Why it’s wrong to deliver Mail into private hands

THE letter, from a former pupil, was addressed simply: Mr Semmens, the headmaster, England. It landed on my father’s desk in north London just three days after it was posted in Sierra Leone, west Africa.
This glowing example of efficiency actually occurred 40 years ago. But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of something like it happening today.
Modern automation might militate against the degree of initiative involved. But I still wouldn’t bet against a similar display of postal chutzpah.
But what if today’s 30 per cent proves to be just the thin end – well, more like the middle – of the wedge? What if the Royal Mail, a few deliveries down the road, is delivered entirely into private hands?
Will we still get such sparkling service then? Will we still be able to post a letter in Ipswich today and expect it to reach Carlisle, Penzance, Belfast or Inverness tomorrow – and for just 36p?
In a way, the troubles of the mail are a consequence of its own success.
Nobody alive today can remember a time when it wasn’t there to be relied on. We’ve all grown up with it, so we tend to take it for granted.
After all, it’s a public service. But now the service is under threat.
In the post-Thatcher world the old Post Office has lost the telephone system – which might by now have made it a highly profitable source of national income.
It has lost the post office branches – the closure of so many of which is a national disgrace.
And what is left has to compete in an unfair market. Rival delivery companies cherry-pick the lucrative jobs without the Mail’s commitment to reach every home six days a week.
No wonder, as Peter Mandelson says, the Royal Mail “cannot survive in its present form”.
This is precisely because successive governments, including his, have for the past 28 years bullied it and butchered it, forced it to fight with tied hands.
Almost all that’s left is the commitment to provide a service. Which it still does, mostly brilliantly. But for how much longer?
If the government was true to Labour principles – instead of Thatcherite ones – Mandelson would today be saving the service, not kicking it while it’s down.
He would be re-nationalising all the bits that have been scandalously sold off or given away, not selling off more
He would be putting the old Post Office back together. And he would be committing the government to keeping it going as an efficient, reliable national service.
It would cost a lot, of course. Maybe as much as a tenth of what the government has handed out to failed bankers.
(OK, that figure is a complete guess, picked out of the air almost at random. But isn’t that what bankers – and governments – do with their big figures?)
It’s perfectly possible. Merely unthinkable for a government that has lost all touch with its roots.
But isn’t maintaining the post – along with water, power and railways – an essential part of what a government is for?


Hot Bagels had me kvelling up

A FUSE blew and all the lights went out. But the band simply went on playing. It must have been, if you’ll pardon me, an electrifying moment.
But then the whole performance was electrifying anyway. I know, because although I wasn’t at the Roundhouse in London I did see the band the next night. And they were something very, very special indeed.
I caught Moishe’s Bagel in the unlikely surroundings of Garboldisham village hall, Norfolk. And they proved to be everything I’d hoped and more.
They’re not quite like any other group, the Bagels. I can’t really describe the sound better than their http://www.moishesbagel.co.uk target="blank">website puts it: “Rip-roaring, foot-stomping, jazz-inflected klezmer and Balkan music from some of Scotland’s finest musicians. An intoxicating, life-affirming mix of Eastern European dance music, Middle Eastern rhythms and virtuoso performances.”
Sadly – foolishly, in my opinion – the organisers of the Cambridge Folk Festival thought the jazz element too strong to include them on the bill.
The players’ backgrounds also bring classical, bossa nova and Indian elements to the mix. But it’s the traditional Jewish flavour of Pete Garnett’s accordion and Greg Lawson’s intense violin-playing that really defines the Moishe’s Bagel sound.
Greg (pictured left)is one of my oldest friends. But last time I saw him play in public it was as leader of the Scottish Opera orchestra about 15 years ago. That was good, but this was something else.
Only one member of the band is actually Jewish. The rest just love the music.
The one is sparkling pianist Phil Alexander, whose mother put on the Garboldisham show and admitted she was “kvelling” – a Yiddish word meaning “gushing with family pride”.
If you can extend that from family to friends, the whole performance had me really kvelling up.

Yes we can - but should we?

DWIGHT D Eisenhower is applauded. His successors Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush all get it in the neck. And Obama? Well, we’ll have to wait and see on that one.
The precedents, frankly, aren’t great. The tendency – one might say the expectation – for all US presidents is to go messin’ where they ought to not mess.
The thumbs-up for Eisenhower in a huge new book, A World of Trouble, is essentially for leaving well alone.
Not in Europe, of course, where if you’re to believe the Hollywood version he won the Second World War virtually single-handed. But in the Middle East, where decades of US intervention have created one unholy mess after another.
And that, by some accounts, has led directly to America’s status as Public Enemy No.1 in the eyes of at least one big part of the world.
By that version, the War on Terror is really the war against Arab and Muslim anti-Americanism. A self-defeating struggle if ever there was one.
Or, to take the more cynical view, a self-perpetuating one – good for arms sales, oil annexation and general alpha-male chest-beating.
But George W wasn’t the first to go striding into Biblical lands like a six-gun-toting John Wayne. And neither was his daddy.
In fact Eisenhower is the only president exempted from blame by author Patrick Tyler, whose book is subtitled ‘America in the Middle East’.
Tyler gives ‘Honest Ike’ credit for untangling the mess made by Britain and France over Suez in 1956 and for “recognising the perils of intervention in distant lands”. And even that is to overlook one of the many wrong turns taken in the region.
In Iran in 1953 the democratically elected PM Mohammed Mosaddeq was deposed in a military coup that installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as dictator. Thereby paving the way for all that country’s subsequent troubles (and those of its neighbours).
It didn’t just happen on Eisenhower’s watch, but with the active involvement of the CIA. Backed by American – and British – funds.
British responsibility for Middle East problems goes back even further than the catalogue of US interference. At least as far as the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which led directly to the founding of the state of Israel 31 years later.
You can’t blame all the troubles of the region on the existence of Israel. But it’s clearly been a huge factor and continues to be so.
It might have been better if Israel had never been created. But it was, and that’s the reality the world has to live with now.
The stated wish of those in Iran and the Arab world who wish to wipe Israel off the map is the biggest reason for Israel behaving as aggressively as it does.
And having once put the Israelis there, the Americans, the United Nations and Britain can hardly just leave them to get on with it.
Much the same can be said of Iraq. America should never have got involved – but having done so they are left with a huge responsibility.
Just to say “whoops, sorry” and leave could make a bad situation worse. It certainly did in South-East Asia, where the US withdrawal led directly to the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
So, like so many of his predecessors, Obama has inherited a huge problem in a part of the world he was not elected in.
One can say – as Patrick Tyler virtually does – that the problem with America’s Middle-East policy is that there is one. But they can’t just stop now.
Or can they?
That’s one of the biggest questions Obama has to answer. By appointing Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state he seems to have answered: No we can’t.

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DAVID NUTT’S job as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is to advise the government on drugs policy.
As an experienced professor of psychopharmacology, he is as close to an expert on the subject as you will find.
Now he has another experience under his belt, though he’s hardly the first to learn it the hard way.
The lesson is that speaking the truth in public and to government ministers is not always what’s wanted.
Nutt said the dangers of taking ecstasy were no greater than those of riding a horse.
Actually, given the statistics on both, that may be slightly underplaying the dangers of riding. But I’ll bow to his superior judgement.
Unlike home secretary Jacqui Smith – effectively his boss – who chose to lambast him in parliament and then ride roughshod over his considered advice.
The difference between Nutt and Smith is that he knows what he’s talking about.

Green can also mean gullible and naive

I AM all for making human endeavour as environmentally responsible as possible. In fact it’s probably up there with tolerance and non-violence as my most treasured moral principle.
But sometimes I’m tempted to wonder whether green isn’t, for some people, merely the new black.
Take these innovations being trumpeted this week as great designs for our glorious green future.
First up, the ingenious gadget that converts coffee grounds into “a sustainable source of ink for your printer”.
That rather begs the question just how sustainable it is to drink real ground coffee every day. But I suppose if you’re doing that anyway, using the ullage to save on chemical ink is at least a neat trick.
I’m always fascinated by architecture that makes a claim to environmental friendliness. Building with straw bales, for instance, or Scandinavian-style turf roofs seem good to me – and that’s just the basics.
These days there are plenty of grander architectural projects in which environmental economy seems to play as big a part as aesthetic values. In fact, it’s often hard to disentangle the two.
Take the latest fine building in Concepcion, Chile, a bustling university city about the size of Birmingham.
In the heart of the thrusting, high-rise business quarter a new office block has appeared that enjoys “the insulating and air-purifying benefits of green walls”. Which is clearly a good thing.
It’s actually the head office of the architecture firm that built it, so it had better be good. And I think it is.
Plus points for using mostly local materials – and for being a pleasantly eye-catching addition to the street scene.
Maybe we could do with something like it among the welter of new buildings that have so changed Ipswich in recent times.
But what is that “green wall”?
It’s a “double green skin” that both insulates the building and shades it from the hot Chilean sun. It’s “a wooden outer structure overflowing with bougainvillea, jasmine and plumbago”. Lovely.
Or, to put it another way, it’s a big trellis with creepers growing up it.
So potentially it’s not just the language that’s flowery. I bet it’ll look great when it’s in full bloom.
But plants growing up the outside of a building? Whoever would have thought of such a fancy idea?
And finally, how about giving your kids some “cute organic play-food”?
Or, to put it another way, soft cuddly burgers, bagels and cheese-on-toast.
That burger may be knitted out of “amazing sustainable textiles” – in this case kapok fibre from the Malaysian rainforest. Which may or may not be a good thing.
And you may pretend the fabric bun is filled with “organic” lettuce, tomato and pickles, “organic beef patty” and “farmer’s pickles”.
But to any kid presented with it it’s surely just a big fat juicy burger. And at about £27 it’s not the cheapest way to get them started on the greed-is-good, fast-food road.
Remember sweet cigarettes? The cuddly burger doesn’t sound that different to me.



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AS a once committed trade unionist, I have seen few more depressing sights lately than that of strikers protesting against foreign workers.
Yes, I have sympathy with those who have lost their jobs, or fear losing them. I’ve been there. It’s not nice.
But one glimpse of that “barge” in which the Italian workers live, moored near the controversial Lindsey refinery, should tell you one thing. These people are themselves the biggest victims of the situation.
The banner waving over the strikers there and at other troublespots bears the ironic name “Unite”.
That word was once part of a famous slogan which ought to mean something to trade unionists.
It followed the words “Workers of the world…”


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I DON’T think much of the Israeli government. I can’t disagree with all those friends of mine who find Israel’s war-making against Palestinian civilians in Gaza repulsive. Or the view that Jews, of all people, should know that genocide is evil.
One dissenting voice told me the other day that he thought of Israel as “our team” and that criticising Israel was an act of anti-semitism.
To him I can only point out that nothing is more calculated to foster the anti-semitism he rightly deplores than Israel behaving badly.
But having accepted all that, one tricky question remains. What SHOULD you do when your neighbour keeps lobbing missiles at you?
The Israeli government, as usual, has come up with one seriously wrong answer. But what is the right one?

My imaginary friend just got off the bus

IT’S been one of the big questions – arguably THE big question – wracking the best brains of philosophers for centuries. Now it’s come down to the Advertising Standards Authority to settle the matter: Is there a god?
Some Christians, including an uppity bus-driver from Southampton, have got all hot under the collar about a British Humanist Association ad that proclaims: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
Which seems like very sound advice to me. But that hasn’t prevented the posters being referred to the ASA.
On what grounds, I wonder?
The authority’s brief is to ensure that advertisements are “legal, decent, honest and true”. Which of those requirements does the BHA ad fail?
It’s certainly decent. It’s undoubtedly honest. If it’s true it must surely be legal. And that little word “probably” must make it true.
In my opinion it’d be true even without the “probably”.
Yup. It’s an opinion. Just as those who say there is a god – or fairies, or unicorns, or little green men on Mars – are only expressing their opinion.
Anyone who invokes the law, or the ASA, against the proposition that there is no god (probably or otherwise) had better watch out. You’re living in a glass house and shouldn’t throw stones.
Not far from my home is a poster that proclaims: “Jesus Lives!” I wouldn’t have to go far to find others claiming he’s saved me (what from?) or that he’s offering me eternal life.
Decent? I suppose so. Honest? Maybe. Probably.
But true? Go ahead and prove it.
There is just one other point I want to make about all this god-or-no-god stuff, though. And it applies to god-bashing atheists such as Richard Dawkins at least as much as it does to bible-bashing Christians or Koran-waving Muslims.
I don’t believe in Noddy, Humpty-Dumpty, the tooth fairy or Santa Claus either. I gave up my imaginary friend decades ago. But I don’t see why that non-belief should define who I am – or even be particularly important in my life.
So can we please just get on to the bit about stopping worrying?


Man City owe it all to Jesus

IT’S probably just as well Kaka turned down a record-smashing move to Manchester City. For several reasons.
OK, it might have been nice for all of us armchair sports fans to be able to watch a world-class footballer at work in the Premier League. But what effect would it have had on his team-mates to know that one among them was collecting half-a-million quid a week in wages while they had to make do with perhaps a mere tenth of that?
And what of next season after the destabilised City are relegated?
What would it do to the economics of the Championship to have one player picking up roughly the equivalent of Doncaster Rovers’ annual turnover every time he trots on to the field?
In these times when the average fan, even the average club director, is facing worries over money and jobs, how can we identify with young men whose pocket-money would fund a small hospital?
But perhaps more serious is the question of the horrendous paperwork – and potential major scandal – City have narrowly avoided.
Across the city at United, another highly talented South American forward is still, after two years, at the centre of a complicated controversy. One that could yet have dire consequences for his former club, West Ham. And has arguably already had a devastating effect on a club he is never likely to play for, Sheffield United.
(If you’re not following this, don’t worry. The Carlos Tevez affair has already baffled more football and legal brains than he’s had hot dinners or scored goals.)
The nub of the matter is that Tevez is “owned” not by any club but by an Iranian businessman, Kia Joorabchian.
Now consider Kaka. Who would City have paid that reported £103million transfer fee?
If a T-shirt can be considered a legal document, Kaka belongs to Jesus…


No more beating about the Bush

AT the time we thought Tricky Dick Nixon was the biggest scoundrel ever to have held the American presidency.
When he died in 1994 his funeral was attended by the serving president and four other ex-presidents. Even the candidate he cheated and beat in the infamous Watergate election of 1972, George McGovern, later said: “I think… Nixon will get high marks in history.”
Now, with the release of the film Frost/Nixon, his reputation is set for a cuddly makeover.
At the time we thought Ronald Reagan was the stupidest and most aggressive president. Remember The President’s Brain is Missing?
History seems to have decided (rather generously, I think) that he was a shrewd operator who brought the Cold War to a peaceful end.
So what will history make of George W Bush?
Even as Barack Obama takes over on a wave of high hopes, the Wall Street Journal is already trying to rehabilitate the reputation of his predecessor.
So let’s just have a reality check. Bigger scoundrel than Nixon. Stupider and more aggressive than Reagan.
Goodbye George. And good riddance.

A world of music and news

I BEGAN one of my early Evening Star columns with the words: “A bomb went off this morning in my corner of the office.”
It wasn’t literally true of course. But it seemed a good way of introducing my two linked subjects, the bombing of Belgrade by Nato planes and the then astonishing fact that I could hear it live on the internet.
It’s only a few weeks short of a decade since that day when I startled my colleagues by fitting speakers to my PC as the bombs fell. Maybe we should stop associating the net with the shock of the new.
Yet I still feel like a kid at Christmas with the excitement of my new toy – an internet radio.
The main reason for getting it was the mundane wish for a clear signal on Radio Three. The spin-off is that I can browse the radio stations of the world, country by country.
My nine-year-old was delighted to hear the latest single by Pink introduced in French. Her current favourite stations are Radio DumDum from India and a channel broadcasting Arabic pop music from Morocco.
I find that one curiously absorbing myself. Though I was disappointed to find the only listed channel in Mali, home of Africa’s most gorgeous music, playing Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Of course it doesn’t take much surfing to find that American music pervades the world as thoroughly as other aspects of US culture.
And I’m not immune myself. One of the first channels I assigned a preset button was RadioDylan.com, a stream of all things Bob, mostly unofficial recordings, coming from the basement of an obsessed fan.
A radio’s not just about music, though. It can be interesting and instructive to hear the news as it’s presented in a variety of countries, too.
On the day an Israeli attack left 40 dead in a school in Gaza, Israel Radio reported it as a “claim” by the Palestinians. The same bulletin told of a rocket fired into Israel and reported grimly that “a toddler was slightly injured”.
The imbalance would have been hilarious if it hadn’t been so serious. But biased reporting, especially in war, is hardly an Israeli invention or speciality.
Which brings me back to where I left off last week, with some inept TV reporting of the Gaza conflict.
In another illustration of the wonders of the web, last week’s column has been shared round the world after being picked up by a journalist in the Philippines.
And that has brought me reaction – all of it broadly supportive – from the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, France and Portugal as well as around Britain.
It’s interesting how little respect people in all those countries have for their TV news channels. Those who read and responded to my comments, anyway.
I fear the silent majority everywhere probably swallow whatever they’re fed. Just as in Israel the majority seem to swallow the dangerous pap put out by their pernicious government.
There is in fact a substantial anti-war movement within Israel but you’d never guess it from listening to the state-owned radio or reading the mainstream Israeli press. For that you have to read the independent Haaretz newspaper (website www.haaretz.com), where you will find real news and a real examination of the moral issues of Gaza from within Israel itself.
The internet, of course, in the form of blogs, emails, dissident media such as Haaretz, even sites such as YouTube and Facebook, provides the real alternative to the output of government and mainstream media. The circulation of my words last week is just a tiny example.
But it provides an example of one of the dangers too.
One reader questioned whether I had made up the story of a TV interviewer mistaking an Israeli gap-year student for a fleeing Palestinian. I hadn’t.
But I had taken it from a report by another journalist in another paper – and I can’t be quite certain he hadn’t made it up.
By now, though, it’s all over the internet, where people no doubt believe it (as I still do – I think) whether it’s true or not.
The moral is that you can’t believe everything you read on the net. But at least you get a variety of outlooks to choose from.
And a variety of music. Right now I’m listening to some wonderful stuff by Mali’s Salif Keita. Broadcast, of course, from Paris.



WHAT do you think of Prince Harry’s use of racist language to a fellow soldier?
Personally, of course, I blame the parents. But I also blame the outdated macho culture that seems to persist, perhaps not surprisingly, in His Grandmother’s Armed Forces.
I heard one of Harry’s defenders this week describe the criticism of him as “political correctness gone mad”. A surprising accusation to level at the News of the World. And a cliché routinely trotted out by those who prefer rudeness, disrespectfulness and bigotry gone mad.

Let's go live to our man in Ignorance

WHAT is news? I've been a journalist for more than 30 years now so you might expect me to know. But it’s not as simple as you might imagine.
The line between news and opinion has always been a bit blurred (anything you read in The Daily Mail, or The Guardian, is almost by definition a matter of opinion). But it’s so fuzzy now that many readers, viewers – and, yes, journalists – no longer seem to know the difference. Or even recognise that there is a difference.
One reason for this is the rise and rise of the 24-hour news culture.
To much of the media, especially television, accurate reporting no longer seems to matter. It’s not as important to be right as to be first. Speed drives everything.
My dad was a news junkie. When I was growing up, the family would gather once a day round the telly. If it wasn’t for the six o’clock bulletin, it would have to be for the nine o’clock showing.
The day’s news – or at least a BBC editor’s idea of what mattered – was neatly encapsulated in 25 minutes. Today News 24 is on all round the clock. And that’s just one of several competing channels.
But there isn’t 60 times as much going on in the world today as there was. It’s just that the presentation of it is spread so much thinner.
No news bulletin in 1969 would have featured shots of a reporter standing outside a building saying: "Well, there's nothing much happening here at the moment."
Yet that's exactly what most TV news now seems to consist of. For some bizarre, mind-scrambling reason it's called "live".
If that's what newspapers are having to compete with, you wonder why they have had to change so much over recent years.
Yet change they have, driven not so much by a need to compete with TV as by the realisation that they can't. Not for immediacy or speed.
What they can do is offer more comment and analysis. They can (heaven help us) fill their pages with banal and tedious waffle about "celebrities", as if the world weren't already full enough of such twaddle. More vitally, local papers can get to the stuff down your street in a way TV, radio and national papers never can. Without worrying what the background looks like.
But let's go back now to our reporter standing importantly outside a building somewhere in the world where something might be about to happen.
Last time you saw him he was standing outside a different building in a different country. Doing exactly the same thing.
Back in the studio one of his colleagues is asking him, as they always do, what's going on. And do you know what? He hasn't got a clue.
How can he have? He's only been there for a few hours.
And he's got no time to find out what's happening, beyond the shallow and obvious. Because he's got to stand there and appear on our screens every 20 minutes.
With no hard facts to impart, all he can offer is a soundbite of uninformed opinion.
But today, in Gaza, he's lucky. Someone in his team has managed to grab a fleeing victim.
It's a chance to get at the real human story, the experience of being under bombardment. What was it like?
"Not too bad, really." The girl grins under her "Palestinian" checked scarf.
Um. So what are you going to do now?
"I'm going to my grandmother's house in Russia. It should be really lovely, with all the snow. Bye – happy new year."
Would that interview ever have made it onto our screens back in the days when the news was actually edited?

Shops fall after we dropped them

The cartoon said it all: “Prices slashed – while shops last.”
The post-Christmas sales frenzy has always been a bizarre phenomenon. A triumph for the collective mania that fuels capitalism – the elevation of price over value, the fetishistic desire for a “bargain”.
This time round the mania has been inflated by a sense of impending doom. A desire to raid the shops before they disappear forever. An impulse not unlike the urge that drives looters in a catastrophe.
And with all that comes, I suppose, a sense of history in the making and an unspoken desire to take part in it.
Exactly how historic current events prove to be is not for us to see or judge just yet, of course. But it seems a dead cert that 2009 will see a lot of familiar high-street names disappear.
And with that, possibly, could come a deep and lasting change not just in the nature of the high street, but ultimately in the nature of towns themselves.
It would give me some pleasure to see the out-of-town supermarkets go to the wall, but I fear that as ever it will be the small independent traders who end up suffering most.
When Napoleon said famously, and scornfully, that England was a nation of shopkeepers it was far from the truth. At that point. It became truer later.
But really what we have been is a nation of shopworkers. What we are about to become is a nation of former shopworkers. Hopefully, not all unemployed.
There’s a slight nostalgic sadness associated with the demise of Woolworth’s. It has at least been a supporter of high-street business against the ghastly out-of-towners.
In many small towns, such as Woodbridge, where I live, it has long been the only place to buy some of the basic natural commodities of life. Its disappearance will leave a gap which I hope the local traders will be able to fill to their own benefit.
But if Woolies is a loss, I can’t find it in me to regret the demise of Zavvi.
For one thing it hasn’t been around long enough as a brand to attract much loyalty. And for another – well, the writing was on the wall for the traditional record shop since long before that name came into being.
I suppose it was the history thing that drew me over the threshold of the Zavvi store in Ipswich on Boxing Day. Well, I happened to be passing on my way to the footy. And while I may criticise the strumpet appeal of commerce, I’m not altogether immune to it.
The one thing which has always brought out the compulsive purchaser in me is music. But even on the opening day of the great closing-down sale I couldn’t find a thing that tempted me to part with my cash.
Not that there aren’t 101 titles itching to add themselves to my already bloated CD collection. Just that I already try to ration my online buying and nothing even in Zavvi’s death-throes looked better value than I expect to get without leaving my keyboard.
Which is, of course, exactly why the record-store was dead in the water long before credit came to the crunch.
Most people just don’t buy their music that way any more. Which may have been a factor in Woolies’ fall and will surely see other old-fashioned record retailers go down the tubes soon.
Actually, apart from food – which I buy as locally as I can and almost all on foot - I hardly buy anything in conventional shops any more.
The internet is simply too convenient, too reliable. Almost everything is available somewhere online and you can compare products and consider their possible pitfalls without having to brave the blather of some in-store "assistant".
I may not be totally typical in this attitude, but it’s becoming more common. And that means we shouldn’t really weep too much over the collapse of shops.
It’s us what done it. We just didn’t like shopping enough.
And the result, I suggest, isn’t entirely a bad thing.
As long as all my lovely local food shops – the real ones, owned and run by local people – survive and prosper.