One man to unite them all?

The political rise of Jeremy Corbyn in recent weeks has been an interesting one. And, dare I say it, it could be the most exciting thing to happen in British politics for years.

Of course, there's some in the Labour party who would disagree, principally those associated with "New Labour" who seem oblivious to the fact that what they're seeing is a proper grassroots uprising, an attempt by party members to take back the party where they see the elite as having become hopelessly out of touch with the footsoldiers of the movement. And I'm guessing that for those who've been pushing the whole "we know best now just shut up and get on with distributing those leaflets" mantra for the last decade and a half, it must be giving them a fair few sleepless nights. Hence the vitriolic nature of the attacks on Corbyn from people like Tony Blair and co.

Unlike a lot of people on the political left, I happen to think that Tony Blair did do some good as leader of this country looking back with ten years' hindsight - raising the minimum wage, introducing Sure Start centres and helping bring youth unemployment down mainly. But unfortunately the first thing that will always come to mind when his name is mentioned is that he dragged this country into an illegal war that only 9% of the population supported at the time. On top of that there's his nauseous buddying up to Rupert Murdoch and his hateful horde of right-wing publications, the introduction of disastrous PFI schemes into the NHS, university tuition fees which inevitably tilt the education system in this country towards those with the money to afford it rather than those who are actually clever enough to deserve to be there and many others besides.

And don't give me the line about how Tony Blair is the only Labour leader to win an election in the last 40 years. The Tories were in such a mess from 1997-2005 that you could have had a lobotomised Boris Johnson spearheading the Labour campaign and he'd still have picked up a comfortable 100 seat majority. The Conservative party that we're dealing with in 2015 (and will be dealing with in 2020 as well) is much more organised, much more crafty and a much more well-oiled machine and they won't be nearly as easy to defeat as they were under Major, Hague, Duncan-Smith or Howard.

Maybe rather than scornfully deriding Corbyn and his supporters as fantasists, Blair and his followers like Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall, Simon Danczuk etc should maybe do a bit of history research into their own party. The Labour Party was set up by the trade unions to be a voice for working class people and protect them from the policies of the Tories and Liberals back in the day who were owned by the ruling class. Hence why in the post-World War II years we got a welfare state and a National Health Service which the current Tory government are doing their utmost to destroy and turn our healthcare system into a terrifying US-style free for all (Andy's recommended watching - "Sicko" by Michael Moore. If you think NHS privatisation is in any way a good thing, this will quickly show you why it really really isn't).

But getting back to Labour, this is why so many working class people now look at the party and don't feel it's standing up for them anymore. Since 1995, there may have been a few cosmetic differences between the red and blue side of the political divide but what Blair, Brown and Miliband have essentially been peddling is a Conservative manifesto from the 1970s. And as anyone with any knowledge of politics knows, the Conservatives have never been a party with the interests of the working class at heart no matter how much Sun journalists might want you to think otherwise.

Labour did make a few moves to the left under Ed Miliband but, again contrary to what Blair would want you to think, it's the fact that they didn't go far enough in setting enough distance between themselves and the Tories that cost them the election, not the fact that they didn't try to continue to be the Tories with red rosettes that they were as New Labour. To quote Edwyn Collins, "I heard it once before and unless I got it wrong, you can't defeat your enemy by singing his song". Don't get me wrong, I think Ed Miliband's a genuinely nice guy and the sort of person I would happily give a mortgage reference to if he asked me but as a political leader, he was hopelessly out of his depth. The instant that him and Ed Balls said that they would accept the horrifically brutish spending cuts imposed by George Osborne in about 2012 rather than trying to reverse them was the moment their chances of getting back into power ended.

Which brings me back to where Jeremy Corbyn comes in. Unlike Miliband, he's the sort of person who won't be dictated to by Cameron, Osborne, Duncan-Smith, Hunt etc and won't let them frame the debate over the economy, the NHS, public spending etc. He's smart enough to realise that a lot of people out there will support a party that promises something different from the five years of poverty that 99% of the population now faces under a Tory administration. And he knows that he can back it up with figures. Consider this - while the Tories were putting through another round of cruel and vicious benefits cuts last month (which, of the four leadership candidates, only Corbyn actually voted against), they were actually putting through in the same bill tax cuts for corporations and the richest in society. Still think that Corbynites are a bunch of left wing loonies? I'd say that the truth is that he's more of a realist than anyone on the Labour or Tory front benches and knows how to fix this country.

In fact, Corbyn's manifesto is probably nearer to that of Neil Kinnock than Tony Benn and makes a lot of sense. Fed up of rip-off train prices and energy bills? Nationalise them. Higher top tax rate? If you can afford to pay then yes - that money will go to the people who need it rather than the fallacy of "trickle down" economics. After all, as "Call me Dave" Cameron said, we're all in this together, right? More affordable council housing? In an age where people can't afford a mortgage until their forties at present, I think that's a very sensible idea. Stricter controls on newspapers and media? Given some of the odious practices of the Sun and the Mail as detailed in the Leveson Report, I'm all for it. And if it annoys a few bankers, corporate fat cats and newspaper owners who decide to take their trade off to Hong Kong in protest then good. The country's better off without leeches like them.

What Labour needs to do is to stop trying to hopelessly chase after the 5% of Middle England voters in swing seats. Newsflash guys - they'll never vote for you. These people are Tories and they won't vote for a Labour party while there's a strong Conservative party in government. What they should do is concentrate on winning back the voters that have been haemorrhaging out of the party since 1997. The people who've joined the Greens because they look at them and see the party that Labour used to be, promising a fairer society. The Scots who've migrated en masse to the SNP - not all of them are rabid nationalists who hate the English spend their waking hours searching the web for people who disagree with independence to troll, they just see that the Westminster system is broken and are crying out for a party promising something different which Labour hasn't been for a long time. The people who've scarily moved to the opposite end of the spectrum to UKIP because they see it as a more grassroots movement than Labour (which it is, unfortunately it's also a borderline far right and ultra-racist one which should have had Labour quickly reacting to shoot down the poisonous myths about immigrants that they're spreading). That's a far bigger group of supporters than just a few undecided 2.4 children families who will probably side with the Tories in the end anyway.

One man to unite them all. And his name might just be Jeremy Corbyn. I hope so anyway. And if Blair, Kendall, Umunna, Yvette Cooper et al don't like it they can always do what David Owen did 35 odd years ago and go off and join the Lib Dems. You might want to ask Nick Clegg about how that party's holding up at the moment though...

The dying art of gigging

"Live music is dead/The funeral's on Thursday/Bring a bottle and a bed" - Jackdaw 4

"You're just chokin' on your Coca-Cola/Chokin' on your dreams" - The Almighty

"Whoops, here come the assholes, they can smell the money..." - Iggy Pop

I don't normally blog about music stuff on this page but something has been bugging me of late. And believe you me, this goes way beyond music - something dark and insidious is slithering towards your favourite venue, your favourite neighbourhood pub/bar, your favourite independent fashion boutique. And it smells horribly like kulturkampf.

A few days ago, the legendary live musc and burlesque venue Madame Jo Jo's in Soho was mysteriously shut down by Westminster Council (full story here). Basically, last month there was a punch up outside involving some bouncers and a rowdy customer which turned rather nasty and the council saw this as an excuse to revoke the club's license. Never mind that the place was hardly a trouble hot spot and you could probably count the number of "incidents" there over the last decade on one hand, bang, one hint of trouble and a popular venue has gone.

I would like to say that it's an isolated incident but sadly in the five years I've been living in London it's become an all too common story. During my first year in the capital (2010), I went to exactly one hundred gigs (yes, sad as it may seem, I did actually keep a count). Many of those were at the Gaff, a great little venue in Holloway just outside the Nag's Head shopping centre. Friendly venue, great bands, cheap beer and a great atmosphere, it was everything you'd want your local live music place to be. Sadly, a few months into 2011 it was no more - the greedy scumbags at Costa coffee bought it out to turn into one of their soulless overpriced caffeine outlets (full story here) which ironically enough has now itself closed due to lack of trade.

But that was only the first of several cannonballs to hit the London live music scene. The intervening years have seen Nambucca, the Water Rats, 93 Feet East, the Bull & Gate, the Islington, the Archway Tavern and the Luminaire among others close due to falling profits. The Intrepid Fox, a staple of the drinking scene for Soho rockers (admittedly one I was never a big fan of but still, it's the principle of the thing) was forced out of its home by the new Crossrail station at Tottenham Court Road and has had to relocate five miles out of the city centre to Archway (ironically, on the same spot where the Tav used to be).

Those same Crossrail developers are now threatening to redevelop Denmark Street, home of the 12 Bar, the Alleycat, several of the best guitar shops in the capital and so much of London's musical history and turn it into another soulless yuppified area, no doubt with a Costa, a WH Smiths and several chainstores (full story here) while the Buffalo Bar, one of the best independent venues in Islington, is facing closure after the pub above it was sold off to a chain who want to redevelop the basement part of the venue (full story here). Even the legendary 100 Club narrowly avoided closure last year but is still very much hanging on by its fingernails.

There are campaigns afoot to save Denmark Street, the Buffalo and Madame Jo Jo's but given that London is cursed with having politics' answer to Mr Toad, Boris Johnson as its mayor, a man who has made no secret of his closeness with those in the financial sector, it seems that it's more likely he'll listen to the property tycoons who fund his election campaigns than some long-haired rocker plebs. Witness how in recent years places like Soho and Shoreditch have gone from being genuinely edgy and alternative places into bland yuppie paradises with all the cool independent shops and character sucked out to be replaced by hipster-staffed over priced organic restaurants and places for bankers to spend their ill-gotten gains. This is Boris' London, where money talks and common sense walks.

And so yet more of London's culture is sold off to become soulless real estate, just like how the price of housing in the capital has been forced up by greedy landlords meaning the only people who can afford to live in the nice areas anymore are greedy CEO's, slimy merchant banker spivs and Russian oil tycoons purchasing a second home to leave empty there. Meanwhile normal Londoners are forced further out of the city by the year and into residential areas where creating any kind of culture becomes nigh-on impossible thanks to the NIMBY brigade who are already there.

And it's not just London either - read this story about the proposed closure of the Star and Garter in Manchester, sound familiar? Meanwhile my old home city of Leeds has seen one venue after another go to the wall in the last decade - the Duchess (turned into an overpriced fashion boutique), the Well (now offices) and most recently the Cockpit. Bradford, the other city I spent much of my youth drinking in, has seen both of its long-established rock clubs, Rio's and the Gasworks, shut due to the live scene dying off. Across the pond, New York has seen the Lower East Side, once the home of thieves, vagabonds and musical geniuses "cleaned up" and gentrified with places such as CBGB's forced to close while on the west coast, the once infamous Sunset Strip in Los Angeles has become a watered down yuppified shell of its former self thanks to the property developers moving in.

Why is all this so important to me you may ask. Well, it's because live music has very much been my life for the last twenty years. From my first gig going to see Carter USM at an all ages gig in Bradford in 1992 through playing my first ever gig with my teenage years band at some pub in Leeds that we were only just old enough to have drinks bought for us in a couple of years later through lord only knows how many memories of gigs both as a musician and a punter. These are the memories that last a lifetime, that keep you going when life has turned to shit, that help put a smile back on your face when you're feeling down. And the smaller ones are often the best - seeing a great band in a pub or a small rock bar with a bunch of your mates and a few like minded souls is just one of those experiences that's hard to beat. And it saddens me to think that all too soon it may be an experience that very few kids out there will even get to have, let alone enjoy.

Think I'm being over-dramatic? I'm not. A recent study by BBC Radio showed that 85% of the demos they receive nowadays are from solo artists (either acoustic or electronic). If we take that as indicative of the music scene as a whole, it means that bands now account for less than a fifth of new music coming through. That's why smaller music venues are collapsing. And the reason that so few new bands are forming is that the scenes in the big cities are being destroyed by the kulturkampf that Boris and David Cameron and lord knows how many other council leaders with their elbows in the trough, be it a red, blue or yellow rosette on their lapel, are imposing. People are (understandably) coming to the conclusion that getting out there, actually getting a gig organised and putting things together is just too much hassle and it's far easier to just make your own music in your bedroom with a Pro-Tools programme and a drum machine.

And that really fucking depresses me. It's like some Orwellian future has happened while none of us were looking. "Oh, sorry, you want to have a music venue? Well trust us, we'd love to give you one but that property's been bought out by Mr Kalashnikov who's got the big empty mansion three doors up and he wants to turn it into some luxury flats full of people who'll only issue noise complaints if we put one there - plus those people need an M&S sandwich shop, a Giraffe restaurant and a stupidly overpriced baby clothes outlet you know." Soon the only places we'll be able to see music will be at big corpo-dromes sponsored by mobile phone companies who charge you £4.50 for a pint of watered down tasteless lager and get their bouncers to thump you if you try to mosh or crowd-surf or generally have fun and will oversell every show so that it becomes downright uncomfortable to watch. Meanwhile the kids coming through will have no idea what a small intimate gig is and will be raised on a diet of soulless diva warbling, crap dance music, money-grabbing hip-hop CEO's and anaemic Ed Sheeran style acoustic guitarists and simply won't know any better. It'll be like 1975 all over again. Except this time, there won't be any punk movement to come along and save us because that loophole has long since been sanitised and closed. Just a Gucci loafer stamping down on the face of independent music forever.

Welcome to the future. You are free to do as we tell you to. Live music is dead. It was good while it lasted. Last one out switch the lights off...

Black Hole Sun...

So on Friday I came home, like a few others out there I suspect, to find a free copy of that most hateful of publications "The Sun" on my doormat. After a quick ripping up of said paper, it's now on its way back to Wapping in a Freepost envelope with the following letter which I thought I'd reproduce here:

To: The Sun

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for sending me a free copy of your paper in the post on Friday. However, as you have probably gathered from the ripped up remains of said paper that accompany this letter, I have chosen not to take you up on this offer and returned said paper via your Freepost service.

The reason for this is that frankly, I do not want to part of a Britain that takes its values from a bunch of lowlife vermin such as yourselves – seeing the paper headline of “This is OUR Britain” is something that fills me with dread and I hope that this is far from the only ripped up or defaced copy of your paper that you have received in the last few days.

Your paper purports to be a vehicle for reflecting the views of the ordinary man in the street but the truth is that, to paraphrase an old saying, the Sun has about as much to do with promoting what is best for the working class of this country as Eric Pickles does with entering the World Hang-Gliding Championships. At the moment there are a lot of angry, hurt and confused people out there. People who have seen their futures gambled away by greedy bankers and neglectful politicians. People who have found themselves turfed out of previously secure jobs and now find themselves on the dole queue with their benefits slashed by a government that doesn’t care about them.

This is surely a time where we should be asking questions about why the banking sector was allowed to run riot with this country’s money unchecked by anyone for so long and why the politicians (both the Tories and Labour) did so little to stop it. We should be asking questions about why the ordinary families of Britain are being bled dry by greedy corporate fat cats running our electricity and public transport companies. We should be asking questions about why despite this government assuring us all that the country is coming out of recession, that more people are living below the poverty line than ever before. We should be asking questions about why the NHS and our free education system, once the two crown jewels in the country's welfare state, are being dismantled by stealth by this government allowing private companies, whose aim isn't to ensure that patients are treated well or that kids receive the best education possible but to make a quick buck and then get out again, to slither in via the back door.

Yet rather than asking those questions, your paper takes a two fold approach to making sure that the working class of this country don’t dare question those who are really responsible for the mess we’re in. Firstly, you seek to deflect the blame on to the easiest targets in society – benefit seekers and illegal immigrants, the sort of people without any voice in our society who can’t fight back to defend themselves. Never mind the fact that for every benefits “cheat” that you so gloatingly expose, there are at least 999 other people signing on who are genuinely there for a reason, perhaps because they suffer from a disease that really does stop them working, perhaps because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw the business they worked for (or even the business they tried to set up and run) wiped out when the country’s economy took a downward turn and now find themselves searching for a job when there are no jobs available. And now because of pressure from your hateful paper, it’s harder than ever for people who need benefits to claim them. Soon, these people abandoned at the bottom of the heap won’t even be able to afford healthcare as this government embarks on stealth privatisation of the NHS, again cheered on by the hack journalists you employ. Let’s be clear here, the NHS is one of the wonders of our society and the majority of other countries in this world would give their right arms to have something along its lines. Yet your paper seems to believe it’s a “drain on society” (translation – our fat cat business mates would earn even more money if health in this country were privatised and they could make a killing by charging people through the nose for inferior treatment to what they receive on the NHS now). If you honestly believe that a Britain where all healthcare must be paid for is a good idea, I recommend you watch the Michael Moore documentary “Sicko” about the American healthcare system and then take a good long hard look at yourselves. In the meantime, if you're really that concerned about the country losing money via benefits cheats, maybe you should do a couple of exposes on corporate tax avoidance which costs this country ten times more. Oh sorry, I forgot, most of the people doing that are probably mates of yours, aren't they?

As for your shameful diatribes against immigrants and asylum seekers, it’s a well known fact that immigrants actually create more money for this country’s economy than they take out of it in benefits and well over 90% of them are safely employed and paying tax within three months of arriving in this country but you’d never know that by reading a copy of your paper. They’re an easy target and it’s a way to keep the working class of this country fighting amongst each other using horrible racist stereotypes rather than concentrating on a common enemy, namely those in the financial and political sectors who got us into this mess in the first place. These shameful distortions of the facts that your paper publishes on a regular basis are at least indirectly (if not directly) responsible for the terrifying rise of quasi-fascist parties like the UKIP in this country.

Let’s not mince words here – I’m a proud Brit. England is the country that I was born in and the country that I’m proud to call home. Like my fellow countrymen, I observed the commemoration of the D-Day landings this week just gone, one of the episodes in this country’s history that I feel we should be the most proud of. I wonder how the soldiers who gave their lives that day fighting the dark spectre of fascism would feel if they knew 70 years later that there is a new fascist upsurgence in Europe and that this time Britain, thanks to Nigel Farage, is one of the countries at the forefront of it. Personally, if I was writing for your paper and saw what happened in the European Elections a couple of weeks ago, I think I’d find it hard sleeping at night.

The second prong of your attack to prevent the working class of this country asking too many questions while pretending to be on their side is to brainwash those who maybe aren’t fooled by your biased political reporting with a flood of cheap pseudo-celebrity tittle tattle dressed up as news. Day in day out, your paper bombards its readers with stories about so-called “celebrities” who seem to be famous for reasons not entirely comprehensible to anyone looking at their history. People like Katie Price, Kim Kardashian, Simon Cowell and his hateful army of Saturday night karaoke contestants, the cast members of shows such as “The Only Way Is Essex”. The sort of people who are, quite frankly, a waste of flesh, bone and oxygen.

Again, there was a time many years ago when to be a “celebrity” required work, effort, charisma and above all talent, an ability to leave the world hanging on your every word. Celebrities to me are people like David Bowie, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger, Peter O’Toole, Rod Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, Keith Richards, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, George Best, Brian Clough, I could go on and on but you get the idea. These people were genuinely recognised as having a gift, as being the best in their field. I’ll concede that we do still have some people in our society who are very worthy of being looked up to like this – the sad loss this week of Rik Mayall, a man I consider to be a comedy genius, and the many touching and heartfelt tributes he received from across society, shows that people are still capable of recognising real talent when they see it. But be honest, why should anyone care who one of those grinning mannequins from One Direction or a reserve team player from Chelsea or Man United is “bonking”? Surely, even as people in the pay of their PR’s to print this stuff, you must find this sort of stuff gets a bit boring after a while?

This, then, is why you can find the remains of your free paper included in this envelope. Again, let me say that I consider myself to be a proud Brit. But the Britain that I love is the one that celebrates difference (be it racial, sexual or personality based) in people, that pulls together when it’s threatened rather than turning on each other, that supports the least able in its society to help them make a living in this world rather than turning a blind eye to their suffering, that knows that when everyone is working in the same direction that we really can create something to be proud of in this country of ours. And none of these seem to be considered as worthy values in the Sun’s Britain unfortunately. All I can say is that if this mixture of ill-informed racism, hollow chest-beating factionism and brain-dead tittle-tattle really does represent the views of "The Man In The Street" then I can only end by quoting the late Sid Vicious - "I've met the man in the street. And he's a c**t."

Still, if you want a small crumb of comfort, at least you’re nowhere near as evil as the Daily Mail is. But I wouldn’t say that’s anything to be proud of.

Yours faithfully,

A patriotic Brit and non-Sun reader

Talking bollocks for fun AND profit!

Well, on a day when the Gagging Law (ie the one which is basically going to allow the government to restrict funding and protest right to any organisations who might, y'know, disagree with them) came one step closer to scary reality, you'd expect there to be some sort of backlash, a call to arms, a cry to get people up on to the barricades.

Instead we got this hogwash in the Daily Mirror. I really don't like taking issue with those on the same political wing (ie the left one) as me (and I'll say this, generally I think FSF is a pretty good writer) but this is shoddy lazy journalism at its worst. If you can't be bothered to scroll down the article, I'll sum it up below:

FLEET STREET FOX: Hey everybody! This country's f**ked!
MAN IN THE STREET: Yeah, we know.
FSF: No, seriously, it's in really grave danger! The government's crippling the NHS, picking on the poorest in society (and, thanks to that "Benefits Street" program on C4, getting the more idiotic members of the population to believe that this is somehow a good thing), implementing a Bedroom Tax which is going to hit ordinary people unnecessarily hard, letting poverty levels rise to the point where Food Banks are common place and all the time the bankers who caused this mess are getting away scott free.
MITS: Yeah, we know. We read the papers. It's pretty f**king bleak whichever way you look at it. Well, you've given yourself a platform which clearly indicates you feel you have something worthwhile to say. What do you suggest we do?
FSF: Well, we could make a start by getting off our arses and voting.
MITS: Absolutely. Contrary to what Russell Brand might say, if we don't make our voices heard somehow and at least attempt to make a difference then we really have no right to complain when those at the top screw us over. So pray tell, where is the party to get us out of this mess?
FSF: Well, let's be honest, the Tories are a party with all the morals of the average crocodile, the Lib Dems sold all their principles down the river as soon as they were offered a sniff of power and anyone who genuinely thinks that Labour is still the party of the working classes is pretty much living in cloud cuckoo land.
MITS: Absolutely. So what do you suggest then?
FSF: Ummm...well, you do know we need to vote for somebody right.
MITS: Yeah, no shit Sherlock, you've already said. But WHO?
FSF: Ummm...dunno.
MITS: Yeah, great, thanks for that. And someone actually pays you good money to write this bollocks and take away five minutes of my life that I'll never get back?

Jeez, it's no wonder that we can't organise any serious opposition to the status quo in this country. If anyone wants me I'll be banging my head against a wall somewhere...

Russell, Robert and Ed too...

So, another thing I meant to write about sooner. I'm pretty sure most of you must have seen Russell Brand's interview with Jeremy Paxman but just in case you haven't, here it is,

Truth be told, I'm really not sure what to think about this. I agree with a lot of what Russell's saying but I've always thought that the whole "we shouldn't vote, none of them deserve it" always sounds like a bit of a cop-out to me. Trust me, I'm as fed up of the current political situation as anyone but sitting on the fence isn't gonna get us out of the hole that our leaders have been digging for the last 35 odd years. Being up north to visit my family this weekend has really reinforced what a mess this country's in at the moment regardless of David Cameron and George Osborne's feeble attempts to persuade us that the worst is over and the country's recovering. Might I suggest that they pay a visit to Middlesbrough or Hartlepool where about 80% of the shops seem to be boarded up. Or Bradford where half the city centre was demolished back in 2006 to make way for a Westfield shopping centre only for the money to run out before a single brick had been laid. Seven years on and all that's left is an empty building site where shops should be and even then the shops that are left are hardly fighting each other for space given the number of closed ones around town. However you look at it, that doesn't seem much like a recovery to me.

Russell's right about one thing - politicians these days are horrifically out of touch with the man in the street. They aren't the ones faced with soaring energy bills and, for those of us who have to commute to work, public transport prices that are going up faster than our wages are. They aren't the ones with friends on the dole who would actually quite like to have a job rather than having to sit at home bored out of their skulls all day but there aren't any jobs available and all the government seems to want to do is demonise them as workshy shirkers who are leeching benefits out of the system. Meanwhile, these corporate crooks in the financial industry continue to brazenly swindle the country out of millions and we're told it's no big deal by the people at the Daily Mail and the Sun while they continue their dodgy ethical practices and whine on about how the place is turning into Communist Russia as soon as anyone mentions press regulations to maybe make sure that people stop getting hurt by their irresponsibility and general lack of morals.

But sitting on the fence waiting around for a revolution isn't gonna change that. I'm sorry but somehow I can't see David Cameron really giving a toss about a few hundred people gathering in parliament square wearing "V For Vendetta" masks. To me, the demo before the second Gulf War started proved that that method of protest is dead in the water. Thousands of people went on that, a public opinion poll showed that 91% of people were against the war and what did Tony Blair do? Went to war anyway. Politicians aren't scared of people marching anymore - they can just look at Blair's example and think "well, if he can get away with that and stay in power for another six years then why can't I get away with this?"

If you want to change the political system then you have to infiltrate it - protesting just doesn't work I'm afraid. Start up a movement, get some like-minded souls together and get a party of your own started. The three-party model in the UK is already starting to look shaky and my thoughts are that coalition governments are going to become the norm from hereon in. To use a musical analogy, it's not a million miles away from how punk rock started in Britain in the '70s - people were sick of the twin evils of ten-minute prog operas from Yes and Genesis and extended guitar solos and blues jams from the likes of Led Zeppelin and wanted something different so they went out and made it happen. Admittedly, it's a lot more difficult to change politics than it is to change music but it can be done and there've been a couple of attempts in recent years such as the original version of the Respect coalition before it got swamped by the nutcase wing of Islam (ie the sort of people who are really no better than the BNP or EDL). And it's also, lest we forget, how the original version of the Labour party started about 100 years ago - the voice of the working classes who felt completely ignored and betrayed by the politicians. Ring any bells?

Which brings me neatly on to Robert Webb's rather bizarre response to Brand a few days later where he stated the best way out was to join the Labour party as they were the only ones saying anything different. Again, Webb is right about one thing, if you do vote you can at least say that you tried to make your voice count in changing things. But, and it saddens me to say this as someone who grew up in a fiercely partisan Labour family, I really don't see that things would be any different under Ed Miliband. He strikes me as a nice guy who would like to be doing more than he is to put some clear water between himself and the ConDems but is hamstrung by trying to please the middle class vote. Which is clearly rubbish because if Ed would try and come up with some policies that would make things more fair to the ordinary people in this country, there is a huge swathe of disaffected voters who would probably be happy to give him a chance especially given how odious the alternative is. For example - renationalising the utility companies and railways so that prices can be fixed centrally and if people are upset then they can always kick the government in the ballots at the next election. Re-opening some of those Sure Start centres and libraries that the Tories have closed en masse. Reintroducing the controls on the financial sector that (spit!) Thatcher abolished in the '80s so that a bunch of spivs in Canary Wharf never have the opportunity to sink this country's economy again. Ensuring that the Leveson Report controls are forced on Fleet Street editors whether they like it or not so that maybe we'll have a press that has to grow up and act responsibly in this country. Kicking private enterprise out of the NHS where it doesn't belong - seriously, what's more important, making a few quick bucks or making sure that we have a healthy population in this country? Ditto the education sector.

I could go on and on until the cows come home but it's safe to say that until Labour starts to try and act vaguely like a socialist party again, I won't be voting for 'em. So where does that leave me? The Greens I s'pose. As a friend recently said to me, you know things have got bad when the hippies are making the most sense. But nevertheless, I will be voting for them at the next election because that's what democracy is about. Use it or lose it.

The solution to the problem that is "The Daily Mail"...

"The Daily Mail". It's horrible, isn't it? Page after page of hateful diatribes against anyone who isn't a white male earning more than £50k a year, relentless scaremongering about stuff that probably will never affect you all written by the sort of people who appear to have all the morals of your average crocodile.

After the whole episode regarding its hatchet job on Ed Miliband's late father, the general response got me thinking. You see, I'm pretty damn sure that there are far more people out there in Britain who disagree with what the Mail says than agree with it, it's just that we don't have the literary version of a megaphone to blast out our message from the rooftops.

But it also got me thinking - really, what sort of person generally has this much anger and bitterness and spitefulness inside them? I mean, just reading someone like Richard Littlejohn's column (well, okay, one of them - any more makes a sane and right-thinking person want to claw their own eyes out just to make the torture stop) makes me think that this is not a happy man. Ditto Melanie Phillips and most of the other so-called "columnists" the paper employs. I mean, you don't come up with this sort of level of hatred and bigotry overnight. There is clearly something very wrong in these peoples' lives - maybe they have an unhappy home life, maybe they've befallen some great personal tragedy or injustice which has scarred them or maybe they're just not sleeping very well and are perpetually grumpy. Either way, the evidence is clear - these people need something to cheer them up and de-stress them. Badly.

I therefore propose the following - we get a deputation together, head over to the Mail's offices in Canary Wharf. With us, we bring tea, biscuits, cake and some kittens and puppies for the people who work there to cuddle. The writers there will have full access to this for the day and once they're suitably chilled out we can get them to work writing their columns. Then maybe they'll see that this isn't such a bad old world after all and that when it all comes down to it, we're all human beings and really it'd be a lot more productive if we all just learned to get on and be happy with what life's dealt us rather than just whinging about it all the time and putting the blame on the easiest scapegoat.

It can't fail I tell you. Now who's with me?

A non-opportunity wasted...

So you may notice that a lot of the updates at the moment are on subjects that are, like, so last month. Apologies - I've been meaning to update this thing for quite a while but it's been the dreaded case of too many things and not enough time.

...Anyway, I've been meaning to write something about the AV vote for a few weeks so here it is. The main reason for this was reading a very interesting article in the New Statesman from behind the No Campaign here. It's very well-written and a good read no matter what your thoughts on voting reform might be. As someone who studied politics at Uni, I've watched things unravel with interest in this whole farrago and, if I'm honest, the conclusion I can't help but come to is that the No campaign didn't really win the vote, the Yes campaign lost it.

Truth is, I think the case for voting reform was lost long before the whole campaign around it kicked in when Nick Clegg brokered his deal with David Cameron last year. Anyone with any sort of political knowledge will tell you that AV doesn't really represent a massive change from our existing First Past The Post system in that it keeps all the problems of the existing system (disproportionate, leads to large majorities which don't really reflect the way the public voted overall) while adding a whole load of new ones as well (makes it harder for smaller parties to get elected due to the second choice vote system, means that the first candidate doesn't always win). I really can't see what Clegg thought he was going to gain by signing up to this idea, especially as he'd dismissed it in the past. At the very least, they could have gone with the Green Party's idea and offered us a choice of voting systems - personally, I think the fairest system for us would have been an Alternative Member system with the number of constituencies reduced to about 400 or so and the remaining 200 MP's elected under a pure Proportional Representation system. But then maybe that's just me.

The fact is though that the Yes campaign could easily have won this if they hadn't run everything so shoddily. They were well ahead in the polls before the No campaign really shifted into gear and, even then, the arguments the No campaign was using were generally pretty flimsy and could easily have been blown apart with a bit of effective campaigning. The harsh truth is that they made a number of key mistakes which, in my mind, lost them the argument.

Firstly, they were far too slow to go on the attack against the opposition, presumably because they thought up until March that victory was in the bag. I think nearly everyone knows that it wouldn't have cost £250 million to implement a new voting system and the fact that the Yes campaign didn't even bother to put a poster out with something to counter this argument was a key factor in them losing the war.

Secondly, the campaign just wasn't inclusive enough. David Milliband and Nick Clegg's refusal to share a platform together just did untold amounts of damage. For all that I despise David Cameron and the Tories, they at least had the sense to realise that to present a united front when campaigning on a single issue, you need to share a platform with people who might be your ideological enemies the rest of the time - hence Cameron sharing a platform with John Reid. Now had the Yes campaign held its conference with Miliband, Clegg, Charles Kennedy, Caroline Lucas and Nigel Farage from the UKIP (yes, I don't like them either but on this issue they were in the same boat as the Libs, and it would've done a good job of showing the electorate that people whose views might be more right of centre and were disaffected with the Tories would have had a reason to vote yes) on the same platform - five people representing almost the full breadth of the political spectrum, then it would have comprehensively trumped Cameron's effort. Instead we had Miliband, Kennedy, Lucas and, um, Eddie Izzard. You do the maths.

Thirdly, while the No campaign came across as clear, concise and unwavering in their arguments (as erroneous as a lot of those were), the Yes campaign just seemed to throw their toys out of the pram at anyone who disagreed with them (a classic example, reading the Guardian board and seeing someone actually use the phrase "You're betraying your children's future if you vote No!" Oh please, give me a break, I don't think so somehow) and the constant barrage of complaining how the No campaign's tactics were unfair. Yes, they probably were but there's a good quote here from Sean Connery's character in the film "The Rock" which goes along the line that if you ever felt like you've been cheated, you probably deserved it because losers usually do. Winners just shut up, get on with it, go home and f**k the prom queen.

So to summarise then, I reckon if the Yes campaign had shown a bit of open-mindedness, a bit more of a "can do" mentality and generally hadn't acted like such a bunch of whinging spoilt pricks then they could have easily won the AV campaign. As it is, they've only themselves to blame for this defeat. Mind you, as said earlier, it's a defeat over something which, in my opinion, wasn't really worth winning in the first place. The campaign for REAL voting reform starts here. In the meantime, normal non-political service will be resumed on this blog as of the next entry...