Before tonight's broadcast, after the awful events in Manchester

Tonight, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn will be interviewed separately by Jeremy Paxman on Sky News and Channel 4. The interviews will take place in front of a live studio audience and the party leaders will take questions.

Will tonight be the real turning point, one way or another, in this sorry excuse for an election campaign?

During the TV debate before last year's EU referendum, the turning point was Boris Johnson's barn-storming pro-Brexit speech. It was reckless, it was dishonest, and he probably didn't believe half of what he was saying, but it worked. When the massive cheer went up at the end of his disingenuous word salad, when he yelled: "INDEPENDENCE DAY!" like he was leading a feral pep rally, I got that sinking feeling that he'd convinced enough people to vote leave. As a militant and unrepentant remainer, I felt a bit ill when I woke up after four hours' sleep on 24 June 2016 and discovered I'd been proven right.

On Monday night, the election campaign was suspended in the wake of the hideous, vile murders of innocent people in Manchester. To take a day off campaigning was the right and respectful thing to do. However, as long as Theresa May upheld the suspension, a vacuum was created and this was filled with stupidity from across the board.

There were the inevitable false flag-obsessed conspiracy theories. People actually thought Theresa May somehow orchestrated the terror attack because Labour was creeping up in the polls. That is a thoroughly despicable accusation to make, especially without any evidence of any sort to back it up. I still think Theresa May is a terrible, incompetent Prime Minister who arrogantly thought she could run a seamless campaign, but I do not for a second believe she is behind the attack.

But her suspension of the campaign for more than a day caused this vicious nonsense to grow a life of its own.

That said, there should be a constructive, national conversation on whether police cuts, which started in 2010, and continued apace ever since, might contribute to terror attacks not being foiled or the spread of radicalisation. Theresa May needs to be pressed on this tonight by Jeremy Paxman.

When Theresa May announced that the terror threat was upgraded to "critical" and that we could expect to see more armed police officers as well as more soldiers on the streets of the UK, the election campaign was still suspended. This did not strike me as reassuring. It struck me as authoritarian. The sight of a spectre-like Mother Theresa commanding the podium to tell us what was best for us - and during a suspended campaign in which debate was therefore stifled - was chilling.

When the terror alert was dropped back from "critical" to "severe" just a few days later, the whole sorry situation became a dark farce.

It is not inappropriate to ask if police cuts are hampering anti-terror and anti-radicalisation efforts. When reports are emerging of British Muslims doing the right and patriotic thing by reporting their suspicions to the police, but then nothing is really done about it, it is proper that we examine whether we have enough police officers and whether resources are being deployed in the best way possible.

When Amber Rudd, the useless Home Secretary, was interviewed by Andrew Marr yesterday, she appeared to have no idea whether the Manchester murderer was on a watchlist.

And that brings me to the second form of idiocy that filled the void. Even before members of the Manchester murderer's family were arrested in connection with terror-related offences, there were calls for entire families of terrorists or suspected terrorists to be deported.

On Facebook, a post by Tam Khan, in which he pleads with his fellow Muslims to integrate in Britain, went viral. Overall, it was not an unreasonable post. His frustration with "uneducated" people who kill innocents is shared by any decent human being.

However, the call to deport not just the criminals but their families too was ridiculous. Aside from the obvious injustice of deporting people who have committed no crime because they happen to be related to some arsehole, the whole idea is unworkable and raises more questions than it answers. To what country would you deport people who were born here? Where would the "deport the whole family" policy end? Immediate family only? Cousins? People related by marriage? Innocent children? A senile grandparent? Wouldn't deporting entire families en masse simply lead to further resentment and radicalisation? What if a family member who was guilty of no crime was going to be sent back to a place where they'd be in danger? For example, what if a terrorist had a gay sibling and homosexuality was illegal in their country of origin?

Surely such a policy only serves to move problems elsewhere rather than solve them?

"But it'd be a deterrent to someone thinking of committing terrorism!" come the howls from the peanut gallery. No. It's not a deterrent. Does anyone seriously believe that someone so vile and twisted, someone who is prepared to not just kill children but to blow themselves up with a nail bomb, gives a damn about any family members they would leave behind?

There are now five-and-a-half hours to go before Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are grilled by Jeremy Paxman and audience members on live TV. I do not expect Paxman to give either party leader an easy ride and nor should he. I do not expect either party leader to come out with any truly courageous or effective solutions to any of the issues outlined in this blog post.

However, I would not be surprised if one of the leaders has their Boris Johnson TV moment this evening. It just remains to be seen which one it will be.




Photography by Matt Brown/Flickr

Grim times for peaceful protest

See that photo above? I am pretty sure I have very little in common politically with the people in the photo but I support their right to peacefully protest in Washington DC. In a free society, they have every right to express their views without inflicting violence on others or having violence inflicted upon them.

This is how peaceful protest should work. Peaceful protest does not necessarily mean quiet, demure protest. Hell, it does not necessarily mean protesting fully clothed either, Pussy Riot and Slutwalk being two cases in point.

But it has become abundantly clear that the right to peaceful protest is misunderstood.

The protest at the Conservative party conference was, objectively, by any reasonable person's measure, a peaceful one. It was estimated that at least 60,000 people marched in Manchester - with four arrests made, that means that, at worst, 0.00666666666% of all the people who protested were arrested. But the tiny and unconstructive minority ensured that anything but the nation-changing issues raised by the protestors got airplay in the next day's papers.

The newspapers have the right to run whatever the hell they want on their front pages. That is how a free press works. But sadly, a few buffoons gave the press a leave pass to run stories that were not related to any of the motivations behind the protest?

Journalists were spat it, which is obviously completely revolting. I understand the frustrations with the media that might lead to spitting but that does not make spitting on someone trying to do their job in any way acceptable. Pitifully though, when I tweeted that I "understand the frustrations", I was jumped on by a Tory apologist hate mob who accused me of condoning spitting. Which I did not do. Never mind that I am the person who dry-retches if I overhear someone spitting across the other side of the road. Apparently, understanding why people are frustrated with the media made me the patron saint of expectoration.

Someone threw an egg at a young Conservative who was trying to get a rise out of the crowd by brandishing a photo of Margaret Thatcher, even though he was probably still in nappies - or possibly not yet conceived - when Thatcher was ousted in 1990. The "egg-throwing yobs" became front page news rather than the issues that are a legacy of Thatcher's Britain.

And some people used their freedom of speech to yell "Tory scum!" at Boris Johnson as he entered the Conservative Party Conference. He punned his way into the headlines by claiming he was warmly welcomed with cries of "Tories, come!". Oh, the hilarity. And, thus, the fact that Boris Johnson only had the cojones to criticise the impact of his party's welfare cuts on Londoners after he voted for the bill that includes the welfare cuts, went unnoticed.

Then there was the sickening, dreadful report of street sexual harassment and a rape threat made to a woman attending the Conservative Party conference. This story was broken with minimal detail by Guido Fawkes. It is not known whether the accused was affiliated to any groups at the protest or whether he was just some random dickhead who decided to join in and allegedly behave like a sexist douchebag. I can only say "allegedly" because it is unclear if the incident was reported to the police. After all, police officers were not in short supply at the protest. Or was the woman concerned happy to just let Guido Fawkes use the story to further his political agenda and equally as happy to let a man who thinks sexual harassment and rape threats are OK to walk freely around Manchester?

And look at that, I've just spent four paragraphs of this blog post doing exactly what the establishment wants. I've talked about the minute minority rather than the real concerns of the 59,994 or more people who managed to march on the Conservative Party conference last Sunday without being arrested.

And just this weekend in Ankara, the Turkish capital, more than 100 people were killed in a bomb blast at a peace rally. Many are holding the government responsible, either directly or indirectly, and, at the time of writing, nobody has claimed responsibility.

Anybody, regardless of their politics, should be horrified at this infringement on the right to peaceful protest in Turkey. But, if you are also part of the brigade that judged the entire march on the Conservative party on the actions of a few, if you seriously think Boris Johnson's beloved water cannon should be used for events like this, I have to ask you: Why do you hate freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and democracy so much?

Democracy does not begin and end at the ballot box. It is a continuous process that includes the right to protest. It is not about people who didn't vote Conservative being "sore losers" unless your political thinking has not evolved past that of a six-year-old. Peaceful protest is one way to challenge the government, hold them to account, and suggest alternatives.

It does not matter if the protest comes from the left, the right or the middle. The right to do so peacefully must be upheld if we are serious about living in a democracy. Whether it is the 250,000 who marched against TTIP in Berlin this week or a handful of Britain First types brandishing inarticulate signs and yelling inarticulate slogans about immigration, it is a right we should all cherish.

One day, you might be the one being silenced because you were angry enough to protest but more people were angry enough at protests in general to stand by and let water cannon - or worse - take over.




Photography by Peter Griffin

Mind The Gap. Part Two: Still lame

Old Street, where agglomeration happens...

After last week's disappointingly thin first episode of Mind The Gap: London vs The Rest, I naively had high hopes for the second episode. Maybe there'd be more analysis, less kissing of Boris Johnson's arse and perhaps some interesting ideas about how the British economy does not need to rely quite so heavily on the capital. Hell, was I wrong!

Instead, we got to see Evan Davis (and more of Evan Davis than I really needed to see in tight lycra shorts) as he messed about on a bike at a velodrome in Manchester, we had the word "agglomeration" beaten into our heads until we lapsed into a collective coma, there were a couple of women whining in the street where Ringo Starr used to live, and we had the example of one cute village as a model for anywhere north of Watford.

Certainly, it is good that Manchester is managing to thrive with a vibrant cultural scene, drawcard facilities such as the training centre for cyclists and a hub for media businesses (that'd be the agglomeration Davis is unquestioningly evangelical about). But Davis seemed to then reduce the rest of "the north" into a homogenous blur that was never going to compete with the might of London.

Bizarrely, Davis mourned the demise of ports in the north of England, blaming the rise and rise of air travel. It is indeed true that most of us jump on a plane rather than sail for months when we take a holiday or travel for work. But in the previous episode, he gleefully skipped around the enormous new DP World port in London without challenging anything in relation to its Dubai Government ownership and generally proclaimed it as a good thing. So there is still a need for ports. There are still plenty of things that need to be transported to and from Britain by ship. And many cities of the north used to have busy ports and the related infrastructure so why was that not continuously developed and updated? Britain is not a big place - it is not an impossible transport challenge to get goods from, say, Liverpool to London any more than it is to get goods from London to Liverpool.

Liverpool was reduced by Davis to the street where Ringo Starr lived until the age of four. The street is a depressing row of terraced houses, mostly abandoned, save for Ringo's old house where Beatles fans inexplicably go to write on the boarded-up window and a few residents who'd like the street demolished to make way for new houses. It was unclear from (yet another) lame interview whether the pro-demolition women owned the houses or not or who was meant to pay for the demolition and rebuilding.

Ironically, disused places such as this row of terraces could be used for agglomeration, which seems to be Davis's favourite thing. He waxed lyrical about London's Old Street, where IT/wannabe Silicone Valley types are prone to hanging out together, setting up IT start-ups and the like. Why not encourage businesses to get the hell out of London and set up shop elsewhere if there is no real need for them to operate specifically from the capital? Tax breaks for businesses that decentralise, perhaps? Hell, it is the very technology the agglomerating Old Streeters are so fond of that makes it easy for businesses to get out of Dodge City and still communicate with the rest of the world.

Then there was a pointless segue to a funky but failed arts centre in Bromwich. All that did was disprove the adage "If you build it, they will come." Sometimes you've got to build something people actually want to use. Crazy, I know...

And then Hebden Bridge, the charming little town favoured by well-heeled professionals who work in cities like Leeds and Manchester but would rather live elsewhere, was put forward as an example of how it could be. Davis said that while places like Leeds and Manchester are hubs, somewhere like Hebden Bridge is a spoke, a desirable place to live with a buzzing economy of quaint small businesses all of its own. Which is fine if you can afford the property as well as the season ticket for the train, but it's not the panacea for the north.

Davis completely ignored the north-east and the potential of places such as Newcastle and Durham, and Scotland didn't really rate a mention. Examination of what an independent Scotland would mean for the rest of the British economy was clearly not in the remit for this one, which is a shame because that would have been a chance for some interesting analysis. Equally, there was no discussion of how to revive manufacturing, how to finally reverse the damage done by inevitable but poorly managed coal mine closures, and no mention of the importance of high education standards in creating strong economies.

But none of that would be as fun as pissing about in a velodrome or having a chuckle with Boris Johnson. In short, Mind The Gap was a massive let-down.

Is Mind The Gap: London vs The Rest the lamest thing on TV this week?

Look at me, there I am, loving London...

First, a disclaimer: I bloody love London. I have loved London since I first lived in the UK as a three-year-old, I loved it when I made return visits and I love living here now. I love the noise, the chaos, the people-watching, the museums and galleries, and I even love the weather. But Britain does not and should not begin and end with one city. I, for one, would happily work in another part of the country. Indeed, I almost ended up as a lecturer at Sunderland University.

While London's economy goes from strength to strength, the rest of the country is lagging behind, aside from a few notable pockets of affluence outside the capital. The effects of the decline of manufacturing and industry in the north continue to be felt until this day and politicians with clear, meaningful policies and ideas on how to develop the regions are sadly lacking. In Germany, for example, the economy is not just Berlin - places such as Munich, Stuttgart, Bonn, Hamburg, Hanover, Leipzig, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Dortmund and Bremen are all doing well in a way that many cities outside of London are not.

So with that in mind, Mind The Gap: London vs The Rest should have been a powerful two-part TV series, a challenge to government, to businesses and indeed to the millions of us who cling stubbornly to London to think about the rest of the country, to be aware that Britain does not end with the M25.

The first episode was completely lame. A fawning blow job to the capital. Evan Davis, an economist, proved to be an interviewer who was about as hard-hitting as a knitted hammer. Even when he did express concerns about the implications of London getting too big and succeeding at the expense of the rest of the country, his attitude seemed to be one of "Oh well, it might be a bit crap elsewhere but it'll be fine because London just can't fail!". Up to a point, Davis is right. London probably is too big to fail. But that should not have stopped him from challenging the status quo. He had ample opportunity to do so in a series of interviews but he just didn't manage this.

Unsurprisingly, his interview in the Shard with Boris Johnson was especially embarrassing. BoJo's dubious charms worked their floppy haired magic on Davis. Only a starstruck interviewer would let the Mayor of London get away with explaining why everything will be all right with a nonsensical jam-on-Ryvita analogy. Boris bumbled his way through an explanation that was along the lines of "London isn't sucking the jam (as a metaphor for money) out of the rest of Britain, London is helping the jam spread across the entire Ryvita (as a metaphor for the rest of Britain) because the jam will spread more evenly the more you pile on." It seems to be a food-based corruption of the theory of trickle-down economics and it went unchallenged by Davis.

Davis also had golden opportunities to ask serious questions about foreign investment and how much it actually benefits London and, in turn, the rest of the country, how much it benefits foreign investors (who, let's be honest, don't invest here for the good of their health...) and why we're not getting the same investment within Britain by British companies. At London Gateway port, you could not miss the DP World signs. There was even one on Davis' high-vis vest. There was talk about how this project creates jobs and maintains London's status as a port city, but no questions about the ethics of a partnership with a Dubai Government-owned company, what Dubai gets out of this, and whether taxes are being paid to HMRC. But Davis got to load a container with a big Chinese crane so that's OK then.

Similarly, when Davis interviewed Tan Sri Liew Kee Sin, CEO of SP Setia Berhard, the Malaysian consortium that is developing the prime Battersea Power Station site, they had a giggle when he was asked if he was interested in building housing in other parts of Britain. He wasn't asked why he didn't want to invest in, say, Manchester, a place with a growing media industry and education sector, an international airport, good transport to other parts of Britain and a thriving cultural scene. Surely that would be an opportunity to not only create jobs outside of London but be ahead of other foreign property investors in spotting a new up-and-comer?

But given SP Setia Berhard paid £400 million for the Battersea site, more than 800 flats have already been sold for £675 million, prices start at £388,000 for a studio, and details are sketchy on how many flats have been bought by foreign owners, it's pretty clear places outside of London are not going to attract this large-scale level of investment, foreign or otherwise, any time soon. It was just a chance to marvel at overpriced studios, along with the tour through an enormous £40 million Mayfair apartment that came with its own hideous, gold bespoke crockery. It was property porn with no analysis.

And then there was his depressing schlep through Elephant and Castle's currently deserted Heygate Estate, where people who owned ex-council properties were forced out with not enough money to buy somewhere comparable, and where a redevelopment probably won't do a damn thing to solve London's housing crisis. His interview with a woman from the local authority was, again, weak and came across like an advertisement for the development. There'll be places for kids to play and cafes and stuff. No talk of how many more people this will bring into an already crammed part of London, no talk of things like the schools and hospitals that will be required, and no talk of why London's property market is so completely obsessed by the crowded and expensive inner city areas Zones One and Two. Three-bed flats at the Heygate redevelopment are now being advertised to overseas buyers before the demolition of the old estate is finished. The price? £700,000. It's another Battersea Power Station. There had to be a better way to improve this part of London but we'll never know.

I can relate to the "If you're tired of London, you're tired of life" adage. But even if you are not a homelessness or unemployment statistic, if you are on an endless waiting list for a council flat, if you cannot see yourself ever owning your own place, if you fear you will be an eternal renter in the land where mortgages are a badge of honour and people treat home ownership as a get-rich-quick-scheme rather than somewhere to live, it can be a tiresome city indeed. The first episode of Mind The Gap briefly visited Yorkshire for some fresh air and talked a bit about the Tour de France. It would appear that the second episode will focus on areas outside of London. But the first episode was a massive disappointment. There were so many missed opportunities to ask hard questions and do a bit of analysis beyond the whizzy map graphics.

 Episode One was a largely uncritical advert for London. Here's hoping for something meatier in the second episode. Christ knows, someone needs to make the issue of regional development sexy and interesting to the wider population because right now, our political leaders sure as hell can't manage it.