STRANGE ECHOES

I have spent the last few days in a strange kind of limbo-land. Work has meant the now accustomed procession of beaten down characters bearing a slip of paper to exchange for a bag of food. Outside of work, I have been outside in the warmth of a surprisingly sunny Scottish spring and working my way through Anthony Beevor’s almost epic 900 page account of the Second World War. As we all come to terms with the permanent erosion of our standard of living, it is tempting to succumb to the idea that things are becoming really bad. It certainly feels that way. It certainly looks that way on the TV. It certainly can be seen in the uncomprehending eyes of those who come into First Base for a bag of food.

Two or three hours spend in the Anthony Beevor Tardis is more than enough to dispel any such thinking.

For years I was as conned as everyone else in my generation when it came to the memories of what went down right across the globe in the 1940’s. I grew up with action men. Some were plastic figures with chiselled chins and all kinds of gear to collect and swap. Others were the heroic characters from the big screen. The Americans had John Wayne, Rob Mitchum and Burt Lancaster. We had Leslie Howard, David Niven and John Mills. Heroes and warriors and when the baddy Germans died, they died well; quickly and almost peacefully as a burst from a machine gun seemed almost like a kindness. The young lads of the Sixties were never subjected to any of the realities of the mechanised butchery that swept the world in the middle of the 20^th Century leaving far too many millions of dead people to accurately count. We were reared on the Boys Own heroics of The Battle of Britain and the Dambusters and the Great Escape and Colditz and D Day. We were steered clear of vast visions of Hell that played out in the East.

Over recent years, having visited a few of those places where for a while Hell came alive on earth, I have developed something of an unhealthy fascination with the biblical savagery that took a hold of so many millions of people for those darkest of all years.

In my opinion, Beevor has no peers. He tells it like it was, warts and all. He gives the view from the top and the view from the bottom. He gives the context of how normal every day postmen and farmers were transformed into utter psychopaths. For a while in the late Seventies, we were all held transfixed as the Yorkshire Ripper story played out and the extent of his butchery was revealed. Well, obviously we were. Yet what Peter Sutcliffe did was no more than the day to day bread and butter of what both sides did to each other in the lunatic asylum of the Eastern Front.

Taking a time to trip back to the very darkest hour of humankind soon dispels any foolish thoughts that things are a particularly bad right now. Sure, life ain’t great and it doesn’t look much like it will get any better in the near future. But once you get a handle on what it must have been like for civilian and soldier alike in places like Stalingrad or Smolensk of Leningrad, then it is impossible not to feel truly blessed.

Having established that the scope for things to be worse is almost absolute, there is some worth in wondering if there are any similarities to be found between now and then.

Maybe there are.

Germany 1933 and Britain 2013. Two outwardly civilised and wealthy western countries, eighty years apart. Is there anything in common? Bits and bats. Both shared some similar problems, mainly economic. In both cases, a massive implosion of the Wall St banks had completely screwed up just about everything. Unemployment up, wages down and factories and shops closed down and boarded up. Did it lead to mass demonstration on the streets against a small minority of capitalists who had robbed us all blind and stuffed their tax haven bank accounts to bursting point? Not really. Not at all in fact.

By 1933 the Nazi propaganda machine was purring like a brand new Jag. They could get millions of Germans to dance to more or less any tunes they pleased. Had Goebbels chosen to urge his brown shirted minions to march their way into Charlottenberg to ransack the mansions of the bankers at the top of the pile, they would have done so without a second thought. He didn’t of course. None of the Nazis did. They were much more interested in cosying up to the super rich and sweet talking their way into a piece of the action.

Sound familiar? Look at the utter misery that is being heaped onto so many hundreds of thousands of people at the moment in the shape of the Bedroom Tax. We are told that times are really hard for the country and hard decisions need to be made to balance the books. The Bedroom Tax will save the country £400 million and every single penny counts. The fact that in the first two months of the financial year 70% of Bedroom Tax is not being paid is brushed under the carpet. It is the principle that counts surely. Everybody is having a tough time they tell us at every opportunity.

But that isn’t entirely true. In fact that isn’t even remotely true. Last year the richest 1000 individuals in Britain saw their collective wealth increase by £40 billion. Big numbers. As in 100 times more than the theoretical savings made by the Bedroom tax. A thousand people saw their wealth go up by an average of £40 million each. It doesn’t seem like the recession is hitting those lads particularly hard. So do we hear about it? Surely we must. Surely such news should dominate the front pages of the papers every day. After all, £40 billion represents more than half of the much talked about structural deficit. Well you know the answer to that one already. Of course we don’t hear about it.

Instead the best selling tabloid newspapers focus on the wickedness of the idle, scrounging poor. The bankers screwed everything up we all picked up the tab. They soon resumed business as usual and the small number of people who own almost everything now use their in-house media to tell us all that the blame for everything is to be found at the doors of the poor. It is ridiculous and illogical and it is hard to get your head around the fact that people are daft enough to take it on board. But they do take it on board. All of it. Hook, line and sinker.

So what template did Hitler and his fellow gangsters leave for the super-rich of today to follow? Not a bad one actually. Get a hold of just about all the media and bribe politicians with promises of a seat at the high table and them distract everyone by blaming the whole mess on someone the people don’t like much anyway.

The Nazis blamed it all on the Jews.

Our lot are blaming it all on the scrounging poor.

And let’s face it, we are lapping it all up just as willingly as the Germans lapped it up in the early 30’s.

This is a golden era for tax haven banks from Grand Cayman to Monaco to Jersey. Just like the 30’s and 40’s represented the greatest ever golden era for those wing collared bankers of Zurich and Geneva.

Last week I sensed a stranger echo with those distant times when Hell and earth became inseparable for a while. Beevor dwells for a while on the sense of astonishment that many young German soldiers experienced once they were surrounded and doomed in the frozen wreckage of Stalingrad. Their childhood years had been completely formed and shaped by Hitler. They were the product of one of the greatest brain washing machines in history; the Hitler Youth. Between 1939 and 1945 the Hitler Youth delivered 8 million soldiers to the Wehrmacht. These young men and women were a thousand percent convinced of their racial superiority and the inevitability of their eventual victory over the sub human Slavs, Bolsheviks and Jews. They were a thousand percent convinced that their beloved Fuhrer was more God than man.

As the Red Army slowly tightened its murderous grip on the half frozen, half staved men of the doomed 6^th Army, many of the young soldiers remained convinced that their beloved Fuhrer would magic up a mighty army of shiny new Panzers to roar across the frozen Russian steppes to save them and smash the Reds into tiny pieces.

When it at last became clear that no such thing was going to happen, they were left confused. Bemused. Uncomprehending. How could it be so?

In some ways, many of those who come in for food parcels carry a similar incomprehension. For years they have assumed that things will just carry on for ever. Every fortnight they will be given some money. They will be given a flat to live in. They will be exempted from most bills. Nobody has seriously ever expected them to get a job. Not really. Both sides have played the game. The person at the Job Centre asks if they have looked for work and they have said yes I have. A comfortable fiction played out by both sides. You get your flat and sixty quid a week and we pretend you don’t actually exist. It all ran a bit like that favourite joke from Soviet Russia where workers said ‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.’

And now of course everything has changed utterly, over the course of a few short months. Last week we handed out 80 food parcels and over half went to people who had been sanctioned out of their benefits. All of a sudden the fortnightly money that was supposed to be there for ever wasn’t there any more. All of a sudden the people at the Job Centre seriously seem to expect people to actually look for jobs and not just pretend to. All of a sudden landlords don’t just threaten eviction, but actually start proceedings.

How? Why? It was never supposed to be like this? Things were supposed to stay the same. Promises were made. What has happened? How can this be happening to me?

What a strange echo. In a way the confusion of the sanctioned souls coming in for their food parcels mirrors the confusion of the doomed young soldiers facing their bad deaths in the frozen Hell that was Stalingrad in January 1943.

Like I said.

Strange echoes.             

OH BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?

 

I know it sounds bad, but he really didn’t look like a food parcel client. This is the case more often than not these days. A few years ago and nine times out of ten a food parcel client looked like a food parcel client. The unsteady walk, the charity shop clothes in desperate need of a laundering and the eyes red and vacant care of a noxious mix of methadone, cheap cider and street valium.

Not so this lad.

Jeans, T shirt and sunglasses. He had the look of a high flying Harvard English student who had been offered a professorship at an unusually early age. So, no. Not the usual food parcel client.

These days we have a form to fill in which teases out the reasons behind a person having no money to feed themselves in Dumfries 2013. In the month of May we handed out 255 parcels - about three times as many as a year ago. 30% of the time, the reason for these people coming through our doors was that they had been sanctioned from their benefits.

Sanctioned.

Never before has the word 'sanctioned' played so large in our daily vocabulary. I suppose the word does the job it is required to do. Try on these three sentences for size.

Sir, I must inform you that all of your benefits have been sanctioned for three months.

Sir, I am taking away all for your benefits for three months.

Sir, I am going to leave you completely penniless for three months as punishment for you turning up ten minutes late for your appointment.

Sanctioned kind of sounds the easiest option, doesn’t it?

So what heinous crime had the young Harvard professor lookalike committed to have been rendered penniless for a month of his life?

When he told his story, there was a reluctance. A wariness. He was pretty sure that I wouldn’t believe a word he said. This is hardly surprising. With every passing week, the ongoing media campaign to get us all to hate, loathe, distrust and despise the poor is having an ever deeper effect. It means that people who find themselves in poverty feel like lepers. Bad people. The shirkers. The ones everyone suspects as having 52 inch 3D TV’s and clockwork regular holidays in Benidorm. They do not expect to be believed.

I guess visitors to the sleepy Silesian town of Oswiciem must have had a similar experience when they told their stories back in the early 1940’s. There was this terrible smell and trains running all hours of the day and all this smoke pouring into the sky 24 hours a day from what looked like the middle of the fields. Did anyone believe these far fetched tales? Nah. Did they hell. Oswiciem by the way was the town’s Polish name: the name it bears today. Its German name was Auschwitz.

In the end when you hear the same stories over and over and over, you get to believing the stories and discounting the nonsense spouted by junior ministers.

So. Back to my man.

He had his next appointment at the Job Centre on 16^th May. But they decided to change it to the 10^th May. They called him up and left him a voicemail message. You can probably guess the next bit. He never has any credit in his phone. So he couldn’t afford the call to pick up the voice message. They know this of course. Everyone else from Dentist Surgeries to the Tesco delivery service send out texts to give the person at the other end the best chance of picking up the required information. They never tend to leave voicemail messages because people tend to miss voicemail messages, whether they have credit or not.

It is hard not to conclude that the Job Centre were actually not overly keen for the required information to find its way to the recipient. No information means non attendance which means another sanction. Their target is three a week and people kind of know this by now. It means the staff at the Job Centre are having to find new and more creative means to catch people out. My man was the wrong side of a particularly cunning plan. Change the date. Inform via a voicemail message. Assume the punter has no credit. Bingo. Gotcha. One down, two to go.

So actually we do believe these tales of woe. And every month of a sanction means at least 8 food parcels will need to be filled and handed out.

I am pretty confident that none of the seventy odd people we have given food to who have been sanctioned in the last month are about to starve to death. The deal seems to be that it is down to the Voluntary Sector to make sure that nobody starves to death.

Happy days.

I recall a joke from the 1970’s which did the rounds for a while. The joke came in the form of a mock newspaper headline

‘Britain’s application to join the Third World turned down’

It doesn’t seem so funny any more.   

IS THIS WHAT DEFEAT LOOKS LIKE?

 

I guess my faith in the honesty and decency of the British State has been slowly crumbling away for most of my adult life until I have reached a point where there is barely a shred left. When did it start? Dusty memories of Bloody Sunday? Piles of rubbish in the streets when we were told that everything was fine and dandy? Driving around Europe in the summer of 81 to find posters of Bobby Sands on every wall? Witnessing the North, my North, become a police state during the Miner’s Strike? The cynical, brutal Hillsborough cover up?

Markers on a road to disillusionment and cynicism.

Then the bumbling State joined forces with a bunch of puffed up scientists desperate to get their faces on the tele, and between them they saw off two businesses of mine care of the BSE and Mad Cow fiascos.

I became an author and a frontline charity worker and duly found myself drawn into ever darker corners. Sometimes researching novels took me into the places you really don’t particularly want to go. Sometimes it was the stories that would come in through the front door of the First Base Agency. If you want a close up view of the pitch black deeds of those to pull the strings for Great Britain Plc, then you can do worse than get a visa to visit the world of heroin. Many foot soldiers who become embroiled in the State’s power games ultimately seek solace in the memory killing embrace of opiates.

It all leaves a mark. A stain. And at times I seriously wonder if I am morphing into one of those wild eyed conspiracy nuts who wave their banners with such frantic desperation. God forbid.

Then I’ll read a Le Carre book or listen to John Pilger and I figure that most of my faculties are probably in place after all.

After seeing so many lies and cover ups, many at first hand, it becomes almost impossible to take anything at face value: impossible not to sense some kind of permanent hidden agenda. 

Tony Blair told us that Iraq presents a clear and present danger to our very way of life. Then he stepped down and lo and behold he is now suddenly trousering £10 million a year care of non-exec directorships from a variety of American Corporations. The worst of it is how ‘in your face’ the whole thing was. Let’s face it, Blair does little to hide the extent of his pay off. But why should I be surprised about that? The State is never less than brazen in its corruption. There were 50,000 of us who saw the truth of what happened at Hillsborough with our very own eyes. Did that make any difference? Nope. Collusion between police, government and media shut us all down for twenty three years – long enough for knighthoods, retirements and final salary pensions running to hundreds of thousands a year.

So on and on it goes. My mate Tommy Sheridan started to become too much of a nuisance. No problem. A call was made to those ever helpful chaps at the News of the World and a couple of years later he was residing in HM Barlinnie at her Majesty’s pleasure. Liam Fox seemed a little too keen to dig into the damning details of some of those multi billion defence deals. Can’t be having that can we? Another call to pals in the tabloids and he was hustled back to the back benches pretty damn quick.

These days we have to jump through a ludicrous number of hoops to open a bank account because of anti money laundering legislation and the War on Drugs. And yet a blind eye was turned for years when HSBC took care of $8 billion for the Mexican Cartels. Surprise, surprise.

Even when the full extent of HSBC’s relationship with the drug cartels was revealed, our leaders still continued to peddle the usual nonsense about our wonderful British values and playing every ball with a straight bat. Aye right. The HSBC case made it crystal clear that the City of London is ready and eager to wash, dry and iron the dirtiest money on the planet.

And so the gravy train trundles seamlessly along its well worn tracks. From public school to Oxbridge to Parliament or the City. Deals in wood panelled clubs and knighthoods and MBE’s and jolly days out at Epson and Lords and Wimbledon.

Last week William Hague successfully threw Britain’s weight around in Brussels and managed to force the arms sanctions to Syria to be dropped. He told us all about the human catastrophe that is playing out. Fair enough. 80,000 people or so have been killed. So what is the British solution? Let’s give them more arms so they can do even more killing. Like some American politician said, it seems like British policy in Syria is to help create a level killing field.

Why?

Why is her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary so keen to tip petrol on a Syrian fire that is already burning perfectly well?

I guess the first answer is the obvious one. The usual one. No doubt the arms we will send will be very expensive toys indeed. Nice business for the Defence Industry which is always more than happy to reward those who throw a bit of business their way. Best of all, there will be no need to come up with a cock and bull story for those pesky busybodies on the Pubic Accounts Committee. Why? Well this is the good bit. On this occasion there is no need for the British Tax payer to cough up the cash to line the pockets of the Defence Industry. Oh no. Those good old chaps from Saudi Arabia will be settling all the accounts. It is sweet deal for one and all. The money will be wired into the City and lots of good old boys in the banks will get a slice of the pie. Then the money will be wired over to various purveyors of the very finest killing and maiming equipment Britain can produce and a few more decent chaps will be able to cash in their share options. And a year of two down the tracks, the civil servants and politicians who got rid of those pesky EU sanctions will get their non-exec directorships as a reward for all their efforts in Brussels. Nice work if you can get it: three days of work a year for a couple of hundred grand and golf every day.

And on the streets of Aleppo and Homs, young kids will start out on a life without limbs. It’s gin and tonic at the Opera from the good old boys who shared a dorm at Harrow and amputation without anaesthetic for the street kids of Homs.

And yet it is hard to wonder if this particular grubby deed maybe goes a little further than the usual corruption. Maybe this is what defeat looks like.

Over the last few years we have given up the habits of our history and done something that we have always avoided in the past: we have picked a fight with Sunni Muslims. This is not our usual way. For hundreds of years we have gone out of our way to be best mates with the Sunni world.

This probably dates back to one our very greatest cock ups – the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Interestingly enough, this particular catastrophe started off with some all too familiar corruption. Rifle bullets in those days used to be wrapped in oiled paper to keep the metal safe from the humidity and dust of the sub-continent. Some bright young thing in an arms factory came up with a cunning plan to enhance the bottom line. Instead of using expensive oil to grease the paper, he decided to use much cheaper tallow fat. No doubt a few palms were greased and soon all the rifles in the Indian Army were to be fed by bullets wrapped in the new tallow soaked paper.

But there was a hitch.

The majority of Indian soldiers in the ranks were Muslims and before using any bullet a soldier needed to bite off the paper coating with their teeth. Not surprisingly the soldiers were not at all keen to put paper soaked in pig fat in their mouths, for to have done so would have damned them to eternal hell.

So they said we’re not doing that.

And we said if you don’t do it we’ll shoot you.

And they still refused to do it and we shot them.

Not surprisingly, they were seriously pissed off by this and they duly mutinied. It all got pretty grim for a while, particularly in Lucknow where British women and children died in horrific circumstances. The British press had a field day. Few things were more guaranteed to get the Victorian gander up than stories of Christian women dying badly at the hands of savage heathens with brown skin. It was decided that we needed to each them a lesson they would not forget in a hurry.

Well, we taught them a lesson all right. In the ten years that followed the Mutiny, we undertook our very own Holocaust which accounted for ten million deaths – double what Hitler managed to achieve less than a hundred years later. I suppose those of us at Hillsborough should not be all that surprised that a successful cover up of 96 deaths was possible. Just like the people of Derry should hardly be astonished that the execution of 13 civilians was buried deep in the bowels of Whitehall. Any country that has the experience of covering up a revenge killing spree that ran to ten million is hardly going to be phased by putting a lid on a mere 96 deaths: or a mere 13.

However, once we had wound up our ten year long genocide, we embarked on a new policy of playing nice with the world of Sunni Muslims. To start with, this cosy new relationship was handy in helping us to carry out our favoured ‘divide and rule’ policy in our Indian ‘Jewel in the Crown’. We filled up our armies with Sunni Muslim warriors from the wild country around the North West Frontier and used them as ferocious in-house mercenaries. They did our dirty work across the length and breadth of the Empire.

Once the Empire days were finally over, we kept our old ties going. By this stage our old pals from the Khyber Pass had become the Muhajadeen and the Pakistani Intelligence Forces. They both hated the Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan with a cold, murderous fury and so did we. Our interests were nicely in line. So we gave them weapons and they used them to kill Bolsheviks on our behalf.

Lawrence of Arabia gave us a template to follow in terms of playing nice with the wild eyed characters who ruled the roost in the deserts of the Middle East. So when these same guys all of a sudden became the richest guys on planet earth, we were first in line to be their best pal. For years we have sold them the very best of weaponry, sent along the SAS to train their soldiers and opened up the doors of the City to look after all their lovely cash. We have also done our best to keep their nasty habits - like stoning adulterous women to death - as far from public view as possible.

All good stuff. Good for the defence industry. Good for the City boys. And good for politicians and civil servants on the make.

And then for the first time in a century and a half, we suddenly changed tack. In the wake of 9/11, we became the tail wagged by the American dog and we duly turned on our old pals. Those scary guys from the wilds of the North West Frontier suddenly were no longer on our side. They were no longer firing our bullets at our enemies. Instead, they started firing our bullets at us, and our other Sunni pals in the Middle East were less than amused. What the hell were we playing at! And then to cap it all, we got wagged again by our trans-Atlantic dog and joined in a crusade against one of the Sunni’s pin up boys, Saddam Hussein.

Well, our change of policy hasn’t exactly worked out all that well. All of a sudden the Russians and the Chinese seem to be getting all the new arms contracts and the good old boys in the City are wondering where all the Arab oil money has gone.

Worse than that, our old allies have pretty well given us a proper kicking. We ducked out of Iraq with our tails between our legs and now we are gearing up to do a similarly undignified bunk from Afghanistan.

All of which makes me wonder if William Hague was last week playing the front man for a return to business as usual. A nice big gesture to please our old pals in the deserts of Arabia and the mountains of the Hindu Kush. We’re back in your camp lads. Sorry we lost the plot for a while. No idea what happened there. But it’s all over now. So let’s see. You need a few guns to kill a few nasty Shia types over there in Syria. Not a problemo. We have guns a plenty. And just leave it to us to square all those limp wristed peace loving types in Brussels.

By the way. Maybe we could ask a small favour. Well. Yes. As well as borrowing £120 million a day at 2%.

Here’s the thing. We will be popping off from our base at Camp Bastion soon, and to be honest, we have rather a lot of expensive kit to ship out. Would you mind awfully? Just a quick word on our behalf to our old muckers in Waziristan? Ask them to maybe ease off a tad whilst we get on with our packing? And you can rest assured that we are very much back in the fold. Absolutely. Super. Now. A little dickie bird tells me you are flying into London next month. Well, you must absolutely come along for a spot of shooting old chap. Remember Muggsy? That’s right? He was in the year below us. With Barclays now. Jolly good sort, old Muggsy. Well he gave me a number for these two Ukrainian girls……..

And in a few month’s time, kids on the streets of Homs will make like colanders care of good old British made cluster bombs.

Business as usual

Cannae beat it with a stick.

Maybe this is what a very British defeat looks like.

THE PRICE OF A LIGHT BULB SAYS IT ALL

 

Regular readers of this blog will by now be more than familiar with the dismal maths facing anyone unlucky enough to be unemployed in this seemingly endless recession. A person on the dole gets about sixty quid a week and most of their rent paid. In the cold snaps of the winter, very few are able to get their gas and electric costs much under £25. If they remain law abiding, they need to stump up £3 or so for a TV licence. And now the new Bedroom Tax takes a further £11. In almost every case people are left with about £20 to feed and clothe themselves.

As in £3 a day.

It seems that £3 a day is more than enough for Ian Duncan Smith to live in the style he is accustomed to, but most of us would find it all but impossible.

So what are the ‘can’t do without’ basics for people eking out a living on a cold island on the eastern edge of the Atlantic bowl?

Food. Obviously.

Water. Obviously.

Heating. In the winter at least.

Light? Of course we need light. Few of us would have the psychological strength to deal with twelve hours of darkness every day in the depths of winter.

But at least the light issue is dealt with in the £25 of power costs. Well, it is and it isn’t. Assuming you have bulbs screwed into the light sockets, then that assumption is indeed very much true. But what if those light sockets are as empty as your pockets? Well in that case you need to get out and buy a bulb.

A couple of days ago I was dispatched to buy a couple of light bulbs only to find myself standing in front of a Tesco shelf in a state of disbelief.

The cheapest bloody light bulb on offer was £3.50.

Three pounds sodding fifty for a lousy light bulb.

The last time I had bought one I got change out of 50p. Which goes to show how often I do that kind of shopping.

Quite often these days, I cannot help but relate the price of something to that dreaded £20 of disposable income that so many now have to get by on.

And £3.50 is pretty damn close to 20% of that figure.

I guess that most MP’s will be left with something like £1000 a week to live on once they have paid their taxes; say £900 a week once they have paid their utility bills. So when they go to Tesco to buy a light bulb, it represents 0.004% of their disposable income. And 0.004% really isn’t any kind of a big deal. If they were to pay the same rate for a new light bulb as someone on the dole, it would weigh in at £157.50.

Now if it cost a hundred and fifty quid to light up the bathroom, I think our heroic leaders would be making all kinds of a racket about it.

It is probably worth getting back to the reasons lying behind so many people having to try to dress, eat and light for £20 a week.

There has been a king size depression. Fair enough. Most of it was caused by bankers. Fair enough. With the best will in the world, there was not a great deal the politicians could have done about it. It is the price we all pay for living in a capitalist society for when capitalism crashes and burns, it crashes and burns big style.

So can the country afford to pay everyone £100 a week whilst they are unemployed instead of £60? Obviously it can’t. In truth we can’t really afford £60 a week.

Do the politicians carry some of the blame for £60 a week no longer being enough? Too bloody right they do, and here is where the light bulb thing becomes pretty cancerous.

Over the last ten years or so a bunch of scientists have come up with a theory that the world is warming up and it is all the fault of humankind. This played really well when the world was in a better place. For a while, we started acting like the Spanish Inquisition used to act. Back in the day anyone musing that the world was round instead of flat would get burned alive for their trouble. For a while anyone who dared suggest that the whole global warming thing was a load of unproved mumbo jumbo faced a similar fate. And not surprisingly the politicians cottoned on to this. They all leapt into it with alacrity and strove to out-Green each other. And they passed law after law accordingly in a frantic effort to ingratiate themselves with the much hankered after Green Vote.

So it was that many of us were presented with umpteen bins to clutter up our gardens and duly threatened with fines if we put an empty baked bean can in the paper bin. MP's all wanted to be seen as being responsible for filling the horizon with as many windmills as possible. This was a tad problematic as windmills are massively expensive to build and all but useless when it comes to generating power. They solved this ticklish problem by promising anyone who built a windmill a 30p a unit bonus for twenty five years on top of the going rate of 10p. How completely smashing. David Cameron flounced around on a sledge complete with huskies and touted for votes. Look at me! What a super duper chap I am! Vote for me and I will build you lots of windmills and our world will be all cuddly and Walt Disney.

I don’t seem to remember him saying anything about getting all the energy companies to collect a new Green Tax to pay for these spectacular white elephants.

I don’t seem to remember him saying anything about vote for me and I will jack up your leccy bill by an extra 10%

I don’t remember him saying it because he didn’t say it.

But how can we produce the power we need if not by lots of lovely windmills? Well I guess we could always open up the mines and create 50,000 new well paid jobs. After all, we still have about 300 years worth of coal waiting patiently beneath our green and pleasant land. But of course we couldn’t so much of think about doing such a wicked thing because it would jeopardise the treasured Green Vote. Much better to tax the buggery out of everyone, build lots of worthless windmills, and shell out for gas and oil from Vladimir Putin and the House of Saud – lovely chaps one and all.

So that accounts for £2.50 a week of the £25 a person on the dole has to stump up to get any semblance of heat into their bones.

When the bankers tipped the world on its head the politicians needed to find a way to keep the bills getting paid. Well there is always a simple answer to that one. If you haven’t got enough cash, then just print some more. The thing is that if you tell everyone that you are printing money, it doesn’t tend to go down very well. We are not that stupid believe it or not. We kind of know that the likes of Robert Mugabe like to print money when they are a bit hard up, and before you know it a loaf of bread costs the same as a Premier League striker. So instead they called it Quantative Easing and that sounded much better. Well, it sounded like complete goggledy gook, but what the hell.

 

Four years ago a pound got you about $1.80 and a litre of petrol cost 90p. Then they printed a bunch of money and devalued the currency by 20% and called it Quantitive Easing, and lo and behold we now get $1.50 to the pound. And fuel needs to be paid for in dollars. Which means we now pay £1.35 a litre and Putin and the House of Saud are laughing all the way to the bank.

Quantative Easing means that the guy eking out a living on the dole pays £5 a week more than he would have done had the money not been printed. But because it is called Quantitive Easing, nobody much has twigged.

So far it seems like £7.50 a week extra would have been possible without the tinkering of vote hungry politicians. Which inevitably leads us nicely to the Bedroom Tax. Oh but there is no other way they howl! We are borrowing £120 million a day! We simply cannot pay more than £500 a week in benefits! Well of course we can’t. So instead of levying a joke of a tax on the poorest in the land which is basically uncollectable, why not look elsewhere for a few savings? April was the first full month of Bedroom Tax and in Dumfries and Galloway and 80% didn’t pay it. Anyone with half a brain can see that it will cost more than it will raise and it will do absolutely nothing reduce the deficit. Instead it is shameful, tawdry ploy to curry favour with the Daily Mail and its vindictive readers who love to see the poor getting a proper bashing.

 

But that doesn’t alter the fact that we cannot afford £20 billion a year on Housing Benefit. Course we can’t. So why not set a maximum rent instead? Say £50 a week for a two bedroom flat. That would probably half the Housing Benefit bill and put an extra £11 a week in the pocket of the man on the dole.

Oh, I forgot. It would also crash house prices and piss off very rich people with lots of property and knock a hole in the balance sheets of our banks. So we couldn’t possibly do that could we?

And so finally we come to the light bulb issue. When Dave came home from his Arctic adventure, he needed to find lots of green things to do to win over all those vital environment loving voters. Just like every other politician in Westminster. So here’s one of the things they did to save the planet.

They checked out the electrical appliance that burns the least amount of power – light bulbs. Then they came up with a cock and bull story that new low energy light bulbs were a vital part of the strategy to save the planet from humankind.

So they took tried and trusted light bulbs that were cheap, lasted ages and lit a room at the flick of a switch and deemed them to be wicked and illegal.

In their place they demanded new low energy bulbs that look ridiculous, take forever to light up, last no longer than the old ones and cost £3.50 each.

And so we all pay through the nose for a few politicians to pander to the Green Vote.

This is what puts the Bedroom Tax, Windmills and stupid overpriced light bulbs in the same basket. It is how politicians think they will win Brownie points with the Daily Mail and the Guardian at the same time.

And we all pay the bill for their idiocy.

And the poorest pay most of all.   

'THE DRUMS OF ANFIELD'

If prostitution is the oldest profession then surely racism is the oldest hatred. Race hate has cast a filthy shadow for as far back as we go. ‘Kick it out’ has been a clarion call down the centuries. Jesus’s tale of the good Samaritan overcoming his racial prejudice to give a guy a helping hand would have sat comfortably in any ‘Kick it Out’ press release. Trying to get human beings to treat each other as equals and not hate each others’ guts is a thread that runs through William Wilberforce to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Nelson Mandela.

Has any of it worked? Are we cured?

Watching the miserable spectacle of a bunch of cave dwelling Ultras doing chimpanzee imitations in honour of the fact that Mario Ballotelli and Kevin Price Boateng were playing a game of football in Milan was evidence that a cure is still some way off.

For a few decades football has become the lens through which we tend to measure racism. Lord alone knows why. I suppose football grounds tend to give large numbers of young males an anonymous platform to vent their spleen about the world and life in general. Sometimes this can be a pretty good thing. Attending Dynamo Kiev games gave thousands of Ukranians a chance to feel less like cattle in a Nazi pen. Steve Biko once upon a time used the cover of football matches to grab a microphone and feed the fire that in the end burned down the Apartheid pigsty.

But other times the anonymity of a packed terrace provides a fertile seedbed for the darker side of our nature. Once upon a time over 100,000 Romans got their rocks off at the sight of the mass murder of Christians. All over the world there are few spectacles more certain to get bums on seats than a public execution. Would someone want to watch a fellow human being getting hung from the neck on their own? Doubtful. But among the safety of a crowd of hundreds of others, we cheer ourselves hoarse.

Would any of the idiots in the San Siro stadium have done a chimpanzee imitation on the bus if a black guy had got on board? Not a chance. But once in a crowd, they were all of a sudden very brave indeed.

Of course it is no accident that we are seeing an upsurge in morons from all over Europe being consumed with the desire to do monkey imitations on football terraces at this particular moment in history. Hard times and rampant racism have always made happy bedfellows.

1930.

6 million on the dole in Germany. Lots of angry pissed off people desperate to blame someone for life being so crap. A few years later 6 million dead Jews had paid the price.

Austerity Europe is providing a sumptuously equipped maternity wing for the rebirth of Racist Europe. The worse the financial shite, the worse the racist shite. Greece tops the league for both and Golden Dawn are the nearest thing we have seen to a full blown Nazi party for a while. Thankfully we have a way to go yet until we are as far up our necks in it as the countries in the south of Europe. Right now we have UKIP and every politician competing to be the toughest on immigration. Funny when you think about it. I never realised that Fred Goodwin was an illegal immigrant. Just goes to show.

For once, the recent racism in football stories have been on the pitch rather than the terraces with John Terry and Luis Suarez playing the pantomime villains. The fact that British crowds have grown out of throwing bananas at black players and indulging in mass monkey imitations is rightly celebrated as progress. It would be easier to have more faith in this progress were we to see more black managers and coaches, but apparently Rome wasn’t built in a day. We did have one charming fan arrested at Anfield last year in the wake of the Suarez/Evra incident. A nineteen year old black left back from Oldham was reduced to tears by the abuse the fan in question screamed at him from the Kop.

The supporter was duly arrested and charged with racist behaviour only to be found not guilty and told he was free to leave court without a blemish to his character. It was all down to a misunderstanding. Everyone thought he had screamed ‘Black cunt’ to the young defender, which would have been wicked and evil and seen him sent straight off to HMP Walton. However, the court discovered that this was far from the truth. The truth was that he had merely labelled the left back as being a ‘Manc cunt’ and this was of course deemed to be absolutely fine.

What a load of tosh.

A few years ago I spent some time in the midst of the whole ‘Kick Racism out of Football’ thing. For whatever reason, racism has always been a thing that has disgusted me. I had my Free Mandela T shirts back in the day and felt physically sick at the sight of Everton fans throwing bananas at Johnny Barnes. Then I met my partner who is black and we now have two lads who are both brown. Which of course brings the whole thing very close to home.

It is no easy thing explaining to a young child why certain people feel the need to get in their faces and call them every name under the sun simply because of the colour of their skin. Both my lads have never had any choice whatsoever than to be Liverpool daft, and so it was that in 2001 I decided to write a football story for them to help to get their heads around the whole being the only black lad in the class thing. To start with, that was all it was going to be: an extended bedtime story written in instalments. A story of two black players dealing with racist abuse whilst wearing the red shirt of Liverpool. When it was done, I gave copies to a few other people to read and everyone seemed to like it. So I decided to publish it and soon to my great surprise it was getting lots of media attention.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been all that taken aback. Racism in football always fills column inches. It seemed odd to be sitting in the Radio 5 studio in London being interviewed about football and racism.

Then, to my complete delight, the club got on board with the whole thing and commissioned one of the Brookside screenwriters to convert my story into a play which was eventually performed at Anfield to an audience of 4000 school kids. On the back of this, lots of schools across Merseyside took class sets of the book. This of course is the kind of thing that makes writing books worthwhile. Well there has to be something! There certainly is no money in it. I had a highly amusing exchange of views in my blog’s comments section with a furious Liverpool fan called Arthur who was incandescent with rage at my tribute to Sir Alex. He was convinced that the real reason for me being such a foul traitor was a desperate attempt to hawk my E books in the Kindle Store. If only! To date my tribute to Sir Alex has been read 25,000 times and this has generated sales of eight books. Wow. The big time. John Grisham must be quaking in his boots. 25,000 blog hits has seen my net worth rise by a mighty £10 over the last few days. I passed this news on to Angry Arthur, but it didn’t seem to calm him down much.

No doubt Arthur will be similarly angry at me for penning this blog and making ‘The Drums of Anfield’ available to one and all as a free download. Well, if I have got your blood pressure up again Arthur, than I apologise. There really isn’t any kind of secret agenda here.

I have always tried to take on board the message of Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King. When the racist poison starts to seep up out of the gutters and onto the pavement, it is the job of any civilised human being to shine a torch on it before it gets out of hand.

Before we wake up on morning and find that we are up to our necks in it.

This is a promise I have made to myself many times over the years. A few years ago we drove a hire car through the night across a snowy Europe to the worst place there has ever been.

Auschwitz. Of course Auschwitz. The nightmare of nightmares. The ultimate contagion. The ultimate reminder that it is always racism that brings out the ultimate evil in us human beings.

No sane person could visit those tortured acres of Upper Silesia and not make a solemn vow to do anything in their power to make sure such a living, breathing hell will never again visit our world.

We can only do what we can do. My thing is writing and ‘The Drums of Anfield’ is my contribution. Has played a part? Left a legacy? Made a contribution? I cannot say. Instead all I can do is to be hopeful. Hopeful that the kids who read the story will now think twice should they ever get the chance to join in with a bunch of idiots making like chimps because the other team has a black player.

Have we kicked racism out of football? No. Not completely. We never will. But it is a whole hell of a lot better than it was.

Have we kicked racism out of life? Not even close. The racial bloodbath in Rwanda came less than fifty years after the tanks of the Red Army rolled up to the gates of Auschwitz Birkenau.

Christ, this is a dark sort of a blog! Before hitting the publish button, I really should point out that ‘The Drums of Anfield’ is anything but a dark story. Most people read the thing in a few hours. Obviously it would be bad form to give away any of the plot, but it is fair to say that Liverpool fans like the way things turn out whilst United fans don’t.

Lots of Mancs have had lots of nice things to say about me after my Sir Alex tribute. They will probably be rather less complimentary if they download a copy of ‘The Drums of Anfield’ and have a read.

Let normal service resume.

 

To download a free copy of ‘The Drums of Anfield’ follow the link below.

http://goo.gl/yCCCB

AN ANFIELD TRIBUTE TO THE DARK KNIGHT OF MORDOR

 

TO LISTEN TO AN AUDIO VERSION OF THIS BLOG PLEASE FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW

 

http://goo.gl/i0YaXU

 

Both of my sons are boys no more. They are men now. One is 26 and one is 20. And until yesterday neither has known so much as a second of their lives when the Knight of Govan hasn’t held sway in the dark empire of Mordor at the far end of the East Lancs Rd.

When he first arrived in his new lair from the frozen northern wastes, there was nothing to suggest the nemesis he would become. In later years we would hear that he made a solemn vow back in those distant days. He swore that one day he would knock ‘Liverpool off their fucking perch.’

And let’s face it, did he ever.

Seldom in history has anyone been so conclusively knocked off any fucking perch!

For a while all seemed fine. For a while it was business as usual as yet another manager strode through the doors of Old Trafford to throw money at rubbish. These were the halcyon days of Mike Phelan and Jim Leighton and Clayton Blackmore. Mordor started to empty out and for a while they couldn’t even manage 40,000. We sat high on our perch and laughed our heads off.

Little did we know that far behind the scenes he was tearing down the old with the blazing passion of a fanatical zealot. Far away from the public view Sir Alex was mining for Orcs, and by the time they clambered into the light they were already an unstoppable force.

They were the Vandals and the Visagoths and the Gauls.

And we were Rome.

And we got well and truly sacked.

When the true might of his re-booted and renewed dark empire was revealed for all the world to see, we didn’t come close to having an Aragorn to smite them down. We had Julian Dicks, and Torben Piechnik and Phil Babb.

And so it was that Bill Shankly’s shining white city on the hill was smashed and burned and reduced to broken columns and stray dogs mooching through its deserted streets.

And of course we have remained under the heel of the Dark Empire ever since. Hindsight makes me remember the greatest line from George Orwell’s 1984.

‘If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.’

They have been the boot, we have been the human face.

In the end he didn’t just knock us off our perch. He sawed up the perch and threw it into the molten lava at the heart of the mountain. We idiotically clung on to an era that was already fading fast. For us, 1986 was that golden summer of 1914 when the sun seemed like it would shine forever and nothing would ever change. But change it did. The old times were already breathing their last.

We never saw any of it coming.

But Sir Alex did.

He smelt the future on the wind and geared up for the new world of Murdoch and merchandising. He built a mighty money machine that would ensure that his newly mined army of Orcs would never suffer a day without the chance to eat some flesh.

And all of a sudden, we became an anachronism. A dream. A faded picture on the wall remembering different times. Better times. Times when money wasn’t everything. Times when Billionaires and stock markets were not required.

Our twenty six year long nightmare had well and truly begun.

But the man behind the mask was never what he seemed. Of course he never allowed too many cracks to appear. For two and a half decades he played the role of the Dark Knight of Mordor to perfection.

But everything wasn’t what it said on the Mordor tin. Rumours would creep out through the tiny cracks in the walls. Young managers fired by idiotic owners would tell of late night calls from the great man. Chin up lad. There’s always another job around the corner. When the sky fell in us on 15 April 1989, he was the first to call up Kenny and say whatever he could do would be done. Anything at all.

When Gerard Houlier all but died from a massive heart attack, the first visitor through the door was Sir Alex who begged that it should be kept secret. 

When the great Shipworker Union leader Jimmy Reid passed away in 2010, Sir Alex dropped everything to head north to give a heartfelt speech at his funeral. How the bloated money men of Old Trafford must have hated that. Their great leader deserted a pre season till-stuffing banjoree to remember a working class hero from the banks of the Clyde. Something tells me that the Glazers don’t do working class heroes. For the Glazers, a working class hero is someone to be stripped of every penny of their wealth and ground into the dust.

And so it was that the truth emerged as we looked up at the new world order from our new position on the floor under the place where our perch used to hang. And the truth was a hard truth to swallow.

For this Dark Knight of Mordor was in fact a new Bill Shankly. A genuine tough as teak, straight talking socialist from pre Thatcher Scotland. He shared Shankly’s remorseless passion and determination. He shared Shankly’s unstoppable will to conquer everything in his path. And underneath their ferocious public face, they shared the same rock solid humanity.

They were true men of the people.

Maybe the last men of the people.

My one brief contact with the great man shines a light on his true greatness. It was the early days of First Base and I was helping a client along the hard road to becoming heroin free and the hope of a Rehab centre. The client in question was a genuine disciple of Mordor and never missed an opportunity to crow about it. I spoke to him on the phone when he was a few days into the unforgiving regime of the Rehab Centre and when I finished the call I had little optimism he would stay the course.

Slowly, but surely he was being drawn back towards the comfort of heroin’s warm and jealous embrace.

Without much hope I decided on the wing and a prayer option and penned a letter to Sir Alex. I explained how far my client had come and how he was now hanging by a thread. I suggested that Sir Alex must have seen at first hand how the Scottish heroin plague had eaten away at his beloved Govan. I implored him to maybe drop a note to my man and I hopefully included the address of the rehab centre.

I remember clearly dropping the letter into the postbox.

Sir Alex Fergusson. Manchester United Football Club. Old Trafford. Manchester.

Mordor.

And I was almost totally convinced that my letter would disappear into some cavernous post room in the bowels of the dark Empire.

How wrong I was.

A few days later I got a call from my man at the Rehab Centre and the voice was that of a completely different human being. He had received post that morning. A package. It contained a long, hand written note and a signed photo from Sir Alex. And these words were all that was needed to make my man believe in himself. He stayed the course. He found his new life. He was inspired.

After that, I became an unshakeable convert. So what that he had knocked us off our fucking perch. Shankly knocked everyone in sight off their fucking perches. After that, the football and the tribalism became secondary. After that day I saw only a great man with the heart to find the time to write to a lost lad in a rehab centre who was hanging by a thread.

So farewell Sir Alex and may your retirement be a golden one. I hope your horses win and your grandchildren behave themselves. In the god awful money mad world of the Premiership and Champions League, it seems inconceivable that we will ever see your likes again.

Now at least we might just have a chance of getting back onto our fucking perch again.     

COME ON BRENDAN, STOP BEING SUCH A BLOODY 'YES' MAN.

 

I have a slightly uneasy feeling as I kick off this blog. A worry. Am I in the process of turning into that bloke who sits a couple of rows behind you and does nothing but moan all through the match? Christ, I hope not. Two moaning blogs in a week where we have gone up to St James’s Park and won six nil certainly has the feel of that old git in the cap a few rows back.

Believe it or not, I make a point of never having a moan at the match. ‘In-match’ moaning has always seemed like an Old Trafford sort of thing and something to be avoided at all costs. The only time I ever have really been tempted to get into full on slagging off mode was during the dark depths of the Hodgson era. Actually, that isn’t quite true. There were also a few times during the desperate days of Souness, Torben Piknic and Julian Dicks. But I can say with absolute honesty that I never actually succumbed to such Mancish behaviour and turned on the team on the pitch.

To be honest, I am pretty confident that I never will. It seems that if you start going the match to slag off the team, you might as well go the whole hog and buy a season ticket in the Stretford End.

That said, slagging off the dickheads who are making a mockery of the club off the pitch seems to be absolutely fair game. It will take a lot to convince me that Fenway Sports Group and Ian Ayre are anything but bad news. Brendan? I really feel like I ought to give him the same support that we always give our managers, but it is getting harder all the time.

His endless management speak is seriously annoying, but it would be a bit harsh to completely condemn him for it. The thing is that he just keeps spouting stuff that really gets on my nerves. No matter how I try, I cannot get by the fact that everything about Brendan looks and feels like a ‘Yes’ man. Our beloved American owners obviously had no faith whatsoever in the fact that King Kenny would put looking after their investment first. They were right enough about that. Kenny Dalglish was only ever going to look after the interests of one thing and one thing only: Liverpool Football Club and its supporters.

FSG clearly hated that. They wanted someone who would jump when they picked up the phone and instructed them to jump. And they hired Brendan.

More and more, Brendan seems to be like a scared kid who is desperate to avoid getting the cane. His handling of the latest Suarez affair seems to have been all about frantically trying to prop up the player’s transfer value. Would Shankly or Paisley or Fagin or Dalglish have given a shit about transfer value? Not a chance. All they would have been bothered about would have been the great name of Liverpool Football Club and nothing else. Mind you, can you imagine in a million years that Luis would have had a go at biting Ivanovic had Bill Shankly been sitting in the dugout?

Aye right.

This week Brendan has really pissed me off with the drivel he has been spouting about not wanting to be in the Europa League. In every respect he seems to be desperately trying to peddle the company line.

We would rather not play in the Europa League because it would interfere with our tour to Asia and Australia. Who gives a shit about some tawdry shirt selling exercise in Asia and Australia? We are Liverpool for Christ’s sake. European nights are at the very core of our being. Who cares if we have to start in July? I never heard Rafa moaning when we kicked off our Champions League campaign against Total Network Solutions in July 2005.

Oh, but we will have too many games and we need to focus on getting into the Champions League. Oh, come on. I listened to Peter Reid on this subject a few months ago. He asked a series of questions to Jamie Redknapp. Was the tackling harder or easier when I played, Jamie? Harder. Did the referees allow more ‘reducers’ when I played, Jamie? Yes. Were the pitches better? No. They were mud baths. Was our diet better? No. Was our training regime more scientific? No. Did we need rotating? No. Do Messi and Ronaldo get rotated? No.

I am just a supporter and I have never played a game of pro football in my life so I feel at times like I have to take all this stuff about players needing resting at face value. But Peter Reid certainly did play plenty of pro football and if he reckons it’s a load of bollocks, then that is good enough for me.

Anyway. Who says we have to play the first team in the Europa League? There is no reserve football any more so half of the players in the squad spend week after week doing nothing but train and get bored. How is it not a good thing for the likes of Shelvey, Suso, Sterling, Wisdom, Assaidi and lots of others to get 15 games under their belts in Europe?

Then we get the usual 'know it all about the modern game' types who get all serious and holier than thou and say there isn’t enough money in it. This is where my blood really starts to boil. Let’s imagine we managed to get to the quarter finals. That means eight home games. 40,000 a game at £20 a head. That’s £3.2 million. The prize money would be about £2.5 million. The TV would be about £1.5 million. All in all, it would bring in just over £7 million. Just because that is a lot less than what you get from making the quarters in the Champions League, we are all supposed to turn our noses up and say that such thin pickings are somehow beneath us.

What a load of utter crap.

Before anyone starts down this particular track I suggest they consider this very relevant fact. For the last three years Robert Lewandowski has been paid £20,000 a week to lead the Dortmund line. As in a million a year. That is what they pay. In Dortmund, £7 million pays the wages of seven first team regulars. Last time I looked they are down to play in the Champions League final in a few week’s time. Maybe those in charge at Anfield would do better to focus on spending our money as wisely as the managers in Germany rather than whinging on about there not being enough cash in the Europa League.

 

I get so completely sick of hearing the excuse that we can’t compete because United and Chelsea and City and Arsenal have more money than us. I remember doing a few back of a fag packet calculations when Argentina took on Germany in the quarter finals of the World Cup in South Africa. On paper the Argentinean squad was worth £500 million and then some. The largely unknown Germans were valued at less than £100 million. So according to the money is everything theory, there could only be one result. It didn’t work out that way of course. The Germans completely hammered them four nil. One side had great organisation and team spirit. The other side were falling out with each other and managed by a basket case. Money never came into it. With better management, we could make £7 million go a long, long way. Just like Borussia Dortmund.

However none of these things comes close to the one that really pisses me off. Our owners and executives and Brendan go on and on about how much they treasure us, the fans. In fact they treasure us enough to have hit us with a thumping price hike for our season tickets at a time when most of us are getting kicked in the teeth by the recession.

If you cared to stop the ‘yes man’ act for a minute or two Brendan, you might consider this. When have we seen the best atmosphere at Anfield this season? Europa League nights. Why is that? It is partly because European nights under the lights will always be magical at Anfield. It is partly because at £20 a ticket, these games give the chance for thousands of fans who have been priced out to actually go to a match and support the team. Younger fans. Fans who live close enough to walk to the match. The same Scousers who once upon a time could afford to stand on the Kop. These are the nights when all the old songs get dusted down and given an airing. These are the nights when Anfield feels like Anfield used to feel. But, hey. That is of no importance when compared to disruption of a shirt selling tour to Asia and Australia.

And Brendan, have you stopped to think about where these Europa League games appear on the tele? The Mancs love to take the piss about us appearing on free TV on a Thursday night. But they are and always will be a bunch of tossers. There are hundreds of thousands of Reds who cannot run to £45 a month for Sky. Europa League games give them the chance to watch the lads on the box for free. That should mean something. It obviously doesn’t.

One last thing. You will have to go a long way to find a more optimistic Red than me. All of us who there in the Ataturk Stadium will always be optimists. How can we not be? But even I cannot see any way that we will win the league next year. And we certainly won’t win the Champion’s League because we ain’t in it. But we definitely could win the Europa League. And wherever the final is, there would be thousands of Reds making the pilgrimage to get there.

That is what I thought Liverpool Football Club is supposed to be all about. Winning stuff. Lifting trophies. Not hawking shirts around the globe and gearing everything to the Holy Grail of finishing fourth and earning more cash.

Sadly, it seems like that is the Liverpool Football Club of the past. All we seem to be now are a series of numbers on a Bostonian balance sheet.

And it stinks.