Showing solidarity on £35 a week

PREJUDICE and misunderstanding abound, so I salute my near-neighbour Claire for her warm-hearted display of solidarity with those seeking asylum in Britain.
Her blog, lightlyliving.wordpress.com has been an interesting read throughout the five weeks she has been trying to live on £35 per week.
That’s the allowance given to those who have come here seeking refugee status and are waiting for permission to stay.
They are not economic migrants – and there is nothing remotely “illegal” about them in any way.
They are people fleeing persecution in their home lands, who have made themselves known to the authorities here and exercised their legal right to apply for asylum under the Refugee Convention.
They are not allowed to work until their case has been determined, which can means many months living a pretty hand-to-mouth existence in Britain.
How would you make out on just £35 a week to cover everything? As Claire found, it’s not easy – and she was doing it in the heart of a warm, loving family, with a secure roof, good clothing, a decent kitchen, speaking English as her first language and thoroughly familiar with British ways of life and shopping.
I was most moved by her account of an encounter in the supermarket queue.
When the woman in front of her declined a ‘buy one, get one free’ offer, she requested the free bread for herself.
How many asylum seekers, I wonder, would have the confidence to do that, even if they had the understanding?
As a well-dressed, well-spoken Englishwoman, she naturally felt compelled to explain herself. And that led, inevitably, to a dispute in the queue about the rights of what she was doing – in particular, about the rights (and supposed wrongs) of asylum seekers.
For Claire, this was a small and rare taste of the ignorance and prejudice which asylum seekers themselves – indeed, migrants of all kinds – face constantly.
To be branded alongside a fearsome, indeterminate “They” left her physically shaken.
Yet “they” are damaged, threatened human beings who have fled here, maybe at great personal risk and hardship, because their life elsewhere has become unbearable – sometimes literally unliveable.
If you are escaping from war or human rights abuses in Afghanistan, Iran, or Somalia, say, Zimbabwe, China or Iraq, the least you should expect here is to be treated with compassion.
If each person in that supermarket queue were to sit down with an individual refugee or asylum seeker and hear their story, some of those who speak most harshly about “them” might respond more kindly. More welcomingly. Less begrudging of a pitiful £35 a week.
I hope so.

****

I WAS just hanging out the washing when a bird flew down and landed on the feeder not six feet away.
What’s more, it stayed there while I fetched my camera, and remained posing sweetly while I took its portrait from several angles.
The little ball of bluetit fluff, still sporting its bright yellow ‘feed me, mum’ beak markings, has clearly not yet learned to be afraid of people. Or, indeed, the dog that was lying equally unconcerned under the feeder.
This delightful close encounter occurred just minutes after I completed my stint of garden-watching for the RSPB’s latest national survey.
I’ve taken part every January for years in the Big Garden Birdwatch. This was my debut, though, in the summer version, titled Make Your Nature Count.
The tally for my hour was five blackbirds, five bluetits (one busy adult with four chicks), four great-tits (two and two), three robins (one of them a chick), two woodpigeons, two collared doves, two dunnocks and a pair of chaffinches.
Plus the rarest of the lot, three blackcaps, two of them brown-capped chicks.
I’ve known for a few years that there was a regular blackcap nest in a holly tree just outside my garden. This is the first year, though, that I have seen the young ones.
I initially only identified them because I was able to watch the parents feeding them and I’ve seen them a few times since.
I don’t know whether the great-tits I can see outside the window right now are the family that was raised in my nesting-box, but I imagine it’s likely.
And then there are the longtailed tits.
They made no appearance on survey day. But a day or two earlier they arrived in the late afternoon sun and stayed, resting, feeding and chirruping in the holly and my apple tree, for a good couple of hours.
As ever with this most charming of species, they were travelling not just as a family, but as a whole troupe. I didn’t count them, but I’d estimate four or five adult pairs, each with three or four chicks.
And why do I tell you all this?
Simply because all this abundance of life around us brings me joy, and I hope it does you too.
To notice and to care about the non-human seems to me one of the best things in being human.

Flag-waving and over-optimism, our national sport

HERE we go then. Time to wave the flag, set up the telly and indulge – for a couple of weeks at least – in another national bout of over-optimism.
The friendlies, the qualifiers, the arguing over who goes – they’re all over. The real action starts here.
Well, for England it starts tomorrow in the Royal Bafokeng Sports Palace in Rustenburg.
And against a team that includes a Watford defender, a Bolton reserve midfielder and a striker who scored twice in 30 games for Hull last season, you’d have to feel Fabio Capello’s side have more than an even chance. (That’s Jay DeMerit, Stuart Holden and Jozy Altidore.)
The one area where the USA look stronger than England is in goal.
I’d pick Everton’s Tim Howard or Wolves’ Marcus Hahnemann over any of the three keepers in the England squad.
In fact, if I were Capello I’d have taken three different goalkeepers – not David James, Robert Green and Joe Hart, but Paul Robinson, Chris Kirkland and Steve Harper.
Of course I’d have given them all a few games first. And England would still have looked weaker in that crucial position than Spain, Italy, Brazil or the US.
Broadly speaking, you have to say Capello has got the outfield squad about right.
Darren Bent may be unlucky. The second highest-scoring Englishman in the Premier League (24 goals) is left behind while Emile Heskey (three) gets a chance to improve his abysmal England strike rate (58 caps, seven goals).
But then, however much we may love him as one of our own, can anyone who regularly watched Bent in an Ipswich shirt picture him as a World Cup winner?
Heskey’s chief contribution may have happened already. It was his tackle in training that cost England the man who was to have been captain.
And who is to say that Michael Dawson, the replacement for Rio Ferdinand, isn’t a better defender right now anyway?
If England are to have a hope of winning the trophy, someone will have to excel themselves in defence, and it could just be the uncapped Dawson.
For most in the oldest squad England have ever taken to a major tournament, this is now-or-never time.
Very few of this lot will be around in 2014, when James Milner, a World Cup rookie this time, will likely be captain.
One survivor will surely be Wayne Rooney.
But now is the time for the Manchester United star – 60 caps already at age 24 – to show he really is one of the world’s best.
If he does that – and keeps a lid on his explosive temper – maybe the dream isn’t impossible this time.
Either way, let’s enjoy the show, not just England’s part in it.
Not just players such as Messi, Kaka, Ribery, Ronaldo and Torres, whose star quality we already know about. But those we haven’t heard of yet who will light up the tournament on behalf of Cameroon, Chile, Slovenia or one of the Koreas.
I’m looking forward to the clash between Brazil and Ivory Coast on June 20. Before that, tomorrow’s game between Argentina and Nigeria should be much more than a curtain-raiser for the England game to follow.
It may provide a clue as to how far Argentina can profit from having the world’s best array of attacking skill (Messi, Milito, Tevez). Or how much they’ll be hampered by having the World Cup’s most incompetent coach (Maradona).
England-USA won’t tell us much about anything, except perhaps our boys’ collective mental state.
Form and history suggest England should reach the last eight. It will be a disappointment if they don’t.
Once there, let’s hope Capello has found a way to clear the mental demons from the players representing the country with the worst record of any in penalty shoot-outs.

****

I FEEL very sorry for the Koupparis family and hope their baby twins recover soon and fully from their injuries.
But the public response to one incredibly rare – one might say unique – incident is as hysterical as it’s predictable.
Foxes are wild creatures and this one clearly panicked in an unfamiliar threatening situation.
There is another creature about the size of a fox, much commoner, potentially as dangerous and overall a much greater nuisance. They are rife on the streets and bold enough to enter homes deliberately.
So, a cull of cats, anyone?

****

DAVID Cameron promises cuts that will change the whole British way of life.
Bet it won’t impinge too much on him and his fellow-millionaire buddies.
Kind of him, though, to ask us all what we’d like to see privatised “to save money”. (Since when did giving things away to business save money?)
I’m quite clear on this, so I can tell you now, David.
Government money shouldn’t be wasted on things that aren’t needed.
So no cash to bankers, the nuclear industry or weapons manufacturing.
On the other hand, nothing that is needed should be trusted to private enterprise.
So time to take the water, electricity and gas services, the railways, the Post Office and all those bits of the NHS that have been surreptitiously given away, back into public ownership, where they belong.
And hands off our schools.

One Laws for the rich...

DIDN’T take long for the first ‘star’ of the coalition to fall, then.
I have heard some sympathy expressed for David Laws, whose tenure as treasury secretary lasted just 18 days. Or about £570 worth of dodgy rent.
Sympathy for what?
Well, OK, he wanted to keep his private life private. Fair enough, I suppose.
But I am sure there are ways he could have done that without cheating the taxpayer out of £40,000 in falsely claimed rent payments. Or, to put it another way, stealing. From all of us.
If I’d done that, simply offering to pay it back (even if I could) wouldn’t get me off the hook.
In fact, my next claim against Her Majesty’s Government would probably be in rental for a prison cell.
And that headline £40k isn’t the whole of it, either.
A thorough examination of his past expenses claims reveals he claimed £150 a month for utilities and £200 a month for service charges. Until receipts began to be demanded, at which point those claims suddenly dropped to £37 and £25 respectively.
Obviously Mr Laws wasn’t very good with money.
So how did he get a double first in economics at Cambridge? And how did he last five years as a vice-president of international investment bankers JP Morgan? Or hold down a top job with Barclays de Zoete Wedd, where he was something called Head of Dollar and Sterling Treasuries?
I don’t know what those jobs involve, but they sound posh. And they sound as if they feature larger sums of money than Laws has been trousering on the sly since he’s been a mere MP.
Perhaps JP Morgan and Barclays de Zoete Wedd don’t care if their executives fiddle their gas and electricity accounts.
But try getting away with it on the dole.
Or try telling the housing benefits office you’re paying rent to the person whose bed you share. That’d give them a good laugh. They don’t tend to be as keen on your privacy as David Laws was on his.
Laws has never been out of work. In fact, he has probably never been paid as little as you or me.
I don’t suppose he has much understanding of what it means to be among the low-paid, or no-paid. Yet those are among the people whose lives and futures he held in his hand until last Saturday.
The whole purpose of the job he’s just quit was to wield the axe, to find the £6billion he could slash from public expenditure.
So a man who could casually claim nearly £300 a month for non-existent utilities and services was to tell junior nurses, teaching assistants, police clerks and road-menders that their jobs were no longer worth paying for.
It has been suggested that Danny Alexander, who has taken over Laws’s old treasury role, lacks the necessary grasp of economics.
What – the grasp of a man who can’t distinguish between £62 and £350?
In defence, it’s been said that what the job requires isn’t knowledge of economics, but something called “good judgement”.
Let’s hope Alexander has better judgement than his predecessor, who left still apparently unable to see he’d done anything wrong.
Who failed to see that nobody, surely, gave a stuff about his sexuality until he was caught cheating us all, supposedly to cover it up.
Even as they were accepting his resignation, Cameron and Clegg were talking about one day welcoming Laws back into the ranks of government. Which surely calls their judgement into question too.
But even if his political career is toast – as it should be – I wouldn’t waste any sympathy on him.
Whatever his future may hold, it’s unlikely ever to be a personal “age of austerity” such as he was preparing to inflict on the rest of us.
He will never have to join the dole queue or dodge the benefit snoops.
He can always go back to being a banker. And claim in ‘bonuses’ the kind of sums a dodgy politician can only dream of.

****

“WE’RE sorry for the disruption of lives,” says BP spokesman John Curry.
Sorry. I bet they are.
Sorry that what President Obama has already called the worst environmental disaster in US history will go on unchecked until at least August.
Sorry that the millions of gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico threaten the extinction of several animal species as well as thousands of human livelihoods.
Sorry that safety concerns were waved aside when the exploded well and its rig were first planned.
Sorry that they have no real idea how to stop the oil from gushing. Even though their best ‘experts’ said it was safe.
Are these, I wonder, the same kind of ‘experts’ who insist that nuclear power is now safe?
That accidents won’t happen – and if they do, we have the know-how to handle them?
Anyone who listens to the pro-nuclear lobby might learn a useful lesson from BP’s current misadventure.
Never trust the safety pledges of anyone with a vested interest.

How can going private be in the public interest?

SO now we have a government pledged to govern “in the national interest”. Oh, good.
But can someone please remind me – when did we have a government that promised to act AGAINST the national interest?
There’s no doubt many have done so, but none, surely, admitted it.
The question then is: Who defines what’s in the national interest?
I, for example, think privatising – or even part-privatising – the Royal Mail is very much NOT in the national interest.
Presumably, members of the government think it’s in their own interests, or maybe the interests of certain of their friends. That’s what privatisation is generally about, after all.
I think renewing Trident is in anything but the national interest – and before the election the LibDems agreed with me.
Conversely, I think the government’s got it roughly right on nuclear power, cancelling the third runway at Heathrow and abolishing house-building targets. But others will disagree.
There may even be someone who’s sorry to see the great ID cards scheme bite the dust. Though that particular piece of NuLabour insanity was surely on its way out anyway, whoever had “won” the election.
The stated intention, carried over from Blair, to “end child poverty” by 2020 is great. Surely no one could argue with that. Except for the blindingly obvious fact that it won’t happen.
Tory education policy (the LibDems appear to have abdicated responsibility here) is to pick up the worst of Blair’s “reforms” and run with them. Not just run, but run amok.
The throwing open of the schools system to private enterprise and private interests is a potential disaster that could damage the country for generations.
Mind you, I’m looking forward to the opening of the first Pagan comprehensive. The first gay and lesbian academy. The first Socialist high school.
I also like the idea of limiting the power of supermarkets, though I’m not holding my breath on how it will work in practice.
All together we face a curious ragbag of pick-n-mix policies. Which is perhaps not surprising when you consider how hastily the Queen’s Speech and all that lies behind it was cobbled together.
One page from your manifesto, one page from mine.
Neither of those manifestoes had any clear, consistent vision anyway.
Maybe that’s the reality of the “new politics”. Neither of us knows where we’re going, so let’s hold hands on the way.
Tony Blair’s “Third Way” was code for “lost our way”. Cameron and Clegg are but babes wandering in the same wood.
There is a common ideology of a sort, though – one all the parties seem to share. And that’s giving primacy in all decision-making to “the markets”.
In other words, making us ordinary folk pay for the mistakes and greed of that parasitic growth known as The City.
So when exactly did “in the national interest” come to mean “in the bankers’ interests”?

****

I WOKE at 3.33am to a sound of frenzied twittering outside the window.
The baby great-tits in the box on the wall, as yet unseen and uncounted by human eye, had begun their constant jabber. Before there was even a vague hint of light in the sky.
From dawn until dusk for a fortnight the parent birds have been on the go, fetching a constant supply of insects, grubs and other titbits to their ever-demanding offspring.
I have never seen any creatures work harder. Surely they don’t have to keep it up during the hours of darkness too?
At 4.13 the nightingale began. I was glad, because I’d been wondering whether there was one around this year.
There it was, loud, clear and utterly distinctive in its endless variety of musical phrase. And probably further away than it sounded.
No, certainly further away. It sounded as if it was in the bedroom with us.
But even if it costs you a little sleep, you cannot begrudge the nightingale his song. It’s one of the most wonderful, life-affirming sounds there is.
And now the great-tits are gone.
They, or others of their kind, are still visiting the feeders and the apple tree. But they don’t live here any more.
Was that great pre-dawn racket the sound of the young family emerging and flying the nest?
I guess it was. And I wish them well in the world.

****

WHATEVER the ads may say, Exile On Main Street is not the greatest rock ’n roll record ever made.
I’m not sure it’s even the best album The Rolling Stones ever made, though it’s close.
The newly remastered and chart-topping CD doesn’t really add much to the original vinyl. Unless you get the version that comes with a ten-track “bonus disc”.
And that raises a sad conclusion.
That the best new Stones album since 1978 consists of out-takes from 1972.

There''s a historical precedent for Con-Dems' reform bid

SOMETIMES you just can’t help falling foul of Godwin’s Law.
I don’t mean breaking it. You can no more break Godwin’s Law than you can break the law of gravity.
I mean demonstrating the truth of it. And the thing about Godwin’s Law is that you should try to avoid demonstrating it until absolutely necessary.
Mike Godwin, an American lawyer and writer, first proposed his law in 1990. It states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” In other words, becomes a near-certainty.
Though Godwin’s Law is an internet adage, in practical terms it doesn’t only relate to the net.
It applies equally to pub conversations, for example. Or, I fear, to newspaper columns.
So here I go.
Having found themselves without an absolute majority after a March 6 election, the party that polled most votes could only form a government by allying themselves with one of the smaller parties.
But this didn’t satisfy them. They wanted “strong, stable government”, and managed to persuade nearly everyone that this was what the country needed.
So they changed the law to keep themselves in power for a fixed term of years – even if more than 50 per cent of Parliament was against them.
Sounds familiar?
The year was 1933. The country was Germany. The smaller party in the coalition was the so-called Centre Party, which had the third largest parliamentary presence.
And the big party, which rewrote the rules to its own absolute advantage, was of course Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.
David Cameron has not quite attempted an Enabling Act, which was Hitler’s short cut to dictatorship.
But he wants a fixed five-year term of office – not the four years Hitler claimed.
And he wants to make it impossible to unseat a government with anything less than a 55 per cent majority of MPs against them.
Which is patently undemocratic, surely unworkable, and transparently – laughably – based on the arithmetic of the present Parliament.
Mike Godwin says his law was only intended to dissuade people from making glib or inappropriate references to the Nazis.
The analogy this time was too painfully close to avoid.

****

IT’S a lot of years since politics in Britain was as interesting as it’s been these past few weeks.
And one of the interesting things is the reversion to tribalism brought about by the LibDems’ chicanery.
I have never known such a wave of people rushing to join, or re-join, the Labour Party. Not even in the first flush of enthusiasm for Tony Blair (which was when I quit).
The battle for the Labour succession will be more than a fascinating sideshow to the coming trials and tribulations of the Con-Dem coalition.
It could – indeed, it should – be a contest to determine the country’s next PM.
The choice between the Miliband of brothers is interesting in itself. It will become more so if more, and more varied, candidates come forward.
I’m disappointed the admirable Jon Cruddas has declined the opportunity.
“Hand on heart,” he says, “I do not want to be leader of the Labour Party or subsequently prime minister. These require certain qualities I do not possess.”
I don’t know exactly which qualities he means.
Perhaps a craving for fame and the ability to handle the constant attention it creates.
Maybe the arrogance – as best exemplified by Blair and Thatcher – to know you’re right even when others can plainly see you’re wrong.
Or maybe the ability to squash your doubts and press ahead, for pragmatic reasons, with policies you don’t fully believe in.
If all or any of those points explain Cruddas’s lack of ambition, then I see his point.
He might serve the country – and certainly himself – better as a voice of conscience from outside the seat of power.
As Tony Benn has always done so splendidly. And as Michael Foot should have done to the end.

****

IT sticks a little in my craw to say it, but our new government is not all bad.
In fact, in a few important ways it’s better than we might have hoped for from any other alignment of parties.
Principally, because it features Chris Huhne in the role of energy secretary.
As a committed opponent of nuclear power, he will not offer any financial support to electricity companies wishing to replace our aging nuclear power stations.
The new policy allows for private companies to continue down the nuclear road. But only at their own expense. And, crucially, at their own risk.
Which, in his assessment – and he’s almost certainly right – means they won’t do it.
And that’s a good thing for the environment – now and for generations to come. For the avoidance of colossal and unnecessary dangers.
And because it will put the onus for development back where it always should have been, with wind, tidal and especially solar power.

Has shifty Clegg signed LibDems' death warrant?

SORRY. I got it wrong. Horribly so. Not just in my predictions – heck, nearly everyone who made a prediction about the election result was wrong.
The bigger error I made was in the polling booth. Me and about 6,827,937 others.
We all mistook the Liberal Democrats for a party with principles.
Those of us who believed that by voting LibDem we were voting against the prospect of a Tory government have been had. Stitched up. Betrayed.
We won’t be doing that again.
From now on, it’s the right-wing vote that will be split between Conservatives and Liberals, not the centre-left between Lib and Lab.
So much for all Clegg’s banging on about fairness, openness and decency. So much for his stated wish to position the LibDems clearly as a party of the centre-left.
Put in the position of kingmaker, he opted not for the party with whom he supposedly shares principles but the one that could hand him a top job.
That was something Labour, in their slightly weaker position, couldn’t do.
They couldn’t offer a full-blown coalition, because a Lib-Lab government would still have had to rely on support from minor parties.
The so-called Rainbow Alliance might have been difficult to organise and run, but it is a great opportunity missed.
An opportunity to run the country for interests other than those of big business.
Interests that would have included the most vital of all, as represented by the Green Party.
Instead, Clegg bought the line pushed by David Cameron (and, sadly, Gordon Brown) that what the country wanted and needed was “strong, stable” government.
In fact, if the British people can be considered as a single entity at all, what it voted for last week was not strong government, but the opposite.
‘The people’ voted for a Parliament in which MPs of different parties have to talk to one another. For consensus, not single-party rule.
Which is, I suppose, what we now have. Except that those of us who voted LibDem were misled about what that would mean.
So has Clegg, by entering into this grubby pact with the Tories, signed his party’s death warrant? Or is that just my wishful thinking?
He’s certainly pinning a heck of a lot on his hopes for voting reform.
Of all the things he got heated about in the leadership debates, he’s given up nearly all the rest.
On public spending cuts, on immigration, on Trident (where the biggest spending cut could actually have done good) the LibDems had good policies, which I voted for. Clegg has waved them aside in exchange for a referendum on how we vote.
Reform on that is certainly decades overdue. But we’d better be sure about what we’re voting for when that referendum comes around. It might not be exactly what you think.
There’s been a lot of airy talk about proportional representation.
There are various ways in which PR can operate, but generally it should deliver a parliament that reflects the broad range of opinion in the country.
It should mean that all governments were coalitions of one kind or another, probably including some small parties as well as one or two bigger ones.
It’s the way a lot of countries work, and it’s not always ideal. It certainly doesn’t always deliver “strong, stable” governments.
Under such a system, I would vote neither Liberal nor Labour, but Green – and it wouldn’t be a wasted vote.
The down side is that BNP and UKIP votes, for example, wouldn’t be wasted either. And such extreme parties could end up holding the balance of power.
All of which is interesting, but irrelevant.
Because what’s on the table isn’t PR at all, but AV – the “alternative vote”.
Under that system, constituencies would stay as they are. You’ll still end up with one local MP in a Parliament of big parties.
You won’t put one cross on your ballot paper, but a list of preferences – just as we already do in European elections.
And what that delivers is not proportional to anything. It simply tends to favour everyone’s second choice.
No wonder the LibDems fancy it.
Whether it’s worth setting aside all their precious principles for is another matter.
You may have gathered by now that I’m feeling a tad peeved – not by the election result itself, but by what the men in suits have made of it.
The immediate future is grim indeed. But the longer view may not be so bad after all.
Not if Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, was right in his prediction.
That whoever took power now would become so unpopular it would be their last stint in charge “for a generation”.
Maybe Labour can use its period in opposition to purge itself of Blairism. To revive itself under a new leader. To re-connect with its core values.
To take sole command of that centre-left ground the LibDems pretended to be battling for.
I’d vote for that. And I suspect ‘the British people’ might too.

Who said we want it strong?

OK, I was wrong. I predicted a thumping Tory majority - and despite having more things (and more money) going for them than any Opposition party I can remember, they didn't get it. Phew.
And I predicted no real change in the pattern of British politics. But now change is what we might get at last.
However loving Cameron's overtures, I can't see how the LibDems can possibly accept them.
But I could see a Labour-led coalition in which LibDem, SNP, Plaid Cymru - and even Green - voices have to be taken seriously.
Which sounds a lot better to me than the "strong government" which Cameron and Brown both claim the British public wants.
If you can talk at all about the British public as if it were one organism, it seems to me that strong government is exactly what it has said it doesn't want.
Brown and Cameron, incidentally, both described this myth of strength in remarkably similar terms - but not identical.
Cameron spoke of "strong, stable and decisive" government, while Brown phrased it as "strong, stable and principled".
Personally, I'd take the principled over the decisive every time - always depending, of course, on the principles. And I'd certainly take liberal (or Liberal) principles over the Cameron-Osborne kind.