In Terms of Bollocks 9

A BBC World News presenter interviewing someone about the death of Joe Frazier: 

"A lot of people talk about the difficulty in terms of beating him".

It really does defy belief.

In Terms of Bollocks 8

The judge to the jury in the Michael Jackson trial: You have been remarkable throughout this trial in terms of your patience and dedication  =  You have been remarkably patient and dedicated throughout this trial  or Your patience and dedication throughout this trial have been remarkable.  

Why are even the greatest among us so determined to make their sentences unnecessarily complex in order to find ways of using the words "In terms of"?

Merkozy Greek Euro Bollocks

Don't you just love all the total euro bollocks coming out of Greece and Merkozyland?  Papandreou announces a referendum to ask the Greek people if thay are willing to accept the deal struck with Merkozy.  Merkozy jump up and down and, we are told, 'summon' Papandreou to Cannes. (Who the hell do they think they are 'summoning' the head of government of a sovereign state?  Papandreou should have told them to get lost). Then Merkozy announce that the Greek referendum question will be 'in or out of the euro'?   (Who the hell do they think they are telling another sovereign state what its referendum question will be?). The Greek media then scream the message that the Greek people just love the euro and are determined to stay in it so there is no need for a referendum, and every Greek vox pop face the TV broadcasters can find confirms that this is the case.  They love the euro they say for all the wonderful economic benefits it has brought to Greece.  Then they go back to rioting in the streets in protest at all the austerity measures they have to accept as a result of the massive destruction the euro has inflicted on them - massive destruction that all resulted from the Greeks falsifying their national accounts on a mega scale in order to qualify for entry to the euro, then spending billions they didn't have when the banks were conned by those falsified accounts into lending them the money to do it.  So they want to be in the euro but don't want to have to stop spending billions they don't have or to repay even half of the money they've borrowed let alone all of it.  They don't want to leave the euro because they know it will be financial ruin for them, and they don't want to stay in the euro becasue they know it will be financial ruin for them.  So they want someone to wave a magic wand so they can stay in the euro and carry on spending bllions they don't have for evermore.  Simple, as the meerkats say.

Only the French could have dug europe into such a deep pit of shit as this.

In Terms of Bollocks 7: The Greatest Yet

Jane Hill on BBC World News reporting today on the findings so far of the Met's internal review into the Tottenham riots:

 

"Unprecedented in terms of anything they had seen before".   

Not clear if these were her own words or those of a BBC news editor or of the Met itself, but either way they are an absolute classic; just about the greatest example of "In terms of" bollocks I have seen yet - which is saying something. Delete all but the first word and you have absolutely no change in meaning and perfect clarity.

Not content with that, a little later reporting on the Turkish earthquake, the BBC told us that "Time is running out in terms of finding people alive" = "time is running out for finding people alive"

Any EU referendum should follow re-negotiation, not precede it

Negotiating to see what changes in the terms of the UK's membership of the EU can be secured is surely not something that needs a referendum. It is not a change in our constitutional position; it is simply an exercise to see what change to our constitutional position could be negotiated.  A referendum would be needed only if the Government then decided  to go ahead and implement the changes negotiated.  The only point in having a referendum now would be to ask the single question: should the UK leave the EU now regardless of what changes in the terms of our membership it might theoretically be possible to negotiate?

The Tory backbenchers getting their knickers in a twist about this should change their motion to that end - if in fact getting out is really what they want.  There is no point even in changing the motion just to one calling on the Government to start negotiating now without a referendum, because it is crystal clear that changes to the treaties are going to have to be negotiated anyway to pave the way for the federalisation of the Eurozone.  The time for an in-out referendum will be after those negotiations are concluded.  The Tory leadership is absolutely committed to holding a referendum then anyway, so the backbenchers should just be keeping their powder dry and waiting to demand then that the referendum question includes the get-out option.

Why is it only euro-sceptic Tories who can't see this? 

Theresa May Right about the cat; Ken Clarke past his use-by date

Read the judge's judgement in the case concerned and it's clear that Theresa May was absolutely justified in what she said about the cat.  Of course the judge did not say the illegal immigrant could stay because he had a cat; but he did say that he could stay because he had a family relationship with a woman and that he was reinforced in that view by the fact that they had a cat.  The implication is quite clear: if they had not had a cat their claim to be in a family relationship would have been weakened in the eyes of the law.  Whether fatally weakened or not we cannot know, but it is undeniably theoretically possible that in the absence of a cat the judge might have come to a different view. So the message to illegal immigrants from that judgement is clear; if you want to avoid being deported, shack-up with a woman and buy a cat.

The case vividly illustrates just how crazy judicial interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights has become, and how urgent is the need to put things right.  Regardless of whether repeal of the Human Rights Act and the introduction of a new Bill of Rights is the right way to do that, or whether saner interpretation of the Convention by judges can be achieved while retaining the Human Rights Act, Theresa May was absolutely right to use the cat case to try to get Ken Clarke off his backside.  Ken looks to me less and less like a serious politician and more and more like an old duffer past his use-by date.

LibFem Grammar

Just listen to these words of Tim Farron, President of the LibDems: Your average Tory minister, bless them, works hard in their department and is rarely seen anywhere near their constituency. 

The statement itself is of course utter bollocks - a black lie - but the words are grammatical bollocks too.  Your average Tory minister - singular - bless them - plural - works hard - singular - in their department - plural - and is rarely seen - singular - anywhere near their - plural - constituency - singular.

Now, whatever you may think of Tim Farron's politics or intellect, like me you probably do not believe that he is this ignorant of the rules of grammar.   So why does he do it?  He does it in a desperate attempt to avoid upsetting the women's lib fraternity by saying  his or him, saying them and their instead even though the singular subjects at that point require singular personal pronouns and possessive adjectives.  He could of course have avoided the problem by saying his or her or, much better, by starting and staying in the plural thus: Average Tory ministers, bless them, work hard in their departments and are ... etc. But getting your words right takes time and effort and for him it was clearly far more important to use that time and effort to get right the LibFem Speak grammar rather than the English grammar.

Farron is not the only one who routinely mangles our grammar for this reason; the habit has become rampant at all levels of society and in all walks of life. But nowhere is it more rampant than on the centre-left of politics, which is particularly worrying because it indicates an obsession with form rather than substance and with dogma and political correctness rather than clarity, practicality and intellectual honesty.  In short, it is a symptom of the disease that is eating away at the governance of Britain.

What Kind of Psychopath Wants to Own a Savage Dog?

My lovely, sweet, affectionate, harmless Cocker Spaniel was savaged yesterday by a bull terrier-type dog let off its lead without a muzzle in a public park.  Fortunately my young, strong, brave and fit son was the one walking him at the time and managed to wrestle with the beast and prize open its jaws. Had its walker been anyone less strong and brave our Cocker would almost certainly have been killed; all its owner did was stand and watch, and his beast had already inflicted multiple deep wounds with blood gushing out of them in the minute or two it took my son to drag it off.   Three visits to the vet for treatment so far, and many more to come at horrendous expense before he is finally signed off I should think.

Browsing the internet we discover that other harmless little dogs suffer similar attacks on a daily basis and nothing much can be done about it because no criminal offence has been committed so the police won't be interested. 

Only someone who actually admires and enjoys savagery could possibly want to own such a breed. If we can manage as a society virtually to criminalise smokers, why for God's sake can't we make the owners of savage dogs suffer for wanting to inflict them on the rest of us?  Why not add an element to Council Tax for all households with dogs, on a sliding scale from modest for harmless little breeds to punitive for the breeds that most frequently attack? Unlike the old dog licence this would be cheap and easy to administer and would bring in some badly needed revenues as well.

Anti-Democratic Europhobia

I am no great lover of the ever-closer-union ambitions of the Europhiles myself, but I do have trouble sometimes understanding the logic of the Europhobes.  To a man and a woman they seem to take the line that having the fiscal and budgetary policies of Eurozone states fixed by Eurocrats controlled by Berlin and Paris would be anti-democratic and bad, and so it would; but then they go on to shout even louder that total political union with the fiscal and budgetary polices of all states controlled by a federal government elected by universal suffrage throughout the Eurozone would be far worse, the ultimate total-loss-of-sovereignty nightmare.  

Er, hang on a minute;  the reason why there isn't a cat-in-hell's chance of the Germans and the French agreeing to such a political union full-Monte anyway is because, far from robbing the people of their sovereignty, it would actually go some way to restoring it, making it harder for Berlin and Paris to run Europe as a duopoly as they more or less do now, and giving every European voter a direct vote for or against everything that any Eurocrat does.

Now, before you shout that the trouble with that idea is that it would be hard for voters in the smaller peripheral states to have the influence on central policies that the big boys would have, stop once and ask yourself whether that isn't a fundamental problem with democracy anyway - dictatorship of the majority; and then stop again and ask yourself whether you are for or against the union of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland with the United Kingdom. If you think it is right for the Scots to vote to elect the Westminster Parliament and Government within the full political, fiscal and budgetary union of the UK with certain powers devolved to them, why not ditto the whole UK relative to the parliament and government of a European Union?

The paradox demonstrates to me that the issue for most Europhobes is at heart nothing at all to do with democracy or sovereignty, it's just history and tribalism.  They are just proud Brits and full European political union would be just too much of a blow to their pride.  I have some sympathy with that sentiment, especially after another magnificent Last Night of the Proms last night; but when Scots say they are proud Scots and the Union is too much of a blow to their pride, we have to remember that what's sauce for the goose...

What is it with all this Man United Bollocks?

Am I the only one who is sick to the back teeth of hearing just about everyone in the media world refer to Manchester United and Manchester City as Man United and Man City?  It gets right up my nose.  

It can't be because they just can't be bothered saying long words or because they think it's a clever idea to use the abbreviations of team names that appear in the score boxes at the top of our TV screens when we watch games, because if it was we should also expect to hear them saying things like Bir City, Liv,Tot Spur, Hud Town, Arse etc, but we don't.

And it can't be because they think it's such a clever, neat, trendy thing to do.  I mean even they can't be thick enough to see it that way now that it's been going on for years and just about every two-bit hack and his dog is doing it.

So it must be that they do it as an affectionate abbreviation - a pet name displaying their personal admiration and loyalty.  But look here you half-wits; we are not ALL fans of Manchester or of either of its Premiership clubs. In fact millions of us are either bored to death by them or hate the very sight of them.  So will you please stop it.  Let us hear the word Manchester in full every time so we don't constantly have to groan and say what prats you are.

What Happened to the Continuous Tense?

Why is it that just about no one says I am sitting or I am standing, or I was sitting or I was standing any more? Or just about any other continuous tense of any verb you can think of for that matter?  It's all I am sat, or I was sat, or I am stood, or I was stood, etc. etc. Even people who otherwise sound quite educated do it. In fact just about everyone seems to be doing it, both orally and in print, including in many of our finest organs.  

Why for God's sake?  If they had been George Formby would they have sung: I'm Leant on a Lampost at the Corner of the Street in Case a Certain Little Lady Comes By ?  Doesn't scan quite so well does it, quite apart from displaying ignorance of English grammar?  The only explanation I can think of for this and the countless other ways in which the depressing impoverishment of our language continues to accelerate is that grammar and style are no longer taught to our kids in school.  The notion  seems to be abroad that as long as what kids say or write is understandable, that's OK.  Don't correct the poor little dears in case you upset them or damage their confidence.  And anyway good grammar is really just posh middle class talk so it's discriminatory and offensive to suggest it is superior to chav talk.  In fact some seem to think its not only socially desirable but linguistically desirable to let kids make up their own grammar and style because that enriches our language.  

No it doesn't you clods.  It just makes them sound ignorant, not least to the millions of foreigners who speak and write far better English than they do, and it makes for prose and speech that are devoid of elegance and style and painful to listen to (the thousands of varied and interesting words and phrases that have been replaced in the speech of just about everyone in public life, especially at the BBC, by the words in terms of is another example of the same depressing trend).  

I suspect we are now well into stage two of the nuclear chain reaction, with most of the so-called English teachers in our schools being incapable of teaching good grammar or style because they haven't a clue what constitutes it themselves as a result of having been taught the same ideological junk in their own school days.

If you can get us out of this fine mess Mr Gove, you'll go down in history as one of our great political heroes . 

Seeing Through the Planning Fogs

There is so much fog in the great greenfield planning controls row that it makes your head ache trying to see through it all. 

Yesterday morning the front-page headline story in The Times was Planning Revolt Fuels Fears Over Economy, giving massive prominence to (and, by implication one would have thought, thereby seeking to reinforce): (1) the argument of David Frost of the British Chambers of Commerce that ministers must defy opposition to their plans to ease restrictions on greenfield development otherwise economic growth will be imperilled; and (2) Vince Cable's statement that groups opposing those plans are "semi-hysterical". 

So we know where The Times stands on that I thought, but then I turn to its leading article on page 2 with the sub-heading: The Government is Ignoring Some Genuine Concerns in the Countryside.  It needs to Balance the Demands of the wider Economy and the Local Landscape.

This reminds me that the previous day The Times had devoted an entire page to an Opinion piece by Alice Thomson with the headline The Looting Continues - in the Countryside in which Alice ridiculed the Government's planning proposals and accused Greg Clarke, Eric Pickles, Chris Huhne, David Cameron et al of being a bunch of  economically illiterate vandals.

Today The Times devotes the same Opinion page to a piece by Phillip Collins: Want a Home? Lose a Hedgerow.  That's Progress in which he basically argues precisely the opposite case to Alice Thomson's.

I am left wondering whether The Times is having difficulty distinguishing its arse from its elbow; whether it is simply genuinely trying to give equal space to all sides of the argument, or whether there is some kind of internal power struggle going on with different editorial staff having control over different pages at different times and using that power to further their sharply differing views.

Whichever it is, a great deal of wisdom and a great deal of bollocks is all getting hopelessly jumbled together.  Alice Thomson is absolutely right to argue that the housing problem is not caused by lack of space for houses but lack of money to buy them; and that housebuilders are hoarding hundreds of thousands of plots of land assuming that the new rules will lead to a free-for-all.  She is right also to attack the Government for its insane green energy policies which achieve nothing but hugely increased energy costs and the hideous scarring of landscapes.  But she is wrong to throw opposition to HS2 into the pot.  If HS2 is needed in the national economic interest the countryside has to be sacrificed for it to be built.  Unavoidably.  So the argument is just an economic one: is HS2 really needed or not?  It is not an argument about the Planning System.  Housing is undoubtedly needed but it is far from clear that a flawed planning system is the cause of any of the problems we have, so that IS an argument about the planning system. (The green energy row is basically a religious one: only those believing they are doing God's work could possibly think there is a case of ANY kind for Huhne's lunacies).

By conflating the housing and HS2 arguments Alice Thomson is doing the building lobby's dirty work for it, because it too is only too happy to conflate them to support its spurious line that relaxation of greenfield planning controls is necessary to correct a housing shortage. Have you noticed in fact that they are usually careful not to blame the controls themselves but planning "red tape", the implication being that it is not the criteria used to decide cases but the slowness of the decision-making that causes the housing shortage. Just speed things up, they imply, and all will be OK. Third rate journalists taking their text from the press releases of the developer lobby repeat the same bollocks.  If speed of decision-making were the problem, it wouldn't be a problem would it?  Because any given volume of applications meeting the criteria for approval would produce exactly the same volume of approvals at any given moment regardless of the length of time taken; speeding it up just reduces the time from application to approval in each case, not the volume of approvals coming out on any given day.  Yes it might reduce builders' costs, but only if you assume that the delay is caused by needess "red tape" rather than by builders failing to comply with criteria for approval, being refused, then appealing, then having central government planning inspectors second-guess the decisions of local planning committees etc.  Can you think of a single major infrastructure project where the time getting it through the planning system has been more than a tiny fraction of the total time taken for the Government or quango concerned to make up its mind to do it and get the budget in place for it?

Phillip Collins shrouds it all in even more mist by arguing that the shortage of housing is causing people to rent rather than to buy, leading to a sharp increase in the percentage of renters over buyers and driving up rents.  Er, hello?.. whether people live in owned or rented houses they are still houses so the demand and supply of houses is just the same.  Yes rents are rising but not because the supply of houses is falling; if it were, house prices would be rising too, but they are not, they are falling. That's becasue there is no shortage of supply of houses, just a shortage of savings, income and mortgages to buy them.
 

In fact I'm far from clear that a national swing back from buying to renting is such a bad thing.  It could be argued to be an essential and unavoidable part of the correction of a bubble process that left many bankrupt with negative equity, placed home ownership beyond reach even for middle-income families, wrecked the banking system and plunged the economy into deep recession.  Listening to the building lobby it is very interesting to hear them crying one day about falling house prices as though they are a national disaster and screaming the next day for more greenfields to build on because it will .... er, bring house prices down.

The central but pretty much unspoken idea on which the developers' campaign and the Government's proposals appear to be based is (1) that, yes, while it may be the case that ample housing could in theory be built on brownfield land, it cannnot be in practice because available brownfield sites are too expensive for the housing built on them to be affordable and/or are not located where the housing is needed; and (2) houses built on a greatly expanded supply of greenfield sites will bring down house prices not so much by increasing supply (since that could be done on brownfield anyway) as by reducing costs. But if you believe that you might as well go and mine the moon for green cheese.  Have you noticed any difference between the prices builders charge for homes on their greenfield sites and their brownfield ones in the same areas?  And if you believe that builders are sitting on hundreds of thousands of brownfield sites waiting for prices to rise before they build (and if you don't you're living on another planet), why do you believe that they won't do the same thing on greenfield sites?

And even if that's an unjust accusation - even if the real truth is that the builders bought the brownfield sites at the height of the bubble and have no choice but to hang on for prices to recover because they'll go bust if they build and sell at current market-clearing prices - so what?  That's what market's are for isn't it?  Let them go bust; let the land then be auctioned of to the highest bidder and let them build at the new market price.  I haven't noticed the Government riding to the rescue of any of the tens of thousands of poor sods who went bust with negative equity in their own homes when the housing bubble burst. Why should builders be immune?  Slap a tax on greenfield developments tomorrow to make greenfield no more profitable than brownfield and stand back to watch the deluge of brownfield housing development that will then happen (and use the revenues to help people get mortgages).

I am in fact basically sympathetic to the idea that building houses on nondescript isolated greenfields will often be less of a loss and cause less real distress to existing communities than cramming more houses into suburban gardens or suburban extensions.  I therefore have some sympathy with the central idea in the Government's proposals that local councils should have the power to decide which greenfields should be used for housing rather than be driven by the ludicrous Soviet-style regional planning system Labour introduced.  But the essential corollaries of that are: (1) that power should be held by local authorities alone: responsibility for every decision should be seen to rest squarely and solely with them so that local electors can punish them on polling day if they do not reflect local wishes, which means that (2) there should be NO right of appeal to central government planning inspectors against local decisions to refuse.

The trouble with even this scenario however is that in many constituencies overwhelming majorities vote even for a monkey wearing the right colour rosette, leaving councillors confident they can get away with murder.  The incentives for them to try therefore need to be minimised, which leads me to the conclusion that the current system under which developers make planning gain payments to local councils should be scrapped and replaced by one in which any revenues flow not direct to local councils but to central government and are used to fund national programmes to help people get the mortgages they need, not funnelled back to local authorities.

More Housing Shortage Bollocks from the NHF

More garbage out this morning from the National Housing Federation about a supposed threat of a severe housing shortage making homes unaffordable to 'ordinary people' (patronising bastards). Take all this with a huge bucket of salt.  Their business is selling houses at the highest prices they can get.  Do they really expect us to believe they care a toss if a shortage forces prices even higher?  It is THEY who are causing the shortage by refusing to build on the big portfolios of brownfield land they own until market prices recover. This is all just part of their on-going PR campaign to scare/bribe the Government/local councils into relaxing greenfield planning controls so they can massively improve their profit margins by building on the cheap agricultural land they have options on.   Their campaign seems to be working, the only question being is that because the Tory party is too dim to see through it or because it it has its own snouts in the trough?

Never Closer Union

What more evidence do Europhiles need before they will believe that all the fine words about ever-closer union from France and Germany have been just so much guff - simply a smokescreen for their ambition to run Europe as a Franco-German duopoly? (the French with the underlying delusion that in practice they would be in the driving seat).  Any notion that their ultimate aim was a genuine United States of Europe is simply blown out of the water by their unwillingness to accept that concept for the Eurozone even though it becomes more screamingly obvious by the day that it cannot survive without it - except in the rather unlikely event that all the other Eurozone states agree to accept fiscal and budgetary dictatorship from Paris and Berlin without their own people having any vote for or against those doing the dictating.  Mind you, since they have been deluded enough to believe all the ever-closer union guff, who knows what more Franco-German bollocks they will persuade themselves to swallow.

What's Easier than History and Geography?

Sitting there desperately waiting for the BBC to stop chuntering on endlessly about the latest GCSE and 'A' Level results, I heard as if in a dream someone complaining that there had been a serious decline in the number of kids sitting 'difficult' subjects like History and Geography.  

What's difficult about History and Geography for Christ's sake?  When I was at school they were the two subjects you took if you wanted to be absolutely certain of being able to get a pass even if you were as thick as two short planks, because all they required was the ability to memorise and regurgitate a few facts.  

So what are the 'easier non-academic' subjects we are told kids are now taking instead of them?  They must be subjects where you don't even have to remember anything and regurgitate it.  Are they subjects in which all the questions come with multiple-choice answers in which every answer but one is so screamingly obviously wrong that even a chimpanzee would pick the right one?  

Or is the problem that with History and Geography you have to be able to understand and write grammatical English - a skill which our heroic teaching unions seem to have managed to strip away from many of our most underprivileged kids.

I tell you, when History and Geography are considered too difficult for a high proportion of our kids, our country is in even deeper deep shit than I had realised.

Why Do We All have to Suffer this Exam Results Bollocks?

At that stage in my life I don't recall a single mention on TV or a single column inch in the press about 'O' and 'A' level results.  The only people who even knew the results were out were we ourselves and our folks.  Now we get blanket coverage of it across all TV channels and across multiple pages of all our newspapers for day after day. Hour after hour of tedious footage of young people celebrating or crying about their results, and of even more tedious discussion and analysis.  Why for God's sake? Who gives a shit apart from the people themselves and their parents?

Policing by Consent Bollocks

I've just watched the Chairwoman of the Kent Police Authority telling us all on BBC Southeast News (its usually on the BBC that you hear this kind of crap) that David Cameron is wrong to bring in Bill Bratton to advise on gang and crowd policing because, unlike the Americans, we in this country have a system of 'policing by consent'.  

It's the umpteenth time I've heard this ludicrous phrase from wool-brained  liberals in the last few weeks.  What in God's name do they mean by it?  What DOES 'policing by consent' mean?  Have the people who utter it the remotest clue what they mean by it?  

Do they mean that in this country the police only take action against criminals if the criminals consent to their taking action against them?  Presumably not.  

Do they mean that in this country the police only take action against a criminal after carrying out a public consultation process to see if the people agree?  Presumably not.  

Do they mean they take action against criminals only after clearing it with ministers in each case?  Presumably not (in fact the police have been busily rubbishing the idea all week that ministers have any part at all to play in policing decisions of any kind).  

Do they mean that in this country police chiefs are elected to ensure that their methods reflect the will of the people whereas in the USA they are not?  Er, no, because as it happens it's exactly the other way round.

Do they mean that we in this country have a very British sense of fair play and think therefore that things should be arranged in such a way that the criminal has at least a 50-50 chance of getting away with it?  I fear some wool-brained liberals do sort of think in this way, but presumably they wouldn't want to admit it, so this can't be what they mean by 'policing by consent'.


Do they mean that crime is more acceptable the less well-off you are, so if you are  working hard going to the Post Office every Monday morning to collect your benefits you should be cut a lot more slack by the cops than if you are a toffee-nosed middle class rich bastard?  Just about the entire left-wing political establishment probably thinks in this way, but again, presumably wouldn't want to admit that this is what they mean by 'policing by consent'.

So what DO they mean by it for Christ's sake?  Can someone please put me out of my misery?

Better still, can someone tell me how we can rid ourselves of these wool-brained idiots occupying influential positions all over the country who are a major part of the reason why we are in the the bloody awful mess we now find ourselves in.

The BBC is a Big Part of the Problem

Not content with insisting on referring to rioters, arsonists and looters as 'protestors' throughout its live coverage of our recent national trauma, the BBC seems now to be devoting most of its news gathering resources to rounding up the thickest, stupidest, most ignorant morons it can find on street corners throughout the land and giving them ten minutes each on its so-called World News to tell us all things like: the riots are Cameron's fault for being away sunnin' 'imself on 'oliday like, then comin' 'ome to plot wiv the cops against us, yeh; an' they're 'is fault 'cos we ain't got no jobs like yeh, an' we ain't got nothing to do nor anywhere to go like yeh; an' like we're only doing like what 'im an' them MPs like did on the fiddle like, yeh; or like what them bankers did like, yeh.

Given that they clearly have absolutely zero understanding of reality, and that they are unable to make any utterance which comes even remotely close to having any grammatical structure at all, it is clear that the reason they are unemployed is that only a raving lunatic would offer them a job of any kind.  That is of course, apart from those fitting the above description who it turned out DID have jobs, all presumably in the public sector of course, government bodies being sufficiently raving lunatic to employ them; or, to put it another way, not giving a shit because it wouldn't be their own money going down the plughole. One of them actually had a job as a teacher.

Ed Miliband then spends the day going round the TV studios saying pretty much the same things as these morons are saying, and in language only marginally more coherent.  We need a public inquiry to find out the causes he says.  And is it any surprise, he says, that these kids do this when they see bankers getting fat etc, etc.  Of course none of this excuses rioting and arson and looting, he says.  Look Ed, if you say it explains it you are saying it caused it, and if you say it caused it you are saying it excuses it.  Worse than that, you are saying we have to make a deal with the rioters:  if they'll stop rioting we'll stop the bankers giving themselves big bonuses etc. etc.

There is of course one legitimate question that needs anwering in the longer term: how in God's name did we got ourselves into this mess?  Which politicians and which parties are to blame? Which of them should never be allowed anywhere near ministerial office again?  If that's what Ed means by a public inquiry, let's by all means have it, but let it be run only by a top judge without a single politician, sociologist, educationist, economist or any other ist or academic allowed within a million miles of the drafting of its final report.  I fear you won't like its findings Ed.

Meanwhile, there is the little question of what to do about the immediate problem, which no amount of public inquiring or stamping on bankers' bonuses or even on bankers' necks is going to make one ha'peth of difference to.  What WILL make quite a big difference is making life for the morons as hellish hell as they are trying to make life for us.  That, Mr Cameron, is what we need and expect from you, what Ed Miliband calls knee-jerk reactions, and fast.

The other thing you can do is set in motion the process of ending the compulsory TV licence and forcing the BBC to sink or swim on the basis of the willingness of people to pay for the stuff it puts out.  I'm sorry, but when the BBC decides that its proper role in a national emergency such as this is to give maximum air time to the morons who are the cause of it and to anyone who wants to spread the idea that it's not really their fault but the fault of Tories and bankers, the BBC has really lost the plot and it's time for it to go.  

Bring Pack Capital Punishment for all Killers

Until now I haven't felt inclined to sign the restore capital punishment petition, but as I sit here wondering how the hell we set about cleansing our system of the generation of sub-human thugs and morons we have managed to create by 50 years of politically correct bullshit passing as education and crime policy, I begin to feel that the shock of seeing their mates strung up for murder might be the only way of making any impact on the problem in anything less than another 50 years.

The trouble is, bringing it back just for child and police killers completely misses the point.  It isn't child and police killing that has exploded since abolition; it is killing for kicks and for money and for power that has exploded, and topping just a few child and cop killers will have absolutely no effect on that.  So come on Guido; start a new petition calling for restoration of the death penalty for all killing, and I'll be the first to sign.

And while you're at it, start another one for capital punishment for the next person who says on a TV news channel that the riot, arson, assaults and looting are all caused by kids being bored/disenfrachised/not understood/not listened to/not empowered/having nothing to live for etc etc.  In fact you might not need to because it's probably only a matter of time before they find themselves being strung up extra-judicially by outraged citizens who just can't take any more of their bullshit anyway.

PayPal are a Monopolistic Bunch of Spivs

PayPal just charged me £3.60 to receive a payment of £100 from someone.  If someone sends me a cheque for £100 and I pay it into my bank account my bank do not charge me a penny for it, even though in their case they incur real costs with real human beings sitting behind a counter processing it for me.  PayPal on the other hand is totally automated, the payment is processed in nanoseconds by a computer with no human involvement at all.

The banks don't charge because they make good money out of having our money sitting with them earning next-to-no interest (and if they do charge its by way of annual bank charges based on the number of transactions on my account, not a percentage of my money passing through their hands).  PayPal must have zillions of pounds of our money sitting with them at any one time waiting for us to get round to moving it out to our bank accounts, on which they pay flat zero interest, so why do they need to charge when the banks don't?

And even if they do need to charge, why do they need to charge on this hefty 3.6% basis?  The cost to them of processing each payment is the same whether it is £1 or £100 or £1 million pounds, so why not just charge the same tiny flat-rate fee for every payment?  10p or something should give them a handsome profit given that they are processing zillions of payments all over the world every minute of the day.

The answer to all my questions is that it is because PayPal are a bunch of spivs controlled by eBay, neither of whom I trust as far as I could kick them and whom I use only because I have no real choice. When is our government going to get round to doing something about them?

In Terms of Bollocks 6

Today, 17.20, Matthew Amroliwala reporting on BBC World News on David Cameron's meeting with the 1922 Committee:

  "Backbenchers were cheered up in terms of what they heard from the Prime Minister ...."

   = Backbenchers were cheered up by what they heard from the Prime Minister ....."


Today, 17.26, Matthew Amroliwala reporting on expansion of the Operation Weeting team:


  "That will take the team in terms of size from 45 to 60 officers"


   = That will take the team from 45 officers to 60"


Today, 17.29, Matthew Amroliwala reporting on the Somalia famine:


  "In terms of difficulties on the ground in Somalia, how are those difficulties adding to your problems?"


  = How are difficulties on the ground in Somalia adding to your problems?


Can you believe all this verbal crap coming out of the mouths of BBC presenters?

In Terms of Bollocks 5

Mark Somebody-or-Other reporting from Watford on the BBC 10.00 a.m. news about the death of Sean Hoare :

"Very little has been heard in terms of detail about"  =  "Few details have been heard"

A minute later he went on to say something like "In terms of the loss of a key witness this is a big problem for the policy inquiry going forward"  = "The loss of a key witness is a big problem for the police".

Even when journalists have a big story to report they can't resist padding it out using ten crappily fashionable pseudo-intellectual words when five plain and simple grammatical words are all that is required.

Eurozone Hell Bent for Political and Fiscal Union - I said it first

I'm flattered that my post of 20 June, saying it had become crystal clear that full political and fiscal union of Eurozone countries was the only way of saving the Euro and resolving the debt crisis, is rapidly becoming the received wisdom among the great and the good of the commentariat - see for example Anatole Kaletsky in The Times yesterday and Daniel Korski in Spectator Coffee House today.

More Utter Lunacy from Huhne's Windpower Maniacs

Well I never.  The Committee on Climate Change, which, we are told by The Times, is 'the Government's watchdog on global warming', has published a report warning the Government that 'lulls in wind speed could occur at times of greatest demand for electricity, exposing Britain to a greater risk of blackouts unless more coal and gas plants are built and kept on standby.'  

Apparently when we all thought we knew that already we were all thinking bollocks.  We couldn't have known it because it could only be known after the Committee had commissioned a report from 'AEA, an energy and climate consultancy', no doubt at vast expense, to tell them so.  

Apparently what really troubles the Committee though is not that this will leave us all unable to pay our energy bills and freezing in our beds, but that it 'could undermine progress towards having legally-binding targets to cut emissions'. 

But never fear says 'Renewable UK', 'the wind industry's trade body', the problem can be solved by building underseas electricity connectors to tap spare electricity supplies in other countries, and by having a "smart grid" that could automatically switch off our fridges and washing machines and draw back the power from our electric cars' batteries at such times.


It would be the funniest thing I've heard in months if it wasn't so terrifying. Don't you just love the way that for the green energy lunatics the only 'truth' that matters is the delivery by any means possible of their insane green energy objectives and damn the collateral damage?  It's just like the old Bolshevik definition of truth - truth is what is good for them.

More Deceitful Green Bollocks from Sir John Beddington

Yesterday I let out a whoop of joy when The Times finally published a major Opinion piece criticising wind power and the rest of the government's ludicrous green energy agenda - a superb half-page piece by Matt Ridley totally exposing the lunacy of it all.

But this morning joy turns to disbelief when I read that the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, has advised the Government to scare the public into accepting green energy policies that will send their energy bills through the roof by linking them in the public mind to major disasters around the world and blaming them on climate change.  He cheerfully admits that none of these disasters have anything to do with the UK and will not affect us, and that nothing the Government is doing on green energy will make the slightest difference even to UK climate let alone global climate.  He doesn't seem to mind too much blaming disasters on climate change even if they may well have nothing to do with climate change at all.  And his willingness to resort to deceit is broadcast loud and clear when he suggests that the Government cite measures such as the ending of the smog threat by smokeless zone regulations as examples of why we all have to pay more for green energy to protect us from other climate threats - as blatant a case of calling apples oranges as one can imagine.

And why does he suggest all this?  Apparently because if we don't do this the rest of the world will never be persuaded to take effective measures against climate change.  By destroying our industries and freezing in our homes when we can't pay our energy bills, we can apparently shame the rest of the world into doing something.  Can you believe this bullshit?


So now we know that the Chief Scientific Adviser sees his role not as providing scientific advice to the Government but as advising the government on how to distort and misrepresent science to achieve its political aims.  Seems to be a consistent character trait with climate change scientists.  Excuse me while I go an throw up somewhere.

#MartinNarey, #Adoption, and the Question that Dare not Speak its Name

In its editorial today about the report on adoption it commissioned from Martin Narey, now the government's new adoption Czar (God how I hate that word) The Times mentions that only 10% of black children in care are adopted whereas over 33% of white children are, the reason being that local authorities insist on ethnic matching when assessing the suitability of applicants.  

The Times and Martin Narey rightly condemn this policy and call for children in care to be placed without regard to ethnicity, but have you noticed that neither of them asks the question that screams to be asked?  If the numbers of white and black children ending up in care, and the numbers of white and black parents wishing to adopt, were both roughly proportionate to the respective sizes of our white and black populations, there would be no such discrepancy between the numbers of white and black children being adopted.  The fact that there is such a massive discrepancy can only mean either that the scale of black parental failure is massively greater than that of white parental failure, or that the need and/or desire of black people to adopt children is massively smaller than that of white people, or a combination of the two.

Given that this is so, this fact must be a huge part of the adoption problem.  That being so, investigating why it is so and what can be done to change it must be a major part of any solution.  So why do you think neither The Times nor Martin Narey address that question?

Of course, it's because they are both terrified of being accused of racism; the very same terror that led the powers that be to sweep under the carpet for years the fact that the incidence of the grooming for sex of young girls by organised groups of men had a massive predominance of whites among the victims and of Asians among the predators.  It took a handful of brave politicians and social workers to get that problem tackled.  How long will we have to wait for the same courage on the adoption front?

We pay such a heavy price in so many fields for the tyranny of political correctness.   

Alleluia - an Anti-Windmill Subsidy Letter in The Times at Last.

Wonders never cease; The Times has actually published a letter today from a critic of the Goverment's decision to inflict yet more carbon penalties on generators rising from £16 per tonne of CO₂ to £30 by 2013, which he says will be passed on to domestic and industrial consumers pushing more of the former into fuel poverty and more of the latter overseas. If Britain is to support a new industrial policy, he says, the environment to allow it to blossom must be in place - and this includes competitive energy prices.

The writer is Tony Lodge, Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies.  Interesting that The Times never seems to find space anywhere but on its letters page for attacks on the Government's insane policies on 'renewable' energy but regularly provides massive space to worshippers of the Windmill God. In fact you rarely read criticism of it even on the letters page. Looks as though even The Times dared not be so brass-necked as to just bin Tony Lodge's letter along with all the others it must be binning every day.  

Massive U-Turn by The Times on New Thames Estuary Airport

After rubbishing for months Boris Johnson's idea of building a new London airport in the Thames estuary The Times has this morning suddenly come out in favour of its being given serious consideration - a U-turn so dramatic as to make all those of David Cameron's that it has made so much hay with in recent days seem insignificant by comparison.

Their reason for this dramatic change of tune?  Well BA's Willie Walsh said at The Times CEO Summit that now there is never going to be a third runway at Heathrow he will take his bat and ball to Madrid instead.  

Doesn't seem to have occurred to The Times that Walsh might just have been bluffing in a last-minute desperate effort to frighten Cameron into changing his mind about Heathrow.  And I bet Walsh never bargained for the possibility that his threat might result in the advancement of Boris's idea which he too has always rubbished (unsurprisingly, given that the Heathrow on whose landing slots he has such a cast-iron grip would be reduced to a shadow of its former self or destroyed altogether if it went ahead).

Hang on though; maybe it did occur to The Times that Walsh might be bluffing. Maybe they aren't trying to punish him for threatening to bugger off to Spain; maybe they are trying to help him frighten Cameron into changing his mind on Heathrow?   In short, maybe it's The Times that's bluffing?  

Either way, it's probably another sign among many that The Times has ceased to be our 'newspaper of record' and become just another campaigning rag and PR man's dream, albeit with less vulgar font and graphics than the others. 

In Terms of Bollocks 4

Matthew Amroliwala on BBC World News on 22 June reporting Obama's plans for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan:

"..... David Cameron has been briefed in terms of the contents of President Obama's ...."

= David Cameron has been briefed about the contents of ....

He just loves saying 'In terms of', never missing a chance to use it in place of any simpler alternative.  The above example came just seconds after a similar equally daft one.  The guy is such a pseud he is like a parody of someone who is a pseud.

English all Gone to Buggery

I have always assumed that the main driving force behind the changes in our language from generation to generation has been the shifting needs and demands of each age – basically just a kind of modernisation process.  There must indeed be a large element of that of course, given the constant need for new words and phrases to name things and activities that didn’t exist before. But it’s just dawned on me that an even bigger element has nothing very much to do with needs at all; it’s just changing fashions.  The great majority of people choose their words for the same reason they choose their clothes; because it’s cool to use the in words just as it’s cool to wear the in clothes.  It’s also safer; you don’t risk being considered an outsider, or out of touch, or just plain weird by your peers.

In olden times when only an educated and aesthetically sensitive minority could read and write, these linguistic fashions would have gone down parallel tracks: a single, literary one for that minority who were capable of communicating with each other in writing, and multiple vernacular ones among illiterate communities in different regions.  The ‘fashion drive’ within the literary one would have been the need to impress one’s interlocutors with the sheer beauty, power and range of one’s language – a drive which produced the glories of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

Weep, for all that has gone to buggery.  Now even the great and the good compete only to see how often they can work into their speech and writing as many as possible of the brain-sappingly fashionable words and phrases on John Rentoul’s magnificent #bannedlists (here and here) avoiding at all costs all possible alternatives that are more individualistic, elegant, imaginative or less tediously repetitive. So, not ‘in future’ but ‘going forwards’; not ‘problem’ but ‘issue’; not ‘and’ ‘of’ ‘as’ ‘for’ ‘by’ ‘in’ ‘to’ ‘with’ ‘through’ or just about any other nominative, prepositional or conjunctive word or phrase you can think of if you can possibly think of a way of constructing your sentence so as to replace them by ‘in terms of’; and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Fashion is driving our language not to new heights of elegant economy but to the turgid, inarticulate depths.

Who or what is driving these ‘fashions’?  My guess is that there are four main strands to it.  One is the modern disease of political correctness, which intimidates us into calling a spade anything but a spade, so ‘mental disability’ must be ‘learning difficulties’, ‘elderly’ must be ‘older persons’, ‘chairman’ or ‘chairwoman’ must be ‘chair’, 'staff' must be 'colleagues', 'departments' must be 'teams', 'interested parties' must be 'stakeholders', any other organisation we have to deal with must be a 'partner', and grammar and style must be sacrificed at all costs to avoid offending feminist sensibilities by using masculine nouns, pronouns and possessive adjectives. 

Another is the daily PR assault on the media by the climate change and environmental fraternity, so that everything now is or is not ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ or good for your ‘carbon-footprint’.  A third is to be found in what seem to be two principles of progressive teaching, one that no child is ever wrong and two that everything possible must be done to avoid confusing them with anything complicated. So yes, they must be taught that the letter ‘h’ is pronounced ‘haitch’ because the poor little dears would be baffled if it were pronounced ‘aitch’, and no you mustn’t correct them if they always say ‘myself’ even when it should be ‘me’ because the poor dears would never then understand why sometimes it’s rude to say ‘me’, and so on. 

And then there is the fourth strand, the central one underpinning all of them, which is the army of companies making a fortune selling training programmes to organisations and individuals of all kinds - sales, marketing, management, career development and media trainers probably being the biggest culprits - who bash all this crap into the heads of people when they are still young and impressionable and can be persuaded that if they don’t talk like this they’ll never get on.

We have to find a way of stopping them, otherwise our descendants are going to wind up back in their literary caves just grunting at each other.

Let's all celebrate as the French and Germans are hoist by their own ever-closer-union petard

Is it not getting clearer by the day that there's only one solution to the Eurozone's Greek, Irish, Portuguese and Spanish problem?  Let the Eurozone move to full political,economic and monetary union as Euroland now, with a president and legislature elected direct by universal adult suffrage; with Euroland-wide standardised pensions, social security and welfare entitlements, and with all member-states' debts converted to Euroland debts.

SInce it has been the efforts of France and Germany to create a fake version of such a union, in which they fondly imagined they would actually be the real powers behind the scenes pulling all our levers, is it not now poetic justice that possibly the only way they can save their fake union from ending in humiliating and total shambles is to move to a genuine union which they really are unable to control but the bills for which their nationals will still have to pick up.

Meanwhile those like us who never bought the idea of ever closer union can stay happily outside Euroland but hang on to our existing treaty benefits as long as it suits us to do so.  Why should we care if the Eurozone is driven down that road? We should celebrate their being hoist by their own petard.


And if their answer to this idea is that it's bollocks to think that this kind of union is wanted by any Eurozone country or could be achieved, well quite, so why have you all been talking that bollocks for the last 50 years or so, and will you now please stop.

More Wind Power Bollocks from Browne

Former BP boss Lord Browne, now President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, tells us in the Times Thunderer column today how we should have lots more wind power ‘cos it will create lots of lovely jobs (mentioning by the way that most of the jobs it’s created so far have gone overseas but swiftly and gayly skipping on from that, presumably on the assumption that now he’s pointed it out it will swiftly be put right).    Yes it will need container loads of government cash to make it happen he cheerfully acknowledges, but this is all right ‘cos North Sea oil and gas needed government incentives in the early days too. 

Can you believe that such a big name can write such utter bollocks, totally ignoring the massive differences between the oil and gas markets and the renewables market?  The Royal Academy of Engineering exists we are told to promote excellence in the science, art and practice of engineering.  Browne clearly thinks it exists to procure shed-loads of government cash to create jobs for the boys.  

Notice also that another whole-page article in the same issue is devoted to telling us how much inflation is outstripping our incomes, without telling us how much of that is being taken from us by utilities forced by the government’s Climate Change Act to buy wind power at exhorbitant prices.  

Last week they allowed David Aaronovitch to rant on for half a page in support of wind power, the only argument in support of which he could think of was that opponents are, in his anything-but-humble opinion,  nimbies.  

God help us all.  Our parliament, our great institutions and our media are all fatally penetrated by people who cannot see the real world for bullshit, or can but don't give a shit.

Women Are Their Own Worst Enemies Janice Turner

Janice Turner in The Times today bemoans the fact that it is hard to imagine a single woman politician today who, if Prime Minister, would not be "ripped to shreds for her looks, clothes, voice; her irreducible femaleness".  Well yes love, but most of the ripping and shredding would be done by magazines run by women for women.  If being treated as sex objects is a major problem for women wanting to make their way in the world, the blame for that rests at least as much with women as it does with men. 

In Terms of Bollocks 3

A spokesman for A4E, one of the private sector contractors for the Government's Welfare to Work programme launched today, on BBC World News:

"We will give them tools in terms of understanding..."  =  We will help them understand.

Only a bunch of bullshitters would use language like this, so I fear the worst for this scheme.

More Bollocks on Wind Power from Aaronovitch

Bullshit and boring are the words that David Aaronovitch’s columns in The Times usually bring to mind (surely he would be happier writing for the Guardian?), and this morning’s one screaming ‘Nimbies’ as a term of abuse at objectors to wind farms in Devon is no exception.

There is an insidious alliance between the woolly-minded left and the unprincipled far right over planning policy, the woolly left seeing ‘Nimbyism’ as the rich trying to hang on to their riches at the expense of the poor and the far right seeing it as sentimental wets putting a brake on their development profits.  Give me the far right on this every time.  I find their cynicism easier to live with than Aaronovitch’s woolly-minded bullshit, and there is always a better chance the former will be seen through by planning inspectors at planning inquiries than the latter.

But what is just daft about both their positions is their common underlying premise that the objections of those who have a great deal to lose from a proposal are automatically ignoble, selfish and therefore far less valid than the arguments of those who have nothing to lose and/or have something to gain from them. The far right are clear-headed enough to know this is bollocks but cynical enough to get that message repeatedly propagandised as attacks on ‘Nimby’s’ by their collaborators in the media in their own interests. 

The woolly-minded left like Aaronovitch cannot even see that it is bollocks.  What do they want – a planning appeal system in which if a barrister can show that you personally have a vested interest in objecting to a proposal you should not be heard, or heard but ignored?  And how is vested interest to be defined?  You might for example have no direct interest in the case in question but fear that if it goes through it will lead to other developments which might affect you directly.  Is that self-interest?  Or maybe it doesn’t affect you but is deeply distressing to relatives who are affected.  Is that self-interest? And if both are self-interest, what armies of barristers could we look forward to in such a system pouring over every last inch of our private lives to dig out the dirt in support of their developer clients?

And will they accept the corollary that if an opposing barrister can show that you have a vested interest in supporting a development you too should be barred or ignored?

In the case of wind farms Aaronovitch is not even right in his basic accusation that only those with something personal to lose object.  Everyone in the country with an ounce of common sense and genuine humanity is opposed to them everywhere, not just in their own backyards, because they know that they will give us nothing in return for the grotesque scarring they cause other than more expensive electricity bills.  They know that wind power is just libtard greentard bollocks that will not have any measurable impact on global CO₂.

Aaronovitch seems to think he has a great knock-out punch: would the objectors still object if it wasn’t windmills but pylons without which it would be impossible to bring them electric power he asks with a great rhetorical flourish.  Well probably not, but what has that got to do with it? Windmills are not being proposed as the only way to bring them power but as the most expensive, ugly, inefficient and unreliable way of bringing them power out of several options.

Thrilled at his own supposedly rapier-like punching, Aaronovitch throws another one: the windmill objectors are just like the HS2 objectors.  No they are not you muffin.  HS2 will unarguably bring great economic advantage to the nation and travelling convenience and comfort to just about all of us.  The objections of all those who have a lot to lose from it have to be carefully listened to and assessed to make sure that the final route selected is the best – i.e. least damaging – choice and that every mitigation that can reasonably be adopted is adopted.  In the case of wind power the nation will be economically damaged by it and every single one of us will lose unless we are one of those who sells land for it or makes money building it.  I am of course discounting as a ‘gain’ from wind power the smug sense of moral superiority it induces in the woolly heads of the likes of Aaronovitch.

Mind you, at least he managed for a change to get through a column without accusing opponents of his point of view of anti-Semitism.

Circumcision, anti-Semitism and Invasive Penile Cancer Bollocks

Dominic Lawson, in his Sunday Times column today fretting that moves in California to get circumcision of boys banned might spread to the UK, manages to imply that campaigners against male circumcision are guilty both of anti-Semitism and of increasing the incidence of invasive penile cancer, which, he says, has been shown to be greater in the un-circumcised.

Interesting that he does not seem to think they are also anti-Islam, given that it's not only 100% of all Jewish boys who are circumcised but 100% of all Muslim boys too.

Interesting also that he does not mention that (1) invasive penile cancer is vanishingly rare anyway, so the increased risk even if it exists is still vanishingly small, and (2) the statistics said to prove the link between lack of circumcision and invasive penile cancer are complete bollocks anyway, as this shows: http://www.circumstitions.com/Cancer.html

More Female Bird Bollocks

Onward marches the femtard cause.  Alice Thomson is at it again in The Times this morning, campaigning for all non-violent female prisoners to be released from gaol.  Interesting that she doesn't see any need to campaign for all non-violent male prisoners to be released from gaol.  Her excuse this time is that it's harmful to kids for their mums to be locked up. Presumably she thinks it's not harmful to kids for their dads to be in the slammer?  Maybe she thinks that's positively good for them in fact?  Note also that she does not demand the release of mothers from gaol, but the release of all non-violent women.  And if she stopped to think for a second she'd realise that if all non-violent mothers were exempt from gaol female crooks everywhere would soon get wise and get pregnant before robbing us all rotten.

In Terms of More Bollocks

Joanna Gosling on BBC World News just now, interviewing someone about Ratko Mladic: "How will it unfold from now in terms of timescale?"  = How long will it take.

In Terms of Bollocks

The expression "In terms of" has during my lifetime gone from being one you heard very occasionally and almost always in its true sense - the value system used to assess, compare or describe something - to being one which most journalists and presenters use with wild abandon as a nominative particle, preposition, conjunction  or just about any other part of speech you can think of. Some can hardly get through a sentence without using it, and some use it several times in a single sentence.  Some go to enormous lengths to mangle their sentences in order to work it in.  

The worst culprit of all is the BBC's Matthew Amroliwala, who uses it in the most tedious and ludicrously unnecessary ways in every bulletin.  Today's classic from him came in his report of the arrest of Ratko Mladic: "It has been two decades in terms of time since ...."  He seems to be completely unaware what total bollocks he is talking.  

The cancer has now spread from the media to the general public with every Tom, Dick and Harry using it because they think that if the media use it it must be sophisticated.

Does anyone know what started this epidemic?  My gut instinct is that it must have been bashed into the heads of students on journalism courses as the smart phrase to use when you haven't got the time, or can't be bothered, or are too illiterate, to think what the right phrase is.  If so, it's completely backfired now because they are all trying so hard to use it that their speech has become not shorter but longer, more convoluted, and totally devoid of the elegance and style on which newspapers and broadcasters of old used to pride themselves.  It is impoverishing the English language.  I do wish the BBC would set an example by banning its use, even if that means Matthew Amoraliwala would be reduced to just staring at the camera and trying to think of something else to say.

Female Bird, Learning Difficulties and Older People

Alice Thomson tells us in The Times this morning that "If Mr Clarke wants to cut the prison population he should concentrate on white collar criminals, women prisoners, drug addicts and the mentally ill".  Do you like the way women deserve automatically to be considered for shorter sentences just by virtue of their sex?

Mind you, at least she uses the term "mentally ill", unlike her colleague Anushka Asthana in the next column who, like just about everyone else in medialand, insists on calling it "learning difficulties".  You regularly hear people who are nearer the grave than the classroom referred to as people with "learning difficulties". This is now backfiring on itself because you can't talk about someone's learning difficulties in the proper sense of the term - I had a lot of trouble learning algebra for example - without risking giving the impression that they are not just not quite as bright as some of their classmates but clinically retarded.

This politically correct bullshit is now going completely mad.  I was recently firmly chastised at a public meeting for referring to "the elderly".  I should call then "older people" I was told.  Older than who for Christ's sake? 

Why can't we call a spade a spade anymore?  Do the people themselves or their families really give a toss?

God Save Our Gracious Judges

I found it hard to keep down the contents of my stomach this morning reading and viewing the nauseating hypocrisy and egotism pouring out from media and politicians alike over the injunctions issue.  
 
It is absolutely crystal clear that the private life of a soccer star has absolutely nothing to do with the public interest. 

It is equally absolutely crystal clear that the fact that anyone can read all the details on the web does not mean that the judge should remove the injunction so the media can jump on the bandwagon.  Tweeters are in it just for the hell of it.  The media are in it for the money, and it is their money that fans the flames and causes people to seek to sell for massive profit and with increasing frequency private information in which the public interest is 100% prurient. 

Media whining about freedom of speech, and about it's being only the rich and famous who can afford protection of their private lives by the courts, is just so much hyprocritical guff.  It is only the rich and famous who need the protection of the courts.  The media are not interested in the private lives of the poor and obscure precisely because there is no money in it for them.

Parliament has created laws, or acquiesced in their creation by the EU, which require judges to protect citizens from breaches of their privacy except where such breaches are necessary in the genuine public interest.  If Parliament thinks judges are misinterpreting those laws it can and should legislate to change them. For a peer and an MP to second guess a judgment behind the shield of parliamentary privilege is just totally shameless attention-seeking revealing egos the size of barns and total disregard for the Rule of Law which is the vital foundation for all our freedoms.


Nor is this confined to soccer players.  Publication of information about someone's sex life, whether extra-marital or not, can be justified if the person concerned has preached publicly against such activity, or has invited people to vote for him on the basis of public statements condemning such activity by others.  In virtually no other circumstances can its publication be justified - and I include in this the Goodwin/RBS case; you have to be pretty dim to think his affair could possibly have had any bearing at all on his decision to buy ABN Ambro and thus bankrupt RBS.  If you believe some of the guff being written about the Goodwin case now you would have to believe that John Major's pension should be docked because his affair with Edwina Currie may have caused Black Wednesday.