If you take a look at this (apparently non-embeddable*) video of BBC 1’s Last Tango In Halifax (broadcast on 4/12/12) from just before 45 minutes in – the really approprate bit is from 46:40 to 47:00 – you’ll hear a laugh out loud summation of Mr Irresponsible, aka David Cameron.

It was all the more surprising to see and hear this sort of thing in an otherwise uncontroversial piece of cosy prime time TV.

* Edited to add:- I’ve found the embed code now, so here it is.

Sounds like a firm of lawyers doesn’t it?

The above three firms are under fire for not paying very much in the way of Corporation Tax despite apparently making large amounts of money in the UK. (That this situation is entirely within tax law surely means the law is askew. Profits made in the UK ought to be taxed here and not be allowed to be shifted elsewhere. Most employees in this country cannot esacpe PAYE so why ought companies be able to avoid Corporation Tax? But this isn’t my point.)

I have heard it suggested that such firms ought not to be pursued too vigorously for tax purposes as that might have an impact on the jobs they provide.

Really?

Seriously: will Amazon give up on the UK market place if they were to be taxed more fairly? Will Google? Will Starbucks? To ask this question is perhaps to provide an answer. If they do turn their backs on the UK then they can – they will – be replaced by firms with more socially responsible attitudes to the country they are taking money out of.

The least a company extracting profit from a jurisdiction in which they operate can do is to adequately recompense the polity which allowed them that opportunity.

I see BBC Director General George Entwistle has been “grilled” by MPs over the Jimmy Savile allegations.

While Savile’s activities ought to be investigated and the truth brought to light I suspect that similar failings of oversight to those the BBC is being charged with would have been present in any large organisation during the times concerned. The mechanisms were not in place then and neither was the awareness.

Granted, the presence of teenage girls at the average Top of the Pops recording was likely to be higher than at other places. These girls (possibly some boys too) were moreover likely to be starry-eyed, but the same would also have been true backstage at any rock gig; and probably still is.

So why the focus on the BBC? It was not only there that Savile is alleged to have acted predatorily or carried out abuse.

I look forward to MPs smilarly “grilling” the bosses at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Leeds General, Broadmoor and at the various children’s homes he was given privileged access to – all of whom arguably had a greater duty of care to those on or in their premises than had the BBC – and for that questioning to be given similar prominence in news reports.

It is sickening to realise that Savile’s volunteering to “help” at these hospitals and homes and also his charity work may have been undertaken – most likely was – precisely as a means of gaining access to vulnerable people.

This affair should not be a stick with which to beat the BBC but a way to ensure that victims of predatory sexual behaviour and of abuse can be encouraged to come forward – and be listened to when they do and for those in charge of vulnerable individuals to be much more careful about to whom they grant access to their in their care.

So in 2014 the people living in Scotland will at last be allowed to vote on their continuing presence in the UK.

I used the formulation “at last” because it will be the first time. When Scotland and England with Wales merged in 1707 the only Scots who had a vote on the proposal were members of the then Scottish Parliament. There was widespread discontent in the general public at the time.

Still, over three hundred years we have had time to accustom ourselves to it.

The likley outcome in 2014?

No to independence.

There will be a lot of scaremongering about how Scotland cannot afford to go it alone though other countries of similar size do alright (Denmark anyone?) and newly independent ones (Slovakia?) don’t seem in a rush to remerge.

The status quo will seem a safer option but that too is a leap in the dark – especially if the little Englanders in the UK were to force withdrawal from the EU. Scottish fisheries might be better off in that circumstance but I doubt anything else will be.

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Short of FIFA removing Scotland’s right to separate representation* in the World Cup and European Championships the majority of Scots won’t vote for independence.

(*Given the national team’s current efforts maybe not even then.)

I hear former Cabinet Minister Jack Straw in response to yesterday’s report on the Hillsborough disaster has referred to the culture of impunity in the police under the Thatcher government, a culture encouraged as they wanted the police to be a partisan force. Norman Tebbit – that government’s “semi-house-trained polecat” (in Michael Foot‘s phrase) – has responded to Straw’s remarks by calling them very, very silly.

Straw seems to have touched a nerve there don’t you think? Tebbit’s is hardly a measured comment. It’s also a deliberate attempt to minimise the effect of Straw’s charge – which has a great deal of substance.

To anyone who, like me, lived in a mining area in the 1980s it was obvious that the police force was partisan. Not only did stories of police officers brandishing banknotes at striking miners through the windows of police vans abound, I was several times prevented from going about my lawful business by a policeman peremptorily directing me back the way I had come. And this was nowhere near an actual coal mine, merely on roads that coal carrying lorries might be intending to use.

It was equally obvious that the then government wanted the police on side. One of their first acts was to ensure that the police got a large pay rise (while the rest of the public services were to endure cuts or freezes.)

And Thatcher herself not only saw the miners as an enemy, she saw football supporters in that light too, or if not an enemy, certainly as undesirables.

Is it any wonder the Yorkshire Police thought that they could get away with distorting the truth of Hillsborough? Football fans, especially in England, more especially from Liverpool, were at the time treated with contempt.

Far from Straw’s remarks being very, very silly, it is Tebbit’s which deserve that label.

I was amused when I heard that Mr Irresponsible, aka David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK, had reshuffled half his cabinet.

The same thing was done by Harold Macmillan, Conservative Prime Minister in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in 1962 when it was dubbed Night of the Long Knives in comparison with the Nazi purge of 1934.

(Macmillan may or may not have uttered the phrase, “Events, dear boy. Events,” under which I have categorised this post.)

Whatever, the Night of the Long Knives incident offered his Labour opponent Harold Wilson a brilliant line when he talked about this some time later. Wilson said, “I remember the then Prime Minister sacking half his Cabinet – the wrong half, as it turned out.”

I wonder if Ed Miliband can somehow reuse that one.

Another thing I woke up to yesterday was the news that Cardinal Keith O’Brien, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, had – along with other Scottish Catholic bishops – written a letter to be read out to all Catholic congregations in Scotland bemoaning the fact that the Scottish government is to legislate to equalise the status of marriage between different and same sex couples.

I’m not sure why it makes a difference to gay people; a civil partnership between a heterosexual couple is effectively a marriage, so why isn’t a same sex one?

I could see some force to the Cardinal’s point if priests were to be forced to officiate at such unions but they, along with Church of Scotland Ministers, Episcopalian Rectors, Rabbis, Muslim Imams etc, are expressly not being required to do that. These marriages will be civil, not ecclesiastical, affairs. (And let’s remember marriage between heterosexuals is not legal until it has been registered by the state. The word of priest, minister or whatever religious official is legally neither here nor there.)

Cardinal O’Brien’s statement that the Scottish government has “refused to listen” to his views is, I think, misplaced. The Government has listened, it just hasn’t done what he wanted. His complaint about their “refusal” amounts to a desire on his part to have a veto on Scottish social policy. Is this a position which any churchman should be taking up?

How many Catholics are likely to agree with the Cardinal on this point anyway? For countless years the churches have been on the wrong side of most arguments as regards social change – from slavery to women’s rights and now to the acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual and other sexualities. They have come round to the views of the wider world in previous cases and found biblical justification for them. Who is to say this will not happen with gay issues?

Scotland is not a theocracy. (Yet. And some would say thank God for it!) And if it were….

Which other religion does Cardinal O’Brien think ought to have a veto on social policy? For what is sauce for his Catholic gander is sauce for other religions’ geese. Would he be comfortable living under Sharia Law, for example? If Scottish Government policy is to be dictated by one religion or denomination it has to be dictated by them all. The Roman Catholic Church has no special place in Scottish politics – except in so far as its denominational schools are subsidised and underwritten by the Scottish state. That is a source of division that has underscored the running sore of sectarianism that has beset Scottish life particularly in the west of Scotland, but also more widely, since the Reformation.

Scotland fought long and hard, and bloodily, for centuries, from the Reformation through the Civil Wars of the reign of Charles I up to and arguably beyond the Jacobite rebellions for the right for its citizens to think and believe for themselves and not to have others tell them what to think and do.

Is this really the pot which Cardinal O’Brien wishes to stir?

Scottish Catholics have been known to complain that they are somehow disadvantaged or excluded from Scottish life in its widest sense. (I personally, though not a Catholic, think this has for quite some time now verged on the ludicrous. There are any number of high profile Catholics in Scottish public life.) They cannot at the same time insist on this perceived subjugation and also that their view on a particular issue should prevail. Or can Cardinal O’Brien not see the contradiction?

I caught an item on the BBC’s Reporting Scotland last week trumpeting the fact that a quarter of probationer teachers in Scotland last year had found a job in teaching. This statistic was greeted as if it was a good thing.

Now think for a minute. All those trainee teachers, with all that money invested in training colleges to prepare them for the job, their time and effort in their probationary year, the time and effort of their mentors and teaching colleagues who provided them with advice and support, in other words plenty of resources expended on this endeavour and three-quarters of them, 75%!, have no job available for them at the end.

Isn’t that a scandal?

All those young aspirants with hope of their chosen career dashed. All that time, effort and (let’s not forget) government money – our money if you like – spent in getting them up to speed; only for them to end up jobless.

Is it beyond the powers that be to make a projection of likely pupil numbers a year or so ahead and tailor teacher trainee numbers accordingly? They do have at least four years to mull over the birth statistics before children reach Primary School age and another seven till Secondary School enrollments.

And I doubt if many of the “lucky” 25% have been offered a full-time permanent contract.

Well, this says it all.

Mr Irresponsible (see here for previous posts) aka David Cameron – the Prime Minister of the UK! – has left his child behind in a pub.

Can you really trust your country to this man?

Just over a year since the last jamboree and we’re at it again. Four days of flummery with the BBC leading the cheers. How any Tory can seriously suggest that the BBC has a left wing bias is beyond me.

It was a bit like the brouhaha surrounding Princess Diana’s death and funeral. We were being told what we ought to be feeling and no (or little) objection was being brooked. I think I saw only one interview with an anti-monarchist over the entire weekend. I’m sure the many who care little for the monarchy must have felt left out of the national discourse in the past few days.

I saw a bit of the Jubilee Concert on Monday night. Car-crash listening. Almost every artist I heard was way past their best; and the singing was excruciating. It was amusing when the orchestra struck up the second verse of the National Anthem. I could imagine the panic. “What are the words!!??” Still, the assembled entertainers were spared any embarrassment, only general crowd shots were broadcast. Faces saved all round there.

I’m pretty sure much of this enthusiasm is not so much for monarchy per se as for the person of the Queen, who has the sense to be bland and inoffensive.

Takes the mind off the economic crisis though, eh?

But what is the UK coming to? It turns out many of the stewards at the river pageant were unemployed people bussed in from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth, given no pay and told to sleep under a bridge.

Appalling.