Boat race protestor Trenton Oldfield was way off-course

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Sad thing is, there were any number of vessels in front of which Trenton Oldfield could have swum this year and been able to count on my whole-hearted support.

Had he waited until the summer Parliamentary recess, he could have intercepted the lilo/dinghy/inflatable banana of just about any holidaying MP known to have voted both for war in Iraq and an end to university grants, given him or her a right dunking in the process and I would have gladly held his towel for him.

There are your villains in your fight against elitism, Mr Oldfield: the people who ensured that we have money for the  pursuit of military folly but not for educating our young, thus betraying a generation and nudging higher education a little nearer to that wretched place where it is less about talent and more about the size of Daddy’s wallet.

Instead of attacking the system at its heart, sadly, you went to its fringes and in doing so inflicted purely collateral damage. I’m no expert where rowing is concerned and the University Boat Race leaves me utterly cold as a spectacle but I suspect its 18 participants last Saturday are beyond reproach where graft and commitment are concerned. What’s more, the message you received from one of them afterwards – a masterpiece of controlled derision – probably speaks volumes as to their average IQ.

Or did you know better about the worth of these young people before you took it upon yourself to mar what should have been one of the highlights of their lives? Did you know for a fact that, if it was indeed an alliance of brains and money that got them to university, it was money that hadn’t been toiled for long and hard by parents for whom no sacrifice was too great?

Did you even bother to ask yourself that question, or was it purely secondary to making a name for yourself?

I don’t speak from the perch of privilege here. University will, I fear, be financially beyond my own sons, both of whom may well have thrived on the opportunity it afforded them. I hate the political priorities that bring that about but I hate what Trenton Oldfield did last Saturday even more. Partly because people who can’t see the target shouldn’t be throwing punches and partly because his little stunt ultimately achieves only one thing: affirmation that inverted snobbery is every bit as pathetic as the prototype.

Related story:

Trenton Oldfield: Boat Race protester’s privileged Australian education

New Year’s Honours and a question of tatt

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And so the race goes on, the gap between the contestants narrowing, the competition fiercer than ever.

Just what will be the next hallmark of stylish exclusivity? Not being mentioned in the Honours List, or not having a tattoo?

Hillsborough was a tragedy, not War of the Worlds

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I suppose that Spiked‘s consistent excellence mean that we were due a stinker sooner or later but Mick Hume’s article on the bigger picture behind the Hillsborough disaster still comes as something of a shock, maybe because it’s precisely the kind of breathless polemic from which Spiked normally takes a step back in search of a better perspective.

The stall is set out early in Hume’s piece…

“…the current narrow focus on the details of exactly who said and did what in Sheffield on 15 April 1989 risks missing the most important factor of all: the wider political context of the state’s war against football supporters in the 1980s”

War? With the real thing still scandalously rumbling away in Afghanistan, Hume might have picked his words more carefully but in fairness, the inadvertent hyperbole does at least fit beautifully with what follows. Football and those who despised it 20 years ago were but a metaphor for class warfare, we learn; football fans were “demonised” by media propaganda, vilified by middle-class society and used as “lab rats on whom police tried out a raft of control measures”.

On this kind of roll, you’d be disappointed if Hume didn’t have a quick stab at equating Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to transform one-man power trips into responsible trade unionism, with the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto. Fear not, he does precisely that.

“Call me a bitter old Red (in every respect),” the Manchester United supporter invites us. Nothing wrong with his mind-reading skills, then.

I think what jars most about the article is the way in which a very pertinent contemporary issue – the bereaved’s hunger for truth – is shrouded in one man’s obsession with the past. Hume indeed, may eventually look back on the following paragraph as self-absorbed condescension worthy of the very worst kind of Tory twit:

“No doubt it is understandable that the bereaved families of the 96 victims…should want every shred of evidence about how and why their loved ones died. For the rest of us, however, this should be more than a question of setting the historical record straight or naming, blaming and shaming a few guilty coppers.”

Step aside, mourners. Man with a real axe to grind coming through.

Only it’s not a real axe. It’s yesterday’s axe. One that loses its edge in the face of scrutiny.

People hated football fans in the ’70s and ’80s because some of them were violent and damaged people and property with a collective callousness that could put the fear of God into you. The truism that it was always only a minority is irrelevant – it was a minority sufficiently significant to present British society with a serious problem that required serious answers.

If it unearthed snobbery among those looking on in distaste, that was just human nature; knee-jerk embroidery on a crisis of public disorder that for so long seemed insuperable. You might expect genuine class warfare to outlive the general demise of hooliganism, yet ‘gentrification’ of football crowds has been a buzzword beloved of cod sociologists everywhere since the fences came down. Funny, that.

I stood in football crowds as Mick Hume did and came in for the same suspicion and brusque treatment from police officers. Where he and I part company is that any irritation I may have felt at the herding and post-game confinement in the visitors’ enclosure was aimed at the knuckle-draggers who’d got  us into this mess, not at the forces of law and order trying to keep a lid on it. So we were subject to a raft of control measures: would Hume have rather they hadn’t bothered?

Truth is, while the Hillsborough families’ desire just to know the full story is as fresh and urgent as it ever was, the venting that rides on its shoulders in this article is way past its sell-by date. When it comes to football, swaying crowds, baton charges and every-day-a-riot don’t live here any more: if you want the new address for Them and Us, ask an Occupier.

By the end, even the author seems to have recognised the limitations of his argument. His grand finale after 2,000 words – “…the authorities play on a different team from us.“

Well blow me down. Who knew?

Royal Ascot and a right royal moral mess

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In the archive of Justice Gone Soft, file this one in the same drawer as policemen referring to gunmen on the run as “Mister” during media interviews, or prison officers asking rooftop protestors what they would like from McDonald’s:

“Racegoers have also been offered a drugs honesty box as they enter the royal racecourse. The single white box, which sits beside a security post at the gate to Royal Ascot, tells racegoers…’Please deposit your drugs here’”  - Racing Post

If you thought Thursday’s brawl was the racing festival’s odious lowlight, I’d invite you to think again. I’m sure  this gentrification of anti-social activity, politely inviting us to drop off our dope as if it were a coat to be left at the cloakroom, wasn’t the only example of mutton dressed as lamb these last five days but it was surely the most repugnant.

Perhaps Ascot will build on this ‘initiative’ in 2012 and appoint an official drug honesty box attendant: let him know your shooting-up time in advance and he’ll have a fresh needle and heated spoon on standby. Maybe they’ll streamline the whole procedure and simply stipulate an intact nasal septum as part of the dress code.

Sadly, the least likely option is that they will come to their senses and let the law of the land do its job, instead of pandering to those who break it.

One of the ironic beauties of a conservative approach to law and order is that it occasionally allows you to be more liberal than liberals themselves. A better country than this wouldn’t dream of patronising Royal Ascot’s smackhead contingent with an honesty box, for example. It would welcome them unquestioningly onto the Heath with open arms, subject to a simple understanding.

If they are caught in possession, then by the time they’ve been reunited with their family after three months inside and contemplated a career reduced to rubble, they will rue the day their taste for white powder went beyond anything made by Johnson’s.

Hell, there’s some meaningless stuff going on in the world…

“At the 10th European Good Practice Awards, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) recognised and rewarded the outstanding contribution to safe maintenance made by eight organisations and companies from across Europe, including Bristol-based manufacturer Tarmac Quarry Materials (West Region). Part of EU-OSHA’s Healthy Workplaces Campaign on Safe Maintenance, the awards were presented at a ceremony hosted by the Hungarian Presidency of the European Union on the World Day for Safety and Health at Work (28th April).“

Now McClaren shows England’s problem may not be its manager

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So Steve McClaren may not be such an idiot after all, coaching unfashionable FC Twente to its first Dutch championship and becoming flavour of the month among rudderless clubs across Europe as a result.

Not bad for someone who unceremoniously left the England manager’s post supposedly a broken man.

But then we’ve been here before. The one drawback to the media acclamation that accompanied Bobby Robson to the grave was the knowledge, among those of us old enough to remember, that some of it came from the same scribes who pilloried him in his time as England boss.

Routinely slaughtered in that post, he was strangely good enough to win four league titles in Holland and Portugal, European trophies with Barcelona and the highly-unfashonable Ipswich Town and the European Manager of the Year award in 1997.

Graham Taylor was famously lamabasted as a turnip during his time at the England helm, yet had shown himself no mug by taking Watford from the old Fourth Division to the First in five years before transforming a relegated Aston Villa side into First Division (now Premier League) runners-up in the space of two years.

And Sven-Goran Eriksson‘s two European titles, championships in both Italy and Portugal and a handful of domestic cups counted for nothing when he was routinely second-guessed by the nation while England boss.

Now while it’s true that international football may have been a bridge too far for the abilities of Taylor and McClaren, the latter’s success in Holland is yet another reminder that the relentless lambasting and ridicule afforded to those falling short of the mark as England manager is often wholly disproportionate to their abilities.

They are hostage to England’s inflated self-worth on the international stage, as are way too many of those who follow our national team from the terraces and the press box.

There is an unholy alliance at work in the mind of an England supporter, between our inventing the game and our sole World Cup triumph, in 1966. The latter validates the former, creating a ‘Chosen One’ mentality in too many English heads and, like the golfer who regards his one sub-100 round of the year as the real him, with all the 120s that surround it mere aberrations, we persist in the belief that a 44-year-old triumph is the real us, even though the balance of power in world football has long since shifted.

Not only does this widespread delusion place the coach of the national side under ludicrous, stifling scrutiny, it also fuels the belief that if he can’t get the job done with England, he can’t get it done at all. We’re England, for God’s sake, what on earth can the problem be…?

I have a theory that the reason Fabio Capello has so far thrived in this madhouse is that his nationality and cast-iron track record as a coach help him detach himself from the clamour of its inmates. Not all are blessed with such imperious aloofness, however and when the Italian decides he really doesn’t need the hassle anymore, I fear for his successor.

I have no doubt that the last few days have seen many England supporters asking each other how the hell a wanker like Steve McClaren can win the Dutch Championship. More depressingly, I can also imagine the same question doing the rounds among some of those who purport to write about football for a living.

Behold, the real villains of the piece.

Cigarettes used to be good for you

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Has there been a greater, more profound evolution in the last 70 years than in the field of first aid?

The Northern Echo has a feature on the sad case of a police officer gunned down in Coxhoe in 1940, in a story all too reminiscent of the Derek Bentley case.

It reports how PC William Shiell had just hours to live after being shot in the stomach, “Despite attempts to revive him with water and a cigarette…”

A prescription you just can’t imagine being bandied around in the Accident & Emergency units of today: “Bloods, saline solution and we’ll start him off on Marlboro Lights…”

Erections: crisis, what crisis?

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It’s a part of the American psyche I can’t understand: so coy about sex on TV in so many ways yet happy to flood its ad breaks during sporting events with so many commercials on medication for erectile dysfunction you begin to wonder if obesity isn’t quite the predominant national malaise over there that we think it is.

A couple of a certain age begin a series of meaningful glances and suggestive touching while decorating their living room (yeah, DIY always gets me like that, too). The scene is interspersed with glimpses of burgeoning Nature, while he wears the relaxed smile of someone who finally has the tools for the job.

So accomplished is the ad industry becoming at capturing the intensity of unspoken middle-aged lust on film, it’s probably just a matter of time before the punchline goes something like “If you’re not getting a hard-on just watching this, we need to talk…”

Then, because this is America, after all, we’re bombarded with the small print just as Mr and Mrs Highly-Aroused head for the stairs, including this masterpiece of ingratitude that makes me wonder if the copywriter’s a woman:

“In the event of any erection lasting more than four hours, seek urgent medical attention.”

I suspect I’m not the only male fortysomething who’s seeking just one thing in the event of any erection lasting more than four hours.

Champagne.

Dead at Your Age

“Congratulations! You’ve just outlived some interesting people. Tell us your date of birth, and we’ll tell you who they were…”

I signed up for Dead at Your Age expecting that it would be no more than a harmless bit of fun, destined to be scrubbed from my feedreader in a matter of weeks, due to boredom.

Au contraire. Being informed at regular intervals that I am now enjoying more time on Earth than someone far more famous/talented/worthy than me, is fast becoming one of the best little life-enhancers I know.

A lot of the famous deceased referred to will, I suspect, be unknown to most people outside of the cultural literati but this is more than atoned for by the occasional barnstormer celebrity, whose lifespan relative to my own renews my appreciation for what I have.

Granted, I don’t have Oliver Cromwell gunning for me but being told that I am now enjoying a longer life than Charles I was one of my prouder accomplishments in 2009…

Dear Fenland Citizen letters page

“A man has time to reflect when he inches his way across a half-mile ice rink between his house and ***** Bus Station on Christmas Eve.

Time to reflect on what kind of return he’s getting on his council tax when he must seriously toy with the idea of crawling to work on all fours to spare himself a broken limb.

Time to reflect on how governmental obsession with health and safety is nowhere to be seen whenever you actually need it.

And time to reflect that there’s a point in all our lives when we must stand up and do our bit for a better Society.

I therefore wish to make it publicly known that should we learn of our highway custodians, Cambs County Council, blowing thousands on a ‘fact-finding’ junket during 2010, I will happily drive any four members of the lynch mob to wherever they need to be.

Yours,

NP Liffe“