December 2008 Archives

I see our beloved leader is going to be calling for a touch of the old Dunkirk and Blitz spirit, standing shoulder to shoulder and all that, to battle the recession when he addresses the world, or the bit that is bothering to listen, in his New Year message to mankind.

It should generate a chorus of "Who do you think you are kidding" if nothing else when he pops up with the bit about looking back in a few years time at another great challenge met by Britain because we had "the right values, the right policies and the right character to meet it".

Whitehall and the City is full of right characters all right who all played their part in creating the financial mess we are in but the world is none too confident about the right values and policies to get us out of it.

Parity or worse with the Euro is just around the corner and despite claims that the sub-prime mortgage bubble was born in the USA and is essentially an American problem, it seems that the dollar is riding the storm much better than the pound which is plumbing new depths every day. Money making has no national loyalty so if the financiers are deserting us in droves we might just be in a spot of bother.

Have a happy New Year.

Hope you all had a good Christmas.

Just in passing, hats off to Woolworth's staff who seemed to have remained cheerful and friendly over the Christmas period amid the buying frenzy where, I must admit, a few somewhat ill-mannered customers could have shown a little more consideration for the people working under the most difficult conditions.

It can't have been easy carrying on knowing that before the left over turkey is finished and the mince pies have gone stale you are out of a job in a sector where no one is going to be hiring. I have not studied the demise in detail but I am sure if the shopworkers saw a decent lawyer there must be something in the Human Rights Act the covers a lack of duty of care by a management which seems to have made incompetence into an art form.

Meanwhile my son and his wife had a festive wreath on their front door. nothing too grand but a gesture towards Christmas in their neighbourhood. On Christmas morning they found the wreath, or at least bits of it, scattered along a hundred yards or so of road after seemingly being involved in some perversion of football - a sort of moron's World Cup.

Once that would have made me angry but now I just find it sad to think what a third rate excuse for a nation we have become. Prisons full, crime figures fiddled and a Government who think honesty is a border plant with pretty seed heads.

Look at any league table for things you would not want in a modern, caring society and we are up there at the top whether it is teenage pregnancy, sex crimes, drug abuse, vandalism, muggings, thefts of mobile phones and sat navs, shoplifting, infection rates in hospitals or whatever.

Anything that you would expect a civilised society to manage to be reasonably good at such as cancer and heart treatment, healthcare in general. care of the elderly, a reasonable standard of education, housing and so on and there we are in the relegation places.

Happy New Year.

Anyone notice the latest grubby little scheme by this shabby Government to screw a few more bob from the motorists? The plan, apparently, is for the police to issue on the spot fines of £60 and points on a licence for a whole host of trivial motoring offences from changing stations on the radio - which could be seen as driving without due care and attention or careless driving or whatever - to fender benders where it would normally be exchange details and on your way.

The fines, less a commission, no doubt, to some private outfit that made the requisite donation to party funds, will go to the Treasury. It is yet another example of how the ever more politicised police are being turned in to tax collectors.

With New Labour's obsession with targets, league tables and performance indicators, which have all but taken over from providing a real service as the priority for any area of life under the dead thumb of Whitehall, the police would be fools not to take advantage of the easy pickings on offer to boost their crime and detection figures.
It makes shooting fish in a barrel look difficult.

But why stop there. The Government could save a fortune and rake in the readies with a simpler, more honest approach. They could downsize, or as we would say, sack, thousands of policemen and close hundreds of police stations by replacing them with a premium rate number. People call at £1 a minute to report a robbery or whatever and an automatic crime number is generated and, for a small fee - have your credit card ready - could even be passed directly to the insurance companies - how efficient is that, cut out the middleman completely.

As for motorists, why not decide in the budget how much you want to squeeze from the serfs of the road and then get ERNIE, when he is not doing premium bonds, to churn out the requisite number of licence plate numbers at random each month and if your number comes up you are charged with whatever offence is the special that month and have to cough up £60.

Simple really.

If the Government really was serious about saving money and recycling then it could start by taking all the noddies at the Waste and Resources Action Programme, a stupid name just to give the acronym WRAP, and find a landfill site to shovel them all in to along with whichever minster and civil servants thought the £80 million a year agency was a good idea,

These are the same people who said it would be a good idea to empty dustbins once a fortnight to cut down the amount we throw away and suggested we should all have a separate swill bucket for food waste.

Their latest loony scheme, a couple of days before Christmas, is that we should wrap Christmas presents up in old bits of cloth such as bed sheets, tablecloths and so on like the Japanese because most wrapping paper can't be recycled.

I might be wrong but I suspect the Japanese do tend to use traditional cloth designed for the purpose rather than recycle an old pair of aunty's bloomers.

We are paying this bunch £80 million a year and this is the best they can come up with.

I must admit I am not a Strictly Come Dancing fan but did find it amusing to see BBC suits - without ties so they could look cool and trendy - spouting the biggest load of old cobblers about why three couples were left in for the final as no one had covered the possibility of tied voting.

I don't know which was worse, the fact BBC head of entertainment production, Jon Beazley is actually being paid to spout such gibberish or he actually believed anyone not part of a care in the community programme believed him. There has never been a competition for anything anywhere on earth where the rules have not covered what happens if there is a tie and if the BBC managed it then walking and chewing gum at the same time is beyond their capabilities.

One would have thought that being fined every other day for bogus competitions and phone-in irregularities would mean the BBC might have learned something, but no, another phone vote and another fine mess they get themselves into. John Sergeant's walk-out left the BBC with a couple short and their answer to that particular problem was not a bye or bringing back the last eliminated couple - that was too complicated - no let's keep it simple and just con the public.

A quick look at TV schedules, printed well in advance of the voting fiasco, might hold more truth than the cock and bull explanations of last week. The aim all along was to have three couples in the final with one eliminated in the first show followed by a dance off between the remaining two couples later in the evening.

Now I know Christmas is a religious festival, one of the two rocks on which Christianity is built, not that that matters, living as we do in pagan Britain, but in the rest of the world it still means something beyond presents, blow outs and getting legless.

But even the Pope probably enjoys the secular bits, the mince pies and mulled wine and all that and it is among the snowmen and robins where Simon Cowell and Sony are hijacking Christmas and the worst thing is we are letting them get away with it.

The Christmas No 1 is a glitzy arrangement of a Leonard Cohen classic belted out by a half decent club singer which was already virtually guaranteed top spot in advance sales before anyone knew what the song was or who would be singing it. We are becoming a nation of lobotomised sheep.

This mass outpouring of grief, such as the embarrassing scenes at Princess Diana's funeral, or adulation, such as the near riots at appearances by X-factor finalists, seems to show that as a nation our lives or our heads are very empty. Anyone who is vaguely famous - i.e. been on telly - becomes a minor deity.

There was some sanity left in that the iconic 14-year-old version of the Hallelujah, by a bloke who died 11 years ago incidentally, pushed Alexandra Burke's version close and came second. That was all sales by downloads as Sony hold the record rights, as people both rebelled against Cowell's cynical arrogance and showed support for a version which will still be around in another 14 years while the Number One will be lucky to last 14 weeks.

Whether either is a Christmas song is debatable but anyone who hears both versions will know that the winner is like one of those knock off Rolex watches you buy in foreign street markets. Flash and shiny but don't expect it to work or last.

The X-factor winner has had the Christmas No 1 since the eminently forgettable That's My Goal in 2005. Since then we have had A Moment Like This, When You Believe and now a karaoke Hallelujah. Can't see any of that lot floating many boats when we get to the Best Christmas Album Ever II in a few years time.

Once upon a time there was real interest in what would be Number ! at Christmas in a battle which has brought us all those festive ditties which fill every shop from November onwards. Now it is whatever Cowell and Sony decide they want to flog us after a six month ad campaign we have paid for. Perhaps it is time for us to stand up and say enough is enough and to take our Christmas No 1 back.

It might be difficult though. In the have your say bit on one of the chart websites we have some creature called Dalin who reckons "Alexandra sings this much better. the Buckley version makes me feel sick. The song should be cheerful!"

With musical appreciation like that we could all be doomed. I hear Dalin is now working on the reggae party version of Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor.

Now I have an overdraft, a mortage and, since last week, no job so what do I know when it comes to high finance?

I can just about understand that when the bankers emptied the trough and found, when they looked over their snouts, that not only was there no more swill on its way but they couldn't even pay for what they had guzzled, that someone had to pick up the bill.

If the bankers go down we all go down which does tend to beg the question of what sort of Government lets them play unsupervised for so long. It also makes me wonder why, if we are paying rather a lot for a not very good piper, we are not picking the tune. If I pay a plumber because I have leak I don't expect to then have to negotiate about when, how or even if he is going to repair it. Ministers trying to sound tough, without upsetting future job prospects in the city of course, and calling on banks to lend what is effectively our money back to us makes you wonder which is the dog and which is the tail.

As for Jag, the world's biggest Indian takeaway, why should we even be talking to a huge Indian multi-national who can find the rupees to sponsor the Ferrari F1 team next year but expect us to bail them out of a hole in the up market car market.

Woolies goes belly up and the Government's response is the wonder of silence. Rover fails its MOT and the only money from HM Government is a few bob to tide them over to put off the really bad news until after the local elections. It is all starting to seem a bit murky around big cat's whiskers suddenly.

BBC researchers had discovered that many kids who pass the 11+ have been coached and many kids at Grammar schools come from middle class backgrounds. Now I don't want to knock the researchers but this is a bit like discovering grass is green. Had they bothered to ask they would also have found that there are a disproportionate number of children of Asian origin because the Indian subcontinent still puts great store by a good education.

This, I can hardly call it a revelation, by the BBC has been like a prod with a sharp stick to the PC and equality brigade with grammar schools once more indicted as middle class elitist institutions designed to maintain and strengthen the class system and so on.

Sadly, if the critics opened their other eye, they might just realise that it is not the grammar schools that are denying kids from working class and poor backgrounds the chance of a grammar school education but the politicians, local authorities and even teachers who ban any coaching or 11+ exam tuition in primary schools.

Thus thousands of kids whose parents either don't care, can't afford or have no idea how to find coaching enter into an exam without even having seen a paper or knowing the format of the questions. Ask those who ban exam preparation if they would have liked to have taken a driving test without having driven a car beforehand.

The answer is not a scorched earth policy on grammar schools but just a recognition that if kids from poor backgrounds are going to take the 11+ then it might just be an idea to level the playing field a bit and give them some idea of what the paper looks like and the sort of questions they might be asked. If people really care about equality instead of some intellectual social agenda then a bit of coaching might just be a start.

We have virtually no control over pricing of gas, electricity of water, no control over investment in the industries and end up with some of the most expensive utilities in Europe with people paying different rates for the same gas and electricity coming down the same pipes and wires in the same street. We have hardly any storage facilities to buy gas when it is cheap, because that costs profits, and hardly enough spare capacity to cope if we have a hard winter for the same reason. But set against that of course, we do have some of the best bonuses for executives in the industry so at least it is not all bad.

We have a free for all in telephones where no one has any idea which provider is best or cheapest, a public transport system where no one seems to be responsible for anything, trains are cancelled to make them on time and you need a degree in logic to book a ticket from A to B. There are buses of more hues than a rainbow on speed from companies who are in there with rail franchisees in making big profits and soaking up more in subsidies than British Rail and our bus services could dream about in their wildest moments.

We have a health service where private health companies are being slipped in by stealth and an education system where any form or a loony with a few bob are invited to start their own schools.

Now, after hiving off the profitable bits of the postal service under the guise of competition - the TNTs and DHLs of this world do not want to get involved with delivering Christmas cards to hill farms in Wales or crofters in the Hebrides God forbid - Lord Mandelson now proposes flogging off a large chunk to a private partner which, he claims, will be in keeping a manifesto promise to keep the postal service in state hands. For how long he does not say. I am sure it will improve profits for whichever of the former trade commissioner's European buddies wins the raffle but there is more chance of Walsall winning the Champion's League than there is of any improvement in service.

We pay more and more in taxes, employ more and more civil servants, yet hardly have a public service left when it comes to serving the public. Mandelson has sounded the death knell for Royal Mail which will go the way of all other public services and utilities with profit the priority and damn the public and the service.

So here we are, first Monday as a free man since the days of long hair (yes, hair - it was a long time ago) beards and ripped jeans as a student. A cup of tea, a scratch and good moaning to one and all.

Anyone watch the X-factor? While it was a television talent show it was a bit of light entertainment but it has grown into a monster and in the celebritocracy we have become the British public are swallowing - and paying for it - hook line and winner.

Past winners, with the exception of Leona Lewis, who has been marketed as a product by the producers and record company to sell the brand worldwide, are almost down to the level of being answers in pub quizzes and let us be honest, the finalists showed some talent but no more and, in many cases much less, than you will find in holiday camps, clubs and small variety shows with performers who have put a lot more year's work in.

What is disturbing though is that for three months or so a record company is running auditions on television, with built in market research and focus groups in the form of voting and are being paid to do it by ITV and, every time they vote, the public. We are being used in the name of entertainment.

Then, cynically, the record company has a final in which they launch what they cynically expect to be the Christmas No 1. We have been conned into paying for a massive ad campaign to sell a record. Saddest of all is the number of advance orders for a single when no one knows who the artist will be. People buy it just because it has been on X-factor.

Last year's Christmas offering was woeful and you suspect that if the Christmas release from X-factor had been a medley of Chipmunks hits with an accompaniment on spoons there are still people out there who would have bought it in sufficient numbers to make in No 1 - worryingly the same people have the right to vote.

As it is we have a rather second rate version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Any recording of that song will be compared to the late Jeff Buckley's haunting version of John Cale's cover and all the X-factor offering does is show just how good that 1994 version really is.

Sadly the Christmas No 1 spot has now come down to a raffle. Win the talent show and the prize is a guaranteed number one record cobbled together to make a quick killing. We are being conned and just can't see it.