David Beckham - Bob Hope For A New Generation

According to the BBC, David Beckham's torn left Achilles tendon has recovered sufficently for him to fly out yesterday from RAF Brize Norton to Afghanistan for a surprise visit to British troops, where he is "due to take part in a question and answer session".

The former England captain is quoted as saying:

"I have nothing but admiration for these young men and women and it makes me very proud to be British.

"I've wanted to visit Afghanistan for a long time and I hope that in some small way
it helps remind everyone at home what an amazing job they are doing out here in very difficult conditions. I feel very humble."

A reminder to everyone at home? This is, of course, the latest stunt in continuing efforts to shift the public's perception of the military, efforts that have by and large been extremely successful. The war in Afghanistan drags on, with little prospect of anything but an unhappy ending, yet a celebrity can still burble on that troops are undertaking "an amazing job" of propping up a corrupt warlord government and most people won't bat an eyelid.

Beckham reminds me of that old reactionary Bob Hope, touring Vietnam to 'boost the morale' of US troops, but at least Hope had the wit to joke, "the country is behind you 50 percent." All Golden Balls seems capable of is reading from a script provided by his army media handlers and happily posing with some guns, apparently oblivious to the fact that nearly three-quarters of the public view the conflict in Afghanistan as "unwinnable" and half don’t understand why Britain is still there.

So step forward David Beckham - no longer just a fading footballer and celebrity clothes-horse, but the patriotic, militaristic, propoganda-spinning Bob Hope for a new generation.

REVIEW: Disgusting Bliss - The Brass Eye of Chris Morris

This review appears in the next issue of Red Pepper, out at the beginning of June...

Chris Morris, the director of the recently released ‘suicide bomber comedy’ Four Lions, is a tough subject for a biography. Influential as a fearless satirist and respected for radio and television programmes including The Day Today, Blue Jam and Brass Eye, Morris has not performed as a stand up comedian, seldom gives interviews and unlike comic collaborators like Steve Coogan, has never become the subject of gossip or scandal. Indeed, he appears deliberately contemptuous of the idea of celebrity, not least in his willingness to ridicule the media’s pomposity and in inviting the press to explode in self-righteous outrage by pushing the limits of ‘acceptable’ taste.

This poses something of a problem for Lucian Randall in filling a book that has his subject’s blessing but not his cooperation. It is an achievement that Disgusting Bliss manages to draw out stories from fiercely loyal friends and to sort through the often improbable myths surrounding Morris’ career, but over 250 pages it often seems bogged down in the detail of radio and television production. But when a more detailed perspective of the power of the media would have been welcome – on the controversy surrounding the humiliation of celebrities and MPs by Morris’ Brass Eye series and especially the storm of protest about the now infamous special on paedophilia – Randall left me wanting to know more. When a comedy is condemned by government ministers in Parliament, it probably deserves more analysis and a far greater range of contributions than Randall has managed to muster.

Definitely a biography for the committed fan, then, and after reading it I went online and bought The Day Today and Brass Eye DVD box sets. Although some of the early sketches look a little dated, Brass Eye in particular is still brilliantly savage and the real-life absurdities of television news are, if anything, even closer to Morris’ mocking vision with the advent of 24 hour rolling coverage. The thing is, you can pick up both series for about the same cost as Disgusting Bliss and for my money, they say about as much – and as little – as Randall’s book reveals about Chris Morris as a writer and performer.

LAZY FRIDAY - Iron Sky: Space Nazis Attack!

Today's Friday lunchtime distraction is a trailer for the insane Finnish sci-fi comedy from Energia Productions, Iron Sky. It is due out next year.

Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity. From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right.

Now it’s 2018, the Nazi invasion is on its way and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom. Get ready to kick some Nazi arse!

Wenlock and Mandeville - The Designers Meeting

Bill Barol at Boing Boing isn't so sure about the Fast Company's theory - that the best Olympics have the worst mascots and therefore Mandeville and Wenlock inevitablty mean London 2012 will be "awesome". Then again, the Fast Company also call the London organisers the "owners of what may be the most widely panned logo in history".

Anyway, I thought the following from Adrian Chen at The Gawker, on how the designers might have come up with the idea for London's genetically mutated Teletubbies, is just brilliant:

5:38pm January 12th, 2010: T— Design Studio, London

DESIGNER ONE: OK, we need to design the mascots for the 2012 Olympics.

DESIGNER TWO: But I'm tired!

DESIGNER ONE: Here, we'll make it easy. We can just reuse the pattern for the walking penises we made for the London SEXpo.

DESIGNER TWO: Great! Should they have fingers? Or creepy stub-like claw things?

DESIGNER ONE: Stub-like claws. Fingers are really hard to do.

DESIGNER TWO: I think their trademark gesture should be the "sieg heil".

DESIGNER ONE: Definitely. They should walk around and just do the sieg heil everywhere.

DESIGNER TWO: I still can't believe that London chose a neo-Nazi design firm like us to make their Olympics mascot.

DESIGNER ONE: We've got some extra blue fabric. What should we do with it?

DESIGNER TWO: Well, one of the key principles of mascot design is to draw attention to the crotch. So let's put it there.

DESIGNER ONE: OK, all done. Let's go get drunk.

DESIGNER TWO: We're already drunk.

DESIGNER ONE: Oh, yeah.

Art Against the Wall

According to Amnesty International. "visit Bethlehem today and taxi drivers vie to take tourists on a 'Banksy tour'".

As well as stencilling and plastering the city's walls with brilliant artwork and Israel's illegal separation wall with vast murals, Banksy and 13 top international street artists have joined Palestinian artists to sell their art in Santa's Ghetto, a former fast-food restaurant in Manger Square in Bethlehem, raising over $1 million for local charities.

Some of their artwork is featured in an exhibition at Amnesty International's Human Rights Action Centre that runs from 2-11 June.

On Thursday 10 June at 7pm, the Centre also hosts the launch of William Parry's new book Against the Wall: The art of resistance in Palestine, with a panel discussion that includes the author and Peter Kennard, the photomontage artist known for the iconic images he created for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s and more recently for the Stop the War Coalition. Parry's book features prints from the exhibition and graffiti written by people from all over the world on Israel's Wall in the occupied West Bank.

Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, EC2A 3EA
The exhibition is open from 9.00am - 6.00pm, Monday to Friday, and entry is free.
More information here.

Abolish The Association of Chief Police Officers!

Just as the new coalition government that promised a bonfire of the quangos buries its disagreements by setting up a series of review commissions, I see that a think-tank, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), is instead calling for the establishment of yet another one.

RUSI Associate Fellow Margaret Gilmore, another senior BBC journalist firmly embedded in the security establishment and the ghost-writer for Andy Hayman's dreadful book The Terrorist Hunters, has written a paper suggesting that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) becomes “a non-departmental government body or agency, with new legislation to facilitate independent oversight.” Acknowledging the controversy over ACPO's status as a unaccountable private company that is “increasingly influential” and “the unofficial co-ordinator of forces”, Gillmore argues that it is nevertheless a “much needed part of the policing mechanism in the UK” that fulfils “a critical function”. All it needs, apparently, is “the strong, independent oversight of other organisations funded largely by the taxpayer.”

This is the most charitable view possible of ACPO's position. Another would see ACPO's very existence as an obstacle to democratic control of the police, with senior police officers willing to allow some public involvement at the fringes so long as they maintain control of the commanding heights.

ACPO has become a powerful lobby group, actively supporting controversial proposals such as the introduction of ID cards and the extension of pre-charge detention for terrorism suspects, lobbying backbench MPs and leading the way in attacks on the Independent Police Complaints Commission after the G20 protests. This isn't just my view or even an outlandish one - even the Tories have previously accused ACPO’s leaders of providing “political cover to the Labour Government repeatedly and consistently”, of engaging in “gratuitous photocalls” with Gordon Brown and other ministers and of “publicly and privately lobbied against a number of key Conservative issues, going far beyond its role”.

Bringing ACPO under the usual perfunctory 'oversight' would leave the fundamental power that it holds unchallenged. Even a fairly liberal position, certainly one more liberal than offered by Gillmore, would argue that there is no reason why most of ACPO's activities, paid for with our money, shouldn't be taken over by central government and become directly accountable to Parliament.

At least that would mean that its many nefarious bodies – the Criminal Records Office, the Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service, the National Community Tension Team, the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit, the Police National Information and Co-ordination Centre, the Confidential Intelligence Unit – would be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. At least government ministers would be forced to explain the true cost of searches for information from the Police National Computer or why £1.6 million needs to be spent on flats in central London.

I personally think that democratic control of the police requires a far more drastic and radical approach than piecemeal reform, but in the short-term, there is no justification for ACPO's continued existence in the heart of government. It's not as though officers of senior rank who want to a body to represent them don't already have a separate staff association.

A new government promising “the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great enfranchisement of the 19th century” could therefore do no worse than abolishing ACPO immediately.

Theresa May's Proposals Are A Return To The 1970s

I appreciate that the BBC television series Life on Mars has provided a certain unwarranted sentimentality about 1970s policing procedure. But the new Home Secretary Theresa May’s proposal to return to the police the power to decide, in a huge number of cases tried by magistrates, whether a suspect is charged is taking things way too far.

Yes, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) can be completely rubbish – not least when it comes to its repeated failure to bring prosecutions against serving police officers. But there were fundamental reasons why the police were themselves stripped of powers to make these decisions in the first place.

Before the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, which created the CPS, there had been considerable unease about the way that the police made decisions about prosecutions. During the 1970s, police forces around the country used different standards and not every force had its own independent prosecution department, although this had been the recommendation of the Royal Commission on the Police as far back as 1962. Moreover, too many weak cases were being brought to court, leading to a high number of acquittals. There were serious doubts that an individual officer who had investigated a case could ever be relied upon to make a fair decision whether to prosecute or not - and equally serious doubts about how their case evidence was often obtained.

The Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure under Sir Cyril Philips, whose report was published in 1981, had been established following wrongful convictions for the murder of Maxwell Confait in Catford in 1972. A prosecution should never have reached the courts, based on confessions by minors extracted through police violence, raised many of the concerns that the Commission went on to consider – the proper balance between the rights of suspects and need for justice. Sadly a similar case from the 1970s, that of Stephen Downing, took much longer to see justice served – it wasn’t until 2002, after he had served 27 years in prison, that Downing was finally released.

On the day that the Independent's political editor has used his paper's front page to laud Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg as the reincarnation of Lord Grey, with Clegg reassuring jittery Lib Dems by promising to end to "obsessive lawmaking [that] simply makes criminals out of ordinary people", one of Clegg's cabinet colleagues proposes a massive step backwards to the 1970s and a means of deciding on prosecutions that has demonstrably failed.

Now that, my friends, is sadly what coalition government is going to look like again and again over the coming months.

Shell's Hell - Party at the Pumps

On Saturday, campaigners from London Rising Tide, London Tar Sands Network and Climate Camp London gathered to shut down the Shell petrol station in Islington for 5 hours, in protest against Shell's involment in Canada's Tar Sands project. Further protests will focus on Shell's AGM tomorrow.

More information on 'dirty oil' at Tar Sands Watch

LAZY FRIDAY - Little Green Man

At the moment (12.30pm), I'm probably still unconscious and recovering from early morning surgery. But I love this, another Friday lunchtime distraction from Mark Fiore on the absurdity of oil dependence, so I thought I'd schedule it in advance:

Bank Bailout Protesters Storm Ireland's Parliament

More on protesters attempting to storm Leinster House in Dublin on Tuesday, in protest against bank bailouts.

Hat-tip: The Daily Bail