Journal of the Plague Years

Go to content

THE JOURNAL



Harriet Harman stands behind the Speaker's chair to warn members of her party to be sure to consult their consciences when voting.
(Harriet Harman, Whip, 26 May)



THE WEB JOURNAL of A FREE CITIZEN of LONDON:



Irish rejection of the EU treaty.

27 July 2008 .


This media tendency to interpret polling results... A couple of days ago (25 July, below), it was about the Glasgow East result being 'a rejection of Brown' - when it seems more likely to have been a rejection of New Labour. In the same way, the recent Irish poll (against the EU treaty) was given to us as a rejection of the EU (which, predictably, the tabloids and the europhobic right seized on with glee).

Was it really likely that the Irish had suddenly gone anti-EU? It seemed to go against what (too little) I know about the Irish and Europe but, when enough of the media pressed their bias, I admit I started to be taken in.

Except that... it's beginning to appear that the Irish 'No' vote had far more to do with what the treaty proposes, and with the Irish government's failure to be clear about it: in fact, it probably had very little to do with approval or otherwise of the EU at all, for many or even most voters.

Here's the rub. Voting is the only real political voice, such as it is, that most of us have in our vast centralised 'representative' democracies. But; it seems that when we've voted, it's Grubb Street which gets to tell everybody what we were actually 'saying'. And Grubb Street can get it wrong; or lie... and there's very little we can do about it.

The question is whether it matters. I think it mattered a great deal on Thursday and Friday, because Brown is likely to replaced by someone even less acceptable to Glasgow East, even more New Labour, than him; and, if too many people accept the fudged (biased?) wisdom from the media, Glasgow and a lot of other places are going to feel even more alienated from the Labour party - as it lurches further into its new Thatch-Blairite slot. I think it matters even more in Ireland, because our future depends on our relationship with the EU; if that goes wrong because clear thinking is poisoned by a media-led propaganda of bias, we and probably the whole of Europe are going to pay.

One might ask, what else can the media do but analyse what they believe polling results to mean? Difficult, I admit. Perhaps they should stick to reporting what results are.


On being patronised by a PPS.

25 July 2008 .


Following Labour's thrashing in Glasgow East yesterday, a digital Ed Miliband joined Newsnight to Bat For Brown. Both interviewer and minister followed well-trodden routes

Newsnight (in effect): "The electorate are saying that they don't want Brown as PM." No, they quite possibly aren't. A very substantial number still voted Labour; the largest vote was more likely to be about Scotland than about Brown since it was for the Scottish National Party; and in any election there are always nearly as many reasons why people vote as they do as there are votes.

Miliband (in effect): "That's not the message I get from talking to members and my cabinet colleagues." (A mistake rather similar to Newsnight's, really.) Amongst politicians. this particular line is too well-trodden - I've already heard it a before, just this week. We're all likely to talk to people a bit like ourselves: when I do it, it doesn't much matter; when politicians do it, it's an unconscious reflection of the fact that they aren't connecting with people outside their own circle - that they're out of touch... and isn't that precisely this parliament's problem? (The 42 day vote, for example, or - especially - the vote to continue MPs unaccountable expenses.)

[In passing: Miliband told us that a major reason for sticking with Brown is that as Chancellor he was generally accepted as up there among the wonderful. Is Miliband right? Do people really still believe that Brown was a good Chancellor, or even one of the greats? I've maintained here that he was carried along by a buoyant world economy and, beyond that, some of his decisions - some of his failures to understand how our economy works - were unbelievably damaging (gold sales, pension raids, deregulation, tax restructuring inter a great deal alia). Personally, I think History will (or ought to) conclude that he was a disaster. Well, however good Brown may have been then... what Miliband has managed to remind us of, without addressing it, is the widespread perception (that after his years of waiting) Brown proved not to be up to the leadership when he got it... Or was that what Miliband intended to do?]

Still; Miliband's solecisms, if such they were, were nothing next to those of Brown's PPS. She explained how what Labour needs to do is to make its message clearer to the electorate. It's the same cry as was going up from the Tory ship as it gradually sank beneath the waves during the nineties; and it's just as patronising and just as rubbish from Labour. I hazard that the electorate understand (New) Labour's message perfectly well, and that the problem is that they don't like it. If I'm representative, they rather resent being told that if they don't like what Labour are saying it must be because they're too stupid to understand it.

The rather foolish PPS was at pains to say that we would vote Labour in the next election because Labour is palpably the party of fairness; she might have been more careful. Now's a time when the economic downturn is beginning to hit the more vulnerable quite hard. It's also a time when Brown, personally, has overseen a sharp increase in regressive taxation while once again refusing to countenance any balancing increase in taxation for the very wealthy... while MPs are perceived still to be feathering their own nests despite the efforts to make them see sense. However true her claim may be, now really isn't the time for this PPS to focus on how fair her party is; because, from the bottom of the economic pyramid, the Parliamentary Labour pig doesn't look any different from the Parliamentary Tory farmer.

Added 26 July (from today's Independent):


(without permission from but with acknowledgment to the paper and the writer.)



How to alienate those who might support you...

24 July 2008 .


During a short interview on Newsnight, Caroline Flint MP put her case for pushing on with with her pet 'eco-towns'; this was in response to the opposition from local communities and councils, and to the numbers of potential developers pulling out. As it happens, I think eco-towns are an obvious, good and probably inevitable idea: I might do things a bit differently from Ms. Flint - better, I might claim (since I'm never going to be asked to take her place) - and I'd certainly re-think some of the locations, but on the whole we're on the same side.

However, after watching her performance tonight, I'm not sure that I'd want Ms. Flint as my advocate.

It was put to her that the local authorities' association is taking counsels' advice that the imposition of these new towns may be illegal. As I understood it, she said that they needn't/shouldn't be doing that, because they'd be able to put their points during the planning process.

Is this the planning process which the government is neutering in order to eliminate the vexation of listening to what ordinary people think about pet projects like airports and motorways... and eco-towns? (Not that we feel they ever took too much notice of what we said, even before.)

That what you want to do may be a 'good thing' doesn't justify running a steam-roller over people. I imagine that it was a faint trace of conscience on that score which led Flint to what appears to be intellectual dishonesty about the true (new) nature of the planning process.

-/-


Of course, I may be doing the minister an injustice - she may have been saying something quite different. Unfortunately, her argument wasn't very articulate, and it was made even more difficult to follow by a baggage of cliches - and litter of at least two dozen 'you know' fillers. (A generation ago, ministers would have been aghast at you know-ing even a couple of times. Well, that was then: but Flint you-knowed so often that it became actively distracting.) So maybe she wasn't being dishonest at all, and I was just misled by her lack of coherence... or perhaps her lack of coherence came about because she knew she was being dishonest...


ID Cards need not pathe the way to a Totalitarian State.

22 July 2008 .


A letter in the Independent (16 July) by John Roger Tardif argues that we need not fear ID cards and all the other requirements and restrictions which the government may feel to be necessary: he says that losses of liberties in Britain during the war against Hitler did not lead a 'slithering down the road to fascism, communism or Stalinism'.

He may be correct up to a point, but there's no doubt that state control during the war profoundly affected the relationship between citizen and state thereafter: whether or not you consider the change to have been wholly beneficial depends very much on your point of view.

What seems likely is that the requirements and restrictions of that war (for national survival) may, as supposed precedents, have pathed the way for some of the more illiberal ideas being aired now.


You mustn't photograph strangers - unless they can't see you.

21 July 2008 .


An odd tale has appeared in the Mail and on the BBC, inter alia. David Green of Waterloo claims that, having been harrassed for months by gangs of teenagers in the street outside his home, he finally took some pictures of them in an effort to get them identified. However, one of them apparently called the police on his mobile and, a few hours later, a PCSO turned up on Mr. Green's doorstep, telling him that in taking photos of the kids he had not only broken the law, but had committed an assault; and that he might be prosecuted. The police and Home Office state that there's no record of the incident - although, interestingly, they don't seem to deny that it happened.

Unfortunately, only the police can access the phone records: in today's climate, one might imagine that they would not be too keen to disclose details of that call if its existence should tend to support Mr. Green's tale. (I'm sorry that I should even have the idea that the police might misbehave in that way, and I don't actually believe it.) As it goes I suspect that, if the call was ever made, it wasn't made to the police. However, that leaves the equally nasty possibility that one of these PCSOs did turn up at Mr. Green's home - not carrying out his (her) duties, but doing a perverse favour for the kids.

-/-


Whether or not Mr. Green was actually committing an assault by photographing miscreants (he wasn't, of course, not even under the increasingly surreal laws of this country), we do live in a country which is getting odder and odder about who takes pictures of us. The widely reported episode last week, of a chap photographing his own children (and nobody else's, as he was able to prove) in a playgound being told he must wipe his camera, was only one in an endless string of similar cases: yet, at the same time, most of us seem to have no objection to total strangers following us on CCTV - even though a string of convictions of, and cautions to, CCTV operators (for voyeurism and other abuses) really ought to be giving us pause for thought.

Personally, I find the CCTV camera in the park following the movements of young women (as my friend suggested and I've now confirmed - q.v.) far more sinister and far more offensive than a doting if irritating parent taking pictures at the school play.


Breach of Contract (I mean, the one between an elected Government Minister and the People!)

21 July 2008 .


Ed Balls, as schools secretary, was talking about ETS losing their contract to administer SATs (as a result of the chaos they've managed to generate) just a couple of days ago. Since then, his department has gone a bit quiet on the idea: it seems that they're worried about the tens of millions they may have to pay to ETS in compensation for early cancellation.

I really don't understand.

Hasn't ETS broken its contractual obligations? If it has, how can the taxpayer be made to pay? Shouldn't we, on the contrary, be suing ETS for breach of contract?

If, on the other hand, ETS has not broken its contract, then the first question to spring to mind, if our government exercised competent procurement, ought to be, 'Then what's all the fuss about?'

Since it's only too obvious what all the fuss is about, the second question to spring to mind really does need to be answered as a matter of urgency. Why has nobody taken responsibility for the governments side of this benighted contract? Specifically; how can Ed Balls (who is the elected politician at whose desk the buck quite obviously stops) say that's he's not to blame because he was at 'arms-length' when the contract was signed between the qualifications quango and ETS.

Dear Mr Balls; the SATs business wasn't the local responsibility of a minor civil servant but one of the main planks of government policy. What right had had you to be arm's length - especially once you had been firmly warned that serious troubles were looming (as you was, by Katherine Tattersall, director of the tests regulatory body Ofqual)?

Added 23 July: It turns out that when the contract with ETS was prepared and signed, you weren't at arm's length at all... officials of your department were present throughout. Surely not another lie?


Trading People.

19 July 2008 .


None of my usual insights in this item; it's just something I'm thinking about.

I watched the Steve McQueen film, "The Sand Pebbles", last night. Give or take a few changed values, it's a darker and better film than I remembered; but then, I was still a kid when I last saw it.

There's a scene in which Richard Attenborough, playing an American sailor ashore upriver in (1920s') China, having fallen for a local girl who's in hock to a Chinese gangster, takes the $200 needed to buy her freedom to the gangster's bar. Some Americans drinking there (in cheap, crumpled and sweaty suits) think it's big joke to bid against him and force an auction - in which the girl is then stripped of her clothes, her pride and her humanity. When I saw the scene before, I was young enough, naive enough, to think that it was just cinema... this time, I couldn't watch it; I've been around long enough to know better.

What really troubles me, in my dotage, is knowing that scenes very like it, and others driven by the same indifference, are being played out all too often right now, even in front rooms and back rooms and dives and clubs right here in my own home town. One of the compensations for getting older is supposed to be that one learns to accept life for what it is. One of the sorrows of my advancing years is that I haven't.

I'll come back to this when I've had some time to reflect. For now, a question: should I have leaned to accept, with sensible Franciscan resignation?

After all, it doesn't affect me. If I ignore these things in the world, I can go on living a very cosy life of my own.


Lonely Bull.

18 July 2008 .


I heard the same story from two of my friends, who have no mutual connection, about the Prime Minister as a guest on The One Show (BBC1) yesterday evening, along with Linda Robson (of "Birds of a Feather" fame, whose son was apparently a friend of Ben Kinsella, the young man who died by stabbing).

There was a report about initiatives in parts of the US to move youngsters away from knife crime (and the gangs and so on) before they become criminals and get caught up in the correctional system - or get killed. It seems that the people working on it treat the problem as more like a disease than as a purely criminal matter; and it also seems that they may be achieving greater success than do more traditional methods.

My friends tell me that after this report from America, Ms. Robson asked Mr. Brown what he thought of this different approach.

"People who are caught with knives must expect to be severely punished," he said (or that effect); then he plodded on through what seemed like a prepared statement: I can imagine how he was talking all too easily. Apparently he didn't argue against the ideas he'd just seen - he'd either failed to grasp them, or simply couldn't mesh them with his determination to look 'strong'.

One of my friends said that she was so embarrassed and ashamed on Brown's behalf that she couldn't bear to remain in the room watching.

I thought, as I was being told all this, that watching a bull in the ring... near the end of his life as he stands exhausted, hurt and bloody, facing his tormentors with uncomprehending defiance... must be much the same.

I don't normally drag my friends onto this site (not too obviously, anyway) because they may have opinions completely different from mine and I don't want to misreport or offend them. This time, though, as I listened, I think I found myself recognising something which had previously escaped me:

I'd pretty much decided to stop criticising Brown on these pages a few weeks ago, on the grounds that he was too easy a target, that everyone's taking pot-shots at him, that it was becoming repetitive... I have a terrible feeling that I may have relented out of pity...


We may well still have SATs; but it seems, after all, that 'Standard' doesn't mean standards.

18 July 2008 .

It may be that yesterday's little rant about SATs was completely redundant (below).

The head of a primary school in Lancashire (Janis Burdin, Moss Side) has demanded this week that her pupils' work be re-marked. She's released some examples into the public domain to demonstrate her contention that the marking has been 'a fiasco'. The following are both from students graded level 4:

I. "Quickly, it became apparent that Pip was a fantastic rider: a complete natural. But it was his love of horses that led to a tragic accident. An accident that would change his life forever."

Marks awarded: Sentence structure: 5/8; Composition and effect: 7/12
II. "If he wasent doing enthing els heel help his uncle Herry at the funfair during the day. And had stoody at high." (Sic, repeatedly.)

Marks awarded: Sentence structure: 5/8; Composition and effect: 8/12

You read the awarded marks correctly.

[It seems that ETS, apparently a rather dodgy American company which has been contracted by the government to run the testing system (if not, below, failing to run it), has been employing wholly unqualified and untrained staff, including agency staff and school leavers, to do its 'marking' - in total contravention of its contract. Long live outsourcing to the private sector! Ed Balls (Brown's own chosen heir to the PM-ship), wearing his minister-for-school's hat, admits that he carries ultimate responsibility but refuses to apologise for the chaos that spreading through the education system - seemingly on the grounds that ETS's incompetence has nothing to do with him!

[We're really going to be able to meet the skills challenges of 21st century.]

Go back to first principles. And start by abandoning SATs.

17 July 2008 .


  • Outrage over the past few days, because the marking of SATs has become so chaotic that some children won't hear their results until after the end of term.


  • Organisational problems for schools because they won't know before the end of term which classes to assign children to, for the new school year.


When SATs were introduced, they were for one purpose only: to help schools, along with interested parents, inspectors, etc, to assess how those schools were performing. They wouldn't ever be used for any other purpose, we were told (not that anybody believed that); they wouldn't interfere with school routine or the normal process of education, we were told; they would never, never, never be used in any way as a stick to beat children with, we were told - in fact, the children would never even be given their individual SATs results... no mission creep, categorically.

  • Now there's outrage, and children stressed out of their minds, because they haven't had the results of the tests which have come to dominate their school lives.


  • As for the organisational problems... whatever happened to teachers having a good professional knowledge of each student's progress, SATs or no SATs?


And the SATs themselves; what do they measure? To be frank, they measure how well each child has been coached to pass SATs. [Much as 11+ (at which I did extraordinarily well, I may say) measured little more than a child's ability to do IQ tests well; which meant that my life at school was made Hell because, since in every other respect I was a very average student, I could never match everybody's expectations no matter how hard I worked - which I did. If you detect an element of resentment here, you're probably dead right.]

And schools are coaching - to the extent that the children's stress has become a matter of profound concern to almost everyone, it seems, except the government; while our education system is getting into such a mess that business and universities are almost washing their hands of it...

  • Universities, to whom the government wants half of all children to go, washing their hands of the governments product...
  • Business, for whom the government are so keen to make education 'relevant', washing their hands of the governments product...
  • And the children becoming so troubled that, quite apart from UNESCO reports about their unhappiness, we've seen unleashed an unprecedented level of youth violence.


I'm outraged: not by the delay in publishing SATs results but by their very existence.

My outburst yesterday (below) was just the tip of the iceberg of my sense of frustration, it seems...


Blair as Casus Belli?

16 July 2008 .


Please excuse the following outburst.

It is, I admit, an outpouring of loathing, contempt and disgust. It shames me. It might best be left unadmitted. But if we do not speak out and condemn what our hearts tell us is foul and corrupt, there'll be some things which we'll never change for the better.

It was provoked by my listening today to a bloke who was saying how History would judge Blair in a positive light. I remained silent then, since I was shaken (and shaking) at the violence of my repulsion: better, I felt, to let off my steam here.

-/-


Saddam was a disease, like Hitler. But if you're sick, are you supposed to thank a self-appointed doctor whose idea of a cure is to burn your house down and murder your neighbours? (Especially when this quack has identified the wrong disease, and even more especially when there's a least a chance of a [UN] cure just coming up.)

Those who believe that Blair was a 'good' prime minister or that, at worst, he made a few mistakes; or, that it was right to invade Iraq in 2003... clearly have no concept, no inkling, of the deep, abiding, visceral loathing that some of the rest of us feel for that man, for Bush, for their ideologues and yes-men, and for their bloody war of death, suffering and hate.

I try to retain the forlorn hope that he (and I) might live to one day see Blair's impeachment and imprisonment. (With the present motley in parliament, some of whom have blood-guilt on their own hands, I know it won't happen. Unfortunately, it's far more likely that I'll end up immolated for being unkind about him.)

Meanwhile, a vast chunk of the Middle East lives with the consequences of Britain's Dear Leader - not the place, but the people; people who've seen their husbands, wives, children, slaughtered and maimed in their hundreds of thousands, people who still live with grief and unbearable loss, and who still live with violence and fear.

In this country, most of us haven't directly seen the consequences of Blair's piss on the gatepost (because, be clear, that was what a lot of it was about, no more nor less than like a dog - else why did he need to 'sex up' his evidence?); but we'll go on living with it for just as long as those people in Iraq.

Now let me come to a particular point... On this site, I've railed against the extraordinary erosion of our liberties, against the surveillance and databasing, against the intrusions, so much of which has occurred in the name of security. Why do I object so strongly? One of the reasons - a major one - is that each of these insults, each security check, each camera, each armed policeman, is a spit-in-the-face reminder of that grinning ego whom we allowed to lead us to the blood and death of thousands.

So, yes. Having never hated anyone in my life, I hate Blair to the depths of my soul. What rather surprises me is that I always assumed that hate is borne of fear. But I find that although I may fear some of his thuggier minions, and do fear a complacent constituency which is too blind to see what is done in their name (just as I would fear the Gestapo, and the neighbour who thinks Hitler is sent by God, if I lived in Nazi Germany), my loathing of Blair is borne out of the merest contempt. You learn something every day!

[Disdain for Brown? Because it's become evident that he was in it with Blair up to the armpits... and was so gutless that he tried to pretend otherwise.]

[And that priest in Rome who welcomed Blair into the church, without Blair giving any sign, to the Brits or to the Iraqis, of any penitence... so much for that church's protestations to the Muslims!]

I've said before: there are moments when I regret lacking the literary skills to carry the full breadth and depth of my message... at this moment, more than at any other time...

But I guess I have to do the best with what I have.


UK plc.

15 July 2008 .


There's that phrase again (in a couple of papers and on the BBC).

"What are the implications of the recession for UK plc?"

I know it's a shorthand, but it's a dangerous and ugly one. It's only one step from regarding each household as ltd (which creditors might not like, but I'm sure some of our bureaucrats and ideologues would... or do).

But we're not first-and-foremost cogs in a profit-oriented corporation.

I'm not going to argue my point. Either you see it and agree with me or you don't.

Added later: Is there any connection between the way some of our politicians (not least Thatcher and her disciples) do seem to think of us as cogs, to the extent that that message has passed into our education system, and the dysfunction (including knife-wielding [see below]) which seems to be afflicting so many children who (rightly?) don't think they're going to do very well as cogs?

China, Darfur and Oil.

14 July 2008 .


The media are telling us that the (criminal) government of Sudan is able to perpetrate its horrors in Darfur largely unimpeded by UN peace-keeping efforts because of support from China; and that Sudan receives that support in exchange for oil (amounting to about 7% of China's needs).

Assuming that the media are correct: if the UN wants China on-side, this simple citizen of the world wonders why the UN doesn't simply make a deal with China, with however much secrecy is needed, that (in exchange for co-operation with the UN) China will go on getting its oil - which it's going to get anyway. Down the line, I'm sure that the current victims in Darfur will regard the possible loss of a bit of sovereignty and revenue as a small price to pay for an end to what's happening there now; and nobody should care too much what the current villains think anyway.


Reactive Government...

14 July 2008 .


After Jacqui Smith's smug confidence just a few days ago that there had been no increase in knife crime, despite the conclusive evidence from our hospitals... the government is doing its headless chicken act, trying to be seen to act firmly in response - to the increase in knife crime.

Having suggested over the weekend that youths found with knives would be taken into A&E departments to see the effects of knifings, Jacqui Smith said today that that is not the plan. Frankly, she's an infuriatingly silly person. Out she came with her grand plan: never mind that the idea's been tried in the States, and found not only not to work but possibly even to worsen the situation; never mind that victims might not want to be exhibits; never mind that she hadn't discussed the idea with doctors involved, who've pointed out that they're already under massive pressure and can't divert their time to 'giving lectures'... does she have any idea what it looks like to announce these initiatives with great fanfare only to abandon them within days?

So, what other ideas are being advanced?

110,000 families considered to have youngster particularly at risk of becoming involved will be put under special supervision. 110,000 families? Where will all these supervisors come from?

Families who allow their youngsters to carry knives will be evicted. What are they talking about? How many families do they imagine will be involved? Evicted? Where will they live?

Any youth found with a knife will face a serious custodial or community sentence. The former's surely out - or is there actually all that room in our prisons after all? Surely, it'll have to be the latter... but there's already a crisis because there aren't enough supervisors or controls for those serving community sentences now.

Reactive government on the hop.

At least we have Harriet Harman's assurances that children don't need role-model fathers.

-/-


Added 15 July (in response to feedback): The possibility that there are members of the parliamentary Labour party who see Ms. Smith as a serious potential successor to Gordon Brown had, I admit, completely passed me by. I suspect that, because the idea is such a demonstrable nonsense, I must mercifully have blanked that bit out.

Because of my disdain, I have been accused of an ad hominem approach in my comments about Ms. Smith. I've rejected that, and I hope rebutted it, elsewhere on this site. I doubt that, had we met in the school staffroom, Smith and I would particularly have hit it off but, beyond that, I have no personal feelings about her either way - nor about her politics, save a feeling that she's rather muddle-headed while being given to self-righteous primness.

What's been written on these pages has resulted from my view, as a probably averagely well-informed citizen, that Ms. Smith's record as Home Secretary has largely ranged between incompetence and inanity, that there's something almost surreal about our toleration of her activities in that post and, I'll now have to add, that it's mind-blowing that anyone seriously believes she would be a suitable candidate for PM at this stage of our history.

I'm not going to reprise the evidence for my indictment all over again now - much of it's to be found in other entries. Let me just suggest why I think her crimmos-meet-victims idea (which she's now claiming she never suggested) demonstrated of itself why she's inappropriate as Home Secretary.

The objections which I came up with (all under my own steam) within minutes of hearing about the scheme were broadly as follows - quite apart from the unlikelihood that stab victims will be chuffed at waking up to find themselves ogled by kids arrested off the street:

  • Some of the knife-wielders will be shocked, or whatever, and will react very much as Ms. Smith hopes. But:
  • A small but significant number not only know perfectly well what the effects of knives are, but carry their weapons (some of them double-bladed or otherwise extra nasty) for exactly that reason. Many of this group will, however, be too clever (as opposed to intelligent) to get caught.
  • Of those who won't have known the effects of knife wounds until they are introduced to them by Ms. Smith, a few will react by wanting to get back on the street and do some similar inflicting of their own. (Do you really believe there aren't kids like that? Then you haven't been on the same streets I have.)
  • Many will not have the EQ to make the connection between the weapons they carry and the injuries they're shown; while others will block, or go into denial. Since our children live in a society which is almost Roman in its fascination with violence-as-entertainment while, contrarily, obsessed with unreal levels of risk aversion; which celebrates 'image' without providing most of them with any realistically meaningful channel to achieve it; which forces so many of them into a faux adulthood (not least sexually) long before they're ready for it... precisely what EQ do we expect those children to develop?
  • A number, who may know the effects of the weapons perfectly well, will regard the exercise as irrelevant: no matter how much they hate what they see (and possibly even hate the weapons they carry), they will perceive their first priority to be self-protection. They may well be confirmed in their belief that they need to carry weapons in order to avoid becoming what they're being shown.
  • Above all, by some of the kids being marched through the hospital wards, the victims will inevitably be seen as members of that contemptible class - "victims". And that's what they'll elicit - contempt, rather than understanding.


My point is not I've been clever to have thought of these objections, but that they seem so obvious. I imagine that folk all over will have come up with similar difficulties, and more (perhaps more cogent).

My problem with Smith is that she came out with this idea, her ('knee-jerk'?) reaction, at all. It may not be a requirement of a Home Secretary that he/she have some street-sense - although personally I would have thought that perhaps it should be - but it most certainly is a requirement of a Home Sec. that she have put advisers in place to stop her from putting forward such damn-fool suggestions in the first place, without careful thought.

The worst of it, of course, is that Smith seems to have been caught on the hop by a social crisis (a) which ordinary people have been pointing out for yonks and (b) for which the evidence has been available for years from A&E hospitals (the obvious place to ask) for anyone who cared to check.

She isn't fit for post.


On This Day...

13 July 2008 .


This item has nothing to do with the environment, bent coppers, greedy businessmen, religion, those twerps whom we elect to rule the country or any other of the fascinating themes with which this website is filled... but it's my site, so I can write what I choose (and just hope that I carry some of you folks along with me)

Just for a moment, please celebrate with me and for me.

Forty years ago today, 13th.July, at about 3 pm: at Queens Ice Rink in Bayswater, I met a kind, sweet, funny and absolutely stunning young woman. By the end of the day I was utterly in love with her, and she fell for me.

The sadness is that those were different days, even as recently as 1968: our families disapproved - on the grounds of class. And we were young enough that, despite a deal of rows and tears, we thought we had to give in... they were different days. The two of us went our separate ways.

The joy is that some years ago we met again.

What was there forty years ago is still there. We're adults now, each with our own responsibilities, so what we feel is calmer, and it's moderated by those responsibilities. But she's my best friend; and knowing that I've always had her love has lit my life.


A breath of reason...

12 July 2008 .


A refreshing letter in today's Independent, about Lillian Ladele, from Russell Pearce of Hayward's Heath ("The truth is out: 'civil partnership' really means 'gay marriage'"). I hope he won't mind if I quote it in large part.

"The gay community should be very happy at the decision (in Ms. Ladele vs Islington)... In finding for the applicant, the tribunal has found that she believes civil partnerships are actually marriages (which the government has been at pains to deny). If a civil partnership is not a marriage... then the applicant cannot succeed... since her beliefs are not violated.

"It seems that Lillian Ladele agrees with everyone else (that a civil partnership is a marriage) and the tribunal does too (which it shows by upholding her claim).

"I really am married - yippee!"

This is more like the gay guys I know. A bit more of this blend of humour and argument and a bit less Stonewall fascism hand in hand with Islington Correct Thinking and the matter would have been resolved long ago. And I wouldn't have got all aerated under the collar. A sincere thank-you to Mr. Pearce.


...But the arguments will go on.

12 July 2008 .

Most of Deborah Orr's column in the same paper is also about the Ladele case ("If this registrar had 'Christian views', why did she ever take on the job?").

She focuses firstly on the contradictions in Ms. Ladele's stand - which I've felt uneasy about but resolutely avoided examining too closely. Ladele describes herself as holding 'orthodox' Christian beliefs - she's clearly a practising, conservative member of the church. Orr asks why, if she believes that marriage is ordained by God, Ladele has been officiating at secular marriages for fifteen years; and, more to the point, how she reconciles her beliefs with (for example) joining people who have previously been divorced. Why did she only advance her beliefs when gay unions came into the mix?

The other concern of the column is the damage which Ms. Orr feels that the tribunal's finding will have done to the balance between (a) the rights, or exceptions, which assertive religion is trying to claim and (b) the tenets and needs of our secular society.

I think that how you see the outcome of the case depends on the way you choose to view what's going on. I accept Ms. Ladele at face value, as an individual who felt she was suddenly asked to go a step further than she could. There's no evidence that she disapproves of civil, secular marriages between men and women - Ms. Orr is speculating when she assumes that Ladele must have had reservations which ought to have prevented her becoming a registrar a decade and a half ago; I see no contradiction in an orthodox Christian happy to see men and women married, even if it isn't in church, even if they're divorced; maybe she felt that a Christian presence at a secular ceremony sanctified it in her eyes; maybe she prayed in the evenings that despite their disbelief they would find happiness in their marriage; maybe she accepts that not everyone marries in a church but she's happy to see them marry where they choose. Maybe, of course, she was just a scheming little fifth columnist from the off. The point is we just don't know her thinking on any of the matters other than the issue of gay marriages - so she is most likely just what says she is, protesting against the one thing she can't accept... and neither Orr nor anyone else has the right to impute motives to her.

On the second issue: it's quite clear that some of Ms. Ladele's Christian support is deliberating fighting that battle which the secularists find so dangerous. However, I choose to see the whole business as being a matter of the individual defining her rights against an arrogant element of the state - it was her rights, not religion's rights, which won the day. Her victory was, overwhelmingly, simply the victory of the individual in an individual case. If those concerned about the balance between religion and state feel they've lost a battle, well, tough, it's not the end of the world - there'll be plenty more battles to fight, either way; but, ultimately, this is all about individuals, and in this case Ms. Ladele comes first.

Ms. Orr writes about people having whatever views they wish, however abhorrent to her or the rest of us, so long as they don't harm others or break the law. Ms. Ladele is not harming anyone by asking that other registrars take responsibility for civil unions; and the tribunal has found, for the time being at least, she has not been breaking the law. [In fact, the people who rather consistently broke the law, until the law was changed, were the gays; does Orr think they should not have done so? Or does she simply think that Ladele doesn't have the same right to test the law. I really do think that on this occasion Orr is guilty of double standards...]


Sex on the Beach.

12 July 2008 .


I don't think Ms. Orr was totally on form today, as it goes. There was a small item in her column about the Dubai 'sex on the beach' incident (two Brits, Michelle and Vince, in serious trouble - up to six years in jail - for frightening the horses on the beach there). She castigates the Dubai police for largely ignoring the massive scale of serious and organised crime in that country while priding themselves on their zero tolerance of street (and beach) crime.

She overlooks reports that when the police first found the pair in flagrante delicto, they asked them to stop. It was only after these fine examples of Britain Abroad ignored a caution and continued their drunken sex that the police finally arrested them.

[Assuming that my understanding of the reports is correct, it would seem that Ms. Orr has made the sort of mistake I more usually make, here on this site; she should keep out of my yard!]

In passing: would Michelle and Vince have been given the chance to desist if they'd been caught by CCTV back home in the UK?


The rights of the individual vs. the demands of the pressure group. (Lillian Ladele and Stonewall.)

11 July 2008 .


Lillian Ladele has won her case against Islington council (10 July). The unanimous finding of the employment tribunal was that the council was so keen on promoting its vision of rights for gays that they ignored Ms. Ladele's rights and unlawfully discriminated against her. This site (despite having opinions differing from hers in almost all spheres) takes a degree of pride in having supported Ms. Ladele; but notes that if there were any other liberal/secular websites that did so, they were few and far between.

The absence of strong secular support has allowed some folk to portray the episode as a battle between a backward-looking, conservative religious bigot and the modern enlightenment of Islington council. The reality is rather different, and lies in the willingness of Islington council to treat with contempt and abuse a loyal employee who's done her job competently, correctly, and without complaints against her so far as I know for the best part of two decades: to bully and harass her and to accuse her of gross professional misconduct and 'homophobia'* because she didn't fit into their political vision. The evidence seems to be that their concept of 'compromise' consisted of telling her to toe their particular line or get out. There is no evidence that, as they imposed on her, they made the remotest attempt to find any real compromise with a loyal employee who, after all, was simply asking to be excused from undertaking a duty which had never previously been in her job description, which she and many others regard as immoral or even sinful, and which wouldn't be placed on her throughout most of the world.

*The accusations of racism and homophobia have been weapons of first use in Islington for at least a generation: they're the kiss of ostracism rather on a par with the accusation of 'incorrect thinking' in Mao's China. The problem is that on the whole they're only too effective in silencing most people. Not Ms. Ladele however, all power to her.

The council's reaction to losing - by a unanimous finding of the tribunal, remember - was graceless: we were right, we can't have people imposing their minority (???) moralities on us, the thin end of the wedge... we are considering our appeal (at my expense, as a council tax payer, I may say...), etc. But having lived and worked in that borough for most of my adult live, I wouldn't expect anything different.

Frankly; if you want to learn where New Labour learned much of its crassness, look no further than Islington.

[There was a time 20 years when I was so repelled by the The Forward-Looking Shock-Workers of the New Labour Cadre who ran The People's Republic of Islington (under the leadership of the odious 'millionaire socialist' Margaret Hodge {q.v.}) that I canvassed for the Lib-Dems. Then I made the mistake of attending a couple of the Lib-Dem's party meetings - to discover what I should have known all the time, that the one party was simply more of the other and that it was impossible to tell who were the pigs and who were the farmers... as subsequently became manifest when the Lib-Dems took power in the council... and business went on as usual.]

Having admitted elsewhere on this site that I underwent some rather distasteful experiences as a child, I will now admit that thereafter I retained a prejudice against homosexuals, whether or not such a connection is strictly fair. This prejudice remitted when, as a teacher in London, I worked with gay men: I may just have been lucky in those I met, but such as I got to know were just decent, ordinary guys (well, extraordinary, actually, but that's another matter). But, one of the characters interviewed by TV after the tribunal findings were published was so pushy, so self-satisfied in his disdain for Ms. Ladele, so queer (in a most definitely pejorative sense) that I could feel my old prejudice stirring - and I suspect that such prejudice probably stirred even more strongly in other breasts. It's a pity that, when groups who have been oppressed finally reach the sunny uplands of security, some of their members are so quick to take up the mantle of bully in their turn; one might say, whether it's on the West Bank or in Islington. This guy was one of those, as he ranted self-righteously about Ms. Ladele's legal and moral duties.

I think I can justify my use of the word 'bully'. I assume that two gays wanting a union would prefer not to have Ms. Ladele officiate, in view of her feelings. The compromise which seems obvious to me - that the person who doesn't like civil unions should be allowed to avoid officiating at those at where she wouldn't be wanted anyway - was rejected by the loudest gay lobby in this affair, Stonewall (for whom I believe my smug friend was a spokesman). What, then, did they want? Since they wouldn't want her at their weddings (sic), the only reason for pursuing her had to be to force her out of her job (the rules of which were being changed for their benefit). What is that if it isn't vindictive bullying? And now, far from accepting independent arbitration, they'll spend money, including mine, to drag the matter out through appeals.

The pity of this episode for me is this: I became so comfortable with homosexuality (or at least unthreatened by the idea) that Heaven, in Charing Cross, became my favourite spot for clubbing, along with Turnmills later in the evening. (Helped by the discovery that gay clubs beat straight clubs hands down when it came to atmosphere, music and the absence of tension and violence.) No longer so true if those clubs are going to be full of Islington Stonewall. Or if that smug git goes there.

 Visit the page supporting Ms. Ladele.


Alastair Sim.

10 July 2008 .


I've seen it put about in the rags this week that Alastair Sim may have been a bit too interested in teenaged girls.

A few circumstantial hints have been offered, of a type that might appeal to a mind looking for smut, but not the remotest glimmerings of any actual evidence. Ever so gentle hints, too, about an inappropriate relationship with young (male) actors whom he mentored (some still working now): again, not a jot of evidence (least of all from his proteges) beyond the fact that they were younger than he was.

The man died over 30 years ago. Who has been helped by these 'exposes'?

I don't know that he was one of the great comics of the English screen, but I bet I'm not alone in feeling that he was part of my film culture when I was young. Now, whenever I see him in a film, there'll be a momentary but horrible image put there by a few self-obsessed little shits in the meedja.

Time, maybe, for another personal admission. I had one or two unpleasant experiences as a child, which have come back to haunt me from time to time since.

Just make sure they're always in my mind, why don't you?


Crippen and Capital Punishment.

09 July 2008 .


The most famous hanging in England in the 20th. century, I would have thought. Possibly ever.

Dr. Crippen killed his wife, Cora, disposed of most of her body by means unknown - leaving a few 'conclusively incriminating' bits of her in the semi-basement of their house in Holloway - and ran off with his mistress, Ethel le Neve. (He was apprehended in mid-Atlantic thanks to the fact that the ship he was on was one of the first to be equipped with radio.) At his trial, he insisted that he hadn't killed his wife but that she had left him and gone to America with her younger lover. He was duly found guilty and hanged.

All my life, Crippen has been up there with Lizzie Borden (who was acquitted, but there you go) as a byword for murder most foul.

Except that he didn't commit the crime for which he was executed and for which he's infamous.

Thanks to the modern miracle of DNA testing, we now know that remains in the cellar weren't those of Cora Crippen. Not only do they not match her living relatives, they're not even the remains of a woman. They come from a young man. [Which doesn't say that Crippen didn't kill his wife. Even if he didn't, he could presumably have killed the man. He might even have killed both of them - and a dozen more, for all we know. So might Winston Churchill. But there's no evidence. That's the point, that there's no evidence at all that Crippen ever killed anyone.] However you look at it, he was innocent of the crime for which he died. Full stop.

Will that make the hanging lobby shut up? Not a hope, I suspect. I quote, rather approximately, an opinion which I heard (not for the first time) just today: "His wife was never found. He probably did it... just some other way." I've also heard: "Who cares? It was all a long time ago."

And I find rather scary the conviction, even amongst some of my own friends: that, if a jury finds a person guilty, you can take it that they're right. (For even worse, see Joseph Amrine: Death sentence was procedurally correct, so innocence is irrelevant. - Post-modernism and surrealism, 19 December, 2007 ).

Anyone in their right mind must know that Justice as an ideal is a Will-o'-the-Wisp. The ideal is vital to the functioning of society, and we can never stop seeking it. The reality, however, is human and inevitably flawed. One of the few moral victories of Parliament over the meedja in my lifetime has been the abolition of capital punishment. Let's keep it that way.

All of which comes to mind as I examine why I could never vote for pro-hanging David Davis tomorrow, even if he weren't a Tory, although I totally support his attempt to try to open up the detention debate. Tough calls!


I'm not forcing anything on you!

07 July 2008 .


Last week saw the first anniversary of the public smoking ban in England: the government's congratulating itself on how we're 'a happier and healthier nation' and how many extra people will be alive in 2337 AD.

I gave up smoking 17 years ago this month. I didn't give up because I wanted to, nor because I was ill (although I'm perfectly willing to admit that I might have been dead by now if I'd smoked on). I gave up because it was clear which way the wind was blowing, and I wanted to give up under my own steam at a time of my choosing rather than under some government scheme. [The state and its local authority minions were already becoming increasingly bossy, even then.]

Since the government is also saying that over 75% of the country approves of the ban, I just want it on record that I don't.

Let's be frank, smoking is the most stupid of addictions: it kills you or makes you very ill; it interferes with sexual potency and fertility, it's unbelievably demanding and addictive (more than many illegal substances); it pours profits into the pockets of very unpleasant businessmen* and, by no means least, as drugs go it really gives very little kick, reward or satisfaction.

*and Blair's party funds.


Even so, I remain unhappy about the ban, and about the smug self-satisfaction of so many of the non-smoking lobby. And I don't believe that I live in a happier nation.

  • You change people's habits by education or by legislation. Some socially acceptable, every-day activities can be the manifestation of so evident an evil (racism, for example, especially as it showed itself a generation ago) as to demand legislation; on the whole, though, I think you're either for educating people or you're for controlling them. I'm one of the former, and I'm fed up with the latter.
  • I've speculated elsewhere on this site that we - or some of us - may need our drugs, even to the extent of being willing to take foolish risks. Tobacco wouldn't be my choice for society's addiction (as, nor would alcohol); but, since tobacco has been institutionalised for generations, I think that an approach of shifting people's behaviour would have been preferable to banning it.
  • The battle against tobacco has been and is being fought with a peculiar (and peculiarly English) moral self-righteousness. If you tell me that what was not a sin when I was a child is a sin now, you'd better have some good arguments: changed circumstances may have made driving large cars a sin; a clearer awareness of the damage and pain suffered by victims makes it clear that racism is a sin (though I suspect that thinking folk always knew it was); but the arguments of damage to the world or to other people due to a few clubs or pubs allowing smoking have yet to be made - which may be why the non-smoking lobby needs its self-righteousness in the first place.
  • The world was supposed to be a drab place after the war. As someone who's lived then and now, I have to say that there are many respects in which it's a lot more drab and puritan now. I sometimes want to be in smoky clubs and pubs - not because I like the smoke or because I want to smoke myself, but because the new puritanism has taken a small but vital part of the atmosphere out of life.

Probably not very good arguments... but I'm just saying how I feel. De gustibus non disputandum est.

'protecting people from themselves' 'Smoking ban'


A home-secretarial grasp of reality?

05 July 2008 .


Jacqui Smith must be quite the silliest Home Secretary this country's had in my lifetime, probably ever. It's hardly ad hominem to say so any longer, if indeed it ever was: I think the evidence of the past year is conclusive. In this week of half a dozen killings in London alone... having admitted that she now feels unsafe walking in the streets of her own constituency and presumably being aware of the rapid rise in admissions by hospitals of knife wounds, she smugly stated that there's no more knife crime now that in the past. [I hasten to add that however we choose to address the problems of violence which we clearly do face, I truly hope that nobody believes that Jacqui Smith's Home Office would be the place to look to for mature, reasoned action.] However, it has to be admitted that she's got guts (or at least gall): she voted against the wishes of her own prime minister this week - not that he was anywhere to be seen at the time; on a matter of principle, too: the right of MPs to go on claiming very large amounts of money in expenses, without due accounting or transparency, for their own use.

They say a country deserves the government it gets; but I don't deserve this.

Added later: Incompetent and silly,of course. Corrupt, too. There is no such thing as complicity in, or condoning of, corruption; if you're touched by corruption and your antibodies don't spring into action, you are corrupt. Ms. Smith, voting against her leader on this matter when she knows the mood of the nation (or, as Home Sec, bloody well ought to), is touched by corruption and has acceded to it without ensuring that we know that there are good reasons for her position; no matter what illusions she may have about herself, we can only infer that there aren't any.

[Added 16 July: despite her valiant efforts, the motion she voted for was substantially reversed today - the issue being forced by the opposition. Someone in the Indy, last week, referred to her corrupt vote as 'suicidally stupid'. All that and she ends up on the losing side!]


It's the pursed, morally-certain little mouths that really wind me up.

03 July 2008 .


Hospitals say there are twice as many children being treated for knife wounds as five years ago, and the figures for knifings go on getting worse.

Jacqui Smith says, "You know... Let's be clear," that London is no more dangerous than it was (when?). This week there've already been a couple more deaths by stabbing in the street since Ben Kinsella's. One was four minutes walk from where Ms. Smith lived until a month or so ago.

Who has their ear to the ground: the hospitals who work there, or the apparatchik home secretary (qv) with the metaphorically (and sometimes actually) tight little mouth, wagging finger and lecturing tone? Tough one!

'Jacqui Smith' knifings hospitals


A liberty lost in Barnet.

02 July 2008 .


It used to be said that the English enjoyed greater liberty than most of Europe: in Europe, you could do anything you wished so long as there was a law that said you could; but in England you could do anything you wished so long as there wasn't a law that said you couldn't. It was quite a fundamental difference, reflected in a robust sense of what it meant to be English. The following tale brought home to me the sense that our old idea of liberty has wholly gone.

The Mail took pleasure in winding me up, again... along, no doubt, with millions of other affronted citizens... it's what they do, after all.

They report that a Mr. Abrahams parked his car (legally) at his place of work. In his car's window, he left a sign advertising the car as being for sale. [All my life this has been common practice, and I've seen it in plenty of other countries, too.] For this offence, he was fined 100. He said that he'd never heard of anything like it; I'm sure he's right - if I were selling my car, I might or might not advertise it that way, but that it might be illegal would never enter my head.

[Barnet (north London) council's case seems to rest on a 1984 law designed to stop uncontrolled advertising by traders on the street: I doubt if Parliament ever debated whether a small card in a car window advertising it to be for sale should be banned; if they did, I wonder if they also discussed advertising on the sides of trucks and vans.]

What really troubles me, however, is that I haven't seen any comment in the Mail or elsewhere on this episode which mentioned the loss of that even more fundamental liberty, the right not to be fined or punished except by due process. (Being issued a fine and then being allowed to appeal, incidentally, isn't due process: it's for the courts to decide on the punishment for an offence committed, no one else.. Sometimes we accept some compromise of due process for the sake of a workable system - parking and speeding rules, and suchlike - but only where the rules are well known and understood. Is this rule known at all?

Due process hasn't been followed, and nobody even mentions it... because we've forgotten a right which only a generation or two ago was taken for granted. It's not so much the loss which I hate and fear, as our lack of awareness of our loss.

[In passing: I'll also bet that Barnet council did call the advertising 'an offence'. (If they didn't, on what grounds was the fine levied?) Thinking what the word really means... isn't actually rather repellent that our local public servants (ho ho) can suddenly decide that some trivial, innocent act or activity suddenly constitutes 'an offence'? Physical violence is an offence; rape is an offence; invading Poland was an offence; bearing false witness is an offence. Sticking an ad in your car window is not.]

'Victor Abrahams' 'Barnet Council' 'Car for sale'


Peter's the chap.

01 July 2008 .


Mandelson on BBC4 this evening as our (unelected) Euro-chap, talking about the need for growth and about the difficulties Sarkozy may be placing in his way in the forthcoming world trade talks. "I'm being undermined."

On those talks, his overt narrative is all about growth feeding the world's starving millions (though it's doubtful that growth is quite the 100% panacea he implies it to be). However, it's quite clear that his real text, if dressed up, is the same old rabbiting about working for old-style economic growth. He's learned the new ways of talking (he invented some of them) but, in his deepest guiding ideas, he's still stuck in old ways of thinking - which the world may no longer be able to afford. Either that, or his suave manner (albeit always slightly impatient with us thicker mortals) is intruding on his message and I'm misjudging him.

My trouble is, I can never forget that it was Mandy's family (Herbert Morrison, 60 years ago) who dismissed the possibility of Britain joining the then proposed European coal and steel union, and hence our chances being in at the birth of the Common Market - for which we, and Europe, are still paying the price two generations on - with hardly a thought. "They wouldn't like it in Durham", he said, without any discussion. He had an inflated opinion of his own omniscience, too.

'Peter Mandelson' 'Herbert Morrison' 'world trade talks' Sarkozy'


Ben Kinsella.

01 July 2008 .


Another heartbreaking death by stabbing in the street not far from my flat.

Ben Kinsella's family and friends, together with a growing band of sympathisers, have come out onto the same streets to express their grief, anger and frustration, and to protest that any and every public area in London has become dangerous.

I'm resisting the temptation to comment on the cliches of the media and the banalities of the authorities.

But, I'm not resisting this, which perhaps I should...

When black kids die, the faces on the media are almost all black. Today, all the faces were white. (I'm not sure whether to be proud or ashamed to admit that I didn't notice - my partner pointed it out - and I know it shouldn't matter...but I have a terrible suspicion that it may matter very much.)

More when I've had time to think about it. Or perhaps I'll realise that this item is inappropriate in the face of such loss and waste, and withdraw it. But, my own son died young: this is a matter to which I give my profound respect.


PROBLEMS!

30 June 2008 .


Last week the computer finally gave up. I bought a new one. I bought it from 'Acer Direct', under the fond illusion (which they didn't dispel when they had the chance) that I was buying direct from Acer. It packed up. I have no idea when the mess is going to be sorted out. I've never before so wished that I was a geek than I do now. I've written about it.

You will find entries back to about 20 June sparse, disorganised or (several) unfinished. It's going to be a week or two before the site is running correctly again. I may even take the chance to organise the site properly...

I thought of waiting those few days before recommencing uploading, but I think it better to be on line and disorganised than not to be on line at all.


Two channels with but a single thought!

30 June 2008 .


I've taken part in all sorts of sports over the years; I even enjoy the occasional game of snooker or, dare I say it, Monopoly. I've enjoyed playing but I'm not interested in sitting indoors watching other people playing on TV. Football galas and Wimbledon therefore do nothing for me, while my opinion on the Olympics can be found elsewhere on this site.

Still, I understand that major sporting events are going to fill our channels, notwithstanding the number of channels these days dedicated to nothing but sport.

However, what happened on BBC this evening was just taking the mickey. BBC2 was showing a tennis game which was so exciting that they decided we'd want to watch it on BBC1 as well... same time, same game, same commentary, same footage; both channels as one! And to do this, they cancelled the programme I'd waited to see and postponed the rest of the evening. Humph.

Technology being what it is, couldn't the people who want to watch the same picture on two screens at once simply tune both of them to BBC2?


I have never called a Hofficer of the Law a pig. Now it turns out that some of them are pig ignorant.

24 June 2008 .


Policeman who take pictures of the accidents they've been in - or caused - and post them Facebook? And who boast there about crashing cars and hitting pedestrians?

Policemen who add comments like:

"I did him a favour. At 82 years old you just shouldn't be on the road and if you are, then most certainly don't go through a green light into the path of an innocent police car." (There were plenty such; this may not even be the worst: one says that having hit and crippled a young pedestrian, he was relieved from driving for three months - which was a "bummer". But the whole thing is too depressingly sordid to go into any more.) There is nothing remotely humourous, even in the most gallows sense, about any of it.

200 officers from the Metropolitan Police Service were members of the group on the Facebook site by the time it was outed. Just 18 were disciplined, 14 of them given written warnings. A written warning is what you get for arriving at work a few minutes late three times in a month. (The other four were given 'verbal advice'.)

Why in perdition haven't the worst offenders been chucked from the force without further ado?

These are the chaps you want investigating if you sister or daughter should be raped? Well, all I can say now is, if somebody burgles my house, then rather than have any Met hofficer drive a car on my behalf I'd simply get my crime number from the Met and let the burglars get on with it... hang on, that's all that's ever happened anyway...

I may have misled some of my readers into thinking that I believe our local police deserve our support, despite some reservations. I really can't imagine how I could have been so deluded as to give that impression.

Shame on them, and on the senior hofficers who think that a written warning suffices.

Only a year ago, all Met officers were warned about putting photos and details onto the internet: so, these ones were not only criminally pig-ignorant but as thick as two short planks into the bargain, and twice as stupid.


Do they mean constipation?

22 June 2008 .


TV-ad grumbles 1. Is there any film I want to watch so much that every ten minutes or so I'm willing to let total strangers talk in my sitting room about slower bowel transit?

TV-ad grumbles 2. Never mind the insulting banality of so many commercials, there is something particularly galling about watching a company declare how all the world is beating a path to its door - on the very day that you're trying to get a squeak of sense out of that company's customer 'service', and when you've discovered that half your friends have got hooked into the same company and are as... vexed... as you are. Of course I don't mean you, messrs Talktalk. [You may need to be ready for 20 mins to connect then 250 kB/s broadband with a max 45 kB/s upload, if you subscribe to that particular company's services. And that's in town! But at least you'll get long conversations with people in interestingly far-away places discussing with you whether those are satisfactory speeds; and, as premium rate numbers go, the expense really is quite modest.]

Humbug.


Proactive accusation.

22 June 2008 .

Ian McKellen supporting his friend Martin Amis.

McKellen says that he detests Islam, and much of what it stands for. Then he says that he'll probably be castigated for expressing his point of view.

Bit of puzzle: it is quite clearly wrong, when you're expressing an opinion - based, as his was, on fact accompanied by the statement of disdain - to accuse those of whom you speak of ad hominem attacks which haven't taken place yet (if at all)... although if he not done so, such would surely have followed.


Sticking the knife in.

22 June 2008 .

Have you noticed how people, honourable people, who haven't conformed to New Labour reality get trashed?

I'm thinking particularly of Dr. Kelly, whom I saw (and heard of) for the first time when I tuned in by chance to see him, live, being grilled by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee... and immediately realised the enormity of what was happening. [There's no why you should believe me when I tell you how perspicacious I am - you don't know me from a stick of rock - but I promise there's a witness who remembers being rather surprised when I shut her up that day!] But there are plenty more.

David Davis has the advantage that he's in a different tent. However, New Labour's instinct is just the same - don't put up a candidate who can argue the issues with him: dismiss him, belittle him, trash him in whatever ways you can think of .


We must work to emulate The Great Thinker.

21 June 2008 .


We were reminded today of the guiding thought of The Great Leader, which he expressed last month more eloquently than I can reproduce, that 'the biggest problem facing the world' is the need to increase our output of oil.

It may be the most pressing need. But if he believes that the shortage of oil is a bigger problem (of itself) than hunger, overpopulation or climate-change, he's not the leader we need.

Anyway, he's free-market man; in his eyes there can't be a shortage of oil - that's what the price mechanism is for. Ah... he's saying there isn't a free market, which is why he's trying to convince the Arabs to increase their output (a free market, maximising output, so we delay making the necessary changes to our lifestyles for even longer AND then run out of oil more quickly... hmmmm. Anyway; if he wants a free market in oil, he can't differentially discriminate against the British motorist by distinctly un-free-market taxes; not if he's being honest... ... ... ah!


Poverty in England.

21 June 2008 .


It may well be true that we in Britain are better off than we've ever been (as this site's feedback has been telling me rather firmly), that such poverty as there may be is relative and that people who are hurting are only suffering the shock of finding that easy money and instant gratification can't always be taken for granted.

Personally, I'm of a different opinion: I believe that whether it's because of ignorance, poor management, old age, mental illness or 'inadequacy' - or, for some, because they have the bad luck to be a child in the wrong family or an asylum seeker in this no-longer-welcoming country... because of a combination of these reasons or any number of others, there are still plenty of people who really do have to make a choice between food and warmth, or even between feeding themselves or clothing a child.

It was the cheek of a grossly overpaid minister telling us not to be so miserable in the face of a recession that brought my pen to paper... that that corrupt, alien, disconnected mob (who append 'MP' to their names as if it were the badge of honour that it once was) should have the bare-faced gall to tell us how we should be feeling about the world... However, as I was starting to write, my thoughts went off at a bit of a tangent.

When people live with abuse, whether in their childhood (physically, emotionally or however), or by discrimination (racism, Nazism), or by poverty, they react differently, of course: some become mean, cruel, violent, abusing in turn, continuing the cycle; others become gentler. I think you can see it in individuals and, sometimes, in whole countries and communities: I've known people who've had unbelievably awful lives yet come through 'good' and others, who shouldn't on the face of it be any different, who don't stop hurting and in turn inflict their pain on the world around them I've been to places where grinding poverty is a fact of life (off the cuff, in Kenya and Honduras) yet where my experience was of sharing, kindness, what you might call common humanity. I've been to - but on the whole avoided - other places of poverty which are just scary, hostile and destructive. The poverty's the same, the people are presumably much the same, yet there's something which turns individuals and communities one way or the other.

When poverty turns a community bad, there's a smell, a sense of danger: the association goes the other way, too - that particular smell comes with and from poverty and inequality. To cut a long story short, I suspect that I can sense it in London, now, in a way that I never have before.

My imagination? I just don't know... it'll take thinking about, I suppose, and talking, if the right conversation should happen to give me the chance.

But if I'm right, then a certain, new, poverty has come to parts of London, and whether it's relative or absolute, economic or spiritual, doesn't really matter - and the platitudes of a generation of politicians who, I suspect, wouldn't have a clue what to do anyway, really don't matter. [I know that Blair banned poverty amongst children, but that's not the way I'm seeing it. Am I wrong?]


Unfinished impressions.

21 June 2008 .


The media are a vehicle for a large part of the information we have about our politicians; to an extent, intentionally or otherwise, they can also be a filter, colouring our impressions.

Politicians are much given to complaining that the public have a poor opinion of them because of the media....

Due to technical problems, this item never got finished; but I bet you can see which way I was going.


Return to Top
Journal 01 Jun -20 June 2008
Journal 21 May - 31 May 2008
Journal 11 May - 20 May 2008
Journal 01 May - 10 May 2008
Journal 11 Apr - 30 Apr 2008
Journal 01 Apr - 10 Apr 2008
Journal 21 Mar - 31 Mar 2008
Journal 11 Mar - 20 Mar 2008
Journal 01 Mar - 10 Mar 2008
Journal 21 Feb - 29 Feb 2008
Journal 11 Feb - 20 Feb 2008
Journal 01 Feb - 10 Feb 2008
Journal 21 Jan - 31 Jan 2008
Journal 05 Jan - 20 Jan 2008
Journal 21 Dec 07 - 04 Jan 08
Journal 05 Dec - 20 Dec 2007
Journal September - November 2007


After a few days, articles on particular topics may be moved to the classified pages:


Back to content | Back to main menu