Bonus Culture Club

Today's post is some slightly delayed comment on a story from last week. It concerns greedy individuals holding their employers to ransom demanding a bonus for simply doing their jobs. Nope, not bankers. No Stephen Hester in sight. No Mr Fred Goodwin. Who then? Who thinks that they should be paid on top of their generous salaries a bonus just for turning up?

If you're struggling to work out to which story I'm referring, perhaps I should reword it. Who thinks they should be paid on top of their generous salaries a bonus for not going on strike? Yup, you got it - the sanctimonious moron Bob Crow and his merry band of lazy bastards, the RMT. Not satisfied with an average wage of £50,000 for sitting still operating one binary control (for 35 hours a week, with 8 weeks annual leave), the RMT is demanding its tube drivers be bribed to not go on strike during the Olympics. What a bunch of belters.

The fact that they get paid double the minimum wage for a job perhaps unsurpassed anywhere on earth for its simplicity is in itself an oddity. Remember that wage when you next see the RMT striking, demanding higher pay in a recession for its "hard-pressed, hard-working members". The little boy in the picture above can at least decide to turn the train left into his mother's ankles or to drive it into a sleeping cat on his right. Tube drivers have 'go forwards' on rails and 'stop'. I'm pretty sure even the doors are automatic. Anyway, enough maligning of the noble profession of tube driving. Onto the specifics of the non-strike bribe…

Because London is hosting the Olympics, there will be a couple of extra people coming to town and this might require a slightly better than normal service in quality and quantity. Because they are working longer shifts they have already been given an extra £1200. Okay. But to guarantee they won't strike (always the last resort clearly, not just the first bargaining chip on the table by an unscrupulous, greedy, lazy leadership - we've been here before) they want a bribe. No point calling it anything else. It's a bribe.

And the Government have already quietly offered them about an extra £500 mainly made up of £20 per shift extra. Now that in itself is sickening; demanding more money because for 1 month of the year, the work might be slightly harder. I think it fair to say that workers in department stores the country over have to work harder in the run-up to Christmas when more people use their stores. But they still work their 9-5 or whatever the shift. And they do it for the same wage as in June. Why? Because it's a yearly salary. Yup, sometimes work is harder, sometimes it's easier. As an office worker, you don't get paid more because you didn't get to go on Facebook as much at work but actually had to do your job.

But even better, the RMT have refused this unwarranted offer of a bribe. Nope, they say it isn't enough and because it's based on having to work longer hours during the Olympics, their members who are on leave or sick won't benefit. Yes, you heard that right. Bob Crow thinks it would be unfair for those who don't even do the apparently harder work to miss out on the bribe to not go on strike just because of the simple technicality that they aren't doing any of the work anyway. Presumably they'll be busy attending the overpriced games seeing as they can definitely afford it on their salaries.

Worth finishing with a comparison methinks. The military will have nearly 15000 soldiers, sailors and airmen working on security flat out over the Olympics. Are they getting a bonus for the many extra hours they will have to work like the £1200 bung for tube drivers? Nope, same yearly salary. Will they demand a bonus on top of that to not go on strike thereby totally fucking the Olympics in the ass? Nope again. Because not only do the not have the right to strike, if they had it I'm sure they wouldn't use it. Because therein you can still find some Britons with a sense of duty and selflessness who will be proud to play their part. There is one bonus for them though that I forgot to mention - to ensure sufficient staffing, they've all had their leave cancelled.

Enjoy the Olympics. Just cycle or walk. London Fucking Underground.

Life in the Slow Lane

An easy Saturday blog to try to ease myself back into the blogosphere. Having been silent for a month or so, there's a fair bit on which to catch up. I suppose I could probably launch into a spiel about welfare in general. We might talk about the underlying issues with our system. There were two things that used to encourage people not to live on benefits. The first was the stigma attached to permanently living off the state. The second was that welfare payments were generous enough to keep your head above water but not generous enough for anyone to consider it a good enough life to choose not to try to make even a few more pounds, even if it meant seeing their kids less of having to get out of bed before The Jeremy Kyle Show.

The fact that people choose not to work tells us both these previous factors now no longer apply. People are happy to not work and be seen not to work. Life is clearly comfortable enough without having to work. There is too a disgustingly large proportion of society who believe these handouts are 'owed' to them (read 'entitlements' rather than 'benefits'). The reality is they are the largess of a generous state doling out hard-earned taxpayer pounds. But that would get me too angry to enjoy my weekend, so we'll move on.

We could talk about housing benefit and the cap, or the most often relevant factor, the biological ability to have children and the apparently God-given right this gives people to have them housed wherever they wish by the state. But not only have we already 'discussed' this here, here and here, and nothing has changed since (except finding out the £26,000 cap is actually post-tax, meaning one can 'earn' the equivalent of a £35,000 wage under the cap by doing diddly squat), but it will also make me too angry to enjoy my weekend.

Incidentally note how when there is public vitriol directed towards someone rich, say Stephen Hester, all the media talk about his pre-tax bonus (£963,000), but when discussing the evil Tories' plans to bankrupt hard-not-working families, they talk about the post-tax amount (£26,000). Probably a mistake - they couldn't have meant to compare like to unlike and present it as inequality. Definitely not intentionally misleading to suit the sensationalist headlines. They wouldn't do that. Dicks.

Or I could talk about the obsession with relating the average wage to what a man earns who controls an enormous, multi-billion pound company with tens of thousands of employees. Now you can argue all you like about whether or not the bonus recently awarded to the RBS chief executive is a reward for failure (though remember he came in after the balls up to sort it out). What is certainly true is that he has a right to whatever the remuneration committee decide to award. They set the criteria. They decide. Shareholders, even those approaching 90% shareholders don't get a vote. So less willy waving please, Ed Milliwho, with your farcical "If I was Prime Minister, I'd bally well stop them paying that capitalist pig etc..." daydream.

As it is, the Government suggested it shouldn't be over £1 million, and it wasn't. Do remember though, that in finance, a bonus is a part of the wage structure. I think few people outside this industry understand this. They imagine that their basic pay forms the same part of their remuneration package as the basic pay of someone in the financial industry, when that is far from the truth. Therefore they struggle to understand bonuses being paid almost as a standard.

It is a better comparison to think of those in financial services as similar to car salesman who get a basic plus a commission-based bonus rather than it be equivalent to just handing a bonus to a guy who earns a set salary at the Home Office, the NHS or B&Q. The salesman still gets a 'bonus' from his commissions in a crap year of selling cars where he was massively under target. It's just less, and added to his basic is essentially his wage. It is just a different way of paying people. So if people could stop demanding individuals give up what is part of their pay when they have nothing but a share price in a company they do not begin to understand to go on as evidence, that'd be super.

Now concern over whether the total remuneration across the sector is a bit high, or a lot high, I can certainly understand. I just don't get going after one man. Incidentally, what did the no.2 at RBS get? It seems you don't suffer public scrutiny unless you're the CEO. It all just seems a little childish, and smacks of the politics of envy. By all means talk about boardroom pay, but go about it like envious hordes and you lose all credibility. So we definitely won't discuss that today either.

Or we could talk about the crackpots at anti-monarchist organisation, Republic, who think it is illegal to get school children to cook for the Queen. In their eyes, one can only do this if you also have an equal amount of time devoted to anti-Monarchical study. Celebrating a 60 year reign of a Monarch by cooking her chicken á la turkey twizzlers is clearly too political. We wouldn't like to nail our colours to the mast and say this is what we as a country are and believe in lest you upset a minority of window lickers. By similar thinking you should also teach as much guerrilla- and anarchist-based politics as democracy in any discussions about Government. And probably give equal lesson time for learning about Satanists as for learning about the baby Jee. What a bunch of cocks. So we shan't discuss that either.

No, after that brief introduction, covering several of the topics I will not be covering today, I shall move onto the small Saturday nag. Wouldn't it be nice if caravans (or anyone who chooses to travel at 10-20 mph below all speed limits) pulled over every once in a while and stopped wasting our lives? Or even just stopped flashing you when you legally overtake them as if you have just emasculated them by  shagging their wife and weeing in their favourite slippers? It's just whilst I know the speed limit is a limit and not a target, you'd think it'd be nice if they peeked in their wing mirrors from time to time. If you're reading this and you're one of them, the 35 car tailback behind you is not a bunch of like-minded people queueing up to read your hilarious real ale-based humorous bumper sticker. They're just people whose lives you are holding up.

Perhaps we could have a rule: If you're a caravan, you have to go round all roundabouts twice to allow people behind to overtake. Or maybe we could have enforced lay-bys. Or we could just be allowed to mount missiles to our bonnets like James Bond. I shall be honest, I haven't thought these policies through totally to the finish, but I think there's enough to form a working group. Maybe we could get Republic to come up with some ideas - they clearly have a lot of spare time on their hands.

Workin' 9 to 5...

This week I was forced to travel through London in the middle of the day. I say forced because I had no other sensible option considering the volume of my load and the multiple destinations I had to visit both in and out of London. You see the other options of not paying congestion charge or paying for the astronomical fuel for the car still come out more expensive, far less comfortable and slower. It's another post entirely one feels but as expensive as motoring is, mainly down to the taxes levied on us apparently to encourage us to switch to other means, those other means are largely unviable.

My mood was tempered by the dulcet tones on Radio 4 and the comfort of my moving sitting room, but even with the aircon humming away I was miffed. Why? Because of course I was stuck in rush hour, only it was midday so I shall just call it rush entire day. There is no rush hour anymore. I queue to get in and out of London and indeed through it at all times of day. So do we all. There are simply too many people with too many cars. Most of them driving badly I might add but I'm sure they'd say the same of me.

What compounded the misery of the polyglot mass crawling through the arteries and veins of London like tar being pumped painfully slowly through a heart is of our own making. Around every corner, past every set of lights or roundabout that you just knew was the cause of the traffic, the road beyond you are certain as empty as the Commons once the cameras turn off at PMQs, was a set of roadworks. Entire stretches of road torn up, to continue with my theme, like open heart surgery. Only instead of having 10 people furiously working per 3 inches of open wound that one expects in an operating theatre, there were 3 people per 100 metres doing very little and certainly nothing furiously.

London is infested with incredibly slow road "works". It pains me to call them "works" so little actual work appears to go on. Boris wrote an excellent article on this very subject here. I suggest you read it so I don't have to plagiarise it all. In essence though he points out not just the irritation, but the sheer cost to UK PLC of queueing through London for roadworks. He points to the laughable situation where just about any utilities company, of which there are now bucketloads, has the right to dig up the road and take their sweet time to do so.

The only way to get them to do this more efficiently is to charge them per metre, per hour. Now people will complain, of course, that these costs will just be passed onto the consumers and that the costs will mean some companies will refuse to put in new lines/pipes/cables and that Mrs Miggins won't be able to get her high speed interweb or whatever. But that is what a free market is there for. Eventually companies will just realise this is another area to cut costs by planning works more efficiently, hiring shift road workers to toil round the clock because time is money and 9 to 5 don't cut it anymore. It will make them talk to each other and co-ordinate digging works to access the same bit of London subterrain. If some companies just keep on with their inefficient methods and pass the costs directly on, some other company will work smarter and undercut them. The knock-on for us is we get less disruption, work happens more quickly and we save a shedload of cash and efficiency lost sat in traffic jams. And I will be that tiny bit less grumpy.

What Goes Up Might Come Down

The price of Brent Crude is tumbling. We should be celebrating, no? I for one shall not be digging about in the garage for my spare jerry cans to fill up on cheap fuel down at my local forecourt. Why? Because the price hasn't changed.

It will have come as a surprise to nobody that finally both Ofgem and the Federation Internationale d'Automobile have both this year investigated the prices charged by fuel suppliers compared to the price of their raw product, with the latter writing to the EU to complain in June.

Ofgem recently announced that for the first time it has evidence that energy companies are hiking their prices faster when costs have risen than they lowered them when costs fell. Wow. Who knew? It does make one wonder what Ofgem do with the rest of their days.

The two most obvious industries whose profits depend on the rise and fall of crude oil are our energy providers and our fuel providers; in many cases much of a muchness. It would take an averagely computer-literate ten year old to find a graph depicting the rise and fall of say, Brent Crude and the prices on the forecourts for the last few years. I borrowed such a ten year old and he found me these: petrol (here) oil (here). Fear not, I have returned him.

Raw product (oil) accounts for only about 1/3 of our pump price. We have the Government to thank for about 65% in tax (is there an easier way to collect tax?), a percent or two to the retailer and the remainder to the refiner. Numbers vary by business model, but it's around there.

The peaks and troughs of the price graphs certainly roughly marry up in shape, but do they in size? You may remember everyone crying when petrol went through £1 a litre in late 2007. Crude oil was at about 80 dollars a barrel. It peaked in mid 2008 at just shy of 147 dollars when petrol prices were about £1.20. Then when crude oil fell to sub 40 dollars a barrel the motorist had brief respite at just below the £1 mark again, when ratios would have had it nearer 70p. Recently we've been up in the 125 dollars a barrel region and the average forecourt price has been over £1.40 or thereabouts.

Now we have an oil price approaching the 100 dollar mark, so we can safely assume the price should be tumbling with it. Now whenever there is a price rise in oil, it gets passed on essentially instantaneously, yet when there is a drop we hear excuses. I'm sure companies do hedge on prices and buy in advance, so if there is a sharp drop they will be selling petrol or energy fuelled by more expensive oil they bought before the drop. However, by that model when prices of oil rise there should be stockpiles of cheaper oil to keep prices lower. But you and I know it doesn't work that way.

Price of unleaded at the recent peak at my local BP when oil was 126 dollars? 136.9p per litre. Price last week with an oil price of 105 dollars? 136.9p per litre. But we're all British so we bend over and take it without so much as a trembling of the lower lip. You wonder what the point is of having an Ombudsman who can stare such sharp dealing in the face and ignore it day in, day out. It's enough to make you want to take the train, if it wasn't so crap and expensive too... 

Screaming Along at 36,000 Feet

Well I'm back, but not in necessarily the fashion I had envisaged. Not fashion in clothing terms, you understand - I dutifully turned up in 4 degree London in Del Monte-esque pastel linens - but in terms of how enjoyable a return it was. You see, as good as my book was, or the fact that I hadn't seen any of the in-flight films before (don't try to watch 127 hours when eating lunch; beef stew and self-amputation don't mix well), it was quite a painful flight. Why, you ask? Because as always, as it seems I am fated to be on every flight until the end of time, I sat within very easy earshot of Damien the Devil Child.

Now I may be the only person to blog about this particular flight, but I can all but guarantee almost every reader will have had a flight pretty much ruined by a screaming child, and there were at least 100 fellow passengers in my position yesterday. I am also not talking about the briefly screaming child. This baby screamed for at least 7 of the 8 hours of flight. Like it was being murdered. Really painfully murdered. Again and again. In fact, whilst we're on the subject, so horrific were the screams that they would have made those of the subjects of the Spanish Inquisition pale into insignificance as slight grumblings about the cleanliness of the ablutions provided. Now you might suggest that this baby was the 1, the 5, the 10% that simply won't stop crying whatever happens and I am being unfair. If that was my only flight ruined by a screaming child I might agree. But I have taken a few hundred flights, 95% ruined by screaming children, and I refuse to believe that the same percentage of no-matter-how-hard-I-try-it-won't-stop-screaming children always end up on my flights. So this post is about all of the flights, not just yesterday's VS 672 row 42 seats C-F. You know who you are, though.

So, babies scream. We know this. Also, they generally don't like flying. We know this too. Even I know this, and I have no children. They often don't like new surroundings. They don't know how to clear their ears to deal with the pressure differentials involved with climbing and descending. Sometimes they are ill too. So, this rather comes down to the parents. With toddlers and young children, you have similar problems, and also boredom thrown in to boot.

I shall make my point clear. If you take you children anywhere you have a duty to try to control them and not let them shout the house down or run wild and ruin everyone else's day. Whether this be screaming babies or riotous toddlers, your friend's house, a church, a restaurant, or an aeroplane, this is one of the many jobs of the parents. They may not always realise this, because whilst you need a Government licence to fish or watch below average television, you don't need one to procreate. I won't get into that one now, but you have all seen parents happy to let their children do as they will, spoiling it for everyone else. Now one would hope that at least some parents would be mortified if they were in a nice restaurant and their child screamed to high heaven for the entire meal, or spent the main course kicking the crap out of someone else's chair. They would have essentially ruined the, let us modestly say £100 per table, meals of anyone in earshot.  Why does this mentality seem to disappear when every single seat costs £500-£1000 on a plane?

I know you can't take them outside, as much as it was tempting to suggest it at 36,000 feet, but you have to do something. This comes in several parts, most of which I was aware of anecdotally but is also easily available online for example. Maybe ask your parents - they probably had children. If you know your baby is uncomfortable in the crappy cots airlines provide, buy an extra seat and take their car seat - they tend to know this means sleep time. Book flights that are most likely to tally with their sleep times. If they are ill, have all the required medicine for them, and if possible some nice soporific stuff like Calpol. Don't feed them just before you get on the flight, because getting them to feed on climb and descent will equalise their ears as they swallow. For toddlers, sweets to suck on during climb and descent work for the equalisation. For boredom, bring games, colouring-in, whatever floats their boat. Now these measures might take a bit of preparation and effort on the part of parents, and even cost them a bit of money. But remember parents, we didn't choose to have your child. You did.

My final point is one I hope I will stick to in years to come as and when I am karmically blessed with the noisiest travelling babies on earth. It is, even if you can't do anything, if you already have the car seat, have timed the feeds, have given them enough drugs to put Courtney Love under and are comforting them from here to Timbuktu, and the babies are still crying or if the children apparently no longer like their toys and have finished their colouring in  … make it obvious you are trying to shut them up. Worse even than the screaming yesterday, was watching the satisfied parents who have got used to tuning out the noise, enjoying their flights whilst everyone else suffered.

Maybe when the revolution comes, and I am made King, there will be family sections at the rear of the planes (much like when there used to be smoking sections - it may be my memory doing me a disservice but I distinctly remember Iberia having smoking and non-smoking divided by the central aisle thus making it all smoking after the left turn out of Heathrow). Now that is probably unfair to the many parents who have well-behaved children and who manage their babies as well as one can, but at the moment it seems policy is to spread the misery as evenly as possible throughout the plane. This policy would though make the standing area at the back a handy screaming-only place for soothing the not-so-happy youngsters, and maximise the joy by compressing the sorrow in a wonderfully utilitarian way. Not sure Unite would be so happy, but then again, they won't be until their waitresses and waiters are paid more than the pilots. Of course, if I'm King, I probably won't have to turn right when I get on the plane. Someone else will have to answer this one for me - do they have screaming children in First Class?

Driven to Distraction

A sad piece from the news last week - a little girl died in an RTA in Bolton after the driver (her father) followed incorrect directions from his sat nav. Now I'll skip gently round this one, because whilst it serves to highlight a point I wish to make, a little sensitivity is probably the order of the day. The driver, a learner, took an illegal right turn when prompted to do so by his sat nav system. He collided with an oncoming car to fatal ends. The illegality of such a right turn was signposted, but neither the driver nor his wife saw the signs.

There are a couple of points here. The first: an extract from the article concerned states "a recent survey found they [sat navs] had been blamed for causing around 300,000 people to crash in Britain." No they didn't. Drivers cause accidents in the vast majority of cases. Duff information from a sat nav doesn't help, but they don't make the decisions. If the chap in the street I ask for directions tells me to drive into a brick wall, down the side of a ravine or along the London to Brighton high speed line, I will probably thank him and then work it out myself (after out of sight so he doesn't know I'm ignoring him - I don't want to be rude, I'm English). You may be wondering why I would ever ask directions, being a man and all. Surely I either have a cast iron sense of direction or a cast iron stubbornness, either of which makes this direction-asking episode a figment of my imagination? I have a mix of the two. And a map. And a sat nav, but like all of us could be a much better driver.

The point is, you can't go around believing everything you are told, and the advice of sat navs is no exception to the rule. Some are better than others. Some are out of date. The same is true of maps, of the advice of locals and of the navigational directions coming from the array of back-seat drivers in your car. Ultimately though, you drive the car. You are operating a very heavy, very fast, very dangerous machine. So, have your maps and advice and up-to-date sat navs, but ultimately, look out of the window at the signs.

The second point is somewhat linked to this first, but is very specific to the case in question. Why was a learner driver using a sat nav? Now many if not most cars seem to have them these days, but having the voice of John Cleese (well he's got to pay for his divorce settlement somehow) telling you where to go does not absolve you of the responsibility for operating your vehicle safely and within the law. I would suggest basic navigation is a pretty important part of learning to drive, as is keeping your eyes out of the car not glued to a mini tv. By all means get sat nav once you've learned to drive, but if you don't teach a new driver the underlying skills, what chance have they of negotiating the roads safely if technology fails? Which it does. Regularly. Good to see, therefore, the Government introducing navigation into driving tests, but you probably still shouldn't use them whilst learning.

So that's it really. A defence of sat navs. They're pretty good. Like maps. But they don't drive the car. The sooner we stop blaming inanimate objects for the flaws of humans, we might get back to the basics of driving and do something positive for road safety. A sad lesson learned the very hardest way, but one that someone might at least learn something from.

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...

What's Driving Me Mad Today...

After a furious session of New Year posting, I feel I should take a small step back from the political blogosphere and vent about something a little more mundane. I drive. You probably drive too. This one is about just that. Driving, or more specifically, drivers.

Driving can be quite enjoyable, given the right blend of company, car, scenery, and music. In my mind I am picturing something approaching a Martini advertisement. But we can't all slalom around the Italian countryside in Ferraris with Charlize Theron/Brad Pitt/Ian Hislop (chac'un à son goût) in the passenger seat; so for most of us driving is rubbish.

It revolves around traffic. More likely than the Martini advertisement, for company you will either be bored on your own or, for the parents among you, with horrible screaming children for company. The car is probably not your dream car but represents the life/money compromises you wish you didn't have to make. The scenery will be litter being discarded onto the verge of said highway by the local ASBO brigade. The music will be some brainless berk on the radio.

However, I can deal with all of this as long as something else remains - a modicum of manners. I'm not asking for doffed caps and waved hankies, but when I let someone in and they don't thank me, I don't think it a total over-reaction to wish I had heat-seeking missiles mounted on my bonnet.

Is it because of the isolation one is afforded inside the protective shell of their own car that people feel detached enough to be rude? I wonder if the same people are as rude on a pavement, in a shop, in a restaurant. It's pretty easy to stick your hand up in thanks or flash your hazard lights. It's probably a small step too far to suggest this is representative of the crumbling of the moral fabric of society, but manners maketh the man; remember that next time someone lets you in.

RMT: Rail Morons' Twaddle

Now you may have already read (here and here) my musings on trade unions. A little more on that today though. The Rail Union, RMT, has confirmed that it has rejected Network Rail's latest pay offer. The offer was for a whopping 5.2% pay rise for operations and customer services staff next year and an RPI pay rise in 2012. Interesting.

I find myself again using the phrase 'at a time of national and international austerity', but apparently some people still are yet to open their eyes to the big picture. RMT General Secretary Bob Crow, hewn from the same block as Red Len McClusky, has decreed that "with VAT going up to 20% in January, power and utilities bills going through the roof and expectations that inflation will continue to rise we are looking to make sure that we achieve a pay deal for Network Rail ... staff that protects and improves their standards of living in this time of economic and political instability."

A nice idea. In other words Bob is saying "the economy is rebuilding slowly from a recession, and everyone is going to get a bit poorer but I think my lot are special, so we should get huge pay rises instead, because we can't have RMT members suffering like everyone else." Yup, it appears Bob knows there was some form of economic crisis, he just hasn't grasped the relationship that might have with future pay deals for him and his boys. The fact that pretty much everyone has overspent, public and private alike and a great deal of restructuring and budgeting is necessary lest various institutions, private (Network Rail) or public (HM Government), go down the drain, has passed him by.

Yes, Bob is another of those who would take a chainsaw to the golden goose for a bit of press, some classist grandstanding and his ludicrous salary and then wonder why there were no more golden eggs for him and his union afterwards. It seems there are swathes of society who do not feel the need to do their bit, whether it's actually going out to get a job, or accepting some of the pain necessary to save the country or individual companies from ruin. The latter are most obviously prevalent in these overly strong, militant trade unions.

So, when you next read about strike action from RMT, or the like, have a look at what they are demanding. And it is demanding, not asking, for they hold their companies to ransom like terrorists. The right to strike is a great privilege and should be used accordingly. Instead, it is being abused and the people perpetrating these acts are a disgrace to the workers, the public and the politicians who fought so bravely for that privilege. It was designed as the last resort against an oppressive and unfair employer, not as the first resort to getting paid over the odds when everyone else is taking pay cuts.

Again, I would ask you to remember the Armed Forces (who will also still suffer the VAT increase, rising energy bills and inflation, and many of them on their return from 6 month tours in Afghanistan) are on a 2 year pay freeze, without so much as a squeak of dissent.

This has to stop. Trade Unions are no longer built for purpose and they are led by utterly inappropriate personnel. They have the ability to be great institutions for legitimate and productive representation of workers. The workers must save their unions from themselves though, for no matter what action is taken to attempt another breaking of the unions from the outside, unless they understand why it has become necessary to break them, why they are out of line, they will regrow again the same archaic beast.

Coming in with unrealistic wage demands when all around are tightening their belts is not the action of a union that is there to "fight for its members' interests." Remember this when the picket lines form again, when your lives are disrupted for the sake of trade union greed. Then, if you can't get to work because the trains aren't running, maybe grab a placard and picket the picketers. They must be shown the nation is not with them on this one.

Oh, The Weather Outside is Frightful

I spent some quality time with my car today - just me, a billion tons of snow ... oh, and half the motoring population of the UK in perma-gridlock. The quality in question was the quality that only quantity can bring. 6 hours to drive 60 miles. So, we light upon the focus of today's post. Is it the inability of any Government of the day to deal with snow in this country? Is it the fact that our 'torrential dump' of snow is utterly mundane in other countries who seem not to grind to a halt when the big Pete Doherty in the sky sneezes? Is it the various truckers attempting to recreate their favourite scenes from Strictly Come Dancing on Ice Factor, sliding sideways down the arterial routes of the country?

Nope. It's tough. I sympathise with the Government. I sympathise with the truckers. Yes, we could indeed have a fleet of 100,000 snow ploughs waiting for the 4.6 days a year that it snows and we could buy all the salt and grit on earth. But then you couldn't have A&E, or primary schools. Perhaps the maths doesn't quite marry up, but you get the point - you can't do everything with limited means, and boy are our means currently limited.

No, the focus of today's splurge of literal anger are thoughtless motorists. Now I am not suggesting we ban anyone not in a snowmobile from the roads or all have to take special snow driving tests or have winter tyres from November to February. Snow is a bit tricky - I had a couple of moments myself today, wonderful motorist that I am (in my totally unsuitable 2 wheel drive child's go-kart of a car) - and people can easily get caught out. No, it is what some people do when they have been caught out.

Much of the delay I had today, and many others with me, was from sheer weight of traffic driving at a sensibly cautious speed. Much of it came from queues behind the unfortunate pirouetting cars, trucks, vans and assorted others who came a cropper. Hey-ho, I can't complain at those. I should have settled into a never-ending pint of cider in the local pub in front of the log fire. Unfortunately it was trying to get back to said pub that plunged me into the fray.

There were though some totally avoidable delays. It is at the architects of these that I now target my irrepressible ire; those caused by cars abandoned with an attitude so whimsical you had to double take to check that the Rubenesque Emmerdale woman wasn't about to hop out and tell you that you had been framed. At several points I queued to crawl past a car abandoned so far from the kerb an average orienteer would still require an ordnance survey map to locate said verge.

If you decide to call it a day and trek to the local hostelry / lie down naked in the snow for the Good Lord to take you, why not try a little bit to get your car out of the way first? Look around - everyone else has parked out of the way, but you seem set on creating your own version of the Senna S at Interlagos. Surely you don't want to add another half hour delay to all the poor buggers with better tyres / more moral fibre / a reckless abandon / a hire car? So, my message of festive cheer today is enjoy the snow at home if you can, go easy on the Government, and if you return to your car after the thaw and realise you are 'one of them', be a little more considerate next time. Remember, we're all in this together...

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.

Rubbish Bombs

A slightly more light-hearted Saturday morning rant...

There exists the rather annoying problem of not having anywhere to throw one's rubbish whilst travelling by rail based transport. Since the Victoria Station and Bishopsgate bombs of 1991 and 1993, bins have very much receded from public places and in particular from stations, and understandably so.

Clearly there is risk analysis to be conducted here, and indeed there are currently many hundreds of opaque bins on the streets of London, maybe thousands. There are still though, relatively few places to throw rubbish when at a station. I'd like to see more of the bin comprising clear plastic bags and a frame from which they can hang - the media via between would-be litterers and would-be bombers.

Not exactly high level blogging but they can't all be...