The wedding list is on the way out. Thank goodness. There has always been something irredeemably dull and manipulative about the litany of dinner plates 12, soup bowls 12, and champagne flutes 6, that department stores produce for marrying couples.
Of course the logic was impeccable – the avoidance of duplicate or unwanted gifts. But it was always a boringly utilitarian imperative which combined the arrogance of demanding presents with menaces with the social anxiety of somehow not trusting the good taste of those who are supposed to be your closest friends. It smacked too much of a financial contract: we’ll pay for the meal, and you buy something that we determine. It was a heartless world which discounted the value of freedom and imagination.
The most popular wedding list gifts, apparently, are ipods, flat-screen tvs and vouchers. The happy couple think of the people who gave them whenever they are used. Or not. The wedding list, someone memorably said, is not about giving, but about taking.
But wait. Though a recent survey has shown that one in five couples are happy for their guests to choose their own presents – and a similar number said they did not expect any gifts at all in these straitened times – more than a third of couples are jettisoning the wedding list only to ask their guests to give them cash on their special day. Perhaps the wedding list is the romantic option after all.
FollowTo me it sounded like a time capsule from another era. But tears formed in the eyes of my aunt as she listened on the battered old walnut-veneered phonogram which took pride of place in her front room. The singer was Enrico Caruso, and the aria, I think, was from Pagliacci. Operatic airs were the pop songs of her youth; Caruso was then only the second recording artist ever to sell a million copies. To me it sounded alien if virtuosic. But to my aunt it laid bare the tragedy of a clown whose love was so jealous that he murdered his wife. I was nine; she was in her forties. We were listening to the same thing, but we heard something very different.
The tragic commedia dell’arte figure came back to my mind the other day, via the lyrics of an old Smokey Robinson song. “Just like Pagliacci did, I try to keep my sadness hid, smiling in the public eye, but in my lonely room I cry, the tears of a clown.” Only this time it was The Tears of a Clegg, after the deputy prime minister gave an interview designed to reveal his softer side by letting slip the admission that he “cries regularly to music”. Actors have feelings too, as Pagliacci would have it. If there’s a smile on my face, it’s only there trying to fool the public, in the words of Smokey Robinson.
Political pundits swiftly added what they called “the blubbing” to Nick Clegg’s previously stage-whispered regular-kinda-guy confidences. Remember when he told Piers Morgan he’d had around 30 lovers? Or disclosed on Desert Island Discs that he is a secret smoker – and told the nation that he hoped his three children would not find out. But when it comes down to fooling you, now honey that’s quite a different subject, but don’t let my glad expression, give you the wrong impression, really I’m sad.
Should mobile phones be allowed in schools?
Mobile phones are an everyday reality in the lives of modern children. A combination of parental anxiety and teenage peer pressure has made the cellphone part of normal life. But sensible constraints must be placed on their use. Having said that there is clearly more to the abuse of phones at the heart of the dispute which yesterday saw teachers at a school near Blackburn come out on strike. read more…
All too often, a leader’s lust for power is fed by his acolytes
It is not unduly cynical to suppose that Laurent Gbagbo – the former president of Ivory Coast, who was last night clinging to power in the face of a final onslaught on his presidential palace by rebel forces – has a few bob tucked away in some foreign bank accounts in faraway places. He would not be the first African leader to do so. read more…
Five million Archers addicts will find out this morning at 10 am whether the dumpty-dumpty-dumpty-dum signature tune of the world’s longest running drama can survive in the wild. The BBC’s most popular radio soap opera is spilling outside the safe sanctuary of Radio 4 with a spin-off series which will bring centre-stage some of the peripheral personalities from the main programme. Even some non-speaking characters will find their voice.
But on the signature tune, as to so much else about the new series, Ambridge Extra, the BBC has played its cards fairly close to its collective chest.
That’s not surprising given the massive anti-climax of The Archers’ last great venture into the wider consciousness. To mark its 60th anniversary the programme’s editor, Vanessa Whitburn, announced that Ambridge would be “shaken to the core” by a traumatic development which turned out to be the unconvincing slip from the roof of his stately home by the series’ loveable toff Nigel Pargetter.
But the death of the great man was a bit of a publicity disaster, with Ms Whitburn herself letting lip the secret in a radio interview – and with the listenership divided between those who regarded it as melodramatic hokum and those who were outraged by the unnecessary PR-driven death of a much-loved character. Internet groups sprang up with devotees declaring their intent to boycott listening.
So this morning a new series, Ambridge Extra, begins on the old BBC Radio 7 which, since Saturday, has been re-branded as Radio 4 Extra in an attempt to tempt stalwart listeners across to the new digital station. The BBC’s head of radio, Tim Davie, has made no secret of the fact he wants to boost the uptake of digital among the vast sections of the population who do not own a DAB radio. Only a third of the adults do at present.
We should never, of course, condone vandalism. But it was hard not to feel that there was something apt in the news that the fence had been hacked down around the £1.2 million lighthouse holiday home belonging to Jeremy Clarkson on the Isle of Man. The boorish culture which the Top Gear presenter celebrates so exuberantly has come back to bite him on the bum.
It’s important not to get this out of proportion. The “grim discovery”, as one portentous tabloid dubbed it, that vandals had pulled down the cliff-top fencing comes at the end of a six-year right-of-way dispute with local ramblers in the 40 acres of coastland Clarkson and his wife have bought on the picturesque Langness Peninsula. The government of the island has ruled in the walkers’ favour and the dispute is now before the High Court. But clearly some disgruntled locals have decided on a bit of unilateral ramblers’ revenge.
Clarkson’s wife, Frances, speaking from their family home in the Cotswolds, said she felt they were being targeted. “It’s not the first time it’s happened. It makes me feel rather sick. It’s upsetting,” she told journalists. But the celebrated wit of the man himself, who has complained in the past about the island’s “militant dog walkers”, seemed momentarily to have deserted him. He was reported as being unavailable for comment.
We see a lot of Jeremy Clarkson in our house. Endless repeats of Top Gear appear to be the default option on our 11-year-old’s preferred channel, Dave, “the home of witty banter” as it calls itself – in a tag that seems as convincing as those lines in dating magazines which proclaim the advertiser to be possessed of a Good Sense of Humour. Then there is the programme’s latest BBC2 series which is, some weeks, the BBC’s most popular show. Top Gear is the most watched programme of the year on iPlayer and is broadcast to over 100 countries reaching 300 million viewers round the world.
All voting systems are unfair to part of the electorate. But are some more unfair than others?
A man knocked on the door the other day and asked: “Do you want to save money on your electricity bill?” The idea that I might answer ‘No’ was clearly not in the script he had prepared.
On the face of it that’s the same with the question: do we want a better voting system? Support for reform of the way we elect MPs to Westminster is for many people the default. Now that Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter are backing the vote for change it looks like the cool option will be to vote Yes at the May 5th referendum on voting reform – especially now they have done so well at the Oscars.
Reform doesn’t just mean change, it means change for the better, the removal of abuse or the rectifying of something faulty. In classical political theory reform meant change that was gradual, as distinct from revolution which was sudden. But modern politicians have recoined the word – rather as they have co-opted the word ‘modernise’ – to mean any changes of which they approve.
The automatic assumption in the ‘modern’ world that all change is good. Certainly opposition to change has been the lament of old men throughout the ages. “In this uncertain life… nothing is secure, nothing keeps,” bemoaned Euripides. But since Darwin’s insight that it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change, our culture has been seized with the notion that we must change in order to survive. To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often, as John Henry Newman had it.
Anyone who rejects change is the architect of decay: the only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery, said the modernists of the 1960s. More recently the self-help gurus of the New Age warn us that we cannot manage change, only be ahead of it. If we can’t accept change we can at least change the way we think about it.
Yet we all know that some ‘reform’ is bad, or at the very least ambiguous, or euphemistic. Mao Tse Tung used to speak of “reform through labour” which meant dissidents were made to work as part of their political re-education. We all know what that meant. Nor are we necessarily enamoured of the constant reshaping of our public services by politicians of all colours. The entire 1970s were plagued by seemingly ceaseless reorganisations of local government. The 1990s saw the same constant reconfiguration of how things were done in Britain’s schools. The same process is now at work ‘modernising’ the National Health Service.
Most British universities, it now seems clear, will soon be charging their students £9,000 a year in tuition fees. The government’s proposed maximum has become the norm. It was always likely to be so. No university would want to admit it was second-rate by doing anything else. But nor did the economics make anything else likely.
Universities are losing 80 per cent of their government teaching grant. Direct funding is being wiped out for almost all subjects other than science, engineering and medicine. There are big cuts in research funding. Fees from overseas students are evaporating under Coalition immigration policies. Billions of pounds are being lost.
On the other side of the ledger Cambridge University this week estimated that the actual cost of a year’s undergraduate course is £17,000 a year. The average UK university science course costs £13,000 a year to run, with about £8,500 for an arts one. Ministers hopes that the average fee would be fixed at £6,000 were always delusional. The idea that those universities who charge full whack will be forced to take more poor, disabled or ethnic minority students is also wishful thinking. The Office for Fair Access has no new legal powers to force universities to do that.
That is not the only problem. Students won’t have to start paying the fees till they are earning £21,000 a year. That means costs will start racking up next year; but repayments won’t begin till 2015, at the earliest. In the interim the bill for the trebled fees will be added to the public sector borrowing requirement. The reforms will create a new £1bn black hole. Ministers’ pledges to find this within the higher education budget can only mean even bigger cuts to the teaching budget. Or they could axe 38,000 university places to bring costs back into line with Treasury forecasts.
The idea that students should pay more towards their education is a good one. Those who benefit should pay. But a market in university fees was never going to work unless cuts to university funding were tapered over several years to allow that market to develop organically. Evolution not revolution was required. Ministers got that badly wrong, and now seem in denial as to how big a mess they have created.
The council that wants to cut everything
Every morning and every afternoon for the past seven years Karen Duke has donned a massive fluorescent coat and picked up her Lollipop lady STOP sign and shepherded scores of children across the pitted and potholed road outside Fairfield County Primary School. It is a busy road, for it links the town centre and the accident and emergency department of the local hospital. Ambulances with flashing blue lights whiz regularly past her. And cars do not always stop at the traffic light crossing unless Mrs Duke interposes her ample presence between them and the children. Some years back a child was killed on the road outside the school.
But Mrs Duke is to go – at least if the local council has its way. Her job has been earmarked to be axed in the current round of public spending cuts.
All across the country tens of thousands of little cuts in public services are about to be made in changes which will do irreparable damage the social fabric of the ordinary communities in which we live. The phoney war is over. With the start of the new financial year on April 5th the biggest cuts since the Great Depression will hit Britain.
But here in Bury in Lancashire local people may see some of the biggest changes anywhere in the UK. That is because the ruling Conservative group on the town council has launched one of the most radical responses to Britain’s budget deficit. It has determined to hand control of all the services the council currently provides to private companies, charities and voluntary groups.
Its recent round of cuts – which threaten to devastate Bury’s youth services, care for vulnerable adults, and take an axe to library services for the housebound, education advisers, school improvement partners and lollipop ladies – is only the start of a programme to save £32m within the next three years. It could bring to pass the dream, or nightmare, of the arch-Thatcherite minister Nicholas Ridley who, in the 1980s said that local councils should only meet once a year to approve tenders from private contractors.
The news has taken the town by surprise. Indeed when the Council leader Councillor Bob Bibby went on radio to announce it last month, the day after the last budget cuts were agreed, even some members of his own inner cabinet and senior council staff had not been forewarned. But Bury Council runs under the Strong Leader model – which sounds like something from North Korea but which was in fact introduced by Tony Blair as an alternative to elected mayors – and the move looks likely to be rubber-stamped when the Council meets this week.
Under the plan – which has just been the subject of a three-week consultation among the people of Bury, though many of them seem to have been aware of the fact – all council services are to be scrutinised against the default assumption “that the council will not directly deliver services”.
The revolutionary idea is being proposed because the consensus in the town is that Bury has been one of the urban authorities which has received least funding from central government in recent decades. Public services were sparely run anyway so no more salami-slicing cuts are viable. Transforming the council into an “enabling” authority is therefore, according to Cllr Bibby, the only option.
Not everyone agrees. A campaigning group of local citizens, the Bury Action Group, has sprung up to oppose the plan outlined in new policy document called Transforming Bury. “Nothing in the document explains why the starting point should be to privatise everything,” says one of the group, George Heron, a retired FE lecturer. “It can only be understood as a political prejudice against public provision.” Nor is there any evidence, he says, that community groups currently working in partnership with the council wish to set themselves up as alternative providers . “On the contrary, those groups are amongst the staunchest defenders of council provision”.
What Bury decides on Thursday could become a model for the whole country.
Over the next few months every service the council provides – from libraries to refuse collection – is to be examined against a Transforming Toolkit which will begin by considering whether the council should cease the service, in whole or part. Where the council has a statutory responsibility it will try to hive it off to a public-private partnership, a private company or a voluntary group or even a stock market flotation. The plan is for the changes to be in place by 2012/13.
I contacted Cllr Bibby, and Bury’s chief executive, Mike Kelly, to ask them to explain the thinking behind a process which critics dismiss as ideological. Cllr Bibby had told the local paper, the Bury Times, “it gives me no pleasure to propose a budget that has such major repercussions. I didn’t come in to politics to cut services and jobs, but we’ve been faced with simply no option.”
But Councillor Bibby has gone suddenly coy. A council spokesman told me: “The Leader feels that it would be inappropriate to give a full interview on this subject. The policy is currently out for consultation, and it is important that this is not prejudiced in any way”.
The Bury Action Group are unsurprised at such a response. “The whole consultation was a sham,” the group’s chair Sue Arnall, a former social worker, told me. “They kept the whole idea quiet until they got this years cuts approved and then announced privatisation with a consultation lasting less than three weeks.”
Worse still, she says, the documents put out by the council are full of impenetrable jargon. “Look at this,” she says point to a line in the council’s cuts proposals. “It says: ‘Restructure of local area working to refocus on community engagement and development – saving £270,000 by losing eight full time jobs’. What on earth does that mean? How can an ordinary person sensibly comment on that?”
What, as an ordinary person, she can and does comment on, is the farewell party held the night before by a parent’s support group who previously met regularly in a community centre in Whitefield. “They are now going to have to meet once a month in Morrison’s café.” Then there are they Cubs and Brownies who have been told they must pay £25 to use the local park. Or the education welfare officers who have been directed to cease working to support parents in getting children fed, clothed and into school and focus on taking the parents of truants to court. “How can the Big Society work if they cut all training for schools governors?”
But it is difficult to assess how badly Bury is going to be hit by even the first round of cuts. That is partly because, she says, the council will only answer questions at meetings which have been put in writing five working days in advance. “That’s not all. The Council Cabinet meets in private and no minutes are published,” she adds. “And all council employees have been told they are not to give the public any detail about where the cuts will exactly come.”
Those directly affected, however, are starting to work things out. “Four of the town’s five youth clubs will close,” says Jamie Walker, a Radcliffe teenager who has been elected by his peers as the town’s MP for the National Youth Parliament. “The clubs are great. We do cooking and painting classes and grow plants to give to the residents of local old people’s homes. But the youth budget is being cut by two-thirds. So now we’ll just have to stay in or just hang around the streets. But we don’t know exactly what will happen, when, because the youth workers have been issued with a gagging order instructing them not to tell us anything.”
The council’s lack of openness about its proposals means that, when you walk through Bury’s famous market and ask local people about it all, most are in the dark as to what is going on. Not one of the dozens of people I encounter has even heard of the consultation process. But there is universal dismay at the false economy of the axing lollipop ladies. And everyone says that more, not fewer, youth clubs are needed, with youth employment at its highest since records began. “We have to provide something to keep the kids off the streets and out of trouble,” says Sid Ahktar who has run a clothing stall in the outdoor market for 20 years.
There are some who back the privatise-everything plan. On his carpets and rug stall Tony Hill is broadly sympathetic. “It will become more efficient. I do two days a week with a charity in Oldham. Same service is run by the council in Bury. Oldham is much better run,” he says. But not all the self-employed market traders are so favourable. “Privatisation sounds good,” says Chris Schofield on a stall that proclaims “Designer Watches £3.99 each”. “But when the cheapest quote gets the job services will go down hill. The council will get locked into a three year contract it’s difficult to get out of.”
When the council put park and sport-field maintenance out to tender, adds one of his customers “the contractor handed the contract back because he couldn’t make a profit being paid what the council employees had been done it for.”
Debra Zajak, a 20-year-old sports development student at Bolton University, who works as a swimming coach with both sectors, also has reservations: “The private sector is better organised but the council staff are more interested in the kids and what they want. And the private sector will put the prices up.”
Over at Sweet Treats, where the average customer spend on boiled delicacies is way down on the past, Gail Ridyard insists that council workers have to do their bit in taking cuts. But she doesn’t want to see council staff put on 16 week contracts losing their permanent jobs. “We won’t get a choice over which private company is chosen,” she says. “It might be one with no morals.”
So what will it happen? The Conservative are the largest party at present with 23 seats, as against Labour’s 21, with the Liberal Democrats six councillors holding the balance of power. The Labour leader, Mike Connolly, is anticipating Labour will regain control at the local elections in May. “As a Labour group we accept the need to look at new ways of working,” he says, “but total privatisation will not be our starting point.”
No-one is quite clear where the Liberal Democrats stand. They have eschewed a formal coalition with the Conservatives but appear to have a tacit pact, abstaining on key issues so the Tories carry the day. “Wholesale privatisation of council services, we would never support,” says their leader, Cllr Tim Pickstone . His party will “look sensibly at everything a council does, and seeing if there are ways of doing things more efficiently”.
That seems to mean the Tories plan that henceforth Bury Council should provide no services directly will be passed on Thursday.
Meanwhile those most affected by such political decisions are having to make do and mend. “I blame the central government,” says Chris Ashley, the headteacher at Fairfield which is to have funding for its lollipop lady axed. “They have put up a political smokescreen. The school budget might be the same as before but we’re being asked to do a lot more with it, buying in services that previously were free. Paying for a crossing supervisor is just the latest example”
He has decided that he will have to find the money from the school budget to keep Karen Duke at work as a lollipop lady. “All schools put safety first. In years gone by we had a pupil killed. So for peace of mind I’ll have to pay an adult to do the job. I can’t rely on parents volunteering; I need the reliability. So I’ll need to downgrade the support I get for caretaking and cleaning . If the caretaker is off I’ll have to cover for opening up the school or a classroom may have to be left dirty. And I’ll have to take eight hours a week from a welfare assistant who supports the children in reading.”
It is cuts like that which will cause widespread public discontent as they begin to bite in frontline services everywhere. No wonder the advocates of mass-privatisation are rushing through the decision in Bury this week. If their consultation had lasted months rather than a few tokenistic days they would, very likely, have found that local people would have said a resounding No to their plan.
The powers that bloom in the spring
This is a public service message. You have had an hour’s less sleep than usual. This could affect you over the next few days more than you think. Unless you are of Icelandic descent. The clocks went forward at 2am this morning and chronobiologists – pay attention – suggest that the after-effects on your circadian body clock can last for weeks. So watch out for drastically lower productivity, increased susceptibility to illness and general tiredness. You are at greater risk of having a heart attack or committing suicide over the next three days. Perhaps you should just go back to bed.
When I was a boy I loved the wintertime with its darkening afternoons. I can remember sitting in my primary school classroom by the big old iron radiator making woollen pom-poms, the school wrapped securely in a blanket of night. But as the years have passed my favourite season has shifted inexorably to the spring.
These days my spirits lift towards the end of January when the working day no longer begins in the dark and the iron-tipped crocuses first pierce the iron soil. Next comes the forsythia and the early camellia, an unknown white blossom on the tree next door, and now the daffodils. The greyness disperses and blue comes to the sky along with a rejuvenated spirit of optimism. Hullo clouds, hullo sky, as Fotherington-Thomas, no fule he, would put it.
The thing about having missed an hour of sleep is that your serotonin may be depleted. One hour might not seem that significant, but most of us are chronically sleep-deprived already these days. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that relays information to different parts of the brain. It can have a direct impact on emotions, mood, behaviour, sexual appetite and much more. It is the happy hormone, which the body produces only in daylight but which governs the production of its polar opposite melatonin, the hormone of darkness, which prompts us to sleep as the evening descends. Between them these two maintain the body’s diurnal rhythm.
A census should allow us to define ourselves – and not be categorised by others
There was a rather cheering moment on Desert Island Discs when Dame Anne Owers was asked whether she wanted a return to what the interviewer Kirsty Young rather peculiarly described as the “Methodist ideology” that “we are all capable of sin but all also capable of making the choice not to sin”.
Dame Anne, the former chief inspector of prisons – who had been extolling the virtues of her childhood in a small North East mining community with no fewer than three separate Methodist chapels – refused to accept the premise of the question. If only more radio interviewees would do that.
It’s not about rules, she said. “It comes the other way round. It’s about people belonging somewhere, and that creates bonds of responsibilities and rights. I’m not a great fan of Thou Shalt Not.”
But, persisted Ms Young, hadn’t Thou Shalt Not worked quite well? To which Dame Anne replied: “Individuals and communities need clear boundaries. But there also has to be the recognition that within families and communities you owe things to each other, you support each another. Simply the negative isn’t going to achieve that; there’s got to be the positive as well.”
It is always refreshing when you hear someone side-step a pigeonhole (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor) and insist on defining an issue for themselves. It’s what, in a limited way, we have been asked to do with next month’s national census. Not everyone approves.
Democracy is the best antidote to al-Qa’ida
The real test of the nature of the awakening sweeping across the Arab world will not come in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Bahrain. It could come in Yemen where President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in power for 32 years, yesterday made a Mubarak-like promise to stand down, but not just yet.
Thousands of young people have kept unrelenting street vigils for democracy in its capital Sanaa since the end of February when protestors in Egypt sent Hosni Mubarak into exile. But the situation in Yemen came to a crisis after a bloody assault by government henchmen killed more than 50 protestors after prayers on Friday. Scores of high-ranking government officials, including five top military leaders, have defected. Among them are the president’s half-brother and Yemen’s envoy to the Arab League. President Saleh has warned his army commanders that the country could descend into civil war – and promised to stand down after parliamentary elections next year.
