Nick Clegg and his miserable little compromise

Now spring is here, things are looking a little bit brighter in Britain. As a treat for our good behaviour and for all the pain we have endured as a country, the government has decided that we deserve some time off to celebrate the upcoming Royal Wedding. Yay, she says sarcastically. Now that is something to look forward to.

I’m sorry for not getting all worked up about it but I simply can’t see why we should all be expected to put our financial woes on hold for the day and celebrate Kate Middleton’s accomplishment at bagging herself a life so completely devoid from our own that she may as well be from another planet. And we’re meant to be happy for her as we struggle to find jobs, fill up our cars and keep a roof over our heads. Give me a break.

If that wasn’t exciting enough the British public are back at the polling booths again in May to vote in the local elections and decide whether or not we won’t to prescribe to a new system of voting – First Past the Post v The Alternative Vote. This government sure knows how to spoil us.

I’m not going to bore you with details of how  the Alternative Vote (AV) system works because that is not what this piece is about, nor would you thank me for it. What I would like to say is that I object to this referendum because it is being casually thrown to the Lib Dems as a pathetic form of compensation for having compromised on their beliefs. What sickens me even more is that David Cameron knows full well that the Lib Dems are not going to win and is doing this only to keep them sweet. Yet there is no telling that this will keep the dissident Lib Dem backbenchers happy particularly concerning the reforms to the NHS. Yet if the Lib Dems believe that they will win more votes under AV then they are in for a shock at the next election when their faithful voters dessert them.

My second reason for a lack of enthusiasm concerning the referendum is that any reform of the voting system seems like rearranging the deck chairs to me. The problem that we have in this country is that people are apathetic when it comes to voting. Turnout over the years has been pitifully low and shows no sign of picking up. When asked, many people say that they do not vote because they cannot trust politicians who often don’t keep their promises.

Which is exactly what the Lib Dems have done, thoughtlessly going back on their promise of abolishing tuition fees, and leaving many young people feeling let down and disillusioned. After all, the Lib Dems core followers are young middle class kids with aspirations. They are the kids who work hard at state schools, dream of going to a top rate university, and pursuing an exciting and well paid career.

They can’t rely on mummy and daddy’s contacts to get them a job or exclusive work experience in some investment bank in London. When asked which public school they went to they proudly hold their heads up high and say they went to a bog standard state school where only 18 of their peers went on to higher education. They probably receive very little or no help from their parents and come out with a mountain of debt, but consider it a sacrifice worth making. They work during the summer holidays or have jobs at university to supplement their student loans and know the meaning of hard work, while their richer friends are off travelling or swanning about.

These are the kids whose parents work hard and earn a reasonable amount and so under the government’s proposals will not be entitled to receive financial support. They will be expected to pay the full £9,000 and probably won’t be able to afford do a masters on top of that. It wasn’t exactly easy before these changes were proposed, what with the competition for jobs, training programmes and graduate schemes, but you can sure as hell bet it will be now.

Yes, Nick Clegg, these are the kids that you were supposed to protect when you proudly said you would abolish tuition fees. They voted for you in good faith, believing that hard, not money, was enough to compete with those kids who’d been to exclusive private schools and had the financial backing of their families, and you’ve let them down.

What is needed in these testing economic times is a well educated class of young people, studying science subjects, engineering, maths and IT at university to pull us out of the mess that we’re in and compete with other countries. Instead higher education in this country is only going to be for the privileged few. Your greed for power has overshadowed your promises. You and your coalition government are too short-sighted to see the effects that this is going to have on our economy. On the whole the savings you’ll make are going to be small in comparison.

So, not only have you ruined your party’s credibility in the eyes of many, but you may well have put off an entire generation from voting again. And no change to the voting system is going to help you now, Mr Clegg. None whatsoever.

Let’s talk about sex

Someone asked me back in January what my new years resolution was. I thought for a moment before replying, “to not get pregnant this year.” At the time I was happily in a relationship (or so I thought) so it seemed like a good one. But seeing as I am recently single and living in the middle of nowhere, the chance of my getting knocked up seem pretty slim. On the whole it’s something I have every intention of keeping and unless something goes drastically wrong, I can get to the end of the year and feel rather smug with myself that yet again it’s been another successful 12 months.

The media were all full of the joys of spring the other day announcing that the teenage pregnancy rate in the UK had actually fallen to its lowest levels since the 1980s which made for some pleasant reading and a break from the destruction and terror that is the news at the moment. Conceptions among under-18s fell by almost 6 per cent last year, the Office for National Statistics said, while the rate among older women continued to rise.

Hurrah, we’re no longer the scourge of Europe, we all thought. That’ll make a nice change. Back in 1999 Tony Blair announced that something had to be done about this blot on the landscape and invested £280 million to tackle the problem. Ten years on and it seems to have done the trick although not quite at the levels Labour was hoping. They had after all pledged to halve the number, but hey, it’s a step in the right direction.

Not that I noticed it, mind you. Back in the day when I was at school, during Labour’s reign, I don’t seem to remember any money being spent in my school on sex education. There were no free condoms handed out; just the ones used for demonstrative purposes that had exceeded their expiry dates and split when you had to put them on the model penis, while the rest of the class laughed.

We seemed to gloss over the biology of it all when it came to my secondary school. Instead their main concern was that we should be practising safe sex, driving home their message by showing us graphic images of syphilis, gonorrhoea and herpes, and avoiding the elephant in the room – pregnancy. We did touch on it briefly, with my teacher told us that the withdrawal method was a valid form of contraception, which as my parents found out, is not the case. And that was that. I’m surprised that it didn’t put me off for life really. Though apparently South Shropshire is rife with Chlamydia these days, so those hours spent reeling in horror was apparently all for nothing.

There are no such things as GUM (clinics in rural areas and doctors surgeries don’t give out free condoms. We didn’t have a nurse at school and I would have never have approached my teacher for help. So what were the options. Fork out a fiver for a box of Durex? Not likely. Yet again the Labour government failed those living in the countryside. But with little in the way of prospects I don’t blame some of my peer for concluding that having a baby was a good career move.

Now that Labour’s 10-year programme ended last year, many fear that the number of young mothers may soon start to increase once more. So I had a think about this and came up with an idea of how we can continue the momentum.

What is sure to put you off getting pregnant any time soon, let alone having sex ever again, is ‘One born every minute’, the new Channel 4 hit show filmed inside a Southampton maternity hospital. My god, giving birth is not some beautiful, joyous moment. It’s gory and bad tempered and groany and long. Blimey, it went on for hours. All in all it was agonising. For me to view, that is.

In the one episode we watched as a 17-year-old writhed in pain and cried for her mum, to later find out that she was only 1 cm dilated and subsequently sent home. It didn’t half make me snigger.

If we don’t want teen pregnancies to rise again, then the government should really consider showing episodes like this in school. If displaying pictures of nasty genital diseases doesn’t make teenagers reach for the contraception then we need to ‘up’ the shock tactics.

Although images of sex are available everywhere from our TV programmes, to films, adverts, the internet, it is still a pretty much taboo subject and something we rarely discuss. So, lets bring in a woman who was ripped from back to front as a consequence, who now experiences bladder incontinence and hasn’t slept for a year and then we’ll see if having a baby is really some sort of frivolous activity. Because even writing that sort of stuff terrifies me.

The Arab spring and the rise of democracy

The courage of millions of people in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain who have braved the brutality of tyrants over the past six weeks to demand the freedoms that we take for granted has been astonishing and inspiring. The Arab spring, or Jasmine Revolution,  as it is being called has rather taken me by surprise. Westerners feared that any political uprising in the region would have been led by Islamic radicals, but so far they have been invisible. The cries of the Arab people for free and fair elections seems to contradict our fears, as we entered the new century, that Western liberalism was in decline.

The confidence we witnessed  in the 1990s as liberal democracy spread through the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall was a triumph. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century it became clear that a bunch of determined people with a world view just as alien to ours as fascism or communism was intent on waging war against us. The liberty we prized was something to be destroyed, not envied. The invasion of Iraq was not a great advertisement for democracy either.

Then came China’s arrival as a serious player on the world stage where a strong state and decline in liberty and political freedom brought high economic benefits. The notion that developing countries should follow the West’s economic and liberal style of governance began to crumble and undermined the self-confidence of Western liberalism. Self-doubt began to creep in and we began to wonder if it wasn’t a bit arrogant for us to regard our values as superior to others.  If Chinese people are getting rich, does it really  matter if they have a lack of political freedom? If Muslims were to reject democracy because it is not sanctioned by the Koran, shouldn’t we respect their wishes?

As we entered this new decade the crowds in Tunis, Cairo, Tripli, Algiers, Sanaa, Manama and Benghazi have swept away those doubts. Millions of Muslims around the Middle East do, it seem, want the same things that we have. The posters, banners and placards demand the freedoms that we are so lucky to enjoy; the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A number of factors have been put forward to explain why change has come about this year – the internet, social media, an educated and young population, access to the international media, travel and education. Having thought about this for some time I would argue that a change in psyche has ultimately played the largest part in this uprising and can be traced back to the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Whatever we consider to be the ‘real’ reasons for having invaded the oil rich state it seems that maybe the Bush Administration’s half-hearted attempts to sow the seeds of democracy around the Middle East hadn’t all been in vain.

Because seven years later maybe Bush’s doctorate may have had some significance. Inadvertently, that is. Arab tolerance for tyranny against them by fellow Arabs is something that is infinitely puzzling. Arabs are proud people who will not tolerate being colonised or exploited, that is unless it is by a fellow Arab in which case they will put up with torture, murder and oppression. The American led removal of Saddam was, therefore, a humiliation for the Arabs and gave them the incentive they needed to rise to the challenge and free themselves from the tyranny they had endured for decades.

The second dramatic effect of the Iraq war was the subsequent capture of Saddam Hussein. When he was found dishevelled, cowering in a rat hole it sent a very important message to the rest of the world. It proved that tyrannous, violent dictators were no different from us; that they were simply human, and could be reduced to pathetic, powerless, cowardly individuals. The level of vulnerability we witnessed was astounding and the images were broadcast around the world. Those leaders who have ruled with an iron fist, and have been seen as untouchable for decades, where no longer viewed as invincible. It at last gave millions of repressed people the confidence that they needed to topple the regimes that had for so long dominated their lives. And their example will have a profound effect on other countries too. China in particular needs to watch its step.

The chances of the protesters wishes being fulfilled peacefully seem slim. Countries that have no democratic institutions are unlikely to be able to build them without chaos and conflict; and there isn’t much that we can do to help. It would seem our values are universal ones with people who are prepared to die for. And we must support them in any way that we can.

The demise of the BBC World Service

It is a window on the world and the enviably independent and serious voice of Britain, which millions of people around the world trust to provide them with a daily source of news.

But yet the axe will fall on vital BBC World Service transmissions this week with the closure of five of its 32 World Service language services. Currently funded by the Foreign Office, at a cost of £272m a year,  the Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services (radio, TV and online) will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa. Radio broadcasting in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish for Cuba, Turkish and Ukrainian will also be cut in favour of online services in a bid to save £46m a year.

As well as this, the World Service will also cease short-wave transmission of six more services in March 2011 – Hindi, Indonesian, Kyrgyz, Nepali, Swahili and the Great Lakes service for Rwanda and Burundi.

Foreign Secretary William Hague has said that although the World Service has a “viable and promising future”, it was “not immune from public spending constraints”. The services in question are already run on a shoestring budget in comparison to the BBC’s domestic output.  Years of efficiency measures on slender budgets and scaled down staffing have left little to cut. A decade ago there were 45 services; shortly that will be reduced to just 26.

The service, which started broadcasting in 1932, has an audience of 241 million worldwide across radio, television and online. The BBC estimates audiences are expected to fall by more than 30 million.

Peter Horrocks, director of BBC WS, announced that these choices were based on the needs of its audiences and the limited resources that are now available. But this has come as a massive blow to millions of listeners around the world who rely on the World Service as a news lifeline. I don’t think we in the West quite realise how lucky we are to enjoy multiple news sources in the form of newspaper, television, internet and mobile phones.

In the developing world the radio remains the cheapest and most important medium for poor or remote communities. Free and independent news and information is essential in developing and defending democracy. Governments such as Russia and China increasingly try to block their citizens from accessing foreign broadcasts in favour of their own propaganda. For people who live in a country with an undemocratic government, state-censored media or partisan law-enforcement, the WS represents a  broader view on the world, a beacon of democracy and a refreshing voice of reason. All for as little as $10.

The BBC world service is hugely respected around the world and one of the reason that Britain enjoys a global reputation as a champion of free speech. And let’s face it – we in the UK don’t have much to feel proud about. Yet we are happy to make relatively small reductions at the expense of losing future reputation, integrity and international influence.

After all, it could be argued that the provision of independent information and high quality analysis to countries without well-developed democracies must be at least as important a contribution to international stability and progress as the overseas aid budget is. If savings need to be made, why not cut back on diplomatic staff or their entertainment expenses?

One of the arguments for the closure of these services is that they will instead focus more attention on online, mobile and TV content distribution in these languages. William Hague said recently that it was absolutely right for the World Service to move towards more online and mobile services, because “that is the way the world is going.”

And it is tempting, perhaps, to agree with this. But I would argue that this is far from true. You try telling that to an illiterate farmer in Uttar Pradesh, India, who tunes in on his crackly transistor radio to find out what is going on in the world. It will be of very little comfort for him to hear that he can now listen online. In India a vigorous letter-writing campaign is under way to persuade the BBC to reverse its decision as well as a demonstration outside the British High Commission.

In other affected areas there have been protests as well. Media Federation President, Branislav Canak said: “We are concerned to hear the news that the BBC World service for Serbia will be stopped. That service has had an enormously important role in the struggle of Serbian society for peace and democracy during the Milosevic era, but also today, when Serbia still stumbles over the remnants of the past and lacks vision to progress.”

Speaking from Mozambique after 30 years reporting on Africa, journalist and visiting fellow at the LSE & Open University, Joseph Hanlon said: “The most trusted radio voice in Africa is the BBC, it has won listeners and trust for accuracy and unbiased reporting over five decades of broadcasting. The relatively inexpensive Portuguese for Africa service has made Britain much better known in Mozambique than its much more expensive aid programme.”

The protests in Egypt have also sought to extinguish this claim. While the government were able to close down internet access and mobile phone services, the world service continued to broadcast. Therefore, to abandon the only technology proven to easily bypass borders and dictatorial censors is short-sighted.

But there is a glimmer of hope. Last October the government announced the BBC would take over the cost of the World Service from the Foreign Office from 2014.

The integration of the World Service into the Licence fee and the move to Broadcasting House where the rest of the BBC’s news operate, provides an opportunity. There will be scope to pool resources and expertise and make genuine efficiency savings. Director General, Mark Thompson has already indicated he would like to invest back into the World Service (although not to current levels). One wonders why this has not been done sooner. Although some people may not be happy that their license fee is being used to provide others with this service it surely makes sense to combine efforts and save some cash.

And if the British Broadcasting Corporation are still looking for ideas to save a bob or two, I recommend axing BBC 3.  Because that is one service I feel very embarrassed to be associated with it.

http://www.savews.com/

Wales’ apathetic referendum

You may not be aware, but Wales is gearing up for its biggest referendum since it voted for devolution in 1997.  It’s the most important decision we have ever had to make as a country since…well, I’m not entirely sure, because I’m not really Welsh, I just happen to live here. But that does not mean that I don’t have an opinion on the matter. In fact, I feel quite passionately about this issue. Because on May 3 we will decide whether the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) should have full law-making powers in areas like health, education and transport.

At present the Welsh Assembly is able to pass primary legislation (called Assembly Measures) in the 20 Policy Fields for which it is responsible. However, it must first have the power to do so conferred upon it by the Westminster Parliament. Only after completing this process, which can take two years even in straightforward cases, longer in some, can the Assembly set about considering and passing a law. But under the proposals the Assembly will continue to have no say over taxation, benefits, law and order, foreign and defense policy.

Yes For Wales (the campaign in favour of expanding the WA’s power) argues the current system as it stands is “cumbersome and slow”, costs a lot of money and causes delays in tackling important issues for Wales. They say that the Assembly would be more efficient and accountable if it did not have to seek “permission” to pass laws.

Speaking for the Yes campaign, Gwyn Griffiths, a retired teacher from Caerphilly, said: “The people of Wales have the right to expect that laws only affecting Wales should be made in Wales. I simply cannot understand why anyone would want to keep a system which requires Wales to ask ‘approval’ to manage its own affairs.”

The campaign has the firm support of the leaders of the assembly’s four main parties, is backed by vested interest groups and has the unions behind them.  It is led by successful businessman Roger Lewis who is also chief executive of the Welsh Rugby Union and has ample experience of dealing with the media.

Mr Lewis believes that if the Welsh Assembly were given “the tools to do the job” then Wales could stop wasting time, money, energy and imagination on an over-complicated law-making system work. He has also stated that Welsh politicians would not be able to hide behind the way laws are made as an excuse for not delivering to the people of Wales.

But not everyone in Wales is in agreement. The True Wales campaign, run by school teacher Rachel Banner, argues that at a time of cuts to public services Wales needs a Government more than ever who can protect people from the tough times they are currently experiencing. True Wales say that so far they have been unimpressed with the WAG and their track record and believe that more powers for the Assembly means more money for politicians in Cardiff Bay.

And they put forward an interesting case that rarely gets reported. The National Assembly for Wales and its Welsh Assembly Government over the past twelve years has failed the people of Wales, they argue. In 1997 the Welsh Assembly said that they would improve the economic position of Wales within ten years and create 135,000 new jobs. Instead, Wales has fallen to the very bottom of the economic league table of the UK. Unemployment levels are now higher and Wales has one of the lowest average per capita income of anywhere in the UK.

The next issue of contention is the Welsh Assembly’s approach to education, which differs to that in England. Wales currently chooses to spend £604 less per child than in England and schools get less if they don’t teach in Welsh. 40 per cent of children are one year or more below their chronological age in reading. In 2010 an international survey put Wales at the bottom of the league of 64 wealthy nations for reading, science and maths.

Health is another controversial issue, which just like education is run differently from England. Despite spending more per head of population, hospital waiting lists are longer, there is a poor ambulance service in rural areas and people are denied specialist medical attention because of the lack of appropriate funding.

This by anybody’s standard is a failure of leadership. A government should focus its attention on providing good quality services, good education and enough well paid jobs for its people. Their failure to improve these critical areas cannot be blamed on their lack of power to make laws. But we don’t hear them apologising. Instead they are demanding further powers.  Can they be trusted with more responsibility when they seem unable to manage the provision of basic services?

Another concern for True Wales is that power would be centralised into the hands of just 60 assembly members (AM) and exclude the scrutiny of elected Welsh MPs. Under the new system a ‘yes’ majority would mean that the Assembly could pass any law without the necessary checks and balances that are essential for a fair and just democracy. And there are no plans to implement a scrutiny system. True Wales believes this would require a further 20 AMs. Little money, if any, will be saved because the work will be transferred from Westminster to Cardiff, requiring more civil servants.

Another expense incurred is the cost of the referendum which is expected to set the Welsh electorate back by £5m to £8m. An expenditure, at a time of cuts, which could have been avoided if the vote had been held on assembly election day in May instead. But Welsh officials don’t really seem too bothered when they’re spending other peoples money.

Turnout is expected to be low for the vote, probably around 30 per cent, but then again Wales has a track record of poor participation. In 1997 when the Welsh were invited to vote on devolution the turnout was a dismal 50.1 per cent. Out of 22 unitary authorities, half voted against the creation of a Welsh Assembly. In total, devolution was passed by a mere whisker with 559,419 (50.3%) voting for the change and  552,698 (49.7%) against. What this proved was that Welsh people weren’t really that bothered either way.  And the apathetic nature of the Welsh population when it comes to voting may well result in full law-making powers being passed on yet another small percentage.

Shadow Welsh Secretary Peter Hain also argues that now may not be a best time to hold a referendum because of the effect of UK government cuts in Wales has created a backlash in public opinion. S4C’s budget has been cut, the Newport passport office closed, the St Athan Defence Training College axed, and the Severn Barrage abandoned, all without consultation in Wales. People who previously would have been reluctant to vote Yes, are now saying “Hang on, I think we need a bit more power in Wales to be able to resist right-wing attacks from Westminster’.” But even if the Welsh Assembly had more law making powers they wouldn’t have been to do anything about these issues.

I think what it comes down to is that members of the Welsh Assembly find it offensive that they need the sanction of the House of Commons before they can go ahead and do anything. While the rest of us are left bemused about what it is they actually do for the country, the power crazy AMs down in Cardiff Bay are busy wasting our money on a massively expensive and expanding bureaucracy that seems to get bigger and more costly. A low turn out should prompt serious debate about how devolution should involve more democracy and accountability at a local level rather than being concentrated into the hands of a few. And until it can prove that it is capable of managing its own affairs then I don’t believe Wales is ready to take on the responsibility to pass its own laws.

http://www.truewales.org.uk

http://www.yesforwales.com

Channel 4′s Big Fat Gypsy Disaster

I’ve just spent a week in the offices of the Travellers Times inputting data from one of the first surveys conducted into the gypsy and traveller community. It was an interesting time to be involved in such a project considering the furore surrounding Channel 4′s ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’. The programme, which has become the channel’s biggest hit to date,  has caused much controversy for portraying the travelling community as brash, primitively patriarchal and tasteless, with Jan Moir in the Daily Mail describing it as a ‘freak show’.

With a publication like the Travellers Times, gypsies feel like they have a voice and that finally ‘gorjers’, or non travellers, are beginning to understand their ways of life. Now they are upset and frustrated that the show is not representative of genuine Romany travellers,  but that it misleads the audience and leads to harm and offence. Rural Media Company (who produce TT) have, over the weeks, been bombarded by requests from the media to comment on the show and have even made a complaint to Ofcom. As one gypsy said, “There is a great deal of variety in our community, it would have been nice for that to have come over a bit more.”

So having had a rare, albeit brief, meeting with gypsy people and those who know more about the travelling world than the rest of us put together, I can safely say that these extravagant weddings are not an accurate portrayal of traveller life. Nor can gypsies be taken as simply one generic group.

What we are seeing, therefore, is only a small fragment of traveller life, heavily edited, with additional condescending commentary. In a way it is a shame, although understandable, that not more travellers wanted to be involved.  We might then have seen a more rounded perspective. As viewers we presume that we are presiding over some in-depth documentary. In fact what we are seeing is a highly sensational portrayal of traveller life which we are led to believe is how all gypsies behave. The programme has done nothing to promote a healthy image of gypsies, who are some of the most ostracised members of society. Granted they have deliberately sought to remove themselves from the wider community but that doesn’t mean that they are subjects ripe for humiliation and ridicule.

The fall-out of the programme has been immense. Splits have emerged amongst the traveller community with some blaming (unfairly?) Irish gypsies for the unwelcome attention. It has also stirred up a wave of anti-traveller sentiment that has always been present if underlying. Sadly, the gypsies featured seem to be playing into the producers hands with their revealing clothing, bare knuckle fighting and five stone wedding dresses.

One question that seems to come up is where do they get their money from to pay for their extravagant weddings. Personally, I don’t know, I presume through working, but as Gypsy journalist, Damian La Bas told viewers on The One Show last week,  “I’m not sure people would be asking how the money is earned if we were talking about any other community – most of the people I know work very hard and pay tax, it hurts me and it’s slightly facetious to be asking me where the money is coming from.” And he makes a good point. It’s as though we want to believe that they fund their lifestyles through a life of crime, so that they fit our flimsy stereotypes of what it is to be a gypsy. Then we’d have the proof to condemn them.

On Monday, The Sun newspaper jumped on the gypsy ‘bashing’ bandwagon with their story, ‘My big fat gypsy council house’ – where a family of 14 were living in a £1.2million council owned house in north London. The paper argued that their presence had brought down the value of the area, with the  family being accused of loud/aggressive behaviour, throwing used loo roll and beer cans over the fence and the house being left in a terrible state. A typical rhetoric for the paper.

My office were outraged by The Sun’s story. “They’re not even gypsies,” said one of the girls who is herself a traveller. “They don’t look like them, they don’t have gypsy names,  no self-respecting gypsy would live or behave like that, and no gypsy man would claim benefits.”

She herself is 20 years old,  unmarried and with no intention of doing it any time soon. Unlike most of the girls in the programme she has aspirations. Although she’d been taken out of school at nine, she had later returned to education, and was now applying to go to university to study music.  She had never heard of ‘grabbing’ – a gypsy courtship ritual where a man grabs a passing girl and carries her off for a fumble in the bushes and instead has a boyfriend and is allowed to hang out with him in public unchaperoned. She lives on her own, knows her mind and enjoys making her own money. Meeting her dispelled all the myths that the programme had sought to create. In fact, when I was inputting the data from the survey into the computer I found that many gypsies had been to university and quite a few of the younger women had jobs.

I suppose this is programme is an epitome of what worries me about the media and the way it behaves. When all you’re concerned about is ratings then journalistic integrity seems to be sidelined in pursuit of sensationalist television and controversy. Yet many of us are aware that Roma travellers in Europe have suffered discrimination and persecution on a large scale, recently being banished from France. And shows like this do nothing to improve their image or place in society. Perhaps Channel 4 were unaware that 2005 to 2015 is the ‘Decade of Roma Inclusion’ before they sought to misrepresent the traveller and gypsy community.

www.travellerstimes.org.uk/

The woes of the UK economy

As you may have noticed, the weather across the UK is a tad chilly at present. Luckily it’s nothing like the harsh freeze that brought snow, ice and chaos in December. This month (February) has brought with it the customary cold wind and drizzle to Wales, but at least we’re not snowed in.

Spare a thought for those across the Atlantic where conditions are very different and the epic winter shows no sign of relenting.

Two weeks ago the North East of the US and Canada were pummelled by their fifth storm in only a month. Some of the heaviest snowfalls struck New York, where 48 cm (19in) of snow fell, breaking the city’s 24-hour snowfall record that had stood since 1871, and making it the snowiest January on record.

The roofs of several buildings collapsed, trees crashed down under the weight of snow, hundreds of thousands of homes were left without power when outdoor cables toppled down and major airports were closed.

And further snow showers and bitter cold have been forecast.

So when it was announced the other week that the UK’s economic growth had retracted by 0.5 per cent, David Cameron and Co were very quick to blame our poor performance on the ‘bad winter’ that we had just endured. Oh yeah, that makes sense, we all thought. It was pretty bad. Planes were grounded and I did struggle to get my Christmas shopping done on time. No wonder the economy has taken a bit of a battering. Not to worry, spring is on its way. Green shoots and all that.

The contraction even took economists by surprise, as forecasts had been for growth of between 0.2 and 0.6 per cent. However, retail sales were heavily affected and the services output was weak. But it was the collapse in construction, with activity decreasing by 3.3 per cent in the quarter, that was a major contributor to the downside surprise.

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls said the figures were a matter of “great concern” and due largely to the speed and scope of the coalition government’s deficit reduction programme.

“The fact is the recovery has completely stalled in the last three months of last year. This is an economy which was growing in the middle of the year, [but] which has now ground to a halt,” he said.

“We have inflation going up, unemployment rising, now the economy is not growing. And all those boasts from George Osborne and David Cameron that they’d secured the recovery – it seems as though the opposite has happened.”

It doesn’t make for pleasant reading and it’s a bit depressing to start the new year on a such of a downer. But what is more concerning is that when we compare our short fall with that of America, we see a startling difference. The US’ growth was up by 0.8 per cent in the last quarter, despite the fact that they were battling with some of the worst conditions ever recorded. And yet they still managed to keep their economy rolling.

One bright spot on our landscape, clouded with uncertainty, is our manufacturing sector. Which is rather surprising considering that I wasn’t aware we had much of one any more. But with the pound looking pretty feeble at the moment, our exports are much cheaper these days.

But by blaming the weather for our unproductive last quarter we have skirted over the possibility that any other factors could be at work. So now that it’s getting warmer and the snowdrops are out we might be forgiven for thinking that it’s all plain sailing from here on. Sadly no. We’re not out of the woods yet. Widespread challenges at home and abroad could still dent growth this year.

I think we would be misguided to put our economic decline purely down to a bit of snow and ice. Serious probing questions need to be asked because the ‘bad weather’ is being used too freely as a scapegoat for our poor performance. Perhaps the simple explanation is that we’ve simply been too optimistic.