Leeds Festival Reviewed

I thought I'd divert from the usual political posts to bring you a review of Leeds Festival, held at Bramham Park - an event I attended over the Bank Holiday weekend. This year I seemed to take more 'stuff' than ever - a good thing in the sense that you're never hungry/thirsty/sober, but the obvious drawback being the extremely large amount of heavy lifting and carrying to be done. The weather was a significant plus-point - it being mild and dry for the majority of the Festival's time scale. I won't give reviews for every, or even most bands I saw - but I will for my top three. In no particular order these were: Blink-182, Weezer and Arcade Fire. Blink are there for the pure awesomeness of their music; Weezer for their brilliant set - the best of the weekend; and Arcade Fire for their technical excellence. Arcade Fire, in particular were a massive surprise for me. I've always been a bit of a fan but seeing them live made me realise how superb they actually are. The main arena was half empty when they were on due to Pendulum being scheduled at the same time on the NME stage so the experience felt quite personal, really. I was just hit by the pure majesty of their performance. On a side note, the BBC must be scolded for not showing ANY Leeds highlights, instead concentrating fully on the Reading Festival - hampered hugely by severe rains for most of the weekend. For events like The Libertines' reunion, that wouldn't have had the magic the second time at Reading, the BBC should have shown the Leeds version. Shame on you, BBC. All in all though, a brilliant weekend.

The REAL Source of the Deficit

Just a quick blog post to draw your attention to the 'Left Foot Forward' blog and its analysis of the real source of the UK's deficit. It proves the coalition's claim that the deficit arose because of consistent Labour over-spending is false - and uses the Treasury's own graph to do this. The conclusion the economist Michael Burke comes to, quite obviously, is that the deficit is a recession effect - attributable to plunging taxation receipts.

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/09/the-source-of-the-deficit/

Tax Avoider to Review Tax Spending.

The retail store mogul, Sir Philip Green has been asked by the Prime Minister to independently scrutinise all the past three years of government spending. He will conduct an external audit and report back to Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude and Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander. As well as being a well known entrepreneur, Green is also a well publicised tax avoider. His wife 'owns' Arcadia - the parent group of Topshop, BHS etc - and lives in the tax haven of Monaco. Asked on the Today Programme about his living situation, he claimed that his wife is "...not a tax exile. My family do not live in the United Kingdom". So it's okay to make billions from customers in the UK but not actually live in this country and pay your fair share - like all those millions of people who can't afford to decamp to Monaco have to do all their lives. It's been estimated that the Greens save themselves around £300 million a year by living out of reach of the Inland Revenue's grasp,Vince Cable, who quite rightly denounced the last Labour government for obtaining the advice of Green, stating that "having an adviser who is also a tax exile is completely incompatible and totally unacceptable" - has now strangely completely changed his mind on the issue and will stand idly by whilst Sir Philip uses his 'expertise' to go rifling through expenditure plans. It's incredibly hard to swallow the fact a man, so detached from the everyday lives of Britons, who doesn't even pay his own fair share to the tax coffers is now deciding how taxpayers' money is then spent!

Prezza for Treasurer.

Just a quick post to show my support for John Prescott in his aim to be Labour Treasurer. He wants to turn the Treasurer role into a role that really counts, not the non-job that it currently is.

John has four key aims that he believes the Labour Party should implement:

To proudly defend the record of the Labour Government
To promote Labour’s progressive policies
To actively encourage greater participation in the Labour Party
To hold the Lib-Con coalition effectively to account

Prescott and his 'battlebus' travelled 5000 miles during the election campaign, clearly showing we need his energy to remain in the day to day running of the party.

Beware the Irish Example

I've just come across a superb article by Johann Hari, which uses Ireland's example of wholesale spending cuts to predict the problems Britain may face as we tread the same path. The Irish have had a two year head start on the British, but at the time the cuts began their leaders used the familiar arguments that we've all become familiar with on this side of the Irish Sea. It was argued that when the economy withers, the Government needs to react like a responsible family and pay off debts by cutting spending. The Irish populace was scared with the usual threat that if the debt was not acted upon fast, the international bond market would charge Ireland more for its liabilities, and the debt would become intolerable. Then Shadow Chancellor, Gideon Osborne described Ireland to be a "shining example" to follow. I'm sick to death of repeating the same things all the time when discussing the cuts agenda being forced upon us, but here we go again. The majority of economists agree that during a recession the government must spend because ordinary consumers naturally spend less and save more; if government was to cut at the same time then nobody in the economy would be spending. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist explains: "If you introduce austerity measures, the amount you can raise in tax falls, and welfare payments go up - so you don't have enough money to pay your debts anyway". This has been shown perfectly in Ireland - austerity has killed their economy. Those bond markets that cuts were supposed to guard against are now turning on Ireland. South Korea is a shining example of the way to get out of a recession. It spent a fortune on employing people to green the country's infrastructure and has been rewarded by being one of the first to come out of this worldwide recession. The lessons of the past and even of our contemporaries are glossed over in favour of severe, ideologically minded cuts that will hinder our economy's recovery and make life that much more harder for the millions already scraping by.

The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century

I’ve just finished reading ‘The QI Book of the Dead’ – a very interesting read containing the life stories of some famous, some infamous and some forgotten dead people. One of the most intriguing people to be featured is Nikola Tesla – known primarily for inventing the Tesla coil, which gave us radio, X-ray tubes and fluorescent light. He was described as having almost ‘extraterrestrial’ gifts as he was so far ahead of his time that science has still not caught up with him. Like many of this planet’s geniuses he was an eccentric (if he had been born today he’d have been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum) and suffered from a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anyway, I’m featuring Tesla because he has largely been unfairly overlooked in the history of electrical development. He built the first alternating current (AC) motor when general consensus (and that of Thomas Edison) favoured direct current (DC) generators. Edison led a propaganda campaign that claimed AC to be dangerous, and bizarrely electrocuted animals in public to make his point. But the tide of public opinion turned to Tesla’s favour, shown by the fact that from 1893 80 per cent of all electrical devices bought in the US were AC. Up until 1905, Tesla was paid $2.50 for every horsepower of electricity sold by his industrialist backer, George Westinghouse. But when Westinghouse’s funds were almost wiped out by a stock-market crash, Tesla made one of the noblest gestures in modern business by foregoing any further royalties. He was not recognised as the inventor of radio (that honour went to Marconi, who won a Nobel prize thanks to it) until after his death in 1944, and one of his most technologically advanced inventions has been mostly forgotten about. In 1899 his piece de resistance was unveiled, it was a ‘magnifying transmitter’ able to send radio waves and electricity through the air over long distances – it could generate 4 million volts, and light 200 lamps without wires, from 25 miles away. His plan was to eventually unite telephone and telegraph systems in a single wireless network – he had in effect envisioned the World Wide Web a hundred years early. Alas, his backer, J.P. Morgan backed out of financing the scheme and his plans were dead in the water. Tesla’s selfless act in ripping up the contract with Westinghouse would lead to his eventual bankruptcy in 1914; he would live the rest of his life in hotel rooms being given money by friends. He came, like many of Earth’s most brilliant residents, to a sad end. But history must surely re-evaluate this man’s contribution to life and class him as one of the greatest to have existed.

Feminists vs the Coalition

Hilarious news today, it seems that the feminist group known as the 'Fawcett Society' is taking the government to court over their emergency budget, on the grounds that it discriminates against women. They are claiming that the government should have commissioned a gender equality survey, and then shown the results to MPs before the vote on the budget, thereby apparently showing them that voting in favour of the budget would result in women bearing the brunt of the coalition's proposed cuts. Now, personally, I find the whole situation rather amusing, as if the Fawcett Society win their case, the coalition will have been publicly humiliated and will undoubtedly lose a great deal of whatever authority they may have possessed beforehand.

Masochistic Mr. Clegg

The Deputy Prime Minister, despite describing early deep cuts as "economic masochism" during the general election campaign, has revealed that he had changed his mind on the issue as early as mid-March. First, he tells us that his opinion was changed abruptly by a phone call from Mervyn King (who denied he had given Clegg any new information on Britain's economic fortunes), now he states that it was Europe's "financial earthquake" that brought him round to the Conservatives' point of view. This is an admittance of a huge lie told to Liberal Democrat voters in the run-up to the election - many would not have voted for his party if he had told them of his conversion. In effect, Clegg stood on a platform that he secretly opposed. Baffling.

The duplicitous nature of Nick Clegg

What better way to start commenting on political matters, than to comment on the fact that Nick Clegg is a lying git. Not only has he abandoned whatever principles he may have had prior to the general election in order to gain a seat at the Cabinet table, he has also lied through his teeth about why he has done so. Today, yet another lie of his has surfaced. That of why he supported the quite frankly disastrous deficit-cutting measures outlined in Gideon Osborne's emergency budget. An article published in the Guardian claims that Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, did not tell Clegg over the telephone that the Tory plans to cut public spending at an increased rate (far quicker than considered safe by either Labour or the Lib-Dems), as Clegg has oft claimed since the budget. This just goes to show that Clegg will attempt to absolve himself of blame by any means necessary, even if it means completely fabricating the reasons for his u-turn.

Belgians still don't make the news.

That's right - the shady organisation sometimes known as the 'European Union' has plans to pour your loved ones' remains down the drain! Or so UKIP and sections of the press would have you believe. A stark example was an article in my local newspaper (owned by the Daily Mail's parent company) that was headed ‘Horror at EU Corpse Plan’. This scaremongering is typical whenever the EU is involved - however little - in a story. For one thing, there is no “EU corpse plan”, with the proposals not originating from the EU at all but from the Flemish Association of Undertakers as a greener alternative to cremation. As much as Mr. Godfrey Bloom (the area’s UKIP MEP who crops up to describe the process as “macabre" in the article) dislikes the proposals they did not originate with a European bureaucrat but a business association in Belgium, an individual EU member state. The European Commission’s only role is to judge whether the proposal is safe or not - it is not about to be forced upon any EU country. I am growing increasingly exasperated at the media's scaremongering - a simple Google search reveals this blatant UKIP propaganda to be pure Eurosceptic codswallop. Whether you agree with the proposals or not, it would actually be sensible as a nation and as a planet to discuss how we deal with the dead in an increasingly populated world. What we could do without is such lazy journalism stoking the reactionary fires.