Freedom of the Press

It is so childish when the rich and the famous complain about the intrusion of the press and the need to restrain their freedom to poke and delve. On the one hand these self same people are more than happy to expose their private life to the glare of publicity and the wider public attention when they have a product they choose to flaunt. Then, having incited the general public's appetite in their doings, cry foul when the public with their whipped up interest, want even more gossip about their private doings, when they have decided they no longer want to be a public and now choose to live off camera.

There is one fundamental truth behind all this, a plain, dull, uneventful life does not generate any news worthy of any interest. Only those who claim privilege, advantage and special treatment find themselves compromised by their inflated sense of importance. As such prime candidates for debunking and taking down a notch. The last thing we need is a shackled press with restrictions on when, where and how they can seek out the truth. The famous and rich are powerful with access to to all manner of means to bar, ban or conceal uncomfortable truths. It would also be exceedingly convenient for the government if they too could call on the same restrictions to prevent the airing of news that might be embarassing to them. A free press is our only hope of lifting that armoured curtain and exposing the flagrant abusers. So an absolute no to legal statutes which restrict the press and favour concealment by the rich and famous.

Which is not to endorse an unrestained press free to rampage over all sensitivities, able to traumatise at will people  already going through tragic circumstances. There can be no justification in the hounding survivors of some dreadful tragedy, just to get a column inch of newspaper or a photo opportunity. What it comes down to is, if you find the means of getting a 'story' distasteful, lacks respect and consideration for people who rightly deserve our heart felt smypathy, then cancel your subscription, standing order or diret debit and refuse to buy copy from those who show a consistent disgrade for decent standards. We get the press we deserve and that we support by continuing to buy their shameful exploitations. 

As a last resort of course the rich and the famous can take the press to court if they publish false information or invade their privacy. Then twelve respectable men, or their surrogates, will decide on the merits of the case and hopefully award punitive damages if found to be true. This is the best route to curb press excesses. Granted not a route for the common person but where the rich can take the strain the rest can follow.


Except of course it is not a level playingfield as it has been heavily scewed by the press Barons. The papers are now run by amoral proprietors, formerly Maxwell and now Murdock, where circulation, at any price, is the mantra. Circulation equates to increased share standing. The Papers are now just a route to ever greater gilt edge status leading to ever more powerful and gargantuan media conglomerates. What price truth, compassion, integrity or even principles when the proprietor insists on circulation at any price? Which underling is able to stand ground and gainsay? See also Living the Make Believe for getting people back incharge of running companies and restoring proper social values. Without this, the usual corporate greed of profit first results in a disregard for the normal human decencies being the norm and being ingrained in the corporate psyche. Just remember that if you do not like that which is being done with your complicit approval then say so loud and clear. Refute your association with it and tell the world.

Checks and Balances

In this vision of a new egalitarian society where we set aside the old first to the post winner takes all and instead work together to ensure everyone gets a fair share there will inevitably be problems. Leaders will emerge that the crowd will follow, most will be mainstream but some will be waywards off the regular tracks. Far rather than new rules and regulations are drawn up to prohibit or restrict them we have to encourage them to flourish. Regulation leads to centralism and totalitarian control. The opposite of the desired route of collective decisions meeting local needs and desires. The mavericks are needed to push the boundaries beyond the norm of conservatism. 



With flourishing contrast and compare examples widely available and highly visible, it is unlikely that communities will be led too far off the proven middle ground before they self correct. But there will always be the exception, and from time to time an exception will emerge that is hell-bent on self destruction along with his followers. What is Society to do? Their community, their choice, at what point can or should the collective wider society step in? What if the maverick leads them deeper and deeper into financial ruin they can never ever hope to recover from? Debts only the wider society can possibly bail them out of. 


So the question is when the wider societal community is put at risk by a community who has the authority to countermand their self-selected choices and who can instigate due redemption and ensure it is extracted? In the end it is the coming together of fellow communities to say this step is a step too far, we hold you to account for your wilful choices. Just as a parent would to a wilful teenager. The teenager has to be given the chance and support to try out a new and different lifechoice but the parent has to be the ultimate safety net to say that is just too far and takes us beyond what we can countenance. Check and balances. Always looking to see what impact your actions have on your neighbours and accepting that they have the right to comment and criticise your actions when they impinge on their freedom to make choices. None places themselves where others becomes disadvantaged. Throw away the centralised rules and regulations and let goodwill and commonsense rule us.

Fair Cop?

For the record I am underwhelmed by this whole Police Commissioner vote thing. The government advertising to whip up public interest really says it all for me. It is the classic 'which slice of the pie' do you want. Stop car vandalism or stop drunk louts or stop house thefts or stop speed abuse or stop drug pushers. The answer is of course all of the above and some more as well. The problem is there just is not enough pie to go round.

What I take exception to is that the government retains tight control of the permitted expenditure and manner and methods to be employed in policing our country. The Police Commissioner is just the 'locally elected' fall guy to take the heat of accountability off from the government decisions which make it impossible to attain the public's policing aspirations. As an aside, 'locally elected' of course equals a political parties nomination with first loyalty to the Party not the electorate.

Just yet another deliberate, cynical tactic by the government to divide to rule. Make someone or organisation 'accountable' at local level to take all the blame complaints and criticisms. Whilst retaining all meaningful control back at central government, preventing them for exercising and employing new innovative and structurally different ways of skinning the impossible cat. They were devised by government so government could escape public blame for failing to adequately source and fund an effective police force.

Smoking Mirrors

The Media reflects but also modifies the society it mirrors. The Media can only survive and prosper if it hits the funny bone every time. So it always has concentrated on permutations of the gory, the tragic, the spectacular, the shameful, the lusting and the voyeuristic. It is just that nowadays the media has so refined its targets, honed in on our subconscious trigger, it can hit the G-spot of sensitivity each and every time. This is distorting our perception of what we are, how we respond and is leading us to adopt new attitudes that are not reflective us as people or a society. The media distortion of us and our view of our reflections is channelling our future reactions, the role model we hold and use to navigate life by.

When our favourite soap 'deals' with a difficult issue, what ever it is this time round, child abuse, family rape, racial hatred, partner beating, gang banging, let us just stop and pause for thought. They are not 'dealing with it' they are cashing in on horrendous social issues, using those issues to pull in viewers and push up their ratings. We must learn to rush to our social networks, by twitter or facebook or what ever and challenge all those simplistic, one dimensional characters and situations and scream out loud, this is not true. Life is much more complicated and convoluted. Life is not simple black and white with  a single start and stop point. Protest out load that their representation is selling us and all victims, so so short. The emotional nightmare of love in jeopardy, distrust and hate cannot be conveyed by one line put downs.There is no one person walking off into the sunset or taken off to jail, or some such simple resolution. Everyone that comes into contact with the events is tainted and carry the corruption onwards about their person for years into the future and on into all their furture relationships. Get that across and then you are 'dealing with it' and doing us all a service by sharing the visceral agonies of life when it goes off the rails.


The next time we surrender to a fantasy world, to escape the gritty realities, let us hang on to some semblance of logic, connection, plausibility, some portrayal of life as all of us do experience it. As we lose ourselves in impossible relationships, gut wrenching bodies torn asunder and mechanical Armageddon, just pause and reflect you are a member of the human race that has to negioate, deal and some how live in a kind of harmony with all other humans. This is not the way life is. Again use your networks and protest out loud at all improbable, implausible plots characters and situations. Beyond your experience sure but not beyond any imagaineable reality. Escape yes but keep some semblance of realism. Keep it possible to translate back to a life we actually have to live. Ridicule plots that jump from one imponderable to another and another without any rythme or reason ever offered. Suspense, oh yes but not adondonment of all logic.

Time for us shape the media we use to reflect the society we aspire to be. Do not accept being pandered to, do not accept pap, stand up and demand to be treated as an adult going about in a adult world. Challenge all that offer anything other, use your voice.

Keeping to Rules

Some rules such as we shall not kill one another, we shall not take what does not belong to us, we shall drive on the left and give way to the right are plain simple ways of organising ourselves so we can live together with the minimum of friction. We regard these self-imposed rules as universal, cast in stone, everyone in our society subscribes to them without question. Some where in the layers apon layers of these rules we adopt to guide our path through life we reach rules which are clearly old-fashioned and not to be followed any more, like chew each mouthful thirty times, like never go out unless properly dressed in coat or jacket and hat, like never to jump a queue or always make way for those weaker than you.

Then there are those other rules and regulations imposed on you by authority. You shall pay your TV licence, you will not drop litter, you cannot enter private property, if your tyre treads are less than that specified you will replace or risk a penalty imposed you. All sensible elaborations of our self-imposed rules which help keep the wheels we rely on turning with the minimum of friction. Even though we might chafe at the detail the general principles seems loud and clear.

To live within the protection of our society we all accept we have to surrender to authority. Go along with decisions from others on how or what we may or must do. It is accepted that we abdicate any right to decide the reasonableness, or appropriateness for ourselves. We will do as we are told, without question, without challenge. This is the proper price to be paid for living within a community that shields, protects and nurtures us all on a broadly equitable level.

We expect our leaders, those in authority over us, to be decisive even proactive, to stop wrongs and injustices occurring and to make restitution to those that have been transgressed against. Now that our leaders are chosen and require a minimal mandate from us, from time to time, they need to be seen to be effective. They need to flex their use of the powers granted them to do things, make things happen. What we end up with is a culture of knee jerk responses. Every incident that claims some notoriety must result in a counter reaction. Some new law, some new regulation has to be passed to demonstrate to all that our leaders are effective and in control.

So we live drowned in a plethora of control, rules, restrictions and sanctions, some good but by far away most, with the benefit of time, too hasty and failing to deal decisively with the issue. A deluge of rules often inconsequential, contradictory, irrational and almost all failing to connect with any universal sense of pragmatic fairness and propriety. A deluge precipitated by and drowned out by the media whipped chorus clamouring for our leaders to do some thing about some incident or other.

We humans are complex social animals. We each have our own individual take on the world. No one person sees the colour red the same as another. Enough of us can compare and agree that what we are looking at is red but the red as sensed by each of us might well be different. If we cannot have something as basic as seeing the colour red in common, what chance is there for any of us to agree on a rules which are fair and right for all of us. Society, life and us as a social organism are so complex that no sets of rules, no matter how voluminous, can ever even nearly prescribe our behaviour. Calling on our leaders to fix it is the ultimate cop out and doomed to failure.

As I have explored before in Saunter to Totalitarianism there is no substitute for each of us taking responsibility for what is going on around us. Not our current leader, not our government, not the local councillors, but us, the me. What am I going to do. If something is going on I do not like, it is for me individually or collectively with my neighbours or my community to sort it out. Not someone else, me. Not defer to some remote agency, but to get stuck in and decide an effective way to resolve the mutually agreed nuisance. Woe betide if you agree to restraints that come back to bite you. This is not a charter for vigilantes, after all a child of yours might be a culprit or victim. No just people using common sense and pragmatism to resolve issues that are pertinent to them. Learn from their mistakes and refine their conclusions next time round. So what if our nation becomes diffuse with different codes of conduct, dependant on where you are. So what if you feel out of place moving around within an new strange community. Perhaps this is right and proper that you pay attention to wishes of the community you now find yourself within. Maybe there really should be several speeds in our nation between city to town to village. Perhaps differentiation is actually the missing ingredient of what makes a community and in the end ties us together as a homogeneous society.

Hysteria

How many accusation's does it take to prove guilt, ten, or hundreds or thousands? Point is an accusation is just that, an accusation. Sure a hundred tend to indicate that something was not right and thousands mean that there is certainly something wrong that has taken place. So the media storm surrounding the Jimmy Saville exposure sounds as if all the accusations have been proven. He is guilty as charged, a pervert, a child abuser. It is unfortunate that he is not now with us to defend his name. 

To date the accusations are just that and have yet to be examined as to their reasonableness. Before jumping in on the witch-hunt let us all just pause for a moment. Accusations come in all shades from the spurious, to the 'me to', to retrospective remorse, to the full on corroborated, clear, without a shade of doubt. Before vilifying a reputations of many decades standing it is worth pausing to check how the accusations stand up by applying all the usual standards we use when considering any serious accusation. Is there corroboration, is there a sequence and patten, what degree of abuse from the inappropriate, to the over familiar to the outright violation, was it consensual (at the time) and how plausible are the claims in all the circumstances?

What I think of the man, Jimmy Saville, does not come into it but neither do I hold a candle for Saint Jimmy. I certainly do not want to minimise the distress and years of guilt that lay behind these accusations. What we do all need and want is the full extent of the truth to come out, as best it can, after all these years. Was Saville a solo operator or did he work within a circle of similar predators? Did his fame endorse an over-familiar attitude to the young people his work put him into close contact with? Were (and are) the codes of conduct for 'famous' TV personalities robust enough to deal with the mania of groupies throwing themselves at or worse making themselves available to their target idol? How can a solo operator, or a small close knit group, operate with immunity for such a long period in such a large organisation that I suspect is riddled with gossip and innuendo.  Who else knew and were complicit in his exploitation over so many years?

There is a lot more behind this story than just the vilification of a once idol to millions. Let us avoid the trap of using hindsight judgements of our sophisticated age with regard to minors, sexuality and abuse and not use them in place of the mores of twenty, thirty or even forty years ago. Be sure, place guilt where it is found, but first let us be a little circumspect with all these accusations until we better understand their strength and where they lead us.

Safety Insanity

There is a prevailing obsession about speed and how speed kills. So obsessed are we that the plans to make a 20mph speed limit widespread across Towns are being welcomed as enlightened, a worthy regard for the sanctity of life. These plans are just bonkers, pure lunacy out of disconnected thoughts. Speed cannot kill. I have sped on many legal occasions and I have never ever killed. Policemen are authorised to speed excessively but their extreme speed kills no one. No it is driving errors, inattention, poor judgement, misunderstanding of reactions times, road dynamics and even pure mischance that kills. Sure speed does aggravate any outcome but is not the cause. 

None of us want to endorse behaviour that might result in the death of a innocent bystander. Being born, getting out of bed each day and going about the world is high risk behaviour that might result in your death. We know life is risky. We take a calm and measured view of the risks. What are the chances of misadventure today? Negligible. Will the bolt come out of the blue? Probably not. We weigh the chances of risk against our need to get on with life whilst taking sensible precautions to minimise the inherent risk out there.

The society we live in depends on our means to get about quickly and efficiently from one part to another. We live in cosy suburbs, away from the bustle of the city centre, because we can travel easily. We live out in the countryside away from the smells and sounds of the busy towns because we enjoy the peace and quiet yet can just as easily pop into town to go to school, or shop or work. The convenience of our world is based on being able to smoothly, easily and tirelessly move about with tolerable time expenditure. We choose not to spend hours on the business of moving from one part to another at the costs of work or family life.

In an ideal world, the world dreamed of by the planners way back in the 1960's, it was simple, traffic separation was the solution. Keep cars and people apart and problem solved. Except of course life was not that simple and has only got worse since those heady days of idealism. Just consider the range of legitimate road users that must be allowed for, mobility scooters, pedestrians ranging from the fit to the slow, roller blades, racing bikes, mountain bikes, buggies, motor bikes, horses with or without carts, cars, stretched limos, buses, trams, van lorries and transporters in all shape and sizes. Each of these legitimate forms of travelling on our roads has it own unique, widely different speed, manoeuvrability, reaction time and ability to read other users intentions. The simplistic vision just does not work, we cannot possibly separate out all those disparate road users. We have to accept they are all mixed together.

So the solution then is a 20mph widespread speed limit. Slow everything and everyone down to the slowest common denominator. In a crowded city with congested roads, crowded pavements and a 24/7 society it is just reflecting reality, that is as high as the hopes go. This nation does not comprise wall to wall cities. It has regions of great density and still has areas of very low density with the bulk of the land with a rich mixture inbetween. Many many town and villages have uncongested roads and pavements that scarcely ever see a pedestrian and a night time where the roads are deserted. So the odd road user on such roads as these should be restricted to just 20mph! This is tunnel thinking just as blinkered as the simplistic vision of traffic segregation. Our society and our lives are structured around being able to move easily and swiftly between locations.

Once apon a time, pedestrians hovered at the edge of the road calculating when there was a sufficient gap between moving cars to make it safely across the road. How times have changed. Nowadays pedestrian walk out as it pleased them across the road in the expectation that all vehicles will fully anticipate their intentions and make passage for them. Neither of course of behaviour is appropriate. What is relevant is that each and every road user has to have regard for the needs of any other road user and to be patient and considerate to those other users. In a mixed society we have to allow for and cut slack for all those others we must by necessity jostle with.

If only 20mph speed limits were definitive. Rearrange society and life based on 20mph and there would be no road casualties, ever. Would not happen, in congested streets, in adverse weather conditions or the unexpected bolt of of the blue, life would still be lost. And we as a society would have sacrificed all the benefits of being able to move about freely, for nothing. The viable speed is totally dependant of the conditions at that time, not some generalised norm. No, lives are lost by errors made by road users. We each have to take responsibility for our own decisions. There can be no hiding behind rules and regulations. We each must judge the time, the place and the conditions as and when we make those judgements. It is our decision alone, each and every time. Failing to anticipate an erratic driver as equally as failing to see a juvenile about to make a rash choice. We each have to assess all the variables like time, weather, visibility, congestion, probable movements as we make our navigational judgements. Information about other users and their limitations, information about causes of accidents, information about black spots that have above average accidents, information fed to a society that fully accepts it is each persons own responsibility for the safety of all other members of their society, that would all help. Coupled with a mature acceptance of the inherent risks in life with an acceptance of their probabilities. Each road user has to be aware and take responsibility for their actions and the affect on all other road users. No blanket traffic restriction is going to better that.

There is Another Way

Just read an article that has given me hope, great hope, 'Evolution of Inequality, New Scientist, 28.07.2012'. I am no longer that nutter aspiring to impossible dreams. There are alternatives, so they are achievable if only we want them enough. Our capitalist based society of the winner grabs the lions share and gets to dictate has only been around for some 5,000 years. Whether or not you accept the premise that prior to that our hunt gatherers ancestors lived an egalitarian lifestyle  matters not. What does count is that there is an alternative to grab first and hoard. He with the biggest hoard gets to take his pick of what is available,  grab more and then use his hoard to buy fealty. The rich just get richer and richer off the backs of the poor, too poor and weak to resist.

The alternative is an egalitarian society where we look out for each other and make sure that what we have is no more than what anyone else has. No one is left in need or want, the group looks after it kin, as the weakest bring them all down, but together they have strength beyond the sum of their parts.

Just the required fresh new way of looking at our world as we have passed beyond the tipping point, where our plunder of its resources exceeds its capacity to replace or regenerate. We have to get back to a more frugal way of life. We have to stop putting our own little clique first and start to ensure all people born on this planet have some hope of a life not too disparate from our own expectations. A way to minimise our use and waste of scarce earth resources. A chance to rein in the incomprehensibly wild extravagances of the few and to look carefully at what the earth is able to offer so that we can all have a comparable share in it. Not equality. Not match for match, but comparable, not so disparate as to give rise to resentment, but a rough and ready fairness dependant on global position, climate and ease of access to resources.

Of course the bully boys and their cohort thugs have ruled the roost for millennia. Each generation is born with them as their only their role model of, take what you want and answer to nobody, as the possible viable route to follow. They are not going to give up their inherited accustomed rights and privileges. Yet their excesses can only be fuelled by the acquiescence of the masses that go without. So it is mutable, but whether peacefully or their rush to force can only be countered by a matching force, is the question to be addressed.

There are prospects, not everything we value in life is based on what can be obtained by force. Appreciation, respect, attention, these give an inkling of an Achilles heel that could bring the capitalist tyrants to book, maybe. Assuming, as a daydream, we overthrow our capitalist society and replace it with a society founded on egalitarianism, the battle is not over. There is always, in every society, it is in our human nature, the small percentage of cheaters, who claim full shares but hold back and conceal their gains. Or even worse steal or take by force when no one is looking. Nothing new here I guess. Like our hunter gatherer ancestors before us, the consequences of becoming a social pariah has to outway any advantage gained by stealing a march. When we all share in the same comparable distribution of resources, when we all know what we are entitled to, it does take the heat out of the need to go one better.

The longer you contemplate an egalitarian society the more it reveals in it a new calmness, the need to work together rather than to complete. How the world could begin to start out afresh in a new dimension. Inspirational but not beyond realisable.

Hiding behind words

It is so disengaged, remote, coldly clinical, the descriptions 'surgical strike', 'precision targeting', 'terrorist threat', 'neutralising a real risk', but setting aside the contrived and deliberate detachment of the words, the end result is still the same, a person, a human being, is to be killed. A person with parents, relatives, maybe a spouse probably with their own children has been selected to be killed.

Man facing man with comparable weapons it could be seen as, almost, a glorious and honourable trial of strength, both with an opportunity to overcome the other and to be the victor. But we have moved a long way from man against man. The weapons have led to increasing distance between the men confronting each other. Now the opposing men do not even see it other and it has been, for a long time, not a matter of one man skills pitted against another, but simply who has the best weaponry and tactical support.

Now a man sitting in a room three thousand miles away, in front of a bank of screens can control a drone that picks out it target and then kills it. No chance to retaliate, the target probably even unaware of their imminent death. Back across the world the man goes home to hugs with family, settles infront of TV with a cold beer and life is very normal. Selective targets with known terrorists links, only picked out for death after the most serious of cross checks and only after Presidential authorisation. This not a casual killing campaign but very carefully premeditated and double checked. Sure there is the odd co-lateral damage. That is to say unintended bystanders, men or women or children also are killed but that is their risk for associating with known terrorists. It is essential for the security of the USofA that these people are killed without further risk to American personnel. Except there is a higher overriding concern. Justice.

Our system of Justice, flawed and rough edged that it is, has evolved over centuries to balance all the complexities of human actions with that need, by us all, that the guilty should be exposed and shown for what they are. The Justice system recognises that you cannot not simply take one side of the argument. It has to be challenged by the opposing version. It is not even simply totting up all the incontrovertible evidence on one side as against the other. Even evidence can be skewed, depending on your point of view. It is not even who is the most believable and presents the most likely account of events. It is all that plus the intangibles, of people, how we as an individual perceive and have a sense of their trust and worthiness. That is why in the more complex cases we bring in twelve decent men off the street and leave the outcome for them to decide. Flawed because even unimpeachable evidence can turn out to be just wrong and seemingly good decision can be eventually shown to be wrong. The wrong person judged to be guilty. There simply are no absolutes, guilty or not entirely depends on your point of view, where you choose to place the emphasis, where you decide credence of truth best fits. At least, with the abolition of the death sentence, it is possible to make retribution for those persons who suffer the rough edges of our Justice System.

The Terrorist is our later day Witch where the ducking stool has been replaced with a death drone and all the hi-tech mumbo jumbo wrap arounds to reassure any waverers that this is all clinical, precise, beyond doubt or question. Except it is still based on 'Prove you are not a Witch/Terrorist' on pain of death. Except the selected target is not give any chance to protest their innocence. At least when the executioner looked the condemned in the eyes he was able to reassure himself, by the demeanour of the condemned, that they accepted their fate and guilt. Not with the remote controlled drones. The victim is killed without any chance to protest, to set out an alternate chain of events to the ones assembled by his judge, jury and executioner. All is fair in the cause of a 'War on Terrorism'. As if that expression defined a tangible cohesive body of people who were united, armed and seeking confrontation. Just as in the War of Witchcraft, it justifies all means and ends. History tells us otherwise. For all the hundreds of witches slain for failing to prove they were not witches, witchcraft was not eradicated. Instead their pursuers were besmirched by their abandonment of all basic rights and restraints. Evil continues on as ever but just pops up under another label with other objectives.

When Mr President of USofA next reviews the daily list of people to be killed by the death drone, he would do best to pause for thought. Is this justice I am administering here or just sanctioned slaughter?

Rip off GB style

I have this very nasty taste in my mouth, been with me for several weeks, try as I can to rinse it out, the bile keeps coming back. Something just is not right. The idea of people at the peak of their physical achievement contesting with others to see who is best is inspirational. So gladiatorial a match needs to be restricted to just once every five years. To host such a contest for the world should be an honour, a celebration of your Nations stature and achievements. So far all so good.

The cost of providing state of the art facilities, accommodating all the athletes with attendant followers, the media and not forgetting all the officials on their jollies is eye-wateringly huge. Just a pared down version let alone a full on lets swank and show the world what we can do version. The returns are proportionate, many immediate in increased traffic, visitors and all those logistics of making a large event happen. Some less tangible and down stream, the shadow of prestige, a heighten world wide awareness of the image put out there and the after effect of gung-ho we can that we can do anything.

Contrary to all the nay sayers, GB Ltd won the rights, has built on time to a budget that retains some allusion of credibility, without the hostage strikes of past decades, a worthy venue. Brilliant. National pride should be soaring. Instead I have this bile in my mouth. Quite rightly the government has chosen not to fund it all out of the public purse and has invited sponsors, large sponsors so inevitably commercial sponsors wanting to make a buck on the back of the biggest circus in town. No problem here either. For all its flaws the commercial world helps keep this world spinning and giving people what they think they need.

My problems stems from that having invited in sponsors it was not then necessary to roll over and grant them cart-blanc, a licience to riff off all and sundry as their prize for being a sponsor. No, their reward is supposed to just come from being intimately associated with a winning event. Instead we have restrictions, no liquid to be brought in, no food to be brought in, no alter logos to be worn, only the sponsors and their products are to be allowed once inside. I have good memories of families with a packed lunch for all going to a national event and having a great family time. Sorry but MacDonalds or coca-cola  are not my idea of healthy wholesome food fit to feed my family on. This is a celebration of commercial greed and a total disdain for freedom, liberties and an empowered citizenry.

It does not stop there. These games were supposed to be for all the people, to enjoy and to have lasting benefit from. The host cities were expected to make sacrifices for the greater good. Putting up with rushed through building sites, giving up transport access and accepting disruption to the norm chaos. Who would be so mean as to put at risk a great celebratory national event just for a few days of inconveniences. Surely everyone would squeeze up a little tighter to ensure the athletes, and the marshals, got to the event in time to perform at their best? Except of course all things are not equal. Who signed up to and agreed that the sponsors clients could also join in on the Olympic Expressway. Who thought it fair and equitable that there very best seats, up close to the favourite finishing lines should be set aside for sponsors clients? These best seats that were never offered to Joe Public. Joe Public never got even a look in. That Joe Public, who in their own small ways, made and are making, bigger contributions to the success of the games than the commercial sponsors who merely sliced off a piece of an already planned advertising budget, which was probably tax deductible in any event. A large cheque for sure, but minuscule and insignificant in corporate operating costs. What puffed up buffoon thought it necessary to seek legal sanctions against anyone with the temerity to refer to or incorporate a reference to the London 2012 Olympic Games, unless of course they were already on the sponsor list. This is not an individuals, a collection of individuals or even an London Games delivery committees, preserve. These games can only happen with the good will, support and acceptance of all the inconveniences of all of the people living in the host cities and of the Nation as a whole. It is a National event. We should all be joining in and sharing to all the tumultitude of excite and references to these, once in our life times, games. Not to be harangued by a jobsworth commissar for daring to make a reference to 'our' event.

Obviously these are not the result of actions of a sole individual or even a small clique, this is a tier apon tier of decision makers and decision ratifiers. What astounds me is that no one has stood back and said hey this is out of hand, this is commercialisation gone crazy. Clearly there was not amongst all those tiers a person with any sense of social propriety, with a sense of fairness and, rough, equity. The blanket assumption seems to be that milking the market for all it is worth and to hell with ethics is perfectly proper, even natural.

Let us hope and even pray that the London Games 2012 will be remembered for superb outstanding athletic achievements and not the crass, rampant, unchecked blatant squalid commercialisation at every single opportunity. A mood so far away from the soaring aspirations driving the Olympic movement (outside of GB Ltd). Not a reflection on GB Ltd I would wish our visitors to take away. I would rather hang on to the old fashioned, fair, generous, inclusive and welcoming GB Ltd that I used to know.

P.S. Just watched the opening ceremony. A complex story told with style, pace, humour, energy and panache. The flame cauldron will take some beating and the river of gold will last as a visual image. So almost embarrassed to be carping on but this grand opening still does not excuse or make acceptable the tacky squalid profit before people approach behind the organisation. Even heightens it, the GB Ltd image of the Opening was so right in so many ways whilst the elevating of sponsors over the people is just so wrong an image of GB Ltd.

Going On One Hundred

There was a charming TV programme, 'How to Live Beyond 100', all about people still able to live active lives when they were 100+. So good to have positive images rather than the usual downbeat doom and disaster ahead. Taken with other strands that are also running, it time to pause for thought, there are a lot of threads running behind this issue.

First off, for everyone that is still 'active' at 100+, there are manyfold others who are trapped, trapped in bodies or minds that do not permit them any active role. They have subsided into a total dependence on others for the daily chore of living, see also my post Waiting to Die.

Secondly as we 'baby-boomers' decline into old age the demographics rockets sky high. From being a rarity to survive until 100, now there are some 12,000 and shortly this will become 90,000 was we get into our stride. By the time our grandchildren grow to old age 100+ will have become the norm of life expectancy.

Thirdly it is incontrovertible that as we age beyond the 60's to 70's our bodies and minds are no longer able to perform as they once did, see also my post Retire at 70+!. All past excesses and poor gene choices come to haunt and rack a frail body or mind. Maybe science, medicine or better life choices might stave off the day, but mechanical or mental failure is the inevitable and inescapable consequence of ageing. We will each need support in some form or other to get by. Logistically large numbers of frail old people will have to benefit from support.

In the meantime our Government considers it appropriate and fitting that the retirement age for all is deferred to the 70's or even later. As a blunt answer to the economics of funding an ageing population it is unchallengeable but the social consequences are horrendous. The physical and mental deterioration that occurs with advancing age means you simply cannot compete with younger work colleagues. The end result is you have to step down, accept to be sidelined, reduced to taking on menial roles, pushed aside whilst watching others more productively undertake what was once your domain. That is a big ask, to carry on pushing a increasing frail body to do work but being surrounded by evidence of your failure to undertake it. Does this reflect a caring society with a compassion for its elderly? Or a society that is only looking at balance it books, to hell with the personal consequences?

I had hoped the programme would open the window of how these centenarians saw and viewed the changing society around them. Not to be. There is no ducking it, this ageing poses two crucial dilemmas. Why live to 100+ and what do we do when 100+. We live to 100+ because our skills have made it possible and there is no other alternative. Medical interventions ensure all the easily curable diseases are cured. There are no knock out illnesses or diseases left, other than the ones beyond the reach of medicine, that used to mean death by the 70's was the norm. All we are left with are causes of death beyond cure, such as the cancers, or parkinson, alziemers or dementia. Not for everyone, but what is left for the large majority who do not succumb to these killers, what is left to bring their long lives to an end?

In the meantime they face the inevitable, inescapable increasing dependency on other to support and provide the means you can no longer cope to provide for yourself. Surrender yourself into the hands of salaried carers. Now our Government has decided that this should not be a charge on the State, if you have independent financial means. You should pay for your own care first off. Apart from weasely caveats, this begs several questions. Where is a line to be drawn between say a terminal bedridden cancer patient or confused wanderer with no conscious recollection putting themselves and society at larger at risk, both clearly in need of constant medical support. As against an impaired person, mentally sound, but physically unable to carry out day to day tasks of feeding cleaning and dressing. Sound like a Solomon's judgement to me. Inherently unfair.

We as a Society, through our Government, have decided that the family home, invested in, harbouring precious memories, a depository for all the family hopes and expectations must be sold to pay off a russian lottery outcome. You are decreed insufficiently incapacitated and it has been decided you have the means, so you shall pay. How outrageously unfair and inequitable. Never mind that with the Governments connivance house values have gone beyond the reach of youth and their only hope to claim a home of their own is a share in their parents inheritance. It tastes exceedingly bad to me. Society is so much more than economic book balancing. It has to be about respect, compassion and a rough but overal even equity.

The final part I want to raise is why would anyone choose to live upto 100, let alone beyond a 100. If life has a meaning, it is about being able to contribute. Plenty of avenues to agree or disagree on the significance of contribute and to what. The ageing are no longer able to physically or mentally compete. They now require support and assistance just to get from day to day. We as a Society have chosen to turn our backs on the one significant contribution the aged can still offer. They have accumulated experience, wisdoms and a longer perspective having seen many iterations of events and peoples reactions to those events. In a youth centric world, these views from a past are brushed aside, marginalised even laughed at for being quaint and so irrelevant. The arrogance of youth. With their one gift trounced our aged are left nothing to contribute but their memories. Instead of being revered for being pillars of wisdom with a canny understanding of how life works, they are dismissed as a costly drain taking up precious and unaffordable human resources better spent elsewhere.

In life we make, or have made for us, choices which set up a flow of consequences. We have chosen to intervene and use our medical skills to take away natures calling card. There is no longer a natural end game for most. We have chosen to marginalise our elderly so they can longer contribute meaningfully into society. We have chosen to regard them as a cost liability to be born by society rather than a debt of honour. We must now face the consequences of those choices and we have to replace natures calling card with a calling card of our devising so that our tired elderly can say, in their own time, enough is enough, and then let them go peacefully, without financial harassment. In peace and in dignity. Tough call. Get it right because in due time you too will incur the consequences.

Living the Make Believe

In what century did Vince Cable acquire his I-Spy primer to the financial world? The idea that the shareholders make a positive influence in the banking institutions remunerations is laughably naive. Pension or Investment Funds, Insurance Companies and Banks themselves hold the greatest majority of shares in the Gilt-Edge companies quoted on the StockMarket. They have no interest or commitment to the companies they hold shares in other than the immediate shortterm one. Will their investment make them more money than any other option? They do not have any long term concerns as to the growth and sustainable development of the companies invested in. Worse, they work in an incestuous world where their key figures are on the executive board of the major companies invested in. Nominate me and I will nominate you in turn. The scratch my back and I will scratch yours rule being first and number one rule of their closed club. So these investment institutions, the overwhelming majority shareholders, are going to police the remuneration packages of the Banks? Only to the extent of seeing who got paid what then making sure they got more when their own pay rise comes round. 

Which is not to say the small individual investors cannot make an impression, as they did just few months back. Collectively they registered a minority protest vote at the remuneration packages proposed. The institutions block votes had the overwhelming majority. The 'small' investors protest vote was duly noted, their obvious concerns would be given consideration, but at the say time, it was pointed the Board was not bound by it in anyway. They had their comfortable, legal, majority. 

The old model of the shareholders with an interest in and a financial commitment to the long term success of a company, collectively voting for a long, stable and secure future has gone. The investment institutions have sidelined them and institutions goals are way off the health of the company invested in. We need to tinker with the share-holding model. Only individual shareholders to be allowed to vote for remunerations, reserves, dividends and appointments to the Boards. Any shareholder with shares in excess of x,000's being required to prove that they are an individual and their address is not shared with any other share holder. That way the incestuous insider nominations will be broken together with the leap-frogging of ever higher salary deals. We might just get back to investing in companies for their survival and long term success.

Hands that do Dishes

Once we led the way to an industrialised society. Utilising the skills of all our craftsmen and artisans honed over the centuries, we fashioned new ways to meeting tomorrows desires. Now we hardly make anything or at best assemble some others production. Too puny to take on the world markets with an exhausted worn out industry that has since been pulverised. Just the memories of a once rich trading nation linger on.


End of the line? Relegated forever to being a service provider, licking the boots of those nations with the wealth? Not my view of our Nation. We do have to reinvent ourselves of course. As a staring point then, an inventory. An inventory of our handworking skills, not our software or accounting, but those skills we have had to make or fashion objects. As a nation we are noted for being creative, skilled in adapting, having a high technical competences and a wealth of generations of passed on craft skills. 

This is the resource pool we need to capitalise on before we lose everything. We promote ourselves to do what we are really good at. The one-off, the proto-type the pre-production modelling, the mould maker, the pre-production test bed, this is our forte. Able to access and modify the electronics and software controls with the craft skills to fashion hightech products out of raw material or re-cycled spare parts. With the ingenuity to see solutions where others see impossible problems and a high design backoffice to call on. This is what we take to the world market and flog. Got an idea, let us flesh it out for you and demonstrate how it can be turned into a marketable product and on to mass production.


We have to seize this vision of a future and invest in the infrastructure to make it happen. Invest in apprenticeships in all the old and current production techniques, encourage the setting up of production plant and develop the skills to operate them. So invest in schools, training, materials sciences, production techniques and electronic and software controls. Certainly not directly by central government who have a proven deadhand in the status quo but making start-up grants and loans readily available with generous extended paybacks for 'successful' businesses. Let our budding entrepreneurs seek out the rich seams, let them use their ingenuity to overcome market obstacles. Government being there, consistent, supportive, encouraging, being helpful when needed and quick to network problems to solution finders. That way we might still have a meaningful future as a Nation.

Flawed Model

Recently I flirted with Twitter. The more I looked the more concerned I became. It seems to me that Twitter is fundamentally flawed, it operates like an inverted pyramid selling game. In the long run is just is not sustainable. Eat my words?

Social networking is the new buzz, the new way to be free, express ourselves and make undreamt of connections. Unlike Facebook, Twitter requires you, as your starting point, to select six person whose tweets you most want to follow. Then, based on that initial selections, encourages you to select other related tweeters to select to follow. 

This is in direct contrast to Facebook which start out with the friends you do know and offers to extend your circle to other connections which have a connection back the the friends you have. Your choice, your pool, you decide pond or ocean.

Back to Twitter then. How does any one person end up with 20 million people following their every cough and sneeze of a tweet? Do they have something that is so original so earth shattering to say that 20 million people are agog for their next pronouncement. I think not. 

Your own tweet is just a grain of sand on the beach, indistinguishable from all the other grains, lost in the sea of sands. Only your tweets that are ripostes to that some august body count and might possibly get noticed. How to be become an august body? Why by being promoted as a person being offered for selection. Who gets to decided which persons tweets are worth being offered for selection? By the originators of this pyramid scam. It is all very self-referential. Only the deemed noteworthy are offered and therefore only they can increase their followers, which then pushes them up the ranking to become an even higher favourite selection. That is why a Miss Withnothingtosay can end up having 20 million followers. Not as a direct response of her undoubted wide and universal popular appeal but just the way the network is stacked. 

In my world a twit was a fool, a numbskull who made wrong choices. Or a twittering was the raucous sound made by a large flock of sparrows. By either definitions, Twitter certainly has found the right word analogies to rest amongst.

Wanted - role model

Within my life time the family has gone from conservative and insular to global and transient. Not mine, but families around me were centred on the close family units of the parents, the Aunts and Uncles and the Grandparents. This closed circle set the norm for what you could or could not do, what interests were possible and how you expressed yourself. They provide the reference point and were quick to correct any deviation. From within their safe haven and encircled by their safety shield the children grew and were invited to discover, explore and gain experience in the surrounding world of shops, church, amusements, sports and the evening out and the occasional film. They set the norms of dress and speech and expected conformity. They set the bar and were the only role model to follow. The radio, the newspaper and magazines or the annual trip might give insights into other possible lifestyle. But just brief glimpses, nothing substantive to base a breakaway lifestyle on. Even your school fellows were social clones. You were the product of your immediate society. 

Then came television, breaking apart the insular family time together, introducing appreciable insights in to the how others live, offering tangible alternatives. Television plus of course social mobility. The freedom to roam and spread, dispersing the family core, breaking forever the close bonds that tied families together. Lots of other social factors were also playing, but mobility and television were the key factors that finally broke the former almost total reliance on the family unit, to get by.

Nowadays the core family unit, of parent and children, cannot compete against the rival attractions of  television, personal computer, online social media, live streaming of news or entertainment, virtual avatars. The family unit is dysfunctional, it can no longer sit together at best spending quality time relaxing in each others company at worst just updating each other on events. Even the core unit of parents is challenged with a single parent, with possibly serial partners, becoming the norm. So what role models do our children of today encounter that will give substance to their perception of who they are and the society they inhabit?  Not the schools with their imposed roles to mentor our new citizens and assume quasi-parental duties. The contacts are too fleeting, too transient, too impersonal to really count. We are just left with the the fictions they are now surrounded by, of cardboard caricature soap stars, media celebrity fantasy lives or even worse some ephemeral virtual being lacking any substance beyond a spotty teenagers imagination. 


In this global connected world the old role models are totally irrelevant. Right? Wrong, when even the language we speak modifies our thinking and logic structures what chance have we of assimilating other cultures. I defy any English born native speaking person dropped into the middle of say China, or India, or South America, to feel at ease and be able to comprehend the reactions and intentions of the people now surrounding them, let alone elicit favourable reactions to their aspirations. No, we are of our society. As I explored in Know Yourself, who we are as individual depends on the society we are born into. We have to have relevant role models to inflate and guide our sense of being, as that person within that society. Without it lies insecurity, anxiety, misplacement, that feeling of never belonging never being understood. We have to rethink our societies evolution. As a start we have to restructure the family unit as I explored in A baby is for life.

Know Yourself

My experience has been that employment agencies look only to find the best fit box to stuff you in that they can then promote to likely employers. Despite all the profiling and other gimmicky that they might surround themselves with, their primary objective is to find that best fit box with the highest turnover and the best commission and then move on as fast as possible. They are certainly not in the business of looking at you as a blank piece of paper to assess the skills and experience you have to offer. All too complicated and time consuming. The best fit box is a fast but dirty way of summing you up into readily recognisable sectors, be it sales, education, health or whatever.

Likewise with your employer, their primary goal is to get you productive and income generating as fast and cleanly as possible. They too are looking for nice neat boxes to put you in, best fitting your past with their operational needs. No niceties, a people person, a problem solver, a task finisher, find and stuff you into the best fit box and get you working fast. Fair enough they need to profit out of your labour. The box you are put into of course only reflects the opportunities and experience's you have been allowed in the past. They are in no way reflective of your actual skill or mind set or where your aptitude really lies, if only you were given the chance. No one has the time or even perhaps the judgement set to gauge how good you might be, but only what you have previously demonstrated. Those boxes you find yourself in you get to carry forward throughout your working life. The chance to breakfree and start with a clean slate, or that white piece of paper, just never comes. You carry your past baggage forward with you, not your choice, not your wish, not your aspiration, it just accumulates and becomes the measure yardstick for all your futures.

You of course know yourself extremely well. Right? Wrong! Imagine yourself in a totally white room, floor, walls, ceiling, no windows no doors, just white sound, white scent and white surrounds.  Now who are you? Not your name, not your history, not your description. But who are you, that inner person? What we are, this inner person, is in response. In response to your surroundings, to the people you last had contact with, with the after tremors of the last physical experience. Your sub-concious and concious responses to these other stimuli are what drives your awareness of who you are. But it is more than this because we too bring baggage. We are not white pieces of paper with each fresh encounter. We bring the past along with us which shapes our reactions this time and moulds the future possibles. Worse still prior experiences limit our range of possible responses and the people we meet recognise and or have preconceptions of your reactions which limit the range of what you can or cannot do in response. We are limited by our past. Not immutable, subtly shifting and adapting, we evolve but within the constraints of what we were and did last time. Not fixed, you could wake up and start out with a clean white piece of paper, inventing a new personality for yourself. Except your physical baggage and all those people you associate with drag you back to what you were. Not you, the who you would like to be, within the constraints of your innate personality. The me that I can be and am, are but reflections of my past and peoples expectations of me.

It is a leap, a small leap, more of just a progression really. How the government views or has expectations of its citizens, directly influences how the citizen sees themselves, how they respond and react. Treated with disdain, suspicion, regarded as flawed, with limit capacity to think rationally or behave with a modicum of decency, they get citizens just like that but pushed to extremes. Regard your citizens with respect, expect the highest standards and they will rise to that confidence in them and often exceed expectations. The we, whether employer, individual or citizen just want recognition and encouragement to do better. Not much to ask is it.

A baby is for life

Caught a breakfast item the other morning about a girl bemoaning that the NHS will not fund her IVF treatment for the baby she so desperately wants with her new partner. The significance of the two children she successfully had but with a previous partner escape her self preoccupation. Babies are a necessary and an essential status image to show off to the world how successful you are. It is your right to have as and when you choose.

Maybe, just possibly there are other considerations that have got lost along the way and need to be taken down and dusted off. Yes, having a child is the single most important life event for man or woman. Our society needs strong healthy children to sustain its population, provide the labour and wealth generators to keep the social infrastructure rolling on. We need stable, well-rounded and confident children that fit easily into the established social networks and patterns. The few odd-ball adventurers or opportunists can be absorbed. We know that children with a single parent or possibly worse serial parents do not grow up to become stable, well-rounded and confident adults. The parenting skills or wants have a huge impact on how that child matures.

It is not about our self-centred personal whims and fancies. How lovely a baby would be. At its roots, it is only about ensuring a sound society can continue to grow and prosper. In the past sheer bloody economic necessity meant there was no option. You had to make do with the partner you ended up with. Woe betide you if you let your fancy wander to a peacock or a thrilling stud. Your life partner choice was critical. Get the best partner your circumstance gave you access to and your circumstance enabled you to seal against the competition. Choose well, then a well managed house and children with the best food from available resources and a regular income provider not tempted to dally elsewhere. Else you are stuck in all the flip sides. With a high mortality, where with luck three out of twelve children might survive into adulthood, unimpeded fecundity was the order of the day.

Not any more. We have to constrain our birthrate but a single child policy is not the answer either, as China's growing pool of 'Little Emperors' testifies. Our investment in marriage as a concept has to be overhauled. It used to signify family, the core and centre of society. Family, the start of the new generation and the handing on of all the inherited attributes. A big event where two gene lines meet, exchange and forge long term relationships. A hugely important event carrying the whole investment of the past and the hopes for some sort of future. Now sidelined as a show, a public display of current success, ephemeral, the oaths given as meaningless as the bouquet tossed aside. No wonder a gay marriage is on the agenda. A marriage is just a civil right, no more significant than casting a vote.

We have evolved, we have a plethora of weapons, so let us keep civic partnerships for all who want a legal sanction on their union, whether for one year or for life. Marriage needs to be upgraded given a special place. Marriage that is the rock bed of procreation and long relationships. Marriage only for couples willing to commit to stay together and bring up the direct results of their union, their children, no matter what.  Not an automatic right for all and sundry but a much sought after and highly regarded right only conferred on those able to demonstrate a long term commitment and likely to produce vigorous progeny.  A precious and hard-earned right then achieved only after passing a peer review and assessment on your suitability, your conformity and viable breeding. Your peers deciding whether you have what it takes to produce and hold a family together in your neighbourhood. With that granting, recognition by the State of that special status approved with additional health, housing, pension, tax rebate rights. Encouragement to provide that long term stable care that we all need our society to foster.

Nothing wrong with childbirth, fostering, IHV, adoption, whatever outside of 'marriage' but within a civic partnership, just lacking the state's sanctification and benefits. We must invest heavily into our future but be compassionate for the many that do not measure up.

Changing Banks?

Thinking of changing Bank Accounts? Choose not to be off-loaded to Santander in the RBS give-away? Be very aware, if you are receiving a State Pension. The glib promises of the banks to take all the stress out of switching Bank Accounts is all one-sided. They only look after the outgoings, you have to sort out all of your incomes. Not so stress free after-all.

Worse of all, before you even think of changing bank accounts your need to tell DWP (Department of Works and Pensions) as they are taking 'upto eight weeks' is the official line, to changing details! Unless you are content to miss maybe two months payments you are stuffed. You will not get your new account details until you have committed yourself. By then it is too late to get the DWP's to amend your account details.

Join the queue of pension receivers who have been notified of a returned payment just because the lumbering bureaucratic machinery has not got round to processing your earlier (in good time) notified account details. They are no short cuts. You will be sure to miss a payment. The only small upside is that after surviving the blind sampling of the automatic telephone response the humans you get to talk are very pleasant and almost proactive.

In this electronic age is it really acceptable for a government department to be working to stone-age time-scales? A woefully inadequate service and no one to complain to, just suffer.

Postscript. It seems that just maybe I have fallen into to the timewarp trap. Organisations are now setup to manange by telephone these essential detail changes. Whereas trapped in my past I assumed that such confidential and vulnerable transaction were best dealt with by the old fashioned letter. Speculation and untested. Maybe telephone is fast and best and letters are consumed to the slow lane.

Living a Now Life

In this era of information overload and instant vox pops by courtesy of the social network sites, putting a cross against some others nomination to signal your consent for the next five years seems just a tad limiting. Time to radically rethink how democracy must work in this era opening up before us. A democratic society is all about finding a consensual middle ground, inclusive of the widest majority. The twittering of tweets around a theme that has caught the public's imagination is as clear a demonstration of how a new democracy might work as could be found. The public have opinions, want to share it and most of all want their opinion to count.

Simple. One downside is the public are impetuous, rushing to voice an opinion so expressing a gut emotion rather than reflective thought. Sometimes the populous 'hang the murderer' on reflection is not the right response when eventually it emerges the youth was not the victim as initially seen but a drunk youth who fell into the path of a lawful car. So we have to steer away from instant polls to determine our future paths and find a more reflective and considered route. It takes time before all the shades of opinion really begin to emerge. The first headlong rush of 'me too' subsides and slowly other options and different takes begin to gather support. This is the point when we want public opinion to begin to influence our future.


Step up to the plate our leaders. We still need you to guide, gather and promote a future view for others to line up behind. The numbers of your disciples determining the impact you have in setting the national agenda. Of course large following will always be easily gathered by keeping close to the knee jerk responses, but does not make for good politics though. We have to re-educate ourselves as to the how's of debate, not character assassination, but about issues. The how to cut to the quick, compare and contrast and weight the strength of evidence for and against. Learn to listen to the nuances of those we disagree with, the better to confound their flimsy arguments. A sophisticated mature agenda but one I see every evidence of being attainable in this our society. A wrong path is not forever immutable, it is possible to change tack and find that other route.


The present media outlets own the political agenda, they determine what and the context in which any thoughts may be presented. That is despite any political parties strong resolve to address some other aspect of that issue. Our media controls the selection, the presentation and the target audience for any political announcement. In our new brave world, at present anyway, no one owns the ether and ideas are 'free' to spawn, gathering critical mass and attention focus. 'Free' because of course the search engines which decide what is at the top of your noticeboard is determined by their own objectives and criteria. So a hint of caution then, when nevertheless, a vogue posting can go viral just by being networked to friends.  Our new leaders have to sign up to this networked world and claim dominance amongst all those that profess to like their agenda. 


A different world, but still a world where we have to take long term strategic views of how to evolve and adhere to that policy for more than short term opportunism. I see a willingness to follow good leadership, I see loyalty prepared to weather bad times for the promise of good, I see a mature adult society that can rise to the challenges of being part of their societies evolution. What I also see are huge numbers of people disaffected by how the current system works against their interest. Where the 'X' fails to reflect the complexity of ideas they have about their and their families future.

Tax Array

Time for another dig deep session. It verges on an Alice in Wonderland incredulity the number of organisations, the variety of assessment / claims forms and the bewildering variety of benefits out there where the government, in some guise or other, pays money back to its beleaguered citizens. These byzantine arrangements, all arrived at with impeccable credentials of fairness, equity, non-judgemental compassion and social egalitarianism ends us up in this current mad house. Duplicates of civic servants or quasi scrutinising the minute of income, assets, disposable wealth and interpersonal relationships to arrive at not so dissimilar views. Yar, this person is in need of financial support to get through.

Some times, just occasionally, the sticking plaster on top of the sticking plaster approach to crisis management fails. This is where we are now. We have to dare to lift up the corner to see right back to the origins and be prepared to discard the past. There are the majority of people that sit within the norm sufficiently well as to not raise concerns. Then there are people that are well below the norm and, compassionately, need special considerations. Then there are those above the norm that require particular attention.

Below the norm people from time to time struggle. Whether from their own duplicity, bad luck or simply an act of god, they fail to cope. So often it comes down to failing to make financial ends meet. It is in all our best interests that they get some immediate relief, a crucial chance to sort themselves out. Extend them that lifeline to get back on their feet. Moving on from there, from whatever the cause, we cannot let any citizen slide into destitution. We just cannot stand by as another human fails to cope, to find the basics of shelter, food and clothing. Two situations then,  the first, hit the crisis button and immediate temporary relief whilst indepth investigations as to cause and remedy are conducted and your self-recovery attempts are monitored. Your crisis, your solution with the state in the background with advisory help. Not a state orchestrated rescue plan or a state ordained way of life, see also From Cradle to Grave. Second situation, you fail to manage your own recovery and slip further into the financial abyss. Until that point when others decide you need to be taken in. Given the minima of security, shelter, food and clothes in a community, with respect for privacy, for the family unit, though not necessarily your own personal private space. A scaling of support dependant on your willingness to help yourself and help all those possibly undesirables you now find as your companions, but always with that encouragement to work out your solution to your own problems. Shades of the workhouse. Inescapable, but a workhouse comparison diffused with compassion and support for the individual to find their own solution.

If we consistently fail to cope, it is right and proper that others begin to make decision on our behalf. It is the price of getting it wrong. One key questions is whether we are paying our way or living beyond our means. Your view is that you are perfectly entitled to a settee, or a wall screen HD TV, or convenience foods or an annual holiday. Others, that is the we of our society, may well judge that your life expectations are out of kilter to any realistic income. If you are unable to earn enough to pay for your desired lifestyle the State will make up the difference. Great. The downside is that the States view of what is required to sustain you or your family will be set eventually very low. A crutch for those in need but, and a very important but, not so comfortable that any one would choose to depend on it. There has to be that bottom line incentive, to get yourself out of your difficulties. It is your job, not the States job. So a sliding scale then, with interventions all along the way, from sustaining you in your present life style for the short term to a gradual reduction to a bare bones basic. Until the final support of some community based last resort shelter. Achieved simply with a tax credit as an income source. Scrap all the other benefits and allowances and special needs. We, this our society, decides a norm, below the norm, tax credit, on the norm, tax neutral, above the norm, tax debit.

Before turning to those in tax debit, an aside. It has to be all about our personal choices. If we choose, let events put us in a place, where we are a single parent, that is a personal choice. That choice has financial consequences which flow directly out of that choice. If we are born disadvantaged in some way, those are the consequences we have to live with and those are the limitations we have to find a sustainable life style to live within. That may well mean having to rely on support of the family, friends or community around you. Life does not come with  any entitlements. It is up to you to make the best of whatever the start you are given. It is not the states function to reinstitute you to some idealised lifestyle. Crisis support all the way for those crisis situations, caught out by the freak events of chance. Does your finding yourself in a relationship with a person with abusive traits amount to a crisis or a lack of judgement or necessary caution?

For people earning above the norm they pay the debit tax. Remember be are talking here about a pro-rata tax on wealth creation, see Tax, salaries and rewards and That Extra Mile. The more you have invested in skills or equipment the less you pay and the less you have invested in plant or people then the more. That pro-rata rate also on a sliding scale. We as a society will decide that no one shall take home a disposable income of more than 10 times, or 100 times or a 1,000 time more than the norm, whatever. We as the society set and control the divergence between the poor and the richest. The minority rich can only accumulate their wealth with the acquiescence of us the majority poor. We take pride in the unique opportunities our society offers. Those rich that recognise these benefits and are willing to make their contribution back into the society that nurtures them, will stay. Those other rich who are only interested in ever richer pickings will go elsewhere. When the 100% tax point is reached, that is you have arrived at the maximum rich to poor discrepancy society can tolerate, the options become simple. You either have to diversify and invest into less profitable enterprises or you spend on humanitarian good causes. This is a tax on wealth generation, not on the value of the pile of golden eggs but how much income is derived within this society from those eggs.

Society wins all round, it entrepreneurs are handsomely rewarded. The more successful they are the more the state recoups. A successful society is ripe for harvesting wealth. An equitable society that looks after all citizens is a just and stable society. Citizens that are motivated to self seek solutions are mobile and willing to try new opportunities. Win, win in principle. Our resourcefulness can mitigate the inevitable downsides. Better to try than continue to fail.

From Cradle to Grave

I have been brought up with the expectation that the State would look after my every needs from cradle to the grave. Clearly this is not possible. Just as a belief in Father Christmas, this is a wholly unrealistic fantasy expectation. Yet it is a wide spread, fervently held expectation, almost as a moral right of citizenship that this shall be delivered to me, if not everyone else. No politician, if they hope to survive,  dares to stir the foundations of this expectation. But for all that it is a fantasy, incapable of implementation.

The human condition is complex, diverse and we are only now getting glimmers of how it might work and come together. One persons needs are of such a different magnitude to another's. Those needs so real and pressing at the time are not immutable. Satiated, the need merely shifts and moves on to new arenas. The time, place and even the company can have a huge impact of the perceived desperation of the need. For some, having an need is a prerequisite to life, without a need to share, they are vulnerable, isolated, cut-off. Their need is their way of relating and claiming attention and reassurance from those around them. Little wonder then that the State has not the least chance of satisfying the needs of its citizens.

All needs are very real to those that live with there lack of resolution. It is rather like deciding on degrees of killing, which is the kinder or more humane method? You might think that providing a wheelchair to a non-ambulant person is a clearly demonstrably more real and justifiable need than reading a newspaper to an elderly person. It all depends on circumstance and expectations. If the non-ambulant person is really missing companionship, the wheelchair may not provide the answer. Hearing the newspaper read may be the last desperate cling onto reality in an otherwise slide into dementia. You tell me which is the real need. Meeting needs is not about cost, it is not about the practical ease of provision, it is not about the physical against the emotional, it is all about a person perception of their need and how it might be provided for. Whether it is a wealthy housewife unable to cope with dusting, a single mum trapped in unsuitable accommodation all across the spectrum to a severely disadvantaged person that needs help just to breath. How can the state cater for all its citizens needs? It simply cannot.

It is the citizen, with their supporting network they have drawn around themselves, that has to address and resolve their own needs, within the pool accessible to them of financial, practical or emotional assistance. Harsh but that is the reality. No magic wands to sweep you out of your circumstance out in to some fantasyland where problems have been banished. We have to live with what we have got and have to learn to overcome the disadvantages of being in that place we find ourselves. Unfair, inequitable but that is life, we do not get to choose were we are born. Which is not to say the State has to be uncompassionate, it has a duty of care to look after those that fall for whatever reason.

Those that fall due to no fault of their own, they are worthy of every possible support and assistance to get back on their feet. Just short of that support becoming a crutch is the catch. As humans we are always going to get it wrong, taken in by a sucker story, to refusing a genuine tale of woe because it appeared self-induced. Despite all the wrong calls, the majority will be desperate needs rightful for state intervention. For all those other self-inflicted needs the state eventually has to provided a final safety net. We cannot let our citizens slump into degradation and despair. There has to be a safety net. It is just that the safety net does not have to equate to  an equivalence of self-sufficient suburban life with own front door and fully equipped and furnished home. The horrors of the workhouse are real and current memories, no going back to that. Short of the workhouse, a place of safety not full of all creature comforts, but a supportive environment to provide shelter and reassurance, for the individual, or members of or up to the whole family,  during that struggle to get back onto ones feet. That is the states remit. That is the extent of the state meeting the needs of its citizens. Well short of support from cradle to grave.

BBC is on the Game

More and more of the BBC's 'light entertainment' output seems to be about indiscriminate product pushing. A media self-attractor appears, uses the format, whatever it is, to ruthlessly plug their book, CD, series, show, tour. The host for the format appears submissive and resigned to just being an escort from one plugger to the next plugger, waiting in the wings. Each plugger in turns taking every opportunity to thrust their product at the camera. At least the shopping channels are up front and open about it, they are just there to sell product. The BBC comes, or rather came, with loftier ideals. 

The BBC and its audience is in a deep relationship of free give and take, based on trust and goodwill. The BBC offers itself for free and the public accept that free offering  with the assumption it is untainted. Clearly a commercial programme maker is dependant on generating revenue and that need impinges on what and how it goes about making it programme offerings. Clear and understood by them and their audience. 

Its charter requires the BBC to appeal across the broad spectrum, inevitably its business is feeding the voracious appetite for 'celebrity' titbits and light entertainment new arrivals. They have to be in and on the media circus where the trade is "I make myself available to appear with you, in return I get to talk about my product". They, the BBC is inescapably in the selling game, of tease and seduction, a role that is as close as it gets to prostitution. Where the waters get muddled and muddied is the degree of how free and easy are you? Is the BBC there as a common-garden whore, harlot, hooker, strumpet or rather as some refined courtesan? 

The distinction that separates a slut from a courtesan is fine but hugely significant. The difference at the lowest point where anything goes as long as you want it and long as you pay for it, to the other highest discreet end, where an accommodation of desires is reached without overt commercialisation and all veiled in good manners and refined conduct.  Where prior selection, distinction or approval are the order of the day not the going rate.

One consequence of being on the game, at whatever level, is that it brings with it the attention of the pimps. Those that want control and influence on the money generated, the how's of the 'service's' provision and restricting who does or does not get access and to which aspect of the 'service'.  The courtesan, to retain self-respect and that right of prior approval and selection, has to negotiate a way past these leeches who seize every opportunity to coerce the abandonment of these lofty ideals.


In the beginning when everything was all corporately funded and sourced it was more like a marriage of mutual convenience. Then the BBC, no longer the sole provider, was seen along side and judged in comparison to the  'successful commercial' providers, brazenly displaying attractive wares each carrying clear price tags. To keep, up with the 'commercial successes', the BBC has whittled away its corporate distinction, in the process losing the sense of what set them apart. It has reached a point now when the question has to be asked, do they still set their own agenda or have they become a mere vessel open for exploitation by the commercial world?

It is no longer clear with any BBC programme whether it is freely sourced,  unbiased and presented purely from some artistic, cultural or educational endeavour. Or is it, as is now so often the case, linked or even tied to some other objective manipulated by others outside of the corporate BBC. We the viewers can no longer rely on the impartiality of the BBC. That trust has gone.  Every programme offering has to be assessed, is it given freely without qualification, is it a disguised free offer of inducement or is it just a blatant bribe? Lets be clear here. The BBC has opened itself up to commercial exploitation and joined the world of prostitution. It offerings can range from the benign, its own commissioned  programmes from independent producers, to buying an outsourced complete programme, to bidding in auction wars with rivals all the way through to accepting programmes just as vehicles to sell product. Where now is our courtesan?

Politics Without Parties

No apologises, this is going to be a long read. As it is central to all my political thoughts, stay with it, it might reward. I have previously set the challenge, Good Government, the Political No Vote, Centre Revolution, so how is it going to work? A democracy that is fully reflective of public opinion and is not carolled and strait-jacketed into a power base, survival at all costs organisation. As considered in my Consensus post, we need leaders, lots of them, all with slightly different take on issues. I am not even against political parties, per say, providing they are background support, not running and controlling what can or cannot be said and by whom. The over-arching objective is that the voters are offered individuals to choose between on their merits. In soliciting votes their views on the key questions of what makes a nation successful, are paramount. Not necessarily their own original views, just views that they understand and adopt as their own, with sincerity and not just for the voter appeal. Individuals who stand because they want to make a difference, not because of their wealth, connections or desire to win power or some popularity contest.
There is the first rub. Our media are fixated on failure or guilt that can be exposed in simple banner headlines. Subtlety, shades of opinion, complicated adjustments depending on degree are way out of their comprehension. It has to be either black or white. Either you are right, move on or you are wrong, in which case throw everything in, to prove how wrong. Not the vehicles to review a range of opinion or evaluate where a central position might lie, nor how extreme left or right any positions might actually fall. Not the place for measure considered debate, either right for that day, or wrong in which case lets seize on this error and display the weakness shown. Bully boy tactics dressed in grown-up speak.


The government of the day enjoys the luxury of a civil service, part of whose function are to present to the Cabernet minsters position papers. An elite cores review of any policy proposal, looking at all the consequence, knock-on events and implications for other policies. A whole gamut of allied and associated causes and effects that reverberate off the policy proposal. Likewise for any opposition counter policy proposals.
 
To escape the media blame game we need to get debate and objective critique of policy out into the open for all to see and consider. Not just government policy but any policy. Let us have the best informed and widest overseeing of all envisage consequences, benefits and penalties, so we can all reflect and judge the strengths or weakness of any policy put forward for the public dominion. Does not need a huge civil service army to effect. Nowadays we can exploit the on-line world. In a forum setting, ordinary citizens can lodge their reactions to any proposals, for and against. The forum moderator would be a small panel of 'civil servants' to hone the comments down to simple pro or con arguments. Voilà, a position paper is borne for all to see, to chip in, to tease, to test and reflect on all the varied responses. To arrive at their own opinion where the fair, pragmatic solution might lie. Ready to be persuaded to rise to another plane by their prospective candidate. Democracy might just work.


This then is the second rub. Money. To get ideas out into the public arena takes money. The more money, then the more effective, more attention seeking and more likely to wins the hearts of your target audience. Hearts, as you are only selling aspirations, not reasoned arguments. Money buys attention, buys respect and buys support. Money to buy media space. Money to buy slick attention seeking material and messages and money to buy audience research to iron out any misrepresentation's before launch. So a game only for a rich boy or organisation. 

Completely counter to the goal of any one being able offer themselves and their sincerity for election. First a commitment. No one stands unless they are so convinced of their need to serve that they are prepared to risk all. Secondly a cap, a very low maximum figure, topped up by the state if need be, to promote and draw attention to yourself and then a minimal salary if elected. Since the salary element came in for our MPs, the desire to serve has been supplanted by the greed for a cosy lifestyle. This salary has to be scaled back, so it is not a feather bed but an adequacy that all, irrespective of social background can afford to serve their country. Finally public online sites where candidates can be seen, their views and opinions offered and they can enter dialogue with their electorate.
 
The next and is it the final rub? There is no ready made political party to take up the electorates voting decision and to run a government.  Political parties are a lazy self-indulgent convenience useful to class based society. They no longer reflect our society. Our government should be a fluid alignment of the majority views, not cast in stone, a constant wheeling alliance of best interests, consensual views and trading off of benefits. That way we might just get a government that does actually reflect and respond to the society we actually live in. Not some ritualistic archaic left-over arrangements we currently toil under. A government in-touch and in-tune with its people, reactive and reflective of the constant changing moods, fears and aspirations.
 
No one suggested democracy was easy. No one claimed democracy gives you clear, decisive and consistent governance. We are after all herd creatures prone to take fright at the least alarm. It takes persons of stature and statesmanship to arise, be recognised, to lead and steady the herd, keeping them on track. That is democracy in action.