November « 2014 « John Harris

Archive for November, 2014

Is saving Newcastle a mission impossible? | John Harris

Tuesday, November 25th, 2014

Caught between savage cuts and a rising demand for services, Newcastle is at risk of financial collapse. Can its progressive leader Nick Forbes rescue the city from disaster?
• Funding crisis leaves Newcastle facing ‘impossible cuts’ and social unrest

Newcastle’s Civic Centre, a grand construction completed in 1967 and formally opened the following year – by King Olav V of Norway, no less – is a monument to civic pride and political ambition. As the headquarters of the city’s council, the building’s huge leather-clad doors, vast chandeliers and abstract art embody not just a strident modernism, but two bigger ideas that seem to have been frozen into every tile and fitting: a determination to pull Newcastle away from long industrial decline, and a belief that city government has the power to do so.

In that sense, though it was conceived before he took office and opened after he had moved on to other things, the civic centre embodies the visions of T Dan Smith, the notorious Labour leader who once gloried in the unofficial title of “Mr Newcastle”. Smith, who ruled the city from 1960 to 1965, was eventually jailed for corruption, and provided the inspiration for Austin Donohue, a central character in the BBC’s epic drama Our Friends in the North. He said he had come to transform a place he thought was “moribund”. “Cities are what men make of them, on land that is given by God,” he said; he dreamed of turning Newcastle into “the Brasilia of the north”.

Forbes was assailed by strangers in the street; once, he was attacked by a man holding a placard with his own face on it

But we’ve got to keep our eyes on a far horizon. Because if we don’t, then we simply wallow in self-pity

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Funding crisis leaves Newcastle facing ‘impossible cuts’ and social unrest

Tuesday, November 25th, 2014

Leader of city council says ‘embers of unrest are starting to smoulder’ with many authorities on brink of financial collapse

The long read: is saving Newcastle a mission impossible?

The city of Newcastle is already seeing the first signs of social unrest because of funding cuts that threaten to make provision of many public services “completely untenable” by 2017, the council’s Labour leader has warned.

Nick Forbes, who has run Newcastle city council since 2011, said his local authority is already heading towards the realm of “impossible cuts” to social care, including transport for disabled children, but he is determined not to be in the first or second wave of councils that “goes down”.

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The blame is all Labour’s if it leaks a large chunk of votes to the Greens | John Harris

Saturday, November 22nd, 2014

From Ed Miliband down, the party seems increasingly incoherent and cynical – even nasty

Ed Miliband pitched up at the University of London last week to make a speech hyped up as his comeback. You may have heard bits of it: he warned of the dangers of what he called a “zero-zero economy” (zero-hours contracts for the unfortunate; zero tax for the lucky few), and took issue with Ukip.

“We will be talking more about immigration as a party,” he said. But lest anyone picture some desperate stampede into quasi-Farageism, he assured his audience that he and his colleagues would address the issue “on the basis of Labour values, not Ukip values”. He went on: “Unlike the Tories, what we will never do is try to out-Ukip Ukip.” With a flourish worthy of an irate Vicar, what Farage and his friends stood for, Miliband said, was “not really very attractive”.

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Love, loss and mixtapes: the Guardian and the Royal Court’s music microplay

Friday, November 21st, 2014

Groove Is in the Heart celebrates the ritual of recording a compilation tape in the days before the infinite jukebox of the internet. Director Bijan Sheibani and the Guardian’s John Harris explain how they and the playwright Robin French explored our changing relationship with music and technology

Your mixtape stories: share your memories and pictures

The Royal Court meets the Guardian in microplays series – video

Watch our food microplay, Britain Isn’t Eating

Off the Page is a series of six filmed microplays made by the Guardian and the Royal Court theatre. The project brings together journalists, playwrights and directors to create responses to issues in six key areas of our coverage: food, music, fashion, sport, education and politics. The next microplay, on the subject of sport, will be online on 24 November.

The last Walkman – changed the battery pressed play – Suicaine Gratification – sounding amazing – damn you iPod. pic.twitter.com/LQixHyZxEm

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Farage and the UK Independence Party: the death of Ukip has been greatly exaggerated

Wednesday, November 12th, 2014

Last week a Guardian Live audience debated the future of Ukip and discussed how far the party could go. John Harris says the idea of peak Ukip is fantasy, and were a long way off it yet

During the first seven months of 2014, a convenient fantasy took root among some metropolitan commentators. Whenever the UK Independence Party was the subject of a negative story, there were mutterings about peak Ukip, and the inevitability of its decline. The peak Ukip theory itself peaked over the summer when the partys runner-up position in the Newark byelection and a couple of months of relative quiet suggested it was in retreat.

I wrote in the Guardian at the time that anyone who assumed that this was the case was guilty of the kind of self-delusion common to four-year-olds and people on bad acid: If I cant see the monster, the monster cant see me, and all that. Because look what happened. On 9 October, the Conservative defector Douglas Carswell won the Clacton byelection for Ukip on 60% of the vote. The same day, Ukip came within 600 votes of taking Heywood and Middleton from Labour. In recent opinion polls, the party has consistently scored some of its highest-ever ratings close to 20%, according to some while combined support for the Tories and Labour has come in at record lows. If broadcasters have their way, Nigel Farage will be included in one of the party leaders General Election debates, underlining the idea that his party is now a major force in British politics.

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