Carry On Jihading

So many people whose opinion I trust have heaped praise on Four Lions that I really expected to love it. The combination of our most brilliant satirist and a subject matter which needs to be approached with the same caution as an IED on a dusty Afghanistan road was an irresistible prospect... what could go wrong?

A lot, as it turns out. Chris Morris's normally impeccable radar has badly let him down and instead of producing a nuanced satire illustrating the poignant futility of suicide attacks, he's constructed an ill-judged farce.

Edgy humour can serve a film brilliantly when it's clear that a film-maker has been willing to include a scene despite knowing that many will judge it to be in poor taste. But poor taste should never be an aim in itself and that very often seems to the case with Four Lions.

The trailer provides proof that Morris's touch for absurd comedy has by no means deserted him. On the contrary, when seen in isolation the dark-humoured slapstick used to attract people to Four Lions is a hoot. But, in context, the film's attempts to find humour in the tragic consequences of the protagonists' incompetence is neither funny nor thought-provoking.

Chris Morris co-wrote this film with Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong who collaborated with Armando Iannucci on In The Loop and have written something like six series of Peep Show. While it's not necessarily fair to second guess the impact the duo may have had on this project, it's hard to ignore the similarity between In The Loop's imaginative use of profanity and Four Lion's use of unlikely Urdu cussing (helpfully subtitled for non-Urdu speakers) which peppers this film. At times, it feels that the purpose of this is to disguise a general comic paucity.

In Peep Show, Bain and Armstrong brilliantly portray the imagined and real dilemmas of a pair of unremarkable young men bound together by long-term friendship and little else. Much of the excellence derives from their ability to mine the comedy of mundaneness. In Four Lions, the plot could hardly be less mundane but the three writers appear keen to persuade us that the same trivial stresses which govern the lives of Mark and Jeremy in Peep Show would apply with equal vigour to young men intent on self-destruction and mass murder.

At one level, this enables the audience to consider the jihadists as ordinary human beings who are prey to the same petty motivations as the rest of us but it makes their choices all the more inexplicable. You can argue that it isn't the role of a comedy film to offer an explanation of the motives that lie the savagery of murderous terrorism but any writer stepping into this territory has a huge responsibility to offer some kind of insight. Otherwise there's a danger that they are merely laughing nihilistically at the most barbaric acts imaginable just to get a rise from those who recognise that terrorism isn't funny.

The film's most baffling and dangerous decision is its depiction of the relationship between Omar (Riz Ahmed) and his young family. Even though the film suggests Omar and his wife are free of the oppression that devout fundamentalism can bring to bear on a marriage, she is portrayed as being cheerfully supportive of his martyrdom plans. Not only does this not ring true, it panders to the most jaundiced view of Britain's Muslims peddled by the far right. It appears to confirm the paranoid view of the BNP that as much danger is posed by well-integrated, liberally-minded adherents of Islam as it is by nutty extremists.

In the past, Chris Morris has proven quite brilliant at convincing people to believe the most absurd propaganda... persuading a series of celebrities to warn about the perils of 'cake' superbly demonstrated his willingness to exploit people's credulity for comic effect. Has he finally taken that process to its logical conclusion by persuading audiences to laugh at something he knows not to be funny? Is he urging us to laugh at his film just so he can laugh at us for being stupid enough to respond to his urgings?

Great Ambiguities

From conversations I've had over the years, it's evident that most people who live on this island imagine that the 'Great' in 'Great Britain' is a reference to this country's grand history.

They're wrong of course... this island is 'Great' Britain solely because it's the largest of the islands that makes up the British Isles. Proper humility can be achieved by reminding ourselves that the Germans refer to our country as Grossbritannien... 'gross' makes it a good deal harder to fall into the self-aggrandisement trap.

All of this came to mind yesterday when I witnessed two contrasting versions of a statement put out by the Arsenal footballer Cesc Fabregas. The young Spaniard is currently the subject of a tug of war between his current club and Barcelona with most experts persuaded that he'll opt to move back to his home country this summer.

But after Fabregas described a recent conversation with Arsenal's manager as the "greatest phone call" of his life, many fans of the North London club might dare to dream that the midfielder has had a change of heart.

They shouldn't get their hopes up. It appears that by 'greatest', Fabregas merely meant 'longest'... an adjective which suggests their conversation had a quite different tenor from the one implied by 'great'. And it should be remembered that a conversation of great length with someone you're about to jilt doesn't often bring about a change of heart.

This didn't stop BBC's 5 Live from reporting that Fabregas had described the conversation as the 'best' he'd ever had. Arsenal fans buoyed by this news should feel disappointed that the broadcaster opted to ignore a linguistic nuance that makes a great difference... or should that be 'a gross difference'?

To Err Is Human... To Forgive Is Divine

An extraordinary thing happened on BBC's Question Time last night when the new Home Secretary, Theresa May, explained that she has changed her mind about several key issues related to gay rights.

This shouldn't be unusual but it is... and other politicians should pay particular attention to the absence of vituperative comment from her opponents on the panel after May confessed her change of heart on gay adoption and Section 28.

There were no cries of "u-turn" or "hypocrite" from Caroline Flint, Menzies Campbell or Shami Chakrabarti and the look on Theresa May's face suggested that repenting her illiberalism was pretty cathartic.

More importantly, both she and her political opponents were warmly applauded by the studio audience who appeared to appreciate the maturity of the discussion.

There's been a lot of talk about the 'new politics' since the formation of the Coalition Government and most of it has been meaningless but a willingness to accept that a politician can change their mind without the sky collapsing is a genuine advancement and we should all welcome it.

Even Those Who Oppose the BA Strike Should Feel Dismay Tonight

Tonight's Six O'Clock bulletin on Radio 4 broke the news that British Airways had succeeded in bringing a halt to a cabin crew strike which was due to begin at midnight.

This wasn't achieved through discussion with representatives of Unite or by capitulating to the demands of the disgruntled employees. It was achieved by persuading Lord Justice McCombe that the union had failed to meet its obligations under section 231 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992.

The Union's transgression was a failure to inform its members that, in addition to the legitimate votes cast in last month's strike ballot, there were eleven spoiled ballot papers.

You don't have to be in favour of the proposed strike to recognise that this highly technical and utterly trivial oversight is being used by the judiciary to prevent legitimate industrial action which was favoured by an overwhelming number of those balloted.

In giving his judgement, McCombe said he was taking the "balance of convenience" into account. It's a strike. It's supposed to create inconvenience... that's how strikes achieve their goal. By admitting that potential inconvenience to travellers informed his thinking, McCombe is making it abundantly clear that this was a political decision.

And the judiciary has form in this area. When the first BA strike was ruled out on an equally spurious basis, Mrs Justice Cox told the court that, "a strike of this kind over the twelve days of Christmas is fundamentally more damaging to BA and the wider public than a strike taking place at almost any other time of the year."

In each case, the presiding judge's candour has inadvertently lifted the lid on an establishment conspiracy to prevent cabin crew from striking. The obstacles now being put in the path of legitimate industrial action are an affront to democracy and it's staggering that more isn't being made of this in the mainstream press.

Clustershag To 10 Downing Street

The Daily News's Jon Stewart offered his take on the political machinations that put David Cameron into 10 Downing Street using his usual mixture of insight, satire and feigned bemusement.

The programme doesn't get everything right... the American tendency to use 'England' as though it's a synonym for the United Kingdom will grate with some and the closing gag suggests that The Daily News finds it hard to distinguish posh English politicians from one another... that's George Osborne inside the cannon, not David Cameron as they appear to think.

But Stewart brilliantly picks up an odd bit of phrasing in Gordon Brown's resignation statement and it's worth watching just to see his impersonation of the Queen. And although John Oliver's contribution is a bit patchy, his lampooning of Cameron's claim that Britain's "best days still lie ahead" is priceless.

There But For The Ingrates Of The Electorate

It would be interesting to know the thoughts of Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown as they watched David Cameron and Nick Clegg at the joint press conference in the rose garden at 10 Downing Street yesterday. Were they ruefully thinking of what might have been?

Talks between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown before the 1997 election on the possibility of creating a progressive alliance were effectively scuppered by the huge majority won by Labour at that election. A development that Blair would have struggled to sell to his party even if it had been necessary became untenable because there was patently no need to do it.

The unexpected enthusiasm displayed by Cameron and Clegg for an arrangement which appears entirely pragmatic has provoked a sense that we might be witnessing 'a new politics' after all and the non-tribal members of the commentariat have expressed extremely hopeful sentiments about the prospects of its success.

If Cameron and Clegg manage to build a constructive arrangement despite their obvious political differences then imagine what might have been achieved by Blair and Ashdown who had such similarly shaped political antennae?

Can This Arranged Marriage Work?

One of the most infuriating things about the coverage of the election result has been the perpetual tendency to muddle the outcome of the vote with the intentions of the voters. We were constantly told by politicians and commentators that we had decided to withhold an overall majority and that we had determined that there should be a hung parliament.

Did we? Because I must have missed the meeting where we all agreed to do that. I naively thought that we all voted for the party that we wanted to win the election and the outcome came about because we lacked sufficient unanimity about which party that should be.

But the media knows best so it stands to reason that we also 'decided' that the Conservatives should do a deal with the Liberal Democrats. And that makes us the biggest bunch of matchmakers in the world and means we share responsibility for the most unlikely of arranged marriages.

The funny thing about arranged marriages is that they often work. Perhaps it's because the happy couple can't fret about whether they made the right choice... because they didn't make one. And maybe the same will prove true of Cameron and Clegg. Having been pushed together by a crafty electorate, perhaps they will learn to love one another and forge one of the most constructive relationships in political history.

I still wish I'd been at that meeting where we decided all of this though.

Harangue Utan

Amidst the ongoing chaos of the post-election negotiations, one man rises above it all to explain to the media that they are to blame for most of what's going on. And that man is John Prescott. Interviewed outside the House of Commons on News 24, Prescott delivered a typically pugilistic performance as he accused the BBC of filling airtime with endless speculation before going on to suggest that Gordon Brown's decision to stand down as leader of the Labour Party was mainly because of pressure from the newspapers and broadcast journalists who've continually told the public that the Liberal Democrats cannot work with him.



Fast forward to 00:41 for a virtuoso lesson from Prescott on dealing with a noisy heckler.

Even A Blind Man Can See That It's Time For The Left To Grow Up

It's been left to David Blunkett to confront the "don't do it, Nick" lobby with the truths they're assiduously trying to avoid. The maths simply does not work and, even if it did, the resulting 'rainbow coalition' would lack legitimacy.

Whenever a Labour supporter or a left-leaning Liberal Democrat points out that 64% of the electorate voted against David Cameron's Conservatives, they appear oblivious to the fact that 71% of voters opted not to vote for Gordon Brown's government.

Since the introduction of universal suffrage, only once has the winning party at a British election secured more than half the votes of the electorate... so the 'more people were against them' argument could have been used to question the legitimacy of every Government apart from Stanley Baldwin's 1931 administration.

David Blunkett is sensible enough to be honest about how he would have felt if Jeremy Thorpe's Liberals had propped up Edward Heath's government in 1974. He felt then and feels now that the most clearly-stated intent of the electorate at the first of the two elections that year was to get rid of the Government. And it's worth bearing in mind that last week's election was downright decisive compared with the February 1974 poll. At that election, the Conservatives won 226,564 more votes than the Labour Party but it was the latter who won the most seats... just 4 more than the Tories.

Had Jeremy Thorpe decided to form a coalition with the Conservatives he would have been supporting the party that won the most votes in a House of Commons so evenly balanced that the election could legitimately have been called a draw. By contrast, last week the Conservatives gained 2,079,429 more votes than the Labour Party and this helped to secure 48 more seats than Labour.

In 1974, Thorpe and the Liberals recognised that the electorate had willed a change of government and that this couldn't be achieved by allowing a damaged government to limp on. The same is true now.

Instead of pretending that the Conservatives' failure to win an overall majority provides sufficient grounds to keep David Cameron out of Downing Street, the left should be grateful that the combination of factors which led to a Hung Parliament will enable the Liberal Democrats to temper the worst instincts of the Tories while allowing the Labour Party to regroup and win the next election under a new leader.

It's worth noting that there's one part of the United Kingdom that is genuinely entitled to question the legitimacy of the Conservative government... and that is Scotland. The Tories have only one MP north of the border and Cameron's party only managed to win 17% of the vote. This dismal showing puts them in fourth place in Scotland behind Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats. Alex Salmond may be feeling a little bruised after winning precisely none of the additional 14 seats he targeted but he should recognise that a Tory in Downing Street is one of the key ingredients required to win an independence referendum in Scotland.

These are turbulent times and there is a great need for stability. While none of the available options is capable of providing a truly robust government, a coalition dependent on four or more political parties and the absolute loyalty of every MP elected under their banners will be almost absurdly flimsy. A Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition will have a working majority and will, therefore, be able to govern. It's the only sensible option.