'RED OR DEAD' by DAVID PEACE - MEMORIES OF A GREAT MAN AND A LOST DREAM

‘Red or Dead’ by David Peace tells the story of the great Bill Shankly coming to Anfield and becoming a legend. It is a completely weird book, but most of David Peace’s books tend to stray into the world of weirdness. This time he is intent on reducing every single sentence down to the very bare bones of simplicity. Bill got into his car. Bill started the engine. Bill checked his blind spot. Bill drove to Anfield…. On and on it goes, for page after page until it passes through the seven hundred page mark. Wow. He lists every one of the games Shankly managed. He gives the scores and when the goals were scored. He gives the crowd and sometimes he describes the weather and how muddy the pitch was.

Game after game. Year after year. Different players. Different teams. Different opposition teams. Ups and downs. And of course that is the point. The whole point. For in the end football can be seen as being a bit like a river. It flows on and on from season to season. It never stops. In the end there are only subtle differences. We have a river here flowing past the house and down and away to the Solway Firth. Sometimes it is full to bank bursting when it has pissed down for days. Sometimes it is a mere trickle during rare heat waves. Sometimes there’s a heron fishing. Sometimes the early morning sun picks out the vivid colours of a kingfisher. But the water always flows. It’s a gravity thing. Day in day out. Year in year out.

This is how Peace sees the relentlessness of football. Different characters flit in and flit out, but the game goes on and on as unforgettable triumphs drift into treasured history.

Would I have made it through all 700 pages had the book been about a different man and a different team? No chance. But it is my team and my man and my life. It gave me a shiver when all of a sudden I reached the moment on April Fool’s Day 1972 when West Brom came to Anfield. Liverpool won 2-0. 46,000 turned up to bear witness. It was the first time I ever stepped into Anfield. I was eleven and a half and the minute I reached the top of the steps and looked into the swaying masses of the Kop I knew I never wanted to go and watch football anywhere else.

And I never have.

And of course Shanks was still in charge back then and the Kop sang his name over and over to the tune of Amazing Grace.

Before ‘Red or Dead’, my memories of his retiring were a little vague. I recall being on the Kop when he came along and stood with the rest of us. I recall the hints and rumours that all was not well with him. I recall getting a sneak preview of Hillsbrough when the cops lost control of the crowds trying to get into the Kop before they locked the gates when we played Swansea on the Saturday after he died.

‘Red or Dead’ becomes almost unbearable when it describes the slow misery of his retirement. The way the club betrayed him. Dumped him. Hung him out to dry. For me this was when the book was at its most brilliant. It depicts an increasingly sad man confronted by a world going to hell all around him. The club he gave his life to doesn’t want to know him any more. The unions he was raised to trust implicitly are bringing the country to its knees. There is suddenly open war on the terraces and Liverpool the city is being reduced to a sad shell of its former glory.

And yet the river of football flows on and the Reds at last conquer Europe. Once and twice and three times. And in the end of course Bill dies as the author hints at the fact that the streets outside the hospital are all on fire as the city has been swallowed up by riots.

On many levels the book was a painful read. It was painful as the endless repetition of the same thing drove me to distraction. It was painful as the passage of football time marked the passage of my own time. Inexorably. Where on earth did that wide eyed eleven year old kid disappear to? Painful in the way it draws a picture of the slow death of the hope that socialism once upon a time offered until Maggie Thatcher killed it stone dead. In those lost days of the late seventies and early eighties I was never a socialist. I wasn’t anything. I was a punk! It took the miserable age of Thatcherism to bring me round to the idea that socialism was maybe the best way to run a railroad. But then the dream was hijacked by Derek Hatton and Tony Blair and now it lives and breathes no more.

Shankly was very much an old school socialist. One of a breed that seems to have gone extinct. Men from the mills and the mines and shipyards. Men with a steel rod of morality running through their spines and souls. Men like Jock Stein and Matt Busby and Brian Clough and of course Sir Alex. Men who have now all been left behind in our new world of Nike and fifty quid to sit on the Kop.

Most painful of all was the way the book picked over the bones of the club tossing him aside like a worn out pair of shoes. In 1984 I got the chance to meet Bob Paisley. At the time my dad held the glamorous position of secretary of the Lancashire Egg Producers Club. I know. You couldn’t make it up. Every month it was dad’s job to book an after dinner speaker.

So he pushed the boat out and tracked down Bob Paisley’s home number. By this time Bob was a few months retired with three European Cups in the bag. He was delighted at the prospect of speaking to a room full of Lancastrian chicken farmers. His fee was somewhere in the region of £50 and his terms included having someone to drive him to and from Liverpool so that he could have a few whiskies. Oh, and he insisted on a free bar.

I got the taxi driver’s job. Unsurprisingly I was just about as nervous as I have been in my life. After all, this was the most successful manager in the history of British football and if you use number of European Cups won as a benchmark, then he still is. His house was a wholly ordinary bungalow in a non-descript suburb and he turned out to be one of the nicest blokes I have ever met. He was more than happy to talk football all the way from Liverpool to Chorley and all the way back again.

In hindsight I can see that there was a touch of sadness about him. Retirement had brought no place on the board and he was seldom seen about Anfield in the years before his death in 1996.

Sadly there is a trend here. A miserable and sickening trend. Liverpool Football Club is one of the world’s greatest sports institutions. There are reasons why 95,000 people turned up at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch a pre season friendly, every single one of them in a red shirt. There are reasons why north of fifty million people across the planet name Liverpool when asked who they support. The reasons are Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley and Kenny Dalglish. Great, great men. All three. And yet all three were unceremoniously dumped by the owners of the club when they were deemed to be of no more use.

When I read about how Shanks was shunted out into the cold, I realised that our currant owners are in fact no different from the men who held the purse strings back in 1974. For a club that has always exuded such class, it really is quite sickening that we always get landed with such owners. When Matt Busby and Sir Alex retired, they were given a place on the board alongside Bobby Charlton. And in the beating heart of Mordor, there is a stand called ‘The Alex Fergusson Stand.’

We have four stands at Anfield. The Kop of course can only ever be called the Kop. But what of the other three? The Main Stand, the Centenary Stand and the Anfield Road Stand? How important are those names? Not remotely. These three stands should each bear very different names. The Bill Shankly Stand. The Bob Paisley Stand. The Kenny Dalglish Stand. Surely it's a no brainer. And I find it hard to imagine that a single one of our fifty million fans would have a problem with three sides of the stadium carrying the names of the men who made us what we are. And yet hell would freeze over before the people who own the club would do such a thing. For of course they no doubt harbour unspoken ambitions to rename the terraces the McDonalds Stand and the Kentucky Fried Chicken Stand and the Coca Cola Stand.

Anyway. In a few hours time I will set out on the all too familiar 300 mile hundred round trip to watch Liverpool FC take on Notts County FC in the second round of the League Cup. And my money will be shunted across the Atlantic into an account somewhere in New England. And at some stage the Kop will sing the name of Kenny Dalglish but the man himself will not be there to acknowledge the chant. The man himself doesn’t feel welcome at Anfield any more. Just like Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley before him. Just like all of those who grew up to follow the team through thick and thin and wind and rain only to be priced out of going to the match.

Lots has changed since a wide eyed eleven year old lad stepped into Anfield and gasped at the sight of the swaying Kop. The river of football has flowed on much like the river of life. Shanks wouldn’t like much about the way the world has moved on and changed. The Peoples Game is the Peoples Game no more. How can it be when it costs £50 to sit on the Kop?

In the end ‘Red or Dead’ made me feel sad and nostalgic. Sad for the man and sad for the way things now are and sad for a dream that was crushed.

Crushed with corporate contempt, until all that is left is a memory and a sense of loss.

There is much more f this kind of stuff to be found in my book 'King Kenny's Revolution'. You can find it in the Kindle Store by following the link below.

http://is.gd/dtxAoY

             

SMALL PRINT TYRANTS

Sometimes hard times can help the emergence of great people and great ideas. Out of the Great Depression of the 30’s came Roosevelt and the New Deal. The wretched wrecked cities of post war Europe were rebuilt and re-energised by the Marshall Plan. The vicious race hate of Sixties America brought forward Martin Luther King in much the same way as the worst of Apartheid South Africa brought forth the very best of humankind in the shape of Nelson Mandela.

Sadly the worst of times also have a habit of spawning the worst of men and ideas. The murderous mayhem of the Russian Civil War provided a platform for Stalin to rise to the top. Our very own Civil War gave us our very own version of Uncle Joe Stalin in the shape of Oliver Cromwell. The Great Depression of the 30’s persuaded the Germans to choose Hitler.

Right now the UK seems to be neither one thing nor the other. Even his fiercest critics would find it hard to equate the easy going, hard smoking Nigel Farage with Hitler. Likewise, even the Daily Mail would find it hard to make a case that Ed Milliband represents the heir to Vladimir Illyich Lenin.

Instead we have nasty, mediocre leaders who are being egged on by a nasty, mediocre media. And there seems to be a veritable army of hundreds of thousands nasty, mediocre beaurocrats ready and eager to their bidding. These denizens of hideous grey people with their Ford Mondeos and fondue sets and lovingly treasured pension plans are always at the very heart of state sponsored nastiness.

They were the ones who ran the timetables of the trains that carried millions to the gas chambers of Poland. They were the ones who processed Stalin’s kill lists in 1937. They were the ones who help make sure that Saddam Hussein always kept Abu Graib prison full to bursting point.

It is a tragic human fact that the work of despots is always made easy by the complicity and willingness of these nasty, grey people who will do almost anything for a pension pot and the chance of a bungalow in Bournemouth.

Regular readers of this blog will have become very familiar with this kind of thing over the last year or so. Almost all of the hardship we see at First Base is caused by nasty, spiteful decisions made by nasty, spiteful people who are getting a real kick out of doing the dirty work for old Etonians in the Ivory Towers of Westminster.

It has now become common knowledge that all the staff at Job Centre Plus have to meet the target of sanctioning three clients a week. And in our very British way, we simply take it as written that the beaurocrats we pay for through our taxes will always do exactly as instructed.

Like sheep.

Like the grey pen pushers who ran the well oiled machine that funnelled five million doomed souls into the gas chambers in the 40’s. The kind of genocide that Hitler oversaw doesn’t just happen. To make sure a daily quota of 10,000 warm bodies arrive on time at the Birkenau railway sidings all the way from Budapest, you need a huge team of dedicated and capable beurocrats. Hitler knew he had such a team. And he knew they would do exactly as they were told, no matter how primordially horrific the results of their typing and filing turned out to be.

Well, George Osborne and his cronies in the civil service and the tabloid media also have an army of servile beaurocrats at their beck and call as they wage their nasty war on the poor.

Every day we see the results of this nasty mean spirited war. Every day we hand out food parcel after food parcel to poor sods who have turned up a few minutes late for an appointment or failed to tick an on screen box. Yesterday I spent some time chatting with a lad who had just been sanctioned for six months. Six months for Christ’s sake! It was his third offence. Ten minutes late for two appointments and a box left un-ticked on his personalised online Jobseekers account page.

The Job Centre person had a choice. They could have simply said oops the daisy…. looks like you forgot to tick the box here …look  .. this one…, hang on a sec…. we can sort that out here and now… there you go… all ticked… all done…

But they didn’t.

Instead they gleefully took advantage of the opportunity the small print presented them. Ah ha!!! You haven’t ticked the box! And subsection 5.21 demands that the box is ticked. By not ticking the box you are in contravention of the terms of subsection 5.21 and I have no choice but to sanction you for the next six months. Next! …Now young man… If you use that tone of voice with me I will call security and make sure an additional six months sanction is added on…….

Over the last few weeks we have been wrapped up a bit of small print tyranny ourselves which has finally wound me up to the stage of penning this ranting blog. The next paragraph promises to be bit on the dull side but it is essential if I am to paint the background picture.

Part of our First Base Veterans Project is helping guys to go self employed to make a living. We try our best to generate contracts with local agencies to give them paid work. Our main contract is with the region’s largest social landlord, DGHP, and a part of this work involves the lads undertaking tasks for tenants who are struggling or vulnerable. In March I received an e mail from a veteran in his eighties. He told me that the time had come when he couldn’t manage on his own any more and he was being moved into supported accommodation. His problem was that he had no way of shifting his stuff and no money to pay anyone to shift it. So I called up DGHP to ask if they would engage the services of the lads to the job and they said they would.

So all went well and the stuff was duly shifted and all three guys shared a morning of squaddie banter that crossed the generations.

At the supported accommodation was one of those automatic doors which made it hard to shift stuff in an out. There was a hook on the door and a catch on the wall. So the lads slotted the hook into the catch and duly shifted the stuff from van to room. Then they unhooked the door and the door worked as normal.

Then they made a second trip.

When they got back the cleaner was standing on a chair and faffing around with the opening mechanism at the top of the door. They thought nothing of it and shifted the rest of the stuff. From van to room. Job done and the old boy was delighted, though a little daunted at the cold, off hand reception he had received from everyone at his new home. Our lads were quite upset about it.

So that was that.

Except it wasn’t.

A couple of weeks later I received a frantic e mail from the old boy. He had received a letter from Hanover Housing, the warm and caring charity to whom he had signed up to spend the rest of his life.

In the letter was a bill for £184 for damage done to the door to the property by workmen in his employ.

I replied and told him not to worry and that I would look into it. So I rang the property and spoke with the cleaner and she was as stroppy as it is possible for a cleaner to be. She posted me a copy of the bill and a copy of the report of the engineer who had been called out to fix the door. The report said that when the engineer had arrived at the job he had discovered that the arms of the automatic door had been disengaged. This came as no surprise to us as the lads had seen the cleaner up on a chair faffing around with the disengaged mechanism. The engineer connected it all back up and the door was up and running again. The call out charge was £184 including VAT.

So I told her that we were not responsible and she said that we were.

So I called Hanover Housing’s head office in Edinburgh.

About 15 times.

And every time I called I seemed to get a different woman on the phone and all of them were as stroppy as stroppy can be,

At last I got through to someone senior and she told me that their position was carved in stone. Our lads had busted the door. Their cleaner was the most morally upright person in the whole of South West Scotland. Our lads were obviously lying through their teeth.

And so it became very clear that we were poles apart. Our guys were adamant that the cleaner was lying and their cleaner was adamant that our lads were lying.

All of this is absolutely fair enough. It happens all the time. I said as much to the senior person on the phone. What I also pointed out was that none of it had anything whatsoever to do with the old veteran whose stuff we had shifted.

I made what I felt was a perfectly reasonable request. I suggested that the argument was clearly between First Base and Hanover Housing. Neither of us were about to change our minds. It was clear that we had reached a peace in the Middle East situation where neither side was about to budge and lines had been drawn in the sand.

So here’s what I proposed.

Take the old boy out of the equation. Stop causing him misery and stress by hounding him with letter after letter demanding £184 which he hasn’t got.

Invoice us direct. And we will refuse to pay. And them Hanover Housing can crack on and take The First Base Agency to the small claims court for £184. And then the court will have the chance to decide which side was lying and which side is liable for the £184 damage done to the door.

But that was too much like hard work. It became clear that Hanover Housing didn’t much fancy putting their cleaner on the stand to argue the toss against our two guys. Instead they decided to hide behind the small print of the old boy’s tenancy agreement which stated that he was liable for any damage done by contractors under his employ.

Basically they took the option of hounding and bullying a very vulnerable old guy who had once upon a time served his country with distinction.

So I kept getting frantic e mails for the old guy. And I kept replying and telling him not to pay the bill under any circumstances. And in the end I took the thing to Alex Fergusson MSP who is one of the absolute good guys. Surely a call from a Member of the Scottish Parliament who for several years had been the Convenor would persuade Hanover Housing to do the decent thing and leave the old lad be.

Fat chance.

They evaded his calls.

And they continued to hide behind their poxy small print and put a vulnerable old fellow under continued stress. You can Google them and check out their mission statement in the ‘About Us’ section. It is all very warm and cuddly and politically correct.

If only.

And no doubt there are many people at Hanover Housing who indeed put the care and well being of their vulnerable tenants before a lousy £184. But there are obviously many others who see the world in a very different way to the soft words of their Mission Statement. There are others who are more than happy to make an old guy’s life a misery because the small print allows them to.

Bullies.

Bullies who should be ashamed of themselves.

Small print tyrants in every sense.  

Can you here the quiet, ghostly sound of train wheels clanking their way along the rail tracks of Upper Silesia.

Journeys scheduled and logged and accounted for by the grey ones.

By small print tyrants.

By small print cockroaches.

VISITING WITH GHOSTS

 

Slowly but surely the pieces of the jigsaw that will at some stage turn into my next book are slotting into place. I reckon I have a title now, though past experience suggests that titles tend to change many times by the time the final full stop is in its place. As of now, the thing is down to be called ‘A Flickering Flame’ and it will run from 1905 to a couple of years in the future.

I have always held a fascination for the small moments in time which suddenly turn history on its axis; moments like the tiny fragment of rock which falls onto a bank of snow to kick off an avalanche which twenty minutes later wipes out a whole town.

The fascination extends to the places where these key moments played out. Like the steps in front of the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King made a speech which ensured than nothing could ever be the same again. Or the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign over the gates of Auschwitz. Or the non-descript looking concrete bridge that spans the Rhine at Arnhem. Or the deserted and overgrown white walled slave fort on an island in the River Gambia.

 
Every day at First Base we bear witness to the quiet and often toxic fallout from events that for a few brief moments appeared on the news and then faded to black. Such echoes can be found in the washed out eyes of the veterans who seek support. A sniper kill on the Ballymurphy Estate in 1975. A screaming teenager with no kneecaps on a grimy pavement in the Bogside.  A family of corpses on the floor of a Bosnian kitchen. Pieces of Argentinian soldier in the muddy bogs of Mount Longden. Snapshots of events from years and years ago which the world has long moved on from and forgotten. Seldom glanced at pages of Wikipedia. But for those who were involved, those desperate seconds and minutes and hours and days remain sharp focused and as painful as a rope burn.

Three of the characters in the early stages of ‘A Flickering Flame’ see everything they hold certain and clear changed forever in a few desperate hours on 25 September 1915 in a small French coal mining village called Loos.

For some reason I cannot really explain, the Battle of Loos has always held a fascination for me ever since I read of it in Robert Graves’s ‘Goodbye to All That’ as a teenager. It is odd how forgotten it has become as history has settled on its memories of the First War.

There was much that was momentous about Loos. It was the first time that the Brits and our allies launched a major offensive against the German lines and it was the first time that we started to learn the lesson that human flesh against high velocity machine gun bullets represents a pretty unfair fight.

We had our own special weapon that day: chlorine gas. In the days before the battle, thousands of unwieldy gas canisters were lugged up the support trenches and put in place on the front line. The theory was simple. The weather forecast promised a wind that would shove the released gas across no-man’s land and into the German trenches. Chlorine gas is heavier than air and so the idea was that the gas cloud would roll along the ground and then drop down into the trenches and bunkers and gun emplacements of the enemy.

Well, it all looked pretty good on paper but things usually do. By four in the morning it was clear that things were not about to go as planned. The wind had changed during the night and now a slow breeze was easing its way down from the German held high ground and over the lines of British trenches.

So it was a no brainer. Cancel the attack and wait for the right wind conditions. But the High Command didn’t see it that way and they ordered the gas to be released at the appointed time regardless of the direction of the breeze. The idiotic order was duly followed and the gas made its way into the British support trenches and lots of our guys were killed. The frontline soldiers responded to the whistles and jumped up to be duly chopped down by the German guns.

Lots of guys died. Lots of guys were horribly wounded. Lots of guys were mentally shattered.

A few yards were gained and then given up the next day.

Everybody blamed everybody else and it was generally agreed that the gas masks our lads had been issued weren’t worth a light. Here are a couple of pictures. It is hard to get your head around the vision of hell that must have come to Loos as thousands of guys in these masks emerged from their trenches coughing and choking amidst green clouds of chlorine.

My fictional characters will watch the fiasco from the German lines. And when the day’s fighting is over, nothing will ever be the same again.

So a couple of days ago, it was time to see what the place is like now. We followed the SatNav down the French autoroutes past Lille and past Lens until the twin slag heaps that gloomily stare down on the village of Loos appeared on the horizon. The whole area is a typical coal mining area. Slag heaps and faded villages and towns and a sense of wasted lives and boarded up shops. These days such places are described as the ‘Post-Industrial West. Detroit and Pittsburg and Motherwell and Leipzig and Turin. Places where the shells of once mighty factories are now crumbling away to mere piles of bricks. On the day of the battle, the ground was dominated by a vast double coal winch which the Brit soldiers nicknamed ‘London Bridge’ because of its resemblance to the iconic Thames crossing. The old winching gear was well and truly trashed during the battle but it was replaced after the war. Here’s what it looked like back then.

The coal mine is still there. Well, what was once a coal mine is still there. Now just a clutch of looming empty buildings surrounded by overgrown mounds of earth. Only a few years ago, thousands of men must have walked and driven up the hill from the village to start their shifts. Not any more. The mine at Loos is now very much post-industrial. There are lots of wild flowers and butterflies and a long view across the plain to the distant sea. There is a garden centre. There is a community theatre. There are some small workshops. But there were no people. Just a couple of distant figures framed on the skyline as they climbed the steep gradient of one of the twin pyramid shaped slag heaps. Even after all these years nothing but the barest of shrubs can grow on the toxic mountains of poisoned earth. In the 50's my dad was part of a Leeds University project to try and identify plants which could thrive on slag. It doesn't seem as if much progress has been made if the slag heaps of Loos are anything to go by.

What a place to end up it must have seemed for the thousands of soldiers on both sides. The Germans held the high ground and dug their deep trenches and concrete machine gun emplacements. The main complex was known as the Hohenzollen Redoubt and it proved to be predictably impregnable. The Brits lined up on the plain and had to attack up a steep hill in the shadow of the slag heaps and the pit itself.

No doubt the whole area would have been poisoned and polluted and stained by coal dust. Grey fields. Grey woods. Grey houses. Grey faces. A grey, industrial, polluted misery of a place. And early in the morning fifty thousand of so men released clouds of green chlorine gas and donned gas masks and marched at fifty thousand of so other guys who watched from the top of the hill.

And then over the days and weeks that followed, thousands of postmen took telegrams to thousands of front doors in towns and cities and villages in England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland and India and Canada and Germany. The ultimate bearers of bad news. The worst news. Thousands lost for a few yards gained.

In September 1915, Loos held the world’s attention for a while. But not any more. Not for a long time now. I wonder why? The obvious and usual reasons I guess. History is always written by the victors and we as victors have obviously decided we would rather not dwell on the fact that we released all that chlorine gas on the morning of 25 September 1915 and that the chlorine gas we released killed a whole bunch of our own guys in their unfit for purpose gas masks.

So now Loos is one of those forgotten places. Once upon a time there was a battle. Once upon a time there was a coal mine. Once upon a time there were jobs. Once upon a time there was a great killing.

And now?

Old buildings. A winch that hasn’t turned a wheel in years. Wildflowers. A soft wind. A pair of slag heaps. The distant hum of traffic on the motorway. Cars in the car park of the garden centre. A couple of dog walkers. A community theatre in the old engine house which is closed until September.

And thousands upon thousands of ghosts. Ghosts from Prussia and Saxony and Bavaria and Westphalia and Lancashire and Yorkshire and Fife and County Antrim and Punjab and Ontario.

Quiet ghosts.

Wikipedia ghosts.

Forgotten ghosts.

Faded memories now. Part of what we now call the Post-Industrial West.

Ghosts who we visited last week.

Soon I will try and capture the look and feel and smell of those long forgotten desperate hours and those hours will become a part of ‘A Flickering Flame’.

Standing there by the old, quiet coal mine I wondered how the ghosts would feel about it? Who knows? Do they want to be remembered or forgotten? Or do they not care at all?

They gave no clue.

Only the hint of a memory in a soft summer wind.    

 

WHAT A COMPLETE AND UTTER BLOODY MESS

The word on the street at the moment suggests that there is a turf war going down for the control of the drugs market in the North West of Dumfries. There are two gangs fighting it out and both have travelled many miles to wage their war. Maybe it is sensible to avoid too many specifics here. Let’s say that these charming individuals hail from two of Britain’s great port cities which once upon a time provided the gateway to our Empire; cities which have now hit harder times. One lies some 120 miles to the south of Dumfries. The other is 80 miles to the north. I am sure you get the picture.

The word on the street is that these raiders have turned up in town with guns and the police are all over the situation like a rash. Let’s hope so. We’ve had a major drug problem here in Dumfries for years, but thankfully guns have seldom played any part in proceedings. Long may that continue.

Much more interesting than the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ is surely the ‘why?’. Let’s face it, on the surface of things it is a pretty big ‘why?’ Dumfries is anything but a boom town. Once upon a time we were a thriving market town serving a booming and luxuriant stretch of productive farmland. Those days are long gone. Unemployment is sky high and prospects are lower than the Atlantic Trench. Dumfries is typical of so many towns all across the post industrial western world; places where coal was once mined or cotton spun or steel smelted or ships built. Over a span of a hundred years or so, all such activity moved away to the East and these places have become pretty well pointless with vast Tesco stores filling the space where factories and coal mines and ship yards once provided a living to thousands. Nowadays the public sector and benefits drive what is left of the economy and of course both are being cut to the bone.

North West Dumfries is home to four sprawling areas of what we now call ‘social housing’. Around 20,000 people live there. The Government up in Edinburgh considers the area to be ‘less favoured’ and therefore eligible for additional financial support. Many locals love to tell war stories about how bad things are, but all this really goes to show is that they have never visited the likes of Croxteth or Moss Side or Peckham.

A fictional Dumfries provides the backdrop for several of my novels and much of the excitement is to be found in a scheme that I call Sunnybank Estate. There has always been a degree of debate about which of the four schemes of NW Dumfries is the real life Sunnybank. Time and again I have pointed out that Sunnybank is entirely a figment of my imagination, but nobody seems much interested in listening. In my stories, drugs being used, abused and dealt tends to play a pretty large role. This is hardly surprising as I have spent the last ten years of my life at First Base which has provided a frontline view of the desperate underworld that illegal drugs inevitably creates.

For years the local wisdom has been adamant that NW Dumfries is full of ‘junkies’. This is unduly harsh as it suggests that people who are born and raised in the four schemes are somehow genetically engineered to become depended on heroin’s warm embrace. This of course is the very worst of prejudiced nonsense. However there can be no denying the fact that there are an unusually high number of drug addicts to be found in the area. The reason for this is down to stuff that Adam Smith would have been more than familiar with: good old fashioned supply and demand.

Over the last 15 years or so, the local cops have had a number of highly successful clampdowns in many of the region’s smaller towns. Dealers have been rounded up and locked up thanks to a number of well co-ordinated dawn raids. A few years ago ‘Operation Emperor’ rendered Stranraer virtually drug free. Not a single dealer was left to ‘punt kit’ once the doors had been knocked off their hinges at five in the morning. But that was only half the story. At the time of ‘Emperor’ there were about 600 heroin users in Stranraer and they were all left hanging on the wire and desperate for a hit. Some rattled and gave up. Some were slotted onto the Methadone programme. A majority, maybe 400 of so, migrated east to the nearest place where heroin was still on sale; Dumfries.

They came to town and declared themselves homeless and spent time in the hostels. Eventually the Section 5 Referral rule meant that they were offered tenancies and these tenancies were invariably to be found in the four schemes of North West Dumfries. Over the years the same thing happened several more times as successful police clampdowns created new migrations.

So, yes. There are indeed a higher than normal number of drug addicts to be found in NW Dumfries, but most were not born and bred. So how many? A rough guess would suggest somewhere in the region of 750. Most are now on the Methadone programme and they have been on the green stuff for a while. They don’t tend to commit so much crime as they did a few years ago for the simple reason that crime is harder to commit. There are many fewer shops to shoplift these days and ones who still hang on have sheets full of pictures highlighting the faces of those with multiple convictions for drug related theft. The harsh truth is that the 750 are not as young as they once were. Heroin addiction is very much yesterday’s news. The last couple of generations of youngsters have been way too smart to get suckered into a life of endless rattling and drudgery. Those who are left on the books of the drugs trade are in their thirties and forties now. Their health is poor and fading. Most are mere shells of the people they once were. They hobble around with leg ulcers and fade quietly away with Hepatitis C. They lack the energy for a crime wave. In their own words, most have become ‘Giro Junkies’. They drift through empty day after empty day care of high doses of Methadone and daytime TV, and once a fortnight they treat themselves to two or three ‘bags’ of smack when their fairy godmother in the Department of Work and Pensions drops £120 of so into their bank accounts.

So why on earth would two aspiring gangs from far away have any interest in travelling so far to fight it out for the franchise to sell this group of lost souls their fortnightly trip to oblivion?

I reckon the answer might well be found in the new Universal Credit which is set to be trialled here in the autumn. Universal Credit is very much the love child of many bright young things who took the journey from public school to Oxford and a shining degree in PPE. Then it was a couple of years of unpaid bag carrying for a junior minister or shadow minister. A place in central office and a seat at the table in the think tanks and focus groups. Next would be the chance to fight a no hope Parliamentary seat where they could demonstrate an ability to tow the party line, say the right things, bubble over with enthusiasm and look good for the cameras. Then at last they were rewarded with a safe seat in the mother of all Parliaments. This new career path has nothing to do with any particular party, though Eton seems to provide an unusually high number of Tory bright young things.

 

Westminster is now dominated by these evangelically power dressed types and we are about suffer as a result of their born again certainties. These are people for whom the theory is everything. They have an image of the poor that is part Dickens, part Walt Disney, part ‘praise the Lord Ohio style’ and part tabloid loathing. They have never spent any of their sheltered lives in places like NW Dumfries and they have no conception of what makes such places tick.

And so they have come up with Universal Credit. Give these poor people some responsibility they cry. Let them pay their own rent and council tax bills like other hard working, law abiding citizens. Trust them. Make them self reliant. Hell, make them like proper Americans with a new ‘can do’ mentality and church for all on a Sunday morning.

Oh dear.

Right now most of the 750 addicts up in NW Dumfries get their benefits in three separate chunks. £240 a month goes into their bank account. About £300 a month heads into the bank account of their social landlord in the form of Housing Benefit to keep a roof over their heads. About £70 a month or so heads straight into the account of the local council as Council Tax Benefit.

The recipient therefore only ever gets a chance to spend £240 of the £610 that is paid out on their behalf.

Well, all of that is about to change and change in a big way. The bright young things have decided that the best thing for poor people is if they are given the responsibility to look after their own affairs. To be given the responsibility of paying their own bills. This is going to raise them up and give them self assurance and enable them to get jobs and credit cards and spend lots of money on the High St and thereby rescue the country from its decline.

Dumfries and Galloway has volunteered itself to be one of the guinea pig regions to see how the brave new world looks in real time.

Let’s have a look at a few sums. Right now the 750 addicts of NW Dumfries have £2.16 million a year to spend with the Drugs Trade care of the DWP. In October that figure is about to grow significantly as the new Universal Credit will put a further £3.33 million on the table.

It’s a fair chunk of cash. And whenever a chunk of cash like this comes available for the grabbing, organised crime gangs tend to be pretty quick off the mark. How many ‘Giro Junkies’ are to be found in the UK as a whole? A conservative guess would suggest about a quarter of a million and the majority live in cities where the housing benefits cover much higher rents than NW Dumfries. Let’s make the maths relatively easy. Let’s assume that the new Universal Credits will deliver up and additional £500 a month to the ‘Giro Junkies’ of Britain. £6000 a year. Multiplied by 250,000.

Oops

We’re talking a cool £1.5 billion and that is a serious chunk of cash in anyone’s terms. You can get a whole bunch of villas by the sun kissed waters of the Caribbean with that kind of cash.

So it kind of looks like we are going to have two trials running up in NW Dumfries in the autumn.  All those bright young people with their PPE degrees will be watching to see if the beleaguered poor are transformed into highly motivated go getters who will set the High St alight. And the hard bitten execs at the top of the drugs industry will be finding ways to ensure that every penny of the new money on the table finds its way into their pockets. If you have watched ‘The Wire’, at this point it is maybe worth picturing Stringer Bell with calculator in hand and a calculating look on his face. It’s the Stringer with his glasses on look.

It seems pretty obvious to me who will win out. The guys who run the drugs trade know exactly how things play out in the schemes and sink estates of Britain. Their business model will be magnificently simple.

1. Find out exactly how much Universal Credit a punter is going to receive.
2. Find out where they live.
3. Find out the day when they get paid.
4. Give them a credit line up to the amount of cash they will be getting.
5. On the day, accompany them to the bank or cash machine and take possession of every penny.
6. Beat the living daylights out of anyone who fails to honour their side of the agreement.

Yo String!

Not so very hard is it? The bright young things are about to give the drugs industry the biggest boost it has had in many years. Organised crime is good at this stuff. Check out the way the Calabrian Mafia are able to get millions of Euros out of the EU’s Agricultural Subsidies thanks to some quick footed bribery and violence. All big chunks of public cash act as a magnet for the new Mafias and they are hugely adept at latching onto every last penny. Giving £1.5 million of cold hard cash to people who are addicted to drugs is almost uniquely idiotic. The phrase ‘taking candy of babies’ springs to mind.

So who are the victims of the bright young things ande their Neo Liberal nonsense? Well, first and foremost will be the social landlords who won’t get the rent paid. Can our local housing associations stand a £3 million drop in income when 750 of their tenants don’t pay any rent? Doubtful. In time, the 750 will be evicted and they will be denied homeless accommodation as they will have ‘intentionally’ made themselves homeless. They will have few opportunities to ‘sofa surf’ as most of those in flats where ‘sofa surfing’ is an option will have been evicted themselves.

So it will be more people sleeping under bridges and in shop door ways.

And maybe a few housing associations will go belly up.

And there will be something of a spike in the price of villas in Antigua.

And those super clever chaps in the City of London will rake in lots of extra commission fees as they launder the £1.5 billion.

So maybe it isn’t so hard to understand why two gangs from many miles away are willing to fight it out for the drug market in NW Dumfries after all.

Oh what a complete and utter bloody mess.

 

OH FOR CHRIST'S SAKE.....

 

Last night I channel hopped across to BBC News 24 to find what has to be the worst piece of journalism I have ever witnessed.

It was just after 11 and a few hours earlier my radio in the kitchen had broken the news that a baby boy had been born in London. I have to say that I didn’t hold a great deal of optimism about hearing much about what else was going on across the planet, but I decided to give it a go anyway. A bad move.

I wonder when was it decided that part of the BBC licence fee should be allocated to producing hour after hour of celebrity drivel?

I first noticed this a few years ago when I switched on the news only to find 25 minutes of live coverage from a frantic reporter outside some poxy suburban courthouse in Los Angeles. Everything was put on hold as we were instructed to wait with bated breath for something truly huge to happen. Know what it was? The arrival of Paris Hilton for her sentencing having been found guilty of drink driving. For twenty five endless, painful minutes we were offered the view of a car park outside an utterly non-descript concrete building. Finally the ‘A Lister’ arrived and was duly bustled inside by a gaggle of crew-cutted, ‘live in the gym’ types.

And that was that.

Paris had turned up, all be it fifteen minutes late. This took us to twenty five past the hour and the rest of the day’s news had to be crammed in before the weather in something of a hurry. The next item was deemed to be worth thirty seconds or so. There had been five huge suicide bombings in Baghdad that day. Well over a hundred people had been blown to pieces.

It was worth 30 seconds of the BBC’s time, whilst someone who was famous for being famous and rich was worth fifty times the attention. Because she was going to court.

For a driving offence.

For Christ’s sake.

So if Paris Hilton can box off the thick end of half an hour of prime news time, then it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that the birth of a royal baby would ignite hour upon endless hour of gushing.

I switched over at just after five past the hour. This meant that the basics had already been covered. A baby had been born. It was a boy. It was eight and a half pounds. The Queen had issued a statement saying she was happy. The Prime Minister said he was happy. Prince Charles said he was proud and no doubt he was also over the moon that something huge had come along to distract the media from prying into his tax dodging.

More to the point, we were told by beaming news readers that the people were happy. The nation was happy. We were about to enter a time of national feel good. Well, obviously. The list was repeated over and over.

Justin Rose, Andy Murray, British Lions, Chris Froome, the walloped Aussies and now a Royal baby. What a completely joyous time to be a Brit. No wonder we are all being told to get out there and feel good. And no doubt over the coming days we will be encouraged to turn this wonderful feel-good factor into something truly positive. As sure as night follows day, we will be urged to dig those hidden credit cards out of locked up drawers and get out there to hit the High St like we used to hit it when Tony Blair ruled over Cool Britannia.

Oh for Christ’s sake.

I guess it is too much to expect anything else in our celebrity obsessed world. There is no celebrity story quite like a Royal celebrity story. Even Posh Spice would have struggled yesterday. She might have called a Press Conference to announce that she was reducing her daily calorie intake from six hundred to four hundred and she would still have been lucky to get thirty seconds. Even a hair extension announcement would have barely caused a ripple. In fact, the sainted Posh and Becks would really have had to push the boat out yesterday to get the media’s attention. Not only would they have had to adopt a Cambodian baby, they would probably have had to have eaten it as well. With mange tout. Now that might have got them five minutes or so. Some expert would have been wheeled out to asses how many calories are to be found in the average Cambodian baby and just how much Posh could have eaten whilst still sticking to her new starvation regime.

Anyway.

Back to the worst piece of journalism in the history of journalism.

By ten past eleven the BBC had a problem. Ten minutes had been more than enough to say everything that there was to say. Baby born. Everyone happy.

So it was time for some breathless, gushing footage from Kate’s home village. Guess what? The residents were all happy. More than happy. Delirious. And it seemed that all of them shared the same sentiment. ‘I just can’t believe it!!!!!”

Well it was indeed hard to believe. A local woman who had been pregnant for nine months had shocked the world by going into labour and producing a child. Unbelievable.

But that is a tad flippant. The main reason they ‘couldn’t believe it!!!!’ was the fact that it was a boy. A more cynical reporter might have pointed out that there is basically a 50/50 thing going on when a human female gives birth. It’s either a boy or a girl. Heads or tails. As yet no human being has ever given birth to a wildebeest or an iguana but I guess there is a first time for everything. The 50/50 thing makes it hard to see why it should be unbelievable either way, but Kate’s neighbours were clearly in a state of shock that it was a male.

Just imagine how unbelievable it would have been for them if the message on the Buckingham Palace easel had pronounced that at 4.24pm an eight and a half pound boy had been born and the aforesaid baby was as black as the ace of spades….

Watch it Frankland. You can find yourself locked up in the Tower for less.

Once the good folk of Bucklebury, Berkshire had managed to get their heads around the idea that a boy had been born, which was basically unbelievable, they moved on to more unbelievable stuff.

Some reported that they had seen Kate walking through the village only a few days before. Holy Christ. Imagine it. Kate. Actually walking. Through a village. I mean you can stick your Martian landing where the sun don’t shine. She was actually seen walking. Actually in a village. How fantastic is that!

Finally we left the million pound houses of Bucklebury behind and were taken to the throbbing scenes of national feel good at Buckingham Palace. Here is where the efforts of Woodward and Bernstein and their Watergate story were so completely eclipsed.

The star of the show was Louisa Baldini and my oh my, did she ever have a story to tell. She had three guests with her – a mum and two daughters and guess what, they were from Ohio.

 

Cleveland, Ohio.

 

Oh my word.

 

What excitement!

 

My heart was banging so hard I wondered it it was about to explode. Here is the tale that the gallant Louisa took ten minutes to tease out. So hang on to your seats.....

 

They were on holiday. They had arrived the day before. They had visited the Palace only that afternoon. They had eaten their dinner at the hotel. They heard the news that a baby had been born. So they decided to walk back to the Palace.

Oh wow.

Just imagine.

Three people from Cleveland, Ohio had finished their pudding and decided to return to the Palace.

And what had they done?

They had looked at an easel and taken pictures.

No wonder the rest of the world news was on hold. This was the real stuff. This is why we pay up our licence fee. This was true breaking news. A mum and her two daughters had looked at a message on an easel and taken pictures. People all the way from Cleveland, Ohio. And they were excited and happy. No wonder the studio made the call to give Louisa a whole ten minutes to tease out every last detail…

Oh for Christ’s sake.

I actually switched across to Al Jazeera before Louisa had the chance to run through what everyone had eaten for pudding.

Surprisingly enough, nobody chose to send a reporter out to Hanover or Saxe Coburg for a bit of local reaction. But then again, we tend to gloss over the Germanic roots of our beloved and sainted Royals. Much like we like to gloss over their tax dodging.

The family tree of the new addition makes for interesting reading.

We have to go back to some anxious days at the start of the 18^th Century when it became clear that William the Third was going to die without leaving a viable heir to his throne. This was a big time problem as the obvious next in line was the offspring of James the Second and all of his family were wicked, pesky Catholics. Now being a Catholic back then was much like being a fully paid up member of Al Queda now. So Parliament had to get stuck into some fancy footwork and dig out an alternative option and lo and behold, they found Sophie of Palatine.

Good old Sophie. Granddaughter of James the First. Born and raised in Holland, married to a German, and not a word of English to her name. In fact she had never visited England. But never mind. She was a through and through Prod and that was all that mattered. So Parliament rattled through the required paperwork to settle the crown upon "the most excellent princess Sophia, electress and duchess-dowager of Hanover" and "the heirs of her body, being Protestant".      

And so it has turned out, for it is pretty nailed on that the new addition will be yet another of those heirs of Sophie’s body who will very much be a Protestant. In the same Act of Parliament, it was written in stone that no Catholic can ever sit on the throne and that is still very much the case.

Seldom, if ever, can an immigrant family have made so good in their new home. It is just a shame that the national feel good factor that we can all look forward to in the wake of the latest Prod heir of Princess Sophie can’t have a more German feel to it. Instead of being all British and spending money in Marks and Spender on our credit cards, we might instead open up a few new car factories and put on loads of extra trains at half the cost we pay now and guarantee that all our football clubs are 51% owned by the fans.

But we are way too patriotic for any of that nonsense. We will celebrate our new Prince in the traditional British way. We’ll buy our tabloids and we’ll spend on our credit cards and when the weekend comes, we will get blind drunk and be violently sick.

All in the safe knowledge that a family from Cleveland, Ohio ate their pudding and went out into the London night to look at an easel.

And they were happy.

Just like we all are. 

For Christ’s sake.

Here's good old Sophie by the way. Let's get Louisa out there for a special feature from Saxe Coburg. Imagine how it must once have been when Sophie walked around her village.... unbelievable.

'RED ZONE' - MY OWN 'BRITISH PROMISE'.

Twenty years ago we spent a couple of weeks in what was once called the Holy Land, is nowadays called Israel and may one day be called Palestine. The trip was part work, part holiday. The work bit involved a visit to a desert dairy farm where 2000 cows produced prodigious amounts of milk under a blazing sun and the baleful gaze of the watchtowers along the border with Jordan. The holiday bit was taking in the shining domes of Jerusalem and all that.

What did we expect? Hard to say. The first Intifada had just run out of steam and for weeks and months the nightly news had carried pictures of Palestinian teenagers hurling half bricks at Israeli battle tanks. It wasn’t all that hard to guess who was going to win!

My earliest memory of the whole Palestine thing was the massacre at Munich airport during the 1972 Olympics. I was twelve and I now find it odd that the images of the shootout didn’t leave more of a mark. But then again, in those distant days the news was a whole lot less sterilised. My generation got the chance to spot the difference between a John Wayne film and the real stuff care of the non-censored images of Vietnam that appeared every night at six for so many years.

By the time I reached sixteen, the Middle East question appeared in my O Level history course. I guess we were supposed to get the party line, but our teacher wasn’t much use when it came to towing the line. He painted a picture in our under heated fifth form classroom complete with peeling walls of mustard paint that was maybe my first insight into the cynicism of my country.

1917. The British High Command are hell bent on launching their greatest offensive yet on the Western Front. They promise that this time things will be different. Honest. Trust us. This time we will break through and romp all the way to Berlin. And they duly present the cabinet with the estimated bill for the planned offensive. We’re going to need this many million shells and bullets and false legs....... Oh, and here’s the quote from the suppliers.......

And all of a sudden there is a problem. A rather familiar problem. The Chancellor clears his throat and puts on a sort of embarrassed face. Sorry chaps, but we’re broke I’m afraid. Completely and utterly. We’ve emptied out every last one of our piggy banks and no bank on the planet will lend us another penny. Ever so sorry to be bearer of such bad news, but there we are. And all of a sudden there are pale, worried faces around the table and nobody quite knows what to say. All except the redoubtable Foreign Secretary, Mr Arthur James Balfour who has a very cunning plan indeed up his Saville Road sleeve.

Now listen up here chaps. And do bear with me. Hear me out and all that. No bank in the world will give us so much a penny’s worth of credit. Why? Because they think our collateral stinks and I for one cannot blame them. So we need to change the game. All the banks that have any money right now are to be found on Wall St. So no surprise there then. They have made an absolute fortune out of all of us over the last three years. Now I suggest you all give me the nod to pop over and have a chat with a few of their chaps. But what of collateral you will most surely ask. And quite right too. Well here’s the thing. I am sure that you are all more than aware that the vast majority of these banks are owned by the ‘Chosen People’. The Jews. And here is where I think I might be able to come up with a spot of collateral. I will ask for them to front us the wherewithal to launch this little offensive that is so dear to the heart of the High Command, and in return I will go public and promise a homeland for the Jews. Where you might ask. Well I say, ‘where else!’ Israel! The Holy Land. Palestine. And of course every acre is well and truly marked in red on the map. Gentlemen, it is our real estate to trade and I suggest we trade it.

Well trade it he did by way of the 1917 Balfour Declaration which sold the Palestinians’ homeland from under their feet. The Jewish banks on Wall St stumped up the cash for the battle of Passchendaele where the British Army made a gain of three miles or so at the expense of 200,000 casualties.

The people of Palestine were duly sold down the river in 1948.

This piece of flagrant cynicism was very much in my mind when we drove our hire car across the unmarked border that separated Israel from the Occupied Territories. There were no border posts back then. No check points. No wall. But you knew you were over the line alright. All of a sudden the roads were full of pot holes and the cracked pavements were infested with army patrols made up of over hyped young men itching to crack a few skulls. It was the first time that I had ever seen what a Military Occupation actually looks like in the flesh. Describe it in one word? Pornographic would be my word. To see laughing soldiers shoulder pensioners off the pavement and into the road is the kind of thing that sends the blood up to boiling point and beyond.

Everything we saw disgusted us. Outraged us. Appalled us. And at the end of every Israeli rifle butt were the Palestinians. The ones who had their homes and orchards and orange groves given away by Mr Balfour in exchange for the price of the carnage of the Third Battle of Ypres.

We caught ourselves a really lucky break in the hotel we stayed at in Egypt before crossing the border into the Negev desert. We met a fellow Brit couple and we all got along. He was the Financial Times reporter for Jerusalem and they generously offered to put us up for the duration of our stay in the city. They were able to give us a few tips that were pure gold dust. Some were practical.

Our hire car had Israeli plates and therefore would have been a particularly tempting target for young Palestinian stone throwers. Thankfully there was an easy way around this. Put a Yasser Arafat scarf on the dashboard. We did, and everyone was all smiles. However the key bit of advice we received was not to be all British and mistrustful when we came face to face with Palestinian hospitality.

Our British instincts are very finely honed when it comes to an Arab being extremely friendly and hospitable. What is he after? Is he planning to lure us into his den to cut our throats? Our host from the FT encouraged us to dismiss these instincts. He promised that the hospitality we would be offered was without strings. He promised that we were about to meet the most phenomenally generous people on earth.

Well, was he ever right. As a supposed man of words, I still find it hard to describe the unbelievable days we spent in the West Bank. If ever a people could be excused for being bitter, twisted and stroppy, it is the beleaguered Palestinians who were so cynically asset stripped by the British Empire. Instead they proved to be the most amazingly open and generous people it has ever been my privilege to meet. Privilege is absolutely the word. I feel truly honoured to have spent time in East Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Jericho. The people we spent time with had every right to hate us with a seething passion for what had once been done in our name. Instead every door was open. I have no memory of being able to spend so much as a penny during our time in the West Bank.

Time after time we would ask what we could do to reciprocate such generosity. The answer was always the same. Please tell our story. Please tell the truth. Please let people know what is being done to us here.

And I made the promise.

So fast forward a dozen years or so and all of a sudden I found myself to be author of four novels, one of which had done reasonably well and sold 25,000 copies. And it became very clear to me that it was high time to keep the promise I had made in those narrow streets of East Jerusalem.

Please tell our story.

Please tell the truth.

All of a sudden I had no excuse not to keep the promise I had made.

However there was a problem. What reputation I had as an author was as someone who delved into the uglier corners of Scottish life. A book on the desperate tale of the Palestinian people through the second half of the 20^th Century would never sell a copy in the kind of shops that sold my books. So I needed a Scottish hook and I found it in the midst of the high rise hell that was Sighthill, Glasgow which became the back drop and setting for ‘Red Zone’..

Sighthill was one of those 60’s experiments gone hideously wrong. The tower blocks were built to house 16,000 but by the Millennium the dreams of the 60’s were all dead and gone. By the turn of the century the blocks were home to 8000 desperate souls and there was room for 8000 more desperate souls. So in its wisdom, Blair’s government made the decision to parachute in 8000 asylum seekers.

Unsurprisingly it didn’t make for a happy mix. 8000 poorer than poor Glaswegians and 8000 lost and broken souls from all corners north, south, east and west.

One of those lost and broken souls was Ghazi who helped me to put flesh on the bones of the story that was growing in my head. But Ghazi was neither lost nor broken. He was in fact one of the very finest people I have ever met. Ghazi’s family were ejected from their family land in 1948 when the plans laid down by Balfour were brought into reality. He grew up in a refugee camp in Syria and somehow managed to educate himself sufficiently to become a teacher. The Syrian secret police didn’t like that. On 27 occasions they called round in the wee small hours of the morning to drag Ghazi away into the night. Sometimes they tortured him. Sometimes they merely slapped him around. Sometimes they locked him up for months on end in conditions of primordial cruelty. Other times they let him out the next day.

In the end he could stand it no more and set out on an extraordinary journey with his two young children that in the end landed him in Glasgow via Budapest.

The sixteenth floor of a Sighthill tower block was a tough gig, but Ghazi had known plenty that had been a million miles tougher. The good old boys from the Home Office were hell bent on sending the three of them back to the Syrian torturers until with huge embarrassment he took off his shirt to reveal the legacy of their handiwork. The Home Office worker all but threw up and Ghazi was awarded his citizenship.

Things have gone well for Ghazi and his family and they now live in Edinburgh. He is a brilliant poet who had also become a screenwriter and playwright. He has had some of his stuff on the BBC. But more than everything else, in my eyes he is an utterly exceptional human being. Having been subjected to the kind of cruelty that was supposed to have gone out of fashion in the Middle Ages, he remains the most gentle and charming of men.

When we first met, he told me a story which has become indelible. We were talking about Palestinian hospitality and he explained how it could cause problems at times. Let’s say you invite a friend around for tea. Of course he will say that he will come. It would be intolerably rude to refuse such an invitation. That is all well and good except it means that the person who has issued the invitation really has no idea if their guest is coming or not. In order to get a better idea of what preparations they should make they will therefore ask ‘but is that a promise?’. To which the prospective guest might say in an unconvincing sort of way ‘Sure. I suppose so. A promise. Yes.’ And once again this leaves the host none the wiser. So now there is a sure-fire way to circumnavigate the inconvenience of perfect manners. The host will ask ‘But my friend, is that a British Promise?’ At last the black and white zone is reached. The guest might shake his head with a regretful smile and say ‘No. Not a British Promise’ which means he has already accepted an invitation to go somewhere else. On the other hand he can beam and nod and say ‘Of course it is a British Promise. I will see you tomorrow.’

I found the story incredibly sad when I first heard it. I was sickened at the way we shamelessly tout the vision of Britain being home to fair play and cricket to the rest of the world. No wonder so many broken souls from the darker and more brutal corners of the world embark on such epic and horribly dangerous journeys to seek asylum on our island. How sickening it must be once journey’s end is reached to find such a cold, inhospitable, mean spirited place of grey skies and hard faces. For a couple of never to be forgotten years in the middle of the last century, we for once ignored our own self interest and stood tall for freedom and democracy. Was that all of us or was it simply the miraculous stubbornness of Winston Churchill? Who knows, but we have dined out on it ever since. Does the real Britain back up the pipe dreams that we sell to the rest of the world? And is a British Promise worth the paper it is written on? I guess those Wall St bankers who extended the credit lines to pay for the slaughter at Passchendaele would say we had been true to our word and delivered up a country for the price of a battle. How strange that the Palestinians who we evicted from their land should still hang on to the belief in a British Promise.

Well once upon a time in the occupied streets of the West Bank I made my very own British Promise and in 2003 I did my best to keep it. My book ‘Red Zone’ attempts to tell the story of what happened after 1948 through the eyes of the wonderful people we met who treated us with such hospitality. I hope it does them justice. I hope it does Ghazi justice.

If you follow the link below you can download a free copy of Red Zone from the Kindle Store and make your own mind up.

Enjoy.           

TO DOWNLOAD A FREE COPY OF 'RED ZONE' PLEASE FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW

http://goo.gl/IQKWVB

GOODBYE TINKER

 

On 28^th May 1982 five hundred men of the 2^nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment attacked a tiny hamlet with its corrugated iron back set against the cold grey waters of the South Atlantic Ocean. The place was called Goose Green and for a few days our flag waving press hailed a mighty victory.

History tells us that the attack was borderline suicidal. Lecturers at Sandhurst and West Point insist that any force attacking a well dug in enemy must have a numerical advantage of at least three to one. In an ideal world they should also be backed up by air support and artillery.

Goose Green didn’t tick any of these boxes. The five hundred Paras were ordered forward to take on 1200 well entrenched Argentinians with no air cover and minimal artillery support. So why on earth did the top brass decide to gamble one of its very finest battalions on such a Kamikaze mission? Goose Green must surely have been one hell on an important strategic target. No. Not really. Not at all in fact. It could have quite easily been by-passed and left to its own devices. But the Government at home needed a victory to get the people onside with the whole Falklands adventure. Up until Goose Green, the news had carried all too many images of Royal Navy ships being sent to the bottom of the sea by Argentinian jets firing French made Exocet missiles.

Was it the sunk ships or the fact that the missiles were from France that got so far up Maggie Thatcher’s nose? I guess we will never know the answer to that one.

Anyway, by the end of May the time had come for her to bang the table and demand a victory. Any victory. Something to get everyone singing Jerusalem down the pub on a Friday Night. Something for her old pal Rupert Murdoch to serve up to the nation as the greatest thing since Waterloo.

All of a sudden the inconsequential and strategically irrelevant hamlet of Goose Green became a photo opportunity.

So. Who do you turn to when you want a victory against all sensible odds? The Paras of course. Who else. That is what Paras are for, when all is said and done. Back in 82 the Paras had been allocated a very specific role in the event of a full on Soviet invasion of Western Europe. They were to get themselves to the very front of the front line and take as many down as they could before getting completely marmalised. Most of the strategic planners agreed that the life expectancy of a Para in that particular scenario was about half an hour.

This was no kind of secret. They told the lads what to expect in the event of the Russian tanks rolling into the west.

Compared to the World War Three option, Goose Green must have seemed an absolute cake walk.

They won the battle of course and Maggie got her victory and the rest as they say became history. We were told by an adoring media that our Warrior Queen had delivered us a win to rank alongside El Alamein and Agincourt. Memories of Empire were re-kindled as the British public bought into the stirring tale big time and when it was time to go to the polls a year later we gave the Iron lady a landslide.

One of the 500 who played a part in the savagery and carnage of Goose Green was Tinker.

Derek Styles

AKA ‘Nobby’ Styles.

And this weekend past Tinker died. He was just over 50 years old.

He was one of the clients of our Veterans Project. Christ, I hate using the word ‘client’ when talking about Tinker. Tinker was just Tinker. In so many ways he was the very epitome of a British fighting man. About five foot eight and as wiry as a half starved kangaroo. A quiet man who exuded decency. A man who on 28^th May 1982 kept on going forward along with all of his comrades whilst all the time knowing full well that the mission was a basket case. From time to time he would come in for a talk and slowly over the years he would tell me a little more about those desperate hours. But never all of it. Whenever he reached the last chapter he would all of a sudden get the thousand yard stare and silence would settle over the room like a January frost. He could never quite manage to relive the final few minutes when the issue was resolved with bayonets.

He might not have talked about those desperate moments of murderous violence, but he certainly never forgot them. How could he? They came back to him every night without fail. In technicolour. He was terrified of sleep. Sleep meant a return to those blood soaked minutes when every shred of human decency disappeared from the world. Minutes when men became the very worst of animals. Minutes when he saw things and did things that he could never manage to box off and store away out of sight and out of mind. Oh no. Never out of mind. His mind became a minefield. His mind became his enemy - a hated, unmanageable VCR that replayed images of Goose Green day and night and night and day. 

Tinker died last weekend.

But on more than one occasion he said that he would rather have died along with 17 of his fellow Paras on the rain lashed slopes of the hills overlooking Goose Green.

For most of the thirty years that followed Tinker’s War, his life was lived off the rails. Addictions, homelessness, prison.

Years of it. Too many years. A couple of weeks ago he came in to ask for me to refer him to a six week programme up at Combat Stress. Would it have worked? We’ll never know now.

Instead he departed his life a tortured soul.

There is a whole lot of stuff that told me about Goose Green that I have no intention of writing down. Would he have wanted me to write it down and throw it out into the vastness of the internet? Maybe. Maybe not. I get a lot of this stuff at First Base. Many of the ugly secrets of our State find a natural habitat in the world of heroin. Things were done on that day back in 1982 that should not have been done. Let’s leave it at that. Well not quite. The bad stuff was signed off by men way, way above the pay grade of Tinker and his fellow squaddies. They were the disposable ones. The were merely the disposable ones who were thrown into a filthy, stinking pit of violence where they prevailed against all sensible odds.

Thirty one years have passed since Goose Green and most of them were bad ones for Tinker. He carried a sadness about him like a tired old overcoat. His fifteen minutes of fame wrecked his life. Was Goose Green to blame for his premature passing? Of course it was. Before Goose Green he was a super fit young guy who represented the Army in gymnastic tournaments all over the world. A bright future was waiting to be walked into. After Goose Green, nothing was ever the same again. His life was a shell of a life. A long, dismal road where drink and drugs stripped away his health and self respect and the nightmares came at him every night.

And through those years thousands of pedestrians passed him as he stood out on the High St selling the Big Issue. And much to the credit of the people of Dumfries, he always sold every copy.

And right now the British State is smiling over a glass of sherry as yet another of its warriors has taken his secrets to the grave. Just like always.

I feel honoured to have had the chance to know Tinker. In every respect he was the opposite of the cartoon paratrooper. A quiet man. A decent man. A man with genuine morality. Empathy. Humanity.

When he was ordered forward he went forward. They all did. And my God did he ever pay the price for a few days of positive headlines in the doting press.

A favourite saying.

Old soldiers never die.

Well they do.

And Tinker did.

Last weekend.

Thirty one years and fifty days since those desperate hours at Goose Green.

I hope that you have found the peace that you could never find when you were living and breathing.

“What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil…”

Let’s hope they are better dreams that the ones you have suffered for so very long.

Goodbye friend. You deserved so much better.

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN TAKING A LOOK AT MY SHORT BOOK 'AFTERWARDS' WHICH TELLS THE STORIES OF THREE OF THE GUYS I HAVE COME TO KNOW SINCE WE ESTABLISHED OUR FIRST BASE VETERANS PROJECT THREE YEARS AGO. YOU WILL FIND IT IN THE KINDLE STORE BY FLOOWING THE LINK BELOW

http://is.gd/2ndxKi

 

ALSO YOU MIGHT WANT TO LOOK AT JAKE WOOD'S STAGGERINGLY FINE AND MOVING ACCOUNT OF HIS TIME IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN AND THE PTSD NIGHTMARE HE HAS ENDURED EVER SINCE. YOU CAN FIND 'AMONG YOU' BY FOLLOWING THE LINK BELOW

 

http://is.gd/yKwa4B