Re-nationalisation edges onto the national agenda: will Labour please take note?

A poll on the website of one national newspaper gives 92 per cent backing to what might seem the revolutionary idea of taking British Gas back into public ownership.

Admittedly, the paper in question is not the Mail, the Sun or the Telegraph - but it's not the Communist Morning Star, either. In fact, it's Britain's third-biggest selling daily.

So perhaps a notion that gets that level of support isn't so far off the public radar as we might have thought. Which is rather encouraging.

And then there’s the declaration by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, that he will re-nationalise the Royal Mail if Scots vote for independence in next year’s referendum. Which is by no means the first thing in Scottish politics that has made me quite fancy the idea of upping sticks and moving north of the border.

In the week the company announced price hikes of around 10 per cent, Chris Weston, the managing director of British Gas’s parent company Centrica (where do big firms get these meaningless names?), has refused to give up any of his £2million bonus.

But then he would, wouldn’t he? Because what used to be a public service until Margaret Thatcher flogged it off in 1986 is now a private company. And private companies exist for one reason only – not to benefit their customers, but to make as much money as they can for themselves.

This is capitalism.

And this is why the privatisation of such vital utilities as gas, electricity, water and telecoms was a Bad Thing.

And why the hawking of railways, health services, universities, colleges and schools – and yes, the postal service – is a truly rotten idea.

The fact that the Royal Mail shot up so far so fast on the Stock Market as soon as it was traded showed very clearly that it had been shockingly under-valued by the government.

It showed equally blatantly that it should never have been considered for selling off in the first place. It should be continuing to make money for the government – as it was doing – rather than putting it in private pockets.

The markets know a good thing when they see one. And – weirdly, almost surreally, for a country still nominally Communist – the people who seem to play the markets best these days are the Chinese.

If the mail, like the nuclear industry so gleefully handed to China by George Osborne last week, ends up being controlled from Beijing, I will not be at all surprised.

In fact, if China were to call in all its debts tomorrow, we might suddenly find that Britain, America and most of the capitalist West was owned lock, stock and smokeless barrel by the National People’s Congress. But that is another story.

This one is about the fact that re-nationalising industries scandalously sold off by the Tories appears to be creeping onto the political agenda. And about time too.

It may be early days to hail this as a real change in public perception. But it’s worth giving at least a cautious welcome.

The Labour Party, which has been a sadly timid beast ever since Thatcher moved the political goalposts so effectively around 30 years ago, should take note.

Ed Miliband scored something of an own goal with his recent promise, if elected, to freeze energy prices. The almost inevitable consequence is that energy companies will ensure prices are as high as they think they can get away with before he comes to power.

Perhaps what he should do is take a leaf out of Salmond’s book – and declare that every state asset sold into private hands under the Tory-led coalition will be re-nationalised under Labour.

At least then we would know that the next election would give us a genuine choice over how the country should be run.

As it is now: for the fat cats by their friends. Or as it should be: by the people for the people.

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My brother, whose wife was born and raised there, and who has spent a lot of time there himself, knows rather more about rural India than I do.
So I take seriously his response to the piece I wrote here last week, in which I mentioned a possible conflict of interest between western conservationists and Indian villagers.
He told me: “Tigers do cause human deaths in India – but very, very few. Thugs employed by rich industrialists cause far, far more.
“The ordinary rural poor don’t worry much about tigers – they’re far more worried about being thrown off their land to make room for an opencast mine, a factory… or a tiger reserve. They’d rather share their land with a tiger than not have any land.
“My parents-in-laws’ village is called Baghdharia – literally, ‘Tiger’s place’. It was, 50 years ago,  and no one ever worried about it.
“It’s still shared with sloth bears, cobras, kraits... all dangerous, but much less so than motor vehicles.”

Who decides which species to save and which are doomed?

As I opened the curtains my eye was caught by a flurry of movement and for the next several minutes I stood transfixed.

My apple tree, as I mentioned last week, has not produced an exactly bumper crop this year. But here it was absolutely full of life.

During those minutes, my little patch of garden – especially the tree – played host to three chaffinches, two goldfinches, a greenfinch, two robins, four blackbirds, a blackcap, and a little brown job I could identify only as a warbler of some sort.

Plus – what had really grabbed my attention – a mixed flock of great tits, bluetits and the odd coal tit. They were flitting about much too quickly and eagerly for me to make an accurate count, but I reckoned there were between 20 and 30 of them.

It was a grey, overcast morning after a night of rain, and I could only assume that the birds had been attracted by a feast of insects.

Though I didn’t spot one, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see that the little birds had in their turn attracted a sparrowhawk to the bonanza.

I’ve recently seen several big raptors being harassed and driven off by other birds. The other day, on the A145 near Loddon, I was startled by a buzzard that flew out of the undergrowth right across in front of my windscreen – rapidly pursued by an angry crow.

These battles are, to me, among the most fascinating instances of wildlife in action to be seen in our midst. Some people, though, seem to be angered by the rise and rise of the buzzard, and the very existence of the sparrowhawk.

There have been calls for sparrowhawks and magpies to be “controlled” (i.e. killed) because of their habit of preying on the smaller birds we all love to see in our gardens.

Which misses the larger point that it is humans, particularly with our modern farming methods – pesticides, monoculture, lost hedgerows etc – who have done the most damage to populations of all kinds of birds.

Misses the point, too, about the huge numbers of garden birds massacred by pet cats.

But, the cat-lover will say, my moggy is only doing what comes naturally. As are the sparrowhawks, which – unlike your pet puss – need to kill to live and to raise their young.

Meanwhile harriers and goshawks are persecuted almost to the verge of extinction for their habit of preying on grouse and partridge – creatures bred to be killed by people for fun, not by wild things to preserve their own threatened lives.

These were among the points of dissension under discussion at the Royal Society in London on Monday evening at a debate led by the zoologist and TV presenter Chris Packham, patron of the World Land Trust.

The Halesworth-based trust does a phenomenal job buying areas of threatened land in vulnerable parts of the world to save them for wildlife. And it believes, rightly, that the growing list of conservation controversies should be opened up to public scrutiny not ignored or swept under the carpet.

Difficult questions such as which species are worth saving. In an era of multiple extinctions, does it actually make sense to allocate large sums of cash to try to keep alive rhinos, pandas, polar bears and orang-utans?

The gut reaction to that is an unequivocal ‘yes’. But who decides which species can be saved and which are doomed?

Can re-introductions to the wild really work – and are they worth it? Is it enough to maintain a gene pool in zoos and captive collections?

And if you’re looking for inconsistencies, here’s a big one that begs all sorts of awkward questions about us in Britain. About our attitude to people elsewhere in the world, as well as to our own beleaguered wildlife.

British conservationists tell people in India they should be protecting their elephants and tigers, even though they can cause human deaths, eat their cattle and destroy their crops.

Meanwhile we are gassing badgers, despite all the evidence that it’s totally ineffective as a defence against TB in cattle. India has no badgers, but it has bovine TB.

Perhaps, instead of telling the Indians what to do, we should ask what we can learn from them. Not, admittedly, a humility that comes naturally to Britain’s decision-making classes.

 

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Among many questions stirred up by the Daily Mail’s vile and unjustified attack on Ed Miliband’s father is this: When and how did “socialism” become a dirty word?

Like the entirely admirable Ralph Miliband, I am pleased to call myself a socialist. But I am uncomfortably aware that the name is not always understood.

Contrary to the way Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong appropriated it – a perversion the Daily Mail chooses to think was the real thing – socialism is about equality, fairness and democracy. Common ownership and common responsibility, not repression of the majority by a rich minority.

Socialism, sadly, is not currently on the British political agenda. The Labour Party may be better social democrats under Ed Miliband than they were under Tony Blair, but socialists they are not.

Preparing schools for the national sell-off

I wouldn’t want to accuse Michael Gove of hypocrisy or double standards. People do change their views, particularly over a span of years that amounts to half their lifetime. Tony Blair, after all, started out claiming to be a socialist. 

It’s interesting, all the same, to recall the four-month strike by journalists at the Aberdeen Journal in 1989-90. The bitter dispute was over the company’s refusal to go on recognising the National Union of Journalists.

There are a few surviving photographs of the NUJ picket line outside the paper’s offices. And in one of them, grinning inanely under a mop of curly hair, is an ardent young Michael Gove.

Union member, striker, picket. And the very chap now leading an all-out assault on the teaching profession.

The chap who refuses to listen to the teaching unions.

The same chap who claims to be worried that British teachers are not “held in the same high esteem” as those in other countries.

And that taking part in strike action will undermine the respect they do have.

Teachers across Norfolk were out on strike yesterday – which ought to increase, not lessen, your respect for them.

Teachers don’t take strike action without good cause or a lot of soul-searching.

The vast majority are dedicated professionals who wish to give their pupils the best education possible. Frankly, they wouldn’t do the job if they didn’t care deeply.

Some people imagine teachers have an easy life. Short days, long holidays. It’s what Michael Gove seems to think. But what does he know?

I’ve spoken lately to a few people who have re-trained to become teachers after having other jobs – in journalism, industry, publishing and business. They’ve all said the same thing: that they work longer hours and suffer more stress as teachers than they did in their previous careers.

It’s a matter of professional integrity – as is the decision by the two biggest teaching unions, the NUT and NASUWT, to hold yesterday’s strike across the Eastern region.

It is well put in a letter sent out by union members to the parents of pupils at my daughter’s school: “We do not take the decision to strike lightly and it is only ever a last resort. We always endeavour to put the students first – it is the reason we came into this profession – but we are concerned that the changes proposed by the current government affect the whole professionalism of teaching and therefore the effective provision of education to those students.

“Teachers who strike will lose a day’s pay and will not be financially reimbursed. However, we feel strongly that the current attacks on teaching pay, pensions and conditions are worth standing up for.

“We feel that it is necessary to take this stand to ensure the preservation of the education service for all.

“We are only able to strike legally on the issue of ‘pay, pensions and conditions’, but our grievances run much further and deeper.”

Headline issues include the workload of teachers burdened by ever greater levels of pointless bureaucracy; cuts to their pensions, along with increases in the contributions they must make, amounting effectively to cuts in pay; and job cuts.

Gove wants teachers to work longer for less.

He is causing chaos by rushing through a new curriculum which those who know believe will harm, not improve, our children’s education.

Crucially, he no longer requires teachers to be qualified – a regressive move that can only undermine their professional status and lead to poorer teaching.

The unions don’t say it in so many words, but these changes and others made by Gove – such as the creation of so-called “free schools” – all point to an underlying agenda.

That, just as with other vital services, the government is preparing our whole school system for privatisation.

Flogging off our kids’ education to make profit for private companies. Which is frankly despicable.

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The International Trade Union Confederation represents 174million workers in 156 countries, which makes it a rather bigger and – dare one suggest – more important organisation than FIFA, which is merely the world governing body of football.

The ITUC says labour conditions in Qatar are so appalling that thousands of migrant workers could die building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup.

“More than 4,000 workers risk losing their life over the next seven years as construction for World Cup facilities gets under way,” according to ITUC general secretary Sharan Burrow.

Which should matter more to FIFA than the commercial considerations of sponsors or the requirements of Fox TV.

More even, you might think, than the potentially deadly temperatures the world’s finest footballers will have to endure if the World Cup goes ahead in a Qatari summer.

Which itself was only one of the reasons FIFA should never have handed the tournament to a country less than twice the size of Norwich and with no football tradition.

They should now admit their mistake pronto and move the finals, not to winter (a relative term in the sub-tropical Gulf) but to a more suitable venue.

Attenborough and the uncomfortable truth

The term “national treasure” applied to a human being doesn’t sound right to me. And from what I know of David Attenborough, I can’t imagine it rings true for him either.
But if there has been a wiser, saner, more admirable person in the history of television than Sir David, I can’t think who it might be.
For almost all my life he has had a profound influence on the way I – and millions of other people – see the world.
His name on any programme guarantees that it will be worth watching, for natural spectacle, fascinating insight, the “wow” factor. And for a thoroughly humane, intelligent – and well informed – attitude to humans’ relationship with the world’s other species.
When David Attenborough speaks, in that warm, familiar voice, you know he speaks from both the heart and the brain. To put it bluntly, you know he speaks the truth.
Which is why he has politely declined every invitation – and there must have been a lot of them – to lend that voice to advertising.
“My stock in trade is dealing in the truth as far as we can see it,” he says. “If I say that dinosaurs have feathers I hope people believe me.
“So if in the next five minutes people hear me telling them to buy a brand of margarine they’ll probably presume I’m telling lies about one of these things.”
And of course the truth – unlike advertising – is often uncomfortable.
Attenborough was decades ahead of most of the media in drawing attention to mankind’s often devastating effect on the natural environment. The threat to the rainforest and the coral reef. The extinction of increasing numbers of animal and plant species.
And he’s ahead of most, too, in pushing past the taboos to state the almost unsayable truth about the world’s catastrophically huge human population.
Earlier this year he said: “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde.
“Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us.
“Until humanity manages to sort itself out … it’s going to get worse and worse.”
Well, yes. The combination of more and more people and more and more desert is a certain harbinger of those apocalyptic horsemen War, Famine and Death.
Those of us born in the affluent West since the end of the last world war are probably the luckiest generation of human beings ever to have lived. That luck cannot last forever.

Attenborough walks dodgier ground when he says, “the last sensitivity - and the most tricky of all - is the fact, when you talk about world population, the areas we're talking about are Africa and Asia”.
Well, yes and no, David. It’s all of us. And not just the sheer numbers in those “developing” areas of the world, but the fact that they – understandably – aspire to the way of life we in the West already enjoy.
There are, arguably, enough resources in the world to sustain a population of seven billion humans – but not to give them all American cars, a European diet and a new iPhone every two years.
Who are we, though, to enjoy those things ourselves while denying them to others?
When he says it’s “barmy” to send food to famine areas, Attenborough risks offending human decency.
As did Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister of India, with her compulsory sterilisation programme in the 1970s. Or China’s ruling Communists with their one-child-per-family policy.
All of them, though, were at least trying to address humanity’s biggest and most intractable problem. Posterity may view them more kindly, as visionaries.
If the Apocalypse doesn’t come first.


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A friend of mine stunned me today by describing Britain as a “capitalist meritocracy”.

That phrase sounds to me like “bright darkness”, “military intelligence” or that staple of football-reporting, “narrowly wide” – an oxymoron. A contradiction in terms.

Yes, we live in a capitalist society. Mostly – and getting more so with the flogging off of vital services such as the Royal Mail.

But a meritocracy?

In what conceivable way do David Cameron, George Osborne, the governor of the Bank of England or the boss of Tesco have more merit than my plumber, your old mum, or the woman at the checkout?

They’re certainly richer, they’re certainly more powerful. They might, in some instances, be cleverer – though not, by any means, in all. Privileged access to a certain kind of education can make them seem cleverer than they are.

But better people? More deserving? More trustworthy?

Young Prince George may be a very “good” baby – but is he a better baby than one born yesterday at the Norfolk and Norwich?
My dictionary defines meritocracy as “an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on class, privilege or wealth; leadership by able and talented persons”.

You could hardly have a more precise definition of what we don't live in.

Millar's tale of bikes and doping has a moral for all sport

True Christian morality – the kind based on the actual reported sayings of Christ – can be pretty tough.

Take the parable of the Prodigal Son. I’ve always thought it a trifle harsh on the hard-working elder son that it should be his riotous kid brother who got the party and the fatted calf.

There is something of this in the way professional cycling has responded to the former Cofidis team-mates David Moncoutié and David Millar.

You’d have to be a pretty keen fan to have heard of Frenchman Moncoutié. Over a 15-year career, he won two stages of the Tour de France and four of the Vuelta a Espana and was twice King of the Mountains in the seven-day Paris-Nice race.

What is exceptional is that he did it all clean – that is, drug-free – at a time, and on a team, when that was not generally considered the normal way to win things.

Millar, who began his career at the same time, also started out determined to do it clean. For a few years he tried, and had some success.

Ironically, by the time he was arrested for doping in 2004 he was again racing clean. But in between times he had made regular use of the banned performance-enhancing EPO.

At his eventual trial in a French court he was acquitted of legal offences, but his admission of cheating had already cost him a two-year ban from cycling.

The first of those two years, by his own account, was pretty much one continuous bender. By the end of it he’d gone from riches to rags, from playboy lifestyle to living on his sister’s floor. He was every bit the prodigal.

But what makes him really interesting is the way he acknowledged his own errors and failings and set about using his experiences to help clean up what had become a very dirty sport.

Who better than a reformed doper to sit on the athletes’ committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency?

Someone who really knows what he’s talking about. Someone who understands how easy it can be to slip into a world where doping is expected. Who knows first-hand about both the physical and psychological effects.

Millar’s ‘Racing Through the Dark’, in which he lays all these things out clearly and starkly, is the best book about sport that I’ve read.

Not the best written, perhaps. But probably the most honest, certainly the most revealing and the one with the most emotional punch. And he doesn’t go easy on either himself or his sport.

Written before the full public revelation of Lance Armstrong’s years of drug misuse, it’s very interesting in its depiction of the disgraced American.

In the early chapters, Armstrong comes across as unexpectedly likeable. Later, though, once Millar has returned to cycling as an anti-drug crusader, there’s a coldness between them.

“Lance is a charismatic but controversial man,” Millar writes.

“Yes, there are all the stories and rumours, but I never saw him dope with my own eyes. If he did dope, then, after all he has said and done, it would be unforgiveable.”

Just so.

And then there’s Bradley Wiggins, the man who – along with this year’s Tour de France champion Chris Froome – has demonstrated more clearly than anyone that it is possible to win the Grand Tours without dope.

After a good start between them, Millar falls out with Wiggins too. Not over anything to do with drugs but because of Wiggins’s single-minded pursuit of his own personal success – rather like the young Millar, maybe, but unforgiveable to the dedicated team-player he has become.

Well, perhaps not quite unforgiveable as the two have teamed up since in the GB Olympic team.

And Wiggins, of course, has made nonsense of Millar’s claim that “we were certain that he’d never be on the podium at the Tour”.

The most ironic thing in Millar’s book, though, is an episode which demonstrates that drug-use is not quite the clean-cut issue some people suggest.

After crashing at the 2001 Vuelta, he suffered a severe reaction to the perfectly legal anti-inflammatory cream he was given. The cure for that was a dose of cortisone – legal as a treatment for tendonitis but not for any other use. So his team reported that he had tendonitis.

Sometimes it’s not only the cheats and liars who weave tangled webs, but the authorities too.

There are some dark times and tangled webs in Millar’s book, both for himself and his sport.

But it’s a tale with some true heroes – notably Dave Brailsford. The head of both British Cycling and Team Sky has been at the forefront of cleaning up the sport, but he was also there for Millar – literally at his side – when times were hardest and his disgrace deepest.

Millar’s tale – of racing through the dark and emerging into the light – is cycling’s tale too. And it’s finally an uplifting one.

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Leg irons and stun guns, suitable for use in torture, were found to be on sale in London last week at a major international arms fair. Illegally.

This is appalling. But is it really any more sickening than the huge array of ingeniously lethal weaponry on sale perfectly legally at the same glittering function?

As long as Britain goes on making and marketing weapons of war, it’s hard to see how our leaders can claim any moral high ground over the people who buy and use them.

So fast so good

“Any weight loss?” the doctor asked. “Well yes, there has been,” I said, “but I think that’s directly attributable to my being on the 5:2 diet for a year.” The doctor just smiled and moved on.

Today I weigh two stone less than I did a year ago, when telly scientist Michael Mosley’s programme Eat, Fast and Live Longer was first aired in the BBC’s Horizon series.

I wasn’t what you’d call fat before, but middle age was spreading about me in ways I didn’t care for.

The gain had been slow and insidious over years, a common experience. The sort of incremental increase you don’t notice day by day, even month by month, until you find yourself buying clothes a size or two bigger than before.

No one looking at me would have thought – as I sometimes think of strangers in the street – “Gosh, he needs to diet”.

But I certainly feel a lot better not having to carry those extra lumps of fatty tissue about with me everywhere I go.

After years of more or less putting up with the idea that I'd never again be the svelte youth I once was, I'm back down to what I always used to consider my “proper” weight. And I've had to buy new trousers in a size I feared I might have grown out of forever.

I don’t want to shrink away entirely but I’m happy with the weight I am now, and fairly confident of maintaining it.

But the regime was never primarily about losing weight. The difference on the bathroom scales is merely a by-product. A welcome by-product, certainly, but no part of the main goal – which is

nothing less than lengthening my life. And, along the way, improving the quality of my living.

Sounds faddy, I know, and perhaps it is. But if it works, those seem to me like pretty worthwhile goals to achieve. And a year in I’m still struggling to see any down side.

I don’t normally go in for fads, and I don’t do diets. Companies that sell you diet products do so in the confident expectation that the effects will be temporary and you will come back for more later.

But I’m not buying anything from anyone. In fact I’m saving money slightly because I’m buying less food. Well, maybe.

If you haven't encountered the 5:2 yourself – and I’ve been amazed since starting it how many other people seem to be doing it too – it’s gloriously simple. For five days in every week you eat just as you always did. For the other two (non-consecutive) days you fast. Which in this case doesn’t mean going without food altogether.

What’s suggested is a total intake on that day of 600 calories for men or 500 for women – a quarter of what the NHS recommends daily to “maintain weight”. The increasing habit of some shops to label their food by its calorie count is a big help. 

Dr Mosley’s scientific approach to the possible benefits, and drawbacks, of various forms of fasting, and his ultimate endorsement of the 5:2 diet persuaded me as I watched.

I was struck by the idea that short spells of hunger seem to trigger regeneration of brain cells and may actually ward off Alzheimer’s.

Add to that the lowering of cholesterol and blood glucose – and yes, reduction in fat and body-weight – and you add a significant lowering in the risk of heart trouble and strokes. All things well worth avoiding if you can.

It seems pretty obvious to me that our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved to eat well on some days and not at all on others.

But are the “fast” days difficult? And do I feel the urge to gorge myself on the other days?

Well, no and no, actually. Though I do really enjoy my food the next day.

The passing waves of hunger are easily quelled by black coffee and near calorie-free nibbles of celery, carrot and courgette.

At the end of my fast days I feel fuller of energy than I used to on days of takeaway pasties and chips.

Medical opinion may be divided on the 5:2 score - though my doctor seems to be happy enough with it.

It’s definitely not recommended for children, teenagers or pregnant women. But for me it’s a whole lifestyle that was surprisingly easy to switch into. And if it lasts till I’m 100 – bingo!

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Part of me wanted Madrid to win the vote to stage the 2020 Olympics. I liked the Spanish capital’s intention to stage the Games on a budget half that of Tokyo and a tenth of Istanbul’s.

Not just because austerity is in fashion, but because the bloated nature of the Olympics has been growing ever more offensive since 1976, when the Games thrust Montreal into a debt crisis that took 30 years to clear.

Madrid – understandably, given that Spain’s economy is in almost as dire trouble as that of Greece – didn’t want to become another Athens.

But the decision to put the Games in the “safe hands” of Tokyo makes sense. Not least because of Japan’s clean record – in sharp contrast to both Spain and Turkey – in the matter of doping. Of which, more in this column next week.

Delicious crumbs from the master's table

My nephew Matt, 12 years younger than me, challenged me this week to name my 10 favourite albums of 1974. A good choice for nostalgic wallowing. While he was no doubt listening to Bagpuss and The Clangers, it was a seminal year in my teenage development, largely shaped by The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Matt’s own list of 1987 faves, post-punk and heavily indie-flavoured, contained nothing I ever knowingly heard. While mine for ’74… well, see the inset panel.

It was not in every way a vintage year. Several of my favourite bands – Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Caravan – were between outstanding albums, while what I remember as my favourite album of 1974, Brothers And Sisters by the Allman Brothers Band, turns out to have been released in ’73.

It’s not generally considered to have been a vintage year for Bob Dylan, either. Eight years after the motorcycle accident that ended his most productive and creative spell and a year before his return to form with the magisterial Blood On The Tracks.

Nevertheless, there could be no doubt, either then or now, that my 1974 Top Ten had to include two Dylan LPs. Planet Waves has never had the reputation it deserved, even among Dylan fans. While Before The Flood is not just Dylan’s best live album, it’s the best live album by anyone.

But then, with the exception of the 1980s – music’s dodgiest decade and the era of Dylan’s dreary Christian dirges – there’s hardly been a year in the last 50 when he wouldn’t have been a prime contender for the chart.

And now, at age 72, he’s done it again, releasing my clear favourite album of this year so far.

Mind you, it’s nothing new.

While last year’s Tempest was no better or worse than either fans or detractors might have expected, Another Self Portrait is an instant classic. And it was all recorded in 1970-71.

Basically a bunch of 35 outtakes and alternative versions from the recording sessions that produced the poorly-received albums Self Portrait and New Morning, it’s a better record than either. More coherent than the first Self Portrait (an ironic title, since most of the songs were borrowed from other people), more interesting than New Morning. And in nearly every case the performances are better than on the versions we’ve known all these years.

Dylan’s voice on this collection is as varied as the songs, several of which are drawn from the “traditional” folk canon. Almost throughout he demonstrates that the commonly held view that he can’t sing is way off-target – or was back then.

If only it contained his versions of Otis Redding’s Dock Of The Bay and Donovan’s Universal Soldier, recorded at the same sessions. Those would surely have been fascinating.

This latest addition to the “Official Bootlegs” series, Volume 10, isn’t quite the best Dylan album of the 21^st century. That was Tell Tale Signs, No. 8 in the set, a superb collection of outtakes and “rarities” from 1989 to 2006, released in 2008, that for me belongs in a Top Ten of all his albums.

But this one will keep me engaged until the next “official bootleg” (a contradiction in terms, surely) comes along.

Crumbs from the master's table, perhaps, but still tastier than most artists' best-prepared gourmet meals.

 

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The morning after the House of Commons passed its most historic vote of modern times, the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown professed himself “ashamed”.
In rejecting a military assault on Syria, Parliament had – according to Ashdown – “greatly diminished” Britain.
“The special relationship with the US is seriously damaged, and Britain is now more isolated,” he claimed. “It was a bad night for the government. I think a bad night for Britain too.”
So that’s what it was all about, then, was it? Britain’s “special relationship” with the mighty US of A.
Which, as we so vividly saw in the Bush-Blair, Iraq-invading years, is the special relationship of a poodle with its redneck owner.
When Ashdown speaks in horrified tones of the “burning children” we see on our TVs he assumes it’s up to Britain to do something about it – as if our imperial past gave us a special role as global cops. As if that was not the role of the United Nations.
And as if there was anything we could do, militarily, other than make matters worse.
Even if it were proven conclusively (which it hasn’t been yet) who the bad guys with the chemicals really are.
So far from being a bad night for Britain, last Thursday’s vote was a rare and unexpected triumph for Parliamentary democracy.
And, I’d suggest – against what seems to be the common view – that it was a good night for the government too.
In asking Parliament’s opinion, and agreeing to abide by its view even against his own, David Cameron didn’t lose status as a leader so much as gain it as a democrat.