A fine bit of prose - by Richard... Saturday, August 13, 2011

A fine bit of prose - by Richard... Saturday, August 13, 2011

... from Raedwald. "The cancer of management consulting and scabrous growth of something called 'HR' has corrupted and distorted the essential tenet that no one should go into public service expecting to get rich".

Sterling stuff.

SATURDAY, 13 AUGUST 2011

Probity and Stewardship

The cancer of management consulting and scabrous growth of something called 'HR' has corrupted and distorted the essential tenet that no one should go into public service expecting to get rich. A pretence that private and public are equivalent has seen greed and self-interest justify the most egregious misuse of public resources. We have seen police bosses struggling to justify officers' credit card bills in the millions of pounds for lingerie, flowers, booze, lavish meals in top restaurants, gifts, electronics, trainers, bling and all the expensive rubbish of conspicuous consumption at the taxpayers' expense. Senior police bosses are resigning in the dozens as gifts, hospitality and inducements from the sleazy and dodgy are revealed. That Paul Stephenson can even have considered a £15,000 gift of spa time as anything but improper and compromising his integrity speaks volumes about the way in which the requirement for personal probity and stewardship of the common weal has been eroded at the most senior levels.

And it's not only the top ranks of the police. Council and quango bosses such as the vile Andrea Hill formerly of Suffolk or the previous head of the Audit Commission typify the perverted sense of entitlement, narcissism, selfishness and avarice that seem to have become essential 'person requirements' for the top jobs in the public sector. And Parliament, the voice of the nation, has become emasculated, an object of derision and ridicule, and unable to comment and be heard, because our MPs have joined the troughing, abuse and abnegation of probity that characterises all the rest. The filth of unalloyed corruption from the exposure of Parliamentary 'expenses' will linger in the nostrils for many years to come.

And so today we have the spectacle of the soiled and befouled police bosses and the filthily corrupt political class flinging ordure at each other in a scatalogical dogfight. The poor domestic burglary victim must be wondering this morning how 1,600 looters can be arrested within 48 hours and some 800 brought to court within 72 hours when all he has to show for his ransacked and violated home is a crime number and the vague promise that someone from victim support will phone. Clearly, the police can solve crime when they put their minds to it. But then to be told that those who pay for the police can have no say in operational priorities adds insult to injury; it leaves the message that both the police and political class will deploy full resources to meet a challenge to the central State, but will not do so to better serve those who pay their wedge. And this, too, betokens a failure of stewardship. Despite Hugh Orde's distorted and perverse world view, the police are not the guardians of the monstrous State but the servants of the poor and law-abiding.

Those who come out well from all this, the inspectors, sergeants and police officers who have spent the past week on the streets, exhausted, bruised, and with aching feet and calves, have every right to feel aggrieved that their achievements are claimed by both sides in the scatalogical dogfight. No doubt as their silver-braidedcapos return to fine-dining and playing politics in the better Victoria restaurants at the taxpayer's expense ordinary plods will join the ordinary public in wondering how on earth we're going to sort this mess out.

Catch-up - by Richard...

I should have picked this up earlier. Jim writes about the Bradford riots ten years ago, which he reported on for his local paper.

In common with myself, Jim charges that the real culprits are the politicians and their technocratic advisors, in both Brussels and Westminster, who engineered and oversaw the social disaster of the open borders policy, designed to weaken the structure of the nation state; the governing Yahoos who put human rights above human responsibilities.

What I will have no truck with, though, is any half-baked idea that this is directly an immigrant problem, and can speak with some personal authority. I was born in University College Hospital London, spent the first four years of my life in Manor House, and then moved to Stamford Hill (pictured), where I lived until I was eighteen.

I went to school in South Tottenham – primary and then Grammar. Our playing fields were behind the White Hart Lane stadium.

Although having moved to Yorkshire, I have stayed in touch with my roots and, most recently, worked as a consultant for a Tottenham firm, with a boss from Grenada – black as the ace of spades and as nice and decent as they come. He employed both whites and blacks ... including, on my recommendation, a kid from Yorkshire who was having trouble finding a job.

His kids, I knew ... nice kids, decent kids ... worth more than ten white kids that you can pick up off a sink estate. But hey! They were as black as their dad ... so they must be a problem. BS!

Back in Yorkshire ... Bradford. Yes, we have Asians ... and thank goodness we do. It is nearly two years since I started getting chest pains. Went to the GP surgery. Saw the doctor ... saw lots of doctors. Nice white doctors. Friendly, competent but, in this case, useless. They found nothing wrong.

The terrors of the night drove me to calling out the emergency ambulance last year, admitted as a potential heart attack case. Normal test showed up nothing. But an Asian Houseman listened to my chest through his stethoscope, and picked up something ... a heart valve problem that is very hard to diagnose. He did it where the others missed it.

I owe my life to him, and the immigrant surgeon who is going to do open-heart surgery on me shortly, and the immigrant cardiac specialist who has referred me to him, after having done the battery of tests that has found out why I can barely walk to the top of the street. With their skills, I am promised a complete cure.

So no, I am not going to take any bullshit about immigrants – of any colour. The brothers in the paper shop are Asian, Moslems. I would stand alongside them on the barricades any time, taking on the white trash wearing the uniform of West Yorkshire finest, who have given me so much grief.

And don't give me the criminality shit either. For a multi-national, I had to set up a deep cleaning division, and went out of my way to hire lads with criminal records, mostly for GBH – and some thieving. They were the most loyal and hard-working team I ever had.

A lot of the kids on the streets, given a chance, will make good – we've had them through our doors ... Mrs EU Referendum, as a special needs assistant, collected waifs and strays from the sink schools in which she has worked - some of them, in their teens, had never been to the seaside. They have now - you won't get Christmas cards from us. Instead, we saved up our pennies and paid for a mini-bus to send them on trips. Some good, bright kids, gone straight, now have decent jobs and serve the community.

My Missus can hardly go down the street without a "hoodie" rushing up to her to tell her that they have dun good because at a key time in their lives she pinned them against the wall and told them they were lazy shits who were going nowhere.

Then we get all the crap from the multi-kults and the bollocks from Cameron and his new bestist mate Bratton. These are the real scum, the dross who are causing the problems. They ignore the good kids, pour the money and the attention on the trouble-makers, and then give the rest of us grief.

And there is the clever-dick commentariat, up its own arse, telling us what is wrong, and how to fix it. Sorry chaps, you don't know what you are talking about, and by and large you are making the problem worse. Leave us alone and we'll sort it.

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In defence of David Starkey - by Pete...

David Starkey is an idiot. How stupid do you have to be to go on the BBC and argue with two leftists? He will suffer for it. But nevertheless, in his own blundering way, he is right. The statement that "the chavs have become black", in my view, is absolutely on the money.

I've had my (near fatal) brushes with Jamaican gangsters over the years. I know what they look like, I know what they sound like. They are people who for whom everyone is a potential source of income they can raid whenever they feel like it. They do it with breathtaking brazenness. The sub-culture is all about machismo and what you can take. And as one of the MTV generation I can recall video after video of misogynistictalentless displays, flashing jewelry, gold, pimped out cars and sexually subservientwomen. Simply having money is the mark of success, not the means by which it is obtained.

And when I go to the London clubs and hear the kids talking, they have more in common culturally and linguistically with the Jamaican underground than a working class Englishman. The culture that has absorbed these kids is a black sub-culture. If that is not so, why is Ali G (pictured) one of the most successful and internationally recognised comedy stereotypes of the last ten years?

And which intellectual pygmy did they pit against Starkey? Owen Jones, author of "Chavs: TheDemonisation of the Working Class". Has it occurred to Jones that these people are not working class? They do not work, never will and their parents are probably of similar uselessness. They are not working class. They are the welfare underclass. And for all the twittering about demonisingthem, I find that more palatable than patronising them. They are the legacy of leftist policies in welfare and education. People like Owen and the other token black leftist (stand-in for Diane Abbott) are the very people who keep them where they are.

But what does this have to do with the riots I hear you ask? Well, nothing at all actually. You could make a reasonably sound case that the lack of certain civic constructs in Jamaica has created a generation of people who do not live up to their responsibilities as parents and as citizens, but I think we did a pretty good job of engendering that for ourselves without any outside help. Don't you?

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A free pass for Cameron - by Richard...

Typically of the Daily Mail, a report from the International Crisis Group, issued on 4 August is given superficial "shock" treatment.

To be fair, at least the Mail covered the report ... none of the other MSM in Britain have looked at it. However, the story is probably based on the Reuters report, issued on the 6th. I doubt whetherMail writer Kirsty Walker has read the whole report – for reasons which will shortly become obvious.

As to the headline issue, this is far from new. Booker did it in his column on 12 September 2009, based partly on my work in the Defence of the Realm blog on 3 September – nearly two years ago.

Then we pointed out that the NATO coalition forces were financing the Taliban's war effort, to the extent that the war could continue indefinitely. Unwittingly, donor country taxpayers were keeping it going. Thus, all this aspect of the report does is confirm that which we averred two years ago. And at this rate, we cannot possibly win.

But the report has much more important things to say about the conflict, which makes one think that Walker had not read it – properly, if at all. It tells us that NATO allies have set a timetable for gradually transferring authority to the Afghan government and plan to hand over full responsibility for security by the end of 2014.

We also get confirmed that transition officially began in July 2011 in several areas, but, for the most part, only in parts of the country where the insurgency has traditionally had but nominal influence. Yet, says the report:

... the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP), despite receiving more than half of total international aid – about $29 billion between 2002 and 2010 – have thus far proved unable to enforce the law, counter the insurgency or even secure the seven regions identified for full Afghan control by mid-year.

As to the aid programme in general, we are told that the amount of international aid disbursed since 2001 – $57 billion against $90 billion pledged – is a fraction of what has been spent on the war effort. More importantly, it has largely failed to fulfil the international community’s pledges to rebuild Afghanistan.

Poor planning and oversight have affected projects' effectiveness and sustainability, with local authorities lacking the means to keep projects running, layers of subcontractors reducing the amounts that reach the ground and aid delivery further undermined by corruption in Kabul and bribes paid to insurgent groups to ensure security for development projects.

Stark though it is, this is really nothing new ... which is perhaps why the media have given it such little coverage. More to the point, collectively, the MSM have decided to give Cameron a free pass on this issue, for the time being. He has told the hacks that he is pulling out in 2014. In the meantime he has a license to waste our money and send soldiers to their deaths.

That is the way the world works, unfortunately. We have neither the power nor the influence, in the short-term, to stop this obscene waste and destruction. All we can do is point out what happens. And, in the final analysis, it will continue because not enough people care enough to want it to stop.

But never let anybody fool you that we have a free press which is holding the government to account. It is as bad as the politicians who make so free with our money and other peoples' lives.

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Shoot the royals - by Richard...

It hardly needs comment, but one can see the naysayers lining up at the Palace with their plastic bullets and tear gas. One really cannot tolerate this sort of thing.

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The politics of fear - by Richard...

Advising the Big Brave Cameron on police tactics is Bill Bratton, the former New York police chief, who is telling the Great Leader that many young people, especially gang members, had been "emboldened" by over-cautious policing tactics and lenient sentencing policies.

Losing public confidence in its ability to provide security - through force if necessary - created "incredible difficulty" for a police force, he says, then advocating that a police force should have "a lot of arrows in the quiver". Thus does Bratton advocate a doctrine of "escalating force" where weapons including rubber bullets, Tasers, pepper spray and water cannon are all available to commanders.

What an extraordinary volte face we have here, compared with July 2006. Prior to Cameron delivering a speech widely labelled as "hug a hoodie", The Observer on the 9 July was reporting with approval that The Boy would "completely re-engineer the Conservatives' image on crime this week with a remarkable speech calling for more understanding of 'hoodies' and criticising what he calls short-term solutions to curb youth crime such as anti-social behaviour orders and curfews".

This "ground-breaking speech", we were told, would call for "more 'love' to be shown to adolescents", urging a greater focus on the family and on the social influences driving children to offend.

Cameron thus would tell a conference on social justice that politicians should be discussing causes of crime not its symptoms, saying: "The hoodie is a response to a problem, not a problem in itself. We - the people in suits - often see hoodies as aggressive, the uniform of a rebel army of young gangsters".

Come the day, Monday, 10 July 2006, The Boy did deliver, telling his audience at the Social Justice Centre that:

To tackle youth crime and disorder for the long term, we will have to place real trust in the hands of the people and organisations that understand the challenges young people face, and can offer the quality of care and emotional support they need.

"I'm not pretending I've got the answers", he then said. "My job is to give a lead, not to take control".

Later defending the speech, he rejected suggestions that he wanted people to "hug a hoodie". He simply wanted "to understand what's gone wrong in these children's lives".

"I think people want their politicians to ask the question", he said, "What is it that brought that young person to commit that crime at that time? What's the background to it, what are the long-term causes of crime?" And, warming to this theme, The Boy pronounced:

If you're ill, it's no good putting a sticking plaster on it. You've got to get to the bottom of the illness. Let's try and understand what's gone wrong in these children's lives and we'll find it's about family breakdown, it's about drugs, it's about alcohol abuse, often it's young people who are brought up in care when they should be in loving homes.

Already analysing the speech was Tim Hames in the pre-paywall Times. "Mr Cameron wants his colleagues, like the hoodies, to be 'inside the boundaries' where 'we have to show a lot more love'", wrote Hames.

"Hug a hoodie" was code for "hug a modern, compassionate Conservative", so Mr Cameron's call for these much maligned characters was to be seen in a new light - not a surreal and incredible publicity stunt but "an honest act of personal empathy".

There is not much "empathy" in the Cameron camp now, though. Such as there is seems to be coming from Ed Miliband, occupying the space created by the tough-talking, scourge of the hoodies. How easy then does Cameron abandon his earlier stance, handing that territory to the now Labour opposition, pandering to the fears and populists tendencies of his faithful.

But, when a politician such as Cameron turns round so dramatically to embrace a doctrine of "escalating force", lining up an array of weapons which include rubber bullets, Tasers, pepper spray and water cannons – all to beat up on kids whom he had earlier said needed "love" - there can only be one conclusion.

This is the politics of fear. Cameron and his mob are running scared. Policy and thinking have gone out of the window. This is survival time, and the man is reverting to type ... a statist thug.

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We may be too late - by Richard...

As the politicians squabble with the police, following these riots and the aftermath has been something of an education. The riots themselves brought out the very best and the worst in some people, and, as far as the commentariat goes, the issues arising sort the sheep from the goats.

As regards the people though, if the Guardian is to be believed, we have echoes of the servility and wimpishness of which Miniter and Coulter complained. A poll conducted for the newspaper has 30 percent saying that Cameron has done a good job, against 44 percent who say the opposite, a net negative score of fourteen. For Boris Johnson, the figures are 28 percent good job and 38 percent bad, a negative of ten points.

By contrast – and here the wimps come out to play – 45 percent think that the acting commissioner of the Met-Plod, Tim Godwin, has done well against 27 percent who say the opposite – a positive score of 18.

In and amongst the commentariat, Charles Moore has his own nostrum. And, while Moore can be a perceptive and intelligent analyst, this time he disappoints.

In another woolly piece, he supports as "vital" the idea of having elected police commissioners to oversee the police, with what Cameron calls the "thoroughly good" result that they will become accountable to the public. He then also wants an investigation "into how our laws and practices have come to prevent the police doing the job almost all of us want them to do".

These changes, says Moore, could start to reverse the trend of 30 years and recover our streets for civilisation. But there is no recognition of the broader issues, and no understanding at all of how far we, the people, have ceded our power and responsibilities. In his heart of hearts, Moore is just another statist.

Hannan is another of the commentariat in full flow. I've never liked the man, but have always thought he was fairly bright. But too many years living high off the hog has dulled his edge, and he is now distinctly second-rate. His person nostrum is elected sheriffs, another of those lightweight ideas that is superficially attractive, but actually meaningless.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that electing officials somehow – and necessarily – improves governance. One would have thought the experience of having a London mayor would have disabused people of that, but learning difficulties here seem to be the order of the day.

The idea, of course, is that elections confer a degree of accountability, allowing voters to dispense with an official who does not deliver the goods. In London, though, the choice is between Ken Livingstone and not Ken Livingstone, which means that the idiot Boris gets the job.

In other instances, an electoral system delivers people who are good at getting elected, rather than the right people for the job. And the idea that anyone has ever lost office merely on the basis of their performance, should long have been abandoned. Surely the experience with Blair should tell people that.

When it comes to the police, I have long held that one of the greater problems is that the complaints system does not work. For minor complaints, the police investigate themselves – badly. When you complain about that system, the police again investigate themselves to see whether the complaint was properly investigated.

Anyone with half a brain-cell could tell you that the system is wrong – which is why most politicians haven't detected it. Anyone who has experienced the system knows that it's wrong. It is a closed loop. And the plods know it as well – they know that they can get away with being rude, arrogant, and stupid. The complaints system won't touch them.

An effective complaints system would actually confer a high degree of accountability – which is why, presumably, there is no attempt to mend the system. Instead, we get faux accountability through elections, which add another layer of expensive professional politicians, and confuse still further the chain of responsibility.

The trouble is that people like Hannan – and, of course Cameron – have a following. That does not mean they are right. It actually means many people tend to be sheep. These are the ones that fawn over men in uniforms, who actually respect politicians – whatever they may say – and believe what they read in the newspapers and watch on television.

These infantile people are the real problem. Giving them freedom and the responsibility to make decisions is like giving a baby a loaded gun. However, they, unlike the politicians, are capable of growing up. But the grown-up debate is happening largely outside the cloying myopia of the failing MSM, and not enough people are joining in as yet.

I am confident that this will eventually happen, as generally I do believe in the "wisdom of the crowd" – it can happen both ways. But it must happen faster if these riots are to be a beneficial turning point. It can go one of two ways, towards a more authoritarian, statist society, or along the path to freedom. At the moment, the media and the politicians are driving it in the wrong direction. We may be too late to change it.