WEEKEND WIDDY
Random thoughts and musings
HI! Welcome to Weekend Widdy which, as regular readers will know, is a collection of short pieces of the type which used to surround my main piece in my old Express column. It comes out usually on a Sunday and is free to all.
This week it is a day late and so will Widdy on Wednesday be as I am in London and not back in time to write it.
A reminder too that I am on Cameo and happy to record greetings for you and yours.
And thanks again to those of you who have become paying subscribers for keeping this substack going.
I do wish the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which could have been such a force for public accountability, would resist the temptation to act as Rentaquote, condemning every item of expenditure on Parliament in a knee-jerk, predictably unthinking way. Their latest utterance is “ Politicians are once again prioritising their own comfort over the needs of hardworking taxpayers”. Rot.
The issue is the re-upholstering of the benches in the House of Commons, which has not been done since 1950. The value of the tender is £600,000 which amounts to £923 per MP. Frankly if all we have to do is pay £923 per MP every seventy five years in order to keep the House of Commons seating up to scratch, then we are getting blinking good value for money. I wonder how many members of the Taxpayers’ Alliance wait three quarters of a century to replace their sofas?
I spent 23 years sitting on those benches, sometimes for seven hours at a time, bar a quick nip to the loo, so I know that they are a long way from ultra- comfortable but they do need to be adequate in terms of support and ease of sitting for long stretches of time. Those benches are of course also part of our heritage and need to be treated as such.
There is waste and there is wisdom. The Taxpayers’ Alliance does itself no service by regularly failing to distinguish between the two.
In 1998 when Tony Blair was setting up NICE ( then called the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) I , in my capacity as Shadow Health Secretary, predicted that it could become very nasty. It did.
The latest of its malevolent decisions is to deny a drug to a man with a tumour that is in an eye and has already spread to the nose. The drug could shrink the tumour and save his other eye. Apparently all the NHS has offered is to sew his eyelids closed. Why is the drug being denied? Because the NICE rulebook says that the drug in question can be supplied only where there are multiple tumours, not just one . It does not matter how destructive that tumour is ( the photos are horrendous). All that matters is that some tumour-counter cannot move more than one bead on his damned abacus.
The Secretary of State should intervene pronto because this chap does not have long enough to wait for a Reform government.
In a recent post on this substack, I bemoaned the falling quality of parliamentarian. I could just have easily written about the dismal quality of large sections of our press and media, with their preference for sensationalism over sober analysis and controversy over boring old fact.
Yet it is something more trivial which irks me on a daily basis and that is that newspapers today are replete with bad grammar, spelling mistakes and incorrect use of words. I do not expect Ciceronian prose and I do not object in the least to informal grammar in chatty pieces but when a major columnist writes “avowing” when he plainly means “disavowing” and “lead” for “led”, as one of my favourite Sunday Express writers did this weekend, one wonders how it could happen.
Did he not read back his work? How could the subs have failed to notice? Or even the lawyers when making their routine libel checks? As somebody who wrote for the Express for more than twenty years I know well enough that these days you get a second chance of checking your own work because the design and layout is sent to you. Sloppy does not even begin to describe it.
Tradition is more powerful than we sometimes realise. The annual bull run in Pamplona has again resulted in goring and injury. If anybody proposed setting up such a sport today it would be refused by horrified health and safety officials but this has been around since the twelfth century so nobody dares to stop it.
Can you imagine any local authority today authorising carts of burning wood being pushed within feet of spectators? Yet that is what I witnessed a few years ago when, in the course of making a documentary on the Reformation, I visited Lewes for its annual bonfire celebrations when the Pope is burned in effigy. But this parade and spectacle has been around since 1829 and that secures its future.
I wondered also how it could be permitted when, in the course of another documentary, I visited the Appleby horse fair and stood within inches (yes, really) of flying hooves but that has been around since 1775.
Then of course there is hunting. Supposing we were starting from scratch now and a group of country dwellers suggested setting up an Association which would let packs of hounds run after a fox until they caught it and tore it to pieces. In the course of these excursions, people’s pets might be killed, traffic would be held up and hounds would come to grief . Some riders would also be seriously hurt from time to time. Of course it would all be very civilised with people dressing up in red ( which for some reason they call pink) and, as used to happen until 2004, smearing the blood of a killed fox on a child’s face. The reaction would be one of horror but that too has been around for centuries.
Ok, I will buy that if people want to risk, bulls, fire and flying hooves that should be left up to them, but then why cannot letting adult citizens take their own decisions on lesser risks be the norm rather than bureaucratic heavyhandedness? Banning the backstroke in public swimming baths, demanding reams of paperwork for WI picnics, insisting that fire routines are read out at every public event, even when it is on the ground floor with all the exits in full view, labelling urns as hot, nut allergy warnings on packets of nuts, exhortations not to run on stations in bad weather as the platforms might be slippery. The examples of mollycoddling bossiness are endless.
A lot of it will be the result of fear of the compensation culture and the tendency of insurance companies to try to eliminate rather than insure risk. But if that does not apply to Lewes Bonfire Night and the Appleby Horse Fair, then it need not apply to the rest of us. After all, risk has been with us since Adam first plucked the fruit from the tree.
Finally, RIP Donald Rose, Britain’s oldest Second World War veteran, who has died at the age of 110. He served in North Africa, Italy and France and was wounded in the D Day landings. Heaven knows what he must have made of the country as it is today but at least Britain is free and for that we can thank him and all who fought alongside him.
Will next be posting on Thursday!