More Zonkyness

Today there has been a lot of coverage of the London Blitz that started 70 years ago today; where the Nazi’s war machine began waging total war against civilians in London. But perhaps we should look a little deeper than the media’s claim that this was the beginning of a new era in total warfare.

Despite the media’s claim that the London Blitz was the dawn of a new era of warfare against civilians, the terror-killing of civilians had been practised earlier by the Nazi’s during the Spanish Civil War – at Gernika (note that I use the Basque spelling which seems more natural to us odd-ball English people). This happened three years earlier than the London Blitz in 1937 and in retrospect was clearly a honing of tactics by the Nazis.

The scale of course was quite different – between 400 to 1600 people were killed at Gernika whereas the London Blitz killed around 20,000 civilians with even more killed in other cities in the UK. We should remember the victims of the Blitz both in London and elsewhere, but we should also remember the Basque victims of the Nazi terror bombing and their other victims too.

Perhaps we need to have a national day of mourning for the victims of all such terror bombings of civilians.

There are several things that occur when watching this video :-

1. Anyone can be arrested for no real reason whatsoever. So everyone has an interest in ensuring that the police or others who have power over us are prevented from abusing us, or punished for doing so after the event. It is too common to hear comments along the lines of “well, they probably deserved it”; maybe they do, but the police are not the ones who should be dishing it out. That’s what the whole criminal justice system is for.
2. Stand on your rights if arrested by all means, but don’t do so physically. Whilst the Sergeant in this video is totally in the wrong, Ms.P. doesn’t help matters by being awkward about being “thrown into a cell”. She shouldn’t be there as she hasn’t done anything wrong, but refusing a breathalyser test and physically resisting being put into a cell was foolish. Understandable perhaps, but foolish.
3. Whatever the police are doing to screen candidates to prevent mindless thugs from joining the police is obviously not working. Whilst many of the police are undoubtedly hard working, conscientious, and fully aware that abusing prisoners is wrong, it must always be remembered that a certain kind of thug will want to join the police as a way of getting power over people. These must be excluded.
4. It seems blatantly obvious that two police officers should be the minimum for putting a prisoner in a cell. No matter how frail a prisoner may be, they can make considerable difficulty for a single police officer tempting the officer into using unreasonable force.

Some geezer called Digby Jones has been pontificating about how Universities should be looking at offering more vocational qualifications. Fair enough; anyone no matter how ignorant is perfectly free to ramble on about anything they want to. But should we pay attention ?

Well the idea of offering vocational qualifications is such a great idea that Universities have been doing it for centuries – they call it the “degree”. One of the first degrees ever offered at any of the truly old Universities was a subject called Theology, which doesn’t sound especially vocational now (although it is – what qualifications do you think are useful for Bishops?), but was very vocational at the time. The Church (of Rome then) was desperate for more educated priests – there are records of Bishops insisting that uneducated priests be sent to various Universities to get a basic education, and of course the career prospects for an educated man at the time were pretty much limited to the Church or the Law. And of course Universities offered degrees in Law too.

It is easy to see how the “hard” subjects such as science, engineering, geology, etc. are very much vocational, but all of the so called “soft” subjects are very much vocational too. In some cases the vocational aspect of degrees such as history, or philosophy are not immediately of use to business but that does not make them any less vocational (historians need job training too!), or any less valuable.

And more than that, a degree is about teaching someone to think and study on their own, and  work on projects with other people. Are these not skills that businesses need ?

Our friend Digby insists that Universities should be talking to businesses about what subjects they should be teaching students to assist business. Well first of all, business is not the only type of organisation to take on graduates – Universities have a responsibility to train students going into government, the church, and Universities too! Secondly Universities are perfectly willing to talk to businesses about the degrees they offer.

Perhaps it should be businesses who should be a little more pro-active about talking to Universities!

If Digby Jones were to come up with a half decent degree proposal, he would probably find any number of academics knocking on his door ready to turn it into a course. And if the market finds it good, he will find students eager to sign up and qualify as “Digby clones”.

Yes the free market is at work within the University sector (complete with government interference) – students choose which degree courses they want; popular courses survive and prosper and unpopular ones wither and eventually disappear. One of the long running criticisms of Universities is that they do not turn out enough good scientists and engineers; well to fix that we need to make the students opt to go for those degrees.

We are used to seeing the more rabid members of the lunatic fringe of the Tory party complaining about the TV license fee and the BBC. For some mysterious reason they would give up the license fee and reduce the quality of British TV to that of the lowest common denominator – American commercial TV. Of course now that we are under ‘austerity measures’ in the public sector, the lunatic fringe is again targeting the BBC.

Of course anyone with half a brain realises that this means that the enormous public sector cuts the coalition is bringing in has very little to do with the deficit and a lot more to do with demolishing public services for ideological reasons. After all no matter how much the BBC reduces spending, the effect on the government’s deficit will be zero – as the whole of the BBC is funded from the license fee.

In fact reducing the amount of money that the BBC spends may be a good idea (although I don’t agree), but now is the wrong time to do it – it would be better by far to wait until real government spending cuts have worked their way through the system before reducing the spending that the BBC makes. Or it could have a problematic effect on the economy.

So the UK and Northumbria in particular has recently gone through one of the largest manhunts in recent times whilst Raoul Moat went on the run after trying to kill three people. And succeeded in killing one – the current boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend – for some reason the media believe if that you have once made a mistake and had a relationship with a nutter, it is a permanent relationship that you can’t escape from.

For seven days we were all glued to a greater or lesser extent to our TV screens whilst the police combined the wilds of Northumbria whilst he was in hiding, but eventually caught up with him and after a multiple hour stand off, he finally shot himself.

Of course as soon as it was all over, people were talking about the police hunt for him and criticising how it was done; in particular the mysterious use of two mysterious tasers that were not of a type approved for use by the UK police. Such things are inevitable.

It was also inevitable that some silly people on Facebook would start a group in support of him. And of course the Tories in government after they heard about it, started frothing at the mouth and demanding that the group be removed from Facebook because of “anti-police statements”.

There are two obvious conclusions to draw from this reaction to the Facebook group supporting Moat :-

1. Tories have little respect for free speech if it is something they do not agree with – such as criticisms of the police – and the acid test of respect for free speech is whether you support it even when it is being used to say things you do not agree with.
2. Tories need to get a life and stop overreacting to what is a handful of silly people on Facebook. A group with 30,000 supporters ? That’s such an insignificant number that it really isn’t worth getting worried about even if you find their sentiments offensive.

If you look at the Facebook group and the comments it very quickly becomes plain that the majority of supporters are ill-educated idiots who have significant problems with grammar, spelling, and a grasp of the known facts.

Actually that isn’t quite the case – it is still in the process of being banned as of today. And of course the law actually reads something along the lines “people are prohibited from concealing their faces in public”. But we all know that it’s to ban Muslim women from wearing the full face veil or niqab.

I have mentioned the niqab before, so I will not be saying too much in this post.

France’s law may be a little over the top, but I do not believe that it is any more anti-Islamic than a law against beating your wife is anti-Islamic. Muslims in France may believe that France’s new law is anti-Islamic, but it is more a reaction against the perceived misogynistic tendencies behind the wearing of the niqab.

Muslims are saying that we should be more accepting of cultural differences when it comes to considering the niqab; I don’t disagree, but the negative image of the full face veil in Western society should also be considered when considering wearing the niqab. As mentioned before, an Islamic woman is still capable of demonstrating her “modesty” by wearing a burka despite not wearing the face veil, and by doing so she is showing her acceptance of Western cultural sensitivities.

This blog entry is going to have a rather unfortunate number of the words “opinion” and “apparently”, getting in the way of the prose. Normal people realise that when I say that X is a scum-sucking, arse-licking slimy snake, I don’t really mean it literally and that it is an opinion. Abnormal people on the other hand are likely to see an opportunity to silence a critic. In my opinion the tobacco industry is inclined to keep hunting packs of rabid attack lawyers ready to pull to pieces the most trivial critic, so it is wise to be a little cautious.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the tobacco industry was just another industry – perhaps a little hick in my opinion as it merely added a bit of value to an agricultural product by rolling up leaves in cigarette papers in a ready to smoke form. But people did not assign tobacco company executives to the same category as corrupt politicians, child molesters and serial killers.

Somewhere along the way it changed as the health risks of smoking gradually become known – with the tobacco industry apparently fighting every step of the way. At some point every tobacco executive woke up to realise he was going into work to help his company kill zillions of people with their product. And apparently the instant reaction from every single tobacco company was to fight the truth.

It must have been easy to deny the truth in the beginning where it was the opinion of one established industry against the opinion of a few wacko medical researchers. Fair enough. Who is going to give up a good income because some odd-ball begins to suspect that smoking tobacco may not be healthy.

But when the evidence began to pile up, wasn’t there one tobacco executive who sat back and said “Hey! This is wrong” ? Nope. I mean sure there was Jeffrey Wigand but he was not so much a tobacco executive as a researcher (who became an executive) who worked in the tobacco industry. And in that case we are talking about the 1990s which is far later than when the tobacco companies first knew that they were selling poison.

So it seems that every tobacco executive since the 1950s has felt that his (or her) income and the safety of the company they worked for was more important than the fact that they were in my opinion going out of their way to kill their customers.

Is there something specially corrupt about tobacco executives ? Well, we can probably guess that they were not necessarily the brightest sparks in the box – how much intelligence does it take to sell drugs to a drug addict ? But they were probably no more morally corrupt than any other company executive.

Which brings us to the question, should we really entrust power to the kind of people who become company executives ?

Well we have had the emergency budget and one of the announcements was a two year public sector pay “freeze”. Of course in reality it is a pay cut because of inflation. Of course if politicians were a little more honest they would actually announce it as a pay cut by freezing cost of living increases; one minor sign of improvement was when the prime minister admitted afterwards on a debate with the public that it was actually a pay cut. After all in the past, politicians have blindly and foolishly proclaimed that a pay freeze was not a pay cut at all.

For those that doubt that it is a pay cut, take a hypothetical public sector worker who earns £20,000 a year and who spends every pound on buying a £1 loaf of bread. This is of course ridiculous, but makes the arithmetic easier. Now let us assume that the current UK inflation rate is 3% (it’s actually a smidgen higher) and stays that way.

In the first year our hypothetical worker can buy 20,000 loaves of bread.

In the second year, the price of a loaf increases by 3% to £1 * 1.03 or £1.03. Because our worker has not had a pay increase, he can now afford just 20,000 / 1.03 loaves of break … 19,417 loaves of bread. In the third year, the bread goes up yet again to £1.06 and the number of loaves our worker can buy drops again to 18,867.

In a very real sense the value of the work that our worker does for the public is being nibbled away year by year. And don’t forget that it lasts until the cost of living increases above inflation eventually restore the value. Sure our worker still gets £20,000 a year, but the value in money is not the in the symbol printed on the bank note, but in what it can be exchanged for.

Whilst the government has plenty of reasons to reduce government expenditure and reducing the total public sector pay bill is perfectly reasonable, the way it was done is a little old-fashioned. One of the noticeable things about the similar efforts in the private sector in this recession as compared with previous recessions has been the amount of negotiation involved. More enlightened managers have negotiated with the workers to find a mutually least disagreeable way of reducing the cost of salaries.

Sometimes this has meant a number of voluntary redundancies; sometimes a cut in the hours worked with an associated pay cut, and sometimes it has been a simple pay cut. Or a combination of all three.

Why hasn’t the government tried a similar path with the public sector workers ? After all, these things can be negotiated. One obvious compromise is to not only freeze the pay, but also to reduce the standard working week every year by the amount of inflation. This is still a pay cut, but at least values the work of the public sector worker the same – it gives the public sector worker something in exchange for less pay – a shorter working week.

By imposing this pay cut without negotiation, the government is behaving like an old-fashioned tyrannical employer who treats their workers like wage slaves.

And where does this idea that all public sector workers get gold-plated pensions from ? Sure many get final salary pensions which in the majority of the cases is not a spectacular amount. Despite the demonising propaganda floating around in the press, most public sector workers do not earn immensely large salaries; on a personal note, I earn roughly half what my brother earns for roughly the same job – and that excludes his yearly profit bonus.

Fact is that the private sector has slowly been dropping final salary pension schemes for years without any great reflection on whether this is necessary to ensure pensions are affordable, or whether this is a means to ensure fatter profits for the fat cats. And yet still there are a significant number of private sector firms that offer final salary pensions.

The targeting of public sector pension schemes by the right-wing fascists is little more than playing up to the insecurities of private sector workers who have been deprived of their final salary pension schemes.

As someone mentioned on a TV debate on the increase of the pension age to 66 in 2016, we not only need a review of government provision of pensions (to both the workers in general and the public sector workers), but we also need a review of how pensions are paid for in the private sector. We are a richer society now than we were 20 years ago, but pensions are less generous.

Is this simply because people are living longer than they used to, so pensions cost more ? Or is there something else at work ?

In dealing with pensions, I have more questions than answers but it needs some serious thought about how pensions can be paid for. Can we as a society really not afford to pay pensioners a decent pension ? We have a belief that the wealth created by private sector workers belongs to the entrepreneurs who risked everything on setting up a company. But all too often these entrepreneurs are merely managers of very large companies that are risking very little. That is not to say that genuine entrepreneurs do not exist, but the assumption that every head of a company is an entrepreneur is wrong; indeed the ones who earn the most are rarely the ones who risk much.

This is beginning to sound like I am in favour of some kind of old-fashioned hard left socialist state. Not at all, but the belief that the free market can solve everything is just as foolish a belief.

I’m watching Malcolm X about the “black” civil rights activist; there is a point in the film where a point is made about colours in the dictionary – black is bad and white is good.

This is supposedly the result of some sort of racist conspiracy to persuade people that black people are bad and that white people are good. There may be some level of truth to that.And this little rant is not aimed at undermining the achievements of the black civil rights activists.

However I have my own dictionary which is somewhat more extensive that the one used in the film – the OED. This includes references to the earliest uses of the word black in various contexts. The first use of the word black in reference to something evil goes back as far as the 13th century; the first use in reference to people of a certain skin colour is in the 19th century.

The meaning of black meaning evil to some extent obviously has its origins in the fear of the dark at night. Everyone has walked home on a dark night and been a little spooked by what can come out of the darkness. Today’s dark nights are a lot less spooky than they were in the past – we have far more artificial lighting and even where it isn’t close, a little of that distant light sheds a little into the darkest corner.

Trying to change things so “black is good” just doesn’t work historically.

And when you come down to it, “black” people don’t have black skin at all – it isn’t even a good colour description. We all have chocolate-coloured skin … mine is like white chocolate; others have milk chocolate skin, and some have dark chocolate skin. But it is all chocolate-coloured.

Humans have chocolate-coloured skin. All of us; every member of the human race.

So we all woke up this morning to find out that the Israeli thugs sorry, military have seized a ship containing “humanitarian” supplies for the Gaza strip. The ship itself was in international waters at the time, leaving Israel in a very precarious legal position given that ships in international waters are subject to the laws of the country in which they are registered. The only exception to that is where the ship or the crew of a ship are an “enemy of mankind” which is usually taken to be those guilty of piracy or slavery. Terrorism is not on the list. And aid workers aren’t either.

The Israelis are claiming that their soldiers only started shooting after those on board started firing; those on board claim the Israelis boarded whilst firing. Well making a careful, thoughtful assessment of the relative believability of both sides, I know who I believe (and it ain’t Israel). But it really does not matter: those on board ship were entitled to defend themselves in whatever way they felt appropriate when boarded illegally.

Israel is claiming that the “aid” on it’s way to Gaza was merely a cover for smuggling arms to Gaza. So what? It’s not as if Israel itself hasn’t done that. But to be honest, after the amount of distrust that Israel deserves, most people will think at worst that most of the ship’s cargo is in fact humanitarian aid. And from every report, Gaza needs all the humanitarian aid it can get, although Israel thinks it needs no more than 15,000 tons a week.

Israel needs to understand that the more it sticks a finger up to international opinion, the more condemnation and less belief it will get. In normal circumstances, a country that allowed it’s military forces to carry out an act that is effectively piracy even if there is a good reason behind it would get a good ticking off and then it would be forgotten about. Israel ?

Well they keep doing this shit. Year after year, and decade after decade. There are no signs that they are willing to compromise to move towards peace with the Palestinians; whatever they might say, their actions seem aimed to inflame opinion. Perhaps the Palestinians are also somewhat to blame, but frankly Israel is the bully in that little corner of the world.