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.

“Plans to use energy from a crematorium to heat a council swimming pool have been approved. Redditch Borough Council voted in favour of plans to heat Abbey Stadium Leisure Centre using energy from the town’s crematorium. The council said it would result in savings of £14,560 a year”.

Picture credit: Joffey

At first glance, anybody could be forgiven for immediately having the thought of ‘eeww, that’s a bit icky’ – one has the immediate thought of some kind of Soylent Green scenario, or worse still, images of bits of ash getting into the water.

But that is, of course, silly – the person at the council register office is no more likely to be pushing bereaved families into a cremation rather than a burial (though it’d be interesting to know if they offer a discount) than do doctors suggest prematurely switching off life-support machines in order to get at the organs.

But anyway, why not make good use of the energy expended in cremation?

Regardless of the states of either the economy or the planet, surely the council has an obligation to you, the council tax payer, to make the best use of resources?

Even though about 85% of the residents of Redditch agreed with the idea in a consultation, and it’s a reasonably common practice in the rest of Europe, Unison, the public sector union, disagree:

“The plans had been attacked by Unison when they were first announced. The union said the proposals were ‘sick and an insult to local residents’”.

Personally I would have hoped that Unison would be concentrating on how it can best protect the jobs and terms and conditions of public sector employees rather than worrying about what happens to the heat from burning dead people.

Photo credit - Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

So whilst Labour peers have spent the last couple of weeks filibustering^Wcarefully scrutinising (including asking searching questions about why the proposed number of MPs in the new Commons of 600 does not correspond to any product of prime numbers – that’s important for democracy, I’m sure you’ll agree), what is the difference between what they are doing now and what the Tory peers did during the debates on the fox-hunting ban legislation?

The government, irritated at the possibility that the Labour peers might actually talk the legislation out of time rather than back down at the last minute – as is traditional – is talking about introducing a guillotine, for the first time in Parliament’s history, much to the outrage of the Labour side. But again, what might the difference be between that and, from the same fox-hunting bill, the Labour government’s invoking of the Parliament Acts to achieve the exact same result?

And politicians wonder why the public continues in its spiral of disengagement with party politics; when party politics too often is reduced to petty politics.

Well, in a completely unexpected turn of events, it appears they are:

“Plans for £8bn of investment in Britain’s railways have been announced by the government.

It is buying about 2,000 new carriages to tackle overcrowding, electrifying some lines and pressing ahead with the Thameslink programme”.

Credit where credit’s due. Let’s see if they deliver.

It’s good that MPs have finally realised there’s a problem with train overcrowding – a problem which is, of course, Britain’s Best Kept Secret(TM).

Previous reports about train overcrowding you might think you have seen are actually figments of your imagination.

Inside Out South reporting on it in January 2009 didn’t really happen, as didn’t the University of Nottingham in January 2003. The report from the Strategic Rail Authority in July 2001 was just hot air, as was the Commons Transport Select Committee‘s findings in November 2003. As for the Department of Transport‘s research published in July 2007, and the General Consumer Council‘s study of September 1999 – well you can take that with a pinch of salt. Just like another report from the Department of Transport in August 2008.

Good news is at hand, though – because according to David Cameron in April 2007:

“Tackling overcrowding on commuter trains will be an ‘urgent priority’ for a Tory government as part of its focus on green issues, said David Cameron.

The Tory leader said more cash was needed to boost capacity on the busiest routes, although it would have to come from existing transport budgets.

Mr Cameron was warned in a leaked memo to avoid tax rises for better trains”.

It’s very easy to release Yet Another Report about train overcrowding. When is somebody going to actually do something about those reports?

“About £2bn was underpaid via the Pay as You Earn (PAYE) system in the past two years, with about 1.4 million people owing an average of £1,500 each. But £1.8bn has also been overpaid and some 4.3 million people will get a rebate because they have paid too much. Treasury minister David Gauke said that in the current financial climate, the government was ‘not in a position to just wave goodbye to that £2bn’”.

Surely that’s something which would be worth going to court over?

Saying ‘the good news is people won’t have to start repaying it until April 2011′ is hardly the point – £1,500 would account for a repayment of over £100 a month, which is a lot of cash to be removed from anybody’s monthly budget at the best of times, let alone for people who won’t have had any form of pay rise, not even an annual Cost Of Living Allowance, for two years.

If you buy a product off a supplier, and the supplier sends you an invoice and you pay it, the supplier can’t turn round two years later and say ‘sorry, I got my maths wrong – you’ll have to pay me some more’; it would just be tough on the supplier.

So why should the government be exempt from those same consumer protection laws? If the government is not in a position to just wave goodbye to £2bn, how many millionaires are there in the country who would completely fail to even notice the shortfall being divvied up between them?

In fact, the government (in the shape of HM Revenue & Customs) aren’t exempt from the law: if the taxpayer has a reasonable belief that they paid the correct amount in the first place – such as for example having had a bill from HMRC which looked about right in the first place – then the tax collector has to just accept their error and write off the underpayment.

“A tribunal is considering how much the MoD must pay a female soldier after she won her case against the Army for sexual and racial discrimination. Tilern DeBique, 28, was disciplined after not appearing on parade because she had to look after her daughter”.

To my mind, this incident gives a completely bad name to the whole concept of the right to work free from discrimination, and just plays into the hands of the foaming Daily Mail readers who like nothing more than to scream ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’ at every opportunity.

The question of the appropriateness of a single mother being a serving soldier in the armed forces – even as a signals technician rather than somebody required to actually shoot people – required to be on call to be deployed to an active combat zone is a whole discussion of itself.

It’s also a fair comment to pose that if the Ministry of Defence is going to actively engage in recruiting overseas, then it needs to make sure it can properly accommodate the overall needs of its recruits.

But as to being disciplined for being late for parade due to being unable to organise childcare at short notice; this is not a normal office environment we’re talking about here – any normal job, it would be a harsh uncaring employer indeed which didn’t offer understanding and flexibility.

But the armed forces are not normal office environments; when you are just about to be deployed to a warzone, you can’t say ‘sorry I’m late, traffic was murder and my childminder let me down’. And the whole point of the way military discipline works is you treat every single day as if you are about to be deployed. You also don’t have a right to not have a nasty howwid drill sergeant say nasty howwid things to you – if you can’t take that kind of environment, then the army isn’t really for you.

In this instance, the army disciplined her (note, didn’t dismiss her), and offered her alternative employment as an option if she felt life in the army was incompatible with being a single mother. Instead she opted to leave and pursue a discrimination case against the MoD, facing a possible payout of of the order of £100,000.

“Wellderly, webinar, disbenefits and under-capacitated are among new forms of jargon being used by the public sector, a survey has revealed. Such impenetrable phrases are on a list of banned words published by the Local Government Association (LGA)”.

It seems to have become a new biennial news story about office jargon, especially in councils:

• Why do councils love jargon?
• Workplace jargon isolates staff

At least this time around the LGA admits that jargon is often necessary for internal use:

“The LGA said it was ‘impossible’ for organisations to avoid all jargon in internal communications but there was no excuse for such language to be used in public information”.

Indeed.

Of course, as the point I made last time around – council’s don’t deliberately want to obfuscate, it’s not in their interest to. When council-speak does leak out, overwhelmingly that’s due to a staff member in a service area putting out communication themselves, rather than – as they are supposed to – going through their service area’s communications teams, part of whose core function is to check the text & convert it into plain English.

But sadly in the current era of cuts and “slashing make-work back-office paper-pushers in order to protect front-line services”, communications staff are considered superfluous, and communications budgets - both for activity and for salaries – are being slashed.

So with a reduced number of people employed in local government to ensure your leaflet reads like it was written in English, expect more webinar trialogues over the coming years.

Unlike parking on yellow lines or overstaying in parking bays – which are now civil offences – parking on the pavement is still actually illegal.

Not only this, it is downright antisocial – the weight puts extra strain on pavement masonry which is designed to carry pedestrians, not cars, invariably a car parked on the pavement forces people with pushchairs or those in wheelchairs to step into the oncoming traffic on the road to get around the car, an in the very worst instances – such as the one pictured here – completely obstruct the paths of blind people, and worst of all here, even obstructing the blind pedestrian from being able to cross a junction in safety because the car is parked on the tactile paving which the blind use to tell they are at a junction.

In busy residential streets, built before the mass ownership of cars and therefore too narrow to safely take legal parking on both sides of the road, this is bad enough, but it’s often accepted by many that a certain level of give and take is needed, so long as the driver still parks with due consideration for pedestrians of all mobility abilities. I’m not going to claim to be innocent of ever having put my wheels on the kerb’s edge in such situations.

However this road is not a street with people living there parking on it – it’s an access road to the blocks of flats either side, to the canal below, and to the footbridge to the other side of the canal. Until recently, parking was not permitted at all, as it was a private access road patrolled by clampers; nobody living there parks there, because everybody who does live there has their own parking spaces. Since the road ceased to be private and the clampers moved out, it has become a magnet for drivers all over the city who are too tight-wadded to pay for their parking like everybody else has to. They have a legal right to park there – for the time being – but no moral right, and certainly they have no right to park in an illegal and antisocial manner obstructing the way for residents and transiting pedestrians alike.

So I wonder if the radio station BRMB approves of its staff parking their cars – with the company logo plastered all over it – in such a way?