Dave Howells

2012-01-25T12:49:00.000-08:00

2012-01-23T06:02:00.000-08:00

2012-01-17T04:37:00.000-08:00

2011-12-22T03:57:00.000-08:00

2011-12-22T03:45:00.000-08:00

"Farewell to the NHS" Dave

Still can't believe the Lib Dems voted this through the Commons, let alone the Lords. Don't get me started on Shirely f-ing Wiliams... I too, will abstain. ABSTAIN! After all that...

Halloween (+ what I'd probably look like if it wasn't for the NHS) Dave

Did this one for Halloween... and without wanting go all maudlin and morbid about the whole thing, the bit in the brackets is probably true, and without the good old NHS, I probably wouldn't be here to sporadically update this blog. Imagine that...

Merry F*cking Christmas Dave

another sketchbook installment

2011-11-25T07:30:00.000-08:00

latest sketchbook scribbles

2011-08-26T05:17:00.000-07:00

some more broken Britons

2011-08-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

2011-08-11T11:47:00.000-07:00

2011-07-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

2011-07-17T15:29:00.000-07:00

2011-07-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

2011-07-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

2011-07-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

More people:

2011-07-01T03:35:00.000-07:00

Some more austerity Britons:

2011-06-30T03:37:00.000-07:00

More sketchbook doodles:

2011-06-28T16:29:00.000-07:00

A very special little lady

2011-06-01T03:46:00.000-07:00

More tube sketches:

2011-05-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

More doodles:

2011-05-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

Me, me, me, me, me...

2011-05-25T08:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, a while ago, in a shameful, deplorable act of self-indulgence, I drew a picture of myself (to use an online avatar). Avid followers of my moaning on twitter will notice that I tweak it a bit every now and then, so rather than leave them gathering dust on my hard-drive I figured I'd slap them up on here with a bit of an explanation. So without further ado, I give you...*drum-roll* me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me and ME!

Slick Rick Dave.

Slightly-more-dishevelled Dave.

Pirate Dave.

(Because pirates are just cool, alright?)

Terminator Dave.

(Big nods to the Governor of California and whoever designed the cover for Mark Kermode's excellent book, It's Only A Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive. Go read it. It's funny.)

One-of-the-blokes-from-Kiss Dave.

League Against Cruel Sports Dave.

(To show my support for them and to mark the fifth anniversary of the Hunting Act.)

"I *heart* the NHS" Dave.

(Sort of says it on the tin this one. Emergency Operation, Saturday 28th May 2011)

"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left to fight for it" - Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS.

Trying-not-to-moan-too-much-about-the-spongers'-wedding Dave.

(Originally inspired by this great photograph of the legendary Bill Hicks, I put this up on the day of the royal wedding as a pathetic means of protest.)

Yes to AV Dave.

I voted Yes; most people didn't. Still a little bit annoyed about that.

Criminal Dave.

I-(allegedly)-had-a-seven-month-affair-with-Big-Brother-"Star"-Imogen-Thomas-and-took-out-a-super-injunction-to-stop-anyone-finding-out-about-it-[edit]-plus-blimey-it-turns-out-I'd-been-having-an-eight-year-affair-with-my-sister-in-law-as-well Dave.

Another sketchbook scrawl:

2011-05-19T02:44:00.000-07:00

Bloke asleep on the tube

2011-05-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

Banks too big to fail

2011-03-11T11:52:00.000-08:00

Another one for Liberal Conspiracy to go with this article by Lydia Prieg from the New Economics Foundation, entitled "Why is nothing being done about banks still "too big to fail"? A damn good question. There's a lively comment thread rumbling on underneath it as well that's worth a look.

The sacred cow: splice, dice and if that fails blow the s**t out of it

2011-02-26T01:34:00.000-08:00

Had an illustrated go at the Tories for longer than 140 characters over at Labour Uncut, in aid of #saveourNHS. Have a read, and then maybe sign this petition? Just an idea.

What Tony Blair did in three words, “Education, education, education”, David Cameron did in three letters: “N.H.S”. That was how he set his stall out at the last election. If they couldn’t get away with being “the party of the NHS”, try though they might, at least they could be “the party that wouldn’t fuck it up”.

Before 1997, Labour had a similar problem with the economy, so New Labour was born and the party was rebranded as one that was pro-business and “extremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Labour committed to stick to the Tories’ spending plans during its first two years in office. There. Done. Now the country could exorcise itself from the grip of the Tories without having to worry that a Labour chancellor might give the Treasury PIN number to too many poor people, or that the wheels would come off UK Plc.

In 2010, the Tory problem was being trusted full stop. But they were particularly vulnerable to accusations that they might go selling off “the family silver”, especially our treasured National Health Service. Because, after all, when it comes to flogging off state-owned assets to the private sector at bargain basement prices – be they railways, telephone networks, council houses, or (more recently) forests – the Conservatives have got form. So, in a move straight out of the New Labour playbook, the Tories said they would stick to Labour’s spending plans, funding for the NHS would be maintained at its existing levels (in-line with inflation, no less), and there would be no more costly “top-down reorganisations”. Oh, and Dave changed their logo to a tree and rode around on a bike a bit. There. Done.

Then came the credit crunch, a global financial crisis, the mother of all recessions and the near implosion of market capitalism. And, all of a sudden, sticking to Labour’s spending plans didn’t seem like quite the stroke of genius it once had done. Much better to abandon the “don’t scare the horses approach” – seeing as they’d already bolted anyway – and opt instead for a public sector slash and burn under the cloak of “deficit reduction”. Wrap that in the rhetoric of their tried and tested “Labour profligacy with the public purse” yarn and some nursery school household budget comparisons, and there you had it. The only hard bit would be keeping George Osborne’s poisonous smirk under wraps while they did it.

But on the NHS – on the face of it at least – Cameron didn’t dare budge. Come election time that poster was everywhere, with Cameron all polished and porcelain-like, straining every sinew to do “earnest and reassuring” next to the words “We’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS”. The Conservatives had a “simple, practical, common sense, human understanding” of this “fantastic and precious fact of British life” we were told, and any Tory who said otherwise got a very public beat-down (recall Daniel Hannan’s “the NHS is a 60-year mistake” gem). Britain was broken, apart from the NHS, was Cameron’s line.

Cut to the present day and, having stood for election on the promise of “no more costly top-down reorganisations”, the NHS is now braced for “the most radical restructuring since its inception”. A mere two pages in the Tory manifesto have miraculously morphed into a bill nearly 370 pages in length – four times the size of the one which originally founded the NHS.

Doctors, nurses and trade-unions have described the reforms as “extremely risky” and “potentially disastrous”. A recent open letter to the BMA from doctors adversely criticising its placid acquiescence to the government’s plans warned that the reforms “will fundamentally undermine the founding principles of the NHS by creating a much more expensive and inequitable market-based system”. Uber-Blairite turned Tory inequality Tsar, Alan pro-private sector Milburn, predicts “anarchy”. New Tory MP and former GP, Dr Sarah Wollaston, has likened the reforms to “tossing a grenade” into the NHS (specifically, the primary care trusts). The British Medical Journal has described the plans as “mad”. While The Lancet predicts a “catastrophic break-up” and “the end of the NHS” and just this week it has been reported that 50,000 NHS staff are set to lose their jobs.

I’m no doctor, but this doesn’t sound like the sticking plasters on the status quo that Cameron campaigned on. This is a deliberate car crash and the private sector are the ambulance chasers. All of which while the NHS is enjoying record-level approval ratings.

Cameron has claimed that these reforms, rather than being a “top-down reorganisation”, will actually be “bottom up” – a semantic side-step that reveals him for the dodgy used-ideology salesman that he really is. He will probably describe the effects as “modernising”, “redistributive” and “decentralising”. But, make no mistake, the grenade that will do this is being thrown from the top.

Cameron knew he couldn’t sell messing with the NHS. So he didn’t try. But whether the Tories like it or not – and most of them almost certainly don’t – the NHS is a sacred cow in the national consciousness; a living, breathing monument to post-war idealism that said yes, in one sense, Dave’s right, “we are all in this together”. Sure, it’s far from perfect – as the disturbing report last week from the health service ombudsman highlighted. But, even so, any inkling that Cameron was going to send it off in a meat wagon to be sliced, diced, and sold off as happy meals to the private sector and Cameron would have been dismissed by the electorate quicker than he could have removed the wisteria from his chimney.

“If not now, when”? Cameron has asked. How about when you’ve won an election for starters, and how about when you’ve done it on the promise of “the most radical top-down reorgnisation of the NHS since its inception”? A structural reorganisation might not hit the same raw nerve as the trebling of tuition fees or the scrapping of EMA, but it should. If anything deserves to be Cameron’s poll tax, it’s this.

Another dispatch from the underground...

2011-02-22T16:34:00.000-08:00

'nother page of doodles:

2011-02-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

Scrawled some more strangers

2011-01-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

Another helping from the sketchbook:

2011-01-12T12:02:00.000-08:00

More doodles of random strangers:

2011-01-11T13:21:00.000-08:00

Doodled some more people:

2011-01-11T06:09:00.000-08:00

UKUncut #payday protests pic

2010-12-21T05:11:00.000-08:00

A wee illustration done recently for Liberal Conspiracy to accompany a post about the UKUncut #payday protests.

More underground doodles:

2010-12-21T04:44:00.000-08:00

No famous folk/rock musicians and/or semi-amusing anecdotes to go with this one, unfortunately.

Latest sketchbook page (featuring one of the blokes from Turin Brakes, a bit):

2010-12-13T12:04:00.000-08:00

You get some added fun with this one because there's a bit of a game you can play with it. It's called Spot One Of The Blokes From Turin Brakes. I was sat opposite them for all of two stops on the underground the other day and I just about managed to do a quick half-sketch of one of them (Gale, I think) before I had to jump off and change trains. It was a bit of a weird moment because, like them, I also had my guitar with me, so it felt like - what with them being a fairly successful folk/rock duo and all - there was a sort of unspoken acknowledgement between the three of us that I probably knew who they were. And not only that, I kept looking up at them trying to draw them, which I think freaked one of them out because he started looking at me as though I was a bit shifty and hid behind his guitar case. So there you go Turin Brakes, not shifty, and not some weirdo fan-boy dumbstruck by the glow of your semi-celebrity status (although I did recognise you and have since used that fleeting moment to liven up a blogpost); I was just trying to draw you.

Another sketchbook page:

2010-12-11T09:27:00.000-08:00

More tube sketches

2010-11-30T09:26:00.000-08:00

Sketches from the V&A Museum

2010-11-26T06:13:00.000-08:00

Cameron's journey and the Miliband brothers

2010-11-09T06:44:00.000-08:00

Another two pics done relatively recently for the folks at LabourUncut which - for various reasons - failed to surface over there.

The second one of the two Miliband brothers turned out to be a bit trickier than I’d anticipated. Who’d have thought that it’d be so difficult to superimpose an adult's head onto a child's body and for it not look downright weird? Anyway, after several painstaking attempts, I think I just about got there in the end.

One minor admission though: I've tinkered with it a wee bit since I first committed it to paper, in homage, and with a deferential doff of the cap to the eminent and ever perceptive Steve Bell. Thinking about it now though, I should probably have added Ed’s new "sympathy grey patch" as well, which he seems to have developed since ruthlessly usurping his older brother and beating him to the Labour leadership. Poor old David, ay? Once he was the prodigal political son of a Prime Minister (all be it a barking mad war criminal one), and now it seems he is fated to languish on the back benches all limp and withered, and growing greyer by the day, while his little brother bristles at the dispatch box like a bookish Sweeney Todd.

Personally speaking, I quite like that whole look they’ve got going on. Besides giving them both immediately identifiable physical features - which is always a help if you're drawing them - to me, it also demonstrates considerable strength of character to be able to concentrate all of the anxiety and premature ageing related to their high-powered, high-stress jobs into one corner of their head. Cameron and Clegg can't do that! It's like the Miliband version of the Harry Potter lightning bolt scar. Somehow grey patches seem appropriate.

Thoughts on Obama & the US Mid-terms

2010-11-07T16:49:00.000-08:00

You campaign in poetry and govern in prose goes the saying. And so it has proved. After a monumental "shellacking" in the Mid-terms and the loss of the House of Representatives to the Republicans, Barack Obama's governing prose is likely to be all the more stunted and awkward from now on. That is if the Republicans along and their barmy new Tea Party intake let him string a sentence together at all. After surfing into the White House on the crest of a cathartic wave of hope, Obama now finds himself fumbling for his surf board in the shallows, covered in oil, and with a Tea Party storm brewing on the horizon. That was some wipeout Mr President, dude.

In his recent sparring session with Jon Stewart, he stumbled unwittingly into a bruising sucker punch from his would be liberal ally when he came out with his "Yes we can, but...". That tiny qualifying conjunction coupled with the telling pause that followed poured two year's worth of cold, sobering reality over the soaring idealism that got him elected. It made for a neat headline grabbing noose and had Stewart and the audience in stitches, but I couldn’t help but feel for the guy. What he eventually - and somewhat sheepishly (it seems even the President of the richest and most powerful country in the world can do sheepish) - offered in retort was "but it won't happen overnight", and as bland and grimly prosaic as that might seem, he’s got a point.

True, Obama has been somewhat cautious at the helm, but America is an enormous, rusting, gas guzzling juggernaut of a country, and it has been travelling in the wrong direction - and at a fair rate of knots - for a while now. Thanks in no small part to his calamitous predecessor who managed to preside over the bankruptcy of an entire mode of production (not many people can put that on their CV), Obama is now being forced to patch up the hull at the same time as navigating some pretty treacherous economic seas. And all of this in a ship that is very slow to respond and has an enormous turning circle. The idea that Obama was going to be able to just slam on the breaks and do a quick U-turn, completely restructuring the social and economic fabric of an entire continent in just two years, was always the stuff of fantasy. But America likes things fast: food, films, cars, capitalism; everything happens at a hundred miles (sorry, kilometres) an hour and then some. Politics plainly doesn't, especially in the swampy quagmire of Washington.

Personally, I’m torn. Obama had the mandate and the majorities to do something radical, something genuinely revolutionary, if only - to coin a phrase - he had been audacious enough. But then another part of me looks at whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com and thinks, hmmm, he’s done quite a lot, actually.

Of course, Obama’s big problem is jobs - there aren’t enough of them. At present nearly one in ten Americans are unemployed, "real unemployment" is reckoned to be nearer double that and exit polls from Tuesday suggested that nine out of ten voters believe the economy is in bad shape. “Yes, things are bad, but it could have been a lot worse,” was always going to be a tough sell in these mid-terms.

Plus, just look at what he has had to contend with. Take the health care bill. Rightly or wrongly, enormous concessions were made in order to bring as many people on board with it as possible (the public option got ditched completely, for instance), but even that - what turned into a very moderate steer to the left - had the Republicans and the Tea Party trying to sink the ship entirely. It was supposed to be his Waterloo, if you'll remember. It wasn't, and in the words of his Vice President, Joe Biden, f-bomb and all, "it was a big fuckin' deal". It was.

So what if Obama is more Clark Kent than Superman? Who’s to say that Clark Kent wasn’t a damn good reporter anyway?

The Bullingdon Slasher's Comprehensive Spending Review

2010-10-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

Another helping from me for LabourUncut to mark last Wednesday's comprehensive spending review (CSR). As you can see it's a picture of our Chancellor, George "the Bullingdon slasher" Osborne, on a very unnatural neoconservative high after using his coalition scissors to slash "the State" to shreds. It probably should have been "the welfare state" (which seems to be bearing the brunt of it), but that would have required a smaller typeface, which in turn would have diminished the impact of the image as a whole. In the background are some soon-to-be unemployed public sector workers protesting against the cuts with a sign saying “The banks caused the recession - not us”. (These figures were actually drawn from life as they were queuing up to lobby their MPs in Westminster last Tuesday.) I'm not sure this conveys quite how angry I felt watching that braying bunch of idiots cheer the announcement of 490,000 job losses and benefit cuts for some of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, but there you go, it was the best I could do. Stay tuned, I have a big backlog of goodies that will hopefully make their way up on here soon...

Nick Clegg throwing away his credibility

2010-09-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

A doodle I did recently for LabourUncut. For the benefit of any non-UK-based blog perusers out there, the bloke in the picture is Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrat party, and now, courtesy of a fluke of our farcical, woefully out-of-date electoral system, also the Deputy Prime Minister. As you can see, he’s in a bit of a daze, drunk on power perhaps, and he’s just about to drop a cat (his credibility – you see what I did there?) into a wheelie bin to join the raft of other Lib Dem policies which he campaigned for but has since discarded of. It probably makes sense on its own, but it also ties in with another story from about a week or two ago which – owing to it being silly-season and all – received a disproportionate amount of coverage in the news here.

Basically, the story goes something like this: woman strokes cat, woman for some unknown reason stuffs cat into a wheelie bin and walks off as if nothing has happened. Pretty simple. Crucially though: woman was also caught on camera. Yep, unfortunately for the woman involved, the two members of our Big Society who owned the cat, presumably having already met somebody like her, were already so fearful, disillusioned and / or paranoid that they had trained a CCTV onto their front gate and had captured her unspeakable act of cruelty for all to see. Cue an internet upload followed by blanket news coverage and a venomous public hate-campaign to show this woman the error of her ways. All very unedifying.

Nick Clegg, covering for the Prime Minister who was off on maternity leave, even saw fit to comment on the case: "To see the reaction to that extraordinary clip of the lady putting the cat into the bin, quite rightly people don't understand how that could happen". Well, quite. But it seems equally barmy, Nick, having for the last ten years or so positioned yourselves ostensibly to the left of the Labour party, for you and the Lib Dems to then throw your lot in with the Tories and vote through things like Osborne's "clearly regressive" budget. Madness. So there you go. I hope that goes some way to explaining the none-too-subtle point I was trying to make with this one.

Top Trump illustrations for Labour Uncut

2010-08-24T12:49:00.000-07:00

Some illustrations of the Labour leadership candidates for Labour Uncut.

Some more Londoners:

2010-08-20T07:36:00.000-07:00

Couple in Regents Park

2010-08-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

More tube drawings:

2010-08-14T03:19:00.000-07:00

My right foot:

2010-08-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

Tired souls:

2010-08-03T05:39:00.000-07:00

Been there, did some drawings.

2010-07-14T11:48:00.000-07:00

Bloomsbury Square

2010-06-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

Commuters:

2010-06-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

More random Londoners:

2010-06-13T03:30:00.000-07:00

On the Chiltern Line from Leamington to London:

2010-06-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

More underground sketches:

2010-04-26T02:56:00.000-07:00

More doodles:

2010-04-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

More train sketches:

2010-04-10T02:26:00.000-07:00

Some of "the great ignored"?:

2010-04-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

Bank Holiday:

2010-04-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

April Fools' Day:

2010-04-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

More sketchbook doodles:

2010-03-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

Spot the celeb:

2010-03-24T14:07:00.000-07:00

The "British" Museum:

2010-03-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

Stuff:

2010-03-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

From the underground:

2010-03-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

On the train back to London:

2010-03-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

Sketchbook pages:

2010-03-16T08:17:00.000-07:00