The Obscurer

Category: Politics

Friday 23rd November 2007

In The Lost And Found (Honky Bach)

A quick word about what is – at the time of writing – the Government’s latest utter balls up; which is to say the personal and banking details of all the recipients of Child Benefit getting lost in the post. It goes without saying that this business highlights some really lamentable security arrangements over at HMRC, but as just about everybody else already has said it there is little point in me piling in and echoing the point. But beyond the obvious I am interested in the statements made by the media and opposition MPs saying that those whose details have been lost are now living in the shadow of a fear of something scary and a wee bit fraudy; because as I am one of the 25 million involved I can say for sure that I’m certainly not that bothered.

Why? Simply because we have all given out our personal details to countless organisations in our time, and whenever we do so we increase the possibility that this data can fall into the hands of unscrupulous people and be used fraudulently. In one of my previous jobs I had everyday access to name and address details, dates of birth, bank account and credit card numbers and all manner of other personal information that our 8 million customers had entrusted to us. While I didn’t have the technical know how to download the entire contents of this database, and while trawling through the system actively searching for personal details could have left an incriminating audit trail, it would still have been child’s play to copy down personal information as and when I accessed it for a legitimate purpose, if I had so wished. I wouldn’t have been able to get 25 million records in a single shot, but I could easily have copied down twenty-odd a day which would have been quite enough to be going along with.

As such I feel that if my financial security has been further compromised by this latest breach I think it is only by a negligible amount; which doesn’t make it alright of course, or mean it doesn’t matter, but it does perhaps put things in perspective. If anything I feel a certain safety in numbers; were I to find out that mine were just one out of ten or so sets of banking details that had gone missing then perhaps I would now be checking my statements for suspiciously large payments to Mercedes Benz and British Airways and look into changing my account number. As it is, the fact that I am just one lost soul in a sea of millions of others makes it seem all the more unlikely that I will fall foul of some specific nefarious deception (he says, not so much tempting fate as tweaking its nose.)

Whenever we hand over our personal information the chances are that we are giving at least one person the opportunity to misuse it. A belief in most people’s inherent honesty, and the fact that when volunteering our details we usually benefit by receiving a good or service in exchange, makes it seem worth our while. Which brings me, somewhat inevitably, to the matter of ID cards. This latest fiasco appears to have just confirmed most people in their pre-existing view about the proposed scheme and the database associated with it, and I am no different; those in favour say that ID cards will protect against identity fraud, while those agin point out that we cannot trust our Government to keep this data safe in the first place. That latter view is the one I share and which is surely the right one; because whether it is mislaid through human error, compromised by poor security systems or quite legitimately accessed by Government employees just doing their job, there is nothing I can see to stop the information on a national database from potentially falling into the hands of the criminally minded. When we provide our bank details to a private company we only do so if we believe there is a good reason to; as the Government has yet to offer anything that bears even a passing resemblance to a good reason for collating all our disparate data into a convenient one-stop shop for the fraudster, for the time being they can fuck right off.

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Wednesday 10th October 2007

An Unwanted Gift

I don’t know what Gordon Brown thought he had to laugh about. His childish chuckling at the Conservatives yesterday as Alistair Darling announced the government’s new policy on inheritance tax was a depressing sight to behold. Can he not just stick to looking dour? It was the shamelessness that so grated; it was always pretty obvious once the Tories had received a boost in the polls with their proposal to raise the inheritance tax threshold that Labour would respond in some way; but the following week? It was all about as subtle as a brick. Fortunately, the sneering response from George Osborne on the opposition benches soon shook me awake; I can never hate Labour as much as I ought whenever I’m reminded what the alternative is.

Yes, I have “a plague o’ all your houses” feeling this week, I think that is the only sensible reaction to yesterday’s announcements, and to the previous week’s shenanigans over the election that wasn’t; which gives an extra added reason to avoid blogs like Iain Dale’s and similar, and reminds me why I tend to give them a wide berth. What has happened recently should give further cause for despair at the nature of politics itself, not mirth-filled glee at having put one over the opposition. It highlights the difference between “political blogs” and “blogs about politics”, as Paulie mentioned last week. We all have our particular viewpoints and biases and it can be interesting to read the writings of someone whose opinions don’t chime with our own, but this week has starkly shown why I avoid those blogs that have a party political axe to grind; they seem completely out of touch, not to be trusted, and while the popular ones may be hugely popular, it is a popularity based on a worthless political tribalism.

But I’m not interested in political blogs. Time and tide (and in the case of the Tory blogs the inevitable Conservative government at some point) will make them disappear up their own arses. Political blogs, like the Westminster village gossip they prattle on about, are ultimately irrelevant. No it’s politics itself I want to talk about, because politics is important, no matter how hard our politicians try to debase it.

Let me deal with Gordon Brown’s faults first, because they are fairly obvious. Bringing forward government announcements, especially the troop “reductions” during the Tory party conference, was as cynical as you can get, and was bound to stoke speculation about an early election. It was spin, of course, and really bad, contemptuous spin at that; so transparent that Brown must really have a low opinion of the British public to think we wouldn’t see through it right away. That it has backfired so beautifully is justice in action. To then play down the importance of the recent opinion polls in the decision not to hold an election, to claim he would still have comfortably won in the marginal constituencies in spite of all the evidence, and to wibble on about not going to the country now because he wants to show the nation his “vision”; enough already.

But if Brown is full of shit, what about the Tories? They have had a pretty easy ride recently as everyone from Conservative bloggers to newspaper leader writers have stuck the boot into Brown, but I mean honestly; all that guff praising Cameron’s autocue-free speech at his party conference overshadowed the hypocritical, vacuous and content-free flim-flammery of the speech itself; the demand for a general election they clearly didn’t want to fight is as disingenuous a declaration as any (Cameron’s shout of “we will fight, Britain will win” must be the most enthusiastically received defeatist rallying cry in history); the fact that in trying to goad Brown into calling an election let’s not forget they were in effect trying to goad him into making a decision based purely on opportunism and self-interest; and to then criticise his decision not to go down that path and to reiterate the party line that Brown had bottled it is to ignore the simple point, obvious in any dispassionate reading of the situation, that Brown just made the correct, common sense decision.

I think that last point bears further consideration. Brown didn’t have to call an election; that he thought about it when opinion polls showed Labour having such a huge lead over the Tories – and when he must have wondered if he would ever again have it as good – is only human. That he then decided against it when the poll lead either closed or disappeared is just the sensible thing to do; to have pressed on with an election he didn’t have to call under such circumstances would have been utterly stupid, and the fact that he can be criticised as being a coward because he refused to do the stupid thing shows how crap party politics is, where saving face is more important than good judgement. That making the right decision can be so criticised is because spin is so endemic to politics, but what to do? Spin is endemic, full stop. If politics is to reform itself where is it to get its inspiration from; from business? But the PM of the UK is no different from any CEO of a PLC in this regard, spin is everywhere we look from government announcements to company press releases. There is a reason why each firm’s in-house magazine is referred to by its employees as Pravda.

Talking of which, I’m not letting the media off the hook either. No doubt there were briefings by senior politicians hinting at an election to come and that this helped build election fever, but the media really doesn’t need any assistance. It was largely the Labour lead in the opinion polls that allowed the media to lose their heads completely and crank up the hype; for them to now blame the politicians for spinning is a bit rich, and it’s not for the first time. More and more it seems that the media are very quick to point the finger at others, when really a degree of introspection is in order (the Madeleine McCann story is a case study on the subject.) It is here that the best “blogs about politics” should be valued as cutting through the media bollocks and providing an alternative, and where the “political blogs” fail because they follow the herd and exhibit all the faults of the MSM.

I’ve not mentioned the Liberal Democrats yet, but I will; they have been as guilty as the Tories in playing this affair for point scoring party politicking gain. But give them their due; at least they have also used it to propose a move towards fixed-term parliaments, which would prevent the farce of the past few weeks while dealing with the inequity behind it. It is interesting how many Tories have been heard to criticise Brown’s constitutional right to call an election when he likes, but I don’t remember such criticism when the Tories were themselves in power. Also, while there has been much criticism of Brown’s antics, there seems a far less noticeable enthusiasm from Conservatives to back the Lib Dems’ motion, at least at this stage, almost as if the problem isn’t with the prime minister having this power, just with Gordon Brown having it and threatening to utilise it. As with proportional representation, while many in the Labour and the Conservative parties complain about the unfairness of the current system when in opposition, few support an alternative because they don’t want to lose the advantage they perceive it will provide them when they get back into power.

In considering and then dismissing the option of holding an early election Gordon Brown did the sensible thing, he did what anyone would have done in his position; but it shouldn’t be in his gift. Hopefully the lasting legacy of this past week will be that in bungling his election decision Brown has drawn attention to this element of our electoral system, and a groundswell of opinion can build to put an end to the anachronism of the government of the day being able to go to the country at the most advantageous opportunity. As a rule of thumb, if we can take something out of the hands of politicians then it is probably a good idea if we do; and when the thing in question is only of benefit to politicians themselves, then that counts double.

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Friday 29th June 2007

Legacy Media

Every Prime Minister loves a legacy – why else would you want the hassle of the job unless you fancied your portrait on the stairs of Number 10 and your name in the history books – and I’ve been wondering about political legacies recently, what with Blair having finally done one, and the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War dragging Margaret Thatcher back into peoples’ minds. Just what did our more recent leaders actually leave us in their wills? Well here is my post on the matter; short on analysis, long on bias, an incomplete and far from exhaustive trip around the subject, more an outlet for me to chuck ideas in the air and against the wall to see if they are ready to stick, like al-dente pasta, and to get my mind back into this blogging malarkey.

Thatcher first; because listening to some you would think that her legacy was to have almost sole responsiblity for the relatively buoyant state of the current British economy; for some it seems that just about everything good in the world can be traced back to her iconoclastic premiership. You won’t be too surprised to find that I disagree with this point of view. It is not that she was wholly wrong on everything, just mainly wrong on most things. I like the analogy (and I hope you like it too) of someone being stuck in the house and needing to buy some bread. If someone were to suggest that you get up off your arse and open the front door then they would be spot on; but if they then directed you to the butcher’s, rather than to the baker’s, then they’ve not really helped you all that much. Sure, they’ve forced you to get a bit of fresh air, and by wandering aimlessly, or asking around, you may eventually find your way to the baker’s yourself; but who should take the credit for this eventual happy outcome? In effect I think that is what Thatcher did; even when she was right she was wrong. And most of the time she was just plain wrong.

So; she was right to challenge the unions (and other vested interests), but wrong to bully them and use them as her personal whipping boys; she was right to offer up privatisation as a solution, but wrong to indulge in ill-conceived and poorly executed sell-offs for the sake of ideology and/or financial expediency; it may have been right to promote home ownership, but to force councils to all but give away their housing stock as part of a policy of social engineering, and to then hinder their replacement, was bollocks. And if that latter move was a way to inculcate people into the ways of property rights rather than state dependency then it was completely undone by Thatcher’s economic policy that shrugged off mass, long-term unemployment as just one of those things, so forcing a generation and their children to regard social security benefits and the welfare state not as a safety net but as an essential, primary source of income, and so a viable way of living.

Andrew Neil on This Week recently wondered if there was a change in the air with regards Thatcher; that perhaps she was being re-evaluated, that her achievements were gaining more appreciation and recognition. Wishful thinking I suspect. For a start, even when in power she was never quite the universal hate figure you would imagine from viewing grainy archive footage of Red Wedge concerts. Amongst a large section of the population she was enormously popular during her period in office; add to this group all of the people aged 25 or under who can’t really remember her, and also the fact that she has been out of power for 17 years, and it isn’t that surprising that there is less animosity towards her than there used to be. This doesn’t mean that those who opposed her at the time are suddenly affording her more respect, have forgiven her or altered their opinion of her. In any case; even if you can point to some good things that she did, now that her government is but a dot in the rear view mirror, and if you can accept that she has bequeathed us all some long-term benefits, it still doesn’t mean we have erased from our minds what it was like to actually have that rabble in power, day-in-day-out, and to live under the rule of a bunch of authoritarian, reactionary bigots.

It was John Major who had to deal with Thatcher’s immediate legacy – a dysfunctional economy, just one more Tory recession – and by hook, crook, luck and judgement actually turned it around. That is to his government’s credit. Even more important is that he then successfully lost the 1997 election before he was able to bugger things up in turn, as I am sure he would have done. That is his lasting legacy; to have presided over a reasonably benign economic situation and to have then fucked off before he fucked it up.

And so to Blair; what has he left us? Well on the plus side there has been continued economic stability (more Brown’s achievement than Blair’s), some constitutional reforms (inherited from John Smith, and in the case of the House of Lords Blair has acted more as a brake than an accelerator), and of course Northern Ireland (although has he actually done more than any previous Prime Minister, or have things just happened on his watch? And am I the only one to feel uneasy about seeing Paisley and McGuinness grinning together at Stormont?) But I think it will be for his failures, rather than his successes, that we will remember Blair by; it goes without saying that he will mainly be associated with Iraq and spin.

For a while it looked as if Blair could escape the rigours of domestic politics to emerge statesmanlike in the black-and-white simplicity of foreign affairs, through Sierra Leone and Kosovo; that is until Iraq turned around and bit him on the arse. Blair’s name will be forever entwined with the conflict as Eden’s is with Suez, or LBJ’s is with Vietnam. To seek refuge in war from the failings of your domestic policies is an act of pure horror, and Blair’s ultimate failure will at least make others think twice. Regarding spin and media manipulation, and his abilities as an actor; these are all things that are no doubt required in the modern politician’s armoury, but they are not good things for a politician to be closely associated with. Blair is indeed feted, if that is the right word, as a fine actor; but as an actor he makes a really great politician. His “act” is often so transparent that he appears about as sincere as Fiona Bruce, as convincing as an extra on Casualty. When you watch the great actors you don’t think “what a great actor”, you believe in them implicitly; but with Blair we knew we were getting an act, and we were wise to it. We will now watch out more keenly for the same thing in Brown, Cameron and other politicians; and that is a surely good thing.

But it is one particular failure in the whole spin farrago that I believe is in fact Blair’s greatest success. It was probably true, after the 1992 election, that Labour had to work hard to get the press on their side, and they managed it; even the Daily Mail clambered aboard. Today of course the Mail views itself as almost the official opposition to government, representing a silent majority in the country ignored by the political parties; but things were not always this way. Back during the Thatcher years the Mail was right in step with government policy, their brand of narrow-minded intolerance was perfectly in tune with those whose hands were on the levers of power. Instead the targets of the Mail’s ire were loony lefty councils and the like; the inequities of central government went unchallenged. After Thatcher, eventual disillusion with the then Major government that was “in office but not in power” and a vested interest in supporting the government-elect Labour Party that promised to be just like the Tories led the Mail to swing behind Blair; but once in government the honeymoon period soured when the Mail realised that Labour, for all their faults, weren’t quite as twattish as the Tories. So it is that today, in contrast to the tub-thumping of the Thatcher years, the hurt disappointment of the Major years, and the naïve hopes of the early Blair years, the Mail has settled into a vehement hatred of and implacable opposition to the government; and that is surely how it should always be. Those furious red-faced and indignant little/middle Englanders should always be out of power, should always feel antagonised by whatever the government proposes; never again should the government manifesto and the Daily Mail editorial have anything in common. Blair’s greatest legacy is that Daily Mail readers, far from being the self-styled silent majority they claim to be, are in reality just marginalised malcontents. Let us not squander his inadvertant achievement; and while Brown is a dour Scot who clobbers the middle classes with stealth taxes, while Cameron hugs hoodies, huskies and haters of grammar schools, and while Menzies Campbell is a Liberal Democrat, at least on this one small thing the future still looks bright.

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Thursday 29th March 2007

Double Or Quits

Well, I’d hoped that by now we would know for certain where the nation’s single “supercasino” was to be situated, but last night’s vote in the Lords means this whole malarkey is going to rumble on for a while yet. How very disappointing.

Should there be a supercasino? Should there be more than one? Where should they be placed? I don’t care. I’m more interested in the way my local TV news has tied itself up in knots over the issue.

Normally it would be pretty easy for the BBC’s North West Tonight, or Granada Reports. If it were London challenging Manchester’s award of the casino we would be hearing about the capital’s domination of all things in the country, and how the respected panel that initially chose Manchester had made the correct and legitimate decision. If Leeds had been awarded the casino in the first place then we would have heard nothing but criticism of both the Leeds bid and the process itself, along with endless propaganda pushing Blackpool’s case. Sadly, for the BBC and Granada, as both Blackpool and Manchester are in their region, they have had to tread a fine line and actually report fairly, no doubt leaving the Manchester Evening News and Blackpool Gazette to fill the vacuum.

What a pain. It must be one of the joys of working on a local news programme that, when in doubt, you can simply indulge in the purely parochial. Why bother to look into the rights and wrongs of all sorts of issues when you can just bang the drum for the local interest above and beyond any common sense? Who cares if somewhere outside your region has a better claim for government revenue or private investment; they are, by definition, outside your region, and therefore damned.

But my favourite quote on the casino matter came from MP Joan Humble. She was interviewed yesterday on News North West about how she would be voting in the Commons, and was then asked which way she thought the impending vote would go; to the latter question she replied that said she wasn’t sure and wouldn’t like to guess as she’s “not a betting person”. Not a betting person? Yet she thought she had the requisite knowledge on the subject of gambling to go and vote against the bill in the hope of favouring a Blackpool bid?

What was it, I wonder, within or without, that had persuaded her which way to vote? Was there a particularly clinching argument that made Blackpool the clear choice? Was is down to evidence that the panel had been negligent in some aspect when originally awarding Manchester the casino? Or was it simply because Joan Humble is the MP for Blackpool North and Fleetwood? I wouldn’t dream of speculating; but should she ever lose her seat, no doubt a career in local journalism beckons.

PostScript: Incidentally, I know you needn’t be a gambler to have have an opinion about if or where the casino should be built, and in favouring her local area Joan Humble only did that any MP would do. This isn’t really about her but about mindless local bias in general, in both the media and in politics. But to say you’re “not a betting person” in this context seemed a particularly unfortunate thing to say, and it caught my ear. Hence this post.

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Monday 8th January 2007

Ex-Mas

Well we managed to get away with it for a few months, but inevitably the PC brigade finally caught up with us and banned Christmas[1] once and for all. Because yesterday, in defiance of the Great British Public, my local council realised their heinous error and removed the festive lights and decorations on Cheadle High Street which I had been enjoying for weeks, so cancelling the celebrations and any mention of them.

Here is a picture of the criminals at work, engaged in sabotage. I am sure you can feel the outrage, the sense of violation; but what the photograph can’t capture is the howls and jeers emanating from the crowd of shoppers who berated the elitist intelligentsia in the cherry-picker as they removed the lights (I say the crowd jeered; I can’t be sure since I have been nursing a seasonal cold with resulting near deafness since mid-December[5]; so I may just have heard tinnitus, or voices in my head, or indeed someone with a trolley asking me to stop blocking the pavement and get out of the fucking way. I can’t be certain; but I know what I think).

The bastard, right-on council have even forced The Christmas[2] Shop to shut for heavens sake; and it’s been selling tinselly tat for, oh, weeks now before the diversity fascists managed to move in and close it down, driving it out of business. I don’t know it’s the council who closed it, but why else would it have shut? Do you know the shop I mean? On the High Street, next to Spinks Hampsons Sayers bakers? It used to be The Fireworks Shop, until that too was forced out in November, no doubt on the order of Health & Safety Nazis.

But I know it’s not just me who is suffering as the forces of multiculturalism finally flex their muscles now that the benevolent gaze of the Daily Express has moved onto other things. Take the telly; when was the last time you heard any mention of Christmas[3] there? It’s as if it never existed. What happened to the BBC1 ident of people making a stupid big snowball to fit in with their latest fucking awful “circle” theme? When did you last see that? Exactly; not for days. So another blow is dealt to the idea of England as a Christian country.

And why are they doing all this? Why, to placate some imagined grievance on the part of some Muslims, probably. The thing is I bet most Muslims aren’t bothered in the slightest if we celebrate the birth of Jesus. I’m sure they wouldn’t complain if I bought them all a present, let’s say that! But I don’t know any Muslims.

But that’s that then, all gone with barely a whimper. Now we must prepare for the long wait until we see those first illicit mentions of Christmas[4] in 2007, before they are slammed down again by the liberal cognoscenti; but writing this in January, August seems so very, very far away.

[1] Opps; I mentioned the C-word; not allowed to say that, am I?
[2] Naughty me. I meant wintermission!
[3] Sorry, etc…
[4] Zzzzzzzz
[5] And this is me. The main consequence of my deafness, apart from my shortened temper, is the way I keep waking in the morning under the impression that the month old Quinny has managed to sleep through, only for my bleary and blood-shot eyed wife to inform me that, well, she didn’t. I owe her.

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