THERE'S NO LUNACY QUITE LIKE NUCLEAR LUNACY

I have been a bit rough over the last few days with one of those chest infections which renders sleep out of reach. Lots of quality time with the wee small hours of the morning. Lots of dead time to kill. So it was that a couple of nights ago I rummaged though the nether regions of Netflix until I landed on ‘Dr Strangelove.’

Well? Why the hell not?

Christ. 1964. Fifty two years old and counting. And yet it took less than five minutes to see the thing had aged as well as Jane Fonda. If Stanley Kubrick had wanted to make it in colour, he could have done. But he chose black and white and was he ever right to do so. The movie is a ninety minute study in genius. The genius of Kubrick as he creates a haunting, terrible beauty out of lovingly crafted shots of a lonely B52 bomber gliding over the dead of night wilderness of Northern Russia. The genius of Peter Sellars who plays three parts and could have won an Oscar of any of them. More than anything else, the genius of laying bare the utter, abject lunacy of mankind’s fascination with pouring resources into achieving the means to destroy the world we live in.

Once Vera Lynn sang the movie out over a montage of exploding hydrogen bombs, it seemed to me the nuclear lunacy of 2016 is several times more lunatic than it was back in 1964. At least back then the nukes were aimed at an enemy who could be clearly identified. The tough guys at the helm of Soviet Russia made no kind of secret about their desire to come get us one day. The many thousands of T62 battle tanks they had stationed in East Germany kind of rubber stamped the point.

There was a kind of horrendous method to the nuclear madness back then. Their army outnumbers ours by at least five to one. And they really do fancy rolling west to come get us. Well, at least they say they do. So we need to keep them in their communist box by threatening them with a nuclear holocaust. The fact that any kind of nuclear exchange would leave us every bit as irradiated and generally screwed as the Soviets was deemed to be neither here nor there.

And I guess it is hard in a way not to accept that the lunacy of mutually assured destruction probably worked.

In a way.

In a completely warped way. For the first time in hundreds of years the regimes of Europe managed to hate each other without going the extra mile and killing each other by the million.

In the end, the threat of having a stream of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles raining down on their heads seemed to be enough to reign in the war like instincts of the leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain. If Saddam Hussein had owned the ability to nuke the White House and Downing St, I wonder if Bush and Blair would have been quite so keen to play the part of tough guys? Something tells me they might have given the weapons inspectors a bit more time.

The bottom line is that when both sides are nuked up to the eyeballs, it means the leaders are effectively right there on the front line. Sure, in the event of buttons being pressed they will be rushed down to the very deepest of the deep bunkers, but when is all said and done not many fancy the idea of spending the rest of their natural lives eating corned beef and biscuits that come out of tins. Instead they much prefer to pick fights with the miserably under motivated and ill equipped armies of the likes of Iraq and Argentina. Lots of glory in the tabloid press and not a snowball in hell’s chance of the bad guys having a go at them personally.

So Kubrick's 1964 was then. Now the world is a very different place. The pro nuke brigade never tires of telling us all about how unpredictable and dangerous it is, but they never seem keen to put any meat on the bones.

They tell us that Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. Fair enough. He is a bad guy. But he holds a very different hand of cards to the one the likes of Leonid Brezhnev were accustomed to holding.

Does he have a vast tank army parked up on the German Border? No he doesn’t. Does he have the money to even think of building that kind of tank army? No he doesn’t. In fact, is the Red Army so completely hollowed out that it took them a whole week to complete the invasion of Georgia which was supposed to be done and dusted in a matter of hours? Yup. It sure is. Recent botched adventures in Georgia, Chechyna and Ukraine have demonstrated the Red Army is still light years away from solving it's age old problem of the lads drinking all the brake fluid in the trucks and tanks.

So the truth of the matter is that Putin has no ability whatsoever to threaten Western Europe with soldiers and tanks and planes. But fair enough, he could still nuke us. But why would he? What could he possibly gain? Nuking someone is a whole different ball game to invading them and stealing all their stuff. If we had nuked Iraq, then BP would have had no chance of getting a hold of all that lovely oil.

Basically there is no gain whatsoever for Vladimir Putin should he choose to nuke Britain. And just imagine how pissed off all his best mates would be at one of his ICBM’s turning their Mayfair mansions into a heap of irradiated rubble. And what of all that lovely loot Vladimir and his mates have safely tucked away in the shiny towers of the City of London? Freshly laundered money is no use if the computer that holds the records has been vapourised.

But what about North Korea!!!! Oh my God!!! NORTH KOREA!! The place is run by a raving lunatic and they are so bad out there that they even tortured Jack Bauer and James Bond. Oh yeah. That’s how bad these people are. Real bad. But no matter how bad they might be, I cannot see why in a million years they would ever have the slightest interest in nuking us. Why would they? If they are going to nuke anyone it will be South Korea first and then America and then Japan. But not us. They don’t give a shit about us. They never have.

But what about ISIS and Al Queda and Al Shabab and Boko Haram!!!!! OH MY GOD!!!!!!

Yeah. Right.

For Christ’s sake.

But then we are told that having nukes is all about forward planning. Fair enough, right now we really don’t have any enemies where having a submarine at sea 24/7 will keep us safe, but that doesn’t mean that these kinds of enemies will not emerge in the future. What about China? What about Iran?

The future is scary, scary……..

And we would be irresponsible and crazy to give up our treasured nuclear safety blanket when the years to come might well be filled with dire threat.

And so the whole issue has become an accepted norm. The future is an unpredictable nightmare. OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!! Let's keep our nukes and stay safe and who gives a stuff about how much it all costs. Because of course like the men in the serious suits say, you simply cannot put a price on staying safe.

To argue against this paper thin logic born out of the same methods parents use to frighten young children with tales of hobgoblins and bogeymen has become strangely unacceptable. Saying nukes are a useless waste of money is right up there with saying communism is a good idea and Donald Trump is well cool. People who usually have reasonably sane ideas about spending public money go all demented when it comes to splashing the cash on four submarines to carry the wherewithal to wipe the world clean of fifty million or so bad guys.

Oh the cost. The civil servant in charge recently described the Trident submarine programme as a 'monster'. Five years ago, our four new submarines were going to cost us £25 billion. During those five years there has been near zero inflation. Well, zero inflation in the real world. In the nuke world there must have been raging inflation because the new quote has popped up to £31 billion. And just to be safe, the civil servant in charge has recommended adding on an extra £10 billion just in case.

Oddly enough this particular price hike isn't actually all that bad in the nuclear world beyond the looking glass. Five years ago the bill for shutting down and cleaning up Sellafield was going to be £6 billion. Now it has risen to £53 billion and we are still very much counting.

This is maybe worth getting straight. It is going to cost every man, woman and child in Britain two thousand quid each to clean up the festering irradiated mess that lurks underneath a few acres of West Cumbria. At the same time we are all required to cough up a further fifteen hundred quid each for a team of four nuclear submarines.

When will we see a return on our investments? Well nobody is willing to give a date for cleaning up Sellafield, but they reckon we might well have the subs by 2031. So that's good. Isn't it? I mean, it looks like we can look forward to ruling the waves again. Or does it?

Mmmmmmm

As the country who once upon had a navy capable of controlling the oceans of the world, we can have no excuse for ignoring the lessons of our maritime history. There is painful truth here. When it comes to wasting vast amounts of public money on warships which are completely obsolete by the time the Queen smashes a bottle on them we have lots and lots of history. In 1920 battleships looked like a really good idea. They were the undisputed heavyweight champions of the oceans. And so Parliament ordered a whole bunch of them. They were supposed to be ready to sail out to the high seas in the 1930's. But you know how it is... These things take time. As it was, most of them were not ready until the late forties. And by the late forties everything had changed. By the late forties there was a new kid on the block. Fighter bombers. And World War Two had provided ample proof that a fight between a bunch of fighter bombers and a battleship was only ever going to end one way and it was always the flyboys who were acknowledging the cheers of the crowd.

Every one of the battleships which were built at such huge cost were completely useless by the time they were ready to launch. We sailed them around for a while for the sake of appearances and then we quietly scrapped them.

Right now the clever scientists in California and Shanghai are working away night and day on designing clever little underwater drones. I gather there will be two types. First there will be diddy little things that float underwater and sense when a big nuclear sub is sailing by. And then there are slightly larger things that can silently tail a nuclear sub around the silent emptiness of the oceans. So here's how it will almost certainly play out in a few years time. Let's for a minute imagine the Chinese government are not greatly amused at us Brits having multiple nukes targeted at their cities. So what do? Well, they might well send a few lads over to Scotland carrying big golf bags as a cunning cover. The lads might enjoy a touring holiday around the coast. The lads might stop on the edge of Gare Loch to take lots of pictures for their Facebook pages. The lads might quietly drop hundreds on the diddy drones into the water. Then they might go and get nine holes in before it gets too dark.

Meanwhile some other golfing Chinese lads might stroll along ta beach in Ayshire and pop a few of the larger drones into the sea.

What happens next? It is pretty simple really. The diddy drones in Gare Loch let the bigger drones hanging out in the Clyde Estuary know when on of our shiny new nuke subs is making its secret way out to sea. The bigger drones quietly fall in behind the not so secret sub and duly keep the brass in Beijing up to speed about its whereabouts. If at any stage the Chinese decide to teach us a lesson, all they need to do is to drop a nuke in the general vicinity of our sub and it will be game over for a hundred billion quid's worth of safety blanket.

Just like all those quietly scrapped battleships back in the day. The only way this outcome doesn't come to pass is if the clever lads in California and Shanghai fail to do their stuff with the drones. From where I am sitting, that outcome doesn't look all that hopeful. They have at least fifteen years when all is said and done. I rather fancy their chances.

But what do I know? So let's for a moment imagine all the clever lads in the world fail to come up with their dastardly mini drones, and when our first new sub sails out of the Clyde Estuary in 2031 it is still capable of staying invisible and therefore viable.

What can it actually do? Well on this point the rules are very, very clear. Under no circumstances whatsoever is any British Prime Minister allowed to use our nukes as a means of attack. That is a complete no go area. All our PM is allowed to do is to fire back once someone else has fired their nukes at us. We are allowed to retaliate, not initiate.

It goes something like this. Bad guys launch a massive nuclear strike on Britain. Loads of bombs hit London and everything and everyone is completely totaled. This is when the Prime Minister has a decision to make. Do I stick or twist? We are already completely screwed. However there is still the option of killing fifty million or so of the bad guys' civilians in revenge. Even though none of the the aforesaid fifty million civilians was in any way responsible for nuking Britain. And then of course there is another ticklish problem. What if the Prime Minister of the day has been reduced to a molecular state by the bad guys' first strike. With the best will in the world even the greatest of leaders struggle to make decisions once they have been well and truly atomised.

Well there is no need to worry. This eventuality has been covered. There has been plenty of pre-planning. I heard all about it from an expert from the United Services Institute who the BBC promised was a genuine expert in his field. Well that figured. The United Services Institute is made up of ex generals and admirals and head spooks. Been there, done that guys. So this is is how things play out.

Bad guys nuke London. Completely. Utterly. Everyone is dead. At this point, the commander of the submarine hidden away under the grey waters of the Atlantic has an inkling that something isn't right. He keeps calling London, but every phone just rings out. So how does he check if there is anyone or anything left? Simple. He instructs his radio officer to tune into Radio Four. If there is no Radio Four any more, he is to assume there is no Britain any more. At this point he goes to his safe and takes out a pre-written letter for the Prime Minister. It's a pretty heavy letter to be frank. The letter explains what the sub captain is to do in the event of Britain being nuked.

Should he stick or should he twist?

Every Prime Minister since Harold McMillan has written their doomsday letter. And you know what? Every single one of them said 'don't do it'. What is the point? The game is already over. Why would I want to become a posthumous war criminal by slaughtering fifty million entirely innocent civilians out of pure spite?

Remember, the guy who explained this was a guy who knew all about this kind of stuff. So for the last fifty years our so called nuclear deterrent hasn't actually been any kind of deterrent at all. Not in practice. And yet we are still planning to spend another hundred and something billion on a bunch of of soon to be obsolete submarines which will be a major radioactive headache when we scrap them in 2040.

Like I said, there really is no lunacy like nuclear lunacy.

HERE IS SAM'S STORY. BE ANGRY. BE VERY ANGRY. I AM.

Over the last thirteen years working at First Base I have been left feeling angry and appalled too many times to count. Angry and appalled at the way people are treated. Angry and appalled at the casual cruelty of our supposedly caring State. Angry and appalled at the way faceless beaurocrats seem to think it is OK to step on vulnerable people as if they are human cockroaches.

It has become a familiar emotion. 

Almost the norm. 

And anyone who has read this blog of mine over the years will know where I am coming from. And at times it is easy to slip into the same kind of zone that A&E nurses probably live in. You get to thinking that you have already seen the worst of the worst. You get to thinking that nothing to come can be worse than what has already been.

But to be honest to think like that would be pretty bloody naïve. And so it was that on a cold day in December I drove up to Edinburgh to meet up with Sam. I described our encounter in a blog and there seems little point in re-writing so here is an extract.

'I have only met Sam once before and it was very brief. It was on one of the very worst of days. The day we said goodbye to James. 

Some background. 

James, the youngest client of our Veterans Project. James, a could have been tearaway who took the King’s Shilling and signed up. James who stood tall and magnificent on a hard, hard tour of Helmand Province. James who left the army when his dad died because his mum needed him. James who was one of the most decent guys it has ever been my honour to meet. James whose conscience and soul could not handle what he had seen and done on that hard, hard tour of Helmand Province. James who took his own life at 23 years old on a bone cold January night.

His brothers in arms from the Regiment came down to carry his coffin under the cold grey January skies.

And Sam was one of the band of brothers. I can still picture him that day. Clearly. He was so tall it made carrying James awkward. Sam the six foot five Fijian with the ram rod back. A face as hard as one of those Easter Island statues. But his eyes. His eyes were windows onto a grief stricken soul.

And I remember standing at the grave side and thinking what a crazy world we live in. Sam. The warrior from a warrior tribe. So many thousands of miles from his South Sea home. Tall and like a king from a Kipling story. Still as a rock. Saying his goodbyes to a fellow warrior.

On a cold, cold day.

In Dumfries.

In Scotland.

James’s mum Nicola called me a few weeks ago. She said she had been talking to Sam on Facebook. She said Sam is out of the Army now. Out in the cold. And things are not so good. Pretty bad in fact. Could First Base do anything? I said we would do our best.

But no promises. Other than the promise to drive up to Edinburgh to meet him.

He is waiting for me. He stands up. All the way up. And it’s a long way. He’s a six foot five version of Marvin Gaye. Hell of a hand shake.

But a very quiet voice. And a story that makes me once again wish that 45 had been 51 and we could be free of London’s bottomless nastiness.

He remembers when they got him to sign the dotted line in Fiji they said that four years served would mean guaranteed citizenship.

He served nine years. 

Iraq. The Falklands. Northern Ireland. Afghanistan. 

The same hard, hard Helmand Tour as James. With James. He did the hardest of hard miles. And every month his salary had income tax and National Insurance deducted. Like he was a citizen.

But when he left the army in 2012 he learned the hard way that the British Establishment tell lies.

Citizenship? Who told you that? Good lord. I very much doubt it..

Well. You’ll just have to apply along with all the rest, won’t you? But don’t hold your breath. We’re not overly keen on your type to be frank. No money? No thought not.

So Sam applied. Three years ago. And for three years they have made him sign on. But his was a different sort of sign on. Every Monday he walks six miles into Edinburgh city centre to sign his name in a police station. Like a common criminal. Like a terrorist. Like scum. And then he walks six miles home again.

And he waits.

He receives not a penny and he has been told in no uncertain terms that should he do do much as an hour’s work he will be on a plane back to Fiji before he gets the chance to blink.

His partner has left him and she doesn’t let him see his son. His son is five now. The last picture Sam has is of a three year old son.

He has another girlfriend now and she pays the bills. They share one room over a pub. They share a mattress on the floor. And Sam watches TV all day. And one by one the demons of those hard, hard Helmand days are starting crawl into his head like moggots.

Whilst he waits on the Home Office.

And waits.

And I feel useless and inadequate and so completely ashamed of being British even though I fought tooth and nail not to be. What have we become?

I promise that I will try to what I can.

And I will.

But when all is said and done it is the bloody Home Office we are talking about here.

We stand and shake hands. Maybe there is a faint smile. Maybe not. He thanks me and I feel terrible.

I get in my van and drive south.

He goes back to his one room over the pub and more hours of TV.

More waiting.

And all the way back I remember him in that cold graveyard on that cold January day. Like a statue. Like a king. Like a warrior. So very far from home. Saying goodbye to an unlikely brother in arms.

But a brother all the same.'

That was then. I made calls. Of course I made calls. But in the end First Base is just a two bit charity in a two bit Scottish town. What chance have we of getting so much as a toe in the door of the Home Office? A Home Office where every man and his dog is tasked with keeping immigrants out at any cost. Because there is a referendum coming. Because Farage scares them. Because all over the Europe the voices of hate are getting louder with every passing hour. And because across the Atlantic a property tycoon of reality TV fame has rediscovered the same strut and rage that once upon a time propelled Benito Mussolini to absolute power. Because everyone seems to have decided that every ill in our fractured world is the fault of immigrants.

Sam's local MP Joanne Cherry has taken up his case and I hope it will turn out that Sam has got lucky with his postcode because Joanne is also a QC. I soon learned that his situation should actually be anything but hopeless. The rights of Commonwealth soldiers are carved in stone. If they serve for four years and keep their noses clean they have an automatic right to become British citizens. It is cut and dried. It is open and shut.

When Sam told the army that he was ready to hand in his kit and leave, the Army should have taken him through all the forms and made sure that all the i's were dotted and all the t's were crossed before he walked out of the gates for the last time. But they didn't. Instead they checked in his kit and let him walk. Bye, bye Same. Have a nice day. Have a nice life.

He slept walked into a beaurocratic labyrinth. Into limbo. Into the faceless desperation of being a non person in a brutal world. Efficiency and the Home Office are not words that fit together in any sentence, especially when the number one priority is to keep people out at all costs because our gallant Prime Minister promised to reduce the numbers of incomers to the tens of thousands.

So I promised to do what I could. And I did do what I could. And who knows, maybe one day things will work out. But there are no signs that day will come any time soon. And to be honest the whole thing makes me sick to the stomach. 

We paid for people to fly all the way to the other side of the world. To Fiji. To a sparkling island in the Pacific Ocean we once upon a time conquered and claimed for our own. We added it to the list. Our long list. We painted Fiji red and added it to the map with all those other placed we painted red. I guess we must have hired some office space. I guess we must have taken out advertising space in the local press. I guess the guys must have blagged interview slots on the local media. And once all was in place they must have started their hard selling.

Good morning, good morning. Pleas take a seat. Coffee? Tea? Something cold? Now then. Let's get cracking shall we? I gather you are interested in joining the British Army? Wonderful. Splendid. Super. We think you will find it an absolutely smashing career. Especially for a such a big fine chap as yourself. In fact I rather think we will be able to find you a spot in the second row. In fact almost all of the Army rugger team is now Fijian. Did you know that? Extraordinary really. And of course if you serve for four years we will give you a shiny new passport and you will be a true blue Brit. Let's face it, what's there not to like? Especially for a big, fine chap like you. So here is the paperwork. You sign here, here and here. There's a good chap......

We sent people all the way to the other side of the world to get Sam to sign on the dotted line. And we did indeed put him in the second row. And for 60% of the salary of a traffic warden we put him in the front line of the our most brutal war since Korea. We made absolutely sure that he got the paperwork absolutely right so that we could get him on the plane to basic training at Catterick. But when Sam decided it was time to leave there was no-one there to make sure all the paperwork was in order for him to walk out onto Civvy St with any rights and entitlements.

It was a very different Sam who walked out into the unforgiving streets in the Olympic year of 2012. All the hard, brutal days in Helmand Province had taken a heavy toll. As the desperate reality of his situation became apparent the depression started to kick in. And then the nightmares. The heat and the dust and the fear and the loss and the blood and the the screams.

Over and over and over.

When I left him in December I made the mistake of thinking that things couldn't get any worse.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Because a few days things did indeed get worse. About a million times worse. It turned out that one of the fellow tenants in his block was a psychopath. How? Because the fellow tenant came up from behind and smashed in the back of Sam's head with a claw hammer.

Like I said. A million times worse. His girlfriend Kirsty cradled his ruined skull and couldn't comprehend how there could be so much blood. She managed to keep him from fading out. The ambulance came and got him to the emergency room. The cops came and arrested the psychopath and duly charged him with attempted murder.

Sam made it though for a while it was worse than touch and go.

And surely it couldn't get any worse. But it did. Of course it did. They let the psychopath out on bail and he returned to his landlord's office threatening more of the same if he wasn't allowed back in. And not surprisingly the landlord was scared stiff. So what did he do? He called up Kirsty and told her that she and Sam were evicted. No notice. No nothing. Just get the hell out. Now! I don't want you anywhere near the place because I don't want that maniac coming round again with his claw hammer. It would have been nice if he had shared his fears with the cops. It would have been nice if the courts hadn't granted bail. Lots of things would have been nice.

But things were not nice. And so it was that when Sam was discharged from hospital with a head full of stitches and staples he was not merely a non person, he was now a homeless non person. They walked the streets to the homeless department. They were told that a box room was going to be £100 a night because Kirtsy was working and Sam didn't officially exist. And it was only for one night anyway.

Come back in the morning and we'll see. The police had given then a piece of paper which was supposed to have earned a degree of priority. But it didn't. So they went back in the morning only to see the psychopath going through the door ahead of them. They called the cops and cops advised them to get out out of Dodge quick. And stay out of Dodge for at least two hours. So they followed the advice. They got out a and stayed out and when they returned the person behind the desk told them it was too late and all rooms were booked. No doubt a room had been found for the psychopath with a thing for claw hammers.

At about the same time James's mum Nicola called me with the news and I called Sam. He brought me up to speed. So where the hell are you going to go? Don't know. We'll just walk about I suppose. The same quiet voice. Calm. Brave as a bloody lion.

I told him it wouldn't do. I told him I would get a hotel booked and text him the details. He tried his very best to dissuade me, but I can actually be quiet determined at times. I sorted the hotel and promised to meet him there at eight thirty the next morning.

I met him. I got all the facts down in a notebook. And yet again I promised to do what I could. And yet again I told him that everything was a long shot. Because we are nothing but a two bit charity in a two bit town. And the State is huge and grey and monolithic and it doesn't seem to own a shred of compassion or decency.

But First Base isn't entirely two bit. I sent a text to my fellow 'Yes' traveler Richard who is now a Member of the mother of all Parliaments. Hi Rich. Please give me a bell. It's kind of urgent. He called back five minutes later. I asked if he could grab five minutes with Joanne Cherry and bring her up to speed regarding Sam's dire situation.

He could. He did. Joanne's team called up Sam. And they have promised to everything they can. Which let's face it is a whole lot more that I can do. After I gave Sam and Kirsty a lift across town to the homeless department, they were given a room for a week. Thank Christ. Some breathing space. A stay of execution.

And so yet again I am left with nothing to do other than to slam my keyboard with the words you are reading now. If there is anyone out there who can help in any way at all please let me know. And if there are any reporters out there who can take Sam's story to a wider audience please get in touch. I asked him if we would be willing to allow the press to tell his story. He is. He will. And I'll tell you what guys, he'll take a a hell of a photo. A six and a half foot warrior version of Marvin Gaye.

He deserves so much more than this. Now he needs a clamour. Angry voices. Justice and fairness demanded.

Because everything about this is just so very, very wrong.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH ... YOU GREEDY BASTARDS... ENOUGH IS ENOUGH..

I wasn’t at the Liverpool Sunderland game on Saturday. Three of us share two season tickets and it was my two sons who went to the match. On the surface of things, the fixture was on the mundane side of inconsequential. We – Liverpool – are a pretty miserable outfit at the moment whilst Sunderland are a perennially miserable outfit. It was mid table against bottom of the table. It was a grey, grey day in February. It was nothing much.

The game wasn’t covered live on either TV or radio. Why would it be? Logically I should have felt little regret that I hadn’t drawn this particular match out of the hat. A five hour drive up and down a wet and windswept M6 on a dank day in February to watch such dismal fare was hardly the most appealing prospect. At least it shouldn’t have been.

But this wasn’t just any run of the mill clash between twenty two mainly foreign and universally over paid individuals. In fact, what went down on the field of play was a side show. The main event was to be found on the terraces among the supporters who are every now and then referred to as Liverpool’s 12^th man.

Last week our American owners announced the prices for next season’s match tickets last week. This is a year when the club will receive a windfall of £50 million thanks to the insane TV deal which is about to kick in. Fair enough. Just a telephone number. Some context would be good. £50 million is half of the savings the Government is looking to make by the heaping misery and abject poverty on hundreds of thousands of citizens via their hated Bedroom Tax. As in serious, serious cash.

Liverpool’s annual turnover will jump up to about £350 million next year. Assuming we have a few cup games, the club will sell about one and a quarter million tickets. Basically thanks to the TV money the club could give every one of these tickets away completely free of charge and still be over £10 million better off. Wow. Let's get real here, not so many businesses are receiving this kind of windfall in these brutal economic times.

What an opportunity for our owners to choose to do the right thing. The terraced streets that wrap themselves around Anfield are some of the most deprived in Europe. Half of the houses have every door and window sealed off with tin sheeting. It is the kind of place where plywood just won’t do. Unemployment, gangs, drugs, foodbanks,. Anfield is a tough, tough place. Over recent years Liverpool the city has managed to drag itself out of the gutter Maggie Thatcher consigned it to all those years ago. But it is hardly rich. It is a city where the 0.1% of super rich citizens are either footballers or gangsters. Otherwise jobs are scarce and the pay is crap. Once upon a time not so so very long ago, the money collected by the Customs House on the docks represented over 60% of the income of the whole of Britain. Those were the days when slaves and sugar made Britain the richest country in the world. The plunder of Empire poured in through the Albert Dock whilst the products of the Industrial Revolution poured out in the opposite direction.

For well over a hundred years the docks provided tens of thousands of workers proper jobs which eventually were properly paid. But not for so very long. Once the workers finally achieved fair rates of pay and better working conditions their days were numbered. The 1% hate fair pay and decent conditions, be they in Liverpool or Detroit.

The 1980’s happened and the majestic buildings of Pier Head suddenly looked like some kind of a sick joke. Yosser Hughes became the face of a blighted city. I can do that. Giz a job.

In the tough industrial cities and towns of Britain, going the match on a Saturday afternoon had always been one of the few affordable pleasures available to those who grafted forty and fifty hours a week for not a lot. It seems almost quaint now.

A few months ago I gave evidence at the Hillsborough Enquiry. To jog my memory they dug out a letter I had written a few days after the disaster and gave me a copy. I had enclosed my match ticket which had never received the attentions of a turnstile operator. I looked at it and more than anything else it was the price that rattled my cage. Liverpool v Nottingham Forest. Hillsborough Stadium. Saturday 15^th April 1989. Kick Off 3pm. Leppings Lane Terrace.

£5

£5! For an FA Cup Semi Final. In 1989. What would an FA Cup semi final ticket cost now? Probably twenty times that. I did some research. To stand on the Kop for the match in 1989 cost £3. So how did that compare in real terms to today's obscene prices?. More research. There was no minimum wage back then, but the average draw for 40 hours of unskilled work was £8000 a year. So £4 an hour.

In 1989, three quarters of an hour’s worth of minimum wage work was enough to get you into Anfield to watch the match. Now our American owners are proposing a top ticket price of £77 to see the game – 11 hours of minimum wage work. To watch from the Kop you get to pay the bargain basement price of £45 – six and a half hour’s worth of minimum wage work. This is a horrible nine times more than 1989. Oh the joys of big money American ownership.

This got me to checking out other areas of 1989 life which were more affordable than they are today. In those days I was a minimum wager myself as we struggled to get an infant business into young adulthood. My £8000 salary made me eligible for a mortgage of £28,000. This was more than enough for me to buy a Lancaster two up and two down for £22,000 – the deposit was £1000. The repayments came in at £120 a month – 30 hours worth of minimum wage work. A 2016 version of me on minimum wage would qualify for a mortgage of £50,000. This would be no great use as according to Google my old gaff would now set me back £180,000 and require a deposit of north of £30,000.

Back in 89, an hour’s work would be enough for five pints in the pub, two cinema tickets and ten litres of fuel. Now an hour’s graft gets you a couple of pints, one cinema ticket and seven litres of fuel. These things are dearer than they were in 89, but nothing approaching the 900% real terms increase in the cost of watching football from the Kop.

No wonder life has become such a bleak grind for so many. A life of spending most of your money paying the rent and keeping the lights on. A life of going out once in a blue moon. A closed down life of work, endless TV and not a lot else.

When Maggie Thatcher gritted her teeth and declared war on the industrial heartlands, the city of Liverpool took on the role of Tora Bora. It was the city of Liverpool who fought the Iron Maiden the longest and the hardest.

We lost of course. She won. But for a while we gave her a run for her money. The Tory Government met the resistance of the city with the same kind of implacable fury the Waffen SS used to put down the Warsaw Uprising forty years earlier. OK. Not quite that! By the end of the 80's Liverpool seemed well on the way to becoming a British version of the kind of post industrial nightmare Detroit is now.

I guess the good folk of Detroit never had the same kind of instinctive unity that the Scouse nation has always been able to rely on. The city somehow managed to stay on its feet and against all sensible odds it has re-invented itself as one of Europe's most popular weekend destinations.

All of this meandering around my formative years brings me very belatedly to the point. On Saturday afternoon the Kop decided that taking it on the chin wasn't their preferred option. They announced to the world they were making the figure 77 iconic. As in the eye watering £77 ticket. A mass walkout was planned for the 77^th minute. A die was cast and I suddenly wished I was making that rainy soaked drive down the M6. How bloody crazy is that? I wanted to go to the match to get the chance to walk out early. Whoever said that being a football supporter is any kind of sane pastime.

As the moment of truth drew nearer I was nervous as hell. For two days the chatter of the football world had been all about how many would vote with their feet. And lots of people were anxious. The general feeling was that if the Liverpool fans failed to step up to the plate, then the 'People's Game' was probably lost forever. For sixty five minutes the stadium was eerily quiet. Instead of the usual array of colour, the Kop waved giant black flags. Usually the Kop waits until the dying moments of the match to sing 'You'll Never Walk Alone'. Not this time. All of a sudden the noise levels shot up in the 75^th minute as the scarves were raised high. Then Gerry Marsden's 60's anthem was replaced by a roar of anger.

“Enough is enough, enough is enough, you greedy bastards, enough is enough....”

And 15,000 Scousers got up from their seats and walked out. Thank Christ. So. Still some life in the old dog yet. How the owners must have hated it in their Boston ivory towers on the far side of the grey Atlantic. Goddamn sonofabitches! This isn't how this franchise is supposed to play out! Well guys.... tough. You had your Tea Party way back in 1773. Looks like it's time for us to have ours. And guess what, we don't like getting ripped off any more than you did. I think you are about to discover you have picked a troublesome enemy. Will we win? Who knows. It would be nice if people power could find a way to give the 1% a couple of black eyes and a cracked rib. Because this isn't just about football. It's about just about everything. It's about the bloody, sodding 1% ripping us off and then ripping us off some more.

“Enough is enough, enough is enough, you greedy bastards, enough is enough....”

As I write this, the news is so far so good. The walkout has generated a huge amount of press and I have yet to read a single word of support for the Bostonian price hike. In the eyes of the world, they are the bad guys. Well, Yippee Kay Yay. They are hiding of course. They always do. No doubt they are hoping like hell that if they keep their heads down it will all go away. I doubt it. We have the taste of blood on our lips. This one has the chance to run and run. Well bring it on. It's about time. Maybe we might even get to win this time. Just for once. They will clutch at the straw of the memory of Maggie and try to follow in her ferocious footsteps. Well, I'll paraphrase a quote from an American Vice Presidential Debate.

“You compare yourself to Maggie Thatcher? Well I knew Maggie Thatcher. Maggie Thatcher was an enemy of mine. You're no Maggie Thatcher.”

Anyway. It's time I come clean and own up to the fact that I have some skin in this game. A couple of years ago a released a short book called 'King Kenny's Revolution'. It tells the fictional tale of a fans revolt against a set of fictional American owners of Liverpool Football Club. In the wake of the events of the weekend, it seems the right and proper thing to do is to put it into the Amazon free section. So if you fancy a read, to can download yourself the book by clicking this link. Unlike watching the match it is entirely free at the point of use.

http://goo.gl/ImoZlG

I hope you enjoy it. Please pass the link around.

AN EPITAPH TO MARY

I can't say that I knew Mary well. In fact I barely knew her at all. For a while she was one of our food parcel regulars.

And then she wasn't.

We stopped seeing her.

When was that? A couple of years ago I guess.

This is the way of things at First Base. We see someone for a while. And they disappear from our radar. Maybe they are in jail. Maybe they have skipped town. Maybe they have straightened everything out. Or maybe....

Yeah. The big maybe. The worst maybe. The dead maybe. That all to frequent dead maybe.

Last week Mary was no longer a maybe. Only dead. Irrevocably dead. Yet another young life snuffed out decades and decades before she got remotely close to making it to the new average age.

I know little about Mary's short and rather blighted life. A conversation with Mary was always a confusing affair. She would jump from this thing to that thing with no obvious reason and all the while her eyes would twinkle with unexplained pleasure.

Rain or shine, wind or snow, Mary would always come through the door with a smile on her face. Sadly her smile labelled her for most people. It wasn't the smile you would expect from a young woman in her twenties. Instead Mary had the smile of a ninety year old Babuschka from rural Moldova.

A Methadone smile. Methadone Hyrdochloride. Sweet and thick and green and doled out once day as the State's answer to all of the lost souls trying to find comfort in the cotton wool embrace of street opiates. Of heroin. Of smack.

Ferociously acidic Methadone Hydrochloride which will eat away the enamel of your teeth no matter how often you brush and floss and rinse. Which is why so many who are parked up on the 'Done' make a point of keeping their lips firmly together when they speak. Stumpy brown Methadone teeth are not a great look if you are looking to put your life onto a better track. One smile and expressions harden.

One smile and eyes glaze. Junkie. Smackhead. Thief. Prosser. Scum.

So best not to smile. Better instead to mumble and keep the secret.

But not Mary. Mary always smiled. Somehow she was able to allow the instinctive hatred of so many of those at the other end of her smile to wash over her. In some ways Mary's long love affair with heroin was evident at first glance. The methadone teeth. The stick thin limbs. The air of inevitable doom.

But in other ways she bucked the stereotypes the world threw at her. She was always determinedly smart. She always had something of a twinkle in her presence. And she always smiled that wrecked smile of hers and the smile always reached all the way into her eyes.

Sum up Mary in a single word? I would say nice. Nice can be a damning way of descrbing a person of course. Not in Mary's case. Nice is just what she was. Oh of course this might well have been down to her mental health problems which were considerable. But I think she would have been nice regardless. She was one of those rare people without a nasty side.

Had she always ghosted through life with a brain not quite fit for purpose? Or was her muddle something new? A consequence of something awful happening? I have no idea. Mary never became a client. She never came in to wrap her bony fingers around a mug of coffee to unpack her bag full of demons. To try and make some kind of sense of them. To dredge up the horrible memories so long buried deep under the insulation of tenner bags of heroin.

No. Never that. Mary was never more than a fleeting presence. Five minutes of smiling and talking very fast about all kinds of everything. And asking over and over again how we all were and how everything was going before drifting away with a bag of food that looked like it weighed more than her.

Thank you, thank you, thank you...

And out of the door. Into the cold. Into the rest of her life.

Being so very nice in the dark world of heroin can't have been good. Mary was a pin up girl for the word vulnerable. No doubt she provided easy meat for the circling sharks out there who can smell vulnerability from a mile away.

But she managed to keep on smiling. And smiling. And being nice.

One day my mobile rang and the screen told me that the person calling was withholding their number. It was the local cops. On a Bank Holiday? What on earth...? Was I the key holder for 6 Buccleuch St? Yes I was. Could I come in? I could.

When I arrived the front door was open and two young cops were filling the reception area with their bulky authority. How had they got in? I checked out the door for evidence of break in. None. They gave me the story. They had received a call from a member of the public reporting that our front door was unlocked even though it was a Bank Holiday. I asked them for more detail.

It had been one of our food parcel clients. They hadn't noticed the 'Closed' sign on the door. They hadn't clocked the fact that all the lights were off. Instead they had simply walked in and stood at the counter for a while until eventually they realised the building was empty.

And then they had called up the cops and stood guard until the cops arrived.

I asked if they could they describe the client in question to me? They could. They described Mary. To a tee.

Was it Mary I asked? Yes it was Mary.

I smiled. They looked mildly confused. “I hope you lads have learned a lesson today?”

They still looked confused and now a tad annoyed as well. After all I was the idiot who had forgotten to lock the front door. When all was said and done.

“What do you mean?”

“You know Mary, right? Had some dealings with her?”

“Aye. We know Mary.”

“So think about it. Here's the scenario. A long term chaotic heroin addict gets lucky and discovers that a building is unlocked and empty on a Bank Holiday. And they have a mobile phone. And the use of a free land line phone. So they have ample opportunity to live up to all the stereotypes and call up a bunch of pals to rob everything in sight? Yeah? But Mary didn't do that, did she? She called up you guys and stood guard until you arrived. How long did it take you to get here?”

A shrug. “Dunno. Half an hour or so.”

I grinned at them. “Not bad. She waited in the cold for a whole half hour to make sure the place stayed safe. I guess that is the lesson for the day, hey lads? Never judge a book by the cover. Would you have expected Mary to do what she did?”

Shaking heads. Vague embarrassment. Also annoyance. Coppers hate it if you get too preachy. It was time to endeth the lesson. They left. I locked up. And the next week we bought a big box of chocolates and kept them at the counter for the next time Mary came in.

She came a week later. And when we gave her the chocolates it was the first and only time I saw her without a smile on her face. The tears were instant and they engulfed her. For a moment I thought her skeleton legs were about to give up the ghost. She hung onto the chocolates with an almost frantic expression on her pale face.

It took a while before she felt able to speak. And when she eventually did speak it was not her usual fast gabble. Just a sentence. Just the one.

“Nobody has ever given me chocolates before.”

She didn't stay for long. She wasn't at all comfortable with being the hero of the hour. She left. Out of the door. Into the cold. Into what was left of her doomed life.

Last week the jungle drums beat out a familiar message. The death message. Mary was no more. Mary was gone. How? Rumours. Maybe an overdose. Maybe suicide. Nobody knew. Yet another lost soul whose chips had been cashed before they turned thirty. And for the umpteenth time I pictured a memorial in the centre of the town erected to the memory of all the young people dead before the age of thirty thanks to heroin and valium and all the rest.

First Base has been going for twelve years now. I guess we will have heard those jungle drums beat at least 200 times. 200 young people dead years and years before their time. 200 in a town of 50,000. I cannot help compare the memory of these 200 young people with the 400 or so who lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan. 400 out of a population of sixty million. They left a gaping hole in the fabric of the country. But the loss of the Dumfries 200 has left barely a mark. Quiet death. Unnoticed death. Unlamented and unremarked. Old primary school pictures on the mantlepieces of forever broken families. Methadone files gathering dust. Police records done and dusted.

Gone and forgotten. Small lives snuffed out leaving nothing more than a wisp of smoke. And then nothing.

Like Mary's life. A fading memory of her wrecked smile and twinkling eyes and hundred mile and hour talk. And a day when she taught two young coppers that just because someone uses heroin doesn't mean they are a bad person.

So goodbye Mary. It was a pleasure to know you. It must have been hard to be such a nice person in such a nasty world. But you pulled it off.

OUR PLACE AT JOURNEY'S END

History gives us the chance to see the wood from the trees. I often think that the best way to get a handle on what is going on at any particular time is to add on sixty years and see how things might look from the future. History can fall down when trying to get to the bottom of an individual event. You know, the whole who shot Kennedy thing. However when the world enters a whole new era, history can generally dig out the main underlying reasons.

A couple of examples. In the fifteenth century a few hitherto inconsequential European countries suddenly got a handle on how to use gunpowder to kill people. All of sudden they were able to punch way above their weight. This kicked off the story of the next four hundred years as a few small European countries were able to conquer the rest of the world and rob anything that wasn’t nailed down. Gunpowder launched the Age of Empire.

In the mid nineteenth century a few clever guys worked out how to use steam engines to power ships. Bigger ships. Massive ships. The kind of ships that were big enough to carry thousands and thousands of tonnes of cheap wheat from the newly opened up prairies of the Mid West of America and Canada. All of a sudden there was enough food to sustain millions more people in ever bigger cities. As in millions more people to fill the shop floors of ever more massive factories. Steamships provided the required amount of daily bread to send the Industrial Revolution into overdrive.

So what trends might a historian looking back on us from 2076. Maybe they will see the beginning of the era when water becomes three times more precious than oil. Or maybe they will see this is the time when ever ageing populations finally sank the very same countries who once upon a time harnessed the power of gunpowder to conquer the world.

Or will they see beginning of the Age of Migration? Were I a betting man, that is where I would put my ill begotten tenner. As water runs dry and soil becomes dust, millions upon millions of people will see their already lousy lives become impossible. This trend is already well established for millions of people unlucky enough to live and breathe in what was once called the Third World. No food. No prospects. No chance to earn more than a dollar a day whilst a few uber corrupt individuals up at the top of the tree fill their off shore accounts of bursting point. In a frantic attempt to stay two steps ahead of getting lynched, those at the top of the pile hire on ever more brutal secret policemen and life for the majority becomes a constant nightmare of terror and grinding poverty.

And then the soil is all prepared and ready ISIS and Boko Haram and Al Shabaab and the Taliban to sow their toxic seeds. And then it is over to the eerily prophetic words of WB Yeats.

‘Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’

This is nothing new of course. Torture, terror, starvation and genocide have been part of human life since forever. So what is the difference now?  I think our 2076 historian will identify cheap mobile phones and widening internet access as the equivalent to the gunpowder and the steam ships. Always before when millions of people were consigned to lives of misery and fear, they felt they had all but no choice in the matter. There was no escape from the Thirty Year War or Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China. Now it is different.

Really different.

A young man in Eritrea who has seen his young sister raped by the secret police and his dad tortured and executed for getting angry about it can turn to his phone and ask Google for a road to a better life. And what will he find? Videos of Munich railway station. A thousand images of countries where there are policemen who don’t rape and torture and murder. Images of supermarkets piled high with affordable food. Flats with constant electricity and no four o clock in the morning hammering on the front door. No barrel bombs. No drought.

A life absolutely worth living instead of a life absolutely not worth living. And more to the point, Google provides a full instruction manual on how you can cash in a life of utter desperation for a life of hope.

The instruction manual cover all bases. How you make it across the Sahara or Iran or the Lebanese border. Where the boats sail from and who sails them and how much it costs. And all the way along the line the message is loud and clear – if you try this journey you might well die. So will people heed the warning? Be put off by the massive danger? Sure. Many will. But many will see the dangers of the road west as being no more than the dangers of their already desperate everyday lives.

And so they will come. By the million. Guided by Google maps every step of the way. In days gone by, the suffering multitudes had no real picture of a better life and even if  they had, they had no clue about how to try and find it. Now cheap mobile phones have changed everything. People in desperation can call up pictures of a life worth living care of a few taps at the keypad.

More to the point they can find out how to escape. The Age of Migration is unstoppable now. It is a vast fact.

Which brings us to those of us at journey’s end. We are the chosen ones in a world where half of our fellow citizens eke out an existence on a dollar a day. We are about to be split in two. Some of us will choose humanity. Others will choose fear and hatred. Some of us will open our doors Some of us will buy new locks and hide and dream of a new Hitler to arrive on the scene to save the day. To clean the streets. To make it all go away.

For thirteen years now the doors of First Base have always been open. If someone comes to us because their life has crashed and burned we do our level best to help them out. It makes no odds to us where they come from or what language they speak of what colour their skin is. Folk are folk. Simple as. For thirteen years we have done our best to help out those who many in society would prefer not to think about. The drug addicts and the alcoholics and the ex cons and the mentally ill. The forgotten ones. The despised. The preferred fodder for just about every prime time Channel 5 programme. More recently we have started to see more and more of the working poor. Folk who graft for every hour god sands and yet they still can’t fill a trolley at the supermarket.

And now we are starting to see more of those who have completed epic journeys from their lives of grinding poverty and fear. And of course if they are hungry we will make sure they have food to eat. And we don’t give a damn what Theresa May has to say about any of it. They are here. They are human beings. And everybody’s gotta eat, right?

Then what? Well we are in the process of starting up the First Base Bridge Project. Hopefully it will achieve what it says on the tin. We will try and be the bridge that will help those who choose our little town to be their journey’s end to find a place to find their new lives. When these weary travellers land up from destinations within the EU, offering some help is reasonably straight forward. Their passports mean they have a few rights. The State has a legal requirement to help them out. Not much, mind. But a bit.

For those from outside the EU, it is a very different story. They are the hated ones. They are the ones Theresa May had in mind when she sent her vans out and about to encourage us to do our patriotic thing and shop an 'illegal' to the authorities.

For the non EU citizens who choose our little town as their home, absolute destitution is a very real possibility. These are the people who are not entitled to a single penny of state aid and they are told in no uncertain terms that this is the case. More to the point, they are absolutely not allowed to work and if they are caught doing so much as half an hour’s work, they risk being frog marched onto a plane and sent back to the hunger and the gangsters and the torture rooms.

Basically they are expected to live on fresh air and as we all know that isn’t any kind of realistic possibility. In January in Scotland every human being needs the big three – some warmth, a roof over the head and some food. The Government has make its point of view crystal clear. They will not offer any help wjhatsoever. They don’t actually say that they are happy enough to see thsese people freeze and starve, but they are doing absolutely nothing to stop it.

So for these people the local community is the only show in twon. There is nothing else. Many in the community will be absolutely unwilling to lift a finger to help. They are the ones who will lock their doors and yearn for the coming of a British Adolf to make all the strangers go away. But there are many others who take a different view. They see the people who have completed the epic journeys as fellow human beings. Fantastically, jaw droppingly brave human beings. Fellow human beings who absolutely deserve our help. 

We can choose to offer this help out of a sense of human decency or we can offer this help out of calculating pragmatism. Let's make no mistake here, these are absolutely pick of the litter human beings. Anyone with the courage and wits to make the journeys these guys have made is going to be one hell of a citizen. For three years we helped Yemesi and her three kids whilst the Home Offcie made them wait. It was the community who made sure they had somewhere to live and something to eat and some heat and light for at least some of the time. Without the community, I hate to think what would have happened to them.

And the family knows this. My God do they ever. Thankfully the Home Office said ‘yes’ in the end and as a community we are all about to get a hell of a return on our humane investment in Yemesi and her family. Once Yemesi was issued with a Naytional Insurance number it took her less than six hours to find a job in a care home. I am pretty sure she will be managing it in a few years time. And in a few years time her son will be an engineer and her twin daughters will be doctors. The kids are top of everything at school. And they all love the community of Dumfries for giving them the chance of a life away from the murderous threat of Boko Haram. Once upon a time a country called America opened up its doors to millions of people from all corners of the earth who wanted to make a better life for themselves. It didn’t work out so badly for them, right? Give a lost person a live worth living and they will become the very best of citizens. It just ain’t rocket science.

So.

Over to you community of Dumfries. Right now we are helping out a family from Ghana. A mum, her niece, and four kids – 18 months, 4, 6 and 8. All lads. They have managed to pay the rent on two rooms for the next couple of months but they have no cash for anything else. No food, no power, no clothes for the kids, no nothing. We have been making sure th family’s food cupboards are full for the last couple of months and we will continue to do so for as long as it takes. Yesterday I was able to drop round four big bags of winter clothes for the kids thanks to a collection from Moxy and her brilliant people at DG Refugee Action. I also have my fingers crossed that we are in the process of sorting out some child care and some cash to keep the heaters and lights on.

I guess over the coming months and years we will be seeing more and more families standing at the gates of absolute destitution. We hope we can indeed provide them with a bridge to a better life. But a bridge has to lead somewhere. On the other side of the bridge we need to find as many people as possible who have decided to choose humanity over hate.

So. Here’s hoping. The family are still on their uppers. If there is anyone out there willing to donate stuff like toys, cleaning products or a few bob, please do so. I figure any of you living in and around Dumfries will know where we are. I can assure you that all donations stimulated by this blog will find their way straight to the family.

There will be a hideous and stark choice we will all be expected to make over he coming years. Are we going to rub along with our fellow human beings and help them when they need help? Or are we going to slam and lock our doors and leave people out in the cold.  The likes of the Daily Mail seem to think the majority of us will be more than happy to take the same hate filled road that eventually took the people of Germany into the fires of hell eighty years ago. I’m not so sure. I reckon we are better than that. Maybe by helping this lovely family from West Africa we can start to prove it.