Lost in (cyber)space

As someone who has to use the thing daily, I take particular interest in the ‘improved’ new Manx government website.

Needless to say, ‘improved’ is not an accurate statement of affairs. Most of the pages professionals need to work with government have been moved around, not linked handily enough together to allow you to carry out necessary tasks smoothly or just taken down completely in some cases. Combined with a few major crashes of the office computer system which wiped out all our useful links it has been an …..interesting (!) experience for a week or two now just trying to get the basics done, get out, and go home.

But one vanishing link is worthy of comment here, and might even be indicative of a governmental rethink (though I doubt it).

There used to be a front page link to a page listing contacts for local religious groups – church postal and website addresses, phone numbers for clergy and that sort of thing. It also, more usefully, gave contacts for the obscurer Christian sects and non-Christian faiths. I say useful, firstly because it proved they exist (contrary to the ‘expert’ advice given to government less than a decade ago by a high-ranking Anglican) and more generally if, say, somebody Muslim or Jewish had been taken ill or died and you needed immediate advice on what to do next.

As far as I can gather, the page first appeared courtesy of the Tourist Department as a way to help tourists find the more obscure churches involved in the annual Flower Festival, and for religiously minded visitors to find a place of Sunday worship. This was in an era when links between Manx church and state were so strong that some worshippers were effectively getting a government salary to practice their faith. In recent years, that generation have retired and it  was also noticeable that the traditional churches took up less and less of the listings and new cults or non-Christian religions were becoming the majority.

I (luckily) knew the old government website so well that I was able to restore the new equivalents of all the vital professional links I use within a day, but after searching extensively I am 100% sure there is no longer any list of religious contacts. As I know for a fact it was the only source used by certain government departments to find a suitable cross-section of religious leaders to advise on ethical issues, it will be worth challenging future government pronouncements that they have consulted faith communities on their policies and met with no objections.

But did the page vanish (a) because churches close to government cannot cope with evidence of their minority status, even when only measured against other faiths (b) completely by accident and rank civil service incompetence or (c) because some government bean-counter worked out that nobody goes to church any more?

Now THAT might be worth knowing. Unlike most of the endless, consistently pointless and fact free ‘media communications’ from government.

Wherever two or more are gathered..........

As a former local journo, I may have the advantage of knowing how far - in measurable fact - the news values of contemporary pseudo-local newspapers owned by large media corporations drift from those taught on NCTJ courses. But any reasonably detached and objective person can giggle hysterically at the polyfilla used to fill all the cracks where the stories are supposed to go.

So it was that yesterday I was sniggering at some of the district news items with another atheist, particularly the prominent coverage of a horticultural show in a Ramsey church. 

“Why”, we cried out in collective disbelief,  “is it news that a church was full of vegetables?”

After further consideration we have the answer.

The key word there is ‘”full”. Be it vegetable, animal or mineral – in 2013 any more than two collected in a Ramsey church would be unusual enough to merit a picture.

Half-baked

For all the guff put out by the Department of Economic Development’s PR merchants, sometimes a genuine picture of Manx understanding of the business world emerges.

For example when you read at

http://www.isleofman.com/news/details/57803/minister-blasts-tesco-for-not-supporting-manx-food that ‘The environment, food and agriculture minister has blasted the store Tesco for only supporting Manx food, "when they can make money out of it".’

But isn’t the basic idea of a business to make money? If a business does not make a profit from goods supplied to carry out the business, how long can it stay in business?

Unlike the Manx government, Tesco cannot obtain their funds from money the public has no choice but to stump up. Also unlike the Manx government, Tesco cannot pay farmers not to grow stuff, or businesses to produce stuff that nobody wants or can afford.

So what next?

Well, I guess that will be the inevitable sneering and finger-pointing from middle-income public sector workers (with jobs for life, however inefficient  they are at doing them) at the unemployed and low paid who buy the food they can afford, rather than whatever Sunday supplement foodie airheads say is healthy or right-on this week.

Because, yes, there’s a serious point (and serious political decisions) to be made about sustainable food production, but it certainly is not made here, and Manx politicians who are busily blaming the dispossessed for failing to stand on their own feet (when those politicians were the ones who whipped away the rug in the first place) show no inclination towards solving real problems, rather than whipping up fantasy ones to complain about.

Those real problems are (1) how do we ensure that what is rapidly becoming a Manx underclass (too young or old to work or semi-unemployable if they are of reasonable working age) can be healthily fed in the long term (as opposed to eating pure stodge now) and (2) how do we ensure a locally produced food supply which will get us through in the unlikely but still possible case that all outside supplies fail? 

Neither are being seriously addressed, and even if the Manx government ever consider question 2 seriously I would take bets they dare not consider the more important first question.

Meanwhile (and until they are ready to do the same) maybe they could have the decency to stop knocking efficient businesses for doing what it says on the tin.

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.

Apologies

Those reading the previous item will think "Wasn't that posted a while ago and now re-jigged?
The short answer is "Yes."
I've been having problems posting for a week or two. The formatting only worked as a sort of extended paragraph that doesn't pick up links and won't allow you to write in anything resembling plain English.
After asking around I find that Google, who run Blogspot - this blogging platform - have been changing settings in an attempt to get punters to upgrade to newer, costlier products which (frankly) are of no use to simple souls like me.
Found a cheap fix, so back to business for now, with  apologies and some personal regrets for not being able to post funny stuff which was briefly interesting but would no longer be relevant.
I'm now looking at moving to another blogging platform in case the problems continue. More on that if or when it happens.

OK, OK, I'm back

I learnt recently that Positive Action Group have calculated that the Manx Government wastes (sorry ‘devotes’) between 60-90 minutes per year on formal prayers – and that’s not even including the bogus religious ceremony on Tynwald Day itself.
 Hmm!
It strikes me that according to your personal belief (or lack of it) this finding could lead to one of three conclusions.
Either….. Nobody’s there, so politicians should stop mucking about and get on with what we pay them to do.
 Or……… Somebody’s there, but doesn’t think it’s her/his job to sort out the mess Tynwald made, so politicians should stop mucking about and get on with what we pay them to do.
 Or….. Somebody’s there, takes pity on us poor Manx citizens and has been intervening to lessen the damage caused by government.
If that is the case, do you even dare imagine how bad things would be without divine intervention if we had to live with the full extent of political bungling?

Shameless plug for The Pink Humanist

I’ve been somewhat remiss in pointing you all towards the June issue of The Pink Humanist, probably because I’m a guest contributor. I am a good friend of the TPH crew, so was happy to give them some on-the-spot reportage on ‘the Ramsey lesbians and the landlord from hell’.

This was not so much to stir up more trouble as to set the record straight. The Isle of Man may be a lot of quirky things, but is no longer the centre of the flat earth world, and Ramsey folk – by and large – are OK. In fact, if we could just fill up a leaky fishing vessel with the town’s evangelical preachers, a few of the crankier Commissioners and maybe the management of the worst finance sector firms, then set it off into the Irish Sea with the rudder set for hell most of our troubles would be over.

I was also glad to do it for other reasons. One is, simply, that TPH runs articles on humanism and current affairs that no other publication can match, and just having my name as a contributor alongside Peter Tatchell, the incredibly brave and intelligent Nigerian campaigner Leo Igwe and other such figures is a boost to my ego.

Take a look and see what I mean. Astonishingly good stuff – every issue a groundbreaker.