Now is our autumn of discontent

Hello again readers. Hope you have been keeping well since I last posted on these pages and that you enjoyed lighting a few sparklers and indulging in some trick or treating. Well, there have been some newsworthy developments since I last let myself loose at the keyboard, so let's get down to business.


Joe on....

Royal Mail reaching agreement with workers so avoiding further strikes until after Christmas
Common sense appears to have prevailed on this score. From what I have read and what I have heard of the reasons for the dispute, I do feel that the Royal Mail workers have had valid grievances with their management, particularly in view of the management's proposed plans to replace existing workers with machines that can do their jobs for "efficiency" purposes. Such a move is not restricted to Royal Mail of course, and all businesses have a duty to try and run efficiently. Nonetheless, in times of economic uncertainty, it is quite natural that fears of redundancies are going to be raised.

However, the industrial action has not done anyone any favours and was becoming a very messy affair. The sympathies that the general public had with postal workers was dissipating with every strike due to the inconvenience that the public have faced on days when strikes have taken place. The affair has also been very damaging to Royal Mail's reputation with businesses and custom has been lost due to the unreliable service offered all the while industrial action has been occurring. While the consumer does not presently have the choice of using any carrier other than Royal Mail, this is not the case for businesses, where there are an abundance of couriers that can carry mail and packages. Having lost customers while industrial action has been taking place, peace now breaking out between Royal Mail managers and staff is unlikely to result in these customers returning.

It is good news, however, that further strikes now appear to have been averted until after Christmas. Disruption to postal deliveries at the time of year when consumers use the post in its greatest volume during the course of the year would have resulted in a complete loss of sympathy for the posties' plight among the public at large and the damage to Royal Mail's reputation would then be beyond the point of no return. As it is, much work needs to be done to restore this reputation and while there is currently a temporary peace, this may prove to be an uneasy one in the long run if managers do not acceed to the union's demands or if the two parties are not willing to meet each other halfway.

One thing that would appear to be a certainty now is that, in the very likely event of a Conservative Government being elected next spring, the Royal Mail service will be fast tracked to privatisation. David Cameron has been very critical of the Government's laissez faire stance in the handling of the postal strikes and he has adopted an aggressive tone rather than one that would suggest he would look to be conciliatory should the disputes spill over into next year. Privatisation has always been a favoured policy of the Conservatives and anything that removes barriers to entry and encourages a free market is music to their ears. Whether these freedoms would be at the cost to employee relations remains to be seen, but the industrial action that has already taken place has already ensured that Royal Mail's reputation as a business has taken a battering.

The Daily Mail's comments about Stephen Gately
Another month and another story of a Daily Mail columnist making vitriolic and vindictive comments. That such comments were made would not normally be newsworthy given that the creation of negative energy is almost a reflex action among Daily Mail's largely middle England leading article writers. However, the Mail surpassed itself this time by breaking one of the unwritten ethical codes. Namely, to speak ill of the dead.

Stephen Gately had not even been taken from this world for a week when Jan Moir chose to share her ill thought out words with a couple of million Daily Mail readers. Choosing to criticise aspects of a dead person's lifestyle in a constructive way might well have been acceptable had a few months passed by, but Moir's comments came within one week of Gately's demise and her critique was anything but constructive.

While it is natural to find it unusual that a supposedly healthy 33 year old man should die so suddenly without any prior warning signs, it should also be remembered that a post-mortem had been carried out which had concluded that Stephen Gately had died of natural causes, as a result of a build-up of fluid in his lungs. This would seem to have been a very rare condition, but one which, unbeknown to Gately himself, would have meant he had a ticking time bomb inside his body which meant that at any time he could go to sleep at night and not wake up in the morning, as appears to have happened.

By questioning the events that had occurred in the hours prior to Gately's death, where Gately had been out socialising with his civil husband and with a Bulgarian gentleman who ended up finding Gately deceased, Jan Moir not only showed a lack of respect to the parties concerned and their families, but she also appeared to call into question the verdict of the post-mortem without being qualified to counter this verdict with any personal or professional insight. Unless Moir has had previous experience of having been a pathologist prior to becoming a Fleet Street scribe then she is not qualified in any way to call into question a qualified medical opinion.

Moir came out on the defensive after the Press Complaints Commission website buckled under the strain of complaints once her opinions became public knowledge. She was adamant that she was not homophobic and that she had previously been a fervent supporter of gay marriage. Leaving aside that previous Moir musings would suggest that her stance on these subjects is slightly different to how she perceives them to be, I think that there is a danger that this episode is seen as abhorrent most for a lack of tolerance towards other people's sexual lifestyle preferences, when the greatest crime was to speak ill of a dead person when they had not even been buried or cremated at the time of going to the press.

It is perhaps understandable, however, that homophobic overtones were particularly highlighted in the aftermath of these comments becoming public domain. The popular press has reported that intolerance towards homosexuals is on the increase and have used some recent unsavoury events in Trafalgar Square as an example of this. In truth, I'm not sure whether intolerance is really becoming more prevalent again, more that it has remained there under the surface among a minority of society. One has to remember that homosexuality remained illegal in the UK until the end of the 1960s and while tolerance has come on leaps and bounds in the past 40 years, acceptance of lifestyle changes among some more cynical sections of the public remains difficult to swallow. The battle is being won, but Moir's diatribe and Nick Griffin's recent comments that some people found same sex couples kissing "repulsive" (pots, kettles Nick, pots, kettles son!) have highlighted the end victory is still some way off.

Nick Griffin's performance on Question Time
It was reported in the immediate aftermath of Griffin's controversial appearance on Question Time that 22 per cent of people surveyed would consider voting for the British National Party. While this revelation no doubt resulted in some considered observers spitting their morning coffee out in worry and disgust, I was not unduly concerned by this statistic.

Surveys are not always a reliable way of gauging the public's opinion. For a start, we are not privy to how the question was phrased to suit the agenda. If the question was phrased in such a way to make the question a leading question that would prompt a particular response, then it is perhaps not surprising that over 1 in 5 of those surveyed would not rule out putting a cross in the box of the British National Party when next confronted with a ballot paper. Added to which, what these reports do not tell us is either the size of the audience sampled or the location of where they were sampled.

If 5,000 people were surveyed across a number of the UK's largest cities, then there may be greater cause for concern. The fact that the results were announced so soon after the programmed was aired, however, would suggest that the sample audience was not high. If only 50 people were surveyed, then it would only require 11 people to say they would be willing to vote for the BNP in order for the 22 per cent to be met. If the questions were asked on the streets of Burnley or Blackburn on the Friday morning after the transmission, one expects the results would also be more distorted than if the survey was conducted in Plymouth.

Having watched the programme, I do not see how Griffin's performance can have significantly aided his credibility. Whilst Griffin's nervousness was understandable under the circumstances, his lack of charm and somewhat evasive attitude will surely not have won him many new admirers. Some of what Griffin said was also tantamount to scoring an own goal. His comments about being acquainted with someone that was aligned to a "non-violent section of the Ku-Klux Klan" bordered on the comedic, all the more so given that Griffin seemingly did not appear to realise what was wrong with what he had said. Griffin did little to dispel the notion that far from seeking to represent an electorate that is down on its luck and lacking a voice in a changing Britain, his agenda is merely self-serving and a means of promoting his own prejudices.

Griffin felt that the programme had showed him in a bad light and that he had been subjected to a lynch mob. Really though, what was Griffin expecting when being offered a platform to appear on the programme? Given that many people did not want Griffin to appear in the first place, he should be grateful to have been given a forum to put his views across. That he did not use this forum effectively is no-one's fault other than his own. It would seem that Griffin felt that the audience had been deliberately cherry picked in order to take him to task, given the nature of his extreme views. But, surely Griffin must have known what he was letting himself in for when he agreed to appear.

The Question Time audience is not deliberately chosen, the audience for its shows is comprised of people that buy tickets. Once it was publicised that a bigot with white supremacist views would be appearing on Question Time, it surely comes as no surprise that a reasonable percentage of the audience that purchased a ticket would be from ethnic minority groups diametrically opposed to Griffin's viewpoints. If that reality was not to Griffin's liking, well hard cheese. In truth though, while the audience's contempt for Griffin was largely overt, the brickbats he faced were relatively tame.

The only sympathy that the public may have felt towards Griffin was how he was treated with contempt by his fellow panellists. Jack Straw's allowed himself to become too emotional in the early exchanges on the programme and that led to a hammy and weak performance from the Government's representative thereafter. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats' representative Chris Huhne largely cut an anonymous, peripheral figure. The only panellist that emerged with an enhanced reputation from the show was the Conservative representative Baroness Warsi, attired with a large poppy, who not only put Griffin in his place but also informed Straw of how Labour's immigration policies had impacted upon the BNP gaining popularity in the first place.

The issue of immigration is a very delicate and thorny subject and it is one which clearly needs addressing sensibly and rationally. This is perhaps something to talk about in more detail some other time. But in summary for now, the suggestion of it being time to "close the door" in terms of the UK's national borders would not be practical, legal or beneficial in the long term. It does not help when national newspapers run stories suggesting the population will increase by 15 million within 20 years, when there is no concrete evidence to suggest that it will. We live in a voyeuristic, material driven world and while more people will come to live in the United Kingdom, so too people will choose to emigrate to warmer, fairer isles.

The current wave of protectionism and looking after number one that people feel due to the current uncertainty economically provides some explanation as to why the BNP have been some people's protest vote party of choice. But, the fact is that they remain a minority party who represent fewer than 2 per cent of the population. Griffin's appearance on Question Time will have increased awareness of the BNP's actual agenda and Griffin's lack of coherent answers to the questions that needed asking will surely have done little to aid his or his party's popularity.

Russell Slade's sacking as Brighton manager
On first consideration, Slade's sacking would appear a trifle harsh. Only six months ago, the former Yeovil Town manager had saved Brighton from relegation to League Two after it had appeared a near certainty with only six games to go. Four wins from Brighton's final six matches ensured that the great escape became a reality.

The problem that Slade perhaps faced was one of perception. His managerial career hitherto had been spent at such unfashionable footballing outposts as Yeovil, Grimsby and Scarborough. It mattered not that Slade had led Yeovil to a League One play-off final nor that he had led Scarborough to the fourth round of the FA Cup and a narrow defeat to Chelsea, but his name was not a high profile one. Had he come into the Brighton job with some previous experience at Premier League and Championship level then his stay of execution would likely have been longer.

Brighton's season has not gone to plan so far, although any pundits that had Brighton down amongst the promotion candidates were always sadly misguided. In a division that contains a number of former Premier League teams among its number, a top half consolidatory finish for Brighton this season would be an acceptable campaign. Until the Falmer Stadium opens for business in the summer of 2011, Brighton simply have to ensure they remain at League One level.

It is this critical requirement which also contributed to Slade's departure. Brighton simply cannot contemplate starting life at Falmer as a League Two club, as this would be seriously damaging to their finances. Although Brighton have two thirds of the league campaign still to run to climb away from danger, they recently spurned an opportunity to take points from back-to-back home matches against mid-table opposition. Brighton instead took only one point from those two matches, conceding five goals in the process. The board decided to act in the knowledge that Brighton now face four consecutive matches against former Premier League teams in Southampton, Leeds, Charlton and Norwich. By the time those matches are completed, it is likely Brighton will be embedded in the League One relegation zone.

Brighton's wretched form at their unloved temporary home, Withdean Stadium is a major reason for their current struggles. Five defeats from eight home matches this campaign is a tale of woe. It has not helped that Brighton's plight has been one of self-destruction with several red cards having been brandished to Brighton players this season. This has led to Brighton rarely having a settled team, particularly in defence, where injuries have also taken their toll. While discipline is an individual responsibility, where there is a recurring problem, this suggests that there is a shortcoming that the manager is not addressing. Slade maybe required more time to stamp his authority in this regard, but football being the cut-throat, results oriented business it now is, Slade was not to be afforded this time.

As ever, when a manager's sacking is announced, there is a frenzy of activity about who will replace him and there has been the usual mixture of crazy, leftfield choices and managers who are out of work simply because they repeatedly left a trail of failure and destruction in their previous jobs. The best candidate for the job, Steve Coppell, has sadly ruled out a return to Brighton, with the job at Hull City possibly being what he has designs on. With Coppell crossed off the list, Dennis Wise appears to be a favourite with the Brighton chairman Tony Bloom, but Wise is a difficult man to warm to. Gareth Southgate's recent sacking by Middlesbrough makes him a candidate but his comparative managerial greenness is not ideal in the predicament Brighton find themselves in, added to which, his playing connections with Crystal Palace will not be forgiven easily.

Beyond these names, there have been some other suggestions put forward, ranging from the delusional suggestion that Alan Curbishley would take the job to a clutch of mediocre lower division managers being linked to the post. Personally, I think Brighton ideally need to go for a manager that has had a couple of previous managerial jobs and who is used to managing at League One level, rather than someone that played and managed at a higher level and who would find difficult to relate to players of a limited ability. Exeter City's Paul Tisdale is a bright, young manager who has done well with limited resources at the Devonian club, but whether Brighton would be able to prise Tisdale away from the South-West, or indeed whether Brighton would be willing and able to pay compensation for his services are another matter.

What is important is that Brighton get a manager appointed quickly. The longer Brighton go on without making an appointment, so they become more of a ship without an anchor. Results need to be forthcoming immediately and the last thing any new manager needs is to be playing catch-up. The next incumbent will at least be able to bring in some fresh blood when the transfer window opens in January, as well as ship out players that are surplus to his requirements. That way, whatever the end result is in May 2010, by then the next manager will have moulded their own team.