Labour's economic problem: simple 'common sense'

The most powerful narrative to emerge from the last General Election was the Tory line that the nation had ‘maxed out on its credit card’.  This, along with the notion that the only remedy was for the country to tighten its collective belt, became the prism through which the political landscape was seen during the election, by the media and by the public at large, and it was undoubtedly a central reason for Labour’s heavy defeat.  The Tory plans for drastic deficit reduction became seen as ‘credible’, whilst Labour was recast as the party of the ‘deficit deniers’ that had spent far beyond its means.

To some extent, this narrative continues to frame the political debate today.  As Jonathan Freedland has recently pointed out in the Guardian, even after it became clear that the Government will have to borrow £158bn more than originally forecast due to the collapse in growth, George Osborne’s personal approval ratings have either held firm or increased, with the vast majority of voters agreeing that the solution to a debt crisis cannot be more debt.  In one sense, it matters little how many Nobel-prize winning economists come out and back the Labour policy for a slower pace to deficit reduction coupled with investment to increase growth.  As long as voters see cutting the deficit as simple common sense, Osborne will continue to enjoy economic credibility amongst voters.

The Tories have always had a better grasp of common sense economics – that is, economic policies that are not necessarily economically right, but make sense to voters – than Labour.  Throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was seen as economically credible in part because of her pledge to manage the country’s finances like a housewife would manage the budget of a home.  Like the present credit card narrative, the idea that the economy of a nation is in any way comparable to a domestic budget is clearly ludicrous, but it resonated with enough people to help secure Thatcher three election victories even as unemployment rose past the three million mark.

The longer the coalition is in office, the more it becomes clear that some inside it are using the experiences of the Tories in the 1980s as a blueprint for success in 2015 and beyond.  The hope is that as in the 1980s, enough people will feel they have been doing well enough to reward the Tories – with or without Lib Dem support – with five more years in office, at least to be able to ‘finish the job’ of deficit reduction.  The continued evocation of the ‘credit card’ narrative allows the coalition to operate the doublethink that simultaneously blames Labour, and not the global banking crisis, for the deficit it inherited, and blame Europe, and not the coalition, for the continuing economic problems.

The question for Labour, then, is how best to respond to this common sense economics.  The party is in the unenviable position of being right without being seen to be right.  One option being advocated by some is to accept the coalition’s common sense narrative, and compete on their terms for economic credibility in the nation’s eyes.  Yet this would be a difficult battle to win, given that the Tories have been perfecting this line of attack for some years now.  And it would also fail to change the economic reality that is affecting the lives of thousands of ordinary people across the country.  Perhaps it is time for the left to come up with its own brand of common sense economics.  Without it, no matter how right Ed Balls and others are proven, the party might not even get a hearing. 

I’d have Tevez in my team – and so would you.



Fans of both City and United 'trashing their Tevez shirts'



For days, the airwaves were buzzing with pundits, fans, and managers, all in a frenzy at Carlos Tevez’s apparent refusal to come on as a substitute in a football match that Manchester City were losing 2-0.  Now, in the run-up to this weekend’s derby, fans of both Manchester clubs are apparently planning ‘trash their Tevez shirts’ to send out a statement to the Argentinian.

Frankly, it’s all a bite nauseating.

Assuming that Tevez actually did refuse to play (something that he denies), the fact is that this kind of thing happens all the time – at United as well as City.  Paul Scholes recently admitted that he once refused to play in a League Cup game; a year ago, Wayne Rooney suggested that he might like to stop playing for United altogether, and maybe go and play for City instead.  Eric Cantona was banned from playing football for six months after he attacked a fan in the stands with a ‘kung-fu’ kick, a crime that, unlike refusing to play, results in a two week prison sentence.

Of all the pundits and professionals offering their opinion on the Tevez saga, it was the ever-quotable Harry Redknapp who was perhaps loudest in his criticism of Tevez’s actions. ‘It wasn’t right for football’, he said.  ‘It shouldn’t happen. It can’t happen’. 

And if you believe Redknapp would pass up the opportunity to sign Tevez, you will believe anything.

In 1998, Paulo Di Canio, an enigmatic Italian striker playing for Sheffield Wednesday, reacted to a decision he didn’t agree with by pushing the referee to the floor.  What followed was a similar bout of riotous indignation, and Di Canio was suspended by his club and banned for eleven games.  So who snapped him up when it was thought that no manager would go near him?  One Harry Redknapp, then-manager of West Ham United. 

Like Scholes, Rooney and Cantona at Man United, Di Canio became a legend at West Ham.  Fans and managers were quickly able to forget each player’s past misdemeanours for one simply reason: their ability to play football.  Tevez is easily in the same league.  No matter that he speaks little English, is petulant and moans about the English weather.  When he is on the pitch, he runs himself into the ground, makes defenders look stupid and scores stupendous goals.  Lots of them.  Sunday’s derby is going to be worse off without him.

It is only a matter of time before a manager decides he is worth a punt.  Harry is probably on the phone as we speak. 

FOLLOW THE EXAMPLE OF LIVERPOOL: DON'T BUY THE NEWS OF THE WORLD

As people digest the news that in 2002 an employee of the News of the World allegedly hacked the mobile phone of missing teenager Milly Dowler and deleted messages on her voicemail, thus giving false hope to her parents and potentially delaying the police investigation, people will rightly feel a sense of indignation.  The lawyer to the Dowler family used the word ‘heinous’ to describe the allegations of wrongdoing by senior figures in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corps.  Indeed, this is now clearly a whole new level from the hacking of the phones of celebrities or sports starts.

Sadly, however, this is not the first time News Corps has fragrantly abused the rights of the innocent victims of a horrendous and shocking crime.  In  1989, 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a football match held at Hillsborough in Sheffield.  In the days that followed the disaster, the Sun – also owned by News Corps – ran a front-page story in which it purported to reveal ‘the truth’ about what happened that day.  In fact, what the newspaper spread was a series of malicious and baseless lies, including that Liverpool fans picked the pockets of victims and urinated on police officers.  All claims were proven to be false.

Like the parents of Millie Dowler today, the hurt that the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy must have felt as a direct result of the actions of News Corps, in a flagrant effort to sell more newspapers no matter what the human cost, is difficult to comprehend.

However, in a sense of unity that in many ways characterises both the city and the football club, a campaign against the Sun was almost immediately set up.  Many newsagents refused to sell the newspaper, and there were public burnings of it.  On signing for the club, players are instructed not to give interviews to the Sun, and, during a recent FA Cup tie at Anfield, Liverpool fans sang ‘justice for the 96’ and created a mosaic spelling out ‘the truth’, in ironic reference to the Sun’s original front page.  Many locals refuse even to refer to the newspaper by name, preferring the S*n in writing or simply the ‘Scum’. In 2004 the Sun finally issued an apology for what it called ‘the most terrible mistake in its history’ but Kelvin Mackenzie, the newspaper’s editor at the time of the tragedy, still refuses to apologise, a point that – alongside his continual employment on the BBC – provokes outrage on Merseyside.

The effect of the boycott on sales of the Sun in Liverpool has been dramatic.  Almost overnight, and for more than 20 years, the newspaper’s sales have slumped regionally from an average of 200,000 before the tragedy to sales of just 12,000.  This was estimated to have cost Rupert Murdoch more than £50million.  Given the apparent absence of morality of many of those who work in Murdoch’s ever-expanding news empire, for those outraged by the latest allegations, the best thing to do is follow the example of Liverpool: vote with your feet.

For more information about Liverpool's campaign against the Sun, please visit: http://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/

The roots of multiculturalism?

I had one of the most surreal interviews of my life last week.  I had arranged to meet and interview Lord David Waddington, a Tory Home Secretary in the last year of Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister.  I was keen to speak to him because prior to becoming Home Secretary, Waddington was Home Office Minister responsible for racial minorities and I thought it would be useful to ask him about the government’s policies on race relations as research for my PhD on Handsworth in the 1980s.  The interview got off to a bad start, however, when Waddington didn’t turn up for our original date and I found myself sitting in the House of Lords reception for half an hour next to the former Tory leader Michael Howard (I can confirm that there is indeed something of the night about him).  Things got even more surreal, however, the following day when I finally got my interview with Waddington.

Lord David Waddington

Now in his eighties and about to retire for a political career spanning more than four decades, Waddington also spent time working as a barrister.  He hit the headlines in 1976 when he led the defence of Stefan Kiszko, a tax clerk who was wrongly accused of the murder of a twelve-year-old girl.  Kiszko’s defence team made a number of significant mistakes, and he would go on to serve sixteen years in prison for a crime that he did not commit.

Waddington has represented three different constituencies as a Conservative MP following his first election victory in 1968.  Margaret Thatcher made him Home Secretary in 1989, following a four-year stint in the Home Office.  It was this period that I was keen to discuss with him because, as he puts it, he was ‘in charge of immigration and race relations’. Waddington found this to be an ‘uncomfortable mix because there were a lot of controversial decisions to be made about immigration, sometimes that didn’t help me in my work of making many of these new communities feel more at home’.

Waddington regarded his remit as minister as being to ‘make immigrant communities feel that the government were as concerned with their welfare as we were with the welfare of anybody else’.  But he clearly felt that this remit put him in some awkward situations.  Individuals would often ask him to personally intervene to allow a family member entry into the UK.  Waddington remembered the particular case of an Asian owner of a nearby cornershop giving him free groceries in the mistaken belief that Waddington had personally allowed a family member of the shopkeeper to enter the country.

It was at this point that the interview took a turn for the bizarre.  As he was recounting the story about the man in the cornershop, Waddington began adopting a mock-Asian accent similar to that of Apu, the Asian shopkeeper in The Simpson’s.  Continually in our interview, whenever he recounted meeting members of the Asian community, Waddington would use the same impression.  It was the kind of act that might be passable from a late-night comedian on Channel 4, but coming from a former Home Office minister previously in charge of immigrant welfare, sitting in the House of Lords, it seemed inappropriate to say the least.

Having been born in 1929, at the height of the British Empire, it is tempting to see Waddington as a product of his time. When Waddington attended Oxford following the Second World War, the British Empire covered a quarter of the world’s land mass.  The year Waddington first entered parliament coincided with Enoch Powell’s now infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he forecast a coming race war in Britain as a result of too many ‘coloured’ immigrants having been allowed in.  Powell was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet, but Margaret Thatcher took many of his proposals on board following her election victory in 1979.  Waddington has consistently called for tighter immigration controls throughout his political career,

Yet despite all this, when Waddington wasn’t making impressions that frankly bordered on the racist, he made some insightful points about the Tory approach to racial minorities, many of which had a resonance with the policies that are regularly adopted in Britain today.

The key approach adopted in the 1980s, Waddington recalled, was an attempt to ‘identify the leaders of the various communities, with whom the government could deal.  If there was a problem, well, we asked so-and-so how best he thinks it should be tackled’.  The self-evident problem of this was that not everyone who claimed to be community leaders had any practical influence on the ground.  ‘We were often mistaken’, Waddington admitted.  ‘We would always get these noisy chaps who claim to be terribly influential within a particular community, but then you dig below the surface and they probably aren’t at all’.  Yet this is strategy that has continually been adopted by governments, the most recent example being with the anti-extremism policies often aimed at Muslim communities.

There was a more fundamental problem associated with the policies adopted by the Tories in the 1980s.  For Waddington, its key downside was that it ‘encouraged a form of separate development’.  For example, ‘if you fund a community centre for the Pakistani community, the Pakistani community are going to use that community centre and they aren’t going to go anywhere else’.  Given the current Prime Minister’s recent comments about the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism, and the anxieties over a perceived lack of integration of certain communities, Waddington’s comments suggest the roots of these themes might lie in the policies of the 1980s.  This is something that has recently been argued by the author and critic Kenan Malik, who sees the allocation of government funding on the basis of ethnicity as one of the key causes of the later rise in religious extremism in Britain.

Waddington is clearly something of a political dinosaur and it is frankly farcical that he was seen as the best man for the job of engaging with racial minorities in this country as recently as the 1980s.  But Waddington, almost in spite of himself, raises some critical points that are relevant to the current debates on multiculturalism.  ‘We should have tried other techniques to make people part of the wider community’, he says.  But how?  Is it possible for a government to do this without patronising the communities involved?  Is it even in a government’s remit to do attempt to do this?  Even thirty years later, these remain the unanswered questions.

HOW TWITTER HAS TAKEN OVER MY FOOTBALLING LIFE

Liverpool have signed Kun Aguero, one of the most highly-rated talents in world football (and also Diego Maradona’s son-in-law).  You might have missed this news in your usual media outlets.  I only know because I saw a tweet from  @redman88.  It must be true, because he also tweeted that we had signed Luis Suarez, at least a week before this became public knowledge.

Kun Aguero: probably not going to Liverpool

In truth, as any Liverpool Twitter addict would know, @redman88 has also claimed we have signed Ashley Young, Aaron Lennon, Eden Hazard and dozens of other exciting European players over the last few months and at the time of writing, none of them have actually put pen to paper.  It is fair to say, even with the optimism generated by the new American owners and manager Kenny Dalglish, it is highly improbable they all will.  

For a whole generation of fans, Twitter has changed the way we follow soccer.  Like many other sports, Twitter has enabled fans to have a much closer relationship with their high-profile idols.  In England, soccer players with Twitter accounts can communicate their true feelings directly to their tens of thousands of followers, something that has often led to bizarre results.  Many players have landed themselves in hot water with their (quite literally) uncensored tweets.

In the last year alone at Liverpool, Glen Johnson had to remove a tweet that responded to criticism from Paul Merson by describing the pundit as an ‘alcoholic drug abuser’ who was ‘average at the best of times’.  Perhaps Ryan Babel’s most memorable contribution in a red shirt was to tweet a doctored photograph of Howard Webb refereeing in a Manchester United shirt in the aftermath of an FA Cup tie earlier this year.  The rookie Jonjo Shelvey was forced to apologise after a picture of someone’s genitals appeared on his twitter page.

But another, far more addictive way it has changed the way you follow your team is that it has provided a platform for a whole legion of people who claim to be ‘in the know’.   The problem, of course, lies in being able to distinguish between those who actually are in the know, and those who actually know almost nothing.  The vast majority of twitterers are like my friend @redman88 – they quite clearly have no inside information whatsoever.  These people adopt a scattergun approach: the more players they claim are about to sign for your club, the more chance they have of getting the odd one right.   Others, like those journalists with Twitter accounts, are able to communicate more reliable information by virtue of having formal lines of communication with the club.  But this is usually the less juicy stuff, like injury updates or interviews with players.  Tantalisingly, however, just occasionally you stumble upon people who fall into neither category, and genuinely appear to have some form of intimate access to club information. 

It is the search for tweets from this latter account that has begun to take over my life.  In the depths of the Roy Hodgson era, the highlight was finding an account that consistently and accurately predicted Liverpool’s starting eleven three hours before a match actually started.  Towards the end of Hodgson’s period in charge, with each bad result I obsessively checked Twitter for news of his sacking and had to endure numerous false dawns, until finally I found out the news from Twitter in bed on a Saturday morning.  In January my girlfriend despaired as I lay in bed every night checking for breaking news on Fernando Torres, Suarez and then Andy Carroll.  Each morning I have breakfast whilst looking for people who claim to know who our targets are for the summer, and whether any deals have already been agreed.

It is tempting to see this as a new phenomenon, the product of a digital age in which information – any information – is valued above all else.  Yet soccer fans have always been obsessive about finding out information about their clubs.  In my youth I was just as committed to thumbing through the sports sections of various newspapers.  It is not the obsessiveness of fans that has changed, but the medium.  In many ways, Twitter is like having the ultimate friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who claims they know someone from inside the club.  Alongside its minute-by-minute updates, what makes it so addictive for soccer fans is the knowledge that whilst the mast majority of tweets are going to be complete fabrication, out there somewhere is a tweet from someone who really is ‘in the know’. 

With regard to Aguero, I’m still looking for more information.  But in the off chance he does sign, remember where you heard it first.

The names of all tweeters have been changed to protect their embarrassment. 

ENGLAND, 2007: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF SIMON ROBERTS

In 1937, a group of researchers started work on a project with the intention of creating a comprehensive record of the nature of everyday life in Britain.  Members of ‘Mass Observation’, as the group called themselves, sat in pubs, churches and at sporting events and simply wrote down what they saw: how people behaved, interacted with each other and even the way they spoke, recorded in as much detail as possible.  The aim, the researchers said, was to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’.



Stanage Edge, Hathersage, Derbyshire, 3rd August 2008
 (©2008-2011 Simon Roberts. All rights reserved)



This tradition is maintained in the 21^st Century by the work of the photographer Simon Roberts, who last night gave a talk about his work at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham.  In August 2007, seventy years since Mass Observation began their own record of the British, Roberts began a year-long journey around England in a motorhome, photographing the scenes and people he came across.  Roberts had just returned from spending a year in Russia, where he was struck by what he saw as the Russian attachment to the ‘Motherland’ (shown in his collection of photography by the same name).  This encouraged Roberts to think about whether there was an equivalent sense of the English.  So in 2007 Roberts set out to see what he could find.

Roberts’ resulting photographs, taken using a 5x4 large-format camera and currently on display at the Midlands Arts Centre, represent a strikingly beautiful record of life in England.  They depict scenes that anyone who has spent any time in England will immediately recognise.  The photographs show, for example, holiday-makers sheltering from the wind and eating home-made sandwiches; a group of day-trippers eating ice-cream beside a car park; Ladies’ Day at Aintree Racing Course.  Many of the scenes Roberts depicts were also a feature of the work of Mass Observation decades earlier.  The images show, for example, a group of football fans on their way to the match, and they also reaffirm that the English love for the seaside is as strong as ever.  Yet these are most clearly contemporary images.  The fashions of the people in the photographs show this – such as the predominance of globally branded clothes like Adidas – but so do the people themselves.  Roberts’ photographs provide a clear illustration that, despite what the politicians may say, multiculturalism remains alive and well in England.

These images are a record of places as well as people.  Roberts, who has a background in social Geography, took many of the photographs from on top of his motorhome, thus providing a panoramic view of the scenes before him.  People often appear dwarfed by the landscapes around them, but they are also shown to be fundamentally a part of them.  In one image (pictured), Roberts captures an Asian couple in the distance walking along a rural path, and they later tell him that it is the English countryside in which they feel most at home.  In another image, we see an elderly couple admiring a view on fold-up chairs.  They have been admiring the same view, it later transpires, for fifty years, and the only things to change were the farmers’ tractor and the salt-box by the side of the road.

In the 1930s, Mass Observation recruited ordinary people to keep diaries of their everyday lives.  In 2007, Roberts also enlisted the help of the public, asking people to make suggestions of events for him to photograph and, for his recent project photographing the 2010 General Election, requesting that people send in their own photographs.  Taken together, what the photographs of Roberts and his own team of ‘mass observers’ allude to, is a modern-day ‘anthropology of ourselves’.  

Simon Roberts: We English is on at the MAC until the 17^th of July; his election photographs are on at the same venue until the 26 June.  For more information, please visit Simon’s website at  http://simoncroberts.com.

Men Cry Too: an interview with the reggae band Beshara



Beshara performing in 1979



A few weeks ago, I went to interview Errol Nanton and Tony Garfield, two of the core members of the Birmingham reggae band, Beshara.  Beshara were formed in the mid-1970s around the same time as bands such as Steel Pulse and UB40.  Unlike those bands, however, Beshara's story is very much one of what might have been.  In 1981 they had a hit with Men Cry Too and recorded an album with Stiff Records, only for it to be pulled at the last minute.  Like doezens of other bands who never quite made it but were seen by many, Beshara represent an equally important but under-acknowledged part of Birmingham's cultural heritage.  Below are some extracts from my interview.

Q: What made you decide to form a band?

Errol: I used to sing in a church – the Seventh Day Adventist church.  My mum used to send me to learn the piano, my brother was learning the guitar, and we teamed up and started playing in church.  When I started to work, a friend of mine found out that I used to sing in a church, and he said he was interested in forming a group.   We started out as the Kushites, and used to do mostly reggae covers.  Then Raymond [Watts] took over the singing, and we changed the name to Beshara, which means ‘surprise’ in Arabic. 

Tony: Our musical influences were the older artists – we used to listen to stuff that had vocal harmonies , things like the Abyssinians, Mighty Diamonds, John Holt, things like that – melodic things.  A lot of those were like roots bands, really and truly. 

Q: Did you feel like you were part of a wider reggae scene in Birmingham?

Tony: There was a scene, and most of the reggae musicians were friendly with each other.  But there was healthy competition.  There were some good bands around, especially in Birmingham.  We used to go down to London and scare the shit out of them.  Our vibe was like a stronger vibe – in London they used to do easy stuff, but the shit that used to come out of Birmingham – we had to fight twice as hard and we had to be twice as good.

Q: So what happened to the original Beshara album deal [with Stiff Records]?

Tony: Well we want down to London [in 1978], and we smashed this album, absolutely smashed it.  Spent a week in the studio.

Errol: We thought we were signing to Island Records, but they ended up signing us to Stiff, a different label.  We had a deal to supply us with all new instruments, we had about a two grand advance, and they would pay for the studio recordings.  So we went in and recorded it.  But when it was time for them to go for the release, that’s when they started giving us trouble, ignoring the calls.  In the end they said they had to cancel the contract...

Q: What was your reaction to that as a group?

Errol: We were gutted.  If they had released the album, we would have broke.

Tony: It was horrible.  We were disillusioned.  We ended up back on the road, taking any work we could get, supporting other acts.  We were just trying to get into as many places as we could, get as much stage time as we could.  It was hard.

Q: How do you look back on that period in the 1970s and 1980s?

Tony: It’s still the best time of my life.  The music thing, it was like a drug.  If you get bit by it, you try and get away but you keep coming back to it.  I just loved doing it.

The Legacy of Ten.8 Magazine

Earlier this month, the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham held a symposium that discussed the legacy of Ten.8 Magazine and ever since then, I have been thinking about its significance.

When in 1979 three Birmingham photographers started the magazine with the aim of providing a platform for local practitioners’ work, there was little to suggest that by the time of its closure in 1992 it would become a widely influential arts journal with subscribers around the world.

Yet this is precisely what happened with Ten.8 magazine, established by Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon out of their shared office in Handsworth, north Birmingham.

The significance of the magazine as part of Birmingham’s distinct cultural heritage has until now been strangely under-acknowledged within the city.  In general, the magazine has received far more attention in the seminar rooms of media studies departments, both in Britain and beyond.

It is perhaps a sign that this is beginning to change that the MAC hosted the symposium, with panellists that included both Bishton and Homer.

From the beginning, Ten.8 was concerned with engaging with issues that affected people in the Birmingham and Handsworth contexts.  Its editors saw photography as offering a way of overcoming negative representations of multicultural areas like Handsworth, places often characterised by high unemployment, social deprivation and poverty. 

Ten.8 regularly featured photographs by artists such as Vanley Burke, whose work attempts to present a different side to inner-city areas of Birmingham.  Alongside photographs, the magazine contained articles that challenged its readers to see photography as a possible tool for political change.

One of the magazine’s lasting legacies was the way in which it showed that photography is often at its most powerful when it is put in the hands of ordinary people.  Bishton, Homer and Reardon’s Handsworth Self-Portrait Project (pictured), which was first featured in the pages of Ten.8, remains one of the seminal examples of community photography.

It is almost twenty years since Ten.8 was forced to fold due to funding problems.  The issues it discussed, however - particular the themes of representation and power - clearly remain as pressing as ever, especially in the digital age.  How long before something else comes along to pick up Ten.8’s mantle?