I often complain about the Manchester Evening News. This is for several reasons, usually because of lack of political balance in its presentation of issues and fact. Often it does a very good job, and certainly campaigns on issues which are of interest to many Mancunians. As a regional paper it is above average. However that’s not really good enough for Manchester, and a shocking pale version of the radical Manchester Guardian (even the modern Guardian in my opinion is no match for the original)
Occasionally, usually in the comment sections, things are printed which at first make me angry, and then embarrassed at how utterly dreadful, ignorant, bigoted and stupid some writers are – Andrew Grimes is king among these. The irony of the strap-line to his comment page “opinions you can’t ignore” – it should read, “if you have even one brain cell you’d ignore it, but only if you had the most sanguine nature possible.” The fact its badly written doesn’t help his frankly childish obsession with ‘Tory bashing’ such as insisting on calling David Cameron ‘Duke Dave’. He is neither a Duke, nor blue blooded, nor a descendant of one, and who gives a damn if he is. This crazy idea that if someone comes from a good background, and is well educated that they should be banned from having any right to the political process is just the mirror image of disgusting attitudes and prejudices long ago against the uneducated working classes – nobody is asked to justify why they have political ideas and opinions, even though they’re un-educated and poor!
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me is this from October 5th.
“Tories shoot themselves in the foot” reads the headline. “At the Tory conference this week, the wildest shouts of joy were for George Osborne’s promise (not true Grimes, I was there!) that as chancellor he would only impose death duties on millionaires. Its funny, but also mildly worrying. All Tories, in the recent past, aspired to become millionaires, and considered themselves failures if they didn’t leave six figures in the bank when carried to the crypt. Given their new self-limiting financial outlook, what will they turn to instead? I wouldn’t rule out embezzlement, assault and battery or highway robbery” oh really Grimes? Get a lawyer……..
If anyone understands what the hell he’s talking about, please do enlighten us. How on earth did this guy get a job writing for ANY newspaper. If you were to employ an equal opposite right-wing nutter they’d be ranting on, airing racist views, so why do we put up with this drivel from someone who only uses our local paper to attempt to come to terms with the extensive chip on his shoulder? This week the Association of American Travel Writers is in town, and I cringe to think what they’d think about our city if they picked up the paper and read the idiotic prejudiced writing on this whole page devoted to this nutter. For goodness sake, get rid of him, he’s an embarrassment to our city!
I note he also questions Tony Wilson being added to the list of freemen of the city, alongside Churchill, Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson. He says of Tony “He was a fairly good television reporter and he created a record label” and then “Tony Wilson up there with Churchill and the Grenadier Guards? Call me old-fashioned, but it doesn’t seem right”
No, I wouldn’t expect you to get it actually, I have a feeling that you and Pat Karney are good friends (with Pat’s obsession of people not criticising the city, ‘running Manchester down’ is his choice phrase), ambition for our city makes these people nervous, because they don’t really know what it means.
Knowing Tony cemented part of the desire to stand for council and try to change the monochrome politics in Manchester, and actually was a catylist for me to stay in Manchester as much as the UK’s best orchestra was, the Halle. His attitudes and passions fr the north fitted exactly with that of how I’d been brought up in the N.E. and my tied in closely with my experiences in the USA. Tony wanted to build a New York disco in Manchester (the Hacienda) when nobody here had any clue what it was! It was empty initially because it was so ahead of its time. Tony didn’t want to make do, he wanted to shake things up, and his inspiration was the greatest city on earth at that time – New York. His talk of loft-living in Manchester combined my desire for the north to grow, with my experiences of city life and civic pride in cities such as New York and Chicago.
Tony knew about these things, and drove the culture in Manchester forward towards that. Current city leaders such as Sir Richard Leese don’t seem to understand this, and keep harping on about cities such as Stockholm and Amsterdam (with its commercial district outside the city centre) as their inspiration – give me a break, who on earth aspires to be like that! Manchester isn’t that kind of city at all, its a city without limits, a modern city, a city of immigrants where anyone can become a Mancunian just as you can become a New Yorker. So, no it doesn’t surprise me that Grimes doesn’t understand why Tony was so important for our city…..its just a shame that in all the furore over people trying to claim that they knew and understood him now that he’s gone, so many people still aren’t able to actually understand what he was all about.
Tony was a Labour member and supporter, but we had much common ground because he had insight that politicians usually don’t have – it was about culture, and how it relates to ambition for a city. Without that we are impoverished indeed, and we would live in the bleakest of all worlds, the world of Andrew Grimes.
The take-away carton in Castlefield that probably began its journey closer to Piccadilly