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Twitter Updates
- New WAG London base will be close to Labour HQ at 39 Victoria Street. Handy for Ed to keep Carwyn Jones on message. 4 hours ago
- New WAG offices will be above an excellent Starbucks where Tory staffers buy their skinny lattes. Do a nice line in amaretti biccies. 4 hours ago
- £270K per annum the projected running cost of WAG's proposed new London office on Victoria Street! I remember going to Tory meetings there. 4 hours ago
- Ironically, it seems Labour Welsh Govt want to rent former Tory HQ at 25 Victoria Street. Running costs of £270K p.a.! http://t.co/AdoRzhvd 6 hours ago
- #FF @SteveHiltonGuru #winning #knowingwhichsidebreadsbuttered 11 hours ago
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Monthly Archives: August 2009
Derwen show
To Derwen, the penultimate show of the season, and one of my favourites.
It is exceptionally well attended this year, with very high standards among the exhibitors. Indeed, the shows this season have all had big attendances; I think it must be a popular reaction to the recession, with people showing support for community values at a difficult time.
Next week, it is Cerrigydrudion show, the last of the season and one of the biggest. I will miss it, because I will be speaking in Cardiff, but Sara will go. Eryl Williams always says that once Cerrig show is over, you’re almost into Christmas. A depressing thought, but probably true.
Megrahi story won’t go away
Gordon Brown is really going to have to make a statement about the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, because, despite his best efforts to ignore it, the story is not going to go away.
This morning’s Times leads with a report quoting “a source close to Jack Straw” (wonder who that might be?) who says that the 2007 decision to include al-Megrahi in the prisoner transfer agreement, after attempts had previously been made to exclude him, was not made at his sole discretion:
“It wasn’t just Jack who decided this. It was a Government decision. Jack did not act unilaterally.”
Mr Brown’s refusal to comment on the case, on the ground that the decision was one for a Scottish minister, looks increasingly laughable. There is an obvious factual matrix to the al-Megrahi affair that was developed at national level. Whilst the final decision to release al-Megrahi was indeed made by Kenny MacAskill in Edinburgh, the British Government was clearly heavily involved, from Tony Blair’s meeting with Gaddafi in the tent in the desert to the letter that Ivan Lewis wrote to MacAskill shortly before the release.
Mr Brown was a senior member of the Government at all relevant times and is its head now. The longer he remains silent, the more the British people will conclude that he is treating them, once again, as fools. And their conclusion will be entirely correct.
Jack Straw tells the truth
Jack Straw has just appeared on The World this Weekend emphatically denying that the decision include Abdelbaset al-Megrahi within the terms of the Libyan prisoner transfer agreement was made for trade considerations.
He says that it was made in order to improve British-Libyan relations generally.
I’m sure that was the case; and an easier trading relationship would, of course, be the surest sign of that general improvement.
Apostrophes matter. Full stop.
Good to see that the increasingly and shamefully neglected apostrophe is fighting back, supported by a number of local authorities (HT Harry Phibbs).
The Telegraph reports that councils including Salford, Hampshire, Vale of Glamorgan, Devon, Derby, Salisbury, Plymouth, and East Northamptonshire have taken to issuing “idiot’s guides” on the correct use of apostrophes and other punctuation marks. The Salford advice, quoted in the Telegraph, sets out the argument for proper punctuation with admirable clarity:
“Do not assume that if you don’t know whether to use an apostrophe, then most of your readers won’t either.
“Many of your readers will notice, and they will infer that you did not learn to write correctly. If a reader notices that you have used incorrect grammar, you will instantly lose credibility.”
Full marks to whomever wrote that; he (or she) knows not also the value of punctuation, but also the correct use of that often-misused verb, “infer”, and is therefore a pearl beyond price.
Not what it says on the shoebox
This morning, I received through my letterbox the latest glossy catalogue from a well-known supplier of men’s clothing much patronised by Members of Parliament.
Among the goods on offer was a range of shoes described as “made using skills from Northamptonshire factories”. These were considerably cheaper than those from another range described as “made in Northants, England”.
It’s fairly obvious that the first range is foreign-made. Possibly the shoemakers, or at least some of them, once visited a Northampton factory before returning to China, India, or wherever, to turn out their shoes at knock-down prices. But foreign the shoes certainly are. It’s just that the retailer knows that they wouldn’t sell in anywhere near the same volumes if they were described as, say, “made in Bangalore, India”.
The weakness of labelling and trade description laws in this country (about which I have previously blogged) is utterly scandalous. Northampton shoes are known the world over as probably the finest made. Yet there is nothing to prevent a retailer from describing foreign-made shoes in such a manner as to give the impression that they originate in the county of Northampton.
This is a wholly disreputable practice, of which the retailer – a household name – should be thoroughly ashamed.
Silly season wrap-up
The August bank holiday weekend started yesterday with the traditional bumper-to-bumper parade of caravans along the A55. We are told that the weather will be good, although at 7.00 a.m. on Saturday it doesn’t look overly promising. There’s a decided chill in the air: a portent of autumn, the conference season and then a winter spent gearing up for next year’s election.
Bank holiday weekend marks the end of the silly season, too. Gordon Brown has returned from the Lake District looking more careworn than ever, and little wonder, given the combined impact of the efforts of Bob Ainsworth, Kenny MacAskill and Frank Field over the last few days. So it’s back to business as usual on Tuesday, with real political stories reasserting themselves.
Anyway, given that it is the end of the silly season, I thought I’d review the predictions I made at its start. The travelling cat and the escaped reptile made their appearances gratifyingly early in August and I was optimistic that it could only be a matter of time before a great white shark was spotted off Penzance.
Worryingly, however, the days ticked by and the western waters remained serenely untroubled by exotic predators. I thought I’d blown it. Until today, when, at the eleventh hour, the Telegraph published a report that a piranha has been found in the river Torridge.
OK, so we’re talking freshwater, rather than marine and Devon, rather than Cornwall. But it’s still a vicious foreign fish with lots of teeth in the waters of the south-western peninsula. So I claim a moral victory. And I do hope you won’t be so picky as to dispute it.
How ill is al-Megrahi?
The question of just how ill Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is was raised with Alex Salmond by the BBC’s Eddie Mair on this afternoon’s PM programme. The issue is of considerable importance, since Scottish Prison Service guidelines provide that prisoners should be released on compassionate grounds only if they are likely to have less than three months to live.
Mair put it to Salmond that none of the prostate cancer specialists consulted by Dr Andrew Fraser of the Prison Service would specify a likely time period for the remainder of al-Megrahi’s life. Salmond was, frankly, somewhat evasive in his response, but did acknowledge that there had been some disagreement among specialists as to his life expectancy: “Some said less than three months, some said more than three months.”
Dr Richard Simpson, a Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament who specialised in prostate disease research, said last Tuesday that the medical reports disclosed by the Scottish justice ministry suggest that there is “significant doubt” that al-Megrahi will die within three months. Simpson, indeed, takes the view that he could live far longer, and says that Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, should have taken a second opinion from an expert in palliative care.
Simpson’s prognosis appears to be shared by no less than al-Megrahi’s own father, Ali, who has given an interview today to the pan-Arabic newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat:
Ali al-Megrahi also revealed that the disease which his son is suffering from is not as dangerous as some in the media are portraying it, saying “he was diagnosed with cancer less than a year ago, and we would bring him medicinal herbs from the Chinese herb market in Britain, he was also treated with other medicine in prison in Scotland.” Al-Megrahi senior added “a relative was diagnosed with a similar disease [prostate cancer] and he was treated and recovered completely. We hope that Abdul-Basset recovers his health as well.”
He said “I see that he is getting better day after day, and [his health] is much better than the first day that he returned to his homeland.”
Practising what they preach
The John Lewis Partnership has hit the headlines today with its “modern reworking” of the 1943 Ministry of Information booklet Make do and Mend, updated for the benefit of contemporary credit crunch victims.
The 2009 version not only repeats the wartime advice to use raw potatoes to revive scuffed shoes and toothpaste to remove scratches from jewellery, but also tells you how to prolong the life of your iPod and save money on recordable CDs by reusing memory sticks.
The Evening Standard also offers the fascinating information that:
The guide was written after the department store consulted 28,000 staff, some of whom John Lewis says were working in its stores when the original pamphlet was issued.
Given that in 1943 the school leaving age had just been raised to 15, this means that some JL partners must be at least 81 years old – surely an example, if one were needed, of the firm’s own sensibly frugal approach when it comes to personnel management.
Taxing the countryside
Phone call today from Tom Livingstone, the Western Mail’s excellent political editor. He’s writing a piece about the 2p hike in fuel duty due next week. Is it, he asks, a big issue in rural North Wales?
You betcha, I reply, in best Sarah Palin manner. It’s a massive issue.
The problem is that, in a lot of Clwyd West, there’s no alternative to the car as a means of transport. People can’t economise on fuel, because they’ve already cut their car journeys to an absolute minimum. I have a constituent who commutes daily from Clawddnewydd to Trawsfynydd; it’s costing him a bomb, but, as he puts it, he doesn’t exactly live on a main bus route.
The underlying price of oil is, of course, increasing, so the Treasury is having a massive duty windfall already. The hike is therefore highway robbery. The answer is George Osborne’s fair fuel stabiliser, which reins back the duty when oil prices are high, but Gordon won’t go for that because his tax take is down 20 per cent and he’s panicking.
So is it an election issue? It most certainly is, Tom. People who live in the countryside are mad as heck that the Government neither understands nor cares about the pain they’re feeling.
Labour will be hammered in the rural areas, not least because of the price of fuel. And boy, do they deserve it.
Straw scuppers Mandelson
The Guardian Politics Blog has bad news for Peter Mandelson today.
Mandelson’s supporters, it will be recalled, were enthused by a provision in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill that permits peers to resign from the House of Lords. This would, it was thought, enable Mandelson to resign before the next general election and return to the Commons as “keeper of the Blairite flame”.
However, the Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, today visited the Guardian’s offices and confided that the Bill, due to have its second reading in October, will be amended to provide for a five-year “quarantine” period before retiring peers can seek election to the Commons.
Straw is well known to be no fan of Mandelson. He will undoubtedly derive huge satisfaction from knowing that his amendment will ensure that the political caravan will have moved on to the extent of putting the Labour leadership well beyond the First Secretary’s reach by the time he is eligible to stand for the lower House again.
Prescott clears it up
Amid all the fog and confusion surrounding the release of al-Megrahi, it’s refreshing to see the former deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, giving his own cool assessment of the affair:
“It’s clear that there are other issues … which the PM has been asked about, and he answered yesterday that governments always have difficult decisions to take.
“This was clearly one, without getting into the arguments of whether this man was guilty or innocent. The courts found him guilty, it’s on compassion grounds, under the legal system he is now being released.”
Says it all, really.
Dump Russell Brand and save £1 million
The Telegraph reports today that the BBC has, since 2007, spent over a million pounds of licence fee-payers’ money on entering its programmes for international awards.
A BBC spokesman said:
“The Awards Unit funds the BBC’s entrance to and attendance at a wide range of awards ceremonies in the UK and abroad, to highlight the creativity of British talent in BBC programmes, including those from independent production companies.”
It may seem simplistic in today’s world of cut-throat lobbying, but Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim still has much to commend it:
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a beaten path to his door.
Possible lesson for the BBC: dump the likes of Russell Brand, concentrate on the likes of David Attenborough, and you can probably scrap your Awards Unit, too.
Healthansafety corner
Special congratulations are due to the Richmond Housing Partnership (RHP), a south-west London housing association, for its innovative development of healthansafety thinking.
RHP has banned its tenants from having hanging baskets, window boxes and pot plants on their porches and balconies, not because of the possibility that they might fall on someone’s head, but on the novel grounds that they constitute a fire risk. Really.
And not only has RHP succeeded wonderfully in making its tenants’ lives considerably less pleasant, but it has also found an enterprising way of making money out of the exercise. According to the Telegraph:
From now on, plant arrangements deemed to be a fire risk will be marked with a sticker which gives owners 24 hours to remove them before the housing association takes them away.
Once they are confiscated, their owners will have to pay a £25 charge to get them back.
I have to say that I was not previously aware of the incendiary properties of trailing lobelias, but clearly there was a serious and potentially calamitous gap in my knowledge.
So, well done, Richmond Housing Partnership, bright new talent of the healthansafety industry!
And I am sure that, once they have got over the temporary pain of handing over their £25 for the return of their empty hanging baskets, its tenants will be immensely grateful for having such a caring, forward-thinking, responsible landlord.
Time to re-assess CCTV
An internal Metropolitan Police report has concluded that, for every 1,000 CCTV cameras in London, fewer than one crime per annum is solved.
Britain is now, by some margin, the most spied-on country in the world. There are over four million cameras deployed in the country, one million of which are in the capital. On my fifteen minute walk to and from Parliament every day, past some of the most sensitive and secure buildings in London, I must be recorded on camera several hundreds of times.
The report confirms what many have felt for some time: that CCTV is a highly intrusive, somewhat inefficient and extremely expensive method of fighting crime. The Met report indicates that the cost of solving each offence detected by the use of CCTV is approximately £20,000.
For anyone concerned with civil liberties, this is highly disturbing. It is hard to see why our every movement should be recorded and open to scrutiny for such a modest payback.
It is surely now time for the use of CCTV to be re-evaluated. Whilst there is some evidence of its usefulness as a crime deterrent in such areas as car parks, the value and ethicality of its routine deployment in many other public areas must be in considerable doubt.
We need an urgent national debate as to whether, for a return on investment of less than .1 per cent, we British are content to be subjected to more intrusive surveillance than the citizens of North Korea.
