I've never been less excited about England - and it's wonderful

Obviously I'm still excited about the World Cup but what I'm less excited than ever for watching England play.

I'm one of those fair-weather football fans. I don't support a particular club, mainly because I only started paying attention when I went to university and lived with people who do. Supporting a football club is a bit like religion: you need to nail it down young and adult conversions are rare. My dad supported Raith Rovers, currently 7th in the Scottish Championship, but that was never a realistic option when I was a child in the East Midlands with friends who all supported Liverpool or Man. United. I keep up with who's up and who's down in the Premier League, partly because it's interesting and partly so I know who to console / mock on Monday morning at work.

But I always watched England play and some of my strongest memories are of the disbelief when David Beckham was sent off against Argentina in 1998, listening intently to the radio as England squandered a 1 goal lead against Brazil in 2002 (I was on a school trip that had to leave at half time) and Wayne Rooney being sent off against Portugal in 2006.


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Why don't we just put adverts on Boris bikes?

With the news a little while ago that Barclays are pulling out from  sponsorship of the cycle hire scheme (I assume because everyone called them 'Boris bikes' rather than 'Barclays bikes') I was thinking about who, if anyone, should replace them?

I always thought it was a bit odd that Barclays should want to spend £50m (£25m as it turns out) on advertising that does little more than mention their brand name. I'm aware that universally recognised brands sponsor big events so I'll defer to their marketing teams' expertise on that. It's about associating yourself with something cool rather than brand awareness specifically but one of the goals surely has to be having people say the word 'Barclays' more often.

But as far as replacing Barclays is concerned, the paradox is that any company with enough money to sponsor the entire scheme surely already has enough brand awareness to render sponsorship a little redundant, particularly if they're only ever going to be known as 'Boris bikes'.

So were talking in the office and wondered why it has to be only one company sponsoring the bikes?

There are around 8,000 Boris bikes in London and about 750 docking stations. Why not allow companies to buy advertising space on a limited number of them the way they do with buses? There are about 7,500 London buses (all figures Wikipedia) so while the logistics of changing the advert at the back of each bike might demand some sort of minimum order (say 500 bikes for 1 month) it should surely be workable. TfL would also have the location data for each bike (or at least the start and end point of every journey) making ad tracking research easy as well.

I was really sceptical of the Boris bikes originally but now quite like them as a useful transport option of last resort. When tubes and trains aren't running £3 for a cycle is a lot cheaper than a taxi. It's obviously a blow that the scheme will lose the money from Barclays but hopefully it'll continue in some form or another.

History time: JFK Assassination Anniversary Special!

So it's the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and no doubt we're in store for a slew of documentaries and minor features on breakfast TV.

But if you want to cover most of the topic then you could do worse than watching two (very good) films:

Thirteen Days is the story of inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ignore Kevin Costner's terrible Boston accent (you'll tune it out after about half an hour) and enjoy the way Bruce Greenwood and Steven Culp nail the mannerisms of John and Robert Kennedy as they try to stop the American military from starting a nuclear war. The film is a little limited in not showing much of the background or why the Soviets put missiles in Cuba in the first place and Greenwood isn't quite as charismatic as the real life JFK but succeeds brilliantly in showing how much pressure there was for a "firm" response and how difficult it was for Kennedy and his team to resist the demands of the generals. The guy who plays Curtis LeMay seems over the top until you read a bit of his Wikipedia page and realise how much they toned him down.

JFK is Oliver Stone's film about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination by Jim Garrison played by Kevin Costner (him again). The conclusion that Garrison, and the film, reaches is a bit nuts but the first part is more understandable than the second.
Basically he concludes that 1) the assassination couldn't have been the work of just Lee Harvey Oswald and thus must have been a conspiracy involving other people and 2) that conspiracy was hatched by the military industrial complex (including J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson who the script calls "accomplices") to prevent Kennedy from ending the Vietnam war.

Now I've just started reading Robert Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson" and if you read anything about him you'll know that he has a history of what we'll euphemistically call "ethically dubious behaviour" but this is pretty crazy stuff. In fact one of the best bits of the film is where the jury in the big trial scene, who have until now been going along with Garrison's explanation of how Oswald couldn't have been the lone gunman, start to scoff and shake their heads when he moves on to his LBJ coup d'etat theory. Tommy Lee Jones' character (the defendant) smiles as well because he knows that at this point he's now guaranteed a "not guilty" verdict.

The number of problems with Garrison/Stone's military industrial conspiracy theory is huge, not least of all the idea that JFK would have withdrawn from Vietnam. Evidence is unclear but Kennedy increased US involvement more than Eisenhower but it's likely that he would have continued US involvement though perhaps not escalated in the way that Johnson did after 1964.
What Stone said afterwards is that the reason for proposing such an outlandish theory was to circulate a "counter-myth" to challenge the myth that Oswald acted alone and dethrone it as the accepted truth even if not directly aiming to replace it.

Regardless of the facts of the assassination, the power of the film is best summarised by the late (great) Roger Ebert:

"The facts, such as they are, will continue to be elusive and debatable. Any factual film would be quickly dated. But “JFK” will stand indefinitely as a record of how we felt. How the American people suspect there was more to it than was ever revealed. How we suspect Oswald did not act entirely alone. That there was some kind of a conspiracy. “JFK” is a brilliant reflection of our unease and paranoia, our restless dissatisfaction. On that level, it is completely factual."

These two films represent Kennedy's greatest triumph (avoiding a nuclear war over Cuba) and the legacy of his untimely death and the way it still captures the public imagination. They don't really touch the other area Kennedy is remembered for, advancing civil rights, but his legacy here is actually pretty limited and most of the actual leg-work was done by Johnson after Kennedy's death, something which I think is pretty well acknowledged now.

Apart from these two films though, most of my knowledge of Kennedy comes from Robert Dallek's "An Unfinished Life" (of which apparently Alex Ferguson is a big fan too). It talks about his crippling (and secret) health problems, his scandalous lack of fidelity and the effect on his marriage, and the influence of the patriarch of the Kennedy clan: Joseph P. Kennedy. The multimillionaire sponsor of JFK's political career whose time as ambassador to the UK is mainly remembered for his pro-appeasement sentiments and support for peace with the Nazis.

The main thing I remember from Robert Dallek (I read the book about 10 years ago so memory is sketchy) is what he said about the unique tragedy of Kennedy's death. To paraphrase: Lincoln's assassination came when relief at the end of the war was more powerful than grief at the loss of a president despised by the South and not yet as revered in the North as he is now. Similarly for Franklin Roosevelt whose death also came at the end of a war and after he had achieved great things. Kennedy's death is tragic because of what he wasn't able to achieve and how a glittering, hopeful future was cruelly snatched away and replaced with Vietnam, social unrest and turmoil.

Is it completely unrealistic? Of course. Kennedy would never have been able to deliver this. Lyndon Johnson signed more of Kennedy's agenda into law than Kennedy himself would likely have been able to. But Johnson's legacy is sullied by Vietnam and his own bullying reputation. Barack Obama came to office with sky high expectations and hopeful rhetoric and has achievements which arguably place him in the same category as Johnson but the reality of governing tarnishes the image and brings it back to Earth.

Kennedy faced his share of criticism while president (though in a less partisan and polarised era) but the premature end to his presidency allows us to imbue him with the hopes of the baby boomer generation without ever having them disappointed.

There's a scene in another Oliver Stone film where Richard Nixon, near the end with the net of Watergate closing in on him, looks up at the mournful portrait of Kennedy and says "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are."

Seriously, George Osborne is investing in a spaceship!

It's a cliché to talk about August in politics being the "silly season" (not only is it almost over but surely Syria makes it fairly serious) so instead I thought I'd talk about something that's awesome.

One of the interesting things to come out of the Budget back in March was that the government is planning to invest £60m in a company called Reaction Engines who are developing the SABRE engine which could make spaceplanes a reality.


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Off Topic: Happy 150th Birthday to the London Underground

So last week the London Underground celebrated 150 years since the first train travelled from Paddington to Farringdon which means a bonanza of fascinating trivia and awesome variations of that iconic map.

When my dad moved to London to study for a year in 1973, he initially bought a tube season ticket but decided to change it to a bus ticket because (to paraphrase) he found himself climbing down into one hole in the ground and reappearing in another with no sense of where he was. With a bus pass travelling was slower but he could start to remember where things were.

With me it's been almost the opposite (although the line I take most often is the above-ground DLR so I suppose I get the best of both). I remember where things are primarily by their proximity to a tube station and if someone tells me where they live or where their office is based, my first thought is to try and locate it on a tube map.

The Underground is the nervous system of the city and the passenger numbers alone are staggering, over a billion passenger journeys are made each year with 57,000 people passing through Waterloo underground alone every morning rush hour. We complain when trains are delayed, when there's a signal failure or when the Circle line has to stop for five minutes at every. damn. stop making it quicker to walk. But the fact that a patchwork system, assembled over 150 years in fits and starts somehow manages to work as well as it does is surely a minor daily miracle.

And it's becoming more of a miracle as time goes on as London's population rises.

The tube network has been undergoing upgrades for the entire time that I've lived in London (just over 3 years if anyone's curious) to make the service more efficient and ultimately carry more passengers.

But it's hard to see them ever keeping up with demand and at peak times on major lines there are already trains every 2 minutes. Will there ultimately be a train arriving as soon as the previous one leaves, using up every minute of the hour? What happens when even these are full? Do we use longer trains which require longer platforms at every station? How long will it be until the platforms of one station almost join those of the next station?

The problem is that the UK is such a London-centric country that the city will likely continue to grow putting further strain on the system and there seems to be little private sector incentive for companies not to move here. From my own (limited and I suppose also London centric) vantage point, most of the clients my company works for are based in London and most of the companies they work for seem to be based in London. So many people that I know moved to London during the great recession because it was the most likely place for them to find work.

It's like a black hole, sucking more and more people and money in and in a round about way this is why I've always been in favour of public organisations like the BBC moving North. The UK is far, far, far too London centric. Is it any wonder nobody cared about the police commissioner elections because there wasn't one happening in London and therefore the London based media barely covered them?

If there's little chance of the private economy balancing the country a bit then organisations which are at least slightly less susceptible to market forces should be helping to move money and talented people away from places which have no trouble attracting replacements. That's the only way we'll stop the apparent drift toward city statehood that London has been on and ultimately that's better for everyone, particularly those that live here.

Off Topic: The "CraigNotBond" site still exists!

As the description says, this blog is supposed to be largely about politics and polling but occasionally there's interesting or funny news on a different topic. This is most definitely the latter.

This site still exists. Seriously!

A bit of background, back in 2005 when Daniel Craig was first announced as replacing Pierce Brosnan as James Bond there were some die hard fans who didn't like the idea, saying Craig was unsuitable for a number of reasons, most of them focusing on him being a bit too blond.

They picked on him for all sorts of tiny issues like having big ears or wearing a life jacket for the publicity stunt announcing him as Bond (despite the fact that a worse headline surely would have been "Foolhardy Craig drowns in Thames after declining life jacket") but the craziest was a site called CraigNotBond.com.

This site not only listed reasons why they thought Craig was a bad choice but actually had reviews and ratings of every other Bond just to prove the point as well as calling for a boycott of Casino Royale.

And then this happened, all the criticism disappeared and Craig suddenly became the best Bond since Connery.

I assumed that the CraigNotBond.com guy would give up in embarrassment at being proven so clearly wrong but here we are, two films later and he's still at it. Most of the links don't work but it's still being updated with rants about Skyfall and everything. The site is now a little collecting point for those people who are bravely resisting Daniel Craig's charms.

The best bit though is that they have their own little self-selecting polls section asking (what else?) who visitors think the best Bond is. First place is Sean Connery with 36% but in close second with 35% is the man a user of the site describes as "look[ing] just like that marionette that was the star of Thunderbirds Are Go."