News Watch!

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has unanimously backed calls for the voting age to be lowered to sixteen, reports the BBC.

Which strikes me as a very cynical, and very voter-savvy ploy. It's ill-informed, immature, hot-head teenage voters who will vote for some perceived glorious notion of Scottish independence without taking into account all the reasons why Scottish independence is a very bad idea.

There are many reasons, but I think it is most telling that earlier this year when the 300th anniversary of the Union came around and the debate reared its head, the Scottish business community was generally dead set against the idea.

The base of the SNP's appeal has always been to people who don't understand how the economic world works and don't understand how everything they do effects and is effected by it. I don't understand how the economic world works myself, but having now become a taxpayer and begun that slow move away from the foolish university communist phase, I certainly get a bit more of the gist of it.

This said, I'm actually all for Scottish independence. I'm frustrated by the West Lothian Question and, as one of the early intakes of university students to have been made to pay fees, am exercised to the point of irrational madness by the fact that Scottish students get free tuition yet English students are made to pay...

Ah, so it's about the money is it?

If so many Scots want independence, then let them have it. It would make a few people happy, and would mean that we wouldn't get all upset when we supported Scotland at the World Cup out of fairness and didn't get the same courtesy in return. Also it would mean six million fewer people and more money for us English.

But when that North Sea oil runs out, don't think that selling a few bottles of whisky is going to hold up the economy.

I like whisky too.

News watch!

A devout Baptist couple who picked up what they thought was a Doris Day film for £2.99 in a supermarket bargain bin were shocked to find themselves watching sapphic Italian schlockfest Tettone, che passione! (Breasts, what a passion!).

Full story on the BBC.

What I love best is that the god-fearing couple continued watching until the end of the DVD, presumably so that they could see just how shocking and pornographic it actually was.

And not that I'm particularly overjoyed or not to see that the Sarkozys are to split, but today's Guardian has an excellent piece about the break-up in all its soap operatic glory. With tales of multiple, twisted affairs and a high-speed car chase through Paris it really is quite cinematic. It's almost like Madame Bovary.

So here are some thoughts...

I obtained a new umbrella today. Half stole it in fact.... At Blackfriars Station on the way home from work the guy sitting on the bank of seats across from me jumped up, and as he got to the doors I spotted his umbrella on the seat. I jumped up too as he pushed the button and with a loud "excuse me!" tapped him on the shoulder, at which he looked back at me, gave me a glance that I can only describe as terrified, and left the train.

Well, I wrote about giving people the benefit of the doubt before, and if he's not prepared to believe that I wouldn't willfully attack a man with a good eight inches on me in a crowded London station, then fuck him sideways with a spoon, and I kept the umbrella, which is rather nice and I think may be designer.

I also consider it some recompense for what happened this morning, when the ticket office at Suburban Station was closed when I arrived with a good fifteen minutes on the 9:01 to find a queue of idiots by the automatic machine. I can be done with the automatic machine in a minute, because I have mad skills and am a fully paid-up member of the Web 2.0 society. But many people can't figure them out, and end up inserting their card the wrong way round and then accidentally buy a monthly saver to Luton Airport.

I missed my train and was an hour late to the office. We're putting out a big souvenir issue this week, and as a result we're kind of up against it, and this was not appreciated. It is for reasons like this that I worry a flat move may be on the cards next year, much as I like this place.

The shop by our tube station has reopened in the past week after a refit, and they seem to have got rid of Scowling Indian Man and replaced him with some absolutely ravishingly beautiful young Polish girls, who were I that way inclined I would make more of in this post. They have also got rid of the grotty lino and the cramped aisles and turned it into a mini home-from-home for Poles, Turks, Russians, Romanians, in fact, any passing shopper who wants nothing to do with the execrable Sainsbury's Local by the tube. There is even a deli counter and a small bakery that does baklava. Needless to say I have been having baklava for dessert all week. I also bought some sausage-meat and a brand of Polish yoghurt called Extra Krzemosy or something, which is actually really nice.

There is one thing about all the Poles and such round here which is quite sad, however, and that is that they seem to have driven out the Aussies. It used to be that you'd go into a bar and be served by some high-octane Antipodean who, despite possessing an accent that is almost as unattractive as Estuary English, could at least conduct a conversation. Now it's a glum eastern European emigre who, despite having six more degrees than I do, hasn't bothered learning English and can't tell the difference between Kronenbourg and a small glass of the house red.

That is not apocryphal either, that did actually happen to me in a pub in Uxbridge a few months ago.

My message to the Aussies; we've kept the bars just as you like them, we've made our climate warmer, and you can get Victoria Bitter in the offy, so where the bloody hell are you?

Yobs and racism

I read with some interest Jeremy Vine's piece on tackling thugs and antisocial yobs on Auntie's website the other day, and recognised the dilemma Vine found himself in right away.

For those who didn't read the original posting or the subsequent follow-ups in tehlondonpaper, there was a burly c**t being sexually aggressive to a girl on the tube; he got off and as the doors were closing one of the other passengers flicked him a v-sign. Unfortunately for the passenger, the tube doors jerked open again, as they so often have a bizarre habit of doing, and the thug launched himself back onto the train and started knocking seven bells out of this poor chap.

Naturally, everybody in the carriage just sat back and pretended to hide behind their Metros until he'd gone away.

You see, I've been in the unfortunate position of having some piece of pond scum holding me round the throat and divesting me of a mobile phone, an Oyster card and £45, and during that unpleasant encounter who should ride by but some big bloke on a bike, with headlights blazing, and - probably stupidly given I didn't know if my attacker had a knife - I called out: "Help, help!" And then when he kept going : "Can't you see he's attacking me?"

The unhappy truth is that people seem happy to stick their noses into every other aspect of everybody else's life, but seem less encouraged to do so when there's something blatantly illegal going on.

To give a less extreme example, I commute through Streatham and Tulse Hill every day, both parts of London that seem to have been in the news a lot this year for various stabbings and shootings and other nefarious high-jinks.

Yesterday afternoon, this tall black dude got on at Streatham carrying a shopping bag with two mops in it, and sat down on the bank of seats directly in front of me.

I thought no more of this until about twenty seconds later I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke, looked up, and saw this guy was openly having a crafty fag on the train, something that has been illegal for at least as long as I can remember.

Of course the proper thing to do would have been to challenge him and say: "Either put that out now or get off this train at the next stop."

But neither me, nor the other eight or nine people who were sitting nearby, did anything. You don't pick a fight with a six foot black man in south London, after all. But for a moment everybody was feeling slightly angry and slightly threatened by an antisocial dickhead.

After he had got off the train - of his own accord - at the next station, he leered up against the window, staggered along the platform, and his eyes were as wide as saucers, so clearly there was something else besides tobacco going on there, and I'm glad I didn't tackle him.

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking back from the station and there was another Afro-Caribbean kid, in stupid trousers and a backward baseball cap with its label still attached, openly defacing the front shutters of a pub with a can of spray paint.

This was next to an open grocery with several people picking fruit from the outside display, and a bus shelter with about ten more people in it. Nobody was raising a finger.

Going back to my mugger, who wasn't black but I think - it was twilight, I didn't see his face properly - was probably south Asian. And as we know, nobody helped me then either.

The reason being everyone was afraid that they'd be armed, with a knife or worse.

It's true that once you've been a victim of crime your liberal credentials go flying out of the window, but I haven't quite joined the hang 'em and flog 'em brigade just yet. And nor am I frightened by this silly season epidemic of stories in the right-wing press that are specifically designed to scare us stupid. In short, I don't think Britain's going to the dogs.

Nevertheless there are questions here I think we have to answer:

1. Why are a disproportionate number of my brushes with criminality with those of ethnic minorities?
2. Is it actually the truth that white people are just scared of ethnic minorities because of media-hype? Is this a racist position?
3. What can be done?

My answers below, but I'd be interested to know yours:

• I think this speaks actually only of my personal experience. London is a diverse city and ethnically homogenous parts of the country, such as Cornwall, have an equal number of white people who are shitheads. However, there is the unavoidable truth that a large amount of the gun crime in the news has been black-on-black. Of course, this begs the question, are we being manipulated by our news sources? Probably, yes, but that doesn't mean that all those teenaged kids weren't murdered this year.
  
• I think a number of white people are scared and am certain there is influence from media sources, your own class background, exposure to people from other countries, and so on. But importantly, given the number of Londoners who live quite happily alongside each other without a problem, there's no need to be. I don't think I'm a racist and I don't think most other people are either.
  
• Fuck knows.