Prudence in Cloud Cuckoo Land
I’m watching Prudence this morning on BBC Breakfast Time.
He just doesn’t believe the mess he’s got us in. He even had the cheek to use the P-word.
Sian Williams isn’t one of the most forceful of interviewers, but seems to have a very different grasp of figures. She is quoting organisations like the OECD and he is saying that they are just wrong.
The sooner he goes the better!
Saying Sorry is Good for Your Business
I first heard this story on Radio 5 and it’s here in full in the Daily Mail.
Nottingham University does a lot of excellent research and this detailed study shows how a simple apology can be better than offering unsatisfied customers a cash payout. The experiment was interesting too, in that it was carried out using a company that made sales on eBay. I wonder how much other good research can be performed in this manner?
The levels of satisfaction were actually 42% with an apology and 23% when a cash payout was offered. So it wasn’t just a small difference!
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post talking about the service I got with a freezer from John Lewis.
So perhaps things are getting a lot better.
They may be in commercial companies, but we will really only have completed the customer-relations revolution, when the various Agencies of the Government get their customer focus perfect. There are ones that are good, but there are others that are terrible.
Get it right and it could help the next government govern for a long time.
An interesting aside to saying sorry, is that an old friend used to run a large hospital department. They implimented an immediate sorry-policy and it cut the level of complaints drammatically.
Is There Racist Opposition To President Obama?
I’ve always respected Jimmy Carter. He drew a lot of short straws as President, but I think since leaving office he has shown himself to be a proper statesman. Often this is the test of a good politician, as when they are removed from the ties and responsibilities of office, they show their true colours and dreams. Sometimes they lose all respect and rightly so.
So when Jimmy Carter says that opposition to President Obama is racially based, we should all listen.
If At First You Don’t Succeed…
The full quote is.
If at first you don’t succeed, then try, try and try again.
Strangely, I can’t find the origin on the Internet, although there is a version, which adds “Then Quit” to the end.
But obviously, Prudence’s law officers don’t have quitting in mind, when they consider the case of three accused of a bomb plot to blow up airliners. They are dint to try, try, try and try again until they get the right result.
I don’t look at this with any view of justice, but it strikes me that if they’ve failed twice to get a conviction, that there’s every chance that a third attempt will fail. Especially, as it will be impossible to find a jury that has not heard of the case.
I think now is the time to give up!
The CRB/ISA Farce
It’s not often that those two newspapers at the opposite end of the political spectrum; the Guardian and the Daily Mail, agree on anything. And Esther Ranzten is in the same camp too.
We need to have checks on those that work with children, but are we looking in the wrong place and the wrong way for a start? I don’t have the figures, but aren’t don’t a lot of serious cases involving child abuse and even murder down to the parents or those that live with one of the parents?
So perhaps we should do checks on all parents. And while we’re at it, lets check grandparents, like me! And au-pairs too!
Everybody too, was getting under the collar about this on Nicky Campbell’s phone-in this morning. And probably rightly so, as estimates say that over eleven million of us, will have to be checked.
No-one seems to have done any risk analysis on this. Does anybody look at the statistics of harm that comes to children?
Lets take fire for a start. This bland set of statistics gives the number of fire deaths in 2005. It shows that 200 or so died in domestic fires, of whom a proportion were children. Do we insist on smoke alarms working? No! A fire officer once told me that kids remove the PP9 batteries from them for their toys and game machines.
And then road accidents!
We need a proper holistic strategy that gives maximum protection to everybody and not just children. And it needs to be done through education, training and watchfulness from everybody.
Not by the heavy hand of bureaucracy!
One caller on Nicky Campbell’s show suggested that it was a government money-raising exercise. I couldn’t possibly comment, but eleven millions at upwards of fifty pounds a time is a lot of revenue for Prudence and his cronies.
But perhaps the most chilling example of how this will all fail concerns the case today of Russell Carter. He had been convicted of armed robbery in the US, but this was unknown in the UK and he was able to get jobs that put people in danger. In the end he murdered his boss.
Michael and Rochelle
Michael Shields, who was jailed for an attack in Bulgaria has now been released by the Home Secretary using his prerogative. The conviction was always dubious, especially when it involved such a horrendous offence. You just feel that in such cases, everyone should make their best efforts to get the right conviction. I don’t think they did here and preferred the anyone would do to discourage the others. I have not seen the evidence, but because that eminent organisation, Fair Trials International, have been supporting Mr. Shields, the conclusion is most likely just.
Rochelle Adams is a 19 year-old Canadian, who made the mistake of falling in love and getting married to Adam from Wales. In fact, she was just a few months younger than my late wife was when we got married in 1968, We succeeded and were married for 39 years until her untimely death.
A few years ago, Rochelle would have been allowed to stay in the United Kingdom, as is fit and proper for anybody setting out in that noble joining between two people. But because we must protect people against forced marriages, she can’t, and so Adam and Rochelle must start their married life for eighteen months five thousand kilometres apart until she is 21. She should then be able to get a spousal visa. Or one would hope so, but if Prudence’s disreputable bunch are still in power, you could imagine a different result.
Now the Home Secretary has the power under the Forced Marriages Act to allow Rochelle to stay. As the BBC says.
He had the discretion to let Mrs Wallis remain with her husband at their home near Aberystwyth but refused to do so because many other innocent victims may also be caught out by the same rule.
But he remains stubborn and is hiding behind the bureaucratic mess that has been created in the last few years. We need to protect against forced marriages, but there are better ways of doing it. After all one forced marriage case involved a thirty-year-old or so doctor! Did their Act help?
Perhaps though you can see his reasoning. Allow one exception and he’d have to allow many more because of a very badly drafted piece of legislation. And let’s face it Prudence and his cronies have been responsible for a lot of that!
Or could I just be cynical and say there are more Labour votes on Merseyside than in the Aberystwyth area?
Japan’s New Wacky First Lady
It’s in the Independent so it must be true.
Technology That Works
The postman came about five minutes ago.
He delivered two pieces of post that mattered amongst all the old junk; a new card for Sky and a Voter Registration Form from St. Edmundsbury.
The card had been flagged up on my Sky system for about a week now. A simple message just told me that the card had been posted and could I check the post. I took out the old card and entered the new one. It worked first time. As it should.
The Voter Registration Card had only one problem. The URL was rather complicated, especially as it included St. Edmundsbury, which is not the easiest word to type. But after a couple of pages and a few clicks, I’d updated everything. Or in my case, just told them that a very lonely man, who spends a lot of his time blogging is still alive!
Seriously though, life isn’t that bad all the time.
But both systems worked without a hitch and with the exception of the URL couldn’t be faulted.
An aside here, is that if you’re developing an on-line system, make sure that the URL is short. There are lots of six and seven character ones available. I even recently acquired mx73.com. Short and memorable.
I just wonder how less stressful our lives would be if so many of the other things that we have to do in our lives were just as simple. We’re getting there, but not as fast I would like.
One thing that works round here, is that when my wife died, the Registrar informed the council, so that I got an automatic Council Tax discount, after I signed and dated the form they sent me. A very civilised piece of joined up thinking.
Do all councils work this way?
And then we have the excellent system for Vehicle Excise Duty, that has cost the Post Offices so much money, as who in their right mind queues for an hour to buy it.
Berlusconi Sues
So Silvio Berlusconi is going to sue the media all over the Europe for the reporting of his life in the last few years.
I did have rather a laugh at this story, as although I might like to be seen in the company of large numbers of gorgeous bimbos, or in Berlusconi’s case is it bimboni, but I really am not the man to do that. I’m just too short at just 1.71 metres or five foot seven and a bit in Imperial units, which everybody still keeps using, to attract them in more than odd numbers. And anyway, I’m too busy writing software to try to organise my life around bevys of young ladies.
But it got me thinking. Am I really too short?
And then I found this web page. When I looked at it, it had an advert for elevator shoes!
But I’m taller than Berlusconi (1.62 m.), Sarkozy (1.65 m.) and Putin (1.67 m.). I was surprised about the last one, so perhaps that’s why all those action man pictures show him by himself. Or on a pony!
So perhaps, I’m in the wrong job. I think though most British Prime Ministers are fairly tall. I remember being in a lift with John Major in Athens and he towered above me. So I’m out! And who’d want the job anyway.
My late wife did her first barrister’s pupilage in libel chambers. Her advice to Silvio would have been don’t sue. You’ll only give lawyers a lot of money and make matters worse. Even if you win!
I’ll end with a quote from Mrs. Merton to Debbie Magee – “So Debbie, what first attracted you to multi millionaire Paul Daniels?”
The Anonymous Widower 