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Local elections: great expectations as Labour ends ‘southern discomfort’
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Labour has won back control of councils across the country, boosting the position of Ed Miliband and prompting soul searching among Conservative MPs.
John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde university, declared that Labour was now a serious opposition party after performing better than last year and securing seats across England.
In a symbolic gain Labour wrested control of Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, from a Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration early on Friday. Labour also regained control of Great Yarmouth and Harlow from the Tories.
In Great Yarmouth Labour gained five seats to take its share to 21 seats. The Tories lost four seats as its number dropped to 18. In Harlow Labour gained five seats to take its share to 20. The Tories lost four to take their figure to 13. The Lib Dems lost their only seat.
Labour also won back control of Thurrock, Exeter, Wirral, Chorley and Nuneaton and Bedworth. There were signs that the party was on course to gain control of Southampton, allowing the party to say it is tackling the “southern discomfort” that helped keep Labour out of power nationally between 1979 and 1997.
The Liberal Democrats experienced a difficult night on a par with last year’s elections when the party lost 760 seats. In an early result, the Lib Dems lost all four of their councillors in Knowsley to Labour, which now has all 63 seats on the council.
The BBC reported that the Lib Dems had lost four councillors in Grimsby. One Lib Dem councillor told the BBC that the party was facing “meltdown mark two”.
Simon Hughes, the party’s deputy leader, told the BBC: “We will not do as badly as last year because people are getting used to the idea of us being in government. For me, it will be a slow climb.”
One of the few bright spots for the Lib Dems was in Eastleigh, held by Chris Huhne at Westminster, where the party made gains. The party won back seats from former Lib Dems who had become independents.
Miliband will hail the Labour results as a sign that Labour is returning in areas it has to win back if is to form a government. The Tories won Harlow with a majority of 4,925 at the 2010 general election. It gained Great Yarmouth with a majority of 4,276.
Curtice told the BBC: “Labour will take heart. It is not the kind of performance Labour was putting in before the 1997 election. But Labour now looks like a serious opposition to an incumbent government.”
A Labour source said: “Early results show we are exceeding expectations – Great Yarmouth, Plymouth, Dudley. We are making real progress in areas where we need to win in 2015 – Harlow, Nuneaton and Bedworth. The big story seems to be a disaster for the Tories who are losing twice as many seats as Lib Dems.”
The Tories showed nerves in the early hours as it became clear Labour had performed well. Lady Warsi, the Tory co-chair who had started the evening trotting out the party’s official claim that Labour had to gain 700 seats to show that it was performing well, suddenly changed her projections. After consulting her iPad during the BBC election night programme, Warsi said that Labour had to gain 1,000 seats.
Tom Watson, the Labour deputy chairman, said: “We will not gain 1,000 seats. That is a ridiculously over-optimistic figure. There are only 3,600 seats.”
The Tories said there were some bright spots. In Castle Point in Essex the Tories held all their seats, ensuring that Labour still has no seats on the council. In Preston Labour lost a seat.
Labour entered the elections facing an acute challenge because it scored just 24% of the vote when the same set of seats were contested in England in 2008. The party is now on 40% in national polls, which prompted psephologists to say that Labour should gain at least 700 seats in this year’s elections.
The party said it hoped to make gains of between 300 and 350 in England and 100 in Wales. It expected to make net losses in Scotland because the SNP is still performing strongly after its emphatic victory in last year’s parliamentary elections.
Labour expects to lose control of Glasgow city council, though it believes the SNP will fail to gain control of Scotland’s largest city.
In the first result, declared just before midnight, Labour gained eight seats on Sunderland city council to secure 64 seats. The Tories lost six seats to take their total to eight. The Lib Dems lost their only seat. Independents have three seats.
Justine Greening, the transport secretary, indicated that the Tories will assess the results across the country with care. “We need to be a government that represents the whole country and not just the fringes of it,” she told the BBC.
Greening’s comments came after Gary Streeter, the moderate Tory MP for South West Devon, launched a stinging attack on the government for having “clobbered” natural party supporters in the budget. “We have to put right the misdeeds of the last month,” Streeter told the BBC.
Labour hopes to repeat its overnight successes in London – in at least one area – when the results are declared this afternoon. It believes it is on course to squeeze the Tories into second place in the London assembly elections.
But Labour is bracing itself for a setback amid a growing belief that Boris Johnson will secure a second term as mayor. In a sign of nerves at the highest levels of the Labour party, the deputy leader, Harriet Harman, criticised Watson for saying that voters should hold their noses and vote for Livingstone.
“It was wrong of Tom Watson to say, ‘Hold your nose’,” Harman said on Question Time on BBC1. “Ken Livingstone has great policies for London.”
Harman made clear that Labour will focus on the difficulty of unseating such a huge personality as Boris Johnson.
“It is a pity that there has not been a focus on the issues that matter,” she told Question Time.
“I hope that Londoners will have seen through the [focus on personalities] and will not have been distracted by the mudslinging from Boris.”
Harman declined to say whether it was right that Livingstone was selected as the Labour candidate. Senior Labour figures blame Harman for agreeing that the contest to choose the Labour candidate should take place at the same time as the party’s overall leadership contest in 2010. This denied David Miliband the chance of throwing his hat into the ring in London.
Harman quibbled with David Dimbleby, the Question Time presenter, when he asked whether it was right of Watson to question Livingstone’s candidacy.
But Watson told LBC last month: “I’m being totally candid with you. I’m saying to you, those Labour voters who are thinking of going to vote for Boris Johnson, ‘Hold your nose, vote for Ken,’ because that’s the way that you will help Labour.”
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Stuart Pearce making plans as though he will be England manager
Posted by: | CommentsStuart Pearce is increasingly immersing himself in the role of England manager and has stepped up the process of identifying the players he wants to take to Euro 2012 if the Football Association decides to keep him in the job for the summer tournament.
Pearce has taken it upon himself to initiate a series of meetings with Premier League managers to discuss the form and fitness of some of the players he intends to take to Poland and Ukraine now he has been led to believe there is a chance he may get the job.
He has also been prominently involved in the FA sending a letter to all the players who have been involved in England squads for the past 18 months and are still available for selection. The letter tells them they are under consideration and gives them a brief outline of the dates they need to keep clear for the tournament and its buildup.
While Harry Redknapp is still the overwhelming favourite to take the job, Pearce is planning for the role with two possible scenarios in mind. The first is that he gets the job as Fabio Capello’s replacement on the back of his work so far, and the second is that he names the squad and another manager, in the words of the FA executive Sir Trevor Brooking, is “parachuted in” shortly before the tournament starts. Either way, he is going about his business on the basis that it will be him who decides which players make the cut.
Pearce, who replaced Capello for the 3-2 friendly defeat against Holland at Wembley last month, has also stepped up his scouting of the players he would involve. Whereas he would usually watch matches specifically to look at players for the England Under-21s, he was at Chelsea’s game against Tottenham Hotspur last Saturday and will be at White Hart Lane on Sunday to see Redknapp’s team again, this time when they play Swansea City.
It is an unusual set of circumstances, with Pearce effectively keeping tabs on a number of players Redknapp will know far better. However, Pearce feels it necessary in case it is left to him to name the squad. The FA have made it clear they will not make their move for Capello’s successor until the tail-end of the season and, until the decision is confirmed, the former England left-back is determined to prepare meticulously.
This has already incorporated changing the warm-up programme Capello had put in place, making recommendations for the operational side and even going as far as arranging a penalty shoot-out in training before the Holland match, so he could begin the process of working out the best men for the job should it be needed this summer.
His preparations will also see him take in Monday’s game between Blackburn Rovers and Manchester United, specifically so he can assess the form of the players in Sir Alex Ferguson’s squad who are likely to be involved for England.
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Government faces embarrassing U-turn on aircraft carriers as costs spiral
Posted by: | CommentsPhilip Hammond, the defence secretary, has recommended a U-turn on one of the most controversial proposals of the cost-cutting armed forces reforms, the Guardian has learned.
David Cameron will decide this week whether to agree to an embarrassing volte-face involving the Royal Navy’s over-budget aircraft carriers, which are under construction.
In the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), the prime minister insisted the carriers would have to be converted to include “cats and traps” to allow a version of the new Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) to be catapulted from the decks. But the Guardian has been told the cost of the modification work has spiralled out of control – to between £1.9 and £2bn.
With the “carrier variant” version of the JSF also beset by technical problems, the MoD has concluded the carrier programme could be delayed by at least another seven years – to 2027 – unless it abandons the current plans.
Though he knows the U-turn will be humiliating for the coalition, Cameron has been told the best option is to switch back to another version of the JSF, which was ruled out by the SDSR because it was likely to cost more and do less.
Having mocked Labour for taking the wrong the decision in the first place, the government will be taunted by the shadow cabinet if Cameron accepts the judgment of military chiefs that the MoD’s losses should be cut now before costs balloon again.
“There will be short-term pain for the government, but in the long run, it is by far the best option,” said a Whitehall source. “Adapting the carriers is skewing the defence budget out of shape and there is every likelihood the costs will continue to rise. It has to be Cameron’s decision but the military advice is clear.”
Hammond’s sensitivity on the subject is acute; he has demanded a vow of silence from all senior MoD civil servants, who have been told not to speak to the media about any military equipment programmes without his authority before the budget for next year is approved.
A U-turn would be humiliating for Cameron and his deputy, Nick Clegg, who both signed off the SDSR. They were withering of Labour’s decision to commit to the F35-B version of the JSF, an aircraft that could take off and land in a similar way to a Harrier jump jet.
Instead, they argued for the F-35C, saying it was the better aircraft and the cats and traps on the carriers would make it possible for French and American aircraft to land on them too.
“The last government committed to carriers that would have been unable to work properly with our closest military allies,” the document said.
“It will take time to rectify this error but we are determined to do so. We will fit a catapult to the operational carrier to enable it to fly a version of the JSF with a longer range and able to carry more weapons. Crucially, that will allow our carrier to operate in tandem with the US and French navies.”
The SDSR also claimed the carrier version of the JSF would be cheaper in the long run, reducing “through-life costs by around 25%”.
However, the National Audit Office expressed deep concern about the cost of adapting to cats and traps. This expense contributed to the government’s decision to deploy only one of the two carriers being built, with the second being put at “extended readiness” – in effect, mothballed.
If Downing Street sanctions the U-turn, it may try to blame the former defence secretary, Liam Fox, who championed the decision in the SDSR in September 2010.
The MoD hopes the savings from abandoning cats and traps could allow the second carrier to be put to proper use after all, sources said. However, that is not without its problems. One of the two Queen Elizabeth class carriers is being fitted to take helicopters.
Jim Murphy, Labour’s shadow defence secretary, said the government appeared to be in disarray. “This would be one of the biggest public procurement messes for many decades. David Cameron has potentially wasted more than a year and squandered millions. A combination of prime ministerial hubris and MoD incompetence has led to British military power being degraded.”
Admiral Lord West, a former first sea lord and security minister, said: “I am slightly amazed at the costs of adapting the carriers, but if they are of that order then you can understand why they are considering this change.
“You have to make the best of a bad job. The navy wanted the capability of the carrier version of the JSF, but the other version is still a good aircraft. And if the navy gets a second carrier operational, then some good will have come of it.”
An MoD spokesman said no decisions had been taken.
“We are currently finalising the 2012-13 budget and balancing the equipment plan. As part of this process we are reviewing all programmes, including elements of the carrier strike programme, to validate costs and ensure risks are properly managed. The defence secretary expects to announce the outcome of this process to parliament before Easter.”
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Fidel Castro may have known of Oswald plot to kill JFK, book claims
Posted by: | CommentsIt is one of history’s most enduring mysteries and has kept conspiracy theorists buzzing for half a century: did Fidel Castro have a hand in the assassination of President John F Kennedy?
Officially, the Cuban dictator was cleared of involvement in the shooting of his fiercest adversary. The inquiry into the murder concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist sympathiser, acted alone.
Now a retired CIA officer claims to have proof that Castro knew the murder was about to happen – an allegation certain to refuel speculation before next year’s 50th anniversary of a pivotal moment of the 20th century.
Brian Latell, who studied Cuban affairs as a CIA analyst in the 1960s and became the agency’s chief intelligence officer for Latin America, says in a book that he is certain Castro at least knew the attack was going to happen.
On the morning of 22 November 1963, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Castro ordered a senior intelligence officer in Havana to stop listening for non-specific CIA radio communications and to concentrate instead on “any little detail, any small detail from Texas”, Latell claims in his book Castro’s Secrets – the CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine, due to be published next month.
Four hours later, came news that Kennedy was dead.
Latell claims Castro was aware that Oswald, who had been denied a visa to visit Cuba at the embassy in Mexico City, told staff there he was going to murder Kennedy to prove his communist allegiance. “Fidel knew of Oswald’s intentions and did nothing to deter the act,” Latell writes.
In an interview published on Sunday in the Miami Herald, Latell, now a senior lecturer on Cuba at the University of Miami, said he discovered the information in interviews with Cuban former intelligence officers, backed up by declassified US government documents.
“I don’t say Fidel Castro ordered the assassination, I don’t say Oswald was under his control. He might have been, but I don’t argue that, because I was unable to find any evidence for that,” he said.
“[But] everything I write is backed up by documents and on-the-record sources … Did Fidel want Kennedy dead? Yes. He feared Kennedy. And he knew Kennedy was gunning for him. In Fidel’s mind, he was probably acting in self-defence.”
Latell’s book, billed as the first in-depth study of Castro’s intelligence operations in the years after the Marxist revolutionary seized power in a coup in 1959, says there is strong supporting evidence. It claims that CIA wiretaps of Cuban intelligence agents after the assassination revealed they had a surprising knowledge of Oswald’s background when only scant details had been reported by the media.
But it is Latell’s interview with the Cuban former intelligence officer, Fiorentino Aspillaga Lombard, who was in charge of Castro’s listeners at his Havana compound, that will raise eyebrows.
Aspillaga, who defected to the US in 1987, told Latell that he told the CIA at his debriefing that Castro personally issued the order to listen for anything about Texas. That information was never revealed publicly and he never repeated it until he was interviewed for the book.
After his defection, Aspillaga lifted the lid on Castro’s lavish lifestyle, giving details of his luxury yachts, lavish properties in each of Cuba’s provinces and a secret Swiss bank account containing millions of dollars.
The claim that Castro was aware of Oswald’s promise to Cuban embassy officials to murder Kennedy comes from several sources, including a former FBI informant and “superspy” Jack Childs, who penetrated the dictator’s inner circle.
Childs said Castro told him Oswald “stormed into the embassy, demanded the visa, and when it was refused to him headed out saying, ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy for this’.”
Castro claimed in public that Oswald’s visit to the embassy was “a minor matter” that had not been noticed by senior officials in Havana.
Investigations by the US security agencies and the official Warren Commission inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination looked at Castro’s possible involvement but concluded that Oswald was a lone gunman acting independently.
Among other issues discussed in Latell’s book are the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Castro using a variety of methods, including exploding cigars and poison pens. He says the efforts were called off after Kennedy died.
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Swiss coach crash kills dozens, most of them schoolchildren
Posted by: | CommentsTwo small Belgian towns are in deep trauma after a devastating bus crash in the Swiss Alps left at least 22 schoolchildren dead.
A further six people died in the crash, on Tuesday night in a tunnel in the south-western canton of Valais, or Wallis. The classes of 11- and 12-year-olds were returning from a school skiing trip to the small Flemish towns of Heverlee and Lommel, east of Brussels.
Distraught parents gathered at the Saint Lambert school in Heverlee anxiously awaiting news of who had died and who had survived the crash, which is believed to be the worst road accident in Switzerland’s history.
The bus was said to have been driving at high speed through the tunnel when it veered into the concrete tunnel wall. No other vehicles were believed to have been involved.
“A very sad day for all of Belgium. Words are not enough for this terrible accident,” said the prime minister, Elio Di Rupo, before flying to the scene of the tragedy. Two military aircraft were made available to ferry parents of the victims to Switzerland.
Didier Reynders, the foreign minister, said the bus was alone in the tunnel at the time of the crash. “We have no indication of what caused the crash.”
There were 52 people on board the bus, overwhelmingly schoolchildren. Of the 28 who were killed, 22 were pupils. The other six dead included the two bus drivers. The remaining 24 were all injured, some very seriously. Many of them were taken by helicopter to Swiss hospitals. While most of the children were from two Flemish schools, there were also seven Dutch children on the bus.
The crash took place as the children were returning from a skiing trip in Val D’Anniviers.
As the parents of the schoolchildren congregated at the two Belgian schools this morning, it remained unclear who had lost sons or daughters. “The information at the moment is very scarce,” said a police spokesman in Heverlee, just outside the university town of Leuven.
There were 24 children from the Heverlee school on the bus and 22 from a Lommel primary school.
“Unbelievable,” said the mayor of Lommel, Peter Vanvelthoven. “We don’t know yet how many children from this school are victims.”
Psychologists and medical personnel were on hand at both schools to support and assist the bereaved.
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Greece on the breadline: ‘a student postponed to queue for potatoes’
Posted by: | CommentsAs well as Greek citizens, expatriates have been in touch with their impressions of their adopted homeland in crisis. Here are a few:
Sara Young in Thessaloniki writes:
It is becoming increasingly difficult. In Thessalonik i, as across the whole country, it is the uncertainty and the daily struggle that are wearing people down.
Whatever decisions are being made in Europe seem to have less and less connection with what is happening in reality in our city.
Here are some examples of daily life among teachers and academics. An adult student of mine – a kindergarten teacher – telephoned to postpone our lesson because she wanted to join the queue for cheap potatoes that are being sold through the so-called “potato movement”, the initiative originally started through the university.
At the same time, Thessaloniki city council has started an allotment scheme for those wanting to grow their own food, while the university is giving free advice on crop cultivation. But still a sense of despair pervades the city. While people are rightly concerned about the effect on the youth of Greece (50% unemployment), it is also affecting the teenagers, who are disillusioned in turn and see no future.
Trying to teach has become a struggle against justifiable apathy and cynicism. Why study, the pupils ask, when they see often highly qualified older family members without work? For teachers, it is a daily challenge to maintain morale, even while we ourselves are not paid on a regular basis.
A friend tells me he hasn’t been paid at all since October. If he quits his job, he will never see the money owed to him. In the light of that, I’m celebrating the fact that I was actually paid the whole of January’s salary – the final €50 owing was paid last Friday (9 March). But as for February’s …
Rebecca Hall has this:
I’m a British expat who lives in Athens. I teach English for a multinational organisation, but even they are suffering, in terms of student numbers. My job is precarious and I never know if I will have work from one year to the next.
The contract they have me working on allows them to fire me at the end of the academic year, then rehire me. Thus I do not get my IKA (national insurance equivalent) contributions paid for two months, and I have to “sign on” for benefits. Even this has been reduced by 22% (€450 last year, God knows what this year).
The cost of living seems to rise and rise. I have more Greek than English friends: one of them works for ATE bank, and has seen her salary slashed. Luckily, she is one of many Greeks that still lives in a family-owned apartment (outright home ownership is big here, still).
Another friend is a self-employed dentist. She is actively seeking work in Italy now. She sees no future for herself here any more. As a teacher, despite a drop in student numbers I have seen a rise in demand for IELTS English, the exam any non-English person needs to pass to study in an English-speaking country. People are looking to leave in droves.
Chris Murphy lives in Komotini, in Thrace:
Recently a despairing, 52-year-old former employee of a wheelie bin factory here held two hostages at gunpoint at his former workplace. He had earlier shot and wounded two former colleagues, whose injuries were not life threatening.
The hostages were released after a 12-hour standoff with the police: a relatively happy ending in a region that doesn’t much believe in such things any more.
Probably the last place that comes to mind when one thinks of Greece, isolated Thrace is particularly vulnerable to a withdrawal of funding and investment from the centre. The unemployment rate is now the highest of any region in Greece, and every time I walk through the town centre more shops have closed.
Conversations about the crisis have moved on, from the shocked and angry, to the cynical, to the practical. We thank God we’re not in Athens, and that Granny has a plot of land in her village for potatoes and the like, should the worst happen and the supermarket shelves are empty.
And yet, in the midst of it all, Greek society has held together remarkably well – at least, in my corner of it. The streets here remain safe; there is no “broken” society. I’m not ready to give up hope just yet.
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Greece on the breadline: ‘We are kicking homeless pregnant women on to the streets’
Posted by: | CommentsAs Greece enters its fifth straight year of recession, the cuts deepen and the dole queues lengthen, some people are beginning to fight back.
On Monday in Plaka, Athens’ old town, I met Katerina Kanelidou, 42, a leadership coach who decided she had to do something one night a couple of weeks ago when she saw a homeless man outside the station during one of the coldest Athens winters in memory.
“Then on YouTube, I saw someone had posted a video of a pregnant woman being ejected from a homeless shelter,” she said. “I was just so shocked. I was thinking, how many unemployed people are going to become homeless? And what kind of society have we become, that we are kicking homeless pregnant women on to the streets?”
Realising she had neither “the power to influence the politicians, or the money to pay for more shelters”, Kanelidou decided what she could do was offer her professional experience, providing specially-devised, free coaching programmes for the city’s unemployed aimed at boosting their self-confidence and skills.
“I just thought: I have to do something,” she said. “Yes, there is real depression; huge numbers of people are taking anti-depressants. And a lot of anger at what’s happened. But the time for excuses is over now. I am so fed up with the excuses: we can’t do anything, we don’t have the money, the time, the right paperwork. I have all I need to do something.”
So Kanelidou posted on her Facebook page and emailed her contacts, offering coaching sessions to unemployed people on little or no income. She wasn’t sure what the take-up would be. “People call us lazy, but we have always worked hard,” she said. “There’s a huge stigma to being unemployed in Greece. Plus volunteering isn’t really a big part of our make-up. There’s a mentality that says, if it’s free it means either it’s no good, or there’s a catch somewhere.”
But in the space of a few days she attracted 15 participants; more are joining daily. They come from diverse backgrounds: two from a family firm that went bankrupt, a couple of HR professionals, a mid-level company manager, an architect. She has taken on a volunteer assistant.
When the town hall refused to lend her a seminar room on the grounds that she did not represent any professional or corporate body, she persuaded OTE, the Greek state-owned telecoms operator, to give her space in its training centre. “They bypassed their whole bureaucratic procedure to give me the space,” she said. “They saw they could do something, too.”
The first sessions take place this week. In exchange for the confidence and skills she hopes to impart (“People have the experience and talent, but many need new tools for a new technological environment”) she is asking her course members to devise concrete ways in which they, in turn, can do something in their community: “That way, if I am just one person helping one group, each of them will do something for another group.”
The press are on to her, and interest is gathering. Longer term, with the programme up and running, she will start looking for sponsors among her corporate contacts to spread the sessions around the city and further afield. For Kanelidou, determined now that optimism and individual action is the only way Greece will haul itself out of the mire, the country’s crisis, while it has become financial, is above all a crisis of values.
“What we had became more important than who we were,” she said. “Always we looked for shortcuts: just give the official some money, everything will be easier. We failed to take responsibility, and no one was ever accountable. And we stopped engaging with politics; we abdicated. Everyone was drunk on this artificial prosperity … It was a party. A big bubble, and now it’s burst. We have to start again, and each one of us has to make it work.”
• Jon is in Athens. If you have a story to tell, know a person he should talk to or live in a place you think he should visit, please contact him: jon.henley@guardian.co.uk, or @jonhenley (the hashtag for this venture is #EuroDebtTales)
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Glen Campbell – review
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We live in an era of rock and pop where no one really means it when they say goodbye, where “farewell” inevitably turns into “coo-eee, remember us?” when the price is right. Given the current climate, there is something slightly strange about attending a gig that really does have an air of finality about it. Earlier this year, Glen Campbell announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and that his current album, Ghost on the Canvas, and its accompanying tour would be his last.
The journalists who have met him recently seem a little taken aback by how faded Campbell’s memories already are, which means it is hard to approach the show without a degree of concern. His eyes seldom stray from the three autocues on stage and he mocks his waning ability to banter between songs – “I used to stand up here and tell jokes, but I forgot ‘em all” – but whatever else Alzhemier’s may have done to him, it doesn’t seem to have affected his voice, nor indeed his guitar playing. Midway through opener Gentle On My Mind he gives an excited cry of “I’m gonna take one!” then reels off an incredible solo, something he does again and again: his playing is dexterous, fluid and effortless, a reminder that, before the hits, he was one of the legendary LA session musicians the Wrecking Crew.
He occasionally seems surprised when his band – including his sons and daughter – prompt him as to what he is going to sing next. “Really?” he frowns. “That?” Then his face invariably softens into a delighted grin: “Well, that’s a great song.” He has a point. Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Southern Nights, Rhinestone Cowboy, Dreams of an Everyday Housewife: his back catalogue is like a masterclass in beautiful, economical pop songwriting, every melody perfectly formed, not a surplus note or word.
The show never feels like an exercise in showy rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light bravado, nor in lachrymose heart-string-tugging. Perhaps that’s because, as he sings in A Better Place, one of a couple of new songs that touch on his circumstances, “the world’s been good to me”. By anyone’s standards, he’s lived a life in full: four wives, eight kids, untold hellraising and what may be the greatest love song ever written in his back catalogue. Tonight, Wichita Lineman sounds as astonishing as ever, the gorgeous, aching guitar solo Campbell added himself instead of a third verse a demonstration of how perfectly his relationship with songwriter Jimmy Webb worked. Or perhaps it’s because, occasionally fluffed lines and all, Campbell just doesn’t cut a sad figure on stage. He looks like he’s having the time of his life, albeit for the last time.
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Glen Campbell’s Alzheimer’s announced in advance of final tour
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It’s some time since popular music was strictly a young person’s game, but Glen Campbell’s reason for retiring is nonetheless striking: the veteran country singer, now 75, has announced that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Campbell – for more than 40 years one of US music’s best-loved acts and most instantly recognisable voices – gave the news via an interview with the US entertainment magazine People. His openness was welcomed by campaigners for those with the disease.
While the Alzheimer’s is still in its early stages, Campbell plans to release just one more album, in August, before a farewell tour, which reaches the UK in the autumn.
“Glen is still an awesome guitar player and singer,” his wife, Kim, told the magazine. “But if he flubs a lyric or gets confused on stage, I wouldn’t want people to think, ‘What’s the matter with him? Is he drunk?’” Campbell did endure well-publicised problems with alcohol and drugs but has been clean for some years. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six months ago, although his short-term memory has been poor for some time.
Born into rural poverty in Arkansas, the musical prodigy began his career as a sought-after and prolific session guitarist, playing with the Beach Boys – who he briefly joined – Frank Sinatra, and on many Phil Spector recordings. He achieved solo fame in the late 1960s with a trio of melancholic Jimmy Webb-penned songs: Wichita Lineman, By The Time I Get To Phoenix and Galveston. Over the intervening decades he notched up many more hits – notably 1975′s US number one Rhinestone Cowboy – and also branched out as a TV variety show host and sometime actor, appearing opposite John Wayne in the original True Grit.
Although widely respected, Campbell was for some time seen largely as a nostalgia act. This perception began shifting in 2008 when he recorded the whimsically titled Meet Glen Campbell, a well-received album of cover versions by modern acts including Foo Fighters, Green Day and U2.
Campbell’s candidapproach to his health is rare in an entertainment industry where stars diagnosed with Alzheimer’s tend to disappear into silent privacy rather than speak about their condition. In the UK, the issue has been highlighted by the author Terry Pratchett, who two years ago was diagnosed with a rare early form of Alzheimer’s.
Bob Harris, the veteran DJ who hosts a country music show on BBC Radio 2, said he had watched Campbell record a TV appearance a couple of months before. “He had clearly, then, disappeared slightly into a zone, as it were. But the one thing that was not in any way affected was his guitar playing,” he said.
“He’s much more than just a country star. It’s worth remembering all the session work he did – he was the guitar for hire and those skills have never left him.
“As that rock and roll generation have got older, people have retired for wear-and-tear reasons like hearing, but I don’t think I’ve heard of this before,” he said. “How brave to do this final tour, to go out on the road and expose this to people, knowing that he has this condition. It’s new for us, in our generation, to face this.”
The Alzheimer’s Society said it welcomed Campbell’s move. “Being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s can be difficult but we applaud Glen for speaking out about his condition,” the organisation’s chief executive, Jeremy Hughes, said. “There are currently 750,000 people living with dementia in the UK and this is set to rise to one million in 10 years yet there is still much stigma surrounding the condition.
“Having a celebrity talk openly about their personal experience helps us improve awareness and also spread the message much further that it can happen to anyone.”
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Britain must beware the dystopic drift towards a US-style judiciary
Posted by: Editor | Comments (0)When Alistair Cooke was still alive, one of the first obligations of any recently arrived Guardian correspondent in the United States was to pay a courtesy call on the Guardian’s legendary American doyen. Cooke would start by making three pronouncements. Understand that the United States is a foreign country. Travel regularly outside Washington. And make sure you grasp the absolute importance of the US supreme court.
No one arriving in Washington this week could fail to grasp the enduring potency of the last of these three pieces of advice. This week’s supreme court hearings into the constitutionality of Barack Obama’s healthcare legislation are not something on the arcane margins. Instead they have all the hallmarks of an event that has the potential to set the nine-judge court fundamentally at odds with Congress, the president, and even with the very idea of effective federal government.
The outcome of this week’s hearings will come in June, when the court delivers its verdict. But the way the case has been choreographed makes clear that the court grasps the scale of what it has embarked on. The fact that it has unusually set aside three whole days this week to allow different aspects of the healthcare system to be argued is a sign that this is no run of the mill hearing.
Which indeed it is not. There are three main reasons why the case of Florida et al v US Department of Health and Human Services et al matters so much – and not just to Americans. One is the sheer scale of the US health industry, which takes up more than a sixth of the entire US economy but does not cover, broadly speaking, the poorest third of the population. The second is that the massively expensive, massively inadequate system has defied all efforts at serious reform for generations – including very nearly defying those of Obama, even when he had a Democratic majority on Capitol Hill.
But the third is that the current supreme court is something new. By appointing two extremely conservative justices to the court, George Bush set in train a reactionary judicial counter-revolution which, as the liberal jurist Ronald Dworkin has put it, is “Jacobin in its disdain for tradition and precedent.” Since joining the court, Bush’s picks, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, have put rocket fuel into the conservative constitutional project that was already being promoted by long-serving Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. As long as they can capture the vote of the man in the middle, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the judicial gang of four seem set on using the court to polarise American life the way the Tea Party tries to do in traditional politics.
This palpable shift has been apparent in several decisions, in almost all of which the conservative majority has carried the day by five votes to four. These have included rulings that stop cities like Seattle and Louisville arranging their school intakes to prevent racial ghettos, or that undermine longstanding anti-trust laws preventing price-fixing. But the two cases which have had greatest publicity – until now – have been a decision to throw out all restraints on the amount that corporations can spend on political campaigning (a decision which has allowed Mitt Romney to dominate the Republican presidential contest) and a ruling which struck down a District of Columbia law preventing the ownership of handguns.
In legal terms, these cases range widely across the field. What increasingly unites them, however, is not so much a coherent conservative doctrine of law like so-called originalism, which sees the original constitution – which upheld slavery – as an almost sacred document that it is the job of the justices to maintain. More dominant in some recent cases has been a much more politically consistent sense of what it means to be an American conservative in fields from religion to race to commerce and government – the ultimate example of this approach being the Bush v Gore ruling in 2000. This approach was expressed by the normally taciturn Justice Clarence Thomas, who told a university audience in 2010: “If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and we are obligated to revisit it.”
The fingerprints of this approach have been all over the healthcare case. Rarely has any legal challenge to the federal government been so explicitly partisan or co-ordinated. But the court has seemed eager to get involved too, fast-tracking the case to this week’s hearing. Remarkably, Justice Thomas also continues to sit in the case, even though his wife Virginia is an active paid lobbyist for an organisation, Liberty Central, which campaigns against the healthcare act. But these are new times not just in American politics but in American law.
The politicisation of the courts has deep roots. Today’s conservative judicial aggression is in some ways merely a modern acceleration of processes which Alistair Cooke would have recognised from the 1930s, when the supreme court fought against Roosevelt’s New Deal. But it is also a lesson in how the politicisation of the law can get increasingly out of hand in an increasingly polarised nation and dysfunctional polity. If the court sweeps away healthcare – as the reporting of this week’s hearings strongly implies that it will – the five judges will not just have entered the political arena but laid claim to control of it.
All this is a world away from the role of British – and most European – judges, and of sensible pragmatic American judges like Justice Stephen Breyer, in his important recent book. Yet we are beginning, even here, to drift into a more explicitly politicised set of interconnections between politics and the courts. Judicial review is as widespread here. Our judges make more speeches than they used to. This week, a Northern Ireland judge has decided to issue contempt of court proceedings against the former cabinet minister Peter Hain. Yesterday a House of Lords report pressed for changes in the way the judges are appointed to ensure greater diversity.
The government remains committed to enacting a British bill of rights in place of the Human Rights Act, and is regularly picking fights with the European courts.
America’s dystopic politicisation of the courts and the judiciary belongs, as Alistair Cooke said, to a foreign country. But this is a slippery and dangerous slope down which we should not allow ourselves to slide.
• The original text of this article stated that ‘a Northern Ireland judge has decided to sue the former cabinet minister Peter Hain’. This statement was erroneous as the court had in fact issued contempt of court proceedings against Mr Hain. This has now been amended. Thanks to commenters for pointing out this error
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