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.
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?
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.
Here at Prospect we eschew the wearisome political cynicism of our age and look forward to the election with a whistle and a skip. Like all national elections it is a festival of democracy—a chance for the country to talk to itself about how to cut the deficit (and whether a hung parliament would make it harder). We have sneaked in with an early “election special” to help to prepare you for the deluge of commentary. But it is not shaping up to be a historic contest.
Indeed, it may be encapsulated by a poignant exchange between a husband and wife (David and Karen) in Luton’s main shopping mall, reported by Sam Knight. “I ask David if he plans to vote Conservative. ‘It’s got to be better than the Labour lot, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘That’s just the way I see it. Maybe it isn’t…’ He is suddenly filled with doubt, and turns to his wife. ‘Karen, if you was voting, who would you vote for? You think they’re probably all the same don’t you.’ Karen looks down the mall. It is full of families. She speaks quietly. ‘I’d give the other ones a bit of a chance,’ she says.”
Spend, spend, spend: in this climate, you can't have too much of a good thing
Britain, along with much of the western world, has (barely) managed to crawl its way out of recession. That it has done so is mostly thanks to unprecedented and, I dare say heroic, government easing. For two years, monetary policy has been spectacularly loose, with interest rates close to zero, and fiscal policy has been hugely expansive, with deficits more than doubling. Finance ministers haven’t had much choice. With the private sector deleveraging, households and businesses saving instead of spending, the government has had to step in order to maintain demand. Imagine what a mess we would be in today with interest rates at normal levels and without massive deficit spending. Unemployment would be through the roof. But all this government expenditure, combined with lower tax revenues, has pushed deficits to almost wartime levels. The question is: will bond markets continue to shrug off what some see as unsustainable budget deficits?
Economists are fighting a civil war over what is more frightening: government deficits or their eradication. We should all pay attention, because the consequences of either side winning could be brutal.
The news that the Conservative Party intend to facilitate greater employee ownership in public services is one of the boldest policy announcements of David Cameron’s leadership. Labour has already thrown scorn on what appears to be political cross-dressing, and the left-leaning twitterati have pored over the proposal for inconsistency and policy naivete. But what evidence is there out there on the viability of such schemes, and how likely is it that the Tories could deliver this successfully?
I authored a Demos pamphlet on alternative ownership models last year, and while I’m more concerned with ownership pathologies in the private sector, the report looks at the potential and precedents for employee ownership in the public sector too. Here are three sets of questions thrown up by this morning’s announcement:
Oops, he did it again. Having spent years giving the impression of being all “grand narrative and no radical policy,” David Cameron is on a roll. He recently announced plans to publish every government contract, a genuinely radical change. And now he has announced something even more daring: giving all public sector workers the right to take over the body in which they work (reaction from Conservative Home is here, and Phillip Blond’s original idea proposing something very similar to this is here. ) Three thoughts:
The media are on a Tory crisis trip, which looks increasingly odd. The Guardian, unless I’m missing it, haven’t written this up. (George Osborne was on the Today programme talking about it.) Very odd, especially given how yesterday Toby Helm wrote in the Observer that Cameron was beset by a “growing sense of crisis.”
Of all the things that the modern British state provides, what could we do without? Britain has to cut state spending, and while we might argue about how much and how soon, there is no question that it will have to come down.
To this end, we’re inviting our readers to suggest how they would go about cutting Britain’s £655bn state spending by 15 per cent. We are looking for a range of answers—from serious and practical to imaginative and amusing—and if they are inventive and original enough we’ll publish them in the magazine.
Post your suggestions in no more than 200 words below, or if you feel you can be really frugal with your pitch why not tweet us your ideas: @prospect_uk
A predictable wave of patriotism has attended Andy Murray’s serene progress through this year’s Australian Open, and there seems to be a growing expectation that Britain is finally set to have a grand slam winner. But the inconvenient truth is that Murray is almost certainly going to lose. Why do I think this? Bias is probably a factor. I am a Federer fan, and so (unpatriotically) I don’t want Murray to win. Don’t get me wrong: I would like him to win a grand slam, I’d just rather he didn’t do it at Federer’s expense.
But even if bias is removed from the equation, I still think, objectively, Federer is the overwhelming favourite. Murray is undoubtedly playing extremely well, but I haven’t seen anything in his game over the past two weeks to make me think it has changed significantly enough. In terms of their head-to-head record, it’s true, Murray has the edge over Federer—he has beaten the Swiss six times, while Federer has beaten him on only four occasions. However, Federer made a revealing comment a couple of months ago, shortly before playing Murray (and winning) at the end of year ATP tour finals tournament in London. “It’s up to me whether I beat Murray,” he said.
To a hammer, every problem is a nail. Alastair Campbell tells us, in today’s Financial Times, that the main lesson we should take from the Iraq debacle is that next time we invade a minor third world country, government officials need to spin it better. Considering that Bush and Blair, back in 2003 were able to drag our countries into war, despite little genuine cause and massive popular opposition, I would have thought that spin was one of the few Iraq war government policies that actually succeeded.
Let us not forget: Saddam Hussein, although a despicable tyrant, had no weapons of mass destruction. He was a threat to no one but his own people and few of them, by the way, are now grateful for our invasion. Our optimism, brute force, cowardice and pathetic planning turned a totalitarian state into something even worse, an anarchic hellhole. I will never forget, in 2006, being told by a man who had spent 6 years in Saddam’s jails how much better things were under the Ba’athist regime. Today, much of the Iraqi middle class is in exile, hundreds of thousands have died, violence still endemic, the economy in tatters.
The war devastated Iraq; it damaged us as well. The international reputation of Britain and the United States have suffered, we have wasted trillions of dollars, thousands of our soldiers lives, and accomplished almost nothing. The big winner in Iraq is Iran and the fundamentalist Shia groups allied with it. If the war’s purpose was to control Iraq’s oil, that plan too was a failure. The civil war years cut Iraqi production to a fraction of its pre-invasion levels and in the recent oil field auction, Russian, Chinese, Angolan oil companies secured more of Iraq’s oil than American and British companies, without their militaries having to go to the trouble of invading.
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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