A monument to Gordon Brown now failed and empty

It moved me more than I expected to hear that the Strathmore Hotel was closing.

Luton, where I now live, isn’t a town that’s particularly strong on prestige. The Strathmore, right in the centre of town, was probably about the closest we got to it.

Not that it was particularly good, or anything: it was housed in a multi-storey concrete slab and the one time I stayed there, my room could only be regarded as luxurious in contrast to a broom cupboard. It was also long on the threadbare, and a bit short on the clean.

The Strathmore.
No great shakes but about as close to prestige as Luton gets

But it was the place that I went to hear a star of the Labour Party speak, way back in 1994. 

John Smith, leader of the Party, had suddenly died a few months earlier. His death opened the way to a hard fought leadership contest. On the one hand stood the heavyweight Gordon Brown, who’d been close to John Smith. Indeed, as the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking on financial matters for the Opposition, he was second only to the leader in stature and his most obvious heir.

On the other hand stood a newcomer, brilliant and charismatic, but without Brown’s standing. Tony Blair, Shadow Home Secretary, had come up with a memorable slogan: ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ It promoted the belief that people weren’t necessarily born criminals, but often became criminals in response to the misery of their surroundings.

But Blair was a bit of an unknown quantity. What did he really represent? Was he just a bit of a crowd-pleaser? On the other hand, after 18 years in opposition, was that just what Labour needed?

Brown came to speak at the Strathmore Hotel in Luton during his leadership campaign. As a rank and file member of the Labour Party, I went to hear him. I was a little sceptical, seeing him as a man of the Party apparatus, a little soulless, over-ambitious, too cold and calculating for my liking.

At the meeting, though, he astounded me. He spoke with eloquence and feeling about the under-privileged, and he made a commitment that if Labour were elected under his leadership, he would make it his primary task to reduce or even eliminate child poverty in this country.

I left the meeting wholly won over. He had my vote. Blair was just a photogenic face and a soundbite. Brown was the real thing.

What happened a few weeks later? The mythology has been immortalised in Stephen Frears’ beautifully crafted TV film The Deal, starring the versatile Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. According to this version of events, broadly accepted as true, Brown and Blair made an agreement at the Granita restaurant in Islington, North London: Brown would stand down from the leadership campaign to give Blair a clear run. In return, Blair would make him Chancellor of the Exchequer if Labour won office at the forthcoming general election.

Blair may also have promised to resign from the top job some point in the future to let Brown have a go.

In May 1997, Blair formed his first government. Brown was Chancellor. But almost from the start, Brown was positioning himself to force Blair out so he could take over. The bad blood between number 10 Downing Street, residence of the Prime Minister, and number 11, residence of the Chancellor, became legendary.

It was one of the defining characteristics of the governments Blair led. And eventually, in 2007, after a little over ten years, Blair did stand down. Brown had a honeymoon bounce in the polls and could have gone to the country in the autumn, when he might have won. But he bottled out and went through to May 2010, when he was soundly beaten.

That deal in Islington set a time bomb ticking which eventually wrecked the Labour government and sank Brown. The story has many of the elements of Greek tragedy: a catastrophe set in train by its very victims, and which once started could not be halted – indeed was driven forward by their strivings.

And yet Brown, as Chancellor and Prime Minister, was a leading figure in administrations that took a million children out of poverty. He didn’t achieve his ambition of lifting them all, but he did far more than anyone else had for decades. His successors have been throwing kids right back into heart-wrenching misery: 300,000 in the first two years alone.

Blair, on the other hand, proved himself as tough on crime as any Tory Prime Minister, as indifferent to its causes.

What Brown did for poor children is monument enough to his achievement, and should compensate for much of the other bitterness. Each time I saw the Strathmore, I thought of it, and remembered the day I witnessed him pledging himself to that endeavour.

Now, though, the Strathmore itself has failed. The place where I listened to Brown and was won over stands empty and forlorn. Grandeur has evaporated.

Leaving only a sense of pathos at past hopes partly fulfilled.

Happiness? Not all it's cracked up to be.

The nine-year old and I stood looking at the Alpine Ridge ahead of us. The sun was beating down and we were drenched with sweat. The mountain rising above us - still rising above us – was serene and seemed contemptuous of our puny struggles.

‘That’s got to be the top, doesn’t it? There can’t be any more, can there?’ I asked him.

The nine-year old, the son of friends, nodded. ‘Got to be. This has got to be as high as it gets.’

But it wasn’t. We breasted the ridge only to find yet another beyond it.

When we’d started out on our epic, two and a half hours earlier, it was to get to the top of the hillside above us in order to look down on into the valley beyond onto one of Europe’s most majestic sights, its greatest glacier, the Aletschgletscher. We’d decided that the best way to get there was straight over the top. 

Sadly the ‘hill’ surmounted by a ridge ahead of us had only turned out to be a shoulder of the mountain, with another ridge beyond it, and another beyond that, for hour after hour of hard graft. We did eventually make it to the top but it took over three hours.

Still, the view was worth it. That broad strip of white stretching down between the dun and grey cliffs, with stretches of scrub and grass too, gleaming in the hot light. The glacier was an incongruous reminder of winter in a sun-drenched summer landscape.

The Aletsch glacier
Rock and stone, even grass. And then the ice

Actually, it looked rather refreshing.

‘Let’s go and cool off,’ I said.

Well, even getting downhill wasn’t as easy as it seemed. But eventually we stood on the glacier and felt the cold of the ice under our overheated shoe soles. And we stepped inside, into crevices filled with blue light, running our fingers over icy water coating the walls and making them smooth. It had all been worth it.

Then of course we had to get home. We took one look at the climb and another at the path, broad, smooth and well maintained by the amenable Swiss authorities. We went for it and were back at our chalet in 45 minutes, instead of four hours.

Why am I telling this story?

I keep seeing posts, on Facebook or Twitter, about happiness. It’s inside you, some people proclaim. Or you only have to reach out for it rather than turn your back on it, as others maintain. Or indeed, and I hear people say this regularly, I don’t care what she/he does, as long as he/she’s happy.

It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Everyone deserves happiness.

Except I’m not so sure. I mean, isn’t the value of happiness just a bit overstated?

Firstly, because it’s seldom unqualified. There’s usually some little fly in the ointment. The meal’s romantic enough, the candles are wonderful, you both look your very best, but it’s pissing down with rain outside. Forget the lakeside stroll.

Secondly, even if it’s pretty well sustained, isn’t happiness just a short step away from contentment? And isn’t that just what the sheep feel in their field, until the day they get loaded into the lorry for the slaughterhouse?

Now I know that in a sense that’s the fate of us all. But do I really want to spend the time up to the point the truck draws up in the farmyard grazing for a few decades, with no more to show for my passage through the world than a few piles of droppings?

It seems to me that this fixation with happiness ignores a whole lot of other emotions that are worth far more. Incomparably more. Elation. Achievement. Fulfilment. Satisfaction. Joy. Even pleasure.

You may say these are just aspects of happiness. I don’t agree. And the experience with the Aletschgletscher makes that point strongly, at least to me. Happy? I wasn’t happy. Why, I felt ashamed. I’d imposed a gruelling trial in a young lad who was in no state to take it – why he spent the next day in bed, exhausted, and though I didn’t, by evening I wished I had. He had nothing to reproach himself with, he was a child. But I was forty, for God’s sake. I should have known better than to take us over the mountain.

And physically too my state could hardly be called happy. My feet were killing me. I couldn’t remember the previous time I’d been that tired. And I was burned by the sun.

And yet – I felt real elation. We hadn’t walked round the mountain on the path, we’d taken it on. A frontal attack. And we’d won. And we’d had the glorious view from the top. Followed by the extraordinary sense of satisfaction that standing on, and inside, the glacier had given us.

Bought at the price of pain. Far more effort than either of us was used to. But far more satisfying than just standing in a field and grazing. A hell of a sight more interesting than mere happiness.

So why do we go on about happiness so much? Is it just because we’re so afraid of pain that we’d rather settle for second best? Rather than pay the price for something rather better?

It’s striking that, when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, what Thomas Jefferson considered an inalienable right wasn’t happiness. It was the pursuit of happiness. Maybe that’s the key: pursuing happiness is a lot more fun than achieving it.

As I discovered among those hellish ridges, all that time ago.

The year of the slave?

Slavery’s all the rage these days, it seems.

Twelve Years a Slave may not be the best film I’ve seen for a while. It’s a little short on moral nuance, for instance, the closest it gets to one being the Southern planter who shows some liking for the main character before selling him, supposedly for his own good, to a sadist. And some of the loving portrayal of whippings (with long shots of gaping welts on victims’ backs) will provide many a thrill to the sado-masochists out there.

Even so, in what it shows of the sheer inhumanity of slavery as an institution, it tells a gruesome tale effectively. It taught me little I didn’t already know about slavery, but by portraying it so vividly, it brought more palpably home what it must have been like to be a thinking, suffering human being and to know that one had no rights of any kind against the authority behind the suffering. 

A self-evident proposition that all men are created equal?

A scene when an overseer decides to carry out a whipping because he has some flimsy objection to the way the slave has undertaken a carpentry task, put me in mind of the scene in Schindler’s List in which a young Jewish architect is shot dead for the offence of pointing out that the SS is building a hut incorrectly.

The scale of the Holocaust was different, and a shooting a more extreme reaction than a whipping, but I was left feeling that indeed the American South’s ‘peculiar institution’ had a great deal in common with the mentality of the Nazis. Which is far from surprising: they had in common the belief that an entire class of humanity was sub-human.

Another lesson that I’d already learned but which was made more compelling by its depiction on screen, was that this behaviour occurred in a nation founded on the proposition that all men were created equal. Jefferson may not have had to force Sally Hemings into bed with him, but she was fifteen and by today’s standards, the actions of the author of the Declaration of Independence were just as culpable as those of the rapist in Twelve Years a Slave.

Just in case we in the old world, however, become too complacent about our supposed moral superiority over the US, next year will see the launching of Belle. It tells the story of a young slave who gained her freedom in Britain in the late eighteenth century. What will emerge is the complicity of the great slaving powers in the crimes shown in Twelve Years a Slave. Every time I visit Liverpool or Bristol, cities that I love, I remember that their past fortune was founded on slavery; Nantes is one of the most pleasant cities in France, one where the extreme right-wing National Front gets its lowest votes, but it too made its money from transporting Africans to the Americas.

So it may be that slavery is a theme that’s emerging more strongly into our consciousness than it has in recent years. Which is perhaps just as well, since it was only last November that we saw the release of two women from thirty years of slavery in London. And just the day before yesterday, a woman in Birmingham was charged with enslaving four men for a year.

Timely, those films. It seems we still haven’t finished exorcising the demon of slavery from our cultures.

Tooth and claw: the diary of Misty, mystery cat

All cat owners must ask themselves from time to time ‘what on Earth does the cat do on his own for so long?’

Our cat is Misty, a name I gave him because of his predominant colour. Or so I thought. I’ve since decided that if the name fits him, it’s because he mystifies me. So it’s with great pleasure that I can announce I've been able to penetrate that mystery a little.

I’ve long known that his English was excellent. You should have seen the way he stalked off into the night one time, when Danielle and I commented that he was getting a little fat. He didn’t show up for twelve hours or more, and then only to eat.

Mastering the language is pretty good going, you know, for a cat who was born in France and we took to live in Germany. Before shipping him to England.

What I didn’t realise was that he’d learned to write too. That’s what he’s been doing when he’s out there on his own – keeping a diary. And now I’ve found it. 

Don’t let him know, but here’s a first extract from it. 

Misty disguising his vocation as a writer

January 2014

Christmas went quite well. A full complement of domestic staff – not just the usual two, but also the two young ones who were around when I was a kitten. They don’t stay, though, they keep clearing off. What do they think? That I don’t mind? That it’s OK to behave like that?

Still, when they show up again, I just can’t help myself. The prospect of curling up on those laps just leaves me without the heart to show how irritated I am.

On the other hand, the freshness of reunion doesn’t last. A couple of days in and one of the young ones got very casual about stroking me. Watching TV or something. Absent-minded with his hand movements. I can’t abide that. So I bit him. Did he curse! That’ll teach him.

Things turned worse after Christmas. They all cleared off. Without even asking for my permission. Which I wouldn’t have granted anyway.

To be fair, they got the substitute in instead, and she’s OK. I’ve got her trained. She knows to open the front door when I ask, instead of sending me to the cat flap at the back. She lets me drink from the tap in the bathroom. And she checks that my food bowl’s kept full, without calling me fat.

What's to criticise?
A connoisseur likes his water fresh

New Year’s Eve was a wash out. A few loud noises and our dog, Janka, becomes a quivering wreck. A full firework display? She was like ‘is this Armageddon or what?’

I’m no fan of dogs. Quite honestly, once you’ve smelled one, you’ve smelled the lot. Some are too big and a tad intimidating, some are small and easily intimidated. Apart from that – well, I hate to sound racist but I just can’t tell them apart.

But our Janka’s different. Maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Terrified of any sound louder than a door slamming. And so yappy! On and on. Whenever anyone turns up, even if it’s the domestics coming home. Bark, bark, bark. Tiresome. The chief domestic tries to do something about it, sometimes even spraying her with water, and she tries to get her sidekick to work on it too, but he’s hopeless. Doesn’t like the noise, but won’t make the effort.

Well, like I said, Janka was terrified on New Year’s Eve. So I went and lay down with her. Least I could do, I felt. After all she’s been around all my life, pretty much. That makes a bit of a bond, really. I owed her, I reckoned.

But, blow me down, as soon as the help got up to leave the room, Janka jumped down and went trotting after her. Completely ignoring me. As though I didn’t count for anything.

Well, I got her back. Sat on the stairs at bed time and wouldn’t let her up. She had to wait till I went mousing. Showed her who’s boss and who’s not to diss.

The domestic staff came back a couple of days ago. I was generous. Didn’t take it out of them. Didn’t show them my resentment. Came and lay on their laps as usual.

But the sidekick’s no good. I’d been lying on him barely ten when he complained about the weight. Weight? Me? With the exercise I get? He should take a look at his own waist line.

Heavy? What's heavy about this?

Anyway, he pushed me off. After nearly a week away, he does that to me?

Still, I didn’t do anything at once. I like him to know that he’s in for a punishment before I administer it. I like him to stew a while. I got him next day. He reached out to stroke me when we were both on the sofa. Got him with as neat a claw stroke as anyone might wish, if I say so myself. right across the back of his hand.

That’ll teach him. He seems pretty well untrainable but, hey, I’m not going to stop trying. After all, getting a little practice with tooth and claw? Does you good. Feels good too. And some day it might get through

Eggs broken, but where's the omelette?

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

That’s a sentiment that’s repeatedly used, and for one purpose only: to justify damage to individuals to serve some more general and, supposedly, lofty goal. 

The present British government came to office determined to make omelettes, and it’s certainly broken a lot of eggs.

It’s aim was to wipe out the ‘structural’ budget deficit on public expenditure over its five year term. In effect, that would mean bringing public expenditure nearly into balance. Equally they were going to get public debt falling, because they regarded the high level of indebtedness as a disaster in itself as well as an indictment of the previous Labour government. Finally, with George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the lead, they set up an acid test of their performance, protection of Britain’s triple-A credit rating.

George Osborne:
great at breaking eggs, not so good on the omelette

To achieve those aims, they cracked a lot of eggs, principally among the working and non-working poor. Systems that made life possible on low incomes, such as tax credits or housing benefits, have been eliminated or scaled back. The disabled have been forced off benefits by being classified as fit for work, with large numbers of these fit people subsequently dying. 

They also introduced what’s come to be known as the Bedroom Tax. This measure means that people on housing benefit who have a spare room, lose a proportion of their benefit to pay for it. For many this has created a double-bind: unable to cover their rent and unable to find smaller accommodation into which they could move, they face eviction and being made homeless.

Charities dealing with homelessness report large increases in their workload.

At the same time, Britain has half a million people dependent on food banks, compared to 40,000 when the government was formed.

So much for the broken eggs.

What about the omelette? Growth is back but at an anaemic rate. The coveted triple-A credit rating has been lost. The deficit is dipping but is still far higher than it was under Labour before the crisis struck. Even the government admits that the target of eliminating the ‘structural’ element within a parliament has been irretrievably missed.

As for debt, far from starting to fall, it’s risen from around 70% at the end of the Labour government to nearly 100% under the present one. The Tories liked to attack the previous, Labour government for amassing an unacceptable level of debt and leaving it to the next generation to manage for us.

Far from wiping out that debt they’ve hugely increased it. And since they’ve taken youth unemployment to nearly 20%, the highest level for 17 years, they’ve made it significantly more difficult for the next generation to deal with it.

And what has George Osborne's reaction been to this track record?

He wants to take another £25 billion out of the benefit budget.

That’s going to plunge a lot more people into grinding poverty. It will break a lot more eggs. But will it produce a better omelette? Or will it just give the same results of the cuts we've seen so far, and make things a lot worse?

Would Labour make things better? Well, they did last time. They got many things wrong, but they spent a lot on improving the NHS and they took a million kids out of poverty. Under the present government, 300,000 have been driven back in, and the NHS is groaning at the seams.

Osborne has at least made the choice before us clear. On the one hand, Labour which made some limited progress in dealing with a series of fundamental problems. On the other hand, a Conservative Party which has failed to achieve its stated goals despite inflicting devastating cuts on the rest of us. And, with that enviable track record, they’re asking us to give them a chance to do a lot more of the same for another five years.

Does anyone really want to give them that opportunity? Or, putting it another way, if you’re contemplating voting Tory – are you sure you can really afford it?

The tussle for the tank top and success of socks

Sales time. Got to get out there and buy some new clothes at least. Particularly as so many of my pullovers are falling apart.

I favour the type we call tank tops. You know, the sleeveless kind. I like them because they keep your trunk warm but leave your arms free. They naturally attract a lot of comments of the ‘do sit down, grandpa’ or ‘where are your slippers?’

Keeps you warm but leaves your arms free.
What's not to like?

When I first started wearing this kind of clothing, about thirty years ago, such remarks just seemed laughable so I ignored them. Now that I actually am a grandfather, comments suggesting that I might be one seems no more than a statement of the self evident, so I still ignore them. 

Anyway, I get the message. They’re not terribly fashionable. But fashion’s just what everybody else wears, isn’t it, so why should that bother me?

As it happens, I don’t like just any old tank top. I’m never very keen on having wool too close to the skin. So I really like the Marks and Spencer pullovers which are cotton rich.

By the way, they call tank tops ‘slipovers’, which sounds like something unpleasant that might happen on an icy pavement, but I suppose is designed to avoid association with the granddad image.

I love the term ‘cotton rich’. It feels like a description of the Southern United States before the Civil War, doesn’t it? Cotton rich, cash poor and not strong on human rights. 

Come to think of it, the Civil War may not have changed things that much.

So I go to Marks for my pullovers. Though in fact I don’t physically go there, at least not initially. I go on-line and see what remarkable offers they have. I did that ten days ago and ordered three tank tops in different colours. I actually went there today, to collect them.

While I was there, I thought, what about some ordinary pullovers? The ones with sleeves? I mean, when it gets really cold, sleeves are probably useful.

There was a colour that particularly caught my fancy, a kind of rich burgundy. Go for it, I thought. And then I saw that it was available as a ‘slipover’ too. Too good an opportunity. I headed for the rack. But just before I got there, some character nicked – yes, I see it as simple theft – the last remaining medium. The remaining ones were all too big.

It was horribly exasperating, but what made it worse is the guy who had the medium kept wandering around the area where I was standing. Whenever he got close, he would hold it up as though to examine it again critically. Each time he made me think he was about to put it back on the rack; each time he walked away again with the pullover on his arm and a smile of self-satisfaction on his lips.

Flouting, I call it. With a bit of gloating thrown in for good measure.

But I rose above all that. I just bought the version with sleeves. Who cares if my arms are less free? I like the colour anyway.

And then I got home and took a look at the three slipovers I’d ordered on-line. A pleasant blue. A refreshing green. And - a striking burgundy. I’d already got one. The guy who nicked the last one in the shop had done me a favour. Otherwise I’d have ended up with two of the same.

There it is. In the middle. The red one. 
It's burgundy, really. You just can't tell from the photo

You can imagine I’d love to track down the flouter from the shop. I can’t but it doesn’t matter. Mentally I’m gloating just as much as he did. And that’s satisfaction enough.

Come to think of it, he was quite big. Who knows. The pullover he took might not even fit him. 

One can but hope.


Postscript. On top of what I like to think of as the triumph of the tank tops, I’m delighted to have scored a notable sockcess. My wife has finished making me my own winter socks, as already supplied to the rest of the family (I resisted because of my aversion to wool, but these ones are irresistible).

Hand-knitted socks
Now I'm set up for 2014

Time for the best witches

Had a great e-mail a couple of days ago, from a friend who had a generous, warm-hearted and much-appreciated New Year message for us. 

But the subject line was ‘Best witches for 2014’.

Now this is obviously just another case of the wonderful, mysterious workings of predictive text or auto-correction.

It created a problem for the woman who texted her boyfriend, ‘Screw the gym! I'm getting pregnant tonight!' He replied that they ought to discuss the matter first. She had to explain that her actual intention was to get some Pringles for the evening.

Pringles: may make you fat if taken instead of the gym,
but they don't usually lead to childbirth

Equally, the text message ‘I’m going to stay home and eat a slave’ didn’t refer to a return to one of the darkest periods of our history, abducting Africans from their homes to be transported in bondage to the Americas, and compounding the horror with cannibalism, but merely to a desire to stay home and have a salad.

Nor was it best to reply to text question ‘Do I look like a cow?’ with the answer ‘Moo’, especially if what was meant was ‘Noooooo’.

Still, it struck me that some good witches wouldn’t go at all amiss in 2014. After all, we’ve had plenty of bad ones in the past. Last year, Maggie Thatcher passed away and a humorous if slightly malicious group of her opponents set out to organise sufficient downloads of the song ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ from The Wizard of Oz, to make it to number one in the charts. And came damn close...

Not all the bad witches have been female. One thinks of Tony Blair, looking us all in they eye and telling us he was a fundamentally straight sort of guy, and then contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on the basis of false (if not falsified) intelligence. Or of Rupert Murdoch, casting his spells and weaving his webs of deceit, through control of more and more of the communications media.

So some of the best witches, or even just some better ones, would be most welcome in 2014. Perhaps Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg would be a good move. They’re a bit infuriating, wandering around sticking their noses into anything they choose without asking whether it’s even their business, but they’re always well-intentioned and the results are usually pretty good.

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg
Not always welcome but they generally do some

Our governments are just as infuriating when it comes to interfering in things where they’re not needed – such as gay relationships or abortion rights – and their intentions wouldn’t usually stand much scrutiny, while the results are generally mediocre to lousy.

Best witches for 2014? Yes, I’d be in favour. So let me pass on my friend’s best wishes, and hope you all enjoy the very best of witches in the the coming year.