John Grierson is actually the founder and first general manager of Manx Radio, the Isle of Mans national commercial radio station. John commenced Manx Radios general programming as the stations very first presenter, at 8.00 am on the 29th of June 1964. It is a privilege to have such an experienced broadcaster actively supporting Celtica Radio and contributing as part of our line up.
Please remember, John has a right to freedom of speech, and a right to express his thoughts as outlined below..
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Most of the items which go into the AirColumn are taken from a book written by Robert MacGregor, and brilliantly illustrated with some of the most wicked cartoons by a genius called Martin Wallace. The book is called "I can't take any more Crap". That title again ... I can't take any more Crap, by Robert MacGregor. How
to Buy your copy of;- OR ...www.tesco.com/books/product.aspx?R=190588611X and with any other on-line book-seller you might know about, such as WHSmith - and you can place an order directly through the publishers at ...www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=339 |
| Welcome
again to the AirColumn - but as from this month, a change to the
approach and something of an experiment. For a long time now I've
been observing and writing about politics in Britain, and I've now
reached the point where I need to share the view I've developed
- and see if I can provoke a response from you, the listener. If
you're listening to this, I want your opinion. And if I don't manage
to elicit much of a response, it will tell me that I'm wasting my
time and my breath because you don't care. You damned well ought
to care, but I can't make you. If you want to respond, send an e-mail
to john@celticaradio.com
and it'll be passed on to me. Then, next time, I can incorporate
some views other than mine, whether they coincide with mine or not. |
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EDUCATION |
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SPORT With the rare exception in the form of a very occasional amazing athlete, we are the world's also-rans, with pathetic financial support from central Government for the sports where British winners in every sport ought to be making us proud. We seldom win anything in any major team sport in the world, and most of them were invented and developed in Britain, where we still have more people per head of population than almost anywhere else, actively participating – but the system is throwing up no stars. Frankly, I am not at all sure that I want any Whitehall fingers in the sports pie and there's a lot to say that the post of "Sports Minister" ought to be abolished forthwith, but where we have national teams which are supposed to be there to bring kudos and prestige to the nation, then maybe some real Government action needs to be taken. Oh, and while I'm on about money and sport - is there anything good we can say about the 2012 Olympics? Does anyone actually know what it is going to cost? IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM We have no idea how to handle this mess, with one lot of politicians telling us that immigrants are good for us, the others trying to cut down on the numbers because immigrants and asylum seekers are a drain on our resources, and no-one able to establish any kind of sensible control. Meanwhile, as the Americans' doors are closed and even France seems to have some sort of policy, Britain is seen as the place to be if you want to escape from where you are, whatever the reason. And if it is true, as it almost certainly is, that immigrants are essential to our economy to do the jobs we Brits won't do, then we ought to have a Government policy to handle that. But we don't. PENSIONS An increasingly poor old-age stares more and more people in the face – Britain isn't a place where you should be content to be growing old, because the state pension will be worth less and less, and private pensions schemes are fast becoming a very bad joke for millions of us, managed it seems by very sophisticated crooks. Is Government making any real progress towards sensible changes ? No, none. At the other end of the scale, Britain is not a good place to start life either - our children are measurably worse off than those in every other civilised country. PRISONS There seems to be a new Inspector of Prisons every five minutes, and every time we hear from them, they tell us that British prisons are disgusting, filthy, overcrowded and breeding grounds for criminal activity of every kind - while whoever is Home Secretary today or Minister of Justice tomorrow keeps creating more and more offences which require custodial sentences in those same disgusting, filthy, overcrowded prisons. |
| TAXATION We're all paying more and more every year, mostly through taxes no-one talks about. Since 1997 when the Bright Shining New Labour Government took over from the Cons, the amount of tax we pay in total, per person, has increased by a massive percentage, while the Lab politicians keeping making it look as though taxes have hardly moved up at all. Compared to every other country in Europe, we pay more tax than their citizens do, whichever way you measure it. And are we getting better value for our money – our money, remember? Not at all. RED TAPE It's strangling our businesses, our schools, our hospitals - and it's getting worse. Ask anyone who runs a school, or any kind of enterprise large or small, and they'll tell you that they're drowning in verbiage, produced by the ton by bureaucrats whose job is to create bureaucracy, nothing else. Accountants, lawyers, consultants all get rich on the proceeds of trying to help people untangle the net as it tightens around them, and even the accountants, lawyers, consultants etc., etc are starting to complain that their jobs are being made nightmarish. When that happens, we really are in trouble. And every year the politicians tell us they are aware of the problem and are tackling it. Such lies. PARLIAMENT, AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IN PARTICULAR A disgraceful snake-pit of bad temper and low standards, with a Commons chamber empty so much of the time that one wonders what it's for, other than having fun at someone else's expense. The chamber fills at Prime Minister's Question Time, when everyone can indulge in or watch their favourite Parliamentary game; "Bait the Prime Minister". Much fuss was made about reforming the Commons, but when it was done, it was all about making the lives of MP's more comfortable. No more, no less. And as for the House of Lords ... well, there'll never be agreement on reforming that plush and posh club because too many members of the club are very comfortable thank you, so just leave us alone, OK? And, frankly, seeing what an elected lower house of Parliament is like, who can blame the Lords for wanting to be left alone? You're listening to the AirColumn on Celtica Radio with John Grierson - and that's the end of Part One of our new experiment to get you thinking about the way Britain in governed in this third millennium. Time for a short break, but I'll be right back. |
| Welcome
back to the AirColumn on Celtica Radio, and now to Part Two of our
new-style AirColumn. So far, I've talked about a dozen or so key areas
of our lives where politics and politicians have their fingers in
the pie and are making a mess of it ... but there's more, starting
with; THE HONOURS SYSTEM A cynical and disgusting display of gongs for the boys, with the whole thing run by the politicians and especially by the Prime Minister, whose power to distribute titles has become a sick joke – but handing out titles and medals is just another weapon in the armoury of a politician who knows how to keep the party faithful in line and to keep money coming into the party coffers. What chance does Britain have while this terrible and corrupt system prevails? And as if this isn't bad enough, we now have a clear-cut situation where the awesome power in the hands of the Prime Minister results in the Police - the Police! Questioning the same Prime Minister about giving away titles in return for cash into the party coffers. BUSINESS FAT-CATS This greedy breed is allowed to get away with putting up two fingers to the rest of us, while they negotiate colossal rewards either for failure or for shuffling bits of paper, and they keep lying to us about the need to pay "international rates" for top jobs. They're paid as much as a good lottery win, every year – and the Government, which could and should be putting reasonable controls on how much any human being can be paid, does nothing at all, because many members of the Government know that, come the end of their careers in politics, they'll be offered and they will accept precisely the kind of over-paid jobs they ought to detest. And that goes for all political parties. FARMING AND FISHING Recent crises in animal farming were handled so badly that no-one appears to have anything good to say about what happened, and when it cost millions more than necessary to bring things under control; weeks more time than was necessary; the loss of hundreds, possibly thousands3 of businesses and jobs - gone forever. Meanwhile, many, many small farmers struggle under mountains of debt to stay in business, and lose the battle every day to huge agri-businesses and the supermarkets, none of which is good for our countryside, or for our future as a nation - while a frightening number of those farmers commit suicide at worst, or at best, leave farming for good. And what about fishing? Spanish, French, almost any boats from anywhere rape our fishing grounds while the British fishing fleet disappears, fish are getting scarcer and more expensive, and centuries of fishing expertise is going down the plug-hole with each crew forced to give up and every boat broken up for scrap. OUR ARMED FORCES Our service-people are equipped with things that don't work, after the Ministry of Defence had spent millions on developing tanks which hated sand, boots which melted, rifles which jammed, radios which received nothing and transmitted nothing. And while we watch our armed forces withering away, (don't take my word for that - several of our most senior Generals, both retired and active, are saying so) our arms manufacturers supply every despot and tyrant in the world with tons of high quality arms of every kind. |
| FUNDING
FOR POLITICAL PARTIES We appear to be edging towards allowing the parties to poke their sticky fingers deep into the public purse so that elections are funded by the very taxpayers who are the voters. That's bad enough, but meanwhile, the parties also push their massive begging bowls in the direction of hard-eyed businessmen and/or trades unions who do nothing for nothing. So, in exchange for great lumps of cash (loans? gifts? both? when is a loan not a loan and a gift not a gift?) the donors expect something in return and they get it in the form of titles, chairs of quangos, or frightening amounts of influence over government decisions and policy. SOCIAL WELFARE Systems keep throwing up abysmal failure to watch out for abused children, old people at risk or families under siege in tower-block no-go areas. New and costly collection and payout systems are almost constantly being "developed" and then failing to work - and while this is happening, the taxpayers' bill for so called "benefits" goes up and up, with new handouts being invented almost weekly, sapping our national will to work. THE "MANAGEMENT OF THE ECONOMY" The Treasury is run by a Chancellor who is neither more nor less than an ambitious politician, who takes credit for anything good that happens in what is called "the economy" while he runs for cover as soon as "global conditions" cause problems over which he says he has no control. And, in order to create an illusion of "wasn't me, guv, honest" the Bank of England is awarded a form of utterly dishonest so-called independence (from the Treasury) while the reality is that the Bank does whatever the Government thinks will play best with the money-markets, the banks, and with the political party in power. Why do we believe this independence rubbish? When Bill Clinton ran for the Presidency of the USA and reminded himself daily that ... "It's the economy, stupid", he said everything that has to be said about the relationship between politics, politicians and economic management. They will remain inseparable for as long as Britain continues to elect party political representatives who are then promptly given control of the important economic levers. CRIME Everywhere in Britain, in every opinion poll or survey taken in recent times, we Brits feel that crime has got worse and that our streets are a lot less safe than they used to be. The truth is that crime overall has gone down in some categories, but violent crime involving guns and knives has increased whichever way it's measured – and guess what people are scared of. Bent accountants? Computer hackers? Persistent parking-violators? No – they're scared of muggings, burglary, abduction of their children – all violent crimes which people are entitled to be scared of, and that's precisely where crime is on the increase. INDUSTRY While small local industries soldier on despite, not as a result of, Government interference and the imposition of horrendous bureaucracy and taxation, Britain loses one large industry after the other until this country rapidly becomes an industry-free zone, where we import everything that actually has to be manufactured, export nothing that anyone actually makes, and create "service" industry jobs because we can't do anything else. |
| Do
I need to go on? No, I didn't think so - you've got the picture.
And the categories I've singled out as examples are just that -
examples from a much, much longer list of disgrace and decay. Britain
is in a mess, and the mess stinks from the top down. Now - is there
a problem somewhere right at the core of this mess, something that
has to change if we have any hope of seeing real improvement in
the way we're governed? Yes, there is. It's the fact that British
politics is being strangled by political parties - and more specifically
by the terrible boring, nothing to offer, my-turn-your-turn rubbish
that gives us a choice - some choice - between Labour going as Tory
and Tory going as Labour. |
| And if you have any comment on anything you have heard from me, I'd love to hear from you. E-mail me at john@celticaradio.com. |
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