No more Warwick Drive

The Queen's Speech included a proposal to 'allow' residents to choose the name of the street on which they live.

What could possibly go wrong?

I'll tell you what could go wrong. Boaty McBoatface.

You'll recall that, in 2016, the great British public was given the opportunity to choose the name for a new polar scientific research ship. They chose Boaty. The Government said "not on our watch" and named the ship Sir David Attenborough. Now, there are those who believe that the honourable thing for Sir Dave to do would have been to have said "no thanks, McBoaty will do just fine". There is actually no record that he actually cares one way or the other.

I live on a street called Warwick Drive. To my knowledge, this little part of Cornwall has no connection with the town of Warwick, nor the Earl of Warwick, nor Jeffrey Archer's William Warwick books, or Warwick Davis, so how this came about is unknown (at least to me). Perhaps there was an online poll and my co-residents - or their ancestors - chose this name. Maybe one of them had just been to Warwick Castle. Anyway, we shall have to endure this inappropriate name no longer. Campaigning will soon begin to choose a better name. I'm lobbying for Just Chilling and I have my social media campaign all ready to go. No Drive, Avenue, Road, Street, Gardens, Grove, Highway or Strip. Just Just Chilling. Get ready for a surge in readership!

It has to be said, in the interests of accuracy,that the proposal actually promises local people “more of a say over changing street names”. So not quite full control to the citizenry. And how frequently can we change names? If we choose Donald McTrumpFace and he goes to  jail, can we change please? Estate agents will be licking their lips at the prospect of new attributes for their properties: "large mansion in St Austell with three street name votes".

Perhaps the UK Government could reflect on the possibility that "levelling up" might just as easily result in levelling down. And stop pandering to the populace! Get on with important things like sending refugees to Rwanda, building new nuclear submarines and declaring war. On second thoughts .........

I don't get it

I try hard to avoid football content, so as not to halve my readership. Well, not that hard, truth be told. And we are in the season 2021/2022 end game from tonight onwards. Despite Wycombe Wanderers amazingly and brilliantly getting through to Wembley for the League One playoffs, my focus is on Thursday's Tottenham Hotspur v Arsenal game.

Arsenal are 4 points clear of Spurs and both teams will have 2 games to go after this North London Derby. One of them will end up in 4th place in the Premier League table, earning for themselves the riches of the Champions League next season. The other will end up 5th and have to suffer the ignominy of Thursday evening Europa League consolation.

If I were a neutral, the expectation would be that Spurs win the NLD - they are in good form and at home - followed by their winning their two extremely easy games against already-relegated-and-on-their-holidays Norwich City and truly-awful Burnley. You - the neutral observer - would expect Arsenal to drop points in at least one of the remaining games against rejuvenated Newcastle and also-truly-awful Everton. All of which suggests it's all on a knife edge. A real 50/50.

Yet the bookies' odds make Arsenal 2/7 favourites to get that 4th place, with Spurs around 9/4 against. I don't get it. Nevertheless I have a dinky little £50 bet on Spurs to make it, although I only got just under 2/1 at the time. Should that happen, it would buy me a few beers to drown my sorrows.

There is also the delicious, if unlikely, prospect that both could overtake Chelsea and force the latter out of next season's Champions League. The odds of that happening are around 50/1 against. We can hope. Watch this space.

Tomorrow - Leeds v Chelsea.

Thursday - the Big One. I would be behind the sofa if I had one. I'm already a bag of nerves, two days out. Time for a drink..........

Glory Glory

Yesterday I wrote that the Metropolitan Police and Durham Police had hardly covered themselves in glory in pursuing lockdown-deniers. But to be fair the police forces of this country were given a poisoned chalice by Parliament [And by Parliament I mean not only the Government but also the far-too-compliant OINO (Opposition In Name Only)], which gave the police new laws to enforce without any new resources with which to do so. I think we can assume that police officers up and down the land were not just sitting around with nothing to do, just waiting for some new laws to enforce. We can probably assume that they were quite busy doing proper policing - catching criminals, for instance. So it was entirely reasonable for them to be circumspect in how enthusiastically to chase people who were meeting 'illegally' in groups of six or more people. My impression is that they mostly focussed on particularly large gatherings of people egregiously breaking the rules.

I was always against criminalising lockdown rules, not only on the resource issue, nor the likelihood or otherwise of people being willing to follow man-made laws as opposed to what we might call guidance on civilised norms, e.g. respecting our fellow citizens, but also as a simple matter of personal liberty. If you are thinking this makes me a libertarian, right-wing lunatic then I readily confess to two of those. Free speech and free action, within unarguably fundamental law, are to me values of a democratic society which we should not be too ready to dilute. In this I am pretty much a fundamentalist: I cannot condone social media companies imposing their own judgments on what should be published on their sites - within the law, obviously. Twitter should not have banned Trump from tweeting, for instance. Are our democracies so fragile that we are frightened of the power of contrary views? Perhaps we have to work harder to build civilised consensus.

The UK Government's Online Safety Bill, currently progressing through Parliament, includes a proposal for online providers to remove “legal but harmful” content. Who says what's "harmful"? If it's harmful, pass a law against the specifics. If not, keep your nose out of my business.

I'm not by any means diminishing the importance of holding politicians to account for their actions but my guess is that public outrage would have been just as great against government (or opposition) lockdown gatherings if those were against the spirit of guidelines rather than specifically breaking (clearly ill-defined) laws. Because of those laws, we (inflamed by the media) are spending months debating whether obviously arrogant behaviour was illegal, the extent to which a Fixed Penalty Notice is a criminal offence and police forces are having to divert resources from crime busting to pseudo political decision making. Are we collectively insane?

That's it for now. Very few people read this any more. Sometimes I just have to let off steam, though. Is it the end? Who knows?

Be brave, Kier

Forget the Daily Mail. Forget the wailing Conservative MPs. Forget the Durham Police who, following in the footsteps of the incompetent Metropolitan Police, have hardly covered themselves in glory. The only fact that matters is that, if you are given a fixed penalty notice for that glass of beer, you will have to resign as Labour party leader. If you did not, and you tried to weasel your way out of it, the public would never believe any of the words you will have to say when the inevitable further fines and the final Sue Gray report emerge over the next few weeks and months.

So you should get out in front now. Immediately after reading this. State unequivocally that, f you are given a FPN, you will resign. Distance yourself from our weaselly PM and make the stand for honesty and decency in politics. After all she has said on this subject, Angela Rayner should do the same. There is no wiggle room.

Labour would survive your departure, even be enhanced by its setting a standard for integrity.

This is your test. Don't fail it.