From The Sunday Times today

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

I make no apologies for the fact that this note is not based on my own original thoughts. It's just that I saw a number of commentaries in the Sunday Times today and I thought they would be worth repeating, albeit in my own words.

First take Ron Liddle. He was once a member of the far left Socialist Workers Party but he's moved on and is now just a rebel like me. It seems that some of our ATM's have been doling out double the money that people asked for. Naturally, folks used their mobiles to text their friends to join in the bonanza. Brings a whole meaning to the term 'a run on the banks' doesn't it.?

Should they hand the money back? Technically it's robbery but then as Liddle says. 'We behave with honesty largely for reasons of reciprocity. The most unjust societies are generally the most corrupt, where individuals cheat and extort because it has been the norm.' These banks have been bailed out with billions of our money and there is more to come. Meanwhile, the bosses keep their jobs and at salaries that the rest of us can only dream of.

He moves on with the tale of a Cambridgeshire council planning to spen £500,000 on a large steel noise barrier around a gypsy site. Most of the locals are against although a few approve so long as it is electrified. It seems that passing motorists on the nearby dual carriageway have been shouting at the camp and the inhabitants don't like the noise of cars. They cannot discern what is actually being shouted at them but the council says that they know it's negative. Liddle suggests that it may not be negative at all and the motorists may have been saying things like, 'Good luck to you wonderful people, with your carefree, peripatetic lifestyles and reputation for honesty and cleanliness!'

If they don't like the noise, 'Why then do they not invoke their traditional right to clear off.'

Moving on, we have Dominic Lawson. He's the son of Nigel Lawson, one time Chancellor of Exchequer, and the sister of Nigella Lawson, the cookery writer whose recipes are almost as appealing as her breasts. But enough of that, in my dreams.

Lawson was commenting on two Government moves to increase social mobility, which is to say the movement between class/income levels. Needless to say that stupid Harriet Harman is involved - the privately educated niece of the Earl and Countess of Longford - who sent one of her kids to a private school and another to a grammar school. Lawson quotes a lot of figures from a recent report. Interestingly, they demonstrate that movement between the bottom and top income quartiles was higher for kids born in 1958 than those born in 1970. On the other hand, there has been a huge movement between individual quartiles - in both directions. So we are moving around, even if not always for the better. (As an aside, I have commented on statistics before. There will always be a bottom and always be a top. At times, it's the absolute values that matter. If you move people from the current bottom quartile, then that quartile will have to be redefined and most will still end up there.)

He attributes 'the real destruction of the aspirations of what used to called the working class was by those who claimed to be its saviours, within the comprehensive (school) system.' 'A Marxist-influenced teaching profession that regarded academic rigour as a bourgeois imposition, based on an outmoded social order, betrayed an entire generation.' Bit OTT, I thought, but he's on the right lines. The guy who founded the Trust that wrote the report grew up on a council estate (like me), passed the 11-plus (like me), went to grammar school (like me), went to University (like me) and then had a successful career in business (well I suppose I did in a way). Of course in those days teachers went to work in suits and the like, only to be followed in the 70's by a bunch of scruffs in sandals and kaftans who thought that spelling didn't matter and that learning by rote was an abomination. I am pleased to say that, at least for the primary school of which I am a governor, that things have reversed for the better.

The letters page has a majority blaming Hamas for the Gaza debacle just like me last week. That may be down to selection by the Letters Editor but I noticed that after Israel called a cease fire this weekend, Hamas banged another 6 rockets into Israel. And wasn't there some UN declaration against siting military installations in civilian areas? No wonder there was collateral damage as it is euphemistically put.

Finally, there was a nice article by a guy called Dominic Roub who talked about the British state's increasing curb on freedoms, largely in the cause of improved security. There are far more surveillance powers (elsewhere I read that we are the most CCTV'd nation on Earth), the police's ability to detain without charge is being proposed and the universal right to trial by jury is being questioned. We have health & safety legislation that will soon prescribe how to go the toilet or at least what paper must be provided. And of course much of this goes through on the nod in Parliament if indeed it ever gets to Parliament.

I ignored all the football crap.