Hoff Limits

Dog in a manger

2011-12-18T19:53:00.000Z

Yesterday David Cameron marked a rite-of-passage among Conservative Prime Ministers as he told a meeting of Church of England clergy in Oxford that a return to Christian values could counter the country's "moral collapse" and blamed a "passive tolerance" of immoral behaviour for this summer's riots, Islamic extremism, City excess and Westminster scandals. In my lifetime this same speech has been made by all previous serving Tory PMs, usually in marked contrast to the moral actions of their own supporters or backbench MPs. And right on cue, up popped Aiden Burley MP in a Nazi uniform to embarrass the PM into action, the latest in a line of Coalition casualties to come up short by this measure by their leader.

It's the sort of non-argument that the late, great Christopher Hitchens would skewer so much more eloquently than me, but I would make the simple observation that surely a morality based on rewards gained in heaven is exactly what Islamic extremists could do with less of, rather than an extra helping. But then that sort of bloviating bilgewater is exactly the sort of dog-whistle speech I expect a Tory PM to make to his party's heartlands, as someone only kept in the job by the support of a man of clay and the opposition of a man of straw.

Since the speech was made to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Cameron probably felt obliged to declare that "Britain is a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so", which, of course attracted all the headlines. However, it was probably the least interesting part of what he said. Far more revealing for me was when he described himself as a "committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian". This says all you need to know about the man; that this religious code is something for the rest of us, not Dave. So much for us being 'all in this together'. To paraphrase a former Prime Minister's Spin Doctor, Cameron "doesn't do God" either, but seemingly because he lacks the conviction. Instead, Dave does Christianity Lite: "I can't believe it's not Jesus".

It's the worst kind of Christianity that expects others to carry to weight of morality and faith. This is a subject on which I speak with some authority, having spent much of my formative years sat in drafty churches witnessing good, committed, decent people trying to discover what exactly it means to do the right thing. I know that it is exactly this kind of 'vaguely practising' Christian who is the biggest pain in the arse, who expects the church to act as a handmaiden in times of trouble. The sort of person who turns up to midnight mass every Christmas and expects a full "smells and bells" burial for his loved ones, but who would no more think of lifting a finger to help the church at other times of the year than he would think of streaking down Oxford Street on roller skates. Such people are quite easy to spot at this time of year, because they turn up to Midnight Mass at midnight, instead of 11.30pm when the service actually begins.

Saint Nicked

2011-12-15T07:26:00.003Z

Recently several friends have shared this rather cute piece of technology (below) that allows you to create a personalised video from Father Christmas. As long as Santa can get his virtual lips around the real name of your child (or your own, should you be feeling very lonely), you can create a real virtual message from St Nick himself.

http://www.portablenorthpole.tv/home

As you can imagine this has been circulated with glee among parents I know, as if children need any more encouragement to get excited about the impending festival of toys. But for me this takes things a bit too far in the traditional, unwritten contract-of-deceit that exists between parents and children at this time of the year.

As a liberal rationalist, I have always been ill at ease with the collective childhood deceptions such as Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy, but have been helplessly carried along on the tide of participation that starts at nursery. So far I have managed to stick with my core principle that I should teach my children how to think, not what to think; to get them to consider the evidence and to try to offer a plurality of views on the important issues of the day: the Middle East conflict, crisis in the Eurozone and why Shaggy has a taking dog.

This can come back to haunt you, as two years ago Sam grilled me mercilessly about how Santa could possibly do all he is reported to do in a single night. Inside I was bursting with pride at the relentless logic of his Questioning Funnel, while mentally scrabbling for possible plausible answers to the next question. We agreed at that point he would consider all the evidence and come to his own conclusion. The dawning of the truth was ultimately delayed by 12 months by the evidence of a half-eaten carrot and drained whisky glass on our hearth. I had become part of the conspiracy and hated myself for it.

So you can probably see why I can't bring myself to create one of these Santa videos for my children. It's one thing to tell a few white lies in order to create a sense of wonder and magic at Christmas. It's quite another to be fixing evidence to make the case. This is not the tradition of imaginative story telling to fire children's imaginations, it is fraud. If you need faked video evidence to make your story plausible, then maybe it's time to 'fess up. Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Creating a fake DNA profile for Father Christmas so you can test a swab sample lifted from the whisky glass?

It has been a widely discussed question as to why, when children find out Santa isn't real, they continue to trust what their parents tell them about other things. We are probably saved from being a species of Sophists both by the impracticalities of doubting everything and by coercing older children into participating in the conspiracy. But I wonder whether there isn't a collective harm being done at a deeper level.

Take the world of Conspiracy Theories and the almost child-like minds that believe the most elaborate hoaxes can be brought upon the world by the same bureaucracies who can't even manage to accurately count the number of people in its own prisons. Certainly they are people who could do with an earlier introduction to the rigours of the evidence-based approach, as opposed to wishful thinking.

Leveson the playing field

2011-11-22T22:48:00.013Z

Watching this week's Leveson enquiry into Media Ethics this week, I was fondly casting my mind back to the rather brilliant summer we had. It's a little hard to recall today, coming as it did before the dismal days of Eurozone crisis, Greek default, London riots and the latest John Lewis commercial, but there was an exhilarating two week period when the News of the World was in its death throes. Every day something worse would emerge, and another previously untouchable News International employee would be defenestrated with indecent haste. In that Schadenfreude fortnight, when it became clear that the Police's reluctance to investigate the phone hacking scandal had less to do with incompetence and rather more with complicity, we were forced to ask ourselves some big questions, such as "who polices the police when they're in the media's pocket?"

Watching this week's coverage, I was asking myself a not dissimilar question: who reports on the reporters? You too can watch the coverage live online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi but if you do, you may notice a bit of a disconnect between what you can see and what you can read about it afterwards. For as the phone hacking allegations spread beyond News International, the popular press coverage of events has vacillated between simply ignoring them to shrilly denouncing the participants with the sort of crude ad hominem arguments that would embarrass a guest on the Jeremy Kyle show.

The Sun has mainly chosen the former approach: the heart-breaking testimony of Milly Dowler's parents was relegated to a single paragraph on page 6. The Daily Mail has chosen to go on the attack, getting its proverbial testicles caught in the mangle over Hugh Grant's reasonable assumptions about its source for a story (his full testimony is here). The moral personal failings of both Grant and, latterly, Steve Coogan (who testified today) apparently remove from them the rights of privacy and free speech that the press so happily enjoy and abuse. Inevitably today the same old arguments were wheeled out in defence of British tabloid journalism, and will be every time someone has the temerity to complain of an intrusion, here neatly summarised by Sarah Sands in today's London Evening Standard:

"Celebrities participate in an over-the-counter trade when they have a product to sell but otherwise their lives are none of anyone else's business".

You must read the above sentence in your most withering, irony-dripping voice. Once you've done so, you may find yourself agreeing there is a certain hypocrisy in currying favour with an editor one day and spurning him when it has become inconvenient. This opinion is probably tacitly held by a reasonably large percentage of the population - probably those who seek self-justification for fuelling the activity through their daily purchase of a tabloid paper. I make this assumption on the grounds that the initial phone hacking story failed to really ignite until the catalyst of Milly Dowler's voicemail hacking by News of the World. It took intrusion into the life of the an ordinary victim of crime to set off the furious indignation of the British public. In other words, celebs were, if not exactly fair game, then not much worthy of our sympathy either.

I find Sands' argument both baffling and horrifying in its implications. It is, in effect, a reworking of the vile rapist's defence of "she was asking for it". The celebrity here has aroused the interest of the press and must suffering the consequences, no matter how far they go. And if the celebrity has, in the past, courted publicity from the press for a project or piece of work, then it's an open and shut case: a metaphorical flirtation with a showbiz reporter is an invitation to a fully invasive assault any time the press feels like it. It's part of the price of being who you are, and you love it really. Sands here is portraying the media as the helpless victim, as though they are forced to give a rising star publicity in their papers; the reduction of people's privacy to a transaction is very much the prerogative of the paper, not the other way around as Sands would have us believe.

There's something peculiarly British about this attitude that explains why the tabloid press gets away with so much. Foreigners encountering UK tabloid reporting for the first time are often shocked by its intrusion because they have heard of something called the Great British Reserve. This means an overbearing deference to people's privacy in everyday life. Contrast how open someone from, say, the USA will be upon first meeting or moving into a new neighbourhood with the UK, where the time getting to know new neighbours can be measured in ice ages. So how does the press get away with it?

It's because the Great British Reserve is trumped by something even greater, called Not Getting Above Yourself. Success in the UK is both celebrated and despised, and for every Lily Allen there's a Julie Burchill ready to knock them down a peg or two. This is the role the tabloid press performs and I'm sure there are sections of it who genuinely believe that, by reporting on Steve Coogan's latest affair, they are performing some kind of public service - as do, no doubt, those who read it.

There's a deep-seated psychological flaw in this attitude that is very ugly. The passive-aggressive sneer of every Liz Jones hatchet-job in the Daily Mail suggests that somehow these celebrities are getting away with something. How dare they enjoy the trappings of fame with no downside. The idea that long-lensed paparazzos are an important counterweight to the excess of celebrity, in the same way investigative journalists are to Executive power, is as unquestioned as it is laughable. Press reporting of Leveson is truly the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the mirror. Or, in this case, the Daily Mail.

The way a cookie crumbles

2011-11-20T16:01:00.011Z

Is advertising an art or a science? It's one of those facetious questions sometimes asked within advertising circles, and the answer largely depends on the department you work within, or what you are trying to get the client to pay for. Though officially a 'suit', I lean more towards the former: advertising is, fundamentally, about persuasion, and persuasion, as we all know, is an art. This also allows practitioners to keep a certain mystery around its practice; Lord Beaverbrook famously once remarked "I know that half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half".

This was the accepted way of things in the 20th century, in the dark, pre-digital days when advertising was channeled through the relative anonymity of a TV, newspaper or billboard. But in this era of digital media dominance, we now have the specter of Advertising As Science. Forget the uncertainty of knowing whether your audience sits rapt in front of your ad or disappears to make a cup of tea, now we can measure exactly who sees your ad and what they do once they've seen it. What started with "hits" on a website that became "unique visitors" has culminated in the phenomenon you must have noticed that is known as "remarketing" through the all-conquering Google.

If you've searched for a product recently - say a pair of Chelsea boots - you may have noticed, as you surf through unrelated, random websites, multiple ads showing you umpteen Chelsea boots. Maybe they even suggest trousers that would go well with this mythical pair of Chelsea boots? This is remarketing - where a website you have browsed places a cookie on your computer that allows it to serve advertising to you, via the Google display network, should you fail to convert the browsing into purchasing. This is Advertising As Science; we no longer need to persuade you why our Chelsea boots are the best because WE KNOW YOU WANT THEM! And we will continue to batter your eyes with ads for them until you give in, because we know we are right. We have statistical proof. Quite simply, you are wrong, because our science has proved it.

I recently visited thetrainline.com to find out prices of tickets from London to Manchester. Ever since, I have been served not just manifold web advertisements for thetrainline.com, but ads quoting me the latest prices for London to Manchester, repeatedly. This is despite the fact I have already purchased tickets on their website for Manchester, and travelled using them more than a week ago; apparently there is no satisfying my appetite for train tickets to Manchester. This is not so much targeted advertising as 'Terminator' advertising - the relentless pursuit of the consumer, like Arnold Schwartzenegger in the eponymous movie, advertising you to death.

Apart from the obvious fact this is incredibly annoying, not to say spooky, I think it also true to say that agencies and clients are missing a trick in the relentless pursuit of greater targeting. The Advertising As Science dogma has it that the more personalised an ad becomes, the greater its effectiveness: it cuts out the waste of talking to people who don't want a product to reach only those who do. This approach, presented as fantasy in the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, is fast becoming reality. Apart from its incredible presumptuousness, it also fails to grasp the complexity of human beings.

If I only try to reach those people who have shown an interest in buying my Chelsea boots today, where does tomorrow's customer come from? I still have hard-wired into my brain advertising slogans from 30 years ago for consumer goods that couldn't possibly have been aimed at my infant brain or unwaged pocket. Many of them are for consumer brands that I now purchase as an adult, who have inveigled their way into my affection over the years through exposure and persuasion when I couldn't possibly have been the target audience. The need to renew an audience and market through persuasion means the 'purity' of a fully targeted approach is as misguided as the 'purity' of a gene-pool; it is through cross-fertilisation, serendipity and, frankly, randomness that success is rewarded. Sometimes the best breakthroughs in creative thinking happen when you need to take a chance. The alternative vision of the future, to paraphrase George Orwell, is of a Chelsea boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Poppycock

2011-11-13T20:36:00.007Z

Yesterday, squashed between Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday, like a burp between dinner courses, was an international football match. This being a friendly game that no-one gave England much chance of winning, the news instead focused on whether Our Boys would be allowed to wear a poppy commemorating Our Men on their football shirts. "No" said FIFA, citing their law forbidding the wearing of political symbols by member countries' teams. Ever quick to spot a bandwagon, our Prime Minister thought it a worthwhile use of his time to plead for flexibility from FIFA. Eventually a compromise was reached that satisfied everyone's sense of self-importance: FIFA could save face, The FA got its chance to appear respectful, and the Daily Mail got three days of foreigner-baiting headlines.

Two things struck me about this wholly manufactured story. First, if I were the Royal British Legion, I'd be desperate not to talk about it - and the rather cool statements issued by the RBL rather back this up. If you think of the values of the poppy: honour, sacrifice, selflessness and duty, it would be hard to think of a less appropriate group of brand ambassadors than those over-indulged, feckless popinjays: English professional footballers. The sight of alleged racist, serial philanderer and user-of-disabled-parking-spaces John Terry braying at his mates on the bench with a poppy on his chest is a toxic brand association.

The second, more important point is the whole issue of the poppy as a political symbol. Of course it is, and why are so many people so horrified to admit it? For David Cameron to claim there is no political link between war and remembrance might be charmingly naive in someone more charming.

One simple proof of its potency as a political symbol among many I could cite is the furore caused in their native Ireland by talent-dodging pop stars Westlife, who were used to promote the poppy in 1999. Whether you agree with the interpretation is irrelevant; the interpretation, as with beauty and goal-line clearances, is in the eye of the beholder.

I believe it should be embraced as the ultimate political symbol, understood in the context of the noble exercise of politics, as opposed to the less noble politicians it is sometimes tainted with. Politics is the attempt to resolve conflict without resort to war. It's the evolutionary triumph of the human brain. War is when politics breaks down. In that sense war and politics are two sides of the same coin, inextricably linked - so to call the commemoration of the consequences of war apolitical is disingenuous.

The poppy is the symbol of politics gone wrong, and the impact that has on millions of people when elites too proud, mad or deluded consider risking the lives of each other's children is a price worth paying. Sometimes it is, mostly it is not. The poppy serves to remind us what happens when politicians of all colours on all sides fail to do their job. So when a politician tries to tell you remembrance is not political, he's trying to get off the hook.

Good offences make good neighbours.

2011-11-07T23:25:00.003Z

Last Saturday I took part in the most exciting piece of participatory democracy in my area since the General Election: a public meeting hosted by a local councillor to decide on a local issue affecting my street. There was a sum of money to be spent on local improvements to an area of greenery, to make play provision for the neighbourhood’s children. Except the neighbourhood’s parents rather like the green area as it is, thank you very much, and feared the erection of gaudy swings would attract an Unwelcome Element into our midst, to sit, after dark, swigging cider, smoking fags and generally Being A Nuisance. Teenagers, in other words.

From the neutrality of living in a house not directly affected by such a prospect, it was vaguely amusing to see the mix of articulate NIMBYism and misdirected bluster as people who had lived comfortably side-by-side for nearly a decade were forced to get distinctly uncomfortable by expressing a public opinion in full view of their neighbours, the political equivalent of getting undressed with the curtains open in our sleepy, ordinary street. Having laid the issue of the swings to rest, the subject of the deeply unpopular New Bus Route suddenly resurfaced unexpectedly, like cider from a teenager’s gut, and just as unpleasant. It had been in the local paper that the council had changed its mind yet again and re-routed the bus through the same neighbourhood, but not after it had spent many thousands of pounds erecting bus stops on a different stretch of road. A separate meeting was needed for this fresh challenge, and so a date was timetabled, and everyone left with a renewed sense of vigour.

To the outsider this might all look like a terrific waste of money in times when that is the one thing no-one can afford: money earmarked for a park no-one wants, bus stops installed for a road with no buses, and a social club rented for an hour for the hoi polloi to collectively mutter to their elected busybody. And yet it may well be the best money spent in the area. In that hour I met more of my neighbours than I have ever done before and felt a real sense of common purpose. Ours is a typical modern British street, with houses built within walking distance of some amenities, but a drive away from others, a collection of castles for Englishmen to hide in. Though well connected and served by facilities, it is not built around anything – it has no heart in any sense of the word. And yet, by its fumbling incompetence, the local council had engendered a sense of purpose to the place for the first time in a decade.

In the same way people exhort the government to stimulate economic recovery through investment in public schemes, I’d suggest there is a social bonus to such spending that has mostly gone unnoticed. If a local authority wants to foster better community relations in tense times – and this summer’s scenes in London would suggest it might be worthwhile – there is a cheaper way of doing it than building another youth centre or commissioning trampoline classes for the under-privileged. Every council ward should announce the most outrageous planning scheme it can think of: nuclear power stations next to the school, digging up a football field to build young offenders’ institutes, a combined uranium mine and refugee crisis centre upstairs from ASDA. Before you could say Section 106 Agreement, you’d have neighbours chaining themselves together to block the street, organising cake bakes and raffles for lawyers’ fees, exchanging emails and maybe even smiles.

It's not you, twitter, it's me.

2011-10-20T21:52:00.006Z

For a free service that opens up the world to people, twitter attracts an awful lot of moaning. Not the untutored Daily Mail whinge that puts all the ills of the modern world at the door of every new piece of technology, but huffy exasperation from sometime and longtime users, who want to flounce away. With that in mind I wanted to spend a little more than 140 characters explaining why I was leaving Twitter, so people wouldn't think I was a flouncer.

Twitter is not just a remarkable tool, it's an eco-system that routes information, news, gossip and terrible jokes with lightning efficiency across the globe. And for all its exasperations - and there are many - it remains truly a wonder of the digital age. Twitter has allowed me to share insights, information, joy and tears with a remarkable community of similar misanthropes. Truly lovely, creative, thoughtful and funny people, all looking for a niche, acceptance and entertainment. But lately I have realised this is a double-edged sword for people like me.

I have somehow collected over the last two years some 1,200 people who, while maybe not hanging on my every word, at least don't find me irritating enough to unfollow. I have done this through dedicated arsing about, glib remarks and the facetious reflex of looking for the joke in every situation. While this can stand you in good stead on something like Twitter, these same qualities can also hinder your success in the world outside twitter in which most of us must live and earn money. I have always taken a joy in the exchange and banter of twitter, and the giddy thrill when something you post is retweeted. I started on twitter after I had been made redundant, and took some comfort in the detached voices shouting in the void, and the validation a growing audience brings. It continues to provide that sense of self-worth, but can also mask those all-too-real deficiencies that I went on to twitter to avoid confronting.

I started to realise I was living a dual life: the surface reality I was skidding across and the underlying life of the imagination, where every event, confrontation, news story or advertising typo was a tweet waiting to be written. Those times when I wasn't tweeting, I was thinking of things I could tweet. The narcotic boost to one's self-confidence by a RT would make the hours daydreaming about the next nob gag worthwhile; I wasn't bunking off work to write tweets, but I also wasn't spending time working out why I needed that audience approval. I could have conversations about work, shopping, the kids and proposed changes to the LBW rule while running a simultaneous stream of thought about the next wry 140-character observation. I have recently realised I liked real life less and less, and was seeking refuge in twitter rather than companionship. Unfortunately real life has an annoying habit of being quite important.

In truth, I don't think I'm dealing with being 40 very well. I become exasperated at my own imbecilities, lack of focus or career drive. The necessity to live one's life day-to-day is an inescapable responsibility, according to Sartre. I might have known that if I hadn't been on twitter instead of reading. My responsibilities are things that can't be dodged or compensated by a neat gag about David Cameron being a cunt. Currently I have an opportunity to develop myself professionally, and I think I need to take it, rather than consign it to the Bin Of Missed Chances that is overflowing in my hinterland. It's not something I do joyfully, but then how much of real life is?

It's au revoir rather than goodbye; I'm not closing my twitter account, because I hope one day I might find space for it when I like myself again. I'm just covering things in dust-sheets. In fact, I continue to use it professionally on @MikeHoffman1. Don't bother looking - it's the most fucking boring twitter feed in Christendom. Well, except for @conservatives of course.

My so-called life

2011-06-24T22:42:00.008Z

I indulged in a little vanity exercise earlier this evening, allowing the Sunday Times to award me a fatuous ranking in its list of Social Media importance. The fact I came anywhere near the top 2,000 in the UK is a mark of its worthlessness as any kind of barometer of influence, unless making silly jokes on Twitter is the sort of thing that turns heads these days. But it does show the difficulty in deciphering the meaning behind the multifarious ways we use online platforms.

Take Fousquare, for example, which this week passed the 10 million-user mark (story here). For those who don't know, FourSquare is a mobile phone application that lets users "check in" to various locations around the world - restaurants, offices, airports or even public conveniences. This in turn appears in the timelines of your friends' Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn applications, while you get awarded virtual "points", and a ranking for that location. To someone like me who grew up before the age of portable telephony, it seems odd that, having attained majority, the first thing you would do is tell everybody where you were and how late you were staying out, like saving 10p for the phone box to call a surrogate parent.

More sinister was the website that was created in response, called http://www.pleaserobme.com/ that nicely highlighted the flip-side of this apparently wanton declaration of openness: that telling people where you were also told them where you weren't, namely, at home. Although never really intended as a serious tool for burglars, its point was clear: how much information is it healthy to give away to any tom, dick or Bill Sykes who was online?

So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see the next escalation in this Social Media arms race, via a story tweeted by my friend @PhilWoodford: Fake Facebook updates. Apparently there is a company offering to manage your Facebook updates while you are on holiday to give the impression you are still at home. According to its founder, Gary Jackson,

"Many people set their lights and radios and TVs on timers when they are away so why not extend this into the Internet as well and have a virtual presence on social media to make any would-be thief think twice?"

This sounds an interesting idea at first, certainly for the light user of social media. But for someone with a more profound addiction who, say, finishes 2,212th in the Sunday Times Social Media List, it's quite an undertaking. My surrogate would need to go to the office to "check in" everyday (can't have anyone usurping me from the 'Mayor of Clerkenwell' FourSquare status), trawl the web for stupid links to post to Facebook, not to mention dream up cretinous comments to apply to all my friends' postings. When that is done, there's the terrible puns and political ranting to be done on my non-professional Twitter account (+1,000 followers who demand their daily fix), not to mention my work-related Twitter stream, blog updates, and manage the LinkedIn requests, referrals and status updates. They'd also need a supply of pictures of my children painting/dancing/falling off trampolines to intersperse the links on Facebook. The list goes on...

When I sat down to work it out, I wondered how I managed to find the time to document all the things I claim to do to my friends and contacts online. Much easier to stay at home instead and create a virtual online holiday from the comfort of my living room. It's the perfect vacation that the recession can't spoil.

The Bride and Womb

2011-04-29T20:30:00.009Z

Surely the dullest of all the dull prenuptial conversations conducted in the media this week has been the Royal Wedding attendees list. Would the Syrian ambassador's invitation be rescinded? How come the North Korean ambassador will get to pocket a couple of vol-au-vents but not Tony Blair? Would the King of Tonga get an invitation +8 for all his wives? When the real question for William and Kate should have been: "Who the blue blazes are any of these people and why are they coming to my wedding?"

I didn't watch any of the Royal Wedding today, but not because of any antipathy toward the British royal family. I am a republican but, as far as I am concerned, that was actually beside the point. I don't think any of the guests should have been there who weren't known to the couple, and they should have kept the cameras outside; not because I don't want to see it (I'm fairly adept at not watching TV), but because, frankly, it's none of my business. Or yours.

The decision to make the wedding of the second in line to the throne a state occasion is at once baffling and revealing. It's strange because Prince William getting married is no more a public occasion than his graduation, first communion or passing out from Sandhurst. By making it into a state occasion, where politics and diplomacy guide the invitations as surely as kinship, it reveals the event as, ultimately, a medieval throwback.

Once upon a time, the new Duke of Cambridge would have had little say in who he married, and would have been unlikely to have known his bride before the wedding ceremony. It wasn't a match made for love, but for political strategy - to forge alliances with other countries, to strengthen their mutual lines of succession. We can now take comfort in changed times, and even celebrate the fact that Prince William was probably the first royal heir in history to have enjoyed an uncoerced and leisurely courtship. But by putting the wedding on a footing with a coronation, we are tacitly acknowledging the base meaning behind the feathery hats and polished carriages: in a political system based upon genetics not public election, you've got to grow your own. And here's where it gets down to brass tacks; I'm surprised broadcasters didn't ask to carry on transmitting fly-on-the-wall style through the honeymoon. Or at least demand to see the bedsheets as proof.

Of course I can understand the public interest in the event. I'm not saying that it's wrong for people to have enjoyed today's ritualised squiring - it's natural, human curiosity, like rubbernecking a car crash. But, equally, if William and Kate had wanted to get hitched in a Las Vegas drive-thru in His 'n' Hers Elvis outfits and let the glossy mags treat for the rights to their pictures, that would have been fine with me. Even if I didn't get the day off work as a result.

Census Sensibility

2011-03-27T22:32:00.005Z

I filled out my Census form today, thankful that my son's recent headlice episode had not re-occurred, which would have forced me to register several hundred overnight guests. I was pleased with my efforts, and I'm quite confident I got most of the answers right, though I was disappointed there wasn't a tie-breaker; 'In 10 ten words or fewer tell us why the maker of the Hellfire II missile system was chosen to count this year's Census'. With 25 million households involved, how on earth will they decide who's won otherwise?

Had there been such a challenge, it wouldn't have been the daftest question on the form. Not even the part where the government demands to know the number of rooms in my house excluding bathrooms, or the method I use to heat them. Although voluntary, Question 20 asked what religion each member of the house was. When I quizzed my 4-year-old daughter, her explanation of transubstantiation was so hopelessly wide of the mark I started to look for a box marked "Scooby Doo". She couldn't even understand the concept of Confirmation Bias that will ensure a skewed result in favour of organised religion in this census, despite dwindling numbers of church attendees.

I think my form must have been incomplete, because there wasn't a corresponding question asking for my political affiliation or that of my children. We've been told in the run-up to this year's Census that it's really important, because spending decisions will be made upon the data revealed. If this is true, you'd think it would be more interesting for the state to know our general feelings towards ideas of state control and freedom, or self-reliance and collective responsibility. How declaring your belief in Middle Eastern prophets should shape the redistribution of state spending is anyone's guess - you might as well ask people if they believe in the infallibility of Nick Clegg.

So despite the protestations of the likes of Anne Atkins, in the eyes of the state, religious beliefs rank higher than anything else you might believe. Though not as important as whether or not you have an outside toilet, which is a compulsory question and probably just as instructive about our British cultural heritage.

What's the Alternative?

2011-03-22T21:39:00.010Z

I consider myself to be reasonably well informed. I watch the news not just to laugh at the macho reporting conceits and overblown graphics. I can not only pronounce Jeremy Hunt the Culture Secretary without slipping, I could probably pick him out of a line-up. In fact, I'd have a stab at it for all members of the cabinet - if it weren't for that ASBO. Yet I suddenly realised this week I had absolutely no opinion on the Alternative Vote (AV) system, nor which way I shall vote in the upcoming referendum on the subject.

Obviously, as a consumer of modern news 'content', I would expect both sides of the debate to frame their arguments in a patronising publicity stunt that involved at least one minor celebrity, yet nary a Sian Phillips nor Alex Reid have I seen. No campaigning, no leafleting, little TV coverage. It's as though they are expecting me to actually look things up and read about it. And having done so, I think I've gotten to the bottom of it: no-one actually wants it.

If you look at the position of all major political parties, and quite a few smaller ones, not one of them is actually in favour of this happening. The Conservative Party self-evidently doesn't want it, but even among those supposedly in favour of the change, they mutter it cautiously under their breath. New Labour looked at the idea back in the 90s before they realised how to win an election with only 35% of the popular vote. Even among Labour and Liberal Democrat members who favour the change, most would actually choose the Standard Transferable Vote system over AV. But having asked for steak and got a burger, they feel they have to swallow it in case yesterday's leftover liver and onions is served up instead. The Scottish Nationalists can't even be bothered to formulate an official position on the subject.

The supreme irony would be if a system of government that requires 50% of the vote to be cast for the winning candidate were chosen by less than half the electorate, assuming turnout is at the usual levels of local government elections. Maybe this is somehow appropriate: a government nobody chose asking us to decide on a voting system nobody wants and may well get, despite nobody voting for it. If you should be careful what you wish for, that goes double for something you don't.

Flights of fancy

2010-11-17T22:42:00.004Z

A cuddly video viral has been doing the social media rounds, brought to you buy those chummy Flash Mob enthusiasts T-Mobile. About 4 friends have independently posted it to Facebook as an uplifting piece of work to general applause from others, leaving me genuinely bewildered at what I am missing. You probably need speakers for the full effect:

Of course this ad was never intended for broadcast but, instead, to be shared by friends across social media such as Facebook. As such it succeeds - it makes us feel warm, we share it with people we like who also feel warm. T-Mobile then prays it makes you feel warm towards them as the original sharer of this piece of feel-goodery, because Life Is For Sharing. So why does it leave me feeling utterly cold?

On one level, it's because it is the playing out of a nightmare. I cannot imagine anything worse, having gotten off a long-haul flight, jet-lagged and disoriented, staggered through customs and have someone come up to me singing songs in my face with imaginary instruments. In that situation I want to get out of the airport as quickly as possible, talking to as few people as possible. Contrary to what T-Mobile (and BA for that matter) would have us believe, airports are not places of high drama and emotion - they are large bus stations with better shops. Even if you are met by a long-missed friend, the whole atmosphere is weird and disorienting, too full of people you don't want to hang out with.

But as a piece of marketing, for me it also fails, by trying too hard. It is part of a very complex communications strategy to position T-Mobile as a social facilitator, presenting a piece of creative that is supposed to dovetail with the spontaneity of new media channels by choreographing a not-so-new product of the new digital age: the Flash Mob. This is supposed to look like User Generated Content, unleashing the spontaneous, touchy-feely-sharey person inside us in a situation where we don't communicate, on the heels of previous executions set in railways stations and outdoor public spaces, such as Trafalgar Square. It is utterly false, utterly contrived jolliness that sits ill with the British character, like TV Evangelism, public mourning and talking to strangers in a lift.

Beyond my personal squeamishness, it falls into that other classic trap of big-budget, high-concept advertising - it is in love with its own image. Creating something special, unique, beautiful, funny, frightening or exhilarating is not enough. I want you to give me a reason to use your product. Dramatise your uniqueness, your point of difference from the competition, make me give a shit about you. Life is not for sharing, Doritos are for sharing - you run a telephone network. What's it like? Good coverage? Value-for-money? Fast data-streaming? Flexible packages? Imaginative cross-platform linking or affiliate marketing programme? Do you sing to me in an airport? One of these things is not a USP - can you tell which one?

Worse, by losing sight of its proposition, it is setting up its customers for disappointment, lured by the myth of "Content". This is basically "stuff that makes people use your service" - content can be TV programmes, websites, downloads, updates, mash-ups, forums, anything that isn't a blank screen. By trying to align itself to what its customers do with each other via T-Mobile, rather than with T-Mobile, they lose sight of the most important thing to any mobile customer: good, reliable, fast network coverage. Have you ever tried to use a mobile phone at Heathrow airport? Or on a train? Or sometimes in the middle of central London outside the wrong building, and experienced "no signal"? Maybe if my message is that important, T-Mobile can organise a singing telegram to deliver it instead.

What's yours is mine

2010-11-11T21:41:00.005Z

The word 'arrogate' is not one you hear used regularly and even then not correctly. But a supreme example of it in action happened a couple of weeks back during the government's Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). Next to the distraction of proposed cuts to child benefit, the question of the budget of the BBC was always going to be an afterthought. But by freezing the licence fee for the next 6 years, the BBC is effectively being handed a 16% cut in real terms. In addition to these "stealth cuts", the corporation also agreed to absorb £340m that currently comes out of general taxation to pay for The World Service, S4C and BBC Monitoring.

Even at its double-counting best, the previous government never quite had the chutzpah to arrogate the BBC licence fee as part of Whitehall spending. But the licence fee that users like you and I pay has now been co-opted into deficit reduction, as part of Gideon's "you're all in this together" blitz spirit. At a time when more of us will be spending more time in front of the TV than ever, as the cuts and tax rises reduce our opportunities to go out, it's as though it's been decided that even programme quality must suffer its fair share too.

People outside the UK must look on with a sense of bafflement as to how the BBC is funded. A poll tax upon all owners of a television pays for 8 TV channels, 11 national radio stations, 24-hour rolling news coverage, a network of local radio and a comprehensive website. The breadth and depth, not to say quality, of its output is extraordinary by any standards, and the funding model, whose collectivism is a relic from a bygone era, confounds conventional thinking about the power of free markets to satisfy demands. Like the NHS, it is a national treasure whose idiosyncrasies should doom it to failure, yet as a representation of who we are as a nation, it is more emblematic, I would argue, than the Union flag itself.

More baffling to me is everyone's apparent willingness to accept these cuts. The inherent weakness of the BBC's position is the fact it cannot set the licence fee itself, but rather must curry favour with the government of the day, in order to secure its future. The speed at which this deal was done caught many by surprise, and prompted a lot of use of the word "challenging", maybe before they had time to say "wait a minute...". Conscious of not wanting to be seen as being out of touch with the public mood, the BBC has grabbed the lifeline of another 6 years of licence fee, barely pausing to consider the political implications of the quid pro quo. They are Audley Harrison to the Chancellor's David Haye.

The FCO always funded the World Service, because it recognised the political nature of its work, and how ridiculous it would be to ask British TV viewers to pay for its outreach programme. But for all the good the World Service undoubtedly does, surely the next logical place to put its funding would be into the ring-fenced Overseas Development Budget. Why is it any more politically palatable for my licence fee to pay for this service now than it was 10 years ago? Especially at a time when its core operating budget is facing cuts that will affect output. Likewise, is there no part of the Welsh office that could pay for S4C? What could be more important to the people of Wales than a TV station in their own language? Or, if it isn't that important to them, then cut it adrift and see if it can attract any EU money for spurious cultural preservation programmes.

We will be forced to pay above inflation price increases for everything from train fares to toilet seats over the next few years, for no extra increase in quality. Yet the one area where an increase in quality would have a positive impact on people at all points on the socio-economic spectrum will be beggared by a government packed with a privatiser's ulterior motive. Today the same government announced they wanted to measure the success of their policies by taking a sample of people's happiness (story here). I'd suggest the first thing they could do would be let the BBC do what it does best with both hands free.

Hire Education

2010-10-12T00:14:00.004Z

As the apologists from the coalition government reeled from the left hook of cutting Child Benefit, they were crunched across the nose, metaphorically speaking, by the right jab of unlimited University tuition fees. Not least because Lib Dems had made a pre-election song-and-dance about not increasing fees, in the unlikely event of them achieving government. Just another of the messy compromises made in fulfilling the coupling of government, and surely the biggest lesson in being careful what you wish for. Another notch on the bedposts of a hungover political party.

For those who may have missed the tuition fee hike proposal, it marks the latest attempt to open up education to everyone by making it affordable by no-one, except perhaps Chancellor Osborne’s personal trust fund. Parents can now enjoy the prospect of helping their children pay £10,000 a year not to attend lectures. Since this represents about the same cost of schooling at Osborne’s alma mater for one year, I’m sure Gideon considers this a perfectly reasonable sum to find. You don’t have to be heir to the 17^th Baronet Osborne to afford it, but it sure as heck helps.

The hoary old argument wheeled out every time this subject comes up is essentially reduced to money. Graduates, taken as an average, earn more than non-graduates, ergo they should pay for their golden ticket before they've even got a job. QED. Leaving aside the rather un-Thatcherite nature of this approach – where’s the incentive to earn more if the government will only take it off them in fees? – this argument seems to me to have two key flaws.

First, there is the paradox of wider university uptake. The reason we need to pay more is because more people are coming into the system. This is undoubtedly true, as more professions demand a degree as an entry requirement: social workers, nurses, teachers – all once could attain their chosen vocation through on-the-job training and night school qualifications. No more – it’s the full three years if you want to do any of those jobs. Before long English graduates will be competing for those jobs in McDonald’s with undergraduate BScs in Burger Rotation Management. As you widen the pool of potential professions that require a degree, you drag down the average earnings of graduates – for how long will the statement remain true that a degree is the meal ticket to top tax bracket earnings? Before long you’ll need one just to sign on.

Second, let’s assume it is true – graduates earn more money. What an outrage. Those selfish, self-bettering, hard-working, economy-powering bastards, who do they think they are? Doctors pushing themselves through 7 years of medical school to spend their days just making people better, and all to earn more money. Those sponging parasite engineers who build the technology that drives the economy – scumbags the lot of them. I’m shocked to think that while we train a new generation of minds to solve tomorrow’s problems and make our lives better, they might earn money doing so. They should do it for nothing and be grateful we let them get drunk for 3 years.

The one way of testing out a direct link between earnings and your degree, of course, would be a graduate tax, something the government has ruled out. While fees remain the financial driver, the best universities will charge the most, attracting those who can best pay in the short-term, not through their lifetime earnings, based upon their contribution to the common wheel. The new level playing fields of Eton.

Let them drink gin

2010-10-11T23:10:00.002Z

The rumpus over Child Benefit that threatened to wake up the dozing pensioners at last week’s Conservative Party conference has proved what a tricky subject the issue of cuts can be. Far from dividing along the line of traditional political allegiance, Chancellor Gideon “George” Osborne found himself at odds with the Daily Mail, which lined up with the Labour party. The phrase "curious bedfellows" has not been applied so truly since Lyle Lovett married Julia Roberts.

At first glance it is easy to see why there was agitation in the ranks. A primary school class of children could point out the iniquities in a proposal that posited a household with one income of £44,000 might merit no support, whilst another couple earning £86k could claim full benefit entitlement.

An interesting debate raged across the various media platforms that was far more complex than the usual name calling; many recognise the daftness of paying child benefit to someone earning, say, £100,000 a year, but how far down the cutoff point should be largely depends on how far south you live, how much your mortgage payments are, and whether you judge a foreign holiday to be a luxury or human right. Still more, the culture secretary, of all people, perhaps unwisely mused that there should be a cap on benefits paid to large families who continue to reproduce, though no mention of how this would be enforced. In turn, childless couples would then vent that, in fact, they were the biggest victims of a taxation system that seeks to rob them in order to pay to raise the offspring of the sexually incontinent.

Given that only 15% of the country pays the top rate of tax (the point at which Giddy proposes to cut off the award), it is possible that the issue excites more attention from journalists personally affected, rather than an accurate spread of their constituency. Nevertheless, speaking as a parent, I would say the government should look on child benefit as an expression of good manners. A tip, or the equivalent of taking a bottle around to someone’s house for dinner. It’s not something that would cover the costs of child rearing and nor is it intended to be. Consider, for example, if I were to abandon my children, throw them upon the mercy of the state. No matter the punishment levied upon me for doing so, the cost burden would fall squarely on the shoulders of the taxpayer, and for a lot more than 20 quid a week. Child benefit is like the state shoving a score in my top pocket and saying “go on, get yourself something nice in town, you deserve it”. It is tacit recognition that, as lovely as children often are, they are also a responsibility paid for, in large part, by the parents for the ultimate fiscal reward of the state – as they grow into tax-paying citizens (we hope).

It is surely no coincidence that the amount of Child Benefit has always roughly been the monetary equivalent of a bottle of gin (I’d argue it should be index linked to it). Because after a trying weekend of childcare, it’s surely every parent’s right to a gin and tonic on the government. Cheap at half the price.

Let them eat dinosaurs

2010-09-28T17:43:00.006Z

As the public sector cuts start to bite, David Cameron took a mouthful out of one of the juiciest pieces of political pork this week: the quangoes. Or at least according to the leaked memo that appeared in the Daily Telegraph. As pieces of political calculation go, it was a no-brainer: many of these bodies are completely unknown to the wider general public, and will be mourned by even fewer. After all, who will miss the Union Modernisation Advisory Board?

As the cuts go deeper, this issue of the perception of their importance, rather than actual importance, becomes more, well, important, in order to sell the idea of austerity to those footing the bill. The Advisory Committee of Organic Standards probably does a lot of important work that will now need to be done by someone else. But it doesn't seem as bad as putting a red line through, say, the Civil Aviation Authority, whose job it is to keep planes in the sky.

But not all quangoes are damned or saved in David's Dantesque underworld; 94 bodies still sit in limbo, neither safe from oblivion nor doomed to disbandment. The government must pick through this collection of committees and panels to decide which ones are still worthy of the public purse and which can go swing. One of those organisations still awaiting news of its fate is something called National Museums & Galleries. Not something that would rank highly in people's minds as of great importance, at least not at the expense of NHS funding. Yet I think it's bodies such as NMG that are the key to the whole acceptance of cuts by the electorate. Or, more specifically, the non tax-avoiding, law-abiding, always-voting middle class.

One of the things the NMG's funding does is pay for free entry into public museums, one of the few great socialist legacies of the Blair years. For the 'squeezed middle'. who will pay the most for the follies of bankers in terms of money (rather than in cut services), the free entry to museums is something to cling to. For a trip up to London with children, just existing seems to cost a lot of money, but free entry into museums makes the trip financially viable, stimulates the economy and reassures people that they still get something back for their taxes. It's proof, however small, that taxation is not a massive black hole that they throw an increasing percentage of their earnings into. It's one of the few times that people who will never trouble social services can actually see money moving in the opposite direction.

It also illustrates one of the differences between household budgeting and national budgeting. When I was unemployed, I took a look at those expenses I could do without and those areas where I could reduce expenditure, and made the adjustments accordingly. For governments the task is, instead, to reduce expenditure where it impacts the least upon those people most likely to vote for them, which doesn't always make for common sense. I'd suggest that for the present Prime Minister cutting the NMG might be the sort of tipping point that makes or breaks his government. I'm off to the British Museum on Friday, and I am pretty confident that I won't have to pay to get in. At least not directly.

Man doesn't bite dog

2010-09-12T20:07:00.004Z

I'm not sure of the exact dictionary definition of the word "news" but I reckon, if forced, I'd say it was something to do with things that happen. If you watch a news broadcast or read a newspaper, the common elements to all the stories is the fact that they are generally things that have happened - legislation passed, bombs dropped or footballers falling out of a nightclub. Clearly there are a lot things that happen in the world, and it's the news's job to figure out which ones to report.

If I can stretch to another reasonably obvious thing, I'd underline this point by stating that America is quite a big country where, it stands to reason, a lot of things happen, ergo a lot of news happens. And yet this week, the news agenda has been dominated by something that hasn't happened, which is unusual to say the least. The something in this case is two hundred copies of The Koran, and the thing that hasn't happened to them is being set on fire - at least not in Gainsville, Florida. The pastor of the most ironically named church in the world, the Dove Outreach Centre, Terry Jones (no, not that one) cancelled the event - which he later clarified as, actually, postponing it, lest his sordid little publicity machine be starved of the oxygen it is thriving on.

This non-event has seemed to spark some very real events - riots in Muslim countries, which, given the resulting destruction occurred in what are some of the poorest parts of the world, rather than Terry Jones's doorstep, was rather self-defeating. It certainly made me think that, if that was what happened when you didn't burn a Koran, what forces would erupt if you did? Jones claims he stayed his hand because of assurance given him by a New York Imam that the Ground Zero Mosque would be moved - an undertaking the Imam has denied giving. Given the fact it isn't a mosque and it isn't at Ground Zero, this somehow seems in keeping with the rest of the non-story.

In fact, the only thing that has actually happened in the whole of this saga, is the global news media has reported it as a story, even if its elements are no more substantial than smoke. The reportage makes it real, not the events that haven't happened. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that, in the cut-throat competition for news stories to fill the rolling news schedules and acres of print and pixelled pages, hacks will turn from the real to the imagined. After all, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins, however many things happen in the world, there are vastly more things that don't happen.

Seeing the redwoods for the trees

2010-07-11T22:30:00.003Z

I was reading John Redwood's blog the other day - not something I am proud of, but it was one of the many random feeds I get via Twitter, following UK politics. For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Mr Redwood was one of the swivel-eyed acolytes of what became known as Thatcherism, who has rested on his laurels of being a businessman ever since being elected to the cushiest public sector job in the land, as MP for Wokingham, some 23 years ago. What caught my eye was his column on public sector cuts, and his view of the heroic stoicism with which the private sector has borne the recession, as opposed to the mewling and puking he perceives within the public sector as Osborne's austerity budget begins to bite.

John begins his story thus:

In 2008-9 many private sector companies faced declines in their revenue of 25% or more. This was all far more horrific than the cash figures for the public sector this year and next. I do not recall these companies appearing in the media telling us they would have to take lumps out of their service to customers, identifying in public ways they could make their service or product worse, or proposing strikes to complain about the loss of public revenue support.

Instead they got on with the difficult but essential task of bringing costs down to meet the reduced revenue. Managers and workers worked together to reduce stocks, cut costs without damaging customer service, accepted pay freezes or even cuts in remuneration for the bad times, lost pension benefits and bonuses, negotiated cheaper purchases from suppliers. They often also at the same time worked on how they could improve their service or product for customers.

Speaking as someone who went through that painful process, I can identify one very significant cost reduction that John seems to have euphemistically skipped over, and not one that people did willingly or voluntarily. What he might call a total "cut in remuneration", as the ranks of the unemployed swelled, putting pressure onto the already contracting public sector. Which is, of course, a rise in demand for their "service or product".

Which is where John's tidy analogy breaks down, because the public sector receives highest demands for its services at exactly the times when there is less money to pay for it. In fact, given the enormous expansion in responsibilities local government has absorbed over the last 15 years, despite being at the mercy of central government for 75% of its revenue, most of the work of the front line delivery of public services is doing exactly what Mr Redwood challenges them to do: improving the service they provide while getting less money to do it with.

The huge contraction in the UK economy was down to an enormous reduction in demand, following the banking crisis. The total opposite to what local government is struggling to cope with as greater demands are placed upon its services; I do remember sitting in an office when the phone stopped ringing, not something I can imagine they have seen happening at the Social Services offices up and down the land.

I predict a riot

2010-07-05T22:23:00.007Z

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, not only can we no longer afford to die beyond our means, it would seem any form of demand we place upon health or welfare services in the next few years is likely to end in an unhappy user experience. That is if we are to believe the government's projected plans for spending cuts, which seem to change on a weekly basis. Two weeks ago we were told there would be across-the-board cuts of 25%, now government departments must prepare for 40%. No doubt by the time you read this sentence, the coalition government's new website for the repeal of unhelpful legislation will abolished the laws of mathematics, allowing fiscal cuts of 150%.

The consequences of this, as has been much remarked elsewhere, not least by those wielding the axe, will not be pretty, with up to 1.5 million public sector workers finding themselves relieved of their ability to earn money. To balance this, George Osborne has promised on his mum's life that the private sector will leap into the breach to magic up 2.5 million other positions by way of compensation, like a fat-fingered, job-creating Dutch boy. Since such a scale of employment growth are unknown in even the boomiest of growth years, it doesn't so much beg the question as to how this will happen as grab it by the collar pressing a knife to its throat.

But when you put together the clues given by recent government policy announcements, the answer becomes clear: you're going to do it. Yes, you. Consider the newly-announced, misleadingly paradoxical Free Schools, where any Tom, Dick or Hermione with a bigger agenda than sense can set up his or her own school. Meanwhile, Ian Duncan Smith wants the Job Centres to be available for the distribution of Rwandan-style food parcels to the poor of this country; maybe we could combine the two, and get school children to grow food for the new starving to generate a wartime spirit and Dig For Victory? This is the Big Society at work or, should I say, at out-of-work. And here's where you come in.

Free Schools, Food Vouchers, growth of the third sector - it's all a bit piecemeal. And with attempts by the new government to tighten immigration from non-EU countries, it surely means it won't be enough to offer people the chance to run a school, job centre or orthopaedic surgery unit. Pretty soon we'll all be obliged to do so. As the rubbish fills the streets and the dead go unburied, everyone will be compelled to take a second job as road sweeper, social worker or Astronomer Royal to fill the gaps left by the collapse of local government under the Austerity Budget. We'll all be like a new immigrant class, with two jobs to hold down just to make sure there are enough people replacing the windows following the bread riots.

On the other hand, the extra money will come in handy to pay for all those tax rises.

The Beautiful. Gamed.

2010-06-14T21:52:00.008Z

As the World Cup commercial build-up finally gives way to the football, there's a danger we might be distracted by the sport from our primary duty of buying stuff because there is a football tournament happening. Mindful of this, Mars is suing Nestle for infringement, because it claims its commercials imply an official sponsorship of the England team, a role Mars presently holds. Interestingly, the (Adidas) boot was on the other foot four years ago, when Mars was sued for insinuating a commercial relationship with Team England where none existed.

Yet on the global stage, some of the World's biggest brands are doing the same thing with breathtaking chutzpah: Pepsi and Nike use their stable of Brand Ambassadors to create some of the biggest World Cup-related advertising, without needing to pay a penny to FIFA for the privilege, such is the power of their stars' image. But what irritates me about this is the culture of expectation this generates, which takes these ads beyond merely brand promotion, as though they are a part of the fabric of our culture. No longer a sideline to the main event, they herald it like John the Baptist, and are listened to almost as reverently - it's as though the World Cup isn't real until we have had the honour of being sold to by the mega corporations.

First out of the blocks this year was Nike, undercutting Adidas as official sponsor of the World Cup with a 3 minute 44 second piece of homage to the central role of commerce to the beautiful game (click here to see the full ad). Nike's nominal message "Write your future" comes over as "Write your cheque", as a parade of the world's biggest football stars play out a story of triumph, failure and redemption on a football field, whose actions ripple across the world and into their bank accounts. Apart from the technical prowess of the story telling, and multiple, shifting narratives juxtaposing the players' private battles with the national mental equilibrium back home, it tries to get inside the minds of the world's top footballers.

And what a place that is. Wayne Rooney (above), apparently, will chase down 60 yards of pitch, just to stop Frank Ribery getting his own poster campaign, and having to live in a trailer sporting an enormous beard. Ronaldinho hopes one day to be the inspiration for a QVC video best-seller. And as for Ronaldo - only the prospect of a 50-metre high platinum statue is going to make him hit that free kick into the top corner. Though in his case, I can actually believe that may be true.

Commercial sponsorship is nothing new in football, and I remember the stars of my own childhood mugging for the camera to push a new football boot or aftershave. But if they were lucky, they might have earned over a professional career what Rooney will earn in a season. They played along for the sake of their pension. Given the vast wages already commanded by the elite stars of these ads, the earnings must be secondary to the honour of being part of a celebratory event - after all, they don't just smile and hold the label to camera, they are required to actually act in these 3-minute epics.

Maybe as an alternate ending, we could cut back to Rooney, still living in his trailer because he misplaced one pass (obviously), who still steps outside to torture himself by looking at a poster of his nemesis Ribery (naturally). The camera pulls back further to reveal the caravan is on the edge of an African shanty town, and we see troops of children walking to their jobs at the factory manufacturing certain branded sports equipment for 50p a day. Write your future, kids.

Won't get fooled again.

2010-05-31T09:36:00.006Z

Last week my son gave me an interesting insight into how we understand the world when he asked me the following question: Are all brown skinned people vegetarians? He had obviously spent a while mulling it over with all the data at his disposal: of the 30 kids in his class, maybe 8 or 9 are non-white, all of whom have some cultural or religious dietary requirements. In school dinner terms, the safest bet for religiously observant parents is to choose the vegetarian option for their offspring. So in my son's universe of 30, there was a noticeable correlation. QED.

While this is charmingly naive in a 7-year-old boy, it would be ridiculous if grown adults followed this statistical method. And yet it is actually remarkably similar to the approach used by newspaper editors when approaching a story about science and evidence. Perhaps my favourite definition of why we take a scientific approach to information is by Robert M Pirsig in Zen and the art and motorcycle maintenance: "The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into believing you know something you actually don't know." Whereas the average newspaper editor seems to operate on the principle that the real purpose of the scientific method is to act as another branch of the entertainment industry.

It was an apposite thing to be considering as it came on the same day the GMC formally struck off Andrew Wakefield, originator of the research that led to what I can only describe as the MMR media hoax. He was not barred from practising medicine because of his bad science but rather his habit of taking blood samples for money at children's parties and performing unnecessary, and bowel-rupturing, endoscopies upon autistic children. His foot soldiers in the war on reason were the British press who ensured the story remained active beyond the point when it became clear the evidence did not support his claims.

Top of the list of offenders was, unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail, though you'd never have guessed it from Tuesday's reporting. Unusually they didn't seek a balancing quote from one of their medical experts: Carole Caplin, Carol Vorderman, Julia Carling or Jackie Fletcher. Nor did they make any mention of the hundreds of column centimetres they had given to popular readings of Wakefield's work. He was hung out to dry as the lone shooter, with the Mail denying its role behind the grassy knoll, as it was shocked, SHOCKED to discover that Wakefield had a vested interest for finding a link between autism and MMR that caused him to ignore the facts. Unlike the Daily Mail, of course.

Of all the coverage devoted to this issue, one fact that continues to amaze me. Wakefield's original research, in 1998, was not ever meant, in itself, to be proof of anything for one simple reason: it was a study based upon 12 very sick children with multiple conditions, including autism. As a sample size for proving anything it is next to useless, and any editor who couldn't see that was either staggeringly stupid or truly desperate for news. Next to this, my son's observation looks like a model of rigour and caution.

Gods and monsters

2010-05-25T22:28:00.006Z

One of the most important breakthroughs in modern science happened last week to the breathless delight of the tabloid press. You can tell it was an important story, because it was the fourth story on the Six O'clock News, hot on the heels of the marriage breakdown of a pop star. Nevertheless, the Daily Mail duly fell for the bait dangled by Craig Venter, a "maverick biologist and billionaire entrepreneur" no less, that he had built a synthetic cell from scratch (story here).

How does it measure up according to our Mid-market Daily Science Story index? Reporting single, unverified claim as scientific fact? Check. Unhelpful diagrams showing sciency things? Check. Apocalyptic speculation based upon ridiculous extrapolations? Check. And, finally, explaining something complex with reference to a movie? Check.

And inevitably he was accused of "playing God" with his experiments, a phrase that always confuses me. Assuming we mean on a metaphorical level, I am uncertain how what Venter has done is morally different from the genetic engineering that mankind has been doing for centuries - cultivating wheat, breeding cattle, clearing and creating forests. The fact that he has done it in an extremely roundabout way is, to me, arguing about angels on a pinhead - and, in fact, he seems to have used an existing life form, one of the oldest known, as an incubator. It's hardly Dr Frankenstein's lightening bolt reanimating the departed.

According to this criteria, I've played God a couple of times in my life, creating lives that would never have existed without me - and I didn't even ask the Daily Mail's permission. Politicians play God every day, making decisions that will affect the life chances of millions of people: whether to go to war, whether to feed the starving, whether to fund the medicines of ill people, whether to protect an animal species.

Meanwhile God seems to have moved on from the whole creating life business to acting as a adjuster for insurance companies - setting off volcanoes to ruin our holidays or freak weather conditions to flatten our homes, as anyone who has tried to claim compensation will know. By logical extension, the Daily Mail should accuse the striking British Airways cabin crew of playing God, interfering with holiday plans in ways previously attributed to acts of the almighty.

What's the big idea?

2010-05-23T20:09:00.004Z

This weekend I joined Dave's "Big Society". Not Cameron, but a different Dave. And a different "Big Society" come to think of it. I spent 24 hours or so as a parent volunteer at a camp for my local Scout Association and the various junior sections in deepest, darkest Essex.

Just so you don't think that the Conservatives "Big Society" thing was a bit of election puff, it is still very much alive. From a link on the Home page of conservatives.com you can read all about the new spirit of community evangelisation, though it has been diplomatically rebranded as Civil Society, in deference to their government bedfellows, the Liberal Democrats. Speaking at its launch as a government policy last week, the Other Dave described it thus: "...we know instinctively that the state is often too inhuman, monolithic and clumsy to tackle our deepest social problems. We know that the best ideas come from the ground up, not the top down".

Leaving aside the false opposition of exactly which direction of travel the best ideas take, the programme itself wants to get local people organising locally, and in true Tory fashion engages in supply-side economics to tackle this: training an army of Community Organisers to raise the Dunkirk spirit, paid for from the money found down the back of everyone's sofa (I'm paraphrasing here, but not much). It here goes for what it sees as the crux of the matter: the money. And of course, it's true - paying for things is very important, in order to encourage people to build local projects and organisations. But nowhere in any of the 16 pages of "Big Society not Big Government" does it tackle one of the biggest barriers to participation.

Returning to Dave our local Scoutmaster, on Friday he shopped for the entire camp of some 36 people and to get to site early to start to set up the tents, assess the infrastructure and conduct risk-assessments on the proposed activities. Once flag was down on Sunday lunchtime, he supervised the dismantling of the camp and returned the Troop's gear to the lockup and the van to the rental office. To say nothing of the organising, arranging payment, raising the money to subsidise the event and the week-in, week-out running of the various beaver, cub and scout get-togethers.

Dave's employers tried to pressure him into working a weekend shift, despite the fact he had taken Friday as annual leave. Between his work and the Scout movement, there's little room for other things, but Dave does it willingly and happily because he believes he is doing something worthwhile, and a thriving body of local children back this by voting with their feet every Monday. Dave is one of thousands of people who put their careers on hold, or have to juggle their work commitments for, essentially, the benefit of other people's children. He doesn't get paid, and nor does he seek to. But here's where Big Government could come in.

Dave doesn't need the Big Society Bank to sell Social Impact Bonds (no, really) to buy another tent, or even cover the van hire. But if his employers could leverage the social value of Dave's volunteer work somehow, so they could benefit from his largess, they might see Dave's hinterland life as a benefit to them, and Dave as a valued employer. Will the Other Dave, in Downing Street, enact legislation to free potential community activists by helping them to hold down work and take some time for the common wheel? Probably sounds a bit too much like top-down, red tape to Dave's mates in the business community.

Proportional Reproduction

2010-05-08T22:02:00.009Z

I listened to a surreal piece of radio on "Today", this morning on Radio 4. As part of the post-election analysis, a reporter visited the ultra-safe Conservative seat of Henley-on-Thames, erstwhile proving ground of political luminaries Michael Heseltine and Boris Johnson (listen here). The local voters seemed both confused and angry as to why David Cameron wasn't Prime Minister. Cameron promised them power if only they'd turn down the heating and love gays, and now it seems they have to hug-a-lib-dem to come close to chucking out the chinz at 10 Downing Street. The trouble with the first-past-the-post system, it would seem, is it isn't first past enough.

It seems everyone is angry with the electoral system right now, and not just people in Henley who can't count. Despite the fact the Liberal Democrats polled about the same as 2005, their usual lack of proportional numbers of seats has sparked actual protests on the streets, instead of the more usual muttering in beer. A thousand people gathered in Trafalgar square to demand change, everyone from Lord Mandelson to Gordon Brown has called the system "discredited"; ironic when we consider the chief losers under the system are currently closer to government now than any of their colleagues had been in a generation. Those who grizzle that we are always ruled by a minority vote have got their wish - no-one with a majority of seats.

It seems electoral reform will be firmly on the agenda; either in the form of a concession to the Lib Dems in exchange for underpinning a Tory government, or propping up a Labour one, or in anticipation of the inevitable election that the alternative to those scenarios would bring in the next 12 months. The time is ripe for change, and surely the people would grasp that to their collective bosoms, wouldn't they? Actually I'm inclined to think it would achieve the opposite.

Most people can understand the simple logic of proportional representation; in order to reflect the will of the people there must be a relationship between the number of votes cast and their representation in the Legislature. Clearly the present system favours those parties who benefit from herd behaviour; wherever people gather to think the same way in concentrated geographies. Not necessarily a sound basis for capturing a national mood. Yet bear in mind that although governments are regularly formed by the representatives of less than 40% of the voting public, nearly 8 in 10 will have the chance to vote in a government of their choice more often than not. This is not an argument in favour of the present system, but a caveat about the obvious support there must be for changing it.

The delicate dance being performed by the party leaders is an insight into what a proportionate result would look like every time. And if, as seems likely, a minority Conservative government limps through the year before calling another election, a lot of people, when presented with the reality of coalitions, will have second thoughts about supporting a referendum on PR. So the very thing that enables electoral reform to happen, a strong showing by the third party in a hung parliament, is the one set of circumstances that will make its prospect the least enticing.

I'm of the view that the current position we are in is the most exciting piece of politics in my living memory; uncertainty and the mewling brats of the stock market be damned, this is real politics in the classic definition of the word: the resolution of difficult things by talking and compromising instead of violence. Instead, the most disturbing aspect about the situation, from my position, is the unseen role of the unelected head of state, should Mr Clegg decide to throw his lot in with the Labour Party - entirely possible, given how cool Cameron is towards Electoral Reform. Under those circumstances, two power bases, neither with a majority, would be competing to run a government - and who would have to choose? Step forward Her Majesty the Queen.

It's one thing to have an electoral system whose nods to proportionality are little better than Mussolini's Acerbo Law, because it's based upon how closely like-minded voters live to each other. But surely that pales beside the daftness of someone deciding who should form a government because she is her father's daughter?

Well hung?

2010-04-25T22:30:00.006Z

David Cameron has been exercising an interesting paradox this week - accusing the Prime Minister of spreading fear among the electorate over Conservative spending proposals, while spreading his own brand of fear over the possibility of a hung parliament. Here I am using the word 'paradox' as a euphemism for 'hypocrisy', of course.

Faithful as ever, the Daily Telegraph published statistical evidence backing Mr Cameron's fearmongering from the last hung parliament:

The last time a British election failed to produce a decisive result, in February, 1974, the FTSE All Share Index – a broad measure of the stock market – fell nearly 15pc in a month and ended the year more than 50pc below where it began.

Horrors! Except that share prices had been falling since 1972 in response to the 'Oil Shock', so here I use the word 'evidence' in describing the Telegraph's article as a euphemism for 'fraud'.

Many successful democracies around the world cope with extended periods of political stalemate - in the US 'gridlock', as it is known, was a feature of the 1980s, a time of untrammelled prosperity, according to some - and more recently Belgium went for whole months without even a government, never mind a budget. Similarly, Germany rubs by with coalitions, managing to do all right in terms of economic growth. But for Britain it would be apocalyptic if the soothsayers are to be believed.

On the other hand consider the following: why do so many people vote (maybe not enough, but let's leave that) and yet so few people are members of political parties? Take me as a typical example of someone who is reasonably politically engaged, yet I have never joined a political party. Leaving aside issues of expense and lethargy, I think the main reason is the same as most other people's: my views across a range of subjects are ideologically inconsistent, contradictory even, and don't easily fit into a party programme of one colour or another. I value the dynamic prosperity generated by free market capitalism, yet also rail at its injustices; I think the NHS is a national treasure while despairing at its inefficiencies; Protectionism is counter-productive and stifling, yet the BBC is a wonderful organisation. Most voters are paradoxes, and where we place our cross every five years is an aggregation of the most prominent cluster of concerns plus how we feel about the party leaders' haircuts.

So let us look on the prospect of a hung parliament as an opportunity to try something more in line with most voters. Shifting coalitions could generate support for different issues and try to build consensus for legislation. The electorate could be used to crowdsource suggestions for things that need to change, and their proposals could be tested against the spread of MPs, who would feel less encumbered by Party loyalty. The main outcome is almost certainly nothing would happen; only the most desperately needed laws would get passed, and MPs might find they have to spend more time in Parliament working together instead of part-time investment bankers. And I use the expression 'investment banker' as a Cockney rhyming euphemism.

On the offensive

2010-04-25T20:05:00.007Z

Last week all over the country there was widespread and flagrant abuse of the law against Religiously Aggravated Offences. Perhaps the most blatant occurred on national television, in front of an audience of over 4 million people, where three men repeatedly insulted, caricatured and lampooned each others' beliefs and the police didn't lift a finger. Perhaps it is lucky for all those people that the police chose such a narrow definition of belief systems that it is illegal to mock.

Somewhat less lucky was Harry Taylor, a self-confessed 'militant atheist', who left some cartoons poking fun at various belief systems in a prayer room at John Lennon Airport, Liverpool. The chaplain who discovered them did what any normal person would do who came across an offensive joke - she called the police. This being Liverpool, a city with a notoriously low crime rate and very little policing need, the local fuzz decided that it would be an appropriate use of public resources to investigate, arrest and prosecute Mr Taylor on the charge of 'religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress'. The punchline is Mr Talyor was not only found guilty and given a 6 month suspended sentence, he was issued an ASBO preventing him from carrying anti-religious materials in public.

You can read about the cartoon contents here - all had appeared previously in national mainstream publications - but it is interesting to see what passes for harassment amongst sensitive sections of the public. The much-derided blasphemy laws were finally abolished some two years ago, and were replaced by these harassment laws as both a sop to the hard-of-thinking and a way of updating outdated legislation. By putting the non-violent exchange of ideas onto a public order footing, it has had the effect of creating a much more virulent blasphemy law, that can be invoked subject to the caprice of regional police forces.

A couple of months ago I realised our reasonably newly-created street was finally on the map (even if it is not quite on Google Maps) when we got a visit from an army of Jehovah's Witnesses; I looked on the event as some kind of rite-of-passage into the normal life cycle of an everyday neighbourhood. Now I realise what I had missed was an opportunity to call the police and claim harassment on the grounds that someone was trying to give me literature that offended my beliefs. In light of Mr Taylor's story, I'd like to think it would be taken seriously - but I somehow suspect religious aggravation is strictly a one-way process.

Things can only get Twitter

2010-04-20T21:18:00.007Z

Watching the British General Election this year we have seen a once-in-a-generation media event at work, but not quite in the way people expected. During his successful Presidential campaign in 2008, Barack Obama achieved a lot of success in engaging with a sceptical audience through "new media" - social networks, emails, viral online communications - that left the McCain campaign flat footed. So it was assumed that in the UK 2010 General Election campaigning would follow the same pattern, with the Twitterati leading the charge for change. Yet it seems the biggest difference this year has been from a decidedly old school medium, creating perhaps the most interesting election since 1979.

Things started off much as anticipated: old style rough-and-tumble politics given a new media twist through the creation of posters that were never actually meant to be displayed as such; creative one-liners that were designed to be distributed online (not least because Labour had no budget for a national poster campaign). Here there were also echoes of 1979 as the talents of the Saatchi brothers were brought back on board the Conservatives stalled campaign. Thirty years ago they produced one of the most famous political posters of all time:

This time around we were treated to the rather less impressive (not to say less well punctuated):

'Labour isn't working' was a groundbreaking piece of work for a number of reasons. In particular it challenged the axiomatic truth of political advertising that you never mention the opposition by name for fear of giving them a boost. Such old-fashioned underestimation of the public's reading of media was plainly a generation out-of-date even then - so Saatchis thought it was about time this was taken on a step in 2010. This time they devised a poster that not only name-checked the opposition, it aped the very tradition of political postering. All the Tories had to do was be less awful than Gordon Brown, and they were a shoo-in. So the strategy was to remind the public how much Brown is a figure of contempt for a vocal population of opinion formers, whether the voters themselves actually can be bothered to dislike him or not. And hopefully the digital disgust that can so easily infect online discourse would do the rest. (For a working demonstration of this phenomenon, go to the sadly-still-free Daily Mail online and read the comments stream below any opinion piece. Or, rather, don't - it will undermine your faith in the future of humanity.)

But while it is true that Twitter is alive with a constant stream of electioneering and political trending, and the parties build iPhone aps to help canvass views and sign up voters, in fact the Internet has had far less impact upon this election than media nerds had hoped. The election season opened with two social media false starts: The Conservatives infamous 'Cash Gordon' Twitter debacle that got so out-of-control, Tory HQ had to release news of Sam Cameron's pregnancy to knock it off the top of the news. And the Labour party's misjudged crowdsourcing exercise in poster creation that proved that creating great advertising is not a democratic process.

This lack of impact was confirmed in a more substantive way in a research study by Apex Communications entitled Election 2.0? Don't believe the hyp e. The summary of its results: "This election will not be decided online. While the use of social media by the national parties, the press and the general public will have an impact on the election, our research shows there is little widespread and effective take-up of online campaigning by individual candidates across the country. No party has yet managed to implement a consistent online strategy at candidate level, and we found very few constituencies where one or other of the candidates is dominating in any noteworthy way."

As if to back this up, the real opportunity emerged from what was new media back in 1979: Television, re-energised thanks to the Leaders Debates. Pre-campaign, expectation was low because of the way the rules of the debate had been negotiated to death - everything seemed so carefully controlled there seemed little prospect of a spark, of people capturing a moment or momentum through a phrase, look or flashpoint. If you didn't actually see the first debate but merely read the reporting afterwards you could be forgiven for believing Nick Clegg was the new Martin Luther King. In fact he succeeded mostly by not joining in - ducking the punches thrown by the lightweight and the Big Clunking Fist - playing rope-a-dope with them until they'd talked themselves out.

Partly this difference between the US and UK elections is one of geography: a British General Election is a mass election of local representatives. They are coming to a street near you and will pretend to care about your broken drains and nearby gypsy camp site. The campaigning is local, the canvassers are neighbours, the constituency boundaries are often walkable - why should I follow my MP's tweets when I can see him talk at my school? An American Presidential campaign, on the other hand, is two candidates for a vast area - the use of technology is not so much modish as necessary to reach those places who will never get a visit from Obama.

Can Clegg maintain his momentum? Has Cameron realised he needs to do more than turn up and smile? Has Brown got a hope? It's almost worth staying tuned to see how this one ends.

UK General Election 2010: My response to people who argue that it is boring, all politicians are the same and why should they bother?

2010-04-13T21:31:00.004Z

What do you think this is - Deal or No Deal?

If you can't be bothered to use your brain for 5 minutes and try to get to grips with at least one issue - which will probably not be very interesting, and may even distract you from Eastenders - then go and sit with the children in the ball pit.

The clot of the amateur

2010-04-05T21:29:00.006Z

As an advertising professional, I am keenly aware of the way in which the digital media revolution has transformed marketing practices. Especially in the last couple of years, when social media has challenged a lot of the received wisdom of advertising orthodoxy, and forced marketeers to think about their brands in different ways. Two stories this week provided interesting commentary on these trends, and made me think that, when it comes to it, maybe so much hasn't changed after all.

Business Day magazine, in Australia, heralded Twitter as calling last orders on the gluttonous ad agencies, drinking at their clients' expense. Perhaps the most revealing phrase was in the entire article was:

Why pay big dollars to an ad agency when you can create your own inexpensive in-house campaign and get your nephew to launch it on YouTube and Twitter?

Why indeed. For that matter why pay a fancy lawyer big bucks to defend you in court, when your law student daughter would do it for free? Why pay a plumber to fix your heating when you're pretty handy with a spanner yourself? There's an almost charmingly naive assumption that, until now, the only thing keeping an ad agency in business in their ability to operate a camera, or to use PhotoShop. Because the internet has the ability to turn individual creative sparks into global phenomena, we can all do it - and thanks to Blogger, Twitter and Facebook anyone can create an online presence.

I am one of the first people to denounce the preciousness in advertising creativity. It is not a cure for cancer, and the fact that agencies are cabs for hire means we can seldom claim moral worth in the ad campaigns that spill across the media landscape. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean there is no skill involved - and the risk in the fact that "anyone can do it" is just that: your campaign will look like it could have been done by anyone.

Which brings me to the Labour party's "people's poster" campaign, which this week backfired in pretty spectactular fashion. The theory must have looked great and really 'of the moment': instead of wasting money on a big ad agency, members of the public would put forward ideas, and the best would be used as an actual campaigning poster. Saves money and gets supporters involved - a win-win. Given some of the amusing content generated by sites such as www.mydavidcameron.com - driven by word-of-Facebook - you can see why the idea was attractive.

And the winner was:

Although this was supposedly the "People's Poster", the fact that its released coincided with the start of the final series of Ashes to Ashes, leads me to believe it may not have been created by a member of the public at all. But let's run with it, and assume the Cameron-as-Gene-Hunt idea was a bona fide suggestion. I'm not actually that interested in why it was a terrible concept - and that analysis has been done to death elsewhere. But by assuming the wisdom of an online crowd is an exact substitute for the collective brain-power of an ad agency actually shows not so much a lack of faith in their creativity, but a failure to use their agency properly.

An ad agency will take a brief to deliver an objective. The creative is the means to the end - to inspire people to do whatever it is you want them to do - and so, in this case, the "people's poster" process, by making the creative into the end itself, gets the cart before the horse. Maybe the answer isn't a poster (and it almost certainly isn't in today's market with Labour's diminished ad budget), maybe it's not an ad at all. Agency and client will challenge each other's ideas, using the objective as fixed point of reference, and hopefully arrive at a solution that delivers the objective. By removing the agency, and reducing the briefing to a "who can make the funniest joke about David Cameron" competition, the objective vanished and Labour's sense-checking partner wasn't there.

Both the "Twitter nephew" and "people's poster" stories are born of rather old fashioned ideas of advertising, and advertising agencies - the place where you go to waste half your money, in Lord Beaverbrook's immortal phrase. The real revolution online media delivers is explicit measurability of the outcome of your campaign; whereas once you had to guess how many eyeballs saw your ad, today you gather fans' names and addresses via your facebook page, YouTube movie or, maybe, Chatroulette routine. You work together, sharing intelligence and insight to meet commonly-held objectives. And if you want to do that on your own, you're like the man defending himself in court, who has an idiot for a client.

Appy Now?

2010-03-25T21:52:00.003Z

One of the delights of being a new iPhone user is entry to the candy store that is the App Store (short for applications, nothing to do with the Apple name). Once you've downloaded the obligatory dull-but-usefuls (Facebook, LinkedIn), you can start to explore the crazier end of the spectrum, and wonder at the quirky pockets of humanity who create some of these things. Yesterday I came across an app to show you the meanings of all UK roadsigns, and I wondered how many drivers were on our roads who didn't know what the signs meant, driving one handed with iPhone in the other.

Almost picking at random, from the current Top 10 list, is an app called 'More Toast!' For a mere 59p, this app lets you make "virtual toast" and "swap recipes" (no, really). It comes in the "lifestyle" category, which makes me wonder about the lives of those who feel the need to look at pixelated bread products and enjoy the sound of a toaster popping when they're away from home. Once upon a time, computer simulations used to transport us to fantasy worlds, interstellar wars and middle earth troll villages. Now they are used to recreate the mundane so we can share it with each other as testament to our common humanity, along with our bowel movements and LOLs via Twitter, MySpace and all the other social media channels.

Fisher-Price recently raised some eyebrows when it made some iPhone apps for 2-year-olds (story here), at last debunking the myth that mobile phones are serious business tools, and not something to mess around on while waiting for the bus. And with iPhone apps set to outsell CDs within two years, it makes sense to start early with the next generation of consumers. But what sort of a generation are we creating?

Back in the last century when I was learning about marketing, the concept of a "felt need" - a problem you didn't realise you had until someone showed you a solution - was usually illustrated by the example of an electric toothbrush. Now I expect marketing course teachers simply point to any one of 1,000 iPhone apps, from The Perfect Egg Timer to Fart Machine Extreme. With apps being created to cater not just for the merest whim, but the most unlikely set of circumstances, will our children no longer learn to tie their laces upon our instruction, but download the relevant app? Well, they would if their shoes had laces in them anymore.

Better the devil you know?

2010-03-11T22:19:00.005Z

The more observant of my regular readers may have noticed a tendency to make rude jokes about Catholic clergy and their desire to bugger children. Whether this is an appropriate response to vile actions largely depends on the breadth of your sense of humour, I suspect. But I would argue it is wholly more appropriate than the reaction from the Vatican's chief Ghostbuster, Father Gabriele Amorth, whose remarks about the "Devil in the Vatican" were widely reported across the British press today.

The Fourth Estate seems to have accepted it uncritically as a mea cupla for the many wrongs visited upon children around the world by the Vatican's priests and acolytes, aside from the chance to explore the ghoulish and macabre practices of exorcism. But a closer reading reveals why we will never get to the bottom of the scandal, and the Church will never admit ultimate culpability as a collective: because it wasn't their fault. It was simply a part of the Devil's work, cited alongside the attempted assassination of the previous Pope, as though there were some moral equivalence - yes, we may have ruined the lives of thousands of children in our care, but feel our pain, too, because someone didn't manage to kill our boss.

Far from lapping up the talk of exorcism, and wondering at Ratzinger giving intellectual time to the lurid showmanship of demonic expulsion, we should be outraged that Amorth, and by implication his sponsor, think this is a good enough answer. Citing the influence of the Devil is a specious argument not even fit for a playground: A big boy made me do it, sir. If the Necromancer does stalk the corridors of St Peters, does that get them off the hook? All a big misunderstanding. Naughty, naughty Devil.

The drip-drip of stories of abuse that emerged from the USA and Ireland became a steady flow this week, as investigations conducted in Netherlands, Germany and Austria have added to the pool of suffering (story here). Taken as a whole, apart from being thoroughly unpleasant, surely it is also one of the more statistically unlikely phenomena if explained purely as random distribution. For all our fears, actual incidences of child sexual assault are mercifully rare, and its practitioners drawn from all walks and strata of life. Now, consider what an extraordinary cluster of predators lurks within the Catholic church over such a wide area; this is not a local conspiracy but a global phenomenon that cannot be explained in any terms other than there is something about the organisation that attracts pederasts. It is simply too improbable for the high number of incidents in a single organisation to be a coincidence; the way it has been allowed to conduct itself and how it was viewed by the public provided a perfect cover.

Imagine any other organisation - a company, a charity, a government or police force - with the same sort of track record of its employees raping children. It would not be allowed to exist: the company wound up, charity's status withdrawn, government resigned (or voted out), police force disbanded (as with West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, for example). I think the time has come for the Catholic church to give it up and declare itself out of business. It has proved itself woefully inadequate in policing abusers, preferring to protect not punish, its secretive, male-only hierarchy is a stacked defence against attempts to open it up to scrutiny, and it seems a honey-pot for bullies, giving them means and opportunity to prey upon the powerless.

And beneath it all, at heart its apologists believe its failings were caused by the bad influence of an imaginary friend. That, I think, is the lowest point of all.

Suffer little children

2010-03-02T23:31:00.003Z

I see the religious lobby achieved its controversial amendment to the bill on sex education, allowing those educational establishments bizarrely known as "faith schools" to teach personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) lessons "in a way that reflects the school's religious character". Does this mean my local Catholic schools will now start preparing their 13 year-old-boys for sex with their local parish priest?

Pick your cherries while ye may

2010-02-25T22:38:00.004Z

The nature of scientific evidence has been under scrutiny this week with the coinciding of three important news stories. Simon Singh was in court for the appeal against the ruling last year by Judge Eady that he libelled the British Chiropractors Association - an action that the presiding judge described as "baffling" (story here) - while the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee delivered a damning verdict upon the funding of homeopathy by the NHS (here). Finally, and a little late in the day, the General Chiropractic Council fessed up the evidence for the efficacy of its treatments, a decidedly mixed bag (here).

What unites these three stories is they are examples of the reliance on cherry-picked evidence by the less-than-scientific, in order to bolster their credentials. In the realms of scientific practice and statistical validity, cherry-picking is one of the big sins; put simply it means ignoring all the evidence that doesn't support your hypothesis. So, if you conduct 100 trials on a new drug and 95 show it performs no better than the current treatment, but five show some improved outcomes, then to present these latter five trials as evidence supporting your drug's efficacy is to do A Bad Thing. Depending on what you are trying to prove, at best you are being unfair, and at worst committing fraud, though that doesn't stop it from being widely practised, and is surely the basis of 1,001 advertising campaigns.

And it also was the basis of an unusual claim by Inspector Roger Bartlett of the Devon and Cornwall Police this week of divine intervention to account for an improvement in crime statistics in his manor (story here). According to Inspector Bartlett the power of prayer by local christian groups has lead to a direct improvement in clear-up rates in the Barnstaple area, and similar decrease in number of serious road accidents in north Devon. Impressively, it would seem Insp Bartlett asked a group of local Christians to pray for a specific reduction in road accident deaths in the area the year before the number of incidents fell by 67%. Rather less impressively, he then continues to list random statistical improvements that he retrospectively attributes to prayer, which rather weakens his case.

But rather than give his notion the fisking it deserves, I wondered if I could try the same thing? Of course I can, for while it seems the good Lord is spending a lot of time helping out the motorists of Devon, he's been taking his eye off the deserving but weak-hearted. In 2006 a double-blinded RCT on the power of prayer was performed Harvard Medical School upon those recovering from coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, with some allocated to receive unctions and some not, and those two groups further divided, with half being told they were being prayed for and the rest not.

The conclusion? "Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications." In other words, knowing you were being prayed for actually increased the chances of you getting worse, not better.

This then leads me to conclude that, while God clearly cares enough about the commitment of sin (crime) to help reduce it, he's not so keen on the love and compassion bit if you have a dicky ticker. Sounds a bit of an Old Testament sort of chap to me, which leaves me to assume the entire basis of Christianity is flawed, and therefore Judaism is the one true faith. QED. Suddenly things become enormously simple if you just notice what you want to see, and select your evidence accordingly, or look for patterns where none exist.

Meanwhile do be sure to drive carefully in north Devon, if you find yourself in that neck of the woods. God's made an impressive start, but wouldn't want you to ruin his hard work by demonstrating free will and driving off a cliff - he'd rather you wait for that heart attack to strike. And poor Inspector Bartlett would have to explain how his number went back up again without defaming Jehovah.

Pester Power 2.0

2010-02-20T21:48:00.004Z

This week David Cameron revealed a new policy that looks like out-Blairing even New Labour. In terms of lack of substance and naked populism, it is an overt attempt to position the party as in-touch with the voters. Of course there is nothing wrong with actually being in touch with voters' concerns, but this latest piece of headline grabbing is so thin you could use it as greaseproof paper to produce some half-baked ideas.

Starting off with the bold headline promise of "Protecting children from sexualisation and commercialisation", he introduces the concept of "premature sexualisation". To me that sounds like the sort of thing Dear Deirdre would tackle in The Sun, but Dave doesn't bother to give any examples of this, or even explain how he came to the conclusion it was of popular concern. It's out there, apparently, and Dave wants you to know he's concerned about it. But he no sooner raises it then he moves on to the bulk of the policy announcement covering measures that are "designed to crack down on irresponsible marketing practices and products targeted at children."

Speaking as a parent who consumes quite a lot of advertising on children's TV stations, I'm struggling to see the problem or why it suddenly merits a policy response. Advertisers have always targeted children, but today they work under greater restrictions than when I was a child. Children are big grabby bundles of Id, as likely to furiously demand to watch a TV show or have another 25 biscuits as they are to covet something they have seen in an ad. Unfortunately, one of the onerous tasks of parenting is managing their expectations, meeting the challenge of their desires, and setting clear parameters.

But let's run with this for the minute and assume ads aimed at children are Very Bad. What's Dave's solution?

Banning the most manipulative marketing techniques aimed at young people
Strengthening the regulatory framework
Giving people the power to make complaints
Banning irresponsible companies from winning future government contracts.

The rules around what you can and can't say when advertising to children, and where and when you can say it is listed in tedious detail on the ASA site (or click here), because a lot of people have given this tricky area a lot of thought, in balancing the legitimate rights of businesses to sell products against protecting the rights of children. And anytime you think that balance is not achieved, you can complain to the ASA. So, again, I am struggling to see what "Dave" is announcing that is not already covered, apart from a general breastbeating that he has an ill-defined concern, and wants you to know he cherishes your kids too.

What I think has changed things in Cameron's mind is the Internet in general, and social media specifically. Cameron is supposedly a hip young guy, groovy to the web and all things digital, as we saw a few years ago with his "Web Cam" broadcasts on YouTube. But here he paints new media as a source of unmitigated threat: children vulnerable to new advertising channels and parents powerless to stop it. But in truth, it is a two way street; just as new media gives new routes to consumers, it gives greater powers to parents to express their displeasure, co-ordinate action against inappropriate messaging and mobilise our economic clout. Parents may no longer be the gatekeepers to the advertising channels open to children, but they still hold the purse strings. New media offers creators of products aimed at children new ways of engaging with the people who foot the bill, to persuade them of their worthiness.

He emphasised that "social pressure" is the best way to combat irresponsible behaviour and encourage responsibility, saying that the Conservatives would "make it easier for parents to mobilise against campaigns and products that they think are inappropriate". At present, thanks to the explosion of new technology, parents are doing just that - forming networks, sharing information, creating pressure groups around issues and concerns, and exerting that pressure in co-ordinated ways.

Take the example of the infamous "Lolita Bed" that was withdrawn from sale at Woolworths, after parental pressure led by the raisingkids.co.uk website (story here). Cameron himself supported this campaign as an example of the "sexualisation of children". He seems to have missed the point that it is an example of grass-roots "social pressure" at work, the very thing he will supposedly encourage. Unless he is somehow suggesting a new law allowing vigilante attacks upon toy manufacturers, parents mobilising against campaigns and products is exactly what they are doing at the moment. Cameron is graciously giving us permission to carry on.

Cameron finishes by saying: "A Conservative Government would take the tough action needed to help families and build a society in which we stop treating children as adults". My concern is, instead, that a Conservative Government will build a society where we treat adults as children.

Dying beyond your means

2010-02-14T21:43:00.003Z

There's been a bit of pre-election huffing and puffing this week around care for the elderly in the UK. The facts about the size of the challenge are clear; according to the Office for National Statistics, despite large influxes of younger immigrants, overall the UK population balance continues get older. It is projected that, by 2033, 23 per cent of the population will be aged 65 and over compared to 18 per cent aged 16 or younger.

The fastest population increase has been in the number of those aged 85 and over, the 'oldest old'. In 1983, there were just over 600,000 people in the UK aged 85 and over. Since then the numbers have more than doubled reaching 1.3 million in 2008. By 2033 the number of people aged 85 and over is projected to more than double again to reach 3.2 million, and to account for 5 per cent of the total population. Combined with the fact that dementia rates rise rapidly among the over 80s, that's a big bill for care that someone has to foot. That someone probably being those of us who work and pay taxes.

The government suggested this week that those entering retirement might want to chip in a bit. Health Minister Andy Burnham said the government may introduce a compulsory charge of up to £20,000 pounds per person payable on retirement to cover the cost of care in old age - though, it is just one of three options being considered alongside a top-up payment system and an insurance-based approach. Frankly, I think he could suggest that the government will pay by winning the lottery every week, since he hasn't much chance of enacting anything after the general election. But that hasn't stopped Dave "David" Cameron jumping in with a soundbite about a "death tax", and an artless poster highlighting the issue (here).

If it were me, I'd make it £40,000, and we'll take the car as well, just so the Baby Boomer generation can finally feel what it feels like to pay for something. Having been rewarded with the best start in life on the backs of their parents' struggles, they have enjoyed a lifetime of free education, full employment, the sexual revolution and occupational pension schemes that seem designed by Bernie Madoff. And, of course, entitlement to retire at 55. Picking up the tab is my generation, who are presented with a unique opportunity to get screwed at both ends, as we won't get the chance to leech off the next generation in time-honoured fashion. The Boomers have pulled up the drawbridge, and we have to pay for everything ourselves.

£20,000 is less than the operating costs of my 4-person family for just one year, so far from extortion, I reckon it looks excellent value for an open-ended commitment to on-call nurses to wipe your bum around the clock. But it's not something I will ultimately have to pay; by the 2030s I reckon they'll have banned retirement altogether, and we'll just be "executed" when the chip in our hands starts flashing. They'll call it Logan's Stagger.

It's beginning to add up

2010-02-13T23:52:00.002Z

I was playing dominoes with my son earlier - the old fashioned tile game, not a see-who-can-order-the-hottest-pizza competition - when it struck me what has been going wrong with the economy these last few years: innumeracy. In short, we have lost the ability to add up a row of numbers. Sure, we can usually manage the small stuff, change from a fiver, that sort of thing, but when the zeros start going on, the wheels start to come off.

It's all coming to a head in Greece right now for this very reason. Many within the Euro zone are pointing the finger at some of the less-than-truthful declarations Greece has made in the past in order to gain Euro membership, and in the present as to the true state of its indebtedness. But I reckon as the number started to rise they simply lost count - put in the best estimate, like an MP's expenses claim. Even the president of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, admitted no-one else in Europe had questioned the figures. If everyone in Europe has lost count of how much Greece owes everyone else, I reckon some kind of number-overload point has been reached.

On a smaller scale, I see it every day all around me - my Twitter fans (!) will know the delight I feel upon discovering supermarket multi-buy deals which are cheaper than single packets. Or take my soon-to-be-ex electricity supplier, E.ON (please). Every April they set a monthly direct debit, based upon my average consumption. Last year we started at £91 per month, until we racked up a £67 credit within 3 months. Taking it down to £81 pm, by Christmas we were nearly £100 in the black, so I was interested to receive this week notification of the proposed new monthly payments from April 2010. They'd done a lot of thinking, carefully analysed our usage, and used all their fingers and toes to come up with a new figure: £119 per month.

And I think it's obvious where this number-weariness has come from: RBS and Northern Rock. As I journeyed into London last week, past Stratford and the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, I was thinking back to 2006, and how quaint it seemed to have a political scandal about those Olympic costs "spiralling out of control" at a cost to the UK taxpayer of £5bn. Even the initial nationalisation cost of Northern Rock at £50bn seems chump change, compared to the hairy barbarian cluster-fuck that is Royal Bank of Scotland. So perhaps I should not have been surprised last week to hear that RBS was planning to hand out £1.3bn in bonuses, despite making a loss of over £7bn.

The only conclusion I can come to is everyone at RBS has also forgotten how to count. Failure to grasp reality was behind the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, and it seems to me that reaching into a pot containing minus £7,000,000,000, expecting to find some cash is the ultimate proof of this. The brain-burning size of the debt has suspended all numeracy functions, and what's more it is spreading: the coverage in the press seemed almost muted. It's such a familiar territory to us now, we couldn't really be bothered to raise a snarl. We have been utterly beaten into apathy and confusion by the sheer size of the figures involved, numbed by numbers. Pretty soon I'm going to be asking my son to add up the weekly shopping as my skull collapses with anger at the idiotic sense of entitlement by morons whose supposed talent for wealth generation has gone almost as far into the red as our savings.

Let's hope I'm not reduced to asking E.ON to count for me.

A Bridge too far

2010-02-07T21:55:00.007Z

I was reading this week in the Corriere della Sera one of those "Funny Old World" stories about the England football captain, John Terry, potentially losing his job because of an adulterous affair. There was a general scratching of heads in Italy as to what one had to do with the other, in stark contrast with the British press who wrote, almost as one, that Terry should be demoted over the scandal as though it were an axiomatic truth. So there was a certain tension on Thursday as we waited to to see whether England's Italian manager would adopt a continental understanding or if he had decided to go native.

I was interested to note that, when the axe fell, those named as replacements at both Captain and Vice-Captain were not exactly adroit at staying out of the papers for reasons of bad personal judgement. And throughout this sordid episode, no one has actually suggested Terry be dropped from the team, so clearly there is a higher bar for moral behaviour by captains than mere squad members - just as well given that at least four regular starting XI players have been named in the tabloids for the exact same sins.

I would suggest that those who seek moral purpose in the England football team are probably wasting their time. As my friend Marcus pointed out, by the same criteria that got Terry fired, we should demote the Archbishop of Canterbury for being bad at football. Just as we don't require our national sportsmen to be Cordon Bleu chefs, qualified architects or banjo players, we shouldn't expect them to be moral paragons. Before Terry even got the job he'd been pilloried in the press for public urination in a bar, inappropriate texting to other women and parking his Bentley in a disabled car bay so we knew he wasn't exactly Albert Schweitzer. But he was evidently good at putting various parts of his body between foreigners and a football, and in our whimsical society, such talents earn £100,000 a week.

Indeed, I'd suggest that is the real point of this story. Football is peculiarly sensitive to excessive remuneration for its elite stars, even though those who can command such pay are the small point of a very wide-based pyramid of journeymen pros hacking each other every week for a miner's wage. We accept with a straight face a banker claiming he can "prove" he is worth a bonus of £1m after a government rescue; John Terry proves every week what he's worth in the most unforgiving public arena. Premier League football clubs are falling over themselves to show how in touch they are with those who buy the match tickets, pies and replica shirts through community liaison, charity sponsorship and "Kick Racism Out Of Football" raffles. "We haven't lost touch with our roots and values" they desperately cry via piles of signed polyester.

Yet the most overlooked part of the story reveals some very old-fashioned values still at work within the beautiful game. Wise sports hacks claimed it wasn't the affair that was the problem, but the fact that the Other Woman, Vanessa Perroncel, was the Ex-Other Woman of a former Chelsea colleague, Wayne Bridge, also a member of the England team. Disruption to England's World Cup plans caused by friction within the squad was the real threat, it was said. Demotion for Terry was the only way to achieve team harmony, it was also said. Or to put it another way: John nicked Wayne's bird.

Details over the exact chronology are sketchy, but it seems Bridge and Ms Perroncel had split at the time of Terry's dalliance; her mistake was not having a "Property of Wayne Bridge" tattoo. Did Terry act shabbily toward a supposed friend and former colleague? Probably, but Perroncel is also a grown up with some free will. The fact she is being implied as the chattel of Bridge reveals a lot about attitudes within the press towards women, in particular those who move in Premier League football's rarefied atmosphere. She has no function outside of being the companion to either player.

John Terry may insert vegetables into bodily orifices for all I care, but ever since the story broke he has proved his worth to his team through solid sporting performance. By contrast, Rio Ferdinand, new England captain, fresh back from injury, aimed a punch at an opponent, earning him a three-match ban - the sort of behaviour that can cost a team dear in a World Cup (just ask David Beckham). But as long as he didn't sleep with someone who wasn't going out with someone who also plays for England, moral decency is upheld. And the humbug of the tabloid press can carry on undisturbed.

Enlightened thinking

2010-02-03T20:57:00.004Z

Prince Charles is a man often associated with backwards thinking, which I suppose is not surprising, given he has lived his life in reverse. For the first 50-odd years he has been in retirement, pottering in his garden and taking up hobbies, and as he approaches the age at which most would be considering superannuation, he is preparing to begin his first day job, as head of state. This would also explain his somewhat fogyish opinions, not a coherent ideology as such, but a combination of Luddite sentimentalism and spiritualist mumbo-jumbo. Imagine a posh Arthur Scargill running a Reiki clinic.

From talking to his plants to model villages, via a general "why can't we all get along" pantheism, his obsessions are so random as to attract little excitement by me, until today. “I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment,” he told a conference at St James’s Palace. “I felt proud of that.”

He goes on: “I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it. We cannot go on surely like this, just imagining that the principles of the Enlightenment laid down in the eighteenth century still apply now."

Well, obviously there are the crackpot ideas from that time that will never last, such as democracy, the rights of man and rational thought. And what has the scientific method ever given us? But I assume this also applies to the serious ideas of the last 200 years like homeopathy and neo-classical architecture, which are rather closer to his heart. How on earth do we evaluate our heritage and decide what still applies and what doesn't?

I've worked out a system for evaluating what we should keep and what we should discard, and it's quite simple. Anything that Prince Charles likes, we get rid of, anything he speaks out against, we should keep. So out with alternative medicine, model villages, polo and overpriced biscuits, and in comes cool architecture, regulation of herbal remedies and critical thinking.

Let's remember England before this Enlightenment nonsense, where everything was judged a result of divine providence, where few could read and even fewer had a vote, and witch-hunting was a bona fide occupation - holistic cures were provided via a ducking stool. But on the plus side, we did have an absolute monarch, who was also called King Charles. Maybe that's what he meant?

Or did he mean the bit after that where we cut off King Charles's head and installed a theocracy for 11 years?

Faithbook

2010-01-28T22:55:00.004Z

Interesting social media news from God's ReTweeter himself last weekend, as Pope Benedict urged priests to evangelise via Twitter, Facebook and blogging, on his YouTube channel: "The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul's exclamation: 'Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel'"

I know what you're thinking: "the Pope has his own YouTube channel?" Actually, the first thing that entered my head was: "Well, that will certainly make it easier for them to groom young boys for sex."

But in the spirit of enquiry, I thought I'd see how far this project has come, so I checked out the Pope's Twitter account for examples of his own 140-character 'microsermons'. Well, Benedict's right on the money - he's got his Twitter account up and running, and has already racked up 172 followers. Except he hasn't actually posted any tweets yet - not one. I think this is the most literal example of someone not practising what he preaches. And as head of a major religion that claims over 1 billion adherents (including the lapsed), 172 is a little disappointing.

He also isn't following anyone, which I suppose is fair enough until God gets a Twitter account. Being generous, I guess he fears that, were he to start tweeting and his entire flock to start following, lapsed or otherwise, he would permanently crash the Twitter servers, given how shaky Twitter was yesterday during the launch of the new Apple iHype device.

He does have a Facebook page, but, again, it only has two postings, the last one more than 18 months old. Now far be it from me to suggest that, just because he doesn't tweet himself, Facebook regularly, or have a blog, that he clearly doesn't actually get the the whole social media revolution. But it was only a year ago that the Pontiff was actually speaking out against the use of such media: in January 2009 he warned that “obsessive” use of mobile phones or computers “may isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development".

Believe me, Benedict, the old tweeting can get a bit compulsive, so maybe it's just as well you have drawn back from the brink before submitting to temptation. But if you do, I'll be waiting for your thoughts, as follower number 173.

Thinking positive

2010-01-24T23:39:00.007Z

At the risk of sounding a little like a scratched record*, I had a bit of an epiphany while mulling over thoughts of homeopathy and evidence of efficacy. Homeopaths make a living by thriving on those who feel conventional medicine has, in some way, failed to cure their illness. And given there are 60 million of us in the UK alone, it only takes the tiniest of tiny minorities to supply enough anecdotes of miraculous cures to supply an entire industry. One can cite all the studies in the world about placebo, RCTs and the body's natural immunities, but personal testimony can be powerfully affecting to those considering an alternative to prescription medicine.

Mainstream science tries to counter this attack-by-anecdote through a number of arguments, most commonly by citing 'regression to the mean' - or "you would have got better anyway" as most would understand it. Impossible to prove at the individual level, it also seems unsatisfactory in dealing with the more rigorous homeopathy cure stories: where patient has pain, takes drug and feels worse and then takes homeopathic cure and leaps Lazarus-like to his feet, on top of the world. This is 'regression to the mean' + side effects of drugs - a simple enough explanation, but hardly a glowing testament to the wonders of modern medicine. But there is something else we should also consider: supposing you aren't sick at all?

I was reading about the second of the great cholera epidemics to sweep London, in 1854, when fatalities at the London Homeopathic Hospital were almost one third of those found at nearby hospitals practising conventional medicine. This is sometimes cited as evidence for homeopathy's noble and efficacious tradition - and at first sight appears impressive. Until you consider that "conventional" medicine at the time was unaware of germ theory, did not employ anti-septics and considered blood-letting as a mainstream cure for many conditions. In the usually dirty and crowded conditions, it would seem that doing nothing cleanly presented a better chance of survival than any of the leading medical interventions of the day.

This prompted me to reconsider the much trumpeted homeopathic success stories in the light of the modern version of harmful interventions: the false positive. Not even the most brilliant tests modern medicine can muster are 100% accurate. Every year a tiny proportion of people taking any number of tests will test falsely positive for a condition they don't actually have. And of course the less accurate the test, the higher the number of false positives, especially if the condition is more marginal - tests less accurate, drugs less well developed, longer term understanding of their side effects less documented. If even 0.1% of testees are false positives, that will give us a fair chunk of people every year taking drugs for a condition they don't have. And when they turn to the magic water of homeopathy, they get a miraculous "cure" and tell all their friends.

In many ways conventional medicine is a victim of its own success. The powerful demonstrations of its power and range, from the elimination of smallpox to the creation of calpol, makes people blase about its limitations, and the risks at the margins. No treatment is without risk (even homeopathy, if taken as a cure for a serious condition), and if people believe it is, they will continue to be vulnerable to quackery when they become disappointed. Public education about science and medicine needs to make people aware of this, to manage expectation and help people understand its vulnerabilities, as well as its triumphs.

* = for the under 30s a 'record' is the old word for a collection of MP3 files. A disc made from vinyl, it carried up to about 12 tracks embedded within the grooves of both its surfaces whose sounds were reproduced via a needle through amplification equipment, making it very vulnerable to damage, often in the form of getting stuck in a repeat loop of several seconds.

Fighting water with water

2010-01-24T21:43:00.005Z

As regular readers of hofflimits will know, I've been watching with amusement the current spat between the purveyors of homeopathy and the recent 10:23 campaign to highlight its barminess (www.1023.org.uk). If any of you are on Twitter, I'd recommend joining in (#ten23) as it can be very fun in small doses, pun intended. However, it does get a bit wearying after a while seeing the level of "debate " it can sink to - Godwin's law doesn't even come into it. Mainly, I think, because both sides are arguing from two totally different definitions of what constitutes evidence, which holds the key not only to the whole debate, but to the very heart of why people are attracted to moonshine theories.

As I have said elsewhere, looking at all the available evidence, homeopathy performs no better than placebo. Already by saying that, I risk incurring the wrath of believers who will cite a number of studies that supposedly do prove its efficacy. Until you discount those studies that are unreliable because of methodological flaws, and then proofs start looking a little thin. So homeopaths will come back with personal testaments of all the people they know who have benefited from homeopathic "treatment" - and here's where we hit the crux of the matter: Sceptics will never win the argument until they debate on the same terms - the battle of PR.

Say I read an account of someone who passionately recounts the wonderful effect a homeopathic treatment has had on his life. It's an anecdote - file it. But supposing you were to read a book of 100 such anecdotes, all true and all argued with conviction. By the time you get to number 76, many people would be wilting under the pressure of such "evidence". The human brain is hardwired to be fooled by poor risk assessment skills when dealing with large, impersonal numbers in the face of direct experience. Risk of anything is always judged as higher if you know someone who has been personally affected; it's been a useful survival skill, and perfectly reasonable when you consider that for 99% of hominid existence, most individuals would not know more than 30 people.

In their heart of hearts homeopaths know they will never win the argument on scientific grounds, unless the laws of chemistry and physics have changed (and the fact our planet continues to spin would indicate this isn't so). Their best shot is emotional appeal based upon weight of anecdote, something scientists naturally shy away from. But I would argue that half a billion years of human evolution can't be wrong - and one of the biggest parts of the UK economy is testament to this approach: Public Relations. Scientists need to embrace it, to take the argument to the homeopaths.

Returning to my mythical book of 100 Homeopathic Cure Stories, scientists need to come back with a database of 100,000 stories about how a particular drug saved a life. Start with one drug - probably any favoured target of the flat earthers - and bring weight of anecdote to bear on its efficacy argued from an emotional, personal perspective. Keep the evidence handy for those who want to check it, but remember it's not the number of peer-reviewed articles that will count, but the number of names you can cite.

Ridiculous? Probably. Impossible? Well, difficult certainly. But it's not actually the stories or names themselves, it's the act of compilation that will be the story. The world's biggest book that will knock a few placebo tales into a cocked hat. If they rise to the bait, then you've forced them to undermine their own position by dismissing anecdote as being non-scientific. And the science itself leaves them nowhere to go.

A tale of two cities.

2010-01-23T23:17:00.002Z

One of the interesting things about economics is that just because it is "economically rational" to do something, it doesn't mean it is actually sensible, morally good, or even in the best interest of the majority. Phenomena like the Tragedy Of The Commons and Externalities demonstrate that, under capitalism, self interest can create Bad Things as much as it can be the dynamo of wealth creation.

So I thought it was interesting to consider two different approaches to the ebb and flow of market forces. I offer this merely as an observation, not necessarily proof than one is a better outcome than the other:

2005 - Danone shares rise by 20% on the back of rumours of a takeover by PepsiCo
2006 - Kraft don't rule out non-hostile bid for Danone, provoking further takeover speculation
2006 - French government introduce laws to protect "strategic industries" such as Danone, to popular acclaim.

2008 - UK government lends RBS £20bn to save it from collapse
2009 - UK government extends its stake to 68% of RBS
2010 - RBS lends Kraft £7bn to take over Cadbury-Schweppes to popular indignation

On the one hand, it confirms that there is no room for sentiment in British banking. On the other, I suppose it means, as a UK taxpayer, I now own part of Cadburys. Next time I'm in Birmingham I'll try to pop in to claim a curly-wurly before they start filling them with cheese.

A data remember

2010-01-21T23:09:00.004Z

The digital world went a little moist with anticipation this week, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched the new government website data.gov.uk, opening up reams of HMG's information to the wider world. Everyone seems terribly enthusiastic about the event and, in particular, how user friendly it is. The vision is for a nation of mash-ups - developers beavering away to build applications that draw on this data to tell us, well, lots of important things that we can't yet anticipate.

The idea seems to have come about with frightening ease, according to Sir Tim in The Guardian:

"Gordon Brown said to me, 'How should the UK make the best use of the Internet?' and I replied that the government should just put all of its data on it," Berners-Lee recalled. "And he said 'OK, let's do it'."

Job done. Imagine how tempting it would have been to say, with the Prime Minister just waiting to carry out whatever you say, "Free porn for the over 75s". Or "A webcam in every home".

While I welcome the principle of open government and free access to public information, I can't help thinking this is symptomatic of the main problem with the Internet itself - providing a waterfall when all you wanted was a cupful. A quick search under "schools" will yield more data sets than you can possibly have thought existed: Post-16 participation in training in Wales; "Core Accessibility Indicators", sorted by school type; Cross Local Authority border movement of school pupils resident in England. In fact, my over-riding thought is not "hooray for openness" but "blimey, doesn't the government collect a lot of information".

Actually what set alarm bells ringing in my mind was the prospect of unlimited data sets for limited minds. In particular, the offhand remark by Sir Tim that it offered the chance "potentially to discover hidden patterns that may not be obvious from the raw information." Generally speaking, that is the sort of thing best left to statisticians, very clever people who understand things like data points, randomness, regression to the mean, biases, clustering, statistical significance and the Bonferroni Correction. I fear we are opening up the candy store to the idiot kleptomaniac children who will have capacity to waste an inordinate amount of everyone's time because they don't know anything about how stats work.

I may not know much about how statistics works myself, but I do know that data dredging will allow all the conspiracy theorist nuts, quacks and fanatics to convince themselves they have the evidence that backs up their claims about UFOs, telephone masts and fluoride in the water. I also know that, as a general principle, data collected for one purpose that is used to demonstrate another is often flawed - it's the oldest trick in the book if you want to fake evidence. Say you collect data to show a correlation between school attendance and smoking that gives nothing, but you notice an unusually high number of blond haired children showing up in the results. It's a short step from there to "proving" that blond children are more likely to take up smoking.

I don't predict this will give us any labour-saving apps anytime soon, since its use in creating hacked applications will pass by 99.5% of the population. But I do predict that it will be used by chancers wanting to get misleading, dangerous or malicious stories into the news with the weight of "evidence" behind them. The Daily Mail's health agenda is about to go nuclear.

It's not a lie if you believe it....

2010-01-16T23:11:00.003Z

At the risk of inviting some very boring spam, this week I've been getting inside the debate about homeopathy, following the new year campaign by the 10:23 organisation (www.1023.org). This is a collective organised by the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and fronted by Simon Singh, to raise awareness of the truth about homeopathy, and to discourage those retailers who should know better from selling it as a remedy for anything. As well as the occasional printed media outing, a lot of chatter across the web and Twitter has been generated, and not a few wounded homeopaths wondering why the big nasty doctors have started picking on them.

I don't propose to get into the detail of the debate, which has been conducted more eloquently by others, but the centre of the debate is one of efficacy and, in particular, the Placebo Effect. The demands of science are for randomised controlled trials whose results can be openly scrutinised and whose methods can be examined. Under such harsh light, homeopathy doesn't come off too cleverly, instead finding better favour as a list of "my friend's auntie took a homeopathic remedy and it cured her sciatica" referrals. But as they say, the plural of anecdote is not data, and bona fide trials demonstrate homeopathy performs no better than placebo. To which I would say - that's not a bad outcome, considering how mad the theory is.

Placebo is not just smarties to be given to hypochondriacs but actually a powerful and profoundly mystifying phenomenon. The Placebo Effect - the successful cure of a patient using fake medicine - can be quantified into degrees of effectiveness: certain colour pills work better than others, water injections work better than fake pills, injections and pills work better after a "consultation" than self-medication. The human mind's ability to convince itself an intervention is having a healing effect and then to enable that cure is astonishing - and far more interesting than quack potion theories. If only it could be relied on under all circumstances, NHS costs would plummet, and if I were a homeopathic practitioner, I'd take the result "no better than placebo" as a compliment.

Which brings us to Boots the Chemist, Britain's leading retailer of prescription drugs. Boots has been a focus of this campaign because it continues to sell homeopathic "medicine" despite freely acknowledging the lack of evidence for efficacy. Their defence is the products' popularity with punters, ignoring the apparent chicken-and-egg relationship that might create that popularity, as an organisation in whom vulnerable ill people place a lot of trust. Boots have been looking for a way to wriggle out of this scrutiny - being accused of selling treatments they know have not been proven to work. How do they continue to rake in the profits without damaging their reputation as an upholder of pharmacological best practice?

Here's how: they claim that, in order for homeopathic products' placebo properties to be effective, the consumers must believe in their efficacy (as long as they don't read the label too carefully, or do any basic research). And what better way to reinforce that belief than by having the largest high street drug retailer in the UK selling the products? If Boots sell it, it must be all right, and the placebo effect starts at the moment the punter queues up to pay. They could claim they would be threatening the homeopathic delivery of effective placebo treatment by not selling the products.

One thing preventing such a defence from succeeding, of course, would be the homeopaths themselves. Their shrieking insistence on acceptance and legitimacy by mainstream medicine and the wider general public would never let them admit any cures they do achieve arise from placebo - which could be the basis of a legitimate practice. But, again, they themselves are in a bind, because if they admit it's all just placebo, the Placebo Effect of their treatments would be diminished. So they are forced to strive for mainstream credibility, in order to keep up what successes they presently enjoy. It's like some hippy version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Or, rather, The Emperor's New Clothes.

Bottle of source

2010-01-12T10:22:00.003Z

This week I finally received an answer to a question I posed to Basildon Council back in October, after a few gentle reminders, ending with an email to the Leader of the Council. It was a little whimsical, so I can understand their reluctance to answer, as it related to something I overheard being broadcast in their office reception while I was awaiting an appointment. A large video display was showing a series of public information films to entertain the great unwashed of Basildon about things like healthy living, council services etc, including an entertaining little movie about the dangers of binge drinking. It included the following memorable line:

Binge drinking can lead to: Alcohol Poisoning, High Blood Pressure, Liver Cancer and Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

To quote Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others, which I thought a little disingenuous - so I called them on it. If I spend the rest of my days in a pub, boozing my life away (and the opportunity would be tempting sometimes), I may well die prematurely of high blood pressure and liver cancer, and suffer several bouts of alcohol poisoning. But unless they change the recipe for beer, I will not catch an STD, no matter how much I drink. It is like saying binge drinking may lead me to die in a car crash, because of the risks associated with drink-driving.

Basildon Council said they were highlighting a correlation and explained their motivation:

"From a communications point of view, utilising the impact alcohol can have on contracting sexually transmitted diseases is an impactive way of portraying the message to young people"

Got that? Untying the syntax of that sentence, I think they mean telling teenagers not to drink because it will rot their genitals is more effective than warning against a long-term risk, such as liver cancer. A valid point - teenagers think they will live forever, and can't see beyond the end of the next dole cheque, never mind 30 years hence.

However, the film did not seem to be aimed at young people, certainly not judging by its stars and its audience in that office (including me). It featured the type of "forgotten binge drinker" the government is keen that we unforget: middle aged delinquents like me who neck bottles of wine at the weekend. People who would no more attempt some casual sex after a couple of snifters than would try to drive a car, operate heavy machinery or host a Radio 2 show. If you start to draw in surrogate outcomes for binge drinking into what purports to be an information film, how far do you wander into areas where self-control plays a part?

How about if we said binge drinking leads to divorce, domestic violence, public nakedness and drowning? Hell, go for the jugular: binge drinking will kill you. If you strain the extrapolation and, most importantly, remove the agent from the action, you strain the credibility of your argument. To me there is a simple rule of thumb: if you want to be trusted more, claim less. It's actually an age-old sales technique - if people think they are getting more than they were promised, they trust you more and are more likely to purchase from you again. Now, where's that bottle of gin?...

Prophile

2009-12-31T00:30:00.008Z

Although Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underpants may have failed to go off, they have certainly ignited the debate around the use of profiling to assess the risk passengers pose to aircraft security. This has been the elephant in the room ever since 9/11, but this week the British government admitted passenger profiling was "in the mix". Is this simply a detached, dispassionate practice, or is it also subject to unhelpful cultural bias?

As the press sifted through the known facts from his time spent studying in the UK, The Times noted last Wednesday that Mr Abdulmutallab was the fourth head of a Muslim Society from a college of the University of London to be arrested on terrorist offences. It's the sort of statistic that actually says very little, because on its own, its a dead end: does that put all Muslims in the frame, heads of Muslim Societies at UK universities, or, indeed, anyone at all? It's an innuendo in search of significance. But it has power in the mind because of the power of the crime of terrorism. It only takes one person to panic an entire nation. If we were to find that, statistically, several heads of the Rugby Society at University of London colleges had been arrested for drunkenness, it would be just as insignificant as a statistic, but we are likely to take a measured view because of the perceived threat to ourselves posed by drunks versus terrorists.

Does the activity of Mr Abdulmutallab put us in the clear to consider Muslim devotion a threat to our bodies regardless of the individual or to insist on more rigorous searches at airports? The fact that high-profile recent terrorist incidents in our sphere of interest have been committed by Islamists leaves those of us outside the faith conducting our own unconscious profiling whenever we are at an airport. But it is interesting how this form of cultural risk assessment is reported, when compared with something closer to home.

At about the same time as Mr Abdulmutullab was buying his special y-fronts, the Murphy Report was released in Ireland, as a follow up to the earlier Ryan Report published in May. Between them these reports set out in depressing detail the astonishing levels of abuse perpetrated by officers of the Roman Catholic church in Ireland upon children, decade after decade, and how that behaviour was covered up, denied and explained away with complicity at the highest levels of the church.

It would be possible to argue that, given the numbers of victims involved, the Church in Ireland has destroyed more lives than Abdulmutullab ever could have - though that would be to create a sick competition. However, we do feel able to idly speculate whether being a Muslim makes you more likely to be a terrorist - yet at the same time, I hear no debates in the press about whether being a Catholic priest makes you more likely to be a child abuser or pederast. In the one case, we can see beyond the collective to the individual, in the other they are all tarred with the same brush.

Returning to our original question, it seems about the only thing Mr Abdulmutullab didn't do was print a "I'm a Terrorist" T-shirt, since he was granted an entry Visa to the USA, despite being on at least one list of suspicious or undesirable persons, paid cash for the ticket and took no luggage with him. The nonsense reactions of those in charge of US air security reflect a desperate desire to reassure people than actually any useful precautions, not to mention to deflect a degree of political embarrassment. Under the precautionary principle, I am reasonably happy to accept a degree of profiling based upon intelligence and statistcal evidence, and sorry if that upsets a few people who fit an unfortunate profile. On the other hand, I'd also insist on the same level of scrutiny being applied to all religious zealots put in a position of where they are capable of causing harm.

Fin de siecle

2009-12-30T23:53:00.002Z

As befits a rubbish year, the end of the decade has felt something of an anti climax. In fact, I didn't even realise it was going to be a new decade until last week. Yet before we know it, we'll be having Noughties Nights at nightclubs, when people can dance to Girls Aloud wearing Ugg boots, drinking bottle of blue WKD.

I wonder when we became quite so self-conscious about bundling up the years into neat packages to be consigned onto certain shelves, as though on New Year's Day 1980 we went from being striking punks to greedy Spandau Ballet fans. I suppose the idea of the Roaring Twenties was the first, with the Wall St Crash to put clear daylight between the delicious abandon of 1929 and the sobering depression of 1930. Looking back on this first decade of the 21st century, what will we say were defining themes? And looking forward to the next, what on earth will we call it?

The Noughties sort of stuck in the absence of anything better, but how will we collectively refer to the years 2010-2019 when we come to look back at the end of the century? The Teens? Teenies? The Wunies? All horribly twee and silly - too much so for what looks set to be a serious time.

If the aforementioned 1920s can also be known as The Jazz Age, then I suggest the next 10 years hereby be known as the Teen Age. First, because we are about to go through a horrible transformation, where our comfortable existence is turned upside down, the lack of money will make us collectively grounded, plus where everything will seem so unfair, what with taxpayers subsidising bankers' bonuses. And by the end of it, we may just be able to afford to buy our own drinks.

The final countdown

2009-12-20T00:10:00.006Z

This week there has been a bit of a ding-dong, and not just from Santa's sleigh bells. Forget Copenhagen, the nation has been gripped by whether X-Factor winner Joe Schmo will get his Tiny Tim dream of a Christmas number one, or whether a spoiler campaign will propel another group to the top of the seasonal chart, in the form of a Rage Against The Machine song from 1993, "Killing in the name of". Simon Cowell has been harrumphing like a bad loser in tones of such unwitting irony that my head almost turned inside out with the mental gymnastics it took to realise he wasn't joking.

For me the most interesting thing is the passion aroused on both sides (or as near as Simon Cowell can come to it) about what is really a curate's egg. I mean, why does anyone give a toss what happens to be the best-selling song at the time of a public holiday? It's not as if there is a religious dimension to the rivalry, reclaiming the feast from the heathen hoards, a la Cliff Richard. The papers will not be filled with speculation as to what is the best-selling book, or the most popular movie on release. Is the Christmas single meant to say something about us as a nation, the aural equivalent of the Queen's Speech? If so, it may explain the sense of national decline.

Once upon a time, of course, it mattered financially. When singles came in vinyl format and you had to shift three quarters of a million units to hit the top, it was the biggest week for sales, thanks to their popularity as gifts. This habit has always puzzled me - you want to buy a record as a Christmas present for someone, but you know so little about them that you have to guess at a song. And if you had used the number one single as some sort of quality benchmark, more often than not the recipient would have been disappointed, as this accolade is won, as often as not, by the likes of Bob the Builder and Westlife - and going back further Shakin' Stevens and Benny Hill. You may as well select number 18 every year and hope for the best.

These digital days, when more people own soft copies than hard copies, actual singles sales are a tiny proportion of revenue for an artist, and given there is not even a Christmas Day Top of the Pops anymore, the question remains as to why people actually care. No-one strives to achieve an Easter Number One or August Bank Holiday hit. Have we let the nation down if the X Factor machine secures its fifth consecutive Christmas number one? What about if it's number one for New Year, not to say a new decade, as it almost certainly will be?

Where do we go from here? Is this the sign of Cowell's waning influence after four consecutive hits? Are the charts of the future going to represent the results of random social media campaigns rather than the current favourite tunes? I'd like to think it marks the end of the idea of a singles chart, which smacks of the bad old days of no commercial radio, three TV stations, and a waiting list at the GPO to get a phone installed. In the multi-channelled world we live in today, a monopoly system that claims to signify something of importance to everyone is an anachronism, and irrelevant to most people. Let's hope Simon Cowell goes the same way.

Voting in the name of

2009-12-15T00:16:00.004Z

As the steroid-injected, bloated cash cow that is X-Factor collapsed off the TV schedules, no doubt ITV executives were cheered by the advertising and phone-vote revenue raised, and Simon Cowell is calculating the precise number of burgers the carcass will make. And newspapers anxious about the sudden lack of stories can fill some time this week by talking up the viewing figures - 15 million on average, apparently, across the weekend's shows. The Evening Standard described the fact that more people voted for the final's contestants over the weekend than elected the current government at the last election as "the most interesting statistic".

No doubt the Daily Mail will join this chorus tomorrow, as a fitting subject for much tutting about lack of interest in politics (all Gordon Brown's fault) and the dumbing down of the population (also Gordon Brown's fault), probably as part of a dismal A N Wilson piece. But even if we ignore the millions of citizens ineligible for the electoral role who do vote for TV talent shows (the under 18s), it seems an odd comparison to make, much as the media loves to do it.

If, in order to vote for Bill or Ben (or whatever the finalists' names were), viewers had to go to their nearest school with a registration card between 7am and 7pm on a Thursday, as opposed to sending a text or ringing a premium rate number, the number of votes polled on X-Factor would diminish considerably. I'm sure over the weekend more people ordered takeaway pizzas than voted Labour in 2005, but that doesn't necessarily represent a collective expression of disillusionment.

But it does seem to have given Simon Cowell an idea for greater political engagement, as he says he wants to organise X-Factor style shows involving politicians ahead of the general election. Debating issues, fortunately, not singing (story here). According to the BBC, he wants to create a "bear pit" atmosphere, with a live studio audience and viewers voting via telephone. He wants to put on a show where a large studio audience was divided up according to its view on an issue, and then "a red telephone would allow politicians to ring in to state their case", which leads me to believe that he's gotten Prime Minister's Questions mixed up with Deal or No Deal.

Although I would welcome Mr Cowell's creative involvement in organising such an event, my greatest fear is it would spark a counter-campaign on Facebook, and before we knew it, the lead singer of Rage Against the Machine would be Prime Minister.

As you like it

2009-12-15T00:06:00.003Z

"Shakespeare? I'd rather stick pencils in my eyes". So runs the quote on an ad I saw today, promoting the new Jeremy Clarkson book, presumably as an example of the author's wit and wisdom. Which is uncanny, because, faced with the prospect of Shakespeare, I too would rather stick pencils in Jeremy Clarkson's eyes. Actually, I don't even need to hear Shakespeare.

Assuming the position

2009-12-13T23:57:00.005Z

Tony Blair has caused a bit of a stir this week by claiming he would still have invaded Iraq in 2003, even if he had known there were no weapons of mass destruction. As much as anything, this is a corner into which he has painted himself. To admit otherwise - that he would have gone to war only because of the WMD - would throw uncomfortable light upon the evidence, dodgy dossier and all. Better to tough it out as a moral position.

At the same time as Blair was undergoing his sofa grilling (at the hands of fearsome political interrogator Fern Brittan), the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was complaining that politicians didn't take religious faith very seriously but as an "eccentricity" practised by "oddities". Since Tony Blair's positions are driven by his deeply held Christian convictions, Dr Williams' comments seem timely, although probably not in the way he intended. If Blair is the poster child for politicians taking religious views seriously, then long may we continue to seek their mutual separation.

It also highlights a contradiction at the heart of Blair the politician. He is often painted as a focus-group fanatic, unable to express the simplest opinion without knowing how it would play with key voter demographics. Yet time and time again, on some of the biggest calls, he would adopt a position based upon instinct and adjust his arguments, or even the facts, to suit it - from Kosovo to ID Cards, PFI and, ultimately, the Iraq invasion.

While this approach might work in the imaginary bubble of politics, I'm not sure how successful a strategy it would be for those who live in the real world. Suppose I want to go to the cinema, and so I tell everyone that a new James Bond movie is playing that evening in town. But when we get there, not only is the movie not showing, but it hasn't even been made. I then turn to my disappointed friends and offer them the opportunity to watch the latest Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy - if they don't like it, and tell me I should have checked the listings, I simply tell them that someone had to take the decision to come to the cinema, and that I believe the trip was worth it. And then spend my friends' annual wages on the tickets.

Paying Liddle attention

2009-12-09T22:33:00.004Z

I really don't want to talk about Rod Liddle, but I feel drawn towards his odious journalistic malfeasance like a moth to the flame. At the risk of giving him the oxygen of publicity, in last week's Spectator magazine, the journal of choice for all swivel-eyed loons, he wrote what he probably thinks is a "brave" article about race and crime in the UK. Once again he was speaking the unspeakable, or in his case writing the unreadable. Here's a sample, to give you a taste of what passes for work in Rod's world:

The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is [sic] carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

As with all good debates, at the beginning I should declare an interest: I think Rod Liddle is a crypto-fascist troglodyte, and did before I even read his loathsome article. He's Clarkson without the brains, Littlejohn without the sophistication. Hitler without the moustache.

Not surprisingly, the article has attracted a fair share of attention, and not all of it says "well done Roddie". Most of the ire is directed to the fairly fundamental point that he actually has his facts wrong (and he cites no sources in the article - for more detail, click here). Black men do not commit the majority of the crimes he mentions, even in London (which he scurrilously tries to extrapolate across the country). But to me this is missing the point.

Let us suppose it were true - in some categories it nearly is true - would that make him a visionary? The question is, as it should be always when applied to statistics, especially in the hands of a dyspeptic boor like Liddle: what are you doing with this information? He presents it as though it were the dispassionate, neutral release of pure data, untainted by spin or innuendo. Does Rod suggest that we abandon all our present crime-fighting tactics and opt for an approach based upon racial profiling? Would I be allowed to pre-emptively attack Afro-Caribbean young men in the street, on the statistical probability of preventing an assault upon me? Rapists are 100% male - should the police start to profile all men on the assumption they will attack women?

Sometimes it's hard to spot the inference, we are so used to categorisation. If I say the majority of knife crimes in are committed by black men, you might think I was making a statistical observation (an incorrect one, as it happens). But what if I were to say that most insider trading in was committed by Jews? Leaving aside whether it is true or not (and I have no idea), suddenly it doesn't sound so dispassionate - I am cutting the data to make a point, and a pretty unpleasant one.

Liddle believes he is the heroic standard bearer for the Silent Majority, taking a stand against the woolly-minded forces of political correctness. Whereas 86% of people think he is a racist dullard with mercifully limited publishing channels. Probably. But who's counting, eh Rod?

3D or not 3D

2009-12-09T13:36:00.004Z

We're now knee-deep in the Panto season, and I have noticed a curious phenomenon sweeping seasonal shows across the land: 3D. From Bromley to Aberdeen, pantomimes are being advertised as starring a particular children's character in 3D, illustrated above by a snippet from a promo for St Alban's theatre. (Incidentally, why are all panto posters set out the same way, regardless of location, star, story or quality? It's like a state industry - has no-one ever heard of design?)

I was always under the impression that the point about theatre is that it's all 3D. I can't recall a night at the live performing arts where someone didn't occupy the space in three directions, though obviously some occupy it better than others. Advertising a theatre show as "3D" is like advertising ice cream as cold, though in the case of Keanu Reeves' Hamlet, I suspect some clarification might have been needed.

Such multi-dimensional confusion is not confined to the stage; conversations with expectant parents have made me aware of something called a 4D scan that creates a very high resolution image of a child in the mother's womb. Because this is such an improvement on the normal ultrasound scan in terms of clarity, it was felt calling it a 3D scan just wasn't enough. It needed taking to the fourth dimension, although as I understand it, there is no prediction for the baby's development, unless the foetus is so wrinkly it also shows what the child will look like as a pensioner.

Spacetime is a slippery phenomenon even for those scientists who know what they are talking about, so I would suggest the lay world tries to cope with getting its use of 3D right before they start dabbling with String Theory. The metaphysical equivalent of remembering their lines and not bumping into the furniture.

The bank of laughter and forgetting

2009-12-06T00:01:00.005Z

My favourite cartoon series is Bloom County, which ran between 1980 and 1989, charting the incongruous banalities of an eclectic mix of characters in a mythical mid-American small town. In one strip from 1988, a ne'er-do-well propositions Opus, the naive penguin, about a hypothetical drug habit he is considering starting. He suggests to Opus that, if he were to develop a serious addiction, the cost in terms of crime, law enforcement, treatment and rehabilitation would be about $1200 per American, but if Opus were to pay him $100 now, he'd take up philately instead. I felt a little like Opus this week about the news of RBS's proposed £1m+ bonus payments and subsequent row with the government, its main creditor.

While I am not above a little banker bashing, I also recognise, as the part-owner of several banks, it is in my interest to get as good a price for them as possible. And it is not a total myth that the best people in any labour pool will attract the best remuneration, though it can be overstated. To suggest the best Investment Bankers will work for RBS out of public spiritedness is absurd, and to pay them below market rate is to leave cash on the table in New York. So how do we express our displeasure while recognising the realities of a fluid labour market? I think I have the answer, and I shall call it Clown Day.

Last year, at the height of the bank bail-outs, some senior members of the banking community did actually go on the record to say sorry. But in the intervening months since then, we've heard precious little of the 's' word from the lips of increasingly cocky members of Investment Banking world. While levels of champagne consumption at Canary Wharf may not quite have reached 2005 levels, the bonus bleating seems to indicate horrifically short memories. So here's where the clowns come in.

I would decree that for one day a year, say 15 September, everyone who works for a bank who is in line for a bonus above a set level, such as £297,920, must dress as a clown in full regalia: wig, funny nose, braces and long feet. Furthermore, they would have to spend the day on street corners in the west end of London hawking for change; any change they do receive would be given to victims of their folly, any abuse received they would keep. It would become an annual spectacle, even a tourist event to raise badly needed cash for the Exchequer.

This is not class war (which is apparently back in fashion), but the chance to show humility. September 15 is the date Lehman Brothers went bust, and should serve as a chilling reminder to all in the world of finance just what can happen if a government doesn't choose to underwrite their foolishness. The world, much less the taxpayer, does not owe them a living, and the day would give them a period of reflection away from the alpha male bear pit of the sales floor to appreciate the enormously privileged position they are in, and the responsibility they carry.

£297,920 is the annual salary of the Governor of the Bank of England, dwarfed by the opulence of the Square Mile's highest earners, but someone who does, at least, have to consider the national interest. In years to come, when the memories of this recession are as distant to our grandchildren as the Wall Street Crash is to us, we will have an annual reminder of what can happen to those who, entrusted with other people's money, are foolish enough to believe their own publicity

I don't think a day of ashes-and-sackcloth (or in this case, greasepaint and nylon) is too much to ask for a million pound bonus. For that sort of money I'd eat the sweepings from my garage floor. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a wiser man than me once said. For the bonus boys of RBS who cannot remember it, they should be condemned and repeat the day they were shown to be clowns.

Paper tigers

2009-12-04T17:23:00.010Z

A government-backed report into cancer this week revealed some interesting statistics, and a treeful of newspaper stories. Most preferred to focus on the negative aspects of Professor Mike Richards' findings in Cancer Reform Strategy, and there was certainly enough material in there for indignation by those papers for whom it is the stock-in-trade: "postcode lottery" for survival rates, lower one-year survival rates than our European neighbours and the call for improvement in early diagnosis.

For me the most interesting aspect of the report was the positive macro findings which gave reasons to give at least two cheers: "There has been a further fall in cancer mortality, with the latest data (the average for 2006–08) showing that, among people under 75, cancer mortality has fallen by 19.3% since 1995–97. We are well on track to achieve the target of a 20% reduction by 2010....For breast cancer, five-year survival rose from 80.6% in 2000 to a predicted level of 86.0% in women diagnosed in 2007. The equivalent figures for colon cancer in men are 47.6% rising to 53.4% and in women 47.6% rising to 52.7%."

Whether you live in Paris or Peterborough, across the board, cancer survival rates are improving across the western world - in short, fewer people are dying of cancer at ages that we would consider 'young'. Terrific news if you are a human being but bad news if, instead, you write for the Daily Mail. For example, the Mail has warned us that the following things are likely to give us cancer: mouthwash, obesity, wine, shampoo, mozzarella cheese, chips, underarm deodorants, your height, vitamin C and candles. With all those threats lurking in every corner, it's a wonder we can even leave the house, never mind attend a screening appointment.

Even more disappointing for the Daily Mail is the apparent cause behind these reductions: evidence-based medicine. Those really boring things like better dietary advice, national screening programmes, vaccination, scientific research and improved surgical techniques. Because they are often difficult, slow and take a long time. They require some patience, rational thought and careful observation. All the things the Daily Mail is against.

The Mail likes its cancer solved quickly - preferably through a cheap, easily available, everyday commodity that can tackle a terrifically complex and various condition, such as cancer, in a simple way. So, again, according the Daily Mail, the following things will probably cure cancer - a balance, if you will, for all that shampoo and mouthwash: mushrooms, kangaroos, raspberries, a special gene, aspirin, tea and uncut carrots.

It is often said that fear of crime is much more prevalent that crime itself - no matter how much crime rates decline, people still put it high on a list of worries when polled in the street. In the same way what the Daily Mail writes about is fear of cancer rather than cancer itself, at least in terms of writing about its risks in a meaningful or sensible way. We see Jade Goody dead at 27 from cervical cancer, we listen to horrific statistics from cancer charities that 1 in 3 of us will die from it (or 1 in 2, depending on the type of cancer or who you ask). We conflate the two points, and imagine middle aged cancer as disturbingly common, smack bang in the middle of the Mail's demographic. But leaving aside unusual cases like lung cancer, which correlate strongly to a single cause, there is one overwhelming factor that determines the risk of you dying of cancer of whatever type and ferocity: age.

Cancer is a disease of the elderly, or at least the over 60s. Over 75 and the rates skyrocket. We all have to die of something, and for the elderly, cancer is a high risk. Of course some young people die of cancer, and when they do it seems cruel, baffling and capricious - the sort of thing that might make you throw up your hands and buy another punnet of raspberries or rub a kangaroo.

The relentless coverage of what is, to the majority of the population, actually quite a low risk, and the giddying array of PR campaigns to promote cures, products, drugs and quackery through the media has the effect of making cancer seem inexplicable, random as though a punishment from the Almighty. Certainly if every day you are told of a different test in a lab that produced a surrogate outcome on a mouse, and that is filtered through the Daily Mail to a simplistic cause and effect: today drink more tea to prevent cancer, tomorrow don't cut up your carrots. It is latter-day shamanism, and rather than empowering readers, or making them better informed, it stops them seeing the wood for the trees - from concentrating on what we know from long-term studies has a meaningful impact on risk insofar as you can control it: better diet, healthy exercise, moderate alcohol intake, no smoking and reduced stress. Evidence-based medicine saves lives, but where's the angle on that?

Arrested development

2009-11-29T21:46:00.014Z

I must confess to being slightly concerned this week, waking up to hear on the radio Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Denis O'Connor, call for a return to traditional British policing tactics and methods. He was answering questions about his report on the enquiry into policing of the G20 summit earlier in the year but, in my sleepy delirium, I had visions of a return to those halcyon days of the 1970s: "sus" laws, racist beatings, the Birmingham Six and the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, when recorded interviews and PACE seemed futuristic nonsense.

What Sir Denis meant was policing by consent, endorsing "accountability, approachability, impartiality and minimum force" in the way the fuzz goes about its business, rather than some of the recent innovative techniques of 'kettling', using the edge of a riot shield as a blade, and taking numbers off uniforms to prevent identification. The most damning part of his report addresses the lack of clarity and leadership over the approach to policing large scale protests, such as the G20. And although this is where the headlines are made, and the most newsworthy copy is filed, it's actually away from such events that policing in the UK faces its greatest challenges in repairing breaches in the public trust.

In another, less publicised report produced on the same day, it was showed the numbers of stop-and-searches being carried out still far in excess of those of just two years ago, from a peak back in April. Worryingly for politicians, these numbers included a large proportion of nice, respectable, middle-class people who would no more commit a crime than commit Harri-Kari. Just the sort of people, however, who would, and do, vote. Shadow Security Minister Baroness Neville-Jones said: "Inappropriate and ever wider use of these powers is one of the surest ways to lose public support in the fight against terrorism".

Apparently the surest way to win public support, in her book, is to have elected Police Commissioners, as the next day Chris Grayling, Shadow Home Secretary, outlined plans to make the Mayor of London the elected Commission of the Met, doing away with the Metropolitan Police Association (MPA) that does the job today. I don't think you have to be a fan of The Wire to see the possible disadvantages of a system of putting control of the police in the hands of elected politicians - not least because the present incumbent in the role is someone in whose hands I wouldn't trust the key to my drinks cabinet, never mind the safety of eight million Londoners.

I actually have some experience of how this might work; earlier in the year, I was doing some recruitment work with the London Development Agency (LDA), part of the triumvirate responsible for running London along with the Mayor's office and the London Assembly. In the middle of April, I took a call from the Head of HR at the LDA about a screaming urgent project to get a job web portal for Londoners up and running by the end of the month. When I asked why the tearing hurry to meet an impossible deadline, I was told rather sheepishly that the orders came direct from the Mayor's office: Boris wanted something in place for the anniversary of his election on 1 May to show he was tackling unemployment in the capital. Never mind the quality, just build the bloody thing.

The public support for the police is largely built upon wholesale ignorance about exactly what they do and how they work. The overwhelming majority of people will encounter a real policeman maybe twice in a lifetime, and certainly not from the wrong end of a riot shield; no matter how many column inches are written in The Guardian, there is enough of the population that will instinctively believe that protesters are troublemakers who deserve any kicking they receive from the police.

If, however, the public come increasingly into contact with the force of law and order through alienating instruments such as random stop-and-search, false arrests to increase the DNA database, speed cameras for minor infringements and Strict Liability policing (see here for a recent hair-raising example of this little-known legal nicety), they will start to question that trust. Which is why the one thing the public always claims to want - more "bobbies on the beat" - is the one thing a politician will promise but never deliver. Just in case a voter actually comes across one.

Who's in charge around here?

2009-11-26T14:45:00.006Z

To the general surprise of just about everyone, yesterday Britain's shiny new Supreme Court ruled that bank charges for exceeding agreed overdrafts were not illegal, much to the relief of the banking industry. For many years, High Street banking has been the poor relation to the glamorous Investment arm, and the prospect of having to shell out £2bn in backdated refunds made the margins look even less attractive. Everyone from so-called Consumer Groups to the banks' oldest chums, the Conservative Party, confirmed how shocked and disappointed they were - Shadow Financial Secretary Mark Hoban said: "This is a blow for consumers."

My first question would be: "which consumers and in what way a blow?" The recent massive bail-out by the government seems to have muddied this debate somewhat; that taxpayers now own a large proportion of many British banks doesn't make the services they provide magically cost nothing, from the shiny-glass-and-IKEA-sofaed bank foyers, to the ubiquitous street-based cashpoints. Who pays for this?

At the moment, the charges levied by banks for breaching overdraft limits do. Or as The Guardian rather emotionally expressed it: "The fact that all big banks openly and routinely use this source of revenue to subsidise the cost of providing banking services for better-off clients flies in the face of natural justice". I can't imagine what sense of outrage The Guardian must feel every time it enters a supermarket and finds the price of beans for the unemployed is the same as for the rich. Or as they might put it, that the poverty-line shopper subsidises the better-off customer. If they are examining the banking system for natural justice, I would think the last two years would show it is probably the wrong place to look.

Bear in mind we are talking about exceeding agreed overdrafts. In other words, when we promise to take £100 and instead end up taking £150, through need, bad planning or sheer stupidity. Try using that arrangement in our above supermarket - paying for one tin of beans but taking two - and see how far it gets you. Little sympathy or natural justice from Mr ASDA, I think you'll find.

These charges are not a subsidy paid by the poor - the level of income has nothing to do with it. It is a levy paid by the stupid, after having agreed a transaction - the fact that banks only charge you money and don't report you for theft reflects the fact it is an unconscious incompetence. But incompetence none the less - and I include myself in this group, as someone who has exceeded an overdraft and paid the price for it.

Let's imagine a world without this 'stupid tax' - where everyone is free to borrow as much as they like willy-nilly without thinking about the consequences or paying anything for the privilege. To pay for the convenience of cashpoints, bank managers and customer call centres we'd have to have a levy upon cash points, monthly current account fees, a tax upon transactions. Everyone would soon resort back to the practices of my parents' generation: queuing at the bank once a week for cash, paying for things by cheque or else stuffing it in a matress. In a world that relies on the free-flowing of electronic transactions, how exactly would this benefit the consumer?

Penny for 'em

2009-11-22T23:33:00.007Z

One of the quirks about the way the BBC is funded is the ongoing existence of programming "fossils" - bits of archania that should have disappeared with the advent of decimalisation. While these are harder to spot on BBC TV, they are particularly prevalent on Radio Four, our nation's flagship radio station of intelligence and, for many, myself included, the single biggest argument in favour of the licence fee (well, plus CBeebies). Radio Four bookends the day with two of these fossils: Prayer For The Day at the start and the playing of the national anthem at the end, but in between events such as the shipping forecast appear like trilobites in the Cambrian stratum.

One such relic given a dusting down this week was Thought For The Day, a curious 120 seconds at around 7.45am every day in the otherwise highbrow Today programme. The list of contributors is long and varied, as are their topics. But one thing unites them all - they are all underpinned by a religious theme, and this week the BBC Trust ruled it was not unbalanced for the editorial policy to exclude atheists or humanists in this slot. So for the time being we will continue to be treated to Rabbi Lionel Blue's reminiscences, Ann Atkin's deranged high Anglicanism and the Reverend Whatisface from the Church Of Making Up The Numbers on how mowing the lawn this week reminded him of St Paul's letter to the Ephesians.

One curious counter-argument that seems to have some currency amongst those who give a toss (and I realise this is of modest concern to many), is that by opening up Thought For The Day to the non-religious, audiences will awake to Richard Dawkins hectoring them for buying an Easter egg. The idea seems to be that, while Christians, Jews, Muslims and, presumably, Jedi Knights, can talk about any subject as refracted through their world view, those without a religion are one-dimensional, and all they can do is bang on about why they don't believe in God. I'm sure even the dullest humanist could improve upon some of the glib non-thoughts posited this week that included Rhidian Brook on why "Love, not money, makes the world go round".

Instead of getting sucked into a reductive argument, I propose a new slot to replace this particular fossil: Joke For The Day. Every day, a comedian would be invited to do a short routine, one-liner or favourite joke. It would turn TFTD from being the point at which people switch the kettle on to being the highlight of the entire Today programme. It may even bring in a younger audience who might then stick around to hear some current affairs, and it would certainly provide more useful content to the listeners. Then at least we would get a chance to hear something that was intentionally funny.

Remember, Remember the 31st of October

2009-11-14T22:55:00.007Z

Last Friday, as I simultaneously attempted to terrify my daughter and delight my son through the medium of home fireworks on Bonfire Night, I was deafened by something unexpected. It was the sound of silence from around the neighbourhood. In years gone by, I would expect to hear Friday and Saturday nights around November 5 turned into soundscapes from North Baghdad or West Baltimore, as private parties released coloured ordnance into the night skies. Not this year, as barely a firecracker marked that weekend.

This could, of course, be an effect of the recession or that it was raining heavily, but most journalists prefer to cite the malign influence of Health and Safety, not least because it affords them a soft target. At the risk of wandering into Richard Littlejohn territory, Health and Safety legislation has had an interesting impact upon Bonfire Night in recent years. Nowhere more so than Ilfracombe Rugby Club, where they held a "virtual bonfire night" - a large screen showed footage of a fire burning - rather than go through the rigmarole of getting the necessary permits to stage the real thing (story here). This visual treat is supplemented by a smoke machine and sound effects for added naffness, sorry, realism.

Inevitably this has been picked up by the lazy media as Health And Safety Gone Mad, cruelly denying every Englishman his birthright to maim or incinerate his children. Which it would be, if it weren't for the inconvenience of the facts: the rugby club has done this now for four years and found the originality of the idea pulls in more crowds than a conventional fire. They admit the idea was spawned by an unwillingness to cover the cost of fire marshalls and was inspired by "lager" - which probably gives a clue to the real reason for them not being able to complete the required paperwork.

What it does highlight is one of the hurdles to overcome in order to celebrate bonfire night - the use of fire and gunpowder by those singularly untrained to do so. And this may go a way toward explaining the relative decline of the event in the nation's calendar of celebrations that seems to correlate with a rise in activities centred on Halloween. Anyone who has been anywhere near a supermarket in recent weeks cannot have failed to notice aisles of off-the-shelf costumes, pumpkins, and themed confectionery for sale to commemorate the ghoulish and occult.

It could be a gross simplification to suggest a correlation between any rise and fall in the fortunes of these two occasions, as though it is a zero-sum equation - you either do Halloween or Bonfire Night. But that doesn't stop seasoned commentators from citing it as evidence of that other near-satanic phenomenon beloved of the fourth estate: creeping Americanisation (which is probably as old as America itself). I'd suggest it is, but probably not in the way most people understand it.

For anyone who can remember the bonfire night events of the 1970s and 1980s - the halcyon days fondly remembered by the Littlejohns as uncomplicatedly wholesome - all you needed was a scout troop, a big pile of wood, some petrol and baking potatoes wrapped in foil. Plus a few rockets stuck in empty milk bottles; organising a Guy Fawkes pyre was even easier than carving a pumpkin. I'd suggest the reason such events no longer happen is not because of Health and Safety, but because they were shit.

For a society recently emerged from the Three Day Week, miners' strikes and The Osmonds, the idea of burning a few pallets and sausages in a dark, wet field was probably the acme of entertainment. We no longer consider that worth doing not because of the need to apply for official permits, but because we have the Internet, on-demand television, 24-hour drinking, home-delivered pizza and central heating. American commercial cultural influences may have brought us plastic Scream masks and pumpkins, but they have also taught us to expect more, to demand better customer service, better products, more of what we want and less of what we should be grateful for.

Calling the shots

2009-11-10T22:00:00.004Z

The Prime Minister's ability to dig himself into a hole without anyone lending him a spade is self-evident, but it would seem The Sun has snuck up behind him with an earth mover, by publishing the recording the phone call between him and Jacqui Janes. I can understand Mrs Janes' reasons for collaborating with The Sun, but can ascribe no such higher motives for News International's grubby manipulation, who seem to have induced her into breaking the law.

The recording and interception of phone calls is governed by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 ("RIPA"). If you go to the Ofcom website it's pretty clear what you can and cannot do:

Can I record telephone conversations on my home phone?

Yes. The relevant law, RIPA, does not prohibit individuals from recording their own communications provided that the recording is for their own use. Recording or monitoring are only prohibited where some of the contents of the communication - which can be a phone conversation or an e-mail - are made available to a third party, i.e. someone who was neither the caller or sender nor the intended recipient of the original communication.

Do I have to let people know that I intend to record their telephone conversations with me?

No, provided you are not intending to make the contents of the communication available to a third party. If you are you will need the consent of the person you are recording.

What do I do if my calls have been recorded unlawfully?

Under RIPA it is a tort to record or monitor a communication unlawfully. This means that if you think you have suffered from unlawful interception of your phone calls or e-mails you have the right to seek redress by taking civil action against the offender in the courts.

The Sun would be a third party, and the Prime Minister certainly was not aware of the recording. So is Mr Brown going to press for a civil prosecution against Mrs Janes? Of course not, as Murdoch well knows - his media power makes him immune from any fall-out from the affair and, apparently, free to break the law.

News International does have 'previous' in this area, of course, as one of its reporters and a private investigator were jailed in 2007 (under RIPA) for intercepting mobile phone messages of the rich and famous on behalf of The News of the World. The editor of The News of the World at that time was Andy Coulson, who is now the Director of Communication and Planning for the Conservative Party, the main beneficiary of the story. What a happy coincidence.

The person who should be most worried by this story is actually David Cameron. Gordon Brown is a dead man walking, and hardly needs this shove down the stairs to see him off next year. But what it does show is the lengths Murdoch will go to, to see off political enemies and unseat those of whom he disapproves: dirty, underhand, illegal. Now Cameron has been invited to sup with the Devil, he should be nervously checking how long is his spoon.

Grave doubts

2009-11-08T23:37:00.004Z

I'm grateful to my friend Phil for drawing to my attention a story in Wednesday's Sun about a North Wales Police murder investigation that wasted £20,000 following up leads given by psychics (story here). An apparently straightforward suicide case was re-opened after information supplied by psychics was passed to the police by the suicide's family, and twenty large later it was confirmed as cobblers by the rather more conventional method of a second post-mortem examination. The police should, according to The Sun, have dismissed the psychics as "cranks" - a commendably sober judgement, undermined somewhat by the stories sitting next to it on The Sun's website: "Jacko's ghost at Neverland"; "Derek Acorah 'talks to Jacko' at Seance". Not to mention the horoscopes.

The police often accuse members of the public of mixing up fiction and real life when it comes to understanding police procedures, but it would seem that, on this occasion, they themselves have been guilty of one too many X-Files episodes. What makes this case unusual is it is normally a last resort rather than an opening line of enquiry that seems to have been done to satisfy the wishes of the family who were said to be "grateful". Touching as this is, I was not aware this was a service the police performed: wasting public money out of sympathy for the family rather than satisfying the rest of us there is some sort of process involved in investigating a death, not just a plan based upon whatever was on telly the night before.

Maybe they were confused after catching a show on Living2 that I stumbled across called Sensing Murder. It is a New Zealand TV show that re-opens cold cases and invites psychics to bring their powers to bear, in an attempt to get fresh insights into unsolved murders. It is also one of the funniest shows I have seen on TV in a long time - even funnier than Masterchef: The Professionals or The West Wing. It's a tricky act to balance - making the psychics' guesses carry some weight to make the show interesting, while trying to appear detached, to make it credible. Amazingly, for an "acclaimed" and award-winning show, they manage neither of these things, allowing the psychics to perform cold-reading techniques that wouldn't fool a child all the while failing to turn up any new evidence that helps solve a case.

So far there have been 27 episodes of the show in New Zealand, leading to a grand total of zero cases being solved. But, to be fair to the Kiwis, the show is based upon a Danish format, and they didn't solve any crimes either. In fact, in every country in the world in which the show has been created, not one psychic lead has ever produced any result. Not that you'd get that impression from the show itself or its website, which is more keen to tell you about the number of reality TV awards it has won. So maybe the cops in Dyfed shouldn't feel so bad about their recent bad publicity; they might be able to recoup the money from New Zealand TV, as the 2009 series of Sensing Murder is currently in production. And maybe by the time Ninox Television has recut it, it will turn out to be murder after all.

Plus ca change

2009-11-07T00:26:00.002Z

My son has been learning about the Gunpowder Plot at school this week. Being a serious-minded 7-year-old, he is getting to grips with the meaning behind the pretty fireworks of bonfire night. One exercise in particular asked him to think about some differences between the present day and the early 17th century.

So we discussed differences, trying to get beyond the superficiality of technology and creature comforts to what a different place the world was then. Of course I was able to reassure him that, these days, there was no chance of religious fundamentalists conspiring to blow up a British head of state or parliament in an attempt to reestablish a theocracy, funded by an overseas religious group claiming divine approval, or the government reacting by sanctioning the use of torture to extract confessions from those presumed guilty because of a common faith. Because that would be as though the enlightenment had never happened.

Convict or conviction?

2009-11-01T13:31:00.011Z

Two bits of recent news brought to my attention some interesting issues over UK employment law and, in particular, how we rationalise discrimination.

First, Nick Griffin's recent appearance on BBC TV was said to have raised the popularity of the BNP as an electoral force, but whether or not this is so is hard to test, as they are not currently accepting applications for party membership. Sadly this is not because they are spontaneously disbanding, but because they are being investigated by the Equalities Commission for possible breaches of UK employment law, specifically the 1976 Race Relations Act. According to the Commission's website: "The Commission has demanded that the party address potential breaches related to its constitution and membership criteria, employment practices and provision of services to the public and constituents."

At the same time a different organisation is also seeking to expand its membership in a similarly restrictive fashion, but apparently under the loving protection of the law. As Griffin was appearing on Question Time, the Roman Catholic church was offering the promise of ecumenical shelter to high Anglicans who could no longer accept the Church of England's reformed employment practice that allows women to served as ordained ministers (story here).

This strikes me as, at the very least, inconsistent, so I wrote to the Equalities Commission to ask about any upcoming prosecution of the Roman Catholic church. They replied by saying that the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, under which any prosecution would be made, specifically exempts a church as an employer - so any such prosecution would fail. And they're right - section 19 (1) states:

"Nothing in this Part applies to employment for purposes of an organised religion where the employment is limited to one sex so as to comply with the doctrines of the religion or avoid offending the religious susceptibilities of a significant number of its followers."

This strikes me as totally bizarre, and is certainly one in the eye for those who claim Christianity doesn't enjoy protection of the law or a privileged position. Imagine substituting the words "political party" for the word "religion" in the highlighted Section 19 (1), above. Indeed, the prosecution of the BNP is precisely because its doctrines and sensibilities are at odds with employment law, but under another belief system exemption from the application of the law is secured. Why is Griffin's belief in discrimination any less valid than the Catholic church's?

I don't intend this to sound like a defence for the BNP - in fact, completely the opposite. The BNP is held to account, because the law defends the rights of employees not to be discriminated against by someone's belief system. It offers universal protection against the personal prejudices of others. But by exempting the Catholic Church, we are effectively saying that a religious point-of-view has greater need of protection than a political point of view. Or, more simply, a religious opinion is more valid than one based upon political beliefs, no matter how firmly held. A religious conviction, no matter how flimsy, bigoted or ridiculous, demands a higher level of protection than other views, and in the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act we have the proof.

None of this is the Equalities Commission's fault. Theirs is simply to enforce the law, not to make it, but I think they might at least make a public statement about it, instead of hiding behind their plush desks. I suspect their failure to do so has, at its heart, a misguided idea that faith is somehow more worthy of respect. Or as Mencken put it: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart".

Tough on fame, tough on the causes of fame

2009-11-01T12:39:00.003Z

The great thing about the Internet is I am able to read stories in newspapers I have not bought about programmes I have not seen, and probably be no less informed about their contents than many viewers. But I am less convinced that those who lead the country are quite so up on its benefits. Take today's story from The Sunday Mirror about the government's new initiative to reduce anti-social behaviour: naming and shaming ASBO holders online. For an administration that prides itself on the fact it "gets" the whole online revolution, its manoeuvrings in this area are sometimes staggeringly crass. They think they are Max Clifford but end up coming across like Carter-Ruck.

Close watchers of New Labour will note this is simply an web-based version of something heralded by Tony Blair earlier in the century, an idea that died a quiet death. But presumably because of the groovy, digital application of the idea - a kind of Top Of The Pops for ASBO holders - Gordon Brown thinks this sounds like a vote-winning plan. As a fan of TV-based Saturday night parlour games like X-Factor, the Prime Minister should know that it will, of course, have the exact opposite effect of the one he intends.

Bored street urchins will compete with each other for top ranking, checking for realtime updates of their status via mobile phones each time they steal a car. The pathetic popularity of TV shows like X Factor and Britain's Got Talent are proof of the desperate lengths young people will go to for attention of any kind, even just for the chance of being slagged off by Simon Cowell. They also show the shallowness of undiscovered talent out there, so for those who can't carry a tune in a bucket, this is probably the next best thing.

Gordon Brown gave a warning to back up this latest policy initiative: "The consequences for committing anti-social behaviour should be clear." Your own record deal and kudos amongst your peer group, I would suggest.

Apathocracy

2009-10-22T22:09:00.003Z

Tonight a notorious professional twit appeared on BBC's Question Time (just in case you have been living in a cave this last week), causing much breast beating across the media and chattering classes. I refer, of course, to Nick Griffin, Leader of the British National Party (BNP), in case you thought I meant Jack Straw. Everybody agrees that the prospect of Griffin's weasel words being broadcast across the airwaves is an unpleasant one, but those who would seek to lay blame are looking in the wrong direction.

Those politicians who oppose the appearance of Griffin naturally blame the BBC for issuing the invitation. Even those Voltairean types who extend the logic of their liberalism to include all comers complain that, outside of news coverage, the BBC is under no obligation to invite every self-aggrandising idiot who runs for office onto its flagship politics programme. Give him his election slots and hope he goes away.

I'm quite happy to say where the blame for this story lies: with us. Of course no politician is going to blame the electorate for anything, because they cannot be wrong. The BBC, too, is scarcely going to slap the hand that feeds them. So I'll say it - we're to blame. More than 1,000,000 of us thought it was a worthwhile use of their birthright to choose a racist representative back in May - that's one in every 16 people who voted. Complaining that the BBC is giving the BNP the veneer of respectability beside the point - they already have it in many people's eyes. Politicians blaming the BBC for tonight's three ring circus at Television Centre is perhaps the definitive example of shooting the messenger.

For too long we have acquiesced in the non-participation of the public in political life. Some is trendy theorising about young people participating through other channels - that wearing hemp trainers and watching Live8 is the noughties equivalent of joining the Young Conservatives. People are not embarrassed to admit they didn't vote at the last election; it is almost a badge of honour, that you are above it all. Yes, politics is complicated, difficult and often boring - just like tax returns, life insurance and building regulations - but you might come to appreciate the effort if your roof falls in.

I think Griffin's appearance tonight might actually be a good thing - not because I think he'll fluff his lines, or suddenly be exposed as an evil scumbag and or even because I think he'll end up looking stupid. I hope for all of those things but I realise that, in a reversal of the usual axiom, he may be an idiot, but he's not stupid. I really hope it makes people bother to find out what the BNP policies are, and then think again about the choices they make.

Shaw said "democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.", and the sight of the gurning, sweaty jowls of Nick Griffin is what happens when no-one takes elections seriously anymore. Perhaps people will suddenly start to realise what matters is engaging in political discourse. And that is not racist politicians appearing on our TVs. It's racist politicians winning unchallenged at the ballot box.

Our lords and masters

2009-10-19T22:06:00.003Z

Some heartening news this week, as technology struck a blow for parliamentary democracy. Trafigura, once an unknown commodities trader, became a little too well known for its own comfort, as its lawyers' attempts to keep its name in the shadows had the diametrically opposite effect. Much has already been written about the triumph of the Twitterati in sinking the ironically named Super Injunction (story here), but slinking in the background was another story about the Mother of Parliaments with somewhat less noble outcomes.

John Bercow, the slick new Speaker of the House of Commons, announced this week plans to let Lord Mandelson and Lord Adonis to address the Commons, in their capacity as ministers for Business and Transport respectively (story here). Apparently this is in the name of "modernisation" and "radical innovation"- MPs were apparently frustrated by their inability to cross-examine two senior government ministers, because they were members of the upper chamber. And Bercow is the man with reformist zeal, determined to throw off the out-moded ways of working.

To me this is like solving the problem of being burgled by putting your jewellery in the front garden. It is a distraction from the real issue: why does Gordon Brown have two secretaries of state who are unelected? Letting them take part in the business of the elected chamber is not a bold reform, as Bercow would have it - it is the ultimate snub to the country. Why should we bother having an elected government anyway? Lets just let Gordon pick his mates and they can get on with it. Or maybe we can change the terms of democracy instead - turn it into an X-Factor style talent contest, with the winner each week getting a different cabinet portfolio. After all, the Prime Minister seems to take such childish delight in every Saturday night end-of-the-pier gong show.

Mandelson, however, prefers to position the proposal as somehow enhancing democracy: "Peter is very much in favour of democratic accountability and reducing the distance between the two houses of parliament," a 'source' at the business department said. "He is full of enthusiasm for this if others decide to go ahead with changes." Which is an odd way of putting it, given he is not subject to "democractic accountability" himself (and why is he "full of enthusiasm" if other people make the changes? If they decide not to, will he change his mind and say it was a rubbish idea?).

Surely the most radical innovation of all would be to bring the mountain to Mohammad: make the House of Lords popularly elected, thus giving Mandelson all the legitimacy he so publicly desires? Or is there only so much accountability our masters can take?

Believing the unbelievable

2009-10-14T16:15:00.004Z

How do we decide what we are entitled to believe? It may sound a curious question, but one that has been going around my head for a week now, since my discovery that the Srebrenica Massacre of 1995 didn't actually happen. Or it did, depending on your point of view.

I suppose I had previously acquiesced in the view that, in July 1995 following the fall of Srebrenica, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, between 3,000 and 8,000 Muslim men and boys were rounded up by Serbian forces, shot and then buried in mass graves in various spots around the city. But according to www.srebrenica-report.com this was impossible logistically and numerically, and the number had essentially been created by Muslim spin doctors and swallowed unquestioningly by the outside world, giving the US government the excuse they needed to arm the Bosnians. Certainly, according to the Srebrenica Report group, the DNA evidence was flaky or non-existent beyond about 200 victims.

It's difficult to know how to react to that. My instant reaction was wariness, probably influenced by the precedent of Holocaust deniers. But the Nazi Holocaust is very well documented, the arguments are familiar and have been publicly documented many times over the years. In short, you'd have to be an idiot to deny the veracity of the scale of Hitler's Final Solution. But what about Bosnia? So much nearer in time, well-documented, and yet shrouded in the fug of public apathy, highly partisan views and UN shilly-shallying. If you read the Srebrenica Report site it appears lucid, well researched, fully cited and the product of people drawn from respectable academic institutions, not the ravings of a lunatic. Could they be right - and if so, does that make me a heretic to say so? Does it make me a Serbian proto-fascist? Is it the moral equivalent of denying the Holocaust?

Trying to find stuff out online, especially about something as complex as Srebrenica, is like trying to fill a water glass by standing under Niagara Falls. You can see why people form opinions and then filter the evidence to pick stuff that reinforces their view (can there be any other reason for the continued existence of The Daily Express?) - and not just because humans are hard-wired towards confirmation bias. Because to do otherwise would mean devoting your life to it, if you truly mean to read around a topic.

Richard Dawkins has recently published a book setting out the case for Evolution in which he equates people who refuse to accept the reality of Evolution with Holocaust deniers. Understandably this has upset quite a few people - but his point remains valid: why is denying Evolution in the face of overwhelming evidence seen as a matter of choice, but denying the Holocaust in the face of equally stacked evidence seen as completely unacceptable (and, indeed, illegal in some places)? Are we entitled to fail to believe something, despite all evidence to the contrary, simply because we find it an inconvenient truth?

Returning to Srebrenica, I decided the only thing I could do was at least try to find a consensus view, so I emailed Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News. It's not a story he has covered, so wasn't able to offer much insight, other than one of the members of the Srebrenica Report is George Bogdanovic, who has made a rather grubby little movie about the subject (http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2002/yugoslavia.php). Another was a former Defence Minister for Serbia. Neither of them declared these interests, but that was probably the extend of the dirt among listed members. Does it invalidate the evidence they cited? Does it rebut the awkward questions about the number of identified victims they raised? Casting Serbia as the devil no more answers these questions, than denouncing Hitler confirms the truth about Auschwitz.

This summer the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) published its latest findings that confidently identified a further 6,186 victims of the massacre at Srebrenica, bringing the total to around 8,100. Just about the same as the number of victims reported missing after the Serbian occupation (story here). Since this came a full four years after the Srebrenica Report group published their findings, I thought I should ask them for their reaction to these latest identifications. Their email address is no longer valid and the site has not been updated for a while. I don't think Srebrenica Report has done enough to convince me of their case - an opinion I think I am entitled to.

Strictly Come Quietly

2009-10-06T22:06:00.004Z

In a story that could have been written just for Hofflimits, news reaches us that from November, the Great British public will be able to join in the CCTV revolution from the comfort of their own homes (story here). A logical extension of The X-Factor will see the citizens of Stratford Upon Avon granted access to local CCTV online, with the chance to report any misdemeanours they see being committed in real time to store detectives. To the winners will go points and prizes, to the losers, presumably, court and jail.

It is the brainchild of the founder of a website called Internet Eyes, James Woodward, who claims the monstrous ubiquity of CCTV in the UK is a victim of its own success. You see there are too many cameras that record absolutely nothing of interest; a recent survey of cameras in London estimated one crime was captured for every 1000 cameras in place. Presumably the rest were in use elsewhere, being operated by failed coppers ogling the hemlines of girls on the street. But this is not because there is not enough crime, or they are badly placed, or, frankly, superfluous. It is because there aren't enough police officers, failed or otherwise, to spend 18 hours a day watching footage of a brick wall on the off chance a mugger will walk in front of it.

This is where you come in. The Internet Eyes website will offer up to £1,000 if you spot shoplifting or other crimes in progress, thereby combining crime prevention with the incentive of winning money, not to mention generating a certain gameshow-esque thrill. What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure you have worked it out already.

I'm not a betting man, but I'd reckon the odds quite good on a crimewave hitting Stratford in November, as people send their mates in to Lidls to liberate a few tins of special brew, before phoning in the "crime" and pocketing a cheque to be split with their fleet-footed friends later. No doubt the coppers will eventually iron out the process of "reward for reporting" - do you get the check only after a conviction, or is it enough just to report it?

Think of the added dimensions this could bring to neighbourhood disputes. That grumpy old sod from next door pops into oddbins - you put a quick call in to the old bill, say you've seen him slip a Cabernet down his trousers. Look at that pramface with her brats in Netto - I should report her just for wearing that skirt. Truly the mean-spirited nature of the worst Daily Mail, curtain twitching tendencies this country can offer are just a month or so away from being fully realised at last. But at least it will stop people banging on about the clash between X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday night. They'll be too busy zooming in to see exactly what Mrs Faversham from number 24 is putting in her trolley.

Motoring offence

2009-10-06T16:54:00.003Z

Yesterday the DVLA withdrew from sale two items from the upcoming auction of high-value licence plates. The grounds for doing so was the risk of causing offence, should they appear in public, and those incendiary combinations of letters and numbers were: F4GOT and D1KES.

I must say I struggled to make out what they "spelled" on a computer screen, never mind on the back of a 90 mph Subaru. And even now I can see the "words", I'm struggling to understand the point of the exercise. I suppose even the illiterate have the right not to be offended, but I do wonder quite what the real thinking behind it was.

Let's assume a homophobic driver wants a vanity plate to reflect his bigotry. I could understand if he were to buy F4G H8R (see, I'm getting into this lingo). But to suggest he would want to drive around with "Faggot" on his car as a bizarre badge of honour seems wrong headed, any more than I would covet a licence plate that read L1verp00L FC. If I saw F4GOT on a car registration (and managed to decode it in time) I would be inclined to think the owner of the car was gay, and proudly reclaiming the word, as hip-hop artists did with with word "nigga" in the 1990s.

Beyond this I worry about the broader implications of this posturing by the DVLA. Are we suggesting oppressed groups prowl the car parks of England looking for offence at knee height? Or, for that matter, trawl the DVLA auction site (a very dull thing to do at the best of times) to be outraged at badly spelled playground language? According to Stonewall, it is to make Britain "more equal", but to construe offence in the unlikeliest places seems to say more about Stonewalls sense of self-importance that taking action to protect gay people from the random violence of idiots.

Meanwhile I expect there are disappointed water defence engineers in the Fens who would have like the registration D1KES as a symbol of pride in their profession. Not to mention the faggot makers of Lancashire.

Cause and affect

2009-09-30T23:46:00.007Z

With timing designed to cause maximum political embarrassment, yesterday The Sun announced it was switching its political allegiance from New Labour to David Cameron's Conservatives (formerly known as The Conservative Party). Gleefully parading its already monstrous ego, as both creator and subject of the news, the story also led the news on the BBC and ITN news, to the eternal discredit of those who should know better.

No doubt the BBC would maintain it was an important story because of the supposed enormous political influence The Sun holds. Famously, after the 1992 surprise Conservative election victory, the paper claimed "It was The Sun wot won it", which did more to enfeeble the British political system and diminish democracy in this country than anything in the last 20 years. Not because it was true, but because politicians believed it was true, and have been cowed by it ever since.

I would like to say for the record that the emperor has no clothes. The Sun can no more win an election than increased sales of ice cream causes hot weather - it is a confidence trick of causality, muddling up cause and effect. Yes the paper has publicly backed the winning party for every election in the last 30 years, but that's like me saying my support for Manchester United has caused them to win the Premier League. People will ultimately vote a government in or out not because The Sun tells them to, but because they come to a conclusion about the issues themselves through a mixture of media influence, including The Sun, peer pressure/influence, prejudice and judgements about likely outcomes to their own personal circumstances. The Sun is the ultimate glory fan, backing a winner to bask in its reflected glory, deluding itself that it says something about its wisdom.

In the past, The Sun has backed the Community Charge, decried Scottish devolution and the minimum wage and U-turned more times than a driving school. Its track record of influencing change is no better than mine. Yesterday's switch of tack does not condemn the Labour Party to defeat at the next election, for they have already done that themselves - it merely goes to show it positioning itself in line with its readers' views. I would urge all politicians to consult the next set of ABC figures in December to see how far The Sun's readership has declined these last 20 years, and how many other sources of news people use these days. Then just maybe our politicians will remember they have spines.

…as the ASDA said to the bishop

2009-09-25T13:23:00.000Z

The Bishop of Reading, The Rt. Reverend Stephen Cotrell, has been making headlines this week with his marketing-led analysis of the English church-goer. His assertion is that the Church of England needs to move downmarket to shore up its declining customer base – or as he put it:

“How did it come to this, that we have become known as just the Marks & Spencer option when in our heart of hearts we know that Jesus would just as likely be in the queue at ASDA or Aldi?”

I am intrigued by the many implications of this thought. First, that Aldi and Marks and Spencer are mutually exclusive. The current recession is proving that middle class people are just as adept at shopping at discount food retailers as the great unwashed. Second, Jesus may indeed have been found amongst the aisles at Netto, but I also guess He wouldn’t ignore those people who frequent M&S as well. After all, what more of an Everyman statement could He make than to buy His underwear from M&S?

A part of me also thinks that rather than queuing for His Pot Noodles, He might instead be tempted to make His own, maybe updating the loaves-and-fishes model for a modern audience – 5,000 kebabs with chilli sauce from a single pitta, maybe?

Modernisation is, of course, at the heart of the entire argument. The Bishop’s outburst was part of a PR campaign to encourage lapsed believers to give the C of E another try; something else the Church has in common with supermarkets is a recruitment drive in the run-up to Christmas, its busiest trading period. As part of this, “a rap-style radio advertisement” (shudder) has been launched to get the yoof back through church doors, featuring this gem:

"Don't look to make no airs and graces.
Faked up smiles and masked up faces.
No need to make no innovation.
Please accept this as your invitation."

It would seem the use of double negatives is to be a feature of the new ASDA-style Eucharist in an apparent attempt to patronise their new audience to within an inch of their lives. How very middle class. How very M&S.

Bones of contention

2009-09-19T20:31:00.004Z

This week saw the beginning of a tour of the bones of St Therese of Liseux, coming to a cathedral, church or prison near you. There hasn't been this much excitement about a tour of old relics in this country since the last Rolling Stones concerts, and the Catholic Church has promised us "a time of grace" for the 30-day duration of the visit. Given that St Therese's disintegrating DNA has also visited Russia, Kazakhstan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Lebanon and Iraq in the recent past, I'm not sure she has much of a track record in that department.

I find it fascinating that, far from being slightly sheepish about this barely-disguised idolatry, the Catholic Church is loudly trumpeting the visit. If there is anything less likely to convince non-believers of your credibility as an intellectual force, I would have thought relic visits would be akin to an Iranian World Tour of Stoning, or Libya parading a terrorist through the streets. Oh, hang on...

But this is not being done for the likes of me, of course - according to the Catholic Church's website "many people have been praying and asking for this to happen, and now their prayers have been answered", which shows a remarkably skewed sense of 'prayer priorities' if you ask me. According to one attendee to today's first stop in Taunton, "although she lived over hundred years ago, St Thérèse is a saint for our times." Quite literally, it would seem, as she has her own 2009 calendar that you can download from her own website. I don't think she has a Twitter account, but I've no doubt she'd get a lot of followers if she did.

Maybe the promoters of the secular world's own poster boy for 2009, Charles Darwin, are missing a trick? Instead of boring things such as exhibitions, movies, documentaries and eponymous extensions to the Natural History Museum, they should have exhumed old Chuck's remains and paraded them to the Science Museum. I think it's important to fight anti-intellectualism on its own terms, just to show that, in these times, it's not about the arguments but who has the best PR. I'm half inclined to switch on "X Factor" to see if St Therese's sarcophagus turns up performing an attempted healing.

Back online

2009-09-14T20:41:00.002Z

Big thanks to my friend Marc Allington for figuring out just what the heck was up with my web URLs, and why my Blogger account was no longer recognising them. www.hofflimits.co.uk is back up and running - now for hofflimits.com.

The long eye of the law

2009-08-31T22:38:00.004Z

Last week saw a new government-sponsored ad campaign to draw attention to the hitherto underplayed dangers of driving while under the influence of illegal drugs. Speaking at the launch, Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said "Whatever one's views on drug taking" it is imperative that drug-driving is made totally socially unacceptable.

While it is true that enormous strides have been made in the last 30 years in making drink-driving socially unacceptable (at least in the UK), this whole campaign seems a little half-baked. If the idea is to make drug-driving socially unacceptable, then that means influencing people's attitudes, making them see the consequences of their actions upon the lives they wreck. All laudable stuff, until you see the ad campaign they have used, which is answering a completely different brief. It would not be the first time the cleverness of an ad has masked its message, but either Lord Adonis hasn't seen the ad, or he has signed off the wrong brief.

The ad features young beautiful things driving back from a night out. I am meant to deduce they are probably under the influence of illegal drugs, but, at this stage, the banter is charming, the people are beautiful, it could actually be an ad promoting the use of drugs for a good night out. But then we notice that all the occupants of the car have massive eyes, like aliens from Communion heading back to the mother ship after closing time at Roxy's. And then they get nicked by the police because their eyes gave them away; the boys in blue, rather than regarding them as a car of genetic mutant freaks, choose to arrest them for driving under the influence of a few grams of whizz. Then we get the pay-off: "Your eyes will give you away. Drugs have an involuntary effect upon your eyes that you cannot control. The police are able to spot this."

So where's the 'socially unacceptable' part of this campaign? This is pure bogey-man stuff, "Heroin screws you up" for the new generation. It is a crass and obvious attempt to scare users into compliance, not to question their own behaviour. Anti-drink driving campaigners realised the futility of this approach back in about 1985, and their recent success in reducing drink-drive deaths has been a switch of tack to convince the public of the moral weight of their cause, not to scare people with breathalysers.

But if you are going to scare people, you'd better make sure your threat is credible - and this campaign is, frankly, laughable. Apparently the police can spot if your pupils are overly dilated or constricted, which is pretty impressive; I have a vision of traffic cops holding up a little ruler to measure the exact size of the aperture and make a judgement to prosecute on that basis on a dark roadside. "Well, m'lud, as soon as we shone the bright torch in his eyes, we could see his pupils were heavily constricted."

There is no "drug breathalyser" equivalent to accompany this slick advertising campaign, despite such equipment being standard in Germany - instead our police have to rely on the less-than-credible roadside tests such as touching your nose or walking a straight line. I cannot imagine such flimsy evidence would stand up if challenged in court, because it is just so subjective, and you may have any one of at least eight medical reasons why your pupils are constricted.

If I were in the habit of driving while high on drugs, far from being worried, I would take some comfort from the fact that, despite the government's claims to "create a national debate" (always the last refuge of the desperate), their ability to catch the guilty has not moved in twenty years.

In defence of irony

2009-08-24T12:52:00.003Z

As a nation, the British recourse to irony as a reflex reaction to any social situation can be both a source of national pride and irritation. It is also a weak point when it comes to those odd occasions when you are confronted directly, though this weekend I discovered that, even then, it has its place.

I was walking to my local supermarket, when I noticed outside was a galley of evangelical Christians performing "street healing", vocally and enthusiastically drumming up business outside the store in a very un-British fashion. It was friendly and harmless, but no less irritating for all that, and I prepared to run the gauntlet of unwanted attention familiar to all who have to confront "charity muggers" on London's streets every day.

Except I had forgotten I was wearing my T-shirt from The Onion, America's finest satirical news source (http://www.theonion.com/); a gentle mocking of a familiar U.S. bumper sticker, it reads "Are your cats old enough to learn about Jesus?" Our would-be healer stopped in mid-approach and was genuinely puzzled - not really knowing what to do. I could see him mentally calculating whether I was serious or not - and considering a level of proselytising beyond even his own comfort zone. I passed through without comment or molestation into the store.

Now, if I can devise a similar device that has the same effect on the charity-backed guns-for-hire that block my path every day en route to work, I may yet die a rich man.

Bravehearts required

2009-08-21T09:52:00.000Z

It would be safe to say that England and Scotland have enjoyed a turbulent relationship these last 1,000 years or so. Neither country realised its full economic or political potential until they decided to bury their differences and become a single country some 300 years ago. And ever since there have been those who have sought a divorce from this marriage of convenience.

It could be argued such voices are in the ascendant, given that the Scottish National Party now rules the recently-devolved government, usurping the Labour Party from its century-old position. And those who long for the days of full independence, when Scotland can bestride the world stage once again as a Nation To Be Reckoned With have been granted an insight into the grubby reality of Realpolitik this week.

Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi may or may not have murdered 270 people (and I must say, the evidence I have seen looks pretty thin), but this week the Scottish government had to make an uncomfortable decision about his future, with the world, and America in particular, watching. How Jack Straw, sat in the safety of the Ministry of Justice in London must have enjoyed saying: “nothing to do with me, guv”, when asked about Megrahi’s future.

Messy compromises and uncomfortable decisions have been the stock-in-trade of the British (not to say English) government for many years. Worldwide revulsion and outrage at the sometimes necessary defence of self-interest can be a mixed blessing for those who carry the British passport and the southern English accent around the world.

Contrast this with the worldwide affection for all things Scottish, nurtured by a wide diaspora and rivalled only by the Irish. Turn up at any city, from Bombay to Badajoz, and you’ll as likely as not find a Scottish pub (next to an Irish bar), clad in all things tartan, and misty-eyed occupants (though that might down to the whisky). Free from the burden of self-government, they fear neither recriminations nor hostility from a world brought up on Braveheart. This week has been a lesson in the often uncomfortable responsibilities of self-government, but a price to be paid to all those who would one day carry a Scottish passport.

Sticking plaster solutions

2009-08-14T22:22:00.004Z

President Obama's decision to re-open the debate over Healthcare is certainly brave, and one that has had a surprising impact on this side of the Atlantic. Watching the US debate on "Socialised Medicine" from the UK, we have been presented with soundbites from a series of right wing commentators pouring a non-stop stream of abuse upon our hapless National Health Service. No doubt that perception is just as lopsided as the "facts" being promoted by those opposed to Mr Obama's project.

Until this point I had no idea that our system of healthcare was evil. Not just evil, but akin to the Nazi Final Solution. It will probably come as something of a surprise to those hard-working nurses at my local hospital when they realise they are latter-day Joseph Mengeles. It feels a bit like your neighbour is having an argument with his wife over which car they should buy, and so he takes a picture of your car, and shows it to her saying: "Is this the awful piece of shit you want to drive? Only a psychopath would drive such a car. You are such an idiot for wanting this car". When his wife can't even drive.

Leaving aside the idiocies of the arguments over how long it takes to get a hip replacement in the UK, I have been intrigued by two main aspects of this debate. The first is: why the UK? Almost all countries have some form of government-backed collectivised healthcare support, why pick on the NHS as the worst? I'm not an expert, but I am willing to believe that the NHS can provide a better standard of care than, for example, North Korea (I'm assuming North Korea has a state run health service). I note Fox News didn't try uncovering horror stories from Sweden, France or Germany where things run rather well, even if they do cost a lot of money.

The second is this false opposition generated by the debate: free market healthcare vs. socialised medicine. To caricature the debate, if the government starts to pick up the tab for healthcare like in the UK, the days of Sodom and Gomorrah will be upon America. Now I've been to many parts of the USA, and I have never seen anyone dying on the streets. Or even slightly injured, begging for medicine. In fact, if you do get ill and have no health insurance, contrary to popular European perception, you don't get thrown in a bin and taken away. A hospital will treat you, and the government will pick up the bill via one route or another.

In fact, if you have a moment, the US government spends a greater proportion of national income on healthcare provision for its citizens than the UK does - a little above 7%. According to Federal Government projections, by 2019, at the current rate of spending, Medicare (the US government programme for retirees health provision) will absorb one quarter of all US Federal income taxes. Therefore the answer to the question "do you want socialised medicine?" is actually "we've already got it, thanks".

A different sort of school examination

2009-07-24T23:13:00.002Z

An interesting story in the press this week about children's authors being vetted before appearing in schools (story here). Apparently the likes of Philip Pullman and Anne Fine feel "demeaned" by having to submit to the new, more extensive safeguarding checks before working in a class of children, hinting darkly it is either a revenue raising exercise or reminiscent of the notorious Clause 28 legislation in the 1980s.

A short way of summarising their arguments would be: "don't you know who I am?" Pullman seems to regard it as insulting that anyone would even think to ask someone working in a school for a background check. "You ought to be able to trust people, so to say to a child that you're having someone to talk to you but don't worry, we've checked him out and he's not a paedophile, implies that everybody who isn't checked is."

I can't quite understand why Pullman's knickers are quite so tightly twisted, but it seems to be cutting off the circulation to his brain. How is asking for a background check on someone working in a school, no matter how briefly, the same as announcing to the children that their visitor is not a rapist? Yes you ought to be able to trust people, and the sun should shine in summer and England should win the World Cup every four years. I wonder how he'd feel if he found out his local GP wasn't registered with the General Medical Council? No doubt it wouldn't be a problem, after all, you've got to be able to trust people.

And as for the comparison with Clause 28, that is a really cheap shot; clause 28 was about what children did or didn't get taught. Safeguarding is about what happens before you even get to the classroom. After the years spent trying to get authorities to take protection of children from sex offenders seriously, and the high-profile failures to protect some children, it seems either extraordinarily naive or pompous, or both. After all, why would a child sex offender try to get work in a school?

Perhaps the most revealing remark was by children's author Adele Geras, who called the scheme "lunatic". "They ought to be able to refine this legislation to make exceptions for people who see huge groups together". For a professional writer her subtext here is not that subtle: "they ought to make an exception for authors" - they are artists, after all. Just like Gary Glitter.

Chew on this

2009-07-21T16:49:00.004Z

One of the ironies of the modern age is, as the number of communications channels widens, the number of different sources of news actually narrows. Cutthroat competition to produce the latest, quickest, hottest stories at the lowest cost has created the concept of "churnalism", and those feeding the rapacious news beast are as complicit as those who buy the papers and download the podcasts. One of the upshots of this is the constant need to produce new information, facts and opinions no matter how useful they are to an audience. It is the news equivalent of making chewing gum.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a government press release. And to make it easier to understand - to give the gum some flavour - it has any contextualising background removed, and is presented as naked truth to a scared world. This week gave birth to a "fact" that I can see becoming burnished across the popular consciousness, and accepted without question. "65,000 people could die of swine flu" was the headline that everyone grabbed from an announcement by Sir Liam Donaldson, Chief Medical Officer. That sounds like a lot of people, the sort of number that is clearly designed to make me panic, hide under the bed, or buy multiple copies of the Daily Mail to await their special feature on how swine flu will impact house prices.

Just suppose I want to accept that the government is trying to tell me something useful. How do I use this information in my assessment of likely risks and understand the consequences? There are some things I need to know to do this:

What's the baseline? What would be a normal number of deaths we could anticipate from seasonal flu, and how many swine flu deaths will offset those who would have died from regular flu anyway?

This is a worst case scenario, though no doubt it will be talked into fact imperceptibly over the coming weeks, though it is little more than a back-of-an-envelope calculation. How likely is a worst case scenario? Governments need to plan for those, but they also need not only to tell us the probability of it happening but how they worked it out so we can do the sums ourselves.

65,000 people represents 0.1% of the population. So 99.9% of us will live in fear of something that will, in all likelihood, mildly inconvenience us. This is not to deny it is important, but we need to bear it in mind. In Botswana, half the adult population is HIV-positive or has AIDS. That clearly is something that affects a whole host of decisions on a daily basis. But I don't think we're quite there yet.

What I would like is a reasoned statement of the facts and to understand the conclusions that have been drawn from the data. We cannot eliminate risk from our lives, but I would like to understand what it actually is. Maybe we are a victim of our innumerate society that governments don't bother trying to give people the tools to make informed decisions, because there is too much other media noise to distract our interest.

Bonus balls

2009-07-16T23:25:00.004Z

Last week the oldest advertising agency in the UK, and rival to my present employer, went bust. It had survived nearly two hundred years of wars, umpteen changes of government, recessions and even the Great Depression, but this was a crisis too far, and the company went into adminstration. One more tale among thousands from this recession, and unremarkable for all that.

Being closer to home, the winding up of Barkers seemed telling to me somehow, as at head of the queue to stake a claim over the assets were a number of banks, as the number one creditors. Once they have stripped the fittings and raided the safes, there will be nothing left for the 150 or so ex-employees who were laid off a few days before, despite promises made to the contrary. This may be normal practice, but I was interested to see that this doesn't seem to work in reverse.

This week, Goldman Sachs announced it was setting aside about £4bn for bonuses after a very health 2nd quarter of 2009. I thought it interesting that, when a bank goes bust (as all those who took government financing effectively did last autumn, including Goldman Sachs), first in the queue for payment is those bankers who caused the mess in the first place. The reasoning for this is that GS has paid back the money it borrowed, so is now entitled to do what it likes with the spoils. I realise that Goldman Sachs is a US bank that borrowed American government money, but where they lead British banks will surely follow, despite the promises this week of tough new reforms for the banking sector.

I guess my first question would be about how much interest Goldman Sachs paid on the £6.1bn it borrowed from the Fed? I'm guessing not very much (but have you tried to secure an interest-free loan recently from anyone, neve mind a bank?). So Sachs may have paid back the Principal, but it certainly has not remunerated the American taxpayer for the opportunity cost of bailing them out. In other words, what the government might have done with that money instead of loaning it to corporate incompetents - such as building schools, job creation schemes etc.

Second, even if it had, I wouldn't want the bank to pay it back at 2%, 10% or even 100%. I'd demand it paid back at 1000%, or more, like punitive damages for the tobacco industry. I'd demand the repayment terms be so personally painful for those running the bank that they would be totally focused upon ensuring that it NEVER happened again. Front of mind, top of the agenda - nothing so important as going back to the days of loans secured against assets, not bundles of other people's debt.

As the debate about bonuses hots up in the UK, and banking industry heads start to bleat about the need to properly incentivise its employees, I couldn't agree more.

Hearing but not listening

2009-07-16T23:13:00.002Z

Kingston-upon-Thames Starbucks, 17 July 2009, 9.30am. The following conversation takes place:

Me: One black Cafe Americano please

Starbucks Employee: Is that black or white

Me: Er, black please

(30 seconds pass)

Starbucks employee: Do you want the milk cold or heated?

Me: No milk please - black.

Two minutes later I am enjoying a steaming hot mug of white coffee. And left to muse on the prospects facing the UK economy, post recession. If we can no longer make money from Ponzi-style financial services "products" - and we have long forgotten how to manufacture anything - our only salvation lies in our continued ability to sell solutions to each other for problems we didn't realise we had.

If the service economy really is to ride to the rescue, I hope my experience today is not an omen of bad times ahead. Or else I should set up a consultancy that teaches listening skills to the service sector.

Making mountains out of moguls

2009-07-11T22:34:00.002Z

Regular readers of Hofflimits will be aware of my bafflement with Italy - its many, many wonderful points as a place to visit in contrast with its inadequacies as a place to live. The UK is hardly Avalon, but, in general, our politicians are closely scrutinised for personal probity, and when something doesn't happen as it should - be that late train, closed office or underperforming sports team - some sort of acknowledgement is made, along with an apology.

But have I been too hasty? The recent hosting of the G8 in the mountains of L'Aquila, Italy, has, ironically, caused me to think we may have more in common with our southern European neighbours than I once thought. It goes without saying that the policing of the, by now de rigeur, protests has been shambolic, but then again I defy anyone to show me a country that has handled large scale street protests to popular acclaim.

But who would have a political system run by a septuagenarian who owns half the country's media, and who controls the political process beyond ordinary accountability, ridiculed for his pursuit of women young enough to be his granddaughter? I was considering this today as a story about a former News International editor withered and died in the face of too many cowardly, self-interested politicians, journalists and assorted hacks and hangers-on.

The police effectively surpressed the story of illegal phone-tapping of major UK public figures, and the Murdoch press, of course, do not want to touch it. The political party likely to form the next British government is heavily influenced by the ex-editor at the very heart of the story, and distorted media bias prevent anyone asking the really awkward questions. If anything does come to be published to suggest wrongdoing, of course, our draconian libel laws are on hand to price people out of court - and make us more of a laughing stock than they are presently, in the face of wanton systemic abuses through "libel tourism" cases brought by overseas plaintiffs.

At least Berlusconi (a) is Italian and (b) does occasionally stand for popular election. But in the murky world of Rupert Murdoch, it's much easier to corner the market and pull the strings behind the scene.

Returning to my original perceptions, I contrast my recent 3-hour delay at Verona airport with my recent 3-hour delay at the hands of National Express trains. In Italy nobody even pretended to explain the delay, offer an apology or consider it to be worthy of serious consideration - it's what you expect. By contrast, National Express will update you about their incompetence with irritating regularity, offering mea culpas worth less than their current share price - they are the living definition of the expression "talk is cheap". Ultimately, the outcome in both cases was the same - I was late getting home. The difference was that the Italians didn't pretend to give a toss. Maybe the difference between us, in reality, is really one of pretence.

The real thing?

2009-07-09T12:23:00.003Z

As part of my lunch "meal deal" today, I picked up a bottle of 'VitaminWater', manufactured by a company called Glaceau, that writes its label copy in the style of a 16-year-old scally: cheeky gags and irreverent reworkings of standard disclaimers, thumbing a nose to punctuation. In fact, everything that Innocent drinks were doing about 5 years ago, but without the wit.

Their raspberry-apple drink is called "defence" because its vitamin-boosted contents guard the drinker against illness. So, naturally, its label says:

"if you've had to use sick days because you've actually been sick, then you're seriously missing out my friend. The trick is to stay perky and use sick days to just, erm, not go in. don't overdo it on the coughing front the day before you want to take a 'sickie' though. big giveaway. just stick with the ever-elusive "24-hour bug" - no one can prove a thing. just remember not to answer the mobile while shopping when you're supposed to be a spluttering, bedridden wreck. please note: taking a 'sickie' is very, very naughty.

I'm surprised they didn't write the last line as "taking a 'sickie' is proper nawty".

Glaceau is owned by the Coca-Cola Company, an organisation maybe not noted for its enlightened employment policies in the past, but this would seem to be good news for everyone who works for Coke. Apparently your employer has just given you carte blanche not to turn up to work tomorrow. Unless (surely not), it is a cynical marketing ploy to make their new fruit-and-sugar-water seem cool.

According to its label, Glaceau is "the center for responsible hydration" (whatever that means). As opposed to its HR advice.

Going public

2009-07-07T21:16:00.004Z

Today the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling, has moved quickly to scotch rumours of public sector pay freeze. Once again the scent of Moral Hazard is surrounding events, as unions beat the populist drum about not punishing public servants for the follies of the super-rich bankers. If you can find £300bn for The City, what's 3% for the hard-working nurse? Brendan Barber, the TUC General Secretary, said that there would be a “very strong reaction” if the Government attempted to “punish” public sector workers for the private sector’s problems.

I like the "Animal Farm" logic of the argument: Public sector good, private sector bad. Mr Barber may be surprised to learn that the private sector, as a whole, did not create the financial crisis, but it is already being "punished" for it, picking up the bill in redundancies. None of my friends who have been laid off had ever been near a Credit Default Swap or Sub-prime Mortgage. But it's part of a bigger perception issue, caused by that timeless political fall-back: creating a false opposition, in this case public vs. private.

In the future, the movement towards the blurring of the lines between public and private sectors will continue even more rapidly. Previously this was seen as the public sector learning from the private: competitive tendering for contracts, commissioning models for public services, privatisation. But this will now have to work the other way: given the Biblical proportions of the present economic calamity, the banking industry will have to accept greater regulation.

I would go further and suggest that, actually, the banking system will need to swallow a thoroughly unpalatable truth: that they are, in fact, a part of the public sector. If the government underwrites your operation and prevents you going bust, you are a public sector organisation, ipso facto. You may not be wearing corduroy, and the lifts in your building may actually work, but as the engine of the UK economy, you are an extension of the government.

The system of international capital flow means we can't go back to a system of little banks. The taxpayer is the lender of last resort, just like it is for Essex County Council. Further proof of this truth is the way the same local government unions, who criticise bail-outs of private banks, were clamouring not so long ago for a similar bail-out when their Icelandic investments went south. There is a total interdependency that may render terms like "public" and "private" sectors meaningless in a few years.

Instead of hoping for short term pay rises, the TUC should accept a freeze on the condition of a share in future banking profits in the form of bonuses. And those bankers who always complain of working 80-hour weeks for their measly six-figure income should take the chance to turn up to work at 9.30 and leave at 3. I think the whole country would feel better for it.

Conspiracy theorists of the world unite.

2009-07-05T21:45:00.003Z

As the Michael Jackson circus rolls on, a debate has been sparked as to exactly who created the famous 'moonwalk', a dance move closely associated with the deceased King of Pop.

I think I can clear that one up - it never happened. It was faked at a TV studio in Los Angeles.

Pop goes the king

2009-07-03T22:06:00.003Z

It would be far too easy to make a cheap joke at the demise of Michael Jackson (but then I never claimed to be expensive), but I think all those had made the rounds, via SMS, within about 5 minutes of his death being announced. Instead I prefer to concentrate on one of the unchallenged facts in the examination of his life - the King of Pop.

It's a curious nickname, but one repeated without question by all sections of the media (The Times's main headline the day after read: "Michael Jackson, King of Pop, dead at 50"). Not really a thing that sounds like it was born of affection - "The King", "The Boss", "The Godfather of Soul". A bit too much of a PR ring to it you might say. I'm also not sure it's really much of a moniker to strive for - who would want to be the king of "pop", a byword for artifice, superficiality, throwaway bubble-gum nonsense? It's not Soul, Jazz or The Blues.

That's probably because it was a PR fiction dreamed up by Jackson's cronies. Back in the day when journos and the public would hang on his every word, before he lost it completely, somewhere between "Bad" and "Dangerous", Jackson's PR team insisted the press referred to him as The King of Pop as the price for granting access. Every interview had a stipulated number of times it had to use this nickname - it was a deliberate ploy to implant the term in the public consciousness. To me this seems one of the more desperate acts of attention-seeking (even more than becoming a pop star in the first place), so insecure in your status, so needing of affirmation that you have to make up a nickname and demand people use it of you. That's even before you get to the fake noses, fake marriages and unsired children. It makes you wonder what lengths he would have gone to if he didn't have any talent.

The idea of Italy and quantum theory

2009-06-29T22:44:00.002Z

Just as important as choosing a good holiday book is timing the finishing of your old book, so you can dip into your new read as the plane prepares for takeoff. For my recent trip to Italy, I mistimed this slightly, and ended up finishing off a book on quantum theory* as I travelled to Verona. So as I jetted off, I was trying to wind up thoughts on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Bosons versus Fermions, and the non-existence of gravity ahead of a weekend of sightseeing and opera.

But actually it was a better complement for the visit than I had thought, as I sat in Verona airport during a 2.5 hour delay caused by, apparently, nothing at all. As you will all no doubt know, there is a contradiction at the heart of quantum theory - whereby particles can not only be in two states at the same time, but in two places at the same time. Furthermore, the whole universe is held together by the balance of matter and anti-matter, particles and anti-particles who annihilate each other upon meeting. To many scientists, the only way to adequately explain the freaky things that happen at the atomic level is the existence of parallel universes.

If this is true, then somewhere there is another Britain made of achingly beautiful cities, serving delicious, cared-for food, with a history for creating passionate art and a language that sings to the soul. Similarly, there is an Italy where transport turns up roughly where and when it should, where you can rely on things to be open when they say they will be, and the prime minister doesn't own half the media. I can go to Italy to enjoy the things that depress me about Britain, and come back in time for relief from the things that would drive me to despair living in Italy. For me Italy and Britain are particle and anti-particle, spinning in opposite directions, locked in partnership as proof of their own identity and, ultimately, their own existence.

* = "Quantum Theory cannot hurt you", Patrick Chown (faber & faber, 2007) - highly recommended.

House of Paine

2009-06-22T21:47:00.003Z

Much has been made this year of two anniversaries of Charles Darwin - the 150th of the publication of On the Origin Of Species and the 200th of his birth. And that is as it should be for a truly great Briton and this country's most important scientific work. But another bicentennial anniversary passed recently of the death of an equally important British figure who goes unremarked these days, Thomas Paine. In the 2002 BBC poll of 100 Greatest Britons, Darwin cracked the top ten, whereas Paine reached the giddy heights of 34, just behind David Beckham and Eric Morecambe.

If Paine remains overlooked by his countrymen these days, then he hasn't necessarily fallen far, since his funeral on 8 June 1809 was attended by just 6 people. Having successfully alienated his native land, by his denunciation of the British Monarchy, he proceeded to lose American friends in his adopted country by his outspoken views on organised religion. He made it his life's work to rally against mental and physical enslavement, offending many people in the process through his refusal to compromise his principles.

No doubt Paine would have a wry smile to think how Oliver Cromwell can cut a King's head off, appoint himself dictator, and somehow become treated as the father of modern British democracy, whereas Paine wrote books that are still readable today, that profoundly influenced the direction and tide of the American and French revolutions, as well as bequeathing us the idea of human rights, and doesn't merit so much as a footnote in GCSC history. Cromwell gets a statue in Parliament Square; Paine has a statue in Norfolk.

No doubt those MPs in the Commons tonight, voting for a new speaker to give them a fig leaf of respectability, would feel Paine's fierce glare. And they'd do well to remember one of his more memorable quotes: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."

The toughest girl in Belgium

2009-06-17T13:30:00.003Z

All over the news this week is the story of a girl who got more than she bargained for in a trip to a tattoo parlour. According to her account of the story, she asked for three small stars to be tattooed onto her face, but instead got a whole faceful of permanent ink (story here). Apparently she fell asleep, and the zealous tattoo artist got a bit carried away. A modern cautionary tale, and general sympathetic noises about the cross this girl will have to bear.

I surely can't be the only person who doesn't believe her, and reckon this should be a story filed under "a tattoo is for life, not just for Christmas". I think she changed her mind when she saw the reaction of friends and family, and needs to save face, quite literally. My reasoning is based upon the understanding that tattoos hurt quite a lot. In fact, an incredible amount, from conversations I have had with people who have endured this process of body art. I think I would find it quite difficult to "fall asleep" with someone sticking needles in my face repeatedly.

Or maybe this will be one occasion when someone is sued for not engaging in sharp business practice.

Please sir, can I have some more?

2009-06-12T11:05:00.004Z

I had to suppress a laugh when I read today about the government's decision to "outlaw" child poverty (story here). Not content with having failed miserably to meet its own plan to halve child poverty by 2010 (unless everyone wins the lottery in the next 6 months), a new piece of legislation tabled today will make it a government duty to "abolish" child poverty by 2020. Clearly Gordon Brown is now so deluded he believes he can actually make Conservative Party policy.

I think it's a revealing story about the state of mind of the government in two respects. That they recognise they are on the way out, and so needn't fear the consequences of their actions. Why stop at child poverty? Why not make it a government commitment to abolish world poverty by 2020? Or war, famine and bad haircuts? Go the whole hog and say we'll outlaw all forms of sadness by the middle of the next decade - it doesn't really matter.

The second is the by now familiar New Labour approach to a problem - to solve a problem through legislation. That by declaring something illegal, it will make it go away. Does that mean that, come 2020, if there are children still in poverty, they will be like illegal aliens? Squads of police will track down rogue vagrant minors, just like Victorian times.

Mind you, a return to Victorian Values might be on the political agenda by then, with the Tories in government.

In God we trust fund.

2009-06-07T20:22:00.002Z

It's nice to have a President of the United States who is actually more intelligent than Osama bin Laden. Although bin Laden certainly holds some idiosyncratic views, his powers of organisation and extra-legal information structures are clearly not the work of a moron. Or to put it another way, he may be mad, but he isn't an idiot. For the last 8 years, a flat-footed George Bush was always three steps behind, not just in terms of locating bin Laden but in challenging his rhetorical appeal along the Arab Street.

And so with predictable timing, bin Laden released a tape to news networks to coincide with President Obama's trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Unfortunately, by accusing Obama of sowing seeds of hatred, he clearly completely mis-read the occasion, and Obama's speech, so adept and well-judged, has had the double effect of challenging views AND making bin Laden look like an idiot.

11 September 2001, and its personification in bin Laden, was seen as the greatest political strength Bush had to draw upon. But it was also one of his biggest weaknesses, for if you can embody the evil of Islamism into a single person, you only achieve success once you bring that person to justice, or at least track him down to a zip code. Either way, it means no-one ignores him, and his views are given credence because of the way he is treated by his enemies.

By expanding the picture to engage across the range of related issues, you take the focus off bin Laden. If you get Israel out of the West Bank and Syria out of Lebanon, bin Laden becomes irrelevant. Maybe the popular uprising in Pakistan against Taliban influence is a sign of things to come? Suddenly bin Laden becomes what he always was - an overindulged rich kid with absent father approval issues and too much time and money on his hands. Maybe he has more in common with Bush than I thought.

Press for change

2009-06-05T08:12:00.004Z

Hoff Limits doesn't tend to make political predictions very often, mainly because we don't want to look silly when the opposite happens within 48 hours. (But since when has looking silly stopped us commenting in other areas?) However I would stick my neck out to say that rumours of the Prime Minister's demise seem, in my humble, greatly exaggerated.

Today, the Fourth Estate is predicting the fall of Gordon within days, as the third Minister in as many days quit his cabinet, though this time the now former Work and Pensions Minister directly challenged the PM to resign. Some journos, clearly giddy with excitement, were even suggesting this was as pivotal a moment as Geoffrey Howe's famous parliamentary assault on Margaret Thatcher in 1990, that did for her reign as First Among Equals.

However, I would offer two observations to suggest why this isn't so:

1) I reckon that, until news of his resignation hit the headlines, less than 10% of the population had even heard of James Purnell, never mind that he had a job in government. Frankly if you'd have asked me at the start of the week, I probably would have suggested it was a chain of estate agents.

2) When Geoffrey Howe thrust his dagger into the PM, he was resigning from the post of Foreign Secretary. The other parallel that comes to mind is Norman Lamont's lament that John Major's administration was "in government but not in power" that summed up the situation with devastating accuracy. Lamont was speaking from the position of ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer. So far the occupants of the great offices of State are holding firm to the PM. Not least because of the absence of credible alternatives.

The conclusion I would come to is the media is now bored. The expenses scandal not only was tremendous fun for the print media, led by The Daily Telegraph, they actually felt important again. Now this story has finally run out of gas, only the distraction of a General Election will maintain their status as worth listening to again.

Just say yes

2009-06-03T20:57:00.007Z

Today I was stopped in my tracks by a bus side-panel ad in Camden:

The simple, startling message points to a website for Release, an organisation that campaigns for changes to UK drug policy. It is part of what I hope marks the start of a challenge to the hegemony of the madness that is the War On Drugs and the misery that is its consequence.

As a piece of creative, it is stunning - the simplicity of the execution is perfect because the message, in just four words, is powerful. Its implications resonate long after the meaning of the sentence has registered in the brain, because it is at odds with twenty years of contrary messaging from well-meaning but myopic War On Drugs warriors.

Or as advertising legend Bill Bernbach once said, "the most powerful element in advertising is the truth."

The hardest word

2009-06-03T12:51:00.004Z

"SORRY" was the theme of a recent London Evening Standard advertising campaign, to promote its relaunch under the new stewardship of Alexander Lebedev. It was a mea culpa admitting to having been, amongst other things, too negative in its coverage, and promising a new approach to its journalism in the future.

One tradition that seems set to continue without any apology is the indecent rush to be first to publish pictures of ordinary people caught up in news events. Frequently evening billboards will announce: "Crash victims: First pictures", as though the very act of publishing the image of hitherto unknown people is especially newsworthy, helpful or adds to the story in any way. It is the print version of an invitation to a rubber-necking or Victorian freak show: be the first to gaze upon old holiday snaps of someone you don't know who is now dead.

Something about this approach seemed particularly sordid in yesterday's coverage of the tragic story about a suicide couple who leaped from a cliff, unable to cope with the death of their child. "Beachy Head Suicide Boy: First Pictures" leered the ES publicity machine. I don't know what I am supposed to do with this advertisement - I wasn't going to buy a newspaper, but the prospect of seeing the image of a dead child before I get home is simply irresistible? Similarly irresistible is the conclusion I must draw that the Evening Standard is somehow applauding itself - basking in the glory of its own prurience, and asking us to endorse this with a purchase.

Sorry, indeed. Plus ca change...

Up in smoke

2009-05-31T21:17:00.003Z

For the upcoming European parliamentary elections, the voter in East Anglia is spoilt for choice. Or, should I say, the Little England voter is spoilt for choice, with a selection of rabid anti-Europeans prepared to take on the barbarians at the gates in Brussels on behalf of the good burghers of Colchester.

Passing over the BNP, whose odious presence I noted in Frinton the other week, and the even more obvious UKIP, I am being urged to vote for UKF (United Kingdom First) and their local candidate, one-time presenter of One Man And His Dog, Robin Page: "NOW is the time to free Britain from the EU, political correctness and the gravy train". From the leaflet, I can't establish whether these three constraints are, in his mind, separate issues or same thing, despite the fact that Robin "is famous for his straight talking". I would beg to differ and suggest that, actually, he is famous for explaining the nuances of dogs chasing sheep.

Robin's main policy, it would seem, is not to do anything at all - he will "only attend the EU Parliament when it's in Britain's interests". While I commend Robin on his commitment to reducing expenses, I can't help feeling he is missing the point about the most effective way to represent my interests. Maybe he is hoping the other MEPs will be shamed by his empty chair, and agree to dismantle the entire EU apparatus?

At the other end of the political spectrum the no2eu party have engaged an equally unattractive famous face to press for my vote - none other than Bob Crow, strike-happy RMT headbanger. Bob is clearly a busy man, but he has managed to find time to read the Lisbon Treaty and find something that no-one else has mentioned: that it "enshrines privatisation as legal requirements [sic] at a time when this discredited dogma has clearly failed". Being an ex-member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Bob probably knows a thing or two about discredited dogmas, though I was interested to note that in most parts of the EU, Trades Unions have supported the treaty, including in Ireland in the referendum campaign.

Something both Bob and Robin (and their anti-EU peers) seem to have missed about the Lisbon Treaty: for the first time it introduces an exit clause for members wanting to withdraw from the Union. While there has been one instance where a territory has ceased to be part of the Community (Greenland in 1985), there is currently no regulated opportunity to exit the European Union. So, ironically, all these parties should actually be campaigning for ratification of the Treaty/Constitution, which makes me question exactly how much they know about the EU in the first place.

Another thing all these campaign leaflets have in common is they made terrific firelighters for my first barbecue of the summer. No doubt the contents of the resulting meal would have offended the sensibilities of the most recent leafleteer in the neighbourhood: The Animals Count party, who are fielding candidates for "a political party for people and animals" under the incontrovertible slogan "animals can't vote, but you can!" I am not sure what it says about the upcoming political process that this is the first pro-European leaflet I have received.

A class act

2009-05-31T20:02:00.008Z

Series two of The Wire has just finished on BBC Two, and it represents one of those rare occasions when a much-lauded TV series actually matches the hype. Long talked of in reverent tones by aficionados of the small screen, it marks another triumph by HBO in world-leading, original TV drama - and another nail in the coffin of that hoary old truism that the UK makes the best TV in the world.

I certainly love it for all the things it has rightly been celebrated for - plot strands woven carefully to allow fully-developed characters to emerge, rather than being forced into clumsy exposition by the need to get to an ad break; fizzing dialogue and naturalistic set pieces; complex story-telling that feels no need to patronise the audience. "True that", as several of the show's characters would probably express it. But its real brilliance for me is it the way it attempts to tell a story of America in class terms, rather than along the usual racial lines.

Series one was centred on a drug-dealing business run on a run-down housing project in Baltimore. The tenants and users are predominantly African-American, the cops largely white, yet it manages to avoid the expected cheap reductions of black-on-white conflict that a lesser series would have grasped for, in an attempt to make easy (melo)drama. Nor does it posit the familiar approach of so-called "edgy" cop series, such as The Shield, that "cops and criminals are just two sides of the same coin". The characters are wholly believable because their actions are rational given the constraints they work within; life choices are a function of social class, and options are limited. Both police and criminals make unenviable moral choices every day, where the compunction to act rationally (in economic terms) does not sit easily with any desire they might have to act morally.

Each side of the line there is a clear class structure into which people fit; some will break out of this straitjacket, but the majority will not. It is very unusual, and a bit disconcerting, to watch an American drama that does not reinforce the national shibboleths of Individualism and Opportunity being the birthright of all. The way to get ahead in the America of The Wire is either to cut corners or play the system and wait your turn - the police are not there to do good any more than the drugs racketeer is. They are pawns in a bigger game, not masters of their own fate.

Ironically, behind this lies another, very British class tale - the lead cop, a blue-collar Irish-American, is actually played by a British alumnus of Eton, whereas the thoughtful, entrepreneurial head of the crime syndicate, whose earnings outstrip a police Sergeant's many times, is another British actor from Hackney. Not only is this a cop show playing against type, but, it would seem, so are its leading men.

Mullah on the Orient Express

2009-05-24T23:40:00.003Z

News emerged today of the trial of Iran's first female serial killer, and much has been made of her claim that she was inspired by the novels of Agatha Christie. For anyone familiar with the oeuvre of Christie, this probably comes as a bit of a shock; she wrote 80 novels, but I can't remember the one where an old lady is poisoned at an Islamic shrine in Qazvin by a young woman offering fruit juice.

According to the BBC: "Just like Agatha Christie's villains, she made careful plans to conceal her crimes." It's an interesting thought that, until the Poirot novels came along, no murderer in Iran thought to try to pretend he hadn't killed someone. Which must make the job of an Iranian homicide detective the easiest in the world. It also doesn't say much for the quality of Persian whodunnits.

I'd always imagined the Islamic Republic's all-powerful mullahs must control quite heavily the content of western art its subjects can enjoy, though I suppose if you relied on the works of Agatha Christie for a picture of Britain, you'd probably never want to visit the place for fear of getting bumped off. And I suppose the surprising anti-semitism you encounter in her works must also enjoy a sympathetic audience in Iranian official circles.

Just imagine what would have happened if she had read American Psycho instead.

Creative accounting

2009-05-24T20:00:00.008Z

There is a pleasing symmetry when the great art you encounter runs in sync with the revelation of truths about everyday life. As the whole sordid story of MPs' expenses unravels, I have been thinking about the repeated patterns of accepted norms within groups, that reinforce their own standards of morality, as echoed in art.

In The Reader by Bernard Schlink, which I am currently reading, an illiterate former Nazi death camp guard, Hanna, goes on trial - and seems to feel a greater shame at her inability to read and write than any moral shortcomings over her wartime actions. At the risk of drawing an inappropriate parallel, I did note a Nuremburgesque quality to the MPs own mea culpas: That they hadn't done anything wrong because it was all within the rules; they were just doing what everyone else did. The way all of the "honourable members" have ganged up upon the Speaker of the Commons this week matches exactly the way the co-accused in The Reader make Hanna the scapegoat over the course of the trial. And, of course, in doing so any lingering integrity is diminished in the indecent haste to cast stones.

Similarly the second series of The Wire, the fulcrum of TV cop shows, provides not only another lesson in creating TV greatness, but further examples of the self-defined norms of behaviour and morality justifying actions. The Police Chiefs who block murder investigations if they affect clear up rates, and the drug barons who pull the strings in the ghettos, are both acting rationally within the bounds of the world as they see it. For every action and outcome there is a cost-benefit analysis, but the constraints of the system make attempts to do the right thing compromised before they begin.

This all sounds as if I am saying I accept the world of duck houses, moat cleaning and second home "flipping". Certainly not, but it is a salient lesson as old as society itself, that the privilege of elites creates rot and corruption when cut off from the fresh air of accountability. And as long as it does, let's hope art is on hand to hold up a mirror to its failings.

No expense spared

2009-05-10T19:40:00.003Z

The Daily Telegraph has been enjoying itself this week, watching the government squirm as it teases out revelations about its MPs' expenses. While this is heralded as a great scoop by the Telegraph, it's hardly Woodward and Bernstein - and symptomatic of the decline of investigative journalism. Rather than spend months tracking down a story, it's easier to just pay an insider for a bunch of emails and reprint them more or less verbatim. With little understanding or context provided for any of the expenses claims, it's the easiest, laziest way of generating a salacious story - but one that is, of course, ultimately of parliament's own making.

The risk here is of losing sight of why we have such systems, as much of the embarrassment relates to the provision and furnishing of MPs' second homes. No-one seems to have bothered to say that it is very important MPs should have accommodation in London, payed out of taxation, in order to allow them to do their duty. A return to Rotten Boroughs is the implication of any other system. So clearly there must be a middle ground - a way of providing for anyone to perform the duty of MP regardless of income, while eliminating the sort of expenses claims that makes Enron look like a model of probity. And I think I have discovered it.

The Palace of Westminster, to give both houses of Parliament their formal name, is a pretty large place. Large enough for 13 bars, countless committee rooms, expansive reception chambers and offices. So why not build a block of one bedroom apartments for all MPs whose constituencies are beyond greater London? This would both ensure that all MPs could have room and board to be able to perform their duties, they would be close enough to attend all the late sittings they so vigorously whine about, and miss out on a tiresome commute during the day. If I were feeling generous, I'd throw in a gym and canteen - it would certainly be cheaper than paying for fixing dry rot, private security patrols or second lavatory seats. The Palace itself is well protected, so there would be no question of added security risk.

If MPs weren't satisfied with this, of course, they'd be perfectly entitled to rent their own accommodation off-site, out of their salary. Indeed, since they would have been given Westminster accommodation, they could use their salary to pay for their normal house back in the constituency they represent, thereby getting around the problem of "flipping" benefits from their London house to their constituency house that has been widely reported. Of course the career of an MP can be risky, and for those unable to secure a mortgage on a constituency home would be entitled to receive a government mortgage to cover the cost, and even give a grace period for a "bridging loan" to allow them time to find a new job, should they be unfortunate to be voted out of office.

If you ask any MP why they chose to run for office, the stock answer is that they want to make a contribution to society. With my system we'd be able to test if this were true, and not the other way around.

It grows on trees

2009-05-07T12:47:00.002Z

Despite the spectre of "efficiency savings" (or cuts as they used to be known), there is a certain schadenfreude, not to say smugness, within the public sector about how prudent and wise they have been in managing their budgets (Icelandic savings accounts notwithstanding) - in direct contrast with the UK banking industry.

In this week's Municipal Journal, Mike Suarez, Director of Finance at Lambeth Borough Council, in London, wrote: "We haven't had to take hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to bail us out just to be solvent".

Hate to burst your bubble, Mike, but where do you think it comes from? Surely that's exactly what keeps you in the black?