Going it Alone

The best analogy I can come up with is, you do not venture out into a wild, unpredictable, rapidly changing, volatile environment with complete uncertainty as to availability of food or shelter on your own. You just don't do it. Anything happens to you, no one will know or will be able to find you. Only if you are extraordinarily rich, well equipped with instant access to a rescue team might you possibly consider it. Harsh places are not for the sole venturer.

Harsh places are for teams, then there is always some part of the group that can go and arrange for help or rescue. More than this, in a harsh climate you have to carry everything you might possibly need. The basics are a change of gear, food and water. These make up the bulk of what you must carry and limit your time out in the terrain. Then there are the also necessary but more optional items of shelter, cooking equipment, first aid, navigation, communications and so on and on. The bigger the team the more support you can consider which extends further the time possible out exposed. Each extra spread out amongst the load carrying capacity of the team, in addition to their own personal survival requirements. So where does a rogue with you but not with you fit in? Wanting independence but not willing to carry any collective load.

Team work brings with it conflict of aims, personalities, abilities and contribution. Managed well teams can way out perform any aggregate of solo contributions. Handled badly and they tear themselves apart without making progress. Finding the leader, for the challenges of any particular stage, who has a commonality of vision and restrained ego is crucial. So how does this loner, part of but not part of the team, fit in? What contribution can he make? How are any opinions offered by this loner going to be regarded by the real team members? Are his claims of pending doom and disaster going to cut any ice? The answer is self-evident.

Obviously what I have in mind is that the basics we each carry of food, which is the nation's currency, and the water, which is the nation's wealth creation mechanisms of industry, commerce and services. The hostile environment is the global multi-national trading environment and the team of course is the EU. Our best and only chance of keeping our head up and making a contribution in this savage world of prey on the weak and defer to the strong and powerful.

All Change

Been thinking about my water supply, pressure seems to be low compared to what it was, but then that just maybe an ageing thing with me. If the Supply Company did set about reducing the water pressure there could be significant savings. Low pressure means less leakage, an insufficient pipe network can cope for longer before replacement and lower pressure means slower take up of reservoir water and lower volume to treat. These are big cost considerations. The point is, there is nothing to stop them from deciding to lower the mains pressure. Their objective is not any longer to provide the best possible service. Their primary, if not overriding objective, is to return an increasing profit to their shareholders. User concerns are not on their agenda other than running as minimal a service as they can get away with, just short of referral to any regulatory body or generating a nuisance level of complaint. Providing a good service cost them and brings them no dividends. There are not more customers to win, it is, to all intents and purposes,a fixed quantum. Their consumers have no where else to go to and no one to champion for them. So what, the water pressure is low, what are you going to do about it? There is no statutory requirement. The consumer is left in a hard place.

Not just water of course but all the old public utility industries, electricity, telephones, rail, and good old Royal Mail. Where are the safeguards that keeps electricity at the target voltage and not allowed to settle to the lowest percentile, or what is supposed to stop a next day delivery becoming 'within three days' norm, what checks are there in the time taken to renew a telephone line fault or what ensures there is a seat, on a clean train which is running on time? Nothing tangible that I can see or find. With the need to generate a profit replacing the previous desire to provide a good service, the luckless consumer, without any real alternate choice or options, has to get on with using these declining services. The politicians are in the clear, privatised, nothing to do with them, (except of course the creation of these monsters). The private companies are untouchable, they provide to the standard required when they were setup. Their regulatory bodies, which are supposed to provide a complaints procedure, seem unable to deal with the deluge of ordinary day mishaps and lack of performance. They have no remit to respond to your actual experienced real or imagined complaints. These private companies loyalty is to their boards of shareholders, (predominately pension plans to a tee), you as a consumer have no voice. Those individual share-owners who bought into the bonanza have no meaningful voice against the institutions that ended with the more than lion's share. So, within the prescribed remit, they meet the requirements and you have only to look at the profits and enhanced values returned to 'their' shareholders to see they are successful. Except by that one essential bottom line, service to the consumer.


When there is a more or less fixed market for your 'goods', when that market is stable and will not suddenly disappear, when the regulators have been left toothless, when the glory goals of 'privatisation' far out shines a dimly held desire to give a good service, when there is no tie between making profit and providing that high quality of service, then any incentive to do better evaporates. In this short-sighted flawed application of supposed commercial energisation the consumer has been sold out. Utility services are just that, essential core services to keep the country turning over efficiently, not optional, not marginal, smack dead central. A Nation has to get its utilities working if all other commerce and industry is to thrive. When shareholders around EU and the globe are in control of your utilities, controlling the infrastructure investment and the level of return required, you as a Nation are left powerless. Your citizens, the consumers of these utilities, doomed to declining poor unreliable services putting them disadvantaged against other nations better serviced. We were sold out of our birth right by a shrews fantasy, sold again into servitude for just a few pieces of gold. Long live the revolution.

 

Chav Culture

We have been taken over by the chav's. Their agenda for a quick fix, instant gratification, getting one over, doing a wheelie deal, never mind them look at me, now rules the roost.The presumption of all in the servicing the public industries is that they are dealing with a chav and gear themselves to deal with just that critture.


There have always been chav's or before them spiv's, just a small minority. It is just that chaviness now has become the mainstream. It has slipped into a normality that is used as a benchmark to judge all else by. So the daily expectation is that of a chav response with the reflex reaction of a hand-off against a chav onslaught. Not just in our person to person dealings but in our expectations of peoples likes and dislikes. This chav presumption is now widespread throughout our society. Long gone are the old presumptions of courtesy, concern, moderation, delight in culture, accommodation, any willingness to take time to discover. Now it's all instant, wham bam, three minute is all you's got, I'm only here for what I get out of it. 


Here because of our past, our willingness to shrug off difficulties without facing them, our eagerness to profit rather than to question and our failure to give due regard to role models who did stand for higher values. So how does a three minute wonder, with no life skills or experience and an autobiography at the age of 23 years stack up? We collectively buy into this creature yet shun lesser non-media hyped persons who have earned wisdom and contributed to enriching life. Shallow versus the profound. Banner headline against a tightly scripted paragraph. Gratification against quality. We made all those choices and are now living the consequence. Living a chav culture.


Nothing is ever unredeemable. The starting point as always is in recognising we have lost out but it will be a long journey back. Like so many of my posts, the starting point is to turn around our isolation. We have to redefine how we connect with each other and then go on to how can relate with each other. Finding the time for tolerance, withholding judgement and giving consideration to varied life experiences. Only then can we rediscover the joys of shared experiences, with the follow on of making possible the seeing and sharing in responses beyond our own limited ken.  

Standing Tall

Time to change, time to look after the small man, time at last to restore a balance and equality back into our land. Picking up from my previous posts, Time to Stand Up and Public or Private?, we need to move forward to where there is a safety net for the small man.The well-heeled and the big corporations surround themselves with pet lawyers who use a big purse to wear down and over-load any less endowed claimant until they give up and go away. Not because their claim has no merit just because their purse is insufficient to overcome the stonewalling defence put up against them. This is not right and has taken us to this point were we exist in a very unjust society. Not a tactic just used by corporations of course but also by government departments, who stonewall, hide behind layers of bureaucracy rather than admit they have exceeded their powers or worse, made a mistaken decision.


The small man with a just claim needs a robust and well-funded ally. So a number of prerequisite to sort out. Means tested, so those with the wherewithal make their own way up to the point where they have mortgaged their futures. Spurious, just trying it on claims weeded out by a common sense pragmatic collection of top of 'Clapham Bus' riders. Only claims where there is a self-evident injustice, misuse of power or a principle of application or interpretation to be established, to be taken up. Well-funded in that successes are re-cycled back into fresh cases, less recompense of losses incurred. Bearing in mind that most indignant victims only want to see justice served and are 'not in it for the money', they should be taken at face value. Well-funded in that some of the income generated from the crown baubles that are to be returned to the Nation, are to be used to champion the underdogs, as a fitting restitution. Robust as bottomless purse can afford to serially engage those with a social conscience and a proven track record. So a self-sufficency budget will emerge with victories ploughed back in and the weeding out the thin weaker cases that do not have a wider social impact.


Politically neutral it goes without saying, a terrier biting at the heels of government departments that exceed or abuse the powers they have given themselves or a rotweiller taking on the multinationals with a false sense of being untouchable. Maybe, just maybe then the small man can escape from being the perpetual underdog and can learn to stand tall and take an active and proud part in the magnificence this Nation has to offer. Now no longer just for the well-heeled or connected but for all with an actual fairness and equity, not just purported. However taking back the baubles from the few privileged family members who have until now had sole enjoyment, baubles extracted from the poor over the centuries, may require the storming of a few castles first. The result, a fair and just society. It is not a unrealistic pipe-dream, if could happen if we, all the small men wanted it enough.

Time to Stand Up

A silly little thing really, has sparked off this post. The Royal Mail smashed a bottle during delivery, offered six stamps as compensation and rigidly refused any other compensation. So what? Well the small man gets a raw deal. Nothing new in that, all down the ages the small man gets well trodden underfoot by all those over and above him. And yet, and yet times have changed. Ever since that woman with her narrow single-minded short-term focus ripped up our society, all prior presumptions have changed. 

Once the government was exemplar for truth, being correct, high standards, fairness and with a concern for the well-being of our Nation. Not any more. The focus and agenda has shifted as these former aspirations drift down the priorities and a new culture permeates the corridors. Performance, cost-effectiveness, media reaction, deniablity all take precedences to the old gold standards. When pride and public service was the watch word, the Royal Mail performance was held in high esteem. Not now, nobody cares and they shield themselves and their indifferent service behind reams of legal red tape. First class? Might be any time within three days but do not bother to query until three weeks have passed. Nobody cares. Yet the rigours of competition were supposed to put them on their toes, but where is the competition to deliver my letter to any where in the world? Right, the Royal Mail are in their death throes so it matters little in the end. But what does matter, is that a previous public service is allowed to lapse and drift into unacceptable levels of bad service and indifference. Not just the Royal Mail see also BT, electricity, gas, water, NHS, British Rail, household rubbish collection, parking wardens or any service to the public that used to be governed by civic pride and being answerable to the man in the street. Not any more. Commercial interests come first, user complaints are robustly refuted. The man in the street is held at a long arms length by legal parameters that were not drawn up with any intention that the common man could ever challenge their intrinsic inequality. The Common Law precept of a contract fairly entered into with equity of terms stood on its head, with the loser, the small man.

This is not just a rail against the commercialisation of public services. What I want to highlight is this drift, under the pretence of choice, commercial pressures, making 'providers' more accountable, these essential services, are actually becoming less answerable to the common man. This quasi 'commercial' element giving them a blanket of inaccessibility, beyond reproach, beyond the need to respond. They operate at a higher altitude able to ignore the real or imaginary complaints of all those people that have to use them and have no other choice. A real commercial operation has to listen to its users or they go elsewhere, there is real meaningful choice. Not with these services to the public. They are only the one providers we can goto, indifferent, passably bad, moderately reasonable, it matters not, we have to use them and acquiesce silently to all their failings, errors and consequential costs that might arise. Without recourse to any remedy. Yes, yes set up with a labyrinthine complaints procedure designed to protect the organisation from accepting fault, not to protecting the rights of the innocent victim of their failings.

I know the common man is prone to exaggeration, trying it on, going for those with big pockets with spurious legal claims but amongst all them are real victims suffering consequences, not of their making, and unable to get justice. Those not small people of course, like the ones that set up and operate these services for the public, are well placed, always have a contact that they can make to see their right answer comes out. Else they have the means to buy legal clout to ensure they get their just desserts. From their privileged view these organisations are answerable and responsive. Not in this two speed society for the small man.

Not just these services to public, but also the government organisations whose function it is to deal with the public. The old gold standards are gone, now it is fudge, obscuration, clear the desk quickly and on to the next, must meet the targets, never mind that problem resolution falls by the wayside. They is always a flip, glib answer that will see it gets buried and off the desk. Taking time to understand the nature of the concern, taking time to see what and how a problem might be answered are no long relevant. Information issued and released by the government is now no longer a model of factual correctness. It is now just a political tool to warp public opinion and win media support. A sad sick society that is not even able to answer honestly and transparently about itself. Wow, huge claims. For example, this really grates with me, some ten years ago the government stopped even trying to count the unemployed. The unemployed were redefined to be only those who complied with a state prescribed work search procedure and were therefore acceptable for signing on. Anyone else is disregarded and not counted. Served a political goal of the time but the (compliant) 'unemployed' are nothing like the best figure for the actually unemployed. Now the (compliant) 'unemployed' totals are taken as absolute, no question as to how many it leaves out. Word play with a hidden agenda. We the small man suffer and are denied usable mechanisms to seek relief.

What we are worth

It is tossed off so easily as if it was definitive, an all embracing understanding, "My house is worth half a million" or "My house is worth £90,000", if you happen to live in a northern blighted town. Then the cough and half-apology of "well it is only worth that if someone else is prepared to pay that much". As we begin our descent into the substrata of meaning, "Of course I cannot get any benefit from that worth until I die or buy a smaller cheaper place". None of this matters in any real sense, it is just flotsam of life, until you make the connections.

UKplc borrowed heavily on the basis of the future continuing rise in its property values. That borrowing, mainly in mortgage debts taken on, was used to fuel a spending bonanza, the like of which we have never seen this side of the WW's. We could borrow so heavily because, property, for the man in the street, houses, just keep getting more and more expensive, keeps growing in value. Aside from gold, property was the next copper-bottom bet. And a bet it always was. 


So what is a house worth? Certainly not just its replacement costs, the cost to rebuild it, other than in a very circuitous self-referencing way. Not even for its build cost plus the value of that scarce permission to build. Once a habitation permit exists, it exists and is very hard to take away. What it is worth, in essence, is the gut feel of what it is in comparison to other properties nearby and what other similar properties have sold for that are comparable. There, that is the worth of a house, a gut feel. Let us hostage all our futures on the basis of this. A gut feel sustained to some degree by a scarcity of perceived 'desirable' properties available. This perceived scarcity fuelling the rush to snatch what is going at whatever the cost, spiralling the costs ever up.
 
There are a few things in life you take as rock solid, hospital care for us when we are sick, policepersons are there to help not to harass you, within the four walls of your house you are safe and buildings last for ever. We grow up surrounded with buildings that have been there for all time. Building just do not fall down and are seldom demolished in our own experience. The buildings we put are now are nothing like the way they used to be constructed. Building in the past was craft based using easily obtainable materials and relied on accumulated experience of what worked with large amounts of built-in redundancies. Nowadays materials are honed to the least essential to achieve the required effect and we depend on calculation to prove that the structure will stand the test of the weather. Previously there was several overlapping redundancies of structure. Now we design for a life of thirty years, or if you are lucky enough to live in a Housing Association home then sixty years. That is all. A thirty years life is the design norm. It will almost certainly not fail in less but the structures integrity relies on many, many small components which may or may fail after thirty years. No one knows, we have not had a century of experience of modern building practices to know where the weak points are. We build a time limited product. Yet we value that same product on the basis that it has an indefinite life. We value houses by their location and not on the floor area provided nor an estimate of the remaining life expectancy or even the amount of repair or upgrading required. It is nonsense but that is the market we have and accept blithely as the norm.

When you live in a fantasy world, do you close your eyes, ignore the contra evidence, and carry on regardless? No of course not. You stop, take notice and start the search for some other path, that leads away from the present fantasy-land nonsense. With UKplc mortgaged up to the hilt in shortlife property with repayments based on a longlife, we have to change tack. Again no simple easy answers. Harking back to another post (Right to Plunder), first step remove freehold, only a long term lease is possible with a commuted sum to restore it back to fertile land. No one can 'own' our land. Secondly the Council Tax is based on per person floor area with a rebate for properties below a set norm and a tax on attached land, setting dependant, and again rebated for those below a norm. Such that City dweller would expect no land whilst out in the country some M2 of land would be a norm. Those two measures will push the market into greater visibility of square footage, land take, life cycle costs and together with the greening measures may take our housing away from the fantasy place it currently bloats in.

Animated Stupidity

Just an aside really, there was this item which drew attention to how UK animation studios where working under a severe disadvantage, compared to EU colleagues, as they receive no Government support. Here was a leading edge industry, with a worldwide repute, pushing forward vigorously the frontiers of IT exploitation, capable of growing careers for a wide range of skills from the creative edge all the way across to tradesmen. What is not to support? Well of course the chorus of me-to's when you are struggling to know where to lop yet another branch off a bloated overgrown unsustainable tree.

Then the incredible stupid short-sightedness struck me. Animation is used by a wide variety of sectors but one sector in particular, has a singularly large and voracious appetite for animation. Children's TV. Young impressionable minds, in this new ever on live-stream feed age, being fed material largely from another culture, the USofA. Material that permeates the language, roles models, ethics, racial, cultural, rich v poor every issue that weaves the fabric of the society that you are and what feel you belong to. This market then is the market our government see no role in supporting! Let market forces be the sole determiner of what TV diet our children are fed! Mind-numbing stupidity of the crassest order.

Justifiable Ends

It is not a frequent event when you stare at the TV, jaw dropped, in utter disbelief. It happened recently during the Andrew Marr Sunday interview with Condoleezza Rice. Without a blink, any hesitation, the least demur she said, stony faced to the camera, the US of A government used all possible legitimate and lawful means to 'treat' suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. Not a moments hesitation contemplating the paradox that as the US of A makes up its own rules, does not allow anyone else to hold it to account, it can make whatever rules it likes and therefore legitimatise any conceivable action. Clearly for the US of A government this readily included the indefinite incarceration of suspects (conceivably innocent) whilst subjecting them to a sustained, deliberate, destructive, dehumanisation programme. A programme specifically designed and calculated, in its use of sensory and social deprivation, denial of cause or hope of relief, with the intention to rob that individual of any sense of self-worth and identity. Rendering these objects, held under their jurisdiction, to the base animal form, stripped of any sense of human normality. In contrast a casual indifferent bullet to the back of the neck would seem, in comparison, almost humane.

A chink just to indicate, looking back, there was, in the full heat of that moment, an over-reaction, a lapse from the normal standards, then she might of saved the day for her and for the US of A, that she put herself out to represent. But no, she was defiant, there was no wrong doing! Just another proof that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts completely. Why our leaders lose all moral and ethical sensibilities as they reach the peaks of authority, I have no idea. What is clear is that by resorting to the tactics and the justifications of your enemy, you give up on your right to judge and inevitably subject yourself to others judgement. When our government subscribes to deception, entrapment, if not outright support and encouragement, in order to infiltrate political activists, as recently seen on Confessions of an Undercover Cop, then they too give up the moral high ground. They are no better than the 'extremists' they seek to control and contain. There are no shall I, shan't I positions, no middling degrees, either you stand by the moral standards you choose to run your life by or you don't. Our government is supposed to reflect the higher standards we all aspire to, not the gutter. They, our representatives, presumably were chosen because of their high moral viewpoints, viewpoints we can all share and applaud. Nothing ever justifies the abandonment of those standards, not by individuals filling out expense forms and certainly not by our government acting on our behalf. Okay, technically the police, but obviously working within the framework prescribed by government and of course, budget cuts will reflect on their ardour in achieving stated government goals, that is, the limiting of political activists freedom to stage events. It amounts really to the same thing.

When terrorist are in the gun sights then all ethical standards fly out of the window. The tight rope walk, when dealing with political activists, of keeping close to the line of public goodwill and support can be totally ignored. Our government, inquisitors in modern robes, loses all reason and see it right and fitting for middle of the night raids. Tearing 'suspects' from home, family support, shattering any career hopes and incarcerating them beyond contact for upto fourteen days at some one else's pleasure. Giving free reign to institutionalised racism, because who ever heard of a white middle-class englishman as a radical terrorists? These raids to root out and discover 'suspects' are based on no more than 'intelligence' which can be gossip, innuendo, grudges or simply mischance, wrong face at wrong time or place. These, our latter day witches hunts, places, as it ever has, the onus on the radical 'terrorists suspect'  to prove the impossible that they are not as named and shamed.

Amongst the hundreds of witches that were burnt, or drowned or worse, for the sake of society at large, no doubt there were one or two that actually tinkered in the black arts. Not every radical is a terrorist, not every terrorist carries out an act of terrorism. By descending into the gutter, demonising all terrorists, (see also my post, War on Terrorists ) and treating them with less than the respect due to any human, no matter what contrary creed, race, beliefs or professed objectives, we ourselves become terrorists against civilised society.

What, as a civilised society, we know full well is that in the end you have to sit down with your sworn enemy and make pragmatic arrangements to live alongside each other. It is so much easier to reach that concord when you have not vilified each other nor have not radicalised their followers by inhumane treatment under your hand. In the end we all have to talk to each other, so keep to your high morals and you have less to repent at your leisure.

Held to Account

In a way the antithesis of trust, being accountable to those we choose to move amongst. In a totalitarian state the only thing to keep us on the straight and narrow would be the fear of being caught out and the retribution which would be sure to follow. That is not a world I want to live in. So what other options are open to us? At this stage in our progress we live in a rootless, faceless society. You can move around in, about and out of town and not see anybody who recognises you. You can cross all of London feeling as a racial minority group with few of your fellow travellers sharing your ethnic clothing, habits, courtesies, dialect and clearly none of your life interests. Yesterday's fad the hoodie is now an irrelevance. There is no longer any need to hide your identity, other than from the ever prescent CCTV camera, your identity is completely safe lost in a sea of strangers. You can and do what you like, where you like and how you like without any restraint, guilt, retribution and not the least chance of a restraining hand from some nearby fellow citizen. You are a law unto your yourself only, and, unless you are very unlucky, no officaldom's heavy hand will come anywhere near you to put a stop to your self-indulgence.


Except of course we do not live on a desert island, and my freedom to move and live my life is dependant on your willingness to keep within the normal social bounds and, of course, visa versa, your freedom to act the goat is dependant on my willingness to tolerate your anti-social conduct. In an ideal world, but we have drifted quite a long way from that ideal world. I cannot physically restrain you as that would expose me to civil proceedings. I cannot verbally remonstrate with you as that may well precipitate a violent physical counter-action. There is no longer the remotest chance that I know anyone in your family that could intercede about your social mayhem as I dont know them and even if I did, youth is no longer responsive to close relative let alone parental restraint. 


It is a mad mad world we are in, but it is up to each of us to change it. To change it to the kind of world where we all feel more comfortable and safe. So, no golden bullet solution but a number of pointers.

First we have to give up the comfort blanket, stop expecting the State to step in to resolve all our issues of being people and living within a society of people. The State does not do finesse, it can only apply coarse over-reactive draconian measures, it simply cannot devise enough unambiguous rules to control how we interact with each other. We will suffocate in the attempt. No it really is down to us.


Secondly then, in this very diverse racially mixed society, how to begin to rebuild connections across all members of the societies (remember this is a matrix society) you move among? You and I have to get involved. So the Small Society. Here the State does very little. You and I have to get involved if anything is needed to make the community work. Anything from pavement repairs, street lights, litter clearance, emergency services, social support, you name it and anything you want then you have to be part of the process of agreeing and cooperating with it running to your satisfaction. No opt out, no longer is it the local authorities job, now it is your job to be involved else it wont happen. Scary.

Thirdly it has to be wide ranging to swamp the community with the need for action. As we all know there are always those stalwarts that step up to the plate and tackle those task for the benefit of all while the majority keep their heads down, content taking benefit, freely criticising but not offering that needed helping hand. If we are to ever escape for our past subservience to power and control from above, we all have to be prepared to play a part and to confront those shirkers. There are a raft of roles waiting to be filled, not everyone is a leader, or committee fodder, but there is role for everyone. Hence to confront the complacency of phoning for the person from the council to sort it out, we need to be inundated with task that do threaten our comfort, security and peace of mind.

Fourthly by people having to come out of their private contented shells to participate in the arrangement and organisation of the every day functioning of their social lives they meet and have to engage with other members of their community. This engagement creates a wider network of known people within the community and as a direct consequence accountability arises. You, and the members of your home group, can no longer pass faceless along the edges of society. You are full on in, known and accountable. You have to conform to your communities mores. 

  
Clearly not a one step panacea, a host of problems and difficulties at every turn, but, and a very big but, if we find this way to re-engage with each other then all the problems and difficulties are solvable. Whilst we a talking with each other there are solutions that will be found. Never can it be more true that the combined whole is so much greater than the sum of its individuals. This is the real core of society, not the application of authority and control from above.

In whom we trust

Trust is such an old-fashioned word, almost archaic. Those long ago bloody, life at risks days when trust was forged, days of kinsmen and even clans are long gone. Our society has grown ever more complex and sophisticated. Yet it is still predicated on that same old fashioned word, trust. Trust that has expanded out of the known limits of kinsmen into the known community that you live and grow up in and where you relate tangibly to those around you. You are known to them and they are not unknown to you, you and they can be placed, somewhere. 

So trust, every time to enter into a closed bus or train and share it with others you do it in trust that the others will not run amok, spit at you, shout obscenities in your face, steal from you, block your passage, push you off the seat so they can sit. You have cause to trust them. When you hand over your credit card at the garage you do so in trust that you will be charged only for that fuel you purchased and the litres shown actually is the same as went into your tank, they will not swipe your card and steal access to your assets and no one will record your private pin numbers you have to enter into their machine under the CCTV camera. You trust the shop assistant that the goods sold to you are fit for purpose, are new not some ones cast off rejects, will give good service relative to their cost and the change you are given is correct and in legal coinage. All done on trust, yes of course there are last resort safeguards., but for all those everyday transaction, you have almost implicit trust in those around. Not just transactions but every single day by day action that is interfaced by another person is founded on trust. When we shake hands, in that ritualised friendship offering, we trust the other person to respond in kind and keep within the parameters of our previous social encounters. Not to invade our personal space, not seek private information, to speak a language we can understand and respond to and not to freeload on the goodwill offered.

All our society connections then are rooted in a trust. Which, as an aside, promoted my concerns about, to burka or not, an abuse of our society by women wanting the freedoms offered but hiding behind their own societies relegation of women as male chattels. A trust derived from a known community and expanded our to our wider towns and cities where there still lingers on, some sense of community, belonging and accountability. You had to answer for your actions within the local community that sustained you. Until, that is this century as we enter into the Matrix Society where accountability and identity shows every sign of breaking down. We are now move anonymous in a multiracial, rootless, shifting population with no obligations of  loyalty to your kith and kin.

Further, this trust implicit in the society supporting us gets transferred onto the all those myriad machines and systems we have come to rely on. We have an expectation that they will do what they seem to offer to do, our usual critical faculties are put on hold and we take them at face value, as if there was a sentient being behind the interface. So in this new wireless always connected world what can you still trust and where should trust be permanently suspended, as if that was an human option? The online store looks the business yet is just a loner working out of a garage. The avatar makes all the right responses but who or what lies behind it? All those myriad facebook friends, how real, how connected are you or is Facebook.com just exploiting your vulnerability? 

We are now in a new age where the one thing we can no longer rely on is our instinct to trust. What lie before us is a desperately urgent need to re-examine how we relate and work with each other. For me the answer is clear, we have to rethink our sense of community and belonging, from the core up. A rethinking that I explore is so many of these posts. For you, what is your answer?

Free to Protest

I can still capture my sense of shame as I watched one of the first CND marches as they came along Chiswick Hight Street, I had not joined in something worthy and honourable. What a long road public protests have been on since then. All down history when the populace rise up against the establishment and the imposition of their will, the populace comes in for harsh treatments. A cause always has to offer a martyr or two before the establishment begins to yield. Nowadays the rebels are not swathed down, or hung on gibbets but are still subjected to draconian measures in every effort to shut them up and hope they will slink away. But now it is all played out in the media spotlight and the steel fist has to be concealed from public view with weasel words that disguise the background manoeuvres and keep public sympathy from aligning with the rebel cause. 


The resolute and ruthless breaking of the miners strike bought us close to civil war, spared only by the a public demonising of Arthur Scargill that never quite left that image behind to swing around him in support. Since then the establishment tactics have drawn back a tad but still have the single focus of suppressing all public demonstrations not in support of establishment worthies. What an uneven battle it is. The establishment have the fire power, the resources, manpower and technology in excess on their side and they get to call all the shots of when where and how. A David and Goliath contest of epic proportions, it is a wonder that any public demonstrations ever occur such are the enormities of the obstacles the establishment puts in their path. It has to be pre-prepared, it has to be pre-agreed and the route, destination and marshalling all are to the approval and satisfaction of the establishment. The establishment are in pole position to orchestrate the CCTV coverage, data collection on all participants and being well versed in media manipulation have a huge advantage in tipping any media response to a direction that suits their aims. What chance then for the demonstrators. Neutralised, any spark of ire quenched before ignition, pacified, reduced to a tamed crowd under the control and direction of the very expression of forces they have risen up against. All they have left is quantity, their raw voices having been emasculated.


Thank goodness then for the Dean of St Paul's for allowing  the demonstrators to gather on his forecourt, refused access to any other more meaningful location to express their outrage at the financial institutions. Not a protest I agree with, to vague and flabby as to intent and purpose. But all power to them for the public expression of contempt with these mega organisations that are compromising our lives. Not easy to forego home comforts, not easy to jeopardise your future, not easy to stay reasonable and contained, not easy to be stuck in a limbo of wanting to stir discontent but refused any modus for spreading it. The establishment have retained the upper hand and can be seen working away in the background trying to find the silver bullet which will finally win over a public demonising of these protesters into layabouts, benefit dodgers, cheats and part-timers. Once the successful image gets planted then the establishment will have their free-hand to clear up the mess, with the public on board. Damned if they comply with establishment rules and damned if they flout them. They fully deserve all of our support, irrespective of whether you agree or not with their objectives. They are representing our battle to retain a freedom to protest. A freedom we will for sure have a need to use in the near future.
 

Done in Our Name

Safety, and particularly highway safety, is highly emotive so beware anyone who steps up to rock that cradle. The core issues are clear beyond dispute. The closing speeds of vehicles on opposite direction carriageways are at their most extreme. Accidents can occur where vehicles end up crossing into the opposite carriageway, so these carriageways must to be separated. When these cross-overs happen the resulting carnage is horrific with inevitable loss of life. I do not underestimate the mental and physical distress on all those involved in cutting people out as a result of such an accident, trying to save lives and then having to break the news of a life lost so suddenly. There were three well established carriageway separators, tension cable or moulded sheet steel on posts, dense bush planting and now a new mass concrete continuous section about 900mm high.

We as a society do not choose to protect lives at all costs from the risk of death. The car manufacturer makes commercial judgements as to how much of life safety features are introduced into a car as standard. Not what is possible. Simply what is thought might seen as affordable by the customer, you and I, compared to a competitor. Or at best what we might choose as an extra over option and at what price level. Not a lot on the evidence and well, well short of the possible. How much to spend in saving lives is a pragmatic choice made by you and me. When we condone, as in stand by and watch, our youth going out to get plastered beyond their ability to control their life's consequences we have no right to take a high moral stand point. When we condone, as in standby and allow our politicians, to cut back spending on the frail elderly needy, so there are insufficient resources to ensure the basics of life are provided routinely hour in hour out. The essentials of shelter, food, basic daily care and minimal social contact, just the bare essentials, ignoring higher aspirations of improving their quality of life and giving them a meaningful environment to respond to. Then we have given up any right to claim life matters, claim it is our high priority.

So lets keep highway safety in perspective. Emotive yes, but actually lower down the pecking order I suggest than care for the elderly, care for our new born and care for our youth. Keep it real. Highway safety is yet another pragmatic cost choice. We are very aware of the scenes of road carnage as we pass by. The number of incidents are actually quiet small. 400 hundred cross-over events in a year resulting in 40 deaths. Keep it real. How many teenagers die as a result of excess alcohol? We probably dont know any more than we know how many elderly die of neglect or babies from inadequate natal care. These are not huge numbers considering the number of daily road journeys made. It is called risk management, something we are not used to thinking about but really do need to get a grip on. The level of risk is low and therefore tolerable compared to costs and consequence of trying to significantly improve on these figures when our journey qualities would have to take a huge nose-dive.  Look around and see how much more relaxed our European neighbours can be about their road safety without incurring horrendous road causality figures.

So what has got me all fired up. CSB', concrete safety barrier's. I cannot recall a single political parties manifesto that referred to the need to replace motorway barriers. In these times of extreme austerity when services we hold dear are being cut off, not slashed and reduced, but simply turned off, who was it that got to decide in our name to spend hundreds of millions of pounds replacing these central barriers? Who in our name decided without reference to us, without inviting our opinion, that a replacement scheme was essential and should go ahead without consultation, without advertisement to us the public. Just de-facto. The decision was made and it happened. Who got to weigh up the rival merits of the different options and who made the decision, vetted by what watchdog committees, that concrete was the out and out winner? Such that ripping out the old barriers and replacing them with concrete was a right choice for our nation at this time? The interim advice IAN 60/05 that can be seen here, issued by the Highways Agency gives some insight. It appears to be a classic one-sided rival lobbying argument that has swept the board. All the contra arguments are brushed airily aside as if of little consequence. Only the supporting arguments, in favour of concrete, are given any credence. Note how concrete, one of the worst environmental materials, is given an unquestioning thumbs up, because it is home produced! This is indicative of the level of debate. Very partial and very one sided. So who cares. We all should.

The visual intrusion of these concrete barriers is horrendous. They are scale-less, featureless, will weather appallingly and reduces the drive experience to one of unrelieved visual boredom. Motorway designers had learnt their lesson and put gentle curves back into more economic straight roads just to relieve this visual boredom. At millions of pounds we are now relentlessly undoing that past insight. They cannot be easily replaced, we are now stuck with them for the future. But we should rise up and protest and stop more being laid down. This is not the driving experience any of us will relish, blinkered by the unrelenting featureless barrier that strips away any sense of distance and scale. That destroys any sense of the passing countryside. UKplc will become known as the bad driving experience of Europe. Design and environmental issues do matter and do have to be balanced against other priorities, even that of saving lives.

Public or Private?

With the drive to privatise government quangos the vision has occurred to me of Serco or Centrica taking over the running English Heritage or the National Trust. Why not? I am sure they will run a lean tight organisation and would make pots of money out of it in the process. Far better than pour pots of taxpayers money down the bottomless drain. Government would then be free to concentrate on the important cabbages and king questions. Trouble is, just as with the NHS, when a government takes on accountability for providing a service to its citizens it cannot cherry pick and just do those nice easy profitable parts. The NHS ends up with all the knotty, difficult and inordinately expensive investigations and routines that the private sectors excludes out their policies and walks away from.

It easy to imagine honey spots of our countryside or highly popular stately homes, where the private sector would die to get their hands on them, to cream off some serious profits. That leaves all those scattered equally important but small or unspectacular visit places no one wants to go to, or where there are mountains of restoration to hold back decay or work to make available for visitors. Just those sort of places where profit orientated companies would run a mile from. As far as I know there are no plans to change the status of the National Trust nor English Heritage. My objective in raising this hare is that it exemplifies a breakpoint between functions that serve the nation and those functions which can or should be profit driven. The nations needs are not constrained to only profitable operations. Profit driven companies are not suited to providing needs where profit return cannot be the overriding judgement. For the record I do think its was a catastrophic mistake to sell off water, electricity and telephone. These are vital infrastructures necessary to sustain our nations progress, irrespective of cost or return. The sale of coal and postal services is fully justifiable as they are no longer mainstream to development. Equally ensuring a extensive high speed broadband backbone to cover the country is a crucial investment into our future. If left driven solely by profit, it may not be a fastest enough path nor ensure the widest covered.

We have to care for and invest in our Nation for our own wellbeing but also to give future generations as firm a start footing as we have inherited from the past. Which loops me back to my earlier post, Right to Plunder. We are but custodian of our Nation with a duty and obligation to nurture it and hand it on to future generations in a good viable state. Despite the strong armed bully boys who took whatever spoils they wanted, subjugated us to their will and tithed us on our labours. The Nation is ours, formed out of the sweat and toil of our forebears, cared, loved, protected and died for by succeeding generations. This is our inheritance and the inheritance we offer on to succeeding generations. Time to put our inheritance on a more secure and long term stable basis. No longer subject to the whims and fancies of monarch, or the titled, or those who would claim it and exploit as if it was their own.

Radical yes. For a start let us forgo on freehold. No one can own our Nation. Lease on a use, repair and return basis sure but in the end it returns to all of us. No more crown property, it was stolen from the people and now is the time to return it to the people. We all own the regal trinkets of wealth acquired out of our past endeavours and held as fiscal bounty. Not of course as individuals, not to be squandered but just as custodians. With a duty of care and protection. A duty exercised on all of our behalf's and well beyond the reach of government to mortgage against as cover to their extravagances. A custodianship that encourages us to connect with, participate in and take pride in, our mutual ownership. As in my Right of Plunder, nothing to be taken away unless restoration or compensation paid in full upfront. The land, the sea, the structures placed on it and the rights to run service on or under it, eventually all to return to us to pass on in turn to our successors.

Baptism of Fire

Just a few months ago we started volunteering with a group helping to improve the local woodlands biodiversity and access. An opportunity to spend time in woodlands, in glorious locations, doing something useful and, as it turned out, amongst a varied group of nice guys. Vaguely knew that clearing scrub and creating opportunities for free foraging cattle opened up the floor flora to wider diversity encouraging a wider fauna to live and breed. Seemed all very simple and straight forward. I knew next to nothing about the whys, where's or hows of what we were doing. Trusted that there was a Master Planner somewhere who looked down and gave approval and that it would turn out right. From the odd discarded comments, picked up the odd gold nugget that revealed more than I knew of this my local habitat.

Then managed to get myself included in this outdoor conference, "the Woodland Edge" for all those wide ranging professionals whose work one way or another impacts on woodlands. So my mind-blowing journey began, opening me up to some of the wide range of issues that confront woodlands, their management, their financing and their future. You will have gathered from my previous post, Caged by Language, that I was uncomfortably thrown into a very touchie feelie world were emotional content was probably more important to the participants than identify and isolating problems so that tentative solutions could be aired. Maybe I got it wrong but that was my impression. But of course it was only the start of my journey. Well everyone has to be on a journey nowadays. I went with the expectation of coming away with some comprehension of the dynamics of woodlands. Why on earth would anyone choose to invest in planting trees, leaving them for the next couple of generations to cut down and make some money out of. Then there was the issue of conservation and special designated areas where trees just could not be cut down to produce income, willynilly. How did they fit into it all. As a backstory perhaps, who was really profiteering from all this free volunteer labour, the community or some other behind the scene's organisation whose motives I may not necessarily endorse.   

During the conference a great many issues were aired that explored degrees of these or similar issues. May be the professionals, (the salaried experts in their particular field) were well versed and brought an in depth understanding. It was not clear to me at all, as the discussions ranged across from forests, as I like to think of them, being mono-cultured planted stock, with a planned life and clear-felled for profit all the way across to the opposite side. A SSSI woodland where every decision to keep, enhance or remove has to be fully argued and justified in some balancing act between an existing living ecosystem and an aspiration to get back to some fixed in time aspirational ecosystem. With a whole range of woodlands falling between these extremes displaying more or less of one characteristics or another. So our professionals discussions were able to range across these woodland distinctions without feeling the need to clarify which aspect of woodland mix they had in mind. But then the conference was more about connecting with emotions than with the dross of practical distinctions.

After the conference I tired to share as feedback the confusion I took away with me but felt like a ignorant pariah pissing on the wonderful emotive outpourings. No really the conference mood was invigorating and uplifting it just did not give me answers that was looking for. Then I turn to "ECOS - a review of conservation" it seems as if it is an academic journal publishing researched papers. Then another world again opens up to conservation at a tipping point with government pushing in one direction. Localism with central direction of volunteer effort. In the opposite direction, that of communities, their 'ownership' of landscape feature which are significant in their daily lives and how their energies can be co-opted to help them to see and achieve their aspirations for their landscape. Irrespective of the extended technicalities of land ownership. At the heart of all these issues, is of course the big question. As a citizen of UKplc who actually owns and controls the land we stand on and live our lives within. When a special historic woodland is designated as something special, does it still 'belong' to the Crown Estates who hold the land deeds, the Forest Commission who hold a lease to manage and operate it within the constraints set by 'Government' who have prescribed what can or cannot happen, presumably for the benefit of all us citizens, so we can carry on enjoying and experiencing this designated unique space and habitat. There is a conundrum. Add to that mix profit and tax benefits for anyone who can show title to a piece of land and you have a potent heady brew with deep seated vested interests.. No wonder our professionals are baffled and confused as to who they serve and what the end objective is. There is no way the complexities of the issues they face can be wrapped up into simple 30 second sound bites capable of being understood by the legislators would make the changes. Equally how do we, as citizens of UKplc, relate, respond and make vocal our concerns for the environment we live in, care about and want to leave in good health for future generations? Have a look at Right to Plunder where I sketch out my thoughts on a self-financing way forward.

Caged by language

A recent conference I was lucky to attend reminded me very eloquently that the expression of our emotions, for one, are constrained by our language. A telling example was given that the Romans imposed a controlling and contained language on us where our use of 'Nature', even when softened to Mother Nature, is a one stage removed abstract. Compare that to a pre-roman direct connection to 'Mother', being the earth and surroundings that support and nurture us. A very direct positive and emotive connection to the land that sustains us. Tosh? Not when you explore your reactions to your environment and understand that the words available to you to explore your inner feelings are remote, detached, non-connected. Other languages do have a much more positive connection, you to your tribe, your ancestors and to those you depend on. 

Not that I had that insight prior to the conference but I was stumbling around becoming aware we are both constrained and liberated by our language strictures. For some things we have wide variety of terms to draw on yet in some other areas there are no words or phrase which can quite offer a true summation of the inner thoughts processes. The wealth of English words is vastly enriched by all the nuances of association or social propriety that by phrasing or posture or altered tone it can be imbued with. Whilst we do enjoy a rich language we must do not lose sight that it is also limiting. Our obligation to each other must be to strive for clarity of expression, to get as close to our inner thoughts as possible. The fudge, the double speak actually spread confusion, not the harmony claimed (see also It is not important). 

The other aspect of this very rewarding conference, Woodland Edge, was how, for me, it was disconcertingly touchie and feelie. I believe I have no trouble getting in touch with my emotions. My discipline depends on a continual examination and introspection of emotive responses to every conceivable environmental circumstance. How to respond to colour, texture, light, space, ownership, as non-exclusive examples. Every creative response requiring this internalised autopsy. This then is where I take some issue to the touchie feelie brigade. Though a maelstrom of connectedness and a feeling of oneness is cathartic, though it builds bridges which can become pathways for future problem solving what it does not do is to identify all those friction points where conflicts of objective or intention can become stuck. I have been schooled to objectify my internalised emotional responses. What is it that generated such a response and how might it be changed to heighten or diffuse that response. So touchie feelies also need to progress beyond the exhilaration of feeling and explore those areas, not of agreement, but of divergence. Bottoming out on where they differ, not so feel good, but actually more important as this will reveal insight into future possible problems. 


All the time we must not lose sight of the limitations of our language and just as importantly the constraints of our particular discipline's thought processes and the jargon with which they are expressed. The more I see the more I realise that we humans are more or less on the same wavelength. In the end it is the just words and phrases used that seem to pose threatening discord. Strip back the words to more neutral expressions and we are actually expressing similar thoughts just but couched differently. That is all there is in the supposed conflict. Language. Remember every time you start a sentence it sets off a wave of limits and expectations to be followed. Start the same idea but with a different sentence lead in and you will end up communicating some thing slightly different, with a shifted emphasis. We are caged by our language but it is all we have to express all of ourselves with. It is essential to talk, to talk clearly and talk precisely.
 

Bankrupt Nation

Been here before, so see also my Government Savings, this Nation is overspending on its Government. Compounded by us, its citizens, with unrealistic, or rather unaffordable, expectations of what can actually be provided or responded to. The size of slice taken to run UKplc is far too great compared to the income UKplc can generate. We are living way beyond our means and get by, by opening a new credit card then spending to its limits without being able to pay back the interest. Suddenly people are waking up to the total absurdity of private investment in new NHS hospitals. It always was crazy double thinking but it got politicians off the hook and gave a back door way to pay for the desperate re-investment required. A back door that had a very nasty and a painful bite some years on. A bite some people are only now waking up to. There is a huge yearly ongoing cost just to service the investment. A cost way in excess of what it would have cost if governement had made the investment directly.

We are in the centre of fudge land. We have expectations of what our country should do and provide for us. UKplc just cannot afford to meet those expectations. The politicians cannot, if they are to survive, tell us to our face that we cannot no longer get what we expect as of a right. UKplc cannot borrow more as it has already exceeded its spending limits. So fudge, enter the world of magic mirrors, where you can spend on huge luxuries, but not actually spend, well not today but only later on down the line. A huge HP loan with deferred easy payments. Everyone happy right? Of course not. As the deferred payments kick in, as they must some time, surprise, surprise, what you have left to spend has been sharply cut back and you owe more to the remorseless repayment schedules and have nothing left to buy for today. It was and is a lunacy.


Yet we clearly do need massive investment in the NHS, and schools and roads and transport. We do actually need to upgrade the apparatus of government and bring it kicking into the ways of the C21 world. We are not in the realm of finding 5%, 10% or even 25% efficiency savings. We really do have to take stock of what we, UKplc, are and what is the level of governance that is supportable. We were once a global power with a huge global empire, a key player. US of A has made it its business to take us out of that role. Today we are a crowded off shore island associated with a big powerful European Union of large nations struggling to come together and work in some sort of harmony. We are a marginal small bit player. Getting marginalised because we fail to play our trumps wisely and opportunely. At this level of play we simply cannot afford  grandiose ideas of having an aircraft carrier, with all the attendant fleet, nuclear submarines, an airforce with world strike capability nor an army able to fight in all theatres of the world. What is affordable within our current so much smaller role in the world is a national defence force able to defend its frontiers, if you must, working in close collaboration with our neighbours. That is the stark reality.   


I do not have a down on the defence services per say, more on that another time maybe. It is just that they encapsulate so well this bloated transition from global power to small bit player. We cannot give up the baggage of our past and come to terms with today's realities. We just do not have the income to sustain a world power role. But look around and there is evidence of this same bloat everywhere. Ministries and support institutions that were fit and proper for an empire but are grossly oversized and over ambitious for our now current status. We need a new slimmed down model of government that is fit, sleek and apt for the situation we now occupy. Many cherished objects and institutes of national pride may have to be sacrificed as we navel gaze our way from that empirical past down to our new needs. Political Parties have talk the talk for years, exorcising this tip here or this unloved limb there, tinkering, not radical. We need radical now, what is the minimum basics we must have to survive in today's world? That is the starting premise.


Along the way we will have to confront the issue of our expectations that 'they' can and will do everything about all those things that perturb us in our daily life. This is a socialist fantasy, actually a nightmare dream, of the State being the all provider. We are too unique, too diverse and too individual to ever be content with a uniform state provision. But there is a lot of comfort in that escape route, the government must should do that, sort it out so I do not have to bother about it. It is lazy, self-indulgent thinking that has become deeply rooted in our national thought. Time to turn tables.Out of the chaos will emerge a sleek, energetic and quickly responsive UKplc up for taking on of what ever challenges lie around the corner. Confident in its abilities and able to deliver decisively. Well that is my dream.

Slow Death

The Accountants are slowly strangling and stifflling the life out of UKplc. Now let us get this straight from the outset. You have to make a profit to survive in business, no question. In hard times you have to work your business hard, cut out waste, improve efficiency, make sure you are as productive and effective as you can be. Run a lean mean machine, no problems. There is however a switch over point. When you run your business with the aim to make a better profit, achieve a percentage increase in market share, to improve your shareholding status or whatever of the many and varied slices the Accountants use to 'judge' the financial success of a business by. You have crossed the line.

The first and only criteria to be in business is to provide what you do to the best of your ability and to the customers satisfaction. Once you lose that motivation you have sold out any solid morale justification and thereby squandered your rights to be in business. No matter how much hype and smooth sounding customer focussed mission statements you come up with you have lost that vital contract. Your personal contract to provide the best. This is where UKplc is now finding itself. Whether we are talking the corner shop, a long-standing family firm, a national or international producer or supplier. The Accountants have their claw around them all. We have grown to expect short-term solutions to be the sole inspiration, another percentage point here or there in profits or growth. Entirely losing sight of the long-term goal of keeping your existing customers happy and wanting them to come back, again and again and telling all their friends to join in. This is real growth, this is real vitality and this is the only measure of survival.

If your priority of attention is to squeeze another percentage point of profit out of your business, the end figures may look very impressive, with lots of noughts, but along the way you have had to sacrifice. The sacrifice might be one or some of many things, quality, supplier relationships, staffing morale, reject standards, returns handling, future investment, plant upgrades, transaction delays, support, or a whole host of other such issues. A host with one thing in common they directly impinge on what you supply and your customers satisfaction in receiving what you offer. A host that might add a small percentage in your costs and that can look large in the balance sheet. They can make major contributions to achieving quality, but quality is not a balance sheet account. So any of these minor irritants that you have given ground on have set off a time-fuse. Your criteria for quality has become compromised. A fuse that will, over time, gradually eat away at customer satisfaction and confidence. By then your business will be in terminal decline and your helpful Accountant, that helped you make more profits, will have slipped away to a better and more promising punter.


Once you give ground on being the sole arbiter on what you are offering and it becomes subject to others value-engineering assessments then you are in the mire. Savings are always easy to offer but retaining the standards you set for yourself are a daily nightmare battle only you can make. 

This is where this blog wants us to all stop and think. As we too are the Chief Executives of our own business. How we put ourselves out and about is our business and we need to be clear in our minds the standards we set ourselves to achieve. Not to be seduced by tempting offers to buy more, buy cheaper, buy easier but to keep on taking ourselves to task for not quite attaining that quality standard we know is right for us.

So look around, be alert, questioning and challenging on whose products you bring into your life. Keep your life account in balance but strive within that limitation to make the quality happen on a daily basis that you know is right for you.

All in the Genes

Very late in my life I found out about my paternal grandparents. Up until then I had interpreted all my personal characteristics within the terms of what I knew about my maternal side. Only just very recently it has become crystal clear that my (and other members of my family) single minded focus and concentration on fine detail counterbalanced with an aloof distancing from anything beyond my direct control, clearly comes down the line from my Paternal GMa. Equally my 'blue-sky' thinking, that gazing eagerly at an unfocussed future together with a passionate deep socialism, not your limp wristed capitalist lap dog Labour Party style, comes staight down the line from my Paternal GPa. So all my past assumptions about family characteristics were so wrong and are now history. I have had to reinvent myself at my age.

So what? Well the more that is being revealed about those genes that we inherit the more it becomes clear that everything, just about everything, from facial features, postures, to skin blemishes, the site for and wrinkle formation, our personality mix, it is all set in the genes we get at conception. The journey to understanding the gene contribution is on its way but it still has a long way to travel. What I am picking up is that hardship endured a couple of generations before will impact on the latest generation. I sense that particular trades accumulated particular aptitudes that fine tuned them for the demands of their work. I can see that a tailor has a different skills mind set from a coal-miner or farm labourer, a skill set that gets passed down the line. Or a weaver has a different take on life than a ship welder. All down to the genes. Sure environment plays a crucial part, emphasising or suppressing characteristics until lady luck gets to play her hand, but only working within that unique blend of genes you to inherit.

What on earth then do people think, when they go in for a donor child, whether by egg or sperm? A child is not a feel good status symbol toy. It is a huge investment, of time, emotion, energy, self-sacrifice, money that last for the remainder of the parents life-time. Not a glib, wouldn't it be nice, choice but life changing with no return ticket. The genes that you pick to mix up with yours are important, not to be left to some vague random factor. Not that I am saying a rapist or a murder passes these traits on in their genes but there are mind sets that clearly could sit very uncomfortably with another. But the genes your own mixes with are relevant and important. The next worst option to a wildcard choice would be to try and select for a particular aptitude. Crufts and dogs springs to mind, we just do not have skills to select for a well rounded human, versatile and flexible to cope with a very uncertain future. What has served us so well in the past is still the best option on offer, mutual attraction. Financial advantage, social status and stability are also runners but often with a latent sting in the tail. No, mutual attraction wins hands down.

Our understanding and conciousness of the ideal mate selection process may be almost entirely missing but there are, nevertheless intuitive processes at work, if only we give them time and a chance. It takes more than a steamy aroused one night stand to suss out whether a soul mate has been found. Conception really is best deferred until there is a solid air of certainty that this mate will be good for the long haul and that prospect, of living together, looks attractive. We have not even scratched the surface of why people develop mutual attraction, so for me, there is no techno fix. Just this belief in an intuitive process at work that rules some potential mates in and a lot more potentials definitely out. A complex process, this mate selection, with all sorts of variable and alternative game strategies. There is only one endgame objective, to find a mate that will care, support and bring up any progeny for the duration. Liking them in the meantime can be a considerable bonus.

So no one-night stands with a lifetime of regret for what might have been, certainly not a donor child with who knows what genes on offer and a categoric no to a technical profiled best gene match until, or if, we get to fully understand the processes. In the meantime just learn to listen to your heart strings.They are the very best thing you have going for you to find the best fit gene match to what you have on offer. Genes matter, it is all in the genes.

ps Have now found out that I inherited an ability to be cold, detached and dispassionate when faced with conflicts from my Maternal GMa. Keeping emotions in check and out of the equation can be a good analytical tool but boy it does make relationships fraught!

Secure in Fantasyland

Just come back from touring around a number of european countries and the absence of the surveillance cameras was very noticeable. Yet I did not feel threatened at any time even in public spaces with crowds gathering, nor did I feel my safety was compromised. Maybe surveillance cameras are just a reflection of a society that is insecure within itself and distrustful of its citizens. Without consultation or prior public consent, they are installed at the whim of authorities. Safe in their uncontested defence that the public welcomes all cameras as they protects them from acts of violence and no innocent has anything to fear!

That protection is of course an urban myth with very little substantive evidence to support it. The increasing numbers of installations are self-defeating. Every camera needs a person to sit and monitor it, for every 525599 (or 527039 in a leap year) minutes of a year. Just incase something is about to kick off. Other than that, your security is just a factor of luck. Is your particular monitor being watched at the moment you are under threat? Chance are so long against it you would stand more chance winning the european lottery! So cameras are next to useless protecting from an event but can have use after an event. As you lie unconscious on the floor, with luck, you might get spotted within half an hour if, of course a caring passing citizen does not respond first!

These cameras promote an entirely false sense of safety. They are of course of great interest to authorities wanting to control a submissive society. They gather vast volumes of data tracking each and everyone of us. With face recognition software they can, when they choose, track a person for their whole active day or life. All in the interest of our greater security of course. Such resources would only ever be employed against known national threats, like terrorists. It just does not add up. They do not know the terrorists in adavance, there are too many cameras for such a focussed need. No, they are used routinely to monitor you and I as we go about our every day lives. To make judgements about our actions and compile dossiers of citizens with behaviour patterns deemed suspicious. Nothing to fear as I live within the law. Yet your behaviour is being judged every day by you know not who. Software designed to pick up on nervous behaviour or by a low paid psychotic with a warped sense of normality. You have absolutely no idea nor any rights to know. Yet if by some mechanism you are placed in the suspect pile, your life can be change dramatically. To prove innocence is impossible. Once you are deemed a witch, or in this day and age, a terrorists, you are beyond help. Your cries of innocence merely confirm your guilt to those judging you.

No, let us get it straight, surveillance cameras are a weapon to be used by an authoritarian state against it citizens that are too submissive and indifferent to care.

Whilst I am at it of course the other aspect are speed cameras. Went through far too many road works when abroad and not a single one had an average speed camera let alone a fixed camera during the works. The organisation of the roadworks were far less controlled and organised than over here. If anything the risks were far higher there, but no cameras. Traffic density could be equal to or exceeding that here. I simply do not believe, and the evidence of my own eyes supports it, that we are not worst drivers. So why such a different reaction? Average speed cameras tightly controlling traffic speed through roadworks and even reducing the speed through the works arbitrarily down to 30 or even 20 mph, compared to, no cameras.

If the accidents rates were remarkably different between one country and another there would be an public outcry in the country at variance. No I suspect that accident and or driving death rates, one country to another, are more or less on par. Even in Germany where they still have unlimited speeds on parts of the autobahn I doubt whether there is a significant difference. So why does this country have such an obsession with speed cameras. It has to be distrust and control. Distrust by us the citizens of ourselves and the willingness of others to behave and an authority that leaps at that permissiveness, to exercise more control over its citizens that is never contested. All muddled and muddied up with good aspirational goals that allay social concerns, the need to save fuel in equal measures with doses of all speed kills. Twaddle but self-righteous twaddle so not easily dismissed.

At the heart of all this is a conundrum. The conundrum is that strong leaders are expected to be seen to act and be decisive and in times of threat, action is expected. In response to those expectations those in control publicly tinker. It matter not what they tinker at so long as it tickles the public's expectations of what is thought to be effective. In reality those tinkerings have very little actual impact on events other than massaging the public's concerns. There are no reliable studies to prove efficacy but they accumulate building up into a mythology of effective reactions to events. Just fantasy solutions for a submissive public that has given up on caring, thinking or protesting at self-evident bad decisions. It is up to you, have surveillance or speed cameras been proven to actually work? Get off your butt and do something.

Youth

No of course it is not because I having nothing to say, lots as always, it is just that I have not had the time! Lets get some strands together. No, our youth are not rioting, a riot has a purpose an intent and wish to get to some goal, pun intended. These youth are just rampaging. What we are witnessing is a new phenomena of our age, 'FlashMobbing' seems to be the parlance. Youth, with all their lack of doom, whipped up by the excitement of being part of something kicking off and with one2one messaging sucking them into the maelstrom.

So let us lay down the blame. Us. You and me are to blame. We have framed and allowed our society to drift down this path. We have watched indifferently as the political parties have corrupted our democratic processes, so we all end up dis-engaged. Look after number one and to hell with the rest of them is our culture. Even as we double talk about what a good idea the 'Big Society' is whilst inwardly shrugging that there is nothing you intend to do to make it work. That double speak, though silent is picked up by our youth and taken as gospel, not the mealy words of spoken agreement but the true unexpressed silent reaction of disdain and disinterest. They take that silence as the route map. So dont blame the youth for taking at face value the society you see, even if you double speak of another world you dont believe in.

Secondly we must blame the parents, for accepting too readily the easy option that single parents are an equal and okay alternative. For not insisting that the children forgo their own space and do join in and take part in family events from mealtimes to get togethers. For not requiring some account of their movements and friends. For allowing their children to develop in a culture where to want is to have without consequences and where authority can be safely ignored as it has no teeth. Where the sense of separateness of youth from the adult world they inhabit is endorsed and promulgated without challenge but actually cheered on as a sign of creative independence.

Thirdly we must blame ourselves for accepting as a norm the divisiveness of a rich get richer society. The quick abandonment of any social values in the hope that you too can get to inherit the riches not realising the chasm has grown enormously over the last decades. With us, the poor on one side gazing in wonderment at a life beyond grasp whilst the rich plunder the the poor, using their energies and desires to build the very barriers to keep the rich enclave for only the rich. All the while promoting the self-evident lie that all can partake of the riches is only you make sufficient effort. Little wonder if those without prospect of progress, yet daily buffeted with tangible emblems of rewards beyond their reach, despair or worse take what they cannot rightfully get. A divided nation is a grossly unfair nation. A divided nation ruled and controlled by the benefiters of that divide is obscene.

Nothing of course condones or mitigates in any way from actions against the very society you live within. Nothing justifies the trashing and looting our your neighbours just because, there is no excuse. We each have to be accountable for our own actions, within a raging mob or not. Accountable, well to our fellow citizens of course. So finally, much as we honest upright citizens are outraged by the sheer mindless stupidity and violence and want to exact retribution. Stop and pause. What we have are youth that are dis-engaged from their society. We urgently need to re-engage them, together with us along the way. So how is locking them up in prison going to help? Meting out stiff punishment leaves a glow of righteous indignation but these are youth who have never had it their way and expect to be pushed and bullied, if not plain ignored. What merit in taking away benefit when they are scudding along on the very bottom rungs already, kick them further down to do what? Again not a good way to go about getting engagement. Yes oh yes there has to be retribution. The consequence of their thoughtless and mindless act has to come well and truly home. How to do it in an upbeat progressive way that ends up with them tying back into our society is a huge challenge. Reward and punishment for failing to work at towards the reward has to be a way. That and working to repair the damage of their upbringing and building back self-respect and hope. Real gettable hope that can be actually grasped. Community work is an option, if they want to make amends but not if enforced against their will. Take away their right to messaging until their have earned its return seems fit for purpose. Take away their right to gather in groups of more than three again seems fit for purpose. Take away their right to walk free amongst us until they have accepted our rules of conduct. Intensive parenting classes and support for parents in standing up to their children again seems fit for purpose. Maybe, just maybe a boot camp experience for those wayward's that refuse to help themselves and are determined to turn their backs on the society that nutures them. But everything aimed at encouragement to join in with us and engage. Maybe we can then learn lessons from them!

Weekly Sanity Check

Just as I despair of the all the attention seeking, the shallow me only selfishness and the endless mindless prattle that fill every day along comes Alison Graham's weekly column in the Radio Times. A breath of sanity. A welcome no nonsense, face life as it is and get on with it attitude. She, like we all, has her lapses when she get overcome with girlyness. Fair do's and she does forewarn with an unmissable klaxon before she gives into her temptation. Her doing girly is of course gritty, blunt and scalpel sharp to the point. Gets over it and gets back to her plain, but so nicely couched self. So often she mirrors, or rather she hones in with clarity on thoughts that were rambling around in me. Or perhaps more honestly, she plucks out of all the chatter a key essence of social conduct that I wish I had had the sense to see, before her enlightenment. And consistent, week after week. No overblown ego, no inflated sense of importance, just another generous insightful observation sparked off by some TV media event.

Her day job, the one that pays the bread, those previews of all the up-n-coming schedule programmes she is paid to write are equally pithy and to the point. A degree of dissemblance is entirely forgiveable. She is employed after all to promote programmes appearing in the schedules and though she seems to have a range of freedom, it is clear she cannot just say, it is all rubbish this week but has to find something. Over time it has become very clear those days when she is of a mind it is all unworthy rubbish, then picks out some long standing formulaic series or some oft repeated golden classic to make her choice for the day. Her linguistic somersaults and verbal gymnastics become words of wonder, as she trips lightly through many varied degrees of faint praise to satisfy the only upbeat requirements of her paymasters. Not that that stops her, occasionally firing both barrels from the hip, finding up-beat words to scathingly expose the nature of rubbish that she has been paid to praise.

A very loud thank you, Alison Graham. Each week you restore my faith as I brace myself for another week's bombardment of trivia. Thank you pay-masters, for carrying on having the courage to give her her head.

Oh yes as a ps, whatever she says is liberally drizzled with high octane irony, delicious!

It is not important

Just heard the Ad for a mature cheese, a new light version, where the slogan hook was 'No compromise'! A mature cheese is made mature so it has a bite and tang to it. That is the whole point of it being mature. So what it is only an advert. But is not, it a verbal role model for a new generation of children being taught, double speak, concealing truths is ok, even cool. This is how the dudes hang out. It is not okay. The hardest thing in all life is to keep close to the truth.

White lies are brushed off as necessary oiling of the social wheels. The suggestion that any lie demeans our society is shouted down. We need white lies is the chorus reply. No we don't, we need truth. Not in your full on face truth. Time and tact play important parts. Better to defer, to miss the point, to talk obliquely in another direction than the empty meaningless white lies, you are beautiful, you are a princess, you are looking so much better, you are so kind. The answer is not to square up and give full barrel critique, you are so childish, grow up and face the reality of your mean spirited life. But not lies, the audience knows the reality, pretending we live in some other mythical place, destroys the bonds between us. Our eternal search for truth.

When the pinnacles of our societies role models openly display a contempt for truth, from our Prince to our Police to our Politicians, society is in deep trouble. The Prince can publicly declare to the world his wedding vows whilst having a mistress at one and the same time off camera. The Police and Politicians can deny impropriety or worse refuse to answer as it might incriminate them, junketing with the Press and benefiting of Press freebies their salary and position gives them no entitlement too. Too eager to drink from the trough of corruption and too enthralled to notice truths lack.

Truth is not an optional extra. Trust is at the root of truth. Can I trust you, can I trust what you say, can I trust that you will be there to help when help is needed. This is the base cement that keeps us in a social bind. Of course we expect to be lied to, to be let down and for some people to pretend to be other than they are. But not the important people. Not the people close to us, the people we care about and most of all the people that have a duty to look after us. From them we expect the highest standards. Our social leaders used to have just a reputation for integrity, principle and honesty. The rot of misrepresentation, of double speak and standards, of weasely words disowning any sensible construction or over-hyped claims way beyond any realisable property, all these are now our common daily grist. The truth flew the nest a long time ago. How now trust? Who do you turn to that you can trust to mean what they say and do what they say they will do.

You are all on your own in a very cynical deliberately misleading world.