Thursday 18 June 2009

Been a while

Self-discipline is not my forte. Maybe I need to get riled before I write on this and, now that our politicians are being upstaged by Iranians, I'm not so angry... One thing that is calming anyway though (and I haven't done it for some time) is fishing. I've never written about it, and now there's probably no point anyway, because it's being done terrifically well over at http://caughtbytheriver.net/ as reported today on R4.

The site was set up by the founders of Heavenly records (appropriately home of Doves and Saints such as Ettiene). A number of their roster are now converts to the divine art of fishing and some of their literary contributors are very impressive names who you might not have thought were likely anglers. But it is Britains most popular pastime. Anyone interested in where their food comes from (or what might happen if it didn't turn up one day), soon starts to think about how they would go and get wild food if they ever needed to. So knowing how to fish is a post-apocalyptic skill. It also presents the enticing posibility of being able to catch fish and then beach barbecue it over a massive bonfire before a bit of dancing and maybe getting off with someone. Think Man Friday in Big Wednesday.

But most little boys (and no small number of litle girls) simply want to get a glimpse of a fish up close and long to catch one and hold it in their hands. Take any six year old into a garden centre with an aquatic section and they will be rapt by the alien colour and exotic behaviour of tiny fish. The water is the first alien environment we encounter, the one we can't breathe in, one that is mucky and inaccesible. So it is the biggest mystery a child could unwrap. If there is a hint that there is life in it I am still intent on spotting it. We went to Mile End recently to help develop the park (a lot of weeding in the borders and painting in the ecology pavilion) and the section by the Hertford Union Canal had separating from the group of weary gardeners and dawdling the long way back just in the hope of catching sight of a suspicious eddy or a misplaced bubble, let alone a glimpse of sinuous movement below the surface. 

Tragically this week we were also reminded in the Anglian news of the dangers of being fascinated by water; a six year old cub scout drowned whilst on a river visit. The details haven't been released but such tragedies serve to highlight that the water is dangerous realm and knowledge of it must extend, beyond what it's natives like to eat, into how not to sacrifice oneself to it. I wonder just how much information children get about the risks of going near water, but it seems it would be a very good topic to take into schools. 

Having not done any fishing for over two years (the allotment having become my new outdoor mistress), I am very much looking forward to the day before my birthday in August when I go out on a cat into the channel with a few workmates to livebait for bass and fish a wreck or two. That's going to be some birthday week as I also have an Ashes ticket to Headingly. Feels like it should be a 40th birthday, with such treats going on, but it's only a 38th. 40 will be here son enough though; no need to push it.

One thing I won't be doing is going to glastonbury. Aforementioned Doves are there and I've heard they are good. I should have gone to see The Specials when they had some dates in London and I reckon that if you can't see them in a sweaty (preferably midlands) nightclub, then why not see them on a big sound stage and exploit Terry's singalong choruses; a very different vibe. Having Dreadzone on the Friday is almost like having the perfect support act for the Specials right there. And I don't doubt that a search through the listings would probably reveal a number of other glasto acts that would be worthwhile. But the event (an expensive and  oversubscribed invitation to lose ones personal effects and ruin one clothes in a field whilst trying to spot B list celebs) seems swamped by novelty acts that are not worth the grief. For that level of cost and aggro I would want a sincere and earnest band headlining who are on the very lip of a new cultural wave and who also happen to rock like f*ck. Rolf Harris and Status Quo and Spinal Tap, and even Madness and Bruce Springsteen, do not meet that criteria. Kasabian is the best they can offer and frankly Kasabian are recycling the baggy sound to distraction and I grew out of that in 1990 and have no intention of going back. 

Of course one is curious. And of course a considerable number of irony addled thirty somethings will appreciate the joke. But unlike a Bob Dylan, Nick Cave or Neil Young or when, a few years ago, Rev Al Green played his sunday morning gospel service (pitch perfect and definintely  something high quality that a lot of these attending would never have got into otherwise), these acts were never seminal, not even Springsteen. You can of course see Neil Young next weekend (and there is the tantalising possibility of seeing him hook up with CS and N as well, certainly more interesting than a reformed Blur). But that Neil Young is brilliant live is no longer a secret. The Specials have maybe the best chance of turning on a new audience. Amongst the more recent acts Friendly Fires may be in the box seat when it comes to taking momentum away from the festival on into the rest of the year. 

Tuesday 2 June 2009

Heather Brooke

The MP's scandal has enough momentum to still be current when Britain goes to the pols to elect MEP's on Thursday. That it still has legs owes much to the piecemeal way in which the telegraph has used the information it has. They're not doing it methodically out of probity. It's because they spent money on it and want to recoup the maxium return on their investment one day at a time. I have far more sympathy with Heather Brooke who chose to go about getting this information using the proper means.

When the FOI came out, we all should have seen it for what it was - a fillip. Some information the government never has any intention of providing, no matter how politely you ask or how valid your reasoning. One of Heather's commentors included the following from the Beeb website (can't find the original):

“A cynic would say that the reason they were not too worried about Parliamentary information falling within the Act’s sway was that they were pretty confident that they could keep the most sensitive and damaging material from being released, whatever the legislation. They were probably right, generally speaking. The fact that they were short-sighted about the danger of expense claims being made public is more an indication of how complacent they had become about the system than their ability to calculate risk.


It is blindingly obvious that a UK government will always be able to keep the worst of its secrets, so the FoI Act was never going to be a great leveller. While I welcome its principles, I still think it is a very bad piece of legislation and when taken in conjunction with the Data Protection Act and similar legislation, it is a nightmare for public sector bodies to work within and a gravy train for lawyers.


As a person who once had to respond to FoI requests - many of them ridiculous pursuits of non-existent information by obsessives or blatent attempts by commercial organisations to harvest sales and marketing information - I have to admit to feeling somewhat pleased that the legislators are having a taste of their own medicine.”

Interesting point. Legislation to some factions is bad per se. Whereas in reality bad legislation is doing damage to the principle that some things require legislating. Some distinction needs to be made. We have a crecession that could have been avoided with proper legislative control of the banking sector. And the banking sector itself is able to argue still that legislation would stifle innovation and economic development in the teeth of foreclosures and redundancies. The poverty of some legislation seems almost wilfull, as if the ability to make laws is some how compromised. Now we know; lawmakers themselves do not have a unalloyed approach to their business. Not only are the compromised by lobbyists and compromised by the despearate need to maintain an image of themselves in the popular press and compromised by the whip of party politics and compromised by the careerist pursuit of the right side of a fence; they are now exposed as fatally compromised in their personal probity. You can shrug off the other things as "politics" because they are all circumstantial in comparison. And the point was made ably by Ian Hislop: Think about what other things MP's decide to spend tax payers money on.

I do have one slight caveat where the lovely Heather is concerned. Journalists who request information who are on fishing expeditions are really helping their own careers, win or lose the information they're after. They're not prioritising in the way that the public needs. I must admit that the scatter gun record of Ms Brookes requests on her website suggest either she selects her targets randomly in order to illustrate that evasiveness is endemic in public bodies, and to fortify her reputation as a slogger through all the knock backs she is inevitably going to get, or else she has some pattern relating to personal interest (although I can't piece together what that might be). Her requests for fire inspection reports from the LFEPA in 2005 seems totally random to me. Anyone who has conducted the brigade through fire inspections can be pretty sure there is very little dirt to dig. Either the brigade fail to inspect properly (and it would take a second inspection of the same building by another expert to verify, and on a different day through different eyes there will always be a different verdict - 10 building surveyors won't agree; either way it's not a job for a hack however clever she is), or there was a proper inspection, a building is in dire need of improvement to avoid very obvious fire hazards, in which case the landlord must be taken to task. But that is the job of the fire brigade. If they fail in that duty, and they very rarely ever do, their own colleagues will have to risk their lives putting out a fire. Fire Brigade inspections are carried out by brigade officers who have previously served on machines, fought fires and lost colleagues. There is literally nothing the fire brigade like less than risking their own men, despite what you might think. They really do take their duties very seriously indeed, have the powers available to prosecute and are always anxious do so where the risk is great, and have been freed up by the Reform Order to get on with inspecting genuinely risky properties and leaving low risk office buildings to the landlords. They don't believe the inspection reports meet the requirements of the FOI but they don't have anything to hide. It's not evasiveness for the sake of it. It's that they have a job to do. Exposing the rather prosaic proceedings of systematic checks that reveal some fire doors in M&S have closing forces below 30N is hardly shaking the foundations of the country. No one wants less fires thatn the fire brigade and no one works harder to reduce the number of them. How can you reproach them for not creating golden opporuntities to undermine their work, even were Ms Brooke the proud possessor of a Masters in Fire Engineering from Strathclyde. What Ms Brooke should investigate is the record of the CPS in bringing prosecutions where the fire brigade request them. 

Nevertheless, Ms Brooke does deserve the plaudits she is now getting for her persistence. I just wonder if the Torygraph hacks hadn't done a deal with brown envelopes in a darkebned multistorey whether her investigations into expenses would have been as fruitless as some of her other investigations have been. I guess the really great skill as an investigative journalists is the correctness of one's instinct that one is realy on to something. No one likes being asked questions. Ask anyone who has been cornered by revenue protection officers on a London bus and asked to show their oyster card to a portable reader. 
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