Don't let the 'democrats' kill off democracy

DEMOCRACY is in danger. Don’t just take my word for it: Justice Secretary Jack Straw says the same, and so does Tory shadow minister Caroline Spelman. So, too, do the men and women of a House of Commons all-party Select Committee.
The difference is that they have just started saying it. Whereas YOU read it here first. Last November, to be precise.
The wee headcount that Prime Minister Gordon McGrumpy has called for next month pales into insignificance alongside the fallout from these words I wrote before Christmas:
“I pay council tax to have my rubbish removed, potholes paved over, our children educated and our old people cared for.
“What I DON’T want from Northumberland County Council is a 32-page, glossy, full-colour monthly propaganda magazine which threatens the existence of local independent media while providing only extra pulp for the recycling plants!”
Trinity Mirror, the publishing company that owns, among other properties, The Journal, has recently taken up cudgels against council freesheets but let’s get something straight: I hold no particular brief for a company that is big enough and rich enough to fight its own battles.
What DOES concern me is the threat to freedom of speech if our political controllers also take control of the means of communication and muzzle criticism.
Jack Straw said this week: “I am on the side of the papers, not the councils. Local papers are of fundamental importance to the workings of our democracy.” Caroline Spelman, Conservative shadow local government secretary, said newspapers “risk being driven out of business”.
Ironically, this month’s Northumberland mealy-mouthpiece (it contains not a single objective criticism, only praise and propaganda for the council’s plans) fell onto my doormat (and, expensively, onto 144,000 other doormats county-wide) at precisely the same time as a Culture Media and Sport Select Committee report tore such phoney propaganda sheets to shreds..
The Office of Fair Trading has been asked to investigate the damage such publications have on democracy, foisting as they do a ratepayer-subsidised alternative to independent and frequently critical local newspapers which are struggling to survive the global recession.
Indeed, not content with foisting its one-eyed spin-sheet on the populace, Northumberland’s newspaper nonentity is now touting for advertising.
Without revenue, local newspapers perish. And without local newspapers, so does democracy . . .

TALKING of democracy, the political jokes have already begun. Here’s my current Number One:
Gordon Brown dies during an official visit to Israel. The undertaker tells British Embassy staff: “You can have him shipped home in state for £5 million or you can bury him here in the Holy Land for just £500.”
Without hesitation the ambassador elects to have the PM shipped home, whatever the cost to the nation. “But why?” asks the undertaker. “It would be wonderful for him to be buried here and you could use the £5million to help settle the national debt or pay for the Olympics.”
“Yes,” said the ambassador, “But two thousand years ago another man died and was buried here, and three days later he rose from the dead.
“We just can't take the risk!”

THEY were at it hammer and tongs the moment the news broke: Steve the ex-bobby was sniping at Klondike Barry, Robbie the lawnmower man from Spittal started laying off bets around the bar while the Byreman wanted the Red Lion renamed using a neutral colour “to prevent trouble”.
“But surely,” I pleaded, “We can agree to differ until the general election campaign is over?”
“Who the hell cares about the election?” said Iain the landlord. “It’s Sunderland and Newcastle together in the Premiership WE’RE arguing about!”

BY the way, I KNEW technology had finally won the Man v. Machine contest when my brother Richard called me after the clocks went forward to see if his digital watch had made the adjustment unaided.
I had to go and check the microwave to find out!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 9, 2010

The day I got that sinking feeling . . .

ARE you sitting comfortably? Then you’re much better off than I am, friends.
I’m starting to get a persecution complex. It started this week when the Red Lion threw out all its old chairs and installed sturdy new ones. The landlord looked embarrassed. “They have to take a lot of stress,” Iain mumbled, nodding in my direction.
Then I made a pre-theatre dinner booking at the quaint, antiques-cum-restaurant business Café Curio in Berwick – where having dined like a millionaire you can behave like one and purchase anything that takes your fancy, from furniture to cutlery and paintings to plates – and was warned by my fellow diner Gilly the Radical: “Watch where you sit: the chairs are a bit delicate!”
Then, to cap it all, my man in Western Australian emailed me from Perth with the distressing news that a past transgression of mine had been exposed in the national press.
Graham Jones of Perth, who gets his Journal second-hand from an old pal in Morpeth, emailed to say that, writing in the latest issue of the Weekend Australian on the beneficial effects of strong coffee, a former Aussie colleague snitched: “I remember one Friday when editor Frank Devine and his deputy, David Banks, went off to lunch and returned for afternoon conference twenty minutes late, red of face and carrying huge tumblers of strong black coffee.
“They walked airily into the conference room and sat down. Now Banksy is not a thin man; think of any big man you know and multiply him by five. Slowly, as the editor conducted his conference, the deputy’s chair buckled beneath him until there was nothing to be seen save for Banksy’s eyes peering over the table top.
“Frank paid no attention whatsoever. He might as well have never before met his colleague. . .”
I then received two emails from contemporary colleagues deriding me for returning from lunch only twenty minutes late (until I pointed out that we left the office at noon and conference was held daily at 5pm!).
To make matters worse, as I sit here writing this column and contemplating yet ANOTHER diet, I notice that the leg on my study chair is getting wobbly…

THERE is one national newspaper I love beyond all others, partly because it has the decency to correct its mistakes publicly but mainly because of the wonderful eccentricity of those errors. This week provided a classic:
“In a recent interview with the Irish singer Gavin Friday we included this quote: ‘And those hip-hop guys, they all have about 10 managers and 10 assistants, all with black berets.’
“On reflection, our writer realised that he had misheard and what he should have written was: ‘And those hip-hop guys, they all have about 10 managers and 10 assistants, all with BlackBerrys."
Not even we journalists could make THAT up, could we?

OF LATE we’ve been doing a lot of hobnobbing with the gentry, the good lady and I, and they raise funds rather more grandly than we do with our coffee morning raffles at Crookham Village Hall.
As a result, we’re awash with the sort of gifts one bids for at charity auctions like the grand affair we attended at George and Jane Farr’s Pallinsburn House in aid of the Tillside Cricket Juniors’ summer tour.
Auctioneer Sandy Jeffries was merciless: as a result, Mrs Banks is lined up for A Hawk and a Walk (a day’s hawking with an instructor/falconer) while I am looking forward to a one-day woodturning course and a tour of Berwick Town Hall with the mayor.
Sadly, I missed out on a day-long horse riding lesson, following the audience’s cruel reaction to my bid.
“How big’s the horse?” they yelled in unison!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 2, 2010