...and how exactly is that a recommendation?

Today's food for thought comes courtesy of MSP Nicola Sturgeon, heard on the BBC speaking in praise of what the powers-that-be now insist we refer to as a 'balanced parliament' (I think they were getting sick of all the jokes...)

"I appreciate that in a UK context that's something people are not particularly used to, but in Scotland we already have a balanced parliament. The SNP is a minority Government in that balanced parliament and we build concensus on an issue-by-issue basis, with different parties.

Small parties in the Scottish Parliament, the Greens for example, they've only got two members of the Scottish Parliament but they use their influence very wisely to win big concessions."

Now substitute another party of your choice for 'the Greens' and 'UK' for 'Scottish'.....

Fork Out!

Remember Morton's Fork? Henry VII needs a bit of cash so he sends his henchman Archbishop Morton out to extract more taxes from the reluctant populace. The cunning Morton adopts a breathtakingly simple double strategy;
"You're not spending much - you must have plenty to spare for the King" or alternatively "You're spending a lot - you can easily afford something for the King"*.

The same thinking is evident in today's Sunday Times article claiming that 'Students are facing rises of up to £1,000 a year in tuition fees under plans being drawn up by an official review that could eventually allow universities to charge the full cost of a degree'.

If the current fees cap is removed, 'Leading research universities could charge students an estimated £7,000 a year while fees for science undergraduates could rise to £14,000'.

Mandelson's appointee, Lord Browne, heads a panel which has put forward the theory that 'it is unfair taxpayers should subsidise families on middle and higher incomes who have often paid school fees'. No mention, of course, of the sacrifices many of those parents have made to do so, or that those paying school fees save the state around 4k per child per year.

You can see where this is heading; Mandy and Browne's Fork goes like this: 'if you went to a state school, you have paid nothing so far for your education so it's reasonable to ask you to meet the full costs' or 'if you went to a fee-paying school, you obviously have enough money to meet your tuition fees in full'.

Henry VII would be very impressed!


*Or, if you prefer the '1066 and All That' version, he sticks an enormous fork in the unfortunate subject until he pays up, to cries of "Fork out!"

A new journalistic low

This picture, according to the Daily Mail, shows ' The All Saints pupil who was dragged into a cupboard by 'fundamentally decent' science teacher Mr Harvey, and hit about the head with a 3kg dumbbell.'

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Shame on you! But seriously, what is the point?

Happy Hallmark Day!

One hundred years of selling crap,

Of tacky verses, mindless pap,

And vulgar jokes and puns that pass

For humour with the underclass.

They're there in every shopping mall,

Purveyors to the urban sprawl

Of hen night trimmings in bad taste

And pointless cards, a useless waste

Of paper, money, space and time;

You name it, they'll supply the rhyme,

To prove there's no need for thought

When sentiments can just be bought.

Quote of the day

'Rochdale was like being thrust from a gleaming front-of-house to the chaotic filthy kitchen beyond.'

Janice Turner in The Times

Why Sir is a Union man

The jury took an hour to decide that Peter Harvey was not guilty of attempted murder. Indeed, as the judge said, it's hard to see how there could be any question of intention under the circumstances.

The premeditation here was all on the part of the pupils who cynically plotted to goad and provoke a stressed man until he lost control and to film the result. Well, they certainly got what they wanted!

Teaching is an anomaly, a job in which any sign of perceived weakness will be exploited and yet teachers are hedged about with draconian rules about how they may deal with disruption to the extent that pupils have developed a 'can't touch me!' attitude.

I am not advocating a return to corporal punishment - although the formal public belting of the school bully in my primary days had a markedly beneficial effect for the rest of us - but when a detention, or even a suspension, can be summarily overruled, the message the pupil receives is that his teacher has no sanctions available.

In addition, the class will be fully aware of the 'Rantzen effect' - the common assumption that children do not lie about assault - which allows a malicious pupil to engineer the suspension of an innocent teacher with unfounded and unsupported allegations.

It's easy for the public at large, watching the top dogs of the NUT in action, to assume that all teachers join a union because they are militant activists. In fact, the reason many of them join is the legal support and appropriate professional advice available to members. It's unlikely any specialist counsellor would advise a classroom teacher to 'let his anger out'.

For most teachers, union membership is more like having car insurance: horribly expensive and seldom claimed on but absolutely essential in case something goes horribly wrong.

Update: I am indebted to JuliaM for this from the Daily Mash; black humour at its finest.

Those Gillian Duffy Blues

I met her on a walkabout in Rochdale,
She tried to make me think she was on my side;
She suddenly got tough on immigration,
Put me on the spot with nowhere I could hide.

They should never have put me with that woman!
Whose idea was that? I think it was Sue’s.

I do apologise and say it’s a pity;
I was only trying to be helpful and do it right.
The lady’s got it wrong if she supposes
I’d have said outright to her face what I had on my mind.

She’s just this sort of bigoted woman
Airing what I thought at the time were bigoted views,

(Yeah!) She’s just this sort of bigoted woman
And she’s left me looking a fool on the ten o’clock news.

(Yeah!) She’s just this sort of bigoted woman.
And I know it will all be her fault now if we lose.

PS: Quote of the day (or week - or year!) from Dungeekin', leaving on holiday Wed 28th April:

'Don't let Gordon touch anything while I'm gone.'

Cameron's University Challenge

Here at the Tavern, we've been considering a political bombshell dropped this week by one of the Offspring currently at University.

Instead of returning to the parental spawning grounds to vote, this wise child has registered in his place of study. This means that a vote has effectively been transferred from a party stronghold to a teetering marginal, by virtue of a term-time election.

And when I say teetering, I mean just that - their present incumbent was elected with a majority of fewer than 500 votes, whereas our sitting MP can, on past showing, expect to secure nearly 50% of the votes cast.

It appears the registration process, facilitated - some might say orchestrated - by campus activists, has been aimed at persuading the 7,500 undergraduates to cast their vote where it will do 'most good' - some will travel home or vote by post while others vote at university.

If the old adage about being a socialist at twenty holds true, a term-time election means a large* unpredictable population of Lib Dem or Labour voters able to select which of two constituencies will have their vote. Combine this with the LibDem's pledge to scrap tuition fees and the student loans fiasco on Labour's watch and things get very interesting indeed.

So if you've tried all the BBC's other interactive toys, why not play 'Spot the University Town' among the target seats and dead certs - bearing in mind that, at the latest count, there are 109 universities in the UK.

*The total number of UK students at British universities is estimated at 2 million.

'Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?'

It looks as if a new benchmark has been set for stupidity in the electronic age. This story has left me speechless - so I offer it in full for your edification.

A woman was plagued with almost 3,000 text messages and hundreds of calls after her mobile phone number was displayed on EastEnders. The incident happened last September when a message sent by Sam Mitchell was shown close-up on screen for four seconds.

So either the callers are blessed with eidetic memory or they actually went to the trouble of pausing the programme in order to read it. I know which one I think is more likely...

Above the message were two further texts which had apparently been sent from Mrs Edwards's phone, showing her business mobile number.

So far, so harmless - a simple technical mistake by the production crew. After all, no one would be stupid enough to call a number on a text from a fictional character would they?

The 39-year-old mother of two from Alvechurch near Birmingham was then deluged with calls and texts, with several asking: 'Is that Sam from EastEnders?'

Others, it seems, were less polite:

Mrs Edwards said: 'The calls just keep coming and I can't use my phone for my business. Most have been friendly but quite a few were obscene.'

Luckily Ofcom are there to provide the voice of reason, informing us that:

'We found that Mrs Edwards would not have expected her business mobile telephone number to appear on screen during an episode of a soap opera.'

You don't say! Ofcom added that the torrent of 'unwanted and abusive calls and texts was

' ...further added to after the repeat broadcast of the programme later that evening on BBC3'.

Which probably says more than we want to know about BBC3's viewer profile. However, nobody comes out of this story very well; according to the BBC,

'the number of calls and messages to Mrs Edwards's phone may have been inflated after she complained to the Sun newspaper about the incident and the number was clearly displayed in a screen grab published by the paper. '

Even allowing for repeat messages, that's still a depressingly large number of people who considered it a good use of time or money to call the number. Either random obscene callers are so short of imagination they need someone to show them a number to dial or viewers have epically failed to grasp that they are watching a work of fiction.

I'm starting to wonder whether universal suffrage was such a good idea....

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

"For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts."

(Alan Sillitoe: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)

Fifty years on, Alan Sillitoe's words still resonate. The spectacle of young men - and women - drunk and incapable now fills our city centres on a regular basis, while po-faced sociologists wonder what prompts their behaviour and try to secure fat research grants to find out.

Being sociologists, they probably worked hard at school and joined all the right societies at university, thereby ensuring they missed out on experiencing the key element at work here - fun. The 'glad-time of the week', letting go after five days of abstention with an explosion of self-indulgence, coincides with cheap alcohol and long opening hours to create a Bacchanalian perfect storm.

It's an indication of how far New Labour have come from their working-class roots that they fail to understand the phenomenon, instead wringing their hands in bemused disappointment that these 'yungpeeple' persist in ignoring the recommended number of units despite all those expensive initiatives and campaigns.

To reduce it to its simplest cost-benefit terms, the Government has yet come up with anything that outweighs the perceived enjoyment of a drunken night on the town. The drinkers are already aware of the risks - whether violence or health-related - but trade them off against the social advantages; the same phenomenon urges on a herd of animals crossing a crocodile-infested river.

And herd instinct is at the heart of this - again, perhaps a closed book to the cloistered sociology researchers. Sillitoe's words are straight from the horse's mouth - the result of four years as a teenager working in the Raleigh factory in Nottingham - and he understood a thing or two about cameraderie. Drinking is something his anti-hero does in company, preferably raucous and occasionally violent.

The first step to tackling the problem has got to be understanding what creates it in the first place. Instead of endless seminars, consultation groups and quangoes, those whose task it is would do better to talk to the revellers, get to know them and understand the forces at work. Reading Saturday Night and Sunday Morning probably wouldn't go amiss either.

In memoriam: Alan Sillitoe , 4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010

Barbecue Summer? Fat chance!

A laughing young couple in shorts feature on the cover of today's Sunday Times, above the caption ' all set for a barbecue summer'.

Will jounalists never learn? A few sunny days at the end of April and suddenly they're back in the prediction business, by implication at least. We've been through all this - we live in Britain. It rains here. Quite a bit, in fact. And no amount of newspaper hysteria is going to change the fact.

The Sunday Times in question arrived decidedly damp, the picture ironically spattered with raindrops as the paper-boy picked his way between the puddles. Still, if you're a glass half-full kind of person, you can celebrate the fact that today sees the 102nd anniversary of the invention of the windscreen wiper*, unsurprisingly dreamt up by by a Briton to whom we should all be ceaselessly grateful.

(The wipers of the Tavern's previous horseless carriage, since gone to the great car park in the sky, had a delightfully syncopated beat that was the perfect accompaniment when singing Louis Armstrong's version of 'Mac the Knife' - the radio hadn't worked since 2001 so we had to make our own in-car entertainment - or Lotte Lenya's on intermittent.)

The Barbecue Summer debacle was the result of too much over-simplification and rounding-off; a set of probabilities expressed, through a sort of Chinese whispers (can we call it that any more, or will the EHRC be round?), as a soundbite of certainty. The fuss over the 'unexpected' cold winter shows that the public and media still hadn't learnt their lesson, and it looks like it could happen all over again.

In British weather, the only thing you can be certain of is uncertainty itself.

*This gem comes from 'The Wrong Kind of Snow - How the Weather Made Britain', which carries the best back cover review ever: 'Should be in every loo in the land' - John Julius Norwich.

How middle class is that!

If the peaked cap fits...

This week the BNP have managed to get smeared with Marmite in a most undignified and entertaining way.

It seems an over-zealous reviewer added a jar of Marmite to the image of Nick Griffin at his desk in retaliation for Marmite's recent advertising campaign featuring two rival parties - 'Love' and 'Hate'.

With a characteristic lack of irony, Mr Griffin explained that the Hate Party was "clearly based" on the BNP.

Well, of course it was. Who else could it be?

And Marmite are frankly no better - ignoring the theory that any publicity is good publicity, they are "currently initiating injunction proceedings against the BNP to remove the Marmite jar from the online broadcast and prevent them from using it in future."

In case we were labouring under any delusions, a spokesman for Unilever (Unilever? Yuk!) helpfully explained that "Neither Marmite nor any other Unilever brand are aligned to any political party".