The Green Ink Brigade

In September 2022, Nigel Smith, landlord of The Fleece Inn in Bretforton, Worcestershire, held a ‘Nigel Night’ in an attempt to revive the fortunes of his name, which is in danger of dying out. Data from the Office of National Statistics revealed that no babies were given the name Nigel in 2016 or 2020, and Nigel Smith’s gathering attracted 372 other Nigels, some of whom had travelled from as far as the USA, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua.

Had Nigel Smith chosen to refuse to serve any of the Nigels, or deny them entry to his pub, he would have been perfectly within his rights to do so. A licensee has the right to refuse entry to whomever they wish, so long as the reason is not unlawful, for instance refusal cannot be on the grounds of sex, race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or belief.

In much the same way, banks have always had the right to close a customer’s account, although like our publican, they should not do so for reasons that would constitute unlawful discrimination. Infringing the terms and conditions of the account is legitimate reason - failing to maintain a minimum balance, or deposit an agreed minimum amount per month, for example - or because of suspected fraudulent activity or money laundering. In those latter instances the bank would not be able to cite those as reasons for the account closure to the customer on the grounds of ‘tipping off.’

The issue of banks closing customers’ accounts has become hot news following Coutts & Co’s decision to close the accounts of former MEP and UKIP leader, Nigel Farage. The reasons for the bank closing Farage’s accounts, and the rights and wrongs of that, have been done to death elsewhere; it strikes me as probable that Coutts were looking for a reason to end the relationship, and found one when he paid off his mortgage, regardless of what happened subsequently.

What is interesting, is what has happened after Nigel Farage went public with the news of Coutts & Co’s withdrawal of his banking facilities.

Firstly, there’s the idea that as soon as anyone errs, or does something that the popular press and Twitterati don’t like, then they should be sacked. In the last year or so there have been calls for teachers, junior doctors, nurses, railway workers, and workers in a score of other professions to be sacked for exercising their right to withdraw their labour in pursuit of pay claims, or – in the case of civil servants – simply being perceived to not be working hard enough. In the Farage farrago, there have been calls for not only Nat West CEO Dame Alison Rose to resign – which she has done (correctly, what with the customer confidentiality she breached by discussing Farage’s relationship with Coutts with a BBC journalist being sacrosanct) - but for the whole board to go. This whole ‘sack the lot of them’ culture has gone way too far.

Secondly, there’s the idea that the Nat West board should be sacked is justifiable because about 40% of the Nat West Group (of which Coutts & Co are part), is owned by the taxpayer. Weirdly, there’s also glee on the part of the same group of people that the Farage affair has wiped £600 million off Nat West's share price: It’s a strange shareholder that relishes the price of their holdings plummeting. That share price tumbling was good news for hedge fund Marshall Wace though, as they made a significant sum shorting Nat West shares. By random coincidence, Marshall Wace’s co-founder Sir Paul Marshall jointly owns GB News, the TV station that employs Nigel Farage. Small world, isn’t it?

While Dame Alison Rose was indiscreet in talking to the BBC about Farage, he published the full details of the document that Coutts & Co provided him with after he made a subject access request. What has been interesting has been some of the comments in the media - mainstream and social - about the document, which exposes a trend that has been increasingly noticeable - especially on Twitter - in recent years, and that is of the uninformed expert. 

Whether it is Brexit, covid, climate change, immigration (especially so-called illegal immigration), and now banking, it is astonishing how many people are vociferous in denying the views of people whose day jobs are working in those fields and are instead enthusiastic in promoting alternative views that have little or no facts to back them up. Emboldened by having a platform that allows gibberish to be disseminated to a wide audience, these people have become ‘expert’ in the last few years in trade deals, geopolitics, epidemiology, climate science, and now banking, all on the basis of ‘research’ that consists largely of bouncing around echo chambers watching weird YouTube videos and reading niche websites. When they start spouting nonsense about a subject you know something about, it casts much doubt on their pronouncements on other topics.

The Coutts document that Nigel Farage gave to the Daily Mail, which appeared in print and on their website, accepts that Farage has been 'professional' in his relations with the bank. Having learned during my thirty odd years working in banking however that it is unwise to put anything in a note on a customer’s file that you would not want read out in a court of law, one wonders if this was perhaps erring on the side of discretion over accuracy. Of course, I know nothing of Mr Farage’s conduct when dealing with his bank, but his public persona suggests that he might have been a customer with quite exacting standards.

Everyone should be entitled to expect their bank to behave professionally when dealing with them, but in my experience, some customers have unrealistic expectations. During my time in banking, particularly in branch banking, there were certain customers whose name being mentioned would provoke groans from members of staff who habitually had to deal with them. 

These customers would be the sort to march in without an appointment and demand immediate access to their safe custody items, then loudly complain if made to wait more than a few minutes. There were customers who would unreasonably demand huge amounts of information within unrealistic time frames – “I need a complete breakdown of all the interest earned on my deposit account between 1974 and 1992, and I need it in fifteen minutes” – and would not take no for an answer. And that’s before you start to consider the customers who would make requests for things to be done that were either impossible, contrary to the bank’s regulations, or even illegal. Some customers would think it perfectly acceptable to arrive five minutes before closing time and tie staff up with protracted but not urgent transactions.

Finally, there were The Green Ink Brigade. These customers would write long rambling letters in green biro on numbered pages torn from duplicate books, the sort used with carbon paper. Letters that would continue, spider like, up one margin and down the other once the bottom of the page was reached, and which were almost indecipherable to read and incomprehensible of purpose.

There are many legitimate reasons why banks can close a customer’s account; writing letters to them in green ink should be one of them. I wonder if Mr Farage owns a green biro?

 

Azura - Under A Clear Blue Sky

A couple of years ago, Val and I were lucky enough to go on the shakedown cruise of P&O’s then newest ship, Iona. For the uninitiated, shakedowns are short cruises to test the functionality of the vessel with a full complement of passengers, although the passengers are usually all staff, ex-staff, and their family and friends.

It has to be said that Iona’s shakedown was not trouble-free, but to a degree, that’s the point of a shakedown, identifying areas that need fixing. In Iona’s case, the online restaurant booking function didn’t work, and some of the staff in the restaurants and elsewhere looked a little bewildered. Our two-day trip took us from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, Poole Harbour, and back again (we didn’t go ashore at either location), and I rather suspect that some of the teething problems we experienced had not been ironed out before the ship’s maiden voyage just a few days later.

While Covid precautions were still very much uppermost in most people’s minds when we did the shakedown – without a negative Lateral Flow Test no one was getting on board Iona in August 2021, and washing hands was compulsory before entering restaurants - they had largely been consigned to history by the time we boarded Azura last week for a seven-night cruise through the Mediterranean and Adriatic.

While Iona is the largest cruise ship I’ve been on (184,000 tons and 5,200 passengers), Azura is no lightweight, coming in at 116,000 tons and carrying 3,100 passengers. Despite its size, and the fact that it was full for the cruise we were on, Azura has a remarkably intimate feel, and although it is now thirteen years old, the amenities are as luxurious as you could wish for.

Azura as we boarded in Valletta

Our cruise started in Valletta. We flew to Malta from Gatwick, having originally been able only to book the cruise with flights from Birmingham; fortunately, London flights became available a week before we sailed. Landing at 6pm and embarking the ship at 7pm left no time to see Malta, and the same was true of the journey home. After dinner in the Meridian Restaurant, it was time to unpack some of the contents of my suitcase more vulnerable to creasing (suit and shirts mainly) and take a relatively early night.

From Malta, a day at sea and an opportunity to acclimatise to the ship and find our way around before docking at Taranto in Italy. Throughout the holiday, the weather was nicer than the forecast had suggested before we left England, but Taranto was a little overcast, but pleasant enough. There’s an old town and a not so old town, separated by a bridge; the old town is more picturesque and we had a lovely gelato there, but on the whole, it isn’t the sort of place I’d go out of my way to revisit.

Taranto

Italy I’ve been to before, but never yet Greece, so landing in Corfu Town on the Sunday was somewhere new. Val was quite keen to find a beach for a swim, but the weather wasn’t entirely in our favour and the nearest sandy beach was probably too much of a hike to reach comfortably, so we contented ourselves with a wander round town where – it being Sunday – the churches were busy, as were the cafes, but only the smaller shops were open. After a lovely lunch overlooking the sea, we strolled back to the ship rather than get the shuttle bus.

Corfu

Entertainment on board ships these days is a lot more professional and varied than it once was, and on Sunday evening we watched some live music from The Bluejays, whose speciality is 1950s and 1960s rock and roll. Not especially my favourite genre, it has to be said, but I like nothing more than seeing a live band who can play well, and The Bluejays were certainly that. So much so that we saw them again a couple of nights later, when their setlist was quite different and still excellent, even if the lead guitarist was hampered by a broken string. I’d thoroughly recommend The Bluejays if you like 1950s/60s rock ‘n’ roll. Actually, I’d recommend them even if you don’t.

Food on board was plentiful and delicious, as it always is on cruises, and Azura has a variety of restaurants. We opted for the buffet for breakfast and lunch, or just grabbed a slice or two of pizza from the poolside, but ate in the Meridian or Peninsular Restaurants in the evenings. The menus are always varied, with choices for adventurous dinners and more conservative ones alike.

Our third port was Split. Croatia’s tourism industry has had to recover from both the war of the 1990s, and covid in more recent years. In 1990, tourist arrivals stood at 8.4 million, but fell to 2 million a year later when war broke out. They have now recovered to the extent that 18.9 million tourists arrived in 2022. The TV series Game of Thrones, much of which was filmed in Split, has had a beneficial impact on tourism, and a large number of visitors to our last port of call, Dubrovnik, were there to take in the sights they had seen on screen.

In Split we opted for a tour to the Krka National Park in Lozovac, which is about an hour’s drive from the port. Unseasonally heavy rains that had affected parts of Croatia in the week or so leading up to our arrival had led to parts of the park being closed right up until the day we visited. The waterfalls are magnificent (okay, perhaps not on a par with Niagara or Victoria, but impressive enough), and for a change from walking round town, the tour was worth the effort (and the money: Shore excursions can be expensive, but this was actually quite reasonable).

Krka National Park

Our final port of call was Dubrovnik. It was the hottest day of the holiday and under a clear blue sky we wandered the walled city, famous as a location for Game of Thrones - in particular, Cersei Lannister's Walk of Shame - packed with tourists, including those from both Azura and a Viking Cruise lines ship that was also docked there. We had a lovely walk around town, a pit-stop at a pavement café, a delicious ice cream, and then back to the ship.

Dubrovnik

One day at sea cruising back to Malta, during which I walked about seven miles round prom deck, and then it was off to the airport to fly home. Getting to the gate at Valletta’s airport proved to be a bit of a bun fight with passengers from two cruise ships descending on the terminal, the queues at passport control were long and slow moving.

In complete contrast, I cannot ever recall as quick an experience after landing at Gatwick as this one. No queues at the e-Passport gates, which – for once – recognised Val’s passport, and we were back in the car and away from the airport in nearly record time.

Cruising has long since lost its image of being expensive and elitist and is now as affordable as any other type of holiday and a generally informal, although it is nice to have the opportunity to dress up a bit on the formal nights. 

This cruise and this ship were perhaps the best I’ve been on and make me keen to do it again.

 

The Three Hardest Words

It’s the morning of Saturday 6^th May 2023, the coronation of King Charles III takes place today, but even before the first guests had arrived at Westminster Abbey, the police were confiscating placards from anti-royalist protesters, some of whom were arrested.

Now, you may say, “Quite right too,” and believe that nothing should spoil the occasion of Charles’s coronation. You may hold similar views about the actions of Just Stop Oil, or Extinction Rebellion.

Police remove placards from anti-royalist protesters.

You may fully support the recently introduced Public Order Act that gives the police greater powers to deal with protests, including the offense of ‘locking on’ whereby a person commits an offense if they attach themselves to another person, an object, or land. Or if they merely go equipped to do so, by which we the act means carrying objects for such a purpose. How do you feel about arresting people for merely being in possession of such things as super glue or a padlock?

Even if you do support such legislation, doesn’t a little part of you feel uneasy that in what we continue to call a free country, our rights are being eroded, little by little? You may say that it’s only extremists, the ant-monarchists and the climate change fanatics, that is to say, those you don’t support, who are being targeted, and that they deserve everything they get. But one day there may be something that you feel strongly about, that gets you up in arms, but about which you cannot lawfully protest about. The right to protest isn’t just being taken away from people you don’t support or approve of.

Just yesterday, the results of local council elections that had taken place in many parts of England on Thursday were announced, but almost overshadowing the results – in which the Conservatives took a battering, losing over 1,000 councillors and the control of 48 councils – were the stories of voters being turned away from polling stations for want of valid photo ID, this being the first time that such ID had been required in England.

Is the requirement to provide photo ID to be able to vote a sensible precaution to avoid fraud at polling stations, or is it voter suppression?

Personation - ‘assuming the identity of another (person) in order to deceive' – at polling stations is very rare indeed, and there were just seven allegations of personation at local elections in England, Scotland and Wales, elections to the Northern Ireland assembly, a series of mayoral elections in England and six Commons by-elections during 2022, none of which resulted in any police action, yet it is estimated that up to two million people lack an acceptable form of photo ID and applications for the government’s free Voter Authority Certificate ran to just 85,000 ahead of the local elections.

The requirement to show photo ID at polling stations is clearly a solution in search of a problem, and one exacerbated by the inconsistency in the types of ID that have been deemed acceptable. 

Proponents of the scheme point to the fact that most of Europe, and even Northern Ireland, requires voters to produce ID, and that the Labour Party – who have largely opposed the scheme – require members to show membership cards to participate in party meetings. This argument spectacularly misses the point. Apart from Denmark, Iceland, and Ireland, all European Economic Area (EEA) member states issue national identity cards, and Labour Party members are provided with a card when joining the party. 

I get the argument that successful instances of personation may not be known, but it is likely to be very small indeed, so assuming that this nut of miniscule proportions requires a sledgehammer to smash it, it would surely have been appropriate for the government to write to everyone on the Electoral Register personally to make them aware of this most fundamental change to the manner in which our democracy works and ensure that everyone who needs one has a Voter Authority Certificate but apparently not.

The publicity surrounding events of this week at polling stations, with many people turned away, and some apparently challenged even though they had valid ID (allegedly the likeness of holder’s photos on passports and driving licences was questioned in some places), should mean that come the next General Election the number of people unable to vote for want of correct documentation will be significantly lower, perhaps as low as the number of cases of personation at the last one in 2019 (33 allegations, 1 conviction, 1 caution).

Voted ID wasn’t required seven years ago, at the EU referendum, and despite various attempts at getting Brexit done after Leave won the vote, we seem to have achieved very little that is positive. A recent Savanta survey for The Independent shows that two-thirds of Britons now support a referendum on rejoining, and of course in the years since 2016, many thousands of teenagers, too young to vote then but who were more likely be supportive of the UK being inside the EU, have joined the electoral register.

Even many of Brexit’s staunchest supporters are unhappy because the version of Brexit that we have is not what they wanted, although on the basis that the ballot paper merely asked whether voters wanted to Remain or Leave, any form of Brexit must be what the public voted for as no details of our ongoing relationship with Europe were specified on the paper.

"Leave the European Union." Seven years on we are still arguing what that actually entails.

Where views on a subject are firmly entrenched it is often pointless arguing about them in person, and even more futile arguing on social media, and especially with strangers. There are some subjects like Brexit, or climate change, that are so complex or diverse that few people have an all-encompassing view, but there may be one area in which they are well read. This results in arguments being all about the pros and cons of two individual’s wildly different areas of expertise, areas in which they have no common ground. In such instances, no one gives way.

Paul Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement categorises various types of argument into a pyramid as shown below:

 

And the reason that the hierarchy can be thought of as a pyramid is that the higher up one goes, the rarer that type of argument becomes.

It used to be said that the hardest three words for a man to utter were “I love you,” but since providing a counter argument or refuting the central point of a particular case rarely cuts any ice with those who with entrenched views on a particular matter, it’s more accurate to say that the hardest three words are “I was wrong.”

The Emergency At 3

This coming Sunday, 23^rd April, is St George’s Day *. It’s also the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth (and death. What perfect symmetry it is to die on your birthday). The London Marathon is taking place, as is the FA Cup Semi-Final between Brighton & Hove Albion and Manchester United, and at 3pm, a UK-wide test of an emergency alert system will make every mobile phone that is switched on (even if in silent mode) sound an alarm and vibrate.

Perhaps you haven’t heard about it and are going to get the surprise of your life on Sunday when your phone (and the phones of everyone in the vicinity) suddenly starts emitting a repeated siren that only goes away when acknowledged.[1] You may be aware that it’s going to happen but will still be taken by surprise because you lose track of the time, or perhaps you won’t get the alert because  you’ve turned the notification off or intend turning your phone off to avoid being interrupted.

Jacob Rees-Mogg said in a party political broadcast monologue on GB News that I caught on Twitter, that government should not be indulging in this type of thing, and confesses that he has disabled the notifications on his phone, which is even more surprising than the news that he has a phone capable of receiving such alerts in the first place.

Sunday will be a test, but the government website, www.gov.uk/alerts, suggests that real alerts will be issued for reasons such as severe floods, fires, and extreme weather. They don’t mention impending obliteration by incoming nuclear ballistic missiles, but that may be another reason, although quite what one should do in such circumstances would appear to be limited. One imagines that an alert would advise people to seek shelter, although places where one could do so effectively strike me as limited at best.  

Let’s hope we never get to find out, or even experience a false alarm of that sort, which was what happened to unfortunate Hawaiians in 2018 when a missile alert message was sent out in error and the agency responsible for it spent 40 minutes trying to work out how to retract it.

There are some people who would have us believe that the alert system is a means of government instilling a sense of permanent fear in the general population. Contrarily, these same people offer the view that such a system will end up being ignored. The alert system is, in some people’s minds, another method of controlling and cowing the populace, in much the same way as things such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and 15 Minute Cities are and how covid lockdowns were used to soften us up to accept climate change/net zero lockdowns, with impositions such as restricting the number of new items of clothing we can buy in a year, limiting the use of private cars, and the number of flights we are allowed to take. I’m sure that’s the plot from an episode of Black Mirror.

The reports that contain many of the ideas that lead people to believe that governments and elite conspirators want to control our every move usually stem from some theoretical,  utopian view (or dystopian, depending on your position) of the future produced by a group of academics. On Twitter, these pie in the sky ideas are being presented as though they are established policy, just waiting to be implemented. 

 

These ideas come from a report, The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World, released by Arup, C40 Cities and the University of Leeds. It’s not government policy, although some people would have us believe it is, or soon will be.

If anyone is keeping us in constant fear, it’s the media and various influential social media contributors, as much - if not more so - than governments.

We also hear – frequently, and alarmingly – about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), and how their introduction will result in cash being abolished and how our spending will be controlled by government who will, through mechanisms like social credit scoring, be able to limit what we are allowed to spend our money on. Along with this, and relying on a 2016 essay by Danish Politician Ida Auken, originally titled, "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better,” there is a belief that the World Economic Forum will, within the next seven years, collaborate with governments to create systems of control that will end up with everyone but the elite being little more than indentured slaves.

Some targets – banning the sale of petrol and hybrid cars by 2030, making homeowners replace worn out gas boilers with heat pumps – have become part of government policy, but the deadlines are unlikely to be met and may recede into the distance and never be met at all since governments are notoriously unrealistic when it comes to targets and equally useless in meeting them.

We are frequently warned that government wants to surveil and control us. Such were the cautions when the NHS Covid app and digital covid passports were introduced. The app was demised recently and the digital passports have fallen into disuse (not that they were ever widely required in my experience). Frankly anyone with a mobile phone voluntarily gave permission to Apple or Google (or both) to keep them under surveillance long ago (just look at your timeline in Google Maps), while your bank knows exactly where you spend every penny, and Tesco’s Clubcard knows about your spending habits in their stores (that’s exactly why it was designed and built in the first place. The discounts and vouchers are just sweeteners to keep you handing over your data).

You could argue that the Covid app’s demise and the abandonment of the covid passports prove that government has no real desire to control us. Alternatively, perhaps they were just the warm up before the main event, merely there to test the water and ensure that when the time comes for the real deal to be inflicted on us, we will be softened up and ready to comply. Frankly, a lot of these supposed control mechanisms suggest a lot more interest in our lives on the part of government than I believe they actually have, and – if they really wanted to implement them - a far greater degree of competence than they have exhibited in the past (and in this regard I include governments from both sides of the political divide). It’s that lack of competence that reassures me that whatever is suggested, and whether the government intend implementing any of the policies that have been mentioned, it will be a complete fiasco anyway. As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”

On Sunday, at 3pm I hope to be out of the house somewhere that’s busy to observe the public’s reaction when the government alert system causes their phones to suddenly burst into life, apparently spontaneously. In reality, I’ll probably have forgotten all about it and be taken completely by surprise, although it would not surprise me one bit if, when three o’clock comes, my phone, primed and ready for the alert, remains stubbornly silent.

 

[1]  Follow this link to see and hear how the alert will appear on your phone https://youtu.be/MvZM-oCReu8

 *Edit: As St George's Day falls on a Sunday in Eastertide this year, the saint's day is more properly observed on 24th April, not that anyone will take any notice.

“Talk a little, but say a lot.” The Wit and Wisdom of Danny Murphy

Whatever your opinion of the British government’s policy on the Channel crossings by people in small boats might be, and whatever you feel about Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s statement on the subject in early March, or the tweet that it provoked from Gary Lineker that exploded all over social media and the mainstream media, most people will agree that there has never been a period of sports broadcasting in England quite like the one we experienced on the second weekend in March.

Pundits Alan Shearer and Ian Wright declined to appear on Match of The Day after Lineker’s removal, and commentators refused to pick up their microphones. There was no Football Focus (replaced by Bargain Hunt) and instead of Final Score there was The Repair Shop. Match of The Day and Match of The Day 2 were rebadged as Premier League Highlights and featured match action with no commentary or analysis.

The Saturday night highlights package lasted just 20 minutes, but even that modest running time was five minutes longer than the Sunday evening show. Nonetheless, the Saturday programme attracted 2.6 million viewers, half a million more than tuned in the previous week. Did this prove that what the viewers want is a heavily truncated show featuring no commentary or pundits? Or, like rubbernecking motorists peering across the central reservation at the opposite carriageway, were the extra viewers simply voyeurs of the car crash?

Blackpool MP Scott Benton was one who thought that it was the former. Here’s what he tweeted six minutes after the show ended: “Best #MatchOfTheDay episode in years. Had all the goals in No ‘expert’ analysis And finished quicker than usual so I could make the pub for last orders. What’s not to like” (his lack of punctuation). I don’t know how far he lives from his local pub, but getting there, tweeting about it, and beating last orders in six minutes is impressive stuff! (No, I don’t believe he went to the pub).

Football on TV has come a long way from the days when I started watching it. Only a few matches were broadcast live on television back in the 1960s; The FA Cup Final, some England international matches, and European Cup Finals were about the sum total. It seemed that Kenneth Wolstenholme commentated on most of the ones I watched, largely because where there was a choice – both ITV and BBC showed the FA Cup Final in those days – I would choose The Beeb.

Watching footage of games that Wolstenholme covered, the difference in style between him and current commentators is abundantly clear. A particular memory of a Wolstenholme commentary that I have was a match involving Newcastle United. At the start of the game, while describing the kits that the two teams were wearing – especially important to the many viewers watching in black and white – he announced that Newcastle’s black shorts had “the manufacturer’s fiddly bits down the sides.”  The multi-coloured, logo covered shirts with numbers that don’t conform to what he would remember as the players’ positions would boggle his mind were he to see them today.

Kenneth Wolstenholme

Newcastle United in their shorts with the “the manufacturer’s fiddly bits down the sides.”

Events in games seemed sometimes to take Wolstenholme by surprise, and he often greeted goals with a simple, “And it’s a goal!” as though no one could have seen it coming. One of his contemporaries, David Coleman, of course habitually announced goals – especially the first of the game – by simply reciting the score in an emphatic manner.

Commentators today offer a bewildering array of facts and statistics to enhance the match experience for their viewers and listeners. John Motson, who sadly died recently from bowel cancer at the age of 77, may not have been the first match broadcaster to supplement their commentary with statistics about games, players, stadiums, and competitions, but he was the one who made an art of it. Largely, he did it in a way that improved the viewers’ experience; he was a bit like your mate at a game who mentions in passing some esoteric fact about one of the players or some previous match because he’s interested in it, and thinks you might be too. Too many commentators today sound as though they have committed the whole of the Sky Sports Football Yearbook (forever simply the Rothman’s as far as I am concerned) to memory and are hell-bent on reciting it all for the ‘benefit’ of their poor viewers.

The late John Motson in trademark sheepskin coat.

There may be people for whom late Saturday night television is incomplete without a dose of the wit and wisdom of Match of The Day pundit Danny Murphy, but I would be sceptical about that, or any claims that Match of The Day audiences want the amount of punditry that is routinely inflicted on them for that matter. To be fair, I’ve never heard anyone who watches MOTD claim to want more chatter at the expense of the action, but it must be true of some people because everyone’s tastes are different, as the ongoing popularity of Mrs Brown’s Boys proves.

The best football commentators add to the enjoyment of games by bringing to our attention things we might not have seen, or imparting relevant information we might otherwise not have had, not by wittering on endlessly, describing events that we’ve all seen with our own eyes and vainly thinking that they are being insightful, or trying to shoehorn in some alleged witticism or tenuous metaphor that they have written and rehearsed to the point that any illusion of spontaneity has been thoroughly removed. Some commentators have me reaching for the remote control to lower the volume to barely audible. Sam Matterface is one, and I’m not alone apparently, because as soon as ITV announce that the commentary team for a game are Matterface and Lee Dixon, Twitter goes into overdrive with mickey-taking memes.

When Martin Tyler first began commentating, John Motson suggested that he should, “Talk a little, but say a lot.” It was sage advice, and something that many of today’s football commentators would benefit from following.

 

 

 

To The Letter of The Law, But Outside Its Spirit

There was unanimity among those I was standing with while watching the Manchester derby in the bar before the Jersey Bulls v Romford game last Saturday that United’s equaliser by Bruno Fernandes should have been disallowed for offside against Marcus Rashford, and there was incredulity when the goal was allowed.

It was widely held that Rashford was both seeking to gain an advantage and was interfering with play, but in saying so, most people were quoting from a half-remembered version of the offside law that no longer applies. The offside law has changed so frequently in recent years that very few of us have been able to keep up with those changes. But none the more for that, there were good reasons why the goal should have stood…but reasons why it should not have too. With offside calls, it’s possible for the decision to be simultaneously wrong, and right.

The concept of gaining an advantage has changed over the years such that this is deemed to have occurred only when a player who is in an offside position plays the ball after it has rebounded off a post, or bar, or an opponent, but not merely by their lurking in an offside position.

As for interfering with play, Rashford could only have been deemed to have been doing so if he had touched the ball – which he didn’t - or if he prevented an opponent from playing the ball, or made an action that impacted on the ability of an opponent to play the ball, and he didn’t do either of those things, so therefore he was unequivocally not offside. Or was he?

Two eminent former referees could not agree on the decision in the aftermath. Keith Hackett had no doubt; “Rashford is offside,” he wrote in The Sunday Telegraph. “To allow Fernandes’s goal to stand is a total nonsense.”

Being in an offside position is not an offense in itself of course, but Hackett goes on to say that Rashford was offside because he was “clearly attempting to play a ball which is close” (Law 11, section 2). Hackett also rightly pointed out that Darren McCann, the assistant who flagged Rashford offside, is one of the most experienced in world football. McCann has given more offside decisions than most of us have had hot dinners and got the vast majority of them right too. Hackett would therefore have supported McCann’s decision.

Meanwhile, speaking on Sky Sports, another former top-class referee, Dermot Gallagher opined that had he been the man in the middle, he would have stuck by assistant Darren McCann’s flag and called Rashford offside. But he then went on to say that referee Stuart Attwell would, from the view that he had, have formed the opinion that Rashford had not impacted on his opponents and was therefore not offside, hence him allowing the goal.

Gallagher also said that this was not a factual offside, but was a subjective one. Which tends to support a view that I have held for a long while: Offside decisions can be given that are technically correct, but which are morally, ethically, and subjectively, completely wrong. To avoid that conflict, and to return to Keith Hackett, “The law is awful and requires a complete rewrite.”

In this instance, because Rashford does not touch the ball, he is not technically offside. The ball however, is clearly within playing distance – defined in the laws as “(the) Distance to the ball which allows a player to touch the ball by extending the foot/leg or jumping,” and as it was within Rashford’s playing distance, there is a strong argument that he was in possession of the ball and therefore technically offside as well as subjectively so.

The Twitterverse has come up with a number of examples from seasons past where players in similar positions to Rashford’s have been given offside, but these are largely irrelevant as the laws have changed since some of these incidents occurred.

Although I would agree with Darren McCann’s decision to raise his flag and say that the goal ought to have been ruled out, I can see both sides of the argument in much the same way as Dermot Gallagher did. I suppose the acid test is, if my team conceded an identical goal, would I accept it graciously, or would I argue in favour of it being disallowed? The answer is that I would be spitting feathers! 

As a result, we’re back to the subjectivity of it all, and the biggest problem with that is – and I’ve said this before – that football is quite precious about having laws, and laws should not be contradictory, laws should not be subjective. To put it bluntly, laws must be objective, so in this I fully support Keith Hackett’s point of view; the law is an ass and needs a rewrite.

One could sum up this decision by say that while it was correct within the letter of the law, it was clearly not within its spirit, a consideration that the laws say that referees must apply when making a decision.

One controversial decision in one game in one country is unlikely to be enough to prompt a change in the law. It could result in a change in the way it is interpreted in England, although the fact that the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) - the body responsible for referees in the Premier League - have backed Stuart Attwell’s decision suggests that that might not be the case.

At some point in the near future, the offside law will change – again – and just about the only thing we can be certain of is that the change won’t add clarity but will simply produce more grey areas and more subjectivity to the decision making. That’s something to look forward to.

 

Strike!

Workers in the UK banking industry have never been particularly militant. During the thirty-six years I worked for Midland Bank/HSBC, there were, to the best of my knowledge, only two disputes that led to strike action. Largely this was due to the fact that the trade union was weak; the majority of staff were not union members.

At some point during the late 1970s or early 1980s, a union rep from what was then either the National Union of Bank Employees (NUBE), or the Banking, Insurance and Finance Union (BIFU) – the name changed in 1979 – came to the branch I was working at in Romford as part of a recruitment drive. He was told to leave by the branch manager and not darken our doors again after he called non-union members “f*****g parasites” for accepting pay rises that the union negotiated.

The only times strike action that I can recall being taken during my time in work came in the late 1970s, and then in the mid-1980s, and that second one was somewhat feeble to be honest. In the late 1970s, workers at Midland Bank’s data centre in Brent, north London, went on strike for two days a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) for a while. The majority of customers would have been blissfully unaware that any industrial action was being taken, but for those of us who worked in branches, it was pretty inconvenient.

At some point during the 1980s there was a dispute over working on Christmas Eve. When 24^th December fell on a weekday, we closed at mid-day, but one year when the last working day before Christmas was not actually Christmas Eve, and we were expected to work a full day, the union decided to flex its muscles and a ballot was called to see if union members were in favour of striking and walking out at lunchtime.

The ballot having been called, the vote went in favour of strike action. I recall that at Midland Bank, Barking – where I was working at the time – the majority of union members voted in favour of striking, but some were somewhat reluctant to follow it through. In the end, I was one of those that walked out at mid-day. To be honest, it was pretty insignificant and a full day’s work in similar circumstances became the norm in later years.

I was always of the opinion that had there been any further disputes in the bank, then a work to rule would have been much more effective than a strike. Most employers rely on workers going the extra mile, doing unpaid overtime and shortcutting processes in order to get the job done. I worked in a number of departments where, had everyone decided to do their jobs exactly by the book, work their contracted hours only, and work strictly in accordance with their job descriptions, then the bank would have ground to a halt. I’m sure that many workers, in many other industries, would say the same.

The 1970s were rife with strikes in many industries and it was almost an act of faith by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to reduce the power of the trade unions, and as a result, membership fell from 13 million in 1979 to around 7.3 million in 2000. We have therefore become used to a period of some decades in which industrial action and strikes have become a rarity. Now, however, many industries are seeing strike action; railway workers, nurses, ambulance workers, junior doctors, university lecturers, and teachers are all striking or threatening to.

The very people who were applauded at the height of the covid pandemic, the very people who were lauded as heroes, the key workers without whom we wouldn’t have got through lockdown, are now being vilified because they are striking in pursuit of reasonable pay rises. I mentioned the former editor of The Sun, Kelvin McKenzie, in my last blog as he called the men and women who drive ambulances as “vile shitbags.” He has subsequently decided that the NHS is full of vile people, that firemen are more interested in their other jobs (pretty sure that this is an outdated, urban myth), and that he looks forward to unions being fined and public sector workers being sacked when they strike.

I’m not picking particularly on McKenzie, it’s just that his vitriolic tweets keep appearing in my Twitter timeline, despite my not following him (coincidence or not, but since Elon Musk bought Twitter, my timeline now seems full of people I don’t follow), and his views seem representative of a section of society – and members of government – who have decided that fighting for a reasonable pay increase is a heinous offense. There have been suggestions that – as McKenzie alluded to – the government may legislate to sack public sector workers who strike. This of course is a bonkers idea; imagine an industry in which workers like nurses or paramedics, or doctors, need several years of training and cannot be replaced overnight, and having those very workers dismissed for going on strike. That really would improve the level of service.

The language used in describing some of these disputes is interesting. “Hard working people” will be unfairly affected if certain workers strike, they say. But the strikers are hard working people too, hard working people who would like to be fairly rewarded for their labours. And as for nurses and others in the health service, there’s a suggestion that what they do is less a job, and more a vocation, the implication being that that somehow that justifies poor salaries, that these workers should be selfless and regard a job well done as reward itself. None of which puts food on the table nor pays energy bills.

It’s difficult to be envious of people with extreme wealth sometimes, but the man next door, who normally earns the same as you but who suddenly gets a generous pay rise, is fair game for our jealousy and resentment, or at least that is how we have been programmed to think by the government and the media.

It’s true that strikes inconvenience ordinary members of the public as much, if not more, than the employers, but in the disputes currently taking place it seems that there is a lot more sympathy among members of the general public than is often the case. In most of these disputes, it seems that the public recognise that the striking workers have legitimate grievances. It also helps that in the dispute on the railways, RMT union leader Mick Lynch is a much more reasonable and measured figure than his predecessor, the late Bob Crow, who was much more combative.

One way or another, the current disputes we are seeing will be resolved. What sort of reaction this provokes from the government in terms of legislation to limit union powers even further than Margaret Thatcher’s did remains to be seen. Perhaps if striking becomes more difficult, then unions may have to look to alternative forms of action, like the work to rule, because surely you can’t be punished for doing your job properly, can you?

 

 

 

 

Motivated Reasoning

I haven’t written a blog for more than three months now; the last one that I published was just after the death of the Queen. It means that 2022 was my least productive year in terms of blogs with just 13 published, the lowest since 2018.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I’ve been busy writing other stuff. You may know that I write for Romford FC’s programme, which entails three pieces (two of 800 words each, and one of about 500) for every home game, and between August and Christmas, there have been twenty-two programmes to write for; in the same period last season, it was ten. On top of that, I’ve been writing articles and match reports for the football club’s website, which amounts to about 2,500 words a week, so time available to write blogs has shrunk.

Secondly, and probably more pertinently, I’ve run out of inspiration. More than once I’ve written an opening paragraph and then not even bothered saving it because I got bored, or because I’ve written something similar in the past. Then there are some subjects that, no matter how I feel about them, I have consciously decided to avoid, politics in general and Brexit in particular, and Covid (especially the conspiracy theories and again, the politics of it all).

When it comes to these subjects (among others), it seems that views, once set and entrenched, are difficult to change. The tribalism that exists in say, which football team you support, is equally evident in politics and recently, in views on the industrial action being taken by nurses, postal workers, and railway workers. Look at people like Kelvin McKenzie, former editor of The Sun, who I’m certain was among the cheerleaders of the NHS staff during the pandemic, but who recently described some of them as ‘vile shitbags,’ or Isabel Oakeshott (journalist) who seems to believe that nurses don’t deserve a pay rise because she believes that they spend all their time standing around and drinking tea, but who would have been leading the Thursday night clapping back in 2020.

There are people – and McKenzie and Oakeshott may well be among them – who don’t accept the lived experience of others if they don’t conform to their own beliefs. And it’s no use countering prejudice and opinion with facts because these people have formed an opinion, found one fact (or more likely, factoid), that supports their position and stick rigidly to it, despite a veritable cornucopia of evidence against. This is particularly applicable to the outcome of Brexit. On TV programmes such as the BBC’s Question Time it’s possible to find an audience member bemoaning the negative impact that Brexit has had on their business only to be told by a member of the panel (usually a Tory MP, often Jacob Rees Mogg) that they are wrong, that their perception of their lived experience is wrong.

Politicians are at the head of the queue of people with limited expertise or knowledge of a given subject who will pontificate and pronounce with absolute certainty, even though they are completely wrong.

Some nurses may earn £30,000 a year, some nurses may use food banks, and some may not be good at managing their finances, but Anderson confidently asserts that the majority of nurses fall into all three categories, even though it is highly improbable he could find any evidence to support the statement.

People who will not be swayed, or are unwilling to change their minds when faced with facts that discredit, debunk, or disprove their position are usually displaying motivated reasoning, where emotional biases lead to justifications or decisions based on their desirability rather than an accurate reflection of the evidence. This commonly manifests itself when someone who denies that something like Anthropogenic Climate Change exists, and rejects all facts and research that support it, homing in on anything that supports their view. Climate change is an interesting subject in that many people without any scientific qualifications (nor it seems, any significant knowledge of any science whatever) feel able to express opinions on the subject and be taken seriously, purely because they aren’t convinced or believe that it’s all part of some conspiracy.

A lot of this becomes evident through the BBC and it’s aims of impartiality, balance and objectivity. To quote Emily Maitlis, the former Newsnight presenter when speaking at the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival last August, “It might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it. But by the time we went on air we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.”

As a result, it’s not unusual to find an expert in a particular subject, be it climate change, Brexit, Covid, or whatever, debating their specialism with someone who holds a contrary view based on limited understanding of the topic, but whose voice is given equal weight, even if their sole argument is “I’m not convinced.”  There’s an element of Dunning Kruger at play here, with being unconvinced shorthand for “I’m a clever person, but I don’t understand this, therefore it cannot be true.”

In this way, the BBC have pitted climate scientists with decades of experience in the field against the likes of Nigel Farage or Nigel Lawson in their quest for ‘balance’ on the subject, despite the fact that the broadcaster had to admit that in 2017, they had allowed Lawson to lie, unchecked, about the subject in an interview on the Today programme on Radio 4.

It’s very rare to find anyone changing their mind in TV or radio debates, or on social media. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone whose opinion, which may be based on prejudice and little knowledge, change their standpoint because a well marshalled argument, backed up with evidence, is presented to them. In the same way, once we form an opinion of a media figure, we are unlikely to change that either.

Nigel Farage and Piers Morgan are probably the ultimate Marmite men of British broadcasting. If you disagree with Farage’s views on Brexit and immigration, you will probably be hard pressed to agree with him on other topics, so when he recently expressed the perfectly reasonable view that travellers from China arriving in the UK should be tested for Covid, his critics’ knee-jerk reaction was to disagree, even if they fundamentally would have agreed with the idea had it been espoused by someone they admired.

Piers Morgan has so many opinions on so many topics, that I imagine many people simply expect to disagree with everything he says and do so on principle. The problem with that is that when he says something sensible (it happens, honestly) it can be hard to agree because of who he is and not for what he said.

If 70% of what someone says (or a newspaper publishes, or is broadcast on TV or radio) is offensive or we simply disagree with it, reasonable views and content that they promote get lost in the noise. We may feel unable to agree with one position that actually chimes with our own standpoint because we may feel tainted by association with someone whose views on other matters we find abhorrent.

Too few people change their minds, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Personally, I've never had a problem admitting that I'm wrong - and I've had plenty of opportunities!