the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Tag: news

November 30, 2024

34:63 presents “Simplifying parliamentary procedure using ‘Life of Brian'”

The juvenile in me can’t resist stating the obvious that House of Commons, in having voted to progress the assisted dying bill onto its next parliamentary stage really put the black into Black Friday. You know, because black is the colour most people associate with death, wear when mourning and at funerals. No other reason. I just felt the need to point that out, because of times we live in. I’m not sure what’s worse; either feeling that you have to explain it in case deliberately people misconstrue it for reasons of their own, or going ahead and doing it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, the theme of this post isn’t to discuss the merits or otherwise of yesterdays vote, as long overdue as the outcome was welcome was. Its to make the rather obvious point that rather than showing parliament at its best, which seems to the prevailing opinion, pronounced upon by MP’s themselves and slavishly reported on and amplified by the media, it showed it at its worst, and as MP’s as the self-aggrandising blowhards I’ve always suspected most of them are.

Consider this. Yesterday the chamber was packed. There was barely enough standing room. The debate lasted hours. MP’s on both sides of the argument made impassioned, intelligent speeches. Lots of them admitted they had changed their minds after speaking to their constituents. Some even shared those stories. The mood was of calm solemnity, befitting the occasion. 

Now try and think back of the last time you can think of that happening. Difficult isn’t it? Those seemingly never ending Brexit votes don’t count. They were to calm and reason what death is to life. No, its only when a decision to go to war is being debated that the chamber is like it was yesterday. The one that sticks out in my mind was the debate on the eve of the Iraq war and that was in 2003!  Possibly there been a few more since, but only a handful, and a newborn baby’s hand at that.

Normally the chamber is hardly ever close to being full. Only for Prime Ministers Questions (PMQ’s) is it full and that’s only because MP’s hope that they’ll get the chance to ask the Prime Minister a question, which’ll hopefully get them on national or regional TV news and remind their constituents who they are. They can then put a clip of it on their website. PMQ’s lasts for half an hour once a week and as soon as it’s over MP’s vanish as fast as a virgin on prom night. So far from yesterdays debate showing Parliament at its best, it in fact showed what it could be, but very rarely is, the exception that proves the rule..

That’s my first problem with all this. The second concerns what happens next. Because if you only based your conclusions on TV news footage from outside Parliament as the result of the vote filtered out, you’d be forgiven for thinking that by the end of next week there’d be disabled people in wheelchairs screaming as they were being propelled by unscrupulous relatives to death centres and it would all be perfectly legal. 

The problem with a properly functioning democracy is one of its inherent flaws; that unless the electorate knows how it functions – at least have a have a basic understanding of how it all works – it isn’t a properly functioning one. Not in my book anyway.

Whilst the bill passed the second reading in Parliament yesterday, there are still loads more stages for it to go through if it is ever to become law. Many MP’s appeared on TV stressing their unease about the bill as it is currently drafted, but were at pains to point out that they’d only voted for it to progress through its many Parliamentary stages precisely because they wanted the time to scrutinise it, to suggest amendments and have more debates. The haggle scene in ‘Life Of Brian’ is the clearest example of what all this means in practice; the earliest it’ll become a law that people can make use of is early 2026 at best.

And having a right to do something doesn’t mean you’ll actually ever do it, but that if you wanted to, you could. As far as I’m concerned, the sort of people who are wilfully misinterpreting what happened yesterday in parliament are not too dissimilar to anyone who detects an ‘ist’ at the start of this post. 

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March 31, 2024

Mark Twain meets James Naughtie

There are many things governments are noted for, but having a whimsical, almost mischievous sense of humour isn’t one of them. So ii is all the more gratifying to see both of the governments England and Scotland impressively rising to the challenge set by no-one and and introduce into law on the same day – today,  April Fools Day – two vastly different, legislative pranks of the very highest order. 

In Scotland, today sees the introduction of their new Hate Crime Bill, which is to is going to be the subject on another post but and manages to be both arbitrary  to arbitrary and prescriptive at the same time. Whereas in England, we have the implementation of an increase to the National Minimum Wage (NMW), which might seem to be a good thing, but actually isn’t. 

because From today, the NMW will increase by 9.8% in cash terms and 7.8% above inflation. Sounds great doesn’t it, until one realises that a percentage increase by a small amount of an already small amount isn’t going to make that small amount substantially larger. So that impressive sounding 9.8% means that the NMW will actually increase from £10.42 an hour to £11.44, to the rather less impressively sounding £1.02 an hour. (And because the NMW is age dependant, that only applies if one is 21 or over. More on that in another blog.)

Its hard to imagine it seeming even less impressive than that, but since the NMW was introduced in 1999, “it has driven up the pay of millions of Britain’s lowest earners by £6,000 a year, making it the single most successful economic policy in a generation”, according to a someone at a think tank who will never have to set foot inside a food bank. 25 years multiplied by 52 weeks equals 1300 and if we divide that by £6000, we get the princely sum of just over £4.61 a week.

Its not like the cost of living has gone up much since 1999, is it?

I was thinking about on this when I thought of Chancer and of him proving that foot and mouth disease can be passed to humans, with his assertion that £100,000 a year salary didn’t ‘go that far’. I suppose if you live in a world in which the company you co-founded sold for £30m in 2017, and despite you quitting it in 2009, the 48% stake in it netted you over £14m, then £100,000 a year isn’t that big a deal. He has to scape by on his MPs salary of only £84,144.

If someone thinks that this is somehow ‘the single most effective economic policy in a generation’, then that someone needs to urgently contact the Nigerian prince who a few years ago was always pestering me to give him my bank account details so he could get his fortune out of the country.

That same so called think tank pointed out that that its analysis of the UK showed that between 1980 and 1998, hourly pay growth in the UK was twice as fast for the highest earners as it was for the lowest earners – 3.1% versus 1.4% a year. They only pointed this out however, so could make the claim “that since 1999 this trend has reversed, and hourly pay inequality has fallen with pay growth for the lowest earners five times that seen by the highest earners – 1.6% versus 0.3 per cent per year.” But as I’ve pointed out, whilst the numbers may well be factually accurate, their practically meaningless, as a small percentage increase on a very large sum will have a greater overall effect on the total than the same percentage increase on a much smaller sum. 

All of which left me thinking that the increase to the NMW, is in fact a coded message to both the poor and the business sector. To the poor, that the government has to go through the motions of pretending to care, but really all it does is take the piss. To business it reaffirms the governments ongoing commitment to facilitate payment of the NMW, by means of such corporate welfare instruments as Working Family Tax Credits (WFTC).  In plain English, WTC effectively guarantees that the government will top up the wages of the lower paid if they meet certain criteria, which employers are only too aware of and will ensure their workers meet them.

I had this one job and it paid me 50p an hour. But I was only 15, did it after school and on Saturdays and because I knew I was being ripped off, so whenever I was on the till I topped up my hourly rate to something more agreeable. But that shop isn’t the government and a government use its taxpayers money on something that will improve its citizens lives in a more practical way than saving a few minutes off a train journey from London to Birmingham.

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March 29, 2024

Fat cat meets much fatter and much nastier cat.

Finally I have an answer to one of pop music’s most perplexing questions, War, what is it good for?’, and it turns out instead of it being absolutely nothing, which I never actually believed, we can now put a cash value on its worth and its worth is an eye watering large pay rise. 

Earlier this week, it was reported that the company that owns British Gas, Centrica, had paid its boss, Chris O’Shea, £8.2m in 2023, almost double the £4.5m he trousered in 2022.  Had O’ Shea actually done something to warrant this obscenity then that’d be one thing, but instead he’d just let a few others do the work for him, and many more die for him. 

One of the few was Vladimir Putin, who thanks to Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine, had effectively cut off supplies of gas from there, with wholly predictable result of a rise in the price of gas on global energy markets. And what a rise it was,  

In 2022, Centica’ s profits were £72m but in 2023 were £751m. This was helped in no small part to some very friendly people over at Ofgem, the UK’s gas regulator, who rather considerately allowed the industry price cap on gas to rise, which in turn allowed British Gas increase its costs to its customers to better offset it having sold at pre-invasion prices. 

So O’Shea did nothing to justify an 82% increase in his salary, he just watched as events outside his control unfolded, and let the market do what anyone could’ve reasonably expected it to do. Scarcity of any commodity pushes prices for that commodity up and when demand outstrips supply an opportunity presents itself. Again, as one could’ve reasonably expected the Organisation of the Petroleum Export Countries (OPEC), essentially a cartel to keep oil prices high, agreed to cut oil production last year, knowing that it would drive prices higher and also boost Russia’s , which coincidentally just happens to be a member of OPEC+ – oil revenues.

This act of fortuitous opportunism also helped raise the share price in Centica, as yet more opportunists saw an opportunity, and for the cycle of geed to work beneficially for O’Shea. However, there were some at Centrica who were troubled by all this, not troubled enough to stop his salary increase you understand, but just enough to salve their consciences by including in their annual report a section explaining why it was justified. It is a scathing indictment of the moral and ethical myopia that passes for business acumen in some boardrooms these days

Basically, it was the same self-serving nonsense, which as before, was created with similar statements in the future in mind, stuff like,  

”We need to ensure Centrica is set up for success in the long term and that means attracting and retaining high-performing executives who can lead this large and complex business. Our CEO’s pay is based on the terms he was appointed on. The structure of the package was approved by our shareholders, and it is consistent with similar companies.”

Which in my book translates as “We’re big company, we can do what we like and besides, other companies do it. What’re you going to do about it anyway? Freeze?” If it transpired that Mr O’shea had been in cahoots with Putin, the stockbrokers who’d caused Centica’s share price to rise, and Ofgem to engineer the circumstances that saw his pay increase by so much, he’d probably be lauded as a visionary thinker, an effective operator and worth every penny.

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March 22, 2024

Schrodinger’s cat meets democracy

The result of the recent Irish referendum was many things and I’ll leave it to those more knowledgeable in Irish politics to expound upon the issues it raises. Much has been made of the decision to even hold a referendum regarding changes to the constitution in the first place. There are many problems facing Ireland right now and holding a referendum on something that wasn’t one of them seemed as if it was an exercise in political virtue signalling. One which indicated how in touch with the values and language of now the political class were, by indicating how out of touch they were with the concerns of ordinary Irish citizens.

An example being that changes to the the wording of the constitution are not exactly on a par with proposed cull of 200,000 dairy cows – 10% of the total – in order to better meet the Irish governments goal of reducing agricultural emissions by 25% by 2030. And whilst tinkering with some of wording of the constitution looked good to people who are inordinately pre-occupied with looking good, it also had the added benefit of seemingly coming with no cost, whereas the cull is estimated to cost £600Million.

But come at a cost it did and whilst much was made of the seemingly low turnout – 44% as compared with 2018’s repeal of the abortion law which had 66.5% – even the most cursory of looks at voter turnout reveals just how low it actually was. In parts of the capital Dublin and at least four counties, turnout was estimated to be no higher than 12 per cent and although turnout was high in some places – 46% in other parts of Dublin – there was an overwhelmingly sense of voter apathy. This the nightmare scenario that awaits both main parties in the forthcoming UK election if they fail to engender anything even approaching a sense of it being anything other than the outcome being a foregone conclusion. The victory of George Galloway in Rochdale underlies the reality of this prediction.

As noted in a previous blog post, there were many things I found highly disagreeable about George Galloway’s campaign, but no matter how calculated one considers his campaign to have been, it was undeniably effective. Making it clear that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale that made up 30% of its population and shifting the focus away from local or even national issues, but instead onto Israel/Gaza was an act of effective strategic masterstroke. It paid off, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

A pathetic inditement of our political apathy, made all the more pathetic when one realises there are 26 constituencies with a majority of less than 1000, each notionally at risk from a well co-ordinated and highly motivated grassroots campaign. Which is both a good and a bad thing for democracy. Good, because it allows people to become properly invested in participatory democracy in a meaningful, not theoretical way, and to decide for themselves what issues are important to them, not have them dictated by a party machine. That is also the bad thing, because as Galloway’s victory in Rochdale shows, the numbers needed to win were not big and therefore permits to a certain kind of activism, as factional as it is unrepresentative. Certainly nowhere near cohesive enough to engender solidity with other similar victors on a regional, never mind national stage.

That’s why to me, the results of the Irish referendum and Rochdale are one and the same, bringing in their wake the warning of voter disengagement with the entire political process. Of how that sense of disengagement, that apathy, could be turned on itself, be weaponised and ruthlessly exploited in the pursuit of a rigidly exclusionary agenda.

Think of those 12,335 votes and tell me I’m dreaming.

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March 5, 2024

Forest Gump’s mum meets Winston Churchill

The most depressing thing about the way in which the entire political class and their fawning sycophants in the media reacted to George Galloways’ electoral victory in Rochdale the other night was that it reminded me of how they’d all reacted after the Brexit vote. With an almost tedious inevitability, there was the same anguished newspaper headlines, the same acres of newsprint opining at length about what it said about Britain, about how it was a sad day for democracy, even down to the PM giving a speech outside No.10.

The statesman like thing to have done would’ve been for Loafer to be gracious in defeat and to admit that whilst he had lost, democracy had won. To position himself was a staunch defender of the democratic ideal, that how he felt about the result was ultimately of no consequence. But no. He somehow managed to conflate Galloways victory and the beliefs of some of the people who supported him as evidence of “our democracy itself being a target”

The thing is, it’s a teensy-teensy bit cheeky for Loafer to even mention democracy being a target, given the obscenely undemocratic way he became PM in the first place, in an act of political chicanery that would’ve made even Kim Jong-un blush. He is to democracy what Prince Harry is to reticence. At least his predecessor, Letttuce, was elected, even if it was only by 80,000 Conservative Party members. The last PM to be elected because of an actual general election was Boris’s Johnson, back in 2019.

Secondly did any Cabinet Ministers travel up to Rochdale to support the Conservative candidate Paul Ellison, especially after the Labour candidate was withdrawn? The media were all too aware of the potential for a Galloway win, most obviously because it allowed them to pontificate upon how disastrous an outcome this would be, so it follows that Loafer and Co were aware too. So where was the one time only coalition of all three main parties suspending business as usual and uniting behind a common cause to defeat Galloway? And instead of sounding all high and mighty about putting country before party like all politicians are always testiculating about, maybe actually doing it?

Galloway won Rochdale thanks in part to a low voter turnout – 39.7% as compared to the 60.1% in 2019 – and of that he only managed to 40%. Basically, 12,335 votes. Essentially if the main political parties couldn’t be even bothered to show up, then why should the voters? Worryingly, a couple of candidates whose names appeared on the ballot paper but were withdrawn before the election itself nevertheless managed somehow get a combined total of nearly 3,000 votes. And that leads neatly onto another threat to democracy.

Politicians themselves.

They are increasingly out of touch with the everyday concerns of the people they claim to serve, hardly a surprise when one realises the huge disparity between them and rest of the population. In 2019, research revealed the sheer scale of this grotesque reality. 44% of Tory MPs, 38% of Lib-Dem ones and 19% of Labour ones went to to fee paying – private – schools, as compared to 6% for the rest of us. It gets worse, as most of the Tory ones – 61% of that 44% – are in Loafer’s Cabinet, and 45% lot of that went to Oxbridge.

Less than 1% of the rest of us do. Unsurprisingly, this disparity stretches into the upper echelons of the civil service, the media and business.

No wonder then that a kind of group-think takes place, one that allows an echo chamber of ideological conformity to flourish and for dissenting opinions to be seldom heard. And that danger to democracy extends to the judiciary; senior judges being the most unrepresentative group of them all, with 67% attending private schools and 71% graduating from Oxbridge, with 11 of the judges on the Supreme Court thusly educated. Puts the legal challenges to Brexit into a harsher light, to say nothing of the Supreme Court unanimously ruling that Boris’s Johnson had “unlawfully” prorogued – suspended – parliament for five weeks. Effectively thwarting, albeit temporally, his ability to carry out the wishes of the majority of the UK population

Much like the Brexit vote, there was a lot of scare-mongering by the commentariat and grim predictions of doom that were better suited to Macbeth, but that didn’t prevent the shocked disbelief and abject bewilderment of the entire political class when the lower orders actually used democracy to be actively involved in their own lives. Possibly not enough of them made full advantage of that possibility in Rochdale, but whose fault is that? That’s one of the great strengths of democracy, which is why the right to vote was very begrudgingly and even more incrementally broadened to eventually encompass all citizens. Just as people are sometimes contrary, often unpredictable and frequently unfathomable, so too can be election results.

And as I pointed out in a previous blog, Galloways self-professed and ruthlessly focused targeting of Rochdale’s Muslim population may well have been distasteful, but from another point of view, a brilliant piece of strategic thinking, one which all of the other parties have always used. Indeed election night analysis almost fetishises the possibility of marginal seats being lost to a rival party, often cutting away so we can see the winner bask in their fleeting moment in the spotlight. And with an emboldened Galloway eyeing up marginal seats – 25 of which have majority of less than 1,000 – the results may not be to everyone’s liking, but isn’t that the point of democracy, losers consent?

To quote Forest Gumps’ mum ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what your gonna get.’

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March 23, 2015

How sports news is like Debbie McGee…

For those of you who don’t know who Debbie McGee is, she’s most famously known for being the assistant to the magician Paul Daniels whom he later married. (Or maybe she isn’t that famous if I have to tell you who she is!) And for those of you who do know who she is, you’re now thinking of the infamous clip on the Mrs. Merton show. Which you can find here.

My last blog – which was a few weeks ago – ended with the somewhat rash observation that in this one, I’d be concerning myself with the fact that whilst sports news might be an oxymoron, it least offered a simple and understandable alternative to actual news. I write rashly because in the strict dictionary definition of oxymoron sports news isn’t one. It might not be news as I see it, but if it is information concerning sports that wasn’t widely known to people who care about these things, is, then it qualifies as news. So I write instead that sports news is like Debbie McGee. Allow me to explain.

As every magician knows, if the audience is paying too close attention to them, then there is every chance that they will spot the sleight of hand or other chicanery they are is engaged in. (For the purposes of this argument all magicians are therefore less than handsome men, and it thereby follows that their assistants are attractive younger females wearing as little as the audience will permit). The purpose of the magician’s assistant is to distract the audiences’ gaze away from the magician and to focus instead on something more appealing. In essence the audience looks the other way, so that the trick can be successfully executed. In much the same way sports news acts as a distraction from actual news. Let me give you an example.

Consider the many problems that face the world today. There’s certainly enough to choose from. From arms control to world hunger and everything in between, the problems facing humanity are simple; the solutions to them are anything but. (Although changing its name is one way to make the threat seem less threatening. The most obvious example being when exactly did global warming become climate change? Several large hats off to whatever genius thought of that one!) And if you spent any amount of time dwelling on all these in a very short space of time you’d go mad. At any rate, you wouldn’t be a funster! Let us take what is on the face of it, an easy one.

ISIS as everyone – except for mental pigmies – would agree is a dangerous slide backwards into religious intolerance and barbarity. But how did ISIS come to be? It is an easy question but one that doesn’t lend itself to easy answers. It all depends on how far back you wish to go. One could argue with some justification that ISIS filled the power vacuum that was left after the American withdrawal from Iraq. Anyone with a knowledge of that whole sorry misadventure could counter that with the argument that the power vacuum only existed because the Americans had not only disbanded the Sunni dominated military but had also installed a weak and ineffective leader. Going further back one could also point to the American support of Saddam Hussein provided them with a regional strong man who was totally dependent on them for support. Mind you Iraqi oil revenues didn’t hurt him either and only a cynic would draw a correlation between Iraqi oil and American support. Nor would one think of the one known diplomatic realpolitik phrase “He might be a bastard but at least he’s our bastard!”

Going even further back, one could even point out that the map of the modern Middle East, which as we know it was drawn up after the First World War according the Sykes – Picot treaty. A treaty that, like so many peace treaties before and since, worked well for those not directly affected by its provisions. If anything was guaranteed to foster generational hatred and tribal rivalries for decades to come then this was it. ISIS is but one as an example of how complicated things can be when you start to look at them with any degree of critical analysis. No doubt my own somewhat sketchy overview of events that lead us to ISIS might well be criticized, but that is precisely my point. Complicated things ARE complicated and defy soundbite understanding.

So it is no wonder that sports news provides an easily understandable alternative to actual news. If you follow a football team you know the rules that both sides will play by. You also know that a football match normally lasts for ninety minutes and at the end of it your team has either won, drawn or lost. And you will also know that at the end of the season their place in the league is a certainty, and not open to interpretation.

News offers no such rules based easy to follow narratives. One is always in the middle of news. The beginning of any news event depends on your perspective and your own bias. There is no clearly defined black and white with news, although there are considerably more than fifty shades of grey. Sports therefore act as a magician’s assistant, it distracts one from more important concerns and in so doing it effectively inures people to the more deserving of their attention than sport. Don’t get me wrong. I loved sport, was in my schools football, rugby and cricket teams. But soon after leaving school, I found I’d no enthusiasm for being a spectator of sports. There were far more interesting things worthy of my attention. But not if there’s a scantily clad attractive woman instead!

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