And if anyone has any requests of programmes they’d like me to review in the hope that this axing is evidence of a Pushing the boundary curse, let me know.

(I’m back from a few-month-long blogging hiatus, by the way. At some point soon, here and/or on Boris Watch, I shall resume doing proper posts. I’m sure you’re on the edges of your respective seats* with anticipation.)

* The plurality of this sentence’s reference to ‘you’ may overstate my readership.

Level crossing

Last month, David Cameron likened his mission to decontaminate the Tory brand to a computer game. Those few short weeks ago, he claimed:

"Until you have cleared level one, which I have incidentally never done, you cannot get on to level two. Level one is: are you a reasonable, decent, non-discriminating, sensible, practical person who understands the world as it is lived today, who wants to live in a modern world and who accepts what that means? If so, then you can move on to level two, where you can talk about some of the difficult issues about families and about responsibilities which can lead to trouble."

Strangely, despite his claim that he hadn’t cleared level one (I can’t argue with that, based on his own definition), he seems to be getting on pretty well with level two regardless. I’m not sure you can do that in most computer games: perhaps he found a cheat code online.

Since (and indeed during) that interview, the Conservatives have been allowing various nastier sides to peep out from behind their Level One sheen.

Nasti spumante

Among these was an opportunistic attack on black fathers. Barack Obama said it first, apparently, so that makes it officially Not Racist. I’m sure Barack Obama has said plenty of other things which don’t involve denigrating minorities, but it’s surely just coincidence they should pick this one – a bit like when the Daily Express happens to pick only the bad stories about immigrants for its front pages (or indeed any of its other pages).

[Incidentally, did you see last Friday’s Express front page? Apparently “1,650 NEW MIGRANTS INVADE UK EVERY DAY”. Seriously. It said “INVADE”. Astonishing.]

Then there was that report by Policy Exchange, saying northern cities have “failed”, which David Cameron had to rush to distance the Conservatives from, despite the fact (familiar to Boris Watch readers) that Policy Exchange has extremely close links to powerful Tories and indeed they’ve managed to keep several of their number in Boris’s administration (so far – who knows if they’ll end up going the same way as James McGrath, Ray Lewis and Tim Parker?).

Sexual discourse

Most recently, yesterday, the Guardian reported a speech given by Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, in which he told overweight people that there are “no excuses” for being obese. Hectoring the overwhelmingly poor obese is yet another return to nasty party habits, but what’s this I see nestling away in one particular paragraph of the speech? Can anyone spot the word here which makes me raise an eyebrow?

"As it is, people who see more fat people around them may themselves be more likely to gain weight. Young people who think many of their friends binge-drink are likely to do so themselves. Girls who think their peers engage in early sex are more likely to do so themselves.”

So we have “people”, “fat people”, “young people”… but suddenly, in the last sentence about early sex, we find “Girls”.

Does peer pressure not affect the age at which boys first have sex? Does the age at which boys first have sex not matter? Are boys to be encouraged to have sex early to prove their macho credentials? If so, presumably that will be with much older girls – or perhaps other boys – so as not to encourage young girls to join in.

This appalling statement is just the latest glaring example of the sexism and outmoded thinking at the heart of the supposedly modernised Conservative party.

Marrying value

Similarly ridiculous is their pledge, repeated as a front-page splash in Saturday’s Telegraph, to instigate a Married Couples Tax Allowance.

This policy represents a complete misunderstanding of cause and effect. The Tories portray this as a way to encourage marriage, on the basis that children brought up in a marriage are more successful in life.

But can it really be the case that a nice day out at a church or licensed civil venue and a couple of rings can fundamentally affect the life chances of the happy couple’s offspring?

How about looking at it in the other direction? Isn’t it possible that the reason why children of married couples do better is that they are children of people who are in a stable enough relationship to consider marriage, and who are well enough off to afford a wedding ceremony, and who go on to remain married for many years aided by the fact that they are comfortable financially and so avoid the “number one cause of divorce”, financial stress?

Of course children living in a comfortable, stable environment like this will have a smoother upbringing than those living in poverty with constantly arguing parents, and get better life chances as a result. But if poverty is the root cause of the problems for the children, what will the Tories’ policy actually achieve?

In the unlikely event that the opportunity to claim a extra tax relief actually does result in any couples marrying and staying together who wouldn’t at least have been living together happily in the first place (and so already pretty likely to bring up successful children), there’s every chance the marriage won’t work out (since they weren’t otherwise confident of it doing so), meaning more rows for the children to put up with, and perhaps eventually a messy divorce (and the loss of the tax bonus).

The more likely outcome is that the tax changes don’t actually affect most people’s behaviour, instead just upsetting people who are already upset, and making already poor people relatively poorer still.

Annulment horribilis

Picture the scene: your marriage of a few years is at a crisis point. You’d love it to carry on for the sake of the children and you’ve really tried to work it through, but it’s just not going to work. You’re already an emotional wreck, your home turned upside down by the sadness of the end of your marriage. You’re wondering how you’ll cope financially moving to one income, one parent doing the day-to-day child-rearing work, etc., and what do the Tory government offer you? A kick in the teeth in the form of a withdrawal of your married couple’s tax bonus.

It’s so blindingly obvious that only lasting love between partners can make a marriage work that it seems unbelievable that the Tories would seek to claim that however many pounds a week their bonus will represent could also do so.

It’s equally obvious that poverty is the main predictor of a child’s life chances, and while the dual income of a married couple can address this, so too could decent, targeted benefits for those in most need. Married couples, many with dual incomes, should not be at the front of the queue for assistance.

I’m married. My wife and I currently have no intention of having children. As I sit in my modest but comfortable home using my decent PC and watching my HDTV, I simply can’t for the life of me imagine why any political party in its right mind would want to give me any more money simply because I’m lucky enough (it really does come down to a significant element of luck, after all) to have found Mrs. Pushing the boundary.

The Conservative party, as it regresses into its old lecturing, moralising, sexist, reactionary and illogical ways, wants to compound the reward of marriage, rather than compensating the unrewarded. If that’s what Level Two is all about, let’s hope Cameron reaches Game Over soon.

The day after we arrived was Belgium Day, and some of the broader UK news outlets saw this as a handy hook on which to hang a bit of coverage of the current constitutional crisis that’s been building recently: could this be the last Belgium day before the country splits in two, that sort of thing. More4 News* brought us one report, and Radio 4′s PM programme* another, each along the same lines as the other.

Basically, for those not familiar with the country, it has a north-south divide that makes that in England look more like the divide between the appearance of identical twins. Until now I’d only really been to Brussels, where you’ll find most signs presented in two languages (French and Flemish), and a general acceptance of either language in most places.

This time we headed to the north of Belgium, Flanders (hi-diddly-ho, good neighbour), and here it is far easier to get on by speaking English than French – it’s Flemish all the way. Fortunately pretty much everyone does speak excellent English, or we’d've been doing an awful lot of stereotypical gesturing and shouting in the face of their initially bewildering language. It’s particularly bewildering to those of us who only learnt French (and Latin – don’t tell Boris) at school, as it has far more in common with German than anything Mediterranean.

What surprised me was the revelation that actually Flemish is essentially the same language as Dutch (which in turn apparently takes its English name from a corruption of "Deutsche" by mistaken sailors who thought the language they were encountering in the Netherlands was German). This revelation did at least mean we could use online translation tools from Dutch to English to get a pretty good idea of what was going on on local web sites.

Anyway, the lack of French-speaking made the Flanders region feel like a completely separate country from our more familiar Brussels. (You’ll note as the time passes that all our holiday destinations are at or near the end of a Eurostar line: it’s the only way to travel for meat-eating, computer-loving environmentalists, so we haven’t flown in years.) So perhaps it’s no surprise that that’s exactly what many in the region are clamouring for it to become: an independent nation.

The south, more properly called the cartoonish-sounding Wallonia, is characterised in media coverage of the Belgium split story as something akin to the media’s equally broadbrush descriptions of Glasgow East – apparently it’s a poverty-stricken, run-down area of deprivation. I haven’t ventured outside Brussels into Wallonia so I don’t know how true this is, but the fact that it doesn’t seem to house any major tourist areas as the north does suggests it’s probably about right – tourist resorts do tend to try to build walls between themselves and social deprivation, after all (though not always successfully).

The upshot is that many in Flanders feel that the Walloons (would Wallonia and the Walloons make a good band name? Only for a Comic Relief single, I suspect) are taking money away from the northern region and squandering it in the southern region on benefits and other state aid.

There seems something ironic about the country at the heart of the European Union considering a split in order not to have to spread money from a wealthy region to a poorer region, when that’s half the point of the EU (and would no doubt continue via EU convergence grants if the two countries were to separate). And it’s hard to see, on the face of it, any other decent arguments for making the split, when the north and south are already so completely different anyway.

Apparently Belgium is one of the most federal countries in Europe as things stand, presumably explaining the non-Welsh-like way of handling the dual languages outside of Brussels – no pan-country requirements for bilingual signs here.

If they can already coexist in one country while maintaining separate languages, cultures etc., what’s to gain from splitting?

Or looking at it another way, there’s also a lot to lose for one side or the other, in the form of Brussels. This city is important both symbolically, as the home of the EU (and perhaps the sprout), and as a major tourist destination, with that handy Eurostar terminal sitting in its southern station.

So do you split the city down the middle, as Barack Obama definitely maybe probably doesn’t want to happen to Jerusalem, or as did happen to Berlin? Does the slightly more geographically appropriate north get it? Could its low proportion (11%) of Flemish inhabitants mean the south could lay claim to it? It seems the question of how to handle Brussels, which in some ways is like a third different region in itself, may be the biggest obstacle to splitting up the country.

* Yes, I watched and listened to these in my hotel room in Belgium. I think there might be another blog post to be written about some of my more unusual uses of hotel wi-fi when abroad…

Apparently it’s big in the US, where Barack Obama is a big fan, and naturally after London elected their answer to ‘Change we can believe in’ in May, the Conservatives are equally enamoured with the nudge phenomenon too. (It’s interesting to notice how much Obama and the Conservatives have in common: it’s as if the entire political spectrum in the US were situated to the right of our own… because it is.)

Where some political philosophies may emphasise people’s rights and freedoms, others their responsibilities, and others the state’s responsibilities to serve and protect them, ‘nudge’ politics is based on the idea that people are basically extremely stupid, and therefore need to be told what to do.

Were such a philosophy espoused by the left, it would no doubt be ridiculed as the nanny state gone mad, but of course this is the new, cuddly and most critically electable Conservatives and it’s therefore perfectly acceptable to the right for them to come out with this idea.

We’re all idiots

The nudge idea is actually quite a reasonable one, as far as it goes. In its propensity to continue to ruin its planet, its self-destructive urge to binge-drink, over-eat and overindulge with drugs, the human race is often its own worst enemy. So unless you take the extreme libertarian view that everyone should be left to get on with it, whatever the consequences (even if those consequences could ultimately be, for instance, the deaths of millions in climate change-caused disasters), giving people a nudge in the right direction is not a bad idea.

The idea is to provide people with the state-determined ‘best’ option as the default choice, while still allowing people to choose other paths if they disagree. So you enrol someone for a pension but give them the chance to cancel it if they don’t want to pay into it; perhaps you even reverse the current organ donation situation, requiring anyone who doesn’t want to donate organs to carry a card to make their wishes clear.

So where can we see this approach in action already? Where are there millions of people, most of them not really understanding what they’re doing, making uninformed choices which can have bad consequences for thousands of others, all of which can be mitigated by sensibly chosen default options? There’s a 90%+ chance you’re looking at it now: Microsoft Windows.

Curtains for Windows?

The vast majority of the world’s computers run Windows, and certainly almost anyone without the first clue about computers will be using it, probably without even realising they’re doing so. (That’s not to suggest only the stupid use Windows: I have first, second and third clues about computers and still choose to use it.)

For a long time, ease of use, to encourage computer take-up, trumped security. Don’t know what this webpage alert about needing to install the rootkit.exe plugin means? Don’t worry, just hit Enter and the page will work fine.

Users’ freedom to do as they pleased in the short term outweighed the benefits to everyone in the long term. (Don’t understand this pension scheme terms and conditions document? Just throw it away and forget about it for now, then.)

But it soon became clear, halfway through Windows XP’s life, that this approach simply wasn’t good enough any more in the always-connected internet age. Suddenly those auto-installing ‘plugins’ were turning into huge internet-wide ‘botnets’ of unknowing computer users’ systems, working together to send spam, attack web sites and generally make internet users’ lives a misery.

Improvements nudge into view

Microsoft responded with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), which was effectively a significant new release of the operating system but was shipped as a free service pack to try to get it out to as many of the existing millions of XP machines as possible.

This release was an early example of some pretty tough ‘nudging’. Vast swathes of default settings had been changed to favour security over ease of use. The firewall was turned on by default, important system patches awaiting installation nagged users into submission, and the browser didn’t even prompt you prominently to install plugins (encouraging casual ‘Yes’-clicking to rid yourself of the nuisance of a pop-up dialog box), instead notifying you through an unobtrusive strip to be sought out only if you were wondering why something obviously wasn’t working properly on the page.

A nudge too far?

The trouble is, even that didn’t appear to be enough. I’m one of those people that gets called on to sort out parental acquaintances’ PCs when they go wrong, and I’ve seen even the most well-patched XP SP2 machines crippled by all kinds of malware that’s tricked its way onto people’s PCs. I once found someone who had actually paid to ‘renew’ a piece of fake anti-virus software that had tricked its way onto his computer – past his existing anti-virus software.

So Windows Vista ups the security and nudging to a whole new level, with administrative elevation prompts often described as ‘intrusive’ in reviews. These pop up whenever you try, or anything else on your system tries, to do something which requires administrative privileges: installing software, changing system settings, generally doing anything which could feasibly result in your computer being turned into a lean, mean, spamming machine, or worse.

Mrs. Pushing the boundary (the wife formerly known as Mrs. Stop Boris) got a bit fed up with these prompts, and Vista’s other beefed-up security credentials and went back to XP. It’s not an uncommon tale (albeit mixed in with the usual teething problems caused by hardware companies keener to sell you new hardware than to spend a few hours writing a new driver for their old hardware), and it illustrates the fine balance to be found between nudging people enough and pushing them too far.

Nudge off

Those of us who know what we’re doing with computers can of course disable all the nudging, although I rather like knowing when something wants admin rights so I haven’t. Governmental nudging would be unlikely to come with a universal off-switch in the same way.

Even at the individual decision level, how would Cameron strike the balance mentioned above successfully? It needs to be easy enough to opt out of, say, a pension plan for those people who genuinely understand the options and don’t think that’s the best one for them, yet hard enough that uninformed people focused on the short term don’t spot a tick-box which to them appears to say “Don’t give away 5% of my money each month after all”.

Con-tradictions

And as with so much of Project Cameron, it could appear that he is seeking an impossible compromise between fundamentally different approaches, like free-market economics and environmentalism, or hugging hoodies but throwing away the key if they’re carrying a knife.

Is this the party David Davis has apparently decided he would like, one which defends liberties and freedoms (apart from freedom from the death penalty and homophobia, of course ), or is it instead another party which will want to tell everyone what to do for the greater good? Are the two reconcilable in a single manifesto? If and when some concrete policies start appearing from the Conservatives, perhaps we’ll find out.

Elsewhere in the past week, the Church of England approved the to my mind wholly uncontroversial plans to permit the ordination of women bishops.

Some of the arguments against this long overdue move that I heard on the news were extraordinary. I stared at the woman who said that because Jesus was a man, all the bishops have to be men too or they couldn’t represent him properly. I mean, popular representations lead me to believe that Jesus had a beard: would she suggest that any bishop who shaves should be similarly banned from ordination?

Surely the real point is that Jesus was a person. Therefore, simply let a person represent him, if that’s what bishops are supposed to do (as an atheist, I don’t claim any expertise).

Fortunately sense was seen and the proposals were passed, bringing the established church somewhat further into the 21st century.

Unfortunately, within a few days of this one step forward, employment law appears to have taken one step back, as a tribunal has ruled that a Christian registrar should have been allowed to refuse to perform civil partnership ceremonies.

This ridiculous outcome suggests that one person’s homophobic selective reading of a sacred text which she chooses to believe in should take precedence over obeying an equality-focused law applying directly to said person’s job.

As I understand them, the fundamental tenets of pretty much any religion are to treat others with respect and love and to remember that all people are equal in the eyes of whichever deity/ies you believe in.

It’s only when you start getting into plucking selected rants from selected books of the Bible (or other religious text) that you find anything suggesting homosexuality is “against God’s will” (as the registrar claimed), but taking that approach would also teach us that menstruating women are unclean to God (and other bizarre suggestions from Leviticus), which makes you wonder if this registrar, Lillian Ladele, suffers a prolonged monthly session of self-loathing and apologetic prayer.

Today’s tribunal ruling sets a dangerous precedent, by suggesting that someone’s personal beliefs can be used to overrule equalities legislation, effectively allowing them to opt out from complying with the law. As Peter Tatchell puts it:

The tribunal has ruled that people of faith are above the law. They can plead conscientious objection and be exempt from the laws that apply to everyone else.

If this judgment stands, it will pave the way for religious people to have the legal entitlement to discriminate on conscientious grounds against people of other faiths, unmarried parents and many others who they condemn as immoral.

We could soon find religious police officers, solicitors, fire fighters and doctors refusing to serve members of the public who they find morally objectionable – and being allowed to do so by the law.

Lillian Ladele claims she was won a victory for religious liberty. No, she has not. She has won a victory for the right to discriminate. The denial of equal treatment is not a human right. It is a violation of human rights.

Public servants like registrars have a duty to serve all members of the public without fear or favour. Once society lets some people opt out of upholding the law, where will it end?

Islington Council, against whom Ms. Ladele’s complaint was brought, are considering appealing against the outcome. I very much hope that they do, and that this time those sitting in judgement remember the importance of protecting gay rights from those who seek to erode them for no more reason than personal beliefs – which in general terms are, after all, exactly what equality legislation is supposed to protect those on the receiving end of discrimination from.

I’m sure there’s another series of posts to be had on the theme of “why politicians can’t win”, but here’s one reason to get things started.

We hear quite frequently about a “postcode lottery” in health, or education, or whatever other public service is in the media firing line on any particular day.

It’s outrageous, the message runs, that the government allows a situation to arise whereby someone in one area is prescribed a particular drug, or given access to a high quality of teaching, while someone in another area is left pleading on their knees outside their GP’s surgery for a prescription for the same drug, or given shockingly substandard teaching.

That’s certainly a decent enough viewpoint, but there’s no disguising the fact that it amounts to a call for much more centralised control of the public services in question.

Yet the people who play the “postcode lottery” card are often the same people who at other times will trumpet the benefits of “localisation”. The Tories are particularly keen on localisation at the moment, and in fact on Tuesday night they called on their council leaders to ignore central government requests for information and certain non-statutory activities. As Eric Pickles put it:

The time is overdue for Conservative councils to stand up to this bullying and controlling government on behalf of their communities. It is time for Conservative councils to just say no. […] We are not in the business of delivering ‘Labour Lite’; local priorities now must take precedent.

But if local priorities take precedent over central co-ordination, won’t we end up with a postcode lottery in which some localities prioritise some drugs while others prioritise others?

So if they over-centralise, they aren’t giving local people the power to have their own say over their lives, but if they devolve power they cause postcode lotteries. What are they supposed to do to win?

Friday’s Guardian reported that the EU is soon to enforce a reduction in mobile phone call charges across Europe. Brilliant, I hear millions of mobile phone users cry.

But wait, cry the newspaper editors. It can’t be good news, it has to be bad somehow. Oh yes, here we go, this’ll do for the headline:

Forced price cuts would end free handsets, phone firms tell Brussels

So the story proceeds with the principle established that the call cost-cutting is OK but the “end” of free handsets is very bad news.

But just think about this for a minute. In the environmentally conscious world in which we sometimes like to imagine we now live, shouldn’t cost be related to consumption and waste? How does the mobile phone industry’s current business model shape up then?
 

It’s not a great match, is it?

I don’t think I need to redraw my table to represent the model to be “forced” upon us by the EU, do I?

I suppose this comes back to the same principle as my thoughts on car running costs last week. In a capitalist system, to tackle environmental problems, the costs of polluting/ wasting/ damaging the environment need to be incurred in proportion to the pollution emitted/ waste generated/ damage inflicted.

What’s more, the table above is a completely artificial construct of the mobile phone industry. If we change the heading of the right-hand column to “Cost to mobile phone company”, “High” and “Negligible” swap places. It costs the companies little to connect and sustain calls, but of course phones are worth far more than they’re ever sold for.

If we’re to stand a chance of tackling global warming, companies simply can’t continue to be allowed to subsidise – often heavily – environmental damage and waste, getting consumers to pay through the nose for relatively non-damaging activities instead.

And that’s why, unlike the mainstream media, I think this story is, let’s say, 99% good news.

It looks like one of those mocked-up spoofs you find used as the group picture on anti-Mail/anti-Express Facebook groups.

I particularly like their proud trumpeting that they are “10p CHEAPER THAN THE DAILY MAIL”. I think it says something about also being “better” underneath that, though it’s hard to make it out. I think drawing a comparison between the Mail and the Express is like comparing having all your teeth ripped out without anaesthetic by a dentist for £50 with having them ripped out by a drunk friend with pliers for £40.

Do people buying the Express actually feel like by reading it they are becoming more informed about the world around them? How disturbing.

There are no other relatively mainstream, left-wing, liberal parties standing against Davis, and his support for the death penalty and what might abbreviatedly be called Section 28-day detention gives the lie to any pretence he’s a champion of civil liberties, so backing the Green party would seem a no-brainer to me, were I actually living in the constituency.

Is 26 candidates in a by-election a record, by the way? Does anyone know? It seems rather a lot, particularly considering the absence of most of the main parties. Hope the returning officer has stamina.

Greetings, Glastonbury, London, England!

That’s really pushing the boundary.

"Your News" is a strange programme, whose weekly 15-to-20-minute dose is given several different outings each weekend on the BBC News channel.

To call it merely "strange" is perhaps to go a little too easy on it: this programme is actually painfully bad in most respects, although if I’m at a loose end when its title shows up in the now and next listings, I will usually opt to cringe my way through it, for reasons which will perhaps become clear below.

What’s in it?

The main elements of the show include:

• A sort of BBC Nowheresville local news programme-style feature, in which they report on something mildly heartening or distressing having happened to a small number of people.

  Note that the heartening or distressing occurrence will not have been deemed interesting or important enough by any of the BBC’s numerous other news outlets to warrant any previous coverage, but somehow has become worthy of national news coverage after an involved party contacted Your News about it.

  In fairness, the fact that someone is prepared to admit on national TV to having watched (let alone contacted) Your News is perhaps newsworthy in itself.

• A Top Of The Pops-style countdown of the top ten most-read stories on the BBC News web site this week.

  The main area of interest here is for anyone seeking guidance on how upset they should be by any particular ‘bad news’ story.

  Originally, this feature was accompanied by a jaunty take on some pop-chart countdown music in the background throughout. This meant that when a particularly tragic tale was among the top ten, the music didn’t exactly make for sensitive accompaniment.

  It was therefore interesting to see where the too-sad-for-music line was drawn: a single accidental death in Britain might invoke a respectful silence, while a handful of remote paupers going missing, presumed dead, might not.

  Recently, though, they have given their chart backing music a major overhaul, sucking much of the cheeriness out of it. At the same time, they have now decided on no fewer than three levels of gravity:

  1. Full-volume musical accompaniment: This story is perfectly fine. Perhaps a celebrity has been caught by paparazzi having an affair with a page 3 girl. Ha, ha!

  2. Very quiet musical accompaniment: Oh dear. This time the celebrity has been caught exposing himself to a child via his webcam. Not laughing now.

  3. No music: Oh no. The celebrity has murdered the child’s entire family, then set fire to an old people’s home. That’s really not at all good, except for BBC web site traffic levels.

  Perhaps I’ll start keeping a note of which stories get which treatment. Finally, a straightforward, statistical way to study the news values of both the BBC and its web site users through one simple countdown! Revolutionary.

• A series of Flickr-style slideshows of viewers’ photos. Generally when watching this feature for the first time, your thought process will progress roughly like this, as the photos play through:

  Ooh, look, something newsworthy must have been happening here. There are police cars… a fire engine… ooh, and a fire. Exciting. Oh yes, there they are putting out the fire. I wonder what caused that. It looks big. Oh, no explanation… we’ve moved on somewhere else, what’s this? An unusual pattern of sunset in the sky over Yorkshire. Hmm, maybe these pictures aren’t supposed to be as newsworthy as I had assumed they might be, what with them being on the BBC News channel. Eh, what’s this? Isn’t that just… a cat pulling a funny face?! Why on earth is this on the news? Oh, that’s the end of the pictures now. Weird.

• If you’re ‘lucky’, there’ll be a popular YouTube video or two too. These are always about as newsworthy as whatever the last picture was in the viewers’ photos section. Be careful if you tune in during this segment: only the news ticker and channel logo will enable you to tell you haven’t accidentally tuned into ITV1 during You’ve Been Framed.

• The most riveting part of Your News is the part where they (literally) sellotape a picture of a BBC News studio backdrop to the front of a shop in whichever town they’re visiting for the opening ‘news’ item, then ask passers-by to stand in front of it and spEak They’re bRanes about BBC News into the camera.

  It’s a bit like if someone put a "Have Your Say" post on the BBC web site asking what people thought about BBC News, encouraging people to comment on it even if they didn’t think what they had to say was interesting – but with the added problem that to qualify for participation in this feature, the users didn’t even have to be capable of working out how to turn on and operate a computer. These commenters’ only qualification for the role was being able to navigate along a pavement in their own town.

  This section of the show provides an opportunity to play what you might call the Your News Drinking Game, although as a teetotaller I’m going to opt to name it "Your News Bingo".

  Your News Bingo

  Fill in about five random items from the list below onto a blank bingo card grid. Then simply cross each one off (or have a drink) as one of the passers-by mumbles something along the lines of what it says. (Always include at least one of the ones marked with an asterisk, because these are practically guaranteed to come up, and it’s nice to feel you’ve made at some progress in the game.)

  • "I think there should be more good news"
  • "I want to hear more about what’s happening in my local area"*
  • "I think the news is too boring"
  • "I think the news repeats itself over and over again, always going on about the same stuff"
  • "I don’t really understand what they say on the news, it’s too complicated"
  • "I think the news goes too in-depth"
  • "I think there should be more sport"*
  • "I think there should be less sport"
  • "There’s not enough stuff on the news that’s relevant to people like me"*
  • "There should be more stuff for young people on the news"
  • "I like the news"*
  • "I think Your News is the best programme on the BBC News channel. If only there were more programmes like it. It’s clearly a worthwhile public service endeavour. Well done, BBC!" (If this one ever comes up, it will entitle you to an instant full house and/or entire bottle of vodka. Don’t hold your breath.)

What’s the point of Your News?

I think this programme was born out of a number of desires:

1. To make the BBC seem relevant and in touch with the latest technology. (Ooh, YouTube videos. Ooh, digital photos. Etc.)

2. Post-Hutton, to make the BBC News department appear to be listening to its audience and accountable to them. See also the rather more worthwhile NewsWatch endeavour.

3. To try (and almost inevitably fail) to capture the spirit of Web 2.0 on television – audience participation, interactivity, you bring us the news, etc.

4. To give ‘da yoof’ something to enjoy on BBC News. (This aim explains the fact that the camerawork on literally every link in the programme involves a series of fast zooms and sudden twists, because everyone who works in TV knows that young people simply can’t abide the idea of a picture staying still for longer than five seconds so will change channel if they don’t keep them interested – to the point of motion sickness.)

Instead of achieving any of these dubious aims, the BBC has made this bizarre hash of a programme which can only really become entertaining when viewed with the addition of liberal dollops of ridicule and time-passing additions like Your News Bingo.

On the plus side, when presented with a programme which wanted to seem cool, trendy and with-it but ended up laughable, the theme tune composer was able to capture the whole situation perfectly. Enjoy!

Rating

3/10 at face value; 6/10 when watched out of amused bewilderment at this show’s presence on Britain’s flagship news channel.

When can I watch it?

Tune in to Your News at 1530 BST on Saturday and again at 1030, 1530 and 2330 BST on Sundays

says the Your News web site, although being a short programme it generally starts about ten minutes later than any of those times.

On Wednesday night, as evidenced in the photo above (thanks Sunny), I attended the Liberal Conspiracy/Comment is Free (CiF) Blog Nation event for bloggers of the liberal-left persuasion, at the Guardian Newsroom.

I’ve been to the Newsroom for a number of its exhibitions over the past few years, including a great tribute to their sadly missed cartoonist Austin, and more bizarrely the world’s first chance to gaze at the entire skeleton of the whale that swam up the Thames a couple of summers ago.

It turned out that the part of the venue which had back then been the whale’s temporary showcase more ordinarily doubles as a lecture theatre-type room, and it was in here that I began putting faces to bloggers’ names as they introduced themselves throughout the discussions, which covered topics from campaigning to coping with the likelihood of a Conservative government in 2010, and from feminism in the blogosphere to the signal-to-noise ratio in comments, particularly on CiF.

[I’m going to use a “Read more” link now. Personally I don’t like these when I’m reading a blog but they seem popular in long posts elsewhere so I’ll give it a go. Feedback warmly welcomed about whether these are good or not.]

The f-word

I intend to return to feminism in the future, particularly after last night when the gauntlet was laid down to male bloggers to try to engage more with those blogging on feminist matters, not least by doing so themselves. I’m happy to call myself a feminist, provided the core belief of feminism is not defined as the most vocal panellist defined it: "Women are better [than men]". I prefer to think of it as "Women are better – than much of society gives them credit for", or more straightforwardly, we’re all just people and our sex predetermines next-to-nothing about us (beyond the obvious physical differences!).

Comments are free to offend

As for the talk about blog comments, a lot was made of how abusive commenters can be, and particularly what a high proportion of CiF commenters leave offensive and insulting comments. Georgina Henry, editor of CiF, defended her site, gaining support from others, suggesting that those who engage with the commenters rather than ignoring them tend to get the best results. Once people feel they’re engaged in a conversation rather than shouting heckles, they tend to become more reasonable, or if they don’t want to do that, then they may instead disappear off to heckle someone else.

I’m delighted to say that I never once deleted a (non-spam) comment on the Stop Boris blog – a fact which I find surprising in the light of last night’s discussion, particularly given the unavoidably antagonistic nature of an anti-Boris campaign blog. Certainly, people wrote offensive, disagreeable comments at times, but I simply responded to them in measured terms and they soon got bored and left me alone.

The only exceptions were those secretly being paid to abuse me, and others like me, by the official Back Boris campaign. They only finally left me in peace after I exposed the true nature of their employment, whereupon not only did they cease to post any further trolling comments, but one of them also begged me by private e-mail to delete all his old ones too! (As I say, I never deleted any comments over there, so his pleas went ignored.)

Publicity stunted

One issue which struck a chord with me on Wednesday night was that of gaining mainstream media publicity for left-wing blogs. It’s true that there are more right-wing newspapers than left-wing ones, and it certainly seems that people like Iain Dale garner acres more publicity than they deserve in the mainstream media, but one question raised at Blog Nation was whether ‘old media’ coverage really matters.

Henry pointed out that CiF reaches far more people each day than does the Guardian in newspaper form, yet many politicians are reluctant to write comment pieces if they won’t be featured in print. While those kind of figures are hard to dispute in statistical terms, it is also worth considering the status still accorded to things which appear in print versus things which appear only online.

In running the Stop Boris campaign, I sent an initial news release to every old media publication I could think of which I thought might be sympathetic, or at least in one or two cases neutral, towards our campaign, along with a couple of specific London Mayor-related blogs. Of all those, only Dave Hill’s London: Mayor & More blog thought it worth a mention or link.

Later, detecting an appetite for Boris videos, I hastily put together the MYR of LDN video and again e-mailed a number of relevant mainstream media blogs, news programmes and so forth to point them to it. It seems their appetite didn’t extend to our song, whose video instead spread through word of mouth through a handful of smaller sympathetic blogs instead.

It wasn’t just that none of these places wanted to run anything about Stop Boris as a standalone piece, which wouldn’t necessarily be a surprise. They equally didn’t even consider mentioning it in passing in a number of seemingly obvious places.

An article purporting to be about Mayor-related ‘cyber-squatters’ on MediaGuardian.co.uk soon strayed into reeling off the addresses of various web sites which had been set up by those opposed to one or other of the main candidates. Yet while what was then a one-page, plain text rant against Ken’s (non-existent) "plans" to expand congestion charging into the ranter’s beloved Bromley was listed, no mention was made of what was by then a successful (in terms of visitors, not its ultimate effect on the election, of course!) campaign site running broadly in line with the views of many Guardian journalists and readers.

Other similar opportunities were missed, including in Zoe Williams’ now infamous election-day anti-Boris ‘hatchet job’, which condensed and summarised many of the reasons not to vote for Boris but could easily have linked to the Stop Boris blog’s coverage for those seeking further information or more in-depth explanations of some of the issues she had skimmed over due to space constraints.

I don’t say this out of (much?) bitterness about my specific site not being linked to by any specific newspaper. (Although, while most blogs may not have any sense of urgency towards attracting a huge audience, with a campaign like Stop Boris, which was necessarily run almost wholly online to preserve my anonymity, every visitor counted towards opening people’s eyes to concrete reasons not to elect Boris. These could be taken away into pub and workplace arguments and potentially help change people’s minds, so of course in the case of that particular blog I was desperate for all the incoming links I could get!)

I merely think these examples are illustrative of a general disconnect between the old media world and blogs. While of course (as many said on Wednesday) most bloggers don’t strive for some sort of recognition or validation by the mainstream media, if a particular blog can offer a newspaper’s readers more information or analysis on a particular topic, why not mention it? They’re happy to outline Primark’s use of child labour and refer us to the BBC’s Panorama programme for more details, after all. Is that really so different?

Perhaps some journalists are distrustful of blogs, unsure of how reliable their information is. But isn’t working out which blogs are worthy of a link just the same as giving prominence to the BBC’s Panorama press release while throwing Five’s documentary department’s press release about the man with two sets of genitals (or whatever) in the bin? (Or vice versa if you work at the Daily Sport, I suppose.)

Meeting of like minds

This post has turned out to be far longer than intended; if you’re still reading, thanks. I’ll just add that it was great to meet several fellow Boris-Watchers on Wednesday, and indeed to meet a whole load of other people too, thanking several for their support of Stop Boris and garnering URLs of blogs I’d never before heard of to check out and consider for my sidebar. May there be more such events in the future!

First, I was taken aback by the large number of complaints that had been attracted by a simple peck on the lips between a two men in an advert. Which century is this? Where did so many homophobes suddenly find the Advertising Standards Authority’s phone number? Apparently:

viewers complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that it was "offensive" and "inappropriate to see two men kissing".

Other complaints include that the ad was "unsuitable to be seen by children" and that it raised the difficult problem of parents having to discuss the issue of same-sex relationships with younger viewers.

Well, really – poor them. Fancy having to discuss an issue of perfectly natural loving relationships with children. How is this not a good thing? I don’t hear these people complaining about having to discuss issues like, say, straight relationships, or perhaps even less natural things like why people keep interrupting their television-viewing to insist they buy things they don’t really need.

Then, shortly after I finished shaking my head in disappointment at people’s narrow-mindedness, I learned that Heinz’s reaction was to cave in and drop the advert! What on earth are they thinking? Have they calculated that bigots are a more profitable market than the rest of us? Is it really more important to keep them on side than the rest of us?

(I suppose they might have a point actually – I can’t speak for other non-bigots but I haven’t bought Heinz products in years. Own-brand beans are so much cheaper, and taste great. Which makes joining the boycott rather easier… )

What makes this all even more bizarre is that if you watch the advert, it’s pretty clear that this advert is no more about an actual same-sex relationship than the Bounty kitchen paper ads are about accurately portraying a pair of cohabiting pre-op transsexuals.

If you’re looking for things to get upset by in this ad, how about the casually sexist stereotyping inherent in wheeling out the cliché of ‘mum’ preparing meals for kids, nagging them and so forth, and ‘dad’ going out to work? Or the fact that a product banned from kids’ TV due to its unhealthiness is prominently advertised being given to kids for lunch.

I’m not suggesting either of these is a reason to pull the ad off air, but they’re certainly better justifications for doing so than a supposed gay kiss (which is almost entirely in the eye of the beholder anyway).

Of course, Heinz has now garnered a lot of publicity over this, as well as appeasing homophobes, but I can’t help wondering if this may turn out to be one of those rare occasions when there is such a thing as bad publicity. Here’s hoping.

As with most questions posed by newspapers, or indeed in life generally, there’s no one simple answer; in some ways, it is a blessing, but in others the disguise is perhaps rather too good.

I can recall reading not that long ago – but certainly before such a prospect looked remotely feasible – that the price of petrol would have to reach £2 per litre before the UK would start to see the sort of modal shift away from cars and onto public transport which London has bucked the trend with over the past few years.

Now prices are about 20% closer to that than they were when I read it, is this an unalloyed good thing?

There’s little doubt from an environmental point of view that there is almost no such thing as too high a price for oil. It’s going to run out, and until it does it’s going to cause dangerous damage to the environment, so the sooner we can cut down on its use, the better.

From a social justice point of view, though, high petrol prices hit poorer people harder, as do most environmental taxes, which makes things that bit more awkward.

The well known difficulty with making the transition from cars to public transport is that public transport needs to be good to encourage people to leave their cars at home. More ideally, public transport needs to be so good that people don’t have a car in the first place.

The problem with the costs of running a car is that so many of them are one-off, up-front, ‘sunk’ costs: the moment you opt to own a car, you effectively commit to throwing hundreds of pounds at it each year in maintenance, insurance, road taxes and loss of value. The incremental costs which actually vary with the car’s use make up a relatively small (but increasing) proportion of the cost of owning a car.

The result of all this is that for anyone who owns a car, public transport simply can’t compete on a fair basis when deciding how to embark on a particular journey. Sure, the overall cost of taking a car on each trip to the supermarket over a year may be similar to the cost of hopping on the bus instead, but that’s not how decisions are made. Sunk costs are irrelevant to any individual decision, so you’re comparing – in the case of our small, fuel-efficient car – an incremental cost of about 15p a mile with a return bus fare, even in the cheap bus paradise of Greater London, of £1.80 per person.

It’s clear that to enable fair competition between private and public transport, as many of those sunk costs need to be removed and replaced by incremental costs which vary with distance travelled instead. So, for instance, the government’s much-maligned (and even now, I understand, not expected by anyone in the Department for Transport to be implemented for at least a decade) national Road Pricing Scheme would be an ideal replacement for road tax, arguably fuel duty (although this is of course already incremental), and perhaps more radically some sort of MOT system funded from the scheme, if they really wanted to try to win over the usually unappeasable motorists. The more sunk costs they can apportion per mile in this way, the fairer the comparison can be between taking public transport and taking the car.

As things stand, too much of Britain is too difficult to navigate by public transport, so many of us – even those of us who write blog posts like this and wish they didn’t feel the need to own a car – find ourselves reluctantly purchasing a car to get around.

Living 150 metres inside Greater London, with parents living a few miles outside London, I know I could very easily and happily go without a car if I only ever travelled in the 180° zone on one side of my home, but since I often need to travel to the other side, going without would be impractical, inconvenient and expensive.

This is why so many people, even those with decent transport links in their immediate vicinity, have cars, and as soon as they own the car, it’s a financial no-brainer to use it as much as possible.

So as the fuel prices begin to rise, and people are looking for ways to change to public transport, what progress is being made toward replacing one-off costs with incremental costs?

Sadly, very little. In addition to the aforementioned shelved National Road Pricing scheme, I arrived home (by sleeper train, not car!) last week to find a letter from my car insurance company, Norwich Union, telling me that the innovative product I signed up for last summer, Pay As You Drive, was being axed.

Apparently take-up was poor – poor to the point where they refused to say quite how poor but insisted it was “not less than” 10% of what they were hoping for!

I’d signed up for this as a first optimistic step towards enabling myself to compare public transport and car use fairly, and while I was pleased by how well it worked and did feel somewhat additionally rewarded each time I left my car at home and walked or cycled somewhere, the per-mile rates, even in rush hour, were minimal, and as nothing compared with all the sunk costs of owning the car. Nevertheless, it was a good start, but now even this small step towards a fairer transport market has been withdrawn.

Perhaps it will make a comeback, but in the mean time, is £2-a-litre petrol still our best hope for achieving modal shift? If there’s not a marked improvement in (and reduction in the cost of) public transport outside London, for the sake of the less well off, I rather hope not.

"Pushing the boundary" doesn’t really work as an identity, though, so perhaps I’ll have to retain the "Mr.". We’ll see.

Anyway, I’m starting this blog because, frustration and failure aside, I rather enjoyed my time writing the Stop Boris blog, and flatteringly a few people suggested when I wound that up that they’d like to read any future blogging I did elsewhere. So I have motivation on my part to write stuff, and a small but perfectly formed and ready-made audience willing to consume it – so here it is.

What will I be writing about? Well, I already contribute to an outlet for Boris coverage, Boris Watch (the .co.uk version, not the .com "LOL BOZZA IS A LEGERND!" version), so the intention is to write about anything and everything but Boris here.

I would envisage that this is likely to include politics, news, the media, advertising, London and, er, pretty much anything else that comes to mind.

I realise this doesn’t sound like an earth-shatteringly original addition to the blogosphere (a word I’ll try to avoid using if possible), and I don’t envisage it winning any blogging awards or even breaking many stories in the way my daily reads (and Boris Watch) might. But hey, I’m hoping it’ll at least be enjoyable – for me and particularly for you, should you elect to return, or to subscribe to my RSS feed.