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Archive for September, 2021

The petrol queues seem like a throwback. But at least in the 70s our leaders weren’t so callow | John Harris

Monday, September 27th, 2021

We’re faced with empty shelves and driver shortages. Yet those in charge today seem totally out of their depth

Among the words that will send the collective British psyche into panic, three are among the most potent: Christmas, petrol, and winter. Put them together, and you have the perfect ingredients for a crisis, made all the more surreal by the fact that one of its key causes – Brexit – is a word no one in politics wants to mention.

Despite ministers’ assurances that the lack of fuel is all in our heads, queues at garage forecourts extend into the distance. Supermarkets are full of empty shelves; rising energy prices threaten household budgets. Everybody knows that the UK’s labour shortages are dire, and that a deficit of 100,000 hauliers is serious indeed.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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Beatles on the brink: the truth about the Fab Four’s final days

Monday, September 27th, 2021

The director’s new documentary weaves together hours of unseen footage to dispel many myths about the band’s final months. John Harris, who was involved in the project, tells the inside story

On paper, the idea looked brilliant. In the opening weeks of January 1969, the Beatles were working up new songs for a televised concert, and being filmed as they did so. Where the event would take place was unclear – but as rehearsals at Twickenham film studios went on, one of their associates came up with the idea of travelling to Libya, where they would perform in the remains of a famous amphitheatre, part of an ancient Roman city called Sabratha. As the plan was discussed amid set designs and maps one Wednesday afternoon, a new element was added: why not invite a few hundred fans to join them on a specially chartered ocean liner?

Over the previous few days, John Lennon had been quiet and withdrawn, but now he seemed to be brimming with enthusiasm. The ship, he said, could be the setting for final dress rehearsals. He envisaged the group timing their set so they fell into a carefully picked musical moment just as the sun came up over the Mediterranean. If the four of them had been wondering how to present their performance, here was the most gloriously simple of answers: “God’s the gimmick,” he enthused.

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Want to ‘level up’ the UK? Just give places the power and money they need | John Harris

Sunday, September 19th, 2021

The government pits regions against one another in a battle for handouts. Meanwhile, it keeps cutting local authority funding

For a term that has been in circulation for more than two years, “levelling up” has not been the catchiest of political concepts. Journalists and politicians now tend to treat it as a self-explanatory part of the national vocabulary, but in my experience few people in the real world have any idea what it means. Neither, if they were to be honest, do large numbers of Conservative politicians.

But it will not go away. Boris Johnson’s reshuffle was sold as the formation of a new team that would “focus on uniting and levelling up the whole country”. Michael Gove’s arrival at the newly renamed Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, we were told, represented a ramping-up of the effort applied to this challenge. “I don’t think people appreciate quite how seriously Boris takes levelling up,” one Conservative source told The Times. If you appoint Nadine Dorries as the culture secretary and then float the idea of a return to imperial weights and measures, many people may have trouble believing you are serious about anything, but there we are: amid the culture wars pantomime, the prime minister’s allies insist that levelling-up efforts are under way and will now only gather momentum.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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Always Red by Len McCluskey review – bluster of a righteous brother

Sunday, September 19th, 2021

Candour and insight play second fiddle to a romanticised history of the left in the former Unite leader’s memoir

Len McCluskey is a chess enthusiast. During his 11-year tenure as the general secretary of the 1.4 million-member “super union” Unite, he kept several sets of pieces in his office, and once sat for a portrait behind a chessboard, camply holding up a king in the manner of a Bond villain. The pose reflected not just his status as a big player in the Labour party, but something too often missed: the delicate negotiations with employers that he reckons took up 90% of his working time, and his reputation as a very capable deal-maker.

Most company CEOs, he writes in this 300-page memoir, are “charming and professional”. In a fascinating section left until the book’s final pages, he explains some of the nitty-gritty of representing a huge range of workers, and tactics he terms “leverage” (“working out where an employer is weak and applying pressure using unconventional methods”). In doing so, he shines light on why and how he rose from early union activism on Liverpool’s docks in the late 1960s – and, indeed, why some of the invective hurled at him has always symbolised how a huge chunk of the British establishment simply loathes trade unions, not least when they deliver for their members.

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Think the Tories are less nasty now? See what they do with universal credit | John Harris

Monday, September 13th, 2021

The £20 uplift is all that keeps many families afloat, even those who work. Yet it’s due to end within weeks

As the days get shorter and autumn slowly comes into view, you can feel it: a deep sense of public foreboding, perhaps best summarised as the growing realisation that business as usual is turning out to be nothing of the kind.

People’s anxieties are focused on everything from the closure of the furlough scheme to the fate of an increasingly under-pressure NHS. But for millions, there is no greater source of worry than the end of the so-called £20 weekly “uplift” to universal credit. Scheduled for 6 October, it’s now being confirmed in messages sent via online benefit accounts, and sowing the kind of cold fear that defines far too many British lives. That is the human story: in political terms, the move surely calls time on hopes that Covid-19 might have somehow marked the birth of a less nasty Tory approach to the benefits system.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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