Revolution by Russell Brand

This is a damn good book. In fact a great book. Great in the sense that it is a great read, and great also in that it is of great importance. It is an intelligent book and in places touches the sublime, almost poetic level. Not bad for a recovering junkie. If you start the book and find yourself getting irritated and a tad frustrated in places, don’t give up on it. Complete the book and your efforts will be handsomely rewarded. Sure, Brand drifts in and out of incoherent, metaphysical ramblings. All that stuff about transcendental meditation changing the world and other obscurantist nonsense can definitely irritate. This is its central flaw, yet paradoxically, it is precisely because it is flawed that it is so engaging.

Read More…

London Calling – A Very Brief History

Londinium dates back to Roman times
Where its ambitious administrators hailed from sunnier climes.
And with the fall of Rome came new masters aplenty
Vikings, Saxons and Norman gentry.
Feudal London was blighted by plague and fire
Life was brutish, living conditions dire.
But mercantile trade began to expand
London pre-eminent, king of the land. Read More…

Small Island by Andrea Levy

If you need help in exploding the UKIP fantasy of a golden era of England, when there were no thieving, scrounging, terrorist migrants to blight this green and pleasant land, Small Island is the perfect place to start. For in reality, England had no such golden era. Prior to post war immigration, Britain was a miserable class ridden, bigoted island, where working class poverty was deeply entrenched, the ruling class elite lived in their protected private school bubble, and social mobility was virtually non-existent. Furthermore, attitudes across the board were profoundly insular and blatantly racist. The idea that England had fought a war to keep the world safe from fascism is something of a joke.

Read More…

Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker

At last a gem emerges from the sea of dross that is British TV. And what a gem it is. It is difficult to find the superlatives to adequately describe Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. A powerful and disturbing technological dystopia. A masterpiece of futuristic gloom. An unparalleled examination of where our new technological powers might be leading us to. Charlie Brooker must now be considered Britain’s pre-eminent TV dramatist with no one else remotely close. This is up there with the very best of British TV: Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective, I Claudius, Talking to a Stranger, Our Friends from the North and This Life.

Read More…

Fury by Salman Rushdie

Well, that makes it three in a row. First there was John Williams stunningly imagined 1965 ‘Stoner’, dragged out of obscurity for a new lease of life in the 21st century. Then pops up Ian McEwan’s ‘Saturday’, where we can engage with his brilliantly drawn Henry Perowne. And more recently, I stumble upon Salman Rushdie’s turn of the century ‘Fury’ where we can follow the travails of the angst ridden Malik Solanka. All three novels have as their overriding theme the horrors of mid-life existential dread. So what can we say of these three authors? Either they have far too much time on their hands or they have all reached the same point of existential crisis; that is, once basic need have been met; regular food, shelter and income, there is the small matter of trying to create meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe.  Read More…

Poppy Day

Oh how do you do, young Willy McBride
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while in the warm summer sun
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done

Read More…

UKIP – Let All the Pus Run Out

If you think for a moment that all the narrow minded, xenophobic, little Englander sentiment is neatly wrapped up in the UKIP party you would be very wrong. The Conservative ranks are full of such stuff as is the Labour Party and the accompanying trades union movement. And the least said about the fascist British National Party, many of whose supporters have quietly decamped to UKIP, the better. No, UKIP does not have a monopoly on such reactionary and inward looking ideas. Such ideas permeate all sections and social strata within British society.

Read More…

Johnny Rotten versus Russell Brand

Is it possible for two seemingly opposite positions to both be true and at the very same time? Yes it is. Given that truth invariably has a huge dollop of subjectivity wrapped up in it, it is entirely plausible that two opposing positions, contradictory as they may be, both contain at least sizable chunks of truth. But before we get carried away, let’ be crystal clear about this truth business. Some propositions are definitively true while others are definitively false. The dinosaurs, for example, existed some sixty million years before the evolution of the biped, and those that have argued, and those that continue to argue that dinosaurs and man roamed the earth together are simply wrong.

Read More…

J by Howard Jacobson

‘Karl Marx was once asked what his views were on the ‘Jewish Question’. Marx curtly replied, ‘What Jewish Question?’ In a similar vein, Einstein was asked if he thought there was anything special about the Jews. He quickly replied he could discern nothing special and he was certain that if the Jews ever were to attain nationhood they would soon behave like every other nation. It seems that Howard Jacobson has not taken on board either of these eminent men’s wisdom, both of whom by the way were committed atheists from a Jewish background. No, our Mr Jacobson, though I suspect he himself probably tends towards an atheist view of the world, insists on conjuring up a Jewish predicament when indeed there is no such thing.

Read More…

Iraq – Eleven Awkward Questions

How is the Saudi regime, a supposedly key component of the international coalition against Islamic State, complete with its routine beheadings and draconian subjugation of women and gays, qualitatively different from IS? How does the Saudi regime continue to substantially fund Al Qaida, the Taleban and now Islamic State yet still be courted as a key player in the international coalition against Islamic terror? How does Israel, with its relentless occupation of Palestinian land and its regular slaughter of Palestinian civilians differ from the brutality of Islamic State jihadists?

Read More…

Consciousness

Something of a blessing, something of a curse
A lifetime of thinking only makes things worse.
What to do with it, where to take it
Am I getting wiser or am I just faking it?

They say it separates us from the birds and the bees
They say it makes us superior to the apes in the trees.
They say it’s akin to the greatest gift
But it’s a damn heavy burden and it’s damn hard to lift.

Read More…

Pride / Two Days and One Night

By sheer coincidence, I have recently watched three films with a trade union/solidarity theme. I should more accurately say two and a half because one, a Ken Loach film called ‘Bread and Roses’, was so full of trite cliches that I was forced to abandon it half way through. Don’t misunderstand me; the politics in the film was spot on, as is invariably the case with Loach films. No, the problem was not the politics but the banal and lecturing manner in which he invariably approaches his work. (The Wind That Shakes the Barley being a notable exception). No nuances, no inner tensions, no unresolvable paradoxes.

Read More…

Scotland Calling

Who are the Scots, who are the Brits?
During days of Empire, a potent mix.
Signing up for the Black and Tans
Killing the Irish with their blood stained hands.

What is the border but an arbitrary line,
Bosses on both sides sipping fine wine.
While the workers either side struggle to survive,
Eking out existence like bees in a hive. Read More…

Scottish Independence – A legitimate Response to Corporate Globalisation

When you examine things carefully, most nations turn out to be nothing but artificial constructs aimed principally at consolidating the rule of a governing elite. Britain is a classic example, consisting as it does of successive waves of Celtic, Roman, Viking and Germanic invasions and subsequently augmented by wave after wave of immigrants from just about every corner of the globe. Prior to the bloody Norman invasion a thousand years ago, Britain was in effect three separate nations, Saxons in the south, Danish in the English north and east, and Celtic at the northern and western fringes. The ancient Britons, whoever they might have been, were either wiped out by the Romans or assimilated into the new realities. Read More…

Ethnic Cleansing

Death to the Other, he ain’t my brother
Death to the infidel, let him rot in hell,
Death to the Ruskies, Hispanics and Yankees
Death to the foreigner with their foul reeking smell.

Death to the Mongols, the Han and the Hun
Death to the Arabs and Death to the Jews,
Death to the Christians and Death to the Hindus
Death to them all and their foul smelling crew. Read More…

What A Wonderful Orwellian World

Events seem to be unfolding at such a pace that even the most dedicated of bloggers will have difficulty in keeping up. On the western borders of Russia, NATO seems intent on provoking Russia into a military confrontation. But how would the United States feel if a foreign power was intent on encircling them with a hostile military alliance? Would they care for Russian military manoeuvres on their Mexican or Canadian borders? I think not. And remember when the Soviet Union dared to put a missile defence system on Cuban soil?

Read More…

A Week In December by Sebastian Faulks

After a few early reservations concerning some contrived characterisation and plot, ‘A week in December’ quickly proved to be a gem of a novel, providing both a tense story line, largely credible characters and most important of all, a most thoughtful discourse on what is real and what is illusionary. Sanity and insanity are cleverly juxtaposed until in the end the reader is left to ponder just where the boundaries between the two might actually lie. There is the socially recognised insanity associated with schizophrenia and other serious mental disorders; the more controversial insanity associated with extreme religious fundamentalism, and finally the rarely talked about insanity deriving from an obsession with monetary gain and social status.

Read More…

Football Has Got Too Big For Its Fancy Coloured Boots by Martin Kettle

A reasonable article by Kettle that even has the courage to mention old Charlie Marx and the notion of ‘false consciousness’. Well done Mr Kettle. And his summation of Premier League football is right on the button. Kettle writes that the charge sheet against modern football is not difficult to draw up. Too much money. Too many mercenaries. Too little motivation. Too few roots. Not enough skill or nurture. No moral compass. That’s about as comprehensive a summation as is required. Whole books have been written providing statistics and anecdotes to flesh out the argument and to compare and contrast with a so called golden age of community based clubs. But Kettle doesn’t do that. Instead he makes comparisons with other sports which he imagines are somehow more wholesome.

Read More…

Rape and War – A Marriage Made in Hell

May 2014 saw a number of activists, celebrities and politicians gather in London for a Global Summit. The organizers of this event were the International Campaign to stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict. The campaign has worked tirelessly to highlight the use of rape as a weapon of war. It has specifically targeted conflicts in Burma, Haiti, Congo, Colombia and Kenya where the use of rape as a weapon of war is well documented.

Read More…

Desert Storm, Grant Wahl, Time Magazine

Despite the obvious US corporate nature of Time Magazine, there is a half decent article on Qatar’s 2022 FIFA World Cup preparations. I say half decent, because it is the things that aren’t discussed rather than the things that are, that is the real problem here. Wahl does a good enough job of outlining the three main issues associated with Qatar’s controversial bid. Firstly there are the allegations of corruption and kickbacks connected with the original bid. Despite whatever the FIFA ‘ethics committee’ might come up with, there is almost certainly some meat to these claims.

Read More…

Jon Snow, Channel Four News

I’ve stopped watching Channel Four News. Childish perhaps, given that it’s probably the best TV news service available in Britain, but I’m just too narked to watch it any more. The tipping point was Jon Snow’s interview this week with a Hamas spokesman. It was a blatant travesty of journalism. Whatever Snow’s or the viewers opinion of Hamas might be, if you are going to invite the man to give his organisation’s viewpoint, then at least give him the courtesy of giving it uninterrupted. Instead he and we were treated to a pointless haranguing by Snow every time the Hamas spokesman attempted to talk.

Read More…