Crawley Town At Old Trafford

It is my experience that most people have never heard of Crawley and even if they have, wonder where it lies on the map of England. We have little reason to be famous. Crawley - just 4 miles south of Gatwick Airport - was created a New Town in 1948; before that it was no more than a small village with a population of a few hundred. Now 100,000 people live here. But yesterday Crawley's location on the map of England was sought by football supporters and newsmen from all around the world. Crawley Town were playing Manchester United at Old Trafford in the FA Cup. They deserved to be there having beaten Swindon Town, Derby County and Torquay United in the previous rounds. For any non-league club to play Manchester United - one of the top teams in the world and currently 4 points clear at the top of the Premier League - at Old Trafford in the Cup is a dream come true. Crawley Town went there yesterday - in their lucky bus with their lucky driver - rejecting an offer from Richard Branson of free transportation to and from Manchester in a Virgin Airways 757. They took with them 10,000 supporters - including the mayor in full regalia, half the town council and the local MP - and played brilliantly. They went down 1-0 but kept MU off the score card for 28 minutes - something that ten Premier League clubs have failed to do at Old Trafford this season. Also, Arsenal are the only other club this season that has restricted Manchester United to a single goal in any match at Old Trafford. And this goal came after a MU corner that should never have been. The ball had been kicked over the dead-ball line by an MU player not Crawley Town. It was difficult for the referee to see but the TV replays from three angles revealed the truth. Crawley accepted the referee's decision without dissent. But Crawley were never outplayed. Of course MU did not field their maximum strength side - will Alex Ferguson be censored for this? They put out many new young players who must be expected to provide a substantial part of the foundations of the club's side in coming years. If this is the case, MU have got problems. One or two players looked good but quite a few were very mediocre and may be given their P45s next week. Alex Ferguson was not happy and I am sure there would have been some strong words in the dressing room after the game. If a footballer plays for MU and does not dominate in a game against a non-league club, how will he get on against Chelsea or Real Madrid? But Crawley played above the standards of non-league sides. Right from the start, they played with enthusiasm, energy and commitment. They ran around the field like whippets and I thought they must tire by the end. But they did not. They never gave up and were attacking the MU goal right into injury time. In the 2nd half they were much the better team - even with Wayne Rooney now on the field - and they twice came very close to scoring an equaliser. "Something they truly deserved," said Alex Ferguson. "This was Crawley's day," he said. The pressure on the MU goal reached a climax at the very end when first Matt Tubbs attempted a Rooney style overhead shot that just went over the bar and then Richard Brodie's header just failed to dip under the bar; one yard to the left and it would have gone in; the goal-keeper was already beaten. Crawley Town gave MU a fright and created a great FA cup game that would have been watched live on TV by millions of people around the world. After the final whistle, the Crawley players stayed on the field for 20 minutes talking to their supporters and enjoying this day that will stay with them for the rest of their days. It was David Hunt who got the Rooney shirt and he now has many a picture of himself wearing it at Old Trafford. Where will the shirt end up? In his bedroom or in the cabinet at Crawley Town? The manager cannot be less than delighted with the way his team performed and after the match he enjoyed the hospitality of MU and their manager Alex Ferguson.

This cup run has netted Crawley Town more than £1.5 million in extra income, which will satisfy the backers, the accountants and the manager. They should achieve promotion to the Football League at the end of this season and they will be in there fighting with no debts - something that few teams can claim these days. Only 18 months ago, Crawley Town faced bankruptcy and oblivion, now they are praised by Alex Ferguson and looking at promotion into the Football League. They have been in existence for 115 years so, it has to be said, they have taken their time getting to this level. But they can only get better and better. Football is, as so many have said, a funny old game!

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Good-Bye Barnacle

Almost buried in the tide of news today was the information that a great cricketer and commentator, Trevor Bailey was killed in a house fire in Westcliff-on-Sea. He was 87 years old. His cricketing hey-day was in the 1950s when he played alongside such greats as Dennis Compton, Alex Bedser, Peter May, Colin Cowdrey, Godfrey Evans, Tony Locke, Jim Laker, Brian Statham, Frank Tyson and Freddie Trueman. And we should not forget Australian greats like Keith Miller, Ray Lindwall and Richie Benaud. An Essex man through and through, born in Westcliff-on-Sea, old public schoolboy - Dulwich College - ex-marine and a robust England cricketer, Trevor Bailey played for England 61 times and was both a good bowler and a batsman. He took 132 wickets in test matches at an average of about 29 but I remember him most for his batting. He had a batting average of 30 but that hides the reality of what he achieved. Trevor Bailey was the batsman England needed when disaster was looming. He never had an instinct for swash-buckling. What he did have was an immovable objection to getting out and many an England innings has been saved by his resistance. When Trevor Bailey put up the shutters and dug in he was almost impossible to get out. He could stay at the wicket for hours without scoring a run and could break the heart of many a fast bowler toiling in the heat of a mid-day sun - all to no avail. It was Trevor Bailey who with Willie Watson in 1953 resisted the Australian bowlers at Lords for over 4 hours and forced the match to a draw and thus provided England with the possibility of winning The Ashes for the first time in 20 years - which they duly did in the 5th Test at The Oval. It was not for nothing that it was the Australians who named him Barnacle Bailey. In Brisbane in 1959 he scored the slowest ever 50 - in 357 minutes

Barnacle Bailey is still the only English cricketer to score 2000 runs and take 100 wickets in the same season [1959]. His best ever bowling performance was in taking 7 - 34 to destroy the powerful West Indies side in Jamaica on a doddle of a pitch in 1954. In addition, he found time to play football and won a winners medal in the FA Amateur Cup Final when he played for Walthamstowe in 1952.

Subsequently he became a fixture on BBC Test Match Special for 26 years and was a wonderful contrast to old Fred Trueman. His autobiography was quoted in The Independent today.

"What I failed to realise early enough, except in the sporting field, was that nothing which is really worth having can be acquired without hard work. Despite this weakness, I can claim that I have been remarkably successful in my pursuit of happiness."

There's not much to disagree with in that. He gave us all many memories and much pleasure and may he rest in peace.

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What Do We Do Now?

I still feel gloomy about the prospects for this country's economic future. We are being told how well - amid all the gloom - our manufacturing sector is doing. Yes, they may be improving a bit but from a base so low that its is almost irrelevant. Politicians seem to have come to the conclusion that a bit more manufacturing will be a good thing. They are not quite sure why and even less do they understand where we should be concentrating our efforts. The trouble is that for the last 30 or 40 years [at least] we have allowed manufacturing to decline. Indeed, in Mrs Thatcher's era we positively encouraged it. But look at some of ludicrous situations we now find ourselves in. For example, about 40% of our electricity is still generated using coal. We have about 400 years worth of coal buried underground in the UK, yet most of the coal for these power stations is brought in from Poland, USA and Australia. Why is this? Fundamentally, because Mrs Thatcher did not like Arthur Scargill, the General Secretary of the Mineworkers Union and we closed almost all the coal mines. Mrs Thatcher's attitude is surely a good enough reason for doing serious damage to our balance of payments, destroying many jobs in the UK and stimulating the creation of jobs in other countries. Sooner or later we will, at great expense, have to re-open the mines as world fuel sources become more and more expensive or unobtainable.

There is a problem in getting sensible policies out of this Coalition - or any government for that matter - for the simple reason that almost all the ministers are either lawyers or classicists who have never had a proper job. They know nothing of science, engineering, technology or manufacturing industry and are never likely to get beyond all embracing platitudes like Harold Wilson's "white hot technological revolution." In an e-mail correspondence with my MP recently, he highlighted the fact that the government planned in a year or two to invest £200 million in new manufacturing. First it's a tiny amount - do they understand the sheer magnitude of what needs to be done? We chucked about £800 billion at the banks - and what do they do with it? Primarily, they made sure that they could carry on getting paid buckets of money.

The people of Britain have a great and natural instinct for making things. That is why the Industrial Revolution started here. But we began to fall behind when education became an increasingly important part of technological progress. And it carries on today. We send 50% of kids to university to study rubbish subjects while giving primary subjects ever decreasing status. We need very well qualified people with good degrees in science, engineering and technology not in hair dressing or media studies. This is only the start. Then we have to invest, directly or indirectly, into new technologies that can create products which we can sell to the world.

The recent decision of American pharmaceutical company, Pfizers, to close their facility at Sandwich in Kent is a serious blow and should make the government look very vigorously now at what the prospects are in so many fields. If we cannot keep Pfizer here, we are in real trouble.

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Good-Bye Australia

This morning the last of the seven 50 over cricket matches against Australia came to an end with England losing again to give Australia a series win of 6 - 1 — and they deserved it. It is time to say good-bye Australia. Of course, England were in trouble in this last match - which they lost by 57 runs - from the moment that Australia dismissed the two England opening batsmen for a couple of ducks. If I may paraphrase Oscar Wilde. To lose one opening batsman for a duck may be considered a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. After England so convincingly trounced Australia in the Ashes Tests these results seem quite extraordinary. But surely, the problem is that the games are pointless. After the five match tests and several 20 over games, why did anyone think that we needed to play seven more one day games. The crowds have faded away as well. I am sure that the England team want to come home. They will be going into a World Cup series in India which begins on 19th February and drags on until 2nd April. If England manage to get to the final, they will then come back to England - win or lose - and start the domestic season. Even the most ardent cricketer will be by then, sick to death of the game and the travel - and India.

The primary reason for all this rubbish is - of course - money. Somebody thought they could make lots of money from this one day series. Even if nobody comes to watch they could still sell the matches to the TV channels in England and Australia. But I think many TV channels will be wondering what they have bought. The series has, of course, given the Australians a renewed belief in their own abilities and, before the World Cup, that is surely bad news for England.

I hope that that this exercise in futility does not have too bad an effect on the England Team in the World Cup but somebody needs to answer for this crackpot schedule.

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Torturing English Down At The BBC

There is much justified comment about the BBC dumbing down its programmes. This is certainly true of TV, which is pumping out some atrocious rubbish under the heading of light entertainment, even trivialising its serious programmes as well. On top of this they are wasting time and money in exercises in political correctness - like sending Question Time to Glasgow. This is fundamentally daft and may well result in all its staff from David Dimbleby downwards resigning. We could see the programme in the future being populated entirely by obscure Highlanders in kilts waffling on about heather and taxes on Scotch Whisky. It is even rumoured that Paisley born Andrew Neal and his This Week team may be dispatched to Inverness.
Now they have given up on the English language. In a report on their web site today they tell us that "The Prime Minister has criticised "state multiculturalism" in his first speech on radicalisation and the causes of terrorism since being elected." Now, it may well be that the PM is very concerned about the problems of terrorism since he has been elected but I think he is trying to take a wider view. The reality is that this jumbled sentence needs completely re-arranging so that it no longer has the ambiguity of the chair and the lady with the Queen Anne legs.
How about this "In his first speech since the election on the subject of radicalisation and the causes of terrorism, the Prime Minster has criticised "state multiculturalism."" That sounds better and has taken away the ambiguity. It is still not perfect. It would be better if, like the tourist in Ireland, we had started from a different place.
Am I being too pedantic in these days of RU 18 and LOL? Fowler and Sir Ernest Gowers, those great instructors on the correct use of English would, I am sure, be less than happy with the BBC's construction.
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Old Trafford, Here We Come!

It is rather shameful that I have written nothing in the last few days of the exploits of our local football team, Crawley Town. I wrote on 11th January about their success at Broadfield Stadium in beating Derby County in the FA Cup 3rd Round. Well, last week-end they went down to Torquay and won again. They now become one of only six non-league clubs since WW II that have progressed to the 5th Round. And now they have the dream draw; they play Manchester United at Old Trafford. The Reds vs The Reds. This is a glorious fixture. No one really expects Crawley Town to win but they will go there and give it their best shot. They have nothing to lose. It is Manchester United who have got to get it right. Even if Crawley lose 7 - 0 nobody will complain and the match will earn them selves another £1 million. But if Manchester United slip up - and they may not play the strongest team, feeling that even below strength they will beat Crawley - who knows? How many people will go to watch? Normally, Crawley Town get about 2,000 people at Broadfield Stadium but I would not be surprised if 5,000 to 10,000 people go to Manchester.

I don't know what will happen. Obviously a Crawley win is a 100 - 1 shot. But for the players it is a dream fixture. To play probably the greatest football team in the world on the hallowed turf of Old Trafford. It is Roy of the Rovers stuff. It doesn't get better than this. And I wish them all the luck in the world.

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What's The Pound Worth?

In recent months I have been prone to moan on and on about bankers and the incompetents running our economy - and those of most of the Western World if it comes to it. Today I was reading the on-line newsletter of Money Week and they produced a graph that shows how total incompetence has been a relatively modern phenomenon. The graph is shown above and it charts the value of the pound over the last 250 years. You will see that while the pound remained on the gold standard the value from 1750 to 1914 remained relatively constant. Then they gave up the gold standard and started printing money to pay for the First World War. And the value of the pound started to tumble. And it carried on tumbling until today its is worth about 1/235 th of what it was 95 years ago. And as Dominic Frisby points out, if Britain and Germany had remained on the gold standard the war would have ended in a few months because nobody would have had the money to pay for it. But they and many other governments since have adopted the Zimbabwean solution - print as much as money as you need to pay the debts. The value of the pound rallied for a bit in the 1920s when Winston Churchill put us back on the gold standard but with the Wall Street collapse and the depression of the 1930s we gave up the gold standard again and carried on printing money. And so the decline in the pound was restored.

All the signs at the moment are that the Coalition government is making little progress in getting the debts under control and they are going to have to rely on the old remedy of inflating away the debts. But looking at the graph above it is looking as though we will need inflation of Zimbabwean proportions to write of the £1 trillion outstanding. Does George Osborne sleep at night? If the answer is "Yes!" then he doesn't understand how bad the mess is.

And yesterday the football transfer window closed with a last minute orgy of spending that makes it clear that these gluttonous footballers are still on another planet. Just as an example: Andy Carroll departs Newcastle United a mere 4 months after signing a new 5 year contract. "I did not want to leave Newcastle," he says. "I was forced out." Now the forcing just may be related to the fact that he suddenly decided via his agent that he needed more money. He was struggling to get by on a mere £28,000 per week - or put it another way, £1,456,000 per year. This week, Newcastle offered him more money - we will ignore the recent signing of a new contract, which, presumably, said what he would be paid. It was not enough. They offered yet more money. It was still not enough and thus he was "forced" to leave as Liverpool handed over £25,000,000 and agreed to pay struggling Andy a bit more money - ie £70,000 per week - or £3,640,000 per year. That should help to keep the wolf from the door for the next couple of years or so. Now this is a very talented player - with a dodgy knee and a terrible track record of heavy drinking, drunkenness, fighting, affray, assault, etc. He has all the characteristics of becoming another Paul Gascoine.

And we are all in this together.

I don't think so!

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We Are All In This Together

Hardly a day goes by without my realising yet again just how badly and continuously incompetent the management of this country has been. I was a supporter of the new coalition government and saw the coming together of Liberal Democrats and Tories as a new opportunity for the country to progress but they are already losing their way. The most depressing thing is a refusal to face up to facts. If they will not acknowledge the existence of a real problem their chances of solving it are close to zero - unless you are an ardent believer in the ultimate success via the laws of chance and good luck. Then there are the slight of hand gestures. For example: we have the worst state pensions in the whole of Europe - except, apparently, for Latvia and Malta - yet David Cameron announced that the state pension annual escalation calculator would now be based on the CPI rather than the RPI - although he failed to mention that the CPI is generally lower than the RPI. In practice pensioners are affected by inflation at a level even higher than the RPI - so the new system will mean that pensions will be down-rated in value even faster than before. Is there any intention to make a step change to bring us into line with other big countries in Europe? I think not. Our low pensions will continue. Not satisfied with a level of pension payment that has been allowed to become pathetically low, they will seek to make it even worse. Add to that the fact that employer's private pension provisions will now be based on defined contributions rather than defined benefits - in other words, the employers will set up a pension fund with trustees and managers who may be completely incompetent but you, dear pensioner, will reap the benefits of their incompetence and get what you are given when you retire - and for the rest of your life. Nothing is guaranteed. The investment bankers will do OK, of course. But the investment bankers do OK all the time. As our government prints money to stimulate the economy, the bankers take it and use it carry on paying themselves monster bonuses. Payments which are necessary in recognition of the supposed brilliance of their understanding of gambling with other people's money. Gambling which brought the world's finance snear to total collapse.

Government ministers waffle on about the importance of manufacturing while failing to note that we haven't got very much. Mrs Thatcher saw to that disaster. We make no ships, no railway equipment - and this is the country that invented railways and supplied them to the world. We pay buckets of money in tax but services just cost more and more to provide less and less, while the numbers of inhabitors of non-jobs increases year after year. Cut local government spending and they shut the libraries and schools, fail to mend the roads, fail to empty the dustbins, fail to clean the streets; yet they can move plenty of paper, spend money on ever more sophisticated speed cameras - not for road safety reason, but to increase money supply - increase the speed of paper shifting, concentrate resources on the criminal and undeserving, reinforce political correctness and retain all diversity coordinators.

The government tells us we are all in this together. The bankers carry on being paid millions and the Chancellor of the Exchequer contacts us, while on a skiing holiday, from the veranda of a £1.7 million chalet in the Swiss Alps owned by a friendly multi-millionaire hedge fund manager. Yes, I think some of us are rather further in this than others.

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A Very Shady Deal?

Frequently, politicians wonder why they are dislike so much and often despised. And then more reports come along that make it blindingly obvious why it is so. The last 24 hours have given us plenty to be going on with.

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Let's start close to home with the saga of BSkyB and News Corporation. The latter with James Murdoch as Chief Executive in Europe, son of big boss Rupert Murdoch, wants to buy the 61% of shares in BSkyB that it does not already own. This is hardly likely to be in the national interest since it will give Murdoch control of a vast swathe on the British media via TV and newspapers and will establish an organisation three times the size of the BBC. Almost everyone else in broadcasting and the newspaper industries is opposed to such a take-over. The regulator Ofcom has expressed severe reservations and has said, quite clearly, in their report published today that the merger should be refereed to the Competition Commission. It is three weeks after the report was available to the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. The minister has told us that News Corporation have been given six months to address concerns expressed by Ofcom in the report. He is, he told us, mindful to refer the report to the Competition Commission, since it is the view of Ofcom that the merger is not in the public interest. Has he any choice? Is it conceivable that he could get away with not referring it. If the answer is "Yes" then what is the point of Ofcom? But we now have the extraordinary situation that - following secret meetings between the minister and the Murdochs - News Corporation is being given time to cobble together some deal that will let everybody off the hook and the merger can go ahead without the approval of teh Competition Commission or - more likely - the referral will be accompanied with some spin to explain why it is now OK. The picture would not look quite so bad were it not for the fact that Mr Hunt is a known enthusiastic supporter of Murdoch and his businesses. Why, I have no idea. Perhaps it is just that he is an old Thatcherite Tory who hates the BBC - he wants to abolish the BBC Trust and trim the Corporation's wings - and he will sleep with any devil who is not a public service broadcaster. Is he one of those who believe that privatisation of everything must be better? But even worse is the cosy relationship between the Murdochs and David Cameron. He has visited James Murdoch in the Caribbean - having been transported there on a Murdoch aeroplane - and he has had dinner with senior executives of News Corporation - privately, not with civil servants present - just days after he took away responsibility for the merger from the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, after he had been recorded voicing his antipathy to Murdoch.. And, it seems, Rupert Murdoch has access to Downing Street via the back entrance. What is there to hide? We like to think that our politics are not corrupt but happenings like this suggest, very strongly, that we are deluded. Rupert Murdoch manages everything for the benefit of himself and his companies and, like all rich people, he can never be rich enough. But all the maneuverings and the clandestine dealings can only make people very sure that blocking this deal must be the right thing to do. But I have little confidence in the government on this. They will wriggle and wriggle in order to allow their cronies to be rewarded.

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Pay Your Taxes, Lads

In these times it often seems that the differences in earnings between the richest and the poorest in society is greater than it has ever been. It is certainly true on an international basis. Sure, in the past there were some exceedingly wealthy individuals and some exceedingly poor. The difference now is that there are more who are wealthy and more who are very poor. Like so many, I have complained about the obscene amounts of money that investment bankers and their like pay themselves, but compared with Premier League footballers, even bankers seem poor. Apparently, HMR&C have decided it's time to target the underpayment of tax by these very much over-paid sportsmen. No doubt some footballers move money overseas just like banks and bankers but the scheme that HMR&C doesn't like is the one involving image rights. Great chunks of money are paid to footballers - and others, I suppose - for their image rights and it is normal for players to sign two contracts with their clubs; one for their hire and one for image rights. The image rights are paid into a separate limited company and companies, of course, pay only 28% corporation tax as apposed to the 50% payable by an individual as income tax. If one of the footballers finds himself stuck for cash, he can top up his playing salary by taking out a loan from the company and pay just 2% in tax on a loan which is considered a benefit in kind. In the last two years Wayne Rooney, for example, has taken £1.6 million as loans to help keep his head above water. I can understand now that if his finances were so stretched that he needed an extra £1.6 million to keep the wolf from the door, he really did need to get Manchester United to increase his total pay beyond £200,000 per week.

As is stated so often, the rich only pay taxes voluntarily; the rest of us pay taxes, whatever. We are even asked to pay in advance if HMR&C thinks we may perhaps earn more than they can get their hands on immediately. They are, after all, as money grabbers for the government, very desperate for cash. I hope they manage to extract more from the footballers, who should be paying most of their tax at 50%.

Talking of the very wealthy, what is Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt doing about Murdoch's News International's attempt to take over total control of BSkyB? For more than 3 weeks now he has had the Ofcom report which, quite unequivocally made the recommendation that the proposed merger should be put before the Competition Commission. There would seem to be no reason why that could not have been done immediately the minister received the report. It is suggested that at this time Mr Hunt - who is a well-known appreciator of the wondrous merits of the Murdoch clan - is in discussions with News International - ie Rupert Murdoch - about ways and means of avoiding the referral. If he thinks he can get away with this he is deluded to the point of being crackers. The responsibility on this matter was taken away from Vince Cable because he had stated publicly his opposition to this deal, even before the Ofcom report was received. We now have a Culture Secretary who is known to be very pro-Murdoch and in no way will those opposed to the take-over of BSkyB allow him to do some underhand deal with a man much disliked by many in the UK. Mr Murdoch in charge of a broadcasting empire three times the size of the BBC is not something to be encouraged.

It's another grey old day and in Australia, the England cricket team have lost the third One Day International in a row to Australia. Bad News. England bowling was not up to much with Anderson, Broad and Bresnan missing and some of the batting was a bit dodgy; plus they let Hussey make a lot of runs again.

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