposing team's national anthem at the start of England's matches does give a wonderful insight into the boorishness and false sense of entitlement which still epitomises so many attitudes when it comes to our position on the footballing world stage.

It also pretty much sums up the entire basis of the bid, which may as well have been titled give us the World Cup, we invented football. We did the whole football coming home thing for Euro 96; to repeat the entire charade gives the impression of simply not being very imaginative, which considering the dullards we had in charge of the entire thing is equally unsurprising. At the beginning of the week even the BBC were describing the lobbying triptych of Prince William, David Beckham and David Cameron as the "dream team", as though a pinhead who doesn't even live in this country, the equally intellectually challenged second in line to the throne and a former member of the Bullingdon were going to win over through sheer strength of charm and glad-handing an executive committee who were never in a million years going to give the tournament to England.

For a few moments we may as well have been transported back to the summer. All of the worst aspects of if not ourselves, then certain sections of the nation seem to manifest themselves when we're in the running for such a prize. Some, especially the media continue to give the impression that simply by turning up we can achieve absolutely anything; witness the laughable Daily Star, the same paper that put Wayne Rooney in a tin helmet on its front page on the day before the England-Germany game, putting the legend "we get World Cup today" on its cover. There's optimism, there's wishful thinking, and then there's just hubris. We seem to imagine that just because we have arguably the best football league in the world, itself built on the shaky foundations of debt, arrogance and greed we have on its own a basis for either hosting or winning the competition. It's through that obsession with the club rather than the national game that we've reached this nadir, with the Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore almost sneering that the "fundamentals of English football don't alter, do they?" Except it's not English football any more, is it? We simply host a globalised league where money talks, and I say this as an Arsenal fan.

Fifa is simply following where the Premier League originally blazed a trail. For all the nonsense of pushing the game into new territories, Fifa is going where the money now is and where it can siphon the most off with the minimum amount of fuss. The pattern was started with this year's tournament, where happily the demands that the world governing body makes on the host nation could be set off against the good news story of bringing the tournament onto a new continent and to the "rainbow" nation, where the development of new facilities and money the competition would bring in could only be seen as very good things, leaving cynics and critics of Fifa's methods in great difficulty. The next tournament in Brazil is in the same vein: a nation of still great poverty and with a horrific crime and murder rate but where the gears of politics are easy to grease. Russia as nation may well deserve the right to host the competition, yet it's the political situation which has made it possible. On the same day as the US cables from Wikileaks describe the motherland as a "mafia state", another completely spotless regime decides it's the perfect place for football to journey towards. Who could possibly be surprised at an oligarchy rewarding what is threatening to turn into a full blown kleptocracy?

Things are slightly different in Qatar, the recipient of the 2022 tournament, but only slightly. As John B points out, Qatar is no more corrupt according to Transparency International than the UK is. By the standards of the Middle East, it's also by no means the worst when it comes to human rights. It does however remain an absolute monarchy and follows the usual Islamic strictures, which poses obvious problems for travelling fans unless things are relaxed for the duration of the tournament. What really attracted Fifa besides the complete lack of any potential opposition to their tax and marketing demands is simply the opulence behind the bid, which involves the construction of a number of stadia in a nation smaller than Wales where almost all the population lives in the capital of Doha. The proposal once the competition is finished is to demolish the unneeded centrepieces and rebuild them in developing nations, a selfless gesture which is only slightly undermined when you consider they could have funded such constructions in the first place and cut out the gibbering insanity of building something which will be used only for a month. As for the players who'll have to play games in the 40 to 50 degree heat of a Qatar summer, well, when was the World Cup ever about the quality of the football?

The blame game then can begin in earnest. Just as the media built up England's non-existent chances this summer, the same press that couldn't accept we lost purely as a result of not being good enough now turns on Fifa for doing what it was always going to. The Sun, the same paper which earlier in the week condemned the BBC for raking over old news unnecessarily now accuses Fifa of, err, "bunging Russia the cup". Anything to distract from the sad fact that even if corruption was involved, our bid had been just as over-hyped as England were. As long as we continue to have this delusional sense of entitlement, going hand in hand as it does with our ridiculous sense of self-importance, this ludicrous cycle of expectation, disillusionment and denial will just keep repeating.

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12/02/2010 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, October 28, 2010 

Scum-watch: How to take advantage of a parliamentary misunderstanding.

We all know how dearly the Sun loves "Our Boys", even if the feeling is not necessarily mutual. It's therefore hardly surprising that it's instantly leapt to their defence, having apparently been accused by Labour MP Paul Flynn of committing "atrocities in the name of the British people". The problem is that almost every single thing about the report by Tom Newton Dunn in which the claim is made, and the leader comment which accompanies it, is wrong.

WIKILEAKS and a Labour MP were accused of giving the Taliban "a propaganda gift" yesterday by spreading wild smears about Our Boys.

Foreign Secretary William Hague mounted a passionate defence of troops in southern Afghanistan after reports were leaked to the website saying British soldiers had shot at civilians 21 times in four years.

Despite what the Sun says, there has been no new leak to Wikileaks concerning British troops and their presence in Afghanistan. The reports it refers to have in fact been released by, err, the Ministry of Defence themselves, after a Guardian Freedom of Information request based on the incidents first detailed in the US war logs leaked to Wikileaks. Far from being wild smears, these are the MoD's version of what happened; surely the army's own account is more believable and reliable than the second hand one which the US recorded?

The MoD said on each occasion the troops were under grave threat of suicide attack or vehicles being driven at them had failed to stop.

Despite this, anti-war Labour MP Paul Flynn jumped on the statistic to brand the incidents "atrocities".

Mr Hague hit back: "I condemn the unauthorised release of information which can endanger our forces and give one-sided propaganda - a propaganda gift, for insurgents."

He also hailed British troops, saying: "They are the finest any nation could hope to have."


Flynn, as you might have guessed, has done nothing of the sort. The Sun has taken only a half quote and turned on its head, as the Guardian didn't provide a full one in the first place. Here's how it reported his remarks:

The Labour MP Paul Flynn called for an inquiry into the conduct of the units in what he said could be "atrocities in the name of the British people". "Truth has a cleansing function," he added.

Not perhaps the most cautious of statements to make, but also clearly not one where he was directly accusing troops of committing atrocities.

It's pretty apparent then that the statement the Sun has William Hague as making had nothing whatsoever to do with the information released by the MoD. Here's where the misunderstanding seems to have originated from. Hague's comments were made in response to a question from Tory MP Stephen Mosley after his quarterly statement to parliament on the "progress" in Afghanistan, who seems to have confused the Iraq war log release at the weekend with the FoI release reported in yesterday's Guardian:

What is the Foreign Secretary's assessment of last weekend's WikiLeaks reports, which made reference to 21 incidents in Afghanistan involving British troops?

Hague's answer was then a general condemnation and a just as inaccurate one, as he talks of the treatment of detainees, none of which applies to the 21 incidents in Afghanistan. He doesn't correct Stephen Mosley, but his stock condemnation of the release of unauthorised information suggests that he realised his mistake, even if he didn't mention Iraq. Hague's praise for British troops which the Sun quotes comes from the statement, and so has been taken entirely out of context.

Paul Flynn is not referred to anywhere in Hague's statement to the House or the debate that followed. It's clear then that Newton Dunn or someone else, despite obviously reading the report in the Guardian still failed to realise that Stephen Mosley had got the wrong end of the stick. Or did they? After all, the story's nowhere near as good if the information, rather than being leaked, came from the Ministry of Defence themselves. Why not then go along with what was said in parliament, while disingenuously attacking Flynn? This seems to be what the paper's done.

Here's the paper's leader:

AS if facing death from the Taliban wasn't enough, our Forces have to face snipers back home.

Labour MP Paul Flynn accuses Our Boys of committing "atrocities in the name of the British people".

His basis for this slur? Irresponsible and unsubstantiated internet leaks claiming British troops fired on Afghan civilians.

The Defence Ministry insists this would only ever have happened in self-defence when our soldiers came under threat of suicide attack.

Our troops have spent nine years doing their best for Afghan civilians, laying down their lives for them.

As Foreign Secretary William Hague says, these smears are a Taliban propaganda gift.

Ed Miliband should order Flynn to apologise.


The leader then simply takes the same (deliberate) inaccuracies and magnifies them again, further misquoting and taking out of context Flynn's quote, gets the source of the new information completely wrong for good measure, and then finally uses Hague's own mistake to attack the hapless Labour MP further. The only people apologising should be the Sun for conniving in a misunderstanding in parliament in order to attack an MP for quite rightly wanting a proper inquiry into what happened.

P.S. The Sun also does its usual bang up job of promoting the witterings of the friends of Anjem Choudary, this time reporting in depth Abu Izzadeen's remarks on being released from prison. It's this sentence and claim though that catches the eye:

His every word was cheered by a flock including sidekick Anjem Choudary and jailed hate cleric Abu Hamza.

Would the Sun care to explain how Abu Hamza was there cheering him on when he's currently being held at Belmarsh prison awaiting deportation to the United States, or was he allowed out for the day in able to attend? This extra detail is missing from the Daily Mail's report of Izzadeen's release, unsurprisingly.

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10/28/2010 11:59:00 pm | |

Saturday, July 10, 2010 

The endlessly inventive, witty tabloid press...




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7/10/2010 02:00:00 pm | |

Saturday, July 03, 2010 

Sorry everyone!

In an article in Thursday's Daily Mirror, headlined "WHY WE'RE THE WORLD'S GREATEST NEWSPAPER", we reported on the glory years of the paper, back when Hugh Cudlipp was editorial director and we were selling 5 million copies a day. We printed a special wallchart revealing how the paper had changed down the years, yet was still keeping to Cudlipp's classic formula of delivering a popular read whilst also maintaining its social and political influence.

In light of the fact that a tennis player we previously eulogised has been knocked out of a competition, we are happy to withdraw our self-promotion and egomania, and confirm that, of course, we have not been a newspaper and have had no social and political influence since Robert Maxwell got his hands on our parent company.

We apologise for any confusion caused and promise not to repeat the claims - until at least we pretend to still be a newspaper again.

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7/03/2010 12:59:00 pm | |

Monday, June 28, 2010 

Why England continue to lose and what needs to change.

One of the best kept secrets of England's win in the World Cup of 1966 is just how the press of the time responded: in as low key a fashion as can be imagined, especially in comparison to how it would be reported today. 32.6 million may have watched it, but the following day some of the newspapers didn't even fill their front pages with the story.

Indicative as that perhaps was of the media's priorities back then, and how, as Roy Greenslade makes clear, there were only two true tabloids at the time, the hysteria which we are now so familiar with every two years only really started in earnest in 1990. Everyone claims to remember Maradona's "Hand of God" in 1986, yet the true turnaround in the fortunes of the English game didn't really begin to start until, as most now recognise, the Hillsborough disaster. The deaths of the 96 and also the media's disgraceful dismissal of the victims caused a fundamental reassessment of the authorities' attitude to the game. Where football fans had previously been regarded as almost another section of "the enemy within", to be stigmatised with personal ID cards and treated like animals, caged in at the grounds, they now finally had to be reappraised. The following summer England went all the way to the semi-finals in Italy, Gazza cried, and the modern relationship with the national team was established.

Not, we should be clear, that everything essentially restarted in that year. The always curious blaming of almost every poor performance or bad result on the manager rather than the players had begun long before. The tabloid press, as it is demanding of Capello today, called repeatedly for Bobby Robson to be either sacked or to do the decent thing and resign, only for him to eventually lead the team to its best showing post-1966, and to be all but beatified when he finally succumbed to cancer last year. Only occasionally has the press ever truly warmed to a manager, such as it did to both Terry Venables and Kevin Keegan; for a time Sven-Goran Eriksson could do no wrong, only to be vilified after the loss to Portugal in 2006. In-between, other managers have been disparaged almost universally: Graham Taylor became a turnip after England lost to Sweden, although his image was not helped by the now infamous documentary where a camera crew followed the team and captured him uttering his equally timeless "do I not like that", while Steve McClaren was immortalised as the "wally with the brolly" after England's capitulation to Croatia in 2008.

Clearly though, the out of all proportion expectation, the demand for endless passion and verve and the subsequent recriminations when the team predictably fails to live up to those ridiculously high standards began in earnest in 1990. The strangest thing about the media's denunciations once the nation exits the global stage is that it seems to manage to include those whom quite reasonably previously didn't believe for a second that the team could win. Even more peculiar is that those same people who didn't hold out any real hope for a victory still feel let down when the inevitable happens, such it seems is the temporary insanity and groupthink which overtakes the country for an incredibly short period.

To even begin to understand why England continue to do so apparently poorly, you have to attempt to examine it from the outside looking in. Using this perspective, England have not failed dismally, but have rather achieved the best they possibly can with a team that has never looked like having the strength in depth to actually win either a European or world tournament. The reasons for why this is do not make for comfortable reading, but do provide something approaching an answer.

First is that to an extent, England's results reflect our current standing in the world. For far too long we've continued to believe that we are this great nation, one of the world's superpowers, strutting the world stage, when we have in fact become as the last few years have demonstrated, little more than in effect a 51st state of America or one of the larger statelets within the European Union. We puff ourselves up on past memories of grandeur, to the dismay and revulsion of those we call allies but whom we still feel vastly superior to, yet when it comes down to it it's all bluff and for appearance. Never is this better illustrated than by the jingoism when we play Germany and almost invariably lose. The popular press simply can't help bringing up allusions to the second world war, even when some of those now reading them were born a full half century after it ended. It doesn't matter that the Germans have done everything and much more besides to make reparation for Nazism, we still feel that we need to remind them of the outrages of their grandfathers. It also doesn't matter that these allusions are usually ahistorical. Just look at Richard Littlejohn's piece, advertised on the front of today's Mail, suggesting that if "the few" had defended as badly as the England team we'd all be speaking German. Admittedly, "the few" refers to the Battle of Britain, where the RAF did triumph against the Luftwaffe, but we often seem to forget that other comment by Churchill, "[B]efore Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat."

One of the best jokes flying around yesterday was that this time round the Americans couldn't join in at half time and save us. It says something about our often undeserved puffed up pride that we do so often forget about the sacrifices of others, even if they joined late. The Americans at least get some recognition; the Russians often get none, despite their equally pivotal role. Littlejohn is by no means the worst offender, even if he fills his opening sentences with heavily laboured war references, only to later suggest dropping the "two world wars and one world cup" refrain for good, as Saturday's Daily Star front page demonstrated and continues today, with the equally ill-judged "Fritz all over", almost Swiftian in its subtlety.

Alongside our undeserved high opinion of ourselves is often the belief that our team should be able to acquit themselves well against the rest of the world because of the undeniable brilliance of the English Premier League and the role which so many of our players have within it. The reality is that the EPL is as much the cause of the malaise as anything else. The current team, which it bears repeating had the highest average age of any of those competing in the World Cup, was for the most part the product of the system either prior to the establishment of the EPL or the first few years before it completely changed the face of English football. Murdoch's money was meant, as well as trickling down to the lower leagues, to help the England team through reducing the EPL to 18 teams and easing the number of fixtures played. Instead the number of matches the top teams play has increased dramatically through European competition. The other change has been to turn the top 20 clubs for the most part into hugely indebted businesses which need results immediately rather than having the time to go through the painstaking and expensive nurturing of grassroots talent. While some teams still have highly praiseworthy youth squads, others have all but abandoned them, relying instead of foreign players brought in by scouts to have an instant effect on performance. The result has been an almost complete lack of quality young English players emerging, and those that have, such as Theo Walcott, were mostly ignored by Capello in favour of experience. The implication has to be that the likes of Lampard, Terry, Cole, Rooney and others are only as great as they are because of the foreign players that compliment them when they play for their club sides. Take them out of their comfort zone and they instead become ordinary.

One of the few lessons that England could have taken from the EPL is that it's no coincidence that two of the most successful clubs, Arsenal and Manchester United, have had managers that have been allowed to build and rebuild rather than dismissed when results have not been going the right way. The exception is Chelsea, and their success has been ensured by the bottomless pockets of Roman Abramovich, something which England can't turn to as an option. As mentioned above, Sven's reign no longer looks like a tale of undisciplined unfulfilled potential when compared to Capello's abject, stern authoritarian regime which only reached the last 16 as opposed to the quarter-finals. McClaren was apparently disliked by the players, but to go from the ridicule he suffered after failing to steer England to qualification in 2008 to winning the Dutch league with FC Twente suggests he must have had something about him which either he couldn't get out of the England players, or they had something which stopped them from performing for him.

Lastly, we have a media whose ficklenesses knows no bounds, resulting exactly in the above. They build up people from all walks of life only to then bring them down, yet never have they done so in such a ludicrous fashion as England managers. Admittedly, they never liked McClaren, but the vitriol he suffered was out of all proportion. Eriksson got the blame in 2006 alongside the Wags, which the media themselves had a major role in creating, following their antics as much as the team's own, and now Capello is facing the same treatment. Before the World Cup he was a genius who had punctured the individual egos of the players and brought them together as a team; now he's a inept tactical pygmy who was far too stifling by insisting on a 4-4-2 formation and on only letting the players have the very occasional beer. Again, the reality is more prosaic: they faced an incredibly easy qualifying group, where only Ukraine and Croatia were any real challenge, only then to come up against what looked an easy initial World Cup group, where they struggled against the USA, were terrible against Algeria and only better against Slovenia and Germany. They were completely outplayed by Germany, despite not being as bad as many are claiming, who were a better team, and lost, deservedly, as a result. It really should be as simple as that. The manager cannot really bear responsibility for a defeat where the team just weren't good enough and when he can only select from the pool he has available to him.

Likewise, you can't blame a team that simply don't have the quality to beat superior opponents. It doesn't how much passion and pride a team has if they can't compete, and the Sun only now attacking the players in a idiotic front page splash when previously they have been far more culpable, screaming "YOU LET YOUR COUNTRY DOWN" when they didn't in the slightest is pathetic. Let's also not forget the role the tabloids had earlier in the year in upsetting the England set-up when they demanded that John Terry should lose the captaincy on moral grounds rather than on his ability to lead on the pitch. It's impossible to know how much impact that had, but that the team then had to change the captaincy again when Rio Ferdinand was injured would have been completely unnecessary had it not been for one of the irregular outbreaks of journalistic humbuggery. The players have to work under pressure all year round, but surely it never feels as crushing as it does when you have the supposed entire hopes of a nation on your shoulders, and when you know the consequences of failure regardless of your ability to have any real influence. Wayne Rooney, built up to be one of the greatest players in the world, almost certainly wilted when he simply didn't get the service he needed to be able to turn on the undeniable skill he possesses.

If 1989 was a turning point, then 2010 should be also. It's time to start again, although not necessarily by dismissing Capello. He clearly needs to dump the "golden generation" with some exceptions, a term incidentally foisted on them by another manager whose failures have been massive but who has never had to face any responsibility for them. The incoming UEFA restrictions on the number of foreign players a club can have registered should be the starting point for the restarting of youth programs, with funding being put aside from the TV rights budget if necessary. A winter break for domestic football should be seriously considered, as should reducing the number of teams in the EPL to the original 18 it was meant to contain. Moreover, EPL teams need to start living within their means, focusing on homegrown talent rather than relying on cheaper in the short term foreign players. More money needs to trickle down to the lower leagues, lessening the yawning gap between the EPL and the lower divisions. All of these things could be easily imposed if the Football Association had any real leadership and believed in the national team rather than the brilliance of the domestic league. Lastly, the media need to show some responsibility themselves, becoming far more realistic in what can be achieved. It will be the latter which will be most difficult to achieve.

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6/28/2010 03:35:00 pm | |

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