57 Reasons not to be Cheerful, one, two, three...

Any large public event is always a balance between freedom of expression and movement, safety, and civil liberty. The “Rile Widding” was no exception. Except it was – it marked a new watershed in the shifting of the balance away from freedom and towards outright repression. I have already remarked that there seems to be a disparity between Brian Haw camping in Parliament Square (not allowed) and thousands of people camping out in The Mall (allowed) and this double standard is indicative of the sneaky, insidious way in which major public events are used to undermine civil liberties. Presumably if Boris Johnson wants to prosecute the people who broke the law on Thursday night in the Mall, he has plenty of CCTV and TV footage to allow him to identify the offenders. I await his next action with interest.

These are the “facts” behind what was “hailed” as a “successful” security operation. I am going to quote this at length from the BBC because it bears some deconstruction. It is a curiously jumbled and un-focused piece that reads as if it is the police official statement merely rehashed and regurgitated.

Scotland Yard has hailed the security operation surrounding the royal wedding as an "amazing success" despite 57 arrests around its security zone. About half the arrests were for breach of the peace and a man was held for an alleged sex assault on a girl, aged 14.

OK, no-one would argue with that. Breach of the peace and a sex assault, it all sounds fairly straightforward.

Ten people carrying climbing gear and anti-monarchy placards were arrested near Charing Cross. Other arrests were for drunk and disorderly, criminal damage, theft and over a suspected environmental protest. Three people were held in the Covent Garden area over the alleged demonstration, police said.

To be frank, I am surprised that the BBC didn’t look into the anti-monarchy and environmental protests more closely. They seem to be accepting of the police lumping these in with drunk and disorderly, criminal damage and theft. In this manner, legitimate protest is subtly criminalised. Were these people charged, and if so, with what?

Anti-terror powers were used to arrest one man who was seen taking suspicious photographs of transport hubs and security personnel in the Charing Cross area.

This is the sort of thing that is an example of the insidious erosion of our civil liberties – and, of course, it will now continue right up to the Olympic Games and beyond, if they can get away with it.

Three others were held over drug offences and four for allegedly carrying an offensive weapon.

OK, we’re back to the straightforward stuff again. But why not make some effort to group the arrests by type? Why mix up protests with criminal activity?

Met Police Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens said the success of the overall policing operation showed that the force could handle security for next year's Olympic Games. She said her 5,000 officers should be "immensely proud" of their role in the "happy and safe" event. She admitted to pre-event "nerves" and defended the decision to carry out a string of pre-event raids as "entirely justified".

“Entirely justified”? Justified to whom, justified by what? Is she saying she has some inside information that she is not telling us? Were the people who were arrested pre-emptively some sort of terrorist threat? Because I have a feeling that this is just the police justifying themselves to themselves, with no scrutiny.

Officers questioned masked anti-monarchy protesters in Soho Square as a huge security operation took place around Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and The Mall.

So who were these masked anti-monarchy protestors? How many of them were there, were they charged with anything? Are they part of the 57 arrests?

Thousands of police officers created a "ring of steel" around the venues. Snipers took to rooftops and undercover officers mingled among the crowds

Sort of gives the lie to the “carefree, joyous celebration”, doesn’t it?

More than 90 people were banned from the area and up to 80 VIPs were granted personal protection.

Again – “banned from the area” – under what pretext, what law, what judicial process has been gone through to be able to ban people from walking through the streets of their own capital city. If we are getting to the state where we are having people “banned” then we need to be sure this is not just something being done on a whim or on a spurious assumption, there needs to be a proper legal process.

Over the past few days police have arrested three people believed to be planning to behead effigies at the wedding. They were detained by police in Brockley, south-east London, on Thursday night.

These people have presumably been detained under the law which says that planning a terrorist act is an offence? Again, the BBC doesn’t seem to have asked any further questions. Were they charged? What with? Or were they merely quietly released again after the wedding? Am I committing an offence if I am planning to burn an effigy on November 5th?

There were also several raids on squats across London, which drew criticism from one Labour backbencher. John McDonnell accused police of "disproportionate" action, saying the raids appeared to be "some form of pre-emptive strike".

These are presumably the pre-emptive arrests of which Teresa May spoke in her advance trail of the measures she was “considering” after the Black Bloc’s window-breaking protests on 26 March. The people arrested in the squats were arrested for electricity abstraction – bypassing the meter. They have probably been doing it for months, if not years. They could have been arrested at any time for it, but coincidentally, police swooped the day before the Rile Widding. Coincidence? You decide.

As I said at the start, any large public event carries with it inevitable issues of public safety and security, even on the basic level of making sure no one gets trampled in the rush. And yes, I accept that – given that we’ve annoyed every hothead east of the Euphrates and a good many nearer home – there might be some people who want to use such an event to cover terrorist outrages. It’s all very lamentable. And in any large gathering of people, statistically there are going to be a few lags, perverts and ne’erdowells. So yes, policing is necessary. Up to a point. But when it gets to the stage where we’re stifling legitimate protest, we have to say, I think, that it’s time to take a good long hard look at where this is going.

Personally, I would let the protestors protest. In the case of the more zany fringe groups, it would show some of them up for the unsupported talentless loonies that they really are. If the whole world can see that there are only twelve members of “Muslims against Crusades”, that shows the world exactly what you are dealing with here. I would have stuck them in some obscure corner of Horse Guards Parade, suitably policed, and let them get on with it. Because the freedom not to be part of this, the freedom to hold contrarian views, however far they are off the bus route, is still one of the things that makes us the good guys.

And personally, I can’t see how you can describe any event where it has to be stage managed to stifle those who disagree with it, and pushed through at gunpoint by the presence of snipers on rooftops, as in any way “happy”.

Good luck, if you want to pretend that the whole country rose up as one great spontaneous street party and boogied long into the night. It didn’t, but feel free to delude yourself. For my part, the Royal Family is only useful for one thing. As a constitutional wedge to stop the bastard politicians taking over forever and issuing a written list of everything you are allowed to do, and everything else is verboten.

So if we have to have the occasional Rile Widding to keep the unwritten constitution intact, so be it. But don’t use it as an excuse to stifle legitimate protest, and don’t expect me to enjoy it. Just pull my vest down when you’ve finished.

The Undeserving Power

I have seen and heard quite a few pronouncements on benefits from the Tories over the last year, but David Cameron’s latest “photo-opportunity” asking workers on the BBC News blatantly, outright, if they were happy with the fact that there are apparently 80,000 people on incapacity benefit because of drugs, alcohol, or obesity, takes the biscuit. The nasty implication was, of course, that these people are still continuing this lifestyle on benefits, and being funded in this excess by the hard-working taxpayer. In reality, it is more likely that these people are struggling to cope with the effects of previous addiction, in a landscape where the very programs and funding that might be able to help them are being cut left, right and centre – by the Tories!

We’re a long way from “we’re all in this together.” But then, so is he. His NHS reforms have been savaged, and the previously docile lickspittles in the Literal Dimwits are having trouble keeping the lid on their section of the pressure cooker, as their leadership seems to have finally woken up to the slaughter awaiting them in the local elections, plus there’s the factor of the AV referendum adding extra strain on an already strained relationship. He has very little to cheer about at the moment (which is probably why they seized on the 0.5% growth in GDP over the last quarter – in reality, flatlining, when offset against the previous quarter’s fall – and trumpeted it like it was the Second Coming).

I’ve never seen a more disgracefully, deliberately divisive speech from someone who would do well to remember that the Prime Minister of this country is the Prime Minister of all of us, and he should be doing his best to unite the whole country, even those of us who would rather cut our own toes off with a rusty knife and serve them up on toast to next door’s cat than ever vote for him. But Cameron isn’t interested in me, except as someone whose disability benefits he can possibly cut. He’s talking over my head, to white van man, the man in the pub, to bigot Britain, to the people who support the BNP and the EDL, who think there are “too many scroungers, too many people on benefits, and too many foreigners”.

“We’re all in this together” has been ditched, apparently, in favour of the resurrection of the Victorian idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. In Cameron’s Tory Bullingdon Club world, the idea of a universal entitlement to benefits under a welfare state is anathema. You should earn your benefits, dear boy, preferably by picking oakum in the Workhouse. He’s preaching the same baseless, anecdotal shit that you can hear from any pub bore at closing time in any working class boozer – and around quite a few middle class dinner tables as well. Or you can pay good money and read it in regurgitated form in The Daily Mail. “ A man in the pub told me once that he had a bloke in the back of his taxi who said there are thousands of them claiming benefits that they aren’t entitled to, they’re all immigrants, over here taking our jobs, etc. etc.”

It more or less writes itself, which is why being a Daily Mail journalist in these heady days must be such a cushy number under this regime. All of the statistics on which these speeches and photo opportunities are based are at best, suspect, and at worse, misleading, cooked-up and completely bogus. The figure of 80,000 people which Cameron used, for instance, for people claiming benefits who are victims of drugs, alcohol or obesity, is actually based on a “snapshot” of the figures, according to the original DWP press release.

In other words, they have taken a small chunk of data, analysed it, then extrapolated the results to see what figure they could come up with if all of the remaining data followed the same pattern, and the answer is 80,000. Suddenly, that figure is enshrined in fact as if it was some kind of innate truth.

They followed the Cameron speech with another similar exercise, a story that “75% of incapacity benefit claimants are fit for work”. What actually happened, when you look into the figures behind the headlines, was that, of just over one million applicants over a given period of time, 39% were found to be “fit for work” but then 40% of this 39% actually appealed against these decisions – and won! [Not that there is any work, but that’s a separate gripe, let’s not get sidetracked here.] So the story didn’t go on to say that, because of that appeal, in fact, the real figure that were “fit for work” was nearer 19.5% of the whole sample, not 39% at all. A further 36% (the other bit of the spurious “75%”) gave up their applications uncompleted, and never bothered to pursue them. The implication from the ghastly Tories is that this is because they’d been rumbled and didn’t bother to go on because they knew the game was up and abandoned the claim, quitting while they were ahead.

Having had first hand experience of the convoluted process and the harassed and unhelpful DWP staff who administer ESA, I can imagine a more likely reason for this, easily. Although I am a “newbie” to the world of disability and benefits, I am a reasonably literate, educated, and fairly articulate person, able to fight my own corner, and even then I have struggled against the overwhelming torrent of forms, questionnaires, and bloody stupid fatuous standard letters asking the same old shit over and over again. It’s no wonder that people abandon their claims. Perfectly legitimate claims, I shouldn’t wonder. The system is set up with precisely that aim. To baffle you with bullshit until you snap and say “oh, sod it!” These mythical people that the man in the pub tells you about, the thousands of them that allegedly defraud the taxpayer of £1000s, must do it as a full-time job, and even then, they’d need a secretary and an accountant, just to keep track of all the paperwork!

So, at next week’s local elections, which is, in truth, what this was all about, had Cameron been honest enough to admit it, you have a choice. You can believe and swallow this hokum perpetrated by the Tories as part of their “divide-and-rule” tactics, if you really believe there are “deserving” and “undeserving” poor and “sturdy beggars”, go ahead and vote for him. If you think, however, that those who are ill through the effects of drugs, alcohol, and poor diet are just as deserving of universal benefits on medical grounds as the rest of us, in a civilised society, and that dividing people into deserving and undeserving poor on the basis of lifestyle “choices” is the thin end of an evil wedge (what about smokers, for instance? Cameron kept quiet about them because smokers might be highly represented amongst the white van man target group) then vote the bastards out, and give them the kicking they so richly deserve. It’s not all of us together, it’s us and them, and it always has been, because that’s their choice, that’s the way they want it, whatever they say otherwise.

Local Cuts for Local People

Eric Pickles is Satan. Or the Antichrist. Or possibly both, if that’s theologically possible. After seeing his performance on Newsnight the other night, I was only surprised that Gavin Essler didn’t start projectile vomiting, or that his head didn’t swivel through 360 degrees. It used to be only Michael Howard out of the Tory top brass that had a whiff of sulphur about him, but this is no longer the case. Roll over Beelzebub, tell Baphomet the news.

Pickles was being grilled on “localism”, which is Tory-speak for “you’re on your own, chum”, as the savage cuts to local government budgets, disproportionately targeted so the heaviest ones fall on the poorest authorities (a point made in the programme) are now starting to bite across the country.

Much of the interview, sadly, focused on “transparency”, which in the Pickles world involves publishing details of expenditure, regardless of any extra cost incurred in so doing. Even more sadly, Pickles was able to deflect the main thrusts of any attempts to call him to account, by focusing in turn on an error in the research, which led Essler to assert that the Department for Communities was only listing expenditure over £25,000 on its own web site, while expecting councils to list all items over £500. It emerged in the course of the debate that the DCLG is now also employing the £500 yardstick. [Actually, there is some interesting stuff on that web site, which repays further study, and I think I will have a closer look, and come back later to report my findings.]

Anyway, this is how localism works. You cut the rate support grant to the councils, taking care to make sure that the leafy suburbs (where the Tory voters live) “friendly” councils (such as the odious regime in Westminster) and key marginal targets are all protected, leaving the brunt to fall on the most deprived areas (coincidentally, many of them traditional Labour heartlands).

Then you meddle, selectively, as follows: when the council, faced with a decision which involves having to make drastic savings, cuts frontline services, and these cuts are unpopular, you make sure (if you are Eric Pickles) to blame the council for the cuts, as if the sudden, dramatic cut in income was nothing at all to do with you. When the council (quite rightly and sensibly) refuses to spend scarce resources on the extra cost of putting the items of their individual expenditure over £500 online, you criticise them for a lack of transparency. [So far, only Nottingham, out of all the councils, has had the cojones to do this. Shame on all the others.]

Funny stuff, transparency. Pickles seems to be remarkably opaque when it comes to admitting transparently that the transparent reason for these councils up and down the country being forced to cut to the bone and beyond, is, er, Eric Pickles. And localism, that’s a funny concept, too. It only works when the local decisions are exactly those which central government would have made and approved of. Central government in the form of, er, Eric Pickles. Any spending decisions taken at local level which don’t accord with the Tory plan for “slash and burn” are dismissed as “irresponsible”.

Of course, the Pickles plan is for the massive deficiencies his cuts will cause in councils to be picked up by the Big Society, for free, and for the massive job cuts in the public sector to be mopped up by the private sector. Neither of which is going to happen. Like all Faustian pacts, it has a sting in its tail. And possibly the horns of a dilemma.

Emergency, War 10!

The Tories and their stooges in the Mini-Tories have been quick to point out that the cost of the war against Libya will not come out of any existing budgets from Government departments already squeezed by the cuts, cut - in some cases - to the bone, and then beyond.

No, it will, instead, apparently, come out of a "contingency fund" in the Treasury, which is kept for emergencies and dire situations, according to Danny Alexander, on BBC's Question Time.

Now just hang on a cotton-pickin minute, thar, boy! Run that by me one more time, as Captain said to Tenniel or vice versa. The country is allegedly stony broke, on its uppers, so much so that the church mice are having a whip-round for us and yet, all the time, we're all in this together (though clearly some of us are "in it" up to our necks and sinking fast, while others haven't even had their expensive shoes splashed, yet) and all this time, the Treasury has a secret slush fund, a giant piggy bank in the underground car park, a hidden panel that, when pressed reveals a cupboard stuffed with £50 notes or something? What?!?!

Not only a secret slush fund, but one which must be fairly substantial, since it can stand funding the UK bombing the crap out of Benghazi with missiles that cost £800,000 each!

This, for me, raises a very important question. If this money is supposed to be used for emergencies, when is an "emergency" not an "emergency"? If we have got to the stage where we're shutting hospital wards, Sure Start centres and libraries, that is a bloody emergency! If we have got to the stage where we're cutting police because we can no longer afford to keep our streets safe, that is an emegency! If we've got to the stage where thousands of people are being laid off - in the construction industry for example - that is an emergency. If we've got people having their houses repossessed and being turned out onto the streets, that is an emergency.

Forget foreign adventurism and posturing on the world stage. We have little or no idea who these Libyan rebels are, or, in the long run, whether the situation there would be better or worse for our intervention. The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan don't hold out much hope.

Meanwhile, you don't need a flashing blue light and a howling siren to see that there are many more urgent "emergencies" at home, caused by the Con-Dims "bombing" their own economy, to appease the markets and bankers, that deserve much more to benefit from the judicious application of Danny Alexander's secret slush fund.

Small is Beautiful, Big is Better, but Both is best of all

The thing is, we did use to have the Big Society, well, sort of. I remember, growing up in the 1950s and 60s in East Hull, our community did look out for each other and - yes, cliche or not - you could always leave your door open and neighbours were always popping round for a cuppa.

In that scenario, you could never imagine, for instance, a vulnerable pensioner dying on her own of hypothermia and lying there for weeks before being discovered, because somebody would have noticed she was missing from her daily round, hadn't seen her in the corner shop recently, and would have stepped in with a hot meal, a blanket and/or a bag of coal.

Now, that kind of Big Society would be worth aspiring to. The kind of society where people band together and see each other through, behaving altruistically without any notion of payment or reward. The only problem with it is, though, that it's actually the Small Society. It works at a micro level, street by street. You can't scale it up to a national level, though it would be nice to get back to a society which was more caring, more respectful, less self-centred and - frankly - venal in its aspirations, since we seem to be descending more and more into "White Van Man Bigot Britain", encouraged by "dog whistle" pronouncements on things like benefits and immigration.

I say "get back to", because of course the communities that nourished and nurtured the "Small Society" are long gone - the fishing community of Hull being an example, the mining communities of the coalfields, the steelworks or the shipyards in those areas of the country where they were strong, and the docks in places like Liverpool and the East End. And not only have the communities, vanished, the ideas which held them together have vanished too - ever since Margaret Thatcher gave the green light to sheer naked greed for money as the motivating force in society, basically the country was set off down a route where it was apparently OK to climb over anyone's face on your way to the acquisition of wealth and goods, and everything has to make a profit, a philosophy that ultimately leads to your mum invoicing you for cooking your breakfast, or outsourcing the job to a chef in Mumbai.

There are some things that are necessary to be organised on a macro scale and which will never make a profit. Health care, education, prisons and the justice system, defence, transport, the postal system, things like that. The reason that the Big Society is falling apart at the seams is that the Tories, deep down, know this, but they are ideologically attached to the idea that everything must make a profit. This inherent contradiction at the heart of the policy is killing it stone dead.

If they could but bring themselves to abandon that shibboleth, and fund the idea like it needs to be funded, then the Big Society could work. But of course, with Eric Pickles in charge of the budgets, that is about as likely as me lapping Usain Bolt in the 100m at the next Olympics. Not going to happen.

So, as it is, we are left with an empty, vacuous fart of an idea, a trumped-up initiative which relies on wish fulfilment and fairy dust for its success. The idea that you can cut public services to the bone and beyond, remove funding left right and centre, throw thousands of people on to the dole and somehow, magically, the economy is going to pick up and create a lot of wealth that will somehow get given to charities by altruistic donors to pick up the slack. I don't think so. There goes Usain Bolt again.

It's not as if they really mean it, though. Cameron is using the Big Society as an attempt to speak over the heads of most people to those who would like Britain to return to a sepia-tinted era with cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, but the reality is a savage attack on the public service ethos (because the Tories truly think everything can be reduced to a balance sheet) and passing the blame on to councils and charities for not picking up the pieces, when in fact, the Tories have stolen the dustpan and the brush!

I no longer differentiate between Tories and Lib Dims, these days they are all just Tories to me, but I do wonder sometimes how the Lib Dims, traditionally the party of local government, volunteering, and local activism, square their support for this dismal claptrap with their professed stance of caring about communities. And how they sleep at night.

Double Dip

Eight months in to the ConDim administration, and we’re starting to see the first damaging effects of the draconian cuts as the economy plunges back into recession, albeit only by 0.5%, but I wonder what the next quarter’s figures will be. They can’t very well blame the snow next time, and if they say it’s due to the increase in VAT, then they are on a dodgy wicket, since that was their idea as well (despite having “no plans” to do it, when asked back in May).

Every time I hear the phrase “double dip” I have this mental picture of George Osborne and Vince Cable, but I guess that’s just me, eh.

So we see, today, Clegg being pressed into service (the Tories always send out an expendable, gullible Lib Dim when they have something evil or contentious or untrue to announce) to give a speech in Rotherham (oh, the irony!) about how the government does really have a plan for growth, honest, it’s just that before we can implement it, we have to slash and burn and decimate and stifle the economy, then when it’s well and truly buggered beyond all recognition, and reduced to broken glass and ashes, well, that’s the time to start thinking about recovery, obviously!

Deficit reduction by cuts is apparently a vital element of the growth plan, according to Clegg, which is a bit like saying that dousing your allotment with paraquat is a vital element in ensuring a bumper crop next year! Either the man is a complete tit or he’s totally dishonest. I suppose there’s an outside chance that he might just be both.

Meanwhile, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Osborne, Cable, Shapps and Pickles, continue scything their way through the public sector infrastructure. 500 jobs here, 1000 there, this year, next year.

I have just one question to the people who support the coalition in its berserker attack on our society and way of life – it’s quite a simple question, and it is this:

Are you happy with the idea of unemployment, repossessions, marriage breakups? Are you happy with the idea of companies being driven to the wall? Are you happy with the idea of the public services being stripped back and cut to the bone? Do you chortle with glee at the thought of people on benefits having their money cut? Are you happy that companies are no longer able to afford to pay their employees? Are you happy, these cold winter nights, about people sleeping in doorways and under bridges? Does it fill your heart with pride and make you glad to be British?

Or like me, does it make you long for a time when it was like Ancient Rome, as portrayed in Macaulay’s Horatius:

Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.
Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the high,
And the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction,
In battle we wax cold:
Wherefore men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.

What I want is someone to take us back to the brave days of old. “Brave” being the operative word, since they would be flying in the face of the yellow press and the vested interests of the current swarm of venal vermin who have somehow, unaccountably, (in both senses of the word) misappropriated the levers of power.

So, my Literal Dimwit chums – are you happy with what you are doing to our country by your support of Cameron and his Tory toffs? And if you are not happy, then why not vote with your feet, get out and leave them to it.

Oh - and, do you know, despite all this, despite the fact that their constituents are up against it and struggling left, right and centre, MPs are STILL whingeing about expenses. Still! They just don’t bloody get it. So you can’t claim for everything, so your paperwork gets lost by officialdom, so, it costs you money to do your job. Welcome to the real world, the one the rest of us live in, and shut the fuck up.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Shop Thy Neighbour

Meanwhile, the relentless march towards a total surveillance society continues. Two news stories in particular caught my eye in the last few days, and concatenating them together, you can see once again the machinery of government “spin” and misinformation being employed to make us all just a little bit more paranoid as we go about our daily round.

Apparently, MI5 and the security services generally are going to be asking if they can search people’s Facebook friends, on the offchance that one of them might be Osama Bin Laden. And in addition, the government is recruiting 60,000 “ordinary people” in the form of security guards, council officials and even shop assistants to be part of its new “front line” in the fight against an assumed increased threat of terrorism.

Now, leaving aside that any terrorists dumb enough to advertise the fact openly on Facebook, using their real names and listing “bombmaking” amongst their hobbies and interests, probably deserve to be arrested anyway, it is actually the second of those two stories that disturbs me more.

What we are recruiting here, is an army of neo-Stasis. Government informers, paid snitches, ready to denounce their neighbours for anti-social behaviour. Does this sound familiar? It certainly would do to Josef Stalin and Erich Hoenegger. Hitler would probably raise a distant eyebrow of recognition, whatever circle of Hell he currently resides in.

So once again, Britain, the country that I love, is being stolen away from me, inch by inch and yard by yard, by a sinister army of grey apparatchiks whose motto is “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. Well. I am sorry, but that is bollocks. I have nothing to hide, but I fear for what we are becoming, and it is not pretty.

“Oh,” but you say, “it’s worth it if it prevents one atrocity”. Will it though? Everyone with a brain cell knows that real terrorists – if they are forced to communicate over the internet – use encrypted peer to peer networks. If GCHQ hasn’t worked that one out yet, they should give up and open a whelk stall. And at the end of the day, God forbid, if there was another attempt at something like 7/7 in the UK, that, unfortunately, is the price we pay for living in a free democracy instead of a society that is just one large prison camp, where some of us are prisoners and some of us are guards, which seems to be the government’s preferred option right now.

So, I’ll take my chances thanks. Let me die in my footsteps, I will not go down in the ground, as a certain Robert Zimmerman once memorably said.

If the government wants to re-invent the Stasi, it should be asking itself where Stalin is now. And what happened to the Berlin Wall. Those who live by the snoop, die by the snoop.

Housey Housey

When I was young (yes, I was once young) we used to go on seaside holidays to Withernsea or Kilnsea, in a succession of bleak rented caravans. Or to Butlin’s at Skegness, in good years. The highlight of these holidays, for my parents, was always playing bingo. Personally, I never saw the appeal, but then, as I say, I was young. I guess now, looking back on it, that it was the cheap visceral thrill of unexpectedly supplementing the drudgery of your daily economic grind with some unearned, untaxed income, in a setting outside of the four walls of your own home.

So I can, to a certain extent, understand the antics of Tony McNulty and Jacquie Smith in claiming thousands of pounds in second home allowances, in circumstances that someone less charitable than myself might have described as “questionable”.

The sheer brass face with which these allegations have been “rebutted”, and the fact that it was felt acceptable to claim these allowances in the first place, though, speaks volumes on the contempt with which politicians currently view the electorate who put them there. They obviously think we are blind, or stupid, or both.

The justification for this behaviour is apparently that “they broke no rules”. If this is indeed true, then the rules need changing. It’s as simple as that. There is no way on God’s green earth that we should be paying for MPs’ second homes anyway. I have long argued that there should be a residence qualification for an MP before they can stand for a certain constituency. If you want to be the MP for Lower Snodbury, you should move there, buy or rent a house there, and live there for at least a couple of years before you are allowed to have a go. That way, we would only get people who were either committed to that area or indeed, actually from that area, standing. And the money saved from the payment of second home allowances to already well-off MPs could be put into something socially useful such as feeding, clothing and housing the homeless.

Sharon Shoesmith

Has taken my advice and is going to take Haringey council to a tribunal.

Watch this space. Meanwhile of course there have been other instances of child abuse reported in similar circumstances. And there will continue to be.

And now, this morning, the incredible news that Lord Laming, on his comeback tour, has suggested the heads of children's services at all local authorities should undergo compulsory re-training, including spending time with a deprived family.

They would be better off having training on how to survive being crucified in the press and hung out to dry by politicians anxious to protect their own substantial arses.

I note that yesterday, with her tribunal even as yet unheard, the Sun described Sharon Shoesmith as the "Baby P Bungler" on its front page. Whatever you might think of Miss S and the rights and wrongs of the case, everyone should be entitled to a fair hearing at an industrial tribunal without the Sun sticking its oar in.

Note to Ed Balls, it's the disease, not the symptoms.

Joined-Up Government

This was a much-vaunted phrase in government circles a while ago. Personally, I suspect that it was probably a product of the Blair spin machine, and therefore suspect even then, and its current parlous state is yet another indicator, if one were needed, of how far off track Broon and his cohorts have been blown by the hurricanes of economic mayhem. Not that there was ever much mileage in the idea anyway.

It was always possible, if you looked carefully, to find examples of the type of mismatch between two conflicting areas of government policy, although these used to be relatively minor, and more amusing than harmful.

These days, there are so many examples of huge gaping yawning chasms between the aims of conflicting parts of government, or sometimes within the same department, that it’s hard to find a single example of coordinated action.

Take the car industry. Everyone agrees (with the possible exception of Jeremy Clarkson) that it can only be a good thing, from the point of view of the planet as a whole and the fight against climate change, that we use our cars less, and generally that public transport should be joined up, integrated and more freely available.

Yet at the same time we are dishing out money like a drunk in a casino to the motor industry, which is apparently teetering on the brink of collapse. To make more cars that no one can afford to buy, while there are already unsold acres of them parked up on every available airfield and storage space up and down the land. Oh, and they have also given the go ahead to Heathrow’s new runway. Yet a genuinely useful public transport project such as Crossrail still languishes in the doldrums.

It would be a start of course, if Broon and his band of merry men acknowledged that this largesse to the British motor industry ("British" in name only by virtue of it being located here, yet owned by multinationals) was the result of the unhappy coincidence whereby most of these plants which are threatened with closure, with catastrophic unemployment levels resulting, are situated in Labour constituencies.

I am editing this posting to record my complete flabbergastedness, if that is a word, at the news this morning (23 Feb 09) that LDV is now going to the government asking for a loan of several millions. While I have every sympathy for the LDV workforce and suppliers, the company is owned by a Russian gas billionaire. Can I just say, as someone who has been paying extraordinarily high gas bills for the last winter, as a result of proifteering by the likes of LDV's owner, that I already gave on this one. No, you cannot take it out of my taxes. Let Mr Gasovitch put his roubles in, since he appears to have gazillions of them. It's what I would have to do if my company got into difficulties.

Take home ownership. Another example. The government announced packages of help for people struggling with their mortgages, back in November, but omitted to mention that it won’t start until April. While my own experience of dealing with government does tend to confirm Andy Burnham’s recent comment that getting something like this up and running in six months counts as fast-tracking it, in government terms, this will not be much comfort to those whose homes are repossessed in March. And again, have they thought it through? What counts as “struggling”? And this bountiful gift is brought to you by the same government that wants to means-test disabled people to try and get them off incapacity benefit and into (non-existent) work! The same government that encourages people to phone the DWP hotline and shop a benefit cheat, while its senior members are indulging in questionable practices with second home allowances.

And now, two hours since I posted this originally, Broon has popped up on Channel 4 news calling for an end to 100% mortgages - and Northern Rock has started lending again, using taxpayer's money: you could not make it up.

Take justice. We stand up there at the UN, supporting the ideas of international justice (what's left of it anyway, post GW Bush) and we freely participate in allowing a relatively harmless hacker from London to be extradited to the USA, because he managed to penetrate the computer system of the Department of Defense, looking for stuff on UFOs, whereas we allow the US administration to meddle in British Justice by telling our law lords what they can and can't say about the treatment of a British subject at Guantanamo, and when the USA refuses to allow two of its pilots to appear in front of a properly convened coroners' court in Oxfordshire, in the case of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, we roll over and let them stick two fingers up (well, one finger, since they are American) to the English legal system.

It is the fundamental dishonesty of it that really sticks in my craw. When Gordon Broon said “British Jobs for British Workers” he knew that there was no way he could deliver on that statement without the UK withdrawing from the EU. Which of course is about as likely as the devil going past the window on a skateboard. At least that particular piece of doublethink came back to bite him on the bum in the form of the actions of the Lindsey Oil Refinery pickets. But of course what they meant when they parroted the phrase back at him, was British jobs for white British workers.

And it is on that issue, free movement between countries and who we do and don’t allow in and out of the UK, that we’ve just seen the most breathtaking recent examples of facing both ways at once.

I am taking this from the Indymedia web site, though it was brought to my attention independently of them. It is just that their account provides a ready-made background to the case and saves me acres of re-typing...

A family of Algerian asylum seekers were taken from their home in Hove to Yarl’s Wood detention centre at 6.30am on the morning of Wednesday 11th February pending deportation. The Home Office plan to remove them to Algeria.

Assia Souhalia and her husband Athmane have been in the UK since 2002. Their 2 year old daughter Nouha was born in Brighton in 2006 and has lived here all her life. The family has made a life here and has many links in the local community. Assia Souhalia fled Algeria in fear for her life in 2002 after her family had suffered years of violence. Two of her brothers, Rachid and Brahim, both policemen, were murdered in two separate and premeditated shootings in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Neither brother was involved in political action. Upon hearing of the death of Assia’s eldest brother Rachid, their mother, Cherifa, suffered a heart attack and died. Since then Assia’s family have repeatedly received death threats and in 1994 Assia’s brother, Brahim, was murdered. Two of Assia’s remaining brothers and sisters both fled Algiers.

In 2002 Assia travelled to the UK with the help of members of her family. Since Assia arrived in the UK only one man has been arrested in relation to the murders of her family members. In 2007 Assia’s sister was badly wounded in a bomb attack. Assia is afraid for her safety should she be deported to Algeria.

The latest on this case is that Assia passed a message from Heathrow last Tuesday that they were not flying that day because there was a 'problem with the ticket'. From 5.30am that morning, campaigners had been talking to BA flight crew and passengers on BA 894 to Algiers (the flight Assia, Athmane and Nouha were scheduled to fly on). The staff and passengers had been told of the Souhalia family's situation, that they feared for their lives if deported to Algeria and that the deportation was depriving Nouha of the right to live in the country where she was born. The passengers were asked not to stand by and let the family be forcibly deported. They were asked to speak to the pilot of BA 895 and request that the plane did not fly with the Souhalia family on board.

Indymedia believes that the real reason that the Souhalia family were not deported on BA 895 was because of pressure from the staff and passengers. The Souhalia family are currently in transit back to Yarl's Wood.

Contrast this with the sanctimonious twaddle coming from all sides of the political spectrum over the case of Abu Quatada. Personally, I don’t think it’s a disgrace that the European Court of Human Rights awarded him compensation. I think that human rights are universal, even for the likes of people who probably don’t deserve them, and you have to apply the law universally without fear nor favour, for justice to be done, and if someone has been wrongfully detained under the law, they are entitled to compensation, whoever they are. That is what makes us the good guys.

But I do contrast the effort being put into deporting Assia Souhalia and her family with the fact that Abu Quatada has been going through the deportation process since 2002. How come we are doing dawn raids and bundling innocent children onto planes to send them to God knows what uncertain fate, yet this man, who was apparently such a threat to our national security that he had to be illegally detained without trial, is still languishing in Belmarsh. If he’s that bad, put him on trial, and stop pissing about.

Another week dawns tomorrow. Is it too much to hope that sometime soon we might see someone come along in Government who can recognise these glaring mismatches and put them right in a just and statesmanlike manner?

Did I just hear a skateboard go past the window?

Who's been eating HIS porridge?

Too many people are getting Legal Aid, says the Tory Shadow Justice Minister Damian Green. He popped up on various radio shows recently claiming that the explosion in Legal Aid expenditure was because of people being encouraged by the Human Rights Act to mount appeals and challenges that were just not “worthwhile”.

Mr Green is of course an expert on the legal system, having recently had his collar felt by Inspector Knacker of the Yard when he was arrested for the supposed offence of “grooming the mole” over Home Office leaks. Sadly, it looks as though his direct experience of the prison system will stop there, and he will not be expected to sew mailbags, eat porridge, or be known as “Brenda” in the showers by a homicidal “lifer” from Lewisham.

It is the assumptions behind Mr Green’s statement that I find potentially disturbing. As I understand it, you are either entitled to Legal Aid or you aren’t, and the idea of a politician deciding what is or isn’t a “worthwhile” use of Legal Aid is not only incredibly arrogant but also, if followed through to its logical conclusion, incredibly dangerous. And the poor old Human Rights Act is getting it from all sides, with Jack Straw wanting to dilute it and replace it with an official list of things he says it’s OK to do, as well. All I can say is, if both Damian Green and Jack Straw are against the Human Rights Act, well that settles it, I’m all for it.

The way I understand Legal Aid, as well, is that there isn’t a set budget, a “pot” of money, after which there is no more. To hear Mr Green you would think that you went to see your solicitor and he says, “I’d like to help you with Legal Aid, Mr Bloggs, but unfortunately Nosher Briggs in Parkhurst has used up the extra budget for 2009 in a completely quixotic and vexatious action under the Human Rights Act.” I can’t believe it works like that.

On one fact, at least, Mr Green is correct. There are a lot more people in prison now than there were ten years ago. More prisoners = more appeals, and more appeals = more Legal Aid. It’s not exactly rocket science. Prisons are full to bursting and the only solution we’re being offered is to build more of them. But is there another way?

When you look at it, there are a lot of people in prison for relatively minor offences, people who just should not be there. At the same time, it is readily acknowledged that there are lots of things in society at large that need doing, and the armed forces are suffering what seems to be an almost permanent crisis of recruitment. I’d like to explore solving all of those problems by bringing them together into one solution.

It has long been Bolshy Party Policy that, apart from the basic defence of the UK, the armed forces should serve as a sort of auxiliary civil defence organisation. We don’t actually have a civil defence organisation in the UK as such, which is why we struggle with the emergency services augmented by the Army, Navy and RAF when we have to deal with extreme weather events, such as flooding.

Within the prison population are large numbers of able-bodied males (and females) whom the taxpayer is currently supporting to stay in their cells and stare at the walls all day. I’m not talking about letting axe-murderers and child molesters out on licence to fill sandbags, but rather something along these lines. A certain range of “non-lethal” offences should be selected. Then, say you are convicted of one of these offences and you get four years. Currently you could expect to be out in two. My proposal is that after you have served a year, you become eligible for consideration for the Civil Defence Scheme. In conjunction with the armed forces, you learn about civil defence techniques and, under careful supervision, eventually progress, while being trained in useful skills, to actually, eventually, being allowed to participate in “real” civil defence work. If at any time during this period you do anything against the rules of the scheme, you forfeit all your remaining remission and privileges and you go back into the slammer for what remains of your full original sentence.

That way, when there is a national emergency, such as the flooding, there will be a readily available pool of labour to help the hard-pressed emergency services and the army. The vast numbers of people who are currently clogging up the prison system to no useful end will be providing some valuable service in return for their drain on the taxpayer’s purse, and gaining some skills, training and self-esteem along the way. One would also like to hope that their skills might help them find a job. Perhaps the next step could be a “bridge”, via the Territorial Army, into the forces proper, if they prove themselves.

Critics of this idea will say, of course (if they are Conservative) that it is far too liberal and smacks of sending offenders off on white-water rafting weekends, whereas liberal critics will see it as being too harsh, one step away from the chain gang and Cool Hand Luke. If it does attract criticism of this sort, from all sides, I will view that as a hopeful sign that I am on the right track.

Children in Need?

The Tories have finally woken up to the issue I highlighted several blogs ago, namely that there is a shortage of social workers. No shit, Sherlock. Well done, Dave. They omitted to go on and elaborate further on the subject (confining themselves as usual to shroud-waving and jumping on bandwagons) so allow me to elaborate. There is a shortage of social workers because their workload is high, their wages are low (comparative to the responsibility they bear) and the resources are few. They are frequently damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and if they make a mistake, they are likely to find themselves crucified by the Sun and the Daily Mail, two papers who support the Tories but not, obviously, to the extent of campaigning for more social workers.

The editorial stance of both papers veers diametrically between castigating the likes of social workers for being part of the PC Brigade (without pausing to reflect that social workers are often themselves victims of the box-ticking, target driven, risk averse society rather than perpetrators of it) and scapegoating them when things go wrong. Never once do they make the connection that if you want more and better social workers, your council tax must go up, because they know this isn’t what their readers want to hear!

Children generally have a poor time of it these days, if Lord Layard is to be believed. But once again, Lord Layard’s diatribe is merely a litany of symptoms, not of diseases. The real root cause of the malaise which is destroying society is worship of the money-god. These days, your sole worth is judged by how much money you have. We live in a dog-eat-dog, every man for himself society where everyone wants fame, celebrity and money, now, without having to work for it, and without any responsibilities. It is this refusal by people to take responsibility for their own actions, the idea that it is always someone else’s fault, that leads to schools being closed at the first hint of snow. Local authorities would rather risk the wrath of a posse of angry parents (angry at being forced to take responsibility for their offspring!) than an expensive lawsuit for personal injury and negligence when little Johnny slips on the ice and breaks his leg, because it’s cheaper. All back to money again. Ironically, the kids who were sent home from school and who, as a result, were forced to spend some quality time with their parents, probably had a more fulfilling day as a result.

What has all this to do with Children In Need? Children In Need is, of course, the BBC’s annual jamboree for charity, in which Auntie Beeb puts on the motley for one day and raises money for “good causes”. It’s joined by Red Nose Day, a similar bun-fight, which is coming up next month. Rod Liddle has described Red Nose Day, in The Spectator two years ago, as a “bullying smugfest” … and that was before the BBC decided to set itself up as the arbiter of which children deserve charity help and which children don’t. (I’ll give you a clue: children in Gaza who have been traumatised, maimed or made homeless by Israel’s war crimes don’t deserve charity, according to the BBC, whereas programmes for youth outreach in Birmingham – that should really be provided by the government or local authority-funded social workers – do need to be funded by people willing to dress up like prats or sit in a bath of baked beans.)

Well, I for one will be boycotting Red Nose Day and Children In Need for the foreseeable. Both of them treat the symptoms and not the disease and, since the BBC’s insane decision not to show the D.E.C. Gaza appeal, for me, at any rate, they have a strong whiff of added hypocrisy which makes them even more unpalatable.

If the BBC, the Tory Party, Red Nose Day, Children In Need and anyone else who feels the need to postulate sanctimonious twaddle about the well-being of children, were really serious about the subject, they must acknowledge, and embrace, the following uncompromising truths:

More social workers, and better social workers, cost more money.

Well meaning as they may be, things like Children In Need and Red Nose Day only treat the symptoms, not the disease, in their belief that money can cure everything, and now the BBC has no moral authority as a peddler of charity anyway, post-Gaza.

What we really need is a return to a close-knit, mutually co-operative society based around adults (married or not, straight or gay) giving long-term loving care and development to help children have safe yet fulfilling lives.

The government should be providing much more to make this happen at home instead of giving overseas aid to questionable regimes that spend it on arms or weapons systems instead of on the recipients for whom it was intended, or to countries such as India which has the wherewithal within its own coffers to fund space programmes and nuclear weapons but not to feed the beggars of Mumbai, it seems.

That would be a start. Then we could all begin to rejoice at the prospect of no more “children in need”.

Salt of the Earth

There's been a lot of blether, woffle and guff in the media last week about Local Authorities running out of salt. One bit of snow and the country grinds to a halt, it wasn't like this in the old days when we had to pay the mill owner for permission to go to work, etc etc children today they don't know they're born, schools closing because of Health and Safety gorn mad, bimey guv'nor and so on...and so on.

I've waited in vain for anyone to mention how difficult this snowy and icy weather must be for homeless people. And waited. And waited, so it looks like I'll have to do it.

One of the problems of course is the differing definitions of "homeless". The Department of Communities, under the control of feisty Krankie-lookalike Hazel Blears, claims that there were only 483 people "sleeping rough" in the UK in June 2008.

Even if that were true, it is still 483 too many, and you can bet your sweet palookah that the figure will have gone up dramatically since that time, with jobs being axed left right and centre because of the credit crunch.

Shelter, the homeless charity, has a multiple definition of homelessness that also includes people living in overcrowded accommodation, people at risk of domestic violence etc., as you would expect.

Crisis, the charity that tries to help London's homeless, has a report which examines these issues as well, and comes to the conclusion that:

We suggest a range for the overall number of single homeless people of between 310,000 and 380,000.

This is a big jump from 483 rough sleepers, even allowing for the fact that one would expect this Government routinely to massage downwards any statistics that are likely to a) embarrass them and b) lead to them actually having to do something.

Maybe the true figure is somewhere in between.

I know I bang on a lot about treating the disease and not the symptoms - over a wide range of issues - because I see it everywhere I look. But in this case, if there is anyone sleeping rough these cold winter nights, we really do need to do both.

It is a scandal even if there are only 483 people sleeping rough this winter and we must do something to rescue them.

The long term issues of homelessness have their roots deep in the very fabric of how society is organised, in the loss of community responsibility, the break up of the family, and the failure of the authorities to ensure a continued and commensurate supply of affordable housing to cope with the demand.

I would like to see more use made of the large amounts of derelict land in the UK. If necessary, central government should “nationalise” or requisition brown field sites that meet certain criteria. They could acquire the land for a fair price to both sides.

They could then parcel it out into “settlements”. Each settlement is a cluster of a set number of eco-friendly, prefabricated, timber-framed kit buildings set around a central source of services, e.g. a small CHP plant, green space, etc, planned along the lines of those designed by the Walter Segal Trust.

The inhabitants of each settlement would then sign a covenant to stay for five years. The government provides the infrastructure and then the settlers provide the labour, as a co-operative, to build their own houses on the site. The houses are identikit, prefabricated. We built lots of "prefabs" after World War Two to repair the housing stock which had been destroyed by Nazi bombing raids, we need a similar effort now. There's nothing wrong with prefabs. I was born in one, but these would be eco-friendly "Uberprefabs" fit for the 21st century.

They then have a choice.

§ If they stay five years paying rent, they have the option to buy (?) but first the cost of the house itself gets charged to their account. But the rent they have paid to date counts as back-dated mortgage.

§ Or they can continue to rent until they decide to buy – at any time after five years.

If they buy, and later decide to sell, there are restrictive covenants on the kinds of people they can sell to, e.g. locals, young families, starters on the housing ladder, key workers, etc.

OK - even though it's now official Bolshy Party Policy (because I say so!) it's still a sketchy plan, and easy to pick holes in. It needs a lot of work. But I haven't seen anything better coming from the people whose job it actually is to sort this stuff out, and who seem to be claiming a lot of salary and expenses for so doing.

With the construction industry in the doldrums, and the government looking around for something to throw money at, now is the time to galvanise the affordable housing situation by starting on schemes such as this. OK, it's not perfect. But which would you rather have? - a patch of derelict land with a ragged collection of homeless rough sleepers huddled round a makeshift fire, desperately trying to keep warm, or the same patch of derelict ground with a small number of eco-friendly social housing units on it, adding to the general stock of affordable housing and providing worthwhile jobs in their construction.

In the meantime, get writing to anyone who you think will listen to ask them what they are doing about giving homeless people shelter during this vile weather.

And keep the salt, and the newspapers that bang on about it, for your fish and chips.

Animal Wrongs

In all of the hoo-hah over the inauguration of Barack Obama, and the continued fall-out of Israel’s war crimes and atrocities in Gaza, the media in the UK hardly mentioned the sentencing of the SHAC activists, the people from the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty web site who were jailed for various terms between four and eleven years.

Heather Nicholson was jailed for eleven years. Gregg and Natasha Avery for nine years apiece. Gavin Medd-Hall for eight years; Daniel Wadham, five years; Gervals Selby and Dan Amos, four years each.

Now, you can well argue that these people were behind a vicious campaign against individual staff members of Huntingdon Life Sciences and its suppliers and sub-contractors. (Though, as a side-bar, some of the defendants claimed that they only pleaded “guilty” because they knew they wouldn’t get a fair trial anyway.) But even so, even if they were guilty of every last jot and syllable of the prosecution’s case, you have to also ask yourself: are these prison sentences just and proportionate?

According to the sentencing guidelines for manslaughter published by the Department of Justice, a review of 50 reported Court of Appeal sentence appeals between January 1990 and July 2004 showed that out of 50 cases, only two received sentences of more than ten years for manslaughter and the commonest sentence band was between three and five years. So how have we arrived at a situation where a handful of animal activists are given harsher sentences for letter-writing, demos, and general harassment than if they had committed manslaughter? Of course, you may feel that it is the manslaughter sentence which is too light, while the “SHAC 7” got what they deserved. That is, however, a different argument, and if you want tougher sentences all round, what are you going to use for prisons, since all the existing ones are fit to bust?

Returning to the disparity in the sentencing, I doubt that the judge sentenced the SHAC 7 to the terms he did as the first step in a nationwide campaign for stiffer sentences. The whole ethos of the trial, right from the start, right from the decision to charge them with conspiracy to blackmail, seems to have been motivated by just one aim: to teach these pesky activists a lesson. The judge even mentioned, in his summing up, balancing the right to protest with HLS’s “right to conduct animal experiments”. The inference we must inevitably draw from that is that it’s OK to protest, as long as you don’t become too effective at it. And there is no doubt that SHAC and its various hangers-on and adherents have been a thorn in the side of HLS.

But anyone hoping that this is the end of the matter is sadly mistaken. By his heavy-handed, disproportionate, that’ll-learn-them sentencing, the judge has handed SHAC an enormous boost. Already events have been held in support of the SHAC 7 and more will undoubtedly follow, as a whole raft of previously moderate people like me are motivated by the sheer injustice of the sentences to take part in the campaign to free them. It is the same process by which previously moderate Muslims become radicalised by seeing attacks on people of their faith in Iraq and in Gaza. Let us hope it does not have the same outcomes.

And the sentencing of the SHAC 7 will fail for another reason. Because, as with so much other state-sponsored repression, it only treats the symptom, not the disease. Why is no-one asking what failures in the democratic process led the SHAC organisation to take direct action in the first place? Many of us voted Labour in 1997 because we thought we were going to get a Royal Commission on Vivisection. Twelve years later, we are still waiting, and in the meantime the government has shown itself willing to act as the backer of last resort not only for HLS but also for the new Animal Experiments Laboratory in Oxford. The only significant Act in favour of animal welfare in twelve years of Labour rule has been the ban on fox-hunting, and even then Blair had to be virtually anaesthetised to get it through Parliament, and it has been policed and enforced half-heartedly ever since.

Is it any wonder, then, that SHAC take the view that it is morally indefensible to sit and wait decades for politicians to take action, and do nothing while animals in laboratories continue to suffer and die? You may not agree with their conclusions or their actions, but you would have to have the intellect of a breeze-block not to see how the situation has come about.

I believe (and therefore it is Bolshy Party Policy) that there are viable alternatives to animal experiments and all that stops their being developed, overall, is the lack of political will, and the fact that money and funding favours the status quo. Who in the scientific community is going to risk their research grant, their nice car, their house in the leafy suburbs of Oxford or Cambridge, by going out on a limb against animal testing?

If we want a truly just society, then justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. It would be a just outcome if the sentences of the SHAC 7 were reduced or rescinded on appeal, and it would be even more just if we were finally allowed the Royal Commission which we have so long been denied.

Small footnote: since I originally posted this, Mel Broughton, who was accused of conspiring to firebomb the new animal research labs at Oxford University, was sentenced to 10 years on 13 February at Oxford Crown Court. Convicted mainly on the links between improvised devices which failed to explode, and his DNA profile, Mel Broughton was the founder of the group Speak, which consistently demonstrated against the new labs and which used similar tasctics to those employed by SHAC against Huntingdon. The bomb which did go off caused £14,000 of damage.
If Mel Broughton was guilty, then however sympathetic one may feel to his motives, nevertheless he should be punished, because no one can be bigger than the law. But in return for our respect for the law the legal system and the establishment, as with the cases of the SHAC7, must ensure that sentences passed are proportionate and are not seen as punitive collective punishment, because otherwise a whole new set of activists will be incentivised by the thought that they have nothing to lose.

It's (Not) That Man, Again!

In the second world war, there used to be a long-running radio series called ITMA which stood for “It’s that man again”. Such is the identikit interchangeability of the apparatchiks in the present government, that this was my first reaction on hearing of their intention to police, curb and generally censor what is available on the internet. I was confusing Andy Burnham with James Purnell. An easy mistake to make, since neither of them appear in many photos. (At least, not when the photo was taken, anyway.)

Andy Burnham has, apparently, spent £1,986.84 of taxpayers’ money on “media training” during 2008. Judging by his latest sally, we should be asking for a refund.

Now, no-one is defending the sick and illegal sites that show abuse happening to children, or adults for that matter, or animals. But these sites are generally illegal anyway and can be quickly shut down, and/or their adherents pursued through credit card records. Beyond this criminal hardcore, which I again stress is illegal, lies a whole hinterland of “softer” material which some would also wish to ban. There are compelling arguments both ways; those who maintain that pornography on the internet cheapens and demeans the status of women, versus those who argue that its presence sublimates a desire which exists anyway and which, were it not for the “safety valve” element of the internet, would manifest itself in other, darker, more concrete forms. I suspect that no one knows for sure.

The internet, though, can generally be relied upon to police these sites itself, and there are now increasingly sophisticated ways in which responsible adults can prevent children in their care from viewing it. The problem there is not the technology but the irresponsible adults. They could also take a look at the access children have to computer games, particularly violent ones with a pornographic tinge, rather than worrying about the chances of an impressionable teenager stumbling on a home movie of a chartered accountant from Droitwich bonking his wife.

But the government, of course, despite the fact that no-one “owns” the internet, is not content to let matters be. Oh, no.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That’s my view. Absolutely categorical,” says Mr Burnham, proposing a cinema-style rating system for sites.

Yes, well, we all think that, but the problem is, who decides what should just not be available? I would much rather rely on the collective weight of international law then the decision of one Andy Burnham or his civil servants. Plus, in one of his media interviews (£1,986.84, remember) Mr Burnham used the chilling word “unacceptable”.

This is the crux of the problem. Not “illegal”, which no-one would have an issue with, but “unacceptable”. When we get to the stage of people in government deciding what we can and can’t see on the internet on the basis of what is acceptable and “unacceptable”, then it’s time to worry. That is the thin end of a very large wedge. What is “unacceptable” can grow and change – once the government gets the power of veto over what is acceptable or unacceptable for you and I to look at on the web, then basically anything the government does not like could find itself on the “unacceptable” list. Sites criticizing government policy. Sites promoting animal welfare, even, if they contravene the government's unquestioning support for big pharma and vivisection.

Hermann Goering once memorably said, “When I hear someone mention ‘culture’, then I reach for my revolver” and I’m getting a similar twitchy feeling. Though in my case it would involve adding the words “secretary, Andy Burnham” into that sentence, at the appropriate point.

63,000 reasons to be ashamed to be British

According to figures I have seen on the news this morning there are 63,000 families homeless in Britain, this Christmas.

There should be no more rejoicing until this figure is zero, and instead of giving the banks another bucketload of money to waste on junketing, the Government should give local authorities the money to build low rise, low density, eco-friendly housing at socially affordable rates, and renovate existing brownfield sites, until the evil of homelessness is banished from our streets.

Plus, building a new generation of social housing will provide a much-needed stimulus to the construction industry.

Oh, and could somebody hand the Pope and Branson a trowel each. It'll keep them out of mischief too.