The Obscurer

Month: June, 2005

Thursday 16th June 2005

Guilt By Association

According to The Scotsman

THE “great train robber” Ronnie Biggs is making a fresh bid for release from prison on compassionate grounds, his legal advisor said last night.

The 75-year-old, who has suffered several strokes and minor heart attacks and can no longer speak, is being held at Belmarsh, a category A prison, where he receives 24-hour care.

My first instinct, perhaps harshly, is that Biggs is taking the piss. He happily evaded justice for years, then when it suited him he flung himself upon the mercy of the British judiciary and taxpayer. However, I am not exactly a hard-liner when it comes to prison conditions, and perhaps there is a case for compassionate release and house arrest; what purpose is achieved by keeping a frail old man in prison?

But wait; what is this?

His legal advisor, Giovanni Di Stefano, said Biggs “did not belong in prison”. He added: “If the Home Secretary can release the most supposed dangerous terrorists from Belmarsh, why cannot he let this old man go?”

Oh dear. Quite apart from the fact that the Home Secretary didn’t want to release the Belmarsh detainees (who, unlike Biggs, haven’t been found guilty of, or even charged with an offence) my heart always sinks when I hear Di Stefano’s name in a news report. Perhaps you shouldn’t judge someone by the company they keep, but Di Stefano’s list of associates makes quite some reading. What next? Biggs’ publicity to be handled by Max Clifford?

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Saturday 11th June 2005

Mersey Paradise

Liverpool have been given the opportunity to defend the European Cup they won in such a dramatic manner the other week. Time to celebrate? A rare and welcome victory for common sense? Well, you would think so wouldn’t you, but according to Les Lawson of the Liverpool International Supporters Club, Liverpool have been “treated with contempt” by UEFA for being asked to compete in the qualifying rounds of the tournament. In this article on the BBC website phrases such as “insult” are bandied about. I find this bizarre.

Remember that a couple of days ago Liverpool weren’t in the Champions league at all; whatever your opinion on the matter that was the situation, and within the rules of the competition at the time. In order for Liverpool to compete next season UEFA have had to change their rules mid-stream, and if I were a Liverpool fan I would be counting my blessings that they have done so. In any case, just a few weeks ago, when there was the suggestion that TNS could meet Liverpool in a play-off for their qualifying round spot, this was generally hailed as a great idea, a real fillip for the earlier rounds of the competition. Now that UEFA have effectively sanctioned such an event, some Liverpool fans are saying the club should tell “them to stick it”.

The simple fact is that according to the original rules, Liverpool should not be in next year’s competition. Do I think that rule was a sensible one? No. I think that the champions should always be allowed the chance to defend their trophy. That said, I don’t think that the team who finish fourth (or third, or even second) in the Premiership should compete in the Champions League in the first place, so there you go. Liverpool, I think, can count themselves very lucky.

Meanwhile, my team Man City look like they will be denied the chance to take Liverpool’s vacant spot in the UEFA cup. The Premier League say they are going to fight City’s corner, but they may as well not bother. While there has clearly been some sympathy for Liverpool’s plight at UEFA headquarters, I suspect no one down there gives a toss about City and so nothing will change. To be honest I don’t even know where this suggestion came from; it always seemed like a ludicrous non-starter from the off. I certainly never heard any UEFA official entertain the notion of City slipping into the tournament; perhaps it was dreamt up by some Manchester Evening News journo with an overactive imagination. No, if we wanted to qualify for Europe we could have done so by beating Middlesbrough in the last game of the season. We didn’t, and so we haven’t.

PostScript: If you haven’t already seen it, check out this site, purporting to be a blog from a new American fan of Manchester United; or the Manchester Buccaneers, as he prefers it. Very, very funny indeed; nearly as funny as the comments section, where a spectacularly large number of people demonstrate their lack of a sense of humour by blatantly not getting the joke.

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Friday 10th June 2005

The Last Broadcast

There have been a couple of fine posts at Third Avenue over the past few weeks on a subject I have covered here previously (for example) namely the BBC; in particular this post which includes a good debate on the subject in the comments section. Now, I think I have written enough about the BBC previously and I don’t particularly want to go over old ground (although that has never stopped me before) so I hope this will be my final post on the matter, but reading Third Avenue did make me question just why it is that I have felt the need to defend the corporation a number of times. I think there are two main reasons.

First, there are the criticisms of leftist bias that to me seem unfair. These allegations are not new – I remember there being complaints of their coverage of the Falklands War, because, for example, they wouldn’t refer to British troops as “our forces” – but since the Hutton Report this seems to have been stepped up a notch. It is quite common to read some totally misleading accounts of the whole Gilligan/Kelly affair (see this Fox News comment for example, via Bloggerheads), and particularly across some of the (for want of a better phrase) Right Wing blogs it is taken as given that the BBC is a nest of leftist vipers.

Now, some criticisms may be in order. Blimpish says of the BBC (in the comments section on Third Avenue) “primarily liberal people work there (no conspiracy behind this, it’s partly down to the type of people who get drawn into TV-media)” and I reckon that this may be true of the BBC. The result could be that there is some sort of “institutional leftism” at the organisation, and I can just about entertain this as a possibility. However, the criticisms usually levelled at the BBC go further than talk of some slight unconscious bias. Like Third Avenue I am horribly drawn to the car crash blogging at Biased BBC; there and elsewhere it is not uncommon for commentators to speak matter-of-factly of the BBC being a Marxist organisation with a unified political agenda. This goes way beyond any talk of a vague soft leftish / liberal leaning for the broadcaster; it is also complete and utter bollocks. I should be able to ignore the insane ravings coming from Biased BBC, but I appear unable to do so.

Secondly, though, I reckon that just 10 years ago I wouldn’t have been a flag waver for the corporation at all. I remember an early Alan Partridge radio programme where he “interviews” Tony Hayers, the “BBC’s commissioning editor”. Partridge reels off a list of his favourite BBC programmes that fit the ethos of “quality, originality and excellence”; except the examples he names (let’s say “Morse”, “Wexford” and “World in Action”) were all made by ITV. The only good BBC programme he can think of is “Noel’s House Party”. It was a funny joke at the time, but just a few years later it seems terribly dated; it is only with great difficulty that I can think of any half decent ITV programmes at all.

This is another reason that I feel such affection for the BBC. Multi channel television has enlightened me, opened my eyes to all sorts of new possibilities; I really never knew just how crap some television could be before. ITV, and to some extent Channel 4 have reacted by producing some absolute shite in response. The BBC has not been immune – I rarely ever watch BBC1 nowadays – but they still have a knack of generally making the better programmes (I am not totally slagging off the TV landscape since Sky appeared, in fact arguably TV overall has never been better; it’s just that there seems so much more dross nowadays as a percentage of the whole). Even critics of BBC News often accept that the BBC does still make some top quality programmes, among the best on television.

Ultimately then, what better reason to defend the BBC than to simply say that I think they are the best broadcaster in the country, and that consequently it seems bizarre that they appear to receive more criticism than anyone else. Similarly, while I have some issues with the TV licence (that it is a regressive tax, and that non-payment is a criminal rather than a civil offence) my overriding feeling is that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and that all the other suggestions for funding the BBC look to me as if they would compromise what we already have.

But finally, yes; I am aware of the irony that my post last week slagged off a BBC television programme!

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Friday 10th June 2005

A House Is Not A Motel

Regular readers (not that there seem to be many left now I have returned from holiday) will notice a redesign of this site. Basically I got a bit fed up with visiting other blogs and finding they looked identical to mine, using the standard “scribe” template from Blogger. I was happy with the way my blog looked, but I decided as my comments and observations on life are uninspired, unoriginal and far from unique, the least I can do is have a website that looks different from lots of others out there.

Not that the new look is exactly a state of the art or cutting edge design, pretty much a straight lift of the look you find on many of the TypePad blogs; but I do like the neat uncluttered way those blogs look, and so I hope I have done a half decent copy. Anyway, if you’d told me when I started this blog last year that I would be able to do any sort of HTML redesign at all I would have laughed. But not to your face; I am not that rude.

While I am doing some “blog housekeeping” I will just mention the addition of The Sharpener to my list of links; not that this group blog needs further publicity as it seems to be doing just fine by itself. However, I do think it is worth noting that The Sharpener is a great blog, with some excellent writing from some fine bloggers, and along with Tim Worstall’s BritBlog Roundup every Sunday is a fantastic time saving device for someone like myself whose “blogging time” (largely of my own volition) is somewhat limited. The quality of the posts so far has been very high, and has introduced me to a couple of nice blogs at Third Avenue and Actually Existing. If you haven’t already, give it a go.

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Saturday 4th June 2005

The Nanny State We're In

I watched a few minutes of Grumpy Old Men last night, just before popping out for a Chinese take-away, and it made me realise how happy-go-lucky and un-grumpy I actually am.
The subject this week was “The Nanny State”, and its opening narration neatly encapsulated the somewhat ambivalent attitudes some people have on the subject. I am paraphrasing, obviously, but the voice-over went something like “There was a time when at least you were free from the state’s nannying influence in the morning, when you could retire to the bathroom and dream up new laws you would like implementing”. In other words, the nanny state interfering in your life is wrong, but you want the state to enact more laws to interfere in others’ business . Smashing.

This is part of the “Daily Mail paradox”. If you were to do a statistical breakdown I would suspect that the phrase “the nanny state” has been used more often in the Mail than in all other publications throughout history put together. At the same time, no other paper is quite so active when it comes to calling for further restrictions on drinking, gambling, video games, films, television programmes and so on. If the Mail doesn’t like it, then it should be banned; if it does, then the nanny state should leave it alone.

But what were the specific intrusions by the state as voiced in Grumpy Old Men? Well, the first was being told about testicular self-examination. Oh cruel and tyrannical state! How dare you educate people about health issues? Personally, since puberty, I have been checking my balls daily for no good reason, but I am not forced to do so by law. Perhaps the contributors live in different health authorities with different byelaws, but I doubt anyone is committing an offence in not feeling their bollocks.

Then there was the old bore about CCTV cameras. “I don’t want to be watched 24 hours a day,” wailed one grump. Well, you’re not, so don’t worry; even the people in the CCTV room probably spend more time eating sandwiches and reading the paper than watching people on the monitors. I know I would if I worked there. Arthur Smith complained that sometimes he just wants to get away from peoples’ attention, but is unable to thanks to CCTV. Someone should tell him that CCTV cameras tend to be on private property, where he shouldn’t be in the first place, or in large city centres, where it is nigh on impossible to avoid other people. I suggest he tries the Cotswolds; quiet, isolated and CCTV camera free.

Just before I left to collect my Salt and Pepper Chicken with Boiled Rice they were talking about smoking bans. Now, despite being a non-smoker I am against a law preventing smoking in public places, but the complaint here seemed to be about non-smoking areas anywhere in society. Why? If a shop or bar wants to have a no-smoking policy then that isn’t the nanny state, that is an individual company exercising its freedom to run a business how it sees fit. But, as with “political correctness”, “the nanny state” is a term that people seem to bandy about whenever to describe something they don’t like.

Now listen, I am against the state interfering in areas that are not its concern, I have made that point several times here already; but I actually find myself getting more annoyed by stupid “nanny state” comments of the sort made in Grumpy Old Men. I know, I know, Grumpy Old Men is meant as a mildly amusing programme there to entertain and perhaps I am over-reacting, but whatever the humourous intent the opinions offered were serious and genuinely held. In the end I wondered what the contribitors were actually bothered about. Even the things objected to seemed largely trivial and not at all intrusive; I got the impression of a group of well off and comfortable people who wanted to play the part of the downtrodden railing against tyranny, or maybe just the arrogant whingeing about being told what to do. Orwell’s name was invoked, obviously, as if talk of the “thought police” and the “ministry of truth” was relevant, but I think that is overdoing it a bit.

When a speed camera caught me the other week I was pissed off, but as I knew that I was doing 90 mph on the A74 just because I wanted to reach my destination quicker I just accepted it, rather than moan about “big brother”. I don’t think Orwell was attacking the use of technology to enforce perfectly sensible laws in 1984; similarly, although he coined phrases such as “thought crime” and “newspeak”, I doubt he would have worried about the sort of “political correctness gone mad” where “you can’t even call people a ‘spastic’ or a ‘paki’ nowadays”*. No, I think he had some significantly more important concepts in mind when he penned his tale of a totalitarian future.

*this is not so much a direct quote as a generic “political correcteness gone mad” comment.

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