Carlisle in 1972

I've been meaning to post these for some time, but many thanks to my friend Andrew Stevens for sending me the links below showing pictures of old Carlisle in the early 1970s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3H6XtYTx24&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeZlabluu10&feature=related

For all the changes Carlisle is still recognisable. On the other hand I suppose it's when you see old films like this when you realise how much has actually changed over the years. You probably have to be slightly over thirty to recall the pre-pedestrianised city centre. I remember in my first year of secondary school catching the Ribble bus home just outside WH Smith's for 24p.

The extracts are from a TV series called Nairn Across Britain made in 1972. Ian Nairn himself (above) seems to be something of a tragic figure, apparently dying quite young in the early 1980s following a long battle with alcohol. All very sad. Nairn was a writer on architecture, and seems to have been in a permanent of being hacked off with where it was all going. Hope you enjoy the extracts.

Let's have a good old moral panic (again)

In today's edition of the News and Star there's some nice coverage for my good friend and Castle by-election Green candidate Neil Boothman.

Neil doesn't like the whole Doing a Terry Jones nature of the by-election either, and he'd rather not have cuts to pay for the mistakes of greedy bankers. We'll be doing everything we can to him elected on 1st March. Neil has a huge amount to offer and will provide original and constructive opposition to the troika currently running the show.

Also in today's paper there's a rather unfortunate juxtapositioning of Rory Stewart's photo under the partial headline appetite for sheep where he drones/bores on about when he was quelling the natives in the province of Watsonistan, or somewhere. I'm obviously no Conservative but why does Rory Stewart end up being placed ahead of Carlisle MP John Stevenson on programmes like local election night coverage broadcast from here? Talk about own goals.

And on page nine we have the headline Council prayers backed by Muslim. This is the sort of thing that American writer Thomas Frank warns us about: a good old moral panic to distract us from the real economic issues.

Apparently some High Court decision means that prayers will now no longer be said at the start of council meetings although this will probably be overturned on appeal after some bloke in Devon with nothing better to do said he felt 'excluded' from council meetings because of the Christian nature of the opening prayer.

Yep, if there was ever a non-issue, this is it.

The News and Star then interviews various people like the Rev Keith Teasdale who predicts the downfall of western civilisation now that prayers may not happen before a council meeting. Hilariously, the Rev Teasdale then goes on to say that prayers have been said at city council meetings since the time of Oliver Cromwell, nicely missing the irony that Cromwell was by modern standards a war criminal and ethnic cleanser. Some things are just beyond parody.

I've had limited experience of opening prayers when I was on the city council over a three year period and to be frank it made me cringe. The same goes for Remembrance Day. It was all traditional rather than religious and my guess is that most people would accept that. Essentially the debate about pre-meeting prayers just misses the point completely. There's something just plain wrong though about saying prayers before a meeting and then going on to carry out decisions that are just so completely against the values of the Gospel. Starting with the Sermon on the Mount isn't a bad place to begin. Christianity contains an extremely demanding and radical alternative vision of society as Oscar Romero, one of the people who inspires me the most, constantly argued. As Martin Luther King so eloquently said:

Any religion which professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a dry-as-dust religion.

Paying more, working longer, getting less and...

I'm writing this whilst watching the regional BBC North East and Cumbria section of Sunday Politics.

It's not a programme I particularly make a point of watching but one of the studio guests interviewed today was some bloke called Ronnie Campbell (above), revealed through a quick internet search to be the Labour MP for Blyth Valley in Northumberland. I'm struggling to recall another occasion when I've seen someone as inept, rambling and incompetent as him interviewed on TV, let alone holding public office. Who let him out?

I've been a workplace union rep for the NUT for almost ten years. I see this as being about two things. First, it's about ensuring fairness and natural justice. Second, it's about enabling people to perform in their jobs to the best of their ability and to thereby ensure that the young people in our care get the best possible education with improved life chances. With the best will in the world, and in a forty year career, people are going to be faced with a range of problems and they need people and organisations to turn to for support. This is a voluntary role and it's on top of my day job and other responsibilities in my own time. It's important to me and I've learned a lot. One of the national issues kicking around at the moment is, of course, the issue of pensions, with many of us facing the prospect of paying more, working longer and getting less.

Obviously I dispute the figures that are put around by the government and others to say that public sector pensions are not affordable. Moreover, the issue is about fairer and better pensions for all and the focus should be on a levelling up rather than the usual British approach of a levelling down. At the same time young people are entering the workforce later and clearly as far as the likes of Greece have shown ridiculously early retirement ages are a non-starter. However, I want to leave those particular issues to one side for a moment because elements of that debate do miss an important point: we need a debate about the nature and focus of work itself.

The thinking behind the current system is based on paying in to a scheme over decades and then stopping formal paid employment at a given age (however that is determined). People then end up with enforced leisure time whether they like it or not as a reward for years of service. However that model needs to be challenged, not least because of the extra and extreme pressures and stresses that many people end up facing on a daily basis.

Some months ago I was very struck by some comments that a good friend of mine made. This was to the effect that the concept of retirement, as such, simply did not exist in pre-industrial societies. The elderly respected for their experience and specific contributions they could make based upon this. Most people did not do formal work full time, but worked for a few hours a week. This may have lessened as they grew older. The only time when people experienced great stress was when there was a crisis of some sort when lives were directly under threat. In contrast, today most of us are operating in full on crisis mode most of the time - although nobody is going to die.

I've generalised horrendously above, but my key point remains the same: let's focus on the nature and place of work in our lives and new ways of working as well as well as the pension debate demographics and figures.

Doing a Terry Jones

From now on, this blog will use the expression doing a Terry Jones to denote gross and unnecessary financial profligacy with public money in times of austerity.

Mr Jones, you may recall, was one of two Castle ward residents (the other being his wife) who called the completely unnecessary county council by-election for 1st March - despite the fact that local elections take place only weeks later and the two sets of elections could have been held together.

Instead, Mr and Mrs Jones have decided to spend up to £6K of taxpayer's money on the election. Both are Lib Dem supporters and I can only guess that they have decided to do so for political gain. The plan is for Lib Dem activists to pile into Castle for a 1st March poll, something that they will be unable to do when they're all busy trying to save their own council seats elsewhere against the coming tsunami that will deservedly blow them all away. Lib Dem MPs voting against PR. Who'd have thought it?

I'd like to thank Mr and Mrs Jones very much for the following:

1. Wasting public money that could have been better spent elsewhere.

2. Putting the city elections team under even greater pressure ahead of the May elections. These people really do have a lot on their plate.

3. Making my own life and those of my Green Party colleagues (and, for that matter, activists in other parties that aren't Lib Dems) more difficult and busy than it needs to be, with the financial implications that a by-election brings and in the run up to an Ofsted at work.

Thank you again.

Unbelievable.

Sabre rattling in the South Atlantic

It increasingly feels like the 1980s all over again.

Large numbers of people losing their jobs, a driving down of living standards and an increase in international tension. I'm almost convinced that the next US president, and it doesn't matter who it is, will launch an attack on Iran killing large numbers of people in the process.

And then there's the Falklands. The Argentine government, headed by Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (who took over from her now dead husband in 2007, and please dial down the plastic surgery) is making increasingly noisy demands for the return of the islands. Nothing to do with political problems at home and attempts to distract the population from them then? Good. Just checking.

Historically, the French claim to the islands is as strong as any. Originally uninhabited (and never settled on a significant scale by anyone) the 1690 to 1833 timeframe is the period disputed as to who did what to whom, when and why - and what the consequences are for current claims. Populism, irrationality and politics take over from reasoned debate as far as any claims to the islands go, although it's particularly so on the Argentine side.

Argentina wants the Falkland Islands. That's the bottom line. Any strategy they pursue is clearly to that end. However I'm struggling to see where all of this can go in terms of a resolution. My own view is that there can't be one, for the simple reason that the vast majority of islanders want to remain part of the UK. There's no independence movement or desire for self-determination of any sort, although there is a long running debate about whether the Falklands should send its own MP to Westminster to represent the 2,955 islanders.

This looks set to run. A showdown with Argentina, albeit on a far smaller scale than 1982, would suit the current government here, so we may see the development of an odd parasitic relationship between London and Buenos Aires in the medium term. Can't we make some obscure Lib Dem MP (although is there any other kind?) some sort of viceroy to keep them happy? They seem to go for that sort of thing.

The Castle by-election runners and riders

Nominations closed on Friday at noon and there are five candidates in the running to be Castle's next county councillor.

Neil Boothman goes for the Greens, Olwyn Luckley for the Lib Dems, Keith Meller for the Conservatives, Michael Owen for UKIP and Willie Whalen for Labour.

As I've said before this is totally Labour's to lose. There was, apparently, considerable opposition to the idea of Elsie Martlew as the candidate for the by-election with various reasons given, such as not a team player, lack of people skills, high risk and Labour actually want to win. Willie Whalen's candidacy may be a shrewd move as, indeed, is Olwyn Luckley's. If you're in a contest like this you need your high profile names.

The Lib Dems are already on the defensive over the calling of the by-election was attacked by ourselves and Labour. It really is an outrageous waste of public money so close to the May poll and has been done purely for political gain. The Lib Dems will try to flood the area with activists in a way that won't be possible in May when they'll all be holed up in their own parishes trying to swim against the tsunami quite rightly heading their way.

The reality is that there are only two choices on the ballot paper. On the one hand you have the pro-cuts parties. They're all signed up the austerity measures and the only difference is in the presentation. This is a bit like in the former Stalinist states of central and eastern Europe where phantom opposition parties were created in a nod to democratic window dressing, but they were all controlled by the ruling party and accepted their 'leading role' in society. On the other hand you have the Greens who are offering something very different. So two very clear sets of choices here if you're a Castle voter.

UKIP would like to think of themselves as some sort of UK style Tea Party. This is odd because they now find themselves in the position of wanting EU austerity measures to go even further but without supporting the EU itself: in other words the EU is doing what they want. For some reason I'm on their local email list and can't get off it. I now know for a fact that they're even more extreme and mad than I thought they were. Public meetings on hanging anyone?

The justice zone

I feel I'm being spoiled.

It's fantastic news that Inspector Knacker has decided to throw the book at the horrendous Chris Huhne and his ghastly ex-wife Vicky Pryce. The comments yesterday from Cameron and Clegg were somewhat less than wholehearted in their support for someone whose name has become a byword for vanity. He's also been pretty useless as a cabinet minister.

Huhne was one of many MPs caught out in the expenses scandal, in his case billing taxpayers for a trouser press, fourteen pence for stationery and a fluffy duster. In the 2007 Lib Dem leadership contest he stated that "relationships, including particularly family relationships, are actually the most important things in making people happy and fulfilled". We know that he meant it too, but seemingly he wasn't speaking about his wife of twenty five years whom he left shortly afterwards, or his three children, all of whom appeared extensively in his general election literature, but a woman he was having an affair with.

I don't buy this nonsense about what people do in their private lives being their own business. If his own family can't trust this bloke, I see no reason why the rest of us should. Adios!