I was pleased to see an outbreak of common sense from one of my favourite clerics, John Sentamu, last week. He attacked Phil Woolas MP, who had said that many asylum seekers were "just economic migrants" and that their lawyers and advocates were just "playing the system".
Mr Woolas seems to have the function in the government of being the mouthpiece for any unpleasant right wing dog whistle policies on immigration which they might want to float just to send an inaudible message to Daily Mail and Sun readers and also to gauge public reaction generally.
Sentamu quite rightly pointed out such instances of "working the system" as the example of a seriously ill Ghanaian mother-of-two who was deported from the UK in January because her visa had expired. She died two months after returning to Ghana because she could not afford the treatment she was receiving on the NHS.
He could just as equally have pointed out cases of asylum seekers being shipped back to face arrest and torture in Zimbabwe.
Or what about the case of failed asylum seeker Ekrem Ovunc (41) who was seized in a terrifying dawn raid from his home in Brighton and taken away for deportation striking terror into Ibrahim, Ekrem’s 17-year-old son. While Ekrem awaited deportation at Colnbrook Detention Centre at Heathrow Airport. Ibrahim, a conscientious A level student at a local Sixth Form College, disappeared. His friends and teachers were deeply concerned for his safety. Ekrem was reported to be deeply depressed. He was in no doubt that he would be tortured or killed if he was sent back. He was put on suicide watch.
Yes, sure, on the planet Woolas, all these people are only "working the system". Snap out of it, Ekrem! Here to steal our jobs, send em all back, and put a cap on immigration to prevent any more!
For a start, a cap on immigration per se is unworkable because you can't apply it to the EU, where there is free movement within member states. So what Mr Woolas is really talking about is a cap on swarthy people, which would be racist if he actually came out and said as much.
I have never felt so ashamed to be British as I did on that day when that Ghanaian woman was bundled onto a plane and shipped out of the UK. I could not believe that our country, which stood for fairness and tolerance and has given refuge over the centuries to the Lollards, the Huguenots, and the Jews fleeing Hitler, has now turned into such a hard faced edifice of hate.
And as far as the economic migrants argument is concerned, if the Poles are all giving up and going back to Poland, and despite record UK unemployment (for which Mr Woolas - or at least the government he represents, are in part responsible) British people are still unwilling to do foul low paid jobs, I don't see the problem with letting Asylum seekers work, if they want to. Give them some sort of temporary permit, make them pay tax on what they earn, and let them work while their cases are sorted out. Bish bash bosh, end of problem, they are no longer a drag on the state (if they ever were, I'd be interested to see which costs more, Asylum seekers or government IT cockups) they are in the system, you know where they are, and if at the end of it they have to go back, then at least they have been able to provide for themselves and their family in the interim. I'm sure they'd rather flip burgers than be under effective house arrest with the threat of being tortured, I know I would, if that was the only choice.
Recently, four families of beavers were brought in via Heathrow. They will live in the beaver equivalent of luxury for six months before being released in the Scottish Highlands in an attempt to reintroduce beavers into the wild in Scotland. While I am all for seeing animals well treated (it's Bolshy Party Policy, more of that anon) and while I welcome the news that Scottish Natural Heritage has weaned itself off killing hedgehogs, in favour of promoting beavers, and while John Sentamu could undoubtedly provide me with chapter and verse for the biblical reference that says there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth... I can't help but contrast the treatment of the beavers with the treatment of asylum seekers.
It seems we have an establishment that values the humanity of asylum seekers below the welfare of rodents. As Lord Longford once chided the Hindley lynch mob (under different circumstances, but the quotation is apposite) "Where is your humanity?"
And, if so, they should hang their heads in shame. Another reason why I will be voting to cause them maximum damage in the marginal Holme Valley in the next election, unless they buck their ideas up.
Sunday, 30 November 2008
VAT was the question again?
The more I think about it, the more I remain unconvinced that the cut in VAT announced by Alistair Darling will do anything to help put money into people's pockets.
I think big retailers will just quietly pocket the extra percentage and not bother to reduce prices, on the grounds that in three weeks, no one will notice. Sure, they will lose some sales because there are people who do shop around, but given that the difference is probably about £4.50 on a £250 purchase (a laser printer, for example) they know that with a gross profit margin of 30% you can put your prices up 10%, lose 25% of your customers, and still make the same gross profit, and they ain't gonna lose anything like 25%.
If you are a major office supplies organisation, mentioning no names, with an annual turnover of £114M, then keeping the prices the same and pocketing the difference is worth £2.1M pa to you, whereas individually in one-off consumer purchases, they will hardly notice they are going to be ripped off.
I suppose in a situation where big high street names are feeling the pinch - Woolworths has gone, PC World Dixons Currys are posting profit warnings, we should be grateful that the extra turnover might tip the balance and safeguard some jobs, but even there, I hae me doots.
So, tinkering round the edges and unlikely to work. Especially since the duty on fuel will be increased to compensate for the VAT cut, and the energy companies will carry on bleeding us white. At least Dick Turpin wore a mask.
I think big retailers will just quietly pocket the extra percentage and not bother to reduce prices, on the grounds that in three weeks, no one will notice. Sure, they will lose some sales because there are people who do shop around, but given that the difference is probably about £4.50 on a £250 purchase (a laser printer, for example) they know that with a gross profit margin of 30% you can put your prices up 10%, lose 25% of your customers, and still make the same gross profit, and they ain't gonna lose anything like 25%.
If you are a major office supplies organisation, mentioning no names, with an annual turnover of £114M, then keeping the prices the same and pocketing the difference is worth £2.1M pa to you, whereas individually in one-off consumer purchases, they will hardly notice they are going to be ripped off.
I suppose in a situation where big high street names are feeling the pinch - Woolworths has gone, PC World Dixons Currys are posting profit warnings, we should be grateful that the extra turnover might tip the balance and safeguard some jobs, but even there, I hae me doots.
So, tinkering round the edges and unlikely to work. Especially since the duty on fuel will be increased to compensate for the VAT cut, and the energy companies will carry on bleeding us white. At least Dick Turpin wore a mask.
Sunday, 23 November 2008
Pull My Vest Down When You've Finished
Maybe I have got a short attention span, or maybe I just don't share everybody else's appetite for an unleavened diet of media bad news, but I am now getting heartily sick of constantly hearing about doom, gloom and recession at every end and turn.
Credit credit credit, crunch crunch crunch: it sounds like a tape-loop of frogs eating frosties. OK, so the capitalist system nearly went ping and vanished under the desk like an old laggy band, OK, so it's gonna happen, OK, so in the best case scenario the banks will just swallow that bailout whole, sit on it, breathe a huge fat collective sigh of relief and go back to the mixture as before, while we all pay with our livelihoods and our jobs, and in the worst case scenario we'll probably all end up scrabbling for loaves of bread thrown from the back of an army lorry, while they watch us on CCTV and the troops fire warning shots over the looters, while the seas boil and the rivers fry and the trees die.
Well, do you know what? I'm SICK of all this crap, and I DON'T CARE, and I AM NOT SCARED, so can we have a bit less of this strange alternative universe* where we have all fallen through the earth's crust and become trapped in an infinitely-extended edition of Moneybox, please BBC? and others?
*But can we keep the bit of the alternative universe where Hull City are going to be in Europe next season, or failing that, if it is all a dream, can I wake up in the shower next to Sue-Ellen? Thanks.
Credit credit credit, crunch crunch crunch: it sounds like a tape-loop of frogs eating frosties. OK, so the capitalist system nearly went ping and vanished under the desk like an old laggy band, OK, so it's gonna happen, OK, so in the best case scenario the banks will just swallow that bailout whole, sit on it, breathe a huge fat collective sigh of relief and go back to the mixture as before, while we all pay with our livelihoods and our jobs, and in the worst case scenario we'll probably all end up scrabbling for loaves of bread thrown from the back of an army lorry, while they watch us on CCTV and the troops fire warning shots over the looters, while the seas boil and the rivers fry and the trees die.
Well, do you know what? I'm SICK of all this crap, and I DON'T CARE, and I AM NOT SCARED, so can we have a bit less of this strange alternative universe* where we have all fallen through the earth's crust and become trapped in an infinitely-extended edition of Moneybox, please BBC? and others?
*But can we keep the bit of the alternative universe where Hull City are going to be in Europe next season, or failing that, if it is all a dream, can I wake up in the shower next to Sue-Ellen? Thanks.
Saturday, 22 November 2008
Bad IDea
Every time I see Jacqui Smith, my first reaction is that she looks as if she should be working on a till at Superdrug. I have to pinch myself hard to remind myself that she is in fact not only a dangerous fascist who wants to deprive most if not all of us of our civil liberties, but also, even worse, she has somehow currently contrived to become Home Secretary.
The latest proposals for the government's ID card scheme have been published this week and from them it would seem, at least if the media reports are accurate, that we could be fined up to £1000 for failing to update our ID card details. This is on top of the existing costs, of course, which will already be heavy.
The supposed justification for ID cards is that they will make us all feel safer by somehow deterring terrorism. Their real purpose, of course, is to extend government control of the individual and to add another plank to the raft of anti-libertarian measures that the government has been building under the pretext of anti-terrorism since 2001 (and, in this country, 7/7) provided them with a convenient excuse.
Quite how the news that transsexuals will be able to have two cards, one for their male and one for their female identities, makes the system more secure, is lost on me. I can imagine Al Quaeda are even now queueing up in the lingerie department of Marks and Sparks and looking at the Bravissimo web site. And homeless people will be able to have a card which gives their address as being the place where they might usually be found. Nothing wrong with that - homeless people are often stigmatised by officialdom because they don't have an "address" as such, but it does rather make a mockery of the security argument.
How long before a terrorist with the ID of "Ms Bina Laden, Underneath the Railway Arches, Acton" manages to perpetrate some form of atrocity, I wonder.
This of course presupposes that terrorists will be bothered by ID or the lack of it anyway. I can't see some nutjob religious fanatic saying "Damn, I was going to fly a hijacked plane into Canary Wharf today but now I've gone and left my ID at home".
Just supposing though, (let's go into fantasy mode here) that the government had a point. Let's ignore for the moment that for the last 900 years or so, it's been the government that had to justify its doings to the individual, and that the concept of ID cards reverses that relationship at a stroke. Let's ignore the fact that the government could store any nefarious information about us that it likes on the chip, and we would not know. Let's ignore the cost, both the cost to the individual, and the cost of the whole thing, coming out of a falling tax revenue that could actually be spent on better policing. Just suppose the government has a point. For the sake of argument.
How secure would ID cards be? To get one, presumably you would have to provide some form of existing, secondary ID. So in fact, already, it's only as secure as the existing system, and you don't have to drill down very far before you get to "proofs" of ID such as recent utility bills and Blockbuster membership cards. Plus, the government has a marvellous reputation for cocking up IT projects. Not just the hapless fools who lose memory sticks in car parks and send unencrypted CDs by second class post, but at a larger level. The history of government large-scale IT procurement (think NHS) is littered with overruns of schedule and budget, and systems that then collapse under the strain because they were designed by committee and never properly specified in the first place.
Plus, don't underestimate the government's capacity for getting things wrong. Just plain wrong. At the moment, if one bit of information about you is wrong, it can be annoying, but not crucial. Just imagine spending hours on the phone to a call centre in Sunderland trying to convince them that your details, as shared across all government departments (assuming that bit works) are wrong.
Doubt has also been cast over whether the biometrics will work, and it looks like there have already been IT compromises on that score.
So, given that it's costly, probably won't work, and almost certainly will have no deterrent effect on terrorism, why is the government so keen to press on into the valley of death in the face of all logic and reason.
This brings us back to Jacqui Smith, the exemplar of New Labour. It is because they want to control us. They want to know where we are, what we are doing, who we are talking to. They want to film us every time we leave the house, they want to record our car number plates, they want to store and read all our emails and phone calls. Because they fear us. They know that they have no legitimate reason for doing this, and they seek to control us to make it harder for people to ask awkward questions. Questions like "why are we putting so much effort into treating the symptoms of terrorism when it would be easier to treat the diseas, by getting out of Iraq?" If you ask questions like that, you might just find yourself banged up for 42 days without the option.
They want to be able to go on fishing expeditions. They want to be able, once they have put this raft of legislation in place, to extend it to the likes of animal rights activists, and ultimately, anyone who disagrees with them or looks a bit funny. They won't be happy, ultimately, until everyone has a bar code tattooed on their forehead, and the coastline of Britain is ringed with barbed wire dotted with machine gun towers. Only then will the freedoms our fathers fought for in 1940 be safe! Har har.
One of the more heartening aspects of the BNP membership being leaked on the internet last week, is that there are apparently only 10,000 of the buggers. Mind you, their vote has been going up at elections because, like Hitler before them, they are past masters at invoking scapegoats and appealing to fear and greed. But still, only 10,000 members.
Pause, though, and think, what living in Britain would be like if one day there was a combination of New Labour's profoundly anti-libertarian legislation and a BNP government. Don't say it couldn't happen, they thought that in 1930s Germany. Once all this stuff gets on the statute book, it will be there for ANY future government to use, and those who say "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" should ponder long and hard on this fact, and on the well-known poem by Pastor Niemoller.
The latest proposals for the government's ID card scheme have been published this week and from them it would seem, at least if the media reports are accurate, that we could be fined up to £1000 for failing to update our ID card details. This is on top of the existing costs, of course, which will already be heavy.
The supposed justification for ID cards is that they will make us all feel safer by somehow deterring terrorism. Their real purpose, of course, is to extend government control of the individual and to add another plank to the raft of anti-libertarian measures that the government has been building under the pretext of anti-terrorism since 2001 (and, in this country, 7/7) provided them with a convenient excuse.
Quite how the news that transsexuals will be able to have two cards, one for their male and one for their female identities, makes the system more secure, is lost on me. I can imagine Al Quaeda are even now queueing up in the lingerie department of Marks and Sparks and looking at the Bravissimo web site. And homeless people will be able to have a card which gives their address as being the place where they might usually be found. Nothing wrong with that - homeless people are often stigmatised by officialdom because they don't have an "address" as such, but it does rather make a mockery of the security argument.
How long before a terrorist with the ID of "Ms Bina Laden, Underneath the Railway Arches, Acton" manages to perpetrate some form of atrocity, I wonder.
This of course presupposes that terrorists will be bothered by ID or the lack of it anyway. I can't see some nutjob religious fanatic saying "Damn, I was going to fly a hijacked plane into Canary Wharf today but now I've gone and left my ID at home".
Just supposing though, (let's go into fantasy mode here) that the government had a point. Let's ignore for the moment that for the last 900 years or so, it's been the government that had to justify its doings to the individual, and that the concept of ID cards reverses that relationship at a stroke. Let's ignore the fact that the government could store any nefarious information about us that it likes on the chip, and we would not know. Let's ignore the cost, both the cost to the individual, and the cost of the whole thing, coming out of a falling tax revenue that could actually be spent on better policing. Just suppose the government has a point. For the sake of argument.
How secure would ID cards be? To get one, presumably you would have to provide some form of existing, secondary ID. So in fact, already, it's only as secure as the existing system, and you don't have to drill down very far before you get to "proofs" of ID such as recent utility bills and Blockbuster membership cards. Plus, the government has a marvellous reputation for cocking up IT projects. Not just the hapless fools who lose memory sticks in car parks and send unencrypted CDs by second class post, but at a larger level. The history of government large-scale IT procurement (think NHS) is littered with overruns of schedule and budget, and systems that then collapse under the strain because they were designed by committee and never properly specified in the first place.
Plus, don't underestimate the government's capacity for getting things wrong. Just plain wrong. At the moment, if one bit of information about you is wrong, it can be annoying, but not crucial. Just imagine spending hours on the phone to a call centre in Sunderland trying to convince them that your details, as shared across all government departments (assuming that bit works) are wrong.
Doubt has also been cast over whether the biometrics will work, and it looks like there have already been IT compromises on that score.
So, given that it's costly, probably won't work, and almost certainly will have no deterrent effect on terrorism, why is the government so keen to press on into the valley of death in the face of all logic and reason.
This brings us back to Jacqui Smith, the exemplar of New Labour. It is because they want to control us. They want to know where we are, what we are doing, who we are talking to. They want to film us every time we leave the house, they want to record our car number plates, they want to store and read all our emails and phone calls. Because they fear us. They know that they have no legitimate reason for doing this, and they seek to control us to make it harder for people to ask awkward questions. Questions like "why are we putting so much effort into treating the symptoms of terrorism when it would be easier to treat the diseas, by getting out of Iraq?" If you ask questions like that, you might just find yourself banged up for 42 days without the option.
They want to be able to go on fishing expeditions. They want to be able, once they have put this raft of legislation in place, to extend it to the likes of animal rights activists, and ultimately, anyone who disagrees with them or looks a bit funny. They won't be happy, ultimately, until everyone has a bar code tattooed on their forehead, and the coastline of Britain is ringed with barbed wire dotted with machine gun towers. Only then will the freedoms our fathers fought for in 1940 be safe! Har har.
One of the more heartening aspects of the BNP membership being leaked on the internet last week, is that there are apparently only 10,000 of the buggers. Mind you, their vote has been going up at elections because, like Hitler before them, they are past masters at invoking scapegoats and appealing to fear and greed. But still, only 10,000 members.
Pause, though, and think, what living in Britain would be like if one day there was a combination of New Labour's profoundly anti-libertarian legislation and a BNP government. Don't say it couldn't happen, they thought that in 1930s Germany. Once all this stuff gets on the statute book, it will be there for ANY future government to use, and those who say "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" should ponder long and hard on this fact, and on the well-known poem by Pastor Niemoller.
Sunday, 16 November 2008
Jodrell Bankers
When I was at school, in the heady days of the 1960's, in the white heat of Wilson's technological revolution, Jodrell Bank's famous radio telescope was often in the news. It didn't take a crowd of snotty nosed 13 year old boys long to start sniggering and using "Jodrell Bank" as cockney rhyming slang for a particular act of self-abuse.
The connection between "Bank" and "Wank" has been brought home again by a few pieces of news I've spotted this week.
The Credit Crunch "proper" happened before I started doing this blog, but had I been blogging at the time I think I would have said in no uncertain terms that I was not happy about the fact that the only choice available to me was either to stand by and watch as the capitalist system collapsed and slid into the River Hudson, or to stand by and watch while the politicians pumped in gazillions of our money in the form of taxes to prop them up so we could all keep going. Either way, we lost, either way we were shafted.
True, the potential burden of higher taxes and a world-wide recession is slightly preferable to having to scramble for hunks of bread thrown off the back of an army lorry while the troops fire warning shots at the looters, but what a choice, eh?
And all the time these bastards in stripey suits were oppressing us and making us do cash flows and projections and charging us a fortune in bank charges, they were actually taking our money and buying recycled mortgages that shysters in America had granted to old guys sitting on porches picking banjos, people who had no collateral apart from a houn' dawg and a pick up truck. Either that, or they were pissing it away investing in Iceland, a volcano surrounded by haddock.
Well, we've bailed them out, in my case under local anaesthetic and with great reluctance, and we've seen Swervin' Mervyn cut interest rates to their lowest in 50 years, and we all sat back and waited for the economy to fire up again and for the wheels to start turning... and we're still waiting.
In the meantime, credit card borrowing has increased in price, and HBOS have apparently had a party that cost them (ie us) £300,000. In the circumstances you could be forgiven for thinking that it would have been better to have just let the banks go to the wall and given the money directly to small businesses instead. Instead of lending them our money so they could lend it back to us at rates too far above the base rate, and siphon off the surplus into parties and bonuses.
There is NO WAY that these bastards should just be allowed to swallow the bail-out whole, give a huge self-satisfied belch of relief, and then batten down the hatches for the mixture as before, while the rest of us suffer for their mistakes.
I'd like to see taxation at 100% on bank bonus payments over a certain figure, I'd like to see the banks being forced to declare their actual trading position so they can then abandon this deadlock of not lending to each other because they don't know who's solvent and who isn't, and I'd like to see them being forced to use their redundant branches, where there have been enforced mergers, to keep open socially useful post offices in the areas of previous post office closure.
We have been ripped off by energy companies hammering us with unscrupulous price rises. We've been ripped off by oil companies increasing prices at the pumps because the price of oil went up to $150 a barrel, then leaving their pump price there for weeks after the oil barrel price fell back to $47 a barrel, we are NOT going to be ripped off by banks failing to pass on the benefit of the cut in Bank of England base rates, and we are looking to our politicians to do something about it. And come election time, I for one, in this wonderfully marginal constituency of the Holme Valley, will be making sure that they know that their actions have been scrutinised.
The connection between "Bank" and "Wank" has been brought home again by a few pieces of news I've spotted this week.
The Credit Crunch "proper" happened before I started doing this blog, but had I been blogging at the time I think I would have said in no uncertain terms that I was not happy about the fact that the only choice available to me was either to stand by and watch as the capitalist system collapsed and slid into the River Hudson, or to stand by and watch while the politicians pumped in gazillions of our money in the form of taxes to prop them up so we could all keep going. Either way, we lost, either way we were shafted.
True, the potential burden of higher taxes and a world-wide recession is slightly preferable to having to scramble for hunks of bread thrown off the back of an army lorry while the troops fire warning shots at the looters, but what a choice, eh?
And all the time these bastards in stripey suits were oppressing us and making us do cash flows and projections and charging us a fortune in bank charges, they were actually taking our money and buying recycled mortgages that shysters in America had granted to old guys sitting on porches picking banjos, people who had no collateral apart from a houn' dawg and a pick up truck. Either that, or they were pissing it away investing in Iceland, a volcano surrounded by haddock.
Well, we've bailed them out, in my case under local anaesthetic and with great reluctance, and we've seen Swervin' Mervyn cut interest rates to their lowest in 50 years, and we all sat back and waited for the economy to fire up again and for the wheels to start turning... and we're still waiting.
In the meantime, credit card borrowing has increased in price, and HBOS have apparently had a party that cost them (ie us) £300,000. In the circumstances you could be forgiven for thinking that it would have been better to have just let the banks go to the wall and given the money directly to small businesses instead. Instead of lending them our money so they could lend it back to us at rates too far above the base rate, and siphon off the surplus into parties and bonuses.
There is NO WAY that these bastards should just be allowed to swallow the bail-out whole, give a huge self-satisfied belch of relief, and then batten down the hatches for the mixture as before, while the rest of us suffer for their mistakes.
I'd like to see taxation at 100% on bank bonus payments over a certain figure, I'd like to see the banks being forced to declare their actual trading position so they can then abandon this deadlock of not lending to each other because they don't know who's solvent and who isn't, and I'd like to see them being forced to use their redundant branches, where there have been enforced mergers, to keep open socially useful post offices in the areas of previous post office closure.
We have been ripped off by energy companies hammering us with unscrupulous price rises. We've been ripped off by oil companies increasing prices at the pumps because the price of oil went up to $150 a barrel, then leaving their pump price there for weeks after the oil barrel price fell back to $47 a barrel, we are NOT going to be ripped off by banks failing to pass on the benefit of the cut in Bank of England base rates, and we are looking to our politicians to do something about it. And come election time, I for one, in this wonderfully marginal constituency of the Holme Valley, will be making sure that they know that their actions have been scrutinised.
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
Don't slam the stable door on social workers
The tragic death of Baby P at the hands of his carers is of course an appalling crime. I think everyone would agree that it should never happen again. Which is why it depresses me almost beyond belief to see people using the murder as a political football, and the social worker in question being potentially castigated in the media, and by definition, all social workers.
I know a social worker. Not the sort that has to make difficult, almost impossible, desicions about child welfare, instead she looks after two guys who can't fend for themselves very well. She works 24 hour shifts, including sleepovers, and when she is on call she has to watch out for things like self-harming, and to try and engage with them, oh, and if one of them has an epileptic fit in the middle of the night, she has to administer rectal valium.
She has an acre of paperwork to fill in, mostly to cover the arses of the people in the management structure above her. Risk assessments, individual learning plans, you name it. And, for all of this, last year, she earned under £16,000. Social Work is one of those jobs like being a teacher, where everyone thinks they can do it better than you. You wouldn't dream of standing over a heart surgeon while he was performing an operation on your auntie and saying "Oi, you've sewn that bit up wonky" - but everyone feels that they can do Social Work and everybody thinks they can teach, egged on by government initiatives to foster "choice" in the public services - choice that people really, actually, don't want. They want public services that work and deliver, not to have to choose between two dysfunctional underfunded public services (often contracted out to the private sector, because we all know how good the private sector is at running things, I mean we have only got to look at the financial services industry .... er...oh.)
While today's shenanigans at Prime Minister's Question Time between Broon and Cameron were vaguely entertaining, sort of a bout of "PMT at PMQ's", they will do nothing to help save future Baby Ps. Why the government feels it can run Haringey social services better than the people who are currently running it beats me (unless they have discovered a secret pot of money) and Cameron of course will not hesitate to jump on any passing bandwagon, especially one that allows him to indulge in a little bit of shroud-waving.
So, once again we hear the sound of stable doors shutting all over Westminster with a resounding clang. There will be an enquiry, involving Ofsted, the Chief Constable, Lord Somebody and probably the Keeper of the Queen's Privy Seal, for all I know.
But nobody wants to talk about the real problem, the lack of that secret little pot of money. Everybody's happy to talk about the symptoms, but not the disease. Until social work is properly funded and resourced, you will always have the situation where potentially, a harrassed, lowly and inexperienced public official can make a mistake with tragic consequences. Unless the downtrodden underclass that we seem to be determined to create with our modern way of life with its relentless obsession with money, fame, celebrity and success as expressed by material possessions, all have a miraculous personality transplant overnight, you will still have kids at risk because of the breakup of what Mrs Thatcher once derided as being non-existent - "society". And it's that mismatch between the growing need and the diminishing resources, coupled with a culture of targets and box ticking which has been fostered and inspired by this government almost to the exclusion of common sense, that causes the problem.
It's a common assertion, especially around the dinner tables of middle England, that the public sector is overstaffed and feather-bedded. It's true, there is some wasteful and totally unecessary spending in public life - MP's expenses, for instance, are a complete scandal. There is no way we should be paying David Cameron's mortgage! But, given that MPs aren't about to sacrifice their salary and expenses to make Haringey social services better funded, then there's only one other option: if you want a social services which really makes a difference because the caseload is not overwhelming and the people who work there are properly-rewarded public sector careerists, then the answer is a simple one - higher council taxes, but that is precisely the thing the angry mob fuelled by the likes of the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the News of the World refuse to countenance. You can't rebuild the ravages of sixty years of social decay on the cheap.
And so poor little Baby P, who was, it seems, sometimes treated like a real football in life, will continue to be kicked around after death by the politicians and the media, in a bizarre competition to see who can wring their hands the most and spout the biggest load of sanctimonious claptrap.
I know a social worker. Not the sort that has to make difficult, almost impossible, desicions about child welfare, instead she looks after two guys who can't fend for themselves very well. She works 24 hour shifts, including sleepovers, and when she is on call she has to watch out for things like self-harming, and to try and engage with them, oh, and if one of them has an epileptic fit in the middle of the night, she has to administer rectal valium.
She has an acre of paperwork to fill in, mostly to cover the arses of the people in the management structure above her. Risk assessments, individual learning plans, you name it. And, for all of this, last year, she earned under £16,000. Social Work is one of those jobs like being a teacher, where everyone thinks they can do it better than you. You wouldn't dream of standing over a heart surgeon while he was performing an operation on your auntie and saying "Oi, you've sewn that bit up wonky" - but everyone feels that they can do Social Work and everybody thinks they can teach, egged on by government initiatives to foster "choice" in the public services - choice that people really, actually, don't want. They want public services that work and deliver, not to have to choose between two dysfunctional underfunded public services (often contracted out to the private sector, because we all know how good the private sector is at running things, I mean we have only got to look at the financial services industry .... er...oh.)
While today's shenanigans at Prime Minister's Question Time between Broon and Cameron were vaguely entertaining, sort of a bout of "PMT at PMQ's", they will do nothing to help save future Baby Ps. Why the government feels it can run Haringey social services better than the people who are currently running it beats me (unless they have discovered a secret pot of money) and Cameron of course will not hesitate to jump on any passing bandwagon, especially one that allows him to indulge in a little bit of shroud-waving.
So, once again we hear the sound of stable doors shutting all over Westminster with a resounding clang. There will be an enquiry, involving Ofsted, the Chief Constable, Lord Somebody and probably the Keeper of the Queen's Privy Seal, for all I know.
But nobody wants to talk about the real problem, the lack of that secret little pot of money. Everybody's happy to talk about the symptoms, but not the disease. Until social work is properly funded and resourced, you will always have the situation where potentially, a harrassed, lowly and inexperienced public official can make a mistake with tragic consequences. Unless the downtrodden underclass that we seem to be determined to create with our modern way of life with its relentless obsession with money, fame, celebrity and success as expressed by material possessions, all have a miraculous personality transplant overnight, you will still have kids at risk because of the breakup of what Mrs Thatcher once derided as being non-existent - "society". And it's that mismatch between the growing need and the diminishing resources, coupled with a culture of targets and box ticking which has been fostered and inspired by this government almost to the exclusion of common sense, that causes the problem.
It's a common assertion, especially around the dinner tables of middle England, that the public sector is overstaffed and feather-bedded. It's true, there is some wasteful and totally unecessary spending in public life - MP's expenses, for instance, are a complete scandal. There is no way we should be paying David Cameron's mortgage! But, given that MPs aren't about to sacrifice their salary and expenses to make Haringey social services better funded, then there's only one other option: if you want a social services which really makes a difference because the caseload is not overwhelming and the people who work there are properly-rewarded public sector careerists, then the answer is a simple one - higher council taxes, but that is precisely the thing the angry mob fuelled by the likes of the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the News of the World refuse to countenance. You can't rebuild the ravages of sixty years of social decay on the cheap.
And so poor little Baby P, who was, it seems, sometimes treated like a real football in life, will continue to be kicked around after death by the politicians and the media, in a bizarre competition to see who can wring their hands the most and spout the biggest load of sanctimonious claptrap.
White Poppies, white feathers
Sorry, I got a bit aereated yesterday.
I don't have a baseball bat anyway, and ultimately nothing is solved by lamping people who you disagree with. Even if they crassly suggest that in some way white poppies are inferior to red poppies. And what about the people who wear both - red to remember the needless waste of lives, white to show they are trying never to let it happen again.
Mind you, lamping people you disagree with would make Prime Minister's Question Time more entertaining, and we nearly got there today. Of which more later
I don't have a baseball bat anyway, and ultimately nothing is solved by lamping people who you disagree with. Even if they crassly suggest that in some way white poppies are inferior to red poppies. And what about the people who wear both - red to remember the needless waste of lives, white to show they are trying never to let it happen again.
Mind you, lamping people you disagree with would make Prime Minister's Question Time more entertaining, and we nearly got there today. Of which more later
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
White Poppies, white feathers
There's some bloke at the Daily Telegraph who has got the bag on about White poppies.
He says
People who wear white poppies - who include the sanctimonious prats of the "Christian" think tank Ekklesia - not only dishonour our war dead: they also assert their supposed moral superiority over the 40 million Britons who wear British Legion red poppies.
What should you do if you see a white poppy wearer today? At the very least - if I may borrow a phrase from my colleague Alan Cochrane - you should give them a cheery wave not involving the use of all your fingers.
Really, when I read bilge like this, I am torn between praying for this dickhead and going round there with a baseball bat. The white poppy was invented by the Peace Pledge Union, which was started by Dick Sheppard, who has been a chaplain to military hospitals on the Western Front in the First World War, and had decided "never again".
I can't imagine ANYONE wearing a poppy, white or red, to glorify war. It doesn't matter what colour your poppy is, any more than it matters what colour your skin is. or is this fucknugget saying war is a good thing?
He's called Damien something, I can't be bothered, to be honest, all I know is that is family must be experts in audio electronic surveillance in a small archipelago of holiday islands off the coast of Cornwall.
Yes, it's obviously Scilly Buggers' outing today.
He says
People who wear white poppies - who include the sanctimonious prats of the "Christian" think tank Ekklesia - not only dishonour our war dead: they also assert their supposed moral superiority over the 40 million Britons who wear British Legion red poppies.
What should you do if you see a white poppy wearer today? At the very least - if I may borrow a phrase from my colleague Alan Cochrane - you should give them a cheery wave not involving the use of all your fingers.
Really, when I read bilge like this, I am torn between praying for this dickhead and going round there with a baseball bat. The white poppy was invented by the Peace Pledge Union, which was started by Dick Sheppard, who has been a chaplain to military hospitals on the Western Front in the First World War, and had decided "never again".
I can't imagine ANYONE wearing a poppy, white or red, to glorify war. It doesn't matter what colour your poppy is, any more than it matters what colour your skin is. or is this fucknugget saying war is a good thing?
He's called Damien something, I can't be bothered, to be honest, all I know is that is family must be experts in audio electronic surveillance in a small archipelago of holiday islands off the coast of Cornwall.
Yes, it's obviously Scilly Buggers' outing today.
Sitting on Defence
Well, I had better make a start on the Bolshy Manifesto somewhere, and it might as well be Defence of the Realm, given that today is Remembrance Day and on the way to the Lakes on Sunday we saw a World War II Dakota complete with authentic paint job, flying over the M62. Unless it was a hallucination of course.
I am not, technically, a pacifist. I wish I was. I have to say, though, that my desire and admiration for the British way of life is such that I can foresee a situation where, if the invaders were at the gates, I would be there, lined up alongside such of my countrymen who were prepared to stop them invading. Not that I would be any practical use but, as a moral relativist, I have to concede there are times when, if for instance another Hitler came along and could not be stopped by any other means, then you might, in extreme circumstances, have to resort to violence.
Unfortunately, this also then implies the need for professional armed forces to defend the country, and all that this entails. And, in an uncertain world, where the idiots in charge of our foreign policy have been wedged so far up Bush’s chuff they haven’t seen daylight for years, we’ve now made a lot of enemies. Which is why, unfortunately, reluctantly (see how those words recur like a tolling bell), we’ve got to replace Trident. I know, I can hear the howls from here. And it ties us in to the Americans. I know, I know. (I’m assuming a slippery operator like Blair made Trident help a condition of being America’s “Blind Ally” this last few years, and if he didn’t, he’s a bloody fool.)
In the question of Trident, I find myself reflecting that it’s like the situation where ideally, you would like to go to the shops but you are actually stuck up to your ankles in an unfamiliar peat bog in the middle of nowhere, it’s getting dark and it’s coming on to rain, you’ve got no torch and you’ve lost your map. Ideally, given the choice, you wouldn’t start from here.
So it is with Trident. Ideally, the Bolshy Party wouldn’t start from here, but given that, by slavishly following the Primrose Path of dalliance promoted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, we’ve now made ourselves the target for every hothead east of the Euphrates with an AK-47 (and quite a lot west of the Euphrates as well), it seems we have no choice. Great legacy, George, Tony, thanks a lot.
However, this doesn’t mean we want to go exporting aggression. It’s perfectly possible to be proud of England without feeling then obliged to invade France (or Iraq). I can see (sort of) an intellectual justification for invading Afghanistan, given that it was a hotbed of fanaticism, but someone should have a) asked the question – what is it about the USA that these people hate so much that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and kill themselves in the process? and b) someone should have taken Bush aside and told him that western armies have very poor track records of invading and subduing Afghanistan, ever since the North-West Frontier wars of the nineteenth century.
Another justification for invading Afghanistan was the plight of Muslim women under the Taleban. Yes, this was pretty dire, but is it possible to coerce an entire religion, especially in a situation where the most militant fringe of it has gained political power by force, into making 600 years of progress in half-a-dozen? Islam and Islamic scholars kept the flame of knowledge alive in the Middle Ages, providing the vital link back to Classical Greek and Roman thought and texts that fuelled Western Europe’s Renaissance. Yet militant Islam is still stuck in the 1100s, when it comes to the place of women, especially. But you can’t bomb someone forward to civilisation, you can only bomb them back to the Stone Age.
So, for these reasons, it’s Bolshy Party Policy to withdraw straightaway from the American-induced adventurism in Iraq. Their mistake, their mess, they can stay and clear it up if they still want the oil, which they will do, even under Obama, I predict. There will be US involvement in Iraq for generations yet, military bases and military “advisers”, private security firms (mercenaries or contractors, depending on who you talk to) and joint exercises.
We would use the men, weapons and materiel freed up by the withdrawal from Iraq to ease the strain on the UK contingent in Afghanistan, while planning a phased withdrawal from there, too. The women will have to be helped by other means – by intellectually challenging the bankrupt assertions of the Taleban and their questionable spiritual authority.
The possession of professional armed services doesn’t mean, either, that you have to use them for fighting. Every year there are scores of disasters, natural or otherwise, around the world which require specialist logistical expertise in relief efforts. Even in the UK, when we get the by now regular floods each summer as a result of climate change. I look forward to the day when the Army, Navy and Air Force have largely morphed into a sort of global logistics and rescue service – a bit like International Rescue but with fewer "strings" attached. A plane can be used to drop food aid instead of bombs. A temporary bridge can allow food convoys to cross a swollen river, rather than tanks.
The Bolshy Party believes that it is perfectly possible to be proud of the achievement and expertise of our nation’s armed forces without that translating over into a sort of gung-ho Little Englander patriotism that sees its mission in the world as being to teach Johnny Foreigner what’s what, keep him in his place, and give him a bloody nose.
The only justifiable intervention outside of the UK, apart from humanitarian aid, should be in the pursuit of international law and justice, and this should be carried out rigorously, without fear or favour, if it is to be done at all, and certainly not done with a sort of lip service attitude, only in areas where it suits the broad aims of US foreign policy.
Soldiers are probably the last people who want to go to war:
Soldiers who wanna be heroes
Number practically zero
But there are millions
Who want to be civilians
- that old protest song from the Vietnam era of the 1960s has it more or less right. So, in those circumstances, we at the Bolshy Party do not consider that if you wear your poppy on Poppy Day, for instance, you are automatically glorifying war. We see it, on the contrary, commemorating all of the countless millions of ordinary blokes and women who didn’t particularly want to go to war, who were quite happy where they were, thanks very much, but who, when the call came, put down their spades, their scythes, their tools, their pens and marched to meet the challenges.
There are different reasons for remembering the dead of the two different wars. For the dead of the First World War, men such as Harry Fenwick and William Evans, we remember the waste and the futility, the sadness of all those millions of unfulfilled lives. For the dead of the Second World War, at least on the Allies’ side, those emotions are also mingled with a kind of thanks for stopping Hitler – or stopping the Hitler war fascist machine. For the dead on the German side, again, there is only sorrow at unfulfilled lives. And of course, potentially the most tragic waste of that conflict, the millions of innocent civilians who were killed, wounded or displaced, some of the consquences of which we still feel today, in the Arab-Israeli standoff.
So to sum up, the policy of the Bolshy Part on defence is: we’ve got to start from where we are, not where we’d like to be, and the longing we feel for where we’d like to be is irrelevant in that context. We’ve got to extract our troops from the two areas in the world where at present all they are doing is providing targets for fanatics. Ideally, in Afghanistan, if we can improve the lot of women by continuing to challenge militant Islam intellectually, if we can cut off the Taleban’s funding by buying up the opium crop and turning it into diamorphine for the NHS, there are still things we can do to pull out the troops without leaving the Afghans in the lurch.
We’re stuck with Trident’s replacement, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go looking for excuses to lose it. It’s a deterrent.
Finally, let’s not also forget that the government gets an easier ride thanks to the efforts of the British Legion and other people who deal with the welfare of veterans. You can say this about many charities. The government gets off lightly in many areas where they should be spending money wisely because goodhearted people who recognise a need for action, get stuck in and sort it out. I’ve written about this dilemma before, in the context of overseas aid.The problem is, if the charities go on strike, it isn't the government that gets hurt by that, it's the people or cause the charity was trying to assist, but no, we should never let our politicians get away with short-changing the people who fought their battles for them.
And it’s possible to be proud of our armed forces without indulging in gung-ho patriotism, and it would be possible to be even more proud of them if we succeed in turning their planes into ploughshares. And if you wear a poppy, it doesn’t make you a war-monger – just the opposite, in fact.
I am not, technically, a pacifist. I wish I was. I have to say, though, that my desire and admiration for the British way of life is such that I can foresee a situation where, if the invaders were at the gates, I would be there, lined up alongside such of my countrymen who were prepared to stop them invading. Not that I would be any practical use but, as a moral relativist, I have to concede there are times when, if for instance another Hitler came along and could not be stopped by any other means, then you might, in extreme circumstances, have to resort to violence.
Unfortunately, this also then implies the need for professional armed forces to defend the country, and all that this entails. And, in an uncertain world, where the idiots in charge of our foreign policy have been wedged so far up Bush’s chuff they haven’t seen daylight for years, we’ve now made a lot of enemies. Which is why, unfortunately, reluctantly (see how those words recur like a tolling bell), we’ve got to replace Trident. I know, I can hear the howls from here. And it ties us in to the Americans. I know, I know. (I’m assuming a slippery operator like Blair made Trident help a condition of being America’s “Blind Ally” this last few years, and if he didn’t, he’s a bloody fool.)
In the question of Trident, I find myself reflecting that it’s like the situation where ideally, you would like to go to the shops but you are actually stuck up to your ankles in an unfamiliar peat bog in the middle of nowhere, it’s getting dark and it’s coming on to rain, you’ve got no torch and you’ve lost your map. Ideally, given the choice, you wouldn’t start from here.
So it is with Trident. Ideally, the Bolshy Party wouldn’t start from here, but given that, by slavishly following the Primrose Path of dalliance promoted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, we’ve now made ourselves the target for every hothead east of the Euphrates with an AK-47 (and quite a lot west of the Euphrates as well), it seems we have no choice. Great legacy, George, Tony, thanks a lot.
However, this doesn’t mean we want to go exporting aggression. It’s perfectly possible to be proud of England without feeling then obliged to invade France (or Iraq). I can see (sort of) an intellectual justification for invading Afghanistan, given that it was a hotbed of fanaticism, but someone should have a) asked the question – what is it about the USA that these people hate so much that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and kill themselves in the process? and b) someone should have taken Bush aside and told him that western armies have very poor track records of invading and subduing Afghanistan, ever since the North-West Frontier wars of the nineteenth century.
Another justification for invading Afghanistan was the plight of Muslim women under the Taleban. Yes, this was pretty dire, but is it possible to coerce an entire religion, especially in a situation where the most militant fringe of it has gained political power by force, into making 600 years of progress in half-a-dozen? Islam and Islamic scholars kept the flame of knowledge alive in the Middle Ages, providing the vital link back to Classical Greek and Roman thought and texts that fuelled Western Europe’s Renaissance. Yet militant Islam is still stuck in the 1100s, when it comes to the place of women, especially. But you can’t bomb someone forward to civilisation, you can only bomb them back to the Stone Age.
So, for these reasons, it’s Bolshy Party Policy to withdraw straightaway from the American-induced adventurism in Iraq. Their mistake, their mess, they can stay and clear it up if they still want the oil, which they will do, even under Obama, I predict. There will be US involvement in Iraq for generations yet, military bases and military “advisers”, private security firms (mercenaries or contractors, depending on who you talk to) and joint exercises.
We would use the men, weapons and materiel freed up by the withdrawal from Iraq to ease the strain on the UK contingent in Afghanistan, while planning a phased withdrawal from there, too. The women will have to be helped by other means – by intellectually challenging the bankrupt assertions of the Taleban and their questionable spiritual authority.
The possession of professional armed services doesn’t mean, either, that you have to use them for fighting. Every year there are scores of disasters, natural or otherwise, around the world which require specialist logistical expertise in relief efforts. Even in the UK, when we get the by now regular floods each summer as a result of climate change. I look forward to the day when the Army, Navy and Air Force have largely morphed into a sort of global logistics and rescue service – a bit like International Rescue but with fewer "strings" attached. A plane can be used to drop food aid instead of bombs. A temporary bridge can allow food convoys to cross a swollen river, rather than tanks.
The Bolshy Party believes that it is perfectly possible to be proud of the achievement and expertise of our nation’s armed forces without that translating over into a sort of gung-ho Little Englander patriotism that sees its mission in the world as being to teach Johnny Foreigner what’s what, keep him in his place, and give him a bloody nose.
The only justifiable intervention outside of the UK, apart from humanitarian aid, should be in the pursuit of international law and justice, and this should be carried out rigorously, without fear or favour, if it is to be done at all, and certainly not done with a sort of lip service attitude, only in areas where it suits the broad aims of US foreign policy.
Soldiers are probably the last people who want to go to war:
Soldiers who wanna be heroes
Number practically zero
But there are millions
Who want to be civilians
- that old protest song from the Vietnam era of the 1960s has it more or less right. So, in those circumstances, we at the Bolshy Party do not consider that if you wear your poppy on Poppy Day, for instance, you are automatically glorifying war. We see it, on the contrary, commemorating all of the countless millions of ordinary blokes and women who didn’t particularly want to go to war, who were quite happy where they were, thanks very much, but who, when the call came, put down their spades, their scythes, their tools, their pens and marched to meet the challenges.
There are different reasons for remembering the dead of the two different wars. For the dead of the First World War, men such as Harry Fenwick and William Evans, we remember the waste and the futility, the sadness of all those millions of unfulfilled lives. For the dead of the Second World War, at least on the Allies’ side, those emotions are also mingled with a kind of thanks for stopping Hitler – or stopping the Hitler war fascist machine. For the dead on the German side, again, there is only sorrow at unfulfilled lives. And of course, potentially the most tragic waste of that conflict, the millions of innocent civilians who were killed, wounded or displaced, some of the consquences of which we still feel today, in the Arab-Israeli standoff.
So to sum up, the policy of the Bolshy Part on defence is: we’ve got to start from where we are, not where we’d like to be, and the longing we feel for where we’d like to be is irrelevant in that context. We’ve got to extract our troops from the two areas in the world where at present all they are doing is providing targets for fanatics. Ideally, in Afghanistan, if we can improve the lot of women by continuing to challenge militant Islam intellectually, if we can cut off the Taleban’s funding by buying up the opium crop and turning it into diamorphine for the NHS, there are still things we can do to pull out the troops without leaving the Afghans in the lurch.
We’re stuck with Trident’s replacement, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go looking for excuses to lose it. It’s a deterrent.
Finally, let’s not also forget that the government gets an easier ride thanks to the efforts of the British Legion and other people who deal with the welfare of veterans. You can say this about many charities. The government gets off lightly in many areas where they should be spending money wisely because goodhearted people who recognise a need for action, get stuck in and sort it out. I’ve written about this dilemma before, in the context of overseas aid.The problem is, if the charities go on strike, it isn't the government that gets hurt by that, it's the people or cause the charity was trying to assist, but no, we should never let our politicians get away with short-changing the people who fought their battles for them.
And it’s possible to be proud of our armed forces without indulging in gung-ho patriotism, and it would be possible to be even more proud of them if we succeed in turning their planes into ploughshares. And if you wear a poppy, it doesn’t make you a war-monger – just the opposite, in fact.
Friday, 7 November 2008
I come from Old Obama, with a banjo on my knee
Well, I am still gathering together the Bolshy Manifesto, so in the meantime, a quick welcome to Barack Obama. (I keep wanting to type Burt Bacharach Obama, but that is probably a different guy).
Welcome ba(ra)ck, America. We've missed you. We didn't like you much in those years when you traded the fiddle for the drum. You look a bit more like your old self this week.
Now get it sorted, and keep away from grassy knolls and school book depositories for the next four years.
One of the funniest things (apart from Paxo interviewing Dizzee Rascal - "Mr Rascal, do you consider yourself to be British?") this week has been the reaction of our home-grown politicians to the American presidential election. Forgetting that "this is no time for a novice!" Broon immediately welcomed Obama.
As for Cameron, you could almost see the little light bulb come on over his head. It can only be a matter of time before he starts wearing bling and rapping at Prime Ministers' Question Time. I am sure he's already sent Osborne round to the shops for a tin of Cherry Blossom, a stripey blazer, and banjo.
Much has been written in a short time about Obama's race. I think I stand with Martin Luther King on this, and that equality will only truly have been achieved when the colour of the President's skin is just not an issue.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character"
Well - Personally, I hope he is everything they say and more, but it's early days yet, and fine words butter no parsnips. I see Hazel Blears has been bleating on about political blogging making everyone cynical and apathetic about politicians. I am actually quite sick of being labelled cynical and apathetic by the very politicians who made me cynical and apathetic.Show me a cause and I'll be there with you at the barricades. Self serving perpetuation or crass opportunism (the two options available to us in the UK at the moment) are not causes as I understand the word.
But yes, let's hope when Obama's finished handing out puppies, he gets the job done. Should be an interesting meeting when the people who funded his campaign attempt to cash in their chips and he says no. I'd love to be a fly on the wall*
*figuratively, obv. If I was a /real/ fly on the wall, I'd have six hairy legs and have to vomit on my food before hoovering it up my nose. But on the upside, I would be able to do a flick roll and land upside down on the ceiling, something I can only perform at present while listening to Question Time...
Welcome ba(ra)ck, America. We've missed you. We didn't like you much in those years when you traded the fiddle for the drum. You look a bit more like your old self this week.
Now get it sorted, and keep away from grassy knolls and school book depositories for the next four years.
One of the funniest things (apart from Paxo interviewing Dizzee Rascal - "Mr Rascal, do you consider yourself to be British?") this week has been the reaction of our home-grown politicians to the American presidential election. Forgetting that "this is no time for a novice!" Broon immediately welcomed Obama.
As for Cameron, you could almost see the little light bulb come on over his head. It can only be a matter of time before he starts wearing bling and rapping at Prime Ministers' Question Time. I am sure he's already sent Osborne round to the shops for a tin of Cherry Blossom, a stripey blazer, and banjo.
Much has been written in a short time about Obama's race. I think I stand with Martin Luther King on this, and that equality will only truly have been achieved when the colour of the President's skin is just not an issue.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character"
Well - Personally, I hope he is everything they say and more, but it's early days yet, and fine words butter no parsnips. I see Hazel Blears has been bleating on about political blogging making everyone cynical and apathetic about politicians. I am actually quite sick of being labelled cynical and apathetic by the very politicians who made me cynical and apathetic.Show me a cause and I'll be there with you at the barricades. Self serving perpetuation or crass opportunism (the two options available to us in the UK at the moment) are not causes as I understand the word.
But yes, let's hope when Obama's finished handing out puppies, he gets the job done. Should be an interesting meeting when the people who funded his campaign attempt to cash in their chips and he says no. I'd love to be a fly on the wall*
*figuratively, obv. If I was a /real/ fly on the wall, I'd have six hairy legs and have to vomit on my food before hoovering it up my nose. But on the upside, I would be able to do a flick roll and land upside down on the ceiling, something I can only perform at present while listening to Question Time...
Thursday, 6 November 2008
Welcome
Welcome to the Bolshy Party.
Neither left nor right, but Radical, in the old 18th-century use of the word.
We'll be publishing The Bolshy Manifesto over the next few days. On everything from affordable housing to inflatable Popes.
It will be .. er... interesting. To us, at least.
For the moment, though, from Dusty the cat and from me, goodnight.
Neither left nor right, but Radical, in the old 18th-century use of the word.
We'll be publishing The Bolshy Manifesto over the next few days. On everything from affordable housing to inflatable Popes.
It will be .. er... interesting. To us, at least.
For the moment, though, from Dusty the cat and from me, goodnight.
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