Don't mention the L word...

Bloody hell! This blog's still covered in adverts for lawyers. I am starting to get paranoid about this: have a bit of a dig at the legal eagles and they're all over you in a trice. Work continues to try and banish these forces of darkness and fill the blog with delightful and pointless fripperies.

By the way, what's the difference between "illicit" and "illegal"? One's against the law and the other's a sick bird...

Sex and holidays and cars and food. Oh, and the News of the World

Apologies for the misleading headline. This is a shameless attempt to get some better adverts on the blog. I've noticed that recently it's been liberally festooned with ads for lawyers, ironic given the nature of the posts but that's what happens when you're at the mercy of some cyber adman. So now you've finished clicking on ads for marital aids, weekends away in New York and you've bought yourself a car and booked a restaurant, let's get down to business.

And my word this News of the World lark is a business, eh? The whole thing feels like a box of fireworks thrown onto a bonfire: dangerous and unpredictable effects shooting out in dangerous and unpredictable directions at similarly unpredictable intervals. Unless you've got more time than I am inclined to spend poring through the detail of all this, it's very hard to assimilate the ins and outs of it all. Plus, at the end of the day, do we really care much and if we do, what exactly are we to care about? Personally, I wouldn't give two hoots if someone hacked into my voicemail. If they're really interested in messages like "If you're in ASDA, we're low on washing powder" or "It's me dad, please send money" then good luck to them. But of course I'd still be straight on the phone to Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Run for a quick bit of no-win-no-fee action against Murdoch and chums. Max Clifford got a cool £1m out of them apparently: it's an ill wind, eh readers?   

Perhaps poor old Gordie Brown could do with Max's services. Looking increasingly like a man who can't even win when backing a dead cert in a one horse race, he now has egg on his face as we learn that his son's medical details didn't find their way into print as a result of hacking or blagging (there's another law I didn't know about) at all. Talk about a lose/lose. No, never mind the mobile phone, I'd be far more worried that if it's that easy to hack a phone, how about a bank account? No one seems to have mentioned this.

The Murdoch organisation of course has always had a touch of the Milwall syndrome about it, you know, "no one likes us, we don't care." Indeed, so unloved are they that the whole of the House of Commons has agreed to gang up against them in some kind of "stop being so horrid or I'll get my dad on you" motion. But are they the real baddies? Is parliament just projecting onto Rupe its own failures properly to stop this kind of thing? And what about the likes of us news consumers? If there wasn't such a demand for reading tawdry tittle-tattle about so-called celebrities then the newspapers (and is it really only News International titles up to no good here?) wouldn't spend the money on the private dicks and their dirty tricks in the first place.

The there's the police. I've been worried about them for a while. Now we learn that not only have some of them been taking money in return for juicy little titbits of info but through some combination of idleness, incompetence and, dare one suggest, an aversion to biting the hand that feeds them, their efforts to date to nail the hackers make Inspector Clouseau look like Sherlock Holmes (mind you, Sherlock bribed the police too.) One of the most senior of the coppers left the force a year or two back and now actually works for News International! Bloody hell! How convenient.

The police have, over the years, become quite literally a law unto themselves. One feels considerable sympathy for the honest rozzer trying to do his bit for society as he is constantly let down by the corruption, bungling and sheer laziness of so many of his colleagues. When we read that police policy guidelines have become infected by the rampant virus which is health and safety to such an extent that in some circumstances officers are told to avoid crimes rather than investigate them, we are entitled to wonder what madness has taken hold. And why does no government ever tackle the problem?

Governments have only two essential duties: to protect the country from its enemies and to protect the honest citizens from the dishonest. Everything else that governments do (and my goodness, don't they do a lot?) is either unnecessary or could be done by someone else.  It's about time that the UK government remembered this and got to grips with police failures. Elected chief constables would be a good start. And a bit more zero tolerance wouldn't go amiss. But that's another subject altogether.

So there you have it. It's not the Dirty Digger we need to be venting our anger at, it's either ourselves for buying this rubbish or the police for not doing their job. Or, ultimately, successive governments for not making sure the police do their job. I never bought the NOTW but I'm sorry it's gone. There's something sad (or wrong) that one man get get rid of a national institution - what next, the Times? Imagine if one man could get rid of other national institutions, like pubs. Or the House of Lords. Or fox hunting. Oh...hang on...

If you did buy the last edition of the NOTW, you will have been reminded of the many occasions when they were several steps ahead of the police in exposing serious wrong-doing. There's nothing to be gained here from the NOTW's demise. On the contrary, perhaps we need a few more fake sheiks and a few less bent and lazy coppers.

Goodnight all.

Get down with your baad self! The festival season is here!

It must be the time of year - I've bought a new guitar. It's a Fender Telecaster (left-handed, natch). I'll try and post a picture.

I think it must be seeing all these youngsters thrashing around with their mud-splattered six-strings that inspired me. Either that, or my dodgy back is making it increasingly hard to cope with holding  the very considerable weight of a Les Paul (a Tele is much lighter, as some of you may know.)

The number of music festivals these days is incredible and even us oldsters get sucked into the frenzy. last week we went to the Hop Farm do (just one day of it - can't go too mad you know) and this weekend it's a similar dabble with Lounge on the Farm. A slightly dangerous one this as it's close to home and is heavily populated by local teenagers determined to commence/continue their "experimentation" with drink/drugs/sex. As a responsible adult, does one report back to their not-entirely-unsuspecting parents or adopt a "what happens on the Farm stays on the Farm" approach? I think only if serious physical (or emotional) harm seems likely should one take the former line. We were once young too. Or so I'm told - I can't remember. And then in August we're off to Cropredy again, a slightly different kettle of fish where our presence actually reduces the average age.

In the old days, a lot of these festival things were free. How times change. You don't get much change out of £200 for a ticket for the full duration at a lot of these picnics and once there, it is very easy to get through eye-watering amounts of dosh on programmes, t-shirts, beer and organic vegeburgers (alright, not me personally on this last one but you take the point.) You could have a week on the Costas for this outlay, with cheaper beer and less mud.

In fact the whole economic model of the music business has been turned on its head in recent years. It used to be the case that the money was made out of records: playing live generally made a loss but was considered part of the marketing budget for the records. But now that recorded music is almost free, it's lucky for the music biz that they can make serious money out of live performance. This is because people are now prepared to pay huge sums for concert tickets. This is partly explained by the wider demographic of gig attendees nowadays. When I first started gig-going, you wouldn't see anyone over 21 in the audience whereas now those of us who are (much) closer to receiving our bus pass than our key to the door are a common sight, and we have more money than the kids. But then there's plenty of them too, aren't there? It's a bit strange.

No point me telling you that my first gig cost 8 shillings (that's 40p to you, spotty) as a lot of time and inflation has passed under the bridge since then. But think about this: when the Who headlined a one-day festival at Charlton in 1974, the tickets were £4. And it was a strong line-up. I can't remember exactly what an LP cost then but it was more than £2. For our one day at the Hop Farm, the tickets were £70 each and, with reasonable objectivity, I can say it was not such a strong line-up as the Charlton bash (e.g. the Who were at their peak in '74. The Hop Farm version of the Eagles are some way past theirs.) Let's say the average cost today of a CD (for those who actually still buy them) is £10. So a live:recorded ratio of less than 2:1 has become 7:1. And I bet you that this would be reflected, albeit to a lesser extent, in a comparison of concert ticket inflation vs. RPI over the period. Incredible, no?

And it's not just concerts: things like football matches have gone the same way. it seems that the nub of it is that "things" have become a lot cheaper but "people" a lot more expensive. The good news is that I can get a Telecaster for about the price of a family day out at the Hop Farm festival. The cost of a family day out to see the Who in 1974 would have paid for a couple of sets of strings and a plectrum or two. Seriously. It's a funny old world, isn't it?

See you at the beer tent and watch out for the brown acid!

A lawyer by any other name...

...would still stink. A deliciously apt paraphrase of the Bard given another story in the paper today about the "compensation culture", this time focusing on schools where, among other ludicrous wastes of taxpayer money, £3,000 was paid out because some little darling scratched themselves on a rose. We've read this sort of thing so much that we've become immune to it, which is dangerous. Here at Marshside we are not so blase. We will fearlessly investigate just what's going on here and see if we can find a solution. Gird yourselves!

The root of this is tort. That's not some kind of Germanic dessert but a branch of common law which, as you will all know, is that part of our law not written down anywhere but which has evolved over the centuries and is in effect made by judges as a consequence of their judgements which set precedents which must be taken into account in subsequent cases. There's about 13 torts (can't remember exactly), including assault, libel and slander. The one at issue here is negligence. A successful action against someone for negligence must show that the defendant owed the alleged victim a "duty of care", that the duty was breached and that the defendant suffered some real loss. A "real loss" normally means that it has a quantifiable monetary value. Not quite sure how a small child can lose money as a result of a scratch but the essence of a claim here would be that the school owed the child a duty of care (little doubt about that) and that it breached that duty by allowing children to come into too close proximity with those lethal rose thorns.

Now you might think this could easily be defended along the lines of: roses being a regular occurrence in the UK, including in the gardens of many children, not to mention public parks, etc., no "reasonable man" (a very important person in law) could regard the existence of unguarded roses as being in any way dangerous and thus this cannot be considered a breach of a duty of care. You might also add in that the child suffered no financial loss, neither immediately nor as a consequence of some kind of permanent disfigurement which could damage their future love life or modelling career (a lawyer acting for the claimant would suggest this might be the case. Well I would). No further witnesses, m'lud. So, having seen this off, how come we end up shelling out £3,000?

This is where the lawyers come in, not to mention the insurers. The school, having received a threateningly worded letter from someone at "ambulance chasing lawyers R us" they would have chucked it in the direction of their insurers. They in turn would have pushed it over to their own pet legal team who would have advised that although the ambulance chasers had a pretty feeble case, the costs of defending it, coupled to the costs in the event of losing it (even if a remote chance) meant that perhaps they should try and settle out of court and, having exchanged a letter or two with their brothers at law, advised that £3,000 would do the trick and that that seems like a sensible deal. Great. So the taxpayer (yes that's you, pay attention) has forked out £3,000 to these nasty little people plus the insurance premium paid by the school, out of which their own lawyers get a fee for their learned advice. Not to mention the insurance company's own costs and the time/cost of the school staff. Oh, and no doubt the school (i.e. you) then spent even more money by either removing or fencing off the offending roses. The net result is that a chunk of the money that comes out of your pocket to pay for our children's education has in fact gone on lawyers, insurers, school admin and fencing contractors. Educational benefit? Zero, unless you count the benefit of children learning what a rose looks like and that its stems are covered with sharp thorns. I don't know about you but I didn't have to go to school to learn that.

So what's to be done? One obvious problem is the cost of lawyers. It's a mystery as to what it is that keeps their fees so high. Of course the Law Society and the Bar Council do their best in this respect, plus the government does its bit by constantly passing new laws (every new law creates more work for the lawyers, if it does nothing else, and often it doesn't.) Perhaps most importantly, what's considered "reasonable" in terms of legal fees is ultimately decided by the judges who are...lawyers. So it's a cosy clique but it's still strange that the laws of supply and demand don't seem to apply to legal costs.

Then there's the evils of insurance. A former employer of mine, a very large UK company, decided some years ago not to have any insurance at all, except where it was legally obliged to. The logic is that over time, the costs of insurance will be equal to the costs of any claims plus the costs of the insurance company. So deal with the claims yourself and cut out the latter (this has become known euphemistically as "self-insuring". It sounds more professional than "not insuring"). More recently, another employer of mine forked out a six figure sum every year for insurance but virtually never made a claim. A colossal waste of money it could ill afford. How many of us have, over the years, received more in claims than we've paid in insurance premiums? Bad luck if your house burned down, you probably answered yes but you're the only one. As insurers can bung the cost of claims on premiums and as all insurers are likely to face similar levels of claims, there's little incentive for them to battle against high legal fees and do whatever else would seem sensible to keep claims costs down. (Something else which contributes to the maintenance of excessive legal fees). Plus, you may have discovered that if you do make a claim, the combination of your excess and the small print probably means they don't pay out and if they do, watch your premium rise next year! It's a lose/lose.

It sounds like I'm arguing that all insurance is a waste of time and money. Most of the time it is, exceptions being of the house burning down variety. Translate that to our rose-infested school and what that means is that they should only have insurance against major claims (e.g. roses turn out to be concealing triffids which eat child). Or more to the point, as they are part of the state and the state is obviously big enough to self-insure, they should have no insurance at all.

Given that the state is covering the school's backside, the school should nonetheless take any claims as a hit to their budget. In this scenario, they might have a different way of looking at solicitors' letters and would have an incentive to fight them. They need to understand the facts of the world as outlined above and especially, that the law is nothing like as complicated as lawyers would have you believe. Let common sense be your friend. take a leaf out of the book of that most sued entity, Private Eye. In the now legendary case of Arkell vs. Pressdram (Pressdram being the company that publishes Private Eye),  Arkell's lawyers wrote a letter which concluded: "His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply." Did Private Eye make panic-stricken calls to their insurers or lawyers? They did not. They wrote back, saying: "We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr J. Arkell. We note that Mr Arkell's attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off."

Problem solved!