the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Perhaps I’m alone in thinking that Tim Fallon is a master of irony of the very highest order, inasmuch as he is leader of the Liberal Democrats whilst being neither a liberal nor a democrat. Proof of this is his pledge – oft repeated – that if elected, the Liberal Democrats will hold a second referendum on Britain’s membership of the E.U. Anyone who foolishly thought that the first referendum was conclusive proof of the settled will of the people, expressed in a free and fair democratic process, well tough!

Tim Fallon knows better. He isn’t a pompous, opportunist seeking to make political advantage out of the unhappiness of people who wanted to Remain. Perish the thought. Rather, he’s offering us another chance. Because– and this but one of arguments in favour of holding another referendum I’ve heard many times – that people who voted to Leave weren’t fully aware of what they were voting for. This raises the question of whether those who voted to Remain were fully aware of what they were voting for? How many of us have read the iTunes terms and conditions before pressing the ‘agree’ button?

And it makes me think of what would happen if Tim Fallon came second in the Olympic 100m Final? Would ne demand that the race be run again until he won? Would he blame everyone else for his defeat? And what about this election? I mean, if he wins his seat, is the second placed candidate is entitled to ask for the whole constituency election to be run again? Democracy works both ways. You get the vote, but you also have to abide by the decision. I voted to Remain, but if there was a referendum tomorrow, I’d vote Leave on principle.

And on a rather facile note – but no more facile than he is being in pledging a second referendum – given that he is a devout Christian, shouldn’t he just forgive those who voted to leave and possibly pray for them instead? After all, there is more rejoicing in the eye of a needle when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

That’s it! He’s not like an angry toddler, throwing a temper tantrum because he can’t get his own way; instead Tim has selflessly come to save us from ourselves!

This is going to be a brief post, because as I type these words I am grimacing in pain caused by a trapped nerve in my back.

Anyway, The Guardian had a headline today that claimed:

Jeremy Corbyn vows to ‘fight every seat in every corner’ of Scotland.

And this got me thinking. What if we took him, and indeed all the party leaders at their word – because all of them will say at some stage of the campaign that they’re fighting for something or other – and put them all in a large boxing ring and said ‘On you go, last person standing wins the election.’

There’d be no weapons, but no referee either. It wouldn’t be to the death but it wouldn’t be one on one. It would be a free for all. It would be interesting to see who worked together to beat the other party leaders into submission and also when they’d turn on each other.

It would of course be televised, providing an ancillary benefit of strengthening the UK’s negotiating position abroad. If the leaders of the G20 countries had incontrovertible evidence of exactly how much our PM wanted to be PM and the lengths they were willing to go to in order to prove, it might make focus their minds somewhat, especially if diplomats let it known that PM was taking a tough stance negations.

Putin wouldn’t be worried though. He’s a black belt in judo.

And we could mix it up. For one election there’d be Mastermind type contest, the next The Cube type contest and so on, to prevent leadership contests weren’t simply about who was the hardest. Although thinking about, a Naked Attraction format is certainly a possibility….

Here we go again, and we’d better get used to it, political parties engaging in something I call manifesto clickbaiting. A proposal that has about as much chance of becoming law as they do of forming the next government. Something that will both hopefully – for them, if not us – dominate the news agenda. And act as a political dog whistle to people who are undecided or wavering;

UKIP is to include a ban on the full veils worn by some Muslim women as part of its general election manifesto, its leader Paul Nuttall has said.

Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show Mr Nuttall said wearing a burka or niqab in public was a barrier to integration and a security risk.

Although this proposal might be seen by some as the state suggesting what can and can’t be worn by women – which some religions do very well on their own without the the state getting in on the act – worse was to follow;

Mr Nuttall also told the programme that he wanted to prevent Islamic sharia law becoming “a parallel legal system in this country”.

“It cannot be right that we have court or councils in this country where the word of a woman is only worth half that of a man. That has no place in a liberal, democratic, functioning Western democracy,” he said.

But he said that Beth Din, Jewish rabbinical courts, would not be affected, because they had been established for centuries and the Orthodox Jewish population was falling.

So there we have it. If something has been established for long enough, that’s OK, is it? Really? Is the permissibility of things now, according to Ukip at least, based on how long they’ve been happening? By that yardstick – and there seems no other logical interpretation – because I’ve always eaten my bogies that’s OK?

In the run up to the election, I’ll be temporarily suspending my recent blog writing apathy in favour of attempting to write a short blog every day of the campaign and my thoughts on it. I’ve always been inordinately fascinated by politics and it’s potential to effect transformative change for the betterment of both the individual and therefore society.

But as I wrote in back in 2014

Quite why there persists in people’s minds the idea that politics is complicated baffles me, as politics isn’t complicated at all. One is meant to think that it is, and that suits the main political parties just fine and dandy. Political parties claim to want voter engagement but actually they fear an informed electorate. Largely because, just as Dorothy discovers in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the electorate will realize when they pull back the curtain that the wizard is not a wizard at all, but in fact an ordinary man, and they will react with anger that for so long the truth has been hidden from them.

In a later entry, I promise to outline my theory that anyone who understands how a family operates – the dynamics and tensions that are at play, the ever shifting balance of powers between the parents and the children and the temporary alliances built on need – can understand politics. Anything that is so complicated that at its most basic level it cannot be explained to anyone with an I.Q. larger than the radius of their kneecap, suggests that the fault lies with the person attempting to simplify the complicated. I promise I will outline my theory in another post, but now is not the time.

The time is now however to speculate on the possibility that the retiring Labour MP Andy Burham is related to Captain Black, him off of the Mysterons? Are some unseen hands pulling his strings?

The inevitable doesn’t just happen. It only happens to be inevitable when one is able look back and correctly assess and interpret the conditions that allowed it to happen. Then, and only then, does it become inevitable. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, because it allows us to make the same mistakes, except now they’re re-packaged so they seem something new and modern. As H. L. Mencken observed “ No-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

The housing market in London, were, if it was house, be condemned. Actually, no it wouldn’t. The house would be bought by a property developer, knocked down and in it’s place would go shiny new flats to be bought by foreign investors. As Lex Luthor notes in ‘Superman Returns’ “ They ain’t building any more land” (Which isn’t strictly true. Ask the Dutch.) But the point still stands, land is at a premium, demand for housing far outstrips supply, so much so that in increasingly desperate times, people will do increasingly desperate things.

So it comes as nary a surprise to learn of a Harry Potter-esque scenario, whereby a bed under some stairs was offered up for the bargain price of £500 a month. Mind you it was in Clapham. Or that people are sharing bedroom space with complete strangers because the rent for a single occupancy room is so high. Even a room with a bunk bed is called a ’twin room’. At £295 per person per month. Communal living is making a comeback as young professionals seek to negate the prohibitive cost of living in London like a rabbit in a hutch.

Barnet House, an 11-storey office building, could be converted into 254 studio flats, if an application by building leaseholder Meadow Residential is approved by the council.

Around 95 per cent of them would be smaller than the national minimum space standards of 37sqm, with the smallest being around 16sqm.

That is around 40 per cent smaller than the 28 sqm average Travelodge room

So, therefore it comes as no surprise to learn that Amadan Aibreain has submitted plans for a three new capsule hotel. Capsule hotels are nothing new. They first appeared, as I understand it, in Tokyo where space is at a premium and only the wealthy can afford those premiums. Essentially a capsule hotel offers a bed and amenities the more you pay, the better they are. So profitable have these been that it was it didn’t take long before one of these opened in London. The Z hotel boasts that;

 The building is a designer conversion of a Victorian townhouse, within a prominent block of mixed architectural styles. Inside, you find 106 rooms set over 8 floors. And it places you in Lower Belgrave Street, just off Buckingham Palace Road, and a stone’s throw from Victoria Station and the local theatres.

But the catch is that the Z hotel is only intended for short stays and ever the entrepreneur, Aibreain was quick to see a gap in the market. His ‘novel’ – some might say – ‘immoral’ idea, is that for the majority of the day the room is empty. Thinking that no one wants to pay for something they will not use, his bright idea is to offer rooms available to be rented in blocks of hours throughout the day. As he says “I was in a hotel in Bucharest years ago and it struck me that I only spent 8 hours of every day sleeping in the thing, the rest of the time it wasn’t used and it struck me, what if one could make better use of the time I wasn’t using it, making it more cost efficient”. There is no limit on the duration of the stay either.

Essentially, he sells use of each room in blocks of eight hours. Amazingly, it has proven to be a success because it seemingly gets around the problem of affording rent in London. He already has one in Canning Town with a further three planned for elsewhere in London. His hotels offer a place to sleep and not much else, but then I suppose with most things existing only in a digital format nowadays, the idea of having a large record collection, books, photos, videos is more a generational throwback to the past – all of these can be stored on a laptop or an external hard drive. So what is the compulsion to surround us with stuff? And more pertinently, can one afford the space to have it with you? I write this whilst looking with some irony at my own large record collection, proudly amassed over the years and it truly is a mass. Although it isn’t as much as a mass as I would have liked.

But to get back on topic Amadan Aibreain reminds me of nothing more than a modern day Peter Rachman, a landlord who came to notoriety in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s by renting out properties to the desperate that were squalid to but for an extortionate rent.