July 2008 Archives

Now that Gordon Brown is finished as a Prime Minister, one major question remains to be answered.

How did he get the job in the first place?

He was, of course, destined for the post ever since the infamous Granita restaurant pact which allotted the job of Prime Minister to Tony Blair and made Mr Brown the Chancellor of the Exchequer until he took over at the top.

But that was last century. Since then even the restaurant has closed down. Mr Brown has spent ten years in No 11 Downing Street under the close scrutiny of Cabinet colleagues and 300-plus Labour MPs.

Did none of them ever notice that the man sat next to them in meetings was a dour, fingernail-nibbling ditherer, eaten away with angst and consumed with minute details?

If the rest of us out here in the real world were picking up the worrying messages that Mr Brown was a control freak with "psychological issues" then surely those rubbing hunched shoulders with him in Westminster must have heard the same, at least.

If we noticed that whenever a difficult or important issue arose on the political horizon the Scotsman went missing, then so must they.

The Government is formulating a new strategy to tackle our epidemic of obesity.

The initiative is based around a £200 million package of publicity supplied by companies including Coca Cola and Mars.

They are promising advertising campaigns and on-pack messages to promote healthy living.

Now what's the only kind of meaningful health message that could be placed on a Mars bar?

"Eat this and you'll get even fatter. Throw it away NOW".

It's not going to happen, is it?

Princess Anne has been subject to a great deal of mockery from sniggering females because she turned up at a wedding last weekend wearing a frock she bought 27 years ago.

The white number with yellow flowers had its first outing for the wedding of Charles and Di in 1981 and re-appeared for the nuptials of Lady Rose Windsor, daughter of the Duke of Gloucester.

It's true, of course, that the re-appearance of the dress speaks volumes about the 57 year old's attitude to spending and to fashion.

But how many of those who mocked will still have the figure to get into their latest outfit in 27 years time?

Especially after two children.

HRH may be a tad mean, her sense of style may have deteriorated over the years but the old girl is still in great shape.

The High Court has ruled that drugs cheat athlete Dwain Chambers will not be allowed to run for Britain at the Bejing Olympics.

The truth is, of course, that Chambers attempted to overturn the ban imposed upon him by the British Olympic Association not because he wanted to represent his country.

It was because he wanted to represent himself.

Which is what all our professional athletes do.

Does anyone believe that the first thing on the mind of any one of our Bejing team is an urge to do their best for the reputation of GB?

They will be on that plane to satisfy their bloated egos and to stuff their bank balances with the appearance money and sponsorship deals that will follow a successful performance.

For days now the filthy-rich supermarkets have been protesting that they are not responsible for the massive food wastage in this country.

Of course they are.

They not only create waste they make massive profits from it.

We are told that every household throws away £420 of food a year. Well, that's £10 billion worth of supermarket sales.

And it is generated chiefly by the way we have allowed and encouraged the big retailers to operate.

Even before food gets to the warehouse, giants like Tesco have junked hundreds of tons of it because it did not meet their peculiar specifications for shape, size and so on.

Their storage techniques, designed to unnaturally prolong the life of fruit and vegetables up to the point of sale, contribute to the almost instant decay of "fresh" produce when it arrives in the home.

Then there's the packaging.

The entire supermarket system is based on delivering food packaged to maximise retailer convenience and profit margin.

If you go into a butcher's shop you can ask for six sausages or three slices of bacon. If you don't want the eight rashers of bacon in the Asda vacuum pack, tough.

And just in case you thought you could use the three rashers you don't need later, the supermarket ensures you throw them away by stamping the pack with a deadline for use.

Sainsbury's chief executive Justin King has said that at least a quarter of his customers do not understand what "best before" means.

They think it means "bin before" and so throw away food that is perfectly edible.

Well, if one in four of his customers does not understand his labelling system does it not cross Mr. King's mind that he should do something about it?

Like explaining, on the package, how long after the best-before date the food is still useable.

But in any case, for those millions living alone, a vast amount of supermarket food is bought as ready meals.

And if a purchaser leaves a fifth of a Lancashire Hotpot or a tenth of a cottage pie, what is he or she supposed to do with that?

Which is why lectures on food wastage, like that one delivered by Prime Minister Brown, are not just aimed at entirely the wrong people but are so out of touch with 21st century reality that they amount to patronising bilge.

Unless Gordon can come up with a recipe for left-overs that will use up two spoonfuls of lamb curry, two slices of bacon, three ounces of cheese and a rapidly decaying apricot.

David Blunkett has launched a new TV reality show in which he aims to show us how to turn youngsters away from crime.

What an affront.

Here's a bloke who has spent the last decade either in the Government or supporting it. For three years he was the Home Secretary, the man with ultimate authority for dealing with crime and criminals.

In that time he and his colleagues failed utterly to turn back the tide of lawlessness in urban youth.

Indeed, as the endless succession of teenage killings so sickeningly demonstrates, criminality among the young - at least in our Cities - is, as a result of their years in power, running out of control.

So you might have thought that Mr. Blunkett might either have been hard at it within the corridors of Westminster working to find real solutions to the savagery he has help unleash, or at least hiding his head in shame.

Instead, here he is popping up on Channel 5 on a four part series called "Banged Up" which takes ten teenagers on the brink of crime and places them in a disused jail with former real-life lags as cell mates.

The idea, apparently, is to scare them onto the straight and narrow.

What a ludicrous notion.

First of all, producers of the show had to come up with a group of individuals who were not actually guilty of anything, and who were keen to volunteer for four nights on the telly.

What possible relationship can this have to real life?

Then there's the fact that what the show proposes - nanging up troublemakers in a bleak nick - is the complete opposite of what Mr. Blunkett's Government has been inflicting on our society for the whole of this century.

The New Labour response to criminality is to grasp at anything that keeps the guilty out of prison, which is why we have the nonsense of ASBOs, the proliferation of the so-called "community sentences" and relentless appeals to judges not to send anybody down.

When Ministers have failed to prevent offenders being sent away, they have simply let them out again on early release.

How dare Mr. Blunkett step out of the shadows of his own brush with impropriety (he was forced to resign over a visa application for his ex-lover's nanny) to serve up an approach to criminality that, in real life, he simply did not have the courage to contemplate?

Yet he is already suggesting that parents, schools and youth offending teams will be recording his show and learning lessons from it.

Learning what? That if you fail miserably with a problem in the real world then the answer is to make a TV show about it?

I do hope Mr. Blunkett's fee for this meaningless venture is going to charity.

It is next to impossible to get through a day without hearing another mention of the name Tariq Ghaffur, the police officer at the centre of the latest racism row at Scotland Yard.

What makes Mr. Ghaffur particularly newsworthy is that he happens to be not just an assistant commissioner at the Met. but the most senior Muslim police officer in the country.

And he has accused the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, of racial discrimination.

Mr. Ghaffur claims he has been humiliated and undermined and has taken on a barrister to represent him.

While Sir Ian denies racism the National Black Police Association, which has seen a file on the case, says that evidence of bullying, victimisation and discrimination is "compelling."

All of this would be deeply serious in any circumstances.

But Asst. Commissioner Ghaffur is the man in charge of security for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Amongst his claims is that he was sidelined from meetings about the event.

The security plans are not going well.

An Olympics report prepared for the new Lord Mayor, Boris Johnson, singled out the issue as an area of concern. It said security was "significantly behind the rest of the planning" and warned that if security features at venues have to be "retro-fitted" then there will be serious cost implications.

It went on to say that failure to catch up and complete and properly costed plan will have serious implications for Londoners as they will be the people most exposed to disruption and security risks.

Nobody is in any doubt that the Games present an almost irresistible target for terrorists who will foresee the possibility of a double whammy - inflicting a major atrocity against Britain and being able to do so before a worldwide audience.

Yet here we are with security planning falling behind target and with the senior police officer in charge of the operation not only embroiled in a major racism row with his boss but apparently being shut out of crucial meetings on the subject.

Am I alone in believing this is potentially disastrous?