But we can all be winners like him.

Lets all create bank accounts named after our cats and dogs in Monaco and direct any payments we receive into them.

When we’re found out and brought to court, we can just say "we’re thick" and "someone else handles our money" and we’ll get off scott-free.

After this formality, we can make an awards ceremony like acceptance speech thanking all of our collaborators, our friends, our husbands and wives, and our children.

When the dust has settled a bit, we can deliberately leak all of the extortionate legal costs footed by the taxpayer to induce outrage and disgust at the taxman for even attempting to address our plainly cynical treatment of the tax system.

Once everyone is on our side spitting in rage and indignation at the needless and worthless case, we can retreat home and laugh at all of the above over a drink.

Finally, when we wake up the next day and look at the newspapers we will all undoubtedly dominate, one of us will be championed as the next England manager.

Today two red tops carried pictures of a couple of England players laughing, and expressed outrage that they could laugh at a moment such as this. Clearly if they had any respect for their fans and their country they would wait at least a week before cracking any jokes. Meanwhile one of the narratives to grip the country is that England failed to get very far because their players are too rich, spoiled and pampered. “Pampered Spoiled and Mutinous…” boomed one daily mail, “footballers now think they are bigger than their country”. According to the Express they are “pampered sloths”.

It all reminds me a bit of my dad  – a good lefty who unfortunately buys into some of the abundance is bad for you crap – telling me that the reason Pele got so good was that he trained without football boots. If this were the case you would think some other coaches and youth development schemes might have caught onto it. And the idea that England failed because their stars have too much cash and bling is equally wrongheaded. At the very least, it is difficult to reconcile with the piss poor performance of teams from Africa,with the exception of Ghana. It is also worth noting, after Germany gave England a footballing lesson, that the wages in the Bundesliga, though not as high as the premiership are comparably astronomical. Compared with the £1.3bn wage bill of the premiership, the Bundesliga  – which has slightly fewer clubs  – spent £684m. Does anybody really believe that somebody on 30k a week leads a substantially different lifestyle from somebody on 50k?

The idea that England’s players failed because they are pampered is in fact a logical extension of the old myth – put about by clergymen, Neitzche and many other dickheads – that suffering is good for you and makes you stronger. And in a period of enforced austerity, this kind of rhetoric really does need to be opposed.

Because the thing about the “austerity ethic” is that it might start at the top, but it soon gets projected onto those least able to afford cuts in their living standards. The “new age of austerity” might start with David Cameron et al. rebuffing a ministerial pay rise, but it ends with civil servants on 21k facing a real terms pay cut of nearly 7.5 per cent. In much the same way, Willie Walsh made a great show of giving up a months pay before attacking the pay, conditions and jobs of those earning far, far less. The fact we have a Tory  health minister who say that recessions can be good for you because people “eat less rich food” should alert us to how this “virtue in poverty” bollocks can be used to justify attacks on working people’s living standards.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see the wage packets of footballers being squeezed, but only so that their enormous earnings can be redistributed to ordinary people. And let us not think for a second that taking their money away will somehow improve their moral fiber, or indeed their ability to kick a ball.

As the London Review of Books celebrates its 30th birthday today, JW Arble picks out ten of his favourites from the new online archive

Until I read Stefan Collini’s essay on the state of British universities I didn’t know what they were for, why so many of them seem to be in a mess or what I should be aiming to get from them. (Unfortunately, like the poet’s 1963, this all came too late to make much difference to my life. I’d already left.) Though a few years old, the article is still required reading for current university students.

The original ‘snark’: although James Wood’s essay ‘Hysterical Realism’ – a review of Zadie Smith’s first novel ‘White Teeth’ is not in the LRB’s archive, his short review of her second novel ‘Autograph Man’ is. Anyone interested in writing literary fiction (and being reviewed by the LRB) would be well advised to avoid the errors Britain’s arch literary critic usually seizes upon…

If you want to know what Britain will look like under the Tories, Ross McKibbin has a good line in prophesy…

Some of the most thorough, and by far the most amusing, analysis of the banking crisis I’ve read came from John Lanchester. His articles Cityphilia, It’s Finished, Cityphobia and Bankocracy are much easier than slogging through Robert Peston’s blog.

Booker winner Anne Enright’s diary, ‘Disliking the McCann’s’ drew tabloid opprobrium when published but was funnier than the satire I saw in the comedy clubs at the time. It will make you cackle, then it will make you feel guilty and persuade you to go and do something more useful with your time…

Less easy reading is the fallout from 9/11 where Mary Beard’s suggestion that many people ‘had the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming’ led to months of angry exchanges in the letter pages.

Frank Kermode has been writing reviews for over 70 years and is arguably the best known living literary critic. His review of Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a typically sensitive and nuanced reading.

‘Unemployment, of course, has gone up, not down. Disparities between the regional components of the economy have grown. We are manufacturing only a little more than in 1979 and investment today is little higher than it was then. International comparisons are grim. In Japan manufacturing production increased over the same period by 38 per cent, in the USA by 25 per cent, in Italy by more than 15 per cent. Britain has managed only a 6 per cent increase. Details on productive investment are just as discouraging. The result is that we have produced less than most of our major competitors, exported less, and grown more slowly… we are top of the league only for our capacity to import and to create the worst balance of payments deficit in our history.’ No ― not an attack on New Labour written some time since the crash ― but Gordon Brown on Thatcherism in 1989…

Reading his essay on Bill Clinton it’s no wonder that the younger, more sceptical Christopher Hitchens, is so missed.

And some joyful nostalgia ― Ian Hamilton on World Cup 1998 ― or at least on the hairstyles of World Cup 1998.  ‘…another thing we’ll never know – for which, perhaps, much thanks – is what Gazza would have done about the hair thing. After all, he has strong claims to be thought of as a pioneer of trichological neurosis. Over the years, he has been wavy, close-cropped, bald, even bewigged. When at Lazio, he appeared briefly in a Roberto Baggio-style hair-piece, or tail-piece. For Euro ‘96, he showed up with a bleached convict cut. In 1990, he warmed all English hearts by tugging at Ruud Gullitt’s dreadlocks, and some of his most ghastly japes have been to do with hair: shaving off the eyebrows of a blotto drinking pal, putting shaving foam into a team-mate’s kettle, and so on. All in all, hair troubles Gazza, as it now seems to trouble so many of his colleagues…’

Check out JW Arble’s interview with senior editor, Paul Myerscough, to mark the 30th birthday of LRB. Here’s to the next thirty years!

If, like me, you are a  football fan then you will already be getting vague itchings of world cup fever. Yet, as things draw nearer another feeling may come over you. It will be a feeling of dread for the ridiculous spectacle with which England begins every match.

At the world cup, every national anthem has the potential to be silly and tasteless. The music is poor and players look embarassed. Yet we  in England  have particular reason to feel hard done by when it comes  to the anthem foisted upon us. The anthems of other countries do, in  some way or another, tend to celebrate the nation at large, and the  people who constitute it. By contrast our national anthem – or at  least the bit that gets sung – invokes nobody but the monarch,  as  though she were the nation. It is, in other words, predicated on a  conception of nationhood which was anachronistic even in the 19th  century.

But do not fear,  for there is potentially an alternative afoot. Given  that the language of patriotism has long been dominated by the right,  it is quite remarkable that there exists an ‘unofficial’ anthem that  is as radical as it is popular. Jeruasalem is a song that is unlike other anthems. Most national anthems are intrinsically conservative  insofar as they celebrate what is. By contrast Jerusalem does not celebrate the England that we see before us. Rather it is a hymn to what might be built and what might be done. Love for one’s country is invoked as a call to action, as a call for change.

There is indeed a certain backward looking element to it. Yet this  should be understood within the traditions English radicalism at the  time. Amongst the chartists in the 1830s and 1840s, amongst the  radical clubs and associations of the 1790s and many before them it  was common to invoke a semi-mythical pre-Norman England. I’m doing so radical reformers were able to look so far back that they could look  forward: Onto the ancient Anglo-Saxon society – for which knowledge was scarce – such men were able to project their vision for how they wished society to be organised in the future.  It is within this  tradition that I think Jerusalem stands.

There is one final context-specific reason why this song strikes a  chord.  It is that  today people rarely conceive of  building  the new Jerusalem in England. One part of the left has  bought into exagerrated pragmatism – to the idea of making the best of things  within the existing parameters, and all the conservativism that this implies.  Meanwhile on the ‘real’ left, revolutionary change is to rarely  imagined as a potentially british experience. Similarly, liberal gap year students seem to love the poor as long as they are somewhat exotic. Speaking for myself I know that before I went to university I  had read more than one bio of Che but could not name anybody who had  lead the chartists.

So who will join me in my crusade to make Jerusalem the world cup anthem?

 20 years ago today 96 Liverpool football fans were crushed to death in Sheffield’s Hillsborough stadium, during an FA Cup Semi-Final game with Nottingham Forest. The disaster had a huge impact on modern football, transforming the nature of football grounds, and consigning terraces to history. It has also had a profound and lasting impact on the people of Liverpool, to an extent which is hard to describe to someone outside of the city.

Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The most immediate feeling around discussions of Hillsborough is grief. Horror at the scale of the human tragedy, that an afternoon at the football could result in so many deaths, but also the inescapable fact that so many knew those involved. 96 people is a huge number in a place like Liverpool, and many people you meet will know people who were there, or killed. Liverpool’s current captain Steven Gerrard, had a cousin (aged 10) killed on that day.

The media has been packed with this over the past few days (though my experience of it may be skewed by living here and watching football). The sense of grief has been visibly communicated with endless interviews with players past and present (the media is full of players from that golden generation, and it seems like every single one has been forced to offer an opinion), and families of the dead. These have been impressive, and moving, there’s no need to cynically deny that. But there’s clearly been something missing.

The slogan since 1989 has been ‘Justice for the 96′, yet you’d be forgiven for asking ‘what justice?’ The coverage zooms in on these banners, but never explains what they mean. Martin Kelner in the Guardian rightly attacks the ‘oh dearism’ of this. The concentration on the tragic event; the grief without the grievance. Because if you don’t understand where the grievance is, why we want justice, and not just memorial, then scousers really are just the sentimental whiners, wallowing in ‘vicarious victimhood’ that Boris Johnson accused us of being.

If it weren’t for this grievance then Hillsborough wouldn’t be remembered as it is. The role of the police on that day is generally thought to have contributed heavily to the death toll. The smear story by the Sun added insult to injury. The events of that day showed a callous disdain for the working class people who had travelled to Sheffield to support their team. The distortions and lies that followed sought to compound the image of scousers as feckless and violent. The city had that had bought the brunt of much of the recession of the 80s was yet again in the news.

Coming from Liverpool, but having lived away, I am consistently shocked by the misunderstandings about 15^th April 1989. People so often say things like ‘no smoke without fire’, regarding the Sun reports, or have even wilder misconceptions about hooliganism and violence. The fight for justice means a lot of things, but if nothing else it should be a fight for a true accounting of the day’s events. This isn’t the place to offer it, but unless we understand that Hillsborough is about a serious injustice, about real grievance, not just blind grief, we will not understand its significance.

 Update: Matt Cookson in today’s Socialist Worker on some more of the specifics of the cover up.

I am often told that my love of football is one of the most incongruous things about me. I’m never sure why this is, maybe I’ll write a blog about it some time, but for now it allows me to spot ridiculous stories like this one.

Everton footballer Victor Anichebe was arrested in Knutsford in Cheshire whilst looking in a jewellery shop window. Some facts:

1. Anichebe is a Liverpool raised Nigerian 20 year old.
2. He is a mid-level premiership footballer, presumably with a five-figure-a-week income.
3. Knutsford is an affluent Cheshire town frequented by footballers and local celebrities.
4. Anichebe was on crutches at the time of the incident.
5. Cheshire Police initially justified the arrest because he was ‘acting suspiciously’.

Clearly, there are police officers in Cheshire Police Force who believe it is suspicious for a young black man to look in the window of an expensive jewellers, and that this is enough to arrest and detain them. I’d suggest this was institutional racism but, y’know, that’s so 1993…