Journal of the Plague Years

• Immigration Amnesty.
• NOTA.
• Liberals frightening the horses.
• Skunk.
• Maher Arer, Blair and Moral Repugnance.
• A bit of reactionary bile from your web host
• 'In the opinion of the British people...'
• Immigrants with skills.
• Carla.
• A memorable story; so easily checked and found untrue.
• Targets and their (incessant) unintended consequences.

Immigration Amnesty.

10 April 2008 .

I tend to feel at home with the Independent: on the whole it makes me feel good about my opinions, or leads me in directions I'm content with. However, I don't go along with one issue it's canvassing at the moment, viz, the question of an amnesty for illegal immigrants. [The (serious) mayoral candidates for London are all in agreement with the paper on this.]

This has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of immigration, or with the needs of immigrants as a whole or of the host population: it's about a coping mechanism which seems to me to be faulty.

Every five or ten years, there is a move to legitimise the positions of those who've arrived in the UK and by luck managed to stay, as if to draw a line... except that more immigrants arrive at increasing rates, so that the cycle starts again, ready for the next amnesty down the line.

There's an element of dishonesty about it. (Arguably, it also rewards those most able to buck the system.)


NOTA.

10 April 2008 .

For various reasons which aren't important here, I'm not sure that I want to vote for any of the candidates standing for Mayor of London on 1 May. At the same time, I believe that a good turnout is important. What do I, or quite a few people in my position, do?

I believe that to offer the vote to the people, but then substantially to limit how they can vote, is close to a denial of democracy. It is in the interests of nobody but the existing political groupings to prevent a voter from saying 'I want to exercise my franchise, but I don't want to vote for anyone on this short list'.

(Actually, I fully accept that in this fairly crucial election, with 2012 on the way, my position is rather a negative one - in fact, I almost certainly shall vote, but with reservations which I won't be allowed to express...)

Just for the record (again): I see no good reason why there shouldn't be a NOTA box on the ballot form ('None Of The Above'). [See 'NOTA' (28th March 2005) in 'Letters to the Editor' for my rather poorly argued case.]


Liberals frightening the horses.

08 April 2008 .

Why do I know anything at all about Clegg's extra-marital sex life?

At least Lloyd-George and Thorpe didn't tell us about theirs...


Skunk.

05 April 2008 .

This item argues what to many people is blindingly obvious, but we're dealing with Brown-O'-The-Manse here.

It's not beyond human intelligence to understand that new(ish)-style skunk and old-style grass are two very different things and that, if we must have an official ABC of toxicity, the two should be classified separately.

However; Brown, The Father And Moral Arbiter Of The Nation, is determined that the whole caboodle should be moved (back) up the scale of illegality - against his own committee's advice - even though cannabis use is by all accounts falling, the leaf has clear beneficial properties for some people, and scientific evidence that the leaf causes schizophrenia has not yet materialised (and there's not that much evidence of a link at all).

Skunk is toxic. We need to see it gone.

The use of any cannabis may be undesirable, but driving it further underground is going to make it even less likely that users are going to be guided about the dangers of skunk.


Maher Arer, Blair and Moral Repugnance.

05 April 2008 .

I'm relieved that in 'Whited Sepulchre' (04 April, Classified - Religion and Politics) I resisted the (slight) temptation to write "am I the only one who..." (...finds The Dear Leaders's prattling from the moral pulpit odious...) Fisk, in the Independent, succumbed (as did Oborne in the Mail, also about blair, albeit on a different issue). [Of course I don't for a moment compare myself with two of the most skilled writers in Fleet Street - it's just a pleasant conceit, for a moment, to imagine that I avoided a trap and they didn't...]

I can tell them that they're aren't alone in their disgust; in fact, I really wonder if His Reverence may have gone too far this time, there in the cathedral; surely we won't go on accepting that detestable man's quite manifest hypocrisy much longer...

In fact, Robert Fisk's article today was an eye-opener on an issue I doubt if most of us would have thought of in a month of Sundays, and I wish I could repeat it here in full. Briefly, he writes about the long reach of dictatorships over Muslims who leave their countries to try to build a new life the West. It seems that an e-mail sent 'home', perhaps after a simple row, or by an enemy or a sneak or even by a 'mukharbarat' agent (of whom apparently there are plenty in the West), can have horrible consequences; families in the home country are, of course, hostages, while a perfectly innocent Muslim here might find himself intentionally labelled as a 'terrorist' by the state at home. He gives the example of Maher Arar, resident in Canada, who was picked up by the FBI while passing through the US and renditioned to torture in Syria on the basis of unfounded information from the Canadian authorities - who had been privately advised by the secret services in his home country. (At least this guy was compensated, to the tune of 10 million dollars, by the Canadian government; but the question Fisk didn't address was, how many more Mahers simply disappear?)

"I am truly sorry to write about this wretched man, again..." writes Fisk: he tells us that, when cautioned by the civil service about the likelihood that asylum seekers deported back to north Africa would be tortured, Blair simply said, 'Get them back (there).'

Which brings me back to Blair preaching to us about waking our consciences... His indifference is too much already; never mind the greedy and corrupt man preaching about poverty; or the warmaker pontificating about suffering

Added later: this item, and the one below, may seem to be rather in contradiction (one apparently 'in support' of immigrants, the other not); actually, neither item has much to do with immigrants at all, but everything to do with the politics of expediency and opportunism which this country now faces.


A bit of reactionary bile from your web host - who wouldn't vote BNP in a million years,

but begins to understand why some people might....
04 April 2008 .

I think the point has been well made by several people, today.

Our political leaders and moral arbiters have decided that children as young as five in our primary schools ought to be exposed to books extolling same-sex relationships, and many schools have decided that they shall be thus exposed. I find this course of action odious and repugnant, but objections (albeit on the basis of the age of the children concerned) can be and have been greeted with accusations of homophobia - when anyone has bothered to respond at all. On the whole, no notice is taken of the wishes of dissenters and the books are put on the shelves regardless.

Until a group of Muslim parents demand that the books be removed from two primary schools in Bristol, on the basis of those parents' own religious beliefs - the worst possible reason for anyone to bend the knee, in a secular state school... and the books are gone, instantly.

When I taught there in the 1980s, we were pretty clear that the only constituencies with any clout in The People's Republic of Islington (a testing ground, under the enlightened guidance of Margaret Hodge, for New Labour) were those chosen by the council - not to put too fine a point on it, mainly immigrants and gays. (The working classes were going to vote Labour anyway, the thinking went, and the gay and immigrant votes would clinch the matter; so why would a rational party bother to worry about anyone else?) The point being made today is that (gay) Stonewall wants the books in - and the rest of us are ignored, except the Muslims.


'In the opinion of the British people...'

04 April 2008 .

Naomi Campbell has misbehaved herself again, at some airport or other.

The British will forgive a lot, says some blathering reporter, but she's nearly forty now, near the end of her career, and the British people won't be so quick to forgive her tantrums.

I'm part of 'British people', but that reporter is never going to know or care what I actually think. The TV and newspapers will have an opinion, along with such letter-writers as they choose to include... Assuming that they give a damn, the British people's (widely varying) opinions will hardly be heard outside the pub.

Until recently, that was it. "The British view is..." the papers would report, and there was nobody to say no, it isn't. At least the web begins to change that, for the comparative minority who read or write blogs. When it comes to Naomi Campbell, of course, it probably doesn't matter one way or the other, but when it comes, for example, to referring to Brown or Blair's shenanigans in summits by reporting that "Britain doesn't want the EU Social Contract" or "Britain wants to retain nuclear weapons" or "Britain feels that it is right to invade Iraq", the shorthand can become very dangerous.


Immigrants with skills.

03 April 2008 .

Immigrants get the jobs, one (part) of the argument says, because they've got the skills.

To put it another way; employers would rather employ immigrants with skills than train up young indigenous workers. Pretty understandable, really.

Or to put it (yet) another way; our schools aren't educating our kids up to a sufficient starting level...

- Because the employers have managed to convince the government to reduce the taxes (which ought to be paying for the schools) so far?


Carla.

03 April 2008 .

Mme Sarkozy is clearly an exciting and charming women who entrances the men she meets. All power to her, and to Monsieur S.

But... We're being told time and time again in the media that she wowed Britain. No, she didn't. Most of us have never met her and never will. The media people obviously did meet her and were very taken with her, but they aren't Britain.


A memorable story; so easily checked and found untrue.

02 April 2008 .

Ma Clinton is right; if you're saying millions of words a day you're bound to make mistakes. But... you'll only make such a mistake, a whopper (like being fired on by snipers, in the public view, when you weren't at all) which was so easily laid bare, if your torrent of words includes so many lies that you can't be expected to filter every single one of them for self-evident disproveability.

Perhaps, for once, the old lags are right, too: it's not the crime that's wrong, it's the getting caught. It's a regrettable inevitability that politicians will lie; Ma Clinton's mistake is to be lying so intensely that her filter's been overwhelmed.

Whatever... This particular lie was so comprehensively egregious as to look deluded and be childish; her hat has to be out of the ring. So how come we're still talking about how it 'might have' affected her chances?

Added 22 April: Ahead of yet another primary (Pennsylvania? I lose track) Ma Clinton is still running. How has she got away with it?


Targets and their (incessant) unintended consequences.

01 April 2008 .

The budget airline Flybe are being castigated for paying agency models and actors to fly from Norwich International Airport to Dublin and back. They did it in order meet a commercial target (for numbers of passengers carried), worth 280,000 to the airline, which had been imposed by the airport but which the airline was on the brink of missing. Ironically, the silly stunt took place the same weekend as people all over the world were turning power off for 'Earth Hour'.

Everybody is obsessed by numerical targets, from Brown down, and they don't seem to be doing us much good. (C/f targets for education, health, police, etc.) Is it that they will always lead to distorted thinking, or have we simply yet to discover that there could actually be a science to setting them?

It's too much to hope that we might scale down a bit on pulling numbers out of the air until we actually understand what we're doing...


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