My Republican mug runneth over...........

Following on from my last post, today's Guardian (here) offers some Royal Birth tat that I have actually bought.

The advertising blurb says: "Exclusively designed by Steve Bell, a suitably disloyal celebration of another addition to a Royal Household that longs to reign over us and in return we all pay for the privilege. The mugs are a limited edition and individually numbered, collectable republicanism. Fine bone china, made in Stoke, dishwasher-proof for those who don't have a Palace full of staff to do the washing-up".

If that wasn't sufficient inducement, then the text on the mug seals it: Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge - Another Royal Mouth To Feed.

Confession time...........

Everyone has dark guilty secrets and I am certainly no exception. Let me tell you about one of mine that I'm particularly ashamed of. It's hard to believe but every now and again I am driven to satisfy my inner Royalist. Sometimes I do this by quietly singing God Save the Queen in my greenhouse, sometimes I do it by wearing my Queen Mother look-alike outfit; other times I do it by looking at Highgrove House's website to see what I can do to help out the impoverished Prince of Wales by buying something from his on-line shop.

There is so much there to satisfy the purse of any ardent Royalist. Me? I was particularly drawn to a Coronation Baby Hamper - a snip at £215. For that you get a small wicker basket with leather straps containing:
* Limited edition red and gold embroidered Coronation decoration.
* Fine bone china Coronation golden carriage mug.
* Lambswool and angora Coronation baby blanket.
* Fully jointed Baby Bear made with antique gold mohair.
As they rightly point out, this would be a gift to be treasured for years to come. It's a pity that I'm such an uncaring grandfather, otherwise I'd buy one for our recent arrival, Molly, to puke over.

I must say that I doff my cap to Charlie Boy for giving us the opportunity to buy so much commemorative tat. No, he's not cashing in on the birth of his grandson. He's just giving us plebs the opportunity to show our loyalty - and empty our purses and wallets. Royal Baby Commemorative Pillbox anyone?

Benefits Cap and Propaganda

A rather aggressive and self-congratulatory column in this morning's Guardian from Iain Duncan Smith. Under the banner of "I'm proud of our welfare reforms", with his now customary distortion of data and facts, he sets out to defend such policies as the Benefits Cap and Universal Credit. As you might expect he makes it all sound so wonderful. Admittedly these are some very politically astute moves, which are popular with many voters and his party's right wingers. Politically astute they may be but expert opinion thinks that they represent the most flawed of all of the coalition’s welfare measures.

Let's just take the Benefits Cap. Here are five reasons why the policy is not going to work the way that Duncan Smith tells us it will.

1. An out-of-work family is never better off than an in-work family. The claim on which the policy rests - that a non-working family can be better off than a working one - is a myth since it takes no account of the benefits that an in-work family can claim to increase their income. For instance, a couple with four children earning £26,000 after tax and with rent and council tax liabilities of £400 a week is entitled to around £15,000 a year in housing benefit and council tax support, £3,146 in child benefit and more than £4,000 in tax credits. Incidentally, and contrary to ministers' rhetoric, the cap will hit in-work as well as out-of-work families.
2. It will punish large families and increase child poverty. The cap applies regardless of family size, breaking the link between need and benefits.

3. It will likely cost more than it saves. For all the political attention devoted to it, the cap is expected to save just £110m a year, barely a rounding error in the £201bn benefits bill. But even these savings could be wiped out due to the cost to local authorities of homelessness and housing families in temporary accommodation. As a leaked letter from Eric Pickles’s office to David Cameron stated, the measure "does not take account of the additional costs to local authorities (through homelessness and temporary accommodation). In fact we think it is likely that the policy as it stands will generate a net cost. In addition Local Authorities will have to calculate and administer reduced Housing Benefit to keep within the cap and this will mean both demands on resource and difficult handling locally."

4. It will increase homelessness and do nothing to address the housing crisis. Most of those who fall foul of the cap do so because of the amount they receive in housing benefit (or, more accurately, landlord subsidy) in order to pay their rent. The cap will increase homelessness by 40,000 and force councils to relocate families hundreds of miles away, disrupting their children's education and reducing employment opportunities (by requiring them to live in an area where they have no history of working). 

5. It will encourage family break-up. Duncan Smith talks passionately of his desire to reduce family breakdown but the cap will serve to encourage it. As a fellow-coalitioneer Simon Hughes has pointed out, the measure creates "a financial incentive to be apart" since parents who live separately and divide the residency of their children between them will be able to claim up to £1,000 a week in benefits, while a couple living together will only be able to claim £500.

I used to think that Duncan Smith was a reasonable sort of man. But that was well before his dodgy use of statistics to support any case he wants to make (he has been rebuked twice by the UK Statistics Authority for misrepresenting figures) and who could forget his laughable claim that he could live on £59 a week. Here is the problem (actually, it's just one of very many) I've got with him and it's a problem shared with Posh Dave, Hapless Clegg and the rest of them. You cannot design a compassionate system if you have no compassion for those dependent upon it. You cannot achieve justice and equity if you believe in a fundamentally unfair and unequal society. You cannot empathise with the lives of others if you believe that people are inherently greedy and selfish. And that's what it means to be one of Posh Dave's Tories. A pox on the lot of them!

Tale of a Cornish shipwreck

Taking a break from solving the UK's political problems, my ITC and I headed down west to meet up with some friends at Mylor Quay. One of them has a small yacht and we were treated to some sailing in the Carrick Roads stretch of the Fal Estuary. The weather was excellent and it was rather pleasant skimming gently over the nicely calm water.

Back on land we took the opportunity to visit the nearby parish church dedicated to St Melorus. An interesting Norman building, with its original door still in place, but we couldn't really get to grips with the inside because everywhere was bedecked with the products of the Falmouth Quilters' Group. They made for a very colourful interior and, whilst I can admire the undoubted skill that was on display, I was disappointed that what I really wanted to see was obscured. Fancy moaning about something like that: I really can be a miserable old git, can't I?

However, all was forgiven when, as we wandered amongst the headstones in the graveyard, we came across a fascinating memorial. Underneath a rather dramatic carving of a shipwreck is the inscription:

To the Memory of the

WARRIORS
Women and Children
who on their return to England
from the Coast of Spain
unhappily perished
in the wreck of the
Queen Transport
on Trefusis Point Jan 14 1814
This stone is erected as a Testimony
of regret for their fate
by the inhabitants of this Parish

We immediately thought "What was the story behind this memorial?" Back home and after a little Googling, all was revealed. The Queen was one of the many transport ships bringing home Wellington's troops (and camp followers) as the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal was coming to an end. She had been moored off Mylor for several days when an atrocious storm blew up and she sunk off Trefusis Point in the resultant high seas. About 360 men (principally invalids of the Artillery), women and children were on board and only 100 were saved. The disaster was widely reported in 1814 and has, apparently, been regularly retold ever since with varying degrees of accuracy and embellishment. There are tales of the looting of corpses and suspicions of incompetence counterbalanced by tales of the compassion of the local community.  It's a story well worth reading about and a detailed investigation has been recently published by the National Maritime Museum of Cornwall. It's entitled "In Search of the Queen Transport" and was written by Sue Kruk.  It can be downloaded from this link. 

 

It's amazing what you can come across when you wander around the land of the dead.

 

Watch Cameron being heckled over the NHS...

Whilst blue blood was being delivered at a London Hospital recently, our red blood was being delivered into the hands of a US private equity firm. Posh Dave announced this week that 'we' have sold the NHS-owned blood plasma supplier Plasma Resources UK (PRUK) to Bain Capital (the company co-founded by Mitt Romney and which was subject to a lot of not-very-flattering scrutiny in the Presidential elections last year) in a £230 million deal. This was done over competing bids from companies with existing expertise in the field and who might reasonably be thought to provide a more natural partnering with PRUK. But if you are on a privatising mission, you'll look at it not as a health issue but as a simple business transaction. Health is regarded as a commodity and, from this perspective, why not sell PRUK to Bain Capital? The fact that private companies do not have a good track record when it comes to preventing product contamination doesn't come into it. No wonder this move has been criticised by many non-partisan and authoritative voices who know about these things.

Episodes such as this reinforce the reality of Posh Dave's agenda for privatising the NHS. Take a look at the short clip of him being heckled by a protester at the Olympic park over the privatisation of the health service. Unable to deny the charge that he is "privatising the NHS", Posh Dave can only offer the non-sequitur that the government is "putting more money in". What struck me about his body language here is his obvious distain for even momentary encounters with the 'plebs'. Patricians don't like it up 'em, Captain Mainwaring!

Hooray for Steve Bell...

Taken from today's Guardian. I wonder if the Cambridge's will be asking for the original?

Chalk and cheese in news terms?

An interesting juxtaposition of two items caught my attention today.  Firstly the news the BBC website deemed fit to fill the airwaves with.



Secondly a cartoon in the issue of New Internationalist that plopped through my letter box at around the same time I was looking at the above. 

Sadly the latter will persist when the former has died away.

I agree with Dave................sort of.

David Cameron announced yesterday that most households in the UK will have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they choose to receive it. I'd be with you 100%, David, if you extended this to include the endless, vacuous reporting of the birth and infancy of the Royal baby.

From the disproportionate journalistic feeding frenzy I saw briefly last night, it's clear that images of the Royal Trio are about to take over the internet and I think that immediate measures are necessary to protect the sanity of the reasonable (ie, me). Without immediate action, this country we love is going to become a worldwide hub for the over-sentimentalisation and exploitation of a young woman and her baby. Royal birth tat, anybody?

Posh Dave has called for some ‘horrific’ internet search terms to be blacklisted. Can I suggest that these make sure that no results would be produced for searches such as ‘Royal baby names’, ‘Prince Cambridge feeding regime’, ‘Duchess of Cambridge pretty dress lovely gorgeous style icon’ and 'What would Saint Diana think of her Royal grandson'?

Building on Dave's suggestion, perhaps we can get the internet providers to include some Republican-friendly filters for their customers as soon as possible so that access to the damaging royal coverage can be restricted to only those who choose it. The filters would apply to all devices linked to the affected home Wi-Fi network and across the public Wi-Fi network wherever sane people are likely to be present. Customers who do not click on either option - accepting or declining royal coverage - will have the restricting filters activated by default. It's got to be a vote winner, Dave!

Amazing stuff in red..............

Let me introduce you to the Red Barrows, a crack team of precision barrow-meisters who performed at the Stoke Climsland Church Open Day on the 20th July 2013. After a gruelling training schedule under the watchful eye of Dave Crawley, and using the actual moves performed by the  RAF Red Arrows, it all came right on the day. To say that the crowd was amazed would be understatement. You can catch the highlights on the 14 minute video below.

And the lady in the barrow at the front? That's Lyn Crawley, who used to act as a Flight Manager for the real Red Arrows so the moves of the barrow-men were authentic - incompetent but authentic.  And, no, we are not taking bookings.

It's all so exciting.

I don't know about you but I've found the Sun's Royal Hospital cam incredibly exciting. So exciting that I'm having to take a break to calm down. What to do? I know I'll watch something only marginally less interesting - like watching paint dry. I'm afraid I could only find this rather lacklustre video. The story line is flat and the producer is obviously trying to gloss over the fact that this is the best he could put up for us. Matt, for that's his name, either needs to brush up on his film-making skills or can it.

 

Upon reflection, I've done Matt a disservice. It's actually a lot more exciting that watching the Royal baby stuff.

Let joy be unconfined.............

Some people may be watching the Ashes on TV but I'm glued to the Sun's Royal Baby Monitor channel which is streaming live from outside of Paddington Hospital. Here's the link.  Don't bother to e-mail, text or call, I'm not moving from my sofa until the Royal Sprog arrives. Now this is what I call reality TV! Hooray for technology and Hooray for the Windsors.

The Last Post - but not yet.

I was heartened to read recently on the BBC website (so it must be true) of another study adding weight to the idea that dementia onset can be delayed by certain lifestyle factors. This one presents data from US researchers suggesting that keeping mentally active by reading books or writing letters (and, by implication, blogs) helps protect the brain in old age. A lifetime of mental challenges, the authors deduce, leads to slower cognitive decline.  That's good news and could mean that I'll never have to conclude my blogging activities with something along the following lines:

Dear thingamabobs,
Regretfully I must let you know that I am stopping writing my wotsit. I have recently been diagnosed with something or other that affects my memory, vocabulary and accordion. This often results in me losing the thread of whatever task I am involved in, repeating myself or simply repeating myself. I have also developed a tendency to repeat myself and to leave sentences half. As you can imagine, this is making writing my whatchamacallit extremely thingy. Or, at least, I imagine it is. I can't really remember. This problem is made worse by a tendency to lose the thread of whatever task I am involved in and repeat myself. So, to summarise, I would be most grateful if I could be excused gym this afternoon as I've left my daps at home.
Yours,
Whatshisname

(Disclaimer: To avoid any misunderstandings or offence, I must add that this post does not refer to any real person, alive or dead. Neither should it be taken as undervaluing people with dementia or similar conditions. To the contrary, I salute them. In fact, some of my best friends - who may even be readers of this blog - have lost, or are losing, their marbles.)

For unto us a child is about to be born..

This is the one and only reference
I'll make to this event

With Wimbledon over, the country lurches on, Union Jacks waving, to the next big event - and we don't have long to wait. Only until this coming Saturday apparently when William and Kate will be having their baby. I wish them well as I would any couple expecting their first child but the ritual outpouring of uncritical adulation for the institution of royalty that the occasion will bring will really irritate me. I won't be alone. 

According to opinion polls, for decades there has been  a fairly constant 20 per cent of the population who would like to replace the monarchy with an elected Head of State yet there is no mainstream politician who speaks for these millions of Britons (and me!). Some prominent politicians must be closet republicans but stay quiet as they are fearful that they would pay too high a price if they ever challenged the prevailing consensus on royalty. A consensus so powerful that it suffocates debate and leads to an attitude of unthinking deference and self-censorship in the media. In recent weeks, for example, the Queen has received a 5 per cent pay rise and it was announced that £1million of public money had been spent to renovate William and Kate’s accommodation. Yet, even at this time of austerity and acute hardship, no mainstream politician had the nerve to breath a single word of criticism.

Let's rewind the clock back to 1894 when a politician spoke up for those millions of us who are republicans. On 23rd June 1894, a future king (Edward VIII of Wallis Simpson fame)) was born and Keir Hardie, who had been elected as the first Independent Labour Member of Parliament, spoke in the Commons:

“From his childhood onwards this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation. A line will be drawn between him and the people whom he is to be called upon some day to reign over and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill".

Hardie spoke just over a century after the French Revolution with its rallying cry of 'Liberté, égalité, fraternité, The world had been thrilled, or terrified, by the novel idea that all men are born equal. No institution stands so completely in opposition to that noble idea as does monarchy. The central principle of monarchy is that some people are superior to others as a result merely of their birth or marriage. Hardie’s words are as true in 2013 as they were in 1894 but I'd be amazed if any of our present politicians has the courage to echo them.

Education matters - so why can't we seem to get it right?

This much I know: I do not have the aptitude to teach children of any age and I admire those who can. I also know that education is a political football, kicked around to its detriment by politicians of all persuasions.  I also know that my knowledge of the educational world is limited. But that doesn't prevent me from having an opinion about developments under the present regime.

Every week seems to bring yet another Michael Gove-led shake up of education. Gove has a vision for what he believes education is for and about. I personally think he's wrong, fixated as he seems to be on an idealised 1950's view of grammar schools (and short trousers). But Gove is a canny politician. He knows who his audience is (parents and Tory activists who also have a stylised vision of a “golden age”) and he plays right to their prejudices. Is there any wonder that he is seen as a potential future Tory leader? One of the joys of having a Conservative, and conservative, outlook is that you can look to the past as a model to regress to and still call it progress. The trick is to make sure you play the game well and ensure that the winners are powerful enough, well connected enough and loud enough to drown out the voices of the disempowered losers.

It seems to me there are five groups of people that education policy can be aimed at: voters, parents, teachers, pupils and the adults they grow up to be. Everyone will tell you they have the best interests of the children in mind, but will also give you completely conflicting ideas as to what that best interest is. Let's be honest, policy is aimed at voters and children don’t vote. So instead of working out what it is that children really want and need from their education, we all allow ourselves to be informed through proxies – the politicians, the parents, the teachers and dogma. We have allowed the debate to become polarised between those who want to focus solely on a child’s intellectual development and those who believe that school is simply a training ground for employees of the future. The truth is somewhere between these extremes. How do we get there?

At the moment, I confess that I don't have a clear understanding of what we should be offering pupils. Not what we should offer to parents; not what we should offer to teachers; not what we should offer to support staff but what we should offer to the pupils and their futures. Instinctively I feel that Gove has the wrong solution but I don't have the knowledge to articulate properly where he's wrong, but exactly what I think right is and why. How do we balance the importance of teaching pupils to think for themselves and to develop intellectual curiosity with the knowledge they need to equip them for the modern world that they will go on to work in?

Children don’t vote, but they are the future. What they need and want must be more important than hustling votes through simplistic ranking systems and nostalgia. We need to work with young people to set the priorities that all children (not just those at the highest academic levels) need from their schooling experience. I'll admit that I don't know how they can be engaged in a meaningful way. But I do know that policy making should be done to make good policy – not just good politics. I also know that it isn’t until we let the needs of non-voting children lead our education policy that we will get it right. This much I know.

(Postscript: For the record I came up through the traditional grammar school system so much beloved by Gove et al. I was always clear that I wanted to be a scientist and this informed all my choices of subjects to study. Because of this, the system served me well but, if I had not had such a focus, I'm certain that the narrowness of the syllabus would have worked against me.) 

Happy 65th birthday, NHS

Remember the man who said that the NHS would be safe in his hands? I can't believe that people are being so quiet as one of our greatest institutions is being re-disorganised by this man and his cronies. Nye Bevan must be turning in his grave.

Decisions, decisions....................

As is quite often the case, one post sparks off thoughts which lead to another. I quite like the concept of a thread of ideas linking disparate topics into a sort of continuum. In keeping with this, my recent post on graveyards got me wondering about what regulations there were governing burials in the UK. A little bit of researching threw up the wonderful website of Funeral Inspirations. I was just looking for burial regulations but this site offers much much more. I did not know that there are so many alternatives to a standard burial: some very practical, some slightly bizarre, some downright weird - but all potentially possible if that's what you want. As I know that many of my regular readers are of a 'certain age', I offer this synopsis as a public service.  Something to bear in mind when you have to grapple with the slightly awkward question of what's to be done with your body when it's no longer needed by you?

Below is a list of the options described on the Funeral Inspirations website, with links which will take you to more details of each one. So, it's choose your partner of choice for the Danse Macabre or should that be the Last Waltz?

Traditional Burial Six foot under and still where most of us end up. There's something comfortingly elegiac about the thought of ending up in a country graveyard.

Green/Woodland/Natural Burial Burial with the environment in mind. You, too, can become part of a Turner landscape. Unless they built a motorway or a Tesco's over your plot - and then you could find yourself under the meat counter. Would you get Clubcard points if this happened?

Cremation Going up in smoke is still the most popular way out in the UK - but don't ask about the carbon footprint of the furnace as you are reduced to....carbon.

Home Burial Yes - it is actually possible. It's surprising how few regulations there are if you want to do this. Could put a new meaning to 'pushing up the daisies'?

Organ/Body Donation Why take it with you when you can help others after you've gone? There must be some bits that are still serviceable!

Burial at Sea Not just for naval personnel, it's an option available to all. Ahoy, HMS Coffin, full steam ahead to Davy Jones' Locker.

Resomation (Bio-Cremation) Innovative new alternative for body disposal which uses a strong alkaline solution to digest the tissues and produce a residue. Sounds like the same process used to strip old doors of paint and varnish.

Cryomation An award winning solution from the UK which uses a combination of freezing in liquid nitrogen, pulverisation and freeze-drying to produce a fine powder.

Promession A potential solution from Sweden. It is a relatively simple process that, through freezing and vibration, reduces human remains to a fine powder. Rather similar to 'cryomation'.

Cryonic Preservation Deep freeze with future life possibilities. If it's good enough for Walt Disney......

Mummification Body preservation the old fashioned but expensive way. If it's good enough for Cleopatra.......

Sky Burial No, not being tossed out of a 'plane at 32000 ft but the Tibetan alternative of being left to the elements and whatever fancies a nibble at your remains.

Plastination Why not become a work of art? You could be a conversation piece at your bereaved's next dinner party. Definitely one for the exhibitionists amongst us.

Fifty more shades of grey..

...................you guessed it! That makes 100. Who'd have thought that there could be so many?

50 Shades of Grey

In praise of Caerphilly Miners' Hospital.

The familiar façade of the Miners' Hospital.

Although I don't think it was a unique occurrence in national terms, the early 1920s saw a remarkable act of self reliance in the coalfields around Caerphilly in South Wales. Remember this was pre-NHS and a time when the healthcare available to ordinary working people was pretty basic. The miners wanted better for themselves and their families and those from 29 local pits arranged to buy a mansion, the Beeches, owned by a wealthy mining contractor. The money was collected via weekly contributions from their wages - my grandfather, Norman Bowyer, was one who contributed and a wage slip of his is to the left. You can make out

the deduction to the 'Cottage Hospital'. By 1923 sufficient funds had been raised to convert the mansion into a hospital and ‘The Miners’, as it was always known as, went on to serve the healthcare needs of local people for nearly 90 years.

As did many others in our village, I have always regarded the Miners' as 'my' hospital and over the years it has featured frequently in my family's story. Births, deaths, accidents, diagnoses, treatments: we've been there, done that - at the Miners'. Sadly, it has now been de-commissioned (a new, and controversial, hospital has been built not that far away at Ystrad Mynach. The Miners' was always going to be a hard act to follow and the new one clearly isn't on the same stage. I doubt that it ever will be.) and the rest of the site has been cleared for housing (what else?), but the original building, the Beeches, remains. What will happen next?

Logically, as the Miners' came from the community, it should go back to the community. And this is exactly what a group is campaigning for. They (Caerphilly Miners' Centre for the Community) say: "We want to return it to community ownership and use. Our vision is of a place where local people of all ages can come together, feel part of our community, learn from each other and celebrate our remarkable heritage. We want to give the Caerphilly Miners' back to the community!" The total cost of refurbishment is £1M. Fund raising is well underway but there's a long way to go. If you feel like contributing to the pot, just click on the 'Donate with JustGiving' button below and your money will be painlessly extracted from you!

There is one aspect of the fund raising strategy that I particularly like. It's the ‘Caerphilly Miners 8’ Campaign which echoes the donations made by miners in the establishment of the hospital in 1923. They put aside 6d (6 old pence) of their weekly wages for the hospital fund. Today’s monetary equivalent of this is £8. If all living relatives of the original miners gave this amount, I'm sure this would make a significant contribution to the target.

Sadly my grandfather died in 1947 just before I, and the NHS, were born. He died of dust on the lung which, had the NHS been in existence at the right time, might have been treated better than it was. I think he must be turning in his grave now at the thought of us sleepwalking into the loss of the NHS as we know and love it. I just find it astounding that the Great British Public seem to be so complacent about what is going on.