Don’t tar all MPs staff with the same brush

I’m not going to comment on the Derek Conway matter, other than to say I would have thought he had more sense.

But I will say again, as I have before, that we must not generalize and let individual cases tar the whole system.

In fact, the House of Commons authorities have strict rules about Members’ staff, will only include them on the payroll if there is a proper contract of employment, and these days there are also scales of appropriate payment for particular jobs.

Most of the wives, sons and daughters, and a few husbands, who work for their spouse or parent are doing a fairly thankless job, working hard, and putting in long hours to do all in their power to make sure the MP is providing a good service to his/her constituents.

Part of the time that I worked in the Commons, I had the privilege to be located around the other side of the horseshoe that was the Lower Ministerial Corridor from the office of Neil Hamilton, where the doughty Christine presided.   I can say with absolute certainty, not least because of the volume of her voice, that here was one MP’s wife who was in the office and working hard all day. 

Mixed hospital wards must go

So Health Minister, Lord Darzi, has decreed that it is simply not possible to ensure single sex wards across all NHS hospitals, admitting thereby that’s another promise Labour has broken.

Just tell that to the old-style Matrons.   They made damned sure there was no “funny business” going on between the sexes, with strictly segregated Men’s and Women’s Wards.  

The Carry on Films showed some hilarious examples, with Matron even moving a bed so that a female patient couldn’t be seen by her amour through the porthole window in the entrance doors.   The lady said, “I don’t mind”.   “But we do” came the severe reply.

Seriously, though, like many people I have had elderly relatives very distressed by mixed wards.   A lady awaking to find an elderly gent sitting on her bed, and in some cases trying to climb in, and, to be fair, similar cases the other way round, of an old lady, totally confused, trying to get into a man’s bed.   Then there is the question of shared washing and lavatory facilities, to say nothing of privacy when changing nightwear.   Dignity in these matters is important to all of us, but especially so to the elderly who belong to a different age and culture.

This needs to be dealt with.   Yet another reason for bringing back proper Matrons.

Squashy bananas for Her Majesty

You have to give it to the Queen for remaining unruffled in the most trying circumstances.

Apparently a lady in a residential home, being visited by the Queen, decided to give her two bananas because 65 years ago Her Majesty’s mother, the late Queen Mother, had presented two bananas to the lady, and she was returning the favour.   Possibly the 1940s ones were the first the lady had seen since the war.

Anyway, as others present their posies to Her Majesty, this lady hands over the two bananas.   The photo of the Queen shows her with two seriously over-ripe bananas in her right hand, and she is looking down at them, still with her professional smile glued to her lips, but clearly thinking what the hell shall I do with these.

Livingstone must have forgotten what he said

Lovely bit in Atticus in the Sunday Times today:-

Ken Livingstone speaking in 1998  -

“Corruption tends to flourish the longer an incumbent is able to hold on to power.”

As Atticus remarks, Livingstone is campaigning for a third term, ie 12 years.

You really couldn’t make it up

Thanks to Dizzy for this wonderful link.   You really couldn’t make it up, could you?

That Labour peer, Lord Murray Elder, who donated to Wendy Alexander’s leadership campaign, should turn out to be a political adviser to the Electoral Commission.

Regional Assemblies making decisions about what happens in our towns and villages

I’ve just been reading one of the local freebie newspapers, and it refers to the fact that the Regional Assembly is to decide whether to recommend to the government a policy of establishing more than 350 new Traveller pitches in our county.

This post is not about traveller sites  -  that’s another story  -  but about the Regional Assembly.

I know these bodies have been around for some time, but I must have missed the process of the Bill through Parliament that established them.   OK, I’ll take it they’re legal.

But the one thing that cannot be disputed is that they are an unelected body.   You and I don’t get to vote for members of the Regional Assembly.   They are appointed by County, District and Unitary authorities.

I have two points about this.

First, here is an unelected body recommending a policy to government which will have effects on the local population.   Is that right?

Second, these regional assemblies are a huge prop in the framework being stealthily built by the government and the European commission to deal only with the so-called “English Regions” and deny us  -  the free-born English men and women  -  the nation status which they have rushed to give to the other three nations of the United Kingdom.   Is that fair?

Seen it all before?

There are acres of newsprint expended this morning on Monsieur Jerome Kerviel and Societe Generale, rather inelegantly shortened to Soc-Gen.

Yesterday the bank’s managers described him as a Machiavellian genius who managed to outwit the toughest financial control systems and plunge France’s biggest bank and world markets into even more disarray.   Then the emphasis changed and M. Kerviel was described as a fantasist and an unsuccessful financier left to flounder in waters far too deep for him.   There is doubt that one man could have caused “the biggest banking fraud in history”.

I will say only one word  -  Barings.

More data for the Government to lose

I’ve just renewed my television licence  -  on line.

And all the time I was doing it, I was saying to myself what a fool I was for giving my credit card details to yet another government agency, so they could lose them.  

I notice the website doesn’t have the usual bit about how they don’t keep credit card details, so I must suppose they do!

A grumpy old rant about H

This is a letter from Bernadette Robinson in the paper edition of The Times today:-

‘Could somebody please tell me what has happened to the “H” in our alphabet?   For 60 years I have pronounced it “aitch”.   There is an “H” in my postcode and recently I have been corrected by various customer advisers: “You mean ‘haitch’?”  To make matters worse, today, on the BBC’s programme Cash in the Attic, the presenter referred to Haitch MS Vanguard.   Is this now the standard pronunciation?’

I’ve been meaning for ages to do a post about this.   Every time a TV voice comes out with that haitch, and more and more of them are doing it, I get so angry.   Is it perhaps that these people have been nagged not to drop their aitches, so they are carefully putting one on the word itself?   After all, the word is aitch;  it doesn’t even start with an H.

And another thing, an increasing number of people who are regarded as educated and holding down managerial jobs are pronouncing something and nothing as somethink and nothink.   Where do they get that K from?

L Gibson from Whitley Bay, also in The Times, raises the point again of why so many younger people now speak with a raised inflection at the end of sentences.   This, I’m sure, can be put firmly at the door of Australian soap operas which have for so long been bombarded daily at television audiences in this country.   This leads us to believe that down under every sentence ends with a question.

Finally, in this little diatribe, I thought I had heard it all tonight.   I was watching my favourite ITV3, (you know, all the lovely old dramas and cop shows), and this evening’s episode of The Dorothy L Sayers Mysteries was about to start.   The story was Have His Carcass, but the announcer said it was Have His Car-Case;  yes, pronounced as if it were a portmanteau for putting in a vehicle!

English, (not US English), is a beautiful language.   As Professor Higgins said at great length, “Why can’t the English learn to speak?”

Sipsip – help, I’m imprisoned in a nightmare

This afternoon I sat in the management committee meeting of a charity, and I couldn’t decide whether I’d gone mad and was in an asylum or was asleep and having a nightmare.

There were 11 perfectly nice people in the room, and they had all talked very sensibly, until we came to the item on funding.   And then it happened.

A torrent of new government initiatives; a cascade of abbreviations and initials; and the confident assertions that each new funding stream had replaced that old one, although probably just a new name and a new committee of people managing it.   There were new “boards” deciding who was to get money.   County council funding had been devolved to these curious “boards” which were populated by young graduates who had gone straight into public service and apparently become instant experts on our town and its people.

The jargon came rolling out, and reached its peak with what sounded like, phonetically, “Sipsip”.   I’m a simple soul.   “What does that mean”, I asked.   I was told it meant Children and Young People Strategic Partnership.   So what are the initials then  -  CYPSP but still pronounced sipsip.

It’s daft, yes, but there’s a bigger underlying concern.   Every time the government tweaks one of these wonderful initiatives of theirs, from New Deals downwards, the whole local government and quasi-government agency structure shakes itself up and restructures, with new committees, new names, new stationery, and all the rest of it.   It costs vast amounts of money and time, both of which would be much better spent in just delivering improvements to the service concerned.