Who is right and who is wrong and who’s to say.

Subject: Who is right and who is wrong and who’s to say.





The issue of ‘Hate Speech’ and its effect on ‘Free Speech’ has serious implications not only on what we say, how we say it and to whom but how we think. The act of having an opinion which differs from a minority opinions, no matter how well intentioned and held by an unelected, shadowy but media savvy cohort acting within society can and does lead to demonising and the use of ‘cancel culture’ to isolate opinion.

All opinion should be challenged in a healthy society but the use of psychological force where deliberate mis-information is used and published to diminish opinion is very  dangerous. The governments continuous attack on the BBC is an example of the drip drip undermining of this great institution and this at a time when news channels such as GBNews and Talk TV, both new arrives, both openly controversial and each fulfilling a purpose by airing not only right wing views but fathering  head to head debate on difficult subject matter where organisations such as the BBC is afraid to venture for fear of being accused of being racist, homophobic and intolerant of the populist view. I think it’s healthy to have your own prejudice challenged and your views re-articulated,  if for no other reason than it forces you to evaluate opinions formed in different times and under different pressure.

Opinion after all is simply that, an opinion, it’s not a law of physics with a need to test its provenance and its attraction to you is based on your life experience and a willingness to consider the alternative. How often we are forced by opinion to change ours is not to often if our opinion is based on the needs of mankind in general and not the specific need of a minority who wish to exercise power. Opinion is not ‘fact’ it’s an amalgam of views which can eventually homogenise into a cultural acceptance which then begin to form as a norm. The test of acceptance is critical but one of the imponderable difficulties of a multicultural society like ours is finding acceptable norms amongst people who have different cultures and religions. Without an overall common acceptance the difficulties of religious acceptance and cultural mores will be a fault line and lead to a destabilised society.

Exposures and education to other opinions and especially to their actual practice in the society is foremost in understanding our differences but that’s not to say because we understand that we agree and our disagreement must be heard without being tarred with the term prejudice. Our entitlement to be different is what marks us out as a nation but the difficulty of acknowledging difference in others, especially since they have become an integral part of our society leads to  great deal of soul searching especially when, for religious conformity on the the other side can not give an inch.

Tolerance is key with some religions but with others religion is unforgiving in its teaching and the observance of strict rules and our non religious based tolerance is stretched to breaking point

The future is in heaven.

 Subject: The future is in heaven.

Currently the Chancellor of the Exchequer is holding out the prospect of tax cuts in a bid to entice voters to vote for the Conservative Party, is this responsible or reprehensible given we already are over three trillion pounds in debt and tax cuts are simply designed to encourage the recipient of the cut to go out and spend in an attempt to generate the ‘tax take’ from the extra spending.

As we teeter towards recession which will inevitably encourage a hike in the cost of borrowing we continue our whack a mole politics with no clear plan other than to respond to crisis with popular slogans designed to deflect critics when questioning “how will we get there”, but the how is always lost in the reasoning since politically it’s unpleasant medicine and democracy is not designed for unpleasantness.

How they must long for Putins totalitarian approach or Xi Jinping's absolute authority in Whitehall, no balancing public opinion or the rights of minorities, just the cane if anyone steps out of line.

Has democracy seen its day in our troubled world. The surety of capitalisms financial gains and what it should have meant to the masses, now scooped up into smaller and smaller pots with the financially bloated recipients unable to comprehend their wealth in terms of ordinary people. The ambition of the people now swallowed up in jackpot mysticism instead of rational goals on which a persons sense of self worth is founded.

As war becomes a topic in the vein of that at the turn of the 19th century and with leaders such as Kim Jong Un or Ruhollah Khomeini holding a nuclear option over our heads, the talk of placing the country on a war footing, at least logistically is doing the rounds once more. But this time we are emotionally so much more unprepared after years of pronouncing on ‘our rights’ how will conscription and a call to arms be accepted. Perhaps in a nuclear war it will all be over ‘in a flash’ before there is a call to arms to man the barricades since the barricades are vaporised along with us and only a specialised group will have survived. Everything will be contaminated, except perhaps the oceans, all the petty ills we suffer will be as nothing in our brave new world order, our sons and daughters and our grandchildren will be wasted by some megalomaniac who believes the future is in heaven.  

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

 Subject: Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Al Jazeera appears to have been taken off air and none of our local news channels see fit to report it.

Israel had threatened to impede the broadcast of any of what it sees as biased, misinformed news that misrepresents the ongoing war in Gaza.

Remember RT the broadcast arm of the Russian state which was shut down in this country and robbed us of insights into Russian thinking if not so much investigating the conditions in Russia.

Al Jazeera is a 24/7 day broadcaster with its head office in Quatar it also broadcasts an English language service from London. This morning as I went for my News round up the screen where I usually tune into Al Jazeera was blank and when I searched Google for a reason it said that Isreal’s were finalising the plans to shut down Al Jazeera’s Gaza office from where we gain most footage of what’s going on there.

There is always the issue of bias in reporting any story but unless Al Jazeera have replicated some sort of Hollywood style screen set  the pictures of bombed out neighbourhoods or the constant stream of wounded people, particularly innocent children rushed into partially destroyed hospitals then we must be allowed to believe our eyes, no matter how disturbing it is.

I always believe on making up my own mind by simply watching and listening to the full range of media outlets, some you weight with more prejudice than others. The new kids on our block, ‘Talk TV’ and its competitor GB News which started about the same time both encourage the political right wing  and are not limited, as the BBC is in remaining factually impartial with both reporters and presenters inhibited in expressing their own view. Some high profile BBC veteran presenters have been fired for appearing to support a political opinion, unlike their adversaries on GB News and Talk TV the who openly criticise the news depending on their own bias. It’s part of a move to emulate media channels, such as X by encouraging  a free-for- all by bringing commentary from every spectrum irrespective of how disabling it is ‘in the cause of freedom of speech.

“Al Jazeera has just come on air” so I don’t know what happened but there was a significant break in service and my twitchy antenna feared the worst.

The channel resumes its expose of this humanitarian disaster, especially in the hospitals but also in the deprivation of food and water to the Gaza population as a whole.

Your mindset must allow, historically the sympathetic cultivation of support for Isreal as a state for beleaguered Jews to settle in after their terrible experience as nation which experienced the Holocaust but in allowing Isreal to break international conventions in its fight for survival it risks losing that support.

Thats not to condone Muslim extremist’s, such as Hamas, Hizballah, Boko Haram, ISIS and many other groups who commit atrocities in the name of Allah. But the old adage “two wrongs don’t make a right” is never more important than now.  

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.

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.

The Special One

Antiquity has many dependants. The tribes and civilisations traipsing across the expense of time each claiming eminence, each with proud descendants who base their linage to be considered special.

Egyptians,Persians, Greeks , Hebrew tautology, Aryan/Davidian mysticism, the Renaissance in Italy and France, the British Empire, the Teutonic influence in Europe, Marxism, each has had its adherents in the sense that history defined them and gives them the opportunity feel special.

This sense of identity through a tribal attachment and the achievement born of intellectual, military and economic might makes us speak highly of ourselves irrespective of the fact  we are a poor image of the original.

Having arrived in the 21st century, economic influence set about the business of creating global markets and dissolving tribal affinity for the sake of consumerism. No longer in many senses are we different. Coke is a universal beverage, Apple and Nike are  worn and paraded everywhere, the American  influence, internationally, means that you can get by with English, at least through the airport. The emotional freeze as you recognise your  reliance on English as your lingua franca doesn’t carry you far in a bazaar in the Middle East or in the domestic affairs of Afghanistan or upper Mongolia when western influence is at a minimum and possibly counter effective, then your historical preeminence worthless.

And yet we persist in inflating our sense of worth, we insist in punching above our weight sending warships into potential war zone situations when in reality we can't fix the potholes in our roads. Is it possible with our history to down size our psych to be a onlooker not a combatant. I'm not talking of our valour in standing up to fascism but nations like Sweden who were a force to be reckoned with in the 17th/18th century learnt to accommodate the world as it was and not try to mould it into what it thought it should be. We can never break the back of religious intolerance or a secular ideology, nor should we want to unless they threaten us and what we believe is just and fair.

Even the might of the American fighting machine is being questioned as the worlds policeman, not least by its own people who question the economic cost and the relevance of nations who it is being asked to defend. The move away from the compartmentalisation of nationhood towards the assumption of commonality in practice and purpose has lead to a distortion of the aims and needs of countries who have not thrown out traditionalism for consumerism. The mullahs of Iran for instance are not at all convinced by western symbolism, their history goes back  through the brilliance of academic achievement known as the Persian Empire. The tolerance of American capitalism, a very recent event, is as hard to swallow as the brash GI was on the streets of London during the war. The phenomenon of the Trump supporter gives credence to the claim that the American mentality is a cut and paste character, more tied to Hollywood than the reality of the world we live in.

Public opinion 2024/25

Subject: Public opinion 2024/25

 

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.