The Scottish referendum - we should be proud of our democratic process.

Whichever way your sentiments lay in the Scottish independence referendum, the most amazing thing watching it unfold has been the level of political engagement. We are repeatedly told people aren't interested in politics any more. Really? When given a vote on something that can have real impact on their lives and futures the people of Scotland were passionate and engaged about it.

A referendum that engendered extreme emotions and potentially  inflamed passions was conducted in a  sound manner and with no recourse to violence. A democratic process has unfurled on our doorstep & we now agree to abide by its decision.

Whatever the result, one side was bound to be unhappy but now is not a time for recrimenation.  Rather it is a time for reflecting with pride on how well political engagement and democracy can work when we let it and for setting out to work together for a better UK for all. There will be much talk now of devolving power from Westminster not just to Scotland, but to Wales, N. Ireland and English regional assemblies too.

Perhaps in some small way this referendum will engage all of us in politics on these matters in the future...but for now congratulations Britain you are a truly democratic nation!

why is a politician's sexuality STILL relevant?

In picking up the paper today a headline stood out in the international section; - 'Berlin's gay mayor step down after 13 years'.

Prior to this I had never heard of Klaus Wowereit the Mayor in question. Why would I? His influence doesn't really extend to Britain. There then followed a brief piece on his career and hiss being openly gay. But do we need to know this? Sure he is arguably a symbol and has every right to be out and proud.

The bigger question is though 'Who Cares?' and if it isn't it should be. This is the 21st Century for goodness sake - people's sexuality should be an irrelivance.

The only question voters need to know is, is he/was he good at his job? That's how we should judge all our politicians, regardless of proclivity.

When we pick up the paper and it say mayor to step down and there is no mention of sexuality, or affairs, or let's face it any of there personal life & it focuses on their ability & time in office THEN we will be getting somewhere.

Is it time for a 'maximum wage'?

A think tank has published research that suggests executive pay is now 162 times that of the average worker. Just so that sinks in, one more time 162 (ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO) times the average workers pay!!

I'm all for paying for 'top talent' and giving equitable reward to those at the top with pressure and responsibility but that is ridiculous and potentially capable of creating gaping social inequalities.

http://highpaycentre.org/blog/new-film-income-inequality-in-the-uk

So what is the solution? Capping top level pay. No I don't mean inverting the minimum wage and saying something ridiculous like thou shalt not earn more than £200 an hour. I mean setting a limit so that CEOs etc could not earn an amount beyond a set multiple of the average pay of their staff. John Lewis already does this, the ration is 75:1 (hardly harsh) and I don't see their business suffering as a result.

Some might say it's an affront to civil liberty and the ability of the market to regulate itself. To hell with that. The neo-liberal dream of the self-correcting market is quite clearly a fantasy undermined daily by the ever widening inequalities in society and the inability of regulators to control soaring profits without justification (cough cough utilities companies).

The average wage in the UK is currently £26,500 - imagine if you index linked 75:1 to that - your chief executive would still get £1,987,500 not exactly a paltry sum!

Stop grading the NFL draft after a day!

Anyone who knows the slightest thing about the NFL knows, instinctively, rationally, definitively KNOWS that you need at least 3 years to see if the draft for your team has worked out.

You can pick the seemingly best players and watch them succumb to injury or poor form. You can see 'reach' picks become genuine stars. You can see all sorts of things.

What you can NOT do is know after one lousy, stinking day with no actual on the field play to back it up just how to grade your team's draft. Stop it. It's just ridiculous.

Lynn Shepherd - you should listen to your friends

I cannot think of a more crass, stupid, pointless exercise in making yourself look inadequate than the one Lynn Shpeherd in which recently indulged. Who is Lynn Shepherd anyway? Why, that would be the well-known author (no, I'd never heard of her before either) who has made a name for herself by having a go at JK Rowling: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/lynn-shepherd/jk-rowling-should-stop-writing_b_4829648.html.

According to this article, the reason our Lynn isn't selling enough books is because Rowling has moved into the adult market, turned their minds to mush and turned them against more adult fare!

Apparently the consideration that her own writings don't appeal hasn't occurred. The idea that Rowling brought a whole generation of readers into the literary fiction market has passed her by. The concept of competition seems alien to her. At least, it does when a competitor has better name recognition and sales.

She suggest herself that this article will seem like 'sour grapes'; one rather suspects that is because that is exactly what this appears to be.

Her friends told her not to express this opinion in print and they were right. She sounds like an entitled, spoilt wannabe who should go away and work on her writing skills. Very, very, very, very few people will ever sell as many books as JK Rowling and being jealous of her success doesn't make a new writer seem all that appealing.

Time for Lynn to get a new pen name and start again, methinks!

England plumb new depths with their complacency

This is a brief moan about the England team. The England cricket team one might add, so if you're here to decry the poor performances of another set of English sporting luminaries then please get in line. The England cricket team have been so inept this Autumn/Winter that it is their absolute right to be at the head of any criticisms that are  forthcoming.

Whilst reflecting on the nadir of a humbling one-sided defeat to a bunch of part-timers representing the Netherlands, both coach and captain of the T20 team made mention of a possible complacency coming into the tournament.

Complacency?!? This is barely fathomable. How doe a team that spent the Autumn/Winter season losing 5 out of 5 test matches (none of which were close), 8 out of 10 One Day Internationals and 8 out of 10 T20s become complacent?

Perhaps if they had been sweeping all before them and were riding a crest of overconfidence then complacency would make sense, but not with that record! Of late, it's felt at times like England are involved in a protracted experiment to test the loyalty of their supporters. We all expect thick and thin - as it were - but the 'thin' here has become almost transparent! It's not just the monotonously recurring sensation of defeat either, it's the nature of those defeats.

England fans, like any fans, will be forgiving if they sense passion, commitment and endeavour on the part of their players. What they cannot tolerate, let alone comprehend, is 'complacency' from a team that has become so astonishingly average (and here I'm being generous).

Complacency seems to be a byword here for not taking personal responsibility. Now we are at the bottom looking up, perhaps the time for such 'complacency' is over?

Linguistic Despair

One does not wish to appear unnecessarily arcane. Never let it be said that metaphorically 'moving with the times' is beyond the realms of personal achievement. One is also not known for tedious adherence to what some humorously (or otherwise) regard as the 'grammar police.'

However my instincts and, as it were, 'natural heckles' were raised by gratingly inappropriate phraseology today.

It was enquired during an online survey whether I had ever "gotten asked" about a subject before. Setting aside the awful Americanism implied in such a 'jargonistic' phrase it seemed wholly unnecessary. Gotten is a past participle of get. Would it have been too much to ask; 'have you been asked before' or something equally appropriate?

Whilst I understand the OED expresses that 'gotten' dates back to Middle English it is certainly no longer part of general usage in the current vocabulary. Even the North American version of 'gotten' is said to imply the process of obtaining ownership (for example, he had been and gotten us tickets for Lords). Whereas got is said to show possession (for example, he had already got tickets for the cricket).

Thus in this instance - that of the survey - 'gotten' became wholly redundant anyway.

Perhaps one is being a tad pedantic, but that cannot be helped when something seems so glaringly anachronistic.

Young people are more abstemious - why aren't we celebrating that?

Not that many moons ago the British tabloids delighted in tales of youth drunkenness, alcohol fuelled town centre carnage and the horrors of binge drinking with metronomic frequency. Yet of late those stories have slowed down somewhat.

What can be the motivating factor for not publishing such stories that prey on the public fears and are usually manna from journalistic heaven?

It's not as though we are suddenly a 'dry' nation. Young Britons still drink far more heavily than their continental counterparts, as evidenced here; http://www.espad.org/Uploads/ESPAD_reports/2011/The_2011_ESPAD_Report_FULL_2012_10_29.pdf

Yet, despite this, things are (gradually) changing. the 2011 census had some revealing statistics,

'Just 12% of 11 to 15-year olds said they had drunk alcohol in the previous week in 2011 - down from 26% a decade earlier, according to National Health Service statistics. The proportion who said they had ever drunk alcohol fell from 61% to 45% over the same period.' (sourced via BBC news).

it seems that the 'joys' of drinking are dissipating gradually. The same NHS report points out that younger people are indulging in smoking and other recreational drugs less than previous generations too.

So what can be underpinning this gradual shift to being abstemious? Well, several factors seem key. University life, for one, is much more expensive now and students are likely to not want to drink away their carefully managed funds.  Social networking and the Internet generally allow for much more social interaction and entertainment without the need for the fuel of alcohol or other stimulants.You could even argue a rising Muslim population contributes to this trend but the rise in British Muslims in no way accounts for the statistical fall in drinking and other recreational stimulants.

it may be a gradual shift and it may be on a small scale but shouldn't we as a society be celebrating? It is much better to see young people engaged in mental stimulation or entertainments than staggering forlornly and incapably around in an alcohol induced fug.

Many know from personal experience that there are few worse places to be than in a room where you're the only one sober and everybody else is a dribbling halfwit who in their own mind's eye sees themselves as a bon vivant with the elan to challenge Oscar Wilde!

So, British press - let's have the other side, let's point out the positives - and celebrate our youth for once instead of berating them all the time.

Charging for a&e attendance is inherently wrong

It has been proposed that 1/3 of GPs in England & Wales back the idea of charging a 'nominal' fee of £10 for a&e attendance which would be refundable f that visit were deemed to be for a 'genuine' reason.

http://web.orange.co.uk/article/news/a_e_visits_third_of_gps_back_charges

The whole concept is not only abhorrent, but also badly thought out and potentially unworkable.
How would one implement such a scheme we can only wonder?

Would reception staff or nurses be expected to take a deposit whilst assessments are made? Someone could present, for just one example, with something apparently innocuous like a cold symptoms, cold , cough ,chesty say which could be masking graver symptoms. Should these medical assessments really be delayed by fiscal considerations? One rather thinks not.

How would the refunding system work? At the point of delivery once a patient has been diagnosed? What if that diagnosis is incorrect? What if a patient later returns having been assessed as a needless attendance to then be admitted? (Let's not pretend such things cannot and do not occur - they absolutely do!)

We are told that attendance will be assessed for their validity. By whom on wonders? Will such an assessment be challengable?

How does patient education fit into this? Many patients may feel genuinely concerned, worried even scared by what to medics are rather minor symptoms. That doesn't make them any less worrisome to the individual concerned. Should they be effectively fined for having their fears allayed? One would hope not. It would be better to educate these patients as to the right things to do and people to see.

It could be argued that it is morally corrupt to potentially charge someone accessing their a&e 'free at the point of care' as they have effectively already paid for it via their tax and national insurance contributions. It would not be too surprising to see an organisation legally challenge the validity of such a system when you consider this.

Finally there is the moral aspect of all of this. To many £10 may seem like a pittance and potentially act as a deterrent to time wasters. The argument has logic. Yet it lacks a sense of care. There are those who will look upon £10 as a payment they can ill afford and thus make a judgement deciding not to be seen.

Unfortunately some who make that decision will be genuinely ill or injured. I, for one, would rather see people who don't need seeing and manage to see the ones who do  than see less people and miss the ones who don't need care.

We can see from other areas, like dentistry and optical care that people already make fiscally based decisions & in some cases miss the care they need; This would just be an extension of such a state of affairs brought on by an appallingly fiscally driven ideology.

In the words of Anurein Bevin, "Illness in neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community".

Anyone with a shred of human decency cannot argue with such a compellingly justifiable truth.