Living In The Past

I recently did something that I hadn’t previously done for more than ten years – probably about fifteen years, actually - I bought a suit.

For over thirty years I wore a suit every day at work. In my last few years, the dress code in my office became more and more relaxed, from casual clothes on special occasions (usually with a donation to charity attached), to dress down Fridays, to dress down every day.

The last suit that I owned before retiring – worn since only for weddings, christenings, and funerals – gave up the ghost a few years back, and I have been relying on a black blazer and (sort of) matching trousers for formal occasions. It didn’t look as smart as I would have liked, so when my daughter’s university graduation ceremony was imminent, I decided to buy a new suit.

At around the time that I was making this decision I came across news revealing that Marks & Spencer, the shop that is the first port of call for men like me when we want to buy a reasonably priced, good quality suit, had stopped selling them in more than half of its 254 stores.

Only 110 larger M&S stores, like this one at Bluewater, still sell men's suits.

Fortunately, my local store was still stocking them, although the choice was quite limited, but clearly my purchase made me part of a falling number of suit buyers. Unsurprisingly, covid was largely responsible for the drop-off in sales that saw M&S sell just 7,500 suits during the first two months of the pandemic, 80% fewer than in the same period twelve months before.

The number of people working from home was growing even before covid; the pandemic accelerated that number and even now, with some people beginning to drift back to their offices, employers are embracing the idea of hybrid working with staff spending some working from home, and some time in the office, with benefits accruing to both employer and employee. In such circumstances, the demand for suits inevitably falls.

On the last couple of occasions when I have ventured into the City of London, the lack of commuters has been quite noticeable and equally so, the fact that many sandwich bars and coffee shops were closed – some merely having closed earlier in the day than they would have a couple of years ago, but some clearly closed permanently.

The detrimental effect on the local economy, and the businesses that rely on city workers who are now working from home is undoubtedly a driver for the government encouraging people to get back to the office. Just this weekend, Iain Duncan Smith (a supposedly intelligent man who regularly does a convincing impersonation of a stupid one) drew the tiresome and irrelevant comparison between covid and the Second World War when he said that workers still went to the office in 1940, even when the Luftwaffe were bombing London.

The comparison is pointless because not only are bombings not contagious, while covid is, few people had telephones at home in the 1940s and the internet hadn’t been invented, so working from home wasn’t an option. But he was actually wrong anyway. In 1940 the Inland Revenue began relocating to Llandudno, 5,000 civil servants from the Ministry of Food moved to Colwyn Bay, and the Bank of England moved to Staffordshire.

Living in the past, and particularly in WWII, is a bit of a national obsession in England. Had that conflict not taken place, I wonder what comparable event people like Duncan Smith would use as an alternative? The Great War? The Napoleonic Wars? And for how long will people born long after the event continue to reference the war? Will our great-grand children’s generation be doing so, or will some other event (Covid, perhaps?) supplant it?

Also living in the past, and like IDS, waxing nostalgic about a time before she was born, Clare Foges recently wrote a piece in The Times under a headline, “Don’t bet on a hard winter toppling Johnson,” in which she claims that “a large chunk of the population doesn’t just endure national crises like these but rather enjoys them.” Claiming that tracking down petrol and grabbing the last bag of pasta in a supermarket confers a thrill on those compelled to do so, she concluded that, “When those who were there in the Seventies speak of it, of three-day weeks and candles burning during the blackouts, their recollections are often tinged with nostalgia.”

There speaks a woman who was born in 1981. I was a teenager during the 1970s and while I didn’t suffer the stresses that my parents did in trying to keep their jobs during the three-day week, put food on the table during the various shortages while coping with the rampant inflation and power cuts, I don’t feel nostalgic for much of what happened in that decade. If those of us who were alive during the 1970s remember them with any degree of nostalgia it’s because we have blotted out the sheer awfulness of much of the decade. As I wrote a couple of years ago, “it was a decade probably best remembered for the Winter of Discontent, rampant inflation, unparalleled industrial strife, IRA atrocities, and Britain being dubbed 'The Sick Man of Europe.' It was the decade of my teenage years, and although there is much to look back on with fondness, there was much about the 1970's that was a struggle and not all that pleasant.” (See https://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-1970s-part-two-strikes-shortages.html)

We had potato shortages, bread shortages, milk shortages; we had strikes by tanker drivers, local government workers meaning that the bins weren’t emptied for weeks in some places, and the dead weren’t buried. We had petrol shortages, water shortages, power cuts and IRA bombs. Oh yes, plenty to be nostalgic about.

I can’t help agreeing with Clare Foges about one thing though: The Conservatives are supremely skilled at taking no responsibility and pointing the finger of blame elsewhere, and, if mentioning Brexit at all, placing all blame on the EU for our current woes. I resolved earlier this year not to write about Brexit (the zealots on both sides of the debate aren’t changing their minds after all), and while it’s wrong to blame Brexit for all this country’s ills, especially when many are shared with other nations, Brexit has undoubtedly exacerbated a lot of our problems.

In 1979, the so called Winter of Discontent led to a vote of no confidence in the Labour government and its leader, James Callaghan. Margaret Thatcher won the subsequent General Election and ushered in seventeen years of Tory rule. Despite everything that has happened since Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Conservatives, I somehow doubt that our seemingly Teflon coated Prime Minister will suffer Callaghan’s fate, even with the evident similarities in their situations.

People like IDS and Clare Foges are keen to invoke the mythical Blitz spirit as though Britain is a nation of stoics rather than one in which people dial 999 because KFC or Nandos have run short of chicken, who hoard toilet rolls, clog petrol stations as they brim their already nearly full fuel tanks, and have hissy fits when asked to wear a mask during a pandemic. 

Don't panic! Motorists queue for fuel at Tesco in Ashford. Photo: PA

Blitz spirit? Whimsical longing for a return to the 1970s?  Don't make me laugh! It’s about as realistic as expecting future generations to wax nostalgic about the coronavirus pandemic.

 

 

Global Britain To Go Imperial?

Imperial or metric? Feet or metres; pints or litres? The overwhelming majority of countries on the planet are totally - or mainly - metric. Only Liberia, Myanmar and the United States use imperial measures exclusively (and the US version of imperial measures is not the same as that which has traditionally been used in Britain – a US pint is 83% of a UK pint, for instance). Britain naturally has to be different, and in this country we use a mixture of both, so that in a pub, beer will be sold by the pint (imperial), but wine is sold by the millilitre (metric); we sell petrol in litres, but calculate fuel consumption in miles per gallon (selling petrol in gallons again and so being more easily able to calculate MPG is actually a change I could get behind).

 

For those who supported the so-called ‘Metric Martyr,’ Steven Thoburn, the Sunderland greengrocer who was convicted for breaching EU rules banning the sale of fruit and vegetables in pounds and ounces back in 2001, Boris Johnson’s announcement last week that moves are afoot to once again make it legal to sell goods using only imperial measure will no doubt make their hearts swell with pride as the country begins to make a bonfire of Brussels bureaucracy, albeit at the cost of creating many yards (not metres) of our own, home grown, red tape.

 

And when we raise our pint in our local pub, we will be able to do so in a glass printed with the crown stamp (which was prohibited by EU directives) instead of the CE symbol. Edit: The crown symbol on glasses was NOT prohibited by the EU, I have learned since I originally wrote this. EU law does not prevent markings from being placed on products, so long as it does not overlap or be confused with the CE mark). That is if the CO2 shortage doesn’t mean that the pubs have no beer. Who really cares what’s on the side of the glass though? It could be a picture of Yoda saying, “A pint, this is,” for all I care, so long as it’s a pint!

 

As The Times mentioned when reporting these moves, they are largely (I’d say solely) symbolic, another dead cat hurled onto the table to detract from the very real issues that the country faces. And precisely who will these moves benefit? Metric measures have been legal in the UK since 1875, the country went metric in 1965, long before we joined what was then the Common Market, and imperial measures have not been taught in schools since the mid-1970s, so they will be simply a source of amusement and confusion to anyone under fifty. Perhaps the move is aimed at appeasing readers of the Daily Express, the majority of whom are in their dotage and for whom this sort of thing probably is actually quite important.

 

Pippa Musgrave, a Weights and Measures inspector, was highly critical of the idea on Twitter (you can read the thread in full here https://twitter.com/PippaMusgrave1/status/1438559713604608003), saying – among other things - that we have a shortage of weights and measures inspectors, most imperial local standards and testing equipment have long been retired, and that Certificates of approval for imperial metrological equipment have long since lapsed.

 

Boris Johnson has said of bringing back imperial measures, "People understand what a pound of apples is.” Do you know what a pound of apples looks like? I for one don’t.[1] When I buy apples I buy by number, because I need one, two, three, or four (or more): Weight doesn’t come into it.

 

It isn’t as though we really need to bring back any more imperial measures, we already use enough of them. Now, I’m not a great fan of George Galloway, but he illustrated this country’s mixed approach to weights and measures perfectly with this tweet, although the point he was making may not be the one he thinks he is:

 

If I am typical – and I think I am – we British are fairly comfortable with a mix of metric and imperial measures. I use imperial measures for my own weight – I can visualise how much I or someone else weighs in stones and pounds but not in kilos (nor just pounds for that matter, which tends to be how Americans express weight) - but I prefer kilos for cheese or meat or other foods. Pints and litres are to my mind interchangeable, especially as milk (which I still buy in pints, or quarts) is labelled in metric and imperial. I prefer miles over kilometres – if a distance is quoted in kilometres, I have to convert it – but for shorter measures, like lengths of wood, or the size of a piece of furniture, then I’m happy with either.

 

A logical extension of reverting to imperial measures could be that our athletes once again have to start competing in races over a mile, or 440 yards; that our long jumpers measure their personal bests in feet, not metres, and that the length of our swimming pools is imperialised. Chances of those things actually happening? Non-existent, but someone probably wishes they would.

 

If we are being honest, how likely is it that any retailers will suddenly start selling goods where the weight is shown solely in pounds and ounces? Not many, I'd say; perhaps the odd market trader here and there may, but, as Pippa Musgrave alluded to, for them to be able to do so legally, they will have to comply with new trading standards legislation with all the costly new bureaucracy that that entails.

 

In a similar vein to Johnson’s jingoistic call to arms on the weights and measures front, at the recent Royal Television Society conference, then Media Minister John Whittingdale announced a new plan that would make it a legal requirement for UK broadcasters to produce shows that are ‘distinctively British.'  While most commentators believed him to be referencing such shows as The Great British Bake Off, Fleabag, and Derry Girls, the more cynical among us suspect that the shows that people like Whittingdale – and Johnson, probably – were thinking of are The Dick Emery Show, Are You Being Served? Mind Your Language, and Love Thy Neighbour.

 

No doubt many of the younger generation get fed up with their parents waxing nostalgic about the 1970s, but if TV shows like those I’ve mentioned were to get remade, and if the soaring gas prices we are experiencing continue, if supply chain problems mean more and more empty shelves in the supermarkets, and if we have to start buying fruit and veg in pounds and ounces, then we’ll all be able to experience the 1970s again!

 

For a government that has previously railed against ‘gesture politics,’ Boris Johnson’s administration seems keen to indulge in such a thing quite frequently, and while it’s been said that a supposed Brexit benefit was the chance to be Global Britain again - implying an outward looking, forward thinking, dynamic nation - all we seem to be doing with announcements about crowns on glasses, imperial measures, and Britishness in TV is retreating into insularity.

 

But we’ll know what a pound of apples looks like, so that’s all good then.

 

[1] I weighed some apples in Tesco this morning to see what a pound of them looks like – it’s two, two apples.

All Our Eggs In One Basket

Last Friday I walked along the South Bank in London for the first time in over eighteen months, and it was almost as though Covid-19 had never happened. Cases – and deaths – might be just as high as last November, when we were relying on lockdown to stop numbers spiralling out of control, now the country has put its faith squarely in the vaccine programme to do the same. Social distancing and mask wearing seem to have slipped off the agenda.

On the tube up to Monument, the mask wearers were largely in the minority despite TfL making wearing one a condition of carriage. When I finished my walk from Monument to Victoria and got on another tube to take me to my destination at West Kensington, the mask wearers were firmly in the majority; perhaps central London commuters are less mask averse.

The South Bank was busy. Perhaps not as busy as it would have been on a Friday evening pre-pandemic, but busy enough, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that few pubs, coffee shops, or restaurants seemed to have closed, there were even a couple of new places that must have opened only since I was last in town.

 

There were no masks in evidence at Nell’s in West Kensington, where I went to see Fischer-Z in my first proper gig since I saw IQ in November 2019 and the first live music I have paid to see since Joe Stilgoe’s show at The Barbican in January 2020. Fischer-Z – who I first saw back in the 1970s when they supported Dire Straits – are more popular on the continent than in the UK despite founder and lead singer John Watts hailing from Surrey and now living in Brighton, and the crowd was actually quite thin, and while that must have been a disappointment for the band and the venue, it made it a comfortable reintroduction to gig going – for me, at least.

 

Unsurprisingly, drink prices have gone up since I last ventured into a pub in London, but even so, the price of a pint in The Marquis of Granby in Dean Bradley Street, just north of Lambeth Bridge, did take me by surprise a bit, coming in at £6.20, and according to the barmaid, prices are higher on Saturdays and Sundays!

 

Picture by Stephen Harris

Post-gig, it was back to West Kensington Station and the long trot back on the District Line, topped off by a half-hour walk home. By the time I got indoors, Friday had become Saturday, and my phone battery had expired, so I plugged it in to charge and went to bed.

When I got up, the only sign of life on the phone was the green LED that shows that it is fully charged. The phone would not switch on despite simultaneously pressing all the relevant buttons as suggested in the Troubleshoot section of the user manual, or any of the many YouTube videos on the subject. Clearly I needed a new phone.

I have often thought – and I’m sure this has occurred to a lot of people – that we are becoming so reliant on our mobile phones that being without one is much more than a minor inconvenience. In the last few years more and more functions and activities are possible through our phones, so by choice, or increasingly by necessity, much of the mundane, everyday stuff we do, we do with our phones. Our dependence on them has gone way beyond a social media driven habit and now, whole areas of our lives are either simplified by our being able to use a smartphone, or are massively more complex and inconvenient without one.

We pay for things with our phones, we have train tickets and tickets for shows and football matches on on them. It is now possible to have a whole day out just using a smartphone, using the Trainline app for rail tickets, an app like Ringo to pay for car parking, paying for goods and services with Google Pay, using the Wetherspoons app to pay for drinks in a pub, ordering and paying for food at Wagamama, and using a QR code on your mobile to get into a gig at The O2. All of which demands that you have a working smartphone with sufficient battery life, and a 4G signal.

On top of all that, the NHS app on your smartphone gives you access to a record of your Covid vaccination status, and regardless of what anyone says, proof of that is increasingly likely to be required in plenty of places.

 

All of which is fine and dandy – until your phone packs up, which is why I rarely go out without back-up, such as a debit card, some cash, and printed copies of e-tickets.

With my four year old Samsung Galaxy S7 now defunct, but with a phone upgrade due, I phoned my mobile provider to see what they could do. Yes, they could get me a new phone, and get it to me by Wednesday, and on a contract that I was happy with. The only problem was that the only colour phone they could get me by Wednesday was pink. A grey one wouldn’t be available till next month. I declined a pink phone and on Sunday, popped into my local Three store where they had exactly what I wanted, and on a better contract than I’d been offered over the phone.

Luckily, I was only without a phone for twenty-four hours or so and fortunately I didn’t need it for football – when Romford are at home I have the job of updating Football Web Pages through my phone, but this weekend we were away, so I didn’t have that responsibility - but my temporary inability to access my bank account online, or see my NHS COVID Pass, to name but two pieces of vital functionality, showed how reliant on our phones we have become. It’s not until your phone is unusable that you realise how much other stuff you do relies on being able to receive text messages with One Time Passwords and the like.

Having not backed up the photos on my phone for a couple of weeks, I’ve lost a few pictures (I posted some from the gig on Facebook on the way home, so I still have them), but I probably got away lightly, most other stuff was backed up and a couple of frustrating moments apart, getting the new phone set up was relatively painless.

Phone technology is all well and good when it works as it should, but reliance on it introduces lots of points of potential failure: For all of the convenience of smartphones, our dependence on them means that we are in danger of putting all of our eggs in one basket.

 

Pitching the Landline

 

Imagine trying to pitch the idea of a landline phone to a telecoms executive in today’s world where the smartphone is ubiquitous and nigh on indispensable for many people.

“What’s the screen size?”
“There’s no screen.”

“So how do you use the camera?”
“There’s no camera.”

“But it’s got Bluetooth, right?”
“No, no Bluetooth.”

“Is it Android or iOS?”
“There’s no operating system.”

“What’s the battery life?”
“There’s no battery, you have to plug it into the wall.”

“Okay, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Nonetheless, even today the landline phone is essential for many people. People who don’t want, can’t afford, or couldn’t use a mobile phone or the internet; people who live in areas where broadband is slow or mobile signals unreliable. For those people, a landline phone is an essential, so they may have been somewhat perturbed to have heard that from 2025, BT OpenReach, who are responsible for our phone and Internet cables, will be phasing out the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) on which our landline network operates.

This does not mean the imminent demise of the landline. Instead of the old copper wiring that connected us through PSTN, landlines will instead use our internet connection and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) which is how we currently make phone calls using apps like WhatsApp and Messenger. Which is all fine and dandy unless you are one of the million or so UK households currently without an internet connection. While some may simply have chosen not to subscribe to broadband, telephone subscribers in hard to reach areas will hope that the government’s £5 billion Project Gigabit plan to level up broadband access where they live will be completed by the time PSTN is switched off. Ingeniously, there are plans to connect households with fibre optic cables in the water mains, a system already in use in Spain.

 Unsurprisingly, the use of landlines has plummeted in recent years. In 2012, people in the UK made a total of 103 billion minutes of landline calls, but in 2017 that was down to 54 billion. While there are still about 22million landlines in the UK, that is down 15% from the start of the 21^st century, when 95% of homes had one. In the last three years 1.41 million lines have been ditched.

There are times when Val and I have considered getting rid of our landline. We no longer need it for our broadband, and when it rings – which is rarely - 9 times out of 10 it’s a scam call. Just about the only reasons we keep it on are that cancelling it won’t actually save us any money and there are a few times when we get genuine calls. Yes, we could tell callers to use our mobiles, but there’s something of an overhead in working out who only has our landline number if we want to be proactive about that.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have a phone – I think I must have been thirteen or fourteen when my parents got one - and even then I seem to recall there was a waiting list, so it took about six months between applying for one and having it installed. The one we had looked very much like this:

It rang only rarely as we knew very few other people who had a phone; mostly it was used by my Mum phoning her Mum. Prior to our having the phone connected, my Mum would have to walk about half a mile to the nearest phone box. In an emergency I guess we could have asked a neighbour who had a phone. Theirs was a party line, not something that has even existed since the mid-1980s but which was common years ago. It seems odd now that a phone line shared by two separate households would even be considered and one imagines that a few family secrets were revealed when one subscriber overheard another’s conversation. Which reminds me that crossed lines were another peculiarity of telephone conversations back in the day. In the middle of a conversation, you might hear another voice or voices, prompting someone to cry, “Can you get off the line please!”

Even accounting for the landline’s decline, the language that is associated with it lives on, and will likely continue to do so for years to come. Despite possibly never having used a rotary dial phone, people still dial numbers; despite being able to terminate calls simply by pressing a button, we still hang up. One thing that we do lack however, is the satisfaction that comes with slamming the receiver into its cradle at the end of an angry or frustrating conversation.

 What we don’t miss however, is the frustration of having to stay indoors and wait patiently (or impatiently) for someone to ring you back. And somehow they always seemed to choose to call in the couple of minutes when you’d popped to the loo. Oh, and the aggravation of being in another room when the phone rang, dashing to pick up and hearing the dialling tone when you put the receiver to your ear! When we first got a phone it lived in the lounge, so absolutely no privacy when taking a call. Later, after we moved, it was in the hall, which, lacking any heating, was absolutely freezing in winter; still, it kept costs down as no one spent longer on calls than was necessary.

 No one misses the irritation of misdialling the ninth or tenth digit of an eleven digit number, or being interrupted and losing track halfway through. “Sorry, wrong number,” is something that one hears very infrequently these days but which was a regular occurrence with rotary dial phones when there was no way of checking what you’d actually dialled.

 And since rotary dial phones had no memory to store numbers or calls, each redial meant actually redialling, not just pressing one button, and every number had to be looked up in a phone book, or dredged up from memory. The funny thing is though, I can still remember some phone numbers that I called regularly thirty or more years ago, but I have no idea of the mobile numbers of some family members today.

 One day the landline will probably be gone and forgotten, much in the same way as the candlestick telephone and having to ask the operator to connect your call, but probably only those who currently have to rely on it will lament its passing.

A Different Perspective

Years ago, I used to go to football matches as a neutral quite regularly,  usually on days when my team wasn’t playing or were away from home somewhere that I couldn’t get to. Nowadays I rarely go to matches that don’t involve Romford FC. For some people however, going to games without supporting either of the teams involved is how they watch all of their football; I’m not sure that I could do that, as a recent experience proved.

 

In recent years, the only non-Romford games that I have seen have been England v USA in 2018 (I was lucky enough to get a complimentary ticket, otherwise I doubt I would have gone), and the 2019 FA Vase and FA Trophy Finals between Chertsey Town and Cray Valley PM, and AFC Fylde and Leyton Orient respectively, but this week I took a trip to the seaside to see Eastbourne Town play Little Common in the Southern Combination.

 

Not being invested in the result, I was able to watch the game in a way I don't normally. It gave me a different perspective on the sort of incidents that may provoke a sense of injustice if they happen in a Romford match; it definitely makes me aware that no matter how impartial and reasonable I think I am when watching Romford, I am not!

The charming turnstile block, sadly not in use.

 

My main reason for going to watch Eastbourne Town play was the ground. The club’s home, The Saffrons, is also home to Eastbourne Cricket Club, Eastbourne Hockey Club, and Compton Croquet Club, while Eastbourne Bowling Club are next door, and the view beyond the bowling green takes in the Renaissance style Victorian Town Hall, built in 1886. The Saffrons was first used in 1884, and includes a beautiful turnstile block which dates back to 1914. It was damaged in a fire in 2004 but has been fully restored. Sadly, it isn’t in use – the actual entrance is a slightly more prosaic gap in the fence in the opposite corner of the site.

The view from the entrance with the Town Hall dominating.

For a Southern Combination League club (that’s five steps below the English Football League, nine below the Premier League) Eastbourne Town are quite well supported – there were 220 there for the game I saw – and have not one, but two groups, of ‘ultras,’ Pier Pressure and The Beachy Head Ultras (although neither were in evidence at the Little Common match), who have plastered the scaffold like standing accommodation behind one goal with the sort of stickers these groups tend to go in for.

The visitors, Little Common, hail from Bexhill, nine miles or so along the coast, but play their home games at Eastbourne United’s ground, and they were not without support on the night. Officially, the capacity at The Saffrons is 3,000 although it’s difficult to imagine that sort of number being accommodated comfortably and safely. It’s mind boggling to discover that back in the 1950s, for an FA Cup tie against Hastings United, 7,378 people squeezed into the place!

 

The game was entertaining without being especially engaging. As a neutral I felt somewhat detached because there was no jeopardy; because I didn’t mind who won, I didn’t really care either. Watching Romford play can be stressful at times, heart breaking sometimes, but thrilling and joyful at others. Supporting a team is emotional, watching a game uncommitted is a bit hollow.

There was no score at the break, but Eastbourne went in front in the first minute of the second half when a forward finished from close range after a good move down the right wing. Little Common equalised after a free-kick was deflected onto a post and the rebound was slotted home. Common then took the lead when a forward skipped past the last defender on the left and bent a shot past the keeper.

 

In the celebrations after Little Common’s second goal, an Eastbourne player ended up on the floor holding his head (I presume he was clobbered by an opponent; I didn’t see what happened), and a 21 man brawl broke out.

 

The scuffle - which came dangerously close to involving members of the crowd – was quite well handled by the referee and his assistants. When the dust had settled, one player from each side were sent off, although it could quite easily have been more.

 

Both teams seemed upset at having a player dismissed, although it was difficult to see why other than because of the perpetual sense of injustice teams feel when they have someone sent off, no matter how bang to rights the player is, and they were also equally aggrieved at a number of yellow cards that the referee had to issue as the sides became increasingly fractious as the game wore on. As a neutral, it seemed to me that the referee got those decisions right, although had the team in yellow and blue been Romford and not Eastbourne Town, who knows how I would have felt?

 

Eastbourne snatched a point with a goal from close range after Common failed to clear. Of the two sides, Little Common would have been the happier to have taken a point.

 

I had heard good things about the Eastbourne Town programme, having seen a number of cover illustrations online including a Halloween themed edition and one with a retro-style FA Cup Final cover, and the cover for the Little Common game was in anime style. Sadly, the cover was the best bit as the contents comprised a few photos and some stats, but nothing to read except for the history of each club.

Many people believe that the football programme is an endangered species, and more and more football clubs are producing online programmes instead of the traditional printed version. In these days when all the statistical information you can want is easy to find online and more up to date to boot, a programme needs to have something you can’t get online, some sort of unique selling point, and the cover apart, Eastbourne’s doesn’t really have that.

 

Well, that’s my view anyway, I guess there are equally people for whom Eastbourne’s programme is perfectly good, but given that it is well produced and looks attractive, the lack of original content seems a missed opportunity.

 

My evening’s football at The Saffrons was enjoyable enough, but it made me realise that watching football as a neutral is not something I’m bothered about enough to do on a regular basis anymore.

 

Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear

Among the many conspiracy theories that have arisen during the coronavirus pandemic is the idea that the vaccines contain some sort of microchip designed to track the movements of the vaccinated. If it wasn’t COVID-19 it would be something else, as there are constantly evolving theories about how ‘they’ (governments, big business, shadowy but unspecified other groups) are tracking our every move, recording our conversations, building up vast amounts of data about us.

 

The one thing that these theories usually lack is what the explicit purpose of this information gathering exercise is: ‘Control’ is often given as a reason, but with limited explanation of how this control will be exercised or what purpose it serves, unless control is the end and not the means.

 

It is true however, that virtually everything we do is tracked, traced, and recorded somewhere by someone. If you own a car, have a bank account, store loyalty cards, or mobile phone, just about everything you do, everywhere you go is logged. And that is before we even get to the estimated 4-6 million CCTV cameras in the UK.

 

Almost everyone will have a story about the somewhat unsettling, spooky online incidents where an advert for a product or service pops up in our social media feeds for something we have been talking about: Coincidence, or is your mobile phone or virtual assistant like Alexa spying on you? Goodness knows, but for most of us the thinking must be, if we’ve nothing to hide, we’ve nothing to fear. If I’m going to see adverts on Facebook for example, they might as well be for things I might actually have an interest in.

 

But news coming from the United States about a plan by Apple to study images that iPhone users upload for storage in iCloud Photos takes matters a step further.

 

Before I go on I must clarify that Apple are only reviewing images to look for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and only in the USA. The creation and distribution of such images is so abhorrent that most people would consider it reasonable to justify almost any method of detecting such offences and bringing those responsible to book.

 

Apple’s process works by comparing images that are being stored in iCloud Photos with known images of CSAM, and if a potential match is found, a human reviewer will assess the images and report the user to law enforcement agencies.

 

Where we start to enter somewhat more uncertain waters however, is how this technology might spread, how it might be abused or misused. Yes, we could quite easily and justifiably defend and support the use of this sort of technology to combat the sexual abuse of children. But then law enforcement agencies and governments will inevitably ask the question, what else could we use this technology for, what other offences could we detect and prosecute using it?

 

Terrorism? Yes, obviously terrorism. If wholesale surveillance of mobile phones could have prevented 9/11, or 7/7 in London, or the bombing of the Bataclan in Paris, then surely it would be justifiable. Or people smuggling and trafficking? Or the drugs cartels? Or what about gangs planning robberies like the Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary, surely we can justify using technology to combat that sort of thing too? I could go on, but that would risk straying into Monty Python’s ‘What did the Romans do for us?’ territory.

 

To some extent it already happens. Phones have been tapped for years if potential criminal activity is suspected, but only by going through a process to justify individual instances that ends with a senior politician or judge authorising such activity. Terrorist offences have been stopped through mobile phone surveillance, but what we are looking at with Apple’s photo scanning process is the possibility of blanket coverage of everyone’s phone at all times.

 

You might shrug your shoulders and say, I have nothing to hide, so I’ve nothing to fear. And if you are not inclined to commit offences that involve CSAM, and you aren’t located in the United States, then at present that’s true. But what Apple have done here is to open a door which they themselves had previously locked, barred, bolted and declared that they would never open. There have been cases in the past where law enforcement agencies have been stymied by Apple’s refusal to unlock phones that have been used by terrorists, even for the FBI, but now they are proactively saying that the data on iPhones is fair game.

 

Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins University, has raised concerns: “They (Apple) have sent a very clear signal. In their (very influential) opinion, it is safe to build systems that scan users' phones for prohibited content. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong on that point hardly matters. This will break the dam — governments will demand it from everyone."

 

This sort of technology would enable an oppressive regime to clamp down on even the mildest form of dissent and suppress any form of protest, making criminals of even the meekest opponents.

 

And that is the point that defenders of free speech and civil liberties, and those who love a conspiracy theory will latch onto, and for once possibly with good reason. Who gets to decide what constitutes prohibited content?

 

In Britain, and in much of the world, people like to think that they live in benign democracies, where their rights are respected, where they can travel and speak freely, and that criticising the government and other authorities is acceptable, where free speech is protected, and civil liberties unlikely to be curtailed except in extremis, COVID-19 being a case in point.

 

But not everyone lives in a benign democracy, and even in countries that purport to be so, governments are not above suppressing dissent – take a look at the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which was passed in the House of Commons by 359 votes to 263 on Monday 16th March, and under which it will become an offence to cause someone ‘serious annoyance,’ or merely put them at risk of being caused serious annoyance. That could merely be a step on the road towards a government deciding that, in the interests of national security, they should start interrogating people’s phones for all sorts of material, including simple, straightforward, currently perfectly legitimate, criticism of government, its policies, and its ministers.

 

At the moment it’s just Apple, in the United States, targeting a particularly narrow, detestable group of people. But the line that has been drawn is not fixed; it can and probably will, move. Things we don’t have to hide today may be proscribed tomorrow. One day, that merry little jape you made about the Prime Minister might land you in very hot water indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liar, Liar!

Parliamentary privilege allows Members of Parliament to say things in the House of Commons that outside it would make them liable for prosecution for slander, contempt of court, or breaching the Official Secrets Act. On the other hand, rules around unparliamentary language forbid MPs from using certain words or phrases about other MPs. Words like blackguard, coward, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stoolpigeon, and traitor. And of course, liar.

 

Members of Parliament are generally described by one another as "the Honourable Member for . . .” and the assumption is, as the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has said, that “No honourable member would actually mislead or lie to the House,” and should an MP unwittingly utter a falsehood, or accidentally mislead the House, then they are obliged to correct the matter at the earliest opportunity. Not that they always do. [1]

 

Accusing a fellow MP of lying will result in the MP making the accusation being required to withdraw from the Chamber if they do not retract their remark, as happened to Labour MP Dawn Butler last week. Citing a YouTube video produced by the lawyer and filmmaker Peter Stefanovic in which he dissected and debunked a number of claims made in Parliament by Boris Johnson, Butler said that Boris Johnson “has lied to this House and the country, over and over again."

  

As Dawn Butler found, in this country we take accusations of lying very seriously. In much the same way as we take accusations of racism and anti-Semitism very seriously. Unfortunately, we take the accusations more seriously than the offence a lot of the time. As former Speaker John Bercow and Dawn Butler herself said in a joint statement published in The Times, “Someone lying to tens of millions of citizens knows he or she is protected by an ancient rule. They face no sanction. By contrast, an MP with the guts to tell the truth is judged to be in disgrace. It is absurd.”

 

Dawn Butler speaking in the Commons on Friday. Picture: House of Commons/PA

MPs can be accused of lying of course. Virtually every week at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sir Keir Starmer says, of some answer or statement that Boris Johnson has given, ‘That simply isn’t true.” A lie, then. As he has said, “the Prime Minister is the master of untruths and half-truths.” Starmer says that he supports the deputy speaker who ejected Dawn Butler, but also supports Butler for what she said. He likely only said that because his silence on the matter had drawn criticism, but that sort of fence sitting harms him more than Johnson and the Tory government.

 

I saw a comment on Twitter that if MPs were allowed to call each other liars, then that word would be constantly bandied about in the Chamber, and the point being made clearly was that it would be uttered even when no lie had been told. Which raises two points.

 

First, if Honourable Members were actually honourable and didn’t lie, then the accusation would carry no weight (it wouldn’t stop it being used, but it would be more detrimental to the accuser than the accused), but secondly – and just as importantly – is it right that MPs shout across the Chamber?

 

While some speeches in the House of Commons are listened to respectfully, anyone who has watched PMQs will know that the House is often like a bear pit, with voices raised on both sides. MPs should not shout ‘liar’ at their opponents; they ought not shout anything at all. They should however, be able to use a speech to call out lies on the part of another member, particularly if that member knowingly and demonstrably did lie.

 

The arcane rules and customs of Parliament are like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, where things are done a certain way because of accidents of history, because of tradition, not because they are logical or make sense. If Parliament were a private business, engaged in banking for example, it would probably use abacuses instead of calculators, and handwritten ledgers instead of computer mainframes because that is how it has always been done. Getting Parliament to move with the times is on a par with getting a cat to learn algebra.

 

Christopher Lee as Mr Flay, responsible for upholding the rules and maintaining 
tradition in the castle of Gormenghast. From the BBC production.

But move with the times it should. The whole system of politics in the UK is overdue for reform: Our First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system for a start. In the last seventy years FPTP means that in all but three elections the majority of votes have been cast for parties other than the one that formed a government. 

 

Politics is binary, but the world is nuanced. The majority support a political party the way they support a football team, with blind, unthinking loyalty. But whichever party you support you are likely to be lumbered with just as many policies that you don’t like as ones that you do. In fact, it may be that there are policies that another party has that you support more than the ones proposed by the party you vote for. Which is the reason why we should stop voting for people and parties and start voting for policies.

 

Come election time, the parties should set forth their intended policies. The public votes for the policies they want and the policies are carried out by private industry. We will still need MPs, but not the 600 odd we have now; a couple of hundred should suffice to act as administrators and make sure that the private companies entrusted with carrying out the policies we voted for do so properly. An unintended consequence is that this could lead to a privatised health service, but at least it would happen through conscious choice and not implemented by stealth.

 

In private industry objectives are the norm, and performance against objectives is how pay rises and bonuses are set. In a privatised parliament, our MPs could be assessed and rewarded by how effectively they manage to get the policies implemented.

 

This method of governance would ensure that the right people are doing the right jobs. Iain Duncan Smith last year lambasted the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), for recommending that working from home measures stay in place. He said that SAGE had no right to tell employers what to do because “most of them have never run a business.” Duncan Smith has never run a business, nor have many MPs, so how appropriate is it that a completely unqualified person is put in charge of the Department of Health, or Education, or the Ministry Defence?

 

Michael Gove once said that Britain is fed up with experts, but it is normally accepted that some degree of expertise and knowledge of a business is useful when running it. Being in charge of a multi-million pound department with thousands of employees and the literal power of life and death over the population of the whole country apparently requires no experience or knowledge, just the good fortune to have won a popularity contest and be looked on kindly by the Prime Minister.

 

It’s time to privatise government and get the experts in.

 

 

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[1] Since 1979 there have been 93 occasions on which MPs have apologised for misleading the House. The most recent was in 2019. Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03169/

It’s Not Coming Home - Again

My interest in football – especially international and Premier League football – has waned a bit in recent years, and I’ve rarely watched live football on TV, especially since covid, what with the lack of atmosphere at games played behind closed doors. I approached Euro 2020 with some scepticism; I wasn’t expecting to watch many games, and I wasn’t overly optimistic about how enjoyable it would be.

 

As it turned out, I watched more games that I expected, and enjoyed them much more than I had anticipated. It helped of course, that England surpassed my expectations (a Semi-Final place was the best I was hoping for, and even that was a stretch), but in any case, the quality of the games – especially in the knock-out stages – was mostly excellent. Two games on the same day – Croatia v Spain, and France v Switzerland – were spectacularly entertaining, and then the next day England beat Germany, and any victory over Germany is one to be savoured.

 

Spain's Mikel Oyarzabal celebrates scoring their fifth goal in their thrilling game against Croatia. Picture:  REUTERS/Stuart Franklin

The football benefited from the return of the fans, although a multi-country, multi-city format during a pandemic introduced some unnecessary risk. It seems that at Wembley especially, the supposed covid restrictions that required fans to show their vaccination status or a negative test result were not rigidly enforced, and the chaotic and violent scenes at the stadium and other parts of London on the day of the Final were as predictable as they were saddening.

 

In the end, England’s quest for a first tournament win since 1966 fell short in the penalty shoot-out against Italy. It won’t be long before ‘thirty years of hurt’ becomes sixty at this rate. Perhaps Messrs Broudie, Skinner, and Baddiel will update the tune in time for the 2026 World Cup, unless England manage to go one better than this year before then.

 

Comparisons between England’s final this year and 1966 are inevitable, and as much as anything, they display the changes that the country, indeed the whole world, has gone through in the last fifty-five years.

 

Take the crowd at Wembley. In 1966 most of the men were in suits and ties; rosettes abound, and the flags being waved were largely Union Flags. Now it’s replica shirts and the Cross of St George.

1966 at Wembley

And everyone looked older. Take a picture from 1966 and compare it with one from this year, and most of the fans will be roughly the same ages, but those from 1966 look older, and they certainly seem to be have been more mature in their behaviour. In 1966 no one was sticking a lighted flare up their backside as one England ‘fan’ did before the game this year. Sadly, the events at Wembley and in Central London on final day make a possible England bid for the 2030 World Cup looked doomed to failure.

Wembley 2021

It isn’t just the fans. This is a picture of Sir Alf Ramsey – plain Mr Ramsey then – at the time of the 1966 final. He was 46 years old.

 

Then there is Gareth Southgate. He’s fifty in this picture. But then, everyone looks younger and dresses younger these days. 

When I was a teenager my grandparents seemed incredibly old, but in reality they weren’t much older than I am now, yet as my mother said, once her mother hit fifty, she became old, and acted old. My parents never owned a pair of jeans between them, or trainers; my dad didn’t even own any polo shirts or t-shirts come to that. His casual wear still involved putting on collar and tie, even if he wore them with a windbreaker rather than a sports jacket.

 

Much has been made of the youth of the England team that lost to the Italians, particularly the ages of those who missed the crucial penalties. Yes, Bukayo Saka, Jordan Sancho, and Marcus Rashford are 19, 21, and 23 respectively, but in 1966 England had Alan Ball (21), and Martin Peters (22). Hat-trick scorer Geoff Hurst was just 24, as was Nobby Stiles; even Bobby Moore was just 25. The average age of the 1966 team was 26.5, compared with 25.27 for Gareth Southgate’s men.

 

The refereeing, and the use of VAR impressed me at Euro 2020. In fact, the first game I watched made me wonder if VAR was even being used. It was unobtrusive and seemed to be genuinely there to help referees, unlike the version used in the Premier League which seems to just stoke controversy and generate perverse decisions.

 

That isn’t to say there wasn’t any controversy at Euro 2020. If anything, it has made me doubt whether I know what is and isn’t a foul any more, especially after some commentators called into question the correctness of the referee awarding a penalty when French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris as near as damn-it decapitated Portugal’s Danilo, but were certain that the minimal contact on Raheem Sterling in England’s Semi-Final against Denmark was a nailed-on penalty.

Some commentators had some doubt about this being a penalty...

...but no doubt about this one.

I have read and re-read football’s Law 12, which deals with Fouls and Misconduct, and have reached the conclusion that it is not a law at all (football is very precious about the fact that it has laws, not rules), but rather a set of very loose guidelines that are within the gift of the referee to interpret as they see fit. I guess that anyone who has, like me, watched football for more than half a century, thinks they know a foul when they see one, but sometimes it can be very hard to explain why when there are a series of very similar challenges, some are fouls and some are not; it’s all highly subjective.

There were two things that rather got on my nerves during Euro 2020. Firstly, the trend for treading on an opponent’s foot, which – if you will pardon the pun – really needs stamping out. The other thing – and why this is so prevalent baffles me – is the foul throw.

 

At the top of the game, players spend hours honing their skills at free-kicks, penalties and other set pieces. They practice pinging passes with unerring accuracy over long distances, but when it comes to taking throw ins it often looks like some of them are doing so for the first time. I lost track of the number of foul throws that were taken, yet not one that I saw was flagged by an assistant referee.

 

The foul throw is somewhat like a victimless crime; it’s rarely more advantageous for the player taking it and his team than a proper throw, and in that respect one might say it’s not worth worrying about. Except of course, football will maintain that it has laws, and unlike rules, with which one might allow a degree of discretion, laws have a more rigid structure. If the ‘law’ on foul throws is not going to be enforced then it should be changed.

  

Now that the dust has settled after Euro 2020, it seems that once again, football has failed to come home; instead, it went to Rome. Maybe next year in Qatar, eh?

 

 

 

 

 

 

One Rule For You

It is easy to paint all members of any given group with the same brush if a small, unrepresentative element among them behave badly. It was too easy (and lazy) back in the 1970s, to condemn all football fans for the hooliganism that a minority indulged in at football matches, and the anti-social behaviour of some fans on trains and in town centres on Saturday afternoons.

 

Badly behaved British holidaymakers in Spanish resorts, and so-called ‘lager louts’ in town centres up and down Britain are equally unrepresentative of the majority of Britons who holiday abroad, or enjoy an evening out in this country. By the same token, we should not consider all of Britain’s cyclists together as an arrogant, ignorant and anti-social, Highway Code ignoring, lumpen mass – but sometimes it is difficult not to.

 

I suppose that it is a combination of confirmation bias and the frequency illusion that gives the impression that all cyclists are ‘Lycra-clad louts,’ as they are sometimes dubbed – not that all cyclists wear Lycra -  and in fact, where I have a problem with cyclists, it is less with the Lycra-clad among them, who at least seem to confine themselves to the road, even if they do sometimes ignore the rules.

 

My biggest bug-bear with cyclists are those who ride their bikes where it is expressly prohibited, and if challenged, are not only unapologetic, but downright affronted, displaying the increasingly common trait of exceptionalism.

A week or so ago, Val and I were in Eastbourne for the Finals of the Viking International Tennis, and as we always do when we visit Eastbourne – and most other seaside towns we go to – we love to walk along the promenade. Eastbourne has a particularly fine promenade, and along the two-and-half miles from Holywell in the west to Fisherman’s Green in the east, cycling is prohibited. West of Fisherman’s Green, pedestrians and cyclists each have their own dedicated lane along the prom to the end, by the water treatment works.

 

The prom at Eastbourne, marked in red.

There are of course, signs on lampposts and painted on the footway indicating that cycling is prohibited. These are flagrantly ignored and in one walk we took, we were passed by nearly a dozen bike riders.

 

Recently, notices have appeared on a couple of lampposts reiterating the ban on cycling, however these are hidden away quite discreetly and virtually invisible to the cyclists that whizz by them. It doesn’t help that as well as being hard to see, the signs contain an invalid URL for the local council (it should read byelaws, not bylaws), and the website for reporting anti-social behaviour to the police is so convoluted and user-unfriendly that many people must be deterred from trying to report the matter.

That notice, complete with mis-spelling of 'bye-laws.'

Getting more and more annoyed as we were passed by more and more cyclists, we decided to ask some of them why they were cycling in an area where it is prohibited. Most totally ignored us, and one or two just laughed. One said he wasn’t cycling because he was riding an electric bike, and one asked why we were bothered, as it was 7am and there were few people about. He got very upset when we took a photo of him.

Cyclists on the prom.

There have also been a good number of people riding e-scooters up and down the prom, and while the prohibition on cycling does not specifically mention e-scooters, riding them anywhere other than on private property is illegal, and police recently confiscated over 500 e-scooters (which are subject to all the same legal requirements such as MOT, tax, and licensing as cars and other vehicles) in London. What makes it particularly galling is that on the north side of Grand Parade (which runs parallel to the prom), cyclists are allowed to ride on the pavement; they presumably prefer the view of the sea that one gets from the prom.

 

You may think that given the name of my blog, which comes from the concept that rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men, that I would be more forgiving, especially since you could argue that a cyclist riding on an almost deserted prom at 7am is doing little harm. Except that my attitude towards being guided by rules is that the person doing so should be circumventing, or even ignoring them for the benefit of others not themselves. They should be using discretion in applying the rules to avoid unintended consequences that disadvantage others; it does not mean blithely ignoring rules that are an  inconvenience, or which they simply do not like.

 

In 2020, the Eastbourne Herald reported that a Freedom of Information request showed that no fines or warnings had been issued to cyclists in the previous two years. In that article, a spokesman for Eastbourne Council was quoted as saying, " Our Neighbourhood First officers do their best to engage with anyone not abiding by the no-cycling signs and explain why it is a pedestrianised area." You will excuse my scepticism on that score.

 

No doubt the police and the council would cite a lack of resources for the lack of enforcement of the bye-law, and I appreciate that the promenade cannot be patrolled 24/7, however, some sort of presence, some sort of enforcement, along with publicising those prosecuted or fined might make a difference, because the current policy - relying on the goodwill of the public- is clearly not working.

 

I do wonder if the apparent absence of any enforcement is due to the fact that back in 2016, the local council wanted to amend the bye-law and allow cycling on the prom, but the Government – in the form of the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) – rejected the plan.

 

Exceptionalism and people’s belief that the rules don’t apply to them has never been more apparent than in the last fifteen months, during which time the whole world has been subject to restrictions of one form or another. And during that time there have been many examples of people deciding that the rules did not apply to them.

Dominic Cummings’s eyesight testing drive to Barnard Castle got justified because he was, to quote the Prime Minister, merely doing what any good father would have done, leaving thousands of men crestfallen that by not breaking the rules, they were not good fathers.

 

More egregiously (which last April I would not have thought possible), we had Matt Hancock canoodling with his aide, Gina Coladangelo, in flagrant breach of the social distancing rules that he was largely responsible for. Hancock’s hypocrisy in this matter is breath-taking: You may remember that last year he was all for the police getting involved when Prof Neil Ferguson resigned (with more alacrity than Hancock did) after breaking social distancing rules.

Thousands of people who stuck to the rules and were unable to visit their loved ones in care homes, or relatives ill and dying in hospital will have asked themselves, why did we bother?

Given the sacrifices that so many people have made because they have stuck to the rules, seeing others regularly ignoring them, those same people may be forgiven for taking a more selective approach to which rules they stick to in the future.