So who speaks for the disadvantaged

 

Subject: So who speaks for the disadvantaged

 


And now it’s the GPs who are holding the nation to hostage, threatening to limit patient access because they say their surgeries are underfunded by government which of course means tax receipts. The junior doctors have just secured a record breaking rise on their claim that their hourly pay in the region of £15 ph, is ridiculously low given the time spent preparing to be acknowledged as equipped to exercise any sort of medical expertise. The nurses similarly suffered, under the Cameron/ Osborn austerity regime as  year on year their pay slipped down the cost of living statistic as did so many reliant on public service increases. So whilst as a nation we simply didn’t improve our productivity but instead insisted on withdrawing from our by far our largest market, the EU we were seduced by the rhetoric of the ideological school who insisted we could go it alone irrespective what the economic statistics told us.
Where do we go from here, do we cripple ourselves by becoming more indebted to the sovereign funds who often represent political states which we abore, do we trim back the money spent on social improvement or limit, in a distinctly troubled world our defence expenditure. We seem to have a pathological obsession in not investing in the bright ideas which our academics develop and would rather do a two step with nations who will invest in us, but on terms which benefit  them.
Where are the UK manufactured of wind farms, ships, railway stock, all of which we have to buy from nations who are our competitors. We had the skill base only 50 years ago but frittered it away long before the Chinese arrived on the scene but by a refusal to invest in our ‘trade collages’ we  converted them instead into dodgy universities peddling even more dodgy degrees. We, or should I say,our business leaders, are the author of our demise
whilst they take their seats in the House of Lords to reminisce about the time they made a killing on the stock market we riot on the streets of predominantly northern towns desperate to be heard in a world that has no place for them.
Of course there is an element of thuggery amongst them but there is also a cry to have been let down as to them the last straw is the sight of swelling immigration which culturally and economically displaces them from the very towns they call their own.
This was foreseeable. Having grown up in Bradford the mill owners rather than compete with the Taiwanese and their modern equipment instead used the oldest tool in the box they imported cheap labour from the subcontinent and expected the people of Bradford to assimilate. A few days ago I broke down in the centre of Bishops Stortford.
Parked behind me was a taxi driven by an old Indian chap. I approached him to ask could he take me home but he explained he was out shopping with his wife and not for hire. Anyway to cut a long story down he agreed and as I settled. Into the back seat alongside a lady his wife he explained that she didn’t speak English even though they had lived here for over 30 years.
Assimilation is in some communities a myth especially if the religion separates women from the normal occurrence such as the freedom to leave their home and integrate with others then the possibilities are few.
The riots are a miserable reflection of the waste land which has occurred and is a blind refusal of our politicians to garner as much remorse for their own electorate as they do for other nations. When I see Yvette Cooper the new Home Secretary voice her disgust of the violence, I see a middle class woman whole sole preoccupation has been towards minority and female issues wholly sidestepping the resentment brewing in working class towns and It’s not so funny to see our country as a whole now reliant on the police, a force which has been described as institutionally racist and misogynistic but on who we now place all our hope to face down the misogynist/racist on our streets.
Hope they don’t follow the lead of the junior doctors and go on strike but of course they can’t, they are constitutionally bound to protect us or more to the point the property interests of the influential.

Winning isn't everything.

 

 

Subject: Winning isn't everything.

 


The following rebutted by Israel of the South African claim that what is happening in Gaza is genocide and not just a series of war crimes or that each is judged differently, one is based on a predetermined set of actions, the other on actions which take place without being determined by the hierarchy such as government policy.
Israel’s argues that the predetermined attack on Israeli citizens on Oct 7th demanded retaliation commensurate with the attack and that the rooting out of the perpetrator, Hamas, has to be thorough otherwise the attacks will be repeated again and again.
The recent sight of the frenzy on the streets of Yemen to the response of the US and British  missiles launched at the Houthi missile launching bases indicates the fury of Arab resentment since the damage caused is targeted and proportional. The claim against the Israelis is that their response is neither targeted or proportional.
Shifting the emphasis of attacking the civilian population in Gaza to one which seeks to route out a sophisticated enemy with a huge complex tunnel system with hundreds of entry points not least those from under hospitals makes the Israeli war effort not simply, as portrayed, a frenzied retaliatory response to the Oct 7th but rather a systematic retaliation on Gaza as a whole because of its complicit war footing.
War is a dreadful business made especially so if one side has the fervour of religious immunity and fighting them has to be totally without restraint. There is an argument that the whole of the Middle East is religiously opposed to the west and no matter what accommodation we come to we will never win the hearts and minds of those following a  religious idolatry. The worry is that this idolatry has gained a strong foothold in this country and whilst a Gaza style war in this country would take a different format you can already see the banners gathering and the wagons circled around what to us are alien concepts.
Dancing around the pin of judicial provenance, the Israeli barrister made claim that irrespective of the bloodshed, the South African claim to the court had been made without an actual official interaction between the conflicted parties who were appearing in court today. And once again we see the law keen to fix its case around the procedural setting rather than the humanitarian one and, in the setting of this court, procedure is everything. It’s the equivalence of a clearly convicted person caught in the act  being allowed to walk away from court because the arresting policeman had failed to read him his rights.
Perhaps the fault line then begins in the court not withstanding the bombs raining down since our belief in right and wrong is vested in the laws interpretation of our actions. The fact that different societies judge these matters differently is reason for a World Court to exist but it doesn't remove the clever tactical manoeuvring by barristers to defuse something we would declare right or wrong. 'Many shades of grey' comes to mind with all its opec posturing, when facts seem to get in the way of justice.
Listening to legal opinion afterwards the view seemed to be that in terms of law, especially genocide the South African case was too general and relied on non substantive suffering without taking into account the suffering of the Israeli Jew when their people were attacked so brutally on October the 7th. The South Africans hardly mentioned it and it goes to the root of the problem in an adversarial court setting. Each side only produces what it feels lends their case a chance of success not to reach the truth or even the basis of reasoned argument rather it obfuscates the truth simply to win.

Vernons Pools.

 

Subject: Vernons Pools.


There’s a television program called “talking pictures” which, as the name implies shows film made 30, 40, 50, 60 and more years ago and for me is a go to channel since, like any self respecting dinosaur I feel more at home with films made when I myself felt  more relevant and the norms of the time were more relevant to the values I had been brought up with.
This morning a documentary made at Vernons Pools the football pools betting system when millions of men and women had a flutter trying to predict the winners of the weekly football game submitted their prediction’s. Today we have the Euro millions and Lotto entered electronically but in those days it was a  painstaking paper driven system which required thousands of women who were employed as checking clerks.
The documentary covers a week in the life of Vernons, as the teams of women, they were mostly women who carried out the task, on receipt  of the coupon from a member of the public to check its content and verify its validity. Teams of women batched the coupons and rebatched them locating the ones with a winning record of predicting which games had been a win, draw or a loss. The combinations were complex but the formula used by Vernons, or their competitor Littlewoods in processing this huge mass of paper each week was an instance of man’s ingenuity before the computer did it for us.
The passivity of the women doing this task seems so out of place with todays emancipated female, robotic is one word to describe it perhaps the production line in Henry Fords motor car assembly plant has some similarity but it’s quite a shock to see how plaintive these girls were, I suppose there’s the similarity with females working in the woollen/cotten mills in Yorkshire and Lancashire but in their case, amid the noise and the danger of machinery it seemed more industrial.
I suppose it’s the mechanisation of humanity and the collective mind which strikes me most as being inhuman but I suppose in the context that it’s simply a job and a pay packet at the end of it which itself converts into food, drink and a night out dancing at the Mecca. Each has its value, each is a trade off as is so much of our lives. Whether it’s worth it is another discussion for another time.

An inbuilt bias

 

Subject: An inbuilt bias

Today two reports have been championed on the television this morning, the report detailing the failings of Manchester, Rochdale, and other police forces in responding to abused children by gangs who saw in these children, mostly white girls, the easy pickings of of a degenerate society where moral behaviour and lax parental control made it easy for these girls to be co-opted by gifts and favoured attention into the darkness of sexual favours to compensate their lives where parents were simply too busy either to care, or were themselves corrupted by their personal economic state of affaires to be at home to offer basic parenthood.

Such powerful oratory by Margret Oliver, against police indifference I have seldom heard and like the Post Office scandal, it’s taken 20 years of inactivity before reports have burst the defences of public offices, police and municipal, who are accused not only of cover up but also collaboration because of the racial aspect in the boroughs most effected.

The clarity of the condemnation was most acute in a speech given by a woman who has given her life to bring this use of young girls as sexual playthings by certain elements in the  Pakistani community who were protected, by the fear of being tagged racist by the white officials who job it was to enact the laws which are there to protect the vulnerable. Like the PO scandal the problem is seen as a top down problem, an impoverishment of treatment by the people at the top of our governing organisations to pay attention to the poor and un represented in our society.
The politicians particularly bear the most shame since they are equipped with parliamentary impunity to speak out without accusation as these matters are brought to their attention through their surgeries. Where were they when they should have been bouncing up and down off their seat demanding to be heard in the Commons.
The police in Rochdale failed to prioritise the plight of these young girls but the Chief Constables who come from a class who failed to equate these young girls with their daughters are still in place lecturing us in articulated argument into which the masses invariably buy
Margaret Oliver a leading campaigner against this malfunctioning executive was marvellously articulate, as I am sure she has been for the years she has been campaigning but for all those years she wasn’t listened to, why. Are we rotten to the core with administrative bodies colligated by public school educated officials who are so biased by their education and upbringing that the plight of ordinary people is beyond their capacity to reason or is it worse they don’t see a reason to do so.

Interpretation

Subject: Interpretation

Tuning in to the opening evidence given to the enquiry into the interrogation of the Post Masters and Mistresses who were being accused of theft from the system one is struck by the whiles of barristers to lay emphasis on a single sentences taken out of context and is to my mind  prejudicial to the search for truth.
The enquiry is interrogating a member of the POs security team who on the one hand seems something of a rough diamond but also a person who might be termed a 'jobs worth' in that as long as he followed the rules as set out by the PO he was very reluctant to look elsewhere as to why the mismatch in accounting process arose.
My own reminiscence of people performing the job behind the counter was that they had to cope with a whole array of procedure from the issue of selling stamps to the issue of motor vehicle taxation, acting as intermediary in passport procurement, a whole array of government processes including pension payments and so much more, each system with its own intricacies and the information required to fill in the documentation and the personal accountability was to my mind quite complicated and each stood alone according to the service offered.
Listening to the interrogation one is struck by the reliance of the PO accounting team on the system rather than drawing conclusions which should have been considered by the sheer number of alleged misappropriation. Psychological compartmentalism is a term which comes to mind. Firms which employ homegrown investigators rather the professional auditors run the invariable risk  of employing people who are blind to associating the issues to a wider auditing process, they install a 'company-man first and foremost' which is a weakness and leads to undermining the core values a company should be founded on. Also the legal companies employed by the PO seem to cozily underperform their own accountability by injecting statements which purport to come from the PO investigatory team but are cut and paste statements to avoid culpability.

The investigation leaves a sour taste in the mouth that this is the way business is done in this country and it's taken a drama/documentary to push the button and get people in parliament to get off their customary high horse and at least take time off their attention to preserving the status quo. 

Looking into the New year

 

Looking into the New year

 

So how are we to look forward to the new year, the following one and the one after that with so much of our overall security in disarray. It's not only the wars which are horrible enough now brought into focus through the lens of thousands of a publicly enterprising cameras ready and waiting to capture the mayhem and publish their efforts on the web
but the solemnity of a private life is becoming more difficult year by year as we take on the plight of a donkey, a caged bear or the dreadful carnage, not only in Gaza or Mariupol but the economic disparity in Mumbai or Bangladesh, the economic cloning of its citizens in China and the severity of displacement around the world as people are primed to look for new pastures and this is my latest offering on our diet of 24/7 news gathering and non stop punditry.
Of course a well tried antidote to the mayhem is the fresh air of a camping holiday well away from any WiFi signal, a reconnect with ones personal world unabashed by ideological criticism in a world which we ourself own and defend.
The compilation of insightful thoughts which arise in our own heads, without the precursor of hysterical noise brought about by others is a wonder to behold. Thoughts which arise in the dead of night or as you awake before the clutter of the first news broadcast breaks through and destroys the crystal clear thoughts that you had assembled in the wee small hours. An array of words and descriptive prose built in an attempt to separate the complexity of the human condition into boxes each box containing a set of parameters not outlandish supposition. Wonderful words with their equally wonderful ability to allow a shift of a few degrees in meaning. It's like painting as the artist mixes his colours to change the temperature of the portraiture  by melding a little aqua blue into the storm clouds building on the horizon. 
We are currently being seduced to drive at 20mph, perhaps tomorrow at 15mph, a slow drip drip incursion into having to give way to the 'big brother' of government or special interest opinion which now govern our lives.

The Post Office and the government in the dock

 

Subject: The Post Office and the government in the dock

How can one of the doyens of British public life, the Post Office which has been shamed by the ITV broadcast drama revealing not only the shortcomings but the shameful disregard by government of the plight of sub postmasters and mistresses wrongly accused of filching money into their own accounts because of the malfunctioning of the Post Office computer which is supposed to account for money transactions. Over two decades this crisis where the sub postmaster/mistress were accused by the post office of being unable to balance their book and being made to find the shortfall out of their own pocket, to the tune of thousands of pounds and in some cases face prison sentences for wrong doing is close to barbaric. It is claimed that this is the greatest travesty of justice ever recorded in Britain and yet it still continues with the post office dragging its feet to remunerate the personal loss never mind the turmoil of being accused when innocent.
The Post Office has a quasi relationship with the government. In an effort to privatise the PO they were set up as a private company with a board chief exec and chairman but the sole shareholder was the government. When it came to judging the people who ran each post office their legal position and their right of an unbiased hearing it seems that the PO executive were judge and jury and the claims that the problems in the book keeping system were due to the Horizon computer system, not the staff in the sub post offices were rubbished. People committed suicide due to the inequity of their position and whilst slowly the picture emerged of a great wrong the post office, to this day fight each claim for compensation as if their flawed system might not be to blame and therefore a legal case is presented by well paid barristers on the basis that you have to prove your innocence and not that you are innocent until proven guilty.
The whole sorry episode reveals a fundamental fault line between the ordinary person in this country when seeking justice and the power of the executive, be it the Post Office or the Government. The scales have been skewed by the removal of legal aid such that expensive defence against litigation is out of reach for the ordinary person and the unnecessary travesty of justice is becoming more the norm.
It's taken a television drama to wake up public sentiment and rough the feathers of our political class who were, as in so many areas of our public life, simply asleep at the wheel. The ministerial avoidance of this problem has been woeful as has the opposition parties reluctance to force the government to take action.