- We can leave without a deal. Obviously this would mean the PM resigns as she said “no deal was better than a bad deal” and has told us this is a good deal so we shouldn't leave with no deal while we have this one.
- If the deal is voted against on December 11 or 12 she could re-present the deal again a few weeks later. However we know our PM is not that two-faced. If the members of Parliament have voted then she would not let them have another vote, would she? The House, like the people of Britain, will have spoken.
- There is an general election but this either requires a vote of no confidence in the government or a two-thirds majority in the house and, in any case, time-wise, wouldn't really be a solution.
- Finally we have another referendum, which our non two-faced PM could never countenance.
1 November 2018
I have long worried about the direction social media and modern technology is taking us. There is no doubt that some of it is very good, very useful and can bring more knowledge to a wider audience. However, at the same time, the dependence on it is fairly staggering.
I spent last weekend in the company of some young people, mainly family. Most of them could not function without their phones or tablets. If they needed to know something, they would ask Alexa or Siri or some non-existent person, who would reply with the answer. We have now even gone past the stage where if you wanted to find something out you would “google” it; now you just ask a machine and it tells you the answer and, sadly, you believe it.
Although I shall not be around to see it, I'm guessing here, I have this vision of 50 years from now. A young teenager awakes in the morning, turns to some digital device and asks, “How do I put my socks on, Alexa”? This is rapidly followed by “what do I do today, Alexa”?
Don't be stupid, I hear you say, especially if your name is Alexa, that will never happen. Just recently a professor of surgery has said that his students have spent so much time in front of screens and so little time using their hands that they have lost the dexterity for stitching or sewing up patients. He added that young people have so little experience of craft skills that they struggle with anything practical. The professor said "It is a concern of mine and my scientific colleagues that whereas in the past you could make the assumption that students would leave school able to do certain practical things - cutting things out, making things - that is no longer the case.," He concluded by arguing that the youngsters of today need to have a more rounded education and that includes creative and artistic subjects He feels that swiping on a two-dimensional screen takes away the experience of actually handling materials and developing physical skills.
Maybe my worry is not so stupid. Take away the need to think and the ability to do so will soon go with it. And the greatest worry is that Alexa is not an all-knowing robot at all. Alexa is programmed by a human being so if Alexa is asked how to put on one's socks, she could easily be programmed to tell you to put them on your ears and the non-thinking generation would do so.
5 November 2018
I am a human being. I am also a humanist but I will leave arguments about that to Professor Alice Roberts who seems to have got into a bit of hot water with her very reasonable views. Suffice it to say I attended a school which was inspired by the work of a man called Jeremy Bentham, who campaigned for higher education to be available regardless of religious beliefs. At the time, only members of the church could study at Oxford and Cambridge, while similar religious based tests were imposed at other universities.
But to return to my existence as a human being. I read today about a young lady who said she had been called a lesbian because she liked to play football. How stupid and ridiculous. Human beings are all different. Some are males, some are females; some have blue eyes, some have brown eyes; some are right-handed, some are left-handed but, regardless of any of these things we are human beings and should be free, within any laws which exist, to be who we want and do what we want.
There are some natural boundaries, on average men are muscularly stronger and women are more supple. But could we please just judge people on who they are and not on any attribute or gender or race or colour or whether they have a birthmark on their left buttock. And in case someone thinks I have trivialised things by that last statement, whether you have such a birthmark is just as unimportant as whether you are male or female when making a judgement.
I have often had a problem with feminism, mainly because I believe such a position actually emphasises the difference rather than equals things out. I totally understand where some of the feminists are coming from and accept that the female sex has been looked at as second best for far too long. I am just not sure that making such a fuss about it gives the right impression. By defining something called feminism and asking for gender equality you would need to accept something called masculinism as well, and hence accept a divide.
I'm just a human being.
7 November 2018
I'm in the wrong profession. Fourteen hundred of the UK's top lawyers have written to the PM to say we should have another referendum. In their letter they explain that parliament should not be bound by the 2016 vote any more than it should be by the 1975 referendum that took us into the EU.
Go and read my two posts from September this year and you will see they and I are singing from the same hymn sheet. Indeed I, and I alone, know they had read my piece and sort of copied it.
These learned people, sorry these other learned people, say that voters should be entitled to know what they are voting for and explain a key difference between 1975 and 2016 as, in the earlier referendum negotiations were complete before the vote took place. They point out, as I have done, that voters in 2016 had a choice between a known reality (without any thought we could possibly tinker with that a bit – my words) and an unknown alternative. Many claims in that campaign were not based on facts. They were just based on the side of a bus in one case.
These lawyers agree with old grumpy that a new vote is not only the right thing to do, it is the most democratic thing to do.
However, in typical non-listening, undemocratic bumph a government spokesperson said that “The people of the United Kingdom have already had their say in one of the biggest democratic exercises this country has ever seen and the Prime Minister has made it clear that there is not going to be a second referendum”, thereby proving beyond any doubt that no one in this government is the least bit interested in exercising democracy.
10 November 2018
Much has been said recently about mental health problems and, in particular in relation to students, As someone old enough to have existed before problems that
today are viewed as serious health issues, and to have suffered some of these problems for a very long time, I may one day make a longer blog. Suffice it to say
that in my day in many cases, mine included, you were told to pull your self together and even ridiculed for your problems, and treatment was either horrific or
non-existent.
However my concern on this matter has come about because I read a quote from the Universities Minister Sam Gyimah which said that "University is supposed to be
an assault on the senses. It should be demanding and disorientating, and with that should come adequate pastoral care for students". He continued that "This does
not mean mollycoddling or cushioning students from the experiences that are part and parcel of university life, it means making sure support services are available
if they need them."
My first point is his choice of words. I would prefer to think that university is there to enhance our senses not assault them. I also find it worrying that
university, in Sam's myopic eyes, should aim to disorientate students.
But what I find most worrying, once again, is that we, as a society if Sam is anything to go by, still look at mental health and physical well-being as
things to be treated separately. More and more we wrap young children in cotton wool so that they have no chance of any minor physical injury or cuts and bruises. They can't play tig, they can't have snow balls fights, rugby should be a non-contact sport and they shouldn't go out in the rain. And yet, at university, their mental senses should be assaulted to such an extent that, in some extreme cases, they can't cope and take their own lives or, in a less serious scenario although almost as damaging, they have these mental scars to carry around for the rest of their lives.,
As far as my child is, sorry was, concerned I would rather a cut, a bruise, or even a broken limb, than a life time of mental health issues brought on
by an assault on their senses in the name of learning.
13 November 2018
Oh dear, more moans about the actions of the POTUS. He wouldn't go out in the rain, he said this, he said that, President Macron handed him a veiled snub about nationalism (young Macron has a very translucent veil) and so on and so on. Nobody much, outside of some parts of the United States, seems to like him.
Then his most famous phrase suddenly meant more to me. It's all to do with spelling. He's actually been saying “Make America grate again” and then behaving in such a way to bring it all true. It all makes so much more sense now.
For those who don't understand here is the OED explanation of grate - When a noise or behaviour grates, it annoys you.
26 November 2018
I have kept very quiet with my grumps over the last 2 weeks while other intelligent people made their considered comments about Brexit. I then spotted that actually there weren't any, certainly from MPs, so I have decided I can no longer hold my peace. I am not, by the way (or btw in the current vernacular) suffering as the POTUS has as detailed in my last grump and, even if I was, it is no concern of yours which piece I am holding.
However,, on that point, it has come to my attention that our own PM has been in the same position as young Trump. When she told us she had some red lines with regard to any Brexit agreement she actually meant she had read some lines with regard to the Brexit agreement, didn't like them but pressed on anyway.
We are now going to have two weeks of debate about the agreement before MPs have a vote and, as far as I can see, the PM will take her message to the ordinary people, to whom she won't give a vote. No, neither do I?
I further understand, my brain hurts, that should parliament vote against the deal there are 4 alternatives.