News of the World and prison

The News of the World's royal editor got up to some despicable tricks in order to satisfy the prurient interests of his readers and it is right he should be brought to justice.

But at a time when our jails are so overcrowded that people are sleeping on the floor of police cells, is it really sensible to send him to prison?

It will cost the taxpayer money to feed and water him and I doubt if it will do him much good. Wouldn't it have been better to give him a community service order? Think of the good he could have done helping youngsters who struggle with reading and writing? According to one view I heard, illiteracy and drugs are the things most law breakers have in common.

Or let him decorate a pensioner's house, let him take some housebound soul out for trips at his own expense, let him wash Prince Harry's car.

There must be a thousand more useful things he could be doing rather than sitting in a cell feeling sorry for himself, probably to emerge feeling hard done by rather than reformed.

Saltaire Sam

Bleep help us

Hilarious story in the paper today about a young man who was asked to remove all profanity and blasphemy from the film The Queen to make it suitable for showing in-flight (don't ask).

He is either extremely dim or used a film version of search and replace because passengers were left to ponder on seven bleeps where the word God should have been, including one 'bleep bless you, ma'am.'

I hope he also edited the news coverage of George W's 'what a state the nation's in' speech, which presumably now ends with a rousing 'And may bleep bless America.'

Saltaire Sam

Did God screw up?

I tend to believe evolution is an imperfect system, which explains why so much is screwed up.

It makes much more sense to me than the belief of those fundamentalist religious communities who insist an ominipotent God made the world in six days before putting his feet up, or those who realise the universe is more than six thousand years old but still insist it was created by God's intelligent design.

If they are right, then he made a hash of it. If you are clever enough to design the intricacies of a brain, the beauty of a sunset, or the emotion of love, why would you make humans so greedy and quarrelsome that they always want to fight each other? Why would you invent Tsunamis? Why would you bother to put wasps on the earth?

They can't have it both ways. If God is the designer, he should take the blame for the cock ups. To me, it makes much more sense to believe that things started to go wrong in the process of the early life forms crawling out of the mud.

Saltaire Sam

Catholic church and adoption by gay couples

It occurs to me that the reason the Roman Catholic church is so opposed to gay couples adopting children is that they are too close to one aspect of the problem and can't see the bigger picture.

They should realise that people in same sex relationships are not like the few priests in their own midst who have abused children. Homosexual is not the same as paedophile.

Saltaire Sam

Makes you want reincarnation be true

I heard a great story on the radio this week about William Beveridge, the man whose 1942 report on building a better Britain after the war recommended government should tackle the great evils of 'want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.'

Apparently he kept working well into his eighties, always taking on new jobs. Right at the end he sat up, said 'I've a thousand things to do,' and died.

I hope I've still got a thousand things to do when my time comes.

Saltaire Sam

Portillo moment

I was one of those who sat up until dawn on election night in 1997, persuaded that we would have a new society by the Millennium. Call me a naive, sentimental fool if you will, but I really believed that Tony Blair and new labour would create a fairer, more enlightened society. After all those years of sleaze and 'no such thing as society,' we could now look forward with optimism.

I was as wrong about that as TB was about weapons of mass destruction, but at least I didn't kill thousands of people with my mistake.

The highlight of that election night for many of us was seeing Michael Portillo lose his seat. God, how we laughed to see the pompous fall, the arrogant get his come uppance.

Now it turns out that Portillo is a thoroughly decent man. I still don't agree with some of his ideas but there's no doubt, he is intelligent articulate and civilised.

So what does that tell us? Perhaps, defeat changed Portillo and a little humility was good for his soul. In the same way, perhaps power corrupted Blair and made him arrogant and certain he was always right, despite all the evidence when he was wrong.

Perhaps I'm just a bad judge of character

Saltaire Sam

TB and the prison population

I watched Tony Blair on PMQs today (24 Jan). There is no doubt he is a good performer and makes David Cameron look quite ordinary, but some of the things he says are scary. You long for the chance to sit down quietly with him and say, 'Yes, Prime Minister, but..'

For example, today he was boasting about the number of new prison places his government has created and the number of people who are in prison for the long term.

If this country is so far along the road to hell in a handcart that we really need all these extra places and prisoners, doesn't that say a lot about our society? If so, what is the government doing to improve things (apart from locking us up)?

Why aren't we pouring resources into tackling the problems of drugs, which are responsible for so much crime? Monty Don's recent TV series with heroin addicts, showed one way in which drug users can be helped but what has become of it? As far as I can tell, nothing. TB prefers to put people behind bars, despite all the evidence that incarceration hinders rather than helping addicts recover.

Saltaire Sam.

Introduction

I guess I should start with an explanation of the title of this blog. It's a quote from the movie Network when the disillusioned TV newcaster, Howard Beale, says to his audience:

'You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

At 61 years old, I find myself feeling more and more like Howard Beale. I've tried writing to the Prime Minister and the newspapers, but it achieves nothing. If Tony Blair can ignore three million people marching against the war in Iraq, he certainly has no problem ignoring my emails, if he ever gets to see them at all.

So blogging seems to be a possible answer. I don't expect this to change things but I hope that it will strike a chord with others who feel the same way or, indeed, have opposite views, and from the resulting dialogue, maybe we can find our own way to relieve the frustration of being a member of a democracy where our view only counts on polling day, and then only in a handful of constituencies.

I plan to make this as wide ranging as I can but inevitably it will have a political bias and in my case a leftish political bias.

Right now, I'm het up about the changing face of capitalism and whether it really is the only way to run the world; the way politicians and big business are using global warming to score points without actually doing something positive to arrest it; about the increasing gap between rich and poor, in Britain as well as the wider world; about the blatantly unfair tax system that takes a greater percentage of income in tax from the poorest rather than the rich; about the fact that thousands of children in the Third World are dying each day for the lack of something as basic as clean water when millions of pounds are squandered on unnecessary luxuries in the West.

And today, I'm angry that the Roman Catholic church, with its disgraceful record of committing and covering up child abuse, has the temerity to say that being gay should exclude you from adopting children.

So that's it, I'm as mad as hell and I hope this blog provides a lot of people with a window where they can yell, I'm not going to take it any more.

Saltaire Sam