Whatever happened to freedom of speech?

"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." (Voltaire)

If you asked people in western liberal democracies what they valued most, I'm guessing that freedom of speech would be pretty high up the list. So why do we treat this cherished right with so little respect? When I say "we", I'm talking about the UK. In some places, like the US, they have this enshrined in their constitution. Maybe we should do the same. In fact the whole issue as to whether we need a written constitution has become a much hotter topic in recent years and will be the subject of future blogging. But in the meantime, let's just think about why even humble bloggers like yours truly have to be careful what we say.

Of course the attacks on freedom of speech are nothing new, as can be demonstrated by number 2 in my series of undergraduate reminiscences. One of the first things that struck me as a wide-eyed 18 year-old was how politicised the students union seemed to be. Politics came well down my list of priorities after girls, beer, rock music, etc. (and I speak as someone who'd studied politics at A level and was just about to study a fair bit more of the stuff) and ditto for all my friends, so why were the walls covered in posters advertising political societies? Get out more, for God's sake!

Needless to say, these "socs" were invariably of the left-wing variety: CP, IMG, SWP and other acronyms too boring to recall (never mind to spell out - look them up if you don't know.) One of the most popular subjects for debate was "no platform for fascists". I use the word "debate" here very loosely. The obvious hypocrisy of this slogan was breathtaking. Surely one of the key characteristics of fascism is its totalitarian nature and its rejection of pluralism, implying a refusal to allow freedom of speech. So refusing to allow fascists to speak, is itself an act of fascism. Yes?! My young head was spinning: it was time to check out the bar/female talent/record shops.

If you put this accusation of hypocrisy to a member of one of these acronym-clad societies, the response ranges from "yeah, but fascists are bastards so..." (student from one of those universities that used to be a catering college) to a full-on exposition of Marxist historical inevitability (Russel Group student, probably ex public school). The whole thing was brilliantly parodied by Malcolm Bradbury in "the History Man" (check it out...plus the BBC dramatisation which was superb...a young Sir Anthony Sher in the lead role). But what it boils down to is the cunning use by some people of trendy (or these days, politically correct) ideas to impose their views and stifle the alternatives.

More recently, this kind of oppression has surfaced in other forms. Almost exactly a year ago, BP was in Big Poo following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. There was some tragic loss of life but this was soon forgotten when apparently a couple of pelicans got a bit grubby and the local prawns tasted a bit off for a while. Tony Hayward, BP's head man at the time, tried to do the right thing of damping down the knee-jerk panic by saying that it was not that big a deal. Outrage! How dare he say that! What about the pelicans?! For this, he lost his job. If O'bama had had his way, he would have lost a lot more. But guess what? Hayward was right. But it seems that speaking the truth is not OK any more.

Here's another one. In November last year, a government adviser, "enterprise tsar" Lord Young, said that for many people the recession would be not be so bad and in fact for some it would be great news, as the reduction in interest rates meant they were saving a fortune on their mortgage repayments.  Quite obviously, and much more so than Tony Hayward's statements,  this is true. But it wasn't the sort of truth that the prevailing PC climate recognised, so he too lost his job. Similar fates have befallen drugs advisers Dr Hans-Christian Raabe and David Nutt who both dared to say things which while true or at least arguably true, the government didn't like.

Then there's Andy Gray and the other bloke on Sky who made a few sardonic remarks about female football officials. Never mind that these remarks were made in private, they had to go. Next up after defenestration for public comments and private comments, hard labour because of unacceptable thoughts: I'm sure the technology is not far away. The Brain Police are coming.

You can probably think up many more of these sorts of "just because it's true doesn't make it right" examples. The ones I've quoted may not seem so earth-shattering, especially in isolation but there's another much more worrying strain of oppression out there. There's a chap called Ben Goldacre who wrote a book called Bad Science (it's a must-read, believe me). In it, there's a chapter excluded from early editions as he was under attack from lawyers armed with obscure Latin phrases and powered by outrageous hourly charge-out rates, funded by someone called Matthias Rath. All Goldacre did was to state the facts about what Rath (a "nutritionist") had been up to, notably in South Africa where AIDS is a national disaster but one that Rath said could be alleviated, not by the accepted medical means but by vitamin pills. His vitamin pills. The fact that Rath and his lawyers could suppress Goldacre's writing is also a national disaster. Why can't we do something about it? Check out Goldacre's web-site or his book for fuller details. It will make you weep/squirm/write to your MP/furious.

I've not even mentioned super-injunctions. You may think that some footballer trying to prevent us knowing that he's been playing away while playing away is no big deal. But then there was the case of a company called Trafigura who tried and for a  time, succeeded, in stopping us knowing about the effects of its toxic waste-dumping in Africa. It's hard to know what other truths we are prevented from knowing by super-injunctions as, by definition, we're not allowed to know what the super-injunction is all about.

It's all gone much too far. "No platform for fascists" has become no platform for anyone to write or speak the truth if someone with enough money or power doesn't like the truth in question. Whether it's by changing the libel laws or by engraving important values like freedom of speech in tablets of stone, something needs to be done.

Marshside blog says: "Any platform for anyone!" Or as the Manic Street Preachers once put it, "this is my truth, show me yours."

"I'm a level 5 vegan...

...I don't eat anything that casts a shadow." One of the great lines from that best modern source for great lines, the Simpsons. As usual, they have hit the nail firmly on the head with their finely-honed satirical hammer. Just what is it with these faddy people who want to feel somehow better than others because of what they eat, or what they don't eat? Now I'm not talking about those who adhere to certain diets for religious reasons. Mind you, there may well have been very good health reasons for not eating pork many years ago - such good reasons in fact that Jews and Muslims agree on this point -  but surely not any more? Why not "modernise" (to use one of my most detested words...alongside "lager" and "Arsenal")?  But I'll leave that for another day. In fact maybe for ever. I don't particularly want to get into religious debate. The Marshside blog seeks to be non-denominational and even "inclusive" (there goes another of those hated words.)

But this business in Germany has made me wonder if the fact that the source of the illness was bean sprouts was not some kind of divine intervention. I don't know if they were "organic" bean sprouts but any kind of bean sprout seems to fit the bill here. My guess is that they were covered in some kind of organic fertiliser, i.e. feces of one sort or another, which was not terribly good for the old constitution. This is no laughing matter of course as a lot of people lost their lives but I think it just serves to prove what all right-thinking people already knew, that organic stuff is to be avoided.

I always steer clear of anything labelled organic like the plague, or like the e-coli. The reasons for this are that in the retail food trade, the word "organic" is a synonym for "high margins" which to you and me means "this way suckers" or "I saw you coming" (see earlier post). It isn't better for you health-wise, it just makes you feel superior. I guess it's maybe beneficial for your mental health but...

What we need is shops that guarantee to sell nothing organic and even better, everything genetically modified. I'm all for GM food. You've noticed that food prices have been rocketing. That's because the world is not producing enough. A lot of people in the world are hungry. They need cheap food that isn't going to poison them and non-organic GM food is the answer. The next time you're tempted by a few organic raspberries in Waitrose, ask yourself whether, by supporting the farmer who used his land to produce this over-priced delicacy, you are helping the world become a better place. Or are you just lining someone's pockets at the expense of those who are desperate for some GM grain at a price they can afford and don't give a stuff if it comes to them courtesy of a few vats of heavy-duty non-organic fertiliser?

Oh, and to return to our opening theme, here's my vote for the best comedy line of recent years, if not ever. It's from the Simpsons again and is in a letter to Homer from the New York parking authorities: "If you fail to remedy this malparkage immediately, your car will be thrown into the East River, at your expense." I think I could write an entire book on why this line is so funny. Other nominations? Leave a comment...

Pub update

I know you're all desperate for news of how our local's doing under the new management. Well last Friday we had the first day of food. They were inundated. Partly it was due to the novelty value plus I think I detected a few locals rarely seen in the place hitherto, probably because they were among those who'd fallen out with the old landlord at some time in the past, which was not a difficult thing to do. And one of his most endearing qualities.

The menu was largely based on the old one, with some slightly smaller portions and slightly higher prices (the price of beer's gone up too by the way, plus they've added a second -  "premium" -  lager!) And the food was kind of OK although it fell down in a few areas: the white bread surrounding my bacon and black pudding sandwich was very much of the supermarket sliced variety which is, frankly, just not good enough. But, to paraphrase Rupert Brooke (yes?) thank God there's black pudding still for tea!

The rumour is that the new tenants are both vegetarians which is a bit worrying when it comes to cooking meat. Also on the list of concerns, we know of one member of kitchen staff who lasted about a day, citing "personal differences" or words to that effect. There is pressure: last Friday they had to close the kitchen for a while, they were so swamped. I just hope they don't think it's going to be that busy all the time. In fact, there's a chance that that day will be the busiest in the kitchen that they'll ever have. Now there's a thought.

On the estates front, they've been dredging out the stream by the pub garden. Possibly looking for the bodies of long forgotten drunken farmhands or perhaps some kind of freshwater shellfish to add to the menu. They're also knocking out bits of the old "family room" which could certainly do with it. In recent years it's not seen too many families. All this is turning the car park into a tip, which won't help the passing trade. But it has to be the right thing to do so good luck to them.

I'm aware this blog doesn't have enough photos and the like, making it a rather "media poor" experience. So I'm going to whack on a picture of the recent Mummers play, as I know you're all keen to know more about this ancient and esoteric ritual. Wicker man not pictured.

British tennis rocks! Marshside blog in U-turn shock!

In the interests of "balance" (not that blogs need to be balanced - isn't that the whole point?) I thought I ought to say congrats to James Ward who beat Wawrinka at Queen's yesterday. A great result but I'm afraid still in the long tradition of unknown Brits getting one over a big name player at Queen's or Wimbledon. It's filed under "one swallow doesn't make a summer but one good win does make a British tennis season."

Before we start thinking that James Ward is the new future of British tennis, we have to remember that he's not a youngster like poor sacrificial Ollie Golding but, at 24 and the same age as Murray, Nadal and Djokovic, at his peak in tennis-life terms. So well-done James but one feels he is destined to be another Bogdanovic who's still slogging away and getting nowhere after all these years.

On a positive note, my tennis team had a crushing victory yesterday with me and my partner winning 6-0 6-0 and 6-1 6-2. We now expect the LTA to offer us huge sums for sponsorship and for us soon to be heralded as the future of British Tennis. Unfortunately, we are even older, by some way, than James Ward.

Anyway it's Andy Murray on in a minute. As usual, if he wins, he's British and if he loses, Scottish.

Give it some welly Andy!

New balls please

It's the tennis season again. Well it is if you live in the UK where the whole season apparently lasts only four weeks. The BBC puts enough resources into two weeks of Wimbledon coverage to televise a whole world war while ignoring the sport for the rest of the year. To be fair, the old red button had a lot of the French Open this year but you know what I mean. The problem has always been that we all go mad and dig out our dusty old raquets in late June and after a bit of a bash down the park, forget all about it again until next year. Those cheating foreigners, on the other hand, play all year round! No wonder the Brits are so bad at the game.

Of course we also see a fair bit of the annual Pimms-drinking fest over in West Kensington at Queen's Club, a social (and corporate) event that can be spoiled, it the weather's good, by a few blokes huffing and puffing around the grass. Most attendees though are able to cope with this without being distracted from their free lunch (at least it was free when I went! Plus a free tea in the clubhouse courtesy of some friends who are members. Can't remember the tennis at all.) This year we've already had the latest of our brave young hopefulls come and go. For poor young Ollie Golding it was a bit like watching a Christian against the lions or some kind of freak show, put on as an entertainment for the lunching classes. We all knew he hadn't a hope of winning but it makes us feel good to see a plucky young Brit sacrificed in the interests of proving that for us, it's playing the game and not the winning that counts. Which is a great justification for our habitually dismal results.

For the next few weeks, there is a law that says that all papers must run several articles on why the UK is rubbish at tennis, so I thought I'd get in first. The usual reasons given are: not enough of us play the game, especially at school; poor facilities; elitist tennis clubs that exclude you if you're not the "right sort"; too much dominance of British sport by football, etc., etc. While all these have an element of truth in them, they don't stand up to serious examination. So I've got two other answers for you.

First, we in GB regard sport as a hobby, not a profession. Nearly all sports were invented here, by newly time (and money) rich Victorians who wanted something to do on their lawns except drink tea. This idea lives on deep down in the British psyche and affects our performance in all sports, not just tennis, which is by no means the only sport in which we are woeful under-achievers. Johnny Foreigner has always been the underdog playing catch up and seeking to give us imperialists a bloody nose. Having been duly bloodied, we refrain from trying to compete and rise above all that ghastly winning business, congratulating the little chaps from the colonies and retiring to the marquee for a drink and a chat.

But the other problem is the LTA. Yes I know the poor old LTA is an easy target but there's a reason for this: it's the right target.   It is simply incredible that the LTA can pour about £30m a year into the sport and produce no one capable of seeing off those pesky colonials. In no other country does tennis benefit from the kind of cash that flies around in British tennis and in no other country is there such a history of failure. It's time to face facts and admit that there is an inverse relationship between money and results and for the LTA to stop chucking the stuff around.

Let the LTA give its money to charity and let our tennis youngsters devleop a bit of hunger, just like all those Eastern Europeans who have to practice in disused swimming pools (true) using fly swatters for racquets (or something). It is surely no coincidence that it's the Olavs and Novaks who dominate the tennis world and not the Olivers and Nigels. Still at least we beat them all at football. Hang on a minute...

Time gentlemen please - nearly

I thought I'd update you on  our local. It's now just two more days until the changing of the guard. We're all having a great time at the non-stop celebrations while holding back the feelings of depression at the imminent change of landlord.

Last night we had a special Mummers play (do a wiki on that one) performance followed by a quiz. This was a bit of a shambles as the pub was full to bursting point. So much so that we had to do the Mummers outside. There is nothing like retiring for bringing in the punters! There was a BBQ on the go and kids games yesterday and a jazz picnic today - plus I can smell from here that the BBQ's been fired up again which suits us fine. Amazingly the beer hasn't run out yet but it's surely only a matter of time: two of the three draft bitters have gone, plus the lager (which we don't really do here anyway - the landlord sells it at a ludicrous price so he can have a chuckle when someone buys it). Oh, and there's no gin, nor ginger wine, nor cointreau. Actually there probably is, it's just that the outgoing landlord can't be arsed to get the bottle down from the shelf. There is still an ancient bottle of cooking sherry which mine host managed to flog me a schooner of instead.

So the whole thing has the feel of the end of an era, if not the end of the world about it. We're all fiddling while the Gate Inn burns. As well as opening up a fiendishly complex spread betting book on exactly when the beer barrel runs dry, I'm thinking of organising some prayer sessions for the future of the pub. Or perhaps building a wicker man in the garden as a warning to the new tenants. If I can get a suitable volunteer for the Britt Ekland role we'll be laughing.

Pork belly economics

Those of you who frequent upmarket restaurants (unlike those of us for whom a trip to the chippy is a night out) may have noticed an interesting menu development in recent times. I speak of belly pork, the latest delicacy to find favour amongst the jus and confits.

I'd never heard of this part of the noble pig until I was an impoverished undergraduate. Our catering formula was one constrained by the need to leave maximum cash available for beer and fags. This meant we existed on the usual (for those days) student fare of spag bol, chili, sausages, fish fingers and the like. But our culinary curiosity was such that we were always on the lookout for meaty bargains to introduce a bit of variety, whilst keeping within our poverty-line budget.

To this end, you would often find me standing on a rain-swept high street in inner Manchester, nose pressed up against the window of the butcher's. Passing quickly over the steak, chops and other exotica and drawing the line at tripe, one day I spotted something that looked a bit like bacon but thicker and, most notably, bloody cheap. Nervously enquiring of the cheery blood-stained bloke behind the counter as to what this enticing bargain was and getting a reply along the lines of "belly pork lad, just bung it under t'grill - smashing" I decided to risk it. And it was a risk. (Previously I'd fallen for ox liver: well it looked, smelt - and tasted - like lamb's liver so surely you cook it like lamb's liver? You do not. Check it out - it's very cheap.) But the belly pork worked fine, except that it's about 90% fat so tested even our nutritional standards to their limits.

So for us struggling students, belly pork ticked all the boxes (just) and found a regular place on our shopping list. But the minute my living standards crept above socio-economic group Z, I never bought it again. So imagine my surprise at seeing it listed between the usual suspects of aged fillet steak and rack of freshly-killed baby lamb at local eateries and not amongst the bargain set-lunch menu but at prices which imply a mark-up that even trendy handbag manufacturers can only dream of.

How come? How can these places convince punters to pay £20 for something that cost them about 20p and requires no significant skill to prepare. Well it's ISYC ("I saw you coming") syndrome. The key feature of ISYC theory is that if you price something high, people will think it must be good. We've already mentioned handbags. Another recent example is that new clothes shop chain aimed at posh kids which manages to convince them that £34 is a fair price for a t-shirt. Imagine the hoots of laughter in the marketing meeting when they decided on that price.

This phenomenon has been expertly parodied in the past by the likes of David Nobbs (the Grot shop in Reggie Perrin) and Harry Enfield's "I saw you coming" shop in the TV sketch but people never learn. Basic economics says that the lower the price, the higher the demand. But ISYC theory turns this on its head. Don't pile it high and sell it cheap: pile it high, think of a price, double it and add on 20% for luck. Belly pork's had its day now I expect but I paid quite a bit for pig's cheeks in a restaurant the other day (yep, they saw me coming) so I'm off to corner the market in those. What's next? Confit of pigeon entrails in a garden snail jus. £25 to you sir. You read it here first. 

50% of people think that half the population disagree with them

Surveys - arntcha sick of them?!!? I'm not trying to compete with Glenda Slagg but could think of no better opening. There's just so many column inches and broadcast minutes to fill these days that most editors resort to the desperate measure of saying to some hapless intern "get on the blower Toby and ask some punters whether they believe in fairies then churn out 1,000 words on the results. It'll get mentioned on the radio by someone like Steve Wright and we'll go viral!" Or with any luck, go down with a virus.

Today's version of this scenario is a headline along the lines of "50% of women believe sex discrimination is alive and well in the workplace." Which means of course, that 50% of women don't believe this, never mind if someone's "belief" actually accords with reality. This is actually an example of  a new game I've invented in which you derive the alternative inference from the one in the headline. You usually find that this is much more instructive. But of course it's usually much less provocative and makes worse copy. 

There's examples of this on a daily basis....keep your eyes open. There is a serious point though which is that our opinions are shaped by these sort of soundbites and people often don't have the time or inclination to delve beyond the headline. So the idea takes root that most workplaces are a vipers' nest of seething sexism...or that fairies really do exist (even if young Toby's survey unearthed only a couple of cranks, a headline of "20% of people believe in fairies!" would probably do the trick) or whatever.

The manipulation of the public's opinion on fairies may not be terribly important but back in the 1990s, the masterminds of the New Labour "project" realised that voting intentions could be altered in this way: what matters is not what governments do but what people think they do. OK so there's nothing very new in government propaganda but we in Britain are a fundamentally honest bunch who imagine that the propaganda machine only really revs up in wartime and that the rest of the time, we can believe most of what we're told. In its defence, HMG (of whatever hue) would claim it doesn't actually spout lies but it does help people to deceive themselves. And empolys armies of people to help them do it. And guess what? You pay for it! Great!

It's long been well-known that you can get almost any answer you like to a survey if you phrase the question the right way. I often wonder whether we would have a Scottish parliament, never mind the talk now of complete devolution, had the referendum in question been phrased along the lines of "would you like more of you income to be spent on the salaries of politicians and bureaucrats, rather than on holidays/cars/booze/fags?" Which self-respecting Scot could say "yes" to that?

So - think. Think beyond the headlines. Be wary of any story which starts "x% of people think...." and always realise it implies that y% of people don't think. Be very wary of graphs - in fact best not to look at them at all - whole books have been written on "how to deceive people with graphs".  Remember, you don't know what the rate of inflation or the level of unemployemt is: you only know what you're told and what you're told may not be as accurate as you might think. And if you get a phone call from a nice young chap called Toby, just say no.   

UK's budget deficit gone - at a stroke!

Among the cognoscenti (that's me and you, natch) it's long been well known that to understand the UK's financial problems, all that's needed is to get hold of a copy of Wednesday's Guardian. Turn, if you dare, to the sits vac section. Feel a faintness in the head and a weakness in the knees as you gawp incredulously at the words on the pages: "Assistant Teenage Pregnancy Co-ordinator"; "Anti-smoking Outreach Worker";  "Change Management Process Manager"; "Director: Equality and Diversity Interface Analysis", etc., etc. The pages are filled with jumbled jargon half-remembered by a half-wit HR minion from a distance-learning MA that they acquired free with a subscription to "HR Today" - incorporating "How to look busy while doing nothing monthly" or some such tosh.

After a few minutes browsing the headlines, few amongst us have the will to look further but persevere and your final reserves of life-force will all but evaporate when you see the salary figures these superfluous sinecures attract. Yes it's true: not only do these bizarre jobs exist but they pay more than you get my friend and you do something useful (well so you tell me).

Many of us have long known that public sector salaries have, over the last few years, courtesy of the generosity of Gordon Brown, taken off and locked into orbits ever more distant from planet reality. A recent study by some think tank or other put the gap between public and private sector remuneration at over 40%, when you include those meaty public sector pensions. I can believe it. It takes a long time to overturn a myth widely held as beyond debate but finally the penny is dropping: public sector workers get paid too much and this is why the country's skint.

So the answer to our financial woes then is easy - cut public sector pay. Oh, plus get rid of all the flaky jobs...any job with a title which includes the word counsellor/coordinator/process/change/pregnancy/diversity ought to more or less do it.

But having lanced the boil on the surface, let's consider the nature of the bacteria underneath. How did we get ourselves into this mess? The first, obvious (and true) answer is that Big Gordie threw more money at the public sector than it knew what to do with.  But I've got another angle for you.

In the good old days when public sector people got a good pension and job security in return for working in a nasty little office on the wrong side of town and earning peanuts (they still get the first two of course but now they get the fat salary and the swanky office too), the head honchos were called "Town Clerks" rather than "Chief Executives" or "Hospital administrator" instead of "Strategic Director of  Community Health". As their empires became increasingly bloated, they had to come up with more inventive names to justify that extra tier of management and it all added fuel to the turbo charging of the payroll.  My answer then is to get rid of these silly overblown job titles and go back to basics. The use of the term CEO would be banned throughout the public sector. Ditto the title "Director" and don't even get me started on the "strategic" directors of this world:  did you ever hear of a "non-strategic" director?

Let's get real. The NHS is there to cure the sick. It does not need armies of "directors", whether "strategic", "executive" or otherwise. And your local council is there to empty your bins and fix the pot-holes in your road. The fact that the public sector seems to think this requires a bloke on £200k a year and a Mercedes shows how detached from reality they've become. Giving them some normal job titles would be a big step on the way to bringing them back to earth.

I believe it was George Orwell who created a mythical perfect pub, called the Moon under Water. It's got a different name but for the last 18 years or so, we have been lucky enough to live opposite what we, and many others, think is the perfect pub. Actually luck doesn't come into it - that's why we bought the house. But nothing lasts for ever and the landlord, who has been in post for an astonishing 36 years, is retiring in a couple of weeks. Today we bade farewell to the bloke who does the food, which includes the legendary - and award winning - black pudding sandwich. Yes it's  a black day for black pudding.

What is it about the English pub that is so special? Dr Johnson's assertion that "nothing has yet been devised by man which has given so much please to so many as a pub" still holds true. But the pub is under threat from all sides. Since we've been here, we have seen many local hostelries close. It's been a tough road, trying to survive the drink-driving laws, the smoking ban, competition from other leisure pursuits (although which other pursuits beat going to the pub is beyond me) and increases in taxes. But probably the biggest problem has been the rise in property prices which makes pubs worth more as houses or development sites than as pubs. 

Luckily, our local will survive, at least for the time being and we wish the new tenants well, whilst putting them under enormous pressure not to ruin the place with nasty lager and boil-in-the-bag food (lamb shank? Run for your lives!) But why on earth can the government not recognise the national importance of something which is now more quintessentially English (note - not British - pubs in Scotland and Wales are not usually quite the same thing) than any other institution and do more to protect it? You can see from the list of threats above that most of them are, like most evils in the world, government-made. So it is within the government's power to do something about it.

One concludes that in most areas of life, governments do more harm than good. I'm looking out for a small idyllic land with no government. I'll bet there'll be some good pubs and that you'll be able to smoke in them. (And if there is any bloody lamb shank, it'll be slow cooked on an open fire, probably by a team of local virgins who will also roll you a cigar on their thighs. Sorry, I'm getting carried away.)  If not, I will open one. All suggestions welcome. But for now, it's a question of the landlord is dead, long live the landlord...and mines a pint of bitter!