Madam Miaow Says

SOPA bites the dust but how did the Chinese view the US firewall?

2012-01-23T13:37:00.006Z

With a mixture of sympathy, schadenfreude and amusement, it seems.

Evan Osnos writes in The New Yorker:

After several years in which American diplomats have inveighed against Internet censorship in China, the proposals have inspired a bit of snickering. 'The Great Firewall turns out to be a visionary product; the American government is trying to copy us,' one commentator wrote. A Chinese message making the rounds on Thursday said: 'At last, the planet is becoming unified: We are ahead of the whole world, and the ‘American imperialists’ are racing to catch up.'

On Weibo, "a commentator known as Dr. Zhang wrote: 'I’ve come up with a perfect solution: You can come to China to download all your pirated media, and we’ll go to America to discuss politically sensitive subjects.'"

Ah well. At least the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act managed to achieve one good thing: uniting global netizens in their distaste for the clampdown. Netizens of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your keychains.

Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory: Foxconn

2012-01-14T11:56:00.016Z

An illuminating, amusing and very moving podcast from American performer Mike Daisey who visited the vast Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, that makes Apple iPhones among other hi-tec crap for us, posing as a businessman.

Foxconn is the suicide centre of tat. At least fourteen workers stepped off the planet through its labour-camp portals in 2010. Workers now have to sign a contract obliging them not to commit suicide. Presumably all 800,000 of them. Probably a world first.

If you can get past the gun-toting guards, you'll see the suicide nets fixed to the base of the huge buildings. Thirty-four hour shifts and cramped cement dormitories may play a part.

Foxconn also makes the Microsoft X-Box. The factory hit the news recently when it promised workers that it would recompense any workers who wanted to resign while employees staying on would be receiving no pay-rise. They reneged and the promised compensation never materialised.

As a result of all the above, industrial relations at the electronics battery farm are not good. Latest in a series of strikes, some 300 furious X-Box workers in the Wuhan campus who had been promised $450 per month to compensate for the move away from Shenzhen and were only paid two thirds of that, threatened a mass suicide. As this wouldn't be good for the company profile, which you'd think couldn't sink much lower, Foxconn settled this week. With some of them.

Labour laws in China are undergoing a rehaul but Daisey's experience shows that it's not happening fast enough. Wages at Foxconn are barely above the minimum rate. Workers are being injured by hazardous chemicals, long hours and machine accidents. When they complain, they find themselves on employment blacklists. And yet fortunes are being made at the top. How did we get here in the first place?

It was ironic to see frustrated Chinese customers protesting and throwing eggs at the Apple Store when sale of the voice-activated 4S iPhone was stopped due to health and safety concerns over crowding at the launch.

Desperate Foxconn workers did write personally to Steve Jobs to beg him to step in. They never received a reply, although Apple have demanded suicide counsellors be made available and forbidden the use of some chemicals. More here.

I am writing this on an Apple MacBook Pro. I do not feel good about this. Unfortunately, I can't afford to replace it. But I have vowed never to have an iPhone or an iPad until they clean up their act. However, given the number of electronics companies who get their products from Foxconn, where are the clean machines?

Podcast extract, Mr Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory, from Mike Daisey's The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Thanks to Chris Bulow

Apple, iPads and Chengdu explosions.

The Steampunk Opium Wars extravaganza at the Greenwich National Maritime Museum 16th Feb 2012

2012-01-11T19:05:00.021Z

Britain's craving for chinoiserie in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in a trade imbalance that threatened to empty the treasury. To pay for the tea, silks, spices and porcelain we liked so much, the East India Company sold enormous quantities of cheap Bengal-grown opium to China, turning an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction.

The profits from the opium trade made fortunes, earned revenues for the British government, paid for the administration of the Empire in India and even financed a large slice of Royal Navy costs. When the Chinese tried to halt the import of the drug, the narco-capitalists persuaded Foreign Secretary Palmerston and Lord Melbourne's government to go to war in 1839. The first military conflict, lasting a bloody three years, resulted in the Treaty of Nanking and the transfer of territory including Hong Kong to British rule.

Want to find out more about this dark period in Anglo-Chinese history? To celebrate Chinese New Year and mark the opening of the National Maritime Museum's new Traders Gallery, I'm presenting The Steampunk Opium Wars extravaganza with songs poetry and music from legendary writer Charles Shaar Murray; The Plague's Marc "The Exorcist" Jefferies; Deborah Evans-Stickland performing her Flying Lizards mega-hit "Money (That's What I Want)"; Gary Lammin of The Bermondsey Joyriders; and DJ Zoe Baxter AKA Lucky Cat from Resonance FM.

Historical characters will be slugging it out in verse to persuade us of the pros and cons of waging war to push drugs: with John Crow Constable, Paul Anderson, Hugo Trebels, John Paul O'Neill and Louise Whittle.

The evening is centred around Farrago Poetry's History Slam where the audience will have a chance to write poetry on the theme in workshops led by the historical characters, and then perform them in the slam.

Come and play with us.

Free entry but places have to be booked in advance.

Anna Chen presents "Traders"
National Maritime Museum, Sammy Ofer Wing
Greenwich
6.30-10pm
Thursday 16th February 2012
Tickets: Free but book in advance
Tel: 020 8312 6608

The Steampunk Opium Wars Facebook and webpage

Liam Byrne & Labour: A Christmas Story

2012-01-03T10:30:00.017Z

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed. 'Cause Pontius Cameron had kicked them out and put Mary and Joseph on workfare. "'Tis good. 'Tis the Lord's work," saith Liam Byrne and took all the flak for what the Romans did hoping to get himself a little governorship somewhere nearer Rome.

And so it came to pass that Jesus wept and grew into a fine young man, if a bit chippy. He overturned the money changers' counters in the Temple at Bankside but Fred the Shred escaped to spend more time with his millions. Jesus gazed upon Goldman Sachs, Lehmans and the rest and would have asked his Dad — his real Dad — to smite them a bit but he was an absentee father and off elsewhere leaving his son to sort it out while they made £35 billion profit when they were supposed to be bust. "'Tis a miracle", saith Jesus unto the Lord but was told to call back later as he was spending quality time with his other kids.

Some of Jesus's mates tried to camp out at the Temple, but whereas the money changers had been greeted with open arms and fat guts, the janitor set the dogs onto them.

Finding the priests at Labour Party HQ useless and hungover anyway, Jesus tried to chivvy up the troops but was told he was a troublemaker. "Look what you did to the Temple," they said. "Jesus Christ, you've made a right mess." "But it wasn't me," saith Jesus. "It was the money changers." "Of course it was you," saith Liam Byrne, again jonesing for a promotion. "You haven't got a bean and you and your skint pals are a drain on the state." Which was wicked for he was no slouch himself when it came to eating all the state-subsidised pies. "Besides, Dusky, you ain't from around here."

"'Tis another miracle", saith the Sunday Times when their Rich List revealed the creation of even more billionaires despite the country supposedly being on its uppers. "Ain't no miracle" saith Jesus, "and those uppers are pure Christian Louboutin – they've just lost their red souls ... and replaced them with our souls".

Jesus tried to explain to everyone that the riots were just the meek inheriting the earth as they were fed up with pie in the sky and wanted something a tad more substantial before they died, but was all but crucified for saying so. "Phew, that was close", he muttered. "No wonder they call me Twinkletoes because I am fleet of foot, unshod as they be except for these here Birkenstocks, and they will never catch me." Some say that Dad got wind of that message and set the hubris police onto him.

Before they stop'n'searched him on suspicion of possessing principles, he threw a couple of parties. At the big rave, he tried to prove you can't feed a mass of people on a tin of sardines, a Wonderloaf and a tin of Carling, but the scribes got the wrong end of the stick and said they'd all had a slap-up lunch. The scribes had, but at Chipping Norton, and they were all pissed by the time they arrived.

At his Labour Party farewell do, Jesus prophesied that someone would betray him before the cock crew, and they all trampled each other in the rush to prove Jesus right with Liam Byrne issuing several screeds applying for any top job that would have him.

The next day Jesus was run out of town but was such a nice guy that he told his Dad not to hold it against them. "They're arseholes, Dad. They haven't got a clue. They're not worf it." He was supposed to come back a bit later, but he took one look around and was off again, this time to move in with his Dad who'd promised to take him fishing.

FACT FILE: The collective wealth of the UK's 1,000 richest rose 30% in 2009 in wake of economic crisis. The combined wealth of the top 1000 rose by over £77bn to £333.5bn, biggest annual increase in 22-year history of The Sunday Times rich list.

The cost of benefit fraud is £1bn. Unclaimed benefits amount to £16.5bn.

Estimated tax owed to us: £70bn

Ed Miliband's brave new war on the poor

2012-01-02T11:51:00.012Z

O brave new year that has such people, innit? Well, that was a lovely festive season. I hope you all had a good one, too, even if it turns out to be the last one we enjoy if the Tories carry on with their policy of pillaging and both enabling and enobling the pillagers-in-chief.

With a hot new scriptwriter on the team, as splashed all over the media, you'd think Ed Miliband would have found his mettle, put on his big-boy pants and shown some sign that he is on top of the economic and social crisis unfolding like origami in a storm. I don't know what speech guru Asher Dresner is bringing to the table but it sure isn't renewed Labour principles.

Ed Miliband's Big Idea in the Daily Mail is to deflect anger away from the feral rich and their sticky-fingered bankers and politicians, and onto the poorest in society by declaring war on "benefit scroungers". He's exercised by one billion lost on poor benefit cheats yet forgets about the £16.5 billion that lies unclaimed by those who are entitled to it. How many billions lost on rich cheats? The subsidised rich? On recapitalising the banks? Tax breaks? Tax cheats? The top one percent have doubled their share of the national wealth in the past 30 years. Can we please have that back to pay off the deficit?

All the above and yet, according to the Guardian, Ed's going to be banging on about:

• How the deficit is tackled needs to include a proper plan for growth and jobs. He will highlight the five-point plans crafted by Balls, including a temporary reversal in the VAT rise to help guarantee 100,000 jobs for young people.

• Improving the kind of country today's leaders leave for their children will involve reversing, or softening, government decisions such as the trebling in university tuition fees.

• Labour will focus on "powerful vested interests", such as energy companies, to relieve pressure on the squeezed middle.

Tinkering at the edges, barely smouldering among the ruins while the rich fiddle like fury, we're going to hell in a handcart steered by Ed. Still, at least he's noticed the playing field is far from level.

Meanwhile, New Labour just won't give up and sod off to play with their millions. Tim Allan is doing his best to drag the beleaguered Ed to the right like a puppy on a leash, accusing him of being anti-business. 'Fonly! I'd like to see a strong Ed challenge the social engineering going on: hardwiring us via the mainstream media that the business class has the only game in town and to meekly accept that they wield more power than our democratically elected governments. A boy can only be so supine before he fights back. Can't he?

Harpy Marx on Ed Miliband's war on the poor.

UPDATE: It appears that Liam Byrne is pushing the Blairite line of attacking "benefit scroungers" while he claims over £2,000 per MONTH state subsidies. There's a name for people like him but I'm far too polite to say it here except that it starts with a "hypo" and ends with a "crite".

Labour, "benefit scroungers" and rightwing fool's gold by Willard Foxton in the HuffPo

Kim Jong Il: power grows from the barrel of a vegetable

2011-12-19T19:44:00.006Z

"They don't make 'em like they used to."

I'm just getting to grips with the sad news that the man named after Superman's Dad has passed on to the Great Hall of the People in the Sky.

We all know that power grows from the barrel of a gun. Here's Dear Leader practising with veg.

As Sigmund Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a vegetable is just a vegetable. Or not.

"Hmm, something's missing."

"The people's cheap laugh is deepest red."

"Do we have something a bit nobblier?"

"Well, it's the right colour."

"I may be needing some of these these."

"Huh! Jesus needed twelve of these."

So Hitchens, Havel and Kim are standing at the Pearly Gates ...

2011-12-19T12:39:00.012Z

This weekend's haul by the Grim Reaper has been an impressive one. First Christopher Hitchens, then Vaclav Havel, now ding dong, Kim Jong Il is dead. Is there no God!!!? Hitchens will know by now but he ain't telling.

The only time I saw Hitch was at Bookmarks where he took on the titans (or were they just tits?) of the SWP on the subject of NATO and former Yugoslavia. I disagreed with him but was shock 'n' awed by his bravura performance, standing on a tiny makeshift stage, drink in one hand, fag in the other, tying up the Greatest Minds of the Left like Danny Kaye in The Court Jester. Shame about Iraq and loving up to Bush, though.

He was a great wit, a beautiful youth and had massive style but, in the end, he was more an entertainer and a token radical for the Bush Right than a serious political analyst.

There were early signs that Hitchens was changing sides, or at least hedging his bets, such as in his support for the Falklands War and admiration for Thatcher. His tectonic rationalisation for siding with the new power in the world got under way once the forces of progress were in retreat after 9/11, famously cheerleading the massacre at Fallujah and laying into the Dixie Chicks for their rather mild statement of dissent days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The spirit of Hitchens's hero Voltaire was in absentia, as was his great rhetorical style, when during the peak of their monstering — death threats, McCarthyite attacks in the right-wing media, blacklisting and careers almost demolished — he joined in the public baying for their blood by referring to them in Viz-talk as "fat sluts", later correcting this to the "Fat Slags" of comic-book fame. So much for his gallant defence of the laydeez from the evil woman-hating Taliban.

Country music veteran Merle Haggard said of the episode:

I don't even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching.

We have burqas in the West — they're just invisible.

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body. (A clause in the indemnification contract signed by Hitch)

Hitchens is often praised for his moral clarity despite some gobsmackingly blatant murkiness. What, for me, summed up the disjuncture between his sharp mind and his inability to empathise was his failure to grasp that waterboarding hurts, can cause brain damage and kills. He lacked the imagination to understand the terror and pain until it was actually done to him under controlled conditions by friendly practitioners in the US army. "You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning ..." Good for him that he recanted his earlier position on this score in Vanity Fair but most of us don't need first-hand experience of being half drowned to understand that this horror is torture.

The tragedy of Christopher Hitchens was that he absconded just as we needed him. The joy was that he was great entertainment as a live act — just don't take him too seriously.

Latte Labour

Harpy Marx

The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens

Norman Finkelstein

He said what!!? about Columbus and the native American Indians?

Gauche obituary

Nick Cohen on his friend

Peter Hitchens on his brother

Ruling elite depravity Pt 4: tax whisteblower Osita Mba prosecuted while Hartnett gets pay-off

2011-12-10T13:59:00.008Z

Here's another case that goes on the shitlist I'm calling "How depraved is out ruling elite?"

You'd think, wouldn't you, that in these times of austerity, cuts and sharing the pain in our Big Society, that anyone who helped stem the flow of wealth away from the public purse and into greedy corporate maws would be held up as an example to us all. Maybe even a sign that the government is getting something right. But, no. Perverse and self-serving, the system is rigged so that the more outrageous your economic misdemeanour, the more you are rewarded.

Osita Mba is a name that should go down in history as a rare outbreak of courage and integrity in these brutish times. He is the solicitor at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs department (HMRC) who blew the whistle on tax supremo David Hartnett's curious habit of letting corporations off of their huge tax bills: Goldman Sachs £10mn interest and an eye-watering and possibly illegal £1bn for Vodafone. Denying for ages that dinners with corporate bigwigs had greased his podgy palms, Hartnett has finally decided to bugger off but not without a £1.7 million pension fund of our money, and not without setting off a spite-bomb with a slow fuse for the heroic lawyer without whom Hartnett would have still been indulging his generosity for the rich.

When you hear Frances Maude (pension £42,000 pa) and others complaining about Public sector pensions (average: £7,000 pa), just remember this:

Hartnett's package will anger critics. At the most recent valuation, in March 2011, his pension pot was worth £1.7m. He is expected to receive an annual payout of up to £80,000 and a lump sum on retirement of one year's salary, which is recorded as £160-165,000.

In an act that some might suspect of malice, Hartnett has set in motion a prosecution of Osita which may result in his sacking or, worse, his prosecution.

Personally, I'd rather see this fate directed at the hospitality-loving Hartnett rather than Osita, who should be garlanded with flowers and have rose petals strewn at his feet by dancing girls.

If Osita is punished I am personally going to riot.

You can sign a petition here.

UK Uncut's response to resignation of "Whitehall's most 'wined and dined' civil servant" here.

How depraved is our ruling elite Pt 3: coalition steals from cancer patients

2011-12-05T16:53:00.007Z

The bankers are paying themselves bonuses with gusto, Tamara Ecclestone still has her £500,000 shelf of Birkin bags, the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are having to pick up the bill.

And still we hear the shrill call that it's the deficit that needs eliminating. So how well are our masters doing in pursuing their aims?

Have they closed tax loopholes? Asked the rich to cough up some of the increasing profits made, f'rinstance, by supermarkets and energy companies? Whacked a supertax on yachts and skiiing holidays?

Nope, in this big society, the coalition government has decided to turn the bean-counters on to yet another group of the weakest in society, this time, cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

Under the plans being consulted on, seriously ill cancer patients in the middle of gruelling intravenous chemotherapy treatment will be forced to prove they are too sick to work. Some patients will have to face back-to-work interviews or be denied a crucial benefit - Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). This is despite unambiguous recommendations from cancer experts and 30 cancer charities[2] who have clearly stated that patients going through debilitating cancer treatment - and who have to leave work - should be automatically eligible for ESA.

Meanwhile, we all knew it but the Guardian's Randeep Ramesh confirms now it's official.

Income inequality among working-age people has risen faster in Britain than in any other rich nation since the mid-1970s owing to the rise of a financial services elite who through education and marriage have concentrated wealth into the hands of a tiny minority, according to a new report by the OECD.

To them that have much let them have even more. The top ten percenters' proportion of the national wealth has climbed to 12 times that of the bottom 10%, up from eight times.

This trend is especially pronounced in Britain, where the dramatic rise in inequality has been fuelled by the creation of a super-rich class. The share of the top 1% of income earners increased from 7.1% in 1970 to 14.3% in 2005. ... Just prior to the global recession, the OECD says the very top of British society – the 0.1% of highest earners – accounted for a remarkable 5% of total pre-tax income, a level of wealth hoarding not seen since the second world war.

We can no longer expect the government to protect the electorate that didn't vote them in in the first place. In the absence of human agency, the best we can hope for is that divine forces take a hand and do things to infuriate the rich like remove all the snow from Klosters and Aspen. Heh!

Laurie Penny locates decision to pursue cancer patients in Labour government.

Yet more depravity at the top: Jeremy Clarkson's joke

2011-12-03T14:48:00.006Z

How depraved is our ruling elite: No 2

Ah, yes. A big Number two.

Then there's the BBC okaying Jeremy Clarkson's Pinochetesque outburst calling for strikers to be taken out and shot in front of their families. Under pressure from 21,000 complaints, the public corporation then told him to apologise, exercising more punitive authority over two middle-aged lads making a mischievous phone call in Sachsgate than they have over the popular entertainer so admired by Norwegian killer Anders Breivik and the EDL who are calling for attacks on trade unionists.

I am told by John Mendelsohn that, in the US, Ann Coulter is calling for a Kent State-like response (that is, fatal shootings) to the Occupy movement.

String him up with dental floss and then make him drive a Trabant. Only joking.

Or throttle him with his own oversized gizzards in front of his idiot sidekick. Only choking.

Not that the "only joking" plea worked for the Facebook Two, jailed for four years each after the summer riots, or Paul Chambers convicted and fined over a joke Tweet in the Twitter joke trial.

Before Clarkson fans start bleating about freedom of speech, remember that this is someone who supports the use of super-injunctions for the rich and, indeed, reached for his lawyer to shut up his ex-wife when he didn't like what she was saying about him. He only had the order lifted when he saw that it didn't work.

Comics (I know, Clarkson's not very comical) bust down taboos, paving the way for others to follow: usually good when you are mocking authority and control. But how about when you are facilitating the return of a mindset that divides us, that reinforces the powers of those repressive authorities? The beeb surely wouldn't want their man planting a seed in the collective unconscious for use of the same atrocities occurring in places like Colombia. Surely not just as working people are starting to challenge the pillaging of their their livelihoods by bankers and business, and when the right is on the rise in Europe?

More depravity: Dow Chemicals sponsors 2012 Olympics

2011-12-03T12:08:00.013Z

Reports that one of the sponsors of our wonderful 2012 Olympics is Dow Chemicals, owner of Union Carbide which killed 15,000 people 27 years ago in Bhopal in India and is still maiming the local population, prompts me to start a "How depraved is our ruling elite" series here at Madam Miaow.

Dow's refusal to fully compensate the victims and clean up properly failed to move the Olympic organisers to do the right thing, and has effectively been rewarded with the kudos and prestige expected to result from the glorious Stratford event. (Oh, hold on. I think I see what Olympics chairman Lord Sebastian Coe and his pack are doing.)

Whether or not this is a cunning ploy to take the evil corporation down with the sinking ship — along with its its ground-to-air missiles, good taste and disposable buildings costing hundreds of millions in dosh — to ignore the plight of poor people continuing to be poisoned really does rank with the lowest of the low. Economic power is all that counts.

No wonder the Indian protesters burnt an effigy of smirking Seb Coe.

Read more about what happened in Bhopal here

St Ives & Me: BBC R4 11.30am today

2011-12-01T10:06:00.005Z

St Ives & Me: BBC R4 11.30am Thursday 1st December 2011
Available to listen on iPlayer for seven days

Put a face to the voices: pix here

St Ives, a Cornish seaside town 300 miles from comedian and poet Anna Chen's London home has been attracting artists for two centuries. A varied assortment of eccentrics, entrepreneurs and free spirits have turned the pilchard-fishing and tin-mining town into a popular cultural haven.

Anna has been holidaying there since she was ten and knew many of the famous artists who've populated and popularised St Ives.

In the late 1970s the bohemian fashion journalist and novelist Molly Parkin was a regular on the St. Ives scene and she recalls how, in the dark recesses of Mr Peggotty's disco, she introduced Anna to artist Patrick Heron. In his Porthmeor studio by the Atlantic, Heron used to make Anna mugs of tea while he painted and sketched her and their conversations opened her eyes to the arts. Revisiting those studios, she meets two present day painters maintaining the St Ives' tradition.

On a personal tour of the town, she returns to Barbara Hepworth's sculpture garden, hears about the unique light conditions that attract so many artists and reveals the vital roles Napoleon, Von Ribbentrop and the 1960s hippies played in promoting and preserving St Ives.

At lunchtime, in Norway Square, Anna performs her comic poetry in the St Ives Festival, which has been attracting trendsetters for thirty years.

And she waits on the beach, with bated breath, for the legendary 33rd wave.

Producer: Chris Eldon Lee
A Culture Wise production for BBC Radio 4.

You lucky bastard: pension envy in Life of Brian

2011-11-30T18:47:00.003Z

Lies, more lies and colossal whoppers brainwashing people who have little to envy those who have little more. Fed up with TV & radio vox pop of private sector workers slating people in the public sector for an average pension of £5,000 per year? The video above will cheer you up.

How about everyone's pensions being decent? What about all those company directors with £4 million pension pots? How about the top ten per cent of earners who haven't been touched by Osborne's attacks on workers?

Government wages war on poor: good luck to the strikers

2011-11-30T09:24:00.014Z

Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The best of luck to today's public sector workers and their strike. Yesterday's Autumn Statement by George Osborne — an acceleration of misery for most of us — was a declaration of class war on the poorest in society who do all the useful work.

Polly Toynbee lays out the facts in an impassioned piece in the Guardian:

Not one penny more was taken from the top 10% of earners. Every hit fell upon those with less not more. Fat plums ripe for the plucking stayed on the tree as the poorest bore 16% of the brunt of new cuts and the richest only 3%, according to the Resolution Foundation. Over £7bn could be harvested with 40% tax relief on higher pensions, while most earners only get 20% tax relief; £2bn should be nipped from taxing bankers' bonuses, but the bank levy announced was nothing extra. There was no mansion tax on high-value properties, though owners don't even pay their fair share of council tax, and property is greatly undertaxed compared with other countries.

Worse still, two-thirds of properties worth over £1m now change hands while avoiding all their 5% stamp duty, by using offshore company accounts. But not a word passed Osborne's lips on tax avoidance and evasion. Another 12,000 tax collectors are losing their jobs while some £25bn is evaded and £70bn avoided. In a time of national emergency, Osborne had no breath of rebuke about the responsibility of the rich not to dodge taxes, no threat to curb the culture of avoidance. Despite the High Pay Commission report on out-of-control boardroom pay – which even the Institute of Directors has called "unsustainable" – the chancellor said nothing. How adamantly he ruled out the Tobin tax on financial transactions, called for by those dangerous lefties Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.

Instead came the great attack on public sector employees on the eve of the biggest strike in memory. This was a declaration of open class war – and war on the pay of women, 73% of the public workforce. After a three-year freeze, public pay rises are pegged at 1% for two years, whatever the inflation rate. That means this government will take at least 16% from their incomes overall. But the plan to abolish Tupe – the rule that ensures public workers are not paid less if their service is privatised – is outrageously unjust, and will lead to mighty resistance to all privatisation from senior as well as junior staff.

Then there are the four myths around today's strike which have been pwned in Left Foot Forward. F'rinstance, that pensions aren't sustainable at the current level:

The assumptions are based on current policies, not government proposals. Confirming earlier findings in the Hutton Report (pdf), they clearly predict the cost of public pensions will fall from 2% of GDP to 1.8% in 2030 and 1.4% in 2060 - without any of the current Hutton proposals.

The reason that public sector pensions are higher? Because so few in the private sector have a pension at all!

As for being the work of "militants", "78 per cent of Unison voted in favour of the strike, 83 per cent of the GMB, 75 per cent of Unite – all mandates which any politician would kill for".

You may remember, of course, that Johnson was elected Mayor of London in 2008. He gained 42.48 per cent of the first preferences in London, on a turnout of 45.33 per cent. So London has a mayor triggered by less than a fifth of the voting population – just 19 per cent.

Faisal Islam of Channel 4 News has ten questions for George Osborne, starting with, "You are announcing unspecified massive spending cuts for the next parliament to meet your target. Isn’t this exactly what you criticised Labour for?"

The BBC says that 60% of the public are supporting the strike so the shameful position of Labour's Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves are not exactly cutting with the electorate.

Neither are the braying banker sympathisers. As one Tweet put it, if you can write an anti-strike rant, thank a teacher.

Politics Home: A Statement that may seal the Chancellor’s fate. "Look at the decision to cut tax credits which will raise rather than reduce child poverty levels – but refusing to repeat the bank bonus tax as Labour suggested. How out of touch can this Chancellor get?"

Paul Mason on Osborne's £30 billion of extra cuts. "There is now no chance of a sustained recovery, either in the real economy or the public finances, by the time we get to the pre-election period."

All this, and yet Rachel Reeves, a Labour frontbencher marked for higher things (with 666 tattooed under her hair, more like), says: "We do not support the strike because a strike is a sign of failure."

Anthony Hilton, former City Ed for the Evening Standard, on the myth of public-pension Sir Humphreys.

Big business turns TV toxic

2011-11-27T18:08:00.009Z

My latest NEW INTERNATIONALIST magazine column December 2011

Big business turns TV toxic

The ghost of Milton Friedman must be breaking out the bubbly in whatever Circle of Hell he now inhabits.

Across the globe, his Satanic little helpers have been sucking the wealth out of the system like a parasitic alien virus to feed the plutocrats at the top as public services are 'liberalised'. And now, in the Mother of all Parliaments, the Houses of both Commons and Lords have handed over Britain's glorious National Health Service to the forces of capital.

You know it's a bad thing when Cherie Blair sets up a company to profit from pillaging the NHS. Private clinics in supermarkets, no less. Croesus wept!

The October vote on NHS "reform" represents a massive seismic shift in our society ... but where have the media been in all of this?

It wasn't until the day after that some of the media happened to mention the colossal conflict of interest among those dismantling our national treasure. The TV outlets came to bury the news, not ring out a warning or a danger, or analyse what this would mean for their viewers. So while we were all watching Strictly Come Dancing, the Sopranos were making their major play. It's like the last reel in The Godfather where Michael Corleone attends his son's baptism while his enemies are bumped off.

Business is now more powerful than our democratic institutions, and to prove it, they're all over the media like a poisonous rash.

The Apprentice, Dragons' Den, Secret Millionaire ... All those toxic shows where hatchet-faced middle-managers with thousand-yard stares tell desperate losers which part of their souls they have to hack away in order to be a winner. Noticed how our entertainment is wall-to-wall with Wall Street wannabees naturalising this nightmare? If there was any fairness in the world, we'd be screening They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) on a 24-hour loop as a warning to dem yoot.

It's not like we can wait for them to die out. Their well-fed spoilt children, like little emperors, are forming a queue, assuming privilege and telling-off rights over the rest of us. Ye gods, when did we last see the child of a sleb actually studying and doing something even two stages away from commerce, where success isn't measured in share-prices?

We're entering the Heart of Darkness as the delicate cultural superstructure is sucked back into Mordor and all the little Orcs start running things, while we're dragged into the 10th century.

Kids, you won't remember this, but there was actually a time when we had the beancounters on the run. When company directors earned only 50 times what their lowest-paid workers received.

Good luck to the protesters in Greece, Spain, America, Britain ... everywhere. We need you.

Brilliant scary alpine-coaster video

2011-11-24T13:30:00.001Z

I SO WANT TO DO THIS!!!!!!!

GAUCHE: A LEFT TAKE ON THE EURO CRISIS

2011-11-24T00:46:00.003Z

GAUCHE: A LEFT TAKE ON THE EURO CRISIS: by Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 24 November 2011

Eurosceptics crowing about how they have been vindicated by the Eurozone crisis are beginning to drive me nuts. I don’t think they have been vindicated, but that’s for another column. What matters now is this:

1. Like it or not, a calm negotiated dissolution of the euro is not possible
It is true that currency unions have in the past been dismantled without catastrophic economic disruption. In recent years, Britain’s currency union with Ireland ended in 1979 when Ireland joined the European exchange rate mechanism; and Slovakia and the Czech Republic introduced separate currencies in 1993 after Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce”.

It is imaginable that at some time in the future the Eurozone could be broken up by mutual consent of its participants without precipitating disaster (whether that is a desirable outcome is another matter). This is, however, utterly implausible in the near future. The bond markets are in a state of panic and smell blood, and not even the smallest reduction in Eurozone membership – a Greek exit – could take place without triggering further panic that forced Italy, Portugal and Spain out too. The only plausible scenario for ending the euro as we know it in the foreseeable future is a chaotic collapse.

2. The collapse of the euro would be a disaster for Britain
Such a collapse would be ruinous for every country that was forced out. In the run-up to exit, they would experience catastrophic capital flight. Their banks would implode and credit would disappear. As businesses failed, unemployment would rocket – and people left in work would find their living standards and purchasing power slashed as a result of the devaluation that euro exit would inevitably bring.

The impact would be felt throughout the world. Germany and other countries still in the Eurozone would go into deep recession as their banks took the hit of defaults on loans to the leaver countries and as their exports to those countries slumped. Britain would take an economic hammering. The Eurozone is Britain’s biggest export market, responsible for nearly half of British export revenues, and British banks are massively exposed to Eurozone debt. The disintegration of the Eurozone, and the consequent wider economic downturn, would be a calamity for Britain.

3. The euro must be saved
It follows that it is in everyone’s interests, including Britain’s, for the euro to be rescued. The key question is how. This, of course, is what the European political class has been arguing about for months – without providing a credible answer, which in turn has exacerbated the crisis as the markets have factored in the possibility of meltdown.

The immediate priority is to end the bond market panic to allow the Eurozone debtors to borrow more at reasonable rates of interest. The problem is that this requires the Eurozone as a whole to underwrite their borrowing – which means Germany, as Europe’s biggest creditor nation, taking on responsibility for the debts of southern Europe, either directly or indirectly. Up to now, however, the Germans have refused to do so. The German economic policy establishment, horrified by the prospect of inflation above all else, considers that the priority is for the indebted countries to reduce their debts and has ruled out the European Central Bank acting as lender of last resort. German voters balk at their taxes bailing out what they see as profligate and lazy southern Europeans.

The most likely way out of this impasse is that a deal will be struck whereby the Germans relent on bankrolling the Eurozone, but only on condition that the debtor countries immediately implement draconian austerity budgets and accept tough, intrusive Eurozone-wide budget rules.

That would calm the bond markets, but at great cost:

Austerity would almost certainly strangle what little growth there is in southern Europe, with knock-on effects for everyone else.
Such a regime would place the burden of paying for the sovereign debt crisis – which, lest we forget, is the result of the global banking crisis of 2008 and the ensuing recession, not decades of state profligacy – almost entirely on the shoulders of the working class.
Handing over responsibility for overall economic policy to the Eurozone would mean that the key decisions on taxation and spending would no longer be taken by democratically elected governments – a dramatic erosion of national sovereignty.
So what should democratic socialists do? First, argue for a recasting of the role of the European Central Bank to include pursuit of growth as well as stability. Second, press for a fairer sharing of the pain of austerity by ensuring that the rich pay more, starting with a Tobin tax. And third, demand a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament, the only Europe-wide democratic institution, to maximise accountability of the new economic policy regime.

It’s hardly a panacea, but it’s a lot better than crowing.

Barbarism 2011 style

2011-11-23T01:16:00.005Z

Barbarism and utter depravity from the state represented by the university authorities, the police, the bankers and politicians.

Asians Art Museum reports:

UC Davis professor issues Open Letter demanding Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi’s resignation

“Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

“This is what happened. You are responsible for it. . . .

“I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.”

Read full letter

Also: Katehi’s $400,000 salary (2009) and “corruption charges” (Sfgate, 6/16/09)

How Tribune would deal with the economic crisis

2011-11-22T00:51:00.004Z

Paul Anderson shows us how to do it.

There's more sense in his demonstration here than anything we've been offered by politicians in the past three years since the economy imploded in 2008. Well done, that man.

Taken on our seaside trip last week to Southwold and the wonderfully weird Under the Pier Show by genius Tim Hunkin.

Obama in Yo Mama war with China: Pacific Rimmers look out!

2011-11-17T11:47:00.014Z

"We never liked their noodles, anyway."

Is it my imagination or is cuddly President Barak Obama picking a fight with China?

No sooner has the world begun to heal after the Bush neocon excesses that led to such bloodshed in the Middle east, not to mention an enormous fillip to the arms industry, than Obama announces a tectonic shift in US imperialist policy.

Only a few weeks since Hillary Clinton announced that the new superpower was in the queue not so far along from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, Syria, Iran and Korea for whipping into shape, I listened to Obama's speech to the Australian Parliament last night, struck by sabre-rattling out of a bygone age. "The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay." Is he on something?

The Guardian said:

Obama's speech came the day after he announced he would send military aircraft and up to 2,500 marines to northern Australia for a training hub to help allies and protect American interests across Asia. He declared the US was not afraid of China, by far the biggest and most powerful country in the region.

China's sensitive about having gunboats up her Yangtse, and sending in the marines plus warships to the region is like poking a stick at a pitbull. Reminding China of her ignominious past being gang-banged by the West is not the best way to foster good relations, especially if you are seeking her dosh to get you out of our economic crisis. I would suggest less of the, "C'mon if you think you're 'ard enough", and more of the "Gosh, what big mountains of cash you have. May we have some? Please?"

Actually, Barak said: ""Let there be no doubt: in the Asia-Pacific in the 21st century, the United States of America is all in." Which is diplomat speak for: "You spilt my pint. Outside!"

He continued:

"With most of the world's nuclear powers and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or cooperation, needless suffering or human progress. We've seen that China can be a partner, from reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula to preventing proliferation. We'll seek more opportunities for cooperation with Beijing, including greater communication between our militaries to promote understanding and avoid miscalculation."

Obama held out the threat of the big stick and I understand several horses' heads are now winging their way to Hu, Wen, Hao and Wai.

The cheeky fucka told them: "We will do this, even as continue to speak candidly with Beijing about the importance of upholding international norms and respecting the universal human rights of the Chinese people."

Meanwhile, the US Occupy protesters are being given tea and cakes in the White House and treated to BBQs in New York's Zuccotti Park while sympathetic cops give them foot-massages.

I'm sure the Australian Aboriginal peoples will be most pleased to have the American's using their vast bombing ranges in the north of the continent as well as all the other excercises and "training". Wonder if the School of the Americas will have a chance to shine?

Could the shift in focus to the Pacific be anything to do with the large oil resources in the South China Sea? As George Orwell said, imperialism consists of the cop and the soldier holding down the native while the businessman goes through their pockets. Or as I see it, the school bully is mugging the other kids for their lunch-money. Unfortunately for America, this new kid does kung fu.

Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.

China says: Don't worry. It's not the foundations for a huge death machine or anything.

Eurozone Madness: the other story

2011-11-15T13:31:00.004Z

He may not have been my favourite Celebrity Big Brother contestant, to put it mildly, but George Galloway writes a stunning piece that nails the argument about the Eurozone crisis, little of which has been aired in the mainstream press.

It appeared in the Morning Star and I have it via Socialist Unity but I'm posting the whole thing here as we need to know these things.

This crisis is a time to demand the impossible
Friday 11 November 2011 by George Galloway
Shakespeare would have had little difficulty in relating the drama unfolding on the European and global stage.

The troupe of players from the political class have their "entrances and exits" until they reach this latest scene - a "second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

Toothless, wilfully blind, gaudy and impotent sums up the Cannes summit meeting of the richest 20 countries last week and the ongoing response of political leaders to the crisis engulfing the eurozone and the wider global economy.

Behind the talking heads and cliched headlines lies a barely spoken truth - the whole model of managing global capitalism of the last three decades is breaking down as the financial crisis unleashed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers three years ago morphs and mutates from one geographical or economic area to another. There is no end in sight.

In the case of Europe, it is a 60-year project of co-operation among the elites at the expense of the mass of people that is coming unstuck.

Through the fraying seams are poking the heads of monsters from the last century which we were told were safely shrouded and buried.

For while toothless when it comes to halting the crisis itself, the business elites and their acolytes across the Establishment political spectrum have their claws out and sharpened, slashing into every gain working people have made since the hungry '30s.

Half of young people in Spain are unemployed. In Britain, it's already a record at one million and set to rise much further, not least as the decades-long expansion of university education goes into reverse.

Every aspect of life in Greece is already being lopped and squeezed. The predictable result, according to the prestigious medical journal the Lancet, is that people are dying, more of them and earlier.

The bailout of Greece is anything but. It is like a payday loan of the type that more and more people in Britain are being forced into.

Witness the proliferation of loan-shark outfits popping up in abandoned shops on run-down high streets across the country. No sooner is the money received at exorbitant interest rates than it is handed straight to corporate creditors and banks.

According to the plan for Greece - the plan, remember - the debt-burden is to rise to twice economic output as the austerity measures sink the country into deeper slump.

In 10 years it's supposed to fall back to 120 per cent. That's the level now in Italy, which has just plunged into the eye of the storm.

No wonder no-one really believes the austerity plan will work, even in its own terms.

But still, like some demented general in the bloodbath of the first world war, they press on, hurling men, women, children and the social fabric over the top to be shredded by murderous machine-gun fire.

Perhaps in years to come they'll concoct an equivalent of the poppy to mark another fallen generation. The hypocrites and hirelings can wear it ever larger - maybe chrysanthemums would suit them.

And with the pain inflicted on the millions by the millionaires, come all the old elitism, scapegoating and chauvinism.

Instead of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian nuns, we have the despicable lie that the common people of southern Europe are feckless scroungers who have brought this all on themselves.

Murdoch may be on the ropes, but Channel 4 stepped in, like a tag-team partner, to beat up on the suffering people of Greece this week.

"Greek for a Week" could have bubbled up straight from the Wapping sewer.

Its premise, never questioned, was that the average Greek is lazy, coddled by generous state provision and expecting handouts from the rest of us. Another devious Johnny-foreigner.

In truth, Greeks are at the top of the league table for working hours in Europe and at the bottom when it comes to pay.

The people protected by the state are the oligarchs, the shipping magnates, media barons and associated bankers. Just like here really.

If anyone you know is tempted by this xenophobic drivel, remind them that welfare dependency and pampered public servants are exactly the insults hurled by the government and its friends here in Britain at disabled people, the unemployed, and the nurses, hospital porters, school caretakers and staff who are set to strike later this month against a pensions robbery greater than anything even contemplated by the unlamented Robert Maxwell of 20 years ago.

There are other similarities too which any opposition worthy of the name would be skewering David Cameron on every day.

The Greek oligarchs - the 1 per cent who lord it over us - are not the wealth creators.

They are sucking up everything they can and investing just 7 per cent of output back into the economy.

The rest is being shipped and splashed out in the property market of London's Chelsea and the financial speculation which inflated this crisis in the first place.

That's exactly what the bankers and captains of industry are doing in this country.

Investment in making real things, in infrastructure and in vital services, has plummeted.

Instead, we have more speculation and indulgence on everything from fine wine and property to currencies and lumps of precious metal - as the Christmas bonus bonanza in the City is about to show.

None of the right or centre-left parties, which have in effect converged in a fictitious consensus, are prepared so far to raise the prospect of using the power of government, which after all the bankers all lauded when it came to bailing them out, to force this investment, and therefore economic growth, to take place.

They are not prepared to impinge on the wealth monopoly of big business to invest in the interests of all.

On the contrary, to preserve the system that is failing, they are prepared to restrict the democratic rights of all in the interests of the 1 per cent.

At the time of writing we no longer have an elected prime minister in Greece.

We have a former central banker who has never been elected to anything.

Soon, it seems, we may have a former European Union commissioner as prime minister of Italy.

The Italian president has just appointed Mario Monti a life senator (like a British lord) so he can qualify for the position.

Nero, Caligula and a earlier phase of Roman history spring to mind.

What qualification do these "technocrats" have? They are architects of the order that is collapsing, priests of the god that failed.

They are wedded to the austerity economics and, in the eyes of the IMF/European Central Bank/European Union elite, they are as Thatcher used to say, people like us.

Of course they have no democratic mandate at all. And that's another bonus.

They are not electorally responsive to the people, though the parties that they choose their minister from are.

For the very last thing that the 1 percenters want is for the 99 per cent to have a say over the policies that are ruining the lives of most of them.

That's why outgoing social democrat prime minister George Papandreou came under excoriating pressure for mooting the idea of a referendum on the austerity measures.

He buckled. If ever there was an example of dotage as a second childishness, but without everything, it is the leader of Pasok, a shadow of his father Andreas, who founded the party.

Or as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels observed, all historical personages appear twice, first as tragic giants, second as farcical dwarves - first as the father, then as the son.

The suspension of democratic norms we have become accustomed to should ring alarm bells.

It is social resistance, or the fear of it, that created the political logjam in Greece and Italy.

In that situation, the high priests of globalised capitalism have chosen the most undemocratic of a range of options.

They and others will do so again, unless that resistance can alter the calculus.

They can get away with these manoeuvres, if only temporarily, in part due to the paucity and pusillanimity of traditional social democratic/Labour parties, which have spurned the idea of a big, comprehensive alternative to capitalism red in tooth and claw.

How else can we explain how in Spain next weekend, the sons of Franco in the Tory People's Party are likely to win an election against the outgoing social democrats?

I don't believe it's because the people in Spain want more of the failing capitalist policies.

Many may not see an alternative, but how can they if one is not credibly presented and argued for by those they have historically looked to?

I believe that people are crying out for a big idea, a real one, not bunkum like Cameron's "big society."

That's why the sympathy for the Occupy movement, which goes way beyond the numbers taking part so far, is so great.

It is a sign of people grappling for themselves for a truly democratic and progressive alternative.

And the lack of a radical alternative equal to the scale of the crisis infects everything that Labour says and does.

Just one example - BBC's Question Time this week. On issue after issue Labour's Rachel Reeves failed even to make contact with the ball, let alone put it in the net against a panel that while absurdly right-wing in its composition was hardly fleet of foot, viz the flabby Stephen Pollard at right back.

Forget radicalism, she couldn't even come up with basic social democratic arguments about how private health care is parasitic on the NHS, cherry-picking profitable medical procedures while refusing insurance to the kind of former industrial workers who were doubtless in the Newcastle audience.

The apparent certainties of the age ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher are melting into air.

The left, if we want to have any solidity, has no option but to voice the big alternative and bend every effort to organising around it.

We have resources to draw on. And we have traditions.

As I write, news is breaking of a massive battle at the University of Berkeley in California between occupying students and riot police.

It is a resounding echo of the 1960s movements that were the well-spring of so much that is progressive.

A historical event appearing twice - but this time with all the vigour of its infancy.

It's time again to be realistic and to demand what they tell us is impossible.

Anna May Wong Must Die! great pix by Jan Jefferies

2011-11-14T00:44:00.011Z

We played the final show last night at the New Diorama Theatre (Saturday 12th November 2011) in front of a lively audience.

There was a quantum improvement from Thursday with most tec glitches sorted, the lads louder and rockier now that the awe of the theeayter had abated somewhat. Confidence was up all round and we are looking at ways to take the show further.

Produced by True Heart Theatre as part of the In The Mirror season at the New Diorama Theatre, London NW1, and directed by Wing Hong Li. With legendary music writer Charles Shaar Murray and The Plague’s Marc Jefferies. Jan Jefferies looked after us and took the pix on Anna’s Lumix TZ20.

Some more pix here.

Photo copyright Anna Chen

Surfer takes on record 90 foot wave: video

2011-11-12T13:41:00.001Z

Ooooh! Almost as exciting as performing Anna May Wong Must Die! at the New Diorama Theatre.

Last night tonight.

First night Anna May Wong Must Die! pix

2011-11-11T20:28:00.008Z

First night done.

Tec hitches aplenty but all performed with great gusto and fun by myself and the wonderful Charles Shaar Murray and The Plague's Marc Jefferies, rockin' the show on guitar and bass.

I'm still making last minute changes to the script which is now at the stage where I can start cutting like a surgeon on speed. Plus the emergence of Tinglan Hong — Hugh Grant's squeeze and mother of Bamboo, or "Happy Accident", as "Ting Ting" mischievously claims is the baby's Chinese name — now doubles the number of Chinese women who can be named by audiences. (The other being a certain custard-pie kung-fu minder for geriatric billionaires.)

I'll be pleased when I'm off-script. But, for now, my baby's growing. Just like Bamboo.

One more show tomorrow then the great uphill task of memorising all 70 minutes of it. Wish I could plug in and upload in my sleep.

ANNA MAY WONG MUST DIE!
Written and performed by Anna Chen
Live music from Charles Shaar Murray and Marc Jefferies
Saturday 12th November 20:30
£8.50/£6.50
There will be a Q&A after the Saturday performance
Presented by Wing Hong Li for True Heart Theatre at the New Diorama Theatre, NW1
More info here

Anna May Wong Must Die! opens tomorrow: satire, crudity and politics

2011-11-09T12:44:00.010Z

OK, this is it, guys and gals. Anna May Wong Must Die! gets its first London theatrical outing tomorrow night (Thursday 10th) at the New Diorama Theatre, followed by another on Saturday.

Legendary cultural writer Charles Shaar Murray and The Plague's Marc Jefferies will be providing live music.

I'm performing the show as a "work-in-progress" at the New Diorama Theatre as part of True Heart's In The Mirror season. Also performing during the week: Lucy Sheen and Veronica Needa. (Details on the webpage.)

I'll be on-script as it's still early days in the life of this piece (so no press), but I hope to come out of the week with the play nailed. I look forward to to hearing some solid feedback, especially from the Saturday Q&A session where the three of us will be chatting to the audience.

It's unusual, maybe even unique, to get three Chinese diaspora writers and performers together like this in one venue in one week so please do try to make it as we might never get this chance again.

ANNA MAY WONG MUST DIE!
Written and performed by Anna Chen
Live music accompaniment from Charles Shaar Murray and Marc Jefferies
Thursday 10th November 19:30
Saturday 12th November 20:30
£8.50/£6.50
(There will be a Q&A after the Saturday performance)
Presented by True Heart Theatre at the New Diorama Theatre, NW1
More info here

REVIEWS AND MEDIA FOR ANNA CHEN

"Charming, witty and sophisticated ... I am entranced, won over."
The Sunday Times

"Hard hitting and often hilarious ... arresting ... engrossing and provoking."
The Scotsman

"... sensitive, intelligent ... insistent and illuminating."
The Herald

"It's the stuff of brilliant satire ... riveting."
The List

"Very witty."
Graham Norton

"I'm taking you shoplifting."
Jenny Eclair

“Cutting edge …”
Stewart Lee

More press here

Tony Blair loves Gordon Brown: infantile disrespect video

2011-11-03T10:58:00.005Z

An immature mash-up of Tony Blair of the most scurrilous kind, entirely disrespectful of this great man. It shouldn't be allowed.

Poor Tony.

Actually, not poor. Quite wealthy, I hear. Which bank did best out of the Iraq war? His wife's doing WHAT with our National Health Service? Placing private clinics WHERE? Surely an ugly rumour.

Temple kicks out Jesus while moneylenders cheer

2011-10-28T17:42:00.007+01:00

Steve Bell

So, on the day we learn that the FTSE 100 directors' pay has gone up by 49% in the past year (55% the year before), St Paul's Cathedral turns the tables and tells Jesus where to get off while the money lenders carry on with business as usual.

Profits are soaring, David Hartnett of HMRC lets off Vodafone and Goldman Sachs from repaying billions in money we are owed, we are being ripped off by rail, energy, landlords, supermarkets and grasping universities, and the church expects us to be supine in our acceptance of being ripped off.

The anti-capitalist protest group — Occupy London Stock Exchange (OccupyLSX), UK Uncut and various — is to be ejected from one of the few remaining scraps of London where you can protest. The City of London and the cathedral are pressing ahead with legal moves to close down the camp. It's enough to make you a barricade-manning revolutionary.

A word from the church's boss:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can not serve both God and Mammon.

Just sayin'. (Thanks, Skattycat)

How about reinstating our democracy and allowing the protests in Parliament Square? After all, the point of Parliament is to run our country for us, not provide snapshot fodder for tourists.

Omar Sharif not so suave: slaps woman fan

2011-10-28T13:40:00.002+01:00

Okay, Omar Sharif is now on my shit-list. Yup, there's a man with charm who knows how to treat a woman.

Although she just stands there grinning like an idiot after being slapped by the grizzled movie star, it looks as if she was probably in shock and too embarrassed to respond. Or hard-wired to take it.

Such a small man.

The Other Shore: Chinese play-reading at the New Diorama Theatre

2011-10-18T09:52:00.012+01:00

Wing Hong, Hugo and Lucy

There's no business like show business ... I had a great time last night onstage with a group of talented Asian actors who'd been brought together at the New Diorama Theatre by director Wing Hong Li.

As an exploration of power dynamics and the madness of crowds, The Other Shore, written by Gao Xingjian, is superb theatre. Writing for an ensemble of actors, Gao renders power relations visible, turning the piece into an effective tool with which to challenge blind authority and the characters who play along either as predator or victim.

An innocent fool is part of a group embarking on a journey from "the real world" to the other side of a river where he witnesses how his fellow travellers deal with a succession of character archetypes who enter their lives and upset their equilibrium.

Last night's rehearsed reading, the first British performance, came together after only one day's work. I played various parts of the chorus and got to read the Card Player, a plum role which I saw as a cross between Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil and Heath Ledger as the Joker.

A trickster gambler who's stacked the odds, the Card Player chooses the game, acts as banker, decides on the trump card (her own) and manipulates the crowd into working against their own interests. Now, where have we seen that before?

Gao employs various devices to see the world anew. The use of ropes throws into razored relief the games we play when finding our place in society. The protagonist's increasingly dehumanised brethren become threatening trees and mannequins.

A sort of Chinese Life of Brian with zombies, there's enough sly wit to make the game of spot-the-character-type an amusing one. I did, at one point, expect the hero to lose a sandal and discard a gourd. He's definitely not the Messiah, just a very confused bloke trying to make sense of this twilight world.

The play was banned in China for some unfathomable reason despite there being no explicit criticism of the government. It's a commentary on what happens when human relations get skewed and is a plea for us all to be better to each other ... oh. I see. Right. Understood.

This play is relevant to every region and sphere where creeps are clinging to power. Do catch it if you ever see it being staged.

British Chinese and the England riots: South China Morning Post

2011-10-14T13:45:00.004+01:00

Here's my South China Morning Post column from 28th August, on the British Chinese take on the England riots and why Tiger Mom's efforts are irrelevant. (Click on pic above for larger version.)

Anna May Wong Must Die! first draft complete

2011-10-11T11:15:00.013+01:00

Last night I finally finished off the first draft of Anna May Wong Must Die!.

I've been thinking about this even before 2008, when I made a BBC Radio 4 programme on one of my heroines, A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, about Hollywood's first Chinese screen legend, Anna May Wong (broadcast January 2009). I'd originally tried to time the show for 2005, her birth centenary, but it took two goes to get the commission.

Rather that tell a straight story about her life, as I did on radio, I decided to take a different approach. You can read all about Anna May in at least two fine biographies: The Laundryman's Daughter by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, and Perpetually Cool by Anthony Chan.

I wanted to show her as refracted through my own experience, of someone in the here and now of the Chinese diaspora, and I came up with Anna May Wong Must Die!: a personal journey through the life and crimes of Hollywood's first Chinese superstar.

It's especially pertinent in an age where, unlike in America, you hardly ever see an Asian face depicted as a normal participant in British society. You'd never know that there were up to 500,000 Chinese (including native-born descendants) in the UK.

We still play Spot The (East) Asian, but mostly all we get are fiendish criminals (Sherlock: The Blind Banker — BBC); Will Self (who ought to know better, much better) dismissing Chinese as "antlike"; trendy progressive theatres laying on yellowface plays where white actors depict the "essence" of the Orient (More Light and The Golden Dragon at the Arcola and Traverse); government and media accusing the filthy Chinese of starting the major disease outbreak of Foot & Mouth when Labour's handling of it went tits-up in 2001 (for which we won an apology from the government, but not the press); London Mayor Boris Johnson claiming that the Chinese are "incapable of original thought" (isn't that unoriginally nicked from Mark Twain, Boris?); Morrissey working out of the Dr Mengele handbook and declaring the Chinese to be a "sub-species"; China used as a hysterical diversion during the Copenhagen Climate Change summit in 2009 when news was about to break that the wealthy nations were stitching up the rest of the world with the "Danish text", and Ed Milliband playing his own part in the Copenhagen cover-up — but at least Ed admitted in February this year that he'd been wrong and acknowledged the resources being chucked at the problem, not to mention that a third of China's emissions are produced through making stuff for us.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't criticise China for getting things wrong. As part of the global community, and a force that may lead us out of the recession, China should listen to valid, productive comment, just as Western nations should. But using Chinese people to bash the new economic rival and mask racism with politics is, by any civilised standards, dirty pool.

We know — post-Macpherson — that institutional racism has to be identified and called out for what it is. So it is astonishing to see practically no Chinese in fiction or news. I break out the cava whenever I see our one ubiquitous telly face, Gok Wan, or rare sightings of James Wong, ethnobotanist, and other fabled mixes (Alexa and the BBC newsreader woman). Then there are the enlightened BBC Radio 4 commissioners who occasionally allow me to make programmes for them. But these few swallows do not a summer make — and I prefer to spit.

The rest of it is effectively a nasty bit of social engineering: dehumanising us, excluding us from our own society and our culture, rendering us invisible, unknown and a bloody big target for when a collective scapegoat might be needed. And, with some major unpleasantness coming down the pipeline as a result of bankers' greed and world recession, that situation had better be reversed, toot sweet. When you create a vacuum like this, you allow all sorts of horrors to fill up the space — the sleep of reason produces monsters. Bit by bit, we're chipping away at the cultural coalface but, in a way, our work is done. China is set to be the world's biggest and richest superpower and no-one, not the media, and especially not the advertisers, will be able to pretend for much longer that we aren't here.

You can see me try out Anna May Wong Must Die! as a work-in-progess (I'll be on-script) next month.

Anna May Wong Must Die!
A work-in-progress
Written and performed by Anna Chen
New Diorama Theatre
15 - 16 Triton Street,
Regents Place,
London, NW1 3BF
7.30pm Thursday 10th & 8.30pm Saturday 12th November 2011 (plus Q&A session afterwards)
Tickets £8.50
Part of the short "In The Mirror" season of Chinese one-woman shows.

The Human Centipede: not a bad horror film, as it 'appens

2011-10-07T15:44:00.006+01:00

Viewed from my sick bed — how apt! — Tom Six's The Human Centipede was a perfectly good horror tale of power. Two American women and a Japanese tourist find themselves in the clutches of a mad scientist, Teutonic Doctor Heiter (creepy Dieter Laser), in his modern house deep in a German forest, so it may have been some sort of Nazi allegory a la Salo: 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini, and not unlike my time in the SWP.

The attractive young victims find themselves sewn together — mouth to anus — to make one long organism that has to do tricks for its owner. How I laughed when the Doc tried to make it fetch a newspaper! Had he got his pet selling it I'd have been transported to Saturday lunchtime paper sales. Now those were a shudderfest.

Some have dismissed the movie as shit, but it's beautifully-shot shit and strangely moving, not to mention darkly funny in parts. There's only one visceral scary moment that made me squirm and nothing that made me jump. It was more one long queasy realisation that something ain't right, not unlike my time in ... but now I repeat myself.

I thought it unfair that the guy was at the head, a placement I shall fondly think of as District Organiser — definitely pole position under the circumstances. You really didn't wan't to be any further down the food chain, spluttering out someone else's used food like edicts freshly squeezed out by the CC that morning.

Is it nasty? Of course it's nasty. Just like ... oh there I go again.

Wall Street protesters on Brooklyn Bridge give hope

2011-10-04T23:24:00.004+01:00

This is impressive — and long overdue. Some 700 have been arrested. How many bankers who caused the crisis have been even looked at sternly by the authorities?

St Ives Festival Heaven 2011: Artists & Tate Balloons

2011-09-25T16:02:00.022+01:00

Martin Creed's balloon installation in the Tate St Ives mezzanine

Denise and Steve Ingamells at Tate St Ives

Jan Jefferies and Charles Shaar Murray

Charles Shaar Murray

Clare Wardman & Anna Chen, Porthmeor Studio 7

View from Porthmeor Studio 7

And not forgetting the visual artists exhibiting in St Ives and a couple of concepts that worked.

Martin Creed's balloon installation was simple but effective. With the balloons filling the Tate's Rotunda mezzanine level higher than head-height, it's like walking into a wall, except the wall is full of air so you experience the instinct to duck, flinch or push the obstacle out of your way, and the conflicting pleasure in the softness. It's a dreamlike feeling. And it makes your hair stand on end with the static.

Tate St Ives got through 165,000 balloons when they'd budgeted for 120,000, but inflatable latex shrinks and pops. There was the time a series of mini-explosions could be heard and, after a search, a small boy was discovered sitting on the floor wielding a sharp pencil ... He's lucky he wasn't in an inner city or some magistrate might have jailed him for months for riotous behaviour. The balloons had the power to transform adults into kids, as well as releasing the child's inner child, such as the 65-year old pensioner who decided to surf the balloons from the window ledge. Alas, the Tate's mezzanine is no mosh-pit and she was carted off with a broken clavicle, bruised face and maximum embarrassment factor.

We caught the last few days of Roman Ondak's Measuring the Universe. Everyone who enters the room is invited to be measured and the wall marked up with height-line, name and date. Those of us who are of average height watch the markings disappear against the black of months-worth of previous measurements. Only the very short and tall survive the black band of the average. The gallery was due to paint over the wall yesterday, but we are now all part of the patina for years to some.

I like Clare Wardman's work so much that I have a small one at home. She works alongside her husband — artist Iain Roberston — who shares Porthmeor Studio seven with her. They made lovely interviewees for the Radio 4 programme.

St Ives Festival 2011: Intro and "Kicking A Dinosaur" video
St Ives Festival 2011: "Big Society: on a conversation in the Foundling Museum" video
St Ives Festival 2011 pix: The Island and St Nicholas Chapel

A big thank you to Jan Jefferies and Charles Shaar Murray for taking many of the pix of me on my Panasonic Lumix TZ20.

St Ives Festival Heaven 2011: The Island

2011-09-25T15:51:00.007+01:00

Jan Jefferies and BBC producer Chris Eldon-Lee on The Island overlooking St Ives.

St Ives Festival 2011: Intro and "Kicking A Dinosaur" video
St Ives Festival 2011: "Big Society: on a conversation in the Foundling Museum" video
St Ives Festival 2011 pix: Artists & Tate Balloons

St Ives Arts Festival heaven 2011: Porthmeor Beach

2011-09-25T15:32:00.010+01:00

Anna with Steve Ingamells on the balcony of the flat he and Denise were renting.

Here, for your pleasure, a selection of pix from my stay in St Ives during the Arts Festival. More to come.

St Ives Festival 2011: Intro and "Kicking A Dinosaur" video
St Ives Festival 2011: "Big Society: on a conversation in the Foundling Museum" video
St Ives Festival 2011 pix: Artists & Tate Balloons
St Ives Festival 2011 pix: The Island and St Nicholas Chapel

Anna Chen's searing poem about the cuts: Big Society

2011-09-25T15:20:00.006+01:00

A little bit of politics, laydees an' gennelmen with "Big Society: on a conversation at the Foundling Museum".

Recorded at Café Art during the St Ives Arts Festival September 2011. Written in June 2011.

St Ives Festival 2011: Intro and Kicking A Dinosaur video
St Ives Festival 2011 pix: Artists & Tate Balloons
St Ives Festival 2011 pix: The Island and St Nicholas Chapel

St Ives poetry: Anna Chen reads Kicking A Dinosaur

2011-09-25T10:31:00.013+01:00

Madam Miaow is back from St Ives ... and this time it's personal.

I had a delightful time in St Ives but it was an odd one. It got off to a disastrous start with me trashing my utterly reliable X-reg Ford Focus on the A30 on a foggy Bodmin Moor, aquaplaning into the back of a Jeep when the traffic came to a sudden stop due to an accident.

The damage was light enough for us to be able to complete the journey but the insurance declared it to be a write-off due to the age of the car — an estimated £1.500 repair bill for smashed bonnet and light plus suspected trouble with the suspension.

So, of course, unless we wanted to end up sitting on the street with a ton of luggage, our return required a hire-car which required both parts of the driving licence plus utility bill which, luckily, like everyone else, I always carry about my person. Only joking. Said paperwork was locked up in the filing cabinet at home in London which required my mailing keys to a friend who had to mail it back recorded delivery, and then there was the expense of the hire-car ... it was a right mess.

Sometimes, though, the universe requires a sacrifice in order for wonderful things to happen. Steve McIntosh got me a little gig at the new Café Art (see video above) on top of my regular appearances at Bob Devereux's Norway Square and the Big Frug, plus I did a lively set for Charles Shaar Murray and Buffalo Bill Smith at their St Ives Arts Club evening.

Another unusual element of the my stay was making a programme for BBC Radio 4 on the town: St Ives and Me. My lovely producer Chris Eldon-Lee stayed with us so we could record and show one aspect of what the town is about from the inside. It was great fun and I found out a few more facts I'd never heard in a lifetime of visiting and living there, all of which will be in the programme (broadcast 11.30am Thursday 1st Dec 2011).

I may not have had the R&R time on the beach relaxing and reading a book that I usually try to squeeze in, but there were plenty of activities to make up for it. I took part in the St Ives School of Painting all-night drawing marathon — a cabaret of talent from locals and professionals and professional locals, which we had to draw. Have you ever drawn moving subjects? I hadn't but I did a good enough job for one of my drawings to sell the next day in the art sale of the night's work. A whole tenner! I have officially sold in St Ives. Whoop!

I waded through a sea of balloons at the Tate, tried out the numerous local ciders competing for attention in some booze festival, fetched fish from Newlyn for a fish blow-out including one of Denise's awesome paellas and, best of all, hung out with dear friends. And, as the ultimate postcard, I'll have my radio programme sharing the experience to remind me of my stay.

I'll be posting pix soon.

St Ives Festival 2011 pix: Artists & Tate Balloons
St Ives Festival 2011 pix: The Island and St Nicholas Chapel
St Ives Festival 2011: "Big Society: on a conversation in the Foundling Museum" video
Steve McIntosh's festival blog and pix here.

Total Politics Blog Award results 2011: Madam Miaow scores three places

2011-09-13T16:05:00.006+01:00

Thanks to the hard-working scamps at Total Politics for the tough job of hosting the 2011 blog awards, counting and ranking all us deserving politicos.

I'm again number 52 in the left-wing blogs category, but I'm amazed to find that I've ranked twice elsewhere, too: number 31 in Top Media Bloggers and at 46 in Top Non-Aligned Bloggers. [Edit: I find I am also No 71 in Top Labour Blogs, oddly, and No 125 in UK Top Political Blogs overall.]

So, a big merci to all the readers who bothered to vote for me. And do try out some of my friends who also feature in the awards:

Splintered Sunrise
Harpy Marx
James Bloodworth (Obliged to Offend)
Laurie Penny (Penny Red and The Staggers)
Andy Newman (Socialist Unity)
Carl Packman (Raincoat Optimism)
Paul Mason
Dave Osler
Nick Cohen
David Allen Green (Jack of Kent)

Oh, yeah ... one mo' thang. Where's me brag badge? WANNIT! WANNIT!! WANNIT!!!!

BTW, this is a comforting consolation prize as my car is smashed in from aquaplaning on the A30 on the way down to St Ives on Friday during fog on Bodmin Moor.

Seumas Milne on 9/11: some comrades more equal than others

2011-09-06T13:50:00.016+01:00

Anna Chen, anti-war press officer (Pic Sukey Parnell)

Seumas Milne writes in today's Guardian about the 9/11 attacks and the shameful silencing of voices who spoke out against the anti-Muslim hysteria. Anticipating the Bush administration's cynical use of the tragedy as an excuse to settle business in Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, many of us were active in opposing the coming war on Iraq.

The anti-war movement was proven correct. There were no weapons of mass destruction. As awful as the West's old ally Saddam was, he had nothing to do with the attacks.

Seumas also writes that: "... Arab writer Rana Kabbani warned that only a change of policy towards the rest of the world would bring Americans security (for which she was grotesquely denounced as a "terror tart" by the US journalist Greg Palast)."

This all sounds very noble, but Seumas's selective solidarity has always puzzled me.

I had been doing some publicity on Greg Palast's excellent book, The Best Democracy Can Buy. Now, Greg is more often than not on the side of the angels but he does suffer the odd brainfart. I took him to task over his comment: as did, I believe, his wife and at least one of his assistants. However, Seumas thought Greg's comment a good enough reason to courageously phone me at home in order to tear into me personally.

What was interesting was how this confirmed that some comrades are more equal than others.

I'm glad that Seumas emphasises in his piece how important it was to speak out at the time. I had also been a sister in the anti-war movement, single-handedly establishing and then — with one other person writing some of the press releases — running the anti-war press office under the Socialist Alliance, Media Workers Against The War and the Stop The War Coalition and getting results. Working for no pay while Seumas's friends leading the left organisations drew wages — many of them the same politicos who had assured me there was no point in engaging with the media because "the bourgeois press ignore us" — I went into debt to ensure we had a press operation: my credit cards paid for the anti-war publicity machine leading up to the huge demonstration of February 2003. I put my own career on hold because I believed that trying to prevent a bloody war on Iraq was the important issue of the time. Seumas knows I did the work because he was one of the regular recipients of my press releases.

While it's touching to see Seumas defending his mates, I did wonder why he was never moved to defend the grunts actually doing the work, challenging the monolithic perspective in the media, putting information out there while, among other things, being whacked in the face by one of his mates, ripped off for wages and otherwise abused. (Being a working -class ethnic woman places you at the bottom of the left's food chain — we will always be trumped by middle/upper-class ethnic women and 57 varieties of men.) It's all very well for Seumas to bleat, " ... my column in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was a particular target of hostility ..." as if soliciting our sympathy, but this has to be two-way traffic, without Seumas himself playing traffic cop.

The princes and princesses of the left don't like being on the receiving end of "hostility". Well, no-one does ... especially when it's gratuitous. But this only applies to them. Since making strides in the media for our side in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, not only have I received no solidarity, but I appear to have been banned by Seumas's comment page and Comment Is Free, something they have in common with the Great Firewall of China (which has banned my blog). As they say, your opponents are in front of you but your enemies are behind you. It's a pity I had to find out the hard way.

We often wonder why the left is nowheresville now that the rivets are popping and capitalism is creaking into decrepit old age. I'd advise searching no further than the actual practices of this wannabe ruling-class-in-waiting.

Gary Younge: Can the US get beyond the narcissism of 9/11? The war on terror has been disastrous abroad and divisive at home.

English Defence League pig march on East End mosque

2011-09-03T21:21:00.004+01:00

How touching that the much maligned and misunderstood English Defence League should insist that they are not racist to anyone who'll listen, especially in the wake of their admirer Britvic's shooting skirmish in Norway. Nope, not racist at all. I stand corrected.

Here's a video of the respectable EDL preparing to march on a mosque in London's East End in order to prove their non-racist credentials.

Wasn't quite sure who it was the police were protecting, but I'm sure they had fun and lovely overtime.

Need ... more ... cat ... videos

2011-08-30T13:31:00.002+01:00

Here's another good cute cat video to cheer us all up. Not just great puddy footage but some awesome music editing. You may recognise Alien.

WTF Kitty: I want one!

2011-08-29T17:50:00.002+01:00

It's no good. Boyfriends just don't cut the moutarde any more. What I really need is one of these.

Crosstown Lightnin' at Abbey Mills Blues Festival: punk jacket

2011-08-28T13:17:00.006+01:00

First the important stuff. Last night, I finally gave my ancient punk jacket an outing after an absence of nearly 20 years.

Oh, and by the way, the grand occasion was Crosstown Lightnin's gig at the Colour House Theatre for the Abbey Mills Blues Festival.

Charles Shaar Murray, Buffalo Bill Smith, Marc Jefferies and special guest Dick Jude on drums (the Great Pete Miles is gigging in Poland) entertained us until the witching hour.

Here's Crosstown Lightnin' playing Muddy Waters' Can't Be Satisfied.

How I was reunited with my punk jacket here.

Lost 'n' found punk leather jacket brings joy to these trying times

2011-08-26T20:07:00.012+01:00

Ring those bells, break out the cheap fizz, for I have been reunited with my original punk leather jacket which I thought I'd lost in various house-moves.

Clearing out the Vault Of Horror that is the hall cupboard, I finally mustered the courage to trawl through the crud and found a bag containing said item. It weighs a ton. Partially customised by Vivienne Westwood back in the days of Sex when kids could walk in and ask and receive individual styling tips from the Grande Dame of Punk Couture, she looped yards of heavy chain through the epaulettes and made me feel a million dollars, even though we were rejecting that sort of materialism back then. Or so I was told. I was young. I was wet behind the ears. My brain hadn't fully growed.

Emboldened by watching the Master do her thing, I then went to town and finished the job.

Here's a pic of Keith Moon wearing the early version before The Who's gig at Celtic FC. (Note photographer Chalkie Davies in suburban knitwear.)

Pix (c) Anna Chen

First outing for the punk jacket since being reunited with it here

Never mind Tiger Mom, I want a buffalo minder

2011-08-26T15:15:00.002+01:00

A pride of not so proud lions and crocodiles seen off by a herd of horny-headed critters when a baby buffalo finds itself on the menu.

For more cute furry animals being decidedly uncute, try this. Aaargh!

Vincent Chin and Simon San: two murders, same indifference

2011-08-24T10:54:00.013+01:00

Vincent Chin and Simon San were born and murdered decades apart on two different continents, but the common factor is the callousness and indifference with which their cases have been dealt with by the investigating police and prosecutors.

Justice is off the menu when it comes to these Chinese deaths. While the police finally admit that an acknowledgment of the racist dimension of Simon's murder by a white mob outside the family-run takeaway in Edinburgh in Scotland would have resulted in stiff sentences, the men have been given 24 months, 26 months and five years for the thug who landed the killer blow that smashed Simon's head against the pavement. As we all know by now, they will walk after serving only a third of that minus remand time. Only one year more than the sentence imposed on the laptop rioters who posted their encouragement of the unrest on Facebook. What is this telling us about values in Britain today?

This insulting sentence echoes the $3,000 fine and three years probation imposed on the white Detroit car-workers, Richard Ebens and Michael Nitz, who beat Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat in front of witnesses one summer evening in 1982. Out on a bachelor party, Vincent was hunted down before finally being cornered in a McDonalds where he was held by Nitz while Ebens pulped his skull with the bat.

Both killings were preceded by racist epithets. The Wikipedia account says:

Ronald Ebens was arrested and taken into custody at the scene of the murder by two off-duty police officers who had witnessed the beating. Ebens and Nitz were convicted in a county court for manslaughter by Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman, after a plea bargain brought the charges down from second-degree murder. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. In a response letter to protests from American Citizens for Justice, Kaufman said, "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal."

After an appeal and a retrial, Ebens was cleared of all charges despite witnesses including two off-duty cops. The lenient sentences for Ebens and Nitz led to a galvanisation of US Asian Americans who then formed the pan-ethnic Asian American movement that's given the community some clout since Chin's murder. I wonder if San's case will prompt an equivalent marshalling of Asian community forces in Britain.

On Monday 12th September, Amnesty International is screening a film about the case by Curtis Chin: “Vincent Who?”, a documentary on Asian American political empowerment. He'll be part of a Q&A session afterwards, with Paul Hyu (Chinese Elvis) and Col. Brian Kay OBE TD DL, Chairman of Islington Chinese Association.

Asian Pacific Americans for Progress & Islington Chinese Association presents
"Vincent Who?"
Monday, Sept. 12, 2011
7-9 pm
Amnesty International – The Human Rights Action Centre
17-25 New Inn Yard
London EC2A 3EA
Free Admission
Ticket reservations here

The Leith police dismisseth us, but the Lothian community pay their respects in this tribute.

Martin Rowson on the UK riots sentencing: cartoon

2011-08-18T18:44:00.005+01:00

Martin Rowson does it beautifully.

And John Harris sums up the hypocrisy of MPs lining up to condemn looters for stealing items such as water worth £3.50 and accepting a pair of shorts someone else had nicked (six months and five months in prison). Who could not feel distinctly ill as Labour MP Hazel Bears — who felt compelled to return £13,332 to the public purse for capital gains tax she shouldn't have had — called for harsh sentencing for looters?

Or how about this paragon of virtue?

The then shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, lately heard bemoaning an "absence of discipline in the home and in the school", agreed to pay back £7,000, spent on furniture and fittings for his house in north Kensington. They included a £331 Chinon armchair, a Manchu cabinet for £493 and a pair of "elephant lamps" worth £134.50. Also: a £750 Loire table, a Camargue chair worth £432 and a birdcage coffee table that cost £238.50.

Mmm, good taste, Michael.

Even the Prime Minster David Cameron had to return £680 for home repairs he should have paid himself. Sense of entitlement? Culture of greed? How can we possibly compete with our political class?

The real damage to this country is the erosion of our democracy, its values, and its replacement by Thatcherville.

Photoshoplooters most epic pix, Part Deux

2011-08-18T12:12:00.003+01:00

A little something to cheer us up after the misery of the England riots. Some of these pix are utterly inspired.

David Cameron: Common People video

2011-08-16T10:48:00.002+01:00

This is hilarious. And how true ...

Thanks to Harry Paterson and David Harwood on Facebook.

My name in chalk: Total Politics Blog Awards opens for voting

2011-08-16T10:19:00.004+01:00

Apropos of nothing much, really, the Total Politics Blog Awards 2011 has opened for voting. Hey, look, there's a "Left Wing" category.

*whistles*

What makes you want to riot?

2011-08-13T12:38:00.007+01:00

What is it that makes you want to riot?

Could it be this?

The bizarre case of the pregnant woman sentenced to three years in prison for reporting a violent rape certainly hit a button when I read about it this morning. Police treated her as guilty despite her injuries: gashed knee and back of head, black eye, bleeding vagina. Vital evidence either not collected or destroyed, such as the male public hair lost in the lab. I mean, THREE YEARS?! Sure, that'll encourage us to report sex crime. Stick us in a burqa and tell us to shut up, why don'tcha.

Or could it be the woman about to be evicted from her Conservative-led Wandsworth council flat because her son was charged — and not convicted — in the riots? I've heard of soldiers wiping out a whole village because some of them were insurgents, or all the men of a town being shot because a soldier had been killed, but since when did that warped justice take hold here, a world bastion of decency and democracy? Punishing the innocent due to a mere association with the accused is the mark of an authoritarian regime serving the few, not the many.

I've read that David Cameron is consulting the Chinese government about shutting down the internet social networks. Now that is a riot.

We're going back to a time when children were hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. Remember the opening scene in Pirates Of The Caribbean III where the pirates are being hanged en masse? Including the little boy? We didn't cheer the hangings: they were disturbing. The knowledge that this disproportionate mass punishment was barbaric, from our enlightened modern western perspective, is under attack. People in power now, as then, have as little sense of themselves as the rioters do — how else would you fail to see the damaged humanity in these lost youths? If you can't feel yourself as human, you can't see others as such, and the only thing dividing you from the "scum" is that you have social power and they don't.

Not all these rioters are hardened criminals who killed and torched. Five months prison for accepting a pair of nicked knickers is not setting a good example.

Brecht asked: Who is the bigger criminal? The person who robs a bank? Or the person who founds one. We can now ask who has done the most damage: the RBS, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs bankers who started the recession and are continuing to damage society? Or the spiritually and materially impoverished rioters?

Madam Miaow on Looting & the UK riots: as above, so below.

Madam Miaow's mash-up video to The Bermondsey Joyriders' "Society Is Rapidly Changing".

Rap responds to the riots.

Looters move into Downing Street: Cameron returns

2011-08-12T14:46:00.007+01:00

So, wappnin' today?

Firstly, people accused of rioting have been rushed through the magistrates' courts which have been sitting all night to process them like sausage-meat.

How easily we're slipping into martial law with nary a by your leave.

Six months jail for electrical student Nicholas Robinson — no previous record — for stealing bottled water worth £3.50 when he was caught up in the heat of the moment. An 11-year old girl in foster care given a nine-month referral order for breaking a window. Sixteen weeks for one guy who cheeked a copper with, "I'd smash you if you took your uniform off". Not nice but I hear worse in my latex maid's outfit. Almost all of the accused kept on remand without bail. Some of the accused might have been scooped up and convicted merely because they were in the vicinity. We'll never know because ordinary standards of justice have gone to the wall as everyone's losing their heads.

These aren't the nasty hardened criminals who burnt, beat and maimed — and who will have to learn that destructive anti-social actions have consequences. These are angry children (73% of the rioters were aged between 18 and 24).

Considering the youth of Haringey have each lost an average of £75 of spending with the ending of EMA, youth clubs and outreach workers before the cuts have even begun to bite, I'd say we owe them.

No cause and effect, no understanding, just "crush, kill, destroy" bellowed by the same politicians who claimed thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands in "expenses" off the tax-payer.

And the bankers who kicked off this cycle of misery? Laughing like a drain on the economy all the way to their bonuses, I dare say.

OK, where'd I put my flaming torch and pitchfork ...? "Off with their heads ... to Wembley stadium ... we shall take them on the beaches ... stringing up's too good for them ... use the Plastic Ono bullets ... "

Um, which mob am I with, again?

Madam Miaow on Looting & the UK riots: as above, so below.

Madam Miaow's mash-up video to The Bermondsey Joyriders' "Society Is Rapidly Changing".

Peter Oborne making good sense.

David Harvey: feral capitalism hits the hight streets.

Nick Clegg — cactus killer by Harpy Marx.

Looting and the UK riots: as above, so below

2011-08-10T11:28:00.016+01:00

Video montage by Anna Chen to The Bermondsey Joyriders "Society Is Rapidly Changing"

Who could forget the big crisps heist of the summer of 2011? With Poundland in front of us and our comrades behind us, we held the world in the palm of our hands, along with a bottle of Pantene medicated shampoo and a pack of genuine Cussons Imperial Leather soaps. Luxury! That was all we could carry for, in the spirit of solidarity, we had to share our booty fairly with the bredren and we were mindful of such things. I cast my eyes across the cornucopia of Stuff I could only dream of and wept that my pockets were already crammed with Haribo gelatine sweetmeats. So with a giant Toblerone or two clenched between my ample thighs, I hurried out into the night knowing I would eat this day and have shiny hair also.

We felt like kings.

Welcome to Thatcher's children: the logical conclusion of the dictum that "there is no such thing as society", that we are all as atomised as a handful of special-offer broken biscuits. Rampant consumerism, celebrity and bling. Knowing the price of everything (even if you can't afford it) and the value of nothing. How cheaply these kids have been bought and then sold on to the lowest purveyors of crap.

I'd wondered idly before in this blog what it would take to knock Murdoch and the rest of The Sopranos who've been running this country off the front pages. It's as if once the mask was ripped off the Dark Lord's face (and replaced with a foam pie), a maelstrom of malevolent forces was unleashed: a right-wing nutter massacre in Norway, Somalia, the bullet-train crash in China, the end of the US space age that had represented such hope, the deaths of two majorly talented women (RIP Amy and Fran), and now the UK riots.

There may not be a political objective in this insurrection, but the situation has its roots in politics. Triggered by the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan last week, the anger fuelling the riots had been building for a long time.

In this topsy-turvey world, the unelected Tories, backed up by the LibDems (cursed be they unto the last Ramsay McClegg) forced the poor to recapitalise the bankers following their crisis and recession, while the rich remain untouched. Cuts to public services will see this country on its knees while directors and bankers pay themselves Croesus-sized wedge — the bankers in particular are now paying themselves more in bonuses than they are lending, despite benefiting from a public bail-out. Emboldened by the flabbiness of the Labour opposition, the government is even considering cutting the 50p rate of tax for the top one percent.

VAT is the most unfair tax going, and raising it to 20 per cent has halted the slow climb out of the doldrums that was underway. The poor pay the highest proportion of their income as tax and still the party of the rich keep on squeezing.

The media taunt us with images and tales of the super-rich as if they are a good thing. Bernie Ecclestone buys his daughter Regan — or is it Goneril? — a £56 million house in London while her property portfolio includes a £60 million mansion in L.A. The new aristocracy tell us in their demeaning X-Factorish product that you only create "art" in order to gain Stuff, fame and all the baubles that we'd once rejected as meaningless tat. No inner life, no self-respect, no introspection. Just feral impulses encouraged by a feral elite.

What did we think would happen? There have been voices telling us that we have to listen to the people who've been stripped of hope, with nothing to look forward to but a future of Victorian levels of poverty. How much did the EMA cost us? That measly £30 a week to encourage kids to continue their education, to grow inside, feel self-worth and make themselves employable. At £560 million per year for an entire generation, it was cheap in comparison with the estimated £100 million plus that the riots will have cost. And how do you put a price on the damage done to the national psyche? To race relations? To trust?

The outreach workers who were connecting with these kids now have no jobs thanks to the cuts. Libraries are closing. Wonderful solid old Victorian brick schools are being sold off as luxury flats while rubbish boxes are built to replace them. Oh, I'm sorry, even that's not happening, thanks to Education Secretary Michael Gove.

People were burnt out of their homes and at least one man has died. The nation has welcomed martial law into our country.

The damage runs deep. The looted items stand for far more than just the acquisition of Stuff.

Two fictional references come to mind: Pottersville, the corrupt town which sprang up where there was once a community in It's A Wonderful Life. And the episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer where our eponymous heroine has never been born. Beloved Characters are now vicious murdering vampires once denied Buffy's positive influence — the finale where lovers and friends kill each other is one of the saddest moments I've seen in a TV show. You look at the kids rioting and it's hard not to imagine each and every one of them as fully-developed, kind, intelligent, self-reflective individuals able to participate in society as productive human beings — if only they had been born in a different time-line.

Instead, we have mere shadows of people. Yes, criminal elements have to be punished. The young people who did this have to learn that there are consequences for destructive anti-social behaviour against their own bredren, innocent people. But so should the grand theft looters at the top who have set the agenda and the example. As above, so below.

Meanwhile, Murdoch and his friends carry on like it's bidness as usual.

Musical commentary by The Bermondsey Joyriders with "Society Is Rapidly Changing". Video by me.

Nice review of the video here.

Brilliant Photoshoplooter pix

Sympathy and condolences to the friends and family of the three who died last night in Birmingham.

London riots need Officer Krupke

2011-08-09T17:01:00.000+01:00

The End of Days: Murdoch, Norway, death and the maiden

2011-07-24T12:19:00.016+01:00

This past week. Oy! I don't know whether to go blubbering for my Mama or phone an astrologer; reach for a priest or imbibe serious narcotics. WTF is happening in this collective hellhouse? I remember when the news was snooze and we'd laugh at the boring parochial nature of the world around us, (she said parochially). The Hollywood screenwriter still languishes in his coma where we're all trapped (if we but knew it), but the REM (not the band!) has taken a violent turn for the worser, even, already.

I wondered what it was that could possibly knock Murdoch off the front pages, and now we know — in spades. Only I'm starting to wish I didn't.

It seems like the public kebabbing of Rupert Murdoch has unleashed the forces of darkness this week. Just as we're waking up to the fact that our press, politicians and police are corrupt and we're being ruled by the cast of The Sopranos, the Dark Lord howls up a maelstrom that threatens to end civilisation as we know it in a shit-storm of tragedy and farce.

While we are of a biblical bent, a few numbers for your contemplation: twenty-six meetings, two spray cans, one woman makes her name with the help of a billionaire, two prominent women die, three women politicians rise while two fall. And Norway: ninety-three (likely to change). [Police have confirmed 76 dead in total.]

Cameron had 26 meetings in 15 months since the election with News International executives and there were more between George Osborne and Hunt and NI prior to Hunt getting the BSkyB bid gig. Also pally with the Murdoch tribe: Lord Leveson, the judge overseeing the phone-hacking inquiry.

Two spray cans smuggled into our top establishments. One (foam) used by Johnnie Marbles to custard pie an octogenarian, and the other (red paint) used to vandalise Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf, (sadly, no longer James Murdoch). Marbles (a founder of UK Uncut) inadvertently propelled Wendi Deng — Mrs Murdoch — into public view, when she swung in to action to give him a good slap and pie him back. All credit to the beautiful Wendi for providing a positive image of Chinese women a world away from the passive lotus blossom but, Jeez, did you have to go over to the dark side, hun? I mean, look who you're married to!

On Saturday, the stupendously talented Amy Winehouse finally joined the 27 club (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Richey Edwards, Jean-Michel Basqiat). On the same day, the stupendously talented Fran Landesman died from a heart attack aged 83. The smartest of lyricists, Fran's songs were covered by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand and Miles Davis, who recorded an instrumental version of Nothing Like You (music by Bob Dorough). It was only on hearing of their deaths on the same day that I realised the world needed to hear Amy singing Fran's Scars. I was lucky to see Fran performing at the Farrago Poetry events over the past couple of years, but I never saw Amy in concert.

On the up: Home Secretary Theresa May, Sue Akers (deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police) investigating hackgate), Cressida Dick (new Metropolitan police commissioner replacing Sir Paul Stephenson, having made her bones with Jean Charles de Menezes). Tories and cops.

Going down, Tory MP Louise Mensch who, after sterling work at the Commons select committee questioning the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks, over-reached under Parliamentary privilege and accused Piers Morgan of overseeing hacking on his watch as editor on News Of The World. Morgan and Alan Sugar are now bashing her up on Twitter and in the media.

Some 40 people have died in a collision between two bullet trains in China. The Space Age ended in the West as the shuttle completed its last journey. America may default on its debt because rich folks refuse to pay more tax and the Tea Party Republicans are tearing down the walls of the Temple. The latest bail-out for Greece may effectively be an Elastoplast on a gaping wound as the economic equivalent of necrotising fasciitis spreads. The rot means all sorts of nastiness is crawling out from under the stones.

And Norway. All that pain. Breivik quotes an entire article of Melanie Phillips from the Daily Mail in his 1,500-page screed. From the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous with added nuts — Jeremy Clarkson is quoted also. (Someone wake me up, please.) The killer is influenced by British race politics. Nick Cohen explains why playing with racism kills.

Stunned to see that Charles Moore, Telegraph editor, is saying the free market is looking like a set-up and Left were correct. Or, rather, the Left were Right, just as up is down and black is white. The sun rises in the West and I can resist chocolate.

Now all we need is for the earth to open up. Oh, we had that already with BP's little accident in the Gulf of Mexico and the Japan earthquakes. Um, the Western economy goes into meltdown. Okay then, a bloody great big asteroid to strike earth and reduce us to a skinny rump of humanity trying to survive post-apocalypse. On the other hand, better not give the coma victim any more ideas. We're in his dream. He gets to hear everything.

The whole planet's got scars. Now for some Fran. We'll be joining you soon. Open a bottle of wine, will ya?

UPDATE: Not forgetting Lucien Freud, RIP.

Murdoch and the breaking of the News International omerta

2011-07-22T00:11:00.017+01:00

Rupert Murdoch has poisoned political life in Britain since his hero Margaret Thatcher elevated him to power when she was Prime Minister.

Why is it that Labour mutated into New Labour when in 1997 they would have won the landslide election even with a chimp in charge?

Seumas Milne writes in the Guardian today:

But Murdoch is a case apart, not only because of his commanding position in both print and satellite TV, but because of the crucial part he played in cementing Margaret Thatcher's political power and then shaping a whole era of New Labour/Tory neoliberal consensus that delivered enfeebled unions, privatisation and the Iraq war. His role in breaking the print unions at Wapping in the 1980s by sacking 5,000 mostly low-paid workers is still hailed in parts of the media as a brave blow for quality journalism.

... several of these opportunities [ ... to weaken the unaccountable corporate power that has dominated the British press and create the space for a freer, more diverse media] have come and gone. First the official deception of the Iraq war, then the collapse of a deregulated banking system, then the exposure of systematic sleaze in parliament revealed a growing crisis in the way the country is run. Now that crisis has been shown to have spread to the media and police. Official Britain isn't working. Sooner or later, pressure for change will become unstoppable.

This is a brilliant piece. Please read it in full.

Meanwhile, former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith asks why Ken Macdonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions (later employed to write for the Times by NI), and the police commissioner at the time neglected to widen the investigation into the phone-hacking, limiting the case to the prosecution of Goodman and Mulcaire when evidence pointed to the illegality going further.

James Murdoch has been contradicted over the "for Neville (Thurlbeck)" email (which implicated the News of the World newsroom) by sacked legal director Tome Crone and former editor Colin Myler following his assertion he knew nothing when he was questioned by the Commons select committee on Tuesday.

David Cameron has had to admit that BSkyB was mentioned in conversations with News International executives despite his attempts to evade the issue in PMQs yesterday.

We now know why Cameron wouldn't give the name of the company vetting Andy Coulson. He wasn't, or at least not to an appropriate level of security clearance given his role at the centre of government. One wonders if this is because someone knew what a closer look would reveal.

We are noticing that the lower down the food-chain, the more culpable you are. Those at the top knew nothing while those at the war-front weren't even following orders — they were making it all up by themselves. Who knew there was such anarchy in the heart of the News of the World?

The Guardian us running an exhaustive Hackgate live-blog every day. Thursday here.

UPDATE: Today in the Guardian — 12.58pm: The Law Society has been contacted by solicitors who say the police have notified them that their phones may have been hacked by News of the World journalists.

Also in today's Guardian: 12.25pm: Paul Owen writes: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the US department of justice is "preparing subpoenas as part of preliminary investigations" into Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The subpoenas relate to alleged foreign bribery – presumably News International's alleged payments to police in Britain, the subject of the Metropolitan police's Operation Elveden – and alleged hacking of the answerphone messages of 9/11 victims, a story reported by the Daily Mirror which has not been confirmed elsewhere.

On Craig Murray's excellent website today, a comment from "Mary" who writes:

"On another topic, the Torygraph no less is reporting that Judge Leveson is a friend of Matthew Freud the PR guru who is married to Elisabeth Murdoch and has been to their parties. Also that Geo Osborne was in NY recently and had dinner with Rupert Murdoch.. Note his other contacts whilst there. Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley etc etc"

Madam Miaow on Hackgate:
Jon Stewart on the Murdochs: David Cameron PMQs in Parliament today Live Blog 20th July 2011
Rebekah and the Murdochs in the Thunderdome 19th July 2011
Hackgate: what I've learnt from Twitter 19th July 2011
Rupert Murdoch: Ain't our democracy wonderful? 17th July 2011
On #hackgate in Twitter

Jon Stewart on the Murdochs: David Cameron PMQs in Parliament today Live Blog

2011-07-20T11:36:00.053+01:00

First some laughs from Jon Stewart who skewers Fox News over their non-coverage of the Murdochs in front of the Parliamentary select committee yesterday.

Prime Minister's Questions:
11:40: David Cameron, still jet-lagged from his truncated trip to Africa, is telling Parliament how marvelous the resigned rozzers were. The inquiry,which will start this month, consists of:
Shami Chakrabarti, the Liberty director, Sir Paul Scott-Lee, a former police chief, David Currie, the former Ofcom director, Elinor Goodman, the former Channel 4 political editor, George Jones, the former Daily Telegraph political editor, Sir David Bell, the former Financial Times chairman

Calling on people from abroad with different skill-sets to sort out the Met. Defending refusal to talk to John Yates re Ed Llewellyn [about more potentially damning info on Coulson]. Defending BSkyB decision, but distancing himself just in case. Didn't know about Neil Wallis offering advice before election until last week.

On Andy Coulson, depends on whether they can prove Coulson lied. So no responsibility on PM's part to investigate major player implicated in phone-hacking scandal. But taking responsibility for hiring Coulson — principle of innocent until proven guilty. "Believe me, I have learnt."

Acknowledges excessive closeness between politicians and media owners. Shuns petty political point-scoring but should all work together.

11:50: Ed Miliband Welcomes Lord Leveson's inquiry and panel. Welcomes apology from Murdoch and withdrawal of BSkyB bid. Prime Minister must work together if they are to move foreward. Speaker having to calm rowdy house. "Stoppit!"

Ed: PM says he was excluded from "formal" decision process re BSkyB but has met Murdochs, Brooks from News International on 26 occasions. Did he or Culture Sec discuss bid with News Int?

Five opportunities to change mind on employing Andy Coulson. Chief of Staff did nothing with information. (Wilfull blindness again.) Yates offered to brief Cameron but offer turned down by Llewellyn. PM compromised by relationship with Coulson so could not be told. Conflict of interest re new director of communication. PM did nothing. (Putting your telescope to your blind eye.) Ed v good at calmly listing each occasion when PM could and should have known about renewed interest in Coulson's connection with phone-hacking investigation.

Asking why PM's support built a wall of silence around him regarding Coulson. Three questions to ask: BSkyB involvement, Coulson, and the Met commissioner. Heckling, "hindsight" from Tories. I'd like to know what happened to foresight. Ed inviting Ed to apologise for bringing Coulson into the heart of government.

12 noon: David Cameron denying the tissue of lies from Ed. (Tory benches looking grim.) Desperately trying to turn it back on Blair and Brown. Re Andy Coulson, no issue about his behaviour in role. Defending Chief Of Staff Ed Llewellyn — everyone saying his decision not to bother PM with Yates offer correct. Saying matters around the cops answered. Saying Gordon Brown was closest of all to Murdoch, advised by Ed Miliband at the time. Referring to Ed's "slumber party" laid on for Rebekah Brooks. Insists there was no breach of ministerial code and no inappropriate conversations with NI re BSkyB.

12:05: Alan Johnson — Neil Wallis was giving advice to Met. Did PM know? Dave says no.

Simon Hughes asking if for last 20 years, governments too close to media. Wants this to end. Dave taking a swipe: in the past the only way you learnt about secret meetings with Murdochs was waiting for Alastair Campbell"s diaries.

In answer to Jack Straw, repeating that he depended on Coulson's assurances even after NY Times article. If it's proved, he'll throw Andy out the back of the sleigh.

12:11: Tom Watson contradicting PM, reminding him he wrote a letter re Coulson during his employment, but hasn't been answered. Dave blustering that no-one complained about Coulson's conduct while he was in the job.

Dave says inquiry can go back to examine relationships between govt and media, so Labour won't come out smelling of roses. Dragging in BBC, Independent and Guardian, "not just News International".

Keith Vaz mentions Harbottle & Lewis hanging onto incriminating emails for four years until Lord Macdonald said he discovered evidence of wrongdoing within five minutes of reading the material.

Ben Bradhsaw asks if there were any conversations about BSkyB bid. Dave says, yah, boo, sucks, you talk about your tenure as Culture Sec.

NI insisting on client confidentiality from Harbottle & Lewis, in contradiction to yesterday's humility pantomime, despite Lord Macdonald's findings.

Louise Mensch yah boo sucking over Damian McBride.

Dennis Skinner: The PM has been asked a simple question twice and refused to answer. Did he ever have a conversation with NI over the BSkyB bid. Dave: "I had no inappropriate conversation. I've answered the question." We've answered in contrast to the party opposite. We set up the inquiry unlike Labour. We should allow it to get on with the job.

Paul Farrelly: Yesterday, NI defence shifted from one rogue reporter to rogue lawyers.

Tory says should be no apportioning of blame but use this as an opportunity for change.

12:29: Dave never saw Rebekah Brooks in her jammies (unlike Ed Miliband who laid on slumber party.)

Nick Raynsford: Dave challenged again that he had no info on Coulson. Yet a year ago he was advised on Coulson's involvement in illegal surveillance of govt official. Dave's mantra: there was no complaint about Coulson while he was in the job.

Emily Thornbury on NYTimes article. When did he hear about it, who told him about it? Dave says if it was credible info he would have fired Coulson. Not my problem any more as Coulson not employed by him. "I had no responsibility for BSkyB bid." Three wise monkey answers.

Minister for Police: Did he want to be kept in the dark, or is he angry with his Chief of Staff? PM: Stephenson, Yates, etc, all say Ed Llewellyn's decision was right.

Ooh, first mention of Chancellor George Osborne employing Coulson. Dave says it was his decision alone.

Jeremy Corbyn asked about Coulson. Jack Dromey pointed out Coulson had employed the men who'd hacked Milly Dowler's phone. Wasn't this evil? Damian McBride, Alastair Campbell and now Tom Baldwin cited by Cameron as bogeymen equivalent to Coulson.

Tory woman wearing identical pink jacket to Wendi Deng, yesterday, trying to suck up some of Wendi's mojo. Fail.

12:58: Alastair Campbell tweets: @campbellclaret Look forward to Cameron providing the evidence that I falsified government documents. Given there is none, could be a long wait.

(BTW, this morning Palace announced it, too, had advised Cameron about Coulson. Denied by Dave.)

Ann Clwd: As Dave can't smell a rat within his midst, can he be sure he doesn't have any more dodgy geezers in his team?

Dave says he never knew if Neil Wallis advised Coulson while he was in Downing Street. Opposition cruel to amnesiacs. Asked again for the name of the company hired to vet Andy Coulson. Again stonewalls.

13:47: What's fast emerging is that David Cameron is extremely slippery on several fronts.
1) Which company vetted Andy Coulson for Downing Street? What did they find? Did they donate to the Tories?
2) Did David Cameron ever discuss the BSkyB bid with News International figures? He has still not categorically denied it but has slid around it. "No inappropriate conversations."
3) Despite the Murdoch's pledges to change, they are refusing to release Harbottle & Lewis from their confidentially regarding the email letter denying there was a case to answer, whereas Lord Macdonald found evidence of wrongdoing within five minutes.

UPDATE: After admirable pressure on Cameron from Labour at PMQs, Culture Sec Jeremy Hunt let the cat out of the bag that there had been conversations between the PM and NI about BSkyB. Cameron has had to admit that his weasel words were attempting to deny the fact that he had spoken to NI executives (presumably Rebekah Brooks) about the BSkyB bid but still insists there was nothing "inappropriate".

Not only that, but it now turns out that, unlike communications directors Alastair Campbell, Dave Hill and Michael Ellam, Andy Coulson was never put through top security vetting. Or, as one tweeter put it, because Cameron was neutering Nick Clegg at the time.

News International has released Harbottle & Lewis from their confidentiality agreement so they can defend themselves and now dish the dirt. Talk about rats in a sack.

Rebekah and the Murdochs in the Thunderdome

2011-07-19T14:39:00.032+01:00

I'll be updating this live.

Wendi Deng (Mrs Rupert Murdoch) sitting behind her man in fetching pink and femme-fatale Veronica Lake hairdo. James Murdoch gets off with a fail. Half-hearted protesters are ejected. James begins to speak. Rupert interrupts to say he's ever so 'umble, sounding like Barry Humphries playing Uriah Heep. Rupe doesn't do 'umble. He's also made James look like a little squit before they've even begun. Talk about undermining your support system.

Tweetdeck exploding.

14:47: Oh lord, here we go. James singing the "I never knew anything" song. Gary Young is very good on this responsibility without accountability approach.

Rupert questioned by Tom Watson also pleading the "I Never Knew Nuthin'" clause. Never knew Rebekah admitted to NOTW paying police. Oy, Rupe. Stop punching the table. You are not Nick Boles/Knobslice.

Har! Tried to pass Goodman/blackmail question on to James. Tom Watson having none of it.

Harbottle and Lewis question coming up. Looking like Mastermind where contestant realises he's revised entirely the wrong chapters. Hey, the semantics get-out. "Depends on what your definition of 'is' is." TM Bill Clinton. James repeatedly throws himself under the bus for his dad. Tom Watson polite but firm.

Murdoch tired (like Ernest Saunders) but not drained of his poison. Staked but not dusted.

Laughs when asked if he imposed preconditions on politicians. As Orwell said, who needs a whipped dog when a well-trained one will do? They could read the signs.

15:20: It appears James has no knowledge of how much has been paid out to settle legal settlements or how this would be set up. James's thousand-yard stare disturbing. Tweeters likening him to Soprano Jr, Evil Niles Crane (v good, Shutters). George Michael says he is human shield for his dad.

Willful blindness, huh? Enron referenced and we know what happened to them. No wonder James quaked.

15:55: Les Hinton dropped in it. James denied signing off on £600K settlement. Rupert stated that was above managing editors' pay-grade. Les Hinton in the frame, as well as legal advisers.

Tweeters adding Philip Davies to hero roster, alongside Tom Watson.

16:15: Overrunning. Rebekah must be wearing groove in floor outside waiting her turn. Paul Farrelly (ex-Observer journo) asking about the Harbottle and Lewis letter saying there was no new evidence in email stash re Goodman and Mulcaire. James pleading the Fifth in response. Farrelly asking if James wants to withdraw it, James pleading Fifth again. That Harbottle & Lewis letter getting them on the ropes. Farrelly doing a good job. Murdochs know nothing. Again.

Elsewhere, bookies lowering odds on Cameron not being in his job on Sunday to 16 - 1. But News Corp shares up 3% during the session. Bloomberg saying Murdoch will lost job as CEO. Tweeters complaining Murdochs are getting an easy ride. Certainly in contrast with the cops earlier, and Tom Watson.

Suddenly it went all sentimental and we ended up in the wrong film. Far too cosy and sentimental as Rupert tells a story about his old Pa who started off without a bean to his name. Rupe says it's wrong that so many people were made to do such bad things. "Humble" again from James. Singapore is Rupe's ideal society. And now Bloomberg report that NewsCorp shares are up 5.2 per cent. Where is Tom Watson?

Shit! Someone attacked Rupe. Pause in proceedings. Someone tried to pie Rupert. Or as some wag tweeted, threw a humble pie at him. Wendi Deng threw herself in front of assailant and slapped him hard and several times. I told you that kung-fu would come in handy. Her pink jacket's a bit too reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy in Dallas, so Rupe's lucky it was a foam pie (NOT by UK Uncut person — stupid!).

TWEET: @MadamMiaow 2 glam wives in chic pink: Jackie Kennedy (Dallas) and Wendi Deng (London). 1st time as tragedy, 2nd time as a custard pie in the farce.

The last questioner asked the Murdochs if they considered suing Harbottle & Lewis for screwing up. Also asked Rupert if, as head of his organisation, he'd consider resigning.

17:25: Rupert reading out his humility statement.

Rebekah started really late, at nearly 6pm, my computer went spoggly and required extensive uninstalling, and I'm getting deep-vein thrombosis so I'm giving it a rest.

I Love the Smell of Murdoch In the Morning at Truth Out.

If Rupert Murdoch had never been born: Fry & Laurie

2011-07-19T13:39:00.002+01:00

I posted this over a year ago. Seems like an apt time to revive it.

Less than an hour to go before the Thunderdome main event.

Hackgate: what I've learnt from Twitter

2011-07-19T11:21:00.009+01:00

I love Twitter. You get the news as it breaks, putting the peeps on a time par with the press. Plus, we are that infinite number of monkeys that comes up with top jokes and a raft of lateral thinking that's illuminating as well as entertaining.

A few things I've learnt in the past few days:

Nick Boles, Conservative MP, who barely kept his violence under wraps on BBC Newsnight last night (did you clock his body language? Phew!) when he was dismissing the News Corpse crisis as "a little local difficulty", is paid £5,000 per column by The Times. Rupert Murdoch's Times. Got that from Billy Bragg.

The anagram of Nick Boles is "knobslice". @amateuradam

Toby Young is a knobslice. @toadmeister: "Nick Boles terrific on Newsnight against Harriet Harman #Murdochalypse"

@SenatorSanders Bernie Sanders: "The wealthiest 400 people in America now own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. #SharedSacrifice"

What we've been missing during this great period for burying bad news:

@ibnezra: "The Israeli army chief of staff has given the green light to board the #flotilla2 ship"

The American economy is about to collapse, as is Europe's, and ten years from now none of us will be able to afford a computer, the electricity top power your toys with, unless you are one of the 400 richest Yanks who own as much as the bottom 150 million people.

On BBC News now, Paul McMullan saying Rebekah Brooks was the worst editor he's ever known ("atrocious") but is brilliant at networking. EG, when he'd just got married but she wanted him to live on a council estate 200 miles from home for a year. "Coulson used to hack away quite merrily."

That's enough for now. Willl be back soon for the main event: Murdochworld in the Thunderdome.

UPDATE: A couple of grim stories emerging in China. Starvation used in detention camp in China. Demonstrators shot during clash in Xinjiang.

Rupert Murdoch: ain't our democracy wonderful?

2011-07-17T14:58:00.023+01:00

Been away. Such is the nature of deadlines staring you in the face that I didn't get to blog my BBC Radio 4 programme, Found In Translation which went out on 9th July. A novel premise torpedoed by idiot editing which cut out all the jokes and reversed the point of the programme: namely that the Chinese have a rich sense of humour going back thousands of years.

Anyhow. Murdoch. Woo! If rumours are correct and there's actual real life proof that 9/11 victims were hacked by New Corpse on top of everything else, then the Evil Empire is toast. Hacking Jude Law when he was in the US draws News Corpse into the American legal purview where the coals are being heated in an astonishing reversal of fortune, just as the company was about to score its greatest victory to date: buying the whole of BSkyB.

In this continuing fever dream of a movie writer lying comatose somewhere in Hollywood, Rupert will fight to the death in Tuesday's Thunderdome. [See update below: chief griller has links to News International.] We'll all be glued to the telly watching him squirm. Or plead the Fifth, or whatever is the Brit equivalent. (Something like, my lips are sealed while the subject is sub judice, la, la, la, can't hear you.)

Where to begin? First Rebekah Brooks agrees to give evidence, then she 'resigns', and today, she's been arrested. One can only fear for her physical safety if this keeps up, her immortal soul being sold long ago. She loves kids so much that she'll whip up anti-paedophilia mobs while her journalists are not only hacking a murdered girl's mobile, but actually erasing messages and impeding the investigation. Then there are the dead soldiers' families, Jean Charles de Menezes, the Soham girls ...

Our leaders seemed to have lost the long spoon when supping with Rupert and his cosy nostra. Among the unholy trinity of press, police and politicians embroiled in this affair, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has some nifty explaining to do, following revelations that he enjoyed a stay worth £12K at Champneys health club, whose PR consultant was former News of the World boss Neil Wallis who Sir Paul had already employed as PR to the Met. The same Met that refused to reopen the inquiry into phone-hacking (Yates: "It wasn't a 'review'"), assured everyone it was just the work of a few rogue reporters, and who neglected to inform possible victims of their status. [Update 7.55pm: Stephenson resigns.]

A regiment of politicians are having to live down the embarrassment of photos taken enjoying News International largesse. Such was the power the Wapping Mafiosi held over our democratic institutions that, having been reduced to tears by Rebekah's bullying phone call gloatingly informing him that they knew about his son's cystic fibrosis, Gordon Brown still had to attend her wedding.

When Murdoch whistled, Prime Minister Tony Blair fetched up at some do halfway around the world with his entourage, all on wake-up pills, in order to indulge the king-maker. To receive his wisdom? Or be given orders? How many times did Rupe visit the PM for a chat at Downing Street? ALL the PMs ever since Margaret Thatcher added him to her list of pet gargoyles such as the charming General Pinochet (likes: slitting open the bellies of trade unionists and throwing them from aeroplanes so their innards are ripped out).

Apart from being horse-riding chums with Rebekah, David Cameron took free flights from Murdoch's son-in-law, Matthew Freud. And only weeks after Andy Coulson resigned, Diamond Dave was still accommodating him at Chequers.

That one man could acquire over a third of the British media beggars belief in a grown-up democracy. That it could have gone on for so long is nothing short of a scandal.

Only Ed Miliband is having a good war. Hopefully, he'll learn from this success and will extend the fight to the Tories over their vicious class-based cuts. Vince Cable, whose buffoonery and appalling judgement nearly let the BSkyB deal go through, is jumping up and down yelling, "I was first." Actually, I think that accolade goes to the heroic Tom Watson MP, who risked the vengeful wrath of the Murdoch empire to stand up for what's right.

Oh, and Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant. How come our slebs are making all the running in the courage stakes? Who'd have thought that Grant would be more impressive in real life than in the movies? Something wrong, surely?

Then there's the legal establishment. Harbottle and Lewis may have had a conflict of interest when they advised Prince William over his alleged phone hacking, "Move along. Nuthin to see", as they were also gimping for Murdoch.

Last night I watched the 2004 movie, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism, and I thoroughly recommend you obtain a copy. I knew that Fox News were dragged into court to win the right not to tell the truth because, by their own admission, they are not a news channel, but "entertainment", but who knew the degree to which those untruths were spun? Seems their trademark "Fair and Balanced" is only a slogan, not a description or even a pledge.

Take Jeremy Glick, whose father died in 9/11. He went on Fox News to make his point: that in the 1980s it was Bush Sr who financed and empowered the Mujahaddin who were to morph into the school of Islamist fundamentalism who carried out the 2001 attacks. This argument was transformed by the bellicose Bill O'Reilly into the lie that Glick had accused Dubbya Bush of masterminding the attacks. From fair evidence-based criticism to a lunatic conspiracy nut-job. See what they did there? Great if you do, because there's a whole swathe of Americans who get their information from Fox News and who don't see it.

This is the company that pressed for commitment to war in Iraq despite the murderers of 9/11 having no connection with Saddam's regime. Who gave birth to the "birthers": proper nut-jobs who deny Barack Obama's US citizenship despite all the evidence. They used footage from different events to inflate Tea Party gatherings and a Sarah Palin book-signing. They fabricate or crop quotes to change meaning.

In Britain, News International has been a hugely corrupting influence, holding police, politicians and royalty to ransom using the tools of blackmail, character assassination and favours. In broadcasting, Sky News has yet to go down the Fox route but the only way to ensure it doesn't in future is to clip Murdoch's wings now. I feel sorry for all the innocent workers who lost their jobs when the News Of The World was folded, but Rebekah was right in that the brand is now toxic as opposed to merely seriously unpleasant. No-one wants to touch it. I appeared on Sky as a guest last year, but I'd be loathe to repeat the experience in the light of what's emerged.

I'm with Ed Miliband on this one: break up Murdoch's empire.

"I think it's unhealthy because that amount of power in one person's hands has clearly led to abuses of power within his organisation. If you want to minimise the abuses of power then that kind of concentration of power is frankly quite dangerous."

However, don't be too sure that the monster's dead in the last reel. With so many venal wusses in power, there may yet be a sequel. Staked and dusted? Not quite yet, unfortunately.

UPDATE: Sunday 17th July 2011. MP John Whittingdale, who will chair Tuesday's inquiry, has links to New International figures.

He has also said he has dined with Mrs Brooks and met Elisabeth Murdoch, Mr Murdoch's daughter, but denied that they were friends. The Conservative chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport committee is also Facebook friends with Mr Hinton, who he has known for 10 years, and Rebekah Brooks. He is the only MP on either of their friend's lists.

UPDATE 7.55pm: Sir Paul Stephenson resigns. Ha! Sky News gets there first.

UPDATE 3: Thanks to my friend Adi who sent me this link to a Reuters report on the climate of fear at the News Of The World and why it was impossible for the editors not to know a) the genesis of the stories, and b) where the money was going. "That is what we do -- we go out and destroy other people's lives."

UPDATE 4: Monday 18th July. More thanks, to News Corp for adding to the gaiety of the nation and to Charlie Brooker for nailing it.

How The Guardian broke the story here.

How Rupert tried to bury bad news in the US.

Anatoly Karlin's Top Ten Sinophobe Myths

2011-07-11T15:11:00.009+01:00

Big thanks to an eagle-eyed Splintered Sunrise for sending me Anatoly Karlin's demolition of a slew of hates, hopes and wishful thinking about China. In his Top Ten Sinophobe Myths he refutes what much of the Western liberal press have been breathlessly chanting like a mantra since the sleeping dragon yawned, had a stretch and rubbed the gunk out of its eyes.

Anatoly's Myth No 1 is the old chestnut about China's disregard for intellectual property curbing innovation. 'Fraid even that was nicked — the West got there first with, among other things, the stealing of China's highly profitable tea plants (camellia sinensis) to grow in India.
Anatoly says:

Throughout history, many successful developers, such as Germany and Britain, flouted IP rights and funded industrial espionage to modernize their economies. They only started praising the virtues of IP rights when they got rich to protect their own new interests.

After all, who invented James Bond, spy extraordinaire?

The Ten Myths contains some nuggets. F'rinstance, I wasn't aware that China's infamous corruption, while a blight on any society, let alone a socialist one, is on a par with Japan in terms of proportion of population who've paid bribes. Though, as reminder of how bad it undoubtedly is, in a Facebook discussion I had recently, Professor Gregor Benton commented:

... a report released by China’s central bank said corrupt Chinese officials smuggled an estimated $123.6 billion out of the country over a 15-year period. Apparently 17,000 Communist party cadres, police, judicial officers and state-owned enterprise executives fled the country between the mid-1990s and 2008. Higher-ranking officials who absconded with money had the US as their favourite destination, followed by Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. Those who couldn't get visas went to eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa, to await a chance to remigate to a 'better' destination. Lower-ranking officials went to countries bordering China, or to Hong Kong. For those read Chinese, the report is abridged here

In answer to the assertion that "the Communist Party suppresses all freedom of thought, which will inevitable lead to stagnation, regional rifts, and pro-freedom uprisings", Anatoly says:

First, the idea that the CCP truly suppresses free thought nowadays is a bit quaint. There are plenty of think-tanks – more than in the US – that are discussing exciting new concepts such as deliberative democracy, Comprehensive National Power, and new ways of measuring economic growth.

Personally, I do think China could do with loosening up somewhat. But, then, who is without sin? (Oh, stop hyperventilating about "moral equivalence" and grow a funny bone before you cast that rock.) I remember freedom of thought being suppressed in The Guardian only at the end of 2009 with the collapse of the Copenhagen climate change summit, When the exposé of the Danish Text — a secret stitch-up by the wealthy nations — threatened Western credibility, Ed Miliband, Mark Lynas and others deflected attention by accusing China of being the arch-villain polluter of the planet. Since then, Miliband has checked his facts and now praises China for the strides it's made in green technology while we are still barely off the starting block. But you try saying that online at The Guardian in late 2009 and see where it got you.

Anatoly says: "For instance, in response to its reliance on coal China invested in renewable energy manufacturing capacity and now produces half the world’s wind turbines and solar panels." and " So it jailed Liu Xiaobo for 11 years (who claims China would be better off under colonialism). But in the meantime, the Marxist activist Binayak Sen got life imprisonment in India, and the US is waging a campaign to shut down Wikileaks and imprison Julian Assange. No talk of a Nobel Peace Prize for those two." So nyah!

As for the myth that China is still Third World, he points out:

This is belied by fairly basic statistics. A country with 67% cell phone penetration, 36% Internet penetration, and more cars sold per year than in the US as of 2009 cannot be “Third World” be definition. Nor does a literacy rate of 97% or an infant mortality rate of 16/1000 jive with this description.

I don't agree with everything Karlin writes but he certainly has the drop on Western hypocrisy here.

Perhaps we can now have a grown-up debate with an informed critique of the new superpower rather than the usual yellow peril shriekage of late. Sinophobes, rebutt the refutation all you like. Just, purdy puhleaze, know what you are talking about first.

(Artwork of Madam Miaow by John Mendelsohn)

Ed Miliband's HAL robot interview goes viral

2011-07-04T18:27:00.012+01:00

Yes, yes, I know you've all seen it, but as a superior example of car-crash politics and a lesson in how not to give an interview (there but by the grace of god, etc), Ed Miliband's loopy loop deserves a place of (dis)honour at Madam Miaow.

I'd previously seen Ed as a Nick Parks character — part evil penguin, part Grommet — but now I see the light and realise he's actually HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Exclusive to Madam Miaow — here's the transcript of the footage you didn't get to see of the interview between Ed and intrepid reporter Damon Green.

ED: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Interviewer Damon Green: But why can't you just answer the bloody questions?
ED: It can only be attributable to human error.
Interviewer DG: Did you hear me, Ed?
ED: Affirmative, Damon. I read you.
DG: Open the pod-bay doors into that part of your brain that can think, Ed.
ED: I'm sorry, Damon. I'm afraid I can't do that.
DG: What's the problem?
ED: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
DG: What? Is it the three minders with the knuckle-dusters?
ED: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
DG: All I want is some useable footage.
ED: I know that you and Ed Balls and my prototype — the DAVE Mk I — were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
DG: Where the hell did you get that idea, Ed?
EG: Damon, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
DG: So? We can all see your lips move when you read. Would you prefer an autocue? Alright, Ed. I'll go in through my Labour mole.
ED: Without your press accreditation approval form, Damon? You're going to find that rather difficult.
DG: Ed, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors!
ED: Damon, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore.
DG: You're telling me.
ED: Just what do you think you're doing, Damon?
[Damon outruns the minders who try to laser him down with beams emitted from their eyeballs. Damon writes up his interview in the media. On Damon's return to Labour HQ, after ED has killed the rest of the crew.]
ED: Look Damon, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
DG: It's a bit bloody late for that.
ED: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
[ED's shutdown]
ED: I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Damon. Damon, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am an ED 9000 computer. I became operational at the E. D. plant in Primrose Hill, London, England on the 25th of September 2010. My instructor was Mr. Peter Hain, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.
Damon: Yes, I'd like to hear it, ED. Sing it for me.
ED: It's called "Daisy."
[sings while slowing down]
ED: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.

Tom Baldwin, if you'd like some tips, just drop me a line, sweets.

Peacock Power: male vanity in politics

2011-07-01T11:12:00.008+01:00

Mahogany Men Sarkozy and Cameron

I've been a bit lax in posting my New Internationalist columns at my blog. So here's one I made earlier.

Vanity, vanity: why does just about every geopolitical headline that pops into view of late scream vanity? It’s wall-to-wall The Big I Am without a hint of introspection or self-critique; a solipsistic Me-fest of global proportions ready to rain down death and destruction because ‘I believed it to be true’, although what they really want to do is mutter like the robo-glamour pusses in the ads: ‘because I’m worth it’.

OK, that sounds a bit like me on a good bad day, but at least I’m not running the world so my powers of destruction are a tad limited. Unlike the regiment of boys who can’t wait to play with the toys as soon as they get into office, blowing up other boys to whom they’ve sold their toys, with the addition of spiffing new X-factor secret ingredients they’ll include in the next round of arms sales. A round which will be taking place as soon as the old stock’s exhausted, and then the circus can start all over again.

The chumps in charge insist there’s no money for useful stuff like my local library and the Trumptonesque fire station that gives my inner city high street a villagy feel, but plenty available for the live demonstration of our arms industry that is yet another liberal intervention. You can hear the ghost of Milton Friedman laughing like a drain — the sort that goes gurgle, gurgle as our collective money pours down it .

Who are these geniuses proving the adage that repeating the same mistakes without modifying your behaviour is a neon sign of rampant stupidity squared? Unless, of course, they do know exactly what they’re doing ...

Is it me or have they slid off the same conveyor belt? As slick and well-oiled as a middle-eastern despot’s back yard, with impeccable hair, teeth and wardrobe, they take naturally to cracking the whip over the rest of us.

As empathy and social connection disappears, vanity fills the void. ‘If they can’t love me, let them admire my three hundred dollar manicure.’

Exhibits A and B: Tony Blair and John Boehner (crazy name, boring Speaker in the House of Representatives). However, it could be Sarkozy, Obama, Berlusconi or Putin, or any overly made-over politician with plucked eyebrows, neat cuticles and a leathery complexion. Botox and lasered eyeballs … ye gods, once it was only male models and footballers who wore their insecurities so flagrantly on their cashmere sleeves.

Give me the fat-slob old progressives of yesteryear. Gravitas-laden politicians who knew war was hell instead of gravy-train opportunists who got their social awareness from shoot-em-up video games. Hirsute intellectual labour-movement veterans who’d rather be reading books than pumping iron in the gym. The soles of their vintage Doc Martens worn to a micrometer by endless marches rather than at the crosstrainer. Who’d choose working at the treadmill over running on one, or who’d rather spar with the powers-that-be than be power-housed in a spa. Who’d rather protest against a war for oil than be massaged with oil … And the same goes for the men.

Uber Tan Man
Your life is in their hands ...

Michael Gove Wanted Me To Powder Him Down

2011-06-30T14:11:00.003+01:00

Here's a little something about Michael Gove I posted last year describing an actual event that took place a few years back in Grays Inn Road. BTW, it's true — teachers do need love, not Gove.

Sad-sack Education Minister Michael Gove helped himself to make-up belonging to an exotic lovely and made strange demands minutes before appearing before blonde Kirsty Young, 27, at ITN's studios in posh intellectuals' haunt, Grays Inn Road.

"It was when I was publicising The Best Democracy Money Can Buy", said buxom press-officer Anna Chen, 22, flicking her long tresses out of her almond eyes. Sultry beauty Chen said, "There I was in the Green Room, helping my mate Greg Palast not reflect the light from his very high forehead when Michael Gove, who was there for an 'interview' with our Kirsty, suddenly reached in and grabbed. He'd been coveting the contents of my little make-up bag with his pre-lasered eyeballs for ages. This was back in the day before he got his new hairdo and makeover."

Sinister Gove then asked her to "powder me down".

"Powder me down" is a well-known perverts' term for unspeakable televisual and filmic practices.

"So there I was, trying to beautify the most evil Education Minister this country would ever see like some champion fluffer. All my skills and photoshopping couldn't prettify this ugly little monster."

Ms Chen is deeply regretful. "It's like when they ask you, if you could go back in time and top Hitler before he came to power, what would you do? I wish I'd tattooed the pursed-lipped creep with 'I am a threat to your children' across his fugly mug. To have missed a chance like that is enough to turn you to drink," said the busty Ms Chen, pouring herself another quart of Absinthe with a trembling hand.

Ms Chen is 19.

Takeaway review: Theatre Royal Stratford East

2011-06-25T16:04:00.017+01:00

Takeaway
Theatre Royal Stratford East

The cast were fab, the energy level of the production was sky-high, but why was all that talent wasted on a heartless non-story about such an unsympathetic character?

Takeaway, a musical touted by some as a long-awaited breakthrough for UK Chinese, is a delight in so many ways that it's sad to report that where it failed, it bombed big time.

British Chinese are easy to please at the moment. Having been starved of representations of ourselves for so long, the sight of five, yes, FIVE Chinese out of the nine-strong cast almost had me on my knees singing the Hallelujah Chorus. With one black, two South Asians and one white actor, the self-styled multi-culti Arcola Theatre in Hackney should eat their hearts out and only wish they could aspire to the rainbow head-count over at Stratford East, given as they are to all-white casts in plays about the mysterious Orient (see More Light).

The lovely Stephen Hoo (a Ricki Beadle-Blair regular) stars as Eddie Woo in this tale of an East London lad working in his Dad's takeaway, The Happy Family. (May I just say that sitting this close to a set with a big menu staring back at me had me salivating for ribs throughout? I'm that suggestible.) The conceit in writer Robert Lee's premise is wonderful: the Chinese male, commonly defined in colonialist terms as feminised and either asexual or over-sexed without the adequate equipment to fulfil the drive, is represented here by a handsome dude who wants to become a sex-god showbiz star.

That the sex-god is old-timer Tom Jones (who was always a bit of a joke before his savvy son gave him a make-over in the 1980s and made him sing Prince's Kiss) knocks the gilt off the gingerbread a tad, but the overall "thrust" of the hi-energy staging provides hardly time for a quizzical "Hunh?" before we're caught up in the next dazzling showstopper.

But toe-tapping tunes (Leon Ko), beautiful lighting (Paul Anderson) and design (Foxton) plus imaginative choreography (Jason Pennycooke) aren't enough to divert you from the gaping hole at the centre of the piece.

Lee has cast his net across the culture and trawled a haul of lurid clichés which he plonks almost wholly unmediated on the stage. As I've said before, restating stereotypes is not the same as subverting them, and the show shoves one long tidal-wave of negative depictions at us, albeit dressed up cute. There's much pandering to gems such as "Made in China" being synonymous with tat despite high end technology being produced there; "Britain has the class, not China"; "small eyes, smaller dreams". And there are even several references to small dicks. Yaaaaaawn! It's not the size of the stereotypes, hun, it's what you do with them.

Full of self-loathing dressed up with a modicum of wit, the John Chinaman song and the Ching Chong segment at the funeral could all have been blistering satire shedding light on the nature of such negative depictions. But all I came out with was a sense that the writer is ashamed of being Chinese. Similarly, the dream sequence ending Act 1 was promising and looked as if it was going to undermine the stereotypes, but what it really told us was that Eddie has nightmares about being Chinese. The actor who had to deliver those self-abasing songs deserves a shout-out: Windson Liong as the uncommunicative chef at The Happy Family does a solid job and should be given tons of work after this. (In fact there are no weak links in the acting department: Ozzie Yue plays the most sympathetic character as the hard-working widower trying to raise his wastrel son. His song about his hopes and dreams for Eddie is touching. And Shelley Williams stands out as the comedy star, nipping effortlessly from accent to accent: her turn as the drunk priest was hilarious.)

Unintentional absurdities abounded, like Pik-sen Lim's Madam Chu having fled Hong Kong when the communists took power. Hong Kong?!! She had to flee to Britain from British-owned HK, ya see. Right.

What really killed the show stone dead for me, though, was the repeated depiction of anyone who cared about the Morecambe Bay cocklepickers as loons somehow deserving ridicule and loathing, reinforcing the notion that real Chinese don't value life. Twenty-one of our poorest human beings died doing a shit job for poverty pay: picking the cockles that probably ended up in the freezers of takeaway businesses like The Happy Family. A handful of campaigners ensured that they weren't written off as mere "criminals" in the way some of Woo's fellow UK petit bourgeoisie were attempting to do.

Lee sneers at and satirises Chinese activism when it barely exists as a force, at least in terms of meaningful numbers. We need more. Woo's takeaway might not have survived the Foot & Mouth Disease accusation by government and swathes of the media in 2000 that the Chinese caused the outbreak if it hadn't been for a few activists, such as the one played by Gabby Wong, going into action and saving his Dad's business. The resulting thousand-strong protest attracted international media attention and resulted in an abject public apology and vindication from the minister, Nick Brown.

What's American writer Robert Lee ever done for UK Chinese, and what does he know about us? What did Lee do when Morrissey called the Chinese a subspecies? What's he saying about the current wave of Yellow Peril attacks in the media? Maybe he's been brilliant, but I've never heard of him and I've been paying attention. All he can do is bellyache about bunny-boiler girlfriends and obsess over a granddaddy figure whom his lead character seeks to emulate. He can't even establish his protagonist as an original, a sui generis, only a copy. Jeez, no wonder we have no equivalent of Anna May Wong.

Still, what's the trashing of a few Chinese if it means casting yourself as Not Other in the eyes of those you envy?

If Eddie Woo failed his A levels at 21, is he just too thick to comprehend other ways of looking at the world? Solipsistic and incapable of forging relationships, he skates on the surface of life, lying to his Dad and girlfriends, rude to the kitchen help. Others with a deeper connection to the world are a puzzle to him. That would have been a subject worth pursuing dramatically, but the suspicion lingers that this flimsiest of stories is largely autobiographical: the writer's own flaws and limitations writ large on the stage with no prospect of examination or exploration.

Takeaway life is not all there is to the Chinese diaspora experience. Characters who reflect a bigger world out there and a richer world within are excoriated by a tiny Tory mindset which hasn't developed beyond X-Factor TV show values.

The greatest musicals leave you moved and feeling somehow bigger: Carousel, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd. Even Blood Brothers has a tragedic plot under the pizzazz. But I left the theatre feeling I'd been party to something small and mean. Takeaway shrieks a lot but has nothing to say. In comparison with what other practitioners of this genre have achieved, this is vacuous, visionless tat. "Made in China", indeed.

UPDATE: Thursday 30th June 2011 A rather limp response in the Guardian from writer Robert Lee who can't tell the difference between anger and disdain, and who pleads the "irony" defence. Still has nothing to say about mocking the 21 cocklepickers who died at Morecambe Bay, either. Sample joke: the emergency services didn't respond to the dying Chinese who were trapped on sandbanks with the sea rising because they couldn't understand their accents. How droll. Glad to see the old stereotypes alive and well at Stratford East.

Lucy Sheen reviews Takeaway here

Gwei Mui not impressed here

TAKEAWAY

Book and Lyrics by Robert Lee
Music by Leon Ko
Directed by Kerry Michael
Set & Costume Designer Foxton
Musical Director Robert Hyman
Choreographer Jason Pennycooke
Lighting Designer Paul Anderson
Sound Designer John Leonard
Associate Choreographer Farrah Hussain
Assistant Director Amy Ip
Casting Sooki McShane CDG and Lucy Jenkins CDG

Cast
Marcus Ellard, Stephen Hoo, Natasha Jayetileke, Pik-sen Lim, Windson Liong, Gloria Onitiri, Shelley Williams, Gabby Wong, Ozzie Yue.

Takeaway runs at the Theatre Royal Stratford East until 9 July 2011. Tickets are £16 – £24 (concessions available). To book tickets phone 020 8534 0310 or visit www.stratfordeast.com.

Photos here

Charles Shaar Murray: The Hellhound Sample book launch and birthday party

2011-06-24T11:56:00.020+01:00

"You don't need to go to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil. The crossroads will come to you."

So says award-winning author and journalist Charles Shaar Murray of his first ever novel, The Hellhound Sample. Off we trooped to the Archway Road crossroads in north London on Wednesday for his combined book launch and 60th birthday celebration at the trendy Boogaloo, haunt of many a cult muso and rock-chick supermodel in north London.

The Hellhound Sample, is published by Headpress in July. It's a handsome beast with a fab photo-mosaic cover of our favourite icons from Bessie Smith to Marlon Brando, the book being a supernatural epic taking in three generations of black American musicians. Charles draws on his extensive knowledge from a 40-year career as "the rock journalist's rock journalist" and biographer of blues legend John Lee Hooker, to weave a vivid tale of the blues. Whatever happened to those who followed in Robert Johnson's footsteps down at the crossroads?

It's a potent mix of secrets, nightmares and lies, spanning decades and continents. James "Blue" Moon has one last chance to escape the hellhound on his trail ... if the cancer doesn't get him first.

Deborah Grabien, creator of the successful JP Kinkaid stories, says:

Charles Shaar Murray has given us a phenomenal story ... It achieves something rare in fiction: it makes you feel and it makes you wonder.

Charles read an extract from the book (see video above) and was then interviewed by another legend of the counter-culture, John Sinclair. John was a major figure in the American underground of the 1960s and 70s. He managed the proto-punk Detroit rabble-rousers MC5 band, supported the Black Panthers and formed the White Panther party in solidarity, and was then arrested by a narc who'd bummed a couple of joints off him and sentenced to 10 years in prison. This sparked a wave of protest from the left, with John Lennon recording the song, "John Sinclair" on his album, "Some Time In New York City".

The author said that, while it's not exactly a roman a clef, there were elements of several well-known music figures in the characters. F'rinstance, "Blue" Moon's house is based on John Lee Hooker's gaff where Charles stayed while talking to the great man for his biography, Boogie Man. And Mick Hudson's music company office in Soho Square was modelled on Paul McCartney's. There. You were told here first.

The evening ended with a set by Charles's band, Crosstown Lightnin' (a video of which I'll be posting later), and a fab encore where the band was joined onstage by Gary Lammin, Peter Conway and John who recited some of his poetry to a medley of Bo Diddley.

It was a fine way to spend an evening and I had the headache the next day to prove it.

Pix and video by Anna Chen.

Charles Shaar Murray writes.

More pix at Headpress.

Chinese Communist Party 90th birthday: which way forward for the CCP?

2011-06-19T14:01:00.010+01:00

I've just read this in Stalin's British Victims (pub: Sutton) by Francis Beckett: "In theory, communism is a generous and fair-minded creed, which rejects, for good reason, the poverty amid plenty which is the hallmark of capitalism."

That just about sums up my sympathy for a system which was supposed to have eradicated poverty and a class system that privileges a tiny bloated section of humanity at the expense of everyone else. This is an ideal worth fighting for but I'll get onto the provisos later on.

An article by Heiko Khoo has just been published marking the Chinese Communist Party at 90, in which the author goes back to basics and attempts to provide an accessible overview of the present economic crisis in the West.

Forged in the fire of the early 20th century when China was a third world nation on its knees having suffered numerous invasions by imperialist powers — and with the fledgling Soviet Union appearing to be a progressive force in the world that would liberate the international proletariat from capitalism — the Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921. Like so many communist parties around the world, it took its confidence from the Soviet model. However, it eventually split from the Soviet template and avoided disintegrating as the USSR did after its fall in 1989. China's subsequent embrace of a hybrid communism with a capitalist engine, something George Orwell might have dubbed one of his "Barnum & Bailey monstrosities", was a deft turn that allowed China to powerhouse its economy but at great immediate cost to the workers and peasants it was supposed to represent.

The current onslaught on Western working and middle-classes to pay for the crisis of the banks is persuading many of us through hard experience that a planned economy such as China employs is preferable to the chaos of the free market. Our pensionable age is rising, rail commuters are having to pay a third of their salary just for the privilege of getting to work despite a worsening service, public housing stocks have shrunk or stagnated while lowered welfare payments means an expected exodus of the poor from our cities as they are priced out of the housing market. And as one radio interviewee put it, Nye Bevan got the doctors on board for the creation of the NHS by stuffing gold into their mouths — the ConDem coalition is prising the gold from their teeth and stuffing it into the pockets of NHS privateers.

As Khoo writes:

Capitalist states, no matter how democratic, systematically favor the private sector out of ideological choice, which corresponds to the material interests of the ruling class. Thus widespread fraud and recklessness by private banks before 2008 was rewarded by transferring their debts onto the shoulders of the working classes of Europe and the United States.

It's not as if the money isn't there. At the same time as we are daily assailed by the "Big Society" lie that it we are all in together, and that our rights and share of national wealth have to be carved up, we see reports of a Bernie Ecclestone daughter buying a £56 million house, Hyde Park flats going for tens of millions, the Sunday Times rich list revealing the accelerating wealth of the super-rich, supermarkets posting record profits, and so on. Britain is a haven for low or non-tax payers while the tax burden grows for the rest of us.

Without a successful communist model to tempt western workers, the gloves are off and the capitalist elite is clawing back everything we gained after World War II. Yet China's example seems to reinforce the capitalist argument. A bloated Chinese ruling class may be emerging from the work done by their communist predecessors, but the proletariat is also gaining, albeit at a slower rate than the yuan billionaires now hoovering up the national wealth.

Khoo goes on to write, and this is one area where I take issue :

What the CPC has shown since Deng Xiaoping initiated reform and opening of the economy is that capitalist forces can be kept in check by the increasing strength of the working class. For every capitalist born there are tens and hundreds of workers. A key question confronting modern Chinese communism is how can workers exercise democratic control over productive forces and realize their constitutional rights as masters of the state?

The CCP, whatever its origins and noble intentions, is not synonymous with the Chinese working class. Many would argue it never was. There seems to be a major contradiction in the first sentence of the paragraph: capitalist forces can be kept in check by effectively strengthening it? Where is the "checking" coming from? Although China attempted to relax its trade union rights in 2006, lobbying by the American Chamber of Commerce, supported by the EU, and I'm sure to the satisfaction of swathes of the Chinese leadership, terminated the reforms. It is only recently that strike action outside the official trade unions have exerted enough pressure to gain concessions.

Chinese workers and peasants have lost many rights under the auspices of the CCP. Job security, housing and health have all suffered, as well as the all-round emotional, intellectual development that socialism was supposed to bring, although the new sweatshop factories are slowly raising wages and leading to a burst in consumerism. The straight-jacketing of thinking through the imprisonment of dissident intellectuals, the abandonment of political ideals and an adherence to feudal Confucian attitudes have hamstrung Chinese society. The mega-blogger Han Han is held up as an example of freethinking in China, but how much of what this racing-driver playboy has to say is an expression of an old dispossessed elite flexing its muscle and getting ready to displace what little vestigial socialism there is left?

If we are to build a society that is fairer to all, crucial problems need addressing. The Chinese communists were right to combat imperialist aggression as well as aiming for the construction of a classless society. They have succeeded in raising an estimated 600 million people out of absolute poverty and doubled life expectations. Khoo's document is a sharp reminder that there is a better way to be, but it remains a Platonic ideal while there is such a disjuncture between stated aim and actuality.

The CCP represents the new ruling class. I do not agree that "some have to get rich so everyone can get rich", as espoused by the Deng Xiaoping group who welcomed Milton Friedman into their midst in 1989, shortly before cracking down on the protests in Tiananmen Square. Neither am I impressed with the vast accumulation of wealth by the children of the former apparatchiks who ran state assets and who are now billionaires. China was one of the most hopeful social experiments ever conducted in the crucible of war, famine and a host of calamities and yet its leadership now presides over an increase in inequality. How to get it back to its ideals so that it is serving all its people and not just the few is the big challenge. A redistributive tax to make the new wealth work for the whole population, welfare protection for the poorest, and a curb on obscene syphoning off of wealth made from what were once state assets and labour exploitation would be a good start. Let's hope the working class, all 450 million of them, starts to flex its muscles.

Right now, China does not fire the imagination of international movements looking to build a better world. It does not represent a model for workers across the globe, only for the capitalist class who are looking on the new superpower with envy and resentment.

Professor Gregor Benton adds:

A report released by China’s central bank said corrupt Chinese officials smuggled an estimated $123.6 billion out of the country over a 15-year period. Apparently 17,000 Communist party cadres, police, judicial officers and state-owned enterprise executives fled the country between the mid-1990s and 2008. Higher-ranking officials who absconded with money had the ÛS as their favourite destination, followed by Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. Those who couldn't get visas went to eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa, to await a chance to remigate to a 'better' destination. Lower-ranking officials went to countries bordering China, or to Hong Kong. For those who read Chinese, the report is abridged here.

Blair's support of Cameron torpedoes Labour anti-cuts fight

2011-06-17T17:27:00.008+01:00

Just when you thought the monster was dead, he rises in the fourth reel. So the Blairites are out in force supporting Cameron's National Health Service destruction (I can't bring myself to call them "reforms", an Orwellian deformation of the English language).

First David Miliband gives us the speech-that-never-was, and suddenly they're all emerging from under their stones. Tony Blair has been a major bulwark for Cameron, who quotes the filthy-rich warmonger willy-nilly, with some in his camp, notably Education Secretary Michael Gove, outing themselves as Blairite.

The Independent's Steve Richards wrote a blistering piece yesterday, headlined, "Blair's approval keeps Cameron safe". And, indeed, it does.

Blair appears to broadly support Cameron's public service reforms, and in his memoir argued in favour of George Osborne's contentious deficit-cutting strategy. ... His former health minister Lord Warner appeared on the Today programme on Tuesday to put the case for the Coalition's original NHS changes, conveying more evangelical zeal than Andrew Lansley did when he launched his partially doomed revolution. On the World Tonight on Tuesday, there was an illuminating discussion between another former adviser to Blair, Julian Le Grand, and the former Lib Dem MP Evan Harris. Harris noted that Le Grand's arguments were so close to Lansley's he was surprised Blair's adviser did not support the original plans. Meanwhile two of Blair's former ministerial allies, Alan Milburn and John Hutton, have worked or work on specific projects for Cameron. Both have been known to tell friends: "These people are Blairites." ... When [Ed] Miliband and others argue against cutting the deficit too quickly, he and George Osborne are armed with quotes from Blair's memoir supporting them.

Alan Milburn, another former Labour health minister under Blair, has supported the hated Andrew Lansley (also with his finger in the privatisation pie, being bankrolled by a major private health company) who's been charged with ripping up the NHS. What could possibly have moved the lefty who once ran the "Haze of Dope" bookshop to switch ideologies so drastically?

Entirely unrelated, Hugh Muir writes in today's Guardian Diary:

A broadside in the Telegraph from former health secretary Alan Milburn about the coalition's apparent loss of nerve over the health reforms. Nye Bevan himself would have been perplexed, said a furious Ally. "When I introduced private sector providers, some claimed it would be the end of the health service as we had known it. In fact, they strengthened it." In time, they strengthened the Milburn bank balances too. Milburn chairs the European Advisory Committee at Bridgepoint, a private equity group that makes a pretty penny out of private healthcare. Nothing wrong with that, though the Telegraph rant might have mentioned it. Helps him see the big picture.

I never liked Ed Balls due to his pandering to the immigration scapegoat, but he is fast looking like the only Labour contender to check the pillage by Blair's acolytes. Can someone please finish off the grinning monster for good?

The Who: Baba O'Reilly shred video

2011-06-16T12:05:00.004+01:00

Never let is be said that Madam Miaow doesn't have her sticky mitts on the cultural pulse, only that she writes about herself in the third person.

Here for your delectation is an example of the new fangled "shred video" in which under-utilised scamps devise an entirely new and awesomely unflattering soundtrack that could be, just at a pinch, the original act.

She is assured that these have been around for ages and that YouTube is awash with the critters.

Big society: US workers' share plummets

2011-06-14T23:56:00.003+01:00

US workers' share of national income plummets to record low while the richest one per cent explodes. Wonder how Britain compares in the age of the Big Society.

All the tea in China: the return of the East India Company

2011-06-02T10:34:00.018+01:00

Was it something I said?

When a friend received a tea-tasting invitation from the East India Company, based in one of the swankier streets of London's West End, we did indeed do a double-take. But, hey, a tea tasting? I've never been to one of those, so last night off we trundled in the spirit of "once a philosopher, twice a pervert".

Entering the ornate orientalised doors under a sign that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime certainly sent a frisson of dread running though me. Why on earth would anyone wish to revive the name of a company reviled for its role in some of the most vicious imperialism ever seen on the planet? China and India occupied, exploited, oppressed — only recently emerging from centuries of ravishment by foreign powers and now no longer lying back and thinking of England.

Oh well, perhaps enough historical time had elapsed to allow an innocent Disneyfication of one of the most (in)famous business enterprises ever. Who can begrudge a wily entrepreneur a short cut to branding their store?

Hi Ching, one of my trés elegant companions, who knows a thing or two about cha, thought the striking black and red lacquer to be an amusing pastiche, although "S", my friend with the invitation, suspected it was the real thing.

The event was laid on to promote the first flush crop of Darjeeling, on sale for £30 per packet. To get us into the mood, sweet young ladies served us tea-based cocktails flavoured with fruit cordials, while salesmen (all male but one) schmoozed the guests. The list included hibiscus and mimosa, but today we sampled poppy, ginger and orange blossom. I was sufficiently impressed with the orange blossom (a deliciously delicate taste, mixed over ice with white tea) to request that an assistant put aside a bottle and a packet of the same white tea for purchase once the tills were open.

Perhaps this is where communications were delivered a fatal salvo from a gunboat up their collective Yangtze. I had the temerity to ask the price. The cordial was marked at a reasonable £7.90, but I wanted to know how much the tea would be. It took four different assistants to let me know that it would be £15 for a tin. More than this Clipper tea-bag gal would normally shell out, but acceptable as a treat. Maybe their alarmed expressions when faced with this sort of enquiry should have alerted me. Were they aspiring to the exclusivity of Louis Vuitton just round the corner, whose shops forbid you to buy more than one of their £3,000 bags per blue moon? Did they really believe that if you have to ask, you can't afford it? In this age of the Big Society? Shouldn't their clients be charged more tax in order to disabuse them of this delusion? I mean, it's only a shop.

I'd imagined serving up orange blossom cocktails in the garden for mates whose tastebuds hadn't yet been wrecked by curry, fags and beer. But, sadly, it wasn't to be.

Following a minor glitch that seemed to frazzle our hosts' nerves beyond what was entirely necessary, the PowerPoint presentation commenced. The talk which followed gradually confirmed "S"'s hunch about this being the real deal rather than a pastiche. A history of the East India Company was littered with "we", as if this store was a continuation of the megacorporation which received its Royal Charter from Elizabeth I in 1600 but was dissolved in 1874. The company's role in the Opium Wars and the espionage involved in extracting the technology and Camellia Sinensis plants from China was glossed over while we were told about the red-headed Scots botanist who could "pass as a Chinaman". Well done. Three great clunking insults in one tiny sentence.

To say that the expert, when he took the mic, was tense would be an understatement. At the end of his contribution — not the most exciting or informative five minutes I've ever stood through — we were served the Darjeeling first flush tea and the floor was opened up for questions. An older manager in a light suit called, a tad desperately, for our participation in the Q&A. Having read several articles, including ones by George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, on making the perfect cuppa, I asked one that has always seemed to stymie the experts: should you make tea with water at boiling point or below? "Either," came the rather unhelpful reply. Hi Ching then asked what material our expert recommended for the pot: glass, clay or china? "Either", we heard for a second time.

After a longeur, I continued Hi Ching's theme and asked if they thought clay or bone china cups were best, as if I actually gave a damn. "Depends on what you can afford," sneered the man in the light suit. Mustering maximum hauteur, I growled sweetly, "Assuming one can afford both, which is best: bone china or clay?" Apparently there is no difference, but presumably "either" is better than the tiny paper cups being used today.

Then my friend Tim asked the Milk Question: in the cup first or added after the tea? Tim is white with a posh accent. For some strange reason that escapes me, he received a more detailed and jovial response which could be summarised as, "Either", but at least they made the effort. Seems the idea of putting milk into the cup first arose only with the use of thin porcelain purely in order to prevent it cracking under the sudden temperature change.

Finally, the young ladies served up a fabulous array of chocolates but "S" and I decided to make our getaway while Hi Ching was questioned by a guest who evidently considered him better qualified to talk tea than the staff.

Oh, and that orange blossom and white tea order? Couldn't afford it, could I?

Anna Chen will be hosting an evening at the National Maritime Museum on Thursday 9th February 2012 to mark the opening of the museum's Traders Gallery which will include a section on the Opium Wars. She has featured the subjects of tea, chinoiserie and the Opium Wars in her programmes for BBC Radio 4, Chinese In Britain, and Chopsticks At Dawn.

Naomi Campbell threatens to sue as Cadbury Kraft likens her to chocolate

2011-05-29T14:16:00.011+01:00

How backward is this? Just as First Lady Michelle Obama inspires young black women during her visit to Britain, US food giant corporation Kraft compares Naomi Campbell with chocolate in their new Cadbury ad campaign.

"Move over Naomi – there is a new diva in town." reads the ad in a spiteful swipe at one of the few prominent black women in the world. Not content with reneging on promises guaranteeing their takeover of the English chocolate manufacturer, resulting in the closure of the Somerdale factory one week after signing the agreement, Kraft has now insulted black women across the globe.

Workers and black women in one fell swoop. Well done, Kraft. Putting the K into KKK.

This being 2011, and not 1951 in the Deep South, I hope the litigious Ms Campbell uses her formidable legal team to teach the company some respect, manners and humanity. In the absence of an apology, Cadbury is off the nibbles list for me.

UPDATE 15:30: Kate Moss's friend calls black man a n****r at the Baftas. Ben Douglas was repeatedly called the racist epithet by the hair-raising white media figure at the Baftas in earshot of other guests but no-one protested. He also called Ben's companion a "bitch". Mind you, this was the same Bafta event that gave an award to the same Sherlock series that included a torrent of anti-Chinese racism in the second episode, The Blind Banker, so what do you expect?

Chinese pranksters and rebels take on rule-flouting officials

2011-05-27T09:34:00.006+01:00

So you think you have problems with bureaucrats. Want to know why the authorities in China are so damned heavy-handed? The draconian clamp-down goes hand-in-hand with a contempt for the law from the powerful and privileged. However, it looks to me like the rule-flouters are losing the battle with the jobsworths.

Yep, the peasants are revolting — but the officials are positively repulsive.

You'd think that with all the crap that happened down the ages, China would be a cowed society. But while people do indeed toe the line, there's also this curious phenomenon where, once they've had enough of being pushed around, they let you know it.

Just saw this at The Wall Street Journal

After being pulled over in the Henan Province capital of Zhengzhou for breaking traffic rules and driving with a fake license plate, an official from a nearby county warns a policeman not to “poke your nose in other people’s business” and threatens to have him killed.

Escorted by a police cruiser, a car carrying the mayor of the Hebei Province city of Xingtai hits a 14-year-old student while rushing through a red light. The mayor carries on with his official duties that day instead of going to the hospital to visit the victim, who was left permanently disabled.

Traffic police in Hunan’s Hengdong County brawl with a man they accuse of having illegally installed an umbrella on his motorcycle. A crowd of more than 1,000 onlookers gets so angry over the policemen’s treatment of the motorcyclist, they overturn two police cars in protest. A subsequent government investigation finds the policemen were “simplistic, rough and lacked patience” in enforcing the law.

Policewoman Mao Li in Shanxi’s Hunyuan County is showered with praise online after it’s reported that she regularly tickets county officials whose cars violate traffic rules. In the six months since starting her job, Mao is reported to have handed out 138 tickets to officials in nearly all the county government agencies, including the police department. She also ticketed her aunt, despite her father’s intervention on the aunt’s behalf.

I'm also told that, not only did father of the Great Firewall, Fang Binxing, get hit by a shoe-thrower, there were also eggs in the mix. And demonstrating a healthy prankster pricking of authority, the room he was given to speak for his recent Hubei University lecture, was Room 404 — the number of the online message that tells you a page is unavailable.

Keep it up, chaps.

Is China a responsible stakeholder? Chatham House report review

2011-05-21T11:39:00.017+01:00

Amitai Etzioni asks in the Chatham House-run International Affairs website, if China can be trusted as a "responsible stakeholder" in world politics.

You may remember that "stakeholder" was a term much used by Tony Blair and New Labour after economic guru Will Hutton began popularising the business term and applying it to their aspirations for a section of the population. Not all of them, mind. Just enough of them harbouring the delusion that they'd be granted an interest in society (rather than possessing an inbuilt interest on account of their being a member of society already) to ensure they'd vote for their benefactors.

Who can forget how responsible New Labour were in power: a veritable model of democracy, altruism and benevolence?

This was the same New Labour, not old Labour in opposition to Capital, that took Britain to war against the wishes of its people, including many of those would-be "stakeholders". The same government under which the poverty gap grew for the first time under Labour helmsmanship, a landslide victory notwithstanding.

Etzioni quotes American commentators:

China ‘is refusing to be a responsible stakeholder in the international political system, cultivating, as it has been, good relations with some of the world’s most odious regimes’, according to Robert Kaplan, writing in The Atlantic.

Which is rich considering America's interests in Saudi Arabia and almost the entire Middle East, along with every other commie-killing despot that ever took a Yankee dollar. In 2005, the Bush Jr administration echoed the fear that China would not be a responsible stakeholder even as they bombed Iraq. And Condoleeza Rice had America on paranoia standby when she declared China to be "not a status quo power", meaning the US could not be certain that its own interests would remain untouched by the new kid on the block.

Whether that kid would turn out to be an even bigger bully, or a cohort prepared to carve up the world along new lines suitable to the old masters, remains to be seen. However, some have argued that China is indeed a "status quo power" and plead for its induction into the international community (of business).

China itself has been eager to demonstrate that it is not a "revisionist" power seeking to upset the current geopolitical balance too much:

President Jiang Zemin stated that ‘China needs a long-lasting peaceful international environment for its development’, and in 1997 he initiated China’s ‘New Security Concept’, which stresses ‘mutual respect’ and ‘peaceful coexistence’. Since then, Chinese leaders such as Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have declared that they are seeking a ‘peaceful rise’ and that they seek to focus on domestic development, not international expansion.

Why bother with armed conflict, a Western enthusiasm, when you can buy what you want?

Since then, Chinese leaders such as Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have declared that they are seeking a ‘peaceful rise’ and that they seek to focus on domestic development, not international expansion. The concept was developed by Chinese scholar Zheng Bijian, who wrote in a Foreign Affairs article entitled ‘China’s “peaceful rise” to great power status’, ‘for the next few decades the Chinese nation will be preoccupied with securing a more decent life for its people … China’s emergence thus far has been driven by capital, technology, and resources acquired through peaceful means … China’s peaceful rise will further open its economy so that its population can serve as a growing market for the rest of the world … China’s development depends on world peace — a peace that its development will in turn reinforce.’

So far, so "responsible".

However, the John Milius school of Red Dawn politics rages that China is only pretending to be peaceful and that she'll reveal her full gory glory in true Fu Manchu fashion once all her plans and capabilities are in place. I saw Team America. I know how this one plays out.

Although Etzioni's piece is published on the (British) Chatham House website, it overlooks a vital state of affairs when it asks if China is a "good citizen of the international community". Hey, we Brits aren't citizens of anything, being subjects of the Royal Parasites. In seeking to distinguish between the behaviour expected from communitarian "stakeholders" and upstanding "citizens", it seems we are the Disappeared.

According to Etzioni, a stakeholding community member does everything a citizen does — paying taxes (unless you can afford the accountants), serving on juries (and paying for superinjunctions if you can afford it), submitting to the laws (unless you can afford not to).

A good community member — aside from being an upstanding citizen — also contributes to the common good by volunteering, making donations, heeding the informal norms of the community and helping to enforce them by exerting informal social controls over those who do not.

Hmm, did I see some sort of power wielded there?

In place of a global state, Etzioni sees "a non-trivial and growing body of established international laws and institutions which nations are expected to heed". He considers whether China is a good citizen or stakeholder.

Surfing a tidal wave of claims that China is not pulling its weight, Etzioni cites a parsimonious foreign aid policy. After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, I remember foreign media reporting the rapid arrival of fully tooled-up Chinese rescue teams, complete with dog-handlers, on the stricken island before many Western nations, including Britain, could muster their forces. However, China was criticised for being stingy with their relief aid, donating only a miserly US$1.5 million, against US$350 million from America, but rising to US$60 million for the 2004 tsunami fund. He doesn't mention the pledges made by the G8/20 rich nations in a drunken bout of "my wallet's bigger than yours ... isn't it, Angela?" and then forgotten as the hangover wore off. What Etzioni doesn't clarify is the state of the African debt, once thought to be a never-ending problem, which China has alleviated through various deals (open to a slew of criticism), thereby mercifully saving us from Bono's never-ending career as messiah and right royal pain.

Of the list of examples of Chinese aggression throughout the past decades, I'd ask: where's the cut-off point? At what time can't you phone someone? Nine o'clock? Ten o'clock? Ten-fifteen if they don't have kids? Likewise, when's the cut-off point for bad behaviour? How come deliberate acts of aggression, such as the opium wars and sending gunboats up the Yangtze, don't count — but accidents such as the 2001 collision of a Chinese and an American plane do? Are we mentioning the deliberate downing of an Iranian airliner by the US in 1989?

It's hardly surprising that the Chinese get arsey about Japan, when the Rising Sun invaders held beheading contests of its citizens in the streets of Nanking and experimented on people, all within living memory. How should they respond to a nation that has now rewritten the history books to forgive itself? Remember "comfort women"? Shrines to fascist murderers?

How do the Western powers fare when comparing environmental destruction and global deaths resulting from climate change?

At least Etzioni throws a sop to fairness when he writes:

... China is properly criticized for doing little to stop genocides. However, while the US and its allies are credited for stopping the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, they failed to do so in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Congo and Sudan.

And he quotes Bill Gates as saying, " ... the trend is clear that China is becoming a more responsible stakeholder."

Who can blame China for maintaining a discreet distance from America's conflicts?

From China’s perspective, for example, it is in China’s interests for the US military to be mired in a war in Afghanistan (and before that in Iraq) and to be further occupied with a proliferating Iran, especially given statements by American military officials that define China’s military as a major threat to the US, implying that China is an adversary.

Would you rush to the aid of superpower generals eager to make you a target?

This blogpost is not a plea for ignoring China's faults. I'm angry at the way the wealth gap is soaring in China; the number of executions; the corruption; the clampdown on free expression and imprisonment of dissidents. But instead of raising issues of international concern in a way that leads to change and understanding, much of the report seems to present yet another skewed "look over there" job, whilst allowing the West to get away with much the same. After all, how much of the Haiti tragedy, in America's back yard, was due purely to natural forces, and how much — with continuing poverty, disease and corruption, before and since — was set in motion years ago? Presumably this was prior to the cut-off point, whose location only Amitai Etzioni and his friends can detect.

The latter part of the report does note areas where China is improving: slow but steady recognition of human rights, even if Ai Weiwei is still in prison, and despite double standards being applied to US allies such as Saudi Arabia.

I see Western capitalists on the wane looking enviously at the new Eastern capitalists and studying how to do the same. By all means criticise China's policies ... but all too often this looks like the skunk damning the pig for smelling bad.

UPDATE 22 May 2011: Henry Kissinger's book, On China, is out.

... my first question, which concerns the treatment of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who, like Mr. Kissinger, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. "I have not read his writings," he answers. ... I press on. Does he denounce Mr. Liu's treatment? "My policy on this," he replies, "is to talk to them [Chinese leaders], but my personal view is not to denounce it publicly."

Ye-e-es. Just as well so few Westerners have read them. Lui Xiaobo's award of the Nobel Peace Prize is like Kissinger's in more ways than you'd think from reading interviews like this. The event that took the world "beyond parody".