Blog 98 Clarkson is a contemporary illness.

Far more hilarious than jokes made by any of the white blokes gurning out of the identikit posters for comedy at this year’s Edinburgh fringe was the comment made by Danny Cohen – head of TV. The one liner was made in relation to the sack of offal we know as Jeremy Clarkson.

“No one person is bigger than the BBC”.

Boy the testosterone must have been pumping when he made that statement.

I bet the genuinely witty Tim Vine is wishing he’d thought of that rather than his vacuum cleaner joke.

Despite a litany of offensive remarks that a 15 year old wouldn't stoop to, I see no sign of Clarkson being expunged from the TV gravy train.

Yes he is popular but so is smoking and eating crap.

The Clarkson illness is the same one that allowed Saville to thrive. And no, before you get hysterical, I am not accusing Mr. Offal of child abuse. I’m talking about the sycophancy that blinds people to what is decent or not, what is genuinely worth air time and what should be relegated to pay2view. It is a wilful blindness but it is a complete blindness. The BBC has – since the influx of multiple channelling - hurtled itself ever downward in the race to the bottom and we all know what’s waiting there.

The idea that no one is bigger than the BBC – which I interpret to mean the BBC ideals – is so utterly laughable that it has to be put in the same category as ‘rich people aren’t above the law’. Do we need reminding that a certain formula 1 oldie recently dipped into his small change and bought himself out of a court case for £60 million? Are the gaols bursting at the seams with the bankers who wrecked the economy with their criminal activities?

Claiming we are all equal in terms of expected standards of behaviour – which is the flip side of Cohen’s comment - is like saying the tax system is fair. Look around at who pays tax and the massively profitable companies that don’t. Yet the press barons and politicians spend eye watering amounts of time and effort vilifying those at the other end of the scale be they migrants or the disabled or generally those on the lowest rungs of society’s increasingly rickety ladder.

I have had good, bad, reasonable and indifferent experiences with the BBC but -organisations /institutions – even countries that become too large or powerful to be assailed from outside – that become too established to be part of the general laws of society or moral equilibrium destroy themselves from within.

Clarkson is just a manifestation of internal rot.

This week’s recommended blog from the archives is

26 Library Love

Blog 97 Viagra – Yes. Effective cure for Malaria – No.

Ok back to blogging though it’s hard to know where to begin this week with a motor way pile up of global nasties.

First I need to work out why when some countries slaughter civilians in large numbers – there is more righteous indignation than you could shake a stick at and a rush to prove humanitarian credentials. The same behaviour elsewhere causes only the equivalent of international tutting.

Fracking is illegal in France but Britain happily issues licences for French companies to frack us. (To see fracking cartoon click on the orange Amanda Baker in right hand column and scroll down.)

Police still don’t get they aren't supposed to shoot unarmed black kids?

We are happy to criticise countries with dictatorships and yet the ruling elite have as tight a grip on power in Britain as the barons of feudal times.

What is ‘the international community’ and why can’t it stop elephants being wiped out? If these creatures are too small and insignificant to protect isn't the planet screwed?

How come we are now chumming up to Assad when he was the devil a few months ago?

 How come Sadam was the devil when, prior to invading, he was a chum of Bush?

And by the way the invasion of Iraq created the environment for the rise of ISIS as surely as the Treaty of Versailles is implicated in the rise of the Nazis. So why is Tony Blair not in prison?

Some global leaders attract our disdain rather than approbation due to their lunacy or buffoonery but we are currently entertaining the idea of Boris Johnson not just as a returning MP but possibly a future leader of the party of that ruling elite. (see blog 62 Boris Johnson’s IQ test). Why?

The West helps create refugees but then gets pissed off when they try to escape to the West.

If you trip on a pavement in the developed world there are lawyers beating down your door to get you compo. If you are a poor family in India and your life and the lives of your children and theirs were blighted or wiped out by the criminal negligence of an American chemical company – tough.

We have Viagra but still not an effective cure for Malaria, Ebola or Aids. Kids still die for want of clean water or a 2pence re-hydration tablet. Is keeping more men shagging longer really a world priority?

I am revolted by these things but revolution is not the answer. What happens after revolution anyway?  Recent and ancient history tells us – worse oppression. Also I am nauseated by privileged westerners  verbally masturbating to their Che Guevara fantasies.

When we get the chance to change things we don’t. A lot of people don’t even vote and I will eat my blog if Scotland votes to release itself from the grip of Westminster/Eton on Sept 18^th.

So what?

Crawl under the bed?

No – While I try and think it through, I will be thankful that a couple of healthy foxes regularly visit the back gardens.  I have nice neighbours on both sides and below. I am lucky enough at my age to still have a grandmother. I am lucky enough that my own domestic ‘problems’ are on a level of being ripped off by my energy supplier and not on a par with having my home razed to the ground in war.

This week's recommended blog from the archives - no. 12 Armageddon will not be televised

Blog 96 Conflicting Promises & BBC blood sport…

I’ll be back to ranting about the world next week but I am, today, hoist by my own poetry petard.

Have you ever been caught out by conflicting promises made to yourself?

You promise yourself you will not walk on the cracks in the pavement but you also promise yourself you will make a better effort to avoid arriving home with doggy doo doo on your shoes. Then you come to that bit of pavement where the pooh-clear space is so tiny and your foot just too wide to avoid the crack. Yes –  we've all been there.

You promise yourself that you will be so appreciative of Aunty Maud’s next presy that you'll wear it whenever you see her. You have also promised yourself that you'll never ever wear a knitted tartan twin set encrusted with orange sequins.

Ok you get the picture.

Having tried a couple unwittingly when I first started doing performance poetry, I promised myself I would not take any further part in slams. For the uninitiated, a slam is competitive performance poetry. A lot of folk love ‘em and if you like blood sports I can see there may be an attraction. NOT FOR ME.

On the other hand when I moved to Edinburgh I promised myself I would do the first 10 things that were offered (poetically speaking). Like the Five-a-day only not five and not in a day. Well – the second thing I was offered was the BBC slam. Instead of saying a definite NO – flustered by the conflict with my other promise - I prevaricated. Then a few weeks ago I received an e-mail (e-mails were sent to those too crap and out of it to be on facebook) with a heat date and time.

Anyway – to cut a rambling story mercifully short – I won the heat last night so now will be doing the BBC final in the big blue tent at the Edinburgh Fringe. The Fringe is something else I promised myself I would avoid for a while but it gives me chance to get my performance back up to scratch after a too long break ready for - hopefully - the autumn's big project. Watch this space.

This week’s recommended blog from the archive is -

Blog 33. Can’t Cuss? Try a Comedy Curse!

Blog 95 Donald Trump proves he’s a chump – again.

 ‘Trump’ was always meant to rhyme with ‘chump’. I know this because I am a poet of the old fashioned sort who enjoys rhymes.  Equally, ‘Bankers’ instantly brings to mind the word ‘w......’ to someone of my ilk.

The irony is that its doormat-head who doesn’t get it.

Donald Trump’s selfish, spiteful tweets in response to the news that aid workers recovering from Ebola were to be taken home to the US for further treatment, have one benefit. They illustrate an important point. From the everyday Jo on the street to the golf-course crazy wombat with silly towers and expensive wives, fear and ignorance are bars to both common sense and humanity.

Mr Trumped-up has possibly fried his grey matter by spending too much time in la la land where the planet is just a smorgasbord of profit opportunities and an expensive place to play.

So here is a reality check.

Ebola may have similarities to the plague (it is incurable and has a high mortality rate) but this aint the mediaeval era. We cannot pretend that there is real separation between countries. Those far-off places that appear on exotic holiday websites have people living in them. Albeit that those people have brown skin, they actually matter. They have families and they love their children and they are not just a resource for the West, either for making money or taking leisure.

Diseases like Ebola and all sorts of things that we thought were safely ‘over there’ (TB, Malaria) as the world’s climate gets knackered will, in the not too distant future, be ‘over here’.

Until the realisation slipped through that, in its latest form and in our current circumstances, Ebola could leave Africa, the news reports were sanguine. It was after all just a few more Africans dying horribly. But as the numbers crept up and the spread seemed not to follow the usual pattern the tone changed. WHAT IF IT GETS US?

In our brave new world, there are going to be increasing phenomena that progress this way. We’ve already seen it with war. Those pesky foreigners engaged in killing each other (in some conflicts that have their roots in Western interference) were news footnotes just before the sport reports. Now it seems Western holidays may be in jeopardy as it becomes increasingly dangerous for domestic flights to fly over war-torn areas. Some favourite tourist destinations get bodies washed up on the beaches from overloaded boats shipping desperate refugees from famine, poverty and conflict.Get over it. It’s not just on the news. It is happening and the world is too small for it to be contained by boarders or treaties or the developing (struggling!) world’s respect for Westerners’ holiday arrangements.

In the 21^st century, war and disease, if we don’t treat them with respect and act to prevent them by dealing with societal breakdown and chronic poverty, will spread. They will spread in the countries where they began and they will spread to the countries that sit by and they will spread while the rich and powerful stroll round their gold courses.

Bullets and viruses will no longer ‘do’ international barriers.

This week’s recommended blog from the archives

Blog 24 Cut Foreign Aid – what a spiffing idea

Blog 94 Scotland could guarantee a win if...

... he convinced us he would deal effectively with the privatised utilities.

My first three months (and counting) in Scotland have been blighted by Scottish Power and their equally slimy inept robbing subcontractors Energy Networks and SGN. 

As an ex- npower / ex-BT customer I thought I’d experienced the worst of what a privatised utility company could throw at you. I was wrong. Scottish Power, Energy Networks and SGN make npower and BT look competent and altruistic.

It seems there is a new equation in the universe that might even fox Einstein -

Profiteering works in equal and opposite measure to the quality of customer service- to the power of a billion.

On a daily basis the stress of dealing with the privatised utilities cuts across the class divide in terms of a concern that causes common frustration and anger.

In the Public = good / Private = bad debate, we are missing the fact that, like the political landscape, it’s no longer an argument between two distinct elements.

Public good / private bad

Potayto / potaaahhto,

tomayto / tomaahto

Let’s sort the whole thing out…

Politicians like to do the ‘sneer’ thing when pointing out that the ‘public = good’ while ‘private = bad’ idea is sadly naive. It is, they seem to suggest, a view possibly only held by the hopelessly idealistic, baggy-trousered, bandanna-wearing, smelly, veggie, chakra obsessed, delusional leftie.

They may be right.

Public = good when it is done properly

Private = good when it is genuinely entrepreneurial

BUT

PRIVATISED  = good only for the government’s insatiably greedy, immoral, profiteering, bloodsucking, tax-avoiding, infrastructure destroying cronies who are going to fry in hell.

There – that’s better.

*

And do check out My BOOKS

Blog 93 Euthanasia Fantasia.

Does the Euthanasia Fantasia faze ya?

Out of step again – I can’t help sensing a disconnect from the raised pulse of the current assisted dying / euthanasia debate. A huge proportion of the global populous don’t get a choice about how they live let alone how they die. Far too many aren't getting to live at all.

The basic ‘problem’ in the West is that we've developed resources, technical ability and unquestioning momentum to keep people alive in extreme circumstances. Along the route we unhitched the moral debate from medical advances.

Recently I listened with some cynicism to a news report about the reduction in road deaths. My sat nav for stat shite went haywire. Are there really fewer accidents on our congested roads or are the statistics at least partially accounted for by the technical advances that keep severely injured people alive?

Our ability to spend gob-smacking amounts of time and energy on the minutiae of comfortable existence in this country while side-lining the pain of others is easily summed up by a news report I listened to a few minutes ago.

“...the majority of those killed in Gaza are civilians ... now the golf”

21 million people living in the world today – over 200 years since the abolition of slavery – are victims of slaving and people trafficking. In too many areas of Africa, countless infants struggle and don’t make it to their 5^th birthdays. Slaughter in Iraq is a monthly ‘norm’. Death from preventable disease takes millions of lives prematurely. We know that in conflict zones it is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier. And so on and so on, the depressing information circles like starving crows with broken feathers while we look the other way.

This is how we make ourselves irrelevant. Like the Church of England expending precious time and funds trying to combat its inherent misogyny while its flock disperse, decrease, die. Like the government taking important Parliamentary time on making sure they can track our e-mails (see last week’s blog) while youngsters leave school unable to read and even people in work sometimes can’t afford to live. Millions of dollars around the world are still being spent on trophy sporting events while children live on the streets, prey to life’s monsters. And actually – what these ego-fests show us – the Olympics, the World Cup etc is that, as humans, if we want something badly enough – however daft – we can do it. It’s just a shame that the people controlling the purse strings are more interested in prestige than people.

So – yes, the assisted dying debate – to give it its sanitised nom-de-plume. The fact is that financial imperatives will eventually force its legalisation. In the West, very soon, there simply won’t be enough healthy working people to support the chronically sick. Meanwhile, the comfortable, well-educated classes who have the where-with-all to not only fight for what they want but also to control the political agenda are a tiny minority. They are often the same minority who can get their kids into the best schools, buy their way to the front of NHS queues. When I lived in the N.E, I read about many cases where miners died of horrible lung diseases while their families tried to get the compensation they were due from the industry that ruined their health. Many died waiting. The families of the victims of Bhopal (a forgotten tragedy of quarter of a century ago) received no proper compensation from the American chemical company that devastated their community – a place where children are still born dreadfully malformed as a result of Union Carbide’s monumental gross criminal negligence.

In summary – the problem we seem to have is that in many parts of the world people are not being allowed to live either decently or at all. In the privileged West, people who are not only ready but only live because science has taken them beyond human endurance, are not being allowed to die.

This week’s recommended blog from the archives,

32 The NHS and the Condom of Common Sense.

Blog 92 Snoop bloggy blog

with DaveNick-Ed.

Paranoid state snooping is a sure sign of weak government, lack of direction and a general disintegration. It is symptomatic of every crumbling nation in history. But ‘emergency’ legislation to back up the state’s observation of our daily (unremarkable) lives is verging on psychotic.

Not to mention that there are one or two more pressing matters that require our urgent attention;

• The national health crisis
• Planetary disease emergency
• Looming ecological cataclysm
• Escalating world war III (GWI - Global War I?)
• Unsustainable profiteering by privatised utilities and collapsing infrastructure

 Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... (see cartoon by clicking on the orange name in the right hand column)

But Dave, Nick ‘n Ed (DaveNick-Ed) have joined forces on this one. No one in the Westminster crazy house seems to have any problem with this at all.

Firstly there is no 'emergency', unless you configure that edgy condition in the same way Mr Orwell did; crisis as a media induced, government sponsored, ongoing state of low-grade debilitating fear, a stultifying neurosis.

 Effective leadership has forward momentum. On the other hand, inadequate rulers invested with power they can’t handle are constantly looking over their shoulders.

They haven’t even found an original ruse for their paranoid prying it’s just ‘ooooh, the bogey man is coming to get you so we need to know whether you rang aunty Marg last Friday’ and ‘we know things you don’t know so don’t question us’. It’s a stinking unconvincing fug. Its smoke that gets in your eyes, ears, nose and throat until you can’t think straight.

The irony of these claims justifying the erosion of our liberties is that the last time we were presented with ‘sensitive’ information to justify government action, (remember the dodgy dossiers?), we were led up the garden path – or was it the road to hell? The last time the secret services gave the government the nod to act on our behalf with seriously loopy information, we were taken into an illegal invasion for which we are still counting the cost in suffering, terror and financial devastation.

Instead of spending zillions and wasting resources snooping on their own citizens and neighbours – the government could try just looking around them, peer into the real world a while. They’d find there is plenty there that needs fixing.

This week’s recommended blog from the archives,

Blog 24 – I’m Spartacus.