Goodbye Mr Tom

I was sorry to read yesterday that Tom Sharpe had died (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/06/tom-sharpe-dies ).

In recent years – have to admit – the old spark had gone but in the 1980’s Sharpe was my favourite when you needed to read something intelligent and funny but not ‘worthy’. In particular, I loved the ‘Wilt’ series for personal reasons.

This is because between 1974 and 1976 I was incarcerated at a Cambridgeshire college, so like the ‘Fenland College’ where Wilt taught ‘Meat 1’ and other unwilling students that for years I racked my brains trying to work out which of my former tutors was writing under the pen-name Tom Sharpe.

Turns out, none of them. There were two such colleges in the county and Sharpe was at the other one. Incidentally though, he did trade stories with some of my tutors and these provided major characters and storylines for the Wilt books, as too obvious connections to his own former workplace might have got him sued… or just lynched.

Another sadly deceased comic writer, the music hack Steven Wells, had a great story about the time NME sent him to interview Sharpe and found he was all he had hoped for and much more. The interview was set for mid-morning, at Sharpe’s home, and on arriving Swells was immediately offered a stiff whiskey to calm his nerves, and then another…..

Things got so out of hand that, on consulting his notes on the train back, Swells could no longer remember if Sharpe had actually said some of the outrageous stuff he’d jotted down or if he’d imagined it. As young Mr Wells was then hanging on to employment by his fingernails (having upset far too many sensitive indie music bods, windbag ‘socialist intellectuals’ and showbiz luvvies) he could not risk more controversy so timidly rang Tom Sharpe to check. Sharpe not only confirmed his comments, but reminded Swells of ones he’d missed and added some truly OTT new ones just for the hell of it. The subsequent story offended everyone Swells could not in his wildest dreams, and as all the offence was caused by Britain’s biggest selling living author nobody lower down the gravy train dared complain.

Great writer, great attitude and, like Swells, he will be sorely missed.

Turned off, tuneless …paid out?

Port St Mary is hardly ‘upmarket’ even by seaside town standards, but amusingly it seems even their residents have some limits.

This http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=65537 was a positive story in a week that has been otherwise a bit ‘so-so’. The Manx Indy’s take on it (not yet online) tries to hint at over–reaction - and Living Hell are, obviously, trying to drum up Christian persecution for all it’s worth - but this would be nonsense.

For the record, a Port St Mary ‘beach mission’ had run amicably enough for almost a century until Living Hell got involved. Since then relations between residents, beachgoers and born-again headbangers have gone rapidly downhill.

No, the truth is a lot simpler. They are too loud, too painful to listen to (even with tongue firmly in cheek) and their message is too bigoted, even for Southern rednecks.

Imagine an over-40s night at some Wetherspoon’s hell-hole (see http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/wetherspoons-to-open-uks-first-human-zoo-2013060470772 for example) and you might be close. The ‘music’ generally consists of repetitive drones, up to 20 minutes in length, punctuated by startling banshee wails and while the song titles vary deliberately (and the pitch accidentally) the words are few and almost interchangeable. This, close observers suggest, is possibly because their core audience commonly suffer short term memory loss, so may just think they are at a Sunday version of whatever day-care they attend the rest of the week.

It is bad enough when the howling of so many distressed souls escapes through the asylum windows each Sunday morning. But imagine that outdoors, on a beach frequented by innocent families, and we are talking serious public health hazard, not to mention the last nail in the coffin for the tourist trade. “Never mind noise abatement, call the MSPCA”, some might cry.

Incidentally, key figures in such antics were spotted with Northern allies at a farewell concert for one of the genuine Ramsey clergy recently. The sight of evangelical panhandlers en masse (as they inevitably are when free food or public money is on offer) was enough to put everyone else off their fairy cakes. It was startling to watch them hovering round the food table, sarnies in both hands and coat pockets overflowing with cake put aside for a later lonely midnight snack while watching God TV (at least that’s what they say they are watching, and if found doing otherwise it must be for ‘research purposes’ into the nature of contemporary sin).

The only question on anyone’s mind was: “if they came 30 miles each way just for a bag of free buns, which government department got the expense claim for the petrol?”

Orwellian antics

Just a brief note to say that the No CCTV campaign is holding a '1984 Action Day' on 8th June. The idea is to hold a number of local actions to highlight both the invasiveness and ineffectivity of CCTV, and to suggest that proper community policing (and I'd add to that proper, functioning communities , not the awful pseudo-variety any number of interfering busybodies with government friends want) is the real answer. In the wake of the awful Woolwich incident, any number of authoritarian nasties are jumping on the bandwagon to revive the 'snoopers charter', so the timing of this action and any discussion it causes could not be more appropriate.
I spoke to these guys a few years back and they stressed to me that they would be happy to forge a partnership with civil libertarians over here, if anyone fancies contacting them to set it up.
Meanwhile, check their blog on the right and http://www.no-cctv.org.uk/action_1984_actionday.asp for more details.

Another day, another Manx drug SNAFU

I see from the government website ( see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/55367/methoxetamine-mexxy-classified-as-a-class-b-illegal-drug) that the island is to extend a temporary ban on various quasi-legal chemical substances and is also – at least in theory – offering advice to those who might like to be surer what they’re taking.

Except, of course, that this is not what is happening

In a nutshell, the tabloid-addled know-nowts up in the Wedding Cake who ‘advise’ on drug policy are trying to pretend their paranoid fantasies have been verified by UK government ‘expertise’. But as anyone who followed the David Nutt affair knows, the UK government does not actually have an expert panel of objective, independent drug advisors.

The chief advisor was sacked for giving evidence based advice rather than being prepared to rubber-stamp baseless nonsense and the principled members of the council resigned in protest. They now offer the objective research the UK government doesn’t want direct to interested members of the public instead (see http://www.drugscience.org.uk/ ) while a ragbag collection of pseudo-independent scientists, professionals and academics produce what reports and findings they’re told, when they’re told, and which fool nobody.

Except, of course, for a class of politicians and civil servants who are even less educated or honest - such as ours.

Meanwhile, a Manx drug advisory service which used to - at least - be guided by information from dependable (if sometimes self-serving) sources in the drug-control cottage industry lost government funding because it did not have enough religious friends there.
‘Advice’ now comes from a clueless consortium which does, and which having absolutely failed to give advice on its core area of inexpertise, ‘alcohol abuse’, now fails to give advice on topics it knows even less about while living off ‘sin taxes’ extracted from the industries which sell such products.

Some days I wonder what would happen if the Manx government sought advice on potential social problems from objective, knowledgeable professionals and tried to put in place coherent and realistic policies to deal with them (if they exist, which is sometimes also debateable). It would be a waste of time, because it has never happened, and will never happen.

Manx government culture just does not work like that, and its policies and ‘solutions’ just do not work. Period.

Home affairs

I don’t usually bother with Manx online petitions as – to be blunt – they’re usually thrown up by racists or other redneck insomniacs intent on keeping themselves in unearned privileges and the rest of us hard at work to subsidise them.

Today I found an exception.

Laura Cull is a young ex-workmate of mine who I’ve watched go from clumsy school-leaver and drummer in a raw but energetic girl band to savvy IT worker and out lesbian. She was one of the first to enter a Manx Civil Partnership and is now finding out the hard way that 'equality' does not extend to housing rights for gay and lesbian couples.

Laura is fighting back with a petition to fully implement our 2010 Equality Act, and not just the parts that our politicians and our employers cannot avoid. You can support her, her partner and many others pondlife with powerful political friends can currently safely ignore with your signature at http://www.gopetition.co.uk/petitions/equality-act-2010-on-the-isle-of-man.html.

Do it now. Make our politicians and legislators do something for somebody other than themselves and their bad business associates.

Ethics Boy

As we all know, Manx klingons like to trade on their insider political status, and the worst are those who leech off Tynwald Day.

So, no surprise that a coalition of the island’s most right wing godbotherers like to hold a 'prayer breakfast' close to the Colonial Clown Show and cut their costs by filching a government guest as the speaker.

Previous offenders have included an Oxford scientist with a sideline in squaring science and creationism, and a general who sent ordinary troops into recent conflicts with duff equipment and no flak jackets but increased the number of military chaplains.

Possibly topping both of these was the UK peer who likes to pose as a mover and shaker on the international aid scene but behind the scenes pushes the ideas of crackpots who, for example, would like to see Israel collapse in order to bring on The Rapture. It beggars belief that a key figure in the House of Lords can one night be a guest at a government reception and days later be addressing friends of the ‘revisionist historian’ (some still prefer the term ‘Holocaust denier’) David Irving. The lecture, I’m told, can still be found on a notorious neo-Nazi website you cannot look at without being blacklisted by the security services of several nations.

This year’s ‘guest of honour’ is a former banker, but also an ordained priest in the Church of England. He is also the author of a book entitled "Serving God? Serving Mammon?”

I’m not sure if the book makes it clear whose servant he eventually is, but his career gives a few clues.

Between 2004 and 2010 he presided over HSBC during possibly the dodgiest period in that bank’s history. A US investigation (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/11/banking-libor-fine-hsbc and

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidhughes/100171357/hsbc-money-laundering-scandal-casts-a-cloud-over-lord-green-the-trade-minister/ for example) later found HSBC managing to somehow not notice money laundering on a massive scale from the Colombian drug trade, or sanctions busting in Iran and other proscribed countries. When the US slapped a then record fine on the bank it emerged that it would actually have been much larger, and that banning the bank from doing any business within the US banking system should also have followed, but that this could not happen because of the risk to international banking and that massive staff cutbacks would follow.

The staff cuts followed anyway, with – for example - major layoffs in the offshore jurisdictions through which much of this cash would have passed and indeed the closure of at least one jurisdiction’s operation entirely - handily enough before further investigations might have revealed much worse goings on. Not that this poster boy for contemporary religious morality suffered as a result.

Unlike thousands of his lower ranking staff, he did not lose his job as a side-effect of the massive fines. Unlike millions of ordinary and innocent workers whose pension schemes were major shareholders his retirement plans would not be dashed when share prices tumbled.

Because by that point he had a new job in the LibCon pact, as Minister for Trade and Industry. Since when that department has cut deals with the largest tax-avoiding corporations, failed to curb the outrageous bonuses paid to senior bank executives (who – not to put too fine a point on it –were pretty rubbish at their job anyway) and nursemaided the UK arms trade towards subtler use of offshore structures to avoid public scrutiny of their deals with some of the world’s ugliest despots.

All I can conclude is that if Jesus is still saving then he’s got his pension tucked away in scams that would make any smack dealer blush.

We're Do-o-o-med!

We’ve had the oddest letter this week, which had me roaring with laughter and Management almost exploding in fury.

It seems Ramsey Baptist Church are going door to door asking if anyone wants them to pray for anything. This is the intellectually challenged clown troupe who wave their hands in the air like they just don’t care every Sunday down at the local primary school because, given sight of a ten pound note, the Education Department have less self-respect than a desperate crack whore.

Well, they could always pray for a collective two figure IQ between their entire congregation, but they shouldn’t expect miracles.

Seriously though. On the one hand, a religious zealot is rapidly dismantling what is left of the welfare state and any sense of collective responsibility or neighbourliness this septic isle ever had. On the other, all kinds of evangelical monsters are crawling out of the primeval swamp, picking off the lonely, the dispossessed, and other victims of this neo-nastiness.

How sick is that?

If I thought Ramsey had local politicians I would write to them, pointing out that such opportunism is on a par with cowboy builders who try to worry you into ‘replacing’ roof tiles then scarper with your cash. But as Captain Mannering (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=65011 ) has just taken charge at Trumpton Town Hall for the fourth successive term I doubt Dad’s Army will be on this case (or any other) within the decade.

So that’s it then. As Private Frazer would say “We’re all doomed”.

Though not as doomed as the Zombie Carpenter’s charmless chums when they knock on our door and Management answers it.