Rants Archive 2004
Netting The Serf
Sometimes, it's most refreshing to see how some grand old ways are
being maintained.
When our National Assembly of the Toothless was set up some five
years ago, some dyed-in-the-wool types were worried by the possibility
that it could mark the end of our country's finest traditions.
They needn't have been concerned, certainly judging by what
happened on the floor of the chamber on Wednesday.
During the debate on the "Queen"'s Speech, Assembly Member Leanne
Wood referred to the alleged head-of-state as "Mrs. Windsor".
Shock! Horror! Elected Politician Shows Disrespect For
Unelected Parasite Shock!
But never mind, all you monarchists! Be of stout heart, for a
gallant hero rode forth to defend the honour of her majesty!
Step forward Leighton Andrews, the Labour AM for Rhondda. Into the
fray he charged, fearing for nought but his invitation to the next Buck
House garden party. This was the telling thrust of his question to
Presiding Officer Dafydd ("Lord") Elis-Thomas:
"I'm sure that in a week when the Queen has been in Cardiff to
open the Wales Millennium Centre my constituents will see that remark
as childish and offensive and I'm sure many others will too."
Aren't you just in awe of the man's courage? Don't you marvel at
his fortitude and strength of character? Aren't you just deafened by
the sound of his hands wringing, Uriah Heep fashion?
E-T, himself a self-proclaimed socialist who nevertheless grabbed
the chance to join that unelectable clique of the has-beens and
never-weres called the 'House Of Lords', naturally concurred, and
ordered Ms Wood to withdraw the remark.
When the brazen hussy decided to stand on principle and declined to
do so, His Lordship ordered her out of the chamber.
(See the BBC report here)
How wonderful to see that, in this at least, the Labour Party is
sticking to its true beliefs. Even though it has turned its back on the
very notion of economic justice, rushed to privatise anything it can
get away with selling, and joined in an illegal war for an ignoble end,
it's heartening to see that it still stays faithful to the old ways of
the likes of George Thomas, that spoiled Mam's boy from Tonypandy,
whose obsequious dangling from the arse-end of the English aristocracy
was an object lesson in how to get to the top without having to sell
anything other than your soul.
Preferment can surely not be long delayed. How soon before we hear "Arise,
Sir Leighton"?
Yes, arise, Sir Leighton: arise from your cheap,
lickspittle existence and stand for something other than your own
desire for puerile publicity. The people of Rhondda deserve better,
particularly when faced with multiple attacks on what little remains of
their well-being by your benighted neo-Thatcherite leaders.
(The only thing Leanne Wood might have been guilty of was an error
in nomenclature. She isn't 'Mrs Windsor', of course. She is, in fact,
Mrs. Mountbatten, having married a Danish gigolo some years
ago. Or rather, if we are to be historically accurate, Mrs.
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha von Battenburg).
To end with, a short quiz. Study the two pictures below. One is of
Mr Leighton Andrews AM. The other is of a toad. Which is which?
(I do apologise for making this so difficult).
Not Write
Standards of journalism aren't what they used to be. If they ever were,
of course.
Take itv.com's report of the funeral of John Peel, for example.
Here's a quote from the piece:
"It [the order of service] contained a quote from the
character Misty in the book Roots:
"The music of our hearts is roots music, music which recalls
history, because without the knowledge of your history, you cannot turn
in your destiny: the music about the present, because if you are not
conscious about the present, you're like a cabbage in this society."
No, no, NO!! In the words of Ford
Prefect, "You stupid Ghent!"
This is a quote from the Rasta band Misty In Roots.
It is part of the spoken introduction to a song called "Mankind",
recorded at the Counter-Eurovision Festival in Belgium in 1979. The
track was a particular favourite of Peelie's, and he often said that
the sentiments contained in the quote came closest to describing the
philosophy behind what he did.
Not only had the poor hack who wrote the report never heard of the
band, (s)he had obviously never read Alex Haley, although
presumably someone must have told him/her about the book, or perhaps
even read it to them.
(Half Man Half
Biscuit, another of John's favourites, tried once to claim that
Haley was adopted, which would have made for an interesting conclusion
to the book).
Research? Wot's dat?
Kick It Into Touch!
Oh dear. I'm going to get a reputation if I'm not careful.
What with my remarks at "Opportunities To Be Knocked"
(12/09/04) and "Privateers Repelled!" (21/03/04),
and a few snide remarks here and there, some of you may be thinking
that I have something against Wrexham County Borough Council.
Well, I mean, better poor democracy than none at all, but
goodness
knows they ask for what my friend Dylan of the band Hecate Enthroned
calls "a damn good slapping".
For years now, the Council has been forever pleading poverty. "We
can't fill in great big potholes in the road because we haven't any
money!"; "We can't give the kids somewhere safe to play because
we haven't any money!"; and, of course, "We're going to try to
con you into voting to privatise your own homes because we haven't any
money to bring them up to standard!"
Whine, whinge, wibble.
And yet, there has always been money for some things.
Like spending hundreds of thousands on tarting up parts of the
town
centre, especially (for reasons I can't possibly imagine) those
parts which happen to be visible from the windows of the Council's
executive offices, while other areas of the town centre lie derelict
for years.
Like turning three or four flourishing secondary schools into
two
gigantic 'superschools', a project which has now gone horrendously over
budget and seriously behind schedule.
Like planning to have a gigantic modern sculpture of a harp slap
bang in the middle of the roundabout on the western approach to the
town (luckily, this one was laughed out of existence before one of
those simpering con-merchants known as 'modern artists' was engaged to
do the deed).
And now comes the latest madness.
Wrexham Football Club is, not to mince words, up Shit Creek. It
has
been bought by a speculating asset-stripper from the Outer Darkness (or
Cheshire, to give it its official name), who wants to sell off
the club's home, The Racecourse Ground, because it would be worth a
pretty penny for redevelopment for the sort of housing that local
people couldn't possibly afford. This, of course, is very worrying to
those who think that football matters, a group to which I once
belonged, before I allowed myself to grow cynical, or rather, grow
up.
So, supposedly to pre-empt this fate, the multi-brained
Executive
Board of Wrexham County Borough Council have now decided that they will
bid to buy the stadium...at an estimated cost to the taxpayer (that's me,
folks) of £1.5million.
Just to put this into perspective: the same Council claims that
the
housing budget is currently in deficit to the tune of
£1.2million, and that estate offices will have to be closed,
services cut back and repairs and renovations not carried out in order
to get back on track.
And this self-same organisation now wants to spend much more
than
that on buying a football ground! (Read their - for want of a
better word - reasoning here).
£1.5million of public money spent on bailing out a failing
private company which employs only a few dozen people ; whereas local
small business are crucified by the business rates and the
all-too-often obstructive behaviour of the Council, and local
communities are starved of funds because, so they claim, there
is no money available.
"Ah, but", say the muddled mandarins, "we'll also be
looking for funding from the National Assembly and other public bodies!"
And where, pray, do they get their money from? Yep. Us.
So we are being forced to pay taxes to prop up a football club
which, if its weekly attendances are any guide, is actively supported
by only a tiny minority of those whose taxes will be used.
Please don't misunderstand me on this: I don't want to see the
football club go under. But it simply is not the place of a
taxpayer-funded body to go chucking our money at a football club at a
time when there is, according to those doing the chucking, insufficient
properly to perform the statutory duties which are a council's proper
function.
The local hack-rag is, of course, totally behind this idiocy,
and
even the otherwise-rational Assembly Member Dr. John Marek is
supporting it. And I daresay that anyone who speaks out publicly
against it will be deemed traitorous to the cause, such being the
ludicrous passions stirred up by a lot of men kicking concentrated wind
in a field.
I've no doubt it'll go through, but I've equally no doubt that
the
Council have forfeited what little right they still had to whinge about
being strapped for cash when it comes to providing the things which matter.
Tally-OUCH!!
I suppose it's what the Germans call Schadenfreude, that
feeling of amusement at the misfortunes of others. Well, whatever word
you care to use, I felt it the other day when I read of the hunting
lobby's encounter with the Metropolitan Police's finest outside of The
Houses Of Parliament.
I would say that, wouldn't I? Yes, I am against hunting
with dogs (although prepared to make an exception for those who hunt
with dogs, which would make for an interesting practical demonstration
of the phrase 'ever-decreasing circles' if nothing else), but there
were some intriguing thoughts which came to me as I scanned the reports
of the événements.
I've seen reports of a few demos in my time. Indeed, way back in
the when, I went to one or two myself. It was quite an eye-opener, my
first one in Swansea nearly 23 years ago. It was a formative experience
which left me with more than a little distrust of authority, especially
if uniforms were involved.
Anyway, what entered my mind as I went through the news articles
was the way in which The Media (capital letters obligatory, as that is
how the members of that particular priesthood tend to see themselves)
portrayed this protest compared with those on behalf of more 'right-on'
causes.
All due emphasis was placed on the 'respectability' of those
taking
part. We were informed with breathless enthusiasm that there were
members of the minor nobility present and, if some reports are to be
believed, a few proxy representatives of the major nobility,
too. As if a few hundred years of examples of just how appallingly
badly the aristocracy and its squirarchical stooges are capable of
behaving had been completely (if temporarily) forgotten.
And when Stevens' braves actually went in and broke a few heads
(in
response, it seems, to having a large acreage of tweed shaken in their
faces), the newspaper and broadcast hacks went wading in themselves to
gain the insights of those on the receiving end. Their underlying tone
of enquiry was one almost of solicitude, as if these people had been
the victims of a mugging or a particularly nasty hit-and-run incident.
This shouldn't be too surprising, however. When the self-styled Countyside
Alliance (the political wing of the Country Landowners' Association
plus a few sympathisers from such illuminated quarters as the BNP and
UKIP) held a big rally in London a couple of years ago, the amount of
media coverage (invariably sympathetic in tone) was immense compared to
that granted to an anti-war march just a few weeks later which involved
a far larger number of people. We live in a land where to own things is
to have a power which democracy seems impotent to counter. The friends
at Court, avoir le piston, these will always have their effect
on the slant given to events.
You see, I couldn't help but think back a mere twenty years.
Then
the coal-miners of this mis-owned island were on strike to try to
prevent the destruction of their livelihoods and of the communities
which they supported. These weren't landowners, they owned little more
than their pride; these weren't those who had inherited land, wealth or
influence ; and (fatally from the point of media interest in this
animal-obsessed illusion some call culture) they didn't even
have the sob story of waggy-tailed woofy-dogs under sentence of death
to make the story really interesting. They were respectable in the real
sense of the word: people who were worthy of respect. They worked hard,
enjoyed themselves when and how they could, and did their best to make
sure that their children kept to the right side.
But, despite all this (or because of it), they were labelled.
And
libelled. Every day in just about every newspaper. And where bias
couldn't be overtly shown (such as in broadcasting), the slant was more
oblique, down far more to tone of voice rather than the words used. And
not just words, either. Pictures have power in our age. Just one
shot of just one striker throwing just one brick at the police
would send enough of a signal to the viewing millions that this,
indeed, was the sort of lawless, vicious mob that the gallant forces of
Order were having to deal with.
Sometimes the broadcasters, as always far more interested in
their
paths to the powerful than in anything which could be called objective
truth, felt that they didn't need to be quite so subtle about it. And
so we had the shameful instance of BBC News' coverage of the clash at
Orgreave, where film footage was deliberately re-edited to make it seem
as if the strikers attacked the Police first, rather than vice versa
as eye-witness evidence suggested. The damage was done, and who amongst
the powerful was remotely concerned if it was made by an outright lie
to millions of people? The miners were demonised, and that led to the
end; the end of hope, and the end of any real meaningful future for
tens of thousands of people with no powerful chums and no inheritance
of purloined property to fall back on.
At Westminster earlier this week, placards and other missiles
were
thrown at the Police, young men with shaven heads and no visible necks
to support them snarled and screamed. The Met responded in the way they
know best, at least showing that they have a keen grasp of the notion
of equality of treatment. A number of Members of Parliament were
threatened, and one (female) suffered a serious physical assault from
someone who then, with a shocking disregard for the idea of nobless
oblige, scarpered off into the throng. No doubt the cretin is
happily retailing the story in his local country pub even tonight.
The response of The Media? Well, it would be wrong to say that
there has been no criticism at all; but what there has been has tended
to be so genteely expressed as to scarcely have a right to exist. Far
more apparent has been the sympathetic twitterings of the right-wing
press, largely about how dreadfully the Police behaved; I mean, these
were respectable people after all ; many of them own
things (like half of Derbyshire). One quote from a Bedfordshire
solicitor has him remarking that he no longer had any respect for the
Police. Well, well, welcome to the real world, sweetie. The Bill have
been doing this to hippies, peaceniks, gays, Irish, Afro-Caribbeans and
kids for thirty years or more. Welcome to the club (or baton to
give it it's official title). You reap what you sow. What a dreadful
surprise it must be for those who inhabit what one writer called 'Topside'
to suddenly realise that the tactics they have urged the authorities to
use against the rest of us have finally come round and bit them
on the arse!
Opportunities To Be Knocked
Time to criticise my local Council again, chums. I mean, I don't
want you to think that they can buy me off just by putting in a central
heating system for me, you know?
Anyway, the other day I had a form from them. It was headed
something like "Equal Opportunites Monitoring" and asked me to
tick the appropriate boxes to say what gender, race and colour I was
(and, in fact, still am).
I do resent this. I mean, it's not for any sinister
reasons. I'm not remotely racist (at least, not consciously so, apart
from a thing against people from Liverpool which I could explain in the
context of my own formative life experiences, but won't bore you with
now), not ever since I saw an episode of "The Goodies" sending
up Apartheid in which discrimination by colour was replaced by
discrimination by height. I was about 12 or 13 then and, although I
didn't consciously get the message (that discriminating against people
on the grounds of their physical appearance is irretrievably stupid),
looking back I can see that it did influence me. For the better.
Where was I? Oh yes. Something inside me screams when I get one
of
these questionnaires. Even if the intentions may be bona fide,
I find myself marvelling once again at the seemingly endless effrontery
of public officialdom. Why do they think that they have the right to
know? Or even ask?
The form said that it would help the Council deliver its
services
to me, the taxpayer. I, the taxpayer, find it difficult to believe
this. For a start, how could the Council better empty my bin by knowing
whether I was male or female? Would it speed up the process by which I
get my tatty front and back doors replaced (hint, hint) if I gave them
reason to believe that I was Chinese? What, in short, do they really
want to know for?
Certainly, I don't suspect any sinister motives, but all the
same,
I believe we should yield as little of our private life and information
to the Apparat as possible (which is why I am totally against the
current plans for a national ID card - see here for details of the campaign
against it).
So, once again, just like I did last year (only the poor dears
don't seem to have taken the hint yet), I have sent the form back
uncompleted, but on the reverse side have written:
"IRRELEVANT
IMPERTINENT
INTRUSIVE
Do not send me one of these again!!"
If you get something similar, I warmly suggest you do the same.
"I Am Not A Pen-Pusher, I Am A Human Being"
Sometimes, I get genuinely angry. Not just the anger
which
can be carefully manufactured and called upon in aid of the need to
write pieces on this page, but a true, burning anger. The trouble is
that, in such circumstances, it is difficult to type accurately, but
I'll have a go...
On Monday last week Gordon Brown, Her Majesty's Chancellor Of
The
Exchequer and One-Eyed-Jack-In-Office, announced that he intended to
axe the jobs of over 100 000 civil servants over the next four years.
This was a substantial increase on the number he had previously stated
in his Budget back in the Spring of the year, which was bad enough in
all conscience.
As before, there had been no warning to, or consultation with,
the
very people who are most directly affected by this policy. Moreover,
Brown delivered the news with all the solemnity and gravitas of
a fairground huckster. He was quite plainly enjoying himself hugely. So
were the ya-yas (so called on account of their brays of
approval) on the Government back-benches, who could scarcely contain
their glee.
There was a time when one could still expect better of the
Labour
Party. No longer. It has been transformed under its current (for want
of a better term) leadership into a me-too, free-marketeering (*) mob.
The 'end of ideology' in the party has been marked by a similar
extinction of any notion of principle or purpose in it as well.
So we come to the pretty pass whereby a Labour
government,
without any qualms, can delight in creating unemployment in the very
sector which it used to regard as sacrosanct.
The media's response was thoroughly predictable. I watched the
early evening news on five
on Monday. The reporter used the same old clichés which are
trotted out any time the civil service is mentioned; terms like "faceless
bureaucrats" and "pen-pushers" tumbled torrentially from
his mouth. We also had the stock shots we've all come to know and love
(not!) of a rear view of a man in a pin-stripe suit and a bowler hat,
carrying (of course) a furled black umbrella. Our tame hack also seemed
to be enjoying himself hugely as he lovingly rehearsed the Government's
own arguments.
But then, what better could we expect? five's news
programmes are provided by Sky News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, that
master peddler of the simplistic to simpletons. And yet, the other
broadcasters were scarcely any better. Although I didn't see it, I'm
told that BBC News used much the same imagery (although in their case,
it seems, they had animated graphics of men in pin-stripes and bowlers,
between which Brown and Tory leader Michael Howard strode like the
Burke and Hare of modern administration).
One does not expect the Great British Newspaper to be unbiased,
however, and it is only fair to say in their defence that they did not
let their fine old traditions down. What was particularly galling (at
least to me, as a regular reader of some years' standing) was the
attitude taken by a supposedly-liberal newspaper such as The
Guardian. It, too, had joined the ranks of the cheerleaders for
Gordon Scissorhands. Polly Toynbee contributed a column which was
egregiously ingratiating even by her high standards. No mention was
made of the people who would lose their jobs; only praise for the
Chancellor's "shrewdness" in "shooting the Tories' fox",
in that slashing the public sector was one of the few policies with
which the Conservative Party could still truly tempt that small
minority of the electorate in that small number of constituencies whose
results determine all our destinies in the cock-eyed electoral system
we suffer with.
In the same newspaper Will Hutton, überbrain of
that
strain of thinking which believes that globalised capital is the
ultimate good, and only needs a bit of presentational tweaking to make
it something akin to an eternal truth; he too avoided any mention of
the grubby business of throwing dedicated people out of work,
concentrating instead on telling us how there needs to be a revolution
in management techniques to ensure that the cuts can be shoved through
with the maximum of ruthless efficiency.
The Guardian did allow someone to write an article
(tucked away in one of its supplements) bemoaning not only the proposed
cuts but the general attitude underlying them. That someone was the
former head of the department I work for, who himself had been
responsible for some howlers in his time (including the signing over of
a huge building maintenance contract to a company based in a Caribbean
tax-dodge paradise); but his defence of us was as welcome as it was
rare this week.
The letters pages, too, have been dominated by the same
stereotypical vision of "pen-pushers". By implication and
direct statement alike, we are unnecessary encumbrances to the land;
talentless obfuscators whose only purpose is to place needless
obstructions on the highway to The Golden Future Of Untrammelled
Freedom. If we got rid of them, the argument runs, then
no-one would have to wait for hospital treatment and our pensioners
could afford champagne every day of the week.
Well, hold on there a moment, you slash-and-burners! Do you ever
pause to think? And if you do, do you ever pause to think about how it
is possible for public services to be provided?
One of the ways in which Brown has sought to sell these cuts to
the
public is by claiming that the people whose jobs are deemed expendable
are merely "support staff", "back-room personnel", and
the money saved by not having to pay them anymore would be used to
increase the resources available to "front-line services".
This is a false division. How are the "front-line services"
to be provided if there is a shortage of people working behind the
scenes to ensure that the people on "the front-line" (curious
how often military metaphors and images are invoked where they are
totally inappropriate) can actually provide the service?
I work in an office which has a combination of the two. There
are
those (the majority) who have direct dealings with the public (or 'customers',
as we must now call them), and there are those who provide the
wherewithal for them to do so. Our colleagues know that, without the
people who distribute the stuff that comes in, arrange necessary
supplies, and try to ensure that the IT and telephone systems are
running, they couldn't do their jobs properly if at all. We (there!
I've finally openly declared my interest) are as essential as they are
in running public services.
So, if over 100 000 support staff are to go, where is the
support
for all this expansion to come from? Two likely answers are already
apparent from recent experiences. The first is to replace in-house
staff with private contractors. That this is invariably less
satisfactory in terms of quality and more expensive than using in-house
resources has been borne out by review after review; but so long as it
doesn't appear on the bottom line of the balance sheet, then it doesn't
matter too much. The second is the replacement of experienced staff by
a constant turnover of temporary workers, all on short-term contracts
and, as full workers' rights need not be accorded them in the areas
which might conceivably cost money, this too will look good in the
accounts. In neither case could it be claimed by anyone with more than
a nodding acquaintance with reality that this will provide the same
quality or depth of service which is already being provided by staff
who look on serving the public as their career; yet political
expediency will undoubtedly triumph yet again, and the pieces will have
to picked up long after our current generation of rulers are safely
beyond the reach of censure.
I am not saying that there is no scope for better use of
resources
in the public services, however. The trouble is that those areas where
the most footling and wasteful activities are carried out are the least
likely to be pruned back; indeed, their activities are far more certain
to expand. I refer, of course, to Management.
The greatest proportionate increase in activity in most civil
service departments in recent years has been as a direct and inevitable
consequence of the mania for 'targets' and 'performance indicators'
resulting from senior figures in Government having been taken in by
that modern-day equivalent of the quack doctor, the 'management
consultant'. They it is who have advocated the whole culture of
piddling micro-management which has had the effect of ME on public
organisations. The 'customer' (a word they force us to use, however
ludicrous it appears in context - one is not, for example, a
'customer' for Birmingham New Street railway station ; when buying a
ticket to travel there, one doesn't intend buying the bloody
thing) must be shown that we are 'achieving', whatever it is we are
supposed to achieve (apart from keeping MBA holders in the style to
which they are now accustomed).
All these 'targets' and 'indicators' must be measured, of
course,
which means that records must be kept. The practical upshot of this, as
any teacher or police officer might readily attest, is that an
increasing amount of time is spent filling in forms (either in paper or
electronic form) to account for what we do and how long it takes us to
do it. I should hardly need to draw a flowchart or devise a
PowerPoint™ slideshow to demonstrate that the amount of time spent
doing this, and the amount of time spent analysing the results, takes
up large chunks of time and energy which could (should) be spent doing
the work being recorded and pored over by the haruspexes of business
administration.
In order to keep these pointless processes under control, more
managers are required. Thus there has been a near-exponential growth in
the number of management positions created in the last decade or so.
This sector expands with every reorganisation (equally frequent in
recent times), and results in the inevitable percentage decrease in the
number of people actually carrying out the work which the organisation
is there supposedly to do.
Unfortunately, I see no signs of this tendency even slowing
down,
let alone being reversed. And so we are likely to end up with more and
more managers, managing fewer and fewer actual 'workers', especially as
those remaining staff, 'front-line' and 'support' alike, are likely to
be first against the wall the next time a desperate and
ambitious politician feels the need to pander to the prejudices of that
small section of our society which believes that high-quality public
services can be got on the cheap, and by hiving them off to whatever
private company can most effectively grease its way into the
Government's affections. And if that means that tens of thousands of
people who, despite the low pay and the ever-increasing pressures, have
committed themselves to serving the public; people who have never worn
a pin-striped suit other than at a wedding or funeral; people who would
laugh out loud at the sight of anyone wearing a bowler hat; if it means
that these people (and their families) are deemed expendable, then who
cares? Except, of course, those dependent upon the services we provide
when they find that those services are not as easy to obtain and not as
effective as they used to be.
By which time it will be far too late.
(* When I ran this piece through the spell-checker, it
suggested
changing "marketeer" to "racketeer". How perceptive...)
Suited And (Jack)Booted
Sorry, folks, but it's politics again.
Yesterday I had the misfortune of my letterbox being dirtied by
having a BNP election leaflet shoved through it.
I have it here in front of me - or, at least, I have the two
pieces
I immediately tore it into in front of me. Sadly, it's made of glossy
paper, and as such would be rather uncomfortable to use for its most
appropriate purpose.
It's predictable enough stuff, really. "Asylum Is Making
Britain Explode" screams the headline (although they are clearly
too dense to bother with an exclamation mark - there isn't one anywhere
on the leaflet, but that is the only concession to restraint),
over a picture of some people - swarthy-looking foreign types, natch -
burning the so-called Union Flag. Unfortunately for our eager
führers-to-be, the photograph was quite clearly taken somewhere in
the Middle East where, not surprisingly, the "superior white races"
are not viewed with a great degree of charity just at the moment.
Then it kicks into full rant mode. People seeking asylum from
brutality or poverty here are, apparently, to blame for the rise in
cases of TB and AIDS, while "pensioners...die waiting for hospital
beds". The words "asylum seekers" (their quotation marks,
not mine for once) are linked throughout the screed with words like "illegal",
"flooding in", "bogus", "money...stolen from our
schools, hospitals...".
Then these wretches start yapping on about how "asylum is
ripping apart our countryside". To back this claim, the Shitlerjugend
claim that the London government is planning "to build five giant
new cities - each the size of Birmingham...to house over 5 million new
immigrants". Funny how the Daily Mail, the Express
and the other xenophobic shout-sheets which pass for the press in this
country don't seem to have noticed that one - after all, much though it
may be desired by some, it isn't possible to hide one
Birmingham: to create five of them by stealth might be fraught
with certain practical difficulties. "S. England is full up so
Wales is next" warn the gruntleiters. So unlike their own
dear leader, of course, who has settled down nicely on a homestead just
outside of Welshpool, an area with which he has no historical
connection, and has encouraged his followers to do the same. As a
consequence, north Powys now probably has more fascists per square
kilometre than anywhere outside of the Home Counties. I'm not sure what
they intend doing there - inbreeding seems odds-on favourite at the
moment, although most of them seem to have got quite a way down that
road already - you can tell when they're around; you can hear the sound
of knuckles scraping the ground from two streets away.
And there, on the reverse (or, if you prefer, arse-side) of this
joyful little document, is the Chief Arse himself, the Griffinführer,
in a head-and-shoulders shot which makes him look like a bank manager
who can't.
Don't be fooled by the smart suits and the caring expression, by
the way. Behind him still stand the bovver-booted, criminally violent
no-marks of yesteryear.
Once again the word "immigrant" is placed in close
proximity to the words "illegal", "criminals" and - of
course - "terrorists". The twisted processes of the race-hating
mind see all immigrants as "illegal", all those seeking refuge
as "bogus" and because some Muslims blow things up, all
Muslims must be considered terminally suspect.
(I sometimes wonder what the reaction of the Bigoted Nutters'
Party
and its tacit supporters in UKIP (q.v.) and the scum press would be if
all the white Zimbabweans suddenly turned up at Dover demanding
admittance. Would it still be a case of "Go back! We haven't got
any room! We haven't got any money! Go back! You were perfectly safe
where you were!"? Or would there suddenly be a cry of "Come on
in! You're our kith and kin!", even though most of them have no
direct connection with this country since before World War II?)
Anyway, onward rants the Übertosser: apparently, "our
own people" would have preference in schooling, jobs and housing.
Given that there would not be enough of any of these things to go
around anyway, we may safely guess what would happen to the
educational, employment and housing prospects of those deemed not to be
"our own people": in the fantasy world of these inadequates,
those deemed not to be 'our own people' would first be confined to
shanty towns on the edges of our cities, subjected to 'pass laws' which
would prevent them from moving out of them, and would be expected to
bow down to Massa. You know, just like the good old days of Apartheid,
or even what the Sharon regime is doing to the Palestinians.
(It is interesting to note here that the Nutters have suddenly
developed a passionate support for the Palestinian cause which is quite
ironic when viewed in conjunction with the Arabophobia routinely
displayed in the rest of their policies. It couldn't have anything to
do with antagonism towards...(cough)...the Jews, of course...).
On he goes again. His mob would enact what he calls the 'Tony
Martin law', which would enable people to kill a burglar with
impunity.
(Note to non-UK viewers : Tony Martin is a Norfolk farmer who,
when
two youths tried to burgle his house, shot dead an unarmed 16-year-old
in the back. His murder conviction was reduced to manslaughter, and he
was released after serving scarcely half his sentence. Much of this was
as the result of his being given acres of free publicity in the
right-wing press, which portrayed this psychologically-unbalanced
convicted killer as being somehow a hero for our times. Tony Martin is
not, of course, 'pigmentally challenged').
I wonder what these Phuckwit Phalangists would do about, say, an
Asian shopkeeper who killed while trying to defend his property against
a mob of braying boot-boys steamed up on cheap lager and the BNP's
rhetoric? Probably have him hanged, I suppose. Or 'repatriated'. Or,
since intelligence seems to take a back seat to colonic thinking in
their world, hanged and then repatriated.
Nicky-poos concludes by reciting the same old claim about how
politicians and the meeja have "bent over backwards to...undermine
Britain's culture". Yeah, sure. I don't see much of it myself, and
I read The Guardian. "It's time to re-assert British
culture and...values", he snarls.
Now, I wonder what sort of culture and values these might be,
dear
boy? The ones which raped half the world and left unsustainable borders
drawn as straight lines on maps, which took no account of the actual
cultural and ethnic boundaries in those areas (Iraq, most of Africa)?
The 'values' which have cut us off from our natural partnerships with
Europe, insisting instead on the 'Special Relationship' with the US
which has always been the relationship between a pimp and a prostitute
(and seldom more so than now)? The 'values' of "know your place,
you little oik"? The 'culture' of the nightly puke-a-thon in our
town and city centres, as the under-25s of both sexes engage in their
regular line-dance of nihilism and violence?
I live in a village which had its main source of employment
destroyed over a decade ago, and that wasn't done by immigrants. There
has been nothing for us since that time, and that's not the
fault of 'bogus asylum seekers' either. There are drug-pushers
in this place now, and they're not foreigners.
This has all been done (and continues to be
done)
by white people. Yes, that's right: white, Aryan, 'British'
people, of the sort these arseholes claim are the sole true hope of
this country.
At the end, Griffin says, "Britain is our country. People
can
love it or leave it".
People, if you do love it, then you mustn't leave it (or
control of any part thereof) in the hands of a bunch of hopeless,
hateful, Führerprinzip-worshipping inadequates who still
fantasise in such infantile ways of their master race. The best way of
ensuring that these criminals (for such they are: they have the courage
of their convictions only because so many of them have
convictions, usually for violent and racist crimes) have to slink off
into their deserved obscurity is to not give them the satisfaction of
an increased percentage of the vote in the forthcoming local and
European elections.
There may not be any other party you might particularly wish to
vote for; but it is crucial that you use your right (while you still
have it) to vote against the possibility of our society being
torn apart by the pathetic, adolescent wet dreams of racists.
Gapping The Bridge
I might sometimes be accused of making things up; you know, just
to
put something on here. But in my extensive experience, real
life is far too full of the bizarre to make invention necessary.
Here in Wales, one can always rely on the Labour Party in local
government; rely on them, that is, for that combination of the
self-serving, the arrogant, the corrupt and the downright bloody stupid
which has become the hallmark of the tin-pot dictatorships which so
many of our councils have resembled for so long.
I've mentioned before (see Privateers Repelled! on 21/03/04 below) the
shenanigans over attempts by Wrexham council to blackmail tenants into
supporting handing over their homes to a private company. All I will
add to that at the moment is that the Council, as an act of pique
against the clear majority of the tenants who voted their pet scheme
down, has now increased our rents twice in less than a month and has
started to cut jobs and services. Anything, in fact, other than have
the balls to stand up to its political masters in Cardiff and demand
that the tenants' wishes be respected. Also, they have just re-hired,
at substantial expense, the same firm of consultants they used during
the balloting process to "try to find out what the tenants want".
If they can't figure it out by now, then there's no hope for them - or,
indeed, for us. Especially as the Council Leader's perks are just about
to be increased from about £10 000 a year to over £30 000. "I'm
worth it", she says. As Groucho said, "We know what you are,
we're just haggling over the price".
Sorry, I got sidetracked for a moment there. This is what I
wanted
to tell you about: the latest in sub-vegetable thought processes from a
Labour council in Wales.
In the village of Cwm near Ebbw Vale, there was a busy road. It
had
a footbridge going over it. The road was to be improved, and so the
bridge had to come down. The road was duly fettled up.
So far, so good: but then Blaenau Gwent County Council (Labour)
had
to replace the old footbridge which, being a product of a less
enlightened age, had no ramps or any other assistance for access by
disabled people or parents with prams and push-chairs.
A modicum of forward thinking, one would have hoped, would have
recognised the necessity for the new structure to have ramps so that
wheelchairs, prams, push-chairs and the arthritic could use the bridge.
The Council spent £500 000 of public money on the new
bridge...which has no ramps; indeed, not only is the bridge
reachable only by the steps which had been part of the old structure,
but the bridge itself has steps on it.
If you think that that is unsurpassable as an act of
civic
idiocy, get this: when people complained about there being no ramps to
the bridge, some fivepenny brain at Blaenau Gwent County Council
(Labour) came up with this little illogic bomb. The Council, he said,
had plans to put a ramp on one side of the bridge in due course; but they
didn't have the money to put a ramp on both sides.
Now, ponder this for a moment. Not for too long, though, lest
your
brains try to escape through whatever handy orifice that may come to
hand. There will be a ramp on one side of the bridge. So the
motionally-challenged will be able to get onto the bridge but won't
be able to get down the other side!
Now, two alternative scenarios present themselves as a result.
In
the first, we may see all the wheelchair users and push-chair-bound
babes of Cwm shuttling up and down one side of the bridge like a cross
between the dodgems and a primitive computer game. Up they will go,
hour after hour, only to be faced with an impossible prospect on the
other side, and to forced back down whence they came.
The second picture is even more alarming. Perhaps one of the
unreconstructed Stalinists in Blaenau Gwent Labour Party had just been
watching his DVD of Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin for
the third time that month, and fancied the idea of bringing culture to
the proletariat by arranging a re-staging of the Odessa Steps scene right
there in Cwm! Oh, imagine the triumph of 'workers' art' as the
arthritic grannies and kiddies of the valley hurtle arse-over-tit down
the steps when they try to get where the bridge is supposed to let them
go! Might even get a photo in the Arts pages of The Guardian
(or, if not, at least The South Wales Argus)!
Either that, or this is another Labour council which is looking
to
make easy money out of the vulnerable. They could do this by hiring out
equipment to enable the ranks of the be-wheeled and hobbling to get
across. One may imagine the scene:
It is nine o'clock in the morning in the terraced house of Evan
Bevan, old collier, and his wife. Evan rises uncertainly from his chair
at the breakfast table, puts down his copy of The Western Mail,
and says, "Freda! Get me stick for me, girl, I've gotto go down the
Post for the pension".
His wife shuffles in with a stout wooden walking-stick in her
left
hand. In her right, she carries two lengths of thick rope and half a
dozen pitons.
"Now don't yew go 'urryin' now, lovely", she says gently
to
her scowling husband, handing him his stick. "Yew know what
'appened the last time you were in too much of a rush. Yew nearly
necked y'self!"
Evan grimaces at the memory as his wife tenderly winds the rope
around the top of his left arm and slips the pitons into the top pocket
of his shirt. "Aye, well, that bloody twitch in me 'and come back,
dinnit? Good job I wuz only three feet up at the time."
"Well, off yew go, luv", says Freda, helping him towards
the
door. "And remember, take yewr time!"
"Wonnave much choice", grumbles Evan. "There's only
the
one pulley workin' after them bloody kids put superglue on the other
one! The man from the Council tole me yesterday that it'll take 'em six
months to replace it, 'cos they 'ave to ask the Assembly for extra
fundin' for it, see?"
And, coughing gently from The Dust, Evan shuffles slowly up the
road to the bottom of the old stone steps at the foot of the gleaming
new bridge. There, a long queue of young mothers with push-chairs and
elderly ladies in wheelchairs waits for the rope to come back to this
side. There is the occasional crunch and crash from across the busy
road as someone else's hand suffers from "a bloody twitch". As
he gets his one pound coin fare out of his pocket, Evan hopes that they
were no more than three feet off the ground...
All joking aside, when are we going to rid ourselves of these
self-preserving nth-rate political hacks? They have reduced local
government in Wales to a level which isn't even funny anymore, falling
instead into my late mother's category of "too soft to laugh at".
There are local council elections coming up on June 10. I
daresay
that hardly anyone will bother to vote, and we will end up with
no-hopers like these for yet another four years. Blaenau Gwent
council has 30-odd members, nearly all of whom sit in the Labour
interest. I don't foresee that changing, somehow. It's all too sad for
words.
Truly, truly, we get the government we deserve.
Who Are The Real Barbarians?
Hell hath no fury like a publicity-seeker forced out of the
limelight.
Robert Kilroy-Silk, the man who once said he would be Prime
Minister, who helped launch the drive to rid the Labour party of
troublesome people like...well, socialists; who then immediately went
off to a highly lucrative future as a media tart, and lost that cushy
little number when he started spouting vicious tosh against Arab
civilisation in his newspaper column for the deeply regrettable Sunday
Express; well, he's back.
He has just been appointed as a candidate in the forthcoming
European Parliament elections on behalf of the self-styled UK
Independence Party in the East Midlands of England - an area with which
he has no obvious connections. This in itself is interesting, as one of
UKIP's basic yells is all to do with "unaccountable politicians
from far away who know nothing about us making basic decisions about
our everyday lives". Then why pick an outsider as their candidate?
Oh, the originally-selected candidate was 'persuaded to stand aside';
and one suspects that democracy never entered into the equation at all.
Mr. Killjoy-Sick is, of course, perfectly matched with his new
ideological soulmates. After all, the offending article I referred to
stated that Arab culture and civilisation has nothing to teach us -
never has had; and he categorised all Arabs (Mr. Killwog-Slick is an
Equal Opportunities Bigot) as "suicide bombers, limb amputators and
women repressors".
UKIP's leaflets in their campaign in the East Midlands could
have
been written with such a candidate in mind: indeed, they could have
been written by him. Here a just a few quotes:
"The EU is nothing more than a devilish conspiracy to deliver
a
quasi-communist-socialist-federal dream state."
"[I]t is inspired by envy, greed and self-serving ambition
that
dictates if they can't beat us they will drag us down to their level
because they can't bear to see a free and democratic country like the
UK doing better than they are".
"predators are at the gate"
"no one and nothing is safe from the barbarians in our midst"
Now, I did A-level History (albeit very badly), and I can see
certain historic precedents in this kind of screaming diatribe.
Unfortunately, English libel law being what it is, it is safer for me
to refrain from drawing even the most obvious parallels. Suffice it to
say that I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see Westminster set on
fire and the blame being placed on, say, an Albanian or a Kurd.
Let's examine some of their claims, shall we boys and girls?
The idea that the EU has anything remotely to do with Communism
should give some indication of the level of reality inhabited by those
making the claim. Twenty five states, each of them avowedly capitalist
in one way or another, and where Communist or similar parties play only
the most minor rôle (if any) in national political life. Most of
those governments (the UK, Italy and many of the eastern states in
particular) put the desires and demands of 'the business community'
(and if you want an image of what such a 'community' might look like,
try imagining sharks swimming in their own shit) before the needs of
the people. And these are the governments which are handing over their
precious sovereignty to a 'socialist federal superstate'! I find it
difficult to imagine that the French, for example, with all their hauteur
and memories of gloire (thanks, Mr. Earnshaw, some parts of
your lectures did take root) would cede a single unnecessary morceau
of their political, economic or cultural identity even in the name of
peace and co-operation.
And 'they' want to drag 'us'< down to 'their'
level? And what level is that, I wonder? Is it the level where 'they'
have a far higher average income than 'us'? Where they have
better pensions and welfare provisions than we do in this combination
of Disneyland, Ruritania and a bad Ealing comedy? Or is it the level
where 'they' have far fairer and more equal societies and economies
than those of us who have the undying good fortune to live in this
latterday wirtschaftswunder, where the gap between the rich and
the rest widens with every passing day, and the tax burden has been
progressively transferred from the incomes of the wealthy to the
necessary expenditure of the poor?
Or do they mean that we are being dragged down to the level
where
the night-time streets are not full of ultra-aggressive drunks (of both
genders) and where you can actually walk down the streets in daylight
hours without the good old British privilege of being casually effed at
by a passing ten-year-old? Good heavens! Raise the drawbridge, Effie!
Here they come, the uncivilised heathen wretches!
Yes, there are barbarians in our midst - most of them were born
here. And the predators (remember my shark image of a moment ago?) are
heading in from Houston, New York and Seattle, not from Hamburg,
Nürnberg or Sevilla. And it's also true that no-one is safe from
them. That's how our utilities and many of the other public enterprises
sold off in the Margaret Thatcher Everything-Must-Go Fire Sale of the
eighties ended up in the hands of Americans (and even some Europeans,
God Save The Mark!).
I had sometimes wondered what had happened to the Flat Earth
Society; you know, that bunch of people who, even when faced with all
the scientific evidence and pin-down-able facts that they were wrong,
insisted that no, they were still absolutely correct and that such
evidence was 'bad science' or devilishly-devised propaganda conjured up
by the Freemasons, the Vatican and Sir Alec Douglas-Home simply in
order to discredit them.
(This sort of delusion can strike in unlikely places : I once
heard
of a very distinguished practitioner of one of the hard sciences who,
nonetheless, was President of a society dedicated to the idea that the
Ark Of The Covenant was buried under the Hill Of Tara).
For some time, I thought they were now running the oil industry,
or
possibly the recording biz - two areas of the 'business community'
where denial of reality has always traditionally brought high rewards.
But now it becomes clear; they are in politics and they are indeed 'in
our midst'.
So what motivates UKIP? Bog-standard ignorance and intolerance,
of
course; but also an inability to countenance the notion that the world
does actually turn and, in doing so, changes. That and a wilful
misinterpretation of history; one in which Brave Britain nobly stood
alone against tyranny (something which certainly won't wash with Iraqis
now any more than it was likely to be a view shared by Indians,
Africans, Palestinians or even Americans in the past); one in which, as
we know to certainty from the films, darling Johnny Mills and dear
Dickie Attenborough beat the living daylights out of The Hun.
They are greatly assisted by the media in the Great Obfuscation,
of
course. This is at its apogee in the press, where the papers owned by
once-and-future North Americans have a vested interest in protecting
their proprietors against the actions for abuse of position which any
half-sane free society would have brought against them long ago. The "plug-ugly,
sub-animal yells" (© John Cooper Clarke) of these rags against
those seeking refuge or simply a better opportunity here is a part of
the weaponry of brute ignorance, and one which they use like Howitzers
against the generally benign instincts of the public, softening them up
so that they can be safely assumed to have no further resistance to
whatever brutality may be initiated in the name of 'The Country' or
'National Security'. But it is to be found elsewhere, too; it is
difficult to keep count of the hours of World War II films shown on
terrestrial TV here (they seem to fill Saturday afternoons on BBC2, for
example). More worryingly when, back on May 1, the ceremonies were
taking place to mark the entry of ten new members of the EU, virtually
every other member state's national TV services carried the events
live. Here, ITV couldn't be bothered at all; and the BBC shuffled the
whole thing off on to one of its little-watched digital channels. A
symptom and a symbol. Is it any wonder that the population at large is
so badly informed?
But what motivates the members of UKIP is far more sinister. It
is
sheer ranting intolerance, which manifests itself in the screaming
quotes I've included in this piece. The world they inhabit is one of
'Us' and 'Them', where the 'Us' are the upstanding, white Anglos like
the nieces of bishops courageously defending their maidenly virtue
against a mob of swarthy foreigners ('Them') seeking to sell them into
prostitution in Rio de Janeiro or Port Said. It is the world of Bulldog
Drummond and other suchlike fantasies created by those who believed
that their 'race' (whatever it may be) was innately superior to others.
Oh, foreigners might be quite charming in their way, of course, but
ultimately were not to be trusted.
UKIP is the last refuge of those for whom the Conservative Party
is
full of pinkos (and is now even led by a Jew, albeit a lapsed one), and
the BNP comprises people who are not quite our class, darling.
And it is into this mad milieu that Mr Robert Ballbag-Suck,
ex-MP,
ex-chat-show host and extremist, has now so willingly inserted himself.
The man himself has been unavailable for comment this weekend.
This
redoubtable defender of the God-givem superiority of everything British
is staying in his holiday home.
In Spain.
Diane Morris died last week.
The name may mean nothing to you, dear reader. But she was a
colleague of mine for some years, and lost her long battle against
cancer a week ago.
Do you sometimes find yourself raging against the malevolence of
Fate; or blind, random chance; or even god if you're of that
persuasion? Why her, when someone like ................ is still alive
and getting paid?
I left that space for two reasons: firstly to enable you to fill
in
the blank with the name of the unworthy person of your choice; and
secondly, to avoid being uncharitable.
Di was never uncharitable. She always seemed to live by the
principles of 'do as you would be done by', and 'if you can help
someone as you pass this way, do it'.
My ham-fisted way of expressing myself might lead you to think
that
this made her a dull person. She most emphatically was not ; she had
the happy knack of a natural, totally sincere cheerfulness, which was
readily transmitted to those around her. Even during her illness, she
would come in to the office and have us smiling with her tales of what
happened when, say, she went to have her wig fitted. In fact, when I
think of her, I think first of her smile.
Behind all this was a solid and genuine concern for her friends
and
colleagues. She always seemed to be there in the right way at the right
time. When my mother died a few years back, she and a few other
colleagues visited me at home. There was no need for her to do this -
they had never even met, although I think they'd have got on very well
if they had. But Diane did it anyway - it had to be that way - and she
also attended the funeral.
And that's why I feel more than moderately guilty about not
joining
the deservedly large crowd at her funeral this morning. I could
plead all sorts of reasons, none of which would be more than 25% true.
The truth is that I know that I would have found it too much. I hope Di
would have understood; she was tolerant as well.
Goodbye, Diane: we remember, now and always.
R.I.P.
Privateers Repelled!
In the late Spring of 2003, Wrexham County
Borough Council announced that they were to bid to transfer the
county's entire council housing stock to a new company (which the
Council itself had set up).
The stated reason was that the Council couldn't come up
with the money to maintain and refurbish the stock because of spending
restraints by central government. Other unstated reasons might
have included the way in which the Council (which has been Labour-run
for as long as anyone can remember) had mismanaged its resources over
many years, with hundreds of thousands of pounds being spent on such
essentials as twin-town junketing and tarting up those parts of the
town centre which just happened to be outside the Council's own offices.
The move had the support of the local Tenants' Federation (a
body
which has long been conspicuous by its absence and silence whenever
tenants have been under threat) and the Labour, Tory and "Radical"
(i.e. Lib Dems who haven't the guts to stand for election as such)
groups on the Council.
Over the succeeding months, with the help of MSC Associates - a
private consultancy company engaged by the Tenants' Association and
paid for by the Council (with our money), tenants were bombarded with
newsletters describing in lurid detail what would happen if the
transfer did not go through ("things would not stay the same, indeed
they would get a lot worse!"), and promises that handing over our
homes to a private company would lead us all into the Golden Future.
The company, called Wrexham Housing - Tai Wrecsam, was set up as
a
shadow, with a board of fifteen members : five appointees from amongst
the local great and good (including the seemingly-obligatory former
councillors) ; five appointee stooges to represent the Council's
interests (selected along party lines - three NewLab, one Tory, one
"Radical") ; and five "tenants' representatives". We were promised we
could vote for the tenants' reps and 'independent' members at some
future point, although what the point would be of electing tenants'
representatives who would be permanently outnumbered was never
satisfactorily explained to us.
Thanks to the policies of central government in Cardiff and
London,
this private company (or 'not-for-profit voluntary organisation' as the
Council would usually put it) would have all overhanging debts written
off, would be allowed to borrow on the open market without limit (using
our homes and rents as collateral) and would also be given millions of
pounds of public subsidy every year. The same central government
refuses point-blank to offer this generous consideration to
democratically-elected councils.
It is interesting to note how much of the Council's propaganda
seemed to turn up (or come from) elsewhere. Entire phrases (such as the
ones quoted above), sentences and indeed paragraphs can be found on the
websites of other Councils desperately trying to privatise their own
housing stock (N.E. Lincs and Kingston-Upon-Thames, to name but two).
It has been even more interesting to note how the newsletters
and
public statements from MSC Associates - the 'Independent Tenant's
Advisor' have also been little more than parrotings of the Council's
own statements.
(Still, perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate in one
regard: in some areas, these expensive PR companies have been called
"Tenants' Friends" by the Council hiring them. Yeuchhh!)
We have had about six 'newsletters' from the Council and three
or
four more from MSC, plus a video which was so unutterably lame that it
should turn up on ITV1 any evening now. It would certainly win a Bafta
if there was one for "Most Obviously Scripted Conversations Between
Hand-picked Docile Tenants And Council Officials".
But how could a Council which is forever pleading poverty when
it
comes to doing something for those in need possibly produce all this
material and pay a consultancy firm to repeat it all over again in its
own publications? Simple: they used our rent and council tax money. In
all, Wrexham County Borough Council have spent close to £1million
of our money on scaremongering ("pensioners would have to pay to get
their gardens done!") and smears against those of us (both Wrexham
Against Stock Transfer - WASTe - and individual tenants like myself)
who dared to be so bold as to oppose the plan and point out its dangers.
And clear dangers there were, which I don't think I need to
rehearse here. Just go to DCH's site at www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk
for a fuller picture.
As an individual tenant worried about the future of his home and
permanently sceptical of the desirability of private sector involvement
in the public sector, I did some research of my own on the internet.
And the more I found out, the more opposed to the sell-off I became.
Indeed, 'giveaway' might be a better word, because our homes had been
deliberately undervalued to the point where the new company would
almost have been given money to take them.
And yet, we faced a huge difficulty. Those of us opposed to
stock
transfer did not have six-figure sums of public money to call on to put
tenants fully in the picture as to what was really going on. All along,
it has been a matter of scraping together whatever resources were
available (such as small donations from unions and individuals),
determination and sheer bloody-mindedness. This inherent bias in the
resources available to the respective sides spat in the face of
democracy and rendered the whole process potentially suspect.
There were other strange occurrences as well, such as the two
letters, published two weeks apart in prominent places on the letters
page of the local weekly rag, signed by 22 members of staff of the
Council's Housing Department which were, of course, absolutely 100% in
favour of the Council's policy. I wonder what would have happened to
any attempt by Council staff opposed to the policy to have a
letter published?
Somehow, however, the word was spread. Public meetings were
held.
Meetings held by the Council and MSC Associates were attended and the
counter-arguments put (in the one I attended, the man - nice bloke,
really - from MSC and his Council minder admitted that the policy was
driven entirely by political considerations).
By and large, 'national' politicians were of no use to us. Both
of
the county's MPs (Ian Lucas & Martyn Jones) were totally in favour
of privatisation, as was Clwyd South Assembly Member Karen Sinclair.
They are all from one party - can you guess which one, boys and girls?
Jones actually told me in a letter that the money available couldn't be
handed over to the council because "it is almost impossible to
ring-fence councils who would then be able to spend it on anything they
would wish to.". I also wrote to one of the regional AMs, Plaid
Cymru's Janet Ryder, and got a holding reply and nothing further.
Only Dr John Marek AM actually came out publicly against the
policy. Marek, some of you may recall, was 'deselected' by Wrexham
Labour Party last year for daring to criticise the ongoing stupidities
of the Council. He stood as an independent in the Assembly elections
and beat the Stepford Wife whom Labour had selected to replace him. His
input and high public profile was important in getting the
anti-transfer message across.
The balloting process ended at noon on 12 March, and the result
was
announced that afternoon. Of about 13 000 tenants, 9 722
voted - a
turnout of 68.4%. 41.2% said 'Yes', but 58.8% said 'No'. For the time
being at least, we have managed to keep the privatising wolves from our
doors.
The announcement of the result was marred by the pathetic
behaviour
of some of the supporters of privatisation, who (not for the first
time) threatened violence against those present who campaigned against
the policy.
The battle is far from over, however. We must now make sure that
Wrexham County Borough Council get their collective arses in gear, join
forces with the tenants and demand that Rhodri Morgan's
Assembly Government makes available to the Council the money which he
was oh-so-keen to hand over to largely unaccountable private sector
landlords. After all, that is what the tenants want - we've said so
democratically.
A change of government policy may well be on the cards. One
Welsh
NewLab MP has apparently been going around Westminster telling people
that if the tenants of Wrexham voted down stock transfer, the policy
(in Wales, at least) is dead in the water. That MP may know what she is
talking about: she is Julie Morgan, Rhodri's wife. This should make for
some interesting talk across the breakfast table!
As an individual tenant, I am grateful to all those individuals
who
helped campaign against this sell-off. And to all of you battling
similar free-market lunacy in your own areas - don't ever give up!
Organise! Tell the tenants what the council and the government would
rather they did not know! Win the tenants' hearts and minds and their
votes will follow!
PS. The day after the result was announced, tenants received a
letter from the Council's Chief Executive, which contained this phrase:
"Throughout the consultation process, the Council has been
very
open and honest about the pros and cons of the transfer..."
As I believe they used to say in the police force, "Don't
piss
on my boots and tell me it's raining!"
Since then, we have had the usual bleating from the Council
about
how it will have to raise rents, cut jobs, "waaah! I wan' my
bockle!"...erm, sorry, but that is the impression they give.
Anything, it seems, to avoid taking the only honourable action they
can, which is to face down their political masters and tell them that
the democratically-expressed wishes of the tenants of Wrexham must be
acceded to, and the money which was to go to line the pockets of
privateers be given to the Council to get the job done. Only the
government's loopy 'private sector good, public sector bad' ideology
stands in the way, and that must be removed.
What A (Sport)lot Of Wasters! (or: Floored By The (Olympic)
Rings)
(No, it's not another Tolkein reference...)
A group of young people in the small mid-Wales market town of
Llandiloes (about 40 miles south of where I sit) wanted a skatepark.
They had heeded the call from politicians, celebs and the medical
profession that youngsters should stop sitting around in front of the
TV (after all, that's an activity set aside for the exclusive use of
middle-aged farts like me) and should go out and get some
healthy exercise.
So, they drew up their plans, got the local council on board,
secured land and planning permission for the skatepark, and made an
application to Sportlot (the quango charged with doling out money for
schemes like this) for a grant of £52 000, this being about 80%
of the total sum needed.
And their reward for their enthusiasm, diligence and drive?
Sportlot have now told them that the application must be reduced
to
£30 000.
Why?
The main reason given is that Sportlot is keeping a huge sum of
money back so that they can bid for a piece of the action in London's
bid for the Olympic Games in 2012. If London's bid succeeds, then
£1.5billion will be thrown at it by Sportlot.
Again, why?
The whole idea of Sportlot, at least as it was sold to us, was
that
it would provide assistance with projects which could not get
commercial support, and particularly with schemes which helped
communities. Instead, we see this unaccountable group gathering
together the loot to provide what is, in effect, a huge public subsidy
to an international organisation which is not short of business
sponsorship (and, indeed, control).
Even in the unlikely event of London staging the Games, the
largest
share of the benefit will be gained by the huge corporations which will
be sponsoring it; by the large companies based in London; by the owners
of hotels in the area; and by the property speculators who will get the
highly-lucrative contracts to build the facilities required. And, of
course, politicians like Blair, Prescott and Livingstone will be able
to swank around.
In other words, few if any positive effects will be felt by
those
outside the charmed circle of about 25 miles radius around London.
Nevertheless, billions of pounds of our money will be sucked in
to
this vortex of excess, leaving us to make do with less, when we
are the ones who need that support.
The other excuse given by Sportlot was that lottery ticket sales
have fallen.
Is it any wonder?
Holy Mad Axeman, Bat!
In the churchyard of the village of Fair Oak in Hampshire, there
stood a magnificent and healthy 140-year-old yew tree.
It stands there no longer.
Well, you might say, nothing lasts forever, not even in a
cemetery.
In this case, however, the cause of death is the local vicar.
This clergyman, and the church council, had it cut down without
seeking permission to do so. Their reasons make for interesting reading:
1) Yew trees grow poisonous berries, which a child might eat.
Well, if you're into god-bothering, surely you should see this
as
part of the Great Plan. Who are one vicar and a few assorted members of
the self-important to second guess The Ancient Of Days?
2) A child might climb it and fall out.
Again, if it happens, then this is an example of god-given Free
Will, and the child will know better than to do it again (once the
plaster has come off, of course).
3) The tree might fall over.
Yes, that's right - it has been there since Victoria, it's in
fine
condition, and now it's suddenly going to topple over and increase the
church's insurance premiums. Even the rapacious heathens of the
insurance world have heard of "acts of god", so why hasn't the vicar?
4) Paedophiles might hide behind it.
No, really, that was one of the reasons given. In which case,
let's
demolish all trees, hedges and walls, let's make sure no vans or
lorries are more than four feet high and six inches wide and let us all
have to live and work in glass and perspex buildings, just so that we
can be utterly sure that we can see everyone and everything.
When confronted with such an example of holy simpletonry, I can
only resort to the cruel suggestion that we should demolish all
churches; after all, far more paedophiles have hidden behind them than
behind anything else.
