Womans World Cup

There is still an awful lot to decry concerning the state and status of women across the globe. One half of the human population still seems to take a sadistic pleasure in degrading the other half. Whichever way we look, east or west, north or south, the material and social outcomes for women is considerably below that of their male counterparts. Women are on the receiving end when it comes to equal pay, equality in education and employment, and perhaps most telling, their general status in society. In the east women are still battling to rid themselves of the chains of feudal bondage.

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Magna Carta – Please stop this nonsense

Whatever the historical merits of the Magna Carta agreements that variously date from 1215 to 1235, the sight of today’s arch reactionaries from the British monarchy and the British Tory party seeking to celebrate this democratic document is enough to make one’s skin crawl. Sure, every nation likes to tell itself heart-warming myths, in part as a way of bolstering its current ruling elite, and Britain is no exception. The favourite narrative of Britain’s establishment is that England is the birthplace of democracy and the English parliament is the mother of that democracy. Try telling that to the billions who suffered under the brutality and humiliation of the British Empire.

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Heroes

Heroes are people we know nothing about
I should know, I’ve followed a few in my time
Heroes are substitutes for I’m not quite sure what
And we follow them without reason or rhyme.

The usual suspects have been up on my wall
John Lennon, and Lenin and Mao
Up on the pedestal was Marley of course
With Karl Marx as the sacred old cow.

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FIFA: Corruption is in its DNA

Some years ago, I had the unsettling experience of listening to a radical Scottish academic outline his thesis on democracy. Selection by lot rather than democratic election was the way forward. Elections, explained the good professor, always favoured the better situated, the most articulate and of course the most wealthy. I didn’t take a position either way at the time, but there was no doubt that his subversive thesis had lodged itself somewhere in my muddled consciousness.

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Money and greed has ruined the beautiful game, Justin Cartwright, Evening Standard

Confucius say, ‘Big sum of money on top of table, big corruption under table.’ He didn’t say this of course, but he may well have had he been around in the early years of the 21st century. There are billions of corporate dollars sloshing around the so called ‘beautiful game’, so it should surprise nobody that FIFA, the governing body of the game is mired in systemic corruption. We see it in every facet of our globalised corporate world; banking, arms sales, corporate manoeuvrings and political lobbying. Why should we expect globalised sport to be any different?

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After the Circus left Town

After the trials and tribulations that the leaders of the three main political parties have had to endure over the last few months, there are some who are worried about their immediate future. There is no need to worry, I think they will be ok.

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This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

Still working my way through this one but thought I’d whet the appetite of potential readers by drawing out the main points in what can only be described as is a scintillating introduction. A genuine stick of dynamite. Perhaps the definitive work on climate change to date. There is hardly a single line that doesn’t deserve to be highlighted, underlined and generally broadcast across the planet. Which brings us to the key point. Klein is telling us that our planet is dying. Right in front of our eyes. Not in one hundred years time. Not even in twenty years time but right now. And we’re all complicit. At least all of us in the developed world. But most significantly it is not so much the individual that is complicit, though clearly we each must take some responsibility, but rather our insane economic model, the one that generally goes by the name of capitalism.

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Ode to the NHS

We are told that Churchill was our greatest all-time leader
Inspiring the nation to combat the marauding Nazi hoards
But the post war British voters soon sent Churchill packing
And put the Labour Party in charge of the Westminster board.

The pre-war years in Britain were a living nightmare
Of unemployment and hunger and despair
So having seen off Hitler’s fascist armies
The British workers demanded something profoundly more fair.

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UK Elections: No ones talking about Britain’s chronic housing crisis

One thing is fairly predictable no matter which party or coalition of parties comes out on top of the forthcoming UK voting circus; in five years time when the next election bandwagon rolls into town Britain will be still be faced with a chronic housing crisis, private corporations will still be trying to get their greedy claws into the National Health Service, Britain’s foreign policy will still be in hock to the US military-industrial complex, and the widening gap between the one per cent and the rest of us will continue apace.

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That Damned Dialectic

From the humblest sub-atomic particle
To the entirety of the Universe itself
A remorseless struggle of opposites
Creating unity by infinite stealth.

Centripetal and centrifugal forces
Struggling through the eons of time
Stability just a momentary illusion
Perfection just an illusionary crime. Read More…

In The Light Of What We Know by Zia H Rahman

A serious polemic, with class as one of its central themes but also a fascinating deliberation on the issue of belonging in a globalised world. Did I enjoy this book? I’m still not sure. The two central characters are the two narrators who offer over five hundred pages of polemical wisdom. The trouble is, there is only so much wisdom a reader can genuinely absorb in any one novel without starting to switch off. Rahman offers philosophical insights by the bucket load with the danger of placing his readers in overload mode. The plot, such as it is, is rather light, and when the novel does get involved in real stuff towards the end, it becomes all rather fanciful. Without rooting his two narrators into something more solid it is difficult to warm to either of them.

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The NHS: Labour and Tories both get it wrong

Nearly everything the Tories say and do is, in the final instance, a reflection of the needs of global capital. They are the mouth piece of the corporate world and have been since the arrival of the Thatcherite neoliberal revolution. Even national capital now plays second fiddle to global capital. And of course we should expect nothing different. Labour in government however has proved to be equally compliant and even in opposition we struggle to find a radical edge to their policies. No more so than in respect to the NHS.

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This Bleeding City by Alex Preston

Something of a book of two halves, with the first half an absolute cracker tense, gripping and relevant. The second half I’m afraid is something of a damp squid, except for a clever twist at the end, which I must confess I should have seen coming but didn’t. The first half of Preston’s story, I assume largely autobiographical, tells the exhilarating story of an ordinary sort of bloke making it good in the City of London until, you guessed it, the big crash of 2008. After the crash come the bankruptcies, the suicides and the disillusionment. The second half of the story gets bogged down in relationship stuff which is not, to be honest, Mr Preston’s literary forte. But the twist at the end makes it all worthwhile and leaves the reader with much to ponder.

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Amnesia by Peter Carey

In too many places this one reads like something from the much loved childhood classic Famous Five series, but it does contain, for all that, much of interest, both historical and current. It is certainly not the novel I had hoped it would be. The illegal sacking of the left leaning Australian Labor Government in 1975, which forms the backdrop to the novel, is close to home for me. This was precisely the subject of my degree dissertation way back in the day. Of course there was nothing startlingly original in what I served up, just a reasonable summation of what was already in the public sphere at the time. But what did I get for my troubles? Scribbled all over the thing by my straight laced supervisor were the words, circumstantial evidence.

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Table Tennis: A Love Letter

Tennis on a nine by five table
Ping pong by its colloquial name
The second most played sport in the world
The Victorians would be amazed by its fame.

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HSBC – Beacon of Capitalist Amorality

Let’s get one thing straight right from the start. Capitalism has no morality despite the endless grating platitudes from the likes of Will Hutton, Ed Miliband and even David Cameron. These managers and apologists for capital incessantly plead for a caring, compassionate, regulated capitalism as opposed, I presume, to a nasty, uncaring, unregulated capitalism. But capitalism is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. And it can no more be made good than it can be turned to evil. It simply does what it is hard-wired to do.

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Heathrow and Harmondsworth

This is something of a David and Goliath story
But it’s certainly not as simple as say Labour versus Tory
This is a cross party story for every season
It’s a classic tale of corporate greed versus civic reason.

We start our story in the village of Harmondsworth
A pretty Doomsday parish built on medieval earth
Which has been under constant attack in the post war era
By an expanding airport that keeps getting nearer and nearer.

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Ode to Austerity

Most born into poverty, a few born into wealth.
Bizarrely the wealthy get wealthier through cunning and through stealth.
Rich kids flying high, backed up by daddy and mummy,
Everybody knows that money goes to money.

The whole rotten edifice is skewed in their favour,
The servant class condemned to endless toil with just religion for their saviour.
Stultifying poverty, breaking hope and breaking health.
A life of modern day slavery, no time to develop one’s self.

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Dear Ed Miliband

Despite the best efforts of the Tory tabloid press to paint you as a demonic Red Ed, try as I might, I am having great difficulty distinguishing current Labour Party policies from those of the present coalition government. Now, under Tony Blair’s New Labour, that was to be expected, because it quickly became apparent that Tony Blair was happily turning the Labour Government into the Tory second eleven. Of course, I should have known that the moment Rupert Murdoch gave his public blessing to Labour during the 1997 election campaign.

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Olympic Legacy – Going, Going, Gone – part 2

They said it would inspire a generation
To run and to jump and to swim.
They promised it would motivate our youngsters
And the fight against obesity would begin.

But the statistics tell a very different story
Of a nation getting fatter by the day.
Gove abolished the school-sports partnerships
And now the children have nowhere to play.

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Charlie Hebdo massacre – Colonial blowback

The final death toll in the West’s illegal war against Iraq can never be accurately determined because the bloody repercussions are still ongoing. Let it suffice to say it will be in the hundreds of thousands. But if we include the stunted lives caused by that criminal intervention along with the civil war that has ensued, the numbers will certainly turn out to be in the millions. And behind these statistics are real people with real families with real hopes and aspirations for the life ahead. And then there is Libya, Syria, Somalia and Afghanistan. All at the receiving end of US led military interventions and all by coincidence Muslim countries.

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