Parking machines, new houses, Trump brings peace to the world

15 February 2025

It’s no secret that car-parking companies, estate agents and ‘independent’ financial advisers appear at the bottom of my rankings of trustworthiness in business and they can be depended on only to confirm that ethics used to be somewhere between Thuffolk and Middlethex.

My latest adventure came courtesy of Apcoa, which runs the car parks for our local hospital.

If, like me, you have separate reading and driving glasses and, unsurprisingly, happen to be wearing your driving glasses when you want to go home, you can’t read small print so, when you’re trying to use one of Apcoa’s camera-linked machines to pay for your parking, you are – technical term coming up – buggered.

It first wanted me to enter my car’s registration number using my normal-sized finger on its microscopic keys. This took four attempts.  Then it showed my entry time, which I assumed the system had picked up from the camera that recorded when I entered the car park, so I pressed OK and, because I also assumed it also knew what the time was, I again pressed OK when it asked for my exit time.  It didn’t accept cash so I showed it my credit card. Nothing happened and the increasingly impatient person behind me leaned over and said there was nothing to pay.

I thought this strange because I’d been there an hour and I retailed my puzzlement about this to some friends I was visiting later that day and they said aha, the machine lies about your arrival time so you’re supposed to type your entry time into the machine.  If you can remember it, they added.  Oh bum, I said.

No problem, they said, you can pay within 24 hours with the app on your phone, which is pretty groovy if you have a smartphone.

Luckily, these friends are clever and generous and have smartphones so they did it on one of theirs and I now owe them £1.90.

Why do I suspect Apcoa of intentionally making it as difficult as possible by not linking the clock in their camera to their payment machine?  Answer:  it’s a scam which lets them later charge you £180 for failure to pay for parking and claim a bonus of £178 for doing Sweet Fair Angela, and the rich get richer …

Even the Labour government, which should have less sympathy with the rich, is fettered not just by the financial mess it inherited from 14 years of Conservative misrule but by its own stupidity in saying it wouldn’t raise taxes.  It’s not even got an inspirational leader in Keir Starmer – a one-man charisma-free zone – and his greatest asset is the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, who blames him for policies that her own party introduced while they were in power, giving him a straight shot at an undefended goal. 

But they have made a small step in the right direction with their reduction of the discount to council tenants who buy their houses from the council.  Until November, tenants outside London could get a maximum discount of the lower of 70% or £102,400;  the maximum they can now get is £38,000, even in the poorer London boroughs and other less poverished areas of the south-east.

There was naturally a massive surge in applications to buy last November before the old scheme ended but that’ll work its way through the system.

It was of course Maggie Thatcher who proudly introduced the ‘right to buy’ to increase her popularity with the voters without actually realising the two basic problems it introduced:  many buyers wouldn’t live in them but would rent them out at more than councils had been charging, and it reduced the stock of council housing. 

Both these problems still exist so Labour has also promised to build 1.5m new homes in the next five years, with a target of 40% of developments defined as “affordable” (i.e. smaller), and has allocated £850m for this. 

There are also plans for more new towns and they have already prepared a longlist of possible sites, from which up to 12 will be selected.  Most are thought likely to be extensions to existing built-up areas including, here in the south west, Exeter and Taunton.

Choosing one example to put this in perspective, there already is a new town to the east of Exeter, Cranbrook, where some 2,400 homes have been built in the last 12 years (with another 1,100 to follow), helping to increase East Devon’s population by 14%.  Unfortunately, the government that oversaw this growth didn’t provide a proportional increase in the real value of funding for public services like the police and health services.  Nor does it seem the new government is about to make good the cuts they inherited.

Cranbrook’s planners talked about improved infrastructure and amenities but didn’t notice the M5 which runs between Cranbrook and Exeter.  Or rather, they did, but decided a new pedestrian and cycle bridge over the motorway would provide enough additional capacity for local commuters because Cranbrookians could walk or cycle to work in Exeter;  it is only about 7 miles after all, which any reasonably fit person can comfortably walk in a couple of hours. 

To be fair, they did build a new station on the Exeter-Waterloo line, which runs one train every hour in each direction, a new bus service runs from the new town into Exeter, and an existing route has been diverted through the town.  And, if you want to drive, there’s always the A30, perfectly good road, with traffic jams of 30-40 minutes in rush-hours even before the next 1,100 houses are built.

But let’s end on a happy note:  Donald Trump has assured us that he and Vladimir Putin can together end the Russian invasion of Ukraine overnight.  Next week, the EU and Canada will be reassuring us that they can together remove Trump’s threat to hold special military exercises in Canada.

And, even better, more than 200,000 Danes have responded to Trump’s offer to buy Greenland (which belongs to Denmark) by signing a petition saying “You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates … Let’s buy California from Donald Trump!”  It’s headed “Måke Califørnia Great Ægain”.

M&S blow it, greedflation, and the shame of being British

4 March 2023

NEVER buy a present from Marks & Spencer for a friend.

I had a present at Christmas, bought at M&S, which looked good but was the wrong size so I drove 12 miles to the nearest store to exchange it, explaining it was a present.  “Can’t do it because the barcode’s missing and I don’t know how much it was” said a particularly grumpy sales assistant.  I explained the barcode had probably been removed because it showed the price and offered to get an identical pair off the rack so they could read the barcode.  “Can’t do it – NEXT!” was their friendly ‘customer services’ response as they looked at the person behind me in the queue.

I emailed ‘customer services’ and the answer was that the stores can’t change things without barcodes and I’d have to buy a new one the right size and return the old ones for a refund.

So I bought a new one and returned the original (still in its pristine packing) to the store where I thought it had probably been bought, explaining the situation and, guess what, they posted it back again (!!) with a standard form of words that I précised as “Bugger off”.

I then wrote to Stuart Machin, their chief executive, explaining the problem again and got a letter from one of his people that I précised as “Bugger off, not even the CEO can override the system”.  So I now have to write back and say I didn’t think the CEO needed to override the system but I’d assumed he had the power to authorise an ex gratia refund and/or compensation when his people had been rude and stupid and wasted my time.

If that doesn’t work, it’s the small claims court.  If some of us don’t stand up for our rights, big companies just get away with it.  All this for a [expletive deleted] pack of socks.

(Check their reputation on Trustpilot – I was shocked to see that 66% of 4,800 customers only gave them 1 star and another 9% only gave them two stars.)

Sadly, we all know what motivates chief executives.  The latest affront is BP’s CEO who could get a special bonus of up to £11.4m on top of the measly £1.4m salary and 2022 annual bonus he gets.  One leading shareholder has said the payment would be “a blatant grab”.  The only sliver of good news is the nominative determinism involved:  his name is Bernard Looney.

Which reminds me, I recently heard of a carpenter called Richard Wood and a local doctor called Katharine Gurney.  How glad I am that my family name isn’t something like Greedybastard or Draincleaner.

“Blatant grab” is a phrase that could also describe what the European Central Bank fears is happening – the unions are calling it “greedflation” (what a lovely word) – as companies that are keeping wage levels in the sub-basement increase prices by more than their costs increase so they can hide an increase in the profit margin.

As the minutes of the ECB’s February meeting are reported to have said: “Profit growth remained very strong, which suggested that the pass-through of higher costs to higher selling prices remained robust” and they will therefore be monitoring “profits and mark-up” as well as wages.  Let me know if you’d like that translated into plain English.

But some big businesses are motivated by power.  Take Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire which influences millions of people all over the world.  His News of the World hacked phones and some of his Fox News presenters repeatedly lied about the 2020 election having been stolen from Donald Trump.  Murdoch himself has admitted in his submission to the $1.6bn Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News that he knew Fox News was spreading lies and allowed them to continue.  By sheer coincidence, this wasn’t reported in the Times, which he also owns.

The only body that can control this sort of thing is the government and we all know where they’re at.  ‘That Woman’ started it all when she started to sell the family silver because she was too stupid to realise that, when you’ve sold it all, you have to eat with your fingers, if you can still afford food.

The most heinous example was her 1980 Housing Act that allowed local authorities to sell council properties to their occupants so we now have a desperate shortage of state-owned properties, huge waiting lists and property developers straining at the leash to build overpriced and overcrowded estates in the green belt.  Meanwhile, council houses that were bought by their tenants are now contributing to the shortage of cheap accommodation as today’s owners let them out at inflated rents.  This week brought news that Foxtons, the estate agents, are advertising an ex-council flat in Pimlico for £3,900 a month, or £47,000 a year. How many of our incomes are more than £47,000, even before tax?

This short-termism is of course another argument for proportional representation which would give much greater continuity in policies compared with our current electoral system in which policies are based on what’s most likely to get a government re-elected at the next election and policies get shorter-sighted as an election approaches.

Earlier this week, I was talking to a medic who was injecting botox into the back of my neck and she said that the government’s closure of cottage hospitals and rehab unit beds made her “really angry”.  More family silver into the capitalists’ smelters.  You’ll just have to guess if I agreed with her.

A retired supreme court judge, Jonathan Sumption, once defended his “puny £1.6 million a year” by referring to the much larger amounts paid to comparable individuals in business, sports and entertainment – and this was way back in 2001.  Anyway, he has commented on last week’s decision about Shamima Begum’s British citizenship.  He agreed that, because the law requires the home secretary’s approval to deprive someone of their citizenship, the commission couldn’t override this, but nor was it able to consider what he describes as “the real scandal” of Begum’s exclusion.

Sumption points out that a person cannot be deprived of “British citizenship if it would render them stateless” and reminds us that, although she was 19 when this was done, her theoretical ability to claim citizenship of Bangladesh (because her parents were born there) was provisional and lapsed when she was 21.  She never even visited Bangladesh which has now disowned her anyway, so she is now 23 and “As a result of the home secretary’s decision, she is stuck in a camp in Syria, with no citizenship anywhere and no prospect of one.”

He adds “Children who make a terrible mistake are surely redeemable. But statelessness is for ever.”

I feel shamed by what I’m supposed to consider ‘my’ country. Why can’t another home secretary return her passport?  What sort of country has Britain become?  I’d be perfectly happy to let her stay in our spare room.

I didn’t know that some farms and warehouses use remotely-controlled vehicles but there’s apparently thought of delivering rental cars to their destinations on public roads by remote control.  The Law Commission of England and Wales foresees “difficulties in enforcement” which could ban remote driving in the UK from overseas “until appropriate international agreements are in place”.  I foresee difficulties, whatever appropriate agreements are in place, caused by the time lag in getting a signal from the car to the driver plus the driver’s response time plus the time taken to get the signal back to the car. 

You see the delay when UK-based TV interviewers are talking to reporters in remote countries and the delay can be up about 5 seconds.  (Have you noticed the producers tend to switch the picture from the studio to the OB unit about half way through the gap to distract viewers from the delay?) 

I reckon this means that two cars heading towards each other, each travelling at 60 mph, will get nearly 300 yards (270 metres) closer, still at a combined speed of 120 mph, in the 5 seconds before the remote-controlled car starts braking, and if there’s a bend or a dip in the road, the cars could be less than 300 yards apart before they can even see each other.  Ho hum.

Post-mortem laughter, Maxwells, predictions and fears for 2022 and fact v fiction

2 January 2022

Sadly, 2021 ended with the death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the world’s religious leaders who, along with the Dalai Lama, didn’t think it beneath his dignity to laugh.  Let’s hope more religious leaders all over the world can give us hope that, if there is an afterlife, it permits laughter.

We heard last week that a passenger flying from Chicago to Iceland developed a sore throat mid-flight, rammed a cotton bud up her nose and tested positive for Covid.  With the crew‘s permission, she then isolated herself in the loo for the rest of the flight.  Yes, that’s right, a loo inside a pressurised metal tube all of whose air is circulated and distributed through the rest of the plane for everyone to share;  and closing your punkah louvres doesn’t help.  Still, it’s the thought that counts.

The other year-end news was the sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell’s being found guilty on 5 of 6 charges.   I never met her but I did meet her father a few times and I didn’t like him.  After her father’s death, Ghislaine made her own way into ‘society’ and has paid the price of notoriety (and having dodgy friends).

After daddy’s demise, her brother Kevin went into business on his own and succeeded in becoming Britain’s largest ever bankrupt.  The interesting sibling was actually Philip, the clever one, who won a scholarship to Oxford’s Balliol College when he was 16 and later left the UK saying he wanted to get as far as possible from his father.

I wonder how 2022 might be different from 2021?  My first reaction is “probably not much”, except nobody will be playing cricket for an urn reputed to hold the ashes of a cricket ball (second prize was two urns).  We Brits invented cricket but, like other British inventions that foreigners took over, like jet engines and hovercraft and deep-fried Mars bars, others do them better now that manufacturing is considered a bit infra dig in the UK and financial services are all that matter.  Actually, now I come to think of it, I’m not sure anybody else does actually deep-fry Mars bars (I had one once and couldn’t move for 3 days).

It seems likely that Rishi Sunak’s promise of “whatever it takes” when the Covid pandemic first took hold almost two years ago will turn out to be another exaggeration driven by political ambition rather than common-sense.  The NHS is even closer to collapse than it was last year, its underfunding over the last 10 years exacerbated by staff having to self-isolate.  And self-testing kits have run out.  And we don’t seem to realise that sharing vaccines worldwide is best for everyone while keeping vast stocks here until they’re out of date is fatally counter-productive.

Prices seem likely continue to rise due to the effects of the pandemic or Brexit (depending on which way you voted in the referendum) (or both) leading to increases in interest rates that benefit those who have savings at the expense of those who have debts.  Supply chain problems won’t disappear overnight and the new, tighter customs checks at borders that came into effect yesterday are likely to increase delays and the costs of imports and exports.

Prices of imports from the EU will also increase and the consumer price index, which rose by 5.2% in November, is expected to top 6% in in the spring, helped by huge increases in energy prices.  More failures of small businesses, redundancies and bankruptcies are likely to follow.

House prices could continue to increase although, for those of us who are lucky enough to own our houses, it makes no difference unless we’re downsizing (or dying):  the more money we get from our sale will have to be spent on paying a higher price for our new house.  So the only beneficiaries will tend to be older, or dead, and estate agents.

At the other end of the market, it’ll become even harder for first-time buyers to find a house they can afford which will give rich landlords the chance to buy and let more properties and become even richer with the rents paid to them by people who can’t afford to buy their own properties.

Luckily, Boris Johnson is on top of all these problems and, although he omitted to mention Northern Ireland or the continuing problems of how to implement the Brexit agreement, he proudly announced that we could return to selling stuff in pounds and ounces and engraving crowns on beerglasses.  (My own favourite glass, which I use every day, is crowned and inscribed GVIR and came from the bottom of the river Cam, but that’s another story.)

He also said that “… from Singapore to Switzerland, we’ve negotiated ambitious free trade deals to boost jobs and investment here at home.”  Can anybody think of any significant countries, perhaps even larger than Singapore or Switzerland, that he didn’t mention?

Stockmarkets worldwide are nervous and are likely to continue over-reacting (up) to news such as the Covid omicron variant being “less lethal” and (down) to problems with China’s property sector, with Evergrande having missed a bond repayment of $255m on Thursday despite huge and costly support from the state.

The investment market will continue to become dominated by hedge funds who can make money even when a stock price falls by betting on its doing so.  By the way. the cognoscenti like to call this ‘selling short’ not ‘gambling with somebody else’s money’.

Further financial uncertainties revolve around cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and the energy needed to ‘mine’ them, and the ever-increasing power wielded by Big Tech (5 companies – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla – accounted for more than a third of the top 500 American companies’ returns).

Jo Biden and Vladimir Putin have discussed Russia’s fears that ‘the West’ will control more and more of Europe and America’s certainty that increasing the West’s control of more and more of Europe will frighten Russia.  Substantive progress seems unlikely.

The UK government is following the tainted precedents set by Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s confusion of fact and fiction.  The Order of St. Michael and St. George honours diplomats and spooks.  James Bond, a fictional character, was a CMG (a ‘Companion’ of the order).  Daniel Craig, a real actor and the seventh to play Bond, was awarded a CMG in the New Year’s Honours List.  Next?  Olivia Colman will be given powers to stop and search people in the street because she played a police officer in Broadchurch.

Elsewhere, the stability of Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Myanmar, North Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Ukraine and umpteen others countries is threatened by power-seekers and, as ever, it’s the normal people trying to live normal lives who suffer and die.

I asked a friend what he thought 2022 might bring and his eminently reasonable reply included saying “there are too many uncertainties” to make sensible guesses but he did say that “the refugee/immigrant/terrorist problem/disgrace will get worse and tensions will continue to rise communists against the non communists [and] Islamic problems will remain much the same”.

He also suspects that Joe Biden will go before Johnson.

My own hopes for 2022 include that Iran will release Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and that Shamima Begum’s British passport will be reinstated so she can return to the country of her birth and childhood;  removing it was spiteful and guaranteed not to reduce any radicalism she still has.

I hope that Jersey States’ landslide vote in November in favour of the principle of assisted dying, which paves the way for it to become legal, will encourage the dimmer members of the London parliament to follow suit.

I hope that the COP26 nations (and all others) don’t do a Johnson but actually meet their commitments to reducing carbon emissions.  (We know we will see more fires and floods this year – what a pity they can’t happen at the same time in the same place, thus killing one stone with two birds.  Er …) 

Some scientists reckon that a lot of London, including the Houses of Parliament, will be underwater by the end of the century so their refurbishment, which could take 40 years, will need to incorporate changing rooms so MPs can don scuba gear and staff can be given snorkels.

I hope that they start means-testing the winter heating payments made each year.  We give ours to charities or to friends who need it more than we do;   and I hope they also introduce a maximum wage and raise taxes and state benefits.

I hope that everybody starts seeing others just as people regardless of their politics, religion, gender, age, sexuality, skin colour, BMI, etc etc etc.

The paradigm has changed.  There is no ‘normal’ to go back to.  We have to learn to change to live with it because it won’t change for us.

I hope we can do it.

More unmarked graves, kindness, face masks, the mind, neuroscience and tree-hugging

4 July 2021

The number of unmarked graves at the sites of church-run residential schools in Canada is now around 1,000;  that’s 1,000 children who just happened to be born to Indigenous parents who died in the care of a church that dumped their bodies in unmarked graves. 

These children were abducted from their families so they could be “civilised”.  If that’s civilisation, give me the wild.  The whole thing makes the Ku Klux Klan look like the Women’s Institute making strawberry jam flambée.

Having originally said they wouldn’t release the information they hold, the Catholic Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate said on Friday they will now release all their documents.  The change of heart might just be related to four Catholic churches being destroyed by fire in the last two weeks which, in turn, might just be related to the grief and rage felt by the people of the First Nations, many of whose children had just been disappeared.  Statues of Queens Victoria and Elizabeth in Winnipeg have been toppled. 

But things are moving forward there, which is more than can be said for Britain which has reverted to the ancient tradition of abusing the messenger who brings bad news.  Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, has provided a refreshingly factual balance to the dithering of politicians since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic but is now being harassed by thickos.

Last weekend, a couple of young men filmed themselves assaulting him and then posted the video online.  The police spoke afterwards to Whitty who apparently didn’t want to take the matter any further. 

Why can’t people be kinder to each other?  Why don’t we think more about how other people might be feeling than how we are?  Let’s spread kindness around.

Despite their subsequent claim only to want a selfie with Whitty, the young men were warned off and ordered to leave the area by police who had witnessed the attack.  One of them, Lewis Hughes, lost his job as an estate agent as a result of the incident.

Whitty’s not even a politician, just doing a job giving politicians the facts and his best advice, from vaccinations to social distancing and masks.

Face masks have one great advantage even if they do hoick glasses and hearing aids out of place when you try to remove them:  you realise just what beautiful eyes so many people have when you aren’t distracted by broken noses and wrinkles, in the same way that the niqab proves just how many Muslim women have beautiful eyes.

Surely we can learn from this:  whatever imperfections other people may have, let’s concentrate on the beautiful bits and realise how lovely they are. 

Think of the joy that Emma Raducanu is bringing to people.  She’s 18, awaiting her A level results and a wildcard player at Wimbledon this year and has, so far, reached the fourth round.  She’s now playing Ajla Tomljanovic tomorrow for a place in the quarter-finals.  She’s said she wants to “stay [in the tournament] as long as possible” and is “having a blast”.  Doesn’t that lift all our spirits?

The human mind has a need to see patterns where there aren’t any and hear words that aren’t spoken, and it’s susceptible to optical illusions.  In days of old, people looked up at the night skies and saw bulls and crabs and scorpions and fish and invented astrology.  This is fair enough – many of us have in our time been drunk and/or stoned enough to see star patterns shifting and changing without actually moving – but we’re now so advanced (ahem) that we don’t try to tell people’s fortunes from them.

There’s a famous picture of apparently random blotches that reveal a cowboy sitting on a horse if you stare at it for long enough, and there are those coloured ‘abstract’ posters from the 1980s which reveal pictures.  Or if you listen closely to the sound of water, such as a tap splashing into a bath, the mind will turn it into random words and phrases.  I used to know somebody who talked like that – I understood all of the words separately, but not what the sentence meant.

It’s also fascinating to see the changes in how your mind works when your chosen hallucinogen is coursing through your system (and, before we write these off as the imaginings of people with too much spare time, we need to remember that scientists are once again using hallucinogens to help people with mental health problems).  It is, for example, possible to see a lump on the trunk of a tree, formed where a branch has been cut off, both as a distortion in the bark and a koala hugging the tree;  or to see a twisted mass of roots under a beech tree both as roots and intertwined snakes, both at the same time;  or a mountain chain in the dust in the bottom of a teacup.  We see faces and dragons in clouds but, curiously, the extra dimension isn’t frightening, it’s fascinating, and beautiful.

Synaesthesia is another example of what the brain is capable of with some chemical assistance.  If you listen with your eyes shut, music can produce brilliantly coloured and ever-changing pictures in your head which are just as fascinating and just as beautiful.

Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University has also infected the brains of mice with light-sensitive algae and fired lasers into their brains through tiny fibre-optic cables, recording what happens when he turns neurons on or off.  He discovered that individual brain cells can be activated / deactivated in this way and the possibilities seem endless.  For example, in May this year, the Swiss neurologist Botond Toska showed how he’d used these optogenetic principles to partially restore the sight of a blind person.

This all seems quite important but if we put it in the context of our sub-microscopic existences in an unimaginably vast universe where space and time and energy interact even though nobody here knows how it works, we can imagine all sorts of possibilities that make fantasy fiction look as unimaginative and limited as a Jeffrey Archer novel.

We know that honey bees can tell others in the hive where there’s a good source of food, in which direction and how far and (for all we know) what colour it is.  We also know that insectivorous plants have a memory:  they don’t snap shut when they’re touched by a passing breeze or even brushed by an inspect but if an inspect lands on them and moves around, there’s a second movement that triggers the ‘catch’ response which captures their next meal, which means they must ‘remember’ there was a first touch to recognise the second.

I’ve mentioned trees communicating before, but biologists are now discovering that their actions and reactions are much more complex than they’d thought, just extremely slow (rather like slo-mo versions of Tolkien’s ents).  Branches will lift and fall during the day and they can warn other trees of invasions by bugs and disease so they can prepare their own defences and it’s possible that, if we hug a tree, they might respond to this, but probably not until next week so don’t wait.

I’m now off to swear at some bindweed.

Comparative religion, estate agents, Indigenous Canadians, ageing, football and a book recommendation

20 June 2021

Last Sunday evening, when two Jewish diners were attacked outside a Baker Street restaurant by two masked men, a member of the Muslim community intervened and the attackers ran off.

You may also remember the man who collapsed in Finsbury Park in June 2017 and he was found by a group of Muslims who had just performed tarawih (night time prayers) at the mosque just down the road.  While they were administering first aid, they were rammed by a van driven by a man who’d decided all Muslims should die.  Ten people were injured and the man who had collapsed later died of multiple injuries.  Bystanders dragged the driver out of the van and were beating him when the Imam of the mosque calmed the crowd and stopped them assaulting the perpetrator who was then restrained until the police arrived.

Isn’t it sad that it’s necessary to emphasise stories like this that show Muslims to be as peace-loving and human as society at large, and a lot more so than, say, racists and xenophobes?

Why can’t we accept that love, peace and tolerance that are the foundations of most of the world’s religions and beliefs and that loonies are just loonies whose ‘faith’ is irrelevant?

There’s good news for estate agents in England and Wales as house prices rise and their fees rise with them.  The Bank of England’s chief economist reports that residential property prices increased by 10% in the 12 months to March 2021 and things are likely to get worse, so the loudest noise is now the squelching of estate agents rubbing their hands together.

And here’s another story that almost makes me wish there is a hell somewhere.

Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, an Indigenous nation in British Columbia has discovered evidence of 215 unmarked graves behind the site of a former residential school in the city of Kamloops, British Columbia, which had been staffed by the Sisters of St Ann and administered by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (who have taken religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience).

This has reopened the whole question of how Canada treated its Indigenous children.  In 1896, the state started to take children, some in cattle trucks, away from their parents to residential schools run by the government or the church, where many of them suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse as part of an attempt to “assimilate” them into the culture of the invaders.  Which doesn’t say much for the culture of the invaders.

In the following 130 years (until 1996!), more than 150,000 Indigenous children were abducted and forced to give up their birth names in favour of ‘westernised’ names, to wear uniforms and learn English, and boys’ braided hair was cut forcibly.

In 1910, one official wrote that the schools were “geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem”.  The (presumably intentional, and manipulative) use of the word “problem” implies it needs a “solution” and the addition of the word “final” makes me shudder.

I knew something similar had happened in Australia but I didn’t know that Canada – which likes to be perceived as squeaky clean, at least in the French-influenced eastern half – had done the same thing.  Both countries were part of the British Empire at the time so their “assimilation” programmes are never compared with Hitler’s abduction of Jews;  I find the word ‘hypocrisy’ hovering in the background of this even though the Reich’s own ‘final solution’ was more terminal*. 

Official records in Canada show that 3,213 of these children died of untreated illness, neglect, abuse and suicide but the actual number of deaths is known to be much higher and the mortality rate for Indigenous children in these schools was between two and five times higher than for non-Indigenous children.

In a report submitted in 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission identified 20 unmarked graves across the country and recognised that there would be more, recommending a national programme “to complete the task of identifying the many unmarked residential school cemeteries and gravesites across Canada”.  This was accepted at the time as a breakthrough in relationships with the Indigenous Canadians but not much has happened since and Justin Trudeau’s government is now fighting a class action seeking reparation for the efforts to destroy Indigenous languages, culture and identity, which implies a reluctance to uncover the truth.

The BC state government has asked the Sisters of St Ann, the catholic order of nuns that staffed the Kamloops school, to release its records but they continue to withhold these because “It might be … there were things that weren’t relevant to the school system or names of those students, as well as other people like visitors” and they want to be able to correct historical inaccuracies before documents are made public.

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate said their congregation would not be providing personnel files of the staff at the residential schools, which could include disciplinary records of nuns who mistreated children, claiming that privacy laws forbade this. 

Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that thousands of records documenting abuse at residential schools should be destroyed and, since 2020, the federal government has been trying to block even the creation of basic statistical records of claims of abuse in residential schools.

So much for British legacy.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Vladimir Putin told Joe Biden he can’t guarantee that Alexei Navalny will survive his prison sentence (although he refused to use Navalny’s name) because the state of medical care offered to prisoners was poor and Navalny’s detention wasn’t his decision.  Of course it isn’t.  How could anybody fail to believe that if Putin said “Free Alexei”, the answer would be “No way, mush”?

Better news comes from a group of scientists from 14 different countries who’ve been researching whether good health and life expectancy could be extended by preventing ageing.  Their conclusion was basically that, once a species reaches adulthood, a species has a relatively fixed rate of ageing and the increase in the average age of humans is down to fewer people dying in childhood and better medical care as people age.  Isn’t that a relief!  Imagine being 200 in a world full of people whose average age was 150 and who were standing on each other’s shoulders for lack of space.  I’m happy to die, but not quite yet please – I’ve still got so much to do.

Boris Johnson obviously supports this bit of ‘science’ and keeps dithering while swathes of the population die, although he has postponed the final easing of lockdown restrictions in England by a month.  He rather spoilt the announcement by saying he’d be “guided by the data” but he wouldn’t tolerate a further delay.  Seems self-contradictory somehow, but that’s his nature.

Some sporting events are already going ahead subject to some conditions and there was a big football match on Friday.  I actually watched about five minutes of it before I got bored but I was interested in how the game now contrasts with rugby union.  There were very few stoppages and people kept kicking the ball around while rugby now stops every 45 seconds while all the players pile onto a huge heap on the ground for a group hug.  Somebody (sorry, I forget who) said that the difference is because rugby used to be a game of evasion but is now a game of collision, which is probably why the average footballer is now so much prettier than the average rugby player.

The ever self-abnegatory Antony Gormley has been supervising the refixing some of the 100 iron statues he scattered over Crosby beach in 2005 after their foundations had been damaged and they fell over.  “I was just very, very concerned that they all face west, between 247 degrees west and 275 degrees west,” said Gormley on Monday. “I also wanted them all to share a common plane, which was 0.4 of a degree of inclination on the horizon.”  When we saw them some years ago, I did wonder if a few of them had slipped and were inclined more closely to 0.41 of a degree.

He added “I think they’re really points of meditation, contemplation, just thinking about time, our time, our relationship to the elements, our relationship to the horizon.”  Ah yes, that must be why the faulty inclination unnerved me so much.

Now, to cheer you up, a recommendation for an excellent book that I loved:  ‘Returning’ by Catherine Mainland, available to download or buy in hard copy from Amazon and reviewed on goodreads.com as “Wonderful reading. Touched me deeply. Want more from the author the characters very rich and genuine to their time.”   Thoroughly recommended, 5 stars, and the fact that Catherine is my niece didn’t affect my judgement (I wouldn’t have included it here if I’d hated it would I?)  One for book clubs?

*          I’ve always had a feeling that “Arbeit macht frei” was adopted as a concentration camp slogan by somebody whose knowledge of German was even more restricted than mine and what they’d meant to say was “Arbeit macht tot”.

Trusting Boris Johnson, G7 and Brexit, your medical secrets, Michael Gove broke the law and releasing murderers

13 June 2021

Cornwall was closed this week.

Nothing to do with local demonstrations against the destruction wrought on local village economies by second-home owners, or even ‘entertainment industry’ owners (like ice-cream merchants) complaining about the loss of tourist income, just the G7 meeting at Carbis Bay where world leaders were supposed to meet to solve the world’s problems, with a side order of hammering the final nail into the coffin of the mythical honour of an English gentleman.

Well, I suppose the image of an Englishman’s honour (no question that Celts or women were ever involved) was self-generated anyway and the “my word is my bond” stuff only worked if the Englishman was on the blunt end of a weapon.  England’s power and wealth is the result of theft – international piracy and the British Empire, which developed for purely commercial reasons at the expense of the indigenous peoples (“natives”) who worked as slaves or were massacred.

So Johnson is not the confident host he so wanted to be but is stuck in a corner, trying to avoid admitting that nobody who backed Brexit realised that the UK has a land border with the rest of the EU, that he left negotiating an agreement until the last minute and now wants something different, risking the Good Friday Agreement that’s given us all 20 years that have been a lot more peaceful than Friday nights at the Bullingdon Club (an interesting article on which can be found at https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2021/02/02/a-day-in-the-lockdown-life-of-a-bullingdon-club-member/ )

The EU’s anger is based on the demonstrable fact that, under Johnson’s leadership, the UK can no longer be trusted and even Joe Biden said, in the exquisite language of an experienced politician, that “Any steps that imperil or undermine the Good Friday agreement will not be welcomed by the US.”  He went on to say that this was not a threat or ultimatum but he was “crystal clear about his rock-solid belief in the Good Friday agreement as the foundation for peaceful coexistence in Northern Ireland” and urged both sides to sort it out (the NI problem, not the mixed metaphor).

Less familiar with weasel words, Emmanuel Macron said that “nothing is negotiable” in the agreement and protocol that was voluntarily negotiated, agreed and signed by all parties.

All this in the background while G7 was trying to concentrate on things like the Covid pandemic, the distribution of vaccines, global economic recovery, the climate emergency, China, how quiet St Ives is, and the quality of the breakfast sausages. 

Before the summit had even started, foreign policy experts and former British diplomats were worried that the UK was widely perceived as not trustworthy and therefore not in the same league as Biden, a big man from a big country, who all too obviously outclasses Johnson, a small man from a small country, in every respect.

A side benefit of these tensions is that, presumably because he can’t risk upsetting even more people, Johnson has agreed to delay his plan to share our medical records with the private sector via NHS Digital, something his government had been trying to sneak through the back door with an absolute minimum of publicity.  Luckily some eagle-eyed cynics noticed and told everyone. 

Otherwise, in no time at all, Google, Amazon, Rupert Murdoch and any half-way competent hacker will know all about our abortions, acne, acute hypochondria, heartburn, hernia, piles, STIs, verrucas, Viagra addiction etc and will be able to target ads directly at our, er, frailties.

So put pen to paper NOW and tell your GP your information must not be released.

And tomorrow it seems likely we’ll hear that we’re not being freed on 21 June and the remaining Covid restrictions will stay in place for an extra two or more weeks, depending on scientists’ judgements of the increasing likelihood of a third surge in infections as the Delta variant hurtles through the population.  (What are they going to do when they reach Omega?  Go on to a chronological list of Derby winners since 1950?)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the High Court has ruled that Michael Gove broke the law when he awarded a large contract to Public First.  The Cabinet Office has said this doesn’t matter, setting a worrying precedent:  if Cabinet Ministers are now allowed to break the law and stay in office, we’re on a greasy slope.

Remember Jonathan Aitken?  He broke the law, went to prison and was subsequently ordained as a parish priest in the Church of England.  Or Jeffrey Archer?  He broke the law, went to prison, and is still writing rubbish books.  Why don’t they just let Gove go to prison and do whatever he’s capable of when he’s released?

But the most impressive news released this week was a brilliant wheeze that the FBI and police in Australian and Europe set up three years ago.  Frustrated by their difficulties in intercepting criminal communications, they set up their own secure, specialised, end-to-end encrypted messaging app, An0m, shut down its two major competitors and recorded all traffic using An0m.

This led to the arrest of 800 suspected members of criminal gangs and the recovery of more than £100m in cash plus tonnes of drugs, cryptocurrencies, weapons and luxury cars.  It also revealed that some gangs were being tipped off, which led to more arrests and “high-level corruption cases in several countries” according to an FBI agent.

Also this week, the UK’s Parole Board approved the release of Colin Pitchfork, who was jailed for life in 1988 with a minimum of 30 years when he was 28, for raping and murdering two 15-year old girls.  His release remains provisional for 21 days until the Justice Secretary Robert Buckland decides whether to approve or appeal against their decision.

The Board heard evidence from Pitchfork as well as his probation officer, police and a prison service psychologist and its decision said “After considering the circumstances of his offending, the progress made while in custody and the evidence presented at the hearing, the panel was satisfied that Mr Pitchfork was suitable for release.” 

Pitchfork has been in an open prison in 2018.

If he is released, he would be subject to a risk management plan that would impose strict conditions, including living at a designated address, being subject to probation supervision, wearing an electronic tag, undergoing lie detector tests, disclosing the vehicles he uses and who he speaks to, with particular limits on contact with children.  He would also be subject to a curfew, have restrictions on using technology and on where he can go, and he would not be allowed into Leicestershire or to knowingly approach any of the girls’ relatives.

What would you do?

On a lighter note, a 17-year old in California saw a large mother bear with two cubs on top of a wall in their backyard.  Four dogs ran out barking and the bear batted at them.  Without thinking what she was doing, the teenager rushed out and pushed the bear off the wall, then picked up the smallest dog and got all of them back into the house.  Great bit of film recorded by a surveillance camera …  (Poor old bear, said a friend, she was only trying to protect her cubs.)