EXCLUSIVE: TPA Sponging Off The Taxpayer

Recently, the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) produced a report entitled “Taxpayer Funded Lobbying And Political Campaigning”, authored by current head non-job holder Matthew Sinclair. This dubiously argued research had one very firm conclusion: such behaviour was A Bad Thing, and the TPA called for a halt to it.

So it was more than a little surprising to find the TPA indulging in a little taxpayer funded campaigning of their own: a Zelo Street follower prompted me earlier to point out that the TPA are at present advertising for an (unpaid) internship.

But, so what? Internships are good for folks wanting to build up experience and a contact base, aren’t they? Well, yes they are, but that isn’t the issue: the TPA have advertised the vacancy on a publicly funded resource. Make that a Taxpayer funded resource.

The advert, as can be seen, has been put up on the website w4mp.org, which describes itself as “The site for everyone working for an MP”. Just to emphasise the Parliamentary nature of that site, it also carries the House of Commons insignia. So what does the TPA have to do with MPs?

It gets worse when you look at the “About” part of the site, where visitors are told “This project was established ... with European Union funding”, so that’s the TPA kicking the EU while simultaneously sponging off them.

Moreover, the “About” page also emphasises “The maintenance of the website is now funded directly by the Resources Department of the House of Commons”.

So that’s the TPA, an Astroturf lobby group which wants taxpayer funded lobbying to be stopped, using a taxpayer funded resource as part of their lobbying.

I’m sure Matthew Sinclair and his less than stellar array of non-job holders have a good explanation lined up for their blatant sponging off the people on whose behalf they claim to be campaigning.

Talking Down Talking Points

One factor behind the nickname of the Maily Telegraph is the paper’s attitude towards the EU: in the old days, the Telegraph would be sceptical towards Europe, but would ensure its reportage was accurate and trustworthy. But now, the confirmation that the paper is just a broadsheet version of the Daily Mail is underscored by its relentless and carping Europhobia.

And this anti-EU and anti-Euro stance is shown to good effect today in a piece by James Hall, who is considering the problems in Portugal, where José Sócrates, now merely caretaker Prime Minister following his recent resignation, has concluded that his country needs financial assistance.

Hall, as befits someone peddling Euro-frighteners, homes in on the real crisis, which is not with Lisbon, Berlin or Frankfurt am Main, but here in the UK: we could have to contribute £4.4 billion towards the Portuguese bail-out. He then offers rather later in his article the qualifier “up to a potential £4.4 billion”. This rapidly revised amount, of course, includes the figure Zero.

And that isn’t the only deeply ambiguous item in Hall’s piece: he cannot resist the temptation to make a party political point, and says of the temporary bail-out fund signed on to by Alistair Darling just after last year’s General Election that it was “fiercely opposed ... by George Osborne”, which is at the very least contentious, and may yet prove flagrantly dishonest.

In any case, Hall misses much of the real news in his attempt to write to the Maily Telegraph agenda: as the Beeb’s Robert Peston has pointed out, the UK’s banking sector has an exposure to the Portuguese public sector, and that country’s wider economy, far smaller than banks in Spain, France and Germany. This will ensure that Osborne can minimise any contribution the UK makes to the bail-out.

But for James Hall, it is kicking the EU and Euro that is top of the agenda, so he blithely carries on with the knocking copy, telling of “the shaky credibility of the Euro”. That would be the currency that gave between 1.4 and 1.5 to one Pound Sterling until the recent financial crisis, but now yields less than 1.15. The starting Euro/Dollar rate was less than 1.2 USD for one EUR: now it’s well over 1.42.

If the Euro’s credibility is “shaky”, then heaven help the UK and USA.

TPA – Restatement Of Ignorance

The learning process among the non-job holders at the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) grinds away only very slowly, as shown by the latest offering from the self-satisfied Andrew Allison. Once again he complains about the rate being offered for a contract position, and once again he fails to do his homework.

Allison’s target is an advert for a Programme Manager at an unnamed NHS Trust: the rate quoted is in the range of £200 to £300 per day. He at least concludes that he doesn’t know whether this is an appropriate amount, but still shows no sign of understanding that freelance workers have to find employer’s NI, holiday and sick pay, accountant’s fees and professional indemnity premia themselves.

And it would not have taken Allison long to check out a site like JobServe, which would show him that the rate offered is relatively low for someone with budget responsibility and project management skills and experience. Certainly in IT, that going rate – in the private sector – would be around £400 per day and upwards.

The local Government and NHS, on the other hand, pay less and therefore see the best project managers go elsewhere. Moreover, “going private” not only means more and bigger paydays, but avoids the carping from the TPA and their churnalist allies on the dunghill that is Grubstreet.

This seems not to occur to Allison, but then, the idea of his knocking copy is not to show understanding or perform any kind of research, but to put the boot in to public service. So he and his pals are unconcerned at their collective and increasingly obvious display of ignorance.

That ignorance extends to the tired TPA idea of seizing on job titles as being the only determinant of whether a job is useful, and Allison provides another example in the same piece, where he makes the discovery that the West Midlands Fire Service employs a “Political Analyst and Researcher”. He does not make the first attempt to find out what the job entails, nor even to ask how much of it is Research, and how much Political Analysis.

No, he merely fires off an FoI request, because that is an easy and lazy way out, and then trumpets his ignorance by asking “Why does the fire service need a Political Analyst?” (note that the “Researcher” part is conveniently dropped). As I’ve said before, if Allison and the rest of the TPA’s non-job holders really had any idea of how these organisations worked, they would not need to ask. They would know.

That they still need to ask shows that they do not know. They are utterly ignorant of the workings of the organisations over which they stand in judgment. It is high time that the Fourth Estate recognises this fact, and tells the TPA it must do better.

Talking Toby Jug – Bad Idea

There is little more delicious in the blogosphere than the sight of a flannelled fool taking aim at his target before inadvertently shooting himself in the foot. And today’s recipient of self inflicted harm, and therefore object of ridicule, is the loathsome Toby Young, supposed “free school” champion and freelance hack.

Tobe has decided to have a snark at the evergreen Arianna Huffington, who is setting up a UK version of the Huffington Post, which Young believes to be a “Left-wing political website”. Moreover, he tells that she “is in for a nasty shock”, as if he or anyone else in the UK is likely any time soon to top Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, or the massed ranks of Rupe’s troops at Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse).

And Young states, at the outset, that he will be playing the person, and not the ball, when he declares “there’s the endless store of embarrassing factoids about Arianna herself”. Then, we are treated to the tired and meaningless “champagne socialism” insult, which inevitably serves when the writer has nothing to say. What Young really means is that Arianna is successful, and he is not. It’s straightforward jealousy.

But the unintentionally hilarious part comes when Young extols the virtue of the right leaning part of the blogosphere. His first fave in this genre is Melanie Phillips, who he likes so much that he fails to spell her name correctly. And exactly where Mad Mel fits in to the libertarian firmament, with her irrational authoritarianism, is not clear.

Tobe’s next big blogging beast is occasional VW Golf pilot Paul Staines, who blogs under the alias of Guido Fawkes. Young manages to miss Staines’ spraying 500 notes up the wall betting on David Laws staying in office, his vicious and futile campaign against Foreign Secretary William ‘Ague, and the small matter of much of the Fawkes blog being written by Staines’ tame gofer Henry Cole.

But it is his third pick that takes the biscuit: James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole, who is so keen to sneer at his opponents, peppering his posts with routine abuse, but who, when showed up by Paul Nurse recently, was soon squealing like a pig who has just discovered he is in the Robirch factory.

And Young tops even this lameness by declaring “A right-wing meteor bursts into the blogosphere every six months or so”. Perhaps he could tell Iain Dale of his discovery: Dale, who knows a thing or two about blogs and blogging, observed recently “The Right Wing Blogosphere Needs New Blood”. He stressed “The comparative decline of the right ... is because there has been no new blood”.

The only “nasty shock” Arianna Huffington will get from Toby Young is if he actually turns up. And on the basis of his latest post, that’s doubtful.

Winter Bluster

As I found out back in November 2009 while on an extended sojourn on the Algarve, the market for winter breaks is not what it used to be. And that extends into southern Spain as well, so the visitor count at Malaga and Alicante airports suffers along with that at Faro.

This means airlines serving these destinations have to either look elsewhere to fill their planes – and, for the package holiday crowd, that includes longer haul destinations – or taking some capacity out of their fleets for those few weeks before the winter sports season kicks off.

So far, so logical, but this week has seen another way in which this off season can be exploited: the twin sports of industrial bullying and corporate mardy strop throwing may be used to pass the time. And there is no company more skilled in both than our old friends at Ryanair, the Millwall of air carriers (everybody hates us and we don’t care).

Alicante airport has opened a new terminal. For many travellers this will be seen as A Good Thing, but not by Scrooge Of The Skies Michael O’Leary, who has called it “unnecessary”, which is at least a change from “bah humbug”. What O’Leary really dislikes, though, is that the new terminal uses airbridges. These are anathema to Ryanair, because, er, O’Leary says so.

He believes it will impact on timekeeping, and that is more important to him than providing a decent environment for his long suffering passengers. His argument is, roughly, that no airport should expand beyond a size where punters can walk between aircraft and terminal. Alicante airport is therefore bad to try so to do.

So Ryanair has very publicly told that it is taking nine of its eleven Alicante based aircraft away at the end of October 2011, closing many routes and reducing frequencies on others. This blatant act of bullying is then blamed on Alicante airport, who are accused of, er, bullying.

The fact of the matter is that Ryanair can’t get the loadings needed to make basing the planes at Alicante worthwhile. The increase in charges – which, as the airport points out [text in Castellano], is 32 cents per passenger at a site that is only charging around half of comparable UK airfields – could easily be absorbed by the carrier, or passed on to punters, the usual Ryanair preferred solution.

Ryanair will be back at Alicante next summer. If they don’t show up, then someone else will take their place. As I pointed out recently, this is just another paper tiger.

Rally For Rich Folks

At the end of last month, around half a million attended the March For The Alternative in London. And, despite the attempt by the “Black Bloc” to turn parts of the capital violent, that march passed off peacefully and showed that there are many out there who are concerned about the nature and scale of upcoming spending cuts.

This appetite for marches and rallies has now spread to the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) and those of like mind in and around the blogosphere: a Rally Against Debt will be held on May 14, and the TPA are publicising it, telling that this will be a chance for the “silent majority” to speak up.

Well, nobody likes debt hanging round their necks, so the naming of the rally at first sounds appealing. However – and there is invariably a however whenever the TPA get involved – this rally is not just “against debt”. It has a positive side, too: it is for something. And that something is more spending cuts.

So the TPA, none of whom make any useful contribution to the country’s economic activity, and their motley band of followers are demonstrating to demand that lots more people lose their jobs. Who on earth is going to march in support of that proposition?

Apart from the TPA, who I’m sure have all volunteered to take part (because these are folks who don’t do compulsion, oh no), there may be a few similarly minded MPs and the odd MEP (guess who) from the Tory fringe. Some from the blogosphere have indicated their possible attendance.

And that may be that, unless the TPA really does have the grassroots it claims. All those overmonied City types will have to overcome the natural desire to properly sleep off the previous night’s demonstration of their “work hard and play hard” ethic. Those who back lobby groups like the TPA will be keeping well out of the limelight. And there is at least one competing rally on the same day.

I’m seriously considering checking what odds I can get on the Rally Against Debt failing to muster 10,000 supporters. With a side bet on it not even garnering 5,000. Even in the North West, the entrepreneurial spirit burns brightly, and I’m sure the TPA will approve.

I’m Sorry, Mika’s Just Out

Live television has its drawbacks, but in the world of the rolling news cycle, live is how it usually has to be. So when someone has a bout of what is known in the UK as “corpsing”, it can’t be edited out. And if it’s one of the two presenters, who just happens to sit right next to the co-presenter, there’s no cutting away.

So when Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, had an inadvertent reaction to a spoof piece on GOP favourite “Dick” Cheney on yesterday’s edition of the show, it was not only live, but complete: co-presenter Joe Scarborough sits next to Mika, with the guests (including nonplussed looking “Last Word” host Lawrence O’Donnell) around the same table.

How do we not get this kind of thing in the UK? Maybe it’s that legendary BBC reserve, or Adrian Chiles being relentlessly downbeat.

[Morning Joe, apropos of nothing much, was the morning show Nick Clegg appeared on during a recent Stateside trip. Joe and Mika spared him any unscripted moments]

Murdoch Is Served (32)

For a “non story”, Phonehackgate is doing rather well: today there have been two arrests, both connected to the Screws. Ian Edmondson, sacked recently from his job as the paper’s news editor, and current chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck volunteered their appearance at police stations of their choice earlier today.

The charges, “conspiracy to intercept communications ... and unlawful interception of voicemail messages”, are most definitely relevant to the investigation into the activities of those hired by the Screws to get information, apparently by whatever means, on a variety of Slebs and royals. And, just to underline the seriousness of the matter, both are having their houses searched.

It seems that the police are now taking the affair seriously enough to examine the possibility that further prosecutions may be brought: to many others, that would seem a statement of the blindingly obvious, given the increasing number of those ready to take action against the Met. So these developments in “Operation Weeting” will no doubt receive appropriate coverage in the press.

Predictably, the Guardian, given the paper’s pursuit of the case, has the story. The Independent, too, is covering developments. But what of the rest of the press? Well, things have moved on since the early days of Phonehackgate, and now both the Maily Telegraph and Daily Mail have joined the ranks of those taking the matter seriously.

Although the Desmond press can be excused – they’ll not get round to it until tomorrow, as it’s not a Euro-frightener – that still leaves Rupe and his Troops. But a look at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun shows no trace of the story, with Chris Moyles’ future apparently more important.

So now the Murdoch press, rather than being in a majority in ignoring Phonehackgate, is now in a very small minority. But there are no doubt a few relentlessly clueless members of the right leaning blogosphere to keep Rupe and his Troops company, so that’s all right, then.

Fat Dick And The Stats Shuffle

He gets paid – note that I do not use the term “earned” – close to a million notes a year, yet Fat Dick Littlejohn does little more than churn out the same stream of bigotry, backed up with next to zero research, week in week out in the Daily Mail. Today’s rant, this time against lawyers, is no different.

Dick uses as the sum total of his investigation a piece in Monday’s edition of his own paper, in which fellow hack Steve Doughty takes figures from the annual Law Society survey of the legal profession, and links the increased number of solicitors in recent years to legal aid, although no link is shown.

Statistics, Guv? Couldn't make 'em up

Doughty, as befits a Dacre hack, does not dwell on mere analysis, so we don’t know what the massed ranks of solicitors are working on. We are merely told to focus on that number being larger than the number of police officers. And Littlejohn falls into line, telling that the increased number of lawyers between 2000 and 2010 was “when Labour’s legislation mill was working full tilt”.

What Fat Dick doesn’t do, of course, is to put the increase into any context other than that which serves his rant. Fortunately, the Law Society figures are freely available, so we can see how solicitor numbers vary over time. In the decade highlighted by Littlejohn, their numbers rose by 43.6%, but in the decade 1990 to 2000, the rise in numbers was far higher, at 55%.

So what is driving the rise in solicitor numbers? Well, there is a hint in Fat Dick’s article, where he talks of the “trusted family solicitor who ... dabbles in a little light conveyancing”: the number of owner occupiers in England rose from 1981 to 1999 by 42.3%, as the owner occupation rate has risen from 43% in 1961 to 68% in 2008.

But, for a Daily Mail hack, linking rising solicitor numbers to the behaviour of the property market would never do. And nor would linking the 70% rise in the number of lawyers used by local Government over the past decade to anything other than supposed town hall profligacy.

Except that here, too, there is a more rational explanation: legal expertise is being bought in when required, rather than keep lawyers on full time. A little Googling brings us to the website of interim recruitment specialists Law Absolute, who tell that “Authorities are hiring high quality legal professionals on a temporary and contract basis to work on specific projects”.

Facts, eh? Terrible things for the likes of Fat Dick Littlejohn – after all, they might get in the way of his latest rant which, although it starts with a quote from Shakespeare, is never going to turn into Tolstoy in the retelling.

Jezza And The Excess

You can always tell when the Daily Mail is jealous of other papers’ exclusives – they rehash them and re-publish with the minimum of attribution. So it was today with the lifting of a Sunday Mirror splash on uncrowned king of Petrolheadery Jeremy Clarkson, which fits the Dacre righteousness agenda like a glove.

Jezza is alleged to be having an affair with – shock horror – a woman who is not his wife. And the woman in question is otherwise single, with the clincher that she is blonde. Er, big deal. If Clarkson had been a relentless peddler of family values in the style of the Mail’s legendarily foul mouthed editor, there may have been a story in this, but he isn’t, so there ain’t one.

There’s far more to pick over in the itinerary of the Top Gear Live tour which Jezza and his pals James May and Richard Hammond have been presenting around the world recently. You want shameless excess? Five hundred quid a night hotel in Oslo, two cars just to take three presenters to a nearby convention centre, five star hotel in Brisbane, one thousand quid a night hotel in Surfers’ Paradise, and then all the bar and restaurant bills – now that’s really bad.

Small wonder the Beeb are stressing that the tour was not billed to them and not funded by license payers’ cash at all. And Clarkson openly parading his smoking habit, too. It’s too tacky for words.

And to make matters worse, the Super Soaraway Currant Bun has run a lame spoiler to try and cover the Mirror story while promoting Jezza – one of their own columnists. That’s doubly tacky.

[UPDATE April 5: the Express has now joined in, and predictably, they are a day behind everybody else. Bizarrely, the piece tells of Jezza "pictured yesterday on holiday in the Caribbean with ... his wife", but uses a stock photo of Clarkson instead. Not that the Desmond press would sink to lifting copy from the previous day's editions of their competitors, or be too tight to stump up for photos - perish the thought!]

The Laws Don’t Work – And Neither Does Mel

The presence of ostensibly illegal drugs on our streets has taxed politicians and law enforcement agencies for decades, and as I noted a while ago, the “war on drugs”, for all the resources thrown at it, succeeds in taking very little of these substances off those streets. No matter how “tough” the policy, the drugs get through.

This, though, has not permeated the dunghill that is Grubstreet, where Daily Mail hack “Mad” Melanie Phillips is today on the warpath against what she perceives as the undue leniency of the justice system towards those caught supplying illegal drugs. Mel wants to lock dealers up – all of them. The thought does not enter that this approach does not work: someone else will take the place of whoever is banged up.

And if the Phillips agenda were to be followed, there would need to be a serious expansion of prison places. Right now, this is just over 87,000. If everyone convicted of Possession With Intent To Supply, Unlawful Supply, Unlawful Production, or Unlawful Import/Export (1998 figures) were imprisoned, around 21,000 prison places would be required.

According to this sample article from the Maily Telegraph (which Mel could have also referenced, had she been bothered), around half of convicted dealers were imprisoned in 2007. So Mel’s approach would need another ten and a half thousand prison places. I do hope she and her legendarily foul mouthed editor have their cheque books at the ready.

Moreover, as I pointed out at the time of the C4 documentary Our Drugs War, even with all the law enforcement resources that the UK throws at this problem, the amount of illegal drugs that fails to get through is, approximately, all of 1% of the total. Making drugs illegal hands an entire industry – growth and harvesting, packaging, shipping, distribution and of course regulation – to organised criminality.

Not to mention quality control, or the complete lack of it: the reason so many of these drugs are deadly is because the whole trade runs without any kind of proper oversight. This, of course, does not trouble Melanie Phillips, and neither does the role of her preferred platform in stopping any kind of grown-up and rational debate on the subject.

When Mad Mel says “the actual problem is a loss of moral compass among those responsible”, she fails to understand that she too is responsible, and that her moral compass is the one that is lacking, as she and her fellow Mail hacks continue to shout down those who would address the issue, preferring instead to indulge in cowardly and pointless whingeing.

Express Departure – From The Stage?

There have been rumours going the rounds for some weeks now that Richard Desmond is “considering his options” on the future of his print titles – that’s the Express and Star newspapers and OK! Magazine, for starters. All are apparently profitable, despite the steady loss of readership, but if today’s Maily Telegraph is to be believed, Desmond is talking to the owners of the Daily Mail about a merger.

On the face of it, this looks far-fetched: the Daily Mail left the Express behind in the circulation war long ago, and now outsells it by well over three to one. The Daily Star titles are so downmarket that they would fit better with the Super Soaraway Currant Bun, but then, Rupe and Junior’s top tab is also well out of sight in the sales stakes.

What future for the Westferry presses?

But Desmond, as CJ might have reminded Reggie Perrin, did not get where he is today without knowing when the time was right to sell up and move on. The Express and Star may be profitable, but this has come at the price of cutting staff to a level where, as Richard Peppiatt revealed when he very publicly resigned from the paper recently, the Star now has only one staff reporter outside London.

Moreover, as this blog has shown, much of the Express’ content comes from the previous day’s editions of other papers. Much also comes from reheated press releases, or depends on rent-a-quote lobby groups and politicians. The amount of advertising on the Express website has reached saturation – and maybe desperation – point.

The last straw for Desmond may be the potential perfect storm: falling circulation, falling advertising revenues, and the end of the road for cutting staff costs. It’s possible that the last of these has already occurred, and advertising income will surely fall as circulation declines.

And, as I noted the other day, the Daily Express lost 7.33% of readers in the year to February 2011, with the Daily Star losing a more worrying 10.62%. Worst of all was the loss of sales by OK! Magazine in the second half of 2010 – 23.4%. Desmond may have done his sums and concluded that he would be best to get out while the going is still good.

If Des really is getting out of the newspaper business, look for the Express titles to go first and be swallowed up by the Mail, with the Daily Star ones remaining for a few months longer before either Sun or Mirror takes them on. And the hacks? As if Des will be fussed: there’s only one beneficiary where he’s concerned.

More and bigger paydays for Des personally now? That’ll be another Benchmark Of Excellence.

Gary Hart’s Legacy

In 1993, a kerosene tanker veered off the M56 motorway at the point where the road crossed over the West Coast Main Line (WCML), ending up on the railway tracks. There was an intense fire. Fortunately there were no trains in the vicinity, and the tanker bringing down the overhead wires tripped circuit breakers, which reverted all nearby signals to danger.

Eight years later across on the East Coast Main Line (ECML), another instance of a road vehicle involving the railway in its accident had less fortunate consequences. Gary Hart, from Strubby in Lincolnshire, was at the wheel of his Land Rover, heading west along the M62 with a loaded trailer. It was just after 0600 hours, and Hart had not slept the previous night.

Hart has always denied falling asleep at the wheel, but it is not easy to otherwise explain why his Land Rover went off the carriageway, down an embankment, and onto the ECML, coming to rest fouling the southbound track. Soon afterwards, as Hart was talking to the emergency operator, the 0445 Newcastle to London train, travelling at around the line speed of 125mph, struck the Land Rover.

The leading vehicle of the train was derailed, and ultimately it collided with a northbound freight train. Six passengers and four servants of the railway lost their lives. Hart was convicted on ten counts of causing death by dangerous driving and was sentenced to five years in jail.

A little extra protection - for the railway

In the years since this collision, measures have been taken to try and reduce the possibility of more road users involving the railway in their accidents. Although the barrier at the point where the M62 crossed the ECML extended for 47 metres beyond the overbridge, this was lengthened further. The practice was extended to other motorways and trunk routes. The DfT’s approach has been well documented.

Most recently, measures to protect rail routes have come to second string “A” roads and even local routes subject to 30mph speed limits. This photo shows a recent installation of barriers between carriageway and pavement at Bridge 6, north of Crewe, where the B5076 crosses the WCML. The barriers give sufficient protection to the bridge parapets to stop their dislocation by a vehicle impact – which could cause a potentially deadly fall onto the railway below.

Further north, where the A530 crosses the railway at Minshull Vernon, the barriers are yet more substantial, and extend well beyond the bridge parapets, but then, the road here is subject only to the national speed limit of 60mph. Such measures won’t stop the next Gary Hart setting out on a 140 mile drive without a good night’s sleep, but they may help the railway continue its recent excellent safety record.

That’s just one passenger fatality in the last six years.

Death Of A Roadhouse

Public houses across the UK are closing down: in January 2009, one estimate was “six a day”, which makes 42 a week. By July that year, another survey had the weekly closure rate up at 52. And no class of pub is more vulnerable and visible than roadhouses, large and imposing hostelries built during the late 1800s and early 1900s to serve new housing estates and tap passing trade.

Beyond last orders: the Cross Keys

In Crewe, The Earl, a roadhouse pub on Nantwich Road, was lost recently when its owners sold out to supermarket chain Aldi, and now The Cross Keys, overlooking a roundabout north of the town centre, has gone, this latter to enable developers Taylor Wimpey to create an entrance road to a new housing estate.

Open land - the developer's prize

Sadly, the Cross Keys was doubly vulnerable: it had been closed last year, so its existence was more than likely marginal, and development of the open space to the north of Remer Street was always a likelihood – the only problem with a new housing development was getting access.

Illustration from Taylor Wimpey

As can be seen from the illustration provided by Taylor Wimpey, the new estate would have two entrances, but the main one (left centre) is from the roundabout that the Cross Keys at present overlooks. It’s also clear that the open space behind Remer Street is big enough for around 650 new houses, as well as a replacement pub and a community store.

Last look before demolition

And so the world moves on: cheap supermarket beer, less passing trade, and competition have done for the Cross Keys. The new housing estate will provide jobs for construction workers, and shoppers for Crewe town centre, which certainly needs them.

Thus the way of the world.

Oh Brother – What A Star!

The increasingly shameless plugging of one part of Richard Desmond’s empire by another has been taken up several notches by the Daily Star Sunday today, the occasion being the supposedly imminent signing of an agreement to bring the Big Brother franchise to Channel 5.

So the paper’s front cover, with its headline “Summer Of Bruv” (along with a cheap attempt to garner readers from the newly defunct Sunday Sport) is no surprise. What may cause a few raised eyebrows is the follow-up “Celeb Big Brother line-up REVEALED”, especially given that it is not.

Under the “exclusive” by-line of Susan Hill, all that Star readers get is a sack full of speculation over who may (or may not) appear in a summer edition of the show. At first it all looks like a done deal, as readers are told “Channel 5 bosses [have] lined up the hottest ever hit list of 12 celebs for the all-star version of the show”.

So that’s a definite, then? Well, no it isn’t: we are then told that the deeply unsavoury Mohamed “you can call me Al” Fayed is “top of the wanted list”. So the old Fugger hasn’t been signed up, and unless he really is desperate for the cash, he won’t be doing so.

Likewise Charlie Sheen, who is supposedly going to be the subject of a “big-money offer” (“big-money”? Richard Desmond? Yeah, right). Other names who can do without the attention of Dirty Des’ forthcoming new acquisition are football pundit Andy Gray, the evergreen Joanna Lumley, occasional royal love interest Chelsy Davy, boxer Ricky Hatton, and rapper Tinie Tempah.

Which leaves a mix of z-listers from the world of formula pop, reality TV, Aussie soap, and those like Peaches Geldof, who is famous for being herself personally now. Who knows, if Channel 5 can provide a big enough pile of Snow, they might even get Tara Palmer-Tomkinson off the streets for a few weeks.

A list of Slebs lower than Z? That’ll be another Benchmark Of Excellence.

Calling Their Bluff Across Europe

The market for “low cost” airline travel grew strongly from the end of the 90s until very recently. Established “flag carrier” airlines lost market share as punters deserted them for far cheaper alternatives. But then came a recession, all those extra charges for things like checking in and baggage, and the pushing back from “full price” carriers through better publicity, and the advent of Opodo.

A new reality hit the low cost airlines, and that reality was that there was very little more expansion to be done in a marketplace that was almost saturated. And there was little point in trying to play airports off against one another, if the only casualty was the airline doing the playing. Belatedly realising that their bluff was being called, whatever the rhetoric, have been our old friends at Ryanair, the Millwall of air carriers (everybody hates us and we don’t care).

The old Ryanair tactic of bullying airports into lowering handling fees might have worked at smaller airports across France, but it didn’t work at Manchester, where Michael O’Leary’s finest flounced out in 2009, only to see rivals such as EasyJet, BMIBaby and Jet2 stay put, along with the charter boys. Ryanair bowed to the inevitable and returned to Manchester last January.

It was more of the same at Hahn, which is not near Frankfurt am Main: late last year, in an attempt to stop the German Government imposing a passenger levy of 8 Euro a time, Ryanair very publicly told how they would reduce their presence at Hahn, blaming what they called a “tourist tax”, rather than allowing the thought to enter that punters would rather fly from an airport that is near Frankfurt, rather than one that pretends to be.

Then, last month, Ryanair made great play of how the Irish Government was losing “high [sic] paid engineering jobs” as it opened its latest maintenance facility at ... Hahn. And there was a similar story at Marseille, after the announcement that Ryanair would close 13 routes from that airport from January 2011, leaving only ten routes remaining.

A check of the carrier’s route map right now reveals that, in the Ryanair world, withdrawing 13 routes and leaving only ten means that there are a total of, er, 25 routes from Marseille.

Michael O’Leary and his pals at Ryanair talk tough, but the new reality is that this is just another paper tiger.

Telegraph – They Have A Problem

Last Wednesday, I noted that the Maily Telegraph was homing in on a five minute comment piece by author Zadie Smith (her chosen subject being library closures) on the previous day’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Much righteous indignation was expended by trying to portray the item as some kind of catch-all demonstration of bias, but sadly, no other part of the Fourth Estate was interested.

No other paper has taken up the Telegraph’s specific accusation of bias, not even the Daily Mail: all that has come from the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre has been a footnote to a Richard Kay column. No mention has been made of this supposedly major event in the Express or Daily Star, or even the Super Soaraway Currant Bun.

Even those titles which might have been expected to counter the Telegraph attack, the Independent and Guardian, have hardly mentioned Ms Smith’s comment: neither has covered the attempt to make a story of it. So it might be thought that the Telegraph and its hacks might give up and chase after some real news, rather than trying to invent headlines where none exist.

But that thought would be misplaced: yesterday afternoon, the ridiculous Simon Heffer joined the fray – or perhaps he was caused to join it – with a typically ill-informed rant about local Government where he pinned the blame for library closures on “mischievous Leftist councils”. The Hefferlump then attacked “diversity officers” and “lesbian outreach workers” to show that he knows even less than the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance about the subject.

Sadly, this fine example of blowhard bluster, along with its sneering tone – Heffer calling Zadie Smith “Miss”, for instance – was equally ineffective in persuading anyone else to join the cause. So today the baton has been passed to the loathsome Toby Young, who kicks off his own rant by describing Ms Smith’s comment piece as “a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party”, which may surprise anyone at the Labour Party.

Young, in an offering that is tediously and pretentiously long, engages in a superb piece of whataboutery by insisting that “the cuts” are only in the order of 3%. He therefore fails to address the 4.4% average across local Government in 2011-12 alone, with some councils facing an 8.9% cut. Added to this are cuts in the central Government “formula” grant averaging 9.9% in 2011-12 and 7.3% in 2012-13. That adds up to rather more than 3%.

Quite why the Telegraph is continuing with its attempt to prop up this attack on the Beeb is unclear. No-one else is joining in, the attacks are increasingly ineffective, and show how little most folks care about the issue.

Bad English, Bad Excuses

The gulf between apparently cheap airfares and the amount you end up paying is something we all know of, and complain about, but usually accept. But the plainly larcenous behaviour of some airlines in levying credit and debit card charges has now caused the folks at Which? to cry foul. And in their sights is Ryanair, the Millwall of air carriers (everybody hates us and we don’t care).

Which? makes the not unreasonable observation that a debit card transaction costs the seller around 20 pence, an amount that should be possible to absorb as part of that transaction. But carriers like Ryanair charge an additional £5 per passenger per sector for these cards, so for that “family of four” on a return trip they rake in £40, rather than 20p, a mark-up of 200 times the cost.

So Which? has made what is called a “super complaint” about this practice, which it asserts is making it difficult for consumers to make informed price comparisons, and therefore interfering in the working of this particular market. Moreover, they point out that alternatives not attracting the extra cost, such as prepaid cards, also entail an additional charge.

But what has irked Ryanair is the call for the practice to be declared illegal. So, hardly had the “super complaint” been submitted than the carrier was out of its corner with fists flying: “Ryanair does not impose any debit or credit card fee” thundered the press release. The charge, it was explained, is a “discretionary admin fee”.

How not to win friends ...

The thought might enter that something looking like a duck, walking like a duck and quacking like a duck may indeed be a duck – rather like something looking like a debit card fee, and being charged as one. And a read through of the Ryanair press release shows an incoherent, ranting tone, a lame attempt at humour – and appallingly bad English.

Perhaps the carrier’s spokesman typed it with his feet – he certainly shows every sign of putting at least one of them in his mouth.

[The Ryanair press release has been included as some readers may not have otherwise appreciated the spokesman’s ranting]

Richard Desmond – The Shrinking Empire

The Daily and Sunday Express are losing readers: this is not new news, and the decline has been going on for decades, ever since the late 1940s when the Daily Express peaked at a daily circulation of around four million. What is also happening is that other titles in Richard Desmond’s stable are losing readers even faster.

In the year to February 2011, the Daily Express registered a circulation of just over 623,600 copies. This was a year-on-year fall of 7.33%. But during the same period, the Daily Star, the Express’ relentlessly downmarket cousin, recorded a figure of just under 718,500, and a rather larger year-on-year fall of 10.62%.

Very tired news-z-z-z

But there is always the banker that is sleb goss repository OK! Magazine to fall back on, isn’t there? Well, maybe not, as that title outdid the decline in the women’s magazine sector during the second half of last year. The average fall in that sector of 8.4% was small beer compared to a whopping 23.4% for OK!

By comparison, rival Hello! Magazine saw its circulation dip a mere 0.8%. So Des’ goss flagship is no longer selling half as much again as its rival, but just 10% more. Much more of a decline and Hello! will be in front. Small wonder that Des and his pals are using Channel 5, the mag, and the papers to plug one another.

Sinking figures and tired news all round? That’ll be another Benchmark Of Excellence.

April Fools – Not What They Used To Be

It’s the first morning of April. You know what’s coming, whether from family and friends, or any part of the media. So, what’s on offer this year? Well, there are some amusing April Fools scattered around the papers, but the problem is, they’re a teensy bit obvious.

Take the Maily Telegraph example, with its “Labour memo: celebrate Ed Miliband’s wedding with street party” headline, another duty for Harry Wallop (crazy name, crazy guy!?!). Any thought that readers might suspend disbelief is swept away by the daft idea that Labour activists would do “trifles and bunting”. One to wallop into touch.

The Dacre hackery over at the Daily Mail has no truck with mere politicians, but the duff story is no less obvious: the piece, “Potato Earth: Gravity satellite reveals what our planet REALLY looks like”, which suggests that gravity “varies” on different parts of the planet, has some colourful illustrations, but it’s obvious codology.

The Super Soaraway Currant Bun tries a little humour with the equally obvious “Police quiz boy, 13, over assault with marshmallow”, but the unintentional laughs come from the comments, including the priceless “no, this is not an April Fools”. Fraid it is, folks. Must try harder.

A much better effort has been made by the Guardian, with its sudden apparent conversion to supporting the royals. The “Royal Wedding Live” piece includes a spoof “diary” from the Duke of Edinburgh, which really is funny. But the paper’s editorial line is well enough known to figure out that this story is another for the morning of April the First, and no further.

Maybe it’s because we know what’s coming that April Fool stories seem less good as the years go by, or maybe the bar was raised so high by the 1957 BBC Panorama “spaghetti harvest” that nobody is going to pull a credible stunt in the future, and especially in a mere newspaper.