What is fact?

Having been busy recently, I have had neither the time nor the willingness to write anything about anything. This is despite recent events such as the budget, or the storms hitting the UK, or the death of Michael Todd, or English crickets continuous woeful form.

But today I saw this. And felt compelled to add my two cents worth.

Now on some level I think I agree with Geraldine Ferraro. She has, in my eyes, highlighted a very important issue which tends to be overlooked. “Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white” she said, and said that anything negative about Obama was instantly seized upon as being racist. For me, it should be much more widely accepted that racism does indeed work both ways. The culture in which we seem to live is that being racist only works towards black people. This should definately not be the case. It should be noted and accepted by society that white people can just as easily suffer racist abuse from black people as vice versa.

However, I completely disagree with her when she suggests that Obama was doing well because he was black. For me, he is doing well because he engages with Joe Public much better than Clinton. And I’m not still not sure that he plays the race card as frequently as Clinton plays her woman card. This whole issue seems to suggest to me that the whole Clinton team is beginning to feel the squeeze as things are moving towards the end of the race. Obama, apparently coolness personified, just plods on, doing what he is doing, very focused. Even the problems that he has faced, he has taken in his stride.

This is epitomised by events last week, as Hillary insisted she was given a raw deal by having to field the first question at every event the pair attended. Despite the success she had last week, she still trails Obama, and I think the pressure of being runner-up may be starting to really show now.

Chitter Blatter…

Right, now I dislike Sepp Blatter. A lot. I think he’s just another suit in the world of football.  He frequently looks completely out of his depth, yet he still insists on sticking his nose into lots of different affairs.

Including the Martin Taylor affair. Now I stand very much on the side of Taylor here. I think it was a freak accident which broke Eduardo’s leg. I think he is genuinely remorseful about the whole affair. And I think he has his punishment, along with the guilt for the next 9 months or so. Basically, I would imagine that Taylor will not be able to escape his guilt until Eduardo is back playing and scoring goals for both club and country.  Taylor has apologised to Eduardo personally, he has apologised through the press. His manager Alex McLeish has apologised for the tackle. The Arsenal players (including Adebayor) have stated that they are willing to forgive Taylor for the tackle, accepting there was not the intent to break Eduardo’s leg. I think even Arsene Wenger has accepted it was just a freak accident. This, I feel, should be the end of the story.

Not though, if you are Sepp Blatter. Oh no.  Blatter, with another one of his great pearls of wisdom has decided that this isn’t the end of the matter. He thinks FIFA should intervene and impose a longer ban on Taylor.

Here are just some of Blatter’s comments:

“You have to have respect and what we witnessed there has nothing to do with football” 

“This is to destroy another player, and that is not the aim of our game” 

“Such players should not only be suspended for a certain time, they should be banned until they have realised they have done something absolutely wrong” 

 Blatter is keen to point the finger at Taylor and make an example of him. However I feel that he is jumping on the witch-hunting band-wagon. To me, the last quote is the worst. I firmly believe Taylor knows he has done something bad. I believe he is genuinely sorry for it.

With all due respect, Blatter doesn’t appear to know what he is talking about. At all. He spouts off about people and situations when he doesn’t know the full picture. To accuse someone of deliberately trying to injure someone else in that manner is digusting. And it is why Wenger retracted his post match statement.

For me, Blatter needs to look at himself and ask two things. Firstly does he believe that Martin Taylor actually went out onto that football pitch with the intent of seriously hurting Eduardo? Secondly does it do any good for him to stick his oar in and reinflame the situation as it looked to be dying down?

I think the answer to both questions is no. Blatter, however, does not seem to realise this.

A month is a long time…

So The Cowfield is one month old. Lots has happened in that one month, both in my life, and in the wider world. I’m not sure I’m the same naive, foolhardy person I was a month ago. I am sure that as a person I fall somewhere between the ‘realist’ and the ‘idealist’ category, more probably landing on the latter side.

In terms of a blog output I have been writing more than I ever used to, just to make sure the field stays fresh with opinion on local and national topics for those of you who actually still read this. I have added certain things to the site, including the ‘quote of the day’ and ’causes’ pages, the latter being things which are important to me. This list will, I’m sure, keep growing as things cycle in and out of my recognised conciousness.

There are, as with many things, still things I want to sort out (small things that I only notice when I re-read the blogs- spelling, grammar etc) in order to make this as good as possible.

And there are plans in the pipeline too, I am considering inviting some people to ‘guest’ blog at some point, but that is just a hope at this stage. I am also thinking of developing a further page of the blog to look at things which interest me outside of sport and politics. As those ‘avid’ readers will know I am fond of Robert Frost’s poetry, and am considering starting a page with some form of comment upon various works from various poets. But only when the time allows. It might not even be poetry, a discussion of books and authors too could be an interesting thing to pursue, an online book-club if you will. These are still being considered at the moment though.

The important thing to consider from all this is the readers. A small but growing readership was an inevitable consequence of branching out into the world of blogging by myself, and I hope that this will continue to grow over the coming months. If you like what I write, or even if you don’t, I encourage you to link to my blog so I can read what you are saying about various things. In essence, spread the word of The Cowfield.

But the one thing I would love to see more of is debate. I hope that through my writing I say some things which may be controversial to some people. I would love to be a stimulus for a topical debate on any given subject, and I would love to see more interaction on a wide range of topics, from sport, to politics, to the monarchy to poetry.

This first month has been good. But there is much more to come I hope!

To the letter… of whiteness…

There have been two pieces of news that have rung with me recently. I am more concerned about the second piece of information, but this first one still annoys me.

Pub landowner Tony Blows has been told to pay almost £12000 in fees and charges for flaunting the smoking ban rules. Tony, speaking on Midlands Today this lunchtime, vowed to fight the charges, and claimed that such an amount was indicative of ‘big bully’ type action from the government. Now I’m usually critical of the government, as and when they deserve it, but to me, Mr Blows hasn’t got a leg to stand on here. He got caught breaking the law. He must pay the price. To me, it is that simple. If you see someone littering in public, you expect them to have to pay the fine. If you get a parking ticket, you have to pay the fine. If you break the law, there should be consequences. And most importantly, there should be no exceptions.

Mr Blows now has been forced to sell his pub in Herefordshire to cover the fees, and has pledged to leave the country, but continue the fight. To me this is a case of ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’. Tony will claim he has little choice but to leave because the government has come down on him like a ton of bricks for breaking the law. If he wants to leave, so be it.

Linking on from this in a roundabout sort of a way, last nights Newsnight programme was a really interesting one. To launch a series of programmes detailing white working class Britain, the programme had Culture Minister Margaret Hodge facing off against three outspoken men who felt that the government had let the working class down. I agree that the label ‘white’ working class is wrong, and that the problems go further than race or colour, but it is the one that the wise BBC decided to use. Nor did they define what the ‘working class’ actually was, a serious fault of the report I feel.

However, it showed many things, the results of which are here. The overall feeling of abandonment though shows something much more serious, and something I have already mentioned on this blog. Politicians are not doing enough to engage with the people. Especially the working class people. The Joe Normal Briton is not feeling satisifed with the current government. But that is only part of the tale. They aren’t satisfied with other options either, most agree that the Tories and the Lib Dems are equally bad. They also seem to think that the BNP is too extreme, and would not engage with the rubbish that Nick Griffin spouted on about in the programme last night (immigration of Pakistanis correlates to increased drug use? Are you actually kidding?). The overall feeling of frustration was the most telling point of the whole report, 58% felt under-represented. 88% felt they couldn’t talk about the subject for fear of being labelled a racist. The qualification “I’m not a racist but…” seems highly applicable here.

Now I am not part of the working classes. I would put myself in the upper-middle class bracket of society. But I too agree that there is something wrong with not being able to talk about immigration without being labelled a racist and having the slur hanging over me.

I also embrace multi-culturalism. I have no problem with people from various ethnicities in Britain, but I would like to see more of an effort made to embrace British culture. That does not mean go to the chippy every friday. It does mean do not hide behind religion or race. Do not use that as a reason you didn’t get a job for example. I feel if people come over here they must play by our rules. The trouble from my point of view is that the government are changing these rules to fit the people coming over. There is so much more I could say more about this subject, but for fear of boring you, I will refrain. All I would do is encourage you to watch the programme (it’s on the BBC’s IPlayer for the next week). And then read the website and the information. And then tell me that there is not something wrong.

The working classes are becoming more and more disenchanted with Britain, and are looking to jump ship. Just like Tony Blows.

Anyone fancy giving me a job?

As I am very much on the lookout for work following the end of my university studies, I was pleased to see this news floating around.

The minimum wage has helped very many people in work earn enough money to live on even when everything else has been taken away. Whilst trying to work out how much money I would have to survive next year, obviously the only benchmark I had was the minimum wage. This increase, albeit by only 21p, is mcuh welcomed. What irks me though is that as a youngster for my academic year, if earning minimum wage, I would be stuck at the £4.77 level as opposed to people in the same year earning £5.73. That whole pound difference really does add up.  It’s about £8 a day. That’s £40 a week. To me, that’s a lot of money to be missing out on just because my birthday is in August.

Leaving my issues aside for a moment though, I was surprised to find out that there were still some 150,000 people being paid under the minimum wage. Personally I don’t think I would stand for it, but I realise that circumstances dictate otherwise. If you need the work, you are glad of the income, and if you earn £5225pa, you avoid income tax. The question is whether you could live on that much a year. Especially with costs rising all the time.

I will return to my initial musings then: is there anyone out there who reads this that fancies giving me a job?

No? Damn…

The times, they are a changing…

Whilst trawling through one of the oh-so-enjoyable books that I have to read for one of my courses I was interested to find the following quotation. The book is about British Radicalism in the 1790s.

“the press free, the laws simplified, judges unbiassed[sic], juries independent, needless places and pensions retrenched, immoderate salaries reduced, the public better served, taxes diminished and the necessaries of life more within reach of the poor, youth better educated, prisons less crowded, old age better provided for, and sumptous Feasts, at the expense of the starving poor, less frequent” (Cited in H.T. Dickinson British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789- 1815)

The quote itself was written in 1792. It lists what the so-called radicals aimed to achieve. There is two very interesting things to note about it.

Firstly, that the issues highlighted here are still the same issues with which we are dealing today. Prison overcrowding, taxes, education, poor people and the poverty line, care for old people. All sound like watchwords from either Labour or the Conservatives spring conferences. Which leads me to wonder

a) If politics has gone round in a circle (ie changing things and then changing them back) over the course of 200 years.

or b) If in reality, nothing much has changed since the 1790s. With the exception of modernisation of course. At heart, the problems of the 1790s are the same problems of today, just dressed differently.

I’m inclined to think that the latter view is the more accurate one, and as politicians have for 200 years strived to solve these issues, it seems that people still have the same basic wants and needs as they used to. Politicians have not sorted out some of the basic issues facing many people. I would maintain that politics is still an elitist conception (although nowhere near as bad as back in the 1790s), and consequently, politicians are still failing to adequately bring politics to the people. Because this hasn’t been done, it can therefore be worked out that those basic issues people have will not have been adequately sorted.

Onto my second point, and this is rather briefer. As the books title suggests, these ideas were very much “radical” at the time. I would though, challenge anyone to suggest that either Brown’s Labour or Cameron’s Tories are “radical”. Both are jostling for the occupied middle ground, and are about as far away from “radical” as you can get.

Which therefore leads me to conclude that the goalposts have shifted somewhat. That the things which were radical are no longer considered radical implies to me that standards have changed. Those things which were radical are not any more. Free speech, unbiased judges, universal suffrage. These are all things we sort of take for granted now. Back in the 1790s these were radical. I’m thankful they aren’t any more.

Should fiction be wrong?

In amongst the past few days there has been some real gems of stories, which usually would warrant a mention from myself. These include Cameron’s plans for more prisons and better sentencing, a new Russian president, and the news that 1 million homes in the countryside are below the poverty line.

But I found a story which stood out just that bit more. It was this one, about a woman who fictionalised a tale of the holocaust. Having read the article, I was left wondering if such accounts of the experiences serve only to trivialise the whole thing. Now I know that wasn’t her aim, and am willing to believe that the story was her way of dealing with the holocaust, but to me it seems a bit wrong.

I am more than willing to listen to people talking about their actual experiences from the period, and having read Primo Levi’s accounts of Auschwitz I find them thoroughly harrowing. I admit that I have a book by Laurence Rees on my bookshelf gathering dust on Auschwitz, and will read that when I have the time. I am genuinely interested in finding out more about the holocaust, and how people reacted to it.

But this work by Misha Delfonseca (or to give her her real name, Monique De Wael) seems to me to be little more than money making out of the whole thing. In the same way that World Trade Centre starring good old Nic Cage was making money out of the ordeal.  De Wael did indeed have parents who were deported by the Nazis, and from my point of view, it would have been far more interesting to here a story about them than some fictionalised account of a young girl accompanied by wolves across Germany. Her story has been made into a film, and she, undoubtedly is earning the royalties from it.

I think this is a bit wrong. I do not have a problem with people discussing the holocaust from experience, or indeed selling memoirs of the experience. Likewise I do not have a problem with historians writing books which try to explain or understand what went on. These have an agenda. They know why they are being written and have a goal in mind. Historians seek to understand the holocaust (something I fear will never be possible), survivors want people to understand so the same things cannot happen again. Personalising the experience is a powerful thing.

Yet I see neither agenda here. Ok, so her (non-jewish) parents were deported by the Nazis to a camp having been part of the resistance in France. But I get the impression that isn’t what the book is really about. The process of writing it was to create a good story, one that would sell. Emotive works about the holocaust sell well, and so I can understand the logic in writing a book with its heart based around the holocaust. And then trivialise it by adding wolves to the story as accompanying actors.

This is along a similar line to Seb Faulks’ Birdsong, or Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Both are tools of making money out of something hugely terrible. And yet, to me, there is something much worse about trivialising the holocaust. And now I here people thinking about Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s well renowned film. To me, the same logic would apply, but I have one lingering thought. Having not actually seen the film, I cannot be certain, but I highly doubt that the supporting ensemble was made of wolves. The film, I’m sure, did not trivialise the experience by adding the unrealistic tones of childs fantasy to make it more dramatic.

He’s finally done it…

So good old Dave has finally come out and said something I agree with. At the Conservative Conference in Wales, Cameron has, amongst other things called for “broken politics” to be mended. He has insisted there is too much in the way of spin in politics, and that because of the actions of a few members of parliament, there has been a ‘breakdown of public faith’(BBC).

I agree, at least in part, with his whole speech. Blaming ’spin’ on the Labour party though, although probably accurate, is almost like shooting yourself in the foot, as the Conservatives now employ spin too.

Bur I do agree that politicians have become concerned with personality politics, which leads to a collapse of public confidence, as Cameron suggests. The trouble is, if you live by the sword (employing personalities to sell something) you inevitably die by it (when things go wrong for those personalities, they go really wrong). The public do not know which way to turn, there is no good option now, the question is about who is less bad. Consequently, the final option to them is to turn away. Be that in the form of not voting at all, or emmigrating to the continent or further afield.

Disillusionment is rife in Britain, and it should be the politicians job to do something to eradicate this frustration. As it is, the politicians are more concerned with political one-upmanship. They wish to outscore their opponent with a witty repost, or a bigger and better way of saying basically the same thing. The Conservatives have recently launched a nice new advertising campaign with promises of more police (surely paying the current ones a better wage first should be a priority?), an improved NHS, and a more stable economy. Which is all very well and good, and honestly, I think the campaign looks smart. But I’m asking myself whether the Labour camp will say the same thing, because, lets face it, they are not going to win any voters by offering a worse economy, or a failing NHS are they?

Returning to the point, I have long championed the argument that communications between MP’s and their electorate should be vastly improved. I still consider this the best way of removing disillusionment. If politicians talked more to their voters, then the voters can have fewer complaints about being ignored, and the MP’s would have a much greater understanding of what the people want.

That does not mean that I, as a voter, should simply wait for my politician to come and talk to me about what I think needs improving etc, but I maintain that the there should be a greater onus on communication, something which works both ways.

And so I am very much relieved that those in the Guild have finally clicked this. Checking out the manifestos for those running for President, and the same things seems to crop up (thus reflecting politics in general?). One of which is communication. They are beginning to understand that to be representative of the people is not simply to win votes but to actually talk to the people and act upon what they are saying.

Last week I was involved in a discussion with members of my department (both teaching and student) about the proposals for a restructure of the course. The staff wanted to know what we thought. There were (I think) three groups of roughly 10 people each who volunteered to learn more and offer criticisms or suggestions about this syllabus change. From this I’m led to believe that voluntary actions won’t work as well. Those at my meeting all had thoughts and opinions about the plans, and were keen to speak about it and discuss it. Students aren’t apathetic, they just need a push. If such meetings were compulsory (and I know of the difficulty of logistics) then I’m sure feedback would be useful as students would have concerns about their course, or university life in general. By making engagement compulsory, then maybe people could start getting enthused with things again.

It isn’t just small university admin-type politics either, there is no reason the Guild couldn’t have meetings, through the Guild Councillors, with the students to discuss things and give feedback on issues which affect them.

I’m just trying to propose some ideas with the main premise that people aren’t engaging because those in control do not engage with them in the first place. Improve communication, and I think you will go a long way towards improving politics.