The View from Cullingworth is still great.

We all get to the point where we wonder why we bother with something. We sort of do it from habit or from a sense of bizarre duty or obligation. You step back from the thing for a minute, scratch your head and ask "do I really want to keep on doing this just for the sake of it".

So it was for me a couple of days ago with The View from Cullingworth. It seemed to be a futile thing and, to be honest, a self-indulgingly futile thing to boot. So I took to Twitter to say that I was thinking of packing it all in since nobody much read it. As with a lot of public self-analysis, it ends up looking or sounding a bit daft, if nobody reads it why on earth should anybody bother whether or not it exists.

Anyway I'm not stopping after all because nice people told me I probably shouldn't (and what else were you going to do with your time anyway). I then considered whether I should be a little more purposeful - perhaps not to have anything so grand as an editorial strategy but to at least get a little more focus. But then I remembered we'd been there before as we tried to focus in on a limited few subjects in the hope that, by doing this, the place gets a few more regular readers of one sort or another.

So it'll still be whatever excites or irritates me at a given moment. Probably not surfing bang on the crest of the big news wave but rather paddling my way in the ripples and shallows of curiosity. This probably means you'll get a lot about housing and planning because, for all that it's seldom a big news story, it is really important to pretty much everyone and so much that's said about it is wrong. Perhaps there'll be more stuff cataloguing my travels through what being a conservative means these days. Plus a reminder about how much of government policy and decision-making is driven by a bunch of fussbuckets, worrywarts and jobsworths.

Anyway thanks to all those who bothered to say nice things about me, to those who gave me the benefit of their knowledge and especially to the folk who reminded me not to take myself quite so seriously.

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Top posts (or at least the top ones I wrote) of 2017

Another year splutters and coughs as it nears its end. And an unusual year following on from the earthquake year of 2016 - Brexit, snap election, minority government, Corbyn, Trump and a new French president. I wrote some blog posts and these are the one's you liked most:

Build more suburbs

Right across England we need a more mature debate about housing development. Not the polemical ASI "scrap the green belt" debate but rather one with local communities about how much extra housing they'd be happy with and where it might go. After all most of those people have families, they know how expensive housing is these days and they want their children and grandchildren to have the joys of home ownership.

Be pragmatic about Brexit

The process between now and the point when the UK leaves the European Union is about these arrangements, about balancing between maintaining access to the EU and openness elsewhere, and about the UK deciding upon and implementing a trade strategy. It's not and never has been about there being some 'plan', a sort of ideological blueprint for leaving the EU. Such planning's main function is in allowing the testing of different scenarios and in exploring how UK domestic decisions play out internationally:

It's not OK to punch political opponents

The only winners from punching Nazis and Fascists are the Nazis and Fascists. And if you think punching people who you disagree with is just fine and dandy then you're part of the problem not part of the solution. If your mythology tells you - and left wing mythology does just this - that violence is central to Fascism and Nazi-ism then your punching that Nazi makes you one and the same as him.

Yes, Trump does want to ban Muslims

So those folk complaining about the description of this action as a 'Muslim ban' - 'it's not a ban and it doesn't mention Muslims' they shout - are wrong. Trump's intention is absolutely that of banning Muslims. We know this because he said so. And all that's happened is the US law and constitution are making it hard for Trump to do what he said he wanted to do - ban Muslims. It may not be a ban but that is its intention. It may not mention Muslims but they are its target. It is, de facto, a Muslim Ban or at least an attempt at one.

The left aren't interested in liberalism

We do not live in a liberal society. The left do not and never have believed in a liberal society. Why the hell should I believe that their marching to defend that liberal society against Trump, Brexit and other demons is anything other than a big, fat stinking lie?

Owning robots...

Partly this distribution of the robot benefits comes through goods and services being cheaper (lots cheaper in some cases) thereby allowing our money to go further. But there is also the consideration that the benefits cannot simply go to a few entrepreneurs if the advantages of robots are to be realised. This is where some advocates of minimum basic income get their shtick - government taxes the robots' added value and shares it with the humans who don't have jobs any more thereby allowing those humans space to go off and do exciting, creative stuff. This does presuppose that government will not crash the robot economy so as to pay the higher basic income they promised in order to get elected. Not a presupposition I'd care to put money on.

Evil marketers and Big Data

The truth is a deal more prosaic. Marketers ask customers about their lives, social media use and so forth then profile this against aggregate data from various sources to produce targeting information - where geographically or behaviourally we can go looking for folk like those customers we've surveyed. I so want us marketers and ad men to be master manipulators, able to switch your mind at the push of an analytical button or the twitch of an algorithm. But we're not like that at all, we're not even that good at using big data.

London habits

None of us provincials and suburbanites think everything is perfect or even that leaving the EU is some sort of panacea to society's ills. Rather, we would like to be seen as people rather than something to be either sneered at or patronised. Above all, as English men and women, we think our country is great, has done great things, and is worth preserving as a place rather than a mere brand in a nebulous, purposeless 'Anywhere'.

Time to close down public health

Imagine Glastonbury, Reading or Leeds Festival without smoking (of any kind). Consider what will happen to your local when smokers have to move half a street away to enjoy a fag. Those smokers - getting on for a fifth of the population - won't be there. And what happens when a fifth or more of your business goes away? No more local pub. Half the nations festivals and concerts unviable. Empty bars. Closed restaurants. Hundreds of thousands more jobs destroyed by public health.

It's a small thing...

It's a small thing. Since the polls closed at 10pm on Thursday night, my in boxes have been free of emails from the Conservative Party and its leaders - not one. And you know something, Theresa, this is a problem. While you've been coming over all strong and stable, you and your team have forgotten to do something really simple.

Your caring, sharing NHS at its most cruel

We're told almost daily how NHS staff are wonderful and caring yet somehow we've reached a point where "as there wasn't evidence to prove that e-cigs were safe or unsafe, they were banned on health grounds" - for people in a hospice receiving palliative care for a terminal illness. Not only is this stupid but it is really cruel. So much for the caring, sharing NHS.

Ten common lies about free markets...

Every day - in the papers, on the telly and all over social media - a bunch of people tell a pack of lies about free markets, capitalism and the liberal enlightenment that made us all rich, is still helping make the poor less poor and the rich happier. The Clerisy, as Deirdre McCloskey calls them, having got themselves secure, often tax-funded positions spend their time sneering at the things that made their comfortable lives possible. Hipsterish, right-on web-design consultants and the like go on about the evils of capitalism while plying their lucrative businesses in that capitalist world.

This makes me angry.

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Scribblings II: On pubs, smoking bans, perdigree dogs, political donations and Brexit

We're back with another dose of great writing from Martin Scriblerus bloggers. I did get called out for calling it 'scribblings' - but what else could I choose! Well here we go:

There are a lot of beer bloggers who talk about beer. Old Mudgie talks about pubs and his blog is a paean to their wonders, a wistful look at the memories of pubs gone and a poke at those who get too precious about beer. Here's he looks at why old pubs just sit empty:

Assuming the building has no future as a pub, it is going to cost money to convert it to anything else, and that will need both someone willing to take it on, and planning permission. In many cases, the owners are probably hanging on to get planning permission to demolish the building and redevelop the site for something else, typically housing.

Up and down the country, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of derelict pubs that have been in that state for years, many of which are featured on my Closed Pubs blog. Fortunately there aren’t too many in Stockport, but two exceptions are the Royal Mortar on Higher Hillgate and the Bow Garrett on Brinksway, both of which must have been closed for over ten years.

Dick Puddlecote, when not running some sort of transport business, writes passionately about the fussbuckets - charmless, judgemental folk who hate us having pleasure. Here he cites a fellow 'jewel robber' (and he calls those challenging the anti-smoking, temperance and diet fanatics) and comments that:

This is what happens when you have a colossal state-funded machine which views life solely through the lens of health. Other pleasures and benefits in consuming the products in question are completely ignored, therefore the prohibitionists simply cannot comprehend the huge social and financial damage their rancid policies are causing ...

Julia has been a loud, uncompromising and essentially conservative voice in the blogging world for a long while. Here's a typical sample of her blogging as she comments of a story about a lefty who bought a pedigree dog - first the quote from the story:

"...Colleagues and friends have accused me of abandoning my longstanding centre-left principles in favour of eugenics, arrivisme and trying to suck up to the ruling classes..."

Then...bang:

Might I suggest you find new colleagues and friends? It should be quite easy, now you have a puppy!

Brilliant!

Mark Wadsworth is best known for writing about land value tax but he's not a one-trick pony and here's a cracking post about donations to political parties (that may or may not be a good idea):

...it has been suggested that parties should either be funded out of taxation or there should be a cap on the amount each donor can give.

I don’t think either of those two are satisfactory, and would like to suggest another alternative. Legislated anonymous donations.

Anyone wishing to donate above say £500, would have to send their cheque to the Electoral Commission nominating to whom it should go. Once a year, those donations would be passed on to the relevant party aggregated and without the names of the donors.

Raedwald's another blogger who takes few prisoners and doesn't bow to political correctness. Here he compares a map of 7th century East Anglia to the devastating effect of ice caps melting on the region:

The Indie prints a map of how East Anglia could look if the giant ice sheet did melt; it's exactly the same as the historic Anglian coastline in the 7th century.

Finally -for this week - Frank Davis compares the experience of Remain voters after Independence Day with the shock smokers like Frank got on 1 July 2007 when they were banned from pubs:

But for those who voted to remain, their experience that day was probably one of shock and dismay and disbelief. They are probably feeling something very like what we smokers experienced on 1 July 2007. For they also had just been expelled from a club in which they had come to believe that they were full members – just like smokers and their pubs. They had become exiles. Their world had been turned upside down. They are probably filled with the same disbelief and rage as many smokers were on 1 July 2007.

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Scribblings...

OK so I've accepted an invitation to join this blog to a latter day Scriblerus Club - if we're a tenth as good as the original one, it will be excellent:

The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of authors, based in London, that came together in the early 18th century. They were prominent figures in the Augustan Age of English letters. The nucleus of the club included the satirists Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Other members were John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Henry St. John and Thomas Parnell.

You can click through to the Martin Scriblerus pages via the icon on the side bar - most of the members are in my blogroll too. Not sure how all this will play out - the original club met some place and probably drank a lot while discussing important things like horses, girls and poetry but any group with Leg Iron, Longrider and Julia in won't be quiet.

Anyhow, I'm featuring a weekly 'scribblings' - at least until I forget or get bored or both - pulling out the posts from Martin Scriblerus members that most tickled, inspired, educated or other wise appealed to me. Here's the first few:

James Higham at Nourishing Obscurity writes about the culture of grassing people up - the unofficial collaborators of East Germany and the Soviet Union:

This girl’s mother had been the Russian equivalent of die inoffizielle Mitarbeiter or informer. Not only that but there was a policy across the USSR of ‘denunciation’. So, if you didn’t like something someone had done or said, you went to a special little hut in one of the yards and made your report or else you went far away to an office somewhere on the other side of town.

We should guard against any moves to empowering people to act as voluntary behaviour police.

On a lighter note Mark in Mayenne breaks off from French life for a second to remind us about the creative way in which huge boxes contain not very much product (something the buyers of potato crisps are very familiar with).

The Churchmouse meanwhile introduces us to Charles Simeon an 18th century evangelical churchman:

The churchwardens tried desperately to stop Simeon. Simeon’s struggle continued for 12 years. The churchwardens and trustees locked the church to which he had no key. Once he had a key, they locked the box pews, so that anyone attending had to stand. Simeon rented chairs, but they were removed. Other men were brought in to give Sunday afternoon lectures, without Simeon’s permission. College students attended services only to attack him verbally when he was preaching. Some threw bricks through the church windows when he was preaching. On the streets of Cambridge, they harassed him with false rumours about his reputation.

And - while we're on religion - Leg Iron ponders an Islamic reformation (and isn't entirely convinced):

Now there is a movement within Islam to stop the indiscriminate killing. It is completely indiscriminate. It kills as many, probably more, Muslims as non-Muslims and it’s just getting sillier by the day. Islam is at last organising to stop it. It starts tomorrow (well okay, today).

Moving swiftly from religion to sewage, A K Haart lays the blame for all the failings of local government on what Peter Simple was wont to call the 'terrible Heatho-Walkerian reforms' of 1974. Times were better before then:

One should not see that trailer load of sewage sludge through rose-tinted spectacles, but for a short time I was working at the local sewage works and I enjoyed it. Effectively we were all working for the Borough Engineer and via him for local people. We knew why we were there, why we did what we did and for whom. By modern standards it may not have been an efficient arrangement but after 1974 a sense of working for people slowly evolved into a sense of working for a salary.

It did rather bring to mind Paul Jennings's essay on 'Activated Sludge' - you really should read his essays they are a delight.

Finally (for now) we have Bill Sticker explaining to Yanks why moving to Canada to escape Trump might not be as great as they think:

To begin with, north of the 49th parallel we do not enjoy the same diversity of goods as in the US of A. Grocery stores do not stock wine or even lite beer. Did I also mention it’s more expensive to live up here as well? Food and rent prices are generally higher, and property costs more to buy, even with the current exchange rate. A lot of places close on public holidays as well as Sundays and Mondays and Wal-Mart is no longer taking VISA payments in some of its stores. And if you want to shop at Target instead… oh, wait. You can’t. They’re all shut. Permanently. Then there’s the bears. Who aren’t to be messed with, even in the suburbs of Vancouver. They’re are also known to break into cars (To be fair, it was a Lexus). On the plus side, the wildlife does tend to keep the human varmints indoors, when they’re not indulging in the odd gang shooting (The gang bangers, not the Bears or Cougars). Which keeps our local Police busy. Yes, and Marijuana isn’t fully legal just yet. So before you sell up and fill up the U-Haul, take a deep breath.

A pretty good start - and there's loads more to go for so pop across a have a read. Worth your time.

Free speech, fussbucketry and other things I won't shut up about in 2016 (sorry but a happy new year)

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The ineffective puritanism of modern public health

Perhaps, we will shift back to a more balanced approach to these issues. Less judging, less hectoring. Or maybe we'll sleepwalk into a ghastly, oppressive world where the New Puritans police our behaviour for its adherence to the received orthodoxy of believe about pleasures. I am not all that hopeful right now.

How lies - by pharma companies and tobacco businesses - are used to try and kill vaping

Biebert has identified Big Pharma, anti-smoking groups and government as the real forces at work to discourage electronic cigarettes and vaping. Biebert, who neither vapes nor smokes, was first drawn to the topic after reading about the famous ‘formaldehyde in ecigs’ claim. Beibert had friends that had switched from smoking to vaping and when he looked into the formaldehyde in ecigs study, the lie was obvious. That got him wondering.

Why free speech is really really important and the only winners in its removal are those with power

"In simple terms: one, I don't think we should be spending public money on finding out whether we can ban the EDL.

"Secondly, free speech and free assembly matters and if we can't have these things our society is worse for it."

How the lack of real accountability in the NHS kills any attempt to make it more efficient or more effective

The idea that the NHS is run by ‘the people’, as a joint endeavour, is a romantic fantasy. The NHS is an elite project, and this could not be otherwise. Collective choice is not a substitute for individual choice and ‘voice’ is not a substitute for ‘exit’. The illusory ‘accountability’ mediated through the political process cannot come anywhere near the accountability of a marketplace, or of a properly designed quasi-market setting, in which providers stand and fall with the choices consumers make, and depend on them for their very economic survival.

How free markets, free trade and capitalism are making the world - day after day - a healthier, wealthier, happier and more equal place

It was Schumpeter who pointed out that capitalism and the free market revolution didn’t mean all that much to Elizabeth I. She already had knitted stockings (in fact, we know the day she got her first pair). The great genius of capitalism is that it ended up with every factory girl possessing knitted stockings. That’s actually the defining feature of the system, that it ends up making everything just extraordinarily cheap–exactly the thing we want in order to be able to improve the lives of the poor. Just as it did our own forefathers of course. Because our forefathers were, almost all of them for almost all of history in exactly that $2 a day poverty that we now define as absolute poverty.

In between this stuff there'll be the usual bits about urbanism, the stupidity of planning, daft environmentalism, a bit of Bradford and - of course, of course - some mushrooms. I might even find a little time to say something about why we should leave the EU. Hopefully some of you will stay the course. Whatever you do, have a good 2016 if you possibly can.

It goes without saying that I'm grateful so many of you kept coming back here - prompted by a few great blogs including that commie fellow Chris Dillow's 'Stumbling & Mumbling', Dick Puddlecote and Chris Snowdon as well as the legion of folk who arrive from Twitter and Facebook.

So whatever you're doing this evening, do it in style and I pray it includes some binge drinking, over-eating, staying up too late, making a noise and enjoying the fabulous munificence of this great world we've got to live on. And I hope you don't let the nannies, the fussbuckets, the puritans, the health fascists and the greeny-greeny, back-to-the-mud huts brigade ruin your year. Above all please try to be polite while saying the things you want to say about the things that matter to you. Don't let the tyranny of those - like the Labour's leader on Bradford Council - who want to stifle your right to speak freely.

Happy New Year. And have a good one.

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The View from Cullingworth - best of 2014...

Hallas Mills, Cullingworth

Happy New Year dear readers.

Here are the posts more of you read this year - an odd collection!



Fair trade and the keeping of peasants in their place- my gentle criticism of fair trade on the occasion of Keighley becoming a 'fair trade town'.

..."fair trade" is part of this corrupted idea of development, of an idea that guilty rich folk should simply hand over extra cash so that people farming ever more marginal land don't starve to death. An idea of development that proposes the use of Western wealth to keep peasants as peasants and then guilt-trips us into coughing up charity to do just that.

You and your racist garden!- a response to some daft sociologist who argued that the “...'crisis in white identity in multicultural Britain' meant people felt unable to express their views for fear of being called racist, so expressed their racial identity in other ways, such as talking about gardening."

...the idea that talking about gardening is suppressed racism may be gibbering, dribbling nonsense but underlying such a statement is something else - an ignorance of the garden, the dismissing of the pastime as some sort of 'white, middle-class' obsession and the desire to make something as quintessentially English as gardening somehow an ethnic marker rather than a cultural wonder.

Prostitution in Bradford - what we should have said in response to that petition. I got into a little bit of bother over a Tweet - so I wrote down the gist of the speech I would have made had I spoken.

I don't know the extent to which we can - on our own in Bradford - move towards a more European approach to the sex trade. Whether we can use licensing and the drawing of boundaries to ensure that the 'red light' area is well defined (avoiding the disturbance to families or communities) and that health advice and support can be provided to the sex workers. It seems to me that this would be a better outcome than what we'll actually get - more police patrols, the hounding of punters and a lot of hot air about community safety. 

The smoking ban didn't work, did it? A more traditional blog topic - commenting briefly on the continued failure of draconian controls to reduce levels of smoking (unlike e-cigs).

The smoking ban in pubs, the thing - the silver bullet - that would suddenly change the world and stop every one smoking was introduced in 2007. And look folks - it didn't work, there was no accelerated decline in smoking and one-in-five of us still smoke. So we've shut down thousands of pubs, destroying business and creating unemployment to achieve almost nothing at all.

A Manifesto for Health Fascism. Reporting on an opinion piece in The Lancet, house journal of New Puritans, nannying fussbuckets and prohibitionists, that describes a 'manifesto for planetary health' - essentially a state of the health fascist ideology.

What we have here is a proposal that denies any individual or personal choice - it is subsumed into the 'wellbeing of all', a well-being that isn't determined through markets or even government but via an unspecified 'independent accountability'. We can only assume that the "special part to play" that our authors ascribe to 'public health' is to provide that 'independent accountablity' and 'remedial action' - regardless of the democratic choices made by people and the politicians they elect.

New Puritans revisited. Returning to an earlier set of blog posts looking at New Puritanism and the sacralising of health. This one took at quote from Lord Macaulay about the (old) Puritans as the basis for looking at how the opinions of 'doctors' outweigh those of others even when those others are better qualified - with the conclusion that:

Such is the sad, drear, judgemental world the New Puritans would have us live in: rationed celebration, the condemnation of unlicensed pleasure, the placing of contentment - wellbeing if you must - as the primary virtue. These are the tenets of New Puritans, tenets that cannot be revoked by either the choices of individuals or the exercise of democracy - they are statements of faith in the religion of self proclaimed by that religion's priesthood - the public health profession.

White Hat bias - fixing results to support what you think is righteous. Explores this idea (posited by biostatistician, Professor David Allison) in the context of out public health debates.

We went through a time when 'evidence-based policy-making' was all the rage. What we should now realise is (as those cultural studies students could have told you from the start) that scientists and researchers wedded to a particular position will be selective in their interpretation and presentation of evidence so as to provide support for that position.

So how much power do your local councillors have? Looking at how the expansion of local government duties resulted in diminishing power for local councillors and an opposite increase in the power of unelected officials. A process accelerated by the local government 'modernisation' of 2000.

The truth of all this is that 80-90% of the spending and activity undertaken by your council (or councils if you live in the shires) is simply given - determined by regulation, set out in statute or otherwise required by central government.

Poking, sneering, moralising and despising - the defining character of Fabianism. Prompted by an article from Polly Toynbee (Posh Polly as we like to call her) accusing Conservatives of being poking, sneering, moralising and despising when it came to the working class. Struck me that Polly's Fabian socialism was far more patronising!

And it's the left - including the last Labour government - who led the charge against people's lifestyles. Banning smoking in the pub, whacking a duty escalator on beer (while exempting wine and champagne), imposing planning restrictions on fast food takeaways and trying to ban gambling. It's the left that want taxes on fizzy drinks, bans on added sugar and salt, restrictions on portion sizes, the ending of multibuy offers and a host of other nannying interventions in people's lifestyle choices.

Finally - here, for you delight, is a squirrel in a sports car...


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In defence of anonymity...

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Writing at Conservative Home, Charlie Elphicke the MP for Dover and Deal has called for the banning of anonymity on social media:

We should target the anonymity hate-tweeters use to harass people online. At the moment it’s just too easy to set up a bogus account and viciously stab at people from behind the curtain. Ensuring people can’t set up anonymous accounts would mean hate-tweeters would be forced to be responsible for the hate they spew.

Elphicke goes on somewhat egregiously to suggest that wanting to ban anonymity isn't a free speech issue arguing this point by creating a new definition of free speech that no-one had used until he dreamt it up:

There are some who will claim this undermines the principle of free speech. They are wrong. It’s an insult to all those who fought for our right to speak out. Free speech is not there to protect people who spread hate while hiding their identity.  The whole point of free speech is the right to speak freely in your own name.  There is also a big difference between the privacy of surfing the internet and claiming “privacy” in aid of anonymity to launch attacks on people. There should be no hiding place for the trolls.

Unlike Mr Elphicke I think this is absolutely a free speech issue and the right to speak anonymously - whether offline or online - is an essential element of that liberty that, in the MP's words people "fought for". And there are very good reasons why we should allow anonymity. Here's one:

A blogger who used the user name, "Miut3" was kidnapped and killed in Reynosa Tamaulipas. She was a "Tuitera" with the over 41k followers on her popular twitter page, that sent out situations of risk, and narco news tweets.

This women - a 'citizen journalist' in a place where the mainstream media and government is coerced by violent criminals - used anonymity to protect herself and to allow the brave resistance to the Mexican borderland's dysfunctional society. If the price of allowing this woman and others like her to challenge and question criminal conspiracy, corruption and murder is that some people use anonymity to post abuse then it's a price I'll take.

Now I can hear Mr Elphicke saying that the UK isn't Mexico and that things are different here. But imagine some other situations - perhaps someone wants to expose wrongdoing within their industry. Do you think that posting under their own name would enhance their career prospects? People simply won't take the risk.

Look at the great blogs exposing some of the management problems in the police - closed down because the blogger got identified. We'd be worse as a society without blogs like Night Jack. And there are tweeters and bloggers who use anonymity to catalogue their struggles with drug addiction or alcoholism safe knowing that anonymity protects their life from intrusion and attack.

Look also at the lengths to which public authorities will pursue bloggers who challenge and criticise them - local councils such as Bexley, South Tyneside, Carmathen and Barnet have all expended council taxpayers money pursuing bloggers (with differing degrees of success). Anonymity facilitates challenge and criticism and this is one of the reasons why public authorities are so keen to see it stopped.

It isn't pleasant to be abused online anymore than it's pleasant to be abused in the street, the pub or at work. But most of the time we walk away, a little upset maybe but not otherwise harmed. The same applies online - switch off the computer, go and make yourself a cup of tea and read a book or watch the telly. The abusers will soon go away if they don't get a response. And don't - unless you're a troll yourself - play the silly game of broadcasting on Twitter, Facebook or your blog that you're being 'trolled'. All that does is make you even more of a target - you've responded so the trolls know they'll get a rise from you.


So I say to Charlie Elphicke, get a thicker skin, stop claiming it's all "for the children" when it's not and read and remember the final tweet from Miut3 - posted by her murderers:

Friends and Family, my real name is Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, I am a doctor, now my life has met it's end.

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Is Lord Leveson stupid?

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He's certainly giving a good impression:

The competition from bloggers and tweeters, "may encourage unethical and potentially unlawful practices to get a story"

This is providing crap journalists (who are remunerated for their work) with an excuse: "it was those nasty bloggers, m'lud, they made me do it".

And what on earth makes m'lud think that bloggers don't know we're:

...subject to the same laws as print and broadcast journalists.

(Although some like Eoin Clarke only find out the hard way).

The problem is that Lord Leveson wants to introduce laws that only apply to journalists and the newspapers they work for - not tweeters, facebookers or bloggers: just journalists in traditional newspapers. Stupid.

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#Greenpeacefail...

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If, say, a lobby group for forestry interests did this there would be the most enormous outcry:

The event was a hoax, and so was the follow-up email and the website with its often hilarious-if-it-wasn't-true fake...marketing copy.

Yet environmental campaign group Greenpeace are revelling in their media manipulation, lies and misrepresentation. Indeed as the New Statesman (hardly the most anti-green bunch) have put it:

The real villain here is Greenpeace. This is an NGO that thinks it is acceptable to lie to the public, to lie to bloggers and journalists, and to then intimidate writers with threatening emails warning of legal action. This absolutely is not okay. I don’t care if you’re saving the Arctic, rescuing kittens from YouTube’s vicious pet-celebrity training camps, or training pandas to pull famine-ridden children out of earthquake debris; to behave in this deceitful way demonstrates an astonishing amount of contempt for the public - not least for environmentalist supporters who spread their message in good faith only to find themselves forced into embarrassing retractions.

There is a limit to the bounds of campaigning. For me, Greenpeace crossed it years ago when they forced Shell to adopt a less environmentally sensible disposal of a redundant oil rig for the sake of cheap headlines and the 'kerching' of the organisations cash register. But this really is stepping even further beyond those bounds:

“Even if you think Shell is evil and will lie to achieve their goals, now you know Greenpeace is the exact same way.” 

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I'm not "pro-smoking" but pro-freedom and pro-choice

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The nannying fussbuckets have created a new category of evil - the "pro-smoking blogger". Mostly this is because they couldn't carry on with the lying claim that these bloggers were all in the pay of "Big Tobacco" since, in the main, they aren't. And the first act of terror under this new designation has been to claim that these naughty bloggers are "threatening" those nice anti-smoking folk who care only for the nation's health (and not at all for their own tenure, bank balance or preferment).

Indeed the nannying fussbuckets have gone as far as to create a little website - "TobaccoTactics" - wherein the expose the evil of these bloggers (not to mentions lobbyists, politicians and other opponents of their prohibitionist urges). I find some things odd about this whole effort not least the manner in which the anti-tobacco lobby tiptoe ever closer to defaming bloggers and writers who have the gall to disagree with the prohibitionist cause - presumably they are sure in their arguments or else confident that, without the funding anti-smoking groups enjoy, these bloggers are hard pressed to challenge.

Others have commented at length on the puerile nature of the "TobaccoTactics" webite but no-one - not even Dick Puddlecote - has spotted the glaring omission from the "politicians" list. Here is that list under "D":

D

• Simon Danczuk
• Alun Davies

D cont.

• Jim Dowd

Isn't there someone missing here? A non-smoking, teetotal advocate of personal choice? My MP and Dick Puddlecote's mascot?

It seems to me that this website and the carefully placed articles in the Guardian and Daily Mail reek of desperation - the prohibitionists are realising that their unpleasant, aggressive and judgemental campaigns are more and more counter-productive.

Those of us non-smokers who support the "pro-smoking bloggers" do so because we are pro-freedom and pro-choice. We are fed up with the endless nagging and finger-wagging from the anti-smoking brigade. And we think - like most sane people out there - that enough is enough. If people want to smoke they should be allowed to smoke - they know the potential consequences of that decision, they are grown-ups and should be allowed to carry on unmolested, uninsulted and free to make their own choices.

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The Peterborough Pravda. Is this what Louise Mensch wants from local media?

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Yesterday, Louise Mensch – the MP for Corby – argued that local newspapers are an essential cog in our democracy:

She called on the government to conduct a review into "local democracy and the local press" to see if there might be some sort of direct or indirect subsidy that could support the sector.

She attacked plans for local TV stations, which will compete against newspapers, because the proposed funding plans include using part of the licence fee as well as BBC content.

Now there are a few obvious things that might be said about Mrs Mensch’s suggestions not least that Tory MPs calling for business subsidies is a wholly new experience for this very long-standing Tory member.

However, at the heart of this isn’t the question of whether we have a local press – in my view we have as vibrant a local debate as we’ve had in a very long while. But here in Bradford very little of that debate is down to the local evening paper.

Local papers have declined, many have merged, closed or become mere shadows – more advertising sheets that newspapers. And that decline continues – think for a second or two where you go to look for a job, a car, a house or the cinema listings? In times past you bought the local rag on the appropriate day and looked in the class ads. Now you use your lap top or your iPhone – tomorrow you’ll be using the telly in your living room.

Local newspapers have become ever more reliant on the money that local councils spend – the statutory notices, job ads and theatre listings. Without this cash, many more local papers would go to the wall. Maybe this would be a loss but it is the market that is killing these papers not the choices or decisions of local councils. People no longer buy the evening paper – 30 years ago the penetration of the York Evening Press was up at around 80%. Hardly a house in the City didn’t receive the paper. Today that paper sells around 25,000 copies each day (as it happens about the same as Bradford’s Telegraph & Argus). The Doncaster Star sells fewer than 3,000 copies.

It seems to me that, for all her good intentions, Mrs Mensch is railing against the wind – for sure, stopping councils from producing their own free newspapers and not using the license fee to support local TV might slow the decline a little. But the decline will continue for the simple reason that people no longer buy the local paper and local businesses no longer advertise in the local paper. And while this is happening local papers reduce their editorial staff – I fear that many will simply be desk-bound churners of press releases (which isn’t why anyone went to journalism school) – to the point where they simply don’t have the resource to cover stories.

However, public subsidy – using taxpayers’ money to stop local papers closing – seems like a recipe for a supine, state-directed newspaper. Something of a Pravda of Peterborough or Isvestia of Ipswich – regurgitating the tractor stats produced by the local authorities and printing without question or challenge the words of the local MP. A ghastly shade of the challenging, offending and investigating local paper of legend.

Maybe that’s what Mrs Mensch wants but for me, I’ll take my changes with bloggers, Facebook and citizen journalism. That might just be the better future don’t you think?

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Councillors and blogging - for the unbeliever

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From my colleague, Cllr Matt Palmer:

Some stats for unbelievers:

Established engagement: 

• Households subscribing to my weekly email list: 468 (only covers Burley - I don't do a Menston one at the moment so that's for half the ward)
• RSS news subscriptions to my web site: 435
• Monthly visitors to website at mattpalmer.net: 5,159 (10k page views)
• Monthly visitors to local discussion forum at wharfedaleforums.com: 11,855 (reading 95,556 pages between them)

 Local paper? About 1,130 in the same area in 2009 but fallen since then.

Almost all of this is from half my ward so with the right efforts over the next 8 years it could probably be doubled.

 
It does work!

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A little thanks and self-congratulation...

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It seems some of my dear readers think highly enough of my rants and ramblings to have voted for me in that Total Politics blogging poll. With the result that we are:

In the top 300 UK political blogs (just - 292)

In the top 300 UK political bloggers (283)

I guess there's a subtle difference between these two categories!

And - this one is especially cheering:

The UK's 21st best Councillor blog!!

Aren't I good -and still the Number One political blog with mushrooms!

And thanks for the votes!

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...and no you didn't miss me!

Back. Eight hundred or so e-mails herded into the further corners of the interwebs, several thousand examples of other folk's fine words (and some stuff from newspapers) beaten down and a pile of old-fashion, paper-based communications opened and placed into a differently configured pile. Ah, the end of a holiday - it used to be so exciting before you all got so wordy and so keen on communicating. Now it's a morass to wade through, a well of treacle, And I know I will miss the one that matters!

Anyway this little missive is by way of announcing my return. Not, of course, that you'd noted my absence. However, allow me the indulgence of believing you did, that the odd tear dripped down the bereft cheek as you waited vainly for wise words to drop into your in-box. Words that, while not life-changingly profound, are crafted to inspire and to challenge.

So what have you to look forward to? There's a blog about foreign languages in election campaigns and another about Moorish ruins and the scandal of EU waste. I might treat you to a sausage and asparagus recipe and I plan a little bit of a 'New Puritan' series in which I try to understand the mindset that inspires the readership of both the Guardian and the Daily Mail - a mindset of judgementalism, control and an unswerving belief that "we know better". And this might morph itself into a celebration of lower middle class pleasures - a sort of "joy of suburbia".

Or I might just rant at you all every now and then. Whatever!

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A little break...

I am having a break. It may involve food, drink and sunshine. And I deserve it!

As a result there won't be any blogging. I'm sure you'll cope - indeed thrive - without my daily rants, worries and whimsical nonsenses. Bear in mind too that approving comments is a bit hit and miss on the phone so there might be some delay in your masterful and insightful contributions to arrive, sparkling and pristine, on the page.

Laters!

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It really is time for us Councillors to stop being so self-important about the reporting of our meetings

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Just a reminder to all the Conservatives who seem to think photographs, filming, twitter and other modern media things should be expunged from Council meetings. Here is what Eric Pickles had to say on the matter:

"Fifty years ago, Margaret Thatcher changed the law to make councils open their meetings to the press and public. This principle of openness needs to be updated for the 21st Century. More and more local news comes from bloggers or citizen journalists telling us what is happening at their local council. 

"Many councils are internet-savvy and stream meetings online, but some don't seem to have caught up with the times and are refusing to let bloggers or hyper-local news sites in."

He added: "Opening the door to new media costs nothing and will help improve public scrutiny." 

We really can't have situations where people get arrested for filming a council meeting, where twitter is banned from meetings and where - as happened in Bradford - a press photographer is thrown out.

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Not that you care of course!

Yesterday evening I was elected as Deputy Leader of Bradford Council's Conservative Group - exciting times but times that will affect the content of this blog. It's not that I'm going away, the mushrooms will remains, the occasional whimsy with flutter across the airwaves, I'll still talk of fairies but on the politics my voice is no longer my own. As a group officer, I have something akin to collective responsibility - my words may be taken to indicate group policy.

So forgive me if some of the more vociferous and trenchant of my political comments become somewhat tempered - such is the circumstance. I'll still be writing when I can - after all a Conservative having a go at socialists, statists and fake liberals isn't exactly a surprise - but it will be moderated by the need to consider the interests of the Group.

Not of course that you care!

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Post-digimodernism and the Art of Blogging

There are moments of epiphany or are they lightning strikes on the road to Damascus – my grasp of religious metaphor’s a tad limited. But there are moments when you encounter the incomprehensible and wonder why it’s there:

Well, what about digimodernism, one might ask? This is akin to some of the pairings in Ihab Hassan's famous list of binaries where the qualities of modernism were placed over against the characteristics of postmodernism. If within a thematic there are logically only two possibilities, and modernism is clearly over, and postmodernism clearly followed it, does this mean that the more recent moment will be with us forever, there being no other options?

I would reply that digimodernism does not choose to focus on either time or space in this manner, but that it combines and enmeshes two relatively new definitions of both. "Real time" and "cyberspace" are the twin axes of digimodernism. The digimodern appears at the intersection of the two. It's not so much a matter of choosing one term or the other, but first redefining then superimposing them.

One might ask, might one? About digimodernism? Somehow I think this unlikely but let’s explore a little further clutching our trusty Concise Oxford for the trickier words:

Since its first appearance in the second half of the 1990s under the impetus of new technologies, digimodernism has decisively displaced postmodernism to establish itself as the twenty-first century’s new cultural paradigm. It owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the computerization of text, which yields a new form of textuality characterized in its purest instances by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple authorship.

So it seems that this ‘digimodernism’ is something to do with the textual analysis of all the crap that we write on the web – a sort of Jacques Derrida meets the blog. That plus the bizarreness of reality TV, mockumentary and the ubiquity of computer gaming. In essence our ‘digimodernist’ already exists except he, she or it remains blissfully unaware that such an exalted status has been thrust upon them!

I wrote a few crown-sourced (well twitter-sourced really) blog posts – the best of which is:

Beards, cats and clever octopusses - thoughts on the World Cup Finals 

This post wasn’t a conscious digimodernist experiment – more of a giggle really. But it approaches this idea of:

In its pure form the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to intervene textually, physically to make text, to add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development.

While part of me loves this stuff – especially the arrogance of saying you wish to appeal to the ‘general reader’ and then exclaiming:

These in turn become the hallmarks of a group of texts in new and established modes which also manifest the digimodernist traits of infantilism, earnestness, endlessness and apparent reality.

The rest of me just want to take the piss – but no-one did that better than Paul Jennings!

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