I have just received some stern advice from our Labour Group Executive pointing out that councillors using blogs and other social media should refrain from personal abuse about other people, particularly their political opponents.
As I am always careful to observe the warnings from my senior colleagues, I will obviously avoid reproducing the protest placard at the bottom of those on this page in today’s Guardian.
Oh what a good boy I am.
Good Christian folk. What would we do without them, eh? Armenian clergymen scuffle and Greek Orthodox clergymen during the annual cleaning of the Church of Nativity, the traditionally accepted birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem decided to whack it out between themselves with broom handles.
Could I take this opportunity to wish my regular band of readers a Happy Christmas. Yes, all of you, even Gary Elsby and the Curmudgeonly old Duffers.
Last year a brown envelope landed on my doormat I had a letter from our friends at HMRC. Due to the fact that over the last few years I have had several streams of income, I had apparently underpaid the Inland Revenue by several thousand pounds. “Not your fault, sir” they respectfully told me, “but your earnings have been covered by a variety of tax offices” none of which appeared to talk to each other, nor to Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs.
I wasn’t particularly happy about having to pay them. If your employer overpays you, and it is the employer’s fault and you have acted in good faith and have spent the money, you’re entitled to tell them to sod off. But sadly, I hadn’t spent the money, and they knew that, and as a dutiful citizen, I sullenly coughed up the money to enable our government to be able to continue fighting futile wars in distant lands.
So it is particularly galling this morning to hear from the Commons Public Accounts Committee that had I been a large corporation, employing a small army of smarmy accountants, and therefore either knowingly (or because my accountants were not only smarmy but also stupid) defrauded the exchequer of anything up to 25 billion smackers, my chums at HMRC would have rolled over and said, “Don’t worry about it Bob, give us a couple of quid and we’ll call it quits.”
Of course, it’s not as easy as that. It may have cost me a bit in order to establish the sort of cosy arrangement granted to Goldman Sachs. They didn’t just employ a bunch of smarmy accountants to help them avoid paying their taxes to our hard pressed Majesty. ‘Call me Dave’ Harnett, the country’s leading tax official admitted to the Public Accounts Committee that he had been forced to suffer 107 dinners and lunches over a two year period with companies, tax lawyers, and advisers. Now we discover from whistleblowers that Harnett personally intervened in settling outstanding cases and agreed to “sweetheart deals” without even consulting with HMRC lawyers.
I realise now wasted my opportunity. A couple of pints of Mild in the Abbey pub, and a fish, chips and mushy pea supper from the Abbey Fish Bar over the road, and Davey-boy may have had a word with the lads back at the shop, and everyone would have looked the other way whilst I made a quick getaway.
Damned good job we’re all in this together.
There is much to despair about in the coverage in the media this morning in relation to last Friday’s European summit. On the right we have the Mail, Telegraph and the Express with all of their British bulldog bluster, amongst the liberal tendency the Guardian are gung ho for Clegg (again, don’t they ever learn) and we are served up some hand-wringing tripe by Mandelson and Jackie Ashley about ‘anti-Europeans’.
It may seem strange to some, but as someone on the left I find I have more in common with this piece by Norman Tebbit than with much of the stuff served up by the media today. Firstly, because Tebbit quite rightly identifies the absurdity of an economic union with a variety of different chief finance ministers with conflicting priorities, and no common fiscal policy, and secondly because as someone who believes in democracy the EU response to the financial crisis is fraught with peril at every turn.
Some of the countries busying themselves with cooking up a solution to the problems of the euro zone are not particularly familiar with democratic principles in any event. Greece may be the ‘birthplace of democracy’ but it is not so long ago it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship, and Spain and Portugal can readily identify with that, not to mention Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and all the other eastern European states recently emerged from under Soviet hegemony. The way in which democratically elected governments in Greece and Italy were casually disposed of by the EU bureaucrats should have sent shivers down the spine of every democrat in Europe,but it passed with barely a murmur. Not a single Italian Minister has any democratic mandate or legitimacy.
I am not ‘anti-Europe’ in Jackie Ashley’s crude shorthand. We are European, by geography and culture. We are trading partners, and in that sense we both need access to each other’s markets. But this new Eurozone superstate is not just about trading relationships, but about controlling a continental European state without the markets having to worry about the vagaries of democracy. It is truly frightening. The economy drives the politics, as any basic reading of Marx will tell you. And when your economy is controlled as tightly as these latest proposals for fiscal and monetary union envisage, by people you never elected and you can not replace, the spiral downwards into a bureaucratic fascism does not seem to be a serious exaggeration.
And who is going to save us? Not Ed Miliband, undecided about whether he is appealing to eurosceptic populism or opposing Cameron for being… errm, eurosceptic . Certainly not Clegg who is welded to this wretched Conservative government because without it he and his party face wipe-out in a general election. And most definitely our Prime Minister, talking tough whilst pandering to xenephobes on his back benches, whilst inwardly wanting to sit at the European diplomatic beanfeast.
I fear it is already too late, we havealready gone too far in to this mess without asking for a democratic mandate, but eventually a British Prime Minister is going to have to grow a pair, and put their fate and their faith in the electorate.
Only then will they have the confidence to say… ‘Well, this is what you wanted!”
I doubt there will be much happening for a few days here. Just taking a long weekend away…
Most opinion polls demonstrate that when people are asked their views on what they consider to be the important political issues of the day, Britain’s membership of the European Union trails in somewhere near the bottom of the list. Ipsos/Mori recently showed that out of 10 issues of most concern to voters, the EU, the Euro, or Europe was 10th in the list of concerns mentioned by respondents. However, I suspect the actual priorities listed may mask real concerns people have about the whole European project. If you look at the top three concerns in the Ipsos/Mori poll, the economy, (un)employment and immigration, although the respondents may not have actually mentioned Europe in their answer, they are all issues massively influenced by Europe and the European Union.
We should also bear in mind that if we actually ran the country based on responses to opinion polls about political priorities, government would have been run for decades by whichever political party promised to get dog shit off the pavement. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea, because you can put no more trust in a politician that promises to eradicate dog shit than one who tells you that his party is Eurosceptic and will repatriate powers from the EU.
For years on this blog I have pointed out to Tories taken in by David Cameron’s EU rhetoric that they were delusional. Their long time in the political wilderness had convinced them that they were the natural party of Euroscepticism. It didn’t matter how many times you told them about Heath, Thatcher and Major being the chief UK architects of the whole Eurofederalist project, they chose instead to create some romantic myth which portrayed the Conservative Party as the defenders of British sovereignty.
Ken Clarke is absolutely spot on. They can rage and froth at the mouth as much as they want, but the Conservative Party are no more likely to repatriate powers from Europe than their Labour predecessors… nor those in the Labour Party who hope one day to defeat them. Being Eurosceptic in opposition is like criticising your opponent in the Council elections for failing to deal with dog shit… easy to do, and pretty damned unlikely ever to happen.
The powers Cameron would like on employment protection, to be able to sack workers easier, to scrap the TUPE regulations, cut back of safety and equalities… are as Delors told the TUC back in 1988, essential components of a single european market. If the British are allowed an opt out and can operate a cheaper labour market because of it, you are allowing a single country to distort the so-called single market. The same argument is used to prevent a Labour government from using state funding to prop up Britain’s uncompetitive industries. The sell-off of Britain’s nationalised utilities wasn’t done because Thatcher was a privatisation freak (although she was) but because the EU requires a free-for-all in energy. Sadly, impotent trade unions greedily held their hands out to grab the crumbs from Delors table. It made their job so much easier if the bureaucrats in Brussels did part of their job for them. Much easier than having to organise their members.
So Cameron can throw raw meat to his ravenous backbenchers, but it is just for show, and like Thatcher waving her handbag in Bruges, rest assured… it is little more than appeasement.
Despite all of the media horror stories about the strike action tomorrow (often from the same people who cheered the beanfeast held to celebrate the wedding of a couple of rich kids earlier in the year)… it turns out that nearly two in three people actually support the public sector strike action tomorrow.
As so often the Labour leadership look like a bunch of rabbits caught in the headlights, terrified of their own shadows, and worried about upsetting the minority opposed to the strike. Well, no-one can accuse them of courting popularity, eh? The reality is that people finally think that someone is standing up to this wretched government, and are supporting the trade unions in doing it. For the second time this year the Labour leadership has succeeded in making the party look irrelevant to the lives of so many people under attack by this right-wing coalition.
When Aston Villa footballer Stan Collymore went missing before an FA Cup game in the late 1990′s he revealed he was suffering from depression. Collymore had cost Villa an estimated £9 million pounds and was earning good money, had a bit of a playboy reputation, and his manager John Gregory was quoted as saying something like “I don’t know what he’s got to be depressed about on 20,000 quid a week.” To Gregory people who worked in factories and struggled to pay the mortgage and support their families, they knew what depression was, not flash rich young athletes, and the manager’s response was to tell his errant star to “pull himself together”.
Since then there have been a number of sports stars suffering from clinical depression. For instance, in the last few years well known international cricketers Marcus Trescothick, Matty Hoggard and Michael Yardy have all confessed to suffering bouts of depression. All England internationals, all well paid, and all obviously failing to “pull themselves together”.
I don’t know why Gary Speed took his own life. As so many people have said, he had everything going for him. Successful, wealthy, a handsome young chap with a seemingly happy family life. To many his death will just be a mystery.
But when the black dog descends, as Stanley Victor Collymore found again this week, it is no respecter of wealth, reputation or lifestyle. It can be triggered by things the sufferer themselves cannot comprehend, and not always major life events like a relationship breakdown, loss of your job or a close relative.
Last week the Prime Minister earned himself some cheap headlines about “blasting Britain’s sick note culture”. People with long term conditions were going to be assessed by “specialists” with a view to getting them off benefits and back in to work. Laudable sentiments, and if true I’m not sure I would argue with it. But it remains to be seen whether Cameron’s ‘specialists’ will have the time or the skills to deal with issues around clinical depression and long term mental health problems.
One thing for sure though, our GPs – those who are apparently going to lead our health commissioning in future – haven’t all exactly covered themselves in glory in this area either. There is not much difference between a GP who signs a script to numb the pain, and a football manager telling you to “pull yourself together”.
As Collymore has displayed again with his cries for help on twitter there are sometimes no quick fixes to these problems. The mind isn’t a broken leg that can be set and make a speedy and full recovery. It is a delicate and complex thing and when the balance is disturbed, as in the case of poor Gary Speed, the consequences can push people right over the edge.
