Racism in Football

Sol Campbell’s warning of the potential for racism and violence at the European Championships is depressing but probably valid. It has been proven time and again that racism is the preserve of the poorly educated and the hard-of-thinking: those who are incapable of identifying with political ideals or philosophical principles are instinctively reduced to forming allegiances based upon colours or areas of geographical origin – despite the abundant evidence that there have been generations of inter-mingling and the obvious truth that, beyond superficial appearances, there is very little to differentiate between any of the various groups.

Can it really be any surprise that such a rich seam of mental enfeeblement has provided a perfect and fertile breeding ground for football supporters?

Facebooking up to Reality – welcome to Brokeville

It appears that Facebook and the banks which led its flotation will now be facing lawsuits from disappointed shareholders. Since a failure to disclose a reduction in revenue forecasts meant an over-inflated initial list price, quick profits are now unlikely. The company, which doesn’t produce anything at all and never will, was originally valued at $104 billion and attracted unprecedented interest from speculators globally. Meanwhile, the real world – the actual place where we live, work and breathe – continues to suffer financial crisis as the money runs out and investment dries up.

I hate to sound obtuse but I really think I’m missing something here: it rather strikes me that people’s priorities have gone somewhat askew when the biggest single investment being made during a time of international crisis is into something which isn’t even real and which only exists at all because of the advertising revenue which it may be able to generate. Is tawdry entertainment really more valuable to what remains of civilisation than a proper infrastructure, a health service, an education system, a manufacturing base or farming? Countless generations have lived, raised families, tried to build a better future for their children – but all of that apparently pales into insignificance compared to being able to post photographs of an evening meal, amusing pets or toddling children accompanied by the ubiquitous, asinine (and occasionally misunderstood) ‘LOL’.

And of course the value of the advertising space was over-estimated – after all, what can realistically be marketed to people who have insecure incomes and who increasingly struggle to afford life’s bare essentials? In many parts of the world, people are starving and children die from preventable disease and malnutrition; meanwhile Greece, the birthplace of modern civilisation, of art and of philosophy, is suffering economic meltdown as the population are forced into penury. Still, maybe from whatever wreckage is left, after the finance houses have finished gambling with commodities and cyberspace, there will be a chance that we can all go and live in a virtual world. Perhaps then we can try to feed people from virtual farms and ask them to go and live in virtual towns where they can spend virtual money in virtual shops.

The sci-fi movie Terminator gave us a chilling warning of a dark future where machines had taken over and destroyed humanity, but the truth is, as ever, far more banal: the internet seems to have ensured that we will go out not with a bang but with a pathetic whimper. The closest mankind now gets to the spirit of revolution is sitting on those spinning chairs in front of our laptops and PCs.

This is all a tragically far cry from the mature, free society that our ancestors once dreamed of. Socrates and Plato must be spinning in their graves. Then again, how can we expect people to maintain their grip on reality when the concept of reality itself has been all but annihilated by the media? It makes me almost ashamed to be human.

Picture of a cat with some inane comment posted below it, anyone?

Prison Factories

Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has set out details of his scheme to set up factories in prisons. The idea is apparently to get criminals into “lawful constructive employment.”

Shadow Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan and the GMB union leader Paul Kenny have both expressed fears for the future of employment for law-abiding citizens in light of these plans, but I think they may be missing the bigger picture. It’s quite possible that the jobs market may suffer in the short-term but, surely, if we have the capability to make people work long hours for well below minimum wage in incarcerated conditions in order to produce goods for big-name companies, then the reduction in production costs is bound to be a boost to UK industry which will increase exports and get us out of recession. It is our import trade that is going to suffer.

I recall that, a couple of years ago, David Cameron was meeting with a trade delegation when he said that Britain could learn a great deal from China. Could it be that Capitalism had actually expressed an admiration for Communism? It seemed incongruous at the time. It’s clear now that what he actually found inspirational was China’s lack of employment rights and worker protection – after all, subjugation of the workforce is the ultimate capitalist’s dream.

On the other hand, I can see a problem with the idea of giving jobs to convicted felons, cheats, fraudsters and confidence-tricksters – after all, we can only be expected to support so many Houses of Parliament.

Rather distressingly, of course, it is starting to seem that the only way one might get onto an apprenticeship scheme in Britain these days may be to get sent to prison. Mind you, given the comparative truancy figures, it’s possible that jail could actually represent a more efficient education system than many of our schools are currently able to offer.

Sometimes the Truth is a Bitter Pill but it’s Always a Better Pill

So once again the question has been raised of whether it is right to give young girls access to contraception and emergency contraception. Predictably, many are outraged at this, although it is unclear whether this is because of some misguided moral standpoint or merely based on jealousy that there are some people out there who are enjoying an active sex life. I can understand that some parents perhaps feel that they ought to be given the opportunity to support their children, but the truth is that young women (underage or not) need to be allowed to feel that they are in control of their own lives and their own destinies. The stark reality is that many of them obviously do feel unable, for whatever reason, to approach their parents about birth-control issues – and it is worth bearing in mind here that not all families share the same cultural values. Who are we to moralise and sit in judgement on the lives of those whom we know nothing about? It’s also worth remembering that this isn’t about pontificating on the rights or wrongs of underage sex, it’s a decision about underage motherhood.

A lot of people seem to feel that parents always know best but, as the underage pregnancy statistics show all too clearly, anybody with the necessary organs can conceive and bear a child – for it demands neither wisdom nor discernment – which rather undermines that entire argument. Our health professionals are qualified to give the very best care and advice in order to help our youngsters without pressure, guilt or the preaching of morals. Young women need to be able to seek support and impartial advice without consequence (or quite literally bear the consequences) and we should be thankful that we live in a culture which does not subjugate females but allows them to make their own educated decisions.

The Rise of the Illiterati

There may be some sense in the government’s decision to increase the cost of using the postal service in readiness for privatisation – it seems to go hand-in-hand with the previous decisions to close all the libraries, dismantle education in schools and price higher-education out of reach of the masses. One can almost see the logic: the sooner the written word becomes alien to the working classes, the sooner they will be deprived of a voice and will drop out of the democratic process altogether, content to merely accept their lot in life without question. There will be no feelings of dissent, the general population will have been denied the opportunity to read the works of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, John Steinbeck or the many other authors who have analysed the subjugation of the masses, and there will be no discussion or analysis of ideas.

No longer will anyone harbour thoughts of revolution; there will be nothing but endless, inane babbling about such distractions as what celebrities are wearing or who footballers are shagging. Already we are seeing the results of this reduction in awareness, as individual’s expressions of thought are increasingly reduced to sharing vapid opinions on dancing, karaoke, cooking, decorating, soaps and games – anything that is able to act as a distraction to the populace, drawing them away from political awareness, engagement or involvement.

Perhaps this is what happens to societies. It might explain why we are unable to make contact with alien species: maybe all that static hiss that they pick up at Jodrell Bank is just text messages from other worlds, void of vowels or grammatical structure and thus beyond decoding into coherence. Could it be that the destiny of all life is to descend into idiotic babbling and unquestioning servitude?

Maybe that’s the plan…

First Impressions – Sexism in Advertising

There’s an old joke which you may have heard:

Why do women wear make-up and perfume?
Because they’re ugly and they smell.

I had always thought that this was just a sexist male joke but I’m no longer so sure that it is: it strikes me that it is more the mission statement of the glossy magazines and marketing gurus, because their intent is to sell paranoia. The media sets out to destroy people’s self-confidence in order to sell them illusions.

To elaborate: advertising of fashion and fragrances often tries to make you think you can buy something that simply isn’t for sale: generally charm and mystique or the attentions of the opposite sex (or the same sex, whatever you prefer). You can’t. Human emotions and passions are probably the last remaining things which still truly belong to us – and yet the media and marketing industries would have us believe that women need to be packaged as product and that all men need to shell-out for gratification.

The thing is – and this is so stupid and obvious that it’s almost frightening – we choose to allow ourselves to believe this even though we absolutely know that it is a lie. Years ago, it was quipped that companies would try to sell us solutions for problems that we didn’t know we had; nowadays, the business-controlled media actually creates problems – dreams them up in the corridors of influence and power – so that they can market ineffective solutions for them to us. And yet we know, we know beyond any doubt, that nobody gives a rat’s arse what perfume or cologne we are using – just so long as we are clean – and that no-one is defined by what they wear.

…Having said which, first impressions last [Damn advertising for appropriating yet another commonplace expression as their own!], so there may be at least some justification in using certain techniques to construct an image of ourselves to be presented to the world, lest we be judged. But where did this requirement come from? We surely didn’t have it as kids – although kids may now have it, as televised marketing targets ever younger audiences – we just used to meet other kids and form bonds based on character and personality. The divisiveness crept in later, almost unnoticed, as we were exposed to sexism, racism and snobbery – because, even if you don’t hold with such bigoted nonsense (as indeed you shouldn’t), it will nonetheless have tainted your perception of the world and will hold sub-conscious sway over your thinking, as merely trying to resist its influence simultaneously makes you aware of it. Thus our separation is initialised and we become ever further apart even as we are assimilated into the whole that is human society.

Thankfully, most prejudices are now deemed unacceptable by the majority of people, but somehow this doesn’t mean that they’ve disappeared altogether: they are still just as present, only now they are played ironically – as if that somehow makes them alright – and this seems to be especially true of sexism, which has somehow managed to be deemed the last acceptable face of socio-political segregation. Perhaps the most insidious form of this is evident in the inverted sexism of television commercials in recent years, where men are often made-out to be the underdogs – relative simpletons governed by nothing more than their primal desires and base fears (at least, I presume this is intended as irony: it might well be merely a literal representation of the truth). Whilst this reversal initially came across as refreshing, it increasingly now feels like an artificial construct, played-out in deliberate contrast to the more common depiction of women – both to men and to themselves – as love-hungry airheads with no further ambitions than to look pretty and to snare a partner. One can almost envisage the advertising execs nudging each other and saying, “Look what I’ve done here – this’ll make the little dears feel empowered.” It’s patronising because it quite deliberately insults our intelligence whilst perpetuating demeaning stereotypes in an underhand manner. More than that, it’s damaging because, even as a comic device, it does little more than to magnify and crystallise unconscious misogynistic prejudices in men whilst belittling women and reducing the feminist cause to a joke.

It’s important to see through the devices and lies which are foisted upon us because here’s the truth: you are enough – you are beautiful if you can only believe in yourself and see through the plastic shrink-wrapped construct that the corporate world is trying to sell you. You don’t need to adorn yourself with anything more to realise your own potential and identity.

MsTaken Identity – a Male Perspective

[I originally wrote this piece for the rather excellent on-line feminist magazine 'The Vagenda' but they didn’t want it. Bloody feminists – emancipation’s too good for them!]

So it seems that the issue of what ought to be the correct term of formal address for women has recently caught the attention of the public, thanks to the French abolishing ‘mademoiselle’ after months of campaigning by two feminist organisations who objected to females being defined according to their marital status.

In Britain, of course, the terms Miss, Mrs and Ms have traditionally been used to differentiate between women who are single, women who are married and women who are fat, man-hating lesbians; but, more recently, this usage has become confused (not least because the latter two categories often overlap so seamlessly with each other as to appear virtually synonymous). Such a system has never been thought to be required for men because we always tend to think of ourselves as single (no matter how much we profess to the contrary), most of us don’t notice or tend to ignore the fact that we’ve become fat, we generally tend to deny or conceal any ambiguity in our sexuality, and many of us seem to passively hate women – treating them with an almost unconscious contempt that defies any rational explanation. Except for me, of course: I’m a thoroughly modern-thinking bloke with no repressed insecurities whatsoever.

Another major issue, still largely unaddressed in the public arena, is the outmoded idea that a woman should take her husband’s surname upon marriage. To me, this has always seemed an odd and distinctly uncomfortable move: the woman is expected to surrender her identity and individuality while the man effectively dilutes and then ultimately abandons his own – and all of this only in the name of making it abundantly clear to the rest of the world that neither of them is up for a random shag anymore. This is quite unnecessary: after six months of marriage, both parties generally appear so utterly defeated and wantonly neglectful of themselves that there can surely be nobody expressing any kind of an interest in either one of them.

In truth, of course, the woman taking the title Mrs and changing her surname originally indicated the transfer of her ownership, from a not-so-distant age when females were considered to be little more than commodities to be exchanged in their youth via a transaction conducted in a church in the ceremony of marriage – possibly the most convoluted ritual ever conceived to legitimise servitude through subjugation and conceal what was, in many cases, effectively child abuse (but that’s a whole other article). This, incredibly, was packaged and sold as if it were every young woman’s dream. “Step into my parlour,” said the spider to the fly…

Indeed, the only time that surnames really ought to become an issue these days is when there are children involved: should the kids take the name of the woman who bore them for nine months – sacrificing her health, her body, her looks and her mental well-being – or should they take the name of the organ lender (not even a donor, note – and since when did organ recipients ever change their names?) who merely gave it his best shot, albeit after perhaps a good forty-seven second run-up? Hmm, that’s certainly a tough call.

Surely all we really need in contemporary society is some kind of a label that makes it clear to ‘browsers’ exactly what it is that we might be looking for. In this age of smartphones, maybe there’s a call for us all to simply bear barcodes so that anyone with a passing interest can easily scan us to determine our relationship status and sexual orientation – not that the latter has ever mattered to me: face-up or face-down, I’ll take whatever I can get.

Seriously, though, do any of us really still feel the need to define ourselves through our relationships? I don’t want to possess another human being and I certainly wouldn’t want to feel owned. We are who we are – surely that should be enough. Women don’t need to be categorised and only a Msogynist would disagree.

Joined-up Marketing

I’ve never been one to criticise corporate strategy but I think that I may have just spotted a fairly significant blind-spot in the thinking of a certain major supermarket leviathan. In order to thank you for helping to make them a multi-billion pound business, exterminating the high street with their concrete monstrosities and huge swathes of extra-urban car-parking, every few pounds spent is rewarded with vouchers: firstly for own-brand petrol (because it is essential that these overblown grocers eventually assimilate all other forms of trade into themselves until nothing else remains) and then two other coupons: the first to get a 70% discount on a set of professional knives and the second to purchase new equipment for schools.

Now, generally I don’t give anything shopping-related too much thought, because my brain starts to shut down very quickly once I am exposed to the strobe-lighted, soul-sucking monotony of these open-plan circles of hell – in a hypnotic state, I move both entranced and disenchanted for immeasurable periods of un-time punctuated only by the holiday-camp style announcements of “Hello Shoppers! Oh, you lucky people, do we have a special offer for you today!” – but, once outside, with the sound of my pounding pulse softly fading from my ears, I started to consider the mind-set that would even contemplate bundling knife coupons with school coupons.

Obviously, I can see the natural association that one might draw between our territorially biased education system and the increasing instances of teenagers stabbing each other, but I’m not entirely sure that I would have chosen to highlight that pairing (or paring, for that matter) at the checkout from the weekly family shop. Still, I suppose that both offers do, at least, help to arm our children for their journeys through life and, after all – to coin a one-time common phrase which is now no more than a nauseating marketing slogan – every little helps.

Liberal Democrats and the Health and Social Care Bill

We should be grateful that some Liberal Democrats still have their principles and were willing to defy Nick Clegg by refusing to endorse the Health and Social Care Bill. What both their party leader and Baroness Shirley Williams seemingly fail to understand is that nobody is interested in the devastation of yet another of our national institutions being watered-down; it has to stop. This government was elected on a clear mandate of fixing the economy – a single goal which they have failed to resolve abjectly and repeatedly. They were not elected in order to destroy higher education or to close our libraries (both of which were heritages left to us by generations of our forebears) and they most certainly were not elected in order that they might dismantle the NHS.

Time and again, governments in this country have tinkered with health and education, despite the abundantly clear fact that they have absolutely no idea what they are doing. We already have knowledgeable and experienced experts dealing with those fields: people who have devoted their lives to vocations which are dear to their hearts and to which they are committed in the long-term – not merely until the next cabinet re-shuffle or our next farcical election.

Privatising utilities in the past has, of course, made them profitable: gas and electricity, telephones, railways – all of these made far less money when they were run for the public good, back in the days when one didn’t need a line of credit in order to use them.

I am aware that the bill makes for tedious reading so I’ve “cherry-picked” the easily digestible (but hard to swallow) bits here:
• Private health care providers will be able to choose (and thus will) to take only less complex cases. This means that the NHS will exclusively get left with the complex cases and will therefore be worse off.
• Charges will be able to be introduced (and thus will) for services which are currently free under the NHS.
• Fewer services may be provided (and thus will) if Clinical Commissioning Groups deem them inappropriate to offer.

Government has clear jobs to do domestically: running our tax system, maintaining defence, managing law and order, keeping our public services operating. If they really want to play with the infrastructure then how about fixing stuff that’s actually broken: given the level of duty on petrol, isn’t it about time that a systematic programme of road repair was implemented? That way, at least people will be able to drive their sick relatives and children to the hospital, where an auditor can decide whether or not it is economically prudent to keep them alive.

As finance becomes the only imperative, we are becoming a nation where each of us is just a number, albeit a number with a percentage sign after it. Your way of life may be at risk if you do not keep up repayments, terms and conditions apply.

Sport of Gentlemen

Sexism, deceit, dishonour, disreputable behaviour, racism, tax evasion and bankruptcy: this may read like the plotlines for next month’s EastEnders but it isn’t, it’s a small selection from the last twelve months of sport news.

Sport stars in modern society are, for reasons which are no longer entirely clear, revered as heroes, as role-models to our children and as aspirational figures to us all. I thought that perhaps I was missing something but I’ve taken a hard look recently and I really don’t get it at all anymore. Quite apart from the illegal scams which have been revealed to be going on with betting syndicates, the professional fouls in football and the pathetic prima donna performances of players who fake injury to gain a quick advantage, just consider for a moment these recent examples of utter caddishness which I can quote without even giving it any thought:

Dereck Chisora and David Haye breaking into a fight after a fight
Luis Suarez’s utterly childish refusal to shake hands with Patrice Evra
Andy Gray’s ridiculous and anachronistic sexist remarks
John Terry’s alleged racist remark to Anton Ferdinand
Wayne Rooney frequently being outed as consorting with prostitutes
The England rugby squad’s well-documented drunken shenanigans

That’s without even bothering to do any research. Honestly, this is the kind of squalid behaviour which one ought only to have to expect from our politicians (and thank-you to Eric Joyce for illustrating my point, in case people can’t remember Jeffrey Archer). The term sportsman has been brought into disrepute in recent years and the only reason I can think of for it is the money. These people (and they are only ordinary people, no better than you or I) have been given a ridiculously over-estimated sense of their own self-worth because they are rewarded beyond all reason for what is, despite the protestations of fans, only a bloody game (with the exception of boxing, of course, which is no more than legitimised thuggery – although it is, at least, a literally bloody game) and somehow this seems to have led some of them to think that they can operate outside of the basic rules of decency that the rest of us adhere to.

Now, what people get up to in their private lives is nobody’s business but their own (no matter what the red-top press would have you think) but these public figures are supposed to be examples – we ought to be able to take national pride in their achievements and behaviour while they are on the field. Our past icons have been men and women who we could rightly put on pedestals: Daley Thompson, Chris Hoy, Kelly Holmes, Steve Redgrave, Sebastian Coe, Paula Radcliff, David Beckham, Fatima Whitbread, Roger Bannister, Bobby Charlton and many, many more have been inspirational examples of what can be achieved through hard work, determination and true sportsmanship. In this Olympic year, we ought to be able to expect the very best from our representatives in the arena. Surely the time has come when we should stop rewarding those who no longer even begin to approach the guiding principles of what we mean by sporting behaviour – of course we should acknowledge these people for their achievements but their passion should be their competition, not merely money and the arrogance it can afford.