LABOUR has come up with a policy on Brexit and it has people pleased or annoyed depending on where they stand on the soft to hard spectrum.

I was going to write ‘excited’ instead of ‘pleased’ but honestly the notion of anyone being excited by anything to do with Brexit is a stretch. The only ones moved to excitement are old-school, Empire-loving Tories or readers of the Daily Express.

Incidentally, that newspaper has a story that, ahem, really sucks this morning. It reports a surge in vacuum cleaner sales as shoppers allegedly rush to beat an EU ban on the most powerful models. “Buy now while stocks last,” the paper says, no doubt going red in the face and spilling its gin. “It’s a British person’s inalienable right to have a vacuum cleaner of such ferocity that is sucks up your underlay and your floorboards.”

That last sentence suggests a sense of humour not always to be found in the Express, so good on whoever wrote those words. But the story still sucks. Any green-minded, energy-saving suggestion from the EU has always been slapped down from such crusty quarters.

Do you remember all the fuss about how “they want to ban our light bulbs”? Those were the old incandescent light bulbs and the prospect of no longer being able to buy them sent certain people into a, well, incandescent rage. True, the new bulbs were slow to cast light at first, but now they’re fine and bright as you like, and longer lasting, too.

If you peruse the files there is probably a Daily Express leader article bemoaning the way Europe wants to “ban our candles” by forcing us to use electric light instead.

Anyway, Labour and Brexit. Here’s the problem I have with this: everything to do with Brexit is just so mind-numbingly and arse-achingly boring. Hugely important, yes; likely to shape this country for generations to come, for sure; but my God has there even been a time when a single matter has dominated the national conversation with such relentless boredom?

It’s as if a topic once obsessed over only by all the boring people on the dull fringes has, by evil alchemy, become the one topic of conversation.

Labour’s new preference is for a soft Brexit. This is good news for those of us who never wanted to leave in the first place. It also puts the government in a tight spot, as Mrs Maybe’s majority is thin and plenty of her MPs are pro-Europe.

Until now, Labour has slithered and slid over Brexit, making mischief for the government without being clear what, if any, policy the party had.

That has now changed and the policy launched in yesterday’s Observer by Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, sounds like a good move. Labour now says that as Britain leaves the EU, it must remain inside the single market and the customs union for a transitional period.

The timespan is yet unspecified, with Sir Keir offering the ambiguous phrase that this period with be “as short as possible but as long as necessary”.

Sounds sensible to me, but already Labour MPs in the midlands and north where the Breixt vote was high are complaining – along with Tory-supporting, Brexit-bound newspapers such as The Sun.

But at least Labour’s long-awaited position on Brexit is sensible and offers some reassurance – especially in the face of the delusional dreams of this weakened government as we amble towards the cliff edge on one of Mrs Maybe’s hikes.

That said, Brexit is still boring beyond belief, isn’t it?

Anyway, the sun is shining on a bank holiday by some oversight of the climate control committee. Later we are going to watch the soapbox challenge on Micklegate. This is the only relatively steep hill in the centre of York and homemade carts rattle down the incline, given a head start by an acute ramp.

Last year’s inaugural race was great fun. And if you happen to be looking for a passing metaphor for Britain nowadays, a headlong rush down a steep hill on a handmade cart with the danger of the wheels coming off sounds like a reasonable place to start.

IT’S early Saturday morning and thoughts about thoughts are bumping around in my mind, like balloons on a ceiling.

Thoughts about thoughts aren’t, well, thoughts exactly, but they’ll have to do. I have just read that a pub in Borough Market charges £13.40 for a pint of beer. That’s not so much a thought as a liquid scandal, but that’s London for you.

Funnily enough, the offensively expensive pint comes from Manchester, where it surely won’t cost quite that much. Perhaps it’s a Mancunian joke at the expense of Londoners. Cloudwater North West Double IPA is a weighty 8.2% ABV. I may be wrong but think those letters stand for “absolutely bloody vulgar”. A glance at an online slang Thesaurus leads me to conclude that such a pint is fancy-pants spendy.

The owners of the Rake bar blame the suppliers, but point out that the beer sells out whenever they stock it. Perhaps you can just charge anything in London. Or maybe the more expensive something is, the greater its allure. When the Sun newspaper sent a reporter to try a pint, there was none left to sup.

I can’t see many Yorkshire drinkers handing over quite so much for a pint. If you don’t live in London, and chances are that you won’t, my recommendation is for a limited-edition beer that is 2% weaker than that London disgrace. High Tea by Roosters is a Jasmine green tea IPA made in collaboration with coffee and tea suppliers Taylors of Harrogate. I know – sounds like a ponce beer, but it was lovely and for a short while sent my brain to a pleasantly unsteady place.

I forget the price in York for a pint of that and a smaller glass of something less brain bewildering for my wife, but it didn’t amount to even half the cost of that London pint.

Here’s another thought bouncing off a thought. Driverless cars are in the news often nowadays, nudging us into the future. An item on the BBC news yesterday asked who will be to blame when driverless cars crash. Is it the driver or the computer? Here’s another thing: will you be allowed to be drunk in charge of a driverless car? Not that I want to be or anything, but it’s a question. If so, the phrase ‘driving me to drink’ might take on a whole new meaning.

Here’s another mental pause: will you need a driving licence or take a test? Anyone who has spent a lifetime manually driving themselves around is going to be lost in this brave new world. That’s if it ever happens.

The driverless cars were forming an orderly queue in the headlines alongside driverless lorries. The trucks aren’t entirely without drivers, but travel in convoy with only the first lorry having a human occupant. The others are linked by wi-fi or something. When I read about this experiment, I thought of our wavering wi-fi at home and began to worry. What is the driverless truck version of that spinning circle you get when the TV freezes? It’s not a comforting thought.

Driverless vehicles suggest other unpiloted things, such as Mrs Maybe’s government on its plotless skid towards that big wall marked Brexit. Do driverless governments have brakes and does anyone know now to use them?

I love it that the UK has been accused by the European Union of “magical thinking” over plans to create an invisible border in Ireland after Brexit. The EU seems to have its finger on where we are driving ourselves, even if we don’t. Magical thinking is not confined to the border between North and South in Ireland – it basically sums up the government’s whole approach to leaving Europe. Magical thinking and crossed fingers.

And here’s a thought to end these thoughts – if a driverless government crashes in the wall of calamity, who’s to blame? Who you gonna call, as that Ghostbusters film once said? And whose ghost will need busting when it all comes down on our heads?

Is it time for a beer? Ah, no – it’s 7.50am, I’ve not yet had breakfast and work starts in two-and-half hours. See you later.

THEY say walking is good for you, but it doesn’t seem to do much for Theresa May. She returned from a walking break in Snowdon with the idea to hold a snap general election to increase her majority – “Oh, look Philip – there’s a landslide. It must be an omen.”

We all know how well that turned out.

The prime minister is just back from another walking holiday – three weeks in Switzerland this time. She hasn’t called an election on this occasion. No, all that Swiss air has merely left her carrying on just as she did before, saying something stupid about the latest national nonsense controversy – and refusing to admit that she was wrong about foreign students.

Her first act was to wade into the giant non-story that is Big Ben falling silent for four years so that vital maintenance work can be carried out.

Mrs May has plenty on her tin walking plate already: the slow-motion car crash that is Brexit and Donald Trump fomenting racial tension in the US and making threatening noises towards North Korea are just two items to be found there, next to a half-eaten apple.

Instead she joins the entirely bogus fuss about a large bell. She said that it “can’t be right for Big Ben to be silent for four years” and has asked Speaker John Bercow to investigate urgently so that “we can continue to hear Big Ben through those years”.

It’s a big clock, no big deal – and that bell makes a lovely sound, for sure, but sometimes the issues we are expected to be agitated about really aren’t worth the hot air. Not only that, it’s almost as if such non-stories are put up there so we don’t notice anything else that’s going on.

It has been pointed out in various social media posts doing the rounds that MPs seem to be more exercised over the tower containing Big Ben than Grenfell Tower in which so many people died. It’s probably an unfair comparison, but still you can see their point. Sometimes we just prefer a big fuss about nothing rather than truly facing up to something that should shame us to our core.

As for foreign students, new figures suggest that Theresa May’s long-held belief that foreign students overstay their visas is just not true. She was obsessed with this as Home Secretary, and carried the obsession with her into 10 Downing Street.

The ‘fact’ of foreign students ‘flooding’ into the country was taken as a totem of bad migration – and she made life much more difficult for these students in the name of cutting the numbers.

The Home Office previously reckoned there were 100,000 students a year staying on illegally, but now new data from the Office of National Statistics puts that figure at only 4,600. Pretty much a non-problem – and another non-story, although one with a serrated edge.

Lib Dem leader Vince Cable, who was part of the coalition under David Cameron, says he spent five years telling the Home Office that their figures were bogus – “But they persisted nonetheless on the basis of those phoney numbers.”

The new figures suggest that 97 per cent of foreign students leave after finishing their studies – a percentage that makes Theresa May look plain stupid, as well as narrow-minded and wrong-headed. Perhaps she should go on another walk.

Much was wrapped up in those bogus statistics, not least the anti-immigrant undertone to the Brexit vote.

The new data also reveals that net migration is falling, partly because of a rise in EU workers leaving our sinking ship. This is only good news if you are the editor of the Daily Express – “MIGRATION SLOWS AFTER EU EXIT VOTE.”

Plenty of other things have slowed too, including common sense; what has increased exponentially is a general sense of us not having a clue about what we are doing or where we are heading.

The fuss about foreign students – coming over here and spending their money at our universities – is in line with other fears about migration. In 2016 Ipsos Mori found that voters believed that 15 per cent of the population were immigrants, with Leavers putting the figure at 20 per cent and remain voters guessing 10 per cent. The official figure at the time was closer to five per cent – suggesting once again that fears about migration are mostly prejudice wrapped in a toxic cloud.

I HAVE lost my car in a multi-storey in Hull and this says something about me as a man. Men  carry on when they can’t remember where they parked, so I am not being man enough about this.

This will be revealed by the man who miraculously tracks down my car, a sort of lion-hunter of these concrete plains – or, in this instance, a Leon-hunter.

I stand before the sign reading inquiries. In my mind it says: “Idiots queue here.” The car park office has a mirrored wall and I see a reflection of a balding bloke in a white shirt and Levis. He is frowning.

I have been here for an interview. Crime writer Nick Quantrill, that friendly man of Hull, told me to park in one car park and I accidentally ended up in another. A small misunderstanding, but not a surprising one if you are me.

The car park has many storeys and I park somewhere near the top. On the way out, I notice a sign saying that you need your registration for the payment machine. I find a scrap of paper in my wallet and write it down.

Two hours later I return and type the registration on the screen where you pay. It doesn’t recognise the car, so I type it out again. Still no joy, but the machine lets you estimate your time of arrival and you pay accordingly. Two hours in the centre of Hull cost me £1.90 – a sum they’d charge you in York for driving past and thinking of parking your car.

Feeling pleased with myself for having worked all that out, I go up to the top floor where I parked my car. And it’s nowhere to be seen. I dash around, but it’s still not there. Concrete rampways are climbed and descended. But that car is still not there.

After ten minutes of this, I admit defeat and walk all the way down the concrete stairs and find myself in a dead end by the fire escape doors. I go back up the stairs, trudge across more concrete acres until I am looking at myself in that mirrored wall.

Remembering that the machine didn’t recognise the car, I wonder if I have wandered into a different multi-storey or possibly a parallel universe.

The window opens and the car park boss, enormous through the smallish opening, listens to my sorry tale. He is unsurprised by what I say. Happens all the time, apparently.

He sends someone out to help me. This man is the most cheerful car-park worker in the whole of Hull or quite possibly the world. He writes the registration on the edge of his hand, where another number is already there in a biro tattoo.

This valiant hunter of lost cars then dashes off, saying: “I know where it’ll be.” Which is more than I do. Five minutes later, he returns and takes me up in the lift. I apologise for my idiocy. He assures me that I am a gem. “Women come and ask for help,” he says. “But most men carry on when they can’t find their car. When I show them where it is, they say, ‘Well, you must have moved it’.”

As he leads me to the car, he says that the multi-storey has a new numbering system. For now the floors have different numbers depending whether you are inside or outside  the parking area. He generously offers that as an explanation for my car dislocation.

“Never lost a car from this place in 30 years,” the friendly man says, whizzing off to rescue the next forgetful driver.

This leaves me wondering why I am not man enough to have a testosterone fuelled paddy about my own stupidity. It seems that I am just like a woman when it comes to losing my car.

I drive down all the levels, remembering why crime dramas set car chases in these places, all concrete claustrophobia, steep ramps and crying tyres.

My own tyres are not crying as I pull up at the automatic barrier. This doesn’t budge. Other cars pull up behind me. I have spent so long looking for my car that I have outstayed my welcome. I press the help button.

“Hello, you just helped me find my car and…”

“Hang on a moment, sir” says the cheerful man who has been 30 years in this place.

The barrier rises and I head for home, a journey that passes without incident so long as you overlook me losing my way around Beverley. And that, for non-northern readers, is a pretty market town and not a girl.

THERE I was yesterday pretending to be a TV critic and praising the lovely Nadiya Hussain – and this morning the Great British Bake Off is all over the newspapers.

Turns out the stolen recipe makes its debut on Channel 4 one week today. You will recall that the channel dough-hooked the series away from the BBC in a row over, well, dough.

I watched every episode of the BBC version, paying keen attention to the bread section. The transfer didn’t please me, as the way favourite programmes suddenly disappear from one channel is annoying – especially if they migrate to Sky, when watching requires the payment of the Rupert Murdoch TV licence (much more expensive than the BBC version).

The broadcaster Mark Lawson, reviewing the first episode in the Guardian this morning, also watched every episode on the Beeb – and concludes that the new version “is as strong as any previously made”.

High praise, so let’s hope that Mark isn’t being half-baked. He is usually a good guide to cultural matters, able to scoop low and rise high. His regular stint at launching the crime-writing festival in Harrogate each year showcases his talents – talents mysteriously abandoned by BBC Radio Four’s Front Row arts show, following a falling out and some reported nastiness.

Over on the BBC website, there are “33 things you need to know about the Channel 4 version”. That’s a lot for a baking show, although it does maintain the list habit of having an odd number of items – more catching to the eye, apparently.

One of the ‘things’ is that veteran cookery writer Pru Leith – in the Mary Berry role ­– told everyone that they should record the show and skip the ads (16 minutes’ worth from a 58-minute show). More ads than ever before in a Channel 4 show, apparently, causing this morning’s edition of The Sun to shout: “Dough Nuts”, adding “C4 milk hit show for cash”.

That seems a little unfair, as well as hypocritical from a commercially owned newspaper, but their sauce is never consistent and often comes with lumps.

The usually reliable Lawson reckons that the ad breaks give the show better shape than those “rather Blue Peter-ish drop in films”. He is also won over by the new presenting team: Sandi Toksvig is always a safe but sufficiently cheeky pair of hands, but the rogue element here is Noel Fielding, who came to prominence being surreal in the sketch show The Mighty Boosh. Lawson says he is an inspired choice, encouraging to the contestants and respectful of the show’s cosy record.

Fielding is no Mel and Sue, of course, but only Paul Hollywood has made the cross-channel swim, reportedly with twinkling ego and celebratory handshake intact.

Fielding and Toksvig are said to work well as a curious double act, with Fielding telling reporters: “When we did our chemistry test we made love straightaway.” He’s referring to the screen tests presenters do to make sure they’re a good fit on camera. “Sandi is the quickest comedian I’ve ever worked with,” he adds, fan-boyishly.

On radio shows such as I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Sandi also has the longest, maddest and most breathless laugh ever broadcast, but perhaps she’ll keep that in check on Bake Off.

According to those 33 things, there are 12 contestants and “their names are Liam, Stacey, Yan, Steven, Tom, Flo, Kate, Julia, James, Chris, Sophie and Peter” (seen above in a photo borrowed from Channel 4).

As the contestants are basically the whole point of these shows, we will get to know them well enough.

Will I watch? Not sure yet. The first one perhaps, but then we’re away for the next three. Maybe I’ll be able to kick that flour-drenched sugar high after all this time.

TODAY I shall pretend to be a television critic. Disappointments over food and other matters will be mentioned, although a passing hooray will be raised for the marvel that is Nadiya Hussain.

The second series of Top Of The Lake (BBC2) is a curious mess. This was must-see television after the first series of Jane Campion’s crime drama was so damn good: edgy, weird and compelling. Mostly the second series has just been flat weird without the better ingredients.

The first series was set in a creepy corner of New Zealand and it lured you in like the mist disguising a dangerous stretch of quick-sand. You couldn’t take your eyes away as you took cautious steps forward. It was all so darkly addictive, and Elizabeth Moss as Detective Robin Griffin was messed-up but strong.

In follow-up, The China Girl, something has gone badly awry as Griffith returns to Sydney. You can watch the whole series on iPlayer but at the time of writing, we are up to episode four – a better hour than the other three, but nothing to worry the shadowed splendour of the first series.

The third episode ended with a frankly bonkers scene in which the now hopeless Griffin had a fight with a man in a wheelchair – the guy she had put there in the first series. They were in court and he trapped her in an anteroom and, oh well, it was the stupidest moment in a series that has struggled to find its feet.

There are strong elements, including the mystery spun around the dead Chinese prostitute found in a suitcase dumped in the sea, and the theme of women being abused is interesting and handled well. But, oh, the characters are just so annoying. Moss’s sidekick, played by Gwendoline Christie from Game of Thrones, seems to have wandered in from a buddy-cop sit-com. Her performance, while striking, is just so strangely out of step with everything else.

The personal strands here are more prominent than the crime backstory, mostly concerning Robin’s 18-year-old daughter Mary, whose separated parents are at war with each other, but united in their horror at Mary’s boyfriend, a weirdo creep of a lecturer with straggled hair and a filthy flat above a brothel. He is quite possibly the most annoying character you will ever have encountered in a crime drama.

Episode four saw Mary, as groomed by her boyfriend, joining resentful prostitutes under a flyover, where she was rescued after attempting to give a stranger a blow job (“I’m not paying for that!”). The closing scene where Mary sobbed in the lap of Robin, the mother she doesn’t know, was powerfully done, and you felt that perhaps this drama might redeem itself. But mostly it’s been a mess.

The Big Family Cooking Showdown (BBC2) is one of the Beeb’s answers to Channel 4 nicking off with The Great British Bake Off. After one helping, it is difficult to see that this show will take off in the same way, but sometimes these affairs manage to stir their own alchemy.

Having families compete against families might work, although it misses the unpredictable chemistry of putting competitive strangers behind the mixing bowls. And family cooking – although important to everyday health and sanity – isn’t exactly sexy in television terms.

Nadiya Hussain hosts with Zoe Ball and does her best, but you can’t escape the feeling that they’ve just met and have been told to act like mates, whereas Mel and Sue in the original Bake Off were genuine lifelong friends. The judges are Rosemary Shrager and Giorgio Locatelli. Rosemary does what she normally does, which is be blunt and a bit eccentric. Giorgio is more of a wild card, unpredictable and grumpy: he was the best thing about this first course.

Will this show be any good? I wouldn’t bet your pudding on it.

But the Bake Off winner is a marvel in her other BBC2 series, Nadiya’s British Food Adventure. What a delight that woman is: friendly, funny and all-round lovely to everyone she meets. And I know it’s a lot to place on such slight shoulders, but Nadiya, the ever-charming, smiley Nadiya, is such a potent symbol of modern Britain. How could any dunderhead watch her and grumble about migration? The day Nadiya migrated into our lives was a happy one indeed. Nice looking recipes, too.

“Don’t buy this rag,” says a Facebook friend in a post. He is referring to the Sun. And I won’t. But matching intolerance with more intolerance does still worry me.

A link on the post takes you to the Canary, a left-wing website that campaigns against Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspaper. It also expends much energy supporting everything Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says or does. Nothing wrong with that as such. But something about this campaign worries me.

My tattered soul is long dipped in printer’s ink. Perhaps being a journalist makes you biased in favour of newspapers in general, even those you don’t like. I’ve worked in and around newspapers since 1980. That ink stains.

I am not in a hurry to defend The Sun. But plenty of people like it. With that in mind, here are a few points.

The Sun is a bit like that other sun in an English summer, in that occasionally it shines. The other week there was a splash about a parrot that nipped a burglar. Police extracted DNA from the blood on the parrot’s beak and the burglar was nabbed. The headline to this story was “HERCULE PARROT”. Now you must admit that was smart. Whoever wrote that headline earned their no doubt over-inflated London salary on that day.

The ‘good’ Sun is sharp and witty. The ‘bad’ Sun is judgemental, cruel, biased, narrow-minded and arrogantly wrong-headed. It’s fair to say that you can wait a long time to be warmed by the Sun’s better nature.

Those who sign up to the Canary Total Eclipse of The Sun campaign will do so in the belief there is only bad under the Sun. Some will be friends of mine; many will be people I like and admire. But I still can’t sign.

Is there an irony in a left-wing website campaigning against a tabloid newspaper read by many working-class people? It’s certainly a thought.

The Canary begins its campaign report as follows: “Now a nationwide boycott is official, it looks like the beginning of the end for Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun.”

The website uses techniques borrowed from the newspapers it despises – over-statement and exaggeration. That “beginning of the end” is over-selling things, I’d say.

This campaign in part is built on the decades long boycott of The Sun in Liverpool, following the appalling reporting of the Hillsborough disaster. Hardly anyone in Liverpool buys The Sun and that serves the paper right. Memories are long and people don’t forget.

But making a show of boycotting something you already shun is rather pointless. Most of those signing up won’t read The Sun anyway. I boycott the Daily Mail and the Daily Express by not reading them. But I’m happy they are around for those who like them.

It’s an unfashionable view nowadays, but the more newspapers, the better. Today you can add websites into that formula, too. And there are plenty of those to read. The more of them the better, too.

What worries me is the absolutist nature of people who hate The Sun and the Mail. Don’t like them myself. But do we really want to go around banning things?

My world view is a BBC/Guardian/Observer one, with occasional excursions elsewhere. To some of the absolutists, this no doubt makes me an establishment stooge, but never mind. I believe the licence fee remains good value – better value than Sky TV, which I have always avoided for anti-Murdoch reasons, and money reasons.

I buy the Guardian every Saturday, the Observer on a Sunday – and stump up a fiver a month as a Guardian member. I do this because I look at the website most days and feel I should pay something. And because I am happy to support that newspaper.

Before sitting down to write this, I listened to Broadcasting House, on BBC Radio Four – a programme almost worth the licence fee on its own.

As for The Sun, if that eventually sinks into oblivion it will mostly be down to its own bad behaviour, and changing readership habits, rather than boycotts and bans, I reckon.

Incidentally, Murdoch is also responsible for keeping The Times afloat and in good shape – something for which we should be grateful even if we choose other newspapers instead.

WHAT would Johnny Cash have thought of Neo-Nazis? Not a lot, according to his family. The country singer is no longer around to let us know, but yesterday his family issued a statement condemning a far-right protester in Charlottesville, seen wearing a Johnny Cash T-shirt.

His musician daughter Roseanne spoke on behalf of his family, saying that they’d been sickened at seeing their father’s name emblazoned on a Neo-Nazi chest.

Here is some of what they had to say: “Johnny Cash was a man whose heart beat with the rhythm of love and social justice…We do not judge race, colour, sexual orientation or creed…To any who claim supremacy over other human beings, to any who believe in racial or religious hierarchy: we are not you. Our father, as a person, icon, or symbol, is not you. We ask that the Cash name be kept far away from destructive and hateful ideology.”

Why would a white supremacist with a knuckle of hate for a brain like Johnny Cash? Perhaps it’s the image, the Man In Black and all those songs about prison. But it got me thinking about the way music and musicians can be misappropriated.

In a sense, dead singers are fair game. A racist and a humanitarian might both like Elvis, say. Perhaps it might even give them something they could agree about.

You can’t tread far along with path without bumping into Richard Wagner. The composer has had a long and ignoble association with the Nazis, but it is fair to conflate Wagner and Hitler – and does this coupling destroy the worth of the music? The composer was around long before Hitler, yet he was virulently anti-Semitic, in common with many Germans of the day, and was known to have made monstrous statements about Jews. All of which later attracted the Nazis to his music. Or does the music rise above all that?

Sometimes the unwanted associations are more straightforward. Musicians as various as the Rolling Stones, Adele, REM and Elton John complained about Donald Trump’s campaign using their music. And it must sicken the heart to see words and music written to one end being snatched away in careless opportunism.

Bruce Springsteen was angered in 1984 when Ronald Reagan used Born In The USA in his election campaign, having misunderstood caustic irony for patriotism. Reagan later compounded the injury by quoting Bruce in his speeches, forcing the famously left-leaning singer to issue statements distancing himself from the Republican politician.

Tim Booth of the band James complained when the song Sit Down was used at a Labour Party conference to usher in prime minister Gordon Brown (who once expressed a ludicrous liking for Arctic Monkeys, saying the Sheffield band “wake him up in the morning”).

This is a corridor without end, so let’s wind up with David Byrne, of Talking Heads, who in 2010 sued senator Charlie Crist for using his song Road To Nowhere in an attack ad on his opponents, Marco Rubio. Crist agreed to pay damages and posted an apology on YouTube. And quite right, too – it’s a fabulous song, a sort of bouncy hymn to nihilism.

Musical misappropriation can come with adverts, too. On television now there is an infuriating ad for Boots based around a cover version of that annoying Slade song we suffer every year, swapping ‘summer’ for ‘Christmas’.

Oh great. Here’s a suggestion. Why doesn’t Cadbury’s or someone pinch the song again for their cheapo chocolate eggs. “I Wish It Could be Easter…” Then we could listen to that bloody song all year round.

To return to Mr Cash, perhaps that hate-filled T-shirt wearer should listen to the singer’s late albums, especially The Man Comes Around. There, Cash performs a version of Trent Reznor’s song Hurt that falls like thunder, and should clear away all vestiges of racism. Or it would if these people weren’t so horribly and hatefully stupid.

There’s a word I almost never use, partly out of uncertainty, along no doubt with many other words whose meanings play misty with me. That word is ‘egregious’ and it was used by Donald Trump in a statement atoning for the inadequacy of an earlier statement.

The protest by white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the death of civil rights protester Heather Heyer, when a car was driven at her, also injuring 19 other protesters.

Trump’s first statement apportioned blame on all sides, and caused general consternation by its refusal to criticise the white supremacists – hardly surprising, in a sense, as his presidential campaign last year was horribly divisive in the way it stoked hatred and cheered the far right in the States.

Trump was later prodded into action to stiffly recite a statement clearly not from his own hand. And you could tell that by the way those words discomfited him.

Here is part of what he said: “As I said on Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.”

That egregious was a dead giveaway. Has that word ever before fallen from his fat lips? It doesn’t often fall from my thinner lips, but I have just looked it up, and refreshed the meaning: “outstandingly bad; shocking”.

The word comes from the Latin and means “standing out from the flock”, and was thought to have been used originally in an ironic sense. And this is where it gets interesting, for egregious has another, archaic meaning of “remarkably good”.

Unlikely that Trump knew that, but it does add another layer to his forced apology.

Anyway, this morning’s update from the idiot maelstrom blows away any goodwill and unity earned from his earlier forced apology. In the latest extraordinary press conference, the president veered into an off-road rant, blaming what he called the ‘alt-left’ and going out of his way apparently to defend neo-Nazis.

As he blundered on, Trump returned to blaming all sides, saying in a typically Trumpian line: “You had people that were very fine people on all sides.”

Tellingly, in seemingly offering succour to “very fine” white supremacists, Trump united the country – against him. His new outburst earned condemnation and disgust from all sides, mostly strongly from within his own Republican ranks.

Here’s a typical reaction, from senator Marco Rubio of Florida: “Mr President, you can’t allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame. They support idea which cost nation & word so much pain.”

The only words of comfort for Trump came from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who tweeted: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists…”

With friends like that, Trump really has backed himself into a fetid corner. How much longer can this freak show presidency last? If I might call on that word, he is easily the most egregious president in US history.

The last incumbent, Barack Obama, took to Twitter to condemn racism after the far-right rally, quoting Nelson Mandela to say: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion.”

That has become the most liked tweet ever, with more that 2.9 million users endorsing the sentiment.

That trumps one supportive tweet from a racist former leader of the Kl Klux Klan.

THE death of a civil rights marcher in Charlottesville, Virginia raises the question of whether such a right-wing protest could get similarly out of hand here. My answer to that recalls what became known as the Battle of Lewisham.

This story from 40 years ago takes me back to my student stomping ground and, more importantly, to my years on the South East London Mercury.

The editor, Roger Norman, made a name for himself as a champion of multiculturalism, although I don’t recall if he ever used the word.

Roger – or RN, as he was known – died in 2006, aged 65, his end perhaps hastened by a liking for cigars, wine and stout. An obituary in the Guardian, written by my former colleagues Pete Cordwell and Pat Greenwood, remembered “his wise, principled direction”.

Pete and Pat also wrote: “His door always open, he was a leader who always listened to problems. So laid back as to be almost horizontal – especially if there was a good wine or a milky-topped stout, a slim cigar, or exhilarating company.”

The 1970s and 1980s were crucial decades for the Afro-Caribbean community in Lewisham, at a time when the National Front was making a nasty nuisance of itself.

In 1974, the Front wanted to march through Roger’s New Cross patch and he ran a front-page lead spelling out in words and pictures what they stood for, under the headline: “You’d Better Believe Us!”

He also put the energy he barely seemed to have – it was all below the surface somehow – into fostering harmony and a sense of live and let live. His beliefs lay partly in personal circumstance, as his wife, Emily, was black, and through what you might call humanitarian politics (he wasn’t party political, as I recall). Roger was awarded the MBE for his services to community journalism in 1996.

The year after that march, I started at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, and sometime after graduating, joined the Mercury. Roger used to waft around the office, smoking small cigars, stroking his goatee beard and gently putting people down with an understated “Yeah?” if he disagreed with what they were saying.

Three years after that noted front page, in the August of 1977, the area was again braced for trouble when the National Front wanted to march along Lewisham High Street.

This turned into an hour-long running battle between protesters and National Front marchers. The march had long been a cause of anxiety and the local council was at odds with the Metropolitan Commission of Police, David McNee, and with the Home Office.

As a newspaper report said afterwards: “It is not known whether the police expected the violence which, for example, the Lewisham councillors were grimly sure would occur.”

The police appeared to be expecting a large demonstration against the march, which in the event drew around 500 people, fewer than many had anticipated. A quarter of the Metropolitan police were on duty that day, with more horses that was said to be normal for a demonstration. They also had riot shields at the ready. These were used later in the day for the first time on the British mainland, having previously been used by troops in Northern Ireland.

What lessons can we draw from those distant days? One is to be forever vigilant against the rise of the nasty right. For if it can happen in the US, fostered in part by the words of candidate Trump, then it could happen here.

The other – and it is almost too late to worry about this – is to remember what a good local newspaper can do for its community. People often disparage newspapers these days, either because they represent the “mainstream media”, that new enemy of the moment to left and right; or because, in the case of local newspapers, they are not all that good any more.

This criticism of local newspapers is all too often true, however hard the remaining journalists work. But a strong paper with a good editor can be a force for good. The Mercury, by the way, no longer exists, having been swallowed by the South London Press years ago. And I don’t think that paper is in great shape, either.

As for Trump, his initial unwillingness fully to condemn the alt-right marchers showed his true colours. A later condemnation, produced after much prodding, didn’t do much to repair the damage already done.