We are where my mother lives before driving back to York for Christmas.
Dashing out on a mission I pass one of the neighbours. We’ve spoken before but she’s forgotten that. ‘Are you a new resident?’ she asks.
A while later I go to put a bag of rubbish down a chute and meet a dog called George. Pets aren’t allowed here and George’s owner asks if I am all right with dogs. ‘So-so,’ I say.
‘I can see that,’ he says.
George runs up to me regardless, trailing his lead, then does a friendly circuit around my legs His owner calls him back and explains that the flat used to belong to his father.
Then he asks: ‘Are you a new resident?’
‘No,’ I say, trying not to sound mildly cross.
Twice within the space of an hour. I must look older than I thought. All that exercise and latent vanity and people still think I might live in a retirement home. This is both mildly annoying and yet unsurprising. I’ve just checked and the age limit is 60 and I am more than nine years past that.
So I could be in one of those apartments off the long corridor where often no one stirs, apart from a visiting dog called George.
But still, it’s a bit much. I will never live in one of those places until, well, age and fate suggest otherwise.
Mum is nearly 94, wobbly after a bad fall in the summer, and she still feels put out about living somewhere like that.
Now we are home in York, sitting on the sofa. I am typing this and mum is asking if I know where her phone is. I often ask myself the same about my own phone.
‘Are you sitting on it?’ I say. That turns out to be the solution.
Anyway, this is a diversion around the rocks of age rather than the usual Trump-bashing, Farage-despairing to be found around here. Such topics will almost certainly still be there in the new year. But for now I am parking the opinions for Christmas with all the usual familial suspects, aged three to 93.
The youngest member was asked at nursery what she was looking forward to at Christmas. ‘Meeting all my family,’ she said.
Have a happy Christmas, whatever your age, whether you are looking after or being looked after. Or just hoping to slope off to a party soon (guilty on that score) and later to visit the shed where a mini-cask of beer sits cooling.
LET this all make sense. Donald Trump now seems to think Europe is the enemy. Or this week’s enemy. It can be hard to keep up.
Any day now he’ll be shouting at his own shadow – “If you don’t stop following me around like that, I’ll have you deported in chains.”
Oh, and if you have ever posted anything mean about him, you’ll not be allowed into America. More of that in a moment.
First, the US has published a security strategy that runs to 29 pages. Alongside much puffery about how well Trump is dong – so well, so much better than anyone ever in history before, etc – there is a warning about Europe. Economic stagnation, censorship of free speech, the suppression of political opposition, falling birthrates and migration all “raise the stark prospect of civilization erasure”, according to Trump.
In a poorly attended rally in Pennsylvania the other day, Trump raised the stark prospect that his own common decency had been erased for good. As if campaigning all over again, he wondered why the US only accepts people from “shithole countries” such as Somalia, adding: “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden… from Denmark?”
Incidentally, why citizens from those sane and well-run countries would wish to move to a dwindling US remains a mystery.
And, scarily, US policy is now hard to distinguish from a Fox News broadcast or an unhinged Daily Telegraph columnist going off on a white supremacist rant.
Trump says Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” and pledges to back far-right ultra-nationalist parties leading what he sees as the “resistance”.
Wow! Wake up Europe. Wake up Britain. Wake up the EU. Trump wants to rule the western world. That’s why he’s been putting out delusional messages about how all Europe is clamouring for him to be their president. They all love me, he says, reading off the cracked autocue of his mind. No we don’t. Many Europeans think you’re a dangerous, self-obsessional loon with thinner skin than the average sausage.
And wise up Keir Starmer. This is where crawling to Trump gets you. Offer him a totally unwarranted second state visit and he’ll grin like a self-swilled goon for a day only to throw it all back in your face.
Flatter his sorry old arse and all you’ll get in return are pledges to support the likes of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, and their far-right equivalents in other European countries.
A disproved right-wing conspiracy theory about “the great replacement theory” claims Muslims are moving into Europe in order to see off western culture. A foul fallacious idea now promulgated by the White House.
This is all bad, mad, wicked and wrong. Trump wants to extend his Maga movement into Europe, possibly to weaken or break the European Union. All of which must please Putin’s Russia no end.
No mystery then why wealthy, posh and entirely bogus man of the people Nigel Farage spends so much time in the US. He’s not interested in British politics as it is usually conducted. No, he’s after Trumpian help, money and validation. If you can’t see that, you’re looking down the wrong hole in the ground.
Trump also intends to introduce strict rules for anyone wishing to travel to the US. These include details of all social media accounts from the past five years. If you’ve said anything unkind about dwindling Don, you’ll not be let in. That’s me and approximately half of Europe staying at home then. Or visiting somewhere more congenial.
You may also have to provide your DNA. All phone numbers and email addresses from the past five years. And the same for family members. And – oh, I’ve had enough of repeating this authoritarian nonsense.
Ironies abound here. If free speech is so restricted in Europe, how come right-wingers receive so much unquestioning attention; how come Nigel Farage has so much exposure and media support, especially on the BBC?
And how come a president who endorses AI images of himself as a pilot king dumping loads of shit on his rebellious subjects gets to whinge about freedom of speech?
Oh, and if we’re talking about cultural invasion, which country has done the most to bombard the rest of the world with its values, music, films, TV and fast food? Yup, the US.
Now you may like US culture, or you may not. Personally I’ve always enjoyed many Hollywood films, the better sort of US TV and much of the music. Either way, we’re up to our necks in the stuff.
Now they’ve exported their barmy president, too. We’re sinking in Trump-swill. However much you try not to think about the man, he dwells in your tired mind. As this blog has just shown yet again.
LOOK, I can’t claim to understand how budgets work. I barely comprehend my own. I squint at the banking app and look away until my wife sidles over with a quaver of concern in her voice.
I trust my wife on finances more than I trust myself; and I trust the chancellor Rachel Reeves more than all those misogynistic twerps calling her Rachel From Accounts.
And I trust Reeves more than Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch or the editors of the usual suspect national newspapers that disparage or despise anything and everything this Labour government does.
Oh, and I definitely trust her more than Chris Mason, the BBC’s weaselly political editor.
The budget was in the headlines for days on end. This was mostly thanks to a whipped-up delirium of headlines claiming that Reeves had ‘lied’ about the state of the nation’s finances as predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility.
That set the outrage wind machine turning. Imagine, if you will, a giant film-set fan blowing angry hot air. Or that wind symbol found on old maps, a man with puffed red cheeks from time spent in bars, hiding a hernia got from lifting boxes heavy with weighted facts.
As for Mason, he fidgeted away doing what he always does, which is to amplify whatever the usual suspect newspapers peddled that morning. Without their biased bellowing, he wouldn’t know where to start or what to say.
After a working life spent in and around the inky sheets, I don’t always find it easy to face up to what newspapers are – or some of them, at least.
But the worst newspapers are little more than propaganda machines, aren’t they? Sure, readers who still buy them may do so for various honest reasons. The sport, the crossword, the features, the recipes, whatever.
But those squawking front pages? They are battering rams filled with boiling oil (to mix the medieval siege engine metaphors).
The Mail and Telegraph, backed often by the Times and the much diminished Express, were outraged that Sir Keir Starmer won the election. And since that unexpected victory, all they have done is campaign to undermine Labour.
Now you might well think, what has Starmer done to deserve our support. And that’s the hole he has planted himself in. He’s loathed by the usual suspects; and those who should show him a little love are too often put off by the way he behaves.
Much as Donald Trump types his social media posts in capital letters, raging with incoherent capitals as the light fades, the Mail clutches its fake pearls and caps up the word SOCIALIST in headlines.
Meanwhile those who might like a socialist government fall off their chair at the notion of Starmer being a socialist.
Personally, it is Labour’s immigration policies that put me off the most, too closely shaped as they are in imitation of Farage and Reform UK. Labour makes the same shoddy mistake of assuming that most of the country’s problems are down to migrants crossing the channel in small boats.
Aside from that, I’d say Starmer, however unpopular in the moment, deserves to see out his time. Otherwise we’re allowing ourselves to be governed by short-term panic, political in-fighting and the shouting of loud-mouthed opportunists such as Farage (who hates the Tories – oh, look, he just told the FT that a deal/stich-up with the Tories is inevitable).
And what of those budget ‘lies’? Prof David Miles from the OBR later told MPs he did not believe the chancellor was being misleading about the state of the public finances. His statement undermined everything in those newspaper headlines. The apologies to Rachel Reeves were hard to find, unsurprisingly.
And the budget lifted 450,000 children out of poverty, protected renters’ rights, boosted earnings for the lowest paid, and the markets reacted well. So that’s all good. Although I have slipped in my own lie there. You know, I honestly don’t understand what the markets are, what they do and why we are always so in thrall to whatever it is they do.
And the BBC and that Mr Mason? Oh, the BBC should report impartially rather than pretending to do so while in fact reheating whatever stew of hostility has been sitting for too long on the headline hotplate.
The newspapers might be dwindling, certainly in print, but the influence the Mail and the Telegraph have over the BBC shows the lasting extent of their power. Oh, and the owners of the Mail are in the process of buying the Telegraph. Two haters for the price of one.
FARAGE FOOTNOTE: Nigel Farage said the budget was “great for you if you are a Somalian with 20 children”. That’s quite the racist statement from a man who swears he’s not a racist. He will, for sure, continue to duck and dive like this, insisting he is not what his own mouth and behaviour prove him to be.
Are you a glass half-full person or has someone drilled a hole in the bottom of that glass?
I’d call myself a foolish optimist, certain everything will turn out right in the end. And when it doesn’t, I tell myself it surely will next time.
I went looking for quotes about optimism versus pessimism and found one from the American humourist and poet Don Marquis – “A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.” I like that as it has a certain Jack Dee-like grumpiness.
Then again, I’d be a lying optimist if I pretended to know anything about Don Marquis. His name was just the bran left after I sifted those quotes.
This is perhaps a circuitous way to discuss another skirmish in the standoff between Donald Trump and the BBC, but there is logic here. Five years or so ago, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman published an excellent book called Human Kind. It was subtitled A Hopeful History.
I chose his book as my read for our book club in a bar, where we match different books to a theme, to avoid us all having to yatter on about the same book.
Rutger believes that basically people are good. Early on in his “quest for a new view of humankind”, he sets out potential obstacles to optimism.
To stand up for human goodness, he says, “means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naïve. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic”.
Rutger could have been forgiven for feeling a touch cynical himself this week. In October he gave the BBC’s annual Reith Lecture in front of 500 people who heard him describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history”.
When the lecture began airing this week on BBC Radio 4, Rutger discovered that the BBC had removed those words – despite his lecture having been approved by the very same BBC.
What happened there? Between the lecture and the broadcast, Trump threatened to sue the BBC for at least $1 billion over a separate editing controversy involving Panorama, that’s what.
Bregman quite reasonably called the removal of his words from the lecture “self-censorship driven by fear”, noting the irony that his lecture was about elites’ “paralysing cowardice” and “bending the knee to authoritarianism”.
He told the Guardian: “I’m really sad about it. The whole team behind the Reith Lectures was incredible.
“And it was such an honour to deliver them, especially because the first Reith Lectures in 1948 were delivered by my intellectual hero Bertrand Russell, who was a huge advocate of free speech.
“I still hope lots of people will listen to the lectures. Because it seems to me that the message, about the cowardice of today’s elites, is more relevant than ever.”
Although a self-confessed European liberal, Bregman is fair-minded in his lecture, confessing at one point his admiration for the far-right. Not for their beliefs – which stand in cynical counterpoint to his optimistic view of humankind – but rather in their persistence, their willingness to spend years or even decades moulding events in their favour.
He cited as an example the protracted battle to overturn the right to abortion in the US; again, he did not approve of this action but could appreciate the long-term effort involved. The left, he said, needed to be organised in a similarly efficient manner.
His lecture is well worth a listen; and Human Kind is well worth a read.
Still, it is hard sometimes to remain optimistic in a world run by a self-serving cabal of pessimists. Trump’s threat to sue the BBC may well not come about; and if it did, it could be found to be baseless.
Sadly, that is beside the point. Trump uses the law to wear down all opposition. And he employs bullying in the same way. The BBC board, running scared after his threat to sue, have done his bidding anyway by censoring criticism from an academic they invited to give a lecture.
Then again, I am optimistic that one day Rutger Bregman’s words about Trump will stand true.
Here is another quote from Human Kind:
“To stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership…”
I HAVE played the guitar for ever, not that you’d know it some stumble finger days.
At my boys’ grammar school in the early 1970s, I gave a mini-recital of a study by Matteo Carcassi, an Italian guitarist and composer born in Florence in 1792 (or so it says here on Wikipedia).
Etude Op 60, No 3. Recalling that title is no feat of memory. It’s just that I have picked up the piece again more than 50 years later.
My guitar teacher was called Robert. He used to cycle with a guitar in a hard case and a rucksack full of bricks. He was in training to ride somewhere far from Cheadle Hulme, Spain perhaps.
My performance went OK but Robert said I should have tuned my guitar beforehand. I made a mental note of his advice. It is still there just in case there ever is another public performance.
I abandoned the classical guitar as a teenager, you see. It didn’t exactly rock; and the pieces became harder and harder. A foolish decision, it now seems, but we are all made of those.
I have lessons again now, every other week online, with a teacher here in York. Andy is very good, keeps me ticking over and hardly ever sighs at my innate lack of rhythm. We cover all sorts from the Beatles to Bach, with blues and jazz in between, plus scales. The piece I am presently doing a disservice to is Strawberry Fields Forever.
I like all sorts of guitarists, but particularly folk-rockers such as the great Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch or John Martyn, another acoustic hero.
Over the years I have played, or tried to play, songs by Thompson as collected in his songbooks. When interviewing him once, I said his songs were hard to play. “They’re meant to be,” he said with a chuckle.
Anyway, back to Carcassi.
The sheet music for that one came in an email, as usual. With tablature alongside the score as my music reading is rusty. Printing this off, I squinted at the musical jigsaw puzzle. Ah, yes, that chord goes there, fits into that chord, as the tune rises up the neck.
Fingers old and not so pliable mostly knew where to go. I was back in the school hall, nervous with the audience before me. Playing a guitar I’d forgotten to tune. After my recital there was a guitar trio comprised of me, Robert, the cycling-with-bricks teacher, and a younger but better student who surely went on to grace other stages; unlike me.
A long time to have been playing the guitar. By this stage of life, you have done most things for an era or two. You stumble on. You get better. You get worse. But it’s the doing that matters. The keeping going, the pursuit of the unattainable, the barely attainable, the doable. You walk that road. Strum that chord. Write those words. Bake that bread, or whatever it is that you like to do.
To borrow a phrase, you just do it. And just doing is good, or better than not doing.
Late in the evening, after my wife has retreated upstairs, I play while watching television. A few scales. Or laying one chord on another. Over and over. And I always tune the guitar first.
After I stopped having classical lessons, I briefly taught a younger boy. He graduated to a proper guitar teacher, who said he’d been taught well, so that was something.
We have three grown-up children, and the middle one is a much better guitarist than his dad. Late at night at his house, after his partner has retreated, he fetches his guitar from his study, goes back downstairs and plays while waiting for their cat to come back indoors.
In the past week I have seen two singer-songwriters who can hold an audience with guitar and voice.
John Smith gave a captivating show at City Varieties in Leeds. He is on tour marking his twentieth anniversary as a professional musician, having started out supporting John Martyn two decades ago.
He fills an auditorium with his fiendish finger-picking and strumming and a resonant voice. He is engagingly self-mocking, too. And his performance of Winter, guitar open-tuned and laid across his lap, fingers beating out the rhythm on the body, was stunning.
A late change of plan allowed me to nip and see folk singer Chris Wood at the NCEM in York, having long admired his albums, especially So Much To Defend. His songs address the everyday, fatherhood, local football, the trials of being a musician, and are quietly philosophical, too.
Eccentric, quirky, the emotion spilling over at times. Another fine guitarist, despite some trouble with his lead.
He introduced a song written for a lifelong male friend. On hearing the song, the pal had said the song was shit. It wasn’t but that was Wood’s wry aside on male bonding, men hiding their affection behind rudeness. Another great night.
Donald Trump vs the BBC is a thing now swollen like an appendix fit to burst. Let’s prod and see where we get.
The US president has threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars over an edition of Panorama. Wow, Trump watches Panorama! You’ll be telling me next that he hunkers down in front of Mastermind, shouting out answers through mouthfuls of cheeseburger.
Well, no – he doesn’t watch Panorama, even when it’s about him (his specialist subject). But he was alerted to a programme he never watches thanks to internal chaos at the BBC and pressure from the usual suspect newspapers.
The edition of Panorama in question was shown before last year’s US election and looked back at the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
It condensed into a clip a speech Trump made just before his supporters marched on the United States Capitol.
All the words used were undeniably spoken by Trump. You can find a transcript online. That was one long whiny ramble of a speech. It needed condensing more than anything that ever ended up in a can of soup.
Nothing Trump said makes you think, oh, he’s only trying to calm things down. The words ‘fight’ or’ march’ are not usually repeated so often when attempting conciliation (which, of course, he wasn’t).
Did Trump urge his supporters to march on the Capitol and protest about the election he lost? At such junctures it is traditional to say history will decide and nod your head sagely.
The trouble is, Trump has been busy rewriting history, removing official mentions of the Capitol riot, while also issuing pardons for around 1,000 of his supporters who were convicted of serious offences.
That edition of Panorama was only shown in this country – and, anyway, as Trump won the election shortly afterwards it can hardly be said to have damaged his reputation. He’s perfectly capable of doing that all by himself. Will he get anywhere with this Florida court case? Is he now going to sue all the world’s media? Or is it just part of his usual bully boy grift?
You won’t be surprised to hear that ejected Tory prime minister Boris Johnson is about to burst forth from that appendix. He set all this in motion when he reshaped the BBC in his image. As part of this, Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief, was appointed to the BBC’s board. This appears to have made the board in part anti-BBC.
Michael Prescott, a former Murdoch journalist and until recently an independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, was the man who raised the contentious edit in a memo to the board.
He is said also to have made claims of systemic bias in coverage of Trump, Gaza and transgender rights, according to the Guardian.
All this led to the shock resignation of the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of news, Deborah Turness.
Johnson, typically, says talk of this being a right-wing instigated attack on the BBC is “complete bollocks”. So it’s almost certainly completely true.
A headline in the Telegraph urges Trump to sue the BBC
Are the Telegraph, Mail and others attacking the BBC because that’s just what they do? Or do they want to bring about its collapse to make room for more right-wing broadcasters, maybe funded from the US? That’s a lasting worry.
And this row about the BBC being left-wing comes just as many people are complaining about the BBC being too friendly to the right, especially to Reform UK and Nigel Farage.
To my eyes the BBC clearly favours Farage. I even put in an official complaint (result: nothing much). Farage receives endless unquestioning airtime on the BBC. Yet he would abolish it in an instant – along with the NHS.
Farage, who spends more time in the US than in his constituency of Claton, turned on his usual Trumpy toady act, complaining about the BBC’s attack on the “leader of the free world”. Good god, if he’s our leader we’re done for.
Honestly, I am more concerned about an elected British politician expending so much energy on doing down his own country. And to think he calls himself a patriot.
The BBC should defend itself and not bow down to Trump. Sir Keir Starmer should look at the running of the BBC – but he says he won’t be doing that. Perhaps it would just be better if politicians of all persuasions had no say in who runs the BBC.
Lord Patten, a politician who sees both sides, has been chairman both of the BBC and the Conservative Party. He had this to say…
“I don’t think that we should allow ourselves to be bullied into thinking that the BBC is only any good, if it reflects the prejudice of the last person who shouted at it.”
Quite so.
The BBC, for its faults and annoyances, for its occasional self-importance and inwardness, is too important, too central to British life, to be brought down by right-wing media owners considering only their own interests and pockets.
Just ask the 11 million people who watched the final of Celebrity Traitors.
On a train in Cambridgeshire at the weekend a man committed multiple stabbings. The reasons for this atrocity are as yet unknown, but news travels so fast now it instantly attains what you might call the speed of stupid.
Answers are demanded as those injured in an incident are still being blue-lighted away. This shouty need to know often comes from far-right agitators who hope what’s unfolding might align with their prejudices.
Nigel Farage of Reform UK plays this game too, while pretending to do nothing of the sort. I dislike quoting that man and only do so in the line of duty.
Here’s what he said on X before anything was known: “The attack last night in Huntington was horrific. My thoughts are with all the victims and their families. We need to know who committed these awful attacks as soon as possible.”
If you spotted a subtext hoping to blame an ‘illegal immigrant’, you will not have been alone.
British Transport Police later announced two men had been arrested: a 32-year-old black British national and a 35-year-old British national of Caribbean descent. The 35-year-old was later released and was said not to have been involved in the attack.
Spelling out the racial background of suspects is unusual but is intended to scotch right-wing conspiracy theories and social media misinformation, as spread so rapidly last summer after the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport.
The far-right may have been disappointed to discover that the man arrested was a British citizen, but they were still able to make vile mileage out of his race, as evidenced on social media. There is no satisfying these people and attempts to do so will always fail.
This willingness, nay eagerness, to believe what you want to believe and never mind the evidence is becoming a defining curse of the age. The US even elected as President a man who is consumed by a raging sociopathic compulsion to be right about everything and suppresses or denigrates anyone who offers evidence to the contrary.
There are other ways that such a shocking incident as that in Huntington can be used to bolster belief or prejudice. Many posting on social media later pointed with something like glee to another aspect of this sad story.
The hero of the hour was a rail worker gravely injured while saving passengers on the train. Samir Zitouni came to the UK 20 years or so ago from Algeria. He represents the best of modern multicultural Britain, although some on the right won’t like such elevation of an immigrant.
We should celebrate this man – but even to do that is to bend him to your side of the wider societal debate while he still lies in hospital.
Sometimes our eagerness to have the last word can override our humanity, our thoughtfulness.
Amid all this, the dormant scab of racism is being scratched into angry new life, thanks to Reform UK and others.
In the Guardian today, the Health Secretary Wes Streeting says he has been shocked by the rise in racism faced by some NHS staff.
Streeting said: “I’m disgusted that a level of racism last seen when Britain was a very different country, 50 years ago, has made an ugly comeback and I’m frankly shocked by those in parliament who’ve leaned into it.”
More such statements from Labour ministers would help.
LET’S end with an uplifting story about an Afghan refugee who found sanctuary here in Yorkshire.
Nahid Hamidi, above, and her husband Ahmad were targeted by the Taliban thanks to Ahmad’s work as a British Army interpreter. They fled the Taliban and Nahid has thanked the UK for giving her family a home.
Now living in Harrogate, Nahid has set up The Afghan kitchen, which has “fed thousands of people and offers other refugees help with their English – and a route into work”.
She said: “I am really happy. We want to say thank you so much to the government for this opportunity to come to the UK. I can work, my children can go to school. We feel safe here. But in Afghanistan, people are in a really bad situation.”
We are lucky to have Nahid in Yorkshire. This is the Britain we should celebrate.
I’ve gone off the BBC due to its unhealthy Nigel Farage obsession. But this is a good story. You can read it here:
I don’t know if Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin has been to Scarborough, but she won’t like what was written in the sand.
Pochin is the MP for Runcorn. What Runcorn did to deserve her is a mystery. Only it isn’t really. She squeezed in by six votes – a perfect illustration of why voting matters.
Anyway, Pochin swallowed the poisoned pint with enthusiasm. Inhaled the noxious nicotine. Or indulged in whatever it is that Nigel Farage gets his MPs hooked on. Mabe it’s vin rage bought by the caseload. One sniff or sip, and they are addicted.
Pochin, above, has proved to be a quick learner. On being elected by six people, she filmed herself for her YouTube channel saying that Greenway Road in her constituency was riddled with crime and social unrest because of illegal immigrants. BBC North West Tonight sent a reporter to interview locals on the street who said that wasn’t true and it was a lovely place to live.
Now she’s gone on Talk TV and said: “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people.” It does what? It you lived through the 1970s, you might think you’d suffered a bang to the head and gone back there.
Responding to a viewer who complained about the demographics of advertising, Pochin said: “It doesn’t reflect our society”, adding, “your average white person, average white family is… not represented any more”.
Advertising is a notoriously hard-headed, nay cynical, industry that uses tricks and artifice to sell us things we probably don’t need. The notion that advertising bosses would fill adverts with black or Asian faces just to adhere to imagined woke guidelines is just madness. No, it’s whatever works for them or their clients.
And their choices reflect the changing face of society. That’s why they don’t sell washing powder by featuring a family of Ku Klux clan members (“It really washes whiter”).
Once nearly all the faces in adverts were white. And outside of the ads comedians were relaxed about making racist jokes.
We all thought we’d moved on. Until Farage started dragging us back a vile mile. In those days there were mass marches against the National Front. If you want a reference, think Reform UK but without the darkly donated US millions, the slavishly devoted BBC, or wall-to-wall social media.
What Farage does is make racism seem acceptable while pretending he is doing nothing of the sort. And he always has a hissy fit if anyone suggests he or his party is racist.
He held a press conference the other day, and the one before that. He can’t help himself. And the papers and the BBC trundle along, knowing there’ll be a lazy headline to hand.
In this press conference he said his MP’s remarks about adverts had been ‘ugly’ but not ‘deliberately’ racist. Oh, yeah. Pull the other one, it’s got a racist joke on it.
You can look up what Farage said if you wish. But the pattern is now long established. Farage is asked if someone in his party might be a teensy bit racist and he splutters, “How very dare you”, or something equally preposterous.
It was taken out of context, he’ll say. The context being that they said something that was racist. The thing is, Nigel, we saw or heard the racist thing. We know it was racist. And we see what you’re doing. You may pretend to decry the racist thing, but the racist thing was already in the headlines by then. Nasty job done.
Actually, I’ve no idea if Nigel Farage is a racist. But he certainly knows how to attract them. How to stir them up.
Let’s hand over now to the veteran Tory grandee Michael Heseltine, above. At 92, he is making a comeback, according to the Times. He has harsh words for Nigel Farage and Reform, whose policies remind him of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell.
Never thought I’d say this, but hurrah for Hezza.
As for Keir Starmer, he woke up enough to accuse Pochin of ‘shocking racism’ and to criticise Farage for showing ‘no leadership’.
Well, yes. But one disappointment with this Labour government is the way it has stuck to Tory or Reform UK rules of engagement over migration. Squint and you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference. With such a large majority behind him, Starmer could have framed the whole debate differently. Instead he just carried on putting all the blame on the four per cent of migrants who arrive here by small boats.
I spotted the Scarborough beach photograph on Threads. In a sorry sign of the times, the positive comments below the post were undermined by Reform UK knuckleheads being rude and offensive. As is often the way, they had few or no followers and had barely posted.
Then again, they might not even exist. The Eastleigh News reported that Reform UK’s Hamble Valley branch posted a page with the headline: “Real people – not career politicians”. This was apparently taken down after it appeared that some of those real people in the photograph had been created using artificial intelligence.
I was skimming an article when three words popped out of the grey text. They were “continuous partial attention”.
That pings a bell, I thought, pausing only to pick up my iPhone and scan social media, check my three email addresses and see if anything new had crawled out from beneath the news stone.
And I don’t even work any more, or hardly at all.
The article in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine was by Sophie McBain and had the headline, ‘Welcome to the golden age of stupidity.’ Technological advances are shrinking IQ scores, leading to brain rot, and “making it hard to work, remember, think and function”, apparently.
New technologies from the printed word onwards have always weathered such accusations, but is the advent of artificial intelligence only going to make matters worse?
A question to which the poached halves of my brain can only respond with an elongated ‘err’ followed by an ‘umm’.
I can’t yet claim to understand artificial intelligence, you see. We seem to be at the stage where everyone nods wisely and mutters ‘artificial intelligence’ without exactly knowing what it means or how it will affect our lives.
Even our government has been at it, suggesting that AI will make everything better and ‘grow the economy’, to call on those dullard words from the political lexicon.
Well, maybe, but has anyone bothered yet to read the terms and conditions, or is it just like always, where you tick the box at the end of a scree of words you don’t read, thinking oh, it’ll be all right.
But let’s settle for now with this notion that using artificial intelligence rather than our own intelligence might be damaging. To borrow the hackneyed phrase ‘use it or lose it’, it seems reasonable to suppose that asking AI to do everything for us won’t stretch our own brains much.
Thinking round a problem is an ancient skill, something humans are good at.
The tech consultant and academic Linda Stone term coined the term ‘continuous partial attention’ in the late 90s after noticing how her students “seemed to be trying to do 20 things at once”.
This notion of being continually but shallowly distracted resonates with me, not least because sometimes this blog is composed of bits and pieces found on social media (once Twitter as was, now mostly Threads), alongside snippets of news, stories clipped from newsprint, words half-heard on the radio.
That’ll make a piece, the distraction motor known as my brain pipes up, just as something else is spotted. Then the newspaper I was half-reading is dropped, or the TV programme I was half-watching no longer grabs my attention, later leading me ask, annoyingly, “What just happened there?”
There is always something in the blog snippet drawer, where potential items live, or mostly go to die. And look, oh, that actor we were wondering about, she was in that thing we liked, the one on BBC4, or Channel 4, or maybe ITV, possibly Netflix.
This digital splintering of our attention span, this need to glance away from what we are doing, risks leaving us unable to adsorb anything at all, doesn’t it?
Our smartphones are amazing slim tablets of everything. But they also give us the cheap hit of knowledge when all we’ve done is Google a question and received an instant answer. That’s miraculous in a sense, but the lack of effort involved is worrying, as too it out-sourcing our knowledge to US corporations.
Still, those of us old enough to know better can remember when life was different, grainier, less instant.
Today’s young people have no such experience, as has been shown in the new series of Channel 4’s Educating Yorkshire, above. The students are very attached to their smart phones; one sparky girl was even suspended and sent home rather than give up her phone for the school day.
For the teaching staff at Thornhill Community Academy in Dewsbury, first seen on TV 12 years ago, the most significant changes have been around mobiles and mental health.
Headteacher Matthew Burton is quoted below from a BBC website feature about the series:
“On the whole, there’s a lot more access to the internet and there are a lot more challenges around teenage mental health and anxiety. On the flip side of that, young people these days are much more attuned to their own mental health and how they’re feeling and are able to ask for the help they need, so we’re really proud of them.”
It’s a wonderful series, well worth a watch, mostly to be reminded of the wit, spirit and undying cussedness of teenagers.
As for this particular blog, it was composed almost without distraction or even one peek in the oddments drawer, leaving all those rancid leftover scraps about Trump and Farage untouched for now.
I discovered the word kakistocracy and thought, wow, I’ll be using that as often as possible, then forgot all about it.
Meaning “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state”, it is drawn from the superlative of the Greek word for bad.
If you were to say that President Trump’s administration is deeply deserving of the label, I wouldn’t disagree.
But maybe we need another word or phrase to encompass a politician considered wildly unsuitable for the role he holds – and yet everyone he meets seems compelled to say what a sound and swell guy he is.
Perhaps psychotic sycophancy fits the bill, as the first word suggests losing some contact with reality – while the second suggests you are, to clatter downstairs to the linguistic basement, a terrible arse-licker.
Some still love Trump, while others, in the US and abroad, now gaze in abject puzzlement, wondering how such a morally dubious, imperious, misogynistic, vainglorious dunderhead could twice have become president.
A dunderhead, should that page have loosened in your dictionary, is an informal word for a stupid person; a splendid word, even if Trump is not that so much as a man totally unencumbered by knowledge.
A man who knows better than everyone else even though he knows nothing. Then again, perhaps a mock-monarch intent on grabbing all the power there is, while seemingly amassing as much wealth as possible for himself and his family, is less of a dunderhead than those who voted for him.
As we know to the vanishing point of boredom, Trump’s every graceless speech is embossed with cheap studs of boastfulness and wrapped in gold ribbons of self-regard.
Mind you, he’s had a good week, having brought eternal peace to the world, or something. It would require a deeper brain mine to examine in detail the agreement between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza and release hostages. Is it a peace deal, another ceasefire or a shifty smudge somewhere between?
Even a shallow-brained observer might peer through the reality-TV-style braggadocio and fear everything could fall apart if the pressure isn’t maintained. Trump is interested in bragging rights rather than details, so it could happen. And he bores easily, much as the rest of us do when forced to listen to him.
One detail mentioned by many observers is that Trump’s deal is essentially the same as one agreed ten months ago by President Biden – but Trump wanted that deal delayed until he was president. As did Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Follow this argument to its grisly conclusion and you see leaders who were apparently prepared to keep the deaths mounting in Gaza for their own political ends. Again, deeper brains than mine will determine the truth of that allegation; but how shocking if true.
Psychotic sycophancy, by the way, seems to be a quality Trump values in those he employs. Steven Cheung, the White House’s director of communications, wrote that Trump would “continue making peace deals, ending wars and saving lives”. Adding, as if that weren’t plenty already, “He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will.”
You might quibble that many politicians from many countries worked on that deal, while Trump slapped his name on it. But those of us who detest the man can at least concede that he got this deal, if that’s what it is, over the line.
Still, all that bullying talk, pleading and shameless lobbying to be given the Nobel Peace Prize was and remains demeaning and pathetic. Asking for something so often and so loudly should trigger an immediate disqualification.
Death and misery all round, and Trump seemed most concerned about whether or not he won a ‘gold star’ from Norway. In the event the prize went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina (who promptly announced that Trump ‘deserved it more’, for heaven’s sake).
There has been some uplift for the anti-Trumpers in that photograph just used by Time magazine for its cover. The story inside is a glowing report, but Trump still wasn’t happy. The vain old fool just hates the photograph, calling it “may be the Worst of All Time”.
Taken with the sun behind his head, the photograph peers up from below, putting emphasis on his crumpled concertina neck, and peeping beneath his carefully arranged coiffure to suggest the bald head within. A sly way to poke fun at Trump while celebrating him.
Oh, and incidentally, the ear hit by an assassin’s bullet appears to be in splendid nick, should you be wondering.
