the righteous and the wicked....

There's a bit in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" where Captain Black runs something he calls the "Glorious Loyalty Oath Campaign", where everyone in the squadron finds themselves forced to sign oaths pledging their loyalty in order to get absolutely anything or everything:

"Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that "The Star-Spangled Banner," one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again"

Of course, anyone refusing to sign one of these oaths is immediately branded as somehow being disloyal to their country, to their flag and to their cause:

"Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them to."

Captain Black's rival, Major Major, is actively prevented from signing any of these oaths, even if he wanted to:

"What makes you so sure Major Major is a Communist?"

"You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you? And you don't see him signing any of our loyalty oaths."

"You aren't letting him sign any."

"Of course not," Captain Black explained. "That would defeat the whole purpose of our crusade".

Thus does Joseph Heller neatly skewer empty patriotism.

I was reminded of this when reading about the Daily Mail's latest campaign to try and get every Premier League football club to display a poppy on their matchday shirts during November.



As a result of their bullying, there are now only three of the twenty clubs holding out: Liverpool, Manchester United and Bolton Wanderers. As a spokesman for Manchester Utd not unreasonably said:

"We don’t think it’s particularly necessary. We sell poppies around the ground and all our officials wear them and we work with Armed Forces charities in a lot of other ways throughout the year."

Not good enough, apparently, and the Mail is continuing to try to bully them into changing their minds. Obviously, their readers are full of considered opinions on the subject. Here's lazzruss:

"Yes Yes Yes!!! It is beyond my capacity to put into words how this 'government' has ruined our once Great Britain by sytematically [sic] attacking our spiritual and historical heritage and culture and we have had enough! Banning poppies is the final insult to our nation as this shows a complete disregard and contempt for our Glorious Dead who gave everything including their very lives for the sake of the future of our Nation and every football team owes them their success and privileges - to display a simple poppy proudly on their shirts should be a moral imperative for anyone who loves our Country and what we (not the inept and shameful Labour Government) stand for."

Let's leave aside the fact that the majority of the players in the Premier League aren't even English, eh? Why let that get in the way of a good rant about WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY?

Um, perhaps it's a statement of the obvious, but if you try to force people to wear a poppy, aren't you restricting our freedom to choose not to wear one? Isn't that the same freedom that "our Glorious Dead' fought for? Like it or not, that's the same freedom that allows a student to get so paralytically drunk that he urinated on a war memorial in Sheffield. Not very nice, for sure, but surely more a story about binge drinking than it is about any calculated disrespect for the dead, whatever the Daily Mail try to make of the story (flogging too good for him, naturally).

This "Poppy fascism" seems to be everywhere at the moment. Apparently the BBC are under pressure because the dancers on "Strictly..." weren't wearing poppies last week. All of the judges were, but none of the dancers. Not good enough, apparently, as everyone on the X-Factor was wearing one.... The BBC initially (and not very bravely) hid behind "Health & Safety issues" as the reason why the dancers weren't wearing poppies, but have now apparently changed their minds in the face of all this public outrage.

Where does this oneupmanship and assumed moral authority stop? Why are we only displaying our poppies for a couple of weeks of November? Does that mean we're being disrespectful and unpatriotic for the other 50 weeks of the year? Should we all be dyeing our hair red and tattooing poppies onto our cheeks so we can be displaying our gratitude and support for the sacrifices made on our behalf every single day of the year?

Of course, you can trust the good old Guardian for an alternative view, and Marina Hyde today has a good rant about this "phony poppy apoplexy":

"So on Saturday, know that every late challenge, every sending-off, will be in the memory of those who fell in battle. Then accept the fact that media campaigns to foreground the poppies that are not being worn, as opposed to the ones that are, serve not as a memorial to the sacrifices made on our behalf, but as a reminder of our hard-wired one‑upmanship and infinite capacity to find ways to divide ourselves."

The commentators are even more strident:

"Forced wearing of the poppy to commemorate a fight against tyranny? Britain seems to get sillier and sillier, and more and more irrelevant every week."

One takes the trouble to remind everyone of the Daily Mail's support of the Nazis in the 1930s, when they praised Oswald Mosley ("Hurrah for the Blackshirts") for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine", and the proprietor of the paper, the Viscount Rothermere, visited and corresponded with Hitler, culminating, on 1 October 1938, when Rothermere sent Hitler a telegram in support of Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland, and expressing the hope that 'Adolf the Great' would become a popular figure in Britain.

They don't talk about that so much, do they? Why am I now uncomfortably reminded of people being forced to wear pink triangles and yellow stars?

It seems that the spirit of Captain Black is alive and well and still busily hunting out people who won't sign his loyalty oaths.

"You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you?"

Is that the Daily Mail's motto?

red running over white....

Something like 10m soldiers, and who knows how many civilians, were killed in the First World War. It was supposed to be the 'War to End All Wars', something so terrible, so utterly awful that it could surely never be repeated. It wasn't, of course, and a barely more than two decades later, the world was again inflamed in war, and a total of something like 70m people died in an even more destructive and all consuming conflict. Even that wasn't the end, and mankind has been trying to settle its differences by force pretty much continually ever since, just as it had been in all the centuries before.

The Royal British Legion was founded in 1921 to provide financial, social and emotional support to ex-servicemen and their families. Almost from the very beginning, their emblem was the red poppy: this fragile, resilient flower was one of the first plants to return to the shell-blasted fields of Flanders between the trenches; it was a symbol of renewed hope, whilst the colour red somehow symbolised all of the blood spilled on those fields. In the run up to Remembrance Sunday on 11th November each year, millions and millions of paper poppies are sold to raise money for the British Legion and also to symbolise all those people whose lives have been affected by war.

I don't hold with the concept of a 'just' war. I know that plenty of people will disagree with that, but I just don't want to believe that anything can be worth all that death and suffering. But opposition to war does not have to mean opposition to the people fighting those wars, and I find this time of year extremely moving, and I will wear my poppy as my own personal mark of respect.

You might remember the newsreader, Jon Snow, getting caught up in a storm a couple of years ago when he refused to wear a poppy on air and criticised what he called "poppy fascism" (it wasn't just poppies - Snow refuses to wear any other charitable emblem whilst on air). His refusal was seen, in some quarters, as disrespectful. John Humphrys was reported as saying:

"The reason I wear the poppy is because I want to pay tribute, it is a mark of respect for those men who gave their lives so that I can live the way I do today - to protect my freedom. And if there is anybody in this country who does not feel that gratitude then I think they should feel vaguely ashamed of themselves."

Hmm. For me, this is problematic. I absolutely and categorically want to pay tribute and show my respect for people who gave their lives in war.... but what about all the poor sods on the other side who were wounded or killed? What about them? How much of a say did they have in the war they were fighting? Do their relatives suffer their loss less? As well as respect, does the red poppy have other connotations of Allied soldiers figthing a just war? The Irish certainly seem to think so, and the poppy is widely worn by Unionists as a symbol of the involvement of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and as such is rejected by more nationalist political parties. But if I want to pay tribute, what choice do I have?

Well, as it happens, there is a choice: you can wear a white poppy . The white poppy is meant to symbolise peace, and aparently has a history stretching back to 1933.

Here's the blurb on the website:

"The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers. Our work, primarily educational, draws attention to many of our social values and habits which make continuing violence a likely outcome. From economic reliance on arms sales (Britain is the world's second largest arms exporter) to maintaining manifestly useless nuclear weapons Britain contributes significantly to international instability. The outcome of the recent military adventures highlights their ineffectiveness in today's complex world. Now 90 years after the end of the ‘war to end all wars’ we still have a long way to go to put an end to a social institution, which in the last decade alone killed over 10 million children."

I like the idea that the white poppy is intended to represent all people on all sides whose lives have been affected by war, and to symbolise the desire to settle our differences without recourse to armed conflict..... but people being people, of course, we just end up arguing about the colour of poppy that we chose to wear to remember those killed and wounded in war.....

After some thought, I've decided that I'm going to wear both: I'm going to wear a white poppy to symbolise my opposition to war and my respect for all victims of war, but I'm also going to wear a red poppy because I want to contribute directly to the Royal British Legion funds that are used to support the victims of war and their families (the money raised by the white poppies goes towards peace campaigning, which is good, but not exactly the same thing). A compromise, perhaps, but it's my own personal statement of remembrance and hope for the future.

Ultimately, I don't think it matters whether you wear a white poppy, a red poppy or no poppy at all. The important thing, surely, is to honour the memory of the dead and to help the living. In a year that saw the death of Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War, we've finally lost that immediate, human link with the 'war to end all wars' that ended more 91 years ago. We do try to remember, especially at this time of year, but with wars being fought all over the world today, we do also seem to be very forgetful.

---

Flanders Fields by John MacRae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

(He was doing so well right up to the last verse....)

...Oh, and yes, I am aware that the white poppy is sometimes held up by religious types as a more "christian" colour to wear than the red. Well, like I say, I know why I'm wearing it.

---

The top news story when I woke up this morning was the five soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Their deaths are tragic, no doubt, but am I alone in finding it slightly strange that the death of some soldiers fighting in a war so newsworthy? Apparently we've become so used to our troops being blown up by bombs that it's mildly unusual to have some killed by bullets. There's also a vague suggestion that the Taliban were somehow not playing fair by infiltrating the Afghan police and then ambushing our troops. Um.... did the Taliban sign up to some sort of code of conduct for warfare that I'm not aware of, or are they desperately fighting a struggle for their own survival against people they undoubtedly see as foreign invaders? I'm sorry these guys have died, just as I'm sorry when anyone dies, but since when did we think there were rules to war?

Wear a red poppy this month, by all means, but surely we can find a better way to settle our differences than by killing each other?

poor little rich boy....

I can't quite believe either the fuss or excitement that has greeted the mayor of London's appearance on Eastenders this evening.



The BBC has come under fire for apparently showing political favouritism by allowing Boris to appear when they consistently rejected his predecessor's requests to show his face in the Queen Vic. Naturally, Ken Livingstone is not amused:

"There has obviously been a Damascene conversion here ... There is no reason why the BBC should not give the mayor a cameo appearance; I just wish they would do it for everybody, not just their chosen favourites."

Having just watched his stilted, awkward appearance that was clumsily and embarrassingly set up by the cast beforehand, I can't really see why Ken would be getting so agitated about the whole thing.

"...I'm going to have a pint of bitter."
"...Please call me Boris."

Awful. Predictably awful.

Still, Boris is always going to be something of an unlikely man of the people, isn't he? Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon club and all.....



David Cameron, the leader of the opposition and likely future Prime Minister of this country, is number 2, and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, is number 8.

[for completeness: 1.Sebastian Grigg, 2. David Cameron 3. Ralph Perry Robinson 4. Ewen Fergusson 5. Matthew Benson 6. Sebastian James 7. Jonathan Ford 8. Boris Johnson 9. Harry Eastwood]

What the hell has happened to the Conservative Party? In the party leadership elections of 1990, Douglas Hurd was widely ridiculed as a "toff". His background at Eton and Oxford was a positive disadvantage as the - definitely less experienced and arguably far less accomplished - John Major swept to power. Nowadays, it seems that Eton and Oxford are prerequisites for a role on the Conservative front bench.

I realise that the Labour Party have made an awful lot of people very angry and have hardly set the world alight recently, but let's take a closer look at the alternative:



Come on. Seriously?

Who do you think is best qualified to run the economy? Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling, two men who have been credited by the leaders of the major world powers with taking decisive action to save the world's economy*, or the man in the far right of that picture above - George Osbourne?

* Let's not probe that claim too deeply, but it is something that people are saying....

For the record, the other people in that photograph are:

1: THE HON LUKE BRIDGEMAN - Second son of the 3rd Viscount Bridgeman, he became heir after the death of his older brother. Works for a private equity firm.

2: NAT ROTHSCHILD - The only son of Jacob Rothschild and heir to a £750million fortune. After turning his back on alcohol he made a second fortune in his own right with the £11bn Atticus hedge fund. Links to Peter Mandelson and Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska under scrutiny.

3: IFTY RIAZ - According to the Daily Mail, "Believed to have moved abroad". But he was always the odd one out in this company, eh?

4: GEORGE LATHAM - Sandhurst. Now a senior fund manager of Henderson's Global Care Income fund.

5: BARON LUPUS VON MALTZAHN - From a prominent German family. A relative of Baron Bruno Schroder, owner of Schroder private bank. Now a senior manager for a consulting firm and lives in London.

6: LORD ALEXANDER HOPE - Son of the 4th Marquess of Linlithgow, his family seat is Hopetoun House, near Edinburgh. Left merchant banking to enter the art world. Now director of UK business development for Christies.

7: GEORGE OSBORNE - The Shadow Chancellor is the eldest son of baronet Sir Peter Osborne, the founder of wallpaper merchants, Osborne & Little

I'm all too aware that similar photos were taken of some of my contemporaries at school.... But I can't imagine (or would care to imagine) any of those people running the country either.

**shudder**

I guess we get the politicians we deserve, eh? I make it a point of principle to vote in every election, but this time around, I'm really struggling to know what to do: I'm not sure I want to vote Labour, but it will be a cold day in hell before I vote for this shower of shit. It's probably just as well that my vote is likely to be utterly redundant as Ken Clarke holds onto his extremely safe seat.....

It's been said before, but the Labour Party are likely to have plenty of time to rue the fact that Tony Blair's greatest legacy may well turn out to be David Cameron.....

But then again......as Tony Blair's background is Durham Chorister School, Fettes College and Oxford University, you might well wonder what the difference between them is anyway.

2010 election? Different result, same old shit.

Grrr.

...not until the next time

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War. At 04:45 on that morning seventy years ago, German tanks, infantry and cavalry penetrated Polish territory on several fronts with five armies and a total of something like 1.5 million troops. Soon after that, German planes bombarded Polish cities. The Germans made swift progress in penetrating the heavily outnumbered defences, attacking the cities of Katowice, Krakow, Tczew and Tunel with incendiary bombs. Air raids on Warsaw began at 0900. The first shots of the war were fired, and England and France declared war on Germany two days later.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel led the commemorations:

"I remember the 6 million Jews and all others who suffered, who died a terrible death in German concentration and extermination camps. I remember the many millions of people who had to lose their lives in their fight and in the resistance against Germany. I remember all those, those innocents who suffered, who died from hunger, cold and disease, from the violence of war and its consequences; I remember the 60 million people who lost their lives through this war that Germany started. There are no words to adequately describe the suffering of this war and the Holocaust. I bow to the victims"

As an historian, I flinch slightly at the idea that Germany was absolutely and solely responsible for the war. Yes, clearly they fired the first shots, but it's simplistic to suggest that it was this naked act of aggression that triggered the conflagration. It's as simplistic, in fact, as suggesting that it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that started the First World War. What cannot and should not be denied, however, is the shocking impact that the war had on so many lives: on every side.

Some of the language we use on these occasions unsettles me though. Here's Obama:

"On behalf of the American people, I wish to join the voices commemorating this anniversary today, and express admiration and gratitude to those who stood on the side of freedom and hope, giving an example of spiritual superiority over tyranny".

On the face of it, I suppose that sounds okay, but it's a prime example of history being written by the winners. Of course, when he says "the side of freedom and hope", he really means "on America's side". "Spiritual superiority"? Really? Are we so sure of that? Did the winning side kill sufficiently fewer innocent people to feel able to assume the moral high ground in the matter? Are we really confident that we did absolutely everything we did to rid the world of Nazism from the first moment we heard rumour of the deathcamps? Really?

Actually, that's another comfort we like to take, isn't it? That Hitler was a uniquely evil man in history and that we can hold him and the Nazi party entirely responsible for the war and attendant atrocities. Angela Merkel is acknowledging this in her speech above: the only way that Germany has been allowed to play a part in the world is if they openly and frequently speak of the remorse and guilt they must always bear for the war (did we learn nothing from the War Guilt Clause?). But you can't pin everything on the Nazis, can you? Who were the Nazis, after all, but people like me and you? We don't much like to think about the bureacratisation of evil; the way that ordinary people wore uniforms, stamped identity cards and processed people onto the trains that took them to their deaths. When people say that something like the rise of National Socialism can never happen again, or that it could never happen here, I don't believe them. If time and circumstances are right, it absolutely could happen again; it could happen anywhere. It might already have started.

I went to watch"Inglourious Basterds" on Sunday night. It's had some terrible reviews but, for what it's worth, I thought it was pretty good, with Tarantino belying his reputation and deftly producing a work of some power and, more surprisingly, subtlety. I thought Christoph Waltz was especially good as SS Colonel Hans Landa, giving us a glimpse at how "evil" can just as easily be contained in the body of a mild-seeming man with a silly pipe as it can in that of a frothing dictator with a toothbrush moustache.

As I left the cinema, talking these and other things over with my companions, we stepped out into the street. It was now after 11pm on a Sunday night, but as it was a Bank Holiday weekend, so Broad Street was still busy. My attention was soon grabbed by the sight of a gang of drunken men walking down the middle of the street, each one with both arms raised to the sky and fists clenched. As they walked, clearing their way through the busy street, they were screaming as loudly as they could in celebration of Nottingham Forest's 3-2 win over local rivals Derby County, some 36 hours before. Even amongst the usual detritus clogging the streets of an average English city centre at closing time, they were an intimidating presence. The cause is very different, of course, but I couldn't help but mark the similarities between this kind of tribalism and the kind harnessed by the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany. You only have to look back to the West Ham v Millwall game the week before to how football tribalism can sometimes lead to violence. Forget the game, these people have chosen to define themselves by the club they support, and this then defines their relationship with other people, especially people who support other clubs. Not so very different to the Brown Shirts.

We are right to mark this anniversary, and right to remember the deaths and sacrifices of so many people in the Second World War. Of course we are. If we are to truly learn the lessons we can draw from the Second World War, though, then perhaps we need to stop pretending that Hitler and the Nazis were anything other than just human beings like you and like me, or that something like that could never happen again or was somehow unique to Germany. Look around you: you can see it everywhere.

you've got to dance, little liar...

I woke up yesterday morning to the distinctly unwelcome sounds of John Prescott holding forth on climate change. I have an unpleasant feeling that he watched Al Gore on "An Inconvenient Truth" and had the dawning realisation that washed-up deputies do sometimes have the chance to completely relaunch themselves and to restore their reputations with the public. Instead of finding his own topic, it appears that Prescott decided that the simplest thing to do would be to nick Gore's idea and bang on about the environment. Who knows, perhaps it could make him credible again. Relevant. Cool, even.

To be honest, I can't really remember what he said. Frankly I was too astonished. This is a man who, more than any other, symbolises the fall of the Labour Party: he's a former ship's steward and trade union activist. His presence in Blair's front bench personified the link between old Labour's working class roots and New Labour's modernising middle classes represented by the likes of Tony Blair. Unfortunately he was apparently unable to keep his hand out of the cookie jar, his fist to himself or his dick in his trousers. To hear John "two jags" Prescott lecturing me on climate change was quite a difficult pill to swallow.... particularly as he seemed to be trying to lay claim to founding the whole movement, banging on about how he swam up the Thames to present some sort of petition to Thatcher. Very impressive, but given that, since then, this man has used his official car to travel a few hundred yards down the road, it's not really very credible. He went on to say how he abhorred violence and cautioned the Climate Camp protestors not to go down that road. Right, advice on non-violence from a man who once punched out a guy who threw an egg at him. Spare us. And whilst you're at it, you might like to modify your tone of smug self-righteousness too.

Whilst he's busy reinventing himself, we learn that Prescott has apparently also become something of a web 2.0 icon, although he admits that he sometimes dictates his Tweets.... because, y'know, 140 characters is a bit of a chore. I'm sure there's lots more to the new John Prescott, but frankly I've long since stopped caring enough to find out.

Do these people think we're stupid? Do they think that just because they say something with authority, it makes them authoritative? Do they think that we've all got the memory of a goldfish and will magically forget all of their past indiscretions as they speak, mesmerised by the magic in their voices? Of course they do. Of course they think we're stupid. Perhaps we are stupid. Why else would we give these people, who long ago sold their principles and their ideals down the river in the pursuit of power, a chance to wake me up in the morning with their fatuous waffle and insincere bandwagon jumping bullshit.

there is no future in England's dreaming....

I'm madly busy at work at the moment. As well as all the normal cobblers I have to deal with, I've been travelling around the country and doing things like work-shadowing, interviewing and holding workshops. I've been to all kinds of fascinating places like Stevenage, Harlow, Hitchin, East Midlands Airport and Birmingham. I was in London yesterday and I'm in Edinburgh on Monday. Whilst I suppose it's good to get away from my desk, I haven't picked up my voicemails in a week and my email inbox long ago crossed the size limit threshold. Every outgoing email I send is now accompanied by some dire warning about how I really need to get my act together. Before I go to Glastonbury on Wednesday morning, there are documents to be written, estimates to be chased and management summaries to be delivered.

The idea that I might love all of this stuff to perhaps think about working longer hours for less money, or even working for free seems absolutely laughable. I realise that times are hard, but how on earth can a well-established company like BA really consider that a reasonable request to make? The Chief Exec is setting the example, I see, by giving up a month's salary. £61k, apparently. With a salary like that, I'm guessing he can afford it more than most. How about he and his fellow board members work for nothing and we use their salaries to prop up the company, not just those of the workers at the bottom of the pile? What a terrible pressure to put on your staff, many of whom have already been threatened with compulsory redundancies. Work for free, they're essentially saying, and you might have a job in the future. Refuse to work for free and you may well find yourself without a job at all. Presumably there's a very real chance that you could work for free and still find yourself without a job if things don't improve. If the people in my office got offered that kind of a deal, how many people do you think wouldn't be spending that time they're working for no money to actively use company resources to look for a job that actually did pay them some money? I know I would be. Can you imagine if your boss sat you down for a performance review and span you all the usual old bollocks about consistency forum scores and capability indexes and your performance against a few arbitrary targets before scoring you as "approaching expectations"? If you weren't being paid, why would anyone put up with that kind of crap? How would they expect you to score them in the Great Place To Work Survey? What kind of Legendary Customer Care would you be providing? What kind of feedback would the Staff Forum be collecting to present to the curious and apparently very-interested-in-what-we-think Executive?

That said, I suppose I give my company hefty chunks of my life for free now: I only get paid for 37.5 hours work a week, and yet I regularly turn in 50 hour plus weeks and work 12 hour days. Maybe that's not so different? Why do I do it? Good question. I don't think it's for love of my job. I think it's because I'm driven to want to do as good a job as I can. I haven't made as much of my career as I might have, for lots of reasons, but I do try, and I do hold out the possibility that one day it might all come to glorious fruition. It's frustrating as hell, but it's challenging and it pays me relatively well (albeit not as much as I believe I'm worth). If I wasn't being paid at all though, what's my motivation to bother putting in a full day, nevermind any of that extra time? None. No future. Dead man walking.

In an environment where several of my friends have now been made redundant over the last few months, I know that I'm lucky to have a job at all. I'm not feeling so lucky that I would work for nothing though. No chance.

Work? Proper bobbins.

Incidentally, it's a bit of a negative spiral this, isn't it? BA get into trouble because not enough people are flying with them, but who wants to book a flight with an airline that isn't paying it's staff and looks like it's on the verge of going out of business? Not me. I think I'd rather fly with those bastards who would charge you for breathing if they thought they could get away with it. It's not a happy place to be, is it? If, by some miracle, BA do manage to turn it all around, do you think that they'll show the appropriate levels of gratitude to the poor bloody infantry who saw them through by working for free? Not bloody likely. That's not really how capitalism works, is it?

Do you think they're still paying expenses? I'd love to see what their executives are claiming as they ask their staff to take pay cuts...... I bet they've all got immaculate moats, and even in the grips of an economic crisis, I imagine their ducks are well housed.

Pah.

Perhaps we should have a fund-raiser for them? Get the BBC to dump Pudsey and the needy children and do it for British businesses going down the toilet? Shall we write a strongly worded letter to the Jon Gaunt outlining our thoughts?

Are you with me?

we wonder if the thunder is ever really going to begin.....

I'm not a political expert, so I'm not going to go on about this... but I have three things to say about the recent European election results and the subsequent political upheaval:

1) It makes me sick to my stomach to hear the newly returned MEP for the British National Party, Nick Griffin, talking smugly on the radio about the "ethnically British" - meaning, moronically and transparently, white people. However, it also makes me feel pretty ill to hear Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, the same people who sent me this flyer, trying to distance themselves from the BNP, as if UKIP themselves were somehow an acceptable mainstream party. It's a pretty sorry state of affairs that either of these parties return MEPs at all, never mind that the BNP appear to have made an electoral breakthrough and UKIP pushed the Labour party into third place in the polls. I see that UKIP actually lost a member in the East Midlands constituency - where I voted - but that the BNP polled 8.7% of the vote (up 2.1% on last time). They didn't get an MEP this time, but they're not far off it. This is exactly why reasonable, intelligent people need to go and vote. Even in European elections.

2) I'm not sure that I thought it was possible, but I'm actually starting to feel a little sorry for Gordon Brown. Sure, he has his faults, but his party is starting to remind me of nothing less than the Conservative Party who tried so hard and so poisonously to get rid of John Major before the 1992 1997 General Election. We have members of the Cabinet quitting as polls close in the elections (although clearly having briefed the newspapers beforehand), we have ministers busy singing the Prime Minster's praises one evening and then quitting in high dudgeon the very next day when they don't get the promotion to the Cabinet that they feel they deserve..... and we have the Labour party as a whole apparently seriously trying to decide if they should keep Gordon Brown as a leader or try someone else in advance of the General Election. The funny thing is that, unlike the Conservative Party, the Labour Party seem almost completely incapable of back-stabbing and conspiracy. Apparently the Parliamentary Party is currently passing emails around stating their desire for a new leader, but that they don't really know what to do with them once they've signed them. FWIW, I think they'd be mad to think a change of leadership will do them any good at all, although quite why anyone thinks David Cameron is a valid alternative Prime Minister defeats me too. Really?

3) ...and whilst we're on the subject of the Labour Leadership, Tony Blair is looking luckier by the day, isn't he? Well, let's not forget that he promised at the last election that he would see the country through the whole term... only to quit whilst the going was still good. Let's not forget too that he kept his Catholicism a secret whilst in office and used his religious beliefs as his compass for taking this country into an unjustified war that we're still fighting. He even went so far as to suggest that "This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation." How arrogant! I'm glad his religious faith gave him the certainty he needed that we were in the right. I'm still far from convinced. Still, why should he care? He's also busy coining it in from bankers like JP Morgan and Zurich (£7m a year) and on the US University lecture circuit ($250,000 for a 90 minute lecture) as he watches - no doubt with some amusement - as his old mate Gordon Brown crashes and burns, perhaps taking the country with him. Think this has got nothing to do with you, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair? Think again.

Pah.

Lovely weather we've been having though, eh? (well... except for the fact that it pissed it down all weekend, but it's been nice today, so....).

past the reefs of greed....

There are elections taking place across England today. Local Council elections and European Parliament Elections, anyway. It's not a General Election or anything like that, and we're not going to wake up tomorrow morning with a new Prime Minister or anything (worst luck). Still, in its own way, it's an important day. No day where you are asked to exercise your democratic mandate is entirely worthless, right? It's a tremendous privilege; one denied to millions of people across the world. It's a privilege we feel strongly enough about to try to impose by force in places like Iraq and Afghanistan......

It's also the first chance we humble electorate get to stick it to the grubbing, venal bastards who run this country.

In yesterday's Guardian, George Monbiot put forward that:

"...even in a first-past-the-post poll (such as the UK's notoriously unfair parliamentary elections) voting Green is the least wasteful decision you can make."

But how so?

"Look, for example, at how each of the two main parties desperately flails around for an explanation when it loses an election, blaming first one factor then another. They know that people voted against them, but have only the haziest idea of why that was (in Labour's case this time, it will be a little clearer). Vote Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, and you might help to send someone to parliament. But they won't have a clear idea of what you want them to do when they get there. But if you vote Green, you tell the political class exactly what you want. It's plainly not a tactical vote. There is no Old Green and New Green – the party's policies haven't changed a great deal over the years. The Greens aren't old enough or big enough to have inspired the kind of blind inter-generational loyalty that has helped to keep Labour afloat. You are saying, unmistakably, that you want action on the environment and social justice."

That's an interesting point. The recent expenses scandals that have dragged on for the last few weeks have cast our elected officials in an appalling light. People want to punish them; to let them know that it's not acceptable for them to have their moat cleaned, their duck houses built and their mortgages paid by the tax payer. European and Local elections are often where this kind of punishment happens: they're simply not important enough to most people for a protest vote to feel like a wasted vote. Somehow a General Election feels like a much bigger deal. Actually, in my constituency at least, the reverse is true. I like in an area where Ken Clarke is the nailed on certainty to remain my MP for as long as he continues to stand for election. A vote for any party here is pretty much as good as any other and no-one but the Conservatives stands a chance of winning the seat. The Local Elections and the European Elections are different. For starters, I get to vote for more than one candidate, and more than one candidate will be elected. This opens things up a bit. It's entirely possible that my vote my make a tangible difference today.... especially if, as the polls suggest, "Other Parties" are currently running level with the Conservative Party on 30%.

So what are my choices?

Well, in the European Election I have:

> British National Party - "British National Party - Protecting British Jobs"
> Christian Party - "Proclaiming Christ's Lordship"
> Conservative Party
> English Democrats Party - "English Democrats - Putting England First!"
> Jury Team - "Democracy, Accountability, Transparency".
> Liberal Democrats
> No2EU: Yes to Democracy
> Pro-Democracy: Libertas.eu
> Socialist Labour Party (Leader Arthur Scargill)
> The Green Party
> The Labour Party
> United Kingdom First
> UK Independence Party (UKIP)

Four candidates on each ticket. Choose one party and make your mark.

Eliminate the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems and what have you got? Some very scary choices indeed (including at least one prepared to incontinently use the exclamation mark). People wanting to punish the main parties are going to be seriously considering voting for the BNP, UKIP and (WTF?) the Christian Party.

My choice in the Council Elections:

> Conservative Party
> UK Independence Party
> Liberal Democrat
> Labour
> Green Party

Two candidates to each party. Pick two of the candidates.

Hmm. On balance, I'm with George Monbiot. I don't agree with the Green Party on everything, but at the moment I'd far rather we pushed a green agenda than a racist one. As for the major parties, do they really think they've earned my vote? Yes, it's a protest of sorts, but there is no way on earth that I wasn't going to vote. This country is many things, but as long as sensible, intelligent people continue to go and vote, then there's some hope. If we don't vote because we're a bit cheesed off with the major parties, then the BNP have already won.

You know what really made my day though? In the school hall where I cast my vote, behind the ladies who handed me my ballot papers, was a montage made by a class of eight year olds. It was a summary of Richard Wagner's "Das Rheingold" with pictures of the dwarfs and kings and suchlike. I bet potential UKIP and BNP voters must have loved that. Me? I love the fact that I live somewhere where 8 year olds are taught about Wagner.

high apple pie in the sky hopes...

Look, I know it's a great day and everything, but as the 44th President of the United States of America gets down to business, do you mind if I get something off my chest?

WTF is "The Audacity of Hope"?

The "Audacity" bit is simple enough:

au·dac·ity (ô das′ə tē)

noun

1. bold courage; daring
2. shameless or brazen boldness; insolence
3. pl. audacities -·ties; an audacious act or remark

I'm assuming that, in this context, Obama is talking about courage or daring and not about brazen boldness or insolence.

The "Hope" seems pretty clear too:

hope (hōp)

noun

1. a feeling that what is wanted is likely to happen; desire accompanied by expectation
2. the thing that one has a hope for
3. a reason for hope
4. a person or thing on which one may base some hope
5. Archaic trust; reliance

OK. So we have bold courage and we have desire accompanied by expectation. Fine. What about the little word that joins the two together?

Now, here's where I have a problem. "Of". Is that really the right word? Does he really mean "of"? The Audacity OF hope? Is that right?

of (uv)

1. from; specif.,
--a. derived or coming from; men of Ohio
--b. resulting from; caused by; through to die of fever
--c. proceeding as a product from; by the poems of Poe
--d. resulting from an operation or process involving the product of 3 and 4
--e. at a distance from or apart from
--f. deprived, relieved, or separated from; robbed of his money
--g. from the whole, or total number; one of her hats
--h. distinguished as by excellence; from among the greatest Presidents
--i. distinguished as the best, most important; from among the holy of holies
--j. made from; using as its material (a specified substance); a sheet of paper
2. is what was done, expressed, etc. by how wise of her!
3. belonging to; the pages of a book, that dog of his
4.
--a. having; possessing a man of property
--b. containing a bag of nuts
5.
--a. that is; having the designation of; a height of six feet
--b. as a way to characterize; a prince of a fellow
6. with (something specified) as object, goal, etc; a reader of books
7.
--a. having as a distinguishing quality or attribute; a year of plenty
--b. as characterized with respect to; quick of mind, hard of heart
8. concerning; about; with reference to think well of me
9. set aside for; dedicated to a day of rest
10.
--a. during of late years
--b. Informal on or at (a specified day, time, etc.); he came of a Friday
11. before: used in telling time ten minutes of nine
12. Archaic by rejected of men

Etymology: ME <> L ab (see ab-), Gr apo-

The bold courage derived from desire accompanied by expectation?

I'm not sure about you, but I think that's got a slightly uncomfortable ring for such an accomplished orator?

How about The Audacity TO Hope?

to (to̵̅o̅)

1.
--a. in the direction of; toward a turn to the left, traveling to Pittsburgh
--b. in the direction of; it fell to the ground
2. as far as; to the extent of wet to the skin, starved to death
3.
-- a. toward or into the condition of; to grow to manhood, a rise to fame
--b. so as to result in; sentenced to ten years in prison
4.
-- a. on, onto, against, at, next to, etc.: a house to the right, cheek to cheek
--b. in a (specified) relation; with lines parallel to each other
--c. in front of; face to face
5.
--a. until; no parking from four to six
--b. before; at ten to six
6. for the purpose of; for come to dinner
7.
--a. as concerns; with respect to; to leave oneself open to attack
--b. in the opinion of; it seems good to me
8. producing, causing, or resulting in; to his amazement, torn to pieces
9. along with; accompanied by; dance to the music
10. being the proper appurtenance, possession, or attribute of; of the key to the house
11. as compared with; as against a score of 7 to 1, superior to the others
12.
--a. in agreement, correspondence, or conformity with; not to her taste
--b. as a reaction, or in response, toward; the dog came to his whistle
13. constituting; in or for (each) four quarts to a gallon
14. as far as the limit; of moderate to high in price
15. with (a specified person or thing) as the recipient of the verb: give the book to her
16. in honor of; a toast to your success
17. by: used in some passive constructions a person known to me
18. at or in (a specified place) [to have someone to the house for dinner]
19. Dialectal with (a specified crop) a field planted to corn

Etymology: ME <> L (quan)do, when, then, do(nec), until

adverb

1. forward; his hat is on wrong side to
2. in the normal or desired direction, position, or condition; shut the door
3. into a state of consciousness; the boxer came to
4. at hand; we were close to when it happened

The bold courage so as to result in desire accompanied by expectation? Is that better?

As the originator of this phrase is now the most powerful man in the world, is it not all the more important that we clarify this?

Or am I missing something?

god is a concept by which we can measure our pain....

I really shouldn't waste my time getting irritated by stuff like this, but....

**deep breath**

Remember the atheist bus advertising campaign?



You know, the advertising campaign sponsored by the British Humanist Association from an original idea by Ariane Sherine, who had been appalled by some of the religious messages she saw on buses. I'll quote her directly:

"Yesterday I walked to work and saw not one, but two London buses with the question: "When the Son of Man comes, will He find Faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8). It seems you wait ages for a bus with an unsettling Bible quote, then two come along at once....There was also a web address on the ad, and when I visited the site, hoping for a straight answer to their rather pressing question, I received the following warning for anyone who doesn't "accept the word of Jesus on the cross": "You will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell. Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire which was prepared for the devil and all his angels (demonic spirits)" (Matthew 25:41). Lots to look forward to, then. Now, if I wanted to run a bus ad saying "Beware – there is a giant lion from London Zoo on the loose!" or "The 'bits' in orange juice aren't orange but plastic – don't drink them or you'll die!" I think I might be asked to show my working and back up my claims. But apparently you don't need evidence to run an ad suggesting we'll all face the ire of the son of man when he comes, then link to a website advocating endless pain for atheists."

Determined to do something about this, Sherine then set about raising enough money to run some atheist adverts on buses... and aren't they a whole lot more uplifting than the usual crap you see on the side of a bus. It makes me smile. It's not saying that there definitely isn't a God, it's just saying that maybe you should be worrying about something else instead.

Richard Dawkins, as you might imagine, and as pictured on the bus above, thought this was a brilliant idea, but so did lots of other people, and they soon raised £140,000 to run the campaign as widely as possible.

Brilliant. You'd have to be completely humourless not to see the funny side, wouldn't you?

Oh, apparently The Christian Voice has complained to the Advertising Standards Agency. Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, said:

"There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world. But there is scant evidence on the other side, so I think the advertisers are really going to struggle to show their claim is not an exaggeration or inaccurate, as the ASA code puts it."

So you're suggesting that there is more evidence for the existence of God than there is evidence that God doesn't exist? Where exactly?

Well, the complaint goes on, "According to growing numbers of scientists, the laws and constants of nature are so "finely-tuned," and so many "coincidences" have occurred to allow for the possibility of life, the universe must have come into existence through intentional planning and intelligence. In fact, this "fine-tuning" is so pronounced, and the "coincidences" are so numerous, many scientists have come to espouse "The Anthropic Principle," which contends that the universe was brought into existence intentionally for the sake of producing mankind. Even those who do not accept The Anthropic Principle admit to the "fine-tuning" and conclude that the universe is "too contrived" to be a chance event...."

The Anthropic Principle? What about the infinite monkey theorem that states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. That being so, why is it so hard to believe that, in an infinite universe, it might be possible for a series of absurdly unlikely accidents and coincidences to happen and create life? Or is God an infinite monkey? Why am I even attempting a rational argument?

I'd go on with the detail of their complaint, but I'm rather losing the will to live. You can read the whole thing here, but it cites various scientists, including Sir Fred Hoyle and Stephen Hawking, as apparently all being forced to conclude that God does, indeed, obviously exist.

Bollocks.

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.

Actually, that might just be the funniest thing I've ever heard.

As I drove home this evening, there was a big sign outside the church just around the corner boldly proclaiming "JESUS IS HOPE". No caveat there, is there? Jesus isn't probably hope, he is HOPE. Definitely.

The atheist message was originally intended to be "There is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The Advertising Standards Agency would only allow them to run the campaign if they added the word "probably". Possessing previously unheralded metaphysical authority, the ASA determined that the advert had to leave room for doubt, and they insisted that it acknowledged that there is "a grey area".

So if the atheists are forced to put in a caveat, how come the christians aren't?

Anyway, why are christians getting so agitated about this? Why do they feel so threatened by atheists? Why are they so interested in anyone "proving" whether God exists or not? I thought the whole point of their religion, and the source of all their smugness and immunity to rational debate, was that it was based upon FAITH. Not hard evidence. After all, there can be no hard evidence that a made up mystical, all powerful being exists, can there? The whole thing is based upon the blind belief that there is something guiding our miserable lives and that there might be somewhere better for us to go once we had died, as long as we'd lived a good and worthy life. Why should they give a shit about proof? And actually, why should they feel that they're a special case, somehow worthy of special treatment, with a right to leave things like copies of their hubristic and mostly fictional propaganda material in every hotel drawer? Who do they think they are? God's chosen people?*

I realise it's a waste of time being angry about this, but I simply cannot help myself. I pride myself on being a rational, tolerant and reasonably intelligent human being, and I find this kind of bullshit infuriating. Everyone has the right to believe what they want, of course they do, and I know that lots of people draw huge comfort and solace from their faith. I also realise that the silent majority of christians probably aren't in the least bit worried or threatened by these atheist adverts. It's a small but vocal and high profile minority that are kicking up this fuss, and it's them that have annoyed me. Why do they feel the need to inflict themselves on everyone? Why can't they respect anyone else's views or opinions when they don't agree with their own? Why do they have to be so fucking self-righteous about everything?

GAH!

*ah no, they're busy bombing schools and shelling civilians at the moment, aren't they?

don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall...

I think it's fair to say that New York is fairly pleased about the results of the recent presidential election. It's a Democratic stronghold anyway, of course, but if the number of Barack Obama t-shirts, posters and button badges on sale are anything to go by, then the Empire State is very taken with the man who stands to become the 44th President of the United States of America. Or they could just be really astute traders and know where the market is at the moment. Most likely it's a combination of the two, but I got a real sense of a genuine optimism on the air, even in cynical old Gotham itself.

America is at a crossroads.

...which is why I very much liked this particular piece of vandalism/street art (*delete as appropriate) on a pedestrian crossing on the corner of President Street in Brooklyn. I love the image of the green man, the symbol of motion and of progress, marching forwards whilst holding an Obama placard. The placement on this particular street is, of course, perfect.

After eight years of immobility, America may be about to "walk" forwards again.

over the moor, take me to the moor....

As you might imagine, having a job that entails going to an office means that, even if I had the inclination, I wouldn't have much opportunity to watch daytime TV. I don't exactly rush in the morning, but I'm almost always at my desk by a little after 9am with my first americano of the day. Today was different: I had an appointment for a checkup at the dentists at ten past nine, and wasn't actually seen until after half past. This meant that I had ample opportunity to sit in the waiting room and to watch the end of GMTV (Lorraine Kelly talking to someone about a green tea diet) and to catch the beginning of the Jeremy Kyle.

I'm aware of Jeremy Kyle, and I know that he hosts one of those shows that is a pale shadow of the Jerry Springer show and the kind of programme that tries to stir up controversy and gets its kicks by raking over the ashes of other people's lives in the name of entertainment. I only watched about ten minutes, but it was still more than I could stomach. The theme of the show was based around a young couple. The girl was a couple of months pregant and was convinced that her partner was no good and was sleeping with other people behind her back. The boyfriend in turn wanted to take a lie detector test to prove that he wasn't lying. So far, so tawdry. It turned out that the stress of it all had driven the girl to drink, and she was downing two litres of cider. That was all the information that Kyle needed to pause the show, climb up onto the highest of moral high-horses, and to lecture the girl that she had NO RIGHT to be drinking when she was pregnant. THAT WAS FACT. She had TO STOP. It wasn't so much what he was saying, as the tone of vast supposed superiority he used to deliver it, to sycophantic applause from the audience. Once that was out of the way, we could meet the suitably pasty and incoherent boyfriend and hear his side of the story. Kyle wound him up, of course. He assumed a sort of crouching position in front of the couple on the stage, and fired in provocative question after provocative question. Eventually, the guy onstage started to shout, and he stood up and moved towards Kyle. Kyle stayed crouched and still exuded superiority as security came onto the stage. I was called up to the dentist before I saw the results of the lie detector test, but before I left I heard the boyfriend confess, before being strapped into the machine, that he had been unfaithful once... but he stressed it was a one off, as if that made things any better.

My teeth are fine, but my faith in humanity has taken something of a knock. I couldn't decide which was worse: Kyle's reptillian hunt for entertainment from someone else's tragedies, or the fact that this couple seemed to genuinely think that the answers to their problems could be found in a daytime TV studio.

My mood wasn't improved by the news either: a three month old baby and his two year old brother were found stabbed to death in their home in Manchester, with the crime having apparently been committed by their own mother. This story comes hard on the heels of the horrible story of "Baby P", the 17 month old child who was found dead in his blood spattered cot in August last year. Three people will be sentenced next month after two men were convicted on Tuesday of "causing or allowing the death of a child or vulnerable person". During the course of his short life, "Baby P" was horribly abused. The post mortem revealed eight broken ribs and a broken back, with another area of bleeding around the spine at neck level. There were numerous bruises, cuts and abrasions, including a deep tear to his left ear lobe, which had been pulled away from his head. There were severe lacerations to the top of his head, including a large gouge which could have been caused by a dog bite. He had blackened finger and toenails, with several nails missing. The middle finger of his right hand was without a nail and its tip was also missing, as if it had been sliced off. He had a tear to the strip of skin between the middle of the upper lip and the gum, which had partially healed. One of his front teeth had also been knocked out and was found in his colon. He had swallowed it. Horrible. It's almost beyond comprehension. Worst of all is the revelation that the child and his parents were visited 60 times over eight months by social workers, police and health professionals. Sixty times.

In October, at exactly the same time that the nation was working itself up into a froth about Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross and really important issues like that, a man was convicted of murdering his malnourished 16 month old daughter by placing her over his knee and snapping her spine in two following months of painful abuse. The prosecution at the trial noted how the child's injuries indicated she must have been in extreme pain for weeks prior to death, and the policeman in charge of the investigation was quoted as saying that "the catalogue of horrific injuries have been some of the worst I have seen in 30 years of policing". The mother of the child, and this is the bit that's really stayed with me, was given a suspended sentence after admitting to child cruelty, but was said to be in the bottom 1% of intelligence levels for this country.

We live in a world that can sometimes seem unbearably brutal. Do we really need "entertainment" like that provided by Jeremy Kyle and his ilk? Or perhaps you'd prefer to watch a celebrity having a breakdown in public, like Kerry Katona the other week on This Morning? Well, "I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" is back on soon, so perhaps we'll get to see someone falling apart at the seams on that. Perhaps it will be one of Kyle's predecessors, Robert Kilroy-Silk.

We disdain the Ancient Romans for the brutality of their chosen entertainment. From our lofty perch of irreproachable moral superiority, we wonder how they could have been considered civilised when they got their kicks from feeding people to wild animals and to watching men hack each other to pieces in the arena.

Are we really so different? We're screaming for blood every bit as loudly as those audiences in the Flavian Amphitheatre, and our society is every bit as morally corrupted as theirs.

fox in the snow....

On the way into work this morning, I drove behind a car with a couple of bumper-stickers. The first was entirely text-based and said:

"You keep your bullshit in Westminster
....and we'll keep ours in the countryside"

I assumed this was something produced by the Countryside Alliance and was intended to be a statement about how the urban metropolitan elite based in parliament was passing legislation on the countryside, most notably by banning hunting with hounds - issues that the knew nothing about and had no business meddling with. Do you see what they did there? they've made a humorous comparison between the "bullshit" spoken by the members of Parliament in Westminster with the actual bullshit produced out of the back end of a male cow. Now, the last time I looked, the whole point of a parliamentary democracy was that every constituency, including those in rural areas, returned a candidate to Westminster with a mandate to represent them. I was not aware that the countryside, or any other part of the nation, was somehow beyond the reach of our law making body. Perhaps that's all the proof you need that I'm irredeemably urban.

There was another sticker too. This one was more subtle. On the left hand side, it featured a picture of a woman on horseback wearing a bright red coat - the garb of someone about to go and kill a fox with dogs. The text underneath said "Now you hate her". On the right hand side there was a picture of someone - presumably the same person - dressed as a nurse. The caption underneath read "Now you don't".

Ah, so what you're saying is that the same people who go out and kill foxes might also hold down highly respected jobs in society. Excuse me for being dim, but what the fuck does that prove? Harold Shipman was a well-respected family doctor, and he's still estimated to have killed 250 people (and no foxes). The fact that he had a respectable job doesn't somehow mitigate the fact that he was a serial killer, does it?

The sticker went on to say that 59% of the population was in favour of fox-hunting. Really? Even if that's true and not some hopelessly optimistic made up statistic, what exactly does that prove? Parliament - the people who we elected to represent us - voted to ban it, and so it is against the law to do it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the law is just or correct, but it is still the law. Protest by all means, as that too is your democratic right, but frankly if you want to persuade me that it's a good idea, then you're going to have to come up with some better arguments. Me, I think it's cruel and unnecessary, and I happen to believe that the ban is no more an infringement of your civil liberties than the law that stops me giving you a slap for being such a blood-thirsty idiot. Actually, I'm genuinely curious about when we decided that our civil liberties were frozen in stone and thus have a sense of when they are being infringed. We don't have a written constitution like the USA, so there's not really any one document that we can refer to as our basic rights as citizens of this country. So how do we actually know when our civil liberties are being infringed? Perhaps some peasants had bumper stickers on their handcarts protesting about Magna Carta? Maybe some of the nobility rode around on Parliament Green waving placards protesting about the parliamentary deposition of Richard II?*

Fox hunting has been banned in most of the UK since 2005, so this is old news really, but what was it Oscar Wilde said? Fox hunting is "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."

Still true, apparently.

--

* I actually wrote a dissertation on the depositions of Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI as part of my Masters degree. In the main, this told the story of the rise of Parliament (as increasingly this was the body used by the usurpers to legitimise their own reigns, thus inadvertently increasing parliament's power as they reigned only through Parliamentary consent). The dissertation also touched upon how there was an intangible, but still very real sense of "kingship" - something that every king was measured against. There is a fair amount of evidence that even the lowliest citizen in Medieval England had a feeling for whether or not they were being governed justly, and usurpations were only tolerated when there was a sense that the king being deposed had failed to live up to this unwritten ideal. I also learnt some fascinating things about how the bodies of deposed kings were usually buried on the quiet and away from London, but that the sons of the usurpers, as the first act of their reigns almost always disinterred the bodies and gave them a proper burial in Westminster Abbey... and they did this because the ceremonial funeral of the old king before the coronation of the new king was a key part of the symbolic transfer of this mystical "kingship" from the old king to the new king.... a tacit acceptance that in spite of Parliamentary assent, the usurpers were never quite legitimate in the eyes of the general population. Written constitutions? Who needs them when you've got a history like that, eh?

new car, caviar, four star daydream....

The US Senate has now approved a new version of a $700bn (£380bn) rescue plan for the troubled US financial system.



Mortimer, we're back in business.....

(although maybe we should use an Irish bank this time, eh? Just in case?)

black horse apocalypse...

They can't prove a damn thing, of course, but it's widely thought on Wall Street that the current financial crisis was initially precipitated by someone on the Commodities Markets monkeying about with Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice (FCOJ) futures....

...or something scarily similar to that, anyway.

Winthorpe? Billy Ray? Just look what a mess you've made of the global economy.....

Beef jerky?

the reckoning....

As I'm sure you will have noticed, today is the seventh anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks on 11th September 2001. Nearly 3,000 people died that day: terrorists, passengers on the four hijacked planes, people in the towers and in the pentagon, emergency workers, bystanders.... It was a horrible day.

As always, George Bush has his finger on the pulse and struck just the right note as the world remembers an event that it is still trying to come to terms with:

"The worst day in America's history saw some of the bravest acts. Since 9/11 our troops have taken the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. Thanks to the brave men and women and all those who work to keep us safe there has not been another attack on our soil in 2,557 days."

I honestly don't know where to begin with that. The staggering lack of sensitivity and the tone of self-justification, even of self-satisfaction, is truly amazing, even for him.

Perhaps it would surprise Mr. Bush to know that the 2,751 people who died in Manhattan on that day were not all American. In fact, more than 90 nationalities were represented. The attacks may all have happened on US territory, but this was a truly global event and the tremors from those impacts reverberated loudly around the world, not least because of the American reaction. To focus on this as a purely American event completely misses the point.

There may not have been another attack on American soil since that day, but are we really so blind that we can't see that a direct consequence of the 9/11 attacks was the retaliatory (and often opportunistic) deployment of US military power in Iraq and Afghanistan and no doubt on a smaller scale in all sorts of different places across the world? As Bush spoke grandly of a "war on terror", someone had to pay. Perhaps you might now feel safe from the threat of global terror in Idaho or Missouri or Ohio or in Kansas, but I'm sure you'd feel a lot less secure if you lived in Kabul or Bagdhad or Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. Hell, what about the 52 people who were killed in the attacks on London in July 2005? What of them? Is it only the deaths on American soil that are worth counting?

And then there's the wars: 3000 died on 11th September 2001, but between that awful day and today there have been between 87,387 and 95,373 documented civilian deaths in Iraq. They may have toppled Saddam Hussein, but have the US led coalition found the links to global terror that they were looking for? Have they found any weapons of mass destruction? Have they found anything at all?

In addition to all of those civilian deaths, there have been over 4,469 confirmed deaths amongst the Coalition forces, of which 4,155 are from the US military. Yes, they made the ultimate sacrifice and we should pay our respects to them, but what have those deaths achieved? Are we closer to world peace or further away?

It's not just in Iraq either: another 1000 Coalition military personnel have been confirmed dead in Afghanistan too, and the UN estimated that the total body count in 2007 alone was over 8,000, including at least 1,500 civilians. Terrorists, it seems, do not have the monopoly on killing the innocent.

Without in any way belittling the 3,000 people who died in the US on that day seven years ago, I would suggest that the cost of "taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so that we do not have to face them here at home" has been unacceptably high.

How narrow an interpretation of "home."
How broad a definition of "terrorist".

An awful lot of people have died since that day, some of them American. Whilst we should never forget those who died on that day in New York, at the Pentagon and in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, neither should we fail to remember anyone else, of any nationality, who has died since that day and as a direct consequence of it.

It would be a fool who suggested that all of those deaths in the 2,557 days since 11th September 2001 had somehow made the world a safer place.

another sleepy, dusty delta day...

You can't choose your parents. Whatever her views might be on gun ownership, the NRA, teaching creationism in schools, the death penalty and drilling for oil in a conservation zone, your mom is still your mom. Besides, how could Track (19), Bristol (17), Willow (14), Piper (7) and Trig (4 months) fail to be proud of the fact that their mother has gone from 'hockey mom' to mayor to Governor to Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in a little over ten years? I certainly don't share her politics, but you have to admire the kind of determination and dedication that must have taken though.

It turns out that her 17 year old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. Well, it happens (apparently about 1/3 of girls in the USA get pregnant before the age of 20, with 80% of those births "unintended").

Except, it's not really supposed to happen to the children of socially conservative politicians who have just been announced on the presidential ticket. Given that John McCain had barely heard of Palin before he announced her on his ticket, it seems unlikely that he knew anything much about this. Clearly though, it's not something that can be reliably hushed up for long, especially when she's apparently already 5 months gone and would be due to give birth in December...so it had to be announced. Of course, as Palin has been outspoken on this particular issue, there was only ever one way that this was going to go: her 17 year old daughter is going to have this child and will be marrying the father. As she said in a statement:

"Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support. Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realise very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family."

Of course, Republicans are now working very hard to make it look as though this is a private family matter and very little to do with the Presidential election at all, which of course it shouldn't be. But then again, and no matter what they say to the contrary, it does at the very least ask questions about just how carefully the McCain camp vetted their choice of Vice-Presidential candidate. What other skeletons has she got in her closet that the press will duly rake up? We've heard about the pregnancy, we've heard about her alleged attempt to get her brother-in-law sacked from his job as a state trooper for attempting to divorce her sister. Hell, we've even heard the rumour that Bristol is already a mother and that Palin is in fact the grandmother of her 4 month old son Trig ... (this last one seems a bit fanciful to me: if Bristol is really 5 months pregnant, then suggesting that she's also the mother of a 4 month year old seems biolgically unlikely to me....but perhaps that's all part of the cover-up?

Actually, in all this, the person I really feel for is Bristol: I don't know what her own views on abortion are and I certainly don't know how she feels about this pregnancy or about the father of this child. What I do know is that her views on those subjects are unlikely to have been given much consideration in all of this. She got herself pregnant and the only way her mother can come out of this with her political ambitions intact is if she has the damn baby and she marries the damn father. To hell what she thinks.

Poor girl. She's seventeen years old and she effectively has no choice over her own life or over her own body.

She's collateral damage.

I've seen Sarah Palin being referred to as the VPILF. Can you imagine? Urgh. No thanks. I don't care what she looks like - I find those kind of views unpalatable. Family values my arse. I wouldn't touch her with yours....



And by the way, is it not insulting of McCain to think that simply by picking a woman to join him on the ticket, all of Hillary Clinton's 18m apparently disenfranchised voters will come flocking to his standard? Is gender the only important issue here, or does he not think that those female Democrat voters may well have their own views on abortion, creationism, global warming, gun ownership and the like which they may consider more important?

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Whilst we talking about US Politics, let me just say again that I think Bill Clinton is great:

"People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

That's some fine speechification you got there, Billy boy.

leave them kids alone...

Well, say what you like about the kids of today - and let's be honest, they get a pretty terrible press on the whole, what with all those hoodies and knives and binge drinking in bus shelters and things.... but they are "working harder than ever before" and are clearly getting brighter and brighter.

A-level results are out today, and that's the only possible conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the pass rate and the number of 'A' grades awarded has risen for the twenty-eighth consecutive year, with the pass rate (papers achieving grades A-E) now sitting proudly at 97.2%. Over 25% of all papers marked now get 'A's.

The Government, of course, deny that the exams are getting easier (whatever would give people that idea?), but have been forced to go on the defensive against the Universities: record numbers of university applicants now have three 'A ' grades, making the allocation of places something of a lottery. Many of these candidates will struggle too, finding the gap between the end of the A-levels they excelled at and the beginning of their degree course has become mysteriously large. Ministers have announced plans to expand the number of pupils who undertake university-style dissertations - worth half an A-level - in the form of an extended project while doing A-levels. So, exams aren't getting easier, and A-levels haven't been fatally devalued, but students are going to be asked to do more work to supplement their results and to provide some kind of an indicator of their academic potential? Where do you go after 'A*'? Is an 'A' the new 'B'? Much though I'd like to get on my high horse about how things were so much harder back in the day, I actually feel sorry for the kids here. From their point of view, I'm sure the pressures of sitting these exams are pretty much the same as they ever were, and the wait for that envelope (or txt msg or whtevr) isn't any easier. They can't help the fact that everyone says the exams are easier, and in fact, if I was in their shoes this morning, I'd be feeling righteously annoyed at the haters denigrating (only got a 'A' in English? use a dictionary...) my achievements.

To be honest, the thing that disturbs me most about this whole thing is the realisation that I sat my A-levels in 1992.... 16 years ago.... and people were saying even then that exams weren't what they used to be.

Sixteen years.

Eep.

In them days [gestures vaguely into the distance], this were all fields......