Full Court Press

So what do we all think of the Leveson report? Or perhaps more importantly, what do we think about what the important people and politicians of various colours are saying about the Leveson report? That's the key point really, seeing as not many of us will have read the 2,000 page dossier.

I did however, watch Hugh Grant's disarmingly charming performance in his new rom com on Channel 4 - "Taking on the Tabloids". I thought the initial storyline was good - principled, slightly rough around the edges but good looking nonetheless, foppish bloke in underdog struggle against big corporation. Unfortunately the love interest curiously never made it into the frame. I assumed she would work for said corporation; they'd initially hate each other but realise love is more important than their political differences and live happily ever after. Like the Coalition. But that didn't happen. He just talked about the press for ages. Some good stuff though.

Hugh and I agree that there's a difference between "in the public interest" and "of interest to the public", thought I don't know if he signs up to my idea that if you effectively make a contract with the press and those who read it that you make your money by their interest in your life (the Kerry Katonas of this world, for example), you have given up some of your rights to privacy. A Venn Diagram here would be most helpful, but I can't be arsed to draw one.

Before you get too tetchy, the long and the short of it is that if you are Jane Q. Taxpayer, the Sun or whoever has no right to publish photos of you topless on a beach on holiday. Yes it is a public place, but by living a non-public life you have a right to things that you put in the relative public space not being broadcast to the world. If you make money as a pop star or somesuch, and you are on the same beach, I reckon it's fair play for the Paps to snap you pups. This is because you put yourself in an overtly public place having got everyone interested in you.

It doesn't stretch to anyone naked anywhere (like for example the poor old Duchess of Cambridge) - if telescopic lenses etc are required to see you, you have gone to enough trouble to remove yourself from the public eye. That has to be then respected as private. And it's not just nudity, but details about your lives etc too. Private is private for everyone, but what is fair game from what is public is down to your 'contract type' and behaviour. It's a shades of grey argument (no, not that like that) which I covered in far more detail here.

So what do I think about press regulation? I'm not a fan. I would also point to the fact that most of the things we think are terrible that the press did were illegal already. Hacking phones is illegal. You don't need new statutes. Use the existing ones. The privacy law idea is always going to be hard to delineate. My 'common sense' approach might make sense (or not) but I imagine it would be hard to enshrine in law.

The press does some pretty despicable things, and there certainly appear to have been very few heads to have rolled, and often not the right ones. I would love to see a better watchdog rather than editors sitting in judgement of themselves. Putting the cat in charge of the cream rarely ends well - just look at the ongoing farce with MP's and IPSA as they continue to stick their snouts in the trough until they are found out (at which point they will apologise for our error in interpretation of their honest mistake and add some transparency that might not have been there before).

But I do not think statutory press regulation is right. Hague makes a very good point that it would do us no favours when trying to take the moral high ground overseas. You could go on forever with examples of when some aberration allowed Parliament to legislate at the thin end of the wedge with only the best of intentions but over time we wandered slowly to the thick end. Income tax started as a one-off levy to pay for the Napoleonic Wars - we all enjoy beating the French but this is taking it a little far (a childish example but you get my drift). Press regulation, as they say, is like pregnancy, and you can't be a little bit pregnant.

But what I really wanted to talk about, partly because I don't have an answer to the press problem; just a gut feeling that statutory regulation is wrong, will be a slippery slope, will have myriad unforseen negative ramifications and is in most cases unnecessary due to existing law, is who is talking about it.

I thought it was brilliant that Ed Milliwho has recently become clairvoyant. He didn't even need to read Leveson's report before he knew, he just knew, that everything in it would be just perfect. Nope, Ed wasted no time working out that Leveson would most likely suggest some form of statutory regulation that would be as unpalatable to the Tories as it would be impractical to apply. So he committed the Labour party (traditional defenders of liberty and freedom, no?) to supporting everything Leveson said and promise to enact any and all recommendations made. Why? Two reasons:

1. He doesn't have to make those decisions as he is not in power so he can make grandiose statements of intent safe in the knowledge they will simply remain just as that (traditional Lib Dem think).

2. It will make for discomfort for Big Dave.

Yup, the bit about Leveson I'm happy to say I have a view on is the behaviour of Red Ed, his party and many Lib Dems. No debate on what is a crucial political topic that could define an entire era, no sensible discourse in Parliament over potentially eradicating 300 years of press freedom. Nope, just political positioning for short term points scoring. One can only hope the British public are intelligent enough to see this and they are punished at the polls. My magic 8 ball suggests the outlook for that is gloomy.

Ed is also one of those who throws all his weight behind people like the McCanns, Christopher Jefferies, Hugh Grant - those who have suffered at the hands of the press. And they have. I should put that front and centre. I have the utmost sympathy for this category of people. I lamented in these pages the court of public opinion's riding roughshod over due process when Christopher Jefferies was essentially convicted of Jo Yeates' murder by the press before he was found totally innocent. But their very intimate involvement with press regulation, or lack of it, if anything makes them totally the wrong people to have at the forefront of statutory legislation.

We put people on trial before an unbiased jury of their peers and subject to the sentencing of a qualified, independent judge for a reason. We don't let the plaintiff adjudicate guilt nor set the tariff. We don't do an eye for an eye. This is not to say that people touched by something are not ever able to be impartial, but it certainly means they are unlikely to be.

People who's loved ones die from a particular disease will often fundraise solely for the charity representing the fight against it; it's human nature. I give more to fighting Alzheimer's and cancer because they are the ones closest to my heart. It doesn't mean that I'm a bad person, or that fighting cerebral palsey is not a noble cause. It just means I probably shouldn't be put in charge of the budget for  disease research for the whole UK: I'm likely to be biased.

People clearly have views - that's fine. MPs might feel one way or another about different diseases or nuclear deterrents or whatever. So might judges. They are expected to put aside their subjective views and examine everything objectively, from the point of view of their constituents and the country. If we think they are sucking at this, we vote them out. Pretty simple.

But the fact remains that those most affected by an issue will in general find it hardest to be objective about it. Which means they shouldn't be the people influencing law. So I say no to Sarah's Law, Megan's Law, Madeleine's Law or any others. Not what is in them - they have fine intent and may be perfectly good pieces of legislation (I am not an authority), but I think composing their content is better left to those professionally obliged to be impartial and experienced in the process of law-making. Is that crazy? I think not. If you would like all of that summarised in a much funnier 1 minute and 42 seconds - listen to Mitchell and Webb's view on it here. I suppose I should have just put that bit at the top and be done with it...

Carry on Nurse

sRight then, time for another venture into the blogosphere, delayed by the Snail Mail's posting of dead tree press to my current location. It is quite a handy excuse to allow me to report my thoughts on the olds rather than the news. Not sure how long I can keep this up for before someone points out any self-respecting blogger should probably get some portion of his info from the world wide. But then, maybe that says more about my deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, as a blogger and as a man. Or more likely I'm just lazy and prefer the inky fingers from out of date newsprint than staring into my pretty, little, silver webterface. Apparently England are playing Wales tomorrow. Might put some money on it - any tips?

I shall persist with the "just a quick one" mantra though I realise from an indulgent perusal of my blog that such statements are rarely borne out. Today I'm blogging about an article that caught my eye from last week's press. It seems the NHS have paid to train a lady to the level of senior staff nurse, fire her for an amusing and harmless quip, then go through no fewer than three tribunals and court hearings. They're also not done yet - they still have to go back to the employment tribunal to determine how much cash they give the lady in question for the now official unfair dismissal. You would have though they were so flush for cash they were handing out cruise holidays with every MRI scan.

I struggle, and am sure I will continue to do so into eternity, to comprehend the level of idiocy that must have permeated so many levels of public services to allow a case like this not just to happen, but to be so typical as to barely raise an eyebrow - why in 4 years has nobody had a common sense check and then smartly kicked themselves in the slats for being so confoundedly stupid - hospital management, NHS management, judicial and tribunal systems (with the exception of the last that finally found in her favour)? This is not a rare case. It seems countrywide there are dolts placed into jobs in the public sector (probably because they kept getting fired from the private sector for gross stupidity) whose sole purpose it is to waste money by making rules or misreading others to try to get in the way of those actually striving to walk forwards in the quest for a better tomorrow.

And so it is I imagine we will end up a good £100,000 plus out of pocket, and maybe much much more with the case dragging on for over 4 years now. Do also remember that as always, it is 'we' who are out of pocket - every penny spent in the public sector was either once yours and mine or borrowed on our behalf without our say-so with our names and the names of our descendants for years to come on the repayment forms. In case you didn't come across the offending article, it appears whilst aiding a doctor in restraining an unconscious epileptic man who was fitting, the nurse ended up being thrown by the patient's writhing astride his naked 'waist area'. She commented "it's been a few months since I've been in this position with a man underneath me".

Apparently humour is dead. Not a complaint from the nurse that she had stayed beyond her shift to help, not a lawsuit for the physical and mental scarring caused from being kicked "between the legs" which resulted in her new position, I believe referred to in some circles as "cowgirl", though I hasten to add, I haven't the foggiest what they mean. Nope. A complaint was lodged 6 weeks later (presumably by a colleague who I hope has had to cover her extra shifts while she's been away as the patient was out for the count) and she was fired for "gross misconduct."

Now I know you know where I'm going with this so I shan't flog it to death, but seriously? Are we not allowed to say anything anymore? It was a harmless quip. If you felt it entirely necessary, you might go so far as to give her a slap on the wrist for what could look like taking advantage of a patient, but it wasn't really was it? It was making light of an awkward situation. Now I'm not suggesting Carry On levels of sauciness about the workplace are to be condoned, but we're in a totally different ballpark, to use the vernacular. So again, remember when you hear about hospitals "being forced to close" or "being forced to cut services" because of the "harsh cuts" (read: only the start of what is necessary to stop us 'doing a Greece'), they choose to waste your money here first well before they even think about treating a patient.

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 Illusion of Security

Today, I am a touche rouge. Clearly yesterday I was a little lacklustre in the repeated application of my sun tan lotion / sun screen / cooking oil. Hey ho, I have no-one to blame but myself. So, I am not going to rant about it, as uncomfortable as it might make my shoulders feel. No, it simply reminded of a sun cream-related incident last year.

I was heading off on holiday with my long-suffering partner. We had some time booked basking in the Greek sun, and bags packed, had headed to the airport. The airport in question, was London Gatwick. London Gatwick, only slightly less tenuous than London Luton, London Stanstead, or the biscuit-taking, London Oxford. With the advent of HS2 I assume we can all expect flights to be advertised to London Birmingham before long. I digress…

Fool that I am, in my packing frenzy I had placed sun cream in my hand luggage. Two 200ml Nivea sun creamy spray things if I remember correctly. Now I'll admit I wasn't in a fantastic mood having queued for an hour like cattle, then being ordered to remove my dangerous looking shoes (flip flops) and assume a recognised stress position whilst being touched up by a failed police officer. I used to travel a lot with work, so I increasingly resented the portions of my life that I was never going to get back which were stolen from me going through (the illusion of) security. So I was not incredibly happy realising I was the architect of my further misery at wasting the best part of 20 sheets on sun cream I couldn't take through. Of course the staff are always only too happy to offer you the option of going back and checking your contraband in too. Two extra pieces of luggage, or one if I found some sellotape (£60), queued at check in for another hour, and then at 'security' for another hour (missed flight, £500). I don't know what Christmas Day is like at the house of the chap who went through my bag, but I can only imagine it has never been better than that moment. The look on his face as he got to confiscate my deadly sun cream, you would think he had just won the lottery. Simple things...

Still, my fault, and all in the interests of my own safety. Probably. Now I have a few points I am planning on making in this post which fall out of this overly-wordy but typical introduction. The first, I have already alluded to; the illusion of safety that these checks provide. Anyone who has driven around the west side of the M25 in rush hour will tell you, the best place from which to bring a passenger plane from Heathrow down, is the big bush by the lay-by just short of junction 15. It is not Terminal 5. All of these commuters sit and watch 30 planes an hour climb at tediously slow speeds and still relatively low heights above them as they sit in the big circular car park that is the M25. This point all comes down to technology. I hope there aren't too many surface to air missiles in the country out of the control of the proper authorities, but I am not so naive to think that with a UK border more porous than a PG Tips tea bag, if someone with enough means wanted one, they would not be able to get one.

So then we ask how they might do this and what we're doing to stop it. You can't walk a basic bomb onto a plane anymore (thanks to security measures) like you can a tube or bus (as well we know). That's a good thing, I am sure. However, going a touch more sophisticated, you can still shoot them down (see above) pretty easily given the means. One hopes the security services are onto 'the chatter' on those ones. Then even less crude, there are super clever bomb things like the chewing gum from Mission Impossible.

Now forgive me for making light of this area, but weapons development is a big market. As much as I always want us to win, I sometimes wonder what chance we have in the fight. There are a lot of people with a lot of reasons to want planes to blow up in the west; be they terrorists who are rather into that, companies who make money out of world conflict, or countries looking to alter the balance of power, there is no shortage and many other categories. The point is, when you wander through security you don't look at the staff and wonder whether they've just quit the SAS because it wasn't hardcore enough, or have just beaten Jack Bauer in an arm-wrestling and menacing whispering contest. You think McDonalds have been down-sizing.

As illustration of the skills of these employees I will take you about 5 hours later in my story. After suitably embarrassing myself (and my partner) with my tantrum over losing my sun cream we went to Greece. On unpacking my hand luggage I found a knife. A big, hard, shiny, metal knife. Attached to a big, hard, shiny, metal corkscrew. I can't remember when I put it in there, but there is was. I imagine about 2 inches of sharp steel and a 3 inch corkscrew. And again, metal. Not hemp. Yes, so avidly had the chap been searching for a bottle of water or sun cream (the easy wins) that he and his colleagues missed a deadly weapon. One that would be pretty handy in a hijack situation were the mood to take me.

So there you have the first couple of points about airport security. Someone can surely beat the passenger security measures; the desire and the money are probably both out there waiting to find the capability. Or cheaper than shooting it down or developing an undetectable explosive a passenger can take through, one could abuse a number of other avenues: Lesser security measures in other countries (cf Yemen); the thoroughly lax security employees experience air-side; or the legal liquid carry-on (as this lot did). My final point is on just that - the legal carry-on limit.

I am not a physicist, chemist, or weaponeer. So, I can't say this absolutely, but I'm going to take a punt anyhow and risk someone explaining to me why I am wrong. I am not entirely convinced that 101ml is the critical minimum limit for a liquid explosive. That is, I think a bomb made of 100ml of explosives will probably be as fatal as one constituting 101ml. Maybe because the legal limit of 100ml is a round number, maybe because I've seen too many films where we are told a teaspoon of 'this' can level a city block, maybe because I am an enduring cynic. Why I can't take 150 ml of something through, in one bottle, or 50ml in a 1/4 filled 200 ml bottle when Linda Lipstick behind me can take 22 100ml bottles crammed into her clear bag is beyond me. If you don't check all of the liquids, surely my 150ml or 50ml of potential nitro-glycerine poses slightly less of a threat that Linda's 2.2 litres?

Now I'm not saying test everyone's liquids and delay us all further, but at least that would make sense as a policy. This half-way house of arbitrary rules is just annoying - make your minds up. On a side note, the pharmaceuticals industry is cleaning up with its overpriced new 100ml bottles. There's a conspiracy theory in there somewhere...