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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
A report out yesterday showed that people value parks almost as highly as they value local primary schools. Taking this passion as a starting point, the report goes on to suggest new ways of running green spaces that don't rely on councils doing anything sensible or efficient. Generally, a development like that would raise the spectre of privatisation and such, but since nobody's ever going to pay to go into a park and there's no enthusiasm for flogging them off to build bijou residences, this really might be as it seems. Communities genuinely prize these spaces; so much, in fact, that they'd rather look after them with volunteer park-tender organisations than leave them to the fate of the neglected municipal pools, with crumbling tiles and floating verrucas. Now, it's true that councils do a rubbish job of looking after common land. Parkies are such Beano relics that if you saw one you'd think it was a paedophile in disguise. If you ask me, we should take the primary-school parallel one stage further, and introduce faith-based parks, where high standards are maintained by a bunch of people busting a gut to behave well because they're all pretending to be Anglicans. But it's still strange that parks arouse such passion, since nobody uses them. Actually, that's not strictly true - there are two days at the beginning of summer when people pile in at lunchtime and sit gingerly on the grass, convinced against the evidence of all their five senses that they're perched on dog shit and will probably get that disease that sends you blind. (Note to the irregular park user: there has been a revolution in poo-tidying - it isn't like the 80s any more.) Otherwise, though, you can go weeks, indeed, whole seasons, without seeing anybody at all. Regular people don't use parks: alcoholics use parks, and dogs use parks, accompanied by their owners for the sole purpose of making sure they cross the road safely. And yet such niggardly effort as is expended by councils is directed exclusively at making life difficult for winos (by closing the park at dusk) and dogs (by making all the best bits no-dog areas). This is an outrage that, were I to dwell on it, would make my head explode. Still, people are inordinately proud and protective over these spaces they never go in. I have yet to meet a single person from Sheffield who doesn't tell me that their home city has more area covered by national park than any other. The only piece of successful direct action I've ever witnessed came about when Southwark council tried to introduce the nightly locking of Warwick Gardens. (There was a sit-in of 20 people, the council relented, the local paper rejoiced, it was a mini-adventure.) A New Labour policy wonk told me, in all seriousness, that the proudest moment of his career was when he saved Peckham Rye from developers as a young councillor. The first step in the ABC of creating a futuristic dystopia for the purposes of film or literature is always to concrete over the green areas. The second thing people who don't like Tokyo tell you about Tokyo is that it has no parks. (The first thing is that you can buy schoolgirls' knickers in vending machines. I still don't know whether that's true.) These places are not prized for their practical use or, if they are, only by a very small percentage of those who prize them. Although undeveloped land manifestly does bring benefits, you'd only have to suggest a wind farm on Hampstead Heath to discover how minor a consideration the green argument is. Commons are cherished as symbols, and they manage, with very little effort beyond being green, to symbolise an awful lot. They remind us that, contrary to the messages sent out by relentless privatisation, certain things will never be for sale, simply because they're not for sale. The more expensive land gets, the more important a message this is. Commons reinforce a sense of community not because we meet on them and chat, but because they are jointly owned. Sure, hospitals and schools are jointly owned also, but that feels like cooperation with the practical purpose of pooling resources. With parks, we share and cooperate for no better reason than that we feel like it. There is a lofty satisfaction to be got from the creation and protection of beauty for its own sake. Once, this made people want to build. We've lost our enthusiasm for the folly and the cathedral - now we want to un-build. Add to that the fact that parks are no longer covered in canine detritus (go on, go for a walk if you don't believe me!) and they really convey a message of peerless social importance. I've half a mind to knock down my flat and make an ornamental garden.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
A report out yesterday showed that people value parks almost as highly as they value local primary schools. Taking this passion as a starting point, the report goes on to suggest new ways of running green spaces that don't rely on councils doing anything sensible or efficient. Generally, a development like that would raise the spectre of privatisation and such, but since nobody's ever going to pay to go into a park and there's no enthusiasm for flogging them off to build bijou residences, this really might be as it seems. Communities genuinely prize these spaces; so much, in fact, that they'd rather look after them with volunteer park-tender organisations than leave them to the fate of the neglected municipal pools, with crumbling tiles and floating verrucas. Now, it's true that councils do a rubbish job of looking after common land. Parkies are such Beano relics that if you saw one you'd think it was a paedophile in disguise. If you ask me, we should take the primary-school parallel one stage further, and introduce faith-based parks, where high standards are maintained by a bunch of people busting a gut to behave well because they're all pretending to be Anglicans. But it's still strange that parks arouse such passion, since nobody uses them. Actually, that's not strictly true - there are two days at the beginning of summer when people pile in at lunchtime and sit gingerly on the grass, convinced against the evidence of all their five senses that they're perched on dog shit and will probably get that disease that sends you blind. (Note to the irregular park user: there has been a revolution in poo-tidying - it isn't like the 80s any more.) Otherwise, though, you can go weeks, indeed, whole seasons, without seeing anybody at all. Regular people don't use parks: alcoholics use parks, and dogs use parks, accompanied by their owners for the sole purpose of making sure they cross the road safely. And yet such niggardly effort as is expended by councils is directed exclusively at making life difficult for winos (by closing the park at dusk) and dogs (by making all the best bits no-dog areas). This is an outrage that, were I to dwell on it, would make my head explode. Still, people are inordinately proud and protective over these spaces they never go in. I have yet to meet a single person from Sheffield who doesn't tell me that their home city has more area covered by national park than any other. The only piece of successful direct action I've ever witnessed came about when Southwark council tried to introduce the nightly locking of Warwick Gardens. (There was a sit-in of 20 people, the council relented, the local paper rejoiced, it was a mini-adventure.) A New Labour policy wonk told me, in all seriousness, that the proudest moment of his career was when he saved Peckham Rye from developers as a young councillor. The first step in the ABC of creating a futuristic dystopia for the purposes of film or literature is always to concrete over the green areas. The second thing people who don't like Tokyo tell you about Tokyo is that it has no parks. (The first thing is that you can buy schoolgirls' knickers in vending machines. I still don't know whether that's true.) These places are not prized for their practical use or, if they are, only by a very small percentage of those who prize them. Although undeveloped land manifestly does bring benefits, you'd only have to suggest a wind farm on Hampstead Heath to discover how minor a consideration the green argument is. Commons are cherished as symbols, and they manage, with very little effort beyond being green, to symbolise an awful lot. They remind us that, contrary to the messages sent out by relentless privatisation, certain things will never be for sale, simply because they're not for sale. The more expensive land gets, the more important a message this is. Commons reinforce a sense of community not because we meet on them and chat, but because they are jointly owned. Sure, hospitals and schools are jointly owned also, but that feels like cooperation with the practical purpose of pooling resources. With parks, we share and cooperate for no better reason than that we feel like it. There is a lofty satisfaction to be got from the creation and protection of beauty for its own sake. Once, this made people want to build. We've lost our enthusiasm for the folly and the cathedral - now we want to un-build. Add to that the fact that parks are no longer covered in canine detritus (go on, go for a walk if you don't believe me!) and they really convey a message of peerless social importance. I've half a mind to knock down my flat and make an ornamental garden.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
The row about the allocation of lottery money is - like the one about the rights and wrongs of Goldie Hawn's botox injections - one that started in the Daily Mail and should have ended there. It all began with the 340,000 grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. The objection to this was kept fairly oblique, but the bare bones of it seemed to be that while the recipients were plenty poor enough for a grant, they were insufficiently white. To this injury to right-thinking citizens has been added a further 145,000, the insult here being that the recipient group is "linked" to one Gerry German. His offence? No, it isn't his name (you can't blame a man for his name - though if he were called Harry Hun, maybe we could put that to a vote). It's apparently his history as a "race zealot", evinced by the fact that he was part of the Commission for Racial Equality during the 1980s, when it banned the Robertson golliwog for being an offensive racial caricature (when truthfully, it was ... what? A charming and side-splitting toy, of course). Now, the organisation in line for the cash is the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, whose stated aims are pretty difficult to object to, put like that. The objection is that German the firebrand is its co-founder, and that seems enough to demonstrate, once more, that this money is being spent on causes with an overt dubious political agenda. The mooted solution is to give buyers the chance to state their preferred charity on the ticket itself. My gut reaction is that this can't possibly work. First, of the 28p from every Lotto pound that goes to charity, only 9p is available to the government for redistribution (the rest goes to other bodies, including the Arts Council and the Sports Council). Of that, only a minuscule proportion, 2% tops, is spent on anything even approaching controversy. Even in the crazy mean-mindedness of the Mail's worldview, they can't seriously believe that people resent making the odd contribution of 0.18 pence to anti-racist organisations. Second, if you're going to be picky about what lottery-ticket buyers want their money spent on, then it might be worth polling them about how much they would choose to spend on high art (the Arts Council - which doesn't extend to museums and galleries, those are covered by the Heritage fund - gets 4.7p per pound. That's a hell of a lot, given that its areas of concentration - opera, poetry, theatre - are such special interest pursuits). Third, the charities that would get the money if ticket-holders were consulted would inevitably be the same ones that have least problem raising money in the first place. The only charities in this country that can drum up money really easily are those supporting cancer research, children and dogs (I guess the Daily Mail might want to be able to specify the colour of the children, though I'm not sure how you'd phrase that; comically, the colour of the dogs would never be an issue). Cancer is a wonderful disease because it doesn't discriminate, which is why it's so easy to get celebrities involved with it. Children and dogs are cute. Most other things - from Christian Aid to Amnesty, World Wildlife to Wounded Warriors Welfare - make a statement about faith, politics or social priorities. These aren't statements that everyone necessarily wants to make, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be accommodated within a wider fund that a lot of people are happy to contribute to. Unglamorous, minority-interest, perhaps ideologically complicated charities are exactly the ones that should benefit from the lottery since, let's face it, they're never going to get Geri Halliwell to launch them a phone-in. And yet, at the core of the Mail's grimly bigoted objections, there is an unfortunate truth. If a substantial number of Lotto players disagree with where the money goes, yet have no means of influencing the spending, then this isn't a game, it's a tax. What else could you call a sum skimmed off a citizen's spending and redistributed by a government? A gift? Once you've admitted that it's a tax, you have to clarify what it's a tax on - it's a tax on being poor. Sure, it might also snag some of the stupid rich (Hugh Grant was snapped buying a Lotto ticket only last week), but the real devotees of the lottery are those to whom the fantasy of the win is attractive enough to off-set its laughable improbability - the more you need the money, the more likely you are to waste it. In other words, it's a total reversal of the principle of taxation, and that can't stand. So, ticket-holders must be allowed to choose their charities, and if there's a huge cash injection into cancer research, nobody could call that a disaster. Perhaps the government could dip into proper tax to make up the shortfall for the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation groups. Or it could really branch out, and stop deporting people. It might be ethically wrong to ignore the wishes of the lottery punters, but there's no law against a centre-left government adopting a centre-left policy.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
The row about the allocation of lottery money is - like the one about the rights and wrongs of Goldie Hawn's botox injections - one that started in the Daily Mail and should have ended there. It all began with the 340,000 grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. The objection to this was kept fairly oblique, but the bare bones of it seemed to be that while the recipients were plenty poor enough for a grant, they were insufficiently white. To this injury to right-thinking citizens has been added a further 145,000, the insult here being that the recipient group is "linked" to one Gerry German. His offence? No, it isn't his name (you can't blame a man for his name - though if he were called Harry Hun, maybe we could put that to a vote). It's apparently his history as a "race zealot", evinced by the fact that he was part of the Commission for Racial Equality during the 1980s, when it banned the Robertson golliwog for being an offensive racial caricature (when truthfully, it was ... what? A charming and side-splitting toy, of course). Now, the organisation in line for the cash is the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, whose stated aims are pretty difficult to object to, put like that. The objection is that German the firebrand is its co-founder, and that seems enough to demonstrate, once more, that this money is being spent on causes with an overt dubious political agenda. The mooted solution is to give buyers the chance to state their preferred charity on the ticket itself. My gut reaction is that this can't possibly work. First, of the 28p from every Lotto pound that goes to charity, only 9p is available to the government for redistribution (the rest goes to other bodies, including the Arts Council and the Sports Council). Of that, only a minuscule proportion, 2% tops, is spent on anything even approaching controversy. Even in the crazy mean-mindedness of the Mail's worldview, they can't seriously believe that people resent making the odd contribution of 0.18 pence to anti-racist organisations. Second, if you're going to be picky about what lottery-ticket buyers want their money spent on, then it might be worth polling them about how much they would choose to spend on high art (the Arts Council - which doesn't extend to museums and galleries, those are covered by the Heritage fund - gets 4.7p per pound. That's a hell of a lot, given that its areas of concentration - opera, poetry, theatre - are such special interest pursuits). Third, the charities that would get the money if ticket-holders were consulted would inevitably be the same ones that have least problem raising money in the first place. The only charities in this country that can drum up money really easily are those supporting cancer research, children and dogs (I guess the Daily Mail might want to be able to specify the colour of the children, though I'm not sure how you'd phrase that; comically, the colour of the dogs would never be an issue). Cancer is a wonderful disease because it doesn't discriminate, which is why it's so easy to get celebrities involved with it. Children and dogs are cute. Most other things - from Christian Aid to Amnesty, World Wildlife to Wounded Warriors Welfare - make a statement about faith, politics or social priorities. These aren't statements that everyone necessarily wants to make, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be accommodated within a wider fund that a lot of people are happy to contribute to. Unglamorous, minority-interest, perhaps ideologically complicated charities are exactly the ones that should benefit from the lottery since, let's face it, they're never going to get Geri Halliwell to launch them a phone-in. And yet, at the core of the Mail's grimly bigoted objections, there is an unfortunate truth. If a substantial number of Lotto players disagree with where the money goes, yet have no means of influencing the spending, then this isn't a game, it's a tax. What else could you call a sum skimmed off a citizen's spending and redistributed by a government? A gift? Once you've admitted that it's a tax, you have to clarify what it's a tax on - it's a tax on being poor. Sure, it might also snag some of the stupid rich (Hugh Grant was snapped buying a Lotto ticket only last week), but the real devotees of the lottery are those to whom the fantasy of the win is attractive enough to off-set its laughable improbability - the more you need the money, the more likely you are to waste it. In other words, it's a total reversal of the principle of taxation, and that can't stand. So, ticket-holders must be allowed to choose their charities, and if there's a huge cash injection into cancer research, nobody could call that a disaster. Perhaps the government could dip into proper tax to make up the shortfall for the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation groups. Or it could really branch out, and stop deporting people. It might be ethically wrong to ignore the wishes of the lottery punters, but there's no law against a centre-left government adopting a centre-left policy.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
The wisdom of debating a TV programme that has yet to be aired is arguable, but the case of Julia Black's forthcoming programme about abortion is more clear-cut than most. The film, due to be aired later this month, includes images of aborted foetuses at 10, 11 and 21 weeks. Typically, the people who insist on representing the reality of abortion with pictures of 21-week-old foetuses are anti-abortionists - at this stage, of course, the embryo is very identifiably human. It has an outside chance of sustaining life if it were nurtured rather than discarded. A termination at 21 weeks looks as much like murder as it ever will, and the fact that this "reality" occurs only in a few very exceptional cases tends to be ignored in favour of maximum-impact images. Black, on the other hand, is no anti-abortionist. She was brought up in favour of a woman's right to choose (her father set up Marie Stopes International), and has upheld that belief, though since having a child has registered more ambiguous feelings. Her project, therefore, could conceivably leave her on perilous territory with no allies whatsoever. Those in favour of abortion will object to her using this visual vocabulary, which seems to locate her, ideologically, somewhere between the Pope and the lunatic Americans who nail-bomb clinics. And those against abortion will object to the fact that, actually, she is not with them at all. In between those two poles will be people who question the motive behind all this. Black claims she wants to make society "re-examine its views on abortion". This is the kind of milky, faux-impartiality that documentary makers shouldn't be able to get away with. Re-examine our views in which direction? On what basis? That if we knew how icky it would be, we wouldn't do it? Without a solid ethical position, this looks like attention-seeking, which is a childish impulse to bring to the debate. But this film could trigger one valuable shift - it could, indeed it must, force pro-choicers to defend their position. Anti-abortionists set out and argue their position all the time; they have euphemisms ("pro-life" for instance), but aren't afraid of the words - abortion, foetus, baby, termination - and they aren't afraid to interpret them. But pro-choicers simply will not call themselves pro-abortionists. I suppose we could pretend this was to avoid confusion - it might sound as if we believed that, ideally, all pregnancies would end in termination - but that is disingenuous. We don't use the word because it's not very nice. This dovetails with the ongoing taboo around termination. One in three women will have a termination. Why will you never hear a woman say she's had one? Why this persistent guilty silence? Why the standard-issue terminology, where if you do discuss abortion on a personal level at all, it has to be in terms of guilt, and sorrow, and confusion, and anger? It's because those of us who are in favour of abortions have never thrashed out a rational justification. We let our mothers campaign for its legality, breathed a huge sigh of relief that we could now abort on main roads, rather than back streets, and never stopped to say, "I believe this is my right, and here's why." So, everyone's in this ethical twilight, where we know it's OK, because everyone else has had one; and yet at the same time, we're not completely convinced it's not murder, so we definitely won't be bringing it up at dinner parties. But that kind of ambiguity is completely inappropriate. Every woman considering an abortion - every woman who's even sexually active - has to decide what, for her, constitutes murder. If you abort at a point when the foetus, if supported, could survive without you, is that murder? Does an embryo only become a human being at nine months? Given that a 12-week-old embryo bears the hallmarks of humanity, does that make it human? We've got into a situation where, because the questions are difficult, we don't ask them. But that makes us easy to attack, because our silence carries such an obvious implication of shame, and what do we have to be ashamed of, if we don't half-believe that this "collection of cells" is actually a very, very small life? On this matter, we don't need more sympathy or understanding - we need to be tougher-minded and more rigorous, both on ourselves, and with each other. Women with any reservations at all about whether abortion is a right or a crime, well, just don't do it - what in your lifestyle is so valuable that it is worth turning yourself into a killer? And the rest of us, without those reservations, with full confidence in the legitimacy of terminating inchoate foetuses, should for God's sake attest to that publicly and stop colluding in this taboo. We give our opponents more power with our shuffling evasiveness than gory footage of abortions ever will.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
The wisdom of debating a TV programme that has yet to be aired is arguable, but the case of Julia Black's forthcoming programme about abortion is more clear-cut than most. The film, due to be aired later this month, includes images of aborted foetuses at 10, 11 and 21 weeks. Typically, the people who insist on representing the reality of abortion with pictures of 21-week-old foetuses are anti-abortionists - at this stage, of course, the embryo is very identifiably human. It has an outside chance of sustaining life if it were nurtured rather than discarded. A termination at 21 weeks looks as much like murder as it ever will, and the fact that this "reality" occurs only in a few very exceptional cases tends to be ignored in favour of maximum-impact images. Black, on the other hand, is no anti-abortionist. She was brought up in favour of a woman's right to choose (her father set up Marie Stopes International), and has upheld that belief, though since having a child has registered more ambiguous feelings. Her project, therefore, could conceivably leave her on perilous territory with no allies whatsoever. Those in favour of abortion will object to her using this visual vocabulary, which seems to locate her, ideologically, somewhere between the Pope and the lunatic Americans who nail-bomb clinics. And those against abortion will object to the fact that, actually, she is not with them at all. In between those two poles will be people who question the motive behind all this. Black claims she wants to make society "re-examine its views on abortion". This is the kind of milky, faux-impartiality that documentary makers shouldn't be able to get away with. Re-examine our views in which direction? On what basis? That if we knew how icky it would be, we wouldn't do it? Without a solid ethical position, this looks like attention-seeking, which is a childish impulse to bring to the debate. But this film could trigger one valuable shift - it could, indeed it must, force pro-choicers to defend their position. Anti-abortionists set out and argue their position all the time; they have euphemisms ("pro-life" for instance), but aren't afraid of the words - abortion, foetus, baby, termination - and they aren't afraid to interpret them. But pro-choicers simply will not call themselves pro-abortionists. I suppose we could pretend this was to avoid confusion - it might sound as if we believed that, ideally, all pregnancies would end in termination - but that is disingenuous. We don't use the word because it's not very nice. This dovetails with the ongoing taboo around termination. One in three women will have a termination. Why will you never hear a woman say she's had one? Why this persistent guilty silence? Why the standard-issue terminology, where if you do discuss abortion on a personal level at all, it has to be in terms of guilt, and sorrow, and confusion, and anger? It's because those of us who are in favour of abortions have never thrashed out a rational justification. We let our mothers campaign for its legality, breathed a huge sigh of relief that we could now abort on main roads, rather than back streets, and never stopped to say, "I believe this is my right, and here's why." So, everyone's in this ethical twilight, where we know it's OK, because everyone else has had one; and yet at the same time, we're not completely convinced it's not murder, so we definitely won't be bringing it up at dinner parties. But that kind of ambiguity is completely inappropriate. Every woman considering an abortion - every woman who's even sexually active - has to decide what, for her, constitutes murder. If you abort at a point when the foetus, if supported, could survive without you, is that murder? Does an embryo only become a human being at nine months? Given that a 12-week-old embryo bears the hallmarks of humanity, does that make it human? We've got into a situation where, because the questions are difficult, we don't ask them. But that makes us easy to attack, because our silence carries such an obvious implication of shame, and what do we have to be ashamed of, if we don't half-believe that this "collection of cells" is actually a very, very small life? On this matter, we don't need more sympathy or understanding - we need to be tougher-minded and more rigorous, both on ourselves, and with each other. Women with any reservations at all about whether abortion is a right or a crime, well, just don't do it - what in your lifestyle is so valuable that it is worth turning yourself into a killer? And the rest of us, without those reservations, with full confidence in the legitimacy of terminating inchoate foetuses, should for God's sake attest to that publicly and stop colluding in this taboo. We give our opponents more power with our shuffling evasiveness than gory footage of abortions ever will.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
I always thought Fathers4Justice would fall out when that fella climbed the Tower Bridge crane with the distinct intimation of his bollocks poking out of his over-pants. That's pretty bad, isn't it? That can't have been in the committee meeting: let's dress up like Spider-Man (Dangerdad! To the rescue! Earthbound women can't stop us, just watch them try!), climb up something high (have a go at that, single mumslag), compromise national security (what if we'd been al-Qaida?) and then make ourselves look irredeemably ludicrous with the small matter of the too-tight tights and the insufficiently capacious superhero undercrackers. Lobby groups have fallen out over less; Ukip fell out over Kilroy-Silk. Nope. They weathered that storm. Everybody laughed. They stood firm. And what finally does for them is the threat to kidnap Leo Blair. I don't think I'm risking the youngling's security by saying, boys, you're better than this. I always thought that when the papers got hold of a possible kidnap story - a Beckham child, for instance - it was because one of the tot's parents had an autobiography due out. So far as I know, neither Blair has any literature in the pipeline, though with Cherie's Married To The Prime Minister currently standing at 14,217 in the online charts, she might like to consider kidnapping one of her children to mark her next publishing venture. Perhaps she'd like to kidnap Euan and send clippings of his facial furniture to the press, as proof it was him. That would indeed be evil genius. I'd read almost anything she wrote after that. Sorry, I was ignoring Fathers4Justice. This happens to them a lot, I feel sure, otherwise they wouldn't be such nutjobs. The "moderate" centre of the organisation never wanted to kidnap Leo at all. It was unkind; plus, if they were any good at kidnapping children, they'd be able to get ahold of their own, instead of climbing cranes. However, as is so often the case with grass-roots pressure groups (look at the WI - they're always being investigated by Special Branch), an extremist wing hatched this evil plan. It has been suggested by various pundits that this was not a plan so much as an "inebriated flight of fancy of three men in a pub" (the Independent). Two reasons why this cannot possibly be the case: first, one of the men's names was Jolly Stanesby. If you are a running joke, liable to get pissed and talk overblown idiocy in a saloon environment, the first thing you do is change your name from Jolly to, I don't know, Mask. Or Leopard. Plus, if you're a drunken fantasist, and Special Branch comes round your house, you don't say, "They were just warning me not to do anything silly." You'd say, "They pinned me down! And then they punctured my big toe with a compass and told me to join their dark society in a brotherhood of toe-blood!" These men, in other words, were definitely intending to kidnap somebody, even if the finer details have been lost to history. Matt O'Connor is right to close it down. Hopefully, this splinter will reopen as Fathers4Child-Snatching. Then we really will see some bollocks.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
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I always thought Fathers4Justice would fall out when that fella climbed the Tower Bridge crane with the distinct intimation of his bollocks poking out of his over-pants. That's pretty bad, isn't it? That can't have been in the committee meeting: let's dress up like Spider-Man (Dangerdad! To the rescue! Earthbound women can't stop us, just watch them try!), climb up something high (have a go at that, single mumslag), compromise national security (what if we'd been al-Qaida?) and then make ourselves look irredeemably ludicrous with the small matter of the too-tight tights and the insufficiently capacious superhero undercrackers. Lobby groups have fallen out over less; Ukip fell out over Kilroy-Silk. Nope. They weathered that storm. Everybody laughed. They stood firm. And what finally does for them is the threat to kidnap Leo Blair. I don't think I'm risking the youngling's security by saying, boys, you're better than this. I always thought that when the papers got hold of a possible kidnap story - a Beckham child, for instance - it was because one of the tot's parents had an autobiography due out. So far as I know, neither Blair has any literature in the pipeline, though with Cherie's Married To The Prime Minister currently standing at 14,217 in the online charts, she might like to consider kidnapping one of her children to mark her next publishing venture. Perhaps she'd like to kidnap Euan and send clippings of his facial furniture to the press, as proof it was him. That would indeed be evil genius. I'd read almost anything she wrote after that. Sorry, I was ignoring Fathers4Justice. This happens to them a lot, I feel sure, otherwise they wouldn't be such nutjobs. The "moderate" centre of the organisation never wanted to kidnap Leo at all. It was unkind; plus, if they were any good at kidnapping children, they'd be able to get ahold of their own, instead of climbing cranes. However, as is so often the case with grass-roots pressure groups (look at the WI - they're always being investigated by Special Branch), an extremist wing hatched this evil plan. It has been suggested by various pundits that this was not a plan so much as an "inebriated flight of fancy of three men in a pub" (the Independent). Two reasons why this cannot possibly be the case: first, one of the men's names was Jolly Stanesby. If you are a running joke, liable to get pissed and talk overblown idiocy in a saloon environment, the first thing you do is change your name from Jolly to, I don't know, Mask. Or Leopard. Plus, if you're a drunken fantasist, and Special Branch comes round your house, you don't say, "They were just warning me not to do anything silly." You'd say, "They pinned me down! And then they punctured my big toe with a compass and told me to join their dark society in a brotherhood of toe-blood!" These men, in other words, were definitely intending to kidnap somebody, even if the finer details have been lost to history. Matt O'Connor is right to close it down. Hopefully, this splinter will reopen as Fathers4Child-Snatching. Then we really will see some bollocks.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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I'm trying to work out what my objection is to doing sporting activities on behalf of charities. At first I thought it was unrelated to the charitable act itself - this was when I got caught last weekend in the middle of some charity cyclists, and they a) were very annoying cyclists, constantly making merry and observing poor lane discipline; b) were all wearing T-shirts that matched, like some kind of stag weekend, only not, obviously, drunk; and c) had festooned those T-shirts with some really irritating wordplay like The Only Way Is Forward (on the front) and Let's See The Back Of Sickle-Cell Disease (on the back - and it's not that I can't apprehend the seriousness of sickle cell disease: it's the jollity. I can't stand joy!). But that's not it at all. Someone then floated past me the idea that I might do a trek in Peru, to raise money for breast cancer. I'm wholeheartedly in favour of raising money for breast cancer, and I think I probably like trekking, and I like Peru, yet the idea appalled me, which you have to put down to the trial of asking your friends for money. The contract becomes: you, friend, should sponsor me for some effort I might put in, but really it would be nudging at the boundaries of fellowship to expect you to care whether I trek or cycle or hop to Peru, though for some reason it is necessary for me to do so - we can't just all, you know, put our hands in our pockets and give away some money. The implication is that the friend won't engage in charitable giving independently of you. Furthermore, that your physical toil is of so great a merit that nobody need trouble themselves as to how much you're giving, they must just stand back and applaud you, perhaps by flapping fivers in your face. And furthermore (I'm sure this is how it works) some of the money raised will help get you to Peru, since I'm pretty sure you don't walk there, and even if you don't use your friends' money for this but your own, wouldn't the breast cancer cause have been better served by you and your friends just giving it some money without involving Peru? And isn't it patronising to the friends? If you want your friends to pay for your sweat, in the service of some charitable goal for which you'll, ultimately, end up taking the credit, why not offer to scrub their stairs or help them move? That's before you even get on to the cause, which has to be uncontroversial, because you'd anticipate asking everybody you'd ever met to sponsor you, so it couldn't be, you know, Ban Trident or Excise American Fundamentalists From African Aid Programmes. And that's fine, since most diseases and causes are fairly uncontroversial, but there's something about that ideological flattening-out that feels so depressingly apple pie and third way and ITV-on-a-Saturday-Night. Again, just give away some money! Let your friends choose their own cause. They might like controversy. Yes, this argument relies on me, right now, giving some money to a breast cancer charity. And also, you're quite right, to one for sickle-cell anaemia, too.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
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I'm trying to work out what my objection is to doing sporting activities on behalf of charities. At first I thought it was unrelated to the charitable act itself - this was when I got caught last weekend in the middle of some charity cyclists, and they a) were very annoying cyclists, constantly making merry and observing poor lane discipline; b) were all wearing T-shirts that matched, like some kind of stag weekend, only not, obviously, drunk; and c) had festooned those T-shirts with some really irritating wordplay like The Only Way Is Forward (on the front) and Let's See The Back Of Sickle-Cell Disease (on the back - and it's not that I can't apprehend the seriousness of sickle cell disease: it's the jollity. I can't stand joy!). But that's not it at all. Someone then floated past me the idea that I might do a trek in Peru, to raise money for breast cancer. I'm wholeheartedly in favour of raising money for breast cancer, and I think I probably like trekking, and I like Peru, yet the idea appalled me, which you have to put down to the trial of asking your friends for money. The contract becomes: you, friend, should sponsor me for some effort I might put in, but really it would be nudging at the boundaries of fellowship to expect you to care whether I trek or cycle or hop to Peru, though for some reason it is necessary for me to do so - we can't just all, you know, put our hands in our pockets and give away some money. The implication is that the friend won't engage in charitable giving independently of you. Furthermore, that your physical toil is of so great a merit that nobody need trouble themselves as to how much you're giving, they must just stand back and applaud you, perhaps by flapping fivers in your face. And furthermore (I'm sure this is how it works) some of the money raised will help get you to Peru, since I'm pretty sure you don't walk there, and even if you don't use your friends' money for this but your own, wouldn't the breast cancer cause have been better served by you and your friends just giving it some money without involving Peru? And isn't it patronising to the friends? If you want your friends to pay for your sweat, in the service of some charitable goal for which you'll, ultimately, end up taking the credit, why not offer to scrub their stairs or help them move? That's before you even get on to the cause, which has to be uncontroversial, because you'd anticipate asking everybody you'd ever met to sponsor you, so it couldn't be, you know, Ban Trident or Excise American Fundamentalists From African Aid Programmes. And that's fine, since most diseases and causes are fairly uncontroversial, but there's something about that ideological flattening-out that feels so depressingly apple pie and third way and ITV-on-a-Saturday-Night. Again, just give away some money! Let your friends choose their own cause. They might like controversy. Yes, this argument relies on me, right now, giving some money to a breast cancer charity. And also, you're quite right, to one for sickle-cell anaemia, too.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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Aren't you glad you bothered to vote, when new legislation is coming so thick and fast and excitingly? I am talking about dogs; and I'm being sarcastic. At least one of those two statements would hold true almost every time I have my mouth open, but that's another story. These are the proposals: that dog owners, being in the possession of a nuisance barker, would face a 5,000 fine, possible imprisonment, eviction from council housing or an Asbo or both. Punishment that harsh always has the ring of the hypothetical to me - at the end of droll stories about people selling their votes on eBay, responsible newscasters generally pointed out that you could face a 5,000 fine or imprisonment or both for misusing a vote. Yeah, right, we thought. In the words of the great Sharon Stone in her fabled no-underwear film, "What are you gonna do, arrest me for smoking?" Still, whenever a new piece of legislation comes out, it's worth wondering why, unless we're to believe that lawmakers just like to keep busy. Apparently, noisy dogs are second only to loud music in the list of aural complaints people have. Even a dog-lover would admit that was bad, although it smacks faintly of the statistic that suicide is the second biggest killer of young men. There isn't that much to choose from, is there? Only singers and dogs feel the need to express themselves with long bursts of unarticulated noise. We all have something - a histrionic personality, an ear for rousing choral music, an urge to reproduce - that will at some point be a nuisance to our neighbours. Ergo, when they make a noise that irritates us, it's a boon, since it's money in the civic bank for when we want to make a noise that irritates them. I had this theory brutally tested when my downstairs neighbour held a sing-along-a-Sound-of-Music party in her garden, but it held. Clearly, though, the majority view is that one has a right to expect an environment no noisier than mild hubbub. To explain a new law, however, you need to ask not only how bad is the problem, but also whether it's got worse. Are there more domestically kept dogs than there have been in the past? No, the dog population is in steady decline. There are more cats, but they don't make much noise, although they do (in my view) look at you funny. There are more urban foxes, which make more noise copulating than a dog could if it were trying to bark a greeting to its cousin in Scotland, but that's by the by. There are no more dogs. Are dog owners less responsible than before? Hard to tell - if all society is going to antisocial hell in a handcart, dog owners would hardly be exempt. But having said that, the highest level of ownership is among 45-54-year-olds, so we're not dealing with the binge-drinking, street-brawling, Turkey-Twizzler-munching youths for whom the whole concept of Asbo was invented. Here's an idea - maybe dogs bark more than they used to; maybe they're going through some kind of moral disintegration of their own, mirroring the steady march of self-interest they see in the wider society with the only form of delinquency they know, unless you count biting and bolting and chasing livestock. Instinct tells me this isn't the case, but I can scarcely hear my instinct over all this canine yodelling. Maybe, as a nation, we're making less informed breed choices, taking fewer walks, failing to train the beasts properly. Maybe the government needs a few windfall 5,000 fines, to make up for the gossamer lightness of our tax burden. Maybe prisons aren't full enough, and they're looking for a new band of people to incarcerate; maybe council houses are too full, and they're looking for a new cause for eviction (although, in fact, 70% of dogs live in owned houses which makes them the ABC1s of the pet world). Maybe there's an anti-dog conspiracy fuelled by people like Alastair Campbell, who I can take one look at and know isn't a dog-person. Maybe it's a veiled threat to Roy Hattersley (toe the line, buster, or your noisy pal gets it). Or, just possibly, we're failing to adapt properly to our increasingly concentrated living arrangements. Downsizers make the news for their funny views, but the trend is still towards urban living. We talk a lot about what modifications this might demand in terms of public services, transport infrastructure, housing and such, but we could gainfully explore what changes are required on an individual level. Changes such as chill out, buy some earplugs, stop bellyaching. We'll be fining people for having noisy infants next, and then there really will be trouble.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
Aren't you glad you bothered to vote, when new legislation is coming so thick and fast and excitingly? I am talking about dogs; and I'm being sarcastic. At least one of those two statements would hold true almost every time I have my mouth open, but that's another story. These are the proposals: that dog owners, being in the possession of a nuisance barker, would face a 5,000 fine, possible imprisonment, eviction from council housing or an Asbo or both. Punishment that harsh always has the ring of the hypothetical to me - at the end of droll stories about people selling their votes on eBay, responsible newscasters generally pointed out that you could face a 5,000 fine or imprisonment or both for misusing a vote. Yeah, right, we thought. In the words of the great Sharon Stone in her fabled no-underwear film, "What are you gonna do, arrest me for smoking?" Still, whenever a new piece of legislation comes out, it's worth wondering why, unless we're to believe that lawmakers just like to keep busy. Apparently, noisy dogs are second only to loud music in the list of aural complaints people have. Even a dog-lover would admit that was bad, although it smacks faintly of the statistic that suicide is the second biggest killer of young men. There isn't that much to choose from, is there? Only singers and dogs feel the need to express themselves with long bursts of unarticulated noise. We all have something - a histrionic personality, an ear for rousing choral music, an urge to reproduce - that will at some point be a nuisance to our neighbours. Ergo, when they make a noise that irritates us, it's a boon, since it's money in the civic bank for when we want to make a noise that irritates them. I had this theory brutally tested when my downstairs neighbour held a sing-along-a-Sound-of-Music party in her garden, but it held. Clearly, though, the majority view is that one has a right to expect an environment no noisier than mild hubbub. To explain a new law, however, you need to ask not only how bad is the problem, but also whether it's got worse. Are there more domestically kept dogs than there have been in the past? No, the dog population is in steady decline. There are more cats, but they don't make much noise, although they do (in my view) look at you funny. There are more urban foxes, which make more noise copulating than a dog could if it were trying to bark a greeting to its cousin in Scotland, but that's by the by. There are no more dogs. Are dog owners less responsible than before? Hard to tell - if all society is going to antisocial hell in a handcart, dog owners would hardly be exempt. But having said that, the highest level of ownership is among 45-54-year-olds, so we're not dealing with the binge-drinking, street-brawling, Turkey-Twizzler-munching youths for whom the whole concept of Asbo was invented. Here's an idea - maybe dogs bark more than they used to; maybe they're going through some kind of moral disintegration of their own, mirroring the steady march of self-interest they see in the wider society with the only form of delinquency they know, unless you count biting and bolting and chasing livestock. Instinct tells me this isn't the case, but I can scarcely hear my instinct over all this canine yodelling. Maybe, as a nation, we're making less informed breed choices, taking fewer walks, failing to train the beasts properly. Maybe the government needs a few windfall 5,000 fines, to make up for the gossamer lightness of our tax burden. Maybe prisons aren't full enough, and they're looking for a new band of people to incarcerate; maybe council houses are too full, and they're looking for a new cause for eviction (although, in fact, 70% of dogs live in owned houses which makes them the ABC1s of the pet world). Maybe there's an anti-dog conspiracy fuelled by people like Alastair Campbell, who I can take one look at and know isn't a dog-person. Maybe it's a veiled threat to Roy Hattersley (toe the line, buster, or your noisy pal gets it). Or, just possibly, we're failing to adapt properly to our increasingly concentrated living arrangements. Downsizers make the news for their funny views, but the trend is still towards urban living. We talk a lot about what modifications this might demand in terms of public services, transport infrastructure, housing and such, but we could gainfully explore what changes are required on an individual level. Changes such as chill out, buy some earplugs, stop bellyaching. We'll be fining people for having noisy infants next, and then there really will be trouble.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
It has been clinically proven that acupuncture actually works. Medical research always puzzles me, especially in the arena of pain relief. The centrepiece of the "God, it really does work, that hocus-pocus" research was that it altered the parts of the brain responsible for pain management, in some cases reducing pain by up to 15%. Immediately, I'm thinking: a) How do you quantify a 15% reduction in this area - by a 15% noise reduction in "ouch"?; and b) It doesn't sound much, does it? You wouldn't buy ibuprofen that claimed to "reduce your headache by a statistically significant but still not very large amount". It's bound to be good for business, this news, and I couldn't be more glad for its practitioners. I've known for years how effective acupuncture is. I've been to a guy who packed me off home with a needle he'd forgotten sticking out of my head, like a Teletubby. I've been to another guy who punctured somebody else's lung by accident, and had to resort to regular, western medicine and call an ambulance. I told my mother, who also visits this guy, and she just shrugged and said, "Well, if you're sticking needles in people, mistakes like that are bound to happen." This is how slavishly loyal you get to an acupuncturist, once you realise it really works. He could puncture my lung any day. Still, they have a bad reputation, I believe, for two reasons: first, all alternative medicines are bracketed together; second, the people who visit them are often seen as flaky, self-indulgent individuals, who don't actually have anything wrong with them, other than a simmering sense of malaise that comes from having more money than sense. In fact, alternative medicines are as different from one another as any of them is from conventional medicines. In the line of journalistic duty, you understand (I don't have more money than sense, oh no), I've been to a homeopath and a naturopath, a pranic healer and a colonic irrigator (these two in the same week; imagine the cleanliness of my innards by the end of it). I've done Australian flower remedies and the Bach sort, and been Ayurvedic'd to within an inch of my interior life. Much as I distrust the information that comes from one person's experience only, I still think it worth sharing my findings: any benefit derived from detoxing is entirely to do with the fact that you're not allowed to get drunk while doing it; homeopathy really is hocus-pocus; pranic healing makes my blood boil (with rage, not for cleansing purposes), but otherwise has zero impact; colonic irrigation is for people with eating disorders whose whole week will be lifted by the entirely misleading loss of a pound or two; flowers are for idiot hippies; and Ayurvedic doctors keep a drawerful of antibiotics for when people are properly ill. Oh, and acupuncture really works. The reputations of people who swear by alternative therapies are grounded in facts rather than prejudice. Few of these treatments have had their worth tested in clinical trials, so the patients must, by definition, lack scepticism and sense. But there is more than logic at play when you feel your fury rise at the Cherie Blairs of this world getting tangled up with the Carole Caplins. When you opt out of conventional medicine, you are saying one of a number of things. Either "there's nothing really wrong with me, and the doctor will just laugh"; or "I'm a hypochondriac, and am only interested in consulting someone who definitely won't be able to tell me whether I am dying or not"; or "I invest a lot of energy in a nebulous quest for inner purity, because I'm selfish, and consequently my life lacks meaning." Whichever statement applies, the whole business is, ethically, worse than opting out of the NHS and going private - at least then you're still following the conventional formula "Am ill, would like to be better". When you opt out in favour of a homeopath, you engage in exactly the same manoeuvre of buying yourself out of the nationalised system but without even the excuse of a decent illness. And yet (this is a bit sweeping, but true) the people who do frequent alternative therapies are the same people who would reject Bupa out of hand on lefty grounds. An instructive parallel would be sending your child to an expensive school in which the tyranny of knowledge had been jettisoned in favour of learning to make trousers out of leaves. Just because it's daft doesn't mean it's not the political equivalent of Harrow. And now I've talked myself out of ever going back to the acupuncturist, on the day I see my first concrete evidence, beyond the abatement of pathetic symptoms, that it works. How irritating.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
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It has been clinically proven that acupuncture actually works. Medical research always puzzles me, especially in the arena of pain relief. The centrepiece of the "God, it really does work, that hocus-pocus" research was that it altered the parts of the brain responsible for pain management, in some cases reducing pain by up to 15%. Immediately, I'm thinking: a) How do you quantify a 15% reduction in this area - by a 15% noise reduction in "ouch"?; and b) It doesn't sound much, does it? You wouldn't buy ibuprofen that claimed to "reduce your headache by a statistically significant but still not very large amount". It's bound to be good for business, this news, and I couldn't be more glad for its practitioners. I've known for years how effective acupuncture is. I've been to a guy who packed me off home with a needle he'd forgotten sticking out of my head, like a Teletubby. I've been to another guy who punctured somebody else's lung by accident, and had to resort to regular, western medicine and call an ambulance. I told my mother, who also visits this guy, and she just shrugged and said, "Well, if you're sticking needles in people, mistakes like that are bound to happen." This is how slavishly loyal you get to an acupuncturist, once you realise it really works. He could puncture my lung any day. Still, they have a bad reputation, I believe, for two reasons: first, all alternative medicines are bracketed together; second, the people who visit them are often seen as flaky, self-indulgent individuals, who don't actually have anything wrong with them, other than a simmering sense of malaise that comes from having more money than sense. In fact, alternative medicines are as different from one another as any of them is from conventional medicines. In the line of journalistic duty, you understand (I don't have more money than sense, oh no), I've been to a homeopath and a naturopath, a pranic healer and a colonic irrigator (these two in the same week; imagine the cleanliness of my innards by the end of it). I've done Australian flower remedies and the Bach sort, and been Ayurvedic'd to within an inch of my interior life. Much as I distrust the information that comes from one person's experience only, I still think it worth sharing my findings: any benefit derived from detoxing is entirely to do with the fact that you're not allowed to get drunk while doing it; homeopathy really is hocus-pocus; pranic healing makes my blood boil (with rage, not for cleansing purposes), but otherwise has zero impact; colonic irrigation is for people with eating disorders whose whole week will be lifted by the entirely misleading loss of a pound or two; flowers are for idiot hippies; and Ayurvedic doctors keep a drawerful of antibiotics for when people are properly ill. Oh, and acupuncture really works. The reputations of people who swear by alternative therapies are grounded in facts rather than prejudice. Few of these treatments have had their worth tested in clinical trials, so the patients must, by definition, lack scepticism and sense. But there is more than logic at play when you feel your fury rise at the Cherie Blairs of this world getting tangled up with the Carole Caplins. When you opt out of conventional medicine, you are saying one of a number of things. Either "there's nothing really wrong with me, and the doctor will just laugh"; or "I'm a hypochondriac, and am only interested in consulting someone who definitely won't be able to tell me whether I am dying or not"; or "I invest a lot of energy in a nebulous quest for inner purity, because I'm selfish, and consequently my life lacks meaning." Whichever statement applies, the whole business is, ethically, worse than opting out of the NHS and going private - at least then you're still following the conventional formula "Am ill, would like to be better". When you opt out in favour of a homeopath, you engage in exactly the same manoeuvre of buying yourself out of the nationalised system but without even the excuse of a decent illness. And yet (this is a bit sweeping, but true) the people who do frequent alternative therapies are the same people who would reject Bupa out of hand on lefty grounds. An instructive parallel would be sending your child to an expensive school in which the tyranny of knowledge had been jettisoned in favour of learning to make trousers out of leaves. Just because it's daft doesn't mean it's not the political equivalent of Harrow. And now I've talked myself out of ever going back to the acupuncturist, on the day I see my first concrete evidence, beyond the abatement of pathetic symptoms, that it works. How irritating.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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I complain a lot (in my own time ...) about the proliferation of stories concerning IVF and fertility in general, since I can generally detect a conservative and/or misogynistic subtext to them, a niggling "you can't have it all, girls" message in every anecdotal conception trauma dressed up as news. But at the very least, you can find a correlation between the rising prominence of IVF in the news agenda and its increasing occurrence in the health service. The number of women having IVF each year has reached the region of 30,000. Regardless of the spin you put on their individual stories (selfish, NHS-draining feminist hellcats or regular people having a medical procedure?), their number is substantial enough to warrant a place in cultural debate. The same couldn't be said for "the young career women who are putting motherhood on ice", a story from the weekend papers about women who are freezing their eggs so they have time to have a career and find a perfect mate, rather than getting a career, then settling for the first chap who comes along with passable motility. This was trumpeted with remarkable prominence in the Independent on Sunday. Clinics "around the country" were reporting "increasing numbers" of women who chose the freezing for "lifestyle", rather than medical, reasons. It sounds like a bit of a trend, doesn't it, something to maybe keep an eye on, if only from an anthropological point of view. You have to dive in a really committed way into the text before you get to any figures. By "around the country" they mean that nine clinics are offering this treatment. By "increasing numbers", they mean that eight out of 26 women, in the instance they gave, were undergoing it for lifestyle reasons. If each clinic has the same number of ball-busting, career-loving lifestyle-seekers, that is still only 72 women. In the whole of Great Britain. I bet there are more women who practise fish taxidermy, who go naked curling, who re-enact famous battles of the English civil war every weekend. The egg-freezing business might lack the spontaneity that some fondly attach to the miracle of birth, but if this is a trend, then so is a polyester bed-jacket with puppies appliqued on to the collar. You can do this with practically any birth-based "craze" you come across in the media - the women who leave it too late to find a partner and then engage in "sperm banditry" (conceiving without checking whether it's OK with the sperm manufacturer); the women who leave it a little bit late, then have a premature menopause and find it's suddenly way too late. Always skip to the figures: most of the time, they barely count as a handful. If you file the nuts and bolts of conception under "personal choice", it all seems very strange. Personal choices obviously do make the news, but only if a lot of people are making the same ones. If, on the other hand, you file unusual conception methods under "crime or misdemeanour", their status in the agenda suddenly makes sense. Aberrant behaviour doesn't need the meat of numbers to make it interesting, it's interesting all on its own. These stories can only loom so large on the landscape if the subtext exists that they are unnatural, wrong and, crucially, a matter of public rather than private interest. The boundary between public and private can't get any more blurred than it does in childbirth. The law takes it as given that, at a certain point in gestation, the foetus has rights distinct from those of its parents and at that point, any choices made by said parents could no longer be called "personal". But the law at least has the grace to formalise that boundary: to determine a time at which abortion is no longer permissible, to establish the furthest acceptable limits of genetic engineering, and so on. The media has no such compunction. It simply decides, according to nothing more rigorous than whim, the point at which a woman's choice becomes a matter of public interest. It then magnifies those choices until they seem ludicrously prevalent to avoid the obvious question we might otherwise ask: "Why are you banging on about this so much?" The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for all the lip service paid to a woman's right to choose, there is still deep-seated reluctance to cede fertility control to the individual. Unless, of course, that individual happens to be male. In that case, he could be laying down sperm for the future in the freezers of his local KwikSave. Not until it was such a trend that there was no room for the fishfingers would you hear a squeak about it.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
I complain a lot (in my own time ...) about the proliferation of stories concerning IVF and fertility in general, since I can generally detect a conservative and/or misogynistic subtext to them, a niggling "you can't have it all, girls" message in every anecdotal conception trauma dressed up as news. But at the very least, you can find a correlation between the rising prominence of IVF in the news agenda and its increasing occurrence in the health service. The number of women having IVF each year has reached the region of 30,000. Regardless of the spin you put on their individual stories (selfish, NHS-draining feminist hellcats or regular people having a medical procedure?), their number is substantial enough to warrant a place in cultural debate. The same couldn't be said for "the young career women who are putting motherhood on ice", a story from the weekend papers about women who are freezing their eggs so they have time to have a career and find a perfect mate, rather than getting a career, then settling for the first chap who comes along with passable motility. This was trumpeted with remarkable prominence in the Independent on Sunday. Clinics "around the country" were reporting "increasing numbers" of women who chose the freezing for "lifestyle", rather than medical, reasons. It sounds like a bit of a trend, doesn't it, something to maybe keep an eye on, if only from an anthropological point of view. You have to dive in a really committed way into the text before you get to any figures. By "around the country" they mean that nine clinics are offering this treatment. By "increasing numbers", they mean that eight out of 26 women, in the instance they gave, were undergoing it for lifestyle reasons. If each clinic has the same number of ball-busting, career-loving lifestyle-seekers, that is still only 72 women. In the whole of Great Britain. I bet there are more women who practise fish taxidermy, who go naked curling, who re-enact famous battles of the English civil war every weekend. The egg-freezing business might lack the spontaneity that some fondly attach to the miracle of birth, but if this is a trend, then so is a polyester bed-jacket with puppies appliqued on to the collar. You can do this with practically any birth-based "craze" you come across in the media - the women who leave it too late to find a partner and then engage in "sperm banditry" (conceiving without checking whether it's OK with the sperm manufacturer); the women who leave it a little bit late, then have a premature menopause and find it's suddenly way too late. Always skip to the figures: most of the time, they barely count as a handful. If you file the nuts and bolts of conception under "personal choice", it all seems very strange. Personal choices obviously do make the news, but only if a lot of people are making the same ones. If, on the other hand, you file unusual conception methods under "crime or misdemeanour", their status in the agenda suddenly makes sense. Aberrant behaviour doesn't need the meat of numbers to make it interesting, it's interesting all on its own. These stories can only loom so large on the landscape if the subtext exists that they are unnatural, wrong and, crucially, a matter of public rather than private interest. The boundary between public and private can't get any more blurred than it does in childbirth. The law takes it as given that, at a certain point in gestation, the foetus has rights distinct from those of its parents and at that point, any choices made by said parents could no longer be called "personal". But the law at least has the grace to formalise that boundary: to determine a time at which abortion is no longer permissible, to establish the furthest acceptable limits of genetic engineering, and so on. The media has no such compunction. It simply decides, according to nothing more rigorous than whim, the point at which a woman's choice becomes a matter of public interest. It then magnifies those choices until they seem ludicrously prevalent to avoid the obvious question we might otherwise ask: "Why are you banging on about this so much?" The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for all the lip service paid to a woman's right to choose, there is still deep-seated reluctance to cede fertility control to the individual. Unless, of course, that individual happens to be male. In that case, he could be laying down sperm for the future in the freezers of his local KwikSave. Not until it was such a trend that there was no room for the fishfingers would you hear a squeak about it.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
|
John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
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A Lib Dem MP asked the prime minister yesterday to get the voting age reduced to 16. Matthew Green said at that age young people were thought old enough to marry, to have children, to pay taxes and to join the armed forces. "Yet they are not allowed to vote until they are 18," he expostulated. Mr Blair, with all the weary wisdom of a man whose house contains several teenagers, which can be like having a flying saucer full of space aliens living in your home, except that they say less and eat more, said: "I am not sure that all those things a 16-year-old can do, we'd always want them to do." This was thought to be a reference to Euan Blair, who was found face down in Leicester Square at the age of 16, in a pose which suggested he had not spent the previous few hours mulling over his choice of candidate. In this he resembled several MPs who, at much the same time of night, cannot attribute their fatigue to the fact that they have spent an age working out exactly which way to vote. It was remarked at the time that Euan Blair's friends appear to have deserted him. This is not a problem for members of parliament. Kindly whips will pick them up from the floor, shout in their ears, and if necessary kick them all the way to the correct lobby. Sometimes they wind up kicking members of the press as well, who are likely to be in a similar condition. (Though of course even while inebriated, we are always sober enough to write a coruscating 500 word denunciation of parents who let their teenage children get drunk in Leicester Square.) The problem is that MPs themselves are now far too young. Just as one generation cannot remember the war, and a later one has no recollection of the winter of discontent, so these young shavers have no memory of shroud-waving. Shroud-waving was a proud tradition during the 1992-1997 Major government, a time which to most MPs seems as distant as the pre-Devonian period. This was nominally to do with the NHS, and was based on the assumption that ministers are personally to blame for every failure of the service, as if, like Roman emperors, they could end or save someone's life with a twitch of the thumb. "Is the prime minister aware that my constituent Mr Brown went to the outpatient department for help with an ingrowing toenail, and was found five weeks later, his face a hideous green and a nest of maggots feasting on his decomposed belly?" they would inquire. The prime minister would reply that he would look into this particular case, but that hon members should be aware that the staff of the NHS did a magnificent job in difficult circumstances, and that the other party's plans would lead to a mass extermination which would make the Black Death look like a touch of flu. Yesterday, Mr Duncan Smith waved the case of 94-year-old Mrs Rose Addis, who, we are told, had to wait days for a bed at a London hospital. "Her clothes had not been changed. Her daughter had to borrow a bowl of water to wash the blood that had become caked on her mother's hands and feet." This was a superb example of traditional shroud-waving, as admired by connoisseurs as a majestic pass by a bullfighter. Mr Blair did not disappoint. He gave a traditional reply to the flapping linen: "The Conservatives want to use these cases ... to run the NHS down. They want to say it has failed, therefore get rid of the health service on which people are depending." In other words, the Tories complain about people getting poor treatment because they want to make sure they get no treatment at all. A 16-year-old could see what nonsense that is, but then, thanks to Mr Blair, they don't yet have the vote.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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A Lib Dem MP asked the prime minister yesterday to get the voting age reduced to 16. Matthew Green said at that age young people were thought old enough to marry, to have children, to pay taxes and to join the armed forces. "Yet they are not allowed to vote until they are 18," he expostulated. Mr Blair, with all the weary wisdom of a man whose house contains several teenagers, which can be like having a flying saucer full of space aliens living in your home, except that they say less and eat more, said: "I am not sure that all those things a 16-year-old can do, we'd always want them to do." This was thought to be a reference to Euan Blair, who was found face down in Leicester Square at the age of 16, in a pose which suggested he had not spent the previous few hours mulling over his choice of candidate. In this he resembled several MPs who, at much the same time of night, cannot attribute their fatigue to the fact that they have spent an age working out exactly which way to vote. It was remarked at the time that Euan Blair's friends appear to have deserted him. This is not a problem for members of parliament. Kindly whips will pick them up from the floor, shout in their ears, and if necessary kick them all the way to the correct lobby. Sometimes they wind up kicking members of the press as well, who are likely to be in a similar condition. (Though of course even while inebriated, we are always sober enough to write a coruscating 500 word denunciation of parents who let their teenage children get drunk in Leicester Square.) The problem is that MPs themselves are now far too young. Just as one generation cannot remember the war, and a later one has no recollection of the winter of discontent, so these young shavers have no memory of shroud-waving. Shroud-waving was a proud tradition during the 1992-1997 Major government, a time which to most MPs seems as distant as the pre-Devonian period. This was nominally to do with the NHS, and was based on the assumption that ministers are personally to blame for every failure of the service, as if, like Roman emperors, they could end or save someone's life with a twitch of the thumb. "Is the prime minister aware that my constituent Mr Brown went to the outpatient department for help with an ingrowing toenail, and was found five weeks later, his face a hideous green and a nest of maggots feasting on his decomposed belly?" they would inquire. The prime minister would reply that he would look into this particular case, but that hon members should be aware that the staff of the NHS did a magnificent job in difficult circumstances, and that the other party's plans would lead to a mass extermination which would make the Black Death look like a touch of flu. Yesterday, Mr Duncan Smith waved the case of 94-year-old Mrs Rose Addis, who, we are told, had to wait days for a bed at a London hospital. "Her clothes had not been changed. Her daughter had to borrow a bowl of water to wash the blood that had become caked on her mother's hands and feet." This was a superb example of traditional shroud-waving, as admired by connoisseurs as a majestic pass by a bullfighter. Mr Blair did not disappoint. He gave a traditional reply to the flapping linen: "The Conservatives want to use these cases ... to run the NHS down. They want to say it has failed, therefore get rid of the health service on which people are depending." In other words, the Tories complain about people getting poor treatment because they want to make sure they get no treatment at all. A 16-year-old could see what nonsense that is, but then, thanks to Mr Blair, they don't yet have the vote.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
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John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
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They say that if you get trapped in quicksand you should not struggle. You must remain very still and wait for help. Nobody has told Stephen Byers. The wretched transport minister has been flailing around for weeks now. It's a horrible sight. Every wave of the arms takes him an inch further down into the inky morass. And nobody has thrown him a rope. The onlookers are all on firm, safe ground, gazing at the dreadful spectacle. Take Harry Cohen, the MP for Leyton. He was one of the many Labour MPs who were in the chamber for transport questions, no doubt to give Mr Byers the support he so badly needs. There was no sign of his celebrated press secretary, Jo Moore. Possibly she had decided that this would prove to be a good day to bury a bad minister. Mr Cohen was in no mood to offer any support at all. He was furious about the public-private partnership for the London Underground. No wonder. He is a London MP. It's his constituents who will suffer. The scheme was, he said, "shaping up to be a disaster". The deals were so appalling that contractors could underperform for years and still get big bonuses. Then after seven years of incompetence, they could re-negotiate their contracts from a monopoly position. What's more they would stick to their own priorities, which had nothing to do with the priorities of passengers. Mr Byers must have felt like a man in a mire who expected planking to be laid out for his escape, but instead felt the tentacle of an octopus wrap around his leg. He blathered about 15bn investment in 13 years, but didn't answer Mr Cohen's charges. Next it was the Tories' turn to make him squirm some more. Sir Sidney Chapman made the point that investment in the tube had been far less since 1997 than it had been in the equivalent period before 1997. Would Mr Byers confirm that? Did he confirm it? Oh, grow up. He renewed his struggles. "I think the issue is ..." he began to Tory jeers and Labour silence. "I will answer that question on my own terms!" he said, to louder Tory jeers, and, in its own way, even louder Labour silence. But he had not finished waving his limbs at us. Thrash, bang, wallop, arghhhh! "We don't want a future of all our yesterdays, in which people blame each other! It is not a time to re-write history, but to look forward and deliver the investment Londoners so badly need!" A time to look forward? Not a time to dwell on all our yesterdays and blame the Tories for everything? What is the party for if it isn't about re-writing history? As Paul Flynn MP once wrote: "In New Labour it is only the future that is certain. The past is continually changing." Mr Byers would really love to blame the inactivity of John Prescott for all his travails, but that's not allowed. The hubbub grew. Vincent Cable, a Lib Dem, asked if it was true that government money for public transport would in future be tied to binding arbitration to stop strikes. Mr Byers gathered about himself what dignity a drowning man can manage, and announced: "The prime minister's official spokesman, and the prime minister himself, which is probably more important ..." The rest of his reply was drowned in mocking cries of "No, he isn't", "don't be silly" and so on. At this point I looked up at the civil servants who have the unhappy task of staffing the press office for Mr Byers. Of the four of them, three were laughing. You know that when the civil service joins in the general delight, the sand is about to close over your head.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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They say that if you get trapped in quicksand you should not struggle. You must remain very still and wait for help. Nobody has told Stephen Byers. The wretched transport minister has been flailing around for weeks now. It's a horrible sight. Every wave of the arms takes him an inch further down into the inky morass. And nobody has thrown him a rope. The onlookers are all on firm, safe ground, gazing at the dreadful spectacle. Take Harry Cohen, the MP for Leyton. He was one of the many Labour MPs who were in the chamber for transport questions, no doubt to give Mr Byers the support he so badly needs. There was no sign of his celebrated press secretary, Jo Moore. Possibly she had decided that this would prove to be a good day to bury a bad minister. Mr Cohen was in no mood to offer any support at all. He was furious about the public-private partnership for the London Underground. No wonder. He is a London MP. It's his constituents who will suffer. The scheme was, he said, "shaping up to be a disaster". The deals were so appalling that contractors could underperform for years and still get big bonuses. Then after seven years of incompetence, they could re-negotiate their contracts from a monopoly position. What's more they would stick to their own priorities, which had nothing to do with the priorities of passengers. Mr Byers must have felt like a man in a mire who expected planking to be laid out for his escape, but instead felt the tentacle of an octopus wrap around his leg. He blathered about 15bn investment in 13 years, but didn't answer Mr Cohen's charges. Next it was the Tories' turn to make him squirm some more. Sir Sidney Chapman made the point that investment in the tube had been far less since 1997 than it had been in the equivalent period before 1997. Would Mr Byers confirm that? Did he confirm it? Oh, grow up. He renewed his struggles. "I think the issue is ..." he began to Tory jeers and Labour silence. "I will answer that question on my own terms!" he said, to louder Tory jeers, and, in its own way, even louder Labour silence. But he had not finished waving his limbs at us. Thrash, bang, wallop, arghhhh! "We don't want a future of all our yesterdays, in which people blame each other! It is not a time to re-write history, but to look forward and deliver the investment Londoners so badly need!" A time to look forward? Not a time to dwell on all our yesterdays and blame the Tories for everything? What is the party for if it isn't about re-writing history? As Paul Flynn MP once wrote: "In New Labour it is only the future that is certain. The past is continually changing." Mr Byers would really love to blame the inactivity of John Prescott for all his travails, but that's not allowed. The hubbub grew. Vincent Cable, a Lib Dem, asked if it was true that government money for public transport would in future be tied to binding arbitration to stop strikes. Mr Byers gathered about himself what dignity a drowning man can manage, and announced: "The prime minister's official spokesman, and the prime minister himself, which is probably more important ..." The rest of his reply was drowned in mocking cries of "No, he isn't", "don't be silly" and so on. At this point I looked up at the civil servants who have the unhappy task of staffing the press office for Mr Byers. Of the four of them, three were laughing. You know that when the civil service joins in the general delight, the sand is about to close over your head.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
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Dr Taylor will see you very soon, and you can have an hour with him," I was told. You don't hear that in the NHS very often, but then very few doctors are standing for parliament. Compared to a busy consultant, candidates have time on their hands. Dr Richard Taylor is standing for the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern party. Astonishingly, he might win, defeating David Lock, a government minister. Martin Bell thinks he will win, and is coming to speak for him. Whatever happens, Dr Taylor will hugely influence the result, and thus scare all the mainstream parties. If an independent can scoop up buckets of votes over a hospital, what next? Schools, incinerators, the Stop People Parking In Our Street After Six O'clock party? There's something engagingly amateurish about the enterprise. That clunky party name for one thing. Any half decent spin doctor would have called it Kidderminster Independent Candidates Killing A State Shutdown, providing a nifty acronym. Then there's the battle bus, which turns out to be a flat bed truck, draped with a few posters and pulled by a tractor, though that is to be replaced by a Land Rover. Dr Taylor is a mild, thoughtful man, though moved to something near fury by the reduction of his beloved hospital to a shell operation. Patients suffering anything serious have to go to Worcester, which for some is more than 30 miles away. Every politician has an oratorical style, which in his case I'd call "bedside manner", though when he gets really angry it's closer to a ringside manner. Dr Taylor, a Labour voter four years ago, decided to go political in April 1999 and after two elections, the party is by far the largest single group on the local council. I suspect Mr Lock may have slightly underestimated his opponent. Like many older doctors, Richard Taylor loves the health service. "In its hey day, the NHS was magnificent. Then we had the chance of making it so good that private practice would have become a complete irrelevance." That kind of talk has got him labelled a "medical dinosaur", a "militant" and a "meddling amateur", though in my experience such abuse makes meddling amateurs even keener to keep on meddling. I went to see Mr Lock, a man who has the burden of being Lord Irvine's representative on earth, or at least in the Commons. He was excited. "Dr Taylor admitted at a public meeting last night that it would be dangerous to bring A&E back to Kidderminster. He's led everyone up the garden path. There is no longer any point in his campaign." I phoned Dr Taylor. "The spin doctors are turning nasty," he said. "I merely pointed out that it would be difficult to bring it back. That's not the same thing." He is learning the first rule of politics: what you say doesn't matter; it's what your opponents can claim you say which counts. Mr Lock assured me that the hospital was raised by only one voter in 10. But when he knocked on the door of someone labelled "firm Labour" on his canvassing sheet, the man said, "I've been Labour thick and thin, right and wrong, all my life. But this hospital thing, it's a very sore point round here..." When Dr Taylor went to a school to talk to parents, one woman told how her little boy had had a burst appendix, and she'd had to go to Worcester with him, and couldn't get home at all, so her husband had to leave work and look after the other three... Luck counts for a lot in elections, and yesterday at least, Dr Taylor had it in spades.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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Dr Taylor will see you very soon, and you can have an hour with him," I was told. You don't hear that in the NHS very often, but then very few doctors are standing for parliament. Compared to a busy consultant, candidates have time on their hands. Dr Richard Taylor is standing for the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern party. Astonishingly, he might win, defeating David Lock, a government minister. Martin Bell thinks he will win, and is coming to speak for him. Whatever happens, Dr Taylor will hugely influence the result, and thus scare all the mainstream parties. If an independent can scoop up buckets of votes over a hospital, what next? Schools, incinerators, the Stop People Parking In Our Street After Six O'clock party? There's something engagingly amateurish about the enterprise. That clunky party name for one thing. Any half decent spin doctor would have called it Kidderminster Independent Candidates Killing A State Shutdown, providing a nifty acronym. Then there's the battle bus, which turns out to be a flat bed truck, draped with a few posters and pulled by a tractor, though that is to be replaced by a Land Rover. Dr Taylor is a mild, thoughtful man, though moved to something near fury by the reduction of his beloved hospital to a shell operation. Patients suffering anything serious have to go to Worcester, which for some is more than 30 miles away. Every politician has an oratorical style, which in his case I'd call "bedside manner", though when he gets really angry it's closer to a ringside manner. Dr Taylor, a Labour voter four years ago, decided to go political in April 1999 and after two elections, the party is by far the largest single group on the local council. I suspect Mr Lock may have slightly underestimated his opponent. Like many older doctors, Richard Taylor loves the health service. "In its hey day, the NHS was magnificent. Then we had the chance of making it so good that private practice would have become a complete irrelevance." That kind of talk has got him labelled a "medical dinosaur", a "militant" and a "meddling amateur", though in my experience such abuse makes meddling amateurs even keener to keep on meddling. I went to see Mr Lock, a man who has the burden of being Lord Irvine's representative on earth, or at least in the Commons. He was excited. "Dr Taylor admitted at a public meeting last night that it would be dangerous to bring A&E back to Kidderminster. He's led everyone up the garden path. There is no longer any point in his campaign." I phoned Dr Taylor. "The spin doctors are turning nasty," he said. "I merely pointed out that it would be difficult to bring it back. That's not the same thing." He is learning the first rule of politics: what you say doesn't matter; it's what your opponents can claim you say which counts. Mr Lock assured me that the hospital was raised by only one voter in 10. But when he knocked on the door of someone labelled "firm Labour" on his canvassing sheet, the man said, "I've been Labour thick and thin, right and wrong, all my life. But this hospital thing, it's a very sore point round here..." When Dr Taylor went to a school to talk to parents, one woman told how her little boy had had a burst appendix, and she'd had to go to Worcester with him, and couldn't get home at all, so her husband had to leave work and look after the other three... Luck counts for a lot in elections, and yesterday at least, Dr Taylor had it in spades.
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0catherinebennett
| 1Society
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There is nothing like a party conference for reminding you that politicians are not as other men and women. It is not only, as Tony Booth remarked this week, that politicians are now under the control of androids intent on world domination - the strange otherliness of our leaders is evident in so many other ways, from the curious "tough on smiles, tough on the causes of smiles" expressions Labour ministers adopted for this conference, to their peculiar use of the English language. Does anyone apart from politicians (both conservative and modernising), use the word "prudent"? Does anyone else, even when speechifying, say "I say in all frankness..."? On the subject of drugs, the current administration becomes almost baroque in its expressions of horror. Keynoting away, Blair raged against the "drugs menace", and the drugs industry - as he put it, "the most chilling, evil industry the world has to confront". Even outside the conference hall, any mention of drugs can be depended on to work our modernisers into a passion of denunciation. They never talk about the need to restrict drug use, or discourage it, or understand it, but must always refer to "the war against drugs", for all the world as if this were a simple, Good versus Bad conflict in which we are all - except for the doomed druggies themselves - eager combatants. Presumably, the lurid language is supposed to convey the extremity of the problem - invariably depicted as a grubby stew of crackheads, playground zombies, dead people in toilets. Before his conference speech, in an interview with the Mirror's Paul Routledge, Tony Blair explained why he wants to extend drug testing of "people who are arrested and charged". "Did you know," Blair said, "that in some areas 50% of people who are arrested have drugs in their system? I don't know about you, but that petrifies me." We must hope he does not decide to extend the scheme to people who are invited to receptions at No 10, or some of his most modern guest lists might be decimated. Drugs, as some bishops and even some opposition politicians, are aware, are not always, indubitably a "menace". You don't have to like them, or take them, to acknowledge that rather a lot of people are doing so now without sliding into the vileness of the gutter and thence into a criminal life from which they can only be rescued by the ludicrously named czar and his legions of drug-testers. But maybe Tony Blair is more innocent than the Bishop of Edinburgh. Maybe he is not, in all frankness, aware that much, if not most, of the modern British creativeness, from Britpop to Britart, to British fashion, with all of which his government so longs to be identified, is the work of artists who have had drugs in their system. Some of these creative people, such as Noel Gallagher, the No 10 invitee, are brazen about it. Some, dashingly, write novels and make films about it. Others, though more discreet about their part in the "drugs menace", feel no sense of shame, or stigma. Cool Britannia, as Labour used to like to call it, is drug fuelled. Maybe testing should be extended to all those who pass through the doors of London's Groucho Club? But if the war on drugs is to be thoroughly prosecuted, it must venture still further, into the recesses of uncool Britannia. We already know, thanks to It Girl Tara, Lord Freddie Thing and the Parker Bowles son, that drugs are as much a feature of junior upper class life, as they are of gangs on sink estates. A recent report suggested that 43% of sixth-formers at independent schools have tried drugs, principally cannabis. They simply do not believe it is harmful. Perhaps they have concluded that their parents suffer more obvious ill effects from alcohol than from drugs. For middle-class people, many of them with impressionable children (people not wholly unlike the Blair family), also play their part in the evil industry. Successful lawyers, financiers, businessmen, government lobbyists - all, otherwise, of the utmost, Blairite probity, are at it too - seemingly convinced that theirs is a recreational habit, which will not end up with car crime and a compulsory blood test. It may not be easy to persuade them, or their world-weary children, otherwise. When Tony Blair talks about his war on drugs - all drugs - it's hard to imagine to which constituency he is appealing. Too many people now appreciate that there are differences between hard and soft drugs and yet more complex differences in individual susceptibilities to the same drugs. Some people can't stop drinking and smoking, either. Even those of us who have been robbed by drug addicts might feel that our interests would be better served by an end to prohibition, or partial prohibition, than a futile and costly "war". Blair's bellicosity cannot disguise the fact that his scheme is wholly unrealistic. Why does he want to test people? "We should be looking at the whole question of bail for cocaine and heroin users," he told Routledge, "because the evidence is that if people are put on bail they just go back to crime to feed their habit. Far better to get them into treatment." Treatment in prison? According to some estimates, half the prison population has a drug problem. It would be like drying out alcoholics in a brewery. The explosion in drug abuse and drug-related crime is alarming, and a severe challenge, but it cannot be seen in isolation as the preserve of a weak-willed underclass and nothing to do with Brit Award winners, models and other modern-approved personalities who don't try to conceal their drug use. Increasing numbers of establishment figures - doctors, editors and police officers among them - are now arguing for the decriminalisation of soft drugs. If Blair is to wage all-out war, he must purge these collaborators and appeasers from his acquaintance. The next Cool Britannia party might be just him and Ann Widdecombe. Enjoy
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
There is nothing like a party conference for reminding you that politicians are not as other men and women. It is not only, as Tony Booth remarked this week, that politicians are now under the control of androids intent on world domination - the strange otherliness of our leaders is evident in so many other ways, from the curious "tough on smiles, tough on the causes of smiles" expressions Labour ministers adopted for this conference, to their peculiar use of the English language. Does anyone apart from politicians (both conservative and modernising), use the word "prudent"? Does anyone else, even when speechifying, say "I say in all frankness..."? On the subject of drugs, the current administration becomes almost baroque in its expressions of horror. Keynoting away, Blair raged against the "drugs menace", and the drugs industry - as he put it, "the most chilling, evil industry the world has to confront". Even outside the conference hall, any mention of drugs can be depended on to work our modernisers into a passion of denunciation. They never talk about the need to restrict drug use, or discourage it, or understand it, but must always refer to "the war against drugs", for all the world as if this were a simple, Good versus Bad conflict in which we are all - except for the doomed druggies themselves - eager combatants. Presumably, the lurid language is supposed to convey the extremity of the problem - invariably depicted as a grubby stew of crackheads, playground zombies, dead people in toilets. Before his conference speech, in an interview with the Mirror's Paul Routledge, Tony Blair explained why he wants to extend drug testing of "people who are arrested and charged". "Did you know," Blair said, "that in some areas 50% of people who are arrested have drugs in their system? I don't know about you, but that petrifies me." We must hope he does not decide to extend the scheme to people who are invited to receptions at No 10, or some of his most modern guest lists might be decimated. Drugs, as some bishops and even some opposition politicians, are aware, are not always, indubitably a "menace". You don't have to like them, or take them, to acknowledge that rather a lot of people are doing so now without sliding into the vileness of the gutter and thence into a criminal life from which they can only be rescued by the ludicrously named czar and his legions of drug-testers. But maybe Tony Blair is more innocent than the Bishop of Edinburgh. Maybe he is not, in all frankness, aware that much, if not most, of the modern British creativeness, from Britpop to Britart, to British fashion, with all of which his government so longs to be identified, is the work of artists who have had drugs in their system. Some of these creative people, such as Noel Gallagher, the No 10 invitee, are brazen about it. Some, dashingly, write novels and make films about it. Others, though more discreet about their part in the "drugs menace", feel no sense of shame, or stigma. Cool Britannia, as Labour used to like to call it, is drug fuelled. Maybe testing should be extended to all those who pass through the doors of London's Groucho Club? But if the war on drugs is to be thoroughly prosecuted, it must venture still further, into the recesses of uncool Britannia. We already know, thanks to It Girl Tara, Lord Freddie Thing and the Parker Bowles son, that drugs are as much a feature of junior upper class life, as they are of gangs on sink estates. A recent report suggested that 43% of sixth-formers at independent schools have tried drugs, principally cannabis. They simply do not believe it is harmful. Perhaps they have concluded that their parents suffer more obvious ill effects from alcohol than from drugs. For middle-class people, many of them with impressionable children (people not wholly unlike the Blair family), also play their part in the evil industry. Successful lawyers, financiers, businessmen, government lobbyists - all, otherwise, of the utmost, Blairite probity, are at it too - seemingly convinced that theirs is a recreational habit, which will not end up with car crime and a compulsory blood test. It may not be easy to persuade them, or their world-weary children, otherwise. When Tony Blair talks about his war on drugs - all drugs - it's hard to imagine to which constituency he is appealing. Too many people now appreciate that there are differences between hard and soft drugs and yet more complex differences in individual susceptibilities to the same drugs. Some people can't stop drinking and smoking, either. Even those of us who have been robbed by drug addicts might feel that our interests would be better served by an end to prohibition, or partial prohibition, than a futile and costly "war". Blair's bellicosity cannot disguise the fact that his scheme is wholly unrealistic. Why does he want to test people? "We should be looking at the whole question of bail for cocaine and heroin users," he told Routledge, "because the evidence is that if people are put on bail they just go back to crime to feed their habit. Far better to get them into treatment." Treatment in prison? According to some estimates, half the prison population has a drug problem. It would be like drying out alcoholics in a brewery. The explosion in drug abuse and drug-related crime is alarming, and a severe challenge, but it cannot be seen in isolation as the preserve of a weak-willed underclass and nothing to do with Brit Award winners, models and other modern-approved personalities who don't try to conceal their drug use. Increasing numbers of establishment figures - doctors, editors and police officers among them - are now arguing for the decriminalisation of soft drugs. If Blair is to wage all-out war, he must purge these collaborators and appeasers from his acquaintance. The next Cool Britannia party might be just him and Ann Widdecombe. Enjoy
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0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Few of us, I think, would rejoice in having a person in Batman suit for a father. Particularly when the twerp in question has a record for harrassing the mother of two of his children and was allegedly overheard, more recently, bragging about the prodigious number of women to have enjoyed the favours bulging to one side of his Batman knickers. And yet Jason Hatch of Fathers4Justice has got himself quite a distinguished following. Yesterday, in these pages, Hatch and his comrades were even likened to the suffragettes. Who obviously missed a trick in not going in for fancy dress. For although F4J's children's party costumes are sometimes deprecated by those who go on to approve its campaign, it seems unlikely that anyone would have warmed to the men, even taken much notice, had they performed their various feats in civvies. In ill-fitting, babyish outfits that contrived to make them look more little-guyishly plucky (or creepy) than oikish, they elicited support and admiration from the most unlikely places. Bob Geldof, meanwhile, thinks them "great and brave". One of our leading young historians urges them on. Even the law-abiding Daily Mail can't resist this nifty new angle for getting one over on women, whose intransigence has apparently created "these men driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard". Although one could easily get the impression that the main reason for the stories is to get the desperate measures on telly. If we didn't know, from numerous interviews, that Hatch has the interests of two of his children at heart, his penchant for sneaking up, or into, forbidden places might look more like a hobby than a cause. In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way. Today, for men who crave camaraderie and thrills but can't afford to go shark-fishing or bungee jumping, Fathers4Justice presents itself as inexpensive, all-male extreme sport, with the added frisson that comes of its also being a crusade and a covert operation. If only more of its members were still cohabiting, it would be a brilliant way of getting away from her indoors. "Could you change the baby, dearest?" "Sorry love, the lads are expecting me on Clifton Suspension Bridge. Where's my Batman suit?" (Actually, it seems that Hatch, last seen acknowledging the crowds from one of her majesty's ledges, is already in the doghouse. Gemma Polson, the mother of their seven-month-old daughter, has reportedly left him, and says: "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He had told me he was going to give it all up - but then he goes and does this at Buckingham Palace." If only he had chosen angling.) Naturally, the ambitions of Fathers4Justice go beyond seeking satisfaction for its premier activists. On its website, the organisation introduces itself as "a new civil rights movement campaigning for a child's right to see both parents and grandparents". Which would not be such a bad idea, if the rights in question weren't going to be enforced by warring adults. And there is, it turns out, a reason why F4J is not called P&G4J. In practice, "parents and grandparents" turns out to mean a "dad's army" which the organisation has been, as it puts it, "mobilising" to fight the authorities which support "recalcitrant mothers". Remarkably little evidence is produced to account for this declaration of war. While it is true that some mothers behave vengefully and deny their children's best interests, there is nothing to support the view that such behaviour is either prevalent, or officially approved. On the contrary. A new government green paper, "Parental separation: children's needs and parents' responsibilities", notes that most "non resident-parents" have weekly or more frequent meetings with their children. It finds that in around 90% of cases, child contact arrangements have been agreed informally by separated parents, of whom, more than 80% profess themselves happy with the arrangement. This does not, in short, conform with the F4J blighted vision of "a nation of children without parents and parents without children". In reality, where there is dissatisfaction with the arrangement this is often because the resident parent - usually the mother - thinks there has been too little, not too much, contact with the the father. If F4J's main concern is genuinely that children should see both their parents, it has launched its dads' army at the wrong sex. Compared with the number of men who say they want but are denied contact, says Gwen Vaughan, the chief executive of Gingerbread, "there are far more fathers who have no contact with their children whatsoever". The men have dropped out of their children's lives. "The idea that mothers are bleeding fathers dry and refusing them access is certainly not the main picture that we see," she says. "They would like more, not less, supportive parenting involvement from their ex partners." If Fathers4Justice is happy to rest much of its case on anecdotes told by individual, often justifiably embittered members, it is surely reasonable to point out that there are many other stories to be told, in which mothers heroically put aside their personal feelings about unreliable, abusive, violent, or possibly criminal former partners purely for the sake of their children. There are more in which fathers, for all that they claim to have their children's interests at heart, use the courts to prosecute a feud with an ex-partner. Since children are not, as Lord Falconer has pointed out, to be divided up like CD collections, it is not terribly surprising that when these cases go to court many more parents profess themselves unhappy with the outcome. They must have been pretty unhappy before they got there. Those of us who have never been through one of these ghastly battles like to point out, the more piously the better, that such parents really ought to put personal animosity aside. But if they can't, the courts will have to do it for them; occasionally deciding that shared parenting, in this battleground, may no longer be the best outcome. Even so, where parents go to court for contact, only 0.8% are refused. But this sort of objection is unlikely to make much difference to the F4J men's approval ratings, at least while mothers seem so reluctant to dress up as cartoon figures and throw purple condoms at people. Still, we can agree with Mr Hatch and his gang on one thing: the children's interests should come first. Which means all the fathers in themed romper suits must get down from the walls immediately, stop showing off, and behave nicely. And what goes for them goes for everyone who has been encouraging this silly nonsense. At their age, they really should know better. Back on song, Blair tries to woo us back Whatever the TUC felt about the content of Mr Blair's address to them on Monday, they should surely feel flattered to have been the beneficiaries of what seems to me to have been, if not one of the great Blair speeches, certainly a hint that we may expect, come conference, a return to glorious, shameless form. The glimpse of a Blair in full song was there not only in his bold reworking of Shakespeare - "I come here to praise Warwick not bury it. To advocate social partnership not belittle it" - but in a plangent bit of phrasing that seems to be his very own: "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back." Assuming Mr Blair did not copy this off the inside of a greetings card with a little bear on the front holding a pale blue balloon and saying "Sorry!", it suggests an intriguing new shift in his rhetorical style, from the visionary who gave us a "new young country" to a sadder but wiser kind of guy who hopes we can learn to love again. A bit like Steps in Since You Took Your Love Away: "I need to find a way back, And I don't know if I'm strong enough ... You took your love, oh baby, no I need you." Could Blair's TUC phrase even be a quote from one of his own, as yet unpublished, songs? "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back, ooh yeah baby, Even if we used to disagree, There's nothing I can do about Iraq, I'm sorry baby ..." Can't wait.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
Few of us, I think, would rejoice in having a person in Batman suit for a father. Particularly when the twerp in question has a record for harrassing the mother of two of his children and was allegedly overheard, more recently, bragging about the prodigious number of women to have enjoyed the favours bulging to one side of his Batman knickers. And yet Jason Hatch of Fathers4Justice has got himself quite a distinguished following. Yesterday, in these pages, Hatch and his comrades were even likened to the suffragettes. Who obviously missed a trick in not going in for fancy dress. For although F4J's children's party costumes are sometimes deprecated by those who go on to approve its campaign, it seems unlikely that anyone would have warmed to the men, even taken much notice, had they performed their various feats in civvies. In ill-fitting, babyish outfits that contrived to make them look more little-guyishly plucky (or creepy) than oikish, they elicited support and admiration from the most unlikely places. Bob Geldof, meanwhile, thinks them "great and brave". One of our leading young historians urges them on. Even the law-abiding Daily Mail can't resist this nifty new angle for getting one over on women, whose intransigence has apparently created "these men driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard". Although one could easily get the impression that the main reason for the stories is to get the desperate measures on telly. If we didn't know, from numerous interviews, that Hatch has the interests of two of his children at heart, his penchant for sneaking up, or into, forbidden places might look more like a hobby than a cause. In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way. Today, for men who crave camaraderie and thrills but can't afford to go shark-fishing or bungee jumping, Fathers4Justice presents itself as inexpensive, all-male extreme sport, with the added frisson that comes of its also being a crusade and a covert operation. If only more of its members were still cohabiting, it would be a brilliant way of getting away from her indoors. "Could you change the baby, dearest?" "Sorry love, the lads are expecting me on Clifton Suspension Bridge. Where's my Batman suit?" (Actually, it seems that Hatch, last seen acknowledging the crowds from one of her majesty's ledges, is already in the doghouse. Gemma Polson, the mother of their seven-month-old daughter, has reportedly left him, and says: "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He had told me he was going to give it all up - but then he goes and does this at Buckingham Palace." If only he had chosen angling.) Naturally, the ambitions of Fathers4Justice go beyond seeking satisfaction for its premier activists. On its website, the organisation introduces itself as "a new civil rights movement campaigning for a child's right to see both parents and grandparents". Which would not be such a bad idea, if the rights in question weren't going to be enforced by warring adults. And there is, it turns out, a reason why F4J is not called P&G4J. In practice, "parents and grandparents" turns out to mean a "dad's army" which the organisation has been, as it puts it, "mobilising" to fight the authorities which support "recalcitrant mothers". Remarkably little evidence is produced to account for this declaration of war. While it is true that some mothers behave vengefully and deny their children's best interests, there is nothing to support the view that such behaviour is either prevalent, or officially approved. On the contrary. A new government green paper, "Parental separation: children's needs and parents' responsibilities", notes that most "non resident-parents" have weekly or more frequent meetings with their children. It finds that in around 90% of cases, child contact arrangements have been agreed informally by separated parents, of whom, more than 80% profess themselves happy with the arrangement. This does not, in short, conform with the F4J blighted vision of "a nation of children without parents and parents without children". In reality, where there is dissatisfaction with the arrangement this is often because the resident parent - usually the mother - thinks there has been too little, not too much, contact with the the father. If F4J's main concern is genuinely that children should see both their parents, it has launched its dads' army at the wrong sex. Compared with the number of men who say they want but are denied contact, says Gwen Vaughan, the chief executive of Gingerbread, "there are far more fathers who have no contact with their children whatsoever". The men have dropped out of their children's lives. "The idea that mothers are bleeding fathers dry and refusing them access is certainly not the main picture that we see," she says. "They would like more, not less, supportive parenting involvement from their ex partners." If Fathers4Justice is happy to rest much of its case on anecdotes told by individual, often justifiably embittered members, it is surely reasonable to point out that there are many other stories to be told, in which mothers heroically put aside their personal feelings about unreliable, abusive, violent, or possibly criminal former partners purely for the sake of their children. There are more in which fathers, for all that they claim to have their children's interests at heart, use the courts to prosecute a feud with an ex-partner. Since children are not, as Lord Falconer has pointed out, to be divided up like CD collections, it is not terribly surprising that when these cases go to court many more parents profess themselves unhappy with the outcome. They must have been pretty unhappy before they got there. Those of us who have never been through one of these ghastly battles like to point out, the more piously the better, that such parents really ought to put personal animosity aside. But if they can't, the courts will have to do it for them; occasionally deciding that shared parenting, in this battleground, may no longer be the best outcome. Even so, where parents go to court for contact, only 0.8% are refused. But this sort of objection is unlikely to make much difference to the F4J men's approval ratings, at least while mothers seem so reluctant to dress up as cartoon figures and throw purple condoms at people. Still, we can agree with Mr Hatch and his gang on one thing: the children's interests should come first. Which means all the fathers in themed romper suits must get down from the walls immediately, stop showing off, and behave nicely. And what goes for them goes for everyone who has been encouraging this silly nonsense. At their age, they really should know better. Back on song, Blair tries to woo us back Whatever the TUC felt about the content of Mr Blair's address to them on Monday, they should surely feel flattered to have been the beneficiaries of what seems to me to have been, if not one of the great Blair speeches, certainly a hint that we may expect, come conference, a return to glorious, shameless form. The glimpse of a Blair in full song was there not only in his bold reworking of Shakespeare - "I come here to praise Warwick not bury it. To advocate social partnership not belittle it" - but in a plangent bit of phrasing that seems to be his very own: "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back." Assuming Mr Blair did not copy this off the inside of a greetings card with a little bear on the front holding a pale blue balloon and saying "Sorry!", it suggests an intriguing new shift in his rhetorical style, from the visionary who gave us a "new young country" to a sadder but wiser kind of guy who hopes we can learn to love again. A bit like Steps in Since You Took Your Love Away: "I need to find a way back, And I don't know if I'm strong enough ... You took your love, oh baby, no I need you." Could Blair's TUC phrase even be a quote from one of his own, as yet unpublished, songs? "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back, ooh yeah baby, Even if we used to disagree, There's nothing I can do about Iraq, I'm sorry baby ..." Can't wait.
|
0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Mindful of the desire of the new commissioner for children, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, for all young people in England to know of his existence, I told the nearest child that she now had her own, dedicated tsar, one determined to raise debate "on the construct of children and childhood in society". He was ready and apparently eager to hear her views. On any subject. Children's participation would be vital to his work. Within a few minutes, the first letter was ready for forwarding. "To the childrens zar" [it began], "I think we should have loads more sweets and crisps. Sincerely, A Kid." The second letter requested longer school holidays, the third no more homework, and the fourth, more pizza restaurants. Given the Zar's record, you feel that he might not be entirely unsympathetic to proposals that would make the world a better place for year 3. After all, as he this week told children at a London primary school, he voluntarily watches Dick and Dom. A couple of years ago, as the government's clinical director for children, he suggested that children in hospital should be tempted with snack boxes including crisps and chocolate. There was no point in offering guacamole, he pointed out; the children wouldn't eat it: "I make no apology for including a Mars bar and crisps, because it's what children like." Sadly for his client base, Professor Aynsley-Green is not empowered to hold back the tide of guacamole now advancing from Jamie Oliver's busy blender, in order to replace it with his own crisp and Mars bar snack boxes. Actually, looking at his role as children's commissioner, he appears to have very few powers at all. He will not, for example, be able to help individual children from being put in custody in Britain, where, as the UN pointed out last year, 27 of them have died since 1990. He cannot stop badly behaved 10-year-olds from being named and shamed on the front pages of their local paper, with the encouragement of the home secretary, who warned young misbehavers this week, "Your photo could be all over the local media; your local community will know who you are ...." Similarly, it will be beyond him to protect children from being assaulted by their parents, who are authorised under the government's recently introduced moderate-slapping legislation to use violence against minors (including babies) as long as they don't leave marks. With the wisdom that comes of having presided over the Islington children's homes scandal, the children's minister, Margaret Hodge, reassured everyone last year that "there is a world of difference between a light smack and violence and abuse". No doubt many of the children whose aggressive, prematurely sexualised, "challenging" behaviour was described by Ofsted this week would applaud this recognition that a little light violence is only to be expected when tempers get frayed. In an opening contribution to his debate on the "construct of children and childhood in society", Aynsley-Smith observed that English society lacks a "warmth" towards children evident in other European countries. Though the popularity of programmes offering advice on child-rearing and the emergence of celebrity nannies such as Gina Powell and Jo Frost surely suggests that parents nowadays are not so much cold as anxious and confused about how to engage with their children. And why shouldn't they be, when you consider the government's simultaneous support for child-whacking (Mr Blair has personally endorsed the loving smack) and persecution of little blighters who go round frightening other people? If the commissioner's job is designed to stop him placing boundaries on such lamentably inconsistent behaviour, he is at least empowered to represent the views of its victims. Do our children feel better for a good slap? Would they like to eat more guacamole? Is there anything about being a child now that the children's commissioner really ought to know? We would be interested in your children's thoughts; contributions welcome at the usual address.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
Mindful of the desire of the new commissioner for children, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, for all young people in England to know of his existence, I told the nearest child that she now had her own, dedicated tsar, one determined to raise debate "on the construct of children and childhood in society". He was ready and apparently eager to hear her views. On any subject. Children's participation would be vital to his work. Within a few minutes, the first letter was ready for forwarding. "To the childrens zar" [it began], "I think we should have loads more sweets and crisps. Sincerely, A Kid." The second letter requested longer school holidays, the third no more homework, and the fourth, more pizza restaurants. Given the Zar's record, you feel that he might not be entirely unsympathetic to proposals that would make the world a better place for year 3. After all, as he this week told children at a London primary school, he voluntarily watches Dick and Dom. A couple of years ago, as the government's clinical director for children, he suggested that children in hospital should be tempted with snack boxes including crisps and chocolate. There was no point in offering guacamole, he pointed out; the children wouldn't eat it: "I make no apology for including a Mars bar and crisps, because it's what children like." Sadly for his client base, Professor Aynsley-Green is not empowered to hold back the tide of guacamole now advancing from Jamie Oliver's busy blender, in order to replace it with his own crisp and Mars bar snack boxes. Actually, looking at his role as children's commissioner, he appears to have very few powers at all. He will not, for example, be able to help individual children from being put in custody in Britain, where, as the UN pointed out last year, 27 of them have died since 1990. He cannot stop badly behaved 10-year-olds from being named and shamed on the front pages of their local paper, with the encouragement of the home secretary, who warned young misbehavers this week, "Your photo could be all over the local media; your local community will know who you are ...." Similarly, it will be beyond him to protect children from being assaulted by their parents, who are authorised under the government's recently introduced moderate-slapping legislation to use violence against minors (including babies) as long as they don't leave marks. With the wisdom that comes of having presided over the Islington children's homes scandal, the children's minister, Margaret Hodge, reassured everyone last year that "there is a world of difference between a light smack and violence and abuse". No doubt many of the children whose aggressive, prematurely sexualised, "challenging" behaviour was described by Ofsted this week would applaud this recognition that a little light violence is only to be expected when tempers get frayed. In an opening contribution to his debate on the "construct of children and childhood in society", Aynsley-Smith observed that English society lacks a "warmth" towards children evident in other European countries. Though the popularity of programmes offering advice on child-rearing and the emergence of celebrity nannies such as Gina Powell and Jo Frost surely suggests that parents nowadays are not so much cold as anxious and confused about how to engage with their children. And why shouldn't they be, when you consider the government's simultaneous support for child-whacking (Mr Blair has personally endorsed the loving smack) and persecution of little blighters who go round frightening other people? If the commissioner's job is designed to stop him placing boundaries on such lamentably inconsistent behaviour, he is at least empowered to represent the views of its victims. Do our children feel better for a good slap? Would they like to eat more guacamole? Is there anything about being a child now that the children's commissioner really ought to know? We would be interested in your children's thoughts; contributions welcome at the usual address.
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0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Has a glass ever looked more half-full? And yet, at the same time, more half-empty? Those of us who have doubted Tony Blair's wisdom in applying this form of efficacy-evaluation to the political mainstream can only concede its aptness to the work of the national lottery commission, and hang our heads. For it is, in its way, a perfect summary of the lottery outcome. On the one hand the glass is half-full: Branson, the crown prince of gittishness, has lost. On the other, the glass is half-empty: Camelot, a practised gang of profiteers, has won. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, do you Tone? Well, you do actually. That little tear glistening in the corner of one of Branson's eyes, as he took in the tragic scale of this abrupt fortune-reversal, was the funniest thing since the death of little Nell. Then again, the revival of Camelot's fortunes must be terribly distressing for New Labour. It is only five years, after all, since the first waves of revulsion caused by Camelot's surging, 1m-a-week profits had Blair and his shadow cabinet queueing up to denounce Camelot and promise their own, cleansing reforms. "Camelot has a licence to print tickets and another to print money", objected Jack Cunningham, then shadow heritage spokesman, who went on to describe the operator as "another private monopoly set up by a Conservative government". In his celebrated "People's Lottery" speech, Tony Blair confirmed that he would open bids for a non-profit-making operator in 2000, "so we can release more money for the benefit of good causes". He pointed out that "No other country in Europe runs a private profit-making lottery". Meanwhile, Chris Smith, shadow heritage secretary, declared that Labour would make sure that, "the lottery serves the people". He said: "The government promised that the lottery would benefit every man, woman and child in Britain. Instead, the distribution of money has become a joke." Since when the joke has got progressively more side-splitting. In fact the story of Labour and the lottery is, in some ways, even more comically terrible than that of Labour and the dome. Labour had not, in opposition, set its face against the dome. And where the dome builders were culpably vainglorious, the lottery commissioners seem to have been plain thick. The great similarity between these two calamities, of course, is that no one of political consequence is going to be held accountable for the mess. Just as the dome emerged as a natural disaster, a force of nature no man could possibly have tamed, so the awarding of the lottery licence is already being portrayed as a task so impossibly huge and complex - think of all those awesome piles of papers! Think of all those big sums! - that we should be grateful that anyone has been found to run it at all, even the beastly old monopoly we all despised back in 1995. Like the genesis of the dome, the selection of a lottery licence will turn out to be so Byzantine a procedure that its complexities can never be satisfactorily explained. We shall never know, for example, why Smith chose to fill his spanking new quango, the national lottery commission, with five people who so consummately lacked any sign of having the "wider range of knowledge, experience, and expertise" that this body was supposed to "bring to bear on lottery regulation". The emergence of Dame Helena Shovelton will remain, for ever, a mystery. Perhaps the commission's task might have been easier had it received more bids. But when the deadline fell, it had just two to consider: one from the fat cats, one from the Cheshire. Branson, recently dubbed Sir Richard by Blair and appointed to Smith's creative industries taskforce, would describe winning the lottery as "the most important thing in my life". Why did he want it so? Not, we know, out of "self-glorification", because Branson has decided to sue Tom Bower, his unauthorised biographer, for supplying this explanation. But if not self-glorification, then what? The simple desire to do good? Possibly. Then again, a job as Britain's Lord Bountiful could not adversely affect Branson's other interests, all of which depend on the bearded person of Branson for their successful branding. Far from instilling doubts about his motivation, the potent Branson brand seemed to appeal powerfully to the commission's chairman Dame Helena and her band of Shoveltons. So much so, that when the dame announced in August that neither bid would do, it was Branson, alone, who got a second chance, a piece of favouritism which would have most toddlers reeling with sympathetic indignation. Branson exulted that his success would make it "worthwhile being born". Camelot, having been everywhere obituarised, successfully sought a judicial review. At this point another cabinet minister might have disbanded his commission and started again. Smith did not. In court, his commission defended itself on the grounds that its process had been like "an architectural competition", in which the People's Lottery had produced a building that was "very nearly there" (a claim which hardly conforms with this week's revised "risky" verdict). The judge, as we know, disagreed, describing the commission's behaviour as "conspicuously unfair", "unlawful" and "an abuse of power". Astonishingly, Dame Helena did not instantly resign. Quite the opposite: she defended her decision, and was, even more incredibly, supported by Smith - who presum ably believes that "conspicuously unfair" conduct is something that might afflict anyone. Only after a week did Dame Shovelton resentfully agree to go, attributing her departure - in a very dome-like way - to "media vilification". Her four, equally conspicuously unfair colleagues (for the judgment had been unanimous) chose - presumably with Smith's blessing - to remain. It must have been obvious to Lord Burns, Shovelton's successor, that the commission was now irredeemably discredited as well as none too bright - but thanks to the earlier prevarication and mistakes, there was now no time to replace these incompetents. The appointment of new commissioners, Lord Burns said, "would delay the process by several months ... the risks regarding that are much greater than the risks in carrying on". Well, we shall see. Burns will just have to hope that a spokesman for the People's Lottery was being honest, in October, when he said: "We have absolute confidence that Lord Burns will be fair and impartial." Branson is not famed, however, for shrinking from litigation. On the contrary. According to Bower, Branson considered seeking a judicial review back in 1994, when he was first refused the lottery licence. This week he was already asking "do we or do we not go to court?" If he does go, then the referral of this extraordinary mess back to courts will be no more than the logical continuation of a saga which seems, in the absence of any competent leadership from those nominally in charge, to have been settled from the start, by the wrangling of professional lawyers. The commission made its initital "conspiciously unfair" decision with the approval of the treasury solicitors. This was overturned in court after successful argument by Camelot's QC. Lord Burns' deliberations have been overseen by the city firm, Freshfields, which has also, by coincidence, previously worked for Branson, Camelot and GTech. And, some may think, why not? Given a choice between Shovelton and Smith and these brainy solicitors and barristers, which would you choose? Wouldn't it be simpler and quicker, given the obvious shortage of suitably qualified public figures, if we just abandoned the pretence of democratically elected government, and appointed a bunch of tip-top lawyers to do the job instead? Then you think of Lord Falconer and Lord Irvine, Lord Grabiner and Lady Kennedy - and remember, that's exactly what Blair is doing. It's just that he hasn't quite finished. Statements The lottery commission<br />Hilary Blume: why I resigned Related stories<br /> Explained: the lottery bids <br />November 10 2000: The debate between who will run the lottery continues Useful links National lottery<br />The Lottery Commission<br />Camelot <br />People's Lottery
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
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Has a glass ever looked more half-full? And yet, at the same time, more half-empty? Those of us who have doubted Tony Blair's wisdom in applying this form of efficacy-evaluation to the political mainstream can only concede its aptness to the work of the national lottery commission, and hang our heads. For it is, in its way, a perfect summary of the lottery outcome. On the one hand the glass is half-full: Branson, the crown prince of gittishness, has lost. On the other, the glass is half-empty: Camelot, a practised gang of profiteers, has won. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, do you Tone? Well, you do actually. That little tear glistening in the corner of one of Branson's eyes, as he took in the tragic scale of this abrupt fortune-reversal, was the funniest thing since the death of little Nell. Then again, the revival of Camelot's fortunes must be terribly distressing for New Labour. It is only five years, after all, since the first waves of revulsion caused by Camelot's surging, 1m-a-week profits had Blair and his shadow cabinet queueing up to denounce Camelot and promise their own, cleansing reforms. "Camelot has a licence to print tickets and another to print money", objected Jack Cunningham, then shadow heritage spokesman, who went on to describe the operator as "another private monopoly set up by a Conservative government". In his celebrated "People's Lottery" speech, Tony Blair confirmed that he would open bids for a non-profit-making operator in 2000, "so we can release more money for the benefit of good causes". He pointed out that "No other country in Europe runs a private profit-making lottery". Meanwhile, Chris Smith, shadow heritage secretary, declared that Labour would make sure that, "the lottery serves the people". He said: "The government promised that the lottery would benefit every man, woman and child in Britain. Instead, the distribution of money has become a joke." Since when the joke has got progressively more side-splitting. In fact the story of Labour and the lottery is, in some ways, even more comically terrible than that of Labour and the dome. Labour had not, in opposition, set its face against the dome. And where the dome builders were culpably vainglorious, the lottery commissioners seem to have been plain thick. The great similarity between these two calamities, of course, is that no one of political consequence is going to be held accountable for the mess. Just as the dome emerged as a natural disaster, a force of nature no man could possibly have tamed, so the awarding of the lottery licence is already being portrayed as a task so impossibly huge and complex - think of all those awesome piles of papers! Think of all those big sums! - that we should be grateful that anyone has been found to run it at all, even the beastly old monopoly we all despised back in 1995. Like the genesis of the dome, the selection of a lottery licence will turn out to be so Byzantine a procedure that its complexities can never be satisfactorily explained. We shall never know, for example, why Smith chose to fill his spanking new quango, the national lottery commission, with five people who so consummately lacked any sign of having the "wider range of knowledge, experience, and expertise" that this body was supposed to "bring to bear on lottery regulation". The emergence of Dame Helena Shovelton will remain, for ever, a mystery. Perhaps the commission's task might have been easier had it received more bids. But when the deadline fell, it had just two to consider: one from the fat cats, one from the Cheshire. Branson, recently dubbed Sir Richard by Blair and appointed to Smith's creative industries taskforce, would describe winning the lottery as "the most important thing in my life". Why did he want it so? Not, we know, out of "self-glorification", because Branson has decided to sue Tom Bower, his unauthorised biographer, for supplying this explanation. But if not self-glorification, then what? The simple desire to do good? Possibly. Then again, a job as Britain's Lord Bountiful could not adversely affect Branson's other interests, all of which depend on the bearded person of Branson for their successful branding. Far from instilling doubts about his motivation, the potent Branson brand seemed to appeal powerfully to the commission's chairman Dame Helena and her band of Shoveltons. So much so, that when the dame announced in August that neither bid would do, it was Branson, alone, who got a second chance, a piece of favouritism which would have most toddlers reeling with sympathetic indignation. Branson exulted that his success would make it "worthwhile being born". Camelot, having been everywhere obituarised, successfully sought a judicial review. At this point another cabinet minister might have disbanded his commission and started again. Smith did not. In court, his commission defended itself on the grounds that its process had been like "an architectural competition", in which the People's Lottery had produced a building that was "very nearly there" (a claim which hardly conforms with this week's revised "risky" verdict). The judge, as we know, disagreed, describing the commission's behaviour as "conspicuously unfair", "unlawful" and "an abuse of power". Astonishingly, Dame Helena did not instantly resign. Quite the opposite: she defended her decision, and was, even more incredibly, supported by Smith - who presum ably believes that "conspicuously unfair" conduct is something that might afflict anyone. Only after a week did Dame Shovelton resentfully agree to go, attributing her departure - in a very dome-like way - to "media vilification". Her four, equally conspicuously unfair colleagues (for the judgment had been unanimous) chose - presumably with Smith's blessing - to remain. It must have been obvious to Lord Burns, Shovelton's successor, that the commission was now irredeemably discredited as well as none too bright - but thanks to the earlier prevarication and mistakes, there was now no time to replace these incompetents. The appointment of new commissioners, Lord Burns said, "would delay the process by several months ... the risks regarding that are much greater than the risks in carrying on". Well, we shall see. Burns will just have to hope that a spokesman for the People's Lottery was being honest, in October, when he said: "We have absolute confidence that Lord Burns will be fair and impartial." Branson is not famed, however, for shrinking from litigation. On the contrary. According to Bower, Branson considered seeking a judicial review back in 1994, when he was first refused the lottery licence. This week he was already asking "do we or do we not go to court?" If he does go, then the referral of this extraordinary mess back to courts will be no more than the logical continuation of a saga which seems, in the absence of any competent leadership from those nominally in charge, to have been settled from the start, by the wrangling of professional lawyers. The commission made its initital "conspiciously unfair" decision with the approval of the treasury solicitors. This was overturned in court after successful argument by Camelot's QC. Lord Burns' deliberations have been overseen by the city firm, Freshfields, which has also, by coincidence, previously worked for Branson, Camelot and GTech. And, some may think, why not? Given a choice between Shovelton and Smith and these brainy solicitors and barristers, which would you choose? Wouldn't it be simpler and quicker, given the obvious shortage of suitably qualified public figures, if we just abandoned the pretence of democratically elected government, and appointed a bunch of tip-top lawyers to do the job instead? Then you think of Lord Falconer and Lord Irvine, Lord Grabiner and Lady Kennedy - and remember, that's exactly what Blair is doing. It's just that he hasn't quite finished. Statements The lottery commission<br />Hilary Blume: why I resigned Related stories<br /> Explained: the lottery bids <br />November 10 2000: The debate between who will run the lottery continues Useful links National lottery<br />The Lottery Commission<br />Camelot <br />People's Lottery
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