Squander Two

One side-effect of this financial crisis is that I've finally figured out who our Prime Minister is.

Allow me to explain.

The press have a way of writing, a certain form that they always follow. Things get more detailed the further through a news item you read. When writing about a member of the Cabinet, the first paragraph will always refer to them by title, and their name will eventually be mentioned four or five paragraphs later. Thus:

The Prime Minister will today announce something dead important.

It's so terribly important, he will say, that we really should bloody well pay attention.

Important things have been even more important than usual lately, especially in Wales, with many things seeing more than a 20% increase in importance, and some things that weren't that important becoming fairly significant.

In today's far-reaching proposals, Mr Brown will set out ...

Until about two weeks ago, when reading stuff like that, I'd get a sudden shock when I reached the name "Brown". "Oh, him?" I'd think. "Oh, yeah. I remember now." Up to that point, of course, having read the words "Prime Minister", I'd been picturing Tony Blair.

In response to some real piracy making the news — as opposed to mere copyright infringement that's been branded as "piracy" to make it sound evil — The Register have published this absolutely superb piece about what the Royal Navy should be doing, with the excellent title "Retro piracy — Should the Royal Navy kick arse?". It's worth reading just 'cause it's dead interesting and knowledgable and stuff, but I'm linking to it for this quote:

A typical modern day sailor — say a radar operator or a cook — for all that he is the heir to the almost unstoppable cutlass-swinging Jack Tars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may be little handier in a face-to-face fight than a civilian, or even a member of the RAF.

There's an interesting response here from one Amy Taylor to the Baby P case. And by "interesting" I mean "disgusting".

In the summer of last year social workers also dominated the headlines but coming from the other side of the damned if they do and damned if they don't debate.

The coverage then centred on controversial MP John Hemming and his headline friendly allegations that social workers were unnecessarily taking children into care to meet adoption targets.

....

At the time of Hemming's allegations Ann Baxter, the then chair of the Association of Directors of Children's Services health, care and additional needs policy committee said that allegations such as Hemming's brought the system into disrepute, may put people off raising concerns about a child's welfare and therefore children might be put at risk. Something Hemming dismissed as "nonsense."

....

If the case did not flag up problems with the system it laid bare how the social workers involved had little self confidence - they, along with other professionals, largely failing to challenge Baby P's mother's account that his injuries were accidental.

Views such as Hemming's chip away at a profession in an already fragile state, the lack of confidence in this case highlighting how everything must be done to challenge them.

In short: "If you criticise us, we'll let children die. And it'll be your fault." And, just in case you think the threat might be empty: "We warned you last time you criticised us. And now look what you've done."

Dress it up however you like. There is an impressive level of sheer perversity required to argue, when the same Social Services department have watched a second child being tortured to death without intervening, that the solution to the problem is never, ever, to criticise them. Is there any other profession that tries that one?

John Hemming himself has turned up in the comments to point out:

The article you cite is dated 2nd August 2007. Baby P sadly died on 3rd August 2007.

This causes you some practical difficulty in arguing any aspect of causality.

The man's an MP for a reason.

And there's an excellent comment here from one Nick Bromley:

I worked on Sir Roy Griffiths' Review of Community Care in the 1980s.... I well remember Sir Roy's increasing exasperation with the language of partnership and joint working. He saw it as a cop out and his constant question, in his trips around the country to see care in practice, was "who exactly is responsible for the success of the service here?" We visited social workers who were caring for people with learning difficulties who had been released into the community from long-stay institutions. It was quite clear that those social workers were fully responsible and the air of competence and confidence was palpable. Elsewhere, we found situations where the division of responsibility between health and social service was supposed to be a matter of joint partnership. There was an air of drift: much discussion of procedures and not much action.

....

When people can shift responsibility onto the process of joint working, they will. Nothing is ever anyone's responsibility because it was discussed in a conference in which the most timid solution usually prevails. People who have firm views are seen as not being committed to joint working. And social workers who have no sense of personal responsibility never learn to exercise a confident judgement. Sadly, i am almost certain that what will come out of these reviews is even more procedures for joint working and even more bodies for collaborative working.

Absolutely right and, of course, pretty damn obvious to those of us who've spent any time at all working outside the public sector.

Anyway, the site's administrator is declining to publish my reply to this tripe, so I reproduce it here:

> But none of the above posters seem able to recognise the huge contradiction in taking a stance that social workers take children away from their parents too readily, and then criticising them when they haven't removed a child.

There is no contradiction there at all, because that's a glaringly incomplete description of the criticism. No one ever complains that social workers remove children and that social workers don't remove children. People complain that social workers remove children who are in no danger and that they don't remove children who are in danger. These two complaints hugely contradict each other in much the same way as the two positions that (a) murderers should go to jail and (b) innocent people should not go to jail hugely contradict each other. The only way to see a contradiction in the latter position is to fail to see any real difference between murderers and the innocent — they're all just people, right? And the only way to see a contradiction in the former position is to fail to see any real difference between perfectly good families and brutally violent dysfunctional families — they're all just families, right?

I don't have a degree in social work, and I can see the differences. If social workers can't, what use are you?


> I fail to see how a headline like "Blood on their hands" is going to protect children

I don't think protecting children is the headline-writer's job. I thought it was yours. As it happens, I agree with your underlying assumption that we should all play our part. Thing is, if every member of society does their bit to intervene where necessary, what exactly do we need social workers for?

The entire point of your job is that we have taken these responsibilities and given them to the state, and the state is taxing us to pay you to shoulder those responsibilities for us. If you don't want to take the responsibility, stop taking the money.

I work for a bank. I can get sacked for trading a few shares, which, frankly, harms no-one. For some reason, you guys don't get sacked for negligence leading to children's deaths.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Harringey Social Services failed to cooperate with the police investigation, refusing to provide relevant documents until forced to by the court. I would be interested to hear your defence of this. Was it because the public are always criticising social workers when they cooperate fully with murder investigations?

Oo! Some utterly amazing news:

The stamp duty one-year holiday was announced by government ministers with great fanfare two months ago. Ministers raised the minimum threshold at which payment is due to properties selling for more than £175,000, up from the previous threshold of £125,000.

It’s changed nothing - judging by data released today by the Council of Mortgage Lenders.

Well, obviously. I for one am a keen supporter of the stamp duty changes, though they don't go nearly far enough: it should be cut to zero for all house sales. But that's because I do not believe that anyone should have to pay the state a few grand for the privilege of buying a house. I see no justification for the state's appropriation of that money. It's the principle of the thing. But I would never suggest that abolishing stamp duty would be any help whatsoever to first-time buyers or to any other house-buyers. It was obvious that it wouldn't, and I've been rather baffled over the last year or so by the well-meaning but clueless campaigners (hello, Kirsty & Phil) who were convinced that it would somehow make houses cheaper.

Look, house prices are dictated by what people are willing to pay for them. When deciding what I am willing to pay, I look at the whole outgoing sum; I don't ignore certain parts of it depending on who they're being paid to — and the vendors, of course, are doing the same when setting their price. So, if I'm willing to pay £100,000 and £5,000 of that is stamp duty, I can buy a house that costs £95,000. Abolish stamp duty, and I can afford a house that costs £100,000 — and, since house prices are based on what buyers are willing to pay, every house on the market at £95,000 immediately goes up in price to £100,000. I end up paying the same amount of money for the same house, but none of it goes to the bloody Government.

Obviously.

If only this were surprising these days:

Every business in the country will be encouraged to help fight the obesity epidemic, under a Government campaign to be announced today.

Encouraged, eh? I think we all know what that means by now.

[Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary] said: "I am today challenging every CEO of every company who can influence what we eat and how we exercise to come forward and tell us how they are going to help beat this national epidemic.

"Obesity affects us all so everyone must get involved."

You know, I almost agree with him: if the whole country's facing a crisis, then yes, perhaps everyone should get involved in solving the problem. Thing is, wouldn't that be an alternative to having a massive state? Isn't the whole point of crippling tax rates that, no, we don't have to get involved in these things 'cause the Government's doing it all for us? Apparently not. Apparently, we pay the Government a fortune so that they can then tell us to deal with problems ourselves. Well, OK, then. May I have my money back, then, please?

(Not, of course, that obesity really is a crisis.

Research for the Department of Health shows that almost nine out of ten parents fail to recognise that their children are overweight or obese.

Experts predict that half of adults could have weight problems by 2050, creating a health crisis expected to cost the NHS £50 billions.

Me, I'm waiting for the national eating-disorder crisis brought on by pushing parents to tell their kids they're obese. I predict we'll never hear about how much that costs the N"HS".)

And you know what? I'm sick to bloody death of Britain's chronic lack of anyone in a position of authority who can actually explain what's wrong with this. I mean, let's say you run a small business. You join the Federation of Small Businesses, so that they can represent your interests. And then what happens?

Stephen Alambritis, from the Federation of Small Businesses ... said: "If this message is targeted to the CEOs of the top FTSE companies that is understandable but at the moment many small employers are struggling to keep their staff on the payroll and it is not the right time to ask more of them."

I don't know how much it costs to join this federation, but you might be better off keeping that money to spend on lard.

The problem with this is not timing. This wouldn't be OK if the economy were doing beautifully. The problem is not that it will affect small businesses as well as big ones. The problem is that it is none of your damn business and you shouldn't want it to be. I'm working for a multinational bank at the moment. They're not a small business — they're bigger than many nation-states. They can certainly afford to get involved in these intitiatives, and [sigh] probably will. And, if they ever try and tell me what I'm allowed to eat, I will, in no uncertain terms, tell them to bugger off out of my private life. I am not paid to eat spinach.

Ray Smuckles on French history:

French history really ain't nothin' to get too worked up about. Basically they're like everybody else, but their homeless people wear fingerless gloves.

I'm not generally into T-shirts with slogans on them, as the slogans are usually just kind of crap. But I have just taken delivery of this rather fine garment. I mean, it's just perfect: it expresses succinctly exactly what I'm thinking about almost everyone almost all the time.

In the two years since I became a dad, I've shied away from writing much about Daisy. This is for two reasons. Firstly, I'm horribly aware of James Lileks. The man's a brilliant writer almost all the time, but becomes unutterably dreary the moment he starts to write about his no-doubt charming daughter. One must always remember that one's kids are less interesting to other people than one might hope.

The other reason, as all parents know, is that, when Daisy does anything entertaining enough to blog about, it usually leaves me too knackered to blog about it.

Yes, obviously that was the preamble to some anecdotes.

My dad and step-mum like to buy Daisy toys which play loud awful music, blaring out nursery rhymes with mangled lyrics, secure in the knowledge that the racket will happen two nations and a small sea away from their ears. Daisy's second birthday was no exception, and we've got a buggy with a noisy dashboard in our living room, shouting at us over the sound of Peppa Pig DVDs.

The other day, this device started sounding even stranger than usual. One of its songs was playing very slowly and sounding downright odd. Daisy listened to this for a few moments, looking at it seriously. Then she reached out, turned the thing off, and turned it on again.

Two years old, and she already knows to reboot. I'm so proud.

She's developed a taste for pistachios, and we have some in the house at the moment. When they're around and she knows it, she will not let us rest. Our job — our purpose in life — is to shell pistachios.

So Vic tries to sit down for a minute yesterday and Daisy shouts "Ta ta! Ta ta!" at her, which, as any parent knows, means "Would you please go to the kicthen and bring me some pistachios, Mum?" or, more accurately, "Yo! Bitch! Kitchen! Pistachios! Now!" So Vic gets up and walks towards the kitchen, but, it seems not quickly enough for young Miss Fuhrer, who decides to speed the whole process up by placing both hands on Vic's bum and pushing.

Yeah, we know our place.

Finally, this isn't so much funny as just plain odd. Daisy's been counting for months now — seems to be a little ahead of the game on that front. She started, surprisingly enough, with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; then decided that 4 was her favourite number (we suspect this is due to Teletubbies) and so stopped having anything to do with 1, 2, or 3; then, for ages, she became obsessed with the number sequence 4, 6, 9. She's only just recently returned to normal counting. It was 4, 6, 9, 4, 6, 9, 4, 6, 9 for months. If anyone reading has any ideas about the significance of this sequence, I'd be very interested to hear them.

Running an Oracle installer at work the other day, and a little box pops up which says "Copying files... Please wait". Except that the window's slightly too small for the text it's supposed to contain, so what it actually says is "Copying files... Please".

Considering how successful the operation was, I find this apt.

Firstly, the Republicans have now learnt not to choose candidates like McCain and might pick actual right-wingers in the future.

Secondly, there is the faintest of faint chances that at least some of the people who drone on endlessly about how oppressed black people are in America might just shut up.


Update:

OK, there is one more silver lining:

The movies will get better, as the moratorium on patriotism comes to an end. ... Perhaps in his giddiness, some Hollywood bigshot will green-light a war movie about our heroic soldiers ... The stories are there, waiting to be told.