The Ugly Game

I've always loved football..."The Beautiful Game", as it has become known. That's quite a feat for the likes of me, as some may understand, seeing as I am a 'Mackem' (that's a Sunderland supporter for those unfamiliar with the term). Like most of my fellows, over the years, I've supported my team 'through thin'. 

OK, Boss...I'll play; but only for another
£500k a week and some tongue

My love for the game is, however, now almost as empty as the Sunderland AFC trophy cabinet and this latest nonesense with Carlos Tevez's reported desire to sue his employer over a defamation issue could be a tipping point for me. Not because I have some hidden desire to see Manchester City come through as Premier League champions, but because it just underlines the whole madness of where money has taken the game. That said, I have to admit I laughed my tits off when City thumped Fergie's lot the other day. Priceless. 

I don't hanker for something akin to the "Corinthian Spirit" seeing as its origins are in public-school educated toffs who could afford to be 'amateur' as a way of going about sport because they could afford to. I have nothing whatsoever against paying people to do sport for the entertainment of the public but I have just about everything in my soul against the likes of Tevez being paid over one million pounds a month. That's more than Fred Goodwin got paid (excluding share options which, now, prosaically, are virtually worthless). Obviously, it's not just the diminutive Argentinian, there are so many more besides whose wages continue to be inflated by factors that would drive the RMT's Bob Crow to hourly orgasms.

Currently, according to the PFA, the average wage for a contracted player in the English Premier League is £676,000 per annum. To be fair to these chaps, they do have to do awful things like, er...run about on a field doing physical stuff for days on end before running about on another field for ninety minutes to the delight or opprobrium of the public who pay between £25 and £100 for the privilege of watching them. That's tough. Then there's the other stuff, like going out to clubs and getting pissed. Selling their image rights to the sports industry and celebrity magazines. Pretending to write an autobiography, aged twenty. Pretending just to be able to write...or read, come to that. Trying really hard to talk to John Motson after a game and not using cliches.  Lots of shagging...their own and other PFA members' WAGs. Hurling racial abuse (allegedly). Getting nicked for traffic offences and sexual assault. It's just a maelstrom of difficult work. How awful for them all...

Let's get back to the wage thing. £676,000 a year...average! It's easy to make silly comparisons like...the Prime Minister gets about £160,000 and has much more in the way of responsibilities. That would have been fair enough if the PM had been, say, Michael Foot or John Smith, but when it's David Cameron, who is independently wealthy, then it makes him look more the Corinthian, really, especially as he appears to be approaching the job like an enthusiastic amateur. It's better to compare a professional footballer in the English Premier League with other professionals, like nurses perhaps, or engineers. OK...no comparison in terms of wages, motivation or, one might argue, job satisfaction, seeing as most professional footballers appear to never to be satisfied with anything to do with their job, whether it's their pay, their 'boss', their adoring public, their opponents or, crucially, any referee.

There's the argument that professional footballers (and indeed other sports people) need to front-load their income seeing as their careers can be so short...maybe ten to fifteen years if they're lucky. There's a grain of truth in that to the extent that most professional footballers would be unemployable in another field [sic], but to earn an everage of almost £7m in ten years? That's just bollocks...

And let's not forget that, for the most part, professional footballers at "the top of the game" are thick as shit. There are, have been, and arguably always will be, notable exceptions. I remember Liverpool's Steve Heighway back in the seventies being touted as the only pro soccer player in the top flight with a degree, having left teaching to play football. Gary Lineker (Mr Clean) appears to be an accomplished raconteur and skilled in sports presentation, as does Alan Hansen and, even though it irks me to say so, Alan Shearer. I gather that Frank Lampard was a Latin scholar, which was a pleasant surprise; but then again, I met his dad, Frank Senior back in '75 and he was a real gent. But none of these scions will ever be the 'norm' when the likes of Wayne Rooney and John Terry run around the turf. Terry's family history is chequered to say the least and, let's face it, Rooney has all the hallmarks of becoming the next Gazza.

But they're all so "talented", aren't they? Er...no, they're not. They're fit, yes, and can kick a ball in ways that park players might only dream of but the key issue for most of the top flight of players is that...they have a brilliant agent.

Fulwell End at Roker - Kids to the Front

When I used to go to Roker Park as a kid and get squashed in the Fulwell End with about twenty thousand others (they used to pass us kids over the their heads down to the front terrace wall that I couldn't see over - but they meant well), I watched my heroes. Len Ashurst, George Mulhall, Charlie Hurley, George Herd, Jim Montgomery and, best of all, left back Cecil Irwin, always there in front of me in the first half as we defended the 'home end'. These guys were on better then average incomes, that's true. But Len used to live in a semi at the top of Dykelands Road, next door to the local TSB Bank Manager, and people could say hello to him and his team-mates in the town while they did some shopping or went to the pub. These days, a top pro might think it frighfully de trop if he was living next door to Bob Diamond ..or anyone at all come to that. You probably can't say hello to Wayne Rooney without his agent agreeing a fee up front. Half of these primadonnas can by their own estate or even a small country so as to avoid contact with the rest of humanity.

And the whole thing appears to be unstoppable. But it will stop. It will implode....it has to. Almost every top football business (they're 'clubs' only in name now) makes a loss. Manchester United, Barcelona, Real Madrid and a few others may be viable as brands and debt leverage vehicles but the rest seem to be the playthings of oligarchs, oil barons and other magnates with nothing better to do with their money...oh, and some chicken farmers who aspired to rub shoulders with the likes of Abromovic. Fools.

Sheikh Mansour - Will He Tire
of Tevez and his Like?

These 'investors' are like children and will soon be tired of their toys. If Tevez does take legal action against either Mancini or the corporate Manchester City, another question might be asked about the value of the toys once the legal bills begin to mount and contractual pay-offs are deducted from the (occasional profit and) loss account. It all has the potential to be a house of cards.

Still, there are some good people in English professional football, like Niall Quinn, but I regret that there may not be enough. The owners have agendas that are at odds with what once was a sport. The agents have agendas that are at odds with fairness and value. The players have become so detached from the real world that they have no idea what the former two groups are doing to the game as they become obsessed with their own celebrity and a misguided impression of their self-importance. I don't agree with the late Bill Shankly on one thing, as opposed to all other wonderful things he brought to the game when it was good. Football is not more important than life and death, no matter how flippant his comment at the time but was later written so large and so tragically at Hillsborough.

Football is still a sport enjoyed by hundreds of millions of spectators and players across the globe. The playing may continue for centuries but the spectacle appears doomed within a few years. I will mourn its passing but will find something else. Such is the transcience of the sports fan. There are signs that professional Rugby Union - still in its relative infancy - may go the same way. The controllers of that sport might like to learn some lessons from what is happening at the top of professional football.

And to all those kids that believe that football is a way out of what they perceive to be the tawdriness of their existences...think again. Even if you were to be the one in a million like Wayne. Just go and get a proper job and play the beautiful game like a Corinthian (only without the privileges, I'm afraid) and feel better for that.

15 Billion Human Beings by 2100?

Some population expert representing the UN has predicted that there'll be 15 billion people on the planet by the end of this century. No big deal there; at least in terms of the prediction, anyway. Anyone with an ounce of skill in this field can do wobbly maths with logistic functions on a sigmoid curve for the exponential growth of mankind...the trick being to understand the saturation point where growth slows down and, eventually, stops. We don't appear to be anywhere near that and we remain, quite obviously, in the exponential growth phase.

A Licence to Bonk? Should be
 "World Restraint Day?

But why? George Monbiot argues that over-consumption is to blame. That's paradoxical, given that "consumption" (or TB) nearly did for us, once upon a time. Regular readers will know that I love to disagree with Mr Monbiot when I get the chance. It's not over-consumption that's led to this huge population and its prediction to double inside ninety years.

So what is really to blame? Shagging...that's what.

All the thinktankery in the world can come up with sociological crap and data to prove that this over-consumption issue here or that macro-economic fundamental there is the cause but in the end, it's all about unprotected sex between male and female human beings (plus a little bit of weird science and eugenics around the edges).

So, taking Verhulst's compressed S-curve theory, when will the saturation occur? Don't know. Nobody knows. But there's a fair chance that we're close already, given the poverty in some parts of the planet. Even if there was an even distribution of the world's resources, there's probably only enough to go round for basic subsistence levels for another few decades. And one can't really see Philip Green of Fred Goodwin sharing out their wealth any time before they make their richly deserved trips to hell in whichever handcart has been supplied.

And what about available space? Saturation points of population and resources are skewed because of the way both are distribued. Here's some wonky maths...

The land mass area of the planet is about 150 million square kilometers. There are about seven billion people. So that's about twenty thousand square meters each. My house and small garden comprises a land footprint of about one hundred square metres and is probabaly about average for the UK. So I'm only taking up one half of one per cent of my share, and I live with another person too, so we are only using one quarter of one per cent each! OK, there are quite a lot of uninhabitable places on the planet but, even so, if the average person is only using what me and my wife are using, then there'd have to be over ninety-nine per cent of the earth's land surface unavailable to make it into a crisis. Result!

Inhabitable, Inhospitable, or both?

Let's look at somewhere that is, largely, inhabitable (as opposed to inhospitable): France. The area of France is 640,000 square kilometers. If we ignore the Alps and Pyrenees bits that are too high and snowy and some of the Massif Centrale, there's probably about half a million square kilometers to play with. If the population of the world was fifteen billion, as predicted, then everyone would have around thiry-five square meters of France to live on and if they lived in families of four, then that would be almost one hundred and fifty square meters per family...half as much again as that which I live on and, let's be fair, even a measly thirty-five is a damned sight more than the average human being has at his or her disposal at the moment. Of course, such an arrangement would mean that there was no room for all the other infrastructure like shops, service workplaces, transport and all that but on the assumption that everyone would need about twice as much of that as they need living space then that just means that instead of France alone, the population could be sorted out across Germany, Spain and Portugal as well. This population enclave could as well be anywhere on the planet and not necessarily central Europe. It's just that it's convenient for temperate conditions climatically and for me to berate the French (a bit).

And that leaves the rest of the planet available for everything else, viz:

1) Manufactories: These can all be placed near the natural resources required.
2) Farming: Again, placed in locations ideal for crop cultivation and livestock rearing.
NB: Where both Manufacturing and Farming require human employees, these can be migrant workers from "Fraspaporger" (that's the new population centre I've just described) for a few months at a time - a bit like the old kibbutz idea, I suppose.
3) Holidays! To suit all tastes from the arctic regions to the Caribbean.
4) Prisons - there are lots of ideal locations already in Northern Russia...or just use Australia again
5) Everything else...

Plenty of room, then. In fact, if Fraspaporger was expanded into Poland, Italy and Denmark (i.e. "Fraspaporger Politaden", and who wouldn't want an address that ended like that?) then the population of the world could go up to more than twenty five billion quite easily and still be accommodated, fed, watered and kept mostly sane.

So why (on earth)  isn't the world sorted out like this already?

Oh, yes, that's it: Greed, Wrath, Gluttony, Pride, Envy, Sloth and, of course, bringing me back to my original point...LUST. So, instead of ushering in my Brave New World, all we have to do is stop people shagging indiscriminately with no thought for the future...even on a Friday night.

Over to all of you, then...

University Applications Slump - Nature's Balance?

Ha! I was right then! University degrees aren't all they're cracked up to be as I've been saying...all along

Just about everything these days is dominated by "markets" and it seems that Universities and their degrees are not to be left out. Markets mostly work on pricing and value. So, if the "price" of a degree (calculated on the basis of the fees to be paid) is seen to have a "value" to the buyer (calculated on employment  and associated income advantages), then a judgement can be made as to whether or not to purchase, just as with any other professional service.

To bestow even greater legitimacy upon this relatively new market in higher education, the consumer magazine Which? has decided to examine the services on offer from our Universities, thus lumping them in with utilities, dodgy car dealerships and double glazing sales...arguably where they belong? Which? intends to rank universities and their degree courses based on values attached to them by consumers, from the ephemeral things like "quality"and "experience" through to more hard-nosed, results-based outcomes like, "did I get the job of my dreams at the end of my courses or do I still work at a call centre taking abuse from the public in return for the minimum wage?".

It's reported in some media and, more significantly, through UCAS, that applications for degree courses in England's universities have "slumped" by as much as twelve per cent as "...a direct result of..." increases in tuition fees "allowed" by the Coalition Government. This government includes some Liberal Democrats, by all accounts; those who were to allow fees to rise over their dead bodies or, as has happened in reality, their bruised and mortally injured party and manifesto.

While the Dailys Mail and Telegraph bemoan this development (based, probably, on the potential reduction of pretty girls to photograph on A-Level results day), I am delighted. My delight is tinged with some concern however, given that those potential consumers who are more likely to have second thoughts about the value attached to a degree in terms of a personal investment are unlikely to be the massed ranks of Tarquins and Jocastas, to whose parents, twenty-seven thousand pounds is so much loose change, The poor, the disadvantaged and the "squeezed middle" are more likely to be the ones having second thoughts as they might legitimately worry that the weight of debt from student loans would cancel out any advantage a degree might provide.

The natural world has been known for balancing itself over the billions of years of its existence. Arguably we remain part of the natural world and this "slump" in university applications can be seen as another self-balancing act, albeit not on the scale of the demise of the dinosaurs. Universities were, at least until the seventies, pretty elitist. In the last thirty-odd years, accessibility became easier under successive governments of both left and right stripes. The balance, through greed and some hypocrisy, is returning to elitism and because it is market-driven, there is bugger all we can do about it except watch that market implode as it prices itself out of existence or simply populates its once-hallowed halls with half-witted toffs and overseas student fodder. So far, so bad, one might argue.

Perhaps not. Those that choose not to seek a degree might get an advantage (apart from not being saddled with ridiculous debt). They'll have three or four years start on the others. As most graduates end up in shitty jobs anyway these days, those that eschew university can start earning earlier. Of course, they'll miss out on the "experience" of university. Not necessarily...

As  most of the population is urban and most urban areas have some kind of university in them, then the non-students can still do some or all of the following:
a) Rent a room in a crappy building that they can share several other people and spend their time studiously ignoring things like cleaning stuff
b) Get up at midday (provided their job starts in the afternoon)
c) Get shit-faced every night. This will be even easier than it is for under-graduates, seeing as the non-students will have some money
d) Pretend to study. Even better still, this task can be achieved without the stress  and worry that they should actually be doing some studying.

There are some things that the non-students won't be able to do, such as go on University Challenge and be patronised and/or ignored by lecturers. No big deal, then...

The Truth About Global Financial Meltdown - And Solutions!

Everyone in The West appears to have moved to a new country, or a state, if you like...and it's one called "Denial". I've taken the odd holiday to the state of Denial in the past but have never planned to become a permanent resident. However, that seems to be position of many governments, including our own here in the UK.

George Osborne and Danny Alexander get to grips
with major Global Economic Problems

Since Parliament came back from the last recess, we've had some major policy announcements. Things that are so fundamentally game-changing that I'm surprised that Dave & Co didn't make them priorities back in 2010. For example, we can all look forward to having our bins emptied more regularly. Ofqual, the watchdog for examinations in education, now have the ability to fine examination boards that have screwed up (annual event). Yippee! And it looks like we're going to get some differently-designed pylons to carry the electricity through the grid...you know, the stuff Vladimir Putin allows to us buy from Russia seeing as we can't make enough of our own. Then there's the thirty-year programme to drive a train from London through the Home Counties to Birmingham so that people who won't need to do the journey any longer because there'll be no jobs, can get there fifteen minutes earlier. Or, there's the much-awaited changes to the Legal Aid system so that scumbags can get away with murder (and lesser crimes) but instead using a free market of supply of lawyers and barristers, probably run by Cherie Booth Legal Services plc; a sub-division of Blair Firerush Global MegaCorp (Bahamas) Inc.

And if all this smashing new policy stuff wasn't enough, then there's the regular political scandal to focus on, the current blip being with Liam Fox. It seems that his best mate, Adam Werrity (is he really called Verity, but the vicar that christened him was German?) goes to work with Dr Fox; attends meetings with dignitaries, advises on defence policy, decides to invade Libya...that sort of thing, probably. Well, that's not so bad, is it? Lots of people take their mates to work. I understand that the soccer player, Steeeevie Gerrraaaard has a mate that just goes everywhere with him so that he has someone to talk to and never appears to be sad and alone. Then there was Gazza and Jimmy Fivebellies. And Raoul Moat and Gazza. See?

All of this and more should keep us all interested and our minds off the main issue...

THE WORLD IS ABOUT DISAPPEAR UP ITS OWN ARSE AS A RESULT OF FINANCIAL ARMAGEDDON!!!! PANIC NOW!!!!! NOBODY WILL SURVIVE!!!! IT'S AN "EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT"!!!!! SOMEBODY PHONE BRUCE WILLIS NOW AND MAKE SURE HE'S WEARING A DIRTY VEST!!!!! AAAAAARRRRGH!!!!!!!

And how has this happened? Here's the view from the Man on the Clapham Omnibus...

"Er...dunno...is it the cuts, innit?"

Let me explain. It's not the cuts, of course. These are  merely a consequence of the problem and a pointless one at that seeing as everything will be toast before they make the slightest difference.

No. These are the things that have brought us to this point:

Get used to wearing numbers
on your clothes, guys...

1) Greed: Greed is not "good", after all then, Mr Gecko. It's not all about the "bankers" either, although some of them are certainly culpable. It's also about the unphilanthropic industrialists (so that's most of them) who play with world's resources and people like so many pieces in a board game in order to be the most powerful and to live beyond the reach of any law. To make matters worse, the people who operate the financial markets don't really get it either. Their motivation is usually pure greed or, when their "positions" become ridiculously exposed, covering their stinking, foetid arses and the billions of dollars and Euros they play with are no more to them than monopoly money rather than the livings of actual human beings.


2) Stupidity: Nobody really understands how the Global Economy works. It's too big and complex and, ultimately, full of surprises, none of which are nice ones. While the IMF, the World Bank, the UN and institutions like the Federal Reserve argue with one another about what's happened, what's happening and what's about to happen, their latest rationales and action plans become obsolete the second they're published because something else unexpected has happened. And the academics and economists are just as clueless. In a less than cheery interview on the BBC recently, a "world-renowned economist" was asked a simple question. If all these countries owe so much money that they can't pay it back...then to whom is it owed? Cue a load of technical flannel about national debt structures. The question is asked again and again resulting in more fatuous gibberish. He didn't know. And yet he advises the World Bank, the IMF etc., etc... The inconvenient truth is that everybody owes the money to everyone else. Some countries even owe money to Greece! And we in the UK are owed money by countries beginning with 'I'. But the lion's share of the debt is owed to the emerging economies like China and India who are snaffling it up like greedy hogs at the trough just like the US did a few years ago.

3) Denial: Because the people who are supposed to understand how it all works or who are supposed to lead countries into a brighter tomorrow either don't get it or are so determined to weather the storm for pointless political ends, we end up living in Denial. There are some healthy, informed and positive debates about Global Warming, because it's tangible. There is even empirical evidence for and against. The trouble with Global Finance is...you can't touch it, see it or fathom it. Osborne is a minor player in the world economy but his reaction and position are typical. Make a speech saying how it'll all be fixed by being prudent and efficient. Take any statistic about the economy here or abroad and spin it with percentages or comparative data. Anything but the truth. Imagine Giddy standing up in the House and delivering the following speech...

Are These Men to Blame? Probably Not...I mean,
look at them. Asleep on the job.

"Look everyone, I don't actually understand the economy or the markets and I've asked all the chaps at the Treasury and neither do they. Even Danny, but then again his last job was as a warden in a National Park. Dave's completely lost, too, and even "Two-Brains Willetts" blew up both of them trying to get his one head round quantitative easing. Then I remembered that we were in a coalition thingy and that Vince was supposed to be clever so I asked him and he suggested that as we had inherited our deficit from Labour we shoud get them to sort it out. That's when I had my brainwave! Inheritance Tax! So that's the new policy...that and asking Her Madge to chip in a bit. Oh, and making things then selling them...you know, lovely things like wallpaper...and possibly something to do with the price of fish and how many eggs make six. That sort of thing. And crying a little bit and running away..."

OK...Maybe I'm over-egging the drama here. Maybe denial is an appropriate response and things will balance themselves over time. No! Really! Maybe they will. Perhaps it's just part of the natural re-balancing that has happened over the last few billion years on this planet.

But, if it were up to me, then this is the plan...

Call it quits. Everyone just wipes out the debts and we start all over again only with a New World Order with the following people in charge of the New World Government:


President of The New World: Morgan Freeman. Without doubt he's been the best President in the movies and has had experience of dealing with major catastrophes. And he's black but a bit freckly and looks very wise. Has also been God.
Deputy Presidents of The New World: Helen Mirren assisted by Hugh Grant. Anyone that is prepared to defend the honour of the deliciously alluring Martine Escutcheon gets my vote, especially when he was faced with the skullduggerous Billy-Bob Thornton in a Bush suit. Ms Mirren's credentials require no justification.
New World Bank Chief: John Major. Let's face it; if we've learned anything about money in the last few years it's that it has to be dull from now on. We need someone who was prepared to run away from the circus to be an accountant.
Head of Justice in the New World: A Woman. Any Woman (apart from any of those listed in appendix 1 below) assisted by Sylvester Stallone in Judge Dredd costume to do her bidding without questions.
New World Controllers of Natural Resources: Gavin Pretor-Pinney & James Dyson
New World Heads of Culture: Brian Sewell & Bjork, based in Australia.
New World Religions Mediators: The Dalai Lama & Richard Dawkins
New World Health Supremo: A Doctor (but not Liam Fox). Graeme Garden would be good, but not Jonathan Miller.
New World Media Heads: Richard Ingrams and Charlie Brooker
Sports Co-ordinators for the New World: Jessica Ennis & John Motson
New World Co-ordinators of Fun: Andi Osho, Sarah Millican, Omid Djalilli and Rich Hall.

There is no need for a foreign policy head as nobody will be foreign.

Appendix 1: Under no circumstances can any of the following people be considered for positions in the New World Government:

Bono
Sting
Madonna
Kate Moss
Gwyneth Paltrow
Ricky Gervais
Jonathan Ross
Richard Branson
Ant and/or Dec
Geoffrey Boycott
Tony Blair
George Bush (Senior or Junior)
Jeremy Clarkson
Victoria Beckham
Alan Bennett
Tracy Emin
Dr Miriam Stoppard
George Gideon Oliver Osborne
Paul McCartney
That woman at the bottom of our street that mistreats her dogs

Loads of others...bored now

End

Party Conference Animals

In the UK, the main Political Parties' Conference season is over again. And what piles of pointless flummery they all turned out to be.

Whether it was some desperate Liberal Democrats attempting to convice that they really are making a difference; an equally desperate bunch of Labour wonks trying to forget the monumental disaster that was "The Brown Years" or the Conservative cabal tinkering around the edges of policy-making in order to appear "in touch"...they all had one one thing in common. They were talking to themselves, and certainly not to us. 

In fairness, that's what conferences are. (n. 1. a formal meeting of people with a shared interest, typically taking place over several days.) It's only because the main three party conferences happen to involve the people who purport to run government or those who have the best chance of undermining it, that they become newsworthy. Otherwise, we'd have blanket day-time TV coverage of the annual conferences of the National Association of Estate Agents or The Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists.



Mr  Cable leaves the stage to rapturous silence

The chosen locations for conferencing this year were Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool - the triangle of wannabe alternate English capital cities - the three parties having eschewed the traditional draws of the Bournemouths, Blackpools and Brightons in favour of something a little more hard-bitten and gritty, seeing as we find ourselves in an increasingly hard-bitten and gritty state. And it wouldn't do for Nick, Dave or that bloke that Labour stupidly voted in as their leader instead of his brother, to be seen walking along the seaside promenade with an ice cream in these dark and worrying times. 

Tracey Crouch MP explains the offside 
rule to George Osborne - along with why
the UK Economy is totally fucked

In the past, much has been made of the conference reactions to the addresses given by the leadership of the parties. How long did so-and-so get for his standing ovation? Which leader got the most applause for a policy change? This time around, commentators were counting the empty seats (even at the keynote speech of the Prime Minister); counting how many delegates fell asleep during Osborne's detail-free faux-polemic on the state of the national and world economies; making up statistics on the age profile of Lib Dems, or taking as many photographs as they could of Ed Balls's wobbly gut and Rooney-like aggression on the football field against the hacks. Even the Tories' football match against the journos gained a headline due to the Party of government's decision to field an ineligible player. FA rules weirdly ban females aged over thirteen from playing in mixed sex teams but the Tories had Tracey Crouch MP in the squad. Dave has announced that he wants to change this old-fashioned and sexist FA regulation as part of the effort to get women back into the Tory voting habit. A further result of the rule change could be that, with a little bit of coaching and a huge fee from Sky, Harry Redknapp can sign the deliciously untalented Cheryl Cole in advance of Spurs' next game against Chelsea, where she would have the opportunity to kick the living shit out her estranged "love rat" of a husband before being red-carded.



Conference Delegates Discuss the Wrong Thing

Even the BBC have become bored and have announced that Newsnight will no longer cover the conferences "live". It was also pretty clear from the faces, attitudes and even the questions of the leading television journalists, that the conferences lacked a certain something. And that certain something happened to be the Elephant in the Room that is Global Economic Meltdown. While the politicians postured and their floppy-haired assistants ran around the halls with their i-phones stapled to their ears, there was a sense that it was all so utterly pointless. A policy twist here, an invective-laden attack on the government there, but no real sense of what it was anyone could actually do about the undeniable fact that, within a few years, China and India will own anything and everything that might be left.

There wasn't even a hint of a scandal to lighten the journalistic moods. Nothing like previous conferences where rumours abounded about who was sneaking down an hotel corridor to in the dead of night to tap on the door of whom like the Howard / Varsi story that was squashed so vigourously a few years ago. Where was William's little friend? The papers had to make do with the old standards like Theresa May's kitten heels that gave them punnable headlines for the spat with Ken Clarke over the asylim-seeker's pet cat and, of course, the gratuitous photographs of SamCam's outfit and an equally gratuitous product placement for the lucky retailer. And even Boris was subdued.

In the end, all we had left was the fast-disappearing memory of the worst leader's address at a Labour conference since...well, since the last one. Ed Miliband is nothing short of unelectably strange. He karate-chopped his way through a list of platitudinous crap for about an hour. He stated the bleeding obvious again and again as he attempted to Trot[sic] out his "New Bargain", that the conference soon realised could be bettered at Lidl. "I'm not Tony Blair!" he announced, sounding very much like Tony Blair, before whispering conspiratorially, just in case anyone might believe it, that he wasn't Gordon Brown, either. Dave, on the other hand, decided that the Tories were clever enough to have worked out for themselves that he wasn't Maggie but she was worth a mention and some gratitude for past endeavours in Tory Leaderhsip, as were Major, Howard and even Hague in the same breath. It would have been a stretch to include Heath, McMillan or Eden and Dave wisely left out Churchill from the list.



"Dave" TV: Giraffe in the Conference Room?

Ed's slightly older and inestimably brighter, more charismatic and, critically, electable brother must be counting the days down to the moment that the Labour Party sees sense and gives him the job. Then, when David Laws has been forgiven for trying to cover up being gay and takes over from Nick, all the three main parties will be run by a "Dave", just in time for the BBC, Sky and ITV to give up on the conferences altogether and the rights to coverage are granted exclusively to the channel of the same name...inbetween re-runs of HIGNFY and QI. Probably where it belongs....but as "Dave" professes to be "The Home of Witty Banter", then there's a massive cultural gap to be breached first...

Who Are These Bastards? And How Do They Do It?

I've been a good citizen so far, I think.

I've worked since I was eighteen. I've paid my taxes and National Insurance for nigh on forty years and have never claimed a bean from the state. I've had a family and looked after them as best I could and my children look like they'll be pretty good citizens too. I give to charities and I volunteer for stuff. David Cameron probably loves me on some subliminal, Big Society level, and even though that love is not returned, I'm sure he's not losing any sleep over it.

Then I fill up my car with fuel, walk into the garage shop and attempt to pay for it. My bank debit card is refused. I don't understand. Along with my good citizenship, I am also debt-free: so "Lucky ME", huh?. Actually, its more "hard-working, careful, thrifty, saving, scared-shitless-of-borrowing" ME, rather than "lucky, spawny, screw-the-system or privileged-inherited-wealth-Osborne-Cameron-type-toff" ME. So how come I can't use my card? No answers. The computer just said "no".

Fortunately, I had another one. And it wasn't just any dull, ordinary debit card. Oh, no. It was a succulent, dark green, points-gaining Marks and Spencer credit card, that I'd been able, fortunately, to remember the PIN for even though I hadn't used it forever and had just got one to get a discount sometime. Just going off the subject a little...it really pisses me off when people refer, tautologically, to "PIN Numbers", but I suppose it would sound stupid to say PI Numbers. What the hoo...



As Olivier Said in Marathon Man "Is it Safe?"



So the garage attendant didn't have to take my wife as collateral until I found an alternate way of paying or call the police to have me arrested for attempted robbery. But I could feel the eyes of the people in the queue behind me burning into my very soul. Not only was I probably a "credit risk" but I was also (and more damnably) a "time-frittering risk" as evidenced by the tapping heels and general tutting about this wretched, impecunious twat at the counter taking up an extra sixty seconds of their busy lives while he desperately and ignominiously found a way to pay his dues. As I turned away from the counter, one woman glared at me so balefully that I believed she wanted to spit in my face. I recall wondering how she might have spent that sixty seconds I wasted for her. Running out onto the motorway and being mashed by an Eddie Stobart truck might just have taken that long...but she didn't use the time that wisely.

We drove away. One hundred miles away, then stopped again for a coffee; you know, one of those coffees that cost £3 and is selected from a menu that you don't really understand, where "tall" means small, "grande" means something else entirely and a "macchiato" is just too difficult to spell and never turns up like it does in Italy. Then I phoned the bank.

In contrast to the arseholes who'd made the assumption that I was a man without money, the people I spoke to at my bank were ruthlessly efficient and, at the same time, appropriately sympathetic. My card had been "compromised". Some scumbag somewhere had probably done something called "skimming" and had attempted transactions that were out of line with my usual purchases so the bank had stopped my card. Brilliant! Well done them. Only they hadn't told me. But that didn't matter in the end, because I'd been protected and I was really impressed by the fraud prevention systems they had.

But what I don't get is how it  happened. Who are these bastards? How do they do it?

There was a purchase on my card for some on-line music download for a measly £6; something I'd never done (and probably would never do - what else is YouTube for?). There was then an automated attempt by the bank to contact me on my mobile to question this purchase that failed because I was out of signal reach. The default is to cancel the card. Fair enough.



Clever Bastard?



The man at the Bank's Fraud Centre explained that "this happens a lot". A card is skimmed and then the fraudster attempts some low level transaction to see if it works before leaving it for a while and then blitzing the card with larger purchases and, effectively, using up all of my money. Well they can't do that now...until the next time? Am I now a target? Which debit card transaction enabled them to skim? Should I now just go to the cash machine and pay for everything in notes from now on? Can I never buy on line again for fear of being stuffed?

Don't get me wrong. Apart from not getting in touch, my bank has been very clever. But what I want to know is how the hell these criminals do this and which was the purchase that led to it. Was it some ingrate at an online store that fed details? Was it a clever scam by fraudsters mining some database somewhere? I'll never know, apparently.

I was not a real "victim of crime". Not like a rape victim or someone who has had their house burgled or just an innocent person who had the shit kicked out of them by some drunken or drug-addled mugger.

But, unlike those victims, I can't even guess how the "crime" was perpetrated. It's not in any way worse...it's just confusing.  And while most people want to bash banks these days, I'm glad that mine did what they did. These are ordinary banking operational things and people; not the merchant banking arseholes that fucked the global economy; the ones that should have their cards "compromised" so we can all get our money back. Fred Goodwin's Visa Debit Card number and PIN are...4358 4020 7345 2....OK, only joking. But wouldn't we like to know?

By the way...I bank with NatWest. It's only fair that I should mention that, I suppose...even though it ended up part of Goodwin's megalomaniac acquisition programme. It seems to have a very effective system to protect customers against low level fraud, nonetheless.

Monbiot's "Declaration of Interests": Ideological Rhetoric or a Bloody Good Idea?

Confession: 

I used to detest George Monbiot's whining, liberal, right-on, global-greening claptrap; so much so that I believed that it bordered upon the solipsistic. That was usually because I rarely got beyond the first paragraph, or sometimes even the headline...

And then he appeared to be standing up for Nuclear Power last year and I thought, hang on a minute...read a whole article of his for the first time and realised that there was a rationalist hiding (in plain sight) within the rhetoric and I was converted. I still disagree with a number of his arguments (and there are, let's see now...lots of them) but each of them is blessedly well-researched and they are, largely, evenly balanced.

And then along came a little piece last week where he decided to lay bare his "interests", and by that he meant his income and (some of his) assets along with their sources by placing the information in the public domain. Well, on his website at any rate. That might qualify as the public domain, I guess.

His argument, in a nutshell, is that journalists should live by the same "rules" that they occasionally and gleefully insist that others live by; i.e. exposure of the personal financial arrangements of politicians, "slebs" and other worthy or unworthy people in the public eye. Fair enough. 



George Monbiot - Sufficiently
Comfortable to be Afflicted?

 His "Registry of Interests" includes his retainer from Guardian Newspapers; a fee that currently brings in £62k a year and a payment from Penguin Books that he hopes will come to £40k over the next three or four years for a book on "Rewilding", which might be about the reintroduction of wolves to Britain to deal with the problems of Traveller communities, but I imagine is more likely to cover the rare Yorkshire thistle, Red Squirrels and the like. Hope so. Incidentally, rewilding doesn't pass spellcheck unless you use a hyphen, but that would mean that his Penguin book might be "about" Rav Wilding, the telly copper, and nobody would give you £40 for that, let alone £40,000.

George also informs us he has a couple of lodgers who, collectively, give him around £5k a year. I assume that they have their own rooms, but even if they shared (and also assuming that George lives in London) then just over £50 a week each sounds anything but Rackmanesque. It's positively philanthropic. Not only that, but you get to share a house with a "thinker"! Just imagine the evenings-in around the fireplace with an organically-sourced ale and a bowl of mange-tout discussing rewilding. Bliss. I'll see if there's a waiting list.

No mention of receipts from his various books, however. Maybe they don't sell. But if they do, then to balance that, of course, he has all of his expenses for research assistance, travel, making pension provisions and running his office, I guess. On the other hand, he may just donate all the proceeds to charities but doesn't want to come across as too nice a chap.

He also gives detail of his savings...banking accounts that contain a measly £14k. It would be churlish of me to point out that he hasn't told us how much his house is worth or whether he's in negative equity, mortgage-free or somewhere in between but he has recorded that, apart from the one home, he has no other property or investments. Maybe there's a wealthy family out there too from which he may inherit squillions, but frankly I doubt that and neither is it any of our business unless you happen to be Cameron or Osborne or, indeed, the rest of the privileged toffs in government that have absolutely no fucking idea what a recession actually means to "ordinary" people. Then it certainly would be our business. 

Sorry...back to Mr Monbiot. By my reckoning, he's putting in his pocket, after deductions, a little over £50k a year which - on the Goodwin/Green Scale of Obscenely Undeserved Income (copyright pending) - barely causes a blip on the graph. 

The strap-line on Monbiot's web page is - “Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable” and whilst  his earnings could be described by some as "comfortable", he is most certainly not one that should be on the receiving end of the "affliction" he wishes, quite correctly, to be visited upon others. 

So: Well Done George Monbiot. Four words that I would never have set down (in that order) until recently. I have no reason to doubt his candour and he should be applauded for it rather than being subjected to a unfunny piece of sniping by Catherine Bennett in the Observer. I think she protests a little too much but not enough to make the list (see below).

But is he right to ask other journalists, columnists and commentators to do the same?

Short answer - YES!

Here's my top ten targets. I wonder if it's the same as his?

1) Polly Toynbee 

2) Fraser Nelson

3) Matthew D'Ancona

4) Peter Oborne

5) Little Richardjohn. 

6) Charles Moore

7) That Sieghart Woman
8) Trevor Kavanagh

9) Kevin Maguire

10) Nick Robinson