David Marsden

“The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.
The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenceless millions – tortured children, women and men – they have become partners to the responsibility.
… I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, in their mass grave.
By my death, I wish to make the strongest possible protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little life is worth today, but since I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall help to break down the indifference of those who have the possibility even now, at the last moment, to save the handful of Polish Jews who are still alive from certain annihilation.
… My life belongs to the Jewish people of Poland, and therefore I hand it over to them now. I yearn that the remnant that has remained of the millions of Polish Jews may live to see liberation together with the Polish masses, and that it shall be permitted to breathe freely in Poland and in a world of freedom and socialistic justice, in compensation for the inhuman suffering and torture inflicted on them. And I believe that such a Poland will arise and such a world will come about…”

This is a neat idea for bringing a street or community together. The South Norwood Tourist Board are currently working with a local primary school on it and I first saw it work in Totterdown in Bristol.
On one day everyone sticks a blue plaque on the front of their house. The plaque is a simple paper plate painted blue. On the plaque is written some thing about someone who lived in the house before you e.g. Mary Wills plumber lived here 1943-67 or Fred Smith grandfather lived here 1932 – 45 or whatever you can dig up from chats or censuses or wherever. kids will love finding out stuff abut their house. Then declare the street day open and wander up and down sharing your new knowledge with everyone and having a chance to talk to neighbours you’ve never spoken to before. Simples.

My heart sank today when I read that the QPR striker, Loïc Rémy has been arrested on suspicion of rape. It sank because once again we were reminded of the rape endemic that is found in the UK. This story centers around three guys and one girl, but reminds me of the 85,000 women who are […]

by steve4319 on May 15, 2013 at 03:33PM via Hynd’s Blog http://stevehynd.com/2013/05/15/on-loic-remy-and-how-football-fans-contribute-to-the-uks-rape-culture/

The greater joy lies not in crossing the finish line, but in rising to the challenge. We thrive less on our achievements than on our challenges. Achievement’s pleasure is fleeting, but it leaves behind an encouragement to spur us on to the next success.

Set goals, create plans, measure progress, course correct, and celebrate upon arrival. Learn to make life a series of milestones and reaching those milestones a lifestyle. Look back for encouragement and forward for direction.

A life spent in the past or in the future is thoroughly dissatisfying. If all hope lies in the past, life is already over. If all hope lies in the future, life never begins.

The BBC today has an interesting article by Mark Brown of British mental health magazine One in Four: Do famous role models help or hinder?

The context is that in Britain, charities and other advocates for people with mental illness have become fond of pointing to famous people, past and present, who suffered from a psychiatric disorder.

The hope is that highlighting these ‘role models’ will fight stigma and provide hope. Winston Churchill and Steven Fry are especially popular in this regard.

But, as Brown argues, these well-intentioned campaigns may not be so helpful -

“Look,” they say. “Here is a person who has achieved so much. Do not lose heart, you too can overcome your disability if you follow their example.”

…but where the inspirational figure is selected for us, and the gap between their life and ours is too great, the effect is not one of encouragement but of disillusionment – especially if their story is told in terms of personal qualities like bravery or persistence.

Knowing that a famous person has the same impairment as you can be reassuring, but only in the vague way that hearing of a successful distant relative is reassuring.

Most of us will never scale Everest, compete for our country at sports or have a showbiz career. This doesn’t mean we’ve failed.

I agree. “He’s got it, and so do you, so you can be like him” is perilously close to “He’s got it, and so do you, so you should be like him – what’s your excuse?”

That said, I think some of these celebrity examples are useful, not as generic inspirations for ‘the mentally ill’ but as concrete answers to particular attitudes. Against the simplistic view that there’s a single ‘stigma of mental illness’, I think there are many different stigmas and they have to be tackled separately.

In the case of depression, the core stigma is that depression is a weakness, a moral failing. That depressed people are soft, weak, pitiable. This attitude is specific to depression – not even bipolar disorder is seen in the same way, let alone the other diagnoses. They have their own stigmas. Depression’s is weakness.

Now this is why Churchill is a good counterexample. Not just because he’s famous or ‘great’, but because he was famously tough. He faced down Hitler. He was blood, sweat and tears. In the most famous photos of him (and they are famous, out of all his photos, because they correspond to the mental image) he is almost unsmiling – but never despairing. Just resolute.

That he experienced depression undermines the myths surrounding that condition, in a way that an entertainer or other generic celebrity wouldn’t.

by (author unknown) on Thursday May 23, 2013 via London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/john-lanchester/short-cuts

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder.

by (author unknown) on Thursday May 23, 2013 via London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/mike-jay/argument-with-myself

The Universal Basic Income hit the Washington Post again this weekend, courtesy of Mike Konczal. He focuses on left objections to the UBI proposal, ranging from its effect on gender equality to its relationship with the existing welfare state to its interaction with the struggle for workplace democracy. In the end, he emphasizes the benefits of the UBI, and insists that while we’re unlikely to see basic income in the United States anytime soon, it’s still worth “taking a moment to think Utopian”.

Matt Bruenig objects to Konczal’s characterization of the basic income as “utopian”, on the grounds that it is not something that “proposes to dramatically overhaul society into an entirely unprecedented structure that will usher in a nearly perfect world.” It is only utopian in the very weak sense that it is not currently on the political agenda as something that is likely to be enacted.

It’s certainly true that basic income is hardly utopian in its etymological sense of meaning “nowhere”. A recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique describes an experiment with UBI in an Indian village. The experiment is run by a trade union called the Self Employed Women’s Association, and it found that with just an extra $3.65 per month, “people spent more on eggs, meat and fish, and on healthcare. Children’s school marks improved in 68% of families, and the time they spent at school nearly tripled. Saving also tripled, and twice as many people were able to start a new business.” This is consistent with the results found in basic income experiments in Namibia and in 1970′s Canada.

Meanwhile, there have long been critics on the Left who criticize basic income proposals precisely for their perceived lack of utopianism. As Konczal notes, Barbara Bergmann argues that it is more important to secure broader access too specific goods like child care, health care, and education: “The fully developed welfare state deserves priority over Basic Income because it accomplishes what Basic Income does not: it guarantees that certain specific human needs will be met.” In a New Left Review essay, Göran Therborn strikes a similar tone, referring to the basic income as a “curious utopia of resignation” arising in response to welfare state retrenchment and diminished prospects for working class control over the workplace or the means of production.

From the perspective of the basic income’s leftist advocates, however, there is another way in which it can be considered a deeply utopian project. Fredric Jameson discusses two different meanings of utopia in his study of utopian politics and science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future. The first is utopia as a fully-elaborated program for the future society, which is close to Bruenig’s sense of the proposal to dramatically overhaul society. But the second is the utopian impulse, which appears across much broader domains of everyday life and politics, including even “piecemeal social democratic and ‘liberal’ reforms”. Such impulses may not themselves be the program for a utopian society, but they can point in the direction of future programmatic realizations.

The French writer André Gorz was a longtime proponent of the basic income, and is also responsible for a well-known theorization of its utopian transformative potential. In one of his early works, Strategy for Labor, he attempted to do away with the tired Left debate over “reform or revolution” and replace it with a new distinction:

Is it possible from within—that is to say, without having previously destroyed capitalism—to impose anti-capitalist solutions which will not immediately be incorporated into and subordinated to the system? This is the old question of “reform or revolution.” This was (or is) a paramount question when the movement had (or has) the choice between a struggle for reforms and armed insurrection. Such is no longer the case in Western Europe; here there is no longer an alternative. The question here revolves around the possibility of “revolutionary reforms,” that is to say, of reforms which advance toward a radical transformation of society. Is this possible?

Gorz goes on to distinguish “reformist reforms”, which subordinate themselves to the need to preserve the functioning of the existing system, from the radical alternative:

A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be. And finally, it bases the possibility of attaining its objective on the implementation of fundamental political and economic changes. These changes can be sudden, just as they can be gradual. But in any case they assume a modification of the relations of power; they assume that the workers will take over powers or assert a force (that is to say, a non-institutionalized force) strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within the system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints. They assume structural reforms.

One criticism of the basic income is that it will not be systemically viable over the long run, as people increasingly drop out of paid labor and undermine the tax base that funds the basic income in the first place. But from another point of view, this prospect is precisely what makes basic income a non-reformist reform. Thus one can sketch out a more programmatic kind of utopianism that uses the basic income as its point of departure. One of my favorite gestures in this direction is Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs’ 1986 essay, “A Capitalist Road to Communism”.

The essay begins from the proposition that Marxism’s ultimate end is not socialism, but rather a communist society that abolishes not merely exploitation (the unjust distribution of the social product relative to work performed) but also alienation: “productive activities need no longer be prompted by external rewards”.

They then go on to sketch out a scenario in which a reform instituted under capitalism leads to communism without the intermediary stage of socialist construction. This thought experiment revolves around the achievement of an unconditional, universal basic income. Suppose, they say, “that it is possible to provide everyone with a universal grant sufficient to cover his or her ‘fundamental needs’ without this involving the economy in a downward spiral. How does the economy evolve once such a universal grant is introduced?”

Their answer is that the basic income would “twist” the capitalist drive to increase productivity, such that:

Entitlement to a substantial universal grant will simultaneously push up the wage rate for unattractive, unrewarding work (which no one is now forced to accept in order to survive) and bring down the average wage rate for attractive, intrinsically rewarding work (because fundamental needs are covered anyway, people can now accept a high-quality job paid far below the guaranteed income level). Consequently, the capitalist logic of profit will, much more than previously, foster technical innovation and organizational change that improve the quality of work and thereby reduce the drudgery required per unit of product.

If you extrapolate this trend forward, you reach a situation where all wage labor is gradually eliminated. Undesirable work is fully automated, as employers feel increasing pressure to automate because labor is no longer too cheap. Meanwhile, the wage for desirable work eventually falls to zero, because people are both willing to do it for free, and able to do so due to the existence of a basic income to supply their essential needs. As Gorz puts it in a later work, the Critique of Economic Reason, certain activities “may be partially repatriated into the sphere of autonomous activities and reduce the demand for these things to be provided by external services, whether public or commercial.”

The long-run trajectory, therefore, is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced costlessly and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary co-operative activity, rather than waged work. It therefore comes to pass that the tax base for the basic income is undermined—but rather than a crisis, as in the hands of basic income critics, this becomes the path to utopia.

Consider, for example, a basic income that was linked to the size of Gross Domestic Product. We are used to a capitalist world in which the increase in material prosperity corresponds to a rise in GDP, the measured value of economic activity in money. But as wage labor comes to be replaced either by automation or voluntary activity, GDP would begin to fall, and the basic income with it. This would not lead to lowered standards of living, because the falling GDP here also denotes a decline in the cost of living. Just like the socialist state in certain versions of traditional Marxism, the basic income withers away. As van der Veen and van Parijs put it, “capitalist societies will smoothly move toward full communism.”

The capitalist road to communism is truly a utopia. Not only in the colloquial sense of a total transformation of a society, but also in its overly simplified and rationalistic picture of social evolution. As Jameson notes, utopias are defined as much by their closures and exclusions as their positive programs, as much by what they cannot say as what they can. A utopia often says more about the present in which it was written than it does about the future it depicts.

In the case of the capitalist road to communism, the things left out include the political struggles that would ensue if social development threatened to evolve the capitalist class out of existence, gradually sapping their profits and their social power. This began to manifest itself even under the meager basic income in the Namibian experiment: white landlords were deeply hostile to the basic income and denied the evidence of its benefits, perhaps because they are “afraid that the poor will gain some influence and deprive the rich, white 20 percent of the population of some of their power.” Also brushed aside are the ecological limits that might make true abundance elusive. Both of these are themes I attempted to flesh out in “Four Futures”. A third issue, which I’ve discussed a bit elsewhere, is the ingrained gender norms that may be reinforced by expanding the domain of “voluntary” labor, which often amounts the imposition of unpaid work on women. But the conceptual clarity of van der Veen and van Parijs’ rendition is enlightening in its very implausibility and incompleteness, a demonstration of the utopian impulse contained in an apparently timid policy proposal.

For the past 10 years or so, my work has been in the area of disability rights, especially from a user perspective.

One of the great privileges of that work is observing the reactions of people – disabled and non-disabled people alike – when they are introduced to the Social Model of Disability, and how it affects their attitudes and everyday life in the subsequent weeks, months and years.

To recap: there are various models of disability. The two most common are the “medical” model and the “social” model.

The medical model focuses on the medical condition of a person – their impairment; their condition; their disease. And it looks for ways for these to be diagnosed, categorised and ultimately cured. What flows from the medical model of disability is typically a focus on someone’s physical or mental condition rather than the person themselves.

The social model of disability puts the person at the centre. It says that a person is disabled by society around them – not just physical barriers such as steps or revolving doors, but also by attitudes towards disabled people (such as pity, charity or fear). Though a disabled person still has an impairment (i.e. in the broadest sense their condition), what makes them disabled is not their condition, it’s society.

Many important things flow from this shift in thinking, and it’s how people approach this shift in thinking that’s such a great privilege to observe.

(For anyone who is interested in more about different models of disability and their implications this guide is an excellent introduction, and I’ve written at further length about this here.)

Why am I blogging on this now? It’s because there’s a fascinating debate at the moment about how the social model of disability (or other models) apply, or not, or some version of it, specifically to the area of mental health.

The latest manifestation of this debate is prompted by the division of clinical psychology (DCP), part of the British Psychological Society, who will be publishing a statement that calls for a “paradigm shift” in how mental health is understood.

(Update: here’s the statement (pdf)).

It’s great that this professional body is engaging in the debate in this way. It draws on a significant literature that mental health users/survivors and others have been writing for a considerable time – see, for example, this paper from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation from 2010 or pretty much anything on the social model from the Centre for Disability Studies at Leeds. This is also a significant theme that runs through the literature on recovery and mental health (such as these papers from the Implementing Recovery through Organisational Change project).

It will be interesting to see how the debate progresses, and good on DCP for going with it.

In their usual subtle contribution to the issue at hand, the Guardian’s sub-editors have called this a “battle” between the British Psychological Society and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. To ensure maximum helpfulness, the Guardian also poses the question “Do we need to change the way we are thinking about mental illness?” and asks people from both “sides” to argue either “yes” (clinical psychologist) or “no” (clinical psychiatrist).

In understanding this to be a debate that perhaps can’t be characterised in such black and white terms, below are 3 principles I modestly suggest it will be useful to keep in mind:

1. It’s not an either/or between a social and medical way of thinking about mental health – these things are complicated, endlessly fascinating and subject to however people choose to perceive them from whatever their perspective might happen to be at any particular time
2. Let’s ensure that all people have a chance to contribute to and define this debate: it’s particularly important – paramount, actually – that people with mental health conditions themselves are central to the debate, with professionals, family, carers and others all contributing
3. We mustn’t forget that these debates – genuinely fascinating and important as they are – don’t always have an immediate impact on the lives of people with mental health conditions and their day-to-day experiences of public services. Alongside the theoretical debates, there is a lot we can all practically do to improve people’s experience of mental health services and their lives as part of their local communities.

Eighteen months ago I was sitting in the North Stand with my dad ahead of our game against Sunderland when David Gill took to the microphone. He announced that they were going to do something unprecedented, really trying to hype the occasion up, with Sir Alex Ferguson standing next to him. “Oh wow, they’re going to let the manager give a speech,” I said sarcastically to my dad, totally bemused by Gill making a big song and dance. Then Gill announced that the stand we were sitting in had been named the Sir Alex Ferguson stand, in commemoration of his 25 years as our manager. Not wanting to come across as a drama queen but it took my breath away and gave me goosebumps. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that they would mark the occasion in such a way. Ferguson, seemingly even more shocked than all of us, then took to the microphone and was audibly moved.

After the game, Ferguson commented on how much it meant to him. “I was really emotional,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t expect that. I have to thank the club, it’s fantastic of them to do that.”

Apparently Sir Alex Ferguson was planning on breaking the news of his retirement over the mic after our game today. Given how gobsmacked I was to hear of the renamed stand, I can only imagine my, and everyone else’s, reaction to learning he was retiring in such a way. Having spoken in his last programme notes about looking forward to next season, I assumed we had at least another year of him left. But as the news started trickling through from journalists earlier this week that his retirement was on the cards, you gradually had some time to adjust to what was happening. Imagine listening to his standard post-championship speech and having that bombshell dropped on us.

Today is going to be a difficult day. We are going to say goodbye to a man who has shaped our lives, who has brought us immeasurable joy, who has transformed our club from a sleeping giant to a world force in football, who felt so strongly connected and indebted to Sir Matt Busby and his philosophy, and who has fought tooth and nail to make our club the best year after year. Maybe heartbreaking is an exaggeration, but I am truly gutted he is going, and I don’t think there are any words to adequately describe how it feels. For those of us who are fairly in tune with our emotional side, this afternoon is going to be a struggle!

My dad always told me to “bottle up” the feelings on big occasions. The best moments, the best emotions, try and bottle them up. Try and save them away somewhere you can relive it and feel it again upon reflection whenever you want. Well today is going to be full of those moments. Walking up to the ground for the last time with Fergie as our manager, taking your seat, applauding the manager and players on to the pitch, singing songs about Ferguson, (hopefully) celebrating goals, watching the trophy being lifted and the lap of honour. I’m not going to want to start the journey there as much as I’m not going to want to leave at the end. This is the end of an era, an absolutely magnificent time of our lives, and I’m going to miss every minute of it.

I’m going to miss seeing him marching up to the touchline, turning to the Stretford End and geeing up the crowd during big games. I’m going to miss his doddery old man shuffle to celebrate an important goal. I’m going to miss him going fucking mental at the officials when they’ve missed a bad tackle on one of our lads or a handball in the box. I’m going to miss him singing along to our chants on the day the title is won. I’m going to miss the security of knowing everything will be alright in the end because we’ve got him in charge.

Only United fans get it, rival fans won’t even be able to imagine what an impact he’s had on our lives, and there’s nothing I can say here to do justice to the man or his career.

Every single one of us, loves Alex Ferguson.

———–
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Gary Neville in The Daily Mail:

It was a Saturday morning game for the youth team at the old Cliff training ground. I was lucky. I was in a side that had Paul Scholes, David Beckham and Nicky Butt, who had scored a hat-trick, and at half-time we were 3-0 up against Chester.

We were all 16 or 17 so we must have felt pretty pleased with ourselves. That was until we got to the dressing room. Sir Alex Ferguson was there. The room went quiet. It was not a surprise for him to come to watch, but on this occasion he had decided he wanted to take the half-time team talk. And he set about us.

There was something he had seen, maybe a slackness or an over-confidence, that he wanted to address. And he let us know about it. We would have been terrified even if he had not been the manager. He had an aura, as did his assistant, Archie Knox. You would hear those deep Scottish accents and they would walk into a room and everything would go quiet immediately.

It has been a momentous week with Sir Alex announcing his intention to retire at the end of the season, and though we all knew it had to come, it is still hard to process. It is impossible to identify exactly what has made him unique in football, such a gigantic force. There are many complex reasons why he is as successful as he is.

But a few memories do come back from the years I spent playing under him that perhaps provide some clues. and that team talk at the Cliff is one. It tells you so much about Sir Alex; about his work ethic for one thing. Both he and his assistants would work every single minute God sent with every single footballer at that club. It was not just youth team games he would come to watch. When we were 14-years-old he would even come down to watch us train as schoolboys on a Thursday night.

Back then we trained in a gym – the coldest gym I have known, more like a freezer – and sometimes Archie would take the session. You wouldn’t ever hear of it now, the manager coming to watch kids training and his assistant coaching them. Archie would stand in the hall and you would pass the ball at him with a sidefoot. And he would say: ‘Take that ball back, son! Drive that pass.’ It also demonstrates Sir Alex’s passion for developing the talent of young people, the fact that he has always seen it as a duty to bring through home-grown players.

And then there is his attitude, his absolute determination to reach the highest standards. Even though we were 3-0 up, he had seen something in that game that he wanted to correct and it mattered deeply to him. He wanted to mould us into what he wanted in terms of attitude, spirit, flair, skill, mentality and being a winner. And, yes, there was an element of fear about his presence, though people who think that he ruled by fear or was constantly intimidating people do not know him.

But in those days, when we were kids, there was fear. Or you could call it respect for someone who was in charge of our football destinies, appropriate deference to an elder. Because fear hampers you but he never inhibited us, never bullied us. He was teaching us to be better. And we believed in him and would have hung on every word he said.

Later, as a group of us progressed to the first team, he would keep teaching us about what it meant to be a team. He was always impressing on us that we should look after our own. It was the upbringing he had in Glasgow, that sense that you all work bloody hard together but that you stick together through that.

So I can remember a couple of occasions when individual players had got into trouble and he was angrier with the team rather than the individuals concerned. His reasoning was: ‘why did you let your team-mate get into trouble? Why weren’t you there to protect him? You’re all responsible for not looking after him. You make sure he doesn’t get into trouble.’

He very rarely fines footballers because he does not believe in it as a means of discipline. But often when he did, it would be the whole squad who were fined because he believed we had failed to meet those standards of collective responsibility. On one occasion when Roy Keane had been wrongly arrested – he was subsequently freed after a night in the cells and no charges were ever brought – the manager was furious and tore into us.

‘Why didn’t you ring me?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this was happening? You’ve all gone home and got into your beds and left one of your team-mates on his own! Why didn’t any of you think to tell me?’

A few years later, when I was captain and a similar incident had taken place, I questioned him in a team meeting as to whether he should fine the whole squad. It was a situation where I thought the senior players, including myself, should bear the responsibility rather than the younger ones. He pulled me aside afterwards and said: ‘Never question me again in front of the players.’ His belief was that if one falls, we all suffer. He wanted to instil that into his players, to drive into them the sense of solidarity he so values.

But the idea he is somebody who is continually abrasive is absolutely incorrect. He is a very relaxed individual, somebody who until a few years ago would join in warm-up drills, where two players try to get the ball back from eight players who are passing it around.

He could talk to his players on all manner of different subjects, far beyond football, and the myth he is someone always looking for confrontation is absolutely wrong. Training had to be hard, it had to be 100 per cent. But it was a relaxed environment, with fun and enjoyment because for him it was important the players were not inhibited. Everything was about expressing yourself and taking risks.

He has never been a conservative coach. His mantra is that you had to take risks to win football matches. He wants his players to have freedom to take players on and beat people and believe wholeheartedly in the Manchester United way.

Manchester United cannot play a 4-5-1, deep in their own box, getting behind the ball. Manchester United have to attack. He embraced that. He would never turn around and say: ‘You’re 1-0 up so now shut up shop.’ He was always giving out positive messages. ‘Go and get a second goal and kill the game.’ And when you had the second goal it was: ‘Think about the goal difference. Get that third goal.’

When you try to identify Sir Alex’s greatest achievements it becomes an impossible task. As soon as you decide on one, you come up with another that surpasses it.

Some have spoken this week about his ability to keep building winning teams in the last decade in the face of new challenges from Chelsea and then Manchester City. As a United fan, winning that first Premier League title in 1993 to remove that burden from the club, the team and the fans, would have to rank as his greatest accomplishment.

You cannot call yourself one of the best clubs in the world if you can’t win the championship in your country for 26 years. He had made Manchester United great again. The floodgates opened from there. It re-energised the club and the way players and fans felt about themselves.

But from my player’s perspective, winning the Treble, an unprecedented achievement, with seven players who had come through the youth ranks as the core of the squad, was his moment of personal utopia. That is when you sense he must have felt: ‘That’s why I was in that gym on a Thursday night watching a 15-year-old David Beckham and Paul Scholes passing a football. Because I knew 10 years later they’d be lifting the European Cup. That’s what I came down from Aberdeen to do.’

I’ve written much over the past couple of weeks about the DWP’s apparent determination to persecute unemployed benefit-claimants by forcing them to undergo activities and tests which are totally unsuitable or even fake.

That this trend reflects a deliberate vendetta rather than mere incompetence is something that appears inescapably obvious while at the same time suggesting some kind of ‘conspiracy theory’ that some would dismiss as far-fetched. But I’ve come across evidence that this is exactly how the DWP regards claimants.

I’ve been reading some information released by the DWP as part of a response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request in 2011 – just over a year after the coalition government took office.

This information includes guidance documents to Jobcentre Plus (JCP) personnel that reveal exactly how the government regards benefit claimants – and the process of cutting off their benefits: as an ‘achievement‘ and a ‘positive outcome‘.

Achievement

In a section of the guidance titled “05 Completing the MF47 statement“, the DWP instructs JCP ‘advisors’ about how to handle new information that is gathered during a ‘compliance interview’:

8. New and substantial information is defined as:
New – a different offence type than the specific FRF given for the Customer Compliance case;
Substantial – will have sufficient grounds to raise a new FRF that would have the potential to achieve a sanction.

The ‘potential to achieve a sanction’. You only achieve something you’re aiming for – if it’s accidental or negative (in your eyes), you don’t ‘achieve’ it.

This is substantiated by further guidance that tells JCP advisors to pressure claimants to sign incriminating statements agreeing that they falsely claimed benefits (whether this has to be true or not is not mentioned by the form) because without the signed form the funds cannot be reclaimed:

Small overpayment statement from customer
4. In order for small overpayments of £65.00 and under to be recovered from the customer, the following exact form of words must be used on the MF47 statement:
 “I admit I knowingly gave false information” or “I admit I knowingly failed to declare a change of circumstance” (as applicable).
5. Ask the customer to sign and date the statement immediately after the last word. The CCO must witness and date the statement and score through any unused parts to ensure no additions to the statement can be made once the customer has signed it.

Remember, this is just an interview. Nothing has been investigated or proven. But the advisor is told that the claimant must sign one of the two statements because otherwise the money cannot be claimed back.

This is already twisted enough, but we’re not done yet. The DWP has a specific description for ending claimants’ benefits.

A ‘positive outcome’

In a section of the guidance titled “Recording Outcomes“, the DWP tells advisors what constitutes a ‘positive outcome’:

Claiming a positive outcome
17. A positive outcome can be recorded when:
 a customer reports a change in circumstances to a Customer Compliance Officer (CCO) at the interview that leads to benefit being adjusted or a change to the amount of the CCG – See example 2 Appendix 5
 following a telephone call to arrange the CCG visit the customer withdraws the application;
 following receipt of a Customer Compliance interview letter and prior to the interview the customer contacts the CCO or Customer Compliance section and notifies a pre-existing change in circumstances leading to a change in benefit – See example 1 Appendix 5
 at an ineffective visit the CCO gathers information for example, property is empty which allows the DM to make a decision to reduce or disallow benefit;
 a customer fails to attend two interviews and the case is referred to the DM to suspend payment of benefit. The customer does not make any contact within one calendar month and their claim to benefit is terminated;

Withdrawn applications – ‘positive’. Circumstances that allow benefits to be ‘reduced or disallowed‘ – ‘positive’. If a benefit can be suspended – great. If the claimant misses enough appointments to allow his/her benefit to be terminated altogether – fantastic, Christmas has come early!

In March, the Guardian revealed that JCPs are being set targets for ‘sanctioning’ the benefits of people who will have nothing if their payments are stopped (no wonder Foodbanks are having to provide food to vast, record numbers of people in crisis).

The DWP denied that any targets were being set, in spite of clear evidence that they were. But now we have it straight from the horse’s mouth – from the DWP’s own guidance notes to its JCP operatives: sanctions are good, great. Positive. Something to be ‘achieved‘ – something to be aimed for and actively worked toward.

The Guardian today claimed that the unemployed are treated as sub-human under this government. The DWP’s own documents show beyond doubt that this is no mere accident or ‘unintended consequence’.

Today’s Gloucester Citizen carries a remarkable story about “husband and wife councillors who watch CCTV of kids on their living room telly”.

As the paper reports, “Hardwicke Parish Council duo Fran and Lyn Welbourne have been so pro-active in monitoring the village youth shelter that they have the live footage beamed right into their home.”

It beggars belief that someone thought it appropriate to allow Councillors to have public CCTV of a youth centre piped into their living rooms.

These people are not trained employees, nor licensed CCTV operators. It smacks of taxpayer-funded voyeurism and will do nothing to actually tackle the problem that is causing concern. It would be more effective to have the councillors actually stood at the youth shelter, if they are so keen to keep an eye on what is going on.

As we have repeatedly highlighted, CCTV does little to deter or prevent crime, and at best displaces the activity a short distance.

Perhaps the Councillors should spend some of their evidently quiet evenings asking why there is a problem rather than indulging their new hobby of sofa snooping.

The 14 previously unreleased tracks tacked on to Sony Legacy’s new reissue of Shuggie Otis’s cult-classic 1974 album Inspiration Information, most of the extra material collected as a second disc under the title Wings of Love, remind us of what a singular talent has lain half-hidden for most of the past 40 years.

The son of Johnny Otis, the remarkable bandleader, songwriter, vibraphone player, talent scout, record producer, disc-jockey, civil rights activist, local politician and author who died just over a year ago at the age of 90, Shuggie made his first trip from California to London in August 1972, arriving as an 18-year-old guitarist with his father’s rhythm and blues troupe. Before they played a memorable gig at the 100 Club, I interviewed Johnny for the Melody Maker and asked him to tell me how Shuggie’s talent had emerged.

In 1967, he said, a fallow period in his own career came to an end when a promoter offered him a gig. He needed to put a band together, and there wasn’t much money involved, so he asked his son to make up the numbers. “Shuggie knew T-Bone Walker and all them guys as a little boy — he was always under my chair, and I didn’t realise how much of an impression they’d made on him,” he said. “So we got a show together, and lo and behold the young white audience turned up, asking me for tunes that they shouldn’t know about!” And they responded to Shuggie’s prodigious talent — as, soon, did Al Kooper, who recorded with him and got him his first deal with Columbia Records. Before long he was turning down an invitation to join the Rolling Stones.

Shuggie is 59 years old now, and turned up in London again before Christmas to play at the Jazz Cafe, receiving this rather lukewarm review from Dorian Lynskey in the Guardian. But, great blues-rock guitarist as he undoubtedly is, his most fruitful environment has always been the recording studio, where he can overdub himself on the many instruments at his command and weave gorgeous tapestries around his unassuming but memorable songs.

Inspiration Information was his third album, following Here Comes Shuggie Otis! (1969) and Freedom Flight (1971), the latter introducing the world to the sublime “Strawberry Letter 23″, which became a hit for the Brothers Johnson. Shuggie claims that the subsequent silence was not of his own volition. “There were little lapses here and there, little breaks from time to time,” he says in the sleeve notes to the new package, “but I never stopped playing, writing, recording. I was still going round to record companies, still pitching my tapes.”

The conventional wisdom is that he had a lot in common with Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder, and echoes of his music would permeate that of Prince. The third album’s best known tracks are the title song, where his slow funk resembles that of Sly without the dark undertow, and “Aht Uh Mi Hed”, whose cool organ stabs remind me of Timmy Thomas’s immortal “Why Can’t We Live Together”. It’s followed by “Happy House”, which lasts no more than 1min 21sec, probably for the very good reason that it doesn’t need to be any longer to make its point. The album finishes in an unorthodox way with three modest but charming home-made instrumentals, mostly  keyboards and the drum machine Shuggie so loves. “XL-30″ and “Pling!” are mood pieces, almost tone poems: like an R&B musician’s equivalent of “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter” from the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile. The concluding “Not Available” is a lovely exercise in bright-eyed funk.

The tracks on the second disc, gathered under the title Wings of Love, were recorded — with one outstanding exception — between 1975 and 1990, and although most of the work was again done by Shuggie, they are rather more elaborate in approach and texture, also making use of strings and horns, which he arranged. The song “Wings of Love” is an 11 and a half minute epic ballad from a 1990 session, bookended by ocean sound effects, and “Give Me a Chance”, recorded three years earlier, sounds like a great lost disco classic, as if bathed in the light of a giant glitter ball, with a raging old-school rock-out finale on which Shuggie’s guitar battles with his Hammond B3.

The one that really pins my ears back, though, is “Black Belt Sheriff”, a spellbinding solo performance for voice and acoustic guitar recorded during a concert 13 years ago in Long Beach, the city from where his father broadcast his influential R&B radio show on KFOX in the 1950s. It’s a six and a half minute reverie of self-examination in the form of a conversation with a friend (possibly one of his brothers, to whom it is dedicated), the singer’s thoughts drifting through the dreamscape of a Los Angeles night, with glimpses of cars, bars, girls and celebrities as he vows to “give up my dreams and transgressions”. There’s a fine bottleneck interlude, followed by a tantalisingly enigmatic closure: “I’d like to stay and tell you what it’s all about / Hear you play, brother, laugh, sing and shout / But I got to go turn around again / So I’ll see you soon…” This has nothing to do with his mastery of studio overdubbing technology or his ability to play many different instruments. It’s his equivalent of Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” or Marley’s “Redemption Song”: the artist stands alone and unadorned, his true power revealed.

* The portrait of Shuggie Otis was made 1971 by his wife, Teri, who happens to be the daughter of the great composer and bandleader Gerald Wilson. It’s taken from the insert in the Inspiration Information/Wings of Love 2-CD set.

When I first wrote this post in 2012, you couldn’t buy a potato barrel outside the UK. (As far as I could tell). Now, nearly a year later, that’s changed.

You can buy a potato barrel at Amazon.com — two different kinds, actually. Beyond that, there are several grow bags and containers to grow potatoes in.

As a general concept, growing potatoes in a container seems to make complete sense. We’ll look at a potato barrel or two (and the mixed reviews). And also how some gardeners are making their own DIY versions.

Wooden Potato Barrel

This is the first one I saw last summer. It’s a beauty to look at.

You can buy it now in the U.S. at Amazon for $140.

It was (and is) being sold by the UK garden retailers, like Primrose.

It’s made of wood, assembles in minutes, and holds up to 4 plants. Is it as good as the picture? The one U.S. Amazon review is negative, but the 6 reviews on Primrose are more positive.

The reviews note this “potato barrel” doesn’t have a bottom. Instead, it’s a grow bag with wooden slats (connected by wire) that wrap around to form the barrel shape.

Plastic Potato Barrel

Compared with the wooden planter, this plastic potato barrel is cheaper. It sells for 95 bucks (not including shipping) at Amazon. In the UK, at least at the garden site (withoutPrimrose it’s WAY less expensive. So maybe the U.S. price will drop down the road?

Either way, it’s made of polypropylene. (A plastic used to used these days to make everything from chairs to the Tic Tac box lids!)

The reviews are pretty strong. Amazon has one negative review, but the 94 reviews on Primrose average 4 out of 5 stars. In general, people say it’s a bit tough to assemble, but works well.

The sales copy says this planter holds up to 5 potato plants. That’s 21 gallons (80 liters) of compost.

Headed to the U.S.?

This potato barrel looks new to me. I didn’t see it anywhere last summer, and I don’t see in the U.S. yet. BUT if the planters above made it to the U.S. in the last 9 months, maybe this one will be here soon.

I hope so.

It’s intriguing because the price looks lower, and the reviews are very strong. Five stars out of five at GreenFinger.com. Reviewers note that it’s easy to put together.

It also holds 5 potato plants and 24 gallons (90 liters) of compost.

DIY? Find Some Containers!

Timothy Hurst built his own potato barrels and wrote about them on Green Upgrader.

He says they reduce weeds, pests, fungi, and eliminate shovel damage to potatoes.

He started by getting containers, like these old wooden barrels. “Just about any 2- to 3-foot tall container will work,” he says.

Pick a container you can drill drain holes in, and clean it with a mild bleach solution, as he puts it, “to get out the nasties.”

How To Plant Potatoes

This will apply whether you buy a potato barrel like the ones above, or make one for yourself, like like Timothy’s DIY potato planter.

“Fill the bottom of your container with about 6 inches of loose planting mix,” says Timothy.

“Add seed potatoes on the layer of soil… You can use the whole potato but I like to cut the potatoes into 1- to 2-inch cubes for planting.”

“Loosely backfill the potatoes with another 6 inches of your soil and compost mix. Then water.”

How To Grow More Potato Sprouts

Timothy’s next step — whatever barrel, bucket, or bag you’re using — is what can give you 100 POUNDS of potatoes in one container!

You have to wait for the plants to have 6 to 8 inches of foliage.

Then, says Timothy, “add another layer of soil mix covering half to three-quarters of the visible stems and foliage.”

Repeat this with every 6 to 8 inches of foliage growth.

You’ll be creating more potato sprouts, Timothy says, “as the plants grow up toward the top of the barrel.”

Harvesting Potatoes!

Think ahead about 10 weeks to harvest time. This is when your potato barrel planting (whether it’s in a barrel, an old wood bucket, or even a bag) really pays off.

There’s no shoveling your potatoes out of the ground! No shovel? No damage!

“When the plants flower and start to yellow, the potatoes should be ready to harvest. ” says Timothy.

“Carefully dig down with your hands to inspect the top layer.” Do the potatoes feel ready?

“Dump the barrel out on a tarp and inspect your bounty.”

You reap what you sow.

Some Potato Planting Tips

Here are a few more potato barrel tips from Timothy.
- Keep a few potatoes to use as seeds next year.
- Bush beans are a great companion plant.
- Try growing potatoes in sawdust instead of soil.

For much more detail and even more tips, don’t miss his story on Green Upgrader!

The post The Potato Barrel: How to Plant Potatoes appeared first on Bombay Outdoors.

Football serves an odd function – and if you are reading this there’s a good chance that you really care about it. I am endlessly fascinated by what football represents to those of us who become so invested in the outcome of a few men kicking a ball around that it is transformed into drama, beauty, frustration, sadness, joy, love, hate (more’s the pity), escape, togetherness. Family.

Manchester United are often called a family club – a massive global enterprise, at the centre of which, administratively at least, are a bunch of the same people that have been around long enough to remember the first Sir Alex Ferguson title win.

[Of course, United are literally a family club, in the worst possible way, given that the club is run by a family of financial parasites, leeching millions away to line their own nest eggs, where presumably they nest their next generation who will grow up to do a leveraged buyout of a club in a developing market somewhere.]

Like all football clubs, United are also something families share, passed down from mother or father to son or daughter, from your uncle who cares about football when your dad doesn’t, or your best friend’s dad’s wife, since this is the modern age. Football has long been regarded as a place where it is acceptable for men to show emotion, letting out the tears that are borne of a deeper loss, but that manifest in the delight or devastation you experience because of the good or not-so-good kicking of a ball.

Somewhere in this mix, where the human unconscious is given an escape valve for emotions that can’t be expressed elsewhere, profound attachments form. And there can’t be many sporting attachments greater than that between United fans and Alex.

Forget the Sir, not just because it’s a weird relic of the feudal age, but also because it’s a latter day addition, it’s a millennial thing, arriving in time to make a handy three letter acronym for the internet age. Before he was Sir Alex, he was Fergie or Alec, and he represented something to me, to us. He was our family club’s dad.

It started straight away. Alex came in and replaced ‘Big Ron’, an avuncular, friendly figure (how little we knew…), and he was quite scary. I was nine, so I didn’t have a drinking culture, but United did and Ferguson put a stop to it, making the club professional, hitting some stumbling blocks, but building, always building.

I never lost faith in him, but I was only 12 when there were “three years of excuses” and living exiled in Zimbabwe, climbing rocks and preoccupied with working out if I could design a hoverboard. By the time I really really cared about football, he became the best dad ever, buying Eric Cantona and winning the league in the year I started sixth form college.

Ferguson brought through a whole generation of kids, and the surrogate father bit was given a whole new dimension. Those of the class of 1992 who became the heart of Ferguson’s team must surely be the players with the deepest relationship with him – David became the black sheep, Ryan, Paul and Gary stayed loyal. Little brother Philip was sent to live up the road with Uncle David so he could come back a few years later and tell us it would all be ok.

Then came the knighthood, and with it the passage to grand-parenthood. Cristiano Ronaldo certainly needed a father figure, and another generation removed, Sir Alex became one. We all watched on, as Fergie became an elder statesman, this great manager becoming the greatest of all time in front of our grateful eyes.

Like all families, there was betrayal and tragedy. He sided with the Glazers rather than the supporters, perhaps because he felt it was in the fans’ best interests to act as a buffer between them and us. Perhaps for less noble reasons. Fergie said that if we didn’t like it we could go and support Chelsea. (Or – we could go to our rooms without any supper, as it were).

Like all dads he embarrassed us, not with his bad dancing – the fist pumped goal celebrations were joyous, not cringeworthy – but his ruthlessness could grate on those with a more sensitive bearing. Jaap Stam, Ruud van Nistelrooy, the weird goalkeeping blind spot. But as you grow up you learn that your parents aren’t perfect, and nor is your football manager.

I’m in my 30s now, and I try to keep the level of emotional investment in men, with a certain colour top, who kick a football, to a manageable level. But Fergie pre-dates my attempts to do that.

I’m so sad that he’s not United’s manager any more, even though I’m happy he gets to retire. I didn’t cry at the montages or the announcement, but I did cry when I recorded Rant Cast and I tried to list all his positive qualities as a human being. A day later, I realise why that was the trigger for me

It’s because it’s complicated. Fergie has been ruthless, and leaves our club registered in the Cayman Islands. He hurt a lot of people. But that’s not the full story.

There has been so much human goodness – the generosity to those in need, the support to other managers in hard times. He is a trade union man, after all. The thousands of letters of condolence and congratulations, done without fanfare.

And whilst there have been times of apparent obstinacy, and masses of footballing frustration, Sir Alex has brought joy to those of us lucky enough to be United fans that no other club anywhere in the land has been even nearly slightly close to experiencing.

I love my dad, even though he is not perfect, and I love Ferguson, even though he is not either. So, thank you, Alex, for dedicating your life to doing something which has made the fans so happy, so often. It’s been absolutely amazing and I honestly cannot believe that it is over.

I understand that impermanence is the fundamental nature of the universe, but I sort of thought you’d be the exception. I am going to remember the joy you brought for the rest of my life, and the pain will fade.

Most of all I will try to remember a mantra I try to live by, something which gives perspective when that inevitable impermanence shows itself: don’t be sad that it is over, be glad that it happened.