Quintin Jardine's blog

Now I’ve got all that off my chest . . .

to all my friends around the globe, those I’ve met, I extend the hope that Nostradamus, Sarkozy, Merkel, Peston and all the other prophets of doom have all got it completely f**king wrong and that we’re all going to have a great 2012.

A couple of years ago a few worthy volunteers within East Lothian founded a community radio station. They called it East Coast FM, and started broadcasting on the internet with a view to proving themselves worthy of a community radio licence, issued by Ofcom, the UK broadcasting regulator. A few days ago, a pal of mine told me that he was doing a two-hour show there. When I went on line to find him, I clicked too quickly and found that I was listening to something called East Lothian FM, an entirely different set-up operating from the same street in Haddington. After considering this for a while, I used the ELFM contact facility to ask what was behind it and what their motivation was. Next day I had a response from the chairman, saying in summary that there had been a fall-out within ECFM and that the new station was a consequence of that. I replied, pointing out  the potential for confusion, and hoping that nothing would get in the way of a grant of a community licence for the county.

This exchange was copied to others. When I opened my emails yesterday morning, I found that my first of 2012 was from a character  calling himself  ‘The Duke’. It was abusive and I found it offensive. My reply was robust; there is no compound for prisoners in my garden. This provoked further abuse and a series of accusations and innuendos against ECFM. At Mr Duke’s urging I have passed these on, and have been assured since that every one can be countered. At this moment, Ofcom is inviting applications for community FM licences in Scotland, and I expect that there will be two from East Lothian. I know which I will be supporting, and why.

This is a very local matter, but I am posting on the assumption that it will become public. I’m not sure whether The Duke, who says he’s a nice guy and a very good judge of character, styles himself after  Edward Kennedy Ellington, Arthur Wellesley, or some other specific ducal grandee. If I had to guess, I’d go for Marion Morrison.

I’ve just finished reading all 115 pages of the written judgement in the Luis Suarez case, and I cannot see how it can stand.

Suarez was not accused of racism by the FA, in  the charge brought against him,  but of using the word ‘negro’ in the wrong way, while speaking his native Uruguayan Spanish to a Frenchman during an English football match in which players from thirteen different nations participated, in a confrontation initiated by Patrice Evra, an opponent who was angered by an earlier foul which he felt had endangered a previously injured knee. Suarez denied that he was being racially offensive and said that he called Glen Johnson ‘Negro’, Dirk Kuyt ‘Blondie’, Andy Carroll ‘Grandote’, in normal, friendly speech between team-mates. Furthermore, he denied using the word more than once. Evra told French TV that he had used it ten times, and told his team mates and manager that he had used it five, leading to Fergie reporting to the referee that Suarez had called him ‘nigger’ five times.

As I understand it, there is no word in Spanish that translates into that particularly offensive term. There was no corroborating evidence, nor is there today, that Suarez used the word more than once, as he claims, only the accusation by Evra. However the commission chose to believe the latter since it decided that he was a credible witness. In determining Suarez’s meaning it relied only on the evidence of two English academics, retained as experts in Rioplatense Spanish, and Uruguayan culture. Most intriguingly, the commission downplayed the phrase with which Evra admitted addressing Suarez at the beginning of the confrontation. It seems to have been persuaded that ‘Concha de tu hermana’ can be translated as ‘F**king hell’, and that version has now found its way into the English media. I am not a fluent Spanish speaker, but even I know that is not true. At its very mildest, it means ‘Your sister’s pussy,’ but that is not the usual translation.

As it happens, Suarez did not hear the phrase; that seems to have allowed the Commission to lean towards Evra by deciding that the fact he had volunteered it somehow added to his credibility. In deciding the opposite about Suarez,and in reaching the view that he had used the word ‘negro’ seven times — not five, not ten, but seven — it relied upon conflicts in various interviews and statements after the event, and even on a conversation between Suarez and Dirk Kuyt. This took place in Dutch, the language they normally use together, in the light of Suarez’s four years at Ajax, the last of them spent as captain of a team including many black players. The exchange was translated back into English, and taken as evidence on the basis that Suarez is fluent in Dutch, something that does not seem to have been tested.

I’m a Man U fan, but I cannot find the justice in this. ‘Evra was more composed when giving evidence.’ Yes, because he was the accuser and the Commission automatically saw him as the aggrieved party; that was the case put to them by the FA and its counsel. Liverpool’s case for Suarez was that Evra had been so angered by his refusal to apologise for the original foul, which he had felt was part of normal play, and not malicious, that he had been bent on revenge, and that was the motivation for his accusations. That is pure supposition on Liverpool’s part and it is right that it should be rejected, but there is so much supposition in the commission’s finding that it’s hard to see that it is fair.

FA regulations do not require proof up to criminal standard; that is, ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. It accepts the civil standard; ‘balance of probability’. The consequences of the decision for Suarez, far beyond an eight game ban and a forty-thousand pound fine, in terms of his reputation, his business, his involvement with anti-racism charities, are too severe for that to be justified. Nobody has accused Suarez of being racist; that would be difficult since he has a black grandfather. Yet that is how he is now perceived by the moronic tendency among the general Premier League support and that is what will be chanted at him for the rest of his playing career in England, a circumstance that might well result in its being curtailed, unfortunately.

Then there’s Evra, captain of my team; he walks away shining. Yet if he came up to me, aggressively and addressed me as ‘Your sister’s c**t,’ I’d do my best to put him on his back, even though I’ve never had a sister. If Suarez had heard him he’d probably have done the same himself, been sent off, served a three-game ban, and that would have been the end of it. Perhaps that’s what Evra wanted. The commission should have asked him, but it didn’t.

Now that the judgement is out there, the English media, other commentators, and most surprisingly the PFA, which should have maintained neutrality until every legal avenue had been explored, are circling the wagons around it, and exerting pressure on Liverpool to draw a line under the matter, even if it is in everyone’s interests but their own and that of  their player. I suspect that very few of those strident opinions are being voiced by people who have actually read the judgement, and considered the basis of the findings.

I may be accused of racism just for posting this. If I am I will laugh it off, and so will every member of my multi-national, multi-racial extended family. I’ve read the document and I’ve considered what it contains, including the highly shambolic presentation of the defence case. I do not find that surprising, given the confused way in which the accusations were made and the varied nationality and language skills of the parties involved, even Kenny Dalglish, and his self-described ‘restaurant Spanish’. (There are those who would say that Kenny speaks ‘restaurant English’.) Furthermore, the prosecution case wasn’t assembled by Patrice Evra, or by Man U, but my the FA itself, so the apples vs oranges comparison must apply. Bottom line, I’m unhappy with the entire process and I believe that Suarez . . . as an individual, leaving the club out of it . . .  should have the right, should he choose to exercise it,  of independent, judicial appeal against the opinions of three men, their chair a lawyer, an adversarial profession of whose members, fifty per cent are by definition, wrong.

And as I will say yet again, I’m a Man U fan.

Normally I don’t post the text of my website feedback, only my responses, but this one’s an exception:

‘I read a couple of your books last year while I was on holiday, and I was hooked! At present I’m sourcing the rest of them. You are a very talented writer, and I’m very pleased that you chose this as a career. Your books enhance an otherwise boring life of a disabled woman, Thank you. 

Lily-Maie‘

I can’t speak for other authors, but sometimes this one has moments of self-doubt, when he asks himself why he doesn’t clear all these people out of his head and get on with the normal life, that his friends enjoy. Then I receive a  message like the one above, and I know. Cheers, L-M.

. . . to my fellow members of what my son-in-law christened ‘The ten o’clock gang’. Won’t make it tonight, guys; I’ll be on my second airport run of the day.

I took AJ to the airport this morning, early. At half past eight I was standing in theM&S food hall at the Gyle Centre, list in one hand, basket in the other. The place was bedlam; even at that hour the shelves were emptying as fast as the staff, suits included,  could restock them. As for the punters, denizens all of them of the posh end of Edinburgh, most looked ready to kill over the last pack of broccoli florets or baby carrots. If you go  there, or anywhere like it, tomorrow, be afraid, be very afraid.

Maybe I am, but I find it curious that England’s notoriously shifty Crown Prosecution Service should announce that the national football captain John Terry is to face criminal charges for alleged racial abuse, the day AFTER the FA . . . a body that is at least the equal of the CPS in shiftiness . . . announced that Liverpool’s Luis Suarez had been found guilty of a similar offence during a game against Manchester United. With the Suarez decision as a background, the CPS would have been under some very hot lights if it had decided that Terry had no case to answer, or even if it had decided that it was a football matter and had kicked it back to the FA. However I can’t help wondering: if Suarez had been acquitted, would JT be facing a date with the magistrates on February 1?

As for the Suarez case itself, I’m all for racism being kicked out of football and everywhere else, and I do not agree that there has been a witch-hunt against the player, but I cannot see that it’s appropriate to set up a court with three judges who are, an English lawyer, an English club chairman and an English football manager (who is already being accused of bias towards Man U) to judge a case involving a Frenchman and a Uruguayan in which the alleged racial abusive words and phrases were uttered in South American Spanish. The process would have been much more solid if at least one of the panel members had been a respected football figure from a South American nation, other than Brazil, where Portuguese is spoken. Ossie Ardiles comes to mind immediately, or Gus Poyet, the Brighton manager, who is Uruguayan himself, with an understanding of the culture in which Suarez grew up. Hopefully this anomaly will be corrected at appeal, so that there are no lingering doubts over the fairness of the finding.

Shall I be cynical again? Although cricket’s ICC set an appalling precedent in judging and banning three Pakistani players before their cases had come before the English court,  I don’t anticipate the FA proceeding against Terry before the criminal charge is resolved fully. Therefore, I wonder: what ‘live odds’ would Bet 365 offer against the case going to trial at County Court or wherever and that process, and possibly an appeal, dragging on until at least next August, by which time Euro 2012, in which England are among the favourites, will be over? Not very long, I’d imagine.

Food for thought by Kenneth Roy in today’s Scottish Review.

http://www.scottishreview.net/index.shtml

My wife and I had a similar experience  a few years back, having just ‘deplaned’ as they say in the US, from an international flight at Prestwick Airport. With a few other passengers we took the train to Glasgow; our companions on the platform were four youths with attitude, and with a couple of bottles of Buckfast between them. You know the type I mean; if you don’t, hold on to your innocence for as long as you can. Objectionable in word, and potentially in deed. The train arrived after a couple of minutes and we all got on. At the next station, the Buckfast Four got off, on the orders of the conductor, who wasn’t having them necking cheap wine on his train. And quite right too.

What’s this, you ask? QJ joining the Alan Pollock Tendency? No, not at all. There is a world of difference between that of which Ken Roy complains, and which I saw for myself, and that of the young man who was assaulted by the fat bloke with the approval of another train conductor. Rightly or wrongly, that kid thought he had a point to make. Generally those who engage in anti-social behaviour do not, and should be dealt with more robustly by those in authority. If I have a criticism to make of Ken Roy’s bus driver it is that he let those yobs off with a warning.

As I consider this issue, I am reminded of an old Lanarkshire saying, applied to  the likes of Peter Manuel. ‘Hangin’s too good for them. It’s a good kick up the arse they need.’

Today I was a little self-indulgent. I dug out a DVD of Bruce and the E Street Band, recorded at Hammersmith Odeon in November 1975, and played it on my 27″ iMac, with the sound through Bose headphones. Was it good? Was it ever.

. . . Alan ‘Big Man’ Pollock, I’ve had a good look at that notorious YouTube video, and I’ve read up on the incident from both sides. The victim of Mr Pollock’s gratuitous assault . . . in my humble, the conductor should be fired for agreeing to his intervention . . . may have shot his mouth off, as young people can do after a glass of ale, but if his explanation is true, and no-one has come forward to call him a liar, he may have grounds for action. As the video demonstrates the conductor wasn’t willing to listen to him, but I hope that the British Transport Police will investigate the incident fully and impartially. In the meantime I know this; if that was my 19-year-old diabetic son who’d come home with a severely battered face, and some fat bully twice his size was taking public credit for doing it, I’d be strongly tempted to find out how big he really is.

I’ve just seen a sports headline on the BBC website. Seems that Andre Ayew, of Marseille and Ghana, has been named ‘BBC African Footballer of the Year’. This took me so much by surprise that I read the whole story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/16202312.stm

Apparently this is nothing new. The award goes all the way back to 1991, when Andre’s dad, Abede Ayew, was the first winner of the award. Great news for the Ayew family: well done lads. It looks like a very nice little trophy.

Now, can somebody in Broadcasting House, or Manchester, or wherever the hell the BBC is based these days, please explain to me why it is doing this, and also what is in it for me, and all my fellow Broadcasting Tax payers? There has to be a cost in this exercise; given the fact that for the last few years we’ve heard nothing but whining from Mark Thompson and his colleagues about being starved of resources, I would like to know how they can justify it. I do not recall reading anything lately about the BBC British Footballer of the Year; all our sports are bundled together into the increasingly embarrassing SPoTY awards with one trophy going to the public’s flavour of the year, or to any member of the Royal Family who’s ridden a horse in competition without falling off. So I repeat, what’s it all about? I’m sure that African football, which is ridiculously over-favoured by FIFA, would continue to thrive if the BBC decided to divert whatever resources it spends on this bauble to a deserving cause within the nation that funds its ridiculous extravagances.

How about the BBC Alan Pollock Award for Alternative Dispute Resolution? That would go down a treat.

I’ve just read the reports of the first day of the racism hearing against Luis Suarez of Liverpool FC, the allegations having been brought by Patrice Evra of Manchester United. We’ll have to see how it maps out, but if it’s true, as has been alleged, that in the same match, Evra said to the referee ‘You’re only booking me because I’m black,’ I find myself wondering why he isn’t on a similar charge himself.

A comment on one of my recent posts has led me to consider the question of the national anthem of a future Scotland, cut free of the Westminster parliament. When sport embraced ‘Flower of Scotland’ it did so because we were all sick and tired of ‘Scotland the Brave’, and also because it’s a damn good song, especially the bit about ‘Proud Edward’s army’. The new Scotland, though, as a nation might want to look a little further beyond its borders, so the lyric would probably not be appropriate.

So, here and now, let me initiate the second independence debate, on our choice of national tune. To kick things off I propose the obvious, that we adopt Dougie MacLean’s ‘Caledonia‘. It’s a damn nice melody, easy to sing, and  the sentiments do the job perfectly. We might leave out the verse about kissing the ladies and leaving them crying, but otherwise, that’s the one for me. Any other suggestions? (By the way, Dougie has to sing it at the independence ceremony, but it would be nice if he could duet with Frankie Miller.)

Another belter from Kenneth Roy at the Scottish Review.

http://www.scottishreview.net/index.shtml?utm_source=Sign-Up.to&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=256046-Strange+goings-on+at+a+public+body

Campbell Read Books has a very small stock of pre-release copies of ‘As Easy as Murder‘ the new Primavera novel, in hardback (RRP £19.99, CRB price £15.99) and trade paperback (RRP £12.99, CRB price £9.99), post free in the UK. Every one signed, personal dedications on request, and still do-able for Christmas.

An interesting view of the Franco-German euro-shambles, by John Cameron, in today’s Scottish Review.

http://www.scottishreview.net/JillStephenson207.shtml

I read that scientists may have found, or confirmed the existence of, the Higgs boson. Hallelujah, great day in the morning; we can all look forward to a better life.

A few years ago, at a book signing in Canada, I was approached by a gentleman of advanced years who leaned over the table and asked, sotto voce, ‘Which are you, Rangers or the ‘tic?’ When I replied, ‘Actually, I’m neither,’ he glared at me, hissed, ‘I don’t believe you,’ and walked away.

The old fool can believe what he likes, but what I told him was true. It is possible to be Scottish, follow football, and yet be a supporter of neither half of the Old Firm. But that doesn’t mean to say we don’t know the songs, and the chants; it’s difficult to avoid them. Therefore, when I read that Celtic FC had been fined €15,000 by UEFA for ‘illicit chanting’ at a recent Europa League tie, I understood what they meant, just as it didn’t have to be spelled out to me when a similar fine was imposed on Rangers five years ago.

Let me make it clear; I do not condone or excuse sectarian singing, chanting or behaviour in any way shape or form. I do believe it’s a pity that a couple of nice and otherwise inoffensive songs have become associated with the hatred between two football clubs, but if they’re off limits, so be it. However in recent years both clubs involved have done everything they could to stamp down on any offence caused, so it smacks of unfairness when each is singled out, and this is compounded when it is done in isolation, by a body based in a country which does not count English among its three native tongues and whose judges understand neither the language or the issues involved.

Singled out? Yes, absolutely. Glasgow does not have world exclusive rights to ‘illicit’ (surely a word chosen by someone who is not a native English speaker)  football chanting, or ‘illicit’ behaviour . . . such as that exhibited by Les Cules (lit; ‘The arses’), the Barcelona support who threw a pig’s head at their former player Luis Figo, when he returned for the first time as a Madrid player. (I know these guys; if they could have thrown the rest of the pig, they would.) Every time I watch a football match on telly, I hear singing that might give offence to many people. Some of it is funny. (I can never manage not to smile at  ‘Cheer up Peter Reid,’ sung to the tune of ‘Daydream Believer’.) Some of it is not. (The stuff that London clubs used to chant at the young David Beckham must have been very hard for him to take.) But I cannot recall any of it leading to action by UEFA against the clubs involved, or even action by their own national associations. Racist abuse gets everyone’s attention, as it should, instantly, but nothing else other than it seems, the Old Firm.

I would suggest to the Gnomes of Nyon that if they are going to set themselves up as censors of the stands and terracing, they should do so on a pan-European basis and crack down on ‘illicit’ behaviour in every one of their member nations.  If they’re not prepared to do that, they should trust those associations to do  the job themselves, as they and their member clubs have done, by and large, over the years. And there’s this also; the people who sing and chant in support of their clubs, most of them passionate and committed men and women who know what is truly offensive and what isn’t, are paying large slabs of money to do so. Don’t they have rights as well, and should they be undermined by a minority of idiots?

I’ve always thought that Nick Clegg was mostly wind and piss. Now I know for sure and so does everyone else. I have no idea what he thought he was achieving today by absenting himself from the Commons. But I do know this; if he can stay in Government after his public show of disaffection, he has no honour, no integrity and no courage.

I never thought I’d say that.