Will Spring ever arrive?

Looking back through my various tweets since the middle of January there is a common theme: when will the Spring arrive?

It is no secret that I find the climate in the UK depressing - the more so at this time of year. The leaden grey skies weep rain or gloom or both; people look downcast and there seem to be more bugs being transmitted than at any other time of the year.

And yet yesterday we had glorious sunshine here in London (not so today ...). The bird song and bulbs bursting through were as a fore-taste of the very special time that is about to arrive. The peacocks in Holland Park strutted and flicked their developing fan tails as all around them snowdrops nodded delicately and colourful crocuses opened their orange throats to the sky.

It seems ironic that the Christian calendar goes into Lent just as the natural world is heralding the arrival of a new year's growth! But then when Easter does finally arrive, the two become synchronised again.

Lead him slowly!

the horse is carrying

the Spring moon.

(WATSUJIN)

The NEET crisis

I've learnt a new word: NEET. It refers to the young people living in the United Kingdom who are "not in employment, education or training" . . . a group of over one million people (or 20.1%) aged between 16 and 24 years of age.

It's a boggling statistic.

We hear daily about how it is time to reform the public services by dis-investing in them, privatising services (I'm not sure how that prevents us paying for them) and how the private sector is going to create jobs and wealth to turn the government deficit into a credit. Every job "lost" in the public sector is going to somehow be compensated by a new job in the private sector.

The prevalent political view is that it is better to pay share-holders a dividend for providing public services than to be the sole financial share-holder. This can surely only be successful if the collective of new share-holders have the same vision as the community and is prepared to accept a pitance of a dividend.

In fact those companies that currently do provide the front-line public services (parks, waste management, etc.) enjoy massive profits and ensure that they have the "competitive edge" by driving down the wages paid to their staff. Their staff are happy to accept the reduced standard of living because with it comes a temporary work visa for the United Kingdom and opportunity to learn English amongst other things.

For the private public services contractor there is no need to invest their profits in training or apprenticeships, to consider the national skills shortages or real investment in communities; just the requirement to lower the cost to the local authority and ensure maximum return to the share-holders.

The reduced expense of providing front-line services has other advantages too: the public service pension schemes draw off less from the public purse and there is more money available to the Treasury to invest in apprenticeship schemes and other get back to work flagships that attract nobody because there are no paid jobs for them to go into (all vacancies having been filled by external applicants - see above).

I don't see or understand how we break this cycle and I'm not advocating spending money for the sake of it.

Into this potentially explosive situation of a million plus youngsters sitting around bored, we have the Prime Minister of our multi-ethnic country stating that multi-culturism is dead and buried. Cue the far Right (mainly unemployed it seems) and we have the right ingredients for a revival of early 20th century Europe.

Surely, somebody in the coalition Government can see that they are fanning the fires and feeding the flames of civil dissatisfaction and discontent. Can they not understand that this number of idle, frustrated hands can only lead to groups of young people coming together in a quest to carve out their own destinies? Intolerance of different races, age groups, faiths and sexualities is borne - history teaches us - out of economic deprivation. Question: why has he / she got that job or income and I have not? Step in the extremist with all the answers and in no time we will find ourselves relying on what ever remains of our armed forces to supplement the thin blue line trying to maintain civil order on the streets. Surely it is better to have people employed and contributing to the economy than unemployed and unskilled. What costs more: a front-line public sector worker in gainful employment or the same person on benefits?

Enoch Powell was probably right about the 'rivers of blood' heading our way: but for the wrong reason in my opinion. Fueled by a vision to clear the previous government's disasterous economic deficit, this coalition is currently beating out the wrong tune and one that will send a seismic tremor of frustration and discontent across the country. Targets will be random, almost certainly from the ethnic and other minorities and completely without justification.

The students' riots earlier this year have ensured that the Establishment and new Whitehall recognise the sound of breaking glass. I fear that without an urgent reappraisal of the causes, what we witnessed in Greece yesterday, will be widespread across the United Kingdom in the near future.

Libraries lost

The proposed closure of the public libraries across Britain is appalling. In part it is led by local Labour councils looking for a controversial cut to draw attention to the wider assault upon the public services by the coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Playing politics with the community in this way is as destructive and wrong in my view as the political objectives of the government driving the agenda forward.

Others have used the diminishing use of  libraries on account of our access to the internet for information as reason for their decision. I do not deny that I probably do now use the internet more frequently than the library specifically for research. However, I have to hand an array of sophisticated electronic gadgetry from a PC down to a BlackBerry that enables that access - most people do not.

Amazon is now claiming that it sells more e-books than paper - but then there has to be a link here, surely, with their e-book reader, the Kindle! My experience in the past of Amazon as a supplier of books has been good: however I am still awaiting a paper biography of Walt Whitman that I ordered through them in November ... currently not available for technical reasons. You probably recognise where my mind is now going.

I have space to study at home, my own office and desk space in work. Few enjoy those luxuries as the cost of housing continues to rise and the size of spaces within them decreases; offices are becoming hot desks at which to plug in laptops that have been stored in lockers as the cost of providing that work space becomes prohibitive.

My office is usually the node at which I relate to colleagues or members of the public. It is anything but my thinking or research space. The public library - particularly in the miserable British weather - remains however my quiet corner for solitude and study. I seek at least once a week to take my gadgets and note books with me to the reference section of the library off the high street and, when tired of staring at a screen, indulge myself in the pleasure of handling a book, and smelling the foggy atmosphere of polished tables and creaking leather seats.

There is a place for progress in my thinking: I would be 'at a loss' rather than 'lost' without my gadgets and look forward to the BlackBerry Playbook being launchd in the coming months as a more business-orientated tablet than the iPad. However many people with a Kindle or Sony e-book reader have had the unfortunate experience of having not checked the charge status of their reader ahead of a long journey by public transport . . . and wished for a book!

There is a more ominous side as well to the loss of the library as a repository of knowledge. I value change for the good, but cannot help feeling that the justification of falling attendance as being reason to close a library is as fallacious as the same justification for closing a church, a bank or a news agent. Not only do we become over reliant upon the convenience of electronics, but so too do we remove the human contact and perhaps most importantly, ability to continue our lives without reliance upon something that can be turned off in an instant. If I cannot Google or Wikipedia it - where do I turn for knowledge? Without libraries, future generations will be unable to answer that question - just as arguably today, the loss of churches as a moral compass could be the reason for a modern intolerance and amorality that is disturbing.

Winds of change swirl all around us

It hasn't just been Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordon to experience the extraordinary power of the internet to mobilise and inform people. Middle East dictators and "Royals" who were previously backed by many Western governments have started to see their hold on power being eroded over the past few weeks. As these popular campaigns, largely orchestrated by the educated middle classes using Twitter and Facebook took hold, tropical cyclone Yasi surged towards northern Queensland, Australia.

Whilst it was being monitored closely by meteorlogical experts, the Australian Federal and Queensland Governments responded to the looming threat by using the power and accessibility of all the tools of our modern communications era to advise and inform their citizens. Despite the incredibly destructive forces of a Category 5 storm landing in a populated area, nobody died as a direct result of the cyclone. One tragic loss of life has so far been reported but that was due to the inhalation of generator fumes.

The Australian newspapers heap praise upon their leaders for their presence and preparedness for two devastating events that have hit Queensland in particular this year: the floods and the cyclone. Using the internet and Twitter as well as FaceBook in particular, I have been able to keep abreast of how family living in the affected area have fared. I knew through blogs posted by the Cairns Post that their neighbourhood was without electricity and consequently not able themselves to reassure family in Europe or Africa. That's a definate sign of progress in my book! Once contact had been restored, I learnt that the local government authorities had already completed the clean-up of their street. That's an example of good governance and the undeniable importance of the formal public service to a community - in a land that already typifies community spirit and neighbourly assistance.

The British are sadly yet to learn and experience the real consequences of the currently proposed abolition of the public sector in favour of volunteers. It is a tragedy in my view that while we listen to politicians lecturing the world about the need for democracy, because of their current political agenda, we will most likely not be able to depend upon ourselves as a nation in the future!

However, history suggests (and perhaps we should take heart) that in our next hour of need, the social networks Twitter and Facebook will be used to alert the ANZACs to our plight and that we will be able to depend upon them to once again come to our aid - just as they have done countless times before.