Nick Abbot2013-05-23T11:12:05-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=nick-abbotCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Nick AbbotGood old fashioned elbow grease.We'll Have A Gay Old Timetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33123812013-05-21T10:02:46-04:002013-05-22T07:51:21-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
"Rather overcast and a bit cold" is, coincidentally, the exact phrase that could be utilised to describe the faces on the Conservative back benches. You could also use the description swivelled of eye and loony-like in appearance, but that might get you into trouble with the swivel eyed loonies.
The pinched faced protagonists of the right have been banging on about marriage as though the institution belonged to them. We must save it, they yell. We must protect that uncorrupted, rock solid institution from the hordes of Satan which wish to ruin it, they say. Marriage will never be the same again, is their position.
This can not be the same marriage that results in failure a full fifty per cent of the time. The one that begins "'Till death us do part, or until someone hotter comes along". Not that marriage surely, because to the casual observer it appears as though marriage, as they describe it - unsullied and perfect in every respect - has already been ruined by the people who have tried it. If one in two marriages fail, exactly what are they so keen to maintain? If anything else had a failure rate that high it would get crushed, or shot, or cancelled.
The argument is that the blessed arrangement will never be the same again if those filthy perverts were to be allowed to take part in it. Not that they actually would use a phrase like that, or if they did would quickly follow it up with "of course, some of my best friends are filthy perverts". It is not about discrimination, they are keen to point out, it is about tradition.
The truth is that traditional marriage will remain the same for anyone who takes part in it. For some it will mean love, for others duty, or expedience, or a way to riches, or sex, or a means to get out of the parents' house, or any other of the myriad reasons that two people get hitched. The institution will not collapse, and nor will society, just as the emancipation of women, the freeing of slaves and the existence of Channel Four has not brought forth the ruination of this great nation, despite what the naysayers predicted.
Overwhelmingly, gay marriage is a old issue, by which I mean that old people make up the vast majority of those fulminating against it. The younger the demographic, the less bothered they are. It is quite hard to see what all the fuss is about if you are in your teens or twenties. These are the very people that a political party needs to assimilate into its ranks. It is this knowledge that is driving David Cameron. He knows that if a party does not modernise, it will die out as its ageing adherents expire. It is a political cul-de-sac to only seek to appease those who wish to party like it's 1949. And don't use that phrase "cul-de-sac" to them, as it looks like some nasty foreign French thing and they don't much care for them either.
It is slightly bemusing that Cameron has chosen this issue with which to announce to the nation's youth that the Tories are not the nasty party after all. What is the difference between being civil partnered and being married, except that the latter is easier to say? It is also quite amusing to watch the right tie itself into knots trying to avoid stating the obvious reason that they disagree with gay marriage, which is that they don't like gays, or the concept of being gay or the hijacking of a perfectly good word that used to apply to being Fred Astaire, not being led astray.
Despite their protestations, marriage will survive any expansion of those allowed to take part in it. If gay marriage becomes law, heterosexuals will notice no difference to their experience of it whatsoever. The furious Canutes who wish to stem the tide of time will switch to some other outrage that will exercise them and keep their blood simmering, like sweets not being like they used to be, or people not wearing hats in public or the absence of pocket squares.
When you get down to it, it is the same people of the same anti-gay persuasion as always stick their necks in when any talk of equality is heard. Quite often, it is those that shout the loudest that are subsequently found to be employing rent boys on the quiet, or abusing small boys in their care. I could list the sins of the incandescently anti-gay Catholic Church in that regard but I don't have the time and there's not enough space on the internet.
It looks rather like an objection that two men or two women (not so much the latter) would have sex together. If the intention of the right is to lessen the incidence of gay sex, then you would have thought they would be all for gay union, for there is not much else that crushes the desire to fornicate quite like being married.
In years to come I predict that all these objections will seem quite silly. I predict the mongers of doom to be wrong. I also predict that The Mongers Of Doom would make a brilliant name for a rock band.]]>Things You Thought You Would Never Seetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32512002013-05-10T06:09:18-04:002013-05-15T08:34:25-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/Things you thought you would never see Number One: The managers of a company actually losing money when the business they are running does badly.
This is known as the Banker's Paradox, wherein nothing that the management of a bank do, no matter how cack-handed and idiotic they are, no matter how little they understand of what their bank is doing and how crooked, underhand and devious they may be, has any effect on their remuneration at all, at least in a downward direction. Chief executive officers of major corporations continue to pay themselves as though they had invented money whether the company they are running hits heights never before imagined or sails serenely off a financial cliff to be smashed into little bits.
In normal circumstances, literally no amount of ineffectual cretinism on the part of those running an organisation would result in those individuals actually earning less. Bonuses are not paid for excellence in such positions, they are paid as away to maximise income without it appearing as though they are receiving that much. If, as a shareholder, you are told that the boss earns £200,000 a year, you might think: fair enough. That figure will, however, hide the truth that for simply showing up he will be paid pension top ups and bonuses and share options and so on. This will all be buried in indecipherable small print to make it seem as though management is getting less while ensuring that they get more, no matter how the business does.
It is quite surprising then, to learn of the nice people that run Morrisons supermarket - their slogan: "We're not as evil as Tescos" (I made that up). Their head of remuneration said that it is appropriate, given Morrisons drop in sales and profits that the chief executive should receive less money than last year. You read that right: less money. Not just a little less either. Even if Bozo The Mayor would call it chickenfeed, I am sure that Dalton Philips, Morrisons monger-in-chief would have noticed that his pay was shaved by a percentage amount that I am unable to calculate as I have forgotten the formula. In actual pounds, his salary went from £1.78m to £1.09m. I do know that drop is more than their 7.2% fall in pre-tax profits. Even I can figure that out.
Morrisons remuneration committee has also tightened its pay policy for the year ahead. New targets that are tougher than those set before will concentrate the minds of those at the top as they mean that management pay will be linked inextricably to company performance. How refreshing. It almost makes one want to shop there, if it were not for fear of bumping into professional Northern cheery chaps, those Captain Blandtastics: Ant and Dec.
Things you thought you would never see Number Two: Alex Ferguson in the House of Lords.
The world of football is stunned at the news that a man in his 90's (must check that) has decided that a life of screaming at referees and swearing at linesmen is no longer for him. Who could have seen that coming? It is literally shocking to learn that a manager puce of face and fiery of temperament should throw in the towel while still this side of a heart attack. Officials of the game will just have to get by without his furious purple ranting at decisions that didn't go his way and the piece of grass in front of his dug out will now flourish afresh, being less burdened with discarded mounds of frantically chewed gum.
In the rush to pour praise on him, there has been suggestions that "Sralex" be elevated to the House of Lords. What nonsense. There's no one in there that is remotely like him. There is no precedent of someone such as Ferguson to be installed in that place. There is no Lord of his ilk for him to sit alongside. Can you think of another shouty, rich, working class, finger jabbing, self made, crimson faced, charm vacuum with a chip on his shoulder the size of the QE2, who is famous for his temper, appears not to be a very nice person and is on telly a lot. Nope, me neither.
Things you thought you would never see Number Three: An MP refusing to pay back the profit made on their homes on which the public paid the mortgage payments.
Just kidding - that's EXACTLY what you would expect. What is surprising is that some actually made not a squeak when asked to cough up the money. MPs owe about half a million pounds to the state, which is to say - us. Seventy MPs have returned the money, which is only right as without us paying their mortgages, they wouldn't have got it in the first place. Among the Cabinet members are Welsh Secretary David Jones who returned £81,446, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond who gave back £34,883 and Kenneth Clarke who gave back £737. Seven hundred and thirty-seven pounds? Where was his house? Hull? How can you make only £737 profit on a house that is fit for a minister to live in? A property expert he is not. He is a minister without portfolio, let's hope they don't give him Housing.
There are refuseniks though, for example one Tory MP is holding on to the £54,000 he made off our backs, presumably as he has already earmarked it for comics and sweets or a first class ticket to Hell. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority will now sue him for it. They will do this using our money, and he will resist their advances to get our money back by using our money. Those gaining, whatever the outcome, will be those representatives of the majesty that is British law.
Things you thought you would never see Number Four: Lawyers losing. And you never will.]]>The Fruitcakes Have Taken Over The Counciltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32190512013-05-05T10:53:42-04:002013-05-06T11:20:32-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
The man off the internet hit "Just who the Hell do you think you people are?" has barged his way into the political Champions League by telling some people what they want to hear VERY LOUDLY INDEED.
On the television news his acolytes were interviewed as they emerged from the voting booth. The quivering soft southern reporter types wanted to know why the lumpen, nylon shod proles in front of them had done something as mad as vote for a party that sounds like a chair from Ikea and each said the same: "I'm not being funny but..." And they weren't.
Any statement of belief that begins with an apology is not going to look edifying in close up and in high definition. "I'm not being racist but...I'm not being homophobic but..." The way it was packaged on the news was classic lefty, liberal, superior snorting at "ordinary hard working people" (copyright D. Cameron) that the intelligentsia can't quite believe exist in such numbers as to give UKIP such a stonking day at the ballot box.
These are people that feel as though they are not being attended to by the Westminster elite. These are the people that at the last general election did not vote for the usual suspects because:
A) they couldn't be bothered
B) it was raining, or
C) they didn't believe anything that the honed and smoothed out, plastic puppets of the main parties said and couldn't tell the difference between them anyway.
What they needed was an anti-hero. Someone who looked just like them and could articulate their vague and unformed fears into something with focus, something they could think: yeah, that's it...it's THEIR fault. Step forward the bellowing gas bag that is the leader of the party that the establishment hopes will be as much of a flash in the pan as the last lot who did about as well and faded soon after.
The Green party were the previous ray of light in the vista of dull despond that is British politics. At the last local elections they did about as well as UKIP did this week: a brace of MEPs and local council seats in numbers that about matched those won by UKIP. Where are they now, this party of difference and protest? All but invisible. Their success was pretty invisible in the press at the time too. The political mainstream is not afraid of some hippy in a beanie but it does fear a populist espouser of the prejudices and fears of the man in the High Street. The Greens also didn't make as much of a splash as Nigel Farage's party, partly because they didn't shout as loudly.
The vote for "none of the above" moved on. The hope that there existed a party of change probably went to the Liberal Democrats and their current fortunes are...what's the word?...unfortunate. And so it goes. Next!
Even though these were local council elections, they were not decided on local reasons. It was the protest vote about national issues that won them the vote. Some UKIP candidates were not the type you would want to run a whelk stand. Some were practically invisible to the electorate but won anyway.
In Dorset, UKIP's first ever councillor did no doorstepping, appeared on no leaflets, did not own a UKIP rosette and only agreed to stand three weeks before the vote. What exactly was it about this man that propelled him to win? Was it his detailed and costed plans for local amenities, his rousing speeches, his winning personality? Obviously none of these things if he did not even participate in the campaign. He won because he was representing the "I'm not being funny but they come over here and take our jobs" brigade. Local issues had nothing to do with it.
The route to electoral success Ukip used was to paint the picture of imaginary or exaggerated problems and depict themselves as the only party to fix them. The EU drains the country of £53m a day, said their manifesto. Throwing around huge figures without any context is a guaranteed way to rally the irate. The fact is that it is not £53m a day. With the various rebates and subsidies and regeneration projects it amounts to "only" £19m a day. That is still a lot of money but only if it does not result in the country earning it all back, and then some, in trade and benefits from membership of one of the major world trading blocks. If you spend £5 a day to get to work but earn £100 a day, then it is not £5 down the drain, it is an investment that pays dividends. The government, by the way, spends about £2billion a day. Nineteen million is, as Boris Johnson would say, chickenfeed, especially if by spending it we bring more back in.
Every CEO of every FTSE100 company who has expressed a preference has said it would be detrimental to leave the EU. The banking racketeers are positively panicking at the very thought and that, sadly, is where we get most of our income from. It is a pretty impressive display of unjustified self belief for anyone with no knowledge of international finance and trade to think that they are all wrong. UKIP's voters have that self belief.
The second page of the UKIP manifesto is all about them coming over here...etc. There could be 425,000 people coming over from Romania and Bulgaria, it states. Well, it could also be 42 million, or it could be zero. It is a complete guess. Migration Watch, an organisation that is traditionally not exactly pro immigration guesses that it will be a tenth of the figure that UKIP pulls out of the air.
What of health tourism? The UKIP manifesto claims that this is a deadly drain on resources. In reality, if anything, it amounts to about 0.01% of NHS spending and most of those treated are people that have come here to work, to do the jobs we don't want to. What are hospitals to do? Pile them up in the car park to slowly die because they were born in Warsaw, not Wigan?
There is the "I'm gonna..." list of promises too. All parties have an "I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that " list and they are all pretty much alike: more money, less tax, better roads, more doctors, more buses, free parking and jelly and custard for tea. The thing that unites the promises of all parties is that they can't possibly afford them. UKIP's position is that through savings and efficiency it will make all these things come to pass (not the jelly and custard part). If that is an accurate calculation then I'm a banana.
When someone new peddles the same old mendacities the temptation is to believe them, where you would not believe those who have disappointed you before. If UKIP's followers are expecting not be disappointed by their party's promises, that just shows the primacy of hope over experience. It's quite touching really.
If a foghorn with a mouth like a disused cemetery, all collapsed tomb stone teeth, wins 25% of the vote in the next general election it will truly be an astonishing achievement. To get that many people to believe that he is the man to lead the nation because he talks like the chap down the pub, the bloke who speaks his mind and he doesn't care who hears him, would be stunning indeed. No-one believes it will happen, including Farage, I suspect.
It is classic fed-up-with-it, recession era, mid term blues. Labour and Conservatives will be fighting it out amongst themselves at the next election, as usual. UKIP will be a satellite at best, pulling the various parties towards their policies as the moon pulls our planet but not veering into its orbit as they are the bigger bodies. Be not afraid Dave and Ed. The game is still yours.
And I'm not being funny but who wants their country to be led by a man called Nigel?]]>It's All No Change at the Toptag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31769002013-04-29T06:39:01-04:002013-04-29T09:22:04-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
The events of all those months ago (twelve) were precipitated by the justified outrage of "ordinary hard working people" (copyright D. Cameron) to the vast amounts of unearned money with which the nation's top business people were showering themselves.
Remuneration committees are stuffed with the exact same people that benefit form the largesse of remuneration committees. The committee members ruling on the rewards to be doled out to one fat feline, will themselves be sitting up on their hind legs and mewling for the same treatment from the committee ruling on their own remuneration. It is in their interests to keep the wage and benefits package of the top nobs expanding like their waistlines because it will set an example that they will cite when writing the terms and conditions into their own contracts. It is the Monopoly version of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours - except those aren't plastic houses they are playing for and that's real money.
The Shareholder Spring of 2012 was supposed to address all that. It was not so much an address, however, it was more like a barely audible murmur from the back of the AGM, a mild rumpus from the cheap seats which was given all the respect that small shareholders in gigantic corporations are normally accorded: none.
A few of the management glitterati were moved aside. They will have to suffer the indignity of spending the rest of their days earning the same amount doing an equally average job for other companies, or as consultants and advisers, doing not much for similar amounts. In the worst case scenario, they might even have to retire at a very young age and eke out their time trying to remember all the accounts in which they have stashed all their money. The companies they ran will just have to get by without the expert guidance that led to their shareholders having a cow in the first place.
The truth is that shareholders would not mind their chief executives paying themselves in cheques the size of a bath towels if the company was paying the shareholders well. If the people who actually own the company were getting their due then what would they care if those running it were sleeping on solid gold mattresses and wiping their bottoms with fivers? It is because the poor dopes who bought into the companies were not getting their dues for their investment that they became so angry. They realised that the reason their stock was not working for them was because the men (mostly men) who were steering the ship were pointing the vessel at the rocks and congratulating themselves on a job well done because they hadn't sunk YET.
The shareholder revolt should have led to a sea change in the way pay is doled out at the top. The drugs company Astra - Zeneca, for instance, lost its chief exec in the shareholder uprising. His replacement will have to just put up with receiving only £6.5m in his first three months. I am not making that up.
Golden "hellos" they call them. They sound like what's on the menu at an illegal lap dancing club but are twice the fun, last a lot longer and don't make you sticky. Golden "hellos" are followed by platinum "how are yous" and diamond encrusted "goodbyes". When such insanity is questioned by outsiders the reaction is one of incomprehension. Those who appear to win the lottery every month are surrounded by people just like them. It is normal where they live and that class of people will fight with everything at their disposal (a lot) to make sure that it remains that way.
The real problem with any shareholder uprising against the undeserved meteoric rise in boardroom pay is that most shareholders couldn't care less what the people at the top pay themselves. Big institutional investors don't want to drive down executive rewards because they are also executives who want to get rewarded. If pay goes down for one, a precedence is set and it just may go down for all. No wonder nothing has happened. Hedge funders aren't bothered either because in all likelihood they won't own the shares for long enough for management pay to make a difference. What do you care if the head of a company commutes to work on a flying carpet made of angels wings if you will only own the shares in that company for six seconds?
The sense of business as usual is everywhere. The bank UBS paid its CEO almost $9m last year and gave its new investment bank chief a £26m kiss on the cheeks as they were firing 10,000 staff.
Banks in general shed staff last year but paid more out in wages. You don't need to be an expert in economics to figure out the trend. Two thirds of banks increased the amount they paid their staff. They didn't make more money as businesses, they just took more for themselves. Profits down, pay up. The banks own preferred yardstick, which measures staff expenses against revenue was up in 18 of the 35 banks that Reuters investigated.
There is a redoubtable lady called Joan Woolard who last year was unable to pay for flowers for her husband's funeral because her bank, Barclays, cancelled her jointly held credit card without warning, following his death. Her complaints were dismissed by the "Go-To" bank, so she bought ten pounds of shares and travelled from Lincolnshire to Go-To tell Barclays what she thought of them in honest, earthy, rural language. She gave Bob Diamond a piece of her mind. Who has not wanted to do that at some point in the past year?
This year, our heroine returned to Barclays' AGM to explain to the board that they are, and I quote: "greedy bastards". Why have no bankers been jailed, she asked, why are they still dishing out seven figure pay packages to themselves when she can live quite reasonably on £726 a month? How can they sleep at night, she wondered aloud.
I imagine the answer is "just fine thanks", on their Irish linen covered, artisanally hand made beds in their soundproof and air conditioned master bedroom suites, in the better end of Chelsea. And as for £726 a month, they must have thought that she said £726 for lunch. That they can understand.
The new Barclays chairman is Sir David Walker. Isn't it always a "Sir" ? Where are they getting them all from? Is there a machine in a bunker somewhere that's stamping them out like toy soldiers? Sir David listened politely and gave the answer that we all wanted to hear. He said he agreed that Barclays overpaid in the past and that it is "not going there again".
In other news, Barclays has just paid 428 of its staff over a million pounds each and given a happy hi-how-are-you to its new chief executive that includes a £1.1m salary, a possible £2.75m bonus and a £4.4m incentive package. Shall we assume that the "possible" comes to pass?
Apart from the obvious, the main difference between the Shareholder Spring and the Arab Spring after which it was named, is that the Arab Spring actually made a difference.]]>City Boys Can Stick It Up Their Hooterstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31375262013-04-24T19:00:00-04:002013-04-25T04:56:47-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
But it is not any old nut, this is Professor David John Nutt who has more letters after his name than you'll find in a Scrabble bag. At the Imperial College London he is the professor of neuropsychopharmacology, a word so big that it just killed my spell checker. This indicates that he is a man of knowledge, someone whose opinion is to be valued, a person due respect, but not if you are one of the fourth estate's finest and you see that the fella is called Nutt. Even QPR could score in front of a goal that open.
His opinion is also to be dismissed by politicians if he says anything about drugs, which is odd as he was appointed the government's drugs expert-in-chief to do exactly that. Perhaps he misunderstood the rules of the game which are:
1. Do not say anything that the government has not already said before, and
2. DO NOT SAY ANYTHING THAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS NOT ALREADY SAID BEFORE!
They fired him because, as he says "I gave a lecture on the assessment of drug harms and how these relate to the legislation controlling drugs. According to Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, some contents of this lecture meant I had crossed the line from science to policy and so he sacked me. I do not know which comments were beyond the line or, indeed, where the line was."
Silly Nutt - the line was wherever the home secretary of the day had been told to draw it to gain maximum political advantage to the prime minister of the day. His job description was really that of one of those back shelf puppy car ornaments: stay quiet and keep nodding.
The former drugs czar said an awful lot of things that were received by his masters as though he had delivered unto them a brim full doggy bag of doggy do. "Drug harm can be equal to harms in other parts of life. There is not much difference between horse-riding and ecstasy.", he said. That may be statistically true but on no account should you attempt to ride a horse while IT is on ecstasy. The laws on marijuana are a bit silly, he said ( I am paraphrasing) and lately he indicated there is a component of magic mushrooms which may have a beneficial effect on the treatment of depression, but who can tell because the government has set its face against any such study. The newspapers love this sort of stuff and fill the spaces between the adverts for maximum strength lager and deep fried salted snacky-bombs with copy about how awful and dangerous a man this is. He's a nutt. See? Too easy.
Professor Nutt's latest pronouncement goes beyond all that, past the territory already accepted by governments more enlightened, less conservative and desperate to appease the Daily Mail. The most recent issue from his office goes right to the heart of why we are in the soup.
The soup of the day is catastrophe because too many bankers were taking too much cocaine, said Professor David John Nutt FRCP FRCPsych FMedSci and he is absolutely WAY OFF there, apart from quite possibly being completely correct in every respect. Let's look at the evidence and compare what we know of the ways of the City boys, that we have hitched the fortunes of our country to, and how their behaviour resembles that of your average consumer of the magic bogey dust.
Cocaine makes you: loud, arrogant and aggressive. It makes you feel impervious and imperious. It increases the engagement in risky behaviour, makes you feel on top of the world, energised and bullet proof. It also turns you into the most overly confidant, colossal, shouty bore. Ring any bells? It is also reassuringly expensive and is termed the champagne of drugs. Sounds right up their private, gated street.
Cocaine is a "more" drug - the more you have, the more you want, like money, and for a while there, cocaine made our dear friends in the banking rackets take greater and greater risks that made them bigger and bigger piles of money, which they used to buy larger and larger piles of the star-spangled powder. Quite a tight little reassuring circle there. And they were all having so much fun, until the smoke cleared and they saw they were standing in mid air and not on solid ground, like the Roadrunner in a Warner Brothers cartoon.
Of course, there is absolutely no proof of this and it is just another Nutty theory to be swept aside as "the time for banker bashing is over" and the government peddles furiously to re-integrate their close personal friends, the financial finaglers, into our hearts and restore them to the pedestal they so firmly believe is their rightful position. How embarrassing it would be if there actually was some evidence that the reason the Square Mile fell on its face was because it had been up for twenty years straight shoving the Inca glitter up their hooters.
There is actually no evidence of such a thing whatsoever, unless you count the current clamp down by the City of London officials who are introducing new licensing rules to attempt to drive out drug taking and dealing and the violence that accompanies it from the clubs and bars in that area. Under freshly minted regulations, hundreds of bars and clubs used by City bankers and traders must sign up to a code of practice as of this month. It recommends that bar staff swab lavatories and that any flat surfaces be removed to stop them chopping out lines of the devil's dandruff. I am not making this up.
This was the same area, the same glorious square mile that in 2011 shut down a "cocktail and cocaine club" that passed on the powder with a round of, presumably, suspiciously expensive drinks. When police swooped, they found £7,500 of cocaine wrapped and ready to go. Officers said the majority of members were professional City people buzzed in via a video entry-phone.
So, when you survey the wreckage of our once prosperous nation, just remember where all your money went - up some pin striped, be-braced, supercilious, clamorous and conceited man's proboscis.]]>We Should All Be a Little More Like Iaintag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30329442013-04-07T11:03:54-04:002013-04-08T09:06:07-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
I..D.S. is:
a) a medical condition characterised by being bloated and full of hot air
b) the Work and Pensions Secretary, or
c) all of the above.
Iain Duncan Smith was riled to be "ambushed" on a radio programmed (not guilty) and challenged to survive on the £53 a week that a benefit claimant said he had to subsist on. It was not really an ambush as such - Iain's job is being a politician, and so talking to people who might not agree with his every utterance and who might have issues with his policies and the direction the government is taking is, sort of, his job and deliberately going on a radio programme to talk about benefit scroungers does rather leave one open to that sort of thing. It was an ambush in the same way that teachers are ambushed in their classrooms daily by all those pesky children they have to instruct.
The man with three names seemed rather put out though, and communicated this fact by getting all sweary. He would take "no bloody lessons" form those calling for him to live on £53 a week, he said, because he had "been there, done that". He claimed to have been "on the breadline" a full two times in his life to this point. He did not mean that he has queued for a baguette in Fortnums.
He first encountered the anguish of inactivity on exiting the army. He had no education, training or skills to fall back on, apart from the excellent schooling he had received, the thorough training he completed at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the heavy goods vehicle driving licence he had acquired on leaving. Truly a moribund circumstance.
I.D.S rammed home the point about his brief but perilous position by claiming that, unlike the undeserving feckless that the coalition has its sights on, he did not receive a remittance from the state. "I didn't claim unemployment benefit - I lived off the savings I had", he said, which is perhaps a little too much information if you are trying to plead experience of being poor, as one can not be in possession of "savings" and be on the "breadline" at the same time.
The Work and Pensions Secretary offered another example of his connection to the common man and why shirkers should not be accommodated. He said that later on in life, when he had worked his way up, he was made redundant and had to start all over again from scratch. This was the period after he had married. This was the period after he had married into the aristocratic Freemantle family by wedding the daughter of Commander John Tapling Fremantle, 5th Baron Cottesloe, 5th Baron Fremantle, DL JP RN, the High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire and Justice of the Peace. That is the "scratch" he was having to work up from. His wife's Eton educated father and his Eton educated father before him are the very same Cottesloes that have an entire theatre named in their honour on London's South Bank. What a pitiful position to find himself in. How utterly hopeless were his prospects.
Despite this cruel hand that fate had dealt him, our doughty hero "looked up the stock market yearbook" and wrote blind letters to people, one of which got him his job. "Every bloody day I had to look for work", he said, which may have been how one talks in the army but not what you might expect from a man at the heart of government in a respectable country. He said it to the Daily Mail. Its readers may have had to reach for a hanky.
As if to underline his tumescent ire, he said he faced the grinding, dragging, sinking despond of long term unemployment and hopelessness when he went without work for a full three months. He said "the honest truth is that I don't need any lessons from these people". Sounds a bit haughty and superior, that - "these people" - rather sounds like he is scraping them off the bottom of his custom hand made leather shoes. Perhaps that is just how it looks in print. You can lose the nuance when it is written down. He added that he has worked hard all his life and "nobody has given me a penny".
Well, that is not entirely true - we the people give him 13,400,000 of them every year, with another ten million or so in expenses. But he would counter that he has earned them all. Quite right. Iain Duncan Smith has got to the lofty position he holds today with no outside help or assistance of any kind and that is proof that everyone could do the same, if only they would apply themselves. Rich and successful people almost always feel that way. They will not countenance that luck had anything to do with it. They all achieved their pre-eminence through their own toil and innate genius.
The squirmingly uncomfortable truth, however, is that almost everyone who has made it got to where they are by chance. They were lucky enough to have been born healthy, for a start. Born to parents that care, who value education and sent to schools that do the same, to sit in classrooms that were not disrupted by the unstable, to live in homes that were heated, to be fed and clothed, to be loved.
They got where the are by being lucky enough to know someone who knew someone who could help, put in a good word, grease the wheels. The were lucky to have seen an advert for a position, to have hit it off with the interviewer who was having a good day, to be the right person in the right place at the right time.
If a successful person charts their rise as a series of circumstances, it is quite likely that the majority of instances when they progressed will have elements of luck about them. But luck does not fall equally and the fortunate like to flatter themselves that it does and that the difference between them and someone who is less successful is that that person lacks application, they are a slacker and they deserve no sympathy.
The newspapers revealed that the man who started this rumpus, the market trader who challenged Iain Duncan Smith to live on the £53 a week that he had to, actually earns a whopping £150 a week. That is a full £7,800 a year. Why is he moaning? All he will have to do is work every day for 128 years, while not spending a penny in all that time and he will become a millionaire, just like Iain.]]>Give Peace A Chance - Take Up Golftag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29884392013-03-31T09:59:20-04:002013-04-01T13:19:40-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
He recently visited his glorious amassed North Korean troops (6) on the border with South Korea. Kim Rong-un was pictured among his loyal servants with a pair of binoculars round his neck, which he used to locate the food tent.
Ms Kim as been on edge since the passing of his father, who was a hard act to follow. Kim Jong-il was the supreme leader of North Korea from 1994 to 2011. Seventeen wonderful years of the freedom from electricity and the right to eat mud for breakfast, led the people of North Korea to revere the man so much that they actually promoted him on his death. I am not making that up. He was variously The Dear Leader, President, Supreme Commander, Marshall, Chairman, Great Leader and Generalissimo. Since he is no longer Kim Jong-il (he is Kim Jong-ded) he is now The Eternal Leader, Eternal Chairman of the National Defence of Commission and Eternal General Secretary, Worker's Party of Korea. He is the secretary for ever but he does not take dictation and, being dead, his typing skills are, at best, rudimentary. Worst secretary ever.
By contrast, Kim Rong-un's only military title was of Daejang, which sounds like a tea. Now he is the leader, however, he has set about earning the respect of the military by hard work and industrious endeavour. And just in case, he had about 200 potential rivals shot. You can't be too careful.
Since his pater's passing to the great internment camp in the sky, Lil' Kim has been trying to prove to the world that the crazy did not die with his father. He has set about building rockets and bombs and other things that look like penises to allay fears that he is deficient in the pantaloonies. He has, however, not impressed in the brain department.
Pictured in the War Room, with the Big Board behind him, state news media announced that Kim had signed the plan on technical preparations of strategic rockets, ordering them to be on standby so that they may strike at the US at any time. If only there was some indication of where those strikes would come. If only there was a way to divine which targets Kim had in mind.
Of course, military secrecy being what it is, there is no way of knowing their plans unless you look at the picture released with this bellicose statement, for there, on the wall, was the map showing where the rockets would lift off from and dotted lines drawn, as though part of a school project, to show the exact trajectory and the points of intended impact: Washington DC, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. Why the latter is included, only Kim knows. Perhaps that is the birthplace of the man who gave him his last haircut. If I came out of the barbers looking that, I'd want to take out the whole town too.
Just in case the world missed these vital clues, the state media announced that the undemocratic Democratic People's Republic of Korea (UDPRK) will also target South Korea, Hawaii and Guam. The citizens of these places should not be afraid. Well, South Koreans should paint their windows white and invest in a table to hide under perhaps, but not the other two. Nor should the residents of the listed cities on the American mainland cancel their summer barbecues. The rockets that the UDPRK have built are notoriously unreliable and seldom hit their target. If they are aimed at Washington, then the people in North Carolina might want to take shelter but those on Guam can rest easy. Guam is so tiny they couldn't hit it if they were sitting on it.
The people who should take care though, are the ten vacationers who have decided to go on a golfing holiday to North Korea. I am not making that up either. You might wonder why such a poor country would promote a rich man's pursuit in a place where the residents do not even have light bulbs with which to see the food that is not on their plates, but that is because you are a stranger to the intricacies of the glorious game.
In a domain of crippling rules about every tiny detail of its citizens' lives, what more perfect pass-time should there be to advocate than one that has more regulations than the Health and Safety Office of the Building Department of the European Union. They even have rules about whether you can untuck your shirt in a heat wave - not in North Korea, in golf.
Kim Rong-un's father was a dab hand with the stick. He shot a 38 under par on his very first try, including an impressive eleven holes in one. He marked his own card to prove it. He then instantly retired from the game having mastered it in one afternoon. Truly inspiring.
Perhaps the downtrodden people of the dingier half of the Korean Peninsular should take up golf in order to join the Drear Leader in honouring his father's memory. They should do themselves a favour and play a round with Lil' Fat Kim himself. It might cheer them up and improve their prospects no end. A nine iron to the back of his haircut should do it.]]>The Press Don't Want Freedom of Speechtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29475282013-03-25T07:45:59-04:002013-03-25T15:05:21-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
This is a mistake. Not their first. Their first mistake was to ruin the lives of the benign for personal profit. When they hopped into saunas to report on the doings of people you have never heard of, to increase their circulation and make more money, they may have amused us - we love a bit of light torture, as long as it does not involve ourselves - but they did not inveigle their way into our hearts.
Just because we buy the stuff does not mean that we feel warmly about the people who bring it to us. I'm not sure the press quite get that. They assume that because something sells that the purchasers are positively disposed to the mongers. People may buy pornography, for instance, but they don't want to hang out with the man who sold it to them and wouldn't be overly put out if he was prosecuted when they'd gone.
If you are the school bully, you may be accorded superficial respect, your company may be sought out by those less strong and brutish than you, but do they like you? Not far below the surface, your acolytes probably yearn for your demise. It is a bit rich for some of the most powerful and amoral organisations on earth to go pleading for clemency to a public that has been given a daily diet of evidence that they do not either need nor deserve their support.
The revelations about their behaviour have opened up a virtually bottomless well of indifference to their fate. Try starting a conversation about press freedoms in a pub and see how far you get. After ten seconds of silence the subject will have moved to football, or handbags, or the price of beer. Probably the price of beer. Try starting a conversation about press freedoms on a radio talk show and you will be talking to yourself for an hour. Believe me, I've tried many times and the public do not care.
The evidence that the people are out of love with the press is there in the numbers. The statistics come out every month. For as far as anyone can recall, the readership numbers across all papers does not exactly match the increase in population. The number of people living in Britain is rising quite steeply. Plot it on a graph and it is a steady line from bottom left to top right. Place the line of people who buy newspapers over it and it forms a perfect cross, like a great big "NO". Papers are losing, on average, about ten percent of their readers every year. Some fare much worse. The industry carries on as though that is not happening, as though they are still as dominant and authoritarian a part of our lives as they were in the seventies, when they would ruin any life they chose just for amusement.
However, none of that is the really bizarre aspect of this plea for clemency, this furious chaffing at any kind of rule of behaviour. The very odd part of this whole issue is that the press are not interested in freedom of speech at all. They have actively campaigned against it at every turn.
Barely a week goes by when someone says something they don't like and they want that person silenced. When a preacher delivers a lecture they disapprove of, they call for him to be deported. When a comedian jokes about a subject they feign to find unacceptable, they want him banned. When a television or radio presenter is chastised for transgressing rules to which the papers are not and never will be subject, do they rush to his defence, do they call for freedom of speech? They do not. They revel in his misfortune, they report on how disgusting an individual this is and they want him fined and they want the station taken off the air. When Channel Four does...anything, they call for the revocation of its licence and the sacking of its bosses. Remove this filth from our living rooms, they say. Ban it, they say. I have looked it up and that does not really match the dictionary definition of "free speech".
The truth is that the press are only interested in a very restricted type of free speech, which is for them to have the right to say and do what they want without consequence. They appear to be so wrapped up in the notion that they are doing good to have completely missed the fact that, much of the time, they are doing just the opposite. They may not have noticed, but we have.
We have noticed that when it comes to free speech, what they are really demanding is freedom of speech for themselves and people who think just like them, and the restriction, or proscription of anyone who does not. If that is the freedom of speech they are after, I am not sure it is worth fighting for.]]>Will the Last One Out of the Country Please Blow Out the Candlestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29443932013-03-24T11:57:34-04:002013-03-26T08:32:01-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/reportedly did was warn his close friends of the impending doom, so that they could make haste to spirit their most precious belonging - money - out of the country before the IMF could nab a chunk of it.
The Italian media, those parts that are not detailing the various shenanigans of their own ex-leader, reported that four and a half billion Euros were taken from Cyprus's banks with a few frenetic mouse clicks before the wall came down and the European Central Bank started to treat those deposits as their own. The ban on moving money abroad came after those in the know availed themselves of all the services that no-questions-asked internet banking can provide.
Ordinary Cypriots queued forlornly at cash machines to take out what they could but, as is the way with the finance racket, forewarned is forearmed. It's just that forewarning is reserved for the haves, not the have nots. It is like insider trading, which is what makes the world go round for those that can afford the ticket to the carousel.
That sort of thing could never happen in this country, though. Our banks are as safe as houses. No, something stronger: our banks are as safe as...banks. Do not be afraid citizens of Britain, your cash is safe. That is the message from the banks and the government. Simply deposit your wages and your savings with us and we will treat your money with the good practice and deference for which the City of London is famous, they say. Then they will mumble something about terms and conditions that you can barely hear and that if you read you would not understand. Still, I am sure they are right. Nothing as third world as a banking collapse could ever happen in jolly old Blighty. I mean, that would be as far fetched as us running out of gas.
In other news, we are running out of gas. Due to the entirely unexpected cold weather in early Spring, something which has never happened before unless you count most of the years you have been alive, our gas reserves are running low. This is because of the selfish manner in which Britons choose not to freeze to death and put on their heating when it is snowing. This self indulgence has decimated our reserves of natural gas.
The United States of America has reserves that will last it six months in the event of being cut off from outside supplies. Our European neighbours have a parsimonious three months capacity on stand by. So, you might think that in well ordered and prudently run Great Britain we would have a buffer of available fuel to last us through the unexpected quite comfortably, given that we are a rich, first world island and not a place that exports bananas and refugees. And you would be wrong. Britain has, at best, fifteen days of gas reserves. Fifteen. At the time of writing, we have less than two days supply.
Be not afraid though, we have completely reliable pipelines that will squirt natural gas up us in the event of us running out. In other other news, one of only three key pipelines that supply us in an emergency just shut down unexpectedly. And who could plan for the unexpected? Unless that is what governments are for.
At least we can rely on electricity. I mean, the lights aren't about to go out are they? Unless, that is, you believe the government body that oversees the electricity industry that has said the lights are about to go out. Give it four years, they say, and we will be reading the television guide to see what we are missing by the dying light of our mobile phone's last charge. But what about the industry that can save us from dependence on dirty old fossil fuels: nuclear power? Nuclear power means we can be independent and not beholden to Russia or the Middle East to keep the internet on so we can go trolling celebrities on Twitter. Except, that is, when there is weather in the air. A brief chilly snap, accompanied by a feather light dusting of snow has forced the Sellafield nuclear power station to shut down. I am not making that up. The bad weather which has caused people to need power, has induced the place that helps produce it to stop working. Nothing remotely third world about that.
If the cold weather continues, which "experts" say it will, then it will be getting a bit nippy inside, unless you have a working fireplace and don't mind burning your furniture.
On the other hand, the Mediterranean is positively balmy at this time of year. If only there was a country there that was desperate for money, didn't mind being over run by Brits and had the same relaxed attitude about financial malpractice that we have here, but with better weather and cheaper restaurants. For the good of us both, I say: let's invade Cyprus, in the nicest possible way.]]>Not a Play Away Day for the Toriestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29000742013-03-18T09:16:04-04:002013-05-18T05:12:01-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
Finally he has a chance to say what is on his mind without Ed Balls waving his arms about like he's directing aircraft. And what did he say? Something about "hard working families" and "law and order" and "education" I expect. It was hard to hear him over the audience's cacophonous murmuring disappointment that their conference was being held in boring old London, where their husbands and wives can check on them, and was not to be the secluded seaside grope-athon that they had in mind when the Honourable Members alerted their pert, youthful researchers that they would be 'needed' at the weekend. By which they meant 'kneaded' at the weekend.
They yearned for the other worldly charms of Blackpool or even Birmingham - some place where they would have absolutely no chance of bumping into someone they know while trying to cop off with a lithe lovely with whom, in the real world outside politics, they would have no chance of securing a drunken squeeze without coming to the attention of the law.
It was Dave's mission to rally his troops. One more push for victory. It was a hard sell. He said: "We want people to climb up through their own efforts", a phrase that, at the same time, managed to sound both painful and dirty, as though those people had fallen into a toilet pit at Glastonbury.
He invoked that get out of jail card beloved of politicians of all persuasions: Winston Churchill. If in doubt, mention The Bulldog and the audience will clap like circus seals, no matter what the context. In this case it was ladders. He said that in order to climb up through their own efforts, people need ladders. They need ladders like a family that nurtures them, a school that inspires them and an NHS that doesn't kill them. I made that last part up. "Winston Churchill had a ladder", he said. "He practically invented ladders. Let's use Winnie's ladder, he left it round the back". I made that up too.
The message to what remains of the party faithful, those that have not left to spend more time with their money or the man named Nigel, was that they must fight. They need to fight if they are to win the next election, he said. And with the polls suggesting that the Tories are as popular with the electorate as a horse-meat lasagne, what he needs is not so much a fight as a miracle.
In the absence of divine intervention, perhaps the undying support and effusive love of the nation's press might do. To that end, Cameron was proposing that the press regulator should be whatever his close personal supper loving friends - the multinational press barons - told him it should be.
When the Leveson Inquiry was set up, Justice Leveson and his inquisitor Big Chief Crazy Glasses were probably the only people involved who had little idea that they were engaged in a giant time wasting exercise, equalled only by trying to bring peace to the Middle East. The Conservatives had no intention of following Leveson's recommendations unless he came to the exact same conclusion that they had already reached before the inquiry heard its first witness.
Let us decide who the regulators will be, the media moguls said. Let us decide where in the paper to publish an apology, they said. If we splash some lies that ruin lives on pages one, two, three, four, five, six and in a special souvenir pull out supplement, it should be at our discretion to hide a confession that we made it all up on the page at the back that houses the adverts for velcro close shoes and elasticated waist polyester action slacks. And Dave concurred like a ventriloquist's dummy with their hand up his bottom.
Trust us, they said. Now that would take a miracle.]]>Life Ain't Easy for a Boy Named Kimtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28952242013-03-17T08:06:37-04:002013-05-17T05:12:02-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
Satellite images taken at night show the Earth is ablaze with light from man made illuminations. Europe is washed with luminescence. America, both North and South, is hard to look at it is so bright. China has pockets of eye boggling incandescence within its vast confines and one could even say Arabia is lit up like a Christmas tree except that they don't do Christmas and they haven't any trees. North Korea, on the other hand, is as dark as one of Gordon Brown's moods.
No brilliance escapes it because its people have no street lights, or house lights, or car lights, or cars. They have no way of finding their way to the cinema at night and nothing to see when they get there because they have no cinemas. They have none of the things we take for granted like power showers or cash machines. There's another thing they don't miss - why have cash machines if you haven't any cash? They do not enjoy frothy coffees with silly names, or take-away... anything. They have no flat screen televisions nor mobile phones, despite the fact that their Western slave southern neighbour is where they all get made.
The people of the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea do not even get to enjoy a democracy - it doesn't even do what it says on the tin. And they don't have tins either. Tins are a conspiracy to sap the strength of the glorious United Workers Party and food will make you weak. That is the message of the Michelin Man with the toddler's face that is running that country at the moment. (Message not verbatim)
None of these privations apply to the Drear Leader Kim Wrong-un. He looks like a man who has had his breakfast and the breakfasts of most of the rest of the population too. Space Hoppers are more svelte. He enjoys the lifestyle of the kleptocratic dictator because the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is not a democracy, rather it is a family business run along the lines of slave plantation or cotton mill and is handed down from one nut case family member to the next on the event of their passing. Korean leaders don't even disappear after their demise - the previous leader Kim Il-sung was anointed Eternal President of the Republic after his ending. Since he died, he's never been so busy. North Koreans will never forget his death day, nor his birth day, mostly because their calender starts in 1912, the year of his beginning. This is not normal. There is precious little about this self blighted country that is. And now they are going to start WW3.
The first World War began when the facially hirsute Archduke Ferdinand took a prohibited wrong turning up a side street in Sarajevo, which at the time was not covered by the Google Navigation app. He got killed because of a traffic violation, which the Sarajevans took very seriously. Everyone promptly declared war on each other and we have never trusted traffic wardens since. The Second World War was caused by a lunatic with a moustache. The lesson here is: don't trust men who don't shave. What is weird about North Korea is that it is being run by a man-child who's face is as smooth as a baby's bottom, and the resemblance doesn't stop there: he comes out with all sorts of cr*p.
His latest eye catching initiative is to put America back in its box by threatening them with all out nuclear war. In the inspirational manual of combat attributed to Sun Tzu called The Art of Warfare it states quite clearly that, and I quote: "don't tell the enemy you are going to bomb them back into the stone age before you do it - surprise them, you stupid idiot."
Li'l Fat Kim has taken over from his father and proved himself even more unstable. Perhaps it is his infantile appearance that makes him so bellicose. Maybe he has gas. Either way he seems bent on proving what a man he is by taking his people on the road to a conflict that will be as one sided as an iTunes contract. He wants war with South Korea and America and its allies which includes, well, everyone. Even China and Russia think he's gone too far and the last time they were on the right side of a moral argument was...never.
People of the world, we can not let this pudding of a man take us down the path of strife. Let's keep North Korea connected to the internet. Eventually someone will see it and pass on how lovely is life beyond its borders. I am pretty sure that once they have seen Charlie Bit My Finger and The Sneezing Baby Panda they will be too entertained to start any war. To say nothing of all that porn.]]>Milton Keynes Is as Mad as Hell and It's Not Going to Take It Any Moretag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28586382013-03-12T06:36:19-04:002013-05-12T05:12:01-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
A proposal has been put forward by a consortium of tradespeople for Milton Keynes to go the way of Singapore and outlaw the selling, chewing and, especially, the spitting of gum within the city's boundaries. Spokesperson Carmel said "We are trying to get the message across to people to be more considerate." And I say good luck to Carmel and her doughty lobby. Getting people to be more considerate is a worthy cause, one for which they will need all the luck they can get. Wars have started over a lack of consideration and none of them ended well for the towns they started in. But why stop at chewing gum? If you are looking at improving the lives of the amiable and the accommodating, the respectful and polite, then I think we can go a lot further than a ban on all that Wrigley's can provide.
How about leaf blowers for starters? Grown men chasing fallen foliage around with a machine that sounds like a massacre in a bee hive and is as loud as a lift off at NASA. This act is usually performed in the morning. On the weekend. If only someone had invented a quiet, less polluting and more efficient way of collecting leaves into a pile. Oh wait, that's right, they have. It's called a rake. I offer this advice with the greatest possible respect: why don't you use a rake you useless, lazy fat slobs? That way you will get the exact same job done in the same amount of time, firm up your forearms and not wake up the neighbourhood, by which I mean everyone living in your county.
In a similar vein, may I propose a ban on two wheeled motor vehicles that make the same noise as fifty four wheeled ones. Why a moped, which has the same sized engine as a food blender needs to make such a whining racket is mystifying. It doesn't seem to be deliberate on their part - no one would intentionally draw attention to themselves by creating such a weedy, cacophonous commotion. Motorbikes are another thing entirely. I know why men on motorbikes like to make a sonorous, earth shaking din - it is because they think it makes them appear tough. Hear is the news, whisper it softly, it doesn't. It makes them look like dorks. Dorks with wee-wees the size of cocktail sausages. Not the look they are going for, I bet.
The same type of men that gad about on their mechanical velocipedes wilfully and with malice aforethought whip their tops off at the merest hint of warmer weather. I should like to ban that too. I think I speak on behalf of all mankind, and a significant majority of womankind when I say that we do not wish to see your jiggling bazooms. Neither is their any desire on our part to wonder at your straining stomach, so big that either the Alien monster must be making its escape or they have attempted to shoplift a football by swallowing it. Put it away, or you shall feel the full force of the law.
Then there is the greeting of many kisses. French people may have this off pat but, and let me be perfectly clear here, WE ARE NOT FRENCH. We don't know which side to start on, or how many is required. Sometimes it is just once and at other times only four will do, which is obviously preposterous. Kissing someone four times that you are not about to have hot interpersonal naked relations with seems like it takes years to complete, is not exciting or even comfortable and we should stop doing it right now. Can we please go back to shaking hands and mumbling something we can't quite catch. That's the British way.
While we are at it, let's ban golf umbrellas on the High Street - there's not enough room; footballers spitting - they only do it because they think it looks hard; people who stop without warning in the middle of the street for no apparent reason, forcing you to run into the back of them; wind farms - there has to be a better way; owners who doggie don't pick up their mutt's doggie doos and automated supermarket check outs - what exactly are they expecting in the baggage area?
That's enough to be getting on with. I am predicting a great success. Milton Keynes has shown us the way. And literally no-one has though that before either.]]>Driving To Their Ruintag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28435082013-03-09T09:37:44-05:002013-05-09T05:12:01-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
Vicky Pryce and her nemesis ex-husband will be served a banquet of revenge soon but it will be the state that will bring it to the table. No need to tip. The authorities are really very cross indeed, or are feigning to appear that way because of something utterly trivial that happened ten years ago, which would never have been brought to the attention of the authorities if only Vicky could have kept her mouth shut, or Chris could have kept his pants on.
In March 2003, Chris was driving at the wholly unremarkable speed of 90 miles per hour on a motorway at night. If there is anyone in the land who would claim that they have never done the same, they are either lying or they drive an Austin Allegro, exclusively on Sundays and only if it is clement, while sporting a flat cap that they have owned since the fifties. He was doing this rate on a dead straight, mostly empty road which had been built specifically for speed and in a car that only stops accelerating when it reaches 155 mph because the manufacturer artificially stops it from going any faster. It is a vehicle that you could do 90 miles an hour in without needing to turn the radio up to hear the quiet bits of Stairway To Heaven. Modern cars are like that. Modern speed limits have not responded to the improvements in motoring technology but the methods of catching those that transgress these archaic rules certainly have.
It was the dead-eyed flash of a speed camera that set the events in motion. Chris was driving back to London from Stansted Airport to be back with his dear darling wife. He had already accrued enough points on his licence for this latest transgression to result in losing it altogether, which he calculated could have undone him, career-wise. He asked his wife, who wasn't even in the car with him to pretend that she was at the wheel. It might have worked if he had not have undone himself, trouser fly-wise.
Years after the speed camera snap, Chris had a dalliance with, as is the way of these things, a much younger woman. This caused Vicky much anguish, she sued for divorce and then, as is often the way of these things, she set herself the task of payback. It did not turn out well for either of them. It could all have been so different.
Chris Huhne was educated privately and was bright enough to attend Oxford University and the Sorbonne in Paris. He got a first in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He edited the student magazine, he started a financial risk rating company, he wrote for The Guardian and The Independent, he authored books. His ex-wife, Vicky Pryce is a multi-linguist, a decorated economist and governmental high flyer. They earned huge sums of money. They were a very bright couple. Stupidest bright couple ever.
They blew it all because of some little lie to avoid speeding points that the law affects to find super colossally important. They face life imprisonment. I am not making that up. It won't come to that but it is an indication of how monumentally seriously the law takes itself. Just about the worst thing you can do is to disrespect it. They call it, quite magnificently, Perverting the Cause of Justice. How fantastically pompous a description of something so mundane. Murderers face the possibility of less harsh punishment. If everyone who had lied to avoid a traffic fine was sentenced to jail, half of the drivers in the country would have been inside at some point and we would have to build a wall round Essex to keep them all in.
In 2003, in trying to hold on to his driving licence, Chris Huhne sowed the seeds for his eventual downfall. It is one of the many great ironies of the case that he lost that licence the very same year for talking on his mobile while driving. I wonder if he was calling his wife.]]>Some Excitement at a Mid Term By-Electiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27961352013-03-03T19:00:00-05:002013-05-03T05:12:01-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/Countdown and heaved themselves out of their Parker Knoll recliners to take the bus as near to the polling station as it goes and shuffled their way into the voting booth as fast as their Hush Puppies would take them.
Eastleigh is the place to settle if you can't stand the pace in Budleigh Salterton and Winchester seems like the future. Without the benefit of actually going there, I can tell you that it is as conservative as an antimacassar sales convention. You'd think that it would also be Conservative but that would be to underestimate the appeal of the Why-can't-things-be like-they-used-to-be Party.
The WCTBLTUTB Party is headed by a man who looks and sounds like a daytime television quiz master from the 1970's and dresses as though he is about to called on to price a nick-nack on the Antiques Roadshow. The manifesto of this conservative party is... and I shall summarise... that if you don't trust politicians, trust US politicians. Their pamphlet has four pictures on the front: a pound coin, a passport, a police car and a white baby. They are pro the pound, against other people using their passports against us, for the police up to a point, as long as they don't nit-pick our rubbish recycling and, as far as I can tell, fully in favour of white babies.
What they are most vociferously against is Europe. Europe is a place full of nasty, old, entitled men who are unelected and throw their weight around while coining in the readdies, awarding each other titles and going to lunch to eat foreign muck with our money. Or that could be the British Civil Service. Or both. Either way, its a bloomin' disgrace and something must be done. They tap into the same mindset that still has us doing the funny walk and not mentioning the war many years after the end of hostilities, the precise number of which I shall look up later.
The issue of Europe causes some British people's faces to go the colour of cordovan shoes. They wouldn't actually wear cordovan shoes though, because they are for ne'r do wells and nancy boys.
Europe, they say, is shoving human rights down our throats. They will say this without hint of irony or, apparently, the understanding that they are themselves human and might, one day, be in need of rights pertaining to their genus. They say that Brussels is full of unelected bureaucrats, without acknowledging that we are ruled by unelected bureaucrats in this country - the same Humphreys that the government of the day is forever whining about getting in their way and preventing them from doing their best.
The WCTBLTUTB Party and their growing number of adherents are convinced that we will be economically better off out of Europe. They have come to this firmly, nay, violently held belief without having done any research whatsoever. Ask a believer why our circumstance would be improved on the outside and they will argue that "it just would". If economics experts with brains the size of car batteries and full access to calculators can not agree on how to split the bill at dinner, it is a wonder that those with no knowledge of finance or trade or international relations or the science of numbers outside of a bingo parlour can be so assured that they have fully grasped such a fantastically complicated issue and come to a sound conclusion.
It all comes across a bit like... well, they just don't like foreigners. And speaking on behalf of all the people of the world - who does?
Maybe they have a point. They managed a full 27.8% of the vote. Maria Hutchings, the Conservative candidate was so overwhelmed by the level of her support, in coming third, that she was struck dumb and tried to exit the Eastleigh count without responding to reporters' questions.
Reporters were not having that though and attached themselves to her like spermatozoa attempting to fertilise an egg. They edged toward the door in a crab-like sideways gait, firing questions such as "where did it go wrong, Maria" and ""why did you come third, Maria" and "take your top off, love" while Maria, the hole in the doughnut of inquisitors grinned silently like a human smiley face, or a woman in the throes of a seizure, only able to stand due to the pressing throng holding her up. The video of it could be the most awkward attempt at group sex you've ever seen and the least likely to get any hits on YouTube.
There is, however, no getting round the fact that Ukip pushed the Tories into third place by about a thousand votes. The Conservatives pointed out that this was not ground breaking, or unheard of for a ruling party in the midst of a calamitous recession and in mid term, and they have a point. Or they would have if it were not for the slight inconvenience that the other ruling party, the Lib Dems, actually won the thing.]]>Carry on Doctoringtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28007682013-03-03T07:54:35-05:002013-05-03T05:12:01-04:00Nick Abbothttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-abbot/
Take the man who runs the NHS for example. It seems hardly credible that he is still in the position to which he has become accustomed. Under his munificent leadership:
vigorously healthy people have come into the hospitals he is running just to read the meter and were carted out moments later in a zip lock bag; elderly people were fed through food blenders to fill the pies that the caterers couldn't find enough horse meat for and patients were asked to take their own pancreas out.
I made these stories up but I think you will agree that does not detract from how shocking they are.
Our political leaders appear to be unanimous in their praise of a man who managed hospitals that were so dangerous to the patients they were supposed to be helping that Dr Josef Mengele would have resigned. Thousands of people died unnecessarily, ineptitude was allowed to continue on a level that would have shamed the catering car on a British Rail express train, wave after wave of doctors and nurses voiced their concerns and not a blind thing was done about it, nor appears to be being done about it now. Except, of course, to massage the statistics to make the problem appear to go away and to silence those that seek to illuminate just how bad things have got.
You may think that because some of this dirty, infected, torn and bacteria ridden laundry is being aired in public that the problem with patient care in the NHS has been dealt with. If you think that, then you may be reading this in a secure facility.
The bosses at the NHS and their parliamentary overseers are still backing Sir David Nicholson despite the very real evidence that a rabid press has scented blood in the air and want their pound of mistakenly amputated flesh. They are writing articles with words like "appalling" and "scandal" and "deaths" in them and the NHS Commissioning Board appear to be of the opinion that they can simply dig their heels in, assert their authority and the issue will die away, like so many of their unfortunate patients. Perhaps they have not read the Daily Mail. They may be in for a nasty surprise. To see what a nasty surprise is like, they should book a procedure in one of their own hospitals.
If the answer is to keep the man in charge who oversaw the melt down in the first place, then what on earth must the question be? The only explanation that makes sense is that this person is a lightening rod of fury so that our ruling elite don't have to be.
It's genius - keep in place a man who is as popular with the public as a rectal examination and our elected representatives can sit back and watch him catch fire from the friction of our fury, so they don't have to. He will just have to soak up the suppurating pool of national indignation for a while before he gets his inevitable reward.
They have already made him a Sir, so it will be Lord Nicholson of the Overflowing Bed Pan before the year is out.]]>