Words Dept.

Two months after the election, the utter awfulness of the Liberal Democrats has hit me in the last few days with some degree of clarity. Of course the Tories are a bunch of shits – everyone knows that already. But the LibDems are even worse.

As the last few weeks have passed, the staggering hypocrisy of Nick Clegg and the rest of the LibDem front bench has become truly apparent. Think back to the election campaign. Clegg was the man who repeatedly described the Tories and Labour as the “old parties”. A campaign poster criticised the Tories’ 20% “VAT bombshell” and voiced opposition to early cuts. Clegg said the Tories have no mandate to make cuts and “take our jobs away” in traditionally working class areas of the UK, like south Yorkshire.

Here’s an extract from an article Clegg wrote in the Independent in March:

The Conservative Party strategy is now clear: personal animus towards its opponents; shameless scaremongering in the financial markets; double standards in its own policies. David Cameron’s spring conference speech carried one message only: vote for me, because I really really hate the other guy. George Osborne’s economically illiterate warnings of meltdown in the money markets carried one message only: vote for us otherwise we’ll get the markets to tear the house down.

These are all now positions that, in a matter of just a few weeks, the LibDems have cheerfully disowned.

The LibDems’ argument seems to be that they can better influence policy as part of a formal coaliton agreement. This is utter crap. The party could just as easily influence policy if the Tories formed a minority government alone and the LibDems negotiated concessions on a bill-by-bill basis. The problem with this approach is that Clegg doesn’t get an overblown job title and a (shared) grace-and-favour country house to doss about in. The man is transparently in it for what he can get out of it.

Spare a thought, though, for local LibDem councillors and other activists who one assumes have maintained – unlike Clegg – at least a modicum of genuine political conviction. In many UK cities, where the Tories are hated, the LibDems are looking at the electoral wilderness. This point was made by former council leader Warren Bradley last week, as well it might be. He is completely screwed.

Politics has had a tough time recently. Nobody in the real world relates to or trusts politicians and apathy is rife. Nick Clegg cannot look anyone in the eye and say that the LibDems have not worsened the situation.

Here are a few instantaneous thoughts on the sad closure of Crain’s Manchester Business, which was announced today. As a local business journalist who was very occasionally (ahem) scooped by the paper, it goes without saying that I have lots of respect for their journalists. But here’s a few quick thoughts on what went wrong:

1. They didn’t sell enough adverts. Sounds fairly obvious but estimates suggest Crain’s would have had to have made up to £25,000 a week in advertising just to break even. Anyone who ever picked up a copy of Crain’s will have noticed that there weren’t very many adverts in it, and their “no discount” policy is well documented. However, assurances were made that the title would have five years to start making money. Perhaps the recession accelerated that process; after two-and-a-half years, the magazine has closed.

2. They were too fearless. Crain’s always seemed to me to have a sort of fearlessness about it, which was great. But it’s not difficult to imagine that its “no bullshit” approach did little to endear it to potential advertisers used to their cosy relationship with the MEN. I was told by contacts from time to time that they’d stopped talking to Crain’s, supposedly because the paper had messed up some story or other. But from what I could see Crain’s very rarely got things wrong, it just printed things that others either missed or ignored. This got up people’s noses.

3. There isn’t enough news (and a lot of it is boring). I think I might have said this before, but how many business magazines does a place need? As well as the MEN, which has had its own problems over the last two years, there’s also the long-established Insider, which rightly increased its news/online efforts immediately after Crain’s launched. (Disclaimer: I freelance for Insider.) The free-to-access Business Desk North West, which has done well under the editorship of former MEN Business Editor Chris Barry after launching less than a year after Crain’s, has further queered the pitch, while there are also various sector-specific business news websites like How-Do and Place North West. Crain’s should be commended for, in the main, having a proper news agenda that avoided recycling press releases. But there has to be a limit over the amount of business coverage people actually need.

4. It had no local roots. Manchester is the seat of the industrial revolution. Parachuting an American brand into a city as rich in business heritage as Manchester, albeit with a crowd of highly capable local journalists, was always going to be risky. And, when things don’t go to plan, a US owner isn’t going to weep over the closure of an outpost thousands of miles away. The writing was perhaps on the wall when Crain’s parted company with Manchester-based publisher Arthur Porter in January, in slightly mysterious circumstances.

5. The timing was wrong. Launching a business magazine in autumn 2007 was a terrible idea given the banking crisis, property crash, unemployment bubble and recession that followed. All this is easy to talk about in hindsight, perhaps, but the fact remains that Crain’s timing was absolutely bloody awful.

The New York Post’s headline yesterday “USA wins 1-1″, in reference to Saturday’s World Cup match between the USA and England, is actually a subtle joke. I know it’s difficult to grasp the idea that Americans understand humour but the front page actually contains self-deprecation and two amusing historical references. The only reason I mention this is because the British, with our claims to not only inventing football but also inventing irony, have totally missed the gag. Instead, we are smugly laughing at the thick Americans who really don’t understand anything about “our” beautiful game.

So here’s a breakdown of the New York Post front page:

1. The idea of a 1-1 win is obviously ludicrous. Americans understand this. They have draws in baseball and basketball from time to time. The paper is almost certainly making a jokey reference to an infamous 1968 headline relating to a college (American) football game, in which it was reported “Harvard beats Yale 29-29“, after Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds of the match. So, actually they’re being quite clever.

2. The clearly idiotic concept of “winning 1-1″ is a self-deprecating gag, a joke at the expense of the USA itself, which, in the eyes of the rest of the world, especially Britain, famously doesn’t understand football.

3. The subheading refers to the Battle of Bunker Hill. This episode in the American War of Independence is classed as a pyrrhic British victory, where massive British losses were sustained. So, again, it’s quite a clever and subtle historical joke.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the USA gave us Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show and The Simpsons, whereas Britain came up with Carry on Camping, Mr Bean and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Just saying.

I always thought the Labour Party was about achieving things on merit, rather than as a result of an accident of birth. That’s why the dismal tokenism that resulted in Diane Abbott scraping together enough nominations to get on to the ballot paper for the party’s leadership makes the Labour Party look ridiculous. The idea of David Miliband and Harriet Harman gifting Abbott a nomination because they want to show how committed they are to, you know, black women and stuff, is absurd and patronising. It also makes Abbott look rather silly.

Elsewhere in today’s news, it has been revealed that Charlie Brooker (who clearly regularly mines by blog and Twitter stream for inspiration) intends to marry former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq. Brooker’s involvement in this C-list celebrity story brought out the worst in users of the allegedly popular social networking tool. He maintains massive cuddleability among that certain brand of free-thinking, straight-talking, pathetic, greying liberal comedy wannabes who populate Twitter, meaning Huq’s name quickly started to trend. But might I offer the following tip to Brooker fans: If you want him to like you, and you obviously do, it’s probably best not to do what I saw someone do earlier, which is to call his wife-to-be a whore. Especially if you mention @charltonbrooker in the tweet.

And James Corden. Something to do with James Corden. You’ll have to Google it.

Warm Bologna night
Right foot volley David Platt
No penalties

Word reached me this week of the High IQ Haiku World Cup Project. I’ve never tried writing haiku before but this idea appealed.

They’re inviting haiku relating to the forthcoming World Cup, or to World Cups past. So I went with Italia 90, the first World Cup I properly remember. Obviously this was the World Cup that first gave England its penalties complex but I thought it’d be a bit obvious to go for the semi-final heartache-type angle. It is, however, about another specific moment from that tournament.

If you can remember the opposition team and the name of the assisting player then I award you an imaginary £5. Well done!

Earlier this month, as part of its Manchester Celebrates Jaguar event, Jaguar lent me a sixty grand supercharged XFR for the night (complete with 5.0-litre, 510bhp V8 engine). So I thought I’d make a short film out of it.

The journey starts at the City of Manchester Stadium in east Manchester and continues through Manchester city centre via Deansgate and St Peter’s Square to Old Trafford. Luckily I managed not to crash the thing. Although that probably would have been quite an exciting ending.

Jaguar Manchester from David Quinn on Vimeo.

I don’t really get the point – journalistically, poetically, metaphorically or otherwise – of the Observer’s 3,000-word Miranda Sawyer-authored feature on the joy of Nando’s today. The feelgood piece, with the headline How Nando’s conquered Britain, is the type of advertising money can’t by, as Sawyer mooches around a couple of branches of the restaurant chain and links its growth with Britain’s simultaneous assent to the position of a mythical “multi-cultural” nirvana. Sawyer even references the lovely Nando’s PR people (“one of whom is on maternity leave”) who fed her this utter nonsense, while there are a couple of token paragraphs towards the end that refer vaguely to Nando’s half-hearted approach towards animal welfare. (Hint: the phrase “actively looking at” is actively totally meaningless.)

With this in mind, I thought I’d have a bash at a similar sort of piece. Obviously 3,000 words might piss you off a bit, so I’ll just give you the first few pars. If anyone at the Observer wants to commission me, I’m all yours at a rate considerably cheaper than Miranda Sawyer.

How Greggs is taking over the world

Peter Kay’s mate (the one out of Max and Paddy) eats there, so does Brian Blessed and my window cleaner. The appeal of Greggs among hungry normal people in places like Chadderton and Northwich is truly fucking astounding. So how did that happen, asks David Quinn (BA (Hons) Smash Hits)?

It was on the high street I spotted the place, just between Curry’s Digital and Timpsons. Blue and orange sign, with the delicious aroma that only baked-on pastry can provide. The queue of unfashionably-dressed people outside told me everything I needed to know. These normal types simply couldn’t get enough of this stuff, whatever it was, and I was determined to spend several weeks researching a pointless feature on the subject.

I went inside and looked around. There was a fridge with some sandwiches in it (“prawn mayonnaise” according to the sign) and some ladies behind an apparently heated counter containing an array of pies and pasties. “What would you like, love?”, one of them asks, and I am immediately drawn to her crow’s feet, her daft hat and her gruff northern charm.

I ignore her completely and instead identify an office worker standing in the queue, which snakes purposefully towards the exit. As I reach for my Moleskine notebook and Olympus voice recorder I poke him in the chest and ask him: What brought you here? What is all this stuff? How can I wring a 3,000-word feature out of it? He looks at me, him in George at Asda, me in Paul Smith, and replies: “I like cheese and onion pasties.”

Greggs. You might not have heard of it but you probably know at least one person earning below thirty thousand pounds a year who regularly buys some kind of cooked brown thing from one of these establishments. Be it a pie, a pasty, or a “prawn mayonnaise sandwich”, Greggs is the place to be if you are a British person who has a proper job in a shop, office, factory or somewhere like that, somewhere in 21st century Britain today.

Peter Kay’s mate (the one out of Max and Paddy) is an idol to these people and regularly comes into the Horwich branch for a steak and kidney pie, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and bottle of 7Up. “It’s all about the pastry, the heat on your tongue as the gravy dribbles down your chin. It can only be matched by the joy of the fizzy bottle of ice cold 7Up that I wash it down with!” he says, after I have his dialogue translated by a northern person I went to university with.

Emily, a wonderfully committed and, dare I say it, attractive young thing who runs the PR team, is similarly enthusiastic. “Greggs has become a metaphor for all that is wholesome, wonderful and British about this great British country of ours in the 21st century,” she says. “Cheap, ordinary, drab it may be, but, look, we can’t all eat at the Ivy every day, can we?”

Continues for several pages…

My memory of the General Election this year is going to be dominated by Salford. As previously mentioned, I’ve been making a documentary about the local campaign in Salford and Eccles, focusing mainly on the anti-Hazel Blears candidate. As a result, I managed to get into the count on Thursday night/Friday morning and witnessed, at around 5am, Blears win through a glorious combination of steadfast political apathy and the fear of a Tory government.

Salford (the Eccles bit was recently bolted on to the constituency) is Labour through and through but during the time I’ve spent there during the last few weeks, it’s become obvious that there is little real backing for the party or its candidate. On polling day, I witnessed a Labour canvasser bawling in favour of the pint-sized MP through a megaphone and an old lady on the pavement mutter, quick as a flash, “I’d rather vote for Adolf ‘Itler”. Nonetheless, many people were happy to admit that they will vote for Blears anyway because they don’t want to open the door to anyone else.

On the night, Blears’ share of the vote fell by 15%, off a 55% turnout. Out of a constituency of around 75,000, just 16,655 people actually voted for the victorious MP, who singled out the Conservative candidate, Matthew Sephton, in her thank you speech.

Despite Blears’ declining share of the vote, the traditional left doesn’t seem to be winning the argument in Salford. David Henry, whose Hazel Must Go ticket was backed by the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, did manage a respectable 730 votes. But that was less than a third of the total achieved by the BNP candidate, Nick Griffin’s PA Tina Wingfield, who racked up 2,632 votes. Blears has promised to listen to her constituents as never before and her most pressing task now is surely to win back support from those whose disillusionment with her brand of politics and house-flipping antics has resulted in a rise in support for the far right. Unless the issue of immigration is properly discussed and debated by the main parties, I really fear for places like Salford, where anti-immigrant sentiment on the doorstep is regularly fairly shocking.

As for what happens now, it would be nice to see some form of proportional representation come out of the situation. In Salford, the votes of 60% of those who voted counted for nothing, which simply can’t be right. I have a feeling, though, that despite honourable intentions, Nick Clegg and the massed ranks of the Liberal Democrats will be no match whatsoever for the entrenched political elites who want to preserve the power base afforded by first past the post.

I finally escaped Buile Hill Visual Arts College, where the count was held, at 5.43am. Towards the end, under the fluorescent lights, the atmosphere got very unusual indeed. Although the only chemical about the place was adrenaline, there was this really odd feeling of a bizarre all-nighter populated by wide-eyed, rosette-wearing geeks.

As a follower (and member) of Amnesty, I was perturbed to read this tweet from their official Twitter account this afternoon:

Gordon is right. She is a bigoted woman. Here is a tip Love, where have all the Eastern Europeans come from? How about Eastern Europe!

The tweet has since been deleted from the web but here’s a grab from Tweetie:

It was all very strange, since Amnesty rarely, if ever, uses its Twitter stream for anything outside the sphere of human rights. The use of the word “love” and the sarcastic tone were also most unlike them.

A few minutes later, this tweet appeared, disclaiming responsibility:

I can only apologise massively for our last tweet – trying to work out how it happened. Obviously, not Amnesty’s view.

Subsequently, the charity said it had changed its Twitter password. In an @reply, it confirmed the tweet had been sent by a staff member, but blamed a “very obscure Tweetdeck bug” for accidently sending the message from the AmnestyUK account instead of the individual’s own account, adding: “We’re a bit baffled.”

There have been a couple of interesting developments on the local web publishing scene in recent days. Firstly, it looks as though Manchester Confidential’s paywall model has rather sheepishly fallen over after three months because boss Mark Garner finally realised some time after everyone else that it never had a hope of working.

Commenting on a post on this blog in January, Garner said he wanted ManCon to “stick out like a sore thumb” – as though this is the key criteria for success in online publishing. He has since presumably realised that much, much more is needed to sustain a subscription-based model, and he has been unable to provide it. As another commenter wrote here back then, all ManCon managed to do was to cull its readership, thus alienating advertisers. Was this really so difficult to predict?

Over at How-Do, the sentiment seems to be that everyone should salute Garner for his boldness and for admitting it didn’t work. Fair enough. I’m just curious about those subscribers who signed up for ManCon for a year, paying up to £100 each. Will they be getting a refund?

Elsewhere in the world of Manchester-based online publishing, a new “hyperlocal” news site called Inside the M60 has launched. (Hyperlocal, in case you hadn’t realised, is the new word for “local”. Just as “binge drinking” is the new word for “drinking”, “hyperlocal” sounds zeitgeisty and now-ish and everyone is getting terribly excited about the concept.)

Inside the M60 was created by journalists Louise Bolotin and Nigel Barlow. According to its own “about” page:

As a result of cost-cutting measures, local papers have by nature become more insular, relying more and more on “churnalism” and breaking that crucial relationship with their readership and their customers, the advertisers. There are, therefore, opportunities for niche journalism projects with a small cost base that take advantage of the low cost of entry and can act as the voice for these communities.

The site has was only properly launched yesterday, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. It wants a range of contributors from different areas of the city to become “community reporters”. Once these slot in, the potential for genuine scoops seems realistic, particularly since the Manchester Evening News closed its local offices last year and now makes all its local reporters work out of central Manchester.

Presumably Inside the M60 is not expecting to recruit an army of NCTJ-trained hacks to man the bureaux in Crumpsall and Beswick and so the mysterious people who constitute “the general public” will be relied on to provide content. Michael Taylor has highlighted what he sees as the “chasm between the present reality of bloggers and the needs of a well-informed society”, using a crass question about Sir Richard Leese posed on Inside the M60’s Twitter stream as the basis for his argument.

I’m not so frosty towards the  idea of “amateur” news bloggers providing a useful service because I don’t believe that only journalists can do what journalists do. After all, some journalists aren’t very good at their jobs and there’s no reason why a moderately intelligent person with good contacts in a local community can’t break decent stories. But, on the other hand, some form of quality control will need to be put in place in order to retain accuracy and, ultimately, credibility. A dispassionate approach to an issue is often the best way to expose it. Nobody listens to a (hyper) local ranter with a chip on his shoulder, and that sort of approach is something that will need to be avoided.

I’m reluctant to be too critical of Inside the M60’s content given the site’s tender age but since its creators are ready to criticise what they see as the weaknesses of other local media, I reckon a little constructive criticism is justified. Firstly, I spotted a lot of typos on the site, including Harpurhey being misspelt, lots of mis-spaced, glitchy commas and the odd half-written paragraph. There also seems to be a bit of an over-reliance on press releases and surveys, which, of course, fall into the category of “churnalism” that the site is railing against. For example, of the ten stories on the front page, three start with a statement summarising some survey or official report, followed by a second paragraph starting with the words “That’s the conclusion of…”

Still, it’s all free to look at and, once the community reporters bed in, perhaps there will be a change of focus. As we have all learnt today, credit should be given for trying something new. So I wish Inside the M60 the best of luck.