14th November 2012

Tomorrow we are invited to elect a police and crime commissioner.

I want to make the bizzies busier

I'm the police and crime commissioner

My aim in life is to ensure that in time

The punishments fit the crime

I want to make the bizzies busier

I want to keep the police on their toes

Ensure that everyone knows

That I've done my job not just on paper

So everyone feels that bit safer

I want to make the bizzies busier

It's not the crime the general public fear

It's the fear of crime getting nearer

I'm not just here to give the police a job

I'm here to find openings for every yob

I want to make the bizzies busier

After all no one needs to fear

I must show I'm earning my £85k a year

But look at my title more closely

Sure I'll work with the police mostly

But I'm also here to commission crime

So how best to use my time

Keeping the bizzies busy and keen

Like the famous Dixon of Dock Green                  

Not enough to do lads no one to arrest

Well funny you say maybe it's best

I want to make the bizzies busier

I've arranged a little taking and driving away

That should keep you busy today

Then tomorrow I've commissioned

A victimless crime I’m on a mission

I want to make the bizzies busier

For the PM who feels misquoted

I wasn't elected 'cos no one voted

But I won't let that stop me making the bizzies busier

I'm the commissioner for police and crime

So now I've started let me do my time

14th November 2012

This month the indoor critic and I will have been married for 44 years.

Reflecting on this I find myself wondering where the time and the money went.

Certainly raising a family of four, spending six months in the USA with a young family, and just the general business of getting through life, usually meant that in most months there was more of the month left after the money ended.

Usury played its part.

Not that I was a usurer but the introduction of debt cards, AKA Credit Cards, around about the time we got married, seemed to offer the impossible dream of unlimited funds with no pain, wrong of course, but that's usury for you.

Still it's not been a bad 44 years, the usual mix of tears and joy, with a few arguments and a few shared jokes and some very fine moments of which the finest was probably four years ago when we invited our children, their partners and their families to lunch to celebrate our Ruby wedding.

It was a great occasion, one we remember with great satisfaction.

November is also the month when my mother was born and when she died.

Born in 1917 she was 63 years of age when she died in 1980, the year that our youngest child was born.

It was only when we had the photographs taken at his christening developed and enlarged that we realised how ill she had looked, even though at that time she was still working, commuting daily to an office in the centre of Manchester.

Her premature death came as a direct consequence of a wrongly diagnosed breast cancer in her late forties.

So what has any of this to do with the big society?

I guess its because we can only ever view the big society through the lens of how it impacts on our own lives.

If the big society is real and capable of doing what the Prime Minister claims it can do for society then we have to ask what difference will it make to my life, my family, my community?

And the answer usually amounts to a j'accuse against governments and society at large.

It never occurred to me to read Barrack Obama's book, but I stumbled across it by accident on a web-site, read the first 44 pages, was hooked and immediately went out and bought the paper back from Oxfam.

It is a fascinating, intriguing, shocking and compelling story.

As I was reading I noticed that George Osborne had an article in my Newspaper comparing the Tory led coalition with the Democrats under Obama.

No, not really, there is no comparison,, Osborne's specious, self serving comments, bear no comparison with the vision set out in the Obama book.

This Tory Led coalition, with the equally self serving motives of the Liberal's led by Clegg, is in the business of keeping things as they are, not changing anything, keeping the poorest in their place, not giving them a stake in the democratic process, ensuring that the only voices heard in the public square, speak with their accents.

I try to keep things as light as possible in this blog.

It aims to offer a wry look at the big society.

It is as easy to blame the coalition for so much of what is wrong as it is for the coalition to blame the last Labour Government, but that would be equally untrue.

Over our 44 years, over the life of my parents, party politics has failed us equally.

As a youngster in Stoke on Trent in 1964, I campaigned as an Anarchist with the slogan Politics Out, that was the year when the Conservatives lost to Labour led by Harold Wilson.

I can claim no credit for the outcome, because it was also the year, despite the hopes and aspirations of supporters of the Labour Party, when the Millenium was postponed indefinitely and politics were most definitely in.

The current crises facing the coalition with the great estates of the Media, the BBC, Parliament itself being subject to increased scrutiny and public disquiet, with Banking and Financial services equal under critical scrutiny, with MP's choosing to abandon their constituents for a quieter life, still being found with their hands in the till of mysterious expense claims or appearing with other self proclaimed celebrities in a jungle near you, it is hard to discover where common sense has gone.

As a friend of mine would doubtless observe they're all barking.

Just as the USA is seeking to de-politicise its policing and its public services, we are electing political Commissioners for Police and Crime and firing Civil Servants in an attempt to create more biddable departments who will carry out more directly the wishes of ministers.

George Osborne and David Cameron's principal aim is to be re-elected.

I would so much prefer it to be to serve the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

After 44 years the indoor critic and I have reached a stage of companionable silence and so we set our sights lower, simply to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

9th November 2012

So a new Archbishop is announced.

On the face of it a good appointment, clearly a man who has been fast tracked through the system, and why not?

Having spent most of my career elevating the concept of biting the hand that feeds to a fine art, I can't complain that I was cul de sac'ed rather than fast tracked, but at least I wasn't sacked, at least not by the church.

Interesting that for a man with a reputation for getting his way in negotiations his opening gambit: Yes to Women Bishop's; No to gay marriages, seems like a pretty clear statement of the who, when and what ...... that will shape and possibly continue to vex his time in office.

I was a curate in Bolton in 1972 when the campaign to Ordain women to the priesthood began to gather force.

My Vicar at the time was vehemently opposed, but he was also a company man, so he voted for.

I asked why?

Oh, he responded, by the time it happens, I'll be retired.

Well now that I'm retired I guess I share that kind of reflection not so much about the Ordination of Women of which I have generally been in favour or of the Ordination of Women as Bishop's which seems logical or indeed the the offering of a sacramental blessing to people in same sex relationships which seems to be an expression of love and justice, which is surely the churches stock in trade?

After all it is part of the big society that we were promised and have never quite glimpsed.

No, my sense of get me out of here, I'm retired, is about the larger question of quite where the Church is heading?

Congregations continue to age and it comes to something when, as pensioners, the indoor critic and I can actually lower the demographic in a congregation when we attend (at least some, but more than before) churches.

So where is it all heading and where will it head under the leadership of a new Archbishop?

My suspicion is that sadly, despite Alpha Courses and the new West Kensington, Evangelical fervour that is gripping the Metropolitan Church, the decline of the church will continue and the curve will stretch into the future as a form of euclidean space in which there will be discontinuity with the past because the story is no longer compelling, a convergence of opinion that the story is no longer true and a profound sense that the story is no longer of value in understanding the human condition.

So the new Archbishop, like the boy in the poem, will be left to stand on the burning deck, hoping against hope that the wind changes direction.

Or maybe he will find himself reciting Matthew Arnold's Poem: Dover Beach:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
and naked shingles of the world.

Meanwhile I can only hope that the Church Commissioners continue to invest their pension funds wisely.

6th November 2012

In 1985 I spent a semester in Cambridge Massachusetts. 

It was my year of Undoing Theology in Red Sneakers.

The project was a major undertaking, relocating six people from the NE of England to the NE of the United States, finding schools for the children, settling into a new apartment and choosing which courses to pursue.

We arrived in January when it was, quite literally, breathtakingly cold and lived the dream through to the summer when it was beginning to feel extremely warm, then we returned home to Newcastle to pick up our old life where we had left.

Whilst we were in the States one of our children changed her name, to Chelsea Wilde but within hours of our return she had defaulted back to her given name.

I spent the next two years trying to find a job in order to make our stay permanent but gave up after coming second one too many times.

On reflection, with four children to guide through University and the indoor critic's increasing disability it seems that we made the right decision.

Education, Health Care and now in Retirement pensions, all point to the benefits of publicly provided support in the form of a welfare state understood in its broadest terms.

The current election taking place in the US appears to reflect this choice.

The Romney ticket appears to wish to undo much of what Obama has achieved and to return to the policies of the Bush era, which as Laurel and Hardy might observe, got the USA into this mess in the first place.

Tax cuts for the rich, no trickle down benefits for the poorest and expensive and unbudgeted wars.

The suprising thing about Mitt Romney is that whilst Governor of Massachusetts he appeared to be something of a Liberal, but the Republican Party has shifted pretty firmly to the Right following the success of the Tea Party Movement.

To gain the nomination and secure the Republican vote Romney had to adopt a much more right wing, even reactionary stance than he presented whilst in office.

Obama on the other hand, inherited a huge mess.

The economy was in free fall, housing, healthcare, pensions and the defence budget meant that his room for manoeuvre was extremely limited and opposition in the Senate from the Republicans meant that every inch of progress was only achieved at a high cost.

But there has been real achievement in Health Care, in Foreign Policy and in public investment which has secured economic growth, wages and jobs.

The emotional investment in an Obama victory in the UK is extremely high.

The special relationship, reinforced by pictures of Cameron flipping burgers on the White House lawn and Romney's cavalier comments about the Olympics mean that even the Conservatives appear to be hoping for Obama to win.

Even William Hague, whilst obviously not as appealing to Hilary Clinton as David Milliband, has managed to appear statesmanlike.

Of course we have no say in the matter.

We have no vote.

But on the BBC News, Hugh Edwards went in search of his Welsh relatives, all of whom appeared to be voting for Romney, to give us a first hand experience of what being caught  up in a presidential election debate might feel like.

I imagine that I will sleep well enough whilst the votes are being counted, I hope that their will be no repeat of the hanging chads debacle which cost the Democrats dearly three terms ago, but when I wake up to the news I have a sense that the world may be the same or that it might just have become a slightly more dangerous place.

31st October 2012

One of the best cars that I ever owned was a DKW.

Built in Eastern Germany before the war, it boasted the famous Audi interlinked rings on the radiator grille, after the war marooned in East Germany, the factory built the Wartburg.

The car had a three cylinder two stroke engine and it was awesomely fast.

It was aero-dynamic in shape and its construction was described as a pillar-less saloon, the rear windows winding back into the doors to form a completely open sided aspect.

The model I owned was a Saxomat.

This variant had a clutch which was electrically operated by means of a button on the end of the steering column mounted gear shift. The fly wheel had a centrifuge which engaged as the speed of the engine rose and disengaged as the speed slowed and stopped.

So at Traffic Lights you could sit with first gear engaged and the engine burbling beneath the bonnet and then as you floored the accelerator the car would rear up on its back wheels and hurl itself forward with blistering acceleration.

It would have brought a smile to Jeremy Clarkson's face.

It certainly made me smile as I left another travelling salesman edging forward through the blue exhaust in his Ford Cortina wondering where I had gone.


But centrifuges work in politics as well as in engineering.

This may prove to have been an unfortunate time for the con-dems to choose to form not only a Government, but a Coalition Government.

In some future time, maybe a hundred years from now, a historian, echoing Gibbon's magisterial history of the Roman Empire, might entitle his history or her story, The History of  the Decline and fall of Europe.

Each chapter would follow the rise and fall of a particular European country as it traces the collapse of economic and monetary union, the collapse of markets, the demise of the common currency and the end of European history.

The chapter on the United Kingdom will, in all likelihood make galling reading for the grandsons and daughters of the members of the present cabinet.

In my last job I was invited to help as the advert had it, 'to build an organisation to break down barriers' it was a challenge that I responded to enthusiastically and with which I struggled for a number of years, until I realised that there were forces at work within the organisation that were simply beyond my or any one else's capacity to manage and which made it impossible to build the organisation.

Organisations, no less than countries or economic unions, are subject to centrifugal and centripetal forces.

The one forcing the energy to flow from the centre outward, the other forcing energy from the edges inward.

In both my legendary DKW, as in the charity I directed, the centrifugal forces were irresistible.

The car's fly-wheel flung out it's teeth, the gears engaged and the car accelerated. The charity continued to expend itself by taking on initiatives and then launching them as independent activities with their own management.

As a membership  'movement' organised into branches, even the branches saw themselves as independent of the centre.

The European 'Project' was based on the idealistic notion that centripetal influences could pull the disparate regions of Europe together into a single economic and monetary union and might even lead to a federal structure.

Czechoslovakia, former Yugoslavia, Spain and closer to home Scotland and Wales, offer examples of political centrifugal movements leading to new smaller nations embracing or seeking independence and nationhood.

Of course an independent Scotland might seek to be part of a wider federal Europe, it might not, Alex Salmond might not win the vote, Spain might remain as a single political confederation under the rule of its King.

It is clearly too early to tell how things will change and how the future will look but what is clear that across Europe centrifugal forces are at work.

21st October 2012

I am not a luddite.

i padded, i phoned and kindled to the hilt, socially well media'd and conversant with live streaming movies and down loading music.

But I just tried to change a flight on easyjet!

Not easy at all!

Who was the wit that came up with the idea that we could manage without travel agents and do the work ourselves 'online' and then happily pay for the privilege?

You go online, change the flight pay the difference in fare, it won't be cheaper! and then pay £35 for each passenger!!!!

Just for the privilege of being an easytouch!

I just hope that George (travel first class on a second class, fare dodger ticket) Osborne doesn't realise what lengths we are prepared to go to and how easy it is to hoodwink us.

And easy it is!

We have been hoodwinked so often!

Driving Licenses, my first one gained when I was 17 was valid until I was 70, well valid until I changed my address and then I was issued a new photo licence and within twenty minutes had to pay a fortune to renew it.

So how did that happen?

I recently sold my car.

We have acquired a new car which belongs to the critic in residence but as we are pretty  much joined at the hip her newly gained independence simply means that when necessary I can use my bus pass or ride the Harley (raining - bus, sunny- Harley, easy travel!).

So having sold the car to a friend of a friend, I sent the necessary paperwork off to the DVLA.

I then receive a letter asking for the necessary paperwork, I telephone Wales to explain, don't worry says a voice straight out of under milkwood, crossed in the post hasn't it?

Love those rhetorical questions as statement's thingies.

Ignore the threatening letter, it's OK its standard in these situations.

Well, nobody told the enforcement section in geordieland.

Apart from anything else, they know where I live.

£1000 fine, automatic, unless you send £30 by return.

So I ring them up, explain, mention under milk wood, don't worry says this lovely geordie lass, obviously a mistake, send a letter to explain.

I suggest that it might be nice if I was to receive an apology.

At the post office the nice lady agrees, best get it signed for, so that's £2 75, the reply when it comes contains no apology.

It is anonymous on behalf of the Secretary of State, but he's a bit busy, apologising to Richard Branson and there are only so many apologies and Richard's got his hands full trying to stop George Osborne fare dodging .............

15th October 2012

I suppose it had to happen.

After the 'success' of the Jubilee and the Olympics a Prime Minister desperate for another diversion has come up with the brilliant idea of celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the start of the First World War.

I wonder if his advisers suggested hanging on for four years and celebrating the end?

What is there to celebrate about Europe tearing itself apart over a carnage that lasted four long bloody years?

What is there to celebrate about countries being destroyed, populations decimated in a conflict that effectively represented a fin de siecle of an age and which in its turn ushered in the Great Depression?

Am I missing something?

Maybe the Prime Minister sees it as a way of nailing down Europe.

First there will be a referendum and we will pull out of Europe, then we will celebrate the defeat of those European nations that had the temerity to challenge our primacy as a political and economic empire?

Coming within days of the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize for the European Union, recognition of what is good and significant about an economic and political alliance that has managed to ensure peaceful co-existence between its member states for over sixty years, it seems somewhat contradictory.

What will we celebrate, the Lions or the Donkeys?

The phrase seems to have its origins in the German High Command who described the ordinary soldiers of the British Army as Lions who were led by Generals who were Donkeys.

One German general commenting that if the British Generals had matched their troops courage with a similar degree of strategy they would have been invincible.

Well, history as Orwell commented is always written by the victors and I suppose that the committee chosen to plan the celebrations will write their own version of what happened.

The sub-text, as with the Olympics and the Jubilee will inevitably be to set out a narrative that tells a story about the unity and greatness of the British Isles.

I have no doubt that we live in a Great Country, it is the triumph of the Lions that despite everything, they survive the lack of strategy, the corruption and the wrong-headed-ness of the Donkeys who insist that they are in charge.

Maybe that is something to celebrate?