Monday Moan 71

 

RUSSELL BRAND – WHY?

One of the great questions of our time is how on earth Boris Johnson ever got to be taken seriously as, well, anything.  Now we can ask the same question about Russell Brand.  

 

Brand’s recent appearance being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight has done nothing to diminish the feeling that we are being asked to take seriously someone whose antics, posturing, behaviour and general Dave Spart-like spoutings might have been mildly interesting or even amusing in the 6^th form, but who shouldn’t be allowed to sit with the adults unless he promises to act his age. 

 

Someone thought it would be a good idea to let Brandspart edit the New Statesman this month, which led to the Paxman interview on Newsnight:- 

 

RB  “It’s not that I’m not voting out of apathy, I’m not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery and deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations now and which has now reached fever pitch where you have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system so voting for it is tacit complicité (?) with that system and that’s not something I’m offering up.”

JP “Why don’t you change it then?”

RB “I’m trying to”

JP “Well why don’t you start by voting?”

RB “I don’t think it works, people have voted already and that’s what’s created the current paradigm”

JP “When did you last vote?”

RB “Never”

JP “You never, ever voted?”

RB “No. Do you think that’s really bad?”

 

According to Jane Garvey, presenter of Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme yesterday, the Newsnight interview was “one of those great media moments”.  Skating over the nonsense of that statement, she also told us that how we view Brand’s comments may depend on our age. As sweeping generalisations go, that’s up there with the best.  According to her, to many people in their 20s Brand is an inspiration. To those older than this he’s just talking “tosh”.  

 

It’s not only Brand, of course.  One James Ovenden (aged 25, writes for the Planet Ivy website, which is for and written by those aged 18-25 – so presumably he’ll be looking for a new position shortly) was interviewed by Garvey and said “I don’t vote because I don’t think the current system can do anything to address the issues like inequality, kind of house prices, the general hopelessness that young people are feeling at the moment. They won’t be able to own their own property, I think it’s something like one in five will likely own their own property and I don’t see that current system you know addressing this and I feel I’m forced to vote to keep somebody out as opposed to vote for somebody to remain in and I feel that’s negative.”

 

Faced with such an articulate and persuasive argument, Gavery asked her other interviewee “Doesn’t he have a point? Don’t you sometimes feel that the world is run by faceless multinational, international conglomerates and we are just tiny little bits of flotsam who amount to nothing?”

 

Feeling depressed at this summary of the world as it is, I was given fresh hope by Garvey when she turned back to Ovenden (aged 25) to say “don’t you think they [our current leaders] are just overwhelmed by the scale of the problem?”, to which Ovenden replied “not really, well possibly it might be that, but that’s all just semantics really”.

 

Vote for Brand and Ovenden – they’ll get us out of this mess.

 

 

ON THE OTHER HAND …..

Superficial and irritating though Blandspart may be, the ‘grown-ups’ in Parliamentland show no sign of maturing and taking their responsibilities seriously.

 

This week’s Prime Minister’s Questions was up (down) to its usual standard. 

 

How on earth are we to take any of this seriously if these people can’t have a proper debate where (a) the main participants do more than engage in knockabout playground insults, and (b) the audience listens instead of thinking their role is to pretend they are at a Christmas pantomime?

 

 

 

THE PRESS DOESN’T NEED ANY HELP – OH REALLY?

Harriet Sergeant, journalist, author and Research Fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies, appeared on BBC’s Question Time last week. Initially, I assumed that Caroline Aherne has simply come up with a new name for her ‘Mrs Merton’ character, but it turns out that Harriet is a real person after all.  She writes for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times.  

 

Answering a question from the audience about the new Royal Charter on Self Regulation of the press, Ms Sergeant distanced herself from the rest of the panel who thought it right that the press should not be the sole judges of whether they were behaving appropriately, by suggesting that “we should judge institutions by how they deal with their scandals.  We have had scandals in the press and what do we have this week?  We have two editors on trial, we have eight journalists on trial in the courts ….” 

 

Oh dear.  If she thinks this demonstrates that the press is perfectly capable of regulating itself then she needs to do some of her famed 10 months of research before she feels capable of dealing with a topic, during which she might ponder on whether those journalists referred themselves for prosecution or whether it was, in fact, the legal processes that took them there. 

 

To save her a lot of time and effort, I am willing to let her know that those journalists were using their freedoms and privileges to ignore appropriate behaviour and it was the intervention of others and the application of the law that saw them in court.  As a demonstration of the strength of self-regulation this left rather a lot to be desired.

 

 

TESCO – STILL FAILING TO GET IT TOGETHER

Have you tried to cash-in your Tesco vouchers recently?  Maybe it’s just my incompetence, but it took me ages to order some things online using my Tesco vouchers – including having to register separately for the Clubcard, Tesco Direct and F&F clothing parts of the site.

 

Having spent far more time on all this than was appropriate I then turned up to collect the goods ordered.  Nobody on the ‘Click & Collect’ desk – there were two people looking after this, the electrical, the mobile and the phone desks, and both were serving the same customer.  

 

The goods were, eventually collected.  Unfortunately, on getting home and trying the clothes on, they did not fit properly and a bigger size was needed.  Not to worry, the helpful person on customer service helpline said to fill in the returns form and return it and the goods to any store and they’d send them back.

 

Not quite as simple as it sounds. Again, it took ages for one of the employees to finish dealing with another customer at one of the four desks he was covering.  Then neither he, nor a colleague who he summoned knew anything about this process and tried instead to offer a refund.  I didn’t want that, and the refund complications arising from having part paid for them with vouchers threatened to cause all sorts of system overloads for a while.  Eventually the boss was raised on the phone and he said that the process was to call the customer service helpline for advice.

 

Maybe it was just luck, or maybe there is only one person on the helpline, but it was the same person I had spoken to earlier. The shop employee passed the phone to me – the voice at the other end said that maybe he hadn’t explained things clearly enough to me, but all I needed to do was hand it over to the store staff and they’d send it back to the depot for action.  “Exactly as I had told them”, I said, and handed the phone back.

 

All I expected was to appear at the store, someone to be there to deal with my issue, take the parcel and say “thanks, we’ll take it from here”.  Is that too much to expect?