Category: General

A day or so ago there was a piece on the TV news which implied that the Government was re-evaluating its approach to the way in which the banks were run, prior to the Crunch, and were bringing in more rules and specifications. I was always amazed that the government didn’t treat the banks as it treats businesses that get into difficulties, and leave them to sink or swim. I would have expected them to open a national bank, that had no links with the stock exchange, but would have the billions of taxpayer’s money, necessary to bail out those businesses which showed promise, and could provided some security in itheir assets. This I believe is constructive criticism, whether it is correct or even possible is immaterial, because it is only one man’s opinion, and would be dealt with accordingly.

I find it incredible that companies are still allowed to offer advanced credit as a means of building sales, openly on television, and in the press, when this was part of the basis of the crunch. We are still being peppered with offers of even more credit cards, and the crunch induced a reduction in prices that in themselves can cause the impecunious to make irresistible purchases. I would have thought that this would have been some of the first things that would have been clamped upon.

On the other hand, the leaders of the two main opposition parties, are not offering constructive criticism, they are sniping. They are standing at the dispatch boxes, openly criticising what the government is doing, but are not prepared to offer any solution, keeping these ideas to themselves, in the hope of forming the next government, and then implementing them. The interesting thing I find about this approach is that they are assuming that the electorate is as thick as two short planks, and will thus believe that they, the pundits, have a viable solution, and for us to take it on trust. 30 years ago that might have washed, but today, with our scepticism and improved nous, we are not so easily conned, what we require is constructive criticism, not naked sniping from cover.

What is more I could even be carrying a gun. It’s all to do with the plastic that they encapsulate my food in. I’m standing there struggling, salivating, and going nowhere in trying to open the goodies. Instead of getting England’s Strongest Man to test the security of a plastic container, they should get me, the Wimp of the Week. I sit there and, night after night, my Scotch warming up, while I am fighting with a plastic container to get to the crisps. The infuriating thing is that they put a black tab to indicate a soft bit of the bag, and it is as tough as all the rest. My great-granddaughter, aged three+, can sit on the naughty step eating crisps to her hearts content, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has opened the bag for her. Actually of course, it isn’t the crisp bags that are the real problem, it is food packaging. I shall probably carry the gun until find I the guy who designs these packages and then I shall shoot him.

When my generation was young, we not only carried a Swiss Army knife in the pocket, we had a sheath knife hanging from our trouser belt, and no one thought a thing about it. Now I’m going to have to carry a knife to open these damn packages, but I shall get away with it because I’ve got white hair and am sitting in a wheelchair.

If we can’t trace where all the money that was stolen went to, let alone by whom, there is every chance that the same thing can happen again without redress, without discovery, and certainly without regulation.

I say Pleb to underline the fact that this is uneducated reasoning to understand the requirements of Members of Parliament, and basically how the system works. Have you ever thought about the process of becoming an MP, and what it entails to that individual? You would think that when they are seeking a suitable candidate in a by-election, they would first of all decide what attributes they required, what gaps there were in the experience of the backbenchers, and virtually pick horses for courses. When you realise that often, with the shuffles, people are shifted from department to department irrespective of any experience they might have, this negates any necessity to import people with particular skills, so one might then wonder on what basis people are selected. Recently I was listening to a young woman, currently a minister for the Prison Service, whom I firmly believed had only just been put in office, and yet was asked to speak intelligently on television on the subject. What she was probably really doing was reading from a script written by a civil servant in the prison service.

The learning curve of a newly appointed MP must be considerable in those first few months, and steep, with documents to be couched in special phrases, layers of authority and routes of communication, mainly written by, and including the power and necessity of the Civil Service in the background. In local government, before making decisions the councillors are generally briefed by staff, and could talk to the staff further if required. An MP reads a White Paper and could have a three-line whip when it comes to voting. This makes me wonder just how much authority an MP has when he or she is representing the constituents, and advancing their concerns. Indeed it might even be considered that a totally new system should be devised, whereby Parliament is firmly linked with local councils, with each council having a councillor whose job it is to inform Parliament of the concerns of the local authority, and discuss ways and means on any matter with a representative of the Department concerned. It might even be considered, as in the old system, that there was a level of duplication when we voted for councillors to take charge of most of our business in the county’s and the city’s, and at the same time voting in somebody to do the same thing in Parliament. That of course does not apply today, because the teeth of the local authorities have all been drawn, except in some other minor, more mundane functions.

I could go on drawing parallels of this type, but they are so obvious I leave it to your imagination. I just can’t understand why we need over 600 people in Parliament when most of the functions are, or in fact should be, originated in the counties and the city’s, which would make the whole process quicker and easier. We need a Foreign Service, we need a Commonwealth office, we need a lot of the other functions not dealt with in the Cities and Shires, like the Treasury, taxation, defence etc. and we need people to oversee properly not only the operation of Parliament but that of the counties and cities. If we change the system we may wonder how many people and how much money would be reduced by necessity. It is easier to stop malpractice or rank stupidity, at local level than it is, if the functions are shrouded, if not in secrecy, but by protocol, and hundreds of miles away.

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.

It is essential when writing a blog that the level of your experience is made clear so that those reading the blog will not be fooled into thinking that you’re an expert on what you’re discussing. What I write here now would shock my nephew, who is a botanist, with alphabet soup after his name, and plants with his name that he has discovered in some of the remoter parts of the world.

The world, which originally started as a mess of gases, has been ever-changing, as a result of different influences. Changes though must be inevitable with time, because the centre of the earth is molten and cooling. There are two theories on why the dinosaurs became extinct, one as the result of a virus, and the other due to volcanic action cutting off the light from the world. Hence one can assume that no theory can be absolute. Scientists have been boring holes and taking samples of ice and rock to enable them to interpret the changing seasons and conditions that pertained at the time as each minute layer was laid down. Whether these interpretations are totally accurate may be questioned, as clearly records don’t exist, except for the last few centuries when records started. Ever since the global warming concept has been giving rise to worry, we have been showered with instructions, entreatments, and bludgeoning for the cause. The man in the street, unsurprisingly is baffled by all the scientific information which he hasn’t a hope of understanding because he has either only or no GCSE in science, and the whole thing is above him. He is in the hands of the government and the scientists with no recourse. It is not surprising that he is sceptical when he is instructed to wash out the milk bottles, scrape out the food tins, and select paper from paper without plastic attachments, and then discovers in his local press, and press in other districts, that the waste is actually being used as landfill, and all the recycling process is a waste of time and money to him and the local authority.

I would like to take just one simple idea, that of the exhaust from a car. Scientists are busy weighing gases and trying to correlate them with samples taken from the upper atmosphere. In my view the gas comes out of the tail pipe, and can be absorbed in water, adjacent plant life, swept along in the atmosphere with the wind, but I suggest that not all of it or perhaps even a major part of it ever reaches the upper atmosphere. The tremendous amount of money, government advertising and pressure on the individual being exerted in the name of global warming, as a result of scientists drawing conclusions, is colossal Recently we have had tremendous forest fires in both America and Australia, in recent centuries there has been colossal volcanic action, and while carbon dioxide from the forests around the world has diminished, that from man has increased. The balance, and other possibly unknown influences must have some input into these equations that the scientists are making, the question that needs to be asked is how accurate the overall information is that is being used to force us to toe the line, to the extent that it is. I am a cynic and believe that with respect to global warming different people have different agendas, not all to do with saving the world. The other aspect that I see is that there is a differential between some of the larger countries and their attitude to global warming and those that our government is inflicting on us. I have no desire to be a world leader, just have a strong wish to keep this country afloat for the sake of my children my grandchildren, great-grand children and those still to come.

After I reread the post that I wrote at three o’clock this morning I realised that not only can we not trust anything at all today, but, if one is exceptionally cynical, one can draw conclusions that are horrendous.

Firstly I realised that it is pointless to act on anything this government says, firstly, because they are likely to do a U-turn and leave you stranded, secondly because their tenure of office is so fragile, causing there to be an election sooner than later, when we will have a new bunch of people rescinding, chopping and changing, and introducing their own versions, which may be just as bad. If however Labour wins the next election I shudder to think what mayhem there will be. We will probably be worse off, what ever happens.

A few days ago I was writing about the problems of the very elderly, who are having to save money to ensure that their house is not sold over their heads, to pay for them going into care. Now the government is whingeing daily that there are too many elderly people cluttering up the country and costing the health service a fortune. So why, at a time when they are scrabbling for money, do they suddenly decide they can afford to scrap this policy and pay for the elderly to go into care, while still able to maintain their house. This would cost millions, and there was no need for them to do it at this time, unless they had some other reason that made it possible, gave the whole system a palliative, and there would be profit for the government beyond just a few extra votes at the next election. Looking through the recent outpourings of the government, with their proposals and their warnings, I came up with the most cynical, but totally rational reason why this was possible. With Mandelson in charge, it doesn’t surprise me, it merely horrifies me. I leave you to work out the solution that I envisage.

It seems, people are paying £2500 for a dodgy ticket, for the possibility of sitting cheek by jowl with somebody with swine flu, in a temperature of 33° C, their heads going from side to side, and they call this ‘pleasure’.

It was predictable, that we would be in the mess we are when they invited Mandelson to take over the government. It looks as though we’re losing at least one of our railway lines, to my knowledge we have had about four U-turns in the last fortnight, and about six new initiatives in one week, most of the latter are something we wanted and were writing about a least three years ago. When this swine flu epidemic was initially broached, I was under the impression, because I was amazed at the cost, that we had something like 360 million doses of anti-flu, sitting on the shelves around the country. Obviously I was wrong in my interpretation of what the PM and the ministers were telling us, because in fact we are not going to get them until Christmas. How could people be allowed to enter this country on a direct flight from Mexico, and other hot-spots, and not be required to have voluntary isolation in their own homes? The information is all there, but then I forgot, the government databases are totally unreliable. It could be a little worrying when I say that my immediate family numbers almost 15 and that I am told that five of us are on a three to one risk. I can’t understand why it was necessary to broadcast figures like that, it achieves nothing, except disturbing the people who are naturally nervous, and in consequence have them worrying whether they should go shopping at eight o’clock in the morning, go on holiday, and so on, with the effect that these decisions would make to us commercially, and on the wider horizon with respect to the travel industry. It seems that the only thing we hear from the front benchers are the words ‘election’, ‘U-turn’, and ‘fresh initiative’ for something which had already been proposed and rejected.

It is definitely cloud cuckoo land

Today I heard of a new initiative by the government entitled Building Britain’s Future. Earlier in the week it was reported that the government was proposing to change the way in which the National strategies in literacy and numeracy would work. Today it was also revealed that the NHS is going to be revamped with respect to cancer treatment, and a closer association with the private sector. It is clear that this is a venture to try and improve the image of Gordon Brown, but at what cost?

What is interesting is that an education White Paper of this type was prepared but rejected by the education minister, Mr balls, only to be resurrected now. I have said recently, and often that change is very expensive in materials, valuable history and labour, and I am firmly convince that continuing to have central government responsible for all services, except the most menial, is only a stumbling block to good management and a serious case of duplication. Just as a mental exercise I thought I would try and see just what the process of changing the primary school strategies might involve. I don’t propose to do things in great detail and will be using round figures and approximations to arrive at some sort of total picture.

Suppose, for this exercise, we take the population of England as 50 million, a lifespan of 75 years, and that the number of children and adults in each year is the same. Therefore the children affected will be those from four years old until 11, a matter of seven years, the number of children in each year will be 600, 000, so the number of children affected by this will be 4 million, and at 40 children to each class, the number of classes affected will therefore be 100,000, or 14,000 schools. Initially they will have to be cross-party meetings to get general approval for the process with all that that will cost in politicians, civil servants and overheads. When the new proposals are thrashed out they will be to be sent to all the education and library boards of the councils in the land who are responsible for their implementation. They in turn will have to contact a proportion of the teaching staffs in their areas, find out their take on the matter, prepare a report and send this back to Parliament. The problem here is that the labour taken to do this in the shires will be outside school teaching hours by teachers, and by councillors who are mostly voluntary. In effect this will not cost the government very much. However, it is the next stage that can be frightening expensive. All these reports will have to be categorised by age, and analysed by civil servants; further reports made, Parliamentary committees having to read and comment on the analysis, and the final report prepared. This would then be presented to Parliament to be voted upon and if successful the work would really begin. On the basis of the analysis a new protocol would have to be made and approved, presumably sent to a select number of county councils for comment, and then ultimately the final draft will be printed, probably taking 20 or 30 pages, in view of the number of educational subjects that it would have to be addressed, and these would be sent to every school, all 14,000 of them. The schools themselves would have to hold a teacher and parent meetings to inform the parents of the new proposals. What is patiently clear, even if my assessment is inaccurate, is an awful lot of people will be forced to give their free time to complete the change.

On the evidence of previous Better Britain type initiatives, it will probably come to nothing, except a lot of people would have given a lot of their spare time to the project with no recompense and no result. Just multiply this by the number of different departments of government that are going to be totally assessed for Change, even if it never happens, at great expense to the country and clearly to individuals. You would never have anything of this sort, if all these functions, such as water, sewage, roads, health, and many more, were the functions of local councils, with merely an overseeing role by the government. That system gives the opportunity to try changes in trial areas before making a sweeping change, and possibly stepping off the edge of a precipice. The government is very careful of medicines being given trials, but it seems that that’s where commonsense stops.

I am a serious sufferer, because I consider that the period between 1933 to the summer of 1939, were halcyon days. We had come out of the austerity of World War I; as far as I remember, unemployment was no longer serious, and there seemed to be very little aggravation of any kind. The trouble with this illness is that you look back on the past through rose coloured glasses, and criticise thoughtlessly about subsequent conditions, without taking into account the inevitable effect of change. For example, with high-speed, mass reporting of the media, we are now presented a diet of ‘man bites dog stories’, on a daily basis in order mainly to boost circulation in whatever form. In the 30s the report of a murder could run to several days, now they are reported at the rate of about 10 a week, most of which are never referred to again. In those days newspapers wouldn’t have dared to delve into the functions of Parliament, nor would there been the political leaks that seem to be a feature of government today.

In the 30s, domestic commerce was conducted, even within large cities, on a village basis. Every village-unit had its own street of barrow boys, it had shops, of all kinds and qualities, to feed the area, and shopping outside the village was treated more as an occasion than a necessity. The popularity of the car, resulting from the lack of public transport, our standard of living, and convenience, has totally changed our shopping system, to the detriment of the small shopkeeper. The throwaway society for similar reasons has made repair rather than renewal almost obsolete. Possibly other than instant communication, these differences, however, have not really been responsible for the upsurge of antisocial behaviour that seems to be the mark of our current age, both nationally and internationally. Terrorism on the scale of today had never been experienced as a worldwide phenomenon until recently. It has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, which is merely used as a tool, but for the advantage of a few, at the detriment of many.

This new age, with broadband, seen by the government to be an essential, yet in actual fact, is more a means of entertainment in the majority of cases, than of tool to improve our social condition, has also been responsible for causing teenagers to adopt a sedentary existence, peering at a blue screen. It is very difficult to separate the individual changes, which have brought us to where we are, a society not comfortable with itself, often changing for the sake of change, without due care and attention to the long-term effects, and then changing once again. It is difficult to learn lessons from the past, because the influences have now become vague with time, and those today are so very disparate from those of the past, that it is foolish to try to draw comparisons. We can only analyse those actions that are abhorrent in the current context, and I for one, should stop looking back, and instead, try to predict effect as a result of cause.