A CHINESE TAKEAWAY

Posted on by victorialucas38

A couple of posts ago, I reviewed the archive Gerald Harper star vehicle, ‘Hadleigh’ at a stage where I hadn’t yet completed watching the whole series; I mentioned an episode from memory in which the suave squire visited Hong Kong, and looked forward to seeing that particular outing again, almost half-a-century on from when it originally aired, in April 1976. Well, since the last post, I’ve watched all episodes of ‘Hadleigh’ and the Hong Kong expedition did indeed figure. It even guest-starred Nancy Kwan (of ‘Suzy Wong’ fame) in a story relating to dodgy diamonds and dodgy diamond dealers, all played out in a landscape somewhat more exotic than Hadleigh’s routine Yorkshire backdrop. It seemed no expense was spared in this glossy travelogue, with the film crew milking the unfamiliar locations for all they were worth. I suppose, back then, viewers were so accustomed to the stock footage of ITC series whenever a lead character was supposed to be in a foreign field (and in reality never ventured further than Elstree) that a TV company actually filming overseas necessitated plenty pre-broadcast publicity, and there was no shortage of it in the case of ‘Hadleigh’, which is probably why the episode stuck in the memory. At the time, my knowledge of the Empire and Commonwealth was fairly sketchy, and the fact Hadleigh was abroad yet everybody spoke English didn’t strike me as odd; after all, I was used to the crew of the USS Enterprise landing on different bloody planets, yet the natives still spoke English. I reckon I must have thought only Europe was the exception to the rule.

When James Hadleigh was dispatched on his mission to the Far East, Hong Kong had precisely 21 years remaining as a British colony under the terms of the 99-year lease from China we were beholden to, yet we’re now almost 30 years away from the day it ceased to be so. Despite the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, which laid out the conditions of ‘one country, two systems’ in order to reassure anxious Hong Kongers the city wouldn’t simply become another oppressed province of mainland China once the Union Jack was lowered, Beijing eventually began to flex its muscles after a surprisingly lengthy period of largely leaving Hong Kong to its own devices. The first real sign of this to receive global exposure came during the suppression of the ‘umbrella protests’ of 2014, though it was the widespread civil disobedience of five years later that laid bare the harsh realities of Hong Kong under Chinese rule. These protests were sparked by attempts to introduce a new extradition law, one which would be enacted should Beijing decide a particular individual (or groups of individuals) posed a threat to the smooth running of Hong Kong along Chinese lines; anyone earmarked as a troublemaker could be extradited to the mainland for – in some cases – a trial held behind closed doors, far from the prying eyes of the world’s media.

Despite inspiring the largest protests ever seen in Hong Kong’s history, what became known as the National Security Law (NSL) came into effect in 2020; even though the pandemic did away with the mass public dissent that was in full flow throughout the months leading up to lockdown, the new law would severely reduce Hong Kong’s autonomy further, making illegal any acts deemed to be of a seditious nature. Since its introduction, hundreds of Hong Kongers opposed to China implementing the same repressive rule of order as applies in the People’s Republic have been arrested and have disappeared from view; pro-democracy news outlets in Hong Kong have been forcibly closed, and there are outstanding arrest warrants (not to mention bounties on offer) for dissenters who have already fled overseas, way beyond China’s borders. A fair few are now living over here, and their personal experience of how far China is prepared to go in order to crush opposition is a good deal more comprehensive than the useful idiots in the British Government who gave the green light to the development of a new Chinese Embassy in London, despite numerous reservations over security. A couple of years ago, the then-British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said the NSL was a ‘clear breach’ of the handover agreement, adding ‘the law’s continued existence and use is a demonstration of China breaking its international commitments. It has damaged Hong Kong, with rights and freedoms significantly eroded. Arrests under the law have silenced opposition voices.’

The latest extension to the NSL comes in the form of Hong Kong authorities now being able to demand private passwords on computers or phones from anyone they suspect of breaking the law; those resisting these amendments face the prospect of a fine upwards of £9,600 or the alternative punishment of a year being detained at Xi Jinping’s pleasure. Resistance does seem rather futile, however, when one realises these new powers also enable officials to seize any items they regard as having ‘seditious intention’, something it’d be quite easy for either a computer or mobile to be regarded as. According to the party line, the amendments to the NSL guarantee that ‘activities endangering national security can be effectively prevented, suppressed and punished, and at the same time the lawful rights of interest and organisations are adequately protected’. Sure, it’s not unusual for law enforcers in other, less repressive, corners of the globe to demand such things as passwords when conducting a criminal investigation, but Hong Kong’s NSL seems to be somewhat flexible where definitions of dissent are concerned; a three-year prison sentence is the reward for providing ‘false or misleading information’, and it would appear any vague sign of dissatisfaction with the status quo could be regarded as subversion, sedition, secession (i.e. breaking away from China) or even terrorism if the authorities have a perceived troublemaker on their hit-list. And a lifetime behind bars is the reward for any of those crimes. It’s no wonder tens of thousands of Hong Kongers have been left with little option but to go into exile since the NSL was introduced.

Anyone with little more than a cursory knowledge of how totalitarian regimes keep track of their citizens won’t be unduly surprised by some of the provisions included in the NSL. For example, the buck stops with Beijing when it comes to how the law is interpreted; should a Hong Kong judicial body disagree with China, Beijing can overrule them. Those who fall under the radar of the NSL are fair game to be put under surveillance and wire-tapped, and even those who are ‘from outside of Hong Kong, who are not permanent residents’ can be subjected to it. In effect, this is the realisation of every fear harboured by Hong Kongers in the wake of the 1997 handover; but it’s not as though it wasn’t envisaged as an eventual outcome of the transference of Hong Kong from Britain to China. It was only a matter of when. Moreover, I would imagine few Brits watching live TV coverage of the handover ceremony in that distant summer of ’97 would ever have imagined some of the Chinese Government’s anticipated tactics in dealing with those citizens who disagreed with them would one day be regarded as a legitimate blueprint for suppressing critics of the old Mother Country’s own government. Remember what happened after Southport?

Fifty years ago, Hong Kong was portrayed in that memorable episode of ‘Hadleigh’ as an archetypal hangover from the colonial era, vividly exhibiting a pattern that was repeated across all the territories that used to be coloured pink on the map – a unique hybrid of the upper-class British trappings some foreigners have romanticised and the indigenous native culture, with both seemingly embracing the other in a mutually beneficial melting pot. That episode works as an advert for Hong Kong’s attractions as effectively as any documentary Alan Whicker could have produced in 1976, though as much as ‘Hadleigh’ represents a piece of Britain that has now gone – a point I did my best to make in the previous post – this one-off excursion full of Eastern promise ironically does exactly the same for Hong Kong too.

© The Editor

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SOMETHING ROTTEN IN THE GARDEN

Posted on by victorialucas38

I saw someone in a mask yesterday – a sadly occasional sight amongst those whose heads were polluted by the Project Fear propaganda of 2020 and have yet to get over it; but I don’t think this particular sighting of a sad individual wandering the aisles of Sainsbury’s like an ageing Raver paying tribute to early 90s Dance act Altern-8 was entirely unconnected to the latest disease to have materialised on our front pages, one serving to revive memories of the pandemic within easily-influenced circles. I’m a long way from Kent, but certain sections of the MSM are treating the outbreak of meningitis in the Garden of England as Covid 2.0 with their customary irresponsibility; it may be six years now since the people of this country were placed under house-arrest, but the experience remains fresh enough to spark a degree of familiar panic in those prone to it. ‘This outbreak is really unusual,’ says Prof Andrew Lee of the University of Sheffield. ‘Whilst single cases of meningitis do happen, outbreaks are quite rare, really.’ And Prof Lee is not alone in his apparent bewilderment. When experts pepper the media with puzzling expressions, pondering aloud as to why this strain of meningitis is not following the standard pattern, one cannot but wonder if they are now so indoctrinated in the recommended social mores that they are subconsciously self-censoring their thought processes, preventing them from coming to the blatantly obvious conclusions the rest of us have.

According to the latest reports, meningitis cases have jumped by a third overnight, giving us a number of cases unseen since routine vaccination against the B strain of the disease was introduced in 2015; this means anyone over the age of 10 most likely hasn’t been vaccinated, and when one also considers children being vaccinated has diminished since lockdown, it’s no wonder students are the most vulnerable demographic when something like this happens. When asked for suggestions as to the cause, medical men and women have suggested it could have been ‘super spread’ in a crowded environment such as a party or a nightclub, and it could equally have been passed on through saliva via sharing drinks or vapes or simply snogging. In a nice boost for the anti-smoking/vaping lobby, some have opined that infected particles could be transported in the cloud produced during exhalation of a vape, though others have claimed there’s no proof meningitis is airborne and any droplets in the air would be essentially harmless when compared to physical contact with somebody already infected. Outbreaks in the 1990s were due to the C strain of the virus, which was rapidly reduced as a danger with the introduction of the vaccine in 1999, though the current outbreak is of the B variant.

‘It may be that this is a particularly virulent or aggressive strain of MenB,’ says Dr Eliza Gil of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, ‘which would mean that is more likely to cause illness than most strains. This outbreak is definitely unusual in the number of affected cases.’ Emma Wail of Queen Mary University of London deals with infectious diseases, and her observations can be added to the chorus of concern some in the medical profession are expressing. ‘I am very worried about the current outbreak,’ she says, ‘as this is a devastating disease with significant complications, including a high mortality rate and significant risk of morbidities in survivors who don’t get prompt antibiotics. I have not seen a MenB outbreak spread at this rate previously.’ A more reassuring opinion emanates from Dr Hamid Merchant of the University of East London. ‘It may feel as though the situation is getting worse, but there’s no need to be alarmed,’ he says. ‘Importantly, most people affected will experience mild illness, recover quickly, and will not require hospitalisation.’ Apparently, MenB droplets cannot last long outside of the body, meaning it’s highly unlikely it could be caught in a supermarket, or on a tightly-packed bus or train, which makes the re-donning of masks (which were merely symbolic shields to repel Covid, anyway) utterly unnecessary. So, no, Fleet Street, this situation does not require a lockdown; what it requires is someone prepared to say out loud what everyone is thinking.

Kent University, where the current outbreak is centred, proudly proclaims itself as the nation’s most diverse, boasting students from 148 different countries – even if, as the image accompanying this post suggests, England itself would not appear to be amongst the 148. Mind you, as Diversity is Our Strength, surely one would imagine those enrolled there are an especially robust breed. As a county, Kent has been at the forefront of receiving the so-called ‘Boris Wave’ of uninvited visitors perhaps more than anywhere else, holding them in camps and hotels before eventually dispatching them to other corners of the kingdom to spread the love. This is a county that receives an annual influx of 40,000 newcomers from parts of the world not only immersed in cultures completely alien to our own, but also rife with diseases we more or less eradicated from our shores decades ago – arrivals often without vaccination certificates or any real evidence as to their medical histories. Three and-a-half years ago, Kent experienced an epidemic of diphtheria – the first in the UK within living memory – emanating from a former RAF base which had become an asylum-seeker processing camp; 50 cases of the disease were found amongst asylum-seekers there. There was also an outbreak of scabies traced to hotels housing asylum-seekers in Kent that quickly spread throughout the South East. Not hard to join the dots, is it?

The specific strain of meningitis which is currently provoking all these headlines is a commonplace ailment in Eritrea, one of many countries with which we appear to have a trade deal at the moment; they export unattached, fighting-age young men to Britain, and in return, we get…what, exactly? Well, all the old diseases nobody here has a nostalgic longing to see again. Most Western countries generally have extremely strict regulations for those entering them as hopeful citizens, requiring detailed medical examinations and a fair degree of jumping through hoops; we seem to have done away with that where the boat people are concerned (not to mention every other sensible precaution that should be taken), and it looks as though we’re now paying for it. I remember at one time the main Continental disease the British authorities feared crossing the Channel was rabies, and the steps taken to ensure it didn’t reach here were stringent, to say the least; today, one gets the impression everyone in a position to prevent infectious souvenirs from the more insanitary regions of the world being brought into Blighty are deliberately turning a blind eye to what’s going on because their honest observations would be interpreted as ‘far-right’, and any critique of the multicultural project renders its critic beyond-the-pale in polite society. How many more indignities do the British people have to endure in order to prop-up this white elephant?

Don’t expect any MSM outlet to approach the probable truth when speculating as to the cause of this unusual spike in diseases we got a grip on a long time ago, of course; besides, legacy media acquired a taste for keeping the population in a permanent state of fear during Covid, in tandem with its buddies in government (remember Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages?); the viral spread of Monkey Pox never materialised in the way we were promised and now it’s the turn of meningitis, which has – purely coincidentally – sprung up in a part of the UK with the highest concentration of overseas visitors. Some of the less hysterical experts door-stepped for their opinions have cautioned against overreactions, stating the outbreak will fizzle out soon enough; but even if that happens, what next – Ebola? At least that’d be something new to look forward to, and I guess it’d be a good excuse to put us all under lock and key again. But, hell, we’ll get through it; after all, Diversity is Our Strength, innit.

© The Editor

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GENTLEMAN’S RELISH

Posted on by victorialucas38

In a way, there are two shades of nostalgia. The first is nostalgia for a time just before your time, a symptom going by the name of anemoia – a rarely-used word that serves as a useful description for the condition; in my case, that’s the 1950s and early 60s, largely fuelled of late via a string of brilliantly British B-pictures aired on TPTV. The second is nostalgia for a time that took place during one’s childhood; and in my case, that’s the 1970s. The ability of both to impress in 2026 is enhanced by inevitable comparisons with the here and now, unfavourable comparisons with a contemporary country transformed by the engineered influx of fifth columnists, many of whom were flaunting their treasonous placards in Central London over the weekend as the alleged enforcers of the law stood by yet again and let them get on with it. When this is the portrait of a nation under the ‘control’ of a weak and paranoid administration terrified of rousing the wrath of aliens whose presence they encouraged whilst simultaneously content to trash the heritage of the natives, it’s no wonder the prime escape from dogmatic fatigue is a journey to the centre of the past. Over the past few weeks, that familiar journey has encompassed a series currently doing the rounds on YT by the name of ‘Hadleigh’. Produced between 1969 and 1976, ‘Hadleigh’ was an early Yorkshire Television production that was actually a spinoff from an even earlier series set around a regional newspaper, ‘The Gazette’; as with ‘Jason King’ spinning off from ‘Department S’, the creators of ‘The Gazette’ had a character within the ensemble piece who had the potential to go it alone. Where ‘The Gazette’ was concerned, that character was James Hadleigh, the aristocratic proprietor of the paper, played by the incurably debonair Gerald Harper.

Fresh from his starring role in ‘Adam Adamant’ – the BBC’s mid-60s answer to ‘The Avengers’ – Gerald Harper slipped into the role of James Hadleigh with the same effortless ease he’d slipped into the role of an Edwardian gentleman thawed from suspended animation 50 years on from being frozen. He was in possession of a now-vanished panache that was the hallmark of a generation caught between revelling in old-school respect for one’s social ‘betters’ and a post-Profumo permissiveness that personified the Swinging spirit of the Carnabetian army. Roger Moore exuded a similarly suave charisma in ‘The Persuaders’ as Lord Brett Sinclair around the same time, though ‘Hadleigh’ was less an escapist fantasy in the established ITC mould and more a dramatic study of the gentry’s struggle to retain their antiquated privileges in a rapidly-changing world. Hadleigh is rarely seen outside of a suit and reclines in the ancestral splendour of Melford, his family home in rural Yorkshire; he upholds the traditional responsibilities of the country squire by exhibiting a benign, patrician approach to his tenant farmers and also sits on the bench as a local magistrate. Although beholden to the social rituals of his upbringing, he is not impervious to the upgraded mores of the era, even if that often brings him into entertaining conflict with the old guard as personified by his Aunt Helen, played with deliciously pre-war Mitford-esque charm by the wonderfully-named Ambrosine Phillpotts.

Being the incumbent Hadleigh of Melford, the pressure is on James to sire an heir and keep the succession going, though such a duty naturally requires a wife, and this is one area in which our Hadleigh is less than successful. The first series sees him drawn to Susan Jackson (Gillian Wray), a young journalist on the Gazette; they become engaged, but his bride-to-be is lured away by the tempting offer of a top job on Fleet Street (when Fleet Street was Mecca to writers with ambitions beyond parochial recognition). Back on the market, the second series brings Hadleigh into close contact with another intelligent young woman of independent means in the shape of Anne Hepton (Jane Merrow). This gay divorcee also has a child, not to mention an estranged husband she never got round to divorcing (played with obnoxious relish by Michael Billington of ‘UFO’ and ‘The Onedin Line’ fame). Once the separation is certified in law – with Hadleigh cited as co-respondent – marriage appears a foregone conclusion, though our hero blows it when a former flame (played by Hannah Gordon) materialises out of the blue and buggers up his plans. The Hannah Gordon character had been the wife of an old friend of Hadleigh’s when we first met her, and represents James’s habit of regularly falling for unavailable married women who could never provide him with the legitimate heir his status requires, something which perhaps explains the whirlwind romance that takes him all the way to the altar in the third series.

Series three is dominated by Hadleigh’s marriage to Jennifer Caldwell, the middle-class daughter of a self-made man whose bohemian inclinations characteristic of her younger years make her an ill-fit for the strait-laced traditions of gentrified Yorkshire Society. Like Hadleigh himself, Jennifer is the beneficiary of inherited wealth, though – unlike her husband – only one generation removed from the backyard privy; this leaves her less capable of coping with the demands of running a large ancestral household a long way from London, and it isn’t long before cracks begin to show. Clashes on screen between husband and wife were apparently mirrored on set between the two lead actors, with Hilary Dwyer as Jennifer an incompatible partner; whether or not the bipolar-esque mood swings of Jennifer were a reflection of this on-set tension is debatable, but the way in which she plays the character as a moody spoilt brat makes Jennifer extremely difficult to warm to. The same can’t be said for man-servant Sutton (Peter Dennis), who arrives at the same time in the series as a successor to the old retainer from the first two series, Maxwell. To refer to Sutton as the Jeeves to Hadleigh’s Wooster is perhaps pushing it, though Sutton’s unflappable talent for remaining amusingly calm in the face of whatever crisis the Hadleigh family see fit to throw at him certainly has echoes of Wodehouse’s imperious valet.

It’s no great surprise that Hadleigh’s marriage to Jennifer ends in tears and devoid of the precious son and heir, though there is a three-year gap between series three and four that sees Hilary Dwyer disappear from the cast without an on-screen resolution to the storyline. Three years does appear a lengthy gap by today’s standards, though it’s worth remembering that the actors routinely seen on television in the 70s were theatre-trained, and it’s highly likely many were committed to theatrical runs that held up production on whatever TV series they appeared in. The stage still held priority over the small screen back in those days. When it comes to a supporting cast, ‘Hadleigh’ is as rich a rep company as any from that period, featuring cameos from the likes of Bill Fraser, Wanda Ventham, Glyn Owen, Sue Lloyd, Paula Wilcox, Garfield Morgan, Ballard Berkley (AKA the Major from ‘Fawlty Towers’), Penelope Keith, Kenneth Cranham, Leon Vitali, Norman Bird, Mike Pratt, Anne Stallybrass, Richard Vernon, Norman Bird, Peter Sallis, Jack Woolgar, Peter Bowles, Roy Barraclough, Nigel Hawthorne, Brian Blessed, Lois Baxter, Stephanie Beacham, Gordon Jackson, Michael Elphick et al. No British 70s TV drama worth its salt would be complete without them.

I confess I’m at a slight disadvantage in penning this post, due to the fact I haven’t yet made my way through the whole series, being currently four episodes into the 13 of the final season; but I feel I’ve seen enough to review it here, especially when the alternative is another trawl through the relentlessly-depressing present day. However, I do know there’s an episode coming up where Hadleigh visits Hong Kong, the only episode I have a clear memory of from the time. Like most mothers in the 70s, mine watched the series and probably harboured an unrequited crush on the character whose equine expertise in the opening title sequence is as memorable as Tony Hatch’s galloping theme tune. When revisited, ‘Hadleigh’ is yet one more example of how we used to do it (and do it well), not to mention offering another enticing portal to a lost world that feels more like home than where we are now.

© The Editor

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CASUALTIES OF WAR

Posted on by victorialucas38

When former Leeds United manager Don Revie bowed to press pressure by walking away from the England job following a string of disappointing results in 1977, his fractious relationship with Fleet Street didn’t make for a nice, clean break; the Don denied his critics the victory that his resignation suggested when it was swiftly revealed he had already prepared for his overnight unemployment by lining up a lucrative deal a long way from Wembley. When news broke that Revie had accepted the job of managing the national team of the United Arab Emirates, the press were gobsmacked and retaliated by portraying Revie as a traitor who had betrayed his country for the Arabian dollar. They’d done a similar job in painting the England cricket captain Tony Greig as Public Enemy Number One earlier in the year, when he’d signed-up for Kerry Packer’s money-spinning World Series Cricket; but the fact Don Revie had rejected an ‘honourable’ exodus by securing his future with the Arabs added fuel to the fire. The oil crisis that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War had given the Sheiks of the Middle East a belated awareness of their bargaining power, and they suddenly became a familiar sight in London, buying up some of Britain’s most valuable real estate and helping to accelerate the British perception of their country as a bankrupt global power only too willing to sell-off the family silver. Half-a-century on, this perception has proven to be a fortuitous one in a country whose assets are now largely foreign-owned; but it all began with the 70s Sheiks.

The fact many of them emerged from a newly-independent former British Protectorate didn’t help the sense of national humiliation. The UAE was formed from the ashes of the Trucial States when the UK withdrew from those expensive-to-administer Middle Eastern outposts of the Empire in the early 70s, and the rapid post-colonial boom of this union of oil-rich neighbours was perhaps best embodied by the transformation of Dubai into a gleaming global citadel that rose from the desert sands like some Arabian mirage of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. A friend of mine reluctantly holidayed there around 20 years ago and described it as a horrible place, with the ruling class treating the less fortunate members of the indigenous population as sub-human slaves, yet welcoming a nauseating abundance of wealthy Westerners knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Certainly, that summary rings true with the general view of Dubai as a kind of Gulf State Sun City, acting as an avaricious magnet to the jet-setting nouveau riche happy to overlook the usual human rights abuses of the region in order that they can wallow in suitably superficial surroundings, exuding all the class of expat Cockney villains on the Costa Del Crime. They hardly imagined this tasteless oasis cocooned from the troubles routinely afflicting less affluent nations of the Middle East would ever be subjected to them, and now that their tax haven Xanadu finally has been breached, their true colours have been exposed in the hurried abandonment of their shallow status symbols.

Iran has taken out its hammering by US and Israeli missiles on neighbouring Arab nations viewed as pro-Western, with the UAE receiving some of the worst body blows. To a man, numerous C-list celebs and what Lib Dem leader Ed Davey referred to as ‘washed-up footballers’ have been besieging the Foreign Office for assistance, not to mention posting updates on their rude awakening via social media. Naturally, not every British national caught in the crossfire falls into this category, but it’s hard to summon up sympathy for those that do – especially those that have included their pets in the list of chattels left behind as they desperately seek to save their own skins. While we may not condone such actions from the impoverished natives of war-torn countries, we can nevertheless try to empathise, however hard it may be for First World sensibilities to relate to the scenario; at the same time, those who relocated to the likes of Dubai simply because they could afford to are harder to feel sorry for, particularly when one sees images of dogs tied to lampposts and cats dumped in boxes by fleeing wankers. One cannot help but wonder if these animals were acquired due to the understandable human instinct for companionship or if they were mere fashion accessories that happened to be chic accoutrements for the season in question. If the pets were supposed to be members of the family, one wonders if the people who left them to their own devices would exhibit a similarly heartless approach towards their children.

Travel restrictions or relocation costs have been regarded as sufficiently insurmountable obstacles by such types not exactly short of a bob or two to treat their pets as furniture that can simply be bought again once back home; the volunteers manning animal rescue centres in Dubai have been overwhelmed by an influx of abandoned pets, leaving shelters at breaking point. One anonymous volunteer told the Daily Telegraph, ‘I’ve seen around 200 posts now (on social media); dogs have been found abandoned on the streets, tied to poles and left behind with no owners found. Some vets have even confirmed that owners are coming in to euthanize healthy pets because they don’t want to deal with relocation costs or paperwork. There is no proper, large-scale shelter system here that can handle this – the few places that exist are always full…on average, I personally receive around five messages a day from people saying they’re leaving, and will put their pet on the street if no one takes it.’ Such compassion; your heart really goes out to these pet-owners, doesn’t it – not to mention coming to the swift conclusion that none of them are worthy of the animals’ affection or devotion.

A dog re-homing organisation known as K9 Friends Dubai has reported ‘a number of calls for abandoned puppies or owners wanting to leave behind pets’, whilst the owner of a pet boarding service in the city called The Barking Lot has said, ‘Shelters are overcrowded right now and are doing the best they can – we are doing our best to stay flexible as possible because we understand these are trying times.’ There have even been reports of some pets abandoned in the desert when Dubai residents attempted to exit across the border into Oman and were refused permission to take them out of the country. A charity which goes by the name of War Paws and exists specifically to come to the aid of animals during conflict finds it difficult to accept that such an epicentre of conspicuous wealth as Dubai could struggle to take care of its non-human residents. The charity’s chief executive office, Louise Hastie, said ‘It’s not just a problem there; it’s happening across Iraq and Ukraine as well…some people just don’t see pets the way we do. Abandoning pets at the border or on the streets, not even leaving them with the vet – there’s really no excuse for it; Dubai is an affluent country.’ She herself is stuck in Iraq at the moment due to the current conflict, but exhibited a contrasting attitude to the guilty parties hotfooting it from Dubai by declaring she’d remain with her animals ‘until the roof came down.’

Ever since I remember seeing a news report on a derelict zoo in the former Yugoslavia at the outbreak of the conflict in the Balkans over 30 years ago – one still containing bewildered and psychologically scarred wild animals – the fate of the domesticated or caged members of the animal kingdom during human warfare has remained at the forefront of my responses whenever horns are locked between nations. We invite these creatures into our homes or our urban environments on the understanding we’ll look after them and care for them, yet the depth of the bond between man and beast with some appears to be little more than skin deep, and that’s to the detriment of man rather than beast. They’ll always give us far more than we often deserve, and at times like this we tend to find out just how deserving their human ‘superiors’ really are.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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KERB CRAWLING

Posted on by victorialucas38

I once saw an archive documentary on The Kinks (via YT) made around the time of their celebrated 1971 album, ‘Muswell Hillbillies’; the programme focused on the North London neighbourhood the Davies brothers grew up in and where the band was formed; amongst other locals, the programme-makers interviewed a vicar of the parish, who gave his opinion of the locality. ‘It’s one of these districts that was built just before the motor car,’ he said. ‘And now there’s no room for motor cars.’ I always thought that an astute point, especially considering it was made over 50 years ago, way before such a thing as two-car households. I myself live in a suburb probably built around the same time as the houses in Muswell Hill that the documentary featured – i.e. late Victorian/early Edwardian, which is indeed ‘just before the motor car’. As a consequence, most of the housing stock in my own neighbourhood consists of terraces or semis bereft of driveways, as the builders of the time evidently didn’t anticipate mass car ownership. This has been a problem for car-owners who live in the vicinity for decades, and many householders have concreted over their gardens in order to have somewhere other than the street or pavement to park their vehicles. Naturally, this has had a negative effect when the heavens open, with rain having no grass or soil to soak into, thus inviting flooding during particularly heavy rainfall; but for those who haven’t gone to such extremes, parking as near to their homes as they can get inevitably impacts on fellow motorists and pedestrians alike.

Either they settle for the road outside their door, which can reduce traffic to a haphazard one-way system if there are identical rows of houses opposite thinking likewise; or they opt for two wheels on the road and two on the pavement, which then impinges upon those for whom the pavement is supposed to be reserved. Throw in the ubiquitous wheelie-bins also adding to the clutter of street furniture and the pavement can be reduced to quite an obstacle course for the pushers of baby-buggies or the disabled either confined to mobility scooters or requiring a guide dog to get from A to B. The new powers gifted to England’s local authorities to deal with pavement parking could, on one hand, be viewed as another episode in the ongoing war on the motorist by government at both local and central level; after all, we should be cycling everywhere or travelling by public transport (despite the slashed services in the case of the latter). This explains why busy thoroughfares have been severely reduced in width to accommodate the cycling lobby, making the gate-crashing of an ambulance during the rush-hour even more of a headache when cars have little room to pull over to one side in. On the other hand, however, these new powers could be regarded as a long-overdue means of punishing those who choose to leave their vehicles stationary on space they’re not supposed to be occupying, and many having to traverse such pavements would no doubt welcome that.

Although there are variations across the country – the capital, for example, has prohibited pavement parking since as far back as 1974, with potential fines of £130 able to be issued – there has never been a national manual for dealing with the offence. Outside of London, authorities have usually had to engage in a slow, laborious process of applying for parking restrictions on pavements street-by-street, not having the same instant powers to admonish a motorist should he or she break other parking rules, such as ignoring signs making restrictions clear or settling their vehicle on double yellow lines. Considering driving on the pavement has been pretty much outlawed since the Highways Act of 1835 – a time when the internal combustion engine hadn’t even debuted in the realms of science fiction – one would have imagined nationwide restrictions would’ve been in place for over a century; yet if a car is stationary on a pavement, it’s only regarded as an offence if it constitutes an obstruction; and that tends to be a matter for the police (if they can be arsed) as opposed to local councils. The new guidelines announced by the Department for Transport a couple of months ago, however, will belatedly outline rules and regulations that apply wherever one happens to illegally park in the country.

Scotland pressed ahead with such reforms three years ago, though this will only be fully operational in all areas north of the border as of next month, with maximum fines of £100 promised; Wales also has a nationwide ban on pavement parking in theory, though in practice this ban tends to be enforced with the issuing of Traffic Regulation Orders by local councils. In England, the new rules will be introduced by the end of the year, and the most vocal supporters of them so far have, unsurprisingly, tended to be those involved in local government. Whilst some might see the changes as yet one more assault on the motorist, up there with speed cameras, others view the madness as having method to it. ‘These new powers, something the Local Government Association has long called for, will help councils keep pavements clear,’ says Tom Hunt, head of Sheffield Council. ‘Pavement parking is one of the most complained-about issues by residents; it can cause a lot of disruption and block access, particularly to those with mobility scooters or parents who are pushing their children in buggies. They also cause cracked slabs and, therefore, increase maintenance costs and trip hazards.’

Many a public information film of the 1970s warned children of the dangers of crossing the road between parked cars, yet whenever one watches any scene from a 70s TV drama shot out of doors, the lack of parked cars on the street is one of the first things the viewer notices; children must have been especially reckless back then if the number of road fatalities amongst the under-16s was high enough to warrant introducing the Green Cross Man. Today, crossing the road between parked cars is often something the pedestrian of any age has little option but to risk, despite knowing all the time that Dave Prowse won’t materialise from thin air to prevent them getting run over. Although it goes without saying that many pedestrians are part-timers, also having a car to call upon, the full-time pedestrian probably has little sympathy for the motorist, especially the motorist who intrudes upon their right of way. Yes, cyclists who choose to skip the cycle lane (if there is one) and take a short-cut on the pavement are an additional hazard – and one that needs highlighting too, particularly when cyclists as a breed appear to be the ring-fenced golden boys of the green-washing brigade; but an unbroken parade of cars narrowing the space available for those on foot is clearly something that needs some form of legislation to curb.

A motorist friend of mine regularly expresses the opinion that the joy has been taken out of driving in recent years, what with speed bumps, speed cameras, speed restrictions and – most of all – the appalling condition of Britain’s roads; from the perspective of the motorist, perhaps pot-holes are the real bête noir of the present day, and these saboteurs of tyres are something local councils seem less eager to resolve than introducing yet another way of making the motorist’s life a misery via fresh rules and regulations regarding parking. The nature of the nation’s older housing stock as touched upon in the opening paragraph – and Britain has some of the oldest housing stock in Europe – makes the problem of parking when some households can own up to two or three vehicles a perennial headache that the new powers bestowed upon local authorities will hardly help. Yet, something has to be done; whether or not this move simply adds to the continuous conundrum remains to be seen.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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RADICAL SOLUTIONS

Posted on by victorialucas38

Where were they? Where were they when insanely brave Iranian women were taking their lives in their hands on the streets of Tehran by removing their hijabs and thus challenging the most misogynistic regime on the planet as they dared to shed an item of male-imposed armour that could give the chastity belt a run for its money? Where were they when the Iranian authorities were slaughtering hundreds of their own citizens in cold blood on the same streets for having the temerity to protest against the totalitarian overreach of a state that literally gets away with murder because it claims to have Allah on its side? Well, they were nowhere to be seen, of course. Yes, I’m talking about the useful idiots of the West, the appeasers of Radical Islam who hate their own nations and their own cultural inheritance more than they hate a design for life that is guilty of all the crimes (and more) than any land of the free they were fortunate enough to be born into was ever guilty of. I’m talking about those for whom every cause is a fashion accessory to be superseded each season by the latest fad that their superficial embrace of indicates what a Good Person they are, the performative puppets engaging in what the author Lionel Shriver astutely refers to as ‘suicidal vanity’, those whose conviction that skin colour is a pointer to purity (as long as that colour isn’t white), those who condescendingly view all immigrants as innocents, whose zealous fanaticism elevates emotion over common sense and is possessed of such First World arrogance that it assumes anyone arriving on Western shores from a completely alien culture thinks exactly the same way they do, turning a blind eye to the inconvenient truth of grooming gangs because that kind of grotesque atrocity doesn’t compute with their wilfully naive worldview, those who vote Green and think Nigel Farage is Mussolini, those who are contemptuously viewed by the illegal economic migrants they pat on the head, feed, clothe and house for free as the gullible fools they are.

Have no fear, though – they’ve just re-emerged and are currently to be seen marching with banners condemning the actions of the US and Israel in attacking Iran. Did they shed tears over the news that Iran’s Supreme Leader, AKA the Ayatollah, was killed in an airstrike? Probably; after all, it was missiles launched by the twin global evils that ended the life of a ruthless dictator who in reality embodied all the actual characteristics they themselves reserve for Trump and Netanyahu, one who endorsed and enforced the kind of authoritarian rule they’re deluded enough to envisage as some sort of Utopian alternative to the depraved, decadent West because it vehemently rejected the wicked Western influence. It’s no different from the way in which the intellectual Left fawned over Castro or even the Ayatollah Khomeini during his European exile. But they’re hardly operating in isolation. Every institution from academia to the MSM to the police force to politics to even sport has ring-fenced Islam and awarded it special status as an untouchable; it was evident at the weekend when the referee actually suspended play for a couple of minutes during the Leeds Vs Man City game at Elland Road in order that City’s trio of Muslim players could step off the pitch and temporarily break their fast by having a drink; the scoreboard kindly informed the crowd this interruption was observing ‘the Holy Month of Ramadan’, which we are now apparently obliged to do; and the accompanying boos that rang around the ground – the cry of those who are thoroughly sick of being preached to and told how to think during leisure pursuits – were unsurprisingly condemned by the appeasers.

Therefore, when Islam is so venerated by our institutions in a way the rest of the population finds both mystifying and annoying, it’s no wonder the US military’s assault on the one country that represents everything about that particular faith that any sane person would naturally recoil from has been received with such vocal opposition from those in Western nations who have overseen and encouraged the dilution and pollution of their cultural richness with the most toxic strain of this oppressive Medieval virus. Not that any outbreak of war is cause for euphoric celebration, mind; whenever that has occurred in the past – the Crimean War and World War I being two good examples from Blighty’s perspective – the brutal realities of conflict and its human cost have swiftly dampened the jingoistic fervour such military engagements were launched upon. The fact that this current ‘skirmish’ is taking place in the Middle East certainly gives the appeasers comfortable distance, as does the absence of home-grown boots-on-the-ground; but the Middle East is a perennially unstable region in which there is always a war going on somewhere. If Middle Eastern nations are not fighting amongst themselves, then the West occasionally intervenes and spices things up with the odd incursion of its own. We saw that in Afghanistan and Iraq over 20 years ago and now it’s Iran’s turn to feel the force of the countries it has taunted ever since the Revolution of 1978/79, when traditional Arab Nationalism was replaced by faith-based mania and institutionalised hatred of the West; no wonder Radical Islam has so many friends on this side of the religious divide. Let them think ‘Queers for Palestine’ will earn them allies in Iran for the moment; they’ll learn.

The Islamic countries surrounding Iran that have taken a somewhat different route over the past half-century are currently bearing the brunt of Iranian retaliation to the attacks by Israel and America, viewed by Iran as virtual collaborators. Although Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman have been caught in the crossfire, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have suffered the most severe strikes so far, punishment for rejecting the continuation of Iran’s one-time role as ‘the policeman of the Gulf’, a role it held during the rule of the Shah; but whereas Iran has embraced Radical Islam and usurped hereditary monarchy in the process, Arab states where the old ways have been retained have always regarded post-Revolutionary Iran as a basket case and prime sponsor of terrorist groups, refusing to eject US Naval bases from their territory and failing to respond to Iranian entreaties to take charge of security for the region. Therefore, they have been earmarked by Iran as the enemy as much as the instigators of this conflict; and the people of these nations are now enduring the kind of aerial assaults the people of Israel are accustomed to on a daily basis.

President Trump’s speech encouraging the Iranian people to rise up against what remains of the regime that has governed the Islamic Republic with an iron first for decades seemed to suggest there would be no conventional invasion by Western forces into Middle Eastern enclaves as happened a quarter of a century ago. For a man whose first term in office was characterised by a decidedly un-American reluctance to militarily intervene in foreign affairs – choosing instead a more diplomatic route via summit meetings with Kim Jong-Un and Putin – the Donald’s sudden conversion to action perhaps reflects the urgency that comes with a realisation there will be no third term. Iran’s nuclear programme has been a dangerous thorn in the side of the West for a long time, and the prospect of Iran possessing the Bomb is not one which ensures a good night’s sleep; its refusal to cease uranium production was destined to provoke a violent response sooner or later, and there have been numerous signposts on the way to this latest outbreak of strikes indicating what was coming. It seemed to be merely a matter of when.

One only has to think of Syria to know how Middle Eastern regimes are prepared to go down fighting, something which suggests a clean and swift ‘regime change’ is not necessarily guaranteed, even if the Iranian people take Trump’s advice and rise up of their own accord. There could be years of bloodshed ahead, with or without a physical American presence; but there was something undoubtedly inevitable about current events that Iran itself did nothing to prevent – and that’s worth remembering.

© The Editor

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PROGRESSIVE ROCKS

Posted on by victorialucas38

Calling all queer eco-warrior immigrant Trans Muslims! Forget the Lib Dems and kick open the borders! There’s a new ghetto in the rainbow nation where you can all live in multicultural harmony and it’s called the Greens. Led by a man who can enlarge breasts by the power of thought alone, the former one-issue party now has a veritable chocolate box of minority passions to feed your fantasies (and your fetishes), and one that can triumph over the Far-Right, fascist white toxicity of that evil vehicle for neo-Nazism, Reform. Welcome to Wonderland, or as it used to be known, Gorton and Denton. Yesterday we saw the ugly sectarian future in the shape of a by-election in a former Labour stronghold, a contest in which the electorate were neatly divided along racial and religious lines as a coalition of lunatic fringes seized control of the constituency. The indigenous working-class voted Reform whilst the immigrant community allied itself with Far-Left activists and middle-class idealists to push the governing party into the bronze medal position. It would appear the fine line separating the two distinct strands of the Uni-Party was too slender a gap to distinguish Labour from Tory, and the voters of this innocuous enclave of Greater Manchester opted for extremities. At least one can see the wide divide between Reform and the Greens; there’s no possibility of confusing the two. And the way this by-election was fought clearly highlighted the priorities of the triumphant party; an online campaign video fronted by the Greens’ winning candidate Hannah Spencer – a Woman of No Colour – saw her delivering her speech to the electorate in Urdu, thus excluding all natives from the democratic process.

There are already accusations of ‘family voting’ flying around, an illegal tactic more than familiar via the inherently corruptible system of postal voting in numerous Labour constituencies with a high Asian population; now that Labour is being abandoned by its dependable Muslim vote, the Islamic Mafiosi has simply switched its loyalties elsewhere, and the Greens have been the beneficiaries in Gorton and Denton, if indeed this technique was utilised to secure victory. But the victory for Hannah Spencer – as with the Honourable Members for Gaza who were elected at the last General Election – leaves a sizeable proportion of constituents effectively without an MP who will represent their interests at Westminster. Imagine if one were a white, working-class heterosexual male seeking the assistance of one’s local MP for whatever reason, and that MP was somebody in the vein of Hannah Spencer; how far to the back of the queue do you think you’d be pushed before you came to the conclusion it was all a waste of time? In an instant, another potential voter is utterly disillusioned with the one theoretical power every citizen has to effect change. If I lived in the constituency under the spotlight and woke-up this morning to find Hannah Spencer was now my local MP, I’d feel as though I no longer had a local MP, and I wouldn’t be alone. This is the problem when a candidate is elected on a platform of issues that matter to a minority: it excludes the majority, and where does the majority go then?

For Labour, this result was a predictable disaster. Many within the party are adamant that if Andy Burnham had been allowed to stand, Labour would have held the seat; but Sir Keir’s determination to prevent the Manchester Mayor from gaining a foothold at Westminster and thus eventually staging the inevitable leadership challenge meant he was willing to sacrifice Gorton and Denton to remain in power (at least for the time being). This is so blatant that even Labour MPs one would expect to be loyal to the man who led them to a landslide less than two years ago are openly laying responsibility for the defeat at Starmer’s door. MP for Leeds East Richard Burgon tweeted ‘Blame for Labour’s defeat lies squarely with Keir Starmer and his clique. They put factional interests over having the candidate best placed to win.’ Hull East MP Karl Turner echoed Burgon’s sentiments on the Today programme when he said, ‘The fact that Andy Burnham was blocked…who was the candidate who gave us our best chance…that’s why we are where we are. Andy Burnham would have won that by-election yesterday without a shadow of a doubt.’ Meanwhile, another traditional bedrock of Labour support expressed similar dissatisfaction with the leadership. Andrea Egan, general secretary of Unison, said ‘Under Keir Starmer the party is failing on every count, leaving the Greens to fill the vacuum.’ The advice to the PM from Unite general secretary Sharon Graham was stark. ‘Stop listening to your rich mates and start listening to everyday people,’ she said. Hmm, everyday people; who represents them in Parliament now? Not Hannah Spencer.

The Conservatives – remember them? – were downgraded so much that they lost their deposit, finishing behind Labour in lowly fourth place, although even they were placed higher than the Lib Dems, who (despite their best efforts) no longer appear to be the natural home for Progressive fruitcakes. The Greens now attract the old ‘Loony Left’ crowd as well as the Guardianistas and the Muslim vote, both of whom were previously copyrighted by Labour. Having long since left behind the white working-class, Labour had pinned its metropolitan hopes on its tried and trusted post-1997 support base without realising that support base has defected elsewhere; the illusory landslide of 2024 was more a case of the Tories losing the Election rather than Labour winning it, with the electorate lending their vote to Sir Keir as the most effective means of ensuring the Tories didn’t get in again. Some in the upper echelons of the Labour Party seem to have interpreted this victory as a ringing endorsement of Starmer himself and the Party as a whole, yet were that the case, how was it that within a matter of months Starmer was the most loathed Prime Minister in living memory and his administration was generally recognised as one of the worst governments anyone could remember. None other than Peter Mandelson was once heard to say that Labour need not concern itself with wooing the white working-class as they would always vote Labour anyway; that vote was taken for granted in the same way the succeeding bedrock of Labour support was in turn taken for granted. And bereft of those whose vote could be relied upon, who can Labour rely upon now?

A syrupy slew of #BeKind bollocks flowed from Hannah Spencer’s victory speech – this time helpfully delivered in English; and at times it was difficult to discern if the Green candidate had just been voted into Parliament or was accepting an award at the BAFTAs. ‘We have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other,’ she said. ‘We can demand better without hating each other. We can do that together.’ The divisive dogma of Progressive politics was writ large, wearing a smiley face to disguise the reality of its ‘inclusivity’; what a shame that didn’t extend to patting a tourette’s sufferer on the head by inviting him along to the shindig. Like other single-issue parties who have had to expand their raison d’être to broaden their appeal – the SNP and Plaid Cymru, for example – the Greens have taken the same route whereby only specific causes are embraced, and we all know what they are. Let’s just say they’re not going to address the pressing issues that impact on the lives of most people in this country, mainly because they don’t fit the remit. This by-election and its outcome seems to epitomise the nihilistic self-harm the nation is inflicting on itself via the cosseted elite who run it.

The Gorton and Denton by-election was as cynical an example of the way in which politics is run today and how it will be run in the future as it’s possible to get. The Greens won because they skilfully united – if only temporarily – the disparate tribes who oppose Reform, and by doing so they helped push Matt Goodwin into second place. With Labour and the Tories no longer trusted by the electorate to deliver, chances are this will be the shape of things to come in 2029. So, go back to your constituencies and prepare for war.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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NATIONAL TRUST

Posted on by victorialucas38

Trust is something that can be hard to win, yet extremely easy to lose; and once lost it can be even harder to win back. What would it take for the Great British public to regain trust in, say, the police, or politicians, or the judiciary, or the legacy media, or the Royal Family, or utility companies? After all, the longer the people feel mistrust towards the institutions listed, the more engrained that mistrust becomes embedded as the natural order of things. And if the institutions themselves show little interest in winning back that trust, chances are it’s gone for good. At the moment, it would appear none of them are especially interested in convincing the wider public they are our servants; they either seem to prioritise minority causes over majority concerns – which excludes the greater proportion of the population; or they come across as being in it for themselves, feathering their own nests at the expense of the rest. The police responding disproportionately to offences most of us would regard as trivial whilst downgrading genuine crimes that can leave their victims traumatised; politicians pursuing agendas nobody but politicians want and wilfully deaf to an electorate they can’t – and seemingly don’t want to – relate to; the judiciary becoming an open house for ideologically-motivated wannabe activists acting in the interests of the few as opposed to the many; the legacy media singing propaganda shanties from a shared hymn sheet (and wondering why the audience is opting out of their designs for life); the Royal Family, embroiled in seedy scandal and in the regal appeasement of those whose faith-based dogma is hardly in the country’s best interests; and utility companies, privatised protection rackets with apparently no commitment to improving the lot of their customers. Such are the common perceptions of these institutions, and it’s difficult to envisage anything altering in the near future.

Needless to say, this is not a healthy state of mind for a society to be in; at one time, the institutions mentioned – with the utility companies in their nationalised incarnation – formed the bedrock of a society that seemed to work in a way it no longer does. And none of this has happened overnight; it’s been a slow, steady drip-drip of a transformation that has taken several decades to bring us to where we are now. Anyone in denial of this change often falls back on hackneyed criticisms of those who highlight the alteration of the nation, accusing them of nostalgic longing for a so-called Golden Age that never existed; they will say that this Rank ‘Look at Life’ view of Britain was always an airbrushed Technicolor fabrication that glossed over many of the iniquities that existed in British society in the 50s and 60s. Yet whilst it’s true that there were many iniquities at play within that version of Britain – and nobody should pretend otherwise – there certainly appeared to be a strong mutual contract between governors and governed that both parties agreed to adhere to for the greater good; and by and large, it worked. Sure, there were far more than a mere two tiers to our society back then, almost as many tiers as there had been in Dickens’s day; anyone wealthy enough for an expensive barrister to represent them in court was always more likely to walk away a free man than an accused left with little option but to opt for legal aid. But the divide wasn’t symbolic of a ‘Broken Britain’ in the way it is now; somehow, old-school inequality was just another facet of the equilibrium that held everything together.

Relics from this era are practically inseparable from the society that produced them in the same way an unearthed Bronze Age artefact is from its society, almost acting as physical evidence that it did exist despite denials to the contrary – even something as innocuous as an old telephone directory. I recently purchased one on eBay from 1973, covering the A-D section of the London Postal Area. And yes, while there are the inevitable (and unavoidable) nostalgic associations – particularly if one was alive in 1973 (as I was) – there’s still something about such an antiquated object that provokes an undeniably melancholic response, representing as it does a thoroughly lost world in its catalogue of redundant phone numbers belonging to people who are more than likely no longer with us – and even if they are, the addresses listed as their residences in 1973 could well have fallen beneath the wrecking-ball of progress decades ago; it’s like looking at a list of eternally unknown lives as much beyond the reader’s reach as that of a Medieval serf. Yes, a recorded voice would inform me the number was not recognised should I be so foolhardy to ring one of them, but the temptation is strong – as though I’d be connected to someone living in 1973 should I get through. I sometimes experience a similar sensation if I see a competition in a vintage magazine and part of me wants to cut out the coupon and post it to the address provided just to see what might happen.

At the time, the front cover of every regional edition of the telephone directory was printed in a different primary colour and was graced with a monochrome pencil sketch of a local landmark pertinent to the locality the copy covered; I remember the Leeds edition always seemed to feature Leeds Town Hall, so it’s fascinating to see images of the other regional editions when trawling online. Some of the copies for sale on eBay even come with the hallmark of an anonymous hand, a number hurriedly scrawled in Biro, perhaps back when they actually had directories in phone boxes as a caller quickly jotted down a number. I know it sounds silly that a mere telephone directory could resonate anything capable of provoking such an inexplicable emotional response, but it’s often the everyday ubiquitous items that we took for granted that do this better than any others. And again, it’s the fact that little remnants of this past survive as proof we didn’t imagine it that helps keep it alive as a real event in our heads – like Mr Benn returning from another adventure he begins to doubt actually happened until he finds a souvenir in his pocket.

But picking up eccentric slivers of the Britain we used to know on the likes of eBay won’t – and can’t – bring it back; nothing can do that when we have communities that are, unlike some, bereft of ‘community leaders’, left to fend for themselves without the support of the institutions they can no longer rely on. And when this is the case, what do they do when under attack – form vigilante groups and police their neighbourhoods? That was more or less what happened in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, with Loyalist and Republican communities looking after their own; but to use that far-from harmonious state of affairs as a blueprint for mainland Britain is a grim prospect. We didn’t need that in the rest of the UK when Ulster was ablaze because we didn’t have sectarian ghettos of the kind that are already well-advanced in the present day, with some even voting their own single-issue MPs into Parliament. This seems to be one more example of the country’s fragmentation into a Disunited Kingdom, something that has been allowed to develop like some untreated tumour on Britannia’s backside by many of the institutions that have both besmirched and abandoned the people they were supposed to be there for.

In the perennially-depressing here and now, it’s not surprising that anyone who can recall a time before years had the prefix ‘20’ naturally knows it can be so much better than this. And even if the hands on the clock can’t be reversed, there should be a path society can take that doesn’t have to be the one it’s on at the moment, for we all know where that leads. To want that isn’t nostalgic anymore than it’s racist or xenophobic or – God preserve us – ‘Far-right’. But so much of the frustration and anger prevalent today is down to the fact people feel so powerless and not in a position to alter the course, as though our destination is a foregone conclusion that the past 30 years have directed us towards. I suppose we could say our last chance to change that course will come in 2029; but that would require trust in the democratic process, and that appears to be yet another casualty of events, dear boy.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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THE GREAT PROGRESSION

Posted on by victorialucas38

The last post pondered a lot on progress, and how technological progress in particular has given our day-to-day lives a dramatic facelift over the past couple of decades. One problem with progress, however, is that there are inevitable casualties. Lest we forget, for every great leap forward in industry, a section of the workforce is suddenly no longer required; from the spinning jenny to AI, this is a pattern that has played out for almost three centuries, and although those affected gradually adapt and acquire new skills that remain in demand because machines have yet to be developed that can do every job in half the time, the impact of new technology on the lives of those outside of industry can be even more profound – and not necessarily in a good way. This is always worth remembering. For example, whenever any service that has been with us for most of our lives is threatened with extinction, we invariably experience a nostalgic rush because of its associations with the past. I remember when Woolworths disappeared from our high-streets around 15 years back, the announcement that its stores were to close resurrected collective childhood memories of perusing the pick ‘n’ mix counter, and the remaining stores were then abruptly packed with customers who hadn’t set foot in a Woolies for decades; and this has been a recurring side-effect of progress for a long time – perhaps ever since steam trains were decommissioned in the 60s and groups of enthusiasts sprang up to save engines from the scrap-yard. But to dismiss opposition to the loss of everything as mere misplaced nostalgia or irrational sentiment would be to play into the hands of those who impose progress upon the masses and often fail to take into account that sometimes the baby can be thrown out with the bathwater.

Yes, of course, the imminent disappearance of Radio 4 on Long Wave – pencilled-in for this September on the all-important Droitwich transmitter – is undoubtedly a source of regret from a purely nostalgic perspective for millions of listeners for whom it has been Radio 4 at its ‘purest’ since time immemorial. Nevertheless, there is more than one reason as to why the BBC has taken this decision. Firstly, the infrastructure in place to radiate the LW signal is entering its twilight years, with maintenance increasingly difficult due to the fact that parts in need of replacement are no longer being manufactured, and the whole system is approaching the end of its life after a century of dedicated service. Secondly, embedded within the 198 KHz Long Wave signal is something known as the radio tele-switch service, which actually controls the on & off timings for older electricity meters between peak and off-peak rates; this has been a thing since 1984, and the system continues to control the heating and hot water in more than 800,000 homes. Although the tele-switch signal doesn’t interfere with the Radio 4 signal, the shutting down of the main purpose for the Droitwich transmitter – and presumably its equivalents in Scotland, at Westerglen and Burghead respectively – throws the continuation of the tele-switch service into doubt. Energy suppliers are more than aware of this, which is why they’ve spent the past few years force-feeding us the superior delights of Smart Meters – even if the aggressive sales techniques of some would put TV Licensing to shame.

The Scottish sister transmitters of Droitwich transmit to some of the wildest terrains north of the border, and though it’s not yet clear whether the closing of Radio 4 LW at Droitwich (and therefore Westerglen and Burghead) means the signal will cease altogether or merely the BBC programming is ending, the fact remains that the more remote areas of the UK are still dependent on a service the powers-that-be are constantly telling us is outmoded and irrelevant in ‘the Digital Age’. Some parts of the country – i.e. rural – are not exactly blessed with great reception when it comes to digital services; indeed, you don’t even have to live in the sticks to appreciate how crap DAB radio is when compared to FM. I have both in my household, and I know which provides the easier listen. But the thousands who will feel the loss of Long Wave are basically viewed as collateral damage by the BBC, as were TV viewers 40 years ago when the 405 line signal was switched-off. Again, it was the less-populated and more inhospitable corners of the country that felt this the most, those who were still unable to receive UHF 625 line pictures when the system was poised to become the only one available. It would be another four or five years before the sufficient number of relay stations were active to rectify this problem, but the television industry pressed on regardless. Additionally, there is one other important factor regarding Long Wave. In the event of a national emergency, when vulnerable digital systems could be knocked-out by sophisticated hackers working either for Putin & Co or Beijing Electronics Ltd, LW would remain a virtually impregnable means of transmitting vital information to a populace whose entire method of long-distance communications had suddenly vanished. Would it really be such a wise move to discard that – or any analogue system that could serve as backup – simply for the sake of ‘progress’?

And from national emergency to personal emergency: In the great rush to expunge the old and present the new as the only option, what of the planned switch-off of the old copper landline telephone network, something telecom companies have been engaged in for a while, forcibly transferring the customer to digital alternatives whether the customer wants them or not? Recent events in Cornwall have exposed anew the inherent short-sightedness when it comes to the wisdom of this decision. In the wake of Storm Goretti last month, hundreds of homes were without electricity for over four days, and those in rural areas with poor mobile reception – and therefore still reliant on landline phones – found themselves completely cut off from the outside world. The old copper lines being powered from an exchange meant phone calls could still be made from a house in the middle of a power-cut, whereas a fibre network system can only function if there is power at the caller’s end. If the internet goes down, everything goes down. Although I’ve been spared this kind of scenario, there have been occasions ever since my landline, television and internet were interlocked in which both the first two have ceased working if the third has gone on the blink, like a couple of sympathetic unions coming out in solidarity when another downs tools. Ofcom says an hour of backup is necessary for ‘vulnerable customers’, yet what good is a measly sixty minutes when power is out for four whole days?

In 2024, the then-telecoms minister Chris Bryant argued a battery backup lasting eight hours was a necessity, yet only a limited number of mobile masts have the generator capacity to make this possible, something Ofcom understandably doesn’t publicise. And for the elderly living alone in more isolated locations, it’s not just the digitally-improved landline that stops working when the power is cut. Some have personal alarm systems and intruder alarms connected to the landline that would abruptly cease to function in such an event, and they may well live in a mobile black-spot. Promises that pensioners and other customers classed as vulnerable would not be forced to switch over before the appropriate safety measures have been put into place have yet to be carried out. One almost feels as though these customers attempting to highlight their predicament to the relevant authorities would probably receive a response along the lines of ‘Have you downloaded our new app?’

Sure, it’s easy to put down any gripe that the disappearance of, say, a high-street branch of a bank in favour of online banking, is simply nostalgic yearning for an age that has now passed; but we have to remember that not all of our citizens are tech-savvy and in a position to convert to digital currency overnight. Bewilderment amongst a generation that were too late to buy into the great progression of the 21st century is a factor that shouldn’t be overlooked when corporations and their lobbied government pals are promoting progress at the expense of common sense. One could say that society as a whole may reap the long-term benefits, but who reaps them in the meantime?

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/u56665294?fan_landing=true

MEALS ON WHEELS

Posted on by victorialucas38

The phrase ‘AI’ when loitering on the printed page can sometimes be misread, though I suppose that mainly depends on the font; one friend of mine recently referred to AI as A1, until I reminded her the A1 is a road that runs from London to Edinburgh; another friend kept referring to AI as Al, as in Al Green, renowned Soul crooner from the 70s. However one pronounces it out loud, the increasing (not to say increasingly-tiresome) proliferation of the phrase across endless misread articles is generally in the context of a threat, almost as though AI were the next virus we all have to be inoculated against. Certainly, AI is a threat to many occupations, though as a rule, when we are routinely informed of how AI technology has been rendering human labour redundant it tends to be in the confines of the white-collar workplace, usually involving job titles most of us would struggle to define anyway. It’s safe to say the more traditionally-physical professions of plumber, electrician, builder or painter-and-decorator are AI-free for the moment, as technology has yet to advance to the stage where bots can be trusted to attend to such tasks on their own. That said, there are some jobs which have always required the human touch that are slowly being infiltrated by machines, one being that of takeaway delivery man.

A few months back, I noticed a trio of odd little miniature vehicles parked on the pavement in my neighbourhood and couldn’t quite work out what they were supposed to be whenever I kept passing them. They reminded me of an electronic novelty toy my brother had in the early 80s called Big Trak, which resembled a futuristic tank from an episode of ‘Battlestar Galactica’; it had a keypad on top, and by typing in particular numbers it would be off on its travels around the house, capable of undertaking 16 separate commands. Like most toys of this ilk, the novelty soon wore off, as Big Trak didn’t seem to do much other than crash into door frames; but little acorns and all that; barely 30-odd years later, the basic principles of Big Trak were considerably expanded for more constructive use. I guess it depends in whose hands the technology resides, reminding me of the point made by Jacob Bronowski in ‘The Ascent of Man’ when he observed the French were pioneers in mechanical technology in the 18th century, yet reserved it for clockwork toys to entertain the aristocracy; the British took the same technology and instead applied it to industry, leaping ahead of their global rivals in the process. Similarly, rather than limit the potential of today’s technology for novelty playthings, some electronic engineers in the US devised a groundbreaking means of delivering food to your door via small six-wheeled robots that could be programmed to journey to a specified destination and then return to their base. I found videos on YT from a decade ago when this concept was being tried out, making me realise it’s been around far longer than I imagined when I first stumbled upon the Uber Eats robots stationary on the street.

It wasn’t until I saw one of these little marvels at work, however, that I felt as if I’d seen the future – or I’d inadvertently stepped into some live-action remake of the Pixar classic, ‘Wall-E’. Trundling down the street towards me like R2D2 on a mission, the sight of an Uber Eats robot approaching is such a strange – albeit not unpleasant – experience at this embryonic stage of its working life that it can’t help but stop you in your tracks. I just stood watching with a big smile on my face, observing its journey until it turned the corner and disappeared from view, headed for God-knows-where. Having not heard much about them, I then looked them up online and found out they were being used for a trial period in my area. The Uber Eats robots have been developed by Starship Technologies, which is apparently based in Estonia. According to the PR guff, they’ve been used to deliver groceries by the Co-Op since 2022, carrying orders from the Uber Eats app. Starship claim deliveries can be completed in less than half-an-hour over distances totalling two miles and say they’ve already undertaken nine million deliveries across seven continents – with the robots expected to march into multiple European nations within the next couple of years. On the YT videos where the prototypes were being put through test-runs, the prospect of them being attacked by members of the public or being stolen were dealt with via alarms and various other means intended to dissuade such actions; I presume there are advanced security measures in place for the Uber Eats models, as it did cross my mind that some of the local areas where they were being tried out do contain their fair share of reprobates who might not view them quite so benignly.

The more recent YT videos from America showed some models actually travelling on the roads as well as highlighting attempts by the manufacturers to make the robots less alien and a little ‘Disneyfied’ by giving them faces, something which made them look like Thomas the Tank Engine reimagined by Dan Dare; but right now the Uber Eats versions are restricted to the pavement, with (one assumes) built-in sensors to prevent them clattering into doddery pensioners, small children, and mobility scooters. Naturally, whilst pedestrians like me merely see them as fascinating examples of cutting-edge technology filtering down to the banalities of everyday life and injecting a dash of colour into the drabness of the standard street furniture, for those who earn a living as delivery drivers it’s a different matter. I don’t know how much these enterprising inventions have cut down the workforces of those who employ them, but it’s inevitable some jobs will have been lost. I can’t quite envisage a mob of enraged Luddites on the rampage, carrying torches and pickaxes as they chase Uber Eats robots down the street; but if they do the business in their current form, the prospect of more sophisticated models emerging as the technology advances in the coming years means one can picture a time when delivery men for your local pizza place or supermarket are as much a thing of the past as signalmen at railway stations. Such is progress.

Of course, if these robots have successfully demonstrated food can be delivered to one’s door, there’s no real reason why other items can’t be delivered by similar means. I read just today of the chaotic situation at the Royal Mail whereby parcels have been prioritised at the expense of letters and cards, with some within the organisation bemoaning a lack of investment that has led to a shortage of postal vans and thus delays in deliveries. Will there be a near-future date when all brand-new front doors will henceforth have their letter-boxes down at the bottom in order for the robots to pop the mail through should the Royal Mail view them as a more efficient means of clearing the backlog of undelivered letters? The fact some of us have steps outside our front doors might present the current delivery robot with a problem – not unlike the dilemma that used to face the Daleks whenever they were confronted by a staircase; but I’m sure this will be something that the bright people refining these creations will find a solution to. Yes, the possibilities are endless – and, let’s face it, robots could probably do a better job than some delivery men when it comes to delivering parcels purchased online.

As mentioned earlier, the threat of AI technology to jobs that have always depended upon human beings to get them done is something happening off-camera for those who don’t work in an office block; but witnessing an Uber Eats robot in action gives the rest of the world the opportunity to see what it can do. Even though such a sight will gradually lose its novelty factor once they become a commonplace addition to our streets, the chances are they’ll be absorbed into the retail industry in the same way those bomb-detector robots have become a key element of army bomb-disposal squads. Speaking personally, now that the trial of the Uber Eats robots appears to be at an end in my neighbourhood, I was quite sorry to see them go. But I’ve no doubt they’ll be back – and coming soon to a street near you.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/u56665294?fan_landing=true