Nicker Vicar?

Father Tim Jones of York preached a sermon recently where he said that, if you were in desperate straits. and you were faced with a choice of burglary, prostitution, or shoplifting, in his opinion, shoplifting was morally less of an evil than the alternatives.

Needless to say, he was pilloried for it by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, to the extent that even his Diocese felt the need to distance themselves from his words by posting a slightly inaccurate version of what he said on their web site.

Well, I am afraid I have to disagree with them. I think he should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. For the record, here is the full transcript of what he said:www.yorkpress.co.uk/

...As you will see he actually says that for those in desperate straits, shoplifting is the least morally damaging option when the alternatives are suicide, burglary, or prostitution.

he says:

Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift. The observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are.

But why let the facts get in the way of a good story, eh?

He's right though. The dichotomy between the glittery, gleaming, gadget ridden, food-stuffed consumer M & S advert Christmas and the grim reality for people on the dole or homeless is obscene, and it IS a grim indictment of society's values.

And these supermarkets who are bleating about it today, such as Asda in York, who described Fr Jones as being "one prayer short of a sermon", would they be the same supermarkets who regularly SKIP huge amounts of "waste" food because of sell-by dates, and would they be the same supermarkets who are ######ing up the planet by flying in dwarf beans from Kenya? Motes and beams, mate, motes and beams. Good luck to Fr Jones, I say, at least he's put it higher up the news agenda, despite every paper reporting it in precisely the opposite way to what he intended.

It would be better if the supermarkets, instead of bleating about the words of an Anglican priest, channeled some of their huge profits back into bolting on an extra "leg" onto their existing logistics network, which already exists and is geared up for the overnight transport of consumables, so that the stuff which currently ends up in the skip at the back of the shop, goes back in the otherwise empty delivery lorry instead, once it's been unloaded at the shop, to a central depot or depots and thence into a separate distribution network run in conjunction with, say The Salvation Army to those who need it.

Funded by the supermarkets. Then people wouldn't need to shoplift out of desperation (though I agree some may still do it for other reasons) which in turn cuts down some of the supermarket's need for CCTV and security, and associated costs etc etc. Win-win.

The only "supermarket" I regularly shop at these days is the Coop attached to the garage in Brockholes, which doesn't stock cats, which is just as well, because they would have to remain unswung if it did, but even so, I would happily forego my divvy for a few years or indeed forever, if the money went into such a network instead.

We HAVE to have a SERIOUS rethink about all this stuff. Since the banks went mammaries uppermost, we are NOT in Kansas anymore.

Now is the hour. Now. We have to start thinking along the lines of SOCIALLY USEFUL CAPITALISM, hopefully with the consent of those enterprises who want to be seen as having corporate social responsibility to the community that gives them their profits. The yardstick is not how big your share is, but how much you can share. There's a song in that somewhere...

PC Bill Barker, George Medal

It will never replace him in the lives of his family, but I still think that PC Bill Barker, who died in the Cumbrian floods in Workington (he had gone to the aid of a motorist on Northside Bridge in Workington when it collapsed, carrying him away) should get a posthumous George Medal.

Top Bloke Awards

Another couple of candidates for the "Top Bloke of 2009" award:

The first is cafe boss George Anderson of Banff, who plans to open the doors of his cafe on Christmas Day so that homeless and elderly folk don't have to spend the day alone.

And despite those who tell you there is no such thing, - they will also get a free lunch.

Mr Anderson and his staff are giving up a day off from the kitchen because they feel they have something to offer the community. He is appealing to other businesses in the town to help out by donating foodstuffs and other treats that will make the day memorable.

"We are going to be open for anyone who is displaced or who has no one to spend the day with, because no one should have to be alone at Christmas," he said.

"There are people living in homeless accommodation and elderly people with no family for who Christmas is a really sad time of year. It's not a happy time at all.

"We would like them to come and spend the day with us and have some lunch. If someone is elderly and can't manage out, we will even deliver their meal."

"As a community, one way or another we all have something that we can offer, and I firmly believe that we should all be trying to do that little bit more, especially at this time of year."

Good for him.

The second candidate is a taxi driver today who battled through blizzards to deliver vital blood to treat cancer patients.

Abdirashid Issa was taking the supplies from Southampton to Winchester and Basingstoke when he was caught up in Monday's snow in Hampshire.

He made the drop in Winchester but was forced to abandon his car due to tailbacks and walk four miles from the M3 motorway to the North Hampshire Hospital in Basingstoke in "horrible" blizzard conditions. He was then stranded overnight and had to sleep on a waiting room chair before he made his way back to get his car.

Father-of-one Mr Issa, who works for Central Shirley Cars in Southampton, moved to England from Somalia six years ago with his wife Iasha.

He set off with the blood at 5pm but he did not reach Basingstoke until 11pm.

The taxi driver told the Southern Daily Echo said: "It was very important. It said 'urgent blood' and if someone needed it I had to make sacrifices because they might be dying.
"I could have stayed in my heated car but I had to do it."

A spokeswoman for the North Hampshire Hospital in Basingstoke said: "We have sent a huge thank you to Mr Issa, who went well beyond the call of duty to deliver blood stocks to Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital.

"The delivery included platelets needed for our leukaemia patients and other blood stock which enabled the hospital to continue with planned major operations on Tuesday as well as maintaining an adequate stock for emergencies."

I don't know! These immigrants eh! What are they like?

Wonderful, Wonderful, Copenhagen

I had very low expectations of the outcome of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, and even then, I was disappointed. Seeing the various squabbles and shenanigans, the cabals and the backroom deals, I think the best thing from now on for anyone who is worried about climate change is to buy a CNB suit and some really thick sunglasses.

What cracks me up, though, is that some people still deny it's happening. Of course, those remarkably dim boffins at UEA, artlessly discussing whether or not to fudge their data, have not helped matters, and I cannot but wonder that there is an untold story there about how that was hacked and released to the media, just on the eve of the conference starting.

I am not a scientist. I dropped physics like a red hot brick in the third year, despite, paradoxically, being quite interested in it now. So, I don't understand the data, I don't understand the graphs.

What I do see, though, is a tedious concentration on the single issue of temperature. Almost to the angels-on-pinheads stage. Is it getting warmer? Is it getting cooler? It's the warmest decade since etc etc etc.

Anyone with half a brain can see there's SOMETHING wrong with the weather. We never get hot summers any more, every winter we always get catastrophic floods, like those in Cockermouth and Workington, and in other parts of the world, eg Indonesia, it's much much worse. It's more extreme. It can't ALL be caused by Barrats and Wimpeys building yuppie-hutches on the flood plain.

As I sit here typing this, we are in the midst of the coldest snap in the UK for about 20 years, which has been gleefully seized on by media wits along the lines of "what price global warming now, then, hur hur!" God, how tediously short sighted these idiots are, not to recognize that it is all part of the massive disturbance of weather systems. I'd like them to spend a few weeks filling sandbags in Cumbria, they might buck their ideas up then.

Irrespective of whether it's warmer or not, SOMETHING is screwing up the weather and making it more EXTREME, so I would be grateful if all the learned boffins could kindly roll down the sleeves of their lab coats, stop arm wrestling about the temperature and shouting "Lower!" and "Higher!" at each other like they were at a screening of "The Price is Right" and actually work out what it is that is DISTURBING the weather systems.

You can drown in warm water or cold water, Even I, as a non-scientist, know that.

Insurance Proposal

Given that some of the people in Toll Bar and Hull who suffered in the 2007 floods are still arguing it out with the insurance companies, I would like to propose a simple solution to stop the same thing happening in Cockermouth, Keswick, Workington et al. This could only apply to people who have insurance in place, but at least it's better than nothing.

Given that they need help STRAIGHT AWAY, but the insurance companies are going to be overwhelmed by claims and given that (from experience) I know that even a simple claim will be bitterly fought in a sort of hand to hand, house to house, Stalingrad style resistance until finally you have to go round their office, grasp them by the ankles, invert them, and shake them til the ££ drop out of their pockets, to get them to pay up, I think the banks should take up the slack in the interim.

Since it's all our money anyway these days, what the government should do is to declare a specific disaster zone, then any business with insurance within the zone who has been damaged by the floods can have a visit and a desktop valuation from the bank. Say for instance, you have insurance which will cover a claim, and the bank agrees that the claim is £50,000. They advance you the money as an immediate interest free advance. This allows you to get up and running again QUICKLY, so that your business can start generating income again. In the meantime, you pursue the insurance claim, and when it comes through, the money goes to repay the bank. If there is any shortfall between the bank;s desktop valuation amount and the actual insurance payout, that is transmuted to a fixed interest rate fixed term loan, underwritten by the disaster fund. Say the bank advanced you £50,000, but the insurance when it came through was only £47,500, the £2500 gets transmuted to a fixed loan.

Since the banks seem to have a never-ending appetite for taxpayers' money, and will never be happy until they are wearing a suit made entirely of money and sitting down to a dinner of roast money in a money sauce with a side salad of money, I think it is the least they can do.

I'd also suggest that next summer every tourist attraction within the National Park asks for an additional voluntary contribution/tax of 50p per adult visitor, to be passed on to the disaster fund. This money could go towards alleviating the plight of the people who were unable to get insurance because of previous problems with flooding, of which I understand there are a substantial number.

The government needs to step in and take over the process of obtaining advances quickly, for those in the defined zone, until the insurance companies catch up. I am being charitable to the insurance companies here and assuming that they will catch up, setting my own experiences aside for now. Make the most of this unexpected leniency on my part. I must be going soft.

Builders, electricians, etc., etc., still have to do the work, and they too are in limited supply.
Once again, the state could organise gangs of them and get them bussed up there, I am sure there is an army of skilled tradesmen, brickies etc in the rest of the UK on short time or with no work because the construction industry is in the doldrums, who would welcome a tour of four weeks paid work in the Lakes. Open up some of the mothballed space at army camps and RAF stations within driving distance of the disaster area to provide accommodation.

The scale of this thing is going to require a Dunkirk Armada of White Transits heading up the M6, and a promise of organised, guaranteed work for a term at the end of the journey. Sort of like Auf Wiedersehen Pet, but bigger.

Rooftree

This blog has been rather neglected of late because I have been working on trying to start a movement called ROOFTREE. I have hinted at something similar in this blog before but I was galvanised into more direct action by a strange course of events.

I was doing some research on the history of the old Hull and Barnsley Railway and in particular Drewton Tunnels, a rather spectacular set of Victorian tunnels under the Yorkshire Wolds near Riplingham, in the East Riding. My research led me to a site called 28dayslater.co.uk, which is dedicated to the pastime of Urban Exploration. Urban Exploration is apparently the practice of exploring derelict buildings and associated sites.

I was staggered, literally staggered, to see how many of these derelict sites there are in the UK. Often large, publicly owned buildings, sometimes hospitals, with (presumably expensive) medical equipment still inside them. This set me thinking, and the result was what I call the Rooftree Letter, the text of which is below:

We have a country where some people are homeless. This is unacceptable. We have a country where some people who need it, cannot access affordable housing. This is unacceptable. We have a country where hundreds, maybe thousands, of sites are derelict, many of which feature large, substantial. public buildings which we, the taxpayers, own, in effect, and which are being allowed to deteriorate to the point of no return. Finally, we have a country where many bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and electricians, roofers and tilers are either now unemployed or on short time, as the credit crunch bites.

I would like to propose a solution to deal with all of the above. The Government, and/or the relevant local authorities, should compulsorily purchase these sites. They should then use any existing structures on the site to provide either accommodation and or core services to support a “settlement” in the grounds, based on the existing modular timber-framed prefabricated structures of the technology favoured by Walter Segal, to provide a source of low cost, affordable housing. The central core building could provide a local source of combined heat and power technology based on a combination of waste incineration and anaerobic digestion.

People have told me this is impossible. Too expensive, compared to building new houses on greenfield sites. That is as maybe, but “expensive” is a relative term. Does it take into account, for instance, the cost of having all of those unemployed builders, bricklayers, architects, draughtsmen, carpenters, roofers, plasterers, tilers, electricians, and plumbers? No, it does not.

Basically, my idea is this: you take the central building on the site and turn it into tenements to house people along the lines of those produced by the Victorian Architect HENRY ROBERTS and also the central building houses the communal waste incineration leading to CHP unit, the anerobic digester, the other communal facilities, and then around it you scatter these individual bungalows, modular timber framed buildings built by the Walter Segal method, which draw their heating and other services from the central building, enhanced by solar panels on the individual houses themselves. Each house gets a stake in the communal allotments which are laid out over any spare land left over which is too small to build on.

It seems to me that most of what Henry Roberts did would be consistent with building regs anyway, I would have thought that the major stumbling block would be cost in his using (for eg) slate for the floors etc. My idea is to start a *campaign* (doing what I do best, allegedly, pontificating and badgering people) to pressure the authorities into changing the building regulations on socially useful housing to make it easier to do this sort of development; to pressure the government to acquire these sites, many of which, I repeat, belong to us, the taxpayers and are currently standing empty, decaying, and prone to vandalism, some of them (the ex-NHS ones) still containing presumably valuable equipment, and many of them having extensive grounds, which could also be utilised; and to pressure the government and the authorities to provide the wherewithal, the seed capital, to allow these communities to come into being, on the grounds that they will eventually recoup the cost in rent and show a profit, and of course they will have the site on their books as an asset, owned for and on behalf of all of us; it would reduce pressures on social housing elsewhere in the system, and building on brownfield sites that would otherwise be derelict is much better than tearing up green fields and trees; and finally that it is socially useful to have all of the construction workers, brickies, electricians and joiners who would otherwise be drawing the dole, actually working.

We just need 1000 sites housing 63 people each, or 500 sites housing 126 people each, or 63 sites housing 1000 people each, and suddenly that figure of 63,000 homeless people in the UK last Christmas becomes much less daunting.

Now is the time, with the property market still depressed, for the government to step in and compulsorily purchase these sites. Say at £2M a site on average, that is £1BN. Small change, compared to what we have been chucking at the banking system.Rooftree is not a charity, not a company, it’s not an anything really. It’s a movement, in the same way that Solidarnocz was a movement. We don’t even have a web site unless someone wants to donate one to us. But what we do have, is a desire to build the new Jerusalem, one brick at a time, one site at a time, until there is no one left sleeping out in the cold.

Please join us. Go to the ROOFTREE Facebook Page or ROOFTREE Facebook Group, (enter “Rooftree in the search box) or sign our petition on the Number 10 web site (search under “Housing” or "Rooftree")

Anyway, that is what I've been doing. Just in case you thought I had been slacking or anything.

80 MPs are appealing (not from where I’m sitting)

My flabber has been gasted once again by the news that 80 MPs may be considering appealing against the assessment of their expenses by Legg.

How many times do I have to say this?

Welcome to the REAL world, MPs. The world where the REST of us live, where things get changed arbitrarily and retrospectively, and we just have to put up with it and lump it. Welcome to the real world, members of parliament, for a much-needed dose of reality up the jacksy. Welcome to the world where, if you are late with your CT600 Corporation Tax return, the HMRCE fines you £500, and you can't get away with writing a letter saying "accountancy isn't my strong suit". Welcome to the real world. wake up and smell the coffee, shut up, stop whining, and get on with running the country.

If they have the brass nuts to try and claim for moat cleaning, duck houses, and bell tower repair on the public purse, they deserve EVERYTHING coming their way. If they want respect, they should shut up and earn respect, instead of whinging about "having to live on rations". As to their pay, a) most of them have several other jobs and b) if they don't like it, they can shove off and join the poor unloved bankers who are going to throw their teddy out the pram and all move to New York or Geneva. I'll do their job. I'll be an MP, for that money. Three times what I earned last year, before tax. Yes please.While there is still ONE homeless person in Britain these cold nights, I would REQUISITION MPs' second homes for emergency accommodation, and make them sleep on cardboard boxes in a sleeping bag under Westminster Bridge, until they do something to end it.

And as for the bankers, I've already said what I would do with those ######s. Tax their bonuses at 150%. Their bonus is that they still have a job, and we allow them to continue breathing until such time as they have paid us back.

Gill Sans

It used to be ERIC Gill that outraged people, what with his wacky lifestyle involving incest, bestiality and stone-carving, but it seems that A. A. Gill, with his pathetic "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die" sub-Hemingway piece about shooting a baboon just for a laugh, is intent on carrying on the tradition. Well, watch out A. A., one day, thanks to the magic of search and replace, you might find yourself sitting on a cloud, twanging a harp, and reading this:-

So I’m in Hampstead, in a hat, with dark intentions and a truck full of guns and other blokes in hats. Josh the Baboon said: “Why don’t we shoot A. A. Gill?” All nonchalant, looking out of the window at the amazing Tanzanian acacia scrub that drifts into the Serengeti plain. What about A. A. Gill?

And here’s the thing. If you tool around the beautiful and unruly bits of Africa long enough in the company of gangs of Baboons in purposeful hats, sooner or later you’re going to do A. A.Gill. You think you’re not, you think you’re the exception, you’re going to just say no, but pretty soon it’s the monkey on your back. I should have worn my Stella McCartney hat.

So, I said, why not? Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer. Now, despite all indications to the contrary, A. A. Gill isn’t stupid. Well, no stupider than Piers Morgan. They know that Baboons in hats, hanging around in trucks with guns, are up to no good. They see you, they sod off, going back to their Hampstead homes where they enjoy riding their mums like little jockeys. And then they stand around in bars and bark like alsatians and jump up and down, mooning with their big meaty arses, like a lot of Millwall supporters down West Ham. Ha!

But neither A. A. Gill nor Piers Morgan are smart enough to have invented telescopic sights. So there was this little weedy bloke leaning against a menu, picking his fingernails, a nerdy geezer sitting in the restaurant with his tuxedo off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run into the kitchens, hang on for grim life. They die hard, restaurant critics. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his fellow diners. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot. I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this.

There is no mitigation. A. A. Gill isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun. They might, at some unspecified theoretical future date, eat birds’ eggs, young impalas and dik-diks — they are opportunist omnivores, but that very much depends on “Today’s Special”. You wouldn’t trust A. A. Gill to baby-sit. But then everything has to eat. I noticed that, when he was alive, I thought about A. A. Gill as a thing. Now he’s dead, I’m posthumously anthropomorphising him, and that was one of the reasons I killed him. It was strangely satisfying.

The Resounding Clang of the Stable Door, Vol 97

The Financial Services Authority, God bless them, have decided at long last, that irresponsible lending should be disallowed. Fine. Stop the banks lending to people, let them just KEEP all of the money we've lent them to get them out of the shit. They can spend the long winter evenings gloating over it.

Meanwhile, perhaps we could ALSO consider that we PERHAPS should be asking for our bonuses back. Because, to be honest, punishing poor people for wanting to borrow money is not REALLY the way forward. Perhaps you SHOULD, MAYBE, have been stopping the banks in the first place, from spending OUR money on imaginary fucking derivatives, you bunch of stripey-suited WANKERS.

Bunch.

Of.

Arse.

Happy as a Sandbag

It is not often that a story where the Government is involved has a happy ending, still less so when that story involves Iraq. However, I can report on one such occurrence, albeit one in which no credit at all is due to the Government in the matter.

I am referring of course to the rescue of three dogs and one cat from Baghdad and Umm Qasr, and their safe return to the UK. The animals in question were Sandbag, a dog, and his puppy, Christened “Dirtbag”, another dog called Royal, and a cat known as Hesco. All of these creatures had previously become attached to various UK units serving in Iraq, in each case becoming unofficial “mascots”.

When the units concerned had to withdraw, in each case, the question was asked, could they bring their mascots back to the UK with them, and in each case, the answer from the MOD was “no”.

Sandbag, in particular, became something of a cause celebre as a result of this. At one point, he even had his own Facebook page, and a petition was drawn up on the 10 Downing Street web site, asking for him to be repatriated. Needless to say, the answer was again, “no”.

This is actually a classic illustration of how badly Gordon Brown is being advised, and why he is going to go down at the next election to a crashing defeat that will make Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade look like a peaceful canter in the park. Just pause to think for a moment what would have happened if BLAIR had still been Prime Minister. He would have had that dog crated up for air freight before you could say “Pedigree Chum” and he would have then invited the world’s assembled press onto the tarmac at Brize Norton to watch him give it a medal and hand it a bonio.

Anyway, be that as it may, thanks to a coalition of the willing (where have we heard that before) involving a South Wales Animal Welfare charity, Baghdad Cat Rescue (surely the single most thankless task in cat welfare, at least from its title) and The Blue Cross, funds have now been raised to bring Sandbag, Dirtbag, Royal and Hesco back to the UK, and they are now currently in quarantine for six months, but at least that is better than being turned out to wander the streets of Iraq's war-torn capital, which was the alternative.

So, Gordon, if you are reading this, which I very much doubt, you, or rather your advisors, might like to ponder on the fact that the British are a nation of animal lovers, and your opponent, Mr Cameron, has already said that he will allow a free vote on repealing fox-hunting if he gets in next year. Why not start asking him some awkward questions on his record regarding animal welfare, instead of continuing to miss this endless procession of open goals?

That BNP Manifesto in Full

On immigration: Britain is full, go home, unless you are able to prove in writing your ancestors were present at Ye Greate Moot of King Eggbound the Unready in 1085. We’re also looking for British volunteers to leave, especially those who might, er, withstand the sunny climates of foreign shores better than, say, those with, er, fair skin. And while we’re at it, we don’t want none of them mixed marriages. Stay within your own village and look for a marriage partner. Or better still, your own family.

On health: owing to acute staff shortages in the NHS caused by repatriation, see above, there may be some interruptions to normal service for the next 20 years until a new generation of indigenous British doctors and nurses can be trained up. In the meantime, call our self-appendectomy helpline on XXXXX
{Your call is important to us. Please ensure you have plenty of Dettol and hot water close at hand}

On defence: yes, we’re quite happy sitting here, thank you.

On climate change: Ooooh, that’s a toughie. Let’s see. Carbon, hang on, carbon is black, right? So it’s a BAD thing. Oh, wait, though, Carbon EMISSIONS, right, that’s pushing out the Carbon, isn’t it? OK, pushing out the black stuff? Yes! we’re all in favour of that. Put us down as a “yes” to Carbon Emissions!

On postal services reform: white envelopes good, BROWN envelopes bad. Next?

On foreign policy: it starts at Calais.

On Europe: see above.

On agriculture: in future, cows can only be black, or white. And kept in separate fields. Not black AND white, and certainly not Swiss Brown. And if you have a dangerous dog, you’ll have to “muzzle-im” Ha ha! Muslim! geddit?!?! Especially Afghans.

On crime and justice: fiery torches and pitchforks will be provided.

On industry: Er… oh.

That’s all, Volks!

Geert back to where you once belonged

I dunno, these bleedin right wing Dutch bigots, comin' over 'ere, takin' jobs and doin' work that could be done by ethnic white British bigots, it's a bleedin' scandal, Guv, and no mistake.

I 'ad that Nick Griffin in the back o' my cab once.

Everything Must Go!

I despair of Gordon Brown.

We are £175 billion in debt and he announces the sell-off of public assets to the approx value of £16 billion.

What's the point? All you are doing is replacing assets with cash. OK, you may be £16 bn less in debt but the other side of the ledger is £16 bn down in assets. Go figure.

No Expenses Spared

I can’t believe some MPs are still thinking of contesting and quibbling over the amount of their expenses they are being asked to pay back.

Welcome to the real world, the world the rest of us are forced to inhabit, where the goalposts are moved daily, with no redress.

For instance, if you were someone who had been unfortunately overpaid by the CSA owing to their ineptitude, you would have already been in receipt of threatening letters from the DWP telling you to repay those benefits or risk prosecution. This is the sort of shit your constituents have to put up with, day in, day out.

It’s not even about the money. You can bloody well afford it. Most of you have got two or three other lucrative jobs alongside being an MP.

Look. How can I put this nicely?

Just deal with it, and move on. You have got off lightly. Stop whinging, shut up, pay up, and get on with running the country. You haven’t got a Legg to stand on.

Oh Say Does That Star Spangled Banner Still Rave

I have to admit, I may have been a chump for giving Obama the benefit of the doubt. I ought to have known that history teaches us that the appearance of a charismatic, young, new broom who promises to sweep clean and transmogrify everything for the better, is inevitably followed by disappointment. God knows, if we wanted an example of the syndrome in this country in recent years, we have only to look at Blair.

But I didn’t expect him to go quite so wrong, quite so early. I refer of course to the totally hypocritical hissy-fit which the US administration has thrown over the release of the Lockerbie suspect.

Personally, I think it’s very decent of the Libyans to let us have an innocent guy to lock up and save people having to ask awkward questions about who really dunnit, but then no doubt all sorts of side deals went down at the time and they were richly recompensed, one way or another.

Anyway, Obama knows much better than I do, because presumably he can toddle along to the CIA and look at the files any time it takes his fancy to do so, that Al-Megrahi is innocent. Just for the avoidance of any doubt though, here’s an interesting point from a chap called Robbie the Pict, from the Lockerbie justice group based on the Isle of Skye, examining the key point on which the Crown’s case against Megrahi rests.

A Sensible Person’s Guide to Semtex
(and why it was not present on Pan Am 103) Semtex is the trade name of a composite high explosive which combines two chemical substances, PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) and RDX (Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine). The American and English equivalents are ‘C4’ and ‘PE-4’ respectively.High Explosive is a substance which explodes at more than 1000 meters per second (mps). Semtex explodes at about 8000 mps, over 5 miles per second.Heat of Explosion is the amount of chemical explosive energy contained within the explosive mixture, measured in joules per gram(J/g).

The term is more from chemistry than physics.Temperature of Explosion is the maximum temperature possible if no heat is lost to the surroundings. It can be thought of as the starting temperature on detonation. The exploding temperature of Semtex is given by the manufacturer as 3,800 degrees Centigrade. This is physics.Detonation is a chemical process involving spontaneous decomposition of explosives molecules, the breaking and forming of trillions of bonds. It is supersonic combustion in which a shockwave through the explosive material compresses, heats and ignites it.

The ignited material further propagates the shock.Deflagration is subsonic combustion (i.e. burning) that propagates through the explosive material by thermal conduction. Semtex burns at approximately 3,800 degrees centigrade or 6,832 degrees Fahrenheit. That is the estimated temperature of a sunspot. Carbon itself melts at 3,720 degrees Centigrade. This is roughly ten times the auto-ignition or self-kindling point of paper. Plastics, solder, shellac (circuit board material) and cloth shirts have auto-ignition points much closer to paper than to carbon.

All these items would be rendered into white hot gas at 3,800 degrees C.Zone of Uniform Velocity is the distance in all directions not obstructed through which the blast from an explosion continues without losing speed. This factor has been determined in laboratory conditions as being as high as a 4/25 ratio where 4 represents the diameter of the charge (explosive) and 25 the distance the blast reaches without losing momentum.

However, explosive engineers prefer the 2/5 ratio as a practical guide. Explosive Effect is therefore that a charge of Semtex the size of a pound packet of butter will render everything in a sphere the size of a basket-ball an invisible, white-hot gas measuring 6,800 degrees F expanding at over 5 miles per second in all available directions. That calculation is based upon approximately 300 grams, the figure first announced by ‘investigators’.Since then commentators with dubious agendas have more than doubled that figure to as much as 650 grams.

That would mean a charge the size of two and a half pounds of butter and, using only the 2/5 ratio, would result in a sphere of combustion the size of a child’s Space Hopper, expanding at about 20,000 miles per hour in all directions at the temperature of a sunspot, 6,800 degrees F.The Crown conspiracy theory asks the public to join the Judges in believing that a page from a Toshiba instruction manual made of paper, a shellac circuit board, soldering, a piece of shirt cloth and some other combustibles survived the explosion experience. Very funny, — and very stupid.


Well, Robbie the Pict puts it a lot better than I could. But given that Megrahi was almost certainly innocent, and given that all sorts of deals have probaly gone down once again, this time over his release, in a grotesque mirror image of those which went down over his conviction, it ill behoves the White House to be lecturing us on justice, and it ill behoves the American public to be boycotting Scotland, when the US is determined to exercise its rights under the criminally one-sided extradition treaty between the US and the USA, and prosecute Gary McKinnon in the US courts.

Gary McKinnon is the archetypal nerd. In fact, he is the nerd’s nerd. He hacked the computer system at the Pentagon, looking for evidence of UFOs. I don’t know if he found any, but he certainly pissed off the pointyheads who are in charge of security over there. Instead of congratulating him for showing up the loopholes in their pathetic firewall and offering him a job, they want to extradite him to the US and prosecute him to make an example of him. Sadly, our government doesn’t seem to have the balls to tell them that – since he committed the crime on UK soil – Gary McKinnon should stand trial in the UK. And they should go suck a zube.

It’s all part of a depressing pattern, which follows on from the previous instance of the US forces refusing to allow the evidence of their gun cameras to be played to the jury in the inquest on the sad death of Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, in a friendly fire incident. But then, the Americans probably think that Her Majesty’s Coroner for the County of Oxford is an extra in a chorus by Gilbert and Sullivan.

I didn’t expect much of George W Bush, a man whose concepts of justice probably involved nooses, white hoods and fiery crosses. But I did expect much, much better of Barack Obama.

Afghan Wounds

The latest spike in the casualty figures from the dismal conflict in Afghanistan has provoked a flurry of comment and criticism from all sides. At one end of the spectrum you have the armchair warriors who say we must never surrender to the Taliban and who will willingly fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. And on the other end, the troops-out peaceniks of the Stop the War Coalition and similar organisations.

What is the ordinary person to make of it? By persuasion, by calling, I am of the peacenik party. I was against the Iraq War. I called it the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, against the wrong enemy, for the wrong reasons. I had my reservations about going into Afghanistan. Picking a fight with the Taliban because they refused to surrender Bin Laden was a big ask. Did they even have the power to surrender him in the first place? Did George Bush even care, as long as the TV audiences at home could see US bombs falling somewhere, on someone vaguely Muslim, in retaliation for the lamentable failure of US foreign policy that was 9/11?

The reasons for being in Afghanistan today are a lot different from those advanced in 2001. The original reason, to flush out Bin Laden, has been unsuccessful largely owing to the porous nature of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the lack of sufficient resource to do the job, and the fact that the mission got deflected, along the way, into a larger mission to win over the hearts and minds of the population. Quite how you win over the hearts and minds of the population by invading and bombing them has become an increasingly problematic question, and one to which there is no answer. In using violence to try and change the culture of radical Islam and in attempting to use it to weld together an uneasy amalgam of warlords to a government that many feels lacks legitimacy, the UK/US forces in Afghanistan have probably radicalised more than they have converted. We’ve created an unholy alliance of the Taliban and Al Qaeda where none existed before. In short, we have incited every hothead east of the Euphrates with access to an AK47 or a grenade-launcher to take a pot at us.

It is often advanced by the Prime Minister that our military presence in the area is somehow making us safer from terrorism. The problem I have with this approach is that the people who perpetrated the worst atrocity on British soil since the dark days of the IRA were actually from Leeds and Reading. They were moved to carry out their actions by our presence in Iraq and, er, Afghanistan. So far from being a preventative measure in the circumstances, I feel that our presence there is exacerbating the situation.

Silly Buggers and Silly FOCAs

I was not amazed at the story which emerged recently of the News of the World allegedly using snooping agencies to try and tape the voicemails of the rich and famous. After all, there was a court case about it a while ago now, and someone even went to jail as a result. Whether he was the right person of course is a moot point, given the wider prevalence of the practice now being suggested. It was not even surprising that the practice was more widespread. After all, the speed and ease of modern digital communications has made mass e-mailings and mass SMS-texting a reality. No, what amazed me is that allegedly the police knew all about it and did nothing! I am not a lawyer, but I would have thought that snooping on someone else’s voicemail must contravene some statute or other, even if it is only the Data Protection Act, which local authorities and call centres are so fond of quoting whenever they want to get out of actually being helpful.

I am not surprised, either, that the News of the World – if they did it, which is still unproven – actually got away with it. In general, the tabloid press in the UK has an incredible power, frequently misused. Their constant mixture of dirty tricks and surveillance with “celebrity” news and gossip makes for the worst of both worlds and risks eventually bring down a draconian “privacy law” on the heads of all the media, which will prevent even legitimate investigation of stories which are in the public interest. To a certain extent, we get the press we deserve, or so runs the well-rehearsed argument. But I am not so sure that the tail does not wag the dog. After all, it’s not as if there is any real choice of an alternative media to peruse and choose instead, for those of us who don’t want salacious red-top tittle-tattle about who is currently going to be evicted from the Big Brother House.

I would love to hear the excuse used by the police for not pursuing this, and I look forward to a successful private prosecution opening the floodgates for many more of the same.
*

I wonder if any of those allegedly bugged by the News of the World’s agents were bishops? Specifically, I wonder if they were the bishops who seem unusually exercised by the word “bugger” in alternative connotations. I refer of course to the Fellowship of Committed Anglicans, or FOCA for short, the hard-line faction within the Church of England who have set out to challenge the authority of Rowan Williams by “upholding” “traditional” Anglican values (such as being anti-Gay). This of course is just what we need in the world today – yet more gay-bashing religious fundamentalism. As if the Taliban were not enough! What really irks me about these people is not so much their fundamentalist views – they are, after all, entitled to their opinions, however loopy. It is the fact that the whole “are gays OK by God” argument (and its offshoot on women bishops) is so massively irrelevant.

I don’t know what it is that gives FOCA the right to assume they are more “committed” than any other Anglican (unless the “committed is taken in the legal sense and they have all been getting pissed on communion wine or fondling choirboys); and in any case, the idea of an Anglican fundamentalist doesn’t exactly conjure up visions of suicide vests. If an Anglican were really angry with you, he might serve you sweet sherry instead of dry.

But FOCA should wake up and smell the coffee. There are lots of problems they could be bending their not inconsiderable traditionalist talents towards the slowing of: for a start, not many people actually go to church any more. Then there’s all those people dying of hunger, lack of clean water and disease. Oh, and the odd war needing sorting out as well. Tell you what, FOCA, here’s the deal. Let’s get all that sorted out and when it’s done and dusted, and churches up and down the land are rammed to the rafters with throngs of happy worshipers, then we can have an international conference, somewhere warm and sunny if you like, to decide whether or not Leviticus says it’s OK for gays to dance on the head of a pin, or what the original Aramaic text of the Apocryphal Book of Spartacus has to say about women bishops and whether they can only move diagonally. Can’t say fairer than that, can we? Or, failing that, bugger off and let these other committed Anglicans sort things out without you sniping from the wings.

Death of a Thousand Cuts

It is looking increasingly clear that the next election will be fought largely on the issue of public spending cuts. Both the major parties, currently, are maintaining a fundamentally dishonest position on this issue. Labour is pretending that everything is going to be OK, that the economy will pick up, and therefore no real “cuts” will be necessary. The Tories have built their entire platform on the necessity of cuts, but other than generalised statements about quangos, have been strangely reluctant to specify where, when and how the cuts should fall. My next sentence was going to be something like, “Quite how we can have an election when both the main parties are lying, escapes me.” But then I thought … hang on.

I don’t even know which one is the more dishonest, although I do know that the Tories have the edge on populist appeal. Labour’s Micawber-ish whistling past the graveyard attitude will not find favour with a cynical electorate who are even now seeing jobs and livelihoods vanishing before their very eyes. Whereas Cameron, with the instinct of the apparatchik to mount every passing bandwagon, has tapped into a rich seam of Daily Mail public sector-hating bigots who would have you believe that the ratepayers of England are regularly subsidising the Lesbian Muslim Hopscotch Agency, or similar.

At the same time as calling for the quangos to be hacked down, root and branch, Cameron has also added his voice to the many which have been clamouring for better equipment for our troops in Afghanistan, specifically more helicopters. So at least we can safely infer that he is broadly in favour of maintaining or increasing defence spending in an era where the government coffers have been used to bail out Lloyds and the Halifax. And even now we are unsure if we can afford Trident’s replacement and the two new huge aircraft carriers that will be the backbone of the Fleet for the next generation.

So assuming we’re going to find some extra money for extra helicopters (in response to the latest casualty statistics, I don’t recall Cameron being that concerned before we lost 15 soldiers in one week), plus the money for Trident II, plus the two aircraft carriers, what is he going to cut to pay for all this? So far, all we have heard is vague rumblings about Natural England (they never did care for the environment, preferring to leave it to rich farmers). Natural England will not pay for all this. Someone should ask Cameron outright, and keep on asking, no matter how often he blethers and obfuscates and tries to change the subject, how many schools and hospitals he will cut to pay for all this.

In fact, Broon should start asking that question now, and continue until the eve of polling, if he wants to avoid a landslide disaster for the Labour party, and the even greater disaster for the rest of us of a slash-and-burn Tory administration, protecting the rich and making sure the poor are the ones who pay for their mistakes.

Local Homes for Local People

The government seems to be suffering from an outbreak of common sense. Sadly, it has taken from 2007 until now to incubate, and even now it is only at an early stage, and may yet perish before it becomes pandemic. Still, maybe Gordon Broon is finally listening, or maybe he’s got some new advisors, or both. Still, cancelling ID cards and shelving the part-privatisation of Royal Mail in the same week is at least a start, in the same way that seeing two feminists doing the washing up is a start.

There’s still the same acute lack of vision, of any sense of purpose though, still the same feeling of flying desperately by the seat of your pants, and what there has been in the way of positive announcements in Gordon’s master plan for the future of Britain is still unlikely to have crowds thronging the Mall or people doing the conga in Trafalgar Square, heatwave or no heatwave. Teachers will have to have a test every five years, and this on top of all the other crap they get dumped on them from on high, and, in a move not widely reported, the sneaky bastards are proposing a measure whereby farmers have to insure their livestock against the possibility of their being the source of an outbreak of foot and mouth or similar, which, considering that the most recent outbreak was sourced back to the government’s own laboratory at Pirbright, is rich indeed.

Both those proposals are inherently nasty, sneaky, and unlikely to benefit the people targeted – teachers and farmers – but the proposal which should perhaps give us most pause for thought in the new plan for Britain’s future is the one which has been characterised as “local houses for local people”.

For a long time, people, including me, have been trying to tell the Labour Party that they neglect the needs and concerns of white, working class voters at their peril. Nature abhors a vacuum and, into the vacuum which the New Labour project has created by ignoring huge areas of what used to be its most solid, bedrock supporters, has slipped the BNP. They start by empathising with the disenfranchised, disaffected people in deprived communities, many of whom are elderly and who have probably, in their eyes, had enough of a world of madness, deprivation and uncertainty, a world where the things they used to be able to take for granted, a job, a neighbourhood, the friendliness of neighbours, a reasonable standard of living and healthcare, the local pub and post office, bus services and housing, are all either gone or under threat. It is no wonder they hark back to a byegone era.

The BNP offers tea and sympathy, and agrees with them that their lives are shitty. The voters respond. At last, someone is listening to them. Then the BNP play their trump card – “And do you know who is to blame for all these problems? Immigrants!”

You can’t entirely blame the voters. It’s a very plausible argument, one that comes with its own ready-made solution. No one in the BNP’s target audience, or very few people at any rate, will respond by saying, “Well, actually, immigration isn’t really as simple as all that, you have to take into account the numbers of people who actually leave the country as well as those who enter it, and nobody, not even the government, knows how many illegal immigrants there really are, and the whole debate is skewed anyway by the issue of the EU, which says we have to accept any Tom, Dick or Harry, as long as he’s an EU citizen”.

Nobody points out that social housing is under particular pressure, never having really recovered from the onslaught of Thatcher’s selloff.

You can prove anything with statistics, particularly if you use them selectively, which is why the BNP concentrates on the influx and ignores the exits. It’s much easier to come up with the simple two-trick pony answer that the BNP peddles. Your life is shit right now. (That, for many white working class or elderly voters, particularly in Labour’s traditional heartlands, is often true). And it is all the fault of Muslims, immigrants and asylum seekers. (False, of course, and even if it were true, these are three very different kettles of fish, but it suits the BNP’s rhetoric much better to pretend they are all the same).

The BNP’s whites-only admissions policy is also ridiculous, ignoring as it does the fact that the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity it demands is in itself a product of immigration, albeit a thousand years ago. Perhaps it takes a thousand years to establish a Reich, Hitler certainly thought so, and look what happened to him. But of course, once you have bought the BNP’s simplistic lie about immigration being the cause of all our ills, it follows quite naturally that you will believe this tosh. The BNP’s justification for it, as far as I can discover amongs the verbiage on their web site, is that there are other, similar rules which apply, unchallenged, apparently, to black-only or asian-only organisations.

Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. A detailed study of the consititution of the Black Police Officers’ Association has not been high on my agenda of late. If it is true, then it’s equally as odious as the BNP’s stance, and should be challenged, but in either case, two wrongs don’t make a right.

It is disappointing, but not altogether unexpected, that the Labour Party’s only answer to the duplicity of the BNP seems to be to try and ape its policies, but this is, of course, partly a reflection of the corner into which they feel they have painted themselves. All of the mainstream and Labour politicians bleating about the voters and the success of the BNP and UKIP in the May elections have only themselves to blame. They took their eye off the ball.

So what do we need now? We need a politician of the left, or of an independent caste of mind, who will be able to take apart the BNP’s policies forensically, and demonstrate the fallacious links in the thinking. To point out, for instance, that if you were to repatriate everyone who was even faintly brown, the NHS for one would grind to a halt overnight. To state boldly and simply that when it comes to immigration, it’s just not as simple as the BNP likes to make out. And to have the courage to stand up and say that all Britons should be treated equally, whatever the colour of their skin, and to formulate policies that demonstrate it, both ways. And if that also means an end to pointless “positive discrimination” so be it.

Ending “positive discrimination” of the mindless, box ticking kind kicks a plank out from under the BNP straight away. I’ve never been a strong advocate of “positive discrimination” of any sort, beyond the physical kind, of making streets, homes, workplaces and public buildings accessible to people with medical difficulties, but certainly in a situation where you have a group of unscrupulous opportunists using any perceived inequality as a stick with which to beat you, I think you should think very carefully before handing them that weapon.

Ending positive discrimination of the worst, the most damaging sort, does not mean, though, going too far the other way, into negative discrimination, which is where Labour are currently heading with local homes for local people. For a start, they should make clear, and continue to make it clear, that by “local people”, they don’t just mean local white people, if they persist down this road.

The BNP, for all its success in the elections, is still a small, minority party, for the moment. But it has certainly fired a warning shot across the bows of the Labour Party, and it is high time they responded by hoisting the red flag to the top of the mizzen-mast, and letting fly a few salvoes of their own, instead of sailing under the swastika and crossbones, and trying to out-Pugwash the pirates.

Gordon Broon's Blackout Book

I haven’t written much blogstuff lately. Partly it’s because I’ve been busy, partly because, to be honest, the political scene has now become so surreal that it’s very difficult to parody or even make fun of. It has passed the “duck horizon”, that point in any news story where ducks are first mentioned, after which it just becomes progressively more and more surreal, to the stage where you literally could not make it up.

No sooner had we digested the debacle of the European elections, with the triumph of UKIP and the BNP, two parties who are not known for their pan-European aspirations, than we were plunged into the reshuffle. By the mid morning it was like one of those offensives in the First World War where if you managed to survive until lunchtime you were likely to find yourself in command of a battalion!

James Purnell resigned, Jacquie Smith resigned, Caroline Flint resigned, Hazel Blears stormed out of 10 Downing Street via Humphrey’s cat-flap, a few others resigned too, I may have missed them. One woman resigned before I even realised she was in the Cabinet. I still don’t really know who she was. Kitty something. She may actually just have been a market researcher who happened to knock on the door of Number 10 to ask them if they’d ever considered changing their electricity supplier and got sucked into the general maelstrom. For a while, people were resigning faster than Broon could actually appoint them, and you got to the stage where it really seemed that at 9am tomorrow it would just be Broon, running round answering all the phones, and some guy who originally called in to fix the photocopier, but ended up as Foreign Secretary.

And over it all bestrides Gordon, like a colossus, and about as deft and flexible. I have no idea who is in the Cabinet now, and I am not sure that Broon does. Except that we have got Alan Sugar, God help us. Because parodying yourself on reality TV is of course a perfect qualification for kick-starting a broken economy. What next, Clive Sinclair as minister of transport?

But still, at least, the Government was getting to grips with the idea of the need to reform expenses, and even the Telegraph was starting to run out of steam, having failed to find a match for Douglas Hogg’s moat. So all Gordon had to do was to basically institute some reforms which would mean that MPs were no longer robbing the taxpayer, and then turn the focus on to the opposition and start asking them some awkward questions about their plans to cut public spending.

But no. Instead he diverted us down some bewildering avenue of his own choosing about constitutional reform, this presenting Cameron with a few more free open goals. We don’t need constitutional reform. A thieving crook who has been elected by proportional representation is still a thieving crook. All we need is for the people who have been elected not to rob the people who put them there. All that was needed was sorrow, contrition, apology, and restricting people’s expenses to things like folders from Rymans, envelopes, and toner cartridges.

But no. Just when the whole thing was starting to die down and maybe even heading towards the first step on the path to getting sorted, the Government goes and publishes the same expenses that the Telegraph published, but with anything useful blacked out! What mastery of the public mood! What skill! If you could have done one thing to ignite the whole scandal again and simultaneously make it seem to voters that you were totally cynical and didn’t care; that you thought they were complete idiots who would swallow anything; or that you weren’t actually in control of the situation anyway, this was the way to do it.

So, the whole thing has re-ignited once more with a mighty ka-boom! The Telegraph has gained a new lease of life, pointing out that Lembit Opik claimed £19.99 for a comedy wig (and I always thought that was his hair) Ben Bradshaw, technology minister, claimed £20 for a service engineer to plug a cable into his TV, and some nameless Tory apparatchik claimed 1p for a mobile phone call. Once more, we’re in “you couldn’t make it up” land, Toto, and we’re a long way from Kansas. OK, so we are not quite yet in the same league as Iran, where thieves broke into Ayatollah Kharmonyhairspray’s palace and stole next year’s election results, but by God, we’re getting there.

And now Inspector Knacker of the Yard is taking an interest, it’s only a matter of time until one of them does the perp walk. Still, at least Cameron was forced to pay back some of his mortgage, so it’s not all bad news. But given the easy ride he’s been getting from the Gay Gordons of late, he’s still laughing all the way to the bank. Me, I am off down to William Hills to put £25.00 on Humphrey the Cat to be Chief Whip by Monday. True, he’s dead, and he’s a cat, but he’s still got 101 more uses than any current member of the Cabinet.

Duck and Cover

There comes a point in every news story where it crosses over into the surreal. A point where no matter what you could dream up, reality becomes both funnier and more bizarre than any satire you could invent. Strangely enough, and I have never worked out why - it must be some immutable law of the universe known only unto Stephen Hawking - this apogee in the news trajectory usually involves ducks.

Why ducks? I must confess, I have absolutely no idea. I just know that, for every slam-dunk, knock em dead press release I have ever written over the last twenty years, there have only been two things we have feared, two things that would sink the little barque of our press release in the deep stormy news seas, lost with all hands: the death of a member of the Royal Family, and/or a skateboarding duck.

A skateboarding duck is such a slam-dunk for the "and finally" spot, that you can bet your sweet palookah that if you come up against one, your press release is bound for the cutting room floor. The death of a senior Royal speaks for itself. And of course, if by any chance the skateboarding duck actually contributes to the death of the senior Royal (eg by frightening the Queen's horse at the Trooping of the Colour) well, that's it, you might as well give up and open a whelk stall.

Similar thoughts must have been crossing the mind of the competitors to the Daily Telegraph this week when the MPs' expenses story finally crossed the duck event horizon, with the news that an MP paid £1645 for a "floating duck house".

Judging from the picture, I couldn't actually see £1645 worth of work in it, but in any case, as a duck-related story of public expenditure excess, it pales into insignificance alongside the news that Defra has spent nearly £300,000 on a study that shows that ducks prefer standing out in the rain to floating on ponds. If they'd asked me, I could have told them that for as little as , oooh, £150,000.

It's not been the only duck-related story in the news this week: a banker in Spokane, WA, USA, got up at the crack of dawn to stand underneath a ducklings' nest on some inacessible ledge (maybe he was planning to jump off it later) and catch the ducklings as, one by one, they fell out of it and headed to what would otherwise be a swift demise as duck and pavement met at terminal velocity. He caught and saved every one of them, then shepherded them across a busy road to a nearby lake. Shame there wasn't a shower handy, but at least it proves that not all bankers are bastards. There is one, in Spokane WA, who isn't.

Anyway, once it crosses the duck threshold, even more surreal things start to happen to the story: a Tory MP claims they are all on the verge of suicide (tough shit, you should have thought of that before bleeding the system white) and someone called Anthony Steen says that all this is motivated by envy of him and his big house!

Just for the record, Mr Steen, I don't covet your lifestyle, or your house. I thnk it would be a lot better for you and for us if you were forced to do a fortnight in a tower block in Walsall. I certainly don't want to be you - who would? I envy you the fact that you can use your position to screen you from the realities of life and to be honest I wish I was able to.

But I can't understand why you just don't admit that it's a fair cop.

Meanwhile, I hope that the ducks are OK

Motes and Beams

Like everyone else, I guess, I have been gobsmacked by the way members of Parliament of all persuasions seem to have been taking the piss with their expenses, going back not weeks, not months, but years with their claims for faux-Tudor beams, foaming moat cleaner, spare tyres for their cat's butler's granny's Aston-Martin, etc etc contd p.94.

Yet, on reflection, I suppose, I have always known - we have always known - that the political class have a featherbedded lifestyle, cushioned from the harsh realities of life, so it shouldn't really come as a huge surprise that, coupled with extremely lax standards of accountability, a certain amount of abuse must have taken place.

But what is staggering is the scale of the problem. As I have said before, I generally deplore chequebook journalism, but you have to say here that, in this instance, the Barclay Brothers’ chequebook has, at least for once in its life, and no doubt to the surprise of any resident moths, been deployed in the public interest. The fact that the owners of the Daily Telegraph, and people such as Rupert Murdoch, probably avoid far larger amounts in tax than the MPs have jizzed out of the taxpayer, is sort of beside the point, for once. As is the assertion that journalists also fiddle their expenses. Yes, we know. But that argument descends quickly to the level of “whataboutery”. So what? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Anyway, as I was saying – the sheer scale of it. We all know about David Cameron’s mortgage and Jacquie Smith’s bath plugs, for instance, but this current scandal is like putting your hand through a small hole in a wall somewhere in the dark and feeling what you thought was a small tassel on the end of a leathery bell-pull, and then discovering to your horror that you are actually holding an elephant by the tail. You sort of think on the one hand it might be prudent to bow out now and let it go, but on the other hand the sheer impressive bulk of the pachyderm deserves a grudging respect.

Elephants, of course, have their uses. While alive, they can haul timber, or carry Nabobs and Mahouts around the Indian jungle, thus saving the rest of us the trouble. Translated to the elephants’ graveyard, they provide useful umbrella stands and excellent piano keys. I’m not sure if anyone is currently working on a publication called “101 Uses For A Dead MP” but if they are, it’s likely to be a slim volume, up there with the Taliban Joke Book and the Spanish Guide to Donkey Welfare.

Because they are going to get slaughtered. Not literally, of course, this isn’t France, where if a similar scandal came to light, their equivalent of Parliament Square would be crammed with burning lorries, rioting students and CS gas, in roughly equal proportions. No, this is England, where we shrug our shoulders and say “mustn’t grumble”! But slaughtered they will be, electorally speaking. This is the problem with repressed anger, of the sort that is seething below the surface of (it seems) the entire voting population right now. It sometimes manifests itself in strange, perverse, unexpected and frankly, sometimes unjust ways. So, all over the UK, come the local elections, hard –working councillors, who conscientiously go to meetings, actually try and help the people who elected them, juggle a workload that would stun an ox, and claim little or nothing in the way of expenses, will get voted down because of the loons at Westminster, because people want to vent their anger and protest, and that process will of course inevitably benefit the demagogues.

In fact, this is probably what makes me angriest about the whole thing. Instead of saying “sorry” about the money – or at least as well as – and coming out with their cockanamie lame excuses about mistakes, oversights and accountancy not being their strong suit, they should also be apologising for undermining the very fabric of democracy and handing victory to the fascists on a plate. Because undoubtedly the beneficiaries of this fiasco will be the BNP and UKIP. It is very easy for the likes of the BNP to do now, in the UK, what the Nazis did in 1930s Germany. Denounce the existing administration as incompetent and corrupt (check); promise to make things better (check) promise to put British workers first (check – they mean white British workers, of course); promise to make the trains run on time (check – well, the only opposition was Lord Adonis, so that was a slam-dunk); and blame scapegoats (in Hitler’s case it was the Jews, in the BNP’s, it’s the Muslims and immigrants). What fascists never tell you, of course, is that once they’ve made the trains run on time, the terminus is always the death camps.

So what are we going to do with these MPs, eh? Those public-spirited stalwarts, who all agree now, in the celebrated quip by Andy Hamilton, that the system was so rotten and so abhorrent they could scarcely bring themselves to milk it dry? Is it enough just to apologise and pay it back, even in those cases where amnesia seems to have shaded over into actual fraud? [On the subject of paying it back, by the way, I don’t really see the sense of this. The Government will only go and blow it on something frivolous like an extra Eurofighter or Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension. I’d rather they gave the equivalent of the overclaims on second homes back as a donation to Shelter].

Is it enough that, in the most widely telegraphed downfall since King Kong brandished a screaming Fay Wray at the passing Curtis Jennys from the top of the Empire State Building, a charmless and unpopular speaker of the House has been sacrificed in the hope that it will throw us off the scent? No. It isn’t.

In real life, of course, it’s no defence to say I’m sorry, I forgot. But we’ve already established that these people inhabit a different reality to the rest of us. If you forget to tell the DSS about a change in your benefit circumstances for instance, you are likely to find yourself being interviewed under caution, forced to pay it all back, and probably fined and or prosecuted to boot. But MPs live in a different world, and I am not holding my breath for any prosecutions. I am, however, and I remain, incandescent over the double standard. Not so much moats and beams, as motes and beams.

Much has been made of the argument that MPs were given tacit signals that it was OK to fill your boots on this tax-free gravy train of a system, because this in some way compensated for a supposed shortfall between an MP’s “basic” pay and that of the grades of equivalent public servants such as head teachers, civil servants, brain surgeons, etc. If that is the root of the problem, then maybe the solution is as simple as – give them a basic pay rise, but take away their expenses. Apart from legitimate business ones. I’ve no objection to them buying a folder from Rymans, but having your moat treated is taking the piss. Seriously.

In addition, I’d also take away their right to vote on their own pay increases, and give it to an outside body instead, perhaps composed of CIPFA, the Office of National Statistics, and maybe even citizen representatives from say a dozen randomly-typical constituencies throughout the land, on the proviso that these people are not members of any recognised political party.

Furthermore, if they do put in an expense which is disallowed, subsequently, then that should be retrospectively taxed as a benefit in kind. Their claims should also be published, in full, in the public domain, at least annually. Finally, to this I would add (to which I return yet again, like the dog that returneth to its vomit) a residence qualification. If you want to represent the good people of Lower Snodbury in Parliament then you should damn well buy or rent a house in Lower Snodbury and go and live there, and have lived there for a number of years before you are even allowed to stand.

The people who point out this disparity – supposed disparity, I should say – also often use this as a plank to support the argument that unless we pay MPs “what they are worth” you will only get rich people being able to afford to run for Parliament, and those of modest means will be excluded. Well, I would just like to say, here and now, that I think £64,000 is a massive sum of money. It’s three times what I earned last year before tax, and I would jump at the chance of being Ancient Geek, MP. There’s only one thing stopping me standing, which is the £1000 deposit. Get rid of that, or reduce it to a nominal amount, then you might get some people who actually want to make a difference standing for Parliament. People who aren’t just in it for the money. True, by-elections and indeed general elections would suddenly sprout whole lunatic fringes of monster raving loony candidates and people like Wing Commander Boakes, of recent memory, who used to campaign by sitting in a deck chair in the fast lane of the A40!

But to me, you see, that is all part of the rich tapestry of democracy. It keeps the big parties on their toes, and it gives the protest vote somewhere else to go, other than straight into the arms of the fascists!

And, it would send a very loud, very clear message to those present incumbents at Westminster, whose idiocy might even now just have let the Hitler Youth into the Reichstag by the back door, that there is more to the governance of this great little country of ours than just turning up every so often and signing for your expenses.

Absolutely Fabulous!

Oh deary me, it looks like the Court of Public Opinion is in session once again, and this time it was invoked by the lawyer for the continuing campaign for the right of former members of the Royal Regiment of Gurkhas and their dependents to reside in the UK.

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of their case, and personally I have a great deal of sympathy for it (though this is rapidly being eroded by the increasingly manic and shrill ravings of Joanna Lumley) there is no doubt that once again, the Government has handled this appallingly badly and now has a PR disaster on its hands.

I’m not sure whether it’s the Prime Minister’s advisers being just not up to the job (spending too much time composing schoolboy emails about George Osborne and his wife?) or whether it’s Broon himself, the clunking fist, blundering on with his usual world-war-one style detrermination, on, into the valley of death. Or maybe it’s a heady mxture of both. But oh, deary, deary me.

The resistance of the Government is fundamentally cost-based at the end of the day. They are wary of opening up yet another door to let yet another class of people and writing a potentially open cheque to them and their dependents, for ever and ever, amen. They are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Our mistaken adherence to the one sided terms of the European Political Union project, which, in immigration as in so many other areas, hands the UK the shitty end of the stick, means that we are forced to take in every Eastern European Mafioso and Romanian rapist, while the Gurkhas, who – after all is said and done – have demonstrated a willingness to fight, if not actually die for the UK, have at best an indeterminate status and an uncertain future, notwithstanding Joanna Lumley’s efforts.

This situation presents people like Ms Lumley with an open goal. One which they have never tired of netting over and over again in recent days.

What I find surprising, is that no one from the Government has made any effort to respond by pointing out to people that this dilemma exists. The British people aren’t completely unreasonable or stupid. True, potentially rubbishing the EU three weeks before a Euro-election isn’t that good a move, but the Government is going to get decimated by UKIP anyway, even before all this blew up.

If the Government turned round and said “Look, we feel your pain, we share your frustration, we’d like to help the Gurkhas but we’re strapped for cash right now, and we can’t do anything about this Eastern Europe situation because – however much we might agree on principle – we are part of Europe and all that that implies, in terms of jobs, investment and trade” – Well, that at least would be a start.

The only person I have seen even groping towards this type of empathy has been the unfortunate Phil Woolas, who was being sandbagged by Joanna Lumley at the time. He’s not had a good week, what with the duffing up she gave him. I’m not surprised if it turns out to be true that, at least on the alleged evidence of the reporting of his expenses in The Daily Telegraph, he seeks consolation in nappies, tampons, and items of women’s clothing.

Which brings me neatly back to MP’s expenses. Generally, I am not an advocate of “chequebook journalism”, preferring to believe that the truth should emerge in the end simply because it is the truth. But in this case, the Government has been stonewalling over this for six months, spending yet more taxpayers’ money on a rearguard action through the courts to stop us knowing the details of how public money has been spent, and to be honest it serves them right that this has now blown up in their faces, for trying to delay publication until after July, when the house would have risen for the summer, and even if the media had picked up on it rather than the usual fare of Loch Ness Monster stories at that time of year, anyone who might have been held to account would have been on holiday in Tuscany.

Predictably, MPs have reacted to the revelations that we have paid – for instance – to have John Prescott’s loo seat fixed twice (one of the more understandable claims, in my view) with howls of anguish that their data has been infringed and their human rights traduced. Mixed with pious observations that “we did nothing wrong” and “the system is a bad system and must be changed” (to the latter of which statements I always feel the need to add the unspoken words “now that we have been found out”.)

Well, tough.

You are lucky even to have a second home, in a country where people are homeless, let alone one which is paid for and maintained by the taxpayer. If I had my way, I would give you a sleeping bag and a sheet of cardboard and tell you to doss in Parliament Square, until there was not one homeless person left in the UK.

Now stop whining and lining your own pockets, and get on with running the country, which is what we pay you handsomely for.

UN - believable!

The Israeli Defence Force has reacted to the report issued by the UN, which blames them for the deaths of some civilians at UN sites within Palestine during the most recent Israeli incursion. The IDF says the report is “biased”.

Biased? I should bloody well cocoa! What did the IDF expect? If someone invaded my territory and killed innocent people by wanging off tank rounds left right and centre, I’d be a teensy bit biased, wouldn’t you? What did they expect? Probably something like:-

“Well, a few of our people got killed indiscriminately by Israeli tanks but hey, shit happens you know, and those Israeli soldiers, well, they probably had a rough childhood, so we shouldn’t rush to judgement, and then there’s always The Holocaust”

There you go, Israel, I’ve written it for you. Better now?

I’m sorry, but I don’t see why we should make allowances for war criminals. I would love to know how these people sleep at night. Not only content with getting away, literally , with murder, they are allowed on top of that to rubbish the findings of a UN report.

Well, Israel, why don’t you just resign from the UN if it’s that biased. After all, you already ignore most of its resolutions.

Best of Three

One aspect of the continuing furore over MPs’ expenses is that Ian Tomlinson has been quietly forgotten by the media. The last we heard was that there had been an initial post mortem (heart attack) then a second post mortem (internal bleeding) and a third PM was planned by the Met. (in some kind of bizarre “best of three” attempt to ping-pong the blame back and forth. )

In the meantime, other stories of supposed police brutailty at the G20 have emerged, with video clips of people being smashed in the face by riot shields. As I have said before, these clips are just that – isolated snapshots of a much larger and more complicated story. What happened before and after the flashpoint?

You can argue (and I’d probably agree with you) that it is never right for a big burly copper to smash a young girl in the face with a riot shield. Deep down, though, I know that there are situations in life where I might feel angry enough to lose control and do something violent, however much I regretted it later. It’s there in all of us. Everyone has a flashpoint, somewhere – all that varies is how deeply it’s hidden, and where the trigger is located.

The thing about the G20, not that it excuses their behaviour in any way, though it might help to make it more understandable, is that the police were on an adrenaline high that day. They knew there was going to be trouble, because the media had been telling them so for days. They, in turn, had been posting on their blogs, and on Facebook, about how they were going to duff over a few hippies and give them a good kicking. Which, in turn, was probably read by the more loony fringes of the hippy world as being some sort of gauntlet being thrown down.

Add a further dash of spince to the mix, in the form of agents provocateur planted by the security services to foment trouble and discredit the activists (and anyone who thinks this is fanciful and paranoid obviously hasn’t read the story of the young woman activist approached by police intelligence – an oxymoron if ever there was one – to act as a “mole”). Bake in a warm street somewhere in the City of London, kettle it until it simmers and then boils over, et voila! The perfect recipe for civil unrest.

The police should remember though, that the ineptitude of the operation is no excuse. And those who formulate their tactics should remember that policing in this country is by consent, and every time something like the Ian Tomlinson case happens, it hastens the day when we are forced to either endure anarchy, or live under a police state.

The Resounding Clang of the Stable Door

The further revelations and developments in the case of poor Baby P have been held up in some sections of the media as further proof of the laxity and negligence of Haringey Social Services. Personally, I think that, if anything, the whole sorry mess only serves to illustrate further the dilemma that they must have found themselves in.

It is easy to be wise after the event in cases like this, and sack two or three people in a macho purge to disguise the futile hope that a line will be drawn and the faults in the system will somehow be mended by your actions. And it plays well with the press.

But, as I have said before (so many times, that I am in danger of sounding like a broken record) this is only tinkering around the edges, treating the symptoms, not the disease.

As a society, we have created a world where bad parenting and social and economic pressures and a lack of communal respect and responsibility, have all conspired to put vulnerable children at risk. While we work on solving these long-term problems, we must have an efficient and effective safety net in the form of social workers or similar, to police and protect those children in precarious situations. Yet, as I have said before (that cracked record again) whenever something goes wrong, the social workers are the first to get pilloried in the media. It seems to be one of those jobs like being a teacher, where everybody thinks that they can do it better than you.

This kind of thinking has now been officially endorsed by Lord Laming, with the proposal that social workers should be subject to the scrutiny of lay observers on their panels, with the unspoken suggestion that social workers need “real” people to teach them common sense and keep them on the straight and narrow.

When in fact, many of their seemingly bizarre decisions are only partially reported and are done because of statutory or legal constraints to which they are subject, and which “real” people would soon bleat about the lack of, if they weren’t there.

It’s no wonder then, that in the wake of the Baby P fiasco, the numbers of people wanting to be social workers has fallen faster than a hooker’s knickers, and dried up to the extent that the Government has now to consider pumping £60million that we can ill afford into a recruitment drive, to stop the system grinding to a halt. What an expensive mistake that Gaderene rush to judgement to appease the likes of The Daily Mail has proved to be!

I am not saying – and never have said – that Haringey Social Services were totally blameless in the Baby P affair. Clearly there seem to have been shortcomings. But we also have to acknowledge the root cause of these was systemic, rather than individual. This was obviously a very complicated case, we now learn, involving two overlapping instances of abuse, investigations about the mistreatment of not one but two children, an investigation that it seems got inevitably tangled up in itself and may even have hindered itself, owing to lack of communication and co-ordination between the various bodies involved.

I don’t know who it was, off the top, who said that "the truth is never pure and rarely ever simple", but it is a maxim we should do well to keep in mind whenever we ponder the sad fate of Baby P.

Pig Sick

I can't believe how stupid the Egyptians are.

I mean, the clues have been there all along. They invented a language that was only ever going to be any use if you wanted to write about dogs with the heads of birds walking sideways and winged disks and shit like that, but even so...

Stupid doesn't even begin to describe it. They have elevated "stupid" to an art form. They are slaughtering every pig in the country because of the world-wide "pandemic" of Swine Flu. This despite the fact that the transmissions among the 100 or so people who have got it, a handful of whom have died, worldwide, have all been people-to-people, and even in Mexico, the original cases might have been from people who bathed daily in lagoons of pigshit, which is still one step removed from the actual pig.

Unless pigs have suddenly developed the ability to fly, as in the old saying, they are not responsible, and in any case, "pandemic" is a geographical distribution term, not a measure of strength or virulence.

Meanwhile, our own wonderful media have been falling over themselves to hype up Swine Flu like there's no tomorrow. In fact, the premise that there is no tomorrow has been the key one behind much of the coverage, as they hastily dug out their old bird flu powerpoint slides and set to work with the search and replace facility (find feathers, replace with trotters, replace all, exit).

Gordon Broon, of course, has grabbed at the opportunity presented by Swine Flu with all the grateful eagerness of a drowning man who, about to go under for the third time, sees a gaily coloured lifebelt tied helpfully to a sturdy rope, bobbing on the tide towards him. What better distraction could there be from his other daily woes; MP's pay and expenses; the Gurkha fiasco; the collapse of LDV and the awkward questions it raises about "real help now"; the credit crunch and its non-effect on pension-drawing bankers, and the fact that everyone from Chalres Clarke to Hazel Blears is queueing up to wield the "ceremonial paper knife of oriental design" so beloved of Agatha Christie and so often found by M. Poirot embedded in the necks of her victims.

This is politics for dummies, page 1 chapter 1, para 1. So we have Cobra being summoned (Smersh must be quaking in their boots) leaflets being sent out to all households in the UK, TV adverts telling us that Charlie says always sneeze into a tissue. Broon (even Broon) can't lose on this one. If it happens, he'll be able to turn it into another Foot and Mouth (though hopefully without the pyres of burning pensioners) and if it doesn't happen, why, his prompt action saved the nation! They might even be able to keep it going for long enough to hide the fact that Labour is going to go down in the forthcoming Euro and Local Elections in a similar manner, and in similar numbers, to the Light Brigade at Balaclava.

The only way it could possibly go wrong for him is if somehow the flu does turn out to be deadly, and somehow it gets out of control despite the 61 million leaflets. Which, given Broon's reverse midas touch of late, could always happen. Better stock up on Lem-Sip, just in case.

Will the real Home Secretary please stand up

Could the aliens please give us back the real Jacquie Smith and David Blunkett? The fact that the real Smith and Blunkett have been abducted by little green men from Alpha Proximi and the planet Quargon (and are, presumably, being rectally probed even as I type, so it's not all bad news) is the only explanation I can think of for the astonishing voltes face over the recording of all our emails and phone calls one one mahoosive database (coming soon via data stick to a pub car park near you) and ID cards.

Still, there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, etc.

Other evidence that we have fallen through the earth's crust into some strange fourth dimensional parallel universe came in the form of Sir Al Aynsley-Green (crazy name, crazy guy) and his condemnation of the use of the Yarl's Wood Detention Centre by the UK Borders Agency to hold children who are being deported. My only problem with this is his timing. It's a pity he didn't pop up saying this before Assia Souhalia and her husband Athmane, who have been in the UK since 2002. and their 2 year old daughter Nouha, who was born in Brighton in 2006 and had lived here all her life, were grabbed from their beds at 6.30 one morning recently and deported.
Still, better late than never, eh, Sir Al.

You can be my body guard, I can be your long-lost pal.

Whistle Stop

Since my previous post about Bob Quick, another set of important government documents has unexpectedly turned up in the public domain. Culture Secretary Andy Burnham apparently left a set of files on a train, and they were eventually handed in by a public spirited citizen in Glasgow. Mr Burnham has apologised unreservedly, and there the matter rests.

Last year, Richard Jackson, a civil servant working in the Cabinet Office, left some papers on a train, which were a secret government assessment of the threat from Al Qaida, and they were also recovered and handed in. He was fined £2000 and demoted three pay grades.

So far, Andy Burnham has not resigned, in the same way that Caroline Flint and Hazel Blears have not resigned for swanning about in Downing Street carrying confidential documents in view of cameras. For which same misdemeanour, Bob Quick resigned.

Ironically, of course, as predicted, those arrested in the dramatically named operation which Bob Quick allegedly partially “blew” have been quietly released without charge, though they are expected to be deported. This of course raises a few (unanswered, nay, even unasked as yet, by any media that I have seen) questions about just how important this operation was in the first place, that Bob Quick paid with his job for having “compromised”.

Other whistleblowers have also come to recent grief. Margaret Haywood, aged 58, a nurse for over 20 years, was struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council for allowing secret filming to be done by BBC’s Panorama, in an attempt to expose what she thought were serious shortcomings in the care of elderly patients. Haywood told a hearing of the Nursing and Midwifery Council in central London: "I was convinced that it was the right thing to do. I had reported the issues and nothing had been done. I felt I owed it to the people on the ward."

Similarly, the civil servant Christopher Galley, who was the “mole” who was “groomed” (I use the word advisedly) by Shadow Home Secretary Damian Green in the Home Office to pass potentially embarrassing details to the Tories, has been sacked. Damian Green is still the Shadow Home Secretary.

So, what are we to make of it, this whistleblowing? It’s a dodgy business, obviously. If you leak something that didn’t oughter be leaked, especially something that embarrasses the great and the good, and you are in paid employment – watch out! You’re likely to lose your job, even if you are Bob Quick. On the other hand, if you are a member of the political classes, be it the government or Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, then it’s business as usual. You can flash confidential files in public, leave them on a train, and groom as many moles as you can dig up, without any fear of censure.

Just another indication, if one were needed, of the way these people think they are immune and simply not subject to the same strictures as the rest of us.

The Right to Roam

I think it was Bill Connolly who originally made the quip that people who livein council houses in Hampstead have another council house in Wales, that they go to at the weekends. But under the latest Tory housing proposal, what started out as being pretty funny, could end up being completely ludicrous!

They are proposing a "Right to Move", similar to the original Thatcherite policy of "The Right to Buy". This, of course, being the cause of the decimation of social housing stocks in England for over a decade, as people bought their own homes and removed them from the available pool, while preventing Local Authorities from using the resulting revenue to plough back into building more houses.

Anyway, the Tory idea works like this [as far as I can work out: they freely admit that they haven't thought it through, and you can say that again!] You are unemployed and living in social/council/whatever housing in, say, Greater Manchester. You know there are jobs to be had for the taking in, ooh, let's say, Stevenage [leaving aside for the moment that the biggest depression since the 1930s seems to be clobbering all of the UK]. You can ask the local authority in Stevenage to provide you with social housing of equivalent stature and nature to allow you to uproot your family and wobble off on your bike, in the best traditions of Normo Tebbs, to start anew in Hertfordshire.

Fine, you say. And of course, there will be some spare social housing in Stevenage, right? No? OK, - er, will your new employer hang about while they build you some? And of course, there will be an equal and matching traffic of people wanting to move from Stevenage to take up social housing in Manchester, won't there? Er, no. Again, no.

If politicians are really that concerned about improving social mobility in the war against unemployment, as we are forced to tramp around the country looking for ever-scarcer jobs, perhaps they should start letting out their second and third homes rent-free, as hostels for those travelling on job-seekers' allowance.

If you had asked someone to come up with an unworkable policy that was obviously knocked up on the back of a fag packet in order to catch a passing bandwagon and provide a few soundbites, you could not have done better. All it lacks is that final touch which marks out any truly ingenious Tory policy de nos jours, rubber wheels.

Don't Wash the Bankers! (Spoonerism alert!)

Gordon Broon's receipe for helping us climb out of the credit crunch cesspit, into which we all plunged up to our armpits at the back end of last year, when his imaginary floor gave way beneath our feet, as at some latter-day Synod of Whitby, is that we should give up bashing the bankers.

Enough is enough, he cries, it's time to forgive and forget, they have suffered for too long, ect ect, chiz chiz.

I'm sorry, but that is bollocks. In the words of the late Margaret Thatcher, "No, no no no, no, NO!" They haven't suffered nearly enough. True, a few thousand lower level employees have been sacrificed by those who caused the mess in the first place, to try and invoke some general sympathy for the banking sector, and I do feel sorry for these people, because they know find themselves unemployed as a result of the actions of their supposed superiors and betters, who seem to have treated them in what is called in management jargon "the Mushroom Method" (keep them in the dark, then drop them in the shit).

But the rest of them? Have they suffered? Apart from a perfunctory, fingers-crossed behind the back apology in front of a House of Commons Committee? Have they buggery! And in any case, these banks in general are the people who saw fit to treat us, their customers, with such arrogance and such disdain in the past, with their megolamaniac demands that we identify ourselves and their snarty little letters that charge us £20 when we might have gone overdrawn. Well, no.

I'm sorry. We own their sorry asses now, and the boot is firmly on the other foot. My foot. Like all bullies, they can dish it out, but they can't take it. Well, tough. While I have got the boot, I will continue to apply it to whatever tender regions of their anatomy I can find, until someone starts to say sorry, and to treat me with some respect.

Cut to the Quick

There is a cruel joke doing the rounds at the moment based on the question "What's the difference between Bob Quick and Josef Fritzl?" The answer being, at least Fritzl remembered his binder. But, in truth, the resignation of Bob Quick, senior anti-terror plod of plods, is no joke, and should really be a matter of concern for us all, or at least, the manner in which it was engineered and executed should.

The bald facts of the case appear to be that he was snapped by a photo-journalist with a long-lens camera as he emerged from a car outside Number 10, where he was due to address a meeting of "Cobra", the rather melodramatically-named Government emergency committee. (You just know, don't you, that the name of that committee was thought up by a middle aged man with an Aston Martin and a James Bond fetish). The subject of his address was "Operation Pathway", not as you might first think, a crackdown on rogue landscape gardeners, but in fact a joint police/MI5 operation against a suspected Al Q'aida terror cell, who were planning some kind of major outrage in the North West.

So far, so predictable. Unfortunately, and rather absent-mindedly, in my view, Mr Quick had a sheaf of papers under his arm, in plain view, which, when the photographers' snaps were downloaded, gave the full S. P. on "Operation Pathway", including names, dates, and addresses. Cue a massed panic in the upper echelons of the security services, bringing forward the operation by 12 hours, and cue, eventually, also, the resignation of Mr Quick.

We don't know, of course, all of the machinations behind the scenes, which went on overnight, before Boris Johnson of all people popped up on the Today programme the next morning and cheerfully but "regretfully" (his own word) blew the embargo agreed by various parties over the official announcement of Quick's departure, no doubt then going home to crack open a "regretful" bottle of bubbly and let off a few "regretful" celebratory fireworks!

Somehow, anyway, overnight, it seemed to have been decided that Bob Quick's position had become "untenable", although previously, both Caroline Flint and Hazel Blears, both ministers of the Crown, on separate occasions, had been photographed carrying similar sensitive briefing papers into Downing Street, yet had escaped the chop. And, of course, the people to whom Bob Quick tendered his resignation have one or two pressing matters of their own to attend to, regarding second homes and expenses, that might well result in them discovering that, with resignations, as with so much else in life, it is more blessed to give than to receive. Time will tell, but the supreme irony of course is Boris Johnson, of all people, receiving the resignation of anyone for incompetence. That really is irony beginning to eat itself, tail-first. like those mythical heraldic sea-serpents that used to illuminate the margins of medieval seafarers' maps.

The conspiracy theorists have already been hard at work since Mr Quick's unfortunate career demise. The wackiest theory I have seen so far is that he engineered his own downfall and dismissal, in preparation for some as yet undisclosed secret mission under deep cover, still working to undermine an unsuspecting Al Q'aida, from some nameless bunker deep under Whitehall. Others have extended and built on this theory to say that the whole plot was manufactured by the security services, to keep us cowed and paranoid. That, I mus admit, I actually find slightly more believable, given the propensity of the anti-terror police to swoop down and arrest people with the maximum publicity and alarum, only to release them again, very quietly, and without comment, a few weeks later. As to Al Q'aida being wrong-footed, I doubt they care on speck of bat-crap who is in charge. As I have said before, these are the people who put the "mentalist" into "fundamentalist" and they are all mad as a runaway pram full of burning poodles.

But Mr Quick probably had enemies nearer home that he should have been worried about, other than the Clitheroe Branch of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. An even more extremist hotbed of loonies and zealots - The Conservative Party, since it was he who organised the arrest of Shadow Home Secretary Damian Green, inside the House of Commons, for "grooming the mole!" This was probably what underlay Boris Johnson's gleeful (I'm sorry, that should of course read "regretful") hooting on the morning of the resignation itself.

It is a sad day, though, coming back to why we should all be concerned, when a senior police officer can be so easily be forced out of his job, by a combination of political and media pressure, for what seems to be a relatively minor cock-up, one caused probably by a combination of absent-mindedness and the pressures and stress of work. It doesn't bode well for the checks and balances of the English legal system generally, and the separation of the powers, and all those other liberties and rights that lie locked up in those rows of dusty tomes and law books that it seems no one will acknowledge until it's too late.

Apart from anything else, I understand that it's now an offence under certain circumstances to photograph a police officerin the course of his duties. And photographing, and subsequently publishing, a document clearly marked "secret" surely contravened the Official Secrets Act. Much as I am amazed to find myself painted into a corner where I find myself defending the police against the media, and much as I violently disagree with the law against police photography on principle, nevertheless if it is the law, it should be applied universally across the land, without fear or favour, and not selectively, and therefore I look forward to the rule of law being upheld and the photographers being arrested and charged at least under the O.S.A.

This was not the only example of course, of laws being selectively or inappropriately applied over recent days. The arrests which the police carried out in Exeter, of protestors against the G20 Summit, immediately before that unhappy event, were carried out under the Anti-Terror legislation. I have previously said that, once the web of restrictive and anti-libertarian anti-terror laws is in place, there is nothing to stop the Government of the day using it against any sort of perceived threat, and potentially to stifle any legitimate protest, and it looks like I was right. There are plenty of existing laws about unathorised use of fireworks.

I was originally going to write more about that aspect of the G20, but it is now overshadowed by another episode where the police did not emerge very photogenically, the sad death of Iam Tomlinson at the G20 demo in central London. I don't think it is a good idea to write at length on this, actually, for various reasons. I have no medical training, but even if I were a cardiac surgeon, I am not skilled in the art of long distance internet autopsy. In short, I don't know if Ian Tomlinson's heart would have stopped beating when it did anyway. The most you can say, until the professionals pronounce on it, is that probably being whacked with a baton and thrown to the ground while under stress anyway (because it seemed he couldn't get home owing to the road to his hostel being blocked off) wouldn't have helped matters.

The complete lack of long distance fully-clothed-autopsy skills hasn't stopped people jumping in with both feet and blaming the police for Mr Tomlinson's death, though, especially since the appearance of film clips on the internet that would seem to confirm him at the receiving end of police brutality. This, of course, is the flip side of the "surveillance society", that nowadays we live in such a goldfish bowl, such a bubble of Youtube and mobile phone clips and rolling news, that it is just as easy for us to film the police, as vice-versa.

As it stands, under this new law which I mentioned earlier, the one aiming to prevent people from photograhing the police, the person who shot the Tomlinson footage should also be prosecuted. Yet in this case, the footage would seem to be clearly in the public interest, in establishing the facts, or indeed maybe even in establishing that the policeman actually had a good reason for treating Mr Tomlinson that way, should that ultimately prove to be the case. Any law which so clearly fails on two such widely diverse cases cannot be anything but a hinderance to justice, in the long run.

In the case of Mr Tomlinson, there are obviously enquiries to be made, a due process to be run, and conclusions to be arraived at in the end. It is important not to prejudice this process, but I will say just this: I hope that any enquiry looks also into the wider issues surrounding the cause of Mr Tomlinson's death.

It was an insane (and very costly) decision to hold the G20 meeting in central London, the more so since the various anarchists and other rentamob agitprop merchants who turn up and cause trouble at all peaceful demos, made it clear they were going to mount a major effort. The media were flagging it up for days in advance that there was going to be trouble, going to be a rumble. And as a result, the police themselves were obviously "pumped up" and "up for it". We always seem to be able to find hundred of extra police for events such as this, as well, and we have to wonder about their level of training and skill to deal with such situations. [As a sidebar, I also find myself reflecting if the next G20 summit could possibly be held in my driveway, so that the unprecedented police presence might just deter those scallies who nicked my car radio, from having another go.]

In short, the G20 was a policing accident waiting to happen, inept in conception, and fired up by the media's self-fulfilling prophecy of looting, anarchy and violence. Speaking as someone who remembers the death of Blair Peach at the hands of the SPG in 1979, I find myself reflecting sadly that little seems to have changed. It is no consolation whasoever for Ian Tomlinson, or his family, but maybe we were lucky to get away with just the one fatality.

We may not be so lucky next time.
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