OCCUPIED COUNTRY

Same As It Ever Was......

So, the vagaries of PR, coupled with a dismal turnout, have resulted in the current leader of the BNP and the ex-leader of the NF heading for Brussels to presumably team up with others of like mind. It’s a sad day when the political process delivers as unpalatable a pair as this but hey, that’s democracy and the people have spoken although they did poll fewer votes than last time. We may not agree with their choice but we have to take on board the thought processes behind the voting; thought processes that the chattering classes just don’t seem capable of ever understanding.

Like the politicians they endlessly interview, too many of our opinion formers and recorders have never lived in the world that the vast majority inhabit. A world of monotonous, far-from-secure, low-paid jobs that Polly Toynbee, for example, simply wouldn’t recognise. She looked shell-shocked last night Ms Toynbee, although she did accept that she could understand why low-skilled workers would feel threatened by a huge influx of highly skilled and ambitious young Poles, completely ignoring the fact that many of them worked for lower pay than existing workers and also ignoring the fact that the vast majority of them have now gone back home.

Personally, although I thought we wouldn’t find ourselves in this position, I’m not surprised that the far right have made inroads in the ex-textile towns of the North West and Yorkshire. Far from the cultural melting pot that the Toynbees of this world believe that these places are, all I see are ghettos where different cultures exist side by side and no matter how hard the powers-that-be try to integrate them, they are as compartmentalised as ever.

When I had the misfortune to deliver Mail my first round was in Glodwick. You may vaguely remember the place – it was the epicentre of the Oldham riots a few years back and it is almost exclusively Asian. Shops, businesses, mosques all geared to a population that definitely wasn’t, and still isn’t integrating. A couple of miles south and you’re in Fitton Hill: almost exclusively White and with a population that definitely isn’t integrating either. 5,400+ votes the BNP acquired in Oldham. I bet you could come up with a fairly good guess where they came from.

I would imagine this same situation is replicated in Burnley, Bradford, Blackburn etc. And yet, to listen to the great and the good you would think that entirely the opposite is true. We all dream of living in harmonious multi-cultural societies but to blithely assume, from the comfort of Hampstead, that such situations are the norm is, at best wishful thinking and, at worst sheer ignorance. As I said in my last post, this is a debate that needs honesty on all sides and it needs to begin soon. Middle class commentators interviewing middle class representatives of ‘Inter-Faith’ groups is not – and has never been – the way forward.

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Another thing that has surprised me about the election results, both European and local is the lack of imagination the electorate has shown in their response to the ‘collapse of trust’ that the expenses farrago has supposedly triggered.

It seems to me that all they’ve done is revert to type, given the incumbents a kicking and transferred their votes to the other main opposition party or stayed at home and watched Big Brother. Lord knows there were enough alternatives on the ballot paper for some constructive protest voting apart from the BNP. It’s an opportunity lost and one that we may all live to regret. It wasn’t just Labour politicians with their snouts in the trough but I’ve got a funny feeling that years down the line the moat-cleaning and duck islands will be forever linked with Labour, just like the three-day week of the early Seventies is.

This electoral timidity will result in the psephologists of the main parties believing they got off the hook and it’s business as usual. All that’s required is to sit back, head down and wait until swine flu or something takes over the headlines again. Gordon, for example, is reported as considering slowing the privatisation of Royal Mail. Slowing down? What sort of procrastinating, Asquithian response is that? What the hell is that going to achieve? That’s not a change of policy. His response to this battering is to ‘slow something down’? He’s also apparently on the verge of announcing an enquiry into the Iraq war. An enquiry eh? And how long will that take to report? Decades I reckon and even then it will be a whitewash. Here's an idea Gordon, ditch the ridiculous ID Card scheme. That would do for starters.

They think they’ve got away with it and, you know what?

They have.

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I watched the England v Kazakhstan game on Saturday. It was a scrappy affair not helped by the state of the pitch but, in the end, we got the result even though none of the team performed outstandingly. It’s always nice being able to watch two Manchester City players in England shirts as well.

Come Sunday morning I ambled down to the paper shop and bought The Observer, The Mail and the Daily Mirror (the latter at the request of Dearest as there was something in it she wanted ?). As I lazily poached a couple of eggs I skimmed the match report statistics in the Mirror. They have a helpful section called ‘villain of the game’ or something like that. Guess who it was. Yup, new City signing Gareth Barry. Now I don’t happen to think he had a great game but after the first twenty minutes or so I though he settled down and let’s not forget he did get the first goal. Glen Johnston on the other hand made mistakes that almost led to goals and was generally skinned every time the opposition approached. David Beckham was pointless, lacklustre and wasteful. But Gareth was the villain.

I opened the Mail, they gave Gareth 8 out of 10 for his performance and the Observer was similarly complementary.

Now I don’t normally read the Mirror as it’s a comic not a newspaper, but I have heard a lot of City fans complain about its in-built anti City reporters and I have seen some uncalled for bile on their website in the past, but this for me takes the biscuit. This isn’t reportage it’s petty and pathetic and the reporters (for it is more than one) need to get a life.