Back in the pod - Cottonmouth Manchester

We recorded the first edition of the new format Cottonmouth Manchester podcast this month. I was chuffed to have been asked by Vaughan Allen, CEO of CityCo, and the pod host, to be one of two regular guests commenting on the news, Manchester culture, business and politics. I was doubly chuffed that alongside me would be Eve Holt, Chorlton councillor and social activist, and someone I've enjoyed working with over recent months.

The first one was pretty good, I think. I listen back and always judge it harshly, and know it could be even better. But now we know what's expected and what we're both like on the mic, then I think it's going to be great fun.

Deutschland 86 - the divided and the deplorable

We’ve just finished ten episodes of the excellent Deutschland 86, the follow up to 2016’s Cold War caper, Deutschland 83. Our hero Martin Rauch starts the series in exile in Angola, teaching German to kids, many of whom are displaced by a proxy war fought by Africans representing manipulative communist and western interests, until he is cornered back into action by his deplorable Aunt Lenora.

There are three great facets to the whole package; the acting, the script and the overall design. Because of the language (it’s in German), and the subtitles, I think I study the faces more and the expressions, the upper body leakage. The writing and story structure expertly manages to weave in real events from 1986; Chernobyl, AIDS, the Berlin nightclub bombing and the US retaliation in the bombing of Libya. But it also catches the style of the era very effectively with Mad Men style graphic titles, a sharp eye for punk fashions, especially in West Berlin, as well as big shoulder pads; all of which is complemented by snappy soundtrack, bookended each episode by the English version of Major Tom by Peter Schilling. Poignantly, just a few days after Mark Hollis died, up popped Talk Talk’s Such a Shame for the pivotal scene of one of the early African adventures.

This tale is darker, I’d say, than three years previous, where it bordered on Carry on Communism at times. The government of the DDR is even crueller and more corrupt than before. There’s certainly no playing it for laughs in how the Stasi treat the Fischer family.

Cynicism abounds and no-one really tells the truth about what they really want and what their purpose is. Everyone’s a bit of a shit, and a bit of dupe at the same time. The ending seems at once both hopeless and desperately sad, the ever presence of a wall that divides families, a people, a country. The hope however is in how their lives play out in Deutschland 89.

February in Berlin - no blog, no cry

February went by in a bit of a blur. So much so I didn't update this blog much. I've been a bit poorly, but nothing serious, I've moved offices at work and started a different role which I'm still getting my head around. I'm also moving into the writing phase on my MA and feel I'm wasting time if it's not about that. But there's something more. As I said on a Twitter thread today, I forever find myself stuck in a perpetual state of repetition. Whatever new outrage emerges about Brexit, Labour, the Catholic Church, Blackburn Rovers, Manchester or Marple, I feel I've said it all, or that all the things I care about seem to be combusting at once. 

Example.

I said in April 2018 that Labour can't get rid of anti-semitism, because Jeremy Corbyn doesn't understand the problem, or see it.

I said in September 2016 that I didn't fear a Labour split, but I actively want it to happen. That the party is wrong, nasty and lost to the far left. Same rules apply.

This month a group of Labour MPs did what I've been hoping they'd do and left the Labour Party. This is what I said in 2017 about a project of the centre, and it pretty much stands. 

And as for Blackburn Rovers - the underbelly has been exposed, which I was worried about in October, only now we can't seem to beat teams as ropey as Rotherham or Reading. More Travis, more Rothwell and a fit Lenihan should stop that rot.

Part of me is tempted to do what David Parkin does and knock out a reflective summary of the week on Friday. 

Anyway, one thing I did do in February was visit Berlin with Joe, Matt and Elliot. It was a great trip, a real living city. It had a vibe of London - but as if it was South Kensington, Westminster, The Mall, Hyde Park and six better versions of Shoreditch. We probably only scratched the surface as you'd expect in a two night break, but we did have the best burgers at a place called Burgermeister in Kruizberg and immersed ourselves in recent political history.

By a remarkable coincidence the new series of Deutschland 86 starts on Friday. Maybe that will get me writing about good telly again.

Be the editors of our own stories - notes for my talk at Alliance MBS today

I started out in journalism as I’ve carried on – unconventional, unorthodox and unprepared. But I was always convinced that what I was doing had a valid purpose.

I was talking to my friend Paul Unger about this the other day; business reporting comes with such a responsibility to the community you are part of. It also gives you such a solid grounding in the basics. Checking, summarising, thinking strategically, listening, understanding and checking again. You have to learn how to cut through the marketing hype of slick PR operations to get the real message. Paul reflected on how Giles Barrie built a powerful brand and platform at Property Week, that in turn spawned a cohort of top drawer media professionals working today. My generation in the media and broadcast press of the 1990s have also gone on to great things too, with the benefit of that firm foundation.

My first editor in the business press was a guy called John McCrone who was pretty tough on me. He had a reputation for having buried a company up to its neck in a computer leasing scandal. He held me to a high standard and marked my work ruthlessly, pushed me to ask the difficult questions and helped me more than I probably ever thanked him for.

You have to develop an empathy for the sector you cover, in turn you risk the inevitable accusation that you have ‘gone native’ and got too close to the people you are supposed to be covering. I’ve definitely done that. But then I just like smart people and can’t help but be impressed by them and their achievements.

In our heyday at Insider and at Television Week in the 1990s we made choices to get closer to our readers by ostracising, humiliating and hounding those who didn’t play by the rules. We were a player in that world, especially when we had a role in building up chancers and crooks as a result of our own previous naiveté.

I used to do this talk to journalism students at UCLAN about why the business press was a good route to a career. One of the attributes you’d pick up was versatility. Writing for different formats, producing events, analysing new sectors. The way things have shaped up since have multiplied that phenomena. But the one constant is knowing what to say, remain trusted by the people you need to be trusted by, and knowing when to say it.

I think of all of this as I browse through the regional media market now – Paul’s brand Place North West and the media site Prolific North are ambitious deep dives into the vertical sectors; they have events as well as streams of content.  The business news factories keep churning it out; the race to cut and paste. I get all of them daily and sometimes can’t distinguish whether I got a story from one or the other. But no media organisation can afford to ever be behind and irrelevant. As long as the print products can generate an advertising income no owner will cut off a revenue stream and take their chances on a digital market that’s been restructured to suit Google and Facebook.

A lack of relevance, a lack of reach and diminution of quality has created a greater drive towards creating your own content channels. Cut out the middleman. It’s created a situation here where our Met Magazine, produced at Manchester Metropolitan University, to a very high standard, is the method by which we get out key messages for local stakeholders.     

Sure, we do plenty of media work, our press office are great at it. This week we had ITV interviewing Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones on campus, and last year David Beckham came to visit. Our experts, despite what Michael Gove said, are still in demand and trusted. We also actively work with other regional players to make our contribution effective.

When I was asked to do a talk at Alliance MBS today on media and messaging, especially the impact of social media, part of me thought it would be a masterclass. A modern PR toolkit for engagement with press and media, star columnists, and influencers. Such is the level of my cynicism now, it would simply include:

• 1.     Have a great back story – childhood trauma
• 2.     Create a business in the tech sector, no need to be specific
• 3.     Have great offices in the city centre
• 4.     Social media presence – lots of hashtags #entrepreneur
• 5.     Offer to speak at conferences
• 6.     Become a mentor to young people - at a university, or an incubator
• 7.     Enter all the awards
• 8.     Get listed in the Insider 42 Under 42, and the BusinessCloud 35 under 35
• 9.     Speak out about charitable causes – homelessness is favourite at the moment, but it was sick white kids
• 10.  Hang out with Andy Burnham

And that, in many ways, highlights the problem.

Two tweets in the last week also showed to painful effect what is going on under the noses of the media that they are able to react to at best, but have actively encouraged at worst. Rachel Thompson from Manchester Digital admirably called out the companies around the city going into administration then opening up around the corner as if nothing happened, leaving creditors high and dry. The other was a tweet calling out a horrendous experience at an interview. But the explosion of interest in the issue here proved it goes way beyond the odd isolated incident. The media, business clubs, events organisers and social media have all been culpable in creating many of the characters responsible; not least promoting the cult of the individual, especially the alpha male, the all powerful corporate dictator, who has taken all the wrong lessons from Steve Jobs.

It comes back to another painful truth about entry into the media profession, as well as resources. So many new emerging journalists want the glory, the status, the attention. I know this. I enjoyed it all too. They want to be a face, a name. Helen Lewis of the New Statesman was commenting recently that graduates want to be columnists, like Owen Jones or Katie Hopkins, neither of whom I rate, by the way. But to have that right, it isn’t good enough to be a voice, loud, strident, opinionated, you have to be able to do the journalism. I’ve been interviewed by Jones and he was dreadful. He was a good speaker at a left wing rally, but he’s no researcher and certainly no kind of journalist.

The other modern new phenomena that I just don't get are so-called 'influencers'. I sat through a presentation recently on how they came about, who they were and how much money they make. I was staggered. We had a descriptor for them back in the day – the corrupt ones. Paying for a positive review is just bullshit frankly. And if you want to see where it ends up – watch the Fyre documentary on Netflix. A party organised by the worst people in the world for people who actually want to be like them. 

I keep hearing that regional journalism is dead. I tell you this, Jess Middleton-Pugh and Jennifer Williams are two of the best we've ever seen. Jess has built a powerful community around property and place making. Jen covers politics and social affairs for the MEN and is the best political journalist working in Britain today. Some are better known, some have better access. But none are as feared and respected like she is by those she covers.

But they’ve both made a choice – they have the same number of hours in the day as every other journalist, they hold truth to power. And yet, let's not forget, there are so many resources that journalists have available now that weren’t around when I started out.

The internet, for a start. Freedom of Information requests. The justice system can be just as impenetrable, but the Companies House website enables you to rely on more than your gut. Open source journalism and data scraping has been the driver behind Bellingcat; a new model of political gossip has created Guido Fawkes, poisonous as it sometimes is. Locally, a few have tried things, but they’re at the margins.

I’m heartened by the CIJ, the Centre for Investigative Journalism at Goldsmiths in London and by a young journalist called Jem Collins who has created Journo Sources. These tools, this spirit for collaboration makes me a little less worried about the future.

And the other incredible resource is access. Social media has flattened the hierarchies, it has created new ones, granted, but it has made the powerful more visible and more fallible. They can’t hide, they don’t hide. More people have that platform and frankly they are easier to track down and enter into dialogue.

My hunch is that we’ve created a vacuum here. A post-truth fake news cavern that is being filled up with a mixture of ice and shit. One melting, to be forgotten, and the other growing and creating a stink that threatens to choke us all.

That painfully needy streak I’ve always had manifested itself in me being flattered and impressed by attention. But how many of you genuinely have a regular dialogue with a journalist? Good journalists talk to people, they get stuff explained to them, tell their stories, share, explain, effectively get the experts to do a lot of the legwork. Same rules apply now. Don't look to the editor, be the editor, come together, share, support, and source. It’s a community endeavour. If we as a community created these monsters like your dodgy company flippers, like the idiot bullying business owner, then we have it within ourselves to do something about this.

I don’t know what the answers are. I can’t claim to know where this will go. But I can say with some certainty that if we don’t pull our fingers out and think very seriously about what we are doing, then we’ll have no-one left to cry to.

Massive Attack’s Mezzanine at Manchester Arena

If you took all the different individual elements of Massive Attack’s live show at Manchester Arena tonight then it’s an enticing cocktail of music, artistic and ideological challenge. It’s why I forked out a ton for a couple of briefs. I didn’t think I’d get Banksy/3D spray painting a mural on the concourse, and I didn’t *really* expect I’d get Mezzanine from soup to nuts, even if it was billed as the 20 year anniversary tour. We didn’t get either, by the way. It wasn’t a shock, or a surprise, or a let down, but I’m wondering why I feel a bit flat after that. And really I shouldn’t.

First off, I’ve now heard and seen Elizabeth Fraser hit those notes at the peak of Teardrop. Second, I fell a little bit in love with Horace Andy, reggae legend, and possibly the only person on stage tonight who looked like he enjoyed himself. Fraser isn’t meant to, not if you sing Teardrop or Black Milk like you mean it. I expected a visual spectacle, there’s always been that element to Massive Attack’s whole pitch.

I’ve duly noted that they have worked with Adam Curtis before. I can sit through 3 hours of his mesmerising Hypernormalisation documentary and feel a bit numb. His film Bitter Lake had a similar effect, but as the backdrop to a couple of hours of spliced together video, knowing cynicism and Jenny Holzer stylised bursts of words the unsubtle attempts at messaging just left me infantilised, as did my teenage son, who assured me he won’t be donning a tinfoil hat in his student flat tonight.

I don’t love Massive Attack for their attitude or their charm, it’s possible even to forgive a lack of an encore, zero attempt to connect with the audience or the rigid set list. Possible even to pass over the £100 we paid (did I mention that?), because at times they were spectacular. That sound comes from here. Those bold cover versions of Velvet Underground, Cure and Ultravox, and that magical atmospheric grit they have crafted to painful precision.

The call of the mountains

Our rocky place

I'd love to claim that my bond with the hills, dales and mountains of England is in my blood. That I could climb rock faces and that I learnt of daring tales of Himalayan expeditions on my mother's knee. And that Chris Bonnington, Don Whillans and Ian Clough were as familiar names around our lives as George Best, Jimmy Armfield and Bobby Charlton. I'd like to be able to say that I was raised on Kendal Mint Cake, born with a Karrimor rucksack on my back and a pair of stout walking boots to guide those few tentative steps.

All of that is true, by the way. Before she had me at the age of 22 my mum was a climber, hitching to Scotland, proper hardcore, hanging with Whillans and that crowd, dossing down in a tenement in the Gorbals before heading out to Glencoe in the morning. Her dearest friends were Ian and Nikki Clough, absolute legends of the climbing world. We now wear the brand of Patagonia on our packs and coats, that logo with the distinctive peaks of Cordillera Del Paine in bleakest southern Chile. Their expedition conquered the central tower of Paine in 1963. To get there they stowed away on container ships and hitched a ride on a military aircraft. Nikki climbed the Matterhorn, the first woman to do so. Ian died on Annapurna in Nepal in 1970. Like I said, legends.

The very first Freshwalks

I probably managed more outdoor yomps than most kids, but I never tried to climb anything more challenging than a tree.  Weekends were spent scrambling around Littledale and Baines Crag, which we called The Rocky Place (top). I went Youth Hostelling with my primary school, hiking with the Scouts and even went up Borrowdale with the serious walkers in my secondary school.

And yet serious walking and hiking never quite fully formed in me. Music, football and friends took hold. True, for my 21st birthday me and the mother got our boots on and conquered Dow Crag, which is laughable when you think of what she was capable of and could have done. I did a bit of exploring when I lived in Australia and climbed Uluru, which I probably shouldn't have done. But I then went for years without doing something that clearly made me very happy whenever I did it. It always gave me a sense of achievement and helped me refocus. I realise now what I was missing all that time.

Over the last ten years, as a family, we've strapped on our boots and hit the hills. We've bagged the best that the Lake District has to offer, even getting lost attempting Haystacks, Wainwright's favourite, only to discover we were in fact on the top of Grey Knotts. But the kids have had enough of that lark, except for the middle son who has taken it to extremes.

It's the Peaks that now draw me closer. And other undiscovered gems around the North West, like Delamere and the coastal walks. That step into nature, away from everything that my city and suburban life isn't. A retreat from the present and yet a step into my past. Yes, I think I've got back in touch with who I should have been. I like the community of Freshwalks, a responsible adult guiding our route and actually understanding maps. I love that it has done all of this for me. It has pushed us to be better, to go further and not only to explore the outdoors and appreciate the natural beauty of the North of England, but to smell it, touch it and respect the challenge it can give us.

The Rodwell incident - Unidentified Footballing Object

Tony Mowbray congratulates Man of the Match, Jack Rodwell

Close watchers of the Sunderland Netflix documentary would have struggled to spot Jack Rodwell in the first few episodes. Not only was the ex-England international not playing, he didn’t appear to be training, or appear in person at all. By the time Chris Coleman arrived, continuing to marshall a losing team, and looking for excuses; Rodwell was cast as pantomime villain.

The facts, we were led to believe, were that he was refusing to play and refusing to leave. He was everything that was wrong with football. Prepared to sacrifice his career for the short term riches that the lottery winning loot of a Premier League salary has offered up. There might be a truth in that, and if I was a Sunderland supporter, as many good friends are, I wouldn’t be happy that a player of his stature was unused while they dropped two divisions.

A far more visible presence on Netflix was the hapless Sunderland chief executive Martin Bain, for whom any sympathy was tempered by the fact that, like David Brent, he welcomed the cameras into his “behind the scenes” world. I’m going to cast an unpopular opinion in here; I’m as uncomfortable with the new exaltation of the senior management team at Rovers, and I winced at Tony Mowbray appearing without irony on a team picture of the “backroom team” tucked in behind Steve Waggott, the Bain of my club.

To be fair, I respect these guys have a vital job to do. And I’ll be honest, when Rodwell signed for Blackburn Rovers I wasn’t doing cartwheels at the prospect, given the collective failure of previous regimes. We’ve been had over by these types of footballer before. One of them now plies his trade on the Match of the Day sofa, ruling his moralistic eye over the footballing world, set up for life with the unearned income from a club in crisis. Obviously I don’t mean Alan Shearer.

In the last month we’ve seen the difference between Danny Murphy and Jack Rodwell. Rodwell has been towering in his appearances for us, and especially so against a dreadful Ipswich side yesterday. I’d suggest the motivation and management of a player of his obvious natural ability has been instrumental to his transformation. I have no idea how much he is paid, or what bonus structure he is on. I believe he’s on a year long contract. We get a glimpse of Mowbray’s management style when he speaks to the press and how he behaves on the sidelines. But what we see in Rodwell’s performances in central defence is of a manager who has found a purpose for a player who has physically changed since he made his mark for Everton as a creative midfielder.

Not only that, Rodwell looks hungry and determined. I love a centre half who is comfortable on the ball. Charlie Mulgrew has that, Rodwell too, and it’s a part of Darragh Lenihan’s game that is improving as he plays alongside either of these two.

For the first time this season yesterday, I sat through a match never in any doubt that Rovers would win comfortably. Paul Lambert’s Ipswich were a ragbag of journeymen artisans and broken men. Much like Paul Lambert’s Blackburn Rovers, to be fair. Every single Rovers player won his personal battles around the pitch, the one possible exception being James Collins putting a shift in at the back and matching Danny Graham in his weekly game of grapple. It should have been 5 or 6, frankly.

I over-confidently predicted that we’d finish 8th at the beginning of the season. To do that would involve getting beat a few times and suffering bad runs as well as enjoying good ones. That’s happened and will continue to do so. What is more, when we win it will be because good players like Rodwell, like Bradley Dack, like Lewis Travis, put in great performances, inevitably attracting the attention of bigger clubs. It’s a good position to be in, maybe not dramatic enough for a Netflix series, but it’ll do me.

Millwall Away

When Tony Mowbray said that Blackburn Rovers’ 2-0 win at Millwall was a terrible game of football, he was obviously right. But it reinforced to me once again how these days are about so much more than the 90 minutes that we forked out decent money to see.

Even the heading for this – Millwall Away – conjures up an adventure, a sense of danger that any football fan will relate to. We were as far away from any of that as we ate artisan snacks in Borough Market before the game, sharing stories with friends old and new in the Market Porter.

Yes, I was delighted to see Rovers win, I always am. But it reminded me of many of the games last season where I felt we were a better footballing side, but had that slight doubt we might not be physically strong enough and could come away empty handed (Walsall, Northampton, Oldham). 

Sure, Rovers contributed to the dire game; lots of mistakes, hoofing up to Bradley Dack (who was off the pace) and Joe Nuttall (who needs match practice), no shots on target until the bitter end and some pointless passing around. But I always take something from a game and for me it was the solid defensive pair of Darragh Lenihan and Jack Rodwell, and once again the role of Lewis Travis in picking out some terrific forward passes and properly mixing it when required.

What will live with me longer in the memory though was the experience of visiting The Den. I went to their old ground a couple of times, even meeting Jack Walker outside on the second occasion and getting a quote from him for the Lancashire Evening Post. I didn’t meet anyone like that this time but Matt Smith (Doctor Who) was stood just behind us. Such is the mythology around Millwall that I did vaguely consider asking him for a lift out of there if he had his blue phone box with him. I’m not going to lie, it is intimidating, it is grim. Everything about getting to the stadium; the heavy police presence, the cages guiding the walkway to the stadium, the fact visiting fans are placed only in the upper tier all create the feeling of being in a state of siege. That in turn encourages a certain type of swaggering dickhead among visitors and ours were no different. We also saw a gang of Dutch lads at London Bridge earlier in the afternoon, and I spoke to another group of PSV Eindhoven fans on the train from South Bermondsey. I doubt there’d be the same attraction for this kind of football tourist to go to Brentford or Charlton.

That makes it another new ground I’ve watched football on, the 158th. I’m on 84 clubs out of the current 92 clubs (the Punk 92), and I’m up to 80 of the current 92 grounds.

New Statesman - an appreciation

From an early age I've always had a magazine that I have consumed avidly and which pretty much defined my world.

At various times that dubious and fragile honour has fallen to the NME (mid-80s), New Society, Marxism Today, Arena, The Face, When Saturday Comes, Loaded, Monocle and The Word. In recent years I've drifted a bit, as I think magazines have.

In all of that time, I've dipped in and out of reading the New Statesman - particularly when it absorbed New Society in 1988, before erasing trace of it 8 years later. It sort of baked in my politics around the 1987 General Election, but I think it probably lost its edge when Labour were in power. At that time, I found The Spectator the better of the political weeklies.

Yet now I look forward to my regular Friday treat of the New Statesman. It’s not only really helpful for work, providing the best insights into British politics, but it’s also a great commentary on a really rich cultural hinterland.

The present editor Jason Cowley has been in the job for a decade. When he was announced I remember a rather snooty backlash against his appointment, given he was a bit of an outsider from the political commentariat and had been editing Observer Sport Monthly, before a relatively short stint at literary journal Granta. Yet it was pretty clear that he's proved those doubters wrong and taken the title in a really bold direction.

In the 2018 end of year edition, he talked about what his original plan was:

"Take the New Statesman upmarket; make it more politically sceptical and unpredictable; free it from the clutches of the Labour Party; publish longer and better-written pieces; burnish its literary pages; create a dynamic website; and discover and nurture a new generation of political writers."

What I think I appreciate more than anything is the careful blend of freshness and intellectual discomfort that it brings.

Of course it's a bit London-centric, all of our media is. I've spent a lifetime trying to do something about that, and I wish they'd make more of an effort. Having a conference on the Northern Powerhouse in Leeds in February is good. More, please.

But I don't think I've read a better series this year than Matthew Engel's tour of Europe. It proved hugely useful to us before our trip to Estonia and I really liked his last essay on train travel.

Kate Mossman, ex-The Word,  is a wonderfully deft culture writer and a perfect accompaniment as a columnist to Tracy Thorn. Having John Gray doing expansive moral philosophy pieces is a real coup. I always enjoy Anna Leszkiewicz's media columns, but her piece on the future of television was the best synthesis of the issues for the business, showing a real grasp of what lies behind the rise of Netflix and the challenge to the conventional TV channel model. I also think the political commentators Stephen Bush, George Eaton and Helen Lewis, all do a particularly good job of  providing steady, solid political commentary on the chaos of our failing system.

It's not just because I agree with everything. I'm at odds with Paul Mason on many things, but he does reserve his best strategic analysis pieces for this outlet than any other he writes for. I also welcome Grace Blakeley joining as an economics writer, because she reflects a particular thread of UK leftist thought that is at the  heart of the debate that has been opened up by Mason and Yanis Varoufakis.

The great skill of an editor is to curate a publishing space that can welcome new voices and nice surprises. There's a fairly high bar here, where the age ranges of the contributors give you a sense of a world observed from a wide perspective. I like seeing Howard Jacobson popping up as a reviewer and guest diarist alongside towering figures like Michael Heseltine, Gina Miller and Mike Brearley.

As well as the writing I enjoy the political podcasts with Helen and Stephen, while Jonn Elledge's CityMetric podcast has a marvellous geeky streak that I just adore. Whatever it is they do, you pretty much know there's a high standard of insight and commentary you come to expect. I even think they make a decent job of the advertorial supplements, which newspapers manage to make unreadable, whereas the NS ones are usually very useful.

When I used to lecture at UCLAN on the magazine journalism course, I used to emphasise the importance of knowing the reader, creating a clear personality of what the title is about and how it improves their life. As the editor of a business magazine group for twelve years I aspired to make our titles this relevant and with that single minded commitment to high quality. When you have writers, designers, sales staff and a publisher who share that vision, then you are on to a winner.

It's been a challenge for magazines to transition to digital and to keep on innovating with events and podcasts and other brand extensions, but I think they have everything at their disposal to do so.

Congratulations on 10 years Jason Cowley, you’ve done a top job.

Rovers put faith in youth - but there's no plan

If we have a lesson to learn from recent performances, then it must be to trust the youth policy. New blood into the squad has yielded some excellent results. No, not the Rovers team at Sheffield United but the injection of young Matt and our Louis into the BRFCS podcast.

I'll not linger much on the game that followed, but we got what we deserved. It's no good matching the best teams for 70 minutes, 80 or even 90 as we did at Leeds. The team has to get much, much better at game management. The line up against the Blades was ambitious. I'm all for bringing in Rothwell and Travis as I rate them both very highly. But they seemed to be unable to provide a killer final ball, understandably as the the whole game plan this season has been to serve two players who weren't on the pitch, Dack and Graham. It pains me to watch Palmer and Brereton, every sinew in my body is willing them to make a liar of me and to perform like match-winning footballers. One reminds me of Grabbi, the other of various loanees who have ghosted in and out to make little impact. The other source of goals has been Mulgrew at free kicks and penalities, which may explain some shameful diving by Palmer and Rothwell.

So, please enjoy the podcast, it's the most enjoyable aspect of supporting Rovers at the moment. I'm not worried about the team yet, but I probably should be.

Policing the boundaries of a community

When I pitched up in Manchester in 2000 to edit North West Business Insider, a well-established regional business magazine, it took a while for the scale of the responsibility to sink in. I barely had a contract, let alone an instruction manual. And certainly no-one took me into a back room and handed me the keys to the secret files.

On the one hand, the sales team had one set of expectations - come up with good ideas that they could sell advertising and sponsorship around. But the far harder responsibility was to make the publication and the brand relevant in the long term. The previous editors all bequeathed me a mixed set of expectations: one was to be accessible, commercial and of good quality; another was to be spiky and brave; and the third was to have a witty, yet powerful voice. All of them had a sense of what would attract readers, which is what the advertisers needed to be sure we had. I was also fairly wedded to strong magazine aesthetics and thought the design was dated and needed refreshing in time.

But this piece isn't a memoir, or a reflection on the nuances of magazine editorship. It is, however, something that's been burning inside me for a while. One of the mantles I was handed was a deeper moral duty, part of a wider purpose as a community clarion to take very seriously what it meant to transact good business in the regions of England. It came with a responsibility to expose crooks and chancers. The magazine was a sustained success because it was part of a community. In so doing we were happy to celebrate the successes of businesses and entrepreneurs who were doing well, who were working hard in pursuit of a common good, but also we were all trying to explain the new rules of an ever-changing world. But that community was also sustained by resolute policing of the boundaries. 

Grimly, sadly, sometimes we'd get taken for a ride. Before I arrived, we had featured a character in the list of the 42 under 42, an annual roll call of new emerging talent. He called himself Paul Raymond Versace, yes, after the fashion label. He popped up as a charitable philanthropist and posed for a photograph with the great and the good of Manchester's business community. His inclusion in the Sunday Times Rich List, and disgracefully, our own, triggered a number of incredulous phone calls from people with an altogether different view of this character. He was using his media and charity connections for personal advantage, opening doors and building credibility. With the help of good sources, and in a fairly short space of time, we had enough to piece together a damning story. Some of the national press waded in with far less subtlety, and he was placed right out of circulation.

Other tip offs followed and we started to get a reputation. I'll be honest, our rival publication, EN magazine, also got stuck in to a few targets and upped their game. Simon Donohue from the Manchester Evening News did a blistering series of articles exposing Reuben Singh. I got a bee in my bonnet about the fact that chancers were turning up to meetings at banks with a clippings file of positive media stories, sometimes with the name of my magazine included. I became obsessed, even chasing down two stories when I was on holiday in Marbella with my family. I formed an alliance with Sue Craven from Armstrong Craven, who remains a good friend to this day. She would help me understand detailed research reports, on labyrinth corporate structures, which helped me to get my head around credit reports and see what the data was saying. One was on a target called The Accident Group, which I long suspected was a house of cards. It turned out to be far worse than that.

A lot of this became self-sustaining, lawyers, corporate finance advisors and property agents would use their intelligence and their networks and tip me off about the latest shyster doing the rounds. 

There were gangmasters, VAT scammers, celeb chasers, phoney football agents, jolly chaps telling stories in the Stag's Head and asking the lads to chuck in a cheeky 50k for a deal that wouldn't happen. You literally couldn't invent a fictional character like Paul "The Plumber" Davidson, but he proved to be the gift that kept on giving. Our hounding of him won us many friends.

In all of these cases, the front of the brain would compute one set of responses, the back of the brain was screaming a different set of messages. Sometimes I'd spend far too long looking for evidence on someone I wasn't sure about. Often it wasn't the money, but the tales of sex, or drugs. I had good lawyers and solid media law training so I knew when to stop, when to draw the line, it was beyond me to expose Manchester's Harvey Weinstein, were we to have found one. In those instances where you know something isn't right, you just had to exercise the one remaining option left, ignore them. Let someone else do their propaganda for them.

Time and again I'd see the same patterns emerge. Grand gestures around charitable giving, associating with genuinely successful and credible people, the desperate seeking of honours and the ostentatious wearing of the badge of corporate social responsibility, which my late great friend Walter Menzies called "the icing on the shit".

That was a different time, but it's not a different place. The resources and reach of the media have been transformed in recent years. I lost my capacity to do anything meaningful over time and created a satirical outlet instead. 

So where are we now?

I've never known a time when businesses in Manchester and the North West have needed someone, something, to police the boundaries more than now. 

I'm firmly on the record for welcoming a Mayor of Greater Manchester. But as much as such an office holds power and leverage, so too it needs protection from those that see it as a quick route to credibility, power and glory. I believe in it too much to see its credibility and moral authority undermined. Same goes for business organisations who have incredible convening power. I have a few opportunities working at a university to promote good work, networks and sound causes. But I'm well out of the media game these days. And I'm not even sure the business press, online and print, is up to it.

But just as campaigns and political movements have been transformed by technology, so too can scrutiny and community protection. I don't know how, I don't know who, but I'm very open to ideas.

The Manchester City Way - a culture of commitment?

Damian Hughes came to speak at Manchester Metropolitan University recently and he was every bit as impressive as I've come to expect.

I've worked with him a few times, delivering client events for TSK and I've seen him speak here before. This was remarkable. His latest book focuses on one of the most successful sports teams of my lifetime, FC Barcelona.

At the heart of this success is "culture". As Damian said to the i newspaper: "As someone who has worked with a variety of elite sports teams and blue chip companies, I always seek to impress upon management the importance of culture. The results bear this out. Research suggests that culture can have as much as 22 per cent impact on performance. Pep Guardiola’s current boss, Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano, emphasised this point – 'culture is a crucial ingredient in all organisations' and is especially crucial at football clubs."

Guardiola's footballing style, his methods and his philosophy were formed when he was a player in Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona team, lifting the European Cup in 1992 at Wembley, a game I was fortunate to have been at.

As Damian says in the book: "Cruyff had his very own interpretation of what doing things the ‘Barcelona Way’ actually meant. It was centred around three trademark behaviours: humility, hard work and putting the team above your self-interest."

I'm going to do Damian a grave injustice in attempting to summarise a whole book stuffed full of stories, evidence and research, but he calls what was created at Barcelona an example of a commitment culture.

I've said before that Barcelona’s ‘more than a club’ irritates me, a little bit like the mysticism of the All Blacks, of which their Haka is a part. Both create the aura of semi-religious purity that so frequently they fail to live up to. But life would be duller without them, granted.

You start to think what other possible cultures any other winning team could adopt. Damian's book highlights five which apply in business and in sport, and from memory, in brackets, are where you might find examples of each one.

The Superstar Culture – Companies would bring in the best talent on the biggest salaries and give the stars the best resources (Real Madrid)

The Autocratic Culture – The will of one person in charge (Man United under Sir Alex Ferguson)

The Bureaucratic Culture – Where middle managers rule (the Moneyball approach, Liverpool under Brendan Rodgers and late period Arsenal under Wenger)

The Engineering Culture – Based on problem solving (Klopp at Dortmund, and now at Liverpool, maybe?)

The Commitment Culture – Getting employees to really buy in to what an organisation is trying to achieve.

I've become curious about what Guardiola is attempting to create here in Manchester, with City. The football they play is magical, based on movement and possession. They've definitely created a winning culture where excellence and preparation have produced outstanding results, but, let's not be coy about it, amidst a setting where money is no object.

I had all of this in mind when I went to the Etihad last night to watch City come from behind to beat Hoffenheim and top their Champions League group. The stand-out player was Leroy Sane, who was left out of Germany's World Cup squad. Also impressive was Phil Foden, who has emerged through the Academy and the great youth set-up at Reddish Vulcans Junior Football Club. Both examples of hard working, humble players who do it for the team.

Damian makes the argument that the foundation of the team at City has obvious parallels with what Pep did at Barcelona – "he quickly dispensed with Joe Hart and Samir Nasri and allowed an ageing Yaya Touré to drift to the fringes of the first team, whilst allowing the humble Kevin De Bruyne, quick-witted David Silva and the selfless Fernandinho to emerge as key figures within the dressing room."

On the back of reading Damian's book I lapped up the Amazon Prime series, All or Nothing. In different ways it told me everything and nothing. For all the claims that it is an access-all-areas and unexpurgated insight behind the scenes it is actually City's tightly controlled commercial exposition of what they want the rest of us to think of them.  As Simon Hattenstone said in his review in the Guardian: "For in the end, this is nothing but a gloriously glossy commercial for Manchester City – a great big blowy for the club from run-down Kippax Street determined to become the world’s leading football brand." And that, in a way, tells you more about humility and culture. So I think there's some real hard traces of all of the above cultures at work in the Manchester City Way.

Much as City have built a team and created stars of real quality, forged around a commitment culture, they have used engineering and bureaucracy to source a tier of superstar. And it was Yaya Toure who rather brutally laid the charge that Pep is an autocrat in the way he enforces his FIFO culture.

To come back full circle to Damian's point about culture, it is always an aspiration. Performances dip, things go wrong. It is a touchstone, a guide, defined as much by what is included as by what is left out. For the moment, it's for football fans to savour the potential of City coming up against Barcelona in the final in Madrid in June 2019.

Buy the book here. Highly recommended.

This day will forever be Pankhurst Day

Our Emmeline, photo by Sue Anders

This Friday, 14 December 2018, a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst will be unveiled in her home city of Manchester, exactly 100 years to the day after the first women cast votes in a UK General Election. 

Amidst a deeply turbulent and depressing period of history, it's sometimes worth celebrating the achievements.

The statue in St Peter's Square has been designed by sculptor Hazel Reeves and will be the highlight of a campaign to celebrate the significant contribution of women to the city and will take place on the day that exactly 100 years ago the first women voted in UK General Election for the first time.

Credit where it is due to Councillor Andrew Simcock who in May 2014 kicked off the Womanchester Statue Campaign to commission a new statue for Manchester to recognise the significant contribution of women to the city’s history. The campaign was prompted by the fact that of Manchester’s 17 statues at the time, only one represented a woman, a monument to Queen Victoria that was erected over 100 years ago, which is situated in Piccadilly Gardens.

Andrew Simcock and Hazel Reeves 

From a long list of 20 potential figures, through a series of public events, a shortlist of six finalists was reached, with Emmeline Pankhurst emerging as the people's favourite.

Once 'Our Emmeline' was chosen, and the artist selected in a public competition, the build up has been fantastic with schools, with parades to the unveiling in St Peter's Square. It is a day that everyone is invited to participate in that will embrace and bring together all those who have supported the Our Emmeline project. To reflect the coming together of people, two symbolic meeting points have been selected; the Pankhurst Centre, the former home of Emmeline Pankhurst and the birthplace of the suffragette movement; and People’s History Museum, the national museum of democracy. Those taking part are invited to meet at locations near these points, or along the route, which we will be doing from Manchester Metropolitan University at All Saints Square, before converging at St Peter’s Square to greet Our Emmeline.

Our Lancaster Story: City, hub & heartland.

Wow. What an inspiring and gorgeous film by my old pal Daniel Kennedy of Paper Films. So many of these place-punting pieces of propaganda get it wrong, but I think he's really pulled in the very best of Lancaster here. Something for everyone.

Our new Met Mag is out now - it's a cracker

I've said before, there's something special about a freshly printed magazine arriving in the office ready to hit the streets. That was the sense right through the comms team at work as the the sixth issue of Met Magazine, the magazine of Manchester Metropolitan University was published. This edition has been an incredible team effort and a real celebration of our greatest assets and achievers – our students.

I was pleased to contribute to the a feature about Students’ Union Presidents past and present, interviewing Paul Scriven, a LibDem peer and Councillor in Sheffield who was President in the early 1990s. It's quite a thing to hold a post like that and as Paul explained to me it shaped his future career in so many ways. I found him to be an absolutely fascinating character, both in the personal struggles he's fought, but his sheer tenacity and decency. There were a few stories that didn't make the cut which I'll use elsewhere.

When I was editor of Insider I used to pick the best interview assignments for myself, but then realised certain people would respond better to a particular writer. So, now I get the politicians and someone else gets the rock stars. Alongside my own modest contribution is one I'm going to confess to a bit of envy that it wasn't me that got to do it. We also cover two diverse and hugely interesting feature interviews. The first is with Guy Garvey, songwriter and lead singer of multi-award winning band Elbow and now a visiting professor at Manchester Metropolitan. He talks about his creative influences and his love of Manchester and its students.

The other big interview is with Nicola Dandridge, Chief Executive of the recently-formed Office for Students, an important regulator for the higher education sector.

As part of our work with MPs, I was also keen to commission a piece from Afzal Khan MP for Gorton and one of the many Manchester Met graduates now sitting in the House of Commons. It is important that people know what we are doing and the impact we have. Met Magazine is a powerful platform to profile our stories and I hope colleagues and friends will share the content and help us to show the way that we change lives for the better, and how we shape our world.

Visitors to campus can pick up the latest edition at reception areas, or if you prefer to read an electronic copy, you can find our new-look digital version. This is a new web version which includes videos and a fantastic podcast featuring an interview with Guy Garvey.

But message me through this site if you want the joyful experience of a beautiful and classy copy of the proper print version.

John Niven and Stuart Maconie in Manchester

Back in October, I took the eldest son to see the writers John Niven and Stuart Maconie in conversation. It was a brilliant evening, full of great stories about the music business, the film industry and the dire state of the world.

I took home a copy of Niven's latest novel, Kill 'em All, the follow up to one of my favourites, Kill Your Friends, the rip roaring tale of 1997 Britpop excess, which I bought for Joe as part of his essential reading list for studying Music Business at University. This one skips twenty years and to cut to the chase, the central character, the appalling Steven Stelfox, has become Simon Cowell and has a plan for total domination and riches based on dealing with the mess created by Lucius de Prey, a character no-one is even pretending isn't Michael Jackson.

OK, I enjoyed it. I had to look over my shoulder to check no-one was watching me laugh at some of the grotesque passages. I loved how it weaves Donald Trump into the story and how Stelfox's wicked inner voice provides a running commentary.

I've done two previous reviews of John Niven's more recent outings, Straight White Male and No Good Deed, and have been impressed how he's progressed as a writer - observant, dark, but not without sensitivity. Seeing him up close backed up the point Stuart Maconie made - how can this affable, kind, funny man I have before me, who I know well, create a dastardly character with such an authentic and believable inner narrative as Stelfox?

But with a POTUS like this, surely all bets are off. There's a nod too in the direction of the MeToo movement, highlighting the turning tide that so surely opened up for Niven to plot Stelfox's return. It must have just seemed too good a chance to miss. It's like a band cashing in on a greatest hits tour before getting back to the studio and banging out another classic.

Finally, I should really mention the event. Back in his NME days I was a fan of Stuart Maconie's humour, writing, observations. I don't listen to him enough on the wireless, but whenever I do I smile and probably learn something new. I've seen authors interviewed by people who have no idea about the context, or many who haven't even read the book. This was a real treat and I couldn't think of anyone better to do it.

Welcome to the future of work

We did a terrific event earlier this year with Gran Thornton. Here's a wee video.

Marple at the thin end of a GM wedge

There's a lot I love about living in Marple. It's friendly, convenient, relatively safe, there's a lot of people very committed to making the community better.

Maybe it's a positive sign that there has been an outpouring of outrage that an old school building will be demolished to make way for apartments.

Aesthetics are important, especially as they represent a link to the past. People care about the physical environment and good quality architecture. Hopefully it guides better decision making about what is acceptable in the future.

Some people at Manchester Metropolitan University who I help out have been doing some very serious work about how a place redefines itself. There's a glimpse of the work of Professor Cathy Parker and Steve Millington and their work here, Five Ways to Save Britain's High Streets. It's not particular to this country though, all over the world, there is a debate raging which is about one thing, shops, but should actually be about something else entirely, land and how we use it.

This issue has become the thin end of a very large wedge; that is, what we do in Marple is but a part of a bigger picture in Greater Manchester.

Flawed though the application for this building is - another retail unit??? - it does meet the requirement for 'brownfield first' that concentrates the minds of the councillors on the planning committee and the planning department, trying to follow complex rules.

Two things can and should clarify those rules, one here in Marple, the other at a GM level, which in turn is heavily influenced by central government.

First, I'm not a town planner, but to me it's fairly obvious that like many areas Marple suffers from poor traffic flows, a struggling central core and a sense of purpose. I like how Marple's Neighbourhood Plan has tried to take a long view on these issues, though the questionnaire rather leads the witness on some issues. But at least it looks up and onwards at the trends that shape our world: an ageing population, a lack of property alternatives for retirees to downsize to, a different kind of demographic and what they might require from shared civic spaces.

Change takes time, and much as it seems unrelated, a high priority should be a high frequency train service to Manchester and a line to Stockport, even if it looped through Guide Bridge and Denton. More than anything else that could ameliorate many of the other issues of overcrowding and air quality.

The second is the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework, which I'm frustrated to see is stuck in the weeds. It needs all ten council leaders and the Mayor to support it. Bolton is on a bit of a knife edge, but the others are stacking up behind it and Andy Burnham looks like he's getting the rewrite he wanted. But Stockport's Labour leader Alex Ganotis has said he won't support the plan if a majority on the Council don't. Given it is under tentative minority Labour control, there's a real chance that it will eventually be sunk in this very area. In order for it to get through in Stockport would require a dialling down of the plans to build extensively in High Lane and Woodford, despite the opening of the new Airport road. In turn that may make it hard to swallow for leaders in other boroughs trying to sell it locally.

Even if it did, I still can’t see it getting support from a majority of members in Stockport. There is too much political advantage to be gained by Liberal Democrats and the very strong NIMBY voice will sway the Tory councillors at the southern fringes. Some concessions on numbers would be basic common sense, especially as the assumptions keep shifting. But all of this work, all of this vision, all of this serious attempt to address land needs of a future economy will be scuppered right here in SK6.

The irony of course is that without rules, without a plan, without a strategy for what an area requires, there will be a planning free-for-all. And when that's the case, there'll be even more isolated and opportunistic developments like this one.

Another brush with crappy crime

Someone crashed their car into mine at Rose Hill Station on Wednesday or Thursday last week. I was parked on the top row, facing outwards and had foolishly left it overnight when I'd been in London on a late one.

I put a couple of posters up on Friday morning in the hope that someone might come forward and realise what they'd done. I hoped someone in a silver car may have checked their car for blue paint scratches from mine. Hopefully we would then swap insurance details and put it down to one of those things.

It's another of life's annoyances on top of our frustration with the ongoing failure to prosecute far more serious local thugs. I enquired to the police and they said I have to attend Cheadle Heath police station with my documents and report the accident. Presumably this is a way of reducing the number of reported crimes, by making it inconvenient to report and to be given the impression by the police that they really haven't the time or the inclination to do anything. My expectations are very low.

Will I even make an insurance claim? Probably not.

Do you know what's really saddened me about this? By Monday my little posters had been taken down, after just one day, and the local Marple Community Forum refuses to put a friendly request for witnesses on their page. I look around at my lovely fellow commuters each morning and am left wondering which dirtbag did this. I don't want to feel like this about people I get the train with. But someone with a silver car knows and it will be on your conscience.

If the CCTV yields anything, then I unleash hell.

Digest and digress, blog from Wonkfest 2018

Here’s the thing. There are far, far more talks and panels (and therefore insights and wisdom) at an event like Wonkfest18 that you DON’T see, than you do. It’s inevitable. You literally can’t be in two, three or even four places at once.

So picking your way carefully through the schedule is part of the skill before you even go. But in there lurks hidden dangers; you miss those serendipitous moments of revelation.

Or as the modern parlance has it, fear of missing out, or #fomo.

My job is external relations. I look for opportunities for our university to connect to industry, other civic institutions, the public sector, our democracy. To make us relevant.

I will also confess to being profoundly irritated by the culture war narrative around “free speech on campus” and the (imagined) prevalence of the censorious “no platform” in our universities. I think it is overstated, and has become a useful “straw man” to bash the sector. 

Food for wonks
So, I digress, but on day two of Wonkfest, I digested quite a lot. There was a sparkling “in conversation” with Two VCs (Linda Drew of our hosts, Ravensbourne University London, and Mary Stuart of the University of Lincoln). I enjoyed the morning motivational lift from Michael Barber. I was even appreciative of a sparky lesson in how badly prepared we all are for Brexit from Dirk van Damme of the OECD.

All good. In fact, really good. But I sat on the edge of my seat in a session, What Should HE Do For Local Communities? Plenty of concrete examples from Clive Winters from Coventry University and Selena Bolingbroke from Goldsmiths, University of London about the importance of trust building and aligning priorities with external partners (that woefully doesn’t do them justice, by the way). But it was everything you come to a conference for: ideas, and confirmation that what you’re doing is right; or a challenge to yourself if it’s spectacularly wrong.

But I didn’t leave early; partly because I’ve been on panels where those on stage outnumber the audience, and it’s a horrible feeling seeing people peel away to be somewhere else when you’re baring your soul. But the main reason was the debate was really getting going by 2.25pm, when I should, by rights, have been shuffling in to the main stage to see Mark Leach grill Sam Gyimah. But I was also really gripped. In a very strong two-day programme it was the most useful and practical discussion I attended.

So, I didn’t get in to hear the minister speak. I could have pressed my nose against the crack in the door and heard him, but I didn’t. Instead, I retreated to the soft furnishings of the Guardian Stage and deleted some email, followed the sparring downstairs via the wonders of social media, and after a few minutes or so was interrupted by a panel of students appearing in front of me to discuss “the snowflake generation”. Remember what I said before? Irritated and grumpy about the culture war rumblings? Yep.

Cut & thrust
It was an illuminating and challenging debate, especially with the questions and answers that followed. I came away with some far deeper reflections on the language we use, the expectations of the students we serve and its coupling to a growing mental health crisis. But also the sometimes woeful institutional response to issues when they arise. It’s all important, of course, because of the wider political context being tiptoed around downstairs as they spoke.

My vice chancellor didn’t know that initially, because I gave him my hot-take on the minister’s comments first thing the next morning, which he seemed happy with. I got that from listening to it on the Wonkhe podcast and scrolling through the social media responses.

But there you go, my first Wonkfest. I really enjoyed it.  I got a lot from it. I felt emboldened and determined. We’ve got some tough times ahead, but there are brilliant people working at all levels of HE prepared to share ideas and work very hard to fulfil a very important cultural and economic mission. To do it well we have to be alive to everything shaping that. And that includes listening to testimonies in places we wouldn’t normally go, however it was that we got there.

Crosspost from WonkHE.