Incompetence to Make the Mind Goggle

Two blogs in three days - shock, horror. I must be bored. Or have been sacked. Today we are going to return to an old theme, seeing as I've already said most of the things I think, I figured it's about time to start regurgitating the old rubbish with a shiny new bow on it.

Not wanting to dive into a deep new topic, and I know I still owe you some more on human rights, I've gone for a clipping which has been lying around for a while. Another article from the papers this week reminded me of it. The old article was a ruling by my very own Oxfordshire county council that swimming goggles are to be banned for schoolchildren. Deep breaths (and scrunch up your eyes presumably)…

Yes, what upsets me today is the groundbreaking news that goggles are deadly weapons. So concerned are the local Government members of Oxfordshire that goggles could "snap" onto children's faces, they have banned them in state school swimming lessons. Brilliant. World gone crazy. It is not that someone is so stupid that they think this a good idea; I expect that from a reasonable percentage of state employees. It is that nobody within the council within earshot of this totally ridiculous rule being made stopped it. Nobody from the desperately simple originator of said rule, to their boss, their boss' boss, to the chap who put it on the website or printed it out, and to the press officer who announced it. It is genuinely unbelievable the levels of stupidity which you must be able to find at all levels of local Government. And you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they're all still in their jobs today, being paid for by our taxes, and will enjoy their final salary pensions.

No-one turned round and said "aren't we going to look like total pillocks if we go ahead with this?" No-one asked if perhaps goggles should be made mandatory instead, or at least make it compulsory for children to open their eyes underwater lest they smash their faces into the walls of the pool when doing lengths. They could employ people to sit underwater to check all eyes were open. But the CRB checks would have to be pretty watertight. In fact, statistically more children have probably been hurt by crashing into other swimmers or the wall in a desperate attempt to keep out the toxic levels of chlorine and wee wee.

If this council were instead a company dependent on profits and accountable to shareholders, it would be out of business. But it isn't. It just bleats that it doesn't have enough money to carry out the many important roles it has (like banning goggles or making them compulsory in schoolyard conker fights), and we keep giving it our taxes to keep it going. Rather like a frivolous child frittering away handouts from its despairing parents who keep hoping it will finally do something useful with its life. This is how I feel about local Government.

There must be some relatively competent types, but they allow the morons to tar the whole system with their brush, so they too are accountable. It is reported a council spokesman declined to expand on the reason for the ban. No wonder.

The article which re-aroused my pique told the story of a Royal Academy painter who was twice ordered to stop painting and remove his easel from Trafalgar Square lest someone trip over it and hurt themselves. Yes, good old health and safety at work, or more accurately a clinical idiot trying to compensate for his feelings of inadequacy by massively misunderstanding a regulation and putting his small amount of power into force. Yet again though, we see not just one, but many fools. A spokesman for the Greater London Authority defended the action of the over-zealous official. He stated, "it's about people with fixed equipment, such as tripods, which can set a precedent if other people want to congregate in the square." Right.

In case anyone is uncertain of what I think should be done, here it is: Boris should find which dolts within his organisation were in any way responsible for this action and the subsequent justification and punish them. Their punishment? Standing on the fourth pedestal in Trafalgar Square writing out lines on an easel that simply say: "I must try harder to not be a moron." Maybe they could invite someone along to paint them.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Now I'm off to the desert again for a few days, so you shall have to amuse yourself in other ways than the 3 minutes a day or so it takes to read, disagree with and mentally discard my thoughts on life, trivia and the universe. Perhaps have a look at a couple of the blogs I check in on from time to time - they're on my reading list on the right. It's an area I'm trying to expand, and is especially useful out here where my beloved dead tree news takes longer to arrive than a Christmas parcel. If you see any good ones out there feel free to email me - my details are on the right too. Just don't find anything too good and not come back. Then it would just be me and perhaps my mother reading.

So how to make sure of your return? It should be the greatest post ever, even better than "First Secretary of State, Lord President of the Council, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade, Baron Mandelson of Foy." And that was quite a post. Only "Dark Lord, Ruler of All that is Insidious" was missing, and I don't think I have it in me. So I thought I'd blog about sun cream, and not just about it being taken away from me by kleptomaniac airport stasi. I thought I'd point out how as much as I prefer the spray sun cream, it irritates me that the rather vital spray element of the item tends to pack up after 4 squirts leaving you pouring liquid hither and thither cursing your positively mormonesque sunbathing neighbour with his retro but functional cream bottle. But I realised that was all I had to say on that, and it probably wouldn't be good enough. So I'm going to talk about equality instead.

The "Equality Act", and it is certainly an act, is the 'brainchild' of none other than Joan of Harman, crusader for apparent equality. Shabbier than the standard pardons of political friends on leaving office in the US, this was a true Parthian shaft from Harperson. If it wasn't for the fact that I don't believe her intellectually capable of such devilment, I might suggest she forced this utterly crap Act through in the last breaths of the Labour Government just to spite those who she knew would inherit it.

Now the Coalition were right to get rid of the horrific social engineering element of this pathetic leftist Act. They have purged the awful clause, begging for legal exploitation, about making it beholden upon all public bodies to essentially socially engineer if a person's lower socio-economic level in any way correlated to their not getting a free mansion, a Double First from Cambridge and an endless supply of £40,000 a year for life scratch cards. They have not gone far enough, though.

They have pressed on with the "Equality Duty." Whilst I can see logic in bringing together a lot of the miscellaneous equality legislation, and this is the only straw to which the Government are grasping, it is still utterly misguided. Perhaps it will save a lot in the long run by condensing what has been a haphazard legislatory debacle into "one easy to manage loan", I mean 'piece of legislature'. But that doesn't get around how it is still a total load of crap itself.

Under the "Equality Duty" all public bodies have to ask a bunch of questions of their employees. The larger the organisation, the more intrusive the questions and more expensive the implementation. In the case of the Department for Work and Pensions I imagine they require gold plated speculums. Apparently we must know if employees are: gay, straight, black, white, brown, blue, tall, short, male, female, right handed, left handed, Catholic, Hindu, Jedi. Competent unsurprisingly doesn't make the list. Then we put it all into a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, highlight it all and click the pie chart button. A paper clip will pop up in the bottom corner saying "It looks like you have collated a load of irrelevant data. Would you like me to make it look like society is being ruined by the domination of pushy tennis mums and white middle class men who listened at school?"

You see, all this is, is a very expensive census. Telling us who is employed, how many of them are over 50, how many are atheists and how many have an extra nipple (not necessarily all together) is pretty pointless on its own. You can't look at those numbers and say: We don't employ enough Scientologists. We don't employ enough 42 year olds. We don't employ enough pole dancers. Without going into massive detail, you will have no idea why the breakdown is as it is, or whether it is right or wrong.

Every year people harp on about the number of state school versus private school children who get into universities, and especially into Oxbridge. No-one ever bothers to publish application numbers, interview and test results, exam results or the personal statements on UCAS forms. No, there are many things weighed up on deciding which students to accept, but if in a given year the number of state school kids going to Oxford drops, the call of "off with their heads" echoes around Fleet Street and Whitehall. No-one asks if enough cricketers got in. Or enough cider drinkers. It may seem to be taking it a bit far, but the point is you can't take a single statistic in isolation when it is viewed alongside many others you choose to ignore. What if record numbers of state school children applied that year, but were not deemed up to scratch? Universities are there to pick out those with the most potential. They have been charged with encouraging more state school children to apply, but that is where their responsibility ends. If they get loads to apply but they aren't good enough, they've done their bit, and the state schools have not done theirs. But we all know how it would play out in the media.

So I expect the public sector censuses will "tell" us that women don't get paid enough, and white men are unfairly dominant. Unfortunately, in doing so it steps well beyond what it can know. It does not know if any of that is warranted or needs redressing, because all it is is a bunch of numbers that cost you and me a bucketload of money. It won't have asked how many women took breaks for motherhood so have lower salaries commensurate with their lesser time at work and lack of continuity. It will just tell us that women are discriminated against. It will tell us that it is unfair that the British Army doesn't recruit many Buddhists. It will not have asked how many actually applied, and whether the ones who were turned away were any good.

It is no surprise the Government wants nothing to do with the results, devolving responsibility for interpreting these random numbers to the Big Society. According to the Equalities Minister, Lynne Featherstone, we are all meant to look at the results and then "be in the front line for holding public bodies to account." At best one hopes that means everyone will give it all a damn good ignoring, at worst it will give bad ideas to those in local government with the dangerous combination of a little power and a little brain. You wonder whether the Tories let this one go because they have bigger fish to fry or are still worried about the "nasty party" image that the Grauniad and others would happily run if they amended this codswallop. Either way, all the "Equality Duty" will ever be is an embodiment of the truism that there are "lies, damn lies and statistics."

"The Public Sector: Wasting Your Money So You Don't Have To"

I hinted yesterday that I might one day post on the topic of public sector slogans. That day has come. Hooray. Yes, today we shall look at one of the most overt displays of contempt for taxpayers which the public sector manages to pull off every day. The embodiment of all that is wasteful, pointless and unaccountable about so much in our public sector are the ridiculous slogans, or tag lines that accompany their titles.

Let's see what we're dealing with here by looking at some examples. From Police forces various:
"Serving our communities, protecting them from harm"; "Protecting our communities by reducing crime and antisocial behaviour"; "Keeping our communities safe and reassured". Specifically from Northumbria Police: "Total Policing". From Kent Police: "Protecting and serving the people of Kent".

Let's look outside the police, major culprits though they are, they are not alone. My local authority, South Oxford District Council: "Listening, Learning, Leading". Wandsworth Council: "The brighter borough, number one for service and value". Department for Transport: "Working to deliver a transport system which balances the needs of the economy, the environment and society."

So we have the police, various local government bodies and even central government. Now what do all of these august institutions have in common? They don't sell. Anything. And yet they advertise using our money. If you get mugged, the police who turn up will be the ones (if they bother) who have responsibility for the area you are in. You don't get to call in your preferred police force; the ones with the best crime detection rate or the prettiest police officers. If you buy a house you will pay non-negotiable tax to the council in whose district you find yourself. You can't ask the neighbouring council to collect your bins because they collect them weekly as opposed to fortnightly. Likewise, whilst you may choose the airline or train company you use, the DFT is all-encompassing. You can't opt out, they have a say over all the roads, all the railways etc.

So why on God's green earth are they trying to sell themselves? Why advertise when you have nothing to gain from it? I get why Nokia are "connecting people", why American Express suggest you should "never leave home without it". Advertising is, broadly speaking, there to increase your market share by increase in product or brand awareness in a competitive market. It's not just business that advertise though - the armed forces all have tag lines because they're competing to sign up people from the same target audience. UK political parties have them because there is a choice there. However, if you're the only option, it's either an exercise in futility (as the police/local council examples are), or part of a wider brainwashing program (Hitler or Pol Pot campaigning and advertising whilst representing the only legal parties).

So let us have an end to this expensive, pointless rubbish (not all of local government, tempted though I am - just the advertising part). Let the police have just that on their cars and letterheads. We know what they're meant to do, they're the police; if anything they aren't helping themselves with these slogans by pointing out jobs they often fail to do. Again, as with all these waste issues, when the strikes come around or complaints at budget cuts, remember where they choose to spend our money first. You can bet your bottom dollar all you will hear is "there will have to be cuts to front line services". What price the announcement "we might have to get rid of our stupid slogan, or at least stop changing it every 3 years"? Thought not...

A Rubbish Christmas

You may already have read here my not so favourable view of local Government, and in particular here, of the waste collection services. Apparently the culprits have not all read my rantings, spread the word and mended their ways. In fact, I'm not entirely sure they have even been reading my blog.

You may be in one of the areas that have not had rubbish collection for up to 4 weeks. If you do, you have my sympathies. And probably rats. The silver lining though will be the 1/12 rebate of the £1000-2000 or so you pay a year in council tax for this service. Ah, if only it were that simple. As usual, a quick glance at the real world (private sector) reveals the imaginary one to be just that - a fantasy for them, or a nightmare for us. Unfortunately, as previously discussed, it is not one we can do much about.

If you employed a private company to come and get your rubbish, even the most rudimentary contract would have got you your rebate over the Christmas collection failure. If you don't do what you are paid for in the real world, you don't get paid. People take their business elsewhere. But again, you can't go to a better local council to provide your services, you can't withdraw your money and go private. Nope, you're stuck with it, you can't haggle for a discount or move your custom when they turn out to be crap. How much would private traders pay for that kind of lock-in? Gotta love the system.

Yes, drives, street corners and alleyways across the country are littered (I couldn't resist) with bags of uncollected rubbish (though they could hardly be littered with collected rubbish). Many local councils stopped collections because their binmen might slip in the snow and ice. In work boots. I have a pair, they are to walking on ice what a Land Rover is to driving on it. So, here we are with no collections for weeks.

The incredible incapacity of local Government to carry out even the most basic of tasks was typified by one Kevin Mitchell, Birmingham City Council's assistant director of fleet and waste management: "It is a triple whammy. This all happened during Christmas, with three Bank Holidays and 420,000 extra turkey carcasses to collect." Yes Kevin. Sometimes it snows at Christmas. It might be an idea to have some form of bad weather plan, if you are a multi-million pound service supplier. The calendar is also reasonably predictable. Or totally. Even if we grant that until his trade union sent him his 2010 calendar for Christmas 2009 he didn't know Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day would all fall on weekends, that still gave him a year. Oh, and as with all the Christmas Days for quite some time, lots of turkeys will be eaten, but it's still just lunch or dinner. People don't eat it as well as their 'normal' meal so there is not vastly more waste than any other lunch or dinner really.

I think we've pretty much flogged this one to death, but you just know that for all the talk of lessons learned that we will undoubtedly hear when they bother to come back to work, it will just be talk. Seeing as local Government is now amending its end of the deal as council tax rockets whilst services are cut, maybe we should start amending our end. Opt out anyone? It is all well and good the Tories talking of decentralisation of power, but a glance at what some of the likely recipients of new powers are already doing doesn't make for pretty reading. Small Government is a good thing, but before we hand power out to local Government, it needs root and branch restructuring.

Local Government Prize Turkeys

After a few days stranded in deepest, darkest Devon I have returned, full of confidence that the world will now be a better place for all the snow. The community spirit you will have no doubt seen as strangers help push cars out of snowdrifts or help the elderly across a particularly icy street will have soaked into even the most mean-spirited. No more will the petty men and women of this world feel it necessary to compensate for their own personal failings by inflicting utter garbage rules and regulations upon us, the unwashed masses.

Predictably, not a bit of it. I read over the weekend about one of the most ridiculous, illogical, and sadly typical decisions to be passed down from a local authority. In this case, the culprits are East Sussex county council. They have decreed that one of their lollipop men, who helps children cross the road by Forest Row Primary School near East Grinstead, must stop wearing his festive-themed hats because they are a risk to ... anyones guess ... yup .. . health and safety. Brilliant. He is not even the first. Another lollipop man was banned 2 years ago in Hampshire from tying tinsel to his stop sign again for "health and safety reasons". On this most recent occasion, the hats in question were the pictured turkey hat, and a jingle bell jester hat.

So what is the reasoning behind this decision, assuming indeed they even bothered with making any up? The argument is that the hats might distract motorists. The man is wearing a 5 foot long luminous yellow coat with reflective stripes. His very job is to attract the attention of motorists. They see him, they see his sign, they stop, the children cross. It's pretty simple. We have already gone to extensive lengths to make him visible; he would be a pretty rubbish lollipop man if no-one saw him and so mowed through the grey and non-reflective mass of drearily dressed school children.

On a wider scale, where are East Sussex planning on stopping? Are billboards to be banned? They distract drivers; it's their job. How about road signs? Or Police Incident signs - they have loads of writing on them that could distract a driver. Are there to be pavement wardens, patrolling night and day to ensure nobody is wearing anything distracting? I have a good mind to go and stand outside Forest Row Primary School in my own turkey hat. What about particularly attractive or particularly ugly lollipop people? What if you can't take your eyes off their distinctive looks and run over half of Mrs Smith's Reception class? Surely we should discard all but the average looking applicants lest someone get distracted. Oh, but that would be discrimination, wouldn't it? Oh, we are in a pickle...

The point is, this is clearly a totally ridiculous ruling. It must have passed through at least one and probably many more people who are in receipt of public pay. If someone came up with such a logic-defying, futile, irritating, stupid decision in any normal job in the private sector, you'd think they might lose their job. Instead, the council defend their decision: "we don't want to spoil anybody's fun, but the safety of the children, particularly on the roads, is a top priority."

In case I haven't made my position clear enough, every single person who was involved in this decision should be fired on the spot with no severance pay, no pension, no nothing (I understand that grammatically the last part would mean 'some something' but I liked the flow; go with it). This decision obviously won't make anyone safer (there goes the ludicrous justification) and it cost a lot of public money. We should be able to fire these people on the grounds of not having the ability to do their job, as displayed by their brainless actions. They shouldn't be moved to another department, they shouldn't be shielded by the council, they should just be out. I even feel sorry for Messrs Health and Safety, bane of my life as they are, because I can guarantee you East Sussex county council couldn't point to the legislation which actually backs their crap decision up.

The problem is, they are all bullet-proof. They are the faceless masses employed by local authorities the country over. They make people drag their rubbish 1/2 a mile because the road might be too slippery for their garbage men, they make the elderly lift their gas bottles out of the house because the delivery men might injure their backs lifting it down one 3" step. You know these people, you've seen these stories. They are all around you. And you paid for every single one of them, a hundred times over.

So, next time you hear a local council whining about having its budget cut and complaining that this would mean they would have to reduce services and how this is an attack on the weak and poor, remember where they are choosing to waste their money in the first instance. There is fat in system everywhere; as with your Christmas turkey, just because you're cutting, it doesn't meant you're cutting out anything useful.

The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

Saturday morning. Slightly worse for wear. Shall leave the heavyweight political points of the day to someone else. This morning we shall talk about bus lanes. This is not the standard moan about the M4 bus lane; annoying as it is to watch the 1% of traffic that qualifies for it cruise past your near-stationary car, you have to go down to two lanes at some point to get into London. No, today I shall moan about bus lanes in general, but specifically in London.

As most of you are probably aware there is a plethora of bus lanes in London, and between them, a myriad of different timings when the general driving public can use them. Boris had suggested he was going to rationalise these varying rules before his election to the High Dukedom of London, but there has been no movement in that department. The variation in timings will certainly catch unaware or unfamiliar drivers out, but that's not really my main problem with the bus lane rules.

When bus lanes are opened to traffic they are used for two things: parking or creating an extra lane. What town planners seem to have failed to grasp, is that one bus lane cannot perform both these functions at the same time. Look at a motorway with a broken down car in the inside lane. One car parked in the extra lane pushes all the traffic out of that lane. Regardless of the ability of drivers to use the third lane to get to the blockage, they still have to queue to get through the two remaining lanes; in essence, that lane has become a car park, a pavement, irrelevant.

All over London there are bus lanes opened up for use as an extra lane for 90% of their length, with sporadic parking bays of 2-3 car lengths. Pointless - the mad dash for freedom up the inside lane right up until the next parked car. If the addition of an extra lane will be fruitless (e.g. there exist other single lane bottlenecks which will eradicate its benefit) open it all for parking - the whole length, there's little enough parking available in London as it is. If the addition of an extra lane will help (e.g. it feeds into a similarly wide road, or takes another lane of traffic to a major junction), make parking in it illegal - the whole length, because one parked car screws us all.

I'm sure the Department of Transport has some great chaos theory-based calculations or something equally ingenious to test new traffic-calming (wonderful oxymoron) measures (like a miniature scaled London with ants for cars). However, for me this one's pretty simple - let the wheels on my car go round and round for once.

Local Council and its Rubbish Service

I pay my income tax. It's not an altruistic thing; a computer does it for me to avoid the moral dilemma of whether or not to lie to the taxman. I do, though, have to send off an eye-wateringly large amount to my local council once a year. As the banking genius who invented switch (remember that) discovered, people don't mind spending money if the folding greenery never touches their sweaty palms, and the reverse is true too; if you have to fork it over, it hurts. Now when I get a meal in return for my hard(ish) earned readies, or a pair of warm and colourful socks, it eases the pain. You have to look a little harder, though, for what you get in return for things like taxes, and in particular council tax.

Here in deepest darkest Oxfordshire we're big into our recycling. Cool. Groovy. Saving the planet one plastic bottle at a time. So, I get a green bin and a black bin - recycling and non-recycling. I noticed that everyone else seemed to have a brown bin too. My interest piqued, I called the council and discovered it to be the garden waste variant. This was good news - my neighbours are catching on to me throwing my hedge and lawn clippings over the fence. So I asked for one.

£40. Per year.

Yup, I have to rent a bin from them. Can I buy one - I checked online, they're about £40? Nope, gotta rent our one. Any particular reason? Does my identically shaped brown bin not fit on the collector? The rules. Of course. Silly of me to ask. While we're on silly questions I then ventured to enquire why this brown bin was not included in the £2000 or so council tax. Simple, councilman told me. It wouldn't be fair on the people without gardens. Glad we got that one sorted, easily one of the more pernicious inequalities in the world. Imagine having to pay for something you don't use. Like a £200 billion welfare state. Make those frivolous mowers of lawns pay for their own Bacchic excesses.

Anyway, despite my dismay at the money grabbing dolts doing their bit to encourage garden waste fly-tipping (though that would probably end up as rather useful compost) I bravely forked out the cash. That was 2 months ago, and still no sign of my bin. I have called up a few times asking as to its whereabouts. Apparently it is a very complex process, sticking a label on a bin, putting it on a van and driving it to my house. So the company entrusted with the job (on a non-negotiable 7 year contract) has fallen a little behind. Amazing how efficient the billing department is of these organisations. If only the rest of them would take note, we might get somewhere.

Speaking of getting somewhere, I feel this post is not. Regardless, onwards I shall speed, blinded by a red fog of ire.

Unable yesterday to see my house from the road, obscured as it was by bin bags of fallen leaves and grass trimmings and less chance of my bin turning up than Lord Lucan, I ventured tip-wards. It's a good 30 minute drive so in the interests of my time and the planet in general I though fewer visits would be the order of the day. So I borrowed the oddly-named Hi-Lux, a half and half car/truck which is anything but luxurious but is certainly roomy in the boot. At the other end of my trip I found the half ork/half human breed who run the tip. A less affable or more charmless breed I have never encountered; bulky men who goose step up and down the site accusing everyone of being contractors disposing of industrial waste without the thought ever entering their minds to help out the 70 year old granny struggling with her old sewing machine. They're down there with the coffee drinkers.

To throw all these leaves away (which the council should have taken in my exorbitantly expensive brown bin), I must get my chit signed. Yup, because my car/truck looks commercial I can only dispose of household waste in it 12 times in 2 years. Oh, but the chap in the much larger Renault Espace next to me can visit as many times as he likes because his car looks more like a car. Good Friday afternoon at Oxfordshire county council that was. Money well spent. I'm beginning to see where fly-tippers are coming from.

So we're not cracking down on commercial waste dumping, just people who put their household waste in larger vehicles to make fewer runs thereby save time, energy, fuel, the planet, money etc. What on earth is the point in this rule? Coming up with that was someone's job. Then they had to pay to print off shiny chits for everyone. Bet that could have paid for my brown bin, wherever it is.