Musashino Musings

Just when you think this country can't get any more shit, Blair's government manages to plummet to even greater depths of incompetance. Surprisingly, dear reader, and despite the fact that Ruth Kelly has managed to elevate her already impressive track record to achieve sublime levels of blundering ineptitude worthy of note, I'm not referring to the debacle over the HIPs scheme. No. I refer to a new law, sneaked in when nobody was looking, that is a good deal more sinister.

As of April this year, new regulations came into force concerning the issuing of UK visas, namely the requirement to pass either a test on “Life in the UK” or to submit evidence of the completion of an ESOL course (English for speakers of other languages). On the face of it, it would appear perfectly reasonable for individuals wishing to become British citizens to have acquired a degree of knowledge about UK life, our customs and language. However, these regulations are now also being applied to all individuals wishing to remain in the UK. My wife and daughter being two such individuals.

Needless to say, there are no ESOL schemes currently running in our area. Nationally, all the schemes are so ridiculously over subscribed as to be virtually impossible to get on. The Life In The UK Test - the other route to permanent residency - is, as one would expect, chock full of meaningless facts and figures (most of which are out of date anyway), half-truths, inaccuracies and politically correct nonsense. All of which conspire to make it the most irrelevant, inaccessible and worthless test of eligability imaginable. Not to mention completely unachievable - including by most British people too, incidentally. We are a normal, law abiding and decent family, living under our own means and not claiming any form of state support. Yet because of this outrageous new law we are now facing the prospect of our family never being allowed to settle here in peace. I consider this to be a gross injustices.

My wife entered the UK on a fiancée visa (£500). We were then forced to pay another £500 in order that my wife could stay in the UK for a further two years. At the end of this period, we were told that assuming we were still living together, we could then apply for indefinite leave to remain in the UK (for another £500, naturally).

As of 2nd April, the fee has leapt to a monstrous and totally unjustifiable £750 AND there is now a requirement for her to pass the test for British citizenship, even though she has no desire to become a British citizen, nor will she receive any of the benefits of citizenship should she pass, such as participation in the democratic process. The only alternative is to keep paying £395 to extend her existing visa, with no guarantee that they will do so and therefore no long term security.

All I want to do is live in peace with my wife and family. We have paid huge sums of money and jumped through every hoop that has been placed in our path in order to do so. Now we have to live with the potential that our family can be broken up and our lives ruined on the whim of some semi-literate fuckwit in the Home Office; A sword of Damacles, delivered into their hands because of this totally inhumane and unjust law and this ridiculous test.

Blunkett, the architect of this supremely idiotic piece of legislation, should reflect that this country went to war to safeguard the rights of people not to be victimised and persecuted on account of their race or ethnicity. This test smacks of the Nazi test of Aryan purity and represents an injustice of similar magnitude. As many have already pointed out, it does nothing to stem the tide of miscreants flooding into the UK - it only hits those families and individuals who have tried to follow the law and behave responsibly. It is discriminatory,racist and totally unjustifiable on any grounds other than as a way to exclude decent people from the UK and to rip them off.

So, after 10 years of broken promises and bullshit, Blair has finally named the day. It will come as no surprise to any regular reader of this blog when I say "good riddance". But, overjoyed as I am to finally see the back of such a despicable sleazeball, I am also depressed by the knowledge that by the time the big day comes around, the PR clean-up campaign will have ensured that Blair's sins are expunged and he will leave as he arrived - that fluffy, squeeky clean, earnest individual we all know and love. Just like the criminals featured nightly on the numerous police docu-soaps, you just know that despite the overwhelming weight of evidence to the contrary, he'll end up sailing away from the scene of the crime without a stain on his character. The timing of the departure announcement itself was transparent, bordering on the pathetic: It's obvious Blair has been waiting for a good news story on which to float his announcement, and the devolution of power in Northern Ireland provided just such a convenient vehicle.

The really scary thing is just how effective his methods are: It's noticable how the post-Blair analysis vox pops all seem to be echoing the same sentiments - "We know he's made some mistakes, but he's really not that bad". Blair himself, in characteristic fake candidity, admits that maybe expectations of his premiership were too high in 1997. Is he saying that we, the people, laid this unfair burden on his shoulders? A burden that despite valiant efforts, he was unable to bear? Poor Tony. The reality is that expectations were high because that's what he promised. Remember "Things Can Only Get Better"? Remember "Education, Education,Education"? Remember "Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime"? All his words, and his promises: All promises he has singularly failed to keep. And now, after 10 years of excuses, the best he can come up with is "I did my best but you asked too much."

I will never forgive or forget the damage that this individual and his incompetant cronies have done to our country, to our standing in the international community and to the countless thousands of innocents around the world whose lives have been destroyed his blundering mismanagement. To all those people tempted to reach for the rose-coloured spectacles, I say you owe it to your fellow citizens and to all decent people in the world to not let Blair slime his way out of his personal responsibility for 65,000 dead civilians in Iraq, a third-world health service, a country crippled by petty beauracracy, a country rotten with anti-social behaviour, with corruption; devoid of civic morality. An education system designed to not to educate, but to entrap in debt; and a society where the favoured rich get filthy rich on the backs of hard-pressed tax payers.

There's much debate about what will be remembered as Blair's legacy: Luckily, we will all be able to be reminded of Tony everytime we want to find an NHS dentist, or we need medical treatment, or feel intimidated by gangs of drunken yobs, or get fined for doing 41 mph in a 40 mph limit. Things can only get better? How wrong we were.

Further to my last little example of the less-than-eagle-eyed checking of exam materials at Edexcel, I came across the following passage in an AS level exam paper.

"Some British towns are beginning to create attractive cycle paths. Nottingham, for example, has the greatest length of cycle paths in England at 180kms; Brighton, on the other hand, has a cycle lane barely two meters long."

Now that's what I call a short cycling holiday!

Call me old fashioned, but I would have thought it would have been reasonable to expect that teachers knew how to spell properly. Whilst reviewing some work set for my daughter, I came across the following section of data:

"Potatoe","V","W","tbsp",4,6,57

What makes this even worse, is that this data was supplied by the exam board Edexcel as part of the official coursework material. The fact that the people setting the questions at the examination board can't spell properly is bad enough. That they are so slack that nobody even checks their work is unforgivable.

Extracts from today's conversation with the intellectual giants of British Gas's amusing titled "customer services" department.....

Q: "I'm ringing to find out why my direct debit has gone from £52 a month to £122"
A: "Because that's how much you owe" How helpful

Q: "But why has the account risen to such a level without my knowledge"
A:"What's probably happened is that you've used a lot of gas, for example, if your thermostat is turned up high or er...you've used it a lot" No shit, Einstein

Q:"But I can't afford £122 a month"
A:" All I can advise is that you pay the outstanding amount to bring the account up to date" If I can't afford 122, it's unlikely I'll be able to afford the 530 you say I owe - f***wit

Q:"So why have you not told me about this before?"
A "We sent a bill on 30th March"
Q:" But it's the 11th of April - where is it?"
A:"It can take up to 2 weeks to reach you" What kind of stamps are you using?

I could go on, but it's just too depressing. The thing that really upsets me is not just their total incompetance ( I have been trying to sort out this account since LAST OCTOBER!) but the fact that by employing such morons, they clearly think each and every customer is just a piece of shit to be talked down to.

There is much discussion at the moment about the decision by the MoD to allow the 15 captured sailors to sell their stories to the media. One of the detainees appeared on tv today, commenting that "Somebody is going to make some money out of this, why not the people that were there?" Interesting, that a serving officer should choose to talk about money, as opposed to honour or duty. The sheer incompetence of allowing 15 armed UK service personnel to be captured two miles inside their own territorial waters is one thing, but to further compound that disgrace by handling it as if it was somekind of reality tv show is almost beyond belief. The chain-smoking single mother at the centre of the row (what a perfect exemplar of Tony Blair's Britain) assures us that "a percentage" of the six figure sum will be going to charity. Well, that's alright then.

On a day when another six soldiers were killed in Tony Blair's pointless war, we are supposed to feel sympathy for this group. Maybe somebody should have told these people that a career in the armed services does, unfortunately, carry with it a degree of risk and that they may be required to face unpleasant and life-threatening situations. Maybe somebody should point out that, generally speaking, they are supposed to fire the weapons they have been given rather than just hand them over like a bunch of naughty schoolchildren. Moreover, as members of Her Majesty's Armed Services, they are expected to handle themselves with dignity and with a sense of duty - rather than cash - uppermost in their minds. However, given that the politicians that sent them to war are themselves a bunch of dispicable, incompetant and dishonourable liars, we really shouldn't be surprised.

The following is an extract from a book called Lost Japan, by Alex Kerr. I discovered it on an excellent blog site put together by a Canadian guy called Jeff.

The folding of the fukusa, the sliding movement of the feet in Noh, the grip of the sword in martial arts - everything was difficult. Moreover, as the seminar progressed, it became clear that these movements were not merely ornamental, but expressed a philosophy. For instance, I encountered the rhythm jo, ha, kyu, zanshin; basically this is quite simple, amounting to "slow, fast, faster, stop". When wiping the tea scoop with the fukusa in the tearoom, we were taught to start slowly (jo) speed up a bit at the center of the scoop (ha) and finish off at the end quickly (kyu). At the instant one draws the fukusa off the tip of the scoop, there is the closing zanshin, which means "leaving behind the heart". Then one returns to zero, in preparation for the next rhythn of jo, ha, kyu.At first I thought this rhythm was a pecularity of tea, but I soon found that it applies in exactly the same way to the foot movements and raising of the fan in Noh drama. In martial arts and calligraphy as well, this rhythm governs all movements. Over the course of the seminar I realized that jo, ha, kyu underlies every single one of Japan's traditional arts. The teachers went on to explain that jo, ha, kyu, zanshin is the fundamental rhythm of nature - it defines the destinies of men, the course of eras, even the growth of galaxies and the very ebb and flow of the universe.-Alex Kerr