Yet another new blog

Jeremy Kyle wasn't at the hearing in Westminster today in front of the  Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee , when his ITV bosses were asked to defend their reality TV programmes. He 'declined' to show up. His bosses came along.  Maybe this is a good point at which to remember Steve Dymond, a 'client' of the Jeremy Kyle show, who killed himself after appearing on the show. Has there been even one expression of regret from ITV for this man's death? Not that I can see.  The man who took the prize for me at Westminster was  Graham Stanier, "Director of Aftercare" at ITV.   Was he sorry this man had died? He denied all responsibility,  claiming he was answerable for his own behaviour but not for the behaviour of his reality hosts.  Stanier was supposed to be in charge of the care of participants, and he obviously failed at the job. Didn't his job include supervision of reality hosts who deal daily with members of the public app...

It looks more and more as if Tories down south don't really understand how to deal with real life. We've been told by several Tory grandees over the weekend that a male MP pushing a woman against a pillar, then grabbing her by the neck and shoving her out of the fancy hall where the Tories were meeting is nothing to make a fuss about. Pretty justified, according to quite a few Tories - sadly, some of them women. Apparently, the woman involved (but not the other women with her) could have been concealing a weapon, despite the fact that she was in evening dress and wearing a sash that proclaimed for all to see that she was not a terrorist but a climate protester. Not to mention that the security must have been crap for her and her pals to get in in the first place. Then we heard that one of the candidates to be prime minister had a bust-up with his girlfriend in her flat, so loud that the neighbours called the police. First of all, there's this question: when the hell ...

I was reading Posh Boys by Robert Verkaik but had to stop at page 133 because I'd started swearing, which was upsetting the cat - not to mention the neighbours. Verkaik has done his homework, so we know that parliament, the law, the church (of England), the senior civil service, the military, the main financial institutions, the media - all are run by men from the English public schools. No women. And that has been the situation for centuries. In the current contest for leader of the Conservative Party, for example, all of the remaining 6 contenders are men (there were two women in the running but they got kicked out in round one) and they all come from public or selective grammar schools: Michael Gove - Robert Gordon’s Jeremy Hunt - Charterhouse Sajid Javid - Downend Academy School Boris Johnson - Eton Dominic Raab - Challoner's (selective) Grammar  Rory Stewart - Eton In addition, these guys all sound alike (Home Counties smarmy - even Gove, who is the l...

I was talking to someone about how political parties can change. In our case, how the SNP and the Greens have grown while Labour has managed to write itself out of Scottish politics in less than 20 years. But the person I was talking to also mentioned the disasters that other countries' political parties have suffered and I looked them up. The first I saw was Canada where, in 1993, the Progressive Conservatives (now there's a name to conjure with) suffered  among the worst ever defeats by a governing party in the Western world, when they lost more than half their vote from 1988 and all but two of their 156 seats. Actually, I never got past Canada, although the same thing seems to have happened in Australia, Germany and New Zealand. I think this is stunning. How on earth did these people go from running the federal government to being more or less wiped out in 5 years? It's worth mentioning that the Progressive Conservatives have never recovered after 1993. Their big p...

This is Natalie McGarry, former MP, who has just been sentenced to 18 months in jail for embezzlement.  I'm not a supporter of the SNP and I don't know Natalie McGarry.  McGarry is a fool. She's ruined her life for  £25,000  quid. She's lost her job and is probably unemployable from now on. Her family life is in tatters. I don't know why she committed this crime or how she imagined she wouldn't get caught.  The sheriff who sentenced her said: “Your fraud and deceit was (sic) of the most serious kind.” He said the charges were especially serious “because of the nature of the organisations and position of trust you held”.  I'd love to know how the sheriff came to the conclusion that her crime was of the most serious kind. No one was injured, physically or otherwise. Her crime involved money. What would a less serious crime of this kind look like?  But there will be people injured by her sentence. For one thing, McGarry has already ...

I usually enjoy Stuart Cosgrove's column in the Sunday National. He writes well and often on interesting topics. But not this week. This week, Stuart was writing about abortion. He put it in the context of 'the abortion clampdown in some US states' and it took him until the third paragraph of the column to stop talking about himself and his Catholic upbringing and start making space for the views of the people who really matter in this issue: women. He lamented the decision by southern US states (Alabama and Georgia are just two of them) to ban abortion once a 'foetal heartbeat' has been heard. Then he praised the Texas legislature for resisting such a test. He also raised the ridiculous picture of women dressed as Handmaids (in the style of Margaret Atwood's novel), but used the words 'intriguing and clever' to describe what was going on. The second part of Stuart's column was frankly disgraceful: he wrote at length about the importance of H...

I try to avoid commenting on the Hebrides except to pals who also know them and/or live there. I worked in Argyll & Bute for 15 happy years and I still visit friends on a couple of islands when I can. But visiting and living there are two very different things and I was reminded of that when I read a blog post by a man from Northern Ireland who went to Islay for the Whisky Festival: https://sluggerotoole.com/2019/05/31/islay-nis-hidden-whisky-island-neighbour/?fbclid=IwAR0nsioHQB3sjclZN_9YCGQWa519CqDYI2rh8f0wWOs_QAdQ9o6ioz96gtE A generation ago, the tourist season on most west coast islands lasted maybe 10 to 12 weeks in the summer, with a wee blip at Easter and another at New Year. In the depths of winter (January to March), locals had the islands to themselves. They did their travelling then but were rightly wary of the winter weather: you could leave Dunoon in blazing sunshine and be caught in a blizzard at Lochgilphead. Then work started to try to extend the tourist seaso...