The Old Gaffer

I recently was forced to buy a new computer. Nowadays, it seems that when you get a new computer you get free, sixty-day trial, versions of the latest software. On this new computer I was given Microsoft Office. For over 30 years I have been struggling with each new advancement, from the BBC1, right up to the sophisticated versions that we’re getting at about half the price, and 40 times the complexity. I still only just write documents and letters, do the family budget, illustrate books on Photo Shop Elements, use my camera, and the Internet. My needs haven’t changed in all that time, but I now discovered, because a 60 day trial was over and my Word programme suddenly went walkabout that it had changed the whole format, it took away my menu bar, and when I started hunting I couldn’t believe all the complexity of what I was finding including something called ‘ Widows and Orphans’. It was something to do with the top and the bottom of the page, but what in the world do I need to know about that for? I know where the top and the bottom of the page are
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If we can’t persuade Microsoft and all the other manufacturers to keep it simple, stop upgrading us with downloads we don’t want, and sometimes accidentally allow to be installed, thus making our own software, to the likes of me, unintelligible. Then I think it is time that a new manufacturer comes onto the market with a very simple machine that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, doesn’t have to have up-to-date software, on the principle that the Navy extols, a sort of ‘if it was good enough for Nelson then its good enough for me’. I can’t really believe that I’m the only one with a home computer, not high-powered business, who just wants a stable piece of equipment, that I understand, that never changes, and has stood the test of time, at a reasonable price. Please! Someone out there open a factory and turn them out, you’ll make a fortune. Something about the level of a good quality 1995 model would be ideal.

My regular readers will have noticed that the rate of posting articles has dropped over the last month, this was because the Press and the Opposition were saying pretty well everything I would have said, and I saw little point in reiterating the obvious, and my e-mail had also made posting a serious problem. It is now time for my other eye to be operated upon, and for at least a fortnight if not longer, I shall not be able to use a computer. In addition I am in the process of revising the policy of the blog, which I think has run its course in its present format. This process will take quite some time and I will keep you posted on the outcome.

Lies and statistics we all know about, because we have been subjected to them for a whole decade, when government has tried to justify itself by allegedly meeting targets that it has set itself, in every field of endeavour, when those with experience in these very fields have been warning consistently that standards have been dropping and money has been thrown away. They don’t seem to learn, they consistently tinker on a daily basis with our most valued services, ignore the financial warnings that are given continuously, and now they are busy digging a deeper pit in every respect for the opposition to fall into when they are voted in in the next election. Where they are going to find the money to support all these new changes, is certainly a mystery to me. The sort of rubbish that is being perpetrated was demonstrated yesterday when the BBC was quoting statistics that over the last month domestic spending had risen, and they blamed it on the weather, and the purchase of new clothes. It is my humble opinion that those with any sense had realised that within the blink of an eye they will not be able to afford the luxuries they were used to, and before they all rise in price and are out of reach, they are buying them in. It is equally clear that although the tax revenue on some items will rise along with inflation, the economic pinch will cut the overall revenue, with obvious further tax income reduction, and as the government has taken on several long-term heavily funded propositions, hidden taxes will continue rise.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again, my grandmother in the 30s repeatedly said of the government and commerce, ‘don’t believe all they tell you, dear!’

I just cannot believe all I’m hearing and reading concerning the vast changes in so many spheres of government, running concurrently, contrary to public opinion, and all in order to save money. Once again we are finding proof that Civil Servants, and Managers are not the right arbiters of standards in professional fields. Leave the Doctors, the Head Teachers, the Chief Engineers, to run their bailiwick, then we will save money. Every new approach, change in principles, and protocol causes an immense waste of time and money, which is the real problem. The Government is using every ploy possible to cut cost, raise taxation, and shed its load, because it has been budgeting badly for years.

Education.
In my last post I implied that I was certain government tinkering with the whole educational system had reduced the standards to a level, where Further Education suffered to the point where many degrees were not worth the expense they had cost the exchequer and drop-outs were at an excessive level. I was therefore unsurprised when I read in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, that Imperial College were adding a year to degree courses to bring the students up to an acceptable educational level. The philosophy of advanced academic education for all, while a proven fallacy for years, by its very nature unworkable, should have been abandoned and the old system, where the trades, which have also become degraded, could flourish once more so we would not have to use immigrant labour to fill the gap.

Medicine
Due mainly to government policy and harassment, we have lost our free dental care to a great extent. Do you notice they don’t reduce our tax because we are now paying our dentist instead of the Treasury doing so? Now the government wants to do the same with the Family Doctor. Many surgeries have modified their systems to accommodate the unsocial hours of the patients, offering small surgery units on prescribed days and most of the other proposals in this new approach the government is proposing, while still maintaining that personal relationship so vital to many patients. If the government brings in local Super Surgeries, not only will this have all the assembly line traits of hospitals, with no doctor-patient relationship, it will have a Manager, and soon become part of a commercial cartel, with all the cutbacks that will involve.

Lost CDs and Documents.
In my experience top Civil Servants have a soft ride, they pass down the work and consider their job is to manage. Middle management, the engine room of the Civil Service, is where the buck usually stops, where the stress is, and where most of the long hours are to be found. So one can’t say a top Civil Servant, carrying a politically hot potato, is tired, distracted, or confused, enough to forget he has the hot potato in his hot little hand. So I find it extra ordinary that knowing it should never have left the safe, it could be left on a train accidentally, not even in a brief case. Unless of course he had been reading it on the train and it had bored him to distraction.

Educational Chaos.
I expect like me everyone who reads this will fail to understand, first of all how they can have 600 schools that are in risk of closure, how they arrived at that situation, and what are they going to do with the children when they close them, also where are they going to find teachers of the right quality? Say each school has 500 children, that means that a third of a million children will be affected, .worse, if you take the population of each age group as being 0.7 million, and that there are seven age groups involved, say 5 million, of which two thirds are going to secondary school, or 3.3 million, then those affected represent roughly 10% - even as a rough calculation it is mind-boggling. Soph, who was a secondary school teacher, teaching to A level has said for a long time that the standards required to get into university and to graduate are too low, with the result that those who reach that level are not all confident and competent to finish the course, and that a high percentage of those that do are inadequate. When I was at university in the 50s in a class of 40, there were only two dropouts, one through serious illness. If her comments are accurate then some of the teachers are below par. Teaching requires dedication, a sensitivity to the reaction of the children, and the strength of character to obtain respect and that can control 30 unruly kids with a glance or a word, and doesn’t need to resort to a harsher punishment. It is not just yet another job!

Is this another government knee-jerk reaction, because inefficiency has allowed this condition to arise unnoticed? I’m sure it didn’t happen overnight, It is acting precipitately instead of with long and serious thought to the way in which standards can be improved without the children involved being disadvantaged.

Caveats.
I read somewhere that with the advent of the Internet instead of the passage of paper being reduced, as one would expect, it has increased immeasurably. Recently I have made a couple of purchases not on the Internet because almost all my purchases there have been a disaster, and I have lost money. These purchases were across the counter. In the old days, you walked into a shop, you trusted the man behind the counter, you expected the article that you purchased to last you a lifetime and it usually did, you paid, received a receipt and went home with the article. Today, the chances are that when you go into the shop they will only have a demonstration model, because warehousing costs money, and so you have to order, and then the paper-chase really starts, if you are fool enough to admit to having an e-mail address, not only do you get paper coming through the letterbox telling you about the delivery, the contract you’ve got, and an invoice, even though you walked out of the shop with a receipt that formed the guarantee, the whole thing is repeated on the Internet so, just to be on the safe side, you print that up so that you can read it at your leisure in case of some caveat that you object to. In some cases you even get telephone calls to see you if you’re happy with the product, generally at teatime. All I want to know is why the word of the man at the counter is not adequate, and if the product when it is delivered is not up to scratch, a phone call will get you a prepaid label and you can return it either to the shop or from whence it came. I strongly suspect, like the use-by dates on the packets of food, all this paper is to avoid being sued whether rightly or wrongfully.

On the second of this month I wrote a piece about knife crime. In the Daily Telegraph the other day both Blair and Brown were being castigated for the vast amount of money they have wasted during their time in office. In the piece, I quoted that Brown was proposing to waste a million pounds on advertisements in the hope of stopping knife crime, and I gave my reasons for saying ‘waste’. I now discover he has upped the anti for advertising to 3 million. What I find annoying is that it is pure knee-jerk.

Advertising has all the same principles as canvassing for an election. If you have been voting for one party all your life, the canvasser is wasting his time - except that if he doesn’t call some would be offended. Conversely if you dislike his party, he can talk or he might and you won’t be swayed. So he is really canvassing that small percentage of the waverers and the don’t knows. If you think of products instead of parties, the attitude of the viewer of advertisements, as a generality, follows the same path, after all politics is an intellectual product. One other thing, he is talking about 16 to 18 year olds who carry knives and are likely to use them, probably less than 1% of the population, and it is highly probable that this particular 1% wouldn’t waste its time looking at advertisements. If I am right in this assessment, the £3 million is going to be totally wasted. This government has always had a propensity for throwing money at things in the hope of getting away with a cure. The 3 million is needed because the government is going to use high octane professionals to direct, to write the scripts, hunt out the locations, select the cameraman and actors, and then put the whole story on a disc.

I have had a different idea which would involve the very people who share their lives with the knife carriers, and cost buttons by comparison. Instead of spending £3 million, on professionals, with their egos, their units, and their large salaries, why not have a competition for all secondary schools, or only those in areas where gun crime is prevalent. The schools to put forward how they would make advertisements that would be telling. The winning schools would be provided with the technical hardware as a permanent gift, to enable them to create the advertisements that they propose. This idea would have several aspects which would bring home the message. The fact that so many children were initially involved in the subject and the creation of a scenario which would show the horror of gun crime, the fact that some could be acting as part of the procedure as gun criminals, and the fact that it was competitive and one would we hope be highlighted on regional television as progressive programming, I believe that this would be far more advantageous than the ads.

My regular readers will know that it is now my policy only to write when I have something new to say, or something worth repeating, because in the last two years I think I have said it all. What I wrote yesterday caused me to think more deeply of the future, when I hear the outpourings of the multination meeting in Rome insisting that we grow more food, while at the same time government is still dithering about the production of energy. The problem is politicians have a habit of making grandiose statements to appear that they are doing something, without an in depth examination of the long-term effect or the side issues that these decisions can make. I give the usual caveat, I’m a civil engineer, not an authority on nuclear power and the other methods of generating energy.

The decision is urgently needed now on the way forward in the face of a fast changing world, to ensure that we can maintain the power necessary for our needs. The problems of nuclear power are well known. As an engineer who has dealt in marine design I can assure you that using wave power, with the singular parameters that it raises, make it a slow and expensive process, with an unpredictable outcome as it is dependent to a considerable extent upon weather conditions.. I know only what I have read concerning the production of petroleum and diesel from farmed produce. It would appear to take up a tremendous amount of space, and I suspect that with the changing conditions associated with global warming, the problems of over farming and the usual ravages of weather, the needs of a nation, let alone the whole world, will be poorly served by this system. Solar energy and wind power are only tinkering with the problem. With respect to oil, greed by the producers coupled with politics make it a racing certainty that if we are not to have our personal and national economies controlled by foreigners with an axe to grind, we have to find a solution which we can rely on in the face of all the changes that are going to occur in the future We may not like the idea of nuclear energy, but from my uneducated corner I can see no alternative and cannot for the life of me understand why the government has not set a course, long ago, instead of wringing its hands

Thinking about vast acres of rape being grown to provide oil, made me think more closely about the speeches concerning world hunger, that came from the international meeting in Rome. I have read for many years that our aid has a strong propensity for falling into the wrong hands, and that those for whom it is intended are no better off. Burma is a case in point. We have been paying our farmers set aside money to avoid overproduction and in consequence, waste. Are we now going to be asked to pay for these pastures to be dug up and sown with produce to feed the Third World, when the reasons for the poverty of the indigenous populations that concerns us so, is as a result of the greed and the politics of the people in charge. What assurance have we that the outcome will be any better than it currently is, and that those indigenous people will once again be respected? I am a cynical old man who has seen it all before, I believe that this is rhetoric with no logistical basis, and while it all sounds wonderful, so does the Charter of the United Nations, and just look how useless that body is when it comes to healing the wounds of the individuals it was intended to support. I just hope our political representatives have the nous to be very circumspect before they commit us to a policy that I see clearly will have very little outcome until the grip of the military juntas has been relaxed.

Are we getting our eye wiped? Yesterday, 02.06.08, the television newsreader gave a dissertation that the increased cost of oil was going to be passed on to air travellers now, and also sometime in the future, even though the purchaser had paid upfront for the contract of their journey, and would be further charged increased costs that could amount to anything up to £400. She also added that one could be stranded at one’s destination because the airline had gone out of business. I would have thought the Office of Fair Trading would have stamped on all this as soon as it was mooted. It appears that airlines want their cake and they want to eat it. They make offers to encourage us to fly, which I would have thought was a contract, and then they propose to put further surcharges on without any action being taken. Currently if you walk into a shop and an object has a price tag clearly written, the vendor, in all but extreme circumstances, is required by law to honour that statement and hand over the article for the price stated. I can understand that carriers of all sorts can no longer give long-term pricing when the cost of fuel is unstable. If this is the case, then they should not give long-term offers that they cannot sustain. People today have financial conditions that are totally outside their own control. It is therefore unfair to the unwary and the naive, that the government allows this situation to pertain. It is not sufficient to say ‘buyer beware’, after the event, the government should insist that once the contract is made it is inviolate, in common law a verbal agreement constitutes a contract and is inviolate, why should a written one be different?

The government itself is also playing ducks and drakes; in this case with taxes. Unless things have severely changed from when I worked with government contracts, the money to pay for them was budgeted annually, irrespective of the date on which the contract started and how long it would take. If for any valid or invalid reason, the assessed amount of money was not spent within the financial year, the surplus was taken back into the Treasury and had to be reassessed in the following year’s budget. This implies that the government at some point in one financial year is taking into account all the expenditure for the following year, presumably with a sensible sinking fund should anything go wrong. This in turn must mean that they have taken into account the amount of tax that they require, based on a yardstick, some weeks or months previous. How is it then that when the cost of fuel rises, which raises the cost of transport, heating, lighting and all the other dependent services, and these costs are then added to all our purchases, with the result that VAT has also risen, and thus tax income, that VAT is not modified? Some government expenses will unavoidably rise, such as school meals, but the overall assessment will no longer be valid and should be reassessed. It is noticeable that wages and many other costs have not yet risen accordingly. The government in effect has achieved a windfall-tax, which is totally unfair, and which it appears to have no intention of refunding, or reassessing. I always thought Westminster was populated by members of Parliament representing their constituencies and responsible for their welfare. Clearly I’m mistaken.

This paragraph is of something I wrote two years ago. Auto-suggestion prompts the ills of today. The editors are less critical, much is gratuitously violent and brutal. In the 30s we had not these options, just sport and our social life, not hunched over a TV, or reading magazines far worse than those we were forbidden. We played simple games, indoors and out, the main stress in general terms was schooling. Single-parent children suffered more stress than others, but we were unaware that this was detrimental to out psyche, and so we just accepted our periodically unhappy lives. Sport figured largely, from being toddlers. Universally, areas such as village greens, parks etc, once common grazing land, were where we all played. Often there were tennis courts, running tracks, and everywhere, small groups of children were playing some game or other. Children skated in the winter at ice rinks, most schools played football, rugby, and later the teenagers formed small groups to play games like tennis, football and cricket, and these developed, as they grew older, into a plethora of local teams, especially football and cricket, on local open spaces.

WW2 ended all this, with Dig For Victory, new housing, building etc. The young people were now thrown back on their own meagre resources, tribal wars, and later a more monastic life mainly spent in front of a blue screen in their bedroom. Hence the tougher, more bolshie elements make trouble. The money spent on so many, fruitless government advertising projects should be used to provide greater facilities for the young. I once joined a youth club, it was an aesthetically cold place, poorly run by amateurs - I left in a hurry. Young people know roughly what they want, and don’t look for the moon, but do not want second-best, an insult giving exactly the wrong impression. Perhaps the young should be consulted. A nationwide survey, of successful clubs might reward and give a benchmark for future design. The club must be better in every way than the homes that most of the young people come from and therefore valued by then, abuse resulting in banishment, would deter most bad behaviour, and respect is a two-way street

Assault and knife crime, currently under review, has gone beyond the above point. When the photos of the people who have been stabbed were viewed, it was noticeable that eight out of 10 victims were from immigrant backgrounds. We are told the tribal wars are more often between these groups. Lack of local district and parental supervision is a contributory factor, and possibly some local relationships with the police might have additional effect. People carrying out these crimes are not to be swayed by a million pounds worth of advertising, they probably never look at it. Previously I had suggested the use of mobile metal detectors randomly set up in schools and at night in areas subject to gun crime, but now I realise that with the ubiquitous mobile phone, the element of surprise would be almost immediately negated. What is clearly required is something like a three pronged approach. There must have been successes in some parts of the country in controlling these crimes, these should be studied. Young responsible leaders of social groups and members of the gangs should be canvassed for their opinions of cause and solution. This information then correlated from across the country, instead of the million pounds being spent on advertising, with say three trials made in different dissimilar locations of the proposals thus produced, might give a valuable lead to cause-and-effect.

The effect of the media? I saw a film called ‘The Departed’, it revolted me. My working life has been in environments where bad language and sexual metaphors are common, but those spoken on the film were so gratuitously used in practically every sentence, plus the most revolting sexual metaphors, something I had almost never experience at that level in 70 years, and I served on the lower deck of the Royal Navy. The gratuitous violence, totally unsupportable in a logical sense had people hammering one another with their fists to a degree that would have broken their fingers and torn their skin, but the battered, who should have been dead, got up to fight another day, while the batterers walked away with clean hands. People were shot out of hand, tied up and executed with a shot in the back of the head, and another for good measure. What I found so revolting about the whole process was that this film had been passed for viewers of 18 years old, had not been censored, was on television with recommendations for viewing, and a five-star accreditation. Aren’t young people without the experience to be critical of the logic of what is presented, at risk from films like this - providing a scenario to ape?