Long before Jack Straw did us all a massive disservice by enshrining the European Charter of Fundamental Rights into our Law, the average person had a fairly clear idea of what did or did not constitute right and wrong.
For instance, under English Common Law the idea that crime begat punishment went unchallenged for a thousand years.
Behaviour towards others was, for the most part, covered by the ten basic laws that Moses handed down to the children of Israel. If one wanted a settled, orderly society it made pretty good sense not to steal, or covert your neighbour's ox or his wife. Stealing, likewise, was proscribed for the very good reason that it tended to upset the victim. Of course, the first four Commandments are not particularly relevant in our increasingly secular society. But, the other six provide a fairly straightforward framework for civilised behaviour.
So, we ticked along for a milennium and built a pretty reasonable legal system around these relatively few basic ideas. Because the rules were so few and easy to grasp, there was never any real doubt when lines were being crossed. If you stole, killed, lied about your neighbour or coveted his goods and chattels you were going to be held to account. It was easy to distinguish between the victimiser and the victim in the majority of cases.
That is no longer the case. Jack and his lawyer chums have altered the basic rules with the introduction of their human rights legislation.Six simple commandments have been replaced by 54 Articles, creating a whole new stratum of legal argument. This may be great for the lawyers, but it takes the legal process several steps further away from most people's instinctive sense of what constitutes right and wrong.
In this new Human Rights wonderland, for instance, judges see nothing odd or insensitive in refusing to deport a convicted terrorist back to Iran because the possible threat of torture would breach his Human Rights. As he can't be deported, he has to remain in this country. He has no job and, having spent the last 28 years incarcerated in a British gaol, he's unlikely to have had much opportunity to play the stock markets or build a buy-to-rent empire.
So, the only way he can remain in one of the world's most expensive cities is at the taxpayers' expense.
The judges who reached this great decision would probably tell you that they have to consider the Law as it exists, not the consequences of its implementation. Which is why I hate the Human Rights culture we have fostered. Because, while our ex-terrorist gets to visit the gym, the library, meet his mates and generally lollygag around our capital city, there are old people all over Great Britain who might have to choose this winter between heating their home or eating. Some of them, undoubtedly, will be in their parlous position because they failed to salt something away for their old age. A fair few might have gone through their whole lives scrounging off the state. But the majority will be people who have worked all of their adult lives and, in many cases, through their teenage years as well. They will have paid taxes for forty or possibly fifty years and made National Insurance contributions for a similar length of time. Many would have spent time in the Services.
Now, in their dotage, they have to scrape by on £40 to £100 per week. Of course, these pensioners can always apply for additional benefits but, unlike our Iranian friend, whose every need will be met by solicitous officials keen to ensure that his Human Rights are left unsullied, they will have to fill in copious forms, take various means tests and have their lives generally poked and prodded by nosey officals to qualify for them. This is what happens when you allow the law to become an abstract thing. It might be an amusement to those of a legal bent to debate the nuances of a particular point of Law. But it has as much relevance to Natural Justice as the old religious debate concerning the number of angels that could dance on a head of a pin. It constantly throws up anomalies like our Irtanian terrorist friend and countless others who end up sucking the life out of our benefits system while native British pensioners are left to flounder on the fringes of the system with insufficient money to feed or keep themselves warm.
For them, the only Human Right, apparently, is to live an impoverished but dignified old age until such time as they give up the ghost and quietly fade away.
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Friday, 31 October 2008
Ross on Why?
If you read the blog threads on the Guardian and Independent websites, it rapidly becomes clear that there is a certain kind of person that sees the uproar caused by Russell Brand/Jonathon Ross's telephone prank as yet another example of Great Britain lurching to the right quicker than David Beckham in an England shirt. The Brand/Ross supporters, with a few honourable exceptions, regard themselves as distinctively individual with a penchant for straight talking. No doubt they would also describe themselves as liberal; with a lower case l, of course. Politically, they are more likely to favour the extreme left of the political spectrum.
There is no-one quite as illiberal as the confirmed liberal. Come to think of it, there are very few people in this world quite as conformist in their thinking as those who, on the whole, pride themselves on their non-conformist approach to life. To prove just how non-conformist they are, they plaster the walls of the accounts department where they work with posters like; "You don't have to be mad to work here - but it helps."
They are the people who campaign furiously against modern technology and see no irony in the fact that they use Blackberries and lap-tops to co-ordinate their campaigns. They are the people who would vigorously protest against any kind of discrimination on the basis of colour or creed but who happily vilify millions of people base solely on the newspaper they choose to read over their breakfast cereals.
For proof of this, you need do no more than trawl through the comments posted on the Guardian and Indie websites. The first thing that becomes apparent is their uniform belief that the whole furore has been fomented by the Daily Mail to undermine the BBC. The second is the relative paucity and shallowness of their comments.
They are, for the most part, devoid of original thought and lean heavily on strident repetition for effect. Overall, their command of English, their ability to spell fairly commonplace words and parse a sentence correctly diminish in inverse proportion to their level of support for Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross.
The more strident the tone of their postings, the more dismissive of Mail readers, the poorer their command of English. Given the frequency of their posts, many of them must be low level Civil Servants or be marking time between jobs with stints on the computers in the local library.
A common athread running through all of their postings is that only two people complained about the broadcast itself. It wasn't until the bloody Daily Mail took up the cudgels that the whole thing got blown out of proportion. Without the Mail's intervention, the 30,000 that, sheep-like, eventually complained to the BBC would never have been any the wiser.
This is a completely spurious argument. If I don't personally see a murder or a rape does that make my disgust any less valid? If I don't witness people dying in an Asian Tsunami should I care less than those who were actually on the ground when the event took place? Of course not. The fact that I learn about or experience the event through a news medium doesn't make the emotion it stirs in me any less valid.
Equally, the fact that 30,000 people didn't hear the actual show doesn't invalidate their right to feel angry and outraged that it was ever allowed to be broadcast.
Personally, I didn't hear the programme and, having read the transcripts, wasn't particularly offended by the content. What really got up my nose was the sheer juvenile nastiness of what Ross/Brand did. It was the broadcasting equivalent of a couple of playground bullies picking on a smaller kid for having a snotty nose or glasses. It was cruel. It was arrogant. But, most of all, it was distinctly unfunny.
The liberals constantly trot out the old sore that, to be effective, comedy has to have an edge; has to be "relevant" - whatever that might mean - and break the boundaries of conventional behaviour. That's just so much twaddle.
Comedy's only job is to make the audience laugh. It has no higher calling than that. If it fails then patently it's not comedy at all. On that basis alone, the two broadcasters deserved to be given the boot.
There is no-one quite as illiberal as the confirmed liberal. Come to think of it, there are very few people in this world quite as conformist in their thinking as those who, on the whole, pride themselves on their non-conformist approach to life. To prove just how non-conformist they are, they plaster the walls of the accounts department where they work with posters like; "You don't have to be mad to work here - but it helps."
They are the people who campaign furiously against modern technology and see no irony in the fact that they use Blackberries and lap-tops to co-ordinate their campaigns. They are the people who would vigorously protest against any kind of discrimination on the basis of colour or creed but who happily vilify millions of people base solely on the newspaper they choose to read over their breakfast cereals.
For proof of this, you need do no more than trawl through the comments posted on the Guardian and Indie websites. The first thing that becomes apparent is their uniform belief that the whole furore has been fomented by the Daily Mail to undermine the BBC. The second is the relative paucity and shallowness of their comments.
They are, for the most part, devoid of original thought and lean heavily on strident repetition for effect. Overall, their command of English, their ability to spell fairly commonplace words and parse a sentence correctly diminish in inverse proportion to their level of support for Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross.
The more strident the tone of their postings, the more dismissive of Mail readers, the poorer their command of English. Given the frequency of their posts, many of them must be low level Civil Servants or be marking time between jobs with stints on the computers in the local library.
A common athread running through all of their postings is that only two people complained about the broadcast itself. It wasn't until the bloody Daily Mail took up the cudgels that the whole thing got blown out of proportion. Without the Mail's intervention, the 30,000 that, sheep-like, eventually complained to the BBC would never have been any the wiser.
This is a completely spurious argument. If I don't personally see a murder or a rape does that make my disgust any less valid? If I don't witness people dying in an Asian Tsunami should I care less than those who were actually on the ground when the event took place? Of course not. The fact that I learn about or experience the event through a news medium doesn't make the emotion it stirs in me any less valid.
Equally, the fact that 30,000 people didn't hear the actual show doesn't invalidate their right to feel angry and outraged that it was ever allowed to be broadcast.
Personally, I didn't hear the programme and, having read the transcripts, wasn't particularly offended by the content. What really got up my nose was the sheer juvenile nastiness of what Ross/Brand did. It was the broadcasting equivalent of a couple of playground bullies picking on a smaller kid for having a snotty nose or glasses. It was cruel. It was arrogant. But, most of all, it was distinctly unfunny.
The liberals constantly trot out the old sore that, to be effective, comedy has to have an edge; has to be "relevant" - whatever that might mean - and break the boundaries of conventional behaviour. That's just so much twaddle.
Comedy's only job is to make the audience laugh. It has no higher calling than that. If it fails then patently it's not comedy at all. On that basis alone, the two broadcasters deserved to be given the boot.
Thursday, 18 September 2008
Random moans and observations
"Getting on with the job" Gordon has recently been ruminating on the privations many people will face this winter when they have to choose between eating properly or freezing to death. His solution to this dilemma is everything that we have come to expect from him and his ilk: dense, both because it is difficult to penetrate and because of its stupidity, inadequate and costly to implement and administer. Doubtless it will keep legions of minor functionaries occupied and well-remunerated but is unlikely to do much for the pensioners and other vulnerable groups it is designed to help.
As ususal, Not -so -flash Gordon is going for complexity at the expense of accessibility. Instead of simply reducing the taxes people have to pay on fuel; instead of clobbering the foreign energy companies who are using the British to subsidise fuel consumers in their own backyards; instead of bringing pensions into line with the true cost of living, Gordon has decided to provide grants for people to insulate their homes more efficiently. In other words, they won't wake up one day and find that the government has given them back some of the money it has previously siphoned out of their pockets. Those in work are unlikely to find a nice little tax refund in their pay slip, either. That would be far too simplistic.
No, what will happen is that a large packet will drop with a dull thud on their hall mats one morning. Inside it will be a glossy coloure brochure with some gerundian heading like; "Making energy work harder for you" written by some 18 year old copy writer whose cutting edge agency will charge the Government £200 per hour for his time and brilliance. There will also be a pious statement by Gordon or Hilary Benn about their commitment to improving the UK's energy efficiency AND making lfe more comfortable for its more vulnerable citizens. Finally, the piece de resistance will be a form that claimants will have to fill in to qualify for the home insulation grant. In common with all other benefits' forms, this will be so eye-wateringly difficult that only those with a BSc in form filling - and Nigerian benefits fraudsters - will be able to complete it satisfactorily. Most will take one look and decide it's too complex. Others will get half-way through, lose the will to live and go to the pub for a pint. The clever ones will do one or other of the above then roll the paperwork into a small log and burn it once the weather turns really parky. It's about the only way that Gordon will provide them with any comfort at all this winter.
Even those who pass GO and manage to get a grant might find it difficult to use it anytime soon. According to the Government's own figures, there could be up to 2 million vulnerable people whose homes need better insulation. The Yell.com website says it has 832 listings for insulation contractors in the whole of the UK. Let's say that, on average, these contractors could handle 20 houses each per week. That adds up to 16.640 between them. If it runs true to form, the weather turn cold enough to represent a threat to vulnerable people in early November. So, assuming the scheme were to get going immediately, by the time that winter starts to get us all in its icy grip, around 100,000 homes might have been insulated; leaving the other 1,900,000 vulnerable citizens, presumably, trying to decide whether to risk turning the central heating on or warming up another tin of baked beans. That's what I call really getting on with the job, Gordon.
You might think that I would be very happy to see the back of Gordon Brown. If that's the impression I give, I apologise. Gordon might be proving to be by some distance the most numbingly inept PM this country has had to endure. But, in all honesty, I would rather he stayed where he is than risk handing the country over to one of his so-called rivals. The thought of David Millimetre making decisions about our collective future only becomes less scary if you replace that image with one of Harriet Harperson in Number 10. Some pundits are promoting Alan Johnson as a safe pair of hands. They either have short memories or are blessed with a gold-plated pension. This is the man, after all, who is so steeped in traditional class hatred that he bowed to Union demands for public-sector workers to retain the right to retire at 60 while the rest of us - lording it up with our fat-cat salaries and pensions in the private sector - are condemned to hard labour until we are 65 now and 68 in the not-too-distant future.
Gordon is, if only by default, the only Prime Minister this country needs at the present. Unless, that is, he calls a General Election. Then he can bugger off with the rest of his chums into another 20 years in the political wilderness.
This country still needs 3 million new homes to accommodate all the extra people we have allowed to settle here in the last 10 years. So, despite the turmoil in world markets, the shortage of mortgages and the impact of the stupid and pointless HIPS on the housing market, house prices are never going to go into complete free-fall. People who, two years ago would have bought a property are now having to settle for renting. Nonetheless, whatever they rent still occupies land and that is a commodity that becomes scarcer every year. As Mark Twain said: " Buy land. They can't invent any more".
As ususal, Not -so -flash Gordon is going for complexity at the expense of accessibility. Instead of simply reducing the taxes people have to pay on fuel; instead of clobbering the foreign energy companies who are using the British to subsidise fuel consumers in their own backyards; instead of bringing pensions into line with the true cost of living, Gordon has decided to provide grants for people to insulate their homes more efficiently. In other words, they won't wake up one day and find that the government has given them back some of the money it has previously siphoned out of their pockets. Those in work are unlikely to find a nice little tax refund in their pay slip, either. That would be far too simplistic.
No, what will happen is that a large packet will drop with a dull thud on their hall mats one morning. Inside it will be a glossy coloure brochure with some gerundian heading like; "Making energy work harder for you" written by some 18 year old copy writer whose cutting edge agency will charge the Government £200 per hour for his time and brilliance. There will also be a pious statement by Gordon or Hilary Benn about their commitment to improving the UK's energy efficiency AND making lfe more comfortable for its more vulnerable citizens. Finally, the piece de resistance will be a form that claimants will have to fill in to qualify for the home insulation grant. In common with all other benefits' forms, this will be so eye-wateringly difficult that only those with a BSc in form filling - and Nigerian benefits fraudsters - will be able to complete it satisfactorily. Most will take one look and decide it's too complex. Others will get half-way through, lose the will to live and go to the pub for a pint. The clever ones will do one or other of the above then roll the paperwork into a small log and burn it once the weather turns really parky. It's about the only way that Gordon will provide them with any comfort at all this winter.
Even those who pass GO and manage to get a grant might find it difficult to use it anytime soon. According to the Government's own figures, there could be up to 2 million vulnerable people whose homes need better insulation. The Yell.com website says it has 832 listings for insulation contractors in the whole of the UK. Let's say that, on average, these contractors could handle 20 houses each per week. That adds up to 16.640 between them. If it runs true to form, the weather turn cold enough to represent a threat to vulnerable people in early November. So, assuming the scheme were to get going immediately, by the time that winter starts to get us all in its icy grip, around 100,000 homes might have been insulated; leaving the other 1,900,000 vulnerable citizens, presumably, trying to decide whether to risk turning the central heating on or warming up another tin of baked beans. That's what I call really getting on with the job, Gordon.
You might think that I would be very happy to see the back of Gordon Brown. If that's the impression I give, I apologise. Gordon might be proving to be by some distance the most numbingly inept PM this country has had to endure. But, in all honesty, I would rather he stayed where he is than risk handing the country over to one of his so-called rivals. The thought of David Millimetre making decisions about our collective future only becomes less scary if you replace that image with one of Harriet Harperson in Number 10. Some pundits are promoting Alan Johnson as a safe pair of hands. They either have short memories or are blessed with a gold-plated pension. This is the man, after all, who is so steeped in traditional class hatred that he bowed to Union demands for public-sector workers to retain the right to retire at 60 while the rest of us - lording it up with our fat-cat salaries and pensions in the private sector - are condemned to hard labour until we are 65 now and 68 in the not-too-distant future.
Gordon is, if only by default, the only Prime Minister this country needs at the present. Unless, that is, he calls a General Election. Then he can bugger off with the rest of his chums into another 20 years in the political wilderness.
This country still needs 3 million new homes to accommodate all the extra people we have allowed to settle here in the last 10 years. So, despite the turmoil in world markets, the shortage of mortgages and the impact of the stupid and pointless HIPS on the housing market, house prices are never going to go into complete free-fall. People who, two years ago would have bought a property are now having to settle for renting. Nonetheless, whatever they rent still occupies land and that is a commodity that becomes scarcer every year. As Mark Twain said: " Buy land. They can't invent any more".
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