What Was Promised by Tobias Hill

There is a touch of Hilary Mantel about the first section of this beautifully crafted London novel. Just as Mantel is able to take her readers back in time with consummate ease, so too can Tobias Hill. Admittedly Mantel has made a name for herself by travelling back hundreds of years whilst TH contents himself with a more modest sixty, but both have that ability to produce absolutely convincing historical narratives. Just like Mantel, in TH’s prose not one word feels out of joint. The second and third sections of ‘What Was Promised’ might be considered a touch uneven; either it is good, very good or superb. Rarely if ever does it dip below good.

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Rebekah Brooks – Incriminated or Incompetent

It beggars belief that Rebekah Brooks, one time chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s criminal media empire, would have known nothing of the industrial scale phone hacking that was taking place across the News International organisation that she was charged with running. Even more unbelievable given that she was shacked up with Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor and now a convicted criminal for that very offence. If, on the one in ten million chance that she was genuinely unaware of this vast criminal network, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that she was asleep at the wheel. Or more accurately, comatose in charge of a global media corporation. Guilty or incompetent are the only two possible conclusions. And somehow, whatever Brooks maybe, an incompetent does not spring readily to mind. Read More…

British Values and ‘The Other’

MacDonald’s has recently returned to one of it’s recurring UK marketing campaigns. ‘The taste of America’. This might seem somewhat odd as McDonalds is already a quintessentially American food outlet. It makes the majority of it’s profits from burgers, an American invention. As a symbol of its home country, McDonalds is right up there with Coke and Harley Davidson. Nevertheless, the burger chain has become such an ingrained part of the UK cultural landscape that McDonalds can introduce ‘The taste of America’ without anyone batting an eyelid.

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World Cup Deliberations

Eight million children sniffing glue on the street
Selling their young bodies for something to eat
Offering sex like a slice of cheap meat
It’s child prostitution in the Brazilian heat

Then it’s back to the glue for a Sao Paulo treat
Where the cops show no mercy on their merciless beat
With their dreams of Selecao but still nothing to eat
Death on their faces and a ball at their feet.

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Gove’s Discriminatory Approach to Religious Schools

Where to begin? Certainly not with Gove’s ill-defined ‘British Values’ because as an arch right wing Tory, Gove’s British values will turn out to be nothing more than a rehash of neo-liberal, corporatist ideology mixed up with some fading British imperialist jingoism and a splash of so called ‘common sense’ Anglo-Saxon Christianity. No, the starting point should more appropriately be with Richard Dawkin’s assertion that all religious indoctrination of children is tantamount to child abuse. Read More…

Gary Barlow raises taxing matters

If you ever find yourself engaged in a discussion with a journalist, any critique of their profession will inevitably involve a declaration of their independence. All journalists believe themselves to be clear-headed, rational, and probably more cynical than the average person. Above all, they cherish their independence of thought. Irrespective of whom they work for, journalists pride themselves on writing, whatever they want. This, of course, is downright weird. In a world where everybody else goes to work and does specific things required to earn a wage, journalists apparently take money in return for writing, ‘whatever they want’.

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The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Roth produces an absorbing fiction based on the scenario that President F D Roosevelt is defeated in the 1942 US election to a pro German fascist by the name of Charles A Lindbergh, a one-time US ace pilot and all round American hero. But when Lindbergh stops being a willing patsy for the Nazis, a full blown fascist coup is orchestrated in the United States and all the bigoted fascists and anti-Semites come crawling out of the woodwork. It’s a chilling novel for the general reader but doubly, trebly chilling if you happen to be of Jewish persuasion or descent – be it orthodox, liberal, secular or atheist. Anti-Semites tend not to distinguish.

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Socialist Worker Party Implodes: No Laughing Matter

If you don’t have a particular predilection for plucky little left-wing groups, even the larger of them, you might allow yourself a quiet chuckle when reading of the inner party difficulties currently being experienced within the SWP. (New Statesman 10/5/14). But it’s no laughing matter. Because every time a progressive party, group, faction or tendency implodes, it raises the desperately critical question of just what sort of organisation, if any, is required to shift mankind from a system of private ownership to one of social ownership. A grim statistic issued recently from one of the leading NGO’s claimed that the wealthiest 1300 billionaires held 96% of the world’s wealth while the remaining seven billion of us are left to scratch around for a share of the remaining 4%.

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Gerry Adams Need Offer No Explanations to the Remnants of British Imperialism

Fact: The British Empire once spread across the planet and was held together by the use of extreme force including genocide, slavery, state sanctioned torture, endemic racism, ethnic cleansing and mass internment. Fact: the island of Ireland was the first of the British colonial occupations and will most likely be its last. Fact: the remnants of the British Empire are still occupying six counties of the Irish nation. Fact: under the United Nations Charter every country has the right to self-determination. Read More…

Big Pharma Needs a Public Stake by Seamus Milne

What are the key defining moments in Britain’s imperial decline? The massive Lend Lease debts incurred during the Second World War, and still being paid to the USA some seventy years later. The rapid loss of colonies after the war, with India, the jewel in the crown, being the most significant. Then came the Suez debacle. After Suez came the collapse of the pound and the humiliating need for an IMF bailout. And the final nail in the imperial coffin, the selling off of Britain’s assets to the highest bidder. The takeover of the privatised British Steel by the Indian Tata Steel Group was a particularly painful historical irony for British capital to swallow.

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RMT Tube Strikes – Act of Defiance

The British media, led by the Russian oligarch owned London Evening Standard, describes in rabid terms, how the RMT industrial campaign to halt the closures of the Underground ticket offices is a disgrace to the city of London. The paper could not be more wrong. On the contrary, the RMT action is a creditable act of defiance against not just another TFL act of public service vandalism, but an act of defiance against so much of what is being done to modern London; zero hour contracts, poverty wages, unaffordable rents, and a chronic and ever worsening housing crisis. What the RMT action stoically demonstrates, is that despite every viscous cut to public services and benefits that working class Londoners are being forced to endure, we are not yet all cowered and beaten. Read More…

Why Ping Pong has Soul

While recently watching a very powerful and moving documentary made by Clark Carlisle, Chairman of the PFA and ex top flight professional Footballer, ‘Football’s Secret Suicide’, it struck me just how different the world of football is from the world I am part of, Table Tennis.Young footballers are being hot-housed at youth academies with no back up plan for life, if and when they become one of the 99% that don’t make it. Increasingly you hear of stories of depressed, bankrupt, alcoholic, gambling Premier League Football stars and ex-stars who can’t cope with the drop off in terms of money, fame and status after a short lived £100,000 a week career.

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Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen

Here’s the situation. Anyone who stands up to corporate America and its giant military-industrial complex, be it the Occupy Movement, or individuals like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Naomi Klein or Michael Moore, deserve our respect and support. Similarly when a country stands up to US aggression we instinctively cheer them on. Cuba, Vietnam and more recently Venezuela and Ecuador all have honourable records in this respect. These days however, with the corporate global economy getting its tentacles around the neck of every nation, only the really big economies can dare to take an independent stand.

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Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Kevin Powers Yellow Birds is the perfect antidote to all that toxic nonsense emanating from and around the Help For Heroes slogan. Whatever the US and UK servicemen and women returning from the bloody imperialist interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan may be, they are certainly not heroes. Yellow Birds makes that perfectly clear. Seen from the Afghan and Iraqi perspective they are probably seen as heartless mercenaries in the pay of corporate America. Seen from an Anglo-Saxon perspective they might charitably be regarded as unemployed and unemployable youngsters who naively join the armed forces looking for something more engaging than their dour and demeaning lives in the post-industrial wastelands of Britain and America.

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Sporting Polemics Marks Its Five Year Anniversary

As Sporting Polemics ratchets up its first five year anniversary, the attached Carl Sagan sketch seems to sum up Sporting Polemics meandering, eclectic journey as well as anything might. In that one clever little cartoon, one can spot the intersection and overlap between sport, philosophy and politics that the Sporting Polemics enterprise has been clumsily toying with over these past five years. A slightly dilettantish journey to be sure, but no less enjoyable for all that, and perhaps, just perhaps, a coherent narrative begins to emerge. Read More…

Transition by Iain Banks

No matter how clever, how ingenious a sci-fi writer may be, and Iain Banks was unarguably amongst the more adroit, they cannot, no matter how hard they might try, escape from human considerations and preoccupations. It cannot be otherwise, nor should it be. For the point of art, all art, including even that of science fiction writing, is to throw light on the human condition in as imaginative and provocative way as possible. It is something of a credit to our species that we continue to dream up ever more inventive ways of doing so. But when all the artistic tricks and gimmicks are stripped away we are invariably left with the usual human stuff; power struggles, empire building, insecurities, and a fear and intolerance of the other.

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The Future by Al Gore

This eminently readable text could very easily have been titled, Common Sense for All, and could have been written by any number of well-meaning fellows of the Ed Milliband, Will Hutton, Ja Hoon Chang variety. In fact anyone who broadly ascribes to a more egalitarian, more rational, more socially responsible world, will find little to disagree with in Al Gore’s Future. Gore makes his thesis seem like good old common sense. However, and it’s a whopping big however, the problem with common sense is that it unwittingly enshrines the status quo and singularly fails to isolate the central dialectic at play. Throughout Gore’s six pronged thesis is a single underlying assumption: that of the achievability of a rational and sustainable capitalism. It’s the very same assumption underlying all the various pronouncements by Milliband, Hutton and Ha-Joon Chang.  Read More…

Crimea – A pawn in a gangsters war

If self-determination is to mean anything, the West should back off and respect the results of Crimea’s referendum. If the overwhelming majority of Crimea’s citizens wish to decamp back to the Russian Federation, so be it. In any case, the West is hardly in a position to take the moral high-ground when it comes to illegal foreign interventions. They specialise in the field. Self-determination is a movable feast for the Western powers as it is for the Russian Federation. If it suits their geo-political interests they’ll scream and shout in favour, but if it contradicts their self-proclaimed national interests then no amount of referenda will be sufficient.

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Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Letham

Letham has produced for his readers an intoxicating cocktail of 20th century New York, complete with communist Jews, Black cops, Irish folkies, hippy Quakers, city communes, Sandinistas and a whole load of the usual Freudian stuff to keep us amused. Khrushchev is in there, as is Bob Dylan, dementia and homosexual professors on the prowl. East Germany looms large at some point. Guilts and recriminations are there by the bucket load: mother-daughter and estranged father-daughter tensions that transcend time and place. The prose is invariably clever, sometimes too clever, but that is probably more an indictment of this reader than the author.

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The New Brazil

The Observer Magazine ran a feature on The New Brazil which was ok as far as it went, but failed dismally to explain how the new Brazil was, like most developing countries, trapped in the global capitalist economy. What was produced was little more than an eclectic mix of post card sized portraits that, when removed from their wider economic circumstances, could mean just about anything to anyone, and nothing much in particular. There were some revealing quotes and the journalists went out of their way to try and present a Brazil far removed from the usual stereotypes of beach parties and free flowing football. But without reference to Brazil’s dependence on the global capital markets, it all ends up, despite the best intentions of the journalists, as hopelessly superficial. Read More…

Captain Phillips: But Who Are The Real Pirates?

There is no doubting that this is a real nail-biting highjack thriller of a film. But there is equally no doubting that a real opportunity has been squandered to explore the geo-politics of the region. So in the end we are presented with the bad guys, those Somalian pirates seizing and demanding ransom from the law abiding seamen, and the good guys in the shape of the US Navy Seals and other god fearing US military agencies. The good guys naturally win the day with the help of some state of the art technology and the bad guys are either dead or serving time in a US penitentiary.

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