Q: Are we not (Scots)Men? A: We are Devo (Max)

This Thursday I am to vote in a referendum that decides if Scotland becomes an independent country or not.  Patriotic sentiment has nothing to do with this as I did not live here until I was 26.

Oil changes everything doesn’t it?  A Scottish campaign to separate from the UK has run for decades, but the discovery of North Sea Oil did much to make it realistic.  It means a division into two countries of more or less equal wealth, unlike other independence campaigns within Europe.  France could easily lose Corsica behind the sofa and not even notice.  However, Spain would be economically doomed without the Basque Country and Catalonia.

It’s the European front where Scotland has its biggest gamble.  I’ve never voted for the Conservative Party in my life, but I’ll concede that they have always been better at handling the EU than Labour.  Not any more – the Conservative fear of losing votes to the UKIP will lead to a referendum that may withdraw the UK from the EU.  Scotland has the will to be stay in the EU if treated separately, but the Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy will do all he can to block Scotland’s membership, as he has his own interests to protect.  The UK only ever joined the EU because Charles de Gaulle died; maybe Scotland has a similar wait.

Seeing as EU students have free tuition at Scottish universities, as well as opportunities through the Erasmus+ programme, much of my livelihood depends on Scotland being in the European Union.  Being British is something I can dispense with, but European is a tougher link to break.

On Friday morning, what I want to hear from all political parties is what the next step actually is.  Because of the way the Better Together/No Thanks campaign has been run, nobody knows what a Scotland run by anyone other than the Scottish Nationalist Party or the Greens would look like.  I’ve already put Labour’s canvassers on the spot about this one – that their party could well be running Scotland in 2016; what are the policies?  Much of the Yes campaign has been based on social reform, but the SNP have no real ideas there.  Alex Salmond seems a media-capable leader but I’m amazed the likes of Nicola Sturgeon are trusted with as much as selling ice creams at the beach.  A Labour Party that is no longer scared of floating voters in marginal West Midlands seats may find the courage to propose a few things.  I won’t hold my breath; in Glasgow, the Labour party has been phoning it in for years.  The Liberal Democrats may have something planned already.  The Conservatives have nothing to lose by showing their hand.

I still can’t hear the term “Devo” without picturing grown men with synthesisers wearing overalls with inverted flowerpots as hats.  “Devo Max” – giving further devolved powers to Scotland – should be the result of a “No” vote.  I would then be very interested to see what happens in the north and west of England, which have just as much reason to be tired of London rule as Scotland or Wales have.  Independence may be beyond their reach, unless they want to frack for shale gas.  However, studies are growing ever more critical of the lack of autonomy for the English provinces, and even Michael Heseltine agrees that the over-centralisation of power in London is counter-productive.  I can speculate that Britain’s local government reform in the 1970s would have been better off being like the French one - creating regional assemblies along German or US lines rather than fooling around with county boundaries.

My final doubt, as tempted to vote for independence as I am, is the monarchy.  I don’t call it the “English royal family” as others do (it’s a line of German princes with some Scots aristocrats married in), but it is a mediaeval relic that any new, bold society would be better off without.  The fact that it is to be kept no matter what shows that the only thing that is radical about independence is independence itself.

Comment éviter les spoilers au cinéma sans mourir durant l'essai

La semaine passée, j'ai regardé le film "Deux jours, une nuit" avec un groupe d'amis. C'est un film sérieux mais pas ennuyeux, et je peux le recommander à tous. En plus, j'ai trouvé le film facile à comprendre sans faire trop d'attention aux sous-titres, ce qui est quelque chose de très rare pour moi avec le cinéma français moderne. (L'anglais est ma langue maternelle.)

Si vous l'avez déjà regardé, ou si vous n'en avez pas l'intention, continuez à lire mon texte. Sinon, arrêtez de lire ce que j'ai écrit ici ! L'ironie ici est, dans un article où je critique les spoilers, il faut vous en donner un !

La BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) est un organisme britannique pour la censure et la restriction du cinéma. Elle a approuvé ce film pour les majeurs et pour les adolescents de plus de quinze ans - un certificat "15" - mais sa mission est aussi de donner les raisons d'une telle certification.

Normalement, c'est le sexe, la violence, des mots gros.. Visible à tous, au début de ce film, il y a le certificat avec les mots "contient une tentative de suicide" ! Je suis d'avis qu'une telle divulgation ruine le droit du réalisateur à raconter une histoire à sa façon. En plus, on est adultes mais le système nous traite encore comme des enfants.

Faking History

The real sign of ageing isn't the grey hair or balding, it's knowing the difference between your past and what is presented as history.

I grew up with a pop culture that wilfully misremembered the 1950s and 1960s - the mere act of putting fashion, music, cinema and other things in boxes labelled by decades is clumsy to start with, but what they are filled with is clumsier still.  My parents were the first to point out that "the swinging sixties" barely existed - and they were the people dispensing the contraceptives.  My father-in-law rarely saw Teddy Boys in full glory as seen in a thousand cheap television documentaries because few people in his home town were paid enough to afford the complete outfit.  I have had a love-hate relationship with some of this stuff over the years; as much as driving away with Jane Merrow in an E-type Jaguar may appeal as a fantasy, it's always a pain to have a recent Golden Age mythologised when you are trying to make your own mark on the world.

Of course, I was never around when Patrick McGoohan filmed The Prisoner and The Beatles recorded Paperback Writer and Rain, too young to read J G Ballard's novels when they were first published.  Rather like the television panelist who was a self-declared expert on the 1960s but had never heard of The Seekers, I'm only on holiday in someone else's past.  Living there is out of the question.

Sooner or later, it was going to be my own past that would be distorted.  My last post mentions the first time that it was - reading Ronald Reagan's obituary and barely recognising the man it described - but politics will always come up with extreme examples.  Now we have the twentieth anniversary of Britpop, with all the magazine retrospectives and broadcasts that brings.  As a keen record-buyer and concert-goer of the time, much of what is being commemorated has me puzzled.

It was only ever a loose musical movement in its day and many of the acts I was listening to - The Lightning Seeds, Super Furry Animals, Stereolab, Dubstar - now seem to have been left out.  It's not as though they were obscure cult figures - they all had hit singles - but mid-1990s British pop music has been reduced to its muddiest and least adventurous by cultural policemen.

Now Britpop means Oasis, particularly if you skip their first few singles and start at "Live Forever", or Blur at their laziest and most arch.  Suede tried their best to avoid the Britpop label at the time; I don't know if this was a lucky escape, or if it would restore some balance if they were included.

There's an article on The Quietus that says much of what went wrong; it was too London-based, too retro, too ironic to make any serious points.  This is true of its worst acts, but I don't want a genuinely interesting few years of British pop culture - cinema, television and comics also had a good patch at same time - flushed down the toilet because of such tunnel vision, or the fact that the dullest runners won the race.

Ashes to ashes, rust to rust

It’s been a strange week of watching opinions fly back and forth since I turned the radio on over Monday lunchtime and noticed that everyone was talking about Margaret Thatcher in the past tense. After writing a couple of Facebook updates about the ex ex-prime minister, I felt that Facebook’s soundbite approach was no longer adequate. It’s just as well I don’t use Twitter.

Ken Livingstone repeated during the week the old notion that “history is written by the victors”. If the web has granted the world anything, it’s the fact that anyone free to use it, victor or vanquished, now has a voice, even if it is just to comment on funny cat pictures. No, I’m not going to lazily embed a YouTube link to “Tramp the Dirt Down” - one of Elvis Costello’s worst songs - or celebrate the death of an old woman from a stroke, I’m just going to give my side of the story.

Thatcherism is not dead. In fact, it isn’t even ill. Margaret Thatcher never lived long enough to see her beliefs discredited - the fact that she spent most of the last ten years needing to be told which day of the week it was meant that this was out of the question. Nor do I expect the likes of Norman Tebbit to suddenly shrug to the television cameras and ask “what was all that about, then?” The man’s belief in devil-take-the-hindmost market economics is unswerving, despite its consequences being all around us. He’d have made a bloody good pope.

But Tebbit is only the second-most misquoted Conservative minister of my lifetime. His “on your bike” (look up the full speech and you’ll find a somewhat different message) is only trumped by “no such thing as society” – again, one line taken out of context from an interview given by his boss to Woman’s Own magazine.

I grew up in 1970s and 1980s north-west England and now live in central-belt Scotland; both regions with that suffered under the decline of old industry and largely left out of the soft economies that have dubiously replaced it. All rhetoric, left-wing or right-wing, does well from having a bogeyman, and Margaret Thatcher was gift to her enemies in that. You can fairly blame her for many things in these places, but why not just go for it and blame her for everything?

I have sat next to old men in a shopping centre built on the site of a former steel forge saying that Thatcher closed the works down, when the factory in question barely survived the 1960s. I have been on trains crossing the River Clyde hearing Glaswegians telling their Canadian relatives that that section of the river used to be all shipyards until Thatcher did away with them – the more prosaic truth being that shipbuilding moved west years beforehand as the water in Glasgow city centre is too shallow and narrow for modern vessels.

My parents were both pharmacists who spent much of their careers dispensing tranquilisers to people in social dumping grounds before weaning them back off. The rioting in inner cities was logical; these places had been screwed for years, it’s just that the residents were now awake and alert to their surroundings in the short term. In the long term, heroin replaced Valium.

Many of the tributes have come from overseas. People who never saw the lop-sided treatment of the economy have eulogised some miracle worker who ended the cold war and apartheid. Both Gorbachev and de Klerk were astute enough to realise they’d inherited countries that were unsustainable. Painting Thatcher (and Reagan before her) as visionaries is ridiculous; they merely picked up the telephone. Let’s not let history exaggerate their importance just because big events happened on their watch.

Her true legacy is the continued delusion that we can all be successful in business, the castration of local government, the lie that free markets provide the solution to social issues, the demonisation of the poor rather than of poverty, the cockeyed faith in tertiary industry rather than maintaining a mixed economy. Her spirit is alive in “the bedroom tax”, which acknowledges the real-life problem of misallocated social housing but then financially penalises tenants as though they are responsible for someone else's administrative error. The Conservative Party, both then and now, can spot a social issue or under-performing public institution but will always blame the easiest target, or do away with the institution rather than repair it. It’s a good job Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron never qualified as vets; they’d have shot the horse every time.

Lastly, I’m not even going to blame her for all of that. Without public support she would have been a crank, even within her own party, or just somebody who helped invent cheap and nasty substitutes for ice cream. I’m going to blame the millions of people who voted for her, time after time, even though they knew that the success of her policies depended on writing off whole areas of the country.

We Don’t Need No Education (Slight Return)

My oldest child is in the second year of high school.  The new Scottish qualifications that replace Standard grades and Intermediates are National 4 and National 5, and my local high school now wants its pupils to choose the subjects that they will take to this level over the next two academic years.  As well as the four core subjects of English, Maths, PE and Religious Education, six others are chosen; one from each of the following groups:

SOCIAL SUBJECTS Geography; History; Modern Studies SCIENCE Biology; Chemistry; Physics CREATIVE & AESTHETIC Art; Music; Drama; PE Studies; PE Dance TECHNOLOGY Computing; Administration & IT; Accounting; Business Management; Graphic Communication; Design & Manufacture; Woodworking Skills; Food Technology; Textile Technology ELECTIVE 1 Spanish; Biology; Physics; Drama; Art; Food Technology; Computing; History ELECTIVE 2 French; German; Chemistry; PE Studies; Music; Administration & IT; Graphic Communication; Religious, Moral & Philosophical Studies

When I was thirteen, I would have chosen the same subjects as my mates did so I could hang around with them, or avoided subjects where I hated the teachers.  A couple of years can make all the difference between making decisions out of some sort of realism rather than just wanting to look cool.  But the way the subjects are laid out shows two big problems that the school system dumps onto everyone else.

First, despite all the evidence that this country’s workforce can’t sell a single thing overseas unless it’s to another English-speaker, all foreign languages have been sidelined in such a way that they can be avoided altogether by someone just looking for easy subjects.

The other is the redundancy of some of the more “modern” subjects.  Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies sounds like a big deal but any decent teaching of History will cover the ethics behind conflicts and political events.  Accounting is only really useful to people who have already proved their worth at maths, which most fourteen-year olds have yet to do.

I wonder if the exercise is more to make schools and their pass statistics look good than provide the universities, colleges and the job market with qualifications that would be of any use.

TV21

The first time I saw anything by Gerry Anderson was when Granada TV repeated Space 1999 and Thunderbirds during weekend lunchtimes in the early 1980s. I was growing up in one of those much-joked about homes where ITV was almost never watched; Gerry Anderson was one of the few exceptions.
I had heard about his illness with Alzheimer's a while back, and he died yesterday.

The great irony in Gerry Anderson's story is that he had no real desire to work in televison puppetry, yet he made his name there by being so good at it. When he came to making the live action series that he would have preferred, posterity hasn't been as kind. The obituaries I've so far read have dwelled on the puppet shows like Captain Scarlet and - inevitably - Thunderbirds, rather than what came afterwards. Although Space 1999 was designed by committee (and it shows), U.F.O. remains my favourite Anderson series.

He could be frustrating from time to time. I remember a few years ago when another company had the rights to Thunderbirds and based an awful cinema film on it. But rather than complain about how some of his best known characters had been made to look like spare pricks at a wedding, Gerry Anderson chose to complain that the cars were wrong.

Much British television - especially of the 1960s and 1970s - lacks visual flair, but the Anderson series do much to put that right. To hell with aerodynamics - for 50 minutes each week, Thunderbird 2 could actually fly, and I'll always be thankful for that.

"Asteroid" by Pete Moore

Dodging adverts on telly is childs’ play, and it has been fairly easy ever since video cassette recorders came in.  Every time someone asks me if I’ve seen the one with the meerkats, or the opera singer, or the gorilla playing Phil Collins’ drumkit, I can honestly answer “no”.  I’m of the belief that if I want something, I’d go out and buy it (budget permitting) – or, at least, that’s what I’ve convinced myself.

Of course, if you were brought up to think that ITV was a bit common then the job was already done for you by the BBC channels, and still is.

Radio’s even easier, especially since the mergers and takeovers in UK commercial radio have led to so many similar channels that I would never want to listen to anyway.  Capital (no prizes for guessing its comedy name) is a London station that is spreading itself over the Earth’s surface like a fungus from outer space.  Its rivals are much the same.

The one place where consumerism has me captive is at the pictures.  It’s rather tricky to blunder through a darkened cinema, looking for a free seat, when the adverts and trailers have nearly finished but the film has yet to start.  The timing isn’t easy either if in a multiplex, especially when my home town boasts Europe’s tallest cinema and I have to go up several floors from the box office to the screen.

I should have known we were in trouble when Pearl and Dean were sidelined from view.  It’s still a very important advertising carrier for many British cinemas, but in the 1970s, with a (Britpop-era) revival in the mid-1990s, it was a very visible presence on screen.

If you’re too young, or too foreign, or suffering from memory loss, this lot:

The jokes about the adverts they used to carry have gone way beyond observational comedy and into folklore.  The generic series of still photographs of people enjoying a meal that would lead to a clumsily inserted caption advertising a Chinese or Indian restaurant “just minutes from this cinema”.  The pornographic enjoyment of the sort of hotdogs that could only ever be bought in fairgrounds or, unsurprisingly, at the pictures during the interval.  (Yes, you read me correctly.  Films were often run with an INTERVAL.)

All this may sound daft, and like some logical extension of a Donald McGill seaside postcard, but it was pretty harmless and sufficiently clumsy and unconvincing to not really jar with the film itself.  Star Wars, or the latest Disney feature, was at a good arm’s length from it all.  And the Pearl and Dean brand itself was not obtrusive – the jingle above (all 18 seconds of it) was out of the way in a flash.

Now, regardless as to whichever film I see, I’m confronted with endless presence of these bastards:

So imagine the scene; I’m settling into my seat to watch some realist drama about a  Parisian child protection unit, or something, and two oversized sweeties come on to plug the latest Big Momma’s House sequel for what seems like an age.

They are like some CGI version of the Chuckle Brothers, there to shatter the illusion of any film that comes within their range (and it’s a very big range) and I really do wish they’d fuck off.

Strangely, I don’t mind the Orange film spoofs.  But despite the message behind them, people still don’t switch their bastard phones off.