TEN THINGS TO DO FROM 27 JULY TO 12 AUGUST

In two weeks time, once the Olympic Games has finished shitting money into the pockets of the shareholders of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Proctor & Gamble, Dow Chemical and the other games' 'partners'; and Team GB laments / celebrates its pathetically small / huge haul of medals, the UK will be plunged back into the morass of economic despair. That's the same morass that we never actually came out of but has been placed on temporary hold while everyone got excited about an old woman's trip on a barge down a river and lots of foreigners arrive to run about a bit, jump, swim, cycle, row and throw things.

The economic despair has been accompanied by a meteorological one, after the Eurozone's air-sucking panic over its mounting debts pulled the jet-stream southwards, then covered the UK in water and effectively cancelled our summer. By early September, when the youngsters return to a Gove-Academy-Free-School-Sponsored-by-BMW, the whole olympic media-fart will be an ugly memory but for those of us in olympic-denial, we need to get through the next two weeks relatively unscathed before everyone joins us in misery again.

So, here are the Fourth Column's suggestions for:

TEN THINGS TO DO (OR NOT TO DO) TO AVOID THE 2012 OLYMPICS!

1) Don't watch or listen to the BBC, and block all BBC websites on your multi-media equipment. Director-General, Mark Thomson's, parting gift to the nation is a self-serving, sycophantic, ratings-grabbing investment of millions of licence-fee payers' pounds to fawn over the 'elite' of world sport; including, no doubt, the queues of asylum-seekers that just happened to have arrived with their nation's squad. It's started already. But that's a side-show compared with the fact that all presenters on BBC radio and television have been injected with some olympic-love-potion to increase hyperbole. Top Tip: Have a bucket or some vomit bags available in case you select a BBC channel by mistake. 

2) Don't leave your home. If, like me, you have sensibly hung on to the "Protect & Survive" material from the 1970s, this will help. The booklet's blurb says, "...how to make your home and your family as safe as possible under a nuclear attack". Just cross out "under a nuclear attack" and write in "during the 2012 Olympic Games" and follow the same instructions in the booklet. And if you were one of those lucky enough to have had surface-to-air missiles put on your roof, this will make the whole experience just so much more real. Top Tip: Make sure that the brown paper bags you get are big enough to fit entirely over your head and don't cut out eye-holes as that defeats the object and, frankly, is a little bit childish.

3) Read a book. It won't take too long to read "Protect & Survive" so make sure that your "Inner Refuge" is replete with appropriate books. Anything by Will Self will do. Top Tip: Take a huge dictionary in with you.

4) Prepare a bid for the 2024 Olympics for Syria on your laptop/i-pad. Istanbul, Tokyo and Madrid are already the preferred candidates for 2020 so you'll have to think well ahead, especially if Turkey was to win and you have to make a case for consecutive events in the Middle East. Prepare your material as if you were Bashar al-Assad. Assume that you will still be in power / still alive / not in jail for war-crimes in twelve years' time, and that Damascus remains your stronghold - a big plus with all of its lovely biblical history. Focus on new 'sports' for inclusion in the 2024 games in order to give your bid an edge; such as Kalashnikov Tennis,  IED-in-the-sand Triple-Jump, Collateral Damage Shot Put, Civilian Diving (For Cover), Synchronised Carpet-Bombing, etc. Top Tip: Do this during the second week of the 2012 Olympics...may be a waste of time if you start this straight away...

5) Alter entries on Wikipedia. Select the Wikipedia entries for some very high profile Olympians and update them. For example, you could change Jessica Ennis's entry to show that her parents were actually Vinnie Jones and Hope Powell instead of Vinnie Ennis and Alison Powell. A few letters altered and Mark Cavendish becomes a Manx cat and he rises to prominence as a Springer spaniel; and Rebecca Adlington is a free-basing swimmer! Hours of fun. Top Tip: prepare several e-dentities and use cloud technology.

6) Get pissed and stay pissed. This is a stand-alone option (or a fall-down-alone option if successful). Care has to be taken, however. All sorts of things can happen when drunk and these may include watching some of the Olympics. But at least you're unlikely to remember it. Top Tip: Mr Tesco is knocking out some booze at silly prices and, for a small fee, will deliver direct to your "Inner Refuge". 

7) Write letters or emails to your MP and to members of the Cabinet, Shadow Cabinet and the House of Lords. Basically, these are the bastards that started it all and the ones in the Coalition will be looking for the accolades when it's all over or blaming those in Opposition if it all goes tits-up. Explain in your communications that you've discovered that IOC President, Jacques Rogge, is a shape-shifting Draconoid alien reptile and all of his pals are going to descend from the mother-ship at the closing ceremony and take over the planet. Top Tip: Sign off all your mails as David Icke. 

8) Set up a Twitter profile. Use the name "The Old Man of Hoy" and post photographs of your genitals (if you're a bloke and your dick is very small - otherwise just paste some small-willie pics from the web). Top Tip: To make this work, make sure the pics are either astride a racing bicycle or that an appropriate bike is in shot. 

9) Telephone UK land-line numbers for loan providers. If you can't find the numbers just google Carole Vorderman. With luck, some of these companies will phone you anyway, at least ten times a day, once you've made contact with the first one and they then sell-on your details. When Shiv or Gita call you from London (Mumbai), agree to complete the process on the phone. Ideally, look for around £20,000 to buy some luxury item such as a car or a sailing dinghy. Make up a load of shit about your life and income so that you don't fail early stage credit scoring. The process should take up to three quarters of an hour - every time! At the end (just before you hand over the credit card number) tell Shiv / Gita that you've just remembered that you are independently wealthy and no more wish to borrow money than to jump into a barrel of cold monkey-vomit. If you're calling Ocean Finance, just say that you'd like to buy the Atlantic...believe me, they will still continue the process. Top Tip: If you have also selected option 6) above, then don't attempt this one.

10) As a desperate measure... if none of these ideas work for you, just go to any Olympic Venue - it really doesn't matter which one - with a six pack of Pepsi, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and attempt to pay for access with a Delta card while waving the South Korean flag in one hand and a picture of Kim Jong Un and his lovely new wife in the other. That should get you arrested by the "Brand Police" and banged up - without trial - for at least a fortnight. Top Tip: Don't forget to ask for the 'sensory deprivation' option upon checking in at the Scrubs, as I gather that they might have telly in the nick these days and all of your hard, creative work might be undone.

Best of luck, everyone, and I'll see you on the other side...hopefully

COMING TO OUR CENSUS

Data from the 2011 Census is now available from the Office of National Statistics! And it's incredibly dull, and it's only about England & Wales. Northern Ireland's and Scotland's data will come later, apparently. Can't wait. Breath bated...


A spokesperson from ONS was delighted to tell us all that "nineteen out of twenty" people completed the census. So that's a margin for error of 5.26%, then (depending upon how you approach the reciprocal fraction).


It's important to understand (or just guess) which people are within the 5.26% of the population who, basically, either couldn't be arsed to complete the form or felt that to do so might just have alerted the "authorities" to their existence. It'll be safe for the Daily Mail to assume that the 5.26% were (and probably still are) illegal immigrants and scumbags, whose refusal to complete the census will have had a massive impact on house prices and will have given everyone cancer. And they might even be right (apart from the house prices and cancer bits).


So the population of England and Wales increased by over three millions. This is, apparently, the largest increase - ever! But, before the government asks Bill and Melinda Gates to turn her attention to the UK, rather than Africa, for education on contraception, it has to be acknowledged that the increase is more to do with people not dying fast enough as opposed to too many people being born. Are babies 'people'? They are in ONS terms but I've never really heard anyone refer to babies as anything other than 'babies'; very rarely as 'people'. Perhaps the ONS is right.

Bill and Melinda Gates acknowledge their failure to
prevent Africans from having more children

There were 56,075,900 people that were prepared to declare themselves as being there at the time of last year's census. It's not clear from the data (OK, it might have been if I could've been bothered to read all the notes) whether this figure is an extrapolation from the returns, but if it isn't, then the number would increase by 2.95 million, which is just short of the declared population of Wales. Does that prove something? Probably not. These 56 million people are distributed within 23.4 million properties...or "households" as the census describes them...so this means that there are an average of 2.4 people in each of them. The actual statistic states that there were 23,366,000 Households with at least one usual resident. Amazingly, there does not appear to be any statistic that informs us of the number of households with at least one unusual resident. This is what we all really want to know. There are twenty households in the street where I live and there are at least three unusual residents and one really odd one. I know it might not be statistically significant, but that's an error of almost 8% on the 'usual' index, so that makes a complete mockery of the census already.

There were 195,000 people that were "non-UK residents" (scumbag-asylum-seekers, them, for Daily Express readers). These people qualify as NURs (or SASs) by reporting their intentions to remain in the UK for between three and twelve months. As the 2011 Census was gathered over a year ago, then I can assume that they've all gone home, so I don't see what all the fuss is about! Curiously, there were no NURs aged over sixty-five in Wales last year.

Daily Express avoids hyperbole...a bit

When the remaining data is published, we'll begin to learn more interesting stuff, like what proportion the population have decided to declare that they have an allegiance to some weird, cult religion like "Jedi", or the "Church of England".

In the 1950s, after the 1951 Census, the government publishing arm, HMSO, produced a statistical booklet based on the Census data. It was called "The Population of Britain - Broken Down by Age and Sex". It's a shame that the ONS don't publish their data with similarly hilarious titles; just to lighten the mood. A bit like the Think Tank, Demos, whose recent report into the issues around illegal drugs was entitled, "Taking Drugs Seriously" (Duh! Like we recreational users aren't serious?) The ONS has hundreds of opportunities to make us laugh. The follwoing publications and data sets could be re-titled:

House Price Index: Monthly Tables = The Mail on Sunday - We Knew They Were Right!
INAC01: Economic Inactivity by Reason = How Philosophy Creates Unemployment
EMP15: Job Related Training Received by Employees = G4S Made-up Shit
Division 19: Manufacture of Coke Products = The Best Ways to Cut Crack; Government Advice

Etc...

775 Lords a-Leaving?

Parliament seems to be missing the point on the issue of the reform of the House of Lords or, at the very least, failing miserably to see the huge elephant in the room. 

On the face of it, Dave is being forced to do something before the end of this parliament in order to retain the perception (at least) that there is a real coalition government, otherwise the weasly Lib Dems will start getting all uppity. Nick and his pals have enjoyed some minor concessions but it seems that this is the 'big one'; make or break for them. So Dave must be a pissed off that there is more than just a whiff of revolt within his own party and this week, some seventy or so ancient politicos have weighed in with...wait for it...a letter! Not an entry on facebook, or a tweet or an email, but an old-fashioned letter; probably on vellum and signed in blood with fountain pens.

The letter, from disaffected, old Tory peers (and backed by the 1922 Committee probably), is advising Dave that any proposal for reform of the Lords will not make them very happy (on the ludicrous assumption that Dave might actually give a shit about that, of course). Signatories include such heavyweights as Lamont - arguably the country's worst post-war Chancellor - and Howe, the back-stabbing assassin of Thatcher (so not all bad, then). In a thinly-veiled threat, these senile old gits from the red benches have opined that the Lords represent "...a vast reservoir of talent and experience, which complements the more youthful and vigorous House of Commons without ever being able to threaten it...". How risible. The 'experience' may resonate but the 'talent'? Why do you think half of these old farts ended up in the Lords anyway? And has anyone ever had a look around the commons, lately? There may be some youth, vigorous or otherwise, in evidence, but it's mostly a sea of wrinkly faces that meets the cameras on BBC Parliament. But the killing phrase from the extract is that the objectors acknowledge that the House of Lords is unable to 'threaten' the Commons (largely due to the revision of the Parliament Act under Blair) so for a few Tory Lords to send a threatening letter - with such an acknowledgement within it - is thus self-defeating and, therefore, surely a demonstration of their (lack of) 'talent'.

Lord Howe comes face-to-face with some "youthful vigour",
and doesn't understand...

Lamont, Howe and the others go on to say that having an elected House of Lords would "...remove the unambiguous democratic mandate the House of Commons currently enjoys...". That'll be the 'mandate' given by barely one quarter of the electorate to the likes of Cameron to occupy the office of Prime Minister, then? But that's an entirely different argument and one that is so stupidly and pointlessly included in their silly little letter.

 

But what of the elephant, or, it might be argued, the massive herd of seven hundred and seventy-five lumbering, ancient pachyderms that occupy the 'upper' house? In amongst the arguments for and against Lords' reform and the suggestions for such reform, the questions that consistently remain unanswered are...what is it for and why not just get rid?

 

 

Arguments against total abolition are, generally, based upon the need to have checks and balances in place around the actions of the government of the day. This might have been a legitimate argument several decades ago but as government is so unremittingly transparent these days through the immediacy of media and as a result of FoI legislation, the requirement to have a body that reviews what happens in the Commons is now redundant. The Parliament Act allows the Commons to railroad legislation without their Lordships' assent anyway and even though our constitution requires an old woman in a big house to sign parliamentary acts, the likelihood of her not doing so is about as likely as Ed Balls and George Osborne sharing a spliff, live on telly.

The rhetoric around how important the Lords are is bonkers. It is frequently pointed out that during Blair's time as PM, he was defeated only four times in the Commons, compared with over four hundred defeats in the Lords. The simple fact that he had a huge, working majority in the Commons for ten years and the Lords was full of old Tory buffers and privileged, hereditary peers had nothing to do with that, of course. And he changed the law in order that he could ignore old windbags anyway.

 

It seems that there is not one person in parliament today - and certainly not in Government - that is prepared to put his or her head above the castellated parapets of the Palace of Westminster and come out as an abolitionist. Well, shame on them. It also seems that a key objection, unbelievably, is that electing people to a second house would damage our constitution. Democracy; bad, then?

Even the alternate schemes for a second chamber are a fudge. The favourite at the moment is to have a "largely elected" House where there will be three hundred plus members to sit and snooze for a "non-renewable" period of fifteen years each. The "largely elected" concession means that there will also be around sixty appointed "independents" and and, of course, twelve 'ex-officio' Lords Spiritual (the Bishops of the Church of England) who, presumably, have been elected by god so that our moral compasses can be correctly aligned. How democratic.

Q: How can we run parliament without these people?
A: Much better...

For some reason, there appear to be no polls around on this subject (abolition). Neither is there even the slightest hint that anyone in parliament is interested in learning of the mob's view on Lords reform. I wonder why. Could it be that I've misread this and in fact the Lords are indeed all-powerful and feudalism isn't as dead as I thought? Or is it that the self-serving Civil Servants in Whitehall are so scared shitless that their committees will disappear up their collective arses (and that they won't get knighthoods and later elevations to the Lords as they believe to be their right) that they have been able to block all attempts at abolition in a manner of which even Sir Humphrey Appleby would have been proud?

And now the whole thing has been reduced to a political spat between the people that are supposed to be in Government together, "for the good of the country", I think they said in the rose garden back in 2010. Liars. Of course, Dave & Co will realise today (9 July) that the reform debate will result in a defeat in the Commons and will can the whole thing beforehand. What a waste of fucking time.

Apart from anything else, the abolition of the House of Lords (and the monarchy, while we're on) would save a large number of stoats. Anne Widdicombe is campaigning for hedgehogs this week and we're about to hear the outcome of the judicial review on badger slaughter. Maybe that's the new direction for government...all legislation should be based on how species of British flora and fauna (wild or domestic) will be affected. And elephants.

The price of doing nothing?

Everyone's a Theoretical Physicist now...

This week, wherever you look in the media, there's a story on the Higgs Boson.

Professor Giggs
Theoretically a Physicist?

(This also being the week that Sky announced its misguided intention to create a chat show called "On the Couch with Peter Crouch". Doubtless some Sky commissioning editor is right now considering a new programme called, "Discover the Higgs, with Ryan Giggs"...)

Years ago, before TV, Social Media, i-pads and the like, if a scientist made some wonderful discovery, he or she would inform their peers and publish 'a paper'. This would then be examined and, if the scientists's findings were accepted, then the discovery would be duly noted and authorised and could then be used in industry, medicine or whatever field it related to. Excellent approach; and one adopted even by recent 'celebrity' scientists from Einsten through to Peter Higgs himself.

Lately, it has become almost impossible to keep scientific discovery (or, indeed, anything) a secret. Tim Berners-Lee - the man credited with having invented the internet - hoist all scientists with this petard, in a way. News of notable events in science are whizzes around the web at something approaching the speed of light, like when the CERN pointy-heads thought they'd detected a particle travelling slightly faster than that a few weeks ago (or, possibly, next week). In the old days, their 'discovery' would have been tested to death before publication and they wouldn't have had to climb down in ignomony. I mean, Duh! Everyone knows that nothing can travel faster than light, and what they detected was a massless particle not dissimilar to a neutrino, which is about as close to nothing as you can get, but not actually nothing...so, something, then, and therefore slower?

The Standard Model - supposedly "Elementary" - But looks very difficult, really...

And that's part of the problem. The internet and the media that ride on it can provide almost everyone with information on just about everything within seconds. Inevitably, this means that almost everyone professes to be an expert on just about everything.

Take the Higgs Boson. Suddenly, from nowhere, there are experts. In every newspaper and on every radio and TV station, someone pops up to helpfully explain a) what a boson is, b) why it's called 'Higgs' and c) what its discovery means to everyone and everything. And I'm prepared to have a little wager that the research done to inform these articles (like this one) and news items probably didn't get a lot further than Wikipedia. And, of course, the Daily Mail reckoned that the discovery of the Higgs Boson would have an alarming impact on house prices in the Home Counties and that the Boson itself will give everyone cancer. The Daily Express  has concluded that Princess Diana was not, after all, killed by the Duke of Edinburgh, but by an attack of gluons and bosons, egged on by top and bottom quarks.

When something really complicated like this hits the airwaves, it is necessary to bring on an expert that is able to trump all other experts; one that is so believable, eloquent and telegenic, that all of the other scientists appear as mumbling morons in his shadow. Professor Brian Cox. He's amazing. It didn't actually matter what he said, either. Even just answering some simple questions in an interview (rather than gazing longingly into space or leaping from a helicopter into the grand canyon) his inferred gravitas was enough to convince the world of anything at all; even that Ed Miliband is a credible, leader of the Opposition or that George Osborne can do sums. But Cox was very cautious about the discovery of the Higgs Boson. In fact, he wasn't convinced that it had been discovered at all. None of the pointy-heads are, to be fair. All they have is a signature that suggests, in all probability, that something like the Higgs was present for one billionth of a billionth of a second after some photons had collided. But come on, Brian, just pretend for a minute that it's definitely the Higgs...what does that mean?

Professor Brian Cox taunts and confuses an old man - sort of restorative justice then?

Cox is non-comittal. All that has happened, apparently, is that these scientists have just scoped out the landscape that might enable us to understand how the Higgs works. It seems that the Higgs boson thing, in theory, is the glue / custard / woolly scarf / magic / scary-thing, that creates / defines / holds / expands / destroys the universe (delete as appropriate to the newspaper you have read).

So, in essence, nothing has really happened and it will be some time before (maybe never) we'll be able to build a starship and ride on a wave of bosonic, quarky, muony stuff using lepton-photon drive to explore the vastness of the universe and boldy split our infinitives where no man has been gramatically incorrect before. Shame, really...

In the meantime, Channel 5 has commissioned the following new shows:

Dark Matter, with Sepp Blatter

The Tau Neutrino, with Ronaldinho

The Hadron Collider, with Wesley Sneijder

Universal Expansion, with Alan Hansen
Name That Widget! With Steven Bridgett

Etc...

Ten Things It Would Make More Sense To Have Public Inquiries About Than 'Venal' Bankers

From just two articles in one Sunday newspaper on 1st July 2012:

"Venal / Shameless / Greedy / Reckless / Predatory / Shocking / Corrupt / Fraudulent / Criminal / Morally-bankrupt / Selfish / Shoddy / Deceitful / Rapacious / Havoc-wreaking / Warped / Rogue / Renegade / Monstrous / Cheating / Conspiratorial / Scamming / Colluding / Manipulative / Incompetent / Scandalous / Excruciating..."

All of these adjectives were used to describe bankers and not, surprisingly, George Osborne, who attempted to gain the morally higher ground this week by suggesting that all of the naughty things that went on with Barclays and other banks happened while Ed Balls and Gordon Brown were cosying-up to the City, and certainly not "on his watch".

For a few days (or for considerably longer, if Dave gets his way) the media shit-storm over the revelations of Libor- and Euribor-fixing will bury all of the truly awful news about the economy. Plus ca change. But at least it's giving that funny little Cable-guy an opportunity to step into the quasi-limelight for a minute and come up with curious damnations of City traders, like "...moral quagmire of almost biblical proportions..." OK, I'm not a bible scholar, but the only quagmire I can recall is the muddy residue into which the Egyptians got stuck once the Red Sea had re-folded and whilst it could be argued that the Egyptians were a tad immoral...the quagmire wasn't.  

And now it looks almost inevitable that we'll have a public "Inquiry". 

How utterly pointless. For the last couple of years, the regulators have been putting the finishing touches to their report; the one that has highlighted all of the skullduggery (there's a good, old word that could have been used in the articles) over rate-fixing. The only surprising thing is that the report hadn't been leaked. Everyone that is anyone in the City and in its regulatory frameworks knew it was coming, too. The FSA was fully aware of the findings of the Barclays Capital issues at the same time as they 'approved' Bob Diamond as a fit and proper person to be CEO of the Barclays Group in January 2011. That's a bit like the UN authorising the appointment of Robert Mugabe as its Director of Human Rights.

In the past - say, pre-1995 - Public Inquiries served a purpose but nowadays, everything is so utterly 'public' anyway, that they serve only to line the pockets of lawyers and allow the broadcast and print media to put on pantomimes for everyone to boo and hiss at villains like the Murdochs and Tony Blair, and cheer the Steve Coogans and Hugh Grants that are paraded, falsely, as heroes. The televising of things like the Leveson Inquiry and Select Committees haranguing anyone and everyone cheapens our democracy and makes redundant the real issues that should be in the 'public interest'.

So, here are ten matters upon which we should have Public Inquiries and then that'll be that. 

1) Wind-farms: Just who are these bastards that are making money out of sticking turbines on their land; how much are they making and from whom?

2) Big, Fat Gypsies: Why are there so many television programmes that begin with the words "Big Fat Gypsy" and why does Channel 4 fail continually to place a comma after the word "Big"?

3) Latin: Gove should dump his idiotic idea to bring Latin back to the classroom...deus vult?

4) Lords Spiritual: Twenty-six reasons for reform of the House of Lords to be discussed.

5) Summers: These now occur only in March and September in Britain. Why has the Government allowed this to go on?

6) Association Football: Professional footballers appear to be paid weekly - surely this is an anachronism. This P.I. can also cover the issue of the negative effect of hair replacement on national football team strikers. 

7) The Duchy of Cornwall: Why is the Prince of Wales operating his business from across the Bristol Channel; and is it more than just about original biscuits after all?

8) Celebrity Lists: The formulation of definitive criteria for lists from 'A' through to 'Z' needs regulation. 

9) Spheres: Should every form of communication in the modern world be described with words that have the suffix, "sphere'? How will this impact the Inquiryshpere? 

10) Public Inquiries: A public inquiry into public inquiries.

After these inquiries are done, everything that needs to be known will be made available to the public at large via Twitter. At least that way, the reports and findings will be restricted to only a few hastily chosen words, preferably composed by Jack Dee, Nick Motown or Councillor Steven Bridgett of Northumberland County Council.