The Old Gaffer

I wonder if anybody in the government has sat down and questioned this absurd urge placed upon us to drive 5 miles less every day to save the planet. The logistics alone are impossible, and at what point does one make a decision not to go somewhere, because it is more than 5 miles longer than you have allowed for the day. Who’s going to sit down and map out their mileage to achieve this? I know that it is a ruse to make a point, but it is so pettifogging and muddled, I believe the point is lost.

Reality in filmmaking
So many of the films that are produced these days are divorced from reality, not because the story is unreal, but because its interpretation by the director includes bizarre, impossible features. Okay, if you want a fairy story then it should be couched in that environment, not in an everyday one. These martial art pictures are fair enough, you know the hero is going to be able to, not only leap vast distances, but is also going to be able to nail half a dozen of his own kind in a matter of minutes.

The other day I was looking at Notting Hill, and in particular at that section in the story where the hero has parted from his truelove, and is walking down the street to the tune of a song which says, that it snows when she has gone. To my simple mind this was one of the greatest piece of filming I have ever witnessed, because the hero not only walked full-length of the road, he started in sunlight went through all the stages of rain hail and snow, with barely a break, surrounded by a very lively street market. When I thought about it I realised that it must have taken days to choreograph so that it was so seamless, which in turn made it so very effective.

When you are, as I am, responsible for somebody’s health, you have long hours a night to watch old films you have seen before, and very often it is the duplication which causes you to see things that you would have missed the first or second time. The opening sequence of, ‘ Once upon a time in the West’. Where there is a thug sitting waiting for a train, in order to kill one of the passengers descending from it. The sequence follows the route of a fly creeping across this man’s face slowly and aggravating him, until at last he catches it in the barrel of his 6-gun. To me that was pure genius, what with the time that it took to choreograph and film, and the incredible delay in the viewing of what one knew was going to be a stand-off, slowly built up the suspense.

A lot of our lives today are governed by economy rather than skill, and the quality of the goods, the choices we have, and the speed with which we now rush, doesn’t allow the sort of quality of expression and product that I have mentioned above. You have to be as old as I am to be able to draw comparisons; they say comparisons are odious, believe me, if more time was given to the aesthetic rather than the throughput, I think the quality would rise rapidly

Illumination.
You can just imagine some civil servant, dying to impress his superiors, waking up in the middle of the night with ‘The great idea!’. He had decided, either here or in Brussels, that those little clear, candle light bulbs used for wall brackets and hall chandeliers are a serious waste of energy even if they were only 40 W, and had to be abolished and replaced by some ugly, un-aesthetic, white energy-saving monster that would have no place whatsoever in all the fittings, in all the lounges and halls across the nation. In my case it will affect approximately 17 40 W bulbs, and the fact of all that energy that I am wasting is keeping me awake at night, not to mention the fact that I’m going to have to decorate the walls, and the reception rooms, when I buy new light fittings to replace those now obsolete.

Would somebody for God’s sake tell those in charge to take a grip, and crawl back into the real world, get advice from someone with commonsense, and one hopes the sense of the ridiculous, before we all go raving mad

Education
There is a battle of words in our house over what I wrote yesterday concerning education, and in particular homework. I’m sure she is right, because she was a highly regarded schoolteacher, with excellent examination results. But then you see her aim was to produce high results in her own field, not taking an overall picture of education per se, and the needs of the individual for his or her future, depending upon the type of future, and his or her ability. School by its very nature has to take account of the wide differential in the ability of its pupils, and steer a course, which will suit all but the highly gifted. I think it is accepted that there is a need for more than just the three Rs, that aesthetic, an awareness of the world, with its population and of its history, is essential, coupled with basic physics in this new world where physics has taken over in so many fields. I was amazed the other day, to find that small children at private preschool classes were being taught French songs by rote, probably taught with an overlay of a regional accent. Everything a child learns in its early years, by its very nature is a form of rote, and when I see adult counter assistants, adding the price of two articles on a calculator, I realise that education has failed the modern generations. We were taught to add long columns of figures, tricks for doing other calculations in the head, because that would be the basis upon which our financial dealings in the future would be conducted and we would be assured of fair dealing. I feel that it is essential that some university’s think tank gets to grips with what is necessary, for the lifestyle, the intellectual ability and the aesthetic of school leavers, so that their time at school is used to the best advantage for them, not for league tables, or the advancement of the careers of some teachers. Teachers by their very nature want to do the best for the children, and in most cases do, but they are operating in a narrow field, taking into account only their own requirements, leaving someone else to decide the overall value of the education being offered. Then we might do away with homework, and stop anything beyond an additional 12% of learning being added to the daily life of our schoolchildren. If this extra time is essential, why have such long school holidays, when the students are ultimately bored to death? Their free-time is valuable for their development in other fields beside school work.

I have said this before, and whether it is wise to repeat it is arguable, because I think you will know what I am about to say, but it seems that we are unable to do anything about it. In my view our political system had lost its way

It is we, the populace, who provide the finances for the running of the country and in consequence expect a reasonable return, and a minimum of flummery and waste. The opposition collectively, is not there to fight its own corner; it is there to keep a check on the way the country is being run and to highlight mismanagement and waste. What is actually happening is that Parliament seems to be more interested in its own function, and what is more its individual reputations, as a result of a feeding frenzy of mass media, than it is in its true function. You only have to listen to PM’s Question Time, to realise this is the case. The continuous stream of change in every aspect of our lives, almost on a daily basis is a clear signal that the statement is correct. In all my adult life from the end of World War II when I was demobbed, I have never seen such a disruptive and insecure method of government, with its constant carping, with the total mismanagement of the more unimportant aspects of parliamentary procedure, which has been pounced upon by the media and has totally devalued the system as a whole, when it could have been handled just as fairly and without the razzmatazz. This was clearly a political ploy which certainly backfired to the detriment of us all, and now we are having more of this nonsense being splattered across the world and demeaning our way of life. Is it any wonder people are no longer bothering to vote because all they will get is a rubber stamp of what they have just had, only the colour will have changed?

The hidden world of the DHSS
The average man in the street even in a lifetime barely scratches the complexity and the store of help that is there waiting for use. Become handicapped and a whole new world opens up to you. It always annoyed me when people used to complain and still do, about the quality of the DHSS, when they haven’t a clue of the incredible complexity and difficulty of running such an enormous department, with so many different individual sub-departments as the DHSS has. The degree of concern, help, assistance and equipment, offered by the DHSS with goodwill and care only becomes apparent when you really needed it. For those who are handicapped the level of help offered in their own home, and the equipment to make their life more simple and bearable, is unbelievable until you are actually on the receiving end. If you get on to the government website as I have had to do, you will be amazed at what is on offer, sometimes for some people totally free, and for the rest of us just very little cost. In saying that, I exclude the cost to the individual or being placed in a care home, as it is government not DHSS policy.

The logicality of international foreign policy
Ultimately, at the behest of the USA, a large proportion of those countries with the facilities, have been induced into fighting wars that were not about the original problems presented by the UN, but about America’s foreign policy especially when it comes to oil. Hussein did a lot of sabre rattling with his fiction of an atomic arsenal, and we were suckered in. As an individual I find it strange that the world isn’t openly and even militarily up in arms against Pakistan for harbouring and apparently doing little about the terrorists clique within its borders, who are creating havoc and murder to a monstrous extent elsewhere, when on the face of it all they are receiving is remonstration.

I am posting this letter on my website, but I do not expect they will read it, but perhaps someone who thinks it is valid might draw their attention to it. I write, not as a politician, or a political analyst, but merely someone who has spent more than 60 years as an adult in this Province. Like many I am peeved at the way the silent majority of the Unionists are currently represented by only one unionist, and that in local elections the choice is an amalgam, a party that has not the same affiliations as the old Unionist party had, and thus also a watered down version of the original pool of pure Unionists Up until 1969 the Unionist party represented the majority of people in the north of Ireland, only a few of whom were of a virulent nature. I believe, that apart from those on both sides of the divide who felt they had a cause to fight, the rest of all persuasions rubbed along reasonably harmoniously. We all know, have experienced, and indeed many of us suffered from the mindless violence of the following 40 years which has got us nowhere, but with a very ambivalent Stormont. There is almost total apathy, which is easily understandable, when those responsible for our welfare are busy fighting their own corners rather than being statesman. The way the British government, time and time again gave us the impression that they wanted rid of us as an unpleasant drain on the Exchequer, forgot that in those years before the troubles we were actually contributing to the British economy which then was of course the United Kingdom economy.

The apathy is easily understandable when one watches on TV, the playacting of the characters in the Stormont farce, behaving in the way that they consider it appropriate to a parliament, and later in the day at news time, one sees them screeching at one another in the entrance hall of Stormont when a fluffy microphone is shoved in their face. It therefore becomes difficult to take them seriously, and not consider that their own egos are more important than both decorum and quality politics, that moves things on rather than allows them to stagnate to a point where nothing is done. Before ‘69 we had politicians who knew their job, weren’t made fun of as the ‘Chuckled Buddies’, something which demeans the whole of the assembly. They conducted their affairs either in Westminster or behind closed doors, but not continuously running to knock on the door of number 10. This practice alone shows a lack of statesmanship. Many of the more experienced politicians are still alive, some influencing from the background on both sides of the divide. Surely they along with some other influential people in the Province can steady the ship, give us people we can respect to vote for, whom we know will do the job properly.

>From the last election it was evident that the amalgamation of the Unionist party with the Conservative party was more to the advantage of the latter, while at the same time totally negating the pure Unionist vote. It would appear that people are dissatisfied, to a considerable extent, with the conduct of the DUP, and perhaps these two facts open a door to a more substantial and worthily Unionist party in time for the next election.

This is not one of my serious posts, but matters that I take seriously, because they are so unfair and so absurd. Take the latest transfer fee of £80 million for a football player in the Premier League. If you take into account the unemployed, the children, the retired, the lower paid and the high-paid fans who are attending the matches, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the average daily pay packet would be approximately £80 for an eight hour day, so the working year of 200 days would amount to £16,000, and the fee would represent five thousand year’s wages of the average fan. It is these fans who are going to have to foot the bill through their purchases, and season tickets for that incredible transfer fee, at a time when so many people are on short time of losing their jobs. Of course it’s absurd! It is also obscene!

Recently we have had a spate of people being brought to book with respect to the police force and the social services, for either criminality, malfeasance, or permitting unreasonable behaviour to pass without censure. Some of these people will go to jail, quite a few will be sacked. How is it then that the far more serious and far-reaching theft of our savings and investments, because that is what it was, when our money was used to gamble with, and when success was achieved, the achievers received bonuses and even higher salaries, from the source, that was the aggrandisement of our investments, as a result of their gambling on the stock exchange. When the wheels came off, they add insult to injury by taking our taxes to actually pay these people, some with incredible salaries and pension funds. It was all beyond being absurd.

I resent very much the way in which some members of Parliament have been playing ducks and drakes with our system of government, in some cases without reference to the electorate that put them in power. The glaring case of course is the inflated ego of Mrs. Blears, who had previously put herself up as a candidate for the vice Premiership and came last. I suspect that without reference to the chairman of her constituency party, she went headlong into an assassination of the Prime Minister. It is possible to imagine that her letter, her rhetoric, and total arrogant attitude reflected her conjecture that there was going to be a leadership battle, and with this she would receive promotion. Her subsequent abject apologies, only went to bolster this assumption. She is not alone in this behaviour, that demeans our parliamentary system, to a level at which we feel we cannot trust those who are supposed to lead us, their judgement and integrity. The whole business over the last few weeks has been more than a disaster, it has cut the feet from underneath our political platform, and except for the fact that the Brits are phlegmatic, slow to anger, saves us from some terrible political upheaval. This is criminal not absurd.

I have seen some rabble rousing in my time, but I don’t remember anything as distorted, and engineered as this that we are suffering at this time. It is not a game, it is our political future which has been ripped apart, often unreasonably, and it will not be possible to put it together overnight. I am convinced that there is a worm in the apple with a ploy as yet unclear.

All along I have beseeched my readers to stop and think. I do so again. We have known ever since the EU was instigated that the people in Brussels were milking the gravy train hand over first to the tune of hundreds of millions. We have been aware of the fact that not all countries obey the rules in the way that our civil servants seem to need to do. So why are we so surprised that this is a similar tradition, because that is what it is, and has clearly been in vogue in Westminster for years. This holier than thou, washing of hands, sheer hypocrisy has got to stop. Over my life I have rubbed shoulders with petty crime, malfeasance, and left. Don’t tell me that you have never done anything that is on the margins of theft. For example paying a tradesman cash because he wouldn’t do the job if he had to present a bill and thus pay VAT, or something similar. In this instance you are conniving to steal money from the government, but a lot of people will condone it. Don’t tell me that you are as righteous as these people who are writing in the press, preaching on television, and who are creating this expose, would appear to be. I have seen teachers taking pencils and books from school for their children to use at home, I have known the people in sweet shops who considered it their perk to steal the odd bar of chocolate. The list is endless, and the higher you go in the value of the circumstances, so the so-called ‘perks’ get greater. If you read through my blog I cite dozens of instances of people bending the rules to their own advantage, it is nothing new, and if we were honest we would not be so surprised in this current case.

Please, just stop and think, and decide if this furore is really justified to the level it has reached, and could not have been dealt with in a more sane way, with a lot less damage to all of us.

I rarely write about Northern Ireland because not many people are interested in it, since it was a daily diet of murder and mayhem, but now I am urged to say something because I believe our local and international politics are going down the tubes. 40 years on, we are not the country we were, we still have terrorists, but now we also have the indignity of a foreign country, Eire, interfering in the internal politics of the UK, where it affects us. The Good Friday Agreement brought about by David Trimble, was to some extent a sop to the IRA, the Eire government, and the American Irish lobby. I believe an American senator acted as chairman. At about that time the Ulster Unionist party was the strongest party, and had several seats at Westminster. Since then, possibly due to apathy on the part of the more conservative population, who were sick to death of politics, allowed the DUP to take over the representation of the Protestants, to a point where now the Ulster Unionists have one member of Parliament, Lady Sylvia Hermon, representing, probably, a high proportion of the electorate, who are still apathetic.

Recently we have had two conflicting financial problems, on the one hand we have the Treasury demanding that we make £122m efficiency savings inside the next two years, which is clearly a mountain to climb, and will have far reaching deleterious effects, at the same time, the Appointed Minister Designate for Social Development for the new Executive, Margaret Ritchie, makes a serious political blunder, which I believe to have been intentional, thus causing a judicial enquiry costing £300,000 and judicial censure. When asked about this she was totally unrepentant, and determined to continue in office. I find this also confusing as today there seem to be so many cases in political life both here and in Westminster, where lack of honesty seems to be able to be maintained without reprisal.

For example, Sinn Fein, whose elected representatives refuse to sit in Parliament, seem to be making a mockery of Parliament itself, because while not attending the debates, they are actually enabled, through knocking on doors, to achieve their ends. This implies by the very nature of its success, that in fact the debates are a waste of time, and the whole system could be conducted behind closed doors. This statement, of course, ignores the need for open government, which has been the basis of our legislative system. On the face of it Sinn Fein has disenfranchised the electoral seats that they allegedly represent, and they have been allowed to get away with it.

Recently, on a Sunday, in the politics show, Sir Reg Empey was confusing me with his new proposal of joining the Ulster Unionists in some manner with the British Conservative party, as a unit to represent Protestants in the North of Ireland. His confusing explanation, citing the different combinations that one can vote for, made me believe yet again, that the Unionist vote will be split among so many parties, that the whole of Northern Ireland conservatism will be relatively unrepresented. Whether this matters, in the light of what I have written in the paragraph above, seems open to debate.

The Backlash of the Credit Crunch must be presenting Alistair Darling with a confusing headache. The repossession of an increasing number of houses might be doing solicitors, surveyors, and the auctioneers an increase in their incomes, and consequently the tax they pay, but the lack of building, and the lack of sales, are having a knock-on effect on the building industry as a whole, and the estate agencies. In consequence he is losing not only stamp duty, but the reduction in income tax from the rest of the industry. When he took over from Brown he was under the impression it was just a sleigh ride, how wrong he was.

The unnecessary swingeing rise in the cost of fuel, increased by the rise in VAT is slowing down the overall spending and hence the revenue. Eire has a reduced levy on fuels which is prompting an incredible cross-border trade. The knock-on effect of the rise in fuel prices we all know about, because we suffer. It is interesting that a lot of the immigrants have already seen the red light and are away home. We, like Alistair Darling, have nowhere to go. The only bright light on the horizon is perhaps the fact that now we should be able to get a plumber, a joiner and a painter, because their house building contracts will be slowing down and then they will be forced to take on our mundane little jobs

The DeLorean Syndrome My pint is always half empty rather than half full. My long memory causes me a certain amount of doubt when I hear of this incredible number of enterprises that are being examined for sponsorship in Northern Ireland. In the past, a new batwing car, designed and intended to be built by an American here in Northern Ireland, all failed miserably with the loss of millions of Government seed capital. Currently there is a great hurrah about American businessmen coming here to open up new businesses in order to provide work in underprivileged areas. I believe the idea laudable, what I don’t understand is, if the American economy is as bad as we are told, why they are not setting up there to help their people, rather than here, unless it’s because they are getting a vast handshake to get them started - the DeLorean syndrome. The inference that I have taken from what I have heard and read, is that these people are looking for special skills. What I question is if we will be able to fulfil the demands, or out of the blue we will have to import hundreds of skilled immigrants to complete the contracts, and have to house these foreigners who will not be spending their money here but sending it home. I question everything that our current leaders do, because up to now it seems that they shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Over the years we have had a number of new starts, sponsored and government-funded to provide labour, and I think I’m right in saying that in some cases once the contractual period had passed, the project either found a new home, or died. Our expertise will be used to design the initial system, iron out the wrinkles, and once the operation is running and children can operate it - bye bye!

I looked at the news today and was unsurprised to find that the PM was once again tinkering with the legislation. Ever since Tony Blair was in office every aspect of our lives has been brought under scrutiny time and time again, and many of the changes made have not, in the long run, been helpful.

Just for openers, I wonder if anyone took a sample of those doing the eleven plus and assessed them in the proposed manner as well, and then compared the results, and more importantly, published the results of this research. I’m surprised it hasn’t been lauded in the Press if it was so successful that we were all to be faced with the change of system. It would have shut up people like me!

In Northern Ireland we have been particularly proud of our education system, the level of grades and university places, and our place in the league tables of the UK. We are one of the last parts of the United Kingdom to retain the 11 plus, now there is a move afoot by the Minister to do away with that by 2010. The reaction to this has turned the whole of our education system upside down. We have a split system here where we have segregated schools, desegregated schools, and the usual mix of nursery elementary and secondary. We do not have private schools, but some have fee-paying pupils. What is now proposed by some of the secondary schools is that they conduct their own entrance exams, and only those reaching the standards required will be given places. There are a large number of schools throughout the Province that have a high reputation, and in consequence parents have been known to move house for their children to be able to attend. The other day I heard that one of my great-grandchildren had her name put down for kindergarten a week or two after she was born. The fact that the schools are confident that their new policy of entrance exams will not reduce the queue of people waiting to enrol children, is a clear indication that those people who respect education for what it is, are prepared to take the risk of the children suffering some worries for a very short period of time, and accept the subsequent expense of attending these schools, even at the expense of other choices.

I in the 30s, had the benefit of the LCC who introduced the 11 plus equivalent, and the scholarship system that went with it. We, parents and children, were delighted with the system, and we believed that others around the country were envious. Now, nearly 80 years on, a minority of psychologists, coupled with parents who have not the ability to see the advantages of academic selection, that the fact that while it may present worry and tantrums for a very short period of time, in the long run, is better than the random nature of the teacher assessment system. I believe in time there will inevitably have to be a reversal back to academic selection, but the sort of experiment taken on such a vast population instead of a trial, is unfair to those affected. Many of us have been complaining that our education system in the UK, taken overall, for a number of reasons has steadily become downgraded, and that the entrance requirements and degree standards of the universities have consequently been lowered to maintain the throughput.

Those who might read this article, will probably each take something different from it. This is the nature of thought processes nurtured in different environments. If you accept these two statements, you have an example of the permutations of reactions that will be placed as assessments across-the-board, randomly influencing the future of young people. In other words, I suggest that if you have 10 children each assessed by 10 different teachers, the assessments will vary considerably in each case. Every one of us knows that some teachers more than others have favourites, and we also know that individuals do not all react on parallel lines. I suggest therefore that without a major yardstick, personal assessments affected by inference are a very blunt tool.