You just can't get the staff!

Now as a former member of the Labour Party I'm as egalitarian as they come but I have always depended on the fact that when people are employed to do ..well..menial tasks they'll get on and do them without demur and this especially applies to work being done for me!.

Unlike the bad old days we are now awash in Employment Law, Health and Safety rules and the like and the former minions who once went about their work keeping our cities clean, delivering furniture etc. without me even being aware of them, now confront me just as I imagine the Citizens of the French Revolution dealt contemptuously with their erstwhile masters the bourgeoisie.

Take the other day. I ordered a wardrobe from a well known Swedish dealer in furniture and was relieved to find that they promised delivery 'up one flight of stairs' as I live in a first floor apartment.

However when the delivery truck arrived complete with about 20 pieces of ready-to-be-assembled wardrobe the situation became slightly fraught. "Where do we stick these then, squire, " asked the huge delivery guy in that tone that says 'I dont really care to be honest and up your ass would suit me fine' - and I do hate the patronising term 'squire' .

"Just up the steps and in through the open door please," said I and he turned decidedly bolshie.

"Well we ain't supposed to do that, squire, its not in our contract of employment. I'll have to talk to my mate and see what he thinks."



I had visions of them driving off and leaving twenty huge pieces of wardrobe on the path.

"Hang on, " I said, "the furniture store promised delivery up one flight of stairs."

It was at this point that he became most smug. "Ah well, you see, we don't work for them. We're just a contracted delivery firm and we've got health and safety rules. We ain't supposed to carry this stuff up stairs. We ain't covered by insurance you see."

At this point I became slightly agitated. "That's dumb,"I said. "Why do the company make promises they're not in a position to keep?"

He shrugged. "Cos all the rest promise the same I expect' he said and went to consult his pal. Fortunately said pal must have been in a good mood because they agreed to carry the stuff upstairs while muttering darkly about 'not their responsibility if it got damaged on the sharp bends'.

I began to wonder why anybody bothers refurnishing their homes when you get a couple of barrack room lawyers, complete with rule book, turn up on your doorstep. A sign of the times.

Similarly, in connection with said wardrobe, I demolished my old one and phoned the local council to come and take it away.

"Is it in one piece?" said the lady on the phone.

"Hardly," I said, "its a wardrobe..and its massive. How was I going to get that out of a flat in one piece?"

"Well how many pieces is it in?" she continued.

"Oh I dunno, about forty. Does it matter?"

"Oh yes," she continued earnestly, " you'll have to bundle it up in some kind of wrapping so it makes six packages."

"Why?" I demanded, mystified. "It's bloody heavy to be wrapping up like a cake."

"Well I'm just trying to be helpful," she snapped, getting a bit shirty now, "if you want it all moved they won't take more than six separate lots. That's the rules."



And that's why I am entering this with a very sore back having spent half yesterday afternoon hauling huge oak doors into bundles. I could have slipped a disc...I haven't but I could have. But who cares about my health and safety?

Nobody it seems as long as the rule book protects our council workforce and our delivery drivers from doing any more work than they have to.......squire!

European domination of tennis confirmed

We have, as I write, reached the semi-finals of the Australian Open Tennis Championships and the semi finalists, in both mens and womens events have produced a situation previously unprecedented in any grand slam. All eight players are European. Three Serbs, one Spaniard, one Frenchman, one Swiss, one Russian and a Slovak. It's quite an amazing landmark in the advance of the European continent as the dominant tennis area of the world but it is merely confirmation of a developing trend.

All world sports go through cycles of domination and tennis is no exception. When I was a small boy the dominant power was Australia with players like Hoad, Rosewall then Laver, Emerson, Hewitt, and in the ladies events, Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong (later Cawley). Then the baton passed to the Americans with Connors, McEnroe and later Sampras, Agassi and many others in the mens championships and the likes of Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova (even if she was imported) and later Lindsey Davenport and the Williams Sisters.

If you look at the tennis horizons in both Australia and the United States, the situation currently looks quite bleak. Of the men only Leyton Hewitt carries the Austalian mens banner with any likelihood of any success and even he will probably never get back to his standard of five or so years ago. There are no Australian women of any real top class quality in sight.

The American decline has been almost as spectacular. With the retirement of Agassi and Sampras, the American mens game is primarily in the hands of Roddick and Blake. Roddick one suspects is a player of tremendous energy and serving power but possesses a lack of real technique which exposes him severely when in the company of the likes of Federer and Nadal. Blake is still young and may get better but having just watched him play Federer, I get the impression that he has no real confidence that he is truly up there with the big boys. Among the women, Lindsey Davenport has retired and the mantle is in the hands of the Williams sisters. Serena looks as if she has lost interest and has other fish to fry, and that is supported by her ever expanding waist line. She has always been big built but now looks positively lumpy and correspondingly sluggish. Her performance against Jankovic, a player who herself has looked out of form, seemed almost lackadaisical, as if her mind was elsewhere.

Venus Williams has come back from the temporary shadow of her sister and now looks the better and fitter player who, on her day, can pull off some marvellous performances and win Championships. But those days are fitful and unpredictable, and one gets the impression that the psychology of both sisters suggests that neither is in it for the long haul. Without them American womens tennis seems in a parlous state.

Meanwhile the Russians, the Serbs and the Spaniards, in particular, seem to keep churning players off the production line just as the Americans used to do. Maria Sharapova seems to have come back to her best with a stunning win over the world no 1 , Belgian Justine Henin and a Slovak girl, Daniela Hantuchova, who I once feared would be a talented but emotionally fragile failure, has reached her first grand slam semi final.

Maria Sharapova

Daniela Hantuchova

In the mens game, Serbian Novak Djokovic is stunning everyone with some terrific performances and he has now reached yet another semi final. But of course the immediate accolades, and for the immediate future, go to one Swiss, the immaculate Roger Federer, who seems to make the game seem easy and to reduce first class tennis players to the level of club night beginners. So now is the decade of European domination and who can say how long that will contine.

Novak Djokovic



Roger Federer



Of course you can always rely on some things in world tennis. The British. We have one player of genuine world calibre in Andy Murray now that Henman has retired, and I seriously doubt if he has the stamina and mental strength to go all the way to winning grand slams, any more than Henman had. The rest are pretty dreadful and as for our women players, well, the highest is ranked about 128 in the world and the next around 232 so enough said about that!!

So as a tennis fan I shall simply bask, for the next few years in being a European (although my fellow countrymen resist the tag) and forget about being British.

The Great Declarations Fiasco

Here in Britain we are going through another round of the Great Declarations Fiasco where MPs, who are supposed to register any donations in excess of £1000 to two bodies, the Electoral Commission and the Parliamentary Register. Only the British, surely, could come up with a system that is so fraught with anomaly and so open to abuse.

During the Deputy Leadership for the Labour Party contest last year we had the unedifying situation of two of the candidates, Peter Hain and the Hideous Harman, accused of either concealing donations or accepting them from 'dodgy' sources. Of course the Conservative opposition made great play of this, particularly when it was discovered that Hain had accepted a lot more than he had admitted, through a 'Think Tank' created to further his ambitions and, presumably, to 'launder' money..though I'm sure he would deny that as a fair interpretation.



The situation became farcical when George Osborne, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and most outspoken critic of Labour's 'devious' misrepresentation, was himself found to have either not declared or incorrectly declared £487,000 in donations.



Now Conservative leader David Cameron is accused of not declaring air flights worth over £1000 and his officials are busily calculating what the plane load was at the time and consequently Mr Cameron's actual 'donation'.

All this is crazy. Surely all this could be put to bed if Government invested in a computer system which disseminated the necessary information to both bodies, compelled all MP's to input to it monthly, and insisted that EVERY donation was recorded...even miniscule ones plus gifts in lieu, like holidays, free weekends, plane flights etc and then estimated their total donation receipts not just those valued over £1000. The current system invites, and receives abuse, because it is so loose and vague in its definitions. Every MP is working to offset donations worth £3600 into, say, four chunks of £900 each so none of it had to be declared. It's like tax avoidance with those who can fiddle the system doing so.

Make MP's responsible for their own input. Lets not have excuses of 'maladministration' as Peter Hain is attempting to claim. I don't doubt that someone did input his returns..probably his accountant...but this would all be obviated if every MP simply recorded everything on a computer, as soon as that donation is received. Then they are absolved from criminal liability and both parliamentary bodies are satisfied. Or, for the British, is that too straightforward?

Stunning victory for the comeback Queen

Having seen her hopes of being nominated for the US Presidency seriously damaged in Iowa, Hillary Clinton, right up to the hour of polling in New Hampshire, must have felt she was staring down the barrel of an electoral gun when the polls showed a double digit leader for the Iowa winner, Barack Obama. But, seemingly even to her own astonishment, New Hampshire Democrats flew in the face of all predictions and gave her victory.



I posted in my last piece that I think this system of primaries is somewhat flawed in giving an early momentum to one candidate based on a pretty miniscule slice of the American electorate. It seems that I have to eat humble pie a little bit here because the New Hampshire Democratic voters clearly thought the same thing..that it was too early to have a coronation of one candidate and so they voted in some numbers for Hillary Clinton, whose camp apparently thought the best they could hope for was a close second place, right up to the time of the count.

The interesting element in this contest was the role of registered Independents. The US system, which is slightly odd to us Brits, requires electoral registration for one of the political parties or as an Independent. This is because we in England don't have a similar democratic primary system where the voter is involved from start to finish. The Independents can vote in either Republican or Democratic primaries but cannot vote in both.

Therefore the great unknown about New Hampshire was which way the Independents would go for the state has one of the highest number of registered independents, around 40%. It seemed that should most choose to vote in the Democratic primary, their votes would mainly go to Obama but as it turned out, it seems most chose to cast their votes for John McCain in the Republican Primary leaving a clear field for the registered Democrats to decide that issue...and the Clintons had enough credits in the state to pull the election out of the fire.

What happens now? Well I don't claim to be an expert on US politics but I sense that Hillary Clinton still has an uphill battle. She never seemed to be that popular among many of the nation's state Democratic party organisations and the reason she had built up such an apparently convincing lead nationally was that she had looked invincible.

But that was before the Obama effect hit Iowa. Will he prove to be a one hit wonder or will his message be revived in Michigan and on Super Tuesday. My guess is the latter and much of the aura which had surrounded Mrs. Clinton's candidacy has been already washed away.

Last night she had a wonderful unexpected result...but I suspect she may have won the latest battle but may still be on course to lose the war.

I am not so interested in the Republican race, mainly I guess, because I'm hoping that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will become President in November but I do have some regard for John McCain who appears to be the new front runner for the GOP but , looking on the bright side, whoever triumphs in November surely has to be an improvement on Bush!

Does this arcane process produce the leader America needs?

Imagine a situation where the Chairman of WalMart calls an emergency board meeting as shares in the company plummet to new levels, while those of rivals Costco, for example, have taken off in a big way.

"But how can this have happened?" worried executives demand, mopping their fevered brows, "what's caused this seismic collapse?"

"It's that damned shopping survey they conducted in Peoria ," says the harassed Chairman, "where our products were voted inferior to Costco."

"But only fifty people answered the poll" say the other Directors, "that's hardly representative enough to pass judgment on our quality!"

"It doesn't need to be," says the harassed Chairman, "just look at the publicity they got and the effect on business confidence!"

Ridiculous I know but (and forgive what might be a poor analogy) but that's rather how I perceive this arcane system of primaries and caucuses that go towards electing the next President of the United States and, of course, leader of the so called free world. Now a number of good things came out of last nights Iowa caucus, not least the fact that Democrats in a rural, predominantly white state were prepared, in great numbers, to choose a black man, Barack Obama, as their choice. An underdog also got chosen by the Republicans. The caucus itself was a wonderful transparent exercise in democracy, particularly that of the Democrats who huddled together in chosen corners as if picking the new school prefect, whereas the Republicans went for a secret ballot in each.



The effect of this is what worries me, because it is disproportionate. Already the pundits are saying, this is a devastating blow to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic surge of both political and financial confidence is likely to move to Mr. Obama. Similarly Mike Huckabee's win has been seen to undermine the campaigns of the other Republican candidates.



But why...and particularly as a consequence of a result in Iowa where the process is completely different from any other state, the electorate is demographically unrepresentative of the nation as a whole, the whole state has a population of only 2.5 million in a country of 300 million AND....perhaps most significantly...of that small population just about 10% came to the caucuses to register their preferences...a turn out which would be considered derisory in a UK council election.

So just a handful of Iowa voters have set a ball rolling which has been picked up by the politicians, the media, the influential party backers...and that mere handful of people could be instrumental in sending the chances of a Presidential candidate into oblivion.

The whole principle of 'states rights' is fundamental to the political process in the United States and thus very little control of how states administer their electoral machinery is subject to Federal Government interference. This degree of independence has been crucial to the entire principle of a true federation of states and one has to say, as an outsider, that there is much to be admired in the political principle which has driven this huge nation since its inception.

But I would seriously inquire, particularly with the arrival of the technological age, whether the laissez-faire principles which allowed the states to determine their own method and their own dates for returning delegates to the national convention which ultimately picks the candidate does any favours to the American political process. There is now so much media interest, so much pressure, so many signs read from early indicators that surely it is not fair that two small states like Iowa and New Hampshire should effectively be a national sounding board for who is chosen to stand for the respective parties as candidate for President of the United States.

I understand that the principle has changed over the years and that super Tuesday, where about 20 states hold their primaries is a fairly recent 1980s innovation

Would it not be fairer to everyone, public and politicians alike, if America therefore devised a Super-Duper Tuesday where all 50 states held their primaries or caucuses at the same time? I am not suggesting some federal regimentation of the procedure each state uses...I know that is completely beyond the pale to suggest such a thing...but I do believe the unfairness lies, not in the method of selection, but the consequent and ridiculous degree of political importance given to these early returns, particularly from such a tiny sample of opinion as about 10-12% of a state with less than 1% of America's entire population!! In other words, Hillary Clinton's prospects, just for example, have been damaged by less than 0.1% of the population of the US..and that seems ridiculous.

Some kind of synchronisation would remove this 'investor confidence' element at a stroke which I think is weighting the contest unfairly. It would also mean a change in campaigning habit where candidates would have to weigh up where they went to curry support with a lot of sophisticated planning but surely this would provide a more balanced and less 'outsider influenced' reflection of voter opinion?