THIS IS GONE. WE GO TO NORWICH

‘This is gone. We go to Norwich’

It was only this morning whilst listening to ‘Football Weekly’ did the true significance of these words become clear to me. James Richardson asked the big question. The huge question. The scary question. The only question.

What will these few short words become over the weeks and months and years and decades to come? Hell, even centuries.

Obviously I am assuming than anyone who is taking time out to read these Good Friday words will know who uttered them. And when. And where. And why.

Just in case you don’t, it was Stevie Gerrard addressing his now famous post final whistle huddle of fellow Reds in the immediate aftermath of Liverpool 3 – Man City 2.

And was he ever wired. It was jubilation, grief and victory all swept along by a raging, boiling a river of adrenaline and triumph. He was the winning gladiator raising his blood drenched sword to the howling masses in the Coliseum. He was King Kong atop the Empire State Building having swatted away a fighter plane. He was the human embodiment of the treeline napalm strike in Apocalypse Now.

And every molecule of the air around him was jumping with the barrage of sheer sound pouring down from the stands all around him.

“We’re going to win the league, we’re going to win the league…..”

There are still those who say that football is just a game. Well each to his own I suppose. You wouldn’t have found any of the 45,000 of us who were lucky enough be at Anfield last Sunday afternoon who would take that view.

For this was football at its very purest. Rawest. Most primordial. A place where we were in touch with our prehistoric selves. Part of a giant marauding pack. Defending our turf. Howling at the moon.

Transported.

And the hell with the normal decorum and manners of life. And being civilised. That was gone. Lost. Redundant. Instead we roared. Like a marauding pack. Defending our turf.

All of us.

And right there, bang slap in the middle of it all, stood Stevie. Eyes streaming and blazing. Our very own warrior king.

Shattered and suddenly grief stricken. Human and super human.

And somehow in that crazed state he came up with those few words which might now go one way or the other.

‘This is gone. We go to Norwich.”

That’s the thing with words. They can always go one way or the other.

Churchill’s fight them on the beaches speech would have looked a bit sad had the Wehrmacht breezed across the English Channel and the Panzers had duly rolled through Kent as if it was a part of Poland.

But they didn’t, and the words became historic.

How differently would we have now viewed Kevin Keegan’s ‘I’d just love it if we beat them..’ rant had he indeed beaten them. Instead he got beat and in the weeks that followed Sky Sports seemed to screen nothing but images of blubbing Geordies in empty stands.

Four more wins and these will be the words carved into the plinth of Stevie’s statue. There he will be. Probably caught in that moment after he headed in a Risse cross to set us all on the road to the miracle of Istanbul. There were almost 50,000 of us there in the Ataturk Stadium that night. But when Stevie urged us on, it was if he spoke to each and every one of us individually. Out of the ashes of a lost cause he made us into believers. A pack. A howling, snarling, baying pack…

I have never met Stephen Gerrard. I guess very few of the millions of reds around the world have actually met the lad in person. But I feel like I know him well. I was there that night when he made his debut. A gangly looking lad with the most ridiculous pudding bowl hair cut you’ve ever seen. We watched him jog onto the pitch and though Oh Christ, who the hell is this lad?

And then after about two minutes, the gangling youth nearly cut someone in half with a tackle straight out of the Tommy Smith playbook and we roared.

We’ve been roaring ever since.

I have watched him go from shy youth to cocky youth to nervous captain to confident captain to consummate captain. From boy to leader. To elder Statesman. Captain of his country. Ambassador for his city. Hundreds of games and highs the likes of which we have never seen. Olympiakos, Istanbul, West Ham….

But those highs are all gone now. Cue Rutger Hauer hanging from a rain swept skyscraper in the last knockings of Blade Runner.

‘All these moments must now be lost… like tears in the rain….’

Like the man said. This is gone.

We go to Norwich.

Norwich is all there is now.

Nothing but Norwich.

Never in history has anyone gone to Norwich like we are all about to go to Norwich.

11 men in red.

Subs.

Back room staff.

2000 fans or so.

They are the ones who will go to Norwich in person.

The rest of us will go in spirit. Absolutely bloody millions of us. And as our date with Norwich ticks ever closer, it is hard to concentrate on anything much else. It is just there. Noon on Sunday. Our date with destiny. Our moment of truth.

Not that anything will end in Norwich.

For after Norwich come Chelsea and Crystal Palace and Newcastle.

Day after day of nervous breakdown.

But before any of that, we go to Norwich.

And over the next few weeks it will go one way or the other.

So what will those words look like in the years to come? Let’s just hope they become the by-word for anyone looking to rally the troops for that last energy drained push for victory.

Well. There’s only one way any of us are going to find out.

We go to Norwich.

Whether we like it or not.

WOULD IT BE THE END OF THE WORLD IF AN INDEPENDENT SCOTLAND ENDED UP OUSIDE THE EU? WOULD IT HELL. HERE'S WHY.

Over the last few months, the people over at Project Fear seem to have been coming out with a new scare story every week. Well three cheers to that. Each and every stark warning seems to narrow the gap between ‘YES’ and ‘No’ another point or two. The main worry for all of us who are pushing for a ‘YES’ is that they will run out of new stuff to try and scare as with and they will suddenly go all quiet.

It’s hard to think they will though. Let’s face it, these are people who just love to throw their weight about and bully people. Imagine George Osborne and Danny Alexander frantically kissing every Scottish baby in sight and playing the part of nice guys. Not a good look! No. I reckon they will keep on with the scare us all to death agenda. To persuade them to do otherwise would be like trying to persuade a lion to make do with lettuce for his tea.

No doubt all those hyper-smart interns fresh out of Oxford with their starred firsts in PPE will be coming up with new and devastating ideas on a daily basis.

If you vote ‘YES’, there will be a new law demanding that all males in Scotland must wear a kilt during daylight hours….!!!

If you vote ‘YES’, new legislation will compel all Scots to consume a minimum of 20kg of broccoli each and every year…..!!!!

If you vote ‘YES’, Vladimir Putin will have planes full of Spetsnatz paratroopers in the air within minutes are there will be nobody to help you when the sky above your towns and cities is filled with silk canopies coloured red, white and light blue….. !!!!!

If you vote ‘YES’, there will be an immediate Martian takeover of the whole country and every child under the age of five will be deep fried and eaten….!!!!!!

If you vote ‘YES’, God will be so incandescent with rage that he will immediately send a vast plague of locusts to reduce the whole land of Caledonia into an empty desert….. !!!!!!!

Now, there’s the sort of dire stuff that will finally get the wretched people of Scotland quaking in our boots and absolutely desperate to flock to Danny and George in our droves.

Oh please look after us Danny and George!

Please take care of us Danny and George!

And we’ll never ask again. Honest. We promise. Pleeeeeeese Danny and George… Please forgive us…

Please don’t hurt us again…..

A favourite from the Project Fear playbook is the absolute certainly that there will be no place for an Independent Scotland in the European Union.

Is this the case?

I have absolutely no idea. To have a clue about this, you probably need to be one of those specialist lawyers with a suite of ritzy offices in downtown Brussels who charge 500 Euros for an initial five minute consultation complete with a decent drop of coffee and one of those wrapped biscuits they go for in that neck of the woods.

From what I can gather, it will all come down to whether the other 28 members are willing to sit back and allow Spain to throw its weight about. If an Independent Scotland is allowed straight into the club, then a precedent would be set for an Independent Catalonia to do exactly the same and that of course scares the living daylights out of the boys in Madrid.

Will they or won’t they. Who knows? I am sure that Gorge and Danny don’t know either. They just like to pretend that they know.

But would it necessarily be such a bad thing if the boys from Madrid got their way? I don’t think so.

At this point I should point out that I have always been a great fan of the EU and I remain so. For two thousand years we Europeans have been killing each other in ever increasing numbers. There were 10,000 casualties at Agincourt in 1415. The advent of gunpowder took the figure up to 47,000 when the Brits and French had another square go at Waterloo in 1815. A hundred years later, a million casualties had been taken by the time the French and Germans collapsed with exhaustion at Verdun. Stalingrad? They lost count at Stalingrad. And of course if we had ever fired our nukes at each other the numbers would have gone into the stratosphere.

We Europeans are pretty good at lots of things, many good and many bloody awful. Mercedes cars – good. Tiger tanks – bad. Sadly the thing we have always been best at is falling out and killing each other in vast numbers.

And then out of the wrecked cities and 20 million dead of World War Two came the first manifestations of the EU. And for nearly seventy years we have managed to stop fighting each other. In my book that is worth any number of daft bits of legislation and bloated Brussels expense accounts.

Project Fear tells us that if we are excluded from the EU, we will never be able to sell anything to anyone ever again. We’ll all be doomed and with a matter of months we’ll all be living in cardboard hovels and living off the Red Cross. Oh really? Last time I noticed, China isn’t in the EU and yet they still seem to manage to sell plenty of stuff to us. And when I check out the butter section in the supermarket, it isn’t exactly impossible to find tubs of Anchor which one way or another have made it all the way hear from New Zealand. If Spain gets its way, will the rest of the world give up drinking Whisky the very next day?

Aye right.

Were we left outside the EU, we would no doubt find it marginally harder to trade with countries like England and France and Germany. But we would find it a whole lot easier to made trade agreements with countries like the USA and India and Australia.

Swings and roundabouts. Neither one thing nor t’other.

For me the big gain would come from immigration.

At the moment being part of the EU means that we tend to get the worst of immigrants. Now hang on a second before you start to get all riled up. I have nothing but utter respect for the young Poles and Latvians and Lithuanians who get on a bus in Bialystok or Riga or Vilnius and take a ride to Scotland to find a job. They are brave, ambitious young men and women and I take my hat off to them. It is almost impossible to imagine our young people having the bottle to do the same thing in reverse.

But what do they give us? Very few come here with the intention of sinking roots and making a life for themselves here. Instead their game plan is to stay a year or two and save every spare penny so that they can get a good start in life when they return home. By and large, they share houses and rooms and work all hours god sends in minimum wage jobs. They hardly ever take any benefits and they pay their taxes. But they don’t pay all that much tax for the simple reason that they seldom earn enough to pay much tax.

Of course the idea of all of us being free to travel and work all over the EU is a truly great thing. But there is a pretty big downside. The downside is that being a part of the club means that we have to become a part of ‘Fortress Europe’ where would be migrants from the rest of the world are kept outside the gates at all costs.

I reckon that there is a good argument to had that these people we work so hard to exclude are in fact the very best of immigrants. These are the kind of immigrants who built America and Australia and Canada. We hear a great deal about the importance of infrastructure and that is fair enough. Assets like railway lines and ports and roads and broadband are crucial for any country. But we can never get away from the fact the most vital asset any country will ever have are the people who live there. Here is where an independent Scotland might just have a mighty opportunity. As things stand, we are a small, shrinking and ageing population who live and breathe in a country with a billion acres of empty space. There will be plenty of room for new people in an Independent Scotland and crucially we are pretty good at being welcoming to new people regardless of the colour of their skin. I have first hand experience of this as one half of a mixed race couple with two brown boys. There are not many countries left in Europe where a mixed race couple can feel comfortable any more. The Far Right is on the march again. The Mediterranean countries are uncomfortable. Places like Poland and Latvia and Lithuania feel pretty damn dangerous: these are places where most buildings in the rougher parts of town are adorned with swastikas. A trip to Moscow as a mixed race couple borders on the suicidal.

Amazingly enough, the only other European country apart from Britain where we can both feel at home and unthreatened is Germany. Ain’t that saying something!

Is Scotland better than England in this regard? It certainly seems this way. Nigel Farage is an amusing chap and it is truly heartening to see a frontline politician supping a pint and smoking a fag with the TV cameras running. But just because he is a cuddly fascist doesn’t mean he’s not a fascist all the same. His game is trading suspicion and poison for votes, and his game is playing pretty well down south right now. Up here? UKIP barely bothers trying up here. No point. They would lose every deposit they paid out.

Were we to end up outside the EU, we could play our two trump cards to huge effect. We have plenty of room and we are good at making people feel at home. Outside of the EU, we would have the opportunity to make like the Aussies. We could set a high bar which would allow us to cherry pick the brightest and the best from all over the English speaking world. We could open the doors and advertise what we have to offer all over the Commonwealth. Just imagine if an Independent Scotland started to become a magnet for the brightest and the best from India and Canada and New Zealand and Australia and Kenya and Nigeria and Ghana… hell, we could even add the USA to the list. Imagine the kind of people we would be handing out work visas to. Young, super smart, super educated, and super ambitious. Doctors, teachers, engineers and entrepreneurs. These would be immigrants who would be aspiring to come and stay for good. To make a life. To become the new Scots of the 21^st Century. No way would they be about to settle for 12 hours a day at minimum wage for a few months before catching the plane back home with a few savings. Instead they would start things up. Inject energy. Make things happen.

Just like what happened all those years ago when so many millions took the boat across the Atlantic to Ellis Island and a new future.

Of course I am pretty biased on this one. My mother in law Judy is a complete and utter star and many, many years ago she took a flight from Barbados to Britain and went on to become a ward sister with the NHS and as fine a citizen as any country could ever wish for. And Independent Scotland which was outside the EU could open its doors to a million of Judies from all corners of the English speaking earth.

And would they ever make the place rock….     

 

LEFT CLICKING DOWN A TRAIL OF FAINT ECHOES.....

 

Surely it is the beauty of the internet at it very purest.

 

Following threads.

 

Catching the sound of faint echoes that might otherwise have been forever forgotten. Echoes which might otherwise have been locked away into an eternity of silence.

We have entered an era where the left click is the gateway to things that once upon a time could be hidden away far from the public gaze. I find it hard to imagine how hard it must have been for authors in times past to undertake their research. Hour and after hour spent in big city libraries digging and delving through dusty paper. Now there is no such problem in following a thread. You merely left click and left click again. And again. And the only challenge is to gauge which bits are true and which bits are as mad as a bag of frogs.

Twitter can often provide the entry point. And so it was for me the other day when a re-tweet advertised a newly released edition of the Scottish Independence Podcast. Much of my life tends to be spent plugged into podcasts these days, whether I be driving from A to B or splitting logs or walking dogs.

Left click.

65 podcasts and counting.

Curser down.

Tariq Ali.

Left click.

Download.

Tariq Ali’s speech at a university in Glasgow was predictably calmer on the ears than Tommy Sheridan’s recent performance which as I write this has been left clicked 113,554 times. However, in terms of painting a picture of Scotland becoming a kinder and less morally bankrupt place to live, Tommy and Tariq are pretty well as one.

Tariq started off by recalling how as a young man he read about the exploits of John Maclean and was duly inspired.

John Maclean?

The name meant nothing to me. So when the podcast was done I typed ‘John Maclean’ into the Notes section of my phone.

Left click

24 August 1879 to 30 November 1923.

A man of the left. Of Glasgow. A man who grew into being a socialist in the grime and choking dust of the Lanarkshire coalfield. A school teacher who used his eloquence to give a voice to thousands who spent their days dying slow deaths hundreds of feet below ground. A socialist who evolved into a Bolshevik once the industrial slaughter of the Great War trenches took root. In his eyes, the war was all about Imperialism and the implacable forces of capitalism competing for market share. He saw the jingoistic propaganda of the Kitchener ‘Your country needs you!’ posters as a means to hoodwink working men on all sides to sign on the dotted line for a big lie. He raged at the fact that working men were being duped and corralled into hacking each other to pieces with bayonets in the name of patriotism.

Well that was never going to play well. He was arrested and duly banged up under the ‘Defence of the Realm Act’ in May 1915.

Wow.

The Defence of the Realm Act?

Left Click

Parliament passed the Defence of the Realm Act on August 8^th 1914. Bloody hell. They didn’t hang about. The war was only four days old when they voted it into law. Every politician of the day was out and about telling the people that the reason we were fighting the Kaiser was to defend our treasured British freedoms against the marauding Hun. And at the very same time, they passed a new set of laws through Parliament that made it possible to pick up and detain anyone without any kind of trial for crimes such as flying a kite or criticising the Royal Navy. It seemed like the best way to defend our treasured freedoms was to get rid of our treasured freedoms.

Well it seems that some things never change.

Detention without trial did nothing to shut up John Maclean and as the death toll ran into the millions he never stopped blaming capitalism for the greatest slaughter there had ever been.

In the end the Government could stand no more of him and they arrested him for sedition in May 1918. His trial in the High Court in Edinburgh found its way into folklore, especially when he used the dock as a stage to have his say. His words are worth repeating. Worth turning into yet another faint echo to be found with a left click.

‘I wish no harm to any human being, but I, as one man, am going to exercise my freedom of speech. No human being on the face of the earth, no government is going to take from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind. I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.’  

Fine words indeed and when we consider that he spoke these words mere months after countless young British and German lads had drowned in the sucking, poisonous mud of Passchendaele, it is hard to argue with them. But the judge wasn’t interested. The judge sentenced him to five years of penal servitude and they took him from the court to Peterhead Prison. And then they got stuck into the task of breaking him.

They never quite managed it.

He raged and he fought and in the end he was left with nothing but the last resort of political prisoners down the ages: hunger strike.

But the Government wasn’t ready to let him become a martyr. Every day they held him down and forced rubber tubes down his throat and into his stomach to force in enough nutrients to keep him going.

They let him out soon after the German Army caved in. Mentally, they never came close to breaking him. Physically he was a wreck. Less than five years after walking free from HMP Peterhead, his health finally collapsed and he was gone. He was 44 years old. Rumour had it that the thousands who lined the streets of Glasgow for his funeral made it the greatest send off the city had ever seen.

Years passed and the echoes faded. The British Establishment never learned to love John Maclean. Why would it? The Establishment won. And to this day the very same Establishment remains firmly in place. Half a century later, Nelson Mandela used his trial to make a speech that was heard all over the world before he was packed of to Robben Island. Nelson differed from John Maclean in two crucial areas. He had the constitution of a lion which meant they never managed to break him physically. And of course the establishment he fought tooth and nail collapsed like a pack of cards.

For a while the place where the echoes of John Maclean were heard most clearly was in the Soviet Union. In 1979 the Kremlin named a Leningrad street after him – Maklin Prospeckt. And then on the anniversary of his death they produced a stamp in his honour. But when the Bolshevik dream finally rotted away like a tired old cabbage, Leningrad reverted to St Petersburg and Maklin Prospekt was tossed into the dustbin of history. It became Angliisky Prospekt. English Avenue! A pretty bitter pill to swallow for a man who had dreamed of an Independent Socialist Scotland.

Had there been no world wide web, the echoes of John Maclean would had become ever fainter.

Instead his words are but a left click away, especially now we have reached the hundredth anniversary of the slaughter of the trenches. The Establishment seems hell bent on remembering that bout of butchery as a heroic sacrifice in the name of freedom. I guess they will be pretty keen to gloss over the Defence of the Realm Act. Will they succeed? Probably not. Instead, those echoes of John Maclean will get steadily louder. And if we all vote ‘Yes’ next September it would be nice to think that we might name a Glasgow street in his memory to make up for Maklin Prospekt becoming English Avenue.    

The renaming of the Russian street took me back to the early days of the 80’s when I was importing stuff from Rajasthan to hawk around summer festivals and autumn university fresher’s fairs at universities up and down the land. We criss-crossed the country in my venerable old VW Beetle and it seemed no matter which campus we pitched up at, there was always a Steve Biko building. I wonder if they are still Steve Biko buildings now? Or have they been renamed as history has moved on and Steve Biko’s words have become echoes from another time?

Who knows.

Steve Biko was a John Maclean. The apartheid establishment hated him for stating the blindingly obvious. His message was always one of peace. He made the point that people of all colours lived under the vast South African skies – black, white, brown and yellow. Maybe they should simply stop hating each other and learn to live in harmony. It didn’t go down well. The Pretoria Government issued a gagging order which promised imprisonment if Steve ever talked to more one person at a time. Like John Maclean before him, Steve refused to shut up. And so it was that they came for him in the night.

They took him to police room 619 in the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth. They tortured him for 22 hours and put him into a coma. Then they moved him to Walmer Police Station and beat him some more and then ignored his major head injury and chained him to the bars of his cell. Eventually a doctor figured that hospital might be a good idea. So they stripped him naked, chucked him in the back of a car, and drove him 1100 miles to the prison hospital in Pretoria. Apparently Port Elizabeth didn’t do hospitals. Against all odds, he survived the journey and managed not to fade out until an hour or so after his arrival in Pretoria.

The Government issued a statement saying he had died as a result of a week long hunger strike.

More echoes of John Maclean.

Memories from other times.

Left click

ITunes.

Search box ‘Biko Peter Gabriel’

Left Click

PURCHASE

Left click

Are you sure?

Left click

‘Port Elizabeth 1977, weather fine…

It’s business as usual in Police Room 619….”

Echoes.

Faint echoes.

But echoes all the same. Echoes of the words of brave, brave men who preached decency in times on obscenity.

Words to be remembered. And treasured. And left clicked down the ages.

In the end Steve Biko’s dream of a South Africa where every man and woman has the chance to cast their vote regardless of their colour has come to pass.

Maybe next September John Maclean’s dream of an Independent Scotland where we can do things better might also come to pass…   

 

 

MAYBE IT'S TIME TO CASH IN THE WHEELBARROW FOR A LAPTOP AND REKINDLE THE SPIRIT OF 1844

Let's face it, there wasn't much to like about the old Soviet Union, but could they ever produce a poster! Take that you greedy Capitalist swine!

 

My blog of last week’s blog which highlighted the rip off prices being charged by the Co-Op in Kelloholm certainly seemed to chime with readers across the length and breadth of Scotland. If you missed the blog, the killer fact was that a basic bag of shopping in the ex mining village cost 350% more than the same groceries could be had for 26 miles down the road in Dumfries. The blog was published on the ‘Wings over Scotland’ site and comment after comment confirmed the fact the Co-Op likes to create monopolies in small, isolated towns and then proceed to take its customers to the cleaners.

It is all a very long way away from the ideals of the Rochdale pioneers who set the Co-operative movement ball rolling way back in 1844. Those gallant Lancastrian mill workers took a wheelbarrow on a twenty mile round trip over the moors to Manchester where food was a third of the price and twice as fresh as what was on offer in Rochdale.

Sadly, my eye watering till receipt from the Co-Op branch in Kelloholm rather suggests that a wheel has come full circle over the course of 170 years. The poacher has become the gamekeeper, and how! How those lads who heaved their wheel barrow along that rutted track must be turning in their graves. A couple of weeks ago the banking arm of the Co-Op announced that they were going to pay their Chief Exec £3.6 million a year because that is what you have to pay to get the right sort of guy. So much for founding ideals. Top, 'fat cat' dollar for the man at the helm at the same time as they are screwing the rural poor for every penny they can get.

And what goes around, comes around.

In 1844, factory owners calculated pay rates on the basis of stumping up the bare minimum required for their workers not to starve to death. Well, not too many at any rate. Then came Trade Unions and votes for everyone over the age of 18 and they were forced to stop doing that kind of thing here in the UK. Not that they stopped altogether. Instead they closed up the factories here and carried on business as usual in Indonesia and China. And what goes around, comes around and now those pesky Asians are getting ideas above their station. The cheeky sods are aspiring to more than a bowl of rice a day and they seem to think 14 hours of work entitles them to a McDonalds and a television. I mean, really…

Not to worry. Things are getting better on the home front. We now have zero hour contracts and most of those annoying factory inspectors had been downsized. And then there is that wonderful Polish chappie from Bialystok who can deliver a minibus full minimum wage lads to your factory gates at 12 hours notice. Who needs Indonesia?

But here’s the thing.

The idea of what goes around, comes around doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. There is no rule why it can’t be a good thing.

Time to hop into the Tardis and take a time trip back to those rain drenched, cobbled streets of 1844 Rochdale.

The problem? There was only one shop selling food in town and the shop owner was exploiting his monopoly to charge three times as much as the shops in Manchester.

The answer? Club together and take turns to push a wheelbarrow over the moors to Manchester and break the monopoly. The idea really couldn’t have been much more simple. And like many simple ideas, it proved to be monumentally effective. It was a genuine game changer.   

So.

Can that simple idea from 1844 be dusted down and made to work in 2014. As far as Kelloholm is concerned, there are a couple of major problems that need to be acknowledged from the get go. A round trip from Rochdale to Manchester was 20 miles. A round trip from Kelloholm to Dumfries is 50 miles. And let’s face it, we aren’t as robust as we were back in 1844. Even if the round trip was only 20 miles, you would have to look long and hard to find anyone willing to push a wheelbarrow that distance.

But things have moved on since 1844. There have been successive technological revolutions which have brought us motorised transport and the worldwide web. So the key is to take the idea beyond needing a wheelbarrow and some stubborn Lancastrian muscle.

The key to the 1844 idea is the clubbing together bit.

The good news is that it is entirely possible for someone in Kelloholm to buy their groceries at Dumfries prices: they can order it online from Tesco or Asda and have it delivered to their door the very next day. Cue archive shots of church bells ringing and massed crowds in the streets cheering and waving.

But of course it isn’t quite as easy as that.

The downsides? There are two big downsides. Two deal breakers.

Number One: it costs a fiver to have your groceries delivered. No big deal for the Chief Exec at the Co-Op bank, but almost 10% of your disposable income if you are eking out an existence on Jobseekers Allowance.

Number Two. To qualify for a delivery, you need to spend at least £40. This is where cash flow becomes a major issue. Once power bills are paid, most people are left with about £25 a week or so for food. Basically you would need to go without food for two weeks to generate the cash flow required to make that £40 purchase. There ain’t many who will be able to manage that. So they remain doomed to walking down the road to the Co-Op and getting robbed blind.

Can that 1844 idea be dusted off to solve the problem?

Sure can.

You need someone to step up to the plate and volunteer to become a co-ordinator. That person will need a working debit card and a small amount of liquidity. The first thing they do is invest £60 in a Tesco or Asda delivery season ticket. We have these at First Base. For a tenner a month, you can have as many deliveries as you like so long as you spend at least £40 each time. We once had 15 deliveries in a month which meant that our average cost was about 66p. Now that’s more like it.

Does such a person exist in Kelloholm?

They sure do. I had a chat last week with Alistair who is the local Church of Scotland Minister and he indicated that he would be more than happy to take care of that side of things. He also said that the church hall could be used as a delivery point.

So what is the next box to tick?

Well that would be the co-operation box. Ideally 20 families will decide to co-operate to make the thing happen. Every week they will produce a shopping list for about a tenner’s worth of groceries. They take the list to a central point at an agreed time. They stump up their tenner and someone takes the list and orders it online. As soon as four people have taken in their lists, and the total goes past £40, the order can go through the checkout and be scheduled for delivery the next day. The maths are both simple and completely manageable. If 20 people spend £10 a week, there is enough to ensure that a supermarket delivery van will arrive at the church hall five days a week. Once this minimum target is reached, then people can take in orders for £5 or even £3. Once this point is reached, the delivery cost drops to 50p a day. Not so bad for a 50 mile round trip.

So. All of a sudden we seem to be getting there.

We have the company who will deliver groceries at a third of the Kelloholm price for an average of 10p per order - Tesco or Asda or both.

We have the man with the debit card who will take care of the transactions - Alistair

And we have a place where the groceries can be delivered – the Church Hall

After this morning, it seems like we have a place where with a computer and internet access: an ideal place where those involved in the scheme can call in with their shopping lists and cash.

Anything else?

A couple of smart as paint young volunteers wouldn’t go amiss. Some time spent co-ordinating this kind of project would look pretty damn fine on any young person’s CV and it would certainly give them plenty to talk about at future job interviews.

Some final pieces of the jigsaw?

We agreed this morning that it would be good to get some sort of public meeting organised to punt out the idea and see if we can win over a few converts. One of the last echoes of the village’s coal digging past is the Miner’s Memorial Hall which seems to me like a pretty ideal venue. It is worth remembering that a few miles up the valley is the town of Cumnock where Keir Hardie cut his teeth as a Union man representing miners back in the 1880’s before going on to become the first ever Labour MP to enter the House of Commons.

Bums on seats?

Well, I have left a message on Tommy Sheridan’s mobile and when he calls me back I’ll see if I can twist his arm to take a ride south from Glasgow to give the thing a kick start. I have a feeling that this kind of grass roots, bottom up trouble-making will be right up our Tommy’s street. We’ll see. Fingers crossed.

Then I guess some kind of name will be needed. 'The 1844 Club'? Maybe. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

I figured it might be a good idea to list all of these various steps from the get go. If this thing works, then it shows that it doesn’t need anything particularly earth shattering for people to start kicking back. This kind of thing is happening more and more in Greece and Spain and France, though it remains under the radar. When the lads did their wheelbarrow yomp back in 1844, there was no Facebook or Twitter or YouTube to carry the news of what they were up to around the world. Well, that is no longer the case. Should the '1844 Club' prove they are capable of giving the profiteering Co-Op a proper kick in the teeth, then there is no reason why lots of people shouldn’t know about it. And then maybe a few will copy what they are doing and break other monopolies in other isolated towns.

Which of course takes us to the very heart of the matter. 

Will the good folk of Kelloholm decide to club together and co-operate like the good folk of Rochdale did 170 years ago?

That remains to be seen.

WANNA KNOW WHAT RURAL POVERY LOOKS LIKE? THIS IS WHAT RURAL POVERTY LOOKS LIKE.

Our volunteer who does the Monday morning food run up the Nith valley is away in Asia and Australia for a month, so my week now starts with a ride up the A76. The countryside is drop dead gorgeous, particularly in the early morning when the newly risen sun paints the peaks of the hills all kind of glowing colours. But the beaten up towns of the valley are like refugees. Only a few decades ago towns like Sanquhar and Kirkconnel had a genuine reason to exist. They mined coal. They helped keep everyone’s lights on. They had war memorials which gave written proof that they had offered up more young men than most to the meat grinders Britain's World Wars.

Then of course everything changed as Maggie Thatcher and Arthur Scargill played out their poker game which eventually consigned places like Sanquhar and Kirconnel to the scrap heap of history.

A few months ago my blog describing the dismal plight of those who have been left behind in these ‘post industrial’ places received many, many more hits than I would  ever have thought. Which was pleasing I suppose. That was back in the autumn when we had just established a new food parcel collection point at Action for Children. Ever since John has taken 15 food parcels up the A76 every week: come wind, rain or shine.

Some basic, permafrost cold statistics? Why not

Number of emergency food parcels per year. 52 x 15 = 780

Population of the village – 2074

Enough said I guess. If we gave out the same proportion of food parcels across the whole of Dumfries and Galloway we would be on target to dish out 56,000 parcels in the next 12 months. In fact the figure will be about 7000.

So we are left with a conclusion which isn’t exactly hard to come to: Kirkconnel is a poverty hotspot. There are two over-riding reasons for this. Number one, the Government once upon a time shut the coal mine. Number two, the Government is now in the process of shutting down the benefit system.

Fair enough. But there is more to the story here. Let’s assume that you live and breathe in Kirconnel and right now you lack gainful employment. You are in fact on the dole or the ‘Brew’ as it tends to be called in these parts. This means that you are given £60 a week to live on thanks to a caring state. So long as you head down the A76 to Dumfries twice a month to sign on the dotted line and you make sure you don't arrive more than a second late for your appointment, then you can look to receiving your ‘Brew’ money for the foreseeable future.

Housing is no great problem. There are plenty of empty houses in Kirkconnel. However they are not like all of those empty houses in Kensington. The houses of Kirkconnel tend not to sit in the investment portfolios of Russian gangsters. They are empty because nobody wants to live in them.

Heating and lighting your house is a problem. The wind lances through the valley in the cold months of the long Scottish winter. The surrounding countryside would be ideal for filming a movie of Macbeth.

‘Light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.’

Oh yeah. The hard ridged moors that stare down on the village are pretty ideal from planning dark deeds.

But I digress. It’s a cold place. It will take half of your Brew money to keep your house anything approaching warm, especially if you have reached an age where the doctor tells you to swallow an aspirin every morning to avoid taking a coronary.

So you’re left will £30 a week to clothe and feed yourself.

As in not a lot, though it always seems that politicians are more than confident that they would be absolutely fine and dandy if they were ever required to get by on such a sum.

This is where life gets particularly hard for anyone unlucky enough to find themselves stranded in a post industrial place which has become out of sight and out of mind. This is where we can see Capitalism at it most savage. When I say or write such a sentence, people immediately call me a Marxist. Don’t get me wrong, I can see why. The fact is that I have never read so much as a page of 'Das Kapital' and I have no political affiliations whatsoever. As far as I am concerned such a sentence represents no more than a cold, hard fact.

Look at it this way.

Where on planet earth is the urban area where people are most desperate for food? I expect it will be those besieged suburbs of Damascus where the Syrian Army seems hell bent of starving to death people who don’t much like the Assad family.     

Where on planet earth is the place where you pay the highest price for a pound of rice? I expect it will be those very same besieged suburbs of Damascus where the Syrian Army seems hell bent of starving to death people who don’t much like the Assad family.    

These two facts are forever locked together. The more desperate people are for a particular product, the more that particular product will cost. It is the religion of the market. Supply and demand. And there is nothing that Capitalism loves more than a controlled market. A monopoly. Because of course if there is only one supplier, and people absolutely need what he is selling, then he can more or less charge what he likes.

If there is more than one supplier, things are somewhat different. These suppliers have to complete with each other and they will strive to be able to sell their goods and services at the cheapest price whilst still turning a profit.

So if you live in a place where there are lots of suppliers fighting each other tooth and nail, then you are a lucky punter.

But if you live in the place where there is only one seller, then you are going to get well and truly ripped off.

This of course is why drug dealers are so fond of shooting each other. Those boys just love a nice monopoly.

Way back in 1844 this particular iron clad rule of capitalism got a bunch of people very wound up in indeed. They were the good folk of Rochdale, a town in the next valley but one from where I cut my Lancastrian teeth in Blackburn. These were cotton mill workers who were grafting sixteen hours a day and they were still more or less starving to death. Not a good look. What really got their goat was the fact that their local shop was charging three times the price for a stale loaf of bread than the bakers of Manchester were charging for something fresh out of the oven. Why? Simple. A good old fashioned monopoly was well and truly in place. They were expected to work all the hours sent by their God and then spend every penny in the local store whilst continuing to doff their caps. Their average lifespan was 37.

But they didn’t doff their caps. Instead they pushed a wheelbarrow to Manchester and back and started up their own shop. It was a twenty mile wheelbarrow commute that changed the game. They co-operated. They became a Co-Operative. They became THE Co-operative.

In theory, the mothers in those shell scarred suburbs of Damascus could do the same. In theory they could set out on a wheelbarrow convoy and clear the shelves of rice in a supermarket in one of the Assad parts of town. And the price of rice would fall by hundreds of percentage points.

The problem with that idea of course is that Assad’s soldiers would hose them down with Putin’s machine guns.

Thankfully the disgruntled storekeeper in Rochdale all those years ago wasn’t able to whistle up a company of dragoons to chop the uppity cotton workers into bite sized pieces and the rest became history.

The Co-op was born.

Cue uplifting music and a cosy montage of images showing ho much better everything is now when compared to those dark, dark days when the mills and mines were truly satanic.

So our man in Kirkconnel is a lucky man indeed. Why? Because the one and only food shop in the village is a Co-operative and there is no way that the Co-Operative movement would ever abuse a monopoly to rip people blind. Of course it wouldn’t. That would be against everything the Co-Op stands for. It would be against the very spirit of those gallant men and women of Lancashire who pushed their wheelbarrows ten miles there and ten miles back again. It would be against 170 of history and progress….

But things change with time.

Once upon a time it would have been hard to imagine Labour Prime Minister hooking up with a far right American President to invade every country they could find. Well that all changed, didn’t it?

And sadly it seems like the Co-Op has changed too.

Yesterday I did a bit of research. I parked up and did some shopping. The Co-Op in Kirkconnel has a nice electric door and inside music from the in-house Co-Op readio station gave a cosy sort of ambiance. The shop was bright and clean and the bloke behind the counter couldn’t have been more friendly. I bought 17 items. Enough to put together a four day food parcel. In each case, I chose the very cheapest option. And when I got the final total I was gobsmacked.

Check it out.

Here are the cold, hard facts. This is the price you pay for living 26 miles away from competition. This is what it looks like when capitalism achieves a yearned for monopoly   

PRODUCT                   KELLOHOLM         DUMFRIES

 

CUP SOUP                    £1.42                           £0.22

JAM                               £0.95                           £0.29

TINNED HAM             £1.69                           £1.00

RICE PUDDING          £1.09                           £0.15

UHT MILK                   £1.04                           £0.53

INSTANT WHIP          £0.67                           £0.17

SAVOURY RICE         £0.92                           £0.26

NOODLES                    £0.92                           £0.20

MARGARINE              £1.42                           £0.75

MEATBALLS               £0.99                           £0.40

TIN SPAGHETTI         £0.75                           £0.15

TIN SOUP                     £0.72                           £0.15

TIN BEANS                  £0.52                           £0.26

CORNFLAKES            £2.05                           £0.31

LOAF OF BREAD       £1.53                           £0.47

TIN CUSTARD            £1.09                           £0.15

BISCUITS                     £0.69                           £0.23

 

TOTAL                         £18.46                         £5.69

This is exactly how things looked 170 years ago in Rochdale. When we were industrial. When those ten miles that separated Rochdale from Manachester made all the difference.

Well we are post industrial now and things look pretty well exactly the same. It is 26 miles down the valley from Kirkconnel to Dumfries. Too far for a wheelbarrow. 

And the Co-Op really should be ashamed of itself.

SOME THOUGHTS ON MY FIRST TENTATIVE STEPS INTO THE POLITICAL REALM

Ten days ago I stepped over a line and did something I have never done before: something I never thought I would ever do. I made a political speech. I entered the political arena.

The occasion? A ‘Yes’ for Scottish Independence rally in Lockerbie Town hall. Even having made the speech, I still find it hard to figure out how on earth I found myself doing such a thing.

Unsurprisingly the back story is to be found in the online world. It is strange how the Mark who exists in the virtual world is beginning to have an ever increasing influence on the Mark who lives and breathes in the real one. A few months ago I penned a blog laying out my reasons for enthusiastically voting ‘Yes’ in next September’s referendum. The thing got tweeted and re-tweeted and linked and Googled and much to my surprise many thousands of people found their way to what I had written.

A tweet landed from Stuart in Lockerbie asking how if I might be willing to talk about my reasons for voting ‘Yes’ at a meeting in Lockerbie and I thought why the hell not.

And so it was that I stepped up to the lectern feeling nervous as hell. How did it go? That isn’t really for me to say. Thankfully nobody chucked any rotten fruit, though the banks of ‘Better Together’ supporters certainly looked like they would like nothing better. In fact they looked like they would gladly have exiled me off to some godforsaken island to break rocks in the tropical sun.

Thankfully at the send of the speech most people seemed to clap. Which was a pretty major relief.

As soon as the meeting was wound up I hit the pavement outside and more or less ate a cigarette!

Well, that was the real world part of proceedings taken care of. A twenty minute speech on a cold and misty night. The audience was about a hundred strong and the average age of the audience was older than I am. Interestingly the only young people in the room were wearing’Yes’ T shirts and badges.

But as we all know the real world only represents one side of things. We now live in a time where the virtual world kicks in almost as soon as real world proceedings have played out. The event was filmed by come people called ClanDestiny who have set out their stall to film the grass roots war for votes on September 18^th.

A day or so later Stuart, told me via Facebook that the film of my speech was now live on YouTube.

Time for another first. I have done talks here, there and everywhere over the years but very seldom have I had the chance to review my efforts. So, with considerable trepidation, I fixed a coffee, lit up a tab, donned my headphones and watched it through. First thoughts? The obvious ones. Jesus, when did I get so old! And I really, really need to learn how to stand still and not jump about the place like some agitated bloke with a bunch of soldier ants climbing up my trouser leg. Too fast sometimes. Probably too much on a level. More pauses required. Further up with the ups and further down with the downs.

Anyway.

You can make up your own mind if you like. Click here and in the blink of a digital eye you can have a watch.

http://wingsoverscotland.com/view-from-an-immigrant/

As you can see the link is not YouTube. It is a site called Wings Over Scotland which has become one of the more effective frontline units fighting the increasingly ferocious battle for votes in September.

A few months ago Wings Over Scotland carried my blog laying out my reasons for voting 'Yes', and I was bowled over by the number of times the thing was read. Now it seems that a whole lot of people are tuning in to watch my debut speech. When I started to write this the number had reached 1684: a number that is already nearly 20 times more than the audience who were there in person. How far will this number rise? I have no clue. But when you sit back and think about it, it really is hugely encouraging.

When all is said and done, I am more or less a complete nobody. Fair enough, I have written a few books and a few people have bought them. In and around Dumfries, people tend to recognise me because the local press have always covered the work of First Base. But I am in no way, shape or form famous. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion. A voice. Maybe I am right about some things and maybe I am completely wrong about some things. That all depends on your point of view. But thanks, to Winston Churchill’s stubbornness and the unrelenting guts of hundreds of thousands of the guys who stood up to Hitler, I still have the absolute right to air my thoughts and views.

Free speech of course is a thing we have enjoyed in Britain for many, many years and it is only when you visit places where such a luxury does not exist that you can really appreciate what a blessing it is.

But that is not the whole story of course. For years now free speech has been censored without us really realising it. The hellish advent of the soundbite has stamped down on the power and reach of free speech.

Let’s roll back the years a bit. Way back in 1879 the Turks embarked on a truly brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. They butchered over 30,000 Bulgarians with the kind of primordial cruelty that is always associated with bouts of ethnic cleansing. The Westminster Government of Benjamin Disraeli decided to let it pass. They deemed that picking a fight with the Turks didn’t chime with the needs of the Empire and the City of London at the time. Funny, but that sounds familiar somehow. Isn’t the area where the Turkish atrocities went down kind of close to the Crimea? Very close. And is the current Tory led government busting a gut to put Putin back in his box? Ah. Not really. Not at all in fact. Why? Well, we found that out when a careless foreign office mandarin got his papers photographed as he made his way down the pavement to Number 10. The message was the same as the message given to Disraeli back in 1879. Having a go at Putin and his oligarch buddies would be bad for business. Bad for the City of London. The only difference is that we don’t have an empire any more.

Anyway.

As per usual, I digress. Turning a blind eye to butchery and slaughter didn’t sit well with Disraeli’s arch rival, William Ewart Gladstone. The 'Grand Old Man' decided that British indifference should not be allowed to stand and he embarked on what history came to know as his ‘Midlothian Campaign’. He rattled up and down the land and gave impassioned speeches to packed halls. The word spread and within months Disraeli’s government had been toppled. There was no TV back then of course and no radio either. To hear the words of Gladstone you had to turn up in person and then you got the whole speech – not just a twenty second sound bite on the evening news.

Hundreds of thousands heard every word he had to say and as a result a government crashed.

The advent of radio and TV should have increased the reach of free speech and taken messages like the one Gladstone delivered into the living rooms of everyone. But it didn’t work out that way. Instead of the whole speech, we only ever got a smattering of words. The soundbite. The message we heard was governed by the decision of the producer who would basically play God. Not surprisingly the politicians soon got wise to this and started to enlist the services of spin doctors in order to design a perfectly formed 20 second segment which would make the TV producer’s job as easy as pie.

And very soon they were all speaking like robotic morons.

And very soon we were being treated like dumbed down morons.

‘You might turn, but the Lady’s not for turning’.

‘Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.’

‘It’s the economy stupid.’

And hard working bloody families until you could happily sling a half brick through the screen.

Ahhhggggggggggh!!!!!!

And then worm started to turn thanks to a mixed race lad with a Kenyan dad and an Kansas mum. I refer of course to a certain Barrack Obama who proved he could give Gladstone or Churchill a run for their money when it came to getting a crowd up onto its feet. Barrack was such a dream of an orator that people wanted a whole lot more than the 20 second extract the TV channels were willing to give them. His people were quick to latch onto this and they put all their efforts into prompting people to log on and catch the whole of the speech online.

Online.

The game changer.

And of course millions upon millions did exactly that. They logged on and listened to the whole thing from beginning to end. And the Republicans were duly put to the sword, just like the government of Disraeli all those years ago.

Surely even the most cynical of individuals has to be encouraged by this. The virtual world is giving democracy a chance at last. Once he became President, Barrack took things a stage further. There was no way that the Mullahs in charge in Tehran were about to invite him along to talk to their people. So instead he talked to the Iranian people online and millions duly logged on to hear him. All of him. Each and every word.

A few years ago my friend Tommy Sheridan was elected to the Scottish Parliament. Tommy is the kind of guy who gives the Establishment kittens. He tells it like he is. He is the kind of guy who would not think twice about raising the kind of secrets the Establishment is desperate to keep on the floor of the Parliament. He is the kind of guy would use his Parliamentary privilege to expose the very worst deeds of the State.

In short, he is the sort of guy who the Establishment always goes out of its way to shut up. They tried locking him up in HM Prison Barlinnie a time or two, but that had no effect whatsoever. So it was time for Plan B. Those two worthy souls Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks were enlisted to go get him and did they ever. It was the News of the World that won it. Or so they thought.

Establishment 1 – Tommy 0

And no doubt they thought they had done enough to gag him on a permanent basis. They really thought they had rid themselves of this particular ‘turbulent priest’.

Not quite.

Not nearly in fact.

For the turbulent priest that is Tommy Sheridan is back and firing on all cylinders. He is in the frontline of the ‘Yes’ campaign and he is shooting from the hip. If you want to watch a speech from a genuine master of the art, then follow this link.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6GsEKrCvgw

Here is a man at the top of his game. You will see that his audience is rather higher than mine was in Lockerbie, but not that much higher. Maybe two hundred and fifty or so. But here’s the thing. As I write these words, over 102,000 people have logged on to watch him. 102,000! Now we are talking the same kind of numbers as once upon a time turned out to hear the voice of Gladstone. And when you click the link you get the chance to hear ALL of Tommy’s words. Not just a soundbite carefully chosen to make him seem off the wall and semi demented.

Have a watch and then ask yourself if the likes of Cameron, Milliband or Clegg could dream of coming up with something that would even come close. Not a chance. Not in a million years. My guess is that the average age of those who have logged on to watch Tommy will be thirty years less than the average age of those who turned up in person. And that is fine by me. How you actually watch the whole speech is a distant second in importance to actually getting the chance to watch the whole speech.

The online world has many, many problems, but the fact that it has enabled over 102,000 people to hear Tommy seems a pretty big deal to me. Something tells me that somewhat less than 102,000 will tune in to my efforts, but I am merely a novice.

I wonder if Rupert Murdoch is one of the 102,000? Maybe. I hope so. You thought you had rid yourself of this particular turbulent priest didn’t you Rupurt?

Well think again.

It was 6.45am when I started writing this blog. At that point 1684 people had tuned into YouTube to watch my speech. It is now 7.53am and 1742 people have now had a watch. In 68 early morning minutes, 58 have enjoyed the fact that they can hear the words of a middle aged nobody from a small inconsequential town in the South West of Scotland.

Ain’t that something!