Category: General

When a boy throws himself off a bridge to fall 20 feet, because he is being attacked; when we hear daily of murder, stabbing, and children with machetes, and other children stoning ambulances, it is time to take stock. Before World War II one rarely saw an article in a newspaper about murder, to the extent that if written, it was emblazoned. Now all news is daily peppered with accounts of murder, so what is the real cause for this terrible breakdown in our society, and what needs to be done to remedy it? Our way of life is totally different to what it was in the 50s, but are we so totally different? I am not aware if a nationwide survey of the type that I’m proposing has ever been carried out to assess if there are actually any patterns in the causes of crime, which are influenced by age, the environment in which people live, and their financial situation, to highlight just a few of the variables. The only way that we can find this out is to examine possible changes in each decade since the 50s and relate them to the rise of violence and criminality that is prevalent today. I did think of an incredibly complicated analysis of the records of all those who have committed crime over the decades, and discovered that it was a monumental task. Then I thought of a marketing research tool that I had used in the past, the Observation Panel. One invited a number of like minded individuals, to a hotel room, showed them a product, asked them for their views on it, and from the information gained, having done this several times, a decision was made on whether the product should be promoted and to what extent. I think graphs should be used once the information is correlated to enable changes to be seen in different categories over the decades. It has been my experience that graphs are far superior to unvarnished statistics, for a quick understanding of any marked variation.

Today’s security, and peoples’ personal records, have to be protected, so a scheme must be designed which will provide analysis, and ultimately promulgation and examination, without access to the names and addresses of the individuals who have been questioned. I therefore propose the following system of analysis by sample, to see if it was possible to find trends over the decades which have led us to where we are today. Firstly we would need to question people who in the past or currently committed one of a number of crimes which we will have under review. To do this we would have to give an incentive to people who agree to be questioned. For their own security they will be required to provide a number of their choice between a 100 and 1000 which would be their personal reference, retained by a collator, who will be the only person to have this information. The environments, the areas that people came from, the types of crime, plus the social and financial background of the individual, would all be estimated in categories, while other information like the reasons for the crime can be explained in more detail.

I am proposing a system which has the same basic philosophy as market research, but instead of being done in groups, is a verbal question and answer session, conducted by a psychologist, but not taped. Veracity would have to be tested. It would be up to the interviewer, or a scribe, to fill in sheets with the categories that they assess the individual’s answer to be. Subsequently after about five people in each of all seven decades have been questioned, and the information converted into graphs, it will be then to decide whether the scheme has any validity, shows any patterns of behaviour, or is a complete waste of time. It’s the old adage of if you want to know what it tastes like, you have to suck it and see.

I don’t anticipate that this idea will be taken up, but if I have at least caused some people in authority to think again, with fresh eyes, on the behavioural problems of today in all ages and specifically the young and relatively young, your time will not have been wasted in reading this and mine in writing it.

If I were a schoolteacher I think I would pack it in, buy a rucksack and go walkabout. It is incredible that we have two members of Parliament, called secretaries, to deliver one message from the Cabinet, the culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, and the school’s secretary, Ed Balls, telling schoolteachers and the parents that the children today are insufficiently cultured and need the equivalent of more than one days teaching added to the curriculum per week for the appreciation of the arts, sport and suchlike. A quotation from the New Testament, ‘ God, forgive them for they know not what they do.’ do they really believe that teachers, without going on another course, spending hours mugging up, can deliver an interesting, light-hearted exposition on the merits of a collection of pictures in a local museum or art gallery that is going to teach young children anything about Art? In the list that was featured by the MP when he gave his explanation. It is no wonder the educational system is in the chaos it is.? Think of the time that will be wasted on gathering the children together, taking them to an art gallery, or whatever, and returning

Our schools are struggling, structurally falling apart, through lack of funds, they have sold off the playing fields, for the same reason. They have added additional classes for those not reaching the standards in the three Rs, and I recently discovered that my great-grandchildren, aged eight and 10, had to sit three hour entrance examinations, to obtain a place in the school of their choice. Neither the parents nor the children in this case,are moaners, all their lives they have knuckled down, to do the best they can, and have as wide a range of interests as possible. However, having to sit these incredible exams at that age, and having tuition in order to be sure of passing, says something about the educational system.

In the 30s, in elementary school, we had, I think, two periods a week devoted to painting and messing about with plasticine, we did physical jerks, and we went swimming, and nobody grumbled about the quality of the education, and most of us were reasonably well educated, enough to hold down a job at 14, pass an entrance exam at 11 to get into a secondary school, and while there was an element among the parents of being selective in the choice of the school, the weight of it didn’t fall on the shoulders of the children. Coming up to the 11 plus, there were certainly tantrums and weeping, when it came to mathematical problems in homework, but nothing like the pressures of today, nor the constant tinkering with the system. We did music, three or four classes coupled together, singing traditional songs, and I remember at least two Christmases where I acted in plays which we put on for the parents. This was an ordinary LCC primary school, open to everyone and approved of by everyone. We had a couple of pretty desperate teachers, but the majority were interesting and interested.

Some will say I am an old idiot living in the past, but the old saying ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ should have been drilled into the politicians many years ago, and the kids coming up now would have the same qualities of education that we had, instead of this repetitious mishmash that clearly doesn’t work, is making the better teachers leave the profession and go and do something else, or never join it in the first place, and I believe money by the shed full is being thrown down the drain for no valid return.

Curry Concerns I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read that 9000 Curry houses were short of staff, and the staff that was needed had to come from Bangladesh. Sophie and my daughter have both taught themselves to make various, incredibly nice curry dishes, using a spice recipe that they got from a restaurant in Cyprus a long time ago. Surely, we don’t want even more immigrants, what we want is a short course which includes hygiene, commercial acumen and curry making, and then the jobs will be filled from within the UK, helping to take some people off the unemployment list and not having to find upwards of 9000 more homes for people to live. I can understand the proposition put by the Bangladeshi curry house owners, and there’s no way that I would think it was a ploy to bring relatives in from Bangladesh, it is just that they don’t want their secrets discovered, so I recommend that the teachers in the commercial Colleges go to Cyprus, instead of Bangladesh, to see how it’s done.

An Annoying New Industry.
Is it avarice, or incompetence? I don’t know whether you are having a problem with updates, I certainly am. I have, on recommendation, AVG anti-virus. They update daily, but that’s understandable. Microsoft has started sending almost daily updates, which I believe slowed down my computer, certainly annoy me and I see no reason whatsoever for them as I was happy with the way my computer operated anyway, but the latest one that has taken me to the fair, has been Nuance. About a week ago I bought a brand new copy of their NaturallySpeaking 9 voice transference, which I’m using at the moment to write this, because of my eyes still needing rest, this has been a great advantage, but I discovered today, only a week later, that they want to update this new version. I am assuming that any communication from a company on the Internet must cost somebody something. It costs me my monthly broadband charge, but is part of that paying Microsoft and all the others to update me? I can’t see them doing it to the extent that they are for free. In the case of Nuance, it is either that, or total incompetence in sending out a product which is still wet behind the ears and yet Nuance chooses to tinker with, this smacks of incompetence. Actually I have an axe to grind with Nuance, I bought version 8, it developed a fault, and I was instructed by the software to uninstall and reinstall. Unfortunately I had forgotten to record the registration number of the disc, I could only half uninstall, and what was left nearly wrecked my computer. I telephoned, I sent e-mails and I wrote, asking to be sent the number, because Nuance knew it, because I was registered, and they were busy sending me ads for new products. They never replied. It was against my better judgement to buy the new version, but due to my eye problems I had no choice. Now they are busy sending the updates I’m scared that I’ll go through the whole thing again with my computer damaged again. Incidentally, even when you register and they send updates or ads, they tell you to up date- that is incompetence, it has happened in both cases.

Stoning firemen just for fun. A pastime created by bored young people, during the troubles in Northern Ireland, seems to have spread throughout the UK. It was really very simple, all you needed was some bottle crates, some old whisky and gin bottles, to steal some petrol and tear up a few rags, make about four dozen Molotov cocktails, and you were in business. Go down the backs of some houses over a hundred years old, and dig up the square sets paving the back lane, steal some money and take it to an illegal dealer in dodgy fireworks, and then just decide what you were going to set alight. It might have been a pile of rubbish, or two or three cars or maybe even a bus, depending on your whim, but one thing you were sure of was that the police and the fire service would turn up. Then the fun started, you pelted them, you bombed them and you shot them with fireworks, and because of the way things are today there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it, it wasn’t worthwhile.

I have a solution, you won’t like it, and nobody will take it up. It’s a mixture of David Attenborough’s friends saving the animals, kidnapping, and government accounting. We’ve all seen people firing anaesthetising darts into harmless little animals, and carting them a few thousand miles, then letting them go in a totally new environment among a few of their own species, whose language they probably don’t understand. It occurred to me that if we fired a few darts into some of these youngsters so they zonked on the spot, the cops could lift them, that’s kidnapping, and then take them and lose them in station cells, scattered here and there, like the government has done with our various records. If they can do it in one case, why not another? After a couple weeks they just open the door and let them wander home. In the meantime they will have discovered that they might have been a bit bored when they were at home, but it was nothing like the boredom of solitary confinement.

Stoning firemen 2. Wisdom comes in strange bundles. For a long time I have known the government accounting is more about face-saving than veracity. At the present moment there is a chasm between the figures of the incidents of the fire service and police being attacked, collected by the unions, and those put out by the government. The unions have an axe to grind as does the government, but what the latter should understand is that when your probity is at a low level in the eyes of the electorate, they are more likely to believe the unions, especially on past experience, than they are of government records. It will be human rights of the young people which will be the concern, while forgetting that the human rights of a mother and two of three children in a house that  is burning, and is not receiving assistance from the fire service, because a fireman is in hospital and the fire engine is up on a ramp. Perhaps instead we should zonk the parents and send them on an excursion round the cells in the police stations.

Government statistics on immigrants. Over the weekend the papers were full of statistics about the actual number of foreigners living in this country. What is evident from remarks made on chat sites on the Internet, is that nobody believes them, and when they quote that it’s 2 million, people feel that is closer to three or even more. I have been over this ground before but I think that it is worthwhile just to underline the facts. Firstly there seems to be no control over where and how these people are employed, which means that local authorities cannot plan how to accommodate them, presupposing they are needed anyway. When this country had a population of 50 million, we seemed to be moving along very well without the need of outside help. Now the population is 60 million, but doubts have been cast on the fertility of the indigenous population, so where have the other 10 million come from? 3 million people on the basis of three to a house, demands a million new dwellings, but housing shortage is causing first-time buyers to get into a level of debt that they may never get out of, so the number of houses required is rising yearly, and our environment is being steadily stretched. The environment is not elastic, and neither is the infrastructure. The infrastructure is made up of engineering works which take time to modify or install, yet nobody seems to be planning ahead. We in Northern Ireland have a case in point of house building having to be curtailed in certain areas, because the infrastructure was inadequate. It seems we can yap on about these problems, but the government is so keen to tinkering with things like education and health, daily, it hasn’t time to take the overall picture.

Yesterday I was in the company of two, very bright women in their late 80s, who in all the 60 odd years that I have known them have only talked babies, weddings, gardening and suchlike, and yet yesterday they lambasted the politicians, saying that they believed nothing they were told any more. They thought the government couldn’t govern, they abhorred the deceit, the financial mismanagement, personal and national, the money grabbing, and above all they were worried for the struggling majority with unmanageable personal finances and the paucity of enjoyable life for the children. We have heard it all many times, but that is the problem, we all seem to know what is wrong but can’t correct it.

Let us assume the main problems are, lack of experienced politicians, the desire to stay in office in spite of extreme duplicity and mismanagement, the refusal to accept blame, and finally an election system which permits the ruling party to have an unassailable majority, which doesn’t allow for reasonable restraint in the face of the need for rethinking and caution. The desire to be loved at all costs is an added deterrent. Theoretically, in a democracy everyone should have equal opportunity and equal say in the way their life is run. In reality after they have voted they no longer have a say, nor seem to want one. Occasionally there are minor representations, but the basic structure remains unaltered unless there is a strong force at the top, with a strong backing, coupled with an intelligent opposition, offering aid and criticism as warranted, rather than the steady rants to bolster its chances at the next election. .No one seems accountable today like they were years ago. Do you know what your MP looks like? Have you ever seen him (her), written to him for help, and if you did was there a satisfactory outcome? If the answers to most of these questions is no, are we getting value for money, because it is costing a hell of a lot to keep the government bandwagon on the road when you take account of the expenses, the support staff and the upkeep of all the departments and buildings?

I have often said working in a city council environment was less frustrating, more productive and easier than as a civil servant doing the same job in roughly the same area. Big business, and the armed services, handling large sums of money, and in some cases, life and death, operate on a pyramidal system. I wonder do we need the 600 plus members of Parliament. We are told that they are required to act on committees. In my experience three or four intelligent people will arrive at a sensible solution in a 10th of the time that a committee of 20 would take, when in the end the committee’s resolution is often the opinion of one man. There has to be input, and output, and this is the function of those at the bottom of the pyramid. Our system was duplicated to some extent, before most of the vital operations were centralised, and the teeth of the councils were drawn..

I know it will never happen, even though it may seem logical to me, that we would incorporate the functions of the councils and parliament in a single system, with the major decisions taken at the top, while the majority of the employees would be at local level, where they will be approachable to the public, and closer to the work in hand, as the councils were,. There will still have to be some separate departments such as the foreign office, and the War office. Tax collection, including council tax could be made much simpler and consequently cheaper to run. I believe that a system of this type would be considerably more wieldy than the current one, where our voices are so far from the executive, they’re never heard.

Since we do not want the sort of debacle the poll tax produced, it would be wise to fund, say, three universities in different geographical and social areas, to undertake to research the problems and devise a model or models, from which the new system might emerge and can be evaluated. I believe the current system has been shown to be past its sell by date, if for no other reason than there seems to be no restraint, no deep thought, and too much razzmatazz.

I still have to be careful not to strain my eyes and over the last few days I have written a piece about government for today, but events have overtaken me and so I write this virtually in shorthand. Please forgive me.

A number of incidents concerning the national accounting are perturbing me. It started some months ago when my dentist said he was going private because  he spent too much time sending financial statements requested either by the NHS or the Inland revenue, that he had already furnished, but recovering them again took time as they were small items. He is honest, hard working and reliable – I trust him. He said it was a ploy, by the Government to make the dental faction of the NHS go private, so that the allocation of money for dentistry could be reallocated to balance the NHS books. I wrote on the 18th January about another piece of sleight of hand. Then there was the row about police pay, lately the problems with differential pay in Birmingham, the lack of funding for the armed forces and NOW, there is a proposal which will, if put through, make GPs also go private. If this happens, the whole structure of the health service will collapse as the dental service is collapsing, and the disadvantaged will suffer yet again.

The funding of Rock will have had an effect, but there are other matters I don’t understand. Who is footing the bill for our contribution in Iraq and Afghanistan? I can’t find out if the UN is in part, or if it is just us? I don’t understand why some countries are contributing troops to Iraq that are not allowed to be at the front, while our boys are being slaughtered day on day. When Haines was Minister for Northern Ireland he used some very questionable tactics to try to blackmail and bully us to toe some very unreasonable lines, and he was not alone in this. Labour wants to appear to be successful in government, but I believe Brown as Chancellor and now PM has joined Blair in making some glaring mistakes and intends more for that very reason. Our infrastructure is miles below what it was in the 70s, our health service, road networks, and transport services are all below par, and fares are excessive, Our educational system is in total chaos through constant tweaking, term on term, not even year on year. Our taxation is more hidden than open and there is confusion what is included in Council taxes.

You know I could double the list, but I would be preaching to the converted.

Old Light through New Windows. On Thursday last, I had one of those days when things can still surprise you. I saw an incredibly interesting and well put together programme on BBC 4 which confirmed things I had been told as a boy about Islam. It was the first part of a triptych entitled ‘The Art Of Spain’, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. The second thing was my daughter, a very bright lady, who will be queuing for her bus pass in a few years and is an inveterate surfer of the Net, introduced me to the BBC IPlayer, and my advice, for what it’s worth, is, if you haven’t tried it don’t delay. So often I have missed TV items which I would have liked to see. Now we have the opportunity to see them later, for 7 days, or 30 if you down load them, – hence the ‘5 days left’ quote above, applies to the Graham-Dixon programme.

I merely wish to cherry pick a few aspects of the programme which gave me food for horizontal thinking, and I don’t mean dreaming, but some of the art would make you wish it was still being produced today. The Moors, consisting of Egyptians, Syrians, and tribes from North Africa, invaded and colonised the southern part of Spain, I knew that, but what I didn’t know was that they introduced the way we eat and what we eat today. They brought the tradition of cooking with imported spices and herbs, and eating a meal in courses. Their art which was on show, consisted of their unique architecture, its beautiful, sculptural decoration of the most intricate designs and forms, and the colourful and equally complicated mosaics, on walls and floors. There is a contemplative atmosphere, fostered by the aesthetic of the architectural design, unsurprising as most of the buildings displayed were mosques or have mosques attached, but none the less beautiful and of the style still to be seen in the Middle East and on the Indian Continent.

At one point in my teenage years I wandered through a number of forms of Christianity and at some point I was instructed that the Koran preached the moral virtues of the New Testament, especially ‘love thy neighbour’. I was led to believe that Islam was tolerant of other beliefs. For some time I have considered my memory to be at fault, until I saw, on the programme, a room in a mosque which had been constructed specifically for the benefit of Jews and Christians and was decorated in Yiddish in stone relief. The presenter remarked that about 75% of the non Islamic people converted. A cynic might suggest it was a simple ploy to aid conversion. At least it was better than the stake.

The presenter referred to the ‘Orange Tree Theory’ which in essence is that empires grow wealthy, decadent, and tend to relax and plant oranges, with the result they are overtaken by others wishing to expand and ultimately, they all cease to exist consecutively. It doesn’t take a historian to see the validity of this proposition. In recent times we have had countries trying to expand their influence at great expense in every form. With the world wide turbulence we now have, it seems the theory has broken down, extreme affluence, greed, extreme poverty, and high speed communication, all seems to be heralding and generating chaos in an unprecedented and unassailable size and form. I hope I’m wrong, I hope common sense ultimately prevails.

Recently I had a run in with my Bank. It was over an unreasonable fine and interest charge because I was, understandably, 2 days late in paying my credit card balance, when I had substantial funds in my current account gaining no interest. This made me examine my banking experiences over 61 years with the same account. The bank was taken over some years ago and again recently, and each time I have noticed a reduction in the spontaneity between teller and customer. In the old days a telephone call between an official and me saved us considerable time, mutually, and I felt a bond with the bank, I am sure it is a combination of the sign of the times, computerisation, and orders from the new boss, but my current experience smacks of a level of sharpness one would not have expected when it is realised the bank has held substantial sums of ours for very many years, giving no, or very low rates of interest, while having use of the money with which to deal on the Stock Exchange..

The invoice from the associated credit card section gives a date up to which payment must be paid. On the back it informs one, if read, that payment by cheque requires 3 days to be deducted from the payment date for cheque clearance. It would seem more in the interest of the customer, but clearly not the bank, if the 3 days were deducted from the date of payment, and the fact that a cash settlement allowed a 3 day extension were put on the back. Old idiots like me forget that Saturdays and Sundays are days of rest, if, indeed we even know what day it is, in this rather boring old age. The result is our calculations are 2 days out and we get a fine and interest charges for late payment, in spite of having ten time the value of the payment lying in our current account with no interest. The bank will probably say correlation is too difficult. With salaries ranging from £2000 to at least 100,000 pa, the monthly deposits in the current accounts must act as surety, and flagging for solvency and repeated errors could simplify the system and eradicate the resentment by valued customers. If people can run up vast debts, then renege, surely one overdue payment should not bring the bank to its knees?

The ultimate resentment is twofold. How can banks calculate that a delay of 2 days can attract such a Draconian response, when the calculations and responses are electronic, and when also, as part of the worldwide credit card industry, collectively they have allowed a buy-now-pay-never culture? This has been the case for far too long, allowing the whole industry to become unstable. It has caused savers, of whom the OAPs are a fair proportion, to be taxed by a weak government, to repay debts amounting round the world, to a level which should never have accrued, and the whole sequence is being viewed by many, including me, not as tantamount to, but actual collusion in pure theft.

We should all write to our banks and complain. We will be footing the bill, as well as them, but we have had no hand in this debacle and should so not be the ones penalised.

Health Warning! Soph didn’t like this when she read it because of the maths, but if one is making assumptions and statements the basis is essential.

This fuss about Electioneering, and Haines in particular I leave to later, but it does raise general questions. I have never voted in GB and voting in N.Ireland is more a case of tactical voting than choosing the guy you prefer. Anyway! To put the questions into perspective I will use some rough and ready assumptions and Maths. If the population of the UK is 60m, then roughly only 80% will be eligible to vote, say 50m. They do say, with apathy only 50% vote, and roughly, because of the system of government selection, 30% vote traditionally, so that only leaves 20% or 10m actually voting because they have a real preference. Let us assume that there are 3 people per dwelling, or 20m households and they each receive 3 fliers from prospective candidates and the fliers cost 20p to print, organise and distribute, then the cost of the fliers is £12m, of which only £2.4m are used effectively. This sort of reasoning applies to so much about electioneering. How many see the bus so lauded, on anything but a newspaper or TV? The same applies to the placard on a lorry, with the razzmatazz of unveiling. So, is all these thousands and millions there is such a fuss about, mainly wasted, or otherwise used?

Theoretically, on average every other person has a computer in the UK Inaccurately that would mean that there is one in every house, but, let us guess that 70% of houses have a computer being used by someone. Most households take newspapers. For the sake of those households with no computer, a token could be printed in the local newspapers, at government expense, to apply, post free, for a request for fliers to be sent to them. The BBC and Google provide localised weather reports daily at no other cost than buying time on broadband. It would seem reasonable at election time, they could provide a sub blog with a title like ‘theelectionwhereyouare.com’ on which all one had to do was type the post code and there would be all your candidates with their self-styled reference, especially if Google and the BBC were allowed to have a small advertising space. Those politically minded people who appear on the doorstep, and to whom some tell them what they want to hear to move them on, will be disgruntled if electioneering goes electronic. Their effectiveness, in the light of the above might be called into question, and a possible subject for a postgraduate degree. My opinion means nothing, but perhaps my questions might have some merit, like, if only, say, 20% of those eligible to vote, which amounts to 40% of those who do vote, are the ones who really have some effect, is all the money spent worth while? It comes from us originally, the unions in their sub, commerce in the cost of purchases and services, and do we still really get the governments we deserve, or has experience deadened our political senses? With the American system cost seems irrelevant, but here it is obviously a stumbling block, and perhaps if other means of getting the message across were employed, minimal government funding would be adequate. Currently I suspect the rural areas are poorly served. I once had to drive a colleague round a large county in winter, as he had to canvas 25 councillors to have a hope of being employed in the post. It was tiring, dirty because of the mud at the farms and, in the end, unrewarding.

With respect to Haines, I have obviously been foolish. I thought logically the PM selected a person from those elected, one he trusted, knew well and liked to work with, and whom he proposed to be his successor if he died in office. I didn’t realise that there was a race which required £100,000 to win, or, as in this case, even lose. You live and learn! Er – why the race?