The Judge RANTS!
There's Always Something Annoying...
Brokebank Mountain?
Due to a managerial screw-up, I found myself in the office yesterday unable to do any of the work that I'm being underpaid for doing, so all that was left for me to do was to go through some of the Depratment's online training courses.
The first one I did was Diversity Awareness. This is standard fare, much of which is common sense to anyone who was properly brought up: don't stereotype, don't make assumptions about people based on their race, ethnicity (and what the hell is the difference between 'race' and 'ethnicity', anyway?), gender, sexual proclivities or physical/mental impairments.
So far, so fluffy.
Then I got to one page where the illustrative photograph seemed...strange. Bizarre, even. I can't reproduce it here, but I can describe it. Two men, aged in their late twenties or early thirties, are sitting at a table, possibly in a domestic environment (although the décor leaves a lot to be desired from that aspect). The one facing us has close-cropped hair (failing to hide the fact that he's losing it from the sides) and a grey sports shirt; the one sitting square-on to his right has shortish dark hair with one of those upturned fringes. He is wearing a turquoise sweatshirt. There is laptop in front of the first man, who is pointing a pen at a sheet of paper in front of the second and...
...they are holding hands.
Putting the mouse cursor over the image reveals the 'title' tag:
"A gay couple doing their home accounts"
There were two thoughts which occurred to me on seeing this, and the combination brought me to such a state of hysterical hilarity that I had to leave my desk and walk around the building for a few minutes.
Firstly, does anyone know of any couple - gay, straight or any combination thereof - who hold hands while doing the household accounts? Unless it's to conduct a séance to find out where Auntie Freda left the old tin box containing the deeds to a large tract of Worcestershire?
Secondly, after all the rabbitting on about not stereotyping, making assumptions, blah, blah, blah, why did the twerps who put that picture there not realise that in one moment they had destroyed the credibility of the whole package? Because one finds it difficult to take seriously the po-faced claims to respecting diversity from an organisation which shows Van Gogh's ear for the music of proper social procedure.
Asking around, it was pointed out to me that they may have been in something of a bind as to exactly how they could illustrate the fact that the couple portrayed were gay. I suggested that the glass of water on the table next to the one in the turquoise shirt could have had 'amyl nitrate' written on it; or that the glass could have been replaced altogether by a small tube of KY Jelly - but discreetly, mind.
The path to good intentions is paved with hells, isn't it?
The Not-So-Fine Print
"No good deed ever goes unpunished". Discuss.
As a service to you, my reader, I thought it would be an idea to do something to make it easier for you to print stuff off of this here website. So I went to it last weekend to design an extra set of stylesheets. These would mean that you wouldn't use up all of your black ink cartridge just printing one piece. It would make the print black on white, and would also mean you could print off the main body of the page without the navigation sidebar.
In the process of trying to implement this, I discovered that something was screwed up in the way that Internet Explorer was displaying some of the pages. I then found out that I had made a mistake in the coding of the exception which means that IE displays pages properly by referring it to a different stylesheet to the one used by all other browsers.
The mistake was tiny - a missing '!'. Unfortunately, I had made that mistake in the very first instance of the code, and had merrily copy-and-pasted the error to every single page on the site. '!', indeed; in fact, '!!!!'!.
Having finally sorted that out, I tested the new print stylesheets. Firefox? A small tweak, but apart from that, fine. Internet Explorer 7 (which uses a slightly different stylesheet)? Same there. I then went to my old Windows 98 machine across the room to try the browsers I have on that. Internet Explorer 6? OK. Seamonkey? Oh, arse! Print Preview won't show more than the first page, a problem I'd also had (and had resolved) with Firefox on the XP rig. Opera? Ditto, plus you need to disable the setting which prints background colours.
I'm still working on this, so printing from the site might be a bit iffy until such time as I can work out a fix.
The Law Above The Law
Let's run this little sequence again, shall we?
A man is walking home from work when he is approached by a group of men carrying weapons, acting in a menacing manner.
The gang order the man to get out of their way. When he refuses to be cowed by their aggressive manner, one of the gang strikes him from behind with a large stick, and then pushes him, causing him to fall to the ground. The blow is witnessed by a number of people, some of whom take video footage.
Having picked himself up and managed to struggle out of the way of the thugs, the man collapses and dies on the pavement shortly afterwards.
The gang claim publicly that it was an unfortunate incident, that it was the man's own fault for not showing them the respect that they felt due to them, that no blow was struck (and if there was, their homey didn't mean it), and that a friend of theirs said that the man was bound to die sometime anyway.
In the full run of events, the 'authorities' decide that - despite all the available evidence - the assailant is not to be charged with any criminal offence.
A strange decision? Not a bit of it; it is completely in line with modern-day standard operating procedure.
Because the man was a newspaper seller called Ian Tomlinson.
The menacing gang were all members of the police, tooled up to smash some protestors' heads during the G20 in London in 2009.
The friend was a serially-incompetent police medic called Freddy Patel who carried out a botched post-mortem examination on Mr Tomlinson which was later completely contradicted by not one but two such examinations carried out by independent doctors.
That, despite over one thousand people having been killed by the police in the last forty years, not one single cop has ever been convicted of homicide in relation to any of them.
Which is why today, nearly sixteen months after Mr Tomlinson was killed, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) announced that the officer who struck Mr Tomlinson - now finally named publicly as one PC Simon Harwood - will not face any criminal charges in connection with the matter.
The pretzeloid reasoning given seems to run as follows:
One post-mortem carried out by a surgeon under investigation for incompetence disagreed with two carried out by reputable pathologists. This is described by the DPP as a "sharp disagreement between the medical experts". Because of this apparent inconclusiveness, Harwood can't be tried for manslaughter, presumably because it would only confuse a jury to have to make a decision between evidence provided by a bungler and that provided by people whose bona fides are not in question, and who agreed that Mr Tomlinson had died as a result of blunt-force trauma.
Assault charges could not be brought against Harwood because the CPS (I actually accidentally typed CoPS there first; silly me!) had taken the view that there was no evidence that the push which followed the attack with a truncheon caused Mr Tomlinson "substantial harm", despite the fact that the 'push' caused him to fall face-first to the pavement.
Harwood couldn't be charged with Common Assault either, because such a charge must be brought within six months of the alleged offence and the CPS and the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission had taken much longer than that to investigate the matter. Which I'm sure was a heartbreaking disappointment to them. I'm sure they tried their best.
So this is where we find ourselves once again. The police cause someone' death. Their first calculated response is to spread a barrage of lies about the victim and the circumstances of his death, aided by a rogue pathologist. When this starts to fall apart - in the face of evidence seen around the world - and the inevitable investigation takes place, the investigators take so long over their work as to preclude the most likely charge against the assailant. The prosecutors then claim that their hands are tied, and that the version of events provided by a dodgy doctor would not be outweighed by that of two clinicians of repute who - independently of one another - reached a very different diagnosis...
...and that the CPS' decision to do nothing at all is announced on the fifth anniversary of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by the same police force, when his killers also escaped without prosecution (although their employers were done for breaches of health and safety legislation).
The ramifications of all this are far deeper than just this one case. It shows not only that the police in general - and the Met in particular - are utterly out of control, but it shows once again that the 'Independent' Police Complaints Commission is anything but (the word 'independent' serving as what one might call a 'Sellafield attributive', rather like those dictatorships which called themselves 'Socialist Republics' because it couldn't otherwise be guessed that they were), and that the Crown Prosecution Service - ever willing to bring ludicrous charges against anyone else if the poltical and media climate might warrant it - turn into a posse of pussies whenever faced by the possibility that some police officers on some occasions are little more than sociopathic and psychopathic thugs.
We are in the deepest trouble when those who are supposed to uphold the law - be it in enforcement or administration - connive between them to put themselves above that law.
Bollocks!
Why is it that the one line of code you copy and paste a number of times is always the one line that's got the error in it?
The War Has Begun
I have said little about the so-called New Politics in recent weeks. Part of the reason is that I would merely be repeating myself. The rest is down to my inability to think coherently and type legibly when my jaw and fists are clenched in rage.
The only thing that surprises me about the savagery of the new régime is that anyone is surprised by it. After all, we are talking about a Tory government here. Tories do what Tories do; and - since the Conservative Party was taken over by the disciples of Hayek and Friedman in the mid-seventies - what they do is to enact policies of unmitigated economic and social brutality against those who are considered to be in no position to fight back: the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and all other marginalised groups. Not only that, but the sheer casualness of their disdain for those groups isn't scarcely even hidden. They simply don't see the need.
In their latest assaults on the values of a civilised society, they have the willing support of the upper echelons of the Liberal Democrats. Again, I was never going to be astonished by the alacrity with which Clegg, Cable, et al turned themselves into Cameron's bitches; I knew that - based on long observation of their conduct in local government - is what LibDems do. The pre-election posturing that they were somehow a left-of-centre party was always ludicrous given the control over the party exercised by the authors of the notorious Orange Book, the central tenets of which could be summed up as Thatcherism redux.
And so we faced Gormless George's 'austerity budget', in which we were presented once again with the socio-economic equivalents of the neutron bomb; policies which harm people but leave institutions such as the banks and The City almost completely unscathed.
Someone has to pay for our economic woes, of course. So why not throw the burden on those who were least responsible for it, and who have the least means to pay? So VAT will go up to 20% and public services will be subject to spending cuts of twenty-five per cent (or is it forty percent this week?). The welfare system will be further degraded to the point where the holes in the safety net will be so big that even Eric Pickles would be able to fall through them.
(And can someone explain to me how it is that, when a Labour Party member suggests it might be a good idea to vote for the candidate of another party in an obscure council by-election they face certain expulsion, but ex-ministers such as John Hutton and Frank Field can accept invitations to join panels on how to 'reform' (i.e. cut) welfare and pensions with no disciplinary action taken? But of course, this is all undertaken in the spirit of "We're all in this together" and gives the political class and its tame hangers-on in the media another chance to mis-use the word 'reform' to mean "cut what we can get away with cutting, and hand over the rest to our donors in The Private Sector").
New school buildings will not be erected, unless they are intended for the quaintly-named free schools; schools set up by businessmen, pushy parents or religious nutters but funded largely with money from the public who will have absolutely no input into how those schools are run.
It seems that this Tory government, with its convenient fig-leaf of LibDem glove puppets, is aiming to be even more extreme that that of Thatcher at her high-sewage-mark in the mid- to late-eighties. The knives are being sharpened, and the guns of propaganda are being re-bored, cleaned and loaded ready to fire at the intended targets from a variety of angles, all apparently different, but all sharing the same passionate intensity.
At this point, I should declare an interest. I am a worker in the public sector (if you didn't know already), and I'm beginning to wonder how long it will be before it will only be safe to make such an announcement whilst I am shown in profile and back-lit.
For we are - and have been for some little time, even well before the election - facing a barrage of statements, calumny and spin all designed to cast the whole of the public sector in a bad light. For although the barrow-boys of The City may have - as the Americans so cutely put it - 'taken a bath', and the bankers may have been more interested in speculating with non-existent assets, and the so-called 'regulators' may have seen little or nothing wrong with this large-scale dereliction of what any civilised society would consider ethical standards; nonetheless, all the failures of the economic system which has ruled this land since 1979 are to be laid at the door of workers in the public sector. They (we) and they (we) only are to be scapegoated, to have ourselves made redundant by the tens of thousands, to have our pay held even further back, to have our pensions and our redundancy packages slashed to ribbons. We, who administer systems which keep the country running, who keep your roads clear, who tend you when you are ill, who clear up your rubbish; we are the ones who must pay the price.
The ground for such a campaign is already fertile and, as with fertile ground in general, has got that way by a steady application of shit, flung widely and frequently. For those who still don't believe the truth of what Goebbels said about 'the big lie', try looking at the newspaper websites whenever the subject of public sector workers comes up. From the readers of the Daily Heil, the Torygraph, yea even unto the devotees of the Interdependent and the Grauniad, come torrents of green bile which might be a useful weapon against BP's latest little difficulty in the Gulf Of Mexico.
All public sector workers need to "get real!" and to "Wake up and smell the coffee!", and other similar phrases betokening the blithering idiocy which has overtaken public discourse in recent times; phrases used by people who think that they sound clever because they once heard an American on television use them.
So all we hear is how we are merely 'pen-pushers' (erm, we have reached the computer age now, y'know? All provided and administered via the dynamic, thrusting, lean, mean private sector; which means they cost about ten times as much and work about one twentieth as well) who sit on our arses drinking tea all day, piss off home at three o'clock, and have as our sole raison d'être the discombobulation and frustration of the good old Brutish Pubic. We are constantly told that our pay is far better than for equivalent work in The Private Sector (to which we are required to genuflect thrice daily for its munificence), that our pensions are 'gold-plated' and thereby unaffordable, and that our redundancy scheme is similarly far too good for the likes of us, being suitable only for cushioning the blow to those few senior executives in The Private Sector ("Hosanna! Hosanna!" (*)) who get the push, not forgetting those of their number who have in recent times been dropped on us like the famous 'Elsan Raids' on the Germans in World War Two (†) - and with much the same effect.
The corporate media, true to their unerring ability to know on which side their preferments are greased, have parroted the same line, whether it comes from politicians, leaders of 'the business community' or from the desocialised trolls of the newspaper websites.
On to such fruitful territory stamp the politicians - all of like mind (i.e. concrete: thoroughly mixed and permanently set). The last government attempted unilaterally to worsen our redundancy provisions but - in an all-too-rare victory - this was blocked by the courts. The new régime, however, has made it perfectly clear that it intends to pass legislation amending the 1972 statute under which our entitlement falls in order to slash payments to just about everyone by very substantial amounts. Similarly, a 'report' published today recommends the emasculating of our pensions, as well as making us pay more to get much less of them.
But who is calling for such public-spirited sacrifice here? Well, an organisation calling itself the Public Sector Pensions Commission (PSPC). Sounds very official, doesn't it? The truth, however, is that the PSPC is a body set up by such independent spirits as....the Institute of Directors (IoD), the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Policy Exchange and other such usual suspects. None of the people involved in the production of today's 'report' came from the public sector, no-one who actually works in the public sector was consulted. This did not stop the BBC (amongst others) from calling the 'report' and the malignant body which excreted it "independent", of course; although the news story which I read on the Broadcorping Castration's website this morning in which they were so described seems to have disappeared by eventide.
All of the people involved have 'form' on the subject, and they have produced a document which merely states what they've always thought. And so you have Philip Booth of the IEA uttering thusly:
"Public sector workers are being promised gold plated pensions whilst workers in the private sector...struggle to make sufficient provision for themselves."
Malcolm Small of the IoD came out with this last year:
"Public sector pension schemes are not sustainable."
Similar bollocks litters the report, in which the whole litany of the loony libertarians is seen in extenso. Let's just look at the two claims above for a start, shall we?
I would hardly call my prospective pension 'gold-plated', unless you habitually use the term to describe the almost see-through foil they wrap up the Easter eggs in at your local pound store. My latest forecast is on its way to me any week now, but I doubt if it will contain any pleasant uplift from the last one, which suggests that the most I can expect is a pension somewhat less than what the State Pension is now. Not a lot for thirty-one years' efforts, I think, even if you throw in the lump sum.
And, if workers in the private sector are having difficulties getting a decent pension, could that possibly be something to do with the fact that many of them work for a bunch of freeloading shits? You know, the ones who took full advantage of their pension funds' performance to take a 'contributions holiday' (which they weren't keen to extend to their employees for some unfathomable reason) and then, when the market tanked, started closing their employees' pension schemes or watering them down to uselessness; and were allowed to do so because Government was 'business friendly', the 'regulators' were rank cowards and the employees weren't in trade unions because they had swallowed the libertarian crap about the undesirability of collective protection for workers?
Even if the above were not true, and the failure of The Private Sector ("We Are Not Worthy! We Are Not Worthy!") to provide a prospect of a secure old age for its workers is all down to the fecklessness of said workers; even, as I say, if the previous paragraph were false, why should it follow that those of us who have managed to protect ourselves from the weaknesses of private provision should deliberately be impoverished in our retirement, unless as a spectacular act of revenge cheered on by those who are motiviated by their own sense of grievance and a nagging feeling that they've been had and have to have someone to lash out at?
As for the public sector pension schemes not being 'sustainable' or 'affordable', well what the hell is 'sustainable' about, say, a new generation of nuclear-tipped penis extensions to enable the scions of Eton, Harrow and Oxbridge to "punch above their weight" around the world (in reality, a position of glorified coat-holder for the world's current playground bully)? What is 'affordable' about massive bail-outs to banks which - true to their recent pattern of behaviour - then use the public's money to ensure that they can keep themselves in the style to which they have become all too accustomed?
But no; we must pay for their bungles, their corruption, their arrogance. We, along with the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, must take it in the crotch.
The Phony War is coming to an end. Shortly the real battles must be fought. And, for the sake of the ability to continue to live in something which is worth calling 'a civilised society', it is crucial that we are not defeated.
For further reading, I guide you to this statement from my union, PCS. OK, you might think that it is biased from the other side to the self-styled 'PSPC', but I know from personal experience and knowledge that it is far closer to how things actually are than the eager slavering of the owning class.
(*) Welsh for "Socks! Socks!".
(†) Whereby the Polish contingent of the RAF used to drop not only bombs but full chemical toilets on the Reich, until the Nazis complained to the Red Cross about an illegal use of 'chemical weapons').
