Training | 2009.06.27
Hugh Muir's diary
We must work hard to get the economy back on track. Play hard too
• Unemployment is as high as in 1996 and it is clear that no part of the economy will be immune. BA wants staff to work for free. Wait for the axe in the public sector. The quango Remploy, "one of the UK\'s leading providers of employment services and employment to people with disabilities", last year began facing the new realities by closing 28 factories. A bitter pill. But doesn\'t it becomes more bitter still when you hear that last night executives were invited to a business and dinner event for nearly 200, including drinks reception, a "fun race night" and free overnight accommodation. Remploy says it was essentially a "training" event; "good business practice", but the GMB union is cross and Gordon Brown, accosted by a Remploy worker this week, promised to investigate. He is also going to look at Remploy\'s executive pay and bonuses. Hope the night went well. It may prove costly.
• Police are getting on top of computer crime; what the scams are, who\'s behind them. And thus we have a message for whoever hacked into the email account of Sir Hugh Orde, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, soon to be the head man at the Association of Chief Police Officers. It was neither grown up or clever to send spam to everyone in his address book, forcing him to contact everyone with an apology. And it may not go unpunished.
• "I think regime change can be wished for by the US but when the US has attempted regime change by its own actions and become the principal party to the regime change, it has usually backfired." Henry Kissinger on Newsnight. Cambodians agree.
• "Not in my front yard!" The battle cry of the Daily Mail yesterday. "The great wheelie bin revolt is long overdue," thundered Littlejohn. And what were readers saying yesterday afternoon on being asked by the paper\'s online poll whether they wanted to get rid of the hated wheelie bins? 45%, yes. 55%, no.
But then the issues are complicated. No one knows what they think. Yesterday\'s assault on the wheelie bin was apparently bolstered by campaigner Doretta Cocks. "They are an eyesore and people are beginning to realise that," was how she was quoted in the paper. But last year, when the Mail complained that the nasty wheelie bins were actually too small, she wasn\'t happy then either. They\'ll be "a nightmare," was the quote. "Do they think we are all fools?"
• The expenses scandal grows and many think it is time to reconsider the idea of housing our MPs in purpose-built accommodation. Some suggest this may be a good use for properties in the 2012 Olympics village. But Eric Pickles, the Conservative party chairman, tells Public Servant magazine he\'s agin it. "Oh Jesus no, I cannot think of a more horrible idea than waking up next door to John Prescott," he says.
• So reality dawns and Labour is getting used to the idea of being less popular than the nuttiest fringe parties. But seasoned observers will note that the rise of the political tiddlers has been a long time coming. These have many and varied policy positions and form for different reasons, but each will know of the debt they owe to the pioneering, tireless work of Screaming Lord Sutch. He died 10 years ago this week, aged 58, but not before he had stood 39 times for parliament, polling 15,000 votes, running through £85,000 in campaign expenditure and blowing £10,000 in lost deposits. The high point occurred in Bootle in 1994 when his Monster Raving Loony party outperformed David Owen\'s Social Democrats. The SDP was gone before too long. Colleagues and friends meet to remember Sutch tonight in a hostelry in Llanwrtyd Wells, mid Wales, and many will likely recall the night in Islwyn when an anguished Neil Kinnock, seeing Labour\'s fortunes sinking across the country in 1992, turned on Sutch as their respective results were announced to a sombre crowd. "Grow up Sutch," he barked out, bitterly, but if Sutch was anything, he was a man of principles. Therefore, he never did.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/19/hugh-muir-diary
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