Minority interests are un British

One of the defining characteristics of the British character has always been an innate sense of justice and fairness. We didn't much mind what happened in life or sport as long as everyone got a fair crack of the whip. Watch a TV documentary about British society in any era prior to the current one and you will find it littered with examples of this respect for fair play: queue-jumpers being chastised for not "waiting their turn"; people deferring to one another in bus or taxi queues; the majority instinctively supporting the underdog in any kind of sporting event and the acceptance that winning by cheating wasn't worth a light. Those were the days when a handshake was frequently all it took to cement a deal; the days when the expression "an Englishman's word is his bond" had some substance. These days, it would probably sound cliched to an audience brought up on The Apprentice or the Dragon's Den; but it was a truism long before it became a cliche.
Fair play wasn't something taught at home or school. You wouldn't have found it on any curriculum. It was never something much discussed or analysed; it was simply there, providing a framework for a reasonable life. People just knew, instinctively, what was right and fair. They did not jostle or push into queues, but quitely awaited their turn. From the playground onwards, fights were governed by unwritten - and immutable - rules; fists were OK; feet, heads and anything remotely resembling a weapon most certainly weren't. And fights were strictly for men and boys. Fighting was not a feminine past-time.
In cricket it was the norm for batsmen to walk when they knew they were out, or for fielders to own up if they hadn't quite managed to hold onto a clean catch. Footballers who dived and feigned injury were treated with contempt by referees, opponents and spectators alike.

Cheating of any kind was considered beyond the pale. Even criminals embraced a rough and ready form of morality. They might not all have been the loveable rogues who worshipped their old mums beloved of popular fiction but, by and large, they didn't prey on females, the poor, the weak or the elderly. Any young man who attacked an elderly man or woman would,have been the object of scorn and, most likely, have found himself on the wrong side of a battering. That is why virtually any middle-aged housewife could disperse a group of rowdy teenagers with a few well-chosen words; something that most policemen wouldn't attempt on their own these days.

So, how have we managed to descend from that innate sense of what is right and fair to our current state of affairs, where queuing is a lost art form - particularly in London - footballers who cheat and win penalties are regarded as the epitome of professionalism and a significant number of young men would not even consider fighting without some sort of edge; whether a real edge in the form of a knife or simply greater numbers than their opponent?
It would take several thick volumes to explore all of the underlying causes. And all I have at my disposal is a hastily-written blog. But, purely at random, here are a few things to consider:
1. Overcrowding. Experiments with rats have shown that colonies break when animals are confined in a small space and their numbers are allowed to grow unchecked. Regard England as a rat colony and you are already a long way to explaining the rapid breakdown in reasonable behaviour; especially in big cities like London. We are a small country that enjoys - probably not the right word - the most people per square mile in Europe. We have more and more people scrabbling for less space and rapidly dwindling resources. It is madness that we don't offically acknowledge the fact and put up the barriers before we all do ourselves a mischief.
2.Officially promoted inequality. Despite the findings, published today by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, that foreigners do not enjoy advantages when it comes to the allocation of social housing, the feeling persists that they do.
Sometimes, the anecdotal evidence looks stronger than any statistics. Take the awful fire that occurred in Camberwell last week. Look at the names of the people who died, those who survived and the people who witnessed the conflagration, all of whom lived in the tower block or one of its close neighbours. They all came originally from eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and points further east and west. How did they manage to get housed in an inner-London borough where the council housing waiting list runs to thousands of names? Whose places have they taken in the queue for council housing? How many elderly people have been left stranded in the area while their children and grandchildren have had to move out in search of affordable housing?
Ask these questions of any politician or local offical and you will immediately be labelled racist. Because, the simple answer is that, despite what the E&HRC says, foreigners who arrive homeless and with large families do seem to be given precedence over the indigenous population. This seemed to be confirmed by what John Healey, the Housing Minister, said on radio 4 this morning: "At present, those people with the most serious housing needs get priority. We are not changing that. " They are not changing it because they can't - at least not without infringing their own Human Rights Act. So, as long as the overarching selection criterion is immediate need rather than entitlement, the refugee family with four children must take precedence over the local couple with just one or two.
It might be the law, but it certainly isn't fair or just. Unfortunately, the only political party that has picked up on this point is the BNP; which is why they made gains at the recent elections which, in earlier, fairer times, they would never have had a hope in hell of achieving.
Harriet Harman will shortly add to this offically enshrined discrimination when she makes it illegal for institututions to discriminate against people from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds. Quite who will set the bar as far as a measurement of poverty or disadvantage is concerned is not yet clear. What is clear, based on the evidence of all prior discriminatory legislation, is that the rules will simply create yet another stratum in our society. Post this act, the poor will be further divided between those shrewd, crafty, well-informed and well-connected enough to exploit the legislation and the great mass who will never quite get the hang of it and go on being just as down-trodden as ever. Plus, of course, there will be another layer created above the other two made up solely of Quangocrats whose job is to monitor, review and enforce the regulations and pad out thei own pension schemes.
3. Much of the blame must, inevitably, attach itself to the people who have guided us for the last 30 years - not just in Westminster but in all the institutions charged with the care and mentoring of our children. They have created the curricula and agenda that have shaped our society. It is the educationalists, philosophers, teachers and other assorted care-givers who brick-by-painful-brick have dismantled a system that took around 200 years to perfect and have replaced it with something that fails in the most basic objective of any educational system; education, education, education.

Doubtless inspired by the noblest of egalitarian motives they are the ones, nonetheless, who have hollowed out our educational system from within. With their insistence on prizes for all - irrespective of talent, skills or effort- they have completely severed the link between effort and reward. Outside the classroom, they have achieved the same effect by eliminating competition from play and sport; awarding the feckless and lazy the same prizes as they do the strivers and achievers. When that hasn't had the desired effect and quashed children's natural competitive urges, they have simply sold off the playing fields. The results of this collective anti-competition activism can be seen in the obese, ill-educated under-class they have created whose opportunities for advancement or betterment are virtually nil.
Even black footballers and athletes from disadvantaged back-grounds rarely have the formal education system to thank for their success. In an earlier era, school sports were organised at all levels from Primary to Senior, with legions of teachers willing to devote time and energy to the running of school teams. Now, thanks to the everyone must win mentality, lack of facilities and Health and Safety issues competitive sport is dead or dying in many state schools. Children in such schools have to depend on external clubs to nurture their talent and provide the coaching and encouragement needed to see it bloom. If the Health & Safety tendency gets its way, of course, these same clubs will soon become so enmeshed in elfin safety regulations and paedo seeking legislation that no sane adult will want anything to do with them - but that's another story altogether.
By contrast, in the private and selective sectors, school sports are flourishing, just as they always have, alongside traditional academic excellence. English/British teams have enjoyed fantastic success in recent years. Probably 90% of the cyclists, rowers, sailors, swimmers, cricket and rugby players who have represented us so successfully on the world's playing fields hail from a middle class or otherwise educationally-privileged back-ground. They can all go on to greater professional achievement in their chosen sports. Alternatively, they could spend a few years getting paid handsomely for something they enjoy and then use their superior academic education to take up another career altogether. Their near-peers, meanwhile, consigned to life in an average sink comprehensive, will be left far behind with very little real prospect of ever catching up.
In other words, in pursuing their dream of unprecedented equality, the levellers have simply replaced a system that gave the majority a fair crack of the whip and allowed the best-equipped to advance, with one that condemns a large majority of its unfortunate participants to a life of unrelieved mediocrity.
Not very fair or just and, by definition therefore, not very British.

sounds, secrets and breathy aitches

I nearly crashed my car the other afternoon.
I was driving home from the West Country and listening to radio 2. The music stopped and a pleasant, female voice chimed out one of the many commercials that litter the BBC's airwaves these days.
I can't remember precisely what programme or presenter the commercial was plugging. I tend to tune out when these things are broadcast. But, I do remember that I almost swerved off the road when she added the strap line "..... the sound to your Sunday morning".
The sound TO your Sunday morning.
What the hell sort of language is that? Who wrote it? More to the point, who, charged with the job of editing it, allowed such meaningless drivel to be broadcast?
I wanted to call the Beeb - as I frequently do - to complain. I wanted to take the announcer - or preferably the writer/editor - gently by the throat and explain that there is no such construction in the English language as "the sound to". Unfortunately, I was driving, I was in a hurry and, truthfully, too apathetic to pull off the road and make the call on my mobile.
So, I let it go. And it has rankled ever since.
But really, how could anyone with English as a first language feel comfortable with such a construction. Imagine writing a diary entry that began: The day was fine and filled with the sound to the birds singing. UURGGH.
Why are people not only being allowed to mangle our language on a daily basis but, what's worse, being paid to do so? Is it out of some mis-guided sense of trendyness? Does it denote lack of interest or affection for the language?Or are they simply ignorant ? Whatever the reason, its effect is grating in the extreme.
It was probably around three or four years ago that I first noticed this trend. Like many linguistic horrors it seems to have originated in America.
The carrier of this particular virus was an ad for a shampoo or hair treatment which promised to provide " the secret TO glossy hair" or something equally specious. It made me grind my teeth then and, just writing it, makes me grind them even now. In any event, such is the power of the broadcast word, whether on TV, radio or the WWW, that "the secret TO" rapidly established itself. It infests evry form of the written word but seems to be particularly prevalent in women's magazines, which regularly promise to reveal the secret to bikini figures, workplace romances, perfect teeth, summer diets and buiness success. The people who write and edit these sections are only outdone in their air-headeness by the people who actually choose to read them.
Another hair-tearing construction that pops up all the time is Bored OF or Fed-Up OF. In fact, it's been around so long that, nowadays, when people find things or other people tedious they are just as likely to anoounce that they are Bored Of them as the rest of us are to be bored with them.
But, these prepositional aberrances pale in comparison with the modern insistence on inserting the letter aitch into the word aitch so that it ends up being pronounced as Haitch.
My bank is called HSBC. Or at least, that is how I have always thought of it. Not any more, though, if a young man that I talked to the other day is to be believed. No, according to him, the correct title of my bank is Haitch SBC with a very breathy emphasis on the H inserted at the beginning of the word.
I tried - and dismally failed - to explain to him that the company's name was HSBC with no aitch sound at the beginning. What I actually said was " There is no aitch in the aitch of HSBC". The surreal nature of that opening never really dissipated. The debate that followed progressed rapidly downhill. We might justt as well have been discussing some obscure grammatical construction in Serbo Croat for all the effect my argument had. Suffice to say that the young lad went away convinced that I was either some kind of nutter or that I was the unfortunate victim of a distinctly sub-standard education. For my part, I had to retire to a darkened room and rub myself down gently with a copy of Usage and Abusage.

Democracy - or what?

The problem with democracy is that it's so bloody unpredictable. Give people the right to vote for whomsoever they fancy and, blow me down if that's not just precisely what the buggers will go and do.
Apart from being found wallowing up to their armpits in the exes trough, nothing exercises our Westminster political reperesentatives more than the idea of people wasting their votes on fringe candidates who refuse to behave like proper politicians: People who spend their own time and money getting their names on the ballot paper in order to pursue a cause or make a difference.
It's enough to get Politics a bad name.
That's why, in the wake of the Local and European elections we have had people like Harridan Harperson sliding in and out of radio and TV studios and claiming that the electorate had used the ballot box to deliver a sharp, wake up call to Labour and the other mainstream parties.
Let's get something straight. The main message the electorate sent Labour was that they didn't like its leader, its policies and, most of all, its arrogant disregard for the concerns of ordinary people. The expenses scandal was just the latest - and most blatant - manifestation of that arrogance. So what has been the party's response to this outpouring of dislike? An exhibition of collective guilt perhaps? A ceremonial donning of sack cloth and ashes? Even an admission that their policies might have, just possibly, been ill-conceived and ineptly executed?
Many things have occurred but none of them remotely like any of the above. A series of nonentities, nobodies and mediocrities has rapidly abandoned ship, each closely accompanied by a painfully thin list of their own accomplishments cunningly disguised as a letter of resignation. These missives contain many references to ME and The PARTY. What they signally fail to contain is any mention of country.
Gordon is still getting on with the job of running the country and saving the world yet still makes time to mutter about the need for Constitutional reform. The same old arguments about the superiority of Proportional Representation have surfaced, encouraged by ministers who hope that therein lies a magic formula for survival. (Strange how every administration that gets hammered at the ballot box touts PR as the most democratic voting system - until results improve or they get re-elected, when they suddenly decide that nothing can beat the dear old first past the post system after all. )
The main purpose of this activity is to distract the electorate from the real issues. What our political elites have chosen - and are still choosing - to ignore is the very simple message that we also don't like Europe. We are fed up with having 80% of our laws dictated to us from a bunker somewhere in Brussels. We are not convinced that allowing Spanish ships to hoover all the fish out of our territorial waters is a good idea; or that European judges from such noted democracies as Albania and Romania should be the final arbiters in our Justice system. Even now, most of us struggle with the proposition that decisions taken in Brussels that outweigh Laws made in Westminster really represent the apogee of democratic governance.
This is where your average politician of whatever stripe puts his or her fingers in their ears and makes nannannnanna sounds. Because, it's not what they want to hear.
Europe is good.
Outside the EU we would be just a small island with no influence and no voice in the world. (That's always been one of my favourites; as if, somehow, being part of Europe changed our geographical location and, once we leave, we'll be towed back into a little backwater where no one will ever take any notice of us again.)
If we leave Europe, major companies like Volkswagen, Renault, BMW and their ilk, will no longer want to do business with us. That's right, on the orders of Frau Merkel or Monsieur Zarkosy, their CEOs will close their UK operations and simply ignore a market where new car sales run at 2 million a year, . It would certainly be fun listening to them explaining that decision at their respective AGMs.
The simple fact of the matter is, politicians like the EU because it's like the UK - only much, much bigger. Hence, there is more money sloshing around; the decisions affect vastly more people and the ministers and apparatchiks making them acquire even more power. The fact that the whole bangshoot is riddled with incompetence, corruption and sheer bloody crookery doesn't lessen its attraction one iota. It's so like the Westminster they have come to know and love that they are all bound to feel perfectly at home.
So, when politicians interpret the EU election results, this is the prism through which they view them. The fact that number 2 in the ballot in many parts of the country was a we-want-out-of -Europe party (UKIP) is an inconvenience to be ignored. They rationalised the switch to UKIP ( or the BNP ) as a simple protest vote. The voters didn't really understand the issues because they hadn't been put simply enough and had placed their cross next to UKIP or BNP as a form of punishment. Ergo, the problem was not one of voter disenchantment, but simply one of failed communication. If only Gordon and Peter could simplify the core message the problems would all melt away as the electorate, once again, was regailed with visions of sunlit uplands, where there was never any boom-or-bust, and the skies are not cloudy or grey.
It never really seems to get through to any of them - Tory or LibDem as much as Labour- that it is precisely this kind of self-absorbed arrogance that really gets people's goat. Obviously, some people voted the way they did to send the big parties a message. But, many placed their crosses where they did having carefully evaluated the options available to them. Until the main parties, and especialliy Labour, take this simple fact on board they will never win back the people who have deserted them.