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Crackers
I’ve just read a newspaper account of a press conference given by Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, at which he is said to have given that body’s first meaningful reaction to the horrific Newtown school shooting, America’s Dunblane. Most non-Americans don’t understand the complexities of the Second Amendment, so I’m not going to comment on Mr LaPierre’s proposal that armed guards be posted in every school in the nation, or on his comment that the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Instead I’ll leave it to the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who said, ‘Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe.’
I’m saying nothing either about the Association’s criticism of video games either, because I reckon they may have a point.
However when it comes to Mr LaPierre’s crackpot call for a national database of the mentally ill, I will not hold my fire. That is one of the most dangerous, evil and fascistic ideas I have ever heard, and yet it comes from a body that is said to have made campaign donations to half the members of the US Congress.
Mistake
I’m posting this just before the long-awaited Leveson Report hits the fan and splashes all over David Cameron, the man who was silly enough to commission it.
I’m sure that when our Prime Minister let it loose, he expected and anticipated that it would be a serious and meaningful investigation of journalistic standards in the UK. Major public inquiries are meant to give a voice to the voiceless, to victims of abuse or injustice, and to consider any wrongs done to them in a sober, responsible manner. They are not meant, at least I hope they aren’t, to evolve into video-boxes for B and C list celebrities, anxious to show the world that in days past they were important or interesting enough to have their voicemail hacked, but diluting the focus on the most serious media abuses.
Leveson has been criticised for this, and accused of exceeding his remit. Take the time to read the brief he was given and you may conclude that it is so wide ranging and imprecise that it could not be misinterpreted. Nevertheless, he went along with it, and as a result invited submissions from everyone under the Sun, and the News of the World and the Mirror, etc. The flaw in this is that the can he opened held so many worms that many were shoved backin there again, as the media, itself under investigation, focused attention on the trivial and away from the truly contentious. As an example, the written evidence of Deborah Grobbelaar, is well worth reading, but never will be other than by those people in the future who seek to gain PhDs, or sit in the Mastermind chair, specialist subject ‘The Leveson Inquiry’. You won’t find it reported in the Sun, that’s for sure.
I believe that most of those future doctorate theses will argue that Leveson did more harm than he did good. I believe also that Dave set the whole thing up off the cuff and that now he is regretting it. Well he may, as he struggles to stay afloat in the torrent that is flooding through his friend Charlie’s Augean stables, and many other places.
It may well bring him down. Will it also signal the end of a truly free British media? No. Why not? Because the media won’t let it.
Speaking peace unto nations
With all the reviews that are going in within the BBC, perhaps someone will spare time to look at the following and ask a basic and reasonable question.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/languages/index.shtml
Why, in this day and age, is the British broadcasting tax-payer funding services in 27 different global languages, including Hausa, Kirundi, Kyrgyz, Azeri, and a few others of which most Brits have never heard? Some of my friends tell me I should be proud of the BBC World Service, which, they say, has flown the flag for decades. However given that we are now broadcasting to countries whose only interest in that flag is as a fire-lighter, I say to them that enough is enough. If we are going to use the BBC as a means of spreading the British message abroad, surely we should focus on those countries where it is relevant, namely our European neighbours and partners, and provide services in German, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, Czech, Polish, which currently we don’t. I don’t advocate that we do that, but I do believe the time has come for the British voice in Pashto, Nepali, Uzbek, and all the rest, to fall silent, and for the money to be put to a better use.
Angry, from Gullane
I don’t like to put the boot into other people’s blogs, but in the case of a lady I’ve just seen named in a Sunday newspaper, it would be a good idea, indeed a public service, for WordPress to shut her down. To me she epitomises everything that is wrong with the internet.
I’m not going to name her, because I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else reading her hysterical, vicious crap.
No excuse
The BBC Trust may not want to lose its director general so soon after he took office, but it’s difficult to see how they can avoid it. ‘It wasnae me’ doesn’t cut it any more, not in this case. The McAlpine disgrace isn’t just the biggest British media shambles since the Hitler Diaries, it’s worse than that because of the vilification that has befallen the person innocently accused. He wasn’t named, but so what? In this dangerous age, when social media gossip spreads unchecked like flame through a bed of pine needles, the BBC failed lamentably in its public duty.
In such circumstances the man at the top must go. Not only is George Entwhistle, the BBC’s Director General, he is also, through his office, its editor in chief. He has no honourable wiggle room. He’s toast.
Bert de Marco
Many thanks, Bert. I have been in your eponymous leisure centre many a time, but not in many a year, since I looked like this.
You raise some interesting points, not least about Kenny McAskill’s ill thought out unified police force, which seems to be based on cost alone with no thought of value or public service.
Bob hates the notion and so do I, so yes, more prequels are a real possibility.
Sieve
I’ve just read this with some astonishment. It appears to show that the Leveson Inquiry, a celebrity video-box set up in a moment of panic by our half-witted Prime Minister to enquire into phone-hacking, bungs to policemen, leaking and anything else that take Leveson’s fancy, has itself started to leak. If so, will Dave set up an inquiry into the inquiry?
I commend, to those who have not seen it, the sixth episode of the recently concluded fourth series of ‘The Thick of It’ and to Malcolm Tucker’s tirade at the end, which encapsulates quite brilliantly the crazy ‘Inquiry culture’ in which we are now living. Sadly it has now gone from iPlayer, but should be out soon on DVD.
To think again . . .
At last, it’s official. There will be a referendum on Scottish independence, most likely on the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, a significant date in our history. My mind is already made up, and has been for many years. I will be voting ‘Yes!’ (Note the exclamation mark.)
I have a few English friends who don’t understand why that will be. My answer is always the same; ‘Because I’m Scottish. That’s my nationality. That’s what I am.’ My dream is that one day I will present my Scottish passport to a foreign immigration official. Maybe he’ll be English, maybe Canadian, most likely Spanish; whatever, wherever, I will insist that it is stamped, for it will be a momentous day in my life.
Already the ‘No’ campaign is rolling, and many of my fellow Scots are in that camp. I’m not going to demean them by calling them names. They’re not ‘Fearties’, most of them, but people who hold a different view to mine and who see our future in a continuing political union with our English nee’burs. But I’m not going to allow the assertion that we are voting for the break-up of the United Kingdom to stand unchallenged.
The United Kingdom has been in existence since 1603, and came about because the Virgin Queen left no weans (Well, she wouldn’t, would she?) to succeed her. The Union of the Parliaments came about in 1707, and it is that ill-considered but long-lasting marriage that will be dissolved if Scotland says ‘Yes!’ I will not be voting to reject the Head of State; I’m a monarchist, and more than happy with the present occupant. No, I will be voting to end an economic and fiscal union that has always been dominated by London and has always put London’s interests first. And I’ll even do so knowing for certain that the new state will have a left of centre government; I, who have never voted Labour in my life.
Nor am I going to allow myself to be deflected by the sterling smokescreen. The pound is a British unit of currency, not English; Scotland is its co-owner, and it is entirely logical that we should retain it, in the short term at least, taking our share of the asset and setting up a Scottish central bank, possibly with Alistair Darling as its first Governor.
Will it ever happen? Will I ever present that Scottish passport? Current polls indicate that if the referendum was held tomorrow, the single question on the ballot paper would see a resounding ‘No’ vote. But it won’t be. Those of us who believe in a sovereign Scotland, in a politically and fiscally independent Scotland, have the intervening period to persuade our fellows to ask themselves the simple questions, ‘Who am I? What am I? What do I want to bequeath to my children?’
The more we can do that, the more likely we are to energise the electorate, particularly its youngest members . . . very young some of them . . . and to awaken the inherent courage of the nation that we always have been in our hearts, and can be again, in the fullest sense.
Quintin Jardine's blog 