UKHamlet's Blog

Irrespective of where you stand in this dispute, I’m sure you’ll agree that what BA’s management are doing will have a deleterious effect on industrial relations. To have a ballot where 81% of those participating voted in favour of strike action overturned on the technicality that the Union had not sufficiently publicised the BREAKDOWN of the votes, is a real slap in the face of the whole democratic process.

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Gordon says what he really thinks of the Tories

It’s amazing really – for years I believed that the economy was badly run by Labour in the seventies as they tried to square the circle of their allegiance to the Unions and the need to manage the country.  It turns out, it’s all a lie promoted by the Conservative press in this country.

Now, at the end of Gordon Brown’s premiership, we’re seeing a repeat of the exercise, in which his stewardship of the economy is being called into question – people are virulently attacking him with a fervour normally reserved for paedophiles and cop killers.  Again most of the attacks are founded on lies and deceit – spun so that Gordon is portrayed to look incompetent and indecisive.

It’s the same story – the same distortion of the truth, with the same aim of using a tyre iron to remove a Labour government and replace it with their friends in the Conservative Party.

Let’s take the end of the seventies. The “Winter of Discontent”, it was called. Kenneth Morgan describes it in his biography of Jim Callaghan: “Sick patients went unattended; schools were closed because of strikes by school caretakers or cooks, or just because they were unheated in freezing weather; ambulance men were failing to answer 999 calls; frozen main roads were not being gritted; dustbins and refuse bags piled up in town centres in their tens of thousands, full of rotting and insanitary waste. There were secondary pickets all over the country preventing non-strikers getting through.”

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I’m not a drug user – I experimented in the seventies, but lost interest in the eighties and I have a certain amount of sympathy with those who believe cannabis use leads to lethargy and psychological problems. In my view, however, there is mounting and undeniable evidence that continued prohibition of narcotics is causing society more problems than it is solving.

The cost of drug prohibition to society is enormous – from policing the supply and use to the cost of property crime associated with drug use, through the cost of NHS treatment for overdoses, AIDS, hepatitis and so on. If you remove prohibition, regulate the supply and quality, allow prices to fall to a market level low enough to remove the need for additional funding from crime, and offer support from the NHS, you will at a stroke remove:

• The cost of policing drug use and supply
• The cost of crime against the person and their property
• The cost to the NHS
• The criminalisation of people that need help not condemnation
• The opportunity for criminals to control addicts, forcing them into prostitution and other crime

You will also create jobs in a new narcotic supply industry – not just at home, but abroad too – where farmers in poor countries can grow cash crops without fear. We will generate income for the Exchequer through taxation, save lives through quality control, allow the police to focus on “real” crime and disassociate drug use from criminality.

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Philosophy or Safety?

I read an interesting blog – by one of those Libertarians who advocates the kind of “freedom” that rides roughshod over the freedoms of everyone else. In this case, it is the freedom to speed in a car or motorbike.

The cause of this puerile outburst which you can read here: http://tinyurl.com/q2b5le – is the new GPS speed governor which is being developed in Australia. “Freedom dies with GPS speed governor” wails Alexander Mark.  His argument is that this is another step along the road to a “dictatorship of rules” against which we will all one day rebel.

Now, in a sense, I’m in agreement with Mr Mark about this dictatorship of rules – we are slowly being hemmed in by regulations and contractual requirements. The former have been instigated by governments who have put in place laws that govern our behaviour and require us to behave as good consumers and the latter are the contractual obligations allowed by these laws that require us to pay forever for things we have already bought.

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…And that nothing much would have been me…

Llandaff is one of those sleepy suburbs you can find in any city of any size. Pebble dashed nineteen-thirty something detached houses, owned by middle class executives, lawyers and senior bank personnel line the avenues and cul de sacs, testifying simultaneously to both the conservatism and wealth of the residents.

Sunday in Llandaff is church, lunch, wash the car and mow the lawn, while housewives busy themselves with being beautiful and peripheral. Monday is suit, briefcase, peck on the cheek and off to do some hard-nosed business. Tuesday is the day after Monday, but it’s just the same. There’s something eternal about places like Llandaff, nothing changes and nothing ruffles the cushioned surface of life in suburbia… nothing much anyway. And that nothing much would have been me.

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Down Shep!

It’s 1977 and me, Jack Dromey and Harriet Harman are on the picket line at Grunwicks. Harriet is the legal advisor to the strikers’ committee and Jack… well Jack is Jack. He is a bluff, charming man with a quick mind, a loud voice and strong, well argued opinions. I am this skinny, long-haired teenager with acne, a smelly Afghan coat, and for most of my time on the picket line, a large lump on my forehead – testimony to the firmness of SPG standard issue truncheons in those days. It’s no wonder Harriet noticed the loquacious Jack rather than me.

Wind forward five years and Jack marries Harriet and they now have two children, both boys, both bearing the surname “Harman”.  Given a choice of that or Dromey, they’ve probably both regretted not picking a partner called Smith or Booth or whatever…

To tell the truth, she wasn’t a raving beauty or anything, in fact she looked like a Blue Peter presenter without the sex, but that’s not what turned my head in those days. Instead, I favoured cerebral, left-leaning older women, with strong opinions and attitude. I still do, but I can do without the attitude and the older bit. Anyway, Harriet was something of a fantasy girl for the young UKHamlet in the seventies – I’m sure she’ll be delighted to hear it – but it wasn’t in a prurient way. Well, not often anyway.

No, I put Ms Harman on a mental pedestal. This is because I worked hard at not regarding women as sex objects in those days, and it would have been a betrayal of my principles to actually fancy getting jiggy with Harriet.

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A man walks out to the street and catches a taxi just going by. He gets into the taxi, and the cabbie says, “Perfect timing. You’re just like Frank.”
Passenger: ‘Who?’
Cabbie: “Frank Feldman. He’s a guy who did everything right all the time. Like my coming along when you needed a cab, things happened like that to Frank Feldman every single time.”
Passenger: “There are always a few clouds over everybody.”
Cabbie: “Not Frank Feldman He was a terrific athlete. He could have won the Grand-Slam at tennis. He could golf with the pros. He sang like an opera baritone and danced like a Broadway star and you should have heard him play the piano. He was an amazing guy.”
Passenger: “Sounds like he was something really special.”
Cabbie: “There’s more… He had a memory like a computer. He remembered everybody’s birthday. He knew all about wine, which foods to order and which fork to eat them with. He could fix anything. Not like me. I change a fuse, and the whole street blacks out. But Frank Feldman, he could do everything right.”
Passenger: “Wow, some guy then.”
Cabbie: “He always knew the quickest way to go in traffic and avoid traffic jams.. Not like me, I always seem to get stuck in them. But Frank, he never made a mistake, and he really knew how to treat a woman and make her feel good. He would never answer her back even if she was in the wrong; and his clothing was always immaculate, shoes highly polished too. He was the perfect man! He never made a mistake. No one could ever measure up to Frank Feldman.”
Passenger: “An amazing fellow. How did you meet him?”
Cabbie: “Well, I never actually met Frank. He died. I’m married to his fucking widow!”

Your rights are under attack. Apple have filed a twenty seven page statement to the U.S. Copyright office arguing that the modification of an iPhone’s software is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The ruling as to this issue is expected this autumn. If they are successful it will mean that when you buy an iPhone, not only can they dictate which service provider you use, but also what you can do with the phone.  It will erode the basic concept of ownership still further.

Things used to be simple – you bought something, it became your property and you could do what you wanted with it. Isn’t this simple? Isn’t it a good thing? Well, that depends on your view of property, but in essence, in a capitalist society, where ownership is a lynchpin of the economic method, you’d expect the simple elegance of this proposition to hold sway.

You buy it, you own it, you do what you want with it.

This is no longer the case. Microsoft et al saw to that with software, which they licensed it to you without ceding ownership. Then it became: You buy, we still own, you do what you want within certain limitations detailed in this twenty page document. Now Apple are seeking to take it still further – it’s about to become:

You buy, we own it, we tell you what you can do with it.

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The spelling mantra that generations of schoolchildren have learned — “i before e, except after c”, is being abandoned in the UK. New British government guidance tells teachers not to pass on the rule to students, because there are too many exceptions.

The “Support For Spelling” document, which is being sent to thousands of primary schools, says the rule “is not worth teaching” because it doesn’t account for words like ‘sufficient,’ ‘veil’ and ‘their.’

Jack Bovill of the Spelling Society, which advocates simplified spelling, said Saturday he agreed with the decision, but supporters say the ditty has value because it is one of the few language rules that most people remember.

The thing is: the full mnemonic is rarely taught and in fact the ditty is much longer:  “I before E except after C or when sounded as A as in ‘neighbour’ and ‘weigh.’” This is a much more comprehensive rule and while there are still exceptions, they are usually grounded in good historical reasons like, of course, it still doesn’t cover “sufficient”. This is because it is technically different: using the original pronunciation, the i and e form separate syllables, and so are pronounced suffish-ee-ent.

The trouble with and glory of English is that it very difficult to codify. Creating spelling mnemonics is all well and good if you can remember them. I listened to a debate on the radio about this yesterday. They reminded me of how I learned to spell necessary with: “1 Collar but 2 Socks”, and diarrhoea: Dining In A Rough Restaurant: Hurry, Otherwise Expect Accidents. However the latter is completely different to the way Americans spell “diarrhea”, and more of them speak English, than errmmmm…. English people. Continue reading

Jay sat in my living room sipping his cooling cup of tea. Had we passed in the street I would probably not recognised the tall, almost gangly, bespectacled figure, his loose blue cotton shirt flapping around him like the sails of an improbable yacht, mast thin legs striding in that peculiarly purposeful way that spoke of pursuit rather than destination.  This should not surprise me, for we had not seen each other in thirty years. When he left University, the proud bearer of a stellar first class honours degree in really hard maths, in contrast to my lucky second, our paths diverged – he went to Harvard, completed a PhD in even harder maths, then secured tenure and has been there ever since.  I messed around for twenty years thinking about doing a Masters. Now here he was, sitting on my chair, asking a favour.

Jay’s brother had a different perspective on academia. While no less brilliant than his older brother, in fact I’m inclined to say he is the bright one in the family, Patrick could not care less about achievements. He disappeared to the Far East, and spends his time writing weird things to even weirder publications. A few years ago, Pat emailed me with contact details, he found me via an old blog I had and chose me presumably because I could be trusted not to broadcast his whereabouts unless it was absolutely necessary. It was. Their mum is ill, perhaps terminally.

Fortunately, I keep my emails. Thank you, Gmail. Equally fortunately, I had mentioned in passing at a family get together, that I had heard from Patrick. This filtered through our convoluted grapevine back to Jay and he filed it away for come the day.

The day came, and so did he: knocking at my door. Continue reading