“Great British Energy” refers to Starmer’s promise of “A new, ­publicly owned green energy company to bring down bills.”

Where to begin with this nonsense? Well let’s correct the terminology first. What this refers to (the “green energy” bit) can only be power (electricity) generation. Britain’s energy mix will continue to be substantially reliant on hydrocarbons for transportation, home heating and a number of other oil/gas specific applications:

The use of renewables for power generation is significant and rising, but it represents little more than 5% of the country’s overall Energy consumption. ( see graphic above).

The only significant “green” options for electricity generation are Wind and (possibly) Solar. The private sector invests in Windpower subject to the returns being adequate. Government can encourage this with subsidy but the value of the electricity generated is broadly determined on the open market.

A “publicly owned” Windpower and/or Solar company for power generation would have no significant advantage over the private sector. It’s generating costs (including the very high upfront capital costs of the turbines) would be little different to the private sector. The need not to pay dividends would benefit operating margins but in truth the effect of this would be marginal. To “bring down bills” is another term for “subsidy”.

Government can subsidise electricity prices if it chooses to but why would they do that ? Most of our expenditure on energy is on petrol for our cars and gas to heat our homes. Labour’s “green energy company” cannot have any effect on the prices of these essentials. And the claim that there will be overall lower bills is a chimera.

Around 30% of Britain’s electricity is produced from renewables by private sector companies. Assuming these are not nationalised the private sector will remain the dominant renewables provider for a long time to come. “Great British Energy” would be a minor player in electricity production for a very long time and an insignificant contributor to the country’s overall energy mix. It’s smoke and mirrors.

During the first half I wondered if Postecoglou had handed over to someone who actually knows how to coach a football team. We even seemed to have tactics to counter the opposition. A first this season during which in most games Spurs have followed an utterly predictable “High line” attacking “plan”. It worked for ten games when we found ourselves unbeaten and top of the table. Then opponents rumbled us with Chelsea turning us over at home and we finished with nine men! And we are finishing the season not just trophy-less (again) but with some of the fans caring more about abusing Arsenal than cheering for Spurs.

The blame culture is rife at N17 with the man who gave us the “country’s best stadium” unfairly in the firing line. The truth is that Postecoglou is no Wenger, or Ferguson or even Pochettino. He’s not the saviour, just out of his depth – inflexible and tactically naive.

Dan Levy has given Spurs a great venue, a sound business and a decent squad. But the blame culture attacks him and some of the players rather than a coaching team that broadcasts in advance its cunning plan for every game (“Same again”).

We didn’t fall apart last night but Pep Guardiola finessed City’s tactics at half time and that was enough. As versus Chelsea in November a violent tackle opened the door for the better second half team to win comfortably. At Seven Sisters station on my way home a group of thuggish fans were shouting abusive anti-Arsenal chants. Is that the best we can do?

I visited the “John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum” in Boston yesterday. It’s a magnificent building designed by the late I.M.Pei at a prime location overlooking the city of Boston and is the nation’s official memorial to President John F. Kennedy.

For many of my generation JFK was what made politics interesting. Kennedy was the first President to have been born in the 20th Century and in my early teens I related to him in a way I couldn’t to the old guard.

JFK was multi talented but it was his speechmaking that truly excelled and probably won him (narrowly) the presidency. There was, as you’d expect, a fair bit of Blarney in what he said! The genes will out. Listen to any of his speeches and admire the cadences and the rhetorical balance, for example this from his inaugural address:

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Kennedy worked with Ted Sorenson on that speech and it’s perfect. It’s like a brilliant piece of theatre, or music. At the Museum it’s the first of the many video displays there to be in colour. A clever bit of symbolism about the new era Kennedy promised.

One of my favourite political quotes is “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” a remark made during the 1988 United States vice presidential debate by Democratic nominee Lloyd Bentsen to Republican nominee Senator Dan Quayle in response to Quayle’s mentioning the name of JFK. The point is, of course, that nobody could be.

Kennedy was in office for just over 1000 days – a period not without its challenges ! Had he completed two full terms how different would the United States and the world have been? This is the great unknown of 1960s politics. Obviously Vietnam being the key issue. Also in the inaugural address he says this:

“To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.”

This is a barely disguised commitment to counter the “tyranny” of Communism which suggests JFK could have escalated America’s involvement in Vietnam as his successor did. But who knows?

JFK’s father Joe had been less than complimentary about Britain when Ambassador in London during the war. Clearly Kennedy’s reference to “colonial control” is a reference to the imperialism of Britain and, in Indochina, France. Suffice to say he looked his happiest visiting Ireland the country of his heritage – and one that had ceased to be a colony!

As you walk through the Museum you follow Kennedy’s life before and in the White House. But , of course, you know the terrible ending that is approaching. You enter a darkened corridor where the only display is the date, illuminated in red in small type “22nd November 1963” on one wall. The only other displays are small screens showing Walter Cronkite’s announcement of JFK’s death:

This is astonishingly well done. The Museum is about Kennedy’s life and achievements not about his assassination, (Nor about his adventurous love life for that matter!)

My memories of JFK are about the good (Cuba, Civil Rights, inspirational leadership) far more than the bad and ugly (Vietnam, the assassination). He was irreplaceable and hasn’t been replaced. Was he a Saint and always right ? Of course not. Was he in a different league from some of the minnows who succeeded him in the Oval Office! Indisputably.

This is a very twenty-first century take on Gatsby. We seem to demand more from musical theatre than just the telling of a story, memorable songs and competent “appropriate” staging. We want glitz, and glamour and pizzazz in spades. And we certainly get it in the Broadway Theatre’s “The Great Gatsby”.

The quite young audience seemed to love it when I went this week and that has to be good. With so many other claims on their attention to bring the millennials to live theatre is terrific.

Scott Fitzgerald, however, is about more than storytelling however well he does it. “The Great Gatsby” is a deeply cynical novel about the haves and the have nots. – about the loaded and the struggling. To stop struggling and advance in that world you can’t be overburdened with a social conscience. Clear echoes of today in that reality !

The new staging of Gatsby gave us the sex and booze and drugs and privilege. But it also gave us the rock and roll, at least the interwar years version of it. It was loud and brash and almost entirely unmemorable. Nobody left the theatre humming the songs – Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe it wasn’t!

R&H tackled difficult subjects, placed ballet in their works and gave us melody after melody. Stephen Sondheim did the same as did Andrew Lloyd Webber. “ The Great Gatsby did none of this – it resembled a Juke Box Musical with no songs we knew in the Juke Box.

So entertainment in the modern style with panache, special effects, superb dance and staging. The youthful audience stood screaming at the end. I wonder how many of them will now buy the novel?

Friends will know that among my obsessions (some would say “petty obsessions) is my extreme aversion to the word “iconic”. Check the work of decent writers of the last two hundred or so so years from (say) Jane Austen, via Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde to Noel Coward and any Booker prize winner and there isn’t an “iconic” to be seen. It’s a modern day neologism used by the vocabulary challenged and hard of thinking. Anyway I thought I’d rant on in more detail about it but found that the American author Garry Berman had done it for me. Here’s what he said:

“I’ve been a professional writer for a long time. I write books, articles, short stories, screenplays, etc. I pay attention to words — not just the words I use, but words that others use as well. And I’ve become convinced that the word “iconic” is now the most overused word in the English language — or, at least, the most overused adjective.

Whether you agree or disagree, please note that this isn’t a scientific finding on my part — no polls, linguistic research, or algorithms were used (or harmed) in the writing of this piece. However, it is the result of extensive observation and scrutiny of our mass media in recent years. And, while I do a lot of writing, I am in no way promoting myself as any kind of Language Police or Grammar Gestapo. I make more errors with my own writing than I care to admit. But I just need to express this…

I will bet you any sum of imaginary money that you will hear the word “iconic” spoken or printed several times this very day, probably within less than an hour after you either sit down to watch TV, listen to the radio or online podcast, skim your news feed, or however you choose to interact with the world. The word seems to have become the favorite go-to adjective of newscasters/reporters, commercials, documentaries, magazines, newspapers, and wherever the English language is found in our culture. I can also guarantee that if you scan down the column of headlines and articles on the Yahoo! or Microsoft Edge home pages on any given day, you will find “iconic” staring back at you two or three times, even before clicking on the actual story.

Yes, in our American culture’s collective laziness and semi-literacy, the thesaurus has apparently become as extinct as the dinosaur (and some might even mistake “thesaurus” for the name of a dinosaur). The result being that we now find nearly every landmark, bridge, skyscraper, bakery, book, film, song, fashion style — you name it — described as “iconic,” even when the subject in question really isn’t, and never was. The other day, I swear I heard an actress described as an “iconic icon.”

An episode of the MeTV program Collector’s Call, which visits nostalgia mavens and their vast, private collections of pop culture memorabilia, reached a nadir of shameful proportions recently: between host Lisa Welchel, the featured collector of ’60s TV items, and the guest appraiser, the word “iconic” was bandied about among the three of them no fewer than eight times in the single, half-hour episode. Other episodes of the show have come close to that shameful total.

Fortunately, there is a generous choice of synonyms that offer the same meaning, any of which could replace “iconic,” yet retain the meaning of the phrase or sentence in which it is used. Just a few:

·       legendary

·       historic

·       famous

·       renowned

·       seminal

·       epic

·       celebrated

·       illustrious

·       fabled

…or just plain “really cool.”

I implore you — use these synonyms! They’re free!

So, how about it, fellow English speakers and writers— any chance of mixing things up a bit and plucking a few words from the above list, or elsewhere, to free them from obscurity, and giving “iconic” a well-deserved rest?

Probably not. The word has somehow permeated our everyday speech and writing quickly and solidly in the past few years, having been absorbed and regurgitated relentlessly and without question on a daily basis, throughout all media — social and otherwise… 

So come on, you Millennials, and Generation X, Y, Z, and We’ve-Run-Out-Of-Letters-To-Describe-Ourselves people. Try a bit of variety. Expand your linguistic horizons, just a little. Save “iconic” as you would a fine wine, to be taken out only for special occasions, and then propose a toast to yourself for demonstrating such restraint. I know you can do it!”

“Today, of course, we live in a different world: we in the UK have enjoyed three centuries of growth and, over the past few decades, unprecedented peace. This has recalibrated our conception of what it means to live in a “compassionate society”…” Matthew Syed in the “Sunday Times”.

So Matthew has fallen for the “growth is always good” imperative. Shame. And wrong. Fifty years ago when I was studying Economics one of the set books was “The Costs of Economic Growth” by E.J. Mishan. He articulated a conviction that the growth in real income was accompanied by a simultaneous decline in human welfare. It was a persuasive and systematic demolition of the religion of growth. And as we look at the growing social and environmental problems of today – especially at environmental degradation – we cannot ignore the fact that untrammelled growth is killing us.

The Industrial Revolution is a handy metaphor as well as a warning from history. The metaphor is that “progress” generally takes place alongside decline. The calibrations are different. In the nineteenth century Gross Domestic Product increased but the society it created, persuasively described by Disraeli as “Two Nations”, was grotesquely unequal. “Trickle down” was nonsense then, and still is.

The “growth is good” mantra is reminiscent of Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good”. Greed creates inequality and that doesn’t deliver a “compassionate society”. In Britain is has created a North/South divide that places us, without London, as Europe’s poorest country!

The most popular political model of modern times is called “neoliberal” and within that growth is the largely unchallenged driver. There are challenges, think Greenpeace or Greta Thunberg, but whilst governments pay lip service to “Net Zero” they still worship Growth which is incompatible with it.

I will be accused by some (again!) of being a “sourpuss” ! Here I wouid reference the Music Hall song:

“It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blame,
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure,
Isn’t it a blooming shame?”

Have you noticed how there is a perfect correlation between scepticism about (say) “Net Zero’ and Climate Change and wealth. Those protesting about our collective insanity of environmental destruction are poor but honest. Those in denial are the rich who revel in the personal wealth that growth has given them.

The King and Country Debate was a debate on 9 February 1933 at the Oxford Union Society. The motion presented, “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”, passed with 275 votes for the motion and 153 against it.

1933 was the year that Hitler came to power and I’d guess that six or seven years later many of the 275 who voted for the motion joined up voluntarily. Context is everything!

I recently responded to an article in The Times by Melanie Philips which hailed Britain’s “historic strengths as a nation.” Philips was peddling bombastic nonsense, at least to me, proving the rightness of Doctor Johnson’s “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” I said “Let’s list a few “strengths” from our history – some still current”:

* A leading slaving nation for 200 years

* Obsession with extending the Empire wider still and wider

* Warmongering pursuit of power

* Destruction of the lives of First Nations peoples

* Inventor of Concentration camps

* An Industrial Revolution based on exploitation of the poor

* Without London the poorest country in Europe

* Inability to create modern and efficient transportation systems

* Destruction of a once substantial manufacturing sector

* A public service emphasis on profit not the population’s needs

* Murderous suppression of those whose territory they usurped

* Preposterous arrogant belief that the “English are Best”

* Male dominated society without womens’ rights for centuries

* Unelected Head of State and upper House of Parliament

* Institutionalised historic racism and colour and religious prejudice

* Huge gaps between the aristocratic rich and the downtrodden peasantry

* Contempt for international institutions and transnational cooperation

* Failure to deal with famine from Ireland to Bengal

* Criminalisation of the sexual preferences of 10% of the population

* Obsession with faux-patriotism and flag waving

* Complete and ongoing failures of political leadership

We are in “Hitler was kind to dogs” territory here. Is Britain the best of the worst or the worst of the best? I don’t compare, in the main, by making international comparisons (except the point about being the poorest country in Europe if you exclude London. Which is pretty shocking).

I received many compliments from readers and friends about my gloomy list. But the usual suspects went predictably into faux-patriotism mode. Didn’t I know that Britain abolished slavery for example? Well yes, I know my Wilberforce. But defending 200 years of slavery by boasting that we were the first to abolish it is pretty weak ! Then apparently we didn’t invent Concentration camps, and lots of countries had empires, and we weren’t the worst imperialists. Etcetera ad infinitum.

Nations do advance over time and yes Britain is more liberal and equal today than it was before the social legislation and change of the 20th century. But there is much to criticise – my point being there always was. In the main we are a fairer and more tolerant society than in the past. And we’ve stopped enslaving people and children don’t work on looms or in chimneys any more. We’ve stopped hanging people and persecuting gays.

In short our past was pretty disgraceful and our present is better. But there’s a long way to go and faux-patriotism and defending the indefensible doesn’t help.

Farage’s 60th birthday with with Tory Andrea Jenkins and Reform’s Aaron Banks. And Liz Truss in the background glancing over. Then there was this a while back:

Tim Montgomerie long-standing conservative commentator recently tweeted “The most successful conservative politician since Mrs T. Happy 60th Nigel_Farage and thank you for your friendship” Something’s up !

It’s not too big a leap to see a Banks/Farage/Tory Right deal. Banks agrees to stand Reform down at the General Election in return for Farage ousting Sunak as Tory leader. Far fetched ? Not really. Ian Dale another Hardish Right Conservative hailed Farage as the most important conservative politician years ago when Farage was UKIP and David Cameron Tory Leader.

We are in “Nothing to lose “ territory here. Sunak cannot win an election and the Conservative Party could be decimated. A punt with Farage would make ideological sense for the ERG (including Rees-Mogg and Truss). He has public appeal especially in the Red Wall seats. And there’s a transatlantic link as well. Remember this?

If Donald Trump can win the Presidency this year then Nigel Farage could be Prime Minister. You think I’m joking? Sadly not.

I didn’t like it when critics started calling Israel an “Apartheid state” and I don’t like the accusations of “genocide” either. South Africa’s racial discrimination was uniquely venal and using the word “Apartheid” for other places takes away from that. And whilst some Israeli government statements are unquestionably racist about Palestinians I think on balance that the actions of the Israeli government cannot be termed genocidal, but it’s certainly close.

But are we dealing with reasonable people who just have a grievance if we institute dialogue with and between Hamas and Israel? I don’t think we are in either case. And, tragically, there’s nothing new about the situation. The problem is that it goes back to 1948 and, arguably, well before that. Land was confiscated and a state created some of which, today, with land acquired in wars and not returned in peace, but settled.

Israel’s actions for decades can be described as being the seeking of and gaining of Lebensraum. This word should send a chill through the blood of Jewish people anywhere, including in Israel. Because if one state gains room another state, or people, loses it. There’s a zero sum.

And Hamas and their powerful backers are at the core fighting about the loss of land – in short about losing their land to a huge scale pogrom – an irony that should make Israelis pause for thought. But Netanyahu has made it clear that his goal is fully to incorporate Gaza into Israel. And then…? The Israeli Prime Minister’s “New Middle Easr” doesn’t imclude Palestine. Negotiate your way out of that!

There’s no such thing as a typical English constituency, but Rochdale certainly isn’t one. Eighteen constituencies across the UK have a higher Muslim population than Rochdale (24%) but it is clearly a crucial element in the voters’ dynamic. George Galloway knew this and saw his chance. But extrapolating from the freak circumstances which gave us this result is wrong. Labour won’t make the same mistake again.

It was the coincidence of Time (when Muslims are being killed in Gaza) and Place (a constituency that is among our most Islamic) along with the foolish remarks of Labour’s candidate which caused this upset. It happens at both ends of the political moral continuum. Remember Martin Bell in his white suit beating Neil Hamilton?

That Muslims are the most protesting against the flattening of Gaza and the pogrom against its people is hardly surprising – in Rochdale, elsewhere in Britain and around the world. To categorise it as “Mob Rule” was as offensive as it was wrong. 

Ethnic minorities should be represented in Parliament a fact that for obvious reasons our Prime Minister should acknowledge. But Sunak comes across as more Winchester and Oxford than British Asian. He’s very distanced by his elitist class from his co-religionists in Leicester or Brent or Harrow. 

The electors of Rochdale had a terrible choice. It was a protest vote and we should listen not condemn.