Vince Gets His Cables Cut

I am waiting; just waiting. Waiting to go to the North of England for Christmas. My original travel plan was to drive on Tuesday, 21st December but weather was bad in the Midlands and there were reports of blocked roads and long delays. We are not very good at coping with snow and the country has been gripped in an icy chaos during the last month. There has been little snow in most of England and Wales in the last couple of days but the BBC, RAC and AA were all warning us this morning that 14,000,000 motorists would be out on the roads today travelling from somewhere to somewhere, and advising them all to travel on the motorways. Sure enough, by lunch-time there were lots of traffic jams. I suspect that today will be the same so I am now intending to travel on Christmas Day. Hopefully the car will be OK and the roads are traditionally quiet on this day.

Meanwhile the Liberal part of the coalition government has got into trouble because of a scam by Daily Telegraph reporters posing as constituents of various MPs and ministers to get them to make unguarded remarks about their Tory colleagues. But the biggest gaff has been Vince Cable telling two reporters that he was at war with Rupert Murdoch and that he would see that Murdoch would not get 100% control of BSky B. Most people in the country believe that this would be the right result but after this gaff was revealed - not by the Torygraph but by the BBC's Robert Peston who had the story leaked to him via a mole in the Torygraph offices - Murdoch is looking like the wounded party. The newspaper, anxious to show us that it was revealing weaknesses and disputes inside the coalition stopped short of making the Cable gaff public because they too are against Murdoch. Now David Cameron has taken all responsibility for media matters away from Vince Cable and moved it to the Dept of Culture and Sport, where the Tory minister is more sympathetic to Murdoch. The result will be probably that Murdoch will get his way - as he usually does - and this is bad for Britain.

There have been many complaints to the Press Complaints Commission and it is to be hoped that they will come down strongly on the Daily Telegraph - but I am not optimistic.

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Count 'em In Again

I have been quiet for over two weeks; not because I had lost all interest in the world around me. No, it was simply a loss of internet connection. The modem went down and then the computer played up a bit. Everything seems to be working normally again now. You know what normal is? Periodic Windows crashes and lock-ups and unexplained deletions etc.

Well, having counted them all out, we will now have to count them back in again. I am talking cricket, of course. I did warn at the end of November that predicting an easy ride and an Ashes test series win in Australia was asking for trouble. So many articles in newspapers about how we were going to trounce the Aussies, etc. Now England are back to their usual form of dodgy bowling and batting collapses. They were over confident and dismissive. Aussies do not take well to that sort of treatment and came back with a vengeance to win this third test by 267 runs - and a day to spare. Mitchell Johnson took nine wickets in the match and scored a wild 62 for Australia in the first innings. England bowling was not superb but the batting was pathetic. In the 2nd innings when they were all out for 123, only Trott managed to score more than 18 runs. I don't think the wicket was that treacherous.
So now the England team need to either draw both of the last two games or win one of them. Ricky Ponting is looking happier, even if he has an itchy ear and a broken little finger. Now I think his team will come to the next test feeling far more confident. Hopefully England will play with a full squad available and no one away on paternity leave. Anderson and co nipping back to England for long week-ends because their wives are having babies is not acceptable. I am with Bob Willis on this. These are professional cricketers, well paid and playing for England against Australia. They are not part of a week-end team of part-timers playing for a team cobbled together by Social Services where political correctness is a greater priority than being able to do the job. The liberal do-gooders and the Guardianistas are the people that draw up regulations for maternity leave and keeping jobs open etc etc. Great for public sector non-jobs but not very good when you are part of a small team where what you are doing matters.
Anyway, i will still wish the England team well. They now know that they are going to have to work at it. They should be going out to win this series, not cobble together draws.
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FIFA Awards Russia World Cup 2018

So, after all the efforts, the expenditure, the compliments and the expectations, England will not get the World Cup in 2018. Neither will they get it in 2022. They can try again for 2026 at the earliest. But why bother? They failed so resolutely in this case that we have to suspect that we will never get the World Cup unless either we are the only bidder or FIFA is drastically reorganised. There have been one or two hiccups along the way in getting our bid together but at the end of the day we presented a very professional proposal, generally acknowledge as the best "technical bid". In Zurich it was supported by the heir to the throne, the Prime Minister and David Beckham as well as many of the organising team. On the day of their final presentation all three of the final team leaders did a good job. We have all the stadiums necessary for the event; there is immense interest in football in the UK; and the country would have organised the event very professionally. But in the first round of voting we collect just two votes and we were immediately eliminated. In round 2 Russia got over 50% of the votes and they were awarded the contest. I have to admit that I am not heart-broken but I do believe we were screwed. FIFA is an odd autocracy that has had Ssep Blatter at its head for 30 years. There have been many accusations of corruption - some of them proven - and both the British press and the BBC have reported on serious concerns yet FIFA is too arrogant to even investigate. If any of the allegations are even half right, we have to wonder whether the British PM and the heir to the throne should be dealing with them at all. It has been suggested that the Panorama programme on Monday alleging corruption should have been suppressed. On what moral grounds can we sustain an argument that corruption should be suppressed in order that senior figures in the British establishment should be able to deal with any persons or organisation unrestricted by any suggestion of corruption - even when they may well suspect it to be true. It is ironic that the event has been awarded to Russia - a country, which has itself been accused of having a less than open and uncontaminated government. They may have done nothing wrong in this case but I am sure that I will not be the only one suspicious of some kind of collusion when England was eliminated so quickly. It may just be, of course, that the secretive group that is FIFA just did not want anyone suggesting that they were not entirely honest - no matter whether it were true or not.

I do hate these bidding processes. In many ways they are obscene. In this case four countries or groups of countries have wined, dined, courted and fawned over a group of officials while spending about £20 million each to put forward their proposals only to find that for all but one everything was a complete waste. Here we have a world with poverty, corruption, deprivation, starvation and disease and £60 million is casually thrown down the drain in order to persuade a group of highly paid carpet-baggers that this or that country is best able to organise a few football matches. The World Cup is a sports event that could take place in any relatively rich country - and in some cases the locals may even have a big interest in the Game. Still it is not so nonsensical - at least in England's case - as spending £35 million in order to be allowed to chuck £10 billion down the drain staging 2½ weeks of school sports known as the Olympic Games.

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