I think it was Bill Connolly who originally made the quip that people who livein council houses in Hampstead have another council house in Wales, that they go to at the weekends.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.
Monday, 13 April 2009
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.
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.
.
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.
.
The Smear Test
In view of the recent revelations about so called email smear campaigns emanating from Number 10 Downing Street, I would just like to stress the independence of this blog!
It is true that I don't have a good word for David Cameron (actually, I do have a very good word for him, but not one to be used in mixed company). I know nothing about his private life, except that we are apparently paying his mortgage on his constituency home, and we shouldn't be. My political dislike of him is based purely on his being a smarmy little apparatchik with no policies or principles who will clamber on any passing bandwagon, and who would sell his granny if he thought it would gain him one more vote in a marginal constituency.
George Osborne is self evidently terminally inexperienced and would be a disaster as Chancellor, especially as he seems to differ markedly from the views on the economy (and probably everything else) which are barely contained within the simmering volcano that is Ken Clarke.
I have to say though, that it is a mark of the extreme poverty of Gordon Brown's team's ideas and approach, that with all of this rich lack of material to work with, they are instead resorting to making up lies, untruths and smears and seemingly trying to spread these virally on the web.
What's wrong with just pointing out that the Tories have no policies and those they do have are either unworkable or could potentially split their party. Labour should be hammering that home at every opportunity. Lack of experience. Wet behind the ears. Weathervanes, blowing whichever way the wind blows. No backbone. God almighty, do I have to spell it out, Broon?
It is true that I don't have a good word for David Cameron (actually, I do have a very good word for him, but not one to be used in mixed company). I know nothing about his private life, except that we are apparently paying his mortgage on his constituency home, and we shouldn't be. My political dislike of him is based purely on his being a smarmy little apparatchik with no policies or principles who will clamber on any passing bandwagon, and who would sell his granny if he thought it would gain him one more vote in a marginal constituency.
George Osborne is self evidently terminally inexperienced and would be a disaster as Chancellor, especially as he seems to differ markedly from the views on the economy (and probably everything else) which are barely contained within the simmering volcano that is Ken Clarke.
I have to say though, that it is a mark of the extreme poverty of Gordon Brown's team's ideas and approach, that with all of this rich lack of material to work with, they are instead resorting to making up lies, untruths and smears and seemingly trying to spread these virally on the web.
What's wrong with just pointing out that the Tories have no policies and those they do have are either unworkable or could potentially split their party. Labour should be hammering that home at every opportunity. Lack of experience. Wet behind the ears. Weathervanes, blowing whichever way the wind blows. No backbone. God almighty, do I have to spell it out, Broon?
Saturday, 11 April 2009
Feeling Jaded
I had actually made these notes before Parky weighed into the Jade Goody debate, and it is quite scary to find how much I apparently agree with the curmudgeonly old Yorkshire git. Perhaps because I, too, am a curmudgeonly old Yorkshire git.
I should begin by saying that it is, of course, always a tragedy when someone dies before their time, especially at the age of only twenty-seven. And cancer is a dreadful disease, have no doubt, even despite modern advances in diagnosis and treatment, the way it can ravage families and destroy the lives of individuals is still a source of much fear and suffering. Both my own parents died of cancer, my mother at the relatively early age of 57, so I know whereof I speak.
I didn't know Jade Goody, despite her obvious "fame" and "celebrity". "Reality TV" tricks us into thinking that we actually "know" people, when in fact "Reality TV" is, in itself, an oxymoron. It's no more inherently "real" than any other type of TV. The "reality" is, in fact, all in the edit. The impression I have gained of Jade Goody, overall, is that she was an ignorant (in the strictly technical sense of the word) unthinking, proto-racist. But other versions of reality are available.
To hear Max Clifford talk, for instance, the only thing that stopped Jade Goody overtaking both Diana and Mother Teresa as the princess of all our hearts, is that she didn't have the same start in life. True, Jade Goody does seem to have had a very hard childhood, granted, although it would seem that she was reconciled to her mother despite that, in a way which could be described as admirable, given what the woman seems to have put her through, if the reconciliation was genuine.
And it was probably because of that childhood experience, that when she was told her cancer had spread and it was terminal, that she decided to turn her last days on earth into an obscene and grotesque spectacle, in order to provide her own children with "the best education money can buy". In this aspiration she was willingly aided and abetted by the mututally symbiotic relationship between Max Clifford and the tabloid press.
The phrase "best education money can buy" of course speaks volumes about Jade Goody's own values and limited horizons. The idea that money can solve everything, and that there might be a very good education that you don't actually have to pay for (of all sorts, not just academic education) and the idea that the education process requires the willing participation of the person being educated, obviously never occurred.
So we were treated to a blow by blow, breath by laboured breath account, of Jade on her deathbed. The press, that had previously been happy to print Jade stories good and bad in the old days, when she was firstly "Miss Piggy" who didn't know where "East Angular" was, and then later, in the Shilpa Shetty debacle, when she became "The People's Poppadum", demanded that Jade whored herself one last time for the money, and for the sake of their circulation, with one gleeful Sun executive speculating that "the Jade effect" had been good for 300,000 additional copies on their circulation. If they had any decency at all, they would have just said "thanks for the memories", given her the money anyway, and left her to die in dignity.
But, of course, instead, the roller-coaster was set in motion, and once her own condition had deteriorated to the point where it was no longer clear to the dispassionate observer just who was taking the decisions and pulling what strings, the children were caught up in the machinery, and God alone knows how traumatised and damaged the experience of participating in the slow, public death of their mother will have left them.
Time alone will tell. But personally, I would rather any of my children were poor but happy, and knew the value of important things, if the alternative was rich but traumatised and psychologically vulnerable, if that were the choice. But then I am not Jade Goody.
Apologists for the public death of Jade also point out another, different, "Jade effect" to the one enjoyed by The Sun, lifting their circulation out of the doldrums. The fact that her plight apparently prompted many thousands of women to take smear tests for cervical cancer, tests which they had previously been ignoring. This may well be true - I know of no objective sampling that can tell us if it is or not - and if it is true, it can only be a good thing. It is not, however, on its own, sufficient to elevate Jade Goody to the sainthood. Her story, particularly the grotesque details of her final days and hours across all the news bulletins and all over the papers, also carried disturbing echoes for me of my mother's final illness.
In and out of hospital, the false dawns of hope, the futile operations, it was all there. So for every person who has taken a neglected smear test because of Jade Goody, I would contend there's probably also a family or individual somewhere who has been forced to remember and confront the painful loss of a loved one, and re-live it in ways they would much rather have avoided.
And that is what it comes to, after all. Sadly, many, many people die of cancer at too young an age, sometimes alone, and frightened, without all the attendant hoohah which accompanied Jade Goody to her grave. Are we saying that these people, and indeed the many people now who fight cancer, and occasionally go on to beat it, who refuse to give in to the disease and battle on heroically regardless, are we saying that these people are worth less than Jade Goody? Because, you see, I don't think they are. I just think that when it came to supping with the devil, Jade Goody unfortunately drew the short spoon.
And as I was finishing off this piece, I noted one final irony: The Sun is requesting that people do not "trample" Jade Goody's grave, respect her last resting place and leave her alone in peace (complete with pictures of the grave). That is rich, coming from the people who gleefully trampled her grave while she was still alive.
I should begin by saying that it is, of course, always a tragedy when someone dies before their time, especially at the age of only twenty-seven. And cancer is a dreadful disease, have no doubt, even despite modern advances in diagnosis and treatment, the way it can ravage families and destroy the lives of individuals is still a source of much fear and suffering. Both my own parents died of cancer, my mother at the relatively early age of 57, so I know whereof I speak.
I didn't know Jade Goody, despite her obvious "fame" and "celebrity". "Reality TV" tricks us into thinking that we actually "know" people, when in fact "Reality TV" is, in itself, an oxymoron. It's no more inherently "real" than any other type of TV. The "reality" is, in fact, all in the edit. The impression I have gained of Jade Goody, overall, is that she was an ignorant (in the strictly technical sense of the word) unthinking, proto-racist. But other versions of reality are available.
To hear Max Clifford talk, for instance, the only thing that stopped Jade Goody overtaking both Diana and Mother Teresa as the princess of all our hearts, is that she didn't have the same start in life. True, Jade Goody does seem to have had a very hard childhood, granted, although it would seem that she was reconciled to her mother despite that, in a way which could be described as admirable, given what the woman seems to have put her through, if the reconciliation was genuine.
And it was probably because of that childhood experience, that when she was told her cancer had spread and it was terminal, that she decided to turn her last days on earth into an obscene and grotesque spectacle, in order to provide her own children with "the best education money can buy". In this aspiration she was willingly aided and abetted by the mututally symbiotic relationship between Max Clifford and the tabloid press.
The phrase "best education money can buy" of course speaks volumes about Jade Goody's own values and limited horizons. The idea that money can solve everything, and that there might be a very good education that you don't actually have to pay for (of all sorts, not just academic education) and the idea that the education process requires the willing participation of the person being educated, obviously never occurred.
So we were treated to a blow by blow, breath by laboured breath account, of Jade on her deathbed. The press, that had previously been happy to print Jade stories good and bad in the old days, when she was firstly "Miss Piggy" who didn't know where "East Angular" was, and then later, in the Shilpa Shetty debacle, when she became "The People's Poppadum", demanded that Jade whored herself one last time for the money, and for the sake of their circulation, with one gleeful Sun executive speculating that "the Jade effect" had been good for 300,000 additional copies on their circulation. If they had any decency at all, they would have just said "thanks for the memories", given her the money anyway, and left her to die in dignity.
But, of course, instead, the roller-coaster was set in motion, and once her own condition had deteriorated to the point where it was no longer clear to the dispassionate observer just who was taking the decisions and pulling what strings, the children were caught up in the machinery, and God alone knows how traumatised and damaged the experience of participating in the slow, public death of their mother will have left them.
Time alone will tell. But personally, I would rather any of my children were poor but happy, and knew the value of important things, if the alternative was rich but traumatised and psychologically vulnerable, if that were the choice. But then I am not Jade Goody.
Apologists for the public death of Jade also point out another, different, "Jade effect" to the one enjoyed by The Sun, lifting their circulation out of the doldrums. The fact that her plight apparently prompted many thousands of women to take smear tests for cervical cancer, tests which they had previously been ignoring. This may well be true - I know of no objective sampling that can tell us if it is or not - and if it is true, it can only be a good thing. It is not, however, on its own, sufficient to elevate Jade Goody to the sainthood. Her story, particularly the grotesque details of her final days and hours across all the news bulletins and all over the papers, also carried disturbing echoes for me of my mother's final illness.
In and out of hospital, the false dawns of hope, the futile operations, it was all there. So for every person who has taken a neglected smear test because of Jade Goody, I would contend there's probably also a family or individual somewhere who has been forced to remember and confront the painful loss of a loved one, and re-live it in ways they would much rather have avoided.
And that is what it comes to, after all. Sadly, many, many people die of cancer at too young an age, sometimes alone, and frightened, without all the attendant hoohah which accompanied Jade Goody to her grave. Are we saying that these people, and indeed the many people now who fight cancer, and occasionally go on to beat it, who refuse to give in to the disease and battle on heroically regardless, are we saying that these people are worth less than Jade Goody? Because, you see, I don't think they are. I just think that when it came to supping with the devil, Jade Goody unfortunately drew the short spoon.
And as I was finishing off this piece, I noted one final irony: The Sun is requesting that people do not "trample" Jade Goody's grave, respect her last resting place and leave her alone in peace (complete with pictures of the grave). That is rich, coming from the people who gleefully trampled her grave while she was still alive.
Passing the Baby
I know I have castigated the press recently for publishing attacks vilifying Sharon Shoesmith while her Employment Tribunal remains unheard (whatever you think of her and her actions, everyone should be entitled to a fair hearing without the likes of The Sun or the Daily Mail pre-judging the issue for us) but I could not let the news go unrecorded, that in fact Baby P's mother could have been prosecuted, but for an apparent fumble by the police in handing over his file when one officer left and eight weeks seemingly passed before it came to the notice of their replacement.
I am only posting this to observe that, although several media sources have made the point that this prosecution, had it gone ahead, would have given the social workers a stronger legal foothold for taking Baby P away, no-one as far as I can see from either Ofsted or Ed Balls's office has said words to the effect of "Oh, now we see, the situation was actually more complex than we first thought, there were obviously a number of contributing factors, and in fact our Gaderene Swine rush to judgement via the media may have been hasty and ill-advised"
Don't hold your breath.
I am only posting this to observe that, although several media sources have made the point that this prosecution, had it gone ahead, would have given the social workers a stronger legal foothold for taking Baby P away, no-one as far as I can see from either Ofsted or Ed Balls's office has said words to the effect of "Oh, now we see, the situation was actually more complex than we first thought, there were obviously a number of contributing factors, and in fact our Gaderene Swine rush to judgement via the media may have been hasty and ill-advised"
Don't hold your breath.
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