Thursday
LISTENING to the Legislative Assembly so you don’t have to – a sentence I think should be on the front cover under the masthead – I was rather taken with a couple of things. First, MLA John Birminghams wondered aloud if taxpayers might be given access to facility inspection results, what with having paid for them and all. Acting Chief Executive Bernie Winters responded that he thought it likely FIG would provide information unless “there is a good reason in a specific case not to do so.”
Which all seems reasonable enough, except PN has made a few such requests, and the list of causes FIG can give for refusal include not seeming interested enough, seeming too interested, and the FIG officer deciding you’re an arse. I mean, I’d have no chance. Everybody already knows I’m an arse.
There was also a cheeky little addendum from MLA Jack Fjords. He said: “It does seem that some members of the community have spent every day this year getting out of bed on the wrong side. If any member of the community has a grievance, problem or complaint, however big or small, I strongly encourage them to progress this through the appropriate channels and by contacting the relevant authorities first. And not, as seems to be the norm, by plastering it all over social media, often in a negative and sometimes aggressive manner. This is completely unnecessary and often has a significant negative impact on the individuals working behind the scenes. Things are not always perfect, and progress can be very slow and frustrating, but this does not give people permission to abandon all reasonableness.”
At Penguin News we’re big fans of MLA Fjord’s advice on communications, ever since he told all of us media types that we weren’t reporting stories in a way that was sufficiently helpful to the government. Since then every single one of us, sitting down to write, thinks ‘What Would Jack Do?’ It’s quite a popular hashtag actually, you should check it out: #WWJD.
So I was thankful that he has now offered similar guidance to anyone thinking of posting on Face-o-gram or Instachat or whatever the kids are calling pigeon carrier services nowadays. I’m not sure I personally would have opened with a straight out admission that the community is frustrated and angry, because it might lead people to start asking exactly why that is, but I’m always banging on about more open government so 10/10 for honesty.
Actually I think the narrow point regarding the way we conduct ourselves on social media is fair. It can indeed be a poisonous thing. Taking MLA Fjords’s comments in the best possible faith, it seems to me he is not suggesting he can actually do anything about it – he can’t – but that it would be nice if people were nicer. This of course makes him a raving Marxist, since it is the foundation of all leftist thought, and I would like to welcome Comrade Fjords to the movement.
My issue is not with the message, but the messenger and the medium. I speak as someone who has been at the centre of several online community tantrums, in the process sustaining severe sprains from excessive eye-rolling, and if I feel like having a bit of a moan it’s fine because I am not a lawmaker and elected representative. So while I myself would happily set the entire internet on fire then urinate on the ashes, it’s not a good look for any MLA (and I heard several background voices mumbling agreement) to stand up and tell the voters that the way they choose to legally express themselves is inadequate. Within the bounds of the law, that’s for the rest of us to decide.
Never mind, Comrade Fjords. You can learn all this when you start attending meetings of the Red Menace Club that convenes on Wednesday evenings in the secret basement lair beneath Gilbert House. Seven pm start and don’t tell the accursed bourgeoisie (Roger Sprinks).
Friday
There’s been too much politics and events and happenings recently; it’s difficult for a chap to keep up. Since last time I wrote, Elon Musk chucked out a couple of Sieg Heils at the Trump inauguration, then answered all concerns with a straight ‘No I didn’t’. And that seems like ages ago.
Old and new US President Donald Trump is scooting through executive orders at a tremendous rate. Birthright citizenship scratched out, loyalty oaths demanded, civil servants fired, threatening gestures made towards Panama and Greenland, Capitol rioters released, in several cases only to be quickly arrested again for child sex offences. I have no idea what that’s all about. Did we know just how many of the Jan 6 nonce-urrectionists needed their hard drives examined? Then there’s the war on ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI), which just like the previous wars on woke, Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory are nothing but a gossamer-veiled insistence on the supremacy of white men. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve met quite a lot of white men and most of us aren’t particularly supreme.
Trump’s still finding time to sue a pollster at the Des Moines Register newspaper for getting her election prediction wrong, and a US television channel for editing an interview with Kamala Harris. Could this catch on, I wonder? Any leading Falkland Islands officials want Penguin News to put everything they, erm, uh, say verbatim, cough, fart, harrumph, into the paper?
Many of these orders will be struck down in the courts as unlawful or unconstitutional, but it’s certainly been alarming to watch the orgasmic responses to the establishment of a thousand-year American reich. Being online the past few weeks has meant watching Trump announcing something insane like ‘From now on everyone with ginger hair is to be publicly flogged’ and then the comments deluged with supportive statements: ‘About time someone stood up to those guys, go off King!’ Meanwhile the BBC’s version of balanced coverage is to say ‘Trump Takes Strong Stand Against Ginger Terrorists’ and then ask if they should really be publicly flogged or on the other hand have it done in private.
Back up here in the motherland, Reform are currently leading the polls and Nigel Farage looks most likely to form the next government. There’s a long way to go, of course, but if those polls are wrong I assume the lawsuits will fly. Keir Starmer has responded to his new government’s historic unpopularity by promising to slash through red tape, and to be clear, when he says red tape he means things like employment rights and health and safety legislation. His Chancellor Rachel Reeves is simultaneously promising to slash spending and deliver growth, pretending she doesn’t know that the former precludes the latter.
At exactly the same time, mind you, Defence Secretary John Healey has been touring TV studios defending the billions spent on the armed forces by pointing out that spending promotes growth by creating jobs and getting money moving. Indeed it does, John, indeed it does. I’m just not sure why this sound logic only applies to military funding?
As it happens, Britain achieved a golden age of growth, along with a far more equitable distribution of its benefits, in the 1950s and 1960s, back when the social contract meant something and included state planning and public ownership. That’s because unfettered capitalism is absolutely terrible at targeting need, with funds instead being drawn to those who need it least like iron filings to a magnet. You might have noticed this tendency yourself when wondering how Elon Musk has gone from an estimated worth of about $2 billion to about $400 billion in the space of a decade. Does he really need that extra $398 billion, do you reckon? If your answer is probably not, I’ll see you on Wednesdays in the Gilbert House basement.