Nick Griffin (BNP) on Question Time

I watched the BBC's Question Time last night, with Nick Griffin (Leader of the British National Party) on the panel.

He was shown to be, and showed himself to be, pretty damned stupid. The anti-fascist protesters outside Television Centre trying to prevent him from appearing were wrong: the BBC did us all a great service.

He was no match for the other members of the panel who were able to show him up for what he is merely by the use of reasoned argument and the presentation of historical facts.

The audience (a political cross-section) allowed him to have his say, but made quite clear the contempt in which they held him. The more Griffin presented his own views the more he made himself look both disgusting and silly in equal measure.

Good job, BBC! Don't be put off by those who would stifle free speech.

British National Party

There is a great furore going on about the Leader of the BNP (British National Party) Nick Griffin being invited on to the panel of the BBC’s Question Time this evening. The BNP, however odious, has two elected Members of the European Parliament, and therefore are technically entitled to appear on such a programme.

This afternoon there were huge demonstrations by anti-fascist organisations outside the BBC TV Centre, and some managed to get inside the building – they were later ejected. At one stage it looked as though Griffin would not be able to get into the building, but this was eventually achieved by one of many back entrances in side streets. At the time of writing this it looks as though the programme will go ahead. It promises to be a somewhat stimulating debate, to say the least. No doubt the studio audience will become over-heated.

It seems to me that it is little good protesting at the BBC’s decision to invite Griffin on to the panel, since the BNP is a legitimate Party. My problem is that it should not really be a legitimate Party at all, and it should be up to the Government to proscribe it. After all, the Party’s Constitution states that membership is limited to the “Indigenous Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Folk” of Britain. To me, this smacks of Adolph Hitler’s dream of the pure Arian Germanic Race.

A recent Court Decision on the BNP’s Constitution requires the Party to open its membership to all. It remains to be seen whether they will make that change. Even if they did, I would be very surprised if any of our “non-white” community would ever wish to become a member! It is an openly racist Party.

I shall (as usual) be watching Question Time tonight, but with more than a little excited anticipation on how it will all turn out. Apparently Jack Straw, Secretary of State for Justice as agreed to be on the Panel, together with a senior MP from the Liberal Democrats. Should make for interesting watching.

This is an excerpt from the BBC Website – an article by the programme’s editor – which makes an interesting reference to the USA.

"There is something very British about Question Time.

Having just spent a sabbatical year in Washington - where politicians are in the most part astonishingly remote from their electorate - I am reminded that the programme represents a major investment in the democratic process by our political class

My American colleagues - some of them aides to top US politicians - would watch DVDs of the show in near disbelief, open mouthed.

This could never happen in the US, they would say, none of the senior politicians would be willing to mix with voters in prime time.

Yet back in the UK, that is exactly what happens, week after week.

Speaking at the weekend to mark the show's 30th anniversary, Harriet Harman said that Question Time can still make or break a political career - and it remains the most dangerous of political formats."

This is the link to the whole article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/8271710.stm

Barak Obama's Peace Prize

I was a few days late in picking up on this bit of news; I'd gone away for a long weekend and was studiously avoiding the news.

Having had time to think about it I'm pleased he got it, though I can't help thinking it might be a bit premature.

Why was it awarded? Well, I have a couple of theories.

1. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush. (I'm still waiting for my own award, because last time I looked in the mirror I wasn't George Bush either).

2. The whole thing was an embarrassing typing error: after a remarkable year in the White House vegetable garden, Obama was nominated for the Noble Peas Prize.

Jeremy Paxman meets his Match

Jeremy Paxman, scourge of the Political Animal Kingdom, was reduced to laughter last night when he interviewed Boris Johnson at the Conservative Party Conference. Paxman, with his usual dogged persistence was trying to get a straight answer out of "Bo-Jo" on the proposed new European Constitution set out in the Lisbon Treaty, and whether a Conservative Government would still give us a Referendum on the matter even if it was ratified by the two countries (Poland and the Czech Republic) still remaining in the ratification process. It was noted that Ireland had now said YES in their recent referendum. (Our Labour Government had already ratified the Treaty without the referendum that they had promised us).

When pressed, Boris came up with the line that he was ".. only the Mayor of London - merely a toe-nail on the body politic". At this point Paxman gave up the unequal struggle.

Death to the "Trumblies"!

I've just driven 15 miles on a 60 mph road at 35 mph because some guy 3 cars in front (with nothing in front of him) has decided that's the speed we should be doing. A mile of cars behind us could do nothing because of oncoming traffic on the other side. Pathetic! Why do these people have driving licences?

IRAN'S NUCLEAR CABABILITY

Changing the subject, why are we all getting so worked up about Iran developing nuclear weapons? For 40 years the USA and USSR confronted each other with WMD which nobody dare use because of the unthinkable consequences. If Iran launched a nuclear attack against the West, Iran would be obliterated. It follows that Ahmed I'm-a-dinner-jacket would not use it.

Forget the Plane - go by Train!

We have just returned from a week's river cruise on the Saone and Rhone in the south of France. We started and finished in Lyon. The vacation package included first class train travel to and from the cruise ship. We made our own arrangements to get to London from York, using National Express Trains. After an overnight stay in London, we boarded the Eurostar at the beautiful new St Pancras International train station, and that took us via the Channel Tunnel to Lille in northern France.

At Lille we changed to a French double-decker TGV that whisked us comfortably down to the south of France at speeds approaching 200 mph. A short transfer by coach from the station to the cruise ship moorings and we were on board the Princesse de Provence by tea time.

After a week's cruising these beatiful rivers, visiting Tournus, Chalon-sur-Saone, Macon, Trevoux, Avignon, and Vienne, taking in the 2000-year old Roman Aqueduct Pont du Gard, and the vineyards of Beaujolais and Chateau-neuf-du-Pape we returned to North Yorkshire by the same route. We left the south of France at 10.40 a.m. and were back in Northern England within seven and a half hours. The journey was smooth, fast and comfortable, with fast check-in, passport control and security checks on the Eurostar leg of the journey.

You would be hard put to beat these times travelling by plane, with which you have all the usual long check-in times, general airport nightmares, and travel to and from airports. You avoid all this by train and, moreover, you actually see something on the journey.

Unless you have to cross a vast ocean to get where you are going, forget the plane - go by train.

Afghanistan

Why are we there?

What have we achieved?

This, from today's New York Times ..

“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”

Besides creating the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai, the officials said.

The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10. “We are talking about orders of magnitude,” the senior Western diplomat said.

We are told by the politicians that our boys and girls in uniform are there (1) to make safe the streets of America and Europe from the threat of terrorism and (2) to encourage the Afghans to take the democratic path as an alternative to the tyranny of the Taliban.

Well, with regard to keeping us safe from terrorism I haven't noticed that our world has been a safer place in recent years, and with regard to democracy, the last I heard was that democracy has nothing to do with faking thousands of votes.

So - I want somebody to tell me again - why are we there, and what have we achieved?

Torture

So now we know .. it was OK for America to employ torture on terrorist suspects so long as strict rules were applied.

The Bush/Cheney regime .. a bunch of crooks and gangsters masquerading as Christians. They deserved to be kicked out of office.

The UK government hasn't been much better in quietly acquiescing to a lot of shady practices, including some carried out by our own security agencies. Election 2010: they are for the chop next!

Incidentally, for all this effort I don't notice the world becoming a significantly safer place - quite the opposite in fact.

Ramada Jarvis Hotel, Blackrod nr.Bolton - Result

The other week on these pages I slated this hotel for poor availability of food and shoddy service (though I gave it credit for pleasant accommodation that was kept scrupulously clean).

I'm pleased to report that having complained to the management I have received an apology, some financial compensation, and a promise to address the issues I raised.

All's well that ends well.

Lockerbie Bomber

It seems that the Scottish Government is considering releasing the guy convicted of blowing up the Pan-Am airliner over Lockerbie. He has terminal cancer and might be allowed to return to Libya for his final days.

There has been an interesting range of reactions to this news. American relatives of the victims are said to be incandescent and I saw one being interviewed on today's BBC TV news. She was in no doubt that this would be a disgraceful decision. A couple of other (UK) relatives of victims have said quite the opposite, citing the fact that this guy cannot have acted alone, he has persisently maintained he is innocent and has an Appeal pending. A lot of people in the UK feel that he was "offered up" by the Libyan Government when Colonel Gadaffi decided he wanted to stop being everyone's enemy and sign up to a friendlier relationship with the UK and the USA. We should remember that for some considerable time after this terrible event it was thought that the Libyan Government had been behind it.

Since history is littered with unsafe convictions, I am of the opinion that this particular conviction may well come within that category. The guy is going to die anyway, so I'm not going to get too exercised about him being returned to his family for his final days.

Gone with the Wind

Here's a couple of recent news items:

News Item No.1

Seven thousand new wind turbines may rise from land and sea by 2020.

Ambitious plans to generate one third of UK electricity from renewables by 2020 form the centrepiece of government plans for a low carbon future.

Financial packages for wind and wave energy and changes to planning procedures are among key components of the Low Carbon Transition Plan.

News Item No.2

Britain's only wind turbine factory is to be closed.

Danish owner, Vestas, has blamed its decision to close the factory on a lack of demand for wind turbines in the UK market.

* * *

Surely some mistake. Am I missing something here?

Ramada Jarvis Hotel, Blackrod nr.Bolton, Lancashire

£7 for a glass of wine? Do me a favour!

We've just returned from a 3-day break at the Ramada Jarvis Hotel at Blackrod (near Bolton) - a pleasant setting in the county of Lancashire at the foot of the west Pennines, within easy reach of the Rivington Country Park adjacent to a large water supply reservoir.

We couldn't fault the hotel accommodation and it was kept spotlessly clean, but the hotel lets itself down in the matter of food and drink. Everything we had from the menu and the wine list were second or third choices because whatever we really wanted was not available, even when the menu said it was available 24 hours a day, e.g., Kashmiri Lamb Curry. When I chose that it wasn't even available for 24 seconds.

On our first night, dinner in the "Arts Brasserie" was severely disrupted by a wedding reception, in that although we had been told we could order a meal from 6 pm onwards, this was not actually possibly until 8.30 pm.

On the second night we sat down in the brasserie, (in which there were only about a dozen other diners), but no one seemed to be getting any meaningful service. Waiters and waitresses were walking around at high speed between various parts of the hotel and the bar in the brasserie achieving God knows what, and we were totally ignored for 20 minutes, until I made a point of asking for some service. We placed our order (still no "24-hour" Kashmiri Lamb!) and had to wait another 20 minutes before being told that my choice of Starter was not available. By the time we had any food on the table we had been sitting there for 55 minutes.

I have never seen so much high-speed walking around achieving so little.

Breakfast was served in a different dining room, and the fried eggs, scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, black pudding, tomatoes, mushrooms and baked beans made an excellent breakfast, but only if you were lucky enough to be in the room when all these items were simultaneously available on the self-service breakfast bar - which wasn't very often! Most of the time, people were standing around waiting for food to appear from the kitchen, or asking the dining room staff for this or that missing item. In three days we never saw the Chef or any member of the kitchen staff check out the current state of the breakfast bar, or stock it up with anything. It was all down to dining room staff having to go into the kitchen to get more supplies as and when they could.

Stress levels were increased by the existence of a persistent high-pitched whistling sound coming from some unidentified piece of machinery, so we were all suffering from a kind of communal tinnitus.

We shall not be returning to any Ramada Jarvis hotel any time soon.

Narrow Broadband

It's not that long ago that the idea that one could watch TV programmes on your personal computer would have seemed slightly ridiculous.

It's not that long ago that being able to connect with both information and people all around the world in a meaningful way was just a gleam in Sir Tim Berners-Lee's eye.

And when he made that possible with his HTML code that launched the World Wide Web on the Internet (hitherto a military and academic piece of international telephonic computer hardware) we became used to the idea that when connecting to this worldwide phenomenon we did so to the accompaniment a vaguely science-fiction display of beeps, tones, whirring and buzzing that was the beloved Dial-up System, and we marvelled that we were transferring data back and forth at the phenomenal rate of 56 Kilobits per second.

The other day I found myself almost transported back to those days when my Broadband connection became mysteriously downgraded to a rate of less than 0.5 Megabits per second; and although this is a huge increase on the erstwhile dial-up system it was in fact achingly slow and rendered any attempt at watching streamed media totally impossible. The BBC i-Player flashed up a message that said in effect, "Your'e wasting your time, your system is totally inadequate for this task, and you should contact your ISP".

It did come up with a possible solution: download the programme to your own disk and run it from there. Fine - but when I started to download a 60-minute programme, after three hours it was still downloading and telling me there were another 50 minutes to go.

I gave up and e-mailed the BT Help Desk, and to be fair to them within an hour I received a phone call from an engineer. (By the way, judging by the accent of every BT advisor I've ever spoken to, their call centre is either based on the Asian sub-continent or their IT section is staffed entirely by Indians, Pakistanis, or Bangladeshis. They are all polite to an almost unreasonable degree, but sometimes hard to understand.)

They carried out line speed tests that told them what I had already established, i.e., my download speed was less than half a Megabit per second, whereas my "BT Broadband Option 3 Package" was supposed to deliver up to 8 Mbps (although the average expectation would be around 5 Mbps).

They seemed to be at a loss as to why this was happening and promised a full investigation, and I would be updated on progress with phone calls. The phone calls never came.

I checked the configuration of My "BT Home Hub" router/internet phone and discovered that it was registering the time it had been connected as 11 days. This was odd, because as far as I was concerned it had been connected for over a year! Not only that, it was apparently configured for only 0.5 Mbps downstream speed. So it appeared that some time in the past week or so it had been remotely disconnected and then re-connected with a different configuration.

I got back to the BT Help Desk yesterday and told them in no uncertain terms this was not why I was paying them £25 per month. Later I played back a message on my answer-phone from one my new "Indian" friends who said the engineers were in the process of resolving my problem, and would I please monitor my Broadband speed over the next few days. Oh, and "I hope you have a wonderful day ahead of you".

This morning I carried out a speed test and - joy of joys - found my speed up to 5 Mbps., and I successfully re-ran a TV program on BBC i-Player, streamed without distortion or interruption from continual buffering.

It got me thinking about how, in spite of how things used to be only a very short while ago, about which we had no complaint, once we move on to yet another level of technical and scientific advancement, we find it almost impossible to tolerate reverting to how things were only "yesterday".

Outdated Expression - "The camera never lies"

A friend of mine sent me a photo of himself standing next to a wartime museum exhibit. I lost control of my computer mouse hand and it finished up like this ..

Well, he said he liked it and I should put it on the internet. So here it is, and be it on his own head. I think his nome de plume is A. Nonny Mouse (possibly named after his little friend with the wooden spoon).

Death of a Superstar

So farewell to Wacko Jacko

How we marvelled at his skin.

Was it black or was it white?

(Very unlike his kith and kin).

Love or hate him, we all know his

Dance routines were far from shoddy.

And he was racial integration

Inside one multi-coloured body.

John Bercow speech to become Speaker

Since he is opposed by most of his own (Conservative) Party that indicates to me that he's probably going to be OK!

New Commons Speaker Tory MP John Bercow thanks MPs

I believe that John Bercow (even though opposed by most of his own Conservative Party) will make a much better fist of this job than his predecessor Michael Martin (who was forced to resign after presiding over the long-running MPs' expenses and allowances scandal, not to mention trying to use the courts to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act).

New Speaker of the House of Commons

Just when we were slowly being conned into believing that the Conservative Party had ceased to be "The Nasty Party" the shits have come out of the woodwork again following the overwhelming election of the excellent John Bercow MP (left) as Speaker of the House of Commons.

There are rumbles and rumours that most of the Conservative MPs were firmly against the election of this particular Conservative MP as the new Speaker. Worse still they are already talking about a campaign to remove him if and when (though they say "when") they have a Parliamentary majority after the next General Election.

So what is their problem? Well, Bercow used to have quite right-wing views when he was first elected to Parliament for the Conservative Party, but over the years he has moderated his views considerably, to the extent that his colleagues think he would be more suited as a Member of the Labour Party.

They are now miffed that his election to the (non-party-political) post of Speaker, soundly beating the nine other candidates, could only have been achieved by the combined efforts of the Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs who rightly saw him as a committed reformer.

It is disgusting that the Conservatives cannot bring themselves to accept the results of a free, secret, and cross-party vote for the most important post in the House of Commons.

Recently I have been wearing rose-tinted glasses when looking at David Cameron and his team, but (1) their opposition to reform of our electoral system, and (2) this latest show of bad feeling against John Bercow have restored my eyesight to its former state.

http://bbc.co.uk/i/lg9jz/?t=1h01m22s

Speaker of the House of Commons

Continuing my theme of Electoral Reform, today, as a result of the enforced resignation of Michael Martin as Speaker of the House of Commons, the House is electing a new Speaker by secret ballot.

Not only is the secret ballot for this Post a new and welcome innovation to the proceedings of the House, but I am struck by the fact that the successful candidate must received more than 50% of the votes cast. At the time of writing this has already led to the initiation of a second ballot, as the candidate with the largest number of votes (John Bercow) nevertheless did not achieve the 50% rule.

Is it asking too much for the voting system used in our General Elections to be reformed in a similar way? Why should our MPs be elected even when they command well less than 50% support just because their votes might have beaten the next highest by a few votes?

Electoral Reform & the Conservative Party

Having almost reached a point where I might have considered voting Conservative at the next General Election I read in today's papers that they are opposed to reform of the voting system.

So long as they are content with MPs being elected on a minority vote I shall not support the Conservative Party, since it cannot claim to be democratic. "First-past-the-post" has served both them and the Labour Party well over the years, and I see the Conservatives' opposition to change as being entirely self-serving. I am not asking for full-blown PR with Party Lists. A simple one MP per constituency is fine, so long he or she represents more than 50% of the vote. We all know there are ways of achieving this.

Conservatives .. please wake up to the basic idea of democracy.

This makes me angry when politicians are supposedly wondering why people are disenchanted with politics.