Who is going to wear the dress tonight dear.

 In the jungle of New Guinea there are teams of scientists cataloguing various new species of insects and vertebrate before they become extinct (that's the insect not the scientist)

The lush impenetrable undergrowth, isolated tribal communities, fierce rivers to cross, the heat and those pesky mosquito's.
It always amazes me that people will not only put themselves through physical hell but the enthusiasm  if not ecstasy at the sight of some new grub or the freakish features of a bat which the scientist swoon over.

High in the trees the camera man sits, lens trained on a the male bird, bright plumage extended out on an eye catching display to attract the interest of the dowdy looking female. It seems a role reversal to what goes on in our human interaction where the woman dons the extravagant clothing or paints her face to elevate certain features which are culturally valued. Men tend to dress down outside the office and rush for the loose fitting sports shirt.
Why in nature has evolution chosen to dominate the male plumage with such a magnificent display of colour and finery, why does nature leave it to the male to concoct the dance, the show, whilst we homo sapiens do the opposite. Perhaps the answer lies within the name, to be what Homer Simpson would describe as "a sap".
What ever we think, it goes to show that the even in nature the roles we play as male and female are different and designed to embellish that difference. Only the homo-sapien has 'over thought' the circumstances of his/her role and decided to rewrite the evolutionary book to fit a political ideology.

Making others happy

And so Jeremy has won the leadership battle and today we are discussing the implications of the Labour MPs opposing him.

Labour made a "sea change" when Tony Blair came to power with his charismatic symbolism and an attempt to create a "centrist party" to win an election.
One therefore has to ask the question what is a political party for. Is it to represent a section of society which it believes needs representing, on the assumption that there are enough people who are missing out in some sort of way and you not only represent their views but if there are enough of them, to eventually form a government.
If a party represents the things the Green Party are keen on and there are many who vote for the Greens, it's not in a belief that the Greens will become the next government but because they support what the Greens stand for.
Labour lost its way in supporting a move way from its traditional grass roots towards the middle class swing voter. It was said in jest by some that, Tony Blair represented "son of Thatcher", he allied himself with much of her aspirational politics, her belief that people can pick themselves up by their boot straps and make something of themselves.
The problem is that that philosophy would possibly stand the test of Britain in the 70s 80s and 90s, when the factory floor was a sponge to absorb the people who couldn't make it. The working class community for them was a resilient home it offered a significant substituting for the person with average attainment.
Somehow in the Blair years, gradually these people, who made up whole urban communities particularly in the North and in Scotland, were lost by the southern centric Labour Party under Blair and Brown. The world stage went to their heads, Blair with his Iraq debacle and Brown saving the world through his financial intervention in 2007/8.
The blind spot as to who represented their constituency became in Scotland a case in point.
Generational voting patterns in Scotland made their cities a safe labour certainty when it came to challenging the Tories in Westminster. The voters in Scotland were assumed to be a voting banker for the party.
The rise of the SNP and its call for Scotland's independence, which itself arose from years of ignoring the Scotish dimension when viewed from Westminster, demolished Labour in Scotland. The Party in London had forgotten what it meant to be a Socialist all inclusive party. In fact the very word Socialism was virtually outlawed by the Blairites.
The phenomenon called Corbynista came about by chance as a relatively unknown backbench MP was asked to put his name forward to present a more balanced view of the opinion within the party after it had surprisingly been defeated by David Cameron in the last General Election. Unerringly, instead of being a sop to the left of the party it quickly became apparent that the Blair years had left deep divisions, not so much amongst the labour MPs who were largely the beneficiaries of the Blairite philosophy but in the grassroots of the party membership. For the grass roots, Corbyns new/old socialism was just what they had been craving after years of being subverted by middle class, university trained, bleeding heart individuals who populated and ruled the parties agenda but who were never seen as truly belonging to the class.
Today they have been ousted and whilst the intelligentsia, the professional graduate with a degree in politics who passed through the portals of the party by dint of being a 'run about' at party headquarters, who were eventually offered a seat, irrespective of locality or first hand knowledge of the people and their issues within the boundary seat, these are the current MPs out of their depth on the thorny issue of the truly deprived, found Jeremy Corbyns, "back to basics" a chapter missing in the political propaganda taught at Oxford.
Whether Corbyn can appeal to sufficient voters to win an election depends on how poorly Teresa May handles her office.
With BREXIT bringing its own economic uncertainty the ripple effect of dissatisfaction might cause enough people who are politically incontinent to realise there is a different way to organise finance and invest in industries which make the things 'we need to sell'.
The popular press who, as a subsidiary to the Tory Party, are loud in their disinclination to look for other methods of healing the ravages of 'free market capitalism' continue to ridicule what Corbyn espouses, but "come the day", we have to recognise that the Free Market has at its soul a receipt for imbalance, and unfairness, of creating the 'haves' and the 'have nots' on a scale which represent society today. Socially unnecessary and tremendously wasteful in human capital.
Politics is not a game it deals in people and their aspirations. It provides those people with the opportunity to live useful productive and happy lives. Perhaps when all is said and done there is no better occupation than to play a part in making others happy.

Education, education, education as someone famously said.

Reading articles written by people who are, or have been in or part of the public gaze, people we have come to acknowledge for common sense and a constructive way of looking at things, they all seem to me to be getting things the wrong way around, getting their proverbial knickers in a knot for no reason at all. I speak of the debate raised by Theresa Mays reintroduction of the Grammar school.

There has been no deeper ideological divide than the way we educate our children in this country. The class divide, the furtherance of inequality within the people of this country is cemented by the skewed opportunity we give our children, mostly conferred by the money we can afford to spend on them by sending them to private schools. The very word speaks volumes, it's a "private world" where most are excluded.
The one area where there was any attempt to offer ordinary kids the sort of education the private schools offered was the Grammar School which in many ways mimicked the private educational system by stressing the ethos and the team spirit within the school.
Dress, sport and team games inculcated into the child his belonging to something larger more important than just his own individuality. He / she represented, through their actions the school ethos  and in recognising that there was such a thing became attendant to it, finding a place for it in their own inner curriculum.  Respect and discipline were the result of the sociability that a Grammar School inculcated within the student, a sense of being privileged to be seen as being a part of what the school represented.
This, some would say created a divisive attitude in young people and could only be challenged by ridding the state educational establishment of the opportunity to divide children and under the banner of "pluralism"  everyone was thrown into the same pot with the hope that something good would rub off.
Well it has, we have one of the worst educational systems and poorest educated children in the western world when measured by that old perennial, the exam.
From being up there with the best we now languish middle or lower with many nations who were uneducated when we banished Grammar Schools now spectacularly better.
For "pluralism" to work you have to lower your sights, you have to stop trying to achieve the best in terms of academic achievement  and concentrate on the less well off. Not only those who come from poorer backgrounds and therefore, it is assumed, a lower sense of worth and a lower sense of personal achievement, it's an attempt to find the mean, the average but essentially it's a political experiment in curbing the dynamics of a society to a one sized fits all experiment which copes with massive diversity, a multi ethnic, multi cultural polyglot we devised in the 50s to cope with our economic needs.
The refusal to consider there are winners and losers goes against all common sense but it's an ideological impediment that many closeted around the educational establishment believe.
If we accept that one of the wonders of childhood is its diversity a diversity in the brain as well as the emotional substructure we all depend on surely the most sensible thing to do is to structure our educational system to cater for all eventualities.
A Grammar School for those who have the academic ability, (whilst curbing the middle classes of the power to gerrymander the assessment) but above all to make the derided Secondary Modern School (the school you went to if you failed the exam) the elite of our public policy for funds and facilities. The ethos so important can be created by attracting (financially) the best teachers who themselves can inculcate into the children a sense of self worth and the importance to achieve goals.
Don't try to do things on the cheap as was the Comprehensive School system. There's no washing powder which can bring out all the pupils sparkling and attentive but with proper attention and rigour, including  discipline as well as modern techniques for baiting the hook, attracting the crucial interest in the child for subjects which in themselves give relevance in his or her common instinctual environment.

A sense of what it means to be human

Every morning I wake up at 5am to the BBC World Service with its menu of world affairs, mostly a world in crisis. 

In the UK in Australia and New Zealand we sleep securely in our beds we assume the morning will bring much as before and we will be able to get on with our lives.

But what of those in Aleppo or Mogadishu. What of the urchin growing up in Bombay sleeping on the street, very much alive to the brutality of other human beings.
As we eat our cornflakes or open the fridge door to the sight of an, as yet arbitrary, "eat by date", array of food, we never consider the left overs in the rubbish bins, hungrily surveyed by the down and out a mile or two from where we live.
Life is a passage and by 'some chance' we have a right of passage denied to others, a gift of birth for which we can claim no credit other than luck.
Would our lives be better if we did a daily 'book keeping' exercise to see how fortunate we are, rather than the resentment of a missing an opportunity, of some "might have been" moment. The very act of being able to read what you read, irrespective of what sense you make of it, has enormous implications when compared to the billions of illiterate people who, not only are poor and probably hungry most of the time but who live in and amongst an even greater impoverishment, the lack of hope !!
That throw of the dice, the parents. How infrequently we offer up our prayers to them in their efforts to make of us what they lacked in themselves. That bottomless lake of love and goodwill towards our own happiness, that constant tendering and nudging our hand to learn from their mistakes. The infinite energy to make a meal and read a bedtime story, to sort out a squabble and make sure the homework is done. The everlasting courier service they perform to meet the assumptive demand of the young, who in their own bubble are for ever demanding more.
If we chose well we were rewarded with the protection to gain time to unwind our own personality, to develop who we were within, the blandishments to do more,  to gain a sense of what it means to be human.

Time and its relationship to the event

Time is a complex embellishment to our lives, an expression of human consciousness, nothing more than a metronomic beat with which we measure things.

Time lies outside our experience it's a monitor of that experience, in so far as it becomes a back drop to the things we do but those seconds that tick so resolutely away belong not to us but something larger.
When we measure time in the way of planning a trip or a holiday we take an enormous risk, we assume that we and time have something in common, that we are buddies. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact we are combatants wrestling for ascendancy who will be where and when, or if at all !!
The expression "time waits for no man" is so true but there is an assumption that there is a connection as if one accompanies the other in some way but what if the time we choose to acknowledge ourselves as being a part of is illusory and we have our own clock, which interestingly does not record time but records events. Events are the substance of our lives, events are the measure not necessarily of success or failure but as a much better measure of our having been around rather than the time we have been here.
And even a 'lack of events' does not relegate us to a lower league rather it's the quality of the events which are important. Quantity often only represents repetition whilst to savour an event, to analyse and savour an event, to reflect and recall an event as we try from time to time to codify our lives into "happenings", a summation of our usefulness for others to compare.
Only our own rational has any meaningful contribution to the analysis of the value of an event in our lives and time plays no part in something so personal.  Only we can understand the impact of an event. Even a simple thing such as when we walk around our home or outside in the neighbourhood, even visiting some far flung shore we merely carry our own toolbox of sensory values, our own experiences, which make the event meaningful, only as a comparative.

its a funny old world

And yet another woman comes out on top of the pile with Diane James wins the leadership as leader of UKIP. She follows Teresa May, UK Prime Minister and Nicola Sturgeon the First Minister of Scotland and still the ever vocal women's lib' groups are   still lining up to bewail the females position in society. 

 The feminists aim in life seems to be predicated on making a noise, irrespective of facts regarding everything through the prism of sexism, seeking to corral men within the straight jacket of political correctness, ensuring they are given every advantage their gender demands.

I suppose it's this "demand" that I find tiring. It's often made by activists who's own gender position is questionable, who feel "instinctively" feel drawn to their own sex in their domestic life.
As men are continually buffeted by the feminist headwind, forced to consider their  traditional position as "bread winner", "house domestic", and "pseudo mother" they cast around for a safe harbour to shelter in !! The campaign has been aggressive, no holds barred,  much of their support coming from an ever growing section of men who are also confused as to their own sexual position.
It is true that women, who make up 50% of the worlds population, are not equally represented in terms of their leadership role in business. This is particularly so in the non western world where, in parts of the globe, they are treated to some sort of medieval  ideology trailing behind their husbands and being genuinely subservient.
In the West I would go so far as to say there are no barriers, other than the ones any person would experience not coming from an elitist background.

Given their natural role of motherhood, the most tiring and committed job on the planet, they insist they want it all. To be a mother is not enough (something of course a man can never be unless you are gay and then a special compensation is made so as not to limit their human rights), they want the kids and the top jobs and of course it doesn't stop there.
There was a program on the other day, discussing whether it could be possible for "wolf whistles" to be brought into the ambit of becoming unlawful.

Women were randomly questioned as to their opinion. What I found interesting was that some of these women when questioned wore (or rather didn't wear) very revealing clothing but still professed to resent being noticed. I suppose it's unfair to say they resented being noticed, they wanted to be noticed, but not commented upon.
Remember the  stories about the gods of Greek mythology who depicted the wiles of femininity each designed to ensnare man. His role to make a nest and to provide security are still in place in the woman's phycology but the pressure to conform to Pankhurst and her lot, have confused the hell out of the women today.

Its certainly true that men have also become confused finding themselves the targets of all kinds of  innuendo.
What will be the outcome as we continue to uphold the woman's right to veil herself from head to toe whilst for others to sunbathe virtually naked on a public beach. To drink to the point of collapse but retain the Victorian ethos of their special fragility !!!

Realising your dreams

The Para Olympics has received far less coverage than the Olympics and given that there was doubt as to whether it would go ahead, the Brazilians having bankrupted themselves on the main games, it was touch and go. Now the results are coming in and GB are second to China in the medal table, just as they were second to the USA in the fully able bodied games.

The stories behind any athlete winning a gold medal are those of sustained dedication, hours of pain and exhaustion withdrawal from the normal things we do with our families, and all this, if you are fully able bodied. Imagine what it is like having been struck down by a disease, injured in an accident or born without certain limbs, the hurdles, both physical and mental are unimaginable to me who can hardly be bothered to walk to the shop. The courage to overcome some calamitous event which changed your life immeasurably is beyond the comprehension of most of us. And yet these brave courageous individuals get off their sick beds, out of their wheel chairs to compete at a standard you and I would be left floundering in their wake.
When the concept of having a Para Olympics was first tabled in 1960 I, and many others were sceptical. We thought it a sop to the disabled who were continually pressurising and presenting their plight and with the prejudice in those days they were often adjudged to be asking too much of society to make a 'level playing field' by providing wheelchair access to buildings, and the removal of obstructions for them to carry on their lives as if they were normal. Even the word normal drew some condemnation since to have only one arm or one leg didn't make you subnormal and rather the term disabled came to be used.
This country has taken the cause of the disabled to its humanitarian heart and events and training facilities have blossomed making us as a nation a leader since then. The success has been achieved by taking on board the debilitating effects of 'discrimination, both in our attitude to race, and gender matters generally and in this case, people who have lost the physical make up  we all take for granted.
The 100 metres has just been run as I write.  People with one leg, people with both lower limbs amputated, other abnormalities which categorised them as competitors all competed and a winner was the first past the finishing line but in fact they were all winners in this race, just getting here was an achievement. In some ways it's not for the squeamish watching people run and cope on artificial limbs, much like Oscar Pistorius, it has the element of freakishness in it as we watch these men and women, equipped with various appendages, compete with all their heart and soul.
As a nation we should be proud of these people but we should also be proud of ourselves, in not only encouraging them  but in making the 'where-with-all'  for them to realise their dreams.

Being a sad sod

One of the disappointing aspects about the BREXIT vote was the dearth of real information. Much of the public voted on the reliance of the truth in a sound bite and since these were delivered by politicians, the truth was a matter of circumspection. Having voted on peripheral  matters such as immigration, nationalism, legal subjection to the EU bureaucracy we now come down to the nitty gritty of how to untangle ourselves from the bear-hug of the huge economic and technical inter-relationship which has been the under laying and invisible structure that is the essence of our relationship. Like the body, the blood flow through the body is reliant on there being no obstruction, otherwise there will be catastrophic results and even death.

Take banking and the use of what is called a "passport" to allow each bank, both here and in the EU to transact business within and between banks. The passport system is at risk and therefore the inter banking system is at risk. Given that financial services is one of the largest earners accounting for 12% of the income which flows into this country, this income is very significant and we will be much poorer without it.

Of course the hypothesise that, as one door closes another opens and that we will, in the long run,  have some sort of equivalence. But as with any new sort of relationship there is no surety that it will work, it might in fact be more prudent to expect a diminishing in our living standards, not because we were not prepared to roll up our sleeves but because the world has become so complex, nothing can be done without the explicit agreement of someone else. Mankind has created a monster in so far as independence is illusory and much of the pre BREXIT rhetoric only spoke in terms of being free to make our own decisions.
Only now are the people discussing the problems in the detail because they are now being forced to as they try to make a fist of a difficult situation. The holistic nature of finance and the Gordian  knots which seems to be the very nature of the way business is conducted is only now becoming clear and that, only if you are a sad sod who listens to the select committee debates.
Heaven only knows what the chap on the Clapham omnibus thinks.

A long way from home

We have many anomalies these days but surely the most onerous is having the 'Rugby League Challenge Cup Final' played "down south" at Wembley. 

To ask those northern fans, this year from Hull and Warrington, to travel 200 miles into foreign territory, where, not only the accents but also the rules of their specific game make this venue the wrong one.
In a brief snippet of TV footage of past Cup Games. Black and white grainy images of games played at Odsal Stadium in Bradford which once hosted a crowd of 102.000 fans  for the Warrington- Halifax Final in 1954 ( a game I attended with my Dad). The poor souls living in Lancashire had to pop over the Pennines and try to wrest the trophy from Yorkshire, a distance of 40 miles but they were still amongst their ain-folk,  still amongst the hills and customs shared, not amongst the "wide boys" down South.
In those days the jostle of the crowd, the banter, the camaraderie was all part of a Saturday rugby league game. My Dad took me to the matches at Odsal on his motor bike, no helmets in those days.  We parked up close to the ground and threaded our way with the growing throng of people through the turnstiles and into the ground.  Roughly terraced with railway sleepers and steel crush barriers to prevent the crowd from rolling onto those in front as people leaned forward to follow the game, our team Bradford Northern were at the top of the league or there about's, with their rivals, Wigan and St Helens playing in Lancashire.     There was total respect between the fans, I never experienced any hostility, unlike the trouble at football matches, and whilst the banter made you laugh there was little or no bad language, only the wit of the working man on his weekend away from work.
For some commercial reason the promoters demand Wembley and so it's a long slog down the M1, especially for the loosing side.
The code Rugby League, is specifically different to Rugby Football which was possibly derived from the Eton Wall Game. It's a game played by working class lads and not the traditional University rugger bugger's, who make up the game down South. It is argued that it's a tougher code with more tackles but with a modern code, designed to open the game and force the attacking team to kick away possession after 5 phases of play, the territorial relief has made the game a little less brutal.
Brutal or not, imagine those lads and lasses disembarking after a 4 hour trip, full of Tetley's Bitter to be met by those opportunists from Whitechapel with their three card tricks and overpriced memorabilia. Imagine the trauma when the Tetley's runs out and you are forced to drink London Pride. Imagine a journey home with your team having lost and the spectre of having to tell "the wife" that you spent nearly all the house-keeping money !!!!

Local and self indulgent

The concept and more to the point, the affordability of paid retirement is but a brief interlude covering perhaps only one, maybe two generations as the realisation in the West, that due to the length of life and the changing demographic, families getting smaller, the concept of "paying people" when they are no longer working is becoming less and less affordable.

Its a chilling assessment that my generation were "but a blip" in the mechanics of 'work till you drop' and the part a decent pension plays in our lives for making the provision to pay for the things we will still need when we get older and can no longer work.
When I speak to the people who work for a London Borough, I know that they don't fully appreciate, or factor in, the special provision of a generous pension to their pay packet.
It's a generosity that Private Enterprise is increasingly refusing to consider.   

An 'employee pension' provision is now largely relegated to senior management. Even the banks who used to offer their employees a Private Pension, now no longer do so, you have to 'sit at the boardroom table' to ensure that your 'special place' in the organisation is reflected by the maintenance of your remuneration package, the substantial perk of a final salary linked pension.
As the world becomes awash with billionaires we have to realise that we are "not of the right cut"  to assume any special provision. To be special you have to be born special or be ruthless in making your way to your own riches in which case you won't need a pension.
People are becoming expendable again. For a short time we thought we were all in the same lifeboat but as the Titanic sank, so did the concept. The gallantry came from the band as it played on, not the rich who pushed the women aside to gain a seat. I suppose it was their unalienable right and their inherited importance which drove them on.
Of course we could follow the common sense displayed by Australia who, as in so many things, this relatively young nation is pragmatic in its aspirations and not tied to ideological constraints which the more established nations force themselves to conform to.
The Aussies say to themselves, in our society we shouldn't have any free loaders. We can only accomplish anything if we acknowledge that every cause has an accompanying cost and has to be planned, therefore pension contributions have to be made by 'everyone' as a statutory responsibility. It's the same in their attitude to voting, its compulsory on the basis that each vote matters and the political outcome is important. They do have a plan regarding immigration, they do have a method of sifting the type of person they need for the economy and excluding people who would contribute little.
Their ability to put Australia first regardless of world opinion is refreshing. In so far as the UK is concerned, opinion is often formed by considerations which often include the whole of humanity when in reality, the consideration people have within a nation is much more local and self indulgent.

Grammar School

The rise and the death, and now the rise once again of the Grammar School has refuelled the debate on our failure to educate our children properly.

The players in this long running play, should I say tragedy, are successive governments, the teachers and their idealistic training academies, parents and of course the children.
'Education' has been displaced by the political mantra of 'social displacement' in society and the need to address the 'mobility' of the poor to "make something of themselves".
Education has become a tool. A yardstick by which government can say it is doing something. Education can be measured, it has targets, it's supposed objective is to give us all a mythical level playing field from where we can live our live and prosper.
The social imperative is replaced by cant and dogmatism, ideological surety and an undying obsession not to listen to any others reasoned proposition.
When I was growing up the educational world was divided into three spheres.
Private education which in those days belong to a different universe. Grammar Schools and Secondary Modern Schools. At 11 years you were given an opportunity to either progress or stay as you were, it was as simple as that. The 11 Plus exam was a turning point in so far as if you were successful the education system did what it was supposed to do - "educate", otherwise it became a sort of holding pen until you went into manual or skilled manual work.
Luckily this was not the end of the world since there was plenty of work for the kids who were the outcome and although it limited the aspiration it never the less had its own strata and many a successful outcome was born of living and working in a community of like minded people.
The Comprehensive School was a grand idea. It merged children who would normally have gone to the Grammar School with the Secondary Modern child in the well meant assumption that the "good" would rub off on the "bad", that aspiration would by osmosis permeate into the texture of the failing child (for what ever reason), they would grasp the importance of education and seek it out like a horse a lump of sugar.
Of course we in this country wish an outcome but are hesitant to provide the funds to follow through. Class sizes ballooned and the quality of teaching didn't keep step with demand
Standards rose marginally for the less able child and whilst the very able (the geek) were able to isolate themselves, the bulk of children, losing the stimulus of achievement which the Grammar School inculcated, drifted and under-performed. Decades of 'ideological well wishing' has seen us fall in the world educational rankings to those of an impoverished nation and its a scandal which successive governments have been party to.
Of course members of government do not normally come from the ranks of the Comprehensive since in this country we have always "bought" our way out of poverty. Private education has been the guarantee of success.
For those clever enough, or with parents who could afford to tutor their child to take and pass the 11 Plus exam, the Gammer School was the only other avenue to a University Education.
Comprehensives now-days supply a fair proportion of the "Uni" intake but the university authorities have long complained about the poor standard of the pupils coming to them from the comprehensives to the extent that the first year in university is used to bring the Comprehensive entrants up to a standard where 'university education' can begin.
Manipulation of school examination standards, the use of multiple choice in answering exam questions and the plethora of grades brought out each year to disguise the lowering of the overall standard has put the educational fraternity into a spin of denial refusing to admit they were misguided when they misguidedly substituted education for a social mobility exercise and, at any cost, the inequity of our social/class system could be remedied.
Mrs Mays review and suggestion that Grammar Schools should be re-establish in the poorer pupil catchment areas has merit. Caution should the byword since the middle class, desperate to find a better outcome than the Comprehensive will buy property in a poor area just to gain preferential residential entrance, on top of being able to afford tutoring.

Perhaps greater emphasise should be given in Primary School to presenting all the children with a curricular and "in school" tutoring, aimed at passing the 11 Plus test and then at least all the children will have had a fair opportunity to pass.

We have to address this poor educational attainment.
We are in competition in a world where 'technical specialisation' is our only answer to the mass exploitation seen in the manufacturing centres in Asia.
Unless of course we have had our honeymoon period of social up liftment and are now once again considering the prewar job uncertainty of queuing for work at the factory gate, which is not far removed from the "zero hours" contract, much touted by our business leaders as being the choice of many.

Before the traders took over

It seem to me that we have to make up our minds "what do we stand for".

I have been reading a doom and gloom account of what BREXIT will mean in so far as

the City and the impact on Financial Services will be as we leave the single market.
The predicted impact of not being able to avail ourselves of being at the centre of the financial structure within the European Union, so devastating for some, that any price is worth paying.
Written from a position of a trader or a broker, perhaps a top flight banker the financial world is their universe and the "trade" is everything. The goings on in this highly developed and much maligned market, where the rules governing normal transactions are cast aside and the devious world of derivatives is a main the ingredient, where as  a sale is made you place a bet on the sale going sour (because you knew what you had sold was not what you had purported it to be). Where super fast computers are used to sift through the data and transact minute differences in currencies, not for any meaningful accumulation of real assets which can be sold as part of the consumerism world which is what we ordinary mortals see as reality, but for a buy/sell transaction that simply swops, from account A to account B, with no accumulation other than a paper one as one account is made richer at the expense of another.
The desperation for this immoral,  transactional merry go round to continue is so strong in the eyes of the City that to them Armageddon is just around the corner and they would cover their eyes and ears and transact just about anything to be able to keep things as they were.
The question as a country we have to ask is, should we be prepared to do virtually anything to stay on top, to be this mythical country which purports to be the 5th richest in the world but can hardly find the money from our own resources to build a strategic power station. Where the riches are merely tumble weed as we print more and more money to prop up a greater and greater financial deficit.

 Where we feel the trade of arms to a despotic regime like the Wahhabi run Saudis in Saudi Arabia is perfectly ok since on, the one hand they have the cash and we can diplomatically fudge the issue of what they do with the weapons and how many innocent civilians they kill.


 In the cause of being the 5th largest economy, we allowed our industries and the skills to wither away and rather we bought into the 'casino' for a quick buck.

At least the French, to say nothing of the Germans have kept their industries in tact and produce real products to export and balance the book on their imports.
The term Riches Countries in the World has a different connotation depending on how you equate a country being rich.
One such is, Gross domestic product  based on Purchasing Power per Capita. (How rich your citizens are as a proportion to GDP).
At the top of such a list comes :- Qatar, followed by Luxembourg and Singapore. Norway is 6th, USA 9th, Netherlands 13th, Germany 18th, France 25th and the U.K. 27th
The wealthiest in terms of actual wealth are :- USA, China, and Japan.
In terms of individual wealth including house ownership, :- Switzerland comes on top followed by Australia, the USA, the UK and Sweden. Germany and France come lower because house ownership is not the norm in those countries.
Using GDP as the measuring stick :- 1st USA, followed by China, Japan, Germany, the U.K. and France is 6th.
It's an interesting club we belong to, 5th when measured in gross earnings and 27th when taking those earnings and dividing them up as a proportion of the populous and the benefit they obtain.
The question I ask is would our "individual" wealth diminish proportion if we decided to be more prudent, more ethical in who we trade with and what we sell.
Norway is seen as an ethically proven country as is Sweden and Denmark all of whom sit well up the table of comparatives. Would we rather be chasing the Chinese with their sweat shop industrial methodology or the Americans with their Wall Street led, neo-con obsession with financial manipulation or should we gain some self respect and get off the tread mill and regain some of the admiration we once held for our legal propensity, our belief in doing the honest thing, in regaining a piece of the moral certitude we were famed for before the "traders" took over.

The price we pay for Capitalism

Those of you who have an ear for the financial papers will have heard that Apple and Ireland as co-respondent, are being fined by the EU for fragrantly avoiding paying taxes by shifting the domicile of the Apple European Head Office to a mythical offshore address where corporate taxes are virtually non existent. 

Apple are complicit, Ireland are complicit in a fraud that if, as an individual I were to be similarly engaged I could expect a jail sentence but of course you can't put one of the wealthiest companies or a country in jail.

The spokespeople who defend the situation begin by telling us that this tax collecting fraud is the reason why Apple agreed to site one of its factories here and therefore we should be grateful and what ever we do, we must not upset the monolith otherwise it relocate. This suggestion, that if we meddle in the affairs of companies like Apple we must understand the consequences, (consequences for ourselves), is close to blackmail, its close to the type of racket for which  the Mafia was famous.
Here is the root of the problem.  

Generally the Commentariat (the press and media) in the 21st century have little time or inclination to educate society to understand that, any 'healthy society' is built on seeing the society in the round, not just the needs of the successful but also the needs of the unsuccessful and that a society which encompasses every member. It's the price we pay for being civilised. To pay for the sanctity of being civilised one relies on taxation to bring the essential services and place them within reach of the people in dire need.  Without taxation there will be no schools, no hospitals, no repair to the fabric which makes life bearable for everyone .
High taxes in the Scandinavian countries are an example of the quid-pro-quo, for the society recognising and being responsible for all its citizens.
An economist was deriding the European authorities for daring to throw a spanner in the works of a very profitable company by asking that they pay a tax, which when due by a normal company, is levied at 20% on the annual profit made by that company. This company tax is collected on profits made from sales within specified national boundaries and includes 99% of the companies operating i.e. doing business in the UK. The fact that in the new 'Global Society', which now over arches the national economy, company's such Apple and Amazon, Pfizer and Roche, see their role towards the societies into which they sell their products to be much like the Digital Cloud, which captures so much of our information in this Internet age, a structure without a home and beyond the rules which bind us. These business' have shareholders and a management structure which in the past would guide anyone into conceptualising where they were located and under who's legal regime they fell, but somehow with an 'accountancy package' which goes with the Globalisation,  they can, or cannot exist.  It depends on the address chosen by the accountant as to where the calculation begins to appraise the tax on profits. It's a surreal world contrived by businessmen and the people who work for them and is seeming impregnable to national politics or the sovereign governments who's citizens have contributed massively by buying the product in the first place.
It's a sham it should illegal but no one seems to have the clout or the will to do anything about it until along comes the European Union.
Having recently been through the BREXIT ordeal, with its many conflicting claims, trying to weigh up the pros and cons, one is again reminded that one of my concerns was the pedigree of successive governments in this country to cosy up to big business. London is seen, in banking at least, a pretty sleazy place where deals are made which boarder on the criminal. London also harbours many of the architects of the corrupt and nefarious financial empires which abound across the world and we in the UK are often accused of conveniently turning a blind eye.
The EU has refreshingly refused to bow to the threats of at least one global enterprise (Apple) and is pursuing them for back taxes amounting to over $13 billion.  The ironic twist is that Ireland, to whom Apple owe the $13 billion in unpaid taxes, say they don't want the money since by taking the money their image of being 'business friendly' would be tarnished.
What corrupt times we live in and the flippancy with which the commentators dismiss it all with, "its the price we pay for Capitalism" is nauseating.

Amber Rudd

Listening to the rise of Amber Rudd, Amber who, one is reminded of the gulf that money and connections provide. The connectivity alone, to be able to ring up and chat to the movers and shakers, to be able to move yourself upwards, is a gift not many of us have. Daddy a stockbroker, Mummy a Magistrate, plummy schools with plummy friends who, as if by chemical reaction all rise in the cake to acquire the positions they always knew they deserve.
It's a process which has held us back as a country. The old school tie, the wink and a nod placement into positions of authority, takes us back to medieval times when family counted for everything. The road to democratising the system of office procurement within the civil service has been very patchy and listening to the sisters and friends of miss Rudd one has a brief insight into the closed, airtight world of privilege. 

Amber Rudd who when asked her reason for wanting to represent Hastings on the South Coast as its MP said " it's within easy commute to London".
On describing her constituency "you get people who are on benefits, who prefer to be on benefits by the seaside. They are not moving down here to get a job, they are moving down here to have easier access to friends and drugs and drink". 

I suppose with such a mindset one could expect to migrate to and within the Tory Party but to be given the post of she initially had, the job of Energy Minister even she must have thought it was good going within only 8 years as MP, (even acknowledging the easy commute).

Her brother, chairman of a powerful Energy lobbying group, who's project to store gas in underground caverns in Lancashire (to my wicked Yorkshire mind perhaps a re-enactment of Guy Faulks is on the cards) was quashed by the previous minister but the issue is now on the back-boiler again. Tory spokesperson had insisted Rudd will not make the final decision and it will be taken by a junior member of her department. Come off it, who is going to blow their career path for Lancashire !!!I 

Anyway, perhaps fortuitously she has risen once again with Theresa May appointing her to one of the top three, the Home Secretary.

As the keeper of the domestic realm perhaps she will be able to do something about that "drunken benefit scourge in Hastings" ?

Leave it to the system

So now we begins to understand how is it that certain European companies seem to be able to embark on projects which are beyond the reach of British companies, such as  the proposed building of the nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point. 

On the one hand the financial backing comes from China which is a country where it's business' is fuelled by taxpayer funding from the State. 

On the other, EDF, the French energy company which designs and builds these massive projects is also heavily subsidised by the French State and is, to all intents and purposes bankrupt if it were not for the State propping it up.

 If this were not enough,  it has been revealed, that Mario Draghi the EUs, ex Goldman Sachs wunderkind, the magician who with slight of hand can turn a set of financial rules and regulations into a process to finance the legally un-financeable is, in this instance printing money to specifically support certain strategic companies, such as EDF so as to  justify the economically unjustifiable. It's a pity we play by the rules. The concept of providing 'national help' to ailing industries is an anathema. Our preferred course of action is that only when the company has gone up in flames will we consider enrolling its workforce on welfare !!!

It's no wonder Hinkley will go to the resourceful French/Chinese combo when we are still mired in privatising the NHS and the BBC. Our ministerial energies are better spent putting these recalcitrant home grown treasures in their place than developing the capital and technical resource to ensure the lights stay on !!It's a topsy-turvy world when real issues like the decision to build an extra runway at Heathrow take years, or a Nuclear Power Station even a Nuclear Submarine to carry Trident is kicked into the long grass until it becomes critical. Aircraft carriers built to a spec that cannot, under the current aircraft we have, fly these aircraft off the new ships.

 Alice in wonderland would be confused at our attempt to convince ourselves that spending £60 billion on a high speed link to Manchester to save for a limited number of business commuters, half an hour on their travel time, whilst deliberately ignoring the benefit of the uninterrupted computer catch up time which rail travel provides.

I could go on but then I am but a plebeian, a commoner who doesn't understand the workings of high enterprise, still less the people who populate these enterprises !!
Leave it to the system !!!

Baby Doll

Investigations into the reaction of girls in Australia who were handed a doll-baby to look after, the doll-baby was programmed to respond to feeding and other human responses such as nappy changing, it also stimulated mood swings which required the girl to comfort the doll. I'm not sure why, other than an examination of the psychology of young girls towards baby's, which we all assumed we know through observation of kids around us but as is the scientific mind, it needed a controlled experiment. Therefore out of a controlled group some girls were given these doll-baby's, others not.
What has startled the people undertaking the work is that whilst the girls who did not have a doll-baby to care for, fitted the profile within Australian society of 11 % going on to have a real baby by the age of 20, in the group who had mothered the doll-baby, 17%.had babies before reaching 20.
One could make the easy assumption that having had the experience of looking after an infant, even an artificial one had stirred some sort of maternal  need in the girls and not withstanding the chore of being forced to attend to its needs when under normal circumstances the girls would have preferred to be doing something else, never the less it didn't put them off and I fact seems to have encouraged them to go on into having the real thing.
It has to be said that having a child before you are 20 is not the norm in Australia. It also assumes the pregnancies were wanted. But that apart it has to be acknowledged that this urge to be a mother and raise an infant is yet another major difference between men and women.
Obviously only women can give birth to a baby but there is something extra special  in the make up of girls/women that fit them for the role of motherhood. Apart from the anatomical imperative  they seem emotionally suited, in fact one could suggest their emotional needs encourage it.
It's not just the inherent role play of proving, to your peers you can bear a child, although that can play a part even when the economics are against you. It seems that the attraction of cuddling your own new born baby is for most people, if they were honest, one of the highest privileges in the pathonon of human privilege known to mankind. To hold a baby is to feel the importance of being a protector, some sort of deep support mechanism we carry around in us and the ability to project that sense of security into the baby when, for what ever reason it is unhappy, is one of the fundamental pleasures, and if like a switch, the baby stops crying as you chunter  some sort of baby language to it, or rock it about in a rhythmic way you feel deeply rewarded.
I developed a strange gentle rhythmic stamping movement as I patted my two as they struggled with wind, it usually did the trick and I always remember the look of relief on my cousins daughters face , in South Africa, being happily flabbergasted and greatly relieved since she was having great difficulty settling the baby and was at her wits end as I took her baby, which had been crying on and off for hours and with my Chaplinesque walk, gently bobbing her up and down until she stopped crying and went to sleep. I was never more pleased with myself, chuffed would be the word when I handed the baby back, job done.
It's their vulnerability and our our ability to make the elemental connection which is important.
Perhaps that is what we try to do throughout our lives, often failing but always trying, to make the connection and the very act of accelerating the process, to establish what it feels like from an early age, in the experiment, is sufficient to reveal one of the wonders of the world, an emotion, on which rests our continuation as a species.

What the hell went wrong

Ordinary men and women are becoming redundant in the scheme of things if the results of the automation in manufacturing and distribution in China are anything to go by.

It seems ridiculous that with a population of  1.6 billion people and climbing there is a push to minimise and in some cases eliminate the human hand. Robots and the shrewd use of interconnected services leads to massive savings and a 24 hour reliable service to meet the consumerism demand. 

But hang on. The people who are 'consumers' have to also be 'workers' to afford to buy the things you produce, so how do you square the circle. And as men and women are being forced into competition with the robots, how can one compete emotionally or physically with a machine. The nearer you get to working in competition with a machine the nearer you are to recognising that you aren't a machine and the question of not only your sensibilities but your status as a human being has to be addressed.
From the boardroom the prize is, increased market share as you speed up production and lower unit cost but what about the bigger picture. We are the same human beings as are the high flyers making the decisions, the gap in earnings and the discrimination which earnings effect is becoming a problem as ordinary people seek the power to be represented by people who purport  to have 'their interests at heart'.
It used to be the left wing who represented the workers but the workers representatives, such as the unions have been demonised and ridiculed by the right wing press for decades such that the worker has bought into the mantra that unionism is bad for business and therefore bad for jobs. 

Unionism was always about 'pay and working conditions', and they represented the source of  pressure which is sometimes needed to be put their case to management and to seek play fair. Sadly, over the last 25 years, the repeated mantra is that companies work better if there is little or no unionism.
The Anglo Saxon workplace is a strange mixture.
Heavily accentuated Health & Safety rules to avoid 'litigation', hand in hand with employment practices which take us back to the Victorian era. 'Contractual obligations' for the benefit of an employer but no obligation from the employer to provide set employment hours or therefore, no guarantee of any pay.
Anomalies galore but the person most disadvantaged and continually in the headlights is the ordinary worker.
Given that the work has changed and lower skilled jobs are done by machines, and given that our educational system is failing so many children, where will these poorly prepared youngsters go when there are no jobs in the future.
Perhaps ISIS will be one of the destinations, perhaps a more realist one is to join the National Front Parties in Germany and France, Golden Dawn in Greece, Tereza or the 'Third Position' in Italy are all calling cards for the economically disenfranchised. 

Each have a dynamic which could leave the sleepy suburban, wherever they live, wondering, "what the hell went wrong". 

How crazy is that

Have you ever considered the time we are exposed to watching advertisements in the course of watching television and the subversive effect it has on our subliminal thinking.

Every TV program has  content. Some of it historical, scientific, autobiographical or purely entertainment, and during one hours viewing, you receive approximately 35 minutes when the program content is shown. The rest of the time is devoted to advertisements !

Each channel, other than the BBC, has adverts and the channels ensure that they all turn over to the adverts at roughly the same time, which in effect means that even tuning into a new channel you are simply tuning to a piece of advertising. Given that the products we purchase are somewhat limited and that the cost of making an advert and the time slot which has to be purchased from the channel to show the goods is very expensive then only a certain type of product and only a limited number of companies can afford to buy a slot. It goes without saying we are watching the same adverts time and time again. If you calculated the number of channels and the proportion of the same messages being beamed each hour then we must be fairly close to Kim Jong-un's, State propaganda in North Korea.
Advertising has to be seen as propaganda. The 'reality' of its content is marginal and its purpose is to convince us of half truths, dressed as fact. We allow ourselves to be suckered into the claims made by the "market" because we have no power, (other than switching the TV off), to control these mega companies and the effect they have on our lives through advertising.
With a right wing, market obsessed Tory party in power, for the foreseeable future we can expect more incursions into the question of the BBCs Licence Fee and whether a more 'market friendly' system of funding the organisation shouldn't be looked at.
The BBC produces and shows programs for the full 60 minutes of each hour, compared to only the 35 minutes shown on all the other channels. There's no gainsaying the argument that the program content shown on the BBC has another 25 minutes added each hour, 25 minutes X 24 hours = 10hours of extra viewing time per day, 70 hours per week or a whopping 150 days in the year !!! 

If this wasn't enough of an argument for keeping advertising away from the BBC, then I don't know what is. It's an argument never voiced by supporters of the BBC as they try to fend off the market taking over as an alternative to the Licence Fee. 

To rub salt into the wound there is also the dreadful iniquity, of 'Subscription TV, such as Sky ' where you pay a 'subscription' to watch the 25 minutes of repeat advertising ! 

Nearly 50% of the cost of watching your  subscription TV is spent so you can watch the same adverts repeated, ad nauseam.

How crazy is that !!

Marginalised

Marginalised. Placed at the margin. At the edge, on the outside, separated.

This is a human condition which we progress towards in old age if we are not careful to continually repair bridges between ourselves and others.
The dynamic of youth generally manufactures many links between ourselves and those around you in fact you become quite blasé making and dropping relationships as you sift out who you are and what you want from life. We are also in danger of making too much of a friendship since, as always we view life through our own perspective, not the perspective of the friend. Personality characteristics might make forming relationships difficult in that some people hold themselves aloof whilst others are too inclusive.
The need to belong to a group, a tribe, a family is instinctive. The friendships formed in being a regular at a pub are different from the affinity you might find at work where you galvanise sub groups in the office to fend off the competition. A club is a fine example of mixing with people with common interests although outside the clubs interests you might have less in common but the camaraderie amongst club members whist engaged in the hobby or sport lends itself to that need most of us have, the feeling of belonging.
Some people don't need this human interaction, they are the archetype loner who shuns most attempts at being drawn in to the group and for many reasons prefers their own company. For them they marginalise themselves throughout their lives and wouldn't swop their lone path for the noise of the crowd for love nor money.
But most people are not loaners they enjoy the company of others with the proviso that the interrelationship is on their terms. The Friday night dominos session in the tap room, (ok I know I'm speaking a foreign language to those under 60) but the sound of the crash of the domino and the loud banter that went on between the players in the smoke filled room was an example of a subset of the tribe. Darts and snooker had a similar attraction for the regular, it combined a relatively non intellectual group around a specific skill set which if you were good, entered your name on the champions plaque for 1955, proudly displayed behind the bar.
As you grow older you tend to marginalise yourself for all kinds of other reasons. 

The yakety yak of conversation, "nothing important just catching up", so redolent of our craze of the mobile phone and the incessantly inane conversations and connections we continually make on them, becomes unattractive. In such a case, the peace of our own seclusion is a pleasure to be profoundly grateful.
The Buddhist undertaking meditation, the solitary hill walker, lost in your own thoughts all lead you to a place where the surrounding pull and tug for your attention is changed for inward contemplation where the competition is limited to your own 'thought process' and the internal search we all take on to find answers about ourselves.

It's cool to be "marginalised" so long as you are the instigator and the condition is of your choosing. Being marginalised against your will is another matter and involves that most pernicious feeling, that of being rejected but even here one eventually finds the mental space to grow again to once more take on the manual of being the single person you always were.