Wigan 1 – 1 Fulham

It may look like an easier away game on paper, but Fulham haven’t beaten Wigan up there for some years, and they are not pushovers.

Both teams did play positively, and both goalkeepers were kept fairly busy. Dempsey’s converted penalty towards the end of the first half cancelled out an earlier Boyce goal, and so Fulham ended up taking away a point and remaining in 11th place.

The international break may mean that some of the injured players are back in time for the Birmingham and Blackburn games later in the month. Four points out of those would put the Whites in a good position.

AS Roma 2 – 1 Fulham

This was a disappointing result for the Whites, especially having taken the lead and held it for most of the game. Nevland saw red shortly into the second half, and soon John Arne Riise was able to cancel out Kamara’s opening goal.

Shortly afterwards, Roma took the lead, and right at the end Konchesky was sent off to sum up how badly the game had gone.

Fulham were the stronger team at first and did dominate the first half, and it’s clear that the sending off of Nevland changed the whole game. The actual offence didn’t look that bad to me, perhaps worth a booking.

So now, Fulham would have to win against CSKA Sofia and FC Basel and still hope that other results go their way if they are to reach the next round.

Still, it’s shown that Fulham can be competitive in Europe – and can beat a team of Roma’s stature with a full team on the pitch – while still having a decent Premiership campaign. At the end of last season, pundits were suggesting that 7th place was a bit of a poisoned chalice, that we wouldn’t have the depth of squad. I must admit I was a bit worried over summer as so few signings were made until quite late, but Hodgson has managed to build up the roster to the point we can put out a pretty good second team, and at least win games without Murphy and Johnson.

Ewan MacColl

Last week, I went up to Salford, the city right next to Manchester, to the tribute to Ewan MacColl, who died just over 20 years ago. Born James Miller into a working class Scots couple who’d relocated to Broughton to escape a blacklist, he left school at 14 just as the 1930s depression was kicking in. He got involved in music, acting and playwriting, as well as left wing politics from a young age.

In terms of his music, he’s probably best known for his part in the British folk revival. He collected hundreds of traditional songs from Scotland and from other parts of Britain, recording new versions of them and rescuing many from obscurity. He also wrote prodigiously, and many of the songs he wrote became folk standards (often to the point that many people think they are far older). He also produced many protest songs, some of which became anthems for particular groups.

The three most famous songs he wrote are The Manchester Rambler, written around the time of the Kinder Scout mass trespasses of the 1930s, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, written for Peggy Seeger who he had an affair with in the 1950s and who later became his wife, and Dirty Old Town, written as a filler for a play but adopted by countless Irish bands (despite the ‘Old Town’ of the title being Salford, rather than Dublin as is commonly assumed).

Politically, he was for most of his life a communist. He even wrote songs extolling the virtues of the likes of Stalin and Ho Chi Minh. Despite that dubious allegiance, his politics did have a positive side – he was a long time peace campaigner and supporter of trade unions and civil liberties, and always held the cause of the common man and woman as paramount.

So, at the concert there were plenty of folkies, peaceniks and lefties. Peggy Seeger performed several songs, including The First Time… and The Joy of Living, which were incredibly powerful – the latter was written shortly before Ewan MacColl died as a farewell to the people and places he loved, and the only other time I saw it performed was around that time when he and Peggy played at the Hawth in Crawley.

There were other stalwarts of the ‘Critics Group’, the tightly knit collective of performers and writers who worked in London from the 1960s, and in which MacColl was instrumental. There were also some younger artists, including a particularly earnest American-Scot who writes lots of peace songs, and Jez Lowe, a sardonic and entertaining songwriter from County Durham.

The audience were encouraged to join in (which is not always that relaxing or tuneful, but did create a friendly atmosphere), and at the end everyone joined in with The Manchester Rambler – made all the more authentic with the dominance of the local accent producing the odd “Man-chus-TOH” in the chorus.

What struck me about it, coming as it did a few days after the fuss about the BNP appearing on Question Time, was that this was an event which was celebrating the life of a ‘white working class’ Briton, in a room filled with white British people, revelling in the sounds of traditional English, Scottish and Irish music and song.

Yet I can bet anything that not one of the people in that room would have any truck with the fascist BNP. What’s more, I bet they’d have had no time for MacColl, even if he’s done more to revitalise traditional English/British working class culture than any of that bunch have managed.

The Politics of Science

I’ve read a few differing views of the saga over the sacking of Professor Nutt, and both sides put forwards points I can agree with. The hardcore ‘we must use science to determine public policy’ crowd are up in arms about it, and it’s of course a convenient stick with which to beat the government with.

On the other side, Hopi Sen says that Prof Nutt is both right and wrong.

He is absolutely right on the scientific evidence. He is right that some legal drugs are worse than illegal ones in their harm profiles and that this leads to apparent glaring contradictions.

Yet he is equally wrong to argue that the government should classify drugssolely according to the medical harm evidence.

There are many other factors in play and they are not irrational. We are not starting from a blank sheet – we are dealing with a society with certain existing norms of behaviour, and with other behaviours that are not widely spread, and policymakers must consider the impact of changing that.

This is pretty important, really. And it goes wider than just science as well. Politicians are there to make decisions on our behalf. In a democracy, they are going to have to include public opinion as part of their decision-making process. In a decent state, they should look at the social effects of policy, not just the dry theory.

Personally, I support the decriminalisation (combined with regulation) of soft drugs, and included in that would be cannabis. Of course, I know that this is not a particularly popular idea, and also that it is not as simple as just declaring it done. Still, I was in favour of the downgrading of cannabis to a level C drug, and not happy about the reversal of that policy earlier in the year. A report like that produced by Professor Nutt’s committee does give a lot of support on the medical side of the argument that the risks of the drug are low.

However, there are still a fair number of unknowns. Alcohol and tobacco have been subject to a far wider range of studies covering their use and abuse than cannabis ever has. Nutt’s report does not really come to a conclusion on the correlation between cannabis use and increased rates of psychological problems – because there is no real conclusive evidence on whether there’s a causal link.

So the confidence level of the health risk assessments on cannabis should be treated as having a bit more of a margin for error than those for our ‘legal’ drugs. When it comes down to it, cannabis is still rated as about as dangerous as tobacco.

The measure that Nutt used was to suggest that drugs more dangerous than alcohol be Grade-A, and those less dangerous than tobacco be Grade-C, with those in between being Grade-B. Cannabis comes out just below tobacco in terms of health risks, and so the decision is actually marginal on that measure.

However, even if the medical evidence is unequivocal, there is still the wider dimension of the social impact of various drugs, and the effect of their grading in the first place. For example, even though alcohol is apparently about as dangerous as methadone or ketamine, and not much safer than the Grade-A drugs like heroin and cocaine, it would be a massive political and social issue to even consider bringing it under the Misuse of Drugs Act. The USA tried prohibition of alcohol, and it failed miserably.

In the briefing that came along with the speech by Prof. Nutt which started this whole furore – Estimating Drug Harms: A risky business? (pdf 367KB) – he himself does acknowledge that the part that the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that he chaired plays only one part among many in the factors of deciding how to grade each substance. There’s a picture on page 3 showing just how many other feeds there are into the decision.

What Nutt appears to have done, however, is to go close to the line that advisors are not supposed to cross in terms of going from giving expert advice to lobbying for a political position. Did he cross it? I’m not sure – but he certainly didn’t back away from it either.

And to bring the issue to a wider context, the issues about ‘expert advice’ or recommendations affect all sorts of policy. A prime example is in planning. Councillors will be presented with a planning application, and a report from the Planning Officers detailing the issues around it, with a recommendation either to allow or turn down the development.

If politicians are only supposed to accept the expert report, then every application recommended for approval will be passed. However, I’ve quite often seen contentious and marginal cases where there’s a lot of public interest and where the officers’ recommendations have not been followed. Quite often the officers themselves will recognise the closeness of the decision, and there is latitude for refusal on a range of grounds.

That’s not ‘ignoring’ the evidence. It’s considering it, weighing it up against other factors, and coming to a decision.

 

Dave’s European Adventure…

The Tories are really poisoning the well over Europe aren’t they?

Obviously, the issue of the direction of Europe and how to engage with it has been a large bone of contention for the Tories, going back to the Maastricht Treaty (although they pretty much waved through the Single European Treaty in the mid-80s. Dissident Tories set up fringe movements, such as the Referendum Party and, more successfully, UKIP as overtly eurosceptic political forces. Even so, the mainstream of the Conservative Party has over time drifted towards an antipathetic stance to the EU, as the influence of the moderate old guard such as Heseltine and Clarke waned in the 1990s.

But Cameron has really annoyed the people who would be the Tories more traditional allies in Europe, the centre right parties grouped in the European People’s Party (EPP). Firstly he withdrew the Tories from their alliance with the EPP, forming a new grouping with fringe right wing parties, mainly from Eastern Europe. The EPP made net gains in the 2009 elections, but could have been even stronger if the Tories and their new friends had joined them.

The choice of new partners for the Tories has also been contentious. The most natural grouping for them would have been the generally right wing, anti-federalist ‘Alliance of Independent Democrats’. However, they already had a UK-based party as leading members, UKIP. The Tories would not sit with UKIP and so put themselves in a position where they had to scout around for right wing parties that weren’t outright fascists in sufficient numbers and distribution to form a new group. As the bottom of the barrel was scraped, some dubious characters were signed up.

The most recent snub to the EPP was to try and stall the process of ratifying the Lisbon Treaty. After a long drawn out process, with some countries having a referendum (or in Ireland’s case two) and most putting the treaty through their parliaments, only the Czech Republic is left to sign it off. It was rumoured for some time that the President was holding off partly in response to a letter from a foreign politician who’d asked him to. Last week it was revealed that it was (as many had suspected) Cameron who had sent the letter.

The Czechs will go through their legal processes, and probably ratify later this month. The Tories will lose their main policy (to hold a referendum if it has not been fully ratified if and when they get elected) and now are set to come up with their Plan B – which is probably to try and negotiate as many ‘opt-outs’ as they can.

But who will they have to negotiate with? Well, the likes of Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, who lead Germany and France and are in EPP parties. They are also supporters of the Lisbon Treaty and have taken a very dim view of attempts to derail it.

Now, I think that Labour has missed a big trick here. The ‘Blair for President’ campaign is stupid – the EPP will want one of their guys to take the job, and likely someone from a ’smaller’ nation which would rule him out of the running on two counts – before you take into account any objections to the man himself. Brown and Labour would do better to avoid putting anyone forward for the top job. Let the Tories be the only UK party which is getting the cold shoulder in Europe – if they win the General Election, let’s see how much ‘Dave’ and his mates can get out of a Europe where pretty much every leader and most MEPs distrusts him before he’s even started.

Fulham 3 – 1 Liverpool

Even a day after it happened, I’m still stunned by this result. I didn’t keep up with the game and only saw the Match of the Day highlights, so it wasn’t until nearly 11pm that I knew the result.

Liverpool have had a bad run form lately, and this will be part of a sequence of seven games in which they’ve lost six (even if the other game was a 2-0 win against Man Utd). In contrast, Fulham now haven’t lost in six games. The Reds had two players sent off, but both came after Fulham were 2-1 up, and neither looked to be particularly bad decisions (Liverpool are appealing against them both).

With Zamora scoring (making up for missing a sitter last week) and Dempsey coming back to the team in great style to make plenty of pay and score the last goal, the team should be buoyed up ready for the Roma game on Thursday. They’ll be missing Damien Duff, who took a knock and came off at half time, but Gera came on to replace him and was involved in the second Fulham goal (scored by Nevland), so hopefully the Whites can put out a strong challenge in the Italian capital.

A bit of a flurry

I’ve not posted for a few days, but there are several topics I wanted to do something with. The problem was I was too busy to get on to it properly, and then when I started I found that my laptop’s hard drive was nearly full.

After several attempts to figure it out (virus scans, spyware scans, checking all my folders, watching the activity logs etc etc), I finally found out what it was. Anyone with Vista on their machine, check this out.

If you are seeing your hard disk space eaten up with files you can’t see (mine was up to 197GB out of 220GB, leaving only a few hundred MB after the data I could see), try this:

Open up a console in Administrator mode (Start->Programs->Accessories, right click on ‘Command Prompt’ and select ‘Run as administrator’). You should see a prompt line beginning ‘C:\Windows\system32>’

Type vssadmin list shadowstorage

You should get something that says something like:

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{a983975a-151a-11de-932e-000235a17ad24}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume:  (C:)\?\Volume{a983975a-151a-11de-932e-000235a17ad24}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 126.938 MB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 400 MB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 2 GB

This is fine. If it’s bigger, especially if it’s much bigger, you can reduce the maximum limit with the command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=2GB

A message will come up if that works –  ”Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association”. If not, then you should get a message to show what the error is.

After a few days of worrying about my machine having been set up as some ghost server for dodgy stuff, the relatively simple fix came as a great relief, but it wasn’t easy to find.

 

Smelled the spring on the sulfured wind

Just got back from seeing the Ewen MacColl tribute concert in Salford. I’ll write a longer post about it, but for now I have just one question:

Why didn’t they play Dirty Old Town?

Man City 2 – 2 Fulham

A fifth game in a row without losing is not a bad streak to have, especially as two of those games were against European opposition. Having already played against Manchester City at Eastland this season (losing 2-1 after extra time in the League Cup), and with the Sky Blues making a very good case to be  included in the top four of the Premiership, this was going to be a tough game. Coming on top of a last minute disappointment in the week against Roma and two games in the previous six days, it was a game I think many supporters were dreading.

So, when Man City scored two in the first fifteen minutes of the second half, after Zamora had missed what is already being described as ‘the sitter of the season’, I thought that it was all over.

Yet, as has already been demonstrated this season, Fulham had the spirit and determination to come back into a game that might have seemed lost. Within  two minutes of City’s second goal, Duff struck to bring the Whites within sight. Six minutes later, and Dempsey headed in from a Greening free-kick to wipe out the hosts’ lead.

There are still key players injured, and this was definitely a good result. Next weekend, Fulham host Liverpool. Before today, the Reds had been on a four game losing streak, but they beat Man Utd 2-0 this afternoon. I’ll be hoping that was just a blip…

Fidget Time

I had mixed feelings about the BBC inviting Nick Griffin on to Question Time. I don’t think that they should be banned or completely censored – those are generally counter-productive as well as being an infringement on the rights of free expression and association. But that doesn’t mean that they have to be invited on to national television. Even if they are, I’m not convinced that Question Time is all that good a forum to do it.

In fact, I don’t really think QT is all that good as a way of having political debate anyway. It can often end up as a pantomime, and the choice of guests can be a bit odd (not as bad as Radio Four’s Any Questions, which seems to have a rule that there must be three people from one side and only one on the other in every single programme).

I was going to give it a miss, but it was compelling to see how Griffin did, and how it was handled. I’m still not sure it went as well as some think it did. Yes, the BNP leader did make some pretty big gaffes – such as referring to the KKK as ‘almost totally non-violent’, claiming ridiculously that he can’t explain how or why he’s changed his mind about the holocaust to to ‘European Law’ when no such law would stop him from speaking in this country – but at times the tenor of the show was about hectoring him, which has the danger of making him appear to be a ‘victim’.

He’s not a victim, of course, of anything other than his own beliefs, tactics and history. The problem is that he can play up to the view of himself and his party as poor innocents being scorned by fictitious ‘elites’, and hope that it will be empathised with by people who are scared of brown people.

On the positive side, he really did look uncomfortable when challenged, and particularly when confronted by his own words. To most people, he will have looked very nervous, which is often an indication of a politician who is lying – or is at least untrustworthy. But most people already know what he stands for, and it’s not them who the BNP are trying to get support from.

And while I can understand the anger that people have about having him on BBC TV, but the demonstrations were themselves overzealous. I’ve been supportive of the UAF in terms of campaigning and highlighting the truth about the BNP. I don’t, however, think that aggressive behaviour is the right way to deal with the problem.