ABSTINENCE does have its benefits – for one thing it is character-building.
They tried it in the USA for 13 years and it built a character called Al Capone.
When it came to creating a favourable trading environment for a gangster looking for an easy way to make a living, prohibiting alcohol must have been the answer to his most heartfelt prayers.
It’s simple supply and demand economics and so it’s surprising that the country that has grown so much as a result of the free market could fall for so simple a trick.
By cutting off the supply from legal outlets, the market was left to the likes of Capone who set up the supply routes for bootleg alcohol to satisfy the public thirst for booze. And as he had a stranglehold on supply, he could charge what he liked.
Naturally others wanted in on the action and thus Chicago became the gangland it was and the mob grew in strength as a result. Capone raked in millions.
As law enforcement measures go prohibition was an unmitigated disaster, and served only to strengthen the hand of criminals who corrupt US society to this day.
It also had the effect of killing the disparate independent brewing industries there, which has had the result of them inflicting upon the world the tasteless bilge they call beer because they lost so much expertise in actually making beer, as well as wine, when they prohibited its sale.
So prohibition doesn’t work. It’s been tried, on a massive scale, it was unworkable, unenforceable, had no measurable health benefits and was a gift to the mob.
So why are we trying it now with drugs.
Don’t get me wrong, this is no paean to the benefits of cannabis or any other controlled substance. Let me say at the outset I think they are all vile and those in their grip are at best tiresome and at worst unutterably sad individuals. Life must be pretty bad if oblivion is a better alternative.
But the fact is the war on drugs was lost long ago, in fact, the minute you declare a war on drugs you may as well surrender, for the very act of declaring war means that you hand control to drug barons who will turn a tidy profit as a result of your action.
Now and again you will read reports of victories by law enforcement in the war on drugs. Some shipment will be intercepted and millions of pounds worth of cocaine or heroin will have been kept off the streets.
But even if this has any significant effect on supply, do you think the dealers bat an eyelid?
No, if they’ve got less to sell, they just shove up the price so they make the same amount of money as they did last week, but by selling less product. And what does that mean for addicts, well they have to find more money, and that often means committing crime.
It’s usually petty stuff, theft, burglary, street robbery, car crime, but the sort of thing that makes life that bit more miserable for the rest of us.
If you want confirmation of this take a trip to magistrates court any day of the week and see how many defendants’ solicitors are pleading drug problems as mitigation for their clients’ crimes.
Richard Brunstrom recognises this and now wants drugs to be legalised and regulated and the old Class A, B and C system of classifying drugs to be scrapped.
It’s odd then that the opinion of a cop who is in charge of cops who have to haul in the same faces week-in, week-out for the same catalogue of miserable crime, is dismissed so easily by politicians.
Alyn and Deeside MP Mark Tami said: “As 280,000 Class A drug users are responsible for half of all crime, taking the risk of legalising such a dangerous drug is foolhardy and I would not wish to gamble so much on the health and well-being of our children.”
A laudable sentiment were it not for the fact that all that crime would not be committed were it not for the fact that the users needed to get cash to buy their Class A drugs from dealers who now they can milk an addict for every penny they’ve got as well as a few pennies they will steal.
Alyn and Deeside AM Carl Sergeant points to the link between drug use and poverty and that it is important to tackle the social deprivation that leads to such drug abuse. Another fine aim, but social deprivation is not going to be solved in this lifetime. In the meantime thousands of lives are being wasted in ineffective court cases and jail terms for people who need help more than they need punishment.
The only people benefiting from current drug policy are the dealers, the drug barons and everyone else in the supply chain all the way back down the line to the poppy-growers in Afghanistan who are defending their trade with rocket-propelled grenades launched at our troops over there.
Richard Brunstrom might not have the answer, but at least he is brave enough to confront us with the inconvenient truth that current drug policy has failed, in spite of the brave efforts of police officers who put their lives on the line trying to enforce it.
The least we can do is have a proper debate of where exactly we think our drug laws are going rather than blithely assuming we can carry on with the current plan which hands power to exactly the people it is trying to put behind bars.
A FRIEND in Cardiff calls.
He’s just received a text. It’s one of those annoying ones from a service provider telling him what new services he can enjoy at the press of a button.
It’s offering him a new ringtone.
Imagine his delight when he’s told he can now download ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ as his new ringtone.
I tell him that if he’s going to get it, better be prepared to run fast down Queen Street.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Column, October 9, 2007
“GIVE me the boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.”
So said the founder the Jesuit order, St Ignatius Loyola, knowing that a good bit of indoctrination when young will lead to lifelong, unquestioning faith.
And it worked for him, or rather the Catholic Church, so why not try it elsewhere, such as in schools?
That seems to the philosophy that holds saw in the Department of Education , beg pardon, Department for Children, Schools and Families (at least that’s what it is until the next reshuffle)
The Government stands accused of an ‘obscene rush’ to get children producing academic work.
So which bunch of lentil-eating, anti-establishment, drop-outs would make such a charge?
The National Primary Headteachers’ Association that’s who – so, basically, the women and men who are running primary education then. A group that any politician with an interest in leaving a legacy that lasts further than the next election date would do well to pay heed.
The NPHA said that play-based learning had all but disappeared when children entered Year 1 – the year after reception class – and warned that some children with summer birthdays would only just have turned five when they are being expected to engage in formal academic learning.
The NPHA wants play-based learning extended until children are at least six.
Now the old-fashioned 3Rs never-did-me-any-harm brigade out there might have a sharp intake of breath at the thought of children playing in class or play having anything to do with learning.
All the evidence from studies in European countries is that children do better academically if formal teaching is delayed until six or seven actually boosts academic performance later in life.
But for whatever reason our schools are locked into this system of one year of playful introduction then that’s enough messing about, time to get your head down and don’t you dare look up from your books until you’ve passed you A-levels.
I wouldn’t mind so much if the Scandinavians were the simpletons of Europe, constantly laughed at for their uneducated ways, pointing at aeroplanes and using their fingers to count etc.
Ever met a stupid Swede? No, me neither, and to think I had three years head-start in my schooling.
But the problem is that the attitude still prevails among politicians and, it has to be said, a fair number of parents, is that children’s heads are empty vessels to be filled up and the sooner you start filling it up the better.
I know pushy parents who are signing their children up to learn viola when their child is still sucking a dummy.
Parents and politicians will say they are preparing the child for the tough competition they face in life, but the sad fact is that they are not.
Education is not a matter of filling up a child’s brain like it was a jug. Of course, you can stand at the front of a class and list the dates from 1066 to the Moon landing and eventually some of it will stick.
But when that child enters the workplace what will they actually be able to do other than list dates? Handy for trivia quizzes but not much else.
If you accept the view that education is more than lists of facts, but that it is helping a child to learn to think, then all the research says that play-based, co-operative learning is what will achieve the best results.
It’s the old Chinese proverb – hear and forget, see and remember, do and understand. So are our schools teaching memory or understanding?
The Department of Children, Schools and Families is adamant that the formal school starting age of five has served children well for decades and that standards in primary schools have never been higher.
Of course, this might have something to do with the fact that government tied funding to performance in SATS tests and head teachers got very good at shovelling their children through the tests to make sure they could buy books next year.
Who said that five is the optimum age to start learning? The fact that it’s been going on for decades means that it was decided a long time ago when we knew far less about just how a child learns.
But this, once again, is an area where Wales’s fledgling government has broken free from its larger neighbour and followed a more enlightened path.
Wales did away with the evil of SATS some time ago and they have pointed out to the government’s review of primary education that in Wales, play-based foundation stage learning goes on until the age of seven.
Round the fringes of Wales this will lead to friction where parents will compare the play-based schooling of their children to the formal drilling going on in their English neighbours.
It’s natural to be concerned if you think your child is falling behind, but given that Wales is only doing what’s been working for years in Europe, then I think those fears are misplaced.
WAY back in the mists if time I spent a year working at a radio station.
They wisely did not let me near a microphone, I was a back-room boy, typing out bulletins for the DJs to read.
Then one day they decided to have a phone-in debate about the aftermath of the closure of Shotton steelworks, but the phones remained resolutely silent.
Eventually the station manager sidled over and suggested I get on the blower and pretend to be Mr Angry of Deeside. Fortunately for the listening public the news arrived and they were saved from my ill-formed thoughts on the subject.
But what if I had got on? Would Ofcom be inquiring into the faking of this segment, would there be apologies all round.
If it had been a BBC station, which it wasn’t, then the answer is a definite yes.
The BBC seems to have lost the ability to decide what is badly misleading (editing the Queen to make her look like she was in a strop) and what is inconsequential nonsense (the name of the Blue Peter cat).
So it’s apologising for everything. And now a Who Do You Think You Are episode featuring Carol Vorderman appears to have played fast and loose with strict accuracy, unbeknownst to the Countdown star, in getting a shop assistant to ‘recognise’ a photo she had never seen before.
Seeing as sorry seems to be the easiest word at the Beeb I await their donning of yet more sackcloth and ashes in due course.
So said the founder the Jesuit order, St Ignatius Loyola, knowing that a good bit of indoctrination when young will lead to lifelong, unquestioning faith.
And it worked for him, or rather the Catholic Church, so why not try it elsewhere, such as in schools?
That seems to the philosophy that holds saw in the Department of Education , beg pardon, Department for Children, Schools and Families (at least that’s what it is until the next reshuffle)
The Government stands accused of an ‘obscene rush’ to get children producing academic work.
So which bunch of lentil-eating, anti-establishment, drop-outs would make such a charge?
The National Primary Headteachers’ Association that’s who – so, basically, the women and men who are running primary education then. A group that any politician with an interest in leaving a legacy that lasts further than the next election date would do well to pay heed.
The NPHA said that play-based learning had all but disappeared when children entered Year 1 – the year after reception class – and warned that some children with summer birthdays would only just have turned five when they are being expected to engage in formal academic learning.
The NPHA wants play-based learning extended until children are at least six.
Now the old-fashioned 3Rs never-did-me-any-harm brigade out there might have a sharp intake of breath at the thought of children playing in class or play having anything to do with learning.
All the evidence from studies in European countries is that children do better academically if formal teaching is delayed until six or seven actually boosts academic performance later in life.
But for whatever reason our schools are locked into this system of one year of playful introduction then that’s enough messing about, time to get your head down and don’t you dare look up from your books until you’ve passed you A-levels.
I wouldn’t mind so much if the Scandinavians were the simpletons of Europe, constantly laughed at for their uneducated ways, pointing at aeroplanes and using their fingers to count etc.
Ever met a stupid Swede? No, me neither, and to think I had three years head-start in my schooling.
But the problem is that the attitude still prevails among politicians and, it has to be said, a fair number of parents, is that children’s heads are empty vessels to be filled up and the sooner you start filling it up the better.
I know pushy parents who are signing their children up to learn viola when their child is still sucking a dummy.
Parents and politicians will say they are preparing the child for the tough competition they face in life, but the sad fact is that they are not.
Education is not a matter of filling up a child’s brain like it was a jug. Of course, you can stand at the front of a class and list the dates from 1066 to the Moon landing and eventually some of it will stick.
But when that child enters the workplace what will they actually be able to do other than list dates? Handy for trivia quizzes but not much else.
If you accept the view that education is more than lists of facts, but that it is helping a child to learn to think, then all the research says that play-based, co-operative learning is what will achieve the best results.
It’s the old Chinese proverb – hear and forget, see and remember, do and understand. So are our schools teaching memory or understanding?
The Department of Children, Schools and Families is adamant that the formal school starting age of five has served children well for decades and that standards in primary schools have never been higher.
Of course, this might have something to do with the fact that government tied funding to performance in SATS tests and head teachers got very good at shovelling their children through the tests to make sure they could buy books next year.
Who said that five is the optimum age to start learning? The fact that it’s been going on for decades means that it was decided a long time ago when we knew far less about just how a child learns.
But this, once again, is an area where Wales’s fledgling government has broken free from its larger neighbour and followed a more enlightened path.
Wales did away with the evil of SATS some time ago and they have pointed out to the government’s review of primary education that in Wales, play-based foundation stage learning goes on until the age of seven.
Round the fringes of Wales this will lead to friction where parents will compare the play-based schooling of their children to the formal drilling going on in their English neighbours.
It’s natural to be concerned if you think your child is falling behind, but given that Wales is only doing what’s been working for years in Europe, then I think those fears are misplaced.
WAY back in the mists if time I spent a year working at a radio station.
They wisely did not let me near a microphone, I was a back-room boy, typing out bulletins for the DJs to read.
Then one day they decided to have a phone-in debate about the aftermath of the closure of Shotton steelworks, but the phones remained resolutely silent.
Eventually the station manager sidled over and suggested I get on the blower and pretend to be Mr Angry of Deeside. Fortunately for the listening public the news arrived and they were saved from my ill-formed thoughts on the subject.
But what if I had got on? Would Ofcom be inquiring into the faking of this segment, would there be apologies all round.
If it had been a BBC station, which it wasn’t, then the answer is a definite yes.
The BBC seems to have lost the ability to decide what is badly misleading (editing the Queen to make her look like she was in a strop) and what is inconsequential nonsense (the name of the Blue Peter cat).
So it’s apologising for everything. And now a Who Do You Think You Are episode featuring Carol Vorderman appears to have played fast and loose with strict accuracy, unbeknownst to the Countdown star, in getting a shop assistant to ‘recognise’ a photo she had never seen before.
Seeing as sorry seems to be the easiest word at the Beeb I await their donning of yet more sackcloth and ashes in due course.
Column, October 2, 2007
“IT is important that we do not tear ourselves apart as a nation,” said Roger Lewis, chief executive of the WRU.
Too late Roger, too late, we were already ripping ourselves asunder when yet another Fijian crossed the try line.
But I suspect Lewis knows his words will fall on deaf ears, after all in almost the same breath he said: “ Rugby defines us as a nation and unites us as a nation.”
Being defined by something and then getting a good drubbing at it does not make for an easy life.
I should have seen it coming though. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I debated the merits of rugby at length with a football fan who believed it was not worth watching because it didn’t produce upsets.
Di I not hear the tramp, tramp, tramp of hostages to fortune on the march as I assured him that it jolly well did, and what’s more rugby was a joy to watch even when you lost?
When I thought of underdogs triumphing I was thinking of plucky little Samoa (population 214,000) or brave little Tonga (population 102,000), against England .
I wasn’t really thinking of Fiji (population 853,000) doing Wales (population 3 million) like a turkey.
I’m sure it wasn’t in the WRU script either, though given a record of 13 defeats in 20 games you could say we all saw it coming, we just hoped it could have been in the quarter finals.
Given what happened in France, a piece of work by Bangor academic Professor Duncan Tanner was about as perfectly timed as a Martyn Williams interception try (sorry, sorry).
He has looked at what he calls the ‘myth’ of rugby being Wales ’s favourite sport.
“On a typical Saturday afternoon in winter you’d find more Welshmen out walking, playing football, and even more playing golf than you’d find playing rugby,” he said in his academic paper entitled “Are the Welsh obsessed with rugby”.
Indeed Prof, indeed, and if DIY ever gets classified as a sport then the numbers of man traipsing down aisles in the hell of B&Q will outnumber all of the above many times over.
He pointed out that in New Zealand more than twice as many men play rugby than do in Wales . Fair point Professor, fair point. They also strongarm in every South Sea islander they can persuade to become New Zealandish, but then after our own rum record in grandfathering in players with dubious, well non-existent, Welsh ancestry, I guess we can’t cast too many aspersions.
But while Prof Tanner found attendance at club games was low compared to football, attitudes changed for the internationals.
In fact we pride ourselves on our rugby above language, music and culture.
Not after the weekend we don’t.
Professor Tanner, who obviously has a promising career ahead of him as a clairvoyant, should he ever choose to give up the day job said: “If we play the Welsh way and lose to one of the top teams, then stoical Welsh fans will have a few beers and look to the new season.”
“If we lose to a smaller nation…the media will be sharpening their knives.”
Only knives?
Still the WRU have blunted the attack with the sacking of Gareth Jenkins and now we’ll go through a period of navel-gazing misery as we try to pick a new coach and assess what we’re going to do to stop our misery being compounded in the six nations.
But Prof Tanner has hit upon something when he talks about the numbers of people actually playing rugby.
If you look at the way in which the South Sea islands produce such prodigious numbers of good players relative to their populations you can’t help but notice how many of them actually play the game.
If you have the majority of your population playing a game at some level then you will discover where the talent lies.
Wales has for too long rested on the laurels of its players in the South, fantastically gifted though many of them were.
The game has changed and if we are to consistently compete at international level we have to make the most of all three million of our population, not just the southern section.
And its no use looking at what the adult population do now, we’ve already lost that generation. We need to be promoting rugby in junior schools so that when kids have a kick-about, while most of the time it will be football, sometimes it will be rugby.
Compared to giant nations like England we punch above our weight, but we place too much emphasis on beating the English in the Six Nations and not enough on the World Cup.
Beating England might be supremely satisfying, but progress in the World Cup would rejuvenate the game and give the young players of tomorrow something to emulate.
Every New Zealand schoolboy dreams of being an All Black. What the WRU needs to do is make the red shirt the aspiration of every young person in Wales .
WITH the prophets of doom gathered around the housing market one section of society ought to be raising a grim smile.
The first-time buyers in Wales , that most endangered of species now has a chance to get on the housing ladder.
It’s predicted that house prices will actually fall next year which will come as a great relief, not least to those of us heartily fed-up with pub bores who tell you how much equity they’re got in their house (only now they’ll bore us about how much it’s fallen of course).
But what will be interesting will be whether, in a falling market, young people choose to stay in Wales .
My theory has always been that young people leave Wales for all manner of reasons, just one of which is house prices. Good jobs and the desire to live in a big city count for a lot more.
Those who argue that the sole reason people leave is house prices should be able to prove me wrong this time next year.
Too late Roger, too late, we were already ripping ourselves asunder when yet another Fijian crossed the try line.
But I suspect Lewis knows his words will fall on deaf ears, after all in almost the same breath he said: “ Rugby defines us as a nation and unites us as a nation.”
Being defined by something and then getting a good drubbing at it does not make for an easy life.
I should have seen it coming though. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I debated the merits of rugby at length with a football fan who believed it was not worth watching because it didn’t produce upsets.
Di I not hear the tramp, tramp, tramp of hostages to fortune on the march as I assured him that it jolly well did, and what’s more rugby was a joy to watch even when you lost?
When I thought of underdogs triumphing I was thinking of plucky little Samoa (population 214,000) or brave little Tonga (population 102,000), against England .
I wasn’t really thinking of Fiji (population 853,000) doing Wales (population 3 million) like a turkey.
I’m sure it wasn’t in the WRU script either, though given a record of 13 defeats in 20 games you could say we all saw it coming, we just hoped it could have been in the quarter finals.
Given what happened in France, a piece of work by Bangor academic Professor Duncan Tanner was about as perfectly timed as a Martyn Williams interception try (sorry, sorry).
He has looked at what he calls the ‘myth’ of rugby being Wales ’s favourite sport.
“On a typical Saturday afternoon in winter you’d find more Welshmen out walking, playing football, and even more playing golf than you’d find playing rugby,” he said in his academic paper entitled “Are the Welsh obsessed with rugby”.
Indeed Prof, indeed, and if DIY ever gets classified as a sport then the numbers of man traipsing down aisles in the hell of B&Q will outnumber all of the above many times over.
He pointed out that in New Zealand more than twice as many men play rugby than do in Wales . Fair point Professor, fair point. They also strongarm in every South Sea islander they can persuade to become New Zealandish, but then after our own rum record in grandfathering in players with dubious, well non-existent, Welsh ancestry, I guess we can’t cast too many aspersions.
But while Prof Tanner found attendance at club games was low compared to football, attitudes changed for the internationals.
In fact we pride ourselves on our rugby above language, music and culture.
Not after the weekend we don’t.
Professor Tanner, who obviously has a promising career ahead of him as a clairvoyant, should he ever choose to give up the day job said: “If we play the Welsh way and lose to one of the top teams, then stoical Welsh fans will have a few beers and look to the new season.”
“If we lose to a smaller nation…the media will be sharpening their knives.”
Only knives?
Still the WRU have blunted the attack with the sacking of Gareth Jenkins and now we’ll go through a period of navel-gazing misery as we try to pick a new coach and assess what we’re going to do to stop our misery being compounded in the six nations.
But Prof Tanner has hit upon something when he talks about the numbers of people actually playing rugby.
If you look at the way in which the South Sea islands produce such prodigious numbers of good players relative to their populations you can’t help but notice how many of them actually play the game.
If you have the majority of your population playing a game at some level then you will discover where the talent lies.
Wales has for too long rested on the laurels of its players in the South, fantastically gifted though many of them were.
The game has changed and if we are to consistently compete at international level we have to make the most of all three million of our population, not just the southern section.
And its no use looking at what the adult population do now, we’ve already lost that generation. We need to be promoting rugby in junior schools so that when kids have a kick-about, while most of the time it will be football, sometimes it will be rugby.
Compared to giant nations like England we punch above our weight, but we place too much emphasis on beating the English in the Six Nations and not enough on the World Cup.
Beating England might be supremely satisfying, but progress in the World Cup would rejuvenate the game and give the young players of tomorrow something to emulate.
Every New Zealand schoolboy dreams of being an All Black. What the WRU needs to do is make the red shirt the aspiration of every young person in Wales .
WITH the prophets of doom gathered around the housing market one section of society ought to be raising a grim smile.
The first-time buyers in Wales , that most endangered of species now has a chance to get on the housing ladder.
It’s predicted that house prices will actually fall next year which will come as a great relief, not least to those of us heartily fed-up with pub bores who tell you how much equity they’re got in their house (only now they’ll bore us about how much it’s fallen of course).
But what will be interesting will be whether, in a falling market, young people choose to stay in Wales .
My theory has always been that young people leave Wales for all manner of reasons, just one of which is house prices. Good jobs and the desire to live in a big city count for a lot more.
Those who argue that the sole reason people leave is house prices should be able to prove me wrong this time next year.
Column, September 25, 2007
AS you read this over the Corn Flakes you may well be looking across the table at a son or daughter, uniform on, ready to go to school.
As a good parent you will take a keen interest in their education, you will have told said son or daughter how important school – happiest days of their lives and clichés like that – having been through it yourself you will be aware that how they do will have a big impact on the rest of their life.
If you are sending your child to a school in Denbighshire you might well be wondering why you bother.
The report, and I have to say it is one of the worst I have everread about an education authority, can be read in full via a link provided by the Daily Post here: http://videos.icnetwork.co.uk/icnorthwales/estyn.pdf
But if you are a parent in Denbighshire, be warned, it makes for grim reading.
Here are a few of the key remarks you might want to contemplate:
“The political leadership of education in the authority is ineffective. At both cabinet level, and in the scrutiny committee, challenges to officers about the performance of the education service are not focused enough. Accountability for the poor performance of the education service and schools is unclear. Overall, the authority has a poor track record in managing change and making improvements in education.”
“The authority does not have an effective planning system for improvement in education.
“The authority places too much emphasis on performance measurement and not enough on performance management.
“The authority has not demonstrated that education and the raising of the standards achieved by all children and young people are its priority.
“There are many important barriers to improving education services in Denbighshire. These barriers impact on all the services inspected.”
Estyn – the school inspection service for Wales – gives grades in its reports, 1 being the best, 4 meaning shortcomings in important areas. In every category bar one Denbighshire got a grade 4, and in the one that wasn’t a 4 they only got a grade 3.
For years people have believed that an education in Wales was a headstart for their child. Education both in Welsh-medium schools and in English was excellent and parents believed they were doing the best of their children sending them to state schools here.
And for the most part they were justified in that belief – but not in Denbighshire.
Now people there is talk of a whole generation of children whose education has been ruined by the mismanagement by the education authority.
How does an education authority allow a situation to develop like this without someone, somewhere saying ‘hang on, this isn’t right, we’re letting these children down.’
And by someone, I mean someone whose responsibility it is to get things right and who has the power to do so – that means councillors and senior officers within the authority.
I’m sure that teachers and head teachers in the trenches had been warning of the problems they were facing for a long time, but change cannot be imposed from the bottom up, leadership need to come from above.
In a masterpiece of understatement education minister Jane Hutt wrote to council leader Rhiannon Hughes saying she was ‘very concerned’ at the findings of the estyn report. Not as concerned as those of you packing your kids off to a Denbighshire school this morning I’ll wager.
She has the power to intervene in the running of the education authority, but has decided not to at this time. It makes you wonder just how bad things have to get before she would intervene, perhaps that solitary grade 3 has to drop to a 4 so Denbighshire has the full-house of bottom grades.
She has said she will intervene if she is not satisfied with the progress that is being made. That’s all well and good, but she should know that parents of children attending these schools will not allow her the luxury of a lot of time to make these improvements. They are going to want to see results fast, and they are completely justified in that desire.
Education, education, education was the promise of New Labour when it was elected in 1997 and its central to the policies of Plaid Cymru who regard it as a ‘fundamental right.’
Both parties need to do more than just trust Denbighshire to get it right from now on, the children of the county deserve better than that.
I’VE always been a fan of Charlotte Church.
I’ve not always been keen on the fact that when summing up Wales, as English meda types are wont to do, she gets wheeled out as illustration along with Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Treorchy Male Voice Choir.
But what I liked about her was a dogged determination to do things her way, in spite of the brickbats being hurled in her direction, usually by London-based critics who did not know quite how to deal with a Welsh woman with a bit of attitude who could not give two figs what they thinks and write about her (and I’m guessing Charlotte would use a different phrase to ‘two figs’ there)
So it’s congratulations to Charlotte and Gavin Henson on the arrival of their baby daughter.
Pleased to see too that Charlotte has gone for a home birth. Wales is leading the way in promoting home births – a system which is already widespread in other parts of Europe, but which for some reason the UK has lagged behind in adopting.
We don’t know the baby’s name as a six-figure magazine deal hangs on upon baby being revealed for the first time somewhere else. Good luck to them, rugby careers and celebrity can be short-lived and now there are three mouths to feed.
As a good parent you will take a keen interest in their education, you will have told said son or daughter how important school – happiest days of their lives and clichés like that – having been through it yourself you will be aware that how they do will have a big impact on the rest of their life.
If you are sending your child to a school in Denbighshire you might well be wondering why you bother.
The report, and I have to say it is one of the worst I have everread about an education authority, can be read in full via a link provided by the Daily Post here: http://videos.icnetwork.co.uk/icnorthwales/estyn.pdf
But if you are a parent in Denbighshire, be warned, it makes for grim reading.
Here are a few of the key remarks you might want to contemplate:
“The political leadership of education in the authority is ineffective. At both cabinet level, and in the scrutiny committee, challenges to officers about the performance of the education service are not focused enough. Accountability for the poor performance of the education service and schools is unclear. Overall, the authority has a poor track record in managing change and making improvements in education.”
“The authority does not have an effective planning system for improvement in education.
“The authority places too much emphasis on performance measurement and not enough on performance management.
“The authority has not demonstrated that education and the raising of the standards achieved by all children and young people are its priority.
“There are many important barriers to improving education services in Denbighshire. These barriers impact on all the services inspected.”
Estyn – the school inspection service for Wales – gives grades in its reports, 1 being the best, 4 meaning shortcomings in important areas. In every category bar one Denbighshire got a grade 4, and in the one that wasn’t a 4 they only got a grade 3.
For years people have believed that an education in Wales was a headstart for their child. Education both in Welsh-medium schools and in English was excellent and parents believed they were doing the best of their children sending them to state schools here.
And for the most part they were justified in that belief – but not in Denbighshire.
Now people there is talk of a whole generation of children whose education has been ruined by the mismanagement by the education authority.
How does an education authority allow a situation to develop like this without someone, somewhere saying ‘hang on, this isn’t right, we’re letting these children down.’
And by someone, I mean someone whose responsibility it is to get things right and who has the power to do so – that means councillors and senior officers within the authority.
I’m sure that teachers and head teachers in the trenches had been warning of the problems they were facing for a long time, but change cannot be imposed from the bottom up, leadership need to come from above.
In a masterpiece of understatement education minister Jane Hutt wrote to council leader Rhiannon Hughes saying she was ‘very concerned’ at the findings of the estyn report. Not as concerned as those of you packing your kids off to a Denbighshire school this morning I’ll wager.
She has the power to intervene in the running of the education authority, but has decided not to at this time. It makes you wonder just how bad things have to get before she would intervene, perhaps that solitary grade 3 has to drop to a 4 so Denbighshire has the full-house of bottom grades.
She has said she will intervene if she is not satisfied with the progress that is being made. That’s all well and good, but she should know that parents of children attending these schools will not allow her the luxury of a lot of time to make these improvements. They are going to want to see results fast, and they are completely justified in that desire.
Education, education, education was the promise of New Labour when it was elected in 1997 and its central to the policies of Plaid Cymru who regard it as a ‘fundamental right.’
Both parties need to do more than just trust Denbighshire to get it right from now on, the children of the county deserve better than that.
I’VE always been a fan of Charlotte Church.
I’ve not always been keen on the fact that when summing up Wales, as English meda types are wont to do, she gets wheeled out as illustration along with Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Treorchy Male Voice Choir.
But what I liked about her was a dogged determination to do things her way, in spite of the brickbats being hurled in her direction, usually by London-based critics who did not know quite how to deal with a Welsh woman with a bit of attitude who could not give two figs what they thinks and write about her (and I’m guessing Charlotte would use a different phrase to ‘two figs’ there)
So it’s congratulations to Charlotte and Gavin Henson on the arrival of their baby daughter.
Pleased to see too that Charlotte has gone for a home birth. Wales is leading the way in promoting home births – a system which is already widespread in other parts of Europe, but which for some reason the UK has lagged behind in adopting.
We don’t know the baby’s name as a six-figure magazine deal hangs on upon baby being revealed for the first time somewhere else. Good luck to them, rugby careers and celebrity can be short-lived and now there are three mouths to feed.
Column, September 18, 2007
THERE was a time when, if you wanted to warn the citizens of the World of the impending arrival of little green men, who were sending you messages through your tin-foil hat, the only way to spread the word was to get on your soap-box at Hyde Park Corner.
It was the repository of the angry, the disaffected and the nut-job.
Then Tim Berners-Lee came up with bright idea of the Internet. Couldn’t he just have let it lie?
Now every wibbling Tom, Dick and Harry has access to the wired-up world to present their views in all their glory.
No longer are they limited to how much they can shout out before the men in white coats come along to take them to the room with the comfy walls, now they can spread the mad word 24/7.
The web has been hailed as the great democratiser of information. No longer is it the preserve of the likes of journalists such as myself, conspiring with my press baron masters to control the flow of news to the masses.
Now anyone with a PC can set up their own website and hey-presto, everyone’s a ‘commentator’ on whatever subject takes their beady-eyed fancy that particular day.
But a word of caution.
Electronic communication, in whatever form, has a tendency to exclude all reason. The more technically advanced it is, the less human it renders you.
There was a time when we communicated face-to-face, by letter, or by phone, and that was pretty much it. Talking to someone in their presence does, for the most part, have a tendency to force us to adopt some norms of civilisation, politeness, common decency etc.
The act of writing a letter, committing something to the permanence of paper that can be treasured, copied, or produced in a court of law, makes you think twice about intemperate language.
The telephone means whoever is on the other end can answer back, you can hear their tone and gauge the effect your own words are having.
All that goes out the window as soon as you sit down at a little screen with the World Wide Web as your oyster.
Normally sane and rational people suddenly have an attack of the screaming ab-dabs when they are put in command of a mouse and they start giving us the benefit of their obviously pent-up thoughts on life, the universe and everything.
E-mail is another nightmare in this respect. It’s instant and having tapped out a message that will make its recipient burn with rage, it is despatched at the click of a mouse, while a snail-mail letter once re-read, might have been rewritten into something less inflammatory.
Chatrooms, supposedly conducive to open debate, are quite the reverse, and become a virtual shouting match with more mud flying than there is at the bottom of a scrum on a wet weekend.
I have been unwise enough to indulge in these on news-sites and, having entered for a quick look at what was causing debate, have found myself, three hours later, in furious debate with some American redneck over the situation in the Middle East. A situation which, I hasten to add, it was patently obvious both of us knew nothing about, other than we disagreed with each other.
You have to wonder quite why people indulge in such grandstanding. Perhaps that what the higher-ups in the Labour party in Wales are thinking about David Collins’ contribution to the debate over the language. Namely, that he thought it was ‘brain dead.’ Unfortunately he thought it out loud on a website and was thus pilloried by every political opponent who smelt blood in the water.
Mr Collins, researcher for Vale of Clwyd AM, Ann Jones, has said it was a slip of the keyboard and that he meant to say it was a dead language, not brain-dead. So that’s alright then. But I would just say that the difference between the word dead and the phrase brain dead is pretty significant and that’s a long enough slip of the keyboard to stretch credulity.
The thing is, we should be able to have a calm, rational debate about the future of Welsh and the place it has in our culture. It is a minority language, albeit a large minority and more and more young people have a working knowledge of it now that they have to do it throughout their school life.
But using phrases like ‘dead’ or ‘brain-dead’ tends to halt any advance of that debate dead in its tracks, because it’s like red rag to a bull to those committed to the language surviving and prospering.
They then attack the person who made such remarks, call for Ann Jones to act, call for the Welsh Labour party to act, and they all naturally get on the defensive and issue statements distancing themselves from Mr Collins while not actually doing anything, probably in the not unrealistic hope that it’s a storm in a tea-cup and it’ll all blow over.
Until next time.
The fact is that for a politician, for Mr Collins harbours political ambition, in Wales to say Welsh is ‘brain-dead’ or even dead, is a pretty dumb thing to do.
I don’t mind my politicians being outspoken and opinionated, it’s what they’re there for – but being stupid is unforgivable.
ONLY in Wales do you get your rugby in stereo.
In one Cardiff pub last week and there was club rugby on one screen, in Welsh and World Cup on the opposite side of the bar, with patrons swivelling according to where the action was.
And it’s a joy to be in a bar where, when a transgression occurs, those present, nod, or disagree, but do not sit nonplussed waiting for the one ex-rugby player present (me) to explain to them the dark mysteries of the ruck (I was a winger, what would I know about one of them? I would just be lying at the bottom of one screaming @not the face, not the face’)
I ended up debating, at length, with a football fan the point of watching a World Cup where minor nations never produce upsets (he had, it turned out, missed Argentina’s opener against France)
I think that, unlike football, you can enjoy a rugby match in which your team go down fighting. Such as Wales Australia . But perhaps you enjoy it more knowing that the English didn’t even put a point on the board against South Africa .
Nil.
Zip.
Nada.
Nul points from the South African jury.
Joy.
It was the repository of the angry, the disaffected and the nut-job.
Then Tim Berners-Lee came up with bright idea of the Internet. Couldn’t he just have let it lie?
Now every wibbling Tom, Dick and Harry has access to the wired-up world to present their views in all their glory.
No longer are they limited to how much they can shout out before the men in white coats come along to take them to the room with the comfy walls, now they can spread the mad word 24/7.
The web has been hailed as the great democratiser of information. No longer is it the preserve of the likes of journalists such as myself, conspiring with my press baron masters to control the flow of news to the masses.
Now anyone with a PC can set up their own website and hey-presto, everyone’s a ‘commentator’ on whatever subject takes their beady-eyed fancy that particular day.
But a word of caution.
Electronic communication, in whatever form, has a tendency to exclude all reason. The more technically advanced it is, the less human it renders you.
There was a time when we communicated face-to-face, by letter, or by phone, and that was pretty much it. Talking to someone in their presence does, for the most part, have a tendency to force us to adopt some norms of civilisation, politeness, common decency etc.
The act of writing a letter, committing something to the permanence of paper that can be treasured, copied, or produced in a court of law, makes you think twice about intemperate language.
The telephone means whoever is on the other end can answer back, you can hear their tone and gauge the effect your own words are having.
All that goes out the window as soon as you sit down at a little screen with the World Wide Web as your oyster.
Normally sane and rational people suddenly have an attack of the screaming ab-dabs when they are put in command of a mouse and they start giving us the benefit of their obviously pent-up thoughts on life, the universe and everything.
E-mail is another nightmare in this respect. It’s instant and having tapped out a message that will make its recipient burn with rage, it is despatched at the click of a mouse, while a snail-mail letter once re-read, might have been rewritten into something less inflammatory.
Chatrooms, supposedly conducive to open debate, are quite the reverse, and become a virtual shouting match with more mud flying than there is at the bottom of a scrum on a wet weekend.
I have been unwise enough to indulge in these on news-sites and, having entered for a quick look at what was causing debate, have found myself, three hours later, in furious debate with some American redneck over the situation in the Middle East. A situation which, I hasten to add, it was patently obvious both of us knew nothing about, other than we disagreed with each other.
You have to wonder quite why people indulge in such grandstanding. Perhaps that what the higher-ups in the Labour party in Wales are thinking about David Collins’ contribution to the debate over the language. Namely, that he thought it was ‘brain dead.’ Unfortunately he thought it out loud on a website and was thus pilloried by every political opponent who smelt blood in the water.
Mr Collins, researcher for Vale of Clwyd AM, Ann Jones, has said it was a slip of the keyboard and that he meant to say it was a dead language, not brain-dead. So that’s alright then. But I would just say that the difference between the word dead and the phrase brain dead is pretty significant and that’s a long enough slip of the keyboard to stretch credulity.
The thing is, we should be able to have a calm, rational debate about the future of Welsh and the place it has in our culture. It is a minority language, albeit a large minority and more and more young people have a working knowledge of it now that they have to do it throughout their school life.
But using phrases like ‘dead’ or ‘brain-dead’ tends to halt any advance of that debate dead in its tracks, because it’s like red rag to a bull to those committed to the language surviving and prospering.
They then attack the person who made such remarks, call for Ann Jones to act, call for the Welsh Labour party to act, and they all naturally get on the defensive and issue statements distancing themselves from Mr Collins while not actually doing anything, probably in the not unrealistic hope that it’s a storm in a tea-cup and it’ll all blow over.
Until next time.
The fact is that for a politician, for Mr Collins harbours political ambition, in Wales to say Welsh is ‘brain-dead’ or even dead, is a pretty dumb thing to do.
I don’t mind my politicians being outspoken and opinionated, it’s what they’re there for – but being stupid is unforgivable.
ONLY in Wales do you get your rugby in stereo.
In one Cardiff pub last week and there was club rugby on one screen, in Welsh and World Cup on the opposite side of the bar, with patrons swivelling according to where the action was.
And it’s a joy to be in a bar where, when a transgression occurs, those present, nod, or disagree, but do not sit nonplussed waiting for the one ex-rugby player present (me) to explain to them the dark mysteries of the ruck (I was a winger, what would I know about one of them? I would just be lying at the bottom of one screaming @not the face, not the face’)
I ended up debating, at length, with a football fan the point of watching a World Cup where minor nations never produce upsets (he had, it turned out, missed Argentina’s opener against France)
I think that, unlike football, you can enjoy a rugby match in which your team go down fighting. Such as Wales Australia . But perhaps you enjoy it more knowing that the English didn’t even put a point on the board against South Africa .
Nil.
Zip.
Nada.
Nul points from the South African jury.
Joy.
Column, September 11, 2007
IT’S a rum time to be a child.
Either you live a life of mollycoddled, barely-contained terror, the imminent victim of whatever predator your parents imagine to be lurking around the corner, or else you are the source of all society’s ills, to be hounded, corralled, CCTVed, ASBOed and generally blamed until you hit 18, at which time you can shift the blame onto your younger siblings.
I suppose behooded youth are responsible for their own tiny proportion of the crime that is committed in this country, although their constant presence on the front page of certain hysterical London-based tabloids might lead you to believe that little Johnny next door is a Ronnie Biggs in the making just because he cycles on the pavement.
However, I’m guessing that on North Wales Police’s ‘most wanted’ noticeboard, you don’t find too many four-year-old girl’s in purple knitted cardigans.
Alright, little Karen Lewis’s cardigan did have a hood, but as hoodlums go she’s about as threatening a presence as Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell.
So, maybe, just maybe, the staff at Les Harker’s amusement emporium could have exercised a modicum of discretion and let her keep her hood up.
I doubt somehow that little Karen’s plan was to empty the 2p machine of its coppery contents before making off safe in the knowledge that she had been hidden from the pervasive CCTV by her gran’s best impenetrable double-knit.
Thinking about it, perhaps the villains on Crimewatch marching into banks and building societies wearing a pair of 30-denier Pretty Pollies to disguise their mush are missing a trick. It’s purple-knits they should be wearing, after all who would suspect them if they look like an advert for Ladybird kidswear?
I’m sure Rhyl suffers its fair share at the hands of youths with nothing better to do than go visit its arcades, an I’m no expert in criminal profiling, bjt I’m guessing that it’s not four-year-old tots that the emporium owners want to worry about capturing on CCTV, but rather males some 10 years or so older.
Like I said, it’s a strange time to be a kid. In Denbighshire they’re planning to get them to eat healthy options by locking them into the school.
They’re fed up with kids voting with their feet and walking to the nearest chippy instead of eating a Jamie Olive healthy meal. So they’re considering a lunchtime lockdown to give them no option but to eat their greens.
They are of course reckoning without a child’s ability to go without a meal if it contains too much greenery and not enough sugar. I’ve a theory that they’ve got some little fat reserve somewhere so, like a camel, when sugary times are a bit lean they can just plod on, refusing food until mum and dad relent and buy them a pack of Smarties.
But this is the plan, deny them the burger bar in the hope that hunger will drive them into the arms of the salad bar.
But doesn’t this sort of defeat the whole ethos of Jamie’s healthy eating plan – that you should convince children of the virtues of healthy eating by gentle persuasion, not the sort of incarceration employed on Alcatraz?
But why should children follow by example when the example we set is so bad? If children don’t eat well in school it’s because they don’t eat well at home. Rather than suspecting hoodie-wearing teens of every ill imaginable, why not wait to see how they behave rather than demanding to catch them on film on the off-chance they turn out to be a criminal?
In fact, if you want them to behave like a human being, why not treat them like one?
THE disappearance of Madeleine McCann, see which theory you prefer.
Her parents, having accidentally killed her, cook up a plan in the couple of hours before they have to go to dinner with friends to conceal her death.
Then they hide her body.
Then they go to dinner as if nothing had happened.
Then they call the police and manage to convince them that their daughter had vanished, having somehow staged the scene in their apartment in the time they went to check the children during their meal.
Then, despite the near 24/7 media scrutiny, they manage to move her body, according to police, thus leaving behind a DNA trace of Madeleine’s blood (despite the fact that, having supposedly died at least 25 days earlier, any body would not be leaving behind much blood.) Furthermore, any parent’s clothing will be chock-full of their child’s DNA, because, well, they’re their parents and when they get any bump of scratch, who do they come running to?
Then, instead of doing a few press conference and fading into obscurity, which any guilty person would do, they embark on a PR campaign the like of which we have never seen, culminating in a meeting with the Pope. Low profile it certainly isn’t.
And all hatched in the frantic moments after the supposed accidental death of a child.
Or do you believe theory number 2.
An incompetent police service utterly cocks up the crime scene and fails to seal it off for proper forensic examination.
Then apartment is then let out again, even though it needs more forensic tests later.
Then, coming under increasing pressure to end this case because, well, the family holiday market is fickle and would you take your child somewhere where there a was a child abductor still at large… the police concoct a fanciful plan to throw suspicion on the parents and to take the heat off themselves, just before the parents are due to fly home.
Then, having successfully slung mud at the family, they quietly scale down their investigation, thus allowing their tourism industry to get back to normal.
I may have concerns at the way the middle classes circled the wagons to defend the McCanns’ actions, but, given what we know I don’t believe for a moment they had anhting to do with her disappearance and if that is the case the behaviour of the Portuguese police is an affront to justice and has allowed the true abductor of Madeleine to go free.
Either you live a life of mollycoddled, barely-contained terror, the imminent victim of whatever predator your parents imagine to be lurking around the corner, or else you are the source of all society’s ills, to be hounded, corralled, CCTVed, ASBOed and generally blamed until you hit 18, at which time you can shift the blame onto your younger siblings.
I suppose behooded youth are responsible for their own tiny proportion of the crime that is committed in this country, although their constant presence on the front page of certain hysterical London-based tabloids might lead you to believe that little Johnny next door is a Ronnie Biggs in the making just because he cycles on the pavement.
However, I’m guessing that on North Wales Police’s ‘most wanted’ noticeboard, you don’t find too many four-year-old girl’s in purple knitted cardigans.
Alright, little Karen Lewis’s cardigan did have a hood, but as hoodlums go she’s about as threatening a presence as Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell.
So, maybe, just maybe, the staff at Les Harker’s amusement emporium could have exercised a modicum of discretion and let her keep her hood up.
I doubt somehow that little Karen’s plan was to empty the 2p machine of its coppery contents before making off safe in the knowledge that she had been hidden from the pervasive CCTV by her gran’s best impenetrable double-knit.
Thinking about it, perhaps the villains on Crimewatch marching into banks and building societies wearing a pair of 30-denier Pretty Pollies to disguise their mush are missing a trick. It’s purple-knits they should be wearing, after all who would suspect them if they look like an advert for Ladybird kidswear?
I’m sure Rhyl suffers its fair share at the hands of youths with nothing better to do than go visit its arcades, an I’m no expert in criminal profiling, bjt I’m guessing that it’s not four-year-old tots that the emporium owners want to worry about capturing on CCTV, but rather males some 10 years or so older.
Like I said, it’s a strange time to be a kid. In Denbighshire they’re planning to get them to eat healthy options by locking them into the school.
They’re fed up with kids voting with their feet and walking to the nearest chippy instead of eating a Jamie Olive healthy meal. So they’re considering a lunchtime lockdown to give them no option but to eat their greens.
They are of course reckoning without a child’s ability to go without a meal if it contains too much greenery and not enough sugar. I’ve a theory that they’ve got some little fat reserve somewhere so, like a camel, when sugary times are a bit lean they can just plod on, refusing food until mum and dad relent and buy them a pack of Smarties.
But this is the plan, deny them the burger bar in the hope that hunger will drive them into the arms of the salad bar.
But doesn’t this sort of defeat the whole ethos of Jamie’s healthy eating plan – that you should convince children of the virtues of healthy eating by gentle persuasion, not the sort of incarceration employed on Alcatraz?
But why should children follow by example when the example we set is so bad? If children don’t eat well in school it’s because they don’t eat well at home. Rather than suspecting hoodie-wearing teens of every ill imaginable, why not wait to see how they behave rather than demanding to catch them on film on the off-chance they turn out to be a criminal?
In fact, if you want them to behave like a human being, why not treat them like one?
THE disappearance of Madeleine McCann, see which theory you prefer.
Her parents, having accidentally killed her, cook up a plan in the couple of hours before they have to go to dinner with friends to conceal her death.
Then they hide her body.
Then they go to dinner as if nothing had happened.
Then they call the police and manage to convince them that their daughter had vanished, having somehow staged the scene in their apartment in the time they went to check the children during their meal.
Then, despite the near 24/7 media scrutiny, they manage to move her body, according to police, thus leaving behind a DNA trace of Madeleine’s blood (despite the fact that, having supposedly died at least 25 days earlier, any body would not be leaving behind much blood.) Furthermore, any parent’s clothing will be chock-full of their child’s DNA, because, well, they’re their parents and when they get any bump of scratch, who do they come running to?
Then, instead of doing a few press conference and fading into obscurity, which any guilty person would do, they embark on a PR campaign the like of which we have never seen, culminating in a meeting with the Pope. Low profile it certainly isn’t.
And all hatched in the frantic moments after the supposed accidental death of a child.
Or do you believe theory number 2.
An incompetent police service utterly cocks up the crime scene and fails to seal it off for proper forensic examination.
Then apartment is then let out again, even though it needs more forensic tests later.
Then, coming under increasing pressure to end this case because, well, the family holiday market is fickle and would you take your child somewhere where there a was a child abductor still at large… the police concoct a fanciful plan to throw suspicion on the parents and to take the heat off themselves, just before the parents are due to fly home.
Then, having successfully slung mud at the family, they quietly scale down their investigation, thus allowing their tourism industry to get back to normal.
I may have concerns at the way the middle classes circled the wagons to defend the McCanns’ actions, but, given what we know I don’t believe for a moment they had anhting to do with her disappearance and if that is the case the behaviour of the Portuguese police is an affront to justice and has allowed the true abductor of Madeleine to go free.
Column, September 4, 2007
IN years to come it will be like the question: “What did you do in the war Daddy?” – What did you do when Di died?
Strange now, 10 years later, how there seem to be more people wondering at the mass explosion of very public mourning that broke out after her untimely death in a Paris tunnel than there are people who admit to the flower-throwing, grizzling grief we saw in those tumultuous days afterward.
There must have been some doing the grieving, I’ve seen the pictures again this week – grown men blubbing like babies as they gently placed bunches of flowers at the edge of the growing carpets that were laid outside the Royal palaces.
But it was worse than that – even though the histrionics displayed by those who never knew her and had never met her was bad enough. What was worse was the self-appointed grief police who were on patrol in our pubs, clubs and offices as the nation mourned.
You needed to show you were suitably bereft by:
Not smiling
Expressing how you ‘could not believe she was gone’ every 10 minutes or so
Warning prophetically that this would be the end of the monarchy
Solemnly intoning ‘the queen of people’s hearts’ when yet another clip of her appeared on TV
If you weren’t doing any or all of the above to the satisfaction of the grief police you were no doubt a heartless swine who probably tortured kittens for a hobby.
The only people smiling, and not even they were doing it in public, were the florists. And how is a bunch of soon to be wilted flowers an appropriate tribute. Save us from this strange desire the British seem to have adopted to place flowers ‘in tribute’ to someone. It had started before Diana of course, with little roadside shrines to those departed in crashes, but it attained its full expression in the carpets of decaying foliage that gathered outside the Royal palaces.
There is a word for what went on in Britain in those September days 10 years ago – weird.
I’m sorry, but if your public outpourings of grief for a woman you had ever known or even met are such that her funeral is taken out of the hands of those who did love her and becomes a public occasion, you’re weird.
What those grieving ‘their princess’ seemed to forget was that she was the mother of two young sons and they above anyone else had a right to grieve.
And yet what happened to them? Were they allowed to cry for their mother at her funeral like any other normal young boy?
No, they had to follow her coffin on a gun carriage because the crowds clamouring for a state occasion would settle for nothing less and certainly nothing private.
That’s why there seem to be more people know who wonder at such public mourning than there are people who actually did it – after all if you had denied two young boys the right to properly mourn their dead mum all because of your overwhelming compulsion to hurl daffs at her hearse, you might have got a bit reticent as well.
Even now, 10 years after, there are still people who regard her death as public property. There were calls for her memorial service to be broadcast on giant screens for the inevitable crowds that would turn up – which would have seemed a bit like overkill to the handfuls of foreign tourists who were hanging about.
There are still people who think they own her memory to the extent that they can dictate who attends her memorial service and that the Duchess of Cornwall was persona non grata, even though she was invited by William and Harry.
That is weird.
One woman even said she felt like she had won the lottery when it was announced that Camilla would not be attending. You would have to have a fairly empty life I would suggest to express emotions like that about a memorial service for a woman you didn’t even know.
Perhaps that’s the reason for the public outpouring of grief that happened 10 years ago. The buttoned-up British finally, briefly, found a person they could have a good blub over in public and no-one would think the worse of them.
Now I think many of those who grieved so loud and long are slightly embarrassed by their actions back then. Perhaps that’s why, for her memorial service last week, the giant screens called for by some national papers were not needed because only a smattering of people turned up as spectators.
That left the memorial service to those who really knew and loved her – her two sons. Which is how it should have been 10 years ago.
IT has always been said that it is unwise to pick a fight with a solitary young drinker in Hereford.
Chances are the young man might well be from the nearby SAS headquarters.
However, as one hoodlum in Harlech found out, there has been an unforeseen result of the Army’s deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He took a dislike to two young men having a quiet pint together in Harlech. He left and was unwise enough to return with a knife.
They were only armed with their bare hands…and combat experience in Afghanistan.
I dare say that if you’ve spent several months having the Taliban fire rocket-propelled grenades at you, a drunk waving a knife in Harlech might seem an amusing diversion.
In the understated terminology of court proceedings it was said that he was ‘disarmed’ by the soldiers. Suffice to say he was duly dealt with – and I’m hoping it was none too gently – and delivered into the arms of the law.
I hope the two brothers in arms went on to enjoy their night out. They deserve bravery awards for their service in Afghanistan, but they shouldn’t really have to earn them on a night out in their home town.
Strange now, 10 years later, how there seem to be more people wondering at the mass explosion of very public mourning that broke out after her untimely death in a Paris tunnel than there are people who admit to the flower-throwing, grizzling grief we saw in those tumultuous days afterward.
There must have been some doing the grieving, I’ve seen the pictures again this week – grown men blubbing like babies as they gently placed bunches of flowers at the edge of the growing carpets that were laid outside the Royal palaces.
But it was worse than that – even though the histrionics displayed by those who never knew her and had never met her was bad enough. What was worse was the self-appointed grief police who were on patrol in our pubs, clubs and offices as the nation mourned.
You needed to show you were suitably bereft by:
Not smiling
Expressing how you ‘could not believe she was gone’ every 10 minutes or so
Warning prophetically that this would be the end of the monarchy
Solemnly intoning ‘the queen of people’s hearts’ when yet another clip of her appeared on TV
If you weren’t doing any or all of the above to the satisfaction of the grief police you were no doubt a heartless swine who probably tortured kittens for a hobby.
The only people smiling, and not even they were doing it in public, were the florists. And how is a bunch of soon to be wilted flowers an appropriate tribute. Save us from this strange desire the British seem to have adopted to place flowers ‘in tribute’ to someone. It had started before Diana of course, with little roadside shrines to those departed in crashes, but it attained its full expression in the carpets of decaying foliage that gathered outside the Royal palaces.
There is a word for what went on in Britain in those September days 10 years ago – weird.
I’m sorry, but if your public outpourings of grief for a woman you had ever known or even met are such that her funeral is taken out of the hands of those who did love her and becomes a public occasion, you’re weird.
What those grieving ‘their princess’ seemed to forget was that she was the mother of two young sons and they above anyone else had a right to grieve.
And yet what happened to them? Were they allowed to cry for their mother at her funeral like any other normal young boy?
No, they had to follow her coffin on a gun carriage because the crowds clamouring for a state occasion would settle for nothing less and certainly nothing private.
That’s why there seem to be more people know who wonder at such public mourning than there are people who actually did it – after all if you had denied two young boys the right to properly mourn their dead mum all because of your overwhelming compulsion to hurl daffs at her hearse, you might have got a bit reticent as well.
Even now, 10 years after, there are still people who regard her death as public property. There were calls for her memorial service to be broadcast on giant screens for the inevitable crowds that would turn up – which would have seemed a bit like overkill to the handfuls of foreign tourists who were hanging about.
There are still people who think they own her memory to the extent that they can dictate who attends her memorial service and that the Duchess of Cornwall was persona non grata, even though she was invited by William and Harry.
That is weird.
One woman even said she felt like she had won the lottery when it was announced that Camilla would not be attending. You would have to have a fairly empty life I would suggest to express emotions like that about a memorial service for a woman you didn’t even know.
Perhaps that’s the reason for the public outpouring of grief that happened 10 years ago. The buttoned-up British finally, briefly, found a person they could have a good blub over in public and no-one would think the worse of them.
Now I think many of those who grieved so loud and long are slightly embarrassed by their actions back then. Perhaps that’s why, for her memorial service last week, the giant screens called for by some national papers were not needed because only a smattering of people turned up as spectators.
That left the memorial service to those who really knew and loved her – her two sons. Which is how it should have been 10 years ago.
IT has always been said that it is unwise to pick a fight with a solitary young drinker in Hereford.
Chances are the young man might well be from the nearby SAS headquarters.
However, as one hoodlum in Harlech found out, there has been an unforeseen result of the Army’s deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He took a dislike to two young men having a quiet pint together in Harlech. He left and was unwise enough to return with a knife.
They were only armed with their bare hands…and combat experience in Afghanistan.
I dare say that if you’ve spent several months having the Taliban fire rocket-propelled grenades at you, a drunk waving a knife in Harlech might seem an amusing diversion.
In the understated terminology of court proceedings it was said that he was ‘disarmed’ by the soldiers. Suffice to say he was duly dealt with – and I’m hoping it was none too gently – and delivered into the arms of the law.
I hope the two brothers in arms went on to enjoy their night out. They deserve bravery awards for their service in Afghanistan, but they shouldn’t really have to earn them on a night out in their home town.
Column, August 28, 2007
IN the past few years it has been my great good fortune to work with a number of young people from the South Wales valleys.
Always of a relentlessly sunny disposition they were, don’t you believe a word from those who would suggest that the valleys imbue people with a demeanour that some would describe as well…gloomy.
Not just gloomy, in a perpetual state of Stygian gloom so inky that, like a black hole they actually consume light. No, no, they are the little rays of sunshine the lot of them.
But, my being North Walian, of a Gog, as the braver among them would eventually sum up the courage to call me, there was never a sense of a shared identity, save for the days when we united in abusing the English in the rugby.
Then eventually, usually as we parted company on a leaving do, they would summon up the courage to say what they really thought.
“David, you’re not really Welsh are yew? I mean you’re not from Welsh Weaallls are yew.”
Welsh Wales for the purposes of this conversation being whatever grassed over spoil tip was home to them.
The reason they had come to this conclusion was that because they had an accent like Huw Edwards, Charlotte Church or the little dragon off of Ivor the Engine, their Welsh credentials were beyond reproach.
My North East Welsh accent, like a Scouser on the run trying to disguise his roots, meant that I was, well, they thought, English.
A few years ago this would be akin to lighting the blue touch paper and standing well back, now I am resigned to us being a nation forever divided.
The problem is that many of those claiming Welshness because they sound like a tenor from Treorchy, couldn’t actually speak Welsh. For them it was how you sounded that was important, not what you spoke.
This division is illustrated by the Early Day Motion (think of it as Westminster graffiti, a sort of political peeing against a lamp-post), put down by South Wales MP Chris Bryant about train announcments which says: “That this House notes that the announcements at all railway stations in Wales are made in Welsh first and then in English; wholly supports the policy of bilingual announcements; but believes that it would be far more sensible and far more convenient for passengers, whether regular commuters or local visitors, if announcements at each station were made first in the language used by the majority of the local population.”
Wholly supports bilingual announcements as long as English comes first in parts of Wales then.
And who is to decide at which point English-first stops and Welsh-first starts?
This is just a mirror image of the old Fro Gymraeg that was suggested by Cymuned way back, but this time if the English-speakers telling us this is English Wales and then over to the West you get Welsh Wales.
The problem is that you create the division in visitors’ minds and then they wonder why anyone bother with Welsh at all. If they can get by without it in the Valleys, why do those bothersome folk in the North keep it up.
You think these attitudes don’t exist but only this week a friend returning from the Llŷn said she had found some people there a little ‘unfriendly’, when asked how, she said, oh, we went into shops and they were speaking Welsh.
It was suggested that had the shop been in France and the language French she wouldn’t have batted an eyelid – but the Welsh understand English she insisted.
And so we do, and that is our downfall. The Welsh language will not stand or fall because railway announcements are made first in English. But it is just one more sign to people that Welsh doesn’t matter, that as long as you speak English you’ll get by.
Try suggesting that in France, where the majority of people speak English, but hey, prefer to speak the language that they think in, no matter how inconvenient that may be to English tourists.
Welsh Wales starts at the Croeso I Gymru signs and it finishes at the sea and we don’t need Westminster MPs bolstering the divisions we create among ourselves.
ONE of the best bits of TV in recent months has been Griff Rhys Jones’s ‘Mountain’ which has seen him scaling Scots peaks, a few English hills and finishing up in Snowdonia on Sunday night.
The photography was the BBC at its best and a greater advert for the awe-inspiring beauty of the Welsh mountains there could not be.
It was no rose-tinted elegy though, he pointed out the impact of man on the mountains from the sheep that crop the slope of their bio-diversity, to the fag-ends and plastic bottle that adorn Yr Wyddfa.
But the strangest pollution comes in the form of the heaps of ash that were once people, scattered over the peak as a final resting place.
Not a bad place to be for eternity, but I think people always have visions of a handful of ash being caught by the wind and disappearing across the peak.
In actual fact cremation produces quite a bit of ash and rather than being caught by the breeze, the remains of the dearly departed end up as small heaps on the slopes.
As Griff pointed out, ash is quite fertile and so plants grow better in these heaps than elsewhere on the peaks and so the ecology is changed.
I’m not sure I would want my final resting place to contribute to such changes, so perhaps those scattering their loved ones from now one might consider doing it on a really windy day.
THERE is a bright side to Wales’s drubbing by France.
You can now get odds of 100-1 on them to win the World Cup.
Look, stick the tenner that you would normally put on the Grand National on them to win.
My theory, as always, is that they’re lulling the opposition into a false sense os security.
Come the final you’re £1,000 up.
One small note of warning, I haven’t won a bet since Seagram won the Grand National in 1991, and that was someone else’s tip.
Always of a relentlessly sunny disposition they were, don’t you believe a word from those who would suggest that the valleys imbue people with a demeanour that some would describe as well…gloomy.
Not just gloomy, in a perpetual state of Stygian gloom so inky that, like a black hole they actually consume light. No, no, they are the little rays of sunshine the lot of them.
But, my being North Walian, of a Gog, as the braver among them would eventually sum up the courage to call me, there was never a sense of a shared identity, save for the days when we united in abusing the English in the rugby.
Then eventually, usually as we parted company on a leaving do, they would summon up the courage to say what they really thought.
“David, you’re not really Welsh are yew? I mean you’re not from Welsh Weaallls are yew.”
Welsh Wales for the purposes of this conversation being whatever grassed over spoil tip was home to them.
The reason they had come to this conclusion was that because they had an accent like Huw Edwards, Charlotte Church or the little dragon off of Ivor the Engine, their Welsh credentials were beyond reproach.
My North East Welsh accent, like a Scouser on the run trying to disguise his roots, meant that I was, well, they thought, English.
A few years ago this would be akin to lighting the blue touch paper and standing well back, now I am resigned to us being a nation forever divided.
The problem is that many of those claiming Welshness because they sound like a tenor from Treorchy, couldn’t actually speak Welsh. For them it was how you sounded that was important, not what you spoke.
This division is illustrated by the Early Day Motion (think of it as Westminster graffiti, a sort of political peeing against a lamp-post), put down by South Wales MP Chris Bryant about train announcments which says: “That this House notes that the announcements at all railway stations in Wales are made in Welsh first and then in English; wholly supports the policy of bilingual announcements; but believes that it would be far more sensible and far more convenient for passengers, whether regular commuters or local visitors, if announcements at each station were made first in the language used by the majority of the local population.”
Wholly supports bilingual announcements as long as English comes first in parts of Wales then.
And who is to decide at which point English-first stops and Welsh-first starts?
This is just a mirror image of the old Fro Gymraeg that was suggested by Cymuned way back, but this time if the English-speakers telling us this is English Wales and then over to the West you get Welsh Wales.
The problem is that you create the division in visitors’ minds and then they wonder why anyone bother with Welsh at all. If they can get by without it in the Valleys, why do those bothersome folk in the North keep it up.
You think these attitudes don’t exist but only this week a friend returning from the Llŷn said she had found some people there a little ‘unfriendly’, when asked how, she said, oh, we went into shops and they were speaking Welsh.
It was suggested that had the shop been in France and the language French she wouldn’t have batted an eyelid – but the Welsh understand English she insisted.
And so we do, and that is our downfall. The Welsh language will not stand or fall because railway announcements are made first in English. But it is just one more sign to people that Welsh doesn’t matter, that as long as you speak English you’ll get by.
Try suggesting that in France, where the majority of people speak English, but hey, prefer to speak the language that they think in, no matter how inconvenient that may be to English tourists.
Welsh Wales starts at the Croeso I Gymru signs and it finishes at the sea and we don’t need Westminster MPs bolstering the divisions we create among ourselves.
ONE of the best bits of TV in recent months has been Griff Rhys Jones’s ‘Mountain’ which has seen him scaling Scots peaks, a few English hills and finishing up in Snowdonia on Sunday night.
The photography was the BBC at its best and a greater advert for the awe-inspiring beauty of the Welsh mountains there could not be.
It was no rose-tinted elegy though, he pointed out the impact of man on the mountains from the sheep that crop the slope of their bio-diversity, to the fag-ends and plastic bottle that adorn Yr Wyddfa.
But the strangest pollution comes in the form of the heaps of ash that were once people, scattered over the peak as a final resting place.
Not a bad place to be for eternity, but I think people always have visions of a handful of ash being caught by the wind and disappearing across the peak.
In actual fact cremation produces quite a bit of ash and rather than being caught by the breeze, the remains of the dearly departed end up as small heaps on the slopes.
As Griff pointed out, ash is quite fertile and so plants grow better in these heaps than elsewhere on the peaks and so the ecology is changed.
I’m not sure I would want my final resting place to contribute to such changes, so perhaps those scattering their loved ones from now one might consider doing it on a really windy day.
THERE is a bright side to Wales’s drubbing by France.
You can now get odds of 100-1 on them to win the World Cup.
Look, stick the tenner that you would normally put on the Grand National on them to win.
My theory, as always, is that they’re lulling the opposition into a false sense os security.
Come the final you’re £1,000 up.
One small note of warning, I haven’t won a bet since Seagram won the Grand National in 1991, and that was someone else’s tip.
Column, August 21,2007
WREXHAM Women for Peace, now there’s a name that fires the imagination.
I wonder if there are sister organisations like Wrexham Women for Apple Pie and Wrexham Women for Teddy Bears?
Also, do they have a nemesis organisation called something like Wrexham Women for War?
No doubt they would be manning, sorry, personning, the barricades along with the Women for Peace who have sent a detachment, well, at least one, down to Heathrow, there to fight the good fight against global warming.
Heathrow as you will have seen has become the latest battleground for an assortment of protesters, from the well-known like Greenpeace, to disparate others who turn up at any old protest like latter-day Wild Ones – Whaddaya protesting against Johnny? – Whaddaya got? Well, this week we’ve got global warming, which everyone has decided is a Very Bad Thing.
Well, if it melts the icecaps and submerges large sections of the coastline worldwide, then it undoubtedly would.
Down at Heathrow they are insistent that they’re a peaceful lot and they march about waving rather pompous banners declaring that they are: “Armed…with peer-reviewed science.”
Well, let’s consider that for a moment shall we?
What is probably true is that we are going through a period of global warming.
What is also true is that due to industrialisation we are producing lots of gases like carbon dioxide as a by-product of things like electricity generation and travel, including by jets.
What ahs not been shown conclusively, yet, is that the carbon dioxide produced by man is causing the global warming.
You see the great big fat problem that the eco-protesters somehow skirt around is that the world has gone through phases of global warming and cooling before, many, many years before the industrial revolution. We had no big power stations, no factories. Henry Ford and Orville and Wilbur Wright were mere twinkles in the forefathers’ forefathers’ eyes, so there were no cars or planes, and yet there was global warming.
So what was causing it then?
Furthermore, since the industrial revolution started, we have also gone through phases of global cooling, though carbon dioxide levels were rising.
Now, I’m not saying that the eco-warriors having their summer camp are wrong, but what I am saying is that haven’t proved that they are right.
They do their cause a disservice by stating things as fact when they have yet to be proved. It is almost like a religion to some of them, and it fits perfectly with their anti-Establishment viewpoint, because being against climate change means you can have a go at big business like airports.
That’s not to say the police haven’t over-reacted somewhat to the legions of the unwashed who surrounded Heathrow like the tidemark on a bath – 1,800 officers to tackle 2,000 protesters does seem a remarkably personal policing service to me.
You also have to take into account that a substantial minority of the protesters will have been undercover newspaper hacks who rather than protesting will have sat cowering screaming “Not the face, not the face” the moment a burly constable flashed his warrant card at them.
Still, it will all fizzle out this week and I’m sure many of those who have so bravely taken on the police will be off on their gap years to various points across the globe. Of course it will take them a while to get to wherever they are going to teach bemused indigenous people how to knit an operating theatre out of raffia, because being anti-flying they’ll have to bike and row their way there.
Still hats off to what a British education has done for these young people, all of whom will have biked or walked to school, and definitely, definitely not been dropped off by mum driving a Chelsea tractor on the school run eh?
And I’m sure none of the middle-class Jonquils and Jocastas ever enjoyed a holiday in the sun with mummy and daddy and went there by jet did they? Odd that they would deny people the luxury of cheap travel when they’ve probably indulged in it to the full themselves during their lifetime.
I’m no fan of air travel, I think it is hellish and avoid it for the simple reason that I don’t like being treated like cattle and fleeced like a sheep.
But for many people air travel broadens horizons and gives them an idea that there’s a world out there other than their own back yard.
You shouldn’t give up that freedom based on the quasi-religious beliefs of protesters who for all their claims have yet to prove their prophecies of doom have a shred of truth to them.
YOU will no doubt by now be cowering in your home, having barricaded the doors, convinced that we are all under siege from anti-social behooded hoodlums.
It seems that we are living in a state of anarchy and the police have yielded control of our streets to gangs of yobs.
That is, if you believe the national newspapers in August. As a rule of thumb I find it best to discount every third story as the fevered invention of a hack with an empty diary.
We have had a few attacks, some murders, some public unrest, and it would seem that editors have decided the nation has gone to hell in a handcart.
All that was missing was asylum seekers as the instigators of the violence, but apparently they had an alibi this time, so the nationals seized upon the next best thing – drunken youths.
This feral lawlessness will come as something of a surprise to many of us who had, until now, been enjoying a peaceful, if rather wet, summer.
But rest assured, the unrest is happening, you’re just not looking hard enough.
So that bunch of kids playing footy in the park? Clearly a cunning cover for drug dealing. The gaggle of girls playing with their dolls – a razor gang waiting to pounce. And why else would kids ride round on bikes other than to run down innocent pensioners?
For those of you who might be persuaded that we are the mercy of criminal youths I would just remind you of the case this week which demonstrates quite how inept these hoodlums are.
This was the case, reported by the Daily Post, of the youth who hatched the cunning plan of disposing of his electronic tag, by attaching it to a sheep.
A plan, stupid in so many ways it’s hard to know where to start. Firstly there’s the question of why the tagging monitors were supposed to believe he was spending day and night grazing in a field.
But secondly it was his belief that he could entice a sheep to him and persuade it to be tagged that marks him out as not the most gifted of master criminals.
If anti-social youth are all as thick as that, I think we can sleep safe in our beds a while longer.
I wonder if there are sister organisations like Wrexham Women for Apple Pie and Wrexham Women for Teddy Bears?
Also, do they have a nemesis organisation called something like Wrexham Women for War?
No doubt they would be manning, sorry, personning, the barricades along with the Women for Peace who have sent a detachment, well, at least one, down to Heathrow, there to fight the good fight against global warming.
Heathrow as you will have seen has become the latest battleground for an assortment of protesters, from the well-known like Greenpeace, to disparate others who turn up at any old protest like latter-day Wild Ones – Whaddaya protesting against Johnny? – Whaddaya got? Well, this week we’ve got global warming, which everyone has decided is a Very Bad Thing.
Well, if it melts the icecaps and submerges large sections of the coastline worldwide, then it undoubtedly would.
Down at Heathrow they are insistent that they’re a peaceful lot and they march about waving rather pompous banners declaring that they are: “Armed…with peer-reviewed science.”
Well, let’s consider that for a moment shall we?
What is probably true is that we are going through a period of global warming.
What is also true is that due to industrialisation we are producing lots of gases like carbon dioxide as a by-product of things like electricity generation and travel, including by jets.
What ahs not been shown conclusively, yet, is that the carbon dioxide produced by man is causing the global warming.
You see the great big fat problem that the eco-protesters somehow skirt around is that the world has gone through phases of global warming and cooling before, many, many years before the industrial revolution. We had no big power stations, no factories. Henry Ford and Orville and Wilbur Wright were mere twinkles in the forefathers’ forefathers’ eyes, so there were no cars or planes, and yet there was global warming.
So what was causing it then?
Furthermore, since the industrial revolution started, we have also gone through phases of global cooling, though carbon dioxide levels were rising.
Now, I’m not saying that the eco-warriors having their summer camp are wrong, but what I am saying is that haven’t proved that they are right.
They do their cause a disservice by stating things as fact when they have yet to be proved. It is almost like a religion to some of them, and it fits perfectly with their anti-Establishment viewpoint, because being against climate change means you can have a go at big business like airports.
That’s not to say the police haven’t over-reacted somewhat to the legions of the unwashed who surrounded Heathrow like the tidemark on a bath – 1,800 officers to tackle 2,000 protesters does seem a remarkably personal policing service to me.
You also have to take into account that a substantial minority of the protesters will have been undercover newspaper hacks who rather than protesting will have sat cowering screaming “Not the face, not the face” the moment a burly constable flashed his warrant card at them.
Still, it will all fizzle out this week and I’m sure many of those who have so bravely taken on the police will be off on their gap years to various points across the globe. Of course it will take them a while to get to wherever they are going to teach bemused indigenous people how to knit an operating theatre out of raffia, because being anti-flying they’ll have to bike and row their way there.
Still hats off to what a British education has done for these young people, all of whom will have biked or walked to school, and definitely, definitely not been dropped off by mum driving a Chelsea tractor on the school run eh?
And I’m sure none of the middle-class Jonquils and Jocastas ever enjoyed a holiday in the sun with mummy and daddy and went there by jet did they? Odd that they would deny people the luxury of cheap travel when they’ve probably indulged in it to the full themselves during their lifetime.
I’m no fan of air travel, I think it is hellish and avoid it for the simple reason that I don’t like being treated like cattle and fleeced like a sheep.
But for many people air travel broadens horizons and gives them an idea that there’s a world out there other than their own back yard.
You shouldn’t give up that freedom based on the quasi-religious beliefs of protesters who for all their claims have yet to prove their prophecies of doom have a shred of truth to them.
YOU will no doubt by now be cowering in your home, having barricaded the doors, convinced that we are all under siege from anti-social behooded hoodlums.
It seems that we are living in a state of anarchy and the police have yielded control of our streets to gangs of yobs.
That is, if you believe the national newspapers in August. As a rule of thumb I find it best to discount every third story as the fevered invention of a hack with an empty diary.
We have had a few attacks, some murders, some public unrest, and it would seem that editors have decided the nation has gone to hell in a handcart.
All that was missing was asylum seekers as the instigators of the violence, but apparently they had an alibi this time, so the nationals seized upon the next best thing – drunken youths.
This feral lawlessness will come as something of a surprise to many of us who had, until now, been enjoying a peaceful, if rather wet, summer.
But rest assured, the unrest is happening, you’re just not looking hard enough.
So that bunch of kids playing footy in the park? Clearly a cunning cover for drug dealing. The gaggle of girls playing with their dolls – a razor gang waiting to pounce. And why else would kids ride round on bikes other than to run down innocent pensioners?
For those of you who might be persuaded that we are the mercy of criminal youths I would just remind you of the case this week which demonstrates quite how inept these hoodlums are.
This was the case, reported by the Daily Post, of the youth who hatched the cunning plan of disposing of his electronic tag, by attaching it to a sheep.
A plan, stupid in so many ways it’s hard to know where to start. Firstly there’s the question of why the tagging monitors were supposed to believe he was spending day and night grazing in a field.
But secondly it was his belief that he could entice a sheep to him and persuade it to be tagged that marks him out as not the most gifted of master criminals.
If anti-social youth are all as thick as that, I think we can sleep safe in our beds a while longer.
Column, August 7, 2007
NEVER trust a bull or a policeman was one of my Taid’s favourite sayings.
He was hardly Staylittle’s own version of the Godfather, him being a deacon of the chapel and all, but, one had to be wary with both of them, bulls and coppers.
That might be particularly true if you suspect that one of them is on the jury trying you at Crown Court.
It wouldn’t be easy to tell of course, they don’t file into the jury box wearing their uniform and helmet, that would be altogether too helpful.
However if you caught one of them giving the investigating officers a friendly wave and then going for a pint with them in the lunchtime break, that might give you a hint.
But it’s been revealed that since the law changed in 2004 no fewer than 92 serving police officers from the North Wales Constabulary had served on juries.
Before the law had been changed they couldn’t sit on a jury – nor could peers, lawyers, prisoners and the insane – strange company indeed. Now they still keep madmen off juries, but they allow coppers, lawyers and lords on.
Perhaps they ought to even things out a bit by allowing the occasional old lag to do a stint on a jury. It would make for some interesting, even frightening discussions.
I think we would all like to think that, in the extremely unlikely event that we were to find ourselves in the dock, that the jury would be packed with the likes of Henry Fonda, giving us a reprise of his role in 12 Angry Men and getting us off even though it looked for all the world like it was a fair cop and they’d got us bang to rights.
I suspect that in reality jury service has more of the Tony Hancock about it than the Henry Fonda.
Certainly that is true if the tale of one US jury is anything to go by. Irrevocably split on whether a man was guilty of murder, they resolved their disagreement by tossing a coin – and found him guilty.
And off he would have gone to life in jail (this was at least one of the US states where the death penalty had been abolished) had it not been for one of the jurors who revealed their unusual method to a court usher and so the whole case went to a retrial.
Whether the heads you’re guilty tails you’re not approach is adopted by many UK juries is unknown – because it is, of course, against the law here to even ask a juror how they reached their decision.
This does protect us from jurors coming out with books the minute they deliver their verdict as happened in the USA in the trial of OJ Simpson. But it does stop us finding out quite what goes on in there at all. Even a judge can’t ask the jury how they reached their verdict, no matter how perplexing it might be.
In the past that has been a guard against tyranny – the judges, often establishment figures, might have directed juries in the strongest terms, but there has been a famous streak of independence in juries, who have over the years returned verdicts which might not have stuck to the letter of the law, but which did deliver justice.
The idea of putting policemen, and lawyers and judges for that matter, on juries might on the face of it seem like it delivers an advantage to the prosecution.
But look at it the other way – a policeman, lawyer or judge will bring their skills, experience and common sense to the case and may be able to spot holes in the prosecution case that others did not.
And if a police officer were to be blindly arguing for a guilty verdict, wouldn’t that tend to drive other jurors in the opposite direction?
The jury system is based on trust and while we may suspect that jurors are swayed by all manner of things from tabloid headlines to whatever they might be googling when they get home, we have to trust that when it comes down to it they will give a true verdict.
If we don’t believe they can do this then the only alternative is to abolish juries and have judges acting in their place.
Juries are, in the memorable words of the late Lord Devlin, ‘the lamp that shows that freedom lives’, that here it is a jury of your peers that convict you, not the state.
Rather than being concerned with how many policemen serve on juries – which is a small number compared to the hundreds of others who must have been called – I’d be more concerned about the number of people whose lack of civic responsibility leads them to get themselves out of it on some trumped up excuse.
It’s harder to do now, but it still happens. If we want juries to reflect our society then we need to do the right thing when that summons drops on the doormat.
THE Royal Mail has apologised for the letter it sent to sub-postmasters warning them of the consequences of speaking out against post office closures.
What with threats of undercover agents visiting them to ensure they were toeing the line and withdrawal of compensation as a penalty, it definitely had a whiff of the Cosa Nostra about it.
You could see why the Royal Mail did it though. Sub-postmasters are the hub of many rural communities and if anyone if well-placed to motivate widespread public protest it is the local sub-postmaster.
The village post offices would become virtual headquarters of resistance movements across the UK, organised like cells. Just as the bosses thought they had snuffed out one pocket of resistance, along would come another group of crack pensioner letter-writers taking them to task for their miserable penny-pinching policies that were going to tear rural Wales and England apart.
But they’ve apologised and withdrawn the letter now, so that’s alright then isn’t it? Sub-postmaster can speak out without fear can’t they?
Yeah, right, of course they can. No matter what the Royal Mail says that letter showed the mindset operating among some of its management.
I would suggest that sub-postmasters have got the message loud and clear and now only the bravest will speak for fear of the consequences.
The Royal Mail should lose its ‘Royal’ appendage for the way it is behaving. It has shown itself to be nothing more than any other venal profit-motivated corporation and it does not deserve the respect that a Royal title commands.
He was hardly Staylittle’s own version of the Godfather, him being a deacon of the chapel and all, but, one had to be wary with both of them, bulls and coppers.
That might be particularly true if you suspect that one of them is on the jury trying you at Crown Court.
It wouldn’t be easy to tell of course, they don’t file into the jury box wearing their uniform and helmet, that would be altogether too helpful.
However if you caught one of them giving the investigating officers a friendly wave and then going for a pint with them in the lunchtime break, that might give you a hint.
But it’s been revealed that since the law changed in 2004 no fewer than 92 serving police officers from the North Wales Constabulary had served on juries.
Before the law had been changed they couldn’t sit on a jury – nor could peers, lawyers, prisoners and the insane – strange company indeed. Now they still keep madmen off juries, but they allow coppers, lawyers and lords on.
Perhaps they ought to even things out a bit by allowing the occasional old lag to do a stint on a jury. It would make for some interesting, even frightening discussions.
I think we would all like to think that, in the extremely unlikely event that we were to find ourselves in the dock, that the jury would be packed with the likes of Henry Fonda, giving us a reprise of his role in 12 Angry Men and getting us off even though it looked for all the world like it was a fair cop and they’d got us bang to rights.
I suspect that in reality jury service has more of the Tony Hancock about it than the Henry Fonda.
Certainly that is true if the tale of one US jury is anything to go by. Irrevocably split on whether a man was guilty of murder, they resolved their disagreement by tossing a coin – and found him guilty.
And off he would have gone to life in jail (this was at least one of the US states where the death penalty had been abolished) had it not been for one of the jurors who revealed their unusual method to a court usher and so the whole case went to a retrial.
Whether the heads you’re guilty tails you’re not approach is adopted by many UK juries is unknown – because it is, of course, against the law here to even ask a juror how they reached their decision.
This does protect us from jurors coming out with books the minute they deliver their verdict as happened in the USA in the trial of OJ Simpson. But it does stop us finding out quite what goes on in there at all. Even a judge can’t ask the jury how they reached their verdict, no matter how perplexing it might be.
In the past that has been a guard against tyranny – the judges, often establishment figures, might have directed juries in the strongest terms, but there has been a famous streak of independence in juries, who have over the years returned verdicts which might not have stuck to the letter of the law, but which did deliver justice.
The idea of putting policemen, and lawyers and judges for that matter, on juries might on the face of it seem like it delivers an advantage to the prosecution.
But look at it the other way – a policeman, lawyer or judge will bring their skills, experience and common sense to the case and may be able to spot holes in the prosecution case that others did not.
And if a police officer were to be blindly arguing for a guilty verdict, wouldn’t that tend to drive other jurors in the opposite direction?
The jury system is based on trust and while we may suspect that jurors are swayed by all manner of things from tabloid headlines to whatever they might be googling when they get home, we have to trust that when it comes down to it they will give a true verdict.
If we don’t believe they can do this then the only alternative is to abolish juries and have judges acting in their place.
Juries are, in the memorable words of the late Lord Devlin, ‘the lamp that shows that freedom lives’, that here it is a jury of your peers that convict you, not the state.
Rather than being concerned with how many policemen serve on juries – which is a small number compared to the hundreds of others who must have been called – I’d be more concerned about the number of people whose lack of civic responsibility leads them to get themselves out of it on some trumped up excuse.
It’s harder to do now, but it still happens. If we want juries to reflect our society then we need to do the right thing when that summons drops on the doormat.
THE Royal Mail has apologised for the letter it sent to sub-postmasters warning them of the consequences of speaking out against post office closures.
What with threats of undercover agents visiting them to ensure they were toeing the line and withdrawal of compensation as a penalty, it definitely had a whiff of the Cosa Nostra about it.
You could see why the Royal Mail did it though. Sub-postmasters are the hub of many rural communities and if anyone if well-placed to motivate widespread public protest it is the local sub-postmaster.
The village post offices would become virtual headquarters of resistance movements across the UK, organised like cells. Just as the bosses thought they had snuffed out one pocket of resistance, along would come another group of crack pensioner letter-writers taking them to task for their miserable penny-pinching policies that were going to tear rural Wales and England apart.
But they’ve apologised and withdrawn the letter now, so that’s alright then isn’t it? Sub-postmaster can speak out without fear can’t they?
Yeah, right, of course they can. No matter what the Royal Mail says that letter showed the mindset operating among some of its management.
I would suggest that sub-postmasters have got the message loud and clear and now only the bravest will speak for fear of the consequences.
The Royal Mail should lose its ‘Royal’ appendage for the way it is behaving. It has shown itself to be nothing more than any other venal profit-motivated corporation and it does not deserve the respect that a Royal title commands.
Column, July 31, 2007
THERE are many rites of passage a child must go through.
First day at school, learning to ride a bike, death of a pet, and the rediscovery of gravity.
Newton got there first of course with his apple, but each and every child at one time or another falls far enough to have time to realise they are actually accelerating toward the ground.
For me it was when I was playing up a tree I just had time to register indignant surprise when a branch came away in my hand, then I was falling backwards toward the ground and I distinctly remember realising that I was going faster and faster and faster. I knew how Newton’s apple must have felt.
The next moment every last molecule of breath was knocked from my body and I wondered whether I was going to die.
Today, if we believe some of the tales of the compensation culture that has gripped the nation, I could have consulted m’learned friends to sue the owner of the tree for having defective branches as well as the owner of the land for keeping it in such a hard, unyielding and dangerously uncomfortable state.
Shakespeare had it right in Henry VI when he wrote: “First, we kill all the lawyers.” Lawyers will argue that what Shakespeare meant was that lawyers were the defenders of freedom and had to be eradicated before any revolt could succeed. Typical of lawyers, they’ll even twist the words of the Bard.
Now we hear of cotton-wool kids, brought up cocooned from all risk. Thinking about it though, some strategically-placed cotton wool might have saved me a winding that day.
Conkers seem to feature highly in the league-table of risk to today’s children. If council’s aren’t chopping down centuries-old conker trees to stop children climbing them, they’re banning the playing of conkers in the schoolyard because as we all know a piece of flying conker shell has all the lethal properties of depleted uranium.
Forget Challenger tanks and Typhoon fighters, what our brave lads need against the Taliban is a good stock of horse chestnuts, they would all be home by Christmas.
But now the conker has had to make way for another threat to our children’s health – the donkey derby.
Llandudno donkey derby to be exact. A hotly-contested fixture on the racing calendar, or so you might think given that insurers have refused to cover it and the lawyers have said that if there’s an accident a young jockey might sue.
Children from across the UK had competed for years and it has to be said the high Court had as yet been untroubled by litigation stemming from it, but nevertheless the organisers were told it was a risk and so this year’s derby took place with inflatable sheep as riders, not the understandably disappointed children.
It was hardly as if they had been facing anything like Bechers Brook on the course, it was a 30-second race at little more than walking pace and they all wore helmets.
Parents were even willing to sign a waiver, but according to the lawyer the child might still sue at the age of 18 for injuries sustained years before.
I’d just like to know how the insurers are calculating this risk. How many donkey derbies are there up and down the country and how many result in death and mutilation for the youngsters taking part? I’m willing to bet there are none.
Now, how many young children are killed or injured by cars every single day? Dozens, and yet of the two risk groups, the insurers decide it’s the killer donkeys of Bodafon Fields that are uninsurable, not the nutters in hit’n’run hot hatchbacks.
It’s stories like this that perpetuate the feeling that our children are constantly at risk. Life becomes like an episode of Casualty when you’re left wondering which carelessly placed iron, which discarded cigarette, which gale-blown tree or runaway bus is going to see off your nearest and dearest.
Reports at the weekend said that fewer children than ever play outside. Their parents generation would play in the street, but the risk from cars and irrational fears of predatory paedophiles mean children are locked away with TV and computers as a diversion instead of something riskier and healthier like a game of football in the park.
Parents who think they are protecting their children by doing this are sadly misguided, with obesity levels in children reaching record levels, is it any wonder they are so fat, when they never go outside?
The protective parent is basically laying the foundations for a heart attack in their child’s 40s by keeping them indoors.
By protecting them from non-existent risks parents also prevent their children from developing a real sense of what is and isn’t dangerous, so that when they finally emerge from their parents’ cocoon, they are unable to make sensible decisions about the risks that are around them.
And the risks they face as a teenager are real – alcohol, drugs, gangs, teenage pregnancy – but they have been so sheltered up until then they aren’t able to assess those risks.
Is it any wonder they end up happy-slapping each other and posting the results on YouTube? By the time they get t 13 their minds must be so addled by boredom only full-blooded fighting can remotely amuse them.
Our attitude to young people is very odd. First we want to protect them from all risk as young children, then when they grow into surly teenagers we want to place ASBOs on them and issue dispersal orders so they can’t hang around with each other.
They might be forgiven for thinking we are all mad, and they would probably be right.
First day at school, learning to ride a bike, death of a pet, and the rediscovery of gravity.
Newton got there first of course with his apple, but each and every child at one time or another falls far enough to have time to realise they are actually accelerating toward the ground.
For me it was when I was playing up a tree I just had time to register indignant surprise when a branch came away in my hand, then I was falling backwards toward the ground and I distinctly remember realising that I was going faster and faster and faster. I knew how Newton’s apple must have felt.
The next moment every last molecule of breath was knocked from my body and I wondered whether I was going to die.
Today, if we believe some of the tales of the compensation culture that has gripped the nation, I could have consulted m’learned friends to sue the owner of the tree for having defective branches as well as the owner of the land for keeping it in such a hard, unyielding and dangerously uncomfortable state.
Shakespeare had it right in Henry VI when he wrote: “First, we kill all the lawyers.” Lawyers will argue that what Shakespeare meant was that lawyers were the defenders of freedom and had to be eradicated before any revolt could succeed. Typical of lawyers, they’ll even twist the words of the Bard.
Now we hear of cotton-wool kids, brought up cocooned from all risk. Thinking about it though, some strategically-placed cotton wool might have saved me a winding that day.
Conkers seem to feature highly in the league-table of risk to today’s children. If council’s aren’t chopping down centuries-old conker trees to stop children climbing them, they’re banning the playing of conkers in the schoolyard because as we all know a piece of flying conker shell has all the lethal properties of depleted uranium.
Forget Challenger tanks and Typhoon fighters, what our brave lads need against the Taliban is a good stock of horse chestnuts, they would all be home by Christmas.
But now the conker has had to make way for another threat to our children’s health – the donkey derby.
Llandudno donkey derby to be exact. A hotly-contested fixture on the racing calendar, or so you might think given that insurers have refused to cover it and the lawyers have said that if there’s an accident a young jockey might sue.
Children from across the UK had competed for years and it has to be said the high Court had as yet been untroubled by litigation stemming from it, but nevertheless the organisers were told it was a risk and so this year’s derby took place with inflatable sheep as riders, not the understandably disappointed children.
It was hardly as if they had been facing anything like Bechers Brook on the course, it was a 30-second race at little more than walking pace and they all wore helmets.
Parents were even willing to sign a waiver, but according to the lawyer the child might still sue at the age of 18 for injuries sustained years before.
I’d just like to know how the insurers are calculating this risk. How many donkey derbies are there up and down the country and how many result in death and mutilation for the youngsters taking part? I’m willing to bet there are none.
Now, how many young children are killed or injured by cars every single day? Dozens, and yet of the two risk groups, the insurers decide it’s the killer donkeys of Bodafon Fields that are uninsurable, not the nutters in hit’n’run hot hatchbacks.
It’s stories like this that perpetuate the feeling that our children are constantly at risk. Life becomes like an episode of Casualty when you’re left wondering which carelessly placed iron, which discarded cigarette, which gale-blown tree or runaway bus is going to see off your nearest and dearest.
Reports at the weekend said that fewer children than ever play outside. Their parents generation would play in the street, but the risk from cars and irrational fears of predatory paedophiles mean children are locked away with TV and computers as a diversion instead of something riskier and healthier like a game of football in the park.
Parents who think they are protecting their children by doing this are sadly misguided, with obesity levels in children reaching record levels, is it any wonder they are so fat, when they never go outside?
The protective parent is basically laying the foundations for a heart attack in their child’s 40s by keeping them indoors.
By protecting them from non-existent risks parents also prevent their children from developing a real sense of what is and isn’t dangerous, so that when they finally emerge from their parents’ cocoon, they are unable to make sensible decisions about the risks that are around them.
And the risks they face as a teenager are real – alcohol, drugs, gangs, teenage pregnancy – but they have been so sheltered up until then they aren’t able to assess those risks.
Is it any wonder they end up happy-slapping each other and posting the results on YouTube? By the time they get t 13 their minds must be so addled by boredom only full-blooded fighting can remotely amuse them.
Our attitude to young people is very odd. First we want to protect them from all risk as young children, then when they grow into surly teenagers we want to place ASBOs on them and issue dispersal orders so they can’t hang around with each other.
They might be forgiven for thinking we are all mad, and they would probably be right.
Column, July 24, 2007
AS a jobbing reporter on regional papers I have numbed my backside for more hours than I care to remember on the press benches of local councils.
Planning committees were often more arduous than most, as one innocuous application after another was examined, rarely exciting hot debate and even more rarely troubling my shorthand skills.
But I do remember one phrase that began to catch my eye on officers’ reports to the extent that I was shaken from my habitual sullen indolence to actually do a story.
That phrase was a short statement which said: “This development is being built on a flood plain.”
Hmmm, I thought, I’m no expert, but doesn’t that sort of imply that occasionally this will, kind of, flood?
Yes, said those who I spoke to, complimenting me on my hawk-eyed watchfulness of planning matters and incisive analysis of their implications (ok, made that bit up.) And what is more if you build on a flood plain, you not only risk floods to tha development itself, but you store up problems for other areas too.
Because if you stick a load of concrete and tarmac on a flood plain, rainwater that would otherwise have sate there and soaked into the ground has to go somewhere else, and it will go wherever gravity takes it – and that might mean into the next-door housing estate.
We have been building on flood plains for years, well, since they founded London in Roman times at the very least. But at least when the Romans built they didn’t seal the ground so thoroughly that they created great tsunamis of flood water that washed everyone from house and home.
Now we have spent decades building on flood plains and with the recent scenes across the country we are reaping the consequences.
It’s no good people demanding why weren’t they warned and why weren’t the defences in place. Firstly, the Met Office were warning us on virtually every bulletin last week, but people have this blind optimism that it won’t happen to them, right up until they see their sofa floating out of their lounge window.
Secondly, what exactly do you expect the government to do? They could evacuate people to safety – which they have. Feed them and keep them warm – which they have. Mobilise the Army to help – which they have.
When a river breaks its banks there is not an awful lot you can do to stop it. Sure you can put flood barriers up and hope they don’t get overtopped, but that just shifts the problem downstream to another town or village. It might break its banks into an open flood plain, but then you’ve got to hope you’ve got one handy that you haven’t built on, see above.
So while I’m all for blaming government when they deserve it, I’m disinclined to stick it to them now.
Especially as the BBC seems to believe the flooding in the West Country this weekend is tantamount to the end of civilisation, whereas when the North was deluged a few weeks ago it was all but ignored.
On Sunday night we had Kate Silverton in a distinctly damp-looking hairdo, intoning grimly about the floods in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. Yesterday morning the Beeb had even set the disaster to music with a plinking piano soundtrack backing slo-mo scenes of devastation.
A couple of weeks ago the city of Hull was laid waste by the rain and did we hear a peep from the BBC? Perhaps they think stoic Northerners can take it better than southern-softy executives who’ve got grand homes in the South West. And they’re probably right.
But here’s a tip if you want to avoid flooding in the future. If on your survey it says the house you want to buy is on a flood plain, don’t buy it. If it’s by a river, don’t buy it. Go onto the environment agency website and use their interactive flood maps to check the level of the last flood – if your house was under water, don’t buy it.
We’ve had rain like this before. But in the last 20 years or so we’ve overgrazed the uplands, so they can’t hold water, and we’ve over-developed the lowlands so they can’t cope with the run-off.
So when we get wet, we’ve only got ourselves, not government, to blame.
THE death of North Wales airman Peter McFerran serves to underline the need to extract ourselves from the country as soon as possible.
There is a cruel irony to the fact, as revealed by his father, that he had thought long and hard about joining the RAF because of his doubts about the war in Iraq.
Once in however, like any good member of our forces, he went where he was ordered and paid for that service to his country with his life.
Our political leaders continue to insist that, having got Iraq into this mess, we ought to get them out of it. But that should not be a blank cheque to be signed with the blood of our sons and daughters they send out there.
The grieving family of Peter McFerran deserve to know that others will not share their fate and that it is time to bring the boys, and girls, back home.
THE schools inspectors have conducted their dawn, well, 9.30am, raid on my son’s playgroup.
They found what we knew was there, a well-run group catering to a lively group of very happy children who learn a lot through various play activities.
It’s well-supported by parents and has good links with the school where the children move on to once they’re four.
But, Ofsted being Ofsted, and I can only hope Wales’s Estyn doesn’t share this ethos, they had to find something to constructively criticise.
And the glaring absence the inspector had found?
No laptop.
Yes, the absence of the white heat of technology diverting them from healthy play into the nightmare of video games was a cause for concern.
My son is four next month. The only laptop he is interested in is the lap of his mum or dad when he gets his bedtime story.
When I started work it was hammering away at a sit-up-and-beg typewriter with carbon paper and elderly gents in green eyeshades picking my copy apart. Since then computers have come to dominate my work and my life and rarely have I felt each innovation bring any great benefit.
There will be plenty of time for my son to explore the good and the bad of computers. Now I just want him, and all other children of his age, to play.
Planning committees were often more arduous than most, as one innocuous application after another was examined, rarely exciting hot debate and even more rarely troubling my shorthand skills.
But I do remember one phrase that began to catch my eye on officers’ reports to the extent that I was shaken from my habitual sullen indolence to actually do a story.
That phrase was a short statement which said: “This development is being built on a flood plain.”
Hmmm, I thought, I’m no expert, but doesn’t that sort of imply that occasionally this will, kind of, flood?
Yes, said those who I spoke to, complimenting me on my hawk-eyed watchfulness of planning matters and incisive analysis of their implications (ok, made that bit up.) And what is more if you build on a flood plain, you not only risk floods to tha development itself, but you store up problems for other areas too.
Because if you stick a load of concrete and tarmac on a flood plain, rainwater that would otherwise have sate there and soaked into the ground has to go somewhere else, and it will go wherever gravity takes it – and that might mean into the next-door housing estate.
We have been building on flood plains for years, well, since they founded London in Roman times at the very least. But at least when the Romans built they didn’t seal the ground so thoroughly that they created great tsunamis of flood water that washed everyone from house and home.
Now we have spent decades building on flood plains and with the recent scenes across the country we are reaping the consequences.
It’s no good people demanding why weren’t they warned and why weren’t the defences in place. Firstly, the Met Office were warning us on virtually every bulletin last week, but people have this blind optimism that it won’t happen to them, right up until they see their sofa floating out of their lounge window.
Secondly, what exactly do you expect the government to do? They could evacuate people to safety – which they have. Feed them and keep them warm – which they have. Mobilise the Army to help – which they have.
When a river breaks its banks there is not an awful lot you can do to stop it. Sure you can put flood barriers up and hope they don’t get overtopped, but that just shifts the problem downstream to another town or village. It might break its banks into an open flood plain, but then you’ve got to hope you’ve got one handy that you haven’t built on, see above.
So while I’m all for blaming government when they deserve it, I’m disinclined to stick it to them now.
Especially as the BBC seems to believe the flooding in the West Country this weekend is tantamount to the end of civilisation, whereas when the North was deluged a few weeks ago it was all but ignored.
On Sunday night we had Kate Silverton in a distinctly damp-looking hairdo, intoning grimly about the floods in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. Yesterday morning the Beeb had even set the disaster to music with a plinking piano soundtrack backing slo-mo scenes of devastation.
A couple of weeks ago the city of Hull was laid waste by the rain and did we hear a peep from the BBC? Perhaps they think stoic Northerners can take it better than southern-softy executives who’ve got grand homes in the South West. And they’re probably right.
But here’s a tip if you want to avoid flooding in the future. If on your survey it says the house you want to buy is on a flood plain, don’t buy it. If it’s by a river, don’t buy it. Go onto the environment agency website and use their interactive flood maps to check the level of the last flood – if your house was under water, don’t buy it.
We’ve had rain like this before. But in the last 20 years or so we’ve overgrazed the uplands, so they can’t hold water, and we’ve over-developed the lowlands so they can’t cope with the run-off.
So when we get wet, we’ve only got ourselves, not government, to blame.
THE death of North Wales airman Peter McFerran serves to underline the need to extract ourselves from the country as soon as possible.
There is a cruel irony to the fact, as revealed by his father, that he had thought long and hard about joining the RAF because of his doubts about the war in Iraq.
Once in however, like any good member of our forces, he went where he was ordered and paid for that service to his country with his life.
Our political leaders continue to insist that, having got Iraq into this mess, we ought to get them out of it. But that should not be a blank cheque to be signed with the blood of our sons and daughters they send out there.
The grieving family of Peter McFerran deserve to know that others will not share their fate and that it is time to bring the boys, and girls, back home.
THE schools inspectors have conducted their dawn, well, 9.30am, raid on my son’s playgroup.
They found what we knew was there, a well-run group catering to a lively group of very happy children who learn a lot through various play activities.
It’s well-supported by parents and has good links with the school where the children move on to once they’re four.
But, Ofsted being Ofsted, and I can only hope Wales’s Estyn doesn’t share this ethos, they had to find something to constructively criticise.
And the glaring absence the inspector had found?
No laptop.
Yes, the absence of the white heat of technology diverting them from healthy play into the nightmare of video games was a cause for concern.
My son is four next month. The only laptop he is interested in is the lap of his mum or dad when he gets his bedtime story.
When I started work it was hammering away at a sit-up-and-beg typewriter with carbon paper and elderly gents in green eyeshades picking my copy apart. Since then computers have come to dominate my work and my life and rarely have I felt each innovation bring any great benefit.
There will be plenty of time for my son to explore the good and the bad of computers. Now I just want him, and all other children of his age, to play.
Column, July 24, 2007
AS a jobbing reporter on regional papers I have numbed my backside for more hours than I care to remember on the press benches of local councils.
Planning committees were often more arduous than most, as one innocuous application after another was examined, rarely exciting hot debate and even more rarely troubling my shorthand skills.
But I do remember one phrase that began to catch my eye on officers’ reports to the extent that I was shaken from my habitual sullen indolence to actually do a story.
That phrase was a short statement which said: “This development is being built on a flood plain.”
Hmmm, I thought, I’m no expert, but doesn’t that sort of imply that occasionally this will, kind of, flood?
Yes, said those who I spoke to, complimenting me on my hawk-eyed watchfulness of planning matters and incisive analysis of their implications (ok, made that bit up.) And what is more if you build on a flood plain, you not only risk floods to tha development itself, but you store up problems for other areas too.
Because if you stick a load of concrete and tarmac on a flood plain, rainwater that would otherwise have sate there and soaked into the ground has to go somewhere else, and it will go wherever gravity takes it – and that might mean into the next-door housing estate.
We have been building on flood plains for years, well, since they founded London in Roman times at the very least. But at least when the Romans built they didn’t seal the ground so thoroughly that they created great tsunamis of flood water that washed everyone from house and home.
Now we have spent decades building on flood plains and with the recent scenes across the country we are reaping the consequences.
It’s no good people demanding why weren’t they warned and why weren’t the defences in place. Firstly, the Met Office were warning us on virtually every bulletin last week, but people have this blind optimism that it won’t happen to them, right up until they see their sofa floating out of their lounge window.
Secondly, what exactly do you expect the government to do? They could evacuate people to safety – which they have. Feed them and keep them warm – which they have. Mobilise the Army to help – which they have.
When a river breaks its banks there is not an awful lot you can do to stop it. Sure you can put flood barriers up and hope they don’t get overtopped, but that just shifts the problem downstream to another town or village. It might break its banks into an open flood plain, but then you’ve got to hope you’ve got one handy that you haven’t built on, see above.
So while I’m all for blaming government when they deserve it, I’m disinclined to stick it to them now.
Especially as the BBC seems to believe the flooding in the West Country this weekend is tantamount to the end of civilisation, whereas when the North was deluged a few weeks ago it was all but ignored.
On Sunday night we had Kate Silverton in a distinctly damp-looking hairdo, intoning grimly about the floods in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. Yesterday morning the Beeb had even set the disaster to music with a plinking piano soundtrack backing slo-mo scenes of devastation.
A couple of weeks ago the city of Hull was laid waste by the rain and did we hear a peep from the BBC? Perhaps they think stoic Northerners can take it better than southern-softy executives who’ve got grand homes in the South West. And they’re probably right.
But here’s a tip if you want to avoid flooding in the future. If on your survey it says the house you want to buy is on a flood plain, don’t buy it. If it’s by a river, don’t buy it. Go onto the environment agency website and use their interactive flood maps to check the level of the last flood – if your house was under water, don’t buy it.
We’ve had rain like this before. But in the last 20 years or so we’ve overgrazed the uplands, so they can’t hold water, and we’ve over-developed the lowlands so they can’t cope with the run-off.
So when we get wet, we’ve only got ourselves, not government, to blame.
THE death of North Wales airman Peter McFerran serves to underline the need to extract ourselves from the country as soon as possible.
There is a cruel irony to the fact, as revealed by his father, that he had thought long and hard about joining the RAF because of his doubts about the war in Iraq.
Once in however, like any good member of our forces, he went where he was ordered and paid for that service to his country with his life.
Our political leaders continue to insist that, having got Iraq into this mess, we ought to get them out of it. But that should not be a blank cheque to be signed with the blood of our sons and daughters they send out there.
The grieving family of Peter McFerran deserve to know that others will not share their fate and that it is time to bring the boys, and girls, back home.
THE schools inspectors have conducted their dawn, well, 9.30am, raid on my son’s playgroup.
They found what we knew was there, a well-run group catering to a lively group of very happy children who learn a lot through various play activities.
It’s well-supported by parents and has good links with the school where the children move on to once they’re four.
But, Ofsted being Ofsted, and I can only hope Wales’s Estyn doesn’t share this ethos, they had to find something to constructively criticise.
And the glaring absence the inspector had found?
No laptop.
Yes, the absence of the white heat of technology diverting them from healthy play into the nightmare of video games was a cause for concern.
My son is four next month. The only laptop he is interested in is the lap of his mum or dad when he gets his bedtime story.
When I started work it was hammering away at a sit-up-and-beg typewriter with carbon paper and elderly gents in green eyeshades picking my copy apart. Since then computers have come to dominate my work and my life and rarely have I felt each innovation bring any great benefit.
There will be plenty of time for my son to explore the good and the bad of computers. Now I just want him, and all other children of his age, to play.
Planning committees were often more arduous than most, as one innocuous application after another was examined, rarely exciting hot debate and even more rarely troubling my shorthand skills.
But I do remember one phrase that began to catch my eye on officers’ reports to the extent that I was shaken from my habitual sullen indolence to actually do a story.
That phrase was a short statement which said: “This development is being built on a flood plain.”
Hmmm, I thought, I’m no expert, but doesn’t that sort of imply that occasionally this will, kind of, flood?
Yes, said those who I spoke to, complimenting me on my hawk-eyed watchfulness of planning matters and incisive analysis of their implications (ok, made that bit up.) And what is more if you build on a flood plain, you not only risk floods to tha development itself, but you store up problems for other areas too.
Because if you stick a load of concrete and tarmac on a flood plain, rainwater that would otherwise have sate there and soaked into the ground has to go somewhere else, and it will go wherever gravity takes it – and that might mean into the next-door housing estate.
We have been building on flood plains for years, well, since they founded London in Roman times at the very least. But at least when the Romans built they didn’t seal the ground so thoroughly that they created great tsunamis of flood water that washed everyone from house and home.
Now we have spent decades building on flood plains and with the recent scenes across the country we are reaping the consequences.
It’s no good people demanding why weren’t they warned and why weren’t the defences in place. Firstly, the Met Office were warning us on virtually every bulletin last week, but people have this blind optimism that it won’t happen to them, right up until they see their sofa floating out of their lounge window.
Secondly, what exactly do you expect the government to do? They could evacuate people to safety – which they have. Feed them and keep them warm – which they have. Mobilise the Army to help – which they have.
When a river breaks its banks there is not an awful lot you can do to stop it. Sure you can put flood barriers up and hope they don’t get overtopped, but that just shifts the problem downstream to another town or village. It might break its banks into an open flood plain, but then you’ve got to hope you’ve got one handy that you haven’t built on, see above.
So while I’m all for blaming government when they deserve it, I’m disinclined to stick it to them now.
Especially as the BBC seems to believe the flooding in the West Country this weekend is tantamount to the end of civilisation, whereas when the North was deluged a few weeks ago it was all but ignored.
On Sunday night we had Kate Silverton in a distinctly damp-looking hairdo, intoning grimly about the floods in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. Yesterday morning the Beeb had even set the disaster to music with a plinking piano soundtrack backing slo-mo scenes of devastation.
A couple of weeks ago the city of Hull was laid waste by the rain and did we hear a peep from the BBC? Perhaps they think stoic Northerners can take it better than southern-softy executives who’ve got grand homes in the South West. And they’re probably right.
But here’s a tip if you want to avoid flooding in the future. If on your survey it says the house you want to buy is on a flood plain, don’t buy it. If it’s by a river, don’t buy it. Go onto the environment agency website and use their interactive flood maps to check the level of the last flood – if your house was under water, don’t buy it.
We’ve had rain like this before. But in the last 20 years or so we’ve overgrazed the uplands, so they can’t hold water, and we’ve over-developed the lowlands so they can’t cope with the run-off.
So when we get wet, we’ve only got ourselves, not government, to blame.
THE death of North Wales airman Peter McFerran serves to underline the need to extract ourselves from the country as soon as possible.
There is a cruel irony to the fact, as revealed by his father, that he had thought long and hard about joining the RAF because of his doubts about the war in Iraq.
Once in however, like any good member of our forces, he went where he was ordered and paid for that service to his country with his life.
Our political leaders continue to insist that, having got Iraq into this mess, we ought to get them out of it. But that should not be a blank cheque to be signed with the blood of our sons and daughters they send out there.
The grieving family of Peter McFerran deserve to know that others will not share their fate and that it is time to bring the boys, and girls, back home.
THE schools inspectors have conducted their dawn, well, 9.30am, raid on my son’s playgroup.
They found what we knew was there, a well-run group catering to a lively group of very happy children who learn a lot through various play activities.
It’s well-supported by parents and has good links with the school where the children move on to once they’re four.
But, Ofsted being Ofsted, and I can only hope Wales’s Estyn doesn’t share this ethos, they had to find something to constructively criticise.
And the glaring absence the inspector had found?
No laptop.
Yes, the absence of the white heat of technology diverting them from healthy play into the nightmare of video games was a cause for concern.
My son is four next month. The only laptop he is interested in is the lap of his mum or dad when he gets his bedtime story.
When I started work it was hammering away at a sit-up-and-beg typewriter with carbon paper and elderly gents in green eyeshades picking my copy apart. Since then computers have come to dominate my work and my life and rarely have I felt each innovation bring any great benefit.
There will be plenty of time for my son to explore the good and the bad of computers. Now I just want him, and all other children of his age, to play.
Column, July 17, 2007
THERE is a strange contradiction in this country.
On July 7 when the Tour de France set off from London for the first time in its history, four million people turned up to watch as it wound its way through the capital and the through the lanes of Kent.
And this year we in Wales had a hero to cheer on in the peloton in the shape of Cardiff’s Geraint Thomas. Perhaps not a contender for the yellow jersey – well at 160th out of 170 when I last checked it’s not the maillot jaune he covets, but the red lantern that he’s trying to avoid.
But hey, even being in there is a towering achievement for any cyclist.
I wonder whether the next day any of those four million cursed as a cyclist got in their way as they drove to work.
Perhaps not, maybe the four million motivated enough to go to see the fantastic spectacle of the Tour’s ‘Grand Depart’ would not be the sort to lean on their horn should a cyclist have the temerity to ride on any part of the road other than the gutter.
I suspect that while many will be cycling devotees themselves, or at least more tolerant of cyclists, a good few of the four million will not be able to see the connection between the superhuman athletes of the Tour and the wobbling commuters on bikes the next day.
On the face of it there might not be much. After all there is world of difference in ability and athleticism between someone who pootles into work on a sit-up-and-beg bike and a Tour cyclist who takes on the lung-bursting mountain climbs aboard a carbon fibre piece of cycling wizardry.
But they’re all cyclists, and outside the marshalled safety of the Tour, the professional cyclist is as vulnerable on the road as the fun cyclist out for pleasure.
And this is where attitudes diverge either side of the Channel. In some European cities up to a quarter of the highways budget is spent on promoting cycling, with understandably positive results in the numbers of people taking up cycling.
Here a fraction of those amounts is spent and, little wonder, in lots of authority areas the take-up of cycling is very small.
Part of that might well be down to lack of demand, but then its chicken and egg scenario, unless the facilities are invested in, would-be cyclists will not venture out on two wheels.
Another problem is the contradictory nature of public attitudes. For many parents one of the landmark moments is buying your child’s first bike and then teaching him or her to ride, eventually without stabilisers.
What then turns such loving parents into cycle-hating demons when confronted with an adult cyclist making their way along the road without the aid of stabilisers?
And what happens to stop a child who is inseparable from their bike in childhood continuing to use it as a teenager and young adult? Something makes them abandon the bike as a plaything of childhood and not a serious mode of transport.
And yet the benefits of continuing the childhood habit of cycling into adulthood are obvious. A healthier population and a drop in the massive cost of caring for people who have had strokes and heart attacks brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle.
When it comes to reducing your carbon footprint there are few bigger things you can do than foregoing the car and replacing it with a bike.
But it’s all very well individuals taking action, but without co-ordinated support from government at a local and national level it is hopeless.
For example, how did the Government, which wants us to get out of our car, manage to sell of rail franchises to operators, some of whom make virtually no provision for bikes on their services. How is that a ‘joined-up’ transport policy?
And then you get authorities like those in Llandudno deciding that a ‘safe’ route through the town for cyclists to take their chance in the traffic instead of sending them along the promenade. Yes, so safe another cyclist has been knocked down and seriously injured again this week.
So, no, sadly, I don’t think the Tour’s start in the UK will mark any sea-change in our perverse attitude to cycling. Instead we have to rely on the sheer bloody-mindedness of the likes of Ken Livingstone who are determined to save their cities from the blight of car congestion.
Where London goes first, perhaps one day Llandudno will follow, but I suspect a lot of cyclists will have to risk their lives before they do.
I THINK only an idiot, or a BNP supporter (and perhaps that is a tautology), could ever have doubted that Nick Bourne would be cleared of improper conduct in calling the BNP “nasty, mean, distasteful and grubby bunch of sub-human flotsam and jetsam.”
But what was interesting was the BNP’s response to the Assembly opposition leader’s remarks on his blog. They were, they said, delighted, because it showed he was afraid to debate their arguments.
Oh really, well I’m sure that the 180 people who had the time and motivation to make a complaint were not BNP supporters at all. Because BNP supporters must all have shared the leadership’s delight at being called a “nasty, mean, distasteful and grubby bunch of sub-human flotsam and jetsam.”
In fact Mr Bourne has done them a favour, after all, political parties can spend a lot on re-branding nowadays.
So instead of spending money on red-socked advertising dandies to come up with a slogan for the BNP, Mr Bourne’s got the job done, free of charge.
As election slogans go it might break new ground in its pithy honesty, but given their pathetic performance in Wales thus far, it might be worth giving it a try.
On July 7 when the Tour de France set off from London for the first time in its history, four million people turned up to watch as it wound its way through the capital and the through the lanes of Kent.
And this year we in Wales had a hero to cheer on in the peloton in the shape of Cardiff’s Geraint Thomas. Perhaps not a contender for the yellow jersey – well at 160th out of 170 when I last checked it’s not the maillot jaune he covets, but the red lantern that he’s trying to avoid.
But hey, even being in there is a towering achievement for any cyclist.
I wonder whether the next day any of those four million cursed as a cyclist got in their way as they drove to work.
Perhaps not, maybe the four million motivated enough to go to see the fantastic spectacle of the Tour’s ‘Grand Depart’ would not be the sort to lean on their horn should a cyclist have the temerity to ride on any part of the road other than the gutter.
I suspect that while many will be cycling devotees themselves, or at least more tolerant of cyclists, a good few of the four million will not be able to see the connection between the superhuman athletes of the Tour and the wobbling commuters on bikes the next day.
On the face of it there might not be much. After all there is world of difference in ability and athleticism between someone who pootles into work on a sit-up-and-beg bike and a Tour cyclist who takes on the lung-bursting mountain climbs aboard a carbon fibre piece of cycling wizardry.
But they’re all cyclists, and outside the marshalled safety of the Tour, the professional cyclist is as vulnerable on the road as the fun cyclist out for pleasure.
And this is where attitudes diverge either side of the Channel. In some European cities up to a quarter of the highways budget is spent on promoting cycling, with understandably positive results in the numbers of people taking up cycling.
Here a fraction of those amounts is spent and, little wonder, in lots of authority areas the take-up of cycling is very small.
Part of that might well be down to lack of demand, but then its chicken and egg scenario, unless the facilities are invested in, would-be cyclists will not venture out on two wheels.
Another problem is the contradictory nature of public attitudes. For many parents one of the landmark moments is buying your child’s first bike and then teaching him or her to ride, eventually without stabilisers.
What then turns such loving parents into cycle-hating demons when confronted with an adult cyclist making their way along the road without the aid of stabilisers?
And what happens to stop a child who is inseparable from their bike in childhood continuing to use it as a teenager and young adult? Something makes them abandon the bike as a plaything of childhood and not a serious mode of transport.
And yet the benefits of continuing the childhood habit of cycling into adulthood are obvious. A healthier population and a drop in the massive cost of caring for people who have had strokes and heart attacks brought on by an unhealthy lifestyle.
When it comes to reducing your carbon footprint there are few bigger things you can do than foregoing the car and replacing it with a bike.
But it’s all very well individuals taking action, but without co-ordinated support from government at a local and national level it is hopeless.
For example, how did the Government, which wants us to get out of our car, manage to sell of rail franchises to operators, some of whom make virtually no provision for bikes on their services. How is that a ‘joined-up’ transport policy?
And then you get authorities like those in Llandudno deciding that a ‘safe’ route through the town for cyclists to take their chance in the traffic instead of sending them along the promenade. Yes, so safe another cyclist has been knocked down and seriously injured again this week.
So, no, sadly, I don’t think the Tour’s start in the UK will mark any sea-change in our perverse attitude to cycling. Instead we have to rely on the sheer bloody-mindedness of the likes of Ken Livingstone who are determined to save their cities from the blight of car congestion.
Where London goes first, perhaps one day Llandudno will follow, but I suspect a lot of cyclists will have to risk their lives before they do.
I THINK only an idiot, or a BNP supporter (and perhaps that is a tautology), could ever have doubted that Nick Bourne would be cleared of improper conduct in calling the BNP “nasty, mean, distasteful and grubby bunch of sub-human flotsam and jetsam.”
But what was interesting was the BNP’s response to the Assembly opposition leader’s remarks on his blog. They were, they said, delighted, because it showed he was afraid to debate their arguments.
Oh really, well I’m sure that the 180 people who had the time and motivation to make a complaint were not BNP supporters at all. Because BNP supporters must all have shared the leadership’s delight at being called a “nasty, mean, distasteful and grubby bunch of sub-human flotsam and jetsam.”
In fact Mr Bourne has done them a favour, after all, political parties can spend a lot on re-branding nowadays.
So instead of spending money on red-socked advertising dandies to come up with a slogan for the BNP, Mr Bourne’s got the job done, free of charge.
As election slogans go it might break new ground in its pithy honesty, but given their pathetic performance in Wales thus far, it might be worth giving it a try.
Column, July 10, 2007
TO BE fair it wasn’t raining every day we were on the Llŷn.
One day it was just blowing a gale.
No-one told me that gills were this season’s must-have for a holiday on the peninsula.
But I suppose the Llŷn was not alone in being drenched last week, and we did have one final day of glorious sunshine that we spent on Llanbedrog beach that reminded me of the idyllic holidays spent in that part of Wales as a child.
In a way not much has changed, the Llŷn is still blessed with unspoilt stretches of beach that are as good as any you would find the world over.
But while the Llŷn remains unspoilt, it is that lack of change which seems to be the greatest threat to its future.
One of the great things about the place is that it has resisted the march of corporate culture. It still has its own quirky, individual shops and cafés that are not part of some global, homogenized chain.
They’re owned and run by local people and their profits stay on the Llŷn because their owners live there.
But, you have to say that 24-hour-a-day convenience shopping is not part of that culture and, perhaps rightly, they shut up shop on the dot.
That’s fine, so long as your competitors do the same, and as long as the Llŷn was served by small shops, that was the case.
But now the big boys have moved in, Tesco, Morrisons, Asda are all within easy reach and they stay open way into the night when the small shopkeepers have long pulled down their shutters.
The arrival of the big supermarkets on the Llŷn is I think the death knell for many of the small traders there, unless they can adapt fast.
Tourists can now head for their holiday home, call in at Asda Pwllheli on the way and load up with all the food they need for the week. The cash that they would have spent in locally-owned shops simply swells Asda’s profits and little benefit is felt locally. OK Asda provides jobs to local people and may buy some of its produce in the region, but it will never benefit the local economy to the same extent as it would if the shopping was done at a local small business.
This is going to change the nature of the relationship between people who live on the Llŷn and tourists, a relationship that is already uneasy at times.
For the most part, while the holiday home debate rages, it was accepted that tourism contributed a huge amount to the economy of the region.
However, when you remove from the contribution the money that is now going to supermarket shareholders instead of local shopkeepers, then the local community are going to see tourists as less beneficial than they were previously.
There’s no easy answer to this, small shops cannot hope to beat supermarkets on opening hours, price or range. But what they can do is be more authentic than the supermarkets.
People don’t come to the Llŷn for convenience – let’s face it, if you were doing what is convenient you would be hopping on an easyjet flight to somewhere much hotter for about the same money that you spend on petrol getting you into Wales.
So if they come to the Llŷn for its beauty and character, it’s not unreasonable to think they might be prepared to forego their supermarket shop and shop locally instead. And they would be more tempted to do this if the local shopkeepers promoted local produce.
Some of them are doing this already, but it needs to be pursued aggressively. You are never going to beat Asda on the price of a tin of beans, so don’t try. Instead source your food locally and make sure that for an authentic taste of the Llŷn then it is your shop that tourists have to come to, not the nearest supermarket.
Some shops might be more specialist and might not see the supermarkets as their competitors. But what the supermarkets do is reduce the traffic of shoppers on the high street, and the passing trade falls off so there is no room for complacency.
This not meant to sound pessimistic, the Llŷn remains a beautiful place that will always attract visitors – but the question is how much benefit will the Llŷn derive from those visitors.
Even in rain that is being driven straight into your face by winds whipping in off the Irish Sea the Llŷn is lovely. It remains the wild edge of the world and my favourite part of Wales.
WHAT wasn’t so lovely was the regular appearance of jetskis off the beaches of the Llŷn.
I think the majority of visitors, and locals, who go to the beaches there do so to find a little tranquility and to enjoy the unspoilt nature of the coastline.
How you do that with a jetski fizzing up and down the shoreline is beyond me.
Of course, some might argue that banning them will damage tourism. But a couple of jetskiers can ruin the enjoyment of a beach for hundreds of other visitors, so what little benefit they bring is vastly outweighed by the damage they do.
They are a vile invention, they serve no useful purpose, they pollute the environment and they ought to be banned completely from the North Wales coast.
One day it was just blowing a gale.
No-one told me that gills were this season’s must-have for a holiday on the peninsula.
But I suppose the Llŷn was not alone in being drenched last week, and we did have one final day of glorious sunshine that we spent on Llanbedrog beach that reminded me of the idyllic holidays spent in that part of Wales as a child.
In a way not much has changed, the Llŷn is still blessed with unspoilt stretches of beach that are as good as any you would find the world over.
But while the Llŷn remains unspoilt, it is that lack of change which seems to be the greatest threat to its future.
One of the great things about the place is that it has resisted the march of corporate culture. It still has its own quirky, individual shops and cafés that are not part of some global, homogenized chain.
They’re owned and run by local people and their profits stay on the Llŷn because their owners live there.
But, you have to say that 24-hour-a-day convenience shopping is not part of that culture and, perhaps rightly, they shut up shop on the dot.
That’s fine, so long as your competitors do the same, and as long as the Llŷn was served by small shops, that was the case.
But now the big boys have moved in, Tesco, Morrisons, Asda are all within easy reach and they stay open way into the night when the small shopkeepers have long pulled down their shutters.
The arrival of the big supermarkets on the Llŷn is I think the death knell for many of the small traders there, unless they can adapt fast.
Tourists can now head for their holiday home, call in at Asda Pwllheli on the way and load up with all the food they need for the week. The cash that they would have spent in locally-owned shops simply swells Asda’s profits and little benefit is felt locally. OK Asda provides jobs to local people and may buy some of its produce in the region, but it will never benefit the local economy to the same extent as it would if the shopping was done at a local small business.
This is going to change the nature of the relationship between people who live on the Llŷn and tourists, a relationship that is already uneasy at times.
For the most part, while the holiday home debate rages, it was accepted that tourism contributed a huge amount to the economy of the region.
However, when you remove from the contribution the money that is now going to supermarket shareholders instead of local shopkeepers, then the local community are going to see tourists as less beneficial than they were previously.
There’s no easy answer to this, small shops cannot hope to beat supermarkets on opening hours, price or range. But what they can do is be more authentic than the supermarkets.
People don’t come to the Llŷn for convenience – let’s face it, if you were doing what is convenient you would be hopping on an easyjet flight to somewhere much hotter for about the same money that you spend on petrol getting you into Wales.
So if they come to the Llŷn for its beauty and character, it’s not unreasonable to think they might be prepared to forego their supermarket shop and shop locally instead. And they would be more tempted to do this if the local shopkeepers promoted local produce.
Some of them are doing this already, but it needs to be pursued aggressively. You are never going to beat Asda on the price of a tin of beans, so don’t try. Instead source your food locally and make sure that for an authentic taste of the Llŷn then it is your shop that tourists have to come to, not the nearest supermarket.
Some shops might be more specialist and might not see the supermarkets as their competitors. But what the supermarkets do is reduce the traffic of shoppers on the high street, and the passing trade falls off so there is no room for complacency.
This not meant to sound pessimistic, the Llŷn remains a beautiful place that will always attract visitors – but the question is how much benefit will the Llŷn derive from those visitors.
Even in rain that is being driven straight into your face by winds whipping in off the Irish Sea the Llŷn is lovely. It remains the wild edge of the world and my favourite part of Wales.
WHAT wasn’t so lovely was the regular appearance of jetskis off the beaches of the Llŷn.
I think the majority of visitors, and locals, who go to the beaches there do so to find a little tranquility and to enjoy the unspoilt nature of the coastline.
How you do that with a jetski fizzing up and down the shoreline is beyond me.
Of course, some might argue that banning them will damage tourism. But a couple of jetskiers can ruin the enjoyment of a beach for hundreds of other visitors, so what little benefit they bring is vastly outweighed by the damage they do.
They are a vile invention, they serve no useful purpose, they pollute the environment and they ought to be banned completely from the North Wales coast.
Column, July 3, 2007
IF you were to wander through a North Wales town firing a shotgun, not particularly aiming at anyone, bit not really taking care not to, I wonder what would happen?
I’m guessing the forces of law and order would soon take an interest in your activities and a short spell in police cells would be rapidly followed by a long spell in prison.
So why is a shotgun different to a car?
Why can you get away with behaviour driving a car that would almost certainly see you jailed were it any other sort of implement?
The failure of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute Robert Harris for any offence other than having defective tyres has been rightly criticised by North Wales coroner John Hughes.
From the inquest it is clear Mr Harris is sorry for what happened when he lost control of his car and killed four cyclists, but prosecution fulfils two functions.
Firstly is punishes those who have broken the law; secondly it prevents further offending – by taking the perpetrator out of circulation – and, crucially, acting as a deterrent to others who see him punished.
That deterrent effect is somewhat diminished if the public who are supposed to be being deterred see the perpetrator walk free with just a prosecution for having defective tyres.
Very few people get behind the wheel of a car intending to do harm and yet that is what they end up doing through carelessness or recklessness and so reminders are what they need no matter how unnecessary they might seem.
So why do car drivers enjoy this leniency?
Well, I think it’s due to the fact that virtually all of us have cars nowadays and when one of us breaks the law there’s a feeling of palpable relief among those unwilling to criticise themselves. It’s a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I.”
And how did the Crown Prosecution Service suddenly take over from the courts?
I can understand them taking decisions on whether to prosecute or not, but they need to understand the effect those decisions have.
The proper place for cases to stand or fall on the evidence is a court, and yet all too often the court does not determine whether the charge is proven or not, the decision is taken out of the hands of judges and magistrates.
If the CPS decide not to prosecute that denies someone their day in court and a cloud still hangs over their name – have they truly been cleared? No they haven’t.
The CPS needs to be careful that in deciding whether there is a realistic likelihood of a conviction they do not undermine the role of the courts. Very often they decide there is not and a case never makes it to court.
The problem is that while grieving relatives may be able to accept a court’s decision to dismiss a case, they are less tolerant of decisions made by faceless CPS staff without any consultation.
But the fundamental problem is that we, as a society, are far too tolerant of crime committed at the wheel of a car.
And the hysterical reaction of people to Richard Brunstrom’
Tackling that tolerance of wrongdoing will take legislation so that the punishment fits the crime and is an effective deterrent.
THE Bankses have packed the car, packed the kids and hit the beach.
It’s a traditional Llyn holiday for us this summer, complete with monsoon it would seem.
How the Llyn welcomes its visitors will be interesting to see. I remember idyllic holidays there as a child and wonder whether it has become more welcoming, or less.
More importantly, will it be sun-drenched days on the golden sands, or noses pressed up against the window and interminable board games as the rain beats down.
I’ll report back on the experience in next week.
I’m guessing the forces of law and order would soon take an interest in your activities and a short spell in police cells would be rapidly followed by a long spell in prison.
So why is a shotgun different to a car?
Why can you get away with behaviour driving a car that would almost certainly see you jailed were it any other sort of implement?
The failure of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute Robert Harris for any offence other than having defective tyres has been rightly criticised by North Wales coroner John Hughes.
From the inquest it is clear Mr Harris is sorry for what happened when he lost control of his car and killed four cyclists, but prosecution fulfils two functions.
Firstly is punishes those who have broken the law; secondly it prevents further offending – by taking the perpetrator out of circulation – and, crucially, acting as a deterrent to others who see him punished.
That deterrent effect is somewhat diminished if the public who are supposed to be being deterred see the perpetrator walk free with just a prosecution for having defective tyres.
Very few people get behind the wheel of a car intending to do harm and yet that is what they end up doing through carelessness or recklessness and so reminders are what they need no matter how unnecessary they might seem.
So why do car drivers enjoy this leniency?
Well, I think it’s due to the fact that virtually all of us have cars nowadays and when one of us breaks the law there’s a feeling of palpable relief among those unwilling to criticise themselves. It’s a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I.”
And how did the Crown Prosecution Service suddenly take over from the courts?
I can understand them taking decisions on whether to prosecute or not, but they need to understand the effect those decisions have.
The proper place for cases to stand or fall on the evidence is a court, and yet all too often the court does not determine whether the charge is proven or not, the decision is taken out of the hands of judges and magistrates.
If the CPS decide not to prosecute that denies someone their day in court and a cloud still hangs over their name – have they truly been cleared? No they haven’t.
The CPS needs to be careful that in deciding whether there is a realistic likelihood of a conviction they do not undermine the role of the courts. Very often they decide there is not and a case never makes it to court.
The problem is that while grieving relatives may be able to accept a court’s decision to dismiss a case, they are less tolerant of decisions made by faceless CPS staff without any consultation.
But the fundamental problem is that we, as a society, are far too tolerant of crime committed at the wheel of a car.
And the hysterical reaction of people to Richard Brunstrom’
Tackling that tolerance of wrongdoing will take legislation so that the punishment fits the crime and is an effective deterrent.
THE Bankses have packed the car, packed the kids and hit the beach.
It’s a traditional Llyn holiday for us this summer, complete with monsoon it would seem.
How the Llyn welcomes its visitors will be interesting to see. I remember idyllic holidays there as a child and wonder whether it has become more welcoming, or less.
More importantly, will it be sun-drenched days on the golden sands, or noses pressed up against the window and interminable board games as the rain beats down.
I’ll report back on the experience in next week.
Column, June 25, 2007
WHEN the British Army was planning the logistics of the relief of Khartoum who do you think they went to for help?
It was quite an enterprise, they needed to move 18,000 troops and 40,000 tons of supplies, plus another 40,000 tons of coal, which needed 28 steamers to take it from Tyneside to Alexandria . On top of that 27 steamers were needed on the Nile and they employed 5,000 local workers in Egypt to shift it all.
Who had the experience of shifting that much bag and baggage across huge distances?
Thomas Cook, that’s who, or rather his son, John Mason Cook, who by that time was running the firm with his father.
No small achievement all in all for a firm founded by a lay preacher who decided the ills of Victorian society lay in too much alcohol and that education through travel was the answer.
The firm practically invented tourism as we understand it today, not only that they invented the package tour and came up with the idea of travellers’ cheques to boot.
So in the early days they clearly showed a genius for the sort of idea that made them the world’s best-known holiday firm. That and a grasp of the logistics of travel that meant many people agreed that they would not just book it, they would Thomas Cook it.
In achieving their pre-eminence as a holiday firm I suspect that their management focused clearly on the things that matter to their customers – price and quality – simple ideas, but taking effort to attain.
Thomas Cook came up with the idea for his holiday firm as he walked one day from Market Harborough to Leicester for a temperance meeting.
I’m not party to his thoughts that day, but as he contemplated the benefits of bring train excursions to the masses, I’m willing to lay money that he didn’t mentally add: “And I’ll make sure none of my staff speak Welsh as well.”
This isn’t the first time this has happened and I’m wondering if some of these companies send their management trainees to the same – presumably English – training school.
Then the bright young things are packed off to the provinces and some of them pitch up in Wales , where, apparently for the first time in their lives, they find that some people actually use Welsh as a first language.
Perhaps it is the shock of this discovery that led someone in Thomas Cook management to issue an edict instructing staff to speak in English.
But by now with the Assembly, the Commission for Racial Equality weighing in and Cymuned parking their tanks on their doorstep, well, waving placards, but if Cymuned had tanks that’s where they’d be parked, you would have thought some bright spark in the company that pioneered the Grand Tour would have said: “Hold on chaps and chapesses, let’s just have a think about this.”
You see, I bow to the superior management skills of Thomas Cook’s upper echelons, but I think before I started banning my staff from speaking their native tongue on grounds of clarity of communication, I might just have checked how much business had been lost because of a lack of clarity of communication between my Welsh and English staff.
I’m guessing that not one hotel room, not one airline seat, not one beach towel, not one Costa barstool went unoccupied because some of Thomas Cook’s Bangor staff speak Welsh to one another.
I’m also guessing that now, whereas many Welsh speakers might well not just have booked it they would have Thomas Cooked it, they’ll have come up with another rhyming slogan which owes something to the Anglo-Saxon that Thomas Cook would like to see employed by all their staff.
There is a point in these affairs where, if someone really senior steps in and says: “Look, bad, bad, really bad mistake, we’re sorry, of course you ca speak the language you learnt at your mum and dad’s knee, just please, please, please carry on booking your holidays with us because we do understand you can quite easily never use us again, ever, ever, ever.”
Then maybe, just maybe, we might be persuaded that it was just the idiotic actions of one ignorant management suit and a fine company with a great history shouldn’t be punished because now and then they give a job to a numbskull.
But, if as has happened so far, the management stick by their unjustifiable policy, then people in Wales might just decide to book their hols at the multitude of other firms who give not two figs what language their staff speak to each other, as long as they sell holidays.
If they won’t listen to reason then there is only one language this company will understand, and that’s hard cash. Don’t book it with Thomas Cook until they have backed down on their decision to ban Welsh.
A NEW threat has emerged to second home owners in Cornwall .
The Cornish National Liberation Army has targeted Jamie Oliver of all people, who it says, is responsible for the inflation of house prices there. Never mind the fact that his restaurant gives local young people the chance to learn how to become chefs, nor the fact that it uses local ingredients from local businesses, logic not the top weapon in the CNLA’s armoury it would seem.
But I was very interested to see the CNLA claim it has financial backing from the USA and ‘expertise’ from Welsh activists who burnt down holiday homes in the 1980s.
Hmmm. Those would be the same ‘experts’ who made such a dent in the Welsh holiday home market wouldn’t it? Not a sniff of a holiday home in Wales from Deeside to St Davids is there?
Estate agents in Cornwall must be rubbing their hands with glee, with ‘experts’ like that on board a second home boom is just round the corner.
It was quite an enterprise, they needed to move 18,000 troops and 40,000 tons of supplies, plus another 40,000 tons of coal, which needed 28 steamers to take it from Tyneside to Alexandria . On top of that 27 steamers were needed on the Nile and they employed 5,000 local workers in Egypt to shift it all.
Who had the experience of shifting that much bag and baggage across huge distances?
Thomas Cook, that’s who, or rather his son, John Mason Cook, who by that time was running the firm with his father.
No small achievement all in all for a firm founded by a lay preacher who decided the ills of Victorian society lay in too much alcohol and that education through travel was the answer.
The firm practically invented tourism as we understand it today, not only that they invented the package tour and came up with the idea of travellers’ cheques to boot.
So in the early days they clearly showed a genius for the sort of idea that made them the world’s best-known holiday firm. That and a grasp of the logistics of travel that meant many people agreed that they would not just book it, they would Thomas Cook it.
In achieving their pre-eminence as a holiday firm I suspect that their management focused clearly on the things that matter to their customers – price and quality – simple ideas, but taking effort to attain.
Thomas Cook came up with the idea for his holiday firm as he walked one day from Market Harborough to Leicester for a temperance meeting.
I’m not party to his thoughts that day, but as he contemplated the benefits of bring train excursions to the masses, I’m willing to lay money that he didn’t mentally add: “And I’ll make sure none of my staff speak Welsh as well.”
This isn’t the first time this has happened and I’m wondering if some of these companies send their management trainees to the same – presumably English – training school.
Then the bright young things are packed off to the provinces and some of them pitch up in Wales , where, apparently for the first time in their lives, they find that some people actually use Welsh as a first language.
Perhaps it is the shock of this discovery that led someone in Thomas Cook management to issue an edict instructing staff to speak in English.
But by now with the Assembly, the Commission for Racial Equality weighing in and Cymuned parking their tanks on their doorstep, well, waving placards, but if Cymuned had tanks that’s where they’d be parked, you would have thought some bright spark in the company that pioneered the Grand Tour would have said: “Hold on chaps and chapesses, let’s just have a think about this.”
You see, I bow to the superior management skills of Thomas Cook’s upper echelons, but I think before I started banning my staff from speaking their native tongue on grounds of clarity of communication, I might just have checked how much business had been lost because of a lack of clarity of communication between my Welsh and English staff.
I’m guessing that not one hotel room, not one airline seat, not one beach towel, not one Costa barstool went unoccupied because some of Thomas Cook’s Bangor staff speak Welsh to one another.
I’m also guessing that now, whereas many Welsh speakers might well not just have booked it they would have Thomas Cooked it, they’ll have come up with another rhyming slogan which owes something to the Anglo-Saxon that Thomas Cook would like to see employed by all their staff.
There is a point in these affairs where, if someone really senior steps in and says: “Look, bad, bad, really bad mistake, we’re sorry, of course you ca speak the language you learnt at your mum and dad’s knee, just please, please, please carry on booking your holidays with us because we do understand you can quite easily never use us again, ever, ever, ever.”
Then maybe, just maybe, we might be persuaded that it was just the idiotic actions of one ignorant management suit and a fine company with a great history shouldn’t be punished because now and then they give a job to a numbskull.
But, if as has happened so far, the management stick by their unjustifiable policy, then people in Wales might just decide to book their hols at the multitude of other firms who give not two figs what language their staff speak to each other, as long as they sell holidays.
If they won’t listen to reason then there is only one language this company will understand, and that’s hard cash. Don’t book it with Thomas Cook until they have backed down on their decision to ban Welsh.
A NEW threat has emerged to second home owners in Cornwall .
The Cornish National Liberation Army has targeted Jamie Oliver of all people, who it says, is responsible for the inflation of house prices there. Never mind the fact that his restaurant gives local young people the chance to learn how to become chefs, nor the fact that it uses local ingredients from local businesses, logic not the top weapon in the CNLA’s armoury it would seem.
But I was very interested to see the CNLA claim it has financial backing from the USA and ‘expertise’ from Welsh activists who burnt down holiday homes in the 1980s.
Hmmm. Those would be the same ‘experts’ who made such a dent in the Welsh holiday home market wouldn’t it? Not a sniff of a holiday home in Wales from Deeside to St Davids is there?
Estate agents in Cornwall must be rubbing their hands with glee, with ‘experts’ like that on board a second home boom is just round the corner.
Column, June 19, 2007
THE thing about Orwell is that people never get him quite right.
Take Room 101 for instance. Now it has become a tame BBC celeb-show, famously consigning all of us to Room 101 when Anne Robinson was a guest.
What the forget is that in Orwell’s vision of the future Room 101 was not some dustbin to which you consigned those things you hated. It was a place were the things you most feared resided and you would be tortured by being put in there with them.
Likewise the title of his novel, 1984, was misread when 1984 came and went and we didn’t have a spy camera in every room in every home.
When he wrote 1984 Orwell was not behaving like some literary Mystic Meg, making predictions for specific dates. He merely reversed the year he was writing in 1948 became 1984 – it just meant ‘the future.’
And now those who sneered in 1984 about the absence of brotherly surveillance from our lives might like to pause in silent apology to Orwell’s foresight.
The spies may not be state-imposed, wall-mounted devices and the television turned out to be much more benign than the spy we have invited into our homes – the personal computer.
We all use them and they sit there quietly logging every last thing we look at, everything we buy, every message we send. Of course, no-one looks at these records of our every last mouse-click – until they need to. And then, if we’ve done nothing wrong we’ve got nothing to fear have we?
Now it emerges thanks to the Liberal Democrats that one in five Welsh children aged between 10 and 17 has their DNA on the national DNA database.
Of course, if they’ve done nothing wrong they’ve got nothing to fear have they?
Lembit Opik, revealing this shocking statistic said: “It is clear ministers see no limits in their haste to invade our privacy.”
This includes some children under the age of 10. So they’re too young to be criminally responsible as far as the courts are concerned, but not too young to be recorded as far as this government is concerned.
Of course it’s always dressed up as the fight for law and order, the war on terrorism or such like. But tell me this, as the surveillance society crept up on us webcam by webcam, have you notice how peaceful and law-abiding we have become?
In fact you almost have to applaud the genius of the criminal community for carrying on in their chosen way of life in the face of increasing odds that their face will be captured for posterity, or at least Crimewatch, and Nick Ross will be warning viewers not to have nightmares about them.
The incredible thing is that when Orwell wrote his book it was seen as almost impossible that free British people would ever allow themselves to become the subject of such intrusive state scrutiny.
Yet here we are 60 years later and we’ve welcomed it in with open arms. Not only that, we buy most of the surveillance kit that Big Brother needs out of our own pockets. We buy the PCs and webcams and mobile phones and pay for the internet connections and e-mails.
Of course, if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear have you?
Just one small thing.
Who decides what’s wrong?
Who was it that decided it would be a good idea to have 20 per cent of the Welsh child population on a DNA database?
You’ll never find an individual, it will just be a succession of small decisions by middle-ranking bureaucrats and so little by little we stop being free.
Instead of walking down the street knowing no-one can interfere with us as long as we are obeying the law, now we cast a nervous glance over our shoulder to see who is watching to check that we are obeying the law.
Soon we will have to take that walk carrying an identity card carrying biometric data confirming we are who we say we are, and we’ll have to show that to a police officer if he or she asks.
That’s not freedom. You’re not free if you’re walking the streets on sufferance, so long as you can produce your papers.
How did we get here? Well we started down this road by believing politicians when they told us lies. They are people who believe they can run our lives for us, and they love seeing our every move, because they believe they can run our lives better, if only they could control us a little more.
Of course DNA is a useful tool to the police and the more people who are on it the better chance of catching criminals.
But here’s the thing. Most criminals, when they offend, don’t even give detection a second thought, they all think they’ll get away with it, database or no.
In the meantime the law-abiding majority have the freedoms they cherish snatched away from them all in the name of law and order.
Under this government this shows no sign of abating and so when you realise how right Orwell was, don’t say you weren’t warned.
AND just in case you were of the opinion that the surveillance society had made us more law abiding, think on.
It was announced last week that prisons in England and Wales were just 481 places away from capacity.
A few tasty nights in cities across the country and they will have to hang the ‘no vacancies’ sign on the door.
So, the option is stop sending so many people to prison, or build more prisons. But where to build when every plan attracts an outraged petition from people who don’t want and prison on their doorstep?
Something has got to give and given the fact that we have the highest prison population per head in Europe , then perhaps its magistrates’ penchant for throwing the book at every offender.
Take Room 101 for instance. Now it has become a tame BBC celeb-show, famously consigning all of us to Room 101 when Anne Robinson was a guest.
What the forget is that in Orwell’s vision of the future Room 101 was not some dustbin to which you consigned those things you hated. It was a place were the things you most feared resided and you would be tortured by being put in there with them.
Likewise the title of his novel, 1984, was misread when 1984 came and went and we didn’t have a spy camera in every room in every home.
When he wrote 1984 Orwell was not behaving like some literary Mystic Meg, making predictions for specific dates. He merely reversed the year he was writing in 1948 became 1984 – it just meant ‘the future.’
And now those who sneered in 1984 about the absence of brotherly surveillance from our lives might like to pause in silent apology to Orwell’s foresight.
The spies may not be state-imposed, wall-mounted devices and the television turned out to be much more benign than the spy we have invited into our homes – the personal computer.
We all use them and they sit there quietly logging every last thing we look at, everything we buy, every message we send. Of course, no-one looks at these records of our every last mouse-click – until they need to. And then, if we’ve done nothing wrong we’ve got nothing to fear have we?
Now it emerges thanks to the Liberal Democrats that one in five Welsh children aged between 10 and 17 has their DNA on the national DNA database.
Of course, if they’ve done nothing wrong they’ve got nothing to fear have they?
Lembit Opik, revealing this shocking statistic said: “It is clear ministers see no limits in their haste to invade our privacy.”
This includes some children under the age of 10. So they’re too young to be criminally responsible as far as the courts are concerned, but not too young to be recorded as far as this government is concerned.
Of course it’s always dressed up as the fight for law and order, the war on terrorism or such like. But tell me this, as the surveillance society crept up on us webcam by webcam, have you notice how peaceful and law-abiding we have become?
In fact you almost have to applaud the genius of the criminal community for carrying on in their chosen way of life in the face of increasing odds that their face will be captured for posterity, or at least Crimewatch, and Nick Ross will be warning viewers not to have nightmares about them.
The incredible thing is that when Orwell wrote his book it was seen as almost impossible that free British people would ever allow themselves to become the subject of such intrusive state scrutiny.
Yet here we are 60 years later and we’ve welcomed it in with open arms. Not only that, we buy most of the surveillance kit that Big Brother needs out of our own pockets. We buy the PCs and webcams and mobile phones and pay for the internet connections and e-mails.
Of course, if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear have you?
Just one small thing.
Who decides what’s wrong?
Who was it that decided it would be a good idea to have 20 per cent of the Welsh child population on a DNA database?
You’ll never find an individual, it will just be a succession of small decisions by middle-ranking bureaucrats and so little by little we stop being free.
Instead of walking down the street knowing no-one can interfere with us as long as we are obeying the law, now we cast a nervous glance over our shoulder to see who is watching to check that we are obeying the law.
Soon we will have to take that walk carrying an identity card carrying biometric data confirming we are who we say we are, and we’ll have to show that to a police officer if he or she asks.
That’s not freedom. You’re not free if you’re walking the streets on sufferance, so long as you can produce your papers.
How did we get here? Well we started down this road by believing politicians when they told us lies. They are people who believe they can run our lives for us, and they love seeing our every move, because they believe they can run our lives better, if only they could control us a little more.
Of course DNA is a useful tool to the police and the more people who are on it the better chance of catching criminals.
But here’s the thing. Most criminals, when they offend, don’t even give detection a second thought, they all think they’ll get away with it, database or no.
In the meantime the law-abiding majority have the freedoms they cherish snatched away from them all in the name of law and order.
Under this government this shows no sign of abating and so when you realise how right Orwell was, don’t say you weren’t warned.
AND just in case you were of the opinion that the surveillance society had made us more law abiding, think on.
It was announced last week that prisons in England and Wales were just 481 places away from capacity.
A few tasty nights in cities across the country and they will have to hang the ‘no vacancies’ sign on the door.
So, the option is stop sending so many people to prison, or build more prisons. But where to build when every plan attracts an outraged petition from people who don’t want and prison on their doorstep?
Something has got to give and given the fact that we have the highest prison population per head in Europe , then perhaps its magistrates’ penchant for throwing the book at every offender.
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