Does we still think of Scousers as irritable, light-fingered rogues?
Twenty years ago, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse created The Scousers. The usual scenario was that three brothers with tightly curled hair and moustaches would parade around in shell suits, flying off the handle at the slightest provocation. Things would be resolved by Ba (Barry), Te (Terry) or Ga (Gary) telling the others to “calm down, calm down.”
Joe McGann played one of The Scousers, Ba, for a while. He says the sketch was meant to be a skit on Brookside, but it wasn’t until after he left the programme that he realised it was compounding the Liverpudlian stereotype. There’s no doubt the image of the thieving Scouser has stuck. I’m not a Liverpudlian, but I’ve been working as a reporter for Radio 4 here for two years. When I go back down south, even I get jokes about how people should watch their wallets when I’m around. In a piece for Radio 4’s PM this Friday, I ask whether Liverpool’s year as capital of culture done anything to change the image of the Scouser.
In February, a couple of friends went to Trinidad for the carnival. What makes for a great carnival? Living in west London, and having seen ours evolve from chaotic and lively to dully over-regulated, I’ve often wondered.
My conclusions: carnival is good when the number of participants isn’t grossly outweighed by the number of spectators, and when it’s easy for the “spectators” to join in (dancing and singing along). Carnival is good when the participants exhibit a range of skills from the absolutely minimal to the absolutely astonishing (the first being an invitation not to be intimidated—“Hey! I could do that!”—and the second an invitation to be amazed). Carnival is good when people of all ages, races, shapes, sizes, beauties and inclinations can get involved. Carnival is good when there’s too much to look at and everything’s mixed up and you have to sort it all out for yourself. Carnival is good when it dignifies and rewards all sorts of abilities—singing, jumping, laughing infectiously, writing the hit song of the carnival, wiggling your backside, standing on a soapbox praising Jesus or the local hardware store, frying salt fish over an oil drum in public, inventing symphonic arrangements for steel bands, building fabulously impossible things just for a day. Carnival is good when people try to outdo each other, and then applaud with delight those who in turn outdo them. Carnival is good when it gives people an alibi to experiment with being someone different. Carnival is good when it lets people present the best part of themselves, and be, for a little while, as they’d like to be all the time. Carnival is good when it gives people the feeling that they’re really lucky to be alive right now. Carnival is good when it leaves people feeling that life in all its manifestations is unbeatably lovely and touching and funny and worthwhile.
Now substitute “culture” for “carnival.” There’s a vision for the future of culture.
According to reports, as soon as he heard noises, Simon Thomas got his shotgun out, loaded it, and pointed it at the villains from a first-floor window. Once they were “begging for their lives,” he considered the situation sufficiently under control to call the police. They took 50 minutes to arrive, by which point the intruders were long gone. When the police are so useless, is it acceptable to do what he did?
I’ve always been a huge Kathryn Bigelow fan. Near Dark is certainly the greatest redneck vampire film ever made, and who can forget the flaming gasoline-wielding “ex presidents” in Point Break? I even liked the gun fetishist stalker in Blue Steel, so when The Hurt Locker came out last year, I was very excited. Pretty much as soon as it arrived in London, I called up my friend Jonah and off we went to see it in Piccadilly Circus.
Jonah and I met in Gaza. We are both journos who have spent a fair bit of time embedded with the US military in Iraq, which I guess either makes us the perfect audience or the worst audience for this film. I hate to say that when we came out of the movie, we were both disappointed.
Faced with charges of $27bn-worth of tax evasion from the Russian government, the company’s executive were arrested and the business was broken up and sold to state-owned enterprises before finally being liquidated in 2007. Although many in the west had voiced their concerns over the seizure of former state assets in the early 1990s that heralded the rise of the oligarchs in Russia, many even within the Kremlin ranks were shocked at the handling of the Yukos affair. As a consequence Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the company and Russia’s richest man before his high-profile arrest on his private jet in 2003, has become a symbol for those angry at the perceived corruption and politicisation of the Russian Federation’s justice system.
In the past the Kremlin has strongly defended its stance, claiming Khordorkovsky abused his proximity to Soviet power structures to facilitate the purchase of state assets at large discounts in the chaos that followed the implosion of the USSR. On a state visit to France last year Prime Minister Vladimir Putin likened the imprisoned oligarch to Al Capone and disgraced American financier Bernard Madoff, noting: “Mr Madoff in the United States received a lifetime, and no-one sneezed.”
Point Omega
by Don DeLillo (Picador, £14.99)
Don DeLillo’s short, very odd but oddly brilliant new novel is set in just two locations. One is a room in a New York gallery where an unnamed man obsessively watches a video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, consisting of repeat screenings of Hitchcock’s film slowed down so that it takes a whole day to run. The other is a house in the desert, to which neocon intellectual Richard Elster has repaired, pursued by a young filmmaker, Jim Finley, who wants him to talk to camera about his experiences advising the Pentagon in the run-up to Iraq.
Little happens in either storyline—or little that would conventionally be called “action”—but that of course is DeLillo’s point: this is a novel about the “slowing of motion,” and the kind of watching and thinking that become possible when the usual time constraints cease to apply. DeLillo’s prose rises to the challenge: both the snail-paced footage and the desert scenery are mesmerisingly described. Does the novel offer any profound insights into American foreign policy? Probably not, other than functioning as a kind of anti-argument, a wholesale rebuttal of the “overarching ideas and principles” that Elster, in his role as “conceptualiser” of war, was required to supply.
This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Prospect
Hope via small business: micro-credit charity founder Vashti Richards with local businesspeople in Nepal
Just how little improvement millions of dollars of aid actually brings to poor countries has vexed policymakers for decades. How can a country like Sierra Leone receive some £50m annually in British aid, yet its healthcare system be so bad that one in six of its mothers still dies in pregnancy or childbirth? Alex Renton’s piece in the forthcoming April issue of Prospect tries to find out—but in the meantime, news of an innovative microfinance scheme called Deki offers hope that things won’t always be this bad.
Microfinance is one of the ways around unscrupulous elites who divert aid into their own coffers. It works by arranging loans for poor businesspeople. The foreign lender makes a contribution of, say, £10 via a local microfinance company, which then administrates the loan and repayment. Interest rates are a lot lower than local moneylenders’ and there’s no shortage of investors.
Deki, though, adds a new incentive by introducing lenders to borrowers via a website where each applicant has a profile picture, accompanied by a short pitch for their business. The lender is free to browse amongst the needy before deciding where their loan will be put to best use. Once it’s done, they can keep track of the improvements their money is making. Like most microfinance schemes, Deki’s local partners only lend to women: research has shown that men are more likely to default.
Oxfam-meets-Dragons’ Den is a strong brew. The scheme may not twang the heartstrings in quite the same way as traditional NGO and charity campaigns—which tend to focus on headline-grabbing privation—do, but using the internet to link the haves with have-nots in mutual interest is an excellent idea. It provides a real incentive to view aid as investment—which is what those millions of dollars need to be if they are ever to have a lasting benefit.
Here in the depths of the bust, it is tempting to feel nostalgia for the boom. Let’s not. The bust has been brutal but the boom wasn’t so great either. The British economy actually grew more in 1979, the year of the “winter of discontent,” than it did in 2006 at the height of the bubble. Most of the western economies did better in the late, unlamented 1970s than they ever have since.
For the past 30 years, the world’s engine of growth has been debt-fuelled consumption financed by asset price bubbles. Growth has been sketchy, financial crises common, inequality rampant. Last week I wrote about the fragility of borrowing and spending as an economic strategy and suggested it might be time for our policymakers to find a better one, by taking a look at what worked during the golden age, 1950-1973, the greatest period of growth the world has ever seen.
The gold rush: welcome relief for a debt-ridden US economy
As the Eurozone contemplates the possibility of Greek default, American pundits are boasting about US federalism. American states, they say, would never allow the fiscal irresponsibility that plagues Eurozone countries. And when states do lapse, the country’s leaders do a better job of putting accounts back in order.
These pundits ought to know their history. In fact, the US has experienced a very similar crisis, in which one third of state governments defaulted. That crisis only ended after years of wrenching political change.
The trigger was the collapse of a land boom. In the 1830s, Europeans invested on a huge scale in US cotton plantations, banks, canals and railroads. Many state governments served as conduits by borrowing abroad and investing directly in banks and public works. Policymakers stoked the boom with reckless monetary and banking policies.
In 1837, the bubble burst. Banks collapsed, tax revenues evaporated, and improvement projects became white elephants. The first states to renege on their debts were Michigan and Indiana, which defaulted in July 1841. Others—Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania—soon followed. The federal government refused to bail any of them out.
Damage to the country’s credibility was profound. “The eyes of all capitalists are averted from the United States,” wrote the English clergyman Sydney Smith in 1843. “Great and high-minded merchants loathe the name of America.” When the US government itself attempted to borrow, Europeans gave it the cold shoulder. “You may tell your government,” James de Rothschild told US agents, “that you have seen the man who is at the head of finances of Europe, and that he has told you that you cannot borrow a dollar.”
As the tributes pour in to Michael Foot, who died aged 96 earlier today, it’s worth looking back almost seven decades to the man in his early pomp as editor of the Evening Standard. Here, aged just 28, he speaks in defence of the Daily Mirror’s right to criticise Churchill’s government with one of the greatest weapons in the public speaker’s arsenal—mockery, of the most serious kind. It’s 1942, and this is simply astonishing:
Michael Mackintosh Foot, 23rd July 1913 to 3rd March 2010.
Nigel Warburton's March philosophy column for Prospect explores the friction between law and religion via Kant, Kierkegaard and Britain's first Asian judge
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