Lots of people this week are lamenting the end of the UK Film Council.
I'm a fully paid up cinephile - I'm probably in the cinema twice a week, splitting my time between my local beret-and-turtleneck arthouse (The Curzon on the Kings Road) & the much more low rent picture palace just along from it, which shows an assortment of hollywood shlockbusters - I'm sure I'll trot off there to see this cinematic maserpiece:
As I write, Facebook, Twitter, an online petition and the letters page of The Guardian are alive with calls to save the UKFC. Am I disappointed by the end of the UK film council? No, because it represents exactly the sort of cuts that should be made.
To understand last week’s move, you need to know that last August Labour culture minister Sion Simon proposed a merger of the UKFC with the British Film Institute, the country’s other big film body, which manages the National Film Archive, runs BFI Southbank and organises the London Film Festival. The plan (despite Labour's shrieks of disgust this week) was to cut costs and prevent overlap. Neither did it help relations that the UKFC’s execs were on far higher salaries compared to those doing similar jobs at the BFI, but were to be the ones who were to be kept.
The BFI were horrified. They were going to be subsumed into an ugly New Labour quango, which was obsessed with pumping lottery money projects like Harry Potter and then claiming it as a "British Triumph". To claim the Harry Potter film franchise is a British Triumph is akin to claiming Monopoly is just like real bond trading. It looks sort of like it on the surface, but really is nothing of the sort. All the money, all the profit, flowed back to the USA.
People are talking about £15 million pounds being removed from UK film funding - that's not correct. The £15 million figure was amount of Lottery funds disbursed by the UKFC - minus the £6 million plus combined staffing cost of the 75 people who work for the UKFC.
The lottery money - which was often blown on shit films like 'Sex Lives of the Potato Men', 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' and 'The Parole Officer' is still there. It's just now in the hands of the eminently more reliable BFI - who have a far better track record than the UKFC - ‘Dog Soldiers’, '28 days later' & ‘Slumdog Millionaire' all started with BFI seed money.
Certainly, the UKFC did have a hand in some good films - notably 'Hunger' - but for the record, its last disbursement was for two street dance films in 3d, both of which utterly bombed at the box office. Of course, Hunger bombed at the box office in comparison to Harry Potter too, but it had the saving grace of being artistically brilliant.
So, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the UKFC were not. The french new wave, the UKFC was not. UK film funding has not dropped; we fired £6 million pounds worth of bureaucrats. This is no reason to weep. We need to take this sort of action across all the areas of the budget.
On this topic, the treasury recently set up a website, by which you could suggest ideas for cuts that the government hadn't thought of. Nice idea, but predictably, it had to be removed, as it swiftly filled up with lunatic racist rants - as anyone who has ever posted a youtube video or read the brilliant Speak your Branes would have been able to explain.
In the absence of the website, some of the things I'd like to see cut are:
Civil Service Pay
The Civil service is ludicrously bloated. There are 525,000 of them, out of 6 million public sector employees. Civil servants are on incremental pay scales, which rise automatically. They need a pay freeze. Now. If it was down to me, I'd also impose a 15% salary cut on all civil service salaries over £25,000, with some sort of phase in at the margin.
On top of that, there are hundreds of civil servants languishing in non-jobs, because they are too expensive to make redundant. Why? Because of the crippling cost of making them redundant. Civil servants have one of the most lucrative redundancy deals in the country, a system which Labour tried but failed to scrap. The terms of their redundancy deal is extraordinarily generous, with many civil servants eligible to receive about six years’ pay if they are made compulsorily redundant.
For example, a 46 year old earning £40,000 who had been a civil servant for 25 years could enjoy a cash payment of about 6.2 years’ salary on retirement, or around £300,000.
We literally can't afford to sack them, but cutting this to an (eminently fair) one year's salary as redundancy payment would save 6 Billion pounds over 10 years. If the unions strike, will the public support them in claiming this outrageous gilded perk? I doubt it.
Second, the civil service offers a pretty ridiculous pension scheme. Contributions to the premium scheme are only 3.5%, but the employer (us) is charged another 22% on top - and we have to maintain that pension, index linked, until death. We should renegotiate their contracts, making it clear they can quit now, or accept a deal which is fair to the country.
No Tax cuts
There are some taxes I loathe. Inheritance tax in particular. Sadly, the truth is, we can't really afford any tax cuts until the titanic deficit is cleared. Don't worry, in 2015 I'll start banging on about why it's unfair.
Means test all Benefits
Means test all benefits, especially child benefit. There's a whole plethora of universal benefits like this - for example, a couple of my friends who are reasonably well off recently had a baby, and the government sent them child toothbrushes and a teddy bear - plus they claim the £20 a week in child benefit.
This is a couple who aren't short a bob or two - he's an oil engineer and she's an oncologist. There is absolutely no way that people earning £100,000 a year should be entitled to free toothbrushes, teddies or cheques. This isn't an isolated case - other deeply middle class friends get child benefit, and I see no reason that the state should subsidise people buying Glyndebourne tickets (or whatever else they spend the money on).
Benefits are meant as a safety net, not a perk you get for citizenship.
Pensions
Equally, there's no way people with over £300,000 in assets should get the old age pension - why not means test it? Secondly, why don't we raise the retirement age to 70 for people currently 30 or under? All of us are of the "screwed generation" who had to pay to go to university - this has inculcated in us a feeling that we cannot rely on the state. We will have forty years to prepare for retirement. The saving from pushing our pension entitlement back would be tremendous - billions and billions of pounds.
Citizen allowance
There are 55 benefits for being out of work or on low income at the moment. ESA, JSA, New Deal, LCA, Income Support, ALA, Incapacity benefit, tax credits, housing benefit. Every single one has an office of bloodsuckers assessing claims, while picking their nose on the telephone.
Why not replace all these benefits with a single welfare payment to all unemployed people (pensioners, the sick, the incapable, the lazy - everyone), regardless of why they are unemployed? It would let us get rid of literally thousands of assessors and would have the tremendous advantage of greatly simplifying the benefits system, making access to it easier for those in need.
This was actually one of the quite a few parts of the Green manifesto I really liked, but more on that some other day...
Defence Cuts
Something has to give. We aren't a great power anymore. If we want nuclear arms, conventional weapons will have to go. If we want to maintain a decent conventional airforce, army and navy, our ocean-going holocaust delivery systems are going to have to be scaled back or cut altogether.
Another discussion for another blog post I think.
Centralisation of all Services for all Local Authority Back Offices
This isn't a very sexy cut. There aren't any movies with machine guns or aircraft carriers or middle class people using benefits to buy champagne & opera tickets. But it is vital.
Every local & county council up and down the country has rooms and rooms full of worthless pen pushers in Billing departments, Accounting departments, IT departments, HR departments & Procurement Services.
These are broad areas whereby each local authority manages the services independently (read:badly) and where the jobs are the same but managed locally by local authorities within local budgets. I can't see any reason why most of the above cannot be centralised. In particular, centralised procurement on major contracts would yield huge savings.
Conclusion
These cuts are probably further than the coalition will go - but they should be pushing this far.
These cuts are relatively painless; which will be crucial for maintaining the mandate of the electorate. To maintain support, the coalition has to cut the deficit, while not letting the axe fall on the weakest in society. We have to maintain the NHS; we can't let benefits fall too far.
In short, don't be distracted by all the noise around the UK Film Council - it was a room full of bureaucrats. More of those need to go.
Friday, 30 July 2010
Chicken - With savage cuts
With all this theme of savage cutting, I think it's probably wise to do a recipe that a.) involves cutting and b.) is suitable for these frugal times.
Chicken is getting increasingly expensive, especially if you're going for leg or breast meat, or organic birds.
I find a much cheaper alternative to buying large amounts of chicken precut is to joint your own chicken. This also means you can roast it all together remarkably quickly, with the bones in for flavour.
There's also a part of me which rebels at the idea of getting meat without realising it comes from an animal - I think far too few people actually think about what they are eating. Chicken is particularly bad for this; I often end up buying chicken breast, and can't help but compare the pink, skinless things under the cellophane to buying a tray of baby rodents or something.
Above: Less like a rodent
Quick Roast Chicken with Savage cuts
Preparation time: 15 minutes the first time, 5 minutes with practice
Cooking time: 30 minutes
Ingredients:
1 Chicken
Olive Oil
2 Cloves of Garlic
A Lemon
A glass of White wine
A handful of Basil
Tools:
One big sharp knife
A Roasting tin
A lack of squeamishness
Preparation:
1.)Cut through the skin between the leg and the breast. Feel like a manly hunter gatherer as you butcher the beast.
2.)Bend the leg back as far as possible, so the end of the leg bone pops out from the socket. Feel powerful as you snap the creature's bones with one mighty blow. Just like being the Hulk.
3.) Cleave the leg away from the body with one mighty blow. Repeat on the other side. Imagine you are a Samurai while doing this.
4.) Cut through the joints connecting the drumsticks to the thighs and separate the two different bits. Just like being Quincy, MD.
5.) Back to Samurai mode, and slice off the wings.
6.) To serve the breasts off the bone, cut either side of the breastbone & then carefully remove the breast meat from the bones with your sharp knife. If serving on the bone, turn the chicken over and cut through the centre of the breastbone to separate the breasts. Yes, breasts. This is a manly dish. Phoar, etc.
Voila! You have 8 pieces of chicken, for far less money than you'd otherwise spend. If you like, you can even use the carcass to make stock, but we'll stay away from that for now.
Cooking:
1.) Season the Chicken, add your handful of dried basil, and push garlic under the chicken skin, then and put the pieces in the roasting tin.
2.) Pour enough olive oil over the chicken to ensure all the pieces are lightly covered - enough so a shallow pool forms.
3.) Quarter the lemon, squeeze lemon juice all over the chicken, then bung in the lemon bits.
4.)Roast for thirty five minutes on gas mark 6/200 degrees.
5.) Remove from the oven, tip in a glass of wine (pictured wine is very firmly Eastern European, called something like Château T-34), and heat the roasting tin over a low heat on the hob until the wine bubbles. Then remove and serve with a green salad or vegetables.
Delicious, quick, and probably cheaper than a Kiev.
Chicken is getting increasingly expensive, especially if you're going for leg or breast meat, or organic birds.
I find a much cheaper alternative to buying large amounts of chicken precut is to joint your own chicken. This also means you can roast it all together remarkably quickly, with the bones in for flavour.
There's also a part of me which rebels at the idea of getting meat without realising it comes from an animal - I think far too few people actually think about what they are eating. Chicken is particularly bad for this; I often end up buying chicken breast, and can't help but compare the pink, skinless things under the cellophane to buying a tray of baby rodents or something.
Above: Less like a rodent
Quick Roast Chicken with Savage cuts
Preparation time: 15 minutes the first time, 5 minutes with practice
Cooking time: 30 minutes
Ingredients:
1 Chicken
Olive Oil
2 Cloves of Garlic
A Lemon
A glass of White wine
A handful of Basil
Tools:
One big sharp knife
A Roasting tin
A lack of squeamishness
Preparation:
1.)Cut through the skin between the leg and the breast. Feel like a manly hunter gatherer as you butcher the beast.
2.)Bend the leg back as far as possible, so the end of the leg bone pops out from the socket. Feel powerful as you snap the creature's bones with one mighty blow. Just like being the Hulk.
3.) Cleave the leg away from the body with one mighty blow. Repeat on the other side. Imagine you are a Samurai while doing this.
4.) Cut through the joints connecting the drumsticks to the thighs and separate the two different bits. Just like being Quincy, MD.
5.) Back to Samurai mode, and slice off the wings.
6.) To serve the breasts off the bone, cut either side of the breastbone & then carefully remove the breast meat from the bones with your sharp knife. If serving on the bone, turn the chicken over and cut through the centre of the breastbone to separate the breasts. Yes, breasts. This is a manly dish. Phoar, etc.
Voila! You have 8 pieces of chicken, for far less money than you'd otherwise spend. If you like, you can even use the carcass to make stock, but we'll stay away from that for now.
Cooking:
1.) Season the Chicken, add your handful of dried basil, and push garlic under the chicken skin, then and put the pieces in the roasting tin.
2.) Pour enough olive oil over the chicken to ensure all the pieces are lightly covered - enough so a shallow pool forms.
3.) Quarter the lemon, squeeze lemon juice all over the chicken, then bung in the lemon bits.
4.)Roast for thirty five minutes on gas mark 6/200 degrees.
5.) Remove from the oven, tip in a glass of wine (pictured wine is very firmly Eastern European, called something like Château T-34), and heat the roasting tin over a low heat on the hob until the wine bubbles. Then remove and serve with a green salad or vegetables.
Delicious, quick, and probably cheaper than a Kiev.
Friday, 23 July 2010
CPS Pusillanimity, Police Brutality & the future of Demonstrations
A few weeks ago, when the story broke in the Daily Telegraph about a senior CPS prosecutor being bribed £20,000 to throw a case. As a former criminal barrister, I cynically remarked "I wouldn't have bothered; in my experience they normally fuck it up for free."
Sadly, I have been proven entirely right by the CPS's absolutely farcical handling of the Ian Tomlinson Case.
There are three problems here - the way Police forces have become corrupt, the deeply unbalanced way the CPS is handling cases, and the impact this has on demonstrations.
Above: The TSG engage in some modern community policing.
Police Brutality
There is a huge problem with the Police - particularly with the Metropilitan Police's Territorial Support Group (TSG), the "elite" unit trained to deal with "Domestic Extremism & terrorism". The conflation of these two things under Ian Blair, Labour's favourite Policeman - legitimate civil disobedience and protest mixed with terrorist outrage - has turned this unit into a self-righteous bunch of thugs.
This poison has seeped into other police forces too, as the TSG provide training to other forces to deal with this sort of incident.
According to The Job, the Met's in-house magazine, TSG officers - who are known as the 'tough guys and girls' of the Met - can be identified by a "U" on shoulder epaulette numbers.
Of course, the question is, can you identify them? When a police officer hides his face & removes his identification number, how can you tell who is who? Speaking off the record to people I know in the Met, there is prima facie evidence of a conspiracy - that the TSG are regularly instructed by their immediate superiors to systematically hide all identification.
Of course, it's not the people behind desks giving these "orders". It's sergeants, the people actually going out in the vans, with the batons and the riot gear. It reminds me of my father telling me that in Northern Ireland, the "policy" was to always shoot first, and then everyone in the platoon would "confirm" you gave the mandated three warnings.
This is creating a huge problem for civic society. Not since the Life on Mars days of the 1970s have we seen Police corruption on this scale. Policing doesn't work unless people respect and support the Police - and increasingly, the actions of the TSG are turning more and more people against them.
I worked with a director at the BBC who exposed lots of the Police Corruption in the 1970s. At its root, he explained, there was always a conviction that amongst the Police that they were doing the right thing. They felt they knew who had done it - who the villains were. That all they had to do was beat a confession out of this scumbag, plant some evidence here or there and justice was done. That attitude was ultimately what lead to the murder of Blair Peach, by the fore-runners of the TSG.
That is exactly the problem with the TSG. They consider themselves an elite; they are almost certainly opposed to everything the protesters stand for. They don't consider any of this to be wrong. The reason they keep doing it is not because they are evil - it's much worse. The reason they keep doing it is because they think they are right. All these petty things like displaying badge numbers, the IPCC and so on, are just lefty-liberal concepts that "get in the way of justice" in their eyes.
I know many police officers and have a great deal of respect for them - they are doing a dificult job. However, like others in positions of trust such as teachers, doctors or catholic priests, 'rogue' squads of police officers leave a terrible stench - especially when the establishment closes ranks to protect them.
I say rogue, but this attitude goes right through the Met - it has been rotted to the core by Ian Blair's tenure. You only need look at Blair's own statements about Jean Charles de Menezes - that he would not revoke the shoot to kill policy, his assertion that the Brazilian was the 53rd victim of the 7/7 bombers & his statement that if Mr. de Menezes had been a terrorist, his men "would have got medals".
This is madness of the first order. Firstly, if Raoul Moat's victims had been Hitler, Goering & Ming the Merciless, then he too would have got a medal. This does not change the fact that instead of those individuals, he shot innocent people. Just like the Met's officers did. The refusal of the high command to accept they did anything wrong is absolutely damning, and sends a terrible message to the rank and file.
The very least that should happen now is that the internal police enquiry should find a reason to sack this officer without compensation or pension, and while they are at it they should look at all the officers who removed their ID and take action against them.
The Metropolitan Police Website says "All employees of the MPS, whether they wear a uniform or not, are in a position of responsibility and trust. As such they should be law-abiding citizens with proven integrity." It is about time the started acting like that.
One law for them, One law for us.
There are countless cases where the CPS has taken decisions quickly, in equally confusing circumstances. For example, in this case involving a similar set of facts.
But the CPS seems to take leave of its senses when it comes to prosecuting the Police. How can it be fair for Sergeant Delroy Smellie walk free after savagely beating someone without cause while a 19 year old dental student with no criminal record gets 2 years in jail for throwing an empty plastic bottle at the Israeli embassy.
It defies belief that bungling in this case has led to a criminal getting off scot-free. A corrupt police force needs to be taken to task; clearly, the CPS are not up to the job, having serially dropped the ball.
Protesting in the Future.
As I mentioned above, the Ian-Blair-inculcated attitudes of the TSG have spread far and wide, through the TSG being deployed as trainers to other forces. They have led to minor incidents, like this young man having to stand up to his rights to more serious issues, such the police covering up a massive overspend by pretending 70 officers were injured by protesters at the Kingsnorth power station, when in fact all the "injuries" sustained were totally preposterous - for example, "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured by seatbelt while sitting alone in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". One officer cut his arm on a fence when climbing over it, another cut his finger while mending a car, and one "used leg to open door and next day had pain in lower back".
These injuries were trotted out to try to justify a massive police presence. All of the apparatus of anti-terror surveillance was trotted out.
This is all down to a wilful attempt, aided and abetted by the previous government, to define all dissent as "domestic extremism".
The term "domestic extremism" is now common currency within the police. It is a phrase which shapes how forces seek to control demonstrations.
There is no official or legal definition of the term. Instead, the police have made a vague stab at what they think it means. Senior officers describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups "that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process." They say they are mostly associated with single issues and suggest the majority of protesters are never considered extremists.
It has led to the personal details and photographs of a substantial number of protesters being stored on secret police databases around the country. In this era of enhanced CRB checks, anyone who goes on a demo not only risks their health from thugs with batons, but also risks their future career in any sensitive area. Anyone who wants to be a teacher, a criminal lawyer, to serve in the forces, or to join the police, is taking a chance if they stand up for what they believe in.
This is a disaster for civil society in the making; by adding barriers to protest, you confine protest to only those willing to suffer serious penalties. You create a culture of demonstrators expecting violence and mistrusting the police.
You push the right to demonstrate out of the hands of legitimate protestors into the hands of extremists. As citizens, that is something worth marching against. Even if we do risk being attacked by thugs or recorded on databases.
Sadly, I have been proven entirely right by the CPS's absolutely farcical handling of the Ian Tomlinson Case.
There are three problems here - the way Police forces have become corrupt, the deeply unbalanced way the CPS is handling cases, and the impact this has on demonstrations.
Above: The TSG engage in some modern community policing.
Police Brutality
There is a huge problem with the Police - particularly with the Metropilitan Police's Territorial Support Group (TSG), the "elite" unit trained to deal with "Domestic Extremism & terrorism". The conflation of these two things under Ian Blair, Labour's favourite Policeman - legitimate civil disobedience and protest mixed with terrorist outrage - has turned this unit into a self-righteous bunch of thugs.
This poison has seeped into other police forces too, as the TSG provide training to other forces to deal with this sort of incident.
According to The Job, the Met's in-house magazine, TSG officers - who are known as the 'tough guys and girls' of the Met - can be identified by a "U" on shoulder epaulette numbers.
Of course, the question is, can you identify them? When a police officer hides his face & removes his identification number, how can you tell who is who? Speaking off the record to people I know in the Met, there is prima facie evidence of a conspiracy - that the TSG are regularly instructed by their immediate superiors to systematically hide all identification.
Of course, it's not the people behind desks giving these "orders". It's sergeants, the people actually going out in the vans, with the batons and the riot gear. It reminds me of my father telling me that in Northern Ireland, the "policy" was to always shoot first, and then everyone in the platoon would "confirm" you gave the mandated three warnings.
This is creating a huge problem for civic society. Not since the Life on Mars days of the 1970s have we seen Police corruption on this scale. Policing doesn't work unless people respect and support the Police - and increasingly, the actions of the TSG are turning more and more people against them.
I worked with a director at the BBC who exposed lots of the Police Corruption in the 1970s. At its root, he explained, there was always a conviction that amongst the Police that they were doing the right thing. They felt they knew who had done it - who the villains were. That all they had to do was beat a confession out of this scumbag, plant some evidence here or there and justice was done. That attitude was ultimately what lead to the murder of Blair Peach, by the fore-runners of the TSG.
That is exactly the problem with the TSG. They consider themselves an elite; they are almost certainly opposed to everything the protesters stand for. They don't consider any of this to be wrong. The reason they keep doing it is not because they are evil - it's much worse. The reason they keep doing it is because they think they are right. All these petty things like displaying badge numbers, the IPCC and so on, are just lefty-liberal concepts that "get in the way of justice" in their eyes.
I know many police officers and have a great deal of respect for them - they are doing a dificult job. However, like others in positions of trust such as teachers, doctors or catholic priests, 'rogue' squads of police officers leave a terrible stench - especially when the establishment closes ranks to protect them.
I say rogue, but this attitude goes right through the Met - it has been rotted to the core by Ian Blair's tenure. You only need look at Blair's own statements about Jean Charles de Menezes - that he would not revoke the shoot to kill policy, his assertion that the Brazilian was the 53rd victim of the 7/7 bombers & his statement that if Mr. de Menezes had been a terrorist, his men "would have got medals".
This is madness of the first order. Firstly, if Raoul Moat's victims had been Hitler, Goering & Ming the Merciless, then he too would have got a medal. This does not change the fact that instead of those individuals, he shot innocent people. Just like the Met's officers did. The refusal of the high command to accept they did anything wrong is absolutely damning, and sends a terrible message to the rank and file.
The very least that should happen now is that the internal police enquiry should find a reason to sack this officer without compensation or pension, and while they are at it they should look at all the officers who removed their ID and take action against them.
The Metropolitan Police Website says "All employees of the MPS, whether they wear a uniform or not, are in a position of responsibility and trust. As such they should be law-abiding citizens with proven integrity." It is about time the started acting like that.
One law for them, One law for us.
There are countless cases where the CPS has taken decisions quickly, in equally confusing circumstances. For example, in this case involving a similar set of facts.
But the CPS seems to take leave of its senses when it comes to prosecuting the Police. How can it be fair for Sergeant Delroy Smellie walk free after savagely beating someone without cause while a 19 year old dental student with no criminal record gets 2 years in jail for throwing an empty plastic bottle at the Israeli embassy.
It defies belief that bungling in this case has led to a criminal getting off scot-free. A corrupt police force needs to be taken to task; clearly, the CPS are not up to the job, having serially dropped the ball.
Protesting in the Future.
As I mentioned above, the Ian-Blair-inculcated attitudes of the TSG have spread far and wide, through the TSG being deployed as trainers to other forces. They have led to minor incidents, like this young man having to stand up to his rights to more serious issues, such the police covering up a massive overspend by pretending 70 officers were injured by protesters at the Kingsnorth power station, when in fact all the "injuries" sustained were totally preposterous - for example, "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured by seatbelt while sitting alone in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". One officer cut his arm on a fence when climbing over it, another cut his finger while mending a car, and one "used leg to open door and next day had pain in lower back".
These injuries were trotted out to try to justify a massive police presence. All of the apparatus of anti-terror surveillance was trotted out.
This is all down to a wilful attempt, aided and abetted by the previous government, to define all dissent as "domestic extremism".
The term "domestic extremism" is now common currency within the police. It is a phrase which shapes how forces seek to control demonstrations.
There is no official or legal definition of the term. Instead, the police have made a vague stab at what they think it means. Senior officers describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups "that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process." They say they are mostly associated with single issues and suggest the majority of protesters are never considered extremists.
It has led to the personal details and photographs of a substantial number of protesters being stored on secret police databases around the country. In this era of enhanced CRB checks, anyone who goes on a demo not only risks their health from thugs with batons, but also risks their future career in any sensitive area. Anyone who wants to be a teacher, a criminal lawyer, to serve in the forces, or to join the police, is taking a chance if they stand up for what they believe in.
This is a disaster for civil society in the making; by adding barriers to protest, you confine protest to only those willing to suffer serious penalties. You create a culture of demonstrators expecting violence and mistrusting the police.
You push the right to demonstrate out of the hands of legitimate protestors into the hands of extremists. As citizens, that is something worth marching against. Even if we do risk being attacked by thugs or recorded on databases.
The Dress Code is - Flak Jackets for Brazilians
Hiya,
instead of recipes, as I promised when I started the blog, I'm going to occasionally throw in a series of restaurant reviews. Obviously, to tie in with the post above, I've picked locations where you are least likely to be hassled by the filth.
Above: Avoid McDonalds at all costs - it really cuts into your protester credibility.
Breakfast:
Roast - Roast is an absolutely amazing restaurant situated over Borough market, just near London Bridge Station. The whole menu is incredible - picked freshly from the market, no less - but I particularly want to flag up their incredible breakfasts.
Between 7 and 8 am, they do a breakfast for two for £15. This is incredible value; both myself and the ladyfriend were unable to finish the wonderfully presented full English breakfast we had. For a good breakfast in Central London, £7.50 a head is a steal, particularly in contrast with hotel breakfasts.
Perfect for building up your strength before being kettled all day.
Lunch
I'd recommend Menula, a fantastic Sicilian restaurant on Charlotte St. Why? Well, have a look at the disclaimer on the bottom of their menu...
Yes, it says "Please note healthy options are available - please ask to see the manager". In other words, they have an absolutely no holds barred approach to Italian cooking. Healthy, it is not. Splendidly cooked, with wonderful service, it absolutely is. In particular, the seafood is spectacular.
If you're taking your life in your hands, why worry about eating healthily? At any moment the Met might beat you to death or shoot you.
Dinner
For a reasonably priced meal out in London, you cannot go wrong with Studio 6 on Gabriel's Wharf, near Waterloo station.
Despite the slightly shabby state of the building, the food & service are outstanding. On a sunny day, the terrace outside is beautiful to sit at and watch the world go by.
However, the area it really excels in is price. All of the main courses are under £10; you get literally some of the best food in London for not much more than you'd pay for a Whopper meal at Burger King.
It's a great first date venue; perfect for taking that special girl you just met while shouting "Nazi punks, Nazi Punks, Fuck off!"...
instead of recipes, as I promised when I started the blog, I'm going to occasionally throw in a series of restaurant reviews. Obviously, to tie in with the post above, I've picked locations where you are least likely to be hassled by the filth.
Above: Avoid McDonalds at all costs - it really cuts into your protester credibility.
Breakfast:
Roast - Roast is an absolutely amazing restaurant situated over Borough market, just near London Bridge Station. The whole menu is incredible - picked freshly from the market, no less - but I particularly want to flag up their incredible breakfasts.
Between 7 and 8 am, they do a breakfast for two for £15. This is incredible value; both myself and the ladyfriend were unable to finish the wonderfully presented full English breakfast we had. For a good breakfast in Central London, £7.50 a head is a steal, particularly in contrast with hotel breakfasts.
Perfect for building up your strength before being kettled all day.
Lunch
I'd recommend Menula, a fantastic Sicilian restaurant on Charlotte St. Why? Well, have a look at the disclaimer on the bottom of their menu...
Yes, it says "Please note healthy options are available - please ask to see the manager". In other words, they have an absolutely no holds barred approach to Italian cooking. Healthy, it is not. Splendidly cooked, with wonderful service, it absolutely is. In particular, the seafood is spectacular.
If you're taking your life in your hands, why worry about eating healthily? At any moment the Met might beat you to death or shoot you.
Dinner
For a reasonably priced meal out in London, you cannot go wrong with Studio 6 on Gabriel's Wharf, near Waterloo station.
Despite the slightly shabby state of the building, the food & service are outstanding. On a sunny day, the terrace outside is beautiful to sit at and watch the world go by.
However, the area it really excels in is price. All of the main courses are under £10; you get literally some of the best food in London for not much more than you'd pay for a Whopper meal at Burger King.
It's a great first date venue; perfect for taking that special girl you just met while shouting "Nazi punks, Nazi Punks, Fuck off!"...
Thursday, 15 July 2010
The famous five and the mystery of the Psychic Octopus
A scots friend recently shared with me an excellent joke:
When asked whether Paul the Psychic Octopus could predict the result of the Labour leadership election, he replied "Predict it?! He could win it!".
This is absolutely true.
Above: How much would this picture be improved by an Octopus?
All of the candidates (apart from Diane Abbott) are absolutely awful. And none of them are psychic.
They are all creatures of the Blair years - in Abbott's words "all male, all white, all former policy wonks". The Labour party - the self-proclaimed party of the working class, the immigrant, the woman, the left - has rolled up the representation of all of its core constituencies into one ultra-token candidate: Abbott.
For a party obsessed with "fairness for all", they struggled to get someone representative and likeable on to the ballot. Even the champion of feminism, Harriet Harman, who nominated Abbott, is on record as saying she will not vote for her. Ironically, Abbott is the only one who could command mainstream support from the country, but the least likely to win within the Labour party. None of the other candidates is capable of attracting support from anyone who isn't a tribal Labour voter. None of them are credible candidates for PM.
There's also some irony in a field of candidates for the party which espouses "class war", having the most 'Ghetto' amongst them singled out by the fact that he studied English at Cambridge rather than PPE at Oxford.
That said, graduates of the Cambridge English department assure me it is "Well Ghetto".
Labour party members (not to mention the electorate) were all crying out for fresh thinking, but the four main candidates are well placed to deliver only one thing - more of the same.
Not one of them has broken free of the shackles of New Labour. Unsurprising, considering this is the first Labour leadership contest in 16 years - New Labour made these men as surely as it will now break them. Part of the reason this campaign resembles a dismal election for President of a Students Union is because of the intellectual straightjacket that Blair & Brown imposed - these people are conditioned to be minor figures. Medium sized fish in a big pond.
Balls
For Ed Balls probably (the individual mostly closely associated with the fag end of the Brown government), dumping the past was his most crucial task.
But he cannot help but be compared with Brown while he continues to defend the legacy the Brown (not Blair) government. When his strongest criticism of Brown is the unspecfic "Gordon didn't get everything right by any means and in the end he couldn't be the leader that people wanted" - it's hardly a differentiating, ringing admission of the were huge problems that culminated in an electoral defeat, is it?
When he goes on to say "what he [Gordon] did manage to do was get the Labour party to have confidence in itself, its values, its beliefs, its unity ", you can't help but see the lack of reality that bedevilled Brown.
How can he say that the dissent riddled Brown government, lurching from PR crisis to real, nightmarish, impoverishing crisis - to coup, after coup, after coup had confidence in itself? In its beliefs? In unity? It sounds very much like His Master's Voice.
Balls looks, acts and sounds like a bully. It is his reputation to such an extent that even Guardian articles begin by noting his tendency towards menace.
It's public knowledge that he has inherited the monstrous Brown negative spin machine, as personified by his chief backer, Charlie Whelan. Darker rumours suggest it was threats from this muck-raking smear bazooka that convinced left-winger John Cruddas not to stand. In the light of this, Balls reaching for the mantle of a centrist, peace-making leader is met with absolute derision.
By the way, having your thugs intimidate people doesn't help with the whole "perceived as a bully" thing, by the way, Ed.
Balls also isn't helped by the sentiment within the Labour party that his infinitely more talented wife should have stood in his stead, but he prevented her from doing so. Yes, it's true - Ed Balls is not even the best potential leader of the Labour party in his own bed.
Milliband the younger
The other Ed, Milliband, is doing his best to run the worst campaign in the history of the world. As a candidate bedevilled by accusations of nepotism, his first act was to hire Neil Kinnock's daughter as his head of campaign events. Is his slogan "Labour:Keeping it in the family since 1983"?
He's also hired useless press officer Ken Young to head his campaign. Young is famously one of the worst PRs in the world - a stock joke in the business - once wonderfully described as "omnishambolic" during his tenure as Brown's head of "gaffe monitoring and prevention.
Yes, he was head of gaffe prevention for Gordon Brown. Needless to say, he is unlikely to win any awards from PR Week for that role. He was behind everything from that youtube video on the expenses crisis to the election blowing Rochdale gaffe. Malcolm Tucker, he is not.
Still, unlike the mercenary Tucker, he's been hired because he is a Labour ultra-loyalist rather than for his competence. Notoriously, Young openly tells people that he styled his hair on Gordon Brown’s while chairman of Labour Students. It really takes class to stand out among Labour student activists as a massive loser.
Aside from the image of the campaign, and inept hires of useless staff, Milliband the younger has constantly missed open goals when offered them, with his constant unwillingness to commit to actually saying anything.
On Gay Marriage: "As someone who is liberal on social issues, I will listen to what people have to say on going further if there is a demand". What does that mean? Nothing. Analyse it - if there is a demand, I will listen to people. How is THAT radical? If people say things, I will listen to them. That isn't a political pledge, it's a basic social skill.
On Civil Liberties: "I accept that in government we were too draconian on some aspects of our civil liberties" Specifics? No. Where's the vision, Ed?
On Iraq: "As we all know, the basis for going to war was on the basis of Saddam's threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and therefore that is why I felt the weapons inspectors should have been given more time to find out whether he had those weapons, and Hans Blix – the head of the UN weapons inspectorate – was saying that he wanted to be given more time. The basis for going to war was the threat that he posed. The combination of not giving the weapons inspectors more time, and then the weapons not being found, I think for a lot of people it led to a catastrophic loss of trust for us, and we do need to draw a line under it... History will judge the outcomes for Iraq and that is important, but I think it is just clear to me because we went to war on a particular basis and when that basis turned out not to be correct even apart from the people that were against the war in the first place, that caused a big loss of trust for us: what I am not saying is that the war was undertaken for the wrong motives but what I am very clear about is what my position was at the time and the way I look at it in retrospect."
I've read that statement about 20 times, and I still have no idea what it means. There are too many caveats for it to say anything. Oh, and as for charisma? Winston Chruchill, he is not. Christ, Ken Livingston he is not.
To win the Labour leadership and then the country, a Labour leadership candidate needs to have the balls to stand up and say "We were wrong on Civil Liberties. We were wrong on Iraq." He or she needs to be unequivocal on issues, rather than running scared from the Daily Mail hate brigade. That is how to win back the five million voters who have deserted Labour since 1997.
On Policy, he is a disaster. Ed Miliband has ditched Labour's manifesto commitment to a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax rises, and has hinted he would prefer a 50:50 split. He hinted. In a campaign to be leader of the opposition. Wow. Bold.
This also means he is dumping the the manifesto that he himself wrote two months ago. Intellectually consistent.
Who? Oh, that other one who isn't a Milliband
Andy Burnham is a non-candidate. His campaign, masterminded by the unlikely combination of the former head of the Freight transport association (that's the Trucker vote in the bag!) and invincible poison dwarf Hazel Blears, consists of repeated assertions of the blandest nature. My favourite, when asked about Andy's vision, Blears responded "Andy [Burnham] believes in fairness". Who doesn't believe in fairness? (1) I mean really?
As for vision, get this from Burnham: "I can give the Labour Party something the Tories don't have: a leader that people can relate to . . . a people person." Well, that's a big idea, isn't it! As a Tory, I am literally quaking in my boots.
You know, I don't think I would mind a field of all Oxbridge candidates so much if they had a single original, intelligent idea between them. They are all well-educated, intelligent people... but the best they can do is "I am a people person".
The Front-runner - David Milliband
The final and most likely candidate for the Labour Leadership is David Milliband.
But the Tories & Jack Straw have planted a massive bomb under his candidacy. As foreign secretary, Milliband consistently denied to Parliament that rendition occurred, yet, curiously, denied a public enquiry into the matter. After having his attempted cover up been defeated in the Court of Appeal - Miliband even had the front to welcome the decision - it was established beyond doubt that the UK knew that Binyam Mohammed was being tortured by the USA.
The truth about the government's complicity in torture is becoming established beyond doubt. David Cameron has announced there will be an inquiry into British (read:Labour) government complicity in torture. According to the first tranche of government documents released yesterday, there was an overarching, ministerially approved policy to use intelligence from torture, which continued under Milliband's tenure.
The contents of these documents are truly shocking - for example, Jack Straw having been directly complicit in individuals being boiled to death in Uzbekistan. Milliband was responsible for the attempt cover up of this; the redactions of these documents and the repeated smearings of Craig Murray were carried out on his instructions.
The cynical would argue the Tory-ordered inquiry is just political point scoring - indeed, one can't help but feel it's convenient that the enquiry will start calling people just before the Labour leadership election goes to the polls. Maybe it is.
But the truth is, Milliband is the only person still standing in the Labour party with direct responsibility for the greatest shame of the Blair/Brown years - the brutal torture of hundreds of people. Milliband has said "we didn't lose the 2010 election on Iraq" - but if he's selected, (assuming he doesn't join Jack Straw on trial), then the stink of Iraq will be something Labour guarantees to carry into the 2015 election.
In short, as a Tory, I think anyone but Abbott (or Paul the Octopus) will be a positive benefit for the Tories. But oddly, I'm not happy about that.
For this week's recipe, in honour of the possibly socialist psi-horror, I've gone for Paul's favourite, Mussels...
1.) Sepp Blatter.
When asked whether Paul the Psychic Octopus could predict the result of the Labour leadership election, he replied "Predict it?! He could win it!".
This is absolutely true.
Above: How much would this picture be improved by an Octopus?
All of the candidates (apart from Diane Abbott) are absolutely awful. And none of them are psychic.
They are all creatures of the Blair years - in Abbott's words "all male, all white, all former policy wonks". The Labour party - the self-proclaimed party of the working class, the immigrant, the woman, the left - has rolled up the representation of all of its core constituencies into one ultra-token candidate: Abbott.
For a party obsessed with "fairness for all", they struggled to get someone representative and likeable on to the ballot. Even the champion of feminism, Harriet Harman, who nominated Abbott, is on record as saying she will not vote for her. Ironically, Abbott is the only one who could command mainstream support from the country, but the least likely to win within the Labour party. None of the other candidates is capable of attracting support from anyone who isn't a tribal Labour voter. None of them are credible candidates for PM.
There's also some irony in a field of candidates for the party which espouses "class war", having the most 'Ghetto' amongst them singled out by the fact that he studied English at Cambridge rather than PPE at Oxford.
That said, graduates of the Cambridge English department assure me it is "Well Ghetto".
Labour party members (not to mention the electorate) were all crying out for fresh thinking, but the four main candidates are well placed to deliver only one thing - more of the same.
Not one of them has broken free of the shackles of New Labour. Unsurprising, considering this is the first Labour leadership contest in 16 years - New Labour made these men as surely as it will now break them. Part of the reason this campaign resembles a dismal election for President of a Students Union is because of the intellectual straightjacket that Blair & Brown imposed - these people are conditioned to be minor figures. Medium sized fish in a big pond.
Balls
For Ed Balls probably (the individual mostly closely associated with the fag end of the Brown government), dumping the past was his most crucial task.
But he cannot help but be compared with Brown while he continues to defend the legacy the Brown (not Blair) government. When his strongest criticism of Brown is the unspecfic "Gordon didn't get everything right by any means and in the end he couldn't be the leader that people wanted" - it's hardly a differentiating, ringing admission of the were huge problems that culminated in an electoral defeat, is it?
When he goes on to say "what he [Gordon] did manage to do was get the Labour party to have confidence in itself, its values, its beliefs, its unity ", you can't help but see the lack of reality that bedevilled Brown.
How can he say that the dissent riddled Brown government, lurching from PR crisis to real, nightmarish, impoverishing crisis - to coup, after coup, after coup had confidence in itself? In its beliefs? In unity? It sounds very much like His Master's Voice.
Balls looks, acts and sounds like a bully. It is his reputation to such an extent that even Guardian articles begin by noting his tendency towards menace.
It's public knowledge that he has inherited the monstrous Brown negative spin machine, as personified by his chief backer, Charlie Whelan. Darker rumours suggest it was threats from this muck-raking smear bazooka that convinced left-winger John Cruddas not to stand. In the light of this, Balls reaching for the mantle of a centrist, peace-making leader is met with absolute derision.
By the way, having your thugs intimidate people doesn't help with the whole "perceived as a bully" thing, by the way, Ed.
Balls also isn't helped by the sentiment within the Labour party that his infinitely more talented wife should have stood in his stead, but he prevented her from doing so. Yes, it's true - Ed Balls is not even the best potential leader of the Labour party in his own bed.
Milliband the younger
The other Ed, Milliband, is doing his best to run the worst campaign in the history of the world. As a candidate bedevilled by accusations of nepotism, his first act was to hire Neil Kinnock's daughter as his head of campaign events. Is his slogan "Labour:Keeping it in the family since 1983"?
He's also hired useless press officer Ken Young to head his campaign. Young is famously one of the worst PRs in the world - a stock joke in the business - once wonderfully described as "omnishambolic" during his tenure as Brown's head of "gaffe monitoring and prevention.
Yes, he was head of gaffe prevention for Gordon Brown. Needless to say, he is unlikely to win any awards from PR Week for that role. He was behind everything from that youtube video on the expenses crisis to the election blowing Rochdale gaffe. Malcolm Tucker, he is not.
Still, unlike the mercenary Tucker, he's been hired because he is a Labour ultra-loyalist rather than for his competence. Notoriously, Young openly tells people that he styled his hair on Gordon Brown’s while chairman of Labour Students. It really takes class to stand out among Labour student activists as a massive loser.
Aside from the image of the campaign, and inept hires of useless staff, Milliband the younger has constantly missed open goals when offered them, with his constant unwillingness to commit to actually saying anything.
On Gay Marriage: "As someone who is liberal on social issues, I will listen to what people have to say on going further if there is a demand". What does that mean? Nothing. Analyse it - if there is a demand, I will listen to people. How is THAT radical? If people say things, I will listen to them. That isn't a political pledge, it's a basic social skill.
On Civil Liberties: "I accept that in government we were too draconian on some aspects of our civil liberties" Specifics? No. Where's the vision, Ed?
On Iraq: "As we all know, the basis for going to war was on the basis of Saddam's threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and therefore that is why I felt the weapons inspectors should have been given more time to find out whether he had those weapons, and Hans Blix – the head of the UN weapons inspectorate – was saying that he wanted to be given more time. The basis for going to war was the threat that he posed. The combination of not giving the weapons inspectors more time, and then the weapons not being found, I think for a lot of people it led to a catastrophic loss of trust for us, and we do need to draw a line under it... History will judge the outcomes for Iraq and that is important, but I think it is just clear to me because we went to war on a particular basis and when that basis turned out not to be correct even apart from the people that were against the war in the first place, that caused a big loss of trust for us: what I am not saying is that the war was undertaken for the wrong motives but what I am very clear about is what my position was at the time and the way I look at it in retrospect."
I've read that statement about 20 times, and I still have no idea what it means. There are too many caveats for it to say anything. Oh, and as for charisma? Winston Chruchill, he is not. Christ, Ken Livingston he is not.
To win the Labour leadership and then the country, a Labour leadership candidate needs to have the balls to stand up and say "We were wrong on Civil Liberties. We were wrong on Iraq." He or she needs to be unequivocal on issues, rather than running scared from the Daily Mail hate brigade. That is how to win back the five million voters who have deserted Labour since 1997.
On Policy, he is a disaster. Ed Miliband has ditched Labour's manifesto commitment to a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax rises, and has hinted he would prefer a 50:50 split. He hinted. In a campaign to be leader of the opposition. Wow. Bold.
This also means he is dumping the the manifesto that he himself wrote two months ago. Intellectually consistent.
Who? Oh, that other one who isn't a Milliband
Andy Burnham is a non-candidate. His campaign, masterminded by the unlikely combination of the former head of the Freight transport association (that's the Trucker vote in the bag!) and invincible poison dwarf Hazel Blears, consists of repeated assertions of the blandest nature. My favourite, when asked about Andy's vision, Blears responded "Andy [Burnham] believes in fairness". Who doesn't believe in fairness? (1) I mean really?
As for vision, get this from Burnham: "I can give the Labour Party something the Tories don't have: a leader that people can relate to . . . a people person." Well, that's a big idea, isn't it! As a Tory, I am literally quaking in my boots.
You know, I don't think I would mind a field of all Oxbridge candidates so much if they had a single original, intelligent idea between them. They are all well-educated, intelligent people... but the best they can do is "I am a people person".
The Front-runner - David Milliband
The final and most likely candidate for the Labour Leadership is David Milliband.
But the Tories & Jack Straw have planted a massive bomb under his candidacy. As foreign secretary, Milliband consistently denied to Parliament that rendition occurred, yet, curiously, denied a public enquiry into the matter. After having his attempted cover up been defeated in the Court of Appeal - Miliband even had the front to welcome the decision - it was established beyond doubt that the UK knew that Binyam Mohammed was being tortured by the USA.
The truth about the government's complicity in torture is becoming established beyond doubt. David Cameron has announced there will be an inquiry into British (read:Labour) government complicity in torture. According to the first tranche of government documents released yesterday, there was an overarching, ministerially approved policy to use intelligence from torture, which continued under Milliband's tenure.
The contents of these documents are truly shocking - for example, Jack Straw having been directly complicit in individuals being boiled to death in Uzbekistan. Milliband was responsible for the attempt cover up of this; the redactions of these documents and the repeated smearings of Craig Murray were carried out on his instructions.
The cynical would argue the Tory-ordered inquiry is just political point scoring - indeed, one can't help but feel it's convenient that the enquiry will start calling people just before the Labour leadership election goes to the polls. Maybe it is.
But the truth is, Milliband is the only person still standing in the Labour party with direct responsibility for the greatest shame of the Blair/Brown years - the brutal torture of hundreds of people. Milliband has said "we didn't lose the 2010 election on Iraq" - but if he's selected, (assuming he doesn't join Jack Straw on trial), then the stink of Iraq will be something Labour guarantees to carry into the 2015 election.
In short, as a Tory, I think anyone but Abbott (or Paul the Octopus) will be a positive benefit for the Tories. But oddly, I'm not happy about that.
For this week's recipe, in honour of the possibly socialist psi-horror, I've gone for Paul's favourite, Mussels...
1.) Sepp Blatter.
Mussels ala Psi-Octopus
I can't guarantee this recipe will give you psychic powers, but it is delicious.
Serves: 4 as a main course, 8 as a starter
Cooking and preparation
Prep time: 10-30 minutes, depending on the cleanliness of the mussels - the more filth and barnacles, the longer it takes.
Cooking time: less than 10 minutes
Cost: Ironically, this is much more at the Orwell price bracket than the Hemingway one. I can usually get everything in it for about a tenner. This not their reputation - one of my most socialist friends seeing me ordering Mussels in a bar once, and saying "Mussels! My god, you're so Bourgeois!".
In fact, Mussels used to have a reputation as the poor man's shellfish. Mussels are cheap and plentiful. In the wild (i.e. near my home town) they grow on coastline rocks and stones but they are also farmed these days. Farmed mussels will often have much more unpleasant beards - make sure you clean them thoroughly.
Farmed Mussels are one of the most environmentally sound types of seafood. Mussels are incredibly abundant, and even when farmed have a positive impact on their beds. Delicious, cheap and environmentally sound...surely not!
Orwell would approve:)
Odd Equipment: A large, heavy based pan. I'm lucky enough to own a giant le creuset pot, which does this perfectly. If you haven't got a pan of sufficent size, it is better to do the mussels in batches than try to cram them in.
Ingredients
4 pints of mussels (about a kilo)
drizzle olive oil
2 shallots, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
150ml/2½ fl oz dry white wine
handful of parsley, chopped
crusty bread, to serve
Cooking Method
1. Clean and debeard the mussels.
I tend to clean my mussels in a colander, under cold water, removing tenacious barnacles with a knife. The "beard" is the ropey film which emerges from the shell. It should come away with a little force when pulled.
If any mussels are opened, tap them lightly on a hard surface. If they don't close, get rid of them. I cannot stress how important it is to do this right. If you're not 100% sure on a mussel, discard it. Shellfish poisoning (while the most effective weight loss plan I have ever discovered) is absolutely hideous.
2. Heat the olive oil in a wide, heavy-based pan. Add the shallots and garlic and cook until softened, but not browned. You can substitute shallots for onions if you're super-poor, or a massive luddite, but the extra sharpness of the shallots really adds to this dish.
3. Add the wine to the pan and boil for a minute or so to burn off the alcohol. The quality of the wine doesn't really matter - I tend to use the kind of wine with slogans like "Mladić: The Serbian wine nurtured in the refreshing winds of the Chernobyl Plateau", but obviously drinkable wine can make the cooking process more enjoyable...
4. Add the mussels to the pan. Add most of the chopped parsley, cover the pan with a lid (use a plate as a makeshift lid if you don't have pots with lids) and cook the mussels for about 3-4 minutes, giving the pan a shake from time to time. The mussels are cooked when they've opened up. Be sure to discard any that don't open.
5. Sprinkle in the remaining parsley, then spoon the mussels into a serving bowl. Pour over the cooking liquid and serve with some crusty bread.
I recommend dispensing with cutlery and using your first mussel as a rudimentary form of tongs. It certainly makes things more fun!
Serving to the perma-tanned nephew of a Labour front bencher is obviously optional, but can enhance the experience...
Serves: 4 as a main course, 8 as a starter
Cooking and preparation
Prep time: 10-30 minutes, depending on the cleanliness of the mussels - the more filth and barnacles, the longer it takes.
Cooking time: less than 10 minutes
Cost: Ironically, this is much more at the Orwell price bracket than the Hemingway one. I can usually get everything in it for about a tenner. This not their reputation - one of my most socialist friends seeing me ordering Mussels in a bar once, and saying "Mussels! My god, you're so Bourgeois!".
In fact, Mussels used to have a reputation as the poor man's shellfish. Mussels are cheap and plentiful. In the wild (i.e. near my home town) they grow on coastline rocks and stones but they are also farmed these days. Farmed mussels will often have much more unpleasant beards - make sure you clean them thoroughly.
Farmed Mussels are one of the most environmentally sound types of seafood. Mussels are incredibly abundant, and even when farmed have a positive impact on their beds. Delicious, cheap and environmentally sound...surely not!
Orwell would approve:)
Odd Equipment: A large, heavy based pan. I'm lucky enough to own a giant le creuset pot, which does this perfectly. If you haven't got a pan of sufficent size, it is better to do the mussels in batches than try to cram them in.
Ingredients
4 pints of mussels (about a kilo)
drizzle olive oil
2 shallots, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
150ml/2½ fl oz dry white wine
handful of parsley, chopped
crusty bread, to serve
Cooking Method
1. Clean and debeard the mussels.
I tend to clean my mussels in a colander, under cold water, removing tenacious barnacles with a knife. The "beard" is the ropey film which emerges from the shell. It should come away with a little force when pulled.
If any mussels are opened, tap them lightly on a hard surface. If they don't close, get rid of them. I cannot stress how important it is to do this right. If you're not 100% sure on a mussel, discard it. Shellfish poisoning (while the most effective weight loss plan I have ever discovered) is absolutely hideous.
2. Heat the olive oil in a wide, heavy-based pan. Add the shallots and garlic and cook until softened, but not browned. You can substitute shallots for onions if you're super-poor, or a massive luddite, but the extra sharpness of the shallots really adds to this dish.
3. Add the wine to the pan and boil for a minute or so to burn off the alcohol. The quality of the wine doesn't really matter - I tend to use the kind of wine with slogans like "Mladić: The Serbian wine nurtured in the refreshing winds of the Chernobyl Plateau", but obviously drinkable wine can make the cooking process more enjoyable...
4. Add the mussels to the pan. Add most of the chopped parsley, cover the pan with a lid (use a plate as a makeshift lid if you don't have pots with lids) and cook the mussels for about 3-4 minutes, giving the pan a shake from time to time. The mussels are cooked when they've opened up. Be sure to discard any that don't open.
5. Sprinkle in the remaining parsley, then spoon the mussels into a serving bowl. Pour over the cooking liquid and serve with some crusty bread.
I recommend dispensing with cutlery and using your first mussel as a rudimentary form of tongs. It certainly makes things more fun!
Serving to the perma-tanned nephew of a Labour front bencher is obviously optional, but can enhance the experience...
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Big Society Cake
Hi all,
I've got ten minutes while I wait for a friend to stop round, so I figure I may as well share the recipe for Big Society Cake. If you haven't read my post on the Big Society, please read it here
Why do I call this Big Society Cake?
Well, thereby hangs a tale. The recipe originally comes from an excellent BBC television show, The Delicious Miss Dahl, which was presented by the daughter of another one of my literary heroes.
The recipe as written was pretty good, but my girlfriend took it and improved it no end by using her initiative. Hence, state provides a decent minimum standard, entrepreneurial individuals improve on that provision - Big Society Cake.
Of course, if we provided everyone with this sort of recipe, an Obesity crisis would ruin the UK - much like Big Society, you cannot live by this cake alone!
Big Society Cake
Invented Sophie Dahl, modified by KD Reid, named & reported by WB Foxton.
Preparation time: less than 30 mins
Cooking time: 30 mins to 1 hour
Makes 1 cake
Unusual Required Tools:
2 9" circular baking tins, some sort of blender/whisk thing.
Ingredients
For the cake:
300g plain chocolate, broken into pieces
225g caster sugar
175ml boiling water
225g unsalted butter, cut into cubes, plus extra for greasing
6 free-range eggs, separated
1 tsp instant coffee powder
2 tsp vanilla extract
For the filling & topping:
A tub of crème fraîche
A medium punnet of Strawberrys
A couple of handfuls of Blueberries
How to Cook:
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
For the cake, grease the base of both baking tins with butter. A thin coating will do.
Break the chocolate into small pieces and add the sugar. Add the boiling water until the sugar and chocolate have formed into a delicious brown ooze. Then blend in the butter, egg yolks, coffee powder and vanilla extract. You really need to blend them well - until they have really combined.
In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff peaks form when the whisk is removed, then, using a metal spoon, gently fold into the chocolate mixture. You use a metal spoon because wooden spoons absorb the moisture too much.
Pour 1/2 the mixture into each prepared cake tin and bake for 45-55 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.
Remove the cakes from the oven and allow to cool in the tin, then transfer to the fridge for 2-3 hours.
To serve, one of the cakes from its tin and place on a serving plate.
Then spread half the crème fraîche on top, then add enough thinly sliced strawberries to largely cover the top of the cake. This cake will form the base of the finished creation.
Carefully remove the other cake from its tin, and place it on top of the lower layer. This is the dangerous bit, requiring the dexterity of Indiana Jones disarming a Mayan trap. The cake has a lovely dense texture (because it lacks flour) but is not the strongest baked good you'll ever see.
However, bitter experience tells me it is delicious even if dropped or broken!
Then use the other half of the crème fraîche to top the cake, and decorate it with halved strawberries and handfuls of Blueberries.
I actually made one of these for my work colleagues this week, but sadly, they ate it before I could take a photograph! Much like the idea of the Big Society, it will have to remain a promise rather than something you can immediately visualise.
Hope you enjoy it!
Willard
Some subsequent notes & corrections from the lady herself:
As you're stealing my recipe I think its only fair that I get to make a couple of corrections. Firstly, you need to grease the sides of the tin not just the base.
Secondly, you add all the ingredients bar the eggs to the chocolate sugar and water then blend it, add the egg yolks blend more, then fold in the whisked egg whites. And finally, don't leave the cake to cool in the tin put it on a wire rack, or a plate.
Oh and don't transfer it to the fridge if you're serving straight away. That's only if you make it the night before.
I've got ten minutes while I wait for a friend to stop round, so I figure I may as well share the recipe for Big Society Cake. If you haven't read my post on the Big Society, please read it here
Why do I call this Big Society Cake?
Well, thereby hangs a tale. The recipe originally comes from an excellent BBC television show, The Delicious Miss Dahl, which was presented by the daughter of another one of my literary heroes.
The recipe as written was pretty good, but my girlfriend took it and improved it no end by using her initiative. Hence, state provides a decent minimum standard, entrepreneurial individuals improve on that provision - Big Society Cake.
Of course, if we provided everyone with this sort of recipe, an Obesity crisis would ruin the UK - much like Big Society, you cannot live by this cake alone!
Big Society Cake
Invented Sophie Dahl, modified by KD Reid, named & reported by WB Foxton.
Preparation time: less than 30 mins
Cooking time: 30 mins to 1 hour
Makes 1 cake
Unusual Required Tools:
2 9" circular baking tins, some sort of blender/whisk thing.
Ingredients
For the cake:
300g plain chocolate, broken into pieces
225g caster sugar
175ml boiling water
225g unsalted butter, cut into cubes, plus extra for greasing
6 free-range eggs, separated
1 tsp instant coffee powder
2 tsp vanilla extract
For the filling & topping:
A tub of crème fraîche
A medium punnet of Strawberrys
A couple of handfuls of Blueberries
How to Cook:
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
For the cake, grease the base of both baking tins with butter. A thin coating will do.
Break the chocolate into small pieces and add the sugar. Add the boiling water until the sugar and chocolate have formed into a delicious brown ooze. Then blend in the butter, egg yolks, coffee powder and vanilla extract. You really need to blend them well - until they have really combined.
In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff peaks form when the whisk is removed, then, using a metal spoon, gently fold into the chocolate mixture. You use a metal spoon because wooden spoons absorb the moisture too much.
Pour 1/2 the mixture into each prepared cake tin and bake for 45-55 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.
Remove the cakes from the oven and allow to cool in the tin, then transfer to the fridge for 2-3 hours.
To serve, one of the cakes from its tin and place on a serving plate.
Then spread half the crème fraîche on top, then add enough thinly sliced strawberries to largely cover the top of the cake. This cake will form the base of the finished creation.
Carefully remove the other cake from its tin, and place it on top of the lower layer. This is the dangerous bit, requiring the dexterity of Indiana Jones disarming a Mayan trap. The cake has a lovely dense texture (because it lacks flour) but is not the strongest baked good you'll ever see.
However, bitter experience tells me it is delicious even if dropped or broken!
Then use the other half of the crème fraîche to top the cake, and decorate it with halved strawberries and handfuls of Blueberries.
I actually made one of these for my work colleagues this week, but sadly, they ate it before I could take a photograph! Much like the idea of the Big Society, it will have to remain a promise rather than something you can immediately visualise.
Hope you enjoy it!
Willard
Some subsequent notes & corrections from the lady herself:
As you're stealing my recipe I think its only fair that I get to make a couple of corrections. Firstly, you need to grease the sides of the tin not just the base.
Secondly, you add all the ingredients bar the eggs to the chocolate sugar and water then blend it, add the egg yolks blend more, then fold in the whisked egg whites. And finally, don't leave the cake to cool in the tin put it on a wire rack, or a plate.
Oh and don't transfer it to the fridge if you're serving straight away. That's only if you make it the night before.
Friday, 9 July 2010
Big Society
I was talking to a friend recently who moved to San Francisco. He was mentioning that he's not only missed the new Chris Morris film, but also had missed the Election. I was forced to admit that, in retrospect, he hadn't missed much.
At the time, I was caught in something of a mad Tory frenzy - I was out campaigning for candidates, writing daily electorally themed facebook statuses, posting comments on blogs, reading article after article - I had never been so politically involved or enthused in my life.
But, after lots of hot air and speculation and excitement, it was pretty much the result you could have predicted from the minute Alistair Darling admitted we were economy-fucked and then Labour tried to destroy him over telling the turth - i.e. a divided Labour party running a campaign largely rooted in smears & fantasy, which would make them lose the election.
Note, I say Labour lost the election, not that the Tories won it. It's clear that despite the inequities of the current electoral system, which favours Labour to an unpleasant degree, that the overall result of the poll was a solid rejection of Labour, but no embrace of the Tories. Why?
Well, lots of my Tory friends - the tweed wearing, hunting, shooting types - tell me "it was down to that Big Society nonsense - didn't play well on the doorstep - by the way, Pass the Brandy old boy..." Really? This mantra is taking hold in the Tory Blogosphere and most of the left has held the policy in contempt since it was announced, characterising it as an attempt to hide cuts behind a charitable mask.
Even the parliamentary party has come out against the big society, with Health Secretary Andrew Lansley attacking the man who should be the poster boy for the Big Society, Jamie Oliver.
In my opinion, this is a bloody stupid thing to do - and not just because triple-chinned, sallow-skinned goon Lansley looks like he could use a few days on an all salad diet himself.
Above:Goon
Oliver's entrepreneurial spirit and drive in trying to help the community was what Big Society was all about. Oliver was successful at exposing the failures of the monolithic state sector - in proving that a philanthropic individual could make a difference.
If you analyse "Jamie's School Dinners" as a project, it successfully delivered the goal of low-cost, highly nutritious meals - and it engaged teams of local, hard-working ambassadors to make it happen, rather than a top-down, government driven bureaucratic system. It harnessed methods of persuasion seemingly alien to politicians in this day and age - humour, cunning & genuine interaction with the public. Surely this is the sort of thing we as Tories should be promoting, not rejecting and ridiculing?
The aftermath of the project is that the schools involved have found their children performed better academically after eating nutritious meals. The overall numbers of children taking school dinners has gone up. Of course, one TV show is never going to change the world, but Oliver did a bloody good job and should serve as a model for future projects on that basis.
The article I linked to give you an idea of how the left sees big society - Johann Hari's superb polemic "Welcome to Cameronland" - was probably the best article to be produced in the general election. It hurt us, badly. I must have spoken to 40 or 50 people who told me it persuaded them at the last minute to vote Labour and not Tory.
In my social group, it put even the hardened Tories on the back foot. Was this what we meant to do? Were we really campaigning for pregnant women to sleep on dirty mattresses under bridges and children's playing fields to be turned into Polo fields? Most simply denied the truth of the article.
Is it untrue? Certainly, it's a Polemic. My girlfriend lives next door to the playing fields in question, and they were only closed off for Polo for two weeks -in return for a vast investment in the area by the hurlingham club - both facts the article would find it inconvenient to mention. Also, the football pitches and children's playgrounds weren't fenced off - another inconvenient truth.
But, having volunteered with homeless charities for years, the story of the pregnant woman forced to sleep rough resonated with me. It's almost certainly true. But I could find you an equivalent of that woman in practically any urban borough in the country.
The truth is, that story represents the state's abject failure to tackle or even attempt to understand the problems of the homeless. I can promise you that if state run shelters had been available, it would have been a miracle if the woman had been allowed in. They are not well run, and they are frequently trapped in a kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare.
I can give you an equally horrific story from my own experience - while volunteering for the Big Issue in Bristol, I saw a council chief luring homeless people off the streets with a promise of free booze on the night of a rough sleepers audit.Councils, regardless of political affiliation care about things like targets. For the record, the last London rough sleepers audit counted 67 rough sleepers in London.
I would guess based on the fact that I usually see 3-4 different people sleeping rough in St.James Park every morning on my way to work, that the figure is about 10-20 times too low. No Londoner can hear that figure with a straight face. The state -not Downing street, but Local councils - has an interest in concealing the true number. Incidentally, what is the state response to the rough sleepers in St.James?
Every morning, a team of four policemen combs the park for rough sleepers and moves them on. Caring, and hardly an efficient use of resources.
Also, it's worth reading what a Labour MP and Lib Dem council did to homeless people in Cambridge a while ago; and the spectacularly evil Lib Dem council in Inverness - who shut down a homeless shelter claiming it cost too much to run, then announced an increase to the budget for New Year's fireworks to the same amount it cost to keep the shelter over for a year.
Homeless people not a big vote winner (like fireworks). They are not taxpayers. They do not vote. But, if we create a culture which says "the state should deal with it", we simultaneously screw the homeless and create an environment where no-one feels the need to act. And it is the same with many other social problems.
We need to enable voluntary organisations to tackle these social problems. Time and time again, we can see that charities and social businesses just do the job better than the state. The Big Issue doesn't have to worry about re-election, about the competing pressure of the Rubbish collection budget, about nimby-ism - that is why it achieves a success rate something in the order of 20 times higher than government programmes to reduce homelessness.
Of course, Big Society is not the answer to everything - the state needs to step in some times, needs to provide a safety net. But The essence of Big Society is that government, the state, is just not very good at solving social problems. David Cameron was right to include it at the heart of the election campaign - it's an idea we have to prove to the public if we want to be taken seriously as a party in these socially aware times.
At the time, I was caught in something of a mad Tory frenzy - I was out campaigning for candidates, writing daily electorally themed facebook statuses, posting comments on blogs, reading article after article - I had never been so politically involved or enthused in my life.
But, after lots of hot air and speculation and excitement, it was pretty much the result you could have predicted from the minute Alistair Darling admitted we were economy-fucked and then Labour tried to destroy him over telling the turth - i.e. a divided Labour party running a campaign largely rooted in smears & fantasy, which would make them lose the election.
Note, I say Labour lost the election, not that the Tories won it. It's clear that despite the inequities of the current electoral system, which favours Labour to an unpleasant degree, that the overall result of the poll was a solid rejection of Labour, but no embrace of the Tories. Why?
Well, lots of my Tory friends - the tweed wearing, hunting, shooting types - tell me "it was down to that Big Society nonsense - didn't play well on the doorstep - by the way, Pass the Brandy old boy..." Really? This mantra is taking hold in the Tory Blogosphere and most of the left has held the policy in contempt since it was announced, characterising it as an attempt to hide cuts behind a charitable mask.
Even the parliamentary party has come out against the big society, with Health Secretary Andrew Lansley attacking the man who should be the poster boy for the Big Society, Jamie Oliver.
In my opinion, this is a bloody stupid thing to do - and not just because triple-chinned, sallow-skinned goon Lansley looks like he could use a few days on an all salad diet himself.
Above:Goon
Oliver's entrepreneurial spirit and drive in trying to help the community was what Big Society was all about. Oliver was successful at exposing the failures of the monolithic state sector - in proving that a philanthropic individual could make a difference.
If you analyse "Jamie's School Dinners" as a project, it successfully delivered the goal of low-cost, highly nutritious meals - and it engaged teams of local, hard-working ambassadors to make it happen, rather than a top-down, government driven bureaucratic system. It harnessed methods of persuasion seemingly alien to politicians in this day and age - humour, cunning & genuine interaction with the public. Surely this is the sort of thing we as Tories should be promoting, not rejecting and ridiculing?
The aftermath of the project is that the schools involved have found their children performed better academically after eating nutritious meals. The overall numbers of children taking school dinners has gone up. Of course, one TV show is never going to change the world, but Oliver did a bloody good job and should serve as a model for future projects on that basis.
The article I linked to give you an idea of how the left sees big society - Johann Hari's superb polemic "Welcome to Cameronland" - was probably the best article to be produced in the general election. It hurt us, badly. I must have spoken to 40 or 50 people who told me it persuaded them at the last minute to vote Labour and not Tory.
In my social group, it put even the hardened Tories on the back foot. Was this what we meant to do? Were we really campaigning for pregnant women to sleep on dirty mattresses under bridges and children's playing fields to be turned into Polo fields? Most simply denied the truth of the article.
Is it untrue? Certainly, it's a Polemic. My girlfriend lives next door to the playing fields in question, and they were only closed off for Polo for two weeks -in return for a vast investment in the area by the hurlingham club - both facts the article would find it inconvenient to mention. Also, the football pitches and children's playgrounds weren't fenced off - another inconvenient truth.
But, having volunteered with homeless charities for years, the story of the pregnant woman forced to sleep rough resonated with me. It's almost certainly true. But I could find you an equivalent of that woman in practically any urban borough in the country.
The truth is, that story represents the state's abject failure to tackle or even attempt to understand the problems of the homeless. I can promise you that if state run shelters had been available, it would have been a miracle if the woman had been allowed in. They are not well run, and they are frequently trapped in a kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare.
I can give you an equally horrific story from my own experience - while volunteering for the Big Issue in Bristol, I saw a council chief luring homeless people off the streets with a promise of free booze on the night of a rough sleepers audit.Councils, regardless of political affiliation care about things like targets. For the record, the last London rough sleepers audit counted 67 rough sleepers in London.
I would guess based on the fact that I usually see 3-4 different people sleeping rough in St.James Park every morning on my way to work, that the figure is about 10-20 times too low. No Londoner can hear that figure with a straight face. The state -not Downing street, but Local councils - has an interest in concealing the true number. Incidentally, what is the state response to the rough sleepers in St.James?
Every morning, a team of four policemen combs the park for rough sleepers and moves them on. Caring, and hardly an efficient use of resources.
Also, it's worth reading what a Labour MP and Lib Dem council did to homeless people in Cambridge a while ago; and the spectacularly evil Lib Dem council in Inverness - who shut down a homeless shelter claiming it cost too much to run, then announced an increase to the budget for New Year's fireworks to the same amount it cost to keep the shelter over for a year.
Homeless people not a big vote winner (like fireworks). They are not taxpayers. They do not vote. But, if we create a culture which says "the state should deal with it", we simultaneously screw the homeless and create an environment where no-one feels the need to act. And it is the same with many other social problems.
We need to enable voluntary organisations to tackle these social problems. Time and time again, we can see that charities and social businesses just do the job better than the state. The Big Issue doesn't have to worry about re-election, about the competing pressure of the Rubbish collection budget, about nimby-ism - that is why it achieves a success rate something in the order of 20 times higher than government programmes to reduce homelessness.
Of course, Big Society is not the answer to everything - the state needs to step in some times, needs to provide a safety net. But The essence of Big Society is that government, the state, is just not very good at solving social problems. David Cameron was right to include it at the heart of the election campaign - it's an idea we have to prove to the public if we want to be taken seriously as a party in these socially aware times.
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Strange Days
We live in a pretty odd time, don't we?
To Kill a Mockingbird is under attack by leading thinkers for being racist, at the same time that Atlas Shrugged enjoys record sales levels. Black is white, white is black.
The other day, a Tory Minister for Justice declared that we lock up far too many people, at the same time that his Labour opposite number appeared in the Daily Mail to say that Prison works perfectly and he proved it. So, right is now left.
The most popular toy for Christmas this year isn't anything real - not like the Action men I played with as a kid, or anything wholly fictional, like the Transformers - it's a Postmodern pastiche of what Toys are like, Jetpack Buzz Lightyear. At the same time, an artist has hung a fighter jet in an Art Gallery and said "It's Art", taking the concept of the readymade to a new extreme. So, art is becoming life and life is art.
All of this stuff, this contradiction, absolutely blows my mind but simultaneously seems totally normal. In some ways, this blog is about contradiction. For a long time, I've described myself as a feminist, multi-culturalist, liberal Tory. I feel myself getting pulled this way and that way by beliefs that I hold to be completely coherent.
In the last week, I've been accused of "being far too left wing to be a Tory" by a Intellectual Property Lawyer, and simultaneously "so right wing you're actually, definably evil" by a Genealogist, for expressing the same view.
So, I guess this blog is going to be about my political beliefs, and why they make sense. It's also going to be a way for me to regularly comment on the political happenings of the day. Oh, and there will be cooking & restaurant reviews too. Hence the strapline.
What? Cooking!? Well, partly it's to emphasise the contradictory nature of the blog - you might look on here for a passionate rant about why feminism is great (written by me, a man), only to find a recipe for Chocolate cake. Of course, real feminists won't mind, because all girls love Chocolate Cake. (This is a joke)
I suppose there's only one question left to answer: Why is the blog called Hemingway & Orwell's kitchen?
Well, first off, Hemingway & Orwell are my two favourite writers. One was a macho man's man, who loved hunting, shooting, and himself - the other a sensitive, urbane consumptive, who feared & cared for the whole of society. Orwell died from his lungs giving out at 46, surrounded by his friends and family - Hemingway died alone, by shooting himself with an elephant gun so spectacularly powerful his teeth were found stuck in a ceiling three floor up from the room he did it in. More contradictions.
But there were fascinating parallels, too. Both hated fascism before it became fashionable to do so; Hemingway covered the Spanish civil war Orwell fought in. Both were poor in Paris in the 1920s; Orwell's idea of poverty was having to sell his clothes so he and his starving Russian emigre housemate could buy a loaf of bread, while Hemingway's was being so poor he could only afford cheap wine & had to share car journeys with F.Scott Fitzgerald. Both wrote by having adventures and then writing down what happened. Both loved clarity of language.
I admire them both, suffice to say. I guess I'm writing what I hope they'd enjoy reading (1). And I hope you enjoy it too.
1.) Although, I suspect Hemingway would consider my environmentalism & commitment to feminism deeply unmanly, and probably shoot me, while Orwell would probably hate me for my reactionary views, and make cutting comments about me to Evelyn Waugh at swish parties. Sigh, I just can't win, can I?
To Kill a Mockingbird is under attack by leading thinkers for being racist, at the same time that Atlas Shrugged enjoys record sales levels. Black is white, white is black.
The other day, a Tory Minister for Justice declared that we lock up far too many people, at the same time that his Labour opposite number appeared in the Daily Mail to say that Prison works perfectly and he proved it. So, right is now left.
The most popular toy for Christmas this year isn't anything real - not like the Action men I played with as a kid, or anything wholly fictional, like the Transformers - it's a Postmodern pastiche of what Toys are like, Jetpack Buzz Lightyear. At the same time, an artist has hung a fighter jet in an Art Gallery and said "It's Art", taking the concept of the readymade to a new extreme. So, art is becoming life and life is art.
All of this stuff, this contradiction, absolutely blows my mind but simultaneously seems totally normal. In some ways, this blog is about contradiction. For a long time, I've described myself as a feminist, multi-culturalist, liberal Tory. I feel myself getting pulled this way and that way by beliefs that I hold to be completely coherent.
In the last week, I've been accused of "being far too left wing to be a Tory" by a Intellectual Property Lawyer, and simultaneously "so right wing you're actually, definably evil" by a Genealogist, for expressing the same view.
So, I guess this blog is going to be about my political beliefs, and why they make sense. It's also going to be a way for me to regularly comment on the political happenings of the day. Oh, and there will be cooking & restaurant reviews too. Hence the strapline.
What? Cooking!? Well, partly it's to emphasise the contradictory nature of the blog - you might look on here for a passionate rant about why feminism is great (written by me, a man), only to find a recipe for Chocolate cake. Of course, real feminists won't mind, because all girls love Chocolate Cake. (This is a joke)
I suppose there's only one question left to answer: Why is the blog called Hemingway & Orwell's kitchen?
Well, first off, Hemingway & Orwell are my two favourite writers. One was a macho man's man, who loved hunting, shooting, and himself - the other a sensitive, urbane consumptive, who feared & cared for the whole of society. Orwell died from his lungs giving out at 46, surrounded by his friends and family - Hemingway died alone, by shooting himself with an elephant gun so spectacularly powerful his teeth were found stuck in a ceiling three floor up from the room he did it in. More contradictions.
But there were fascinating parallels, too. Both hated fascism before it became fashionable to do so; Hemingway covered the Spanish civil war Orwell fought in. Both were poor in Paris in the 1920s; Orwell's idea of poverty was having to sell his clothes so he and his starving Russian emigre housemate could buy a loaf of bread, while Hemingway's was being so poor he could only afford cheap wine & had to share car journeys with F.Scott Fitzgerald. Both wrote by having adventures and then writing down what happened. Both loved clarity of language.
I admire them both, suffice to say. I guess I'm writing what I hope they'd enjoy reading (1). And I hope you enjoy it too.
1.) Although, I suspect Hemingway would consider my environmentalism & commitment to feminism deeply unmanly, and probably shoot me, while Orwell would probably hate me for my reactionary views, and make cutting comments about me to Evelyn Waugh at swish parties. Sigh, I just can't win, can I?
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