Posts

Tax mother******, do you pay it?

Image
IT appears that at last the right-wing press has found some compassion for minorities - it's just a shame that they're hurrying to help the affluent rather than the embattled.  Consider  The Daily Telegraph  rushing to the defence of an elderly couple who had assembled investments in 60 buy-to-let properties, but because of Labour's tax plans now faced "selling their boat". Call me old-fashioned, but people whose retirement plans to sail the world are built on the back of buying up half the Monopoly board are not exactly the epitome of being on the breadline.  The same paper also splashed on the fact that the government's move to close a death duty loophole on agricultural estates had been met with disapproval from the world's richest man - Elon Musk. What to, misquote Mrs Merton, first attracted the multi-billionaire to opposition to redistributive tax policy? I haven't yet seen reports of a "war" on those hard-pressed passengers facing a hi

Save the West Country, save the world...

Image
THE North Cornish coast in the early 1990s seems, on the face of it, a rather unlikely place for a revolution... But the end of an old world order has to start somewhere - why not the small village of Delabole? It was here, 33 years ago, that the UK's first commercial windfarm was built. My earliest childhood holidays were just a couple of miles away; the turbines - china white against the skyline - visible from the front of the bungalows. The structures were the legacy of local dairy farmers who, having lost a barn roof in stormy conditions, began to consider if they couldn't in fact harness "the damn wind" for good.  And in doing they were not just entering a new UK industry, they were starting one from scratch. Back then this technology was new and strange enough to attract visitors - 100,000 in just a few years. I still remember standing outside the site's tourism office, staring up at the giant blades with a sense of awe.  Fast forward three decades and there

The director's cut of history is definitely worth a look

Image
IN order to finally turn the tide on the dangerous populists whose influence is ever growing we need to assert a simple truth - the past was pretty shitty for almost everyone. A sort of hazy nostalgia for a time not so long ago is a powerful tool for extremist parties such as the AfD, MAGA Republicans and the UK's own Reform. If only, they argue, we could get back to when our countries were simpler, quieter and (let's be honest) whiter. A period sort of around the late 1990s but without Tony Blair in charge. When we could have a touch of the Blitz spirit without the actual bombing. Indian takeaways but rather fewer actual Indians. A green and pleasant land but none of that green transition nonsense. And maybe a bit of childhood meningitis (because no vaccines, obviously). You swiftly get the whiff of wistfulness in Facebook heritage groups when a picture of an old high street conjures up memories of an era when kids were safe to play out, men whistled on their way to work and i

Internet shitposters are out of the tree - and inside Westminster

Image
DURING the grimmest period of Covid I took a call from my then news editor asking me to investigate reports that the local ice rink was to be used as an emergency morgue. The claim was one of many circulating during a time that was, much as now, rife with anxiety and fast-spreading rumours. As it turns out the ice rink story was entirely untrue, although I was able to confirm contingency planners had indeed earmarked a hangar at Birmingham Airport for a similar purpose.  During the often chaotic weeks and months that came after I also had to investigate reports of army helicopters conducting flights over the borough, plans to bring the area into local lockdown and care workers without PPE using bin liners for protection. Some claims were true, others were partly factual but perhaps exaggerated or distorted and some proved entirely bogus. The job of any responsible reporter when alerted to a whisper on Twitter or an anonymous email is to establish quickly whether there's anything to

In Place of Hope

Image
"We should treat the 2017 manifesto as our foundational document, the radicalism and the hope that that inspired across the country was real." --- Keir Starmer, January 2020. EXACTLY seven years ago this week I was stood in the city centre getting - what the kids might describe - as "low-key pissed on" with a pretty big smile on my face. The "get out the vote" rally was organised on the eve of the eve of the election it's generally hoped we've forgotten these days. If only because the shock surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn might give the strange impression that socialism can be quite popular actually. A few thousand people - most of them young, many of them with more interesting haircuts than mine - had flocked to Birmingham city centre to see the then Labour leader speak. Every poll going was predicting a Tory landslide, Corbyn himself had been traduced and abused as everything from a terrorist-sympathiser to a Jew-hater to the most dangerous al

Future history at risk in the internet age

Image
AN OBVIOUS but often unnoticed consequence of the death of the local paper is that future history might be rather flimsier than today's. I'm about to start work on my dissertation, which will delve into the Welsh workhouses of the nineteenth century. An obvious advantage in trying to understand social conditions in this period - compared to say 1512 - is the increasing abundance of press coverage which offers insight into daily life at the level of local towns and villages. While no source is infallible, print journalism was a form of record-keeping that tilted coverage much more firmly in the favour of ordinary people.  Initially of course such outlets were not the platforms of community news they would later become but fast forward to the twentieth century and titles were undeniably offering your average resident a platform. School fetes, political rucks, footie matches, live shows and crimes were set in type and published. One of the few joys of my brief stint as acting edit

Trying to find my style

Image
THEY talk in hushed whispers in a hundred and one creative writing classes of the writer finding "their voice". Which might imply that there's some triumphant moment when you can suddenly draw it like a sword from the stone and bellow defiance at the heavens at your new-found authorial authority. I suspect though it's more a gradual process of feeling your way with sentences. At some point eventually you squint down at the page and think "oh, yeah, I do tend to do that don't I." Except I'm never sure I've ever even quite done that, so here I am on a chilly Monday evening, trying to. Here goes. I'm probably a writer who likes testing what he can do with the language. I like assonance, I like the way sounds repeat, I like the way you can really rub your reader's nose in a point. Then let go. Because speed makes it urgent. Maybe. That sort of poetry in prose approach comes, I think, from my love of Ray Bradbury. If it's possible to imagi