Manchester United: The Biography by Jim White

This brilliantly crafted history of Manchester United contains, in reality, three stories running parallel to each other. The first and obvious story is that of the football club from its humble working class origins through to the billion pound corporate global monolith that it has become today. Even as a life long Chelsea fan, I found this history of the Red Devils compelling reading. A second less obvious, but equally compelling story, emerges concerning how football in Britain has changed its complexion over the decades from its amateur, local community status to its current status as a global corporate brand and play thing for the obscenely rich. Manchester United is now just one of half a dozen such clubs in Britain whose economic turnover is every bit as powerful as that of a medium sized multinational company. Read More…

Can Capitalism Ever Be Regulated?

There are two central questions that emerge from the ongoing world wide financial crisis, questions that are underlined yet again by Murdoch’s News International (see earlier blogs ‘Declare War on Murdoch’ & ‘Murdoch’s Empire Knows No Bounds’); can capitalism ever be effectively regulated and if it can, will it really still be capitalism? Clearly, we have reached a stage in the rise of monopoly capitalism where some five hundred global corporations, some now state owned in China and Russia, largely control the world’s economic production.

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Fire In Babylon: Film Review

If you want to get a sense of what lies behind the continuing successes of today’s Jamaican sprinters, this documentary is as good a place to start as anywhere. Documentaries on sport may be informative but are invariably dull and a little predictable. Fire in Babylon is anything but dull. In fact, it is wholly uplifting, and must be a candidate for one of the best sporting documentaries ever made. The history of the all-conquering West Indian cricket team of the 70’s and 80’s, set to a mesmerising reggae soundtrack, brings back to life the history of one of the greatest sporting teams in the history of team sport.

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Britain Still Constrained by Class – Olympic Notes No 8

Two articles appeared in the British media last week that confirm, yet again, the rigid class structures that still hold Britain in a vice like grip. In the Saturday Guardian under the heading; ‘The New Boys network: Etonians flood into Who‘s Who‘, we see in hard figures just how little class mobility there really is in this country. These figures are particularly depressing given that we have just experienced 13 years of a Labour Government.

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FIFA executive corruption

There is little surprise to learn that no less than a third of the FIFA executive have had substantial allegations of corruption made against them.’ It is alleged by Lord Triesman, The Times and the BBC that Qatar won their 2022 World Cup bid by employing some FIFA fixers to organise the appropriate backhanders, worth many millions. No doubt similar ‘gifts’ and ‘promises’ were made by the Russian oligarchs to ensure Russia won the 2018 bid. So where does that leave countries like Britain, the US and the other developed nations? Squeaky clean? Not a bit of it.

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Terror Police Warned Not To Abuse Their Powers During The 2012 Games

Sometimes, quite often in fact, I get the feeling while blogging away, that I have become dangerously paranoid. Most people on the left get this feeling from time to time. We are forever warning of the creeping fascism all around us. Then suddenly, you get the unnerving thought that it‘s all in the mind. There is no incipient police state in Britain, just the perpetual dialectic between personal liberties and legitimate state security. The modern neo-fascist state is nothing but a delusional state; the only fascist jack boots are in the mind. Then a little something happens and suddenly it all comes flooding back.

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Al Qaida – Made in the USA

Memories are short and Western Imperial propaganda is ubiquitous. We conveniently forget, even assuming that we ever knew, the bloody march of European and more latterly, US colonialism. After all, we in the West are the beneficiaries of these past five hundred years of European colonial plunder. We hesitate to remind ourselves of it, but the plain historical truth is that European development was largely at the expense of the rest of the world. We industrialised and, at the same time, deliberately de-industrialised the opposition. Those that stood in the way were mercilessly eliminated.

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Royal Weddings – Just another Opiate

Don’t think for a moment that the British monarchy is a benign force. No monarch from any epoch can ever be described as a friend of the people. Emperors, Kings, Caesars and Pharaohs of the classical slave owning societies were tyrants all. The kings and queens from the feudal epoch were tyrants too bloody barons that usurped power without a shred of legitimacy. The kings and queens of Britain in the early capitalist era were no less tyrannical – all aristocratic thieves, enclosing the common land for their own gain and stealing foreign wealth at every opportunity.

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Sectarian Hatred in Football and Religion

If mankind has a spiritual dimension it is very much an earthly one. Sure we have always stared up into the sky and pondered the big questions, and for those of a superstitious disposition, gods and religions are quickly summoned. For the more rational amongst us, a never-ending quest for scientific understanding is our form of spirituality an ongoing endeavour to deconstruct the universe and our puny place within it. Down here on earth, our human spirituality is occasionally expressed by an empathy with those less fortunate than ourselves, an urge to share our own scarce resources, and a vague sense of belonging to a human collective.

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Respone to Niall Ferguson by Viktor Vijay

In rebuttal of the racial-superiority and Colonial justification arguments of Ferguson I quote from my book ‘MONA LISA DOES NOT SMILE ANYMORE’ (ISBN 978-81-8465-512-4). “No human or animal desire to live in cage or chains. Would the British have swapped development at the expense of slavery under Nazis? It is the primary motive that counts, incidental outcomes there from are of no consequence. British subjugated India and sent Indians as virtual slaves to different islands from Fiji to Mauritius, to West Indies to South Africa to work as indentured plantation labour, they occupied an independent country and used its resources and humans in a bland exploitative manner over nearly two centuries.

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Civilisation, The West and the Rest, a Review by Alex Von Tunzelmann

Niall Ferguson is a dangerous man. Victor Vijay is right to lambaste him for being an apologist for imperialism. Alex Von Tunzelmann is no less damning. Why is Ferguson so dangerous? After all there is no shortage of history texts whitewashing the brutalities of the British Empire. No, Ferguson is dangerous because he has the ear of the current Tory government and is advising the government, officially or otherwise, on the history curriculum in schools.

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Wiff-Waff for the Riff Raff – Olympic Notes No. 6

Under the cleverly constructed heading, ‘Wiff Waff for the Riff Raff’, I recently received’ a request for a donation towards a bid to win some Olympics table tennis tickets for some youngsters in a hard up community table tennis club. For those unaware, ‘wiff-waff’ was the original name for ping pong, which itself eventually gave way to the more sober sounding table tennis, and it was wiff-waff that Boris Johnson bizarrely referred to in the closing ceremonies in Beijing. Behind this wonderfully astute touch of self deprecating humour lies a deadly serious point of contention. Why is it that our sporting youngsters have to go begging for the money to get a foot inside the Olympic circus when thousands of top class tickets are freely distributed to every two-bit VIP and corporate tax avoiding criminal?

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Time For Outrage by Stephane Hessel

Hessel’s hugely popular, multi- million selling pamphlet, Time For Outrage has found resonance in today’s fraught times due to his own combative past as resistance fighter against the Nazi regime; as a survivor of Nazi torture and their bestial concentration camps; as one of the original authors of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and as a UN diplomat seeking to put substance into those fine sounding words of that Declaration. Hessel must be a huge embarrassment to today’s authorities because while they, the Bush’s, the Blair’s, The Sarkozy’s and the Cameron’s, pretend to stand for the democratic ideals that helped defeat fascist aggression, Hessel indicts them precisely for having abandoned those very ideals. Read More…

Civilisation: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson, Allen Lane, London

There is one very important point to which I am in accord with Niall Ferguson, and that is the need for a clear and consistent narrative in the teaching and understanding of history. The current vogue of offering school kids an eclectic patchwork of bite size mouthfuls of history is simply of no value. A few weeks of the Romans followed by a few more weeks of 1066 and the Norman Invasion, closely followed by a month of Tudor history and then, inexplicably, a lurch into the rise of the Nazis, with perhaps a unit of American civil rights thrown in, makes absolutely no sense at all. No, the human story, the most intriguing of all stories, needs to be presented in a coherent, chronological and intelligible manner. On this I agree with Ferguson but then, on much else, we must part company. Read More…

No Logo: (10th Anniversary Edition) by Naomi Klein

I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to revisit Naomi Klein’s updated edition of the rightly celebrated, No Logo, to see what take she has on the past decade, particularly in light of the Great Recession that we, in the West are still limping through. I was not disappointed. Nothing in her groundbreaking exposure of the dehumanising effects of global corporations and their obsessively fiendish attention to global branding has been rendered obsolete over the past ten years. Rather, this calculating corporate strategy has become more intense, more refined, more poisonous than ever. What is new however, is the manner in which the US government, taking its lead from corporate America, has itself outsourced so much of its core activity, and to cover its tracks, has produced perhaps the most ubiquitous brand on the planet, brand Obama. Read More…

The Promise, Channel 4

At last, something intelligent on a terrestrial channel. It’s been a long time coming. There was a time, of course, when the BBC and the others regularly produced gems, but the years between these classics just seems to get longer and longer. American HBO is different. They are churning them out in rapid succession. They are arguably light years ahead of the Brits now and the gap seems to be getting wider. I never imagined myself pro-offing such a glowing trans Atlantic sentiment but facts are stubborn things. There is simply no comparison between say, the Soprano’s, The Wire, and best of all, In Treatment, with such turgid fare as Downton Abbey and all the rest of the highly predictable English costume dramas.

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Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxon

This one gets to the very heart of the matter. As they used to say in The Wire, follow the money, and that is exactly what Shaxon has done, painstakingly and relentlessly. Even, I might add, to the possible detriment to his own and his family’s safety. The fact that large corporations and criminally wealthy individuals have been moving their wealth off-shore to avoid the tax man, and in some cases, the serious fraud squad, is nothing new. They’ve been at it for years. What is new in Shaxton’s book is the exposure of the sheer magnitude of, not only the sums involved, but the Byzantine methods employed to cover their criminal tracks. Read More…

Sir Alan Sugar, The Biography by Charlie Burden

Without doubt, quite the most awful book I’ve read for many a year; a totally sycophantic tribute to a man who comes across as a total narcissist. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sugar commissioned Burden to write the thing himself. No self respecting biographer could come up with such a shallow account, so totally devoid of critical comment and reflection unless they had had their pockets stuffed with loot. There is no doubting Sugars entrepreneurial bent, but never forget the old adage; behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Read More…

The clash of civilistions

David Cameron, old Etonian, millionaire, Tory leader and now, British Prime Minister, ventured to open up on the vexed question of multiculturalism and in so doing rather made a complete arse of himself. To almost universal condemnation, save for the English Defence League and the rabid Tory right wing, Cameron made assertions that will certainly exacerbate community tensions rather than assuage them. Firstly, he quite dangerously confused and equated the real but relatively insignificant phenomenon of home grown Islamic militancy with that of the far more significant problem of segregated communities and fraying social cohesion.

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A spot of Tennis While Cairo Burns

Last weekend millions of Brits, egged on by hundreds of sports journalists, turned on their TV sets on Sunday morning to witness a British tennis player win a Grand Slam tennis event after an agonisingly, ingloriously long 75 year wait. It didn’t happen but it was good fun getting all worked up especially since both Federer and Nadal had both been knocked out of contention. Only Novak Djokovic stood in the way and Murray had beaten him on their last three encounters. Djokovic cruised home three sets to nil. Murray chocks again, screamed the Monday headlines and the long suffering British tennis fan just shrugged their shoulders and went back to work. Read More…

China China China

When China was awarded the 2008 Olympics it was considered a landmark in that nation’s extraordinary economic development. That it put on a well organised showpiece Olympics and swept the medals table in the process merely emphasised the growing economic status of the country. In sporting terms China will continue to surge ahead on all fronts simple because sport is state sponsored and sporting success is considered, as it is for all countries but to even a greater extent, a badge of honour and a statement of national virility. In recent weeks Chinese sports stars have excelled in both snooker and tennis, two sports that have traditionally been beyond their sphere of operations.

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