The Unorthodox Website Blog

Yes, I know there are local elections thruout England and Wales, but as a Londoner I realize we have a fight on our hands to keep Ken Livingstone as Mayor of the capital city.

I don’t usually vote New Labour since they became, in effect, the New Tories under the leadership of Tony ‘Thatcherite’ Blair, and his successor Gordon Brown is a complete disaster. But Ken Livingstone has been a great politician for many years, first as leader of the former GLC, and later as the first Mayor of London.

So I shall be voting for Ken as Mayor again, with gay ex-policeman and Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick as my second choice.

For the two Assembly members I’ve decided to vote Liberal Democrat again, as the left-of-center party most likely to win seats. Note, I no longer regard New Labour as ‘left-of-center’ and haven’t done for years, with a few exceptions such as Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner.

Freedom of movement yes, absolute freedom to emigrate/immigrate, no. This is so blindingly obvious, but the two concepts seem to get confused.

All countries have to control immigration and emigration, which was why the DDR (East Germany) built the Berlin Wall, why the USA has erected a huge fence on its Southern border with Mexico, and why all countries have border restrictions.

DDR flag

Mass emigration from any country which has educated and trained people at its own expense, just to have them abandon their homeland, leaving it short of essential labor power, just because they think the grass is greener elsewhere, could be regarded as a form of mass treachery.

The DDR experienced this before the Berlin Wall went up. Many didn’t even bother to emigrate to West Berlin or West Germany. They continued to take advantage of cheap subsidized homes in East Berlin, use the subsidized transport and health services there, looking forward to a heavily subsidized State pension when they retired, going on subsidized FDGB (the DDR equivalent of the TUC) holidays, shopping at subsidized DDR shops in East Berlin, but earning their wages and paying their taxes in West Berlin.

On May Day, celebrated by workers throughout the world (except USA) as Labor Day, local elections take place in UK. In London there is also an election for Mayor.

Although I can’t bring myself to vote for New Labour usually, because of their appalling record in office under Blair/Brown, and their wholesale adoption of Thatcherite policies, privatization and total rejection of Socialism, I always make an exception for Ken Livingstone, who led the GLC so successfully, and then the GLA both as an independent and now back in the Labour fold.

I shall be voting for Ken again on Thursday, with second preference going to gay Liberal Democrat ex-policeman, Brian Paddick. At all costs we must keep that buffoon Boris Johnson out.

The problem arises for me in how to cast my other two votes for Greater London Assembly members.

London bendy-bus (click on picture to enlarge.) 

Tory London Mayor candidate Boris Johnson wants to design and bring back a new Routemaster, with conductors.

Totally impractical! It was a great bus in its day, but dangerous because of its hop on/hop off open platform, and quite unsuitable for rush hours (it could only take 5 standing passengers), for those with shopping trolleys, pushchairs or wheelchairs.

The new fleet of buses are excellent, they just need the right staff to operate them. Drivers who know how to pull up right beside the kerb, so full use is made of the low-level entrances and exits for instance. And the ‘bendy-buses’ which Boris hates so much are very good, and operate in many cities around the world successfully. All you need here is more inspectors who would regularly jump on and make sure everybody has a valid ticket for their journey, thus stopping its reputation among some as ‘the free bus’.

The last program in the Channel 4 Dispatches series ‘Immigration, the inconvenient truth’ was very insulting to born-and-bred British people. Rageh Omar, after interviewing Norman ‘get on your bike’ Tebbit, concluded the solution to immigrants undercutting our hard-fought for wages and stealing our jobs, was to ‘get on a plane’ and find jobs overseas.

This is all well and fine if Britons want to emigrate. For instance, in the 1950s many took advantage of the £10 one-way fare to Australia, which was crying out for British immigrants, and they uprooted their entire families and made a new life in Australia. Others went to Canada and other Commonwealth countries.

Norman Tebbitt’s ‘on your bike’ advice of several decades ago was also very sensible - you cannot always expect to find the job you seek unless you are prepared to commute, or possibly move to another town where the jobs are.

Norman Tebbitt/Rageh Omar’s latest advice to ‘hop on a plane’ was quite different.

 (Click on the pictures below to enlarge them.)

This title refers to pop or rock music of course. To understand what happened in the mid-1960s we need to look at Britain, because this is where the wave of groups starting with The Beatles emanated from, quickly captivating America in what became known as ‘the British invasion’ and indeed spread around the world.

Look at any of the surviving British TV or film clips dealing with British pop music in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and one thing will strike you above all else – it was very ‘American’. In this era almost every hit song came to the UK from America, was covered by several British singers, and then entered our Hit Parade, as it was then called.

If you study the singers of that period, they too were very Americanized. We had Cliff Richard and many others modeling themselves on Elvis Presley, and all trying to sound American.

How lucky young people are today in the UK. Most of them no longer suffer the totally unfair agony of the 11+, an examination which marked us out for life as ’successful’ or ‘failures’. They go to comprehensives, where they have considerable choice as which subjects they study, they then have the opportunity to take GCSE ‘O’ and then ‘A’ levels in a variety of subjects, and then go on to University if they wish, with the aid of student loans.

By contrast, we had none of these advantages. Just take three examples – myself, my deceased partner, and my mother, who’s now 93.

My mother was born in 1914. At the age of 14 she was forced to leave school without any qualifications and go into domestic service. My mother is an intelligent woman, and like many in our family, an excellent writer. She had the story of one of her first domestic servant jobs published in a magazine many years ago.

Today I got a phone call from the Cooperative Bank, I believe it was, asking if I want a Cooperative Loyalty card. Since they shut down all our local Cooperative stores about 30 or more years ago, I told them there was no point.

Then I asked ‘Why is the Coop introducing Loyalty cards? Surely that defeats the whole purpose of the Cooperative Movement?’ The woman didn’t know what to say, so I told her that the Coop was a form of public ownership, and that it was something called Socialism which most people today had never heard of. I then hung up.

Why should I have to educate people who work for the Coop as to what their movement is all about? Loyalty cards in the Coop just don’t make sense at all. The ‘loyalty card’ is Coop membership. You pay a pound and become a member, a joint owner of the Coop. You then share in the profits.

What’s cooking? Overdone beef and under-cooked vegetables is the short answer. 

Unless you go to a very expensive hotel, restaurant or pub with a Carvery, you’ll find most places have no idea how to serve roast beef, or indeed roast lamb. The same applies to most domestic households. The traditional British Sunday roast, yet few people know how to cook it, only how to ruin it by overcooking it.

Beef and lamb should be served underdone, pink. Especially beef. Once it has lost it’s pink color, it has lost 90% of its flavor and tastes like old leather or rag. Beef steaks too are best served blue, rare or medium-rare.

I know this is a matter of taste, but with roast beef you are not given the choice. All but the best chefs serve it well done, and this is wrong.

Watching on TV the Olympic Torch being carried across London yesterday, and the protests over Chinese repression in Tibet and elsewhere, makes me think whether there have been many Olympics when there has not been some political issue involved?

There were games in Moscow during the days of the Soviet Union, with protests and boycotts, and indeed almost every country hosting the Games could attract criticism of some kind. In 2012 the Olympic Games come to London, so should we attract protests and boycotts because of our involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.?

Whilst people have the right to protest in a free country, I think it is a shame when they try to stop the progress of the Olympic torch, or disrupt the Games themselves. They are an international event which brings countries together. Just holding the Games brings attention on the host country, and hopefully having them in Beijing this year might lead to an improvement in human rights in Tibet and China generally.