Blunt v Bryant: The bout of the century

As if January wasn't miserable enough, we've now had to sit through an exchange of open letters between James Blunt and Chris Bryant, the main upshot of which has been to undo all that good work Blunt had done by being charming on Twitter.

Because your life is too short, here's what you didn't bother reading:

Bryant: It's nice that Eddie Redmayne has an Oscar nomination, but isn't it a bit unfair that people like him and James Blunt from more comfortable backgrounds are able to build creative careers

Blunt: You are a classist gimp, and a wazzock, because it was harder for me having rich parents not easier, somehow

Bryant: I bought one of your records and I wasn't saying it was wrong for posh people to be working in the arts, just that we should make sure people from poorer backgrounds get their chance too

For all his good-natured jokes at his own expense on Twitter, James is so incredibly touchy about anyone pointing out that when you come from a family who can help you out as you're getting going, it's a lot easier to make a name for yourself. See also Doherty, Dido, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

Roger Daltrey is an angry man

Roger Daltrey has announced that he will never vote for Labour again.

Why, Roger? Is it because a man with three houses voting for a party of social justice might be too much irony for you?

Depressingly, no: it turns out that it's foreign people upsetting him:

I will never, ever forgive the Labour Party for allowing this mass immigration with no demands on what people should be paid.

Didn't Labour introduce the minimum wage which, pretty much, is a demand on what people shou... oh, hang on; he hasn't finished.

I will never forgive them for destroying the jobs of my mates because they allowed their jobs to be undercut with stupid thinking on Europe, letting them (immigrants) all in, so they can live 10 to a room working for Polish wages.

This might sound unlikely, but it turns out that Pete Townshend has been replaced with ten Poles. Shocking.

I could pick Daltrey's argument apart, but frankly, Daniel Knowles dismissed this tired old whinge in the Telegraph pretty comprehensively:

Here's what the Migration Advisory Committee goes on to say:
But this possible displacement of British workers only holds for those migrants who have been here for under five years. Both EU and non-EU migrants who have been in the UK for over five years are not associated with displacement of British born workers. Between 1995 and 2010 employment of such working age migrants rose by approximately 2.1 million. The associated displacement of British born workers was, on our own calculations, around 160,000 of the additional 2.1 jobs held by migrants, or about 1 in 13.
[...]
There are some reasons to worry about immigration. The evidence is ambiguous, but it's not unreasonable to think some foreigners may be coming to claim welfare. There is also a cultural argument, and while I wouldn't make it, not everyone who does is a racist or a bigot; Ed West frequently makes the case convincingly. But while it is reasonable to be worried about immigration, it is simply not true to suggest that "foreigners are stealing our jobs" or that immigration is responsible for unemployment. And those who do, in defiance of the evidence, make me wonder about their real motivations.

Even someone who worries that perhaps foreign people are coming to the UK to get access to cheap-ish prescriptions and IDS' welfare disaster doesn't buy that they're stealing jobs, and wonders if there might not be some sort of other agenda at work here.

But Roger doesn't have a problem with the foreign people he's singling out and unfairly claiming are driving British nationals into penury:

"I've got nothing against the Poles at all but that was a political mistake and it made me very angry and the people who get it in the neck are the immigrants and it's not their fault."

You know the best way to help those people who are given a hard time? How about not standing up and yelling that they're undercutting wages and causing mass unemployment when it really isn't true, Roger?

Interestingly, Daltrey doesn't seem to have a problem with the bits of the EU settlement which made it as easy and cost-effective for The Who to play Paris and Amsterdam as Birmingham and Glasgow.

Wolf howls

Sure, this is a week old, but it looks likely that Patrick Wolf won't have calmed down yet. He was onstage, doing his high-end Mika thing, at a Köln pop festival, when somebody switched off the PA earlier than he would have liked.

He had a chuckle, and it was all soon forgotten.

Oh, hang on: no, he didn't:



To be fair, it does look like it started out a little tongue-in-cheek. Started out.

[via Stereogum