- The Observer,
- Sunday January 12, 2003
Nothing has changed. If anything it has got worse. Along with thousands of other commuters last week I found myself battling not just with snow and ice but a railway system that seemed on the brink of total collapse. Twice (on Tuesday and Thursday to be precise), the Great Western Region ground almost to a standstill. And the worrying thing was that the weather did not seem to be the cause of it, just a couple more cases of major signal failure.
Passengers in the meantime had ample opportunity to catch up with the news of rising crime figures, falling share prices, demoralisation of teachers and official warnings that the NHS might be squandering Gordon Brown's billions on more bureaucracy. In the circumstances, it seemed just appropriate that our railways had reached a state that would disgrace a Third World country.
The fact that, while these various crises were surfacing, the Prime Minister seemed intent on going to war with a country that poses no direct threat to Britain, has nothing to do with al-Qaeda and may not even have any of those weapons of mass destruction they keep talking about, only made him look more irrelevant than ever.
It was a pity that in all those tributes to Roy Jenkins, no one had the bad taste to remind us that only a few years ago Jenkins had dismissed Blair as someone with a second-class mind undeserving of an honorary degree from Oxford, a Blair of very little brain, in other words.
Beeb boobies
A few weeks ago, The Observer reported that the BBC's director general had commissioned a confidential poll to find out whether or not the Corporation was perceived as being too commercial an organisation.
Obviously the results have been reassuring for scarcely a day goes by without the BBC embarking on some new departure into an area outside their traditional remit.
The latest move, announced last week, was the launch of what was called an 'on-line digital curriculum service' for schools, approved by the Culture Minister Tessa Jowell and financed by £150 million of licence payers' money. The service will embrace video, flash animation, interactive games and worksheets and other wonders of the modern world.
It will not have occurred to Greg Dyke or Ms Jowell to question the BBC's credentials, commercial or otherwise, to get involved in the classroom but some of us would argue, convincingly, that one of the reasons so many children are so backward is that they spend too much time watching the BBC's programmes.
If Dyke is so interested in helping children, you would not get it from the programmes he provides for them, most of it lowest common denominator stuff such as cheap imported American cartoons, trashy pop music and mindless quiz shows.
Because we all subscribe to the view nowadays that education is something that only takes place in the classroom, it would not begin to occur to anyone to tell Greg Dyke that he ought to start trying to improve the quality of his television before he spends millions of pounds on interactive games and worksheets, things that nobody seems to want.
Legacy of hate
On my travels through snowbound London, I bumped into a young Labour MP on his way to see Mr Blair to express, along with some of his colleagues, his concern about the rising tide of racism and, in particular, the recent electoral successes of the British National Party.
I recalled the meeting two days later when I read in the Spectator the words 'Enoch Powell was right', a reflection inspired by reports of gang warfare in Birmingham which resulted in the death of two young girls. The writer, the Greek-born columnist Taki, sent his piece from Switzerland, a place he suggested that was mercifully free from large numbers of black people.
Why should one pay any attention to the cabdriver opinions of an amateur scribbler in a small-circulation magazine?
I may be accused of overreaction, but I find it significant that the editor of the Spectator, the man responsible for printing 'Enoch was right', is the respectable, well-educated Tory MP Boris Johnson and that his proprietor, the recently ennobled Lord Black of Crossharbour, holds him in the highest regard and, according to rumour, may even promote him to the editorship of the Daily Telegraph.
The fact that neither of these two gentlemen appears to see anything wrong with putting Taki's opinions into print and, if pressed, would probably think the whole thing was quite funny, is a small sign of the way things are going nowadays in Conservative circles, and possibly the country as a whole.
A sign, too, that my MP friend was right to try to get the Reverend Blair to address his mind to the question - if he can spare the time from his military preparations.
