Off The Kerb

By Mark Steel

Reproduced by kind permission of The Independent newspaper.

Read Mark's regular column in The Independent every Wednesday
Mark Steel in the Independent.

Poxy Tescos

Tescos is terrifying. It's unstoppable, like bindweed. You couldn't even organise a guerilla army against it because if you blew one up, two would spring up in its place. They must land in the night, like Triffids. Soon they'll have permission to set up Tesco mini-stores in your house, so you'll get up one morning and there it will be in your bedroom. And a PR spokesman will issue a statement that "Our customers have indicated that any lack of privacy that may result from having a shop by their wardrobe is compensated by the convenience of being able to purchase lasagne or shoe polish in the middle of the night without getting up."

But this report that's come out doesn't seem to care. It was set up specifically to comment on this rampaging monster and concluded it should be alright if it doesn't go much further. Who compiled that then - Neville Chamberlain? There's already hardly anything left they don't dominate. Next they'll take over drug-dealing, launching their new line with an advert in which Prunella Scales says to Jane Horrocks "Don't expect me to do any housework tonight dear - not while Tescos are offering Springtime savings on a quarter ounce of top quality Afghan skunk."

It's hard to identify what's SO groteque about these places, as they claim they're only so profitable because customers choose to go there. But a starting point has to be that no one in Tescos is ever happy. People are lured by cheapness and convenience, but then they pay for that by spending their time there in a vegetative trance, staring aimlessly into the despotic white light, maybe drifting back into consciousness for a moment to whack their kids on the back of their legs for climbing on the trolley, before the regular beep-beep of the bar code machine returns them to their hypnotic dreamy half-life. Maintaining your faculties in a queue at Tescos is almost impossible. Once you're stuck behind six families with overflowing trolleys before it's your turn, you could be a multi-lingual bio-chemist and you'd struggle to remember the capital of France. These conditions should be used for training people who need to be able to think clearly in extreme circumstances, because if you can keep your thought process at ninety per cent in a Tescos queue, then repairing an oxygen mask while in space or deep sea diving must be a piece of piss. And you even have to hire the trolley for a pound - the bastards. Even in Abu Ghraib they don't make you pay for use of the cattle prod.

And that's why it's wrong. Every boast they make is actually its crime. It's horribly irredeemably joylessly functional. Every tin of custard powder is placed at such an angle to entice you to chuck it in the trolley. Every tomato is perfectly spherically fluorescent. Occasionally they might decide customers have indicated they appreciate conversational check-out staff, so the check-out staff will be ordered to say "Hope you enjoy your evening." But that's worse than if they stared into space. Soon we'll all be fitted with a chip in our arm, so our interests can be recorded and pop up as we're paying, enabling the staff to make an appropriate comment. So if you're a carpenter, they'll say "Enjoy your dovetails this week sir," if you're a racist they'll say "Send 'em all back I say, madam," and so on.

Tescos is the extreme end of modern town planning, in which every town is planned to look tortuously identical. You could be in Kettering or Greenland and you know that as you leave the centre of town, past Body Shop and River Island and Clinton Cards and some poor sod selling chocolate-covered almonds, down the road with the building societies and the Wetherspoons pub, just past the Esso garage and maybe a Big Yellow storage place, there it will be with its vast car park, symmetrical shrubs and slightly wrong clock.

Even the claim that shopping in Tescos saves time is mostly a con. People say "At least I can get everything in one place," but the place is bigger than an average High Street. You might as well say "I go shopping abroad because at least you can get everything in one place - France."

Or there's some 'new' thing they're doing that's pointless, such as pre-packed diced pyramids of rhubarb, or bananas in balloons, so "Now you don't have to pick your bananas off the shelf, just pluck them from the air as they float round in balloons that keep them extra-nana-fresh!!"

All that driving and jostling can't make it much quicker or cheaper than going to a local shop, except the local shop's probably shut down because of Tescos. Then they boast they've set up a 'green fund' when they're responsible for so many car journeys they'd be more green if they spent all day melting icebergs with a blowtorch.

And of course, because they're a massive multinational whose aim is profit, they screw people all over the world. So one report quotes a farm worker who picks fruit for a Tescos supplier in South Africa "I sleep on the floor in a plastic sheet. There's no water or electricity and the walls of my shack are made of cardboard." For this she gets seventeen dollars a week. And they probably encourage them to buy the sheets from the local Tescos, who advertise "Your sleep is complete on a sheet from Tescos."

But on and on they march. Soon they'll have their own team in the Olympics, then they'll develop a nuclear capacity and eventually rule everything. And we'd at least stand a chance if the next report says "Look, the economics of it are a bit complicated to be honest. But what we DO know is Tescos is an abomination devoid of love or affection or hunanity or imagination or even genuine animosity that could make a day interesting or unpredictable, just a corporate tyrant devouring us all with its soulless and chillingly inconvenient convenience."




Nick Fucking Cohen What splendid timing. Out pops a book applauding the virtues of the invasion of Iraq, just when even the invasion's last bedraggled supporters in the American establishment are giving up on it. Even the head of the British Army has declared it a disaster. The United Nations have revealed that among the occupation's magnificent achievements is there is more torture in Iraq now than under Saddam. The debate about the scale of the slaughter concerns how many hundreds of thousands are dead. So here Nick Cohen not only cheers the decision to invade but declares his bemusement about why everyone else didn't join him. Maybe he's got another one coming out called "Why can't everyone see England are bound to win the 2006 World Cup?" Much of the book comprises accounts of Iraqis who supported the invasion, with scorn for those opponents of the war who "wouldn't listen" to Iraqis who'd experienced Saddam's tyranny. But even the Iraq Survey Group sponsored by George Bush reported that 60% of Iraqis now support attacks on occupying troops, and amongst the most strident are those who suffered under Saddam. So does Cohen still think we should follow mainstream Iraqi opinion. If he does, presumably he's training to go out there and start firing, is he? But there's also an extraordinary element to this book. As well as being a re-hash of all the insipid arguments used by fans of the war, (the anti-war movement didn't want Saddam to be deposed because they "Might have faced a Middle-East running short of dictators for them to salute" etc.), he claims his pro-war mania should be the true agenda for the left. So everyone vaguely connected to the left is reviled in this book for opposing the war: Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, human rights lawyers, the lot. Everyone was wrong except Nick. Cohen WAS impressed however by Paul Wolfowitz, co-creator of the "Project for the American Century," and Bush's choice to head the World Bank for his uncompromising dedication to big business and militarism. Cohen met him in London, and admired his "warmth" and "coherence" and "sense of purpose." So - the left should denounce everyone with a record of valuing humanity above profit and war, and revere the most prominent champions of profit who are prepared to fight wars to defend this. It would be like someone cheering all season for Arsenal in an Arsenal shirt, then saying he was doing this because he was the only true supporter of Tottenham. And what a bizarre world he lives in, which writes off all those millions who oppose the war as either twisted lefties, or dupes of twisted lefties. So there we are - Cohen is the only true person on the left, despite the fact that on the defining issue of our times he is angrily to the right of two ex-presidents of America, the Liberal Democrats, Joanna Lumley, Leo Sayer, Zoe Ball, Jimmy Hill, Pope John Paul II, Jacques Chirac, Dolly Parton, almost everyone in Africa and South America, the head of the British army and Cat bloody Stevens. It might be worth reading a book explaining the 'virtues' of this war by Colin Powell, or even Paul Wolfowitz, as an insight into the thinking of those behind it. But this represents no one but himself. If you're really bored and fancy reading it, do something more useful, such as counting the ants in your garden or pushing an onion round the perimeter of Surrey. Crowded Prisons When that paedophile was sent home by a judge, who blamed John Reid's directive, a bunch of Conservative politicians and newspaper editors must have literally wet themselves with happiness. Across rural Britain they'll have screeched joyfully in their conservatories while their wives mopped up the mess with a sponge, muttering "This hasn't happened since the Belgrano was sunk." Labour was so soft on crime they sent convicted perverts back home. And on the news the released man was almost begging to be jailed, until it seemed he'd carry on "Stringing me up is the only language I understand, but instead Doctor Reid has given me a job as clown-in-residence in an orphanage." Except all that had been suggested was the overcrowding meant people shouldn't be jailed for "lesser offences," not that no one should be jailed at all. The judge might as well have said "Due to the government's guidelines I have no choice but to release all the leopards from Whipsnade into the town centre, and hope this doesn't result in a regrettable incident." Somehow the logic is that the reason every jail is jammed is because the government is too soft to send people to jail. But inevitably the government has responded by insisting they'll find plenty more space to jail people. Maybe they'll outsource jails to the rail companies, confident they'd take a heaving crammed prison and say "We could squeeze another seven hundred in there. AND make them pay." But first they're re-opening the disused bits of prisons, the parts that were probably shut down by the Victorians as too barbaric. By the weekend there'll be newspapers howling "What about the sewers? There's plenty of room down there but John Reid is more concerned with the 'rights' of criminals not to be made to live in an underground pipe full of human waste than he is with our old-aged-pensioners who fought at Arnhem." Managers in the NHS might be called in, to bring in the method they use in hospitals, and tell half the prisoners there's no bed so they'll have to spend the night on a trolley. None of this will satisfy the jailing brigade, whose next demand will be "If there's no room in prisons, why not make the prisoners smaller? Why should prisoners be allowed to be the same size as honest citizens? They should have thought about that before mugging a pensioner!" A true New Labour solution would be to pursue the same line they're doing with pensions. They could say that in the modern world with so many of us needing to be jailed, we simply can't expect the state to look after us when the time comes. So we should all take out private jail insurance, encouraged with an advertising campaign in which a smiling convict in a freshly painted cell beams "I get to slop out when I want, with the bucket I want. I even got to choose which other prisoner raped me on the pool table - and all that peace of mind is thanks to Prisoner Choice Pensions." So far John Reid's response has been to say "I will see it through. If it needs endurance, if it needs determination, it will be there." It's like listening to Henry the bloody Fifth at Agincourt. Maybe he'll follow this up with "When the darkest hour hath descendeth, when foes do gather and cowards flinch from moral duty, then I shall announce an inquiry of some sort into rearranging the Home Office, and that, my subjects, shall be our greatest triumph." In any case it's not him that's doing the enduring, it's the people in these institutions. There's not much bravery in saying "No matter how strong the enemy we must stiffen our sinews, and remember at least we're not trapped twenty-three hours a day in a six foot square cell with a junkie who crawls on all fours and thinks he's a hyena." The one thing you know John Reid won't do is take on the argument about prison overcrowding. He won't complain that vast numbers of prisoners have been jailed for offences such as failing to pay bills after their husband walked out, or not paying a TV license. He won't suggest that ten per cent of prisoners should be immediately moved into hospitals, having been diagnosed as "functionally psychotic." He might just accept they could be donated to circuses who could tether them to a post so that local children can poke them with twigs. He won't explain that as we jail a greater proportion of people than any other country in Western Europe we SHOULD be sending loads of them home. Instead he'll join in with the demands for more prison space, as if jailing people is an Olympic event and it's a matter of shame that we lag behind Uzbekhistan and wartime Japan. Because the most important thing to get across in all this is that he's hard. Or to use the technical term 'functionally psychotic'.