The Iron Lady of Liverpool town

As public opinion will still be divided up and down the country today, we continue to live having lost a truly tenacious woman.

People will think of her from the contentious world of the 1980s. As a person she took on a broken system and reminded us that things needed to be changed for the better of the nation's well-being  A deep-rooted change was desperately needed because, as things stood, everything was pretty rotten.

She shook the English political classes from all walks of life in their boots.

As a woman, she was born in a typically brisk provincial English town, and she wasn't afraid to put the fear of God up a male-led world, as it was her legacy that grew stronger with worldwide praise and attention.

As a mother, she will be remembered when her son famously went missing. On our TV screens, in its aftermath, her passionate pleas were enough to make the hearts of the most iron-willed sing.

Her name? Who would dare forget? Her name was Anne Williams.

Today, Anne lost her battle against cancer at the age of 62. But that battle must have seemed inconsequential compared to the war that the English Establishment brought to her doorstep. The war began just before 4 p.m. on 15th April 1989 when her son, Kevin Williams, died at Hillsborough. According to WPC Debra Martin, who helped get Kevin away from the Leppings Lane stand, his last word on earth was "mum".

Anne, like the mothers who are made to send their boys to war, never got to hear him say it as she was at home in Liverpool. Anne, along with 95 other family members, didn't fully expect to lose her child to an organised football match in a developed country with a developed infrastructure of safety certificates and police protection.

But this was the late 1980s, and Britain wasn't a pretty place to live in. In the week leading up to Anne's passing, we've seen those memories dredged back up, reminding us of the deep-rooted bitterness forged by surface skimming Tory social policies. The people of Liverpool, and the supporters on its football terraces, were precise targets for the sharp suited, sharp elbowed Thatcherites, all of whom frantically ripped up the country with a Rottweiler's appetite. 

In a week where a great deal of blind faith has been dubiously invested in the misnomer that Thatcher did untold good for women, an analyse of Anne's life would cast great doubt on this assumption. True, Anne was  a mother to three children before Kevin's death - she was a housewife too - but she stepped out of this role for her family, because like anyone who is forced to fight, she did. And what she fought for was a deeply hidden truth at the heart of the world where Thatcher was adored. 

Anne Williams was 47 when her son, whom she had brought up for 15 years, was taken from her. She was 61 when the Hillsborough Independent Panel struck a tangible victory in the dogged fight against an intransigent series of authority enemies. Her life was a swing from the comforts of normality to the often purgatory madness of British political campaigning.

As the evening news rolls on tonight, Anne's story, and Anne's death, gets fewer mentions. And this, you'd think, reflects on our media's reporting of the truth. The more a person leads a valiant life - a life that looks outward toward their society instead of turning its back - the farewell on the television screen drifts out of view. The more venal, greedy and narrow-sighted legacy you leave, however, just screams and shrieks at you until you have no choice but to believe in nothing else. And for 23 years we believed in nothing else, until that one day in September last year when Anne and her fellow campaigners found out something very different. 

With hindsight, Britain will probably regret the tears some of its people shed last week and this. I didn't cry about Thatcher, because Thatcher didn't stir any compassionate feelings. I was one from the large, unrepresented number who the Daily Mail arrogantly flogged for showing dissent. With petty, greedy politicians like Thatcher, what went around came around. But with the death of Anne Williams, I did cry; I shed 96 tears to be exact, and all of them meant something real.

The last eight months of Anne's life got somewhere after years of wilderness. We expect an afterlife, and life certainly went after Anne. But for now, let's just think of her with Kevin, and her hearing him say "mum" for the rest of eternity.

The sullied goods of the grocer’s daughter

The obituaries were never going to be direct, only directed. 

Margaret Thatcher shrewdly corralled the British media: “Labour isn’t Working”, “Gotcha!”, “Up Yours, Delors” weren't instances of chance. An entire union movement wasn't tickled to death; it was strangled in its sleep. 

Democratic plurality in the Britain Thatcher gave us favours the successful first. Although we have heard the opinions of the Scottish, the northern Englander and the Catholic Irish, the voices of the elder statesmen, the businessmen and the homeowner have come first.

Like newspapers, TV news editors know that the audience often skim the body of the story and only follow the ledes. Those with idle concentration spans will be therefore left malnourished in their ideas about Thatcher and what she really did to this country.

Watching the obituaries roll in, you would think that you’ve stepped back into the 1980s again. The problem, however, is that twenty three years since her own cabinet sacked her, Britain has lost all sense of ideology thanks largely to the economic and cultural molestation Thatcherism – and New Labour -  performed as its one and only peccadillo.

What Thatcherism involved was enough to warrant a further autopsy - to roll back the frontiers of what we missed, or was not told in the first place. Like Reagan, Thatcher’s hands got dirty. Did the Belgrano really pose a military threat? If reported fully at the time, what damage would the Westland Affair have done to her reputation? And the Irish, the Scousers?  How close were they to being purged by the sheer propaganda heard in the words “terrorist” and “hooligan”? 

The library footage we have seen appears as a highly-charged episode of “I Love the 1980s”; all the ideological nutrients have been sucked from our memories during what was a terrible time for the many, not the few, under the Iron Lady grip. Instead, it’s become a television-shaped essence of history. 

Margaret Thatcher was the grocer’s daughter, whose only real wish was to sell us down the river.

In its reflection of the politics we had to suffer under her, the country is as it was in the 1980s: divided. 

The idiots' guide to parenting

Channel Four's sinkhole slot at 8 p.m. has not only gone full circle, it's become a garishly large lollipop that spirals into the middle. And it's given that lollipop to parents who can't control their children's sleeping routine.

Bedtime Live shares a similar format to last year's live "experiment" with drugs, taking what is nominally a closed-door activity and giving real parents sat at home the chance to remark with stifled mirth and scorn. 

It hopes to "put your kids to sleep", a claim as dubious as Channel Four's decision to commission this show for a five-week run.

The concept and delivery is crass. It uses candid cameras shooting in night vision (which brings backs memories of 1990s standards such as Noel's House Party and, perversely, Ghostwatch) to reveal, as what would be classed as its USP, parents struggling with the apparent rocket science of putting their children to bed. 

Its presenters include the standard issue "child psychologist" and - somewhat bizarrely - a man who normally stands trackside at Formula One races.

In its essence, Bedtime Live shares the traditions to the lost Raj of Channel Four reality television. Big Brother, for all the debate that surrounded it, was scintillating voyeurism. Now, it seems children are the contestants, along with the handpicked parents picked on by headphone-wearing, self-serve checkout characters, glibly letting generalities spill out of their mouths. When the parent has mastered the impossible, and put their child into a target-driven state of slumber, platitudes wrapped up in cliches are dished out like treats in a supermarket aisle. 

This format is not new to the London-based producers furiously scratching their heads around a whiteboard, in a world far removed from the subjects they wish to cheaply exploit.

In 2007, Channel Four aired Supernanny; a show dripping in so much Marmite it can still readily burn the inside of our gawping mouths. Jo Frost was the person who swept in from America to rush our children to the "naughty step", very much like how George Bush barracked quivering Iraqi men, women and children into accepting democracy from the end of the barrel of a gun. Frost didn't get to know our nation's young to justify this pitiful army camp drill, but parents, you sense, did it anyway. In the process she trampled on innocence, and left vulnerable parents confused at their kids' future ambivalence towards them. But, Frost presumably got enough media exposure to shift tie-in books.

Bedtime Live will, on a production and entertainment level alone, be panned. But again, from shows like this a peculiar smell lingers, very much like a soiled nappy. This, presumably, will be dealt with in the next show on Channel Four's roster: Nappy changing Live. 

Shame'll fix it for whom?

September and October have seen the UK jolted from a reverie whose mist appeared from what we considered to be a true version of facts. But, of course, fact is manufactured as much as a tabloid newspaper is on its printing press.

The Hillsborough Independent Panel report turned a public discourse inside out. Perhaps the largest fruits plucked from the Leveson Inquiry have had a heavy burden in the hands of those who thought themselves impenetrable. The police - guardians of our safety and justice - have seen another domino blow over in what now seems to be an inescapable collapse. The social institution breathing down its neck - the press industry - have shown us that what they are capable of writing isn't necessarily tomorrow's chip wrapper paper, but a stain that takes a generation for someone to come along and erase.

It is no coincidence that the same inquiry has helped cast its light on a very dark secret to prey on the collective minds of what was once a closed-door, cosy showbiz world. In that now dusty and decomposing world, public figures close to the nation's dear, old, unassuming heart have been shown to be close for a specific reason.

A year on from his death, Jimmy Savile was the proud million dollar medallion garishly swinging on the neck of the BBC. But when such an illustrious book is slammed shut by natural causes, a plume of unnatural dust is left with us long after the wake.

The details contained in the recent ITV documentary on Savile's insatiable acts of paedophilia aren't new: as we are now sickened to realise, the BBC's Newsnight programme was ready to run with this revolting story two month's after Savile's death. In not airing this piece, they failed in their remit to the nation that funds it, presumably for the reason that his legacy was still fresh in its creation.

We therefore have a lot to thank the careless phone hackers at the News of the World.

Worringly, however, we see the same institutions - the press and the police - crawl back into their seige mentality worlds. These are the same worlds that employed extra protection when truths were yet not ripe for discovery. A fresh IPCC inquiry here, an internal review there: it will take Aunties' special broom to clear up so much dust from the murky ground they themselves have exclusively created. They'd rather that we were looking the other way.

This is not too dissimilar to the role the Press Complaints Commission when it comes to issuing "corrections". The self-regulatory interests of the PCC comes from it being an interest lobby for print editors. Contrition is an inverse reaction to the brazen headlines they create in order to damage lives and reputations - often before the grief hasn't yet truly taken hold of the headline's victim.

Hillsborough is, of course, an indigestible textbook in itself. The mainstay of the UK's press didn't come out and completely rubbish the reputation of The Sun or its editor-in-grief, the right veneral Kelvin MacKenzie. Instead of "drinking at the last chance saloon", MacKenzie has instead sought more prosperous drinking holes at other media oulets. He also managed to throw about his usual chutzpah towards the still grief-stricken of Liverpool. Similarly, The Sun, apart from those rightfully mortified in Merseyside, rose and rose until it could scorch us no longer. 

We see now what so much sex and scandal can do to our constitutions as we have greedily torn through the tabloids during our Sunday breakfast and beyond. Firstly, what can sex do? Well, if you're a much-loved bastion of charitible organisations and light entertainment, you can take girls as young as twelve into your BBC dressing room; or into your "quirky" mobile home; or you can entrap them in failed schools because their lives haven't turned out the way Abigail's from Middlesex has. Or you can take them and then you can leave them, because they certainly won't have the stomach to want to appear same time, next week on the regular prime-time slot.

Secondly, what does a good scandal give you? Well, it can, in one silent swoop of a black claw, falsify the statements of police officers; it can engineer a show trial of a public inquest; it can, some would argue, unlawfully kill 41 once innocent lives; it can take at face value the word of one local Tory MP; it can tell you "The Truth".

Again, it is with thanks we give to the inept phone hackers at the News of the World. For it was their not telling its readers of these two exclusives, and instead going for the salacious and whispy stories that were to eventually destroy them, that we now have reached a satisfactory - albeit a grimly posthumous - paradoxical conclusion.

Riddled With Holes

The bandwagon keeps rolling into town.

Over a month since Madonna pinned up the soiled bed sheet of her dwindling pop career in Tel Aviv, another 1980s musician – of a more diametric persuasion to Madge – has done the same.

However this isn’t any old queen crooning to the house lights: this is Morrissey. This is the man who subverted the downtrodden into rallying against the monarchy, the government, meat-eaters, and cultural banality with a crashing ease.

He has of course flirted with disaster since The Smiths broke up. He courted controversy in The Smiths too, however it was done with a purpose as the period where they were at their most virile was a divisive one for the UK. Union Jacks have been draped, immigration has been mooted and the Chinese – a population in its millions – has been homogeneously singled out as being “subhuman”.

When you look at the semantics of what he has said and done then you can almost make out the subtleties of his argument. Some of the time you may find yourself in agreement. What isn’t agreeable is his almost dense flirtation with Zionism, seen in all of its technicolour dubiousness yesterday in Tel Aviv.

Morrissey, in a week where Netanyahu has found his raisons d'etre for a blood feud with Iran, has apparently had a whale of a time performing to whatwas probably an all-Israeli audience. He got the keys of the city; he also managed to convey some platitudes to the crowd in Hebrew.

Tel Aviv is a city far removed from the brutal, indiscriminate and intransigent environment of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Both in terms of distance and culture. Since al-Nakba in 1948, Tel Aviv has been constructed to represent a predominantly Zionist city. Its obvious transcendental appeal – lying so close to the Mediterranean – would appeal to such hopeless romantics such as Morrissey. With over ninety percent of the city’s population Jewish it shimmers for Israel’s tourist industry and how the Zionists would like Israel to be viewed by the tourists flying into Tel Aviv airport.

So, if this were the case, is Morrissey completely oblivious to the near-apartheid military regime the government inflicts on the Palestinians in the occupied territories? Instinctively you would think not, as his myopic eye for history, politics and society seep throughout the lyrics he writes. But these words are usually written about British history, where on the mainstream of British pop music, he has provided an alternative discourse.

My first guess as to why Morrissey has performed twice in Israel and courted their affections is due to his own parochialism. Earlier this year, another curmudgeonly and revered Mancunian legend, Mark E Smith, took his band to play in Israel. Again, this course of action was met with protest and shock at such a bonfire of alternative voice vanities. Is this place somewhere nice to play on your holidays, but leave your grasp of the geopolitical at the door?

At worst, could the reason for hot-stepping over the civil rights of Arabs and playing to a mostly white, westernised audience once again be due to his predilection for the controversial? In 2010 John Lydon somewhat cack-handedly spewed out this nonsense when he was justifying PiL’s presence in Tel Aviv:

“If Elvis fucking Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he’s suddenly got this compassion for Palestinians, then good on him. But I have absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, Muslim country, with a democracy, I won’t understand how anyone can have a problem with how they’re treated.”

Revered pop stars, who have earned respect because of the compassion they have shown, can fall easily into the Julie Burchill route of logic, whereby they can often implode their credibility by being occasionally venal and blinkered.

Firstly, what was repugnant about Lydon’s statement was that he attempted to justify democracy in Israel. The Knesset is in a majority of Jewish members; since Israel formed as a state they have denied political autonomy to the Palestinians; they have literally bulldozed territory that they have no legal right to; and checkpoints, walls and separate roads perpetuate a militarised existence that inflict caustic misery on everyday lives.

Lydon, like Morrissey, has Irish roots, and in the past they have expressed their distaste at oppression because undoubtedly they spiritually at least feel this oppression. Lydon’s heritage is based on immigration and diaspora, therefore what have displaced Palestinians been forced to do throughout the last sixty four years? That’s right, immigrate. Should there not be a blatant acceptance of solidarity here? 

Morrissey has never stated on record if he follows this Lydon pattern of thought. He is a complex individual, and would like you to be reminded of this way. But one of the first songs The Smiths wrote was “Suffer Little Children”. Does a man of such intelligence not see that children, often the ages of the ones killed by Hindley and Brady, are routinely taken by the IDF and tortured just for throwing stones? His entire body of work has highlighted the routine cruelties we face, be it physical or mental. The West Bank and Gaza are rife with this.

One of The Smith’s most potent songs was “The Queen Is Dead”. Morrissey is a staunch anti-monarchist. If he read his history books a little more clinically then he would have noted that, under the auspices of the King of England, the British army obliged themselves in Palestine between the end of WW1 and the end of WW2. It was the gradual collapse of allegiance that the British had with the native Palestinians – who owned the land for thousands of years prior to interference – that lead to al-Nakba and subsequent persecution in 1948. All in the name of Zionism.  

So with history bearing itself against him why has he built himself up to bring his reputation crashing down so cheaply? Was it the money? The glare off the Mediterranean? A further glistening of his ego?

When a voice that echoes meaning into your life wavers, you get pushed back into the hopelessness of the world. It is of course overly precious of a fan to expect a musician to yield to all your moralistic whims, but the Israeli-Palestine mess is a sacrosanct issue to flirt with. An outside observer has to pin their sails to a side and forever ingrain themselves to it, because one side idly promotes oppression and the other side is a victim to it.

Morrissey, to be worth any kind of salt, should have not boarded that plane to Tel Aviv. 

Jubileave It Out

An image struck me when I was watching an old documentary about Britain's failed "System-Built" housing scheme of the 1960s. It was the image of the Queen opening a particularly nasty set of Brutalist flats in Glasgow. That image, and its significance, really sums up this weekend's unquestioning tossing of itself to the royalist crocodiles.


Any monarch is a three second ripple in a sea of misery, exacerbated by royalist reference. Open some flats, put up a plaque, wave politely and smile gracefully. But once she's gone, with the whiff of privilege lingering in our trite nostrils, the decay starts to show. This is the problem of a society with a figurehead: it rips to shreds our own worth. 


And similar to the strive to build shoddy, inhabitable housing projects, we celebrate with wild abandon without looking for the consequences.


"Fuck you, Ma'am."

"Who Took The Bomb Out Of The Ramalaladingdong?"

In a world where Madonna takes her ammunition cache to a political situation already accustomed to its meaning, I examine pop music's fascination with political exploitation.

It seems that in pop music there is a symbiotic relationship between the star and its audience. Ever since the idea of marketing a hit-maker originated, the amorphous mass of gasping, grasping fan-consumers took their implacable place in society at large. For decades this seemed fair game. Times were innocent and the world was saccharine enough to accommodate the two.

However pop music and its audience shares the world with darker elements and it is when these collide then a third group enters the pop world illusion. That group is the political activist, a group hell-bent in pointing out the sometime idiotic tendencies pop wanders into.

Last week Madonna - pop's perennial scratch on the roof of the mouth - went to Tel Aviv to perform the first date on yet another world tour. The problem was she took some guns with her. A bigger problem was she was waving them about in a politically-burdened country that is both used to seeing guns in equal measure to being absolutely sick of the sight of them.

For performers like Madonna controversy is a luxury she is safe behind. From shopping for Third World children, to pornographic coffee table books, a throbbing PR campaign is maligned to pop's biggest rival: reality.

Most pop star's lives are an escape from reality. They try to sing their way out of it so that they take their place on a stage where hats travel alone in first class and wind is told to quieten down. (This is the entire point of the slew of talent shows on mainstream television.) Drugs often expedite this transformation, however other spurs are aggressive schedules and budgets, supply and demand and, of course, an encompassing global public image.

These misnomers were familiar to the band Queen, who, in the early 1980s, bit off the hand that offered them a lucrative tour date in South Africa. The country wasn't a particularly safe or savoury place to exist in at the time. Death squads roamed about with a very finite appetite for the black man's destruction. Queen were, to many at the time, apartheid's loyal pop servants. Worse still, they appeared unapologetic amidst the casual "pop is pop" attitude. 

The main problem when pop and politics clash is the apparent crass path the situation takes. It is unsurprising that such incidents occur when an artiste is on tour, as pop music is at heart the bumbling tourist that stumbles ungracefully into something it cannot and will not deal with properly. Even when the musician attempt to legitimise their presence in these situations they come across as someone who has quickly skimmed the country's tabloids on the way to the same-day stadium. 

On the whole pop-star-as-politician seems like a very soggy-bottomed concept. When politicians attempt "cool" they are derided out of town. Often they're the antithesis of cool and generally stay well away. So why do pop stars feel comfortable in doing the reverse?

A glaring example is Bob Geldof, a man who seized upon the multi-layered problems of Ethiopia and single-handedly offered himself a second career coming. Geldof admittedly generated both cash and attention to famine in Africa (ironically wiping out Queen's baleful attempts in the same continent and era). However, when we look back at the bluster of his denim jacketed approach to politics was the issue completely tackled? Again, we have to look at the core principles of pop music and how, in the cold light of stark reality, they don't fit the purpose. 

The Band Aid single and the Live Aid concerts were two monsters that needed to be packaged and delivered in order to capture a mood before it would be lost. Undoubtedly this is where Geldof got it right, as the image of solvent, middle class, Middle-England crying during The Cars' starving children video still lives with us. But they are only fragmentary - pop-sized like Elvis, Mop Tops or tartan flares. They take part in pop's reflective collage. What doesn't stay with us is the eternal drag politics has on our day to day lives. What was never trumpeted during 1985 was the politics behind the famine in Ethiopia. The Derg were not iconic in people's minds, nor was the issue of Ethiopia's rights to independence. Ethiopia's situation, like most in the African continent's, was largely complex and toxic to side sweep in the space of seven months. Geldof's involvement, in terms of a pop impact, therefore had the bitter legacy of any western crusade.

So is pop music another agent for spreading western ideals, like Christianity was in the pandemic of Empire? Pop is undoubtedly a strong force in corruptible influence - certainly more so than Christianity ever was. The reason for this is pop's all-inclusive secular appeal. When something is Godless then money and profit is the first born.

Without doubt Madonna has tapped the Israeli market as it is a burgeoning, if not controversial one. Bands who add the country to its touring roster are instinctively implored not to play. But they do without recourse, as rock cliches The Red Hot Chilli Peppers are prepared to do in their latest tour. Israel, I would imagine in the mind's eye of the pop star, offers something unique: a white population, with a West-friendly religion to legitimise it, amidst an unfriendly, foreign opposite. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire the West has had a Lawrence of Arabia complex towards the Middle East. Its charm is mysterious; however like most complexes it has that odious sense of superiority. Since Zionism sunk its claws into Palestine that same level of superiority exists daily.

Affluent, arrogant agents of postmodern pop do not help matters when they incite situations further. It is a grey area they try to colour with unnecessary irrelevance. One thing we should familiarise ourselves with pop stars is they're acting out fantasies on stage for two hours, of which they repeat the following night in cities or countries that are not politically unstable. Pop music can enthrall us at times; it packs a power of changing a mood or creating an entirely new one. What it cannot do is move implacable situations that even the people paid to sort them out struggle to do. This should be an idea that we could all move our hips to. 

My Lai (4) - 16th March 1968

Full credit is due to Yorkshire Television for producing this documentary in 1989, as it is the only one I have researched so far which shows the soldiers involved.

To clue you in if you're the uninitiated, the My Lai 4 massacre happened in March 1968. A platoon of relatively wet about the ears American GI's went into a hamlet in South Vietnam and murdered five hundred children, women and the elderly. At no point during the raid into this hamlet were they shot at by the Vietcong. 

It took until late 1969 for the story to be actually verified. The US army hid it, the press corp in Vietnam didn't print it. The chain of command that morning were all exonerated as doing their duty in the fog of war. Only one CO was put to trial - the man who got him off the charges later employed him in his helicopter company.

The lieutenant on the ground - William Calley - did stand trial however the politics at the time (an aggressive Nixonism) severely relaxed his punishment. Calley was later released and, as the documentary shows, went onto own a business in Georgia. He is still alive and enjoys those freedoms the American constitution likes to boast about. He murdered over a hundred woman and children first though, before he could exercise his rights.  

Historically, the only consolation out of this was the utter humiliation of the US army in this monstrously fought conflict. Crucially, the history of this massacre has and never will be taught to us in schools. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny when we're told who our heroes are.   

Why am I bothering writing about something that happened forty four years ago? I think it is because the message is clear that you cannot trust America and its power. It makes a mockery out of the Everyman. 

I constantly tussle with the idea of how I cannot cope any longer with US cultural and military hegemony. And how I want to shut this country out of my life forever. There seems to be no questioning of its consequences, let alone its intention to sully. 

The story of the My Lai massacre, with its horror of children dying under the protection of their mothers, of boys arms being blown off and then "put out of their misery", can put anyone on that path.

Four Hours In My Lai.

A Red Box Of Tricks

Despite looking like the put-upon younger brother to children television's Sad Sack, George Osborne has yet again used his faulty calculator to inflict more misery upon the shoulders of Britain's vulnerable today.

The cuts to pensioners' pay and people claiming Child Benefit have been incisive. Personal tax allowance has also been handpicked for extra cruelty. Oh, and lest we forget the NHS? 

Economic commentators have come out to denounce the cumbersome nature of Osborne's chicanery - stating that it outdoes Lawson's gilded scythe which was used with aplomb in the 1980s to set free the dirty rich of Britain.    

The incumbent Treasury are sure to be doing the rounds for the sake of their charm offensive (but certainly not for their guilt). Perhaps some amount of doublespeak will justify the challenges they are facing following the fuck up of the banking sector in 2008. In the May 2010 Election all parties were chasing a burst ball down an economically retarded path. Rather naively Nick Clegg - a career opportunist resplendent with heavily rehearsed hand gestures - saw a position of power rather than the principles his party loosely follow. Politically the UK is in a stalemate whilst the economy - trenchant since the freeing up of the markets thirty years ago - is the all out winner.  

All of this is, then, no surprise. It will continue to be unsurprising. 

Larry Elliott makes the point that the huge tax cuts for the rich in the '80s were serving the purpose of making Britain a holiday island for the world's elite. And it did yield a somewhat Ratner's-lite impression that everyone was independently wealthy enough to gorge themselves on the property boom and own a swanky car at the same time. It failed the decade after, however this is not the point. Lawson, and more importantly the Thatcher government underpinning the Treasury at the time, wanted a free market economy for Britain. The UK have had this and continue to have this now - and look at the mess it's left.

So what of this Budget? What modus operandi has it taken if there is not an ideological catch-all behind it? 

Osborne has taken a bruising, almost molester's approach to Britain's pensioners. In a bygone age when we could pride ourselves on having a community the pensioner was characterised as investing their lot in the building society. They'd worked hard, and like  anything that just wants to rest and rest peacefully, withdrawing a pension from trusted sources would be as natural as holidaying to Dorset once or twice a year. 

Robert Maxwell was the first grim sign in a post-Thatcher era that the businessman could do what he wants under the rules set out by the government. Even pension funds. In late 2007 the television screens were full of disturbing images of pensioners standing in line outside Northern Rock branches worrying what was happening to their investments. The building society garnered the most pity in that situation.

Bankers, businessmen and politicians have with ever greater vindictiveness hit the pensioners the hardest in the last twenty years. Politicians, in particular, are the most rank in their hypocrisy. Often they condemn a broken society, especially when elderly people are abused by yobs in their own home. However, are the politicians not more of a threat to the pensioner than an unhugged Hoodie? A burglar can enter a pensioner's home once, and take whatever is lying about. The politician can get unbridled access to the pensioner's bank account anytime. And do all of this whilst wearing a suit and a set of over prepared hand gestures. 

The reason behind it is simple. I would imagine that the operators in power see the elderly as the froth to be whisked away. They cannot fight back because they're not in the mindset to fight back. They have retired after all. Pensioners are not the go-getting, consumer behemoth that will instigate growth in an often deluded economy. On average a pensioner wouldn't spend great swathes of cash in supermarkets, or on holidays, or on cars, or on houses, or on Smartphones, or on computer games, or on televisions, or on all the trinkets that the Treasury wants you to purchase, so that the multi-nationals can see a point in investing in Britain.

Whatever your take on big companies pumping money into the British economy - an economy which was once doing the pumping in an era most pensioners' fathers and grandfathers can remember - a group within its society invariably has to suffer. And this is the point to it all. An average seventy five year old would have seen traditional industries flounder under the Tories (and Labour) in an era that gave way to American and Far East capitalism. The same seventy five year old would then have to suffer the cuts and robberies from a denationalised economy. The retired worker would then have to worry about what their banks were doing with their savings. 

It's as if the Tories, in a very public fit of vengeance, want to put them all in a home with no windows or fresh air. Osborne is a politician who would be the first to drive them there with a very assured smirk on his face. 

Heavy Military Machinery Is Hovering Overhead

Benjamin Netanjahu is, among other things, a great believer in the tradition of a leap year. 

Nearly four years ago he and his Likud government put it upon themselves to attack the Palestinian territories in Gaza in what was considered by the scarce media pack present a series of megalomaniacal bloody onslaughts. However this was on a people on the ground who literally swapped over the role of the Jews' David not for their own wont.

Events at their very real essence get filtered and distorted by the various satellite stations wanting to keep onside the lobby groups lurking in the director's gantry. It's very much how Chinese whispers start and never seem to end. So with every incident, intentional or otherwise, it's a race to win over the "perception agenda". 

Politically Netanjahu knows that this year is going to be crucial for his hell-mended desire to keep Israel afloat. Last year Palestinian political leaders and its peoples' good will went to the UN to apply for recognition within the international community. Strangely - and conspiratorially one would imagine - nothing has yet come to fruition for the Palestinians' democratic right for statehood. With this in mind Likud, perhaps having a hand in the fate of this move by the Palestinians, would have become masters again on the path of their role in the Middle East. 

However stranger things are happening and insurances are constantly being sought. 

Netanjahu, along with AIPAC, have been lobbying hard again for tougher sanctions and, reading in between the lines, an all-out war against Iran. Whether Mossad have been working overtime lately or not, Likud seem spooked at something. Perhaps Likud are concerned that, what with growing distance in the relationship between Netanjahu and Obama, this next year is crucial for them to get their deck sorted out whilst the cat's away. 

Netanjahu was in Washington last week meeting Obama. They exchanged terse language in what was an uneasy confrontation with the media. Netanjahu was on record saying how Israel is a strong country and should remain that way. Now this is tough talk that belies a deeper, hidden concern that he and his Zionist friends are really following, namely: would Washington abandon us and we would be left arms-less and set adrift?

This is the precise reason why Israel is increasingly striking their enemies when there is a US election year. Likud know that if Obama gets re-election then there is another four years of strained relations and international vilification - especially if Palestinian human rights continue to suffer. However if a GOP candidate gets elected then they can be rest assured that AIPAC will get to them before Netanjahu even boards a chartered jet at Jerusalem International Airport.

Will they want to chance their arms at such a gamble? Hardly. The Gaza onslaught three and a half years ago was when the furniture was being moved about in Washington. There will be military maneuvering this year - you can guarantee it because Israel flexes its muscle when the stronger are weak and when the weak remain the weakest.   

As I write this F-16 pilot fighters - sat in planes they bought from the West - are hovering over Gaza like the chill of yet another unnecessary dawn.

Rest In Peace Reamonn Gormley

On a couple of occasions on this blog I have commented on the end of murder trials and how they have reflected the wider society - and how the wider society have affected the cases themselves.

Similarly I want to do the same for the case of Reamonn Gormley. Reamonn died a year ago today at the hands of two polar opposites to him. It was at the hands of these two that he fell on a street in Blantyre, Scotland, cynically stabbed in his neck for his mobile phone and wallet. 

Daryn Maxwell (left) and Barry Smith

Quite often in life good people are taken away from us but in Reamonn's case he was taken away by two societal vacuums. Police mugshots instill many emotions in us: Hindley and Brady is was revulsion; Sutcliffe it was fear; Venables and Thompson it was complete bewilderment. In the faces of the two who were sentenced it is only complete anger. In Maxwell I see all the cliches in a human I wish to avoid, however in those dead, beady eyes, the depressing skinhead hair cut and the overweight stagger something is nagging. Smith is similar: the same GI haircut, the tight, mealy mouth, the dead beady eyes and the tattooed neck. They wouldn't look out of place fulfiling their "Call of Duty" fantasies in Afghanistan, wanting to wipe out any "raghead" who got in their greedy way.

Maxwell's life towards his sentencing and after is worth shit. You can point out the societal causes as to what made him snuff out a life so casually, but it is pointless. I sincerely hope that the prisons which the state has incarcerated these two pieces of shit allow larger stabs wounds to enter every possible important organ that were wasted on them. Better still would be the castration of glands deadened by the dirty carpet thrills of violent computer games and the unceasing diet of  Gregg's pasties. 

Reamonn was an active individual, and did things that helped out his wider society without seeking anything in return. He was loved for this. You can pour scorn on the reactionary tabloids when it comes to persecuting the criminal but with this case something is very different. Perhaps it was a societal murder, but I really do think that Reamonn was taken from the world by two evil and stupid people. I hope that they get theirs. 

We draw strength from people like you, Reamonn. Rest in peace. 

We Don't Need Stepping Stones When We Can Take Great Strides

In November 1977 two men produced an unpublished report called "Stepping Stones". The authors were of little experience politically; John Hoskyns  and Norman S Strauss carved out their careers prior to the report in business. The former with IBM and the latter with Unilever. 

The two men looked at Britain both socially and economically. They wanted to pare down and at best destroy the established order of organised workers and a stagnant UK economy. Their peers in the conservative establishment were fighting a battle they could not see ending. Hoskyns and Strauss saw how the bigger picture of repeated trade union victories were humiliating for Britain's standing in the world markets.  

The timing of their report was culturally perfect. They saw a vulnerability opening in front of them. The same year the film Star Wars depicted one lonely warrior destroying what was seen as a monolithic Empire with one shot from his lazer cannon. The authors got their own shot very much spot-on. 

They executed their ideas scientifically as they saw this process of elimination would lead to the greater success for the people who shared their ideas. 

'Such thinking and planning is perhaps better described simply as "systematic", rather than strategic. Any game...which involves competitors, goals and a choice of routes, each with associated risks, demands a strategy. The question is whether such strategies are developed haphazardly or systematically. The systematic approach requires considerable initial effort, a higher ratio of "thinking time" to "doing time", in the hope of getting the consistently....better performance which in the end separates winners from losers.'

To the hawks within the Tory right this document was the clearest objective they had yet to follow. Immediately it was foisted upon their leader, Margaret Roberts. She was two years before her election victory and here was the blueprint for a country coated in Tory blue. The majority of what was proposed in the report came true. North Sea oil was controlled; the steelworkers, dockers and miners as a community and force were emaciated; the Labour Party was riddled with in-fighting and chaos; the media was used to its full potential to push this agenda; the EU was shunned by xenophobia. 

The two authors were never taught on the national curriculum as far as I and my peers are aware. They may have reached the hearts and minds of those privileged in society and somewhat clinical enough to appreciate this work. Indeed it is frightening how such a force in one document can hold so much portence and rapture without seeing the light of day. 

Hoskyns and Strauss were, however, broaching a political system weighted towards the worker ever since the British worker got organised in the Victorian era. They wanted the scales tilted back to the entrepreneurial industrialist, and the corporate shareholder. British prime ministerial power has been an advocate of the Stepping Stones mantra since Roberts was shoved off her throne in 1990. It has reached the extent that the British Labour party betrayed their very foundations in 1994. In 1979 "Labour wasn't Working", according to the smart guys at Saatchi and Saatchi, however in 1994, under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, Labour was working...with the free market economic structure at the very heart of their Treasuries. 

However a Tower of Babel can come down, and coming down is what it is precisely doing now. At a chaotic pace the unions are now beginning to feel the sting of their demise. They are starting to protest. Once the veil of Labour dissolution cleared, the working classes are seeing their lives turn into the cathartic lives their elders experienced in the early 1980s under the Stepping Stone plan. The unemployed, an ever growing benefactor to the taking away of skilled labour, are bearing a brutal attack on their basic of needs. 

In 2008 the world economy suffered a blow-out that has psychologically turned the tables on the ethics of free market engineering. As a "turn around strategy" Stepping Stones stated:

"the more factual, cool and rational that debate (regarding the trade unions of Britain at that time), the more it will open the public's eyes to the unions' existing privileges and destructive role..."

The unions, it could be argued, were not out to make a profit. Their very existence was to protect and harness the welfare of the worker who worked for the men who had the largest houses on the hill overlooking the slums. They were criticised in Stepping Stones for asking for more wages, vilified for collecting together and "holding the country to ransom".Today, "existing privileges" are out of the workers' hands: they're in the hands of the very same people who bought into the idea of Stepping Stones. Banks are now criticised for being bailed out by the taxpayer. Global capitalists fly into the country at short notice when they want to sway a policy the government into their own advantage.  

The time for the zeitgeist to brook is imminent. What Hoskyns and Strauss could not have foreseen when they saw a world in which the working classes were cajoled was the invention of the world wide web. Communication in their time was a relic compared to the speediness of today's. (As you can see, they sent the report to Roberts in a badly typed form.) Normal people, who work in the jobs that keep them quiet and sedated have the tools to arm themselves. They can communicate, they can organise, they can criticise. Blogs are available for free and therefore opinion can be shared and our political representatives can be brought to book. It is tantalising to think how the world would have reacted in 1929, after the Wall Street crash, if everyone had access to an iphone or a PC. History may have taken a twist that could have perhaps averted the Second World War. However that is a different story. 

On the televisions in the 1970s, leading directly up to the Stepping Stones report, there  were talent shows dominating the airwaves. Music was peddling out often benile, pub sing-along tunes that said hardly anything to the people it reached. People were  on the streets protesting against issues that struck them personally. This could be today. 

With the adaptation of the Stepping Stones report to reflect principally and completely on the economic and political conflicts that we inherited out of Thatcherism, we can evaluate what the problems are when a large amount of capital is hoarded. We can evaluate the structure and power of the banks and corporations. We can disable them in the hope of getting the 'consistently....better performance which in the end separates winners from losers.'

To do this we need to take great strides over the stones. 

Win Yourself A Cheap Tray

There is sometimes a grotesque missed opportunity within the flurry of technological advancement. A freedom of choice which in leaps and bounds can help us immensely to those who do choose it. A revolution of the masses tap away at their gadgets, going to places that they can do at a graceful ease.

However where are they going? There comes a point where everyone is saying the same thing in internet subcultures but a point has clearly not been reached. A marker for society isn't put down. 

This stasis goes back to the aged problem of the zero point of the words that sound funny: homo sapiens. Undoubtedly when words became de rigueur and a bounce of bright sorts decided to get creative from this form of species we have been treated to works of pure, other worldly joy. 

But there is a puzzle involved. It hasn't been straightforward. Never has it. If everything were simple then we'd spin off the axis and end up in a better terrestrial stream. It seems that an acute puzzle affects the one precise point of creativity: lasting the course.  

It must be a matter of endurance. It must be a dispelling of pride, arrogance, exorbitance and all the other flowery adjectives. At worst boredom can castrate beauty. At its most obvious we're all massively in love with the idea that as you get older you get stale.  

An example that is both frustrating and glorious at the same time is The Smiths. I take this example as The Smiths sear into a cultural, and sometimes lazy conscience. It's understandable that a career which spanned five years brought out the best in a country bored to tears with the politics affecting their society. 

What bothers me about them is not Andy Rourke continuously chasing Mancunian drug hostels, or Mick Joyce getting his share of the band takings erratically wrong. Nor is it how Johnny Marr was overworked to the point of his quiff collapsing. It was only because they got slack and broke up.

Millions of relationships, not documented in grand poetry, do the same thing too many times. It's a continual hiccuping of missed chances. The failure of the adjudged unfailing. Like witnessing an accident when you don't expect to witness it a shock overtakes the soul and time takes a wicked paternity.  

I feel sorry and hateful for creativity at the exact same time. I don't have a laudable skill in it. By the power of every possible thought imaginable I wish the genuinely gifted ones realise that you may get bored, irritated, doleful, tired, angry, jealous, confused, victim, arrogant, drugged, undrugged, geographical, political, religious, naive....famous.      

We may take for granted that "we know so much about these things". 

In Racist Soil (In Memory of Stephen Lawrence)

London has today seen outside one of its law courts human bouts of stamina that does not need an Olympian fanfare or an expensive ticker tape parade as we shall see magnified later in 2012.

Doreen Neville stood on the steps of the high court to read out a speech that you felt didn’t have the pride of achievement an athlete would show on a podium. In fact it was a speech steeped in a pyrrhic melancholy that will greet the relatives of the Hillsborough relatives when justice is found after their day in court.


When Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death after immediately hearing the words of "Wot wot nigger" the leaders of Britain were dreaming of a world of "back to basics". It was a nation of quiet bowling greens for the post-Thatcher well-to-do village dwellers. But in the other land of that time there was the underclass struck in the motorway queues waiting upon answers from the Cones Hotline. There was recession not only in the economy but also in the feeling that, with every epoch of self-indulgence, there was a bigger recession culturally. The Cones Hotline didn't seem to actually exist; it was the Established institutions which maintained this situation. 

Stephen Lawrence wanted to become an architect, and with a family that was always supportive to him he would have seen this happen in his life. To him, the career in architecture would be just another life getting fulfilled. The problem was that Stephen stood at a bus shelter late at night in 1990s Britain.  

The five who were captured by the police on camera in 1994 acting out fantasies of racist abuse were and are of a typical breed. But they are not typical in the sense that they can easily be worked out as being white, working class thugs from Eltham in London. There is such a thing we see in our lives as cause and effect. In the pitch battles of wars in the middle ages there were two opposing lines of belligerents and that was it. The big bang. The rest was down to fate and its shaping of history.

David Norris would not know how to “set ‘em alight”, as he threatened towards an imaginary “load of niggers and pakis” in the surveillance video. He and his mates acted on a ten second impulse with a large knife, in the pitch darkness of a South London night in April. Lawrence was with a friend who thought he would be the next victim, but Duwayne Brooks needn’t have worried, as whoever struck the blows with the knife ran away. Ironically, the perpetrators were the scaredest.

The five – Gary Dobson, David Norris, Luke Knight and the Acourt brothers – are the victims of their own lack of self-esteem. It is obvious in the surveillance video. They are the epitome of the chuntering under your breath when you don’t really express what you want to say to someone – or some group – that you don’t like. One of the gang is seen acting out a stabbing with a knife. He is on his own in the room. It is an embarrassing and pathetic sight to watch as he could easily have been playing air guitar or scoring an imaginary goal. He is a boy playing out fantasies that have unfortunately in this case been poisoned by their fathers’ or peers’ prejudices.

And then there are the Metropolitan police who let the basic of crime detection skills slip away as easily it was for the five to do on that night. The role of the Met in their direction of ethnic communities versus the macho idiots who drag up their sons into their inept worldview always stay the same. It happened in the riots in the 1980s and also in the incidents in London last year. The Met is a riddled beast that cast pestilence among the minorities of London because they know that it only takes a special handshake to get away with it.

We are now left with three of the cowards, two of whom are brothers whose surname sounds like what they have to see before they die – a court. The three remaining culprits ran away that night into a freedom that they thought would be protected forever by Metropolitan police institutional racism. For Dobson and Norriss this luxury has lasted for eighteen years. Science can beat the stupidity of corruption, so Knight and the Acourt brothers need not be so complacent.

Andy Warhol famously said that every wannabe without the talent have their fifteen minutes of fame. However, when it comes to seeking justice in this country it takes over fifteen years to reach any level of success. The ones who are looking for the justice are the most talented and honest of people. So, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, take up your place on the podium.

Choking on Popcorn Just to Avoid The Ending

I have just given myself a headache within two hours flat. It wasn't for the want of screaming at white noise with sandpaper allowing itself to scrape the back of the neck that connects to the spinal column. 


It was because I watched The Dark Knight.


Batman returns, shows up, goes for a holiday, comes back again, fills out invoices for a firm in Chepstow that deal in double glazing and patio re-decoration. Often the more flimsy characters in these films ask "Who is he?" I only ask "What is the point of him?"


Christopher Nolan's second interpretation of this sodden Story (a capital S is used for its self-confessed biblical qualities) was all that the year 2008 could harp on about. The next installment is going to do the same next year, and probably early into the year after that. 


First of all, the bull in the room. Or indeed the bull in the room that committed hari-kari in an American hotel room in early 2008. In this film he did what the Hollywood machine wanted him to do - one big blast and then boom! He's gone. The written requiems thereafter were almost automated and the posters put on walls of him saying "Why so serious?" went up quicker than the production of Blu-Tac could have ever anticipated.


His first major scene, reminiscent of the one Jack Nicholson pulled out of the saddle on his one trick pony in the 1989 film, is one where he comes out of a restaurant kitchen. He murders someone gruesomely, he makes idle threats at some terribly one-dimensional gangster characters, and then returns back into the kitchen. I never knew that a ham could walk out of a kitchen by itself and then go straight back in there without being cooked in between.


Really, after that Ledger just gets absorbed into Nolan's nik-nak of a plot. (Ledger would have been surely happier absorbed in his own Hollywood plot.) Violence begats violence. And not in the Biff Bang Pow sense. More like the put-put-put of guns shattering the pain-glass windows of Chicago's skyscrapers. And inside those skyscrapers is the completely out of sync plot of Establishment good trying to get rid of Establishment bad, which as the film goes on starts to stink of the Joker's off ham acting. 


Aaron Eckhart was put in this film for the celluloid to accommodate his massive jaw and hair-straightened blonde hair. His character, his motive, his complete ineptitude for having a plan B were all equally astounding. The motivation point for him to turn into Two-Face was as flimsy as the Joker pointlessly blowing up a hospital at the expense of a budget that could give medical aid to a real hospital.


The human sideways glance that is Maggie Gyllenhaal was put in because I assume someone had to best Nicole Kidman for awful Batman love interests. (By the way, do bats have sex with piss-poor Hollywood actors, normally?) Gyllenhaal has played a similar part in movies before. In the Oliver Stone let-down "World Trade Centre" her role was ranked number 20 behind another list of characters (where in that instance Mohammed Atta was number one). In this little number though she flitted about the sewn up scenes aiding nobody in particular in the search for the plan B.


A scourge of the modern remakes of the Batman franchise was the Batman himself. Christian Bales into significance in this massive mistake of a set-piece. He is lost inexorably in plot holes that are too frequent to mention (for instance, after he saves Gyllenhaal from having a death cab for cutie, why does he not go back up into his own property and dispense of The Ham?) In fact when he turns up as Bruce Wayne he seems like the oily cunt persona he played in American Psycho. Worse still, in the linear catastrophe of what is the final cut of this movie he seems utterly superfluous to the many enemies that wax and wane this story. Oh, and his Batmobile has fat tyres. 


There were honestly only about three scenes in this film full of MANY that caught my attention. I am not a person with slow learning difficulties. The promotional people at Time Warner are neither. But they've made your admittance fee, the Blu-Ray DVD fee, and the enduring, sagging memories of actors who heroically and quite possibly sado-masochistically died in the making of this film seem like a comic book. 

"How To Behave And Why" By Munro Leaf

This is a complete retelling of the children's book "How To Behave and Why" by the author Munro Leaf:

"This is really a book about how to have the most fun in living, and it doesn't matter whether you are a boy or a girl, a man or a woman - the rules are all the same.

How old we are isn't what counts. The two biggest questions to ask ourselves in life, at any age, are: Are most of the people I know glad that I am here. 

Am I glad that I am here, myself?

Anyone who can honestly answer YES to those two questions most of the time has learned to BEHAVE in this world and to live a happy life.

It doesn't matter whether you are a Chinese grandfather, and Eskimo mother or an American boy or girl going to school -

You still have to get along well with other people and have most of them like you, if you want to be happy.

Ever since the days when men stopped living in caves, the good and decent people of the world have found out that there are certain ways we all have to behave if we want to live together pleasantly. 

The good ways, or the good rules for behaving, have lasted a long time - so they must have something.

 No matter where you are or who you are, there are four main things that you have to do if you want to make good friends and keep them.

You have to be HONEST


You have to be FAIR 


You have to be STRONG


and


You have to be WISE....

HONEST people tell the truth.

Other people know that when they say something is so, they can believe it. Now that is very handy, because if you are honest and promise to do something, others will trust you.

They will share things with you, tell you secrets, lend you money, and help you do many of the things you want to do - because they know that what you promise and what you say is true. They can count on it.

Only a dope will tell a lie. 

Some people think they can be smart and fool others when they tell a lie - but sooner or later the truth usually is found out and then the liar is sorry because he knows he won't be trusted or believed the next time.

Nobody knows what to do with a person who doesn't tell the truth.

 How can you believe a word they say? Even if they do tell the truth part of the time, how can you know which times they mean it and which times they don't?

 No - we can't say that just one little lie doesn't count. It counts every time and people can't really know us and like us unless they can believe what we say.

You have to be FAIR

Friendly people find it easy to be FAIR. Being friendly and being fair both come from believing that other people have just as much right to be alive and happy as we have. 

The man or woman or boy or girl who goes around gloomy, with a sour face and is afraid that everybody else is going to make him or her unhappy has a very hard time making friends. 

There are a lot of nice people everywhere and the sooner we meet each other in a friendly way and get to know each other, the better the world will be for all of us.

Our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers make wonderful friends, if we treat them fairly and do our share to make home a happy place for everyone there.

Remember that the secret of fairness is sharing. Selfish people who won't share with others find themselves left alone and unhappy no matter what they own that could be fun. 

We know now what it means to be FAIR, and we will learn all through life that the friendly person is a happy person most of the time.

You have to be STRONG.

Real strength comes from having a clean, healthy mind and a clean healthy body.

Think it out for yourself. All the power of sixty gorillas won't do you any good if you use it stupidly, and if you don't stay healthy you might as well be a run down mouse.

 Any brave man or woman can tell you that having a clean healthy mind comes from taking the time to think what is right and then doing it no matter how scared you are or when it would be easier to do wrong or even if somebody else tries to talk you into it.

Regular habits are the answer to the question: How can we grow from a weak baby to a strong and healthy man or woman? Eating the right food when we should, keeping clean, playing and exercising, sitting and standing right and getting the right amount of sleep and rest are HOW TO GROW WELL AND STRONG.  

Grown ups aren't some kind of weird monsters that have fun making us do things we don't want to do. They just know a whole lot more than we do because they have been here longer. Listen to what they tell you and you will be surprised how right they usually are.

If we are HONEST, and FAIR, and STRONG we won't find it hard to be wise.

We get along with people and we make good friends when we have polite manners like:

Shaking hands when we meet

Smiling and saying "good morning" or "good afternoon"

Waiting for other people to finish talking before we start 

Helping very old and very young people as much as we can, and being quiet and gentle when we are with them

'I can't be right no matter who I am' is a good thing for all of us to remember. 

Other people have ideas and thoughts - ways to do things, ways to work, ways to play, ways they think of God and their country and their race. Their way can be just as right as your way. Remember that, and be glad you have a chance to choose the best of all ways.

If you have learned to be 

HONESTFAIRSTRONGWISE

then you have learned HOW TO BEHAVE AND WHY"