Labour lies about rats in rubbish

One of the least appealing aspects of the Blair-Brown administrations – in a very long list of unappealing things – is the institutional dishonesty which these two men and their advisers have brought to government. The dishonesty comes with added hypocrisy since both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in their different ways, have expressly laid claim to a religious and moral basis to their lives.

This dishonesty is not just morally wrong. One is left gaping sometimes at the political stupidity of lying about subjects on which you are bound to be found out sooner or later, particularly things which, however important, are not matters on which governments fall. Governments are entitled to make some mistakes, to experiment, to assess the consequences, and to accept they got it wrong. What loses the votes is the persistent feeling that we are being lied to daily on every subject.

Blears smears Oxford estate

A few days ago, Hazel Blears’ spokesman said that she supported “whatever the Prime Minister said”. Who would say that now?

Not everything which pours from Hazel Blears’ mouth is nonsense, and her observation in a recent speech that “brutal, ugly buildings and estates contribute to crime, antisocial behaviour and social exclusion” is quite correct. She made two mistakes.

One is that New Labour has been responsible for plenty of brutal, ugly building, much of it on grass, including former school playing fields. The opposition which it faces to its house-building programme derives largely from the certainty that most of the result will be hideous, as well as badly planned and divorced from the infrastructure which would make the houses work.

Condemning the sludge in the public service pond

I do not often run ad hominem attacks on public servants. It is often hard to distinguish between their personal failings and those of the system which they work in and, for the most part, it would be like criticising the dog because his treadmill malfunctions, or beating one of those bovine creatures who push a pole round a well because the water dries up. We employ whole offices of people like that – whole departments of state in the case of DEFRA or the Home Office – and can’t really complain because dull unthinking drudges perform dull unthinking tasks in dull unthinking ways.

Politicians are different, of course. They solicit our votes by their claims to competence, honesty and personal charm, and if Ed Balls fails on all three counts, it is proper to say so. Caroline Flint cares about us all so much, but we don’t care for her and I hope she knows it (although she, of course, has more in common, intellectually speaking, with the pole than with the ox which pushes it, and may not notice the general air of mockery and contempt which attends her every pronouncement).

Tom Stoppard’s message to Gordon Brown

I went to hear Sir Tom Stoppard speak this morning at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. I usually come away from such a session with my notes in my head, confident that I can do a reasonable précis from memory. Stoppard taken aurally is as densely packed as Stoppard in print. Each memorable statement (as one thinks of it as he speaks) is immediately overtaken by the next, and most were lost to me by the time he finished.

A few points stuck in my mind as I wandered homeward – can one better, by the way, being in Oxford on a day when deep snow had fallen overnight, Stoppard had talked, and the sun shone on stone buildings from a brilliant blue sky? One could forget, temporarily at least, the Brown unpleasant land around one.

Meet the Managers at First Great Western

My fury at First Great Western’s inability even to be honest (one does not expect competence) as I eventually pulled out of Oxford Station on Tuesday (see Incompetence or Dishonesty at FGW) made me determined to take up their invitation to Meet the Managers on the way back.

Unlike at the ticket office, there was no great queue to meet the drone who had been delegated to field the complaints, and I stood behind a couple who were complaining about the removal of the Travel Centre which, they said, they had often used and much missed (see FGW closes Oxford Travel Centre) .

A journey by train from Oxford to London

An evening trip to London by train illustrates how the “customers” are let down by those who provide their “services”. It affects life more than New Labour corruption.

The extent to which we are serfs to the so-called service providers was illustrated four times before the train pulled out of Oxford station.

First you have to get to the station. Every time I queue down Hythe Bridge Street, I curse the valuable time taken from me by the thickest of all thick public servants, the highways officers of Oxfordshire County Council. What inversion of society’s priorities means that flotsam like that can waste hours out of the lives of so many real people, people with jobs and lives that matter?

HSE buries its towels slip

Despite its famously frank Chairman, the Health and Safety Executive seems very coy about its widely-derided research into bathroom slippages. We investigate the missing web site entry.

Poor Sir Bill Callaghan. The boss of the Health and Safety Commission (and through it the Health and Safety Executive) has tried very hard to distance himself and his organisation from the “jobsworth rulings that threaten seemingly innocent traditions and pastimes” that would “wrap kids in cotton wool and bind up businesses with red tape” as the Times’ Public Agenda put it last week in a sympathetic interview.

The HSC and HSE (soon to be merged, apparently) govern workplace safety, and are there to stop children being sent up chimneys or lathe operators from losing their fingers. The people who ban conker fights, chop down trees in case children climb them, condemn doormats as a trip hazard and hanging baskets in case they fall on us, are usually dim little ferret-faced men from local councils, with clip-boards where their brains should be and an exaggerated sense of their own importance.

Now where is the News from the BBC?

I don’t know what was more infuriating about this evening’s BBC News, the presentation or the stories themselves.

It kicked off with a long exposé about Bulgarian baby-selling, complete with film from hidden cameras, dramatic-sounding appointments late at night, and an East European villain from Central Casting. The story was run by an intelligent-sounding, attractive-looking female reporter on, I would guess, her first big break, who spoke proper English and walked well that narrow line between sober journalism and breathless excitement.

The newscaster, Dermot somebody, clearly thought he was somebody, adding his stern visage and heavy moralistic adjectives and adverbs to make it clear that he wasn’t just a reader of bulletins but a man with opinions.

The news element in this could have been disposed of in 30 seconds. It was competently done, and not unimportant – but it was not news. It was investigative journalism, put together some time ago and held over to make a splash on the first available quiet night.

Cameron swings both ways on defectors

By chance, I read two articles today which suggest that David Cameron’s ambivalence on policy matters extends to his view of party defectors. It seems to depend on which way they are going.

In the Times on Saturday, he talks about Quentin Davies, a Conservative MP who felt that he deserved wider fame than he had won for his conviction for cruelty to sheep. He defected to Labour on the eve of Gordon Brown’s elevation, after writing a long and contrived letter to David Cameron, and was duly herded into the House of Commons by Labour groupies to be paraded as a rather empty token of Brown’s pulling power.