Category Archives: Current Affairs

Islamic Extremism

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The recent slaughter, in Algeria, of twenty three international workers (including six Britons) by Islamic Militants at a BP owned gas plant was a sickening reminder that the problems of terrorism are still with us and a reminder too that the evil tentacles of these fanatics are able to reach out to virtually any part of the world. Our Prime Minister said that the war against terrorism could take decades to win, if indeed it is winnable, and his warnings are not to be taken lightly.

Closer to home, yesterday’s Sunday Times (a paper not known for gratuitous sensationalism) contained a report that white people in the London Boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest are being apprehended by Islamic vigilantes, seeking to impose Sharia law, the law of Islam. Evidently these vigilantes, calling themselves the Muslim Patrol, have forced whites to pour away cans of alcohol and have told white women wearing short skirts to cover themselves up because they are in Muslim districts where Sharia law applies. Further, it is common in these areas for advertisements deemed offensive to Muslims, such as adverts for ladies’ underwear, to be defaced and homophobic graffiti to be sprayed on buildings.

How do we react to this in a balanced, rational manner without fear of being branded intolerant and reactionary and without upsetting the liberal sensibilities and politically correct thinking of those who rule us? Well, let’s start by saying that there is one law in this land for all of us, the law of statute and common law. Secondly, there is no place for vigilantes since we have a police force to patrol the streets and enforce that law. Thirdly, if people do not like the law then they can seek to change it by democratic means.

This is the United Kingdom and that is how it works. We respect the rights of the individual, we respect and defend the freedoms of speech, movement and association, we are a free country and a democracy. Men and women are equal in the eyes of our law.

It is outrageous that any group should illegally and arbitrarily seek to impose their views, religious or otherwise, on their fellow citizens and such behaviour should be dealt with quickly. We can only hope that the authorities have the political will to act because if they don’t the road ahead is dangerous indeed.

National Flag?

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What a tragedy that the centuries old problems of Ireland, specifically Northern Ireland, show no sign of abating. The province seems to be locked in a vicious spiral where trouble breaks out, peace is made and all is quiet for a while before it all kicks off again. One wonders will it ever end? Sadly, as things stand, the answer is almost certainly no, because whilst there may be a peace-loving majority there are still enough extremists and bigots on both sides of the religious divide to guarantee that any cessation of hostilities will always be temporary. However, the latest outbreaks of violence almost defy belief and those politicians who decided to restrict the flying of the Union flag over Belfast City Hall are surely worthy candidates for admission to the local asylum.

There are of course two separate communities in Northern Ireland namely Catholics and Protestants with the Protestants comprising the majority. Traditionally, Protestants wish to remain a part of the United Kingdom whilst a significant number of Catholics would prefer to be part of a United Ireland. The situation is never less than sensitive or delicate and it doesn’t take much for trouble to arise as can be seen each year during the Protestant marching season when the archaic Orange Order openly and provocatively celebrate their 17th century victory over the Catholics.
The Union flag is much in evidence all year round in Protestant communities and is an obvious symbol of their membership of the UK. The crass decision to restrict the flying of the flag from Belfast City Hall to certain days of the year was inevitably going to lead to outrage and trouble. What on Earth were the City Council members thinking of, surely they must have known what the response to their decision would be?  Northern Ireland is like a keg of gunpowder, nice and calm when the lid is sealed but even a small child can tell you what happens when the lid is removed and you strike a match.
The province is part of the United Kingdom and its citizens should have an unrestricted right to fly the national flag on all public buildings at all times, just as they should, for that matter, in all parts of the UK. As long as the majority in Northern Ireland wish to remain in the UK their wishes should be respected. There may well come a day, and some say it is rapidly approaching due to a rapid growth in the Catholic population, where a new majority decide that they no longer wish to do so. That will be a different ball game and those pressing for a United Ireland may one day get their wish, though if I were a citizen of the Republic of Ireland I doubt that I would want the troubled North to be a part of my country.

Drunken Britons

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Whilst it’s always nice to write and talk about the good things in life, sometimes we have no choice but to confront the things that irritate us and affect our lives in a negative way. None of us can fail to be aware of the huge increase, in recent years, of anti-social behaviour in this country and you only have to open your national or local newspaper to see many examples of what I’m talking about.

Yesterday, a Ryanair flight from Tenerife to Manchester was delayed due to the behaviour  of one of the passengers. The 7.25am flight was already full and about to leave on time but was then delayed to enable the last passenger, a drunken Englishman, to board the plane.
Once he’d taken his seat he became abusive to both passengers and cabin crew causing the plane’s captain to take the view that he was a threat and danger to the safety of the flight. The captain aborted take-off, turned the plane around and returned to the terminal where the police boarded the plane, arrested the man and took him away. The flight was delayed by nearly an hour, 300 decent law abiding passengers were more than a little inconvenienced and  the airline suffered financial loss all because of the irresponsible and selfish  behaviour of one man.
Fortunately, the Spanish police are not so obsessed by political correctness and human rights as ours and no doubt they gave the lout a bit of rough treatment before throwing him into the cell where he belongs. With a bit of luck he will also be fined heavily and banned from flying with that particular airline, though in my opinion he should be banned by all airlines for at least a fixed period. An example surely has to be made.
The problem is that these type of incidents occur with alarming regularity on flights carrying British holiday makers and if that seems a harsh thing to say just ask any travel operative from Spain, Greece, Portugal or Turkey, for example, what they think of us British. Whilst they may say that they realise we’re not all like that there are certainly enough to cause concern and words like thug, hooligan and drunken lout come quickly to their tongues. 
That is a cause of shame for all of us, if only for the fear that we all end up being tarred by the same brush. It’s about time we and our government did something about it.

Happy New Year!

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It’s hard to believe that the year has come and gone and here we are, once again, on the eve of yet another. Where does the time go?

By and large 2012 has been a good year for most of us in the UK. For sure, we are still in the middle of a European crisis (aren’t we always!) and we are still suffering from the effects  of a recession that has allowed few countries to escape its clutches. However, life goes on and whilst there has been a general tightening of belts the country is hardly in a state of depression.
This was a year that saw the United Kingdom feature prominently on the world stage. The London Olympics together with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations put a smile on our faces and showed the world that our once mighty nation is still capable of putting on a show to match the finest. If nothing else those two events did wonders for national pride and morale and the positive effects may last a while yet.
So , what can we expect of 2013 and will anything change? Well, the recession is unlikely to go away in the foreseeable future and the problems over Europe are going to get worse before they get better. Our politicians will continue to promise prosperous days ahead (whilst crossing their fingers!), the trades unions will still call for national strikes and our weathermen will excite us with predictions of a glorious record-breaking summer until yet another rain-soaked August exposes their false promise!
We’ll ride through it all though, just as we always seem to do and there really is no reason why this coming year should not be, at the very least, the equal of the last. It’s all a question of positive thinking, isn’t it! Happy New Year to us all!

A Tragic Telephone Call

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The prank telephone call by two young Australian DJs, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles, to the hospital treating the Duchess of Cambridge was an idiotic caper with unforeseen tragic consequences. Unbelievably, their laughable attempts at a Royal accent were enough to fool two nurses at the King Edward VII Hospital, so that one nurse was persuaded to disclose confidential information regarding the health of the Duchess. The other nurse, who answered the phone call and passed it over to her colleague, was evidently so distressed by the subsequent uproar that she was driven to take her own life. Predictably there have been demands in both the UK and Australia for the two DJs to face the full wrath of the law but is this fair?

So-called prank calls by clowning DJs have been with us for years. Sometimes amusing, occasionally offensive but often just plain tiresome they have a certain appeal to audiences the world over. On this occasion the prank went horribly and fatally wrong and as ever, in the midst of all the outrage, there has been a clamour for retribution. The attention has largely been focussed on the DJs who in actual fact are probably  the players in this tragedy least worthy of our attention.

In their wildest nightmares they could never, for a moment, have considered or foreseen that their juvenile behaviour might lead to somebody’s suicide and, in all honesty, who could? No, the real cause of the tragedy lies elsewhere. Firstly, these DJs have producers and bosses who decide on what goes out or doesn’t go out on air. Even more significantly it has been reported that this particular broadcast was vetted and passed fit for broadcast by the radio station’s lawyers. So how can the DJs be held responsible? If you give your 5 year old child a carving knife and he carves up your furniture is the child to blame or is it you, the supervising and consenting adult?

Secondly, following the theme of responsibility, who is responsible for the employment of staff at the hospital? Who made the decision to appoint the poor nurse, an Indian immigrant with possibly not the greatest command of the English language, as telephonist in a hospital famous for treating members of the Royal Family and other well-known public figures. Such patients need considerably more protection and security than us ordinary folk and common sense would indicate the need to employ staff of the highest quality. It was surely foreseeable that a hospital such as this was always likely to attract prank or crank calls so therefore the appointment of intelligent, confident, no-nonsense staff to properly screen and vet telephone calls should have been a top priority.

The higher levels of management at the hospital most certainly need to be held to account and questioned in detail as to why their high profile patients were not provided with adequate protection and screening. They and the radio station’s management (and lawyers) are the main culprits in this case, not the hapless DJs.

Snow Chaos

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Well, it’s that time of year again, the first snowfall of winter and our roads are blocked, our trains cease to function and flights are cancelled as our airports shudder to a halt, paralysed, evidently by less than two inches  of snow. It happens every year and every year it seems that our public services and transport systems are taken by surprise. Why?

Why is it that winter snowfall is such a shock? Why is it that this country suffers more disruption and cancelled flights than Sweden, for example, a country which regularly has snowfalls of several feet over a period of four to five months?  Yet, bar the odd blip, they manage to keep things moving along quite nicely and airport closures and flight cancellations are something of a rarity for the Swedes.
I hate knocking this country, I really do, but why on earth can’t our transport system perform better than it does? Compared to many countries we, in the UK, are very lucky with our climate. I know we’ve had some recent floods, which were certainly dreadful  for those affected, but we don’t have the hurricanes, tornadoes and other extremes of weather suffered by many other nations who, in spite of those extremes, still manage to get on with daily life without excessive disruption.
It can’t be that hard to get it right, can it? Surely, it’s just a matter of planning and preparation, preparing for the inevitable changes in weather that the seasons bring and stockpiling enough salt and sand together with the equipment and manpower to deliver it. Common sense tells you that snow falls in winter and sometimes that snow can be quite heavy, it’s just a shame that common sense isn’t that common after all as far as our public authorities are concerned.

Freedom and Responsibility

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At last,  Lord Justice Leveson has finally delivered his much awaited report into press regulation following the phone hacking scandal and the disgraceful behaviour of various journalists many of whom were employed by or associated with Rupert Murdoch’s News International. The scandal led, last year, to the closing down of Murdoch’s News of the World and I doubt many responsible journalists mourned its passing.

It seems to me that “responsible” is the key word in all of this, a word that seems almost archaic so rarely is it evidenced  in modern life. Responsibility for one’s behaviour or actions is an alien concept to many and certainly those journalists who hounded those victims of crime and other figures in the public eye (I dislike the use of the word “celebrity”) have much to answer for. It’s all well and good claiming the right to freedom of the press but with all rights there is an equal duty of responsibly. There are two sides to every coin.

Many people feel that the press has singularly failed to regulate itself effectively and it’s hard to disagree with that viewpoint. However, the question is should the press be regulated by Parliament with all that that entails? Is any further regulation required where victims of press intrusion have the ability to sue for libel and seek redress in the courts? In extreme cases, victims could rely on the protection of criminal law but if the CPS decided not to prosecute then the victim would have to fund a private prosecution. Unfortunately, in the absence of legal aid, the cost of court action would be prohibitive to all but the wealthy and so some protection is clearly necessary for the vast majority of the public.

Lord Leveson has proposed a new regulatory watchdog to monitor the press and whilst it may appear to be a compromise and a half way house it is probably the right thing to do. The press has undoubtedly failed  to regulate itself effectively and something had to be done to protect the innocent. So long as a proper balance is maintained between press freedom and responsibility then there should be no need for Parliamentary or Government interference. We can only wait and see.

Clean up for Auntie?

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These are not good times for the BBC.  The once venerable institution seems to be lurching from crisis to crisis and the sad thing is that most of its current difficulties are undoubtedly of its own making.

The scandalous withdrawal of the Savile expose by the Newsnight programme a few weeks back and then the subsequent outrageous allegations of paedophilia made against an innocent public figure on the same programme were quite mind-blowing. The first was at the very least an act of gross incompetence by management and the second was an extremely poor piece of “investigative” journalism that quite simply beggared belief.

Any decent journalist – in fact any trainee journalist – knows that you should always check out your source and investigate fully all aspects of your scoop to avoid not just claims of libel or slander but also the possible destruction of an innocent man’s reputation. The fact that the innocent victim in this case, Lord McAlpine, has settled quietly rather than destroy the BBC in court is to his credit. However, no matter how the settlement has been reached, let’s not forget the other innocents in this story, those responsible for forking out the damages for the Corporation’s incompetence, namely us, the BBC licence payers.

This week saw the 90th anniversary of the first BBC radio broadcast and one cannot help but think of the early aims of the BBC to “inform, educate and entertain”. The BBC still does an awful lot right and is much respected both in this country and in many parts of the world. Many of the BBC’s dramas, documentaries and current affairs programmes are of the highest quality and the fact that the beleaguered director-general of the BBC, George Entwistle, was forced to resign following a savage grilling by his employee, John Humphrys, on the Radio 4 Today programme, is to the eternal credit of the BBC’s ethos. Can you imagine such a thing happening in China, Russia or in fact almost anywhere else in the world?

What is needed for the BBC is a weeding out of the incompetent, complacent, arrogant and politically correct management who have led the Corporation to this sad state of affairs. Replace them with a determined, focused, disciplined and responsible management hierarchy capable of leading a team of good quality enthusiastic  journalists and within a short period the recent disasters will be consigned to history. Don’t  let’s give up on Auntie just yet, she just needs a bit of a clean-up and face lift and all will be well once more.

Child Benefit – Helping the Needy

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Much of our recent news, apart from predictable speculation on the identity of the next president of the USA, has focused on the payment of UK child benefit.  Evidently the Government has decided that payment of these benefits should be means tested. Well of course it should, isn’t that what the welfare state is all about?

Why on earth should people who earn enough money to pay higher rate tax receive welfare benefits? If you are fortunate enough to earn a large wage (the Government’s starting point is £50,000 a year) then you don’t need a handout from the state. This has got nothing whatever to do with socialism but everything to do with common sense.

The whole purpose of the welfare state is to look after people who are not able to look after themselves whether through age, infirmity, or a genuine inability to find work and please note the use of the word “genuine”. Those are the people who need and deserve state benefits and if it is true that some Tory backbenchers are opposed to this principle then they belong in the Dark Ages.

As I have said before in this blog, one of the prime responsibilities of a civilized state is to look after and safeguard the needs of the weak and less privileged, not to continue to line the pockets of those with no need for it.

Protecting Children

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Sky News featured a story over the weekend on the alarming rise of gang-related child abduction in India, one of the world’s so-called emerging nations and one of the fastest growing economies.  Evidently the abduction of young Indian children has reached epidemic proportions with an estimated one child being taken every eight minutes. That works out at just under two hundred a day or a staggering fourteen hundred a week. Investigations have revealed that, once enslaved, the children are used as either cheap labour in one of the country’s thriving factories or as prostitutes.

The Indian government, not surprisingly, are extremely concerned by the situation and questions are being asked as to whether or not the police are doing all that they can to safeguard the welfare of their children. A national register has been set up with the idea of posting on it a photograph of every child in the country to assist in tracing anyone unfortunate enough to be abducted. It seems a good idea but how effective will it be in a country of over one billion people and with wide scale poverty among the lower classes, many of whom undoubtedly slip under the State’s radar?
Abuse of children has always seemed to me to be the worst type of human abuse since children are naturally so vulnerable, trusting, innocent and weak. Any State that cannot look after its most vulnerable members can barely refer to itself as civilised and I’m not singling out India here. Closer to home we have been faced with a barrage of tales concerning the late Sir Jimmy Savile and whilst, initially, there may have been doubt at the allegations made against him one year after his death their sheer volume can only lead one to the conclusion that here was a man of at least questionable behaviour but more likely, as many have claimed, a paedophile. I just hope that the investigation, and there will undoubtedly be a national enquiry, is calm and well balanced, concerning itself only with truth and fact and does not degenerate into a witch hunt.
In the meantime, all any of us can do is to educate and alert our children to the dangers of the world, to warn them against the wiles of some adults, not just strangers, and to encourage in them the use of common sense. We mustn’t overdo it though because there is still a lot of good in the world and a sizeable majority of people are undoubtedly thoughtful, decent and kind. It would not be right to bring up a new generation of untrusting, hard-faced, bitter, cynics. No, that’ll come soon enough with middle-age!
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