School's out for silly season

Well hello again everyone. In the finest traditions of Mastermind, I intend to start what I finished the other night with some further discussion of some of the interesting and quirky things in the news these past few days.

Since I last posted some ramblings on these pages though, another story has come to the forefront of the media coverage and I feel it is only right I should talk about it. No, I'm not talking about Ashley Cole's ill advised midnight drinks and disputes with Paparazzi photographers and members of London's constabulary, but I am of course talking about Labour's King of Slime getting the custard treatment in an appropriately slimy colour.

4. Direct action could indirectly score an own goal
Well, like most people that watched the news I was amused in a juvenile schoolboy sort of way by Peter Mandelson receiving the green custard treatment. Mandelson is one of the most contemptible of all politicians swimming in the shark infested waters around Westminster, of that there is no doubt. However, whilst people will certainly remember the image of Mandelson being gunged much in the manner of a guest on Noel's House Party or Live & Kicking back in those halcyon televisual days of the 1990s, I do have my doubts over whether this type of action is the right way to get your point across.

I should point out at this point that I actually know who the phantom custard flinger was. Although I don't know Leila Deen in the sense of being a friend or acquaintance, I do recall her being at both my primary and secondary school and in fact her elder sister was in the same year as me. Apparently Leila is well renowned as a political activist with a keen interest in environmental matters, although I must confess, I had not previously heard of her involvement in this field until this story broke.

It would seem that Leila's particular bone of contention with Mr Mandelson was his support for a third runway at Heathrow Airport, which as a leading activist with the Plane Stupid pressure group, it will not surprise you to hear that Ms Deen was opposed to. Mr Mandelson was recently appointed Business Secretary by Gordon Brown, despite the fact that the King of Spin no longer sits in the House of Commons and in fact is now a member of the House of Lords. Within this role of Business Secretary, Mandelson's support of a third runway should not be surprising as he has no doubt been representing the views of many leading figures in business who I expect have lobbied him and his party. Although wannabe benefactors are supposed to not donate money to a political party in exchange for political influence, I think we all know that this does happen indirectly in certain situations.

The fact remains, however, that Lord Mandelson was not actually the person who gave the green light for the go-ahead to the fifth runway development at Heathrow. This person was in fact Geoff Hoon, the Transport Secretary. So in some respects, Mandelson represented a convenient scapegoat because he happens to attract a higher profile whereas for those with just a casual interest in or knowledge of the current Labour cabinet, picking Geoff Hoon out of an identity parade could prove to be a tough challenge.

Certain questions come to mind as a result of Leila Deen's "attack" on Mandelson. First of all, where on earth was the security? OK, so as it turned out, Ms Deen's weapon of choice happened to be green custard, but if security is as lax as that for Government ministers, who is to say that a top minister could not be exposed to a more dangerous weapon, such as a knife or a blade in another situation? Secondly, how on earth was Ms Deen allowed to just walk off unchallenged in the aftermath of her attack? Bearing in mind that just a couple of years ago, security at the Brighton Centre ejected an 80 year old man who was supposedly being seen to "heckle" a speaker at the Labour Party Conference, you would have expected there to be someone near to the incident who would have stopped Ms Deen in her tracks and arrested her. Ms Deen subsequently voluntarily attended a police station where she was placed under arrest. I wonder if she will get remanded in custody. Custody, custardy, geddit? Hmm, where's the cloak rooms?

Another wider question that should be asked though is do the public really take heed of pressure groups' messages after direct action has taken place? There are those who argue that it is only these kinds of actions that generate awareness in a particular cause and bring it to public consciousness. I tend to think this is a flawed argument though. Sure, people will remember the action and they might well know what the protest was about. However, for the action to be worthwhile, surely it is going to need people to motivated to go out and sign up to your campaign on the strength of the action they have witnessed. While I imagine some people's reaction to Mandelson's gunging was "couldn't happen to a nicer bloke", I doubt there were many who felt motivated to sign up to Plane Stupid or to find another means of campaigning against a third runway at Heathrow or get involved in any other form of environmental protest.

In the main I expect that most people's thoughts were something along the lines of "silly girl" or "you can't condone an assault". And this is what Plane Stupid need to wary of. If people find their protest methods old hat and over the top then it could in fact do serious damage to the credibility of their campaign. There is previous precedent in this respect in the form of Fathers For Justice.

This pressure group, you may recall, was a group formed to improve rights for fathers with regards to access and custody of their children and was at one stage championed by Sir Bob Geldof. However, the worthiness of this group's cause was seriously undermined by a series of publicity stunts by a small minority of activists. These stunts included someone throwing a purple "powder bomb" at Tony Blair whilst Parliament was sitting and some fathers dressed as superheroes scaling the exterior of the Houses of Parliament. The militant actions of a minority resulted in the group being dissolved for a period of time, before being recently reformed, although its reputation has now been permanently tarnished.

I have some sympathy with the opposition towards the third runway at Heathrow, although my sympathy is not so much with residents. I have always wondered about the mentality of people who complain about airport expansions when it was their choice to go and live near the airport, unless they really are so old that their residence pre-dates the airport. My particular concern with the expansion is less to do with the environment and more to do with safety. Heathrow is already Europe's busiest airport and adding another runway will add to the traffic flying over London. Given the sometimes inclement nature of our weather in this country, with more planes in the sky, surely this poses more danger of a crash in extreme weather conditions.

On the environmental point, I think there is a real conflict in people's attitudes. On the one hand, you have people who are more environmentally savvy and do care about the world they leave behind for their descendants. But the conflict is that people need to marry this with the ever increasing need to travel and take on a voyage of discovery. People are more hedonistic now than a generation or two ago, people want to sample different cultures and broaden their horizons and the main way they get to do this is by travelling, plus in some cases, travelling is an essential part of one's employment.

Whilst the green brigade would love everybody to stay at home more and reduce their carbon footprint, I dare say that many of the said activists have spent gap years going round India or Thailand and I doubt many chose to get to Asia on the Vladivostok Express or by going on the longest Tuk-Tuk ride in history. The bare facts are that flying enables people to get round the world far quicker than any other form of transport and given the nature of people's fast paced, live for today lifestyles, it is unrealistic to expect many to follow the Deen family's reported example of travelling to Morocco for a family holiday on a three day train ride.

Heathrow's latest runway is supposedly going to be open for business some time in 2019, although I expect like most building projects, it will eventually be opened late and well beyond the intended budget. So we are talking at least 10 years before the first commercial flights land on the new runway. In that time, I would not be remotely surprised to see significant advances in making aircraft a more environmentally friendly means of travelling. It would require work to be done on the fuel and quite possibly on the dynamics of the aircraft in order for these advances to work. After all, passengers would not want improvements to the environment to be at the cost of longer flight times.

Nonetheless, I do think it is quite feasible to see progress on this by the time Heathrow's next runway opens because normally where a designated need has been identified and it is seen that it needs attention, innovation tends to shine through in the end. People are not going to stop travelling and they are going to expect to get from A to B by aircraft at least as fast then as they do now. There simply are no realistic alternatives if people are travelling long haul to visit their Great Aunt Sheila in Australia or want to go on safari in Kenya. And people are not going to suddenly go back to spending their summers in Newquay or Bognor Regis because their conscience is pricking them.

So all in all, I don't think Leila Deen's chosen method of making a political stand will make any difference in the long run. Governments tend to make decisions affecting us all because they can with the disclaimer that "you elected us". So while I am sure in the short term, people will remember the images of Lord Mandelson's Incredible Hulk-esque face, I expect in the long run it will result in very few people being empowered to go and sign on the dotted line with Plane Stupid. You could argue that Ms Deen's actions were exactly what it says on the tin.

5. The rules are an ass
As something of a quiz fan, it probably won't surprise you to learn that I have been following the recent University Challenge controversy with some interest. In fact, I try and make sure I catch the show whenever I am at home on a Monday night. The show is appealing not just for giving you an ego boost if you unexpectedly answer the most obscure question correctly, but Jeremy Paxman is the perfect host for keeping the current generation of tax dodgers in place.

The controversy that has brewed in the last week or so has been in relation to the status of one member of the winning Corpus Christi College Team from Oxford University. The gentleman concerned supposedly broke the rules because he was no longer a student at the time when the final was filmed and had started a postgraduate job. This supposedly is at odds with the competition's rules which states that any member of the team has to still be at university by the time of the final.

While I appreciate that there are those out there who are sticklers for rules and no doubt will be saying "rules are rules" as their response to this, I personally feel that disqualifying Corpus Christi and handing victory to Manchester was a ludicrous decision and one that could have been avoided. Firstly, why on earth does the final need to be recorded several months after the earlier rounds? I was listening to Bamber Gascoigne the other day and he said that this scenario would not have happened in his time presenting the show because the series was played out continuously without gaps in the filming. If all of the rounds can be filmed within a short space of time, it completely removes the possibility of this scenario occurring.

Secondly, how did the producers of the programme not come to know about this potential problem much earlier? Surely as a pre-requisite for going on the show, the show's production team and researchers make a note of what courses the students are studying and presumably when they are scheduled to graduate. The student in question supposedly informed the production team that he was going to have graduated by the time the final came round but at the time, they did not see fit to take any further action.

This is a terrible way to decide a great series of University Challenge, especially as the final itself had been strongly contested. People out there no doubt feel that Corpus Christi gained an advantage by having an ineligible player but it is up to the BBC to make the rules clearer. In any event, the difference between the two teams was the Corpus Christi captain Gail Trimble, who scored over half the points that Corpus Christi amassed in the final.

Giving the prize to Manchester is awarding their team the most hollow of victories, much like when a Formula 1 driver gets awarded a race after the driver who took the chequered flag gets disqualified because of the most trivial technicality. If the powers-that-be really felt it necessary to challenge the result, why not just replay the final at a later date but with Corpus Christi using another player in place of the chap who had graduated. I have a strong inkling the result would be exactly the same.

I can't but think that this overreaction has been a result of the recent panic stations at the BBC where the popular press, led by the Daily Mail no less, have been jumping on any small scandal at Television Centre, however trivial or irrelevant it seems to the wider world. The BBC being the bureaucratic organisation it is has gone on the defensive and consequently it panics every time one of the papers sticks the knife in. This was an overreaction but now the BBC has created a rod for its own back with the news that in previous series, there were other teams that fielded postgraduates. A simple change of the rules and to the filming schedules needs to happen to avoid any further embarrassment.

One other thing about University Challenge. While I appreciate that the programme tries to represent the diverse range of students going to university, I would like to see more teams being represented by students doing Bachelors and Masters degrees rather than making up the numbers with students working towards PhDs. Getting to PhD is a fantastic achievement of course, especially given the time constraints associated with fitting it in to a career and sometimes a family life. However, I tend to think University Challenge should in the main test those working towards a future career and so PhD students with more worldly experience and knowledge could give their team an unfair advantage.

6. Facebook is not the root of all evil
Social networking seems to be all the rage at the moment. As well as Facebook and MySpace, we now have Twitter which seems to be the current play-thing of choice among celebrities. Some of whom have notoriety, some of whom are called Tim Lovejoy. Twitter's current popularity is something I find baffling given that essentially it is just like a Facebook status update except that you are restricted to 140 characters. Surely there needs to be more to it than that for people to migrate from Facebook to it?

Anyway, Facebook recently celebrated its fifth birthday and there have been plenty of discussions about its general usefulness recently, with some arguing it is an effective way to build networks, while the cynics are suggesting that it encourages laziness and that it results in more artificial relationships which lead to poorer social skills and communications, particularly among children and teenagers that use it.

The truth of the matter is that Facebook is not responsible for the world's ills, nor is it the cure to them either. First of all, Facebook is a fun website that people use to just kill time and to keep in contact with people. I am sure everyone on this fine planet has a mental list in the back of their head of people who they once knew, be it from school, college, university or previous employment who they would love to know what became of them. Or, they will have extended members of the family who they don't speak to often other than at weddings, Christenings, funerals or Bar Mitzvahs. Facebook provides a way of keeping in touch with people from all walks of life and it is up to you and them as to how much you choose to communicate with one another.

There are those that say that if people really wanted to stay in touch, they would have done anyway, but life is not always as straightforward as that. People go their separate ways, change jobs, meet spouses and move across the country, plus sometimes people also change their phone numbers or e-mail addresses and not everyone finds out. The great part of Facebook is tracking people down and comparing notes on how things have changed since you last hooked up.

Like all social networking sites, I think there does come a time when Facebook reaches saturation point. It was the same with Friends Reunited a few years ago, there was a period of time when membership levels snowballed but gradually everyone that you knew who was going to sign up had done so and the other people who were the subject of those "Whatever happened to..." moments were never going to sign up. Facebook has attracted more people than Friends Reunited, but that can be explained by the fact it is free and there is a much wider choice of applications that you can engage in. Nonetheless, my friend list has probably lost as many people as it has gained in the last 3 or 4 months, the result of some people having enough of Facebook's less favourable attributes.

Facebook is not perfect and I imagine that was Mark Zuckerberg's intention when he decided to throw Facebook out to the wider public domain back in 2006. The website is a commercial operation and it makes plenty of money from advertising, while further money is made from companies posting up their applications on the site. This provides the user with a diverse range of interactive options and experiences, but it also leaves the site prone to security lapses and potential viruses wherever applications are not sufficiently vetted.

The other problem with Facebook of course is the inability of some people to conform to the "site etiquette". You know the sort of thing I mean, people forever sending requests to participate in quizzes, posting pornographic images on your FunWall space, not to mention those requests to attack their zombie. People put up with this for so long, but when it gets to the stage where you have 400 requests to engage in various activities, you can understand why the less patient social networker decides to withdraw their Facebook presence.

In terms of the recent discussion about Facebook, I do not think social networking is to blame for poor communication or poor social skills, certainly not on its own anyway. There are other factors which are just as significant, such as text messaging. I would imagine a high percentage of teenagers now own a mobile phone but in general, how often is the phone used for speaking to people? I would hazard a guess that text messaging is predominantly used and text speak leads to sloppy English and less verbal communication. Also, where parents are leading hectic lives, how often do a family unit get to sit down together and engage in dialogue as a family? This surely has a bearing too.

That is not to say that there aren't certain trends with Facebook that are not disturbing, but often the worst culprits are adults. Some adults seem addicted to Facebook, to the degree that they have to update their status every hour or two, even if they updating via their mobile phone and if nothing of tremendous interest has occurred in that time. Some status updates such as learning that your Facebook friend is having a cup of tea and a biscuit or is doing the washing up is of such mind-numbing banality, that you wonder what possessed them to think anyone was interested in the first place.

Then there are those people who log into Facebook via their phone when out socialising with friends. Picture the scene. You are sitting in the pub having a pint with friends and everyone round the table is looking at their phones checking other people's status updates. Or substitute the pub for sitting down for a meal in a restaurant. Surely there has to be a cut-off point, a point where you say "let's leave the artificial communications until later". This is one of the reasons why I never use Facebook on my mobile phone. Well, that and the fact that my phone is ancient so it is not powerful enough to log into it anyway.

These are the types of people that give Facebook a bad name in some respects. You just want to sit them down and say "go for a walk, get some fresh air and turn your phone off when you do so". But some people have addictive natures, whether it is to nicotine, coffee, alcohol or the Internet. How long before the first meeting of Facebookers Anonymous is convened? I suppose it would at least give people the chance to network, and presumably send each other a friend request afterwards. They could consider staging future meetings via Facebook conferencing.

The truth is that Facebook can at times be annoying. If used wrongly it can be dangerous. You would be hard pressed to say that there are educational benefits from it unless you happen to play Lexulous on a regular basis. But, it is without doubt a guilty pleasure and I am sure that there are plenty of examples across the world of lost liaisons being retrieved and new friendships being formed and that surely is its purpose. Let's not try and pretend that it is rocket science, or anything more than a guilty pleasure, and a relatively inexpensive vice at that.