'This is beyond sports' - Chuck D on the fight in Arizona

When Arizona passes an unjust immigration law, Chuck D is on hand to criticise it. After all, the Man from Public Enemy once rapped “By The Time I Get To Arizona” when state officials refused to recognise Martin Luther King’s birthday.
Chuck D. The Hard Rhymer. The man on the mic for the most politically explosive hip-hop group in history, Public Enemy. With albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” “Fear of a Black Planet,” and anthems like “Fight the Power” and “Bring the Noise” along with the breathtaking production of the Bomb Squad, PE created a standard of politics and art.

Perhaps their most controversial track was “By the Time I Get to Arizona” (1991) about seeking revenge against Arizona political officials for refusing to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday [Lyrics include: ‘Cause my money’s spent on The goddamn rent/Neither party is mine not the Jackass or the elephant.]

Today, in the wake of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration Senate Bill 1070, “By the Time I Get to Arizona” has been remixed and revived by DJ Spooky. Chuck D also recorded his own track several months before the bill was passed called “Tear Down That Wall.” I spoke to Chuck about the music and the nexus between immigration politics and sports.

DAVE ZIRIN: Why did you choose to record “Tear Down this Wall?”

CHUCK D: I had done “Tear Down this Wall” four or five months ago because I heard a professor who works with my wife here on the West Coast speak in a speech about the multi-billion dollar dividing wall between the U.S. and Mexico, so, therefore, I based “Tear Down that Wall” on the policy of the United States border patrol in the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.

I just wanted to put a twist of irony on it saying if Ronald Reagan back in 1988 had told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall separating the world from countries of capitalism and communism, we have a billion dollar wall right here in our hemisphere that exists that needs to have a bunch of questions raised. Questions like: “What the Hell?”

I wrote the song about five months ago and I did it coincidently, with all that’s brewing in the state of Arizona. Immigration laws and racial profiling is happening right here and I think the border situation, not only with the U.S. and Mexico but the U.S. and Canada, on both sides is just out of control. It’s crazy.

You did “Tear Down This Wall,” we have the DJ Spooky remix of “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” and with your wife, Dr. Gaye Theresa Johnson, you wrote a syndicated column on SB 1070. What’s the response been to you being so out front on this issue?

Well the response is the usual, but I make it a habit not to look at any blogs, because I think the font of a computer gives as much credence to ignorance as it does to somebody who makes sense. So I try not to read those responses, because anybody can respond quickly. Back when people had to write letters it took an effort, especially if someone didn’t have decent penmanship and handwriting.

I try not to look at the responses. I try to do the right thing. I tell you this much, there is a rap contingent, a hip-hop contingent from Phoenix, who did a remake of “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” I think that needs to be recognized because these are young people. The song is about eight minutes long. There’re about 12 MCs on it, and they are putting it down. They are talking about how ridiculous this law is. They are speaking out against it and they are putting all the facts on the table, and they need to be acknowledged and highlighted. There is a stereotype about young people and young MCs [being apolitical]. They break it.

It’s remarkable how the original “By the Time I Get to Arizona” has been resurrected from the early ’90s now that the struggle has picked up. Did you hear former NBA player Chris Webber before the Suns/Spurs game say, “It’s like PE said ‘By the Time I get to Arizona’”?

[laughs] My dad told me about that, you know Chris Webber is the man. I wasn’t tuned into TNT at that particular time.

He said more than that. He said, “Public Enemy said it a long time ago. ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona.’ I’m not surprised. They didn’t even want there to be a Martin Luther King Day when John McCain was in [office.]. So if you follow history you know that this is part of Arizona politics.’” So he brought it all together with Public Enemy at the center of it.

Unfortunately when it comes to culture, the speed of technology and news today makes things out of sight, out of mind. While these situations [the MLK fight and the immigration fights] are different, the politics of both things stay around like a stain… Once again Arizona has put themselves into this mix.

Immigration laws and racial profiling is happening right here and I think the border situation, not only with the U.S. and Mexico but the U.S. and Canada, on both sides is just out of control. It’s crazy.

I don’t know what the hell was on Gov. Jan Brewer’s mind or what contingent is behind her, but, you know, to make a decision like this and to be told to ignore the people who have been in this area on this earth the longest period of time. It just kind of resonates with me as being crazy.

Do you support an athletic or artistic boycott of Arizona until this gets settled?

Dave, you know I do. Artists and musicians can say we’re going to play Texas, El Paso, New Mexico, Albuquerque, and we gotta play L.A. But we’ll skip Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tucson and the like. But you know what this is really a challenge for: that’s Major League Baseball.

You’ve got nearly a third of the players that are Latino. If they don’t stand up to this bill, they will actually be validating the divide amongst Latinos [between documented and undocumented immigrants]. At the same time they’ll also be lining themselves right into the stereotype of what an athlete is if they don’t speak out: a high-priced slave that doesn’t say anything.

And, to me, it’s beyond just boycotting the All-Star game. What are those Latino players on the Diamondbacks going to do? What are the players going to say who go into Arizona to play against the Diamondbacks? What are they going to say and what are they going to do? Major League Baseball has to step up.

The NBA has very few players of Latino descent and [the Suns] are saying something. But Major League Baseball, if they don’t say anything, it’s crazy. The owners, the team, the league, and especially the players, whether they come from the Dominican Republic, whether they come from Venezuela, whether they come from Puerto Rico, they better step up.

If they don’t step up, the music industry, at least from my area, we’re going to clown them. For us to speak out against this law, and basketball stepping up, and Major League Baseball not stepping up at all?! Come on now, give me a break. And I know a lot of the cats they live in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico or whatever, there’s like a trillion years difference between them and their high salaries and the average people living in the streets.

They might build themselves a castle with a militia to protect them, but this is the time to unite yourself with the people and at least live in the legacy that [Major League Hall of Famer] Roberto Clemente set of uniting people just to protect against the nonsense that the other side can come up with. They need to know that it’s going to spread if they don’t come up and say something about it.

Any final thoughts? Perhaps about Major League Baseball pulling the All Star Game out of Phoenix?

At the end of the day man, sports is really not that important compared to people living their everyday lives. Say you have a Major League player, and he happens to play for another team, or he happens to play for the Diamondbacks and he gets pulled over because people think he’s an illegal immigrant. Then all of a sudden that’s when the “ish” finally hits the fan? Come on. This is beyond sports.

We want athletes to speak up because they have advantages. They have everyday coverage. They’re covered by a person that has a mic and a camera in their face, and this is the time to step up. Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star game out of Arizona should be the least of it.

Dave Zirin @'Edge of Sports'
Click here for a free download of Chuck D and DJ Spooky’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona.”

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BTW

Just checking the stats of 'Exile' related stuff that went up at (Son of) yesterday and to date just over 320 downloads w/ not one 'thank you'. Could be a new world record...

Willy Vlautin - Lean On Pete

Another great novel from the Richmond Fontaine frontman, reminding me more and more of Sam Shepard's writing (a compliment.) Looking forward to catching him at the end of the month.

A Cult Artist’s Cult Artist - Who’s Jackie Leven? Ask Johnny Dowd, or Ron Sexsmith, or Pere Ubu's David Thomas

I've been a devout fan of legendary Cleveland art-rockers Pere Ubu and their leader, David Thomas, since I first heard their debut album, The Modern Dance, on college radio in Winnipeg in 1978. The following year I invested with equal passion in lamentably unlegendary London art-rockers Doll by Doll and their leader, Jackie Leven, when I heard their brilliant (but not at all similar) debut album, Remember, on the same station.

I'm going to assume that you've heard of Pere Ubu and Thomas but not Doll by Doll and Leven (rhymes with "even"). The fact is, I've never met a Doll by Doll fan who wasn't also from Winnipeg, my hometown. It's a funny place, where odd things catch on that die aborning everywhere else. Does anyone remember a British prog band called Audience? No? Well, I swear they could sell out Winnipeg's downtown arena tomorrow on word of mouth. Ever seen Brian De Palma's 1974 glam-rock horror-musical, Phantom of the Paradise? Exhibitors couldn't get rid of it fast enough—except in Winnipeg, where it played to packed houses for four and a half months. Given half a chance and three Molsons, most middle-aged Winnipeggers can and will sing along to its awful Paul Williams soundtrack with 98 percent lyrical recall.

I realize these examples aren't buying me or my hometown any credibility, but the salient point here is that Winnipeg has a track record of pop-cultural idiosyncrasy. Even there, though, Doll by Doll was never a local phenom on the level of Audience or Phantom. They were embraced by a subset of the city's punk-rock/new-wave cognoscenti, but they seemed to have as many detractors as fans. I can still hear one of my high school buddies, a hulking, beer-fueled hockey monster whose concepts of the sublime overlapped with mine when it came to Pere Ubu, Can, and the Residents, denouncing Doll by Doll (in the charming parlance of our Neanderthal milieu) as a "fag band."

I knew he was being an idiot, but I also recognized what he resisted about Doll by Doll. Though the noisiest passages of Remember are a match for any Krautrock guitar meltdown, and Bill Price's abrasive production fit the cultural moment—he'd already worked with the Sex Pistols and the Clash—Doll by Doll were otherwise completely out of step with punk and new wave. God knows they were usually dark and moody enough in their lyric—violence, death, humiliation, heartbreak, the works—but Leven, an avid poetry reader since his teens, had no use for what he calls the "cartoon violence" of punk. "Especially on that first album, we were interested in exploring much heavier emotions than just a fixed adolescent sneer," he told me in an interview last month.

It didn't help that Doll by Doll weren't shy about flexing their technical chops, or that Leven's melodies had a sweeping, Morricone-ish scope—which, in combination with his unfashionably sophisticated song structures, invited fatal charges of prog influence. Then there was his voice: a rich, controlled, supremely undemocratic instrument that violated every tenet of the DIY ethos under which Gary Numan qualified as a singer.

Regardless, the first three Doll by Doll albums—Remember (1979), Gypsy Blood (1979) and Doll by Doll (1981)—are for my money among the three greatest and lostest of great lost rock albums. (Their fourth and final record, 1982's Grand Passion, isn't really up to snuff.)

When Rhino reissued Doll by Doll's catalog on CD in 2007, I learned from the liner notes that the band had polarized listeners in Britain as well. They'd attracted an ardent cult of fans and minority support in the music press, but punk tastemakers like the BBC's John Peel and rock critic Paul Morley positively loathed them. Their unclassifiablility is summed up by the best gigs they got as a supporting act: Devo and Hawkwind. The hard-drinking, hard-drugging Doll by Doll was fired from both tours, not for bad shows but for friction with the headliners. "One of the funniest things that ever happened to us was being thrown off the Devo tour," Leven writes. "They hated us, beyond endurance. Once we got over being stunned . . . we sat in our hotel in Newcastle and tried to trace where it started. [Guitarist] Jo [Shaw] decided it was because he went and asked them if they had any beer, because we'd already drunk ours at the Glasgow Apollo. And they were so wary of Jo they gave him all their beer. He came back laughing, but that was what did it."

History issued an unexpected aesthetic verdict in my favor in 2000, though, when Leven and David Thomas came together to form a short-lived touring project called UbuDoll. I actually didn't learn this till the news was seven years old, and when I first encountered it online, I entertained the possibility that I was dreaming—especially about their cover of the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," which is exactly the sort of absurd detail that brightens my occasional non-nightmare.

Long story short, the revelation inspired me to follow up on what Leven, now 59, had been up to since Doll by Doll fell apart in 1983. Upon answering that question, I've concluded that, note for note and album for album, he just might be the most underappreciated songwriter alive today.

 That said, I'd be hard-pressed to specify what genre he's been quietly excelling at. He recombines the raw materials of country, soul, blues, Celtic balladry, girl-group pop, art-rock, found sound, spoken word, and, once or twice and with quite respectable results, even hip-hop. Critics lazily tag his music either as "folk rock" or "Celtic soul," though Leven hates the first ("What the fuck is folk-rock about anything I've ever done?") and says the second is "better than nothing but probably doesn't do me any favors, given that I don't sound anything like Van Morrison."

His latest record, Gothic Road (Cooking Vinyl), a characteristically somber blend of folk rock and Celtic soul, is his 13th solo studio release since 1994's The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death—itself his first solo album since 1971's Control, recorded under the pseudonym John St. Field. That count excludes umpteen fine live recordings and Chip Pan Fire, a profanely hilarious 2007 spoken-word release whose stories are based in part on Leven's youth in the Scottish coastal region of Fife. But it includes the three albums he's recorded as Sir Vincent Lone, a persona he created in 2006 to absorb a surplus of songs that exceeded the carrying capacities of his record company. "My label, Cooking Vinyl, said that the dynamic laws of market phasing require 18 months to properly market a Jackie album," Leven explains. "But the songs are too good to waste, so I just hand them off to Vince, who unlike me can record an album in three or four days."

Over the years he's kept some diverse artistic company. In addition to David Thomas—who contributes to three tracks on the excellent 2000 release Defending Ancient Springs, including that improbable, wonderful Righteous Brothers cover—he's collaborated with alt-country hell-raiser Johnny Dowd, melancholy Canadian popster Ron Sexsmith, best-selling Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin (who's also from Fife), and poet Robert Bly, whom Leven has known since the 1970s, long before he came to fame as a guru of the "men's movement."

This is how the notoriously autocratic Thomas explains his creative relationship with Leven in an interview on Leven's 2004 concert video, The Meeting of Remarkable Men: "I envy his voice. He's a great singer, he's a great storyteller, and he's a man's man, and therefore he's a lot of fun to work with, because you get that male poetic bonding right away, and that's a lot of fun artistically. . . . He's got a deep connection with the land, with geography, with landscape, and we connected immediately on that level. And working with Jackie is . . . When you're working with people who are your equals, then you're willing to be submissive to their way. It's like dogs. Dogs immediately recognize where they are in a hierarchy. They don't object to being in a hierarchy. . . . If I walk into a room I know pretty much immediately where I fit into the hierarchy of other arty types. I know whether I'm an alpha male in that room or whether I'm somewhere else down the line."

As a cult artist's cult artist, Leven has been obliged to make his living by relentless touring, playing small club dates with just his guitar or with a drummer and keyboardist. Until recently it wasn't unusual for him to be on the road 200 days a year, though lately he's been touring less—he says he wants to "spend more time writing songs at home and less time pillaging minibars." When Leven leaves Hampshire, England, where he lives with longtime romantic partner Deborah Greenwood, it's mostly to play in Germany and Scandinavia, where his biggest fan base lives. "It seems that these countries with gloomy reputations are also the places where people think that what I do is funny," he says. Most of Leven's lyrics could compete with Townes Van Zandt's and the Handsome Family's for sunlit cheer, but he's also recorded a rousing cover of the country-and-western chestnut "I've Been Everywhere" rejiggered with German place names.

Doesn't it sometimes drive him crazy, doing all this good work to so little notice? "Yeah, sometimes it does," he allows. "But then, I know so many musicians who complain that they're bored out of their minds with what they do, and if they only they had a choice, they'd be doing something completely different. To which I say, 'What the fuck do you mean? Of course you've got a choice, you've just got to be willing to pay the price.'"

Which leads me to a sly little joke Leven inserted into the lyrics of "Last of the Badmen," an atmospheric downer on Gothic Road. "I hold an ace of sunlight / In this weatherbeaten game / It's the card that saved me / From the injuries of fame." It's sure to have them rolling in the aisles in Germany and Scandinavia.

Cliff Doerksen @'Chicago Reader'

The New War Between Science and Religion

Look at yourself after watching this...

...you are beautiful!

(Thanx Fifi!)

Twitter to the rescue

Great bit of Twitter toilet humour from Japan.

Seems a man was using the public facilities at a large camera store in Tokyo.

When he reached for the toilet paper he came up empty handed.

Major problem I'm sure you'd agree.

So he posted about his predicament on Twitter.

That's his tweet above.

Amazingly somebody saw it and slipped him a roll of toilet paper under the door.

Classic!

And who said social media was a waste of time?

@'BrandDNA'

If jumps racing continues, it will kill itself

Time for a little mathematics. Promise it won't be boring, rather it will frighten your socks off. It will explode the myth perpetrated by the jumps racing community that last week's Warrnambool carnival was a wonderful success.

Sirrocean Storm, for one, thought it a failure. His horrible, tortured death is proof enough. If you have the courage you can see it on YouTube but be warned it is sickening vision. But listen to the jumps racing community and the sycophants that trail around behind it, a swell time was had by all.

That irreverent newsletter, Jumping Informer reported that RVL chief executive Rob Hines praised the effectiveness of jumps racing's new obstacles following the three-day carnival.

"We are confident that the new obstacles are working and believe they have been a positive measure in improving the safety of jumps racing for riders and horses this season," Hines said. He added that six jumps races were conducted with one fatality. Hines also praised the Warrnambool Racing Club for its conduct of the carnival and thanked the fans of racing for supporting the three days.

"The racing was exciting across all three days and the atmosphere generated by the big crowds certainly added to the experience for those trackside," he said.

Oh, yes it was a ripper all right. Sydney's megaphone Richie Callander thought it the best darn thing he had seen outside a city racetrack. All the journalists raved about it. Veteran Herald Sun racing writer Tim Habel gave the meeting an overwhelming pass mark.

Well, let's do some serious analysis rather than cheerleading. A little mathematics. If one death per six races is a pass mark, a statistic that more than pleased Hines, the man who runs Victorian racing, then we should apply the formula to races across Australia yesterday and to be run today and tomorrow.

The Australian Racing Board website lists 14 meetings around the country for a total of 113 races over the three days. If it is acceptable for a horse to die on Australian racetracks every six races then the fatality count come tomorrow night will be near enough to 19 horses. By any measure that would be a disaster and the sport of racing under national review.

So Warrnambool's carnival does not look quite as wonderful as the jumping people would have you think. Let's look at it another way then. In those six jumps races 49 horses went around, all or part of the course. So Racing Victoria thinks one death in 49 starters is an acceptable ratio. Apply that formula across the races yesterday, today and tomorrow where the ARB website tells us about 1500 horses (allowing for scratchings and emergencies) could have gone round.

The one-in-49 formula so admired at Warrnambool would bring a fatality count over three days of at least 30 horses. Give it six months and there would be about three horses left alive in the country.

To suggest that one fatality per 49 horses is acceptable really does underline that racing uses horses for no other reason than to make money no matter what the consequences to the horses.

Add in the factor that the ARB has collapsed under the lobby of breeders, owners and auction houses to increase the legal use of the whip to about 17 strikes per horse per race, jockeys will have been entitled collectively to strike horses 25,500 times over three days. How do you reckon the sport is going?

The racing industry is uncomfortable that you are told this information because it challenges the idyllic environment in which it seeks to portray racing. The Melbourne Cup carnival of pretty girls and fast horses, bush racing with its earthy people and picturesque courses, of jumps racing with its brave animals and brilliant horsemen and women. It is an illusion, a public relations trick.

If racing really wanted you to know what happens on the track, it would not have put up a sign at Warrnambool that read in part: "A person may only take images of activities at the racecourse for personal use only and must not make available any images for commercial exploitation, sale or distribution by any persons unless accredited by the RVL."

Even that heavy handed attempt at damage control could not stop the public exposure of the grotesque vision of Sirrocean Storm, back leg swinging at nearly 360 degrees, being dragged to his death.

Patrick Smith @'The Australian'

The sickening demise of Sirrocean Storm 

(Thanx Leisa!)

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Cocaine Treatment & The Stroop Test

@'Addiction Inbox'

Jackie Leven - Single Father & Working Man's Love Song

A live appearance on late-night Italian music show 'Taratata' around 2000. Two songs, 'Single Father' & 'Working Man's Love Song',' and some typical deadpan Leven verbals with comedian presenter Gene Gnocchi.
His new album 'Gothic Road' is as usual superb. This man deserves to be so much better known, but isn't that always the way?

Cigarette Butts Make Steel Stronger

This statistic is just mind-blowing: every year, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded.

Given that just one butt with a little leftover tobacco attached is enough to poison a liter of water and kill half the fish living in it, a few trillion could potentially do a lot of environmental damage.

Efforts to recycle butts are few and far between, probably because one person doesn't tend to smoke them by the thousand -- and even a pack's worth of spent smokes only make a tiny, insignificant-looking pile of trash.

But boy do they pack a punch. Cigarettes contain all kinds of foul chemicals, including cancer-causing benzenes and heavy metals, to say nothing of the toxicity of nicotine, a natural pesticide produced by tobacco plants. When smoked, at those lovely bits go into the butt (and your lungs, too).

With that in mind, a group of Chinese researchers set out to see if this noxious brew had any beneficial applications in the industrial world -- something that, if it existed, would give people a reason to recycle the butts.

Oddly enough they did. Chemical extracts from cigarette butts were found to bolster N80 steel -- commonly used in the oil and gas industry -- against corrosion.

The results were pretty dramatic. In a near-boiling solution of 10 and 15 percent hydrochloric acid (HCl; same stuff as stomach acid), the cigarette-derived cocktail reduce corrosion by between 90 and 94 percent.

Is this a perfect idea, using cigarette butts to help shore up industrial steel? Maybe, maybe not. It's possible that a big chemical company could come along and find a cheap way to produce this protective coating that further damages the environment.

Interestingly though, the team led by Jun Zhao of Xi’an Jiaotong University found that nicotine was among the active ingredients protecting the steel. So if people are going to smoke anyway, we may as well stop their polluting ways and help out steelworkers in the process.

Michael Reilly @'Discovery News'

Via: American Chemical Society 

(Thanx BillT!) 

HA! As a Chelsea fan put it...

"...this blog moves faster than Theo Walcott on amphetamines!"

Johann Hari: This is not what the British people voted for

We are all supposed to now laze back and watch the latest Richard Curtis film: Politics, Actually, a charming tale of two 43-year-old rich men who have to run Britain together despite having different colour ties and eccentric armies of supporters tossing buns at each other in the background. Larks and hijinks no doubt ensue. But before you reach for the popcorn, can I briefly refer back to the will of the British people, before our ballots are so casually binned?

David Cameron went into this election with every conceivable advantage – a half-mad Labour leader randomly insulting his core vote; a comically biased media; a massive financial advantage over his rivals, flowing from a tax haven in Belize; 13 years out of power; a major recession – and yet he got only 36 per cent of the electorate to endorse his vision. To be fair, let's assume the 3 per cent who voted Ukip also broadly prefer it, and call it 39 per cent. Against this, 55 per cent of us voted for parties of the (relative) centre-left – the same proportion who say they want a country that is less unequal and less unfair. In any other European country, where they have democratic voting systems, it wouldn't even have been close. This would have been a centre-left landslide, with Cameron humiliated.

Elections are supposed to be an opportunity for the people to express the direction in which they want the country to travel. By that standard, this result is an insult. Don't fall for the people who say the Lib Dem vote was "ambiguous": a YouGov poll just before the election found that Lib Dem voters identified as "left-wing" over "right-wing" by a ratio of 4:1. Only 9 per cent sided with the right. Lib Dem voters wanted to stop Cameron, not install him. So before you start squabbling about the extremely difficult parliamentary arithmetic, or blaming the stupidly tribal Labour negotiators for their talks with the Lib Dems breaking down, you have to concede: the British people have not got what they voted for.

So what kind of government will we now get? There are two possibilities – and nobody (including Cameron and Clegg) knows which it will be yet. The first is a muzzled and castrated Conservatism, where the Lib Dems stop the Tories doing their worst, and smuggle some progress under the radar. There is some evidence for this. As part of the coalition deal, Clegg got the Tories to ditch a few of their ugliest policies – like giant inheritance tax cuts for double-millionaires – and got them to accept some excellent Lib Dem ones. Schools will now get a big cash bonus for taking in poor children, reversing the social apartheid in our playgrounds. There will now be considerably higher taxes on Capital Gains – the shares and second homes owned by the rich. Planes, the most environmentally destructive form of travel, will now face higher taxes. It's a shaming indictment of New Labour that they didn't do all this years ago.

Clegg deserves real credit for these changes – although it will be very hard to get any of this past the parliamentary Conservative party, who are now even more right-wing than before. To pluck just one example: an incredible 91 per cent of them don't believe man-made global warming exists. This oddball rabble are five times bigger than the Lib Dems, despite getting only 13 per cent more support.

Which leads to the second possibility: that the Lib Dems can only splash a few yellow dots on to a deep-blue juggernaut. This is what a lot of the Conservative right are gleefully anticipating. Fraser Nelson, hardcore Thatcherite editor of The Spectator, boasts this will be "a radical reforming Tory government with Lib Dem backing vocals". Indeed, it may be worse. Startlingly, during the negotiations, the Lib Dems actually talked the Tories out of their commitment to ring-fence spending on the NHS, dragging them to the right. Nelson smirked: "You gotta love these Lib Dems." In this vision, Clegg's sweet smile makes it easier for Cameron to drop the Rohypnol into our drinks.

In this febrile Dave New World, the Labour leadership election matters even more. Cameron and Osborne are committed to turning off the stimulus and cut-cut-cutting now, even though we aren't safely out of recession: check out the history books for 1937 to see what happens next. All their instincts are to cut services for people at the bottom and the middle. So long as the President of Argentina doesn't invade the Falklands, they must be odds-on to lose the next election – provided Labour gets this right.

So before the personality parade begins, Labour needs to ask – what did it get right over the past 13 years, and what did it get wrong? The right-wing policies pushed by the Mandelson Tendency that were supposed to make them "electable" were, in the end, albatrosses dragging their support down – from the City-licking that made us so vulnerable to the crash, to the one million killed in Iraq. By contrast, it was the true Labour achievements that remained popular: redistributive tax credits, doubled spending on the NHS, the minimum wage.

David Miliband is the candidate of the people who poisoned the New Labour years with right-wing fantasies. Peter Mandelson is merrily pushing him as the Blairite who can most attract wealthy donors and remains unrepentant about Iraq. His brother, Ed, is much more appealing: he gets global warming more than almost any other British politician, and injected some social democratic steroids into the Labour manifesto. Yet both Milibands – raised in a cerebral, highly political family – speak with a peevish anti-populism that doesn't communicate well.

While everyone is concentrating on the drama of two brothers standing against each other, there's a family battle that should matter more. It looks like Yvette Cooper is standing aside for her husband, Ed Balls – but she is a far more impressive candidate, and should be urgently pressed to reconsider. The politics of the next few years will feature a bunch of wealthy men shutting down SureStart centres, ending Child Trust Funds, sandpapering down tax credits, and increasing unemployment. Who better to oppose that than a down-to-earth young mum who has herself spent time on the dole when she got ill?

Cooper is rooted in the Labour tradition – her grandfather was a miner, her father was a trade unionist – but she has the ability to speak beyond it to the real Middle England, who earn on average £23k a year. In government, she piloted some of its most popular progressive policies, from SureStart to free fruit for all schoolchildren to tax credits. She defended them on TV in the election better than anyone else I saw: she's clever (a First from Oxford) but entirely normal, an unusual combination. Labour hameorraghed female voters at this election, while women in all parties were relegated to the role of silent beaming wives. It ended with a cabinet that has only one more woman than Afghanistan's. Isn't Cooper a great attention-grabbing antidote? Or do we still live in a 1950s world of brilliant women stepping aside for their less impressive husbands?

But whoever Labour chooses, it looks like we are about to face years of a ConDem coalition we didn't vote for and don't want. I hope I'm wrong and Clegg really will tame the Tories – but I'm braced for this movie turning into One Shotgun Wedding and A Bloody Long Funeral.

 HERE