What ?

At first this looked insane :

A teenage golfer who has represented Wales has been sentenced to eight months youth custody for possessing an imitation firearm. Mold Crown Court heard police were called after Keith Torrence was seen in a car holding what looked like a gun.

The weapon turned out to be cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun.

Torrence, 19, from Wrexham, who has represented Wales both at home and abroad, admitted affray and possessing an imitation firearm in public. The court heard how members of the public and staff at shops in Wrexham town centre became concerned when they saw Torrence sitting in his car, holding the "gun" one afternoon last summer.

Another adult and children were in the back of the vehicle. A witness in a cake shop told police how he realised that he had been seen - and seemed to move the pistol around even more. Another witness heard someone in the car telling him to stop it because he was frightening the children.

What ? Waving a toy gun around inside a car gets you eight months ? Thank heavens sentencing was lighter in the long gone days when my brother and I were waving these around Redcar. What would have happened had he one of these ?

But it seems the BBC are, not for the first time, a little light on the actualite.

Judge John Rogers QC told him the possession of a firearm, whether real or not, caused fear and distress among those who saw it.

Torrence had caused such distress members of the public called the police, he said.

A custodial sentence was inevitable and he had considered whether it could be suspended.

But he had committed the offence while subject to a community sentence for affray, and the day after his arrest for the imitation firearm he had been involved in an offence of battery.

“It is quite inappropriate now for me to again impose a sentence which does not involve immediate custody,” he said.

The affray conviction was his third and he was supposedly serving a sentence' "in the community". While I doubt he'd have gone down but for the 'gun', it looks more like it was the straw that broke the judge's back.


(and another story from the Daily Post - showing journalistic invention at its best :

Shockingly, when the door of an industrial freezer was opened in the basement of Llandudno’s Sakura Japanese and Korean restaurant, officers found the sleeping quarters of the Sakura’s chef – an illegal immigrant from China.

They opened the door and found him ? Very shocking, because :

Officers were amazed to see his bed laid out inside the industrial freezer with its door removed.

)

A Few Bits of Wrapping Paper From The Curate's Bedroom Floor

A happy, secure and prosperous New Year to you, although my head tells me it's more likely to be an 'interesting' one.

Just a few stories that caught the eye but no time to blog thereon :

The policy of fighting 'child poverty' by throwing extra benefits at low-income 'families' is certainly having an effect - as the least-educated mothers opt for more children.

The researchers then looked at fertility rates both before the reforms were announced and after, for a sample of 101,330 women aged between 20 and 45.

They found a large increase in the first year after the benefits were made more generous, particularly among women who had left school as soon as possible.

The results show a 15 per cent increase in the probability of having a baby in the "low education group", equivalent to an extra 45,000 births compared with 670,000 across Britain as a whole.

Overall there has been a steady rise in the birth rate since 2001, and although some of this is down to higher fertility among immigrants, even among women born in the UK it has risen from 1.68 births per woman in 2004 to 1.79 last year.

Well, even 'women born in the UK' will increasingly be the daughters of migrants. I'd love to see a geographic or ethnic split for the figures. We know already that the largest number of births are in the areas with the largest numbers of immigrants, and that the most educated women have fewest babies. This latter trend appears to have been reinforced by Labour's reforms. The full report (pdf) is here.

Surprise surprise. The massed ranks of Guardianistas in the Probation 'Service', as well as other liberal do-gooders, don't like the Government's latest vote-grabbing scheme (a scheme I agree with, while having no illusions about what's driving it).

Plans to make criminals wear high-visibility jackets while doing community punishments face being undermined by a probation service “institutionally on the side of offenders”, the Government’s neighbourhood crime adviser said.

Louise Casey said that she was afraid it would use health and safety reasons as an excuse for offenders not to wear the jackets, which will bear the words “Community Payback”. She said that it was a “no-brainer” to make offenders wear them, because they showed the public that there were consequences for criminals who were given non-custodial sentences. She said also that she wanted leaflets put through letterboxes to tell people the outcome of crimes in their area.

Ms Casey told The Times that she was astonished at the level of opposition within the probation service to the jackets idea. “[The plan] will have to be driven very, very hard, but this is just the beginning to opening up the criminal justice system. I think the other thing that will meet huge resistance is sharing information about what happens to criminals.”

She added that there was a huge gap in providing information to neighbourhoods about what had happened to suspects taken to court and the punishments handed down. If people were told more about what had happened in the courts, they would have more faith in the criminal justice system.

I didn't know HMG had tweaked the law a few years back to make it legal for bailiffs to break into your house. Where the hell were the Tories ?

Now they want the bailiffs to be able to beat you up as well.

The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.

Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.

The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog.

From last year - a Muslim convert to Christianity gets full police support ...

A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to “stop being a crusader”, according to a new report.

Nissar Hussein, 43, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was born and raised in Britain, converted from Islam to Christianity with his wife, Qubra, in 1996. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to “stop being a crusader and move to another place”. A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire.

A blog wholly devoted to the great Dalrymple. He is published in so many places it's hard to keep track. The Skeptical Doctor is the place which does all the work, and so I forgive the American spelling.

Britons once had the right to bear arms just as did Americans. How did it disappear ?

In a salami stylee - a slice at a time. "All the way down the slippery slope" follows the history.

It's not just the jobs that Poles flock to the UK for. While our electronics and space manufacturing sectors may not be too hot (when did anyone last buy an item of consumer electronics made in the UK ?) our thriving abortion industry is a (admittedly tax-subsidised) world leader.

Ten thousand Polish women had abortions in Britain last year, it has been reported, in procedures which are thought to have cost the NHS between £5million and £10m.

Thousands of the women are thought to have come to Britain specifically for the procedure, which is illegal in Poland.

People coming to Britain as temporary workers are given a National Insurance number, which allows them to register with a doctor and have NHS treatment.

Britain is thought to be a particularly popular destination as terminations can be carried out as late as 24 weeks into a pregnancy. In several other EU countries, abortions can not be carried out after 12 weeks.

A pill given to women under nine weeks pregnant costs the NHS about £500 while an operation necessary for those further into pregnancy costs about £1,600 including after-care.

Magistrate quits because "he recently jailed an offender for six months but saw him walking about the town just six weeks later".

Dr Soper said: 'My greatest frustration and that of my colleagues is the very early release of prisoners.'

He said virtually all offenders are released automatically halfway through their sentences, while emergency measures to tackle prison overcrowding means many have another 18 days knocked off their sentences. Yet the judges and magistrates who heard their cases have no say over their early release.

Dr Soper said magistrates considered 'very hard' how to punish criminals, and added: 'It is frustrating when that careful thought seems to be undermined. It has certainly reduced my confidence in the system.'

Community service and unpaid work have been trumpeted by ministers as punishments to help ease jail overcrowding, but Dr Soper said his own research locally showed only 60-65 per cent of offenders bothered to turn up.

Police were increasingly preferring to deal with offenders through cautions and on-the-spot fines rather than charging them and sending them to court, he said - undermining the principle of public and media scrutiny of justice.

Dr Soper said: 'It is not just minor cases they deal with - theft and violence are included and this court recently had a violent offender who had previously been cautioned by the police for causing grievous bodily harm.'

In his years as a JP, Dr Soper said, the number of courts in West Suffolk had dropped from six to three - and will soon be cut to just one.

'The idea of local justice, one of the strengths of the system, is disappearing fast,' he said.

'Now I hear that the courts budget is to be cut further, so what next?'

Blimey. When Micael Portillo, who lost his political stomach in 1997 and has since reinvented himself as touchy-feely Mr Nice Guy, says "Britain has lost the stomach for a fight" I think we should take notice.

It raises questions about the stamina of our nation and the resolve of our political class. It is an uncomfortable conclusion that Britain, with nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers and the latest generation of fighter-bombers, is incapable of securing a medium-size conurbation. Making Basra safe was an essential part of the overall strategy; having committed ourselves to our allies we let them down.

The extent of Britain’s fiasco has been masked by the media’s relief that we are at last leaving Iraq. Those who have been urging Britain to quit are not in a strong position to criticise the government’s lack of staying power. Reporting of Basra has mainly focused on British casualties and the prospect for withdrawal. The British media and public have shown scant regard for our failure to protect Iraqis, so the British nation, not just its government, has attracted distrust. We should reflect on what sort of country we have become. We may enjoy patronising Americans but they demonstrate a fibre that we now lack.

But be fair. One of the strange contradictions of NuLabs regime is the willingness to upset Muslims overseas while bending over backwards to avoid upsetting them in the UK (apart from the said overseas upsets). The retreat from Basra would at least be a mark of consistency, of bringing foreign policy into craven line with domestic, were it not for the fact that the withdrawal is almost certainly aimed at facilitating an additional troop movement into Afghanistan. Our boys will go from being blown up in under-armoured vehicles, short of body armour and helicopters, in Iraq, to being blown up in under-armoured vehicles, short of body armour and helicopters, in Afghanistan - all so that little Nooria can go to school.

Madness

"Way-oy,
too much madness upon the land,
I've got to wonder,
if it's because the times so hard,
yes I've got to wonder
if it 'cause of too much drinking
or it 'cause of too much smoking,
I don't know
I want to know ...

Most of this madness
comes from the wickedness
of our own people ..."

In 1976 the Mighty Maytones were singing this about Jamaica. Admittedly there's a fair amount of wickedness about today that doesn't come from 'our own people', but the natives are doing their bit to make the song a lot more applicable to the UK than it was in those days ...

(if you liked that, try Owen Gray's 'Bongo Natty', of similar vintage. Unfortunately the youtube poster, a chap called wikidub, has seen fit to improve it with random gunshots and other effects - can't be helped).

Youtube and the internet are wonderful things. I love Bulgarian singing, I love pipe music (be it Highland, Border or Irish) . But I had no idea what absolutely wonderful, haunting pipe music they had over there. Try this. Suddenly you realise where a lot of the little trills and inflections in Bulgarian singing come from. Gorgeous.

Can't work out if this is corny or beautiful - perhaps it's both. Inga and Anush Arshakyan are surely the Clannad of the South Caucasus. But where else other then the web would you get an Armenian lullaby - with dancing - at short notice ?

And for anyone who liked the medieval Sinfonye music, here's head honchette Stevie Wishart producing some more modern sounds - in her electronic bondage outfit.



(Apologies for the lack of serious posting when there's so much serious/unpleasant stuff happening- apart from the usual Christmas shenanigans, I've been decorating a room. "Just" got the flooring to do tomorrow.)

What Does it Say ...

- about the Level of Debate on Domestic Violence in This Country...

... that I have just watched the most sensitive and informed treatment of abusive relationships I have ever seen on British television, and it was in Wallace and Grommit?

Fluffles was the archetypal battered partner, and Paella the archetypal abuser. It was harrowing ...

Laban's immediate and ungallant thought was that her Significant Other needs to keep an eye on the sherry bottle. Has anyone else any ideas about What It Says ? After all, if she's right, the Organisation Formerly Known as Dr Barnardo's Homes has just frittered away a lot of the punters dosh on expensive representations of Real Domestic Violence as envisaged by Bartle Bogle Hegarty's finest - when it should have been giving us Mr Park's gentle allegories.


(I must admit to preferring Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which I'd not seen before. Paella was too obviously a villain from the off. But will the lovely Fluffles become a fixture in the W/G menage ? It occurs to me that Gromit is a hero in the Gary Cooper mould ..)

Belated Christmas Joy To You All

A couple of years back I mentioned this lovely Marian hymn. My daughter put this together with the freebie XP movie maker and Google, Vivien Ellis sings beautifully - Gloria in excelsis !

(post backdated to the appropriate day - at the time I was just too busy !)

Tariffic !

The trade barriers are starting to go up. While the company formerly known as British Steel, now Indian-owned, faces 30% production cuts, India is raising steel tariffs to protect its domestic production capacity. At the recent G20 meeting, participants swore to uphold free trade - then went home and raised duties on steel (India) and cars (Russia - a decision which provoked protests).

The Economist is distressed.

Tariff increases may be the protectionist’s barrier of choice, despite limits agreed by members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This is because in the past decade many countries have unilaterally cut tariffs to well below those limits. They have plenty of room to raise them without breaking any rules.

If all countries were to raise tariffs to the maximum allowed, the average global rate of duty would be doubled, according to Antoine Bouet and David Laborde of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC. The effect could shrink global trade by 7.7%.

China has announced tax rebates for its favoured exporters, as well as pegging its currency at what America sees as an unrealistically low level. In many countries there's pressure for more import duties.

“Post-imposition of the duty, the prices for imported zinc would go up, thereby inclining buyers to opt for domestic variants,” an official of a zinc company said.

He seems to have grasped the concept pretty well. The Economist is reminded of the 1930s and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. In fact, the increases weren't that hefty compared with the already-existing tariffs. But :

Smoot-Hawley did most harm by souring trade relations with other countries.

And that's the point. America was then the great world exporter. By provoking retaliatory tariffs, she cut off her nose to spite her face, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, again in Cassandra mode, explains :

There has been much talk lately of America's Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which set off the protectionist dominoes in 1930. It is usually invoked by free traders to make the wrong point. The relevant message of Smoot-Hawley is that America was then the big exporter, playing the China role. By resorting to tariffs, it set off retaliation, and was the biggest victim of its own folly.

Britain and the Dominions retreated into Imperial Preference. Other countries joined. This became the "growth bloc" of the 1930s, free from the deflation constraints of the Gold Standard. High tariffs stopped the stimulus leaking out.

It was a successful strategy - given the awful alternatives - and was the key reason why Britain's economy contracted by just 5pc during the Depression, against 15pc for France, and 30pc for the US.

Could we see such a closed "growth bloc" emerging now, this time led by the US, entailing a massive rupture of world's trading system? Perhaps.

Interesting to see that the 1930s depression in the UK was apparently nowhere nearly as bad as in the US, thanks to Imperial Preference - the policy of making the British Empire as nearly as possible a free-trade zone. Some remnants of Imperial Preference - like the favourable UK import regime for Caribbean bananas - only vanished relatively recently. Not that depression was a picnic for those affected - my grandfather was unemployed for pretty much the whole of the 1930s, with occasional labouring work on Government relief schemes, and his daughter went to school with cardboard in her shoes.

We have no Empire any more, so that avenue is closed to us - and America is not the world's exporter any more, so the lessons of Smoot-Hawley don't necessarily apply to them either.

Protection can work pretty well for a nation with a devastated economy and infrastructure wishing to rebuild. Japan and Korea did pretty well out of it - can you think of any candidates closer to home ? The South African and Rhodesian economies under the impact of sanctions did not collapse, but substituted imports and became self-sufficient.


I must admit I had M. Sarkozy down as a Brit-style price-of-everything sell-the-grandmother merchant. Maybe not so, although he's probably just playing to the gallery :

"We cannot be the only continent in the world that does not support its builders and manufacturers. We have to help our industrial infrastructure," Sarkozy told the assembly.

"Otherwise we are going to see an industrial wasteland."

What do you mean "are going to see" ? M. Sarkozy obviously hasn't taken a train between Birmingham and Wolverhampton or Sheffield and Leeds.

Pity The Poor Banker

Robert Peston reports Bank of England deputy chairman John Gieve as follows :

"If we'd used interest rates to try and address this asset-price credit growth, we would have been holding down the level of activity elsewhere in the economy, in manufacturing, in other services, holding down the level of employment at a time when consumer price inflation and earnings were stable and reasonably low. And people would have said, you know, 'this is a wilful reduction in the prosperity of the country'."

In other words, they feared the political reaction to what they knew was the right thing to do, so they didn't do it.

So much for the political independence of the BoE, for which Chancellor Brown was given so much credit, and which seems to have left him with the power while passing the responsibility to the BoE.

And the kindest expression for the BoE personnel involved would be that they "fell below the level of events".

It's not "that the Bank of England does not possess the proper tools for dealing with incipient booms in assets and lending". It's that it doesn't possess the proper bankers. John Gieve sounds like one of those chaps who would have trundled through less interesting times without trace. Instead he seems to have a CV covered in red ink and blots.

BoE website :

Sir John Gieve was appointed Deputy Governor in January 2006. In addition to his membership of the Monetary Policy Committee, he has specific responsibility for the Bank's Financial Stability work ..

That's unfortunate. Financial stability seems in short supply ...

He oversaw one Home Office shambles :

Sir John Bourn, the Comptroller and Auditor General wrote

To inform Parliament that the Home Office has not met the statutory reporting timetable in respect of its 2004-05 resource accounts;

[...]

I cannot form an opinion on the truth and fairness of the Home Office financial statements for 2004-05

[...]

That is as strong a condemnation of incompetent financial management as any auditor is likely to utter.

It is as astonishing as it is unacceptable, that a major Central Government Department like the Home Office cannot be trusted to account for the money it spends on our behalf.

If a private sector organisation had mismanged its financial affairs as badly as this, then the people in charge would be out of a job forthwith.

Will the Home Secretary Charles Clarke, whom in theory bears resposibility for this David Blunkett legacy, have the honour to resign ?

What about the "Sir Humphrey" , the Permanent Secretary and therfore the Accounting Officer of the Home Department at the time. i.e. Sir John Gieve.

Sir John is now the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, with a vote on the level of the Bank of England's official Interest Rates, which affect the entire UK economy !

And another :

Last week the 56-year-old career civil servant returned to Westminster for a grilling by the Home Affairs Select Committee about why more than 1,000 prisoners were not even considered for deportation after serving their jail sentences. "There were failings in the handling of foreign prisoners which I regret," Gieve told the committee. "I am not trying to excuse the inexcusable."

Gieve has also been criticised over the running of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and his failure to give a full account of how the nanny of Kimberly Quinn, David Blunkett's former lover, was given a visa.

In recent weeks, the Home Office has come under fire from several corners. Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, called the department "dysfunctional", while Clarke's successor, John Reid, recently judged it "not fit for purpose".

You have to be impressed with a chap who can preside over so much disaster and is still prepared to share his wisdom with us on prime time TV (tonight's Panorama). What's Hebrew for 'chutzpah' again ?

To be fair to Gieve and his colleagues, house prices were roaring ahead long before 2006. It was around 2005 that I started to get unsolicited invites to buy-to-let seminars at snazzy hotels, one of the signs that the market is heading for a peak. And doing the right thing would probably have cost the members of the Monetary Policy Committee their jobs. Instead it'll cost ours.

Gods of the Market Place

In my Amazon post I got comments from people who seemed to think I was a disciple of free markets. Up to a point, I am. As a general principle, free markets seem a pretty good way of 'making us better off' - although that phrase covers a multitude of sins and ideas - what exactly is 'better off' ?

But only up to a point. People are not always rational. What JFC Fuller called the myth of the Heroic Man is to a greater or lesser extent always in conflict with the myth of the Economic Man. Neither myth is terribly healthy, as we're not all one thing nor all the other.

Unfortunately both major UK parties are full subscribers to the myth of Britons as Economic Men.

Labour see that 'you are what you have' - and it doesn't matter how you got it. Hence the idea that being poor is somehow in itself a stigma and disgrace - to be removed by state transfers of cash. Pretty much the direct opposite of their founding beliefs, that an honest working man, no matter how poor, could - and should - be able to look anyone in the eye. But it's a long time since Labour was the party of the honest working man.

Tories see that 'you are what you make' - and it doesn't matter how you make it. Wasn't David Cameron's previous existence spent doing PR for upmarket vertical drinking establishments ?

I'm more of Martin Kelly's mind (he's quoting here) :

"(Economics) has moved into the void left by the decline of religion and the moral consensus; and it is increasingly seen as the main preoccupation of public policy, a panacea for social ills, the source even of private contentment. From being a technical subject, explaining human society in the way that medicine explains the human body, it threatens to become an end in itself, laying down goals, motives, incentives."

Which, as he says, is how we end up with Billy Aitchison and Sonny Devlin.

It's not one or the other, it's more or less. Don't forget Heroic Man, don't forget Original Sin and don't forget Original Damn Foolishness - the unwise decisions of clever men are likely to impact us much more then the unwisdom of the stupid, because clever men will be in positions to make decisions which affect us all. Vortigern thought he was maximising his utility when he hired Hengist and Horsa, but it turned out they had their own ideas about utility.

The worshippers of the Gods of the Market Place should ponder the end that attended Gabriel Oak's dog George, shot in "another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise".

Trouble is, we may by then have suffered the fate of his sheep !

Laban Agrees ...

... with Chick Yog. I'd thought the Tories had selling off the family silver down to a fine art, but they're just amateurs compared to this lot ...

(btw, there's a small Cultural Studies paper waiting to be written on names - how the Amalgamated Union of Wire-Drawers, Fettlers and Allied Trades turns in thirty years into something called "Together" or "Unity", British Insulated Cable and Radio Limited into "Xantippe" or "Xenith", and the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment via "Defence Research Agency" into "QinetiQ". The key being that the old, wordy, literate names actually described what the organisation did, the new ones conceal it and are post-literate, logos in letter form)

UPDATE - can there have been a worse government since the Baldwin/Chamberlain administration ? I'm speechless.

The Treasury is considering privatising other state assets in what critics have called a recession "fire sale". These include:

*Ordnance Survey

*The Met Office

*The Forestry Commission

*The Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster

*The Covent Garden Market Authority

*The Royal Mint

*The Tote

*Buildings owned by British Waterways

*British Nuclear Fuel's stake in uranium enrichment company Urenco

*The Oil & Pipeline Agency, which manages the UK's underground network of fuel distribution pipelines.

Why don't they sell the Palace of Westminster to Donald Trump and lease it back as well ?

"‘A careful reading of the text ...."

Children as young as eight were among the audience at the performance of The Comedy of Errors at The Old Laundry Theatre, in Bowness, Cumbria.

Actors from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) took part in the show.

It featured one of the play's characters Dromio guarding a door when a man dressed as a woman walked up to him, pulled down his pants and Dromio's pants, before the pair simulated sex.

Not tebbily surprising.

Peter James, LAMDA principal, said: ‘A careful reading of the text would demonstrate that we did nothing that was uncalled for by the Bard'.

It's all in the interpretation - and these days the interpretation is likely to be one that Thomas Bowdler would be uneasy with. Even Cymbeline at the Swan last year featured a few single-entendres - and as I said at the time, I hadn't realised what a huge influence on modern drama Benny Hill and the Carry Ons were.

We took the kids to A Midsummer Night's Dream at Stratford a month or so back, where as ill-fortune and a dodgy wall would have it, the famous lovers Pyramus and Thisbe were forced to communicate through the legs of the Wall (who sported a fetching pair of red Y-fronts) - and, golly, if Pyramus doesn't accidentally kiss the Wall's bottom in time for the line "I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all". Thirteen year old boys find that kind of stuff hilarious.

Now you could argue that the baying mob in the pits of Shakespeare's day would have expected - nay, demanded such toilet stuff. But you can't tell what some transgressive director will come up with next. We considered another trip to Macbeth at Stratford, and while I know the play comes with its drunken porter you do have to check out first whether the director has given the text 'a careful reading'.

"The way I read it is this. Lady M is desperate to get hubby's courage screwed up to the sticking place. Given the position of women in medieval Scottish society, her sexual hold over him is one of the few levers of power available to her. Lady M is a strong, ambitious and determined woman. Surely in such a circumstance she would use all her wiles - including ..." we get a radical new interpretation of 'sticking place' and the play is sold out for months. But it's art, darling !


After all, the then artistic director of the Globe, one Mark Rylance, read Macbeth so carefully that Lady M, in the form of the delightful Jane Horrocks, wet herself on stage every night in a perfomance that sold out every mackintosh within ten miles of the theatre. There wasn't a dry seat on the stage ...


(btw, I do love the bit in Macbeth where the murderers are waiting for their quarry and discuss the beautiful evening ... 'the west yet glimmers with some streaks of day ..')


(I'm sure David Duff will have views on this .. he usually does !)

"Do you mind if the dog smells your breasts?"

There are more things in heaven and earth ...

It's Cognitive Dissonance Time ...

Aren't (Christian) 'fundies' funny, with their weird views on women and homosexuals ? sayeth Sheffield's Incurable Hippie.

Not so the 'fundies' of other religions. It appears that one Benyam Mohammed, current address Guantanamera Bay, is on her Christmas card list.



"I used some of my photographs to make cards" quoth the self-confessed 'pacifist warrior'.

I hope she sent him this one - I'm sure he'd appreciate it.

On the other hand, perhaps not this one - don't want to put ideas into a chap's head, do we ?

Amazon / Home Delivery Network Saga II

I just took a look at the Amazon site again. The delivery was booked out of the depot at 7:17 and "delivery attempted" at 8:18, 61 minutes later.

A quick AA Autoroute tells me the depot is nearly 46 miles away and about 59 minutes drive in a car. I suppose the driver booked out the parcel as the very last one then leapt into the van and caned it directly to my house before tragically finding I wasn't there even though I was. They're making it up as they go along, aren't they ?

It was booked out at 7:11 this morning. It's now 9:09 and I'm typing this in the kitchen, looking out at the road. I wonder what time they'll 'attempt delivery' today ?

Well, I've written to Amazon and now I'm trying the phone to the depot. Wish me luck.

UPDATE - no answer. There's a surprise.


Home Delivery Network The , Hitchin , HERTFORDSHIRE , SG5 1RT , 01462 421336
Home Delivery Network , Eastleigh , HAMPSHIRE , SO50 4NG , 023 8061 9866
Home Deliver Network Ltd , Lynx Trading Estate , SOMERSET , BA20 2NZ , 01935 432924
Home Delivery Network , Sunderland , TYNE AND WEAR , SR2 8QS , 0191-564 0924
Home Delivery Network , Dafen , DYFED , SA14 8QW , 01554 777877
Home Delivery Network , Warwick , WARWICKSHIRE , CV34 6QP , 01926 311404
Home Delivery Network , Rochdale , LANCASHIRE , OL11 3JR , 01706 352537
Home Delivery Network , Eastleigh , HAMPSHIRE , SO50 4NT , 023 8061 8398
Home Delivery Network , Yate , AVON , BS37 5QZ , 01454 316101
Home Delivery Network , Glenrothes , FIFE , KY6 2RU , 01592 773297
Home Delivery Network , Stoke On Trent , STAFFORDSHIRE , ST6 4PB , 01782 836071
Home Delivery Network , Park Royal , LONDON , NW10 7UA , 020 8961 8774
Home Delivery Network , Bolton , LANCASHIRE , BL3 6AX , 0870-154 5414
Home Delivery Network , Fareham , HAMPSHIRE , PO15 5ST , 01489 581544
Home Delivery Network , Lenton Lane Industrial Estate , NOTTINGHAMSHIRE , NG7 2TG , 0115-986 0431
Home Delivery Network , Gateshead , TYNE AND WEAR , NE10 0ES , 0191-495 2211
Home Delivery Network , Oldbury , WEST MIDLANDS , B69 3EX , 0121-552 5541
Home Delivery Network , East Kilbride , LANARKSHIRE , G75 0YA , 01355 233085
Home Delivery Network Ltd , Newbridge , MIDLOTHIAN , EH28 8LD , 0131-333 3651
Home Delivery Network Ltd , Morley , WEST YORKSHIRE , LS27 0BN , 0113-253 8226
Home Delivery Network Ltd , Basildon , ESSEX , SS14 3DT , 01268 286666
Home Delivery Network Ltd , Mitcham , SURREY , CR4 4HX , 020 8685 1032

Should You Be Buying From Amazon ?

In the last 18 months I've probably bought more from Amazon than from any other online retailer, as it's overtaken my previous top site of ebuyer (the house now has 5 PCs built from Ebuyer components plus two 'bought-in' boxes, so my purchases there have diminished). Admittedly a single Ebuyer order might have been for £150-odd compared with my average £30-40 on Amazon, but the family between them have probably spent getting on for £500 this year, including Amazon gift vouchers.


Following the revelations in the Sunday Times about the way Amazon UK treats its staff, I'm wondering if I shouldn't diversify - maybe look to Borders for the books and CDs and elsewhere for the electronics. They're getting too dominant in the marketplace anyway.

An investigation by The Sunday Times at Amazon’s enormous warehouse in Bedfordshire has found that workers were:

– Warned that the company refuses to allow sick leave, even if the worker has a legitimate doctor’s note. Taking a day off sick, even with a note, results in a penalty point. A worker with six points faces dismissal.

– Made to work a compulsory 10½ hour overnight shift at the end of a five-day week. The overnight shift, which runs from Saturday evening to 5am on Sunday, means they have to work every day of the week.

– Set quotas for the number of items to be picked or packed in an hour that even a manager described as “ridiculous”. Those packing heavy Xbox games consoles had to pack 140 an hour to reach their target.

– Set against each other with a bonus scheme that penalises staff if any other member of their group fails to hit the quota.

I'm surprised the sicknote stuff is legal. Anyone out there got good ideas for Amazon-replacements ?


There's another thing. My son is waiting for the delivery of his new Acer netbook, sourced from Amazon. While awaiting I did a quick bit of googling for the delivery company Amazon use, Home Delivery Network.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

HDN tracking system said they had 2 failed deliveries, and had left cards each time. Funny how I was working in my hall the whole time, and never saw or heard a vehicle, no ring or knock at the door and certainly no cards. Amazon apologised and said they would "follow it up". Its difficult to NOT use HDN with Amazon, as they use it by default on many items, and you have no choice unless you upgrade to much more expensive shipping options. The lack of contact details of ANY KIND on their website just confirms their incompetence, as they obviously have far too many complaints to afford staff to man the phones or email relies. Avoid if you can...

In over 10 years of shopping online I have NEVER had to deal with a shower such as this company! I finally gave up on the call centre and phoned my local depot after the website was updated showing I had missed a delivery for the FOURTH time despite me being in all day.

08/03/2007 00:00:00 Customer Parcel Data Received
08/03/2007 19:30:01 Sort Centre - Shaw, Oldham Sorted
08/03/2007 23:42:00 Leeds Depot Received
09/03/2007 06:36:42 Leeds Depot Loaded onto vehicle
09/03/2007 09:40:02 Leeds Depot Unable to Deliver Carded
09/03/2007 13:48:23 Leeds Depot Received
09/03/2007 13:49:09 Leeds Depot Unable to Deliver Carded
12/03/2007 06:31:17 Leeds Depot Loaded onto vehicle
12/03/2007 14:06:28 Leeds Depot Received
12/03/2007 14:08:43 Leeds Depot Unable to Deliver Carded


I rang them and the guy on the other end was very unhelpful. making out like I had missed them and they would be trying again on Monday. Of course he wouldn't listen no matter how much I insisted no attempt was made to deliver the parcel and the same thing is going to happen on Monday.

I had been in all day and had no cards and heard nothing.

Well, you know what's coming. The beastie was recorded as leaving the depot for delivery at 7 this morn. No further update (and my son stayed in all day) until nine tonight, when finally the Amazon 'tracking' page updated.

Apparently the driver was 'unable to deliver' at 8.20 this morning - when I was still in the house and would have heard any delivery vehicle arriving. No one rang, no-one left a card. I get the impression the drivers have too much stuff to deliver and end up inventing 'failed deliveries' for those households they don't get round to. We stayed in till 7 tonight and left a note for the driver when we went out. We were wasting our time. Why wasn't the site updated in real time ? Don't they carry little digital, mobile-linked tablets to record failed deliveries as they happen ? Or do they wait till the driver's returned to the depot (having had plenty of time to think up plausible non-delivery scenarios) ?

There's a fortune to be made for the person who devises a decent delivery/tracking system, although nothing will avail if the company are screwing their drivers with too much work and the drivers are returning the compliment by lying about 'failed deliveries'.

Most of the delivery companies are incompetent to a greater or lesser degree. I must at this point give due to one of the senior guys at Initial Citylink. When my son's birthday present didn't arrive I phoned head office and actually got through to (I think) the sales director. He put me through to a regional manager - with the result that the manager of the depot where my son's gift was ended up putting it in the boot and delivering it personally on his way home ! He didn't look too chuffed about it either ...

Anyway, what think you ? Where can an ethical(ish) consumer turn to as an Amazon-alternative ?

Beheaded ?

Crumpsall ?

Now who would do a bad thing like that ?

One Nation Under God

via Martin Kelly I learned the story of George M Docherty, the Glaswegian pastor of Abraham Lincoln's local Washington church, whose 1954 sermon to a congregation including Dwight D Eisenhower resulted in the words 'under God' being added to the Pledge of Allegiance.

In his sermon, Docherty anticipated the theme of Gregory Isaacs - that "Men without religion Just can't keep in a righteous man's position" :

"Philosophically speaking, an atheistic American is a contradiction in terms. Now don't misunderstand me. This age has thrown up a new type of man - we call him 'secular'; he does not believe in God; not because he is a wicked man but because he is dialectically honest (? LT) . He would rather walk with the unbelievers than sit hypocritically with people of the faith. These men, and many I have known, are fine in character; and in their obligations as citizens and good neigbours, quite excellent.

But they really are 'spiritual parasites'. And I mean no term of abuse in this. I'm simply classifying them. A parasite is an organism that lives upon the life force of another organism without contributing to the life of the other. These excellent ethical seculars are living upon the accumulated spiritual capital of Judeao-Christian civilisation, and at the same time (they) deny the God who revealed the divine principles upon which the ethics of this country grow."

That's exactly right. And we in Britain are, in the main, parasites living upon the accumulated spiritual capital of nearly 1700 years of Christianity, just as the Britons of the fourth century were warmed by the declining glow of Rome's glory - until the barbarian war-bands came.

Take a psalm ...

.. and bring hither the timbrel, the pleasant harp with the psaltery.

Well, he says it's a 2100 year old Greek song, played on a copy of a Jewish temple lyre - who am I to argue ? It's beautiful ... I love the harp in all its forms.

This is another lovely old song, and the very wonderful Sinfonye - three Aussie feminists and a hurdy-gurdy - are involved. If I have time I'll try and get some of their music - which is as gorgeous as they - onto Youtube. For some reason there's a chunk of Pentangle on the back end, but that's never a bad thing. In fact Jacqui McShee sounds a bit like the singer of the next piece :

North African Jewish music ? And isn't the first part a song to Our Lady ?


You may notice my preference for female voice again ... here's an exception. This is 900 years old but sounds to me as if someone like Philip Glass could have written it. Perotin - Viderunt Omnes.

A Few Damp Patches on the Curate's Wall

Dominic Lawson on "the right to die" - aka "the right to be killed". After all, "the right to die was granted" us in Eden, and there's no opt-out clause.

...in the Netherlands, the supposedly enlightened pioneer of euthanasia, more than a quarter of “physician-assisted” deaths occur without any request from the patient-victim and people carry cards that read: “Please don’t kill me” ...

Perhaps the most compelling evidence given to the House of Lords came from Dr Bert Keizer, who worked as a geriatrician in Amsterdam for a quarter of a century and carried out many “physician-assisted suicides”– the basis of his book Dancing with Mr D.

Dr Keizer told our legislators: “It is useless to worry about the slippery slope. Once a society has decided that euthanasia is allowed in certain cases, one is on it. Thus in Holland we have given up the condition that a patient must be in a terminal situation. Next, mental suffering was allowed [as a reason]. Then one’s future dementia was suggested as a reason for a request for death . . . I believe, on the grounds of the more than 1,000 deathbeds I attended, that euthanasia is a blessing in certain exceptional situations, yet I would rather die in a country where euthanasia is forbidden but where doctors do know how to look after patients in a humane manner.”

Martin Kelly on the same subject :

"That has been the track of modern history; there is absolutely no reason to believe that doctors will not euthanise with the same abandon that they have aborted."

Why are misery-childhood memoirs so popular ? I'm sure future sociologists (if there are any) will make connections with the rejection of parenthood. My theory is that the childless buy them, but it's a theory based on zero evidence plus my prejudice.

... given the gravity of the allegations made in the millions of “miserable childhood memoirs” that have flown out of bookstores in the past decade or more, the wonder is that there haven’t been more law suits, both civil and criminal, arising out of this genre.

One of the few to hit such an obstacle was Kathy O’Beirne’s memoir of a horrific life in the Magdalene laundries, which sold 400,000 copies worldwide. But after Kathy’s Story was published, the Sisters of Charity issued a statement insisting she had never set foot inside any of their institutions, either laundries or care homes, and five members of her own family claimed she was a vindictive fantasist.

The Pub Philosopher brilliantly sums up what's going on with Sark and the Barclay brothers :

"Half a millenium of European history has been condensed into fifteen years."

He thieved, drank, took drugs, sabotaged religious meetings. Perhaps that would have been enough for many an Oxbridge lefty, but there was more to him than that. Paul Anderson remembers. Ernest Bevin is rotating at 7,200 rpm.

"The United Kingdom is officially a grey nation. The number of pensioners exceeds the number of children under 16 for the first time, figures published yesterday show."

And of the children under 16 in England and Wales, heading for a quarter are "ethnic minority". More on the latest ONS stats when I have time.

More questions on identity in the next census.

In a further bid to capture how society has changed since the last census, the 2011 poll will ask residents whether they consider their "national identity" to be British, or English, Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish.

People will also be asked if they have step-parents or step-children, if they have entered into civil partnerships and whether they have second homes.

New proposed questions, which must be agreed to by MPs, require each member of every household to state what month and year they came to live in the UK, how long they plan to stay in the country and what passports they hold.

Elected police commissioners ? Blood on the streets if “white, middle-class, middle-aged men in suits” get the jobs, according to Chris Huhne.

He told MPs: “In complex urban areas, with substantial ethnic minorities, such as Greater Manchester, Merseyside and the West Midlands, the Conservatives’ proposal – and to a lesser but almost equal extent, the Government’s proposal – would ensure that the people elected as commissioners and members of the police authorities would be white, middle-class, middle-aged men in suits.

“They would not represent the genuine differences, especially ethnic ones, in police force areas.

“That worries me, because it would set up exactly the sort of problems that led to the riots in Brixton and cities such as Bristol in the early 1980s.”

I like that 'complex'.

Chicago politics does sound like a TV script. The Times, unlike the BBC, let us know Rod Blagojevich's political affiliation.

The Invisible Hand.

This sounds like a non-story.

Muslim children are being beaten and abused regularly by teachers at some British madrassas - Islamic evening classes - an investigation by The Times has found.

Students have been slapped, punched and had their ears twisted, according to an unpublished report by an imam based on interviews with victims in the north of England.

While reports of a child being kicked in the head are obviously bad news, most of this sounds like standard school discipline in a 1960s State grammar.

" Madrassas and similar religious classes are not subject to any regulation nor are their teachers required to be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau."

I bet they are. And I bet the massed ranks of infidel Western social workers don't want to "go there".

"Is Britain Civilised ?"

On 9/1/2003, Neil Clark wrote the following in the Telegraph, but the link no longer works. If anyone can find a link I'll link to the post - in the absence of which here's the whole thing.

Roy Jenkins made Britain a far less civilised country


By Neil Clark


Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 09/01/2003



In his Guardian obituary of Lord Jenkins, David Marquand listed four "achievements" of his hero on which, to him, "the verdict of history seems plain". As Home Secretary, "Jenkins did more than any other person to make Britain a more civilised country to live in". As leader of the Labour Europeans, he played an "indispensable part" in taking Britain into what is now the European Union; and, as president of the European Commission, he played an "equally indispensable part' in paving the way for the single currency. Finally, by forming the SDP, and "breaking the mould" of British politics, Jenkins created New Labour.


As an Old Labour Euro-sceptic, I believe the last three "achievements" that Marquand lists were ones we could have well done without. But what of Marquand's first claim: that Jenkins made Britain a more civilised country to live in?


As an up-and-coming Labour backbencher, Jenkins had written, in the late 1950s, a tract entitled Is Britain Civilised?, in which he attacked Britain's "archaic" laws on censorship, homosexuality, divorce and abortion, as well as arguing for the abolition of capital punishment and changes to the country's "Victorian" criminal justice system.


At that time, Jenkins's "progressive" views on social reform were still in the minority in the Labour Party, dominated as it was by its socially conservative, working-class ethos. But by 1964, when Labour eventually regained power, much had changed. A group of middle-class, mainly Oxbridge-educated "intellectuals" had risen to prominence in the party and, for these "modernisers", led by Jenkins and his Oxford friend Tony Crosland, the main aim was the social, rather than the economic, transformation of Britain.


Although their views had little support among the British public at large, this group was able to push through its liberalising agenda when Jenkins became Home Secretary in 1965. Already, earlier that year, the death penalty had been suspended. Now it was full steam ahead to give support to private members' Bills to decriminalise abortion and homosexuality, relax censorship and make divorce easier.


Jenkins's impact at the Home Office did not end there. He also embarked on the most radical programme of penal reform since the Second World War. His Criminal Justice Act of 1967 said very little about the victims of crime, but plenty about the perpetrators. The Act introduced the parole system of early release of offenders serving sentences of three years or more, established the Parole Board and introduced the system of suspended sentences.


In two years, Jenkins had succeeded in transforming the criminal justice system from one whose raison d'etre had been to deter wrong-doing to one designed to be as "civilised" as possible to the criminal.


Jenkins was of course convinced that the "permissive society" was the "civilised society". In this, he - alas - got it all terribly wrong. What underpins civilised society is not permissiveness, but self-restraint, a phrase detested by libertines of both Left and Right. What Jenkins failed to see was how the freedoms he espoused would lead to the degeneration of British society and the selfish, me-first libertinism of today.


Jenkins was never a socialist, but in my view he was not much of a liberal either. Classical liberalism always understood that liberal freedom is dependent on moral self-restraint. Without it, freedom becomes licence - which itself is a threat to freedom, as it acknowledges no obligation to others. Before the Jenkins-sponsored social reforms made their impact, Britain was a country famous for the self-restraint of its people. "Letting it all out", extreme displays of emotion, and shouting and swearing in the street were all considered unacceptable. For Jenkins, the taboos that existed in 1950s Britain were intolerable. But the net result was a society remarkable for its civility.


More than 30 years on, the damaging impact of Jenkins's reforms on the society we live in is all too clear to see. One marriage in three now ends in divorce. Almost 40 per cent of children are now born out of wedlock, the highest figure in Europe. Since the 1967 Abortion Act, more than six million unborn children have been aborted.


The legalisation of homosexuality has not been the end of the chapter, but merely the beginning, with an aggressive "gay rights" lobby demanding more and more concessions. The policy of early release of prisoners has had a catastrophic effect on the safety of the general public: 14 per cent of violent criminals freed early are convicted of fresh violence within two years of their release.


As The Sunday Telegraph's Alasdair Palmer states: "Scores of men, women and children have been assaulted, raped and murdered as a result of the policy of releasing dangerous criminals before their sentences are completed" - a policy initiated and endorsed by Jenkins.


In addition to this tally, we must add the hundreds of innocent lives lost as a result of the abolition of capital punishment, which Jenkins zealously campaigned for and whose reintroduction he so resolutely opposed as Home Secretary in 1974.


Dividing his time between the palaces of Westminster, the delightful Oxfordshire village of East Hendred and the high table of the Oxford colleges, Jenkins did not, of course, see too much of the social debris that his "civilising" reforms had caused. Had he seen at first hand what the "permissive society" amounts to in practice on a "sink" council estate, he might have modified his views.


It is, though, unfair to blame one man for all of Britain's modern ills. Others, too, must take their share of responsibility for the nation we have become, not least the economic freedom junkies of the 1980s. Nevertheless, the Britain of 2003 is very much the Britain that Jenkins always wanted. The self-restraint and taboos of the 1950s have all gone. The "archaic" laws against which Jenkins railed have been abolished.


On the day of Jenkins's death, I looked at the other stories listed on the Teletext index. They were: "Man accused of bodies-in-bin probe", "Gun killers will be caught, pledge police", "Man faces charges over abbey axe attack", "Man charged with taxi driver murder" and "Freedom for hostage in 11-day siege".


If David Marquand believes the Britain of 2003 to be a "civilised country", it would be interesting to hear his definition of an uncivilised one.

What's German For "Schadenfreude" Again ?

Rowan Williams complaining about people not liking Britain is like Schopenhauer moaning about pessimists.

The Archbishop of Canterbury told shoppers yesterday that Britain was a country that was “unhappy” and “didn’t seem to like itself”.

Speaking in a city centre pub in Cardiff, Dr Rowan Williams told his informal congregation after a presentation on social problems that the nation seemed ill at ease with itself and was in urgent need of some help.

“What we saw was a picture of a country and society that doesn’t seem to like itself very much,” he said. “We are not very happy, we look around for people to blame . . . When society is that unhappy then society has a problem.

I can't understand it. After all, apart from a few surviving traces of sexism, racism and homophobia, Roy Jenkins' "Civilised Society" is pretty much with us today. That bad old Britain of the 1950s, when innocent murderers were hung, innocent criminals and innocent homosexuals were sent to prison, and the streets ran red with the blood of the victims of domestic violence and back street abortion (the victims of the latter being the mothers, of course, not the babies), classrooms rang to the screams of the victims of corporal punishment - and worst of all to the Archbish, the Church of England was a strong supporting pillar of such evil - is now history.

Only a few elderly bigots cling to the hideous morality of our wicked past - and they'll soon be dealt with.