Here is Robert Peston’s commentary on the refinancing of Liverpool FC, a situation on which I have had my beady eye for a while.

But Peston does not get to the nub of the problem. Liverpool and Manchester United have been borrowing to sustain performance. They will both find themselves having to pay back the money they have borrowed in aggregating their costly squads. And when they cut back on the spending their teams’ performances will most likely slip as well. But with less success, their revenue will decrease, limiting the clubs ability to repay debts further. With the danger of this de-leveraging spiral of decline looming, the future looks a bit bleak for the reds.

Arsenal is looking good, and will benefit if Man U and Liverpool go down the pan. They have virtually no debt, and are still in the top four simply because of Arsene Wenger’s sheer managing ability and resistance to media pressure to spend money on overpriced [English] players, seeking out undiscovered value from farther afield.

Chelsea are all right too. Abramovich is still flush, despite his massive losses due to the recession. He bought the club without masses of debt, unlike the Glazers and Gillett/Hicks who were more or less acting as agents for international banks and debt salesmen.

I hope that Liverpool is not an economic model for anything more widespread. Otherwise we really could all be in the brown stuff a few years down the line…

I can’t believe I haven’t uploaded this picture yet…

We know that barbers just don’t give a fuck. We know they feel a hairstyle photo in their shop window only really matures when it is at least two decades old. But I have never seen a head shot so faded (and clearly so loved) that some manky tonsorist has taken the trouble to restore it with biro. Badly.

British politics is reeling with the shock that the BNP have just gained their first representation in the European parliament. While this bunch of fascists, yobs, thugs, and white-supremacists have not really increased their number of votes, the massive dive in Labour voter turnout has yielded seats to them. However, extremist voters are much more likely to vote than mainstream voters, counterbalanced by the fact that fewer people meet the criteria to become BNP voters in the first place (requirements generally include low foreheads, an inability to count beyond three, bolts in necks, and a bib to catch saliva whilst shouting racist abuse).

Labour is meant to represent the working classes. But the working classes don’t associate with Labour anymore, and you can see why. Blair, Mandelson, and Campbell shifted the party to appeal to more affluent echelons of society. This worked for them: traditional Labour voters would still vote for them: partly due to loyalty; partly due to party smokescreens; partly due to a lack of any practical alternative. The new middle-class voters ticking the New Labour box were surplus to their old core vote.

Now Labour look self-interested, incompetent, and hopeless. Their middle-class appeal has gone, and they have severed themselves from much of their traditional voter base who are really suffering in the harsh economic climate.

While the statistics show that these disaffected voters have not all of a sudden become racist and voted BNP, they have mostly stayed at home, showing their complete lack of faith in politics, or gone and voted UKIP, again showing their complete lack of faith in politics.

This Labour vacuum has allowed the BNP an opportunity to air their nasty little opinions, and get some TV airtime. Nick Griffin has been venting his hilarious double-think, and repressed social intolerance with horrible preparedness. He tries to emphasise the BNP’s anti-immigration policies rather than their racist ideologies. But just look at the banner of their anti-immigration policy page:

It is pitiful and laughable how they couldn’t think of any more subtle way of suggesting a relationship between not being white and being a terrorist. The designer’s train of thought makes me shudder: the visual link between the Sikh turbans and the Taliban head dress is foul; the mythology of the queue of foreigners, ‘the hordes at the gates’, is a disgraceful misrepresentation of of ethnic minorities in Britain; and despite all their haranguing of Polish migrant workers, all the people in the image are non-white.  I wonder if the BNP got the image rights of the people in those queues… I hope they get sued.

The political freakshow  of the BNP would be funny if it were not so sad. It gets worse. What sort of a bunch of fucking halfwits thought that having a retarded, yobbo, Butlins-style mascot would be a good idea, ’sumfing nice fer the kidz’:

I mean what the fuck!? Is this what skinhead children snuggle up to at night? Billy Brit looks like the sort of twat you see beating the shit out of his pregnant scally wife before vomiting all overhimself and nearby arresting officers.

However, I am not too concerned about this slag-heap of buffoons. It is sad, but there will always be ignorant people in all countries who blame minorities for their own failings, for the fact their lives have not turned out the way they wanted. Dealing with them on tv is simple. All you have to do is ask the BNP whether it is acceptable for non-whites to live on equal grounds with whites in Britain. If they say ‘no’, they expose the cess-pit of racism which underlies their party; if they say ‘yes’, they will the majority of their support.

Anyway, back to real politics. Labour needs to re-invent itself (again). They must re-connect with their voter base, and give the opportunity to their former votership to feel enfranchised once more. Surely they can’t do this with Brown at the top – he may be hard-working, but he looks like a bit of a prat who does not understand his party. The election of such unlikely dolts as Nick Griffin and Nazi afficionado Andrew Brons show how far he has lost touch. It must be pretty depressing for him today.

Some time ago I wrote a post about the spiralling debt at the top of the Premiership. In order to feed their gluttonous spending spree, top football teams, most notably Manchester United and Liverpool have been running up enormous debts, or at least their parent companies have.

Despite their great successes in recent years, these teams’ debts are mounting. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Can you imagine a Premiership without Liverpool and Man U? If they don’t sort their debts out before long, they could be going the way of Lehman…

My grandfather, Kurt Rowland was an artist, illustrator, and writer. He wrote books on visual education – instruction on how to educate one’s aesthetic and visual faculties. He had a load of strange and interesting titles published, like ‘The Shapes We Need’, ‘Sight and Insight’ to ‘Visual Education and Beyond’.

People go on wine-tasting courses to learn what makes a good tasting bottle of booze. I even had wine-tasting general studies  classes at school. But never did anyone suggest a class on the principles underlying good design; the relationship between the development of aesthetic principles and civilization; or the way design affects and guides the functioning of modern society.

In school art classes, I was never taught about Gombrich or Itten. Colour theory was never even mentioned. I do remember making a lot of sketches of masterpieces from postcards for some reason. But there was never any reference to the philosophy of colour combination or the mathematical foundations of composition and proportion.

At primary school, kids are taught to have fun and paint nice pictures of their parents, a gratifying exercise for artist and subject. It is about fun, getting the kids to be a little creative, perhaps breaking up the drudgery of the three R’s. There was once a time when Victorian schoolchildren were soundly beaten with an iron rod in case they even conceived of colour. So a bit of splashing paint around can’t be a bad thing for the littl’uns.

However, we seem to take certain misconceptions through to secondary, and perhaps even tertiary art education. We think that art, like poetry, is all about creative self-expression which takes precedence over technical or academic achievement. But I cannot think of single great artist or poet who has not been ruthlessly obsessed by perfecting their craft. It seems that the greater their attention to technical detail, the greater the human relevance of their creative output.

Poetry is metrical writing, nothing more. Otherwise it is prose, or doggerel. Art is the aesthetic application of visual media. Whether  in a bizarre arrangement of paints on canvas or an arrangement of slate in groups on a gallery floor, personal items scattered round a bed, or pharmaceutical bottles on the walls of a gallery room, great art represents fearsome obsession with the development and application of aesthetic principles.

On the subject of Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin: these  artists inspire resentment as well as admiration from the public. I am personally not worried about whether someone thinks Hirst is a genius or a media slag, I am concerned that you very really hear an organised, rationalised explanation of such opinions.

It is a concern that art education in Britain has a generational problem similar to that causing the gastronomic ignominy of our country. Until we sort it out, we shall lack the critical faculties to escape the loathsome tyranny of tv arts critics. Our kids will need to develop their own informed opinions about what makes a good painting as much as what constitutes a good environment for them to live in, or space to work in. We don’t want them getting all their ideas off some twat off BBC 4.