Alex Niven's Blog, page 3

Football supporters' trusts provide a model for a more democratic Britain | Alex Niven

Ken Loach once said Supporters Direct was New Labour's saving grace. Now grassroots activism is needed more than ever

As supporters up and down the country prepare for another wearily predictable Premier League season, Newcastle United, the nation's most farcical club, has supplied another slapstick vignette to usher in the footballing calendar. Following a charade involving dressing-room rows, Twitter, and George Orwell, Joey Barton, perhaps NUFC's last remaining good player, was on Monday exiled to the club's free transfer list. Not for the first time, supporters were left scratching their heads at the mysterious idiocy of a club administration that offered no explanation for this haemorrhaging of the squad just days before the start of the new campaign.

By now, the Newcastle fan-base, like that of many other British clubs, is used to being kept in the dark while the game's elite plays corporate roulette with its cultural heritage. And for a long time it has seemed like there is no alternative to a cowboy culture of spectacular mismanagement, exploitation and PR-dissimulation. In football, as in British society as a whole, obeisance to the interests of big business has long been viewed as the only realistic way of running the show.

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Kicking the Geordies when they're down | Alex Niven

From Cheryl Cole to Geordie Shore, the north-east's economic decline is matched by media contempt for its citizens

"Canada's a bare land / For the north wind and the snow. / Northumberland's a bare land / For men have made it so." So wrote the Northumbrian modernist poet Basil Bunting in the 1930s, thus drawing attention to the plight of the north-east of England at a time of endemic rural poverty and industrial discontent. For many residents of the region in the depression era, emigration to Canada was preferable to remaining in a neglected corner of the British Isles where unemployment and political disenfranchisement were unavoidable fixtures of the landscape.

The north-east is arguably no less of a bleak hinterland today, entering a new period of marginalisation and decline. Even before the coalition came to power, the signs were not good. As the noughties unwound, people began to twig that the cosmetic overhaul of the Blair years, which saw regeneration projects all over Tyneside, was little more than a superficial makeover, a hollow PR enterprise funded by private-finance initiatives and bolstered by champagne socialist hubris. Then, David Cameron happened, and things went from bad to worse. From cuts in local authority spending to attacks on further education, the north-east was at the top of the coalition's fiscal blacklist. As unemployment soared throughout the UK, the north-east enjoyed the historically familiar distinction of having the worst jobless rate in the country.

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