Joe's Jottings

…which many will recognise as the opening line of the Beatles song, “A Day in the Life”.  Unfortunately, I had to change the next line to ‘…and was as angry as Hell’ rather than ‘About a lucky man who made the grade’.

Today, on Westminster Bridge in London, people protesting against Government Plans to ‘reform’ the NHS are gathering in an event called, on Twitter, #blockthebridge.  It appears that a few thousand people are gathering, and at the time of writing the protest was peaceful.  Although you might be ignorant of this protest unless you’re following it on social media like Twitter and Facebook, becasue neither the BBC or Sky News have seen fit to report on it.

After all, there is a more important story happening..Sir Paul McCartney is getting married! Yes! We’ve had the interviews with the waiting fans, know that Sir Paul and his bride to be went for a workout this morning, know the colour of the wedding car and it’s just popped up as ‘Breaking News’ on the BBC News channel where we have live footage of a car parked in a driveway waiting to drive off.

Quite honestly, it’s shameful – McCartney and (on Sky) dead pop singer Michael Jackson have managed to provide some suitably anodyne and irrelevant ‘OK’ or ‘Hello’ style celeb puff pieces to cover up that people are fighting for the future of the NHS.  It’s either piss poor editorial decision making or censorship, and given the coverage not given to the Wall Street occupation in the last week I’m going with censorship.

Oddly enough, it would have been John Lennon’s birthday today, and I like to think that as the co-writer of the song I quoted above he would have been tempted to go and join the protesters rather than attend the wedding, had he still been with us – were he not already occupying Wall Street, of course.

And in case you’re interested, the BBC are now showing a bus pulling up at a Register Office….

Yesterday, Peter Falk died.  The 83 year old veteran actor had had dementia for a few years – an ironic end for a man who will always be known as Columbo, the dishevelled homicide detective with the razor sharp mind. Enough will be (rightly) written about Mr Falk over the next few days, and I’m sure that the TV planners are already dusting off parts of their schedule for a few re-runs, but I just wanted to blog about what Peter Falk meant to me as an integral part of growing up.

I blogged about the show a year or so ago – here - and it’s sad to come back to it in this way.

Columbo was part of the ‘Mystery Movie’  TV series developed in the US in the late 1960s / early 1970s that featured feature-length stories from three or four detective, once a week. So you’d get a Columbo one week, McMillan and Wife, then a McCloud, etc. They were standard viewing in Pritchard Towers – although I was usually dodging in and out of the living room, doing homework and hobbies or just ‘mucking about’ in the evening.   Columbo is always associated with my early teens; whereas I was not always allowed to watch some TV police shows, Columbo was OK and passed parental screening.

It was like a jigsaw puzzle – you knew who did it, when, how and to whom.  the trick was working out how Columbo would piece the clues together to get to the murderer. If there was ever such a thing as a ‘Police Opera’, Columbo was it.  There’s a saying ‘The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings’ – in Columbo, it wouldn’t be over until the man in the mac turned to the suspect as he was leaving after an interview and said ‘There’s just one more thing…’.  That was the ‘Black Spot’ for the murderer – they were marked for nicking, and it was just a formality from there on in.  The bumbling detective who, in the words of one character, ‘looked like an unmade bed’ was in many cases almost apologetic when he slapped the cuffs on – indeed, there were a number of episodes where the murderer was much more sympathetic than the victim! Columbo was like a favourite uncle, complete with dreadful car and a dog as laid back as he was, called ‘Dog’.

Like another of my favourite detectives, Morse, first name was never mentioned; I got the impression that his mysterious wife (like Arthur Dailey’s ‘er indoors’, mentioned often, never seen) would call him to dinner with a quick ‘Lieutenant, dinner’s up’.  To me he had a number of character traits that were charming and unusual to see in a lead role in a TV detective show.  He was untidy, (apparently) easily distracted, showed humility and was pretty non-violent. He also had a sharp mind, dogged persistence and a sense of fair play and justice. In other words, he was a nice guy who just happened to be a homicide cop.  He didn’t have ‘issues’ like modern cops, but you could actually believe in him – I think even now I want my police murder squad people to be either Columbo or Morse.

Falk was also brilliant in one of my favourite war films ‘Anzio’, in which he played a member of a squad of GIs stuck in a farmouse with German soldiers around them, but for me his greatest film role would be as, wait for it, unkempt, dishevelled, private detective ‘Sam Diamond’ in the brilliant comedy ‘Murder by Death’, which sends up every ‘locked room’ mystery you will ever have seen.  It was on TV a few days ago.  There is a description (and spoilers) here.  If you’ve not seen it, and don’t mind fun being poked at Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade et al. then do take a look!  Falk has some brilliant lines – I have to say that my favourite, after he finds out that he and his girlfriend are locked in a room with a bomb set to explode in 30 seconds, is :

[a bomb is about to explode]
Sam Diamond: I’ve got an idea! I don’t know if it will work but I’ve got to try. Turn around!
Tess Skeffington: I’ve turned, Sam.
Sam Diamond: Whatever you do, don’t turn around until I say so.
Tess Skeffington: [turns around] But Sam…
Sam Diamond: I SAID DON’T TURN AROUND!
Tess Skeffington: Yes, Sam.
Sam Diamond: Good! Cause… I think… I’m gonna cry.

When the news came through about Peter’s death yesterday, I heard it first from Twitter, and then came the grubbing around for a few minutes on Google and such to get it confirmed.  I have to admit to being a little bit teary – but then I realised that I was sad and smiling – all those super memories I have put there by Peter Falk. 

Let me find my Columbo box set…

Those of us of a certain age in IT will remember Apple’s famous TV advert for the groundbreaking ‘Macintosh’ computer back in 1984.  The advert, here on You Tube, portrayed how the Mac would free computer users from the grasp of the evil Corporate Computer giants (such as IBM and Microsoft) and did a lot to help Apple’s image as the ‘good (albeit expensive) guys’ in the computer world, providing computers that were fun to use, cool and trendy.

Macs were always hard to write software for, compared to the PC.  But the ease of use and availability of high quality software for media use, combined with a large number of users who might be regarded as ‘opinion formers’ – writers, authors, musicians and other media players – ensured that the Mac would survive.  In recent years the iPod, iPhone and iPad have created new markets for Apple products – indeed, I have an iPad on loan at the moment and I really enjoy it, despite my original qualms about the iPad.  But Apple kit has become increasingly ‘walled garden’.  I first explored this in this Blog post: http://www.joepritchard.me.uk/2010/04/apple-why-2014-could-be-like-1984/, expressing concern about the way in which Apple were controlling what you viewed and accessed with the iPad.

So, what’s new? Why am I back here?

Take a look at this Patent.  The stated purpose is to allow the owners of concert or conference venues to turn off the cameras of any devices in the venue that are using technology that is described in the Patent.  You might wonder why someone in the digital camera / video business would want to put circuitry in their cameras that would allow them to be remotely disabled.  Well,  if you’re a media publisher, then you might be very interested indeed in being able to prevent people filming concerts and such that you might actually have the rights for.  At this level – that of Digital Rights Management – then it’s a useful technology – especially if, like Apple, you make money by selling media, or if you think that governments, encouraged by media companies, may consider beefing up DRM laws to protect more forms of media.

The patent relies on infra-red light to disable (or change the function of) the cameras.  Wireless signals would have range issues or might even be disabled by the simple expedient of the user of the camera simply disabling WiFi. As far as I can see, the patent works by using Infra Red light coming in through the camera lens – there might be a way to filter this, but I’m not entirely sure – probably suitable IR filters would dim and distort the colour of the image beyond usability.

Whilst the DRM issue of recording performances has been the overt driving force behind this patent, I’m more worried about how it might be used to disable the camera at demonstrations, civil unrest, etc.  Capturing footage such as that seen in the UK Student Demonstrations, the UK G20 evidence about the death of a passer by and all the footage from Egypt and Greece might no longer be possible for users of cameras fitted with such technology.  All the authorities would have to do is ‘paint’ areas of the scene they don’t want filming with a suitable IR signal and that’s that – apart from any ‘old tech’ that doesn’t have this patent incorporated.  This would be a simple step – the technology to paint with IR could be as simple as a battery of high intensity infra-red LEDs emitting the required coded signals.  One can imagine the situation – the authorities wish to violently break up a demonstration, they turn the infra-red emitters on, the phone cameras go dark, the kickings start.

Apple seem to have come a long way since their ‘freedom from authoritarian power’ beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s.  The revolution will not be televised; certainly not with Apple kit, anyway.

Hear me out on this one.

I’ve been a political animal for over half my life; for me it came with the turf of being working class boy, avoids going down the pit by going to university, comes home and sees the five pits that I could see from my bedroom window as a kid closed down within a few years.  I was active in ‘Old Labour’ – Chair of Ward, vice Chair of Constituency, District Labour Party, etc. before quitting in disgust at the direction New Labour was taking the party.  Since 1995 my politics have been with a small ‘p’ – they’ve been about community building – bottom up helping people create their own solutions, a little writing, a little online community building, whatever.

So, you might be surprised to read this item, in which I am going to argue that many of the ‘big leaks’ of US Military and Diplomatic Information from Wikileaks have been ultimately pointless, organisationally egotistical and distracting from the issues at hand.  The lack of US security, the possibility that some of the information is ‘black propaganda’ and the personal life of Mr Assange are matters for another day and probably another writer.

Going back to the first time that Wikileaks hit the headlines, the release of papers showing that there had probably been war crimes in Iraq perpetrated by Allied troops, that torture took place and other stories associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was undeniably valuable and the sort of traditional ‘investigative journalism’ that we might expect from the Fourth Estate.  These were relevant and important leaks in any number of ways - wrongdoing by US and UK citizens, possible war crimes, lies in Government about the prosecution of a war – possible further indications that the wars themselves were illegal.  They removed the last shreds of the idea that these were ‘just’ wars being legally and effectively prosecuted. 

Now, the October/November 2010 release.  More of the same to some degree, with added diplomatic cables – what embassy staff said about world leaders, stuff like that.  And stuff going back 20 or 30 years.  Here’s where I start having misgivings – the Diplomatic leaks.

Diplomacy has been defined as the art of saying ‘What a nice doggy, here doggy, have a biscuit, cute doggy…whilst looking around for a large rock with which to hit said dog.’   A great deal of diplomatic traffic is ‘private’ – a concept that many people in Wikileaks and who believe that ‘all information wants to be free’ have problems with.  Does it benefit anyone in the world to find out that British sailors were released from Iranian detention after possible involvement by the Pope?  Or that a US Diplomat regards the British Government as having slight paranoia about the so-called ‘Special Relationship’?  I’m not sure it does – to me it genuinely appears to be gossip on a par with that published in Heat about the status of the marriages of people in the public eye – but I’m sure that it gave the chattering classes a great deal of vicarious pleasure by apparently letting them in to what CS Lewis called ‘The Inner Circle’ – a group of people who know something that most other people don’t…  But ultimately, I’m reminded of the story from World War II surrounding ‘Enigma’ intelligence.  Messages were decrypted that often gave lots of useless personal details about German officers – like one chap constantly complaining about gout.  Whilst it was amusing it was also pointless to the allies, and potentially dangerous to the Enigma decoding project, as were it to get back to the enemy that the allies were having a good laugh at the General’s throbbing toe, it would soon lead to a review of policy and procedure that might shut down the Enigma source for good.

There are other diplomatic leaks that should be kept secret – simply because they deal with ‘work in progress’.  Diplomacy is not a spectator sport.  Those of us of a certain age can remember that the Camp David agreement was greatly facilitated by ‘back channel’ diplomacy where people could speak to each other in secret without knowledge of these meetings, which would have probably scuppered political careers at the very least, getting out until after the event.  This sort of ‘get lots of data, apply no self-censorship, dump the lot on the Internet’ approach from Wikileaks will undoubtedly make any diplomats think twice about what they say in such situations in future.

Wikileaks themselves have admitted that their approach to releasing documents without review or ‘redacting’ (blacking out text, for you and me) could mean that the site would ‘one day have blood on it’s hands’.  To say that and still persist in the same publication method is arrogant and ego-driven.  Amnesty International have already raised the issue of redaction of the names of Afghan civilian workers from released documents – i.e. people helping the Coalition forces in Afghanistan who’re now at risk of death (as are their families) because of the leaked documents.  There is also information about techniques and equipment used to tackle ‘roadside bombs’ in the leaked documents.  Whilst it’s likely that anyone with reasonable technical knowledge could work a lot of this stuff out, there is no point in making the task easier.  I am forced to wonder how much blood will be spilt on the backs of these two stories alone?  Afghan civilian and bomb disposal officer?  Feeling queasy yet, Wikileakers?  People on the liberal left quite rightly decry the waste of life of these wars; I’m not hearing the same voices decrying the waste of life caused by the release of documents by Wikileaks.

And the whole Wikileaks business has been a massive distraction here in the UK.  Whilst a fair number of mainstream media outlets have been publishing leaked Wikileaks documents, running stories on them, and then most recently getting in on the personal stuff about the Wikileaks founder, Britain has had a number of student protests and ‘bottom up’ political protests that have received either biased or no coverage at all.  To people in Britain, Wikileaks will have :

• Academic / prurient interest for journalists, the chattering classes and teh wannabe ‘heroes of open data’.
• Serious interest if you’re serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, or have family or friends there, from teh point of view  of your own life or the lives of others being put in greater jeopardy by the data released.
• Political impact (probably negative) in terms of diplomatic negotiations
• Very little impact at all on the vast majority of people in the UK.

That’s not to say people are not interested and concerned about leaks that deal with wrongdoing at a personal, governmental or corporate level. That’s what organisations like Wikileaks SHOULD be doing, but with a degree of care, and not with teh arrogance and narcissism that they currently display.

But things like the Student Protests and the protests against unpaid tax made against High Street shops and businesses such as BHS, Vodafone and Top Shop are relevant to people on  day to day basis – they will be paying for that unpaid tax, their children will be paying more for education.  Their children are getting their heads broken (literally) by Police batons.  And these stories are only getting out to the public slowly and with great effort. 

Wikileaks is a distraction to these stories and activities that are more relevant to the British people.  But, I guess they’re not as sexy as things with ‘CLASSIFIED’ written on them that smell, ever so slightly, of spilt blood.  

Like I said, ‘Heat’ magazine for the Political classes,  political porn for the poseurs.

The last visit from a Pope to the UK before the most recent one was back in 1982 – I’m old enough to remember that one.  I was just finishing university at the time, and I remember doing some revision while the visit was on TV in the background.

But it was not a state affair – that is, the Pope was not invited by the Queen and was not given treatment accorded to a head of state. This time around, he is.  The visit has cost the taxpayer £12 million, and has upset a vocal minority in the UK who’re objecting to the papal visit with regard to:

• The Holy See doesn’t meet the rqeuirements for a state under the Montevideo Protocols
• The Catholic Church’s  beliefs on homosexual rights
• The Catholic Church’s failure to deal adequately with paedophilia within the priesthood
• The Church’s rejection of condoms causing the spread of AIDS
• The Church’s support for segregated education
• The refusal of the Vatican to sign various international human rights treaties, and instead form concordats with other countries, that have negative effects on human rights issues for people within those countries.

The full list is here.   And the list is totally accurate – the Catholic Church does need to get it;s house in order on a lot of issues, and at the same time the Vatican needs to review it’s links to other countries in the world.  As an Anglican I don’t have to believe in Papal infallibility; the Catholic Church and the Vatican must get their act together. 

However, it’s likely that very few world leaders could happily jump through all the hoops here.  I assume therefore that we’ll eventually see:

• Protests against President Obama for continuing human rights problems at home and abroad.
• Protests against President Sarkozy for his treatment of the Roma population.
• Protests against the Dalai  Lama (who regards homosexual sex as ‘sexual misconduct’)

Will we see protests against these leaders? It may happen….who knows…but I doubt they would have the same amount of vehemence from corners of the liberal establishment  and press that this Papal visit has seen.  In size, the number of protesters has been quite small compared to the numbers obviously supporting the visit, but the media attention given to the protesters seems to have been disproportionately large compared to the amount of  support the protests have garnered.

What has really upset me, though, is the bigotry and sheer offensiveness that I’ve seen from people that I know personally; indeed, some folks have now been given a permanent leave of absence from my Facebook and Twitter accounts; it’s not that I disagree with their beliefs, it’s just the way those beliefs were expressed.  Indeed, I’ve heard comments that must come pretty close to inciting religious hatred from some so-called liberals and ‘progressives’, and whilst I can understand they’re angry about the attitudes expressed by the Pope and the Vatican, it’s worth them remembering the simple rule of thumb that ‘Two wrongs do not make a right’.

It’s been an eye-opener, to be honest; I have to say that seeing 18th Century expressions of ‘anti-popery’ made by people who surely regard themselves as civilised people living in the 21st Century was quite something.  Maybe teh liberal veneer on soem people is a lot thinner than they’d like to think.

Not for Google Wave the sudden death; more a slow, drawn out lingering farewell on the life support machine of ‘development has been stopped’. I guess it gives the boys at Mountain View the opportunity to change their minds if the pressure gets too much. The demise of Wave doesn’t actually surprise me; I’m surprised that it’s lived as long as it has done.

Here’s the story of my experiences with Google Wave.

When it was first announced, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it – a sort of mash-up of email, instant messaging, social networking, blogging and online discussion forum. I received my invitation and got signed up. I have to say that I wasn’t an early adopter – to be honest I wasn’t sure what I was going to use it for and I’m past the stage in my life where I have to try out all new technology the day it comes out – life is way too short to be someone else’s Beta-Tester….

And there we hit problem number 1. I knew that Wave would not work with IE, so I signed in with Firefox, and had a few problems there as well. OK, Google, you want me to use Chrome so I will do – and I was sorely disappointed when I still couldn’t get the equivalent of a profile set up on my Wave account – the special form of Wave that stores such information just wasn’t playing with me. I contacted Google technical support, scoured discussion groups and found that others experienced the same problem. I was told by Google that it was something to do with my account, but not how to deal with it. Various other folks suggested that it was ‘just one of those things’ that might get fixed at some point, but for now it was a problem that bothered some users.

OK…I could live with it.

The second thing is that getting a Wave account is rather like buying the first telephone in your circle of friends – because of the social nature of Wave you need a few friends to make it worthwhile. You can use it without other folks in your network using it – but it rather misses the point. So, next, find your friends. And that was the next sticking point for most IE using, Firefox using, non-techies that I knew – why should they bother trying to get on to a new social networking / communications / chat / mail / what have you system where most of their friends AREN’T?

However, I have a number of techy pals and people who’re interested in emerging technologies, so I got a few folks on-boad.

OK…I could live with it.

We then hit the issue of exactly what to do with Wave. For one project we did try using it to discuss design ideas and such, but we found that it was more convenient to use an existing issue / bug handling system already in place for the organisation. Another couple of people I knew attempted to kick off various waves but it just felt like we were using Wave for the sake of using Wave. I was reminded to some degree of a great piece of software (IMO) from the 1980s called Lotus Agenda – it did all sorts of clever stuff but conceptually was a mare to get your head around – but at least Lotus provided a few samples of what could be done.

And I think that this was, in the end, the thing that did Wave for me – I couldn’t honestly think of an application within my circle of friends and professional contacts that couldn’t be done better with a different tool. There’s an approach to software utility development that I often adopt that I was taught very early on in my career; build tools to do specific jobs very well – and if possible, make those tools so that they’ll talk to each other. Now Wave attempted to combine e-mail, social networking, instant messaging, file sharing and online discussion forums in a way that doesn’t really give the advantages of the individual technologies but requires a change in working practice, in many cases change of browsing software and a cultural / behavioural change amongst participants to get them ‘on board’.

And that’s why I’m not terribly surprised that Wave hasn’t taken off; I am hopeful that if Google release the code in to the wild as an Open Source project we might see some new projects spring from it. But I’m still to be convinced that the ‘Wave’ concept of multi-mode online communication all in one place is going to be popular – especially if it requires you to sign up to yet another site and maybe even change browsers.

There’s an old joke about politics – politicians are people who think that:

• Ethics is a county in the south of England
• Morals are paintings on plaster
• Scruples is the Russian currency

Unfortunately it seems that this joke is rapidly becoming a reality – within 48 hours we’ve had two Chief Secretaries to the Treasury who’ve had, shall we say,  slight incongruities in their financial backgrounds.  Ignoring the red-herrings that have been tossed around about David Laws’ sexuality, the bottom line of this is that it appears that the Liberal Democrats didn’t audit the financial backgrounds of their senior members – something that both Labour and the Tories did in the aftermath of the expenses scandal.  It shouldn’t have been rocket science for the Lib Dems to do this; indeed, I would have thought that it should have been pretty easy and straight forward to achieve; after all, there were not as many LD MPs as Tory or Labour MPs, and over the years we’ve often been regaled by the Liberals with how they represent honesty and integrity against the perfidy and entrenched privilege of the other two major parties.

Well, a quick exposure to power has revealed the the LD MPs have as many financial ‘D’OH’ moments to deal with as their blue and red colleagues.

Perhaps Nick Clegg honestly never believed his MPs would play fast and loose, perhaps they genuinely didn’t think they’d done anything wrong.  Perhaps they never expected to gain power and so come under public scrutiny – but the Lib Dems are now under the same sort of withering fire from the media as Labour and Tory MPs were at the start of the expenses row.  I’ve already suggested in a previous post that Laws has bought the Coalition in to disrepute and has carried over the issues surrounding the integrity and financial probity of MPs from the last parliament in to this one.  Now that Danny Alexander appears to have dropped the ball as well, it does begin to look like there is a systemic problem at the heart of the Liberal Party which needs sorting out if they’re to retain the moral high ground they’ve previously had.

I’ve found it interesting this evening to briefly debate the issue with Liberal Democrat apologists on Twitter, whose main argument has been to try and sidestep the allegations Alexander’s financial irregularities by trying to focus attention on the tax status of the Barclay Brothers who own the Daily Telegraph, who’re publishing the Alexander information.  The difference is that the Barclay Brothers did not get elected to Government on the back of people’s despair over MP’s expenses.  Neither do they run the country.

To all members of the Liberal Democrat Party.  Fix this mess.  Audit your people, come clean, accept that some of your folks have issues that need addressing and address them.  Don’t try and bullshit us with claims of homophobia (for Laws) or feeble attempts to blame the messenger (for Alexander).  I hope that the Alexander issue IS something out of nothing, and that the situation is satisfactorily explained to us over the next day or so.

But let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.  In the meantime, how many Liberal Democrat MPs are left who can take the job on?

A little history.

One of the reasons why there has been radical political change in the UK in the last year is that the British people have finally started getting truly fed up with MPs on the ‘gravy train’ who seem to prosper whilst the rest of the country goes down the plughole.  Until 2006, it was legitimate for MPs to pay expenses / rents / fees etc. to their partners or family members.  A change in the rules then stated that you could no longer do that.

David Laws fell foul of this by virtue of the fact that between 2004 and 2009 Mr Laws claimed money back from the State - that is, us - to pay rent to his partner a total of around £40,000.  I think it’s safe to say that had this been a story involving a couple of jobless folks claiming benefits there wouldn’t be an issue of paying the money back right now – it would be more likely to be an issue of someone spending a year at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

At first glance, Laws appears to have either been incompetent with money (never good for someone tasked with the job of implementing Government cuts) or dishonest (equally a bit of a downer for someone in that job…)   And then it gets complicated – apparently the actual reason for the…misunderstanding….involving the expenses was that laws was actually gay, and he was trying to keep this quiet for respect of his and his partner’s privacy.

To date I’ve been impressed with the Coalition – both their politics and the way they’ve been implementing them. But the Coalition has come to power with a whole host of ‘issues’ around it – there are folks in both parties who don’t want it to work,  Labour are waiting for errors to exploit and people are expecting a lot from the new Government.  What folks are not wanting is a return to parliamentary expenses problems – especially when it features someone who’re responsible for implementing serious, albeit necessary, cuts.

• Laws – this is why I am bloody angry with you.  I find it VERY difficult to believe that you:
• Didn’t appreciate that your private life was going to be public at some point in the last year or so. 
• Chanced your arm by carrying on claiming after the rule change.
• Were hard-up enough to need to claim the rent back at all.
• Didn’t realise that it would all come out if you became a frontbench Minister, especially in the Treasury.

It’s inevitable that whoever implements the Coalition’s Treasury policy needs to be pretty much whiter than white – or at least as white as any politician can be these days -for whatever reasons Laws didn’t meet this criterion. 

Whether he thought he was working within the rules or not, he wasn’t.  He’s now given an open-goal to opposition to the Coalition within the Tory Party, the Liberals and New Labour.  Personal hubris has yet again laid waste a political career, but with potentially bad implications for the country.

And that’s why I’m so fucking angry with Laws – he’s managed to drag the bad issues of the last Parliament through in to this one, distracting people away from the really major issues of getting the UK back on it’s feet after a decade of mis-rule.

Back in January 2009, there was a little article in The Guardian referring to thefunding of a film by Chris Morris by FilmFour, the film production arm of Channel 4.   The film, “4 Lions”, has now been produced and released to mixed reviews, some of which will have undeniably been influenced by the subject matter of the film – a comedy about Islamic extremist suicide bombers planning a bomb attack on the London Marathon.

The film was described as  showing the “the Dad’s Army side to terrorism”, as four incompetent jihadists plan an attack.  For some reason the description of the film reminded me of the description of the spoof musical ‘Springtime for Hitler’ as ‘ A Gay Romp WithEva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden’ in the movie ‘The Producers’.  Interestingly enough, given the calls from relations of people involved in the 2005 bombings for the film to be not distributed or screened, ‘The producers’ had some difficulties at the start of it’s life with problems with getting it made or shown.  Eventually it was released as an ‘art house’ film and then got big ‘word of mouth’ takeup.

Now, I love ’the Producers’, but I’m rather less enamoured with Morris’s film, and it set me thinking about what makes some ’bad taste’ films acceptable and others unacceptable.

I guess the first thing is the timing.  When ‘The Producers’ was made in 1968, WW2 was 23 years in the past; whilst easily within living memory, it wasn’t raw.  Less than 5 years have elapsed between the July 2005 London bombings and the release of this film.  Probably too close for comfort – and releasing the film around the time of the 2010 London Marathon was probably a brilliant wheeze  from a marketing point of view but a little ‘naff’ for those taking part in the Marathon or remembering those killed in 2005.

Then there’s the closeness to real life.  Let’s stick with ‘The Producers’ as our control here.  They made one of the two most evil men of the 20thCentury look like a buffoon, and had a series of song and dance routines that were so far over the top – and intended to be so – that there was no real link to reality.  “4 Lions’ has a group of four would-be bombers – complete with Yorkshire accents – coming down from the North to London to do the attack.  Sound familiar?  Just a little too close.

Then there’s the delicate issue of who makes the film.  ‘The Producers’ – bad taste comedy about the Nazis made by a Jewish producer, with Russian and German Jewish parents, and who also served in combat in WW2.  4 Lions is the brainchild of a comedian / comedy writer who’s best known for sketches and set-up pieces that often involve unsuspecting people who believe that they’re taking part in something ‘straight’ and are actually the butts of the humour.  4 Lions could well have been more acceptable had it been made by another comedian or had the involvement of someone directly involved.

Basically, as far as ’4 Lions’ is concerned it’s badly timed, too close to home and made by a team who appear to be unsympathetic to the issues involved.  Morris and the film makers apparently did a great deal of research in to the whole mindset and culture of extremists to make the film.  Perhaps they should have researched whether it’s just too soon.  Or whether it’s a good idea at all to laugh about people being blown up less than 5 years ago.

For a senior politician to be filmed ‘meeting the people’ is a feat of great courage that is fraught on all sides with danger.  The voter may hate your guts, may egg you, may tell you things you don’t want to hear.  And you know what?  If you’re a smart politician you smile, listen, say your platitudes, maybe even argue in a civilised and sensible, statesmanlike manner.

You then walk away, talk to someone else, smile alot and maybe kiss a baby.

A piece of free advice for all politicians in the UK….what you don’t do is, whilst still on a live mike, call the person who you were filmed being nice to a bigot.  Especially if the person concerned is a female old age pensioner who’s only saying what lots of folks in the UK may feel.

So…here’s where ‘Wee Gordon’ embarasses himself in front of the whole TV watching population of the UK.

I genuinely feel sorry for Gordon Brown on a personal level – I hate to see anyone drop themselves in the shit.  He’s not the guy for this sort of ‘one on one’ interview with the voter, particularly when it’s not at all certain what the voter concerned is going to say.  But on a political level – come on, people, this is Political Campaigning 101.  Whatever you may think in private, you don’t say it in public.

I’m gobsmacked at some of the nonsense and bollocks I’ve heard uttered by people from the Labour Party today – apparently Mrs Duffy is a plant, the whole thing’s a Murdoch Media setup, it’s a conspiracy to embarrass the PM, it was Nick Clegg’s fault, etc.  The facts are quite simple:

• Mrs Duffy made some comments about immigration to the UK that didn’t fit the NuLab policy sheet.
• Mr Brown debated the point slightly, and walked away in a dignified manner.  All good, clean, politics.
• Mr Brown neglects to take the mike from Sky News off.
• He then shows clear annoyance at whoever it was in his entourage who set up the conversation.
• And finally calls Mrs Duffy a bigot.
• And realising what he’s done apologises profusely to Mrs Duffy and the Labour Party.

Now…to all the NuLab people I know who I’ve annoyed this evening – and who probably aren’t reading this anyway… – Mrs Duffy’s comments seemed totally fair, Brown’s ‘on camera’ reaction reasoned and sensible, his off camera reaction totally out of order and poorly judged, reinforcing the numerous stories we keep hearing about the Prime Minister’s intolerance.

It was his press officer’s job to keep an eye on the mike and media presence.  It was Brown’s job to keep his mouth shut until he knew he was ‘off air’.  Unless the press officer was working for Murdoch, the Tories or the Lib Dems, and the Prime Minister was brainwashed to open mouth before engaging brain, the only people here to blame are the Press Officer and the PM.  The reporter was doing his job.  Sky was doing it’s job – they played hardball and took advantage of the situation to get a ‘scoop’, but that’s what the media does.  the media are no-one’s friends but their own.

Labour were made to look hypocritical incompetents – get used to it, folks, and stop whining like spoilt children.

So, in the broader picture, what does this debacle tell us about Labour and their leadership?

1. They don’t like hearing what the voters say when the voter doesn’t toe the party line.  Sounds familiar?  It should do.  Those of us who’ve been in debates with New Labour over recent years have come to know that NuLab is tolerant whilst you toe the line.  There is a strong hint of dishonesty and hypocrisy here.
2. The Prime Minister really misjudged the situation here- there was a camera crew around when the comment was made, let alone a live lapel mike.  The PM made an error, but this is not a politician on his first election; this is an experienced political leader who wishes to be Prime Minister of the UK.  He also exhibited petulance and bad temper – and not for the first time.  I would expect better judgement from Mr Brown and also greater competence from those around him.
3. There was clear contempt for the voter concerned – and by extension all of us.  This current election is by no means an open and shut ‘shoe-in’ for any party.  It’s there to be lost by the parties, and in the last week the leaders of all three major parties have worked hard to put their foot in it in one way or another.  But this must be the biggest cock up yet. 

The media is very much the fourth major party in the 2010 general election; it’s loyalties are split across the parties, as they always are, but this time around everything that happens gets Tweeted and blogged as quickly as it happens.  Our political leaders seem to be having difficulties dealing with this – and the winner will be the one who screws up least.