End of an Era

Bliar resigning? No, something far more important. BBC has lost the rights to broadcast Neighbours. Fair dinkum. After 22 years on the Beeb the Australian soap will move to Five in 2008.

I been watching Neighbours, on and off, since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Of course, in the early days I could only watch it during the school holidays. Thankfully they brought in the evening installment in 1988.

A lot has happened in Ramsay Street since them - some good, some bad. But I have stuck with Neighbours, as have some five million others who regularly watch the show.

Sure, the BBC may have treated Neighbours fans badly. They would never publicise the show. It would be the first programme they remove from the schedule every time there were showing a sporting event. They would not show it on bank holidays using the excuse that if they didn't do that they would overtake Australia. This was a laughable excuse as Neighbours is shown for all but three weeks a year in Australia. Two weeks off for Wimbledon, at least one week off over Christmas, another five bank holidays, football world cup, European championships, Olympics and the odd horse racing meant there was never any chance of the UK catching up with Australia. However, at least the Beeb stuck with Neighbours despite audience figures falling from 18 million to 5 million.

Will Five stick with Neighbours if audience figures fall? Probably not. And if Five drops Neighbours it will surely mean the end of Neighbours. So much rests on the all-singing all-dancing Neighbours that Five's money will pay for.

5.35pm will never be the same again. What will the BBC schedule in Neighbours place? How about bringing back what they used to show at 5.35pm: the Flintstones...

Thank Heaven for All Little Girls

You cannot have missed the news of the missing four year-old Madeleine McCann. It's been all over the papers. It's been the leading item on the news, ahead of the daily carnage in Iraq and the civil war in Gaza.

You cannot fault the McCann family for doing all they can to publicise the abduction. Of course it helps that they have a large, well organised extended family and wealthy friends. If only everyone was so fortunate.

What about thousands of Iraqi girls who have been murdered by the illegal American invasion and occupation? What about the millions of girls who die each year through famine and poverty? Even if you're a Sun reader and therefore don't give a damn about foreigners, what about all the other British girls who have disappeared? Nearly one thousand other British children have gone missing since Madeleine was abducted. Can you name a single one of them? The money raised by the Madeleine appeal is greater the annual budget for the National Missing Persons Bureau.

The most distasteful thing about this case is all the "Great and Good" of the land who have jumped aboard this particular band wagon: businessmen, footballers, musicians, actors, cricketers and politicians. Why?

What makes this one single girl so special?

Thirteen Years Too Late

On the night of 11th May 1994 I saw John Smith, the then leader of the Labour Party, on the news. He was stopped by a reporter in the street and asked a question about something. As John replied he got all "worked up". I thought to myself that he shouldn't be getting angry - I knew he had had a heart attack before. The following morning John Smith died of heart attack. He was aged 55.

Why is it that only the good die young? Why is the world robbed of honest decent people like John Smith and Robin Cook and yet self-serving liars such as Bliar, Mandelson and John Reid seem to go on forever?

One can only imagine what kind of a different (and better) world we would all be living in if John Smith hadn't died so young. But it wasn't meant to be. Instead, we got thirteen years of Tony Bliar.

Many people have prospered under Bliar's regime. But many, many more have suffered. And now Bliar has announced he will step down as leader of the Labour Party on 27th June. It's thirteen years too late. The damage has been done.

Bliar's final words of his resignation speech was to wish the British people good luck. Millions of British people were thinking good riddance.

Things Could Have Only Got Better

Friday 2nd May 1997. It only seems like yesterday. The hopes of millions of Britons rested with the new Labour government. After eighteen years of Tory rule Britain was ready for a change.

Ten years on, here is the clinical, rambling analysis of what the Labour government has achieved.

Under this Labour government there is now a minimum wage and everyone has the right to join a trade union but it was perfectly legal for an American to sack 670 Gate Gourmet employees via megaphone and for Mark Langford to sack 2,500 Accident Group employees via SMS text.

The gap between the rich and poor is wider now than it was ten years ago. The government may trumpet the fact that several hundred thousand children have been taken out of poverty but this, like so much of New Labour’s spin, is a subversion of the facts. In absolute terms poverty has fallen. But in relative terms, where people’s income is compared to average income, poverty has actually risen over the past ten years. One of the reasons for this is that it is the middles classes who have benefited the most from the much heralded tax credits. You can be earning as much as £60k and still claim tax credits if you have a child. But if you don't have a child, you could be earning as little as £10k and you wouldn't entitled to a penny in benefits/tax credits.

Hundreds of billions of pounds have been poured into the public sector without any discernible improvement in public services. Where has all this money gone? They have gone into the pockets of the directors of private companies involved in PPP/PFI schemes. They have gone into the pockets of GP's and consultants, most of whom now earn in excess of £100k despite working only part time in the NHS (the rest of their time is spent working in private hospitals or on the golf course). This is happening at the same time as hundreds of thousands of other NHS staff are working on the minimum wage. The government has pampered doctors and nurses but would the NHS function without the services of cleaners, porters, catering and clerical staff?

Hundreds of billions of pounds have been wasted on IT and construction contracts that have cost much more than their budget. Why is every contract between the public sector and private sector written in a so one-sided way that it is the public sector which ends up footing the bill if the project overruns or turns out to be more complex than originally thought? Would this happen in contract between two private companies? When the construction for the new Wembley stadium overran, who ended up paying for this? Certainly not the FA, the client. It was Multiplex, the contractor, who paid for the overrun. Why doesn't this happen in the public sector? Because our politicians and officials are being bribed by the contractors to sign such one-sided contracts.

And who has paid for all this? Certainly not the rich. Tax laws in Britain are now so lax that Britain is now a tax haven. Gone are the days when greedy businessmen and celebrities would hide their fortunes in an obscure Caribbean island. Now they just bring it to Britain. Seven of the top ten in the latest Sunday Times Rich List were born outside the UK.

Tax laws in Britain have also allowed it to become the home of venture capitalists. These scum buy successful companies by taking out vast loans. Tax laws allow these loans to be shown as liabilities of the companies being bought, rather than the venture capitalists. Not only does this remove all the risk associated with the loan from the venture capitalists, the huge interest to be paid on the loan is tax deductible! They then asset strip the companies and sack thousands of employees. Once they've done this they just walk away from the business, having pocketed hundreds of millions. They have raped hundreds of UK companies, including household names such as Rover and the AA. Their eyes are now set on Boots and Sainsbury's.

It is the poorest in society who have ended up paying for this governments waste and corruption. Indirect taxes have been gone up steadily over the past ten years and, by virtue of these taxes being regressive, it is the poor whose tax burden has risen the most.

Education, education, education. That was Bliar’s mantra. Yes, there are many shiny new schools where every pupil has a laptop but, again, what has this achieved? Every August government ministers pat themselves on the back after record passes at GCSEs and A Levels. But this is only achievable by fixing the grades after all the exam papers have been marked. You couldn't make it up. Even under this dodgy way of grading of exams there is growing gap in the qualifications achieved by school leavers. At the same time as record numbers are achieving the top grades, record numbers are leaving school without any qualifications. The savvy middle class are using the property market to corner places in the best schools for their children. If you can’t play this game you’re doomed to send your children to bog standard schools. The government can throw as much money as it can at these schools to improve standards but nothing will change as long as there are ghettos in our education system.

Record number of school leavers may be going to universities but what are they studying? Media studies and sociology. In the country that gave the world the industrial revolution, the number of maths, science and engineering graduates are at record low. In the market orientated world universities operate in now many are simply dropping courses in these subjects. They simply cost to much to run. At the same time China and India are churning out millions of science and engineering graduates every year. One of the few comforts of all our manufacturing jobs going abroad was that at least the designing stage was still being done in Britain. But if these jobs too are exported because a lack of appropriate graduates, what on earth are future British generations going to do for a living? Are they all going to end up working in Tesco, stacking its shelves with goods designed and manufactured abroad?

Another one of New Labour’s buzzwords was ethical foreign policy. It got off to a good start with Kosovo and Sierra Leone but it’s been downhill ever since. Ethics have been abandoned in favour of economics and national interest: China, Palestine, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran etc.

Of all the things done by New Labour in the past ten years, surely giving unconditional support to America in it’s “war on terror” was the most wreckless. Have any “terrorists” been defeated by using military force? The Boers tried to defeat the ANC, whom they and Margaret Thatcher described as terrorists, by using military force but in the end they had to admit defeat and abandon Apartheid. The Jews haven’t been able to defeat the PLO using force. Even the British had to negotiate with IRA/Sinn Fein. You don’t hijack a plane and kill thousands, including yourself, unless it’s the last resort .

Things Can Only Get Better was the anthem of the New Labour victory in 1997. How wrong it was.

T'is the Season of Anniversaries

1st May 2003



What went wrong George?