The Old Gaffer

Are you as disgusted with the theatre of Prime Minister’s Question Time, as I am? The body language, especially of David Cameron, when he leans on one elbow, almost as far as the dispatch box, screaming at Brown, makes me think of Playtime in an elementary school playground. All, or almost all of the children are trying to justify their existence, to the TV audience. So much of what the screaming is about is relatively unimportant, except to them, such as the contributions to, and behaviour of other members of the house.’ In this current period of severe distraction from our domestic problems to that of world finance, some of these exchangers we could well do without as they take us no further, just waste parliamentary time.

This business of Obama spending upwards of 150 million to get into office raises that old hackneyed phrase, ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’. Few if any of those contributions are given without underlying strings, and it clearly applies in all circumstances of today’s life. In this particular case the number of people involved must be huge, and where their influences and demands will take American politics, and consequently that of the world, is a $64 question. It is my firm belief, as we demand unbiased politics, we should be prepared to pay the costs of reasonable electioneering expenses, graded to be commensurate with the neutrally adjudged chances of outcome. I would suggest that a large proportion of the money donated, has actually been provided by the electorate, in its purchases and financial dealings, it had to come from somewhere. From the start, this proposal would stop so much bickering across the Chamber, and the subsequent feeding frenzy in the press. It would also, I would hope, provide a level playing field for the contestants at election time, and concentrate their minds on how best to use the relatively small amount of funds they would now have available. Those, assumed generous benefactors will be keeping their millions, and those parties who are not the flavour of the month might just have a better chance of being seen and heard.

We are all worried about something these days, but I have found one or two specifics strange enough to be worrying.

It seems that to some extent we are joined at the hip with America and what happens there affects what happens here. The credit crunch has born this theory out. Therefore when you read that Obama, who could one day have serious influence in the world’s politics, is able at a time of colossal financial down turn, to spend an estimated $6 million on what is nothing more than one half hour’s political advertising across the US, and is part of over $150 million+ spent on electioneering, one can wonder whether he has anything worth selling. If he had, surely it would sell itself, with only a little persuasion. The USA really worries me, they have already marched us into two wars without sufficient planning, and, as a nation, they certainly don’t really warm to the Brits..

We are constantly hearing how the government is making a total mess of budgeting, meeting its financial obligations in such areas as the Child Support Agency, legislating and then changing its mind, and failures in information technology, causing a wide ranging number of problems. We are now discovering that they have totally miscalculated the finances necessary to carry forward their theories on university training. Their solution is going to cause a wide amount of disruption over the next four years, irrespective of how it is handled. The grant system up to now, I am told by some students, is a shambles, with student debt rising. If they suddenly in midstream, start changing the rules, no one will know where they are. When on the one hand they are talking in trillions, and as the budget shortfall is alleged to be about 2 million, my own logic would suggest that no changes are made by cutbacks, but proposals be made for the future, so that individuals, can at least budget accurately, even if the government can’t.

I am going to write from hindsight, and I hope with logical foresight. We are forever hearing about saving energy, road accidents, and the cost to the environment of driving of every sort. What I find incredible is that now we can find money in trillions not even billions, in spite of the fact that this has occurred because of blatant criminality and the lack of respect for others. Looking to the future, before we are out of the so-called down turn, I believe we should be seriously examining a total rethink of transport. I suspect that there will be a number of civil servants who will be relatively unemployed, in the logistics and engineering fields, through the downturn, and these people should be marshalled in such a way that information can be exchanged from every part of the land, correlated, new theories evolved, fed back into the areas to find the weaknesses, and finally produce a plan that may take years to implement, in stages, but will get us back to where we were before we lost all our railways. We must not continue with this one-man one-car business, the mummy run, and vast lorries hammering roads that were never designed for them. It is since I have been retired that I have discovered the relief of travelling by public transport, but once you’ have actually found the flaming thing, the problem is either you want to go where there is no route, or the service is so poor you are forced back on to the road as a driver..

In 1914 Germany went to war for its own aggrandisement, thousands died time and again and the overall death toll was in millions. That was a war to end all wars, but it wasn’t, and the next time the death toll was obscenely high, the largest proportion of which were civilians. Yesterday when the Paras returned from Afghanistan to their loved ones and the grieving widows and orphans, we had the Minister speaking on television, trying to justify the war in Afghanistan which the Russians couldn’t win, on a basis I believe to be fraudulent, in that he was suggesting that our troops were there to prevent terrorism in our country. The tragic death of a young aid worker merely because she was alleged to be promoting Christianity, was just as fraudulent, and underlined the fact that terrorism is more to do with excitement, money and criminality, than ideals. In Afghanistan heroin is the problem.

When I make statements I believe in setting out the limits of my experience. I served as a home guard with the Grenadiers in Westminster blockhouses, in 1940, during the Blitz and then at 18 served as a sailor on Atlantic convoys, and I also served as a night-time, part-time policeman in Belfast at the height of the troubles in the 1970s. In retrospect I look upon the whole of those periods as a waste of the lives of the young people who were killed, and the rest of us who were standing guard on nothing, fighting shadows, and having very little to show for it in the long run, because within a short time the status quo is re-established, as Germany was back to being a severe power in Europe. Concerning terrorism in Northern Ireland, we are still having burnings, Molotov cocktails, kneecappings, murder, and all the other miserable aspects of terrorism, still, after 39 years.

Wars and acts of terrorism stem from the egos of a very few. In the case of terrorism there is a sham justification put forward, but there is also a strong underlying element of pure criminality, murder, gang warfare, theft and money laundering. The unfortunate aspect of this is that the young are allowed to be drawn in, not for any altruistic reason, but the relatively safe, exciting adrenalin rush that they will get when they face up the police, while stoning and throwing Molotov cocktails at ambulances and fire tenders, in the certain knowledge that they can’t to be taken to book because of their age. One ruse of the terrorist is to use these children and their parents as a cloak from behind which they can shoot.

If you add up the man-hours of patrolling, guarding, personal searching in offices and shops, the disruption of life from bombing and the use of fake bombs, the emotional and the physical damage to the innocents, and the families of the dead, and add into that the cost of repairing the bomb damage, there is no way you can justify terrorism, because at the end of it all there is little or no change. We, in Northern Ireland, know that if you think you have won through, It is only a mirage..

At a time when the trust in government is at low ebb, they bring back Peter Mandelson, whom for some reason they have made a Lord, to once again take up a post of being an adviser, rather than having been voted in as an MP. Whether it is the press or just public opinion, there seems to be the same amount of controversy over his appointment and his statements that wwre the case previously, one of which of course is his pay.

On a daily basis we are receiving woeful news about our finances, personal and national, the forecast for unemployment, and the general reduction in our standard of living, yet we also receive on a daily basis, from a government that didn’t realise the effects of the huge internal debt, new costly schemes in the various departments of our political structure, some as I have proven elsewhere, untried. Once again the government has grandiose schemes and innovations. A large proportion of the electorate, who could see the collapse coming, and were writing about it in newspapers and on blogs, including repeatedly on this one, are now giving warnings again which also will go unheeded. The last thing we need at this time either from this government or any other that is voted in, is innovation for the sake of innovation, we need to draw in our horns. If you read Peter Mandelson’s latest outpourings, you will find that he is urging the opposite to what I’m suggesting. I think some of them in Downing Street have even forgotten we still have to pay for the Olympic Games in 2012, in billions.

More costs in NHS. There is something called ‘The King’s fund health think tank’ which states that they want to improve care for patients by more innovation. They want to make use of video-conferencing - web chats, and patients should be able to send and receive e-mails from their GP, which all comes as the health service is in the middle of a 12 billion revamp, otherwise estimated at 50 billion. To me this is more like a case of having to say something to justify your existence. I never heard of anything so crazy, when only 45% of households are actually online, a proportion of them only the children in the house, and I suspect that 20% to 30% of the overall are the most vulnerable, the elderly, and those with only carers to look after them, who would never be online anyway. This sort of thinking underlines the fact that what we have are laymen pretending to be technocrats, while at the same time having no idea of the financial and technical ramifications of this type of proposal, both to the service and the individual. Yet again, when it is expected that our welfare bill will reach astronomical proportions, and the government is losing information, and having computer breakdowns on monthly if not a weekly basis, someone wants to throwaway more money on an untried scheme

Examining this aspect overall, underlines the fact that central government just does not work. More importantly, in this technical age of high-speed communication, records and number-crunching, instead of being in localised units, controlled locally, it has become a massive undertaking which I believe is totally unnecessary and undoubtedly exceedingly expensive and vulnerable. Big is no longer best

It was thinking about the new hospitals that prompted me to write this. Design is an art and comes in several forms, the architects, product designers, the visual arts and even music. It can be influenced as much by fashion as by aesthetic. Fashion being a product of advertising, of celebrity influence, and often a demonstration of status, has no true validity in determining the quality of design, but its influence is of great proportions in the design of the products that we buy. Civil Engineers and Structural Engineers are obviously designers also, but their work tends to be more prosaic. They design things like bridges, railway stations, sewage works; structures that are designed to perform a function rather than be decorative. For the sake of the world at large, we try to make the designs pleasing to the eye, and in some cases such as sewage works we actually hide them with specially selected trees. Occasionally the work is done in conjunction with an architect, such as a row of flats and shops, then we also have to accommodate the design flourishes of the architect.

If you think about the design of everyday products, buildings of all types, the visual arts and even music, there have been unbelievable changers in taste and presentation over the last 70 years. The problem in all these cases is down to the desire for recognition, the ego and the aspirations of those performing the designs. Up until the end of the Victorian era design was very much a prerogative of the well heeled, and it was their pleasure to search the world and collect artefacts from the past, or instigate elaborate designs for their houses and their objects. Even then there was an element of competition. Once the middle and working classes had more spare cash, manufacturers realised they had a growth industry, and with that growth came competition and the building of reputations. It was at this point that the designers were beginning to get a name for themselves and in consequence were in competition. Artists themselves have been in competition since the dawn of time, and one thing about competition is nobody wants a copy, so you have to be innovative to build a reputation. This philosophy has rubbed off into industrial design and architecture. Any work of reference will show you how designs of household products, houses, buildings, vehicles and even factories have changed as taste, and the desire of the designers to be different has also changed to keep up. Taste is transitory, dependent upon experience, as well as personal preference. This has been underlined over the years, in particular by the changes in taste in the pictorial arts, some of which are examples of promotional tactics rather than true artistry.

Innovation demands experiment, new methods and in some cases loss. If designers are given their head, rather than required to provide a simple traditional design, the client will inevitably be footing the larger expense, part of which is to bolster the reputation of the designer. Civil servants, handling our money, should think very carefully about whether particular features in a design submitted are actually necessary, or just an expensive ornamentation, or unnecessary innovation.

For a start the government is doing its world leader bit. They have built a hospital in St Helens which is alleged to be the best in the world. It was built under a system known as Private Finance Initiative, or PFI, whereby the NHS makes an agreement with the private sector to design, build and finance projects, such as this, and then the NHS repays the capital and interest over decades. In praising the design they highlighted, of all things, the skirtings and walls, which were curved so that the bugs could not take hold. As an engineer I can appreciate the increased costs both in design and construction that this type of initiative can add to a project, and I suspect that this is not the only case of experimental design. It is not clear who has the final say in the details of the design, and the cost is always in the detail. The Tories naturally are cavilling, possibly with reason, as this is just part of a huge scheme of 31 projects, allegedly at a cost of 12 billion, but the Tories suggest it will be closer to 50 billion. When I hear of talk of curved skirtings, so the bugs can’t take hold, I began to worry, because this is pure flummery. If it were designed with no skirtings, but a coven joint between wall and floor, cleaning would be easier and construction cheaper. The staff won’t care, and neither will the patients even notice, and who is to tell that the bugs can’t solve this problem like they do the rest?

The private sector may or may not have the interests of the NHS at heart, but what is certain, they are not in it just for the ride. I do question how much supervision is given to the initial overall specification, and later to the detailed design and execution, or are we just buying a hospital off-the-shelf, and picking the prettiest one on offer? As some of these contracts have already been constructed and others let, this credit crunch must come as an awful shock to the financial section of the NHS, who are going to have to foot the bill for decades to come, for any amount of new hospitals, and will they even get the additional money, or will there be cutbacks here as well?

The government is proposing that as a result of the large percentage of children of 16 and under who are becoming pregnant, and the level of sexually transmitted disease, they propose to have sex education of five-year-olds and upwards in the schools. I often use an analogy to discover the snags in a problem. If you teach a child of any age, depending on its ability, how to pick a lock, its imagination, and its interest, would have it experimenting with picking locks at every opportunity. Sexuality is a highly complex, psychological and physical change in outlook, and physique, as a child grows up, and the rate of change, the reactions to change, could be said to be unique to each individual, and are mainly dependent upon information and association, and hence this proposal has a high level of risk

>From the past on until WW 2, there was a strong taboo on the discussion of sexual matters between children, and some adults, and this applied pretty well across the board. Looking back to the period just before the war, our secondary school tended to have a social relationship with a nearby girls’ secondary school, with the result that some members of the fifth and sixth forms would gravitate at the end of the day to meet some of the girls. The whole thing was totally innocent; to my knowledge not only was there no petting, even kissing was not practised. In retrospect I think it was as much because we were generally totally ignorant where it came to sexual matters, and the jokes that were passed among the boys, would today be considered puerile. The war put an end to that, because we were scattered like chaff in a wind, by evacuation. The war also tended to divide the sexes, men and women were cut off from relationships outside the services for long periods of time, which made a return to quasi-civilian life, when they were on leave, to be totally surreal. In consequence, the mores that functioned before, were now steamrollered and relationships were less permanent. After the war there was a period in civilian life, of scarcity of major proportions, which in turn put us back more than the four years of the war, with the result we were so busy catching up, we were probably living at home, under the rigours we had had before we left.

I suggest that teaching children of any age the facts of life, from basic association to deep sexual relationships, has so many pitfalls, that it is the reason adults over the years have avoided taking on the task. Similarly I believe that not every teacher who will be required to give these lessons will be adequate to the task. This again is one of these broad brush attacks on a problem by the government, without a trial run on a small number of children, whose ages are within the range of those who are currently becoming pregnant and or suffering sexually transmitted diseases. The silly 60s, coupled with unbridled sex as a daily diet of TV, have torn away much of the reticence, and consideration, our generation took for granted. I believe the clock has run so fast that it will be very difficult if not almost impossible to turn it back, and sex education, which includes and possibly underlines the mechanics of intercourse, will open the door to more rather than less abuse, and possibly at an earlier age. The government is opening a Pandora’s box.

I write the following as a result of the boy being stabbed outside a youth club. At about ten, I visited a youth club, not of the quality of the one referred to in the press, but a miserable little room, in the loft of an old stables, dark and poorly equipped. I never went back

I have not written this before, because for the last 76 years, I have never thought of that night without shame. It happened during a very unhappy few years in my life, when my mother and I had been separated due to our financial situation, and now we were together. She had higher moral values, was highly intelligent, and was a fighter. Prior to that she had worked through the day, and at night attended an evening class to obtain a City and Guilds qualification as a pastry cook. She was now able to support us both, but this involved leaving the house early to walk, and travel by tube to Mayfair, where she demonstrated cooking for the Women’s Electrical Association. She returned any time after six o’clock. We lived in a two room flat, consisting of a joint bedroom and a kitchen. I had to prepare myself for school, was probably provided with lunch by my grandmother who lived more than a mile from the school, and from the time the school broke up in the afternoon, I was expected to go to the flat and do my homework, until my mother returned. Needless to say this was not always the case, in the summer months a group of us would play cricket on Clapham Common, but in the winter we tended to roam the streets.

I drifted into a gang, not entirely welcomed, because I had not grown up in the district, I believe I was merely tolerated, and I don’t think I had any real friends among the people I knocked about with. It was pitch dark, probably about five o’clock in the evening, when the caper started. I personally was not privy to all the facts, until the activity was well underway. The father of one of the boys had been sacked by a local entrepreneur and our gang was apparently going to extract retribution. A game was organised on the forecourt of a grocer’s shop which had a large number of boxes set out in the street, among them was a box of eggs. It turned out the game was to have two teams playing a game of catch using a large leather glove in lieu of a ball. The game went on until the glove landed, ‘accidentally’, on the egg-box and when it was retrieved eggs were stolen at the same time. The leaders then proceeded in a state of glee to the house of the entrepreneur, and his Rolls-Royce sitting in the street. They then ceremoniously broke the eggs over the radiator and smeared them as far as possible.

The point I’m making is that I, would not have joined in had I been in possession of the full facts, but I was an outsider tagging on for company. The scale of vandalism was relatively harmless, the eggs would have washed off, and a couple of eggs stolen was not in the upper ranks of criminality. What it does demonstrate is how easily an innocent member of the gang, permanently on the periphery, can be inveigled, unwittingly, to be party to a serious act of vandalism, or worse, that they would have had nothing to do with, or contemplated, if they had been in possession of all the facts. Gangs I believe generate their own momentum through the psychopathic tendencies of one or two strong-minded leaders within the group. It is loneliness that draws the remainder to the group. They have three choices, to join that group, or another, or spend their free time in miserable loneliness. Gangs once formed, if they have some form of glamour, will not only grow but they will persist through time. The interests of a computer will inevitably be short lived.

I’m not writing anything that the authorities don’t know, it is the way our society operates now, where we are more insular, the extended family is almost a thing of the past, we have less time for the social graces, and less facilities like parks, Commons, and well-run youth clubs, where the innocents can enjoy and pass their time.

To day for the second time since the scheme opened, my plastic and paper waste-bin has received a note of complaint due to ‘contamination’, this time by a tub. I am not an inveterate complainer, but I do expect logical, reasonable and courteous service, as I believe the residents to be the council’s employers.

The burning question in this case is when does a box become a tub, and what in fact constitutes a tub. Ice cream, and similar products come in tubs. I’m not entirely sure whether it was an empty egg box made of compressed paper, or the washed, bottom section of a plastic box that food is sent by carry-out establishments. Neither of these items would I have termed a tub. I found it interesting also that my neighbour had a tub that I couldn’t find when I looked in his bin.

The absurdity of this whole process is that the majority of us try to play by the rules, and if by some accident place on the very top of the bin, an article which is deemed to ‘contaminate’, itself an absurd phrase, when, if the offending article had been about four layers down in the bin it would never have been seen and had to be dealt with, and would have been dealt with at the receiving end. Nobody can convince me that the whole of a highly sophisticated recycling concept is going to come to a halt because somebody has placed, by accident, the bottom half of a plastic box. I can also understand that some people take advantage rather than play by the rules, and the council has to resist this, but I would not have thought it should be by a boorish note that does not make logical sense.

I believe the problem is to do more with the way that the men are paid, which I assume from everything I’ve seen of the way they work, is not by the hour but piecework. The only other time that the bin of mine was rejected was because lying on top was a piece of very light plastic film, half the size of a pocket-handkerchief, which presumably had blown in when the bin was open. To me this is a pettifogging rule, that a small piece of plastic, which could have been lifted out, and put in a container on the lorry specifically for that reason, causes rejection. I hardly think it would have represented a serious problem at the plant. . On one other occasion my green bin was rejected because, over the fortnight that it had been standing full, it had compacted to an extent that prevented it from being emptied in the conventional manner. As you know I’m in the late 80s, with serious spinal and hip problems, and having to empty that myself and refill it , after a fortnight of stagnation, was not only painful, it was unpleasant. The system takes no account of the householder’s condition or ability to empty and refill, when there is virtually no need

Instead of a blunt refusal, the piece of paper attached to a bin should say, even in their parlance, that the bin has been contaminated, with the reason given, but the bin had been emptied out of courtesy, but if this reoccurred the situation would have to be reviewed. I can’t see that it is all that difficult for the drivers to have a blacklist of repeated offenders, while at the same time aiding the householder who on an odd occasion has either misunderstood the terminology, or made a reasonable mistake. The fact that the operators do not hoke down through the bin looking for contamination, to me shows an element of unnecessary bureaucratic bias.

Several things have come to light in the last few days that I have found beat logic, that those involved seem to have got away with it. The biggest one of course is the question that we are all asking, where has the money gone that used to be swilling about in the financial world, and the banks lent to one another? My assumption is that places like Switzerland and the Seychelles are beginning to sink under the weight of it.

The big payout to the McCanns and their friends, by the press because they were libelled, seems to lend weight to an article in last Friday’s Daily Telegraph concerning statements made about the Blairs’ various meanderings away from the truth, and the legality concerning their financial dealings. I personally don’t care that they have been garnering a fortune with lecture tours in the US, because the audience could well afford to be duped. What I have found over the years to be so surprising is that when we have all been told repeatedly that Blair made decisions that have cost hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives in Iraq, while at the same time being responsible for the deaths of so many of our servicemen and women, I would have expected him to have been impeached, years ago.

On Saturday night there was a feature on British television concerning the early years of Queen Victoria, when she was virtually in solitary confinement, as a result of her mother’s personal ambitions. The fact that Victoria’s mother got away with it for 18 years says a lot about the Victorian public’s relationship with the monarchy. She would not have got away with it, with the sort of press that we have today. The article made me think about affection in all its forms, and affectation and its effect on affectation. I have found that affectation is corrosive when it comes to affection. Affection has to be nurtured because it comes in so many different ways, and in so many degrees. There is our love for a child, the affection and indeed love, we feel for close friends and relatives, and the affection that we receive. In the case of men, especially between men, any affection is rarely signalled overtly. We tend to take affection for granted, generally without question, and it is only when that affection is withdrawn, either in fact or we have inferred it, that we really notice it is missing. Affection or the lack of it, is what moulds our characters from our early days, and as the programme on Victoria underlined, if there is hostility, or even merely disregard, it can have a serious effect on the responses of the individual in later life. I believe the speed of living today, the necessity in a lot of cases for two incomes, is the root cause of a of lot the problems that we have with our youth today. I believe that many want and really need the affection in their early years, this often demands time that is not available