Roy Jenkins’s Lunch in Holloway Prison
Roy Jenkins is best known for being a prominent Labour politician of the 1960s and 1970s. I suspect he was someone who knew his food and drink, as many of those educated in one of our oldest Universities do.
In the early 1970s, C used to visit Holloway Prison as part of the Cameron Group. She often described the group in the way the inmates did and that was “The Ladies in the Pink Hats”. It probably applied to some of the group, but not to C.
One night she came home and told the story about the new Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins and his visit to the prison. He said that he wanted to go everywhere and this didn’t go down well with the governors and the guards. But remember Roy’s father had been in jail because of a riot during the 1926 General strike, so quite rightly, he probably had strong views about how inmates should be treated. He certainly wasn’t a hanger and flogger.
After the tour, the governor suggested lunch and had probably prepared a lunch to impress the Home Secretary. But Roy said he wanted to eat with the prisoners.
After a heated argument, he pulled rank and did so.
Halfway through his meal, he pushed it away muttering something like, “I wouldn’t give this to my dog.”
Being Home Secretary is not an easy job.
Is Rick Perry What the United States Needs for President?
It is being reported that Rick Perry is seeking to gain the Republican nomination to stand against President Obama.
Let’s face it, he’s for capital punishment, the NRA and against publicly funded health care to name just three issues.
He may not be good for the US, but just as with other right-wing presidents of the past, it may well mean that the rest of the world benefits from immigration of some of the United States brightest thinkers, scientists, doctors and engineers.
Does Ed Milliband Want To Be Labour Leader?
Ed Milliband is one of these people, who are very anonymous. Take most senior politicians and you have an image of them in your mind. If you look at Labour politicians of the last few years, there were a few characters, whether you liked their policies or not.
Surely though Ed Milliband must be one of the most unrecognisable Labour politicians of recent years as he just looks like so many of the others.
So why is this a problem?
If say I see someone on the television news saying something that I might find interesting, I like to know who’s speaking. With Ed Milliband, unless there’s a caption under the screen, I have difficulty recognising him.
And it’s not just Labour politicians, it’s a good percentage of all of them. I suspect that the selection process is so tight these days, that people like Kenneth Clarke, Boris Johnson, John Prescott and many others would not be selected. If you look at the women politicians, the ones that stand out have their little quirks. Just like my neighbour many years ago, Gwyneth Dunwoody.
To illustrate my point, there’s a government minister on the box at the moment, and I’ve no idea who he is.
I would think that Ed Milliband could rectify this anonymity problem, but he diesn’t seem to be trying hard.
So why did I give this post the title I did?
It would appear that he is not backing the strikes today. Is this because he is trying to be sensible or because he doesn’t want the job. The BBC puts their view here.
If he isn’t backing the strikes, his stance is surely a very simple way to alienate a large proportion of his supposedly core support.
You might ask what my view is on the strikes. I’m usually against strikes as in most cases the fact that a strike is called is a failure of company and employees to see the sensible solution. I’m not going to name them as I don’t want to shilt them, but there are lots of good companies and organisations, where there has never been a sniff of a strike.
With pensions, there was bound to be a problem, as the numbers just don’t add up. And they haven’t for years! So the blame for this problem is all of those politicians of the last fifty years or so, who put their head in the sand and hoped that some new disease would start to kill people at 65.
Should High Earners Be Allowed Subsidised Housing?
I have always felt that houses should be used to provide the maximum number of individual dwellings.
For instance, I don’t believe that people should own two houses, that they keep for their personal use. But if they want to, then they should not get any reliefs on the second house. In the past I’ve owned and lived in two houses and it doesn’t have too much to recommend for itself. Some may claim it’s nice to live in London in the week and go to their cottage at the weekend, but do they ever realise that that cottage probably causes someone to not have a house. If you live in two houses, then the second house should be taxed to provide subsidised houses in the area.
Buying to let is different, as you are providing a service of housing for someone else. And if you are successful, then you pay tax on it.
But what really gets me is those, who live in Local Authority or Housing Association properties and earn enough money to either rent privately or even buy their own house. The case of the ex-Labour Minister, Frank Dobson, reported in the papers today is scandalous. He should be booted out forthwith, so that someone else, who needs it, can have the property!
All of these abuses should be tightened up and hopefully the government is doing something about it. And while they are at it, they should be tougher on those, who illegally sublet their properties.
I should also say that sometimes, I feel guilty about having a reasonably large house all to myself.
To return though to the Dobson scandal! In my year at school, Animal Farm was the set book for GCE O Level. George Orwell was so right and it is fairly obvious, what his view of NuLabor would have been!
Belgians Break the Record
Belgian has just broken the record for the longest time a country has gone without a government.
So does it prove that often, when you are in a real hole, the best thing to do is stop digging.
I feel that one solution to the problem of political parties that have their own opposite agendas, might well be to agree how the taxes are raised to keep the country going and then let everybody get on with it. So many things in this country perform quite well, without any political interference. In fact, in some areas like food, as I showed with the bread story, that interference actually makes things worse.
Why Are Loaves Square?
Apparently, we’ve now had the square sliced loaf for fifty years. In my years, that’s fifty years too many.
But have you ever wondered why Britain fell so much in love with this awful product? Here’s an e-mail, I’ve just written to the BBC.
In the 1970s, I did some work for a major bakery group in the UK. I dealt with top management, some of whom had been bakers. And very much of the old school, who knew their bread.
So I asked why we had so much bad sliced bread and did they eat it.
They didn’t eat it and to a man, they took a sack of flour home and then baked it themselves.
The reason there was so much square sliced bread was that van drivers in those days were paid by commission and they could get most commission by cramming that sort of bread in the van. So they wouldn’t distribute the better class of bread, which didn’t fit so well.
Another interesting fact from this period, was that a lot of bread got returned to the factory. Harold Wilson and his government felt this waste pushed up the price of bread, so they banned returns. Do you remember happy bread, which was a different colour for each day?
In fact, the non-return policy, meant that the price of bread rose, as the returned bread had a whole lot of uses like animal feed, which then became unprofitable. The returned bread just went into the waste bin at the shops and then probably into landfill.
All in all it’s a sad tale, which shows that often the reasons for things being the way they are, are not what you’d expect.
I’ve also just watched the BBC Breakfast report on 50 years of the awful sliced loaf. No wonder there are so many coeliacs or those that are allergic to wheat-based bread in the UK, judging by what goes into it. All of those bakers years ago were right!
Waking Up In Cloud-Cuckoo World
I woke at about five this morning and put the radio on to listen to the news. One of my favourite books is The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
I felt that I’d woken up in a world where everyting was being run by idiots, who had lost their sense of where they were supposed to be, but were still of course getting all of their perks and salaries. Or in the case of various dictators were still milking all their subjects for ever cent they’d got.
The first story was the problems in Syria, where all sane people agree that President Assad must go. The president used to be an opthalmologist, which in my book is a sort of doctor, so why is he blinding some of his people and killing others in an effort to cling to power? And why were we still supporting this despot until recently?
Then there was the story about Greece having a referendum on cuts. Turkeys and Christmas come to mind. Of course they’ll vote yes to the cuts!
The Germans are supposed to be efficient. But they can’t seem to find the source of their e-coli outbreak. So what does the EU do about it, have a meeting?
I could add other stories, where those in charge are going one way and doing their utmost to keep their high-salaried jobs.
Don’t get me going on the NHS, where at present I just need a repeat prescription and it seems to take days at my GP. At the previous one, I sent in an e-mail and either collected the drugs or the signed prescription on the next working day. How many highly-paid civil servants does it take to not impliment that very simple policy?
And now to cap it all, BBC Breakfast is talking about the lack of cuckoos this year. They’re all alive and well and living in politics and government, all over the world!
Child Abuse Cases, Baby P and Sharon Shoesmith
I’m not going to comment on the recent judgement in Sharon Shoesmith’s appeal, as it would appear that we have all sorts of groups and interests colliding in a Court of Law, with everybody claiming the moral highground.
I have just looked at the timeline of the tragic case at the centre of it all, Baby P. As I thought he died a few months before my late wife, C.
I can remember discussing this case in particular and many others in general with C over the years.
She often despaired at the ineptitude and sometimes downright indifference of some social workers and police and sometimes suffered mentally, as she tried to sort it all out as a barrister. Not that she did many cases as tragic as Baby P. She always said that she was lucky and could come home with a clear conscience,unlike many front-line workers. Not that she didn’t worry about some of the really bad cases she handled.
She would have argued that a lot of the problems were down to constant changes in the law, with large amounts of retraining, were cutting the efficiency of the very services, the changes were trying to improve. She would always tell stories about how she’d been involved where yet another baby had been taken into care from an abusive family. Some families were costing Social Services hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
So now that money to these services is being cut, staff are further stressed and we have well-meaning politicians shoving their oar in, I think it unlikely we’ll see much improvement in the next few years.
More on Chris Huhne
Popbitch also dicloses two facts about Chris Huhne.
His father made his money selling speed cameras to the government. If this is actually true, then surely he should have known that you can get caught for speeding.
Hi mother used to be the voice of the speaking clock. If that is true, there is a history of public speaking in the family.
I Bet Elliot Morley Wishes He Was French!
Elliot Morley has just been jailed for expenses fraud for sixteen months.
What would he have got in France?
After all, the French believe that Dominique Strauss Kahn is innocent and it’s all a setup, so I suspect someone like Eliot Morley would have probably been given a guided tour of the Bastille.
The Anonymous Widower 