UKHamlet's Blog

Tony Blackburn

The Digital Switchover for TV appears to be in full swing and generally it appears to the consensus that this is a good thing. That’s another debate, but more concerning to me is the momentum being gained by the Radio Switchover proposed for 2015. It seems a long way off, but it is only five and half years away. If government has its way then at some point in 2015 all car radios, analogue hifi radios, the radio you have in your kitchen, your clock radio and so on, will become scrap.

Let’s just take the car radios. There are more than 35 million cars in the UK, with slightly smaller numbers in most European countries and slightly more in Germany. There’s about 200 million in the USA. In 99.9% of these cars there are analogue radios and for the foreseeable future car manufacturers will continue to pump out cars, vans and trucks with analogue radios.

Continue reading

I wrote this article a few years ago when Microsoft  started imposing DRM on everyone. It was meant to be a rant against digital rights, but ended up as a critique of the direction of modern capitalism. At the time, I thought: “This is all going to end in tears….” I’m pretty sure it now has.

Digital Rights Management is more than just a software device to maintain the copyright of published material. It is a reflection of a new philosophy that will ultimately lead to a society in which consumers own nothing, where the nightmare of the dispossessed comes true and corporate bodies own everything. The logical extension of this is: you lose your home, car, all your possessions and everything you own to some vision cooked up in the boardrooms of America. Their vision of the model citizen is someone who is heavily in debt, but owns nothing, who consumes without assuming ownership, and who is powerless to influence the tide of events because the democratic process is meaningless.

The most fundamental premise of capitalism is the concept of ownership. It is the guiding principle that allows everything else in the market economy to work. Ownership is the idea that an individual is able to possess something exclusively, sell it and use the tokens of exchange to buy other things. It is the primary motivational force of incentive. Take away ownership and you take away capitalism. Continue reading

Ian Kerr, private investigator, could be named more appropriately, but only just. He is to be prosecuted by the Information Commissioner for allegedly selling private information to companies in the construction industry who wanted to vet potential employees.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner says he seized documents on individuals that had comments appended such as: “communist”, “definite problems, no go”, “lazy and a trouble maker”, “do not touch”, “orchestrated a strike” and so on.

Kerr kept an illegal intelligence database on over three thousand individuals, of which the commission said: “This is a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. Not only was personal information held on individuals without their knowledge or consent, but the very existence of the database was repeatedly denied.”

So, here we have a man trading illegal information to companies on individuals who were participating in perfectly legal activities such as trade union membership being brought to book. It’s probably the tip of the iceberg though. An employer I know has been approached on a number of occasions by investigators who have offered services of this kind. How serious they were, I have no idea, but their existence and this case leads me to believe this is the norm rather than the exception.

The construction industry is particularly hairy arsed and most of the people at the top of the ladder are incredibly thick: classic examples of the buoyant characteristics of faecal matter. So getting caught with their dicks in their hands is par for the course and not particularly surprising. The Tarquin and Rodney set that run the City, the banks and the blue chips are not so stupid. They have the common sense to cover their tracks and not employ dumb-arses like Kerr.

The truth of the matter is the board rooms of Britain are populated by men (and a few women) who are of a similar political mind. Their social standing is an irrelevance, but a disproportionate number of them are from similar social backgrounds, mostly what used to be described as the old ruling classes. The latter is increasingly becoming less the case, but the former is entrenched. You simply do not see anyone with a left leaning outlook in positions of responsibility in these companies. There are virtually no exceptions to this rule.

Now, there may be many reasons for this, not least the simple fact that if you are of the left you probably do not attempt to climb the corporate ladder, but surely there might have been a few exceptions to that rule. Or even one.

When was the last time a leading banker, industrialist or anyone at the top of British business was criticised or complemented for being too socially responsible? How many companies have policies that make Trade Unions irrelevant? Because that’s the crux of this matter: if Trade Unions didn’t need to exist, they wouldn’t. Continue reading