Category: UK

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Despair Politics UK

Britain Deserves Better

Ok, ok. It’s not as if the world really *needs* another hot politics take or anything and more to the point I doubt there’s anyone out there to even *read* this blog, gathering dust as it is in this neglected corner of the web, but apropos of nothing in particular and really just for my own benefit here, dear god it’s been depressing watching the absolute state of British politics unfold during this election campaign.

Not as depressing as the polling numbers, mind. Although maybe baffling would be a more appropriate word. How is it that even after everything, the Tories are still polling numbers that say “massive majority government”? Nine years of crippling austerity politics. Nine years of cuts to the NHS and other public services. Nine years of fit-for-work tests. Nine years of foodbanks (I mean, seriously, how does one of the world’s richest countries have millions of people reliant on foodbanks?)

Who exactly is it who looks at Boris Johnson — a man who has lied and schemed his way through his incredibly privileged life all the way to Downing Street, who has said and written awful racist and homophobic things, who isn’t even trusted by members of his own family, who disparages single mothers while simultaneously doing everything he can to personally create as many of them as possible — and thinks “yeah, that guy’s got my back”. The Queen-lying-to, take-your-pick-from-my-pro-and-anti-Brexit-articles, pointing-at-a-camera-crew-saying-there’s-no-press-here, 53-million-quid-garden-bridge-to-nowhere, reporters’-smartphone-stealing, lies-about-the-NHS-on-buses, american-tech-entrepreneur-funding, hiding-in-a-fridge guy.

Is it the fact that he’s going to “get Brexit done”? Well in one sense a Conservative majority likely means they *can* plough ahead with the hardest of Brexits, unburdened by a pesky democratically elected parliament applying oversight to the process (I mean wasn’t this whole thing supposed to be about parliamentary sovereignty anyway?) but if you really think Boris Johnson’s “Oven Ready Brexit” is going to be “done” in any meaningful way any time in the near future, then I’ve got this awesome bridge to sell you. Like most ready meals, it’s just crappy reheated leftovers that taste nothing like they were supposed to.

The withdrawal agreement is the *start* of the process, not the end. It took Canada 8 years to reach a FTA with the EU. There is zero chance one is completed by the end of 2020. Brexit will be dominating British politics for *years*. *Decades*, even. (Unless enough people finally come to the realisation that a country declaring economic sanctions on itself is monstrously dumb and just cancel the whole thing, of course…)

Yeah, so Johnson went to Europe with Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement (you know the one he and his ERG mates had repeatedly voted against), replaced the temporary backstop that was supposedly the reason they wouldn’t vote for it in the first place with a permanent border down the Irish sea, and caved in to various other EU demands. As someone much smarter than me described it at the time, it’s the political equivalent of paying full price for a DFS sofa. And then when he finally won a vote in parliament, he threw his toys out of the pram and pushed for an election that’s now taken up most of the article 50 extension time. Just as well we haven’t wasted our extension again…

But here we are, on Christmas Election Eve. And I fear what Election Santa has in store. I’m sure it’s some logical fallacy to overstate the importance of *events happening right now*, but to say this feels like quite an important election is something of an understatement. A majority Tory government can do a lot of damage in 5 years to an already divided and unequal country. Britain deserves better.

Categories
UK

Well That Was A Bit Embarrassing, Wasn’t It…

I got up early this morning before work to watch the Olympics Closing Ceremony. I have to say, having seen the lineup, I didn’t exactly have high hopes, but after the delight that was Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony I thought that they might just pull it out of the bag once again.

It didn’t quite turn out like that.

There was something rather poetic, though, about the shabbiness of the way things drew to a close. It had seemed, from this distance at least, that throughout the games, from the moment that Opening Ceremony began right up until 5 minutes to 9 on the Sunday evening, Londoners–heck maybe even the whole of the UK–had shrugged off the default British cynic mode and embraced the wonder of it all. No more was there talk of security lapses, of G4S, of LOCOG and the brand police. Now we just focused on all those great performances. On those Six Super Saturday Gold Medals. Mo. Jessica. Bradley…

Now suddenly it was all coming to a close and as it did so it seemed as if the organisers were saying to Brits everywhere: it’s ok. Things will be back to normal tomorrow. Here is something you can be sarcastic about again.

It was what we had all feared the opening ceremony might have been. Essentially those embarrassing twenty minutes from Beijing with David Beckham and the London bus, only padded out to three hours. Not so much a Symphony of British Music as just whoever happened to be available and said yes, with some shocking sound production to boot.

Where the Opening Ceremony was a socialist indie kid fantasy with a subversive hint and a sense of humour, this was a return to a world of MOR mediocrity and the cult of vacuous celebrity (I mean, come on, Kate Moss and Russell Brand? These are your role models to #inspireageneration?)

The Opening Ceremony had the suffragettes.
The Closing Ceremony had the Spice Girls.

That is about about all you need to know.

Categories
Media Shoddy Journalism teh internets UK

Mr Pot, Meet Mr Kettle’s Web Presence

Just catching up on a couple of recent Private Eyes, I couldn’t help notice that they chose to conclude a story about recent problems at the Times Literary Supplement with this somewhat surprising paragraph:

The resulting outcry is awkwardly timed for [Sir Peter Stothard, the editor of the TLS], since to access his organ online is to find utter chaos. Already a laughing stock because it is reached via the Times’s “entertainment” division, the TLS’s website has been “under construction” for so long, even Stothers himself felt compelled to admit the process “has tested the patience of readers and writers alike”.

Ahem. Well now. I’d link to the story in the extensive archives on Private Eye’s comprehensive, modern and easy to use website, except that Private Eye don’t seem to have got round to making it yet…

Come on guys. Of all the things you can criticise other publications for, I really don’t think you should have a go at their website until you’ve sorted out your own.

Having said that, when I visited the Private Eye site just now I did see that they have started to embrace the modern age. My subscription apparently entitles me to exclusive “digital downloads”:

Please note, as one of our valued subscribers, you have full free access to all digital downloads and content as well as your print copy of Private Eye every fortnight.

Except. Oh…

Categories
Media Shoddy Journalism teh internets UK

Google To Destroy Music Industry, World

In the olden days it was a lot easier for newspapers to pass off ridiculous claims as facts because anyone who wanted to verify them would have to go to some serious effort to do so. These days, however, we have teh internets, and fact checking has suddenly become a whole lot easier.

So if you’re going to make claims about teh internets, then you’d better be pretty sure that your claimed facts are, you know, actually true.

Case in point number 247 is this article in the Daily Mail: Google threatens to destroy not only pop sensation Adele, but Britain’s film and music industries.

Scroll down towards the end of the article and you’ll find this astonishing claim:

One only has to switch on the computer, call up the Google search engine and type in the name of a star like Adele to understand why the digital channel is such a threat to the UK’s performers, and for that matter our whole creative industry.

Nine out of the first ten websites which pop up on Google’s search engine are run by pirates who have downloaded Adele’s output and offer it online far more cheaply than official copyrighted sites and High Street retailers.

In effect, Google has granted these piracy sites a licence to steal. Instead of the proceeds going into future investment in artists, it ends up in the hands of internet buccaneers.

Really? Nine out of the top ten search results for “Adele” are “run by pirates”? Did you really think you could make a claim like that and nobody would check?

(And by “far more cheaply”, I presume you mean “free”, no? Unless you really believe your claim that any proceeds are someone ending up in the hands of “internet buccaneers”…)

Anyway. So I turned on my computer and “called up the Google search engine” and did just that. Your mileage may vary, because Google now gives you geographically specific and personalised search results, but when I try that very search I get her official website, her wikipedia page, her MySpace page, a YouTube link, her Facebook page, last.fm, a lyrics website and Amazon.com.

Hmm. No pirates there.

Now I’m not suggesting that it isn’t possible to find copies of Adele’s music by doing a Google search, but you do have to specifically go looking for it. And until someone releases an album called “BitTorrent Download”, you won’t really be able to accuse Google of promoting piracy.

Actually, that’s sort of the point of a search engine–Google’s job is to index the internet, not to pick and choose what is worthy of inclusion in their index. Blaming them for the fact that certain websites show up in their search results seems to be the very definition of shooting the messenger.

Unless you have some other specific reason to be annoyed at Google. Oh, hang on…

So dominant has it become that it has helped to destroy great swathes of other media in its wake, from regional newspapers in Britain and the United States to business directory companies.

Ah. I see.

Categories
Australia Customer Service UK

Your Call Is Important To Us

I was transported back to an earlier time, last night, as I sat listening to hold music being told that my call is important but that all the customer service agents are busy right now, and I realised that I don’t really do this any more. Much as I loved living in London, it seems as if I was always hanging on hold trying to sort out some problem or other. I still remember the time that I spent so long on hold to Homechoice/Tiscali trying to sort out some problem or other with my broadband that I listened to an entire Leona Lewis album before someone answered. Happy days…

But I can’t remember the last time anything like that happened.

Maybe this is the real reason why I haven’t been blogging so much since we moved to Melbourne. There just isn’t enough to get pissed off about here (and on the rare occasions when I have to call my lovely ISP, iinet, they even do this wonderful thing where you just hang up and they call you back, and then use the caller ID to pull up your account details before you even start talking to them…)

Of course it goes without saying that the company I was on hold to was in the UK: I’ve decided that it’s finally time to extricate myself from the company that hosts my other web presence. Originally this was hosted by an excellent small hosting company called Freedom2Surf, who I picked about 10 years ago when I first set up that site in a vague attempt to make it look like I’d done at least one extra-curricular thing at uni that I could put on my CV. And they were great for about 5 years, until they got taken over. And taken over. And taken over again. Following the most recent takeover they have been completely rebranded and I now find myself a customer of Talk Talk Business.

I’ve moaned about them before, but general laziness has always kept me from doing anything about it. But with the latest rebrand the old F2S website account area is gone. I used to be able to log in and check my account details, see past invoices, and update my account settings, address and billing details. Now I have the My Talk Talk Business Portal, which provides almost zero functionality. I can log in to this and see that I have an account, but that’s about it. No invoices, no pricing, no indication when my hosting or registrations expire–everything just leads to a message telling me to phone a UK 0800 number if I want to do anything. That’s a bit of a deal breaker for me, though, given that I live on the other side of the world now and it’s not massively convenient to have to call someone in the UK whenever I need to do something…

I can’t even update my address details because their wonderful portal has been coded to accept only UK postcodes and phone numbers. Oh and when they rebranded they also sent me a letter in the mail to my house in Australia containing my login password, which they had apparently been storing in plain text all this time. Oops.

So it’s time to sort this out: unfortunately I just paid for a new year’s hosting and registration before the rebrand, but as a first step I thought I’d try to get the .co.uk domain that I have registered with them (www.pastemagazine.co.uk) moved over to my other (cheaper, better) host (who are probably preparing to sell out to Talk Talk as we speak…) so that they will be the ones who bill me when it comes up for renewal in a couple of months. 20 minutes of hold music later, and having been passed between 3 departments, I finally get through to someone who can help me:

“Oh yes. You need to send us an email to request that, as all cancellations have to be in writing.”

Thanks. Wonderful. Thanks so much for writing that on your website… Now can I have the last half hour of my life back?

Categories
Australia UK

Neither Here Nor There…

I was struck by a wave of nostalgia the other day, when my mid-afternoon-lull/boredom-alleviation strategy at work saw me tuning my iPhone to BBC 6 music, only to find Damon Albarn mid-way through a performance of his The Good, The Bad, And The Queen “concept album about modern life in London”, recorded at The Roundhouse in Camden in 2006.

Ah. 2006. When I used to live just down the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting at my desk on a dreary winter afternoon in rainy Melbourne wrestling with a cross-browser CSS issue, I was walking along the canal with Sal to Camden on a sunny summer day. Perhaps we were off for a pint of Fruli in the beer garden at the Edinboro Castle. Who Knows.

Of course I inevitably have a rose-tinted view of our past life–it’s easy to forget the freezing winter mornings and those commutes spent wedged into someone’s smelly armpits on a packed tube train that has just decided to hang around in a tunnel for a bit for no apparent reason–but regardless I miss the people and the places that we left behind.

Unbelievably it’s almost two years since we arrived in Australia (and now well over two years since we gave up our Marylebone flat and packed our London lives into 26 shipping boxes and a couple of rucksacks), and I began wondering how Australia has changed me (apart from the extra grey hairs, but I’m pretty sure they’d have sprouted regardless).

Clearly I’m still clinging to my old life in many ways–Private Eye turns up every two weeks to keep me informed about whatever hilarious japes those Coalition boys have been getting up to, and that VPN connection I signed up for gives me access to a certain online telly streaming service–but recently I’ve found that when I need a news fix I instinctively reach for www.theage.com.au before news.bbc.co.uk.

On the other hand, even after two years of living in this sports-mad, aussie rules obsessed city I’d still rather lose sleep to watch another depressing late night Everton result play out than sit through a whole AFL game. (And I won’t be losing sleep when the current season of that particular sport is over in a couple of weeks time, if only because it means that everyone will stop talking about it…)

Then again, with limited opportunities to expose myself to new British music, my Recently Added playlist is local bands all the way (a couple of notable exceptions aside).

So I find myself somewhat conflicted–no longer the person I was when we lived in London, but not quite a proper Australian yet. Still, there’s two years to go before I get to apply for this, so there’s plenty of time for that to change, whether I like it or not.