de burgh: the mao of merseyside

A football team's colours are key to their identity. Fashions have come and gone, hems of shorts have gone from the knee to the crotch and back again, empires have risen and fallen, but the colours remain.

Wearing them to the match is part of the ritual, it declares the wearer to be part of something greater, something that pre-dates them and will live on after they're gone. The unbroken sweep of the same colour is part of the atmosphere in the ground.

So it's a big statement when Manchester United fans abandon their red, black and white and start wearing yellow and green. These were the original colours of the team when it started a over a century ago. They're being worn again as a statement about the roots of the club, specifically against their present capitalist scumfuck owners.

The takeover of top-flight football by Very Big Money Indeed affects all clubs, especially the 'big four' in England; Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool.

So, where would you go if you were looking for an unwitting army to conscript? If you want unswerving lifelong loyalty in a group tens of thousands strong, where better to place yourself than at the head of a supposed people's revolt in their name?

So it is that we see the recruiting sergeant of totalitarian shapeshifting lizards setting himself up as the Mao of Merseyside, pitting himself against Liverpool's present directors and painting himself as a scouse man of the people.

Laying into Liverpool's owners, Chris De Burgh said

These people are not football supporters, more importantly, they are not Liverpool Football Club supporters and they should go.

As an Argentinian-born Irish aristocrat, Chris De Burgh couldn't mock us more heartily. After the dark day of usurpment we will wonder how we were ever taken in by such talk.

The teams of the Premiership elite have an unmatched devout following, with 50,000 people jostling for tickets at every match, followed by millions around the world watching their every move with awe and adulation. And here he comes riding that focus, the Pied Piper of Argentina, leading us into lizardly dystopia.

If he's being so brazen, he must be confident that there is little time left to confront him. We might have only days to go.

save 6music - get it done

No apologies for a further nudge to save the BBC digital radio stations 6Music and Asian Network.

As I've made clear, I've a huge personal bias for 6Music. Not just for its greatness so far, but for what it promises as a part of the musical firmament.

As Steve Lamacq put it

Don’t scrap it now before its fully discovered its true identity. Instead, in five years time, take the praise for what it will have grown into and achieved: an independently-minded station on the periphery of pop. A station which understands and celebrates our musical history – while always looking to the future.

All our Facebook indignation and sincere bloggery is worthless unless acted upon.

It's easy and fairly quick to fill out the BBC's online survey. Please get it done.

Tom Robinson explains a few key points about submitting your thoughts.

When making your views known to the Trust, here’s the crucial point:

The argument is not about whether Stuart Maconie or Bobby Friction make excellent radio shows. It’s about whether that excellence should be merged into digital offerings from fewer, bigger, more marketable “brands”.

If you are keen that Asian Network and 6 Music should survive as distinct public service offerings, then your best hope is to convince all 11 members of the BBC Trust of their importance. That there’s more to “Putting Quality First” than narrow categories and brand consolidation. And that there’s a place in the nation’s heart (and half a percent of the BBC budget) for these two small, standalone centres of excellence.

We could still win this. Help tip the odds.

product displacement

Many years ago I was out drinking with someone who worked in a bar. At closing time, it struck me that I'd never heard her call lasties. 'Haven't you noticed?' she asked. I shrugged and waited. Disbelieving that I was unaware, that her bar's policy really was so subliminal, she nonetheless explained.

Ten minutes before last orders, they put on the Jive Bunny CD, but quietly. No matter how drunk the clientele, the place unfailingly emptied within fifteen minutes.

I wonder if this proven idea could be extended. Indeed, I wonder if perhaps it already has. Further to the news that product placement is to be allowed on British TV, are movies still one step ahead of TV in selling opportunities for anti-product placement?

For example, if a movie shows a family getting into a car with the Volvo badge prominently displayed, it means they're about to have a crash but all survive unscathed. Could Volvo instead pay for a death crash to happen in a Nissan? Could Pepsi pay for an obese toothless nerdy diabetic character to drink Coke?

I haven't seen either of those examples in action, but what else other than this principle can explain the excruciating syrupy songs at the end of James Cameron's movies?

I suspect the cinema cleaners' unions realise he runs seven minutes of credits, so they got him to put My Heart Will Go On - a song as tragic as the needless death of 1,500 people - over Titanic's closing credits, causing everyone to run from the cinema clutching their bleeding ears.

Then comes Avatar and he bolts on Leona Lewis' I See You - a song as great an atrocity as the attempted genocide on Pandora - to the end, making all but the severely hearing impaired trample one another in their rush for the exits.

In both cases, the cleaners get in early and have the popcorn boxes gathered up and are out of there, probably before the intolerable aimless forgettable warbling's ended.

And that forgettability is a further achievement of those songs. Like And I Will Always Love You from The Bodyguard, you've heard My Heart Will Go On a squillion times yet you can't really remember how it goes. How hard it must be to write a song so prevalent yet so soluble.

Sure, you think you can remember And I Will Always Love You, but (apart from people who know the Dolly Parton original) try singing anything other than the title line. Go on, really try it.

See what I mean?

The Bodyguard. For fuck's sake. They made that piece of shit whilst the same studios were turning down Tarantino. Top tip kids: never watch a movie where you can tell everything that will happen from the fucking title alone.

My friend Caroline found that out the hard way last weekend with Snakes On A Plane. Sheesh.

i can't believe it's not... a real tv show

Product placement - a company paying to have its product included in a TV show - has been illegal on TV in the UK. But not for much longer. This comes despite the government saying a year ago that it would be a bad idea.

The government said plainly that the morality of the idea is still the same, it's just that as the recession sets in (you know, the same recession they keep telling us is over), the first thing to suffer is advertising revenue. So product placement becomes acceptable because it will throw £30m into ailing profits.

Of course, they phrased it a little differently.

Adherence to our current position in which UK TV programme-making cannot benefit at all from the income potentially to be generated by product placement would lead to continuing damage to its finances at a time when this crucial part of our creative industries needs all the support we can give it.

There will be certain product placement free zones. As children are less able to differentiate between fact and sales pitch, product placement will be prohibited in children's programmes. So as long as children never watch any other programmes everything will be fine.

News programmes and the entire BBC will be safe. Additionally, the government plans to prohibit alcohol and foods high in fat, sugar and salt. For now.

Of course, we've long had product placement on our TV in imported shows, and in a world of increasingly globalised brands it will have had an effect on us.

Additionally, it's existed in movies for a long time. One of the many great things about the Spice Girls movie Spiceworld - genuinely a work of cultural significance and real wit, only dismissed by those who haven't seen it - was the way they exaggerated their product placement and showed how it had already become familiar to us without realising.

So the new laws don't introduce it to us. But they do take a ferociously destructive social force and increase its power and range.

As Bill Hicks said, advertising and marketing is the most evil concept ever.

tories: like the last 50 years never happened

In January, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan was on Any Questions. He defended the Conservative plans to give tax breaks to married couples as actually being good for women's needs, saying

there may be women with partners who are given an extra argument for getting a ring on their finger by this. They’re able now to say well here is an incentive.

Because we're still living in the 1950s, a land of stereotypes where women want marriage and men try to avoid it.

Around the same time (the Any Questions show in January, not the 1950s), I plugged the site doing spoofs of the creepy Conservative poster campaign.

There have been several new ones since that tickled me, especially this one



The campaign was too alien and faux-presidential, so they've replaced it with ones that have pictures of Ordinary People.

They tackle our visceral hatred head on, aiming squarely at people who've never liked them.



Straight out of the gate, the spoofers hit back



But more interestingly there's another spoofing site that uses 'I've never voted Labour before...'.

Although it's a pro-Tory site, it actually serves to show us what they're really - and always have been - about.

It includes this one.



Because Labour are letting in lots of immigrants, and all immigrants love Labour's policies. And we all hate immigrants.

It echoes the one in the comments on - him again - Daniel Hannan's blog post

I’ve never voted Labour before because I’ve just been granted asylum from Baghdad.

This, even more starkly, shows that for the Conservatives the last fifty years haven't happened - it's just paraphrasing a slogan they used back then. In the 1964 general election, the Conservatives fought for the Smethwick seat under the slogan 'if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour'.

Don't let the young man from the PR firm Michael Rimmer David Cameron fool you. It's still the same Conservatives as it ever was.

save bbc 6music

Believing themselves to be facing cuts in the years ahead, especially if the Conservatives come to power, the BBC got in there first. They hired one of the authors of the Conservatives' last election manifesto to do a report into the BBC.

He recommended a bunch of cuts, including the axing of two of their digital radio stations, the Asian Network and 6Music. The Director General just said he agrees.

6Music is the only reason I bought a fucking digital radio. If they close it I want my fucking money back.

The station has 620,000 listeners a week and costs £7m a year to run. That's about a tenner a listener. I'm sure half the listeners would pay 20 quid a year to have the station there. I certainly would. It's struck me many times as odd that the American model of small, specialist interest listener-supported stations isn't replicated here.

And just having an absence of corporate propaganda invading your brainspace is well worth coughing up for your TV license, so why not for 6Music too?

By the way, don't think that commercial stations are somehow free. Some time in the 90s I read a study that showed the average family of four paid more for commercial TV than for the BBC TV license, thanks to the extra cost on their groceries to cover the cost of advertising.

The BBC Trust complain that only 20% of adults have heard of 6Music. Well yes. It's a digital radio station. You have to have a DAB, listen online or be one of those people - if they really exist - who listen to the radio on their digital TV receiver. Stick it on FM and watch the listenership ratings balloon.

The Director General's report says 6Music 'competes head on for a commercially valuable audience'. Er, right. So now it's a big, commercially valuable insignificant niche.

Back on Planet Earth, 6Music is not in competition with any commercial station. The BBC Trust's own report shows 82% of listeners believe 6 Music offered 'something that could not be found elsewhere'. It's loved precisely because it appeals to people who want the unexpected, the intelligent and the weird, people who hate the corporate.

Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone plays experimental music from further out than anywhere else I've ever heard, and not as some gimmick but as an envigorated exploration of what music can do to us.

Getting passionate, informed presenters in like Tom Robinson to do the new bands show, or Bruce Dickinson to do the rock show, or Craig Charles to do the funk and soul show, leads to an unrivalled ability to discover new acts.

Tom Robinson's show alone has given the first radio play to well over a thousand bands. People who are now household names like Florence and The Machine or Amy Winehouse spent their early days doing sessions for 6Music.

Craig Charles' show is the most expensive I've ever heard. I can barely get through half an hour without having to go and buy some killer tune he's played.

All across the station's output there's a liberal dose of the BBC archives, a simply unparallelled stockpile of treasures. Every DJ plays Peel session tracks, and Gideon Coe's show is entirely comprised of old sessions, live concerts and other stuff, giving you new angles on artists you know and unearthing tiny greatness from people you've never heard of.

This archive, as Radio 7 also shows, is a gargantuan goldmine. They should stick all those Peel sessions and live concerts and stuff on iTunes, or create their own download platform. The cost of digitising would be minimal.

The Bowie and Queen type stuff would sell by the skipload, but there's something else. Everyone who loves pop and rock music has a few pet favourite artists they adore who are largely unknown. We'd practically soil ourselves at being given their unreleased BBC sessions in clear digital quality. It woulds surely only take a couple of downloads of any given session to cover the cost of digitisation.

Kinnell, there's my second (admittedly implausible, arguably beyond-remit illegal) fundraising idea for the BBC in as many minutes. That'd make more than the savings from closing 6Music.

There is a 12 week public consultation about their plans. The BBC have said they want to close 6Music, but BBC Trust chairman Michael Lyons has also clearly said that if there is 'massive public concern' then the station can be saved.

Write to the BBC. It will make a difference. Here is how to do it.

faith in medicine

Last week the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published its report on homeopathy.

Its findings were unequivocal, saying 'as they are not medicines' the NHS should stop funding their prescription, and they should not be allowed to have labels claiming medicinal properties. The report is clear in its belief that homeopathy does not work beyond placebo effect.

Supporters of homeopathy counter with the fact that it can't be a placebo as it works for a lot of people. This misunderstands what's meant by placebo.

It's often interpreted as meaning 'you are a gullible idiot' or 'you were making your symptoms up'. The fact is that placebo does produce real, measurable positive results for people with real medical conditions.

The interplay between our individual personal mindset and our physical health is as extensive as it is uncharted and mysterious. All of us have had our demeanour alter our susceptibility to illness. We don't need to know how something works in order to know that it does work.

But that's the thing with homeopathy; whether it works. When you get to the high-quality trials - randomised double-blinds - it is shown over and over to be no better than placebo.

Indeed, this was admitted by Paul Bennett, the Professional Standards Director and Superintendent Pharmacist at Boots the Chemist, in his evidence to the Science and Technology Committee. But he said he sells them anyway because

It is about consumer choice for us. A large number of our consumers actually do believe they are efficacious

A large number of people believe using cola as a vaginal douche prevents pregnancy. If I labelled cola tins as contraceptives and sold them for a tenner each, would Boots stock them?

A far larger number of people - many more than believe in homeopathy, and for centuries longer than homeopathy's been established - get real results from praying to the Virgin Mary. Should Boots be stocking statuettes of the blessed virgin with labels saying 'cures cancer'?

During my adolescent dalliance with Christianity, a man at the church explained the power of prayer. He told of how there had been a sick baby in hospital, but the parents had organised for people across the whole county to pray at the same time. It worked instantly, the doctor says the time of prayer was the moment when the infant's condition started improving.

Leaving aside the unlikelihood of a doctor pinpointing a single instant in which someone started getting better, I love the concept of god the story invokes. God hadn't noticed the sick child already. Or maybe he had, but it didn't strike him as unfair until it was pointed out to him.

Even then, a single prayer wouldn't have done it, it took a synchronised mass effort. Perhaps there are so many individuals praying that there's a sort of indistinct hubub. It's like being in a room with fifty people talking, you can't make out anything, but if ten of them suddenly say your name in unison you hear clearly. 'Oi! God! Over here!'

There are so many contradictions of the idea of an all-knowing benevolent god in there, it makes you rather admire homeopaths for their comparative logical consistency.

Having that memory bubble up in my brain sent me off to dig out an extract from George Orwell's wartime diary. You can never read too much of Orwell's chunky four-volume Collected Essays Letters and Journalism.

Anyway, in March 1941 he was a member of the Home Guard, and says it was 'more or less compulsory' to take part in their church parade and national day of prayer.

Apparently God is expected to help us on the ground that we are better than the Germans. In the set prayer composed for the occasion God is asked to "turn the hearts of our enemies, and to help us to forgive them; to give them repentance for their misdoings, and a readiness to make amends." Nothing about our enemies forgiving us.

It seems to me that the Christian attitude would be that we are no better than our enemies, we are all miserable sinners, but that it so happens that it would be better if our cause prevailed and therefore that it is legitimate to pray for this...

I suppose the idea is that it would be bad for morale to let people realise that the enemy has a case, though even that is a psychological error, in my opinion.

But perhaps they aren't thinking primarily about the effect on people taking part in the service but are simply looking for direct results from their nation­wide praying campaign, a sort of box barrage fired at the angels.

support fossil industry prisoner pat o'donnell

Shell have been planning to drill gas fields off the Western Irish coast at Rossport, County Mayo. There has been a concerted campaign against them, including comprehensive and relentless local opposition bolstered by campaigners from further afield.

This is about transnational corporations getting governments to give them rights to resources, whilst those same corporations ride roughshod over local communities. It's about the local impacts and dangers of building the gas pipeline. It's about the lunacy of drilling more fossil fuels as climate change takes hold. If you have any ability to understand injustice, you will see it plainly at Rossport.

Two weeks ago Pat O'Donnell, a local fisherman, was jailed for seven months for charges resulting from his resistance to Shell's gas project. Pat has been one of the most active opponents of the project, and his actions over the last few years have made him a major obstacle for Shell.

As well as being an amazing campaigner, he's also respected and admired by locals - who nicknamed him 'The Chief' - as well as visiting campaigners who talk of the lengths he goes to in order to ensure visitors feel welcomed and at home.

Niall Harnett details it further

Pat O'Donnell was sentenced to 3 months imprisonment on a charge of a 'breach of the peace' and 4 months imprisonment for 'obstructing a Garda'. Judge Raymond Groarke ordered that the sentences be run consecutively. As a result Pat will serve 7 months in custody at Castlerea Prison, Castlerea, Co Roscommon. These were two separate incidents involving the Gardaí at a time of high tension surrounding Maura's hunger strike at Glengad in September 2008, that gave rise to the charges against Pat...

Pat has stood up to Shell since the Erris Inshore Fisherman's Association united in 2005 to oppose offshore pipelaying in Broadhaven Bay. Regrettably, Shell paid off the fishermen over the course of the last few years. Pat refused any pay-off by Shell, including an offer of 300,000 Euro in 2009. Yes... Three Hundred Thousand Euro.

Pat and his son Johnathan have been arrested while fishing in their boats and detained in custody, with no charges arising, on different occasions while Shell boats tore their fishing gear from their moorings at sea. Pat has been singled out along with his brothers for assault by Gardaí at Bellanaboy and been punched in the face sustaining facial injuries and broken teeth.

In the early morning of June 11th 2009, as the pipe-laying ship the Solitaire prepared to steam to Broadhaven Bay, Pat's fishing boat was boarded by 4 masked men, 2 of whom held him and his crewman Martin McDonnell at gunpoint in the wheelhouse while the 2 others went down to the engine room to scuttle the boat. The boat sank to ocean floor while Pat and Martin had to be rescued from their lifeboat.

It doesn't take a supersleuth to work out who the gunmen were working for. Of course, while Pat languishes in jail, nobody has been charged with the attack on him and sinking of his boat.

Please take the time to write to Pat in prison:

Pat O’Donnell,
Castlerea Prison,
Harristown,
Castlerea,
Co. Roscommon
Republic of Ireland

Prison is boring. It is designed to be so; it is an institution intended to break the human spirit. Getting the mail is, for many prisoners, the highlight of the day. A card or letter is proof that there are people who care. Descriptions and pictures of things outside inspire dreams and hope. Even just a postcard is something that takes you one minute yet will be looked at over and over and make the prisoner know they're supported.

As with writing to any political prisoners, don’t think that just because you don’t personally know Pat you don’t have anything to say. You can write not only about why his cause matters to you, but about whatever it is you do.

Remember that all mail will be read by the authorities, so don’t put anything that’d incriminate anyone.

Be sure to put a sender’s address on the back of the envelope; it gives the screws less excuse to stop your letter getting through.

You don't need a prisoner number or anything; stuff mailed to the address above will reach Pat. You can send zines, books, magazines, new and second hand CDs (so long as they originals, not home burnt); nothing has to be direct from a publisher/amazon-style supplier.

If climate change, the fossil fuel industry or local autonomy bother you at all, write to Pat.

gaza: writing from beneath the bombs

A year ago, as Israeli forces rained military death upon Gaza, we blogged, we wrote emails, some of us even took to the streets. And all of it felt futile.

Others, however, were out there. The Free Gaza boat activists had sailed laden with supplies for the besieged Gazans, and many were still there when Operation Cast Lead began.

Sharyn Lock was one of them and, as I nudged folk towards at the time, was blogging from the thick of it. Her writing was clear, intelligent, compassionate and fearless. She wrote calmly, straightforwardly and thoughtfully, yet didn't flinch from her freaked out Western reactions, nor from the duty to stay where she was most needed and report what she saw.

The subject matter was so vivid, the number of voices coming out so few, and her talent so great, that she was commissioned to make a book of her writings which has just been published as Gaza: Beneath the Bombs.

In order to assemble it into a coherent narrative she worked with Sarah Irving. Irving's not only an incisive non-mainstream journalist but is also an experienced volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement.

She first went to Palestine in March 2002 as part of a group of international citizens whose presence in Israeli-occupied territories would, they hoped, curb the excesses of the Israeli military. Soon after they arrived, the Israelis launched fierce attacks, massacring Palestinians and shooting unarmed peace demonstrators.

This being before blogging had taken off, Sarah maintained frequent email contact with the outside world. Her reports from Bethlehem - contrasting sharply with the biases of the corporate media - were startling, harrowing and compelling. So much so that I couldn't let them disappear and archived them over at U-Know.

Her writing, like Lock's, is trustworthy precisely because it doesn't have any pretence of objectivity. They lay their feelings wide open; we see any bias plainly, we see why it exists, as they refuse to shy away from emotional responses. How could anyone really be there and really be part of it but remain aloof?

If a writer on a political subject manages to preserve a detached attitude, it is nearly always because he doesn't know what he is talking about. To understand a political movement, one has to get involved in it. And as soon as one is involved in it one becomes a propagandist.

- George Orwell (New English Weekly, 22 Sept 1938)

Yet this is not blindly partisan. The book has an unswerving compassion for all the people recorded in it, Palestinian, Israeli or international. As Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine, says in the book's afterword, it manages to humanise the inhuman.

It is powerful, moving and strikingly modern writing; accessible, warm and humane. It is as much about psychology as physical fact, as much a story of resilience as brutality. Anyone wanting to understand the reality of life in Gaza should get a copy.

The authors are doing readings at bookshops and event around Britain, check here for details. You can also buy it online. If you're going to do that, go to the publisher Pluto Press and enter the code FREEGAZA or ISM GAZA during the payment process, and the relevant organisation gets a cut.

getting out of it with brian eno

All of the encouragement of modern life is to tell you to pay attention to yourself and take control of things. We can invent technologies and we can think of ways of organising the world to our advantage, to our benefit.

However, the other thing we obviously love doing is almost completely the opposite, is putting ourselves in situations where we're not the primary figure, where we are not in control but we are carried along, we're floating on something. And I like that state that I call 'surrender', and other people call 'transcendence', and other people call 'getting out of it'.

- Brian Eno, interviewed for Arena, BBC, 2009