Book Review: Greaveburn by Craig Hallam

A touch of steam-powered punk

Review: Greaveburn by Craig Hallam | Inspired Quill

Resonant with the hiss and clank of steampunk chic, Hallam’s Greaveburn is a richly-textured and suitably macabre gothic fantasy fit for this cynical age, writes Mark Cantrell

 First published in Cheshire Today

REVIEWING books can be an ethical quandary these days, given all the sock-puppetry shenanigans that’s rippled through the publishing world recently, so before we begin this appraisal of Doncaster-author Craig Hallam’s debut novel, Greaveburn, it’s perhaps wise to point out that this reviewer is also signed up with his publisher Inspired Quill (IQ).

This has no bearing on the nature of this review, of course, but if nothing else it’s a nifty opportunity for some cheap self-publicity (hey, if you’ve got it, flaunt it), and it certainly pre-empts any accusations of favouritism on my part. Trust me, I’m a journalist, I don’t play favourites. I even eschewed time-honoured tradition and procured a paperback copy of the book at my own expense.

Now that’s dedication, you might think. Actually, no; this was the reader’s instinct at work. An eye-catching cover, which, on closer inspection really captures the moody spirit of the novel, an intriguing blurb, a suitably sombre introduction, and I have to say that I was snared. All right, I confess there was a certain degree of curiosity too.

So, with that disclaimer-come-disclosure out of the way, what did I actually make of Greaveburn?

Frankly, I enjoyed it. I suspect fantasy aficionados will get a good buzz out of it too. It is certainly a respectable debut for the author.

The novel proved itself an atmospheric page-turner, filled with a delightful array of weird and wonderful characters, all embroiled in the calamities of intrigue, dubious friendships, bitter rivalries, rebellion – and murder most nefarious. 

And what a setting. Hallam’s imagination paints a vivid cityscape, from its cobbled and shaded streets, to the grandiose architecture of its belfry, citadel and palaces; the detail of his prose brings the place bursting to startling life, without ever becoming turgid, as one might mistakenly expect from its baroque Gothicism. 

The cast of characters are as weird and wonderful as the city too; an intriguing mix of eccentricities, foibles, dysfunctionality, and outright sinister intent. But there is honesty of purpose too, kind of, in the figure of the appropriately named Steadfast, for instance. Don’t think this makes him a safe bet as hero material, however. The beleaguered Captain of the Guard is bound by ‘The Duty’ – torn by conflicting loyalties and lost within the timeless intrigues of the city’s ruling families. In Greaveburn, right and wrong are tangled, such that even its heroes are villains.

Then there is Riccall, the disfigured anti-hero exiled into the sewers where the so-called ‘Broken Folk’ reside. These are the disfigured, the disabled, the sick; outcast for their ‘deviance’ from what passes for ‘normal’—and to my mind they proved the most human and humane of all the city’s denizens. They save Riccall’s life, give him shelter and company, yet filled by a desire for justice – or is it really a burning need for vengeance? – he will readily spend their lives in a rebellion against the city that cast him out.

At the heart of it all is innocence in the form of 16-year-old Abrasia, the rightful heir to Greaveburn’s throne. With her father murdered, the city ruled over by the mad Archduke Choler, she lives a virtual recluse in the palace, stalked by the constant fear of assassination. She’s not entirely alone; Steadfast is determined that she will live to succeed to the throne. 

Just remember those conflicting loyalties, however. 

While he is sincere in his duty to the young heiress, he also lives in constant fear of the day he might be called upon to deliver the Archduke’s sealed note heralding Abrasia’s death. He is nothing if not a stickler for duty after all. And he has form – we meet him duly despatching his good friend Durrant, former Captain of the Guard, ally to Abrasia, and unfortunate subject of a sealed death note. Murder or execution? Even Steadfast isn’t sure, not that it stays his hand. 

No, it’s not easy being the good guy in a place like Greaveburn.

Into this moody gothic tale, the author has artfully integrated a steampunk aesthetic, and – whether by design or serendipity – it serves to highlight the city’s stagnant self-absorption.  The technological marvels created by the arrogant genius Loosestrife hold the key to the city’s future, yet they are left to gather dust once they have satisfied his intellectual ego, leaving Greaveburn untouched by their potential. 

But before the intrigues run their course, and the fires of rebellion rock the city’s shaded streets, Loosestrife’s mysterious device known only as ‘The Womb’ will figure large in the tangled lives and deaths of Greaveburn’s imperilled players.

Greaveburn itself is a curious place. This is an ancient city, stifled by a history that seems largely forgotten; enclosed by its baroque and grandiose architecture, as much as it is by its gargantuan defensive walls. Beyond those walls is nothing but wilderness; an empty land that leaves the city trapped in its own self-contained isolation. 

In short, it’s a society with no sense of purpose or vision. The ordinary folk merely get on with their lives, wealthy aristocrats wine and dine and play the rituals of social one-upmanship, and the Choler family, meanwhile, schemes for power. Not that the avaricious dynasty will do anything with this power, of course – other than wield it for its own sake. 

Greaveburn is that kind of city. One might think of it as a dark playground for bored dynasts and oligarchs; but in Hallam’s capable story-telling hands, their cosy little world is about to be turned upside down. 

If there are any gripes, it’s that moving the story forward leaves portions of Hallam’s canvas blank, his world tantalisingly obscured by omissions. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly doesn’t detract from an enjoyable and enthralling novel. In fact, my minor gripe really boils down to wanting to see, taste and hear more of Hallam’s world.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it all, but dammit I want to know. I guess this gripe just goes to show that Hallam has really got his hooks into me. And for an author, that’s no bad gripe at all. 

Details:

Greaveburn

By Craig Hallam

Inspired Quill

ISBN: 978-1-908600-12-7

Paperback, 262 pages (also available in digital editions)

Price: £7.99 (£2.99 digital)

This article was first published in Cheshire Today, 28 November 2012.

Interview: George Clarke, celebrity architect

Man with a mission

Television was the last thing on architect George Clarke’s mind when he was starting out, but he took to it with gusto and his clear passion for good design and quality homes has made a winning champion for empty homes but, as he tells Mark Cantrell, solving the housing crisis will take nothing less than a radical overhaul of the entire system

First published in Housing magazine

FROM an early age, George Clarke aspired to become an architect but by his own admission he kind of fell into television; he’s never looked back, however, and his presence on prime-time telly has served to add clout to themes that are close to his heart.

In a sense, it all started back on the building sites of his childhood in Sunderland. “My grandfathers were both builders so when I was a kid I used to be on building sites a lot, during school holidays and weekends, always helping out,” Clarke said. “At the same time, I had a huge passion for drawing. My granddads said from the earliest age I’d just sit there drawing for ages and ages. Then I tended to start drawing buildings. I spent so much time around them so I sketched them a lot. And it just moved on from there.

“I didn’t really know what an architect was when I was seven or eight years old; once I started getting to 10, 11, 12 and started reading books about buildings, architecture was the only thing that I wanted to do. I had a huge passion for buildings on every level, the way they were built, the way they were designed, and I just enjoyed reading about them. I remember, really, being about 12 years old, thinking I want to be an architect, and never wavered from it for a second.”

That unwavering commitment took him to the university of Newcastle and then university College London, where he studied architecture. By 2000 he was working his dream, having established his first practice, Clarke: Desai, with business partner Bobby Desai. Television was the last thing on his mind.

“I just stumbled into it. I literally just stumbled in,” he said. At the time, alongside running his practice, he was teaching at Newcastle University as a visiting architect and tutor, he was also writing a book. “I didn’t realise that it was a broadcasting agent as well as a literary agent. And so I signed for them on a Thursday afternoon and on the Monday morning she called me and asked had I ever thought about television?”

The agent pitched the idea and sold him on the screen test; he went along and subsequently got the job. “So literally between the Thursday afternoon and the following Tuesday, it kind of changed everything really,” he said.

He’s been on air now since 2003, first with Channel 5 – ‘Build A New Life’ – and then with Channel 4 where he’s since become the “face of architecture”. His show reel includes ‘Property Dreams’ (2004, C5), ‘Dream Home Abroad’ (2005, C5), ‘Build A New Life In The Country’ (2005-2007, C5). For Channel 4 he’s made ‘The Homes Show’ and ‘The Restoration Man’; all told they convey his infectious enthusiasm for architecture, for buildings, for homes, and the tremendous impact they can have on our lives.

But it was ‘The Empty Homes Show’, aired in December last year, that proved Clarke’s ‘call to arms’ – and one that was answered beyond even his wildest dreams.

“When you make something like that you always worry that when it comes to something political, if you like, that the public might not buy into it, but luckily they did,” he said. “In the first week, we had 100,000 people sign up for the petition. Thousands and thousands of people used the Empty Homes app to report empty homes. The Government very quickly woke up to what I was saying.”

Indeed, in April he was asked to serve as the Government’s empty homes advisor. “Basically, I ’m sent around the country to work with different councils and different areas to try and help them bring empty homes back into use and try and minimise the amount of demolition that’s happening,” he explained. “The Government’s phrase is that I ’m there to challenge [them] regarding their housing policies and also to challenge councils to think differently about how we deal with our old housing stock.”

So, what does he think of the Government’s efforts on the issue? “The Government is heading in the right direction, there’s no doubt about it. For us to be even talking about empty homes is fantastic, because it’s never been on any previous government’s radar. We’re seeing some great changes. Is it going far enough? No. Do politicians ever go fast enough? No,” he said. Not that he’d like to find himself in their shoes, especially in these difficult times.

“So, the Government is making all the right steps, all the right noises, but I find the process quite frustrating because I just want to get on with things and get things done. I’m not very good at ticking boxes and red tape and bureaucracy but unfortunately government is all about bureaucracy, really. I’ve been moving in there and trying to throw big spanners in the works and causing lots of trouble to be perfectly honest.”

As a working architect – he established a new multi-disciplinary practice George Clarke and Partners last year – as well as a successful television broadcaster, one might wonder where he finds the time to manage all this ‘extra-curricular’ activity: essentially it’s teamwork.

“A lot of hours,” he said, laughing. “I’ve got a great team behind me, some great people in the office who manage the day-to-day when I’m filming,” he said. “Genuinely, it’s an enormous amount of work, from when I get up in the morning to the minute I go to bed at night; it’s not a lot of me time, put it that way.”

Clarke clearly relishes all his roles, and is currently working on a follow up to last year’s empty homes show, catching up with some of the stories from the last programme, and reporting back the successes that have been achieved since then. Obviously, the content is rather ‘hush hush’, but not so his enthusiasm for the project and the “inspirational” stories it will reveal.

Some of the shine is lost from his palpable enthusiasm, it must be said, when considering the wider housing crisis: “I’m pretty miserable about it, unfortunately. Normally, I’m forever the optimist, but talking about the housing crisis generally, I think it’s pretty bad. It’s something that has gradually got worse and worse and worse over the last 30 years,” he said.

“We’re not building enough affordable homes at all. The Government needs to take full responsibility for that: they have neglected the affordable housing needs of Britain... We haven’t got anywhere near enough council housing in this country.

“Unfortunately, there’s too many big developers. We’re very different to Europe. If you go to places like Germany and through Scandinavia, there are many many many small scale developers, rather than the big beasts we’ve got. They dominate the industry, and they control the industry, and they drip feed the market to basically control pricing.

It’s simple supply and demand. If you’ve got very few houses being built then the houses that are there are going to be at high value; there’s always a demand and if you then reduce the supply it keeps the individual unit prices up.”

Planning, banks, architects, building quality, the whole system, it all comes in for a critical appraisal; Clarke clearly isn’t afraid to risk upsetting people, as those who saw him speak at the CIH event in Manchester will have gathered.

“The whole system is a complete mess and needs a radical overhaul... I’m not saying all the things I recommend are right, but I think we should be talking about it, we should be debating it, and we should try to move things on because we can’t carry on as we are,” he said.

“We need to be building between 350,000 and 500,000 homes per year to make the system affordable. My God, we’re not even building 100,000 of them at the minute. Year on year, the situation is getting worse and worse and worse and that’s why I think the entire system needs a massive kick up the backside.”


This interview first appeared in the September 2012 edition of Housing magazine and was subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 2 October 2012.

The Glaswegian approach to violence

Violence is a disease – and it can be cured

By treating violence as a public health issue, Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) broke ranks from the conventional law and order model to create a proactive multi-agency approach that has clear lessons for those tackling the anti-social behavior, writes Mark Cantrell 

 First published in the September 2012 edition of Housing

“THE sin is ignorance,” said Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan; a phrase that perhaps cuts both ways as we contemplate the malignancy of violence and anti social behaviour (ASB). As a society, we can bang on about law and order, take a macho stance and demand tougher penalties, but as Carnochan pointed out, it takes us no further forward.

At the end of the day, the criminal justice system can only mop up the mess, not resolve its root causes; that’s society’s job but all too often, society shrugs it off as somebody else’s problem, or retreats with the defeatist perception that violence will always be with us. This isn’t a view that’s finding favour north of the border: attitudes can and must change.

Using the image of an iceberg, he said: “The top end, the bit that we see, is where most of us work. We chip away at that – new legislation, new laws, lock more people up – but it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to the size of the iceberg. It just keeps bobbing up a little. if we want to shrink that iceberg, we need to raise the temperature of the water. And that’s the big stuff. That’s stuff like equality. The societies in the world that are the least violent are the most equal.”

And challenging social inequalities and deprivation is not something that the police, or the courts, or the prison service is geared up to do. Carnochan is co-director of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) and since 2005 it has been leading efforts to actively demonstrate that there is nothing inevitable about violence. In June he was in Manchester to take this message to delegates at the CIH conference; that he was speaking in the session on ‘housing as a determinant of public health’ ought to indicate that he’s not your average tough-talking copper.

“Violence is a public health issue. It’s not a criminal justice issue,” he said. “We’re the service of last resort. If you leave it to us, we’re really good at it: check your prisons, they’re full. [It costs] £42,000 a year for someone in jail, and I don’t come cheap either. We’re an expensive outfit, and we’re the last resort – but we seem to be taken as the first resort all the time.”

Strathclyde Police established the VRU with the explicit aim of tackling all forms of violence, especially knife crime and the carrying of weapons by young men in and around Glasgow. In April 2006, the unit’s remit was extended across Scotland to create a national centre of expertise on tackling violent crime. One crucial aspect to its approach is that it doesn’t work alone – it can’t work alone – to tackle the problems of violence, which are said to be chronic in Scotland.

“We think of deterrence; we think about prevention,” Carnochan added.

The organisation took its lead from the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) report on violence and health published in 2002 and adopted the public health model. The aims are to reduce violent crime and behavior by “working with partner agencies to achieve long-term societal and attitudinal change”. Enforcement – the criminal justice side of things – isn’t abandoned, but the VRU seeks out best practice to develop solutions to the issues. in a sense, the public health approach treats violence as akin to a disease.

“Violence is an infection that has crept through society to the extent that it is viewed today in much the same way as the common cold – something that is both incurable and inevitable,” the organisation says on its website. it takes the view that there is nothing inevitable or incurable about it.

Karyn McCluskey, co-director of the VRU, provided the impetus for its inception, having moved from the West Mercia force to Strathclyde in 2002, she told Housing she was “absolutely shocked by the level of anti-social behaviour and violence”. The traditional methods, to her mind, just weren’t working, and so she took three weeks holiday and spent it writing a report arguing for a different approach.

“This is not just a policing problem. If everybody thinks that this is up to the police then we are never going to help them, we’re never going to solve it,” she said. “We’ll put loads of people in jail, that’s great, but you have to jail those you’re afraid of, not those you’re mad at, and you have to do something different.”

That something was the shift towards the public health model; more holistic and pro-active, it takes in a whole host of considerations and agencies, to identify, isolate and intervene to address the factors that, well, breed the infection of violence and propagate it down the generations. By identifying risk factors, then preventative efforts can be put into place. In terms of violence, typical factors include: deprivation, poor parenting, education issues, and members of peer groups who are already engaged in violence.

“It allows us to look at things like primary prevention: parenting, early years, housing design, and a whole range of things like that,” McCluskey said. Secondary prevention then targets those who are at risk. Housing organisations and professionals are crucial allies, but interventions can also take place in what seem – at first glance – the unlikeliest of places.

“We do interventions in dental clinics now,” she added. “Because if I punch you in the face, the first things you’ll lose are your teeth.”

They found that dentists weren’t addressing the causes of these injuries. The VRU helped establish a charity Medics Against Violence, which has recruited around 300 consultants and dentists to push the anti-violence message. “Intervene at every teachable moment in someone’s life and they might be motivated to change,” McCluskey said.

Back to Carnochan and his hard-hitting presentation on gang violence, just one example of the VRU’s approach in action; in 2008 the VRU set up the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) in Glasgow’s east end. The initiative drew upon the best practice established in the United States to combat gang violence in cities such as Boston and Cincinnati. In Glasgow, the ‘diagnosis’ revealed 55 separate gangs that were “highly territorialised”, “obsessed with respect” and “resistant to change”. In effect, a life of violence was all they knew.

The process starts at an early age. As Carnochan explained, he put the question to Professor Richard Tremblay of Montreal University, a child psychiatrist, ‘how do young men learn to be violent?’ the answer was to turn the question on its head: how do we learn not to be violent?

“What we do in those early years, those first four years of life, are the most important and what we learn is to negotiate, to communicate, to compromise, to empathise, to problem solve, to resolve conflict, so that the violence option gets pushed down the menu, so it becomes the last resort. For lots of young men, they never learn these skills so the only option they have is aggression and violence. It’s not a deliberate thing, the sin is ignorance, they don’t know any better,” said Carnochan.

What this means, he added, is that they can learn. With the right approach, the interventions, education and support, they are capable of change, and that’s what CIRV is all about. The initiative involves a wide-range of partners working together, from the justice system, social work, housing, health services, education, and the community, and former gang members themselves, all working on a shared strategy to target at-risk gang members. It’s as much about prevention as it is about enforcement.

But there’s a flipside to this culture of sin and ignorance. “The world that we live in and operate in is all about professionals – we have silos. I’ve got a two-hour leadership lecture on gangs and I never mention a street gang once,” Carnochan said. “The gangs I speak about will be universities, it’ll be health, it’ll be education, it’ll be social work, it’ll be housing, it’ll be the police – those territorial gangs are the most corrosive, the most pernicious, and cause the most damage to our society than any street gang ever did – and we need to tackle that. Think beyond the profession, the job title. You’ll be a father, a son, a mother, a brother, an aunt, an uncle, a wife – you need to think of your whole self.”

There’s more to the VRU than gangs. In its latest phase it focused on weapons-related violence and alcohol-related violence, while later this year its next phase will be to tackle domestic abuse and violence against women. regardless of the particular focus of its overall mission to reduce violence, at the core of the VRU is the firm stance that violence is everybody’s problem, and so we all have to work together to solve it.

“We have to change public attitudes because it’s everybody’s issue. No one is safe until everybody is safe,” said McCluskey. “They can’t draw their curtains in Knightsbridge and just say ‘that’s the bad boys in Tower Hamlets or Mosside or Easterhouse’ – it’s everybody’s issue. And that’s what we’ve tried to do; you know when they point the finger and say what are the police doing about it? We say here’s what we’re doing; now there’s three fingers pointing back at you when you’re pointing at me – so what are you doing about it?”


This feature first appeared in the September 2012 edition of Housing magazine, and was subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 16 October 2012.

Book Review: Boris Karloff – More Than A Monster

Not just a pretty face

Review: ‘Boris Karloff – More Than A Monster’ the authorised biography by Stephen Jacobs

As Frankenstein’s Monster, Boris Karloff has become a cultural icon encapsulating the ‘golden era’ of movie horror, writes Mark Cantrell. Beneath the make-up and the macabre roles, however, was a thoroughly nice chap who earned the affection and respect of his peers, as this detailed but sometimes heavy-going biography reveals

First published on Cheshire Today 

FOR horror aficionados, Boris Karloff needs no introductions; he is the face of movie horror’s ‘golden age’, although admittedly that face is usually smothered in the prosthetics that transformed him into the Monster that made his name.

Frankenstein (1931) propelled the then jobbing film actor onto the world stage of international stardom, but by the time this ‘big break’ landed him on his lead-weighted feet, he already had a solid 20-year career as an actor behind him. Ironically, the role of the Monster was never expected to be anything more than a ‘throwaway’ part, but Karloff’s acting shone through to create an iconic screen presence. A star was born; the product of a long apprenticeship one might say.

Karloff’s career spanned almost 50 years and over 150 movies, ranging from the silent picture era through to the days of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. His roles in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’, ‘The Mummy’, ‘The Black Cat’, and many others – most now considered classics of the genre – ensured his reputation as ‘The King of Horror’.

There was more – much more – to Karloff than this iconic role, however, as Stephen Jacobs’ biography makes clear in compelling detail. 

The biography is a solid tome; a heavy read and not just in terms of the book’s physical weight, but the sheer wealth of information it assembles. The book is without doubt a labour of love and can be very heavy-going given the amount of material packed into its 568 pages, but it offers a fascinating and almost encyclopaedic insight into Karloff the man as much as Karloff the master of the macabre.

Having not read any rival biographies of Boris Karloff, it’s impossible to say how Jacobs’ labours compare against its competitors, but his work scooped a Rondo Award for best book earlier this year, so it is hardly a slacker in its exploration of the man. It has also been endorsed by Karloff’s daughter Sara, making it an authorised account of her father’s life and work. By all accounts, it’s proved an eye-opener for her: “[I]t is such a learning experience for me. I never knew about my father’s family, about his early life, how old he was when his mother died, and on and on and on.”

The biographer’s craft is not an easy one; sourcing the material, be it letters or press cuttings, from decades gone, chasing down friends and acquaintances, interviews, assembling the wealth of material from such a variety of sources, is certainly no easy task. Jacobs’ research was made all the harder by his subject’s itinerant lifestyle as a jobbing thespian with a number of touring companies. 

He was also rather fond of his privacy, and tended to play up the mystique of his Karloff stage name, regaling people with its Russian origins and playing down his own Anglo-Indian heritage. In part, there’s the actor no doubt creating the brand, but as Jacobs’ work takes us back in time to less racially-enlightened times, if it can be put that way, there was also an element of diverting attention away from his own mixed-race ancestry.

Karloff was born William Henry Pratt in Camberwell, South London, in 1887. He was born of a relatively well-to-do family, of Anglo-Indian descent, and was expected to follow in his family’s footsteps as a civil servant in the administrative machinery running the Empire. However, young Billy – as he was known – fell in love with the stage. He turned his back on the comfortable, if predictable, life of government service – and headed off for the uncertainty and poverty that was the touring actor’s lot.

In 1911, he ran off to Canada, where he joined a succession of touring theatre companies, living out of a suitcase and learning the nifty trick of frying an egg for breakfast on an iron. When stage work was not forthcoming, he took any labouring work he could find. 

Hard though the life was, he persevered. He scored worthy reviews for his performances, developed the professional and easy-going attitude that would win him much respect as a movie star, and never forgot his roots as a jobbing actor worrying where his next paycheck might come from. Eventually, he tried his hand in Hollywood, stepping back and forth between film and stage, until that breakthrough role with Frankenstein came his way.

Over the course of his life, Karloff got through five wives; he didn’t become a father until the age of 51 when his daughter Sara arrived. By then he was a Hollywood staple and also, it must be said, an active trade unionist. The founding member of the Screen Actors’ Guild was a tireless recruiter for the union, and often recruited on the sets of his movies. 

Despite his union activities, Karloff was hardly a ‘Bolshie’. What comes across clear as day from the testimonies of his fellow actors, the directors and film crews he worked with, is the very epitome of the unassuming professional actor. Even at the height of his stardom, far from being the ‘prima donna’, Karloff by all accounts remained what he was at heart – a jobbing actor dedicated to his craft. Indeed, throughout Jacobs’ book comes the strong portrait of a very nice man – a gentleman who earned the affection of his peers.

The actor kept working almost literally until the very end, and some of his last performances didn’t appear until after his death in 1968. His later years were plagued with ill-health. Indeed, in one of his final screen appearances, ‘The Curse of the Crimson Altar’ (1968), the actor was in a wheelchair – not for the sake of the role, but because his health demanded it. In pain, Karloff persevered with little complaint.

Endurance in the face of discomfort, even pain, was a common theme in Karloff’s career and his ability to grit his teeth and press on without complaint, whilst delivering a strong performance, helped earn him the respect of his peers. Some of his later ills were a legacy of the injuries and strains sustained in his earlier film roles; the make-up and prosthetics for the Monster were a heavy burden that placed a real physical strain on the actor. And that wasn’t just in the wearing of it, but in the long hours it took to apply and remove the make-up. Karloff worked some gruelling hours to give us the iconic image of Frankenstein’s unholy creation.

For modern audiences, that classic image now seems a little kitsch, we’ve see it that often, and moviemakers have since given us a gallery and more of schlock-horror to curl our toes and chill our bones. Back in the day, however, Karloff’s get-up was terrifying to behold. By all accounts, when he was made up as the Monster, he was expected to wear a bag over his head when leaving the set to avoid scaring people and he had to go around accompanied. That’s before he was banned from leaving the set altogether. Perhaps that serves to show just how desensitised we have become in this age of high-tech and CGI visual wizardry.

As for the man himself, Karloff was by all accounts more enamoured of the macabre than the gory visuals we’ve grown used to; his preference was for the subtlety of performance, for the chilling potential of suspense, to convey horror. He personally was anything but a monster, as the biography ably demonstrates, just an actor following the breaks where they would.

“I didn’t set out to chill anyone. I was just an actor willing to try anything. I had no special interest in terror subjects. My private tastes are still very Catholic,” he said. That quote occurs at the very beginning of the book, and captures in essence, the biography of the man. As Jacobs’ strives to reveal, he was a thoroughly nice bloke who got lucky playing horrific roles, but there was more to his screen and stage personae, and whether playing monsters, old-fashioned but very much human villains, or the good guys, he left them on set when he was done.

As for Jacobs and his performance with this biography, he has certainly produced an in-depth and detailed portrait of the man’s professional and personal life. At times, it might be heavy going, but he has certainly done his subject justice.

Details:

Boris Karloff – More Than A Monster

The Authorised Biography

By Stephen Jacobs

Hardback, 568 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9557670-4-3

Price: £30

Tomahawk Press

This article was first published on Cheshire Today, 11 September 2012.

Essay: Nationalising the labour force

Towards a very British gulag

The Government's welfare reforms and workfare programme represent a curious kind of nationalisation, argues Mark Cantrell in this essay originally published on one of his earlier blogsites

GULAGS are often associated with the incarceration of political prisoners but behind all this rhetorical justification they tend to have a rather more practical economic purpose: the provision of state subsidised labour.

To put it in less euphemistic terms, that would be slavery. Under this model, the State ‘harvests’ a captive labour force, either for use on its own projects, or to farm out to clients, but either way it bears the costs for the upkeep and secure management of the unwilling participants.

By their nature, forced labour camps are – forgive the pun – labour intensive and costly institutions so we’re not likely to see them here on British soil any time soon. Anyway, it’s not as if they’re really in keeping with the national spirit. For a society that prides itself on its progressive credentials, labour camps most certainly give out the wrong message. Barbed wire fences and armed guards make for bad PR as do the incarceration of people simply on the basis of economic misfortune or supposed incapability.

With the right approach, however, these unfortunates can be suitably criminalised into an institution capable of extracting some shareholder value out of otherwise obsolete livestock. Labour is one of the biggest costs any business faces, after all, so the opportunity to gain some basic manpower free at the point of delivery has to be of benefit. Why pay when you can simply take? That’s got to be good for the bottom line.

One might consider it the ultimate in externalised costs, getting someone else outside the business – that's the still remunerated tax-paying public – to stump up for the payroll, but it needs some serious spin to sell it to we the suckers.

Forget ‘political crimes’. That’s dubious territory and likely to backfire. Better that the inmates are seen as feckless layabouts leeching off the good will and charity of the citizenry. Put them to work and they’ll learn a thing or two about thrift and self-reliance. Better still, if the carrot of ‘self-improvement’ can accompany the stick of hard reproach then it surely proves a boost to any progressive reputation, but there still remains the problem of ‘harvesting’ and stockpiling this plentiful resource.

Nationalising the labour force

'Workfare', Soviet style

Fortunately, there’s a better way than labour camps for offering private business the chance to partake of this nationalised resource. Indeed, in many respects it already exists ‘pre-herded’ into suitable ‘enclosures’ ready to be farmed out.

Successive governments and media outlets have also long-since prepared the ideological ground needed to justify a crackdown on the ‘burdensome parasites’ riding free at our collective expense. With the scapegoats at the ready, all that needs to be done is to modify the existing system into something that can manage the resources accordingly. The current Government appears to be doing just that. And there’s not a barbed-wire perimeter fence in site.

Nice work, if you can get it (and be paid for it).

The solution relies heavily on the legacy of the Welfare State, throwing together some old-fashioned Dickensian thinking, with the latest wave of 21st Century reforming zeal to twist some cruel barbs into the economic ties that state benefits invoke. Welcome to the re-forged Welfare State, harnessing the dismissed and excluded to furnish a little welfare for business. Just don’t call it slavery, okay – it sends out the wrong signals – think of it as charity.

Back in the old days, Britain witnessed the dubious charity of the workhouse. These were brutal and callous institutions – deliberately so, lest the poor succumb to the temptation to indigence that was somehow inherent in their nature (very much a similar line to the attitudes taken today). Once incarcerated under the thumb of the Beadles, there was little chance of ever escaping the hopeless regime of gruel and back-breaking toil, beyond the Reaper’s tender mercies that is.

Workhouses were to all intents and purposes prisons – ‘micro-gulags’ – for people who had committed no crime other than the worst sin of all – to be out of work and utterly poor. Oh yes, and utterly desperate too.

Fortunately, Britain in the 21st Century is a progressive nation utterly dedicated to the pursuit of social justice, so there will be no return to the workhouses any more than we will see traditional labour camps arising. At least, not just yet, but even so it appears the good old Job Centre is fast becoming the modern equivalent.

In a nasty twist on the whole concept of the Job Centre, Government welfare reforms are slowly transforming them into ‘command and control’ centres for amassing and directing an army of state-subsidised labour. Essentially, once their grace period ends, the unemployed are increasingly expected to work for their benefits.

Often the justification is that the work helps the unemployed regain the skills needed to find and hold down a job, but according to opponents of this burgeoning ‘workfare’ aspect of the welfare system, they are being used to displace paid workers from employment.

The organisation Boycott Workfare is taking issue with the new Government Work Programme, a crucial component of its transformation of the welfare system. Essentially, its concerns hint at the shift from ‘safety net’ and support system for individuals and their families to a punitive mechanism that effectively undermines hard-won employment rights – even employment itself.

“The Work Programme is a cash gift from the Government to businesses which can replace employees with a constant free labour source mandated to work by the Job Centre at risk of destitution,” said Joanna Long, a spokeswoman for Boycott Workfare.

“It is a disgrace that Government and providers are talking about this as a boost to job seekers’ prospects when it is putting them to work – often in unsuitable roles – for far below the minimum wage.”

So much, then, for the valuable lessons and positive benefits of hard work the politicians often hector us about from on high.

In place of direct provision for the inmates' upkeep – food, clothing, shelter – this 'gulag' out-sources the means of subsistence to the inmates themselves via their meagre benefits. Okay, it's still an expensive system to maintain, but you have to speculate to accumulate. In the meantime, those on the receiving end can kiss goodbye to social mobility and working hard to get on in life – just keep toiling in the hope the benefits won’t be stopped and there might be a real job at the end of it.

Well, when it comes to the second aspect, dream on suggests Boycott Workfare. The organisation is a coalition of organisations and groups, taking in the unemployed, anti-cuts campaigners, charity workers, trade unionists and others. It alleges that the Government’s Work Programme undermines opportunities for paid employment and does nothing at all to help people find work. Instead, they are being exploited as cheap labour – essentially free from a business’s perspective – under the threat of losing their benefits.

This might not seem like much of a sanction, for those not struggling to make ends meet on JobSeekers’ Allowance [or the forthcoming Universal Credit]; of course, loss of benefits includes housing benefit, which means that the threat doesn’t just cover food in the belly, but the roof over someone’s head too. Losing the first is bad enough; the two combined is one hell of an argument for compliance.

The Work Programme ups the ante on unpaid ‘work experience’; it has already been carried out in some areas under the Flexible New Deal programme. Boycott Workfare alleges that some companies have reaped the benefits, stringing people along in unpaid work with the suggestion of jobs that never materialise.

Poundland and Primark are two of the companies the organisation has accused of using a succession of people mandated by their local Job Centres, replacing them one after the other, as each person’s mandated work period ends, but the two businesses aren’t alone – a number of charities are said to be making use of such mandated labour too. One might expect business motivated by the margins to make the most of the Government’s schemes, but charities? That’s another matter.

“It is astounding that some of the larger voluntary sector organisations are collaborating with the Government on the Work Programme to replace volunteers with mandatory unpaid labour,” Long added. “This flies in the face of the sector’s values and will surely damage their reputations.”

Will work for food?

Obviously, the application of mandated labour is somewhat limited; but with the British economy now so reliant on the service sector, it remains a potentially sizeable pool of subsidised labour, but for how long and what ultimate cost to our society?

'Commissar for Workfare' Iain Duncan Smith

So far, it’s early days for the Work Programme. For the moment the prospect of learning on-the-job-skills and boosting the CV remains a persuasive argument, but sooner or later scepticism will turn to resentment. That’s the downside of forced labour: sooner or later it gets uppity. But there are always means of applying discipline to a captive labour force, and Britain’s very own ‘open plan’ gulag is no different.

For one, the numbers mean there’s plenty to play with. Second, the ‘inmates’ of the system exist in a scattered and fragmented form; difficult to crystallise into organised resistance (though not impossible). And thirdly, the threat of losing benefits can be a potent persuader of the benefits (sic) of obedience. And if that fails, there’s always the conventional State apparatus to deal with the recalcitrant. This brings us to the cruel twist incorporated into the Welfare State: the move from social security to social disciplinarian.

True, the Welfare State was never built to cope with mass unemployment of the kind we have seen these past 30 years: in its origins – and for much of its later use – its purpose was to provide a safety net to citizens. This was the social contract that said we were all in it together and if we fell on hardship we would be supported. But it wasn’t just about a safety net; it was about standards and values for a decent, humane society.

The system was far from perfect, of course, even before it was expected to mop up the 'collateral damage' of economic 'restructuring', but for a while at least it proved a handy ‘warehouse’ for the unemployed created by the Thatcher Government’s abolition of whole industries and the communities that had arisen to serve them. Since then it's creaked along, bursting at the seams, to carry the heavy burden imposed on it, not to mention wave after wave of 'reform' proposals motivated by a combination of ideological prejudice and realpolitik convenience.

Now, we have a new regime, a curious amalgam of Tory leaders and LibDem lieutenants, that is forging ahead with the solution to the alleged trans-generational worklessness their political forebears fostered (and which studies by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and others has revealed is a myth, with the reality being a cruel cycle of poorly paid, insecure work and unemployment); the poverty and the unemployment of communities that are being trashed by the latest recession, even as they were still struggling to recover from previous downturns – they will grant their labour free to clients in the private sector.

The transformation of the unemployed into state-subsidised labour, delivered free at point of delivery, is welfare for the business class. It rips the concept of the Welfare State inside out and utterly revokes the social contract of old. More than that, it epitomises the transformation of the welfare benefits system into a mechanism for social control – one that can be used to herd us all into quiet compliance.

Every Job Centre becomes the local ‘command and control’ hub, where the unemployed [and the 'under-employed' part-timer workers] must duly report; where every aspect of their lives is subjected to intrusive scrutiny, gathering intelligence that may be used against them; where the fear of losing benefits replaces watchtowers and guards and barbed-wire fences. This is the surveillance state – one aspect of it – that will strip the citizenship from all but the wealthiest.

Some may welcome the ever-more draconian regime that those on benefits face in this day and age, but the wise citizen must surely realise that few of us are more than a P45 away from reporting for duty in this brave new world of a very British gulag. Over the last two years, there have been many in 'secure' employment who suddenly found themselves reporting, bewildered, for duty at their local Job Centre; how many will subsequently find themselves back at work – on pain of losing benefits?

First they came for the long-term unemployed. After that, everyone else was easy.

###

The Social Security Advisory Committee is said to be scathing of the workfare proposals. It released a critical report about the Work Programme in April 2011. Find it here.

###

Copyright © August 2011. All Rights Reserved.

This article was written for one of the author's earlier blogsites, The Word on the Wall, and published there on 29 August 2011.

Interview: Terry Waite CBE, Emmaus

At home with the underdog

Given the wealth of time and effort he donates to charities and good causes, it’s little wonder that Emmaus president Terry Waite has been called a “roving humanitarian”, but it was his time as a hostage in the Middle East that really tested his mettle . He talked to Mark Cantrell about how his experiences have moved him to promote the cause of human dignity

First published in Housing magazine 

Terry Waite CBE

TERRY Waite, president of the homelessness charity Emmaus, is no stranger to hardship and deprivation, having witnessed much over his long and varied career; he has endured it firsthand too, as a captive in the Middle East, but he has never allowed his experiences to dim his humanitarian flame.

That’s obvious from the 73-year-old’s full CV; equally so from his good humour and thoughtful manner, even while talking about his own captivity. Most of us gain little opportunity to test our mettle in the face of extreme duress, but in 1987 Waite found himself faced with the severest personal test when his efforts to negotiate the release of Western hostages ended with his own captivity in Lebanon.

At the time, Waite was working for the Archbishop of Canterbury, then Dr Robert Runcie, as part of his personal staff at Lambeth Palace. Tasked to manage the Archbishop’s diplomatic and ecclesiastical affairs, he also found himself in the media spotlight for his successes in negotiating the release of hostages in Iran and Libya in the early 1980s. Waite was under no illusions about the risks he faced.

“I went on many hostage missions and was successful on a number of occasions,” he said. “When I went I always took with me a clockwork watch because I always believed that if I was wearing a battery watch and I was captured, the battery would run down and I wouldn’t know the time. Of course, best laid plans – when I was captured they took my watch away so I was no further forward. So I never believed I was immune to captivity, but when I was captured I had to learn how to develop my own strengths from within.”

Waite was incarcerated for nearly five years – 1,763 days – and for some four years of that he was held in solitary confinement. It wasn’t until 19 November 1991 that he was finally released.

“I suppose it sounds very trite when I say it, but it was actually something that did enable me to develop a greater sense of identity, a greater sense of self, which you have to do when you are in adverse circumstances like that,” he said. “Nobody else is going to give you any positive feedback; you’re going to be kicked around and you are going to be treated as a non person, and therefore you have to generate from within yourself the ability to be yourself, in other words to stand up and recognise that you are an individual, that you are a person, and a person of worth.”

Waite’s experience of captivity has fostered a deep well of empathy and understanding for those who are less fortunate in life, he said. This “sympathy for the underdog” has its roots in his earlier career, working in Africa to deliver aid and development programmes, for instance, or his work as a consultant to the Roman Catholic Medical Order, for which he worked on a broad range of development issues, health and training programmes across the world.

“I’ve worked in many – if not all – the main trouble spots in the world during the course of my life,” he said. “It’s given me a sympathy with the underdog, a sympathy with the people who have little or nothing in this world, in particular with children who are born in poverty, who will live in poverty, and will die in poverty. Now, I’m not saying riches necessarily improve in every instance the quality of life but there does have to be a better chance for many people in the world today.

“I suppose, by having experienced this through working in different parts of the world, and also having experienced severe deprivation through my own captivity, I have an instinctive sympathy with those who find themselves in similar positions and believe that one should do what one can to at least give more and more people at least some opportunity in life.”

Having seen so much deprivation and hardship, it must surely be difficult not to be ground down by it all at times. Waite added: “Yes it is, at times, but I think what I had to learn during those years of solitary confinement when I was almost five years alone, was that one of the things you must do is find resources within yourself and be able to maintain hope. If you can somehow maintain hope, both for yourself and for situations that appear to be hopeless, it’s not an easy thing to do, it’s a battle, but it is possible.”

These days, Waite earns his living by writing and lecturing, but he donates a great deal of time to charities and good causes. Indeed, the list of organisations he is involved with – as president, vice president, chairman, trustee or patron – is so extensive you might wonder where he finds the time to write.

“There is no such thing as a purely altruistic motive, you always do it for yourself as well,” Waite said. “I find a certain personal satisfaction at seeing people who have formerly been in a deprived situation getting back into life. That in itself is its own reward.”

Homelessness is one of the many issues close to Waite’s heart. The experiences of being homeless resonate strongly with his experiences of captivity, he feels, and he is adamant that homelessness can happen to anyone.

“It’s a terrific mistake to categorise the homeless as being just drops outs, alcoholics, drug addicts and wastrels. Many of the homeless that I meet – and I meet them constantly – come from all walks of life,” he said.

Emmaus can’t help everyone – nor does it pretend otherwise – Waite explained, but it works to give homeless people back their dignity and their independence by the way the organisation works, based on a few fundamental principles.

The organisation has created 21 self-sufficient communities in towns and cities throughout the UK so far – the latest is being put together in Cornwall – where homeless people live and work together and support each other as part of the wider community.

“Emmaus provides a structure and a community life for homeless people to enable them to get back into life,” Waite said. “The basic principles are very sound. First of all, [when] a person first comes into an Emmaus community they must agree to leave behind state support. One of the reasons for that is state support, or indeed charity to put it another way, is demeaning for the individual. At times it is necessary to receive a handout but to be a constant recipient of a handout does nothing for you and for your own development, and your own dignity, as a human being, because you are being put into a subservient position to other people. So they must leave behind the dole, leave behind state support.

“Secondly, they come into a community, a community which is a supportive group of people, no larger than say 25 people, and they get a good standard of accommodation, and the reason that [important] is you are recognising people have dignity. Thirdly, they must agree to work according to their capacity and in so doing regain their dignity as a human being.”

The work can vary. Clearing houses, for example, or renovating furniture and white goods, while In Bedford the community runs a bistro that not only provides food and work for residents, it also provides subsidised meals to elderly people living in the wider neighbourhood. Being an active member of the wider community is an important factor wherever Emmaus sets itself up.

Given his extensive involvement in charities and good causes, not just Emmaus but the many others too, it is tempting to wonder if all of this hasn’t been part of his own process of rehabilitation from his experience of captivity. “I suppose it is, I don’t know, I never thought of it in terms of rehabilitation. I thought of it in terms of having some form of active involvement in some of the issues that society faces today. Something which I have done right across life but probably now do more fully than I was able to do when I was younger,” he said.

“One thing I ’m glad of: I’m 73 but I still have the same passionate commitment to some of those social issues that I had when I was a young man of 23. I haven’t lost that and I haven’t lost that campaigning spirit – thank goodness.”


This interview first appeared in the June 2012 edition of Housing magazine. It was subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 21 June 2012

Cover Story: The case of the Olympic missiles

Anti-aircraft missiles spark tower block row

It’s not every day somebody asks to position anti-aircraft missiles on the roof of a tower block, so when the Ministry of Defence selected two residential sites in East London it raised rather more than curious eyebrows – some residents were up in arms about the whole idea

By Mark Cantrell

First published in the June 2012 edition of Housing magazine

BY now the man’s eyes were surely rolling. Certainly, the tone of his voice suggested so, as Lieutenant Colonel Nick Short of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) sought to reassure yet another journalist that it was perfectly safe to put missiles on residential rooftops.

The rooftops in question belong to a couple of apartment blocks in East London. The first, Fred Wigg Tower, is a traditional tower block in Waltham Forest, managed by ALMO Ascham Homes. Strictly speaking, the second site is atop a water tower at the Lexington Building in the Bow Quarter, Tower Hamlets, rather than a rooftop per se, but nonetheless residents were perturbed to learn it would play host to high velocity missiles.

Apparently there’s little need to worry; it’s rather like letting off a firework from the side of a milk bottle. Nothing happens to the bottle; likewise with the missile, if the worst came to the worst and it had to be fired, then nothing would happen to the fabric of the building that might endanger residents, he explained. “The Army wouldn’t be putting dangerous stuff on buildings without thinking it through first. Strange thing that,” Lt Col Short added, with – it must be said – a certain rising exasperation.

Okay, so what about the residents’ security, you might wonder; doesn’t placing a weapons system on top of an apartment block kind of turn it into a target for the bad guys? Again, it gets short shrift from the Lieutenant Colonel, who said it wouldn’t be a “bright idea” to attack a point defended by soldiers
and police.

“In all my years in various conflicts around the world and dealing with terrorists, I’ve never really seen them go and attack a strong point – they always attack the weak point. This hasn’t been done without any thought. It’s been a long, considered process by professionals who do this all the time,” he said.

“We’ve offered our military advice and no decision’s been taken but we’ve come up with the best solution for protecting a lot of people. It’s just a shame that a few people are getting all upset about it, without any real knowledge.”

To be fair, it’s not every day that someone comes calling to say they’d like to stick a missile battery on the roof. Most of us on Civvie Street lack the Army’s ready familiarity with the technology. The most we usually have to go on are Hollywood movies and newsreel footage, neither of which tends to focus on the mundane realities, but rather seeks to emphasise the ‘wow’ factor. Doubtless many people envision missiles akin to the Rapier trailing plumes of fire as they streak skywards, rather than the kind of system that was actually deployed, but even with all the assurances, it’s bound to cause some misgivings.

A spokesperson for Waltham Forest Council confessed they were all rather “surprised” when the MoD made its approach regarding Fred Wigg Tower, though generally it’s more at ease with the prospect than some. All told, the news of the rooftop missiles has provoked a cocktail of surprise, incredulity, concern, worry, fear, and outright outraged opposition.

“It’s not the sort of thing you expect to hear, but we sat down with them and they explained why it was strategically the best place,” said Waltham Forest’s spokesperson. “It’s fair to say we were quite taken aback by the prospect of it. Yes, it was surprising, somewhat daunting, but once you sit down and go through it, you realise they’re professionals, they know what they’re doing, and you feel they’ll be able to do this without much disruption to local people at all. I suspect it will probably be one of the safest places in London to be during the Olympics.”

The missile systems were deployed as part of Exercise Olympic Guardian, what might be called a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the main event, as it put the military assets through their paces over nine days spanning the May Day bank holiday weekend. Both the ground-based Rapiers and rooftop-positioned Starstreaks are cited as the final line of defence in the event that an aerial attacker manages to evade the RAF’s Typhoon jets that are to form London’s primary defensive ring.

Fred Wigg Tower and the Lexington Building were selected as sites for the Starstreaks because of their strategic vantage point and unrestricted views over the Olympic venues and surrounding areas, according to the MoD. The exercise was as much a showcase of the Government’s determination to keep the Games safe as it was a test of the security services’ preparedness, but it’s fair to say that those missiles – only a tiny part of the exercise – pretty much stole the show. For all the wrong reasons.

“My worry is that the gun may make the [Fred Wigg] tower a target,” said John Cryer, the Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead. “I have met most of the residents. Many of them speak English as a second language and are struggling to keep their jobs in the current economic situation. I wonder if the authorities would be foisting a piece of military hardware on a block if it was in a leafy, middle-class area and full of middle class residents.”

A dash of class conflict often adds a little spice to any controversy; unfortunately it’s rather spoiled by the fact that the Lexington Building, in the Bow Quarter, is a rather leafy, pleasant-looking gated community populated by, well, rather a lot of affluent middle class types. One of them, Neil Midgeley, is a journalist with The Telegraph, who blogged: “In the eight years I have lived here, this is certainly the most dramatic – and controversial – thing that has happened. The last leaflet that I received from BQRM [the management company] was about the installation of new equipment in our on-site gym.”

Not every resident was so sanguine about it all. Bow Quarter resident Brian Whelan – also a journalist – brought the matter to national attention, when he ‘tipped off’ the media. In his view, the missiles were effectively ‘foisted on’ the community.

The MoD said it had conducted extensive consultation, including “extensive talks with local authorities and landowners, briefing local MPs, discussions with community representatives, and, most recently, delivering leaflets to residents’ homes”.

Whelan disputes this, however, claiming the first he heard was the leaflet shoved through the letterbox only a few days before the exercise was to take place. He said: “It’s not been well thought-through; it’s not been well-planned, and they’ve not properly engaged with anyone in the community.”

As yet, the Government has still to make a formal decision on whether or not the missiles will be deployed during the course of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, until then residents are left in the shadow of uncertainty. It may be that the deployment of the Rapiers or the Starstreaks or both is deemed unsuitable or unnecessary for providing adequate defence. However, in an effort to pressurise Ministers and Generals into saying ‘nay’, local people in Tower Hamlets have established a campaign group called – appropriately enough – ‘Stop the Olympic Missiles’.

Councillor Rania Khan represents the Bromley-by-Bow ward on Tower Hamlets Council. Speaking at the campaign’s launch, she expressed similar concerns to Whelan and other residents.

“We all agree that protecting the Olympics from the threat of terrorist attacks is important and it is also a priority... [but] it is important to get the balance right between those attending the Games and the safety of the residents who live in the vicinity of the Games – and I am one of those residents too,” she said.

“Unfortunately, the plans of the MoD to place a missile defence system on the top of the Lexington strikes me as the wrong sort of balance. In my view, they handled this issue quite badly. They should have consulted properly with residents. I got to know about this on the day from the newspapers. So they haven’t consulted properly with residents. Instead they have tried to reassure – the council – that if they go ahead with deploying the missile system, it will be manned by professionals. I should really hope so. I would hate to think what might happen if they were operated by amateurs.”

If the Government decides against the missiles, then such concerns become moot; if they say yes, however, then they might well find they have a rowdy crowd of concerned citizens to deal with. For those of us beyond London’s borders, meanwhile, it’s a rather curious conundrum – how would we feel about it all if it was our roof? Be honest now.

Olympic security is a serious business; heaven forbid that any of the military measures deployed will be needed, but for all the MoD’s efforts to set minds at ease, it’s only natural that local people will have concerns about those missiles. After all, they’re bloody big fireworks.


This article first appeared in the June 2012 edition of Northern Midlands and Southern Housing magazine. It was subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 21 June 2012.

Interview: Jack Dromey MP, Shadow Housing Minister

Could have done better 

Shadow housing minister Jack Dromey MP is scathing about the Government’s record on housing, but admits that politicians of all parties have failed to give the issue the attention it deserves. He told Mark Cantrell it’s time that housing was taken to the centrestage of politics

First published in Housing magazine 

Jack Dromey MP

“THROUGHOUT my life a guiding principle has been to make a difference,” said Jack Dromey. For over 30 years he followed its star as a trade union activist, so he’s no stranger to fighting some tough battles, but it also took him into the political fray long before he actually stood for and won a parliamentary seat.

Today, the former deputy general secretary of the old Transport and General Workers Union (T&G) and subsequently the union Unite, represents Birmingham’s Erdington constituency, having secured the seat with a 3,277 majority at the May 2010 General Election.

Despite being a relative newcomer to the Parliamentary arena, Dromey’s involvement in politics goes back a long way. He is cited as one of two trade union modernisers active inside the Labour Party to rebuild the party in the 1980s; once again a necessary task following “what was a serious election defeat”.

Doubtless, he will be drawing upon his long experience of trade union activism and Labour Party politics in this second round of rebuilding.

“I’ve been deeply involved in politics for 20 years and more,” he said. “I served on the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, I was its elected Treasurer for six years, and also through my work in the union, I’ve been deeply involved fighting battles in the political arena.”

Of these battles, one of his early highlights, and the one through which he rose to prominence in the trade union movement, was during the 1970s, when he led the historic Grunswick strike for union recognition.

Much more recently, his campaigning for workers’ rights saw him coordinate the coalition of support that brought the Gangmasters Licensing Bill into law, “so that never again in Britain do we have the obscenity of Morecambe Bay”.

When it comes to housing, again he’s no stranger to the issues. He chaired the working group from 2005 that subsequently led to the 2007 Housing Green Paper and eventually the commitment to invest £8 billion to build three million new homes. He then worked with John Healey during his tenure as Housing Minister.

Now he himself holds the housing brief, albeit in a shadow capacity, and it is doubtless no surprise that he is an ardent defender of the Labour Party’s record on housing during its 13 years in office – but he admits that it could have done more.

“Labour did great things – but,” he said, letting the pause say its thing before he elaborated: “There were two million new homes, a million more mortgage holders, half a million new affordable homes, the 1.7 million homes renovated through the Decent Homes programme, and the action that we took in 2008, both to build homes and get the economy moving, but also to keep people in their homes, avoiding the terrible scourge of mortgage repossessions that scarred the 1980s. Having said that, we did not do enough, but I will defend our record any time compared to the failure of this Government’s housing and economic policies.”

When the Government launched its Housing Strategy last year, Dromey greeted it as yet another round of “false dawns, grand plans and press launches followed by broken promises and a failure to deliver”; the NewBuy Guarantee mortgage indemnity scheme launched earlier this year, was “too little too late” from a Government that has done “virtually nothing to tackle the worst housing crisis in a generation”. For good measure, in Dromey’s view, not only is David Cameron’s coalition “failing”, it’s also “out of touch” and “making the housing crisis worse not better”.

Here, he returned to the theme: “There is not yet a serious housing strategy. Some initiatives with some merit, but more often press statements and initiatives that never go anywhere. If there was a home built in England for every press statement issued by Grant Shapps, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. So there’s a great deal of activity, and sometimes sound and fury, but the statistics speak for themselves. Housebuilding has remorselessly fallen.”

The construction of new homes is down by 11 per cent, he said, whilst homelessness is up by 14 per cent; there is a “mortgage market where people are not able to get mortgages and a private rented sector characterised by ever-increasing rents”.

“I don’t think the Government takes housing sufficiently seriously,” he added. “It’s not enough for David Cameron and Nick Clegg to don Wellington boots and visit a building site in a fanfare of publicity when they launched their housing strategy last November. You need a serious strategy driven from the top. What we do not have, given that Britain faces the biggest housing crisis in a generation, is any sense of housing getting the priority it deserves. On the contrary, Eric Pickles and Grant Shapps have lost virtually all the battles that they have fought within Government for support on housing.”

The problems he discusses as a politician with a nationally-focused brief on the Opposition benches take flesh in a more immediate and personalised sense in his capacity as MP – a role he says very much influences his presence on the national stage.

“In everything I do, I always refer back to local people, local experiences, because the first job for any Member of Parliament is to stand up for their constituents. In that context, Erdington is one of the 12 poorest constituencies in Britain, but it is rich in talent. Sadly, Erdington is suffering grievously the consequences of Government policy,” he said.

“On the housing front, there is an acute lack of affordable housing and a rapidly growing private rented sector. Yes, there are some good landlords, but there are many rogues ripping tenants off and failing to maintain the premises that they own. The scale of Birmingham’s housing crisis is demonstrated by one statistic: we’re going to need 70,000 new homes in the next 10 years to meet the growing demand.”

Dromey is supportive of the council’s creation of the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust, which is planning to build some 1, 400 new council homes, but he’s critical of the council’s management of its stock, which he said “leaves a great deal to be desired”.

All told, the Erdington MP sees Birmingham as a microcosm for the problems caused by the housing crisis locally and nationally. It’s not just the result of the current Government’s failure on housing – it is one that relates to his admission that Labour could have done more. In his view, politicians and governments of all hues have failed to give housing sufficient priority for over 25 years. We’re paying the price for that failure now.

So, Dromey is scathing about the current administration’s record, but what has the Labour Party got to offer the country? For now, little concrete; make more use of public sector land, both local authority and central government; ensure that the freedoms gained under HRA reform are able to provide concrete results in terms of new homes; invest in affordable housebuilding; and ensure that housing finally gets the attention it deserves at the centre-stage of government policy.

Beyond that, it’s a case of watch this space. Over the next six to nine months, he said Labour will present its package of housing proposals as part of its ‘battleplan’ for the 2015 election. Whether the country can afford to wait that long is open to question, but in fairness that one is out of Dromey’s hands.

“Our first duty is to meet the immense and growing demand for affordable housing to buy and to rent,” Dromey said. “One again, we have to make housing centrestage in Britain.”


This interview was published in the May 2012 edition of Housing magazine, and subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 23 May 2012. 

Book Review: A Horse in the Bathroom by Derek J Taylor

Self-builder’s chronicle tells an affectionate tale of village England

It's not easy building your own home but it can certainly be a colourful experience, as Mark Cantrell discovers in this fascinating and throughly readable chronicle of how one couple's dream home became a reality

WHEN former ITN journalist Derek J Taylor and his wife Maggie decided to build their own dream home in the country, the end result was rather more than a house – it also led to this unexpectedly entertaining chronicle of their experiences.

Unexpected because in the hands of a less-engaging author, ‘A Horse in the Bathroom’ might so easily have become bogged down in the dreary minutiae and indulgent journaling of the process of building that ‘perfect house’. Well, Taylor’s book is anything but an indulgent self-builder’s ‘how to’ guide; rather a characterful, colourful and illuminating real-life yarn that reads with all the page-turning qualities of a novel.

The story is simple enough; the process of building their own home anything but. As the blurb puts it: “When Derek and his part partner, Maggie, decide to escape to the country, they don’t opt for the simple life. Instead they set about converting an old Cotswold stables in Stow-on-the-Wold into their dream home. Over the next two years, they wage guerrilla war on the Planning Office, are cursed by everything from collapsing walls to poison gas and dozy apprentices, run out of money, and meet some very strange characters – till in its final stages of construction, the place unaccountably floods.”

To compound the difficulties from inception, the couple have – shall we say – contrasting requirements for their ‘dream home’. Somehow these have to be accommodated. Taylor favours a house with “character” while his wife wants a house with “lots of light”. Both of them are stubborn to the core, but somehow they must fulfil their disparate requirements, along with the demands of the planning and conservation departments (which often appear capricious, but as Taylor concedes, have method within their moody demands to maintain the rural aesthetic both he and his wife crave).

Along the way comes compromise, set-back, good fortune, and more than a few occasions when the couple wonder if they haven’t over-reached themselves, as slowly but surely an overgrown burgage and its derelict stables gradually become a garden and a home.  The story is as much about the characters they meet, as it is the self-build, and holding it all together is the pair themselves, as the process tests their relationship to the full. In that, it reveals a couple who very much complement one another, whose contrasts serve to deliver a winning team.

The story is filled with an engaging human warmth for its subject matter, an infectious enthusiasm for the quirks and foibles of rural and city folk alike, and filled with snippets of information and entertaining anecdotes that really keep the pages turning. Taylor demonstrates a keen eye for the kind of detail that might at first seem to sidestep the story but in fact reaches to its beating heart, especially as he guides his readers through the main heart and soul of his story.

While the focus of the book is the couple’s efforts to achieve the dream home, the heart of the story is the context: stung by a chance comment from a city-dwelling friend that they are just seeking to achieve some fanciful ‘rural idyll’ – Lark Rise To Candleford syndrome – he sets out to investigate rural life in the 21^st Century – to discover what makes modern villages tick. So the story encompasses rather more than a comfortable middle class couple’s desire to get their perfect house – it explores the world of village living, from the good to the bad, to discover the truth behind the ‘warm beer and cricket on the village green’ image of rural England.

Again, it’s a compelling read, almost a voyage into another country. Taylor’s verdict: that modern villages have never had it so good, at least those that have managed to re-invent themselves for the 21^st Century.

“In the globalised economy of the twenty first century, city-dwellers yearn for clean air, open views, less stress and fewer drive-by shootings. So they retire to a village. We’ve come to see the escape into village life as ‘Recapturing an Ancestral Peace’. TV programmes, sociologists, me, we talk about RE-generating the English village, as though some past dynamism has been lost. Maybe it has in some places. But not everywhere,” he writes.

“It’s not a question of having lost ‘The Good Old Days’ at all. It’s more ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good As Right Now In The Twenty-First Century’. [Bleddington] The most peaceful and affluent spot was for hundreds of years a sink of misery and despair for most of its population. How common is that story to the villages of England, I wonder?”

Later on, he writes: “One thing’s for sure. Whatever people believe who move home from cities to villages, there wasn’t some golden age of rural life back in village history waiting to be recaptured. The past of villages is a tale of struggle against starvation, death in childbirth, bubonic plague and similar man-made and natural atrocities. Life in villages has never been as comfortable as it is in the twenty-first century.”

Not everyone will agree with Taylor’s take on the comfortable fortunes of modern day villages, given the very real existential issues facing a good many rural communities – as the author also alludes to in his writing – but the journey through this countryside world proves a colourful, eye-opening and informative excursion. And Taylor proves a most entertaining guide through this living landscape.

All told, ‘A Horse In The Bathroom’ is a compelling read, filled with an infectious enthusiasm and affection for its subject, and told with the panache of a man who has an eye for the human interest.

Details:

A Horse in the Bathroom

How an old stable became our dream village home

By Derek J Taylor

Summersdale Publishers

ISBN: 978-1-84953-240-2

Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99

www.summersdale.com

MC

First published on Cheshire Today, 17 June 2012.