National Poetry Day UK: In a Home

IN A HOME







`Yes I'm all right'



the old one

turns away

towards the place

where all the old ones wait



not looking back



I caught

a lifetime's feeling

in her daughter's eyes

(c) Richard Lawson

It's National Poetry Day today. Theme: Home

Feeling Sorry for David Cameron

Pic from PA via Telegraph

This may lose me followers, but I have to say it.

Yesterday I had a tiny twinge of feeling sorry for David Cameron.

Ye I know. He is privileged, been to Eton, and is about to tear the country apart, plunging us into the deepest recession in 70 years, is a friend of the bankers, and is a Tory.

But I still feel sorry for him. Just as I did for Gordon.


Dave had nothing to say of any importance yesterday, and had to read, not recite, but that was because he has been changing nappies. Notionally. I'm sure he has someone to change nappies for him really.

He stood up and failed to impress his party, because large swathes of his party actively hate him. And Tories are very good at hate. They do it well. It's their Best Thing.

His Big Idea is the Big Society, and nobody knows what it means. Insofar as it means anything, it would mean better social cohesion, but his neighbour in No 11 is about to rip society apart, leaving Dave holding the limp tatters of a burst balloon of his Big Idea.

Dave is not a bad man. He has a good heart, and he means well. But he is leader of a party that is still very nasty, a party of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. They are setting about punishing the North, the poor, and now mothers who do the right thing by the Tory canon. Dave has the Spending Review to look forward to, and after that, the pain of imposing intolerable pain on the nation that he professes to care about.

Why did Osbore bounce the party with an ill thought through Reduction of Child Benefit for families whose mother stays at home looking after the children? Clearly this was a late entrant into the arena. Did Andy Coulson nudge The Boy George into doing it in order to divert attention from the Channel 4 programme that exposed once again his wet tissue of lies?

Clearly, Coulson is a dead man walking. He has become the story, not the story teller, and is doomed. The amazing capacity of the mainstream media to do a three wise monkeys on Coulsons mendacious pretence of ignorance of phone hacking is delaying Coulson's departure, but depart he will. The reason that he has hung on this long is that Dave is probably procrastinating, dreading the awful moment when he has to call Rupert Murdoch that his man Coulson has to leave Number 10. Even worse, who will Rupert install in Coulson's place? Richard Littlejohn? Mad Mel?

Faced with the prospect of 4 years of sharing space with Rupert's next place man, in addition to  the impossible prospect presiding over a  recession while simultaneously cutting public spending, it is not unreasonable to feel a tiny bit sorry for Call Me Dave.

The Ballad of Andy Coulson

To the tune of Poor Paddy Works on the Railway.


The Ballad of Andy Coulson

With Andy Coulson in control
The News of the World was on a roll
The News of the World was on a roll
Exclusives every Sunday,
(Each Sunday).
But Andy knew not whence they came
Poor Andy was out of the game.

They brought a story to the boil
From Mulcaire’s hacking of a Royal
Two men went down and still stayed loyal
And Andy still knew nothing.

They were working
Serving Murdoch
Hacking mobiles
Bugging Royal
Selling tabloids
Andy Coulson still knew nothing.

They hacked into the phones of slebs
Politicos, coppers and a few debs.
They even hacked into the plebs
But Andy still knew nothing,
(Knew nothing),
Even with the practice so widespread
Poor Andy was out of the game.

Now silence you can always buy it
They paid their victims to keep quiet
A million pounds to stop a riot
Andy still knew nothing.

They were working
Serving Murdoch
Hacking mobiles
Bugging Royals
Selling tabloids
Andy Coulson still knew nothing.

They called in Hayman of the Yard
Who really didn’t try too hard.
The victims of the crime were barred
From knowing about the hacking,
The hacking.
Now Hayman works for Murdoch
And Andy, he works for Dave.

Democracy’s a wondrous thing
So long as you can rein it in
Control the press, forget the rest
And tell the people nothing.

They were working
Serving Murdoch
Hacking mobiles
Bugging Royals
Selling tabloids
 Andy Coulson still knew nothing.


Now slowly truth comes trickling out
Like slobber from a sick pig’s snout;
It makes it clear beyond all doubt
That Coulson is a liar
(A liar).
It makes it clear beyond all doubt
That Andy was in on the game.


So what is Cameron to do
With Andy fallen in the stew
They try to keep it out the news
But Twitter’s got the story.


They were working
Serving Murdoch
Hacking mobiles
Bugging Royals
Selling tabloids
All for lying Andy Coulson.

© Richard Lawson 5.10.10

(If you want to

Channel 4 Dispatches: Metgate/Coulson affair action

The excellent Chanel 4 documentary Tabloids, Tories and Telephone Hacking on the Coulson/MetGate affair has just gone out. You can see it here. 

As a matter of interest, our screen froze and we lost sound at an interesting point. The same thing happened in 2 other areas of the country, according to Tweets. Reviewing it, I believe it was just as Peter Oborne was summarising his case. At the point sound was lost, (09:26 into the above linked video) Oborne was saying, (paraphrased):


"The idea that this was a single rogue reporter is risible. This story is not just about newspaper ethics, but concerns the relation between media and police, and the influence of Rupert Murdoch's News International at the heart of Government."

On re-watching the film today, I think it may have frozen at 05:09, when Oborne was giving a precis of the film's argument, expressing it as 

"Above all, what does this tell us about the power wielded by News of the world's owner, Rupert Murdoch?


The film caused a storm of feeling among those who watched it - anger, despair and depression. 
We need to convert these emotions into action.

Here is a start point: why not write to your MP and local paper on one or all of the action points below.


This resolution was passed unanimously at the last Green Party Conference in Birmingham Sept 10-13th.

1.    Conference notes that the scandal arising from illegal surveillance of public figures by the News of the World raises many important questions relating to democracy in the UK. It is emerging that the tabloid press frequently indulge in illegality. The influence of Rupert Murdoch's News International empire is excessive, and its relations with the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), who appear to have failed to conduct the News of the World investigation with due diligence, is questionable.

Conference resolves that the Green Party, through its elected members and its press activity, should call for :
1.    An independent inquiry, whether judicial or by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Police.
2.    The MPS to  release all information relating to illegal surveillance to those affected by it
3.    A fresh investigation into the surveillance by a police force other than the MPS
4.    Mobile phone companies to review and improve their customers' security
5.    The setting up of a Media Commission, along the lines of the Banking Commission, to review and make recommendations on better journalistic practices, including the matter of undue domination of the media by a single person or corporation.
6.    An amnesty for past acts of illegal surveillance by journalists, in order to get a fresh start without an unmanageable number of individual court cases
7.    The Press Complaints Commission to be replaced by a body with real authority to correct errors within the media.

Israel - non-violence succeeds where violence sucks

Great story here in the NYT about a Palestinian community who succeeded in diverting an Israeli security barrier by non-violent resistance.

There is a film about it - Budrus.

Violence is a self-perpetuating vicious circle. Non-violence is the antidote to violence.
It is a pity that there is no reference in Green  Party Israel/Palestine policy (afaik) to the advantage of non violence, and no clear reference to the eminently green policy of cross community cooperation in water management projects. 

And another thing. We have a problem in that ultra-orthodox religionists believe that the Creator promised the whole Land, from Dan even unto Beer-Sheba, to His Chosen People. Against this kind of certainty, rational negotiations shine as a candle on the surface of the sun.

Depressing. But there is a ray of light. As well as promising the whole land, the Torah also specifies many other items.

For instance Deuteronomy 20:19 forbids the destruction of an enemy's trees, something that the Israeli bulldozers do on a regular basis. There are many other laws that could rebound on Israel's actions, which would be sufficient to inhibit most of what the Israeli Government and its agents, especially the settler movement, is doing.

If learned and right-thinking Israeli jurists would take on this challenge, taking settlers to court for breaking the laws in their own Torah, we might be able to sideline the obsessives, and get some rationality in the situation.

I stress the "might". It's worth a try. Anything is worth a try.

Glastonbury tickets: there is a better way...

After 4 hours of trying, on 2 computers and a phone, we got our Glastonbury tickets today, 2 off, at the very last moment.

Getting Glastonbury tickets at present is a huge cyber queuing event, with 200,000 tickets to sell, and so I reckon 400-600,000 peeps were there trying, which would mean about 800,000 hours spent in trying to get through, and many KWh of electrons being agitated. It is a random event, getting through - your machine has to log in at the very moment someone else logs out.

So I have a better idea. Register at leisure in the months before the tickets are divvied out, as you do at the moment. You are given an index number, which are stored on database. On the day, a random number programme crawls through the database, picking lucky winners, who are then emailed to prompt a transaction completion.

That should work, shouldn't it?

IDS' welfare reforms - good, but will need WSS in order to work.

"Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne reach historic agreement to deliver a ten year programme of welfare reform", tweets @TimMontgomerie. 

Read Tim's nice clear description of the reforms here.

OK. Good. Good for IDS. Not good if it means that some poor people get even less, without any chance of getting more, but the 21st Century Welfare document says that is not going to happen. Let's hope they're right.

But credit where it's due, IDS has got two good ideas: the Unified Credit, and trying to make it so you always get more money by going to work. Two very good ideas, all credit to IDS for getting that far.

There's just one thing.

It is pointless to train and motivate claimants to seek work, and to  facilitate their passage into said employment if there is no bleeding work out there for  them to take up.

I hope I have expressed that sufficiently clearly, because it is vital to my argument.
Please use the Comment slot below if you have any difficulty in understanding the above line, because it is vital to the development of my argument. By pointless, I do not mean blunt. 

I mean futile. Fruitless. Ineffectual. In vain. Doomed. 

I mean, like, der.

This is the weakness of Ian's otherwise excellent scheme. The trouble is, that his friend and ours, George Osborne, is about to throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, as a mass human sacrifice to the Gods of the Market. George is in all probability going to exacerbate the next recession. 

This means that far from reducing the enormous Social Security outlay, George is going to balloon the SS budget like a minor starlet's lips after visiting an inebriated plastic surgeon who got muddled up between 10 ml of collagen and 100 ml of collagen.

SS spending is going to go up, not down, thanks to George's policies of cutting spending. 

Yes, bit daft.

For IDS' plan to work it needs, well, work.

I have a cunning plan that supplies the vital third ingredient that could make this work thing work. In my submission to the consultation, I called it the WSS - Work Stimulus Scheme.

Essentially it takes Ian's idea a step further, and allows people to keep all their benefit when they go into work in the green sector of the economy.  All of it. Without a time limit*.

This enables enterprises in the green sector of the economy to increase productivity while providing work. The benefit is transformed from being a dead dole to a living stimulus to the green economy. 


Read an intro to it about it here.

Confirmation from a DWP report:
– Subsidised (‘transitional’) job schemes that pay a wage can be more effective in raising employment levels than ‘work for benefit’ programmes. (.pdf)
*So it works like a Citizen's Income. Except it's not a full 100% perfect Citizen's income. Which is why the Hand Brake Tendency threw it out when I proposed it at  Conference. It's like refusing to get on a bus because it is not yet at the place you want to be.

What exactly do the Tories mean by a "Small State"?

The ideology that is driving George Osborne's maniacal chainsaw attack on the fabric of British economy and society arises from the philosophy of individualism (which is fundamentally mistaken, given that mankind is a social animal) which has the mantra "Private good, public bad".  They always preach the virtue of a "small state".

What is a small state?

What is the state?

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a state as: an organized political community under one government; a commonwealth; a nation.

Which is odd, because the Tories who want a small state always oppose devolution of Scotland &c as "Breakup of the Union".  They talk up the nation. 

To work out what they want, we have to look at what they hate. They hate Communism, where the State was, or tried to be, total, with no private economic sector, and almost no individual freedom. Totalitarianism.  Which is a dumb and failed idea, to be rejected by any right thinking person.

Right thinking peeps have come to a consensus on the correctness of a mixed economy, with the private and public sector in dynamic balance - more in some countries, less in others. But there are ideologues within the Tory party, and also maybe within the LibDems, who want to go further, and reduce the "State" to a bare minimum, with maximal power and minimal restraint handed over to the private sector.


This is what is happening in the NHS, and has been for decades, with private suppliers competing with NHS suppliers. And in local government, where private contractors have been taking over housing and waste management. 


There is scant evidence that private service is cheaper or more efficient than public provision, and some evidence that it is less efficient. Which is not to say that state provision is always efficient. It is not. It needs constant revision, preferably grassroots-up through an enhanced Suggestion Box system.

A key point to remember is that the flagships of the private sector are the multi-national (transnational) companies. They are bigger than most states, and are effectively above and beyond many laws. Their directors' responsibility is solely to maximise profits, and they avoid and evade taxes to a large degree. They have overweening political influence. They like the idea of a "small state", because it leaves them free to maximise profit with scant regard for the well being of people and other living things. The state most definitely needs to grow, not shrink, its power to bring multinationals under the rule of law.


So it is all a bit unclear. The State is an ambiguous, mixed concept. It can be inefficient, it can sometimes be an enemy of freedom. But it can also serve the people, as with the NHS, social services, the welfare system, the police (in their good, thief catching function, not in their controlling mode, as in kettling), and even the armed forces, in their defensive mode (protecting us from invasion by the French, and in successful actions in, dare I say it, Sierra Leone.


The state is, as the definition says, our common-wealth. We are a social species, and the state should embody and facilitate our sociability. The state is our pooled resources. It can get it wrong, and can be inefficient, in which case it needs to be reformed.  Maybe it could be reformed so as to make it more efficient, in which case, the tax take could go down, which would be nice, but don't hold your breath.


What is most definitely blindingly obvious is that it has taken the state decades and centuries to reach its present level of debt and inefficiency, and it will take many decades to reform it towards efficiency and solvency. Osborne's cuts are a totally insane effort to destroy the deficit in 5 years.


What we face as a nation is what an obese man with a BMI of 40 faces when he goes to a surgeon, and the surgeon offers to cut the flab off with a chainsaw. Without an anaesthetic.  Osborne's cuts are deadly. They will increase unemployment, bring on a double dip recession, lower the tax take, and increase, rather than decrease the deficit.


Don't believe me? Just wait 12 months to see who is right.

______________________________________________

More on the Small State

A lesson in economics for George Osborne: Investment

Class, settle down. Gorge Osborne, stop kicking Liam under the table.  Would the Treasury Civil Servants at the back please stop talking among themselves and LISTEN.

Today we are going to do Investment.

Investment, according to the Economist's dictionary, means:
Putting MONEY to work, in the hope of making even more money. 

Let us take an example. The UK is running out of oil, we are importing gas, and Thatcher shut down our coal mines. We have got in any case to stop using carbon based energy because it is wrecking the planet.

This means that we must invest, first in things that mean that we have to use less carbon energy, and second, in renewable energy technologies including the pan-European HVDC grid.


All clear so far? Stop fidgeting, George, and pay attention.

So money provided to create work in insulating houses and businesses up and down the country will save more money in the future because we will not have to import so much energy in the future.

The money paid to the low-skilled workers who insulate houses will save money that would be paid in unemployment benefits, and the extra money that they earn will be spent into the local economy, keeping the local community in a more healthy state, raising popular morale generally.

Yes George? You say there is no money. Quite. So what do we do if we have no money? We first try to borrow some from the bank. But right now, the banks are feeling very sorry for themselves and are not lending any money to anyone.  So we have to go to the same place the banks go when they have no money, to the Bank of England. The BoE, as we call it, can create necessary money in exactly the same way that banks create money.  That is, by creating two values that balance each other out - an asset and a liability. 

The asset is the positive side: the promise that energy will be saved, jobs created, and the economy stimulated. The liability is that people might just run off with the money and not insulate any houses. The liability is protected by checking up that the work gets done. Got it? Good.

For your homework, I want you all to find out how many jobs will be created, at what financial costs, and how much energy will be saved as a result, together with the financial value of the energy saved, taking into account the rising price of carbon energy as resources dry up, and internalising its ecological costs.

You're the bloody economists, after all, this is your job. I'm just an ill-paid primary school teacher. Now, off to PE. Liam, I saw that. See me afterwards.