Category: Rants & Campaigns

“I read the news today, oh boy”… and what continues to baffle me is how people seem to think there’s an instant solution to everything. There rarely is. The media fuel the idea that there is, career journalists love it, and they target specific topics and specific individuals to give the impression there’s a quick fix for everything. Many of them want to be seen to follow a public mood, a political agenda, or simply to create a legacy for themselves. They know full well that most people only read headlines, therefore cheap shots predominate: “Starmer must go”. “Amorim must go”. “Mandleson’s gone”, again. And the alternatives are?

There are many things I find distasteful about the way the current UK government is performing, but after a lifetime in international business I also know for certain that anything good takes at least two years to achieve. A government that has been in power for just over a year can’t possibly solve the myriad problems inherited from the previous 14 years of appalling Tory government. Labour call it “steadying the ship”, but while this particular ship is being steadied, it’s also being battered by multiple tsunamis, some self-inflicted. So I have empathy for the (still new) government, but little sympathy because their Press Office has been staggeringly incompetent.

And so to the football analogy. I saw some of the live posts for the most recent Manchester derby on BBC Sport. There’s a clamour for manager Ruben Amorim to be removed after less than a year in one of the most difficult, high profile jobs in world football. Had this kind of knee-jerk response been so prevalent between 1986 and 1991 Sir Alex Ferguson, the most decorated manager in football history, would himself have been history. We saw back then how the skills of older players on contracts were being utilised until they were moved on. We saw senior players being moved on unless they towed the line. We saw utility players brought in to help bring on youth players who would be the cornerstone of Ferguson’s strategy. Change takes time. People generally hate change. In that sense, there’s little difference between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’.

We seem to live in a world that constantly clamours for change at a time when change has rarely been so feared. Change has to be right, and with change must come patience, and a level of trust in strategy. So those clamouring for yet another football manager, yet another government or yet another leader, should note that the UK prime ministers who have brought the greatest stability in the last 50 years (love them or loathe them) were the destructive Thatcher (11 years) and the smooth talking Blair (10 years): Callaghan lasted 3 years from 1976; Major 7 years from 1990; Brown 3 years from 2007; Cameron 6 years from 2010; May had 3 stonewalling years from 2016; the miscreant Johnson 3 years from 2019; Truss wallowed in her 45 days in the limelight in 2022; Sunak had an unremarkable 2 years. Apart from Sunak and Truss, every Prime Minister since 1976 has been in power for at least three years (and by the way, every single one of them has had to bend to the will of the US, not least because their business conglomerates largely – directly and indirectly – control our own). This country has seen little evidence of stability in the last decade, so should we not be craving it?

The first question I used to ask each of my UK export clients was always “What’s your five year plan for international trade?” It was my bare minimum timeframe. Some fell off their chairs. Most just thought I was after a long term contract, but I didn’t want to work with businesses that had no vision, or no long term plan. Those who sat up and took notice went on to build solid foundations for their export business…and then some utter cock decided Brexit was a good idea! Brexit wrecked the international business reputation of the vast majority of companies in the UK. It stopped some companies exporting to our geographically closest market. It singularly wrecked the reputation of this country and put us in an appalling negotiating position from which it would seem there are finally a few green shoots of recovery. This, I’m afraid, is shit I know about. International business equals jobs. Brexit, apparently, was “taking back control”. Of what? For whose benefit? We all know the answer to that. New US investment in the UK announced in the last few days, means we are ever more dependent on the US, but being a US bridge to Europe is a better place to be than its sick man.

So for those who want “Starmer Out” or “Labour Out”, from whatever political persuasion you happen to be, this article is my ‘Six Penneth of Perspective’. Reform (as they are so incongruously called, with their open door to the Far Right) now have 5 MPs: no experience, a leaky vetting system, and appoint teenagers to lead councils. They have a leader who, if I were to ever be so deranged as to want to soil my hand by shaking his, would lead me instantly to count my fingers. The Tory party (119 MPs) is undergoing prolonged and embarrassing death throes, and have a leader who frankly would even make a bad head girl. Then we come to the opposition from the left of centre. The Liberal Democrats (72 MPs) have good principles, which is presumably why the media hate them so much and give them such a pitiful profile. The LibDems will never gather the momentum to assume power. The Green Party (4 MPs) have many laudable objectives, and an energetic new leader, but the media hate them even more than they hate the LibDems. Then we have the ‘radical left’ who seem to spend their time dividing left of centre politics, thus wrecking any chance of a sustained government of the left. The media really, really hate them! Ironically, they have policies I’d like to see as part of the mainstream Labour agenda, but I don’t trust extreme left wing politicians as far as I can throw them. I never have done. As with Brexit, you don’t change a club by leaving it. Change takes time, from within or without. Knee-jerk politics never works. Nor does Messiah politics.

Sadly, therefore, for all their faults, the current UK government needs at least those 3 years that have been afforded to most of the Prime Ministers since 1976. Starmer’s biggest problem is that he has singularly failed to get the media onside. It appalls me that the media are the key, but they are. Blair was the last Labour Prime Minister to get them onside, and yes, it meant he had to suck up to forces that are counter to true Labour principles, but it got him ten years. It also got us ten years of the most stable and successful economy of my long lifetime (but don’t even start me on Iraq), and just remember who his Chancellor was for the whole of those ten years. No government ever gets everything right, but that particular Labour government was doing something right before the entire global economy collapsed in 2008. That wasn’t within their control. We haven’t known true stability since.

Meanwhile, the bickering continues and ordinary people continue to suffer. Amorim will probably go before his time, and Kier Starmer before his. I severely doubt he’ll be afforded a second term. The alternatives are too awful to contemplate.

Peace

John

I’ve read a number of articles recently expressing concern that the world is drifting inexorably into a Third World War, and possibly a nuclear war. I’m sitting somewhere in between “they won’t be that stupid” and “they are actually mad enough”, but doom-mongering by a media clamour to be first really isn’t helping the situation.

Essentially, three old men in suits control the destiny of a world population numbering 8.2 billion people: one sits on the sidelines waiting for his opportunity while the other two sabre rattle and posture to ‘caress the mighty egos’. They genuinely don’t give a shit about anyone else. They are on the ultimate power trip.

Waiting in the wings are multiple tin pot national despots, poised to do equal damage to their own populations. We have one such here in the UK, yet astonishingly, voters from across the spectrum (just as they did with that tyrannical buffoon Johnson) seem to think a bloke who smiles a lot, pretends to drink whole pints in pubs, wears sharp suits, and talks shit with confidence, is the answer to all our country’s ills. He isn’t. He’s a charlatan: another old man with a similar sized ego to the three referred to above.

Now here’s the thing: you can actually make a difference to this situation. I’m sure few would disagree that political instability is one of the main causes of conflict across the world. So let’s move to become politically stable. Changing governments every time they disappoint you will never achieve that, so to a large extent we need to learn to trust those who are elected to represent us, at every level, and to hold them to account when they fall short. Democracy is about the people entrusting elected representatives to their jobs.

Our political system isn’t perfect. No political system ever is. But without a stable political system there is either anarchy or autocracy. Neither of those is a good path to tread. So if you truly want a settled world for your children, your grandchildren, and the many generations to follow, engage with your political leaders at every opportunity, and make those public servants serve their public.

Peace.

John

For the fourteen years from 2010 when Cameron became Prime Minister of the UK, we were subjected to multiple worse moments in history than even we endured under Thatcher, who bloody well started it all. As I write this, the current Labour administration has held power for less than a year, and while I’m unhappy with some of the things it’s being reported they are doing or about to do, and appalled at the incompetence of their Press Office, I also know that whatever they do will not come close to the destructive and inhuman policies of those last fourteen years.

As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and the nation seems both to have lost all perspective and developed acute memory loss. In 2010, there were just 62 food banks in the UK. There are now more than 3,000, together with 3,000 ‘warm banks’. We have walked away from our closest and biggest market, with Brexit doing irreparable damage to our economy, trashed even further by 45 maniacal days under Liz Truss, jobs for the boys Covid scandals during which a Prime Minister and his Chancellor were both fined for breaking rules the rest of us had to follow, four Chancellors in four months in 2022, clapping our NHS farther into the ruinous hands of private enterprise, and a new status of Billy-No-Mates in the international world. Wars on multiple fronts may be great for the newfound interest in having our own steel industry, but all that is actually shit for the one truly existential threat faced by our planet. Climate Change. I could go on, but really? Is that not enough to encourage us to give the new administration time? 

From my 35 years as an international business professional, traveller, trainer and tutor, I learned that good things take at least two years to achieve. In those terms, this Labour government is about half way there, and like everyone else I want to see more positive, well-managed policies that even our right wing media will have little choice but to swallow. One of Blair’s achievements, love him or loathe him, was to get the media onside early in his tenure. Starmer’s erstwhile failure to do the same could end up being his achilles heel. The media in this country is obsessed with Farage becoming the next Prime Minister. It is their self-fulfilling prophecy, and it is a real and present danger. Even Starmer has acknowledged, rather foolishly, that Reform is this government’s main Opposition. Gun. Foot. Bang!

The national broadcasting media, for which many of us pay an annual licence fee, have been falling over themselves for decades to appease right wing politicians, and gave way more air time to Reform in its UKIP infancy than they ever did to the LIbDems and the Green Party, both of whom were larger at that time. In order to pander to apparent fairness, BBC voxpops interviewed a Labour voter, a Tory voter, a UKIP voter, and if you were lucky a LibDem for almost every topic. Fairness my arse! The Green Party didn’t get a look in until the election of 2024. The biggest problem of all is that when people don’t believe the mainstream race-to-be-first media, they take comfort in the uncontrollable race-to-be-first of amateurs on social media platforms. The fascists have absolutely loved it. Misinformation, manipulation, and massive pork pies! 

I don’t want charismatic politicians. I don’t care that they look good, smile nicely, have an attractive partner, or were once on telly in a jungle eating cockroaches. I want politicians to do the job they’re elected to do, and to do it well. Although the jury may be out on the current Labour government, anyone who has lived more than five years on this overly expectant planet should also understand that new governments tend to get the bad news out of the way in the first half of their tenure so they can focus on bringing the electorate back onside in the second half, with warm and cuddly policies and promises they may neither be able respectively to bring to law or to keep. I hope they do. They may yet fail. But that, I’m afraid, is life.

Peace.

John

I was trimming a section of the extraordinarily long hedge that bounds our garden from Black Path, an alley that runs from our street up to a well-to-do area of housing called The Meadows. As I cut one end, it revealed “Niggers Out” written on our adjoining fence, probably written by some deluded teenage kid, but there are no excuses, and there is zero tolerance here for shit like that. The same vile expression has been seen in a few places around town in the few years we’ve lived here in Berwick upon Tweed.

It got me thinking. Why in a world so deeply interconnected has racism raised its ugly head once more? Back in my Blackpool teenage, one of my sisters would babysit for Carl and Craig, who were mixed race twins and she’d drop in with them from time to time before school. Her then husband had a Rasta friend called Lincoln, and he would also occasionally drop round. There was never any thought of difference, because Mum and Dad raised us to be nice to all human beings. It shaped my life.

In my student days, I would frequently attend anti racist events in Norwich and in London, with the largest and most inspiring being in Victoria Park, London in 1978. The punk movement had empowered teenagers just like me to resist the vile scourge of racism with the National Front and later the British National Party constantly promoting their warped and poisonous views. The media obsessed about it of course, and often portrayed it as something that happened in poorer neighbourhoods. That wasn’t the case then, and it isn’t the case now. My Mum and Dad had nine children and we all lived in a three bedroom semi-detached house, with my Dad having two jobs to keep the family afloat. Not exactly rolling in cash, but there wasn’t a racist bone in our bodies.

Through a series of happy accidents and a little determination on my part, I ended up with a 35 year working life in international trade, 20 of them running my own consultancy and 7 tutoring for the Institute of Export. I travelled widely and made friends across the world, but get this: the only place I had trouble getting paid, or getting my clients paid, was here in the UK. I’ve enjoyed hospitality in other countries that I’ve almost never seen in this country. This insular island can learn a huge amount from other cultures, but teenagers writing shit like that on a fence is another reminder that the poison of the far right is never far from the surface.

It would seem I will have to spend the rest of my days expending yet more energy on fighting a battle that should have been won decades ago. There is no place for racism around here, on or offline. There is no place for it in the world. Please join me in speaking out against racism wherever and whenever you can, and in making this world a more inclusive, safer and happier place to be.

Peace.

John

Whether it’s a Suez Crisis, a Cuban Missile Crisis, war on the Falklands, in the Balkans, Caucuses, Middle East, Far East, Africa or wherever, decent human beings have always found a way during my lifetime to say a big flat ‘No’, ‘Enough’ or ‘No More’. We are at one of those junctures right now, where lives are being wasted and abused around the world, and men in suits are wringing their oily hands with glee at the thought of the profits it will all bring.

In 1967, the ‘Summer of Love’ was by modern standards a small expression of how some young people wanted their world to be. It wasn’t a demonstration against anything much, so much as a statement by a relatively small group of people – an estimated 100,000 (but probably more) – in a small area of San Francisco. The Summer of Love gained international attention as a hippie event, but more widely has been seen as a turning point for youth, self-determination, and for the way people want to live, have a right to live, and ultimately for our relationship with our political leaders. 

The cause may not be the same, but this weekend’s impressive  protests across the USA and beyond mark a turning point in the way that good Americans relate to their political leaders, with the current President polluting the high office with his fascist agenda and fickle, disposable friends and followers. He is damaging our world for his own ends, and like all fascists, he’s using soundbites and other empty media gestures to garner the support of people who have the mental capacity to vote but not necessarily to think about the consequences of their vote. 

This President’s rise was borne as much out of the weakness of the Democratic Party as any kind of strength of his own. His own strength amounts to plain and simple bullying. The signals had been there since way before Sarah Palin opened her mouth with “I can see Russia from my house”. This is Imperialism borne of idiocy, super-Capitalism borne of a way of life that few normal people would ever experience: extreme wealth matched with limited connection to normal life, and worse still, the assumption of religious endorsement for their warped agendas. If there is indeed a God and he approves of these people and the vile things they’re perpetrating on our world, then he’s a shit, and the angels should be taking out their banners and demonstrating on the streets of ‘Heaven’ to remove him.

Good Americans voted for this President either because previous administrations had promised much and delivered nowhere near enough, or because they were taken in hook, line and sinker by the stage managed lies, spread by an increasingly subservient, right-wing media. Biden should have handed over to a younger leader swiftly after winning the right to lead the world. He was way too old and infirm to deal with the onslaught that the current gangster President and his henchmen were intent on delivering. By all accounts, it was a very narrow victory and that should have put Democrats immediately on their guard. Instead, they took their eye off the ball. I’m not actually sure they saw a ball at all, and they were certainly blind to what was coming. To many good Americans and people around the world, it was staring them in the face. The Democrats are culpable, and recognising that has to be the start of any fightback.

Hopefully, it will now have become more obvious to a larger majority of good Americans that the current regime (because ‘administration’ doesn’t feel like the right word) really does not have their best interests at heart. Following the playbook of your long time arch-enemy while upsetting and often deriding former friends, does seem to be a rocky road to ruin. So if ever there was a need for a political ‘Summer of Love’ around the world it’s here and now in 2025: the normal person’s Project ’25’ – because this current state of affairs cannot continue, and if you remain silent, you are part of the problem.

Peace.

John

I wonder how long it will take for people to understand that in order to improve society, each of us has to put in a bit of effort? Society will otherwise not improve itself.

Our elected representatives have a huge part to play in that, but we can’t expect that they will be able to make changes as quickly as we want them to (and as quickly as many of them would want to themselves). The core thing that people seem to miss is that elected representatives want to be re-elected, so the more we communicate and engage with them on key issues, the more they will know what key issues will give them the best chance of re-election. Most of them want to hold on to their empires. These are empires that are supposed to serve us. So make them, at every level.

Yet even locally, most of us sit on our arses. We blame the council for things that are the responsibility of central government and vice versa. We blame the bin men for not collecting the bins often enough when actually we waste far too much, and therefore persistently overfill them. We whinge about too much packaging, yet we seem to prefer overpackaged supermarket items. If we didn’t buy them, they wouldn’t restock. We think that plastic in the oceans is a dreadful scourge, when much of it is created by such packaging that won’t biodegrade in thousands of years. We whinge about online services that we continue to patronise. We blame dog shit on dogs, yet many of us own them and don’t take responsibility for their output… I could go on for pages, but hope by now I’ve made my key point.

For me, it feels like a fundamental of life to be a ‘responsible citizen’. Much that I hate the subservient connotation of the term, it does what it says on the tin. A society can’t work without some form of structure, and however imperfect we feel that structure may be, it just so happens that it’s the starting point for improvement. In theory, the higher the baseline, the better off we should all become. But it takes all of us to improve things for all, not just the few who can be arsed. It takes all of us to help those of us who don’t have the ability or opportunity, and all of us to call out those who can’t be arsed.

For my sins, I’ve always been a giver and will continue to give, but I’m weary of giving to the point that others now need to show they aren’t solely takers. I’m not being cryptic. It’s just a statement on the way I feel in a world that has descended into a spiral of extreme selfishness. I hope now to be proven wrong.

Peace.

John