Apart from the kid with the nuclear bomb, what could go wrong?

Every vaguely intelligent person accepts that you cannot believe everything you see in the media.

Generalist reporters irritate us as they trample heedlessly over our specialist subjects. Train nerds like me seethe at every reference to “a steam train” that actually means a locomotive, or the notion that freight is conveyed in carriages rather than wagons.

If Radio 4’s Today programme foolishly pronounces Alnwick as it is spelt, how many more of its “facts” may be similarly flawed?

Then there are those endless surveys suggesting that the great British public is bestially stupid, and recognises the name of Churchill only as a nodding insurance mascot.

Spot the difference: 1

I console myself with the belief that resentment of intrusive market researchers must tempt people to offer ludicrously wrong answers. At least until the next time I chance upon a TV or radio quiz show.

Then there are reports of the latest research proving that eating meat or drinking tea will give you cancer, or cure it. Usually both, on successive days.

Plus the news of fresh EU directives and European Court judgements, usually calculated to cause something to be thrown across the sitting room with a shout of “Haven’t they got anything better to do?”

At the highest level is live news footage of events that one can’t quite believe are actually happening. The fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and last year’s Japanese tsunami both fell into this category of a reality so dreadful that it seemed more likely to have been invented by a Hollywood studio with all the resources of computer-generated imagery at its disposal.

And then there is North Korea. Can any of us quite grasp the utter weirdness of that closed society: a hereditary monarchy that claims to be communist and whose leaders apparently enjoy lives of almost unbelievable self-indulgence while its people starve? Yet who stage epic displays of public grief when one Kim drops of the perch to be replaced by another, looking even stranger than the last. We have seen nothing like that in Europe outside Enver Hoxha’s Albania and the Miliband family.

Watching film of the elder Kim’s state funeral, I could not help thinking that the whole thing seemed far too much like a spoof conceived as a Christmas entertainment by the CIA. But then the catchphrase of another columnist kept echoing in my head: “You could not make it up.”

Dreaming up the sheer barminess of North Korea would have been beyond the satirical powers of Swift or Orwell, never mind the sort of American civil servants whose most original idea of the last century was trying to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar.

I have only made one New Year resolution for 2012, in response to strong representations from my wife, and that is to spend more time counting my blessings. I shall begin by giving thanks that I do not live anywhere near the Korean peninsula, and in a free and open society.

Those of us of a Eurosceptic cast of mind are sometimes dismissed as “little Englanders” but I, for one, am anything but. I am delighted to live in a country that punches far above its weight in so many areas of art and science, and which has given the great gift of its language to the world. As communications improve, why on earth do some people insist that we must narrow our horizons and hop into bed with the girl next door, particularly when it is Frau Merkel?

Spot the difference: 2

There is only one thing that slightly dents my unusual sense of optimism at this time, and that is the fact that a chubby kid who appears a dead ringer for Timmy Timpson, the legendary spoilt brat from Viz comic, is currently sitting in Pyongyang nursing a nuclear trigger. That and those predictions that the world will end on 21 December, when the Mayan calendar runs out.

But, apart from that, what could possibly go wrong? Happy new year, everyone.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Give us a vote on who makes our laws

I couldn’t get very excited about last week’s Barnsley by-election. Nor, judging by the feeble 35% turnout, could the electors of Barnsley themselves, who obediently placed their usual signatures against the name of the Labour candidate, as they have done since time immemorial.

Notwithstanding the apparently inconvenient fact that the Labour candidate they had elected only last May subsequently turned out to be an expenses-fiddling crook.

What did get me very exercised last week were the astonishing statements made by two previously unheard-of judges at Nottingham Crown Court who, in the course of barring a Christian couple from fostering children because of their unfashionable views on homosexuality, proclaimed “We sit as secular judges serving a multi-cultural community of many faiths” and “the laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form. The aphorism that ‘Christianity is part of the common law of England’ is mere rhetoric.”

And there was I fooled into thinking that I lived in a Christian country because we have a head of state anointed in an ancient religious ceremony, two established churches, bishops sitting in the House of Lords – oh, and because nearly 80% of the population of England and Wales defined themselves as Christian, when asked in the 2001 census.

The judges themselves presumably delivered their shocking words in a court adorned with the royal coat of arms, and in which the proceedings usually kick off with participants being invited to swear an oath on the Bible. So how could they so easily conclude that Christian beliefs count for no more in Britain today than those of the islanders of Vanuatu who worship the Duke of Edinburgh as a god?

Memo to judges: the bit at the bottom means 'God and my right'. Quiz: Why might Peter Cook be turning in his grave?

In fact the Vanuatans would almost certainly be accorded more respect by the English courts, because it seems axiomatic that we must pander to the views of every religious minority for fear of causing offence. Hence the widespread sale of unlabelled halal meat to unsuspecting supermarket customers, and the official efforts to excise Christianity from our traditional public holidays, even though worshippers of other faiths keep asserting that they don’t mind in the least. My Muslim in-laws certainly celebrate Christmas far more enthusiastically than I have ever done.

The really important issue here, however, is not the content of the judgement, but the fact that power seems to be leaching constantly from those we have elected, however reluctantly, to judges who are forever beyond our reach. That applies whether they sit in the British courts or in the ever more powerful European ones, which came up with last week’s infuriating judgement on the illegality of taking account of the fact that men are more dangerous drivers than women, and die sooner (two facts which might just be tangentially connected).

In May we are being granted a referendum on a change to the voting system that absolutely no one wants, because even those campaigning for the Alternative Vote would really prefer proportional representation, which AV certainly isn’t. You only have to look at the estimates of how much it would have increased the number of Labour MPs in 1997, 2001 and 2005, when they were hardly in short supply, to realise that.

It would also have made not a blind bit of difference in Barnsley, where Labour’s Dan Jarvis scooped over 60% of the vote.

We are apparently so strapped for cash that we must sack soldiers returning from the front line of Afghanistan, yet we can afford to invest millions holding a pointless referendum to appease the doomed Nick Clegg. Well, here’s a radical idea. Why not hold a referendum on something that matters, like who actually makes our laws: MPs, British judges, Brussels bureaucrats or the European courts?

Until we are allowed a vote on that, my career advice to my son will be unequivocal: become a lawyer.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The day they confiscated our history

The past may be a foreign country, but at least it is a territory well supplied with guide books and maps.

Opinions may differ on precisely what happened at Suez in 1956, say, but the facts are out there and we are much more likely to reach a sensible conclusion about those events than we are to predict “what next” for Egypt and ex-President Mubarak.

For me, the Suez crisis of 1956 has always been tantalisingly out of reach – within my lifetime, but before I began to take the slightest interest in anything beyond a bottle. Some things remain remarkably constant, when put like that, but Britain has changed almost beyond recognition in my lifetime, and our humiliating withdrawal from Egypt in 1956 seems increasingly like the tipping point.

It led to a crucial loss of self-confidence: the rapid withdrawal from the remains of Empire, the rundown of our armed forces, the first application to join the Common Market. We ceased to be a country that went its own way and did not care what the rest of the world thought, and embarked on a programme of trying to fit in.

There was no sadder example of this, to my mind, than the abandonment of our distinctive and glorious currency 40 years ago today on “D-Day”, where “D” stood for “decimalisation”. Like that von Trapp girl in the Sound of Music, I was 16 going on 17 at the time, and naïve enough to feel excited by the novelty of it all. I remember volunteering to do the rounds of the Benton shops for my mother, to save her fiddling with the unfamiliar new coins.

We had been softened up for weeks beforehand by The Scaffold singing repetitive dirges to us in public information films: the chorus “Give more, get change” ran through my dreams for years afterwards. This was all based on the premise that there was going to be a prolonged transition lasting up to 18 months, during which “decimal shops” would co-exist with “LSD shops”, disappointingly not specialising in hallucinogenic drugs but simply continuing to use the old currency.

In fact, like most Government forecasts, this proved to be hopelessly inaccurate. The change was almost instantaneous everywhere, with only the Corporation buses continuing to use the old money for a week until they felt confident that most passengers would possess the right change.

It was only later that I began to reflect on what we had lost: a unique coinage that offered a history lesson in every handful of change, with the coins of five reigns in everyday circulation, including pennies showing Queen Victoria as a young woman as well as a veiled widow.

From the halfpenny to the majestic half crown, via the octagonal brass threepenny bit, there was something of beauty and interest in every transaction. The coinage proclaimed that this was an ancient nation with a proud history that took its symbols seriously and attached importance to good design.

What has happened since is almost too sad to contemplate – and surely it isn’t just coincidence that a pound today is worth roughly what a shilling was in 1971?

For 40 years we have kept slithering down the slope of meek conformity. Yes, we may still muster a ragged cheer when the House of Commons declares that prisoners shall not have the vote, but we know that the next act will be a humiliating cave-in and climb-down. Meanwhile another barmy European Court looks set to confiscate a sizeable chunk of my pension on the grounds that it discriminates against women if insurers allow for the fact that men die more quickly.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when the world went mad, but February 15, 1971, was undoubtedly an important milestone on our descent, and deserves to be remembered today with an appropriate sense of loss.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.