Graham Spaid's Blog, page 5

Fan fiction

It’s official.  The British are the laziest workers in Europe.  A recent study has shown that they ring in sick more than anyone else, excusing themselves with a range of fake illnesses. 
I suppose if you normally deceive people, you expect other people to do it to you.  When footballer Wayne Rooney rang in sick for two World Cup qualifying matches, accusations kicked around social media that he lacked commitment to the English cause.  He felt he had to prove that he was really injured, and posted on Facebook a photo of his bloodied head.  It was grim, but no doubt there are people who remain convinced that he should stop looking at himself, get back on the field and do what he is paid to do.  With fans like these, who needs an opposition? 
In attack or in defence, the power of social media is enormous.  A picture can be unforgettable.  The Arab Spring is still blossoming nicely.  When it began, as despots fell around us, commentators noted with satisfaction the role played by social media in helping idealistic young people organise their protests.  At the same time, images from mobile phones were posted on the internet to show the true suffering of the population and so contradict the propaganda of the regime. 
In the UK, two summers ago, technology gave youngsters with other ideals an advantage over police in the so-called Blackberry riots.  You won’t, of course, bless mobile communication when your grip on the realm is being prised away, finger by finger, by teenagers with a hand-held device.  SLAP!Don’t mention the riots! 
But forget the bad guys. It’s far more embarrassing when the good guys shoot themselves, on film and in the foot, doing things you wish they had done in private or not at all.  I mean the footage of the Colonel, baited, butchered and bundled off to YouTube, the hell of endless hits, when rebels surrendered to the same urge that makes tourists snap each other and hunters screw their kill to the wall.  Although we loved getting rid of him, these antics gave us liberals a problem or two when they were uploaded onto VirtualPurgatory. 
For a start, those of us who queued up behind the righteous ones in the contest with Tyranny are now inconvenienced by images that are, at best, tasteless souvenirs and, at worst, proof that some, if not all, of the righteous ones are as bad as the devil they deposed, their vengeance is so calculated, their cruelty so deftly improvised. 
That’s not all.  Even though we regret that the photographer and his friends are intent on the murder of a human being; that they’re finding pleasure in his pain and humiliation – his true suffering, if you like – and clambering to record their involvement in it, we are nonetheless fascinated.  The jerkiness of the camera enhances the realism, and the horror; it seems we are holding the camera ourselves, we wonder if we could do the same things, and we feel guilty just for wondering.
These moving images of one, helpless man shame us more than fifty stills of executed loyalists.  A rebel said there’s a Gaddafi inside everyone.  I'm a fan.  He can have a job in my next government. 

Behind a bush, in the wind: the boys from Brazil

The relationship between UK police and young Brazilian men does not make happy reading.  They shot and killed an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezez, at Stockwell tube station during a terror scare in 2005.  Opportunities to identify him were missed.  There was a police stake-out at his apartment, but he was not photographed when he started out on his fatal journey because the cameraman was having a piss.  An image of him, passed  to police ‘Gold Command,’ would have confirmed straightaway that he was not the right man.  How many calls of nature have left a person dead? 
With David Miranda, again from Brazil, the police have now shot themselves in the foot.  We are supposed to believe that they just took it on themselves to detain him for nine hours on anti-terror laws.  No instruction from the Home Office.  No 10 just says it was ‘kept abreast’ of what was happening. Washington just says it was given a ‘heads-up.’  Trite metaphors, but this was the very choice which confronted police when the time came to shoot Menezez.  They chose the head in case he had strapped a bomb to his breast.
The material which David Miranda was carrying may have been obtained illegally, but it may also expose how security forces have been spying illegally on their own citizens.  Terror laws were formulated partly to protect the public against data which could assist terrorists.  The British government has portrayed the seized data as dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.  But the only danger here is to Western governments caught with their fingers in the pie.  Embarrassment of this sort can be fatal – to governments.  It is not a danger to the public.  On the contrary, it is in the public interest to know when government agencies break their own laws. 
Terror laws were used on this occasion to intimidate and stifle investigative journalists.  They are meant to be used randomly, but they targeted a particular individual.  Miranda was questioned about his ‘entire life.’  Once again we are talking about the entire life of a young Brazilian man.  Less than thirty years, but beyond the life span of a democratic government.
Nine hours can be a long time.  As we know, there are crucial moments in every investigation.  We wouldn’t want to let anyone down.  This time the police employed six agents so they wouldn’t miss a thing. They rotated the questioning.  None of them had to wait more than ninety minutes for a piss.

Vive la France

It’s hard being the UK Foreign Secretary.  In times of crisis, to make life easier, the British normally let the French go first.  This summer, the French déploré the shooting of unarmed civilians in Egypt, then the British did; this week the French blâmé the Syrian government for gassing unarmed civilians, then the British did.   
It wasn’t always like this.  In Libya, the UK tried to get in first, and it was even more embarrassing.  However much Foreign Secretary Hague tried, he didn’t write the script.  From the start, he was coyote and roadrunner was French.  Remember, after the resolution on the no-fly zone, it was their air force, not the UK’s, that saved Benghazi from the armoured column rollicking towards it over the desert, engines backfiring, ammo belts flying like strings of detonating bangers. 
At the same time, the British parliament, that club of gentlemen, was still reassuring us – and Gaddafi – that no action could be taken “until after the Commons debate on Tuesday,” as if what they had in mind was no more urgent than choosing a brand of cigar.  The delay, of course, would have given the rat-catchers from Tripoli enough time to exterminate half of Benghazi.  Mais oui, the French got in first.
The one time Britain did do something … I hope you’ve forgotten the botched essay in the sand, the crack troops helicoptered in, only to be rounded up by a few, good-natured camel herders, when all that needed doing in the first place was to make a phone call ahead.  After this, the Foreign Secretary famously admitted that he was fed up with the world, although he perked up again when the war was won (by the US and Qatar), which highlights the common sense of not resigning after your first débâcle.
Let the French go first, and ideally Mr Hague won’t get sick of Egypt and Syria, which are bubbling along quite out of his control.  How many countries are there in the Middle East?   If he does despair again, let’s hope he doesn’t do so in public.       

The power of naming

I know a boy called Ronni.  That’s short for Ronaldinho.  His parents came to the UK from Romania.  You probably don’t know the little fellow, but you may have heard of the famous Brazilian footballer they named him after.  That was in – fans have guessed – about 2005.  What happens when the famous footballer stops playing well, or hangs up his boots?  The kid gets stuck with the name.  Still, if the name happens to be longer than the career, you can always shorten it to something else. 
You’d think that naming your baby boy Messiah (another famous one) was a safe bet in America.  But a judge there wouldn’t allow it.  The parents rightly complained that there were already lots of other Messiahs around.  It would, in fact, be an excellent choice for several reasons.  For a start, the original Messiah is not likely to hang up his sandals any time soon.  And if the name does become a problem – again, unlikely, but you never know – there is Messi for short. 
Of course, the names of children tell us more about their parents’ aspirations than their own natural abilities. We name more than babies, though, and it can be embarrassing.  A TV viewer recently denounced The Railway Children, a film which has been a family favourite in Britain for decades, as it encouraged children to play on railway lines.  It was the first-ever complaint about the suitability of this film.  Whoever named and shamed it was generally derided, but this shows what can come from our zeal to protect.  The official response was no less ridiculous.  We were reassured that nowadays public access to railway lines is much more restricted, so the film is not dangerous.  So it was dangerous for years after it was made?
Then there’s the British Library user who found his access to a video of Hamletblocked.  More red faces.  The official response?  New software was filtering out violent material which could harm children.  It just required a ‘tweak’ to fix.  Type that in.  Tweak number # ... allow … Hamlet.  Done. Given the nature of world literature, there’ll be a whole lot of tweaking going on.  (Rock ’n’ roll was dangerous, too, children.) 
Annoying ‘errors’ aren’t the only problem.  During this awkward time for the Library, there was never any opinion expressed or, I am sure, even secretly supposed, that Hamlet should be blocked by the filter.  Everyone assumed, like a fact of life, without the need for discussion, that it would be wrong to filter out this play.  Why?  Who decides what gets through, on what grounds, and what doesn’t?  What do we do about the dangerous works we have always enjoyed and even praised as classics, not to mention the things we aren’t so sure about? 
A British MP launched a career-boosting campaign to outlaw written child pornography.  Then he realised the need to deal with books like Lolita.  Another famous name.  A classic such as this would, he said, be excluded from the ban.  Really?  At one point in the novel, the narrator shares an orgasm with the 12-year-old girl who is sprawling on his testicles.
In the nineteenth century, Mr Thomas Bowdler tweaked the naughty bits out of Shakespeare’s plays to make them ‘suitable’ for women and, naturally, children.  You can  now find him under B  in the dictionary, a disparaging three-syllable verb, and a noun with -ism after it.  But he might be on the way back.  The Prime Minister has his own, vote-winning scheme for an internet pornography filter.  He's going to cameronize the web.  Under C, that will be.
We can’t get away from names, can we?  But please pay attention to the whole word, not just how it starts.  To boost sales, the now-defunct News of the World newspaper once had a crusade to name paedophiles, which led the public to attack the properties of paediatricians and other names that looked the same at the beginning, as if anybody would allow their criminal record, and this sort in particular, to be advertised on a brass plaque on their gate. Witches, communists, paedophiles.  Get the name right.

New turn, old spin.

The DRS/bat tampering debate has taken an unexpected turn with the discovery that a well-known English batsman has played several Test matches with a large hole in the centre of his bat.  The hole is reported to be about the size and shape of a cricket ball.
The batsman, who has not been named, denied that the hole gave him an unfair advantage.  To begin with, there was no tape or linseed oil around the inside of the hole, so any impact from the ball in this area would not be concealed from Hotspot.  The existence of the hole, he went on, was against neither the rules nor the spirit of the game. On the contrary, the absence of a large piece of wood from the middle of his bat could arguably assist the bowling side if, for example, the ball passed through the hole and onto the stumps.  No one, he continued, had complained until now.  Why should it suddenly be labelled wrong?  He knew of many other English batsmen who had played with holes in their bats over the last 30 or 40 years, especially in the '90s against Australia. 
Analysis has in fact revealed that the hole is scarcely large enough for a cricket ball to pass through.  In controlled experiments, nine times out of ten, a direct hit travelling under 50 mph lodged the ball tightly in the hole. This news generated a whole new line of discussion on BBC Radio’s Test Match Special.  Would a batsman be out if the ball got stuck in a hole in his bat?  Was it a dead ball, was the batsman obstructing the game, or was it something else?  Would the batsman be caught by his own bat?
It is now clear that the hole offers no real assistance either to the batsman or to the bowler in relation to most types of dismissal, with or without the structural addition of the ball.  However, if a bat with a ball embedded in it struck the wicket, the batsman would technically have played the ball onto his wicket at the same time as he struck the wicket with his bat.  This point launched the commentators into further discussion about the possibility of getting out in more than one way from a single ball – in this case, played-on and hit-wicket.  Surely, one pundit lamented, after centuries of cricketing tradition, they could not suddenly introduce a new way of getting out. 
          Via text message, a cricket fan reminded everybody, public and pundit alike, that umpires have been having enough trouble with the system as it is, and that giving not out for more than one reason for a single delivery in Durham produced enough heat on its own – in general discussion, if not on the surface of the bat – without the introduction of a new controversy.  

Welby, Wonga and the Money Factory

A woman complained the other day to a local newspaper about the decline of the UK High Street.  Superstores and internet shopping have forced out many traditional businesses.  In their place we see rows of other kinds of shops: second-hand, betting, kebab and pawn, six or more of each in a short stretch of road.  But the poor still need to be fed and clothed. 
The grandiose old banks, like the grandiose old churches, have been boarded up or put to other use.  More popular, down-market versions – Pentecostal missions and loans-till-payday bureaux – have taken their place, sometimes literally.
Archbishop Welby of Canterbury, with a career in business behind him, not to mention a certain Biblical precedent, now has it in for these money lenders.  He recently declared financial war in a very public way on a company called Wonga.  Unfortunately for him, it was straightaway discovered that the Church of England has itself been investing indirectly in the same company.  Naming Wonga, the Archbishop not only embarrassed himself beyond all understanding, but also offered to that business the heaven of free publicity.  We assume, rightly or wrongly, that he targeted Wonga before all the other companies because their business is the biggest, and that it is the biggest because it is the most efficient, which means it is the best place to go if we need some quick cash.  The heaven of free publicity.  If I irk the Archbishop, can he give it to me?
Mammon and God have long been twins.  The Virgins Money and Mary.  Not many businesses have property portfolios and multi-national interests as vast as those of the Church.  There have been shops in cathedrals for decades, but now you have to pay just to walk inside these great, stone monuments.  For Canterbury Cathedral, the entrance fee is £9.50.  At Salisbury Cathedral they charge £10 per adult, with a family ticket of £27 for two adults and one, two, or three children.  That’s right.  Unplanned charlie number four will have to empty out his piggy bank or wait outside. 
Presumably, the other heavy monument nearby would not have fallen into ruin if, for the last five thousand years, visitors had been asked to pay the current £8 entrance fee.  Not quite so long ago, in a different temple, Christ overturned the tables of the money changers.  Perhaps someone pulled the same stunt at Stonehenge, but the authorities followed his advice, and things went downhill from there.
Sooner or later we all pass our solstice.  Things shut down.  Post offices now rent space in pharmacies. There is a plan to put police desks in post offices.  They’ll be dispensing more than justice soon.  To combat pay-day loans, the Archbishop is allowing user-friendly credit unions to operate on church premises.  Why not go further and open up branches of the Church inside the money lenders?  It’s true, one day some visionary capitalist might come along and overturn the altars, but companies like Wonga don’t need to put the Church of England out of business.  It’s performing that task very well by itself with a large canon of controversies which now include the pronouncements of its own leader.
Meanwhile, let us venerate the miracle of interest.  Each time the loan sharks get a payment, it must feel like a Virgin birth.  They didn’t lift a finger, but it arrives all the same.   

Royal Blue

Years of travail by primary school teachers to break down gender stereotyping have been undone by a single birth.  In the old colonies at least.  In Canada, they made Niagara Falls look blue (if you didn’t get it, the water is normally white with spray) and in New Zealand, Christchurch airport was also illuminated in the colour for boys.  Prince William, says their Prime Minister, is held in high affection over there as he attended the opening of the Supreme Court.  They lit up the wrong building, then.  The Australians, to their credit, chose not to use the new baby as an excuse to showcase their own natural or man-made wonders.  Their PM, in that endearing gruff, Australian way, merely referred to the royal bub.  What's that, an eight-pound door knocker, a ceremonial barge? It's hard to picture a human being, let alone a specific gender.   But you would expect the seat of power to lead the way, and London did not let us down.  Note the inclusive symbolism on the London Eye, where they celebrated every possible gender with colourings of blue, pink and indeterminate.  This may, I suppose, have been intended to represent the Union Jack.  Gender stereotypes aside, with the forthcoming vote on Scottish Independence, the English were never going to highlight the colour blue.  The morning after, anti-Monarchist and Unionist alike, each had to choose his tie with greater care than usual.  As for me, I will just say that the birth of a girl would have allowed me a wider choice of wardrobe.  Work that one out. I might also suggest that, for more than one reason, the baby’s name was never going to be Jack.  We all know, deep-down, that boys are best.  The tennis king out-plays the tennis queen.  Those servicemen on HMS Lancaster must have been hoping for a BOY.  They were parading on the flight deck in the shape of these three letters when one of their helicopters chanced to pass overhead and photograph them.  The extra letter in girl would have put some sailors too close to the edge of the deck, not to mention indeterminate.  I wonder what New Labour would have made of it.  Every gender matters? Like a lot of recent legislation, DC’s own fiddling with the primogeniture law remains irrelevant.  Speaking of fiddling, how do we know it’s a boy?  Because some people were paid to inspect the future monarch’s genitalia and make a written report about what they saw.  We trust that this is the last time such a thing occurs.
BBC headlines about the world's waiting for, then reacting to, news of the birth may have pleased a domestic audience, but in fact referred to little more than a few best wishes from a few predictable presidents and Commonwealth countries.  Nonetheless, in the BBC’s fine tradition of balanced reporting, their website quoted a Pakistani journalist’s tweet that the royal arrival makes no difference whatsoever to a great number of people.  But we can still celebrate our British-ness, can’t we, even when we know that not everyone does and that members of the Royal family are born and live and die exactly like the rest of us?  And we hardly need to travel to the sub-continent to witness such flourishes of ennui.  After that car accident in Paris, anarchist graffiti like DEAD AS A DODI straightaway appeared on walls around London.  Life is probably easier for anarchists.  They don’t wear ties for a start.   

What, are fish fingers made from children?

We keep getting these reports. 1 in 10 secondary pupils think tomatoes grow underground.  A third of primary kids think cheese is made from plants.  This ignorance should surprise no one, or just the ignorant, since many children also believe that their father is God, that policemen never tell lies, and that politicians, unlike prostitutes, don’t take money for favours.  Some children don’t know where babies come from, Mummy, let alone what prostitutes add to the equation.  Nor can they do maths.  They are clueless about how to use money itself.  No doubt there are children out there who don’t even know what money is.  Children need to be told things.  Though please spare them, and us, the science of statistics.  The new study reveals that 25% of little learners think fish fingers come from chicken meat, or pig.  I confess this does surprise me.  I never imagined having to tell a fish the truth, let alone a child.
But why pick on children?  You old bullies.  Of course, most journalists are over 18.  Nonetheless, adults often know as little as, or less than, children.  We should ask some strapping grown-ups the same questions.  I suppose it’s much easier to get hold, so to speak, of large numbers of children.  They can’t escape the classroom, where peculiar questions are the norm and where strapping, I should point out, remains illegal.  However, we can surely find ways of making enough adults answer awkward questions without barricading rush hour Tube trains or locking down football stadiums.  Stadia, I mean – don’t bombard me about that.  You old pedants.
By the time we’re adults, we shouldn’t still believe that adults know everything.  I myself am an adult.  I personally know a lot of adults.  I have heard tell of many more.  I admit that you can sometimes find knowledgeable adults, perceptive individuals with excellent taste.  In China, for example, customers at a rat restaurant complained when they were served lamb.  In the UK, consumers are not always so discerning.  Until the recent meat-switching scandal, the retired couple next door used to eat entry-level supermarket beef lasagna.  (Yes, gentlemen, lasagne is the plural form.)  At least, those two lovebirds thought it was beef.  When the wife went into hospital for an operation, the old chap asked if they could test her for horsemeat while she was there.  He was probably joking.  His mistake was to ask the question before the old girl was fully sedated.
Don’t mind the neighbours.  You can come across mistakes anywhere.  There is a blue baby on your Facebook Profile page, and you know that babies are not normally blue, not properly-breathing, human ones, anyway.  It’s ridiculous.  A blue baby and a white nappy.  But it doesn’t make the headlines.  The designer’s an adult, isn’t he?  Either a Krishna devotee who thinks that nappies only come in one colour, or a bluestocking who knows that, while most people don’t care what colour nappies are as long as they are clean, they might object to an earth baby of a regulation colour if it doesn’t match their own.  Some mistakes are a good idea.  Some make it into schoolbooks.  Who writes the schoolbooks?  Adults.

Serving the nation

It was quite a coup.  Andy Murray’s victory at Wimbledon, I mean.  If Scotland was already independent, Britain would still be waiting for its first Wimbledon champion since 1936.  The Scots will get their vote in the end.  And if democracy doesn’t give you what you want, there is the other sort of coup.  The youth of Egypt delighted the world with their Twitter revolution.  The Army did nothing.  We saw the power of technology in the hands of fresh-faced democrats.  The Muslim Brotherhood did nothing.  Let the youngsters take the credit.  We’ll take power later through legitimate elections.  Mubarak went.  The fresh-faced democrats stayed in the Square for months until the Army allowed elections, then took to the Square again until the Army removed the party that won them. 

A stunning victory

So, Mrs May has got what she wanted.  Abu Qatada has gone.  But who exactly won?  Like millions of other law-abiding UK residents, he had wanted to stay.  The government feels it can claim victory as it got him to do something which he hadn’t wanted to do.  But his deportation was possible only because it is now illegal for the courts in Jordan to use evidence which has been extracted under torture.  And he did drop his old objection to going.... That’s some victory for any Home Secretary.
The problem is Mrs May wanted to get rid of him well before the legal safeguards for his fair trial were put in place.  His human rights didn’t matter because she had decided he was a dangerous man.  The Human Rights lobby irritated the government.  She tried to wash her hands of him and the lobby, but the courts wouldn’t allow it.  If she has her way, this so-called victory will now be used as an excuse to withdraw altogether from the European Convention on Human Rights.  That would be some victory for any Home Secretary.    The Human Rights lobby should, in fact, be applauded for making governments respect the need for a fair trial and the rule of law.  If Mrs May was tortured into confessing to a crime she did not commit, or implicating an innocent person in a crime, she would look to a fair trial and the rule of law.  If Mrs May was tortured into confessing to a crime she did commit, or implicating a guilty person in a crime, she would look to a fair trial and the rule of law.  This is everybody’s right, although some people, such as Mrs May’s supporters in the battle over Abu Qatada, might think a dangerous woman didn’t deserve it.
There is, of course, no guarantee that Abu Qatada will be found guilty in a trial in Jordan.  In fact, if he has a fair trial, there is every chance that he will be acquitted.  There is no guarantee, either, that the British Government will not disregard the basic human rights of other individuals.  If this happens, sooner or later an innocent person will suffer.