A long few weeks. How come this fear? How come everything that once seemed certain seems now just one mis-step away from the clown hole? Everything shaken up…the endless churn of capital, people, social media content…how long before I get swept up in all of this?
In a Stockport hospital an asylum seeker is read his rights by attending police officers as his hunger strike protest against living conditions continues. That the place he was temporarily accommodated in is a hotel booked out by government contractor Serco is a political potato in such need of blowing on that just as frontline charities implore them not to – for fear of attacks such as the arson strike on a migrant centre in Dover at the
start of November – Tory MP’s still queue to shame those businesses who take in the destitute. Inedible food, scabies…reports from inside centres in Greater Manchester don’t read like postcards from Pontins; the dissonance between the two schools of thought, when it comes to the migrant debate, is so jarring as to be terrifying.
“What’s under-reported is that staff have threatened inmates that complaining would affect their cases,” Rhetta Moran tells me when we meet at a rush hour city centre pub. Serco deny this. It’s from a Mount Street office that Rhetta’s associates at RAPAR intercede on behalf of those caught up in the asylum nightmare, the front line in a poisonous war in our midst. In July, an open letter to city solicitor Fiona Ledden accusing the council of hiding behind the Home Office over safeguarding issues in a South Manchester centre; in November, a scabies outbreak at a Serco managed hotel in Stockport. The reality of a culture in which the mistreatment of asylum seekers can appear to be incentivised.
Ecce Homo
As a City of Literature, at least, the written word here is thankfully embiggened. In fact it’s difficult now to recall the dark ages before we were raised from our collective illiteracy by the miracle of UNESCO branding. Among the stricken troubadours of Manchester’s arts scene it is, as elsewhere, a time of belt-tightening, penny-pinching and ratchetingly insincere air-kissing, and as the latest round of Arts Council funding awards is revealed it’s instructive to see Carcanet emerge from the ass pile with an apple in its mouth. The highbrow poetry press – fiefdom of pint-sized genius Michael Schmidt – is one of the culture sector’s blue-chip outfits, despite its rarefied world and an editorial wagon hitched to the prejudices of one complex, eccentrically-endowed man.
“We are very pleased to announce that we have been successful in receiving Arts Council NPO funding,” the publisher celebrates. “Which means that Carcanet will be discovering and developing more great new poets and finding new readers for its prizewinning backlist for the next three years!”
It is in many ways a brave decision on the part of the Arts Council. The Carcanet brand can be elusive to the general reader in terms of its mission but its list includes Nobel Prize winners from across the globe: Orhan Pamuk from Turkey; the late Octavio Paz
from Mexico; Jose Saramago of Portugal, Louise Gluck from the States. Middle East conflict underdogs Palestine used to boast their own Nobel-worthy versifier called Mahmoud Darwish, whose name would familiarly be heard among the speculation whenever a winner was due to be announced…until 9 August 2008, at least, when as Wikipedia notes a bit alarmingly the poet failed to recover from an operation he didn’t directly need. When Michael proposed a literary festival for Palestine it set in motion a process which led to the creation of Pal Fest, which carries the torch for its letters to this day.
I was part of it. It can be a fiendishly poisoned sector of the ecology…more hostile now than it ever was after the BDS controversy and the antisemitism furore have burned so bitterly through Western discourse. Death threats and blackmail scams are what can await those straying into this culturally militarized zone, as Michael knows.
With a brace of first collection awards for Irish poet Victoria Kennefick this year shoring up one of the publisher’s intermittent talent-spotting hot streaks, the Carcanet imprint is a bastion of the free word helmed by one of Manchester’s least understood cultural mavericks: publisher, poet, academic, gatekeeper…a Harold Bloom for the Chethams set; a pocket Macbeth, perhaps, for those not keeping up at the back. Asked once about the creative writing boom of the early Noughties the man who had himself founded two MA courses at different Manchester universities quipped “they’re a con…we pray on the dreams of the talentless” knowing as he did that among the many monies which had accrued in his university’s coffers as a result was mine. Such a man is an adventurer and no doubt as they say a dying breed. At 74 he can’t go on forever, but for now Carcanet and this most precipitous of characters remain indivisible.
Just deserts
As Qatar 2022 continues despite our snottiest tears to suggest that football can come home to a desert oil monarchy and put its feet up on the pouffe in the front room as though it had never been away…as though in a weird counterintuitive way it might be strangely better from now on if the competition were to be staged at some geopolitical black site rather than a humble South American nation where forty million children dream of raising themselves out of the barrios via something they can reach out and tangibly cling to…the Manchester United for sale story beams out at us like dawn on the planet Shit, its tin moon falling into the gutter-puddle of our world like a penny dropping.
There has been no shortage of sages to suggest that both the Glazers and Fenway Sport Group have in turn done exactly the same thing: decided, once the European Super League plan went tits up, that there was no growth left in domestic football, left it a year or so (“would’ve looked desperate”) then put Manchester United and Liverpool up for sale while the monarchies of the Middle East and the anglophile wing of the Russian mafia and whoever else are at play on the Arabian
Peninsula and the eyes of the world are on the world’s game. For each proprietor, their respective project can go no further. What exactly we are going to now do with a domestic sport which the world markets may soon deem unfit to “subsidise” is anybody’s guess.
Hats off, at least, to the Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST): previously lampooned on this page for the quaint belief in fan ownership of the club, but which had the support and the political clout to make itself heard as the story evolved.
“You have made huge amounts of money from Manchester United,” it told the owners, dispensing the kind of authority competent Trades Unions do in ITN bulletins. “Hundreds of millions of pounds out, without a single penny of investment in. Whatever commercial objective you had in 2005, we suspect you have met it.”
As we prepare to wrest our thoughts back from the mirage of Kane’s penalty chance to the fantasy of Premiership football what remains beautiful of The Beautiful Game?
And how come this fear? What of Palestine and Saudi Arabia and Iran? How come everything that once seemed certain seems now just one step away from god knows what?
