Bolton Score Shock! Horror!

Great news. Bolton Wanderers have scored a goal. Now, it may not seem a particularly special event for a football team to score a goal but in the Premier League Bolton Wanderers have managed to go more than 540 minutes playing football without scoring a single goal. On Saturday 27th February, Zat Knight scored in first half injury time at the Reebok Stadium and somehow Bolton managed to protect their own goal for the whole of the second half - even if Wolves did hit the woodwork several times. The 3 points from this game lifted Bolton four places in the Premier League. Another 3 points or so could elevate them into 13th position but that will be the limit. There are 7 points between West Ham in 13th and Blackburn in 12th and with the rubbish teams in the bottom part of the table that is an almost unbridgeable gap. If Bolton go another 540 minutes without scoring they will probably go down - not definitely; there are other teams who can't score either. Bolton were getting somewhere in the days of Sam Allardyce but in the years since, it has been more a matter of survival - but at least they used to be able to score a few goals.

Why would anyone want to manage a team in the bottom part of the Premier League. It is a soul-destroying job. Perhaps it is the money? Yes, that's it. Even if you get sacked after a few months you will go away with a couple of million pounds, which should allow you to get by while unemployed.

/

Earthquake in Chile

Terrible news has come through in the last couple of days about the earthquake in Chile. The epicentre was just a few miles to the north of Concepcion and has effected the surrounding country for a few hundred miles in all directions - including Santiago - and into the Pacific Ocean where tsunami warnings have gone out to countries as far away as Australia. Of course, Chile is always prone to earthquake problems but this one is the worst in 50 years. So far, it seems that 300 people have been killed - let's hope the number doesn't increase further. I can't say that the area to the north of Concepcion is one I know well but I did stay a few nights in Santiago. In 1976 I spent 3 months in Chile working in a dairy in Loncoche - about 200 miles further south. I went up to Tamuco a couple of times looking for engineering services and parts and this is now in an area that has suffered some severe earthquake damage. I suppose that there will be more huge cracks across the Longtitudinal road that runs the length of this elongated country; cracks which may one day be repaired.

Chile is in many areas a beautiful country. With the Andes all down one side, creating some spectacular scenery comes easily. But everywhere there are the simmering volcanoes that tell us of turbulence and instability in the Earth's crust beneath. The country is so long that the climate changes dramatically from one end to the other and gives it a rich variety of wild life - flora and fauna. I remember the black vultures that gathered near the dairy where I worked and could be counted in dozens sitting on fences waiting to pounce on small animals and fish that appeared in the warm water that ran into the river from the dairy's drains. I liked the people in Chile and their pragmatic approach to life - in the time of my visit they were ruled by the Pinochet dictatorship, which only 3 years earlier had slaughtered President Allende and his family in the presidential palace - with, it seems, CIA backing because the Americans didn't like the idea of a Communist democracy. I met the local police chief in Loncoche, who wanted to know about any strangers on his patch - Europeans in Loncoche were rare - but he seemed unaffected by who was in charge in Santiago from one day to the next.

I expect that the Chileans will get over this earthquake and, as Churchill would have said, "keep buggering on." I wish them well.

/

Winning Needs Goals

Well, as expected, Bolton Wanderers lost at Ewood Park. Blackburn 3 - Bolton Wanderers 0. It seems to have been lost on the Bolton team that if they are to survive in the Premier League they need to score goals. They have now gone over 480 minutes in the league without scoring a single goal. The new manager who was supposed to improve on Gary Megson has now gone 8 games with only one win. It will need a miracle now to keep Bolton in the Premier League and with declining support they will sink and sink. Lads, the situation is now desperate and serious. What are you going to do about it?

[above BBC picture of snow at the match. How much Bolton miss Big Sam]

/

Bolton Wanderers

As I am writing this, the Premier League match between Blackburn Rovers and Bolton Wanderers has just started at Ewood Park. As a long time supporter of Bolton Wanderers I live in hope rather than expectation. Since Owen Coyle took over as manager from the less than popular Gary Megson, Bolton have won only one of seven games. In fact it is worse than that. As of this moment, Bolton have gone 460 minutes in the Premier League without scoring a single goal. They have collected 3 points from 27 available in away games since they beat Birmingham last September and they haven't beaten Blackburn since the current manager of Blackburn, Sam Allardyce left Bolton in 2007. So will Bolton win today? The runes suggest not but, as I say, I live in hope. It has to be said that many of their regular supporters who go to watch games are losing the will to live. Crowds at home games are fading away and in the FA Cup game against Tottenham last week only 13,000 bothered to turn up. The match was on TV, of course, so on a cold and dreary Sunday, many non-season-ticket holders would have opted to save their money and watch at home rather than on the wind swept terraces of Reebock Park.

Football is a funny old game, according to Jimmy Greaves, a former Tottenham and England player - he was in the World Cup winning team of 1966 - who was 70 years old yesterday. He freely admits that he doesn't watch football much these days and prefers rugby. In recent years, football has become a battle between rich owners of clubs with English names and proud traditions but staffed with players from here, there and everywhere whose only common denominator is an obsession with money and a rich lifestyle. Few teams can persuade 50,000 people to pay £40+ for a ticket to watch them home and away, week after week, year in and year out. Rugby, on the other hand, has become a game played by fit, fast and powerful young men who have transformed the game from the slow and old-fashioned slog of yesteryear. For the most part the players are home grown - via public [ie private] schools it must be admitted - and we do have the possibility of building teams that can match the best in the world. I enjoy much more watching rugby - although the Italy v England match in Rome last Sunday was enough to drive everyone away from the game as the two teams indulged in a display of ping-pong, kicking the ball from one end of the field to other for most of the time; nobody seemed to want to run the risk of doing something positive.

Bolton are swanning around next to bottom of the Premier League - above Portsmouth, who via the owners or the Inland Revenue look doomed to bankruptcy - but Owen Coyle says he is confident that they will soon start to win games. They may and a couple of wins would hoist them into the middle of the league because there are many other clubs who are also quite useless. Half the league only exists to provide a rich points harvest for the top five clubs. Why do we have to import so many players? Why do we not have a steady stream of great players coming into British football? It may be because, of course, we have stopped kids playing football and other sports at school. It may be good for H&S but it is no good for sport.

It is now half-time at Ewood Park and Blackburn are 1- 0 in the lead. Oh, Sam, why ever did you have to leave Bolton?

/

Britain Isn't Working

Here in the UK, we had some new unemployment figures released yesterday and a pretty sorry state of affairs is revealed. The official figure of jobless stands at 2.46 million. Bad enough, you may say, but in reality it is much worse than it looks. Various governments over the last 30 or 40 years have found various ways of massaging unemployment figures to make them look better than the reality and an examination of the detailed figures for the current situation show just what a mess we are in. Of course things will just get worse because government spin wants to make us believe that things are good. Yvette Cooper, the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions welcomed the figures. The unemployment figures are better than many expected because of, she said, "the tough decisions families and businesses have taken to protect jobs, as well as the substantial extra investment in getting people back to work." What she is talking about, I have no idea.

Consider the number of people in part-time or temporary work. The Office of National Statistics tells us that the total number of "underemployed" people - ie people who are working in temporary of part-time jobs because they can't find full-time jobs is another 2.8 million. Then within the population of working age, we have a total of 8 million people who are "economically inactive". This huge number includes students, home carers [looking after family members], temporary sick, permanent sick, early retired and 724,000 "others". Under Labour the number of long-term sick has more than doubled. When there are complaints about people living longer, when we have doubled spending on the NHS and standards of living have risen, why do we have so many people permanently sick? Of course, the reason is that governments have used permanent sickness for off-loading people from the unemployment lists and to massage the unemployment figures down. The same goes for early retirees. Anybody over the age of about 55 who can't find a job can be made "retired" and shifted off the unemployment register. Then we send more and more teenagers to college to get them off the unemployment register as well for a few years. All of these "economically inactive" have to be supported to a greater or lesser extent by the state via social welfare payments of one kind or another and so the cost goes up and up and up.

Another statistic which has slipped out is that we now have fewer people working in manufacturing industry than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. I don't know what date they are taking to mark the start of that revolution but it must be of the order of 200 years. In 1810, Britain's population was about 17 million [including the whole of Ireland]. Now the total population of the UK [excluding the Irish Republic] is about 61 million.

Today the Corus steel plant at Redcar is to start the process of shutting down and is then to be "moth-balled". This is spin for closure. Yet another bit of manufacturing industry goes down the drain. It is, say the financial wizards who are so good at their own jobs, because wages and costs are too high - this came from, among others, a man whose bonus for 2009 exceeded £1 million.

The government has no policy whatsoever for the re-building the economy of this country. And neither has the Tory Party. I have even less confidence in "call me Dave" and his Old Etonian mates than I have in Gordon Brown and the dead-legs of New Labour. They waffle on about technology and training engineers and scientists, but to do what?????? Lord Adonis has been pushing plans for a new high speed rail system. This could create lots of jobs and provide a solid foundation for a part of Britain's manufacturing future. Because if we are going to recover, we have to make things the world wants to buy - just like the Germans do. Trouble is, if we went ahead with a new HS rail system we would give the work to foreign contractors employing foreign workers and we would buy all the equipment form foreign manufacturers. And the government would think it had done the right thing. After all, this is the government that has given the order for re-equipping the East Coast Main Line to the Japanese - and then told us the lie that this preserved 12,000 jobs. That got the inscrutable Japanese worried.

Is there any hope?

/

Re-arranging The Deck Chairs

I have just sent for a copy of Chris Mullin's diaries now the book is available in paperback. It has been much praised as a revealing account of the realities of government. As a junior minister in the Dept of Transport & the Environment he set himself just three objectives. If he could achieve these, he would have considered his time in office a success. He wanted to eliminate night flights; to control leylandi hedges; and cancel his ministerial car. After 2 years he had managed to cut the cost of the ministerial car from £700 per week to £400 per week but that was all. Otherwise, he had made no progress whatsoever. Most of the time he had no idea what was going on unless he read it in the newspapers and finally he thought that his job was no more than re-arranging the deck-chairs. In near despair, he returned to the back benches.

He is not the first minister to realise that he was waisting his time. Government these days is controlled by the spin doctors and the civil servants and everything is a matter of presentation rather than reality. This is why we are in the mess that we are. So much is total incompetence and most of government seems to be re-arranging the deck-chairs more and more frequently.

None of this is really new. Michael Portillo, when asked what he thought was his greatest achievement as a government minister - and he was a senior minister - told us that it was keeping the Settle and Carlisle railway line open. It really was an achievement and he - as well as all the campaigners - had to work for years to get what they wanted. But, as Portillo says, the Settle and Carlisle line was something he could still visit and say "I kept this line open." Now the line is a great success; traffic is increasing and it brings tourist from all over the world. Most of what Michael Portillo did has been filed away buried in all the otter dead records of bureaucratic government. All meaningless, pointless, expensive legislative rubbish. Most legislation does little to change anything and always wastes buckets of money.

Is it surprising that the country is in such a mess? Who will pull us out of this gigantic hole?

/

Yet More About The Luge

Well, my concerns about the luge events in Vancouver have been stimulated even more when I find out more about shenanigans at the Whistler Sliding Centre. I watched the finals of the luge at the week-end but i didn't see every run. One, by the very experienced Stefan Hoehener [above], came very close to repeating the death crash of Nodar Kumaritashvili, when the Swiss luger had all but parted company with his sled as he rushed towards the final bend. He managed to hang on and just about avoided another bad crash. He was out of the running for medals, of course, but many in the IOC and the FIL will have breathed a very deep sigh of relief that we had not had another catastrophe on this apparently satisfactory slide. They cannot say that Hoehener lacked experience; he is 29 years old and has been a luger for more than 10 years.
It has been reported by the American Team Captain, Ron Rossi, that one of his team, Meg Sweeney came very close to having exactly the same accident as Kumaritashvili when she crashed at the 16th bend during practice two days before the unfortunate Georgian. Luckily, said Rossi, she didn't go quite so high up the wall - but then she started lower down the slope - as did Hoehener. The start point for men during the actual competition had been moved 200 m further down the slide in order to slow everyone down and yet a very experienced luger nearly came to grief. Another little revelation about this unproblematic slide was that the curve of the ice had been altered at bend. In the light of all this, surely it is staggering that the officials dared to suggest that Kumaritashvili was responsible for his own death.
The goings-on at Whistler have told us much about the sham of the Olympics. The Canadians have had up to ten times more practice time on this slide compared with the visitors, in order to give them an advantage over all the bloody foreigners and help Canada maximise medal winnings on home territory. Many visiting teams have complained but to no avail. After all, the Canadians revealed, they have put a lot of money in to ensuring Canadian wins and everything has to be done to make sure they succeeded. But now they are complaining that the modifications to the course - by altering the ice curvature and moving the staring point by 200 metres - have effectively wiped out their advantage. "There is a lot of money invested", said Canadian Ian Cockerline. "It's really what it comes down to in the end." James Lawton in The Independent thought there was no bleaker epitaph for the fallen Olymian. It is difficult to disagree.
/

More About The Luge

Well, the Men's Luge Event at Vancouver has taken place and top German Felix Loch [above] was the winner with David Moeller also from Germany in 2nd. Armin Zoegeller from Italy was 3rd. Congratulations to all of them. Having watched these finals on TV, I can see just how dangerous it is going down an ice track at 90 mph on these glorified tea trays. It is a bit of a nutty sport but I have to admire the men [and women] who do it.
There will have to be more investigation into the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili in practice runs on Friday. It seems as though I was not the only one who criticized the FIL and Canadian Olympic officials for attempting to lay the blame for the tragedy on the head of the dead man. That is quite unacceptable. In a sport like this crashes are inevitable and on such occasions the athlete is going to get a battering. It is not acceptable that he [or she] goes over the top of a safety wall into a row of steel columns - rather more than just a stray pole as the original reports suggested. Many competitors have said that this course is dangerous and the Canadians, anxious to get Canadian medals at these games have given Canadian athletes far more access to this course than they have athletes from any other nation. And just to prove how safe the track is, they have moved the start points farther down the start incline to reduce the speed of the luge at the last bend. Further, they have added about another 8 feet to the height of the wall on the last bend to stop any other luger going over the top.
Following the Friday accident Nodar Kumaritashvili has become probably the most famous luger in history and - posthumously - has given the sport more publicity than it could ever have hoped for by any other means. The officials will come out of this looking like idiots but the competitors will have gained considerable fame and new respect.
/

Death in Vancouver

Luge is not a sport that normally I take much interest in. But the activity has hit the headlines after Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili [above] was killed practicing for the Winter Olympics which open today in Vancouver. I would like to know how anyone gets into luge. It is hardly a romantic sport. How do you train to be a great luger? To the outsider, it seems an exercise in lunacy. By any normal criteria, this must be considered extremely dangerous. The competitor lies down on his back on a tiny sledge thing that looks like a tea-tray with skids and then launches himself down hill on an artificial ice slope - like the Cresta run - at speeds up to 90 mph feet first. Courses are not straight and involve steering around steeply banked curves as well as keeping a tight line down the centre of the straight bits. Crashes are inevitable but, for the most part, only result in luger and luge parting company and going down the run separately. Crashing must cause a lot of aches and pains and some broken limbs but, surely, it should not be possible to slide over the top of the wall on a bend and hit a steel pole? Mr Kumaritashvili, only 21 years old, did just this. He lost control on a bend, the luge flipped and he slid up the ice, over the top of the wall and into a steel column. It seems that he died almost at once.

It has been decided that the luge event will go ahead anyway. I would have expected that. But what I would not expect and which I think is quite reprehensible is the conclusion that the course is safe and that the accident was caused because the athlete "did not compensate properly going into the bend." I am sorry but that is surely a totally unacceptable remark. Any athlete in the Olympics is trying his utmost to be the best and in the case of luge that means going fast. The athlete needs to have total control while pushing to the limit. Occasionally he will get it wrong - if he did not, there would be no crashes. It is the responsibility of those officials that lay down the rules and regulations and, presumably, inspect the course to ensure that if an athlete does get it wrong he can crash as safely as possible. And that does not allow for athletes going over the top of the wall into steel poles. The FIL [Federation Internationale Luge] have inspected the track and have concluded that the accident was not caused by deficiencies in the track. However, they tell us, as a preventative measure the walls on the final curve where Nodar Kumaritashvili crashed and died will be raised "in order to avoid that such an exceptional accident should occur again." Well that's alright then. But its not. All the H&S legislation around the world requires that things should fail safe and surely Newton's Laws of Motion will tell us that if a luger has problems on a high speed bend, the likelihood is that he will go up the side wall and over the top - unless his progress is halted by "an externally impressed force". There should be a safety net or padding that stops him before he hits steel girders. I hope all the other bends are safer - just in case there is another exceptional accident.

Apparently, this track in Whistler, Vancouver is regarded as dangerous and prior to this crash several teams have raised concerns about safety. There have been several bad crashes in training runs this week and surely considerably more attention has to be given to safety. I can enjoy watching competitors in all the high speed runs in luge, bob-sleigh, etc. But I expect that if anything goes wrong the athletes are as safe as can be.

I am sure that with a sport as specialist as luge, all the competitors from around the world know each other and feel part of a rather small family. They will be a very sad family this week-end at the start of what should be the peak of their togetherness for an Olympic Games. Young 21 year old men should not be killed doing the thing they love because the safety measures are inadequate and I sincerely hope nothing similar happens to any other luger at these Winter Olympics. All we have here is stable door shutting after the horse has disappeared over the horizon.

My commiserations, for what it's worth, go to Nodar Kumaritashvili, his family his friends and all who knew him.

/

Expenses Again

So our MPs are about to repay £1m in excess expenses claims. This is just about enough to pay for the enquiries that have investigated them. In addition three MPs are to be prosecuted for false claims and fraud. Only three? And these three are going to try to avoid court by claiming parliamentary privilege. This privilege was enshrined in the Bill of Rights of 1689 in order to allow MPs to speak openly without fear of legal action or interference by a reigning monarch. It was not intended to allow MPs to escape prosecution for fraud. Party leaders suggest that they will amend the legislation to prevent this action by the three MPS. Why? It is blindingly obvious that the 1689 act had no connection whatsoever with a matter of MPs expenses. I am a cynical bastard and I suspect that any messing with the 1689 act will allow the parties to adjust things a little bit to protect the government from extraneous investigations. Leave it alone and let the MPs go to court.

Following on from the MPs expenses extravaganza, we now hear that a supervisory body is to be brought in to oversee matters in the future and this is about to cost us another £8m. Why? It must be obvious to all what are reasonable expense claims and what are not and it could be operated = if necessary - by an ombudsman in each party just to ensure that there is nothing that is not completely above board. Most private individuals who put in expense claims have them signed by a senior executive. Why cannot the MPs not do the same?

Only if we have MPs with moral principles will we have many and women in parliament who can properly supervise what our money is spent on. Far too much is poured down the drain paying for consultants and advisers Also many salaries in the public sector are too high. We should have the right pay levels for MPs and ministers and these should be used as the bench marks for others in the public services.

/

My Pension Is Reduced

Today, the state Pension office sent official confirmation that my pension from 1st April will be £139.45. This includes my state second pension, which, the government has decided will not be increased in line with the rules. Only the base rate will be increased by the statutory 2½%. This piece of slight of hand will reduce my pension by 2½p per week. If I had had a full state second pension the reduction would have been a whole 6p per week. This scratching money from the hands of pensioners is so typical of this government. They have spent billions bailing out the finance industry only to see the money going straight into the inflated pockets of ridiculously overpaid bankers and done nothing about it. But grab pennies from the hands of pensioners they do without a moments hesitation. To those that have shall be given; to those that have not, it shall be taken away. Not content with having the worst state pensions in Europe they will nibble away at the payouts so that pensions become less and less in real terms. Of course, it will have minimal direct effect on them because everyone in Whitehall has a generous pension scheme, inflation proof and guaranteed by tax-payers.

In three months time this shower will be seeking re-election. And the only alternative is call me Dave and his Old Etonians - men, who to a man [or a woman] have no idea what living on a state pension actually means. Just to make things worse, they are now chasing their economic policies round and round in ever decreasing circles - and who knows where they will come to a halt. They inspire confidence that will precipitate a disaster if they are elected.

/

Blair - On Stage Again

Well Blair has had another go on the stage of politics and, as I expected, he has got away with it. I am talking, of course about his appearance at the Chilcot Enquiry. He spent 6 hours before the inquisitors on Friday and told us nothing. He was allowed, over and over again to ignore questions that were asked and allowed, instead, to answer questions which he wanted to answer. This committee are really and truly not up to the job. They are all Establishment figures who will not rock the applecart. Even now, out the back, the minions are mixing the buckets of whitewash that will be needed in the end to be painted all over the conclusions. This is not a court of law, Sir John Chilcot has told us. You can say that again. I have heard many more forceful cross-examinations in a student's union. Only the former ambassador, Sir Rodericn Lyne has shown any serious wish to ask real questions but even he still allowed Blair to slither away. This preposterous mountebank, this hypocrite, this deluded man, this actor-manager, this most appalling of prime ministers admitted no mistakes, no regrets and confirmed that he would do the same again. So now, by his own admission, he is a fool as well. He may feel that he has to answer to no one but God but that is a measure of his delusion. I still think he is the worst prime minister in my lifetime and probably much longer. I still dislike him as I have always disliked him. He is a man of no real principles and he still stays in my mind as Uriah Heep - ever so humble but completely untrustworthy..

He will not be dragged before a criminal court. He should be - but he will not. All we can hope is that his place in history will not be elevated. He was prime minister for 10 years. The Iraq war and his support of the US government was the peak of his failures but he failed on matters of civil liberties, on social policy and on education. It will take many a year to unravel the harm that he did nationally and internationally.

/