A BIT of a stushie on social media about Marks & Spencer selling Ramones T-shirts, with ardent fans complaining that Johnny, Joey and co would be turning in their graves. Well, they are all dead. It’s just another predictable instance of big business cashing in on the afterlife of stars.

I mean, who hasn’t got a six-pack of David Bowie Happy Socks at £59.99? But if you’re a cheapskate you could go for the three-pack in special presentation (cardboard) box at £39.95 – which “includes out-of-this-world patterns inspired by some of the legendary performer’s most iconic outfits”. And 86% cotton.

And then there’s the videogame Guitar Hero where you can grab your plastic axe and play along with Kurt Cobain singing Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer. No, really. It’s excruciating. Presumably his widow, Courtney Love, sanctioned this and the estate is cashing in. Doesn’t smell so much like teen spirit as shameless exploitation.

In 2008, the legendary band Half Man Half Biscuit released the raucous track Joy Division Oven Gloves. The surviving members of the Division (singer Ian Curtis hung himself in 1980) surely couldn’t, could they? Oh yes, they have licensed them. Just £19.95, only about double the price of other gloves.

Visit Bob Marley’s Facebook page and the very first thing you will see is an embedded “Shop”. You’re directed to the dead man’s website where you can buy a range of items, including a Bob Marley Don’t Worry face mask for £15. And Amy Winehouse, nearly 10 years after her death, is still tweeting away trying to sell product. As far as I know Bing Crosby isn’t selling golf clubs.

Taking the Michael

STILL on dead stars, I saw a clip from the US current affairs show Sixty Minutes, purporting to be an interview with Martha Chansley, mother of the QAnon cretin Jake Angeli, the guy with the horns who was one of the first to storm the Capitol building. I thought it had to be a spoof. Here was a Michael Jackson impersonator saying that her son was innocent and all he did was walk through an open door. But no, it was actually she. Separated at birth perhaps?

Lost in translation

THE author RS Archer tweets: Recently one of my books was translated into Portuguese and it got its first local review. “What a complete waste of time, this book fails to mention Portugal even once. One star”. The book is about the Winter War between Finland and Russia.

Unhealthy attitudes

OVER the last 10 years, MPs, like Boris Johnson, have had eight pay increases (he has benefited more than the others and is now on £150,000 as Prime Minister) while nurses’ pay has fallen in real terms in that period. Captain Sir Tom Moore got a knighthood for tottering round his garden, raising £33 million for charity, which has largely gone on tea breaks and snacks. Nurses’ latest below-inflation pay rise of 1%, around £3.50 a week, wouldn’t even buy a small latte and a bun in Costa.

Or as one nurse put it: “I’m so excited to spend my 1% pay rise on my 5% council tax increase.”All those promises about properly funding the NHS – writ large, too, at £350m a week on the side of a red bus – turned out to be as empty as the inside of one today.

The German comedian Henning Wehn, while not commenting directly about Old Tom, put it succinctly: “We don’t do charity in Germany, we pay taxes. Charity is just a failure of governments’ responsibilities.”

He’s right. If the captain (how come you retain rank decades later in civvy street?) had done his 100 laps campaigning for a substantial pay rise for NHS workers it would have been more admirable. Mind you, he wouldn’t have got that bauble and the lavish adoration of Fleet Street.

We spend less per head of population on our health service than other developed countries – less than Ireland, the Netherlands, considerably less than Germany, France and Sweden – and we have done for years. I declare an interest: the NHS has probably spent disproportionately more on me than the average person, particularly over the last couple of years. No apology. I paid my way for decades.

There is going to be widespread revolt within the NHS over this derisory, insulting award, which may well be part of cunning plan by “Tony Hancock” and Co, allowing them to privatise more chunks of it

Howl of controversy

A STRAW poll of nearly 300 lawyers by Scottish Legal News overwhelming agreed that the role of the Lord Advocate should be split so that political and prosecutorial functions are separated. The present Lord Advocate, James Wolffe, as well as being head of the Crown Office, the chief public prosecutor, also sits in the SNP Government Cabinet. Of those lawyers polled, 81.4% thought the roles should be distinct.

As one respondent put it: “The present holder of the office is an outstanding individual but that is no argument for preserving an office that objectively speaking involves a clear potential conflict of interest.

“If the post of Lord Advocate were created now, of new, it would be at risk of immediately being struck down by judicial review.”

From the first Labour Government after devolution in 1999 until 2007, the Lord Advocate attended the weekly Scottish Cabinet meetings. After the 2007 election, the new First Minister, one Alex Salmond, decided that he or she would no longer attend the Cabinet, saying that he wanted to “depoliticise” the post, and it was only when legal advice was needed that he turned up. That ended with Nicola Sturgeon taking over and “repoliticising” the position.

The separation of powers was also backed by judges of the Court of Session, the highest civil court, in 2012. We’re still waiting.

Low note for humanity

TONY Bennett, or Benedetto, is the last great American crooner (Michael Bublé doesn’t cut it). Not my kind of music but everyone’s kind of man. He’s 94 and must also be one of the few survivors of the Second World War. He served as a private in the 63rd Infantry Division and after just six weeks’ training the unit was sent to France to replace Allied troops who had suffered heavy losses. Half of his pals died within three days.

It gave him, as he put it, “a front-row seat in hell” as they fought through France and then Germany. But a greater hell was to come. In April 1945, one of his last official missions was to help liberate Kaufering concentration camp in the town of Landsberg, Germany. There, he said, he saw things that no human being should ever see.

Bennett had been promoted to corporal and then demoted in November 1945 because he had invited a black friend to dine with him and celebrate Thanksgiving. “It was actually more acceptable to fraternise with the German troops than it was to be friendly with a fellow black American soldier,” he said.

He may be too frail now to take the knee but I bet he would if he could.