I blame the scapegoats (17 page)

The trouble is that most people on the left
didn't get involved in politics because they felt passionate about a prudent
stewardship of the national economy. Not many of us ever went on marches
chanting, 'What do we want?' 'Abolition of the national insurance ceiling in
order that NHS spending as a proportion of GDP can be brought into line with
other Western democracies!' Our solution to the complex economic problems of
this country was basically that there was this woman called Maggie, and we
wanted her out.

Then the Labour Party rather threw us by
actually coming to power and on day one they set about putting the economy
straight. 'So, interest rates?' said Gordon. 'What do we think - up or down?'
And the various junior Treasury ministers pretended to think really hard as a
way of covering up the fact that they had no idea what was the expected answer.
'Um - I dunno, maybe just move them sideways a bit?' Ten minutes later it was
agreed to hand this particular decision over to the Bank of England. Maybe
that's why the Tories invented laissez-faire economics: it meant you didn't
even have to pretend to comprehend any of it.

But
this 2002 budget was different because everyone understood it. We're going to
pay more National Insurance and get a better NHS. It is indeed great news, even
if it shows how bad things had got that this should seem such a radical idea.
'Hooray, hooray! Labour government to raise money to pay for health service!
You know that car we've had for all these years, well, they're going to let us
put petrol in it too!'

While
many Labour MPs cheered the news, some of the 1997 breed of New Labour clones
were bitter about this betrayal of everything they stood for. 'Typical Labour
Party sell-out!' they shouted angrily. 'Oh yeah, in opposition it's all
"Down with the workers and up with big business" - but as soon as you
get into power you change your tune!' Some of them are thinking of forming a
faction called 'Old New Labour'. But most people in the country welcome last
Wednesday's great news. This government is putting £40 billion pounds into the
NHS because at last they finally understand what is most important to the
people of this country. If that's how much it's going to cost to mend David
Beckham's toe, then so be it.

27
April 2002

There
were ugly scenes in the Commons yesterday when rival supporters clashed over
the collapse of ITV Digital and the future of the football league. Playing way
out on the right wing, Blues forward Tim Yeo missed another open goal,
prompting the usual groans from the dwindling band of long-suffering supporters
behind him. Soon they turned their frustration on the yuppie supporters
opposite, jeering at the hundreds of New Labour fans and chanting, 'Where were
you when you were shit?' Afterwards new signing Tessa Jowell said she was 'sick
as a parrot, but at the end of the day, we give it our best shot but it weren't
to be and that's football innit?'

ITV Digital was born out of the presumption
that there was no limit to the amount of football that the viewing public would
watch. On BBC1 there was football, on Sky Sports there was football and on ITV,
well, there were highlights of Leicester City versus Derby. Of course, there
were still plenty of other things on telly. There was drama about footballers'
wives or quiz shows featuring retired footballers. The clamour to get more
football on television reached such a fever pitch I'm surprised that even
infant school friendlies weren't televised. I'm sure Des Lynam and his guests
would have done their best to provide expert half-time analysis:

'I'm worried about the shape of this
under-eights team, Des. Instead of playing four-four-two, they've opted for the
less conventional formation of eleven. If we just look at the replay here,
watch the marking from seven-year-old Jamie. He should be tracking back to mark
the centre forward, but no, he's waving to his mum and the striker goes
straight past him and scores.'

'To be fair, Andy, the striker is from
the same side and is scoring in the wrong goal there . . .'

'Well, that's another area of their game
they're gonna have to work on, Des. At this level if you keep scoring in the
wrong goal, you're going to lose games.'

ITV
Digital paid hundreds of millions of pounds for the rights to the Nationwide
League, but then to everyone's shock and amazement it turns out that no one was
particularly interested in paying lots of money to watch Kidderminster Harriers
v. Cheltenham Town. Who could possibly have foreseen such an outcome? That
clubs that were only attracting a couple of thousand supporters in their home
towns would not attract millions of viewers across the country! It's the
greatest surprise since a stunned nation learned that Wales had failed to
qualify for the World Cup.

Now dozens of minor clubs who had been
promised large amounts of cash from the deal are faced with extinction.
Century-old clubs that are part of this country's sporting heritage will be
bulldozed to make way for garden centres and DIY superstores. But will anyone
actually go to these garden centres? Will these supermarkets really make any
money? All right, yes, they will, but that's not the point. There is more money
in the game than ever before, and yet the smaller clubs are going bankrupt.
When they said that football was a metaphor for life, now we know what they
meant.

The
Football League chairman is called Keith Harris, which was always a worry. How
did we hand over our national sport to someone whose only experience is putting
his hand up a duck's bottom? But the real soccer hooligans in this story are
Carlton and Granada, the companies behind ITV Digital. They were very keen to
make a quick buck out of the beautiful game (or 'the rather dreary game', when
we realized which matches they'd bought), but despite their poor business
judgement they're happy to walk away and leave the football clubs to perish.
Those expensive set-top receivers will still have their uses, of course. Anyone
in need of a sturdy paperweight or handy doorstop need look no further.

A major shake-up of the league structure now
looks inevitable. At the beginning of next season the clubs will have to stand
against a wall and then Nationwide Divisions One and Two will take turns to
pick. 'Stoke City, we'll have you. Er, Coventry - over here!' Meanwhile Torquay
and Lincoln will be standing there with their hands up saying, 'Pick me! Pick
me!', knowing that no one wants them and they'll just have to play rounders
instead.

Despite this fiasco, the onward march of
digital technology continues. Because it's just better, apparently - if you
had been reading this column online, for example, you'd be getting much funnier
jokes than in the piece on the printed page. That's the brilliant scam about
anything digital: it does exactly the same thing, it's just much more
expensive.

'Excuse me, why is
this cup of tea seven pounds eighty?'

'Well, it's digital - it's digital tea;
everyone has got to switch over to digital tea soon, digital coffee, digital
Ovaltine - they say the price will come down eventually . . .'

'Really?'

'Yeah, unless it all goes bankrupt, of
course, and then no one will have any tea whatsoever. There's your digital
sugar - that's another five pounds please.'

4
May 2002

Lionel
Jospin and his wife had a terrible row this morning. All she said was, 'I bet
you never thought you'd be voting for Jacques Chirac tomorrow!' Honestly, some
people can be so touchy sometimes. To understand the misery of French
socialists this weekend, imagine yourself having to vote for Margaret Thatcher
to keep out the BNP. Alone in the polling booth, your hand would shake and then
recoil at such an unnatural act, and then your other hand would be needed to
grip it and physically force it to put that supportive cross next to the words
'Thatcher, Margaret, the Conservative Party candidate'. Outside, Labour
activists would be on hand to treat traumatized socialist voters, dispensing
sympathetic counselling and vomit bags, while in the distance hard-left
demonstrators chanted 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, In! In! In!'

In Britain's local elections this week,
turn-out was up from appalling to just dismal, prompted in part by the French
National Front's success and the spectre of gains for the BNP. The lazy excuse
that 'they're all the same' now seems a little hollow.

'I mean, what's the point in voting? One lot
say they're going to invest in education and the other lot say they are going
to invade Poland - I can't see any difference between them frankly'

'Exactly,
one party promises more bobbies on the beat and the other

promises to create
lebensraum for the Nordic master race - there's nothing to choose between them
any more.'

We won't always be able to rely on French
fascists to push up our local election turn-out a meagre 5 per cent or so, and
drastic action is still needed to tackle voter apathy. On Thursday all sorts of
pilot schemes were attempted to encourage people to take part. In Hackney the
entire election was done by postal voting and we are expecting the result as
soon as last year's Christmas cards are finally sorted. Residents in other
boroughs were able to vote using the remote control on their digital
television. After pressing the wrong button residents in one ward have
discovered that their local councillor is now Will Young from
Pop
Idol.
Another experiment was internet voting, which
was heralded as the greatest leap for democracy since the hanging chad. If only
they'd had voting by computer in Florida, that would have made people less
suspicious, wouldn't it? It's not just the idea of hacking that's so scary; it
is the political opinions and interests of those anoraks who spend endless
nights alone in front of their computers. And the winner of the Antrim North
by-election, by over a million last-minute online votes, is Pre-Op Ladyboy Lola
of the White Supremacist Bondage Party.' Other votes on Thursday were cast
using text messaging. Imagine the arguments at the count while the returning
officer tried to sort out all the messages that said 'IM VTNG 4 LB' between
Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the zany Lord Dyslexia. Next they'll be
suggesting voting by telepathy. Mystic Meg will be employed to sit in the
polling station and say, 'I can sense that Mr Jones at twenty-three Station
Road wishes to vote Lib Dem, but would mistakenly vote for only one council
candidate instead of the permitted three.'

Next
week a Private Member's Bill is to be tabled which proposes compulsory voting,
but sadly no MPs will bother turning up to the chamber to vote for it: 'What's
the point, you know, it never changes anything . . .' Maybe we should try
thinking in terms of a carrot instead of a stick. Here is one possible idea to
radically increase voter turn-out at a stroke. On the Saturday after the
election there should be an additional Lottery draw for a
£5
million jackpot. For this draw you wouldn't have to buy a
Lottery ticket; all you'd have to do is to have gone and voted in that
Thursday's general election. The prize money could come from within the system;
every time there was no jackpot winner, half a million could be taken out of
the amount rolling over to the following week. Over the year the fund would
build up until there was a huge jackpot to be won on the Saturday after the
election. But you are only in the draw if you voted. Turn-out would shoot up to
80 per cent - with just a handful of billionaires saying, 'I can't see the
point, it wouldn't change anything . . .'

Obviously
this 'Voter's Jackpot' idea would need to be piloted somewhere first, and I am
happy to suggest my own ward as the ideal testing ground; in fact, just my road
would probably be all you needed to try it out, maybe just odd numbers only. It
might strike some people as a bit vulgar, but drastic action needs to be taken.
In the first normal British election after the Second World War, the turn-out was
84 per cent. But it's not as if there's ever going to be another Nazi takeover
of mainland Europe to make us sit up and realize the importance of taking part.
Oh hang on, no, that's tomorrow, isn't it?*

*
Jacques Chirac did of course go on to
win the French Presidential election after the French answered the inspiring
rallying call of 'Vote for the Crook, Not the Nazi!
'

I
I May 2002

It's
the same in every family. First the shock and sadness at the death of an
elderly relative, and then the mad scramble to get your hands on all their
stuff. If you look back at the footage of the Queen Mother's funeral
procession, you can see that it speeds up considerably towards the end, as
members of the royal family compete to be first one back to the house to help
themselves to the jewellery. No wonder Edward and Andrew stood guard over her
coffin; they were there to stop all the other relatives nicking the crown off
the top.