See you, Jimmy!

I've had my say on postal voting - more than once - and you'll have gathered that I'm agin it, or at least the modern approach where you no longer have to give a good reason in order to get one.  But the news that postal votes for the Scottish independence referendum are being put up for sale on eBay surprised even me.  I would have thought this is probably illegal, but have been unable to find any definitive answer to the question.  Media reports say "the police are investigating..." but no more. And the interesting theoretical question for me is, if it is illegal just who has broken the law?  Is it the person who puts it up for sale, or - presuming they use it - is it the person who buys it?  It's certainly illegal to turn up at a polling station pretending to be someone else and voting in their name but if somebody knowingly lets you do that, I'm not so sure if they have broken the law.  Watch this space, as they say.

Join the dots - what dots??

The papers are full of calls for Shaun Wright to resign.  Who he??  Well he was head of child services at Rotherham council at a time when apparently hundreds of young children were being systematically groomed for sex by a gang of Pakistani men, and it is said that he was, or at the very least should have been aware of what was going on, and did nothing.  Right - resign yes?  But the point is that he is no longer in that post and is now Police Commissioner for South Yorkshire, which Rotherham comes under.  And it is this post that there are now demands he resigns from.  Am I missing something - where is the connection?  If what is said about him is true, then he should certainly be apologising and grovelling and perhaps being put in the stocks and pelted with rotten fruit, but what has this to do with the post of Police Commissioner?  Do the allegations (again I stress, if true) make him any less able to carry out the duties of the post he now holds.  Why should there be any question of resignation?  I ask again - am I missing something?

You're kidding???!

This is not a spoof !  HM Revenue and Customs (the tax man to you and me) are holding a VIP service in Westminster Abbey in a few weeks to "recognise the taxman's work collecting revenue".  The mind boggles!  And this it seems is being done at the behest of Lin Homer, now head of HMRC, and whose last post was Head of UK Borders Agency who of course were heavily involved in the eBorders fiasco which I posted about a week or so ago.  It just gets better and better, doesn't it?

What a work-round!

An official Iranian report has revealed that a significant number of Iranian young men and women are having sex before marriage.  This is a surprising revelation coming from such a closed authoritarian regime, but what surprised me even more is the fact that apparently under Iranian law you can enter into a temporary marriage for a fixed period of time and this is being suggested as a way of legitimising what is going on. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

Ice bucket challenge

It seems the latest craze (or one of them) is tipping - or getting someone else to tip - a bucket of iced water over your head.  Oh, to be young and stupid again!

R.I.P.

Richard Attenborough - what can I say?  A man of many parts, and all of them brilliant.

Is there an answer?

Perceptive quote from the ex-Mayor of Ferguson, the American town which is currently infamous for the shooting dead of a black youth by a white police officer, leading to accusations of racism - and worse. "Sure we're segregated. Most cities are. People want to be with people that look like them, think like them, talk like them. It's human nature.  It doesn't mean it's bad" And he's right - segregation in and of itself is neither good nor bad - it's just the way things tend to be.  Just think of the way there are small areas of the Costa del Sol which are predominantly populated by Brits.  Segregation only becomes a problem when it leads to isolationism, which in turn leads on both sides to a "them and us" mentality.  And that unfortunately happens all too easily.  So then it becomes a sort of "chicken and egg" problem.  Which is the cause and which the effect?

No - Magnum PI is a TV programme!

What's the current rate of inflation?  Should be a straightforward question with a definitive answer, yes?  But no - it depends on which measure of inflation you are using.  There are two - RPI (Retail Price Index) and CPI (Consumer Price Index).  I don't pretend to understand the nuances, but RPI tends to be a higher figure than CPI.  So the sneaky thing is that the Government choose which index suits them best in the circumstances.  When it comes to increases in the state pension, for example, they use CPI, 'cause that's generally lower, but when it come to increasing the price of rail fares, they use RPI, 'cause that's generally higher.  I think it's called having it both ways!

Here we go again...

We've talked more than once in these pages about government's lamentable track record when it comes to IT projects, but the latest fiasco - the so-called eBorders system - takes the biscuit.  This was to be a "count-'em-out and count-'em-in" system which would have kept comprehensive records of everybody entering and leaving these islands, but as is so often the case the actual details of what was required kept being changed with the result that what was eventually produced satisfied nobody.  So one of the first acts of the current Government, when it came to power in 2010 was to cancel it.  That would have been bad enough, but this was done on the advice of civil servants that the company involved had failed to meet the specifications asked for, and therefore were to blame for the failure. But the company took the matter to court and have been awarded some £185m damages after the court found they had done precisely what was asked of them, and that the problem was that the project, as designed by government, was never going to work the way it was supposed to. Of course all those involved have moved on (and in the case of civil servants, almost certainly moved up) by now, so the probability is that no-one will be held to account.  Ain't that wonderful?

Do good to those that hate you??

Interesting to see the Pope wading in to the Iraq business saying that the use of force is justifiable. Always been a bit of a problem for Christians - the religion is based on the teachings of Jesus - love your enemies, turn the other cheek and so on, so how can you justify going to war and killing people? I think it was Pope Urban the something-or-other back around the first millennium who made the switch and came up with the concept of "holy war" with automatic absolution for those taking part and which led directly to the Crusades. Since when, of course, the teachings of Jesus - at least as far as this aspect is concerned - have gone right out of the window.