Nihilist dad

Two weeks ago the Corbynite members of the bloggerati were having a high old time of it. And who can blame them. Having endured the carping of more or less everyone else for two years that their man had all the electoral appeal of soiled trousers, events since June must seem like the biggest vindication. And I include myself in that list of carpers.

So having lowered all expectations to the point at which a small failure felt like victory, they needed to mark the likes of me clearly with a Scarlet Letter for our ideological shame. The insult that seems to have landed the best turns out to be Centrist Dad, which is both suitably dismissive and witheringly accurate. Who could be more uncool than a dad? Ironically impotent, a figure of irrelevance - not significant enough to be even be evil. A pitiable fool, a Falstaff dressed in Fred + Florence. Fairly pointless, until the time comes to borrow a stepladder.

It's a tag I'm happy to wear. Both as my comeuppance for not recognising Corbyn as an Ayatollah for our times and that a shadow front bench devoid of talent is a government in waiting. Corbyn's strength has been talking the language of socialism without actually moving the policies much beyond Ed Miliband. His socialist credentials and record allow him to stand for a set of values that people can believe in, without looking too closely at his actual policy successes or stances. He's the Jürgen Klopp of British politics.

In a normal world, he wouldn't stand a chance, based on his personal position on everything from the nuclear deterrent to nationalisation. His basic lack of experience in a decision-making position with real consequence. His underwhelming leadership skills. But this is not a normal world. It's one in which the most unimpressive, grasping imbeciles are in charge of the most important political challenge of our lifetime. Where a walking hardcore suicide pact in Saville Row suits seems determined to trash everything in pursuit of an ideological mirage. Where a government is so divided even the Prime Minister's voice seems determined to split from the body politic.

A modern tulip fever of fuckwittery is catapulting everything over a cliff against the direct wishes of almost everyone who's not been trying Dan Hannan's Kool Aid, because some people didn't like others speaking Polish on the bus. And we are all paralysed from acting by the yellowing legitimacy of a popular mandate to do something non-specific involving a shotgun pointed at our feet.

So, under the circumstances, why not Corbyn? Why not free university tuition, 50 million council homes, and end to trident and a trillion more on the national debt. If nobody in charge of anything cares whether the country descends into a jam-infested backwater, drunk on nostalgia, then let's bet the farm on stuff that helps people. Not so much hung for a sheep as a lamb, but a whole flock. Then at least we can make a nice curry for everyone, not just the few.

Getting over it

I've decided to take the advice of the winners. Brexit means Brexit. It's the will of the people. We lost and we need to get over it. Pull together and make a success of Brexit. Forget the old ways, it's time to get behind Britain and push for those sunlit uplands. I've decided to take this on board and really take the advice of those wiser than me who know what's best and Make A Success Of It.

Armed with my new attitude, I went to the swimming pool on Saturday. A baptism, a fresh beginning. With purpose I approached the cashier - "one free swim, for a free Briton" I confidently demanded.

"Pool is closed to adult swimmers - swimming classes until noon on Saturdays" came the mealy-mouthed reply. Clearly a hide-bound thinker, afraid to look beyond the safety of the rules. So I tried a different approach.

"How do you expect to open up new economic opportunities if you're not prepared to accept new thinking?" I challenged. "It's this lack of imagination that means remoaners like you are holding back our potential. Think differently. This is a new opportunity. Brexit means Brexit, and you're standing in the way of destiny".

Half an hour later, I finished a rather challenging, but enjoyable, swim in the showers, and was getting changed, reflecting on how my new approach was really opening up new possibilities.

I went to Tesco to buy some champagne to celebrate the triggering of Article 50. British Champagne, of course. In a rather backward-looking move, it turns out Tesco don't sell British Champagne. Thanks to Brussels' red tape and rules only France can produce Champagne. This nonsense clearly had to stop.

"We're leaving the EU - get over it!" I helpfully advised the store manager. "If I want to drink British Champagne, I will, and I refuse to bend to the ridiculous rules and regulations of unelected gnomes of Belgium" I cried. "Now will you sell me some British Champagne, or do I have to find somewhere that will?"

He relented, of course. And that evening I savoured my victory, toasting our brave new future with a glass of finest Strongbow Champagne, a new marque in the world of fizzy wine that is sure to give the Veuve Cliquots of this world a run for their money, once we are finally free from tyranny, able to sell our own champagne to whom we like, not at the whim of pettifogging Eurocrats.

The year of giving up

I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions. Anything I’ve given up, I’ve done on the spur of the moment because I wanted to, not according to an arbitrary convention of the calendar. And 2016 was to be no different, yet I’m ending the year having given up three things without meaning to.

The first decision I made was to stop drinking, but at the time I didn’t realise that’s what I was doing. On 22nd August I weighed myself and found that, after a week of beer and ice-cream, I had gained about 5lbs. I’d broken the 15st barrier for the first time, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Having been as thin as a whip for most of my life, I had no sense of self-control when it comes to eating – and I had no desire to take up the sort of diet where you need a calculator to decide what to eat. I felt the easiest way to lose weight was to cut out the crap – including booze. At 180 calories for a pint of lager, I realised a few drinks and a pack of peanuts was the equivalent of eating an extra meal.

So I stopped, and haven’t had a drop since. Moreover, I’ve absolutely no desire to have a drink either, which is quite weird, having been a bit of a beer nerd for most of my adult life. I’ve lost 17lbs so far, and with another 13 or so to go, I can see a time when I’ll have ‘permission’ to slip back onto the sauce. But I don’t want to, and I can’t see a point when I will want to. I genuinely think I’ve moved from being someone who’s not drinking to being someone who’s stopped drinking. I like the clarity it creates in my mind – I don’t have to decide if I’m driving or not, I don’t have to think if I need to get up early. I never have need of the life-saving McDonald’s en route to a day at my desk praying for death or 5.30pm, whichever comes sooner.

This can create some social awkwardness that’s only partially disguised by the excuse of a diet. Mainly because I’ve spent nearly as long as I’ve been not drinking trying to work out why I no longer want to. Because it’s not as if I had a problem. A shared bottle of wine at weekends, rarely going out in the week. I certainly hadn’t had a Moment Of Clarity after waking up in a puddle of my own piss on a golf course at 5am. Surely it couldn’t be just because it made things simple. Surely I’m too old to be indulging in personal development?

Another thing I hadn’t expected to give up this year was supporting the England football team, though at least this time I know the root cause. Until now I’ve been fairly comfortable in my England fandom, despite the less-than-savoury reputation of its fans over the years. I no more felt collective affinity or responsibility for idiots throwing chairs at foreign police than a Muslim should feel for 9/11. I was reclaiming the shirt for a different England – tolerant, multicultural, coolly ironic and nicely understated. Comfortable about its new place in the world and interested in its neighbours.

In the middle of Euro 2016 I watched thousands of England fans in France chanting for Brexit, in between running battles with the police. And when the coup de grace came on June 23rd, it suddenly seemed the wrong side to be on. I could handle being thought of as an England fan, because most foreigners would know it was only a tiny proportion who were idiotically violent. But it was harder to wave away 52% who may not have been as combative, but were definitely as stupid.

And you know how it feels? It feels WONDERFUL! Honestly, if I’d known sooner what a weight off your shoulders it is, I would have tried it years ago. No more nervous anxiety as we labour to a 1-0 win against the Pitcairn Islands, no more agony as we fail in yet another tournament that was, apparently, well within our grasp. The barbs of friendly rivalry from our Celtic neighbours no longer prickle. I’ve freed up so much space in my brain, I might take up learning another language. And losing to Iceland in front of all those neighbours we’d stuck up two fingers at not three days prior? No longer traumatic, but hilarious.

I’ve been wondering whether there is a connection between these two – even though on the surface there seemed none. Clearly, watching football and drinking beer go hand in glove, regardless of the result. And one came before the other, but both came after June 23rd. And it’s this that is the crux of it all, the third giving up. Until June 23rd I naively thought the UK had done pretty well, all in all. Sure the occasional inner-city racial tension could still erupt, but despite the bile being pumped by the tabloid press, we’d absorbed a lot of new people in the usual British way: stoically, adapting to new tongues and newer shops, taking it in our stride, even in places where immigration was a comparatively new phenomenon. We’d share a joke, make an ironic comment, have a beer and get on with it, looking with pity across the channel at France, and the war zones created in the Banlieues by intransigent government and implacable policing. In short, we were coping. We were all right.

Except we weren’t. Suddenly a needle’s width majority became the catalyst for an outpouring of the most depressing attitudes long suppressed. Uncharacteristically bellicose and brutal behaviour became a new normal at frightening speed. And it became clear that this was how it had really been all the time, behind closed doors and net curtains. Petty nastiness was given permission to finally speak its name, to hector dissenters and demand loyalty as the price of participation in public life. Those privileged with the best education were suddenly announcing a cult of anti-intellectualism, the mill owners were smashing up the looms, determined to return us to the feudal poverty of a new Dark Age.

This is why we can’t have nice things. And why I don’t drink. Because there’s nothing left worth toasting.

Beware the march of IDS

This winter, the Red Cross is handing out food parcels in the UK for the first time since World War II.

I'm just going to leave that out there for a moment for you to take in. If this fact doesn't embarrass or amaze you, you should probably stop reading now, because the rest of this post works on the premise that a society that cannot feed its own citizens is not one worthy of the name. The UK is the only G8 country to receive this unwanted attention, and as stigmas go, it puts us right up there with Zimbabwe and Syria, albeit on a less dramatic scale. Around half a million people in the UK used food banks in 2013, an increase of 170% since this time last year.

Someone who isn't embarrassed by this is Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, though the government of which he is a member has a somewhat schizophrenic attitude to the situation. On the one hand, his fellow ministers with less self-awareness than fungi are pictured grinning as they open food banks in the apparent belief this is something to be proud of. And on the other, Mr Duncan Smith has condemned those who run food banks for encouraging a culture of dependency. That's the problem with food of course - it's very more-ish. The poor should learn to get by without it instead of allowing themselves to become the victims of nutrition.

This week, Mr Duncan Smith had two chances to do something to at least pretend to take it seriously as a political issue. But a debate in the House of Commons on Tuesday turned into an even less edifying spectacle than usual, with backbench MPs on the government benches openly laughing at stories of food bank users' hardships, and Duncan Smith himself walked out early, after refusing to answer questions. Later on in the week, he also refused to meet the UK's largest food bank charity, accusing them of "scaremongering" about the size of the problem.

So what can we do to provoke a political reaction, and maybe get some media traction, now celebrity chefs taking cocaine is becoming yesterday's news?





Next year is the 20th anniversary of Band Aid's single Do They Know It's Christmas. How about a commemorative re-release next Christmas, but this time all the proceeds to go to food banks in the UK?  For the 'Band Aid generation', which includes most of the members of the present government, there can surely be no more stinging a rebuke than the symbol of generosity of their youth boomeranging back to remind them of the moral failings of their middle age? For politicians who equate being 'in touch with public opinion' with 'keeping up with celebrity gossip', to be forced to comment on that single being the Christmas number one, would be a beautifully ironic way to hoist them by their own petard. And the proceeds would also help half a million families know that it's Christmas time at all.

For whom the road tolls

Road congestion, as my father was fond of remarking when he worked for the AA, has been one of Britain's most successful growth industries of the last 100 years. The supply of facilities to enable people to get from one part of the country to the other in a reasonable time has been consistently outstripped by demand, and numerous studies have shown how this negatively impacts both our quality of life and our economic output. Official government estimates put the opportunity cost of sitting in one's car instead of sitting in a meeting to UK plc at £8bn per year.

I was considering these costs sitting in my own car, as we crawled towards the Dartford Crossing today on the M25, shuffling forwards to pay our £2 toll. The Dartford Crossing, with its levy for users, is a somewhat singular type of highway in the UK, a country that has traditionally abhorred the idea of road taxes paid at the point of consumption. But when Parliament created the holding company to build the final phase of this river crossing - the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, opened in 1991 - they granted them a 20 year licence to collect revenue. It was naively expected that the government of the day would scrap the toll once the debt had been repaid and a suitable maintenance fund had been accumulated, which was deemed to have occurred on 31 March 2002. 

But here's the cunning bit. They were allowed to carry on charging the toll, because they stopped calling it a toll. Under an unnoticed clause of the 2000 Transport Act, they could create the catchily-titled "A282 Trunk Road (Dartford-Thurrock Crossing charging scheme) Order 2002" that allowed the continuation of the crossing fee, because it officially became a charge and not a toll, as of 1 April 2003. The underlying reasoning here being, like a dog barking in a neighbour's yard, once people get used to something, eventually they stop noticing it. So more than 2 years after the expiry of the original toll concession period, they continue to pocket a toll. I mean a charge. Plus ca change, plus c'est la exact change please...

From a productivity point of view this creates a dilemma for the government. The Dartford Crossing is very much a part of the £8bn problem of economic inefficiency - and one that is deliberately created in order to raise revenue. There is nothing accidental or random about the travel delays caused to some 50 million journeys every year; in effect, the £100m or so raised is an indirect subsidy by motorists to the cost of economic underperformance. How much money would be injected into the UK economy by removing the tollgates and letting the traffic run freely? Sir Rod Eddington, in a 2006 report for the DfT, estimated a total closure of a single junction of the M25 cost the economy about £64,000 per hour. What's the opportunity cost of that congestion vs the value of the tolls to the Exchequer?

A similar problem dogs the controversial HS2 rail link, which came under further attack last week when a report by the Institute of Economic Affairs claimed the actual cost could reach £80bn. Even if we accept the government's assurances that costs will rise no higher than £42bn, their own calculations have promised a mere £48.2bn of economic gain over an unspecified period of time. A highly likely slip of a mere 15% to the budget will wipe out any overall profit.

Maybe, as a backstop measure, the government can look to the example of Dartford to recoup some of the costs, by installing toll booths across the HS2 tracks south of Birmingham, and passengers can file through the train to pop a £1 coin into the coin buckets each time they pass through? This would obviously reduce some of the economic benefits to the country, but would provide some much-needed revenue to fill the government's coffers. In fact, it would probably negate any economic gains to be made, once the construction itself had stopped, but, as they found at Dartford, no matter how inconsistent it may be to levy a random tax, after a while people don't really notice that sort of thing when you have no choice in whether to pay.

Rule of dumb

Outside my house, there is a bus stop. This is not in itself unusual, except this bus stop is a little out of the ordinary. It was erected by my local council at considerable expense, but has never been used as a bus stop. It sits there with a plastic bag over the offending sign, like a gallows prisoner awaiting the drop, to prevent people from making the quite reasonable assumption that where there is a bus stop, there will also be a bus. Like a piece of surrealist art, ceci n'est pas une bus stop, and no public transport will stop there. Because, having planned a route and erected the stops, the council made the unfortunate discovery that our road is too bendy for buses to navigate without the real possibility of striking a pedestrian on the pavement, as they lurch, Italian job-style, around the curves of Gavin Way (the buses, not the pedestrians).

To continue the dual themes of buses and official incompetence, if you drive along Colchester High Street, you may anxiously look for traffic wardens, because it appears you are, unavoidably, driving in a bus lane - the only through route available. Happily you won't get a ticket, despite the road markings, because this is another example of the council putting on its trousers before its underpants, as they decided to ban private vehicles from driving through town, in a half-baked notion this would transform the place into Las Ramblas. Sadly the street cafe lifestyle failed to materialise when it was pointed out the ban would also extend to lorries delivering to the very shops the scheme was supposed to promote. So instead, the landscape has been enhanced with temporary road signs urging drivers to ignore the road markings. Ceci n'est pas un Bus Lane.

Two local examples that, I am sure, could easily be topped by other authorities all over the world. The sort of thing that makes good copy for local journalists, and conversation starters in pubs across the town. But I prefer see these things as positives. For where there are unnecessary bus stops and road markings that need making, so there are jobs for people making unnecessary signs, and mixing vats of unnecessary paint. Incompetence (or maybe, more kindly, jumping the gun), when applied across strategic sectors of the economy, might be just the catalyst we need to kick on the sluggish recovery. I have a feeling that, in 2029, when HS2 is finally completed, late and over budget, and obsolete after the successful launch of the personal jet pack in 2023, a similarly self-serving excuse about economic stimulus is the sort of thing a government minister will grasp at, when pressed as to why his predecessor thought getting to Birmingham quicker for £32bn was a good idea.

And it seems that others have also picked up on the idea of incompetence as a business strategy: Chipotle, an American Mexican food restaurant chain - the thinking man's Taco Bell - this week garnered a heap of publicity, after its twitter account was apparently hacked:





The apparent inability of Chipotle to use twitter went viral, and these tweets earned over 12,000 retweets (against a usual weekly RT number of about 75). Many people who had never heard of Chipotle were caught up in the apparent hamfisted attempts to grasp social media, and spread the story. Today, the restaurant admitted this was actually a deliberate strategy to spread awareness of the brand ahead of more formal publicity promoting its 20th anniversary celebrations (story here). Chipotle had managed to cut through the competing media noise not by being slicker than everyone else, but by being deliberately rubbish.

They may have been inspired by MP and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, who achieved similar, perhaps less wanted, attention after he accidentally tweeted his own name, on 29 April 2011 (he was trying to search for what twitter was saying about him). This inspired an Internet meme of people tweeting the hashtag #EdBalls, culminating in "Ed Balls day", two years after the event, a mass retweeting of the original posting (story here). Once again, idiocy and incompetence had gain traction with the wandering attentions of the world wide web.

From economic recovery through to business and media strategies, random acts of stupidity might be the way forward. Forget planning, forecasting, careful analysis and competence, it seems what the world actually needs is a greater number of idiots in charge of everything. To that end, when I look at the current crop of pinheads with their hands upon the levers, maybe things will turn out okay after all.

Dawkin the walk

I'm going to stick my neck out here: I like Richard Dawkins. I like his writing, both the polemic tilts against religion and the more considered scientific writing. His contribution to the public understanding of science is profound, and if you ever doubt the scientific explanation of the universe can be poetic, I'd recommend you buy a copy of his "Unweaving the Rainbow". His refusal to kowtow to absurd woolly-mindedness because it happens to wear a dog collar, kippah or Qutwani is as necessary as it is un-English, and is, I am convinced, one of the reasons he is disliked by people who Don't Like To Make A Fuss. His desire to hold religious beliefs to the same burden of proof as any other belief systems often earns him the hilariously unoriginal sobriquet of "Atheist fundamentalist". You know, like one of those atheist fundamentalists you see all the time in England, barracking churches and blowing up vicars.

But he can be a terrible dick on twitter. Overbearing, Pooterish and, in accordance with bad twitter practice, retweeting others' praise of his work. This is particularly true when he steps outside the bounds of his usual academic interests and picks up something from current affairs or, even worse, sport. This week, he rather unwisely stepped into the debate about cricket and the morality of "walking". In a test match this week, an England player, Stuart Broad, was inexplicably not given out by the umpire, despite very evidently been caught after he hit the ball.

By way of background for the non-aficionado, in some quarters it is seen as being in the "spirit of the game" of cricket, that if you know you are out, you should walk off the pitch without waiting for the Umpire's signal, much less wait around on the off-chance that you might get away with it. As the debate over "walking" raged across the social networks, Prof D waded in with his size-10s:

Stuart Broad obviously knew perfectly well he was caught. Refused to walk. What a revolting cheat. I now want Australia to win the Ashes.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 12, 2013

So far, so Dawkins. But for an academic, he was playing remarkably fast and loose with some loaded terms. "Cheat", for example. So I asked Prof Dawkins:

.@RichardDawkins Cheating is breaking the rules or laws of the game. Which law of cricket did Stuart Broad break?
— Mike Hoffman (@MikeHoffman1) July 13, 2013

To which he replied:

Of course what Broad did was in accordance with the rules. It was still utterly dishonest and contemptible.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 12, 2013

At this point, many people gently informed him that Australian cricketers have, historically, never walked in a test match (with a couple of notable exceptions). More interestingly, the perspicacious former England Rugby player Brian Moore chipped in the excellent observation that, if Broad declares himself out, despite the umpire declaring him not out, he is putting himself above the rules of the game, appealing to a higher morality. Which means, in the future, should he be given out by an umpire when he didn't hit it, by the same principle he would be entitled to refuse to leave the pitch, and declare himself still in. Clearly appealing to a higher power is sailing dangerously close to the wind for Professor Dawkins, so it was curious that at this point, he fell back onto the line of reasoning adopted by folksy preachers who can't cope with a contrary point of view:

Yes, I was naive not to know Australians do it too. Naive to want them to win Ashes. Proud to be naive. Sad cricket's descended to this.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 13, 2013

This is like the populist firebrand claiming he doesn't need learning, evidence, strong arguments or thinking - he just knows what he knows, and has his faith to protect him against straw man arguments.

"World's divided into winners & losers. If you're honest you're a loser. Grow up, don't be naive." Then I'm proud to be naive.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 13, 2013

Which steered the conversation back towards something Professor Dawkins does know something about: competition, and its role in the evolution of life. Was not Stuart Broad's action natural in an environment that represents the pinnacle of competitive achievement? Was this not *whispers* Darwinism in action? Apparently not:

Darwinism... is what we were put into this world to rise above.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 13, 2013

I couldn't resist it:

@RichardDawkins Put here by whom? ;-)
— Mike Hoffman (@MikeHoffman1) July 13, 2013

So far I have yet to receive a reply...

A speedy recovery

Through the recent icy weather people have been able to keep themselves warm by harnessing the cubic metres of hot air being released over HS2. For those not familiar with the hot topics of British infrastructure planning, this is the sequel to HS1, a high-speed rail line connecting London to Birmingham, that, like a teenage delinquent, needs somewhere else to be moved on to once it reaches the midlands. So this week HS2's twin paths to the east and west of northern England were announced to the usual cries of joy and disdain from the NIMBYs and YIMBYs who believe they will lose or gain from its proximity.

To bolster its case as a piece of strategic thinking, and not merely jam tomorrow from a government desperate both to look visionary and to be seen to be investing in infrastructure projects, all sorts of projections of wealth generation are being cast about like fishing lines. These sort of calculations are speculative at best - not so much back-of-an-envelope as back-to-the-future, as we are betting a £33billion farm on a time we cannot see: no-one will actually be able to experience signal failure at Toton until at least 2033. But that hasn't stopped HS2 itself (which seems to exist as an independent entity, with its own website) reckoning it will generate £47 billion in user benefits to businesses when the entire network is completed, as well as between £6 billion and £12 billion in wider economic benefits. And all this from the ability to get from London to Birmingham 30 minutes quicker.

We've become used to spurious economic externalities being blamed for downturns in recent years: royal weddings, snow days, hot days, cold days, bank holidays, sick days, all of which make the difference between businesses staying afloat or going bust, it would seem. But the prospect of an economic boom coming on the back of the next generation getting to Brum 30 minutes sooner seems generous at best. What can you do with an extra half an hour - have a piano lesson? Are we going to rebuild our flagging economy by cramming in extra piano lessons in the time we saved not being slumped dribbling on the 08.45 out of Euston?

Recently I've taken to cycling to my local train station rather than driving - it saves money and gives me exercise, though it does add probably half an hour to my commute. I worry that, given the apparent solid link between time and money confidently predicted by HS2 that I am now contributing to the economic malaise in the country. How much more money would I make for UK plc if I drove? Better still, I could take a helicopter and be in London in half an hour. If the price of the recovery is simply getting somewhere else a bit quicker, why aren't they laying on 12 trains an hour, 24 hours a day across the country?

My second doubt about these predictions is the same as my doubts about any soothsayer or, god forbid, "futurologist". In 1993, who was predicting that by now you could do a week's grocery shopping and tape your favourite TV show from a telephone you could carry around with you while you waited for the train? No one could even see the future of the tablet market 6 years ago, never mind 26 years ago. My son's headmaster reckons that, by the time he graduates from university, around 25% of the jobs he could do wouldn't have existed before he started his first day at school.

When I was younger, I went to Portsmouth to look around HMS Warrior, the less glamorous younger sibling to Nelson's flagship. It is perhaps the best-preserved example of an Ironclad Ship, the successor to the ordinary, and very penetrable, wooden war vessel. Within a few years of its completion, it was completely obsolete, as full iron ships showed counter-intuitively that metal that floats was the future. Ironclad was definitely the future until we saw it was just a bridge to something else, with the wisdom of our hindsight. Similarly, I can't help thinking that, in twenty years time, when we'll all have hoverboards AND jet-packs, plus dinner in pill form, the idea that we would want to get to Birmingham any quicker than we had to might seem a curious one.

And in 100 years, my great, great grandchildren will take school trips to visit HS2 like I went to see Warrior, to marvel at the uncertainty of betting on a sure thing.

Public convenience

So after the death, the post-mortem. As the results of the PCCs elections emerged today, the sheer scale of the embarrassment became apparent to even the most ardent government supporter. The Electoral Commission promised to investigate the worst election turnout in the post-war period. Highlights included one polling station where literally no-one voted and, nearer to home, 10 times the usual number of spoiled ballots (ahem) in the neighbouring county of Suffolk. Opponents blamed a lack of information and publicity, those sympathetic to the cause suggested the weather. The government adopted its favourite passive-aggressive tactic of blaming a lack of understanding by the electorate, like with the earlier NHS reforms, further cementing an unfortunate reputation for condescension.

But even for an opponent of the measures like me, I can see this is not an isolated case, but part of a trend that worries a lot of people. Although we expect minor ballots, like yesterday's, to attract low numbers, long term trends show falling levels of participation in even General Elections, which usually attract the highest numbers of voters:

So what does this mean? Are fewer of us interested in politics than previous generations? Have politicians so betrayed our trust that we are punishing them by not turning up at the polls? Or is this symptomatic of loosening social ties - where there is no sense of duty to vote, and no social embarrassment in not voting? Actually, I think it's much simpler than that - elections haven't caught up with our entitlement to choice.

Choice, as a political concept, has been a watchword of the Right for at least 30 years, and is now grudgingly embraced by the Left when the occasion suits. At its worst, it's an excuse for dismantling public services, whether through ideological zeal or economic necessity. At its best it allows us to demand more from the world around us, and often the world responds to that need. I can remember when, in order to get a telephone, you had to register with British Telecom, rent a phone from them, and then wait 6 weeks before they bothered to come around to connect you. That seems as alien from today's world as motor cars must have been to the mid-Victorians.

The diversification of services, growth of choice, and speed of technological change has not only revolutionised our lives, it has fragmented what were once collective experiences. If the War represented a Year Zero in collective experience - rationing, mobilisation, isolation - then the 70 years since have been an ever-widening funnel of disparate and diverse possibilities in an integrated world. People talk with glassy-eyed fondness of the days when 25 million Britons would watch Morecambe and Wise at Christmas, conveniently forgetting that this was largely because there were only 3 TV channels to watch. Even in my youth, in playground reenactments, I could pretty much guarantee my friends would have watched the same TV show the night before. Now, it could be from any one of hundreds of channels, assuming they watched anything at all, and weren't on an XBox, Facebook or uploading themselves singing onto YouTube.

And yet, come election time, we expect everyone to suddenly act like a homogenous group: to do the same thing on the same day in a way that would be familiar to their grandparents. While we have crawled with the times to allow postal voting for those cheeky enough to go on holiday during an election, it is a remarkably old-fashioned demand to make of generations who have been told they can have what they want, when they want. Pause the TV, buy it online, listen to it whenever you want, speak instantly with your friends any time of day. It's not that people don't take an interest any more, but that, frankly, it's not that convenient, and we've been told choice is not just good, it's practically a human right.

But it's more than thinking up radical solutions, like voting with your iPhone, or gamifying voter participation. People don't just expect the world to work to their pace, there is more competition for their time. Or, to put it simply, there's more stuff to do these days than 30 years ago. Politicians who worry about these trends think in terms of making politics "fun" and "exciting", as if anyone other than policy wonks has ever felt that way about it, even in the 1960s. But 50 years ago, there was less to distract you, less to do. The pubs closed every time you felt thirsty, you might as well go and vote. Now, we can do all the same things people did then as well as everything else that's been invented since - basejumping, web-surfing, battle reenactments, 24-hour drinking, gambling, TV on demand, skateboarding, night-time shopping, Gangnam-style dancing. You can do stuff whenever you want - it is utterly amazing and thrilling. Except vote. You've got to queue in the pissing-down rain, to mark a scrap of paper with a scratchy pencil on a string at the local church hall on one day of the year, outside of work, childcare, parent-care or anything else you might do. Frankly, given the choice between a session of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 or picking between three charmless greasers you'll never see for four years, I'm surprised they even get 50%.

You have the right to remain silent

Tomorrow, literally dozens of people up and down the country will be voting for the first time to choose a local Police Commissioner. In keeping with the spirit of electoral firsts, I'm going to do two things that I've never done before as well.

The first is to tell you how you how I'm voting. Although you may guess my political affiliations, so far in twenty years, I have never actually told anyone how I vote in public elections, not even my wife. As we are patronisingly told every year, people died so we could vote (an argument that I have never found particularly convincing: people have died for a whole host of causes, some barmy, some noble, but the fact that someone threw herself under the King's horse doesn't make me beholden to her whims). More importantly, campaigners for popular suffrage also championed secret ballots just as passionately, to prevent the circumventing of the democratic process, which I think is worth respecting just as much when I turn out to cast my mark at the polling station.

The second thing I shall be doing for the first time is spoiling my ballot paper, as a signal of my opinion about the new Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). There is no popular mandate for this policy - it was bunged into the post-election Coalition agreement as a makeweight for Nick Clegg being allowed to use the loo in Downing Street. A fact that is borne out by the record low turnout expected across the land, as Dave's Big Society gesture attracts the smallest of crowds. I am using the only mechanism I have to register my displeasure at the whole unappetising spectacle.

Not only do most people not know what the new Commissioners are supposed to be doing, they don't know what they are replacing. At present, Police Authorities are responsible for all the powers the PCCs will inherit: Budget setting, hire & firing of the Chief Constable, determining local criminal justice priorities. These bodies are composed of local councillors, magistrates, criminal justice experts and appointed representatives from among the general public. This amalgam of expert and lay opinion, elected and unelected will now be replaced by a single party hack with one eye on the TV news and the other on the ballot box. This is not some great revolution in crime fighting - new dynamism sweeping away red tape and getting More Bobbies Back On The Beat (TM). It is taking exactly the same powers currently in the hands of an expert body, and giving them to a failed politician. It's the concentration of considerable power with very few checks apart the quadrennial trip to the electorate.

It has all the hallmarks of an eye-catching Big Idea for the Big Society - Tory party Thought Architects no doubt imagined Mom & Pop candidates standing to give a voice to the man on the Clapham Omnibus, without a thought as to how they might fund an election across a wide area without party backing. The means the reality is, of course, the overwhelming majority of candidates belong to political parties, and are standing on party platforms - exactly the opposite of what was intended. And in the absence of any other criteria, name recognition will count for much. To cap it all, multi-party contests will be using the ever-baffling Supplementary Vote system to ensure everyone's second choice is elected.

This unwelcome and unnecessary politicisation of the police is the classic example of a solution in search of a problem - something beloved of all politicians down the ages. Because no-one has actually been able to say exactly what problem the new PCCs were supposed to be solving. Crime has been consistently falling for twenty years, police continue, overall, to retain high levels of popular support and respect. Even the high-profile problems there have been - from the Hillsborough cover-up to cash-for-information to journalists - have been symptomatic of either front line cultural or management failings. Not the sort of thing individual Police Commissioners are best placed to tackle.

So why stop at the police? Why not heads of PCTs, Traffic Wardens, dinnerladies and dustmen. Why shouldn't we be given the chance to pick every public servant, repeatedly, on a never-ending conveyor-belt of choice? Maybe one day, if we prove ourselves capable of keeping up with the exponential growth of elections, we could even get to choose our Head of State? But Dave would probably think that ridiculous.

Voting: it all ads up.

Democracy is, in its crudest form, a numbers game, and while many this week were focusing on the number 270, as the total number of electoral college votes the US Presidential candidates had to reach, some were pointing to some other numbers. Two billion, for example - the amount in dollars spent by both candidates to achieve the same outcome on 6 November as there had been on 4 November. One of the things Mitt Romney and I have in common is the fact that neither of us is the US President, but the difference is, I haven't just spent millions of dollars not to achieve that. Makes me feel a bit better about not winning the lottery.

This may seem like a lot of money - a point has been made repeatedly across the world's media - but is it really? It's the same amount of money the USA spends in Afghanistan every week. It's the same amount shrugged off in May by JP Morgan as a loss by another rogue trader. Most interestingly of all, it's the same amount of money the US government spent NOT building a large hadron collider in Texas before CERN came along - because they took the idea of a "God Particle" literally, and then changed their minds when they realised what it meant. Frankly, if it cost any less than $2bn to elect the most powerful man in the world, I'd be thinking we weren't taking it all that seriously.

The number that tells me it was being taken seriously was 1,000,000. This was the number of TV ads run by both sides. If this were to be run on a continuous loop 24-hours a day, it would take almost a year to run them all. A million ads maybe doesn't seem a lot across such a big place as the US, but when you consider the overwhelming majority were probably run across half a dozen battleground  "swing states", that's a year of pretty horrific television for a large minority of the people. Personally, I'd find the idea of living in Florida bad enough in itself, without Mitt Romney interrupting Mad Men every five minutes to tell me Paul Ryan can bench press 300 lbs. I suppose the reason Romney attacked PBS was because it was the one place he couldn't buy airtime.

On our own shores, nearly as much passion and interest has been shown in next week's elections for regional police commissioners. If by 'passion' you mean 'indifference' and interest, you mean 'ennui'. In The 'States, the idea of publicly elected policemen is the norm, of course, along with judges, school commissioners and the local rat catcher, and they sensibly put all the choices on the same Presidential ballot. Here we've decided it's such an amazing opportunity to spend £75,000,000 of public money we don't have, we're going to give it an election all of its own - to almost universal indifference. Turnout next week is expected to be between 10 and 15% of the eligible electoral role. Considering we cannot even choose our own Head of State or upper chamber of the Legislature, you'd think we'd jump at the chance to pick our local top coppers.

Maybe this problem, along with the overall decline in voter turnout at General and Local Elections, stems from the fact that, unlike in the USA, candidates cannot advertise on TV, except under highly restricted conditions. Maybe the government could enact legislation that would trigger the right to advertise on TV at the next elections, if turnout at these ballots falls below, say, 40%. The threat of allowing televisual political spam could, I believe, act as a powerful incentive to drive up voter participation levels in future elections. Instead of fining non-voters, like they do in Australia, we'd threaten to subject everyone to more politicians. Before long, self-formed neighbourhood citizens groups would march the streets with burning torches to drive the under-motivated to the polling stations. Which would at least give the new Police Commissioners something to do.

This sporting death

On Tuesday I tweeted that the real climax of 2012's great Summer of Sport was not Andy Murray winning the US Open, but the release of the Hillsborough Independent Panel's report into that ill-fated FA Cup semi-final on 15 April 1989 (full report here). But as the full extent of the systematic abuse of due process emerged, I realised the difficulty in understanding why such a broad "coalition of culpability" took so long to be exposed is because of the revolution that has taken place in professional sport in the UK since those dark days.

If your only frame of reference is the modern stadia of the Premier League of today, it's hard to imagine what it was like to attend a professional football match back in the 1980s. Many people remember fondly the swaying terraces of Old Wembley in the pre-seats era. Me, I remember the toilets that probably defied the Geneva Convention, terrible noisome pissoirs as seemingly imagined by the men who built the Soviet Gulags. The frightening swaying terraced crowds, a baying monster of profanities that engulfed you and threatening to spit in your hair or stub its cigarette out on your neck. And the FA and government scratched their heads as to why violent thugs used to turn up at such venues to pick fights when the whole set-up seemed designed to entice them in at the expense at anyone else with basic social skills and awareness of personal hygiene. It's hard to pinpoint which came first in this particular chicken-and-egg scenario - did people behave like animals because they were treated like them, or vice versa?

Anyone under the age of 35 might be shocked that people were locked into cages to view football matches. But although unheeded warnings had apparently been given by Health & Safety professionals to the indifferent suits at the FA, at the time it seemed perfectly normal. The question of how to evacuate people from such enclosures was couched solely in terms of containing social disorder rather than protecting the lives of the fans themselves. This shows the extent to which football fans had become dehumanised and demonised into a collective mob in the eyes of many members of the press and, it must be said, the wider general public. And you don't have to look very far through the news reports of football matches of the day to see why.

And not to put too fine a point on it, by April 15, 1989 Liverpool FC were themselves four years into a ban from European football competitions because of the actions of their own fans. In such a context it is easy to see why The Sun's smears of drunken, violent, thieving yobs was seized upon as official explanation, and why it took so long to shake. Liverpool fans fitted the convention demanded by the narrative, because the alternative was more unpalatable: that we'd have to start treating football fans as human beings, with all the variety and complexity that entails, instead of members of a quasi-illegal militia.

The journey from the squalor of Hillsborough to the triumph of London 2012 was the slow dawning amongst a broader populace that watching and celebrating sporting achievements was an acceptable activity, and that if you raise the expectations of its fans, you can raise your own expectations of their behaviour. Hillsborough in 1989 seems shocking to us in 2012 not just because of the callous disregard for human life by contemptuous public bodies, but because the expectation of what public sporting occasions can and should be has changed so much. When so much talk around London 2012 is of "legacy", the Games themselves were the true legacy of Hillsborough: that you can go to a sporting occasion with the expectation of returning alive. What a pity it took 96 deaths to rise to that challenge.

What a difference a Games makes

In the warm afterglow of the recent Summer Olympic games held in London, there has been a certain amount of self-congratulation. Despite the warnings by Jeremiahs in the media and amongst the general populace, not only didn't we cock things up, we actually made the games a success. More surprising to a lot of my compatriots than the logistical success was that we managed something far more elusive than making the trains run on time - that we actually got into the spirit of things.

In some quarters the British have a reputation for being reserved that would seemingly make them mis-matched for the high-octane hyperbole that surrounds the modern Olympic movement. Certainly some people had predicted a less-than-enthusiastic reception for The Games in the UK, not least the man being tolerated in the race for the US Presidency, Mitt Romney, a man not encumbered by tact or, it would seem, basic self-awareness. His misreading of British understatement as lack of enthusiasm shows a man who has clearly never spent time at a professional football match in England. Sport is one of the few occasions Brits allow themselves to throw off the yoke of overbearing respect of others’ private space and openly commune, often fuelled by the accelerant of alcohol. As shocked residents of many European cities during World Cup qualifying campaigns of the 1970s and 80s could sadly testify.

But instead of energetic violence, an army of thousands of volunteers from far beyond the Capital willingly (and freely) gave their time to dress up in an alarmingly-coloured uniform and advise visitors how to get around, determined to prove we are not a nation of total misanthropes. In the ten days or so since The Games ended, there has been a good deal of speculation about how long such warm feelings of goodwill to others can last, or how long we can continue to feel good about ourselves.

Two stories emerged today that made me think that maybe the idea of a legacy is not simply the marketing shtick some have decried it as. First, that high-profile NHS hospitals are being encouraged to expand operations overseas, taking their brands into new markets. While we should acknowledge this partly for what it is at heart - a desperate revenue-raising exercise by the government facing a terminal decline of its own - we should also recognise it as an enormous expression of self-confidence. Although much beloved by Brits, the NHS is so frequently used as a political football by vested interests in public life and the media, it's sometimes hard to see beyond its more newsworthy though less appetising features: waiting lists, MRSA, overcrowding, closed wards, low staff morale and waste. Danny Boyle's brave decision to put it at the heart of the Olympic Games opening ceremony tapped into a powerful British shibboleth. Reaction to today's announcement of an overseas expansion has been greeted with cynicism at the government's motive rather than incredulity at the idea that anyone else would want our hospitals at all (with the notable exception of the Daily Mash). I can't help thinking the reaction would have been quite different a few weeks ago.

The second story was the more quietly-revealed, but no less remarkable, news that Transport for London (TfL) has been appointed as transport consultant to the Rio 2016 Olympic Games organising committee. Given the pre-Games apocalyptic warnings of transport chaos issued by, amongst others, TfL themselves - not to say the collective anger inspired by bus, tube and train failures on a daily basis in the despairing hearts of millions of London workers - this is something of a coup. That we made it work using the world's oldest Underground train network should prove instructive for Brazil, who need to develop the world's newest system to serve their forthcoming Games. 

Both stories reveal the benefits of bringing global insight to the usual blinkered view we can take of ourselves and our institutions. Maybe the Olympic Games legacy will be not sports facilities for the masses or homes for the East End poor (though both of those would be nice), but a greater sense of our own worth, and the ways we go about things. That we can turn "The summer like no other" into a new slogan for a new confident age, as we face up to the biggest economic crisis in living memory: "Great Britain: not always as rubbish as we think we are".

Dive talkin'

One of the main operating principles of this blog is that in no way should it offer advice or opinions that could in any way be construed as useful. But I'm about to break that rule, mainly because I have had an idea that is too long to tweet or put on Facebook, so bear with me if you are not comfortable with this phenomenon, or if you have no interest in Association Football. For I have solved one of the most vexing problems of this sport: how to resolve poor decisions by referees who award penalties where none was due, or who fail to award one where an obvious infringement has taken place.

A bit of context for the footballing ingenue: Despite running a multi-billion dollar sporting franchise, none of the governing bodies of Association Football allow the use of video technology to help officials make decisions during live play. To the outsider this must seem like running a long jump competition without using a tape measure, but for the gnomes of Zurich, where FIFA is splendidly headquartered, this is something of a badge of honour. From the point-of-view of such a venal, bloated, corrupt, blinkered, reactionary collection of self-serving, vainglorious tosspots, it is entirely understandable that any questioning of officialdom should be stamped on with zealous enthusiasm. For the mere hint of questioning the fallibility of a referee is the thin end of a long wedge that ends with the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to a country so ill-suited to its hosting, the only possible explanation for the outcome is malfeasance.

But grown-up sports such as cricket, rugby (both codes), tennis, athletics and even horse racing have all realised that arriving at the right decision is better than not hurting the feelings of put-upon referees. Without exception each of these sports has improved as a result of the introduction of technology, when seen from a utilitarian overview of the totality of decisions made. That this is self-evidently so in practice only increases the pressure upon Association Football authorities to surrender to the obvious every time a poor decision is made. Every week, in other words.

The anti-technologists, who somehow feel poor decision-making adds to the richness of a sport, make two key objections to the use of video during play: it disrupts the flow of the match and it undermines the authority of the referee. So let's look at these objections, before setting out my solution:

1) It disrupts the flow of a match. Anyone who has ever watched a live match in any of the top European leagues knows a professional football game flows like a frozen lake. The ball is actually in open play for around two-thirds of a match. In other words, 33% of every game played is spent NOT playing football. I think we can cope with the odd break before we wander off like attention-deficient children who've spotted a new toy.

2) It undermines the authority of referees.Again, anyone who has watched more than, say, two professional football matches will- HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, hoo-hoo, hee hee, heh-heh *is carried out helpless with mirth on a stretcher*. No, really, what did you say? The Authority of...? Oh, dear me, that really is a good one. No, really, what was your SERIOUS objection?

My suggestion is simple: Football should follow the example of the DRS system used in cricket. Each team would have one appeal per match for an incident that happens inside the penalty area. If a penalty is awarded, the defending team may appeal to an off-pitch referee with access to all TV camera angles, or, similarly, an attacking team who feels a foul was committed can appeal through the same process, if the on-field referee denies them a penalty. The off-field ref must be satisfied the video evidence is strong enough to overturn the on-field referee's original decision. If the appeal is upheld, the decision is overturned and the appealing team retains its appeal for future use in the match. If the on-field referee's decision is upheld, the appealing team has no further appeals to use in the game, and must abide by all the on-field decisions. If a penalty is overruled, the diving attacking player incurs an automatic yellow card.

This is restricted to incidents in the penalty area. The captain is the designated decision maker about whether to appeal and he has 15 seconds from the ball going out of play to lodge an appeal with the referee. It supports the primacy of the on-field referee, but allows teams to overrule the obvious howler. It would also give the lie to those wise-after-the-event players to put up or shut up during the game. It might even, as a result, give a hitherto unknown respect for referees by the players, who realise it isn't easy making decisions on the hoof. By involving players in the decision-making process, it would probably also encourage a sense of self-policing, engendering a greater professional responsibility among a group not known for such a thing.

I realise there is a significant downside to this proposal: if poor decision-making were eliminated from football penalty areas, what on earth would football fans talk about for hours? Entire radio phone-in programmes would become barren empty wastelands. TalkSport FM would cease to exist as a going concern. The entire fabric of the football-watching world would be torn to shreds. Perhaps Sepp Blatter and his cronies have a point after all.

Salmond fishing

I don't often give much thought to Scottish politics, as it doesn't often give much thought to me. Even rarer is it for me to feel much sympathy for David Cameron. But both these things happened yesterday, so I thought I should write something down before I forgot to mark it on the calendar.

Despite being blessed with a Scottish name, Cameron is not blessed with many Scottish supporters. So more or less anything he says on the topic of the independence referendum north of the border will be swatted away by the native Big Beast of the SNP, Alex Salmond, with an ad hominem swipe.

Cameron came apparently bearing divisive gifts: reject independence, he cooed to the voters, and we'll see what we can do about extending devolution. This was the political equivalent of stuffing a roll of banknotes into the electorate's bra and telling them to go Up West and treat themselves to a new dress. Salmond said such breezy promises were worthless because they'd been offered something similar in 1979 that never materialised. I was promised a PlayMobil knight in 1979 that I never received, but I've rebuilt my life since then. Salmond obviously remains scarred. I'm surprised he didn't bring up the Highland Clearances.

The point Cameron had gone all the way to Scotland to make seems a fair one to me: for the referendum, the ballot should contain only the yes/no option on independence. By contrast, the SNP seems intent on building a menu of options to cover so-called 'Devo-Plus' (or 'Devo-Max') - extra powers for future Scottish administrations if the independence vote goes a bit Rangers FC on them. Would sir like fiscal separation with his devolution? How about a sprinkling of military autonomy?

I think there's good reason not to muddy the waters. Say the ballot does give multiple options: What happens if 55% of Scots choose independence but 65% choose 'Devo-Plus' (which I reckon is quite likely)? Does that mean independence trumps all, and subsequent questions are redundant? Or does it, in fact, undermine the case for full independence by saying more people prefer devolution over full separation? As anyone who's designed even a basic questionnaire will tell you, the answers to multiple related questions are dynamic: the responses to some will impact upon the outcome of others. Hypothetical questions about aspects of Devo-Plus are built upon an assumption of the failure of a full independence vote, which will build in a predisposition toward that failure. The act of answering the question will affect the result you reach. It's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as a political instrument.

It begs the question why Salmond would want to jeopardise getting a mandate for political independence for Scotland - something that has supposedly been his lifelong political dream. Maybe now it's within touching distance, the prospect of the reality of grubby day-to-day politics for an independent, not-quite-so-rich nation in a recession is making him think twice. Maybe the prospect of a bit more power without the responsibility for underwriting it is, in fact, far more enticing for a career politician. If the people of Scotland suffer a decline in living standards as a result of independence (or even as a perceived result of it) they'll be looking for someone to blame. It's nice to have an independently wealthy Old Etonian English strawman to blame for preventing Scotland from reaching its destiny, instead of someone closer to home.

Child's play

Professional sport, it may be argued, is an oddly childish way to make a living. And nowhere was that better demonstrated than today at Old Trafford, where one man's selfish immaturity brought out the worst in everyone. As depressing a spectacle as this was, it's merely one of a succession of stupid feuds, tantrums, rancorous spats and general pettiness that keep the sports pages bubbling over between matches. More than just bickering, this behaviour, as embodied in today's brouhaha between Patrice Evra and Luis Suarez, is also characterised by judgement so poor that is almost autistic in its lack of awareness of other people.

Leaving aside the more serious offences committed by these athletes, let's not forget the frequent car crashes, affairs, tattooing, preening and house-pimping that goes barely noticed by a general public desensitised to the concept of a teenager earning a million pounds a month for kicking things. Mario Balotelli is the poster boy for this behaviour; stories about his follies are legendary, from setting off fireworks in his bathroom to wandering unannounced into schools to use the toilets. We raise our eyebrows, or shake our heads - but should we be amazed at such jejune antics from our leading sports stars?

It wasn't always this way, and before we all get nostalgic about the Corinthian Ideal, it's easy to forget how we ended up like this. When I was a child, my professional footballing heroes earned little more than an office worker. Around the time I was born, it was commonplace for pros to work a second job in the off-season to make a living. This week, when everyone has been imploring the FA to pay Harry Redknapp £4million a year to be the England manager, we might reflect as a player he used to stack supermarket shelves in the summers between football seasons. The man who will most likely manage England on a temporary basis, Stuart Pearce, used to advertise his electrician's business in the Nottingham Forest programmes when he first played for the club in the 1980s.

In the 25 or so years that have passed since you could call "Psycho" to come and wire your house, the game has improved in ways that would have seemed fantasy in my childhood. Technical standards, fitness levels, preparation and planning - nothing is now left to chance in pursuit of excellence. The quality of football played is vastly superior, but the trade-off is the increasing infantilisation of its players. By removing the distractions from a player's life that allow him to focus single-mindedly on kicking a plastic sphere, you are forcibly removing him from all reference points of reality. From the moment he gets up until when he goes to bed, he is told what to do, what to wear, what to eat, where to go and where not to go. His finances, diet, catering, household are all managed for him. If his on-field behaviour sometimes goes beyond the cynical, it's because he knows both the price and value of nothing.

In return, the price for spine-tingling football played at breakneck speed by the human equivalent of thoroughbred racehorses is their continued existence in a child-like state of opulence. In a profession full of Peter Pans, we shouldn't wonder why they behave so appallingly on occasion. Instead we should marvel that they don't do it more often. Racism is not a price worth paying for such sporting rewards, but even at their most sophisticated, games rarely stray far from the playground.

Dog in a manger

Yesterday David Cameron marked a rite-of-passage among Conservative Prime Ministers as he told a meeting of Church of England clergy in Oxford that a return to Christian values could counter the country's "moral collapse" and blamed a "passive tolerance" of immoral behaviour for this summer's riots, Islamic extremism, City excess and Westminster scandals. In my lifetime this same speech has been made by all previous serving Tory PMs, usually in marked contrast to the moral actions of their own supporters or backbench MPs. And right on cue, up popped Aiden Burley MP in a Nazi uniform to embarrass the PM into action, the latest in a line of Coalition casualties to come up short by this measure by their leader.

It's the sort of non-argument that the late, great Christopher Hitchens would skewer so much more eloquently than me, but I would make the simple observation that surely a morality based on rewards gained in heaven is exactly what Islamic extremists could do with less of, rather than an extra helping. But then that sort of bloviating bilgewater is exactly the sort of dog-whistle speech I expect a Tory PM to make to his party's heartlands, as someone only kept in the job by the support of a man of clay and the opposition of a man of straw.

Since the speech was made to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Cameron probably felt obliged to declare that "Britain is a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so", which, of course attracted all the headlines. However, it was probably the least interesting part of what he said. Far more revealing for me was when he described himself as a "committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian". This says all you need to know about the man; that this religious code is something for the rest of us, not Dave. So much for us being 'all in this together'. To paraphrase a former Prime Minister's Spin Doctor, Cameron "doesn't do God" either, but seemingly because he lacks the conviction. Instead, Dave does Christianity Lite: "I can't believe it's not Jesus".

It's the worst kind of Christianity that expects others to carry to weight of morality and faith. This is a subject on which I speak with some authority, having spent much of my formative years sat in drafty churches witnessing good, committed, decent people trying to discover what exactly it means to do the right thing. I know that it is exactly this kind of 'vaguely practising' Christian who is the biggest pain in the arse, who expects the church to act as a handmaiden in times of trouble. The sort of person who turns up to midnight mass every Christmas and expects a full "smells and bells" burial for his loved ones, but who would no more think of lifting a finger to help the church at other times of the year than he would think of streaking down Oxford Street on roller skates. Such people are quite easy to spot at this time of year, because they turn up to Midnight Mass at midnight, instead of 11.30pm when the service actually begins.

Saint Nicked

Recently several friends have shared this rather cute piece of technology (below) that allows you to create a personalised video from Father Christmas. As long as Santa can get his virtual lips around the real name of your child (or your own, should you be feeling very lonely), you can create a real virtual message from St Nick himself.

http://www.portablenorthpole.tv/home

As you can imagine this has been circulated with glee among parents I know, as if children need any more encouragement to get excited about the impending festival of toys. But for me this takes things a bit too far in the traditional, unwritten contract-of-deceit that exists between parents and children at this time of the year.

As a liberal rationalist, I have always been ill at ease with the collective childhood deceptions such as Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy, but have been helplessly carried along on the tide of participation that starts at nursery. So far I have managed to stick with my core principle that I should teach my children how to think, not what to think; to get them to consider the evidence and to try to offer a plurality of views on the important issues of the day: the Middle East conflict, crisis in the Eurozone and why Shaggy has a taking dog.

This can come back to haunt you, as two years ago Sam grilled me mercilessly about how Santa could possibly do all he is reported to do in a single night. Inside I was bursting with pride at the relentless logic of his Questioning Funnel, while mentally scrabbling for possible plausible answers to the next question. We agreed at that point he would consider all the evidence and come to his own conclusion. The dawning of the truth was ultimately delayed by 12 months by the evidence of a half-eaten carrot and drained whisky glass on our hearth. I had become part of the conspiracy and hated myself for it.

So you can probably see why I can't bring myself to create one of these Santa videos for my children. It's one thing to tell a few white lies in order to create a sense of wonder and magic at Christmas. It's quite another to be fixing evidence to make the case. This is not the tradition of imaginative story telling to fire children's imaginations, it is fraud. If you need faked video evidence to make your story plausible, then maybe it's time to 'fess up. Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Creating a fake DNA profile for Father Christmas so you can test a swab sample lifted from the whisky glass?

It has been a widely discussed question as to why, when children find out Santa isn't real, they continue to trust what their parents tell them about other things. We are probably saved from being a species of Sophists both by the impracticalities of doubting everything and by coercing older children into participating in the conspiracy. But I wonder whether there isn't a collective harm being done at a deeper level.

Take the world of Conspiracy Theories and the almost child-like minds that believe the most elaborate hoaxes can be brought upon the world by the same bureaucracies who can't even manage to accurately count the number of people in its own prisons. Certainly they are people who could do with an earlier introduction to the rigours of the evidence-based approach, as opposed to wishful thinking.

Leveson the playing field

Watching this week's Leveson enquiry into Media Ethics this week, I was fondly casting my mind back to the rather brilliant summer we had. It's a little hard to recall today, coming as it did before the dismal days of Eurozone crisis, Greek default, London riots and the latest John Lewis commercial, but there was an exhilarating two week period when the News of the World was in its death throes. Every day something worse would emerge, and another previously untouchable News International employee would be defenestrated with indecent haste. In that Schadenfreude fortnight, when it became clear that the Police's reluctance to investigate the phone hacking scandal had less to do with incompetence and rather more with complicity, we were forced to ask ourselves some big questions, such as "who polices the police when they're in the media's pocket?"

Watching this week's coverage, I was asking myself a not dissimilar question: who reports on the reporters? You too can watch the coverage live online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi but if you do, you may notice a bit of a disconnect between what you can see and what you can read about it afterwards. For as the phone hacking allegations spread beyond News International, the popular press coverage of events has vacillated between simply ignoring them to shrilly denouncing the participants with the sort of crude ad hominem arguments that would embarrass a guest on the Jeremy Kyle show.

The Sun has mainly chosen the former approach: the heart-breaking testimony of Milly Dowler's parents was relegated to a single paragraph on page 6. The Daily Mail has chosen to go on the attack, getting its proverbial testicles caught in the mangle over Hugh Grant's reasonable assumptions about its source for a story (his full testimony is here). The moral personal failings of both Grant and, latterly, Steve Coogan (who testified today) apparently remove from them the rights of privacy and free speech that the press so happily enjoy and abuse. Inevitably today the same old arguments were wheeled out in defence of British tabloid journalism, and will be every time someone has the temerity to complain of an intrusion, here neatly summarised by Sarah Sands in today's London Evening Standard:

"Celebrities participate in an over-the-counter trade when they have a product to sell but otherwise their lives are none of anyone else's business".

You must read the above sentence in your most withering, irony-dripping voice. Once you've done so, you may find yourself agreeing there is a certain hypocrisy in currying favour with an editor one day and spurning him when it has become inconvenient. This opinion is probably tacitly held by a reasonably large percentage of the population - probably those who seek self-justification for fuelling the activity through their daily purchase of a tabloid paper. I make this assumption on the grounds that the initial phone hacking story failed to really ignite until the catalyst of Milly Dowler's voicemail hacking by News of the World. It took intrusion into the life of the an ordinary victim of crime to set off the furious indignation of the British public. In other words, celebs were, if not exactly fair game, then not much worthy of our sympathy either.

I find Sands' argument both baffling and horrifying in its implications. It is, in effect, a reworking of the vile rapist's defence of "she was asking for it". The celebrity here has aroused the interest of the press and must suffering the consequences, no matter how far they go. And if the celebrity has, in the past, courted publicity from the press for a project or piece of work, then it's an open and shut case: a metaphorical flirtation with a showbiz reporter is an invitation to a fully invasive assault any time the press feels like it. It's part of the price of being who you are, and you love it really. Sands here is portraying the media as the helpless victim, as though they are forced to give a rising star publicity in their papers; the reduction of people's privacy to a transaction is very much the prerogative of the paper, not the other way around as Sands would have us believe.

There's something peculiarly British about this attitude that explains why the tabloid press gets away with so much. Foreigners encountering UK tabloid reporting for the first time are often shocked by its intrusion because they have heard of something called the Great British Reserve. This means an overbearing deference to people's privacy in everyday life. Contrast how open someone from, say, the USA will be upon first meeting or moving into a new neighbourhood with the UK, where the time getting to know new neighbours can be measured in ice ages. So how does the press get away with it?

It's because the Great British Reserve is trumped by something even greater, called Not Getting Above Yourself. Success in the UK is both celebrated and despised, and for every Lily Allen there's a Julie Burchill ready to knock them down a peg or two. This is the role the tabloid press performs and I'm sure there are sections of it who genuinely believe that, by reporting on Steve Coogan's latest affair, they are performing some kind of public service - as do, no doubt, those who read it.

There's a deep-seated psychological flaw in this attitude that is very ugly. The passive-aggressive sneer of every Liz Jones hatchet-job in the Daily Mail suggests that somehow these celebrities are getting away with something. How dare they enjoy the trappings of fame with no downside. The idea that long-lensed paparazzos are an important counterweight to the excess of celebrity, in the same way investigative journalists are to Executive power, is as unquestioned as it is laughable. Press reporting of Leveson is truly the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the mirror. Or, in this case, the Daily Mail.

The way a cookie crumbles

Is advertising an art or a science? It's one of those facetious questions sometimes asked within advertising circles, and the answer largely depends on the department you work within, or what you are trying to get the client to pay for. Though officially a 'suit', I lean more towards the former: advertising is, fundamentally, about persuasion, and persuasion, as we all know, is an art. This also allows practitioners to keep a certain mystery around its practice; Lord Beaverbrook famously once remarked "I know that half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half".

This was the accepted way of things in the 20th century, in the dark, pre-digital days when advertising was channeled through the relative anonymity of a TV, newspaper or billboard. But in this era of digital media dominance, we now have the specter of Advertising As Science. Forget the uncertainty of knowing whether your audience sits rapt in front of your ad or disappears to make a cup of tea, now we can measure exactly who sees your ad and what they do once they've seen it. What started with "hits" on a website that became "unique visitors" has culminated in the phenomenon you must have noticed that is known as "remarketing" through the all-conquering Google.

If you've searched for a product recently - say a pair of Chelsea boots - you may have noticed, as you surf through unrelated, random websites, multiple ads showing you umpteen Chelsea boots. Maybe they even suggest trousers that would go well with this mythical pair of Chelsea boots? This is remarketing - where a website you have browsed places a cookie on your computer that allows it to serve advertising to you, via the Google display network, should you fail to convert the browsing into purchasing. This is Advertising As Science; we no longer need to persuade you why our Chelsea boots are the best because WE KNOW YOU WANT THEM! And we will continue to batter your eyes with ads for them until you give in, because we know we are right. We have statistical proof. Quite simply, you are wrong, because our science has proved it.

I recently visited thetrainline.com to find out prices of tickets from London to Manchester. Ever since, I have been served not just manifold web advertisements for thetrainline.com, but ads quoting me the latest prices for London to Manchester, repeatedly. This is despite the fact I have already purchased tickets on their website for Manchester, and travelled using them more than a week ago; apparently there is no satisfying my appetite for train tickets to Manchester. This is not so much targeted advertising as 'Terminator' advertising - the relentless pursuit of the consumer, like Arnold Schwartzenegger in the eponymous movie, advertising you to death.

Apart from the obvious fact this is incredibly annoying, not to say spooky, I think it also true to say that agencies and clients are missing a trick in the relentless pursuit of greater targeting. The Advertising As Science dogma has it that the more personalised an ad becomes, the greater its effectiveness: it cuts out the waste of talking to people who don't want a product to reach only those who do. This approach, presented as fantasy in the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, is fast becoming reality. Apart from its incredible presumptuousness, it also fails to grasp the complexity of human beings.

If I only try to reach those people who have shown an interest in buying my Chelsea boots today, where does tomorrow's customer come from? I still have hard-wired into my brain advertising slogans from 30 years ago for consumer goods that couldn't possibly have been aimed at my infant brain or unwaged pocket. Many of them are for consumer brands that I now purchase as an adult, who have inveigled their way into my affection over the years through exposure and persuasion when I couldn't possibly have been the target audience. The need to renew an audience and market through persuasion means the 'purity' of a fully targeted approach is as misguided as the 'purity' of a gene-pool; it is through cross-fertilisation, serendipity and, frankly, randomness that success is rewarded. Sometimes the best breakthroughs in creative thinking happen when you need to take a chance. The alternative vision of the future, to paraphrase George Orwell, is of a Chelsea boot stamping on a human face - forever.