Constructive ranting

Well, I'm back again to finish my ramblings from earlier on in the week. Quite a few bits and pieces to get through so I had better get cracking with some more constructive ranting.

2. Let's encourage responsible people
As ever, the media has of late been all too busy to highlight the negative side of youth culture with a series of stories about bullying in schools, news of poor literacy skills amongst Britain's teenagers and the continued spectre of knife crime that hangs over certain inner city communities within the country. All of which are valid concerns, of that there is no doubt. Yet, I do feel that our media is guilty of painting a distorted picture of growing up in modern Britain. Even when there is news of youth achievement, such as excellent grades in GCSEs and A-levels, self-appointed know-alls come out of the woodwork and disparage these achievements and say the exams are too easy, presumably for no other reason than because the green eyed monster has consumed them, reminding them of their inadequacies in their own adolescence.

I feel that sometimes as a society we are all very good at focusing on what people's bad points are rather than what actual positives there are to be found in the vast majority of individuals. That is not to say that there are not certain rotten apples to be found in society, clearly there are. However, a small minority of rotten apples does not make for an orchard that should be condemned. Without wishing to turn this into some kind of Dickensian style nature versus nurture debate, some people turn out in a certain way due to circumstance. This can be due to bad parenting, poverty or poor schooling, possibly a combination of all three. The point is that it is very easy to tar everybody with the same brush.

So I was pleased to hear of a recent development that some secondary schools are looking to introduce a mentoring scheme. The scheme would involve fifth year (or year eleven if you prefer) students having to mentor first and second year students to help them in acclimatising to the big school and supporting them with any issues they may be having, such as being bullied or keeping on top of work. Whether the remit will include the mentor doing the mentee's maths homework on Pythagoras's Theorem is unclear, although I am sure a line will be drawn at the mentor nipping out to buy the mentee's cigarettes.

Facetiousness aside, I personally think this is a very good idea and feel that I would have benefited from this type of scheme being around when I was at school, both from the perspective of being a mentee, and latterly, a mentor. I appreciate that some see it as a dirty word, but I think this type of opportunity offers empowerment to the mentor and gives them a sense of responsibility. I realise that there is the possibility that some mentors will choose not to use that responsibility as it was intended, but that ultimately is their choice. You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. If the mentee makes the most of the situation, not only can this help them through their schooling, but it could also give them a few pointers for mentoring three years down the line.

As I said earlier, I did not have access to this type of programme at school, although I latterly was involved in a mentoring programme when I was doing my degree in Business Studies. In my first year, this involved being mentored by a final year student around applying for a notional job and then when I came to my final year, I sat on the other side of the desk and had to mentor two first year students. Although there were certain challenges that I found with mentoring first year students who are making the most of university's social attractions while they can, I got enough from the experience to help me in a professional capacity and I think it is sensible to adopt a similar programme in schools in order to help people to be responsible and accountable at an earlier age.

Back in my days at school, the nearest thing that there was in place to encouraging good citizenship amongst pupils was to appoint school captains and prefects. These roles brought about badges of honour, although in general terms, the responsibilities that came with the role did not encourage empowerment nor did it involve much interaction with more junior peers. A typical day in the life of a prefect would involve standing guard outside the boys' toilets (I think that was done voluntarily if you were a girl prefect!) or apprehending delinquant first years by encouraging them to pick litter. I think the problem with the prefects system is that it encouraged an "us and them" policy, which is perhaps counter-productive in fostering respect.

Giving teenagers more responsibility and autonomy is something that could go a long way to improving the current downsides of youth culture and the negative press that is so prevalent every time one picks up a tabloid newspaper or turns on a shock jock on a talk based radio station that needs to sensationalise to get its audience into a larva. I also think more should be done to help pupils leave school with the level of communication skills required to be effective in the workplace.

It is a common complaint from employers and those representing employers' interests to say that today's school leavers possess poor communication skills upon entering the world of work. It is an understandable occurrence in some respects because verbal communication has become more fragmented as a result of the increased use of non-verbal technologies such as mobile phone texting, MSN Messenger and Facebook in order to communicate with others. There has recently been a campaign to improve oratory among young people and I fully support this idea and feel that the best way of encouraging it is for all secondary schools to have a debating society.

I remember that there was a debating society at my secondary school that ran around once a month at Monday lunchtime and I went along a few times to observe, if not to contribute heartily to the debate. Although the society was never that well attended, it did attract a cross section of students from different years along to the debate and there were some eloquent debaters who made a strong case on a range of issues, such as capital punishment, animal testing and hunting.

Knowing how to present a coherent argument and being able to present in front of an audience are two major skills that useful in spheres far beyond school debating societies. In both an academic and a professional capacity, the need to present in front of an audience of often influential people is a vital skill and presentations are increasingly incorporated into the interviewing stage when applying for a job. Therefore, it makes sense to provide students with a forum at a relatively early age where they can get used to presenting and communicating with an audience, and in giving pupils the chance to present a clear argument, it will also encourage them to develop their command of the English language, which is something that we are informed is a dying art.

As I have said before, there should be a lot of encouragement on people to have responsibility and to be accountable for their actions. This of course, does not only apply to teenagers, but also to adults as well. So with this in mind, I was somewhat disturbed to read this weekend that the German Government is considering banning paintball as it believes that combat games could be contributing to the culture of youth violence and gun crime in Germany.

Now, I do not wish to dismiss this claim out of hand as I suppose there are a small minority of people who can be influenced by combat games just as there is a minority that exists that has played shoot-em-up or beat-em-up games on their PlayStation or XBox and then felt compelled to go out and take copycat actions. There are also those that are influenced by violent scenes they see in Hollywood movies. Just because you or I played such games when growing up and continue to watch movies that contain graphic violence without feeling the urge to go out into the street and play out these scenes does not mean to say that there are those that will. Such people, however, will in all likelihood, have deep rooted mental health issues that impacts upon their disturbed behaviour.

The problem that introducing bans or censorship of this kind is that invariably it is the responsible people that are penalised the most. I have only ever been paintballing once, as part of the day's itinerary for a friend's stag do, but it is one of those activities that I would not mind the opportunity to participate in again at a later date. What struck me from the one occasion that I did take part in paintballing was that there were two distinct groups among the participants, namely those that were paintball enthusiasts and those who were paintball novices, the group that it will not surprise you that I included myself in. The paintball enthusiasts though, did not just derive pleasure from going round firing paint at friends and acquaintances, but also enjoyed the teamwork involved and the strategy of the game.

Introducing any form of ban does not provide any understanding of the types of people that take part in an activity, but it instead imposes a blanket decision on everybody without giving a moment's consideration to who it affects and what difference their sanctions will make. I very much doubt that stopping people from participating from playing paintball will result in a significant downturn in gun crime in Germany because unless the crime statisticians know differently, I would not expect there to be any correlation between people who are participants at paintballing and those that are arrested for violent crime. It might make more sense to impose a lower age ceiling for when someone can start taking part in paintball and other combat games, so to ensure that there is not an effect on more impressionable teenagers and also so people are responsible in handling their guns and ammunition.

This reminds me a little of the handgun ban that was introduced in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Dunblane massacre in 1996. The Government was right to move quickly to ban ownership of handguns in the aftermath of a shocking tragedy. However, it is arguable that they went a step too far because the people that were penalised the most were those that were licensed, responsible owners of guns who were no longer allowed to use them. Members of Britain's rifle shooting team were not allowed to train in the United Kingdom ahead of the Olympic Games because of the ban and so had to use facilities overseas. Can it be right that the responsible people are penalised for the actions of the irresponsible and the incapacitated? It does seem that sometimes our Governments are all too ready to use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

3. ID advocates have no idea
The activist V, of V For Vendetta fame would be shaking his masked head in disbelief at some of the recent legislative whims that our dearly beloved Government have been stewing over with regards to further removing people's rights to privacy and further down the road of a Big Brother culture.

First of all, it would seem that the Labour Government is intent on pressing on with its compulsory identity cards proposal. Just in the past week, it has been reported that Manchester is to become the first British city where these cards will become available. Advocates of the identity cards believe that they are an essential evil in the current climate in order to track down any potential terrorist threat. There are also the usual crowd of misguided fools who are only too keen to reiterate that if we have got nothing to hide, then there should not be anything to worry about.

But the actual benefits from these cards just do not stack up. One of the key advantages that ID cards will supposedly offer is that it will clamp down on identity theft and credit and debit card fraud. This is an argument that I believe is fundamentally flawed. Yes, it is possible that ID cards could cut down on any "over the counter" fraud where cards could be double swiped, but what it does not acknowledge is that an increasing percentage of personal transactions take place online. Security on the Internet has improved markedly in the past few years with most reputable companies having secure access wherever financial transactions take place online. However, there are hackers who are expert in finding loopholes and there are other ways in which fraudulent activity can take place online, such as fake e-mail messages that encourage the recipient to pass on their bank details to a third party.

My other problem with identity cards is that the data on them could be used for all manner of purposes and there are no guarantees as to who will end up with access to the details on them. Is it really essential for the Government to hold a dossier on every single person that lives in the country and to know what their spending patterns are and what their credit rating is? Quite apart from the snooping aspect to this kind of behaviour, why should we trust the Government with sensitive information when they have previous for mishandling confidential material by virtue of leaving CD-ROMs, USB memory sticks and even laptops on trains or discarded in pub car parks. If there was a real benefit associated with having access to the type of classified information held on an ID card, then I would possibly understand more, but there is negligible evidence that the information held on an ID card would result in catching wannabe terrorists or perpetrators of identity fraud.

The craziest aspect to the Labour Government's commitment to ID cards, championed by their hapless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is that in all likelihood the Labour Government will be deposed by this time next year by which time a General Election will have to be called and at the moment, the Labour Party is on course for a landslide defeat. If the Conservatives are elected as currently appears likely, should they remain true to their party policy to date, they are likely to scrap the idea altogether. At a time when the Government needs to clamp down on unnecessary expenditure and wastage of resources, surely the best policy would be knock this controversial policy on the head for good.

As if its commitment to ID cards was not bad enough, the Government recently announced proposals where everyone's personal e-mail address can be accessed for legal and policing purposes and that ISPs need to keep a record of every e-mail sent and received. On the surface, you might think that this sounds like a good idea if accessing someone's e-mails can lead to some important clues around solving a crime, or if by looking at the content of someone's e-mails, it can be seen if any inflammatory behaviour had taken place.

However, none of this will be possible because the key aspect to this policy is that the police will not be able to see the content of anyone's e-mails, but will only be able to see who a person has e-mailed and when they did it. Therefore, I do not see how this will be a particularly useful device in solving crime as all that it tells the investigating officer is who was e-mailed and the date when the e-mail was sent. This is only going to be helpful if the e-mail records confirm or disprove a suspect's alibi of where they were on the given date rather than being able to confirm what the purpose of the e-mail was. Call me cynical, but there is the possibility that this measure could enable police to "fit up" certain individuals wherever a prosecution is not appearing otherwise forthcoming.

I realise that actions do need to take place in order to counter the threats of terrorism and of identity fraud and in opposing these measures, I would like to make it clear that I welcome any attempts to reduce these threats that potentially affect us all. However, I feel that the measures that the Government are pushing forward are excessive and there is not any substantive proof that the measures will result in a reduction in terrorist or inflammatory activity, nor will it combat certain types of fraud. All that these measures do is feed the media hysteria and the net result is that we are being led ever more towards a Big Brother state where our every move can be potentially monitored. I do not have any wish for anybody to be voyeurs in my life, least of all a group of civil servants in pinstripe suits with a pocket brimmed full of memory sticks with our life stories on them.

4. UEFA rules do not appeal
As I am a Manchester United supporter, you will not be surprised to hear that I was delighted with United's 3-1 rout of Arsenal in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final last Tuesday. The result ensures that United reach the final for the second year running and the small matter of Barcelona stand between United and their successful retention of the Champions League trophy. Should they be successful, they would become the first club to manage this feat since the Champions League format was introduced to the European Cup competition in 1992. It really is a fantastic opportunity for United to make some history as well as maintaining Sir Alex Ferguson's insatiable pursuit for trophies.

The one blemish on an otherwise exemplary night for United was the red card for midfielder Darren Fletcher. Fletcher was red carded after being adjudged to have fouled Cesc Fabregas as he prepared to shoot, although television replays showed up the folly of this decision as Fletcher clearly toe ended the ball away without gaining an advantage. Having given the foul, however, the referee was duty bound to issue Fletcher with a red card as he deemed that Fletcher's intervention had denied a goalscoring opportunity.

It is a great shame for Fletcher that he now appears likely to sit out the final due to this unwarranted decision. People that say United should not look to contest the decision because Fletcher is not that important to their chances in the final are missing the point completely. Fletcher has been one of United's unsung heroes this season, he has never been one to court publicity and he has carried out a relatively unglamorous but important role for the team effectively. Without Fletcher's simple passes and mopping up in front of United's back four, United's more creative players would be allowed less licence to get forward and attack at will. While players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney will surely get plenty of chances to appear Champions League finals again, someone of Darren Fletcher's ilk may only have one opportunity like this in a career. After all, Roy Keane was suspended for the Champions League final in 1999 and never got another chance to play in it. For this opportunity to be cruelly snatched from Fletcher due to a poor refereeing decision is grossly unfair.

What makes matters even worse is UEFA's pathetically draconian attitude to appealing decisions. In any walk of life, be it the workplace, housing or education, not to mention the judiciary, an appeal system is an essential pre-requisite. It is there to ensure that if an applicant or defendant feels that their case was not given adequate consideration or if vital evidence was held back then a decision can be overturned. Sometimes figures in authority do make mistakes and what looks right on first inspection can latterly turn out to be wrong.

However, UEFA do not adopt this attitude because in the immediate aftermath of the game, it was reported that Darren Fletcher had no right of appeal. I found this revelation staggering. Maybe I am exaggerating, but to my mind, the right of appeal is a basic human right, an acknowledgement that sometimes mistakes do happen. For the governing body of football within the continent of Europe to not recognise an appeals process just does not add up and it seems very myopic on the part of those who oversee the rules. Given the presence of the European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice within the same continent that UEFA serves, I wonder if anyone has ever checked the validity of UEFA's disciplinary procedure. To me, I would think there would be a strong chance that the courts would tell UEFA that their approach is illegal and could result in them incurring some hefty legal bills at the very least. Surely one day a club will stand up to UEFA on this matter and create a legal precedent. It will be interesting to see what happens when that day comes.

The removal of a right of appeal is the kind of thing I would expect to see in a country that is under the rule of a dictator, such as Zimbabwe or previously in Iraq, but this rule is imposed in the relatively democratic European mainland. Regardless of whether one feels this individual sending off was right or wrong, I would like to know how any fair minded individual could possibly think it right that the person on the receiving end should have no right to contest the decision. OK, I am aware that an appeals process is always potentially there to be manipulated and some appeals would border on the frivolous. But that is human nature at work. Knowing that some people will take advantage of the system is not a reason to not have an appeals process, in fact it is a cop out. After all, an appeal is not a guarantee of overturning a decision, but merely a request that it is reviewed independently by a panel of people that have no discernible link to the original incident.

It has subsequently emerged that Manchester United could be granted special dispensation to appeal the Fletcher red card which would not be in keeping with UEFA's normal policy. Equally, Barcelona could also appeal Eric Abidal's absurd red card against Chelsea where he was adjudged to have fouled Nicolas Anelka when Anelka was stood so far away from the Barcelona left back that while Anelka fell over in SW6, Abidal was located in SW9. I would not be too hopeful of either player overturning their suspension for the final, but at least it is a start. Not having an appeals procedure is an acceptance that every decision made is right, which not only was proved wildly incorrect by the awful refereeing in both Champions League semi-finals, but is also one step away from organised autocracy and Fascism. And that is not the best approach to power in the twenty-first century.

5. What a load of rubbish!
The council elections are once again due to take place across the country and while these will in no small part be influenced by the current dissent and apathy towards the Government at national level, they will for the most part be influenced by local issues, not least how the public services are performing.

In Brighton and Hove, the hot potato in this respect right now has to be the refuse collection. Or rather, the lack of one. Since the working conditions were changed last year, a number of militant binmen have taken it upon themselves to not actually bother to collect the rubbish in some areas of the city. The rubbish collections which originally were scheduled once every week were changed to once a fortnight, although in certain parts of Brighton, my own included, it has been quite some time since a binman was last spotted in the neighbourhood. This lax service has resulted in people having to resort to disposing of their rubbish in communal bins, which is not an ideal method of disposal, not least because of the potential for fly tipping that this offers.

I suppose at this point I should be careful what I say, as it has recently come to light that there is a militant force at work at Brighton's refuse depot that has been sending poison pen letters to anyone that has had the audacity to write in to The Argus newspaper in Brighton to complain about their rubbish having not been collected. The content of these letters has been relatively tame, but it does nonetheless suggest that the people that wrote the letters of complaint have struck something of a raw nerve.

Refuse collectors do not have a job that any of us would envy, if we are honest. However, they are employed to perform an essential public duty in order to keep our cities clean and hygienic. Over the past few months, due to the workers' levels of demotivation, backed by a union that is more interested in its own agenda than that of its members, ultimately it has been the public that has been the biggest loser as this essential service has not been performed adequately across the board. The trouble is that some of these workers are in such a comfort zone through having worked where they have for so long that they do not feel they should be questioned and are not accountable for the consequences of their actions. In the time that the mystery poison pen letter writer took to write their compositions, a whole neighbourhood could have had their bins emptied.

It seems to me that taking pride in their work in that profession is at absolute zero and this has far reaching impacts on everyone that lives in Brighton and Hove.