Some people have been campaigning against plastic bags for ages. The Co-op’s banned plastic bags in Devon and Cornwall, still in that neck of the woods, Modbury is the first town to ban plastic bags and councillor Sheila Newman hasn’t given up on banning plastic bags here in Chorlton.

All great stuff!

And all will be surprised to hear that it is not they, but the Daily Mail which has secured a government clampdown on plastic bags thanks to a campaign lasting just three days (not even Prince Harry in Afghanistan could knock this off the front page).

… apparently PM Gordon Brown owed editor Paul Dacre a favour.

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Prince Harry’s ten weeks living his dream in Afghanistan have, he says, given him a chance to live a normal life, sadly that’s all coming to an end.

I think the Ministry of Defence is being a more than a little hasty. Pulling him out is a form of retreat and hands the Taliban a propaganda victory. I reckon we should keep Harry out there for as long as it takes… and if that’s twenty years, so be it. (Alternatively, if he really wants a normal life he could always have a go at renouncing the monarchy. I think he’d be surprised how quickly he’d be forgotten; nobody seemed to miss him while he was away.)

Sure he’s a bullet magnet, but that could be a good thing; use him as bait to lure the Taliban into the open. Better still send Prince William out to join him… he graduated as an army officer too and it would be a shame to waste that.

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David Ottewell of the Manchester Evening News is pretty much on the money, reminding us that Manchester’s supercasino has been sacrificed to help Gordon Brown develop a more friendly relationship with Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail.

And goodness what a result.

The Daily Mail initially reported the story under the gloating headline ‘Labour heartlands to be regenerated to curb grassroots revolt over supercasino axe’; a real kick in Gordon’s teeth. That story is no longer online… nor is it in Google’s cache… but try searching ‘“Government was today set to launch huge regeneration projects in Labour heartlands”’… for a limited time you’ll get:

Click the link and you’ll find that story’s been replaced with the apparently more conciliatory ‘At last Labour owns up to casino fears over gambling, crime and family breakdown’.

What a triumph for Gordon Brown’s campaign to bring Paul Dacre’s Daily Mail into the ‘government of all the talents’; Paul Dacre is chief censor of government secrets from the Thatcher years… placing Thatcher’s historical legacy in the hands of one of her most hysterical fans.

Of course, the Daily Mail should not be worrying about money being spent on ‘huge regeneration projects’. Tuesday’s £10m pay off (which looked like a white elephant anyway; a massive BMX park and a ground for rugby club nobody goes to see) was Wednesday’s sham. Meanwhile Tory controlled Blackpool, which will have been quite shocked to be labelled a Labour heartland by the Daily Mail, was promised a runners-up prize of £300m (yep, thirty times the first prize), but as the Manchester Evening News reports: ‘it is understood £250m of this had already been announced – and spent.’

Gordon Brown needs to understand that Paul Dacre may smile to his face, but the Daily Mail will never be his friend.

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It’s refreshing to see Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Withington, Lucy Powell, using her Guardian blog to tackle issues around incapacity benefit, or the ‘sick note culture’. Refreshing because too many of our politicians shy away from difficult issues.

The phrase ‘sick note culture’ is incendiary, so Lucy’s sending a strong message just by writing under that headline (although I guess she might be able to blame a sub-editor, should that land her in hot water), but there clearly is a significant section of society that has failed to grab the opportunities of the last ten years. We have to go back to 1971 to find employment rates so high, but a significant number of people have remained benefit dependent and we have to import labour. That’s partly because Tory labour laws, which government’s been afraid to repeal for fear of looking radical, help create crap jobs that only really appeal to immigrants, but not entirely.

I don’t really like using anecdotes, but some stories are worth telling. A friend of a friend is a nurse at Christie Hospital, which is a demanding job especially as she has multiple sclerosis. She has to work because her husband has been on incapacity benefit for over ten years; effectively retiring from his job as a painter and decorator in his early thirties. She’s been quite depressed lately as her eldest son has more or less given up on education; dad, who’s never felt any incentive to retrain (even though he could), has not been a very good role model.

And yet the incapacitated should never be victimised.

So Lucy Powell’s not threatening to come after the sick with a big stick, but working with a charity that helps those who want to change. More people – like this friend of a friend – need to want to change. Lucy’s keen on health secretary Alan Johnson’s idea of changing sick notes, which simply sign people off as unable to do their usual job, for well notes that identify the abilities they retain.

However, to work effectively the kind of multi-agency approach Lucy Powell discusses in her blog, will need to be a reality. It’s no good a doctor identifying a basic skill set, unless somebody with a friendly face is standing in the wings ready to help the formerly incapacitated retrain and find work.

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Who could fail to admire the students who held an illegal – but surprisingly responsible – rave at Withington’s disused White Lion?

The ‘reclaiming abandoned space for the community’ line sounds like convenient nonsense to me, but in a piece that’s failed to make the online edition, the South Manchester Reporter reckons the police received not a single complaint, there were proper bouncers and a system for selling alcohol without a licence that sounds far too simple to be true.

Greater Manchester Police should be singled for particularly high praise after they allowed the students to rave on from 11pm to 6.30am. (Although some are cynical about the constabulary’s emailed offer to return equipment confiscated at that time.)

All of which is one in the eye of our local MP and councillors, who have dedicated their lives to closing properly licensed and regulated establishments. Organising the party via a secret Facebook group and starting well beyond the killjoys’ bedtime (most are curled up in bed by 9pm with a mug of Horlicks^* and a chocolate biscuit), ensured the whole event flew well under the radar… and shows the night time culture to be far less disruptive than is claimed.
^*For a limited time you may claim FREE Horlicks here.

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Fans of Arnold Wesker’s Roots like to say this ‘was and is a revolutionary play’, but perhaps the emphasis should be on the ‘was’.

Roots could easily have been subtitled ‘waiting for Ronnie’, who sounds like the worst kind of smart arse (but who, to be fair and without giving anything away, is finally revealed to be refreshingly human). As we wait two weeks for Ronnie to venture out to deepest rural Norfolk to meet his future in-laws, we find his fiancée, Beatie, bursting with things to say about the man who has freed her from a simple, but so she now fears, ignorant life. Ronnie has taught her so much that she needs to pass on to her family; knowledge that will lift them to higher place. And so an image of Ronnie as towering guru and (shockingly) amazing lover is developed; a façade that simply has to give way. How will this man live up to Beatie’s hyperbole?

Writing in the late-1950s on the tension between town and city – with the latter thinking the former intellectually challenged – Arnold Wesker does remind us of the forces that have led to creation of reactionary bodies like the Countryside Alliance. But, that’s probably too generous. Roots has its moments, but it’s hard to care for any of the characters who are all rather crudely drawn. (We were tempted to leave at the interval, but it does pick up in the second half.) A play of and for its time, perhaps.
Arnold Wesker’s Roots is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester until 1 March.

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At first sight Escape is just another bar in a suburb that has seen many new bars and restaurants open (and some close) over the last decade. But I reckon the proprietors of Escape are heroes for bravely investing in what was a rundown shopping parade opposite Chorlton Bus Station. When a couple of restaurants, along with an upmarket boutique, followed them another little patch of Manchester was regenerated.

So successful have the entrepreneurs behind Escape and other bars and restaurants been, it’s not uncommon for the odd Birmingham celebrity to come over all jealous and we’ve a perilous shortage of chefs. Meanwhile, those who don’t like it can sell up for a tidy profit and move to one of the many dormitory suburbs common to any city. Everybody wins.

Yet local Lib Dems Cllr Tony Bethell and Cllr John Leech MP are most upset. To them Escape represents the worst excesses of Labour’s 24 hour licensing policy; a rather silly claim given that Escape is clearly closed in the Lib Dem’s photo and Chorlton has no 24 hour drinking dens. (Bethell and Leech have well earned reputations for being economical with the truth.)

Sadly, despite headline grabbing ethical clothing stores and Beech Road’s trendy boutiques, the high street is still dominated by charity shops and there’s no shortage of units sporting for sale signs. The claim that bars and restaurants drive out traditional local shops is simply nonsense.

Yet Cllr Tony Bethell lives right by a failed shopping parade in the middle of a former council estate; the Merseybank shops (or rather ex-shops, as most are boarded up). So you’d think he’d understand that there is no queue of traditional shopkeepers desperate to get into Chorlton. The good people of Merseybank have no interest in returning to 1950s shopping habits, dividing their shopping between small independent butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, bakers and the like offering limited product ranges and poor service at inflated prices.

Bethell and Leech reckon the council should step in and convert the entire parade into a great big council service centre, which could hardly be described as a sustainable approach to urban renewal. Sadly, it’s almost certainly time to give up on the Merseybank shops, situated as they are in an area unsuitable for destination retailers or bars. Better to look to redeveloping the parade as housing which, given the location, could be relatively affordable.

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… the old man being an on form Tommy Lee Jones, who helped contemporise the western in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and does it again thanks to the Coen Brothers and scary Javier Bardem.
A what’s not to like 10 out of 10
Writer/Directors: Ethan Coen & Joel Coen……Starring: Tommy Lee Jones……Javier Bardem……Woody Harrelson……Kelly Macdonald
Charlie Wilson’s War……Vantage Point

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Almost every day the North West Hunt Saboteurs Association emails with news of often extreme examples of animal cruelty, surprisingly frequently connected to fox hunting… despite the apparent ban on this blood sport three years ago this week. Much of this goes relatively unreported, but news highlights have been assembled here.

Not a single hunt has disbanded and while there has been the occasional prosecution and small fine it’s reasonable to say that police have retained their role as hunt protectors. So far from retiring hunt saboteurs are reorganised into organisations like Hunt Crime Watch and are as active as ever.

Last year Tory leader David Cameron marked the ban’s second anniversary with a promise to legalise hunting as a matter of urgency. Fortunately, 73 per cent of people are against him. In the meantime, why not email your chief constable to politely ask that they do their job?
Fox photo taken in Essex by Neil Phillips. Used with permission. Some rights reserved.

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Marking the centenary of the photographer’s death, Contact: George Rodger’s War Photographs makes for an impressive collection; a bombed Coventry street, a crowd gawping at a dead Japanese soldier, a Sudanese wrestler.

Generally, the images on display are notable for their harsh realism. Working for Life, an American publication before the US had entered the war, meant that George Rodger wasn’t subject to the same degree of censorship as others and so didn’t have to resort to tricks like asking an assistant to pose as a milkman. (Although the German soldier paying his respects at the grave of an unknown British airman, with downed plane in the background, looks a little staged to a cynic like me.)

There is certainly no filler here. Each image is powerful and worth a trip to Salford Quays; that George Rodger led an interesting life is plain for all to see. And yet there is no story.

We’re told that Magnum, the agency George Rodger was to co-found, was established in the aftermath of the war, but we’re offered no insight into this new and revolutionary agency’s philosophy or ways or working. Consequently, Contact is worth far less than the sum of its parts.
Contact: George Rodger’s War Photographs is at Imperial War Museum North now and until 27 April 2008

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