It's a myth story

I see from the local pseudo-media (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/57597/heritage-centre-explores-history-of-the-north ) that the Ramsey Heritage Centre is now “officially” open.

Apart from being untrue (it has hardly ever been open to the public since the first time a local dignitary opened it, and hardly ever will be) this begs a question. Why bother taking away a perfectly good contemporary community facility in order to build a mausoleum based on some ageing Rotarian’s Prozac-addled vision of what it used to be?

The excuse is that it will be a tourist attraction and an educational facility. Totally untrue on both counts.

If there was ever a market for this (and current thinking is that it vanished in the mid 1990’s) it was the Woopy (‘well off older person’). Under current economic conditions that market is deader than the dodo.

With final salary pensions gone for most and pension values decimated the only older people well off enough to visit the Isle of Man are also able to, say, cruise down the Rhine or go on photo-safaris in South Africa. Why would they visit ‘heritage exhibitions’ of communities which, by their greed, they played a major part in destroying?

To gloat? Even geriatric Thatcherites aren’t that sick!

Most will be familiar with the saying “history is written by the victors” (which implies that such history is somewhat subjective). The heritage industry, in comparison, is market-driven history written for the losers. It would not exist unless some bean-counter had calculated that enough losers would pay to view exhibitions portraying a somewhat sepia-tinted vision of past communities which misdirect the blame for their demise onto outside elements (venal foreign manufacturers and evil multinationals, etc. etc.). This is just so much bunkum.

The irony is that the vanished Ramsey it mourns was destroyed by the plans of the very Rotarians and political interests which now proudly claim credit for the heritage centre. The terraced houses and small shops vanished to make way for the first multi-storey flats, intended not for locals but first as holiday flats for wealthy tourists (just as the price of jetting off to Greece or Spain tumbled and the traditional British seaside trade vanished), and then for retiring Brits who might like to escape from the dreary, overtaxed UK (but who quickly discovered that they could retire to sunny Spain for far less). The small shops vanished because government chose, instead of tax breaks or grants for refurbishment to local retailers, to give development grants and tax holidays to the offshore finance firms who are now ‘regrouping’ in other offshore locations when such cash incentives are gone and higher standards of financial supervision are being introduced.

It also has to be said that racism is a subtle undertone throughout the heritage industry. This is a ‘history’ favoured by dispossessed elderly white people because it turns on photographs of houses, streets and businesses in which no black faces are seen. It edits out Empire (except as a source of fortunes for enterprising white people or the cheap goods from the semi-slave conditions in the Empire country farms and factories they were enabled to run). It quietly misdirects the blame for the disappearance of such a mythical community onto the aggressive tactics of ‘foreign business interests’.

Most ironically, in modern Ramsey such elderly locals are not even cared for by their own families, but by carers from other countries. Because in reality the community and family values such exhibitions claim to celebrate and encourage do not exist now, any more than they did in the times of the sepia tinted photographs, and the conservative business and political interests which dismantle our current community while underwriting this myth factory must know that.

Turning a crisis into a cash cow

This (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/jeremy-clarkson-loses-fight-over-langness-1-4490271 ) was sad news.

Stripped of legalese, what it means is that the daughter of the only Manxman ever to win a Victoria Cross cannot prevent rubbernecking ‘nature lovers’ pressing their noses up against her windows under the pretext of observing local wildlife. This is really a bad joke, considering such peeping toms are more of a freak of nature than any known wildlife, and get way more public subsidy than the endangered species that dwell in Sites of Specific Scientific Interest around Langness. Bit of a mystery how these freaks breed in the first place really, given that most seem to be of indeterminable gender or age (though all are startlingly bearded and/or otherwise hirsute) and with drab plumage which biologists would agree should repel rather than attract a mate.

As I have mentioned before, I once worked down the road from the cottages, and two workmates were sons of the last lighthouse-keeper, so I know the inside of the cottages, the footpaths and the Bennies (as we nicknamed them) who troll there quite well. So, I have no doubt that (a) there is no need for walkers to go so close to the window (b) the action of the Bennies is deliberately intrusive (c) many are so trapped in a deluded little bubble that they are mentally incapable of understanding that they have duties or that others have rights (in fact there are valid arguments as to why they should not be allowed in a public place without competent adult supervision) but (d) that any court or legal proceeding staffed by objective, capable professionals would be able to find a way through this which allowed decently minded nature lovers to wander around enjoying themselves without the Clarksons having to sit at home with drawn curtains all day. Sadly, the Manx legal system is the last refuge (outside politics and the civil service) of rich, self-serving thickos who would otherwise be begging in the streets, so common sense or justice were never options open to the Clarksons.

Which leaves them with a dilemma – what to do next?

If I was them I would consider turning the tables on the Bennies.

The thing is, when I first encountered examples of this species in the early 1980’s, it struck me I had not seen any offshoot of Homo Sapiens so odd since nursing patients stricken with GPI (General Paralysis of the Insane) in Devon back in the last decade of the Victorian asylums.

GPI was not, strictly speaking, a medical analysis. It was a polite term for the feeble-minded offspring of Plymouth prostitutes born in the days when that city was still a major military port, syphilis was rife and penicillin not widely available. As the poor creatures were inevitably institutionalized once diagnosed the last of them were dying out even as I worked there. Granted, rumour had it that 10p and a Mars bar still bought patients the favours their mothers once sold for slightly more, but in reality once confined to asylums for life they could not have children, and as anti-biotics and the downfall of Empire ended both the oldest profession and its side-effects outside asylum walls GPI ended too.

When you see horror films featuring old school mental hospitals, the wild-eyed stereotype of the patient in the straitjacket is the nearest you will see to the GPI sufferer. Needless to say, it has not been seen in a real mental hospital in decades. In the early 1990’s, while at college, I did a few night shifts at the last ‘old style’ Yorkshire asylum. Staff close to retirement vaguely recalled the name GPI, but no-one younger had seen a living example, which makes the Benny even more of an Object of Interest.

Who can account for it? More importantly, how much cash would you part with to see one?

So, instead of being trapped at home by slack-jawed yokels, why not turn Benny-watching into a business opportunity? If wealthy Brit tourists will pay a fortune to look at lions and tigers in Africa, they would surely shell out for a weekend break watching equally exotic wildlife closer to home? It would be far cheaper, far funnier and less dangerous. While getting the wrong side of a lion gets you half-eaten, the worst a Benny can do is drool on your sleeve – and if the glass between the two parties is thick enough, it need not even come to that.

Forget the heritage-themed loser scripts on which the Manx tourist industry has bet our future. Forget scraping the barrel to try and find even one viable example of Manx life in past times which would interest more than half a dozen anoraks on limited incomes.

We have a real life freak show to sell the world, the Clarksons may own the theatre and they should clean up, if only to get compensation for the injustice and blinkered attitudes they have to put up with from the Manx government.

An island nation of unemployed telemarketers

According to http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/publicviewssough1.xml our Minister for Child Abuse and his cohorts have announced another public pseudo-consultation, this time on dumbing down kids for the workplace.
What an awful idea.
While, admittedly, the very idea of the Welfare State reached us almost by osmosis when the adjacent isle developed it, there used to be the idea that even a state education should invite children to be all they could be, not what vile, venal employers who cannot even compete in the UK market want them to be.
My parents were never so proud as the day, when I was about ten, Mr Fretwell, my Oxbridge educated form teacher, urged them in his cut glass accent to make me aim high, maybe Oxford or Cambridge, maybe the Classics. This was, to use Blair’s phraseology, a “bog standard junior school”, and ironically enough it was Cherie Blair’s maternal grandfather who, only a year later, encouraged my Dad to similarly aim high, stop throwing away the musical talent his parents had invested in so heavily, and get himself a university degree so that he could nurture that talent in other council house kids.
This was 40 years ago and Mr Fretwell may be long gone, but are there no teachers today who still think like that? Are they all too terrified by an educational industry which seems to chew up young talent and defecate prematurely aged mediocrity to …. well, do their job?
The thought that Manx children should have standards of education (already almost non-existent for too many) further lowered to raise new generations of call centre dullards is, frankly, horrific. The irony is, the call centres and other techno-sweatshops in countries which undercut our costs and laugh at our pitiful service standards are staffed by graduates who already have all-round educations our children can only dream of. As I saw only last week, we struggle to achieve basic standards of English, while graduate employees of our clients for whom English is a third or fourth language send back our sloppily written professional documents for rewriting with spelling and grammatical errors highlighted.
It would be funny if it were not so tragic. Can the nation which once, within a period of five years, produced both Randolph Quirk and Frank Kermode really be reduced to this?
The main reason those young Manx people who haven’t had all self-worth kicked out of them at school in the first place must “engage in lifelong learning” is that they learnt so little at school either. And the main reason most of them won’t even be able to benefit from lifetime learning (at least through on-island sources) is that the Education Department has dropped all the adult evening classes where we used to be able to do that. All that remains are a few second-rate flower-arrangers and new-agey nonsense, with the ‘serious’ emphasis on Micky Mouse vocational retraining courses to meet the requirements of employers who can thus pretend to be offering ‘professional development’ while retaining dumb, compliant employees who cannot afford to leave.
Were an eleven year old Randolph Quirk or Frank Kermode to be going through our current school system, what would be the highlight of their curriculum? Probably Business Studies, IT, and Marketing, I suspect, especially if, like Quirk and Kermode, they were children from modestly off families with no social connections.
If we throw away all hope for our children like this we sentence ourselves to become an island nation of unemployed telemarketers within a generation.

Of bigotry, class struggle and counter-insurgency

Here’s a tale of two shops which explores social attitudes in the Isle of Man, and also gives evidence that even the dispossessed can hit back from time to time.


Tale 1 – a customer in one of the island’s most decrepit charity shops approaches the counter with some items, none priced above 50p. In an obvious foreign accent she asks the bored pearl and twin-set volunteer cashier to wait a moment while she checks she has enough change to pay. The cashier ignores her to carry on conversing with another chinless wonder, punches in the numbers and rings up the total. The customer, having now sorted her change, finds she’s about 10p short.
BP&TS snaps “Well, you’ll have to put something back then”, folds her arms and sticks her nose in the air for all the world as if the innocent customer had loudly farted. The customer scans through all her potential purchases, rejects a 30p child’s T-shirt, places it carefully back on the rack, pays for the rest and puts the extra 20p in the charity tin anyway. All this while both damish dullards watch her as if to check no major shoplifting was going on.
I’m tempted to name the shop but I won’t. Suffice to say that as the charity has a royal patron it attracts the island’s most vacuous social climbers, none of whom have held down paid employment or would know enough about retail to cover the back of a matchbox. This might explain why (a) their shops are too untidy and poorly stocked to attract even the most desperate council estate pensioner and (b) the ‘charity balls’ where their supporters pat each other’s backs make no serious cash.

Tale 2 – five minutes before closing time today in one of the island’s most customer-friendly businesses, and the tannoy announces the store is closing so please make your way to the exit. This place is famously open seven days a week, every day of the year except Christmas Day, and if the staff don’t have the very thing you want they’ll not only get it but ring you to say it’s in and, if you can’t collect, have someone drop it round when it suits you. Me and Her Indoors are at the counter, paying off just such a special order.
An Afrikaner, dressed in the kind of over-priced tat no self-respecting benefit-fraudster would be seen dead in, decides to inform its equally hideous rugrat and spouse that this is a major inconvenience and it really can’t understand why a store would close at the very time on the very day when customers like it choose to visit.
After announcing this at foghorn volume it reaches for the door handle. At the same second the index finger of the shop manager’s hand slides under the counter. Mysteriously, the shop door will not open and so the Afrikaner looks increasingly vexed.
“Don’t worry, Madam, my colleague will be along to let you out just as soon as he is free”, calls the shop manager, soothingly.
‘MC’, hidden safely from sight in an office behind the counter, raises an eyebrow to us, carries on reading his paper and refills his mug with coffee. After about another minute, as we at the counter turn our back to the irate woman in a struggle to hold back our giggles, he saunters out with a large key, with which he pretends to open the door as the manager’s finger releases the security button.
“Thank you for waiting, Madam, do please come and see us again at a more convenient time” calls ‘MC’ to the three vanishing atrocities. As the door clicks shut all of us explode with suppressed laughter.
For obvious reasons I would not identify the store. Just thank the staff for proving to downtrodden decent folk that, even on the Isle of Man, from time to time we can always cut the great and the good who misrule this place down to size.

Plane stupidity

Sometimes the combination of lies, deception and pig-ignorance that passes for Manx government activity is so blatant you wonder why people fall for it.
Take an article which you will be reading in the Manx press next week, though if you can’t wait you can read most of what it will say now at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/cso/initiativeishelp.xml .
It will begin by trying to tell you that:

“The Small Countries Financial Management Centre is set to welcome representatives from 29 different nations on Sunday (July 11, 2010) for the start of its second annual international capacity-building programme.
The Centre, located at the Isle of Man International Business School, aims to build on the success of the inaugural event in 2009 which helped small countries from around the world to respond to the global economic downturn. The Small Countries Financial Management Programme is a major initiative developed through a partnership between the Isle of Man Government, the World Bank, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Small States Network for Economic Development, and the University of Oxford.”

…and so it potters on, and on, and on… with ‘comments’ from one muppet at the World Bank, another halfwit from the misleadingly entitled Isle of Man International Business School, and so on ad sodding nauseum.
Oh, I can’t even be bothered to rip this tosh apart bit by bit!
So I’ll just cut to the chase.
The Oxford University Said Business School is so named because the main benefactor is Wafic Said. Just Google ‘Al Yamamah’, remember a time not long ago when the UK’s Labour Government blocked all attempts to investigate just how British Aerospace gained so many lucrative Saudi arms contracts, and then wonder if, say, a dead slug with a history of hebephrenic schizophrenia could do a worse job of ‘advising’ the Manx government on improving our international image than any of the overpaid consultants currently failing to do so.

Woe, woe, woe, woe....Portaloo

The Deluded Herd were trying convene another Homage to Nuremburg this morning. This time they used their special privileges to ‘do a Glastonbury’ down at the godawful Bay Festival (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=45882 for more).
Under normal circumstances they wouldn’t need a tent. A festival Portaloo would have done the job nicely and had just the hot, sweaty atmosphere evangelicals seem to like.
But was there more to this than meets the eye?
Last year’s original Bay Festival set new local precedents for the over-pricing of tickets to see sad burn-outs, inconveniencing of locals and, in return, mass disinterest. It was no surprise that the organisers irritated Peel residents and local politicians so much that nobody wanted them back –ever – or that the commercial set-up behind it eventually went bankrupt.
How or why our national misgovernors ever fell for the whole charade all over again and lent an even bigger venue in the capital - Nobles Park - to the ‘new’ festival management we’ll never know. It certainly couldn’t have been a brown envelope job, as most island retailers are having nothing to do with a ‘business’ which probably still hasn’t paid last year’s bills, never mind wanting a credit line for this year.
The ticket prices are just as outrageous – with an average family needing to spend in the region of £100 to see the Sunday afternoon X Factor runners up meet Britain’s Got Talent runners up extravaganza which features the only artists anyone under 40 has heard of. So how handy that godbothers, presumably, could stroll in free on Sunday morning then ‘forget’ to go home again, and I’m sure nobody from the churches would have thought of that – them being such paragons of virtue and all.
Or it might be even simpler than that.
This year’s festival has been played up like nothing is wrong (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Bay-Festival-fever-hits-as.6369304.jp ), though that’s probably more to do with the advertising clout of the ‘sponsors’, but it’s noticeable that yesterday what should have been a crowd-filler (the Diversity show) eventually offered free entry to kids with every adult ticket in order to make the place look even half-full. And this ‘looking full’ is the key because (as the unsuccessful organiser of a previous festival once told me) the money is in the webcams, not punters on the ground.
Maybe the simple truth is that even the Sunday afternoon show isn’t shifting units, so the organisers are happy to have a few hundred godbotherers waving their hands about and looking blissed on camera – kind of like crowd extras in a Hollywood blockbuster who you don’t even have to pay, and who don’t even need to act because they’re naturally enthusiastic about total rubbish anyway.
Yup, reckon that’ll be it. Though that won’t be the way either godbotherers, tourist department or festival organisers will spin it in coming weeks.

Offshore sauce with that?

There’s a piece on Spiked by Rob Lyons about what you might call the reblanding of tomato ketchup that, in turn, led me to an interesting idea.
Lyons (see http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/earticle/8898/ ) notes how governmental pressure has led Heinz to ‘voluntarily’ reduce the salt content in all versions of the famous sauce, rather than just offer a reduced salt/sugar alternative. It’s only the latest ‘voluntary’ move by the retail industry, and as Lyons sums up nicely:
“Still, there’s something entirely appropriate about the way that our political leaders are trying to save us from ourselves. Because the food we’re being forced to eat is, like them, increasingly bland.”
Tucked away in the piece is a hilarious quote from another Spiked piece, where Mark Sparrow says:
“What was once the nation’s favourite biscuit has morphed into a rather pathetic, pale imitation of itself. The Digestive that sustained, nourished and comforted a generation through two world wars and played its part in keeping the home fires burning is no more. The callous tick of a ballpoint pen of some joyless Whitehall functionary has managed to finish off the biscuit that even Hitler failed to crush.”
Sparrow was fulminating furiously on the wrecking of another comfort food staple by the health and safety Gestapo, and you can read the original at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/6095/ .
The bit that really struck home for me was where Sparrow says:
"Actually, the truth is that these voluntary guidelines are anything but voluntary. The government’s standard practice in these situations is to introduce guidelines and then back it up with an ugly threat of legislation if the food/tobacco/alcohol (delete as appropriate) industry does not kowtow. It’s government by stealth, intimidation, coercion and bullying and does away with the need for all that tedious legislation and accountability."
Now, where have we seen that recently over here. Well at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dha/alcoholcodeofpra.xml for a start.
By the way, an interesting joke here. A couple of years ago the key participants in this also organised a Fair Trade wine testing to which some of the island’s senior clergy and government ministers were invited, and which is rumoured to have ended with the police van giving night cover for the south of the island being commandeered to take guests home.
But what really got my attention was Sparrow’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that:
"Perhaps the answer to all this nonsense is to take the production of all tasty and traditional foodstuffs that may offend the tofu brigade to an offshore location."
Because funnily enough, Mick Jagger has fired up a Manx debate with something on the same lines this week. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/celebritynews/7743788/Sir-Mick-Jagger-Rolling-Stone-calls-for-marijuana-to-be-legalised-on-Isle-of-Man.html for an example, and http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Jagger-calls-for-Isle-of.6308102.jp for a local reaction which contradicts attempts by our drug and alcohol ‘therapy’ racketeers to give ‘Manx opinion’ in right wing rags (numerous attempts, for example, by someone who forgot to say she’s the Manx employee of a notorious pro-life cult – how sad, how pointless, try getting a job).
Maybe there’s something in this offshore comfort food lark. Centuries back we had ‘the running trade’ (smuggling), because UK drinkers didn’t want to pay outrageous taxes on European spirits, then the TT developed because the UK wouldn’t allow racing on public roads, as they had in Europe. Then we had offshore finance because, let’s face it, nobody likes paying more tax than they really have to.
All are, to fundamentalist morality, ‘bad things’, and to the rest of us just getting on and making the most of it without puritanical prats interfering.
Or think of it in business terms. There’s a recession, and in recessions people turn to things that remind them of childhood. Now, comfort foods are at one end of the scale, while at the other is religious fundamentalism, abandoning public services in favour of charities run by joyless preachers, and other stuff too horrible to think about.
Maybe a few Manx factories making and exporting ‘proper’ biscuits, cakes, full strength baked beans and other pleasures to the world (in response to miserable legislators in other countries who’ve, effectively, banned them) would be a steady earner. If nothing else, it couldn’t get Obama and other hypocrites on our back the way they are over ‘offshore finance’.
Which, of course, the politicians who criticise us loudest never, ever use to discreetly fund their expensive election campaigns or the ‘educational trusts’ which fund their retirement.

More government mugs on drugs

Ah well, even as the UK and Manx governments introduce a pointless ban on one ‘legal high’, the market has moved on (see, for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/18/drug-replace-ban-mephedrone).
For the benefit of public sector drones, I think you’ll find that’s called ‘market research’. Businesses in the real world do it all the time. What’s known in marketing as ‘SWOT analysis’ (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). Basic FE college stuff for business studies kiddies, but harder than rocket science, apparently, for bumbling public sector and ‘third sector’ parasites who live off the taxes of others.
There’s a really, really simple point here which the clueless anti-drug industry is missing. Drug dealers weren’t flogging legal highs, innovative and quite legal small businesses were.
The folk behind such initiatives are well used to thinking on their feet, for example to avoid being overtaxed or burdened with long term liabilities. They spot new trends and jump on while they’re rising, they jump off well before flat-footed government employees create obstacles or the market in last year’s novelty item collapses. These are not thugs sleeping with a sawn-off beside the bed to see off competitors; they’re embryonic Richard Bransons.
Which makes it all the funnier to see our local drug czars continuing to pimp the fundie product of Christofascist ‘family values’ cults (see
http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/freedrugandalcoh.xml) under the pretence of ‘educating parents’.
Can I just make another simple observation on this?
In my entire experience of life - in numerous UK inner cities - I have never heard of a drug dealer brazen enough to claim his product offered life after death. And I have never heard of a junkie dumb enough to believe it.
Evangelical Christianity? Now THAT is a drug industry that needs some serious investigation if civil servants and small town politicians need a point to their lives. A scam run by the totally unscrupulous, patronised by the totally clueless.
And while we’re looking at ‘government mugs on drugs’, try
http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2010/04/absolute-non-surprise-of-week.html for some views from the UK libertarian community.
Even wilder is http://www.cnbc.com/id/36267220/ , where I saw something I wouldn’t believe possible. A Texan Republican talking sense about drug issues.

Of charity, financiers and witch-doctors

Some readers may know an old joke summarising the readership of various UK newspapers. It’s the one which starts off saying the Times is read by those who run the country and the Financial Times by those who own the country, going through Guardian readers (think they should run it) Telegraph (used to run it), Daily Mail (wives of those who used to run it), Morning Star (think it should be run from another country) and ending with Sun readers who don’t care who runs the country as long as she has big knockers.
In the Isle of Man the Times and FT readers would be finance and private sector workers, and the Mail and Telegraph readers would be the voluntary sector. As for those who actually run the place – sadly I’m not sure they can read at all.
I mention this in case it helps explain the huge gap between the way doddering voluntary sector blunderers and finance sector doers understand reality in general, and a specific frustrating experience I had this week.
Without going into detail, a while ago I agreed to stop pointing out on this blog the worst mistakes of over-sensitive civil servants and charity workers if they would start talking to proper civic groups, not just their church buddies. Then this week another Manx charity decided to seek new helpers and committee members exclusively via churches, and to emphasise this by having the Anglican bishop open their new premises.
Unfortunately, the next day I and another atheist were due to meet hard-headed finance sector types who, for the last year, we have been steering away from the usual recipients of corporate charity and towards one which, though badly run (predominantly by evangelical halfwits), is the sole hope for those with one awful Manx problem.
That day, these no-nonsense corporate MDs should have been signing five figure cheques, to be donated anonymously to the charity in question. But they point blank refused.
As a blunt Yorkshireman put it: ‘Why should anyone trust their hard-earned cash to a charity run by bampots who ask a witch-doctor to bless their office?’
Good question. And at some point somebody in a Manx charity really should think about it.

Sparing the faithful's blushes

A surreal sight in a Douglas shop window today has me wondering.
There’s a big sale on in Mackay’s, and at first sight the window behind the huge ‘Sale’ notices is bare.
Not quite. Actually the shop dummies are there, but the dummies themselves are bare. Clever little idea – isn’t it?
And it gets funnier. Because as my missis and daughter noticed first, all the dummies have been turned around so that they modestly look inwards towards the shop floor.
Just another part of the joke, or is there something more to it? Because you see, the shop is next door to a church, St Thomas’s.
No, they couldn’t have, could they?
Well actually they could, and they probably did.
Because this is the church whose tiny but well connected congregation raised so much fuss about having to pay to park in the town’s multi-storey car park – whose entrance lies just to the other side of Mackay’s - that Douglas Town Council eventually dropped all charges for Sunday parking.
And this is the church whose clientele got so snotty about being combined into a single parish with the larger, less snooty All Saints that the current bish has upgraded them again. Now a church with a single figure congregation which used to be pretty much tended by a very junior curate on his day off again has it’s own full blown priest who…..
Well, he has a lot of time on his hands in which to take up any minor matter any of his parishioners cares to blow up into a moral mountain actually.

Who killed Christmas?

I’ve just got hold of Faith In Action’s Christmas leaflet, albeit via wealthy friends.
It’s basically a note with times for all the Ramsey Xmas church services, padded with stuff about loving your neighbour and making a difference in the community – which is quite ironic when you think about it.
The thing is, the Ramsey churches used to combine to put the predecessor to this through all doors. But this year they’ve only leafletted upmarket homes. How odd - or perhaps just revealing!
The disastrous interplay between churches, local government and business is all too evident in Ramsey, and getting worse as recession bites. I expect nothing else in a small town than for the seediest elements to combine.
Masons, Buffs, Rotarians, evangelicals…whatever. Private deals in chapel or lodge turned into public policy after nominal discussion in the council chamber. It’s always been the way in small towns throughout the British Isles, and probably far beyond. Secret scufflings of superstitious village idiots holding the world back. Ho hum.
But I didn’t realise quite how bad it was here until present-hunting with my small daughter in the main street yesterday. No secret that Ramsey commerce is all but dead, though not because of Tesco or online retailing.
The problem is revealed in the way the empty shop windows are decorated in a vain attempt to hide the decay. Some bright spark handed them over to the evangelical lunatic fringe, who mounted rival nativity scenes/advertising for their Xmas antics. Even in the half-alive shops there are adverts for obscenities like Christmas on the Hill at St. John’s instead of posters for community events. Rather than a friendly, small town celebration of humanity at a traditional time of good cheer, the effect is closer to Kristalnacht.
You see what happened? In their rush to claim a tradition drawn from many streams for Christofascism, the deluded herd have achieved what neither the Puritans nor the Taliban could.
They’ve killed Christmas.

Compulsory reading

Gary Otton, my favourite secularist muckraker, has just posted his latest piece at http://www.scottishmediamonitor.com/features2.cfm?ID=42 , and shaft me sideways he’s on form!
Scottish Media Monitor first appeared in January 1996 in Gay Scotland, sparked by sickeningly inadequate Scottish press coverage of the violent murder of 35-year-old Michael Doran in Queens Park, Glasgow in the summer of 1995. Since then Gary has held the ‘proper’ Scots media and politicians to account with passion and humour.
Sexual Fascism, his subsequent book on Scotland’s Section 28, is compulsory reading for anyone who wants to know how a combination of slack, bigoted reporting and Christian fundies held back the development of a small Celtic nation for way too long. If this island is ever to crawl out of the primeval Christian swamp it’s been in for as long as I can remember you’d better hope a few copies of it start circulating here.
This month Gary’s target is Christian business (or as churches laughingly term it, charity), which in Scotland is becoming depressingly usual. He points the finger, for example at a fundie church which has managed to avoid £10, 000 in business rates in the last three years, and the educational hijacking pulled off between Stagecoach (the bus company owned by Scotland’s best known Christian Neanderthal) and Oasis (still substantially controlled by a TV vicar so far up New Labour’s backside even Rentokil couldn’t shift him). It will surprise nobody to know this means a group of schools underwritten by public money where homophobia and other evils run rampant.
I always recommend Gary’s work to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. But in particular it’s a million watt flashing DANGER sign for the situation developing here, courtesy of the Sally Ann, Broadway Bumpkins and (let’s never forget) Port St Mary’s very own Living Hell Church. You can see them daily, crawling into government broom cupboards, picking the public pocket and setting up one bogus ‘charity’ after another.
Recession won’t stop them either. If anything, parasites who prey on misery will use the current situation as an excuse to further their sinister agenda. Read Gary’s work and similarities between the scams of their Scottish chums and those currently being fermented here will be alarmingly obvious.

Think global, screw up local

Apparently it’s Global Entrepreneurship Week next week, so the imposingly titled Isle of Man Business & Innovation Centre is marking it with events next Wednesday and Saturday.
And we should be impressed, because as Kate Lord, who is apparently ‘Incubator Manager, Isle of Man Business and Innovation Centre (IoM BIC)’, is telling us:
"Entrepreneurs carry a vision. They have the energy to develop themselves, the capacity to innovate and to create employment. We need them, their dynamism and their success. IoM BIC is keen to assist aspiring entrepreneurs to progress their ideas with our support on the Isle of Man. Even if all you have is an idea, or just a willingness to get involved in something different, you can get involved."
Now I know this because the DTI put up a press release about it yesterday at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/investiniom/islandsbusinessi.xml.
Incidentally, it went up at 5 PM, just as most islanders were heading home for the weekend. That tells you how plugged in they are to reality.
Something else to note is that:
“IoM BIC’s free support helps pre-start ups with potentially high growth business ideas; often these are technology, e-commerce or innovation based.”
So try clicking on the IomBIC website at the bottom of the press release and see what happens.
Fills you with great confidence, doesn’t it?
Now that was a joke unintentionally cracked by the Manx Government.
For a much funnier joke intentionally cracked about the Manx Government, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQXF15VZV7I&feature=player_embedded.