The Ice Planet

SUNDAY Because I am a lovely person I got up early and got us a breakfast from starbucks -just pastries and tea really. I ordered a macchiato for Cocky but it turns out that Starbucks’ macchiatos are not like anyone else’s and are a sort of caramel coffee dessert rather than the usual espresso with [...]

by admin at July 02, 2009 09:17 AM

Once cast as part of the 'axis of evil', Iranians have shown they are real people, not collateral damage in waiting Published in the Guardian...

July 01, 2009 08:20 AM

by Nick Cohen at June 29, 2009 09:03 AM

Daily Mail, 29 June 2009

For weeks now, Britain has been consumed by a crisis over public sector excess. Revelations of MPs flipping allowances and claiming for duck-houses have changed the course of politics. With forecasts of savage cuts ahead, an age of austerity has dawned.

Could someone please tell the BBC?

The five-day annual Glastonbury rock festival and mud-fest finished last night. The BBC sent more than 400 people to cover it at an estimated cost of £1.5 million.

Yes, you read that right: 400 –comprising 125 staff and 150 freelancers working as presenters, producers, directors or technical crew, plus about 130 short-term contractors hired by the BBC to provide rigging, security and other support.

To be fair, a huge outside broadcast event such as this can’t be covered with a handful of staff. But 400-plus? Was there not inevitably a vast amount of duplication?

In its defence, the BBC says it broadcast some 117 hours of television coverage of the festival, plus more than 60 hours of radio output.

To which one can only ask –why? Glastonbury might be popular among the young, along with a bunch of superannuated hippies vicariously revisiting their lost adolescence, but it hardly caused the nation to cancel its social engagements en masse in order to sit at home glued to the telly.

The BBC says that last year’s festival broadcasts attracted 14 million TV viewers and six million radio listeners. But that was over several days. To put it into context, some 12 million people tuned into the Wimbledon men’s final last year, lasting one afternoon.

It’s hard not to conclude that Glastonbury — or ‘Glasto’ as various BBC presenters knowingly call it — is an event with particular appeal for those of a certain age who were teenagers in the Sixties and Seventies. Which, by an amazing coincidence, just happens to be the age of many senior BBC executives.

It’s also hard not to conclude that it was a bit of a junket for those senior BBC executives reported to have been given free Glastonbury passes. Were these also vital to the broadcasting of this event?

This is but the latest example of how the BBC flings public money around. Last year, it sent no fewer than 437 people to cover the Beijing Olympics — 124 more than were actually in the British Olympic team. Similarly, last year’s U.S. presidential election was covered by 175 BBC staff.

Sure, the BBC has many more outlets than, say, ITN or Sky. But the duplication of effort between programmes seemed to owe more to the prospect of a giant jolly for equally giant egos than to the requirements of journalism.

It’s the apparent contempt shown to the public that causes such offence. That’s why the recent revelations of the lavish pay and expenses for BBC executives have caused such outrage.

These showed that the Director-General, Mark Thompson, receives a basic salary of £647,000 (£816,000 last year with bonuses) and that no fewer than 47 BBC executives were paid more than the Prime Minister’s salary of £195,000.

Documents extracted from the BBC also revealed that it had paid £364,000 in expenses to its top 50 executives over the past five years — including, bizarrely, a response to a claim for £500 by the (equally bizarrely styled) Director of Vision for the cost of her stolen handbag.

Only half this amount was actually paid — but why should the Director of Vision have been paid anything at all? Why on earth should the licence-fee payer stump up for her handbag?

To cap it all, since 2005 the Corporation has spent more than £250,000 contesting freedom of information requests — in other words, actually charging the public for trying to keep secret how it spends the public’s money.

And just like our corrupt MPs, the BBC denies flatly that it has done anything wrong. Mark Thompson seeks to justify his enormous salary by claiming he could get more than three times as much in the private sector. What arrogance.

With whom, precisely, is he comparing himself? Are his own skills as great and as rare as this unknown fabulous creature on around £2 million per year? And is he really saying that his job is four times as important as the Prime Minister’s?

In any event, the comparison is absurd. There is no equivalent to the Director-General of the BBC because there is no valid comparison with the private sector.

The BBC provides job security and a gold-plated pension. In the private sector, if you screw up, you are shown the door. In the BBC, you will probably get promoted.

Just as egregiously, Mr Thompson also defended his own expenses claim of £ 2,236.90 to fly his family home from their holiday in Italy when he had to return to deal with the scandal over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. Given that his family would otherwise be abandoned, he said, it was ‘rather understandable’ they felt they should come back, too.

Well no, actually, it’s not understandable at all. If he had been working in that private sector he cites to justify his salary and had returned from holiday to deal with a crisis on his watch, the idea that his company would also pay his family’s fare is, to put it mildly, fanciful.

And to expect the hapless licence-fee payer to pick up the tab for the inconvenience to the Thompson household as a result of the abuse of the licence-fee in hiring the foul-mouthed Ross and Brand in the first place — and furthermore paying Ross £6 million a year for the privilege of degrading public service broadcasting — takes the proverbial biscuit.

I should declare a mild interest in all this, because I regularly take the BBC’s (extremely modest) shilling for appearances of one kind or another. I am also aware that the BBC plays a unique and historically vital role in British public life.

And I also know that a very large number of BBC employees survive on very low salaries and contracts with no job security, let alone holiday travel perks. What must they be making of this gold-plated gravy train trundling merrily along above their heads?

What so upsets people about the attitude by MPs and the BBC is that they seem to think the money being funnelled into their pockets is somehow nothing to do with the public, who are given no choice but to pay up.

And it’s not even as if the public is getting value for that money, with the BBC producing so little of any creative brilliance and so much puerile dross, swearing and smut.

Instead, the money is paying for legions of endlessly duplicating middle managers or senior executives with absurd non-job descriptions such as Head of Diversity or Head of Compliance.

As David Elstein, the not entirely disinterested former head of Channel Five put it, the whole lot of them could be replaced overnight at half their current cost and no one would notice any change in quality. (Actually, Mr Elstein is wrong: the quality might go up).

The Director of Vision’s handbag is the BBC’s duck-house. The BBC has become so big and bloated that it has lost all sense of what public service and accountability actually mean. And as with Parliament, the public just won’t stand for it any longer. The licence-fee party is over.

by Melanie Phillips at June 29, 2009 07:21 AM

by Nick Cohen at June 28, 2009 10:26 AM

by Nick Cohen at June 26, 2009 04:28 PM

Jewish Chronicle, 26 June 2009

Among American Jews, a degree of ‘buyers’ remorse’ has been detected recently.

Almost 80 per cent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama as President. Those of us who warned that this man would endanger Israel were scorned.

How could that possibly be, said the secular, liberal American Jews. He’s a Democrat, he’s black and he’s pro-abortion. With this triple-lock of unassailable virtue, how can he be bad for Israel? Now some of them are getting an awful feeling that they may have made the biggest misjudgment of their lives.

As the world watched events unfold in Iran, Obama’s double standard over Israel was illuminated in flashing neon lights. How come he’s saying it is wrong for him to tell the Iranians what to do, people asked themselves, when he is dictating to Israel its policy on settlements?

Why was he so concerned not to antagonise the Iranian regime? Was it because he hopes to reach a Grand Bargain which would allow Iran to develop nuclear capability, provided it promises him ever so nicely it would never turn this into weapons — in exchange for which, Israel would be offered up on a plate?

For the past six months, while Obama has been holding out the hand of friendship to Iran, he has been showing Israel a mailed fist.

Why, people asked themselves, was he singling out Iran’s putative victim for the heavy treatment while soft-soaping Tehran? Why had he torn up the Road Map which requires the Palestinians to dismantle their infrastructure of terror before anything else can happen, telling Israel instead that its stubbornness over the settlements was the main impediment to a Palestinian state?

Why didn’t he acknowledge the blindingly obvious — that the Palestinians’ continuing, explicit refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state was the fatal impediment?

And then there was the Cairo shocker of a speech. Even the American Jews could not ignore this. Obama stated falsely that the Jews’ aspiration for a homeland was rooted in the Holocaust and their tragic history.

Airbrushing out both the Jews 3,500-year connection to their ancient homeland and the central place of Jerusalem within the religion, he thus effectively denied that Jews are in Israel as of right.

Sanitising Islam through false claims about its historic achievements and selective and misleading quotation from the Koran, he declared that it was part of his responsibility to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

Why? Did this mean therefore that he would fight against any condemnation of the theologically based Jew-hatred pouring out of the Islamic world, not least in Egypt where he was making this speech?

Did he not have a similar responsibility to fight against the negative stereotypes of Jews or Zionists that are inciting terrorism, war and genocide in the Muslim world?

Through the use of a Koranic reference, he also subtly implied that Jerusalem would become Muslim while stating that it should be home equally to Christians, Muslims and Jews.

And he referred to the region as being where Islam was first revealed. This was a revealing word to choose, implying acknowledgement of divine revelation. ‘Revealed’ is the language of a believer.

None of this proves Obama is really a Muslim. But it does all suggest that America has a pro-Islamist President.

Doubtless as a result of his constant sniping at Israel, the percentage of American voters who say they support Israel has plummeted, according to the Israel Project, from 69 per cent last September to 49 per cent this month.

The US and Israel could be heading for the greatest disagreement between the two countries in the history of their relationship, as Middle East expert Robert Satloff recently told Newsweek.

Even now, though, despite the outbreak of buyers’ remorse, most American Jews still don’t realise what they have done — and probably never will.

by Melanie Phillips at June 26, 2009 03:16 PM

by Nick Cohen at June 26, 2009 11:56 AM

Saturday Alice and Nicky dropped the kitties off at Conifer Lodge Cattery while I attended to the chap who had come to fit the new kitchen. After Alice left for Durham, along with her moth trap cum cat entrancer, I packed for Nicky and Marigold. We intended to travel with hand baggage only so I factored [...]

by admin at June 24, 2009 04:20 PM

The nation watches and either feels its veins bulge with rage or shrugs with resignation, despairing at society's inability to change Published in the Guardian...

June 24, 2009 07:01 AM

Daily Mail, 22 June 2009

So is today the day when Parliament is to be saved? Don’t put money on it.

As the House of Commons chooses a new Speaker in the most important election of the post’s 600-year history, there are still precious few signs that, even after everything that’s happened, MPs really grasp how fundamentally the political landscape has changed.

Or to put it another way, they think that after a few token (and lowly) heads have rolled and a few superficial reforms have been rushed into place, they can carry on stitching-up and ‘redacting’ as normal.

Consider. A new Speaker is necessary because of the astonishing revelations of endemic and institutionalised dishonesty over Parliamentary expenses.

The previous Speaker, Michael Martin, was forced out because not only was he himself tainted by the scandal, but he was also seen as blocking all attempts to clean up Parliament.

The Speaker’s historic role as custodian of Parliament’s integrity is central. It is therefore absolutely essential that MPs elect a replacement who is fit in every respect to undertake the Herculean task of restoring that integrity, and with it the trust of the people.

But look at the candidates to succeed the disgraced Speaker Martin. The front-runner, Margaret Beckett, claimed for almost £11,000 in gardening expenses, including £1,380 for plants.

Last month, she said that a £600 claim for plants for hanging baskets, tubs and planters in 2005, which was rejected by the Commons Fees Office, had been ‘a mistake’ - even though she had made three similar claims between 2001 and 2003.

Mrs Beckett is the favourite for the job only because the shine has come off the previous front-runner, the Conservative MP John Bercow — who twice charged taxpayers for the cost of hiring an accountant to complete his tax return, a breathtakingly brazen rip-off made even more disgraceful since MPs pay no tax on their expenses.

We also learn that Sir Alan Beith, the sole Liberal Democrat candidate, billed taxpayers for his Westminster-based secretary to spend a month in his constituency during the 2005 General Election campaign — an improper muddling of public service and party politics.

Another Tory candidate, Sir Patrick Cormack, claimed expenses for household bills on both his main and second homes.

And Labour candidate Parmjit Dhanda over-claimed on his second home allowance on at least two occasions, charging taxpayers more for mortgage interest than he was charged by his bank.

Meanwhile, the ‘bicycling baronet’ Sir George Young, who is chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee, may not have any expenses fiddles to his name — but he hardly stands out as a reformer, since he refused to insist that MPs’ expenses details should not be blacked out in the farcically ‘redacted’ accounts published last week.

As for John Bercow, his candidacy is a prime example of Westminster’s unparalleled cynicism, since most of his backing comes from Labour MPs whose sole purpose in electing him is to discomfit his fellow Tories who loathe the sight of him.

So much for taking the Speakership seriously. Corruption, yah-boo political games and sordid stitch-ups — aren’t these the very things that have so terminally alienated the public from British political life?

Yet this unsavoury circus is supposed to be all about restoring Parliament’s reputation. Says it all, really, doesn’t it?

The apparently never-ending revelations have made people disgusted not just with individual MPs, but with Parliament itself.

After all, as MPs have unceasingly told us, they virtually had a gun put to their heads by the Fees Office to claim for moats and Mars Bars on the grounds that such claims were an accepted way of bumping up everyone’s pay.

The scandal has firmly cemented in the public mind the already lethal impression that MPs live on another planet from the rest of us and have scant concern or respect for the people they represent.

So whoever is elected Speaker today faces a formidable task in repairing this damage.

Their first task is to introduce a totally transparent expenses system based solely on the need to prevent MPs from being out of pocket in the service of their constituents.

So far, so obvious. But the equally obvious problem needing urgent attention, that MPs are more generally held in such low regard, has provoked all kinds of extremely silly suggestions as various agendas come tumbling out of the closet.

These include a written constitution and electing the House of Lords, or John Bercow’s proposal that MPs should be paid £100,000 a year.

As a reward for bad behaviour and thus hammering the last nail into Parliament’s coffin, this last suggestion could hardly be bettered. And reforming the constitution is to miss the point by a mile. It’s not the constitutional structure that’s inadequate, but the people who operate it.

This low behaviour has a great deal to do with the callowness and low quality of so many MPs. And in large measure, that’s because they have never in their lives done anything other than politics.

They’ve never done a real job, but so often have gone straight from university into working as a researcher for an MP or think-tank and then been selected for a parliamentary seat. How then can they relate to the lives of ordinary people when they have themselves never lived an ordinary life?

And how can they appreciate the value of money, either when it comes to dishing out vast sums to a host of different causes or lining their own pockets?

It would improve the competence and standing of MPs overnight if there was a requirement to have held down a job outside politics for a period of time before they could be elected.

Much of the problem derives from the fact MPs view representing their constituents as a job and expect to be paid accordingly. But it is not. It is a public service.

Being career politicians also makes them so dependent on promotion they are prepared to do anything the party whips want and will never rock the boat.

But what we need above all are independent-minded MPs who will stand up for the people against the party machine. That means they should have jobs outside Parliament, which will give them independence, experience and a broader outlook.

And that means that rather than being paid a higher MPs’ salary, they should be paid less. After all, what are we paying them for?

One of the reasons we are in such a mess is that the state has far too much power over our lives. We need less government, resulting in less interference. And that would mean fewer parliamentary bills and less time MPs need to spend in Parliament.

So who should be the new Speaker? My choice would be Ann Widdecombe. She is squeaky-clean — the lame suggestion that she should not have claimed a newspaper cuttings service on expenses, which she insists was necessary to do her job properly, is absurd.

The great advantage she has over all the other candidates is that she is widely admired by the public — including her political opponents — for her bloody-minded independence, integrity and courage.

Aren’t those the characteristics we expect from Parliament?

She would have no truck with overambitious reforms, but would just crack heads and clean up. In the year she would be in the post, she would probably get more done than all the other candidates put together.

If anyone can save Parliament from itself, surely she can. This is Ann Widdecombe’s moment. Whether Parliament actually wants to be saved is another matter.

by Melanie Phillips at June 22, 2009 09:58 AM

I’m on nights this week and it has been CRAZILY busy. Usually, the East Central is dead by 2am on a week night. This week, I’ve still been juggling a screen full of calls at 5am.

So what do you think is responsible for the increase in call rate? Drunken people enjoying the good weather? Swine flu? No, it’s the pollen count. Our screens are full of young people having “severe difficulty in breathing”, brought on by hayfever. It’s the first time I can remember this happening, and from a Control point of view, it’s hard to tell how serious these calls are. Some people are undoubtedly calling just for bog standard hayfever symptoms, and as a sufferer myself I know how horrible that “pins in eyes, feathers in throat, corks up nose” feeling is, but I wouldn’t call an ambulance from it. On the other hand, in some cases, the hayfever triggers a full blown asthma attack and the patient really does need us.

In other news, our control room is being refurbished at the moment. They are ripping out all the desks and making them point in different directions. This means we keep getting moved around to different rooms, no one knows where any of the other desks are and management have not been seen for several days. The highlight of last night’s shift was finding a big box of Christmas Belgian biscuits in a hidden cupboard when they dismantled the East Central desk. We ate the lot.

by Suzi Brent at June 17, 2009 03:46 PM

Everyone hates corporate buzzwords and boardroom slang. Everyone. Even newborn infants, yet to glimpse the world for the first time or hear anything other than the beating of their mother’s heart are filled with a primal, instinctive dread at the very thought of modern business phrasiology. It is an unspeakable horror, more twisted and vile than anything described in the pages of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu’ mythos.

By far the worst however, by several orders of ghastly magnitude, is the term “singing from the same hymn sheet“. Derived from the slightly less foul but equally forbidden “reading from the same page”, this sickening utterance not only fills the meeting rooms of the English speaking world like a deafening, crackling static, but by introducing hymn sheets to the fray drags Christianity into the fucking equation. Bloody Christianity.

While contemplating this term and the various methods I would employ to dismember any soul foolish enough to use it in my presence, it occurred to me that it would offend me far less if there were a variety of multi-faith equivalents that could be used by, for example, our Islamic chums or those nice Buddhists.

Some examples:

Bellowing from the same minaret

Praying in the direction of the same Mecca

Wearing the same turban

Carefully moving the same earthworm out of our path so we don’t stand on it

Sacrificing at the same altar

Fasting for the same Ramadan

Hallucinating with the same shaman

Taking a pilgrimage to the same Hajj, circling the same Ka’bah seven times, kissing the same Black Stone, running back and forth between the same hills of Al-Safa and Al-Marwah, drinking from the same Zamzam Well, standing in vigil at the same Mount Ararat and throwing stones in the same Devil-stoning ritual.

Take note, international people of business. Take note, or I will punch your stupid heads off.

by rodti at June 17, 2009 10:26 AM

One from the archives here, but since I’ve been neglecting you all a little I thought I’d spoil you rotten by dousing you in this hot spray of sticky liquid fun. The following is an exchange betwixt myself and one scamming Nigerian bastard. I’m afraid I have since lost the images that accompanied the story, but will attempt to convey their content using words.


From: philtom [mailto:philtom@ummah.org]
Sent: Sun 29/08/2004 03:46
To: rodti macleary
Subject: BUSINESS MANAGEMENT & CONCEPT.

OMISORE GEORGE CHAMBERS.
{Legal Practitioners & Corporate Consultants}
Owa Oyibu, George Wilson, Philip Tom, Rudy Douglas
12c Glover Blvd, Johannesburg,
South Africa.
Tel: +27-728832823
philtom@ummah.org

Dear Sir,

REQUIRED: PROXY BUSINESS REPRESENTATIVE.

We would like to develop business relations with you by establishing a trust agreement whereby you shall hold, manage invest and distribute all assets received from us in trust and the proceeds there from, under the terms of the trust agreement.

I am an attorney & consultant to an influential politician, currently a federal minister in the Federal Republic of South Africa who has been able to use his diplomatic status to move the sum of US$18 million overseas (name of country with held until you are ready to do business) and presently deposited in a private security company for safe keeping. These boxes of money were air freighted as artifacts and photographic materials.

My client, because of his present status in government cannot be physically involved in the management of the money; hence this is going by way of proxy and fiduciary agent in order to avoid any probe by the present democratic government of South Africa. I am requesting your assistance as my colleague and learned friend to help secure investment outlets whereby this fund are invested in government treasury bills and bonds and in secure first mortgages supported by your countries real estate and other attractive investment programs available. You should be aware that you and your associate would manage the complete process & escort our fiduciary agent through the various procedures.

If the above is workable for you & your associate, I would be glad to forward our standard discretionary asset management agreement for you to look and make any necessary amendment. If any, this agreement we hope will help to assure the safety of the funds and consolidate the relationship. Prior to handing over the funds to you & your associates, we hope to arrange for a preliminary meeting with you on a neutral ground where the original of the agreement will be signed by you & our fiduciary agent/ me.

To ensure the success of this transaction and guarantee this unique relationship, kindly treat this transaction with utmost secrecy and confidentiality. Send your private telephone and fax numbers to enable us talk on one on one basis. I await your urgent response. Please, contact me only on my private e-mail address: philtom@ummah.org, or telephone numbers respectively for security reasons.

Best regards.

RICHARD TREVOR ESQ.
Principal Partner

—————————————-

From: Hans Vogel [hans@vogelvogelvogel.co.uk]
Sent: Sun 29/08/2004 03:46
To: philtom [mailto:philtom@ummah.org]
Subject: BUSINESS MANAGEMENT & CONCEPT.
Mr Trevor,

Thank you for your email. I am assuming from your location that you received my details from Otto Klemp in Port Elizabeth? I have not seen him for several years but understand he is still working with the development agencies in SA.

I am interested in your proposition but must say I do not fully understand what is expected of me. If you could furnish me with the initial steps required to partake in this investment I would be most grateful.

Regards,

Hans Vogel

—————————————-

Attn: Hans Vogel

Dear Sir,

Thank you very much for the mail and more importantly your contribution towards having a successful investment plan with you. You were absolutely correct about Otto Klemp in Port Elizabeth. He has recommended you highly for this project and we trust that you will not let us down.

Furtherance to our conversation and in response to our proposal in which you indicated your positive disposition towards assisting us, I hereby convey the approvals to work with you and to continue discussions with you. My client was indeed overwhelmed with joy when I informed her of our
discussions. I'd like to specially thank you for offering to assist us actualize this transaction.

However, I will like to take you through the entire steps of this programme. The fund is right now deposited with a Security & Trust Company in South Africa and will be moved prior to your acceptance to receive it on our behalf. We intend to invest the entire fund in your country under your care and management.

Well, I was born on the 20th March, 1950. I was born & bred in South Africa. I studied banking & finance. I have since resigned from the banking sector out of which I excelled very well. I have a Tom Masinga consultancy outfit that is prominent and recognized in South Africa and Africa generally. I'm versely traveled because our clients spans from all over the world.

It is based on my credentials and resumes that my client asked me to develop business relations with you by establishing a trust agreement whereby you shall hold, manage invest and distribute all assets received from us in trust and the proceeds there from, under the terms of the trust agreement. Her interest is in companies with potentials for Rapid growth in long terms, and more importantly, expert with vested interest in real estates and property business.

As soon as we reach a compromise I'd instruct my team of lawyers to draft out a simple power of attorney and the discretionary asset management agreement. I shall fax same to you for endorsement. We shall then arrange a meeting. Can you come to Europe? Prior to handing over the funds to you &
your associates, we hope to arrange for a preliminary meeting with you on a neutral ground where the original of the agreement will be signed by you & our fiduciary agent/ me. If the above is workable for you & your associate, I would be glad to forward our standard discretionary asset management agreement for you to look and make any necessary amendment. If any, this agreement we hope will help to assure the safety of the funds and consolidate the relationship.

In the interim, our fiduciary managers are on standby waiting to take instructions from us for the handover. We would expect a swift and prompt response to facilitate faster completion.

Could you tell me a little bit about yourself? If I’m entrusting so much money into your hands I feel it will be logical to get to know you much better. In this circumstance we are quite desirous, willing and prepared to work with you if you would give us your full and maximum co-operation. For a business of this size we would offer you a total of 15%. We hope you find this convenient.

Please I would like to emphasize the issue of trust and confidentiality which is the hallmark of a business of this magnitude. I do have confidence in your ability to handle this hence my contacting you in the first place.

While we thank you in anticipation of your co-operation, we shall be glad to have a fruitful and rewarding relationship with you and your organization. For further directives please call me on +27-728832823.

Regards,

Yours truly,

DR. TOM PHILIP

—————————————-

Dr Philip,

Thank you for your quick reply. You are quite right that I should introduce myself fully to a potential business partner, so please allow me to do so now.

My name is Hans Vogel, joint company director of Vogel, Vogel and Vogel, a family company established over 80 years ago. My grandfather started the company as a small business in Berlin, Germany, but in the events leading up to and during the Second World War his business blossomed as the controlling government at the time had great demand for his ’specialist’ services.

In 1945 my family left Berlin fearing for our safety as the city fell into Allied hands. It was from there that we fled to Durban in South Africa, myself just a small child at the time, but it was there I was schooled and indeed met my old friend Otto.

As the political climate changed and the needs for our services on a more global scale became apparent I moved to the UK in 1976 with my two brothers, and we have continued trading under the same company name since then.

Our current business turnover has grown constantly over the last several years, and I am now in a position where I can afford to dabble in various capital ventures and opportunist investments.

I find your proposed percentile share of 15% quite acceptable, and look forward to doing business with you. Could you give me an illustration of the expected return amount by your calculations so that I can compare it to my own? I can then work on securing the required funds from our company assets, and will be able to complete the necessary paperwork within a few days.

If a meeting on European soil is possible it would certainly be easier that my travelling to Africa! It would certainly be easier for any meeting to be in the UK at the moment, as my diary is quite full.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Hans Vogel

—————————————-

Attn: Hans Vogel

Dear Sir,

I'd like to thank you for your swift response one more time.

Having accepted our offer I have issued out instructions to my team of lawyers to drafdt out the power of attorney and the discretionary asset management agreement for you to study, endorse and return same back to us for commencement of action.

However, we are interested in working with you in as much as the business you would dabble into has high profit margin and swift turnover. Initially what we thought we wanted to do was venture into real estates, stocks, shares and high yield banking programmes. But since you have a wealth of
knowledge in investment it will do a whole lot of good if you take possession of the funds and invest same under your care and management.

However, I'd like to have your telephone numbers for enhanced communications. In the interim, I shall later today fax to you a copy of my international passport. I'd be honoured if you could do same. Please make your fax numbers available.

I await your response whilst I look forward to a fruitful relationship with
you.

Regards,

Dr. Philip Tom


—————————————-
[I discovered a rather nifty service called YAC which gives you an (07...) mobile number which can also receive faxes. It's free, namely because it charges an extortionate amount to the person calling the number. Any calls can be forwarded to a mobile or landline of your choice. Perfect for my 'special requirements' here...]
—————————————-

Hello again

You can fax the power of attorney to fax number +44 7092 840971. As this is a special fax line solely for the attention of myself and my brothers, please mark the power of attorney with a swastika and your initials in the top right hand corner. This mark should be used in all future correspondence.

I have a number of profitable portfolios in which I intend to invest these monies. They are managed by some close friends of the family back in Germany, and the funds themselves are kept in Swiss accounts. If you are interested in an account with this Swiss bank I would be more than happy to introduce you to them. Their services are very discreet, and membership is quite exclusive.

Kindest regards to you,

Hans Vogel

—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

I have instructed my lawyers to draft out the documents and I'd have it faxed to you tomorrow.

Please I'd like to know specifically what kind of business we are getting into with you. However, I have a netherland Visa, so perhaps we could meet in Amsterdam next week.

—————————————-

Hello again,

I’l look forward to receiving the documents. Will I have to complete anything or is the form pre-populated? Naturally if I have to do any ‘backdoor research’ to get the form completed I’m quite happy to bend over where necessary.

Do not worry about my company – we are quite solvent and well established. We service a very select clientele and provide a unique product. Naturally our clients are keen to remain out of the public eye, but I can assure you we have had nothing but praise from them.

If you are questioning the Swiss banking arrangement please don’t worry about it. I simply thought you may be interested as we have an arrangement with them, but of course I imagine you already have lots of plans for your share of the money. I know I have! If you change your mind just tell me.

Amsterdam might be possible. Travel out of the country is a bit of a no-no at the moment as I am very busy with some new Argentine clients, but flights to Amsterdam from here are only an hour, and I could probably nip across and back in an afternoon. We can finalise any arrangements nearer the time.

Regards,

Hans

—————————————-

Dear Hans,

The arrangement sounds good to me.

However, I'd like to re-emphasize that we are interested in an associate whose wealth of knowledge in investment is overwhelming.

One more time, what kind of business do you wish to venture into on our behalf or you are just interested in obtaining your share of our fund. If the last is the case then we might not be able to work with you since we are not into money launderying.

Please let me know your stand. Let me have your telephone numbers for enhanced communications.

I await your response.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

Tom,

I’m sorry if I’ve given the wrong impression about my intentions in this enterprise. I am naturally interested in the share of the fund that would be mine when the deal is complete, as there is nothing more comforting to a businessman than the knowledge that an asset is secure, but naturally I am also keen to help you invest and grow the collective fund to our mutual benefit. As you will recall I can arrange a secure Swiss banking service for the collective fund or whatever percentage of it you see fit as a ‘base’ from which we can invest elsewhere. The Swiss organisation we bank with have been very good to us since 1945, when my father left sizeable assets in their care. Indeed, these assets have continued to grow in their care and have been the source of my families wealth for decades. If you do not wish to open your own account there I would be happy (upon completion of certain guarantees) to allow you to be added as a named trustee to this account, giving you the freedom to add any further monies and invest accordingly.

Certainly there are other places to keep money safe while ensuring a commanding rate of interest, but I can assure you as a man of no little experience in the financial market that the arrangement we have with them is unequalled.

The number you have already +44 7092 840971 is my personal mobile number, and you can contact me there. If I am with a client do leave a message.

Best wishes,

Hans
—————————————-
[He's not quite a stupid as he looks, and must have had a look at the domain (vogelvogelvogel.co.uk) that I was mailing from. Of course I was way ahead of him and had built a fake website. It's still there today ]
—————————————-

Dear Hans,

I visited your website. I was quite intrigued by your write-up.

However, I shall have the documents delvered tomorrow.

I have concluded arrangements with Diplomats on the delivery of the fund in Amsterdam. Once we meet in Amsterdam next week you shall also take possession of the fund. And based on your new condition I and my client have mutually agreed that we offer to you 10%. Hope you find this ofer fair
enough.

Tuesday will be ideal for the Amsterdam trip. So please make arrangementsand keep me posted.

I await your response.

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

Tom,

I’m not sure how I am placed for Tuesday, and so will check my work calendar tomorrow when I’m back in the office. If you are flying to Europe would it not be easier for you to come to London than going to Amsterdam? I could meet you at the airport. As I’ve said I may not be able to come out to Amsterdam on Tuesday, but I’ll find out if this is your only possible destination for some reason.

I am not sure I understand the change in the shared pot from 15% to 10% – could you explain why this change has been made? I really require concrete figures before I can commit.

In the meantime, I will look forward to the fax tomorrow.

Hans

—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

Please confirm receipt of the faxes sent to your mail box.

I await your response.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

I have received both faxes, thank you. Do you want me to sign them and fax a copy back to you? I am in meetings for most of today so I will reply to any emails later.

I would also like clarification of the percentage share we will settling on, prior to arranging a meeting. I do not want this to go wrong, and would like assurances from you that this will run smoothly. Most importantly I must not fail the honour of my dead father, Obergruppensfuhrer Ernst Rohm-Vogel. Help me make him proud of me for once, instead of the foolish disappointment I was as a child. You surely understand my motivations?

Regards,

Hans

—————————————-

Dr Phil,

Upon inspection of the documents I notice you have not marked them with the symbol I asked you to. I must insist that you perform this one courtesy to me, as a mark of trust.

If possible, please fax the documents again with an initialled swastika in the top right corner of each page,

Thank you

Hans

—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

Thanks for acknowledging receipt of the faxes. i tried to call you though but there was no response.

I'm indeed glad that the agreement sooths you. I have concluded arrangements that will be arriving in London with the funds. But first I'd like to know what part of Uk you are situated in. He is going to meet you one on one before the hand over will be done.

The reason for the 10% is because you said you cannot handle the areas of investment for us. Once you take possession we would like you to activate an account with a bank then we shall take possession from there. Does that sound good to you or do you want to come up with something different?

From all indications the Diplomat might leave on Friday morning to have full preliminary discussions with you and proper handover. I shall keep you posted as to his itineary.

I hope you do not let us down.

I await copies of the endorsed agreements. Fax same to my mail or +27-115075168.

regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

Consider it done

I’ll have my secretary scan the documents and send it right away

—————————————-
[Unfortunately I've lost the scanned documents Phil sent me, with the word 'SWASTIKA' scrawled across each and every page in what appeared to be lipstick. What a fucking clown.]
—————————————-

Dr Phil,

Thank you for taking the time to carry out my request. You didn’t do it quite how I intended, but your action has shown willing and honesty. I will make the necessary amendments to the marks before sending the documents by fax.

It would be much more convenient for me if we meet in London as I work in the city. Thank you for making the effort to change your plans. Am I to meet the diplomat instead of you? Whomever I meet I should like a photograph so that I will be able to recognise you – could you send me a photograph of yourself or the diplomat? We will probably need some way to authenticate the picture too – I will think how we can do this, and also will get a camera to take a picture of myself for you.

I am looking forward to our doing business. Perhaps afterwards we shall sing Deutschland Uber Alles together. Do you know the tune?

Best wishes,

Hans

—————————————-

Thank you for your photo. Will it be yourself I will meet next week? After all we’ve talked about and the business relationship we’ve built it would be a shame to only meet this diplomat!

I have two questions – the first is that I need to be sure that is you – we have built trust but I want to be careful when the safety of this transaction is at stake. Could you take one with something in it only we would know about? How about my company name? I will do the same when I get my hands on a camera, so please tell me what I should have in my photo to make it unique.

Finally, could you please tell me at your earliest opportunity when you will be in London. I will be very busy next week and while I obviously don’t want to miss the chance to partake in this investment venture, I will need to arrange my calendar around it.

Cheers!

Hans

—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

I believe strongly that I saw your pic online when i visted your website. What I'll require you to do is to send to me a scanned copy of your driver's license for reasons of identification.

I do not need to send to you any further identification if you are not willing to co-operate with me. The fact that I have handed-over this transaction to a Diplomatic firm is enough proof that we mean business. I hope to be in London on the 15th Sept. The Diplomat is going to be taking care of business on my behalf.

If I do not receive the endorsed documents today the business is cancelled. And more importantly, a copy of your driver's license.

Talk to you later.

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound unhelpful but I was rather surprised by your last email. We are going to enter into a business venture about which I am very excited, but at the same time I realise that we should both be taking precautions.

I do not drive, but I will scan some identification for you (perhaps a passport) tomorrow when I’m back at the office.

I will have to insist, much as I am willing to send you evidence that I am irrefutably who I say I am, that you will also do the same. I think my request of a unique photograph with a codeword or special object in it was reasonable, but of course if you can suggest something else I will consider it. I wouldn’t make a very good spy with my lack of inventiveness!

Your documents will be returned to you as soon as I have finished reading them, fully completed – this should be first thing tomorrow morning.

Kind regards,

Hans

—————————————-


Dear Mr. Hans,

I'd like to thank you for your mail again.

Well I look forward to receiving the documents today to enable us forge ahead at once. In the interim, the Diplomat will be leaving on Sunday and will arrive in London in the afternoon. You must provide a convenient phone with which the gentleman can reach you. I also will need an address as he is willing to come and see you as instructed.

He i going to call you on Monday morning. But however, I must receive the documents for us to proceeed. Since the Diplomat will be meeting with you I do not want to subscribe to any other form of identification other that your international passport.

I look forward to receiving the documents alongside your international passport.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

I will be emailing the documents back to you this evening – apologies for the delay but I want to make sure I get the swastikas just right, and there isn’t a scanner here so I’ll have to borrow one from a friend.

We will be meeting on Monday, then? The afternoon would be best for me. I suggest we meet somewhere public, perhaps we could do the deal over a late lunch? I know several restaurants that provide excellent ‘under-the-table facilities’ for gentleman clients. It’s a bit like Bangkok in that respect.

As always, I look forward you your reply.

Hans Vogel

PS I nearly forgot, but I will also scan a photograph of myself so that you will recognise me on Monday. The picture on our corporate website is actually of a model called Peter. I met him while they where doing the photoshoot and he was a very nice, gentle young man with lovely eyes.

—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

I've had a busy day today concluding all arrangements for effective execution.

You have yourself a date once I receive all the documents.

I look forward to receiving yet the telephone number with which you can be contacted on Monday.

Have a great weekend ahead.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

Apologies for my delay in replying. I have not yet obtained the scanner I was promised on Friday, but will have it tonight. Hectic weekend – niece’s wheelchair got stuck in a cattle grid, chaos ensued. It was like Dresden all over again.

Expect my email with the attached documents tonight, then we can arrange to meet and finalise details.

Hans

—————————————-

Dear Hans,

The Diplomat arrived into London On Sunday.

He has been trying to contact you. Could you please reconfirm the number with which you can be reached at once.

Get back ASAP.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

I cannot get this scanner to work. I have slid in the cable again and again. It is all the way in and I have made sure it is the right driver. I will ask my friend to give it to me properly tomorrow.

I am very frustrated – I shall contact you tomorrow.

Hans

—————————————-

Dear Hans,

I need to call you right away. Give me a number please. The Diplomat is in London and feeling frustrated because he cannot reach you.

I await your response.

Dr. Phil

—————————————-
At this point I was tiring of Phil and Tom’s nonsense, and decided to up the ante. They wanted to meet in London, I wasn’t anywhere near London, and if I was then I certainly wouldn’t want to meet up. I did however do a quick Google for businesses called ‘Vogel’ in London, and found the following – http://www.nvogelandsons.com. Now this is admittedly a little naughty of me, but I gave them the phone number for N Vogel and Sons, and sent them on their way. Tee hee.
—————————————-

Please ask the diplomat to call this number – (020) 7242 6971

If you are asked tio identify yourself please tell them you are an agent of the Odessa.

Regards,

Hans

—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

I'll have him call you right away

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

Have you arranged a meeting with the Diplomat?

Dr. Phil

—————————————-
I giggled like a fool when this one appeared in my inbox.
—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

tried to call you earlier but learnt that you will not be in the office until another one hour.

Anyway, I wanted to confirm your appointment with the Diplomat for today. Please send me a mail as soon as you hit the office.

Talk to you later.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

I have to go to several meetings in the city this afternoon, and will not be able to leave my mobile switched on. Could we perhaps meet this evening, or preferably tomorrow? I apologise for my busy schedule, but as my associates and I are preparing for the Fourth Dammerung I cannot spare a moment during business hours.

All the best,

Hans

—————————————-

Dear Mr. Hans,

I appreciate your busy schedule.

Please call Desmond Tambora the Diplomat on 07821551974. He is anxiously waiting to meet you and conclude this transaction without any further delay.

Ensure that you make your cell number available for easier communications.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

He was engaged when I tried to call him. I shall try Desmond Tambourine again tomorrow.

Hans.

—————————————-

Dear Hans,

Thanks for yout mail.

i'm indeed disappointed that uptil now you have not spoken with the Diplomat.

Please ensure that you get hold of him today

—————————————-

Hello? The diplomat is not answering his phone – I am getting very worried about this transaction.

Hans

—————————————-


Dear Sir,

I was able to speak with the Diplomat on that phone yesterday.

he is woried because the reason he came to London has not been achieved.

Pls try again or better still tell me when you will be in the office so I
can have him contact you immediately.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-
ENDGAME.
—————————————-

Dear Hans,

What have you resolved with the Diplomat?

I need to know ASAP to enable me take a decision. HE said he had called you and you were asking a lot of questions that you should have asked when you meet with him one on one.

I await your response.

Regards,

Dr. Phil

—————————————-

I had a call from Otto Klemp the other day, and he claims to have never heard of you. Can you explain yourself please?

Hans

—————————————-

THE END

by rodti at June 16, 2009 03:54 PM

One weekend has seen the Middle Eastern landscape transformed – and the US president's critics are already circling Published in the Guardian...

June 16, 2009 09:10 AM

Daily Mail, 15 June 2009

A ghastly blunder at an NHS fertility clinic has left two sets of prospective parents devastated.

A couple who had already produced one son through in vitro fertilisation decided four years later to have another child by using the last viable embryo of nine which had been created and which was stored at an NHS clinic in Wales.

To their horror, they were told that through a clerical error this embryo had been implanted in the wrong woman’s body — and aborted as soon as the mistake was discovered.

It is said that staff at this clinic had been struggling with an enormous workload. But this was by no means the only such debacle in NHS fertility clinics.

New figures due to be published this summer will show around 200 serious mistakes and ‘near misses’ in such clinics. Such blunders deepen doubts not merely about standards at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, but about IVF itself.

There is no question but that it brings great happiness to otherwise childless people whom it enables to have a baby. But it has also raised a host of ethical issues that have multiplied and remain unresolved.

Many find it distasteful and troubling — to put it no more strongly — that because it is so difficult to implant an embryo successfully, more are necessarily created than will eventually become babies and so the majority are eventually destroyed.

Creating potential babies in this way only to dispose of them has undoubtedly helped erode respect for human life.

The procedure has also led us into the ethical quicksands of embryo research and ‘designer’ babies, not to mention in some cases breaking the biological link between parents and children and enabling other women to have children without a father being around at all.

More sharply still, for most people IVF simply doesn’t work. Almost three-quarters of those who put themselves through this trying procedure will not end up with a baby. By raising their hopes only most cruelly to dash them, IVF must surely deepen their anguish.

True, much IVF work is done privately. But given all these concerns, the question is whether it should be funded by the taxpayer at all.

That may sound harsh for those who do have IVF children on the NHS. But in a service with finite resources and where provision is always rationed in one way or another, choices inevitably have to be made about what the NHS should provide and what it should not.

After all, the NHS is a health service, not a happiness service. So where should the line be drawn? At what point does clinical need turn into ‘what I want’ instead?

Is it right, for example, that the NHS should pay for gender reassignment or gastric band operations for those who cannot — or will not — lose weight by conventional means?

Such questions are especially acute now. For despite the attempt by Gordon Brown to pretend that the Government will not make cuts in public services, it is clear that this is indeed the case.

As the respected Institute For Fiscal Studies has pointed out, the Government’s own spending plans envisage that from 2011 there will be cuts of around 7 per cent over three years.

Remarkably, Mr Brown is brazenly denying these statistics even though his own Government has produced them. He is doing so because he thinks that tarnishing the Tories with plans to cut public services such as health and education is one of the biggest weapons in his electoral armoury.

So he will challenge them to say whether they will cut teachers or nurses, or to spell out what NHS treatments they will stop funding.

But this tactic is not only cynical and dishonest: it is fatuous. Asking what public services either Labour or the Tories would cut is to pose the wrong question.

That’s because central government should not be making such decisions in the first place. It is wrong for a politician or some Whitehall bean-counter to say people can’t have IVF or the latest drug to combat Alzheimer’s.

Whether or not these things are efficacious or worth the money is a calculation central government should not be making. It should be no business of the state to tell us what treatments we can and can’t have.

But as long as the Government controls the purse-strings, it is entitled to make up the rules. What’s wrong is that it does control the purse-strings. It’s our money, and we should be entitled to decide how to spend it.

For we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Government cannot be trusted to spend it properly. We know about the serial computer debacles.

We know about the huge profligacy and waste, with the idiotic non-jobs of ‘diversity outreach co- ordinator’ and such-like.

We know that in both health and education, gazillions have been poured straight into a black hole. We know that, while the extra money has undoubtedly brought about some improvements in the NHS, most of it has been wasted.

As for education standards, we can see them slipping as we hear ministers lying through their teeth that they are rising. And the most heavily funded state schools are often the very worst.

What the current crisis surely tells us is that this is now the time to stop prattling meaninglessly about ‘cutting waste’ and ‘increasing efficiency’ and address the root of the problem.

The era of paying central government to deliver public services such as health and education should be declared to be over.

We should start with a blank page on which should be written two fundamental principles: that the public should be put in the driving seat, able to choose what type of services to have and to take responsibility for those choices; and that the poor should be protected, so that all have access to a decent level of provision.

These principles would play out differently with different services. Personally, I favour some kind of European-style social insurance scheme for health and long-term care, and education vouchers to give all parents a proper choice of schools.

In countries where such schemes are in use, standards for all in both health and education are vastly higher than in Britain.

With our current system demonstrably bust, this is surely the moment to start a serious debate on these matters. But on all sides, politicians are unable or unwilling to tell the public the truth.

By denying what his own economic policy means, Gordon Brown is treating voters like imbeciles. But the Tories are scarcely any better. When Shadow Health spokesman Andrew Lansley let slip that, like the Government, the Tories would also be forced to cut public spending, his leader apparently rewarded him for his honesty by a roasting.

The Tories are still terrified that they will be painted all over again as the ‘nasty party’ if they acknowledge that the game is up for the NHS and other public services. So they are effectively colluding with the Government in the spending charade.

But times have changed. Everyone knows that whoever wins the election will have to make cuts. The new issue is that the public will no longer tolerate being lied to, about this or anything else. They are demanding honesty and transparency in political life.

And that means an end to the illusion that everyone can have identical access to everything — from IVF to ‘gender reassignment’ — at all times.

It means an end to this puerile politics of the playground. Now is a golden opportunity for the Tories to seize the agenda — along with their courage — and change the terms of the entire debate.

by Melanie Phillips at June 15, 2009 09:32 AM

by Nick Cohen at June 15, 2009 08:11 AM

A few weeks ago, a two-year-old boy was killed when he was hit by a rollercoaster after accidentally wandering on to the tracks. You may have heard about it in the media. This didn’t happen in my sector, but on the desk opposite, so while I was getting on with my work, I kept picking up snippets of information across the room.

“It sounded awful,” said one of the call takers. “Everyone was screaming. I couldn’t get any sense out of anyone.”

“DSO’s on the phone,” announced the radio op. “He says HEMS are working on him but it’s not looking good. Crews are going to have to go off the road afterwards. The FRU paramedic is really upset. Sounds like a really awful call.”

Seconds later, I had my own call to worry about. A tipsy teenage boy had fallen down a river embankment. His friends couldn’t reach him, but they could see that he was unconscious and had blood trickling from his ear. They couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

As we sent the crew, we asked them to report for HEMS, even though we knew HEMS were the other side of London, dealing with a critically ill toddler. We hoped they’d say HEMS weren’t needed, because there is only one HEMS team and they can’t be in two places at once.

“Perhaps it’s not as bad as it sounds,” said the radio operator dubiously. “He could just be drunk and it could be a scratch on his face. It could turn out to be nothing. Do we know how far he fell?”

I fired up the new “street view” thing on Google maps to get a better look at the river bank in question. Of course, Google probably didn’t intend their map system to be used for this purpose, and there wasn’t a good close up of the riverbank, but I could clearly make out that the river was well below street level and that there was a set of stairs leading down to it. It looked to me that it could be at least a fifteen-foot drop.

The crew arrived and found the stairs we’d seen on the map. As they arrived, the boy was coming round but was extremely confused and cerebrally irritated, lashing out at anyone who tried to come near him. This kind of behaviour (which is sometimes hard to distinguish from alcohol induced aggression) is indicative of a life threatening brain injury. The crew called up for assistance. They needed someone, anyone, down there to help them restrain the boy in order to treat him, and they really needed the help of the HEMS doctor. We sent the police and another ambulance crew…

The phone rang. It was the DSO.

“We heard the crew on the radio. HEMS have done all they can here; the toddler’s on his way to hospital, so they’re coming to you now. Where exactly is the call?”

I told him, and the HEMS team got in the car (the helicopter does not fly at night) and belted it across London. They were at the riverbank in fifteen minutes. They were able to sedate the boy and get him on board the ambulance.

As they got him to hospital, he went into respiratory arrest. The A+E staff all battled to save him, but it was no good. It’s likely he had fractured his skull and had a serious bleed into his brain, and if this was the case, nothing anyone did would have saved him.

Now both the toddler and the teenager were dead.

The next morning the papers were full of stories about the tragedy of the toddler and the fairground ride. Not one mentioned the teenager or the river bank.

by Suzi Brent at June 14, 2009 07:16 PM

I like old people, so I have a tendency to think they are all sweet and nice and try to send ambulances to them as quickly as possible.

The other day, we had a call to a seventy-two year old female with a nosebleed. I decided to send the ECP (Emergency Care Practitioner) – a paramedic in a car who has extra training, and can deal with a lot of calls at home. The ECP will always perform a full set of checks on the patient before deciding whether to call for an ambulance or leave the patient at home and perhaps refer them to a GP, district nurse, etc.

The ECP had been at the old lady’s house no longer than a couple of minutes when he rang me.

“I’ve had to leave!” he puffed. “I thought she was going to attack me?”

“The seventy two year old with a nosebleed?!” I said, confused.

“Yes!” said the ECP. “I turned up and she was there with her bag packed – and no hint of a nosebleed except a slightly bloodied tissue. I explained that I needed to examine her properly before we were going anywhere and that she might not even need to go to hospital, and she went crazy! She told me to Foxtrot Oscar, and when I tried to explain, she came at me! So I ran away and locked myself in the car!”

I don’t know what our ECP looks like, but he sounds like a strapping young man and the thought of him running scared from a septuagenarian almost made me titter as I made sure he was okay and assured him he wouldn’t have to return to the address and we would make alternative arrangements.

I wasn’t laughing five minutes later, though. Incensed by the fact that the ECP hadn’t done as she asked, the elderly lady in question had rung back twice and sworn at two call takers and one of the Telephone Advice paramedics. Not content with this, she had also rung NHS Direct, her GP, her careline, the complaints department and her local MP to complain. All of the above, with the exception of the MP, had rung in to find out what was going on. (I do not know why people always threaten to tell their MP when they do not like something the ambulance service has done. I have seen no evidence that any MP is remotely interested.)

I had no option but to send an ambulance crew to her to take her to hospital. I warned the crew what had happened to the ECP and asked if they wanted the police or a DSO (manager) to help them.

“Nah, I think we can just about outrun a 72 year old if she gets nasty!” said one of them.

The crew also had no success in examining the patient and decided to cut their losses and ferry her to the hospital, just as she’d asked.

At the hospital, the receptionist told our charming patient that there would be a three hour wait to be seen. She promptly muttered something about complaining to Gordon Brown and stormed out.

The hospital she was taken to was right next to her local shops. If I were the cynical type I might suggest this was behind her rather odd behaviour.

by Suzi Brent at June 13, 2009 07:53 AM

(This post will probably be boring if you do not work for the LAS, so please scroll past if you like!)

The East Central desk are seriously persona non grata with the East Central Ambulance Crews at the moment. No one wants to bring us Percy Pigs, in fact we barely get a grunt from some of the crews when they answer the phone. We are The Enemy, a bunch of saddos whose purpose in life is to make crews’ lives difficult. What have we done? Well, basically, we’ve been checking up on their every move. For instance, if a crew is at hospital for longer than 30 minutes, they get a message telling them asking them exactly what the delay is. If they are trying to avoid their rest break (to get their £10 missed break payment or an early finish), we have to report them to their managers. Not only are we watching the crews’ every move, our managers our watching us, so if we miss something, it’s not just the crew concerned who get in trouble - we get in trouble for letting them. So I’m there banging out the messages: “Report delays!” “Return for rest break!” “Go out on Active Area Cover!” I occasionally give out the odd emergency call, too…

The trouble is that contrary to popular belief, ambulance crews are adults. They don’t like being told when to take their lunch and they don’t like being told they can’t hang around the hospital for a five minute cuppa after they’ve booked their patient in. The more we treat them like children, the more they act like them. They twiddle their statuses, drive round in circles and backchat to us on the radio. In turn, we get irritated with them and think “well, if they’re going to be like THAT they are DEFINITELY getting their rest break. And then I will send them to Horace Halfpenny! Hahaha.” But crews don’t play up if we just let them get on with their job without all those annoying messages. Well, some of them do, but the bad apples stick out like sore thumbs, and I have no hesitance in reporting a crew who are genuinely slacking off. The rest of them are just playing up because they feel their professionalism is being called into question, and I can see their point. I also think that whoever thought of giving crews a £10 bonus (sorry, compensatory payment) for avoiding their lunch break is a complete idiot. Most people would gladly skip their lunch for a tenner, so what did they expect?

The sad thing is that there’s a real sense of “us” and “them” at the moment and it’s counterproductive, because we need to work together. I need the crews on side when I want them to do me a favour (work late to cover a call I that I really don’t want to keep waiting, for example). The more we annoy the crews, the more they annoy us, the less gets done and the worse service we provide to patients.

I propose that to solve this problem, we abolish all the current LAS targets and bring in a new rest break system where all crews get a break that they actually want. Who cares whether we meet all Cat A calls in 8 minutes when it is proven that most of the time they are not even life threatening? Who cares if all your crews get a break if they all claim “dirty uniform” and go home early anyway? Can’t we count the number of lives saved and the number of patients satisfied with the service we provide? Making a real difference to patients is an achievement, meeting an arbitrary target is not.

by Suzi Brent at June 12, 2009 11:03 AM

And while I am on the subject of regular callers, an update on some of the others who I have previously mentioned on this blog.

Horace Halfpenny, the exceedingly unpleasant man with protruding bowels who cheated death after setting fire to his new flat while he was in it, has not been seen for some time. He has moved on from the hostel in my sector where he was staying and hopefully is somewhere deep in the South West where my poor crews don’t have to get abused by him.

Ben Higginbotham, the aggressive depressive who likes to ring us to talk about Neighbours and Hollyoaks but turns nasty when the crew arrive, has been ringing a lot lately to ask us to contact his mother for him. One of the paramedics told us that his mother has, in fact, been dead over a year. I felt sorry for him – but my sympathy declined swiftly when he later threatened a paramedic with a scalpel.

Jimmy Smirnoff, the charming young alcoholic, has not been too well after two recent life threatening overdoses. Out of all our regulars, he is the one I think about the most and I really hope he pulls through.

Bananaman, the disabled teenager who put every call taker in the room through months of sheer hell by calling up to 200 times a night offering us bananas and telling us that his penis was itchy was never prosecuted (much to my annoyance) but HAS stopped calling (much to my relief, especially as the “address” he gave is in my new sector). Apparently Social Services have intervened and his social worker brought him to the control room to show him what we do and to make it more “real” to him. While I applaud this approach, I think if I had known he was coming I might have been forced to purchase a large bunch of bananas and chase him round the room with them. Angry Allocators do not forgive and forget easily.

by Suzi Brent at June 12, 2009 10:10 AM

Though it may not last, the prime minister is finally back on the terrain he likes best – the issue of spending plans Published on the Guardian's website...

June 11, 2009 08:53 AM

Today’s tube strike in London made me really, really angry.

It wasn’t the fact that I had to get up at 4.30am and sit on a dirty, stinking nightbus just to get to work on time. It wasn’t the fact that at the end of my twelve hour shift, I had to walk the two miles to Liverpool Street to catch the overground train home. It wasn’t the fact that my arduous journey meant that I missed the start of the England football match. It wasn’t even the fact that the tube workers could all be watching said football match from the comfort of their local pub with loads of beer, safe in the knowledge they don’t have to get up for work tomorrow.

No, none of those things were what made me REALLY angry.

What made me really angry was the fact that by rush hour, the streets of central London - the streets that my ambulances need to get to critically ill people - were utterly gridlocked with people trying to get to work. There was just so much traffic that no one was going anywhere - not even an ambulance on blue lights and sirens. While people tried to get out of the way and the drivers are permitted to break the rules of the road when on lights, there just wasn’t room for the crews to get through. And, of course, ambulances are only supposed to use blue lights when they are on way to a call or when a patient whose condition is life threatening is on board. It took one of my crews AN HOUR AND A HALF to take an assault victim from the scene of the crime to the local hospital - a journey which should have taken around fifteen minutes.

It would only have taken one call for the tube strike to end in disaster for us. A car accident we couldn’t cover, a cardiac arrest we couldn’t reach. We do have motorcycles, bicycles and cars that can get into tight spots, but anyone in a life threatening condition needs hospital, and for that you need to be able to get an ambulance to them. I watched my screen and held my breath, crossing my fingers and praying that nothing would happen in those gridlocked areas.

It was my lucky day. Nothing did. We got ambulances to all the calls without too much delay, and the delays in getting to hospital were an inconvenience rather than a disaster. But it could have been different. And this is why the tube strike made me very very angry, and why I have absolutely no sympathy with the tube workers and in fact hope they DON’T get their pay rise. If anything, they should be penalised for inconveniencing and endangering the public.

(Sidenote. In the midst of the chaos, a man committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. I wonder if he got a certain bitter pleasure by putting a halt to one of the few means of transport remaining - a final two fingers up at the world - or if he was so disturbed he merely found the tube strike an inconvenience because there weren’t many trains to jump under. Either way, there is a certain irony about a “one under” in the middle of a tube strike.)

by Suzi Brent at June 10, 2009 07:47 PM

To win back the voters of the broken heartlands, Labour must remind the public what it's for. But I fear it won't be enough Published in the Guardian...

June 10, 2009 09:49 AM

A comment on my last post inspired me to tell you about another of our regular callers.

George Lennon is in his forties. He’s an alcoholic who is prone to fits. He’s also prone to calling up when there is nothing wrong with him, and equally prone to telling the ambulance crew who have rushed over on blue lights to tend to him to Foxtrot Oscar. He is far more likely to let crews in if they are female. George likes the ladies. He likes them so much that he likes to snap them with his mobile phone and then print the pictures off and stick them on his wall. When one paramedic objected to this, he offered to let her take his photo too. She obliged, and now there’s a picture of George’s grinning face pinned to the noticeboard in the ambulance station mess room.

George has never been anything but delightful to me. He is less polite to my male colleagues, so maybe it is a good job that I am not really Mark Myers. Often, when George calls, we ring him back to gauge his mood (to help the crew decide if they need the police’s assistance – he’s never hit any of the crews but sometimes he looks like he’s just about to) and often just the sound of a female voice is enough to make George happy and make him cancel the ambulance. He calls us all “angels” and has asked me to marry him twice. I said I’d think about it. It’s the best offer I’ve had in some time.

George rarely travels to hospital and has never been blued in while I’ve been on duty. As far as I knew, there was nothing much wrong with him except a somewhat excessive love of the bottle.

Well, I was wrong. A comment on my last post, from one of the ambulance crews in George’s area, informed me that George recently suffered an out of hospital cardiac arrest. Against all the odds, he survived, but it could happen again at any time.

I’m halfway through Tom Reynolds’ new book, and a post where he talked about his regulars really struck a chord with me. As you know, since February I have been the allocator for the area where Tom works – but I didn’t recognise any of the individuals he talked about. Then I got to the bottom of the entry, where Tom explained that since he originally wrote the post a couple of years ago, they’d all died. I am coming to realise that this is the inevitable end of the story for so many of the regulars I have become fond of, and it makes me sad. Because we get so many calls from the regulars, plenty of which are not medical emergencies, it is easy to shrug them off and think there will never be anything seriously wrong with these people. But really, they are more vulnerable than the people we do not regularly hear from, and there will come a day when they stop calling and disappear from our view, and we can only guess what has happened – that they too have died.

I hope George is okay.

by Suzi Brent at June 09, 2009 05:51 PM

Published on page 1 of the Guardian's Top stories section...

June 09, 2009 09:58 AM

Daily Mail, 8 June 2009

There has been a political coup. Not the one that everyone thought might happen last week until it became clear that the putative assassins had the courage of a blancmange.

No, the Prime Minister has instead been captured, imprisoned and forced to mouth the lines now being written for him by the man who is now effectively running the Government.

Step forward the real Prime Minister, Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool, Business Secretary and now First Secretary of State and Lord President of the Council.

The irony is stupendous. Here is the previously regarded by Gordon Brown as his mortal enemy, forced twice to resign in disgrace from the Government — and yet now the one person keeping Brown in Downing Street.

After James Purnell resigned his Cabinet post last Thursday night, it was Lord Mandelson who leapt into action, ringing other likely ministerial defectors to persuade them not to jump, too. If this hadn’t been done and other ministers had followed Purnell, Brown would have been forced out.

Mandelson then helped work out the emergency reshuffle that kept the Prime Ministerial protege Ed Balls out of the Chancellorship, thus staving off even more high-profile resignations by ministers who detest him.

Now, Mandelson seems to be the only still point in the storm — and the only one in command. He has simply taken charge.

All his authority spent, the Prime Minister presents a pitifully diminished and haggard figure, looking indeed as if he is on the verge of a complete breakdown.

The contrast with sleek, purring, self-assured Mandelson could not be greater. The collective collapse of confidence and self-belief now tearing the Labour Party apart is for lesser mortals, not him.

The way he languidly made mincemeat of a poorly briefed Andrew Marr on his BBC show yesterday demonstrated the combination of astuteness and sheer brazen absence of shame that makes Mandelson such a formidable player.

We don’t know, of course, precisely what role he has been playing in these tumultuous events. Nor do we know who, if anyone, has been orchestrating the plotting.

We don’t know whether James Purnell acted alone. What is clear, however, is that he was left high and dry when other potential rebels, such as David Miliband, Andy Burnham and Alan Johnson chose to remain in the Government.

Indeed, as coups go, this has been more Keystone Kops than Tonton Macoute. Clearly, when it comes to the resignation crunch, principle can’t compete with the terror of losing a ministerial salary.

And anyway, why would any of the young pretenders to the throne want to become leader of a party going down to certain defeat?

As for the so-called WAGs — Women Against Gordon — who have staged serial resignations, this has achieved nothing except making a toe-curling spectacle of themselves. Caroline Flint on her own has set back the cause of women’s equality by about a millennium.

First, she declared her loyal support for the Prime Minister. But the very next day, when she was not offered a Cabinet post, she stopped being loyal and staged a walkout as histrionic as it was self-serving.

She berated the Prime Minister for treating her as ‘female window dressing’. Yet she had made herself into window-dressing by being photographed for a newspaper in vampish pose, for all the world as if she weren’t the Europe Minister but model Christy Turlington. Then she whinges that women politicians aren’t taken seriously!

Yesterday, she was at it again, claiming that women in the Cabinet were just ‘a smokescreen’ without real influence and that women constantly had to work to prove their worth.

But this isn’t true for women in politics or anywhere else who have been appointed strictly on merit and just get on with the job. The fact is that many of the women MPs who have stood down were either second-rate or had their hands in the till — or both.

All the WAGs have done is to highlight the downside of positive discrimination and show up the Blair Babes as being even more ridiculous than we thought they were.

It is the fact that there is no first-rate alternative leader of either sex that has really held back the plotters. David Miliband has been damaged goods since his ‘banana moment’ last year, when he was photographed holding the fruit; James Purnell is too young and callow; Alan Johnson is a creature of the trades unions.

Into this maelstrom of flailing ineptitude has descended Lord Mandelson to shore up the shattered Prime Minister, who, he has decided, is still the only man for the role.

The Shakespearean resonances are unavoidable, although it’s unclear whether Gordon Brown is playing Macbeth, Julius Caesar or King Lear — or a combination of all three.

But what is clear is that Lord Mandelson is directing the play and providing medical support for the principal actor to ensure that he continues to make it onto the stage.

Leaked emails that Mandelson sent more than a year ago to the former spin doctor turned psychotherapist Derek Draper merely confirm that the First Secretary holds the balance of power over the Prime Minister.

His assessment of Brown’s weaknesses — insecure, angry, uncomfortable in his own skin — was written as if it were from one therapist to another discussing the best way to manage a disturbed patient for his own good.

Given his Blairite pedigree, he might himself have been expected to be orchestrating the revolt against Brown. But he fears the catastrophic result of an early General Election that would inevitably result from a new leader.

Others in the party argue that the defeat will be even worse next year if Brown remains. But Mandelson thinks the situation can still be retrieved.

And the reason is that now Gordon Brown is wrecked, the programme he will put forward will be Mandelson’s.

He set it out yesterday. The expenses scandal would be cleaned up; the constitution would be reformed; the economy would be saved by his own business reforms; and in health and education, power would be transferred to parents and patients.

In other words, with the Blairite dauphins Miliband and Purnell out of the picture, it will be Mandelson himself who will drive forward a Blairite agenda, with Brown his helpless cipher. In this way, he thinks he can shoot David Cameron’s fox and claw back Labour’s chances at the next election.

Audacious, or what? The man hasn’t even been elected to Parliament and yet he is now apparently masterminding the entire government agenda.

But Mandelson sees himself as the architect of New Labour, which he invented to rescue the party from oblivion. Now he is determined to save his creation. So democracy can go hang.

But will it work? Unlikely. How can the expenses scandal be redeemed when gross offenders such as the Chancellor and others are still in their posts? And as for devolving power in the public services, we’ve heard all that before.

Can anyone really see that chronic state control-freak, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls, devolving power to parents?

For all his efforts, Mandelson may not save Brown either. Lord Falconer added to the pressure yesterday by calling for a debate over the leadership; tonight, the Parliamentary party might deliver the coup de grace.

But a new leader won’t save them– and neither will a propped-up Gordon Brown. It’s the Labour Government that is the problem; and it’s Labour, whether Lord Mandelson and the rest of them realise it or not, whose time is now up.

by Melanie Phillips at June 08, 2009 08:40 AM

by Nick Cohen at June 07, 2009 08:22 AM

Published on page 1 of the Guardian's Top stories section...

June 06, 2009 07:51 AM

Published in the Guardian...

June 05, 2009 07:57 AM