Week 30 2012

Tendring Topics........on line

 Once again – Public Sector to the Rescue!

   Why on earth, I wonder, is the present government so obsessed with the idea that ‘the private sector’ can always perform more economically and efficiently than ‘the public sector’?  Public authorities, they believe, should no longer actually provide the services for which they are responsible (refuse collection and disposal, maintenance of public buildings, parks and recreational facilities, care of the disabled and elderly, highway maintenance, catering and routine cleaning of schools and hospitals to name but a few)  but merely ‘facilitate’ them. All these services must be put out to competitive tender and given to the contractor who undertakes to perform them at the lowest cost.

The government is continually trying to extend the field of the private sector further (into the provision of health, policing and educational services, for instance) and to reduce that of public authorities.

This devalues or undervalues the loyalty that long-serving staff feel towards an employer who treats them fairly and respects their expertise and experience. It undervalues too the pride that permanent employees take in making sure that their canteen or staff restaurant provides the very best meals in the most welcoming atmosphere, that their ward is the cleanest and neatest in the hospital, that their park is always safe and welcoming to visitors, or that the service that they render the public is the very best of which they are capable.

The prime motive of private contractors is not to give the best possible service but to maximise profits by giving as little as they can get away with, for as much as they can get. Cost effectiveness, profitability, productivity, the three persone of Mammon’s unholy trinity, are the only criteria of the market place – and of the economic jungle.

            Over and over again we have seen the results of this.   Private enterprise has failed to set or mark examination papers efficiently or in the time required.  Private contractors have failed to pay out badly needed grants on time.  Public money poured into banks has been squandered, and call centres have been located in distant lands and staffed with people who can barely speak English – for no other reason than that their labour is cheap and they are prepared to put up with appalling living and working conditions.  The private sector was unable to cope with the effects of the nation-wide foot-and-mouth disease epidemic.   The public sector (the army) was called in to help clear up the mess.

            The latest example of this, and the one with the potential to produce the most catastrophic results, is of G4S the private contractors employed to ensure security at the 2012 Olympic Games that are about to begin.  Many people, it seems, had been well aware of the inadequacies of this private organisation but the Home Secretary remained blissfully ignorant until the last moment.  Then, just days before the Olympic Games were due to begin, she called on the public sector – war-weary troops from a government-depleted army many of whom were denied their well-earned leave  - to step into the breach and, as Houseman put it in quite a different context, 'save the sum of things for pay’.  For army pay, of course, not for the millions of pounds that private sector entrepreneurs G4S had been expecting.

            In Manchester and other urban areas accommodating Olympic athletes or otherwise associated with the Olympics, where G4S claimed to have recruited and trained sufficient private security staff, only a fraction of those needed reported for duty when required*.   Their place too has had to be taken by the public sector, by already hard-pressed police officers (also from government-depleted forces) working overtime to remedy private sector failure.

There are already plans to privatise some aspects of police work.  No-one, as far as I know, has yet thought of privatising the armed forces. It wouldn’t surprise me though to learn that there are those who are wondering if re-introducing 17^th century style privateering might prove to be a cost-effective way of strengthening our government-depleted Royal Navy!

*It was interesting to hear Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary and Minister in charge of the Olympics, making excuses for G4S on tv. He didn’t feel that there was anything particularly surprising or specially reprehensible in a private contractor promising a hundred trained operatives when required and then supplying only twenty or thirty.  This was, of course, the same Jeremy Hunt who hadn't noticed that his principal adviser was virtually on kissing terms with News International.

Preventing an Olympic terrorist attack!

          A warship in the Thames, anti-aircraft defences on the flat roofs of high buildings in the vicinity of the stadium, fighter aircraft patrolling the skies, thousands of troops on patrol – I am not at all sure that if I lived in London, particularly in the stadium area, I would be sleeping more easily in my bed in the knowledge of all the precautions against terrorist attack that are being taken.

            We are told that if an unknown plane approached the Olympic zone and refused to obey orders to change course ‘lethal force’ would be used against it; it would be either shot down or blown up.  And what, one wonders, would happen to the bits of the suspect plane?  We haven’t yet, as far as I know, perfected a means of vaporising them so we can only assume that they would fall on the buildings and people below, also possibly with lethal force!

             I think that if I were the commander of a terrorist gang, intent on having maximum ill-effect at the time of the Olympic Games, I’d give East London and all other Olympic venues a complete miss.   I would think that, with all eyes and all counter-terrorism measures concentrated on the games, this would be the best moment to strike at  quite different but prestigious targets in East Anglia, the Midlands or the North.

 Britain’s railway termini and airports, armed forces bases and depots, and our power stations might well be considered vulnerable.  I hope therefore that, in the concern about the protection of the Olympic Stadium and facilities in London, the defences of these possible targets have not been forgotten.

The Chilcot Enquiry

             The Leveson Enquiry, the revelations of jiggery pokery (I don’t recall ever before using that expression in a blog, but I can’t think of a better one!) in the world of finance, and the failures of G4S, have all but driven the Chilcot Enquiry out of our minds.   This, you’ll recall, was into the causes and conduct of the Iraq War and its aftermath, and ran from 2009 till February 2011.   I understand that the Chilcot Committee’s report is now almost complete and that it runs to two million words.  For those like me who can’t even imagine what two million words look like, it is roughly twice as long at Tolstoy’s mammoth historical novel War and Peace!

            It had been confidently expected that the report would be published this summer. We now learn though that this will be delayed for at least a year because of a dispute about the inclusion of just a few thousand words!  It is unfortunate that these are the words that many of us are particularly eager to read.

            I am not greatly interested in the conduct of the war or even about the mismanagement of its aftermath.   I do know that Saddam Hussein was a cruel and autocratic dictator with many innocent deaths on his conscience.  I am  quite sure though that he had no time at all for Al Qaeda, nor had they any time for him.  Consequently he had played no part whatsoever in the 9/11 terror attacks on the USA.

            Furthermore I was sure that at the time of our invasion of Iraq he had no weapons of mass destruction, and I am convinced that Tony Blair and George Bush Junior were well aware of this too. Yet a majority of MPs and a large section of the national press were persuaded to support the invasion on the grounds that Iraq was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks on the USA and that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction that threatened Britain.

            How did this mass deception happen?   It resulted in thousands of deaths and many thousands more damaged lives, the almost total destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, a boost in the recruitment of volunteers for terrorist organisations, and the beginning of ethnic and sectarian acts of terror and violence that still continue  (to this very week in fact!)

            I think it likely that emails and recorded conversations between the American President, George W. Bush and Tony Blair the British Prime Minister during the weeks immediately prior to the invasion may help to throw light on the matter.   A record of these exists and has been seen by the Chilcot Enquiry Committee.  It had been intended to publish them with the final report – but the all-powerful Cabinet Office has objected. It is thought that public access to those emails and the records of those conversations might harm USA/UK relations and inhibit the future sharing of intelligence information.  Tough luck!   If USA/UK good relations depend upon the British electorate continuing in ignorance of a conspiracy of deception, then those good relations are hardly worth having.  Nor is it of any value to us to be permitted to share lies and carefully selected half-truths.

            If for no other reason that Tony Blair is now our ‘special peace envoy’ in the Middle East (it was rather like making one of the Kray brothers a Chief Constable!) we are surely entitled to know what he was discussing with George Bush immediately before he persuaded a majority of MPs to support the invasion of Iraq in our name.

Week 23 2012

Tendring Topics......on line

 ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream..........'

            During the past few weeks two events have conspired to give me salutary reminders (as though I need them!) of my advancing years.

There was my ninety-first birthday on 18^th May.   Obviously it was never going to be as exciting as my ninetieth when the whole immediate family, eight of us altogether, travelled to Zittau to join my German friends in celebration.  I was very glad of that because I am increasingly conscious of the fact that I am a year older, a little feebler, a little less steady on my feet, a little more forgetful and a little more easily tired than I was then.  

We didn’t have a family photo this year but here we all are celebrating my 90^th Birthday in Zittau last year.  Younger son Andy isn’t in the picture – he was behind the camera

         

This year all the family, except grandson Chris in Taiwan, joined me for a celebratory meal and exchange of family news at The Bowling Green at Weeley. The following day Ingrid my longest standing German friend, who had been unable to be with us the previous year, came to see me with a friend.  We again lunched at The Bowling Green and came back for a chat to my home in Dudley Road afterwards.  I was pleased to learn that her family are all well and that her nephew and niece (my ‘honorary’ nephew and niece!) two year old Tom and his six year old sister Maja, are thriving.

     In addition I received 35 posted birthday cards plus email and text greetings from friends and relatives in England and Germany (and one in Australia!). 

With Ingrid on 20^th May – I think I look very tired (which I was!)             

 Then, of course, another reminder of my age came with the Queen’s Jubilee and the realisation that, despite the fact that she has been our Queen for sixty years, I have actually seen the reign of no less than three other British monarchs!  During my childhood there was George V.   He seemed very grand, very distant and very worthy, deserving our respect and loyalty but hardly our affection.  That was until, years later, I learned what are said to have been his last words (no, not the official ones – I never did believe that he said How goes the Empire?)  before dying. When I learned what he really said I realized that he had been very human and ‘one of us’, after all.

  His successor Edward VIII had a very short reign.  He abdicated to marry twice-divorced American socialite Mrs Wallis Simpson. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Cosmo Lang and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin were strongly criticised at the time for forcing the abdication. I really think that they were right though.  It had been difficult to imagine a Queen Wallis! Quite apart from her earlier broken marriages she had been much too friendly with some of Germany’s top Nazis. Not everyone took the situation desperately seriously and there was a lot of back-street humour at the situation.  One printable witticism was, ‘He could have been Admiral of the Fleet but chose to be third mate to a Yankee drifter.’

            I was in the fifth form of Ipswich’s Northgate School for Boys at the time of the abdication crisis.  In Ipswich we had something of a grandstand view of the crisis as the divorce making the royal marriage legally (if not ecclesiastically) possible was granted in an Ipswich Court. After the abdication, we fifth formers were given a couple of hours off school and encouraged to cycle down to Ipswich’s Cornhill to hear the proclamation of the accession of the new king – George VI – publicly made by the Mayor on the steps of the Town Hall.

            When, over two years later, I volunteered for the Territorial Army it was to King George VI ‘and all his lawful heirs and successors’ that I swore my allegiance and loyalty.  I have known quite a few avowed republicans in my time but have never heard a word of personal criticism either of King George or of his consort the Queen Elizabeth.  She is best remembered today as the indomitable Queen Mother with a passion for race horses and salmon fishing.   People of my generation  remember when she and the king were a youngish middle-aged couple with two endearing little girls, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. They stayed in London throughout the blitz, though they could have easily gone to Canada for safety.  Viewers of ‘The King’s Speech’ will know of the struggle the King had with his speech impediment.  I heard on ‘the wireless’ (that’s what we called the radio in those days!) the speech – the climax of the film – that the King made on the outbreak of World War II, and remember thinking that the King’s impediment was not nearly as bad as the popular press had suggested.  I now realize what an ordeal making that speech must have been.

            I remember being told of King George VI’s death.  I was Housing Manager to Gipping Rural District in Suffolk at the time and someone told me the news as I visited a Council House in the village of Haughley.  It came as a complete surprise.  I hadn’t even known that he was ill.  I think that it must have come as a surprise to our top politicians and to members of the Royal family as well.  Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would surely never have embarked on a Commonwealth tour had they imagined for a moment that the King’s death was imminent.

            The accession of our new young Queen in 1952 was hailed as the beginning of a New Elizabethan Age in which our country would recapture some of the splendour of the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth.  It hasn’t worked out quite like that.  Few of us then could have imagined that during the course of the next 60 years we would see the systematic denigration and dismantling of the Welfare State  created by the generation that had won World War II; that in the first decade of the new millennium a spectacular failure of the capitalist free market economy world-wide had meant that Britain’s public services, of which we had been so proud, would be run down, that all of us (except the very rich) would be facing years of hardship; that more young British lives would have been lost and were still being lost in warfare, and that in the  Diamond Jubilee year the gap between rich and poor would have become wider than it had ever been.

            Don’t blame the Queen – blame the politicians and the financiers!  The Queen too has had cause for sadness.  Those sixty years have seen the Empire disappear and the Commonwealth shrink.  She has seen one of her most historic homes – Windsor Castle – threatened with destruction by fire.  She has seen the first marriages of three of her four children end in divorce.  She has said farewell to her Royal Yacht.  Yet she has remained apparently serene, a worthy representative of all her people.  She is just four years younger than I am and I have seen her, in the press and on tv, develop from engaging child to outwardly imperturbable matriarch.  My late wife and I appreciated the card of congratulation that was sent us on her behalf on the occasion of our own Diamond Wedding Anniversary six years ago. 

Heather and I, with our extended family, celebrating our Diamond Wedding Anniversary in Clacton's Quaker Meeting House in April 2006.  Three months after that happy event, Heather’s life came to an end.     

I offer her every good wish, and hope that her lawful heirs and successors, to whom I swore allegiance and loyalty in 1939, profit from her example.  I have been asked how I reconcile my belief that a constitutional monarchy is best for our country with my fervent desire that our country should become a more ‘equal’ society.  There really is no contradiction.  Norway, Sweden and Denmark are all constitutional monarchies.   The USA is a republic.  Yet, I don’t think that anyone would question the assertion that the USA is a far less equal society than every one of those three Scandinavian countries.  In the British Utopia of which I sometimes dream, the principal source of government revenue would be the Citizenship Tax, levied proportionately as the first charge, without exception, on the income of every single citizen, from the wealthiest and most powerful to the very poorest.  The monarch and members of his or her family would be subject to that tax in the same way as the humblest citizen. That, I think, would level off society far more effectively than toppling the monarchy and replacing our hereditary ‘head of state’ with an elected president.

            May God save the Queen and, as the never-used-nowadays second verse of the National Anthem puts it in its final line, may God save us all!’

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…….’

            That’s how, in the silent movies of my childhood, the scene shifted from the menfolk gallantly combating marauding rustlers or Indian warbands, to the ranch-house where the dastardly villain (you could tell him by his twirly moustache and –‘city slicker’ clothes) was threatening the virtue of the rancher’s beautiful daughter.

            At the end of May 2012, as Britain prepared for a four-day Jubilee holiday weekend, life was going on, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan – and at the Leveson Enquiry.

            Tony Blair, not one of my favourite people, was disarmingly honest when he explained that politicians simply couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of powerful press magnates.  That’s why he had pursued Rupert Murdoch half-way across the world to get into his good books.  No, of course there was no kind of formal agreement between himself and the American (formerly Australian) multi-millionaire.  There didn’t need to be.  Mr Blair was well aware of Murdoch’s policy preferences.

            If there is one thing that is worse than a government-controlled press, it’s a press-controlled government!

            The theme continued with the long awaited appearance before the enquiry of Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister, who had been given the responsibility of deciding whether or not News International (the Murdoch media empire) should have total control of BSkyB tv.  Mr Hunt explained that he had held, and did hold, a personal view favouring News International’s case but, in the quasi-judicial role to which he had been appointed, he had put his personal views on one side and had acted strictly ‘according to the book’.  He had done nothing wrong.  Why on earth should he resign? 

            I am quite sure that he had done nothing wrong.  He had consulted all the right people and had been able to put affirming ticks in all the right boxes.  When the time came he would be in a position to make his own quasi-judicial decision – and who could possibly doubt what that decision would have been? However Mr Murdoch, evidently more shaken by the phone hacking and police bribing scandal than Mr Hunt had been, withdrew his application for full control of BSkyB.  Mr Hunt, who had done nothing wrong, was off the quasi-judicial hook.

            Prime Minister David Cameron is to appear before Lord Leveson in the near future.  I look forward to hearing his explanation of his sacking Vince Cable from the post of adjudicator for having been tricked into declaring his personal opposition to the BSkyB takeover, and on the same day, appointing Jeremy Hunt, who had equally emphatically declared his support for the takeover, to the same post.  Email evidence suggests that Chancellor George Osborne had also been involved in those decisions. Those two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk (both of whom had close contacts with the Murdoch Empire) had been at it again!

           

           

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Week 18 2012

Tendring Topics........on Line

 ‘The Proof of the Pudding…………’

            It was about three years ago that I decided to have a solar water heating system installed.  My bungalow has a south-sloping roof and Clacton-on-Sea has, statistically, a good deal more than an average number of hours of bright sunshine.   I was then in my late eighties and knew perfectly well that I would be unlikely to recover the capital cost of installation.  However, thanks to the present government’s fiscal policies, it seemed probable that the money saved would be greater than the interest the cost of installation was earning in a bank savings account.  In any case, again thanks to government policy, my banked savings were inexorably decreasing in value as each month passed.

            The solar water system installed was a complicated one – a development of the very primitive solar systems that I had envisaged when writing my books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage twenty years earlier!    An additional small hot water storage cylinder was provided in the roof space. A temperature controlled pump circulated an antifreeze solution in a closed circuit between the solar panel on the roof and the new cylinder to warm the water stored in it.  A second electronically controlled pump exchanged this solar heated water with cooler water in the main storage cylinder. The flow and return pipes between the boiler and the main cylinder remained unchanged.

            The system worked very well when it was working properly.   My monthly direct debit payments for gas and electricity dropped from over £100 to something over £70. There was a lot that could go wrong though – and did!  Faults were always promptly put right by the installers. I called them teething problems though it must be said that some of them carried on well into the system’s adolescence!!  Last year at this time, we had had a hard winter in which I had let the gas boiler run night and day for several days.  Several faults had occurred and had been rectified. My monthly payments rose to £98.  I began to ask myself if it had all been worthwhile!

           

            Providentially (though it didn’t seem like that at the time!) last summer my main hot water storage cylinder failed.   It had been in constant operation for nearly a quarter of a century.   Its heat exchanger was covered with hard water scale. The gas boiler was taking an unreasonably long time to heat the water in the cylinder. 

            One of the operatives of Solar Power Ltd. my installers, suggested that I should replace the old cylinder with one of their recently developed ‘dual action’ solar cylinders and thus greatly simplify my system.  It would, I was assured, give me trouble-free service.   It was quite simple really.  The small cylinder in the roof space and the second circulating pump were dispensed with.  The new hot water storage cylinder is rather larger than the old one and is very heavily insulated.   It has two separate heat exchangers inside; one, in the top one-third of the cylinder is connected to the flow and return pipes from the boiler.   The other, near the base of the cylinder, has flow and return pipes connected to the solar panel on the roof.  There is just one electronically controlled pump which circulates an antifreeze solution through this latter heat exchanger when the liquid circulating through the solar panel becomes hotter than the water in the storage cylinder.  

During the summer, it would be possible on sunny days to switch the boiler off and rely entirely on the solar panel and that lower heat exchanger for all domestic hot water.   Even in the winter just an hour or two of sunshine would be sufficient to preheat the water in the cylinder before it passed through the boiler. Less gas would therefore be needed to bring it to the required temperature.

            The new ‘dual action’ cylinder was installed in mid-July.  At about the same time I took advantage of a Government grant and had my roof space heavily insulated by a specialist firm.  As we moved through autumn into winter the prices of electricity and gas rose dramatically and the government cut services and benefits.  Some old – and not so old – people were faced with a stark choice; Eat or Heat!

            My new solar hot water system was working perfectly.  It had no ‘teething problems’.   I could hear its pump switch on to warm the water in the storage cylinder, as the solar panel on the roof began to heat up.  I felt that that extra insulation above my ceilings was helping to retain warmth in my bungalow.  I awaited the annual review of my E-on account with both anxiety and hope.  Had the new system plus the insulation cancelled the effect of the price increases?  Would my monthly direct debit payments stay unchanged?  Was it just possible that they would be reduced?  The proof of the pudding is in the eating!

            That proof arrived last week – a large official communication from E-on.  I opened it with some trepidation, but I need not have worried.  My hopes had been more than justified.  My account was comfortably in credit.  £74.64 would be repaid to me within the next few days and, with effect from 1^st June, my monthly direct debit payments would be reduced from £98.00 to £62.00.   Solar power plus insulation had saved money!

            My improvements had been made towards the end of July.  They had therefore been effective for only nine months (the least sunny nine months) of the year.  Next April there should, with any luck, be a further reduction.  However, as I shall be celebrating my 91st birthday in three weeks time, it would (if I were a gambling man) be unwise of me to bet too heavily on my ever seeing that reduction!

            I hope, by the way, that I am not so pleased with the success of my own efforts to reduce my energy bills as to forget that there are many old people, and many poor families, who are not able to take similar action. They really do sometimes have to choose between Eating and Heating!   I wish I could solve their problems as effectively as I have solved my own.

An Evil Empire?

          When the Leveson Enquiry first began its work, I wrote in this blog that I had little doubt that the nefarious press practices of phone and email hacking, and the even more corrupt and illegal practice of bribing and/or threatening the Police and other public officials, would be thoroughly investigated and exposed.   I thought it likely though that there would be far less investigation and exposure of an exercise of press power that affects every single one of us but is probably not even illegal.  It is the way in which those who own and control the news media influence the policies and decisions of senior politicians, thus promoting national policies to the advantage of those owners and controllers rather than that of the rest of us – the nation as a whole.

            On 25^th April Mr Rupert Murdoch, whose News International owns forty percent of Britain’s national press and has similar holdings in North America and in Australia and New Zealand., assured the Leveson Enquiry that he had never asked a favour of Mrs Thatcher or of any other British Prime Minister.  It was a claim that was dismissed by the Daily Mirror (not a Murdoch publication!) as codswallop.  I have little doubt though that the Mirror was wrong and that Rupert Murdoch’s claim was literally true.

            Mr Murdoch wouldn’t condescend to ask a favour of any politician. Why on earth should he?  He doesn’t seek their favour.  They seek his.  Tony Blair created New Labour, reversing everything for which the pioneers of the Labour Movement had fought, to gain the approval of Mr Murdoch and the electoral support of the Sun.  David Cameron, while still in opposition, interrupted a family holiday in Turkey to fly to Rupert Murdoch on his private yacht on the Mediterranean.  In office he consulted with him and his lieutenants again and again, inviting him to the back door of 10 Downing Street to escape the notice of the non-Murdoch press.   Cameron appointed Andy Coulson, former News of the World Editor, to be his personal spin doctor and pursued a neighbourly relationship with Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s ‘right hand woman’.  Rupert Murdoch doesn’t need politicians’ favours.   They need his!

            Murdoch has never concealed the fact that he owns and controls newspapers to promote political causes - unfettered free enterprise and extreme Euroscepticism!  Politicians who support those causes can expect the support of the Murdoch press empire – those who don’t can expect derision!   When, after a Tory electoral victory, the Sun claimed ‘It was us what done it!’ it was no idle boast.

            If we really want a free and independent press (independent of ‘big business’ as well as of the state) we will make certain that it is impossible for a substantial section of it to come under the control of one individual, particularly not someone who is a foreign national, has his home and principal interests outside the United Kingdom, and owes and acknowledges no loyalty to our country, its culture, and its traditions.

 ‘I don’t believe it!’

            My nature is, I think, to be somewhat credulous and unsuspicious; the uncharitable might say ‘gullible’.  I tend to believe what I have been told until I have good reason to do otherwise.  On balance, I prefer, very occasionally, to be deceived, rather than to suspect wrongly that someone is deceiving me.  There are limits to my credulity though. I find that these days those limits are constantly being overstepped by politicians and others in the media spotlight.

            Take, for instance, the case of Mr Jeremy Hunt, Culture Minister.   Mr Hunt took over from Lib.Dem. Vince Cable the decision about the ownership of the residual BSkyB shares when Mr Cable was trapped into remarking that he had declared war on Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire was eager to acquire BSkyB in its entirety.  Mr Hunt was on record as an admirer of News International, so David Cameron obviously felt that he could be depended upon to make an absolutely impartial judgement and arrive at the decision everybody (well, everybody whose opinion mattered) wanted!

            Adam Smith, Mr Hunt’s principal adviser, seems to have imagined that our Government was the political wing of News International (it was a mistake anyone might have made!) and carried on a considerable email correspondence with News International on that assumption.  What I find difficult to believe is that, considering the nature of the ‘advice’ that Mr Hunt must have been receiving from his adviser, he still had no doubt that he would  be able to make an impartial judgement on the disposal of those BSkyB shares.  I am reminded of the story of the judge in America’s ‘wild west’ who told a captured bandit, ‘We’ll give you a fair trial – and then we’ll hang you!’  

              There is little doubt in my mind that the acquisition of the whole of BSkyB by News International would have gone ahead ‘on the nod’ had not the extent of News International’s phone hacking activities come to light at a crucial moment – and Rupert Murdoch had decided that it would be politic to withdraw his bid for those shares rather than to risk its being refused on the grounds that News International was an unsuitable organisation.

That brings me to the other news story that has stretched my credulity beyond its limits.  I just cannot believe that Rupert Murdoch, the astute news media superman, who prided himself on keeping a tight rein on all his enterprises, on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Antipodes, could possibly have allowed himself to become a victim of a conspiracy of his underlings to prevent his learning about the wide-spread phone and email hacking that had become the practice in at least part of his British media domains.  He was, so he claimed, a victim of that conspiracy and not its source.

            As Victor Meldrew, anti-hero of One Foot in the Grave, used to proclaim on our tv screens, ‘I  don’t believe it!’

‘The Cruellest Month!’

          T.S. Eliot begins his poem ‘The waste land’ with the remark that ‘April is the cruellest month’.   April 2012 certainly was that for our Prime Minister and the coalition government.  A unpopular Budget benefitting millionaires was followed by a scathing comment from one of his own Conservative MPs that he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer were ‘two arrogant rich boys who don’t know the price of milk’

Then there were those emails to which I have referred above – and Lord Leveson’s disinclination to stray into the Prime Minister’s domain and decide whether or not Jeremy Hunt had breached ‘the Ministerial Code’.   Almost at the end of the month came the pronouncement of Scotland’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop that the government’s policies were benefitting the rich at the expense of the poor.  On the same day came the official revelation that the richest of rich Britons had become even richer!   The rest of us don’t need official confirmation to know that we have become poorer!

This week are the local government elections.  The Prime Minister must surely be praying that the electorate will concentrate on local issues!