Journal of the Plague Years

• File under 'Sodom and Gomorrah'.
• Nothing really changes.
• When are we going to sort our ideas out?
• Did Blair achieve a new first - opinionated apparatchi(c)ks?
• Newsnight
• A constant plaint from your web-host is that the government is not guided by scientific evidence.
• Burma.
• Clone Time!
• He knows somebody. She carries on a family tradition.
• TV's power to inform?
• Lessons of the Election.
• Are you still here, Mrs. Clinton?
• 'Harriet knows best', or, I may never vote Tory, but she deters me from voting Labour, either.
• The Party of the Future...
• As the Blond Bombshell replaces Red Ken (if he does), who can replace The Great Helmsman?
• I've been told the story's apocryphal, but I'm certain it's true...
• A point of view.

File under 'Sodom and Gomorrah'.

10 May 2008 .

I really must stop reading the Daily Mail (occasionally though it may be). I still find most of it a criminal waste of rain forest (with the honourable exception of Oborne, who is cogent again today), but I'm getting depressed at my increasing tendency to be exercised by some of what I read in it; it must be old age.

'They call this a helpline' is a article in the Mail today about a 2006 study [by BMG and (or, on behalf of?) the government] of Sexwise, a government-funded helpline aimed at helping teenagers with relationship problems. Apparently, 'mystery shoppers', mostly aged 14-17, were hired to 'test' the service including by pretending that they were under pressure from friends or partners to have sex. In less than half the tests did advisers convey the message that the callers should wait until they were ready. One caller was told to 'go to a family planning clinic and get the morning-after pill'; during her debriefing, the caller said she had expected to be asked her age, and why she wasn't using protection - but hadn't been. Another told the adviser she was feeling pressured into having sex by her older partner even though she was only 15, but the adviser made no mention of the age of consent. Some boys expressing concern about being pressured got the impression they were being asked 'what are you complaining about?' The article listed several more examples of similarly inappropriate responses from the advisers.

My first reaction was the sort of dull, exasperated but resigned despair at my government's incomprehensible initiatives which has grown wearisomely familiar over the past twenty or thirty years. Then I realised that the Mail said nothing about this helpline beyond it is government-funded: for all that they reported, it may be some rather misguided local charity that receives tuppence-ha'penny a year from a minor department; it may be an experiment; it may be anything. I was reminded that the Daily Mail is actually very selective in its reporting. I felt a degree of relief... if I'm still thinking about the article in a day or two, I can always look up 'Sexwise' on the net and see what's going on - assuming that, with a search-term like that, I don't get more than I'm bargaining for.

I felt a degree of relief... until I remembered that this is the government that seems to have no problem with the idea of instructing doctors that they must offer contraception and abortions to 14-year-olds without telling parents, and pharmacists that they risk being struck off if they don't collude in the law-breaking of underaged children by filling prescriptions for contraceptives (whatever the pharmacists' moral views). (Come to that, I'm reminded of the recent Muslim outcry in the primary schools in Bristol where, with government approval, five-year-olds were to be taught the value of same-gender sexual relationships.)

We in the UK have the worst teen-pregnancy rate in the developed world - avoidable misery on a life destroying (and expensive) scale, never mind the morality. I've no doubt that I'm completely with the Mail when I wonder whether the politically motivated, 'politically-correct', evangelists for the idea that sex amongst 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds can make simple connections.

Sexwise BMG 'Teen pregnancy' pharmacists contraception

Nothing really changes.

09 May 2008 .

Cohn-Bendit, hero/anti-hero of Paris in 1968, says that we live in a very different world now.

I understand what he means, but there's a level on which I disagree - I don't think power relationships have changed very much; in England, we've actually fallen from where we were in 1968 in just too many ways that are measurable. More later; for now, I feel a moment of sloganising coming on, with a nod to Marx:

iPods are the opiates of the people...

'Danny Cohn-Bendit' 'opiate of the people'

When are we going to sort our ideas out?

08 May 2008 .

Sometimes I see the world in simple terms; in fact, I work quite hard at doing so. In that spirit, I ask this naive question:

With the international community, led by the UN, in a fury at the Burmese government's inaction or active refusal preventing aid from reaching hundreds of thousands of its own desperate citizens (for no reason other than its own contemptible power-greed)... is it possible that, if Bush and Blair had not expended our international credit through the fiasco in Iraq, there might have been the moral authority to force the junta to behave themselves?

[Added later: There have been several appeals on behalf of relief organisations hoping to work in Burma, today. It's a pity that each one (that I've seen, at least) seems to have followed news items about the military government's intransigence in refusing to allow any relief into their country.]

Added 9th.May: Now it appears that the military authorities have actually seized such relief as has arrived in Burma, preventing it from being distributed fairly, where it's needed, or possibly even at all. Meanwhile all the officials at the visa offices, where anyone from the international organisations hoping to help in Burma have to apply, have gone on holiday.

While tens or hundreds of thousands more people die, who with an appropriate response might not have done so, we must presumably accept that we live in 'the real world'. Yeah.

Burma 'Moral authority' junta relief 'military government'

Did Blair achieve a new first - opinionated apparatchi(c)ks?

08 May 2008 .

Richard Ingram has suggested that the Blair Babes came into existence so that The People's Dear Leader would look good when he was photographed surrounded by them; boyish, thrusting New Labour and suchlike. Beyond that, it's a relief to find that I'm not the only old buffer to find that litter of clone-creatures at the one and the same time bland, incompetent, opinionated and (only because of that combination) dangerous.


Newsnight I.

07 May 2008 .

It seems that, despite legislation five years ago to tighten security for workers 'airside' at British airports, action by the government to enforce it has been woefully lacking; to demonstrate how seriously it takes it (honestly!), the government has commissioned an inquiry

Jim Fitzpatrick MP, a transport minister who had a hand in that legislation, appeared on Newsnight this evening. Paxman asked him a series of questions, including whether there are any people working airside who have criminal records. 'They undergo the same security checks as passengers,' said the hopeless minister. How many foreigners work airside? 'They undergo the same security checks as passengers.' How many people with records for terrorism? 'They undergo the same security checks as passengers.' Was there any check as to whether, say, a French person working airside had a record for terrorism? 'They undergo the same security checks as passengers.' The truth is, says Paxman, is that Mr. Fitzpatrick has no idea about the answer to any of these questions. 'They undergo the same security checks as passengers.'

I ask again; how long do we put up with being treated with such contempt? Although it has to be admitted that during this interview, despite his time in politics, Mr. FitzP. had the expression about his eyes of a dazzled rabbit.

[Afterwards a Clinton aide was unbelievably patronising to Paxman; 'I know it's very complicated,' he said, as he explained that democrats who favour one candidate over the other now will nevertheless vote democrat come November, whichever is nominated... Paxman really did deserve Brownie points for his restraint with this prat.]

Newsnight II

Wendy Alexander (leader of the Scottish Labour party) favours a referendum on Scottish independence. Brown declares in Parliament that that's not what she's saying: it clearly is; TV has been replaying each of the several occasions she's said it over the past several days. Paxman takes a few moments to demonstrate that Brown and Alexander aren't singing from the same sheet.

Brown is clearly hearing something completely different from Paxman, me or, I imagine, almost anyone else. Perhaps he's genuinely, constitutionally, unable to listen.

Newsnight III

On the injection of 50 billion by the Bank of England into banking sector last month, in response to the credit crunch, Foreign Secretary Miliband said that he's not heard a single voice suggesting that it wasn't the right thing to do. In one sentence he told me that he doesn't read my website (which suppose I rather guessed) and that my opinion against the injection puts me in a minority of one.

Miliband does, I admit, begin to look like a future PM. God knows, we're going to need somebody. At least he tried to address the questions that were asked of him (even if he did contradict himself a couple of times; far rather that than endless fudge).

'David Milliband' Newsnight 'Wendy Alexander' 'Jim Fitzpatrick' 'Airport security' Airside

A constant plaint from your web-host is that the government is not guided by scientific evidence.

07 May 2008 .

Gordon Brown asked for a scientific assessment on whether cannabis should be returned from class 'C' to class 'B' - i.e. be treated more seriously by the police and the law. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (the government's own advisors) duly assessed, and returned their findings that this would not be the best course of action: so Brown's home secretary, Jacqui Smith, has announced the cannabis will be regraded to class 'B'.

So what was the point of asking for a scientific assessment? Smith says that she's decided on the wise course of action (but then the blair babe clones always say that what they decide is the wise course of action): it's obviously best, she says, to err 'on the side of caution.' On what basis does she make these pronouncements? Not, certainly, on the basis of the evidence!

Perhaps The Moral Arbiter Of The Nation wishes to demonstrate what he means by 'listening'.

Marijuana 'Class C' 'Jacqui Smith'

Burma.

07 May 2008 .

Bush offering aid to Burma... in tandem with a demand for democracy in that country.

I don't think I know anyone who has a moment for the government in Burma; for once I'm with Bush on a political aspiration... But... without expressing an opinion either way, I am wondering if the right thing to do might be to offer the aid with a totally open hand - no strings at all, even implied - and get back to the politics later.

A purely personal, or rather family, note. I've never been to Burma; I believe it's something I should do before I snuff it, because a very tenuous link - or rather, two.

My Dad died when I was very young, so I don't know what the details are; but, so far as I know, he was the civil servant who signed off on Burma's independence from Britain. I do know, however, that the officer who hauled down the Union Flag for the last time in (British) Burma later and by coincidence married my mother's sister.

Two sisters, one marrying the serviceman and the other the civil servant who returned Burma to its post-colonial fate... I have to blame the politicians for getting it wrong, really...

Burma Independence

Clone Time!

06 May 2008 .

I wonder if Paxman is under instructions to go a bit more gently, or if he's having a quiet day, or if (God forbid) he's mellowing; whatever the reason, he gave Hazel Blears a comparatively gentle time on Newsnight this evening. (She's another apparatchik clone, distinguished not so much by that slightly superior smile - which is after all a clone feature, albeit one which ought to have faded just a bit (at least) since last weeks local elections - as by her increasingly alarming, fiery red hair: totally unfair to pick on a physical feature, but just try pinning this mob down on anything that matters!)

Asked whether she agreed with the decision by Wendy Alexander, leader of the Scottish Labour party, to go for the devolution - 'break from the union (with England and Wales)' - referendum, which seems to have been taken without consulting Brown or the cabinet, Blears wriggled. Asked whether the 5.5 million poorest, hit by the '10p' tax rate change, were going to be compensated, Blears wriggled. (Actually, this part of the conversation was identical to another, last week - Paxman on Newsnight then, too, with another Blair Babe clone: try as I may, I can't remember which that one was*... I almost wrote about it then, because it was such typical B-BC waffle; but I had better things to do.) Then Paxman asked if, assuming there were compensation, it would go to all those hit by the tax cut. Blears wriggled. She also twisted: 'If I say "yes",' she said, 'you'll go out and find the one person who hasn't been compensated' (and cross-examine me on that one person). With saintly patience, Paxman explained that he meant substantially all the losers. Why do we have to put up with such infantilism from senior(ish) government figures on the leading BBC news analysis programme?

*(Added later:) It may have been Tessa Jowell, on Newsnight last week... but who can possibly remember one clone from another after a day or two? After I wrote this item, TV news showed Jacqui Smith at the despatch box, with Harriet Harman sitting just behind. They were dressed identically, with identical haircuts, identical pearl necklaces, identical tight, dismissive expressions... it was a distinctly spooky and rather unsettling sight. Mind you, it may have been HH who was speaking... or it may have been two totally different clones - it really is difficult to tell them apart!

Clearly the Blair Babe clone creatures have learned nothing from their drubbing last week. Was this, I wondered as I watched, the sign from Heaven that we're doomed to a Tory government from 2010? If we are, I know where I'll be pinning a substantial part of the blame, Ms. Blairs.

But she did come up with one novel response, which with she seemed rather pleased: this was that Frank Field (MP) had talked with The Great Helmsman about the removal of the 10p rate, and had been 'pleased with what he'd heard' (or words to that effect); and that if Mr. Field was happy with it, then we should all be happy with it too (presumably without the boring necessity of us proles being told what was actually said). Frank Field is one of the few MPs whose reputation is still worth more than three ha'pence, and there are a lot of people who are relieved that he's challenged The Father Of The Poor on this issue... but, but, but...

Ms Blears' idea that the electorate should be satisfied with what the government is doing because an MP in the government party is satisfied is a novel interpretation of how democracy should work, no matter how respected the MP concerned. In any case, it's been in the public domain for some days that Mr. Field may be feeling that what he thought was on offer from Mr. Brown and what actually is on offer are not quite the same thing: whether that rumour is correct or not, Blears is presumably aware of it... or perhaps not... Duplicitous or stupid?

'Blair Babes' 'Pod people' Harman 'Jacqui Smith' 'Hazel Blears' Newsnight 'Blair Babe' 'Frank Field' 'Scottish Devolution'

He knows somebody. She carries on a family tradition.

05 May 2008 .

Further to my astonishment yesterday, at the apparent continued viability of the Clinton campaign...

Obama is being castigated (barracked?) over the sermons and speeches of his ertwhile pastor and colleague in charity, Rev. Wright(?). I was under the impression that Obama had distanced himself from the opinions of that rather inflammatory preacher weeks ago, with absolutely no equivocation; but it seems that he's not being allowed to put any clear water between them...

What I'd say I don't understand, although in fact I fear I understand only too well, is how the fact that Obama had a rather firebrand pastor can possibly be equated with Clinton's outright, egregious lying.

Obama

TV's power to inform?

05 May 2008 .

I've just spent four hours, over a couple of evenings, watching (yet) another disaster movie, 'Flood' (ITV), about a North Sea storm-surge inundating London. Some of the special effects worked quite well, but on the whole my time would have been better spent in the pub. These films always have a flaw which makes the suspension of disbelief so difficult - unless someone can explain why the authorities, with only three hours' warning of the surge hitting the city, tried to evacuate a million and a half people through gridlocked roads and a closing-down underground system. Why didn't they just send them to the upper floors of all those solidly built office buildings, most of which were going to and did, and would, remain standing?

Or was this a hidden message, warning us of the authorities' inability to respond under pressure or to think of the blindingly obvious?

Flood 'Flooding London'

Lessons of the Election.

05 May 2008 .

With Gordon Brown's promises to listen to what people are saying, we should be entitled to hope that this week's drubbing of the Labour party in the local elections might serve the excellence purpose of puncturing the complacency of this most smug of governments. 'A return to more fundamental Labour principles,' some people are saying. Except that Brown made the same promise last year... and the Blair people (sort of Pod people, but without the charm) will be convinced that the setback was a comment on Brown, but not on the Dear Leader (who, even as I write, is probably even more smug at home in his new manor-house, in the knowledge that he never got such a drubbing).

In fact, I fear that Brown is so ingrained a control freak that he'll learn nothing, and the rest of the Labour party will learn the lesson they choose to think is being taught them. For thus it ever is.


Are you still here, Mrs. Clinton?

04 May 2008 .

Ma Clinton told that extraordinarily foolish lie about being shot at on the tarmac in Bosnia. Not something she could make a mistake about. (Unless,of course, she's actually clinically insane.) So how can she still be a serious contender for leadership of the Democratic party?

Clinton Bosnia Lie

'Harriet knows best', or, I may never vote Tory, but she deters me from voting Labour, either.

04 May 2008 .

Harriet Harman has said (New Statesman, 16 Oct 2006) that in messy divorce cases, she wants children as young as six to give evidence in court about their wishes. She may well be on the right track, for all I know; although, as someone whose parents divorced when I was seven, I'm inclined to be rather less certain on this. (I do not think I'd have been able to express in clear terms what I wanted at that age; and appearing in court would have traumatised me.) Frankly, I don't know what the rights and wrongs would be on the issue.

However, it wasn't her viewpoint which first turned me against her (a disdain which has grown steadily since then)... rather, it was how she expressed it: 'Allowing (those) children to give evidence in court is imperative. It's a no-brainer.' Her phrasing, apart from being unattractive, denies the possibility of argument. And doesn't it display the sort of moral self-certainty which is proving so disastrous in government latterly? She may well be right in her view... but stuff her message - she makes herself the messenger who begs to be shot whatever that message may be.

I think 'priggish' and 'bossy' are the words I'm looking for.

'Harriet Harman'

The Party of the Future...

03 May 2008 .

Tories are in a lather about recent strikes - 'the return of the 70's', 'a new Winter of Discontent', and Thatcher's 'the enemy within'. The shadow chancellor, Osborne, has called for greater controls of the unions as a matter of 'urgency', as if we face the imminent collapse of society from this quarter. (In fact, there's not much resemblance at all between the democratically-moved actions of the extraordinarily regulated unions now and their often politically motivated stranglehold then.)

Yet there's no talk from Osborne (nor, indeed, from the front benches of either party, so far as I can see) about any need for greater controls of the banking sector - never mind the infinitely greater damage it's done and is doing to our economy, the vast input of taxpayers' money and guarantees to prop some of the banks up, and a greed which union bosses of the worst water wouldn't even bother to dream about.

In a radical alternative approach to the same perceived problem more locally... Boris Johnson, on BBC just before the election, when asked what he would do about the RMT in the light of their strike action on the (grossly poorly managed) London Underground, said that he'd ask the members to 'enter a no-strike agreement'. Why would they do that, he was asked, without something pretty substantial in return? 'They'd see that it was in their own interests'.

Gawd 'elp us.

'Winter of discontent' 'enemy within' RMT 'No-strike agreement' 'Boris Johnson' 'Ken Livingstone' 'Banking sector' Osborne greed

40 years!

London, May 3rd, 2008

Paris, May 3rd, 1968.

As the Blond Bombshell replaces Red Ken (if he does), who can replace The Great Helmsman?

02 May 2008 .

New Labour has been trounced in the local elections: as I write, it seems that Johnson will supplant Livingstone as Mayor of our city... and that London will experience the administration of a buffoon whose apologists find it necessary to keep telling us that he isn't a buffoon. We'll find out soon enough, I suppose.

The media are talking about the results of the election in terms of a public rejection of Brown, as are some MPs and even cabinet ministers (Alan Johnson damned Brown with a kiss on the BBC's election programme last night...) Just because the media say it doesn't automatically mean they're right,of course.

I've made my own disdain for Brown clear on this site; but I've made my even greater contempt for some of his colleagues and opponents just as clear. Awful though Brown is, I suggest that we have to think very carefully who might replace him.

[I really ought to start working on my manifesto ( new page created today, to be worked on over the next few weeks).]

Brown Boris 'Ken Livingstone' Buffoon

I've been told the story's apocryphal, but I'm certain it's true...

01 May 2008 .

Every year a school in Germany (Hamburg, I believe) used to send a school party to visit England for a week. It may still do so. The pupils would stay in Hackney, in London. (I lived in the borough very briefly: it isn't a destination I'd recommend, even to stay cheaply while visiting more interesting parts of the city; imagine one of the more depressed parts of N.Y.'s Harlem without the sense of optimism.)

The council publicised these school visits, a few years ago, with some pride. (It's certainly true that Hackney has made a feeble and, so far as I know, unsuccessful attempt to offer itself as a tourist destination.)

A colleague reported back that he had met and chatted with one of the German teachers in charge of the visit, and had mentioned Hackney Council's pride that the borough had become a destination and its hope that further educational tourism would follow.

After a pause, and with some embarrassment, the German had explained that the school wanted its pupils to gain some experience of what is was like to live in a third-world city, and Hackney met their needs most conveniently.

I was born and raised in London. It may have changed more than I have and I may not be really at home there any more, but it's still my city: listening to the nonsense spoken about London as the election approached over the last few days, it's come home to me again just how different the politicians' world is from mine.

Just for starters, will someone explain to some of them that London is a city, where eight million people live and/or work. It isn't a ruddy sports stadium under construction. Nor is it a constituency-fest for their ambitions and some of their more egregious ideas of what being a mayor involves

'Hackney Council' 'Third world' 'school trips' tourism

A point of view.

01 May 2008 .

Mediaeval mind, BBC 4, this evening: "The mediaeval world was seen through a spiritual and supernatural prism which it's hard for us to imagine..."

We may not have a spiritual view of the world any more - and arguably we're paying a high price for it in all sorts of ways, especially here in England ('British children are the unhappiest in the developed world', etc.).

I suggest, however, that in our own way we're just as superstitious today, and just as thought-controlled, as our forebears were. The difference is that then, for all its faults, the church offered salvation; now, the state offers nothing but a new iPod and Tesco's open on Sunday.

Just a (gloomy) thought.

'Mediaeval mind' 'spiritual view' iPod

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