Soundbites are no substitute for justice

It was just hours before someone declared that justice had been done for Daniel Pelka.  According to the BBC website report, Senior Crown Prosecutor Lisa Windridge said Daniel’s killers had been sentenced for a ''heinous'' crime. ''We are pleased that justice has finally been achieved for Daniel Pelka.''

It hasn’t. Daniel, 4, starved to death by his mother and her partner, died a tragic death as dozens of people failed to notice what was going on.

Justice is not handed out to victims posthumously. Justice is handed out to the criminals, and if we are to have any hope of achieving and maintaining a sensible justice system we need to be able to sort out the differences between crime, punishment, revenge, retribution, public safety, rehabilitation, and any number of other quite difficult ideas.

I have no dispute whatsoever with the 30-year jail sentence in this case. But the process must involve rather more than lock up, throw away the key, hope everybody feels better and can forget what happened.

Sloppy soundbites and turgid thinking provide nothing but comfort blankets for some who may be feeling uneasy.

Royal baby: all circus and no bread

So July 22, 2013 repeats the situation of June 23, 1894, when the royal family had three direct heirs lined up. Not much has been made of this precedent in the Bullshit Media, possibly because the 1894 birth was that of Edward VIII, who proved not to be such a hot royal prospect, and abdicated when he was expected to turn up for work, preferring to shag an American Nazi sympathiser.

Bullshit Media has had a field day dropping its turds this week, gawping and drivelling about how popular the royal circus will be for the next million years or so. Radio 4’s Today programme asks republicans why the public seems, as it does seem, so comfortable with the monarchy.

The answer is that the public feels, justifiably or not, comfortable enough at the moment, and will happily applaud a moderately well organised circus decently stocked with a baby script and clown princes. The monarchy’s weakness will show only when the public doesn’t feel comfortable with life; when the bread issues – unemployment, homelessness, food prices, getting killed abroad for no good reason – become acute and the circus looks like a piss-take.

In tough times an overpaid family which does little but prance about in helicopters and procreate may find that no one gives a flying f**k about them, and would rather turn their royal mansions into publically owned museums.

Ding dong! Ask not for whom the bell should have been tolling...

In the old public school and media circles I once inhabited, chaps would talk about life as if everything was a sporting event and then assess how people had performed during it. Thus reporter x would be deemed to have had a Good War, or a politician would have had a Good Election (without necessarily winning).

So far then, who’s having a good Thatcher Funeral, and who’s having a bad one?

The Thatcherite Right look they’re having a Bad one. The Socialist Workers Party has got it totally wrong.  Russell Brand has written the defining piece so far, and Ed Miliband is having a Good One.

I’m watching it all from my sick-bed (actually housebound, but pottering and tottering).

The Thatcherite right was caught out by a successful campaign to make Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead, a 1939 song by Judy Garland from the film The Wizard Of Oz, top of the pops in the week Thatcher died.  The more they protested, the more successful the campaign became.  The more successful the campaign became, the more they protested. As a non-drinking alcoholic, I can recognize the symptoms: they couldn’t let go.

Russell Brand, a fellow non-practising addict, wrote a beautiful essay in The Guardian which showed why funerals are useful for the living. We sort out our attitudes to death, and to life, the gap between being born and dying. If we are lucky, we can experience the sort of empathy Brand was able feel for the frail old lady watering the roses who had once been a mighty world figure.  We learn about humility, and change.

Ed Miliband won deserved plaudits for a Commons speech  that noted the deep divisions that over Margaret Thatcher’s record as a politician and respected the mourning process, and won more plaudits for leaving it at that.

The supposedly Marxist Socialist Workers Party got it completely wrong, deciding to celebrate the death of the frail old lady watering the roses.  Marxism, and I’m happy to call myself a Marxist, is not humanist, and Marxists believe that class struggle has more social importance than idealized individual humans, polishing their individual humanist egos. But in the face of death, Marxists always support life.   From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! , a key aspiration of communism, is entirely about supporting life.

I downloaded the Judy Garland song. I think it is fair enough, if the Thatcher funeral is to be a public, participatory event, to register my dissent from public adulation of the deeds of Margaret Thatcher and that the download did that effectively.

Then a friend posted online: “Thatcherism or the death of Thatcher has brought out the wide spread and contagious disease known as 'immensely passive aggressive assholism' on Facebook threads across the country. Also known as 'I really judge and hate everything you stand for but I'm gonna be polite and pretend like I don't know that we are insulting each other whilst talking as though I am a professor of political theory,' disease. There is no known immunisation but symptoms are relieved by getting involved in your own community and getting off of Facebook.”

She has nailed the paradox. She’s right about the passive aggressive assholism. She’s wrong in that this might be a good week to just be polite and try not to insult anyone. Her antidote to all this bad behaviour – get involved in your own community – is helpful. Thatcher’s funeral, just like anybody else’s, reminds that we all have to die and death is a sad business for those left living.  And the way we move on is by helping each other.

There is, after all, such a thing as society. Whoever said there wasn’t?

Same old Old Street, always changing

I see from Professor Tim Stonor's blog that there has been a conference about improving Old Street roundabout as an urban space.Mmmmmmm....
I lived very close to the Old Street roundabout from 1997 to 2004. It was great, but the thing I learned about it was that the Old Street roundabout is always being regenerated, in the same way that the Forth Bridge was always being repainted. I don’t think there was a single day during those seven years when some part of the transport infrastructure that meets there (and there is a huge amount of that) was not under repair/malfunctioning/being redisigned. And there is always something there that someone will think they can improve.

The golden days of OlympicsJPAT

Now that the London Olympics 2012 are under way, a few TV viewers, in the gaps between being thrilled by the sporting prowess on show, may ask who gave planning permission for all these buildings in Stratford, East London,  to be erected.

I have written about this at some detail for Corporate Watch UK, but one quick answer is that it all started in 2004 with something called the Olympic Joint Planning Authority Team. This was made up of  democratically elected councillors from planning committees of the four boroughs that circle the Olympic Park.

On September 9, 2004, it granted outline permission for the Park, which was then just a circle on a map, and gave permission for 50 or so trees to be chopped down. You might think this important body has had a busy time since then. But no; as soon as our councillors had given permission they were kicked out of the way, and an unelected Government-appointed body, the Olympic Delivery Authority, took over.

Democracy doesn't lie down that easily, however. And on August 20, 2010,  OlympicJPAT was still going strong, as its website, which has since disappeared, demonstrated:

How green were my Olympics

The Manor Gardens Allotments, which used to be on a small island in the Lea Navigation, were concreted over to make way for the London Olympics 2012. The gardeners were moved to new allotments in Waltham Forest.

The conflict of interest between the allotment holders and the Olympic Delivery Authority presented a remarkable cultural clash. Intriguingly both sides in the conflict can trace their origins back to the same Victorian tradition - the philosophy of muscular Christianity. Those tracings present a fascinating picture of the social scales, shapes and sizes of democratic, economic and political processes.

The Manor Gardens Allotments are[1] the last trace of the Eton Mission to the East End started just after 1880. This mission was one of several undertaken by Oxford and Cambridge University colleges and public schools. These missions involved young men and sometimes women of wealthy and privileged backgrounds going out the East End and undertaking socially, morally and educationally improving works among the impoverished working classes.

The Eton Mission began just before 1883 in Hackney Wick with the building of a church and the establishment of premises for various clubs: men’s clubs, boy’s clubs, Sunday Schools, classes and social welfare programmes. It was funded by Eton College, then the pinnacle of wealth and privilege in the British education system and producer of endless Prime Ministers.[2]

Among the activities organised were several sports activities. The reason for their inclusion was based broadly in the Victorian philosophy of ‘muscular Christianity’ ideas prominent at Rugby public school under Dr Thomas Arnold.

Another person influenced by these ideas was the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who, at the same time as the Eton Mission started, was busy organising a revival of classical Greece’s Olympic Games.

“Thomas Arnold, the leader and classic model of English educators,” wrote de Coubertin “gave the precise formula for the role of athletics in education.”[3] In 1883 de Coubertin visited England to see how this public school athleticism worked in education.

The Eton Mission and particularly the sports clubs flourished. In 1924 four wealthy and well-connected Old Etonians set up the Manor Charitable Trust to administer them. They and their donors gave land for and funded an astonishing array of sports facilities, including the allotments - tilling the land being a healthy Christian activity - that became the Manor Garden Allotments.

After World War Two the Trust’s interests became more educational. Trustees purchased land outside of London, and the Trust eventually evolved into the Villiers Park Educational Trust which today helps ‘gifted and talented children’ from under-privileged backgrounds get into university.

The boys’ clubs closed in 1967 and, despite much recent somewhat nostalgic history about them, little is immediately publicly available about the disposal of the Trust’s assets. By 2000, however, the land on which the allotments stood was owned by the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority.[4] This land was compulsorily purchased by the Olympic Development Authority.

While the Eton Manor clubs thrived and declined, de Coubertin’s Olympic Movement grew into the global corporation which is today’s International Olympic Committee. Victorian ideals thus inspired both the creation and the temporary destruction of the Manor Gardens Allotments.

- - - - - - - - -                                            - - - - - - - - - - -

Olympic Reading

Books

Brohm, Jean-Mari, Essays. Sport: A Prison of Measured Time. Translated by Ian Fraser. Ink Links, London NW5 2JS. 1978.

Hill, Christopher. Olympic Politics, Manchester University Press, Manchester. 1992.

Articles

MacAloon, John J. ‘Legacy’ as Managerial/Magical Discourse in Contemporary Olympic Affairs, International Journal of the History of Sport, 25: 14, (2008) pp 2060 — 2071).

Johansen, Michelle. Adventures in the Wild East: The Early Years of the Eton Manor Boys’ Clubs. This lecture was delivered at the ‘Up the Manor’ Project Launch in September 2007. http://villierspark.org.uk/web_images//pdfs/michelles_lecture_the_early_years.pdf

Villiers Park Educational Trust, Our History, http://villierspark.org.uk

---

[1] The allotments are due to return to the Olympic Park area when the Games have finished, so I continue to use the present tense.

[2] Plus ca change…

[3] De Coubertin, Physical exercises in the modern world. Lecture given at the Sorbonne, November 1892. (cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Coubertin )

[4] Answer given by the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority to a Freedom of Information Act question from Julian Cheyne of the Clay’s Lane Residents Association.

Bypass bliss to Pompey

THE London to Portsmouth road will from this week finally consist entirely of bypasses.
When the Hindhead Tunnel opens on Wednesday car drivers will travel on dual carriageway all the way from Putney Heath to the Portsmouth ferry terminal. Their only inconveniences will be two roundabouts.
The opening means that the London to Portsmouth road has now been completely moved off the route it originally took when it was first designated as the A3 in 1923.
It also means that the A3 now spends all its time avoiding places rather than going to them. The historic towns, whose centres were all pretty near wrecked one way or another by car traffic, are now deviations off the main road rather than stops on it.
Kingston-upon-Thames, Esher, Ripley, Guildford, Godalming, Liphook, Petersfield, and Cosham were all towns that once had thriving businesses based on the through transport of the Portsmouth Road. The various bypasses have restored some of the peace to their centres, but often the historic travellers’ staging posts have been lost.
Now Hindhead joins the list of places saved from the blight of the A3 – and the common and the Devil’s Punchbowl can once again be enjoyed in all their glory.

Messy morals of investigative journalism

Investigative journalism has always been amoral. The end justifies the means and is itself justified by being in the public interest. The judge of that is ultimately the public. There are no moral or legal considerations about it.

Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World died not because it behaved immorally, but because it failed to satisfy anyone that its use of the techniques of investigative journalism was in the public interest. Its farewell edition in many ways demonstrated the history of the abuse of those techniques.

The Guardian, its editor Alan Rushbridger and reporter Nick Davies, have rightly been applauded for exposing the NotW’s phone hacking. The Guardian rightly had brickbats hurled at it when, in 1983, it failed to protect Sarah Tisdall, a source who was judged to have acted illegally in providing the paper with information which it chose to publish.

It’s not a right-wing or a left-wing thing, investigative journalism; it’s a messy thing, and most newspapers are wary of it. But when it works - and on very occasional moments in its 167-year history the NotW made it work exceptionally well - the public is served by journalism at its best.

Public interest is of course a concept that orthodox tabloid journalists struggle with. They tend to confuse it with what they think the public is interested in. Rod Gilchrist, a former Daily Mail man in New York and deputy editor of the Mail on Sunday once summed that up as “they’re interested in how much money people have got and who is having sex with who.”

The difference between the two is not particularly tricky as moral mazes go, but NotW editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson blundered badly in the hedges. As a result hundreds of their employees lost their jobs, millions of people can no longer buy what was the most popular newspaper in the UK, and the Murdochs have closed an institution that occasionally defended the public interest.

Fit and proper?

MPs and the public are outraged by the immorality and illegality of the NotW’s phone hacking, and the surge of that hostility has led to the ending, possibly temporarily, of the Murdoch bid to take over the whole of BSkyB. I’m slightly worried to find myself thinking that this leaves the Murdochs further away from the stuff they are not so bad at, ie serving up the TV circuses of football and movies, and still totally in charge of the stuff they are pretty grotesque at, the News International newspapers, The Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.
Another worrying thought is that the Murdochs could construct a very solid looking defence against any regulator’s application of a fit-and-proper-person test around just two words: Richard Desmond.

Declaration of interest: I was sacked from The Sun by Murdoch for refusing to cross printers' picket lines in Wapping in 1986.

Private history of a tycoon's mansion

If the Thames Gateway is a thoroughly modern public concept being rather dubiously attached to an excellent history project which seems to lend it some cultural status, then Sutton Place, which I came across on my stroll down the A3, is something of the opposite: a building of immense historical significance which is, and always has been, very private.

The back entrance (pictured above) to the mansion came as something of a surprise to me as I approached Guildford, in Surrey, having walked down from Burnt Common. There is no great house visible from the road, and from a car whizzing by on the A3 up to London it looks like a an impressive gateway with no further clues to what it is about. It is hardly possible to make out the name, Sutton Place, from a passing vehicle. Its history, when I came to look it up, was something of a surprise.

Sutton Place it turned out was, to quote the 20th century architectural oracle Nikolaus Pevsner, “the most important English house of the years after Hampton Court”, or as Wikipedia puts it, Sutton Place “is a Grade I listed Tudor manor house built in 1530 by Sir Richard Weston (d 1541). It is second only in importance to Hampton Court Palace in showing the earliest traces of Italianate renaissance design elements in English architecture.”

I don’t propose here to detail the architectural glories of the place or the estate or go into much of its history. It’s the surprise I’m interested in. At a time when even Buckingham Palace’s State Rooms are occasionally open to the public, when stately mansions all over the country depend on throwing their doors open to the public, and when the National Trust has, for 100 years, been bringing historic buildings into the public eye, it comes as a shock to be reminded that history can be private, no entry, keep out; that so much of history is owned by the wealthy classes and does not come into the public gaze unless the wealthy deign, or are economically squeezed, to place it there.

Sutton Place remains a very private slice of English history, held close by members of the wealthiest echelons of British society. Briefly Sir Richard Weston was an under-treasurer to Henry VIII, who stayed at Sutton in 1533. The house stayed in the Weston family until the end of the 18th century. It later passed on the Salvins, a prominent Durham family, and was for a period rented by the newspaper proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, aka the Daily Mail owner Lord Northcliffe. It was bought in 1918 by the 5th Duke of Sutherland, a Conservative Cabinet minister and Privy Councillor in the Twenties and Thirties, and head of one of the richest land-owning families in Britain. In 1959 the house was sold to oil tycoon and philanthropist Jean Paul Getty, described by Forbes magazine in 1957 as the richest American alive.

In 1976, many society parties and much Getty family drama later, the house was bought by Stanley J Seeger, an American timber and oil heir who, in turn, sold it off in 1986 for about £10million to Fred Koch, an American philanthropist. In 2004 the house was sold to Alisher Usmanov, the Russian based Uzbek billionaire, who owns a large minority shareholding in Arsenal Football Club and an even larger majority shareholding in the Russian industrial conglomerate Metalloinvest. He secretly paid £10million for the house and the surrounding 300 acres of the Sutton Estate. His identity as its owner was not known for three years, when the Sunday Times reported close friend of Usmanov’s as saying: “It’s the only property he owns in Britain and he bought it because it’s a beautiful and unique building which was in a very bad state. He is currently renovating it and wants to restore it to its former splendour.”

Sutton Place, for centuries a home to England’s ruling elite, is now the one of the chosen homes of a man who definitely qualifies for citizenship of what the Sunday Times last week called Richistan - that global superstate of wealthy plutocrats who run the world. And its history remains as private as ever.

Surrey, Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner, Penguin 1962.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Place,_Surrey
http://www.jwhistory.org.uk/sutton.html An excellent local history of the area
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2652890.ece

Gateway to heaven, via Olympus?

So what is the Thames Gateway? I asked myself the question after a visit last week to the opening of the excellent Working Lives Of The Thames Gateway exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London.

I’d never heard of anything with any history called the Thames Gateway. The estuary yes, the riverside, the Thames Barrier, the dockside, there were hosts of words to describe the Thames and its activities but never actually a Thames Gateway.

John Pudney in his book London’s Docks, covers the history of the capital’s docks without one mention of a gateway. He finds that the dock workers, within the industrial society of their time “had indeed established a way of life. Their community was distinctive, geographical, shaped by the bizarre spacing of their work on the tideway between the Tower of London and Tilbury Fort.” Peter Ackroyd in his mystical journey down the Thames, finds many words for the waterway, including Sacred River, but never records a Thames Gateway.

The first mention of a Thames Gateway that I could find was in that old favourite The London Encyclopaedia, the completely revised 3rd edition, published in 2008. There among the Thames entries in the index (Thames House, Police, Polytechnic, Water Authority etc) was the Thames Gateway initiative, 681. Page 681 baffled me: fascinating references to Ranelagh Gardens (in Chelsea; Mozart once played in an orchestra stand there) and a splendid lithograph by J C Bourne of the building of the railway at Camden Town in the 1830s.

But no Thames Gateway, until, at the end of the Rainham (settlement of the ruling people ‘Roeginga-ham’) and South Hornchurch entry, I found: “The Thames Gateway initiative, announced by the government in 2002 to develop a great swathe of the riverside from Canary Wharf to the estuary with ‘sustainable communities’, made special mention of the need to preserve Rainham Marsh as ‘one of London’s last wild spaces’.”

The point being that none of the workers whose vivid memories are so fabulously recorded in the Working Lives exhibition’s well illustrated accompanying book, would have recognised themselves as working in anything called the Thames Gateway. This is a Government-created 21st century concept, as the book states. “The Gateway was created as a development zone covering six London boroughs along the Thames riverside stretching from Tower Bridge in the west to Erith and Rainham in the east. It was created as a focus for its regeneration through Government and private funding… It sought to writ large the successes of the London Docklands Development Corporation on the Isle of Dogs but on a much, much broader canvas.”

The Thames Gateway initiative became the Thames Gateway Development Corporation in 2004, and in doing so indeed writ large one of the LDDC’s great successes: in the areas it covered it removed large scale planning control from the hands of democratically elected local councillors and placed it the hands of a largely Government-appointed body. Its establishment also came in very handy the following year when the British Olympic Committee, bidding to host the 2012 Olympic Games, could honestly tell the International Olympic Committee, that the proposed 2012 London Olympic Games site fell within boundary of an area already earmarked for regeneration. This was true, for the Thames Gateway, as a concept, at the crucial geographic point, took a turn up the River Lea so that its boundaries enclosed a chunk of the Lower Lea Valley which was already part of the Lea Valley Regional Park and where the Games site was proposed. It was also handy, because the IOC, and its global sponsors including McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, do love the four-yearly TV advertising bonanza to be associated with a nice slice of regeneration.

The Thames Gateway Development Corporation went from strength to strength, even though its planning control over the Olympic Games was whipped away as soon as the bid had succeeded and placed in the hands of the Olympic Development Authority (majority government appointed, with local authority nominees).

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown waxed lyrical about the project to the Thames Gateway Forum in November 2007: “Europe’s biggest regeneration project is underway and the prospects for this area 40 miles along the Thames estuary, are once again being transformed. This will put the Thames Gateway, not just in a leadership position in Britain, but in Europe and the world, not just for economic development, but as I will suggest in a few minutes, for environmental development, as well.”

He promised £9billion would be invested in the area, over and above Crossrail, and that by 2016 there would be 160,000 new homes and 225,000 new jobs. It is impossible to assess the progress towards fulfilling these ambitions, because much of the investment was expressed in the form of school, university education and health projects. On top of that it will be difficult to monitor any double accounting that might take place over the £9.3billion being invested in Olympic infrastructure that might just get mixed up with the Thames Gateway figures…

Gordon Brown’s optimism for the project was by no means universal. That same month the House of Commons’ public accounts committee reported its concerns that the Gateway development might become a “public spending calamity”. Its chairman Edward Leigh said: “The DCLG [Department for Communities and Local Government to which TGDC was accountable] is at present manifestly not up to the job of managing the enormously ambitious enterprise of regenerating the Thames Gateway region. It still amounts to little more than a group of disjointed projects which do not add up to a programme which is purposeful and moving forward.

“The department has been incapable of taking the present rather insubstantial vision and galvanizing the multitude of central, regional and local partners in the scheme to work together to turn it into reality.” Leigh said it was “incredible” the DCLG had not yet set a budget for the project, and that the final cost to the taxpayer was still unclear.

It is difficult see where the TGDC is going at the moment. In its 2009 - 2010 annual report the TGDC boasts that, during that year, it invested £39.4million in the area. It also said that the corporation had granted planning consents for 4,462 homes and office space providing capacity for 3,542 jobs. These figures bear little relation to the grandiose numbers bounced around three years ago by the former prime minister.

Working Lives Of The Thames Gateway was produced by Eastside Community Heritage, which was founded in 1999 and therefore has had a longer working life than the Thames Gateway. The project was funded by the National Heritage Lottery fund. The histories and interviews are excellent and their value will easily outlast their spurious heritage attachment to a rather unconvincing development concept and its struggling Development Corporation.

The voices are genuine and the old demands of the East End still ring true.

Sadly, the following quote is not one of the National Heritage Lottery Fund sponsored quotations. It was the view of the East End Dockland Action Group, in 1970, recorded by Pudney. “We want the riverside to be enjoyed by all the people - not to be parcelled off for sale to the rich. We have no use for safari parks, yachting marinas and luxury hotels. Local people must decide what is to happen to their area. We want genuine participation in planning and we will not be fobbed off with silly public relations exercises.”

Exhibition reviewed at Culture24 (plus see, right, the History Student blog)

Pudney, John. London’s Docks, 1975, Thames & Hudson Ltd.

Ackroyd, Peter. Thames. 2007. Chatto & Windus.

The London Encyclopedia (revised third edition). 2008. Macmillan.

Strolling down to Pompey

The opening of the Hindhead tunnel will be the most significant opening of 2011. For roadies and petrolheads it will mean the A3 is dual carriageway all the way from Tibbett’s Corner in Putney to the Dockyard gates in Portsmouth, and that the Hindhead traffic jam, the (very often literally) long-standing bane of Hampshire motorists’ life is finally unblocked. They will justifiably celebrate.

I have no idea how the ecological balance sheet stands for the new Hindhead Tunnel; most new road building seems to fall on the negative side. It will, experts say, be the longest non-estuarial tunnel in the UK so presumably the boring technology must have been pretty cutting edge. It also gives a great chance for Hindhead Common to return to a more natural state, potentially restoring, alongside the Devil’s Punchbowl, one of the most beautiful spots in the south of England.

The development also means that the first A3 London to Portsmouth road will have been, in slightly less than 100 years, almost completely shifted off its original line. The London to Portsmouth road was named as the A3 when the great road numbering system was brought in on April 1, 1923; it then ran through Kingston, Esher, Guildford, Liss, Petersfield and Cosham, and on to Portsea Island. All those towns have since been bypassed, starting with the Kingston bypass opened by then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in October 1927.

The old line of the A3, renumbered in various places (the Kingston to Esher road, for example, has become the A307), is now out of main road usage and provides fascinating historical snapshots of road, town and village development over the twentieth century. This road itself is a development of the various old coaching routes and turnpike roads from London to Portsmouth, and the traces of these, now that the A3 is shifted on to its new super speedway line, can hopefully be explored at greater leisure.

Which is how a retired sub-editor with a pencil, a notebook, a camera and an itch to experiment with html - http://www.londona3.co.uk/home.htm - comes to be strolling down to Pompey…

Ah, the joys of leisure

Social networking produces two bonuses this week: Facebook comes up with a free ticket to Midsummer at the Tricycle Kilburn, and twitter tips off about a National Theatre cancellation which gives a cheap ticket to Hamlet. Not bad for someone who can go months on end without going near a theatre or even thinking about it.
Midsummer, apparently an old hit from the Edinburgh Festival last year, is a great comedy, musical with songs its writer and producer calls it. A great laugh, and touching. Hamlet has a very good Rory Kinnear and is a fabulous pruduction by, better get his name right, Nicholas Hytner.

Exposed by the leaks

So I pass my sixtieth birthday and the students are still revolting, taking their protest right up to the House of Commons as it votes to effectively privatise higher education. Great campaigns by the students using occupations and the Internet, and transforming Twitter from a medium through which the world discovers what Stephen Fry had for breakfast to one that is a useful tool in political struggle. Even at 60 no home but the struggle as fantastically under-rated novelist Edward Upward wrote.

Students and wikileaks then were last week’s firing pistons in the motor of British history. The wikileaks saga demonstrates an outrageous abuse of civil rights in what clearly looks like a convoluted plot by the Americans to get their hands on Assange. I can understand the American diplomatic service being miffed at being exposed in their own cables as a bunch of devious, two-faced, calculating manipulators, but what’s new about that. The real exposure in the wikileaks cables is how different the real picture of American foreign policy is from that presented in the mainstream media. In other words how many of our respected journalists swallow without question official government utterances. It’s as if the sort of demented twisted thinking that made the Iraq dossier into a case for invading that country was not so much a one-off act of political desperation by Bush and New Labour, but rather the norm of western diplomatic thinking, and that journalists get embedded into that just as much as they get embedded into jingoistic reporting alongside the troops. Not true of all journalists, but the exceptions, Pilger, Fisk and others seem increasingly marginalised.

Peaceful, now then to be a retired hack, not that, as a sub-editor in the lower echelons of British tabloid driveldom, I was ever near the levers of press political power. I managed to turn down my only offer of promotion up the greasy careerist pole…that was many moons and many bars ago.

So, back to finishing off a disgracefully decadent Euphorium chocolate birthday cake, and watch out for the next anti-extradition demo…