Wednesday 23 September 2015

Nothing new to see here: move along

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes, 1:9 

I have never before been moved to start a column with a quotation from the Bible. But, freed from the tyranny of print deadlines and editorial oversight, I can see no reason not to allow the Authorized Version to sum up in 31 words what I shall now struggle to convey in a further 800 or so.

Namely the acute sense of déjà vu that accompanies every glance at a newspaper or TV bulletin.


It would be lazy to suggest that the triumphant Jeremy Corbyn is simply a throwback to the 1980s; a reincarnation of Michael Foot. Foot was an intellectual and bibliophile, a brilliant writer and a great Parliamentary orator; I remember sitting in my car in a supermarket car park during the Saturday emergency debate on the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in April 1982, unable to tear myself away from either Foot’s speech or the subsequent contribution from that other Commons star, Enoch Powell.

Much good, incidentally, did this skill do either of them or the other most talented Parliamentary debater of recent times, Jeremy Thorpe.

Foot was also nothing if not a British patriot, unlikely ever to have consorted or sympathized with terrorist groups in Ireland or the Middle East. So the great parallel boils down to both being on the left of their party and a certain sartorial unconventionality – though the donkey jacket that Foot was forever damned for wearing at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday in 1981 was, in reality, no such thing.


Just like Mr Corbyn not singing the national anthem in a church full of service grandees and Battle of Britain heroes, he was trying to be respectful.

Surely, you might think, Mr Corbyn must at least have broken new ground is his selection of the shadow secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs. For Kerry McCarthy, the woman tasked with calming down the angry farmers and turning the true blue shires red, is a committed vegan.

Not only that, she is on record as saying that meat eaters should be treated like smokers, nudged by the Government to abandon their dirty and life-threatening habit. Opening up a vision of fillet steaks being sold in plain wrappers adorned with pictures of a cancerous colon, and bacon sandwiches scoffed in the rain outside the doors of pubs.


Yes, this is pretty mad stuff, but some of us are old enough to remember the furore that erupted in 1965 when Harold Wilson appointed as his transport minister Barbara Castle. A woman who could not drive!

As if that were not bad enough, she went on to introduce the breathalyser and a permanent nationwide 70mph speed limit, challenging the age-old right of the Englishman to drive home from the pub at 100mph while completely plastered. A pretty theoretical right, it must be admitted, since in the late 1960s most British cars could only exceed 70mph very briefly, after being driven over a cliff.
But what, then, of Mr Cameron and the small matter of drugs, the Bullingdon Club, Piers Gaveston Society and that pig. Surely this must be unprecedented? Only, I suspect, in the willingness of the national media to write about such things, which would previously have been censored to avoid maiden aunts having to be revived with smelling salts at the breakfast table.

Upper class halfwits have been baying for broken glass at Oxford for as long as anyone can remember, and inventing arcane and vaguely disgusting initiation rites for their absurd societies. 


Regular readers of my columns will have grasped by now that I am no great fan of Mr Cameron; indeed, I have yet to meet anyone who is, and he is cordially detested by nearly all the journalists with whom he had dealings in his brief non-political sojourn as a corporate PR man.

Even so, I have to say I rather admire him for snubbing the billionaire who thought he could buy his way into office by financing the Conservative Party, and for the rhinoceros hide from which the current allegations appear to be bouncing off.

In short, no change, as they like to say on election night. We are blessed with a Prime Minister relatively few regard with enthusiasm until they contemplate the alternative of Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband. Will the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn change that?

Let us just say that I don’t think we will need the assembly of an Argentine invasion fleet to guarantee the general election of 2020 bearing more than a passing resemblance to that of 1983, in the admittedly unlikely event that Mr Corbyn is still around to contest it.

Mr Cameron, of course, has promised that he won’t be hanging around to contest it, either. But then Mr Cameron’s record on promises is probably worth a future column all of its own.

So let me end, as I began, with a quotation: “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.”

Wednesday 16 September 2015

So long, and thanks for all the fish

“Well, he had a good innings,” we mutter to the bereaved after the coffin has trundled away at the crematorium, or as we attempt to sustain polite small talk over the subsequent ham tea.

At any rate we say that of anyone who has made it past the age of … I guess around 85 these days, now that 80 is the new 60 and any death short of that is considered an untimely tragedy.

My thoughts precisely

I certainly had a good innings at The Journal: 469 columns over 9¾ years, missing only the odd week through illness. Albeit after a rather longer hiatus in mid-2006 when my then editor and I had a serious disagreement over whether Islamic terrorism was an appropriate subject for comedy. 

Holidays never stopped me – not even my honeymoon. And amazingly I am still married.

It all started a couple of years earlier, in October 2004, with a monthly column in the paper’s well-regarded business section. I persuaded the business editor to add me to his roster because I had recently moved back to the North East full time and felt I needed a hobby.

I also hoped to raise my local profile in the hope of winning some new clients for my alleged PR business. Even then there was no budget to pay me for my efforts, but I was content with that. I learned a new craft, different from the financial copywriting that had long been my mainstay, and I enjoyed it.

By the time I graduated to the main paper in February 2006 I had begun to harbour deluded hopes of earning a living from writing rather than PR, so I insisted on being paid a fee for my work. This was set at a token £50 per week and remained so until a couple of weeks ago, when I was advised that “Trinity Mirror’s new fee structure” would mean writing for nothing in future, or not writing at all.

I would have given sympathetic consideration to such a request from a not-for-profit organisation running a community newspaper. For a ruthlessly bottom line and bonus-focused plc like The Journal’s owner Trinity Mirror, whose chief executive Simon Fox is currently jogging along on a feeble £1.8 million per annum, I felt there could only be one answer.

A fat cat

It pains me to break with The Journal, which I have read for as long as I have been able to read at all. It was delivered every day to my childhood home, along with its sister papers the Evening Chronicle and Sunday Sun; and, rather eccentrically, the long defunct Daily Sketch.

It was a broadsheet in those days and much more of a national and international newspaper than it is today. Unusually, the Hann family was not watching television on the evening of Friday, November 22 1963, so the first my parents knew of the dramatic events in Dallas was when I woke them the next morning, clutching a copy of The Journal with the biggest banner headline I had ever seen, and asked, “Mummy, what does ‘assassinated’ mean?”

I had not encountered the word before, though as an intelligent nine-year-old I had already grasped that it was far from good news for that nice Mr Kennedy.

Today the front page splash would be something like “City mum vows to beat cancer” with a small box to the right: “US President killed: see page 5.”

The paper was still a broadsheet when I used it to announce the deaths of my parents in 1982 and 1992, and I’d always assumed that it would be where my own funeral arrangements would be publicised. But unless my cardiac disease gets its act together in the next few weeks I now feel pretty confident that the obsequies of The Journal will precede my own.

This is a crying shame but I have no answer. Every round of cost-cutting removes another few reasons to pick up the paper and there are now scarcely any left. I certainly shan’t be buying it again. But the underlying problem of an ageing and inevitably declining readership is not one that could be solved by throwing money at it, either.

Still, I certainly cannot complain. My second weekly column appeared on February 14 2006 and was unoriginally entitled “Be my Valentine”. It prompted an attractive young woman to e-mail me and initiate and intriguing if short-lived relationship.

That alone might be considered a pretty good return on 700 casually dashed off words, but a later column actually found me a wife, and led to the totally unexpected arrival of two intermittently delightful children.


Rarely in the entire history of global journalism can any writer have been better rewarded for his work. On top of this there have been the many kind words I have received from readers who have written, e-mailed or stopped me in the street to say that they have enjoyed something I have written.

I am grateful to absolutely everyone who has ever read my column, and particularly to Iain Laing for giving me my first opportunity and Brian Aitken for making it a weekly event.

Now I have got into the habit of writing a column every seven days I am going to find it very hard to stop, so this website is a godsend.

But for The Journal, I can only echo Douglas Adams’ dolphins. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Wednesday 9 September 2015

Refugees welcome?

There are many excellent reasons for not attempting a column on the refugee/migrant crisis in Europe and the Middle East.

For a start, my own wife was once a refugee from the Iran-Iraq war, and if I offend her I will surely end up cooking my own dinners for the foreseeable future.

Even if by some miracle I avoid upsetting her, I am sure to outrage someone. The left-leaning bodies from which I receive most of my news (the BBC and Twitter) assure me that there is a massive groundswell of public support for allowing many thousands more refugees into the UK.

A picture from The Independent

Yet while only the most notorious internet trolls would dare to suggest that a certain number of drowned children are an acceptable price to pay for ring-fencing our own home comforts, I suspect that there is a large and largely silent section of the populace regarding Mr Cameron’s latest PR-driven U-turn with deep suspicion.

The same sort of people who nod enthusiastically when they hear Jeremy Corbyn speaking, then quietly vote Tory in the privacy of the polling booth.

However, the most powerful reason of all for keeping shtoom is that I have absolutely no idea how this crisis can be resolved. Unfortunately, neither has any government, opposition or supra-national authority I have heard pontificating on the issue.

The best we seem able to come up with is dropping more bombs on an already bombed-out country. Because clearly we made a mistake two years ago when Parliament would not let us bomb the evil dictator Assad.

Kobane

Now it seems we mainly want to bomb the evil dictator’s opponents in ISIS, ignoring the ancient and Churchillian dictum that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, however repulsive we may find him.

Given that military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and (in a smaller way) Libya all seem to have made things worse rather than better for the bulk of their people, I cannot help wondering what useful lessons have been learned along the way.

There are two key emotions driving all human conduct: greed and fear. Politicians and commentators attempt to divide those currently on the move into refugees driven by fear, with whom we are meant to sympathise; and economic migrants driven by greed, who can be sent back whence they came without compunction.

Yet the distinction can never be so clear. It is evident that the preference for Greece over Turkey, Germany over Hungary and Britain over France, for those encamped at Calais, has nothing to do with fear of persecution if they stay put.

Calais

Family ties apart, the motivation can surely only be the hope of a materially better life in their country of choice.

It is also a plain fact that those on the move are far from the poorest of the poor.

Revolutions rarely occur when people are cruelly oppressed, but when the oppressor lifts their yoke. Similarly, mass migrations are not undertaken by those with no money, but by those with smartphones to see the better life available in the West, and enough cash to pay people smugglers to get them here.

I feel a bit queasy about part of the foreign aid budget being redirected from the poorest in the world to those with the pluck and push to get themselves into the UK. Though admittedly not as queasy as I would be if I did not suspect that a fair chunk of the aid budget simply flows into the Swiss bank accounts of assorted Third World tyrants.


I really am not unsympathetic to those fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea or any of the other failed and failing states that are currently fuelling mass migration. I dare say I would do the same in their shoes.

But all of us already here, whether of Celtic or Norman stock or first generation immigrants, must recognise that a free-for-all on our borders is not compatible with the continuance of a functioning welfare state.

Where we come down on that issue is a matter for our individual consciences, and I wish those hashtagging #refugeeswelcome and offering shelter in their own homes the very best of luck.

My own conscience is clear. I have done my bit. Reader, I married her.

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Wednesday 2 September 2015

Rejoice! School's back from summer!

Today is a true red letter day in the Hann household. Festal garments will be worn, jigs danced, barrels broached and bells rung.

Because where I live this is the first day of the autumn school term.

Newspapers are missing a trick. Girls jumping for joy about their A-levels could be matched by yummy mummies leaping outside primary schools on the first day of term.

I do feel a bit mean about my elation. I may be old, but I still remember the intense resentment I used to feel as a child about the constant bombardment of “back to school” advertisements, which seemed to begin the day after we broke up.

I don’t remember being a massive amount of trouble to my parents during the holidays. But then people were much more relaxed about leaving young children on their own in those days, despite the much greater number of dangers abounding in the average house, from open fires and floor level gas taps to dodgy wiring, mousetraps and mangles.

I grew up in a house built in 1939, but it still had a coal-fired range like this.

I remember that I read a lot, once I had mastered that skill, and was able to wander off and play with other kids in the street.

Sadly my children aren’t growing up in that sort of suburban community and, if they did just wander out of the front door as I used to do, they would stand a high chance of being mown down by a speeding car.

So, despite a panoply of entertainment I never even dreamt of at their age, from DVDs to iPads, they are bored. And, in the case of my elder, worried about the return to school and the move to a new class.

Throw in a slug of separation anxiety and a touch of paranoia about people being locked in rooms and unable to escape, and you have the perfect recipe for days spent “working at home” while keeping an eye on my son being transformed into a living hell.

Last summer we had relatively few problems. On the days when Mum and Dad were both working, the boy went happily enough either to an out-of-school club at his old nursery, or a rather wonderful project in the local forest.

There he climbed trees, made dens, and crafted catapults and peashooters like a child from an Arthur Ransome novel, returning home each night filthy, exhausted and elated.

The deep dark wood

But the organisers decided not to repeat it this summer because they had had a bellyful of Elfin Safety, the requirement for an OFSTED inspection and the plethora of rules we put in place in the name of child protection.

While the nursery out-of-school club holds no attractions because all of his old friends have moved on elsewhere.

The only good thing that has come out of my summer of occasional childcare is the realisation of how incredibly lucky I am in having an office to which I can escape. Never again will I sit behind my desk thinking, like a six year old, that I am bored. Or wishing, like a 60-odd year old, that I could retire.

Never happier

Retirement may present a fine vision of regular ocean cruises and beach holidays, sipping pina coladas as the tropical sun goes down. But the reality for most is eking out a meagre pension, worrying about their deteriorating health, and looking after the grandchildren who are dumped on them during the school holidays while their parents enjoy a quiet day at the office.

Or for that matter at the building site, coke works, scrapyard or glass bottle production line, all of which would offer more restful environments than my house did last week.

Years ago I knew a chief executive who was made redundant when his business was taken over. His wife did not read the business pages so he continued putting on his suit, leaving the house at the usual time and driving around until he felt able to go home.

At the time I thought he was barking mad. Now I realise that he most probably had young children, and I understand exactly where he was coming from.

I have taken a vow that by summer 2016 I will have identified a suitable holiday club for seven year olds, even if I have to found and fund it myself. Failing that I shall be seeking a quiet refuge for myself in a suitable old folks’ home.


Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.