Just heard that Somerset’s own sci-fi pioneer, Arthur C. Clarke has died aged 90 at his adopted home of Sri Lanka.

I first encountered him as many did, after watching 2001 and deciding to buy the book to work out what the hell was going on.  That led to a rapid collection as I tried the short stories, the 2001 sequels and Rama.  His style of writing was dry but detailed, his worlds felt real and there was always the sense of depth behind the events of the story.  I guess that he could have written twenty volumes of Rama if he’d wanted and I would have read every word.  Can’t even blame him for deserting Somerset, Sri Lanka’s a lot warmer than Minehead.

Best wishes Arthur and thanks for everything you did and wrote.  I hope up there you can see Da Vinci, that would be a great meeting of minds.

When you’re a trade unionist in Britain, it’s easy to forget that in some parts of the world being a trade unionist means that you run the risk of intimidation, imprisonment and even murder.  One of those countries that you can’t be a free trade unionist is Belarus, described as the last dictatorship of Europe and a country that even David Milliband has recognised as engaging in human rights violations.

It’s no wonder that Belarus President Lukashenko needs some Western PR and who should be going after the job but Timothy Bell.  Mr Bell should be used to working for political leaders who want to destroy trade unions, he used to work for Thatcher after all.

I’m not the sort to complain about telly adverts, but what are VW thinking of? I don’t want to see a frightened and shivering dog on my tv, even if it’s been CGIed and I can’t see how it’s going to sell your cars.

VW, please recut the advert so it’s just got the happy singing dog. That would be so much better.

Posted this to respond to David Keen’s blog post at St Aidan to Abbey Manor about the Shannon Matthews disappearance. Money quote from David:

“this is not just a problem of child poverty, it is an entire culture which was there in Darlington, is here in Yeovil, and doesn’t sound a million miles away from Dewsbury either. You can’t solve moral, spiritual and relational anarchy with money and government initiatives.”

I grew up on a council estate, both my parents worked in low paid jobs both proudly working class and I never felt any stigma attached to living there. I remember there being a mix of people, there were some “Asbos” around, but not too many, far outnumbered by people who had respect in their community.

When Right to Buy came in, those that could afford to leave the social housing system did, they would have been stupid to turn down what was effectively free money. That left those that couldn’t squeezed into the poorest housing.

Around where I live now (not a million miles away from Abbey Manor), everyone cuts the grass in their front gardens because everyone else does and you wouldn’t want to appear out of place. If you lived in a “problem” estate, you wouldn’t because everyone else doesn’t and you wouldn’t want to appear out of place. Making your home nice would appear to be “too posh to be around here” at best and a target for harassment, violence, burglary and arson at worst.

And the worst thing about that is that everyone else writes them off as scrongers, as criminals, as feckless and immoral. No they aren’t, I would trust their word over someone of the middle class any day. But imagine how hard it is to get out of that trap, If two people are going for a job, equally qualified, one living in Wellington Flats, the other from Combe Street Lane, which one’s more likely to get that job?

Shannon Matthews is only nine, but she surely knows that she doesn’t have a good future. Just by being a kid from her estate she’s been written off by society. Why should anyone from an estate like that respect anyone when they are treated worse than dogs by the middle class. The only way to solve in your words the “broken society” is to stop treating them like lepers.

Just out of interest, how many working class kids attend your Sunday School? What are you doing to make them feel welcome. I remember our local vicar coming around my house once to chat to me (I wanted to be in the clergy before I realised I didn’t actually believe in God) I still remember his distaste at the way our family was.

Quick post as I’m moving house this weekend (I would say blogging will be light, but it’s usually light anyway). Caught this comment on Guy Fawkes’ blog.

Last month saw 529,338 page-loads off 386,417 unique visitors. Despite the competition from more and more Big Media blogs; Adam, Ben, Kevin, Sam, Coffee House, and the Three Line Whoops, Guido’s readership keeps on growing year-on-year. 40% up on January 2007 (379,964 off 267,123) and more than quadrupling since January 2006 (101,273 off 69,536). Compare that to Kevin Maguire’s Daily Mirror, where circulation is down some 25% over the same period. They don’t call it the “Dead-Tree-Press” for nothing…

So

Thanks to the Bristol Blogger for spotting this one.

The guy on the left in the brown shirt suit is Richard Barnbrook, councillor and London Mayoral candidate for the British National Party there to lend his support for the police’s pay claim. Maybe the Police Fed needed some more bodies to march with them.

Barnbrook claims that marching with the Fed won’t cause them any embarrassment which is to be expected. But what is more surprising is that the Police Fed won’t disassociate themselves from the fascist party.

Oddly enough, the protest march passed peacefully, which is at least better than the usual treatment cops hand out to protesters.

Our scurrilous friend Guido makes a rather outlandish claim that he’s two-thirds as popular as the politics pages of the Guardian’s website. Money quote:

In December the Guardian politics pages had some 455,000 UK users, compared to Guido’s 305,000 users. Iain Dale is on a similar number. In fact any two of the top five blogs get more British readers in a month than the whole of Guardian Online’s politics pages.

Guido’s claims to have his figures from hitwise but doesn’t provide a link to the actual data, so I’ve had to look at Alexa instead. There order-order.com (Guido’s website) has a 3 month average global reach of 0.00105%. If we assume there’s 1.2 billion internet users in the world, that equates to 12,600 of which 81% are from the UK making 10,600 different people from the UK accessing his site on an average day. Multiply 10,600 by the 31 days of December and you arrive at a number close to Guido’s advertised monthly figures. But I hate to break it to Guido, many of the unique users on 1st December, would also visit the site on the 2nd December and so on. I would guess that Guy Fawkes monthly UK readership based on that would be somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people. A good figure, but a little short of the advertised performance.

Now to the Guardian. Alexa can’t manage to look at sub-domains, but the 3 month average of guardian.co.uk is 0.1805% or on the same assumptions 2,150,000 people per day. Only 31% of their readership are in the UK, so counting just UK users they would be read by around 660,000 different people on an average day. Not all of them would read a politics.guardian.co.uk page, but the Guardian stated figure of 455,000 per month sounds realistic to me.

Not that having one-tenth of the readership of Guardian Politics would disappoint me. Guido should be pretty pleased with himself for having that many readers. But the hyperbole does make him look a little bit silly.

Myth: Busted

Report on Joint Union meeting on Decontamination:
UNISON Offices Taunton and Bristol (video conference)
Wednesday 16th January 2008

UNISON and Unite reps from Yeovil, Taunton and Barnstaple attended along with full time officers from both unions.

Issues discussed
Lack of some job descriptions from Decon Sciences.
It’s not clear yet if staff in posts with no comparable job at Decon will be TUPEd or made redundant.
North Devon are organising a written petition to supplement the e-petition.
The Nursing Times wants to do a piece on the issue, but want to speak to a theatre nurse rather than an SSD worker.

Report from HR meeting 14th December
Confusion over Redundancies, South Devon calculate a cost to them of £750k, question is who pays? There’s no answer from DoH.
One trust has proposed a retention payment to staff to keep them on up to April 2009 (when Decon Sciences would take on the contract). Again, DoH are uncommittal on whether trusts would be allowed to do that.
Penalty costs are still a problem, currently any of the seven trusts who pulls out of the project will be liable for a penalty equal to 50% of the project costs.
Next meeting of the HR Group 25th December, Somerset Academy (Musgrove Park)

Finance Meeting 3rd January
There was a meeting of finance people on 3rd January but we had no report from there.

Report from meeting with Ben Bradshaw MP, 14th December
UNISON reps did get the chance to discuss the issue for about 20 minutes before an event at Weymouth Football Club. Ben was not budging publically but we did make good points and he did leave the meeting better informed. Ben is the invited guest to UNISON’s Regional Labour Link Forum on 2nd February, so we’ll have the opportunity again there.

Next meeting of Joint Unions, 2pm Wednesday 6th February, UNISON, Taunton.