A SNOOP TOO FAR FROM NEW LABOUR JOEYS

I apologise if this reads as if it is emanating from some paranoid, anorak-wearing conspiracy theorist, but the news set before us is not the stuff of Orwellian fantasy – this is real – this is New Britain, 2008 style – and if you value what civil liberties we still possess, you must fight back.

Two infamous Joes – Goebbels and Stalin, must be looking up from their hotbeds in Hell with pride. Their sinister methodology for dealing with dissent may well have been the diametric opposite in thinking to what the founders of the Labour Party once held dear – the democratic right to privacy and protest. However, the sharp-suited, muddled brains of 21^st century Millbank are obviously in love with the tenets of intrusive terror history’s most famous Joeys held close to their festering, compassion-free hearts. Not content with perpetuating the myriad miseries of their batty Auntie Margaret, kow-towing to the perpetrators of Guantanamo Bay and Abu-Graihib and pouring billions of our money into the fat cat pockets of Northern Rock, they now seek to intrude into the last remaining corners of our private lives in one huge secret sweep designed to weed out anyone who does not voice unconditional support for their masters in Washington.

A bill has been presented in the Government’s draft legislation programme for 2008 that will give the Government total power to snoop on our electronic communications.

The Communications Data Bill is due to come before the House of Commons in November. Even the Government’s Information Commissioner is none too impressed with this proposed bill.
Richard Thomas warned the database would be "a step too far for the British way of life".
He said: "Do we really want the police, security services and other organs of the state to have access to more and more aspects of our private lives?“
What this bill means is that the Government can snoop on your phone calls (mobile or landline), your emails and your web browsing without you knowing.
At the moment this information is available to the police and a long list of other agencies but they need to request it from the operators. The operators in turn have a responsibility to ensure that the requests are fair and reasonable, and that the information provided is accurate. A request has to be for the communications activity of an individually identified person. That can be identified by a name, an IP address, a Phone number etc.

TAKE ACTION!
The Government is inviting comments or questions about these proposals to CommsData@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk. With the low standing of the government at the moment they may be inclined to drop any controversial legislation, so it’s well worth sending them an email, and getting friends/colleagues to do the same, telling them exactly what you think of their plans.

Let Rip Microsite! Tell them what you think.

Let Rip! is the new Our World Our Say microsite where you can tell politicians, organisations, or anyone else, what you think of them –
http://let-rip.ourworldoursay.org/

We have listed several notable people, political parties and organisations who you can email directly – if however you don't see the person or organisation you wish to write to, we will find an address for you to write to.

If you think other people would like to use the service, you can email your message to them at the same time. http://let-rip.ourworldoursay.org/

Freedom means responsibility – perhaps that’s why we most dread it, but this is a step too far for any government. Tyranny is always better organised than liberty.

    Let's face it - almost everyone hates traffic wardens. In the past, they used to be a local authority-run adjunct of the Police. This usually meant a proper training course, and wardens in possession of a modicum of skill for discretion and compromise. But as the privatisation of transport and hospital cleaning has proved - and, for that matter, rubbish collection - once you farm out such work to the lowest bidder then the old adage about paying peanuts and getting monkeys comes into full swing. Such is the case with the town of Mansfield.

    The recent ‘de-criminalisation’ of parking has led numerous Councils throughout the UK to look for options on how to tackle the rise in illegal parking. The least creative and most profitable route, is to contract out the policing of parking to the lowest bidder. Needless to say, this profits-above-people solution is the one Mansfield District Council have opted for, and everyone, from the disabled to the hapless resident whose wheels are a few inches out of a parking bay, are now feeling the full force of NCP’s privatised ‘parking attendants’ and their policy of zero-tolerance.

    Almost 30 tickets have been issued between 14 residents on West Hill Drive in the space of a few days, and no doubt by the time this letter appears, that number will have increased significantly. Families with more than one vehicle in an already congested area have been easy pickings for issuing multiple tickets, but the contrast between the discretion and common sense of our original Local Authority Wardens, overseen by the Police, who vanished off our streets some years ago, and the new NCP profit-only shock troops, is remarkable. Previously, if a resident was waiting the delivery of a new Residential Permit, providing you let the Wardens know, then a period of grace was allowed. Not any longer. There seems to be a specific vindictiveness attached to NCP’s attendants, who appear to devote more time to clocking up as many PCN’s (Penalty Charge Notices – or ‘NCP’ backwards) as possible. NCP’s administration will firmly deny that there are any incentives paid for the number of tickets issued in a day. However, NCP parking attendants in Westminster receive a £50 bonus if they maintain a monthly average of issuing two tickets per hour, and this increases to £215 if the attendant can bag three motorists per hour – and there is a monthly cup awarded to the attendant issuing the most tickets. Could this be happening in Mansfield? NCP will probably deny it happens at all, but there must be some hidden force which drives the compassionless fanaticism now faced daily by Mansfield motorists.
 

    What lies behind this nastiness are ‘Key Performance Indicators’ (KPIs) – or, to the simple layman, profit – something NCP are good at. When Torbay, in Devon, a town with similar population to Mansfield, dismissed their original local authority wardens, the annual number of tickets issued was 4,581. Then the Torbay Council farmed the job out to NCP. Result? 28,500 tickets issued annually. It is claimed that KPIs include other aspects of a parking attendant’s job, but the ticketing targets loom large in key performance indicators. Another NCP-blighted city, Edinburgh, recently had to scrap 3,000 wrongly-issued parking tickets and pay back £90,000 in wrongly collected fines – yet Edinburgh Council still made £5.6 million from parking. How much will Mansfield make?

So, brace yourselves, Mansfield drivers – forget hoodies - there’s a new gang on the block and they’re definitely out to get you. Forget reasonable excuses for minor infringements. NCP have ticketed fire brigade vehicles, milk floats and even a funeral procession – one disabled man got a ticket because his blue badge was ‘upside down’. So, we have no chance. What strange, rapacious and unpleasant company our elected members prefer to keep. Zero tolerance is an attractive idea, but in this case it ruins the delicate balance between the public and authority and turns hitherto peaceful souls into angry victims disdainful of the law – and utterly intolerant of those who seem to enjoy enforcing it.

    The New Labour ‘dream’ – accompanied by ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, is well and truly over. The Tories, who, for a while, looked as if they were forever consigned to Trotsky’s ‘dustbin of history’, are on the rise again. Why? Because New Labour have created the most conservative-orientated society the Tories could have ever needed to succeed.

    Now, via the Establishment and MI5, together with the media, whole-scale political revisionism is in full flow. Everyone is at it. To begin with, BBC TV have recently devoted a whole night’s viewing built upon the premise that Margaret Thatcher was, contrary to all reality, really a bubbly, lovable ‘gel’ . The Long Walk To Finchley was a ‘drama’ Dr. Goebbels or Josef Stalin would have been proud of. Not the nasty, compassion-free, milk-snatching harridan who claimed ‘there is no such thing as society’ – forget her. What we had was an attractive, ebullient actress playing a lass from the lower middle classes setting out on her glorious path to make Britain a golden Valhalla of entrepreneurial freedom.

    There is also the Whitehall dirty tricks brigade pulling off a series of brilliant scams designed to undermine any confidence in the current, doomed government. Are we really supposed to believe that employees of the Security Services (a) carry print-outs of ultra-sensitive documents relating to Al Queda and terrorism and that (b) they read these in the presence of other passengers on busy commuter trains? Pull the other one. No – this is a deliberate ploy to bolster up the so-called ‘war on terror’ and justify the continuation of our lowly position as Washington’s pet poodle. Everything which decent humanity sees as perverse and wrong seems to be on the agenda now. The attack on civil liberty goes from strength to strength. 42 days’ detention for ‘terror’ subjects is a scandal – few people realise that this makes us the most draconian law-makers in the western world – even in the USA, which admittedly has the disgrace of Guantanamo Bay to shoulder, suspects can only be detained for a mere 2 days. The next highest period is that suspects face in Australia – 12 days.

    New Labour, with their 9,000+ pieces of legislation since coming to power, will seem like Disneyland once the Tories get back. Does anyone expect them to have a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, or care about the destruction of the NHS? I could rabbit on in this vein of despair for another thousand words, but the die is cast. We’re in for a dark new age – thanks, Mr. Blair – this is what the abandonment of socialism by New Labour has brought us. Enjoy your publishing advance and y0ur millions from your phoney ‘peacemaker’ role. It’s dumb Britain who’ll pick up the tab.

    I’ve been a supposed non-smoker now for 14 days. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had a few last week when I attended an event down in London – it was the booze wot did it – ’onest, guv. And last Saturday when my daughter Sarah and Son in law Ivan came round for lunch – they smoke for England – I indulged again. But for the remainder of the time, I’ve been chewing frantically on NiQuitin 4 mg strength nicotine gum to keep the wickedness from Virginia at bay. That said, I know that the next time I go out for a drink, that I’ll end up with a ciggie in the other hand. It’s inevitable. C’est la vie.

    But it isn’t the smoking now that gets me so down and angry. It’s dieting. Just to complain about smoking or dieting is, in many ways for those of us living in what the desert Arabs might call ‘a Fat Country’, is obscene. As I type this, there are women in some god-forsaken part of Africa having to walk three miles for a 5 gallon jerrican of water. There are kids with distended stomachs to whom the three Ryvitas I eat for breakfast would be a sumptuous meal. And as for a cigarette, then perhaps a smoke to most third world victims is the only bit of comfort they’re going to get. But the magic tumblers of fate and geography mean that I was born a European. I’m sorry for being obese, I apologise for wasting so much money on tobacco, but that’s the way it is.

    A year ago I was pushing 20 stone. That’s 280 lbs, folks. Disgraceful. Then, due to the possibility of an operation for an umbilical rupture, a blunt surgeon told me to go away and lose 2 stone. 28lbs of wobbling blubber. And so I did. Three months later he told me that he still wouldn’t operate unless I lost a further 28lbs. I lost 14lbs, and upon visiting him again in May he told me he was ‘disappointed’ in me, and that he would give me until November 28^th to lose at least a further 28lbs. My target weight is supposed to be 14 stone – and even that is considered obese. Yet the last time I was 14 stone was April 23^rd 1966. That was the day I got married. My mother was over 17 stone when she died. My father was 20 stone. I have two brothers – one intermittently pushing 18 stone and another in Finland who, at various times, has reached almost 20 stone. But of course, as all you dieting experts know, obesity isn’t a genetic thing. Oh, no – it’s a sign of moral laxity, a walking billboard proclaiming ‘this person has no self control’. In short, you think we’re all slobs.

    Many things have vanished from our fridge in recent months. Cheese. Lovely Brie, Cheddar, Gloucester……Camembert. All gone. Bacon. Gorgeous, aromatic, crispy bacon. Gone. No more ice cream. Other culinary pleasures have evaporated into memory; potatoes, rice, and most important of all, the sheer ecstasy of bread. I live on fresh fruit, lettuce and tomatoes, low-fat sunflower spread, and dry crispbreads, with all the taste-bud allure of a sheet of cardboard.

    These days, now I’ve past 65, I have a new, self-imposed regime. I can’t go to a gymnasium because that form of exercise will exacerbate my umbilical hernia. So, Monday to Friday I get up before 8 am, struggling against every huge temptation to puff up the pillows and pull the duvet over my head to sleep on for a further hour, stagger into the bathroom, shave, and then head for the swimming baths. 45 minutes and around 30 lengths later I emerge, come home and enjoy the one calorie-free indulgence left to me – freshly made ground coffee. Sometimes, I might meet someone who hasn’t seen me for a while and they’ll comment – “Er…. you look as if you’ve lost a little weight…”. For a brief moment, that buoys me up, but then I realise how bloody angry it makes me. LOST A LITTLE WEIGHT? You schmucks! You normal, balanced, thin, un-comprehending buffoons! Do you realise the sheer effort it has taken for me to be graced by your well-intentioned observation? Yes, I am a representative of that ‘wave of obesity’ which is rampaging across the western world. I’m the walking tragedy standing apart from the ranks of the body-fascists – the man who can’t find a pair of jeans past a 42 inch waist, or a jacket past a 46” chest. I am an outsider, a victim of your incessant barrage emanating from your self-satisfied ‘loveliness’ campaign.

    So why is it that all the people who ‘know’ about dieting, all those clever swines who tell me ‘Ah…you should never miss breakfast – you need something to get your metabolism working’ – why is it that they are usually thin – and have never known what ‘fat’ means? Would I try to advise Stephen Hawking on how to improve his brain power – just because I have a bigger cranium than his? And who says we should be slim? Capitalism needs fat people. We’re a source of income. Pizza Hut, KFC and MacDonalds are built on fat. Where would the chief execs of Weight Watchers, Heinz and Slimming World be without us? Of course, being ‘slim’ means being ‘fit’. And we should be fit for one particular reason – so that we can work longer hours, make more profits for our masters, those distant, faceless tanned bodies checking their stocks and shares whilst their yachts are moored up in Nice or Barbados.

    So, each time I light a ciggie, or tuck into a pork chop and some roast potatoes, I’ll be sticking two metaphorical fingers up at you all. Will I reach that golden plateau of 14 stones? I doubt it. Try to imagine what it’s like after a week on 1500 calories a day to stand on the scales and discover that, contrary to all logic, your weight has actually gone UP by 3 lbs. It happens, believe me. But, you skinnies out there, you who can eat chips and pies and down your lager like there’s no tomorrow yet still naturally burn off the calories – don’t you dare judge the Stout Brigade. Just bask in your own good fortune and accept the fact that we’re fat – and that’s that.

PLENTY OF SMOKE, NO FIRE.

I’ve been a smoker on and off for over 50 years. When I joined the Merchant Navy in 1959 I could have 200 cigarettes per week if I wanted them – for around 65p. Camels, Lucky Strikes, Senior Service, Woodbines, Park Drive, Players….you name it, the bond locker had them. Smoking was de rigeur, and although I never discovered the full, rewarding punch of inhalation until the 1980s, I rarely went anywhere without a smoke. In the 1970s, along with my friends, we thought we could be groovy and Bohemian by smoking pipes. Thus we would appear at our weekly get-togethers bearing Meerschaums with bowls the size, colour and shape of porcelain toilet bowls, stuffed with the aromatic, expensive pleasures of that most exotic of smokes, Balkan Sobranie. No Condor or Three Nuns for us. We were hell bent on giving Sherlock Holmes a run for his money. As I write this, at the age of 65, I have just rolled another ciggie from my dwindling supply of Gaulioses Melange Original. It’s a damned good smoke, and it still costs much less in France than anywhere else.

But I know, deep within my heart, lungs and troubled soul, that I have to quit. I’m hoping to live, if I’m lucky, for another couple of decades, because I still have a lot to do, much to achieve. Of course, it may be that the damage is already done; my insides could be festering towards a total collapse as I write. I’ve tried the patches; yet the best thing one can do with those is to stick them over your eyes so that you can’t see where your tobacco is. The chewing gum works, but gives me a form of hiccups which can be measured on the Richter Scale. All that’s left is cold turkey, and for some of us that prospect is just as depressing as it is for a smack addict.

I only know a few people who smoke cannabis. In the main, this is because cannabis is illegal, and with the government recently cranking up the legislation, now even more so. So, in my perhaps skewed view of the world, I see the reason why smoking is so hard to get away from is not entirely down to smokers – it’s to do with the lack of courage of politicians, and their abiding hypocrisy.

New Labour passed a law to prevent people from using their mobile phones whilst driving. Yes, pretty sensible in its own way – but what were the statistics which generated this legislation? 20 deaths over 5 years. Compare this to the 120,000 deaths due to tobacco related illnesses over one year in the UK. Now, if someone suddenly stepped onto our streets selling a product which could kill 328 people every single day, the forces of Law and Order would go into overdrive. So why is tobacco not banned – why are Gallaghers, Players and BAT still allowed to operate? The answer is easy – as usual it comes down to money. HMG trousers a handy £9.3 BILLION each year from tobacco duty. Before we say ‘ah, but the NHS needs this to deal with the problem of smoking…’, consider this: smoking related problems only account for £1.5 billion of the NHS turnover. So that leaves Gordon Brown (or whoever else thinks they’re running the country by the time I’ve finished my rant) with a useful £7.8 billion provided by us rollers and puffers. You can buy a lot of air-to-air missiles, bullets and tanks for the Iraq War with that kind of dosh.

There have been cases, and these are increasing, of surgeons refusing to operate on smokers with health problems. If you’re an avid non-smoker, you’ll cheer at these decisions – but consider the fact that not only have the majority of smokers paid a massive whack of duty on our smokes – we’ve also contributed to the National Insurance scheme. So, in terms of health care, we pay more than anyone else.

I am about to stop smoking this week. This is my final and most meaningful attempt. I will do it without patches, lozenges, gum or silly inhalers. I will be extremely twitchy and miserable for a couple of weeks, but I will eventually start to feel superior. Once I have reached that plateau occupied by the Holier-than-Thou, I will begin to campaign for the total close-down of the tobacco industry. The Lancet has already begun the campaign with a well-timed article. Let the tobacco giants take their dangerous product elsewhere. (They’re already pushing kids into smoking in Africa – just shows what moral bankruptcy this industry possesses). Yet the last bastion of anti-smoking, ASH, (Action on Smoking & Health) displays a sinister reticence in any move to a total ban. Deborah Arnott, ASH’s Director, says that a total ban and legislation is ‘neither possible or desirable’. Why?

We’ve killed off pub life – we could have brought back the common sense of the Smoking Room, or had smoking and non-smoking pubs, but no, we had to take a sledge-hammer to crack a nut. 12 pubs have shut down here in Mansfield in the past 10 months. Putting the final, big, giant nail in the smoking coffin must now be the only way forward.

I’ll miss you, my little white, comforting tubes. You’ve been a friend to me for many years, a support at times of crisis, the welcome accompaniment to many a tasty pint, the follow-up on summer nights to a thousand lovely dinners. I can’t argue with the statistics any more, nor can I rely on the fact that ‘it takes a lot of character to carry on smoking’. Politicians these days lack the guts or the desire to change the world for the better. So we have to change our own, personal worlds instead.

Cutting The Mustard:

Over The The Hill – Enjoying The View

A few years ago, when the late, great John Peel was still alive, BBC TV embarked on a successful experiment – Grumpy Old Men. Of course, the title wasn’t original, because Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon had already burned it into the public memory with a movie of the same name. Yet the concept was spot-on. As the social break-down of the new century began to reveal to us old folk the complete and bewildering vista of sheer frustration foisted upon the over-55s, Grumpy Old Men became a timely platform for olde celebrities express, on our behalf, a growing incomprehension towards a baffling new catalogue of social changes, from mobile phones, texting, through to rap ‘music’, the piratical behaviour of the banking system and the rise of the robotic call-centre….. and much more.

Unlike many Asian societies and those in the Middle East, in the glorious West the old are a combined source of amusement and disdain. Doctors act condescendingly towards us. The young, who think they’ll live forever, (as we once did) know that we have far less years ahead of us than behind us. That makes us, in the main, unemployable. Feral teenagers regard us as passing targets in some kind of coconut-shy, vulnerable objects of ridicule and a source of inhuman fun. The State has a disrespect of its own. The minute retirement age is reached, we’re bombarded with letters from the Inland Revenue warning us of how much tax they’ll take from our pensions. Even Italian and Greek senior citizens receive higher old age pensions than their UK counterpart, which is surprising when one considers that Britain is the fourth most successful economy in the world.

Old people appear to be a joke. Yet whilst the spiky-haired 25 to 35 brigade are laughing, they’d better realise a salient fact – the Oldies are on the rise. There are more of us as each decade goes by, and there’s something else to consider – you too will get old. It happens faster than you think.

Yet, as subsequent series of Grumpy Old Men, and latterly, Grumpy Old Women, have revealed, the under-50s, those at the helm of the good media ship Brave New World, couldn’t even stick to the concept of ‘old’. Thus we witnessed the appearance of people like Kathryn Flett or the ubiquitous and un-funny Jenny Éclair. Neither of these people know what ‘old’ means yet. So, because the GOM franchise was a success, then it had to be hi-jacked. Don’t you lot have enough ‘culture’ (!!) of your own already? How many episodes of Two Pints of Lager & A Packet of Crisps or Hollyoaks do you need? There are that many of us oldies now that we could run a complete TV channel. Yet there are those of us who seriously let the side down. Take daytime TV, for instance. I don’t want Frank Windsor asking me ‘Have you thought about your funeral yet?’ or Michael Parkinson (haven’t you got enough money yet, Parky?) blathering on about Sky Plus. Taking Murdoch’s shilling – and as a so-called journalist – the man’s a bloody disgrace. When the new editor of Saga magazine, Emma Soames, took over the title, she decided that the readership should become the 50s age group. The rest of us were sidelined. Then there’s Bill Oddie, agreeing to appear in those appalling, insulting ads for ‘The People’s Post Office’, when the corporate suits of the PO are keen to make it anything but – we have to walk miles now to post a parcel and wait in a queue whilst we lose the will to live. Can you see a pattern developing here? Yes! This diatribe is what being old and grumpy really is. We’ll never say ‘Don’t get me started’ because we’re already in full grumpy flow the minute we wake up. What passes for progress today is in fact a perversity. Technology has interfered with the common sense of human inter-action. The purpose of technology is not to make day to day life easier – it exists to make truckloads of money for faceless brigades of shareholders and directors who, whilst sipping Champagne, plot the dissolution of the Post Office or the encroachment of the private sector into the NHS via their laptops on the decks of their yachts moored in Nice or St. Tropez. Those who behave the most appallingly towards society reap the biggest rewards. Take Crozier, the Post Office’s CEO. After the closure of almost 3,000 regional post offices, he not only receives a £1m salary, but a £2m bonus. So with that kind of money, he’ll never have to wait in a queue for a book of stamps or a postal order – he can under-pay some hapless minion to do it for him.

There’s a new wave of Oldies on the rise. I know, because I’m in the vanguard. We’re going to shock the under-55s by revealing that we have much, much more to offer than you ever imagined. That’s because we have something which youngsters are still only slowly accruing. Wisdom. We not only see the world for the possibilities it once held – we see it for what it could still be.

Britain’s motto has nothing to do with patriotism. It’s ‘Mustn’t grumble’.

Where are today’s angry figureheads and organisers among the young? What happened to the fighting spirit of the National Union of Students? Will there ever be a sweeping mood of change as there was on the streets of ’68?

No. But us oldies are here to remind you. We’ll dance and sing, be creative, and make our contribution. and ruffle your conscience. So let me hijack a bit of your own recent culture by quoting General Maximus in Gladiator:

“What we do in life, echoes in eternity’.

But hang on a minute…. that movie was made by Ridley Scott. Born in 1937. That makes him 71.

Nice to have you on board, Ridley.

How Much More Nauseating Can it Get?

I notice from reading other blogs that people pour out their hearts on just about everything, and this often includes politics. So, as I’ll probably be writing simply to myself here, I feel I should express my disdain at the socio-political landscape in Britain as it stands in the Spring of 2008.

To begin with, there’s that festering heap known as New Labour. What a stupid decade they’ve spent in power. Every opportunity they had in ‘97, carte blanche, to introduce some real changes to Britain has been avoided. As a socialist, I knew Blair was nothing but one of Maggie’s toyboys, but I never expected him to be quite as horrendous as he’s turned out. He makes Neil Kinnock look like Lenin, and boy, did I detest Kinnock. A few days into the 97 campaign I recall Prescott blathering on about public transport on BBC Radio 2. “One of my first priorities will require me looking into taking the railways back into public ownership..” Yes, Prezza. You obviously found other priorities, such as screwing your secretary and parading as a synthetic ‘working class’ figurehead for all us Old Labour types who thought there might still be the odd socialist act waiting in the wings. The protest against the illegal, disgusting and immoral Iraq war was the greatest demonstration against a government in British history, yet Bambi felt he knew best. Has Bush got some naughty negatives of Blair en flagrante delicto in his safe? Or is our ex-Prime Minister simply as dumb as his Washington counterpart? The latter, obviously. Now we have the nauseous parading of Cherie Blair’s unctuous memoirs polluting every media channel available. She has the utter gall to claim she is ‘still a socialist’. How can ‘still’ you be something you never were in the first place? I might as well claim that I’m ‘still a Nazi’ for all the sense Cherie makes. Then we have the utterly disgraceful arrival of ‘famous diet guru’ Sarah Ferguson, slumming it up in my home town, Hull, showing the working class how to be healthy. The reason she’s ‘healthy’ and the reason she’s a ‘celebrity’ is because we, the working class, have feathered the royal nest for centuries with our hard earned taxes. Fergy, and all her relatives, from Buck House down, ought to be given council houses and basic benefits and then come back in a year’s time and tell us how to live. Either that, or ship the bloody lot of them out to the Australian bush and let them learn a thing or two about survival from the aborigines.

Britain is buggered. Since Thatcher and the defeat of the miners, what was once the proud working class have, in the main, become a shiftless, sore-thumbed texting army of over-tattooed hoodies whose idea of nirvana is MacDonald’s and Big Brother. Capitalism has won, hands down. Politicians no longer seek to change the world for the better – they are in the job for self-aggrandisement , and to tinker with Thatcher’s legacy – not to dismantle it, but to make it work better. Liars, spin doctors, the propagandists for anti-progress. I am so glad now that I am old. My generation have lived through the best times of the past century. They were times when we actually cared about our country, and about each other. When Maggie told us that ‘there is no such thing as society’ we never imagined that even New Labour would take this on board as a mission statement. But they did. Take the avaricious and disgraceful destruction of the Post Office. Branches are closing at a rate of knots, yet huge sums of money are being spent, trumpeting the Post Office as some kind of social asset – ‘The People’s Post Office’. Yet what they want it to be is the very reverse – they want it to be Threadneedle Street’s Post Office – the Shareholder’s Post Office. Such perverse, sinister advertising brings to mind the warped thinking of the very far right……. Arbeit Mach Frei….’work makes you free’. Anyone who saw that message knew it for the cynical deliberate lie it was. The Post Office is a threat to 21^st century political thinking because it retained something which must be destroyed at all costs – it was a social gathering point, a place not for profit, but for the everyday activity of ordinary people. Now it has to be installed beyond the gilded portals of shopping palaces – the Asda Post Office, the Tesco Post Office. No one leaves without filling their basket, too.

Am I being extreme? Yes. That’s because the extremities of New Labour have been foisted upon us by insidious degree. They swell up our anger into a throbbing boil and then we explode, as I’ve done here. If the Conservatives return, as they surely must, they now realise, thanks to Blair and Brown, that whatever plans Thatcher had, they can return to with gusto, because New Labour have demonstrated that you can ride roughshod over the stupid population (yes, they are – why else is Boris Johnson Mayor of London…) and they have no redress. Identity cards? No doubt they’re on the way. An NHS run by Lloyds and Barclays? Why not! Fully paid care for the elderly? No chance. Decent pensions? No, just die, you old buggers. It seems odd that George Orwell’s real name was Blair. It makes his predictions even more scary.

West End impresario Bill Kenwright’s story, about a hitherto-unknown trip to the UK by Elvis Presley, told on BBC Radio 2, is highly entertaining. This is in the same ‘what if?’ vein as the idea that Adolf Hitler once lived in Liverpool, or that Martin Bormann lived out his last days in a quiet village in the south of England. So, Bill, run this past us again….. Elvis is in the Army. Over to you.

"Elvis came to England. Nobody thinks he did and I hope Tommy Steele doesn't go mad when I tell you. Tommy got a phone call one night. It said: "They tell me you're good' and Tommy replied: 'Who's this?'

"The caller said: 'It's Elvis,' and Tommy said: 'Get outta here.' And Elvis said: 'Are you as good as me?'

And they talked and they got a friendship. Elvis flew in for a day."

He said Mr Steele had shown Elvis round London, including the Houses of Parliament.

Elvis, who would have been 23 at the time of the visit, had joined the US Army in March 1958 and was posted to Germany.

It was during his time in the army that he made a brief stop-over at Prestwick Airport in 1960, on his way back to base. A plaque and an Elvis-themed bar in the departure lounge marks the visit.

Now this is going to go down with Cliff Richard and Jimmy Savile like a fart in a space-suit. What makes it very fishy to me is that Elvis did at least have some taste in music. He’d grown up listening to Hank Williams, The Drifters, Big Mama Thornton, Wynonie Harris and Big Boy Crudup. So, of all the UK rock pretenders he could call (and we didn’t have many who could really rock, apart from perhaps Cliff in his very early incarnation, or maybe Marty Wilde or Joe Brown), why on earth would he dial Tommy Steele’s number? Tommy ‘chirpy Cocken-ee’ all-round entertainer Steele, Tommy ‘can’t wait to get out of rock’n’roll and become a middle-aged song and dance man’ Steele. At least Elvis kept on rockin’.

If Tommy Steele did meet Elvis at the airport, then what flight was the King on – the cabin crew alone could have hardly kept this secret – or was it a USAF flight? And how did Col. Tom Parker’s valuable ‘property’ manage to move around London with the Little White Bull sans security? Even in the late 50s-early 60s Presley was an icon, instantly recognisable. Arriving in the vicinity of the Houses of Parliament and not being spotted by any passing fans? (And he had infinitely more of those than Tommy Steele ever had). For heaven’s sake – had Elvis ever been subjected to Rock With The Caveman? If he had he wouldn’t have needed to ask Steele if he was any good. He’d have cut his losses and called Wee Willie Harris or Billy Fury.

Let’s see some evidence. Would Tommy Steele have gone through this epic experience without taking a few snapshots? Maybe the late Kirsty McColl was closer to the mark. ‘There’s a guy works down the chip shop thinks he’s Elvis…’ So, if it’s all true, then that’s great. And if that is the case, how on earth could Tommy Steele stay schtum on such an ego-enhancing yarn for all these years?

Now…let me tell you about the time John Lee Hooker called me up and I showed him and Howlin’ Wolf around Hull’s fish dock. That was the day Gene Vincent was driving the car, and we dropped Eddie Cochran off at the chippy. I’m not making it up. It’s true…..