Boycott Topshop and tax-avoiding oligarchs

Here's a vivid example of the oligarchs currently fleecing the nation of tax revenue while also advising the coalition government on cutting public services. I wonder if Ferdinand Mount is as hard on Tory favourite "Sir" Phillip Green as he is on the infrastructure in which the rest of us survive. (See my last post on Mount's defence of the ConDems.)

As much as it pains me to refrain from purchasing from one of my preferred frockeries, I would rather go naked than put another penny into Green's piggy hands. He famously paid himself a dividend of £1.2 billion from profits by his Arcadia group (Topshop, Miss Selfridge, BHS and others), but made the cheque out to his wife, a resident of Monaco, thereby escaping a tax bill of some £280 million. And now he's wrecking lives of countless people by colluding with the thieving Bullingdonites running and ruining the country.

UKuncut organised an occupation of Topshop yesterday, a spokesman promising: "If you bring your market into our education, we will bring our education into your market."

"At 1.30pm on Monday 29th November, a group of students and citizens fighting cuts used Twitter and Facebook to organise a flashmob against Topshop where they staged a public lecture on the dangers of debt. Dressed as prisoners in a chain gang, enslaved to debt, they protested at Topshop's flagship store in Oxford Street."

Watch out for the spirited Laurie Penny in the video.

TOPSHOP ACTION DAY SATURDAY DECEMBER 4TH

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Richest 1,000 could pay off the deficit here

Ferdinand Mount's 'Orwell on the Oligarchs' lecture: how George would have loved the Tory cuts

Well, I saw this coming a mile off. I knew that Ferdinand Mount was a novelist, Sunday Times columnist, Thatcher-era Tory grandee and former TLS editor when I heard him deliver his talk on 'Orwell and the Oligarchs' last night at the annual George Orwell Memorial Lecture hosted by Birkbeck. However, I had no idea he was also a cousin of David Cameron's Mum and a former baronet, yet I still managed to guess, about ten minutes in, on which side his fois gras was buttered.

More sophisticated than John Lloyd, whose carefully selected quotes at last week's talk on Orwell and Russia skewed Orwell into a hater of all things socialist rather than someone opposed to the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution, Ferdy knew how to get his audience on board.

He began well enough with the bleedin' obvious crowd-pleasing observation that the new oligarchs of business are having a larf with their pay. Directors are trousering hundreds of times the average pay of their own workers and Ferdy laid out how it's done with satirical aplomb.

Remuneration for boards of directors is out of control and has little to do with worth, stitched up by "mutual admiration societies" of executives and non-executives, leading to widescale looting and pillaging.

He highlighted the case of US company Household, bought by HSBC for £9 billion and which turned out to be an aggressive lender in the sub-prime market. Its inevitable fall was one of the first examples of collapse leading to the recession.

And yet ...

Building up to a full head of steam, he pleaded for self-examination, pointing out that while Marx and others in the leftist pantheon were willing to tear the mask off others, they failed to fully introspect themselves. And so Ferdy showed us how to do it, generously allowing himself the assumption that his way was the straight and narrow, pursued with enviable crystal clarity.

Thus Ferdy took us from George Orwell's critique of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and through to his own conclusion. Burnham, according to my Lovely Companion, made the rightward trek from Trotskyist to "ferocious right-wing-conservative". But he didn't travel far enough to the right for Ferdy, who detected a residual Trotskyism in Burnham's analysis that "capitalism was doomed". The state would take over, he warned, and rentier private capital would be smashed rather than retain any place in business. Orwell disagreed, foreseeing a trajectory towards an oligarchy where bankers and managers displaced scientists and productive talent, snatching a disproportionate share of the rewards. Power would be concentrated in fewer hands at the top and, indeed, Britain now has one of the most concentrated power elites in Europe.

And how does this destructive state of affairs manifest?

Not in the rich and powerful who make up the oligarchy: the upper classes salting away their cash in tax havens, dominating the media, and sucking out all the wealth with devil-take-the-hindmost gusto, apparently. Not in the smashing up our arts, culture and education and returning us to Victorian levels of poverty.

According to Ferdy, it is centralised government that is the Big Bad. After all that preamble, with one bound banking and business were suddenly off the hook and out of the equation, while the "thickening networks of controls" and "gigantism" were doing the damage. The Department of Education, f'rinstance, imposed its power on all aspects of education. What's more, municipal housing equates not with putting a roof over the heads of our citizens but with the loss of freedom for the tenants.

He harked back wistfully to a time of individual freedom before financial controls and regulations became oppressive. We all like to relive our glory days, and Ferdy's would have been around 1982-3 when he was a member of Margaret Thatcher's inner sanctum and heartthrob Ronald Reagan was dismantling US financial controls with the results we are still feeling today.

Ferdy wittered on about the virtues of the coalition government. Theirs is true liberalism, don'tcha know, an "apprehension of oligarchy concentrated in too few hands" aiming at a "devolved, plural, liberal" system without central government telling the little people what to do. The policy of Tory cuts, backed by the LibDems, is "the result of genuine dialogue designed to put right what's gone wrong." A "refreshing" "surfacing impulse to examine and put right the oligarchy".

Thus a banking crisis is turned into a crisis of public services. See what he did there?

It was fitting that this lecture should have been held in Senate House, the architectural inspiration for Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

Such was the tortured logic of the argument that the purpose of the lecture appeared to be to give succour to the Bullingdon bullies and legitimise the coalition government's savage policies. Do these guys sit down over dinner and work out a strategy for deceiving the public via the various media organs and propaganda outlets? Or does this stuff spring fully-formed like Minerva from heads hard-wired to work in self-serving concert? As Orwell wrote, you don't need a beaten dog when well-trained ones will do just as well.

The surreal lurch from a deserved castigation of the greed and corruption of the elite — Ferdy's peers — into an attack on our public services, and everything that made this country a pleasure, was bizarre to behold. If this is the best the right-wing intelligentsia can offer, pack them off to the dreaded Media Studies they loathe so much where perhaps they will learn to make their propagandising a teensy tad less transparent.

Birkbeck's invitation was a truly generous and charitable act, providing Mount's threadbare intellectual cast-off with home and shelter. Ferdinand Mount should be grateful that the great man himself was not in the house to offer the drily stinging rebuttal which some of us were aching to hear.

At close of play, Orwell may have been Mounted, but he certainly wasn't stuffed.

Gauche asks what sort of state is it that Labour wants?

Video: Ferdinand Mount's George Orwell Memorial Lecture, "Orwell and the Oligarchs".

Richest 1,000 could clear the deficit here

Wilko Johnson presents Charles Shaar Murray with journalism award: Record of the Day 2010

The lovely readers of Record of the Day voted Charles Shaar Murray winner of the prestigious Outstanding Contribution to Music Journalism Award at last night's bash at the Idea Generation Gallery in Shoreditch.

Following an almost clean sweep of the awards by the newly rebooted NME, Charles's old alma mater — thanks to editor Krissi Murison who won the Editor of the Year Award — he impressed on the journos in the audience the importance of writing, not just about the music, but about what the music is about, including the political, spiritual and cultural landscape of the time. Which is largely what led to the success of the NME in its 1970s heyday.

As Charles said in his blockbuster speech, if you stick around long enough, you get your props.

Also getting his props since featuring in the Julian Temple film, OIl City Confidential, about the history of Britain's finest blues rock band Dr Feelgood, was the magnificent Wilko Johnson, guitarist, songwriter and singer, who was there to present the award to Charles. Two legends on one ticket — it doesn't get much better than this. (Shame they played "Milk & Alcohol" as his play-on music when it was recorded after he left the band.)

Lucky gurl that I yam, I got to talk to Wilko beforehand. He's very excited about the HBO series, Game Of Thrones, he's making for American TV in which he plays the mute villain Ilyn Payne (geddit?). Possessed of a rubbery face it was a delight to watch Wilko animatedly describing the role, the full-length chain mail suits, and the swords he has strapped to his back, poor lamb, making sitting down belween takes an impossibility. How we laughed, though, when he told us about how Sean Bean fares in confrontation with our hero/villain, which I can't possibly divulge here as that would be an almighty spoiler.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer writer Jane Espenson is also involved so this will be one to watch.

Charles and I urged him to sort out merchandise so we can have an articulated action doll of him in full regalia. Either that or we take him home.

UPDATE: For everyone outside the UK who's visiting this blogpost via the Winter Is Coming site, a bit more about the gorgeous much-loved Wilko. You may already know that he was the super-talented guitarist and songwriter with Dr Feelgood, the uber British pub-rock band of the 1970s who played up a storm with their hyper-energy blues rock. Not only that, his chiselled features made him one of the most beautiful men on the planet. If you haven't seen it, check out Julien Temple's documentary film, Oil City Confidential. This may help explain why there are guys of a certain age (40s and 50s) who, even though they may be stern upright citizens, turn into babbling fifteen year olds when talking about Wilko. I have never seen so many straight men go so silly over a rock hero. It's quite funny and sweet to watch.

Anyhow, we are all thrilled that Wilko's multiple skills have been revealed to a new audience across the Pond via Game Of Thrones, and hope you come to love him as much as we do. If you are lucky, you may even get to see him play. On New Year's Eve his band (with Norman Watt-Roy and Dylan Howe) plays London's 100 Club which is now under threat, supported by Crosstown Lightnin'. Hope there's a US tour next year. Go see.

Charles Shaar Murray and Wilko Johnson (pic Record of the Day)

Charles Shaar Murray and Wilko Johnson (pic Record of the Day)

Wilko Johnson, Anna Chen and Charles Shaar Murray

Wilko and Anna

Impossible shoes and sado-fashionism

I am reposting this item from July as the media seem to have caught up and noticed on the dominance of the killer heel in fashion over the past couple of years.

And I am supposed to walk in these, how?

The male species may not be aware of the torture-wear storming the shops this past year. Following the best few seasons for ages featuring frocks that I actually desire and which would be cramming my wardrobe if it weren't for (a) dosh (or lack thereof), (b) space (or lack thereof) and (c) my favourite outlet, Primark — bringing high fashion to the low rent — STILL failing to sort out its cheap labour sources ... the deity that rules these things has snuck in footwear that hates women.

Unbearable AND unwearable! Your choice this summer is flat flip-flop-style sandals with that alarming strap that threatens to slice your big toes from all the other little piggies; medium-height wedges that allow no movement in the dark night of the sole; and vertigo-inducing hobblers, example above (Top Shop). Steve Martin didn't call them "cruel shoes" for nothing.

What happened to good ol' Clarks, you may ask? Well, what happened with me was a pair of lovely black leather mid-heel boots that moulded beautifully to my size sevens, apart from the stitched band across the base of the toes that failed to give and pushed my big toe joint sideways, making walking painful even now.

China got rid of its bound feet decades ago, but here we are being lured back into crippling bondage boxes for our delicate tootsies. Do you know how similar to bound foot-stumps the current trend in foot shapes is? These things may look fab when you are reclining sexily, but have you watched women walking in them? Have you TRIED walking in them? Look at the angles on those things. They push your bum out at unnatural degrees closer to our Australopithecus ancestors, and force you to waddle like a duck.

France bans the veil but puts up with our young women crippling themselves permanently. If you are going to dictate what women should or shouldn't wear — which you should not be doing at all — I'd rather see Sarkozy banning Carla Bruni and her sisters from wearing these things in public than telling grown Muslim women they have no say in their own attire.

And, yes, I did buy a pair. Why do you ask?

How Lefties Commit Romance

I just knocked this up on the xtranormal website. Romance lefty-style.

This is not based on any real people, living or dead, etc. Sort of.

Quantitave Easing Explained: utterly brilliant

Thanks to Mick for this gem about treasury bonds, the Federal Reserve, printing money the recession and the whole grim stitch-up. Economics made easy.

The richest 1,000 cud clear the deficit here