The Obscurer

Saturday 11th September 2010

Getting Sniffy

Just what is the problem the TaxPayers’ Alliance has with West Midlands Police? A wee while ago I wrote about their criticism of the force’s disgraceful plan to equip their staff with shirts. I also said that “you can consider this my last post on the TPA”, so to get out of that statement on a technicality, kindly consider this to be a mere coda rather than a stand-alone piece in its own right. Because now the TPA has swung into action once more, highlighting another flagrant waste of public money.

WEST Midlands Police has been accused of wasting officers’ time – and taxpayers’ cash – by bizarrely setting up a Twitter page for a crime-fighting sniffer dog.

Their two-year-old Labrador Smithy, who has been dubbed an internet scent-sation, now regularly posts tweets on the social netwoking site.

Writing the occasional 140-character tweet? Outrageous! This sounds like a job for the joyless fuckers at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, who opine…

It difficult to see how putting a dog on Twitter is supposed to benefit the people of the West Midlands.

The tweets aren’t even casually informative, they’re just nonsense dreamt up by a member of staff.

This silly PR stunt is a just a diversion from real police work, and with cuts being made Smithy should probably keep his nose to the ground and concentrate on the job.

Just how diverting is this Twitter account? What real police work does the TPA fear was left undone when this magnum opus was being composed:

Training went well ! but that is not the end of my handlers day; we, will still get a walk later, the great benefits of being a Police dog.

Well, that’s got to be a couple of murders West Midlands Police could have solved right there, if they hadn’t been so diverted! What about this one:

Duty time 8am till 5pm today…..I’m staying at home, as Drake is working at a football match, my fellow canine will update you later !

So now we have two dogs tweeting! What next? Three? Here’s another:

Off today and tomorrow, chilling, lapping up my growing internet following…gonna get either a new ball or bone out of this, claws crossed.

Days off? DAYS OFF? Why do police dogs need days off? Yet more public sector waste! And what’s this?

A request re a missing person please RT http://www.west-midlands.police.uk/np/coventry/news/newsitem.asp?id=1040

What’s that all about? Just as the TPA said: dreamt up nonsense that is not even casually informative. But it gets worse still when you look at this story.

Smithy’s trainer PC Terry Arnett said: “It was just something he wanted to do.

“He felt he and his team weren’t getting the praise they deserved and the next thing I knew he was tweeting.

“We’ve had to have the keyboard adapted so he can type, but apart from that it’s his way of letting people know the important work he and his pals do.”

And how much did this adapted keyboard cost? And guess who’s paying?

You know, the more I read about the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the more I’m beginning to think they are double-agents on a deep-cover assignment designed to ridicule and discredit small-government ideologues.

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Tuesday 31st August 2010

Dumb Pipes

Oh what fun I’ve had behind the scenes at The Obscurer recently. If you’re one of the few humans to read this on the website itself (as opposed to a human who uses a feedreader, or a spambot that visits the website) then you may have noticed the other day that I’d experimented with my first major redesign of this blog since I’d moved to WordPress some three years ago. I loaded up the the beautifully minimalistic Manifest theme, and I was very happy with it, noting the way the look of this blog had mimicked the career path of Talk Talk from “The Party’s Over” through “The Colour Of Spring” to “Spirit Of Eden”, as I started with the classic-pop of the standard Scribe template on Blogger, stripped it down to my more individual style with the assistance of veryplaintxt, and then pared everything to the beautiful bare bones with no widgets and fewer plugins. That was until my wife, after viewing this blog in IE6 at work said “what the hell have you done to your blog?” “Looks good, don’t you think?” I responded. “It looks awful,” she replied. And viewing it on IE6, I had to agree. So, for now, we’re back to this archaic theme, albeit one with a bit of the clutter removed from the sidebar, and a plan to investigate “child themes” so I can keep my customisations while finally updating the theme to include all those newish WordPress features like threaded comments that I don’t want to use.

Oh don’t worry, I’m under no illusions. I’m fully aware that no one else shows a tenth of the interest in this blog that I do, and to an extent that is part of the appeal. Tinkering pointlessly with the design and set-up at times seems more important to me than actually writing a post; and writing a post often plays second fiddle to actually publishing it. Often a sort of pedantic perfectionism takes a hold and I’ll spend way too long faffing about over some trivial rejig, but I justify it with the fact that I’m doing this for my own satisfaction rather than for an imaginary reader who might actually give a damn. That way I don’t feel so bad about spending ages installing drop capitals, or sorting a mobile edition, or changing the font in my blockquotes; all stuff you almost certainly won’t have noticed. One day I spent hours trying to debug a problem with the template which meant that the meta-data (that “This was written by Quinn…” gubbins at the bottom of each post) would ride up the side of an image if the text in the post was only short and the image was aligned to one side or the other. It was a problem that affected literally two-or-three posts such as this one, and which I’m sure fussed not a soul; yet when I’d finally sorted it (a simple “clear: both;” command in the stylesheet) it gave me a great sense of achievement.

But my most wasteful waste of time has got to be my tumblr. I already had one tumblelog which I used for my family and friends, for displaying simple snapshots or videos or brief posts, emailing them from my mobile whilst on holiday, so that on my return people could tell me “oh aye, I forgot to check your website for updates when you were away.” But I suddenly became attached to the idea of creating another tumblog for The Obscurer, to collect together links to all my posts, tweets and delicious bookmarks. I didn’t care if nobody looked at it – and in that I haven’t been disappointed, and I have the stats to prove it – I just liked the idea of tying things up neatly for me to refer to again if I liked. And it was easy enough to set up too, not even that time consuming; simply a matter of creating the tumblog, playing with a template to imitate some of the look of this blog, and then arranging it so it would publish the result of my blog, twitter and delicious rss feeds. Perfect, if pointless.

But of course it wasn’t that simple, and soon I realised I had gone down the path, once again, of creating a time consuming project that no one else cared about but which would frustrate the hell out of me. It was those rss feeds that were the problem; everything was duplicated, everywhere. I’d use twitter tools to issue a tweet each time I published a post post here, so each post would show up in both my blog and twitter feeds, and so would show up twice on my tumblr; and I used twitterfeed to do the same for each delicious bookmark, with the same result. I also, at the time, was doing those weekly twitter digests, meaning that tumblr would needlessly update each week with a link to a post here which detailed the collection of the tweets my tumblr had already reproduced individually over the preceding seven days. Now, I could just manually delete those duplicates as and when then came in, but that would be stupid waste of time. Better just to scrap the idea of the tumblog, obviously. But sadly, for no good reason, something in me wouldn’t allow me to do that. There was a problem, and I just needed to find some solution, somehow.

And I found that solution my usual way; by trying everything I could think of and getting it wrong wrong wrong until suddenly, surprisingly, I stumbled upon the thing that worked. And that thing was Yahoo! Pipes. Now you may well know about these things already – I’m usually the last to know – but in essence pipes are where you create your own rss feeds; you can take a feed or a number of feeds in one end, amend and adjust them, and out the other end you get your own personal feed. So, rather than tumblr simply publishing this blog’s rss feed, I get it to publishes the blog pipe; the blog feed goes in one end, runs through an operation that strips out any posts in the “twitterings” category, and publishes a revised feed at the other end. I did the same for my twitter feed; tumblr instead publishes the twitter pipe, being the twitter feed minus my blog posts and bookmarks. Out go the duplicates, and what is left is an easily maintainable tumblog that I can ignore as easily as everyone else can. Sorted.

But it got me thinking; what other uses could there be for Yahoo! Pipes? Surely in this internet and digital age where everything is reduced to zeros and ones there must be a way to use Pipes – or some distant cousin of Pipes – beyond just amending rss feeds for websites no one reads into a combined rss feed for another website no one reads? Surely they must have a more practical use? And once I had set my mind on that train of thought, it was hard to stop.

Let’s take it a step at a time. When I first started reading blogs I liked to read widely, to actively court opposing views; some, like Biased BBC, I read just because I couldn’t help getting wound up by them (before finally kicking the habit), but others I found genuinely interesting even if they did come from a different point of view. But time is tight, and those reasoned blogs I’d disagree with could always be relied upon to write one too many stupid posts until my considered opinion was “get to fuck”; and so over time the stuff in my Bloglines Google Reader has come to reflect rather than challenge my prejudices. However, stray onto the comment pages of those blogs written by authors I agree with and before long you will still encounter those tiresome opinions that I’d much rather be insulated from. I’m talking about the likes of Newmania on Hopi Sen, Bob B on Stumbling & Mumbling, David Duff on Banditry*, Sally on Lib Con, Quinn on The Filter; all people who I rapidly scroll past when I guess that the tedious drivel I’m reading is one of their efforts. But how better to avoid this crap altogether?! I could use shutup.css or readability to get rid of the lot, but many comments are fine. Most blogs , though, now publish a comments feed; couldn’t you just whack one through a Yahoo! pipe, strip out any comments that are by or refer to the aforementioned bores and hey presto! A more enlightened comment thread at a stroke! There has to be a plugin going begging right there.

What about beyond blogs and out in the dreaded MSM? Perhaps you could do the same on the Daily Mail so you only read red arrowed comments? Then again, it’s probably better to simply avoid the Daily Mail altogether (and bless Rupert Murdoch for saving us the job and putting The Times behind a paywall, so it doesn’t even trouble Google News). But what if I want to know about a particular subject, say our good friend “public sector pensions”, but I want to read informed analysis of their viability rather than an ideological rant? Could I just set up a Google news alert for “public sector pensions”, run it through a pipe that strips out any article that mentions “gold plated” or “pensions apartheid” and consider it done? I don’t see why not. Sure it’s not foolproof, I may still get articles I disagree with, but that’s fine; they should at least be a little bit more intelligent, or at least more imaginative in their bias.

But of course the internet isn’t just web pages. I love my Pure Evoke Flow internet radio for the way it can slip almost seamlessly between listening to live Test Match Special on 5Live Sports Extra to yesterday’s Archers on Listen Again to a Collings & Herrin podcast. How about the viability of someone far cleverer than me hacking it and running its output through a pipe? Then, when listening to football commentary on 5Live it can automatically go quiet when Alan Green comes on? Sure, Jimmy Armfield or Graham Taylor will sound as if they’re talking to themselves for a while, but that’s still better that hearing Green whining on and on about some minor, trivial point as if it is a serious affront to human decency. Perhaps you could take another feed from another radio station – even TalkSport – when the egotist approaches the mic, until John Murray or Mike Ingam get their turn? Okay, it’s a rough idea, a work in progress, but one worth considering, and extending to television in turn.

When I was younger I always thought that technology had advanced as far as it could; that the arrival of Betamax and Channel 4 were the apex of our achievements and that the fantasy you’d see on Space 1999, of people talking into little mobile video phones was just that. Now my kids look baffled when we’re on holiday and I have to explain that we can’t pause and rewind the TV like we can on our PVR at home, an invention I never even countenanced. But as times change so do our expectations; we have come a long way since those days when we had no choice but to be passive recipients of whatever the neutral reporting of the BBC and ITN allowed, our prejudices only partially sated by the bias of the Telegraph or the Observer. The internet and new media on the otherhand has allowed such a wonderful profusion of different voices, a boom in choice and variety, that it has enabled us to selectively listen to a far narrower range of views than ever before. With filters such as Pipes going that inevitable step further and, if successfully arranged, preventing any dissenting voices from ever invading our brain space, technology allows us another fantasy: an echo chamber where we can confirm what we always half-believed. That all our opinions are wholly right.

Update 5/9/10: That’s the way to do it! Via Jim, a Ryan Avent-only pipe drawn from the RSS feed for The Economist’s “Free Exchange” blog.

* I’ve given up on John B, actually, after reading one daft comment too many. Although a pipe to remove any post where he deems it necessary to refer to someone as an idiot just because they hold a differing opinion† may be tolerable.
† Oh dear. Sadly, that’s all of them.

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Wednesday 14th July 2010

Getting Shirty

I read a couple of versions of this story the other weekend and I was going to dash off a quick post in response; but time was tight and I wasn’t sure of my facts, so I decided to wait until both those issues were remedied before commenting. There’s a moral in there, somewhere, for somebody.

West Midlands police “wastes money” on new shirts

ran the BBC headline, but the Telegraph, Mail and Mirror also covered the story. The fury is over the discovery that West Midlands police have spent a whopping £100,000 on changing the shirts of non-station based staff from white to black. “It’s absurd to spend money on cosmetic changes at a time when police forces are feeling the pinch,” suggests the inevitable TaxPayers’ Alliance spokesman, Mark Wallace. But what’s this? Did I use the definite article erroneously? Over at the Telegraph, Matthew Elliot of the TaxPayers’ Alliance chips in “Now is not the time for police to make a cosmetic change, like switching the colour of their shirts”.

Now, you may wonder why the TaxPayers’ Alliance feels the need to employ two people to say essentially the same thing – if they’re looking for efficiency savings, then they can have that one for free – but instead lets look at that £100,000 figure. It is a large sum of money indeed; certainly, were I to spend that much on shirts then I would be unable to dodge the accusation of profligacy. Then again, last time I checked I wasn’t a police force serving “nearly 2.6 million inhabitants” (source: Wikipedia). If I trust my maths (and I don’t, and neither should you; grab a calculator before you take this as fact) then that £100,000 works out at around 4p per resident of the West Midlands area. Of course, not all residents are taxpayers; I reckon some people will be paying upwards of 10p towards those shirts. But all those 10 pences add up; specifically they add up to the suspiciously round figure of £100,000, which is a big number, with lots of noughts. Is it money well spent? Well, we simply don’t know. Because the journalists employed here are useless. Evidently. Allow me to explain.

I read these articles, and a whopping yet oddly unasked question kept occurring to me; namely, is this £100,000 on top of the money the police would have been spending on white shirts anyway, or instead of it? It seems so blindingly obvious a question that I find it amazing that no one saw fit to ask, or to clarify the matter in their article, but apparently no one did. But it’s pretty pertinent; on the assumption that West Midlands police would be buying shirts for their staff anyway, what does this £100,000 actually relate to? And once you’ve asked that question, why stop there? Why not go on and try to find out other relevant information (the technical term for this is “journalism”); we can probably assume that some of that £100,000 is down to having to replace everyone’s white uniform shirts in one fell swoop, but what is the unit cost of each black shirt compared to a white one? Are they more, or less, expensive? Are they more, or less, hard-wearing? Apologies for getting all “1066 and all that” on your ass (as I believe the hepcats say), but depending on the answers to such questions we could range from one extreme, where the police are spending £100,000 over and above what they would have spent on white shirts in order to procure more expensive and flimsier shirts – this is a bad thing – to the other extreme where they would be spending £100,000 minus what they would otherwise have spent on white shirts in order to kit their officers in less expensive yet more rugged, longer-lasting gear; that is potentially a good thing. But rather than ask the questions that need to be asked to prevent their stories from being cobblers, instead the media collectively seem to have just sellotaped together a Press Association story with some added quotes from the TaxPayers’ Alliance and considered it job done. Now, I don’t expect the ideological twits at the TPA to want to go looking for the actual facts of the matter, but how not one journalist seems to have had his or her curiosity slightly prickled and thought to get the answers to the bleeding obvious questions without which their articles are meaningless, I do not know.

Now, journalists do far worse things than this, I know. This seems at face value to be down to laziness, albeit a laziness that allows a story to be put about that fits in with a popular media agenda; and we know that journalists also deliberately lie, twist facts and quote out of context in order to try to mislead their readers into drawing nasty conclusions. That I don’t generally tackle such stories is because people like Anton, 5CC, MacGuffin, uponothing and Jonathan do it so much better than I do; that and, while I often read a tabloid story and think “that’s bollocks”, I don’t usually have the time or inclination to look further into it, especially when I reckon that one of the above named is usually already on the case and doing the leg work. I also rarely have a background knowledge to give me a head start in taking the media to task; but I do know about shirts (I possess several, in varying colours and fabrics), I can follow the logic of what it must be like to have to procure staff shirts, and I can spot a gaping big hole in a newspaper article. This is part of the reason why I have written about such a trifling matter as police shirts, rather than, say, a more important matter such as this repulsive bit of journalisting.

But in fact the main reason I have written this post is not to criticise journalists; they’re just collateral damage. No, I’ve actually mentioned my key point already, and I’m writing this here because a realisation hit me as I was mulling things over. Do you know what it is? Any ideas? No?

It’s my earlier line about the TaxPayers’ Alliance, and my belief that

I don’t expect the ideological twits at the TPA to want to go looking for the facts of the matter

Because we know that the TaxPayers’ Alliance are just a bunch of rentaquote oafs there to pad out stories such as these. We know that they aren’t a serious think tank dedicated to the efficient running of government; but they claim to be, and they damn well should be. When a paper comes calling, asking them for their opinion on wasteful spending, they shouldn’t just dash off a quick spleen vent; they should investigate it, and then come back with a proper analysis. But they don’t appear to have done that, quelle surprise; this waste of server space is all I can find on their website, while both of those underemployed TPA spokesmen’s dismiss West Midlands police’s action as a merely a “cosmetic change” without apparently even being aware of the police’s justification that officers find the new shirts less restrictive and more comfortable. On the assumption that even the TPA believe that the police should both exist and wear a uniform, why didn’t they at least think to ask those obvious questions I raised above, even while deadline-bound journalists couldn’t be bothered? Why did they seemingly just respond “wah!”to that headline £100,000 figure, rather than investigate the long run costs or savings of this decision, as one would expect of an organisation genuinely interested in value for taxpayers’ money? Why do they only ever seem to call for more and more cuts in public spending, when they should be at least as concerned about blind, stupid cuts; for as public borrowing is just taxation deferred, can’t rash cuts just be public spending deferred? And why am I not in the least bit surprised by the way they have acted, and why do I expect so little of them?

Well, we know the answers, don’t we, and with luck I’m signing off here and you can consider this my last post on the TPA. Thing is, a proper taxpayers’ organisation genuinely holding government to account and actually doing what the TPA claims it does would be a good thing indeed. Shame the TaxPayers’ Alliance we have is broken.

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Thursday 8th July 2010

The First Sign Of Madness

Re-reading the final section of my previous post, I imagine a reasonable person could make an obvious riposte to my comments on public sector pensions. This person would work in the private sector, he doesn’t have an occupational pension scheme, and the personal private pension he is paying into each month is building a pension pot that, at current rates, will pay him an annuity on retirement which will just about cover the daily costs of a cup-a-soup and a small bottle of supermarket own-brand cola. He has little time for my whining, and with fair cause. After all…

“Why should my taxes rise to help pay for your gilt-edged pension, when I can’t afford to pay for a decent pension for myself?”

It’s a good point, I say, and I don’t think your taxes should rise for that reason. If there is a shortfall in public sector pensions then that should be met by the employees, or by employers within existing budgets, but it would certainly be unfair for you or others to pay more to ensure I have a good pension. As it is, whether or not public sector pensions are unaffordable is, I think, more arguable than the media often allows. That is when they aren’t just complaining that public sector pensions should be cut for the sake of it, because they are usually better than most private sector pensions.

“Ah, right,” he says, seeing me on the back foot, “but they are usually better than private sector pensions aren’t they, and that isn’t fair, is it? Why should I pay into your pension at all, when you don’t pay into mine?”

Well, it’s true that my pension may well be better than yours and you may not consider that fair. On the other hand, your pay may well be better than mine; is that also unfair? Perhaps you get a company car; why can’t I have one? We both have our pay and benefits and a good pension is one of my benefits; it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to cherry pick one area where my benefits may be better than yours and decide to reduce it for reasons of fairness, while leaving untouched other areas where your benefits may be superior to mine.

“But I don’t care if your pay or benefits are better than mine. I care that I’m paying for them. And not just me; millions of people in the private sector are paying a premium in taxes so that those in the public sector can have better pensions than we can ourselves afford.”

And millions of public sector workers pay for goods and services in the private sector, and so we pay into your wages and benefits, including into your pensions, or into the wages that you then invest in pension funds. Have a word with your employer if they choose not to provide as good a pension as my employer does. But if you must reduce things to this simplistic public sector versus private sector argument, as if both are just opposing homogeneous blocks, then whilst it’s true that you pay my wages, it’s truer to say that we all pay each other’s wages. And while your taxes do help pay for my pension, your consumption spending is also going to help pay for the occupational pension schemes of private sector workers whose pensions may similarly be better than the one you are able to afford. What’s the difference?

“Oh come on! The difference is that they are private companies and can do what they like with their revenue. That’s completely different to what government agencies do with public money. Our money.”

But it’s your money that private companies receive, just by a different method, through your discretionary spending rather than through taxation; it’s different, yes, but not, I think, completely different. Put it another way; you complain that public sector pensions are better than yours, and you are paying a premium on your taxes in order to pay for them. But many private sector occupational pensions schemes are also better than yours, because the employer pays into the pension scheme. In effect aren’t you therefore paying a premium when you buy their goods, paying a premium for their workers to have a better pension than you can have? And that premium is your money too, your money that you have had to pay on top of the price of the goods to pay for someone else’s pension. Should private sector companies also cut their occupational pension schemes in some great levelling down, simply because the benefits of such schemes are better than your own?

“No. But. That really is different. I can’t choose whether or not to pay taxes; I have to. I don’t just decide to pay my council tax, I am forced to by law, and some of that money gets paid into pensions whether I like it or not. With private sector companies I can choose who I give my money too, and so I’m not forced to pay into someone else’s pension if I don’t want to. I can always take my custom elsewhere.”

But would you?

“Eh?”

Would you?

“Would I what?”

Would you take your custom elsewhere in order to avoid paying into a private company’s staff pension scheme? It seems to me that we have reached a point where your main objection to public sector pensions being more generous than your own is because you have to pay for their services and so pay into their pensions schemes regardless; but you don’t seem to mind some private sector schemes being more generous than your own because you can simply avoid paying into such schemes by avoiding using their goods and services. So the question is, would you? Would you avoid using a private sector company solely because it means paying into a decent pension scheme? Would you ever consider not shopping at Tesco if you were to discover that some of their turnover goes into paying for a staff pension scheme that is better than your own? Would your hunt for an alternative supermarket be in any way influenced by whether or not another supermarket pays into an occupational pension scheme for their staff? Would you really object if they did? If not, and so the provision or otherwise of a staff pension scheme by a private employer plays no part in how you choose to spend your money, then surely the fact that you are able to take your custom elsewhere is not relevant to this discussion, and so should have no bearing on the provision or otherwise of a staff pensions scheme by a public sector employer to whom you have to pay your taxes. And indeed you could extrapolate this concept further; whenever you hear of something that occurs in the public sector that you think is outrageous and yet you have to pay for, consider what you would think if you heard of the same thing happening at a private sector firm you patronise, and whether you would still object to the extent that you would exercise your freedom to choose not to pay for it by taking your custom elsewhere. And if you wouldn’t, and if you would still cheerily pay for a private firm to do the self same thing that you find so objectionable in the public sector, consider that perhaps you’re not really viewing these things equally.

“”

I realise, then, that somewhere during my last paragraph, my conversation partner had disappeared. Perhaps I had flummoxed him with logic and reason? Perhaps he had tired of feeding me prepared lines to which I could deliver my prepared responses. Perhaps my mention of Tesco reminded him that he needs to pop out for some milk. Perhaps he’ll return in a few minutes with a crew to make me shut the fuck up. But perhaps, just perhaps…he didn’t exist at all, and was just a compliant FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION!

That would mean that I’ve been talking to myself, all this time. “What’s new, on this blog,” you may very well think; that is if, indeed, you exist. But this feels different. I’m tired, so very, very tired. Time to splash myself with cold water and go out for some fresh air.

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Wednesday 30th June 2010

Tribes

So, a great result for England on Sunday, no? Another fine victory over our greatest historic tribal foe. Makes one proud to be English, doesn’t it.
Sarcasm? Me? Oh no, sorry, you misunderstand. Were you still thinking about the football, and Germany? Oh well, I’ve already moved on; to cricket, and yet another one-day international victory over the hapless Australians*. But I can understand your confusion. An easy mistake to make.

As for the football, what can I add to the obvious, and that England simply aren’t good enough to justify the hopes that some people place in them? On the game itself, I do think it a tragic irony that the one time a Lampard speculative, edge-of-the-area pop actually gets into the goal, the officials manage to miss it. Fortunately, such was the extent of Germany’s victory that any dwelling on that “goal” as an example of us being robbed has been kept to a minimum. On the other hand, it has reignited the old issue of whether technology should be used to prevent such mistakes again. I seem to be in a minority here in harbouring serious doubts over technology’s use. Perhaps, if you could guarantee that such technology was limited only to judging if a ball has crossed the line, then fine; but can you? Later that evening, when Argentina scored a goal that was clearly offside, technology was mentioned again; when Eire failed to qualify for the World Cup finals thanks to an Henry handball, again the benefits of technology were mooted. Where will it end? Before you know it, perhaps every goal will have to be analysed before it is given: to see if there was perhaps an illegal tug on a defender at some time during the long, labourious build up to it being scored; to wait for the committee to decide if, on balance, the award of the free kick that led to the goal was down to the attacker diving; or perhaps we’ll have to scrutinise each free kick, corner and throw in before it is taken just in case it results in a goal, eventually. And so the game as we know it will be buggered, all to prevent the sort of decision on Sunday which is extremely rare, and which was also so blatant that technology itself shouldn’t even be required for it in the first place. No, I’m really not sure it is a road we should be going down.

But a few words on the England team. I usually get pretty hacked off when pundits say stuff like “he would have scored that in the premiership”, or “why do England players look so poor here, when they look so good in the league?” It’s bollocks, mainly. Hansen and his ilk spend each weekend bemoaning terrible misses and poor defending, as players’ form fluctuates during the course of the season; but come the World Cup, all that is strangely forgotten, and they all seem to expect the players to be as good as they appear on the “Best of…” end of season review DVDs. But, as I said, I usually get hacked off by such nonsense…but when was the last time you saw a premiership back four defend as badly as England did against Germany (Burnley excepted)? With the possible exception of Ashley Cole, did they have a clue about their roles or where they were meant to be playing? It is easy to blame the manager – and if he has lost the confidence of the players then that may be fair enough – but what is any manager meant to do when his centre-backs take it upon themselves to wander about the field aimlessly, and with no regard to positioning or formation?

Capello has also got some stick for his attacking options: why didn’t Joe Cole play a bigger part?; everyone know we should play “Gerrard-in-the-hole!” Enough, already. Was playing Heskey really the reason that Rooney had apparently forgotten how to control a football? I doubt it. There is always some simplistic solution to England’s woes; four years ago it was the failure to select Defoe, before that it used to be the manager’s refusal to play a Waddle, or a Le Tissier. I’m sure that if Capello had listened to the media and played Gerrard where they wanted him they would just have found something else to whine about. Because there’s always something, and there always will be. Because, as I said before, we’re just not good enough.

The British media collectively announced another European victory over Blighty and common sense the other day, this time regarding contentious EU labelling legislation. You’ll remember the old Metric Martyrs story, years ago? The injustice that it was made illegal to buy a pound of bananas? I was pretty shocked at the story myself; shocked that the media expected me to buy bananas by the pound anyway. Does anybody? Don’t they buy them by the bunch, or by number? Isn’t the weight irrelevant to most people, be it in pounds or kilograms? Anyway, the whole story was a pile of crap regardless, since it was and is permissible to buy groceries by the pound, as long as the shopkeeper has a metric scale.

But having told us we should be buying items such as bananas by weight, the media has now changed its mind, at least with regards eggs. New EU regulation, apparently, will mean that items will have to be labelled with their weight. By a massive leap of anti-logic, some people have decided that if a box of eggs has to be labelled by weight, it can’t also be labelled to include the number of items in the packet. “It’s an end to buying eggs by the dozen”, apparently, despite the fact that eggs almost universally come in boxes of six. It takes a special kind of stupid to think that packaging will actually be prevented from mentioning the number of contents on the inside, and no mention whatsoever is made of this in the legislation. But we are talking here about our pathetically tribal, anti-EU British press here, so I guess anything goes. And it is my perhaps debatable allegation of tribalism here which means I can just about squeeze this brief observation into my post on the theme of “tribes”.

Tribalism, of course, is a feature of our party politics, so I’m on safer ground in this third part of my post; but elements of that tribalism still surprise me. I’ve felt close to the Liberal Democrats for many a year now, being something of a student activist and a member for a time. I veered away a bit during the useless Menzies Campbell’s era, and then smug Nick Clegg’s. I stopped understanding what they really stood for – I’m not sure they themselves know – but they still got my vote at the election. Following the formation of the coalition government I was surprised by some Labourite sniping at the Lib Dems, accusing them of betrayal and the like. As an outsider who saw the Labour party as my natural allies, such tribal anti-Lib Dem sentiments took me aback somewhat. It was a reminder of one of the things I so dislike about party politics.

And now? Well, while I still wouldn’t call the Lib Dems traitors, I am getting more distressed at the way their leadership seems to have so gleefully signed up to the Conservative’s agenda; for while I may like to think of myself a something of a pluralist politically, I still, pathetically, simply cannot abide the Tories. Now, I am sure that the Lib Dems will have exerted some sort of positive influence on the recent budget, but not enough for me to be happy. On such crucial issues such as how quickly the budget deficit should be reduced, how it should be reduced, and when to start, the Lib Dems were always more-or-less in step with Labour. Now they have performed a volte-face and say they are backing the Tory’s ideas, based on a post-election worsening of the UK economic position that hasn’t actually happened. When Obama wrote a letter to the G20 leaders saying we should be careful not to instigate cuts too soon, the coalition’s reply was that each government should act depending on its individual circumstances, apparently oblivious to the irony that they keep justifying the actions they are taking in Britain by referring us to what is happening in Greece. But at least the Conservatives can state that they went into the election saying they would start the cuts now, although my fear has always been that they haven’t so much dismissed the idea that cuts now can harm the recovery – a reasonable and arguable position – as failed to understand the economics of the theory in the first place. But the Lib Dems cannot claim such ignorance.

Now, I can see why Liberal Democrat MPs may be backing the Tory policies; they are in government, in the cabinet, and governed by collective responsibility. They may be supporting things they personally have misgivings about but feel they have to go along with, to toe the party line, in the same way the Labour leadership candidates are now fighting over each other to disown some of their former policies that they went along with at the time.

More surprising to me is the attitude of so many Lib Dem bloggers and commenters on sites such as Liberal Conspiracy, where they seem to have so seamlessly adopted some typical Tory rhetoric in an effort to defend the Lib Dems and their coalition policies, the sort of rhetoric they would surely have shunned just a few months previously. But I guess the question is did they actually shun such rhetoric previously? That is to say, perhaps I simply haven’t been paying attention, and that many Lib Dem bloggers have been saying these sorts of things for ages. In which case, perhaps I’ve been part of the wrong tribe, and voted for the wrong party, all along.

One of the coalition’s recent acts was to move to speed up a change in the age at which one can draw the state pension, an action that has been openly welcomed by some Lib Dem commentators. Perhaps that shows the gap between myself and some other Lib Dems; demographic changes may mean that a later retirement age could be considered necessary for the public finances, but how it can be actively welcomed is a mystery to me. In a few short years my expected retirement age of 65 has moved to a likely 70, and I doubt that will be the end of the matter. It’s demoralising, to say the least, to see the date at which you could retire move away from you faster than the years themselves are passing by.

Changing the state retirement age has been described by some as a wake up call for people to get their personal pensions in order. Well I thought I’d done that in signing up to my occupational pension scheme, but as public sector pensions are the next item in the firing line, I don’t know how that will fare. I assume that, at the very least, my contributions will have to rise again, just a couple of years after the last review meant an increase in my contributions. But I don’t mind that, as long as such changes are based on the financing and affordability of the pension scheme itself, and not just an attempt to make public sector workers pay more to redress the unfair way many private sector employers have chosen to abandon decent pension schemes for their workers.

(As an aside – and as a final, transparent attempt to crowbar this last section of the post into my tenuous overarching theme of “tribes” – it’s funny that when I left the private sector I assumed I was just changing jobs; I had no idea at the time that, as far as some are concerned, not least many denizens of blogs and newspaper comment sections, I was also changing tribes. Despite doing a very similar job, and working at least as hard and with the same abilities as I had before, little did I realise that to some private sector workers I was now a lazy, inefficient, incompetent and overpaid public sector worker, all pampered and bloated. Now, fortunately I am lazy, inefficient, incompetent and overpaid, slightly pampered and certainly bloated; but my many hard-working colleagues must be furious at such an unjust guilt-by-association, especially since I had never been the target of such daft generalisations when in the private sector because such contempt does not appear to be reciprocal. Nowhere I think seems to show this tribalism better than the matter of pensions, where too often the financial affordability of public sector pensions plays second fiddle to the argument that it’s not fair that some people have better pensions than others. Perhaps I had been naive in my private sector days, but my move to the public sector revealed to me that tribalism can appear in the most unlikely of places, and when you least expect it.)

But how else should I personally react to this supposed financial wake up call? Voluntarily increase my pension contributions still further? For a while I had been considering taking out some AVCs to supplement my pension, and I guess that is what some would still advise, but now I’m beginning to think: for what? To add to a pension that, with each revised retirement age, I am increasingly unlikely to ever see a payout from? I used to see things through the eyes of my parent’s generation, fed on Saga adverts of suntanned old folk enjoying their long, slow, golden retirement. Now it seem far more reasonable to assume that retirement will never happen and we will have to adjust to that reality and live for the day. Rather than work harder to pay more into a pension I will never see, perhaps I should just take it easy and take life as it comes: with an expectation that I will have to work till I drop, I’m not going to slog my guts out now for no reward later.

If the change in the state pension age was intended to make us all plan more for the future, then I think it will have failed to have had the desired effect on me. When combined with the events of last year – my father, after all, passed away aged just 68 – my response is more a “fuck it…this is my life now, and I think I’ll live for the moment, thanks very much.”

*Oops.

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