Eclectic Blue

I don’t want to talk about it

0 Comments 25 September 2016

I might have profoundly disagreed with the 52% who voted to take Britain out of the EU but I am not stupid enough – honest! – to suggest that somehow they were wrong and that we should have a re-run until they vote the “right” way. And even though we have no idea what Brexit will look like, Brexit is coming. And it’s absolutely crucial that everyone is properly engaged in the debates and negotiations that are to come. This will shape our entire future. So, what does the Labour Party decide to do at its annual conference in Liverpool? It decides not to talk about it at all.

I read that it is the delegates who have decided that the most critical national debate of the decade is not worthy of their time. I am sure there are other vital topics to command their attention, but to ignore the vote to leave the EU and not even discuss it suggests a monumental dereliction of duty.

This, surely, gives a free run to the Conservatives to do whatever they like on the subject. This is how I see things panning out.

In early 2017, Theresa May will trigger article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which is effectively the starting pistol to negotiate both our exit from the EU and our future relations with it. She will have two years to complete the deal, so by 2019 we will know what life outside the EU will look like. I suspect the future will not look too good. May and her advisors will know better than anyone that they could be heading into the 2020 general election a year after Brexit, quite possibly with the economy tanking, trade tariffs imposed by the EU, the end of free movement with the introduction of visas to travel abroad and huge insecurity across the land. May will surely not allow this to happen.

If article 50 is triggered in, say, March 2017, I suspect May and her government will have set out a shopping list of demands in her negotiations which she hopes will explain, for the first time, what Brexit means. She has repeatedly said Brexit means Brexit without actually saying what it means, because she can’t. No one can. So she will call a general election and win with a landslide majority.

As we have said before, May will call an election for two main reasons. One will be to buy time – an extra two years – to enable the electorate to get used to a post-EU world and the other will be the current state of the official opposition. Today’s opinion polls show the Tories 15% ahead Labour and that’s before the boundary changes which will hurt Labour still further. It would be madness for May not to strike with the polls looking so good for her and so bad for Labour and one thing May isn’t is mad. She is not the imagined “safe pair of hands” either which is another reason she will surely go to the country next year.

Britain really does need the best deal possible from the negotiations because we will be massively affected in terms of almost every aspect of our lives. But the Labour Party has decided not to bother to debate it.

I doubt that this unbelievably stupid decision has anything to do with the hapless and hopeless re-elected Labour ‘leader’ Corbyn, who is probably still basking in his success, being cheered to the rafters after making speeches to people who already agree with him. Some half-witted conference arrangements committee will have made a recommendation to delegates, before they went out for an evening of the far more important business of partying and boozing (why else does anyone go to a conference?). “All in favour say aye,” said the chairperson. “That’s carried. We won’t even talk about Britain leaving the EU with all the implications that will have for working people. We’ll now adjourn for lunch. Mine’s a few pints of Boston’s Old Thumper.”

“How can we even take the Labour Party seriously?” May will ask on a party political broadcast early next May. “Your Conservative government has been working hard since you voted to leave the EU. Our manifesto tells you openly and honestly what we hope to gain from leaving the EU, things that will benefit working people up and down the country. You can vote for me to fight for your interests, or you can vote for the opposition who couldn’t even spare the time to talk about it at their conference last September. We gave you the referendum. Now give us the chance to finish the job. You can trust us.”

I couldn’t trust any Tory government, least of all this one, to do anything that was in the interests of working people and I do not believe, for one moment, that Theresa May’s priority will be the “ordinary working people” she keeps banging on about. She will seek assurances and deals for those who do best under a Tory government, like the bankers who wrecked the world economy in 2008, not protections for those who still suffer the effects.

It is absolutely vital that May and the Conservatives are held to account by a forensic opposition. However, it seems this opposition doesn’t even want to talk about it. Another step towards irrelevance for the people’s party. Shame on Labour.

Eclectic Blue

He ain’t heavy…

0 Comments 24 September 2016

Having lost my parents, my stepfather, my only uncle and – decades ago – my grandparents, one of whom died before I was even born, life might be a lonely place. I’m not lonely, of course, thanks to my partner, my children, who aren’t children anymore, her family, my father’s widow and my two brothers and a surprisingly wide group of friends. My day job reminds me that I am very much one of the lucky ones. There are a lot of people who have nothing.

One of my brothers, Noel, came to see us last night. It was a fleeting visit but it was wonderful for all that. I seldom see him because he lives in Vancouver. It will probably be years until I see him again. The feeling as I dropped him off at the bus station in Bristol today was far more powerful in terms of upset than seeing him arrive yesterday was of great joy. Saying goodbye is just so sad.

Gradually, with family dying at frequent intervals, I began to treasure them even more. The longing to be near everyone has become more of a need than a longing. I was reckless and careless with some family members years ago, not visiting them as often as I should have done, taking for granted the thought they would always be there. And suddenly, with the passing of my father in 2011, with whom I had finally, belatedly, established the father/son relationship I had never known but always dreamed about, it was taken away from me. With that positively came the negativity. I missed all that growing up.

Canada came into the equation, but it could have been anywhere a long way away. My dad left for Canada in the 1960s and that’s where his second and third sons were born and now live. Apart from infrequent visits, I hardly ever saw them and even when I did my head was so fucked up with the confusion of it all, I wanted to be somewhere else. But even if I had wanted to spend more time with my relatives who lived in Canada and the Netherlands, where my uncle lived, I couldn’t have, firstly through financial reasons and secondly because my uncle didn’t want to know his sister’s son anymore than he wanted anything to do with his sister.

Such a short time with Noel, it will feel like and probably be an age until we meet again, or my brother Vaughan for that matter, and as I drove back up the motorway I didn’t really want to do anything except hide away from the rest of the world. I am very lucky to have a partner who allows me to do that. I could have gone to the football, but I didn’t want to wear a painted smile because I knew that once I said goodbye after the game, I would feel horrendously guilty for having enjoyed myself when really I wanted the world to open up and swallow me whole.

Goodbyes are more awful than hellos are good, that’s a simple truth. I don’t wish that my brother hadn’t come to see us – that would just be plain silly – but I wish him leaving didn’t make me feel so bad.

Like I say, I am the lucky one because I am not alone and I am not feeling sorry for myself, either. But being near the people I love means more to me than anything on earth and that’s why I am so down tonight. It seems all the happy pills in the world can’t make you happy. Just a little less depressed.

Eclectic Blue

The B Team

0 Comments 23 September 2016

Holding my hands up, I did feel that initially there was something to be said for the FA’s suggestion that Premier League ‘B’ clubs should be allowed to compete in the lower leagues of the English Football League (EFL). Then, I thought about it and concluded what a barking mad idea it was. And to my astonishment the man who presides over the Premier League, which is doing more damage to English football than anything else, one Richard Scudamore, said that B teams won’t work in the English structure. With friends like him…

So, presumably unless Rupert Murdoch comes along and offers several billion quid extra neither change will occur. But the news got even better. Scottish teams – that is to say Celtic and Rangers – will not be joining the EFL on the not altogether surprising grounds that they are Scottish.

If people really did think the introduction of B teams into the EFL was a good idea, then they will surely have changed their minds after seeing the absolute fiasco of this year’s Checkatrade Trophy, formerly the Paint Pot Trophy, a tournament that has been severely wounded, possibly terminally, by the imposition of B teams from the Premier League and the Championship including the likes of Reading. Football supporters are notoriously unwilling to complain about anything, no matter how damaging it is, so it was surprising that many of them made a spontaneous decision to ignore this year’s competition. Despite there being no organised opposition, the EFL will surely not repeat this crass error especially that the entire tournament has been ruined this season, regardless of who wins it because it was not a genuine tournament.

The EFL clubs don’t want mid season breaks either, which again is fair enough. The whole point of these breaks is to ensure international players don’t get worn out before international competitions and as few of the England team come from League one, at least at the moment, why should we care if lower league foreign internationals playing in the EFL are blowing out of their arses come the summer?

One change that may go ahead is the idea of increasing the number of EFL clubs to 80 in order to move to four divisions of 20 teams. The idea, I understand, is to reduce fixure congestion. Fair enough, but I suggest clubs will need to see how much income they will lose in the event this happens – what will fans say about paying the same for a season ticket for four less games? And in order to introduce the new system in one go as many as seven Championship clubs might be relegated in one go. That would make for exciting times!

We shouldn’t be against change per se because change doesn’t always mean bad news. B teams and the two Glasgow giants undermining the English League was always a step too far and it’s not going to happen. Perhaps other stuff will, including perhaps regionalisation, but the authorities would do well to listen to fans. Not listening has made a right mess of the Checkatrade Trophy, hasn’t it?

Eclectic Blue

Never the twain

0 Comments 23 September 2016

We all know that sometime tomorrow Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected Labour leader. In the words of Captain Sensible, I’m glad it’s all over. It’s not the end of the world as we know it, as Michael Stipe would have put it, but it’s the end of any possibility of us seeing a Labour government for both the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. What we have seen is a clash between two very distinct and irreconcilable philosophies. Never the twain shall meet.

What has happened with Labour is what has happened with politics all over Europe but with one very big difference. In Greece and Spain, for example, the traditional left of centre parties have been usurped and even crushed by brand new political parties of the hard left. In the former, PASOK has been obliterated by SYRIZA which is more a coalition of the hard left than a single party. PASOK, which was in government as recently as 2011, achieved barely more than 6% of the national vote in the second election of 2015, winning just 17 seats. This represented a small improvement on the first election where the figures were 4% and 13 seats. In other words, nowhere. Podemos, a new Spanish hard left party is now the third biggest party in the country in terms of popular support and they’ve only been going for two and a bit years. In Britain, instead of forming new hard left parties, hard left supporters have joined Labour, creating a problem for which there is no hope of finding a solution.

It would be too simplistic to say that the Labour Party is now divided into two distinct parts which is to say those mainstream supporters, the foot soldiers, who have been there all along and a hard left rump which has joined since 2015. There have always been a broad range of opinions and philosophies but in the end we have usually managed, often through compromise, to put forward policies on which we can all campaign. The status quo no longer exists.

My experience is that a very large proportion, a majority indeed, of new members are University-educated members of the affluent middle classes who live in the big cities. Far less of the new blood has been recruited in Labour’s working class heartlands. Some of the new members were members and supporters in the dim and distant past before Labour became electable again in the 1990s. They left in the Blair years, rejecting New Labour’s achievements such as the minimum wage, rescuing the NHS, the Human Rights Act, Sure Start and all the rest of it. Others were inspired to become active in politics by the simple, homespun rhetoric from the 1980s resurrected by Jeremy Corbyn, dressed up as a “new kind of politics”. That it was no such thing is beside the point. For many people, having experienced the slippery spin of modern politics this appeared to be something worth fighting for. Here was an elderly man who was prepared to say it like it was. The antithesis of the modern politician. Put the pre 2015 Labour Party together with the post 2015 version and it didn’t work. It never could and it never will.

Where Labour could once come to agreement through debate and compromise, Labour is now two parties in one. You cannot square the circle where a large number of members support an independent nuclear deterrent and the rest support a pacifist, a pacifist who also supported the IRA when they were murdering innocent people, who regards islamic fascists as “friends” and a man who has tolerated and arguably by his inertia encouraged the most disgraceful campaign of bullying and abuse in recent political memory. I consider myself to be to the left of centre left, if that makes any sense, but I cannot honestly say that I would vote for a Labour Party led by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell which includes as members the likes of far left union wrecker Mark Serwotka and anti-Semites like Ken Livingstone. I am someone who left the Labour Party because of the Iraq invasion of 2003 and didn’t rejoin until 2015. I am not some Tory/Blair lite socialist or a Red Tory as the posh boy Corbynistas try to paint anyone who doesn’t worship at the altar of the great leader.

I didn’t actively support Owen Smith in his doomed but courageous campaign to defeat Corbyn but I voted for him as a far less damaging candidate than Corbyn, hardly a glowing endorsement there. I see no one in the parliamentary party who offers the Labour any real hope of rescuing its descent into political oblivion so the future for Labour is Corbyn and that’s no future at all.

Labour needs a swing bigger than Tony Blair achieved in 1997 to win a parliamentary majority of one seat and, with Scotland lost, probably forever, to the centrist, arguably right of centre, SNP. Labour in England and Wales must improve dramatically. It’s not going to happen, is it?

Many of those who have joined Labour since last year do not need a Labour government. They quite fancy one, but it wouldn’t make any real difference to their lives, so they can put their weight behind the “pure” candidate who will not win. To them, socialist purity matters far more than the poor, the old, the sick, the disabled, the low paid and everyone else politics has left behind.

In the end, winning elections does matter because you cannot improve the lives of working people without power. Tomorrow, Labour members will have consigned Labour to years of opposition, assuming it survives at all, which is by no means a given. And when Corbyn addresses his adoring cult following, the Champagne corks will be popping at Tory HQ because their preferred candidate will be back in place.

Eclectic Blue

Power cut

0 Comments 21 September 2016

‘Karmaaaaaaaaaa’, tweeted president Wael Al Qadi last night, as Bristol Rovers came from behind to inflict a late defeat on Swindon Town at the County Ground, in a replay of last month’s abandoned game. The’Karmaaaaaaaaaa’ to which Wael referred was because the host club had decided to charge many supporters – and all Gasheads – the full whack for tickets, with no refunds after the abandoned game or discounts for the rearranged game. And according to Swindon Town chairman Lee Power, do you know whose fault it was? It was God’s fault.

“What happened on Saturday afternoon was an act of God and beyond the club’s control”, said Mr Power, somewhat unconvincingly. My first thought was this: what was God thinking about? There are places all over the world that desperately need water and what does God do? He dumps it all on Swindon in one go. I hope Mr Power issues a banning order to God because this sort of behaviour is unacceptable in modern football.

I had seen Mr Power’s interview a little earlier on BBC’s Points West show when he was interviewed by the excellent Ali Durden. I cannot recall the exact words Mr Power used about ripping-off Gasheads by making them pay twice to see the same game, but it ran something like this: “Thanks to God, we’ve got extra costs for this game. God doesn’t seem to want to cough up, even though it’s all his fault, so I am going to make Bristol Rovers fans pay twice. I’m not picking them out. The same would apply to any team called Bristol Rovers who visited Swindon.”

The ‘Karmaaaaaaaaaa’ to which Wael joyously referred took a long time to come, with Rovers trailing for much of the game, but with mere minutes remaining a Matty Taylor penalty and an own goal by God turned misery into joy. I made the last bit up about God, but maybe, just maybe there was a little divine intervention.

Swindon’s actions, which were opposed by their trust and many supporters, will hardly endear them to Gasheads and they can look forward to a colourful welcome when they visit the Memorial Stadium next January as they battle to stay in League One. It soils their reputation and not just with Gasheads who have known just what Swindon have been like for many years. It spreads throughout football and reputations stick.

Karma, Mr Power, is a bitch. I am not sure I wish Swindon any luck for the future but I suspect they will need a lot of it with him as chairman.