This morning I revelled in listening to an almost totally deadpan documentary in the BBCR4 "In Living Memory" series-- on the origins of the Section 28 legislation in the furore over the publication of "Jenny Lives with Eric & Martin". This hilarious bit of tendenz literatur was read aloud, complete with the bit where nice, liberal Mr Jones transformed the homophobia of his wife, grumpy Mrs Jones, to the gay male couple with daughter living next door by the simple expedient of explaining to her that he had once loved a man, but decided that he loved her better and married her. Don't try that one at home, folks.
a couple of whom appear in the equally wonderful documentary on the seventies/early eighties Angry Wimmin of the clip above.
Today's programme included a priceless soundbite from one of the more plausible of them, who got herself elected as a councillor in charge of running (and presumably playing some role in recruiting the staff of) the Lesbian & Gay Unit. She proclaimed that the opposition to the circulation of propaganda books about happy gay male couples bringing up daughters represented anxiety that if knowledge of gayness as a valid lifestyle became widespread, it would threaten the continuation of capitalism.....
Tory grandees and foamers at the mouth were also given lots of past & present soundbites, the latter mostly shamefacedly recanting of their then attitudes.
And still it falls, and the sky is that solid muddy grey that signals another thick blanket ready to descend.
Here's my road, with a bunch of teenagers out enjoying their day off school and the unprecedented opportunity to toboggan down the middle of the road on a tea-tray.
Out on my deck, there's an almost silence. Usually I can hear a distant constant humming, the sound of the North Circular, the busiest road in London. Now, there's almost nothing. Just wind sighing in the trees and the occasional flop of a fistful of snow falling off a vine.
I've only seen one intrepid milk float on the road since eight this morning. Nothing else on the move. All the buses cancelled. Almost all the schools shut.
Last night, I drove home through a blizzard. I emailed my daughter to say that was the first time I'd done that since the time I lived out in rural Berkshire, before she was born. Then at half past one in the morning, she emailed back to say she and her husband (both aged 23) and a bunch of their friends had just come in from being out playing in the snow. Cambridge snowbound at midnight. It must have looked stunning.
I do realise this must make Canadians and most northern USA folk laugh their socks off. Five inches of snow can be almost guaranteed to shut everything down in the UK.
There was our Mayor, Boris Johnson, on Radio 4 at 1pm, valiantly inventing new verb conjugations to convey the frantic intensity of the London gritting team's unsuccessful efforts to get the roads cleared:
We gritted, we grat, we grut, he said. But when you get that much snow, there's just nowhere to put it.
Sending up the notorious "leaves on the line" British Rail apologies for the regular breakdowns of service every time the first major Autumn storm brings the fall, he also said
This is the right kind of snow, it's just the wrong kind of quantities
You have to give the man credit. He'd actually cycled all the way from Highbury to his mayoral office. And the dreaded Red Ken would never have carried off that apology for failure with such charm and good humour.
Hmmm. Weather forecast on Radio 4 just said we're due for another foot of snow in the next few hours.
The Students' Union at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), one of the UK's highest ranked university centres for the study of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, has voted to demand the cancellation of a lecture series organised to mark the centenary of Tel-Aviv.
The series has been organized by SOAS' Professor Colin Shindler, the UK's first professor of Israeli Studies, who has also been a friend of mine for over twenty years.
The students of SOAS include a very large number of from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries and others who are passionately supportive of the Palestinian cause. But SOAS during most of the recent history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has also been a place where those students and those from its Hebrew and Israeli Studies centre attend lectures on the Middle East conflict and the history and culture of zionism and discuss the issues in a spirit of scholarship and free enquiry.
Ironically, the Students' Union website carries a constitution proclaiming its commitment to free speech and its absolute commitment to opposing discrimination. That was voted in in 2006, after a previous history of attempts by some student groups to intimidate Jewish students in the name of anti-zionism. Throughout that history, the SOAS directorate firmly opposed such action and subsequently adopted a "Freedom of Expression" code which all who are members of the School are expected to sign up to.
But this latest action has been taken by the Students' Union in the name of boycotting Israeli academics in response to the current Gaza conflict, because they are amongst those who have been invited to lecture in Colin Shindler's Tel-Aviv centenary series.
Here's an even greater irony. The series started last term (and resumed for the current term on Monday night, despite the Student Union banning vote). Amongst the speakers were the Palestinian Authority ambassador, who was formerly a well-respected academic at Bethlehem University, as well as an anti-zionist Israeli academic.
Here's Colin Shindler's statement, issued before the vote was taken, demonstrating his impeccably and consistently sustained record of peace activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Our lecture series
‘Tel Aviv at 100: 1909-2009’ began last term and followed the normal pattern of
lectures that we organise around a theme each year.
Professor Joachim
Shlöer of Southampton University started the series when he spoke about his
academic studies on the history of Tel Aviv. The Palestinian Ambassador,
Professor Manuel Hassassian, formerly of Bethlehem University gave a paper on
‘Tel Aviv and Ramallah: The Next 100 Years’. Professor Reuven Snir, an
anti-Zionist Israeli Professor from Haifa University spoke about Arabic
literature in Israel. This term, academics from Tel Aviv University were due to
speak on the same theme on non-contentious subjects such as architecture and
music. The first lecture this evening is by Professor Anita Shapira, on of
Israel’s leading historians on the early history of Tel Aviv.
It is therefore
terribly unfortunate that these lectures, planned months ago, have coincided
with the terrible events in Gaza.
Any call for
cancelling this series will be seen as not based on opposition to the
centenary, but on the participation of Israeli academics. A resurrection of the
attempt to boycott academics simply because they are Israeli regardless of
their opinion about the tragedy in Gaza. SOAS as an institution and the British
government have always strongly opposed and condemned such a boycott.
Academic institutions
rightly do not suppress different narratives and different opinions. Its ethos
is that the violence of the street should not be brought into the classroom. On
a personal level, it is something that I hold to dearly and even if I am in a
minority of one, I will adhere to this and not bow to any intimidation.
I have never called
for the cancellation of a lecture at SOAS even if the views expressed were not
to my liking – such as the participation of a Hezbollah representative in a
recent conference or the talk, given by the hijacker, Leila Khaled in the past.
In the ten years that
I have been at SOAS, I have always worked hard for my students, regardless of
their opinions and background. I will continue to do this.
I hope that colleagues
will not discriminate against students whose opinions on the Israel-Palestine
conflict they do not agree with.
These are difficult
times for all of us. I am grateful to the many colleagues – whether they share
my views or not – who have contacted me. Let us hope that the killing ceases
this week and we can attempt to rebuild the bridges between us.
Last night, I was at SOAS to hear presentations by Colin Shindler and Dr Emmanuele Ottolenghi on Israel and the Gaza War. The lecture theatre was packed. The presentations were excellent. The post presentation questions and discussions were courteous and attentively listened to. Amongst the SOAS student respondees at the end was a woman in Islamic dress who said she deplored the Student Union vote, and strongly supported free speech. And there was also the ardent pro-Palestinian activist who demanded to know why the Palestinian perspective had not been included. But then, as Colin Shindler pointed out, this was a special event presentation on Israel and the Gaza War. And the activist had spoken as if there was one single Palestinian perspective, although the presentations had discussed the ample evidence of the strongly divergent politics of different Palestinian parties, particularly Fatah and Hamas.
Clearly, the issue is not just about attempting to ban Israeli academics, though that's appalling enough. It's a clear cut attempt to boycott any public academic presentation about Israel, however unrelated to the Gaza conflict, or even the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it's also about an attempt to impose a one-story Palestinian account, despite the academic evidence of a divergent, complex politics amongst Palestinians and their allies.
So much for the SOAS Students' Union. Sources at SOAS also tell me that Colin Shindler has been put under a great deal of pressure to cancel the series by leaders of the SOAS branch of UCU, the academic staff union, of which he is a member. Will SOAS UCU now act in favour of or against free speech?
Desert Island Discs is one of my favourite BBC Radio 4 programmes. Like an awful lot of the Radio 4 schedule, it's been there for ever. Like over sixty years. There's a story that Herbert Morrison, 1940s Labour cabinet minister and leader of the old London County Council so longed to be chosen to appear on it that he used to carry around a list of the eight records he'd selected, just in case he got the call. He never did.
Well, yes, I'd love to be on Desert Island Discs, and I think I could put together an interesting eight track playlist. But I haven't got a pre-selected list I carry around with me. If I wanted to, I could do a Desert Island Discs blog post anyway. It would mean that I'd never get invited, but that's the way it is, anyway. With an iphone with over 900 tracks on it, the whole concept looks a bit absurd.
Then of course, the real reason is the vanity one, the lure of being selected.
So I'll readily own up to my own vanity and say how pleased and flattered I am to have been asked by Norm to be the subject of a normblog profile. Blogging royalty. In a pantheon which includes international star bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Omar of Iraq the Model and Michele Malkin. And a great many of my own favourites. The thing is, Norm's now up to number 252 . OK, he doesn't do them in rank order, as far as I know, but maybe he's down to scraping the barrel?
So Norm sends me this proforma to fill in for the profile. Consternation. There are fifty questions to answer, and I have to choose just thirty. As you'll see from my archive, I tend never to use one sentence where fourteen will do, so how am I going to work out which ones I can bear to leave out?
Would I prefer to tell the world which political or philosphical thesis I think it more important to promote, or would it be better to reveal what I'd do with a huge amount of money if it came my way? Believe me, the choices weren't easy.
And then, I really like putting links into my posts. It's a sort of extreme pedantry. There are no links in normblog profiles, yet here I was going to identify so many ideas and references to things I'd really like to share with people. I emailed Norm. Could I just put links in? No. But if I supplied the links separately from the draft, he'd try put them in for me. When I sent him my draft, there was a list of about fifty links. Norm's tone was slightly pained, but tolerant. There were an awful lot of links; normblog profiles don't usually have links, and would I mind if he made decisions about which if any to put in? No, of course I'd be happy to leave it to him.
So that's what he's done, being a very excellent mensch, as well as an ace blogger.
Thanks, Norm. And thanks for unwittingly giving me the idea of doing a post in which I include the answers to the rest of the fifty questions that didn't go into the profile, updating it to add a few at a time over the course of the day.
Which is almost certainly more than you want to know. But here's the information if you care to read it.
What has been your worst blogging experience?
Being threatened with being sued by a writer who didn't like what I'd written in relation to a comment she wrote on my blog, and then deluged with emails from her friends and allies who piled on the pressure and some of whom organized various forms of ostracism. I didn't back down, she didn't sue and the whole thing petered out but left me feeling resentful and indignant.
What philosophical thesis
do you think it most important to disseminate?
The idea that groups of ordinary people can organize and achieve enormously beneficial changes, even if they don't belong to a political party. The history of zionism, of the Soviet Jewry campaign, and the various movements that led to the downfall of Soviet Communism are cases that come to mind.
Do you think the world (human civilization) has already
passed its best point, or is that yet to come?
The best is definitely yet to come. That's Jewish optimism for you. I think the problems of global warming will be solved, and the forms of terrorism that blight our world today will be eliminated by changes in technology. I realise this is very much a minority opinion.
I'm still thinking about who might be cultural heroes for me. And then I've run out of time for the moment. I'll be back to do some more later today.
At 12:27:
Who are your cultural heroes?
Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Elvis Presley, Superman, Lord Snooty, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, Sunny (my aerobics trainer at LA Fitness--she has a huge following), Princess Diana.
Do you have any prejudices
you're willing to acknowledge?
Mmmm. I'm prejudiced against pretty much any variant of English blokeishness, especially the shouty outdoor drinking, upperclass braying and football fan types, but ditto for macho cultural wannabees of every nation.
So I'm now thinking about:
If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be
Prime Minister (President etc), who would you choose?
Given the present incumbent, tempting to say almost anyone, but it's not quite true. The obvious choice is Tony Blair. I liked Lord Desai's comment that Gordon Brown was put on earth to show how good Tony Blair really was.
What is your favourite
proverb?
Many waters cannot quench love
What, if anything, do you worry about?
Like Imshin said, if you're a Jewish mother, you worry about just about everything. On a personal basis, how to provide for an old age which could well include years of dementia; on my daughter and son in law's behalf, what will they live on, and how will they be able to afford a house; in the wider world, how will we be able to keep the rogue states and terrorist groups from blighting our lives and theirs before we find the technologies that will totter them.
If you were to relive your life to this point, is there
anything you'd do differently?
I can think of some people I should have walked right by.
What would you call your autobiography?
Getting the Lightbulb to Want to Change
Who would play you in the movie about your life?
Imshin wrote after she met me that I reminded her of Judy Davis. I don't look like her, but I'm flattered by the comparison, so I'll opt for her.
What is your most treasured possession?
My grandmother's brass candlesticks and my grandmother's silver betrothal spoon, both of which came from Galicia in Poland
What talent would you most like to have?
I'd love to be a brilliant street dancer
Which English Premiership football (soccer) team do you
support (or which baseball and/or basketball team)?
See my comments above on commonly enjoyed activities which I regard as a waste of time.
If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come
true, what would you wish for?
To be able to give up paid working and devote my energies to all the other things I don't get enough time for
How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly
to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money?
Firstly, set up a charitable fund of ten percent of it, and devote a part of my life to using the income anonymously to help individuals and causes I like. Secondly, buy my daughter and son in law a fabulous home and everything needed to make it into whatever kind of place they dream of. Thirdly, use the opportunities to travel to spend time with family and friends across the world, plus attend some fancy workshops run by top people in their trade--like Linda Weinman's Photoshop and Susie Fishbein's cookery workshop. Fourthly, sponsor groups of young Jewish families to get housing near synagogues so they could become long term communities. Finally I think I'd get plastic surgery to do some pin and tuck work on the saggy bits that you get when you're my age.
Yesterday, I posted about the way in which the current crowing over Deputy Mayor Ray Lewis' downfall by the anti-Boris cheerleaders, including The Guardian, ignored identical errors of dligence on their own part.
The mayor, who promised to clean up City Hall now looks like the inexperienced blunderer predicted by his opponents; someone who failed to carry out even the most basic checks before making a senior appointment. His attempt to defend Mr Lewis from claims that he had misrepresented his past collapsed within hours last week when it was shown, among other things, that the deputy mayor was not a justice of the peace, as he had claimed.
Mr Lewis would like people to believe that he has been chased out of his post by what he calls "fully paid-up members of the 'hair splitters' convention": in other words, people who believe that it is important for office-holders to tell the truth. London voters will ask why the Conservative party was so ready to place its trust in such a man.
Well, Guardian readers will also ask why The Guardian was also willing to place its trust in such a man to the extent that they chose to give his Eastside Young Leaders' Academy a special Charity award just last December, and ran an enthusiastic article defending the award against the criticism that, yes, they were indeed choosing an organization favoured by the Tory party, complete with Tory grandees on its board.
They headlined the article "Ray of Hope".
And prominently featured a picture of their public services editor, David Brindle, grinning alongside Ray Lewis and a group of boys from his Academy proudly holding the Guardian Award.
For good measure, the Guardian's Martin Rowson cartoon today features a grotesque caricature of Boris with a bit of his ample thatch of hair twisted into the word: SLEAZE.
I presume The Guardian is so named because it draws on Plato's theory that
The best and the brightest, a very small and rarefied group, are those who are in complete control of the state permanently; Plato calls these people "Guardians." In the ideal state, "courage" characterizes the Auxiliaries; "wisdom" displays itself in the lives and government of the Guardians. A state may be said to have "temperance" if the Auxiliaries obey the Guardians in all things and the Producers obey the Auxiliaries and Guardians in all things. A state may be said to be intemperate if any of the lower groups do not obey one of the higher groups. A state may be said to be just if the Auxiliaries do not simply obey the Guardians, but enjoy doing so, that is, they don't grumble about the authority being exercised over them; a just state would require that the Producers not only obey the Auxiliaries and Guardians, but that they do so willingly.
When the analogy is extended to the individual human being, Plato identifies the intellect with the Guardians.
Famously, the Latin poet Juvenal posed the question "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"-- Who will guard these guardians?
Plato had an answer which seems to have been tailor made for the world-view and modus operandi of The Guardian:
The question is put to Socrates, "Who will guard the guardians?" or, "Who will protect us against the protectors?". Plato's answer to this is that they will guard themselves against themselves. We must tell the guardians a "noble lie". The noble lie will inform them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege, they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it.
In the case of The Guardian, readers can judge the extent to which its journalists and commentariat believe in their own nobility and disinterestedness. But there's no mistaking in the tone of this editorial the belief that it is better than the elected Mayor of London, and sees itself as the protector of lesser mortals.
In response to which, it's perhaps best to keep reminding ourselves of The Guardian's hypocrisy as demonstrated in its most famous failure of candidate-checking, Dilpazier Aslam, the advocate of a return to a seventh century Islamic caliphate. Including the way in which it took a great deal longer than Boris Johnson to take the action which led to the departure of Aslam, once his background, and his concealment of it in his job application were exposed by bloggers. And in which it initially tried to respond to the exposure of Aslam by blaming "right-wing bloggers" mounting "obsessively personalised attacks" at high speed.
Imshin's comments on my previous post that the Jerusalem bulldozer terrorist didn't have the criminal record check that could have identified him as a rapist and drug addict makes a grotesque link with the case of London's Deputy Mayor, Ray Lewis. He has been forced to resign from his £200,000+ job after it had emerged that there had clearly been no enhanced criminal record check, which would have identified his repeated investigation by police for a series of alarming misdemeanours involving financial and physical irregularities, as well as a misrepresentation of himself by Lewis as being a magistrate.
It's clear that in neither case would the man concerned have got the job they were in had such checks been carried out. Imshin's revelation that recently passed human rights legislation in Israel will make it impossible for employers to conduct such checks in future is even more alarming, particularly since, according to the police reports on the bulldozer terrorist incident, a very high proportion of Israeli Arabs who get involved in terrorist activity are men with criminal records.
A few years ago, I was involved with a range of educational consultancies through which I worked with school governors, community activists and philanthropists who were either running existing Jewish schools or setting up new ones. The roles I played including guiding and advising them on appointing head teachers and other senior appointments. That was before the current system of requiring enhanced criminal record checks for all people working in schools was brought in, early in 2005.
That happened firstly as the result of a high profile murder case, in the course of which it emerged that the man accused of the crime, a deputy headteacher who had just been appointed to a headship, had lied about his CV, and did not possess most of the advanced qualifications he claimed to have. Following that, it had emerged that Ian Huntley, the brutal murderer of two schoolgirls in Cambridge, had been appointed to the school caretaker role which enabled him to get access to the girls and conceal evidence of their murder, despite having been repeatedly accused of sexual assaults against young women, because the school had not carried out the required checks.
The consultancy work I was doing was my first experience of working at close quarters and over a long period of time with millionaires and very successful executives; they ran banks and businesses with high profile national brands and enviable stock exchange ratings. Some of them were finance professionals with direct responsibility for the probity of international organizations with world recognition. Almost to a man and woman, they were self made. The only one I knew of who'd inherited millions was the son of a self made property millionaire, who'd gone on to make even more than his father had.
Yet in the specific situation of the school governor role, charged with the job of appointing a head, most of them resorted to behaviour that I then imagined they would never have tolerated in their day jobs. They strongly resisted conforming with the required equal opportunities legislation. While they appreciated the legitimate enquiries I could carry out to investigate whether publicly available inspection reports confirmed the claims candidates made, they were all too eager to resort to gossiping to their friends and community contacts about the candidates, despite the fact that current employment and equality legislation should have ensured that all candidates were entitled to privacy. They all had people they knew who they wanted to suggest for the jobs, and in whom they expressed utter confidence, who could be shown by simple reference to their school's track records to be completely unsuitable for the job.
They had immense self-belief.They profoundly trusted their own intuition and what the people in their immediate circle had to say, whilst expressing contempt and impatience with the legislation and the slow, boring process of systematic checking of references and track records.
I ended up resigning from one of the consultancies after one group of governors resorted to such public flouting of the legal requirements for appointments that I felt my own professional reputation was at risk if I continued to be linked with them.
What I think links their behaviour with the two very different scandals in London and Jerusalem is an insight into some of the profoundest weaknesses of both the self-made individualists who become brilliantly successful businessmen and the communally-oriented altruists and conformists who so often rise to the leadership of schools and community organizations.
I can see both in the actions of the business grandees I worked with and in the upper echelons of the Tory Party the individualist and libertarian streak which leads them to discount and sometimes feel contempt for processes of systematic checking of the claims of those who appear to offer exactly what they're looking for. I'm not surprised that Sir Alan Sugar ended up appointing as his apprentice a man shown to have lied about his CV. His behaviour and attitudes seemed exactly like those of the grandees I worked with.
They feel they're able to judge character and potential from what they're presented with, and above all, what people they trust have said. Politicians in particular are always desperate to find solutions; they are prone to fall for apparently charismatic individuals, loners, activists at odds with bureaucratic systems they distrust, who appear almost out of nowhere and establish successes which seem to have eluded mainstream organizations like schools and community centres.
And their insouciance is mirrored in the administrations of schools and government departments, even the police service, by an inertia factor. This springs from very different ideological underpinnings, based on unquestioning trust in public sector organizations and the assumed disinterest and efficiency of public sector employees. Head teachers, administrators, governors assume that if candidate X has worked for schools A, B and C, then he or she must be safe to work with children, and their qualifications must be everything they claim they are. The other people, who are of course disinterested public officials who have the interests of the public at heart, must have checked, so they don't have to.
Even now, I still find, in the course of my professional work, schools that haven't carried out the required checks on people working with the children and young people they're responsible for. Schools seeking socking great development grants for community projects which would allow people off the streets and into their schools to get unchecked access to their students. They naively assume that such people are public-spirited or deserving seekers after further education who don't really need checking. After all, they may be parents of their own students.
Opinion pieces regularly crop up in right wing papers like the Daily Telegraph which bemoan what they see as the absurd and unnecessary process of enhanced criminal record checking, even for people who are volunteering to accompany teenage school students on staff-supervised trips.
And from the libertarian extreme left, one of the key lines of the Revolutionary Communist Party, via its guru Frank Furedi, is to attack constantly the criminal record check system for people working with youngsters, making grotesque and unsubstantiated claims that it is inhibiting adults in every sphere of life from interacting with children.
But Ray Lewis was running his Academy for young people--and presumably still does so. What of the system of enhanced criminal record checks and the responsibility of OFSTED to check that voluntary as well as state organizations working with young people ensure that whoever works for them is someone whose track record is what they claim it is? Doesn't that imply that there's still something very wrong with the system the current Labour government is responsible for?
I like to think I keep up to speed on the latest credit card fraud and identity theft scams.
I've experienced several calls from credit card firms telling me that someone had been attempting to use a faked version of one of my cards in places from Wales to Alaska. Luckily, my card firm has always noticed such attempts and avoided paying out. Except once, where an employee of a firm where I bought a television used the system to charge my account for a laptop which I hadn't bought. Luckily, I had no difficulty in convincing both the firm and the credit card issuer that I hadn't bought the laptop I was being charged £1400 for.
I also live quite near where there was once a spate of bin-scamming, where thieves were either fishing out documents to use as the basis for identity theft or, if the victim was high profile enough, to sell anything embarrassing to the press.
Since the introduction of chip and pin systems for credit and debit cards, it's clear that life got much harder for the gangs of thieves and pickpockets who used to make a nice living in the UK stealing credit cards and using them quickly before the owners could notify the banks.
Then came the time where you had to watch out any time you used a cash dispenser machine to make sure that a gang of scammers hadn't fitted it up with some sort of skimmer or camera to clone your card. Now it seems there's an ingenious new way to secure cash at someone else's expense...
Or at least, it's new to me and, apparently, to the police of north-west London. I got this post today via an email list which I'm on:
"My husband recently received a bank card on a new savings account
that he hadn't requested. He called the bank and they found a voice
recording of a man claiming to be him, with sufficient personal
information to open the account and transfer money into it from my
husband's current account. Shortly afterwards, an ATM card arrived on
the same unwanted account, but we were all slightly baffled, as there
appeared to be no way that the impostor could actually get the money
out.
Little did we know...
On Friday morning, I found a small black mailbox on our doorstep. Our
letterbox was taped over, with a handwritten sign stuck onto it saying
" wet floor - post ->" pointing towards the mailbox, so that the
postman would leave our post in the box.
Fortunately the postman was
nearby, and from him I learnt that this box had been appearing on and
off over the past 2 or 3 weeks...which means that we have had our mail
stolen regularly...and had I not discovered the box, who knows how
long this could have continued!
It appears that the impostor has been attempting to retrieve the new
cards and the accompanying pin numbers, which explains the activity
with the bank.
Obviously we both ran credit checks and my husband's account is now so
secure we hope HE will be able to get money out of it!
But I am
posting this to warn everyone else to watch their mail as well as
their bank accounts, as we could never imagined this scenario, and the
police we spoke to have never encountered it either. The police
advised shredding EVERYTHING, even envelopes with name and address on,
as people are apparently paid to sift through rubbish for them, as
they indicate current occupancy (as opposed to say the electoral roll,
which is only updated periodically).
Isn't it a great world out there..."
I think this scam would only work where there was regularly a postal delivery reliable and early enough to have been completed before your target victims were up and out of the house. Where I live, the post comes so unpredictably, but always so late, that the chances are high that I'd be out and tripping over the fake postbox long before either the postman or the scammer got to it.
But I wouldn't underestimate the potential of this particular ploy.
The other thing is how vulnerable the supposedly noble act of recycling your paper for the weekly collection leaves us. I always feel very sceptical about how much energy the mass recycling of our waste paper really saves either the local authority or the planet. Years ago, I actually used to collect up bales of my waste paper and take it down once a year or so to the biggest waste paper works in London, where I'd get just enough to cover the cost of the petrol and car costs to make it worthwhile.
The last time I went down, over ten years ago, the man at the depot told me they weren't buying any more, because the glut of paper collected was so huge. He didn't need to tell me. I could see mountains upon mountains of baled paper everywhere I looked, right on down to the ends of the Thames Estuary. And that was before there was mass use of recycling boxes and weekly collection services.
Yes, I'm still dutifully filling up my recycling box. But I find it a real pain to have to remember to identify and tear into tiny pieces anything that could include potential identity-theft material. Not always so easy to suss out. My pet hate: the many circulars from my credit card company sending me so called credit card cheques which I haven't asked for and wouldn't dream of using, because they carry hefty cash advance fees.
I've always been intrigued by the Heimlich manoeuvre, an arcane piece of first aid derring-do which helps you get a bone out of the throat of anyone unfortunate enough to have swallowed one.
But all this has paled by comparison with the spectacle of the Pretzel manoeuvre for Livingstone. I refer to the amazing intellectual contortions and posturings that I've been seeing from some prominent London Labour loyalists in the cause of trying to persuade sceptical Londoners to vote for Ken Livingstone.
The track record of Livingstone as a serial sayer of appalling things and a doer of somewhat murky ones has been regularly documented in Aloyada. Here is a sample of his track record in telling some Jewish propertry developers to ...go back where they came from, whilst at the same time praising other Jewish property developers who had contributed to his campaign funds for his previous election campaign. And here, he tries to explain away some of his more notorious political support acts, such as his support of the influential Islamist Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, advocate of wife beating, execution of gays and indiscriminate suicide bombing of Israelis.
The supreme prize for turning yourself into a pretzel to come up with reasons why you, dear Londoner reader, should vote for Livingstone has to go to Jonathan Freedland, writing in last Friday's Jewish Chronicle. His article is titled "Why Livingstone gets my vote", but it's much less about that than putting pressure on Jewish Chronicle readers to join him in voting for Ken despite his established track record of insulting individual Jews as Jews, of characterizing the Board of Deputies, the representative body of British Jews, as being controlled by the intelligence service of Israel, and of expressing sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers.
Jonathan Freedland's argument follows one of the main lines of the standard Pretzel manoeuvre currently being used by Livingstone and his supporters to try to get voters to overlook his more off the wall actions and statements. This particular variant is based on suggesting that these are minor matters which should be overlooked in favour of a supposed big picture of success in what are seen as the key issues.
Freedland's argument is breathtaking: Jews should ignore Livingstone's gratuitous offensiveness towards mainstream Jews and his characterization of the Board of Deputies as a sinister organization controlled by the Israeli intelligence services because he's standing as Mayor of London, not as Chair of the Board of Deputies or President of the Zionist Federation:
I wouldn’t vote for Ken Livingstone to be the next head of the United Synagogue. If he was running for the chairmanship of the Jewish National Fund, he wouldn’t have my backing. And if he wanted to lead the Zionist Federation, he could count me out.
We all know why Livingstone has disqualified himself from those posts. He’s the man who hugged Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim cleric who justifies attacks on Israeli civilians; who told the Reuben brothers to go back where they came from; who heard a Jewish reporter say he was offended to be compared to a concentration camp guard and didn’t care; and who, most recently, wrongly claimed that former Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits had declared the creation of the state of Israel a mistake.
So Ken can rule himself out as a future president of the Board of Deputies. Luckily for him — and us — that’s not the job he’s seeking. He wants instead to carry on serving as the mayor of London. And the basis on which Jewish Londoners make that decision should be entirely different.
For if we are full participants in the life of this city — and I believe we are — then we should elect a mayor not because of how he appeals, or doesn’t appeal, to our own particular, sectional interests, but what he does for London as a whole.
We would take a dim view of an American Jewish voter who chose between Obama, Clinton and McCain solely on the basis of how closely each candidate cuddled up to Israel rather than on what they would do for America.
What Freedland is saying here is that concerns about Livingstone's demonization of the biggest mainstream Jewish representative organization and Livingstone's endorsement and active support of an anti-semitic Islamist religious politician are only relevant to a leadership position within the Jewish community; they are irrelevant to a wider community role, even one which is supposed to be representative of the whole community.
Freedland isn't the first Jewish polemicist to suggest that caring about Jewish concerns in a wider community context is an indicator of an inappropriately parochial concern, and that the genuinely community-minded Jew should be disregarding those in favour of a supposedly wider agenda. He's gone much further-- to state that the most offensive of Livingstone's gratuitous Jew-baiting does no more than render him unsuitable for the leadership of either a Jewish religious or a zionist activist organization.
By suggesting "we" (who's this "we"?) would take a "dim view" of any American Jew who chose to vote for a US presidential candidate "solely on the basis of how closely each candidate cuddled up to Israel", Freedland manages subtly both to sneer at American Jews, and to suggest that London Jews' concern is about "cuddling up to Israel" rather than the gross accusations that Livingstone has made that the Board of Deputies is the tool of the Israeli government, and that the anti-semitic, misogynist and homophobic statements attributed to Sheikh Qaradawi are deliberate mistranslations by an organization controlled by Israeli intelligence.
Freedland twists himself even further into a Pretzel manoeuvre by going on to suggest that while London Jews shouldn't vote against Livingstone despite the whole farrago of his years of demonization of zionism and Israel, they should decide to vote against Livingstone's main rival Boris Johnson because Freedland alleges that he characterized once Islam as "viciously sectarian" and "mediaeval" in an article written after 9/11. Apart from the display of highly selective indignation that this represents, it's another example of traditional secular left attitudes to Jews, who are to be rebuked for any signs of concern with their own liberation, and enlisted as demonstration fodder in the service of others' grievances.
Apart from these so far thankfully unique variants of Pretzel manoeuvres for Livingstone, Freedland trots out most of the others which feature in almost every example of the genre:
You shouldn't vote for Boris Johnson because he went to Eton
You shouldn't vote for Boris Johnson because he's never been responsible for the administration of any major national enterprise before (but why is it that they don't also campaign against Vaclav Havel, the poet who became the President of the Czech Republic?)
You shouldn't vote for Boris Johnson because he's a buffoon (strange how the buffoon managed to get a scholarship to Eton, become President of the Oxford Union, make quite a positive impact on the Spectator, write a series of books and make a creditable television series on the history of Ancient Rome)
You shouldn't vote for Boris Johnson because the BNP is backing him. He doesn't mention that Boris Johnson very promptly and vigorously repudiated all BNP support. Still less does he mention that, by contrast, Ken Livingstone has done nothing to repudiate a letter of support from a group of Muslim organizations which includes some highly reactionary Madudist Islamists.
Pretzels are pretty much my favourite party snack. But as a template for effective political campaigning, they're at best ludicrous and at worst deeply repellent.
For another, if more harmless example of Pretzel manoeuvring for Livingstone, see Monday's article by Charlie Brooker in (where else?) The Guardian. Semi-literate, ranting, wholly self-important (another key feature of the genre), what is there to say when faced with arguments like this?
Now, even if the Standard photographs Ken carving a swastika into a dormouse's back, I'll vote for him for the following reasons:
1) I'm genetically predisposed to hate the Tories. It's my default, hard-wired position. If Boris wins, their simpering pudge-faced smuggery is going to be unbearable. Picture the expression Piers Morgan makes when he's especially pleased with himself, then multiply it by 10 million, and imagine it looming overhead like a Death Star. That's what it's going be like. Therefore I don't care who wins provided Johnson loses, and loses hard, preferably in close-up, on the telly.
2) Ken's other main rival is solid-but-dull Lib Dem candidate Brian Paddick. He probably deserves a shot, but as he's not going to win, voting for him would be a waste of a perfectly good X, which might otherwise be used to pinpoint buried treasure, indicate affection, or mark a plague victim's door.
3) I wouldn't trust Boris to operate a mop, let alone a £10bn Crossrail project.
4) On a related note, I don't believe in my gut that Boris gives even the faintest hint of a wisp of a glimpse of a toss about London, or indeed humanity in general. Both of which are fairly important in a job like this.
5) But on the other hand OMFG LOOK AT HIS FUNNEEE HAIR LOL!!!! BORRIS IS A LEGERND!!!!
Anyway, if the worst happens and Boris gets in, then provided he doesn't obliterate the capital in some hilarious slapstick disaster, or provoke war with Portsmouth with a chance remark - provided, in short, that London still exists in some recognisable form - the rival parties should fight fire with fire by running equally popular TV characters against him in the next election.
It doesn't even matter if they're real or not. Basil Brush would be a shoo-in. Churchill, the nodding dog from the car insurance ads - he'll do. Or if we're after the ironic vote, how about Gene Hunt from Life on Mars? Or Phil Mitchell? At least he's a Londoner.
They might as well. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and there's no more desperate sign of the times than the current wave of LOL OMFG!!!! BORIS DONE A GUFF!!!! ROFL!!!!!!! THE MAN IS A LEGERND I TELL YOU LOL!!!!! I CARNT WAIT 2 SEE HIM RUNNING THE INTIRE CITTY!!! BORRIS 4 KING!!! LOL!!! LOL!!! LOLLL!!!!!!!!!
!!!!
Charlie Brooker is a Guardian columnist and satirical comedian. Oh,yes.........
Yep. It may be nearly the end of March. And there may be an English weather proverb that goes, "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb." Only this year, March more or less came in like a lamb and looks as if it's going out like...a grumpy old polar bear.
Tough luck on the many people for whom this weekend is one of the few where they get a four day hoiiday, with the Bank Holidays for the Easter weekend.
Right now at 11:30am, the snow's melted. But the weather forecast I heard this morning was talking about heavy snowfalls later in the day.....
This morning, for the first time since last summer, the sun pouring into my living room felt really warm on my back. Really frosty, though, and freezing cold once I actually ventured out onto the deck.
We've had two or three days like this over the last week--not so warm, but the same sequence of very chilly frost, followed by beautiful, pure, pale sunshine. For the first time, the grass on the lawn is an intense, gold-flecked, brilliant fresh green.
Since December, I've had a small but never failing daily lift to my spirits from the sight of the white hellebores blooming by the front door. They're the variety called "Christmas roses", but they rarely do bloom on time. You're much more likely to find them flowering in late January. But these ones have surprised me, first coming into flower before Christmas, and they just keep going and putting out more and more showy little white blooms. Now the oldest ones have just started turning green, which is a bonus, as I really like green flowers.
Out on the deck, IKEA have provided me with some brilliant pots of campanula as the centre of the display when all the potted shrubs had stopped blooming and the bulbs hadn't come out yet.
But here comes the cavalry! The iris reticulata came out early last week.
And this morning, there were fronds of new leaf waving about on the wisteria. The first muscari were turning a full clear blue.
On my Shabbos walk yesterday, I walked as usual from my home in Finchley, through the Little Wood and the Big Wood of the Garden Suburb, across the square and onto the Heath extension and the Heath itself. Then over into the astounding garden of Inverforth House. And that's where I saw the first japonica blooms of this year, fragile and pale coral, against a pale blue sky.
February 17th. "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life" (Samuel Johnson)
