an immedia reaction

No, not the song by Lily Allen, but the news that an £80m transfer fee has been agreed for Cristiano Ronaldo to move to Real Madrid. He is 24.

I’m 24, why isn’t someone paying £80m for my skills and experience?? Admittedly, I don’t know what Ronaldo’s actual salary will be when he gets to Madrid, but £80m is a mind-blowing amount of money.

More importantly, what the hell is Gordon Brown doing commenting on it?

That’s not what I advised in my last entry at all. It’s good to see they rate his opinion so highly that he’s at the very bottom of the article.

What follows below is slightly dependent on the outcome of the European elections, which we won’t really know until tomorrow. The PM might well be out of a job by Monday. I’m not saying this would be the best strategy for the UK as a whole, but if I were Gordon Brown, here’s what I would do:

Call a General Election for November/January. It confounds my enemies both within and without. The opposition parties will claim a victory, because they’ve been calling for one for a while, but they’re just as damaged by the expenses scandal as we are. If I drag it out, it’ll just make me look indecisive. More importantly, the sooner there is an election, the less likely I am to face a challenge over my leadership. If an election is imminent, the Parliamentary Labour Party will have to pull together to make sure we don’t get absolutely massacred. Plus, they’ll be relying on the party apparatus to help them get elected.

Then, because the expenses scandal has put an end to our hope of running an effective government, radically overhauling that has to be our priority. I’ll put together an independent committee including MPs from each party in proportion to the numbers in the house. I’ll also get some people from the judiciary and a random sample of 15 of the General Public so they feel included, with some civil servants on hand to provide information on how things currently work. They will have six weeks to come up with a list of proposals comprising a radical shakeup of the system.

Then, I will hold a public referendum on the new system, to be legally binding. And give everyone the day off work so they can vote on it. Each proposal will be voted on individually. If people don’t like what we’ve come up with, they can hardly say we didn’t try. The importance of having a working system in place before we elect new politicians will be stressed. I will also launch a counter-offensive and draw attention to the MPs in Parliament who haven’t abused their expenses. Even if they’re not members of my party. There must be some somewhere…

All that done, I will gather my Cabinet about me and will concentrate on the economy until the election.

From Hannah’s perspective, there’s no guarantee any of that will work, but it would certainly be better than what we have now, which is an indecisive government in a tailspin.

Things have taken a turn for the exciting lately. As of a month ago, I started working on a daily paper. This has severely limited both my time and energy. I’m not ready to throw in the towel on this project just yet, but I think I need to try and give myself a more realistic update schedule. Maybe once or twice a week, instead of never. We’ll see how it goes!

This is just to apologise, again, for the lack of updates. My internet connection does not love me. The wonderful person who hosts this site for me is also going to move webhosting soon, so I’m disabling comments for a while and the site may be inaccessible. I promise I’ll post again when we’re definitely settled. Thank you, sole reader, for your patience!

I’ve decided there are certain words and phrases I’m going to try, where possible, to ban from my professional written vocabulary. I don’t have an exhaustive list yet, but so far, the nominees are:

• community
• partnership(s)
• empower/ing/ed
• anti-social behaviour

I reckon if I can expunge those four dread creations from my work, the clarity (quality?!) of my writing will significantly increase. The importance of word choice is a favourite hobby horse of mine but I really feel it’s something worth taking a stand on. We will fight politically abusive language on the beaches and in our column inches. I’m not saying I regularly use these words anyway, but they appear in so many press releases we’re sent that if you use any of the press release at all, it’s a skill in itself to weed them all out.

This post was sparked by a press release mentioning the work of a “partnership” to “break down barriers in the community”. Can I say “Wut?” If it’s a community, surely the barriers are around it, not in it? But before we get ourselves in a tizzy trying to unravel that, I’ll move on.

To explain: In his brilliant book, Unspeak, Steven Poole attacks the use of “community” as divisive, pointing out that it is frequently used to label minority groups and set them apart. F’rinstance, we hear of the Jewish community and the gay community, but never the white community. In my regional journalist world, “community” seems increasingly to be used to mean “anyone above the age of 21 who is obviously not a cider-drinking, beer-swilling, hoodie-wearing, chavvy little scumbag”. Given that I’m also sick to the back teeth of ageism directed against young people, I’m going to refuse to use it on that basis that is divisive and discriminatory.

Partnerships: the use of this word annoys me because it is often used in a way that I think is incorrect. It’s also an excuse for every local government association with a profile and an agenda to push to muscle in on any coverage. People I speak to recite them like a mantra “You have to say thank you to the housing association and the police and the council and the mayor’s sister’s puppy.” Ok, maybe not the last one, but you can bet, nine times out of ten, none of these groups were responsible for the bright idea behind the story. They’re just coming in at the 11th hour and making themselves look good. I’ll admit they probably do bring something to the table on occasion, but I’m not there to flatter them. I’m there to make sure they’re doing their jobs properly. But mainly it annoys me because it’s used to describe groups of MORE THAN TWO. I know there are usually more than two partners in firms and such, but the overriding use I associate with it is to mean one body and then another. TWO. Not, three, six or ten. Two. You and your partner, not you and your multiple lovers having a mass orgy.

Empower/ed/ing: It’s over-used. And often belittling. The organisations who gather together in these monstrous perversions of “partnerships” between more than two entities often use it in their blurb to describe the ordinary bloke or blokette on the street who has had the idea they’re trying to pinch the credit for. They say “they’re empowered by what we’ve been doing here.” My considered response: O rly? It’s the least evil of the four, but I still don’t like it.

Anti-social behaviour: I remain convinced the Blair government invented this phrase. I’d never heard of it before 1997. And it seems that the problem it claims to describe has grown unstoppably with the popularity of these three little words. I’ve had more conversations than I care to count with local policemen describing large groups of da yoof hanging around in town as “anti-social” with none of them picking up on my heavy sarcasm that gathering together in a group should perhaps be classified as “social behaviour”. Their typical response has been that they’re “frightening the wider community” which da yoof are apparently not included in. And when it gets to the point where the police have powers to make it a criminal offence for someone to stand on a particular stretch of pavement within in a given amount of time, after having previously told to clear orff, you really do wonder what is going on. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people found that dispersal orders just move “the problem” to another place. As a concept, anti-social behaviour is a load of round objects.

And the whole thing reaches a gloriously awful climax in PACT meetings, which stands for Partnerships And Communities Together. Which I reckon essentially means “Groups of people and some other groups of people come together to form a group. Of people.” They’re meetings when the General Public can come and have a whinge about whatever is on their minds to local bobbies and ultra-local councillors. They’re a stark illustration of just how excluding the word “community” can be. I’m not suggesting this was anyone’s fault, but when I went to PACT meetings regularly in Cardiff, everyone there was over 30. The only representative of anyone younger, apart from me who didn’t count, was a local authority youth worker. Who was coincidentally the only black person in the room.

I’m fighting a War on Language. WOL for short. Who’s with me?

Shortly after I wrote the last post, my internet connection died. The man I’m renting my room from is away in Germany and when I called up Orange they couldn’t do much because a) I’m not the account holder and b) the connection doesn’t use an Orange livebox. I was also working several nights last week and didn’t manage to get round to calling anyone until Thursday.

I’m currently in Birmingham, making use of a friend’s connection. But I have no idea when I’ll be back regularly. I’ll try getting it fixed again this week. But I’m not hugely hopeful of success. Bah.

As you might have noticed, it has been snowing rather a lot lately. From some of the media coverage, you would think this was the end of the world as we know it, but it’s the oldest chestnut in the stable, to the point where it’s practically a horse in a wheelchair, which is wheeled out every time it gets a little bit cold.

Weather stories annoy me, we have weather all the time, I can’t be the only one who has noticed this. Weather stories are lazy journalism. Papers have been filling their pages with heaps of pictures of people playing in the snow. It’s easy to do and fills lots of space with relative ease, at a time when transport is difficult and journalists, like everyone else, don’t want to get snowed in. I’ll admit it, I’m lucky that I live about two miles from work, but still.

Weather is nothing new. Yes, it’s provided a welcome distraction from the credit crunch and the wildcat strikes, but there are any number of more important things going on out there. I know we don’t get snow very often and that our public infrastructure is supremely bad at coping with it, but this point is made every single time Britain experiences a snow shower. You only have to look at this evening’s Snowmail (Channel 4’s daily e-mail taster of what’s coming up on the evening programme to see that there’s any number of more interesting things happening. Here’s an extract from their list:

• The row between Britain and America over the determination under all circumstances by the US authorities to keep secret the contents of a torture trial in Britain continues.
• Lindsey Hilsum is in Tehran tonight as the authorities effectively close down the British Council. The fascinating aspect of this is that they are doing so on the eve of the opening of one of the most important exhibitions about Iran, at the British Museum.
• There’s a huge row developing over potential bonuses being paid to managers at the Royal Bank of Scotland, the day after Barack Obama capped such payments in America’s nationalised banks. RBS is all but nationalised, and MPs are jumping up and down. Gary Gibbon has the story.
• We’re also looking at the strange and long-ago death of Dr Haim, the Nazi experimenter and one of the most wanted. I say strange because he died at least 17 years ago, leaving a vast amount of money in a bank account, and the normally reliable Simon Wiesenthal Center was convinced he was still with us. Rags Martel explains all, at seven.

I’m not saying that bad weather can’t generate good stories. But until the bad weather causes something to happen that isn’t exactly the same as “more weather” I personally don’t see it as headline material. The girl who died after sledging into a barbed wire fence. That’s news. But she gets lumped in with updates that there has been more snow. Personally, I think that’s disgraceful. We were talking about the story in our office, even though it’s nowhere near our patch. It’s the kind of terrible event that strikes a chord, irrespective of where you are from. If I were doing a local update on the weather situation, I wouldn’t include her story in the main body of an article, I would put it on the same page, in a snow section maybe, but I wouldn’t bundle it in with “snow scenes across the county”. Just arg, no.

But maybe I’m just a cynical newbie to this game who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I’m sure local people are actually pretty chuffed that their snow pictures are making it in to the local dailies and after all, life’s pretty much stopped because of the weather, right? Let’s try for filming hilarious footage of people falling down icy steps like incompetent penguins. Bread and circuses anyone?

However, the duration of the snowy spell has led to some interesting angles. And this is where I get to be a tiny bit smug. Britain is running out of road salt. Now that’s a story. Because we’ve been hearing all week that there was a possibility this snow could keep coming for a while. And perhaps someone working on such things should have enough foresight to think “Hey, maybe getting in some more grit would be a good idea?!” What will be interesting is seeing whether central government will respond to calls from the Local Government Association to take the lead on this to resolve shortages.

Why am I smug? Not because I want our roads to become horrifying, snarled-up death traps that’s for sure. But because, yesterday, I asked Shropshire County Council how much salt they had used, how much they had left and where they were getting it from. In response, I was told they’d used 2,200 tonnes since the beginning of the week, had enough to last the predicted snowfall, but not any more and they wouldn’t be sent any more for the rest of this week. And what was national news this morning? The grit shortage. It’s nice to be ahead of the game.

Is there anybody out there?

This year got off to a better start in blogging terms, I managed to update fairly consistently for a couple of weeks. And then came the am-dram. And the change of job to a town an hour away.
I was in an amateur production of Cinderella for eight shows and started having to commute two hours a day between Ludlow and Shrewsbury. I moved house last weekend but my life is still pretty much contained in boxes that I’m slowly, but surely, unpacking.
There have been several things weighing on my mind lately that I feel deserve some online dissection, but some of them will have to wait a while. I’ll freely admit I’m only writing this entry (and the next one) as an extended form of procrastination. There are so many boxes, it’s rather daunting.

But once everything is unpacked and all the surplus paperwork is thrown out or shredded, I’ll be able to get back to this more regularly. Right, here goes.

I have been a member of Amnesty International for a little over two years. As I explained in this post, I joined after hearing the account of a prisoner who suffered two years of imprisonment and torture. Sad to say, in the two years I have been a member, I have done little to help beyond give them a subscription and buy some of my Christmas presents from their catalogue.

This week, I wrote a letter to David Miliband, through the Amnesty website, asking him to do more to help the situation in Gaza. It’s not much, but it’s a start. If that’s one resolution I can make this year, and stick to, it’s to do more for Amnesty. They’ve achieved so much over the years, simply by getting people to write letters. In the age of the e-mail, there’s really no excuse. It takes five minutes. I think one of the reasons I haven’t contributed much is because I’ve felt that writing a letter is not going to change anything. And on it’s own, it won’t. But Amnesty has shown time and again that large groups of people can bring about change. And who knows? If I’m ever particularly inspired, the turn of phrase I use might just persuade someone, somewhere, to change their minds. The right word in the right place could change the world. I’m not saying they’ll be my words, but they could be anyone’s.

So go on, get involved. Write a letter. Or, if you can afford it, make a donation.

“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” So reads the new slogan on some of London’s buses this week. The stunt by the British Humanist Association has drawn mixed reactions from Christians, but now some spoilsport evangelicals have suffered a complete sense of humour failure and complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. It’s not all bad news though, some Christians are enjoying the debate.

I would call myself an agnostic and I’m certainly no fan of Richard Dawkins who, not to point too fine a point on it, gets so far up my nostrils he’s practically moved in and built a small room where he jumps up and down on a regular basis just to annoy me. But I think he makes a fair point in the BBC article, we see so many adverts preaching divine salvation, what’s wrong with a little balance from the other side?

The group complaining have asked the ASA whether the British Humanist Association’s claim of “probably” no God can be substantiated. I can’t claim to be an expert on either ASA regulations or probability. But, if you’re an atheist, on the balance of probabilities, you would say God did not exist, therefore the slogan is entirely correct and not a false claim. It’s all about how you define the balance of probabilities and atheists and believers have been arguing about that for decades. I don’t think this is a situation where people are going to be “taken in” by the claims of the slogan, as such. It’s not saying that believing this will get rid of the bags under your eyes and cover up those unsightly thread veins, on the basis of zero scientific evidence. Belief is a very personal matter and I wouldn’t be surprised if no two people on this planet held identical views on the existence, or otherwise, of God.

Atheists can’t prove God exists, but neither can believers prove that he does. The whole point of belief is faith without proof. If the ASA were to rule that slogan breached advertising regulations by stating something that isn’t true, I reckon the BHA would be in a position to complain about numerous religious adverts making similarly unprovable claims.