Effects of Recession on the A62

The Guardian has a great gallery of Christopher Thomond's images depicting scenes representing the effect the recession is having along the A62.

View the gallery here.

Howard Jacobson on an old mill town with a touch of ‘comic pessimism.’

In Newsweek Magazine
Howard Jacobson Reflects on Manchester, England
Apr 9, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

There are cities that reveal their charms on introduction, shamelessly, and there are others that give you more time to get to know them, cities which are not voluptuous but viable, easy to get around, good humored, self-effacing without being apologetic.

Manchester, 200 miles to the northwest of London, and just a half-hour drive from its noisier neighbor Liverpool, is one of the latter. It would be incorrect to say it lacks beauty, for the great mills and warehouses built in the days when cotton was king, and Manchester was its Versailles, are on the scale of Italian Renaissance palazzi and can indeed look like Italian Renaissance palazzi on sunny days and when, standing on a bridge over, say, the Rochdale Canal, you are in the mood to see the best in things. Hotels, clubs, apartment blocks now, the old mills and warehouses have made the change well from temples of ceaseless industriousness to palaces of ceaseless pleasure. Victorian neogothic architecture enjoyed a flowering in Manchester too, most notably in the great spired almost fairy-tale Town Hall, a sort of cathedral to commerce that exudes confidence and prosperity yet is not without delight in magniloquence for its own sake.

Moonlight on wet streets, the distant prospect of chimneys made phosphorescent by their own smoke, industrial valleys looking nostalgic in these nonproductive times, and on Saturday nights, whatever the weather, girls with mottled thighs and boys in short-sleeved shirts drinking mojitos en plein-air—such are the city’s sights. But it’s substance rather than poetry that Manchester has always sought to convey, a no-nonsense stolidity reflected in all the public buildings, squares, and statuary, commemorating men of affairs, free traders, and reformers rather than artists or adventurers.

If Manchester wears its cultural achievements lightly, that is because it finds showiness, like its geography—the city is positioned in the very path of wet clouds coming in low off the Pennine Hills—absurd. A hundred years ago Manchester rivaled Berlin and Vienna as a city of music. The Hallé, founded by a German immigrant 50 years before, had become one of the world’s great orchestras. It tells you something about Manchester at that time that a young Westphalian musical prodigy such as Charles Hallé should have chosen to make Manchester his home. A small but active population of German expatriates—some in flight from religious intolerance, others simply doing business—was already established in Manchester, making music, meeting to discuss ideas, encouraging an interest in literature and in art. If the native Mancunian needed this spur to his own hesitant creativity, it is to his credit that he welcomed it wholeheartedly.

Though the Jewish population was small when I was growing up, Manchester seemed a Jewish city to me, so at home did we feel in it and so in tune with its energetic comic pessimism. Foremost among the pleasures of the city today is the Rusholme Curry Mile, a stretch of Asian restaurants a short walk from the university, which, if you were dropped there at night, you might take for a street in Bangladesh or Pakistan. A great city knows it is never more itself than when it can make room for what is different to itself, the corollary of which has been, in Manchester’s case, the adoption by other cultures of Mancunian modesty and sense of the ridiculous. You will hear better Jewish jokes in Manchester, as a consequence, than you will ever hear in London. And I suspect the same holds true of Bangladeshi jokes.

The presiding genius of the place remains, though he died in 1976, the painter L.S. Lowry, famous for his industrial landscapes, canvasses that simultaneously teem with life and express the desolation of the northerner over whom the clouds too rarely lift. It took a while for Lowry’s greatness to be recognized, so determinedly plain about his art was he, so bent on downplaying his gifts. Outside of football—which is a fiefdom of its own—it’s not done to blow your own trumpet in Manchester. People will laugh with you on buses or in shops because they take the human comedy, of which they are no less the butts than anybody else, to be universal. This is not a population of a once fabulously rich cottonopolis making the best of its decline; Manchester’s laconic mirth was always its strength. And you breathe it in on the streets still like a tonic.

Howard Jacobson’s novel The Finkler Question won the Man Booker Prize in 2010.

Drew Foley's Wheel of Rape

It cannot have escaped anyone's attention that the NHS is currently being dismantled by a government we didn't elect. The greatest single invention Britain has ever come up with. Providing universal healthcare for it's people (before you right wing “death to anyone who isn't poor or me” apologists all start, yes I know we fucking pay for it. It's not the point I'm making here. You think when Cameron gets rid of the NHS he's going to stop us paying a chunk of Tax and National Insurance? Get real, fucktards). People say the first duty of government is to protect it's citizens. I think that it's specifically to keep it's citizens healthy, because a healthy citizen can achieve anything. For good or bad.

Now I've noticed a trend over Twitter in the last few weeks. It's that men are to be feared. Not only feared, but actively avoided. Every five minutes a post has cropped up saying that people are being raped. Whilst there are a lot of poor women (and men, which seems to have been glossed over) who are being raped, there is a much worse situation on the horizon. We are all about to be raped.

Guess what. Our rapist isn't going to be a dodgy bloke following us home with a packet of butter in his pocket for lube. He isn't going to be wearing a balaclava as a mask and walking around with a long coat to disguise the fact he is naked underneath. He isn't even going to look at you. Our rapist is wearing a suit, and a tie, and has a serious air of respectability,

So, with that in mind, who is raping the us over the NHS the most?

Welcome to Drew Foley's Wheel of Rape

Spin the Wheel, there are six suspects

1. The Voting System

OK, so this one isn't a person, but it was devised by people and has been long used as an excuse. It still amazes me how few very intelligent people actually understand our voting system. It is not fit for purpose and hasn't been for years. It also fucked us over in a way you wouldn't guess unless it was explained to you.

The main thing to point out is that, no matter how much the media want you to believe it, you are not voting for the leader of a party. This fact seems to get lost, but it's true. I supported the leader debates because they were an opportunity to showcase the main policies of each party, but it's a fact that these may differ at local level. Not that that is ever made clear to you.

You are told your vote counts. Well, it does, you should vote. If you don't, then quite frankly, you have no fucking right to complain about anything that every happens because you didn't do anything about it. You didn't register your opinion. You don't care enough, therefore, you are saying that you don't matter. You are a pawn to be played with by the major political parties who can use you as a beating stick or an oppressed mass, whichever they see fit.

You should register your opinion. However, herein lies the problem. Every constituency votes for it's own MP. There are 650 MP's, meaning that there are 650 different constituencies in Britain. This means that how much your vote matters depends on where you live.

For example, where I live, you could put a red rose on a turd and it would get in, for the simple reason, it's the strongest part that isn't Tory. That is the case in a massive number or inner city wards. I decided that I wasn't so ecstatic about Labour this time round so I voted Liberal Democrat . However, it didn't matter. Labour got in by a landslide where I live. As they generally do in urban areas. On the other side of this, if you are a Tory, I could forgive you for wondering why you aren't in control of 70% of the country, when you look at the electoral map. Most of the country is blue. That's because people who live in the sticks generally vote Tory, for reasons best known to themselves.

The problem is that our electoral system is designed for a two party election. In a two party election, it works. We aren't a two party state. In 2010, there were 50 different parties. That is a lot of different parties in all the different wards. In fact, if you have enough money, you can put yourself up. Martin Bell did it against Neil Hamilton to great success. However, you aren't properly represented. Our system is so daft, that the Lib Dem's seats went down, but their share of the vote went up? How the fuck does that work? Even stupider is this...

The Liberal Democrats polled 23.3% of the popular vote, which is a quarter of the country, but only took 8.77% of the seats in parliament. To put this in context, the popular vote is all the individual votes counted together and divided.

I'm not defending the Lib Dem's. Quite frankly, if they survive the next election with more than 10 MP's I'll be shocked. They conned the fuck out of us. They sold their soul to the blue side. I'm just pointing out that a party that has nearly a quarter of the votes of all the people in the country, has about a twelfth of the seats in parliament.

That's fucking wrong. End of story.

Our electoral system is outdated, outmoded, confusing and presented to us in an Americanised way which is designed to make us believe that we are voting for a specific man, when we're not. You thought you were voting for Cameron, Clegg and Brown.

Well, you weren't.

You were voting for someone in your area who may well have been completely at odds with your views, but you didn't realise, because you were conned.

For the record, I'm really sorry about voting Lib Dem. I actually wrote to the electoral commission to ask for my vote back, even though it didn't matter shit. Fuck, I still felt dirty after what happened.

This voting system needs to change to Proportional Representation. However, it won't. For one very simple reason. To quote Sir Humphrey Appleby,

“No Government is going to change the system that got it into power”

So we're all fucked.

2. Andrew Lansley – Secretary of State for Health

This is an obvious choice. Lansley came up with the bill (well, his name is on it), and he has been trying to sell it to us, he has been Operation Human Shield. to all the hospitals, to take all the shit from the entire country.

Even his Wikipedia photo is sinister, like he's a Bond villain planning to annex Scotland. Mainly because there are no Tory voters there.

We may as well gloss over the donations he has received from private healthcare operators while he was in opposition, and in government.

Actually, lets not.

He took donations from Care UK, who just happen to provide private healthcare for older people to PCT's and councils. No conflict there. I mean, why would he want to farm out NHS services? How about General Healthcare Group? Adrian Fawcett, otherwise known as the COE of GHG only shared a stage with Lansley at an event that GHG sponsored (albeit, indirectly)

Just to confirm, this is a conglomerate that sees the NHS as “one of the largest and most attractive healthcare markets globally”

Let's just take this in. Why the flying fuck is the NHS an attractive healthcare market? Why are people looking at it as an investment opportunity? There is no way that the NHS should be a market. It should be a not for profit organisation. The NHS exists to provide healthcare to the citizens of Britain. It shouldn't exist to provide competition

Andrew Lansley may be a sacrificial lamb. However, he still has a vested interest in the abolition of the NHS. How he sleeps at night is anyone's guess.

3. David Cameron

Cameron is the Prime Minister. Leader of the Conservative party and lead candidate for next political assassination. Seriously, this man is pure evil. He has obviously made a check-list that Thatcher couldn't finish, and he is going through it. His policy record confirms that he simply doesn't care what happens to the country as long as he and his friends are OK. This is obvious in many policies, not limited to road privatisation, bombing Libya (while we were apparently broke), relaunch of the right to buy policy and his crazy idea of antagonising the Falklands.

The fact he lives very close to Rebecca Brooks, who just happened to be the editor of one of the biggest newspapers in the country. Yup, when she wasn't beating up Ross Kemp, she was in charge of the News of the World, (2000 – 2003) and The Sun (2003 – 2009), before finally becoming Chief Executive Officer of News International (2009 – 2011).

Do you know where she is at the time of writing? She is on bail, after being arrested in the phone hacking scandal. Yes, that's right. Our Prime Minister, the man who is representing us on the world stage, is close friends and neighbours with a women who is currently on trial for hacking into innocent people's phones to print news stories

This is the same man who is desperate to to privatise everything we have. He is evil beyond belief. He doesn't want to pay for anything because he doesn't realise how the real world works. He's never had to live in it.

The main question here, is how does he have any integrity left?

4. Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg was the most powerful man in British Politics for a short time.

That is no exaggeration. That time was, in fact, from 6 May 2010 until the 12 May 2010.

There was a hung parliament. There was no overall majority. The Tories had the most seats, and the biggest percentage in parliament. They didn't have enough however, to make a government. They needed another one of the big parties. It wasn't going to be Labour, obviously, and a coalition of all the small parties wouldn't work either, so it could only be the Liberal Democrats.

Let's consider this. In the situation the country was in, the Tories could only get a working majority by going in with the Liberal Democrats. If the Liberal Democrats were to go in with Labour, the seats would be 314 to 306, which is not enough for a strong government, on account of the fact that only 9 people need to rebel and everything is fucked.

Let's look at Clegg though, and the Liberals in general. The liberals lean to the left. There is no doubt about this. They always have and always will. Clegg leans to the left. They don't go for everything Labour go for, but they do lean to the left. So why did they jump into bed and suck the right wing cock? Swallowing all that right wing policy. They are swallowing the cum, thinking that they are in power because they're sat on the government side.

The reason is this. Nick Clegg didn't think of the country He thought of himself, and his party. On the face of it, he had no choice. The fact of the matter is that the Liberal Democrats are finished whatever happens. In a way, he had no choice. So he went with the Tories in the hope that they, as the Liberal Democrats, could temper the policies of the Tory Party.

No chance. Not only have the Tories sent their smear masters against all the Lib Dem's in power, they have got nearly everything through. Basically, Clegg has rolled over. He's being tickled on the belly. Meanwhile. Cameron, is fucking us over. Vince Cable is the only man who has stood up to anyone.

The Tories played the Lib Dem's like the political masters the Tories are. Next election, the Tories are planning to all but wipe out the Lib Dem's by changing the boundaries.

I'm aware that he couldn't have gone with Labour. A majority of 8 isn't enough.

What Nick Clegg should have done is forced another election. Under our ridiculous system, he would have been entitled to do it. He didn't do it because he would have brought the destruction of his party forward 5 years.

So Clegg has won a Pyrrhic victory. He brought power to his party, at the expense of having it with the Tories, and Cameron has fucked him over. Nick Clegg will be going to bed every night feeling the bleeding from his arse. He knows how much he was fucked and if he has any humility, he will shoot himself in the face in front of Parliament.

I know he won't, but that's not the point.

5. The British Voter

The British worker, fundamentally lazy, wants something for nothing.

“This is worse than Afghanistan” shouted one women in Didsbury. She shouted this after half past nine whilst she was in a large queue still to vote She ended up not voting.

The average British voter, can be a parasite on society.

29,650,011 people voted in the 2010 election. This is out of a total of 45,844,691. That's 65% of the potential electorate. Are you seriously telling me that only 65% of the electorate would turn out if they knew that their public services were going to be sold off to the lowest bidder? The simple fact is, that they wouldn't. Some polls put support of a rethink of the NHS bill at 85.2%.

I'm aware that the British public is full of disenfranchised voters, thinking that their vote won't make a difference. You know what, maybe it's for the first time ever, but next time round. MY FUCKING GOD IT WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Now, this government has passed a law which means that they can be in power for five years, Cameron has basically put himself in charge for long enough to line is good friends pockets.

Maybe if the British voter knew that they were being led back to the 1980's. Maybe if they knew they were being fucked every day of their life, they might vote. However, our government wants to keep them stupid.

The sad thing is, that many people will still think that their vote won't matter,

We're going to try. Jesus Christ we're going to try. We need to push to get this cancer out.

6. Tony Blair

I won't deny. Tony Blair kicked this off. Apparently, he was a socialist at one point. A direct enemy of Anne Widdecombe. Tony Blair was great for the country in 1997 (even though he picked the wrong band). The fact that National Health Service don't appear on any achievements of his explain his attitude towards the NHS. He was a Labour Prime Minister, and he didn't give a shit.

Who the fuck are we supposed to trust?

You know what the biggest problem with the NHS is?

It's simple. The biggest problem is the private sector.

People sought to bring Private Sector ethics into the NHS. Now, the top of the NHS is filled with people who earn salaries in massive excess of the published highest wage. According to NHS employers, the highest wage you can receive is £97,478. Derek Smith, of Dorset County Hospital, earned £387,220 for the 141 days work in 2010 to 2011. This equates to £1,002,378.01 a year. Are you telling me that no other NHS trusts are employing people at such daft salaries?

The argument is that you can only attract the best people if you pay the best wages. Maybe that's true, but in this case, he was an interim. To take a typical example, a Nurse applying for a job at  Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust (sic) can expect a starting wage of £25,528.

So, what we're saying here is that a head of a hospital can earn the equivalent of 35.4 nurses?. While I imagine this is a generally isolated case, I refuse to believe that it is on it's own.

We need to rid the NHS of the private sector. The simple fact is that the NHS should be a not for profit company. We pay for it to provide healthcare for everybody. We are happy to pay in for years, in the knowledge that one day, when we need it, it will be there for us. Generally speaking, the United Kingdom is an country that is happy to pay to do this.

The NHS has people at the top who want to rape the NHS of all of it's money. Soon, we'll be paying these motherfuckers to rape us. Better start saving now. For me, diabetes is just around the corner.

STOCKPORT!

As Above, So Below: Urbexers' Surreptitious Shots of Central Library

The newly refurbished Central Library is still a yearfrom re-opening, but these pictures offer a unique insight into how progress his shaping-up. Visit http://www.goneeightyfive.com/  for more amazing clandestine perspectives of the underbelly of the Nuclear Free City and elsewhere.

MMU's (FREE!) MANCHESTER TIME MACHINE APP - 20th Century Procession of the iPhone Ghosts

A little over 60 years after the Computer was allegedly invented here in the form of 'the Baby', most of us now carry around something profoundly more powerful - shallower than a fag packet but with a similar sized Perimeter. Key to this Pandora's Box's myriad capabilities are Apps. Those not endemic to any given device are predominantly pointless, and this one is barely any different depending on your perspective. While nicely put together, and seemingly free of the bugs that louse-up most others, the Manchester Time Machine app is little more than a glorified collection of looping snippets of History to haunt your pocket. But as far as apps go, that's no bad thing. While the Map Function gives the impression that you'll be able to summon-up archive footage of your immediate vicinity, it is in fact largely redundant unless you happen to be on our City's most often-trod streets. In spite of this, this free mini archive of 77 clips spanning from 1911 to 1974 is likely to provide you with more profound hours than catapulting cartoon birds.

Of particular interest: A luminescent tram, careering through the night like the glowing of so many lost souls through a V-Day crowd in Albert Square.

A Bobby giving directions in front of a crazily-laden horse-drawn wagon, towering almost as high as a nearby tram.

The impeccable looking 1960s Piccadilly Gardens, when it was actually a Garden.

The old Orange & White SELNEC buses in St Peter's Square. 

 

 

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.Requires iOS 4.2 or later

Download the FREE app here

Manchester Histories Festival 2012: Fanzine Event

 

Taking place on Saturday 3rd March at 4pm at Manchester Town Hall, Manchester District Music Archive, in association with Manchester Histories Festival, will be hosting a panel discussing the history and legacy of Manchester’s alternative music publications. The discussion will be chaired by Dave (‘Debris’) Haslam. On the panel will be Mike Don from ‘Mole Express’ (legendary early 1970s local underground paper), plus Liz Naylor (of post-punk ‘City Fun’ fame), Bob Dickinson (a contributor to the likes of ‘New Manchester Review’, and ‘City Fun’), and Dan Russell (from the contemporary fanzine ‘Things Happen’). 

The panelists will:

 -  recount tales of Manchester’s music scene

 -  celebrate fanzines and analyse their relationship to the music scene, to the political underground, and to other independent and/or marginalised cultural activity in past eras

 -  discuss the significance of fanzines and other self-published/alternative publications in an era of blogs, digital technology and social media

The panel event is free admission. But attendance should be confirmed by registering here:

http://fanzinespanel.eventbrite.co.uk/

There may be some unregistered availability on the day but this can’t be guaranteed.

http://www.manchesterhistoriesfestival.org.uk/ 

 

Via Manchester District Music Archive