June 2009 Archives

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Michael Jackson. In terms of popular music he was an important player but to see the media frenzy and mass hysteria surrounding his death you would be forgiven for believing he was the second coming.

We had some young girl in tears saying this was the day the music died with the irony of quoting from a song about the death of Buddy Holly lost on her and another girl outside the hospital where his body had arrived a couple of hours earlier saying she and all the people around her would know exactly where they were the moment he died.

Not a difficult feat considering they only had to remember back to lunchtime when they had all made the trek out to the hospital. We have then had the celebrity fest of tributes and people who have never owned a Michael Jackson track in their life buying them like sweeties. His music is no better or worse because he is dead and if they were not inclined to buy Jackson when he was at the peak of his stardom then buying now smacks at best of musical voyeurism or at worst of being a human sheep. .

But half the world is swept up in epidemic of mob grief complete with makeshift shrines with conspiracy theories coming on the hour about poisoning, overdoses, even suicide and murder but strangely no mention of court cases involving minors, bought off parents and behaviour that stretched the boundaries of eccentric into another dimension. Faults are not so much forgiven as forgotten, excised from the mob psyche.

We have seen it all before though, Jade Goody was transformed from thicko racist in the eyes of the popular press to saint by the simple act of dying and who can forget the outpourings over Princess Diana when reason was suspended?.

Perhaps a psychologist can explain why people manage to get wrapped up in grief for someone they never met, never knew and probably never thought about except in passing until they died. It is not something I can explain.

I would have put money on Jackson not managing all of his 50 date run at the O2 arena but that hardly matters now as he has risen into legend and the promoters are even set to make money out of that with an offer to the O2 concert goers of your money back or you can have a commemorative ticket instead.

The commemorative tickets, which were to be give free to concert goers, are presumably already printed so would either be pulped, or with 800,000 of them, sold for very modest sums as mementoes - unless of course you can get hundreds of thousands of griefed-up punters to shell out £75 upwards each for them to commemorate a concert that never happened presumably in the hope they can find even more griefed-up saddoes on eBay.

You might have thought that the news that welfare payments will be higher than tax revenues raised from those actually working might have made some impression on those currently running the Westminster shooting match.

And the prediction that by the end of the year the welfare bill will be higher than taxes from the workers and their national insurance contributions combined you might have thought would at least have slowed down the spending of our money.

But not a bit of it. The welfare culture and benefits as a career option are still alive and well in Whitehall where the Government are still trying to buy votes for next year's election.

Anyone still drawing breath must have worked out by now that as a nation we are skint yet far from telling everyone that belts need to be tightened and spending cut - and what better place to start than benefits - all we get from the Government is dire warnings that everyone will suffer if the Tories win the next election because they will cut spending.

Not only that but we are told the spending will continue to grow under Labour and we even get grandiose plans with names such as Winning the Fight for Britain's future or the current Building Britain's Future and other such cobblers with talk of extra investment in schools and hospitals - presumable we are not seen as being bright enough to remember what little return we have had so far for the billions poured into health and education since 1997.

Then we are all going to have access to mega fast broadband which, despite telecoms all being privatised, and very profitable, we will be paying to install at the rate of a £6 tax per bill which in many cases - mum, dad and two kids on mobiles and a house landline, will be £30 a year- to provide a service many people already have for free. I have not yet heard any mention of all these private telecom companies buying or renting back from us, the taxpayer, all this infrastructure we are providing for them. Perhaps it is in the small print.

None of this will happen or need to be paid for before the next election of course and just in case anyone questions whether we can even afford to print the plan let alone implement it, the Government's biennial spending review - a sort of audit - has also been delayed until after the next election.

And speaking of the next election as an out and out spoiler there is the British council houses for British families policy which is nothing more than a blatant attempt to pull back votes from the BNP.

The previous policy based purely on need left ordinary decent folk languishing on housing lists in their home town for years while migrants with large families were housed at once. Locals were not adverse to using the system either. Any girls who fancied their own place but didn't really fancy a job to pay for it, employed pregnancy to go to the top of the housing list and set them up for a career in benefits.

Does anyone believe that if the BNP had not been picking up votes the policy would have changed?

Meanwhile figures today show that the public sector pensions schemes are unsustainable and for every two pounds a private sector worker puts into his own pension pot his is putting three pounds into the public sector pot.

What we need is what we do not have, a party to tell us how much we can afford to spend, what our priorities need to be and then promise to cut the rest including benefits which should be regarded as a safety net and not a wage for not working. Come up with that plan and it could be a winner at the next election rather than the current offer of various Government member's grannies in return for votes.

Our MPs just do not seem to get it do they, particularly those wearing the New Labour t-shirt? They were on the verge of pushing through a whopping great increase in their pension contributions, paid for by us of course, until someone realised that the public might just put straws, camels and backs together and start to hang nooses from lamp posts.

Amid calls to clean up the Westminster version of the Augean stables, instead of Hercules the MPs elect a speaker as pure as the driven sludge. Then, after the public have seen MPs come up with more fiddles than an orchestral convention, there is a sizable number who seem determined to ensure that any details that might actually be of interest to the people paying the bills - you and me- are redacted, which we all know is the posh word for covered up from prying eyes, when the next volume of the MPs' slush fund is published.

That means, of course, you will just see the totals of what MPs have claimed but not what they have claimed for or for what property it has been claimed.

Then there are the calls, included a loud one from the new Speaker, that MPs should have their pay increased by a modest £40,000 or so up to £100,000 so they wouldn't have to fiddle their exes so much. One MP tried to justify a £100,000 salary on the grounds it was the only way to attract the right people.

I am sure there are enough of the . . . right . . . people, those who actually want to do something for their fellow citizens rather than for their bank balance or career prospects, who would happily do the job for the current money - and think they were well paid at that.

Meanwhile the Government, in the vain hope of not passing entirely into the footnotes of history at the next election, is showing its usual knee jerk system of formulating policy by trying to cobble together a new set of laws to govern MPs' behaviour.

We have already seen New Labour wipe out a thousand year's of tradition wherever it can, give as much power to Brussels as Europe asks for and now it is looking to end an evolution of Parliament which has taken centuries with a collection of proposed laws knocked up in ten minutes on the back of fag packet. Laws, if a future Government was so inclined, which could even be used to jail Opposition politicians.

Of course it would never happen, just as it would never happen that two women at the Cenotaph reading the names of our soldiers, sailors and airmen who have died in Iraq or someone dissenting at a Labour Party conference would be hauled off by police under anti-terror legislation.

Sadly one suspects that the feeling among many at Westminster is that once the summer is over, football is back on telly and people are thinking of Christmas then the sport of MP baiting will all blow over and MPs can get back to their old ways of claiming every penny they can with the pension increase, pay increase and publication of well hidden exes slipped through just before a Parliamentary break.

A few MPs will be sacrificed to the altar of public opinion at the next election but things will carry on much as before because the really frightening thing is that many MPs do not see that any of them have done anything wrong.

What is needed is a bit more than a few new rules or an election to change the DJ - we need a new system and a new political movement. The current lot are doing little more than rearranging the deckchairs in the hope we will think it is a new ship. Someone has to change things so, as no one else is doing it, it might as well be me - so welcome to the launch of the National Democratic Movement. Watch this space for more details.

Am I the only one who thinks the rip-off car park charges at hospitals are a national scandal?

I have just been to Good Hope with an injury which required three stitches (if you could all go "Ahhhhhhhh, poor love", sympathetically, in unison it would be appreciated) and I have only praise for the staff. I came across a smiling nurse who cheerfully cleaned up the wound with minimum pain and a remarkably friendly, excellent Sri Lankan surgeon who stitched me up while we had an interesting chat about everything from cricket to the Tamils.

But when I came to leave, after just over two hours, the car parking charge was £4 which in my book classes as robbery. Ok, it was not exactly the difference between eating and starving tonight but many of the people who park at hospitals are vulnerable and for many £4 is a lot of money. Patients in for tests or treatments have enough to worry about without the cost of car parking. To be given bad news, for instance, and then be charged for the privilege adds insult to injury.

Usually out-patients have no idea how long they will be waiting and I would suspect that two hours or longer is the norm for minor injuries in A&E so £4 is the minimum cost of an accident in modern Sutton Coldfield

Visitors are also fleeced and if you have a friend or relative critically ill the cost of support becomes quite a substantial amount.

And all the levels are set by unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable quangocrats doing the bidding of the latest health minister and looking to hit the latest targets with the usual knighthoods and gongs over the horizon for those who manage the remarkable feat of keeping their noses both brown and clean.

There will be claims that parking is outsourced so pricing is beyond a hospital's control but that just smacks of those in charge signing a contract with no consideration for patients or visitors only for a quick boost in finances for short term gain. Mind you I suppose we are lucky we don't get charged for a seat in the waiting areas or for the stitches, bandages and plasters used on our injuries - but give them time . . .

redact. (ri-dakt).
tr.v. re·dact·ed, re·dact·ing, re·dacts
1. A form of editing where several sources are combined and, where necessary, minor alterations are made to produce one coherent and definitive version for publication.
2. A form of editing designed to hide, cover up, black out, censor, omit or falsify information to produce an incoherent and totally misleading document which is only being published because of a court order.
3. A form of editing to prove no one did anything wrong.

This is my little bit to help anyone trying to keep their dictionary up to date.

What planet is British Airway's chief executive Willie Walsh from?

He is the one asking all BA staff to work for free for a month and just to show he won't ask his minions to do something he won't do himself, he's not picking up his £61,000 pay packet - or should that be pay suitcase - for July.

Now if someone were to offer me £61,000 a month I would quite happily work for free for 11 months a year, let alone one, and struggle along on £1,200 a week and I am sure that would go for the majority of BA staff.

But the fact BA management could even come up with such a scheme shows just how much the ruling classes - management, politicians, financiers and the like - are out of touch with the majority of people in this country.

A bloke on £732,000 a year, plus bonuses and exes, is hardly going to end up in the workhouse if he does not get paid for a month.

But in the real world, with real money where real people live, no salary for a month means food will be scarce and the mortgage won't get paid, nor will standing orders for gas, electricity, council tax, insurance, loans and the like - either that or the month will end with roughly a month's salary added to the overdraft.

Now if Willie and the rest of his executives and management were to offer to work for check in desk wages for a couple of years then that might make a difference or at least it might stop them coming up with hare-brained schemes.

Is there anything we will not do in this country to squeeze a few extra pennies out of the long suffering public? These days the nearest we get to public service is charging the public for any service provided.

I must admit it is a while since I actually picked anyone up at Birmingham airport. When I use it I tend to park there so it came as a bit of a shock to come across the £1 drop off charge for the first time.

For those who don't know, the airport charges you for the privilege of taking or collecting their passengers - and if a flight is delayed or baggage is slow to arrive and you find yourself staying beyond the 15 minutes parking that your pound buys then you might as well take out a mortgage. Stay a couple of hours and it would be cheaper to leave the car and buy a new one!

The airport claim it is a security measure after the attack on Glasgow Airport and presumable the several million a year that chinks into the airport coffers through the payment machines is just an unfortunate side effect of the terrorist threat.

Strangely other airports manage to avoid being blown to smithereens without screwing everyone who wants to fly from there for a quid. Now I can see you don't want people parked outside the terminals for hours on end but a moderate period of free parking to allow the drop off and collection of what are after all the airport's passengers, their bread and butter business, seems to be the minimum service an airport should provide and one which most manage.

But then again, there is no money in that. Public service has no place on a modern balance sheet. With the summer holiday season underway the terrorist threat is a licence to print money.

The old saying goes that if you are going to make a mistake, make it big and in Mere Green in Sutton Coldfield it is in 18 in high letters on a shop front proclaiming there is now a new Off License.

Still at least they didn't throw in an apostrophe.

I would love to know how much this Government has spent on whitewash, particularly as they must have ordered another tanker-load for Gordon Brown's newly announced Iraq inquiry.

This inquiry will be in private and will report after the next General Election when no doubt Gordon will already be coining it in on the board of some multinational bank or indeed several with taxpayer's cash safe and sound in the vaults.

All his rhetoric about cleaning up Government, transparency and the usual other cobblers about open government, with of course world class added regularly, that any of New Labour's snake oil salesmen spout whenever a notebook, microphone or camera appears, lasted less than a week.

An independent inquiry into the Iraq war by a hand picked team which will be held in private. We could save a lot of time and money by just announcing the result now because I am sure the Government already know what that will be.

I suspect any intelligence considerations are a minor concern behind the reasons for secret hearings and next year's resultant cover up . . . but preserving reputations and burying the lies - that is a different matter. Some things are happier kept in the dark.

Saddam Hussein was a nasty piece of work but until he invaded Kuwait he was our nasty piece of work. He might have been a corrupt, brutal dictator but while he was taking on Iran and al Qaeda he was a tolerated tyrant and still on the Christmas card list - Kuwait changed all that.

The first Gulf War ended before Hussein was topped which left a decade of stand off between Hussein and the US. Iran had no more to do with 9/11 than the Isle of Man but it was the excuse, the catalyst, the White House needed to finish what George Bush senior had started but never completed in the first Gulf War - taking out Saddam Hussein.

When you embark on a war against a nation not threatening your borders and a war which has seen anywhere between 150,000 and 1,100,000 Iraqis killed - depends whose figures you believe - along with 5,000 or so allied troops and thousands more wounded then you really need better answers than discredited claims of weapons of mass destruction to explain why.

Cover-up has been the hallmark of this administration though. I suspect you would be hard pushed to find enough people to make up a game of bridge who actually believed the Hutton report into the death of Dr David Kelly. It was a high profile death but somehow the Government decided, conveniently, that no inquest was necessary. Witnesses under oath, medical evidence that can be questioned, a jury . . . can't have that sort of thing!

This latest charade will do nothing to reduce the contempt with which we hold our politicians. Without a public, genuinely independent inquiry into the lead up to and the reasons for the Iraq War then the report is not worth the paper it is lied upon.

Does anyone else hate drivers who think every other car is banned from bus lanes except theirs?

The ones I really hate are those who scurry along on the inside while you follow the rules and when you reach a junction and want to turn left the road is full of cars who shouldn't even be there and who won't even let you in.

And have you noticed the drivers of bus lane cars all suffer from deafness, stiff necks and lack of eye mobility. If you stare at them their heads and eyes never move - they just stare straight ahead.

They are the same breed who avoid queuing in lanes to go left, right, straight on or whatever, cutting in at the last second to the annoyance of everyone who has waited their turn. The Perry Bar flyover at One Stop is a favourite for that. Heading into the city they scuttle down the inside hoping for a gap created by someone a little slow on the gears or failing that forcing one. Coming back it is the exit from the underpass where they try to jump the queue, relying on other drivers to avoid an accident..

I reckon that the standard of driving and courtesy on the road in this country is probably at about its lowest ever but then again when policing and safety of our roads is left down to revenue generating cameras it is hardly surprising we have a group of motorists who think the secret of good driving is braking hard every time you pass a yellow box.