Then he tripped up and fell on his face, my how we laughed

Via Paul Linford I note that Robert Hazell has written the following in the Guardian:

Regional government in England is the only solution that offers an answer to both versions of the English question. It could help give England a louder voice within the union, and help decentralise the government of England. But defeat in the North East referendum in 2004 has raised the bar…

Raised the bar? Like a mediocre hurdler at an Olympic pole vault competition Mr. Hazell responds to the issue with the wrong tools, the wrong approach and a complete inability to grasp how high the bar actually is.

How can multiple regional assemblies address any of the major constitutional issues that devolution has laid bare in the Union? How can, for instance, any regional assembly or group of assemblies contrive to address the advantages in student funding that are enjoyed by Scotland on an English national level?

How can any assembly realistically reduce prescription fees for the English on a national level? I doubt they’d manage it on a local level and even if they did how would they prevent people outside of their region enjoying the benefit via tourism? Would trying to do so even be acceptable? I don’t think so.

There are many, many other issues that imply that Hazell misses the point completely. It’ll be fun watching him trying to jump that raised bar but, when it comes to equality in the Union, we all know that he doesn’t have what it takes.

Dom has the photos

Dom has pictures of the freedom of speech demo that took place in London over the weekend. There's one placard on show that had me giggling. See if you can guess which one it was.

Also get a load of that copper with his COOL lens. He should really have that strap round his neck, that kit we all bought him looks really expensive.

The English have no loyalty to their own produce – Tesco official

I’ve finally received a response from Tescos regarding their use of Scottish and Welsh flags on Scottish and Welsh produce and the British flag on English produce. Their web site says:

We have dedicated buying teams in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, whose task it is to seek out and develop relationships with suppliers. In the UK, Tesco stocks over 7,000 local products. All products are labelled with the country of origin and, where appropriate, with national flags.

They responded to my question about labelling English produce with the same courtesy with this:

We do not place the English flag on "English" products because we have what we term generic core lines. As Tesco view Scotland & Wales as "Regions" for the purposes of merchandising and to ensure we give the customers in these areas exactly what they expect and want (i.e. Welsh& Scottish people have loyalty to their own products), we like them to know that the products they are purchasing are from their own areas /countries hence the reason for the flag. As I am sure customers can appreciate,it is more difficult to do this because of the sheer size and complexity of areas in England.

Laura Pollock
Tesco Customer Service

Get that. The English do not have loyalty to their own products. One has to assume that the English do have loyalty to British products otherwise why would Tesco bother using the British flag on English produce? Laura also deals in a little trickery with her response by defining Scotland and Wales as regions, the implication being that any food labelling on English products would have to be region based, hence there would be no need of the English flag if Tesco took this approach. This culminates in her statement that it is more difficult to do this because of the sheer size and complexity of areas in England.

And there we were thinking that it was just a matter of putting the English flag on products that were produced in England.

So, in short, you have no loyalty to the produce of your own country so there is no English flag on our products. You do have loyalty to British produce which is why we label our English food as British. The Scots and the Welsh have more loyalty to their national produce than they do to British produce which is why we use their national flags. Oh, and England is big.

I've fired off this to customer.service@tesco.co.uk:

Laura,
I wonder how your English customers feel about your implication that the English have no loyalty to their own products but they do to British products and that England is somehow too big and too complex to be treated with the same courtesy that you afford other British nations?

The cat has been out of the bag for some time now and the English are beginning to notice how politicians and organisations such as yours treat England. We are growing tired of the various excuses we are being given.

Insane hardware

Haha. I love this little snippet from the technology report on CCP games and how they have recently addressed some data transfer issues with their Eve SciFi online game:

EVE Online's underlying storage bottleneck is a classic problem with Online Transaction Processing. 10,000+ users accessing account information, warping across the galaxy, buying goods from black-market free-lance smugglers and upgrading their mining frigates to assault cruisers all at the same time puts immense stress on disk-based storage.

The tragedy of the SS Guardian

Stephen Pollard asks if the Guardian can sink any lower? Before you go off and read Stephen's observation just remember that there is a distinction between supporting free speech and providing a platform for the kind of thing Stephen points out.

Things are less tragic now.

On ID cards, the importance of the Lords and the calibre of our representatives

The Lords has defeated the government for the third time on ID cards. Expect the government to whip out their get out of jail free card (or the parliament act) as soon as they feel it appropriate. It's a real shame what's happened to the Lords because of the free and easy way the government deals this card. It no longer gives us the same level of protection that it used to, even though the act has been around for a long time. There are no longer any gasps of surprise and shock when someone speaks its name.

Charles Clarke, a very important minister and one who we might expect to be intelligent and thoughtful, told the House of Commons on Tuesday passports were "voluntary documents" that no-one was forced to renew. Honestly, if the calibre of our representatives gets any smaller we'd be hard pushed to find an effective use for them.

Driving licenses are also voluntary documents in as much as you only need them if you want to drive a car. Does he really think that the people he represents (and the rest of us) are that stupid?

Utterly corrupt in thought, respect and principle. He deserves himself and that's about it.

Shame! Shame!

From the Times, a disgraceful attempt by the British government to get Welsh and Scottish MPs to interfere in matters which have been significantly devolved to national bodies outside of England:

The scale of government concern was shown when it emerged that Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, had met Scottish and Welsh nationalists to try to persuade them to back the timetable motion.

Gareth writes to Lord Falconer of Neptune about this issue.

Chaos in The Land of Take What You Want

FA letter intercepted

Gareth has an intercepted compilation of letters that you should probably read.

Hurricane English Backlash

Alfie gets a phone call.

BBC - choice without choice

Oliver Kamm makes a mistake here:

The problem with the BBC is not that it is a public service broadcaster, but that it isn't very good at it. How to make it better is an important issue. Privatising the BBC is exactly the wrong answer.

The mistake is that he doesn't take into account those viewers who no longer consume BBC programming or who do so only occasionally. For such viewers a decision on quality programming has already been made and they have chosen to seek it elsewhere. Basically, they have been offered the BBC product and have declined it in preference of a product they have decided is better suited to their requirements.

It is not appropriate for these viewers to be forced to repair a product that they have declined.

Falconer's interview transcribed

Murky has transcribed Lord Falconer's 'English Parliament' Interview. A difficult task but one that will serve us all well as a reference of eternal embarrasement to the Lord.

In bed with Hawking

I’ve been suffering terribly from flu, and I mean proper man flu not just a bad cold. I spent most of yesterday in bed trying to prevent boredom by reading some Stephen Hawking stuff through streaming eyes, achy bones and a runny nose. I never did physics at school but I imagine that it would have been pretty much as I experienced it yesterday.

Jenkins on Falconer

It's not the guts of the Jenkins article but it's worth quoting I think:

On Friday Lord Falconer, the lord chancellor, blithely announced as if by ukase that the English people would not get equal rights to the Welsh and Scots within the British parliament. Who says? He implied that even to ask was impertinent.

The very British BBC

From the Times:

THE BBC is to be forced to promote British citizenship and a sense of
community under a new royal charter to be unveiled this week.

That, dear readers, is a political agenda. They will also be tasked with:

representing the UK, its nations and regions

It is, effectively, becoming a tool of the British state.

Are they simply very poor at the job?

Get a load of this article from the beeb and ask yourself, in the context of the article, what the by line of the picture of the Angel of the North means:

The North East rejected devolution.

No mention that the rejection was about regional devolution and not devolution for the whole of England, a completely different question.

Oh oh!

Toad flu!

English in, British out

It’s all about sensitivities you know. Caring, sharing, trying not to offend.

Black sheep are transformed into beautiful rainbows. Rag dolls are arrested for being in possession of certain racial traits. Manufacturers are thrown onto the altar of correctness for refusing to sponsor football teams from nations outside of their own. There’s no need to go on.

The defenders of equality and their allies, the soldiers of sensibility, seem to be doing a grand job of ensuring that they do not waste a single opportunity to point and cry shame at each and every offender and offending remark that even approaches the realm of an individual or a group identity.

Except that there is a flaw running through them. A subtle imperfection which has taken years to notice but now that it has been noticed, ruins what could and should have been something really rather nice.

The flaw is that they are deaf and blind to the English.

It’s as if someone has installed filters over their ears and over their eyes that cut out all ability to recognise the English spectrum. It’s a simple process that goes something like this.

English in … (oo) … British out

“Hello”, you might say. “My name’s George and I’m English”.
“Oh, how simply wonderful”, they might respond, “I’m British too”.

That’s English in, British out and it can be found all over the place. If it’s a new concept to you I urge you to try a small experiment at your convenience just so that you can experience it for yourself. Go into a local Sainsbury's supermarket, walk up to the fruit and veg. section and examine the packaging. You will soon discover two processes at work. The first is the straight through process and goes something like this:

Scottish turnips … [sensibility filters] … For sale, Scottish turnips.

The second process is the one we have already described, EiBo for short:

English apples … [EiBo filters] … For sale, British apples.

The problem for the sensibility brigade is that the EiBo issue actually becomes rather hurtful after a while. Like a splinter that causes an infection. First it’s not there, then you feel a little prick, then it starts to irritate, gets infected and eventually it really, really hurts. You look around but there’s no one there to help. The sensibility brigade don’t even know you exist. They are not tuned into your particular wavelength.

Let me give you another example of how deeply this issue runs. The government is keen on national identity it would seem. So keen in fact that they have decided to find out a little more about it during the national census due in 2011. They will flat out ask you about it but are, unfortunately, suffering deeply from EiBo:

The national Census is to include a question on national identity so people can say if they consider themselves Welsh, Scottish, Irish or British.

Amazing isn’t it. No English. Of course, the reason why this is the case is revealed by this letter:

…there is no such nationality as English as laid down by various acts of Parliament and accession. Persons born in the United Kingdom are citizens of the United Kingdom and are therefore British/English.

And yet the 2011 census will include Welsh, Scottish and Irish, all UK nations.

It’s a disgrace and somewhat confusing given that under the Race Relations Act being English means that you form part of a 'racial group' as defined by 'national origin' (one of the terms used in the Act) [Carine Bakken, CRE]. But you can bet your last £1000 that if you were to try and assert your racial group as defined by your national origin on the census you will be severely punished.

There are no two ways about it. If find it deeply hurtful and ultimately discriminatory. It would be different for me, as a British Unionist (fading as that now is), if the census form was about Britishness. If all constituent nations were treated as being part of the same melting pot. But it is not and it’s all tied up with devolution and the re-birth of the political structures of Wales and Scotland, the same structures that are being denied to England and all who live here.

There is a pledge available on the Internet here. Those brave people who sign it declare:

"I will refuse to fill out the 2011 UK census unless 'English' is included as a nationality but only if 1,000 other English people will too."

I’m not sure that I can sign it for two simple reasons. Firstly I cannot afford the fine that the state will impose upon me. Secondly the state will likely further punish me by removing my privilege to hold a shotgun certificate because I will be showing myself to be a person of questionable standing when it comes to being law abiding. I will be seen to be breaking the law.

There are, however, two things that I can do.

Firstly I will finally join the Campaign for an English Parliament and I will endeavour to do it today. I have been remiss in this and there is no real excuse except that I am not a big joiner of things, usually preferring to take my own path. I hope what I have been doing on this blog has made up for that oversight in some small way.

Secondly I will write to my MP specifically on the subject of the 2011 census form and I will do so in terms of how I feel right now. I feel hurt through prejudice and I have no interest at all if prejudicial hurt was the intent or not or whether the census in the stated form is perfectly legal. It’s the way that I feel and I will make that known to my representative in parliament.

As for the census form I honestly don’t know what I am to do when the time comes for me to fill it in. Like I have said I am not wealthy enough to refuse and am more exposed than most. Perhaps I should look for a new hobby.

News is coming in of a reporting error by the BBC. Story unfolding....

BBC story has been changed to:

The national Census is to include a national ID question so people can say if they consider themselves English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish or British.

ie it now includes English.

Those crazy Beeb reporters.

In other news this story has just been released by Civitas.

The wanky arm of the law

Astonishing. And to think that I didn't know it was illegal. Just imagine how many thousands upon thousands of other laws I must be in ignorance of.

Like some kind of albino scuba monkey spider!

It's horrid! Horrid I tell you!

Rock, meet hard place, turn the lights off when you are done

Well, it looks like this morning is a quote the Gareth morning. This time it's this astonishing example of clear thinking:

Dear Mr Heald,

The Conservative policy of English Votes on English Matters does not include any provision to stop Scottish MPs being given ministerial portfolios such as health, education, transport and culture media and sport.

Would you explain to me why a Scottish MP should be barred from voting on education bills but should be allowed to head up the Department of Education?

Many thanks,

Gareth Young

I'm a little nervous to be honest. Nervous that we are missing something here and that there is a perfectly good and obvious reason why a policy of EVoEM is compatible with allowing those that cannot vote on their own policies to hold such an office.

Further, if such a minister is barred from voting on such an issue because, basically, it is not within his remit to do so then what does this say about the ministers mandate to affect policy in the specific area at all?

I suspect the answer to Gareth's gloryously impertinent question lies in the reason why the minister should not be allowed to vote on English matters. There is ruination ahead if that answer has anything to do with not having a mandate from the people in areas that have been devolved to other nations in the Union. In fact, the whold notion of having a minister crafting policy and pushing through changes in an area where the Tory party framework recognises that he is not equal to other MP's on the issue is incredible.

Another conservative chased away

This makes me feel like joining the Conservative party again just so that I can quit in more style rather than in the way that I did. Sure, they phoned me to find out why but a well thought out letter is so much better.

Via Gareth who quotes the following from Chad's highly quotable letter:

"You cannot promise tax-cutting in Scotland whilst demanding “sharing the proceeds of growth” in England."

Google GDrive?

Now this is interesting:

Web giant Google is planning a massive online storage facility to encompass all users' files, it is reported.

Access to all your data from anywhere, using "any device". It's not an official release from the google people so keep it under your hats.

Lords and IDs

The more the present government and the House of Commons fall into disrepute, the more reasonable and worthy of respect the House of Lords seems to become. It’s astonishing until you realise it’s exactly the point.

My guess is that it's all likely to be in vain though. I hope that I am wrong but the Lords is no longer a serious barrier to the commons and there is a lot of money and some rather large contracts riding on the ID database and all its associated bits and bobs.

Indeed, one of my consultant friends now drives a brand new Jag paid for in cash.

Councillor in huff over his nations flag? Or perhaps it's just over women? Or over women and flags? We ask which it is.

Now here's a fascinating insight into the mind of a New Labour Councillor:

I would have thought a picture of a young blue-eyed, blonde woman wrapped in the Union Flag was the sort of thing one would expect on the Freedom Association (or worse, the BNP) site rather than a serious political blog.

Now, considering the fact that Councillor Bob Piper is a member of an apparently strongly unionist party and presumably has nothing specifically against women, blondes, and people with blue eyes, we have to ask of him what exactly does he mean by his objection?

Still, it could get worse:

Whatever next.. a young woman in a PVC cat suit carrying a whip in one hand and a cross of St George flag in the other? (no, no, not you Mrs T.) Perhaps someone could explain the reasoning.

Erm no Councillor, perhaps you could explain yours. I grant you that overly sexual overtones on a political site are largely not appropriate (unless that site happens to be Westminster I suppose) but I fail to see any relevance in the references he makes to the flag of the British Union (of which his party is an extremely strong supporter) or the Cross of St. George (which his party is at its wits end trying to find reasons to ignore it).

(G)ordon (B)rown

Click

Fox this, I'm off!

You remember that fox hunting ban? You remember all the moaning us pro-hunt bloggers did about it not being about the protection of foxes but about punishing the landed gentry and the posh for centuries of poshness and horses? You remember all that stuff we said about the fox not really benefiting? Well, my dear guardianistas and observeroids, looks like us Toff Huggers are no longer alone:

The current issue of Horse & Hound contains an interview with one Graham Sirl, who says he despises the League Against Cruel Sports and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for running a lavish campaign that has now produced 'absolutely zero'.

No surprise that Horse & Hound should condemn the ban as an absurd waste of parliament's time, you might think. And it wouldn't be surprising if Graham Sirl wasn't a former chief officer of the League Against Cruel Sports. He's not alone in giving up on the cause he once championed.

In the past decade, the league has lost two chief executives, two chairmen, one treasurer and one regional head. All of them concluded that an effective ban would lead to the slaughter of foxes by farmers with guns who no longer wanted to keep them alive for the hunts to chase. I cannot think of another protest group that has seen so many of its officers go over to the other side. It is as if senior staff of Greenpeace regularly joined the board of Texaco.

Ooo look

A Peter Hitchens blog (via Lance Dragon).

One for the blogroll.

The English Parliament sits where is has been since the days of Simon de Montfort- at Westminster.

And we could easily get it back from EU control if we stopped chasing silly English nationalist mirages and concentrated on re-establishing Britain our country.

Delinked for confusing the British parliament with a non-existent English parliament and confusing a desire for equality with silly mirages. Honestly, there can be no way, no sane or reasonable argument that the parliament that sits at Westminster is anything but a British parliament considering the current way that it functions.

Hitchens accuses supporters of an English parliament of being posessed by silly nationalist mirages and in the next breath proposes a British nationalist agenda about wrestling back control from another larger Union. Simply astonishing.

I have to say that it is a delink born from some considerable disappointment.

Wall to Wall productions in new exciting venture

Will Francome works for a television production company called Wall to Wall productions. This is the company that brought us the entertaining TV programme Who Do You Think You Are where various celebrities traced back their family trees for our pleasure and their enlightenment. Wall to Wall have apparently been commissioned by Channel 4 to create a one off programme on what it means to be English and the company are currently looking for people who would be interested in participating in the show by explaining what it means for them to be English and by allowing similar family tree examinations to their previous programme to be performed.

All very interesting and quite likely to provide some entertaining viewing.

Except there is, in my opinion, something very wrong with Wall to Wall’s approach. You see it seems that to qualify to comment on what you feel it means to be English using their platform you need to have a very specific kind of family tree. An 'ethnically' English one (though they don't say exacly how far back counts).

I have already heard of people who have been turned down by Wall to Wall because they need ”someone who's family tree is probably all English".

One has to wonder why? Is Wall to Wall’s position that to actually qualify as English one has to consider ones self ethnically English? If so this does certainly disqualify a large number of people who consider themselves English from having the opportunity to voice their opinion on what it means to be what they consider themselves to be on Wall to Wall’s production. If that is not their position then why not provide the platform to all English people?

And what if, as is extremely likely, it turns out that the qualifying participants actually have, you know, non-English elements to their family tree? What then? Will Wall to Wall excitedly point out to the participant that he or she is no longer qualified to comment? Will they exult at the participants mongrel nature? Is this result of any examination into a pure English participants family tree actually expected by Wall to Wall productions? They would be extremely foolish not to expect this to be the outcome, certainly if they go back far enough.

Mary Jones, who I believe works for Wall to Wall confirms in an email to Gareth that the programme is to be about English identity:

Channel 4 Television are making a film about English identity and are looking for contributors willing to appear on the programme to talk about what it means to be English today.

[My emphasis] And yet the programme makers are deliberately excluding large numbers of English people on the basis of obvious non-English bloodlines in recent family history.

That, to me, is deliberate exclusion of English people on the basis of ethnicity and is underhand. It would be, from my point of view, perfectly reasonable to create a programme which examines the family trees of people who consider themselves ethnicly English (whatever that means) if Wall to Wall productions are up front about that and do not represent their programme as being about anything other than an exercise in discovery with respect to pure blood lines. But to include in any shape or form any language about what it means to be English in this programme while excluding those whose recent bloodlines fail the qualifying procedure is a disgrace.

One of many expected closing lines by Wall to Wall on many, if not all participants: Oh look, a Frenchman. Can you imagine?

Mirror, mirror on the wall

The people over at the Power Inquiry ask:

How can democracy survive when we feel politicians don’t listen?

Hmmm, I thought to myself, I have this odd feeling that the submissions that me and my friends made to the inquiry were completely ignored. Well actually I’m sure of it.

Now that’s funny.