Can the squalid disgrace of Iraq get any worse?

It has been announced today that Iraq, as if it hadn't suffered enough, is in the grip of a major cholera outbreak, 4,000 people now in the grip of it in Iraq's northern provinces. In the provinces of Kirkuk and Sulimaniyah so far eight people have died but with that number of cases so far among already under nourished people the death count will undoubtedly climb.

The cause is starkly clear. The water pipes, blown up during the bombing of northern Iraq have not yet, despite four years having elapsed, yet been fully repaired and it appears raw sewage has mixed in with the drinking water.



No doubt the United States and its wretched President will put the responsibility on the Iraqi government which it so enthused over and now distrusts but there have been warnings from the World Health Organisation almost since the invasion took place that the United States and Britain were not doing enough under the Geneva Convention to restore essential services after the illegal invasion - I refuse to call it a war. Britain, belatedly, did something around Basra at the expense of its peacekeeping role but the U.S. it seems has done precious little in the north of the country..or certainly not enough.

As this squalid little man in the White House staggers towards the termination of what is possibly the worst Presidency in the history of the United States, his approval ratings sink below the waves, currently at about 30%. I wonder how he sleeps at night, though I'm sure he does! He is like the proverbial barber's cat - all wind and water! Not only has he initiated the most infamous aggression in American history killing thousands of innocent men women and children but the incompetence of his administration and the lack of post invasion planning has meant that the country has become a savage tribal battleground, almost ungovernable, and its people continue to die from terrorism or simple neglect as is tragically the case with cholera.



Its not as if he can claim magnificent successes at home to compensate for his appalling handling of foreign affairs. He returned from New Orleans this week with jeers and abuse ringing in his ears for the failure of federal authorities to respond quickly enough to what was possibly the greatest natural disaster in American history, but this latter day Nero fiddled while New Orleans flooded. 43,000 city residents are still living in trailers two years after the disaster. The city stll looks like an abandoned wasteland and there appears to be a complete lack of planning between federal and local officials as to the best way forward.

America has another 16 months or so to tolerate this 'dead duck'...Lame' would be too high a compliment...but I feel genuinely sorry for the next incumbent of the White House, be it Democrat or Republican, for he (or possibly she this time?) has a massive job to do. Not simply to do the practical things like extricate America from a mire of its own making in Iraq, and restore diplomacy in place of all the stupid sabre rattling Bush has been doing in the direction of Iran..who now clearly treat him as a joke and ignore him ... but to restore America's image in the eyes of the rest of the world as a nation to be looked up to and respected...as it used to be and I'm certain will be again.

...But its going to be one hell of a task!

An ordained plan or random chance?

Yes indeed, a question which has occupied theologians and philosophers for centuries in the context of the origin of the species. Now would they like to turn their attention to Britain's transport network? Here, in my own city of Birmingham, we have just enjoyed a Bank Holiday weekend when all the happy souls free from the rigours of work want to get out and about for the weekend.

So what happens, two of our most popular railway local railway services are halted because it has been decided that this is the ideal weekend to do work on the tracks. OK fine, so if we want to go shopping in the city we take the bus or the car? Well there are much reduced bus services because the staff all want a holiday too, so its the car..which our political masters do not want us to use because of pollution and climate change etc etc.

Well thats OK though because all roads into the city centre are closed to traffic because of a fallen bridge ...oh and more importantly... a climate change demonstration! Oh well so the city shops, which gain a lot of income on Bank Holiday Monday might as well close then!

So, trainless and busless, we take our cars, clogging up the atmosphere as they do, with our families and kids to some area outside the city for a day out.

Ah, but of course Bank Holidays are an ideal time to repair lanes on all the motorways, so the hundreds of cars are routed down one or two lanes with vehicles heating up, dad getting irritated, mom getting fraught and the kids screaming in the back. Eventually thanks to the careful coordinated planning which has tried to make our Bank Holiday such a pleasure, you reach your destination an hour later and it should have taken and having used twice as much fuel, pumping all those nasty carbon deposits into the atmosphere.

If there is any regional planning at all it seems to be designed to benefit the local authority and the Network Midlands traffic management rather any any coordinated attempt to minimise Bank Holiday disruption for the rest of us. Surely its clear that people are going to want the trains, the buses, the motorways to get out when they are on holiday, yet there seems to be no cognisance of the fact. Why can't roads be repaired at night - as they are in America, for example - when there is little traffic on the road? Because we're British and no one complains.

Lesson to be learned? If you live in Birmingham, forget about going out on Bank Holiday Monday..just curl up with a good video and let the world pass you by. I did!

The banality of the Mission Statement

This is a rather light hearted piece but if there is one thing which marks me out as a crusty, cynical old Brit, it is without doubt the 'Mission Statement'. It seems that every company, enterprise or organisation now has a Mission Statement? Why? Don't they know what they are there to do? I wouldn't mind but these things are so bloody banal.

I was reminded of this topic when reading my local council website which now has a 'mission statement' on its 'Local Elections' page which says of the purpose of its Elections Office, "To ensure all eligible citizens of Birmingham have an equal opportunity to exercise their democratic right to vote" Well, goodness me, we'd never have worked that one out!!

My former employers had a mission statement which used to make me wince every time I read it:- "To produce a product which will totally delight our customers." There is something about the expression 'totally delight' that sounds so sort of twee and camp. One can imagine the late John Inman clasping his hands together in 'Are you being served?' and saying "OOoooooo, Mrs. Slocum, what a total delight you are this morning!"




For those of you as cynical as I and believe that these things are just another example of American marketing, stemming from the evangelical core that seems to drive the United States, and which have somehow found their way to Britain look up the amusing Delbert.com site where you can generate a mission statement for all seasons Here are just a couple:-

"We envision to synergistically administrate competitive methods of empowerment so that we may interactively foster effective resources to exceed customer expectations"

"It is our mission to assertively build value-added meta-services in order that we may seamlessly leverage other's ethical information in order to solve business problems"

LOL Brilliant - just the right amount of terminological and fundamentally meaningless bullshit to look good when framed on the Managing Director's wall.

The thing I hate about mission statements is this inference that the company you work for is on some holy crusade and that you are disciples who have to be constantly reminded of the true path, instead of the truth which is that you are some expendable cypher who is only valuable for as long as you are needed to build your part of the company's profit base. It is a form of brainwashing designed to suck you into the belief that the company you work for is the most important thing in your life.

Great for them. IBM used to be past masters of this 'pull the wool over the eyes routine' where interviewees were weeded out if they didn't have a 'company philosophy'. ie if you thought giving them a fair day's work in exchange for a fair day's pay was enough. They wanted you heart, body and soul.

Easy for me to say, I suppose, now I've retired, but I worked in the Information Technology workplace all my life and never once have I ever allowed myself to be conned by this ploy. Oh sure Ive worked late and all through the night on occasions...but they damn well paid for it - in spades!

Global capitalism and the domino effect

I have long been suspicious of the workings of global capitalism, and I suppose that's because I'm what's called in Britain 'a bit of a lefty'. But now the western world is in the throes of a mini financial crisis and, until you look behind the headlines, and you see whats going on, it is hard to understand cause and effect. And certainly it throws the whole moral concept of global capitalism under the microscope.

Basically it seems the problem began with what is termed the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States. In recent years the U.S. has enjoyed very low interest rates and this has encouraged banks and other financial houses to lend money to people with poor or no credit history. A little foolish you think? Well no not really because the finance houses reasoned that it was expanding their profit base and, should these unfortunates be unable to meet their debts, the financial institutions could simply re-possess the properties and re-sell them. All heart eh?

In more cases than the finance houses now care to admit, they were dishing out what have become known as 'Ninja loans' to people with no jobs and no assets. Amazingly there were an incredible number of 'no-doc' loans where people had no need to prove their financial status - so of course, desperate to get a home, many people lied.

But then interest rates in the United States began to rise quite sharply. The financial institutions, who had provisioned for a certain level of bad debt, suddenly found that their 'generosity' was rebounding on them. Repossessions increased at an alarming rate, the houses couldn't be sold and the US housing market has now collapsed, saddling the financial institutions with billions of dollars worth of bad debts.




So how has this effected the rest of us? Well this is where global capitalism comes into its own. The bad debts within the worlds banks are parceled up into chunks and sold off to other finance houses..in this case not just in America but all over the world. Why on earth would you buy a 'bad debt' let alone millions of dollars worth? Well simply because there is an assumption that the debtor will eventually come good and the higher interest rate for late payment of debts will more than cover the risk of the purchasing bank. For the selling bank it improves the look of the balance sheet if they have taken on too many of these.

Now comes, to me, the incredible and really frightening part. No one, including the major central banks in the worlds capitals really has a clue how much bad debt any individual financial house is currently absorbing. The bad debts are sold on..and on..and on ..as 'collateralised mortgage obligations' and they can be dispersed, collated, bound up..call it what you will into discrete..and discreet..packages of quite incredible complexity.

The capitalist world thrives on debt, paper promises ..and confidence. Much of the confidence has been drained away by the collapse of the American housing market and the insecurity about how solvent each lender actually is in fact. Nobody is sure what is lurking under the paperwork. Some banks have frozen their investment funds because they are no longer sure of their true worth. So individuals and companies have begun putting their money in safe places like government stocks, rather than in fluctuating volatile company shares.

The consequence of this is that billions of dollars have been wiped off the value of companies all across the globe over the last week or so, which apart from the entrepreneur and the professional investor hits the 'little man and woman' in Britain and elsewhere who have never come near buying a share in their lives.

Why? Because these people have invested in pension schemes..and the pension funds themselves rely on a thriving stock market in which they disperse the invested pension funds across a portfolio of companies.

So when those companies hit the skids, all because business confidence has failed those pensioners are facing a worrying future. All because some banks in America saw a chance of a get rich quick scheme by lending money to people who couldn't repay!

And they say there is no better system! Its hard to believe it!!!

Salute to the King!

Tomorrow, August 16th, is the 30th anniversary of the death of one of the most influential figures in the history of popular music - and certainly one of my earliest idols - Elvis Presley.

I just want to mention my personal memories of the 'King' and the effect his music had on me. I had grown up in the early fifties with what passed for pop radio in the UK playing Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, Johnny Ray and the like. All very nice melodic middle of the road pop music which couldn't offend anyone.

Then in 1955, the film 'Blackboard Jungle' opened in the UK and its background track, 'Rock around the Clock' began to make vibes on British radio...there was hardly any TV around in Britain then. The music was raucous..so we thought..and not at all like the stuff my parents had been used to listening to, but they were reassured by the sight of the fat little guy with the kiss curl and the smile who recorded it and who looked so sort of 'nice'. Then the craze for this music really began with the release of the movie 'Rock around the clock' and parents all over Britain started to panic as their little darlings began doing crazy things like bopping in the aisles of cinemas and generally behaving in a very non British manner.

But that was nothing compared to what was around the corner, when HMV records in Britain released the first single to be heard in the UK by a young truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi and called 'Heartbreak Hotel'.

I was only nine at the time and 'Heartbreak Hotel' didn't register on my wavelength then, though the record made no 2 in the UK, and I came to love it in later years..particularly that tinkly Floyd Cramer piano in the background, but the breakthrough came when my neighbour's son across the road, who was 17 said some months later, "Wow, have you heard THIS!!' and played me Elvis Presley's second UK release, 'Hound Dog'.

I had never in my life heard anything so wild, so raucous or so exciting. In the UK, we didn't have black stations and at least in America, even if 'decent' white kids were told not to listen - Buddy Holly was banned by his father from listening to black stations on threat of a butt whipping - at least they were there. So I knew nothing about black R and B and how white artists like Presley were borrowing songs from original 'race music' labels and making them their own.

Presley's music was, therefore, more than a revelation to me and I persuaded my neighbour's son to loan me the 'Hound Dog' record and I took it home to play on our brand new radiogram. My mother, though slightly startled by the sheer animal energy of it, took my new 'taste' in her stride, confident that I would soon tire of it and return to listening to 'music', but when my father, normally a quiet and tolerant man, heard it he nearly went apoplectic and raged that he wouldn't have 'this rubbish' in the house. Well my birthday was coming up and the neighbour's son, who was a good hearted lad, persuaded his parents (who were close friends of my parents) to buy me 'Hound Dog' for my birthday reasoning that my dad was too nice a guy to spurn a gift.

Fortunately he was right, but Dad made me swear I would play it only when he was out or else I would find it turned into a plant pot! So thats what I did and, out of that first, exciting find of a sound that simply blew me away, I started to research Elvis' background and the stuff he had made earlier for Sam Phillips at Sun Records. That led me on to discovering Arthur Crudup, Memphis Slim and other stars of black music until it became an obsession and I began to collect the stuff with my limited pocket money. By now Dad had given up, convinced that his son's musical soul belonged to the Devil!

I was still at primary school then and I remember amazing one of my female teachers by explaining loftily virtually the whole history of black R and B music, still virtually an unknown quantity to most British adults, let alone to a precocious ten year old.

For me Elvis was at his most supreme when at his most wild and raucous. Thus, unlike most of his fans, I could virtually forget 'Its Now or Never', 'Surrender' and 'Wooden Heart' as selling out to a wider audience, just as long as I had the stuff that never made the charts like 'Lawdy Miss Clawdy', 'My Baby left me', 'Money Honey' and the fabulous 'Mystery Train' which I still think is one of the most exciting records ever made...the Elvis Presley who was once described by the folk/ blues writer John Hammond as having 'the greatest white blues voice I ever heard'

And thats what I remember...not the pout or the sideburns that sent the girls crazy. Not the ridiculous gold lame suits for the 'mules with binoculars' at the Las Vegas concerts. Not the sad shambling drug ridden and bloated mess who ended his life prematurely on a bathroom floor...but a young voice when in his 20s, so exciting, so wild, so raucous that it excited every nerve to listen to his music.

Thank you, Elvis, for launching me on a musical journey of learning, excitement and pleasure that has never left me. You will always have a special place in my heart for that!

The danger of emotional journalism

For what is now longer than three months, the British nation has been hooked on the disappearance of four year old Madeleine McCann. Right from the beginning a few warning voices said that the amount of emotional heart-string pulling exercised by the British media was disproportionate when so many children sadly went missing somewhere every day.



But these people were written off as cynics as the emotional groundswell gathered force. She was too good an image to be ignored of course. A pretty, blonde little blue eyed child who represented everything middle class white Britain would want its children to be - cruelly taken from her apartment at dead of night by some abductor while the parents ate dinner nearby. The McCanns have been feted as such brave stoic parents, staying in the resort until 'our Madeleine is returned' while in between flying off to conferences about child abduction in America and other places.

Posters were issued - I had one on my windshield, caught up in this as much as everyone else - asking the whole world 'Have you seen Madeleine?' with the picture of this pretty child accompanying the text. Rumours abounded that she had been sighted in Belgium, Spain, Austria...but nothing ever came of any of the rumours.

Now it seems, the Portuguese police have privately told their journalists - as they are not allowed officially to comment on an investigation - that they believe the little girl died in the McCanns' apartment on May 9th and was never abducted by anybody.






Now if this proves to be the case, and forensic analysis of blood samples found there is currently being done, then the case will, of course, turn full circle and the finger of suspicion will point in another direction altogether. I have no wish to speculate on the outcome of this case except to say that the way it is drifting now, if the abduction theories are all found to be false, there will be a tremendous sense of anger and disillusion among the British population who got wrapped up in all the emotional implications of one missing child, who looked every day for news of her, who took their car stickers abroad with them (I did!) and who looked hopefully on the streets of Madrid, Amsterdam, Berlin...wherever...hoping to be the hero who reunited missing Madeleine with her loving parents.

If the press had dealt with this story proportionately and rationally right from the start much of this emotional over committment would have been avoided. Its good to feel angry about the fate of any child - but to so hook the nation on an emotional sob story has its downside. Now the public comment sections of every national newspaper contain angry remarks like 'Live it up while you can Kate and Gerry - the net is closing in on you'. Well there is no more justification for this pack animal savaging of the McCanns than there was the exorbitant emotional sobs of support for the last few months. There is no proof of their involvement in the child's disappearance and /or murder. That has yet to be resolved. People are so fickle when they get emotionally involved like this and angry when their idealistic images appear to be dashed. Whats worse is the next time a child goes missing - maybe one not as pretty and photogenic as Madeleine McCann - and where grieving parents need all the support they can get, the nation will simply say 'I bet it was the parents all along' before the facts are known and that could be even more unbalanced and unfair.

Are we facing another horrific bovine slaughter?

Britain has been hit with another outbreak of foot and mouth disease, this time currently localised at a farm in Surrey and 60 affected cows have been humanely destroyed.

But if..and one can only hope this doesn't happen..the disease spreads, what is the policy to be? The last time Britain had an outbreak of the disease in 2001, vets slaughtered nearly ten MILLION cattle and the loss to the country was in the region of £8.5 billion in lost trade and owner compensation.

Many agricultural scientists say this policy is ridiculous and the scenes 5 years ago of mass burnings of cattle corpses were truly horrific.



Burning of cattle corpses at a government cremation site in Kilbride, Scotland





Why do we do it when there is the option of bovine inoculation? Because Britain's National Farmers Union, have long resisted the inoculation programme. This is because Britain's farmers receive good compensation for slaughtered animals and because they cannot sell the beef or milk of any cow which has been inoculated against foot and mouth disease.

Britain is almost alone in not inoculating cattle within a certain radius of an infected farm and we have been accused, rightly in my view, of allowing animal cruelty on a mass scale with the hideous slaughter of perfectly healthy animals. Our European partners inoculate in this limited way, why can't we?

Because it appears our farmers are putting economic considerations ahead of any animal welfare ones and that they are quite content to allow thousands of healthy animals in a foot and mouth infected area to be slaughtered needlessly. Surely there is a better way.

A stain on our national reputation

A British Foreign and Commonwealth Office report, published today,claims that the cost of administering our consulates is escalating because of a 'disproportionate use' of consulate time by Britons abroad. Many of them, it is reported, have lost passports but an excessive number are seeking consulate help because they have been arrested by the police or ended up in hospital following outbreaks of violence.

Top of the league table of countries who are most affected by this behaviour is Spain, the traditional sun, sea and sex hang out for the 18-30 Club type British holiday makers abroad.



Coming up hard on the rails though is the Czech Republic where all the trouble happens in one place - Prague. This is the favourite and very cheap venue for British stag and hen parties - you know those pre-nuptial extravaganzas where the boys act like untrained animals and the girls like unrestrained sluts. Plane loads of kids fly out to Prague every weekend these days and the tourist money this brings to the Czech Republic must be offset by the amount of damage they do.




Now the British drink and sex macho holiday industry is looking at a new, cheap n'easy destination for a weekend's booze cruise - Latvia, and in particular Riga the capital. A spokesman for the Riga tourist office was quoted today as saying "Latvia is a very quiet, shy country - the people are very calm. They teach their children, for example, not to speak in a tram as they ride. So to have a bunch of loud-mouthed boys come here and drink, take off their shirts, run around the streets and scream and pee on our monuments, it's not very well-received."

I shake my head in anger and despair when I read this stuff. The British - or at least our youth - have long been top of the unpopularity list in every country in Europe for belligerent, aggressive, drunken behaviour. I am at a loss to understand why so many of Britain's young people - particularly when holidaying in a herd - feel the need to behave so appallingly badly.

It's a terrible shame because, despite the bad reputation, its still a minority. The British are among the world's most widely travelled and millions of Britons go abroad annually and are a credit to their country and a pleasure for their hosts.

I am frankly ashamed to be from the same nation as some of these animals who despoil everywhere they go like some rampaging army. But what do you do about it? Short of changing the culture overnight the obvious answer is harsher punishments to deter others. More often than not, however the host nation does not want the hassle of prosecutions and simply either puts up with the vandalism and drunkenness or, in extreme cases, sends them home. In that case the British authorities are powerless to prosecute them in a British court

When the host nation DOES take action then we, the British taxpayer, ends up paying for the time spent assisting and defending them vis a vis the F.O. report I mentioned at the beginning. We really need an agreement throughout the European Community about acts of drunken violence and vandalism so that reports from a foreign government supported by photographic and other evidence can result in a prosecution in their country of residence.

Until then I will continue to cringe as I read year on year of how British yobs sully the reputation of my country in just about every corner of the world.