Releasing contentious information on Friday afternoon used to be UK government’s way of minimising its impact. A Sunday release seems to be taking the practice of making news items insignificant to a whole new level. How keen must these Treasury workers be, if they are working on a Sunday?

The BBC has just reported that the failed Northern Rock Building Society is to be nationalised. After spending a fortune on it, the UK government was not best pleased that the Office of National Statistics (ONS) decided to class Northern Rock as part of the public sector. Hence its debts added close to £100bn to the National Debt.

(Fascinating sub-plot. ONS employees, facing their jobs disappearing if they won’t move to Wales and with a new obligation to prove scientific independence, just decided to tell the truth. Woot.)

….as the Office for National Statistics has made clear by insisting that its liabilities, to the tune of £90bn, should be classified as government borrowing (from the Observer, 10 Feb, 2008.

As a side-effect, a harsh spotlight fell on the plans to plug the holes in pass this billion-leaking cash sieve and pass it on to Virgin so they could make profits.

By the way, the UK’s population is round about 61 million. So, thats well over a thousand pounds for every person in the UK. If we just count the working population, this is about 29 million. If I haven’t got the wrong number of zeroes here, I make that £3,103 for every working person in the UK. That’s a year’s tax for the huge numbers of low-paid workers who make up the bulk of the population. Don’t make me look up how many countries in the world there are where the average annual income is much less than that. (That’s what Wikipedia is for)

The British public seems to love Richard Branson, seeing this ex-Etonian as a true man of the people, because he wears loud sweaters and gets in hot-air balloons. Even so, there is a limit even to the British people’s love of ballooning billionaires. Hence there is some opposition to shoring up a company for his benefit at quite this level.

Or maybe Branson isn’t prepared to take any risk at all with Northern Rock and needs the government to make Northern Rock profitable before Virgin get their hands on it.

From yesterday;s Guardian:

Taking the bank into public ownership – which could mean sacking thousands of staff and making taxpayers in effect bear the risk of ‘owning’ £100bn in mortgages – would trigger a storm of protest…..

I can see that letting a bank go bankrupt would be pretty economically devastating and the government had little choice but to rescue it. Even so, how come no one has been arrested? And what about the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be there precisely to make sure that people like me – i.e with no capital and a poor track record for looking after even their own money – don’t suddenly find themselves looking after billions of pounds of other people’s money?

And assuming, that the government now has to do all the dirty work to bring the bank back to life, why on earth must they hand it back to the private sector as soon as it ever becomes profitable again?

(Sorry if you thought this was going to be about the beautiful wrestler-turned actor in rubbishy movies, the Rock. You probably noticed by now that it isn’t.)

Today’s drugs panic relates to Dwain Chambers, who has once again showed he can run 60m faster than anyone else in Britain, after a two-year ban for use of a banned substance.

The big names in British athletics (yes, that is a very llocalised meaning of the words “big names”) are engaged in an unseemly scramble to distance themselves from him. Plus today’s BBC website says that a promotion group won’t have him at events.

How fair is this? His real crime seems to have been to have said that it was impossible to win the Olympics without some chemical assistance.

He was banned for two years. This time is over. It’s not as if athletes have twenty year careers, so that they can just be out of their sport for a few years and lose no ground.

In my limited understanding of the term, he was never “cheating” anyway. He outran everyone who he raced against. “Cheating” would involve tripping up his rivals or bribing the timekeeper.

It’s tough to distinguish between a fair and an unfair advantage. I can guarantee that no amount of chemical enhancement would put me in the Olympic class for swimming. (For a start, I can’t really swim.) Why are some things that give an athlete sporting advantages “cheating” while other things aren’t? Good genetics for running – unfair, but we don’t all have them. Aerodynamically enhanced sportswear? Expert coaching? Good diet? These all provide sporting advantages that aren’t equally available to everyone.

For most sports, access to the opportunity to do them at all rests on having an unfair advantage: your own eventing horse, a tennis racket, snow, an athletics club that you can afford to go to, an Olympic-size pool, time to train, a national commitment to providing facilities and so on.

So, clearly, the whole issue rests on where you draw the line. The athletics associations drew their line to exclude whatever pharmaceutical letter combination Dwain Chambers was caught taking. Fair enough. He was competing under their rules. They applied a penalty. Also fair enough. He accepted the penalty and kept to the testing rules while he was banned from competing.

So why is the man now being blamed for everything from being a bad influence on future sportspeople to keeping a good non-cheat out of the England squad by selfishly winning enough races to get into it? (Arguments on BBC Breakfast.)

One commentator claimed that he had modified his physique by taking the banned substance 3 years ago, so would have inherent unfair advantages for the rest of his career. I don’t know what magical substance Dwain is supposed to have taken, but, if such a product exists, surely doctors all over the world would be clamouring to get it it to treat the physically weak.

The BBC says that the Gitmo trials will be fair.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has promised a fair trial for Guantanamo prisoners accused of organising the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Firstly, these are military tribunals, not courts, but they intend to seek the death penalty. Does that sound like a convincingly fair trial to anyone outside the Bush administration?

Surely, by definition, you can’t have a fair trial where the evidence is extracted under torture.

If the investigators were so inept that they had to keep people in isolation for years, interrupted by periods of regularly overtly torturing them, to make a case, I suspect they may not have the strongest case in the world.

This is clearly the perspective of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“Possibly putting someone to death based on evidence obtained through water-boarding, or after prolonged periods of sleep deprivation while being forced into painful stress positions, is not the answer,” said Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch. (from the BBC website)

Is the Bush administration completely stupid?

Is there any way on earth that this show trial will diminish the threat of terrorism, given that noone outside of the US and few people inside must see this as any form of due process?

Even the British royal family doesn’t believe what the US says about the war in Iraq, ffs. Much as it grieves me to quote a Royal in an approving manner,
Prince Andrew got it pretty well spot on last week, although he was seriously slated in the media, for daring to express a political opinion.

(Ironically, Princess Diana is still worshipped by the media, precisely for daring to express herself. I guess that is more to do with the touchy-feely “poor sensitive me” stuff that she came out with. In the present day, you are much more respected if you discuss your bulimia on Oprah than if you give any serious thought to the world…)

Andrew said there were

“occasions when people in the UK would wish that those in responsible positions in the US might listen and learn from our experiences”.

Basically, the prince, himself a decorated Falklands war veteran, was implying that the colonial mistakes of the British could prove instructive to the USA. Specifically, not acting in ways that spur lifelong hatred and will to fight, I assume.

He also said, although more politely, that we in the UK don’t believe what we hear from Washington, post-Iraq:

the Iraq war had induced a “healthy scepticism” towards America.(from trhe Guardian, 5 Feb 2008)

I grant that our own government seems hellbent on not learning any lessons from history, so it’s not as if our hereditary figureheads have any influence here, either. But, surely years of holding on to their land and fending over republican revolutions have taught them a thing or two about the virtues of flexibility and of not making unnecessary enemies.

Five musicians were awarded damages after a Ryanair pilot  refused to carry them, acting on the suspicion of an onboard psychologist.

(This is clearly a man whose awareness of the limits of his own expertise had been misinformed by tv programmes with psychologists and profiler heroes, such as Cracker and Criminal Intent. The pilot may also have watched too many of these.)

The story would be quite comical if it didn’t involve serious embarrassment and major inconvenience to some blameless travellers.

…. And if the incident didn’t expose pure racism …..

The paranoid psychologist saw 5 black men sitting separately on the plane, although they had been together in the departure lounge. (Has he never been on a packed plane before? Maybe he knows the secret of getting 5 adjoining seats without booking 2 years in advance. It’s often tough enough to get two seats in the same part of the plane.)
He claimed that one of the men, who was blind, appeared to be reading a newspaper. (The blind man’s friends were actually reading to him, but in any case, blindness is not necessarily total. Does a blind person incur a duty of complete blindness on themselves, in case their limited sight turns out to confuse people. )

Apparently impressed by the psychology professor’s logic, the Ryanair pilot,

Captain Dunlop decided to remove the men, the only black people on the flight, after two families and a stewardess said that they would not fly with them on board.

So, even after the men had been removed from the flight and their credentails fully established, Captain Douglas refused to have them on board.

The decision left the group stranded in Sardinia and unable to see their families on New Year’s Eve. The first available flight back to Britain on New Year’s Day was to Liverpool. The men could not find a hotel when they arrived in the city and had to spend the night at a bus station, sleeping on their instruments. They only got back to London on January 2.

Even if you choose to ignore the obvious racism behind all this, the incident speaks volumes about where our anti-terrorist panic is leading us, as a society. We seem to be becoming more and more like the McCann “witness” – who saw a non-Anglo-saxon man in the resort, a few days before the McCann’s arrival, and assumed that he must be the person responsible for the disapperance of Madeleine. The British press seem more than happy to treat this prejudiced nonsense as a genuine witness statement.

This psychologist did the same. He saw some people who stood out – to him – ONLY by the fact of their not being white. He then chose to interpret their every action as a threat and to report them to an authority – the pilot – who immediately went along with the claims of a middle-class white passenger, despite their innate absurdity.

Imagine:

• Professional terrorists whose plan somehow requires that there be 5 of them together on a flight but that they appear to be strangers to each other.
• They also have to pretend to be a steel band, thereby making a mockery of the whole “unknown to each other” idea.
• One of them has to pretend to be blind.

This already constitutes a plan so cunning as to be incomprehensible to mere mortals. What could possibly be achieved by having an ostensibly blind passenger, who was actually sighted? Would a terrorist act be more effective if any stray nosey fellow-passenger passers-by might assume those involved weren’t travelling as a group.But the oddest assumption is that the supposed terrorist architects of this intricate and complex plan do not even have the wit to stick to it for a couple of hours.

They are “terrorists” so inept that they can be out-thought by an academic with a plane ticket – someone who fills no formal intelligence or security role and has no access to any information whatsoever, except his own prejudices, in fact.

The judge gave them 4 times the standard amount of damages, but this sum still seems derisory, especially as RyanAir even gave a false story to the press.

Normally, damages for being denied boarding are limited to £250, but the judge said that the group’s “embarrassment at being the only black persons removed from the aircraft at gunpoint for no just reason, their inability to be with their families and friends on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, the overnight stay in the cold of Liverpool, [all] had to be taken into account”.
Ryanair had also lied about the incident to the press. Peter Sherrard, the airline’s head of communications, had told newspapers that “airport security were informed and decided to remove the group”, and that “no request was made to our pilot to allow this group to reboard”. This was “false and misleading”, the judge said.

On the BBC website, those (like me) who mocked the new McQualifications get a right telling off by Mike Baker for being snobbish.

Hmm. Another chance to sound off about them. In numbered list format, even.

• It’s fine for companies to choose to train their staff and give them proof of having achieved a certain standard of competence in the company’s work. It’s hardly the concern of public awarding bodies.
• Despite a rhetoric of opening up the opportunities to gain qualifications to the less academic, these “qualifications” implicitly place the holder firmly in the “peon” class.
• At the same time, they create a further “under-peon” class of people who haven’t got them. So, they put people who haven’t got them at an unnecessary disadvantage in terms of getting jobs or promotion.
• Vocational qualifications being what they are, they will reward those people who can fill out the standard phrases in their standard portfolio in a standard way. This means that people who are actually good at being shift supervisors but rubbish at documenting their achievements will do worse than those who are good at collecting documents.
• Any one of average intelligence can pick up the skills needed to work in most jobs, with a bit of experience. What difference does a piece of paper make except to limit access to those jobs?
• There is a big UK push for all under-18s having to be in “education or training.” Hmm. Education that stretches the mind, maybe. Training in craft skills, maybe. Training in tasks that any able-bodied person can pick up in a couple of weeks, no.

Is objecting to McQuals for McJobs being “snobbish” toward the recipients? I think the disdain they rouse comes from a recognition that these are worthless bits of paper that just attempt to draw an obscuring veil over the massive deskilling of workers and the failure of the education system to develop people’s real potential.