Latest news with #Shifty
Winnipeg Free Press
19-07-2025
- Sport
- Winnipeg Free Press
Trainer Mark Casse chasing record-tying fifth Woodbine Oaks victory.
TORONTO – It's a path that's twice taken Mark Casse to the King's Plate winner's circle. Five of the 12-horses in the $500,000 Woodbine Oaks on Sunday will be Casse trainees. The Hall of Fame trainer will be vying for a record-tying fifth Oaks victory. And twice, the Oaks has provided Casse with the winner of the $1-million King's Plate, the crown jewel of thoroughbred racing in this country and opening event of the OLG Canadian Triple Crown. This year's event is slated for Woodbine Racetrack on Aug. 16. In 2014, Lexie Lou completed the Oaks-Plate double, earning Casse, 64, of Indianapolis, his first title. Four years later, Wonder Gadot crossed the finish line first following a second-place finish in the Oaks. Casse's last Plate victory came in '23 with Paramount Prince, which finished ahead of Oaks champion Elysian Field, another Casse-conditioned horse. It's already been an eventful week for Casse, who's been named Canada's top trainer an unprecedented 16 times. He earned his 4,000th career victory Thursday at Colonial Downs Racetrack in Virginia. The Oaks is the opening event of the Canadian Triple Tiara for Canadian-foaled three-year-old fillies. The 1 1/8-mile race on Woodbine's synthetic track is also a key prep for the 1 1/4-mile Plate, which is also run on synthetic. Also on Sunday's card is the $150,000 Plate Trial, a 1 1/8-mile race for three-year-olds that goes on the same surface. Having the two races on the same day provides insight as to how the two race winners compare heading into the King's Plate. Casse's five horses in the Oaks: Ella It Is, No Time, Shifty, War Signal, and Winterberry. 'Shifty is probably the most talented (of the group),' Casse said. 'She has her quirks. 'If she can settle and get into a good rhythm, she will be tough. She's very talented.' Shifty has finished in the money four times over seven career starts (two wins, twice third) and amassed $152,037 in earnings. She won her three-year-old debut May 11 before finishing third in the seven-furlong Fury Stakes on June 7. No Time has two wins and a third-place finish from seven starts. She heads into the Oaks off a fourth-place effort in the Grade 3 $150,000 Selene Stakes at Woodbine on June 28. 'I think No Time is a sleeper,' said Casse. 'I think she has a very good pedigree — both her and Shifty have very nice pedigrees. 'She is not easy to ride. She is another one that if she is happy, she is going to be tough.' Ella It Is has two wins and two second-place finishes over eight starts. She'll make a fifth career stakes appearance Sunday. 'She has shown she can run well,' said Casse. 'She has to step up her game now. 'This will be a test for her. She is really only one of my fillies in this race who can settle.' War Signal will make her seventh start Sunday, having amassed two wins and a third-place finish. She was sixth versus the boys in the Grade 3 Marine Stakes on June 28, just two lengths behind winner Mansetti. 'She ran well in the Marine … I thought she hung in there,' Casse said. 'She is another one who likes to be up close to the lead.' Winterberry has three wins from six starts. 'She is coming into the Oaks better than ever,' Casse said. 'I'm still not 100 per cent sure she can get the mile and an eighth, but she is very talented. 'Every rider is going to do their own thing. I'm not giving any instructions. I think the break is going to be very important, and how each rider can get their horse to settle going into the first turn.' Casse will also have a horse in the Plate Trial. The 10-horse field includes Regal Guest, who'll be ridden by Patrick Husbands. Husbands has the distinction of having ridden the last Canadian Triple Crown winner, that being Wando in 2003. Also in running in the race will be Scorching, who was second to Mansetti in the Marine. The dark bay colt was making his three-year-old debut following a layoff since Oct. 6. 'I was surprised by the performance,' said trainer John Charalambous. 'He ran according to the way we wanted him to race — not the result, but how he sat off the pace.' Other starters included Notorious Gangster (Queenston Stakes winner and last year's Coronation Futurity Stakes victor); Dewolf ('24 Bull Page Stakes winner), Unbridled Weather ('24 Frost King Stakes winner) and Regal Guest (second in '25 Queenston Stakes). This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 18, 2025.
New Statesman
09-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Keir Starmer has time to turn this around
Photo by Benjamin Cremel/Getty A country only changes direction when the behaviour of its people does. Margaret Thatcher believed this. She is the principal protagonist of the new Adam Curtis BBC documentary series Shifty, a collage analysis of modern Britain reviewed in the New Statesman last week. In it, Curtis shows her at the depths of the monetarism chaos, telling her party they must think in terms of several parliaments: 'We have to move this country in a new direction; to change the way we look at things; to create a wholly new attitude of mind… To shake off the self-doubt induced by decades of dependence on the state as master and not as servant.' I am not advocating Thatcherism which, during that period, gutted and demolished so many great British companies and industries that might have survived to this day, hollowing out towns and communities which have still not recovered. But there are two things for Keir Starmer's team to think about in what feels like a crisis that, though very different, is as profound. The first is to keep focused on the middle distance during a blur of terrible headlines and weekly chaos. Real change takes time. Starmer feels this himself, exuding an unearthly private calm as he recites the long-term investments being made, and better prospects for British firms in sectors threatened by tariffs. It's almost a 'calm down, kids' mood. Leaders are often seen as strange quasi-parents. Thatcher was the revered-or-evil mother, chivvying us along or depriving us of milk. Starmer is the slightly distant father, increasingly derided by his rebel children. But even as he's told he is too unpopular in the polls to survive, he is thinking of at least a decade to change the country. He believes we are not broken. We are just a bit too poor. With more money and the dignity, over time, of a better car parked outside the house and a better holiday next year, everything will feel different. That's it. That's his vision. But here is where the more important lesson begins. As in the 1980s, our problems are more structural. Not enough of us are working, and those who are are not working productively enough. We have become entitled. Our communities are fissured by mutual dislike, fear and suspicion. This is a social crisis. And that, in turn, I think explains the otherwise bizarre loathing of Starmer, a decent, serious and empathetic man. He loves meeting people in their workplaces and at home and recently invited hundreds who had helped inform his politics during his tours around the country back to Downing Street to thank them. I can't think of another prime minister who has done that. Yet he is not addressing, calling out, naming and providing answers to those deeper, corrosive problems. And angry, unsettled people hate him for that. The collapse of the welfare bill is an excellent example of what has gone wrong. A system designed for those in wheelchairs, or with severe disabilities that might make it hard to wash, or move around, or dress, has been steadily expanded – particularly since the pandemic – to provide cash for people who are not working because they are depressed, stressed or anxious. A better, more urgent national leadership would have challenged the country, challenged us, about this: is it right? Real reform would have started a year ago with the Prime Minister relentlessly trying to start a national conversation about benefits, challenging campaigners, engaging MPs, and only then bringing forward 'back to work' reform plans. This is not what happened. Disability groups were left in the dark and became increasingly suspicious. MPs were brushed aside. And in the end, the changes did not make logical sense. In many cases the personal independence payments had kept people in work. The belief spread that Starmer, Rachel Reeves and the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, were going after wheelchair users and those in chronic pain – even some Labour MPs thought that. Bloodied water under the bridge? The most recent argument, about cuts to special educational needs and disabilities (Send), feels very similar. The way things are going, I predict another government retreat (though details on any changes to Send provision are not expected to be released until later this year), not only because, as my colleague Rachel Cunliffe has explained, MPs get accustomed to the habit of rebellion, but also because there is an imbalance in the public argument. On the one hand, there are highly articulate, media-savvy voices, campaigning groups and a new far-left group forming around Jeremy Corbyn, with already-suspicious voters at their backs; on the other, there are voiceless civil servants and not particularly articulate ministers. Well, you can see how this is likely to go. There is an equivalent conversation to be had – which isn't being had – about migration and the changing make-up of the country. The government is conducting an inquiry into anti-Muslim hatred. Its terms of reference include that any definition of Islamophobia 'must be compatible with…freedom of speech and expression – which includes the right to criticise, express dislike of, or insult religions'. That ought to comfort those (such as me) who would resolutely oppose a new back-door blasphemy law that singled out criticism of Islam as somehow more heinous than that of, for instance, Christianity, Judaism or Hinduism. But because neither Starmer nor any other senior government minister wants to make a big explicit argument about the place of Islam in a fundamentally post-Christian country, conspiracy theories swirl and curdle. As ever, it's about language, finding the right words, catching attention, winning arguments and wanting to change behaviour, even when it's hard, even when it's among minority communities. What we might call 'the Tragedy of Rachel's Tears' has weakened Starmer. It weakens him because it provides an unforgettable image of a flailing administration and because it forces him to guarantee her job throughout this parliament. That, in turn, makes it even harder to break from previous orthodoxy on taxation – which, as the New Statesman argued last issue, is essential. But this could be a strengthening moment, too. Starmer privately accepts he needs a far better relationship with his parliamentary party. I hope he is beginning a journey that persuades him parliamentary politics is not a disease but a necessity. Beyond that, I hope he is starting to understand there are fundamental things wrong in the country which will require more radical politics, and far bolder, sharper public language. More on migration and communities; more on crime; more on Europe; more on tax and fairness. Money in our pocket is not the only solution. To achieve the fresh start that is now so plainly and obviously needed, Starmer needs more instinctively political people around him. Morgan McSweeney is a brilliant and loyal operator, but he can't do everything. The cabinet needs to step up and start to operate as a political council. There are some exceptional ministerial and back-bench talents that need to be tutored, brought in and listened to harder. The author and former policy wonk Torsten Bell, for instance, is a future chancellor – if he can be shaped into the political beast he'd need to be. If Starmer is looking for help with a clearer narrative, I'd recommend his battle-hardened Trade Minister, Douglas Alexander. And the Scottish parliamentary party is brimming with underused, potentially helpful talent. Because – in a final throwback to that early Thatcher speech – there is a lot of time left, plus what is, still, a majority most previous prime ministers would have given all their teeth for. It is a bit early to be writing them off. The government has done good work. It's also been far too bad at politics, too inarticulate. It has been raw, and inexperienced. It's made bad mistakes. But the only truly lethal mistake is not to learn from them. [See more: Netanyahu bends the knee for Trump] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
The National
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Pat Kane: The powerful vision of Adam Curtis has an obvious blind spot
And sometimes, as a Scot, you watch to wonder at the way 'Britishness' can blind even the most brilliant to our very existence. Shifty (comprising five episodes of uneven length on iPlayer) drills down on how our current world is shaped by Margaret Thatcher's revolutions, from the late 1970s onwards, in her zeal for individualism and liberated finance. Curtis finds a clip where Thatcher goes on about changing the 'consciousness' of individuals in Britain. This is a new riff on her familiar axiom, where she says, 'economics are the method – the object is to change the soul'. READ MORE: Craig Murray: I've been left questioning real purpose of Alba Party Curtis attempts to show our souls being changed by his daring montages of 'b-roll' – the stuff discarded in TV edit suites, which show the powerful (and the powerless) in less guarded moments. I'm old enough to have been fully present in this era, so there's much I can vouch for here. To start with, Curtis is smart enough to note that the new individualism predates Thatcherite ideology. The series begins in an Edinburgh-based LGB rights centre, ever-so-politely informing a visitor about the gay disco they organise. Curtis also covers the extreme behaviours of an Esalen-style encounter group, all arm-waving self-expression and bad singing. Woven into this is Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie's decision to report the royals (especially Princess Di) as flawed individuals rather than figures of state. Yet along with illustrative instances of property-owning, self-branding egoism, Curtis goes both genuinely eccentric and literally cosmological. Such 'high weirdness', as scholar Erik Davis puts it, often emerges around animals. A bull mastiff changes sex before its bewildered owner's eyes. There are a few literal 'elephants in the room', where pachyderms are made to perform by profit-conscious zoos, now run by management consultants. As someone's business is strangled by the banks, their horse lies down to die in its paddock. Pigs poisoned by privatised water companies run obsessively into walls. There's a dim awareness of an increasingly disordered nature here. Or it's a medieval feel for signs and wonders, in the shift from one world to another. But at another level, the entire universe is on the line. Curtis highlights the physicist Stephen Hawking, bodily worsening across these episodes while increasing in fame – and the documentarist makes a bold explanatory leap. Hawking had a maths-driven ambition for a 'theory of everything'. It's presented here as a deep legitimation for a Britain thrown into disorder by unleashed markets and hyper-selfism. All time and space – which could mean all precedents and institutions – are reducible to one equation, printable on a T-shirt. Reality is an endlessly flexible field, and we can't change that basic condition. In retrospect, how 80s/90s. There are some excellent (and eminently culpable) baddies on show. The Duke of Westminster salivates over his breakfast as the national news shows miners and steelworkers battling with policemen on the telly. Thatcher herself is shown, cleverly, in various moments of wifely cosplay. She coos over table adornments, exults in her pearls, thrills to new underwear – even as she constricts the money supply, smashes unions and re-engineers the soul. Curtis's biggest political critique of Thatcherite individualism is this. Yes, you can politically build a culture where self-interest is the ultimate motivator. But doesn't that eventually come to corrode the very behaviours, institutions and regulations you need, to keep your establishment in power? READ MORE: Kate Forbes: Bigger-picture switch is proving key in tackling tourism issues And so it did, as Curtis recalls. He charts all the economic shocks that presaged the Great Recession in 2008. Each of them is an indicator that financial traders had the actual control of our national economy, not the politicians who had granted them that power. Again, in a week when the tears of a UK Chancellor cause multi-billion fluctuations in financial markets, Shifty illuminates the roots of our submission to high finance. The quirkiness of Curtis's video-curating seems to come from an almost anarchist belief in the possibility of humans acting differently. The fashion designer Alexander McQueen isn't just praised for his counter-conceptual couture shows, dramatising the psychic stress of the era. But we also hear that he used to sew abusive messages into the lining of Prince Charles's double-breasted number. Music – and particularly music scenes – are valued here as temporary autonomous zones, in which the young and the marginalised can flower. Massive Afro-Caribbean sound systems are loaded off trucks; cheeky post-punks grab their TV spot to argue for cannabis decriminalisation; Pulp, fully in their pomp, sing their anthem for 'Common People'. We are even reminded that Bucks Fizz's The Land Of Make Believe was written as an anti-Thatcher polemic – followed by its writer decamping to Europe as a tax exile. Trevor Horn's use of digital samplers to entirely record Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax meant he could produce scores of versions of the song. Curtis adduces this as another analogue of Thatcher's spirit of deregulation. Haud on. As a musician who used sampling in the 1980s, to complete the part that Tom Waits's Uptown Horns were too hungover to do the next day … let's say that not all of Curtis's big connections work. There is one element to Curtis's approach which seems embarrassingly cloth-headed. And that's his entire ignoring of the constant agenda of Scottish self-determination pressing on these years. It's odd. In the interviews surrounding this series, when asked for what comes after and out of this interregnum, Curtis constantly seeks out some new form of collective belief. 'I hope that there is going to be a new kind of idea, which says, 'No, you can have a world in which people still feel themselves as individuals and are free, but also can come together collectively',' Curtis tells Dazed and Confused. 'I don't quite know where it's going to come from. What it needs is for a new kind of politician or social analyst to create a language and a terminology that explains the world to people in ways that [make them] go, 'Oh, yes, I get that. I get why I'm uncertain. I get why I dread the future'. READ MORE: Being a journalist at Westminster is all about right place, right time 'Because before you can come together collectively, you have to have a shared language that means you can recognise in each other why you are all feeling this.' Haud on again. Doesn't the vision of a fair, inclusive, renewables-driven independent Scotland, explored and reported on daily in these pages, exactly fit this bill? The 'shared language' Curtis seeks is the left-green civic nationalism that most of us in the independence movement try to forge. The political and narrative initiative I am involved in, Spring, finds Scottish answers in what we're calling 'cosmolocal' community development to many of the questions Curtis raises. Again, from the Dazed interview: 'One of the things that makes democracy a good thing is the feeling it creates for millions of people of being a part of a community ... if you want to make it work properly again, you need to reinvent the feeling of being part of something. It's not nostalgic. It's necessary. 'I always believe that imagination is terribly powerful. All it requires is someone to come along with a leap of imagination that reconfigures society in a simple, clear way. It's almost like a heightened dramatising of the world you're living through.' It feels like a shame that the civic burgeoning which happened in Scotland during the four decades covered by Shifty simply couldn't be registered by Curtis – even as he yearns for something like its restoring potential. Nevertheless, Adam's a serious man, wholly adequate to the seriousness of the moment. Indeed, one should admit, quite the singular individual.
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
What does Adam Curtis know?
Photo byOn or about May 1979, the British character changed. That, in a sentence, is the argument of Adam Curtis's new documentary series Shifty. The election of Margaret Thatcher was the beginning of a revolution she helped accelerate but could never control, one involving economics, physics and ideology. Our nation – fretful, immiserated, lonely – was created in the two decades that followed. The adjectives most often used to describe Curtis's recent work tend to be related to drugs: hallucinatory, trance-like, psychedelic. They are apt. Though his earlier films featured interviews and televisual strictures, now he works through a combination of montage and caption, ditching even the nasal narration that once characterised his work. Some storylines he pursues for a full episode, others receive a mere 30 seconds of fame. The effect is disorientating, a constant swaying between plot and subplot. But sudden contrast is Curtis's fetish: gentlemen in cricket whites beneath skeletal electric pylons; shots of glass-and-steel towers immediately followed by a horse dying in a field. However, despite this reputation for experimentation, you get the sense that the scenes he is most drawn to are sober, humdrum, everyday. So, while you have Thatcher scuttling about laying tables for state banquets and trying to force monetarism to work, you also get nightclubs, barbers and police interviews – all the inventory of history from below. Sometimes you wonder where such moving footage comes from: who was letting documentarians into their house parties in 1981? But no matter. Such is the capaciousness of the BBC's archive that serves as Curtis's quarry, he doesn't have to show or tell you. You simply see. When he's doing history from above, though, Curtis is, by his own standards, dealing with a conventional arc. We move in a familiar sequence from Thatcher to Big Bang, from deindustrialisation to MDMA, from mass politics to mass atomisation. Perhaps it is a sign of the shifting historiography of the recent past that this feels more like restatement than reinterpretation. Thatcher is no longer seen as Britain's saviour on the right or left. We all know the bankers are crooked and the politicians are powerless. And did anyone else hear that Max Clifford was a wrong 'un? However, these familiarities are diversified by much more Curtis-like swerves into the strange and the eccentric. Like the story of Stephen Knight, a local reporter who became a national figure for claiming in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that the Victorian murders were linked to both the Freemasonry movement and the British royal family. Knight went on to write another conspiratorial book about the Freemasons before his early death from a brain tumour. Though Knight is scarcely remembered today, for Curtis he is illustrative of a paranoid society growing fearful and sceptical of its elites. The title of this series ('shifty') is a description of what happens 'in societies when the foundations of power begin to move'. It's something we all feel – almost to the point that you wonder if it is truly confined to the last two decades of the 20th century in Britain. The Sixties and Seventies – with their own depressive introspection, aristocratic crack-up, and stewing industrial conflict – could surely have served as part of the same canvas. At times Curtis overstretches himself, conflating the late-20th century with modernity in the broadest terms. Aside from Mrs Thatcher, Curtis's main protagonist is probably Stephen Hawking, whose hyper-rational analysis of the cosmos Curtis places in parallel with the penetration of market forces into the soul of Britain. It is difficult to see these phenomena as coterminous. At other moments, his captions are slightly strident, almost drunkenly so: 'The concept of privatisation had been invented by the Nazis.' 'Do you really believe that, sir, or are you just trying to make us think?' So Dakin asks his teacher Irwin in Alan Bennett's The History Boys as he hears the mythos of the First World War being swept away. I would ask Curtis the same question. But in Bennett's play, the boys learn that sincerity and iconoclasm are both necessary instincts. As a rare historian who is willing to prioritise sweep, argument and craft over the accumulation of credible detail, we are fortunate to have Adam Curtis. Shifty BBC iPlayer [See also: Amol Rajan's Ganges vanity project] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Is Keir Starmer turning into Harold Wilson?
Photo by Henry Nicholls -Another week and another crisis for Keir Starmer after another U-turn. It should not be like this, of course. He is one year into a five-year parliament with a working majority of 165. The Conservative Party is in free fall. Nigel Farage leads a party with just five MPs. And yet something is clearly wrong in this government. The Parliamentary Labour Party is refusing to be led. Hostile briefings are everywhere. The Chancellor is under attack; so too the Prime Minister's most influential adviser. Starmer himself appears remorseful, apologetic and unsure what to do, searching for a sense of mission and direction, assailed from all directions by the kind of advice no one wants. There is a scene in Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wilson that I cannot shake at moments like this. Wilson was a wily intellect and an even wilier politician, able to dodge and weave to keep his party together and himself in power. He also had a clear sense of direction, promising to modernise Britain and reinvigorate its faltering economy. It was a sparkling prospectus, delivered with sparkling rhetoric. And yet, it failed. By 1976, after an unlikely return to power, Wilson retired a broken man, drinking in the afternoon, quick to tears, mournful and unsure. Before he left office, he told one interviewer that he hoped to spend more time thinking about the country's problems. I once retold this bathetic story of political history to one of Starmer's closest aides, warning him of the dangers of power without a clear sense of direction. I tried to make a joke of it, not wanting to be too Eeyorish. Still, Wilson's fate seems to hang over this government in some strange, spectral fashion. 'The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,' Karl Marx once observed. So they do. Whether Wilson, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, it often seems as though our ruling class is haunted by the traditions of those who came before, a feeling captured on page 50 by Nicholas Harris's review of Shifty, Adam Curtis's new series about Britain in the run-up to the millennium. Our new culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, is haunted by different ghosts on page 32. In many ways Starmer is underestimated as a politician. Although the calibre of prime ministers has noticeably declined since Wilson's day, it still requires skill, political acumen and what might generously be called 'wiles' to reach the pinnacle of British politics. (The most powerful leader in this issue isn't even a politician: read Zoë Huxford on page 33 to see what I mean.) Starmer has all these traits and more. Yet the man before us today looks far more like late Wilson than he should at this stage of his premiership. At the heart of Starmer's apparent crisis of confidence lies a crisis of direction. From as early as 1967, Wilson began to lose his verve after abandoning his economic plans and devaluing the pound. In Pimlott's telling, Wilson's failure to see through his economic plan became a crisis for social democracy itself, which never really lifted. Without economic planning, what does Labour stand for, Pimlott asked? For a while Blair and Gordon Brown appeared to answer this question, but their model – as we can now see – died with the financial crisis of 2008. In many ways, Starmer's crisis is the reverse of Wilson's. His plan cannot be said to have failed, because he did not have one to begin with. Rather, his struggles are those of a man searching for a plan and finding instead a fleeting politics, as Finn McRedmond finds at Glastonbury on page 8. My ambition for the New Statesman is to step into this obvious ideological void on the left of politics; to be a journal of ideas that can help light a new direction for this government, and for progressive politics more generally. Our cover story this week begins this process. As Will Dunn writes on page 20, it is time for the government to confront our baffling, irrational tax system, which fails to raise enough for the kind of country we all want to live in. Without a clear direction, Starmer is being pulled in all directions. His friends urge him – in private and, it seems, in public – to ignore the Blairites, move left and abandon his hopes of recovering voters lost to Reform. Those of a more Tony-ish hue whisper to me and others that this is the siren call of Milibandism. A battle is now underway for Starmer's ear – and for the soul of this government. As both Andrew Marr and George Eaton write, a new politics is opening up, one that is far more radical and dangerous for both of Britain's main political parties than before. History appears first as tragedy, and then as farce, Marx observed. It seems he knew what he was talking about. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: The rebellions against Starmer are only just beginning] Related
