June 2008 Archives

If Harriet Harman is going to call it an Equalities Bill then, I must be honest, I would have thought she would be trying to get rid of discrimination in employment not just shuffling the pack to change whose turn it is now to be hard done by.

I can't really see how nominating some other poor soul to end up with no chair when the music stops actually helps anyone but there you go, I don't get paid to turn my prejudices into policy. It seems that being English white male is now a crime in the eyes of the Government.

The Minister for Women does have some form when it comes to sticking her feminist knife into men as well as the traditional notion of family - mother, father and all that old fashioned stuff - but I would have thought that the daughter of a Harley Street doctor and a London solicitor who had the benefit of an education at the independent St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith might just have just picked up, along the way, that discrimination is like unique in that it cannot be qualified.

Something is either discrimination or it isn't, and just as an object cannot be almost unique - it either is or it isn't - there can be no such thing as positive discrimination - just ask the poor white, English bloke who misses out to prove the point.

I was on the M1 yesterday where judicious use of 40 mph speed limit lights ensures regular congestion as a fair proportion of drivers have to virtually stop to read the signs - I wonder if their lips move as well. Eventually after a few miles of stop-go for no apparent reason an all clear sign appears and traffic moves freely again.

Amid all this though are the drivers who perceive the lane next to them is moving a few feet an hour faster so have to change, forcing their way in, and then when the lane they were in starts to move faster they have to change back again. One such in a Honda must have gained about fifty yards in two miles with four changes yesterday.

And while we are on about drivers who treat everyone else with contempt, we also have those who when given a mile or so warning of a lane closure accelerate down the soon to close lane, past all those who heeded the warning and merged with the adjacent lane, with the sole intention of forcing their way in when the road finally runs out. Don't you just love 'em..

So Alistair Darling is telling us all we need to accept below inflation rate pay rises or the economy will go into meltdown. Perhaps we should tell him that, on the basis the inflation rate is set by a Government who lie out of habit, many of us in the real world have suffered below real inflation rate rises for years.

Notice there is no mention of firms having to accept lower profits, or shareholders having to accept lower dividends or the favoured few having to accept less than lottery winner level bonuses, just the peasants at the sharp end taking the brunt again.

We are even being softened up for rises in interest rates. Now I seem to remember that this whole economic shambles was brought about by the breathtaking arrogance and greed of our bankers who thought they could make killings with deals anyone with blood flow above the neck could see were somewhere between dodgy and suicide on the financial scale.

Now an increase in interest rates makes a nice windfall profit for . . . you guessed it, the ones who caused the whole mess.

And in the midst of all this wringing of hands and pleading with use to accept penury as a way of life to save the nation MPs are recommending they get £24,000 a year tax free, presumably in a brown envelope, used notes, non-consecutive numbers, so they don't have to fiddle their expenses for second homes any more. Nice timing lads. You just could not make it up.

Someone told me the other day that I had become an international media star . . . all right, it was just a mention in the St Petersburg Times in Tampa Bay but that is international and it is media so two out of three ain't bad.

Just to prove it the link is . . . HERE

I was at the NEC at the weekend for Santana and maybe I am just becoming a miserable old git but why do people pay large wads of cash out for tickets for seats and then stand. We make football stadiums all seater and threaten to expel people who stand at matches or suspend licences of the clubs concerned but when it comes to concerts, in the dark, with loonies flailing arms around and gyrating about in some sort of trance, in once case at the NEC to a completely different rhythm to the music, no one bats an eyelid.

Now I was fortunate enough to be on the front row but that becomes an irrelevance when people with tickets for seats somewhere on the other side of the airport drift to the stage in the interval so that long before the show restarts the barrier is packed making front row seats redundant unless you like to watch bums and backs.

I often wonder if I am in the minority in actually preferring to sit and watch an act in relative comfort rather than standing for two and a half hours. I have a suspicion though that perhaps the minority are the ones who have never quite mastered the art of sitting and appreciating an artist at work. Maybe it is an attention deficit thing, hoping to be noticed by the celebrity, rather like the ones who have to cough or shout out when they know a live recording is being made or maybe they just don't have the attention span to sit still for a complete song, who knows?

Once a few stand then those behind them have no option if they want to see anything and so the domino effect spreads. One irony was that security came along, when the barrier was already heaving with people ,to say the front row had priority at the barrier. If they had cleared the barrier of interlopers the front row would not have had to stand and nor would the second row, nor the third row . . . starting to get the picture?

There is something about the coverage of the death of Sarah Bryant in Afghanistan that strikes me as being a bit patronising both to her memory and to women in general. Corporal Bryant was a soldier and died with three other soldiers, Corporal Sean Reeve, Lance Corporal Richard Larkin and Paul Stout in the same roadside bomb yet her three comrades barely merit a mention as if their deaths are somehow less important or don't really matter.

So far 106 servicemen have died in Afghanistan, mostly in combat, and those who died on our behalf should be honoured equally as soldiers not just because they happened to be a woman.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that councils, Government and the hundreds of bodies which have been given some sort of official standing are all getting a bit too big for their boots - boots remember that we are actually paying for.

The bin bag bonanza coining in £50,000 a year in Birmingham is just a symptom of the wheel clamper mentality that seems to run through our town halls and Government departments. Perhaps it is time for the old council to get back to basics and just do the things we are paying them for rather than festivals for one-legged jugglers and delivery units delivering things no one has ever even asked for.

Government too has this idea that it is a plc, with a need to charge for everything and make a profit, forgetting that we are the shareholders of course, and instead of a new initiative for every news bulletin might do better to dump all the airy fairy ill conceived big ideas and just do what we are paying for.

All we ask for is that our children are educated to a decent standard, our elderly are looked after without having to sell their homes, our streets and homes are safe, our roads are well lit and not full of potholes, our public transport system is both cheap and a public service and our health service gives us the best treatment, and best chance os survival, available. Oh, I almost forgot, rubbish collection comes into the deal as well. It does not seem a lot to ask for the ever increasing amounts we are forced to pay.

After being one of scores of motorists held up the other day why do people think if they park on a busy narrow road to go in to a shop that somehow putting hazard warning lights on means that double yellow lines no longer count particularly if they also mount the pavement to block both pedestrians and traffic?

And while we are on inconsiderate road users which bit of the highway code, road traffic act or simple common sense says that traffic lights and road signs apply to anyone except cyclists? I came off the Walsall Road at Perry Barr dog track this morning and waited at the lights facing Birmingham City University while a cyclist weaved past me squeezing between cars and turned right across five lanes ignoring a red light completely.

Had he caused or been involved in an accident I would lay odds he would have no insurance and we all know cyclists certainly pay no road tax nor are they required to pass any test to ensure they have even the most rudimentary knowledge of traffic law.

An omission which meant a cyclist coming the wrong way up a one way street by our company car park came close to being flattened last week - one assumes the hand signal he produced in response to almost being killed was merely an inquiry to see it actually was a one way street.

Remember my moan about supermarkets not stocking things because there is no demand despite the very fact that you asked for it tends to demolish that particular argument? I have a penchant for Simmers Abernathy Biscuit which my local Sainsbury's stopped stocking because there was "no demand". The occasional moan seems to have an effect though because they are back which is one small victory for the grumpy old gits amongst us.

I reviewed Britain's Got Talent live at the NIA last night. You forget just how loud small children can be. This was swimming pools on a hot day in the school holidays times an England women's hockey international times ten simultaneous birthday parties at McDonalds. Just a constant wall of high pitched screams.

With Britain's obsession with any fleeting hint of celebrity and rush to see anyone who has appeared on TV the promoters knew they were on a winner as they cashed in on the TV show. Had they collected the ten best variety acts in Britain, or even the world, and put them on at the NIA at £32.50 a pop they would have been lucky to sell the first three rows - and that would have been mainly to friends and family.

Make it a TV show spin off though, a sort of Gang Show with untried acts who were unknown a month or so ago, and you are quids in in spades. I am not knocking the performers, good luck to them. They have been given a chance and they are taking it and, more important, seem to be loving every minute of it with an enthusiasm which is infectious.

My own feeling is that acts appear in shows but stars put on shows and on that basis most of the finalists were acts, and largely novelty acts at that, with a limited shelf life but let them enjoy it as long as they can. With no real variety circuit left they should manage a few years of clubs, cruises, seaside season and panto along with ads, film and TV work which should ensure a comfortable life when the bubble bursts and audiences move on to the next overnight TV sensations.

In 12-year-old Faryl Smith though the show has unearthed a talent which has the potential to take on the world. She has the richest soprano voice I have ever heard and has yet to reach her teens. She is a star in the making destined for audiences way beyond the TV gawpers.

The other find was Escala, who we must be honest are a bit of a Bond clone. They have been on the prawn sandwich circuit but have shown they are capable of much more than musak in the corner or a five minute spot at the end of the pier. I am probably not alone in being quite happy to watch them for ten minutes or so even if they didn't play a thing but I am sure the next time the quartet appear in Birmingham it will be in concert and not among the finalists of a talent show.