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welcome to simon's blog. on it i'm mainly commenting on the news stories of the day - mostly i'm commenting on whether i think it really was a true story or whether it just seemed to be something put in the programme or the paper just to pad out the space on a slow news day, but since it's my blog, i reserve the right to put my own articles in it too.
These are my most recent blog posts; you can also subscribe to an rss feed 
if that's your thing:
New hope over JFK mural row
http://tinyurl.com/6km2m4"BIRMINGHAM’S historic John F Kennedy memorial is now being touted to a second major developer after being rejected by the city’s Irish Quarter. The mosaic, in storage since being removed from St Chad’s Circus two years ago, is now being offered to Kuwaiti property developer Salhia to include in its plans for the Beorma Quarter, in Digbeth".
That's good to know - but what about the other mural which used to surround the Kennedy mosaic in that location?
Sadly that mural is lost forever, as rather than being lifted off the walls and placed into storage for future restoration, the bulldozers simply smashed it to smithereens.
Most people would call that vandalism.
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Andy Mabbett - 18 June 2008
We've also lost the Civil War mural at Steelhosue Lane and the Horsefair mural is also showing signs of neglect.
60 post offices set for closure - 18 June 2008
http://tinyurl.com/5k7z8z"ALMOST 60 Post Offices are set to close across the West Midlands - with protests by customers doomed to failure. The Government admitted today that residents will not be able to block post office closures when they are finally confirmed next week. The savage round of cuts, caused by increasing numbers of customers going online for benefit payments and other services, will hit one in six post office branches nationwide".
Heaven forfend the Post Office being treated by government as an essential public service - where post offices are kept open according to social need rather than according to profitability, where taxation is used to subsidise the essential public service where that service doesn't make a surplus on its own.
It's all very well blaming the loss of customers on the increase in services provided online, but at the end of the day you can't weight a parcel online, and you can't hand it over the counter online. And since it is now so difficult to actually use a post office for other services, is it any wonder more and more people do it online anyway - the last time I tried to tax my car at the post office (in order to do my bit to stem the loss of customers) I ended up giving up because of the two post offices remaining in the city centre, the one less further away from me had the queue trailing out of the door and along the street.
Especially facile was Labour MP Gisela Stuart's comment:
"It is very easy for Opposition parties to accuse the Government of recklessly closing post offices; they have done so over the past few years, especially during election campaigns".Indeed it is easy for them to do this - because the government are making it easy for them by recklessly closing post offices !
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'Don't panic-buy' motorists urged - but are the lorry drivers worth their demanded payrise? - 13 June 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7452033.stm"Drivers are being urged to buy only the fuel they need as more than 600 tanker drivers begin a four-day strike. The strike was called after Unite said the improved pay offer from Hoyer UK and Suckling Transport, who employ the drivers, was 'not sufficient'. However, the employers said their latest offer was as much as they could afford and would take drivers' average earnings to about £41,500, up from the current average salary of £36,500".
Generally, I try not to worry about how much other people are paid, in terms of what often gets described as 'inflated salaries'. The way I see it, if a business thinks a job is worth what most people consider to be a lot of money, then fair play to them - it is, after all, their business.
Pay rises though are different - if a group of workers think they deserve a payrise in excess of the annual cost of living allowance (which I myself haven't even had for over four years), then I do think they have to prove their worth. Especially if their current wage is higher than what most people would consider to be 'average'.
Where I also consider average to be relevant is the hardship of doing the job - and the choice the worker has to do it. The way I see it, the more over average (which I think most people would put at somewhere around £25,000 per year) one is paid, the less room you have to complain about the privations of your job; if you do a difficult job for £35k a year, you always have the choice to do an easier one for £25k a year.
So coming to the petrol drivers' strike - I've no doubt that driving a lorry full of petrol is a tough job, and like many lorry drivers they find it much harder to stay as in touch with their families as people who work in offices. But at the end of the day, if they don't like the conditions, they can always get jobs paying half the salary like many other people.
In Today's Economic Climate(tm), is demanding a £5 grand pay increase from £36.5k to £41.5k not, well, taking the mickey a bit?
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Bursting - 2 June 2008
It doesn't matter how badly you need to go, you'll still get a parking ticket…
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MPs to vote on abortion limit cut - 20 May 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7409696.stm"MPs are to vote on the emotive issue of cutting the abortion time limit on the second day of debates on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. An amendment to the government's bill has been put forward to reduce the upper time limit on abortions from 24 weeks to 20 weeks or less. Health Minister Dawn Primarolo insists there is no evidence requiring the abortion laws to be changed. She told BBC News: 'There is no science that shows us that the survival rates have changed since we took the decision to have the time limit at 24 weeks'".
A few points on where I stand to get out of the way straight away:
- I believe terminating a healthy, sentient, human life without its consent to be ethically wrong, full stop
- I would prefer in an ideal, civilised, utopian society that abortions didn't happen, or need to happen
- I accept we don't live in an ideal, civilised, utopian society, and that ethics, like politics, is the art of the possible tempered by pragmatism and compromise, and that
- although two wrongs never make a right, sometimes one wrong can mitigate the worst effects of another wrong
- I believe a woman has the right to choose what happens in and to her own body up to the point of terminating a healthy, sentient, human life.
So in some respect, you might say that where I stand is firmly on the fence. However that wouldn't be strictly correct; the key phrase for me is the one of the sentient human life; I do not believe there is anything magical about the point when a sperm burrows its way into an egg which immediately creates a sentient human life - to my mind the collection of cells which are formed in the first few weeks of a pregnancy are no more of a sentient human life than the collections of sperms and eggs which live in their separate containers beforehand.
So to my mind, the whole basis of the debate about abortion is based on the question, "at what point does the developing collection of cells become a sentient human being?"
At this point in human evolution, 'science' cannot provide the unarguable, definitive answer, & 'religion' does not speak an answer with one united voice - Roman Catholicism goes as far as saying every sperm is sacred even before conception, whereas other denominations and religions range from having conception be the point at which life begins, through a point somewhat later, to not actually stating an opinion at all.
My own view is the collection of cells becomes a sentient human life at the point where it takes on a personality - and practically every woman who has felt a baby inside herself and especially seen the picture of it on the ultrasound screen knows there is a point when that happens; generally it's thought that point occurs at some point in the second trimester of pregnancy; it's also generally agreed in reproductive science that its not until the second trimester that the pregnancy can be said to be established - spontaneous auto-termination can and does happen frequently and at any time during the first trimester.
So in my framework, sentience begins at a fuzzy point on a fuzzy line between the second and third trimesters.
And to my mind, the law should also be fuzzy about it.
Certainly, the number of people who subscribe to the religious belief that all abortion is wrong full stop are in a clear minority, so clearly that view should not be the one which prevails in law.
A just, ethical law would set an earlier time limit before which any abortion can take place on-demand, no questions asked, and a later time limit after which no abortion can take place regardless of circumstances. In the middle period, the sanctioning of an abortion should be something to which a great deal of thought has to be given, involving more people than just the woman carrying the pregnancy and the doctor(s) who would be carrying out the procedure; the granting of an abortion should be by no means automatic, but similarly it should by no means be automatically denied.
As to how to determine the timings of those points - well, they're only ever going to be arbitrary. It would make sense to make the earlier point the end of the first trimester, so why not make the second point the end of the second trimester? That would seem to me to be no less arbitrary than the - to me - entirely irrelevant, and shifting, point of at what point this year a premature baby can survive with medical assistance.
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Comments:
Alison - 20 May 2008
I agree the issue of at what point a baby can survive if prematurely born is pretty tangential to the abortion time limit. I would count the forming of a human life as at conception, but as for sentience I have no idea. Something to do with consciousness and pain, but who can tell that?
I'm also like you in that my position looks like fence-sitting but isn't - I think abortion is immoral, but I don't think it should be illegal. I think eating meat and drinking alcohol and a whole host of other things are immoral too, but I don't expect my personal morality to be reflected exactly in the law. I personally would not abort in any circumstance I can imagine. But what gets me about the pro-life position is that they are expecting a woman to do something with her body against her will, namely, carry a child in it. If they could take the child out as easily as they could administer an abortion, then I think they would have a case that the former should happen. But if they can't, then for me it's a choice the woman has to make herself. The attempt to control a woman's body like that smacks in my head of institutionalised rape. That's not something I would sanction the law to do.
I appreciate my position does not make much sense to people other than me, by the way :-)
Birmingham Carling Academy to move to The Dome - 19 May 2008
http://tinyurl.com/6ltndc"A landmark city centre nightclub, which has been silent for four years, could soon be rocking to the tunes of the world’s biggest rock and pop acts. The former Dome nightclub on Bristol Street is to be given a £4 million overhaul to become the new home of the Birmingham Carling Academy".
On the one hand this is clearly good news that the future of the Academy is now secured, in the shadow of the plans for the demolition of its current site on Dale End to make way for the forthcoming Martineau Galleries development.
On the other hand, whilst its good the Academy has found a new home at all, I do worry about that location compared to the current one, which is slap bang in the middle of the city centre. The new location will be perfect for the Birmingham University students coming in on the bus (and of course those of us who live in the city centre already who go to gigs...), but it does become a little out of the way for everybody else - especially when it comes to getting a bus home at the end of the night. That almost certainly won't affect the big name bands who play at the Academy (and its predecessor, the Hummingbird), but it has to be remembered not all the Academy's bands are big names - there's always been a tradition of smaller bands playing there (I've even played there myself!), which an increased trip time could make all the difference between getting a decent audience and not even getting the dog to turn out to see you.
But particularly depressing was the quote in the news story further down the page:
City licensing chiefs gave the go ahead for the move to Bristol Street despite protests from local residents and the nearby St Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church and Primary School over fears of anti-social behaviour and late night noise.
They claim the venue will attract a large number of binge drinkers, drug takers and with them vandalism, litter and late night noise as well as disturbances from taxis and traffic.
Nice to see the church there stereotyping all people who go to listen to popular beat combos as being drug-crazed binge-drinking knife-wielding window-breaking yobbos.
Would it be unkind of me to equally stereotype churches, and especially Roman Catholic churches, and church primary schools as brain-washing alterboy-abusing money-grabbing control freaks?
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Surface Unsigned Festival - nasty litigious pay-to-play bullies - 19 May 2008
http://peteashton.com/2008/05/surface_unsigned_are_fools/Reports are flying today through the twitosphere & the blogosphere about some less than community minded behaviour on the part of the Surface Unsigned Festival of rock bands taking place in Birmingham at the Rainbow & the Medicine Bar.
This is basically a 'battle of the bands' competition, but it turns out that each band on any given night (of six bands) has to sell at least 25 tickets at £6 in order to go through to the next round of the competition - so effectively the band has to cover £150 for each night they play a 20 minute set in; given many nights of the event there have reportedly barely been 25 people in the venue, let alone 150 people, it's not hard to work out what might be going on - the bands have been having to stump up that cash themselves.
Now operating a pay-to-play is bad enough, but at least the bands have chosen those terms & conditions of their own free will - stoopid as they might be for doing so. But in what can only be described as a PR own goal, the operators of the Surface Unsigned Festival have sent a legal cease-&-desist take-down notice to the main blog for the creative industries in birmingham, Created in Birmingham, for criticising this practice, claiming copyright violation for reprinting the paragraph from the terms & conditions the bands had to sign containing the evidence of the policy.
Do we want this kind of behaviour from music promoters in Birmingham ?
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simon - 20 May 2008
Update - The Stirrer now has an interview with the organiser of Surface Unsigned; for some reason, the organiser has asked in the interview to remain anonymous.
Additionally, I note that the Surface Unsigned - which is a company registered at Companies House - website has no real-world contact information on it; if I'm not mistaken, its actually a legal requirement now for companies to make transparent their real-world registered office address, so for Surface Unsigned to be not doing so, there's something wrong going on. ironically, the main reason why it's a legal requirement is to make it possible for a dissatisfied client to initiate legal action in the event of a problem.
But regardless of the whys & the wherefores, one does have to wonder, if Surface Unsigned is a completely legitimate operation, why they (a) have a confidentiality / non-disclosure clause in their contracts preventing bands from telling people they are having to pay to play in the competition, & (b) why they are so keen to try to maintain their anonymity ?
Animated Graffiti - 15 May 2008
http://www.vimeo.com/993998Generally I don't post links to other creative work or whatever here, because that isn't really the purpose of this blog.
But I thought this video, made by Graffiti artist Blu was so absolutely brilliant I had to share it:
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
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CCTV boom 'failing to cut crime' - 6 May 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7384843.stm"Huge investment in closed-circuit TV technology has failed to cut UK crime, a senior police officer has warned. Det Ch Insp Mike Neville said the system was an 'utter fiasco' - with only 3% of London's street robberies being solved using security cameras".
It just so happens that the other week I did have the idea that if it could be demonstrated that CCTV genuinely does reduce crime - especially violent crime - then I'd modify my objection to it. So I carefully constructed a freedom of information act request to try to get figures going back over the last 10 years to find out if CCTV had made any difference - basically, to compare convictions for violent crime with and without CCTV evidence, and to track the level of violent crime over the years of the gradual proliferation of the cameras:
Dear West Midlands Police,I also offered several easy get-out options if it would have made answering the query easier.
I would be grateful if you could supply me with some information under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act:
- Number of reported instances of 'violent crime' (muggings, robberies, assaults etc) in public areas (including 'private public space' such as eg Bull Ring centres & Paradise Forum etc) of Birmingham city centre (as defined as being within the divisional areas of Steelhouse Lane and Digbeth police stations) during 1987.
- Number of convictions secured for above offences during the same year.
- Number of reported instances of 'violent crime' (muggings, robberies, assaults etc) in public areas (including 'private public space' such as eg Bull Ring centres & Paradise Forum etc) of Birmingham city centre (as defined as being within the divisional areas of Steelhouse Lane and Digbeth police stations) during the years 1997 - 2007, broken down by year.
- Number of instances of violent crime in public areas (as defined above) viewed and recorded by operatives on CCTV routinely accessed or operated by West Midlands Police during the years 1997 - 2007, broken down by year.
- Total number of convictions for offences in (3) above, broken down by year as above.
- Number of convictions for offences in (3) above where CCTV evidence was submitted in evidence to the court, again broken down by year.
- Number of acquittals for offences in (3) above where CCTV evidence was submitted, again broken down by year.
Here is their reply:
Your request for information, received 15 April 2008, concerning violent crime and CCTV, has now been considered.Or to put it in simpler terms, "we don't actually know if CCTV makes a difference, and it's too much like effort to look at the records and find out".
Firstly West Midlands Police can only provide data back to 1995.
Secondly, West Midlands Police do not specify whether a crime has occurred in a 'public place' or not. We do have a marker for 'public place violence', but this does not record all violent crime. This marker is used
Thirdly we would not be able to tell whether crimes have been recorded on CCTV, unless we have used it as evidence. However our databases of recorded crime do not record which evidence was used. We therefore cannot easily identify where CCTV evidence was utilised.
The only way to identify those crimes would be examine the records for each individual crime. Please note that researching each individual crime file would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12 (1)). For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond. In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a refusal notice.
However, the Home Office does have some statistics on violent crime nationally, without necessarily recording whether CCTV has made a difference to the conviction; according to their published statistics violent crime nationally has been on the rise since 1999, with an apparent levelling off in 2005/06 (no figures there for 2006/07 or 07/08).
If the ability to have one's movements be closely monitored throughout the whole area of a city centre is so good 'for our protection', why hasn't there been a clear decline in violent crime over the years that CCTV has proliferated ?
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What kind of Facebook person are you? - 30 April 2008
![[List of Facebook groups a certain unknown person is a member of]](/birmingham/db/images/albert/162.jpg)
When I first started using Facebook I very quickly noticed that in most of the Facebook groups in existence have very little actual traffic in them; basically, most Facebook groups seem to be treated by people as badges to pin on to the sides of their profile pages to tell people a little bit about what they're into, what kind of person they are.
A friend recently emailed me a screenshot from a profile page he'd recently come across. It is reproduced here without further comment…
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