markgamon.com

This sent today to BBC Trust (responsible for cutting BBC costs)…

Dear Sir

I’ve just been reading your new Local Radio Service Review. There are some rather glaring contradictions.

On page 5, you state:

‘Our audience research found that there was demand across all age groups for programmes focusing on emerging local talent.’

Then, on page 6, you state that:

‘On weekday evenings (7pm–10pm) all stations will come together for a new all-England programme.’

Could you explain where the ‘emerging local talent’ will now be featured? If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, can I refer you to Sue Marchant’s excellent show on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, which regularly features emerging local talent of all sorts between 7 and 10 pm? That’s the time of day when emerging local talents are usually available to perform: if you’re ‘emerging’, you’re highly likely to be at school or work during the day.

Your commitment to emerging local talent also appears to be undermined by the statement, on page 13, that:

‘Music will be based on the current Local Radio core playlist, with an increased bias towards music from past decades and reduced amounts of current music.’

Presumably emerging local musical talents will now be expected to give up writing and performing in contemporary styles, however relevant?

I just thought I ought to bring these errors to your attention. After all, you’re branded as ‘Delivering Quality First’, so I’m sure you wouldn’t want to publish a sub-standard and contradictory report, would you?

I look forward to your reply…

(I’ll let you know if they bother…)

Funny that. Greece turned out to be a sort of cradle of democracy after all. Or at least they’re the first electorate to flip the finger at a system in which national economies are persistently controlled by forces beyond national boundaries.

Of course they’ve got good reason to turn. People the world over will always take the line of least resistance. If you’re comfortable enough, why change? But when you’re being undermined from outside – with no way to stop it because even your national leaders are being proved powerless on a daily basis – then you’re going to lash out at the first opportunity.

They’ve not got a majority, but a part of me is heartened to hear that 16% of Greeks (more, if you count the wider left) chose to lash out by telling the rest of the world where to put their punitive interest rates and their speculation profits. Syriza might struggle to form a government, but that’s still an awful lot of Greeks prepared to say enough is enough.

They’ve sent a message – to the world’s entire economic system, not just the Eurozone. But the sad truth is that it won’t be recognized as such. Already the media are talking about Greek’s Marxists as if all the emissaries of hell had just come marching over the horizon. And if the media are behaving like that god alone knows what the markets are thinking. They’ll flap like headless chickens and cover the money with their chicken wings and cluck that it’s all somebody else’s fault and refuse to let the money go where it’s needed in case some of it doesn’t come back with a lucrative chicken-mash margin attached.

Which means Syriza are screwed from the start. They’ll fail to form that government, or if they do they’ll get sucked into corruption and compromise. It’s not the support of the Greeks they need – it’s the support of the speculators. And that will never be forthcoming, because the markets sit forever outside the democracy they so vociferously claim to support.

Meanwhile, democracy has a dark side. For 7% of Greeks, lashing out means lashing out at the nearest different looking person: usually an immigrant. This is the lesson of history: when you take away hope, you let in the fascists. And there they were – right there, on our screens last night.

I have a song about immigrants. It’s somewhat unfinished. This weekend, I’ll put that right…

I’m fond of a pasty, me. Of the Cornish variety of course – I recommend Barnecutt’s in Wadebridge. Like George Osborne, I don’t believe I’ve ever eaten a pasty from Greggs, which as any fule kno got its start in the North-East, and is therefore disqualified in my humble opinion.

I hope that’s where any similarity between myself and George Osborne ends, or I may have to exterminate myself. I’ve seen quite a few governments, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one go bad quite as quickly as Cameron’s. Not that it exactly started on a high, but you know what I mean. Paying VAT on pies is just about as barking mad as that window tax they tried in the early 19^th century.

Pasties can be reheated – so will pasty sellers leave them in the window just long enough to be considered cold and therefore VAT-exempt? What temperature is considered hot enough to tax? Why is it good to penalize small high street shops that sell pies out of a heated cabinet by encouraging their customers to go to feckin’ Tesco and buy the pies uncooked instead?

And just how much money will this raise, compared to the administrative cost of sending armies of VAT inspectors, thermometer in hand, out on the streets of Britain in search of proles who dare to prefer their food hot?

Mind you, this nonsense does deflect the mind wonderfully from some of the other crap Gorgeous George has been trying to foist off on us. This morning I found myself listening to some dim-witted government apparatchik, hectoring the nation about the damage ‘a tiny minority’ of fuel tanker drivers were about to do by going on strike, when what we should all be doing is tightening our belts and concentrating on reducing the national debt.

I dunno much about the tanker drivers’ grievance, but I’m guessing it’s pay. And I’m guessing, too, that underlying the specifics of their claim is a more generalized complaint: that they’re being asked to freeze their wages at precisely the same time as anyone earning over £150,000 is being given a 5% reduction in the top rate of tax.

There will be more of this, I fear. It’s not about how much that top rate actually raised – though I bet it would have been a lot more over time than the liars (sorry, spin doctors) in Whitehall would have us believe. It’s about the sheer outright mendacity of a government that exhorts us to all pull together whilst at the same time giving a massive hand-out to people who have never eaten a high street pasty in their life.

PS: I’ve just read a BBC article which claims that Unite says the drivers’ dispute is not about pay. It’s about constantly having their pension providers changed, and about delivery deadlines that have created a ‘turn and burn’ culture. I’m actually horrified that Unite feels they should be blustering that pay isn’t the issue – almost as if they themselves feel the need not to gainsay the government’s ‘all stand together against the economic downturn’ gobbledegook. OK, it’s not precisely about pay – but it is about money. Same difference.

I had the misfortune to catch the first ten minutes of the BBC’s Question Time this week. The ‘star’ speakers were John Redwood and David Starkey. Plus a couple of feeble party line apparatchiks from Labour and the Lib Dems.

Halfway through the first question, Redwood came up with a convoluted and unsubstantiated argument that we shouldn’t be asking the super-rich to pay more tax because if they did tax revenues would actually decrease.

Maybe he’s right about that. I don’t know. Nor will I ever know until someone presents me with the actual numbers rather than sitting there like some self-important meritocrat telling me that the thing must be true because they allege it to be true; and they’re the ones that know so there’s no reason for us expendable proles to bother our little heads over the detail.

Then Starkey took his turn and ranted like a third-form swot in just about the most offensive manner I’ve ever seen on Question Time, including directly insulting any member of the audience who chose to look at the argument from a different angle. The man’s a pompous dick, and listening to him was rather like listening to Redwood under the influence of LSD. Which is not recommended, by the way.

Like I say, I don’t know if Redwood’s numbers add up. What I do know is that he stated his ‘case’ without the slightest evidence of moral compass. The reason we should ask people to pay tax according to their means is nothing to do with numbers: we should do it because it’s right. Once you go past a certain income threshold, you don’t need any more money to live a decent, secure, comfortable, taking-care-of-your-loved-ones kind of life. But you do have a respected place in society, and you should be prepared to pay for that respect by chucking some of your disposable cash back into the system that nurtured you. Rather than buying yet another yacht.

Meanwhile, no-one’s giving a lot of thought to the other end of the scale: cutting lower and middle income taxes. And yet it seems to me that if we were to do that, we’d be freeing people to spend and invest more, which has to be good for the long-term health of our economy, rather than waiting for prosperity to trickle down from the meritocrats sitting at the top. Because if there’s anything that the last twenty years has taught us, it’s that trickledown ain’t ever going to work.

I went to bed pretty bloody depressed, thinking about all this; and fearful that there will soon be nothing we can do about the damage being down by neo-cons and freemarketeers and people whose minds have been twisted into thinking that all economics is about is the survival of the fittest. Because that’s what the Nazis believed, and it only takes a sideways glance in Europe’s direction to start wondering when the fascists will raise their ugly heads.

Nothing I can do, but from time to time there’s a guitar in my hand, and as long as it’s there I’ll use it to say what I think. It may never be Woody Guthrie’s Machine that Kills Fascists (and in any case I mostly don’t write that kind of song) but if it helps fill the moral vacuum left by morons like Redwood and Starkey then it will be a thing well used.

I had some gift tokens left over from Christmas, so this weekend I took myself off to David’s in Letchworth (incidentally the best book and music shop in the known universe), there to pig out on new CDs.

Top of the list was This One’s For Him, a recent ‘various artists’ tribute thing. Not the sort of thing I usually buy, but this time the tribute was to Guy Clark.

Halfway through the first track (Rodney Crowell singing That Old Time Feeling) I was welling up. Without explanation. Other than… well, I’ve never forgotten the first time I heard Old No 1, in a friend’s flat in Crouch End, around 1976. From that point on I understood what country music was all about, and Guy hasn’t let me down since.

Except I think that definition (that ‘country music’) may have been a little narrow. For one thing, it ain’t just country. This new album’s sleeve notes call it folk. Some might prefer Americana (which is a hideous category). Me, I’ve just come to understand what Guy Clark does as the finest, purest, simplest songwriting I know.

I’ll be eternally grateful. And I’d give anything to time travel back to Guy and Susanna’s house in the early 70s, with Townes van Zandt knocking at the door, clutching a bottle of Tennessee whiskey in his hand…

You can take the man out of the blog, but you can’t take the blog out of the man.

What the heck. I miss blogging. I don’t have a lot of time these days, but every once in a while I find myself with something to say that just won’t fit on Twitter.

So this is for those big thoughtful ‘what the hell is it all for?’ moments. Peppered with occasional updates on what I’m doing, but never fear: I will not be using this to tell you all about my breakfast preferences, latest love affairs, emotional crises or what goes on in the day job.

I intend this to be tougher than that. Watch this space.