Journal of the Plague Years

• It's a terrible thing to say, but I regret that sympathy with Fayed for the death of his son is exhausted.
• Punishment by Machine.
• The Obsession With Executive Flight in Cool Britannia.
• The spin must go on...
• 'B'
• Zimbabwe's Rotten Boroughs.
• The Tower of Babel? Or just a system too complex...
• Yesterday Once More.
• Praying for Peace in Basra.
• Not a good day for Democracy.
• The BBC and Motor Racing.

It's a terrible thing to say, but I regret that sympathy with Fayed for the death of his son is exhausted.

31 March 2008 .

The Coroner in the latest round of the Diana conspiracy saga has ruled on the evidence that Paul Burrel is a liar ('by his own admission'), along with several other witnesses, and that Fayed's theories are totally without foundation. I can't believe that anyone seriously thought that Diana's death was by the order of Prince Philip, and at this most critical moment (for Fayed) he has been unable to substantiate that there ever was any apparent evidence for it, even circumstantial. But we've still spent more than enough money on the Phony Pharoh's crackpot ideas to keep Jodrell Bank going for an extra year or two. Can we stop now, please?


Punishment by Machine.

31 March 2008 .

Although there may be arguments about whether the levels of fines are too high, or whether parking arrangements in an area are the best they could be, it's fair that anyone who parks badly should be treated the same. On the face of it, it seems reasonable that it shouldn't matter whether you're caught by a (human) traffic warden or by a camera - but it isn't: I'd think that punishment ordained by machine may be (ought to be) a psychological step too far; but then again, we've accepted it for speeding...

What is repellent is the name change for traffic wardens, to 'civil enforcement officers'(??)... it's spin in typical corporate/new labour fashion. (Windscale was still Windscale, and went right on shedding nuclear pollution, never mind that they tried to 'move on' by calling it Sellafield. And everybody still calls guards on trains, 'guards'.)


The Obsession With Executive Flight in Cool Britannia.

30 March 2008 .

An executive jet crashed today onto a residential street in Farnborough, Kent, shortly after take-off from Biggin Hill.

I was trained to fly there, in very different times; I have wondered for years at the use to which the airfield has been put since then, because I can say from experience that it's very unsuitable for anything much larger or less controllable than a Spitfire. There are two problems with the field which, in any sane society, would have ensured that it stayed catering only for light aircraft:

The first problem, that it's in a fairly heavily populated area with aircraft having to pass low over residential areas, was the one that home to roost today; but it's never washed (and probably never will) with our recent tech- and flight- obsessed governments, so straight to the second...

This would convince me not to base jet aircraft here: the field is on a plateau; with the generally prevailing wind, there's a powerful downdraft at the start of the runway which makes landing demanding even for pilots familiar with it. It's a problem that was already been well-known when Biggin was probably the most famous fighter station during World War II. Jet engines take a measurable time to respond to (urgent) demands for extra speed - a feature which has resulted in several well-reported crashes elsewhere. As I write, 'an aviation expert' is explaining on TV how the skilled pilots in jet aircraft could react safely to unusual and rapid-changing conditions peculiar to landing at this particular airfield. Perhaps he really doesn't know that jet engines can't react as quickly as pistons do - and need to, sometimes, at Biggin Hill.

[A main road passes along right by the fence at precisely the dangerous (downdraft) point; I have a vivid memory of exchanging glances at about 20 feet with the passengers on the top deck of a double-decker on route 410 as I landed on my first solo .]

With these types of aircraft, a local resident said, today's was an accident waiting to happen. How right.


The spin must go on...

30 March 2008 .

On the subject of flight... The CEO keeps popping up telling us how sorry they all are for the foul-up that's been the grand opening of Heathrow Terminal 5. Which continues...

So sorry, that they tell us how many flights will depart each following day - instead of simply and directly admitting how many will be cancelled...

So sorry, that instead of putting up 'Flight Cancelled' on the departure screens, they put 'Consult Airline'. You may know perfectly well that consult equates to cancelled, but you still have to queue (for an hour or so?) to consult because, if you were wrong and the flight went - without you, you'd lose what you paid for your ticket... But of course, when you've queued, you find you were right... and you've had to queue to be told about the cancellation because they won't just write it on the board in the first place.

Sometimes it really is the detail that's so irritating. (The Tower of Babel, below)


'B'

28 March 2008 .

I'm not sure that there's anything useful I can say here, except to put my feelings on record.

Panorama, yesterday, on organised gangs running child prostitution rings up and down the country. Additionally distressing because even where the police are acting, they seem not to be getting very far. An estimated 5,000 children in England - and I'd lay money that that is a low estimate; only forty odd indictments in the past year. It doesn't compute too favourably. And the government spokesman, a sub-man with responsibility for policing, seemed to have no grasp whatsoever.

Police officers talked about the problem first having surfaced (as something other than the better understood paedophilia rings) in two towns, Wolverhampton and Nottingham, around 1998. The programme talked exclusively about girls.

I realise that 'I knew that' is up there with 'I told you so' on the irritation scale; but we did know about child prostitution, as teachers in London, at least 15 years ago, involving boys as well as girls, and we had an inkling of criminal gang involvement; at the time we blamed it largely on the new Thatcherite economic climate (and I still think that we were to some extent on the right track). I was told in about 1991 that there may have been more children in prostitution in London then than in 1891; I didn't find it impossible to believe.

Unfortunately, the care system in the People's Republic of Islington, still in denial about the long-term sexual abuse of its wards, was contributing to the involuntary workforce - a fact which I think was probably known to most teachers here. It's one of the reasons why I particularly despise Margaret Hodge, late and unlamented mayor of this borough (and later, by a revolting irony, children's minister) whose response to suggestions that all was not well in her borough was ad hominen attacks on witnesses.

This story, to the best of my belief, without further comment, from 1995.

Out one evening at a slightly seedy joint in Finsbury Park, I was greeted by 'B', about sixteen or seventeen years old, who had until recently been a pupil at the school where I taught, and a resident (in a home) in the care of the borough.

While he was a pupil, his pastoral head thought that B had been abused in the home and was pretty certain that he was 'working'. I believe that the teacher had worked hard for B but, as I understood it, without much success and with very little help from the police ('no evidence that would stand up' - at least that's changed a bit), social services ('he's already in care' and almost 'what more do you want us to do?') or, of course, the home itself. B was never in any of my classes and I have no recollection of ever having spoken to him while he was at school, although I'd certainly heard about him in the staff room.

On the evening when I met him, B offered to spend the night with me for free, because apparently I had been kind to him while he was at school.

Sorry. One comment. As I write this, I'm on the edge of tears.

We did know there was a problem, 15 years ago.


Zimbabwe's Rotten Boroughs.

28 March 2008 .

Well, I suppose we didn't actually set them up in order to swing elections (full marks to Mugabe for creative thinking, there), but I think we should remember that it's not so long since Britain had rotten boroughs all of its own: and didn't the vested interests just fight tooth and nail to keep them? More to the point; I don't think we should forget that the UK system of voting is pretty fragile; the present government, albeit inadvertently, made it even easier to fudge ballots through it's dedication to postal voting - and we've seen supporters and elected representatives of both parties exploit this, to the distress of democracy, just recently in Slough (and who knows how much we haven't heard about?).

As a further antidote to post-imperial assumptions, I don't think we should forget the gerrymandering that has also been a quiet, but continuing and not-so-rare, feature of British political life.

Mugabe comes even further down the food chain than Saddam, so far as I'm concerned; there's nothing good about his political system any more (if ever there was). I merely suggest that we in the UK probably ought to walk a fairly fine line between assumptions of British superiority and the equally dangerous fear of risking being labelled racist. Best, perhaps, to think of other countries and our own being reflections of each other; then we can be robust in so many ways...

A toast to that fine old Ulster call to the ballot-box which, in my own lifetime, wasn't by any means entirely a joke and which (thanks to poor legislation) is being polished up a bit here on the mainland:

Vote early and vote often!

The Tower of Babel? Or just a system too complex...

28 March 2008 .

A sinking feeling as the launch of another resource-hugging dinosaur goes pear-shaped... Heathrow Terminal 5, this time. There are moments when it feels as if the UK has cornered the market in big-project incompetence, but of course it isn't so (c/f space rockets and aircraft to town-planning, and airports for that matter, all over the place).

What I think is true is that we suffer a Babylonian hubris: we just refuse to accept that, perhaps, there are limits to the levels of complexity which we're intellectually equipped to handle. It shows up most obviously when 'prestige' projects go wrong, but it actually runs right down the line to our everyday lives. One of the reasons I was glad to leave teaching, a job which I'd enjoyed for twenty years, was that so many conflicting tasks, initiatives, targets and whatever had been bolted on that it became impossible to do the job properly. (With teaching, some might think, not so important; but as air traffic control, or driving a London bus, or policing, become more complex, people are hurt or die.) It's not just our jobs which drive some of us to illness or despair, either. Everyday life is becoming more than an awful lot of people can handle; and ruling Britain without foul-ups, while clearly beyond the present mob, may have become so complex that the systems we have now are beyond the realistic grasp of anyone.

It's the details, sometimes, which take one's breath away. The widely trumpeted and very public opening of a 4 billion project, portrayed as the new gateway to our country, and they hadn't even had a full dress rehearsal, they didn't have enough airport staff on duty to allow the airline workers to get to their posts on time, and the staff - having supposedly been trained for six months - didn't know how to work the baggage system. Perhaps we are just incompetent, after all.


Yesterday Once More.

26 March 2008 .

Yesterday, I wrote, was not a good day for democracy. It seems I hadn't quite grasped the full, delicious, hypocritical irony of it.

'Constitutional Renewal' was the theme of a little homily by Jack Straw, he who feels that he has the literary skills and political understanding to match the writers of the US Declaration of Independence and first Constitution. Unless politicians behave in a more open way, he said, they risk harming our body politic. 'Mr. Speaker, the accountability of government is fundamental to the health of our democracy.' So true; it's just a pity that he's a loyal and senior member of the government that's refusing a proper inquiry into the 2003 invasion on the very same day and which has Mr. Speaker investigating Mr. Speaker's own corruption. And it's a pity that he sounded such a hack.

I sometimes wonder that I find Straw quite such an empty vessel, apart from his convenient shedding of principles as he climbed the political ladder. Yesterday at least reminded me why.


Praying for Peace in Basra.

26 March 2008 .

Basra was a comparative haven of peace once the initial invasion of Iraq was over; now a state of virtual civil war exists there, and it's one of the most dangerous places in the country. It really isn't a ringing endorsement of our 'handover'. [The four thousand British troops are sitting in the airport, miles away.] We want to be optimistic that the much vaunted programme, whereby the local government has supposedly been trained to sort the situation out, works as planned - but, if it succeeds, it'll be about the first such of the invaders' plans to do so.


Not a good day for Democracy.

25 March 2008 .

It's been a long day, and I feel I've got better things to do than reprising my Victor Meldrew act on the computer. But from the BBC news in just the last few minutes come these:

1. Mr. Speaker Mammon Martin's committee has managed to find a legal opinion that says that an appeal to stop the publication of MPs' expense claims on second homes (under the Freedom of Information Act) might just succeed. So, they're going to spend vast amounts of taxpayer's money trying to do exactly that. [This is the Mammon Martin who, with his wife, has ripped the taxpayer off to the tune of over 500,000+ per year (q.v.) and is viewed outside the House as the acme of modern scotch corruption; the very man whose committee is supposed to be reviewing MPs expense arrangements in the light of perceived sleaze. Such is the blairite, post-modern world.] The general opinion of the BBC appears to be that the reason MPs are scuttling for rocks to hide under, is that there will be several who will not be able to look their own constituents in the eye once the figures become public. I've got news for BBC and MPs both: the issue has become so rancid that many MPs shouldn't be able to look their constituents in the eye now.

2. Brown has decided to allow his party (some) leeway to vote against (elements of) the Fertility Bill on conscientious grounds; a bit less than predicted (including by me, here, a few days ago), then. And suddenly there he was, on film, saying (words to the effect) that he had always felt that it was important that his people voted according to their conscience on this issue and that was how it had been planned. So all the fuss of the last few days was just a big mistake? That's okay, then.

3. The Commons have voted rather underwhelmingly not to have a proper inquiry into the Invasion of Iraq just yet. The motion was carried by well under half the MPs; there seem to have been an awful lot of abstentions... If any jihadist Muslim were to tell me now that the British parliament remains intransigent, I would find it hard to argue... but please remember that the MPs who voted against the enquiry carry the ballot-votes of less than 15% of the UK electorate.

So I've gone for the Meldrew touch after all. For which, apologies. But even allowing for my rather jaundiced view of the present sorry crew, you must admit that our parliament is hardly a splendid thing right now.


The BBC and Motor Racing.

24 March 2008 .

The BBC is boasting on its website that it snatched FI racing... but not from under the nose of ITV, which had already decided not to bid. It's much reported elsewhere, so this strangled squawk of protest is just for the record.

1. The BBC has a public service remit, so why does it keep spending vast quantities of my money to acquire programming which would be shown by somebody else anyway, without a penny of my money being spent?

2. Motor racing is a dinosaur - and an increasingly stupid one in light of the pollution and climate changes we face. Whether it should be banned altogether is another matter, but should the BBC - with its increasingly green brief - be investing in it?


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