FIFA corruption and duplicity must not go unexposed

Today’s announcement that Russia will host the 2018 World Cup was nothing short of a shambles. David Beckham, one of England’s ambassadors for the bid, was more diplomatic and praised Russia and Qatar as ‘two great countries’.

The romance of taking football to the east is completely lost on me I’m afraid. In awarding the 2018 World Cup to one of the most corrupt countries in the world, FIFA has truly shamed itself. The awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a country whose bid was described by FIFA itself as ‘seriously high-risk’, borders on the ludicrous.

One could argue that it makes sense for FIFA to award the World Cup to nations which have never before hosted the tournament. It could encourage the development of the game in these countries. However, in that case, there is no point in countries such as England bidding for future tournaments. The Premier League Chairman has said that England’s excellent stadia could have counted against our bid. Sepp Blatter and company may have felt that it is better to encourage the development of new stadia and general infrastructure of other countries.

Putting that aside for a moment, the key question for me is how England’s bid, which many FIFA officials described as being the strongest all-round bid, managed to muster only 2 out of 22 votes in the voting process, resulting in elimination at the first stage. The members of England’s bid team were clearly lied to by several members of the FIFA Executive Committee, whose promised England their votes. The much-maligned British media should expose these members for their duplicity.

It is clear that many backroom deals must have been done between Russia and representatives of other member states. Watching today’s proceedings was highly reminiscent of watching the voting process in the Eurovision Song Contest. Serbia and other Eastern Europe states don’t even try and hide the fact that they are openly biased towards Russia; Serbian winters are extremely cold and Moscow turning off the gas would be highly inconvenient.

As news coverage has suggested, part of the problem of the FA is that England didn’t ‘work the room’. We don’t do schmoozing, infiltrating and influencing very well. If England plans a future bid to host the World Cup, the FA need to play a more active role in FIFA, infiltrating its various committees. The higher echelons of FIFA are rank with corruption and many of its members need naming and shaming into early retirement.

The bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups has raised many questions, questions which must not go unanswered.

The Dire Derby

This week’s Manchester derby was the one of the most over-hyped football matches that I can remember.  Manchester derbies are usually tense, passionate affairs; last season, Manchester United snatched victory in injury time on both occasions.  But this time we had a Manchester United side which has started the season lethargically and has had a defence, which at times, looked about as secure as an Icelandic bank.  By contrast, Manchester City are flushed with cash, bankrolled by UAE oil tycoon Sheikh Manzour.  This was supposedly a chance for the boys from Eastlands (which had always sounded like a high-security prison to me) to prove that the balance of power of in Manchester has shifted.  There is something very nouveau riche about Manchester City’s transformation.  In many ways, it’s like watching Wayne and Waynetta Slob buying a mansion in the Surrey countryside.  Perhaps I am just a football aristocrat at heart.

Anyway, I digress slightly.  The point is that the media managed to kill what could have been a thrilling game.  For Manchester City, defeat would have illustrated how money can’t buy success and how Sheikh Manzour’s money would have been better spent on a bigger palace.  For Manchester United, defeat would have shown that the Fall of Rome was not far away.  The determination of both sides not to lose stymied any creativity or risk-taking.  The media had ended up talking a potentially brilliant game into its grave.

Both Roberto Mancini and Sir Alex will not be too displeased with a point.  It still feels as it we are early on in the season and that things will kick on after Christmas.

 

 

Descent into Darkness

This weekend, the United Kingdom puts its clocks back to move from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time.  Many people are looking forward to an extra hour in bed on Saturday night/Sunday morning.  I must confess that I have never understood this view myself.  Don’t get me wrong, I like nothing more than a good night’s sleep.  But in my view, the trade off is losing one hour of afternoon daylight for five months of the year in return for one extra hour in bed for one night of the year.  This is like someone saying ‘I’ll give you £10 now if you give me £20 a month for the next five months.’

I was on a train back from Manchester this evening.  I exited Huddersfield train station at what turned out to be 6.00pm, emerging into the early evening darkness.  I turned round to check the time on the station clock.  It said it was 5.00pm.  And then I realised that the station had changed its clock early and that from Sunday, it would be that dark at 5.00pm.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11642878

http://www.lighterlater.org/benefits.html

Rather than reiterate in detail the health and energy benefits of moving to Central European Time, I have provided two links which make the case for moving to CET (GMT+1 in the winter and GMT+2 in the summer- time zone of much of the European Union).  Considering the pressing need to lower our energy usage and take more exercise, it seems very logical to revisit this issue.

There are obvious drawbacks to moving Britain’s clocks to Central European Time.  On the shortest day of the year, sunrise would not occur until around 9.20am in Leeds and 9.45am in Glasgow.  This would be a shock to the system.  It would mean that children go to school in dark for part of the year.  However, the crucial point is that there would be an estimated 100 fewer road deaths per year if Britain moved to Central European Time.  The increase in road accidents in the morning would be more than outweighed by a decrease in road accidents in the evenings.  This is precisely what happened when Britain used Central European Time between 1968 to 1971.  However, the results of the trial were not properly analysed and it was abandoned after the House of Commons heard emotionally-charged anecdotes from Scottish MPs children getting knocked down in the morning darkness.  The fact that much fewer children were involved in road accidents in the evening (even in Scotland) was completely ignored.

I can see both sides of the time zone argument.  But I think that the issue is worthy of revisiting.  On December 3rd, MP Rebecca Harris will put a Private Member’s Bill before the Commons which asks the government to review the benefits and drawbacks of moving to Central European Time and then to proceed to move to CET on a trial basis only.  This seems like a very sensible proposal to me.

In my view, the arguments of many people who refuse to consider the idea of a time zone change are based more on emotion than logic and reason.  Some people say that we ‘should’ be on GMT given our longitude.  It is true that time zones are loosely based upon longitude, but are there to be manipulated in order to ensure that natural light is used as efficiently as possibly.  France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain all use Central European Time, even though Geography suggest that GMT would be a more appropriate time zone; France and Belgium used to be in the same time zone as us, but moved one hour ahead after being subjugated by Germany in World War II.  During the war, Britain also went onto what is now Central European Time to make the most of natural daylight.  But whereas France and Belgium stayed with Central European Time after the war, Britain went back to GMT.  After all, what’s the point of winning a war only to adopt the time zone of your enemy?

As a nation, we revisit the GMT vs CET issue every year at this time.  The facts are clearly in favour of at least a trial of Central European Time.  At a time when the government are taking a sledgehammer to public services and many people’s jobs are at risk, you might ask why I choose to write a blog post about this issue.  I have done so because putting the clocks back has an impact on people’s lives. It would be nice to be able to come home from work and go outside again in the daylight.  People would go out more, take more exercise and be less fearful of crime.  There would be fewer accidents on the roads.  And it would save money and help to combat climate change if we could put the lights and heating on one hour later.

Putting the clocks back means that we will temporarily have more morning daylight, but people don’t use as much energy in the morning as they do in the evening.  There are those who say that people who want more daylight should just change their work patterns and get up earlier.  But not everyone has the luxury of flexitime at work.  These days, people generally get up later and go to bed later.  Very few people get up at the crack of dawn to milk the cows at 4am and blow out the bedroom candles at 9pm.  Some people, specifically farmers, still live like this.  But most people do not.  And while I understand why farmers in the Hebrides are against a time zone change, the fact is that the majority of people in the United Kingdom do not live in northern Scotland (Jeremy Bentham anyone?)  In a nutshell, our hours of daylight are out of sync with the hours we keep in ourselves.  It would be much easier to move our clocks an hour forward than to change the time at which we do everything.

As I said, I can see why some people want to keep to Greenwich Mean Time in winter.  This is why I support the idea of a trial and a review of using Central European Time.  I hope that logic and reason will eventually have an impact on people’s thinking on this issue.

Now, if you will excuse me, I must get to bed.  I have to be up at 3.30am to go and get water from the well.

The Free-Market Gone Mad

The world of football has been very eventful indeed this week. A few days ago, Wayne Rooney looked set to walk out on Manchester United. Cue a emotional, but very skillful, piece of PR by Sir Alex Ferguson at his pre-Champions League game press conference on Tuesday. Sir Alex used the world’s media to great effect in putting the onus back on Rooney and questioning his reasons for wanting to leave Manchester United. The following day, Rooney retaliated with a statement, expressing his concerns about Manchester United’s ability to attract the best footballers in the world. The stage looked set for an exit to Eastlands or Stamford Bridge. But on Friday, the drama took another massive twist, as Rooney signed a new five-year deal reportedly worth around £250,000 a week. Maybe I should take a leaf out of Rooney’s book and become embarrassingly incompetent in my job for a few months, then ask for a pay raise.

Money has always been a malicious influence in football, but the events of this week brought it home for all to see. Manchester City were allegedly lining up an £85m bid for Rooney and were set to offer him wages of £288,000 a week. All this while Portsmouth were hovering dangerously close to administration.

I reflected on the events of the last week and thought myself ‘When is this all going to end?’ Foreign owners bankrolling teams and trying to buy silverware. Players on ridiculous wages. This issue was raised on last week’s Question Time. There was a lady in the audience wearing a Chelsea scarf, as you do when you go a political debate, saying that she had no complaints with foreign ownership of teams and believed it was a good thing. It may be a good thing for supporters of Manchester City and Chelsea, but the way in which foreign owners try to buy silverware is not a good thing for football at all.
Astronomical spending creates inflation, with players valued far above their actual worth. This inflation prices the majority of teams out of the market.

In my view, UEFA should impose spending limits to restrict how much money clubs can spend during the transfer window. There should also be tighter restrictions on players wages, so that we are not treated to the spectacle of players like Wayne Rooney, Yaya Touré, inter alia, on obscene wages while other clubs go to the wall. There are some that will argue that UEFA has no jurisdiction to interview in the free-market economy of football. But I would argue that supranational bodies have the responsibility to ensure that the football economy remains competitive and open to all.

The Spending Review- beware of TINA

After reading the details of George Osbourne’s Comprehensive Spending Review and watching highlights of his performance in the Commons, I started to feel the hand of TINA on my shoulder. We haven’t seen TINA around for a while. She was good friends with Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s and was referred to in many of the former prime minister’s speeches. Fast forward to 2010 and I find myself very worried that TINA is being used to justify punitive cuts.  According to George Osborne, There Is No Alternative.  We must support the coalition’s economic policies, or we will end up like Greece.  Or even worse, Manchester United.

It all sounds very sensible, prima facie. The nation has a debt of around £150bn. Therefore, we should spend less and try and eliminate the deficit. The major flaw in this is the rate at which deficit reduction is planned. The key question is whether you can justify taking a sledgehammer to public services in order to reduce the amount of interest that the nation pays on its debt. While MORI polls have shown that the public broadly agree with the thinking behind Coalition’s deficit reduction plan, it will be interesting to see how such views hold up once families up and down the land begin to the feel the pain. Mrs Thatcher was fond of framing her economic policies as ‘kitchen-table economics’ and Osborne is largely doing the same. But can you think of a financially-troubled family who would turn to their kids and say ‘no packed lunch for you today, we’ve got to pay off the mortgage.  If you get hungry, just drink some water and remember that we’re all in this together’.

There can be no doubt that Conservative policy is driven by dogma.  The Tories get to indulge their ideological fantasies while apparently taking the moral high ground.  Labour must exploit the Tories’ lack of a growth strategy.  Osborne is betting everything on leaving the Bank of England and the free-market to take care of growth while he focuses on deficit reduction.

The spending review gave us all plenty to worry about.  We must not be conned into accepting that eliminating the structural deficit in five years in necessary.  Osborne is taking a huge economic gamble with our public services and the welfare state, two central pillars of our society.

It is certainly going to hurt.  But it might not work.

The Coalition

We are nearly three months into the unholy alliance of what is the Tory-Liberal coalition.  Thursday evening’s BBC2 documentary, ‘Five Days That Changed Britain’,  made highly interesting viewing.  Perhaps I viewed the programme through red-tinted spectacles, or contact lenses to be more accurate, but I couldn’t help but feel that the coalition didn’t show the Liberal Democrats in a particularly flattering light.

It is alleged that one of the major stumbling blocks to the emergence of Labour-Liberal coalition was the insistence of the latter that spending cuts should be immediate.  Days after an election campaign in which Nick Clegg was attacking the Tories for irresponsibly wanting the fiscal scythe this year, Clegg performed an extraordinary volte face. When questioned on this subject by Nick Robinson, Clegg looked extremely uncomfortable.  Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking that a mouse had just ran up his leg.  We were told that ‘fast-moving events’ had made immediate cuts necessary.  In other words, we are expected to believe that riots in the Greek capital Athens made the Lib Dem leader renege on a key part of his own economic policy.  What’s that flying past my window?  Looks a bit like a pig.  Surely not.

Both Tory and Liberal ministers are using scare tactics to justify one of the most masochistic Budgets in history.  We either cut now and cut hard, or we disappear into the economic abyss.  This fallacy is at the heart of the government’s economic strategy.  The difficulty for Labour has been to produce a nuanced counterargument.  By acknowledging that spending cuts will be necessary over the next few years, Labour has left political room for the Tories to adopt a slash-and-burn approach to public expenditure.  There is no doubt that cuts have to be made.  But eliminating the structural deficit over the course of one parliament will prove to be a Pyrrhic victory, as this requires the decimation of public services that will hurt every single person.  Reducing the deficit at a slower rate is a much more preferable strategy.  Labour has to convincingly argue that we can protect public services and stimulate economic growth without destroying the public sector.  Such a strategy should involve both targeted spending cuts and tax rises on those who can most afford it.

We are currently witnessing a rebirth of Thatcherite Toryism.  Mrs Thatcher was fond of lines such as ‘We must stop living beyond our means’ and ‘Britain must pay her way in the world’.   Such lines sound very prudent and logical.  But in reality, Thatcherite economics led to a ‘scorched earth’ economic policy.  Millions were left unemployed and public services were allowed to fall into disrepair.  This must never be allowed to happen again.  As a Labour activist, I worry that the electorate is mistaking prudence for idiocy.  There is absolutely no need to reduce the deficit so quickly.  Whoever is elected as the next Labour leader must waste no time in attacking this fallacious assumption.

A Week in Politics

This has been the most politically frantic week of my lifetime.  One week ago today, I was out campaigning in Halifax for Linda Riordan MP.  Voters were queuing up outside polling stations, as British democracy appeared to be reborn.  One week later, we have a new prime minister, a new cabinet and to use a contemporary phrase, ‘a new politics’.

I must admit that I was shocked when I saw the exit polls on Thursday evening, which had the Tories on 300+ seats, 50 ahead of Labour, and the flavour of the month Lib Dems languishing in third place with fewer seats than they won in 2005.  I had predicted a much closer affair in terms of seats between the Conservatives and Labour.  Every seat really mattered, and the Conservatives being just short of having a Commons majority was the deciding factor in hindsight.

On Monday night, I went to bed thinking that a Labour-Lib Dem coalition would be a done deal by the morning. Both sides would collude to keep the Tories out of No 10 and cement a progressive alliance.  I was upset when I heard that the talks between Labour and the Lib Dems had failed and I knew that the bell was tolling for the Labour government.  The speech at which events then transpired really shocked me.  I came home from work to the news that Gordon Brown was resigning as PM.  ‘Hang on, what was that about staying on as PM until things were settled?’ I thought.  After a late-afternoon, early-evening nap, I awoke to hear that Brown had already been to the Palace to tender his resignation to the Queen.  What on earth next?  Should I dare go to the bathroom and miss the appointment of an entire Cabinet by David Cameron?

I could not believe that Nick Clegg had thrown his lot in with that of the Tories.  Surely a progressive left-of-centre, pro-European, anti-Trident party couldn’t get into bed with the likes of Iain Duncan-Smith and Bill Cash.  Whatever next?  Would Sir Alex Ferguson be appointed as the new Liverpool manager perhaps?  At the end of the day, power has proved to be the ultimate femme fatale for Nick Clegg, to the consternation of many in his party.

In my view, Nick Clegg has sold the family silver for a bag of marbles.  The post of Deputy Prime Minister, a non-entity of a job if ever there was one; the briefs of Business Secretary, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Energy and the Scotland Office.  I expected Clegg to be made Deputy PM and Home Secretary.  Instead, the latter went to Theresa May, a woman whose achievements so far comprise an expensive shoe cupboard. The Lib Dem Holy Grail of Proportional Representation has been downgraded to a commitment to a referendum on the Alternative Vote system.  Coalition politics require compromise, but I can’t help but feel that Nick Clegg has been duped.

The post of Work and Pensions Secretary has gone to Iain Duncan-Smith, a man who ‘discovered’ poverty on his way to Glasgow: I have this mental image of IDS making 80-year olds work for their pension.  ‘Beware the quiet man’, said IDS at the 2003 Tory Party Conference.  Touché.  The post of Chancellor of the Exchequer unsurprisingly went to George Osborne, the most powerful Sixth Former in the country.  How is he going sort out to the economy and revise for his AS-level exams at the same time?  I hope the Treasury has an ample supply of Red Bull.

I hope that the Liberal Democrats can soften the edges of the Conservatives in government.  And I welcome proposals such as raising the income tax threshold to £10,000, the financial scrutiny of replacing Trident, fixed term parliaments and the pupil-premium for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  As a teacher, I hope to see government taking a step back and trusting the judgment of trained professionals.  Though I would also like to see Michael Gove tempering his obsession with Swedish schools.  The man should just train to be a teacher and then go and live in Gothenberg.  He would be completely in his element.

I genuinely do wish the coalition government well and that they can successfully steer the economy to calmer waters, as Gordon Brown had started to do.  How long will the marriage last?  I have my doubts personally and believe that Nick and Dave will need a lot of counseling to keep the show on the road.  We are in unchartered political territory and no-one really knows how things will do.  Well, no-one apart from Vince Cable that is.  He knows everything.  Maybe the Treasury should send Vince down to William Hill and get him to bet our money on all the World Cup games.  This is the era of ‘the new politics’ after all.

Train Madness

Yesterday I laughed when I read that Sir Nicholas Winterton, the anachronistic MP for Macclesfield, complained about the prospect of MPs having to use standard class carriages on trains.  Standard class passengers were ‘a different kind of person’, he remarked.  This faux pas reminded me of how insulated from reality some MPs are.  If you use first class travel on trains, how can you possibly know what it is really like for the other passengers who use standard class carriages day-in, day-out.

I recently had a 5-hour train journey from the South West of England to Leeds on a Cross Country service.  The train had fewer carriages than normal, and extreme overcrowding was the obvious result.  The train was packed with people standing up from Bristol Temple Meads onwards.  Also, many of the passengers had luggage with them, making things even more cramped.  To make matters worse, the train became stuck outside Burton-on-Trent because of a problem at the station.

For many people, this is a common experience on trains.  My question is, why should we have to put up with such operational incompetence?  Why were there not sufficient carriages in service at one of the busiest travelling times of the week?

Considering how much people actually pay to use the train, we really do deserve better service.  However, I can’t help but think that we the travelling public do not do anything to help the situation ourselves.  More people are now using the trains than ever before.  So, where is the incentive for the train operation companies to cut costs?  If lots of people use the trains and never actually complain about poor service, where is the incentive to improve things?

It was a four hour train journey between Bristol and Leeds and staring at the mosaic of green fields and sheep that is the English countryside made me think about the quality of service that we receive. I must admit here that I would usually have been playing my phone: e-mailing, texting, reading articles online, but I could not receive a proper signal between Bristol and Leeds.  I can understand having no signal in the middle of rural Gloucestershire, but not being able to use my phone in the middle of towns and cities like Cheltenham, Birmingham and Derby really surprised me.

Anyhow, I digress, back to trains.  You can travel between Leeds and London in around 2 hours.  I have used this service before in the past and am quite impressed with it.  However, other long-distance train journeys take much longer.  For example, a train journey between Bristol and Edinburgh takes around six-and-a-half hours.  The journey between the two cities is around 370 miles.  By contrast, a train journey between the French capital Paris and Marseille takes around 3 hours, despite being over 100 miles further apart in comparison.  The train between South-West England and Scotland makes multiple stops, but through reduced stoppage and faster speeds, Cross Country could provide a limited faster service option for travelers.

We’ll Never Have Paris

Most of you will know about my travel adventure at Manchester Airport by now.  For those who do not, I spent the best part of 15 hours on a plane at Manchester Airport, going absolutely nowhere.  I was meant to travel to the United States, via a connecting flight in Paris.  It really was a day from hell, but looking back, it was also a comedy of errors on the part of Air France.

Firstly, they allow us to board the plane before realising that they need to refuel it and can’t refuel it because of snow and ice on the tarmac.  So, we waited for hours for the tarmac around the plane to be cleared, with only the sight of surrounding planes soaring into the sunrise.  The plane was eventually refuelled, but then it turned out that the wings has frozen and needed to be de-iced.  And there wasn’t a de-icing truck to be found.

At round lunchtime, Manchester Airport was closed because of the snow. We were allowed to disembark and I set off in search of food.  The Boots sandwich fridge was empty and ridiculous queues had formed at every food establishment in sight.  Even the vending machine was being mobbed like a Hollywood film star.   We were promptly advised to reboard the plane for a scheduled take-off at 1500.  But guess what happened next?  Yep, that’s right, the wings froze up again.  And the de-icing trucks were nowhere to be seen.  Five hours later, we are still sat on the tarmac at Manchester Airport.  The only thing that was moving were the passengers, to the cockpit to ask what on earth was going on.  The staff inspired nothing but diffidence, as they had no idea if or when this plane would depart, or about any information on connections from Charles de Gaulle Airport.  For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of travelling through Europe’s second busiest aviation centre, Charles de Gaulle is the Channel 5 of airports.  You avoid it at all costs, but sometimes there is no alternative.  The staff are generally rude and unfriendly and the food is extremely expensive.  And the airport itself is as easy to navigate as a labyrinth.  Also, aesthetically-speaking, it is a post-modernist experiment gone horribly wrong.

Family and friends had told me not to fly with Air France and to avoid Charles de Gaulle Airport.  But, I thought it would be OK.  ‘It’ll be OK.  France is a highly-developed, technologically-advanced country.  It’s national airline should be fine to travel with.  Besides, I speak French, so it should all be good.’ I spoke in English to the flight crew and didn’t let on at all that I could speak French.  When it became clear that something was going very wrong with the flight, I went to the front and spoke to the crew again, in English.  But then I started to listen to what the crew were saying to each other in French in an effort to get more information.  Eventually, I was drawn into speaking some French.  One of the flight attendants started pointing at things and describing them to me. ‘This is ‘la bouteille’, this is ‘le verre.’  ‘Aah, interesting,’ I commented without letting on.  By this stage, I was tired and fed-up.  Parisien French is very quick and is sometimes difficult to understand because of this.  The words can be like bullets coming out of a machine-gun and you can’t tell them apart.  So I decided not to show my hand.  Besides, it was interesting to eavesdrop and find out what was reallly going on!

Just before we de-planed, I began to feel in a slightly better mood.  I knew that freedom was at hand and a wave of patriotism swept over me.  This was my country, I was safe here and didn’t want to leave.  The thought of sleeping around Charles de Gaulle Airport on the off-chance of getting a seat on a different flight four days before Christmas didn’t seem like a good idea to me.  A sense of camaraderie was palpable in the flight cabin, and we shared chocolate and sweets with other passengers.  The guy sitting next to was meant to travel home to Pennsylvannia, and the girl next to him was going home to Bulgaria.  ‘Ah well, we’ll never have Paris’, I said to them.  And so it proved to be.