Walther PPK Mitty and the Strangely Unironic Case of PRISM Break II

With mirror-refined bonhomie and affected bemusement, a former UK secret service operative diverts attention from the British backdoor benefits of project Prism with a studied nonchalance. “The irony,” he tells me via Sky News, “is that the whistle-blower should decamp to Hong Kong, where his every move and email will be scrutinised by the Chinese.”

While this practiced, self-serving obfuscation may indeed make us pause and ponder on the wisdom of whistleblowing Edward Snowden, I do wonder where the irony is. It could be entirely logical, at least in terms of internal consistency.

Of all generations, we are surely the most familiar with internal logic. We flick from narrative to narrative, blithely accepting the oft-conflicting conventions of one with another. One moment we’re treading the Weatherfield cobbles, happily accepting that posh-ish middle-aged spinsters frequent an inner-city local, the next we’re pressing the spacebar in Arkham Asylum and grimly bataranging Killer Croc.

We inhabit a world of multiple, serried realities, indulged with a variety of compliance, cynicism and temporary abandon. Aside from our top-level reality of the rent, the nine-to-five and travel connections, we subscribe to sundry auxiliary actualities, all designed to make the day disappear by baby steps. Historically, it has been ever thus – campfire heroics, first editions and prestidigitation have all intermittently beguiled the ancestors.

Today, I would suggest, we are unique in the multiplicity, duration and immersion offered by our otherworlds of choice. While our forefathers may have sustained a seven-day snapshot of just what prevented Flash Gordon Conquering the Universe in any given week or had a lingering, instalment-spanning recall of the progress of Roadsweeper Jo’s consumption, we have to sustain an array of continuities, with new ones ever-jostling for admission.

From DVD-box-set mid-marathons, soap operas (domestic and transatlantic), multi-digit (and multi-incarnation) film franchises, novels, biographies, video games, sports fixtures, the vicariously-lived love lives of starlets and canteen colleagues, the musical careers of chord-striking concert stars and the world-narrative of tectonic events to more home-spun fictions, those designed for your mini-me to mull or to maintain the trust of your misguided Mrs, we live a life steeped in a veritable Venn diagram of unevenly shared realities.

Thankfully, these narrative strands seldom collide; content to sit in separate cerebral shoeboxes until required. While they may occasionally overlap – comparing Homeland plot exigencies down the Rugby Club – they, by and large, lead independent lives. Even a brief interleafing of Reality Prime, though, can prove somewhat disconcerting – meeting a Manchester chum in Hong Kong bar or spotting a Facebook Friend on an alien Timeline.

How then should our whistleblowing Hawaiian resolve his own supposedly collapsing realities? Why would he choose to flee the land of the free after digging his own grave in the home of the brave? Was it too much for him to suddenly discover that Uncle Sham had independently declared open season on online privacy? Was it a Mavis-Riley-Meets-A-Dalek moment, with the internal consistencies of his all-American world view suddenly undermined by their internal contradictions? That Tekken glitch that catapults you living room-wards sans dhoti?

It’s a nice idea, but not one that bears much examination. This was not some recidivist member of the Famous Five, weaned on hampers, cycling proficiency and voluntary admissions of LBW. This was a 29-year-old intelligence officer earning, allegedly, US$200,000 a year – in a country where the median wage is still around US$50,000. 

The frequency with which his earnings are cited should be enough to arouse suspicion. It was a figure bandied around online by both Snowden and his on/off poll dancer girlfriend. Hardly the most covert of financial operations – you don’t, after all, read of James Bond boasting about the extent of his licensed OOverdraft.

Snowden turned to security work after failing in his bid to join the Special Forces, a sort of USAS, apparently breaking both of his legs in a training accident. It is an interesting choice of early career for a man who latterly decides himself a champion of individual freedoms. 

This was not, then, man who stumbled upon a dark secret and found himself obliged to turn rogue. This was a man who watched too many movies, a man whose own internal narrative became corrupted by cross-contamination from his Bourne DVDs.

Casting himself as The Geek Who Saved The World, Hong Kong was a logical – rather than ironic – choice for him to seek sanctuary. Having already outflanked Assange – partly by being more personable and a bit less rapey – he now has his sights on being the anti-Chen Guangcheng (the blind Chinese activist who sought sanctuary in the US Embassy in Beijing just over a year ago).

Every story needs a sequel. And one with ever-higher stakes. The follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark was hardly going to be Indy and the Stubborn Trouser Crease, now was it? 

If Act One sees you defy the Oval Office and flee the FBI, then why not become a global water-cooler icon, the sand in the Vaseline of the world’s two mightiest ideological and economic opponents? Now there’s an Act Two.

Hong Kong, then, was a logical choice for a man with an eye on the on-going narrative. Mainland China would have been a still better bet, but – Mittycisms aside – the boy is still an American and wouldn’t want to risk the plumbing.

The Mancunian Candidate

"Good job we booked..."

There used to be a bar in Houhai, central Beijing’s over-priced lakeside leisure zone, called simply “The Manchester Pub”. Simultaneously cramped yet empty, this diminutive drinkery sat oddly among its more garish and ubiquitously (and understandably) Asian-themed neighbours. In fact, it’s probably no longer there. 

Lined with black and white prints of obscure musicians from the 1980’s and blessed with a Brit-pop soundtrack that lured most would-be patrons elsewhere, The Manchester Pub had none of the hallmarks of a long-term fixture. Its chatty thirty-something proprietor, himself a Beijing native, confessed himself enthralled with all things Mancunian, particularly the city’s two great periods of musical glory – in the late 70s/early 80s and the mid-90s.

Perhaps sadly, he’s never visited the site of his affections, a two-million strong English city set some 5,100 miles to the west of Beijing.

It’s not unusual for Manchester, arguably Britain’s second city, to garner international renown. Typically, though, it’s the city’s sporting prowess, rather than its musical achievements, that have seen the city eclipse its northern English neighbours –most notably Leeds and Liverpool – in terms of global awareness. Manchester United is, without a doubt, the world’s leading football brand and, some would say, the most globally well-known sporting institution of them all. Critics of the team – and they are legion – dismiss it as having no local following, maintaining its fair-weather fans are more likely to be found in London or, indeed, in increasingly footie-fixated China.

Heathrow-upon-row

The Ring Way...

Despite the profile of its indomitable football team, though, this is not the primary reason for making Manchester your first port of call in the UK. That accolade must go to Manchester Airport (MAN), the UK’s only truly international airport to be based outside of the capital. Travellers from Asia, facing a 13-hour plus flight from the relatively civilised air hubs of Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong, really don’t deserve the full eight-hour time-shifted horror that is London Heathrow. LHR is, without a doubt, one of the worst, most inefficient, ungracious and badly-organised airports to be found in any supposedly developed economy.

Manchester is a small airport by comparison with LHR, but a hugely more civilised one in terms of actually gaining access to the UK. With tarmac to car park times in London now easily outstripping two hours or more, passengers arriving in Manc can safely assume to be well through the Green Channel within half an hour or so of touchdown, teeth ungritted and less disposed to inflict violence on any passing member of the UK Border Agency.

Currently, flying to Manchester from many of the major Asian hubs requires changing flights – typically in Dubai, Amsterdam, Helsinki or, as a definite last resort, LHR. This is set to change with direct flights from China to Manchester planned for the near future, a move publicly endorsed by George Osborne, the UK chancellor, at the end of April. So that’ll definitely happen then. With Manchester barely two hours by rail from London, direct flights could see this northern airport becoming the arrival point of choice for the growing number of Asia-based LHR-phobes.

After arriving in MAN, you’re barely 20 minutes from the city centre. It’s a fitting pilgrimage for visitors from Asia to tour this Victorian built city. Work on its imposing town hall began in 1868, with its construction funded by profits from the city’s status as the world’s first workshop. The garment trade flourished here long before the mills and factories of China and India were ever dreamt off, only finally disappearing in the 1950’s and 60’s.

The legacy of its ‘Cottonopolis’ years saw the city centre and its immediate environs saddled with massive former warehouses and abandoned industrial sites. While languishing throughout the 70’s and 80’s, these hulking structures have been latterly reclaimed as stylish canalside apartments and boutique hotels, returning residential life to the once-abandoned city centre.

This renewed trend for urban living provided a massive and much-needed boost for the city’s nightlife. As late as the early 90s, this consisted largely of dodgy pubs, tacky restaurants and terrible, but thankfully short-lived, night clubs. Massive investments throughout the 1990s transformed many northern English cities, with continental-style bars, Michelin-starred restaurants and trendy nightspots opening (and closing) on an almost daily basis.

Depsite the fact I left 8 years ago, Manchester people seem not to have forgotten (there is a possibility I am wrong about this one..,)

Manchester led the way in this, building on its already vibrant underground(ish) scene. The high church of low culture in Manchester was the legendary Hacienda, a club once billed by Newsweek as “the most famous in the world”. It was here that such legendary Manchester musos as New Order and The Smiths made their earliest appearances on stage. The Hacienda closed forever in 1997, a victim of financial mismanagement and too many drug-related fatalities. The site is now home to a block of upmarket apartments, though the name has been retained.

It is one of many stops on the surprisingly popular walking tour of Manchester’s recent musical history. As well as the Hacienda, the tour takes in the Free Trade Hall (where Bob Dylan legendarily outraged a generation of folkies by going electric for the first time) and the Dry 201 Bar (formerly the place for Hacienda pre-gig drinks and one of the many places where Liam Gallagher, the ex-Oasis frontman, is barred for life).

On the more contemporary scene for would-be quaffers, the Canal Street area remains the city’s most lively setting for late-night imbibing. Once billed as Manchester’s Gay Village, this ever-changing stretch of bars and restaurants has long been a heterosexual haunt, with partygoers attracted by its easy-going nature, late serving and high-energy music. Its transvestite cabaret nights are a nod to its more outré roots, but even here patrons are split pretty evenly among sexual proclivities. Ish.

The musical heritage and the nightlife are definite pluses for visitors to the city, but it’s the aforementioned sporting associations that loom largest. Even in the most non-English speaking parts of the world, the locals can usually manage three terms – “hello”, “Coca-Cola” and “Manchester United”. It is possibly the only team that is way more famous than the city that spawned it.

Fortunately for visiting fans, the club is as well-versed at

For that Rooney Mooney...

exploiting their expectations as it is at exploiting pretty much everything else. For £25 (HK$300) per person you can enjoy a behind-the-scenes tour of the team’s Old Trafford stadium. Should you wish to be personally guided, albeit somewhat slowly, around the club’s premises, you can book 75-year-old Wilf McGuiness (the team’s manager in its highly unsuccessful 1969-70 season) for an extra £100 (HK$1,200) per person. To cap off that perfect day, you can even purchase a special offer three-pack of United branded undercrackers for just £6.79 (HK$82) on the way out.

On a cautionary note, the tours are often booked up well in advance (even more so in light of the team once again topping the Premier League this year), so it’s well worth making a reservation on the club’s website prior to your arrival. Should no slots prove available, you can just take pot luck and turn up on spec at the Ethihad Stadium, home to United’s one-time rivals, Manchester City, where there’s seldom a queue. No-one ever does though.

For Chinese tourists, more than for any other nationality, partiality to their native country’s cuisine always looms large among any travel concerns. Fortunately, Manchester boasts one of Europe’s largest China Towns and is home to the Yang Sing, a Cantonese restaurant regularly hailed as one of the finest in Europe.

The historic links between China and Manchester has seen it won the accolade of being a “Dragon City’, the only such metropolis in Europe. Along with the world’s other three non-Asian Dragon Cities – Perth, San Francisco and Vancouver, the honour is in recognition of the size of each city’s long-term Chinese communities and (allegedly) the strength of their abiding Triad connections.

The Pink Hand Gang

The centrepiece of Manchester’s very centrally-sited China Town is an Imperial Chinese Archway, presented to the city by the Chinese government back in 1987. It is said to be one of the finest and most ornate such structures outside of the Mainland. On Sundays, it proves the focal point for the North of England’s largest Chinese market, with traders and buyers travelling from across the region to attend.

For those looking more for luxury shopping than a taste of home cooking, Manchester boasts an impressive array of designer shops and branded outlets. The best place to head for is the Trafford Centre, set some 15 minutes by taxi from central Manchester. The centre, apparently the second largest retail space in the UK, boasts many of the world’s leading luxury stores, including a Selfridges, the exclusive high-end department store – the first such outlet to open outside London.

The downside of the success of the 15-year-old Trafford Centre is that it has pretty much killed off city centre shopping in Manchester. Particularly to be avoided – unless you are in the market for lukewarm sausage rolls and remaindered books – is the Arndale Centre, a horrific hangover from the very worst architectural practices of the 1970’s. Back in 1996, the centre was targetted by the Irish Republican Army. Few mourned the bomb damage done to the Arndale and fewer still celebrated its refurbished return to service several years later. 

Far more recent and more architecturally appealing are Urbis and the Imperial War Museum North, two of the city’s most admired landmarks. Set in the city centre, Urbis opened in 2002 as a space for artistic events and temporary exhibitions. Financial pressures forced its closure, before its successful reopening in 2012 saw it reimagined as the National Football Museum, home to historic souvenirs of the glorious game and a range of interactive exhibits and activities.

A little further out is the Imperial War Museum North, designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect responsible for the Run Shaw Creative Media Centre in Hong Kong. The museum, which opened in 2002, has won awards for both its design and the quality of its highly-interactive “experiential” war-time exhibits. Set near the Old Trafford football ground, it makes an ideal pairing with a visit to the “Theatre of Dreams” as United fans seem contractually bound to refer to United’s stadium.

A gratuitous pic of a twat

Aside from Manchester’s own sundry attractions, the city with its range of excellent hotels (The Lowry, The Midland and the skyline-dominating Hilton come particularly recommended) is the ideal base for exploring the other delights of north-west England. The picturesque Lake District, one of the UK’s most appealing locations is just 65 miles away, while the far more visceral charms of Blackpool, one of England’s most traditional holiday towns, are only 48 miles away.

While a Chinese influence is hugely apparent in Manchester, with the community annually boosted by a vast number of Mainland and Hong Kong students enrolling at the city’s hi-tech friendly university, it may still be a few years before it plays host to a tiny, cramped “Beijing Pub”. When that day comes, and an enthusiastic 30-plus Mancunian gamely ushers visitors in to listen to his favourite Canto-pop hits of yesteryear, while admiring his collection of sepia-ed Super Girl shots, then China’s global conquest will truly be complete. 


Not entirely as planned, this is my valedictory piece for Gafencu Men. Kind of appropriate, eh kismet fans? http://www.igafencu.com/gm/men_en.php

Journey of the Maggie

Magi...

She was only a grocer's daughter,

But she did things she didn't oughta...

Many forget that when Margaret Hilda Thatcher took her first steps into 10 Downing Street as its 51st – and first female – tenant, she became Prime Minister of a Britain that was closer to World War II than to the present day. The guns of the 20th century’s bloodiest conflict had fallen silent just 33 years before and the UK was, even in 1979, still coming to terms with its aftermath.

Post-war rationing had finished just 25 years earlier and the last National Servicemen – compulsory conscripts to the country’s armed services – had been demobbed in 1962. The 33 years since the armistice had also seen Britain’s Empire, once the mightiest the world had ever known, dwindle away. The country’s territories in India, the Middle East, Asia and, finally, Africa all either secured independence or declared it unilaterally. Internationally, the country’s lowest ebb came in 1956 when its combined military and political weight failed to secure control of the Suez Canal, a highly strategic waterway and one seen as vital to Britain’s access to its few remaining colonies.

Internally, things were little better. The post-war euphoria that promised a new deal for Britain had all but dissipated. The 1948 arrival of the National Health Service (alongside a raft of other social benefits, assurances and entitlements), offering free healthcare for all had been billed as a just reward for the exigencies of two global conflicts within just over 20 years of each other. By the 1970s, though, life in many parts of Britain was still pretty grim, utilitarian and riddled with conflict.

The consumer boom that transformed the lives of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s made little impact on life in regional Britain. Giant refrigerators and even larger automobiles, staples of the American cultural imports that flooded the UK’s cinemas, black and white televisions and newsstands, were every bit as alien to English sensibility as the nuclear-powered extra-terrestrials that stalked their colonial cousins at the drive-in every-week. Even the home telephone did not become the norm in UK households until the early 1970s.

Against this rather austere backdrop, the “swinging 60s” came and went. As London briefly became the style-capital of the world – a status partly due to the northern musicians and artists who traded in their own dour landscapes for celebrity and success in the capital – the rest of the United Kingdom remained largely unchanged.

...Maggie...

While the residents of Chelsea and Kensington, two of London’s more affluent areas, became ever more Bohemian, beat-focused and laid back, life in Hull, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast Newcastle and Manchester remained pretty similar to its pre-war existence. It did, however, have a slightly more contemporary soundtrack, thanks largely the growth in popular music and its almost universal adoption by the country’s teenagers, the first generation that century to know no war.

Amid all this social change, both cosmetic and profound, two great power groups were battling for control of the British way of life – the unions and the establishment. On one side were the traditionally moneyed classes, the mill owners and the aristocracy of yesteryear. On the other side were the trade unionists, hard-nosed activists from the pit and the factory floor, now freshly aligned with a new generation of politically astute left-wing graduates.

With a sense of entitlement driven by generations in the political wilderness and the promises of post-war change, the unions sought to control the UK’s political agenda. Organised, restrictive, dogmatic and belligerent, they terrified the institutions that had dominated the UK’s social and political landscape for centuries. Bereft of the cheap labour in the far extremes of the empire and hamstrung by a variety of restrictive labour practices, aggressive wage demands and the very real threat of industrial action at home, the British economy faltered.

The gentlemanly understandings that had seen old money and the old school tie run Britain like the world’s biggest family business were no longer being honoured. The ruling class, lacking the underpinning of popular support and acceptance, were impotent in the face of this wide-spread social rejection of the hierarchies of the past. Fortunately, for them at least, their salvation was at hand – in the form of the 53-year-old grocer’s daughter who became Britain’s first woman prime minister on 4 May 1979.

While not the first leader of the traditionally right-wing Conservative party to be of middle-class stock (that honour belongs to her immediate predecessor as party leader, Edward Heath, himself the son of a carpenter turned small businessman), Thatcher was certainly the first to actively make a virtue of it. Despite having attended a highly-regarded girls’ grammar school and later graduating with a chemistry degree from Cambridge University, it was her heritage as a grocer’s daughter that she traded on.

Tellingly, it was her combination of a home-spun desire to better yourself, together with frequent allusions to the need to “balance the household budget”, that were to prove the basis of her defining deceptively simple philosophy.

...Mag-E...

Upon entering office in 1979, she memorably told the world’s press: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Citing the prayer of St Francis of Assisi as a battle cry was a bold, if politically naïve, move and attracted far more condemnation than it did approbation. The words were long come back to haunt her term in office.

Ultimately, though, it was an assertion she was to live up to. Her means of achieving harmony, the nature of her truth, the faith she was to inspire and the exact identity of those she was to bring hope to were, at that juncture, probably not even clear to the nascent PM herself. Although, an apparent plea for consensus and unity, her statement marked the arrival on the world stage of one of the most divisive political figures of the second half of the 20th century.

...Out...

Although this was her entrée to global renown, her domestic debut came as Education Secretary in 1970. It was then that she launched the first policy to bring her public vitriol, when she abolished the right of primary school children to daily free milk. In a label that was to stick throughout her career, The Sun, a daily British tabloid branded her: “Margaret Thatcher, milk snatcher”. This early vilification is perhaps ironic, given that the Murdoch-owned Sun was later a keen advocate of all things Thatch and has been credited by many as playing a key role in Maggie’s three election victories.

Having tackled the excesses of the nation’s toddlers ten years earlier, her first challenge in office – and for many the defining issue of her political career – was to go head-to-head with the unions. The three previous administrations – those of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan – had signally failed to bring these powerful interest groups to heel.

The union grip was formidable. Across many industries and service sectors – manufacturing, mining, local government, utilities, teaching and public transport – it was inescapable. Union membership was compulsory and the use of “closed shop” agreements – practices that forbade the employment of non-union members – were widespread. Even the emergency services and the media were in thrall to the union barons.

After generations of subservience, the endurance of wars of unimaginable horror and the example of revolutionary furore elsewhere in Europe, the British electorate were willing to tolerate the excesses of the unions, even if stopping short of endorsing them. Throughout the 1970s, the unions held the governments of the day to ransom, striking frequently over pay and conditions.

Actions by the militant electricians and mining unions made power cuts a regular feature of British life at the time. This saw families’ bulk-buying candles and making the best of the inevitable nights without lighting, heating and electricity. 　　The long-anticipated collision between the Thatcher government and the unions came during the course of the miners’ strike. Running from March 1984 till March 1985, the strike was one of the longest and bloodiest in British industrial history. Triggered by government moves to close a number of supposedly nonviable pits, the action was, in truth, High Noon for two opposing ideologies.

During the course of the 13-month strike, livelihoods were lost, communities were forever divided and the police came to be seen as an increasingly partisan political tool. When the strike finally collapsed, so too did the British trade union movement’s chance of having any controlling role in the future of the country’s economy or having any wider societal impact. It was a turning point for her administration.

...Out...

Speaking in 1987, during her third and final term as prime minister, Thatcher famously said: “There is no such thing as society.” It was the cornerstone of her beliefs. By dividing and conquering the miners, she had ended the threat of collective bargaining. From there on, the needs of the individual (and their immediate families) were enshrined as paramount, with the notion of wider responsibility being the province only of the out-flanked “loony” left and a number of young idealists, all largely expected to soon grow out of the notion.

From then on, Thatcher and her supporters managed to bridge the gap between the disenfranchised British establishment and the newly impassioned electorate. With nationalised industries sold off to first-time shareholders, work in the trading rooms of the city’s financial institutions suddenly put on a newly-egalitarian footing and those dependent on welfare forever stigmatised, the Thatcher revolution was complete.

For her opponents, it was greed that had become venerated, for supporters it was, more palatably, seen as self-reliance or ambition. With her administration coinciding with Britain’s delayed consumer boom, ostentatious acquisition was endorsed, while state reliance was discouraged by both statutory means and via widespread denunciation in the Thatcher-friendly print media.

It was an unsavoury transformation, but a necessary one. Pre-Thatcher Britain was an anachronism, with the self-interest of the labour movements stymieing social and economic progress. The process of change was, perhaps, unnecessarily brutal with Thatcher clearly revelling in the obvious vicissitudes facing devastated communities.

It was this glee, as much as any economic impact, that earned her the undying enmity of many sectors of British society. That enmity was hereditary, with many of the protestors at her funeral last month still intent on righting the wrongs done to their parents or even grandparents.

Forget the Falklands war or the fall of the Berlin Wall as the Iron Lady’s defining moments. Her lasting legacy is in transforming the post-war, post-colonial United Kingdom into the country it is today.

Quite how you view that legacy depends very much on how you see 21st century Britain. The jury, as they say, is very definitely still out...out...out...

...Out!