by David Merrigan

The amount of the refund is not quite life-changing, but it’s certainly game-changing as far as my own personal finances are concerned, especially since theoretically I should have another refund for similar  mis-sold PPI on another, now paid-off personal loan, due to me in the new year, once I get around to putting in the claim for it.

Now, I’m not going to deny that I’ve initially had a little bit of fun with the cash, by upgrading my camera equipment to help me to make better videos. Since I do that kind of thing as a ‘work’ activity (even though I don’t get paid for it), I think that’s a reasonable luxury I can grant myself. I’m also intending to put aside a little bit of the money so that I have ready access to ready cash in order to not have to always shop first in the reduced fridge at the supermarket – to know that actually, I now can afford to follow some principles in terms of looking at the origin of the piece of meat, and favour ethical production practices over dubious ones.

But the lion’s share of the cash I am indeed being sensible with, by using it to make a significant dent in paying off my remaining personal debt, and reducing the amount of my monthly income which goes into paying off that personal debt.

And that’s where the insanity comes in.

The balance of the loan on which the PPI has been refunded is £1,680, at an interest rate of 15.5%, with six remaining instalments to pay of £290 a month.

That’s not the only debt I have – there’s also three credit cards, one of which has a balance of £5,400 at an interest rate of 25.5%, and a monthly payment of £120.

Can you see what’s silly there?

For 95% of the population, debt is a reality, and not necessarily one to be afraid or ashamed of; few people under the age of 50 are truly completely free of debt, whether it’s a personal loan, a mortgage, student debt, or credit card debt.

The misery of debt is not, for most people, the actual balance of the debt, because that’s something which is purely notional and fictitious – it’s a number on a piece of paper they receive each month. The true misery of debt is not the balance, but the monthly payment required to service that debt – and the difficulty of seeing an end to that monthly payment in sight.

So for me, with a big wodge of wedge at hand to do something about clearing my own personal EU debt mountain, it’s insane to be presented with a choice of either clearing a (relatively) small debt attracting a (relatively) low interest rate entirely, or making a significant inroads into a much larger debt attracting a higher interest rate. The choice between releasing an expenditure of £290 a month or one of £120 a month is an obvious one – take the money, not the car. Realistically, big as the PPI windfall was, the most which could be put aside is £3,000, so actually that becomes a choice of releasing £290 a month or £70 a month.

The insanity of personal credit is how the repayments on credit cards work – not the higher interest rates, but the very mechanism by which the minimum payment – which let’s face it is what most people pay each month – doesn’t actually pay off the debt, it merely pays the monthly interest charge on the debt. The way the debt is structured, the credit card company holds all the power over the credit card owner; there’s no incentive for the company for you to pay off your credit card, because – like a gangland loanshark – the longer you remain in debt to them, the more money they will make out of you, way in excess of what you’ve actually borrowed from them. There’s no incentive for you yourself to pay off your credit card, because to do so will make little difference to what actually matters to you – your monthly outgoings.

This surely should be an area where government intervention should come into play?

It seems to me that the legislation around credit cards should be modified so that the customer is incentivised to not build up such a high credit card debt in the first place, to ensure that the monthly repayments are structured in such a way that the minimum monthly payment ensures they are always paying of a certain minimum amount of what they actually owe rather than just paying the interest, and that if the customer comes into a cash windfall, the monthly payment they are paying is sufficient that it will always be worth their while to pay off more than even the increased minimum amount.

If the customer then spends into that repayment the next month, then that is their concern – but the debt should always be structured in such a way that the balance of power of repaying it is put in to the hands of the customer, not the credit card company.

And in the meanwhile, if you’ve had a loan and paid payment protection insurance on it, consider the possibility that you too might be entitled to a refund; the classic reasons why you would definitely be entitled would be if your employment status was temporary, or self-employed at the time of the loan – but even if you were fully employed, being able to demonstrate that you were told it was an automatic part of the loan will be enough to get you a refund. You’ve got nothing to lose by making a claim! You don’t need to engage the services of a dodgy no-win-no-fee claims management lawyer (who will take a sizeable cut of your refund) – I just went into the bank and said ‘I want to make a complaint’, gave them the details, and six weeks later the money was in my account.

And of course, I’ve paid off the loan first.

White poppies from the Peace Pledge Union

It has reached – hopefully – its zenith this year with an argument with FIFA about whether British football players would be allowed to have some poppies embroidered onto their football shirts during international football games over the next few days. Even though there has never been any desire on the part of British football players to do this before, even though to do so is clearly against the FIFA kit rules, and even though no other nation which observes Remembrance Day has been clamouring to do this, all of a sudden the wearing of a poppy has become An Historic National Tradition, the initial refusal to allow it was Political Correctness Gone Mad, and the compromise which has been reached with FIFA is a Victory For Common Sense.

Apart from my early years in primary school (when I didn’t understand what the whole thing was about, and when I was basically intrigued by the actual physical product) I’ve never worn a poppy, and I’ve never actively participated in Remembrance Day activity. Usually when 11 November falls on a work day, out of respect to the 99% of my colleagues who do wish to observe the two minutes silence I usually absent myself to the toilet around that time rather than ostentatiously sit there carrying on working, but this year it’s probably fortunate that I’m actually off on leave on that day because, the level that poppy fascism has now reached, I might end up saying or doing something somebody else might regret.

Why do I feel this way?

There are a number of reasons for it, but many of them can be summed up in one succinct phrase.

Because it’s bullshit.

The message of Remembrance Day as it was conceived was supposed to be Lest We Forget; it was instigated in the aftermath of The War To End All Wars to honour the millions who gave their lives – or rather, were forced at gunpoint to give their lives by their so-called class superiors – in what was humanity’s biggest act of utterly pointless industrial slaughter ever. In its early years it was a noble tradition, but sadly even then probably not truly believed in by those responsible for that slaughter.

But now? Lest We Forget has nothing to do with it; we Remember for precisely four minutes every year (or only two minutes if 11 November happens to fall on a Sunday). We barely Remember in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, and at precisely 11:02, after we’ve done our Remembering, we immediately Forget. The killing continues, the political grandstanding continues, and nobody in any position to actually do something about stopping the killing does anything about doing anything to stop it; our media and political class publicly and ostentatiously mourns every one of Our Boys announced to have died, whilst publicly and ostentatiously celebrating the deaths of The Baddies. And similarly the other way round; in their own communities jihaddi terrorists are fêted as Heroes Of The Revolution, whose deaths at the hands of the kafirs will be avenged, regardless of the number of children of those kafirs who were liquidised by the bomb planted on the bus or outside the pavement cafe.

Rarely does anybody stand out from the crowd to say Enough! Rarely do we hear anybody call for the madness to stop; the few who do, and the few who refuse to play the game, who refuse to stand up in a sham token of respect, are pilloried by the media and their peers.

Whilst the original meaning of Remembrance Day was about Remembering those who had given their lives in defence of Freedom, it has mutated into being about showing visible support for Our soldiers who are engaged in State-sponsored killing overseas; to question that support is framed as being unpatriotic, and of Spitting On The Graves Of Those Who Died That I Might Spit; the meaning of Remembrance Day is no longer a moment of private reflection, but instead has become a When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife? question.

But apart from anything else, why are only soldiers given a special day to be Remembered anyway? Why do we have no Remembrance Day for firefighters who’ve died saving lives? Or police officers? Or paramedics? Or accident and emergency nurses? They too risk their lives in the line of duty, but we have no special symbol or special day to remember their sacrifice. Our soldiers are acting under their own consciences on the orders of our government – but so are Their soldiers. It is patently ridiculous to assert that Our soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Right and Their soldiers and government have always universally been Morally Wrong – so whilst Remembering Our soldiers who have been killed in action, why can we not also remember Their soldiers who Our soldiers have killed? As the throwaway line in Austin Powers goes, “henchmen have families too you know”.

Some people often suggest that I might sport a white poppy instead; it’s an attractive suggestion, but actually I see it as a bit of a cop-out – whilst it promotes a conversation, it’s still buying in to the whole attitude that for the first two weeks of the year people must display their support.

Now, whilst I fit into the wider set of people called ‘pacifist’, I’m not a naïve one – I do agree that regrettably there are indeed Bad People in the world, who end up running countries, who manage to inspire other people to kill on their behalf, who cannot be stopped with strong language and the promise of a trip to the seaside if they promise to be good, and that We need soldiers to stop them. I’m the kind of pacifist who accepts that whenever a situation reaches the state of armed conflict, then armed conflict is the inevitable consequence – but that the seeds of the next conflict are always sown in the aftermath of the ending of the last one. I accept that sometimes there’s no reasoning with Bad People – but I do wonder if some Bad People might turn out to be not so Bad after all if our media and politicians were willing to make just that little bit more effort to reason with them.

Don’t get me wrong – I accept, respect, and support right of you, the 99%, to hold your Remembrance Day commemorations. Why do so many of you have such difficulty in accepting my right to dissent from them?

(Further reading: Adrian Short on the crass commercialisation of the Poppy Appeal, and Dan Slee recounts a moving personal family tale)

The item mainly talked about how rubbish as a car it is, going on to become an item about what kind of car you could get on the second hand market for that kind of cash.

Coincidently, this lunchtime I called into the bike shop to get some new tyres for my bike, the current ones needing replacing partly because off-road tyres are a bit silly for somebody who never goes off-road, but mostly because they’re getting a bit ripped to shreds on the sides. Seeing the cheapest tyres that were any good came to £20 I did that sharp intake of breath thing, deciding that i didn’t feel like ponying up £40 at once instead getting just one tyre, to replace the other one next month.

Standing by the till waiting to be served, I saw this bike in the rack for sale:

I did manage to stop myself from saying out loud that for that price, I’d expect it to come with an engine attached.

Mock-up final NOTW front page by Adam Westbrook

With yesterday’s announcement that the News of the World is going to be printed for the last time this coming Sunday, now I’m outraged.

There’s a disgusting irony in that the closure of the paper – with the loss of 200 direct jobs – has been prompted by the sustained campaigning of the political left; the people who have a political mission to save jobs have caused a whole bunch of jobs to be lost. Not just any jobs, though – innocent jobs. Remember, the phone hacking scandal took place 5-10 years ago – none of the people who are losing their jobs this weekend were responsible for what took place back then, indeed, of the people losing their jobs this weekend only about five of them (according to the News of the World’s outgoing political editor) were even working for the paper at the time of the scandal. 200 innocent jobs are being scapegoated in order for The People of Twitter to feel like they’ve secured an historic victory, sticking it to The Man.

Yes, 200 innocent jobs – one thing I missed out of my post on Tuesday was my increasing cynicism about being told to be outraged by Twitter; more often than not (and I’ve been guilty myself), when Twitter tells me to be outraged about something on the Monday, information which comes out by the Wednesday reveals that there are other important aspects of the story which put a different slant on the outrage. So whilst this Tuesday, Twitter was effectively calling for the News of the World to be shut down, once it secured its victory we learn that different slant. Whilst the chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the News of the World at the time the criminal activity started who must surely have not only been aware of what was going on, but must have signed off on it, escapes (so far, at the time of writing) completely free.

The 200 jobs which are being lost on Sunday were not responsible for the phone hacking scandal – those 200 jobs were the people responsible for uncovering Sarah Ferguson’s flogging time with her ex husband Prince Andrew to people hoping to gain business advantages as a result of such meetings; they were the people who proved corruption within FIFA and who uncovered the corruption within Pakistani cricket.

As an educated middle class left-leaning person, I’ve never been a fan of the News of the World’s editorial style or stance, but one less newspaper for sale on Sunday is hardly of benefit to our society. Much as my hyperlocal blogging friends like to see themselves as plugging the gap left by the gradual withdrawal of the mainstream media from local journalism, a few possible high-profile examples aside, keen amateurs simply don’t have the skills or resources to undertake the kind of sustained investigative journalism needed to keep those in power accountable to those who aren’t – and to those who are calling for more statutory regulation of the media, do you really think a State-regulated press is healthy for democracy?

There’s also the question of the wider effects of the News of the World’s closure – although a mere 200 people were directly employed by the paper (some of whom may get the opportunity to apply for other jobs within News International), the paper has been reported as being the most widely read newspaper in the English language; as well as the direct employees, there are also the indirect employees – the paper suppliers, the distributors, the newsagents and other shops – who will lose a significant portion of their livelihood overnight.

So, do we feel proud of ourselves?

Venn diagram by Mr Wowser

What’s that, you say? That since I don’t normally buy the News of the World (or subscribe to any other Murdoch media products), and my rubbish isn’t taken away by the council anyway, that me proudly declaring my boycott of them is a completely empty gesture?

Well, quite. And ultimately, that is why boycotts fail, and why calling for boycotts is usually an empty gesture – because the people who call for them are far more often than they aren’t not actually customers of the Bad Company(tm) in question in the first place, and if they’re customers of another company in the group rarely do they extend that boycott to their own purchasing when to do so will cause themselves more than the slightest inconvenience. I suspect many of the people calling for a NOTW boycott – who are also extending their outrage to the whole of News Corporation and calling for Rupert Murdoch’s intended purchase of the remainder of BSkyB that he doesn’t already own to be blocked – are also Sky subscribers. For their outrage to be genuine rather than empty, they’ll also be cancelling their Sky subscriptions and suffering a bit of personal inconvenience – that’s what a boycott is about, not about telling other people not to do what you don’t already do anyway.

Similarly, those who call for a boycott of companies involved in the disputed territories of Israel/Palestine actually have it quite easy – there’s bugger all that they might want to buy in a shop which is actually produced there, so ultimately the boycott of standard retail goods boils down to looking at the label to see where one’s avocado comes from. And not buying SodaStream any more, for anybody still living in the 1970s. If one really wants to take a stand, if you live in a municipality which uses Veolia for rubbish processing you’ll opt out of the council’s rubbish collection and take personal responsibility for disposing it elsewhere (and probably not to the council tip, because that itself is probably operated by Veolia as well). I will however allow them to continue to have their sewage taken away by t’Corporation (even though a lot of the specialist valves used are manufactured in settlements in the disputed Golan heights) – emptying my own toilet myself on a twice weekly basis is one of the few aspects of my own lifestyle I wouldn’t wish on others.

As an aside to the boycotts issue, I must confess to be now suffering from Twitter Outrage Fatigue Syndrome; I’m sure back in the olden days of Usenet outrage was there (especially in the darkest corners of the talk.* hierarchy), but it seems practically a day doesn’t go by without half of Twitter telling me to be outraged about the latest outrageous thing. Frankly, I think the phone hacking scandal is a bad thing, but I don’t think it’s an outrageous thing. The arms trade, the ongoing banking crisis, and our government’s continued eagerness to spend money on wars which should be spent on the NHS, they’re worthy of outrage. I’m even inclined to be more outraged that two Birmingham MPs are campaigning to relax the ban on smoking in pubs. Dodgy practice by a handful of journalists 5-10 years ago is not remotely on that scale.

Since I became converted to WordPress a couple of years ago, finding it easier to build new websites with it than using the Windows / .asp / vbscript-based content management system I’d actually lovingly handcrafted myself from scratch five or six years ago, I’ve never ceased to be amazed by its power and versatility – power and versatility which has only increased during the last two years, and for me increased exponentially since I learned how to create my own themes (and most recently, started learning how to create plugins).

I’ve persuaded Birmingham to use WordPress in-house for our own microsites (with apologies to my friends in the local multimedia agency community…) with reasonably successful results – our weather disruption site helped us keep people informed during the bad weather (though I’m still narked that you-know-what failed to notice it when they did their annual survey…), and our commercial property management division is now using a WordPress-based site in order to try to shift its offices and shops to let (sorry, I know the ‘browse properties’ menu has its usability faults – I’m planning on trying to fix that next week!). Our Birmingham Newsroom website has been so successful it’s won awards – real ones! Other councils (Lincoln and Shropshire councils were in the room represented, and the inspirational Staffordshire Hoard website is also running WordPress) have also used WordPress for microsites, for its flexibility, speed of deployment, and agility.

But could WordPress run an entire council website, with thousands of pages of content using a devolved authorship and publishing model of a community of a couple hundred web editors?

Regardless of what you might think of the content strategy of such a website, it’s a question which would need resolving before any council webteam or IT infrastructure team could remotely seriously contemplate taking such a bold leap. The obvious answer of ‘well wordpress.com runs off one single instance of the same WordPress multisite that you install yourself at home’ doesn’t really answer the question adequately – for one, we don’t know what kind of massive server farm wordpress.com is running on compared to what any given council’s site is running on, and for two we don’t know what extra hardcore security measures wordpress.com has applied to it which haven’t been – for good reason – open-sourced.

In the session we had a free-flowing discussion, with plenty of points made for and against. Although as a session we didn’t come right out with a complete agreement that WordPress could run a whole council’s website, we were clear that as far as we could tell as the hive mind, there’s nothing definite saying it couldn’t.

Things which occur to me to keep in mind if one is going to seriously consider such an endeavour include:

• Be clear about WordPress’ limitations before you start; specifically, accept that if you’re going to go down this line, you will need to fundamentally rethink your existing content model. If this is a good thing, go ahead! If that’s not such a good idea for your situation, then Jadu is still a very fine content management system, by all accounts.
• If you are going to proceed, then make yourself fully aware of how the WordPress content model works, and plan your content strategy around it – learn all you can about WordPress tagging, categories, ‘static’ pages, posts, etc; you’ll almost certainly want to make full use of the little-understood WordPress custom taxonomy feature which lets you assign multiple groups of tags to your pages / posts / articles / whatever you’re going to call them, sorted and separated sensibly rather than serving up one big bowl of useless tag soup.
• Make a decision early about whether you intent to go with one single WordPress site, or a network of sites using the WordPress Multisite feature, and plan accordingly before you actually start migrating content. It’ll only be a major pain in the bum if you want to change your mind later.
• Take advantage of everything WordPress offers in terms of agile development; rather than jumping straight in to designing your theme with all of its graphics etc in place, design your layout as a working wireframe theme first, testing and consulting, testing and consulting. Extend your wireframe theme upwards with its graphical elements after the layout has been finalised. Don’t forget to also design a much simplified theme which can be switched over in an instant if a major disaster occurs in your town putting extra load on the server.
• Share your development process along the way – start off internally, then share it with a few trusted external people (selected according to user profile criteria), gradually widen the net, maybe even run the two sites in parallel before doing the big switchover. That way you and your IT team should be about as confident as it’s possible to be that part of the answer to this post’s question has been found.

I don’t want to trot out a list of plugins to install on this post, but here’s a few things which have caught my eye just in the last couple days and, indeed, during the hour I’ve spent writing this post:

• How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs – case study of how a newspaper went to a web-first workflow publishing model, very akin to many councils’ workflows, and information about and links to download the specific plugins they’ve used to adapt WordPress to work with that model.
• Network Theme for WordPress and Buddypress – a premium WordPress theme which will be invaluable to take a look at and rip the guts out of (disclaimer – I’ve not looked at the licensing situation for the theme so it may not be possible to rip the guts out of it itself, only ‘learn from it’) if you’re committing to the network of sites model, in order see how to share menus and content from one site to another.
• Site lister function – a quick little function shared by Steph Gray which can be used to list a network’s sites (and from there, feeds from sites and content, if your .php skills are hard enough).

Enjoy your flight!

Stickers by Dave Briggs

They’re not just fab because I’m one of them; next time you hear of some politician or crappy journo talking about lazy council workers who do bugger all for their inflated salaries, consider that these people all gave up half their weekends – most of whom if not all not getting any pay, time off in lieu, or even train fare to be there – because we’re passionate about our jobs, and we’re passionate about learning from one another to do our jobs better, and thus provide you, the hard-pressed council tax payer, with a better service as a result of it.

What was also fab about the people and the event was – whilst everybody was appreciative of what everybody else had to share – I didn’t feel any evidence of what I have to admit I’ve started to become a bit… uncomfortable about when I read my Twitter stream. Charitably, some of what shows up can be described as groupthink, or uncharitably sometimes what manifests is a bit of a, um, how can I put this, don’t be offended when I, erm, say a… mutual backslapping society. There, I said it – oops. If you’re reading this as a member of the local government web community, you’ll have almost certainly often seen a Twitter post from somebody declaring they’ve just read an excellent blog post by the excellent somebody-or-other, which has an excellent comment on it made by the excellent somebody else.

Now I’m all for acknowledging excellence, but when everything which is said is excellent and everybody who says it is also excellent, where does that leave something which is even better? When everything is excellent, nothing is excellent; in fact, when everything is excellent, everything is in fact mediocre – if every link you tweet is excellent, the busy reader will probably end up following none of your links.

But more importantly, if everything we say is deemed by our colleagues to be excellent, heard uncritically and unchallenged, then that serves nothing but the very trend towards mediocrity which we’re all trying to work against. Nobody likes to be told they’ve had a crap idea, but sometimes clever people really do have crap ideas, and nothing’s worse than those crap ideas being turned into crap projects; few things are more career limiting than being associated with a crap project which wasted a whole bunch of public money, especially if the project could have been avoided or improved simply by somebody acting as a critical friend.

It also, admittedly, can be a bit disconcerting to see conflict within a close-knit group on the modern internets; when Dave Harte wrote a piece last week critiquing a statistic presented (off-hand) by Dan Slee at a conference describing social networking usage vs traditional media reach in his area, I think I’m not the only one who read it and thought ‘oo, ouch…’.

But we’re all grown-ups here, and even though some of us have digital footprints going back nearly 20 years it’s not like any of us are n00bs at this online discussion gig thingy.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we should start behaving like arseholes to each other, arguing the toss for the hell of it like the very worst corners of Usenet used to be like. But we should feel more comfortable than we perhaps do to respectfully challenge each other, to be critical friends, rather than allowing everything to pass unchallenged, uncritiqued.

And perhaps have a little less of the excellent-ness?

More recently, after buying an Amazon Kindle device (which is an infinitely better electronic device from which to read text), I’ve learned how to actually create Kindle-format content, writing two books (with two more in the pipeline) culminating a couple of weeks ago with me co-leading KindleCamp, a one day workshop where I taught a group of people how to author content in Kindle format and go through the process of getting it into the Amazon shop for other people to buy.

So far pretty much all Kindle content is exactly what it was created to be – putting a piece of paper into digital form; not exactly a piece of paper on the internet, but a lots of pieces of paper into a small piece of plastic. In this form alone we could say that we live in the future, in this form alone we’ve effectively got The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Me, I want more.

As well as being an eBook reading device, the Kindle also has a rudimentary web browser – if you’ve got the cheaper version, you’ve got internet connectivity whenever you’re in an accessible wifi zone, and if you splashed out on the 3g version you’ve got free internet connectivity wherever you are in the world where there’s some kind of digital mobile phone signal. Because you can have hyperlinks within your Kindle book, you can link out from text within the book to external websites – maybe to a Wikipedia article about something mentioned, or to a blog post allowing people to discuss each chapter all within the same environment.

More interestingly still, the way Kindle content is created and published means that whenever a change is made to a book – which classically might be correcting some typos, or in my own case getting around to writing the colophon pages for my books to stick on to the end – those changes are automatically synchronised to everybody who has already bought the book. They might have bought the book, not yet read it, and be completely unaware of the updates – or they might have read to the end, and then receive your final bonus chapter some time afterwards.

Rather than just making pieces of paper in a piece of plastic, how can content authors make creative use of the enhanced interactive features of the device?

The mobile internet is a marketplace not quite ripe for the pickings, but certainly fertile soil in which to sow the seeds of content delivery; it’s possible that as the number of Kindle users increases that may provide an audience which isn’t going to particularly take to mobile phone web access. Is there any mileage for Kindle content in local government? We’ve got the easy obvious wins of being able to use it to help with our content rationalisation targets, publishing policy documents and the history of the canals in Birmingham in this format, but is there anything more interesting we can do, taking advantage of the Kindle’s web connectivity and content updating and synchronisation capabilities?

I’ll be attending #localgovcamp in Birmingham – if anybody else is interested in talking about this to explore the possibilities, shall we do a session on it?

I’m not going to break that habit and publicly mourn the sad death of Gil Scott-Heron, but instead I’m going to talk about the best concert I’ve ever been to in my 41 years of life, and what perhaps will remain the best concert I’ll ever have been to in what remains of my (hopefully at least another 41 years!) of life.

It’s a story I’ve told people in person more times than I care to count; there’s some people who’ve heard it more times than they’d care to count. I tend to present a fairly robotic, sentiment-free face to the world, but telling this story is one of only two (and you can read the other one on birmingham-alive!, if you want) which genuinely brings an emotional tear to my eye, rather than just my allergies to the many airborne particulates where I live.

I can’t quite remember if it was late 1989 or early 1990 (it was definitely that academic year, because I was in my second year as an undergraduate at Birmingham Conservatoire) that I went to a concert at the Birmingham Hummingbird. Myself and my best friend at the time arrived at 8pm, the doors open time printed on the ticket, got a drink each, and waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. It’s fair to say after that we waited some more, followed by some more waiting.

Eventually at about midnight(!) a band came on – it was the a-capella group Black Voices, doing what I think might have been their first ‘proper’ concert in a big venue. They sang for about 40 minutes, and it’s fair to say that considering the ticket price, we felt we’d got our money’s worth just for that.

Then, at about 1:00am another band came on – Microgroove – who played for about an hour. Unquestioningly, it was easily worth the ticket price just for them – so much so, by about 2:00am when they finished we assumed the concert was over, since back the Gil Scott-Heron had a particular reputation for not turning up (or rather, being detained by airport security…). But the stage manager announced over the PA that we should rest assured, the concert we were going to see was going to happen.

Then about 2:30am, the man himself came on to the stage, sat in front of his Fender-Rhodes electric piano, leading us in what was his at-the-time concert opener, Five Miles Down. And then the rest of the band came on, treating us to at least two and a half hours of the most amazing concert ever, including a 30 minute version of the song Angel Dust. At the close of the concert, myself and my friend walked back home to our flat in Kings Heath.

I’ve not told you how much the ticket cost yet.

£6.

Now, being in the making-things-and-trying-to-sell-them game myself, I’m certainly not going to defend the big corporate borg with fancy expensive lawyers ripping off the little person who, if they making a living selling their work at all, they’ll only just be making a living and almost certainly unable to afford to take a multi-national to court over it.

However, we have been here before. In February 2010 the internet rip-off scandal was about how Paperchase had ripped off another indy designer‘s artwork to put on some notebooks and carrier bags.

But when the bottom of that story was reached, it turned out that Paperchase had done no such thing, themselves – instead, it was a designer in an agency contracted by Paperchase who had done the ripping off. And so it’s highly likely that Urban Outfitters themselves didn’t rip off tru.ch, rather one of their suppliers did the ripping off. This is how multi-national corporate retail works – just as Nike don’t actually make their trainers any more, Levis don’t make their jeans any more, Paperchase, Urban Outfitters, and all these similar shops don’t actually design and make anything – they just buy product in from third party suppliers.

So whereas of course Paperchase and Urban Outfitters should be the first port of call for the aggrieved designer to say ‘oi!’ to, immediately organising a mass internet campaign for a boycott is a bit silly – Paperchase and Urban Outfitters didn’t do the ripping off, they just accepted what they were given by their suppliers with the reasonable assumption their suppliers were providing them with legit product. In the Paperchase case, they – albeit after some time – investigated and pulled the product, which Urban Outfitters will almost certainly so do as well.

Now you might think it a bit off that both Paperchase and Urban Outfitters didn’t immediately pull the product after the first email from the designer, but let’s be realistic – how realistic really is it for a multi-national megacorp with hundreds of branches in nearly every country in the world and at tens of central administrative offices to receive an email from anybody off the street and just take action on the spot? Whoever receives the first email has to work out who to forward it to, then that person has to read it (in between however many meetings they have that day), then delegate it to somebody else to read again and possibly do some research to verify the truth of the original complainant, write a report making a recommendation to the buying committee, wait for that committee to meet (assuming the report gets on the next agenda), etc. You’ll be lucky to get just those steps achieved in a month, let alone whatever else needs doing.

And the tru.ch vs Urban Outfitters case turns out to contain more story than the original blog post let on – news and aggregator websites Apartment Therapy and BoingBoing took up the story, only for both articles to be filled with comments from people claiming to have seen stuff like the disputed items for five, ten, twenty years, suggesting that tru.ch was hardly selling an original idea in the first place. Indeed, Regretsy has even found examples of other people selling the designs before tru.ch did anyway.

The moral of this tale is – when somebody on the internet tells you to be outraged about something, always pause and check some facts first.